456: Gavin de Becker—Forbidden Facts

Security expert, author, and entrepreneur Gavin de Becker https://gavindebecker.com/ joins us to discuss his newest book, Forbidden Facts: Government Deceit & Suppression About Brain Damage from Childhood Vaccine https://www.amazon.com/Forbidden-Facts-Government-Suppression-Childhood/dp/1510785957/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1WQ3VJ2VEFC3T&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9. NzklcTehUc0aEkFIj5ew4yy6orsvZRpNdp6cHpirmfdHaEHpzCDGVbPJoob3tf9JkVS8ZNEh35Gk3_wJvikZk77vC17a1BMxJWankZa2lLbPdVFpNh0pjdELn7KYQR-cREr1UHjvO1FJ9Go83VRRNbrdB0dpS_8TYFL9cIh3742T6jQrblRczLCriYVe72gJdm1UsDI9jBMNoaPZDUvvECUCvoCGUeqUf5nBYUvKjTY. QsG1r4jTmS4QJDtWODB57jgSQOTn7Z14W339OIa_k2o&dib_tag=se&keywords=forbidden+facts&qid=1761613730&sprefix=forbidden+%2Caps%2C191&sr=8-1s https://www.amazon.com/Forbidden-Facts-Government-Suppression-Childhood/dp/1510785957/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1WQ3VJ2VEFC3T&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9. NzklcTehUc0aEkFIj5ew4yy6orsvZRpNdp6cHpirmfdHaEHpzCDGVbPJoob3tf9JkVS8ZNEh35Gk3_wJvikZk77vC17a1BMxJWankZa2lLbPdVFpNh0pjdELn7KYQR-cREr1UHjvO1FJ9Go83VRRNbrdB0dpS_8TYFL9cIh3742T6jQrblRczLCriYVe72gJdm1UsDI9jBMNoaPZDUvvECUCvoCGUeqUf5nBYUvKjTY. QsG1r4jTmS4QJDtWODB57jgSQOTn7Z14W339OIa_k2o&dib_tag=se&keywords=forbidden+facts&qid=1761613730&sprefix=forbidden+%2Caps%2C191&sr=8-1—a hard-hitting investigation into how government agencies and industry cover up evidence and manipulate public belief. We also discuss the attempted assassination at Butler and how neatly it was tied up in a bow. Gavin also reveals who he believes really killed Robert F. Kennedy Sr.—spoiler alert; it ain't Sirhan Sirhan.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Mike Rowe?

  Hello friends, it's still me, Mike Rowe. And this is still the way I heard it. And as far as I know, that's Chuck staring at me, still, through my computer. How are you, buddy?

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm great, Mike. How you doing?

• 0:13Mike Rowe?

  I'll tell you, man, I am still awash in the, um, in the forbidden facts. Showered upon me by one of my favorite guests. And I think I actually mentioned at the end that if you're gonna have a dinner party, and if you have an opportunity to get Gavin DeBecker to come by and just hold court, you might not agree with every single thing he believes or has to say, but I am telling you, the stories will go deep into the night, and you will have him back.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  And he will make you think. Because whether you believe him or not, he is well sourced, as is his book.

• 0:52Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Gavin and I met almost two years ago now, back with that crazy dance I did with Bobby Kennedy, when, um, when he was running for the big, for the big office. And there was some crazy talk going around about, uh, what a world would look like if I were his VP. We don't really get into that. Those facts are not forbidden, by the way.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:16Mike Rowe?

  But that's how I got to know Gavin. And the more I got to know him, the more interested I was in the kind of life he had led. And, you know, he's sat on several presidential, what is it, like, commissions?

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so.

• 1:29Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. He's like the go-to guy in the world of security, both cybersecurity as well as personal protection. He guards some of the wealthiest, most powerful people on the planet. And he's done it for a long time.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44Mike Rowe?

  But, boy oh boy, uh, he's gotta be in his bonnet about the incredible way our institutions have let us down. And he's written a book that's gonna make you look real hard at everything you think you know is true. And, yep, the vaccines, the big V, it's right in the center of it.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  It's not just the vaccines, it's just the way that studies are done. It is the way that our country, our government, for whatever reason, doesn't think we're, we've got our big boy pants on enough to tell us the truth. And there, he's got some humdingers of lies that he brings the receipts for that are really fascinating.

• 2:26Mike Rowe?

  You want the truth?

• 2:26Speaker 01

  And alarming.

• 2:27Mike Rowe?

  You can't handle the truth.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  That's, that's what they think, yeah.

• 2:30Mike Rowe?

  For sure. Gavin is not an anti-vaxxer, he'll go out of his way to tell you that, but you will hear some things and read some things that might lead you to conclude he is certainly skeptical. And without a doubt, he is.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  He questions if they're safe and effective. We're being told that they're safe and effective, and that's what he is questioning.

• 2:51Mike Rowe?

  With great, with great passion.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:55Mike Rowe?

  With great passion. He's, he comes at this honestly, and by that, I mean, he's truthful, but also it's authentic. He's a criminologist by trade. And this book reads almost like a whodunit. It's just jammed with facts, and as you said, every single page has QR codes all over the bottom. It's intensely researched. If you're skeptical by nature, you're just going to enjoy this on every level. If you're not, it's going to make you uncomfortable. It's also going to make you angry, and believe it or not, it's going to make you laugh out loud. Sometimes, when you're right in the midst of being pissed, it's a, it's a, it's a really interesting

• 3:40Mike Rowe?

  achievement from a literary standpoint, and I think maybe a really important legacy for him and, and a guide, I hope, for all of us.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  He's got a wicked sense of humor, and that comes through in his writing and in his conversation. But, boy, I could listen to him talk all day long, and we pretty much did with this.

• 4:01Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, it'll feel like that. I mean, it's a two-hour podcast, it's going to fly by, I promise you, but I stayed on the phone for like, with him for another 90 minutes after we said goodbye. And that's never happened with. With a guest before. My only regret, full disclosure, as we jump into this, is that we weren't able to do it in person. He's over, uh, deep in the South Seas right now, but carved out some time for us. It's a terrific book. It's called Forbidden Facts. He's called Gavin DeBecker, and if you haven't met him before, what a treat you're in for right after this.

• 4:39Mike Rowe?

  I'd like to talk about initiative, if I could, for just a moment. Here at MicroWorks, we value it a great deal. In fact, it's the most important quality we look for in our work ethic scholarship applicants, but everybody wants it. I'm talking about the, uh, the quality in a lift driver that inspires him or her to carry your bags to the door without even asking, or the grocery clerk who shows you where an item is on the shelves, or a doctor who personally calls you to explain your test results. If you're hiring, you want to encourage initiative because it's invaluable. And ZipRecruiter has a way to allow a candidate to tell you, in their own words, why they're interested in your job. Not just why they're qualified, but why they're interested.

• 5:24Mike Rowe?

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• 6:17Speaker 02

  Let's not begin with laughing, okay?

• 6:20Speaker 01

  I just want to say, I'm sorry I didn't get the memo about the baby blue shirt, guys. Really.

• 6:24Mike Rowe?

  It is just ridiculous. And technically, is that robin's egg blue, Gavin? Or is it periwinkle? I can't tell.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  All I know is the last time I did your show, I was criticized for what I was wearing, and it still hurts. So I decided to go with something fairly new.

• 6:40Mike Rowe?

  Well, you were wearing like, a onesie or something, as I recall.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  That's something you might have dreamed. What I was actually wearing was a dark blue shirt and a dark blue jacket. But you didn't like it. That's what stuck with me.

• 6:52Mike Rowe?

  It's not that I didn't like it. It's just that, you know, I didn't realize the first time we sat down to speak, just how much actual verisimilitude and credibility you were going to bring to the proceeding. And so the outfit, while consistent with that level of know-it-all-ness, kind of threw me off. But then the more you talked, the more I realized that your intellect did, in fact, match your outfit. And though, everything became congruent, which is why we're friends today.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  That was a Russell Brand question. That was good.

• 7:27Mike Rowe?

  All right, to be clear, the conversation has begun.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  Uh-oh.

• 7:32Mike Rowe?

  And I suppose, while I'd love to just BS with you forever, because honestly, I don't know many people who are better at holding up their end of a meandering conversation than you. I just want to come out, right, with a kind of a shameless plot. I'm gonna hold up your book. It's called Forbidden Facts. And I'm gonna ask you right out of the gate, how in the world did you manage to put together so many claims, so much observational dogma, in such a condensed way, in a fashion that made me so angry, Gavin? You made me

• 8:13Mike Rowe?

  very angry. And then you made me snort and laugh. Sometimes, within the same paragraph, as I was experiencing like, a kind of rage, I was suddenly giggling out loud. Is that because you're a better writer than I thought you were? Or because sometimes the truth is just so damn strange that there's nothing reasonable to do in the face of it, except laugh?

• 8:35Speaker 02

  Yes and no. The thing is, some of this stuff was just actually funny. And it's not a funny topic because the book is about, you know, the various methods that government uses to debunk facts they don't like, or falsely debunk them, and all the tricks they use. And so that's the part that's enraging because when you see it in practice, it really does piss you off. But then, when you see it in, you know, we got to go into the room because somebody leaked a lot of transcripts of some of these meetings, and that stuff is just like a one-act Broadway comedy. That stuff is just absolutely downright funny. The way these supposed scientists who are paid to debunk things engage with each other

• 9:15Speaker 02

  behind closed doors is ridiculous, as in worthy of ridicule.

• 9:21Mike Rowe?

  Vaudevillean.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's true. It's true. I'm glad you found that as well. And, look, listen, writing it, I was often really pissed off and often laughing. And that was just the reality of the gift that the government delivered to us for this book.

• 9:36Mike Rowe?

  I also think it's the reality of being alive and curious in 2025. If you're not in on the joke, and if you're not capable of laughing at some of the horror show with which we've been confronted, then you might go mad. But because you're also curious, you need to engage in a genuine inquiry. And I feel like what you've done with this book is really balance those two. You know, I think it was Travis McGee that said the only sensible way to go through life was with the fatalistic attitude of a vaudevillean clown. Like the ones in the circus that get out of the tiny car with 30 other dudes dressed just like them, and they know they're gonna get hit in the face, right?

• 10:20Mike Rowe?

  They know they're gonna get the pie in the face. And yet, and yet, they show up and they do their job. You're gonna get a pie in the face for this, brother. You know that. You have pissed off powerful people from sea to shining sea. So first of all, congratulations for that. Congratulations for laughing while you did it. And then to the question, why? What in the world do you hope to accomplish?

• 10:49Speaker 02

  Well, I had two things. First of all, I don't entirely know the reason why. I know what I was inspired to do and what I was thinking at the time. As I look at it now, there are aspects of this book and the whole inquiry that if you take the helicopter up high enough, is not about Agent Orange and the tricks the government played, or Gulf War Syndrome, or baby powder that causes cancer, or vaccines that cause brain damage. It's really about the way power operates, and it just doesn't feel, and when there's nobody to answer to, they, power does not feel that it needs to tell the truth. And then if it doesn't like the truth, and the truth is finding its way out, then there are these methods of debunking,

• 11:31Speaker 02

  and pre-bunking, and engaging supposed science when it's really just syntax. So that, that seems to be what I wrote about, though I didn't start off that way. I thought I was going to be writing about, about the Institute of Medicine, which is, I should back up and just remind everybody that the Institute of Medicine is this tremendously revered government organization that studies things that are important to public health for the government and settles issues once and for all. Only, it isn't a government agency. It's a private organization. The guy who runs it makes 1.1 million dollars a year. All the experts are paid and paid well, and, and it's hardly unbiased. It actually is

• 12:14Speaker 02

  the government's crisis control PR division.

• 12:18Mike Rowe?

  Let me back up even further and say that the book, for the record, is written from the point of view of a criminologist, which happens to be what you are. But at base, at base, it's a story. And that's the compliment I meant to pay you initially. All of these facts, all of these forbidden facts, are woven together in a narrative. And anybody who appreciates a decent narrative knows the importance of a protagonist and an antagonist. You need a villain. So as we start to talk about what you wrote and why you wrote it, tell me if I'm wrong, but it, it felt to me that if there's a snidely whiplash in this thing,

• 13:01Mike Rowe?

  twirling his metaphorical mustache and cackling maniacally in a corner, it's the, it's the IOM.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  You're right on all counts. I'd say the government that funds it and the corporations that fund it, but you're very right that it's a story and it's a story of, you know, I asked in the first chapter, what's Agent Orange got to do with it? Agent Orange was a, you know, a chemical warfare material that was used in Vietnam and sprayed on jungles and on people.

• 13:30Mike Rowe?

  Dioxin, right?

• 13:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, it contained this tremendously toxic material you just mentioned and that caused a lot of injury and death to people and then birth defects to the children, the offspring of Vietnam veterans when they got back. So they came to the Veterans Administration and the government and said, hey, we've got all these injuries from Agent Orange. And the government said, Agent Orange, no, no, no, that's not a biological weapon. That's just for plants. That won't hurt anybody. And people said, well, I'm hurt and look at my children with, you know, severe deformities exactly like animals have the result of severe deformities from dioxin. And the government eventually said, well, let's get to the bottom of this and let's hire the Institute of Medicine and the Institute of Medicine will answer this question once

• 14:16Speaker 02

  and for all. And so the Institute of Medicine convened a group of experts who concluded that there was no connection between dioxin, this known toxin, and all these injuries. And they concluded it by doing a study that two years later, they published their report. And the conclusion was more studies needed. So two years later, they published their subsequent report, which had a much better conclusion. That was more studies needed. And then two years later, they did it again and this one, interestingly, also concluded that more.

• 14:52Mike Rowe?

  Don't tell me, don't tell me.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Ah, damn it, I spoiled it. Yeah, I really. So now we get up to year, to year 19 and they now get really bold and they say not only that more studies are needed, but they say we ought to study the actual veterans who were affected by the Agent Orange because they hadn't thought of that yet. So I don't have anything to criticize about that, except that it literally took 20 effing years to. And then conclude that there was no connection between Agent Orange and all these terrible injuries that people had not been compensated for. Enter, in the story, Admiral Zumwalt, who does another inquiry for a congressional committee,

• 15:34Speaker 02

  and he comes back and he says that the IOM put forth the most fraudulent and terrible study he could imagine that was done entirely to save the US government from any responsibility, and he found that they were dead wrong. And it's particularly poignant that he's the person who did that study and provided that testimony to Congress, because he had ordered the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, and his own son had died from it.

• 16:02Mike Rowe?

  Oh.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's a, as stories go, that's a compelling part. Then the Veterans Administration did a study, and they too disagreed with Agent Orange. And then to jump ahead in the story, the two people who were most discredited for the shammy and scammy work that the Institute of Medicine did, were they fired? Were they demoted? No, no. They were promoted and then took over responsibility for studying childhood vaccines. Same two people. And so, you know, I look in the book at the Institute of Medicine's Agent Orange debacle, and then their Gulf War Syndrome, which as far as they were concerned, what's Gulf War Syndrome? We don't even think it exists. And then burn pits, how could that possibly hurt anybody?

• 16:46Speaker 02

  Probably healthy to breathe the smoke from burn pits. And then a bunch of other things where they always surprisingly concluded that the big bad corporation and the big bad government had nothing to do with it. And so that's the through line of the story, involves the Institute of Medicine, but also how powerful centers in our society, the government and corporations, pay the Institute of Medicine for these conclusions.

• 17:11Mike Rowe?

  Where is the Institute of Medicine today?

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Well, naturally, it's located in a big, impressive building, part of the National Academies of Science in Washington DC. However, the National Academies of Science is also not a government agency, and is also just a private organization, that is also just paid money by large corporations, and today is actually seeking to expand its funding from large corporations. And it's had some doozies, like, you know, baby powder doesn't cause cancer. That took... That took 50 years.

• 17:46Mike Rowe?

  Johnson and Johnson, right?

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, Johnson and Johnson baby powder. It's the reason I say it took 50 years is that about 50 years ago, Johnson and Johnson went to the FDA and they asked for a special meeting. They sent a delegation and they said, look, we've got a little problem with our baby powder and it's a little problem. It just contains a tiny bit of of cancer causing material. And the same material that's taken out of buildings. What is that called?

• 18:10Mike Rowe?

  Asbestos.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Asbestos.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, that's that terrible stuff. It's just in the baby powder. And the FDA said, well, thank you for telling us. We must immediately study how much asbestos is OK in baby powder. They never considered that the answer might be zero asbestos is OK in baby powder. But they began a study and boy, when they study, I got to tell you, Mike, they really stick with it because they stuck with it for more than 40 years. Before they finally came out and said, yeah, there may be something to this. And then eventually they said, yeah, maybe the baby powder that Johnson Johnson is making, maybe you shouldn't use that. And that was in 2024, last year.

• 18:55Mike Rowe?

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• 19:41Mike Rowe?

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• 20:20Mike Rowe?

  Also, people who switch plans after calling Chapter save an average of $1,100 a year. 804-Chapter. That's the number. Call it today, it's free. Whole thing takes about 20 minutes. 804-Chapter. Good God. Okay. Well, back to my earlier point. How can your brain be asked to process that without those weird equal mixings of rage and absurdity? I mean, we're living in a time... You put on Fox News right now, the odds are decent. There's some guy named Doug who's suffering from mesothelioma, which he contracted by

• 21:02Mike Rowe?

  breathing cancer when he was building a submarine back in 1970 or something. I mean, we all know, it seems, and I want to be certain of those kinds of superlatives, because the debunking and the rebunking is really important, too.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Don't forget the pre-bunking. That's interesting.

• 21:22Mike Rowe?

  And the pre-bunking. But I think the rebunk... We'll get to all the bunkmate stuff. But this idea that we know asbestos is bad. We know it. And yet, we have to sit quietly back... And watch this sort of unholy kabuki unfold as the experts come to the conclusion that Marge from Idaho realized decades ago was self-evident.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:51Mike Rowe?

  It's enough to make you nuts Gavin.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's really true and for a time in this book and the last book, I probably was nuts and I still am not fully comfortable with accepting or taking on board that people can actually sit around a room and say, hey, we've got this new product, let's say the mRNA vaccine, and when you inject it in the arm, it's supposed to stay in the arm, but we know that it goes into the ovaries and the testes and the heart and the brain and crosses the blood brain barrier and we're just not going to tell anybody about that and we're going to put this out publicly even though we know it will cause cardiac problems for young people.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  It's very hard for me to cross that line and picture the people sitting in that room who can have that conversation. This book made it a little bit easier for me because somebody leaked the transcripts of the actual behind closed doors conversation that the Institute of Medicine was having when they studied whether any vaccine could cause any brain damage to any child in America and concluded, of course not. Well, we got to get those transcripts and when you read those transcripts, it's easier to believe that people actually do knowingly participate in something, you know, that

• 23:16Speaker 02

  awful and that damaging to that number of people, but it's true. Still hard, however, for me to accept.

• 23:23Mike Rowe?

  But I mean, not to oversimplify it, but didn't the IOM simply write the headline before they jumped into the story regarding Agent Orange, regarding baby powder? You know, obviously we're going to get to vaccines and the mercury they're in, but it just seems like in every case, we're starting from a conclusion instead of from some kind of objective inquiry.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Well, you can always find any kind of study you want. And what I've learned is you can also fund any study you want with any result. And I won't jump ahead to vaccines beyond just saying, because I happen to have the page marked here. This is the first thing said in the behind closed doors meeting. The point of no return, the line we will not cross in public policy is to pull the vaccines or change the schedule. We wouldn't say compensate the injured. We wouldn't say pull the vaccines and we wouldn't say stop the program. CDC wants us to declare that these things are pretty safe on a population level and we are not ever going to come down that autism is a true side effect.

• 24:32Mike Rowe?

  Good God.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  That was day one, hour one. And then two years more, you know, so-called study to conclude what they ultimately concluded. So that's, that's what goes on.

• 24:44Mike Rowe?

  Do you, I mean, you name names in the book, you show pictures. Who said that? Who was listening?

• 24:52Speaker 02

  That particular thing was by Kathleen Stratton. She worked on Agent Orange as well, so we know that she's got a lot of experience with injury to children. And then the second part, we are not ever going to come down that autism is a true side effect, was said by Marie McCormick, rather. And she also, I think, worked on Agent Orange, but she ultimately ended up at the CDC working, as all parents would hope, on childhood vaccines.

• 25:18Mike Rowe?

  Who in the world leaked it?

• 25:21Speaker 02

  We don't know. We don't know. Some really good, good-hearted person. It's happened a couple of times. There's another secret meeting, even more secret, where they just warned everybody 10 times not to discuss this anywhere. And in that one, it was also leaked and, you know, very favorably. I think, you know, I want to give you a really weird analogy. Because when I was having trouble accepting that Pfizer really would do the things it's done so many times and been criminally fined for so many times, I was talking to a friend of mine, the novelist Bruce Wagner. And I said, it's just, you cannot get your mind around the idea that people sit in a room and talk like this and know what they're doing. And he said, "Well, it's a little bit like the conference at Bonsi."

• 26:05Speaker 02

  And I said, "I don't know what the conference at Bonsi is." He said, "Go to Wikipedia and look it up." So I go look up the conference at Bonsi. And this is the conference at which Hitler's generals and various operatives go and meet with the civilian heads of government agencies, the Minister of Transportation, the Minister of Agriculture, etc. And these civilians, at this point, know very little about what we would call the final solution, what the plans were. And so the generals inform these civilians at this conference at Bonsi, and they say things like, "Well, then we're gonna move 600,000 people by train to these relocation camps." And the Minister of Transportation chimes up, and he says, "No, no, we don't have enough seats." And the general says, "Well, we're not gonna use seats."

• 26:50Speaker 02

  And it's slowly dawning on these civilians that this final solution is a much darker thing than they realized. And yet, here they are, being told by the powers that be in Germany that this is gonna move forward, relocation camps. And when the meeting ends, they then break out the wine, and they stop the euphemisms, and they start talking about it all much more openly. And the reason I said it's an unusual analogy, Mike, is that that too was transcribed and leaked. And you can find it on YouTube. People have performance films where they just say the actual words that were spoken. No, these aren't dramatic representations. They're documentaries that just have the exact conversation, the way it evolved.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  And so, can people do this? Yes, yes, yes, and people do it.

• 27:42Mike Rowe?

  You have an anonymous whistleblower. Is there any pushback from the individuals that you just mentioned by name who are quoted in the transcripts? Is there any denial of it?

• 27:54Speaker 02

  I haven't heard a denial, and I haven't gotten the, you know, the letter from lawyers that will no doubt follow our discussion today.

• 28:02Mike Rowe?

  Great.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  I don't know much about their position or what their position will be as things move forward.

• 28:09Mike Rowe?

  Of all the conversations with which to blow myself up, it's the one with you while you're in Maui and I'm sitting here sweating it out in Northern California. This is where it all ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 28:22Mike Rowe?

  This conference, when do you, when do you figure that was?

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Conference at Bonsi is 1942, 1941 and 1942. Hitler's been in power for many years and on the subject of pre-bunking and the use of scientists, Hitler did another very interesting thing where the administration did, and that is using scientists. It's very well described in a long and boring book called Hitler's Professors.

• 28:49Mike Rowe?

  Yep.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  But what they did is they started funding academics to do studies that concluded that Jews spread disease and that Jews adversely affect the economy and that Jews, Jews, Jews, Jews. And so the population was being moved slowly to a place where it could be what it became by the time of Kristallnacht and what it became by 1942. But that happened in the very same way that the US government, and yeah, no, I'm not making a comparison between Nazis and the Institute of Medicine. No, no, no, I'm making a comparison between the processes used by people in power and they are identical.

• 29:31Mike Rowe?

  I would go even further and make a comparison between the good Germans in 1939 and the sensible Americans in 2020. Now, all of a sudden, and look, I, God, please don't blow yourself up, Mike. Please don't blow yourself up. But, but if on the eve of the Kristallnacht.

• 29:56Mike Rowe?

  Many good Germans look around and say to themselves, you know something? This doesn't feel right. This does not feel like a thing I'm comfortable accepting. But they'd been tenderized.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 30:09Mike Rowe?

  They'd been tenderized for nearly a decade by Hitler's professors. And so a great many things that might have felt heretical or just straight up crazy had been introduced. And so like the frogs in the boiling water, they had become desensitized to the place where, well, what do you mean? We're not going to have seats on the trains? What do you mean? We're going to move them? Like, that, that didn't happen because we flipped the switch. Now, in the same way, how do you think about how we've been prepared or tenderized as

• 30:47Mike Rowe?

  citizens to accept a, a certain list of morals and dogma that cannot be questioned because they have been, quote, previously debunked? And before you answer, I'll just say that back when I, you know, used to impersonate an actual interviewer and wanted to have some sides on this conversation, I Googled, uh, Gavin DeBecker, I asked Chat GTP, whatever the hell it is, to comment on your book. And they do. And it's fascinating because virtually every paragraph starts with the fact that you're dealing with claims that have long since been debunked. Everything is qualified. Everything.

• 31:31Mike Rowe?

  And so I think maybe now, as we think about Agent Orange and we think about the baby powder and we think about all of the other ways these ideas come to, come to fester and root, what is the role of the debunker in all of this and the attendant challenges?

• 31:51Speaker 02

  Well, you're right on the mark of what I was exploring here from a criminal point of view, and that is the preparation of societies, in this case, including consumers who will pay for something, pharma products or whatever the products are. The preparation is long and effective and, you know, time-tested. And in our case, we all experienced, say in 2020, we experienced a form of mass madness that was accepted by most people, really because it was connected to science and because you were told or made to feel you'd be stupid if you didn't support the science, when it

• 32:34Speaker 02

  really meant the paid scientists, often, very often, by the way, paid by pharma, there's a Merck product that came out and it had 18 studies, safety studies, published before the product came out. 16 of them were written by Merck employees, for example. There's so many examples like that. But we were told, 2020, wear a mask made out of anything, it can be made out of an old pair of socks, just go to a fabric store and put something over your face and that will somehow stop virons, which are, you know, microscopic. And then we were told even wear two masks, and all our government officials, for a time, would wear a largish white mask with a black mask over it, so you'd see that they had two masks.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  And they'd put them on right outside of camera view before walking on for a press conference and then take it off in order to talk, spreading COVID that would kill everybody in the process. We actually accepted the idea that we should clean the outside of the pizza box when the pizza's delivered, but it's fine to eat the pizza. We accepted the idea that contact transmission was possible, meaning you could touch something in the supermarket and suddenly you'd have COVID. We accepted the idea of standing six feet apart. We accepted the idea of a single vaccine that would give you immunity forever, morphing into a vaccine that you'd have to take again in three months and again in three months.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  Again in three months and then give to your six month old baby every year for the rest of its life. We accepted all that bullshit and we did it because we were tenderized to use your word. And nobody does the tenderizing better than academics and what I have to call so-called scientists. They may have degrees, but they they leave their degrees at the door when they decide to just do what the government wants them to do.

• 34:31Mike Rowe?

  Here's a crazy idea. What if there was an academy out there that paid students to learn instead of the other way around? Specifically, men and women who want to work in the skilled trades. And what if this academy not only paid for your training, but also covered all the expenses associated with your training? Like travel and food and lodging. And finally, what if this academy guaranteed you a job at the end of the training period? Well, that's exactly what's happening at America's Workforce Academy by Meta. This is a five-week, highly immersive, pre-apprenticeship program that gets you all the necessary certifications you'll need to start a career in the skilled trades immediately.

• 35:13Mike Rowe?

  I'm talking about AI-proof, six-figure jobs, helping to build out the new infrastructure that our economy is depending on. Electricians, plumbers, HVAC techs, welders, fiber optic technicians, these jobs, they are all in demand like never before. And again, every graduate of America's Workforce Academy is guaranteed a job on a Meta website. I first announced this program a few months ago and I have been watching the response ever since. It's extraordinary. This is a nationwide, unprecedented fast track to a long-term career in a skilled trade.

• 35:52Mike Rowe?

  If you or your spouse or your kid or your grandkid are looking for a straight path into a career with no cost at all, check out the opportunities for yourself at meta.com slash America's Workforce Academy. That's meta.com slash America's Workforce Academy.

• 36:10Mike Rowe?

  How was it a gift in the context of what you just described? And was it fear in its undistilled form? Or was it some level of something else? Because it's not just, I mean, we were scared, so we did a lot of those things. But right next to the fear that drove us to comply was the comfort that came from complying. And then this, I don't know, lordliness that came from correcting the heathens around us, who hadn't yet fallen into line and needed to be educated. I use the example all the time.

• 36:52Mike Rowe?

  Chuck came up to visit me in Northern California at the height of the lockdowns. And we were walking around this neighborhood, which is a pretty quiet, isolated place. And on the far side of the street, a man was walking with two masks. And he lowered both to scream at us. "Shouldn't you have your masks on?"

• 37:10Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 37:11Mike Rowe?

  And he was, I couldn't decide if he was mostly scared or mostly delighting in an opportunity to correct a couple--

• 37:22Speaker 02

  Equal measure, I would say.

• 37:24Mike Rowe?

  Yes, a couple less informed bipeds who needed to be straightened out. And he was on hand to do it. So, talk about all that vis a vis the gift of fear.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  Well, you know, fear is certainly used by every government in world history. All leaders in world history have used fear to control and influence populations. Fear of the outside tribe that's going to come and invade our village. And fear of the enemies that will come over the wall. And fear of disease. And fear of terrorism and communism and ideas that got smaller and smaller and smaller. You start with fear of a real country and the soldiers in it. And then you go to an idea like communism. And then you go to terrorists, real people. Then you go to terrorism, an idea. And then ultimately, we came down to the smallest particle possible, which was the viron, viruses, been used for a long time.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  But that fear, just to give you the distinction-- That fear is unwarranted fear, because in Gift of Fear, I describe what I'm talking about that's a gift is true fear. And true fear is always apparent, because it occurs in the presence of danger. And it is something that you sense, you hear it, or you smell it, or you see it, and, or you touch it, or it touches you. That is true fear. Unwarranted fear is, are all the things that arise in the imagination. Anxiety, worry, the story we heard from three weeks ago, or three months ago, the story we heard from somebody else that's operating in our brain.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  Now, there's a somewhat humorous example I give, that if you, you know, how can you tell the difference between true fear and unwarranted fear? Well, you're, you know, you're at the airport and you get that feeling, "I shouldn't get on this plane, I shouldn't get on this plane", which people, many people have had that feeling, "I should take another flight". And if that feeling is based on your memory of a news report from three months before, where, you know, a terrible plane crashed somewhere, that's unwarranted fear, because it's not in your presence. But if it's based on seeing the pilot stumble out of the bar at the airport drunk and board the plane, that is true fear, because it's based on something you perceive in your presence. And, and that's the issue of, of like, how you tell the difference,

• 39:45Speaker 02

  is that any time that a government, or a marketer of a product tells us to be afraid of something, we have a, I think, patriotic duty to be skeptical and come to understand exactly what it is we're being asked to fear. What is it that's being used to herd us like cattle into a particular ramp, and to, you know, get onto a particular truck? And then, you know, if, if it's something that's genuinely frightening, like lava coming down the, you know, coming down the street, when people see lava, they don't think about it. They don't make imaginings of what they should do, they just run, run away. They run down the street. And so, it's our responsibility to figure out the difference

• 40:29Speaker 02

  between things people want us to fear, and, and things that we actually have good reason to fear. And to figure that out, and to, you know, live our lives accordingly.

• 40:40Mike Rowe?

  I'm so sympathetic to parents with kids who are trying to either trust their gut or pick which expert to trust.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 40:51Mike Rowe?

  They're gonna read a book like this and their faith in institutions is going to be shaken, maybe irrevocably. Spoiler alert, you do what you always do, which is why I, one of the things I like about you, there's several things I like about you Gavin, but I

• 41:06Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 41:07Mike Rowe?

  In the end, your arguments are always rooted in a measure of personal responsibility. So, again, spoiler alert, but the book ends with trust yourself. Like, in the, in the wake of all these forbidden facts, th- there's not much you can really offer in the way of counsel, other than to kick the tires until your toes break and then trust yourself. Because in the end, right? In the end, that's what we're left with. Um, sorry, I'm Russell branding you, but the question is, isn't the opposite also true? When you say, when the government sets out to scare you, it's incumbent on us to say,

• 41:51Mike Rowe?

  why are you doing that? But in this world, it felt like we were being told not to be afraid. It's safe and defective Gavin. It's safe and defective. That's not somebody trying to scare me. That's someone trying to assuage me in order to act in a certain way. And we have to discern, it seems, both of those things, sometimes contemporaneously. And what a pain in the ass that is for the average Joe.

• 42:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, listen, it's, it's not easy being human and, uh, as I've raised 10 kids and I have two teenagers now, uh, two sons, 16 and 14, and the reality is, uh-oh, uh, 17 and 15, a mistake I make too often, they will, they will remind me. But the reality is that there's a lot of responsibility that goes with that. And of course, you know, parents wanna drive their kid to school and, and, and throw the kid out of the car and generally land near the and know that it's now their responsibility, it's the school's responsibility. Because the school, after all, is the government. And the government knows best, and the government has my best interests at heart, etc. We want to do that because we can't really get into, do I want to do a background check on every employee to know that there's no sexual predators

• 43:07Speaker 02

  working in the school? Were there ever? Might there be in the future? Are the policies sound? Does the fire safety system work? It's all too much. And so, what I've done as a parent is, and we all do, we limit. We're going to trust certain things, like traffic lights, and roadworks, and aircraft, and airlines, and elevators, and escalators. We're going to trust certain things that we know are beyond our ability to fully dig into. But, but, I draw the line at that which you want to actually inject, or you want my child to ingest, or eat, or think, or do. That becomes too much.

• 43:51Speaker 02

  We all have to make these decisions ultimately. And I say in this book that no parent in America would let a stranger walk up to their baby and inject it with something that the parent doesn't understand or know what it is. And yet, nearly every parent in America does exactly that. When they go to the Long's Drugs, or the Rite Aid, or the local pharmacy, and they have a 23-year-old pharmacist assistant, who was hired three weeks ago, if you even know that, injects something you don't understand. And you don't know what it is. And so, in this book, I tell what it is. I have a lot of pro-vaccine information, and a lot of QR codes that lead to links that are pro-vaccine. But when you really know what the ingredients are,

• 44:34Speaker 02

  and when you really understand what they're meant to do, and when you understand the history of it, and you understand that the same government that told you that Agent Orange was no problem, and burn pits were no problem, and Gulf War Syndrome was no problem, and baby powder was no problem, that's the one telling you, to use your term, Mike, "safe and effective." Now, is safe and effective itself a use of fear? It is. Because those are both fear words, right? Safe is conjures danger. And they're telling you this product is safe, but you're in danger. That's the key message. And then effective is telling you that you need this. And its effectiveness is important because otherwise you're dead from the virus.

• 45:15Speaker 02

  And you and everybody you know, your grandmother and everybody else, they're all perished and doomed. If you don't take this product that we're telling you is safe, unlike the dangerous virus, and effective. So it's still the fear button after all.

• 45:30Mike Rowe?

  But there's also this other patina on it. Like you can shake your finger at me and tell me, oh, there's too much sugar in all that soda pop. Or there's too much alcohol in all that liquor. You can go down the list and find all of the injurious things I'm doing to myself. Smoking is a great example, but the whole argument tipped when we introduced secondhand smoke. And now we're outside the bounds of my own domain. Now I'm impacting people around me. And man, I mean, wasn't that the thing that just tipped us straight into crazy town with all of this? It wasn't just the lecture.

• 46:14Mike Rowe?

  It wasn't just the experts saying, do it for your own good or do it for the sake of your kids. Now it was, you're gonna kill your neighbor. You are just a menace right now because you're uninformed.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  You know, actually, Mike, it came at you exactly as you describe it, but it came at you in many, many ways. And the persuasion campaign was probably the largest and best funded persuasion campaign in the history of the world. I'm talking about COVID vaccines, mRNA vaccines all over the planet, billions of doses. And it came at you in the form that you just said, which is you'll, you'll be helping others and you'll be meeting your civic duty and you'll be saving grandma and you'll be protecting other people. This is a, a method that's been used before, was used for the swine flu in, in 1976 that was eventually taken off the market because it caused. Paralysis and Guillain-Barre syndrome. But the same method, even in 1976, they were saying that, you know,

• 47:14Speaker 02

  if you hug this person and then the mailman, and then the mailman goes home and his mother is sick and she gets it, and then she gets it, and then she gets on a plane and gives it to her friend and she gets it, and it explained the same premise. But in addition to that, there was the premise that you can't get on an airplane, you can't go to a restaurant, you can't keep your job. And so there were some personal consequences given for making a choice to not get the mRNA vaccine, for example, which now, today, already, it's only a few years, is, you know, in countries all over the world, western countries all over the world, not even allowed for people under 50 years old, and certainly not allowed for children.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  But in the United States, until Bobby Kennedy, it was still on the list for every six-month-old baby. Three, three injections for every six-month-old baby, for God's sake.

• 48:11Mike Rowe?

  I was in a small airport last week, standing on a little jetway that hadn't been maintained in a while, and on the wall, it still invited me, urged me really, to stay six feet away from whoever was in front or behind me. And out of nowhere, Gavin, a wave of nausea washed over me. I know so many people now, frankly, myself included, that if I could go back in time, I wouldn't have taken it, you know? I have a good reason, or I have a reason, I don't know if it's a good one, and I suppose everybody does too.

• 48:50Mike Rowe?

  Mine, mine wasn't rooted in fear, I don't think, unless maybe the fear of not being able to work or the fear of a lawsuit.

• 49:00Speaker 02

  That's a good one.

• 49:01Mike Rowe?

  Right? I mean, so.

• 49:05Mike Rowe?

  I just wonder, are we going to look back at this? Or are our kids going to look back at this? And where will those five years reside in the hierarchy of consequential moments in the history of modern civilization? I mean, compare it to the First World War, the Second World War, compare it to whatever you want. Will there be anything more consequential than what we just went through?

• 49:39Mike Rowe?

  Couple of weeks ago, on this very podcast, I talked with Brooke Rollins, our Secretary of Agriculture, about the incredibly complicated business of delivering affordable beef to our citizens without disadvantaging American ranchers. We also discussed the very controversial decision to import 300,000 metric tons of ground beef from various foreign countries and the maddening policy that allows meat packers to label imported meat as a product of the USA. Well, shortly after that conversation, one of my sponsors, Good Ranchers, reported an unusually high level of interest in their product. And this is not surprising.

• 50:20Mike Rowe?

  Given a choice, most people would prefer to buy their meat from American ranchers. And Good Ranchers is the number one company in America that delivers 100% American meat straight to your door. They partner with over 100 local farmers and ranchers to deliver pasture-raised meat with no antibiotics and no added hormones. They've got 25,000 five-star reviews on TrustViolet. 25,000, including my own. This month, when you visit GoodRanchers.com/row, you'll get a free Angus ground beef bundle with your first order. Again, that's GoodRanchers.com/row for four bonus pounds of ground beef raised right here in these United States.

• 51:05Mike Rowe?

  And that's guaranteed. Support your local ranchers by insisting on American meat delivered at GoodRanchers.com/row.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  You know, I think there really won't be, in so many forms, the interruption of infrastructure that caused millions of starvations, the enormous shift of wealth, hundreds of thousands of businesses just in America put out of business forever, and then the long-term physical consequences that we are learning more about all the time. There are studies that come out all the time, hundreds of studies, by the way, that you can find in that book. I've got 400 and some odd citations, but hundreds of specific examples of, you know, young people, particularly young boys, having cardiac, you know, sudden cardiac death that is arguably the result of the mRNA vaccine. And when I say arguably, there's plenty of studies, including that the CDC has now, you know,

• 52:10Speaker 02

  put that on the vaccine product information sheet, that it causes myocarditis and pericarditis. So we won't know the long-term medical consequences of injecting the entire planet, or just about, with a product that wasn't ready for primetime. Now, you said, "How will we look back at it?" That's a tougher question, because the victor tends to write history. And so, you know, those people who storm into Rome and destroy all of the particular kinds of statues, or particular icons, or particular buildings, they get to write the history. And this is true for world wars.

• 52:55Speaker 02

  You know, if you go to the, as I have, to the Holocaust museum, I'm sorry, not the Holocaust museum, the museum in Hiroshima that discusses and commemorates is the wrong word, but, you know, reveals the facts behind the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's a totally different story than I was taught in school. My wife is Japanese, and I remember when I first met her, she was showing me something, and it was an architectural, it was a building, a monument. And I said, "Oh, what's that?" And she said, "Cut it out." I said, "No, no, what do you mean? What is that? I don't know what it is." She said, "Cut it out. That's the Hiroshima Arch." And I said, "Listen, darling, in my school, it was five minutes of study.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  There's no arch that Americans are taught about. There's no monument of any kind." She said, "Really?" And she was really surprised. It would be like if you didn't know the Statue of Liberty. So when I went to the Hiroshima museum... With my sons and my wife, and we all had a good cry. The story told is a different story than the story told by the victors in the United States and in the Western countries. So, what will be the story of these five years we've experienced in which people were literally locked in their homes? And not allowed to engage, you know, families of divorced families, for example. The kids couldn't go from the mother's house to the father's house because that would be mixing households.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  In Hawaii, where I live, the governor put out an order that I had to send to friends in the mainland because they wouldn't believe me if I just told them. It said, "All forms of transportation are prohibited, other than for essential businesses." It said, "Musical instruments, you can only play guitar. You couldn't play instruments that blew air." You could, I mean, brother, it was insane. You could walk on a beach, but you could not stop on the beach because walking is exercise and stopping is death. A man fined $5,000 for not wearing a mask on a surfboard. True story. It was literally madness.

• 55:05Speaker 02

  And how will it be remembered? Well, I think the most damaging, damaging is a hard word. The one that has touched me most deeply in my heart is to know that something around three and a half million Americans died in hospitals, not from COVID, but from all things, as happens every year, alone. Because they couldn't have a family member to hold their hands because it would be oh so dangerous to let anybody into the hospital. That's a dark reality. That's a dark one. And another dark one is that people were not allowed to gather together. Why does that matter? Well, we're social animals and it's what gives us social cohesion. You know, we're all at the concert.

• 55:48Speaker 02

  of some performing artist and we don't look over and say oh that guy over there voted for Trump or that one over there voted for Biden oh I hate that guy oh that guy doesn't care about other people or that guy's right or left we just enjoy the music together we don't go to the beach and say oh that dad over there is an awful guy he voted for Trump or Biden or whatever our our hate methods were but when we were all at home and we weren't allowed to gather like that what were we left with social media that does inspire anger and hostility and hate and that broke the world in my opinion that period of covid lockdowns in all the countries where it worked broke the world it's still not

• 56:30Speaker 02

  back hotels are not back to providing service hospitals are not back to providing service people don't want to go back to work I'm almost done with this long answer Mike but when when the new administration that's in Washington right now went in I had reason to speak to several officials and I learned that almost nobody had gone to work in five years almost nobody in DC the buildings were empty a billion dollars was spent on air conditioning and heating buildings that were empty only janitors and security guards were working in those buildings can we believe that that happened and all the way up till

• 57:10Speaker 02

  Trump was continuing to happen holy shit so these five years are incalculably destructive how will they be remembered probably it's possible that lots of people will say the covid vaccine saved the planet from the terrible scourge of covid

• 57:28Mike Rowe?

  look we're still not quite flat on how to think about Stonewall Jackson unless you go to Georgia

• 57:34Speaker 02

  yeah that's true

• 57:36Mike Rowe?

  that I truly understand but I think I'd like to ask you about and by the way I don't want to spend all our time on your fabulous book because I'm starting to feel like you know a book salesman and I'm happy to sell this one and there's a lot more to talk about but I've got two or three other things I've got to get in your head about while you're here so if your bladder rebels or if something happens in your very busy world of protecting some of the most important people on the planet just give me a heads up and I'll I'll cut to the meat okay I mean you're nodding but nobody can hear you nod Gavin

• 58:10Speaker 02

  okay hang on a second hang on a second nod

• 58:17Mike Rowe?

  Words, language. Everything you just described was a kind of assault on liberty rooted in fear. But with it came an assault on the language wherein the words stopped meaning what I thought they meant. And throughout this book, we see how pandemic doesn't mean what it used to mean. Vaccines don't mean what it used to mean. There's, there's just a long list of words that got slowly redefined to the point where I don't know that their definitions are currently recognizable. And as you riff on that and collect your thoughts, I was also struck by a couple pages

• 58:59Mike Rowe?

  in your book where the authoritative organs project the deaths likely to occur from us wine flu, from the avian flu, from the COVID. I mean, it, there's a long list of things, even some of the-

• 59:17Speaker 02

  Mad cow disease-

• 59:18Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:19Speaker 02

  Bird flu, yes.

• 59:20Mike Rowe?

  Right. So what that page made me think of, and, and obviously the projections next to the realities is the thing I want you to comment on. But my point too was it, that same weird lack of true understanding exists with Chernobyl and Fukushima and Three Mile Island. And, you know, I, I still remember looking at the map of Europe in the wake of Chernobyl and half of it, well, maybe a third, was just blackened out. And experts with many initials after their names were saying, this could be it. This thing could literally, a third of Europe could be uninhabitable.

• 1:00:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:00:02Mike Rowe?

  Right? What, like 17 people died? So if you would, what have we done to our language? And how can we live with these authoritative agencies who have so completely beclowned themselves with regard to projections that were not only off, but cosmically off?

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'll hit both of those, and thank you for raising them. The language thing is very interesting, because often when you can't change, for example, a law or a regulation, let's say there was a regulation about pandemics, and you can't change the regulation, what you can do, all by yourself, without going to Congress and without getting elected to any office, is you can change the definition of the word. And I'll give you two fast examples. Here is the CDC's original definition of the word "vaccine." "A product that stimulates a person's immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease." Now, that's what we grew up with. You take this injection, and you won't get polio.

• 1:01:08Speaker 02

  You will be immune to polio, and you will be protected from this disease. That was for all of our lives, and still in most people's consciousness, what it means when you say "vaccine."

• 1:01:18Mike Rowe?

  To be immunized, to be immunized, yes.

• 1:01:22Speaker 02

  Here is the actual CDC's new improved definition of "vaccine." "A preparation that is used to stimulate the body's immune system against diseases." So what have they dropped? They've dropped "producing immunity to the disease." They've dropped "protecting the person from getting the disease." Those two ideas died of COVID in 2020. And then, the other one that's worth mentioning quickly is "pandemic." As defined by the World Health Organization, this is what pandemic used to mean. "An influenza pandemic occurs when a new influenza virus appears, against which the human population has no immunity, resulting in," and this is the key part,

• 1:02:04Speaker 02

  "several simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness." In other words, an emergency. Here's the new and improved definition of pandemic from the World Health Organization. It's really short. "An influenza pandemic may occur when a new influenza virus appears, against which the human population has no immunity." So what was dropped? You don't need a single death anymore to call it a pandemic. It doesn't need to be widespread to call it a pandemic. It doesn't need to be simultaneous in more than one country. It doesn't need to be worldwide. And so they get all the power, and all the funding, and all the fun of declaring a new pandemic

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  on the basis only of the fact that it's a virus that's new. That's it.

• 1:02:53Mike Rowe?

  But new was not sexy enough. We had to go with novel. Right. It's the novel, coronavirus novel.

• 1:03:04Speaker 02

  That's right. And then I want to go to the second part of your, of your long Russell Brandinian question. By the way, Russell's getting a lot of attention today for these questions. I hope he doesn't become like Kurt and concise as a result of this criticism.

• 1:03:18Mike Rowe?

  He gets away with it because of the accent and because he's jacked up on a lot of caffeine, obviously.

• 1:03:25Speaker 02

  I have to add eloquent and, and funny.

• 1:03:29Mike Rowe?

  For sure.

• 1:03:29Speaker 02

  This isn't the place for adding anything nice about Russell Brand. Here we're just criticizing him. Okay, so here, a second part of your question had to do with the projections. And projections are typically modeling, meaning they are, you know, ideas and mathematical suggestions of how terrible a thing could be. Many of the projections that we've all lived by have come from something called the Imperial College in London. Here's their history. In 2002, they predicted 150,000 deaths in the UK from mad cow disease. The actual number, not 150,000, 170.

• 1:04:08Mike Rowe?

  Oops.

• 1:04:09Speaker 02

  In 2005, they predicted 200 million people could die from bird flu. The actual number, over six years, 282.

• 1:04:20Mike Rowe?

  Whoops.

• 1:04:21Speaker 02

  Yep, whoops is right. In 2009, they predicted 65,000 flu deaths in the UK. The actual number, 45. That was swine flu, by the way. In 2020, they predicted 179,000 COVID deaths in Taiwan in the first full year of the pandemic. The actual number of deaths in Taiwan in the first year of the pandemic, 10. So the modelers basically have run our world in recent years by giving government what they want, which is there could be, you know, hundreds of millions of deaths from this, and that links to the vaccine saved, you know, 150 million people.

• 1:05:02Speaker 02

  And in the book, I won't do it here, it's too, you know, requires a lot of precise math. But in the book, I discuss how these projections, these modeling projections are just radically off base, and they become facts, like it's a fact now that vaccines have saved 154 million lives, until you learn that it includes things like the tetanus vaccine, where in all of the United States, in 10 years, the number of tetanus deaths was 13, and they were all old people. So how then would you say that billions of life years of, you know, people's lives were saved by the tetanus vaccine?

• 1:05:43Speaker 02

  Because the tetanus vaccine, there's a billion and a half people on earth who haven't had it, and guess what they have? The exact same death rate as the ones who have had it. Same with measles. The death rate for measles going back many, many years, 22 years, in the United States was zero, and it was zero for the vaccinated, and it was zero for the 9 million unvaccinated. So when you make these ridiculous reaches to say things like, you know, 1.1 billion life years resulted because of the tetanus vaccine, I want to just quickly, by the way, for people who are interested, say something favorable about the tetanus vaccine, which is that you can give it at the time of the injury.

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  You don't have to give it prophylactically. So, and the injury, by the way, comes from a very deep wound. A puncture. With wood or metal, a deep puncture, but it also has to have the tetanus bacterium on it. Tetanus is not transmissible. Tetanus is incredibly hard to find on earth. There's a chart in the book, most people wouldn't believe, but it shows that in all of Europe, 24 countries, whatever it is. All but two countries had zero tetanus. In all of Russia in 2022, one case of tetanus. In all of Central America, 20 some odd countries, fewer than 10 cases per 100,000. Not deaths, just cases. Because when you get that injury,

• 1:07:11Speaker 02

  you can at that moment in the hospital, they always say to you, no matter what, even if you had a tetanus shot a year ago, five years ago, they say, we'll give you a booster. So they're gonna do it anyway because of the deep puncture wound on the off chance that you are one of the, listen to this, this is true math, one of the 150 million people in America. It's one out of 150 million will die of tetanus.

• 1:07:34Mike Rowe?

  So two a year?

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  In some years, and often zero a year. You know, here's, if you wanna go really crazy, you look at polio, which is the, you know, the greatest killer of all time, we are told, that's the spin. But I'm gonna tell you how many polio deaths there were in the world, on Earth, last year, out of 8 billion people, the number of polio deaths last year was zero. Zero. Polio. 99% of the people who contract the polio virus have no symptoms. They never know they even had it. Of the 1% who do know that they had it, they have what amounts to a cold that resolves typically within a week.

• 1:08:21Speaker 02

  And of that percentage, about 1% of them suffer the big dreaded consequence, which is paralysis. And that is, on Earth, last year, there were 154 human beings out of 8 billion, ah, sorry, 541 human beings out of 8 billion who had poliomylitis paralysis. And 97% of them were vaccine-induced poliomylitis, meaning it was the vaccine strain, not the wild. That's the truth. That's the truth, all documented from the CDC, by the way, in this book. And yet, polio is the one that they use like crazy

• 1:09:04Speaker 02

  to say, well, you don't wanna get polio, do you? For all I know, I've had polio, maybe several times. We don't know. But the bottom line is that this thing we were told is like instant death. The CDC tells you on their website that 99% of the cases. And by the way, I got one more for you. Half of the people who actually experienced the dreaded outcome, which is paralysis, half of them recover. So this whole idea, I'm not saying it's a great thing to get polio, or that, you know, that it's not a problem on earth, but it's not a problem on earth. But putting that aside, they will quickly say, well, that's all because of the vaccine. How does that account for the more than a billion people who didn't take the vaccine?

• 1:09:50Speaker 02

  And yet have the same death rate and the same paralysis rate and the same side effect rate? The problem with this whole thing is it doesn't work. It doesn't stand up to scrutiny. That's why it's treated like a religion.

• 1:10:09Mike Rowe?

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• 1:10:52Mike Rowe?

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• 1:11:32Mike Rowe?

  I think the thing that is most terrifying about all of it is that it's so much broader than just this one thing. It's the curse of the consensus. And like, back to all of the stuff that accompanied ChatGPT's analysis of your book, all the parentheticals, long since debunked, proven as misinformation. It just reminds me of, if you go looking at global warming arguments, you'll find that 98% of the scientists, that there's a consensus, right? And I'm not even sure what the consensus is, but this idea that the science is settled,

• 1:12:17Mike Rowe?

  that feels like it's a core part of your book as well. Because you talk about gravity and you talk about a great many things that at any given time in the world, we were awfully certain about. It's, you know, Chuck and I were having this conversation the other day on a slightly adjacent matter, but it had to do with this nexus of faith versus skepticism. And how for the longest time, there was a supernatural explanation for virtually every inexplicable thing. But once we determined that maybe the sun wasn't being dragged through the heavens by chariots, and once we determined that maybe taking most of the blood out of George

• 1:13:01Mike Rowe?

  Washington's body wasn't the way to keep him alive, blah, blah, blah. Less supernatural, more natural, more science. And now it just feels to me like the real rush is not to figure out the truth of the thing, it's to shut somebody up who is not on board with the settled part.

• 1:13:21Speaker 02

  Yes, it's to lock down, lock down information as settled when the term settled science is against everything that science is, which is continued exploration. Of course, we know that all these things have changed in the last hundred years and thousand years as we've learned new things. The problem is that we now pretend like we've gotten to the end and this is now settled science. Will you indulge me to read something from my book on this topic?

• 1:13:48Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 1:13:50Speaker 02

  Okay, because it's a good example of how the arc works in, you know, the early experimenters with vaccines, for example. You know, why is it called vaccines? Because vaca means cow. The early vaccines were pus, taken from cows that had cowpox, and then put onto wounds on human beings, eventually injected into human beings, pus from cows, pus from horses, and a whole lot of other things. But they were experimenting, and they were advancing. And some of the old-timey vaccine ingredients, now I'm reading, were made by steeping them for years in a mix of ox bile, glycerin, and potato slices. And yes, really potato slices. But over time, vaccines evolved, because science evolves.

• 1:14:34Speaker 02

  And over time, they began to include dried rabbit spinal cords, duck embryos, chicken blood, human bile, because God knows you don't want to throw that away. You want to use that for an injection, ground-up rat spleens, and boiled pigskin. Now, all of that is about the past. We've come a long way since then. Here are some ingredients in today's modern vaccines. Gelatin from boiled pigskin, chicken embryo protein, blood from the hearts of cow fetuses, human fetus DNA fragments, albumin from human blood plasma, oil extracted from the shark's liver, protein from army worm ovaries, and finally, monkey kidney DNA fragments. Now, all of that is true.

• 1:15:19Speaker 02

  And it reminds me of that Shakespearean, you know, the Macbeth scene, where the witches are stirring the brew and they're saying, you know, "Eye of newt, toe of frog, lizard's leg, tongue of dog." It's not really that different. And just quickly to read one more paragraph. That I just shared with you was the natural ingredients. It's not natural to inject them into other biological beings, to take them out of a pig, or a cow, or a monkey, and inject it, or a worm, and inject it into us. But these are the chemical ingredients in today's vaccines. Formaldehyde. I don't have to say anything bad about formaldehyde. I guess people know it. Polysorbate 80, which is linked to infertility. Potassium chloride. Now, this is a great one. Potassium chloride is the final injection

• 1:16:04Speaker 02

  that's given to people when we execute them with lethal injection. But of course, much higher volume than we give to infants. Phenol, which is listed by the FDA as a hazardous substance, borax, you can imagine that's probably not good for you, MSG, monosodium glutamate, and finally, the big one, ethyl mercury, which until just a few weeks ago, thanks to RFK Junior, was in all kinds of vaccine products given to, given to children, even though the FDA and the CDC claimed it had been removed in 2005. It wasn't. It was still in six vaccines given until just very recently. Mercury, mercury, for God's sakes, injected into people.

• 1:16:47Mike Rowe?

  I would encourage people, if you have a relationship with ChatGPT, or Gronk, or whoever your favored assistant is, ask it about mercury. With the possible exception of radioactive material, is there a substance on the planet that is more widely?

• 1:17:07Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:17:09Mike Rowe?

  I mean, don't touch it, don't eat it, don't sniff it, it will kill you. It's like crystal, crystal, crystal clear, until you ask the AI if it's okay to inject it.

• 1:17:25Mike Rowe?

  And then it gets weirdly awkward. It's like cough, cough. Well, I mean, what are we, what are we doing?

• 1:17:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's an interesting one. You know, mercury has been so well established. There are a couple of world events, the Minimata disaster, it's called, Minimata, Japan, where the people in this small village started noticing that their cats were acting unusual by falling into the ocean and dying. And then they noticed that their friends were acting unusual by falling into the ocean and dying, or first going crazy and then dying. And so they wondered what was up. Nearby was the Chiso Corporation factory. And they also wondered what was up because for 10 years, they'd been feeding the cats their mercury waste product that they were dumping into the ocean as a test

• 1:18:19Speaker 02

  because they were trying to figure out what was going on too. The difference is they were doing it in secret, not telling the people of Minnimata. And so for 10 years, they continued to give, to dump mercury into the oceans. And the fishermen would get sick from the fish. And of course, the cat who shared the same diet would get sick from the fish and die. That went on for 10 years until finally it was acknowledged and the Chiso Corporation paid some of the survivors, the ones that hadn't died. By the way, the Chiso Corporation is still in business and doing great, just like Pfizer is still in business and doing great. So after that, there was the Iraq disaster with mercury, where a bunch of seeds were shipped to Iraq and they had been treated with mercury as a preservative, an insecticide.

• 1:19:03Speaker 02

  And on the bags, the sacks that contained the mercury, it said lethal and poison and it had the skull and crossbones. And all of that didn't mean anything to the Iraqis. Skull and crossbones is not a graphic icon that's used there. So they ate it. They cooked it into bread. And 100,000 people got sick from it. And it was one of these great disasters of mercury around the world. And then I have to add to that the little matter of hundreds of millions of children being injected with mercury all over the world, now billions. By the way, what RFK Junior did by making it no longer a viable vaccine ingredient in childhood vaccines all over the rest of the world, it's still used hundreds of millions of times.

• 1:19:48Speaker 02

  Mercury, I'm not a scientist. But I have enough brain cells left to know that mercury should not be injected into human beings.

• 1:19:58Mike Rowe?

  So the obvious question, I can hear people screaming, is why? Why are all these Shakespearean? Why is it still a witch's brew? What is the purpose of all of these wild components, including and especially?

• 1:20:15Mike Rowe?

  Mercury. And in the same breath, what possible reason could you have for deliberately putting asbestos into baby powder? I get why dioxin went into Agent Orange, and I understand why there might be a giant concerted effort to maybe redirect or misdirect the inquiry around that. But what is the affirmative reason to put these clearly toxic substances into these things?

• 1:20:46Speaker 02

  Well, in the case, let's, let's take mercury first. So what, um, and by the way, aluminum is also on that list, is also, uh, you know, in many childhood vaccines and is also a heavy metal that's not good for you. The stated reason is that mercury was added as a preservative. The actual reason, in my opinion, is that it was added as an adjuvant. An adjuvant is a vaccine ingredient that causes the body to say, whoa, what the hell? I don't like that, and mount an immune response. Why is that important? Because back in the days when, uh, CDC and FDA were actually doing their jobs, um, they would, a vaccine would have to prove that it was effective by showing that it got a, an

• 1:21:31Speaker 02

  immune reaction, uh, a certain percentage of the time. Sometimes it was called 90%, later it was called 50%, but in any case, you had to show that something happened when you injected this thing into the body. That's an adjuvant. It's there to insult the body so that the body reacts and says, every time I see that thing from now on, I'm going to mount an immune response. And with it is, uh, a measles viron or, or a, a particle from some disease that is the target disease. So if you follow that, the adjuvant is meant to aggravate the body and the, the, it was often said by toxicologists that the more toxic the vaccine, the more effective the vaccine. It sort of goes in the category of no shit.

• 1:22:16Speaker 02

  You inject me with something, my body is going to go, whoa, what the hell's that? And if it doesn't have that reaction, then you're not going to get much of an immune response. And so they say it's a preservative. I don't believe them. I believe it was always meant to be an adjuvant because you couldn't find a better one. And they claim and maybe believed that.

• 1:22:38Speaker 02

  It was only trace amounts, so it didn't matter. Even though ChatGPT or Grok or any other AI will tell you that mercury in any quantity, no matter how small, those are the words it'll use, no matter how small, should not be touched, should not be breathed, should not be eaten and would be, should not be injected other than in childhood vaccines. That's sort of my opinion in the matter. But your why still stands strong and it links up to how. In other words, how in the world can we, you know, I just read the vaccine ingredients and experimentation continues. And, you know, is virology an acceptable science that really makes sense and is a discipline that we should all follow?

• 1:23:23Speaker 02

  I have to put that in the category of maybe. It might be a little bit of black magic, but it's a priesthood. And like any discipline, scientific discipline, it's a priesthood that will do anything possible to protect itself and to get attention and to get funding.

• 1:23:41Mike Rowe?

  What are you saying to people who will listen to this or glance at your book and not necessarily read it? And by the way, I should mention that like your previous book, Cause Unknown, I think it was?

• 1:23:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:23:54Mike Rowe?

  You've mentioned these QR codes. I want people to understand that very, very rarely is there a page in this book that isn't filled with those things. That's what it looks like. It's not just a footnote. I really recommend reading the book with your phone nearby. If you read something that simply sounds inexplicable, you just scan it and you hit it and you can take a fairly deep detour. But maybe not a detour because in the end, Ben, you're going to have to defend yourself. You're going to be called an anti-vaxxer. And I would love to hear, you know, how you're going to respond to that, how you have responded to it. And when the business of being skeptical

• 1:24:37Mike Rowe?

  turns you into not an inquisitive seeker of truth, but a denier.

• 1:24:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's funny. Why I'm laughing is that the things being denied are not being denied by skepticism, but by an almost religious commitment to unquestioning allegiance to, let's say, vaccines, that's an example, but government itself is an example. You know, we rely upon government for a lot of things, and sometimes we have a choice, and sometimes we don't have a choice. In the case of a pharma product, a pill or a vaccine, I hope we continue to have a choice for a while. And so, you know, I'm actually not anti-vax, which is the interesting feature. There's a passage in this book. And by the way, we've talked about the book a lot, Mike, and I appreciate it. I want to make clear that neither I nor the publisher makes any money on this book.

• 1:25:30Speaker 02

  We both did it to get the information out, and I made it very short, and the way creative energy is, this book had to get out of my chest. And it wasn't because it's going to get me a new car or an add-on porch at my house, although it would be nice to have a new porch at the house, but I'm not going to get there by this point. Anyway, you know, there's a section in here where this very topic is discussed, which is how should parents make decisions when, you know, their pediatricians are coming at them and saying, you know, you have to take all these vaccines. Interesting discipline, by the way, pediatrics. If you think back to your own childhood, you didn't get sick very much. You didn't have to go to the doctor very much. And kids don't.

• 1:26:14Speaker 02

  They're born, the vast majority of them, inherently healthy. And then we begin to hit them with all the toxins and all the processed foods and all the, you know, bad behavior of sitting around online that causes weight gain and all of that. But they start off quite healthy, and I didn't go to the pediatrician in my entire life as a kid, other than when I broke my leg. And it didn't have to be a pediatrician, that's who it happened to be. Today, however... People go to the pediatrician all the time for wellness checks. We gotta be sure your seemingly healthy young kid who's just running around athletically all day with seemingly boundless energy. We gotta be sure that your kid is well.

• 1:26:56Speaker 02

  And while he or she is here, let's take the opportunity to inject them with one of these vaccine products that we're going to do 140 times before they're 18. So Pediatrics itself, which is of course is all, you know, not all, but in large measure pro-vaccine, sells these vaccines and makes its business by getting you in there to get these vaccines and of course charges for doing so. Am I saying they're all corrupt and terrible? No, but they're all following a priesthood in the CDC and very few pediatricians will know as much as a single reader of this book will know. Very few. In fact, I've got a chapter in here called Ask Your Doctor.

• 1:27:36Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:37Speaker 02

  And you ask your doctor, what are the vaccine ingredients? Not ask him by email when he'll just go check ChatGPT or the CDC website. Ask him in person.

• 1:27:46Mike Rowe?

  I like the question. I like the question where you basically, who debunked it?

• 1:27:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:54Mike Rowe?

  And why? And what is the answer? I mean, have you heard such an answer?

• 1:28:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, that's sort of how I started with this book was to say, we all know that the link between or any link between any vaccine product and brain damage or autism has been debunked. Everybody knows that's been debunked and only a stupid person would claim otherwise. It's been debunked. And then you ask, how was it debunked? You so smart person, how was it debunked? And who debunked it? And why was it debunked? And all of a sudden, nobody can answer those questions. Those three simple questions. Answer, by the way, how was it debunked? By the IOM going into a room and having closed door meetings that are funny as hell. Who debunked it? The IOM. Why was it debunked? This is an interesting question too. Why? It's not because Bobby Kennedy, he wasn't even involved in the topic.

• 1:28:45Speaker 02

  It's because there were many, many scientific studies that showed a connection between childhood vaccines and autism and brain damage. Why? Why were vaccines even a suspect? Because when mercury damages the human body, it damages the body neurologically. It causes the very things that are evident and apparent in brain damage. That's what it does. And so when you had these thousands of parents say, "I took my kid to be vaccinated and the next day, my kid was gone, mentally gone, no eye contact anymore, no talking anymore, listless. Maybe it has something to do with that vaccine." So it wasn't Bobby Kennedy who got the idea. It was reality itself.

• 1:29:30Speaker 02

  That's the big problem. And there's a scene in this book where the, they talk about the fact that seizures that follow vaccination is normal. It's perfectly healthy. What, what? Yeah, why would that be a problem? So your baby has a seizure that ends up in the emergency room. So what? He's already lying down, right? Yeah, he's down, he's comfortable. It's not like, it's right, right. Not like your baby was driving a car or operating heavy machinery. And so it just had a seizure. It's totally normal. Well, the interesting thing is that there are two studies I cite in the book that talk about why, how it's very serious problem. Seizures after vaccination is a very serious problem. Not because of the seizures or the emergency room visited to in the morning.

• 1:30:15Speaker 02

  It's a problem because it causes vaccine hesitancy. And vaccine hesitancy is the one thing we must never have. I know, by the way, what actually causes vaccine hesitancy. It's reality. No shit. You take your baby to the hospital at two in the morning with seizures and your baby's eyes rolling back in its head, and you'll be very thoughtful. But when they tell you, "Oh yeah, that's from the vaccine. That's no problem. That's a, that's the most normal thing in the world." You'll, you'll be very thoughtful before you'll do it again. Lots of parents do. They do it the second time and they get, some of them lose their babies that way.

• 1:30:56Mike Rowe?

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• 1:31:40Mike Rowe?

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• 1:32:19Mike Rowe?

  I hate this question, but I have to ask it as a, you know, as a fake journalist. Okay, you're not anti-vax. And I know you're not an expert, but it's very difficult to read this book and not come to a conclusion that's rooted in profound skepticism. What vaccines, if any, are you comfortable with?

• 1:32:43Speaker 02

  Well, thank you for asking. And as a fake journalist, you said you have to ask. So as a fake journalistic subject, I guess I have to answer. And it goes like this. There is a vaccine called the BCG vaccine. That's given for... For tuberculosis. Now, the actual number one killer in the world, infectious killer in the world, a transmissible killer in the world, is tuberculosis. Uh, 1.5 million children a year. And it's not very prevalent in the United States, but the, uh, it's very big around the world. And it's had a vaccine for more than a hundred years without the, uh, the new tech, uh, technology that we don't understand yet, like mRNA. And yet that vaccine is not given in the United States.

• 1:33:29Speaker 02

  Go figure. That's the vaccine they don't give. The one that actually is, helps to prevent the number one, uh, killer, uh, respiratory killer in the world, which is tuberculosis. Now, why? Why is it not given? Well, they might say, uh, because the prevalence of, of, uh, tuberculosis is so rare in the United States. However, that doesn't work because there were 9,000 cases of tuberculosis in the United States last year. And if you say that the, that prevalence isn't enough, then how do you deal with the fact that you're giving it for, you know, uh, uh, 10, uh, uh, cases of, uh, the one I mentioned that you get from, uh, Pope, tetanus, for example.

• 1:34:08Mike Rowe?

  Tetanus? Or like, how about zero polio?

• 1:34:11Speaker 02

  Uh, zero polio, and yet we're still giving the vaccine. That's right. And the only polio cases in the United States, by the way, there's just been one since 1986. One. And it's polio. It's the vaccine-induced poliomylitis. So, you know, in asking what vaccine I believe in, I think this BCG vaccine is actually very valuable. It is helpful for fighting cancer. It is helpful for fighting other respiratory diseases. And you could actually make the claim that it improves health, uh, which you cannot make for the others. You know, the others, uh, are demonstrated time and again, uh, to, uh, to have unfavorable consequences in addition to preventing the disease they're intended to, to prevent. Many of them do that, meaning many of them work.

• 1:34:56Speaker 02

  So, uh, you know, am I, uh, anti-vaccine or pro-vaccine? What I'm anti is the, um, the deification of these supposed experts who act like this is a religion. And what am I, by the way, for questioning this? What am I? Uh, crazy.

• 1:35:14Mike Rowe?

  Well, you're the denier.

• 1:35:15Speaker 02

  They would say crazy debunked. What is Bobby Kennedy for questioning it? Who, by the way, wanted nothing to do with this topic. He was talking about mercury in fish and nobody called him anti-fish. But when he started talking about mercury in vaccines, what happened to him? Nineteen years.

• 1:35:31Mike Rowe?

  In the wilderness.

• 1:35:32Speaker 02

  Unable to get on television, couldn't be interviewed on a news program. Crazy, he's crazy. They had to say he's crazy because they don't want to engage with the arguments. And every time that anybody refuses to engage with the argument and instead does what ChatGPT did to me, you know, saying that I'm, you know, floating debunked theories and things that have long been debunked. Well, when you see the debunking method, debunking ain't so grand anymore.

• 1:36:00Mike Rowe?

  You know, you quote, oh, what's his name? Hotez in the book.

• 1:36:06Speaker 02

  Yes, Peter Hotez, yeah.

• 1:36:07Mike Rowe?

  As saying maybe one of the all time dumb things. I'd like to hear that if it comes to mind. But I'm also thinking of some people that I kind of respect, you know, writers and thoughtful thinkers, some of whom are at the National Review, who have called Bobby a crackpot. And I guess it should be said too, that, you know, you and Bobby have been friends for decades. You go way back.

• 1:36:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have a lot of, I have a lot of respect for him. And I have lots of people who've been friends, who I wouldn't, you know, endorse their process or their belief systems. But, you know, Bobby was a trial attorney who took on corporation after corporation for toxins being put into our environment. And there's no better example of that than being injected into our internal environment. And he was very successful. He was very well regarded, very well liked, you know, cover of every magazine as, you know, one of the hundred most influential Americans. And he'd done so much for the environment until that fateful day that he published the book called Thimerosal, Let the Science Speak.

• 1:37:16Speaker 02

  Thimerosal is ethyl mercury, mercury. And at that moment, that was it. No TV shows, no articles anymore. All his past articles taken out and debunked. And that was the, you know, the farmer's third rail because. It's not that he said something bad about vaccines. It's that you can't say anything about vaccines because they can't stand up and walk around on their own. They're not capable of mounting a viable argument. And that's when it becomes a religion. And that's how it's treated as a religion. I want to get that Peter Hotez quote, I found it. Here's four quotes in a row from scientists. The first one, "In science, consensus is irrelevant. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science.

• 1:38:01Speaker 02

  If it's science, it isn't consensus." Period. That's said by Michael Crichton, you know, graduate of Harvard Medical School and went on to become a great writer. Here's another quote, this one from Carl Sagan. "Science is a process of learning and discovery and debate at its heart." I'm sorry, "and debate is at its heart." Carl Sagan. Here's one from Neil deGrasse Tyson, who's a more current scientist. "In science, the debate is never over." And I end with the dumbest quote I could find from Dr. Peter Hotez. Quote, "Science is not up for debate."

• 1:38:38Mike Rowe?

  Well, with great respect to Dr. Fauci, isn't "I am the science" a strong contender?

• 1:38:44Speaker 02

  It is, but I was done with Fauci already by this point. And Hotez needed some attention. I mean, listen, I'm not saying a thing bad about Hotez. He's an idiot. And he's the one who demonstrated his idiocy, not me. When he says "science is not up for debate." And he's in the religion, by the way. And he's a vaccine maker. And he's, basically to him, you all saw that when he appeared on Joe Rogan, Rogan said, "Will you debate Bobby Kennedy?" And he said, "No," because science is not up for debate, apparently. But I think he was offered ultimately millions of dollars to just attend, to attend that debate. But he is not going to debate Bobby Kennedy because Bobby Kennedy is crazy and not a scientist.

• 1:39:28Speaker 02

  You don't debate with non-scientists. Well, listen, I'm not a scientist, but I speak English. And I can read the CDC website and I can read these quotes that I'm reading. The idea that you have to be a scientist to have an opinion about what you eat? Or what you swallow? Or what you inject into your baby? Wow. That's a bad idea.

• 1:39:51Mike Rowe?

  Isn't it interesting, though, and I think probably a net positive, in this sea, this miasma of chattering and certainty, which we're obviously long on, the long-form podcast for the genuine curious biped, who really wants to understand, or at least inquire as to how to be healthier, you know, how to get in better shape, how to have a better diet, how to understand the very things we're grappling with right now. I mean, I don't think you and I have ever lived, certainly in a time where there was more information. Granted, the great challenge now is to separate the wheat from the chaff.

• 1:40:35Mike Rowe?

  But if you're curious, there are lots of tires to kick.

• 1:40:39Speaker 02

  It's true, and this, of course, threatens government profoundly. And if you agree, Mike, we can try something here, live on the air, that I didn't even tell you about. And that's where editing will come in if it's no good. But it's a very interesting exploration of how AI can function in our lives and how important it is to ask that second follow-up question. Would you buy into a little experiment I can show you?

• 1:41:03Mike Rowe?

  It's why we're here.

• 1:41:04Speaker 02

  OK, thanks. Let's see. So I'm talking now to Grok. Who killed Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968?

• 1:41:14Speaker 03

  Sirhan.

• 1:41:17Speaker 02

  Say it again. I didn't hear you clearly.

• 1:41:19Speaker 03

  Sirhan.

• 1:41:20Speaker 02

  Wouldn't you note we're having an audio problem with it? It says Sirhan Sirhan, Sirhan Sirhan killed Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968.

• 1:41:30Speaker 02

  OK, how many shots were fired at Robert Kennedy?

• 1:41:34Speaker 02

  You know what? This damned experiment's not going to work the way I hope because Grok is not working. How many shots were fired at Robert Kennedy when he was killed in 1968?

• 1:41:46Speaker 02

  What a shame. All right, we tried the experiment. Here's the thing. You asked that question. You want to try it? I can give you the questions.

• 1:41:51Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, sure. Let me try it.

• 1:41:54Speaker 02

  Who killed Robert Kennedy in 1968?

• 1:41:56Mike Rowe?

  Who killed Robert Kennedy in 1968?

• 1:42:02Mike Rowe?

  It's not going to talk to me.

• 1:42:05Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 1:42:06Mike Rowe?

  Funny. Hold on a minute. But why wouldn't it? I mean, it searches.

• 1:42:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:13Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Yeah, Sirhan Sirhan killed him.

• 1:42:16Speaker 02

  Okay, now ask how many shots were fired at Robert Kennedy?

• 1:42:26Mike Rowe?

  How many shots were fired at Robert Kennedy in 1968?

• 1:42:32Mike Rowe?

  Generating.

• 1:42:35Mike Rowe?

  Generating. Based on official reports, Robert F. Kennedy was shot four times with three bullets hitting him and a fourth passing through his jacket. However, the total number of shots fired during the assassination is disputed, and there is evidence to suggest more than one shooter.

• 1:42:53Speaker 02

  Oh, that's a good answer. That's probably my responsibility for a lot of these conversations. Ask if Sirhan Sirhan was standing in front of or behind Robert Kennedy.

• 1:43:03Mike Rowe?

  Was Sirhan Sirhan standing in front of Robert Kennedy or behind him?

• 1:43:12Mike Rowe?

  Sirhan Sirhan was standing behind Robert F. Kennedy when he shot him. Kennedy had just turned to shake hands with someone when Sirhan stepped out from behind a tray stacker and fired at close range.

• 1:43:25Speaker 02

  Ask it to reconsider whether he was standing in front of or behind.

• 1:43:31Mike Rowe?

  Reconsider whether Sirhan Sirhan was standing in front of Robert Kennedy or behind him.

• 1:43:40Mike Rowe?

  Generating. Generating. A discrepancy exists between eyewitness accounts and forensic evidence regarding Sirhan Sirhan's position relative to Robert F. Kennedy during the assassination. Eyewitnesses generally place Sirhan in front of Kennedy, while the autopsy report indicates the fatal shot was fired at point-blank range from behind him. This has fueled controversy and theories of a second gunman.

• 1:44:10Speaker 02

  Ask it, who is Thane Sazhar?

• 1:44:14Mike Rowe?

  Thing?

• 1:44:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, T-H-A-N-E. Who is Thane Sazhar?

• 1:44:18Mike Rowe?

  Who is Thing Sazhar?

• 1:44:23Speaker 01

  Thane, T H A.

• 1:44:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:44:26Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. While a specific person named Thang Cesar could not be identified, a popular Colombian-born designer named Caesar Geraldo, no, I guess I got that wrong.

• 1:44:37Speaker 02

  Hang on.

• 1:44:39Speaker 02

  Who is Thane Cesar who was present at the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy?

• 1:44:45Speaker 02

  I was hoping mine was gonna start working.

• 1:44:47Mike Rowe?

  Oh, I got it. The suspected second gunman is Thane Eugene Cesar, an Ace Guard Service employee hired by the Ambassador Hotel for that night. He is implicated in several ways. He was standing immediately behind Senator Kennedy at the time of the shooting and said he was holding the senator's arm.

• 1:45:09Speaker 02

  Was he armed?

• 1:45:11Mike Rowe?

  Was Thane Cesar armed?

• 1:45:16Mike Rowe?

  The LAPD, which interviewed Cesar shortly after the shooting, did not regard him as a suspect and did not ask to see his gun. Cesar stated that he did own a 22 caliber Harrington and Richardson pistol, and he showed it to LAPD Sergeant P. E. Osteen on 24 June 1968.

• 1:45:38Speaker 02

  So, he was standing immediately behind Robert Kennedy. He hated Robert Kennedy. This is me talking, you can stop with that. He's standing immediately behind him, he hated him, he had a top-secret clearance, he worked for one night as a guard for a company called Ace Security. The round that killed Robert Kennedy was upwards and from the right, the bullet, the gun was right against Robert Kennedy's head, according to the autopsy. All the rounds that hit him were fired from behind. Sirhan was standing six feet in front, and yet, AI began by telling you and me, Sirhan, Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy. And so, the, why I raise this, and I wish we could've gotten mine to work, it would've been fun, but that why I raise it is that the, the first question you ask, you must never stop there with AI.

• 1:46:22Speaker 02

  You have to keep going, because what you get on the first question is the official consensus answer on anything. And what you'll get on the follow-up questions is, you know, far more significant and valuable.

• 1:46:37Mike Rowe?

  You know, it probably wasn't available when you generated those early reports for some of your clients at the height of the, well, not at the height, but at the onset of the lockdowns. I remember talking to you about, you did a pretty deep analysis on what was happening in Italy. And that, you know, how useful would AI have been, or could it have been, when you were trying to get to the heart of some of the way the, the information on hand had been spun, omitted, and leaned into in ways that just, in hindsight, don't make a lot of sense?

• 1:47:15Speaker 02

  Well, what we learned, I mean, that was in March of 2020, and for a group of clients, we wanted to learn what the risks were. And what we learned from the first data that came out, which was out of northern Italy, was that the average age of death was 81, meaning that the people who died of COVID had already outlived the national lifespan average. They'd already won the lottery, in that sense. And then we learned that the, the things it would, it would take to die from COVID included catching COVID, then not treating it, then not going to the hospital, then getting very sick, then going to the hospital, then being one of the small percentage who would be admitted, then being one of the very small percentage that would be admitted to, to intensive care. And even

• 1:48:00Speaker 02

  then, you had a 90% chance of survival. In other words, this was not the instant death drama that we were told. Who did die of COVID, by the way? Probably the single most remarkable statistic you can find out of the COVID drama is that 71% of the deaths attributed to COVID in Canada were people living in nursing homes.

• 1:48:26Speaker 02

  So, that's not, that wasn't presented to us that way during all the COVID drama from all the marketing and promotion. It was not, if you're not living in a nursing home, your odds are overwhelmingly, you know, favorable that you're going to be just fine. It was quite the opposite. It was, you know, even children will die, and we have to inoculate even the children, and who had just about zero consequence from COVID. The other thing we learned was that the people who died of COVID had 3.7 existing fatal comorbidities, meaning they were already very sick. And so the the idea that just a healthy person, I was sixty five years old and, you know, was told, oh, if you're over sixty and you get Covid, you're dead. That was the original information.

• 1:49:11Speaker 02

  But after I got the Italy information, it was quite apparent to me that I would be just fine when I got Covid, which of course I did, which of course everybody did, including all the vaccinated people, got it two or three times. And so there were a lot of, you know, you could generously say mistakes and ungenerously say lies and concealments. I'll tell you the weirdest one. I wrote, you know, a passage for Cause Unknown, I wrote the afterword and I helped Ed Dowd with the book. And a lot of the information was based on Covid deaths around the world, which came from Johns Hopkins University called Worldometers, funded by Bill Gates, by the way.

• 1:49:52Speaker 02

  Only afterwards, only years later, did a very smart friend of mine say, um, how do you think they got those daily deaths from all those countries, a hundred and ninety countries in the world, that they could report on the daily deaths that crawled along the bottom of the CNN screen, for example? And it never occurred to me to wonder, I thought, well, deaths, that must be from death certificates. No, death certificates aren't filed the day of death. And and how could they know, since these people were sick with other things as well? How in the world did they do that? And you know what it turned out to be, Mike? Very unfortunately, modeling. Modeling. It was the same thing when we were told, this is the number of deaths in this country and this is the number of deaths in this country.

• 1:50:36Speaker 02

  Yesterday, the number of deaths were this and yesterday, the number of Covid cases was this. Never before in our lives could you be a case without being sick. But you could be a case, a Covid case, just for testing positive. And testing positive, as we know, did not mean being sick. In, you know, large measure, there were many more positive tests than there were people being sick. But all over the world, I believed that too. I fell for it too. And I was saying, oh, look at the number in North Korea, look at the number in South Korea, what can we learn about this? The number of deaths daily reported. You couldn't do that in any country in the world. Could you get accurately the daily death rate from something?

• 1:51:22Mike Rowe?

  Here's a crazy idea. What if there was an academy out there that paid students to learn instead of the other way around? Specifically, men and women who want to work in the skilled trades. And what if this academy not only paid for your training, but also covered all the expenses associated with your training, like travel and food and lodging? And finally, what if this academy guaranteed you a job at the end of the training period? Well, that's exactly what's happening at America's Workforce Academy by Meta. This is a five-week, highly immersive pre-apprenticeship program that gets you all the necessary certifications you'll need to start a career in the skilled trades immediately.

• 1:52:04Mike Rowe?

  I'm talking about AI-proof, six-figure jobs, helping to build out the new infrastructure that our economy is depending on. Electricians, plumbers, HVAC techs, welders, fiber optic technicians, these jobs, they are all in demand like never before. And again, every graduate of America's Workforce Academy is guaranteed a job on a Meta website. I first announced this program a few months ago, and I have been watching the response ever since. It's extraordinary. This is a nationwide, unprecedented fast track to a long-term career in a skilled trade. If you, or your spouse, or your kid, or your grandkid are looking for a straight path

• 1:52:47Mike Rowe?

  into a career with no cost at all, check out the opportunities for yourself at meta.com/america'sworkforceacademy. That's meta.com/america'sworkforceacademy. How charitable should we be? And how angry should we be in light of all of this? I talk to people all of the time who are already ready to shrug it off. It was an unprecedented time. People were doing their best. There was a lot of confusion and fear. Let's just get on with it.

• 1:53:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, the idea that any world event is just an organic event that our, you know, say our federal public health officials were scurrying around to react to. I just don't believe it anymore, unfortunately. And anybody interested can go to YouTube and, and look at Event 201. And if that doesn't put you on the same page I'm on, I'll be very surprised. Event 201 is an event funded by the Gates Foundation and attended by representatives from CIA, from the Chinese CDC, from the US CDC, from the military, from CBS News and various media organizations. And it happened in October of 2019.

• 1:54:02Speaker 02

  And it's all about a flu-like virus that's going to become a pandemic in the world and how we will handle it. It was a tabletop exercise to say, how would we handle this thing? And you know what they discuss at Event 201? They don't discuss the medical responses. They don't discuss how they'll improve people's health or protect people's health. They discuss how they'll manage misinformation. And what is misinformation? Misinformation is, or disinformation. Disinformation is a, a, a great phrase, because that misinformation is accidentally inaccurate. That's the definition of it. Disinformation is intentionally inaccurate. That's done by those terrible people who promote disinformation, like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

• 1:54:43Speaker 02

  And, and then there's malinformation, my favorite of all of them. Malinformation is true, but, but unhelpful to the government. Misinformation and disinformation and malinformation, that's what they talked about in October of 2019, as, as the world was gearing up for, lo and behold, what an amazing coincidence happened right afterwards, in October, November, a, a new virus evolved in nature and was spreading around the world. And we're just doing the best we can. We're doing the best we can to resolve it. I don't believe it anymore. So you're a malinformation? I'm a malinformationist. Yeah, screw you too. You're almost as bad as I am.

• 1:55:28Speaker 02

  How dare you, you and your name calling.

• 1:55:30Mike Rowe?

  Well, look, you know, it's, you're a teller of inconvenient truths. And I don't know if you've seen that movie, An Inconvenient Study. Is this thing on your radar yet?

• 1:55:41Speaker 02

  Oh, yes, I saw it and I, if you didn't raise it, I was going to recommend it to everybody. It's really, really good information, a really good material and, and very, I thought very well made. I'll, I'll ask you what you thought of it, if you've seen it.

• 1:55:55Mike Rowe?

  I haven't seen it yet. Chuck recommended it to me and thought we ought to, we ought to get the people on to put that together.

• 1:56:01Speaker 01

  We ought to get that great Native American, Del Bigtree on.

• 1:56:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, by the way, I, I know him well. I just recently spent some time with him in, in Austin and I'd be very glad to, to introduce you guys to him.

• 1:56:13Speaker 01

  Please do. I saw the movie already, but I'm having like eight people over tonight to watch it again. I thought it was fascinating and jaw dropping and I was telling Mike about it. It's very much like your book. It's right in line with your book.

• 1:56:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm so glad. And of course with filmmaking, that reaches people on a different level. And so I, I really strongly encourage, you don't need the encouragement Chuck, but you, Mike, who runs from any information and just denies everything and falls for everything that the government tells you to believe, you should probably see it.

• 1:56:48Mike Rowe?

  Just be patient with me, all right? Baby steps. Crawl, walk, run. Look, this is ridiculous. I've, I've kept you, I promised Chuck we'd like keep, start keeping these to an hour, but I can't do it with you and I also can't let you go yet. I just, I just got to do a quick hard pivot, if you don't mind.

• 1:57:06Speaker 02

  I don't mind, I don't mind.

• 1:57:08Mike Rowe?

  Because you're, I mean, you're like nail and jello to a tree, man. You're very hard to find. You go around the world, all, all over the place, but I, I wanted to talk to you after Butler. The assassination attempt, and I really wanted to talk to you last month after Charlie was killed. Just from a security standpoint, I know you can't know, but when these things happen, what goes on in your medulla oblongata? Like, how do, what does your brain do in the immediate wake of that? And what, if anything, do you have to say about either or both events?

• 1:57:48Speaker 02

  Well, I'll talk first about Charlie. It just broke my heart. I didn't know him. I didn't even know a great deal about him. I'd seen him do debates on campus, and I really loved the fact that he was, you know, committed to dialogue and discussion. And it just broke my heart that he was killed. It really, I had a very, you know, emotional reaction to it, and I thought it was a terrible thing for, for society that in the very process of engaging with our division, which is what he was doing, now, people will say, "He was divisive."

• 1:58:30Speaker 02

  I didn't find that, but nonetheless, everybody's entitled to their opinion, no matter what. He was going around the country and the world and engaging with people over divisive topics. And so, the first thing was an emotional reaction. Now, on the, in terms of my, my profession and my work in anti-assassination and in studying assassinations, my early reactions are that it's difficult to learn what is, what actually occurred at any of these events. It's difficult to understand the motivation of people behind them. It's difficult to, to draw conclusions because of the very issue we've been discussing in

• 1:59:09Speaker 02

  this last hour, which is the inability to accept at face value information that those in power want to present. And so, as in Butler, the very fast resolution of, "Everything you need to know is right here. It was that young kid over there, and he's dead, so there's no trial, there's nothing further to, to explore or to do." And, you know, in these cases, and the other assassination attempt at the golf course, which is... Has a much more problematic bad guy aligned with it in that he was, you know, several times in Ukraine, even though he was supposedly anti-war.

• 1:59:51Speaker 02

  He was a recruiter, acting as recruiter for soldiers around the world to go, is he crazy? Maybe he's crazy too. But the concept of the lone gunman, which we just took a little look at in that AI exploration of the well-documented assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy, where everybody knows he was killed by a Palestinian man named Sirhan Sirhan. And yet, when you get into it, you find out that it isn't so. So my, you know, I have a, it's not even a skeptical reaction, Mike. It's a, it's a quite scientific reaction. You know, the, my work in anti-assassination is physics.

• 2:00:32Speaker 02

  And it's, and protection of public figures in environments like Charlie was in mostly boils down to athleticism. It's an athletic contest, usually between somebody wielding a handgun and, and the protectors. And where they're standing and how it all works is what I tend to study. In this case, it's, you know, I, I can't come up with a better phrase than to say it's too soon to know. And will we ever understand all of it? I, I just don't know. There are certainly elements to this narrative that was, you know, immediately set forth and exploited that probably will not withstand physics when we can really understand all the details.

• 2:01:17Speaker 02

  It's a very unsatisfying answer. It's unsatisfying to me too, because we are subject to the two competing influences that we're dealing with. One is those in power and official narratives, and the other is the, you know, massive amount of information, false and accurate and speculative, that we all have to sift through via the internet.

• 2:01:41Mike Rowe?

  Well, it sure sounds like you just kind of glossed over it, but I was gonna say, do you think Cesar did it? It seems clear that Sirhan Sirhan was a patsy, and the country just hasn't got the memo yet.

• 2:01:56Speaker 02

  Well, I'll just go a little further onto that. Yes, I think Thane Sazhar killed Senator Robert Kennedy and Sirhan Sirhan had a trial that didn't get into any of the physics or issues. His lawyer was the same lawyer as for Johnny Roselli, of all people, a known participant in assassinations for the CIA. The whole case is just ridiculous, but just to stay with the physics for a moment, ChatGPT or Grok will quickly acknowledge for you that the number of shots attested to by witnesses was 13 or 14, and Sirhan's gun held only eight shots. That the number of shots demonstrated by audio, by review of

• 2:02:41Speaker 02

  the audio recordings was 13 or 14, and Sirhan's gun held only eight shots. That Sirhan was always standing in front of Senator Kennedy, and Thane Sazhar was always standing immediately behind him, and that the shots were upward, all the shots that hit Senator Kennedy were from behind him, not from in front of him, and the shot that killed him was a contact wound from behind him. So, there's nothing about the Sirhan case that, where the official narrative can stand up and walk around on its own. So, yes, Thane Sazhar, who immediately, by the way, left the country and moved to the Philippines, where he eventually died some years ago. We don't know how he was supported during that time. We know he hated

• 2:03:25Speaker 02

  Robert Kennedy. We have a bunch of public quotes regarding things he said about Robert Kennedy, and he likely was aligned with bad actors in a broader conspiracy. But is Sirhan Sirhan the shooter? No. By the way, Sirhan, how did I come to know this? I'd written an actual book called Just Two Seconds, which is about the physics of assassination, and one of the, it studies 1,400 cases, and one of them was the Sirhan case, which I bought the narrative on. So, if you get an old version of that book, it says Sirhan Sirhan fired eight rounds and killed Senator Kennedy and hit six other people as well, including Senator Kennedy's best friend, who was hit in the head.

• 2:04:09Speaker 02

  And he came to Bobby Kennedy, the Bobby Kennedy Junior that we know. And he came to Bobby Kennedy and said, would you be willing to look at the autopsy report? Years after, Bobby was in his sixties. And then Bobby read the autopsy report. It was quite clear that all the shots were from behind. And it was quite clear that Sirhan fired only two shots before being knocked over by people who were protecting Senator Kennedy. And so he went and met with Sirhan, Bobby Kennedy did. And then he petitioned for his release and a reevaluation at his next parole hearing, which was denied. He and one of his brothers, by the way. And then I got into the case fully.

• 2:04:53Speaker 02

  And I have some, you know, tremendously decisive information provided by and available to anybody via Grok or ChatGPT, where at the end of the discussion, the same entity that told you that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy in 1968 will make the best possible case for why it could not be Sirhan Sirhan.

• 2:05:18Speaker 02

  So, so yes, that's my belief. And that, that took only, you know, all these years to get even me there as an expert on the topic, because the information that was available when I was a kid and Senator Kennedy was killed, you'd see a press conference, the cops would be there, the mayor would be there, and they would say, we have our man, we've caught him, and he's a Palestinian who hated Senator Kennedy. And why would you disbelieve them? Why, why possibly would, would they not be telling the truth? And why would they be quick to identify a suspect and say the case is resolved? Well, all those same questions apply to Charlie Kirk. Why, three days later, do we have?

• 2:05:59Speaker 02

  Really weird texts written by the shooter that completely admit everything and completely make the case against him. Why? How did he get the gun on the roof? How did he get the gun off the roof? You don't see that in the video. They say he disassembled it. Why would he disassemble it and then reassemble it to place it to be, you know, where it was found, wrapped in a towel? There's plenty of things that are questions. They're just skeptical questions. It's, I, I can't, I don't have enough information to claim a conspiracy or to claim anything. And this is the part that's unsatisfying.

• 2:06:32Mike Rowe?

  Hmm.

• 2:06:33Speaker 02

  But, which is that we, we cannot know in these cases.

• 2:06:35Mike Rowe?

  We can't know yet, but you have a fair amount of certainty decades after RFK.

• 2:06:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:06:43Mike Rowe?

  We're a month, what, six weeks maybe after Charlie Kirk? And there's a level of skepticism now and dubity, it seems, that probably, I don't know, I wasn't old enough to remember, but, you know, six weeks after RFK's assassination, did the country more or less buy the, the company line?

• 2:07:08Speaker 02

  One hundred, one hundred percent. Not just the company, not just the, the country, but the, uh, the family, a hundred percent. Many family members to this day, including, uh, children of Senator Kennedy, um, still absolutely accept, as even Bobby Kennedy did, until, uh, until, uh, he was in his sixties and, and got this approach from his father's best friend, uh, uh, accept the official narrative. But the official narrative, by the way, in the, in the case of Senator Kennedy, is, um, absolutely unsupportable. It cannot stand and walk around on its own.

• 2:07:41Mike Rowe?

  Hmm. Well, I guess maybe the final thought has to do with, you know, as we land the plane here, the topic that we, that we talked about at length the first time we met, which was just this, this weird challenge that I think, back to most commonsensical, curious people who have components of faith in their life, but who are being called right now to be more skeptical than ever. I mean, if we're to find the truth, if we're to put our trust in any of the institutions that we've talked about, from doctors to politicians to journalists. We have to be insanely skeptical.

• 2:08:25Mike Rowe?

  And then on the other side, you know, when it comes to the supernatural, when it comes to our faith, when it comes to these things that, you know, we're called to be faithful. So I guess my question is, what's your advice to the average Joe? Who feels like he's being called to be faithful? And rational, and at the same time? Being pushed into a level of skepticism that's right adjacent to cynicism. Because in this world, I just don't know how? How we can move forward, you know, without proclaiming that the science is never settled? And embracing a new level of skepticism?

• 2:09:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I wish I had a great answer, Mike. I'm struggling with that issue all the time myself. I don't, you know, nobody, we have, we have no difficulty believing something like the conference at Bonsi, which occurred and was transcribed, etc. That I talked about earlier. We have no difficulty believing that generals sit around a room and conspire to, on how a war will be mounted and prosecuted? And how it will be undertaken and where it will be started? And how we'll move our troops and where we'll fire the first missiles, etc. Why do I call that a conspiracy? Because sometimes we conclude those wars were wrongful. And that's all a conspiracy is. Is one or more persons secretly getting together to take a wrongful action.

• 2:09:47Speaker 02

  Every product launch in America is preceded by a conspiracy. And I'm not exaggerating. What do they do? They sit around a boardroom and they, let's say, take a pharma product, for example. They say, how shall we most discredit the alternative products? That's number one. That's wrongful. How shall we most overinflate or inflate the value of our product? That's wrongful. How shall we deal with anybody who questions our product? That's wrongful. And then how shall we keep this all secret until the, until the product is rolled out? And, and we can advertise it in the most favorable way while suppressing the unfavorable? How shall we do all that? That's a conspiracy. And so the idea that people have this phrase conspiracy theor-

• 2:10:31Mike Rowe?

  And they say, oh, if you talk about conspiracies, you're the problem. You're the, you've got some kind of a problem because you're a conspiracy theorist, which is a pejorative. Um, it's ridiculous. Uh, people conspire to do things all day. I've done it myself all day in many, many ways. And, uh, and, and it happens in, in corporations and of course it happens in government. Why, by the way, why more among the powerful than among the un-powerful? Uh, because the powerful are less likely to get caught. And maybe because too, you know, I worked for Tylenol for a few years. McNeil Labs hired me in another life and I did maybe 20 commercials for them. And I remember sitting in a conference room.

• 2:11:16Mike Rowe?

  You know, this of course was after the Tylenol scare and a frankly, pretty brilliant move to pull all that product and introduce the safety cap and talk about making, you know, lemonade out of lemons. But the whole battle in analgesics in those days was really a zero sum game. And the only way to get more people using Tylenol was to get less people using Excedrin or Bear or Anacin. And they were all in this giant knife fight in a phone booth, making claims about taking comfort in our strength and all of these other things. And I only pointed out to say that if, if that happens in pharma,

• 2:12:00Mike Rowe?

  you know, it probably happens in running shoes. It probably happens in every imaginable thing we've ever purchased. And, um,

• 2:12:10Speaker 02

  True, it's all true.

• 2:12:11Mike Rowe?

  Money, money, money. It's the money, man.

• 2:12:13Speaker 02

  Sure. And aspirin is interesting and Tylenol is interesting because aspirin is grandfathered in so that its adverse effects, which it has, by the way, aspirin has some benefits and some adverse effects for some people. And so it causes, for example, stomach bleeds in some people. And, uh, and that's the, you know, a substantial cause of, uh, of, uh, injury to a lot of people. And there's people who just shouldn't take aspirin. And then there's others who take a low dose aspirin for blood ...thinning to reduce the likelihood of heart attack. So all of these things take a little bit of thought. You can't just believe the advertisement in all these cases. Tylenol has a very, you know, bad profile for liver damage,

• 2:12:56Speaker 02

  and particularly bad for infants as we're learning more and more in recent days. And yet, the second it comes from, say, Bobby Kennedy or President Trump, everybody says, you know, when Bobby Kennedy ordered that, not Bobby Kennedy, but the ACIP, the committee at the CDC that makes decisions on vaccines, ordered that vaccines not have mercury anymore. People were incensed. "Don't take away our mercury. Don't take away our mercury we're trying to give our babies." And the same thing happened with Tylenol. "Don't take away our Tylenol that we're trying to give to our babies, when maybe it's not always the best decision." But these are all hard decisions.

• 2:13:36Speaker 02

  And the question that, you know, my book ends with is, who shall decide? Do you want it to be the company deciding? And let me tell you a few things about Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson. Before you make that decision, all the criminal fines, all the outrageous bad conduct, I mean outrageously bad criminal conduct, that they've been fined for more than any other institutions in the United States. And billions of dollars in fines. So criminal fines. So do you want them to do it? Okay, if not them, do you want then the government to do it? Oh, that would be the government agency that's run by a former pharma guy who's about to be a pharma guy again when he joins the board of Pfizer as soon as he leaves? You know, the guy who left, Dr. Peter Marks,

• 2:14:20Speaker 02

  who was the head of vaccines at FDA and resigned in protest over Robert Kennedy. I wonder where Peter is now? Oh, could he possibly be working for Eli Lilly? Ah, interesting. That's what's going on. And so there is, it's not corruption in the form of people twirling their mustaches. It's systemic corruption. It's the way things work. And so if I'm holding this brand-new baby boy, and I have to make a decision, and who do I want to make it? Either I'm gonna really trust this particular pediatrician, or this particular pharma manufacturer, or this particular government agency, or learn about it and make a decision myself, and be as comfortable as I can be with it. Uh, it's not easy, not easy.

• 2:15:02Mike Rowe?

  Well, you can't put the shit back in the goose. And you're right about the aspirin, you know, 80,000 people admitted to hospitals last year from stomach bleeding brought on by aspirin. I can't imagine how you could get that product today if it were just introduced onto the shelf without somebody like the IOM running some sort of study and say, yeah, like a seizure in your baby, it's just a little stomach bleeding. It's just a little blood in the toilet. Don't let it freak you out. On the other hand, tell me I'm wrong, but is Vioxx gonna wind up back on the market?

• 2:15:35Speaker 02

  Oh, sure, for sure. It'll have a new name and it'll have a, you know, some new use. And I mean, things like even the dreaded remdesivir ended up back on the market. It hadn't even completed, it was stopped in the middle of the FDA trial for being too dangerous. Too many people were dying for it in the FDA trials, for God's sake. And it ended up on the market because of, thanks to, you know, Anthony Fauci. And what did the people in the hospitals call it, by the way? Nurses that worked in intensive care nicknamed remdesivir, run, death is near.

• 2:16:08Mike Rowe?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:16:10Speaker 02

  It caused, it caused kidney failure and yet it became the, what did, what did Fauci called it? The standard of care. It had never even been FDA approved. Uh, and it became the standard of care for COVID. Uh, oh, my God.

• 2:16:25Mike Rowe?

  Look, you've pissed a lot of people off. You've intrigued a lot of people. You know, I hope we sell some books. Who, who benefits, key bono from the purchase of this book?

• 2:16:36Speaker 02

  The reader. Uh, I hope that's the, that's the only intention. I don't get any royalties and the publisher doesn't make any money from it. And we've, we've all basically, you know, the, the publisher is an important publisher in our country because it publishes all the books nobody else will publish.

• 2:16:51Mike Rowe?

  Who are they?

• 2:16:52Speaker 02

  Uh, Skyhorse Publishing. So they publish Woody Allen, who nobody would publish, Norman Mailer, because he, after his death, for God's sake, he got canceled. Um, and, uh, and books that are pro-vaccine and books that are anti-vaccine. And if you go to Amazon and you look up Vaccine is a category. You'll see a whole bunch of books there, some of them tremendously pro-vaccine and some that are skeptical of vaccines. But they wouldn't be there if it weren't for Skyhorse Publishing. The company just deeply believes in publishing books and let the consumer read the books and decide, you know, which information they want to credit and which information they want to discredit.

• 2:17:33Mike Rowe?

  Well, not all truths are convenient. Not all facts are forbidden, but these are. It says so right on the cover. It's such a... I almost said fun. It's not fun, but it's compelling. It's quick and it's well researched. And sure, it's controversial, but whatever you think of the claims and whatever you think of my guests, I'll tell you this, man, if you're having a dinner party and Gavin DeBecker is available, invite him.

• 2:18:02Speaker 02

  I want to add to that because I'm very hungry right now, having been here for two hours. So if anybody has an invitation, please email me right away.

• 2:18:10Speaker 01

  You can come tonight and watch the movie with me and my friends again.

• 2:18:14Speaker 02

  Thank you, Chuck. I really do like the movie.

• 2:18:17Mike Rowe?

  Dude, he's in Maui. You really think he's gonna fly to friggin' North Hollywood to sit down?

• 2:18:22Speaker 02

  Mike, I'm doing it. I'm headed to the airport just to prove you wrong, which is, as you know, one of my favorite things to do.

• 2:18:28Mike Rowe?

  Well, when you're there, do me a favor. Keep six feet between you and your fellow travelers, okay? It's the only rational thing to do. The book is called Forbidden Facts. You'd be a fool not to read it. Get it wherever fine books are sold or even controversial ones. Chuck, always great to see you. Gavin, my friend, we have to hang up now, but stay online for a minute because I have some deeply personal things I need to ask you.

• 2:18:49Speaker 02

  All right, let's record those two. Thank you very much for the show, Mike. Thanks.

• 2:18:53Mike Rowe?

  Let's not. All right. Adios.

• 2:19:37Speaker 04

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