Carol Roth explains how much control the WEF might actually have on society or whether it’s a conspiracy. Are we really on the precipice of a ‘new financial world order’? Is the social credit system just something that’s restricted to China? What’s the role of ‘Big Tech’? Will we all “own nothing” and “be happy”? Why are companies really adapting ESG? What’s happened to the American Dream, is it dead? And what can we do to empower ourselves? Or is it too late?

Carol has worked in a variety of capacities across industries, including currently as an outsourced chief customer officer (CCO), as a director on public and private company boards, and as a strategic advisor and C-level consigliere. Carol connects the dots on financial, business, and economic issues for novice and pro audiences alike. She is also the creator of the Future File legacy planning system and software (FutureFile.com). Carol advocates for small business, small government, and big hair. Coming from a blue-collar family, Carol has worked hard to seize the American Dream, and is fighting to preserve that opportunity for all Americans. For more information or to connect with Carol, visit CarolRoth.com.

Freely Ashley is a former leftist turned independent conservative that shares political and cultural commentary on YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter. With a refreshingly healthy dose of common sense.

I’ve always found it rather interesting to learn about what it is that causes people to change their beliefs—whatever they might be. How does someone become entrenched in one belief and what allows them to challenge their own point of view? As you’ll hear in our conversation, Ashley’s beliefs were rather entrenched.

We also get into some topics that were more “unscheduled,” like abortion. A contentious subject, and yet, despite our differing views, we are able to hold a civil discourse around it—unlike so many of our peers. Which brings us to another subject: Why is it so difficult to have conversations with those around us who disagree? What happens when people resort to personal attacks? And what happens when people on each “side” take extreme positions?

Sure, our views might not exactly align on a number of topics, but what Ashley and me share is a willingness to not view our ideological opposites as “enemies” or “evil” and to try and understand how other people’s views are shaped, as well as to try and find some common ground.

There’s unfortunately a level of concern that comes from having a conversation about vaccine injury in the current climate. On the one hand, one worries that a group would use such a case to spread radical claims and conspiracy theories to fully discredit vaccines in the service of sensationalized narratives. On the other, there is always those perfectly willing to dismiss and gaslight someone’s personal experience as something that’s just made up or exaggerated. Something that often happens with those dealing with the consequences of long COVID as well.

But we must be able to have these conversations openly and with nuance, or else we’d never be able to confront the reality of things.

And the reality is that with any medical intervention there is always a risk—something that has always been the case with any vaccine/treatment. Why should pharma’s answer to COVID—the mRNA technology—be any different? In fact, in this case, it has had much less time to be tested, studied, and examined. The question is, what’s the extent of this impact?

There are more qualified people to answer that particular question than me, so I’ll leave it to them.

My discourse on this episode of the Forbidden Conversations podcast focuses on just one case and the personal experience of one person. That someone happens to be one of Australia’s most revered music photographers, Michelle Grace Hunder. She's photographed the likes of Billie Eilish, Dua Lipa, Shawn Mendes, Drake, Lauryn Hill, Mark Ronson, Kendrick Lamar, and Ruel.

What makes her case particularly noteworthy is that it’s more than a mere claim based on conjecture—it is documented and her unfortunate injury has been officially diagnosed as caused by the vaccine.

In our far-ranging conversation, we discuss Australia’s strict lockdown laws, the mandates, her dealings with the medical system, her injury, how her experiences ultimately profoundly changed her views, and whether she’d be able to trust institutions again.

As photographer Michelle has two separate portrait series in the National Sound and Film Archive of Australia, has published “RISE,” a photographic book detailing her personal journey into the world of Australian Hip-Hop after shooting with literally every major player in the Australian Hip-Hip scene. She also spent four years on a major personal project called "Her Sound, Her Story" celebrating Women in Australian Music, across all genres, with her project partner, Claudia Sangiorgi Dalimore. 

Her unique style captures the raw energy and emotion of live performances, and her photographs have been featured in numerous publications and exhibitions.

Find her on her official website, Instagram and Twitter.

Many of us only hear about opioids from one perspective—generally that of doctors over-prescribing them and patients getting addicted. Or worse, some of them ending up on the black market. I’ve heard many such stories myself, including directly from those who were affected by these addictions and struggled to get out from under them.

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, in the United States alone, an estimated 2.1 million people had an opioid use disorder in 2019 and opioid overdoses accounted for over 47,000 deaths in 2018.  According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, in 2020, 1.7 million people in the US had a substance use disorder involving prescription pain relievers.

Such statistics have led to what my guest on this episode of the Forbidden Conversations podcast refers to as the “opioid prohibition” and it affects him personally.

Peter Pischke has been disabled since age 18, starting with chronic pancreatitis, further developing diabetes, severe eyesight problems with photophobia (extreme light sensitivity) and autoimmune issues. His health condition is very painful, but the current state of medicine and regulations around opioids have made him unable to get effective pain treatment.

What make his alternative perspective valuable is that not only does he have personal experience dealing with the lack of access to opioids for his pain management, but also because he is a disabled journalist who investigates health and disability issues, especially the opioid crisis and its devastating impact.

He challenges the myths and stigma of opioid prohibition while promoting evidence-based policies. His work has appeared in publications such as Reason, Newsweek, NY Daily News, and USA Today. He is a member of Young Voices. You can find him on Twitter @happywarriorp or tune in to his podcast with Baen Books, CultureScape, where he interviews the geek creators who shaped nerd culture.

When Peter Santenello was 24 years old, he took his $20,000 in saving, left the U.S. for the first time and spent the next two years travelling around 50 countries, debunking for himself the fear-based narratives that he was taught in his youth and learning about the world around him.

Today, he does much of the same for his 1.6M YouTube subscribers who tune in to his videos to help them discover cultures, places and stories that the media so often fails to capture. Whether it’s the Hasidic Jewish community in New York, Chicano culture in East LA, the Amish, Skid Row, Compton, a Native American reservation, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or the U.S./Mexico border—what distinguishes Santenello from most is his tremendous openness and curiosity when it comes to capturing these stories and unique communities. And he’s often willing to go places where much of the mainstream has more often tended to ignore.

In this episode, we discuss why some cultures tend to be more widely misunderstood, why his work has resonated so much with audiences, how he keeps his own views and biases from tainting his coverage, how he decides what topics and cultures to cover, how he’s able to gain the trust of the people featured in his stories, the increasing polarization in our media coverage, and whether he’s found any universal truths throughout his many adventures and conversations.

As of late, I’ve become increasingly aware of how specific words have been infecting our consciousness.  How the oversimplification of language and, hence, concepts has been doing harm to our society and discourse.  I call that: Word misappropriation.

This phenomenon occurs when groups of people pillage a particular word or term, declare their own definition of it and then insist that the rest of us accept that very definition and all the beliefs systems that follow it. 

These are often the beliefs, and definitions, of very specific and aggressively vocal groups of people and often have little in common with objective reality.  In this way, at worst, words become weaponized. At best:  Objects of mass confusion.   If we can’t even agree on the definitions of words and discuss them openly, how could we possibly begin to approach discussing what it is that they really mean for us? What happens when words are robbed of their true meaning?

What happens when filmmakers and creative people begin to self-censor?

This episode of the Forbidden Conversations Podcast has me going back to my cinematic roots as I get to speak with, Chris Gore, the founder and publisher of one of the top independent film review websites FilmThreat—which he started as a zine in 1985.

In addition to to FilmThreat, Chris also hosts the ⁠FilmThreat Livecast⁠ on YouTube and is the author of several books, most notably The Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide. Chris is also a filmmaker, having written and produced My Big Fat Independent Movie and directed Attack of the Doc. Chris has hosted shows on FX, Starz, IFC and appeared as a regular on G4TV’s Attack of the Show. His documentary about Attack of the Show and G4TV is coming to VOD on April 24th. For all the details, ⁠visit here⁠. You can find him on Twitter at ⁠@thatchrisgore⁠ & ⁠@FilmThreat⁠.

Like Chris, I used to run a popular online magazine that was dedicated to covering film—as well as other topics. Mine shut down circa 2003 or so. But I had continued working in film and television interviewing hundreds of actors and filmmakers, producing creative content on sets, and as a unit publicist—sometimes even getting to travel with productions to exotic locations like Morocco and, well, Paris.

Throughout our time working and playing within the entertainment industry, both of us have observed the industry around us change. Artists in particular became affected by the self-silencing plague, unable to freely express their artistic impulses for fear of offending the wrong colleague or executive and see their career ended. Audiences suffered as result, too, exposed to sanitized content. Or worse, narratives that overtly push agendas over telling compelling stories. “Today’s writers can’t write subtext,” says Chris.” And while we saw more representation on the screen and off, there were many important voices who got unfairly pushed out because they didn’t check off the right boxes—or if those particular boxes were already checked off by ‘too many people.’

Those are just some of the topics that we cover in our far-ranging conversation.

My guest on this episode of Forbidden Conversations is Buck Angel, a motivational speaker, filmmaker, entrepreneur, and human rights activist. He is also someone who identifies as a transexual—a female who lives as a man. Born female in 1962, he never felt female and struggled with his identity until he had the opportunity to transition later in life at age 28 when it was still a very new phenomenon.

A major component of Buck’s message is about self-acceptance and he has sparked many conversations, making appearances on HBO, National Geographic, Netflix, The Tyra Banks Show, Dan Savage, Howard Stern, Much Music, and many others. He’s also been written about in Forbes, Esquire, VICE, BuzzFeed, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, New York Times, and others.

And now, on this podcast.

Regardless on where you sit on the trans debate, I hope that you can watch this episode with an open mind and I suspect that it may challenge some of your views. One of the things that I really respect about Buck is how open he is and how important it was for him to ensure that I wasn’t tip-toeing around anything during our conversation. In fact, that’s what tends to keep us apart rather than bringing us together.

My intention with this episode was to provide a nuanced perspective and representation. Too often, we are exposed to the most extreme examples within the “community,” whereas the truth is that there is no such thing. Trans people are individuals and have a diversity of opinions/views.

I hope you listen to our conversation with an open mind. If nothing else, I made a new friend. Please follow Buck on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Masking. Standing 6 feet apart. Showing vaccine passports whenever you enter a public space. Whether you agree or disagree with such measures, those are just some of the ways we were asked to comply during the pandemic. Pupils of history will recognize that this situation is not unique and that compliance has been used both for good and evil throughout centuries. The psychology of why we agree to go along with things—sometimes ones that don’t logically make sense, or go against our moral reasoning—is fascinating and complex.

The Milgram Obedience Experiment had participants deliver what they believed to be electrical shock to another person on the orders of an authority figure. The Stanford Prison Experiment in the 1970s had participants take on the roles of guards and prisoners and showed how people would mold into whatever expectations came with their social roles. The experiment had to be terminated after only six days after the "guards" had started displaying abusive behavior towards the "prisoners." Group affiliation, size, and power dynamics all play important roles when it comes to compliance and these experiments also revealed how easily people’s behavior can be manipulated—even when they are aware that they are part of a study.

My guest on this episode of FORBIDDEN CONVERSATIONS is Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, a physician specializing in psychiatry and author of three books, including most recently, The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State (2022). He is a Fellow & Director of the Program in Bioethics and American Democracy at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a Senior Scholar & Fellow at the Brownstone Institute.

Dr. Kheriaty also serves as Senior Fellow and Director of the Health and Human Flourishing Program at the Zephyr Institute, and Chief of Medical Ethics at The Unity Project. Dr. Kheriaty holds the positions of Scholar at the Paul Ramsey Institute, Fellow at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, and serves on the advisory board at the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy.​

Dr. Kheriaty graduated from the University of Notre Dame in philosophy and pre-medical sciences, earned his MD degree from Georgetown University, and completed residency training in psychiatry at the University of California Irvine. For many years he was Professor of Psychiatry at UCI School of Medicine and Director of the Medical Ethics Program at UCI Health, where he chaired the ethics committee. He also chaired the ethics committee at the California Department of State Hospitals for several years.​

Dr. Kheriaty has authored books and articles for professional and lay audiences on bioethics, public health, political theory, social science, psychiatry, philosophy, religion, and culture. His work has been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Newsweek, The Federalist, Compact, The New Atlantis, Arc Digital, Public Discourse, City Journal, and First Things. He has conducted print, radio, and television interviews on bioethics topics with The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, Fox, NPR, EWTN, and Epoch TV. 

On matters of public policy and healthcare he has addressed the United States Senate, the California Medical Association, and has testified before the California Senate Health Committee. Dr. Kheriaty has consulted on Covid related ethical issues during the pandemic for the UC Office of the President, the County of Orange Healthcare Agency, and the California Department of Public Health.

Find him on Twitter and Instagram.

My guest on this episode is none other than the wonderful writer, host, podcaster, and comedian Bridget Phetasy. This happens to be our second conversation, with the first taking place during my appearance on her own terrific podcast, Walk-Ins Welcome. So, in a way, this is round two for us. We decided to just let loose and see where the conversation takes us, but we make a lot of stops along the way. We talk about rising extremes, the right fighting with the same tactics as the left, labels, political homelessness, how to avoid falling into thought traps, trusting your own opinions, nurturing an audience that feels empowered to disagree with you, the economics of being an independent speaker, and how to deal with noise of social media.

Bridget Phetasy is a writer and stand-up comedian. She incorporates vulnerability, satire, and mischief into themes about independence, recovery, wellness, and the critical importance of dialogue in our daily civic life.

Bridget has contributed to a wide variety of publications such as SpectatorUSA, Huffington Post,Playboy, Tablet Magazine, The Washington Examiner, The Federalist, The New York Post, Mel Magazine and New York Daily News, sharing her opinions, advice and stories of struggle, faith, grit and resilience.

Her weekly podcast, Walk-Ins Welcome, has become staple listening for many influencers in the social media space. Her relaxed and conversational style provides an easily accessible environment for the sharing of important and topical ideas.

Her YouTube show Dumpster Fire is a satirical commentary on the ridiculousness of the 24-hour news cycle, the culture wars, media, social media and humanity in general.  Bridget is passionate about issues related to addiction, recovery, mental health, sex, and relationships, and is honest in sharing her own experiences. She is a fearless advocate of free speech and tackles the topics of self-censorship and cancel culture with vigor, providing a refreshing dose of common sense in an increasingly insane culture.

Find her on Twitter, Instagram, and consider joining her community of supporters.