 Welcome to the Knuckleheads of Liberty. Valerie Durham, Executive Director of FreedomFest, 2022. And so she's here to tell us a little bit about that. So Valerie, why don't you tell us a little bit about what is FreedomFest? Well, thank you all so much for inviting me to be part of your amazing podcast. I'm super excited to be here. I am Valerie Durham, Executive Director of FreedomFest. And I'm delighted to tell your audience about it. FreedomFest is a four-day extravaganza, the ultimate summit for liberty. We invite everyone who cares about liberty in any direction to come together to learn, share, network, and grow the liberty movement. So we don't just talk about politics, although there's plenty of that. We talk about financial freedom, health freedom, including like health, nutrition, health care. We talk about education reform, criminal justice reform, social issues like drug legalization, sex work legalization. We tackle science, technology, privacy, cryptocurrency. We talk about, we have our whole film festival. So it is four days that are just jam-packed. Thousands of people, we have 250 to 300 speakers who show up and about almost 200 sessions. So there is something for everyone at FreedomFest, whether you're interested in like history and philosophy, libertarian principles, or if you wanna go and have some bomb, listen to some bombastic debate on the future of Trump. We've got everything between, but what really brings us together is this love of liberty. We're a Big Ten event, we're a small L libertarian, and we really invite everyone to come together to find that common ground, but also propel ourselves into solutions. And our founder, Mark Scousen, he saw this back when he was the president of V. He felt like all these freedom organizations were very siloed and he really wanted to bring them together at one time and one place to have these important conversations and to get together. And so that became FreedomFest and we've been around for 15 years now and we're growing and growing and we're in Vegas. So there's all kinds of fun, social things going on. Once you're done with the conference day, when it's blazing hot outside in July, then you can go out on the strip and find whatever you find. So do you all have, so Bari, do you all have scheduled debates? I mean, big name people debating issues of liberty. Absolutely, we have, debates are one of our biggest aspects because we don't use political labels. We really try to bring experts into the room and talk about things from a different perspective and actually in an open forum, civil discourse way, allow people to make up their own minds. We call ourselves the world's largest gathering of free minds for a reason. So for example, we'll do something this year for we have Eric Metacis debating Michael Shermer on whether atheism is dead and that's being co-sponsored by Atheist for Liberty and they're really excited and we're really excited to bring those two formidable minds together to debate the idea of the future of atheism and religion. So that's the kind of topic that you're gonna get at Freedom Fest. We also have our mock trial, which is one of our most popular events every year. We have the signature mock trial with a judge, you know, prosecuting attorney, defense attorney, star witnesses, we pull a jury from our audience and we put all kinds of things on trial and really listen to both sides as part of the argument. So we put unions on trial. It's funny, I was there last year. So last year was my first year to Freedom Fest and it was great. It was in South Dakota. And I remember it was a Michael Shermer, I think, was involved in the trial too as well, I think he was in. Yeah, he's great. Well, he's just such a brilliant mind. He can talk about almost anything. So this year we're putting drug legalization on trial from not just the war on drugs, but, you know, is it, as we see more and more drugs being legalized, how do we manage this? Do we manage this? There's been a spike in overdoses. So what's the situation here? And we really want to look at that from not only a philosophical perspective, but also a practical perspective. So that's our Big Mock trial this year and we have some really good people lined up for that. So that'll be Friday night. And yes, tons of debates on anything you can imagine. Is the whole thing happening in the Mirage this year or does it spill out of there at all? Or is it still not? We love to be self-contained. So when we, South Dakota was our first time last year being outside of Vegas, we'd always been in Vegas up until the pandemic. We thought of Vegas as, you know, the nation's most libertarian city. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness always and forever.