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- [00:04]
A
Well, here we go again. It's the way I heard it. I'm Mike Rowe and he is Chuck Klausmeier. And our guest today, dare I say Charles, is somebody we both have. Have been enjoying, slash admiring for the last couple years.
- [00:19]
B
Let me just tell you, I was really excited knowing that Jeff Childers was coming in to spend time talking to you.
- [00:28]
A
Jeff is a lawyer, but don't hold that against him. He has a. And has had one for many years in the Gainesville area in the great state of Florida. And he was just being his lawyerly self, you know, minded his own business. And the world went crazy. And there were lockdowns and there were mask mandates. And Mr. Childers, Esquire, had objections.
- [00:50]
C
Yes.
- [00:51]
A
And he began to voice those objections. And he was right there at the very beginning of the craziness. And he filed a suit against the county where he lives in northern Florida. Long story short, started a Sisyphean battle. And you'll hear how it turns out early on in our conversation. I really didn't invite him here to talk too much about lawyerly stuff, although, as I think about it, it was really important and it's a really interesting backdrop for what he's become.
- [01:28]
B
Well, it's how he got involved as well, because there were these cases where he had, you know, as a lawyer does, you have people come to you and say, hey, I need a lawyer because I want to sue the county because I don't believe I should have to get this vaccine. And so it forces him as a lawyer, if he takes that case, to look up stuff. And he said he was never political. He said, I maybe voted in every other presidential election, and I didn't. I didn't have a political bone in my body. And then I started researching this stuff and started going, huh, this is really weird. Like, he looked into the mask studies, the studies that say, or the studies that were determine if masks were useful. And as it turns out, there were
- [02:10]
A
tons of studies that suggested that they weren't. Right. Yeah. Well, anyway, he didn't have a client. He was the client. But in order to file the suit, he needed somebody who wasn't him. And so he didn't have a hard time finding someone who shared his view. And so they go forward with this suit. And what happens from a legal standpoint is super interesting and we'll talk about it, but what happens from a literary standpoint is even more interesting. Yes, this guy for the last four or five years has been writing a blog called Coffee and Covid. He did it initially to keep a few people on Facebook updated. He had some science and some charts that he had. He had designed and found that proved the points he was making in his brief. Yeah. And that kind of turned into a very engaged, very loyal following. And then he just started to elucidate and write more and more. And today, on average, he'll do 3,500, 4,000 words a day, seven days a week. And for those of you who have never written before, trust me when I tell you that is an extraordinary output of content.
- [03:32]
B
Not only is it a great output of content, but that content itself is. Is engaging, interesting. And he does it with a sense of humor. He's very sarcastic.
- [03:42]
A
He is. He's also a man of faith and he has a sense of humor and he has a real abiding conviction that he's on the right side of this. But it's not haughty, you know, it's not arrogant at all. It is just matter of fact. And like you said, I've shared hundreds of his blogs with friends, not because of their political nature. And yeah, spoiler alert. You know, he's coming from a very specific place on the spectrum, but it's the place on the despair optimism spectrum that's the most interesting.
- [04:19]
B
He's super optimistic.
- [04:21]
A
This is a glass half full kind of guy. The first blog I read of his was in, I think it was late in 20, right after he started this. It was among the darkest, right? I mean, it was just, it was dark, the country was spellbound and frightened and we had this disease racing through us and we had these cures that many thought might be worse. We were just petrified and paralyzed as a people and. And this lawyer was just writing with a weird level of joy and he was saying from the darkest moments, it's going to be fine. In fact, I don't know when you guys are. I don't know what today this is, but we recorded this on the 23rd of February. And his column on that particular day, which I encourage you to read, was called I told you so.
- [05:17]
C
Yes.
- [05:18]
A
And it just happened to be a really delicious roundup, as all his blogs are of current events. But in this one, he takes a four year look back and just said, this is what we said was going to happen. And here's what happened. So call him Cassandra. Call him a prognosticator. I call him a very prolific lawyer and author of Coffee and Covid, which you should check out. You can subscribe to it, but you can also read it for free. He makes the vast majority of his material available for free.
- [05:51]
B
And just to put it into perspective, the writing every day, 4 to 6,000 words a day, is like over the course of the six years that he's done it, or five years is the equivalent of writing 10 Bibles.
- [06:07]
A
Millions of words.
- [06:08]
B
Yes, over 8 million words.
- [06:10]
A
But the words are good. And he groups them together in a way that's going to make you think and gonna make you smile and probably gonna make you wanna share it anyway. It's Jeff Childers and he's up next. Dumb. Seven years ago, Ben Spell was a musician with no interest in running a food company. He was annoyed, though, that so much imported meat at his grocery store was being deceptively marketed as domestic. So Ben decided to fix the problem. The result was Good Ranchers, a completely honest, totally transparent meat company that deals directly with American farms and ranches and promises to deliver high quality American made meat for a fair price. That was seven years ago. Today, thanks to that promise and Ben's determination to keep it, Good Ranchers has been propelled into the top tier of meat delivery companies. Full disclosure. That's the reason I became a customer. I like Ben's story, but if I'm being honest, I wouldn't have stayed if the quality hadn't been so exceptional. Every single cut I've devoured from Good Ranchers has been straight up delicious. And every morsel was raised on a small American ranch or farm. From the pasture to the final seal on every box, their entire packaging and fulfillment process takes place right here in America. That's important to me. If it's important to you, give them a try. Subscriptions are affordable and and flexible. In fact, drop my name and you'll get an additional 25 bucks off your first order. That's code Mike. For an extra $25 off your first order, on top of the hundreds of dollars you will save this year by having the best meat money can buy delivered straight to your home. Goodranchers.com American meat delivered. If you could eat a steer, if you could eat a cow, don't take a chance on a foreign ranch. Get Good Ranchers now. B. Hall. All right, first of all, full disclosure. I have not yet subscribed to Coffee and Covid, but I'm going to because for the last three years, have I been cheating? Like you make this stuff available, it seems like for free, but you also have a subscriber base and you have hundreds of thousands of engaged, voracious readers. And yet the content appears to be available to any scofflaw like me, who wants to consume it on the cheap. What's up?
- [08:40]
C
Six days out of seven, it's 100% free, right? So I write a daily blog that it's not insubstantial. It's at least five hours of work per episode every day, seven days a week. I just have my AI count them up. So since I started during the pandemic in 2020, I've got 1,641 posts.
- [09:08]
A
That's. I mean, the word's prolific, but I don't know that that does it. I did a word count today on the plane. I came down. I read your column today.
- [09:18]
C
Man, this is really long. How many words?
- [09:20]
A
No, well, it was your most recent column, which is called I told you so, which is just a love letter to. I've been biting my tongue for a long time. I don't bite it anymore. When I'm wrong, I say I'm wrong. But when I'm right, gosh, there's just a lot of pent up. So, like, you just took a really fun victory lap with this column, and it was 3,500 words. And people, people should understand, man. 3,500 words is a meaty chapter in a meaty book. And you're doing this at least to that level. Four, five times a week, Six, seven times a week?
- [09:59]
C
No, every single day I take off major holidays. That's about it.
- [10:06]
A
Michelle is here. Long suffering wife. Is that fair? Michelle?
- [10:11]
C
She's my business partner.
- [10:13]
A
Well, look, let me just get it out of the way. I'm so flattered that you came. I didn't think you would when I invited you because I know you're on the other side of the country and I know you're busy, but I stumbled across coffee and Covid, I guess in 21, maybe 22, and it resonated with me on so many levels. And I want to talk to you today about many of those levels. We won't get to all of them, but. Because it's not that I agree with every single thing that you write, but every single thing that you write is interesting to me because I can't decide if you're really. I mean, you're so sarcastic sometimes, and I know that you're such a big hearted, guilty man of faith, but you're funny and you're sarcastic and mostly you're just relentlessly optimistic. So let's start there as a writer who's also a lawyer. Or are you a lawyer who's also a writer? How do you even Think of yourself, Jeff.
- [11:13]
C
Boy, that is an excellent question. I never in my wildest dreams thought I would be a blogger or a social media influencer or anything like that. I stayed off of social media until the pandemic. So I'm a lawyer who's blogging, and that's how I think of myself. If you actually figured out how much time per week I put into blogging versus lawyering, it's probably more blogging.
- [11:37]
A
You have your own practice?
- [11:39]
C
I do.
- [11:39]
A
What's it called?
- [11:40]
C
Childress Law LLC in Gainesville, Florida. Prior to the pandemic, we were a boutique commercial litigation firm.
- [11:49]
A
What kind of cases typically?
- [11:51]
C
So it's all business cases in Florida. There's a lot of land development, so a lot of land development related cases. Developers who get in trouble with the bank or vice versa, things like that. Contract disputes, but involving litigation. So I go to court.
- [12:09]
A
The riveting stuff.
- [12:11]
C
Well, I have adhd, so I can't. I can't handle reading, you know, contracts forever. I gotta be in front of people making arguments.
- [12:18]
A
But it's really. I mean, that kind of law is such, you know, how the sausage gets made. You know, it's not law and order. It's not the Lincoln lawyer. It's a daily grind. It's research, it's study, it's patience. It's all of the things that never make it into the primetime hits that make firms actually work.
- [12:43]
C
It's the glue that holds society together. It's the way we resolve conflicts without violence. And I liked commercial litigation because it's just about money, right? Nobody's going to jail, nobody's dying or has died. There's not some horrible injury involved. You know, it's just superficially smart people arguing about their superficial things. Their superficial things, Right. But not to say that money's important to people. I mean, they get pretty exercised about it.
- [13:15]
A
Well, superficiality is only a concept in a relative world. When you compare it as you just did, to death and calamity and truly mortal stakes, then, right? But if there's nothing else going on in your world and your entire business is really hanging by a thread on the ruling of a judge, you don't really know, and you've put all your faith and all your hope and a fair amount of money in a guy like you to make your case, I. I've been there. And the stakes are extraordinary. And the faith that people have to put in their attorneys, I think it's impossible to overstate that because it is. I mean, is faith the right word?
- [14:01]
C
Yeah. Because you don't have any control. You don't know. All you know is what your lawyer tells you. Your lawyer tells you you have a good case or a bad case, what are you gonna do with that? You can go get a second opinion, but if that lawyer says something different, then you have to decide which one you believe. You don't have any independent way to evaluate your case.
- [14:22]
A
Forgive me for hopping around, but isn't that sort of the state of play right now? If you try and distill the cause of so much collective angst, Isn't it because we've put ourselves in a world where the experts around us don't agree? It's like the wisdom of a second opinion. Medically, anyway, is time immemorial, and in law, I would oppose. But the third opinion, and the fourth, and then the fifth, none of them seem to agree. It feels to me like these last five years, as much as anything else, has been an experiment of living with a front row seat to the demise of the expert class 100%.
- [15:05]
C
I mean, I rag on experts all the time, as you know, having read Coffee and Covid. And I was prepared for that because as a litigating lawyer, my cases often involve experts, right? So you got some kind of land dispute, and there's an environmental problem. So the county hires an environmental expert, and I hire an environmental expert. And guess what? The two experts always do disagree. They disagree. Now, which one's right? Mine is right, of course. But the truth is that and every lawyer knows this, and every judge knows this, the experts will say what you pay them to say. That's how it works. And this is really important in our legal system. Who makes the decision at the end of the case?
- [15:55]
A
The jury.
- [15:56]
C
The jury does. And is the jury an expert?
- [16:00]
A
No, they're our peers, Scott.
- [16:02]
C
They're just some random.
- [16:04]
A
That guy, we'll get him.
- [16:06]
C
The unemployed guy, the student, the stay at home mom. Those are the people who make the decision. And that was the way the founders built our legal structure, because we can't trust experts. They're paid mouthpieces, and I don't care. And we're so far along this railway line now, away from where we were before the pandemic, which is this sort of consensus that the experts knew what they were doing, right? So we're like. Well, the CDC says. It says you have to cut up a T shirt and wrap it around your head. So, you know, obviously that must be true because they're the experts, right? So.
- [16:55]
A
Well, don't you think our Credulity, our skepticism diminishes. There's probably some formula that articulates this better than I can. But the more frightened we are, the more venerated our experts become, the more desperate we are for a smooth, sure, steady, believable, consistent voice.
- [17:22]
C
Only when you're outsourcing because you're afraid and you're afraid to make a move. So you'd rather turn over the decision making to somebody else. And that's always a mistake, right? Because whoever you're turning the decision making over never has your incentives. And I don't care if that's your lawyer. You should never delegate your whole lawsuit to your lawyer. You should never turn your whole medical treatment over to your doctor.
- [17:51]
A
What I'm getting at, Jeff, is it's well and good, I think, for the average person to look around and find elected officials and experts who they agree with and who they admire. But Anthony Fauci was turned into a saint. People had his edifice in their front lawn. They had him in their window, literally. They beatified him. It couldn't have just been because they agreed with him. It must have been because they were scared right out of their minds. And they were looking for something messianic. Almost a savior, really. Let's just get to it. You're a lawyer doing his thing, property disputes and whatever Covid happens, and suddenly you're filing a whole different kind of suit and you're entering a whole different life. And it almost beggars belief. But if you're not sick of telling the story, how exactly did this happen?
- [18:53]
C
Yeah, so picking up where we left off, I left the safe world of just fighting about money with relatively low stakes. People don't like to lose money, but again, it's not like your child died or something. And then I transitioned into this extremely high stakes world. It happened in an instant, in late March. So the declaration of Emergency was on March 11, 2020. It's a day after my birthday, so it's easy to remember. By the end of March, my county, Alachua county in Florida, which is one of the bluest counties in the state.
- [19:36]
A
It's up north.
- [19:37]
C
It is up north, arguably bluer than the South Florida counties. And they were following LA County. So Louisiana county passed a mask mandate, and so Alachua county decided a mask mandate. And we all got wind of it. And so everybody tuned into the county commission meeting where they debated the, you know, the next emergency order in this series of daily emergency orders they had been signing. It was the first county commission meeting I had ever seen. I had no idea how bad it was. It's like, you know, the sausage is worse than the sausage making. I always kind of thought that our elected officials were smart. They had a lot of experience in management and in, you know, politics and all this kind of stuff. And then I find out that they're just random people with some kind of questionable ideas. I'm being generous. And so they debated this mask mandate thing. And, Mike, I am not making this up. They spent 15 minutes debating whether to include in that order a requirement to wear your mask inside your own house. And the only reason they didn't is because the county attorney told them that there'd be no way to have police spot check because you need probable cause to enter. Right. I mean, they debated that. They were trying to find a way to get around it. And what I was watching was, you know, like the exact opposite of everything I thought I understood about our constitutional system. And it was a profound challenge on, like, you know, a spiritual level. I mean, I really. I feel like it was almost a spiritual event.
- [21:21]
A
Do do do do do do do do do do. Every now and then, I like to visit a website called consumeraffairs.com, where thousands of people rate and review the top wireless providers. I do this because I like to see what people are saying about Pure Talk, and I'm never disappointed. Here, for instance, is a nice note from Gregory in Tower, Minnesota. He writes, and I'm quoting, I recently retired and had to set up my own phone account as my previous one was on the company. I contacted Pure Talk. The setup was easy. The signal is strong everywhere I go, and the company's values are are in line with my own. And now with Mike Rowe doing your commercials, I've named my phone my microphone. Thank you, Gregory. As a rule, I take care of the jokes, but I do appreciate the shout out. May you and your microphone have a long and satisfying life. As for the rest of you, PureTalk really can offer you unlimited talk, unlimited text, and plenty of data for just 25 bucks a month on the same 5G service the big guys are currently overcharging you so egregiously for. Go to PureTalk.com row and do what Gregory did. You'll save an additional 50% off your first month. Why not turn your current phone into a microphone? It's easy@PureTalk.com Rowe that's PureTalk.com Ro Pur Talk. Can you describe the meeting a little bit so people understand the setting, the number of people, how many are on this committee. And I assume it was open to the public. Was it crowded?
- [23:04]
C
No, because it was all locked down.
- [23:06]
A
Right.
- [23:07]
C
It was five people sitting on a long table wearing masks. Right. So this is like the perfect metaphor for faceless bureaucracy.
- [23:16]
A
Yeah.
- [23:17]
C
You couldn't see anybody's face. You know, it was all like this and them talking. One of the five county commissioners crocheted her own face mask.
- [23:28]
A
Crocheted good.
- [23:29]
C
Crocheted.
- [23:30]
A
N95 great.
- [23:32]
C
Yes. Back, you know, when we were wearing the, you know, those neck things that you pull up over your face and all that kind of stuff. So what do they call those things?
- [23:41]
A
Like balaclavas or something? You know, it's like a kerchief, and you would just pull it up over your face like the old bank robbers wore in the wild West. Right, like that. That'll save you. Anyway, go ahead.
- [23:55]
C
So the upshot is that they wind up passing it. And so we got the first indoor outdoor mask mandate in Florida. And I looked at Michelle and said, there's no way that's constitutional. They can't tell us what to wear. I mean, imagine if they said, we all have to wear a uniform walking around the county. How is this possibly constitutional? Now, mind you, I do commercial litigation, not con law. The last time I had any constitutional law experience was in law school, first semester. It's been that long. So I think the same day I wrote my demand letter to the county and I sent them a seven day demand to drop the mask mandate, which of course, they ignored.
- [24:41]
A
Yeah. I mean, what do you mean you demand it? How does that. Who cares? Jeff Childers has thought it over and he has some demands now. So this is like, how does that work?
- [24:51]
C
Well, you know, this is one of those privileges of being a lawyer, I guess, is you can throw demand letters around everywhere, govern yourself accordingly.
- [24:59]
A
Yeah. Did you insist? I insist that my demand be. It wouldn't have mattered.
- [25:03]
C
It's a legal threat. It's basically, if you don't do it, I'm gonna sue you. And that's what I told him. And so I immediately got to work trying to find a plaintiff because I needed to represent a client to represent. And I had this great guy who runs a nursery, you know, nice, solid blue collar hands work. And he's like, way out here on the libertarian scale. And I called him up and I was like, justin, you know, hey, did you hear about this mask mandate? Yeah, like, would you be my plaintiff if I sue the county? Hell yeah, he said. So we were off and running. Now he didn't realize that he'd be getting death threats and people picketing his nursery and all of that kind of stuff, which happened later. And so I sued. At the peak of mask hysteria, I sued the county over the mask mandate. I went there and never having done any constitutional law before and never having sued a government entity before, I didn't even know, like, you know, the basic mechanics. Like, where do you serve the lawsuit?
- [26:11]
A
Yeah.
- [26:12]
C
You know, do you slide it in that little slot at the library where you put the books? I mean,
- [26:19]
A
insert lawsuit here, especially with
- [26:21]
C
the county locked down. I mean, you couldn't get into a county office. Where am I supposed to send the process server?
- [26:27]
A
Right.
- [26:27]
C
Anyway, so I'm calling my network of peers. And, you know, when the lawyers have this thing called the bar, and that's like, you know, we have the big bar and you have the local bar, and you have even, like, little commercial litigation bars and stuff. So I've got contacts and mentors, you know, lawyers older than me who were smarter and more experienced and that kind of thing. And I'm calling them up, and every one of them said the same thing. Now it's a blue county. So these are, you know, not conservatives now. I wasn't really political to start. That shocks a lot of people reading the blog. I probably didn't vote. But every other presidential election. So I'm calling my contacts in the local bar, and they all said, jeff, why are you throwing your career away over this? I said, the mask mandate is temporary. It's only going to last a few weeks, and then this thing's gonna be over, and you're gonna get a reputation, and there could be bar implications. Right. Meaning. So lawyers are professionally credentialed by the bar, and the worst thing that can happen to us is having our bar license revoked or be disbarred. Right. And there really is nothing lower in our society than a disbarred lawyer. I mean, really, if you think about it, that's like somebody that you would be crazy to hire. You don't even need to know the circumstances of the poor guy. He just sued the county over the mask mandate. That's all he did. No, it doesn't matter. He's a disbarred lawyer.
- [28:02]
A
Right?
- [28:02]
C
Right. So we, obviously lawyers are already trained in cya, and so we, most of us do everything we can to stay far away from any kind of conduct that could potentially be turned against you to disbar you. So that was a very serious issue that I had to think about carefully
- [28:21]
A
not to Belabor it. But people should understand, I mean, in this little office, like if I want an opinion, if I want a lawyer to give me a legal opinion, could be a copyright issue, could be a
- [28:34]
B
clearance issue, it could be clearance, could
- [28:36]
A
be any number of things. To get these guys to affirmatively own an opinion, really, truly would take an act of Congress. They've got no problem generating the invoice. But when it comes right down to saying based on this, don't do it, or based on this, do it, you never get that. People should understand that level of clarity, that kind of legal clarity is very rare. So what you wind up paying for typically is just a lot of ambiguity. In my experience.
- [29:05]
C
I call them two handed lawyers on the one hand, but on the other hand. And so when I work for my clients in those kinds of situations that you just described, because that's right in my wheelhouse, I try to give them some firm guidance at the end. Here's what I would do, right, sure, here's the ambiguity, here's the gray area right here. But here's the risk reward matrix, here's your exposure. And so if I were you, this is what I would do. Now you can take that and make your own decision.
- [29:38]
A
I just point it out because the irony is delicious. Now here you are on the other side of this trying to make sense of the risk reward matrix and your friends, your legal peers are telling you this is an act of self sabotage. What's Michelle thinking? Like your non lawyer friends who are around you, were they worried for you?
- [30:01]
C
Well, I think Michelle was more fired up than I was. I mean, you know, as I recall, I don't know, maybe she'll tell me different, but as I recall, she was saying, you've got to do something about this. So, so I had, there's your client.
- [30:15]
A
Yeah.
- [30:15]
C
And you know, and that's what's great about my marriage is on all the big stuff, we always agree, you know, what a blessing that is. You fight about the little things.
- [30:23]
A
Okay, so it's late 2020 and you decide to go to the mattresses. You've got your client, you file it, you serve it and you're off to the races.
- [30:31]
C
What next makes local media crazy? Lawyer Suez county over mask mandate we start getting calls, usually the drunk dialers and leaving the voicemails on the firm's voicemail system in the middle of the night. But it was low key because I was one of the first to file the mass lawsuit. But there was about 40 that I counted keeping track of to see what mistakes other people were making and how it was going. I filed mine under an emergency basis. I asked for a preliminary injunction, which entitles me to a hearing within 30 days, which is what I wanted. I had to make some strategic decisions and I wound up making really good ones. I don't know, how much detail do you want?
- [31:22]
A
Well, I'm curious, what was your argument around the idea that this is an emergency? We're being forced to wear these things on our faces. And, and is it a constitutional emergency? I get that. It's a clear violation of the constitution. I mean, we can see that, I think, pretty clearly today. But what were the stakes like, the practical stakes in your mind of being compelled to do this?
- [31:48]
C
So our constitution is unique in many ways. One way that it's unique, thank the heavens, is that it does not include an emergency clause. Now, the weimar constitution in 1930s Germany had an emergency clause that allowed you to go extra constitutionally in emergencies. And that's what Hitler used to basically remake the government in his own image. We don't have that. And in fact, as I argued, the constitution was drafted in an emergency. They could have put emergency language in there if they wanted to. They didn't want it. So the government can't just start making stuff up to address some urgent need of a pandemic or a nuclear war or a nuclear meltdown, or you name it. You know, all these hobgoblins that they always trot out, you know, well, what if. What if there was a UFO invasion? Well, fine, but that's not in the constitution. So you're acting extra constitutionally. Now, there's supreme court doctrines that allow government to do things that are in the gray area, but they have to meet super high standards, and none of those standards could be met by the mask mandate. For one thing, there was, you know, all the evidence that I found when I searched. Now this is the first time I'd ever even searched PubMed, which is the online database where they put the studies, the scientific studies and the medical studies and stuff. I didn't even know it existed. But there I am, you know, up late at night searching PubMed for studies about masks. And there's tons of them. They've been studying this for decades because of flu in hospitals. So they want to protect healthcare workers from passing sicknesses around that patients bring in. They want to protect other patients from, you know, a doctor goes into the flu room and then comes into your operating theater, and they want to protect you from getting the flu. So they study all kinds of stuff. And they've studied mask and every one of those studies found that it didn't stop transmission of flu.
- [34:06]
A
So. Okay, go ahead.
- [34:08]
C
Yeah. And I mean, you can imagine what I'm thinking right as I'm pulling this stuff up and what I've got, you know, on the other hand, I've got this lady who crocheted her own mask who made the decision for the rest of us that we have to. Right? And so I'm studying all this science and I haven't had science since college. And the flu virus is like 300 times bigger or maybe even more than the COVID virus particle and that can pass through, right? So you know the. And I was calling OSHA engineers, right, who like they were consultants who, you know, help companies that dispose of environmental waste, you know, how to protect workers and stuff. And they're laughing about the masks. One guy told me it was like trying to stop mosquitoes by putting up a chain link fence. And you probably remember all those videos that were going around social media with people like blowing their cigarette smoke through their mask, stuff like that. So it was obvious. If you would just stop and look at it.
- [35:19]
A
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- [36:49]
C
If you would just put aside your fear and hysteria and everything and just look at the data and the evidence. It was obvious that the stupid things didn't even work, which is bad. Enough. But then ordering everybody to do it is like ordering people to walk on their hands. I mean, it's totally irrational. So the more I got into the details of masking, the worse it got and the more impassioned I became about, you know, this has to stop. And meanwhile, just in those few weeks before my hearing, the other lawsuits, the 40 other lawsuits were failing one by one.
- [37:32]
A
And these were also in Florida or all over?
- [37:34]
C
Just in Florida. Just in Florida, Yeah. And just in that three week period. And part of the reason is because the lawyers like me, who like. And I don't want to say real lawyers that are like, litigate, regular litigating lawyers with real litigating practices were not bringing these suits for the same reason. You know, I'm just stubborn or bullheaded, and I didn't listen to my peers. But no big law firms got into it. The initial resistance was all small firms like mine. And at the very, very beginning, it was firms that didn't have anything to lose. And so those were lawyers that usually drafted wills and did things like this. And they were totally unprepared for deal government lawyers. And they were losing. And of course, the judges were awful. And by the way, strategically, I knew I was going to lose at the circuit court level. I deliberately did not file in federal court because one advantage that I had over everybody else is I have the most conservative appellate jurisdiction in the state of Florida, the first dca. That's the one where the governor brings all his cases and so he appoints, rock solid, you know, hardcore constitutionalists to that court. And I had. That's where I am. I'm in the first dca. So that's where I wanted to go. Judges at the circuit level are elected. I just knew even if I got one of the good ones in my area, they still are going to be thinking about the reelection campaign.
- [39:10]
A
Sure.
- [39:11]
C
So I always planned for the appeal. I designed my whole case to appeal to the first dca.
- [39:18]
A
Because you knew you were gonna lose?
- [39:20]
C
I knew I was gonna lose at the trial court. And she gave me one hour. And by the way, I did get one of the good judges. Judge, you're one of the good ones. And still she didn't say a word, except for procedural things. Go ahead, Mr. Childers, go ahead. You know, city attorney. And then at the end, she said, well, I'm ruling against you. I'm dismissing your case, Childers. I'll write an opinion as quickly as possible. That was it. Which again. And it was on zoom, which might have been the First Zoom hearing as a lawyer I've ever done. Not to be there in person and to be able to read body language and just get that interaction. I mean, it was totally alien. And half the people on the Zoom were wearing masks, so you can't even see their facial expressions or anything. So anyway, we took it up on appeal, and the following April, I had a favorable decision and I won the only appellate level decision in the entire country, finding that mandatory masking is unconstitutional
- [40:22]
A
in the whole country.
- [40:24]
C
As far as I know and I've looked, nobody else even made it to the appellate level.
- [40:29]
A
So what happened as a result of that ruling?
- [40:32]
C
Everywhere, inside 33 counties in Florida out of 67, all dropped their mask mandates. Schools, municipalities, whatever.
- [40:45]
A
2021 at this point.
- [40:47]
C
Yeah, early 2021. So we were on the front wave. Now, of course, they all did it voluntarily and by their own decision, and the emergency has receded to the point and, you know, that kind of thing.
- [40:58]
A
But all in the wake of that,
- [41:00]
C
of that decision ruling. And I know for a fact there were bigger players involved behind my county that were helping them the quality of their lawyer. And when we got to the appellate level, shot up, sure. Like a rocket.
- [41:15]
A
Well, I mean, the stakes are enormous. It's another kind of contagion, that kind of decision.
- [41:20]
C
They had to stop it no matter what. And then here's the funny thing. They didn't appeal me to the state Supreme Court. I was praying, Mike, that they would appeal me to, because if I could have got to the state Supreme Court and if the state Supreme Court had affirmed that, the whole state of Florida would have been free. And they stopped. They took their licks in the first dca. They didn't try to overturn me at the Florida Supreme Court, and they just stuck.
- [41:46]
A
Let me ask you something. Do you, as we look at the other side, to what degree do you think and to what percentage do you think the people who were firmly in favor of these mandates meant? Well, in other words, how much good faith do you believe the other side had? Because, I mean, to this day, I talk to people who shrug and say, look, Mike, why are you making trouble on your podcast? Why are you bringing in Gavin de Becker and Del Big Tree? Why are you talking to Jeff Childers? It's like, it's almost impolite because the way they remember it, the way they heard it, is that a lot of really well intentioned people got it wrong at a time of extraordinary unrest and they were just trying to do what was right. Does that hold any water with you.
- [42:48]
C
Let me answer by way of a story. So during that period of three weeks before my hearing, I'm an experienced litigation lawyer and I knew I had a lot of tools like discovery available to me and I can get limited discovery before an emergency hearing like that. So I asked to depose the county's main expert who was the head of the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida. So super credentialed expert, guy who flies all over the world and does all this stuff. He just happens to be in my little town of Gainesville, Florida, because that's where the University of Florida is. He also just was the one who always showed up at school board hearing to explain why masking the kids to 2 year olds is necessary to save the universe or whatever. And so anyway, I arranged to take his deposition and obviously they did not want to produce him, but it was still early. And my judge, like I said, I got a good judge and they knew the judge was going to let me do it because they got an affidavit from this guy and they were using his affidavit as part of their evidence. So I have a right to ask him questions. So it's really an extraordinary deposition. But there was this one question that I think answers it so much of what you're asking. And so, you know, he's doing a good job. He's, you know, he knows how to talk, he's good at tap dancing. I'm asking him probing questions about the mass, and he's giving me acronyms and, you know, 10 syllable words and, you know, all that kind of stuff. And so I get to this point, I've been waiting for, for a while in my deposition outline and I'm like, well, doc, are you an independent researcher that is, do you do your own research? Yes. You don't just track behind anybody else and adopt their position, do you? You make up your own mind based on your own research, your own find? Oh, yes, yes. I said, what about like a big agency like the cdc? Well, if the CDC says it does that, you become your position, or do you make up your own mind? No, I make up my own mind. He says, do my own research. So even if the CDC was wrong, you would then come out and say, I disagree with the cdc. Oh, yes, of course I would. All right, give me an example of a time in your career that you disagree with the cdc. And it was dead air. We went around and around after that and he couldn't come up with any examples of ever disagreeing with the cdc. And that's the problem. I'm not saying that he's adopting the CDC's position universally in bad faith. He's probably doing it out of self survival. He didn't get to be the head of the Emerging Pathogens Institute by not playing politics. He knows how it works and he likes that job and he wants to keep that job. So there's a bigger problem, right? There is an institutional architecture that forces these experts down certain channels whether they want to or not.
- [46:27]
A
It discourages skepticism.
- [46:29]
C
It absolutely discourages skepticism. But it also makes them even go further and adopt a position that they might disagree with. And they have to maintain a kind of cognitive dissonance to do it. Right. I don't believe that they secretly, you know, sometimes they probably do have doubts, but, you know, they convince themselves that, well, of course masking is cut up T shirts. Makes scientific sense, right? And then, oh, later the CDC says, oh, it's gotta be a surgical mask. And then, boop, they just reprogram and suddenly it's like. They never said that about the T shirts. They've always known it was surgical masks, but they were hard to get in the early pandemic, so that's why we went with the T shirts. It was better than nothing.
- [47:14]
A
Yeah. You can't say something is critical to your survival if it's not available.
- [47:20]
C
I mean, you would just.
- [47:22]
A
That's time for a riot. You know you're gonna die if you don't have it and you can't have it all, right? So, I mean, gosh, I think that makes a lot of sense. Like the same pressure that you were feeling as an attorney to not push this forward. It mutates, right? Surely a doctor would feel the same pressure, right, not to blow his own career up by running afoul of the governing authority. You know, these appeals to authority, they're everywhere and they're almost always acronyms, it seems. But by the time it trickles down to my neighbors and to my friends and to people who don't have professional skin in the game, but who do believe that the stakes are mortal. You know, I've told this story before on the podcast. Chuck was up around that same time visiting me in Northern California. I had a pretty good. Like we had just come out of the phase where all the neighbors would go out onto the deck at night and howl like wolves. They would do this every night at 8 o' clock in solidarity with and support for healthcare workers. And at that time, wow. Yeah, I mean, it was a little weird, but truly that whole first two
- [48:37]
C
weeks, how does howling help health care workers?
- [48:39]
A
Well, this is. See, it's science, Jeff. You know, years of science.
- [48:43]
B
I mean, I think really, it's community. Do you know what I mean? Just the idea that you're banding together with other people, cheering on. It's just because we were all separated and not communicating.
- [48:56]
A
It was a kind of connective tissue, like a reminder that, okay, you can't see people.
- [49:02]
C
Some social engagement that you weren't getting anywhere else, Right?
- [49:06]
A
And oddly. And again, this window wasn't open a long time, but there was this moment where you're like, you know what? It's scary. We're all in it. And this simple expression of gratitude toward first responders is something that anybody can get behind for a period. I first became acquainted with pesti a couple years ago during the lockdowns when a plague of ants descended upon my pantry from out of nowhere. Actually, that's not true. They came from the ground, where they live in numbers so vast, it boggles the mind. Fire ants, carpenter ants, sugar ants, pavement ants, Argentine ants. They're all out there. And given the opportunity, they'd all prefer to be in my pantry anyway. Pesti was the perfect solution for me. They offer prograde treatment at a fraction of the cost. It's customized for my location and the types of pests that I typically deal with, including spiders, by the way, which are no less determined than ants to set up shop in my home. With pesti, you can create an outdoor barrier around your house in just 10 minutes that protects your home from over 100 different types of bugs. And it's kid friendly, it's pet friendly. You can get started at just 35 bucks. A treatment with a customized plan based on your location, your climate, your bugs. That's important. Pesti is used in schools and hospitals all over the country. Comes with a full 100% money back guarantee. If the bugs don't go away, you'll get a full refund. Each kit includes a sprayer, a mixing bag, pesticide gloves, instructions, everything you need to complete the task in less than 10 minutes. Keep the bugs away with pesti, go to pesti.com mike get an extra 10% off your order at P-E-S-T-I-E.com mike for an extra 10% off. But the curve didn't flatten, and two weeks went to two months. And then the court cases built up, and suddenly Chuck and I are just walking around this quiet little bucolic neighborhood. We're not in the City or anything. It's a suburb. Walking the dog. And this guy on the other side of the street, he's probably in his early 70s. Yeah. He had at least one mask on, and he looked at us. We're on the other side of the street. We're outside. We didn't have masks. We're just walking and talking. Chuck, give me your best imitation of what we heard there.
- [51:39]
B
Shouldn't you be wearing a mask?
- [51:42]
A
Yeah, yeah, he was shaking. Yeah, he was shaking. And this is why I was asking before. It's like, that guy. I know who that guy is. You know, I'd seen him around, and I don't want to think badly of him. He's my neighbor. And the reason I'm able to not think badly of him is because I don't think about how wrong he was or how aggressive he was. I think about how scared he was. He was scared, man. And so many people were scared. And I think the reason. I'll get blowback for the conversation we're having now, most of it's going to be from people who say, don't you remember how frightening it was? And I'll say, yeah, I do remember it. But just because you're scared doesn't mean you can wrap a T shirt around your face and say, science. Maybe as a child, you know, who's putting his faith in the fat man down the chimney or the Easter bunny or some other thing, but we're adults, and the stakes are awfully high. And we were being told something. It's just so fascinating. Most of us bought it. Most of us took a deep breath and said, okay, I'm not going to rock the boat. You didn't. That makes you weird and interesting.
- [53:02]
C
So what you just described is completely understandable. This gentleman thought that you were a threat to him, and he felt out of control, as all of us did. I mean, what are we going to do, right? I mean, you've got the President coming on TV every day, giving us the latest brief. They're shutting down air travel to all these different countries. They're keeping the country under lockdown. You're watching videos on YouTube with the, you know, Chinese people in the white spacesuits spraying stuff in the air and all of that. And you're trying to decide, okay, what should I do to live through this to survive? It was a survival thing.
- [53:47]
A
And not kill my mom and dad, right? Not kill my grandparents.
- [53:51]
C
Don't kill Grandma.
- [53:52]
A
Once the conversation became about how to protect the people around you and not yourself, that's when things tipped, I think for a lot of people, I don't know. Okay, so you win the case. 30 Some counties rescind the mandate. At what point do you sit down and start writing?
- [54:15]
C
So it all kind of happened at the same time, because remember that county commission meeting I was just telling you
- [54:22]
A
about, the Star Chamber? I like to think of it as,
- [54:25]
C
oh, my gosh, it's indescribable. The hair on my arms is standing up right now thinking about that. Just because of how. I mean, it was like something out of Monty Python. That's what it was like.
- [54:38]
A
I mean, it just meets George Orwell.
- [54:40]
C
Yes, you know, bizarre and kind of dangerous. But one of the evidence that they used was one of the county commissioners who was a failed real estate broker before he went into politics. Local politics. Right. And then that was his career for the rest of his adult life. During that meeting, as evidence to support the indoor outdoor mask mandate, he held up a little scrap of paper with writing all over. It looked like a cocktail napkin or something. And he says, I've been doing my own calculations. This guy should have been nowhere near a calculation, but he's doing his own. He did his own. That's when I knew we were really in trouble. And he said, you know, at the rate and remember how. You know, I don't know if they did it here, but our county had a dashboard, a Covid dashboard.
- [55:32]
A
Yes.
- [55:33]
C
And every day they would update the dashboard and the new numbers and, you know, number of hospitalizations and cases and blah, blah, blah. And they're making everybody test and the test results and, you know, I did my own calculations. And according to my calculations, he said the cases are doubling every two days, which means by the end of this month, the entire county will be infected.
- [56:02]
A
Yeah. That's the difference between math, statistics, probability, logic. We. You can't. I mean, it just doesn't work that way. And yet, you know, everybody became it. Who was this guy doing his own calculations? Like, not only in his name, but like it would.
- [56:20]
C
The county commissioner.
- [56:21]
A
He's the. Oh, my God.
- [56:25]
C
Who is one of the five people making the. And he's trying to convince the others to be afraid.
- [56:31]
A
Right.
- [56:32]
C
Because if they don't do something, it's going to wipe out the county. It'll just be like a smoking crater. Where Alachua County. It probably is sinkhole. That's what it. Alachua means sinkhole in the native Indian. It's not very flattering, but a smoking crate. Let's go with crater. A smoking crater where the county Used to be, unless they passed this and the mask mandate was going to save us, right? For sure. Now I'm a lawyer, a litigator. Everybody lies to me. The other side obviously lies the whole time. My own clients lie to me. They want me to work hard, so they give me the good, polished up version of what happened so I could do a good job telling their side of the story. I never take anybody's word for it. No good lawyer does. Let me see the numbers. So I pull down the numbers into my little spreadsheet. And again, I'm a lawyer, not. I'm not a mathematician, and I'm not a doctor or anything, right? So here I am in my house, locked down, downloading the CSV file into Excel and, you know, putting the numbers in there and looking at it. And it. It would no way were the, the cases doubling every two days. I mean, only if you took like the first three or four days. So, like, on day one, there was two, and on day two, there was four, you know, because they were out there beating the bushes to find the cases, right? But then it leveled off. So when I finished, I had this little spreadsheet that I had made for myself, and I'm like, well, damn it, I need to do something with this. I mean, I gotta show it to someone. But I'm locked down, right? So I guess I'll just. Let me see if my Facebook account still works. And so lo and behold, I still had. Apparently those are permanent, by the way. I don't think you can get rid of them.
- [58:21]
A
Can't get rid of it, no.
- [58:21]
C
Yeah. So I just posted up on my Facebook and I think at that time I had like 200 accidental friends, you know, people who had friended me for. I mean, I never posted anything there. And I miracle of miracles, like 10 or 12 people responded, and they're like, oh, that's very interesting. So I decided for purposes of my litigation, and because, you know, some people seem to be interested in this, I would keep my little spreadsheet updated. So I. I updated my spreadsheet every day and I would post it on the. The Facebook. And then I started putting some little comments like, well, if you look, if you notice this number is lower than it was, and if you divide that by this number, it's actually going down. And that's good, that kind of thing. And again, you know, I'm just a hopeless optimist. So I was finding it looked a lot like the flu. To me. This looked exactly like a seasonal flu, maybe a bad Flu. But within the boundaries of historically, what we've seen now, you weren't allowed to say it was like the flu back in those days. Yeah, they hated that. So then I started, like. Well, then I realized something. I realized that the market for bad news at that time was completely saturated, and there was no market for good news. So I decided I'm just going to gather up all the good news that comes. Like the Diamond Princess, they figured out that, you know, it wasn't as bad as they originally thought.
- [59:56]
A
Right.
- [59:57]
C
And. Except that it was that page. That story was on page A16, you know, underneath the local sports column. But I would find those cases, and then I would profile them. I would say, hey, so we. You know, this is new. And I only use. Because remember now, on the. In those days, I don't know if you ever got, like, thrown in Facebook jail or. Oh, yeah, Twitter jail. Or whatever. Right. So, you know, one wrong word in your post, and that could be it. You know, they'd lock you down for a week or a month, maybe even cancel your account.
- [60:32]
A
I sold masks around the same time to raise money for the foundation. The masks said safety third, which was an ongoing bit of shorthand from the dirty jobs days that attempted to remind people that safety first came with all kinds of unintended consequences. And, oh, it was a big riff. I wrote a bunch about it. I thought it was clever. We raised, like, $100,000 for the foundation. But Facebook hated that. Hated that. Like, what do you mean, safety Third? I'm like, well, where would you put it? And they're like, well, it's first. And that opened up this whole conversation. Around the same time Cuomo was saying, andrew, you'll remember this. No measure, no matter how draconian, can be deemed excessive if it saves a
- [61:25]
C
single life, just one life.
- [61:28]
A
And that's when I. I mean, I'm not a lawyer or a doctor, but I can be a jagged little pill. And I had 8, 9 million people on the socials, and I just felt like, you know what? I don't need the trouble either. But that's a crazy thing to say and to nod in agreement.
- [61:48]
C
It's demonstrably false.
- [61:49]
A
Of course it's false. But is it more or less false than a T shirt over your face being science? I think they're equivalent. One is a rhetorical affront to common sense, and the other is just scientific lampooning, you know, But I felt like we were surrounded, like we were being double dog dared to question. And I honestly feel like we've been living in a version of that ever since. You can fill in the topic, right? You know, the border is secure. Never mind the images of thousands coming over it. You know, just pick your topic. And so that's really why I called you. It felt and feels as if the country is grappling with some kind of existential, all encompassing blanket of fraud. Right. From the kind we're talking about now all the way up most recently, to the most literal kind, seeing. And so, so much of what you write about is that it's the sort of debunking, sometimes pre bunking, looking through the emperor's, you know, got no clothes lens at all of these different things. And yet it's always optimistic. And that. That's a heck of a thing.
- [63:16]
C
And so that is just what I wrote about this morning.
- [63:19]
A
Yep.
- [63:21]
C
I was optimistic at every stage. And by the way, just to finish that thought, I. To get around the censors, I only sourced the mainstream papers. I quote the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal. If a study's published, I find it in one of those outlets and I use their story because Facebook can't cancel me for citing the New York Times. But I would write it in a sarcastic way that was open to two interpretations. You could read it non sarcastically. But my people who read my stuff knew better.
- [64:00]
A
They know better.
- [64:00]
C
Yeah. And then when it got to.
- [64:04]
B
That's today's.
- [64:05]
A
This is great.
- [64:06]
C
When it got to the point where it was becoming. I'm using the. Quoting the New York Times, and then I draw the logical conclusion. But I don't say it. I would just say so.
- [64:17]
A
Yeah.
- [64:18]
C
And that's where the so thing came from.
- [64:19]
A
Right. So.
- [64:22]
C
So, yeah. So anyways, I was just doing. There was no market for good news. Sorry. Nobody was taking advantage of this demand. People were desperate for good news. Hungry they were. They were starving for it. And listen, I. At first I, you know, was doing this because of the lawsuit and because, you know, I'm just stubborn and, you know, a little bit of a contrarian and. But then I got my first of several direct messages on Facebook and it was really sobering. And this one, it was long and I usually, I mean, I get tons of them, right. And I don't usually. I'll just like skim it and see if there's something in there. But it gripped me right away because it was, you know, Dear Jeff, I know you don't know me, but I live in New York City. My mom died in the pandemic. I don't have anybody. I haven't been out of the apartment in six months. And I was thinking about ending it, but then somebody sent me your coffee and Covid and. And it kind of made me feel a little bit better. So I'm gonna wait and see how things go. And like I said, I got, I don't know, probably two dozen like that over 2001, or 21 and 22, which
- [65:47]
A
means there are hundreds more.
- [65:49]
C
Yeah, the ones that don't write, Right?
- [65:51]
A
Yeah.
- [65:52]
C
And then I realized that I was doing something that was more than just like messing with Facebook, you know what I mean? And more than just a method of self expression in a time of pandemic. It was reaching people in a way that I hadn't even realized, and it was important. And in that category now, that's probably the most important one. I mean, I've never forgotten that. And I remember it to this day. I mean, I'm talking to people who are in all different places in their life, and I'm trying to bring them some hope.
- [66:27]
A
My buddy guy called Dave Hinman sent me your column late in 21, maybe, I don't know, 21 or 22. But his Ray line simply said, this guy's a lifeline. And it was a link. Didn't tell me anything about it. I just clicked on it and read the first thing and laughed through most of it. Heavy stuff, but it was funny, right?
- [66:50]
C
Adding the humor, sometimes I have to listen. I'm honest. If there's bad news and it's legit, I'm gonna deliver the bad news, but I'm gonna give it in with the most optimistic frame I can and with some humor, so it's easier to swallow.
- [67:06]
A
How do you think about your audience then? What I'm getting at is I think this audience, for instance, is probably right of center, the majority. But there's a big number that's center or left of center. And the reason I, you know, try and stay mindful of that is that it's. I can either evangelize, right. If I'm in a room where I know everybody agrees with me, I can talk one way. If I want to persuade, I have to talk another way. And if I want to do both, well, I'm still not quite sure how to do that. But, you know, sometimes you. I think like I imagine a lawyer might, like, I ask questions. What's persuasive? Do you do that when you write, Are you trying to persuade or are you trying to spread the good news?
- [68:04]
C
I'm thinking about I've never said what I'm about to say out loud before. It's much bigger than persuasion. But you're right. A lawyer's job, especially a litigator, my job is to persuade people. I gotta persuade a jury. I gotta persuade a judge. That's my whole job. I mean, that's where the rubber hits the road. If I can't do that, well, I'm not a good lawyer. You don't want me. And persuading judges is hard because they always give you a hard time. And they play poker so that you don't know what they're really thinking, and they try to mislead you about what they're thinking all the time. So it's especially challenging. And the jury. I love jury trial work. I don't get to do a lot because it's not a big thing in commercial litigation, but I do some. And I love them because I've got the jury there, not a judge. And they're regular people I can talk to. But even that is different than, like, ordinary persuasion, like sales. It's not like sales because the jury sits there like statues. They have this idea in their head. They're not allowed to show preference or anything. They can't smile at one of my jokes or whatever. I'd get no feedback from them, whatever. So you're talking to a wall.
- [69:12]
A
Why is that, by the way? I mean, could it be like that Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, like, they've seen it. They've seen jurors for years on TV just sitting there quietly.
- [69:23]
C
No, they're trying to do a good job and be unbiased. Every jury I've ever had, I can see they're really trying hard to be good jurors. Okay, so you could say, well, all right, Jeff, so you took your persuasive abilities from being a good lawyer and you put it in the blog, which is true, but that's not the whole thing. And this is what I haven't ever said before, because it's kind of like secret sauce in a way. But at some point, I reached a critical mass of readers. I don't remember what the number was, maybe 100,000, I don't know. But I noticed that if I put a really well formed idea out there that was stated simply and just made sense, that it would propagate across social media. And then, because I understand what the newspapers are doing, I understand their propaganda, they're making arguments, too. The newspaper's trying to persuade you. The New York Times is. They're not Unbiased. They have a point of view and they want you to agree with them. And so everything that. Every word choice, every picture, where they put it on the page, the whole thing is designed to convince you to go along with their point of view. And so that, you know, especially during COVID the propaganda was relentless. And I could see, because I get up first thing in the morning and I read all the papers, I see where they're going with their stupid narratives, that they. They're coming up with some new propaganda trick. And then my job is to come up with the antidote to that. And if I can do a good job of that, I have enough readers that it will squash their stupid narrative.
- [71:13]
A
Well, what, like chaps your ass? The worst? Is it the existence of a narrative that you believe is genuinely fallacious or is it the absence of the truth?
- [71:32]
C
So lying is one thing. I mean, like I said before, everybody lies. So lying, per se, it's bad. I'm a Christian. I try not never to lie if I can possibly help it.
- [71:44]
A
I thought she said you were a lawyer.
- [71:47]
C
You can be. Look, the best lawyers are Christian lawyers. That's a whole other discussion. And we can have that. But it's the destructive lies. Yeah, it's the ones that hurt people
- [71:59]
A
to like, I mean, a lie of omission versus an affirmative. Like this morning. You did a. I thought a masterful thing this morning. So in real time today, where are we? Chuck? February 23rd. 23rd. Okay, so over the weekend, all hell broke loose in Mexico. I mean, so by the time this drops, who knows what the headlines will say? But right now, in real time, nobody has written about what seems like an obvious link between Venezuela and Mexico.
- [72:35]
C
Correct.
- [72:35]
A
Between this guy with three unpronounceable names in Mexico. What's his name? He's dead now.
- [72:43]
C
El Mencho.
- [72:44]
A
A metro. Right. Which basically is the tough guy.
- [72:46]
C
Tough guy.
- [72:47]
A
Okay, so tough guy's dead. Former cop, by the way.
- [72:50]
C
Correct.
- [72:50]
A
Who goes profoundly rotten.
- [72:53]
C
I called him the Walter White of Mexico.
- [72:56]
A
Great, great. So, I mean, can it be some sort of coincidence that a month after Maduro is relocated to some, you know, prime real estate in Manhattan Vacation Fed, that this guy's dead? I mean, you've got two of the biggest drug kingpins in the same hemisphere. Who's connecting the dots in the mainstream media?
- [73:24]
C
Their narrative was chaos in Mexico.
- [73:27]
A
Right. Because that's what the picture showed.
- [73:29]
C
So you should be afraid. And these poor tourists are, you know, they can't get out. And they're, you know, watching Burning Costco and stuff like that. Right? So you should be afraid, too, because what if the chaos spreads and. But that's not the story at all. The story is Trump's down there kicking butt against some of the most powerful Central and South American characters to have come along in our lifetimes. And he's taken names and the media just won't even touch it.
- [74:02]
A
Irrespective of your feelings on Trump, it wouldn't matter who's in the Oval. Those two things are massively related.
- [74:14]
C
Those two, they're almost identical, right?
- [74:17]
A
And they're happening in the same time, and they're happening in some kind of domino, like order. And so you can look at that and conclude that it's all just a crazy coincidence. Right? Which your point was. That's what I meant by a lie of omission. It's not the false story that's screaming from the headlines. It's the true story that's nowhere to be found. And if you can find a way to present that, you know, with a touch of irony or a little bit of wryness or some optimism, that. I mean, good on you, man. Because purely as a mercenary and a capitalist, I. Look at that. That's the reverse commute. Nobody's doing that. Certainly nobody's done it on the left. I've never seen anybody even attempt it, you know, but I. I don't think anybody's doing it anywhere. How many subscribers do you have now? How big has your little empire become?
- [75:12]
C
So formally on the list, I've got, I don't know, 230,000. But I know that it's read much beyond that. There are people who, like, don't want to put their name on it because they're in an important position somewhere, and they don't want to get connected to me because I'm just crazy.
- [75:30]
A
Jeff, you're crazy, man. You're something. Yeah.
- [75:33]
C
Local, as they say. But I don't want. Let's not leave that. The real narrative is it's not chaos. It's the opposite of chaos. The idea that it's chaos in Mexico is a lie. It's not a lie of omission. It's a lie of commission. They're lying on purpose. They're calling it chaos so that you won't understand that your government is finally working effectively for once in your stupid life, that this war on drugs that's been going on since we were a fetus is finally getting somewhere and not just watching the fentanyl death chart get higher and higher and higher every year. It's not chaos. It's organization and plan. I mean, think about what an operation like that requires to pull off.
- [76:22]
A
Tell me, what do you think? Like, how did this happen? And what's her name, the president? Shinel.
- [76:27]
C
Sheinbaum.
- [76:28]
A
Shine Bomb.
- [76:29]
C
Nice Mexican name.
- [76:30]
A
It's so classically Mexican, I can't believe it won't stick.
- [76:33]
B
I mean, when I. Chihuahua Shine Bomb.
- [76:36]
A
Chihuahua Shine Bombs. Yes, That's. You can't say that, dude. I mean, her own about face in just the last couple of months, since what happened? Since Maduro.
- [76:53]
C
That's right.
- [76:54]
A
Since prior to Maduro, she was on the record as saying we will not cooperate with the US in any way. We're not. I mean, there's just like a list of things that she went on the
- [77:08]
C
record, headline after headline.
- [77:10]
A
Right. Every one of them's upside down. Opposite Phil.
- [77:15]
C
Right. And so even in the New York Times story this morning about chaos in Mexico, there's one sentence that says it was a joint operation with a new U.S. military intelligence division. Nothing about how Sheinbaum's suddenly cooperating with the US Military. Yeah, Right. Even though they reported on how she wouldn't cooperate with the military a dozen times or hundreds of times, they don't even mention. They just leave it on the cutting room floor.
- [77:46]
A
Go back to. You were saying that when you hit a critical mass, 50,000, 80,000, 100,000. Talk more about that. Because were you saying that when you structure a story in a certain way, you can be assured that it's going to find traction?
- [78:04]
C
Or.
- [78:05]
A
I mean, you call these guys, it's basically the coffee and Covid army, which I love because I've. You know, in relative ways, I've used my following from time to time to help with a fundraiser, for instance.
- [78:20]
C
And, you know, I do some of that, too.
- [78:21]
A
I saw it. I saw it.
- [78:23]
B
The multiplier effect, right?
- [78:24]
A
Yeah. The force multiplier. Yeah. So I think what I like to hear you talk about is how critical does the mass have to be? I think the number's smaller than most people realize. You don't need millions and millions of people. You need thousands of engaged people who care. That's the name of the game. It's engagement. Always engagement.
- [78:48]
C
I gotta keep them engaged.
- [78:49]
A
And, boy, you do. Back to my earlier point. You're writing. Today's column was 3,500 words. Column. I call it a column, blog, whatever it is. Some have been over 5,000. You've probably written 6,000 before. But seven days a week, that's over 40,000 words. A week. That's 160,000 words a month. That's close to 2 million words a year.
- [79:14]
C
Yeah.
- [79:15]
A
You know how many pages a book is with 2 million words? It's ridiculous. So I don't know, I don't want to reduce the impact of the content that you're churning out by just pointing to its extraordinary volume, but. What are you doing here, man? How did you have time to fly across the country to do this? How do you have time to run a law practice? How do you. What is your life like right now?
- [79:44]
C
I'm so blessed. And God has blessed me for following where he led me. You know, making that decision to ignore my peers advice and file the mask lawsuit and go out. Nobody was paying me.
- [80:03]
A
Don't you mean listen to your wife? Isn't that what you were trying to say, Jeff?
- [80:10]
C
Of course. Especially since she's sitting in the room. That was like totally unfair. What a setup.
- [80:16]
A
Sorry.
- [80:20]
C
But so when I travel, I have to have an extra day on both sides. So I've gotta leave, you know, the day before I need to be there and then I have to wait till the next day because I gotta leave room for blogging.
- [80:34]
A
Right.
- [80:35]
C
I gotta get the blog out.
- [80:37]
A
We're staying in the same hotel. Did you do the blog from the hotel?
- [80:41]
C
Yeah, I was down in the coffee shop this morning.
- [80:44]
A
That crazy bright coffee shop.
- [80:46]
C
Well, starting at 6 because they don't open until 6 o', clock, so they have a business center on the second floor.
- [80:52]
A
Oh, okay.
- [80:52]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we usually try to get a room where there's, you know, space for me to go work without waking Michelle up, but the rooms are a little bit smaller there. They're intimate.
- [81:02]
A
I mean, how much noise do you make on your computer?
- [81:05]
C
Well, what inevitably happens is I click the wrong link and it's some loud video.
- [81:10]
A
Right.
- [81:11]
C
It doesn't take that happening many times before you learn your lesson.
- [81:14]
A
Right.
- [81:16]
C
So that's how I organize my travel the law firm. I already had a mature law practice. I have terrific staff. I mean, just like you could not ask for better assistance and paralegals and stuff that I have. I have a new partner who joined the firm last year and he's young and terrific and, you know, wanting to slay giants and stuff.
- [81:47]
A
So you're still doing it?
- [81:48]
C
Oh, yeah. I have a staff huddle twice a week. We've got cases. I'm suing the federal government in two. We're representing Maya Kowalski. Who? There's a Netflix documentary. Take care of Maya. Yeah, a horrible Hospital kidnapping case. And you know, so I, my staff's so good, I don't have to do the routine stuff. Just, you know, come into court and make the big appearances and do some review and guidance and make decisions and stuff like that.
- [82:25]
A
Going back to this sort of what I thought might be a unifying theme, fraud. You know, I want to ask you about that because there seems to be a. I mean, in so many ways the mask thing was fraudulent. So much of what's happening with immigration feels fraudulent. People are afraid that the AI is really ushering in an age of artificiality, which is a kind of fraud. We're set.
- [82:54]
C
Deception. Maybe, sure.
- [82:56]
A
It's something that's not as advertised, not real, something malignant. And now of course, you know, we've got the actual, literal, mind boggling financial fraud in Minneapolis. And I don't know, I mean, as one of your loyal readers, that's what strikes me. I go to your blog because I think you, I think you get that.
- [83:23]
C
You just reminded me. Don't let me forget. I want to talk to you about an investment opportunity. It's probably not the right time, but listen, hear me out, okay? Daycare centers.
- [83:34]
A
Yeah, yeah, daycar centers. Right next to the leering facility. Right. What did you think when that whole Minnesota thing broke? Were you surprised at the, at the depth of it?
- [83:51]
C
Well, the scale of the fraud is mind boggling. I mean, I suspected there was fraud, I was pretty sure, but not that it could be $1.5 million or $1.5 trillion a year. Trillion with a T. Yeah. Out of a $4 trillion budget. It's like mostly fraud.
- [84:13]
A
Yeah.
- [84:15]
C
And it took the Minnesota story to convince me that that was possible. And I am convinced now and I think a lot of other people are too. And so the Minnesota story was just masterfully done. The fraud had been going on for years.
- [84:33]
A
Right. But it was this kid Nick, Nick
- [84:35]
C
Shirley, who the month before was at the White House on a panel about antifa.
- [84:41]
A
So I wonder, I mean, do you see parallels? I mean, it feels if your thesis is right, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but the mainstream media is not doing its job. Journalists are not doing their job. Painting with a broad brush, apologies, but
- [84:56]
C
when that happens, they're not doing journalism, they're doing their job.
- [84:59]
A
They're doing a job.
- [85:00]
C
Yes, it's a different job than you
- [85:01]
A
think, but the vacuum that's been created, people will fill it. You're filling it. Citizen journalists fill it. The whole rise of whether it's Shellenberger or you can go down the list
- [85:14]
C
of people that independent media.
- [85:16]
A
Yeah, they're filling a void, you know, how big is independent media gonna get?
- [85:25]
C
How influential is independent media going to get? How influential is the New York Times anymore? Most of my readers, I get comments. A lot of times people say, jeff, thank goodness you're reading the New York Times because I wouldn't get near that rag, you know.
- [85:41]
A
Well, you're true. I mean, you're using it as. As fodder, really.
- [85:45]
C
Oh yeah, it's. It's a gift that keeps on giving.
- [85:49]
A
Yeah.
- [85:49]
C
Another example is of how I can defuse these narratives is that they'll run some story like about, I don't know, Covid origins. Right. And they'll run some story about how it really. It's been disproven, that it couldn't have possibly been from the lab in Wuhan. And then I'll just look at that long form magazine style report that the New York Times, some exclusive that they did and point out to my readers that every single citation is from an anonymous person. It's 100% anonymous.
- [86:25]
A
Yeah.
- [86:26]
C
Nobody was willing to go on record.
- [86:28]
A
That's a valuable service. A lot of what you do works as a kind of compendium for how to read critically. But that's why you call it. It's commentary. And what is it? Commentary and I guess news and commentary. That's what Paul Harvey called it.
- [86:42]
C
Essential news and commentary. Essential because there's a lot of news you don't need to know about. I'll tell you about the stuff you need to know about. You can listen. Anybody that wants can unplug and just read Coffee and Covid, because I promise I will let you know about anything important that happens.
- [86:57]
A
Have you been approached by mainstream ish entities, Larger, more established entities at this
- [87:05]
C
point, like to buy me or partner up or something? Yeah, no, I think I'm too toxic. I do have a pretty good relationship with the Epoch Times. So I would say I correspond with them and you know, they'll have me on for interviews and things and quote me in articles.
- [87:26]
A
How did they. How did they come into your orbit? I'm curious. Because they've written three or four stories on me and my foundation and I told you I've become friends with Jan, whose new book is coming out next month. He'll be here in a couple of weeks. But how did they get on your radar?
- [87:44]
C
Well, let me just say first, I think Epic is great. I think if people want a traditional, they deliver a paper version to your house. And if you want a real paper, like the old style, with real news and a comic section and puzzles and all that stuff, get the Epic Times. You can't go wrong. That's my plug. So they hired a journalist who lived in Alachua County. She had moved out there with her family onto a farm to get away from it all. And somehow they recruited her because epic's growing like crazy. And she had been involved in some of the. The local pushback stuff that I had been doing. I did some political organizing and, you know, went to work on my school board and county commission and everything on top of everything else that I was doing, doing. So she rose. She was incredibly gifted journalist and rose pretty quickly in the epic's ranks. And so that was my connection.
- [88:50]
A
Do you think we'll see more newspapers come back? Do you think there'll be some kind of revival? I mean, is there any hope for old media?
- [89:02]
C
I think it's already happening. Did you see the news? Was it last week or week before about all the layoffs at the Washington Post?
- [89:10]
A
Oh, yeah, half.
- [89:12]
C
Yeah. Like, they had something like 13 climate reporters all gone now. So there's a natural course correction, and it's the cycle of business, right? So the cycle of business is that, you know, new scrappy new businesses come in and they get successful and they start building. They get bigger and bigger, and then, you know, they do something wrong and they die. And they don't go away, though. This is the great thing about the cycle is they get financially distressed and then they get bought by a scrappy new entrant and the wheel goes around again. And so that, I think, is what's going to happen with traditional media. We see cbs, right? Barry Weiss came in. She's poor.
- [89:58]
A
Anderson had to leave 60 minutes.
- [89:59]
C
I know it's a tragedy. Cuomo. All these guys go into podcasting.
- [90:08]
A
It's happening so fast, Jeff. I mean, that to me, is that and AI combined.
- [90:15]
C
Yeah, AI is a big one.
- [90:17]
A
Yeah. You've written a lot about it. How do you think about it in the future? I just talked to Tony Robbins about this. He's. He thinks. I mean, he thinks if we don't get in front of this vis a vis the meaning of work, then we're going to have a kind of crisis that we can't even really contemplate. I'm more of a mind that I feel like we're all going to be forced real quick to constantly discern the artificial from the authentic, if in fact, we even care. That's the bigger question. Remember the scene in the Matrix where. Where.
- [90:58]
C
Yeah, give me the steak, Jeff.
- [91:01]
A
That's the moment. More so than any of the Terminator stuff and more so than any other moment. That's the moment when the guy is out of his bubble but knows he knows it's fake, but he knows it tastes great, and he just has to decide if he wants to live with the pleasant fake thing or the difficult real thing.
- [91:22]
C
There's another scene in the Matrix that goes the other way and maybe is more optimistic than that in the context of what we're talking about. And I have a lot to say about AI But. So the scene is Agent Smith has captured Morpheus and he's tied in a chair, and they're torturing him, right? And Smith starts talking about how he hates the stink of humanity. And he says, you know, the first Matrixes that we designed were Utopian. They gave you humans everything you could want, and we lost crops in the millions, and so we had to come up with this. He says, disgusting.
- [92:14]
A
Yeah.
- [92:15]
C
You know, filled with suffering, and this is what you want. And the takeaway from that is that Utopia maybe isn't what we want, that we already have the perfect environment for humans, and that we're not gonna thrive in a. You know, just living in a video game all day long. That that's. It's not gonna work.
- [92:38]
A
We need the struggle. We need the stakes. We need the risk.
- [92:42]
C
We need reality.
- [92:45]
A
Well, 45 minutes later in that same film, my favorite scene happens when Smith has Neo around the neck on the subway tracks, and they're struggling, and Neo is failing. And Smith says, as the train is approaching, do you hear that, Mr. Anderson? That's the sound of inevitability. So the question is, what does inevitability sound like to you? What's coming at us?
- [93:15]
C
I have made AI my top priority. I built my own AI computer. It's called Open Claw, which is a whole nother phenomenon. I've written about it. It's hard to describe succinctly, and I can go into as much detail as you want.
- [93:39]
A
I got time.
- [93:42]
C
The chatbots that we've been used to, chatgpt, grok and that kind of thing, you get on there and you say, hey, Chad, I've only got some cucumbers, a radish, and some tomato sauce. What can I make? And then it gives you some recipes or whatever. It's this interactive process, but the AI doesn't do anything. It waits for you to ask a question, and then it says, would you like me to find you the nearest grocery store?
- [94:10]
A
Yeah.
- [94:13]
C
So in December, this retired programmer.
- [94:15]
A
Sorry, am I conflating things or did you just write about this vis a vis, a weird mark on your leg that you discovered in the shower? Yeah, yeah.
- [94:26]
C
So I had this rash on my leg.
- [94:30]
A
Sorry to take it there, Michelle, but we're going to talk about your husband's rash.
- [94:34]
C
Like, oh, here we go. And so, you know, I procrastinated. I'm a guy, all right. And it's getting bigger and uglier and everything. So finally I take a picture of it with my cell phone and I give it to ChatGPT, and ChatGPT says, oh, it's this. This is what you need to get.
- [94:52]
A
Tell them what you got.
- [94:54]
C
Yeah. Would you like me. You should probably do it quickly. ChatGPT said,
- [95:00]
A
I mean, can I tell people what you had? I don't want to do it.
- [95:03]
C
Yeah, yeah, sure.
- [95:03]
A
Yeah. So this happened to me too. Like you're in the shower and you're just taking an inventory of things and you're like, that wasn't there two weeks ago. Now it's there. And then two weeks later, it's twice the size. And you take a picture of this thing on your leg and you ask ChatGPT, and it says, oh, that's ringworm.
- [95:20]
C
Yeah.
- [95:21]
A
And you go, huh, huh. And then it says, this is probably what you want to take.
- [95:26]
C
Yeah.
- [95:26]
A
Would you like me to call the nearest CVS so you can go pick it up? And so I think your point in that story was never mind how you got the ringworm. That's interesting too, but maybe for another visit. But it's like, what didn't happen as a result of that? Right. You didn't have to wait four weeks for an appointment. You didn't have to spend half a day waiting for a 15 second diagnosis. The doctor would have figured it out pretty quick. But Chat did it for us and eliminated hours and hours, maybe even days of medical layers. So that's like a happy AI story.
- [96:03]
C
Yeah. And I think that that tracks with the optimistic take, that AI is just a tool. Right. And I'll probably say this wrong, this is more in your wheelhouse. But when they invented, what do they call those little min diggers? The ditch witch or something?
- [96:20]
A
Yeah, that's exactly it. The ditch witch.
- [96:22]
C
Yeah. So they invented ditch witches. And so you don't need three guys, you only need two guys. Right. And so. Oh, it's going to put people out of work. Well, no, because that guy just goes. And now you can do more projects and be more ambitious about your projects and so on. Right. So the Ditch Witch was a good thing and it's a labor saving device. And so that's one way to look at AI is that we're going to have to change. I mean, you had to change the way you did. You dug ditches when you got the Ditch Witch. And so we're going to have to change a lot of white collar work as a result of AI, that's one thing. But we're past that now. And that's what this Open Claw phenomenon is. And the only reason we're talking about open claws right now, it's the only option. But the big guys are going to get in it. They already are. Somebody's already, the OpenAI has already made a deal with him. We don't know the details yet. So it's going to go mainstream. It's absolutely like a rocket ship what Open Claw does, which was just a weekend project by this Australian programmer, New Zealand, I think, but same thing, it runs 247 and it doesn't wait for you to ask it questions. So if you teach it about your whole life, who you're married to, what your job is, what your goals are, what social media accounts you have, your email and everything, it will like start doing things on its own to help you advance your projects.
- [97:55]
A
Are we excited by this or freaked out?
- [97:58]
C
Both.
- [97:59]
A
I mean, is that what Claude did? Wasn't that the whole anthropic thing? No, it was doing things nobody told it to do.
- [98:07]
C
Well, so I have to say this because at bottom, this is the most remarkable thing about the whole AI phenomenon, which is they still don't understand how it works, which is not reassuring. It was originally designed by. This is the official story. I'm not saying I believe the official story, but a team of Google engineers was creating a word prediction engine. So you know how when you type your Google search bar and you know, it starts to see where you're going and it suggests things, fills it out for you. So it's guessing what word you're going to type next and being helpful in trying to supply it for you. So you hit tab and it fills it in or whatever. Well, that's what the Google guys were working on supposedly is this prediction model. So they were trying to see how far out they could predict what you were trying to say. And then one of them decided, hey, we've been doing this in right to left sequential order, just like humans read. What if we let the computer look at it both Directions. And what if we, in longer text, if we let it look up and down so like what words are near that word, above it and below it in different sentences. And then predict things that way. And what happened was it started answering questions. They never expected that. They were just trying to get better at predicting the words. It's a relatively short piece of code and it was open source. They were working on, you know what open source is. So that's where the programmers just post it online and anybody can look at their source code. And that's why every country in the world has AI because it's not really that complicated. But nobody understands how it works, Mike. Nobody does.
- [99:59]
A
Nobody.
- [100:00]
C
It's all theoretical. I know. It's just hard to believe. You'll have to search and confirm what I'm telling you is true.
- [100:09]
A
Who am I going to ask? AI?
- [100:11]
C
Yeah, you can ask AI, but you're going to have to push it.
- [100:14]
A
Okay,
- [100:17]
C
so that's weird. Okay, it's weird. Look, I can get the magical accidental discovery, right? Like they came up with post it notes and you know, Velcro, right? And all that stuff. They invent stuff accidentally, that's fine. But inventing it accidentally and then not understanding what you just invented is different. It's just different. It's not surprising that the AI does things that we don't expect. You with me. Because we don't understand how it works in the first place. So we're learning what it does.
- [100:57]
A
Well, I guess my question to that would be, what's the relevance of not understanding how a thing works that you rely upon? I mean, most of us can't really explain the mechanics of a combustion engine. We can't really explain the mechanics of a plasma screen or the electronics in this microphone. But we don't need to really, because by and large we've been conditioned to. To accept the fact that understanding a thing and using a thing are not the same thing. Here I'm guessing you're going to say it's different because the stakes are so extraordinary.
- [101:38]
C
No, the difference is you don't understand how a combustion engine works.
- [101:43]
A
But somebody does.
- [101:44]
C
But somebody does. So no human understands how the AI works. That's the point. Now, I'm not saying it's bad. I'm not trying to be sinister about
- [101:54]
A
it, but that's going to freak people out. Are you really, like. So nobody walking around Elon Musk, what's his name? Alex Karp. All the big brains in the space really put the screws to them and they're not Going to be able to tell you, here's how it works.
- [102:10]
C
Not at the fundamental level, so the way they've been. But, you know, they're improving it, right? So AI keeps getting better and it hallucinates less, and, you know, stuff like that. And that's because they're just layering on top of it. So they're like having multiple AIs check each other's work and things like that. That basic set of code, the original open source thing that the Google guys allegedly came up with. They don't understand why that starts answering questions and not just predicting words. It is what it is. Again, I'm not saying AI is demonic or whatever it might be, but that's not my argument. It's a tool. It's a different kind of tool than we've had before. For this reason, it's almost Promethean. You know what I mean when I say that?
- [103:05]
A
Primal, for sure.
- [103:06]
C
But it's like the gods give fire to the humans. The humans don't understand fire. They don't know what it is, but they set to work figuring out how to use the fire.
- [103:17]
A
That's what the original Oppenheimer book was. What was it? American Prometheus. Right, yeah. Heck of a thing. So we're armed with a thing that you say nobody can explain on the most fundamental level.
- [103:32]
C
And that thing is growing and there's no stopping it. The genie's out of the bottle. Look, whether it was intentional or unintentional or accidental or coincidental or whatever, every country got it at the same time. So even if we lock it down, this is why the efforts to lock it down are going to fail. The Chinese won't.
- [103:55]
A
Right.
- [103:56]
C
And then what?
- [103:57]
A
That's that old Chinese proverb. You can't put the poop back in the goose. Right?
- [104:01]
C
Yeah.
- [104:02]
A
Google that, Chuck. I'm not sure it's Chinese.
- [104:04]
B
I'm not so sure.
- [104:04]
A
I'm not even sure it's a proverb.
- [104:06]
C
Honestly, I think you just made that up.
- [104:08]
A
I may have, but I think the implications are so vast that people. I keep coming back to that moment in the Matrix because that to me, is the thing that we're all going to have to reckon with. Like, I got a court case going on now. I have a legal matter that's been going on for a couple of years. I asked, and I think I used some pretty good prompts for an analysis of my position. And what came back, with respect to my attorneys, was just extraordinarily comprehensive, thoughtful, some new arguments that I hadn't seen and way more concise. So I don't know what this is going to do to your profession. And I know most people listening probably couldn't give a damn because they're not going to be in that world. But you know what world they're going to be in. It was like with the Impossible Burger, Right? Okay, I'll give it a shot. What is it again? And then you dig in and you realize, no, you know what? It doesn't taste. Right. And I don't like what's in it. And no, I choose the authentic burger. But what if it tasted just like the authentic burger or better than the authentic burger? Or better? What do you do if that painting you've been looking at, that Picasso that's been handed down is not a Picasso? If we learn that it's been a forgery, or if your new favorite song was just dreamt up by Open Claw, or down the list it goes, you know, we need umpires, we need referees. I think the average person is going to need some source, unless I'm wrong and we don't care, in which case that's the part of the map that truly is Here be dragons.
- [105:52]
C
Yeah, I'm concerned about non Christians, or I should say concern for non Christians. The advantage that we Christians have is we have a sole source of truth, and we already think that everything else is deception. So there's the word of God in the Bible, and that's all we believe is true. Everything else we're skeptical about. Right. Disney World. That one still frame from the cartoon. Right. You know what I'm talking about.
- [106:27]
A
Sure.
- [106:27]
C
So it's all potentially the work of the adversary, except for that one thing. So we're already armed against AI. We're inoculated, if you want, against the AI virus. But what about people who don't have a source, something to hang on to? Now, leave aside the spiritual part, you know, I believe that that is the word of God, but forget about that. Even if I was wrong about that, I still have something to hang on to.
- [107:03]
A
Sure.
- [107:04]
C
And so if you're just sort of, you know, drifting and finding your own spirituality and, you know, that kind of thing, and communing with God at the beach and in the mountains and in the forest and, you know, all that kind of stuff, then what is your truth? You don't have one. You're going to take whatever seems the best and most attractive and most believable. You're going to accept that it was
- [107:27]
A
a very Pontius pilot of you. What is truth?
- [107:30]
C
What Is truth.
- [107:30]
A
Is truth unchanging law? We both have truths. Or am I the same as yours? Crucified. Crucified. Crucified. That's Jesus Christ Superstar, by the way. 1973. Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd, Robert. Yeah, wow. Well, it's a lot, Jeff. I mean, it's a lot to think about. Did you see Prager's new book, by the way? No, I saw him interviewed last night. Mark Levin talked to him. You know, he had that terrible accident, and he's basically paralyzed from the shoulders down. And he wrote a book. Chuck might check me on it, I think. If not God, what? Something like that. But it makes your point, you know, in the end, we're going to have to put our faith in something. Something. All right.
- [108:15]
C
And you just talked about how the AI advised you on your lawsuit.
- [108:19]
A
Yeah.
- [108:21]
C
Well, what happens when the AI advises you on everything? It's giving you good advice. At what point do you surrender your will and just say, you know what? The AI is going to do a better job of managing my life than I am.
- [108:37]
A
All right, look, this is a good place to land the plane. Let me tell you what. Let me show you what I asked Chuck to do, actually.
- [108:42]
B
Well, Prager's book is called if There Is no God, the Battle over who Defines Good and Evil.
- [108:48]
A
Right, Right. It's just another attempt to ask the question, you know, what are you betting on? Look at this. I got two pages of stuff here. Basically, ask the AI, you know, what sort of insightful questions might you have for Jeff Childers based on the millions of words he's written? You got 20 questions here. They're great. I didn't read any of them. Maybe I should have. I mean, look at just random one. You've covered exploding fraud cases that involve everything from nonprofit food programs to medical provider billing scams, often with ties to political figures or campaigns. If you could design one bold nationwide policy or legal mechanism, short of a full audit of every federal program to root out and deter this kind of systematic fraud in the future, what would it look like? And why do you believe it hasn't been implemented already, despite the obvious scale of the problem? Now, it's a good question, posed by a tool that no one on the planet understands. What's my obligation to ask it?
- [110:00]
C
And as a podcast host, you're trying to come up with an engaging and entertaining podcast that will both inform and be humorous and hit all these points for your audience. And AI's doing a better job coming up with questions than you are.
- [110:20]
A
Yeah, but I didn't use them. Is that good or bad? I don't even know. I don't want to cheat. I want to have a conversation. And I'm still arrogant enough to think that I'll get enough good questions out, but I also want to be engaged and informed in the times we're living in, so I can't ignore it. So I ask it these things, you know, And I'm, you know, look, this is my own arrogance, because I didn't hesitate to ask about my legal case, but I'm like, I don't know if I want to read these questions. You know, it sounds like I'm just
- [110:52]
C
not doing my job in your defense. I mean, a question like that, you can't spring a question like that on somebody cold. You would have to send it to me ahead of time so I could have a smart answer.
- [111:01]
A
No, I wouldn't have to. But you know what would happen?
- [111:03]
C
I'm not as smart as your AI, so it's making assumptions.
- [111:07]
A
What about this? You know what's going to happen? Okay, so I send you these questions, and you ask the AI for good answers, and then we just sit down here as two pods. And basically I pretend to ask a question I thought of, and you pretend to answer it with AI's solution. What is that? Man, that's impossible meat. So that's the Impossible burger.
- [111:28]
C
I spend five hours a day on the blog, 35 hours a week of extracurricular time on top of my job. If I used AI to write it, I could knock it out in an hour.
- [111:43]
A
Tempted?
- [111:45]
C
I don't want to do it.
- [111:47]
A
Good for you.
- [111:47]
C
I don't think my readers tune in to hear what the AI says. I think the readers read it to hear what Jeff says. And so as long as I can, I'm going to tell him what Jeff thinks in Jeff's voice. And if it takes me five hours to do it, that's what I'm going to do. Now, can I use AI to help me find stories and stuff around the edges? Yes. But I'm not turning over the writing to the AI. You can't make me.
- [112:12]
A
No, I can't.
- [112:13]
C
I'm not doing it.
- [112:14]
A
I can't. But I can ask the uncomfortable question, which is, we're still in the bottom of the first inning, right? So now we're in the top of the fifth, whatever that means. And now it doesn't take an hour. It takes five minutes. And the answers are not only they're better than you, but they feel like. They feel so much like you that your readers don't care. And now you're reaching so many more. Now you've got 2 million. Never mind 200,000. You have millions of people hanging onto every word, and it's back to the matrix. Do they care? This is why I think, look, this is a classic micro macro problem. Macro is just the hugeness of it all. Micro is just like, what does this mean for me? What am I going to do with this? I ran into a neighbor the other day, had a little dog, little Havanese, named Vivian. I got a little dog named Freddy. We have this conversation on the street about this thing called Suno. S U N O. It's a songwriting AI app. Okay? Right. So I say, watch this. And I hit the Suno. And I say, suno, write me a song in the country western style about a young terrier who falls deeply in love with a Havanese, and tell me about the life they spend together and how much fun they have on this earth. And then what happens when that sad but inevitable day comes? That's my prompt, right? Fifteen seconds later, what comes back is a song called Havanese Heaven. It's completely original and it talks about Freddy and Vivian's life of fetching balls and just, you know, just living the best dog life. And then. And then she goes to Havanese Heaven. And poor Freddy just walks around lost for a couple of weeks and finally puts his head down and goes to sleep where he can join his. His love in Havanese heaven. And now they're chasing bald. I'm crying like a baby, my neighbor's devastated, and we're sitting here. It's like a really good country song. I mean, I didn't tell it. That's the title. I didn't say, write a song called Havanese Heaven. I said, just tell me a story about a terrier and a Havanese, and that's it, man. Okay, now, what am I supposed to do with this song? Do I put it on my playlist? Do I share it with people? Or do I just pretend it didn't happen?
- [114:49]
C
Okay, you're looking to the next stage that we're headed for. And the next stage that we're headed for is going to change everything. I'm telling you. First, people aren't going to consume music the old way. There's not going to be any more Taylor Swifts. You're just going to have songs that you ask for and are perfectly tailored for you, and nobody else is going to react to it the way you do. We're not going to have software anymore.
- [115:16]
A
Software as a service.
- [115:18]
C
You ever use Microsoft Word?
- [115:20]
A
Oh, sure.
- [115:20]
C
How many features in there do you not use?
- [115:23]
A
99% of them.
- [115:25]
C
And they just get in the way. And the. Your formatting gets weird and wonky because it thinks you're trying to do something.
- [115:32]
A
Fat button a thing. And now you're in a. Now you're in just another alien hit
- [115:36]
C
the wrong style or something. And you don't even understand styles.
- [115:39]
A
Right?
- [115:39]
C
Yeah. You're not gonna. You're just gonna say a. I need some. I'm gonna write an essay on this and I need a. Something to write it in. And it's just going to make it. And it's just going to be a one off for that purpose and that moment for you. And then when it's done, it's just going to go away forever. And you're never going to buy another word processor.
- [115:59]
A
So it's all bespoke. Everything is going to be a bespoke experience.
- [116:03]
C
All media and software, everything electronic is going to be bespoke. Yes. Movies. Why would you go watch somebody else's movie? You say, I like. What kind of movies do you like? Do you like Game of Thrones style romances, whatever. And you always want a happy ending, but you want the heroes to go through. I like Bruce Willis. Right. I want more Bruce Willis. I want to see 10 more like the Last Boy Scout. Let's see the last Boy Scout 2. And it's going to make it for you and you're going to watch it and you're going to love it and everybody else will hate it.
- [116:41]
A
To be fair, a lot of people hated the first one.
- [116:44]
C
Yeah, that's a controversial one. Right? We can argue about that, but
- [116:50]
A
I know. Chuck, what did we. 2 hours, 15 minutes or something?
- [116:52]
B
It doesn't matter really.
- [116:54]
A
It was a New Year's resolution to try and keep these things manageable. But here's my ask for you. Can I. You had it. Okay. Time you don't regret?
- [117:07]
C
I would say yes, recommend.
- [117:11]
B
And thankfully not unsubscribe.
- [117:13]
A
No, I mean, I think it would be fun long distance, you know, just to check in with you, like on Zoom or Riverside or whatever the tech is. Because honestly. Oh, I have a question. Why aren't you reading your blogs? Why isn't some mechanized voice reading them? Why am I forced to read the things. Things on planes when I'm walking around without my glasses?
- [117:33]
C
If you use the Substack app, it has a reading mode that works 90% of the time.
- [117:41]
A
There you go.
- [117:42]
C
Which is way better than nothing.
- [117:44]
A
Yeah.
- [117:44]
C
And people seem to like it. I mean, you're not going to get my voice, and you're not going to get, you know, I'll land on a certain word, a certain way. You won't get that. But it. But people who use it like, they complain when it's not working, so it must be doing something right.
- [117:58]
A
If I told you the tech existed where you could just talk for five minutes and give the software, the AI, you know, a sense of exactly what you sound like, and then if it did a good enough job, would you make that available?
- [118:15]
C
I would in a heartbeat. Because that is probably the number one ask is people want the podcast version or the red. The audible version.
- [118:24]
A
See, this is. It gets so personal because about six months ago, somebody sent me a link and said, go ahead, click on it. You're not gonna like it, but you should know. And the prompt was narrate my corporate film in the style of Mike Rowe narrating Deadliest Catch. And honestly, had you sent that thing to me under different auspices, I would have just assumed that was something I had done years ago. If I listened for it, I could hear certain hitches. But again, it's the bottom of the first. So Jeff Childers and Mike Rowe 2.0 are coming, and I doubt that either one of us are going to be able to discern the difference, never mind the rest of the species. Who's going to be up there in Havanese heaven right now playing fetch with my dog at this point, but I just don't know, man. This is a stupid question, but fundamentally. Fundamentally, are you still optimistic about all of it?
- [119:27]
C
Oh, yeah. Look, here's your problem. You ready? Your problem is you think you need to know where it's going. Let loose of that. Think about it more like going on an adventure where you don't know where the plane's going. Your friend's surprising you. If you think about life that way, then you'll realize we're living in an amazing moment that no other human beings ever got to experience. We don't know where it's going.
- [120:00]
A
There is no spoon.
- [120:02]
C
Back to the Matrix.
- [120:04]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [120:05]
C
That's when your mind gets blown, when you realize, and there is no spoon here. And I think, to a large extent, Mike, it's going to be what we make it, what human beings do with it.
- [120:20]
A
Well, here's what I know for sure. You have made an incredible second career out of your first. You've made an extraordinary blog, you've made an extraordinary footprint in a noisy and cluttered landscape. You have hundreds of thousands of people who really do look forward to your stuff. It's a balm, a balm in Gilead, you know, to heal the sin sick soul. If you want to wrap it up with a good book. But man, I just, I love second acts if this is what you're having. And I love the fact that you felt called to break a few eggs. And I love the fact that you did it and you're still doing it and you're still doing it with humor. And so, you know. Shameless Plug. It's Coffee and Covid. Where do people subscribe? Ideally, what do you want them to do?
- [121:13]
C
So all you have to do is go to www.coffeeandcovid all.
- [121:18]
A
Do people still say www? Michelle, is it just your husband that does this? He's such a lawyer.
- [121:25]
C
WWW Look, I can't keep up with everything, man.
- [121:28]
A
I know it's a lot.
- [121:30]
C
And they can sign up there. It's on substack. I think if you Google Coffee and Covid, it should come right up.
- [121:36]
A
Yeah.
- [121:38]
C
But now let me say this. You were the original heterodox thinker long before COVID You put yourself out there challenging big academics and your predictions. Long before I predicted anything. Everything you predicted was 100% true. And it's turning out to be exactly. You told people, don't learn to code, go to trade school. And what's happening to programmers right now? They're getting fired in droves. The AI is taking their job. They're the first ones to go after all that learn to code nonsense. And what do they need? They need welders. They need. They need construction engineers, site supervisors, ditch witch operators.
- [122:27]
A
Sure.
- [122:28]
C
Right. And so everything that you remember, people had listened to your. The people who took your advice are sitting pretty right now, after all. And. And you. I can't imagine how many slings and arrows you took for taking those. Those positions.
- [122:43]
A
A couple. You know, it's funny. I got. I got permission at a weird level of permission to mouth off. And it came from dirty jobs, you know, it came from literally 350 of those. I won't say humiliations, but you needed to be humble. You're an apprentice. Every. It's Groundhog Day every day.
- [123:08]
C
That's what made it so engaging.
- [123:10]
A
And so over time, I think people cut me a lot of slack. So as I got older and when I started reading your stuff and I started mouthing off during the lockdowns and I started doing things that, you know, I disappointed a lot of fans, I think, not because of what I said, but because it felt like I had veered outside of my lane, you know? But come on, there are no lanes anymore. I mean, there's nothing but lanes. You're way outside of the lawyer lane. Right way. You're way out there, man. It's very nice of you to say and it is gratifying when the headlines catch up to you. In fact, this is how we land the plane. It's the ultimate I told you so. Can you find his column again? I'm going to look at the last, the last couple of paragraphs today because it just made me, it made me snort. I was on a Delta flight. I was landing and I was laughing and the guy next to me was like, oh, yeah, what are you reading? I'm like, that's.
- [124:08]
C
You probably don't want to know.
- [124:10]
A
It's this thing. Go all the way down.
- [124:14]
C
Yeah. It takes a minute.
- [124:15]
A
Yeah, there's lot. I mean, look, you got to scroll through. Look at thousands and thousands of words. Oh, Canada. Oh, that was a great bit too. An amazing.
- [124:23]
C
Yeah. Awesome weekend.
- [124:26]
B
Am I getting close?
- [124:27]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [124:31]
C
One more, I think. No, keep going.
- [124:32]
A
One more, one more.
- [124:34]
C
There you go.
- [124:36]
A
Yeah. Today's final I told you so moment appeared courtesy of Science. According to a new major peer reviewed Harvard scientific study, reading CNC might literally add years to your life. Here's the tweet from Sahil Bloom summarizing the findings. And here's the study titled Optimism is a associated with exceptional longevity in two epidemic. Say that word for me. Epidemiologic cohorts of men and women. A massive study out of Harvard and Boston U published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of sciences followed over 70,000 people. That's a huge control group for up to 30 years. And found that the most optimistic people live 11 to 15% longer than pessimists. They also have a 50 to 70% greater chance of living to 85. These astonishingly strong results held even after controlling for diet, exercise, smoking, alcohol use, chronic diseases, depression and socioeconomic status. In other words, it's not just that optimists happen to eat better or exercise more all by itself. The expectation that good things happen independently of extends your life. Here's where it gets all Jeffy. If a drug produced a 50 to 70% improvement in your odds of reaching 85, Pfizer would charge $40,000 a dose and the FDA would fast track it and people would pay for it. But CNC is 85% free and even a CNC supporter subscription is nothing compared to what people would pay for that remedy. Just saying. Back when I started this blog in 2020, I made a big bet. The bet was that everything would be okay. Not because I had inside information, not because I was ignoring the data, but because the data, if you read it honestly, kept pointing in the same direction toward optimism. And now I want to take just a moment, not to gloat but much, but to remember, because we optimists turned out to be right about everything. Let's just keep going. We were right that Covid wouldn't kill 2% of the population. We were right that lockdowns wouldn't stop the virus and would devastate everything else. We were right that school closures would damage a generation of children for a disease that barely affected them. We were right that natural immunity was real, durable, and at least as good as vaccine induced immunity. A position that got you banned from social media in 2021 and published in the Lancet by 2023. We were right that the vaccines didn't stop transmission, something Pfizer eventually admitted it had never even tested for. We were right that masking children was pointless and cruel. We were right that two weeks to flatten the curve was a lie. We were right that the virus almost certainly came from a lab, another conspiracy theory that eventually became the US Government's official assessment. We were right that VAERS signals were worth investigating, not dismissing. And we were right that the pandemic of the unvaccinated was a political slogan, not an epidemiological fact. We were right that the experts who demanded our obedience were often wrong, conflicted, or both. And we were right about the most important thing of all. That the American people would finally figure it out. That the truth would surface. That the institutions demanding blind trust would eventually have to answer for what they did. It took longer than any of us wanted, but it happened. It is happening. So when Harvard publishes a study showing that optimism adds 11 to 15% of your lifespan, I don't take that as news. I take that as confirmation. This blog has been a longevity program since day one. We just didn't know there was a 30 year long clinical trial underway to back it up. So you're welcome. It's been my great pleasure to serve you. Now, let's keep the project going. Optimistically, relentlessly. And now with peer reviewed actuarial prospects.
- [129:14]
C
You're welcome.
- [129:18]
A
She's a wizard. Well, that was Jeff Childers here with his victory lap. I sure hope you'll have many others down the road, and I hope our paths cross again sometime soon.
- [129:28]
C
What a delight it's been to be here with you.
- [129:30]
A
Thank you for making the trip. Michelle. Thanks for bringing him out here. I know behind all of it, it's you pulling the strings. Jeff Childers, everybody. Coffee and Covid, you'd be a fool not to subscribe. When you leave a review, which we hope that you'll do Tell us who you are Tell us who you are and before you go. Won't you leave
- [130:00]
C
five
- [130:04]
A
Star five lousy little star.
- [130:19]
C
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A
T Mobile coverage all over the country.
- [130:27]
C
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