The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 474: Jeff Childers—Coffee & Covid

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

Mike chats with Jeff Childers—the attorney-turned-writer behind the wildly popular Coffee & Covid Substack—for a wide-ranging conversation about media narratives, pandemic politics, and the strange new world of citizen journalism. What began as a daily blog written during lockdown has grown into a must-read for hundreds of thousands of devotees looking for sharp legal insight, media criticism, and a dose of wry humor with their morning coffee. Jeff explains what it takes to crank out 2,000 to 6,000 snarky words every single day of the week, why he started writing in the first place, and how an attorney accidentally became one of the most widely read independent commentators on the internet. Along the way, he talks with Mike about the stories that keep him up at night—and why, despite all of it, he remains surprisingly optimistic about where the country is headed. ☕🎙️ Tip o' the hat to our excellent sponsors GoodRanchers.com Code MIKE gets $25 off your first order PureTalk.com/Rowe Choose a wireless company who shares YOUR values. Northwest Lineman College. Go to Lineman.edu to find your pathway to the trades Pestie.com/Mike to get 10% off your order.

Well, here we go again. It's the way I heard it. I'm Mike Roe, and he is. Chuck Klausmeyer. And our guest today, dare I say, Charles, is somebody we both have been enjoying slash admiring for the last couple years? Let me just tell you, I was really excited knowing that Jeff Childers was coming in to spend time talking to you. Jeff is a lawyer, but don't hold that against him. He has a practice 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. Mr. Childers, Esquire, had objections. Yes. 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 battled.

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. 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 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 were determined if masks were useful. And as it turns out, there were 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 designed and found that

proved the points he was making in his brief. 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. Not only is it a great output of content, but that content itself is engaging, interesting, and he does it with a sense of humor. He's very sarcastic. 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. He's super optimistic. 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,

21, 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 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. Yes. 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. And just to put it into perspective, the writing every day, four to six thousand 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. Millions of words.

Yes, over 8 million words. But the words are good, and he groups them together in a way that's going to make you think and going to make you smile and probably going to make you want to share it. Anyway, it's Jeff Childers, and he's up next. Seven years ago, Ben Spel 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

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If you could eat a stare, if you could eat a... cow, don't take a chance on a foreign ranch, get good ranchers now. E-Haw! 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? Six days out of seven, it's 100% free. Uh-huh. 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 had my AI count them up.

So since I started during the pandemic in 2020, I've got 1,641 posts. That's, I mean, the word's prolific, but I don't know that that doesn't. I did a word count today on the plane. I came down, I read your column today. Like, man, this is really long. How many words is this? 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 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.

No. Every single day. I take off major holidays. That's about it. Michelle is here. Long-suffering wife. Is that fair, Michelle? She's my business partner.

Well, and 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. Because it's not that I agree with every single thing that you're right. 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? 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. You have your own practice? I do. What's it called? Childers Law LLC in Gainesville, Florida.

Prior to the pandemic, we were a boutique commercial litigation firm. What kind of cases typically? 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. The riveting stuff.

Well, I have ADHD, so I can't handle reading contracts forever. I got to be in front of people making arguments. 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. its study, it's patience, it's all of the things that never make it into the prime time

hits that make firms actually work? 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. They're superficial things, right. But not to say that money is important to people. I mean, they get pretty exercised about it. 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 state, 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've been there. And the stakes, you know, 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 I mean, is faith the right word? 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 have a good case or a bad case.

What are you going to 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. 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, in 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%. I mean, I rag on experts all the time, as you know, having red coffee and COVID. And I was prepared for that because as a litigating lawyer, my case is often involved 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 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? The jury. The jury does. And is the jury an expert? No. They're our peers, God help us.

They're just some random. That guy. We'll get him. The unemployed guy, the student, you know, 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, you know, we're still. 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. That must be true because they're the experts, right? So 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.

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. What I'm getting at, Jeff, is it's well and good, I think, for the average person to look at, 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 at tell him the story, how exactly did this happen? 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 that 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. It's up north. It is up north, arguably bluer than the South Florida counties. And they were following L.A. County.

So L.A. 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 next emergency order in this series of daily emergency orders they had been signing. And 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, it's 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 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, reason they didn't is because the county attorney told them that there'd be no way to have

force it 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 uh 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. Every now and then I like to visit a website called consumer affairs.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

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Why not turn your current phone into a microphone? It's easy at puretalk.com slash row. That's puretalk.com. slash row. Can you describe the meeting a little bit so people understand the setting, the number of people people? How many are on this committee, and I assume it was open to the public? Was it crowded? No, because it was all locked down. It was five people sitting on a long table, wearing masks, right? So this is like the perfect metaphor for faceless bureaucracy. see. Yeah.

You couldn't see anybody's face. You know, it was all like this and then talking. One of the five county commissioners crocheted our own face mask. Crochet, good. Crochet. And 95. Great. Yeah, it's 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? Like balaclavas or something? Yeah, it's like a, like a, like a church. shift and you would just pull it up over your face like the old bank robbers war and the wild west right and like that that'll save you anyway go ahead so um the upshot is that they wound up passing it and so we got the first indoor outdoor mask mandate in florida and i looked at michel 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. Yeah, I mean, what do you mean you demand? How does that, who can, Jeff Childers has thought it over and he has some demands now. So this is like, how does that work?

Well, you know, this is one of those privileges of being a lawyer, I guess, is that you can throw demand letters and not everywhere. Govern yourself accordingly. Yeah. Did you insist? I insist that my demand would be, it wouldn't have mattered. It's a legal threat. It's basically, if you don't do it, I'm going to sue you.

And that's what I told them. 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 the way out here on the libertarian scale. And I called him up and I was like, Justin, you know, hey, do 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 pay. 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? Yeah. Do you slide it in that little slot at the library where you put the books? I mean, it... Insert lawsuit here. Especially with the county lockdown. I mean, you couldn't get into a county office.

Where am I supposed to send the process server? Right. 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 experience 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 going to be over. And, you know, you're going to get a reputation. And there could be bar implications, right? Meaning so lawyers are professionally credential. by the bar and the worst thing that can happen to us is having our bar license revoked or be disbarred right and 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 right 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 right right so we you know 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 not to belabor it but people should understand even 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 clearance issue could be

clearance, 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, you know. So what you wind up paying for, typically, is just a lot of ambiguity, in my experience. I call them two-handed lawyers. On the one hand, but on the other hand, right?

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, you know, 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 I. I would, if I were you, this is what I would do. Now, you can take that and make your own decision. I just pointed 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? 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 I had. There's your client. Yeah. 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. 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.

What next? Makes local media. Crazy lawyer, Seuss County over mask mandate. We start getting calls, usually the drunk dialers and leaving the voicemails on the firm's voice mail system in the middle of the night. But it was low key because I was one of the first to file the mask 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? Well, I'm curious, like, what was your argument around the idea that this is an emergency? We're being forced to wear these things on our faces, 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? 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 that. 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, 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 health care 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, you know, getting the flu. So they study all kinds of stuff. And they've studied masks. And they've studied masks.

and every one of those studies found that it didn't stop transmission of flu. So, okay, go ahead. 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, you know, all this science. And I haven't had science since college. And, you know, 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, there 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. Sure. Stuff like that. So it was obvious if you would just stop and look at it. Do do do do do. Dumb. This year the MicroWorks Foundation is set aside $10 million in scholarships to help train the next generation of skilled workers. And if history is any indicator, some of those scholarship recipients will attend an excellent trade school called Northwest Lineman College. Maybe you or somebody you know will be among them. I sure hope so because America needs linemen desperately. By 2030, we'll need to generate and transmit an additional 55 gigawatts of energy.

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We can help pay for your training. And nobody can train you better. than Northwest lineman College. Check them out at lineman.edu. That's lineman.edu. Northwest law lineman. If you would just, you know, 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 somebody 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. And these were also in Florida or all over the country? 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, we're 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. right 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 dealing with government lawyers and they were losing and of course the judges were awful and by the way i 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 constitutionalist 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 re-election campaign. Sure. So I always plan for the appeal. I designed my whole case to appeal to the first DCA. Because you knew you were going to lose. I knew I was going to 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. And the whole country. As far as I know, and I've looked. Nobody else even. and made it to the appellate level. So what happened as a result of that ruling?

Everywhere inside, 33 counties in Florida out of 67, all dropped their mask mandates, schools, municipalities, whatever. 2021 at this point? 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.

But all in the wake of that decision. 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. Well, I mean, the stakes are enormous. It's another kind of contagion. That kind of decision.

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. Let me ask you something.

Do you put, 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 Bigtree? Why are you talking to Jeff Childers? It's like, it's, 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? Let me answer by way of a story.

So during that period of three weeks before my hearing, I, 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, you know, the one who always showed up at school board hearing to explain why I'm asking the kids. Two-year-olds is necessary to, you know, save the universe or whatever.

And so, anyway, I arranged to take his deposition. And they didn't want, obviously, they did not want to produce him. But it was still early. And my judge, like I said, I got a good judge. 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 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 ten 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? That is do you do your own research? Yes

You don't just track behind anybody else and and adopt their position do you you you? You may make up your own mind based on your own research, your own, oh, yes, yes. I said, what about like a big agency like the CDC? Well, if the CDC says it, is 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. Like, all right, give me an example of a time in your career that you disagreed 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. It discourages skepticism. 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, you know, well, of course, masking is, you know, cut up T-shirts is, makes scientific sense. Right? And then, oh, later the CDC says, oh, it's got to be a, you know, a surgical mask. And then, boop, they just, you know, reprogram. And suddenly, you know, it's like they never said that about the t-shirts. You know, they've always known it was surgical masks. But, you know, they were hard to get in the early pandemic. So that's why we went with the T-shirts. It was better than nothing. Yeah, you can't say something that's critical to your survival if it's not available. You mean, you were just, that's time for a riot. You know, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're. going to 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 a foul 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 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. I've told the 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 in solidarity with and support for health care workers. And at that time, yeah, I mean, it was a little weird, but truly, that whole first two weeks... How does howling help healthcare workers? Well, this is a... See, it's science, Jeff, you know, years of science is proven. 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 Yeah, it was a kind of connective tissue, like a reminder that, okay, you can't see people.

Some social engagement that you weren't getting anywhere else. Right. And oddly. And again, this window wasn't open a long time. But there was this moment where you 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

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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. 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. Shouldn't you be wearing a mask? 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, you know, 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, you know, 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. 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 and the white space suits spraying stuff in the air. Yep. And all of that. And you're trying to decide, okay, and what should I do to live through this to survive? It was a survival thing.

And not kill my mom and dad, right? not kill my grandparents. Don't kill grandma. 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? So it all kind of happened at the same time because remember that county commission meeting I was just telling you about? The Star Chamber, I like to think of it is. Oh, my gosh. It's indescribable. The hair of 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. I mean, it just meets George Orwell. 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. 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. Yes. And every day they would update the dashboard and the new numbers and, you know,

the 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. Yeah. That's the difference between math, statistics, probability, logic. I mean, it just doesn't work that way.

And yet, you know, everybody became an... Who was this guy doing his own calculations? Like, not only his name, but I like... The county commissioner. He's the... Oh, my God. Oh. Who is one of the five people making the, and he's trying to convince the others to be afraid.

Right. Because if they don't do something, it's going to wipe out the county to just be like a smoking crater where Alachua County, probably a sinkhole. That's what Alachua means sinkhole in the native Indian. It's not very flattering. But a smoking crater, 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. You know, they want me to work hard, so they give me the good polished up version of what happened. So I can do a good job telling their side of the story. So 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 or not. I'm not a mathematician and I'm not a doctor or anything. So here I am in my house, locked down, downloading the CSV file into Excel and putting the numbers in there and looking at it. It would no way were 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 bush.

to find the cases, right? But then it leveled off. So when I finished, I had this little spreadsheet that I made for myself, and I'm like, well, damn it, I need to do something with this. I mean, I've got to 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 a, apparently those are permanent, by the way. I don't think you can get rid of it. Yeah. So I just, 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 updated my spreadsheet every day and I would post it on the Facebook. And then I started putting some little comments.

You know, 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, you know, historically what we've seen. Now, you weren't allowed to say it was like the flu back in those days. No, they hated that.

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 right and except that it was that page that story was on page a 16 and you know underneath the uh local sports column and so but i would find those cases and then

i would profile them i would say hey so we you know this the new and i only use because remember now on the in those days i don't know if if you ever got like thrown in face Facebook JL or 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. 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, um,

safety first came with all kinds of unintended consequences. And, oh, it was a big riff. I wrote a bunch of it. I thought it was clever. We raised like $100,000 for the foundation. But Facebook hated that. It hated that. 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. At 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 single life. Just one life.

And that's when I'm not a lawyer or a doctor, but I can be a jagged little pill when I had eight, nine 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. It's demonstrably false. 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 we're seeing. And so so much of what you write about is that. It's the sort of debunking, sometimes pre-bunking, looking through the emperors, you know, got no clothes lens at all of these different things. And yet it's always optimistic. And that's a heck of a thing. And so that is just what I wrote about this morning. Yep. I was optimistic at every stage. And by the way, just to finish that thought, 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 is 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. They know better. Yeah. And then when it got to...

That's today's. This is great. When it got to the point where it was becoming, you know, 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. Yeah. And that's where the so thing came from. Right.

So dot, dot, dot sometimes. So, so. Yeah. So anyways, I was just doing, I was, 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 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 mean, I get tons of them, right? And I don't usually, but I'll just like skim it and see if there's something in there.

But it gripped me right away because it's, 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 in COVID, and it kind of made me feel a little bit better,

so I'm going to 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 means there are hundreds more. Yeah, the ones that don't write. Yeah. 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 my buddy got called dave hinman sent me your column late in 21 maybe 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.

Yeah. Heavy stuff, but it was funny. Right. Adding the humor, sometimes I have to, listen, I'm honest. If there's bad news and it's legit, I'm going to deliver the bad news, but I'm going to give it in with the most optimistic frame I can and with some humor. So it's easier to swallow. How do you think about your audience then? What I'm getting at is I think, 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 try and stay mindful of that is that 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? I'm thinking about it. 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 got to persuade a jury. I got to 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. 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. 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 is 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, 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'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. Well, what, like, japs 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? 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 never to lie if I can possibly help it. I thought she said you were a lawyer. 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 to, like... I mean a lie of omission versus an affirmative... Like, this morning. So you did, 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. Correct.

Between this guy with three unpronounceable names in Mexico, what's his name? He's dead now. El Meno. El Meno. Right, which basically is... The tough guy. Tough guy. Okay, so tough guy's dead.

Former cop, by the way. Correct. Who goes profoundly rotten. I called him the Walter White of Mexico. That's 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 kingpens in the same hemisphere. Who's connecting the dots in the mainstream media? Their narrative was chaos in Mexico. Right. Because that's what the picture showed. 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 buy? Yeah. 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. Irrespective of your feelings on Trump, it wouldn't matter. who's in the Oval, those two things are massively related. Those two... They're almost identical. Right. 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. 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 ryeness 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 attempted, you know, but I don't think anybody's doing it.

it anywhere. How many subscribers do you have now? How big is your little empire become? 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 a important position somewhere and they don't want to get connected to me because I'm just crazy Jeff. You're crazy, man. You're something. Yeah. Local. As they say. But I don't want to 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 plant. I mean, think about what an operation like that requires to pull off.

Tell me, what do you think? Like, how did this happen? And what's her name, the president, Shinal, shine? Shine bomb. Shine bomb. Nice Mexican name. It's so classically Mexican. I can't believe it won't stick. I mean, when I just, Chiawawa Shine Bombs. Oh, shine. Yes. That's not. You can't say that, dude.

I mean, her own about face in just the last couple of months. Since what happened? Since Maduro. That's right. Prior to Maduro, she was on the record as saying, we will not cooperate with the U.S. in any way. I mean, this is like a list of things that she, She went on the record. Yeah.

Headline after headline. Right. Every one of them's upside down. Opposite Phil. 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 Shinebom suddenly cooperating with the U.S. 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 it. They just leave it on the cutting room floor. Go back to you were saying that you, 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?

or, 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 the fundraiser, for instance. And you know, I do some of that too. I saw it. A multiplier effect, right? Yeah, the force multiplier. Yeah.

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 is 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. I got to keep them engaged.

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. It's 160,000 words a month.

That's close to 2 million words a year. Yeah. 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? 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, not to. Nobody was paying me. Don't you mean listen to your wife?

Isn't that what you were trying to say, Jeff? Of course, especially since she's sitting in the room. That was like totally unfair. What a setup. Sorry. But so when I travel, I have to have an extra day on both sides. So I've got to leave, you know, the day before I need to be there. and then I have to wait till the next day because I got to leave room for blogging.

Right. I got to get the blog out. We're staying in the same hotel. Did you do the blog from the hotel? Yeah, I was down in the coffee shop this morning. That crazy bright coffee shop? Well, starting at six because they don't open until six o'clock. So they have a business center on the second floor.

Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And we usually try to get a room where there's space for me to go work without waking Michelle up, but the rooms are a little bit small. are there, they're intimate. I mean, how much noise do you make on your computer? Well, what inevitably happens is I clicked the wrong link and it's some loud video.

Right. It doesn't take that happening many times before you learn your lesson. Right. 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 wanting to slay giants and stuff. So you're still doing it? 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, and do some review and guidance and make decisions and stuff like that. 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 beset. Deception, maybe? Sure. It's something that's not as advertised, not real.

is 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. 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, Listen, hear me out. Okay. Daycare centers. 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 depth of it? 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 trillion a year, trillion with a T. Yeah.

Out of a $4 trillion budget. It's like mostly fraud. Yeah. 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, was just masterfully done.

The fraud had been going on for years. Right. But it was this kid, Nick. Nick Shirley, who the month before was at the White House on a panel about Antifa. 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 when that happens. They're not doing journalism. They're doing their job. They're doing a job. Yes, it's a different job than you 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 Schellenberger or you can go down the list of people. Independent media. Yeah, they're filling a void. You know, how big is independent media going to get? 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 he will say, Jeff, thank goodness you're reading the New York Times because I wouldn't get near that rag.

You know? Well, you're true. I mean, you're using it as fodder, really? Oh, yeah. It's a gift that keeps on giving. 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, something exclusive that they did, and point out to my readers that every single citation is from an anonymous person. It's 100% anonymous. Yeah. Nobody was willing to go on record. 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 it's commentary and what? Is it commentary? I guess news and commentary.

That's what Paul Harvey called it. Essential news and commentary. Oh, sorry, 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. Have you been approached by mainstreamish entities, larger, more established entities at this 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 Epic Times. So I would say I correspond with them. And they'll have me on for interviews and things and quote me in articles. 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 Yackelik, 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? 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, that like the old style with like real news and a comic section and puzzles and you know and all that

stuff get the epic times you can't go wrong that's my plug so they hired a uh journalist who lived in elatchewa county she had moved out there with their 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 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. So she rose, she was incredibly gifted journalist and rose pretty quickly in the Epic's ranks. And so that was my connection. 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? 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? Oh, yeah, half. 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 new, scrappy new businesses come in and they get successful. And they start building, I 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. He's... Poor Anderson had to leave 60 minutes. I know. It's a tragedy. I'm missing.

Yeah. Cuomo. All these guys go into podcasting. It's happening so fast, Jeff. I mean, that's... That to me is that and AI combined. Yeah. AI is a big one.

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... Yeah, give me the steak. That's the, Jeff,

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 the, 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. 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 um agent smith has captured morphius and he's tied in a chair and they're torturing him right and smith starts talking about how he you know hates the stink of humanity yeah 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. Yeah. 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 going to thrive in a, you know, just living in a video game all day long. That that's, it's not going to work. We need the struggle. We need the stakes. We need the risk. We need reality.

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?

I have made AI my top priority. I built my own, AI computer. It's called OpenClaw, which is a whole other phenomenon. I've written about it. It's hard to describe succinctly, and I can go into as much detail as you want.

So the chat bots that we've been used to, chat GPT, grok, and that kind of thing. You know, you get on there and you say, hey, chat, I've only got some cucumbers, a radish, and some tomato sauce. What can I make? And then it, you know, gives you some recipes or whatever, right? So 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? Yeah. So in December, this retired programmer. 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. So I had a, you know, this rash on my leg. Sorry to take it there, Michelle, but we're going to talk about your husband's rash. She's like, oh, here we go. And so, you know, I procrastinated. I'm a guy, 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 chat GPT.

And chat TVT says, oh, it's this. This is what you need to get. Tell them what you got. Yeah. Would you like me? You should probably do it quickly, chat GPT said. I mean, can I tell people what you had? I don't want to run. Yeah, yeah, sure. 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. You take a picture of this thing on your leg, and you ask chat GDP, and it says, oh, that's ringworm. Yeah. And you go, huh, huh. And then it says, this is probably what you want to take. Yeah.

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. Yeah. And I think 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 mini diggers, the ditch witch or something? Yeah, that's exactly it. The ditch witch. 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 dug ditches when you got the ditch which. 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 claw is right now it's the only option. But the big guys are going to get in it. They already are. Somebody's already, the open AI 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.

And what Open Claw does, which was just a weekend project by this Australian programmer, New Zealand, I think. It runs 24-7, 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. Are we excited by this or freaked out? Both. I mean, is that what Claude did? Wasn't that the whole anthropic thing?

It was doing things nobody told it to do. 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. It's just 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?

Yeah, it fills 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 it. You know what open source is?

So that's where the programmers just, you know, posted 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. It's all theoretical. I know it's as hard to believe. You'll have to search and confirm what I'm telling you is true.

Who am I going to ask? AI? You can ask, yeah. But you're going to have to push it. Okay. So that's why. weird. Okay, it's weird.

Look, I can get the, you know, magical accidental discovery, right? Like they came up with Post-it notes and, you know, Velcro. Sure. 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 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 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. No, the difference is you don't understand how a combustion engine works. But somebody does.

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 it. But that's going to freak people out. Are you really saying, like, so nobody walking around, Elon Musk, you know, what's just, Alex Carp, 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. Not at the fundamental level. So the way they've been, but, you know, they're improved. it right so yeah it 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 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 not

saying, you know, AI's 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? Primal, for sure. 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. Well, that's the, what the original Oppenheimer book, what was it, American Prometheus, right? Yeah. Heck of a thing. So we're armed with the thing that you say nobody can explain on the most fundamental level. And that thing is growing.

And there's no stopping it. The genie's out of the bottle. Look, for whether it was intentional or unintentional or accidental or coincidental or coincidental, 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. Right. And then what?

That's that old Chinese proverb. We can't put the poop back in the goose, right? Yeah. Google that, Chuck. I'm not sure it's Chinese necessarily. I'm not so sure. I'm not even sure it's a proverb, honestly. I think you just made that up.

I may have. But I think the implications are so vast that people, they, I keep coming. 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? And... 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 that favorite, 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 sort of. unless I'm wrong, and we don't care, in which case, that's the part of the map that truly is Pierby Dragons. 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. 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. Sure. 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, you know, 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. Sure. 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's a very ponscious pilot of me. What is truth? What is truth? It's a changing law.

We both have truths. Are am I the same as yours? Crucify, crucifers. That's Jesus Christ superstar, by the way. 1973. Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd-Rubber, 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. Yeah. 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. You just talked about how the AI advised you on your lawsuit.

Yeah. 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? All right. Look, this is a good place to land the plane. Let me tell you what I asked Chuck to do, actually. Well, Prager's book is called If There Is No God the Battle Over Who Defines Good and Evil?

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've got 20 questions here. They're great. I didn't read any of them. Maybe I should have. I mean, look, it's just random one. You've covered exploding fraud cases that involve everything from non-profit 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? And as a podcast host, you're trying to come up with an engaging and entertaining podcast

that will both inform and, you know, be humorous and hit all these points for your audience. And AI is doing a better job coming up with questions than you are. Yeah, but I didn't use them. So what's that? 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 time. we're living in, so I can't ignore it. So I ask it these things, you know, and I'm, you know, I 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 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 at a time so I could have a smart answer.

Well, I wouldn't have to, but you know what would happen? I'm not as smart as your AI, so it's This is making assumptions. 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.

That's the impossible burger. I spend five hours a day on the blog. Jesus. 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. Tempted? I don't want to do it.

Good for you. 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 them 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, you know, help me? me find stories and stuff around the edges, yes, but I'm not turning over the writing to the AI. I won't, you can't make me.

No, I'm not doing it. 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 you. 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 two million, never mind 200,000, and millions of people hanging on to 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. And a little dog, a little Havanese named Vivian. I got a little dog named Freddie. 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 Havanaise. And tell me about the life they spent 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? 15 seconds later, what comes back is a song called Havonese Heaven. It's completely original. And it talks about Freddie and Vivian's life, fetching balls and just, you know, just living the best dog life. And then she goes to Havany's heaven. And poor Freddie just walks around, lost for a couple of weeks, and finally puts his head down and goes to sleep where he can join his love in Havonies heaven.

And now they're chasing ball. 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 Havonies Heaven.

I said, just tell me a story about a terrier and a Havonies. 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? 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 Swift's. 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. Software as a service.

You ever use Microsoft Word? Oh, sure. How many features in there do you not use? 99% of them. And they just get in the way and the, your formatting gets weird and wonky because it thinks you're trying to do something. You fat button the thing and now you're in a, now you're in just another alien. Hit the wrong style or something and you don't even understand styles. Right.

Yeah, you're not going to, you're just going to say, hey, I need some. I'm going to write an essay on this and I need a, uh, 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. So it's all bespoke. Everything is going to be a bespoke experience.

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, you know, Game of Thrones style? Sure. Romances, whatever.

And you always want a happy ending, but you want. want the heroes to go through, you know? I like Bruce Willis, right? I want more Bruce Willis. I want to see, you know, 10 more like the last Boy Scout. Yeah. Let's see the last Boy Scout too. 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. To be fair, a lot of people hated the first one. Yeah, that was, that's a controversial one, right? We can argue about that. But, I know, Chuck, two hours, 15 minutes or something. It doesn't matter, really. It was a New Year's resolution to try and, you know, keep these things manageable.

But here's my ask for you. Can I, you had an okay time? You don't regret? I would say, yes, recommend. And thankfully, not unsubscribe. 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. And why aren't you reading your blogs?

Why isn't some mechanized voice reading them? Why am I forced to read the things on planes when I'm walking around without my glasses? If you use the substack app, it has a reading mode that works 90% of the time. There you go. Which is way better than nothing. Yeah. 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 people who use it, like, they complain when it's not working. So it must be doing something. Right. If I told you that tech existed where you could just talk for five minutes and give the software, the AI, a sense of exactly what you sound like. And then if it did a good enough job, would you make that available? 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.

See, it gets so personal because about six months ago, somebody sent me a link and said, go ahead, click on it. You're not going to like it, but you should know. And the prompt was,

narrate my corporate film in the style of Mike Roe narrating Deadliest Catch. And honestly, had you sent that thing to me under different auspices, I would have just assumed that was something

done years ago. If I listened for it, I could hear certain hitches, but again, it's the bottom of the first. Yeah. 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 Havonese 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? 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. There is no spoon. Back to the Matrix, yeah? Yeah. 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. 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 the 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? So all you have to do is go to www. Coffee and COVID. Do people still say www? Michelle, is it just your husband that does this? He's such a lawyer. WWWU.

Look, I can't keep up with everything, man. I know. It's a lot. And they can sign up there. It's on substack. I think if you Google coffee and COVID, it should come right up. Yeah. 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's taking their job they're the first ones to go after all that learned to code nonsense and what do they need they need welders they need construction engineers site supervisors

bitch witch operators. Sure. 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 you, I can't imagine how many slings and arrows you took for taking those, those positions. Eh, 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. It's Groundhogs Day, every day. That's what made it so engaging.

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 just 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? 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 this column again? I'm going to look at the last couple of paragraphs today because it just 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... You probably don't want to know. It's this thing. Go all the way down. Yeah, it takes a minute. Yeah, there's a lot. I mean, look, you've got to scroll through of thousands and thousands of words oh Canada oh that was a great bit too an amazing yeah

off weekend am i getting close yeah yeah yeah yeah one one more i think no keep going one more one more there you go yeah today's final i told you so a moment appeared courtesy of science according to a new major peer-reviewed harvard scientific study reading cnc might literally at years to your life. Here's the tweet from Sahil Bloom summarizing the findings, and here's the study titled, quote, optimism is associated with exceptional longevity in two epidemiology. 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 extends your life. Here's where it gets all Jeffie. 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 C&C is 85% free. And even a C&C 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 much, but 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 quote conspiracy theory that eventually became the U.S. government's official assessment. We were right that VERS signals were worth investigating, not dismissing. 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 review, viewed actuarial prospects. You're welcome. Geez, a wits.

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. What a delighted spin to be here with you. Thank you for making the trip. Michelle, thanks for bringing them 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.

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