474: Jeff Childers—Coffee & Covid

>> Well, here we go.

Again, it's the way I heard it.

“I'm Mike Row, 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 of years? >> Let me just tell you, I was really excited knowing that Jeff Chilters 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 as lawyerly self, mind that his own business and the world went crazy and there were lockdowns and there were mask mandates, Mr. Chilters, S. Quire, 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 Cicifian battle, and he'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. He looked into the mask studies, the studies that say, or 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 Cova. 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. >> Yeah.

>> And that kind of turned into a very engaged, very loyal following. And then he just started to elucidate and write more and more. And today, on average, he'll do 354,000 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 yet spoiler alert, 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 2021, 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, yeah, as a people. And this lawyer was just writing with a weird level of joy.

In fact, I don't know what 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 of 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 for to six thousand words a day is like, over the course of the six years that he's been working on. He's done it, or five years, is the equivalent of writing ten Bibles.

>> Millions of words. >> Yes, over eight 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 Chilters, and he's up next. >> Seven years ago, Ben Spell was a musician with no interest in running a food company. He was annoyed, though, that so much imported meat at his grocery store was being deceptively marketed as domestic. So Ben decided to fix the problem.

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get good ranchers now. All right, first of all, full disclosure, I have not yet subscribed to Coffee and Covent, 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 scoff law like me who wants to consume it on the cheap. What's up? Six days out of seven, it's 100% free.

“All right, so I write a daily blog that it's not in substantial.”

It's at least five hours of work per episode. Okay, seven days a week, I just have my AI count them up. So since I started during the pandemic in 2020, I've got 1,641 posts. That's, I mean, the word's prolific, but I don't know that that does it. I did a word count today on the plane.

I came down, I read your column today. Well, man, this is really long. How many were so? 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."

And I don't bite it anymore. When I'm raw, 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 3500 words. And people should understand, and 3500 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.

Michelle is here, long-suffering life, is that fair? Michelle? She's not fair. 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. You won't get to all of them, but because it's not that I agree with every single thing that you're right, but every single thing that you're right is interesting to me. Because I can't decide if you're really, 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, where 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 loaring, it's probably more blogging.

You have your own practice? I do. What's it called? Children's Law LLC, in Gainesville, Florida, prior to the pandemic, we're 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 the contracts wherever 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, it's 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, their 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 stakes than 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 on 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 mean, it's 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. You're going to be for hopping around, but isn't that sort of the state of play right now?

“If you try and distill the cause of so much collective angst, isn't it?”

Because we've put ourselves in a world where the experts around us don't agree. It's like the wisdom of a second opinion, medically, anyway, is time immemorial. And in law, I would oppose. But the third opinion and the fourth and then the fifth, none of them seem to agree. It feels to me like these last five years as much as anything else has been an experiment

of living with a front row seat to the demise of the expert class.

I mean, I rag on experts all the time, as you know, having red coffee and COVID, and I was prepared for that, because it's a litigating lawyer. My case is often involved, experts, right? So you've 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?

Just agree. They disagree. Now, which one's right? Mine is right, of course.

“But the truth is that in 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. There are peers, guys. There's just some random, that guy, we'll get it.

The unemployed guy, the student, you know, the stay at home, 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 so far along this real way 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?

“Well, the CDC says it says you have to cut up a t-shirt and wrap it around your head.”

So, you know, I'll be just leaving it true. That must be true, because they're the experts, right? So, well, don't you think our crudulity, 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

and we are for a smooth, sure, steady, believable, consistent voice. Only when you're outsourcing, because you're afraid, 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 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'd be out of fight 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 this thing, property disputes, and whatever. So if it happens and suddenly you're filing a whole different kind of suit and you're

entering a whole different life and it almost begers belief, but if you're not sick and telling the story, how exactly did this happen? Yeah, so picking up where we left off, I left the safe world 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 11th, 2020 and today after my birthday, so it's easy to remember. By the end of March, my county, a Lachua 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 LA County. So LA County passed a mask mandate and so Lachua County decided a mask mandate. And we all got wind of it and so everybody tuned into the county commission meeting where they debated the, you know, the next emergency order in this series of daily emergency orders

they had been signing.

It was the first county commission meeting I had ever seen.

It's like, you know, the sausage, it's worse than the sausage making.

“I always kind of, you know, thought that our elected officials were smart.”

They had a lot of experience in management and in, you know, politics and all this kind of stuff and then I find out that they're just random people with some, you know, kind of questionable ideas on being generous. And so they debated this mask mandate thing and, and Mike, I am not making this up. They spent 15 minutes debating whether to include in that order a requirement to wear

your mask inside your own house. And the only reason they didn't is because the county attorney told them that there'd be no way to have police spot check because you need probable cost to enter. Right. I mean, they debated that.

They were trying to find a way to get around it. And what I was watching was, you know, like the exact opposite of everything I thought I understood about our constitutional system. And it was a profound challenge on like, you know, a spiritual level. I mean, I really, I feel like it was almost the spiritual event.

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“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. Yeah. You couldn't see anybody's face, you know, it was all like this and I'm talking.

One of the five county commissioners, crocheted her own face mask. Crochet. Good. Shade. And 95.

Great. Yes, back, you know, when we were wearing the, you know, those neck things that you pull up over your face and all that kind of stuff. Were they called those things like ballet clavos or something? Yeah, it's like a, like a curchiff and you would just pull it up.

Yeah, over your face, like the old bank robbers wore and like the wild west, right? And like that, that'll save you, anyway, go ahead. So the upshot is that they wind up passing it.

And so we got the first indoor outdoor mask mandate in Florida.

And I looked at Michelle and said, there's no way that's constitutional. They can't tell us what to wear. I mean, imagine if they said we all have to wear a uniform walking around the county. How is this possibly constitutional? I'll 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 it. Like, yeah, I mean, what do you mean you demand it? How does that? Who could Jeff Childers has thought it over and he has some demands now? So this is like, how does that work?

Yeah. Well, you know, this is one of those privileges of being a lawyer, I guess, is that you can throw demand letters everywhere, covering yourself accordingly. Yeah. Did you insist?

I insist that my demand be, it wouldn't have mattered. It's illegal thread. That's basically if you don't do it, I'm going to sue you.

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 often running. Now, he didn't realize that he'd be getting death threats and people piciting 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.

And 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. You know, do you slide it in that little slot at the library where you put the books? I mean, 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 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 than that kind of thing.

And I'm calling them up and every one of them said the same thing.

That'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 then there could be bar implications, right?

“Meaning, so lawyers are professionally credentialed by the bar and the worst thing that can”

happen to us is having our bar license revoked or be disbarred, right? And there really is nothing lower in our society than a disbarred lawyer. I mean, really, if you think about it, that's like somebody that you would be crazy to hire, 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? So we, you know, obviously lawyers are already trained in CYA and so we, most of us, do everything

we can't stay far away from any kind of conduct that could potentially be turned against you to disbar. So that was a very serious issue that I had to think about, carefully. Not to belabor, but people should understand, even, I mean, in this little office, like if I want an, if I want a lawyer to give me a legal opinion, could be a copyright issue,

could be a clear institution. It could be clear. It could be any number of things to get these guys to affirmatively own an opinion, really truly would take an act of Congress. And 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 want to pay 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 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 active self-sabotage, what's Michelle thinking?

Like, you're non-law your friends who are around you, where 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 you recall, she was saying, you've got to do something about this.

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. Yeah. Media, crazy lawyer, Sue's county, over mask mandate. We start getting calls, usually the drunk dialers and the, you know, leaving the voicemails on the firms.

Sure. Voicemails system in the middle of the night.

But it was low key because I was one of the first to file the mass lawsuit, but there

was about 40 that I counted, keeping track of, to see, you know, 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-- 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 Y Mark constitution, in 1930's Germany, had an emergency clause that allowed you

“to go extraconstitutionally 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 there was a UFO invasion? Well, fine, but that's not in the constitution. So you're acting extraconstitutionally. Now, there's Supreme Court doctrines that allow government to do things that are in the gray area, but they have to meet super high standards.

And none of those standards could be met by the mask mandate for one thing. There was, you know, all the evidence that I found when I searched. Now, this is the first time I'd ever even searched PubMed, which is the online database where they put the studies, the scientific studies and the medical studies and stuff. And you even know it existed.

But there I am, you know, up late at night, search and 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, you know, protect healthcare workers from passing sicknesses around that patients bring in, they want to protect other patients from, you know, 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 study mask and every one of those studies found that it didn't stop transmission of flu. So, okay, good.

“Yeah, and I mean, you can imagine what I'm thinking, right?”

Because 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 write and, and so I'm studying, you know, all this science and I've been at science since college and, you know, the flu virus is like 300 times bigger or maybe even more than the COVID virus particle that can pass through.

Right. So the, and I was calling, uh, 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 cigarettes smoke through their mask, stuff like that. So it was obvious, if you would just stop and look at it, dumb, this year, the micro

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data and the evidence, it was obvious that the stupid things didn't even work. Which is bad enough but then ordering everybody to do it is like ordering people to walk on their hands. I mean it's totally irrational. So the more I got into the details of masking the worst it got and the more impassioned

I became about, you know, this has to stop in meanwhile, just in those few weeks before my hearing, the other lawsuits, the 40 other lawsuits were failing one by one.

“These were also in Florida or just in Florida and just in that three week period.”

And part of the reason is because the lawyers like me, who like, I don't want to say real lawyers that are like litigating, regular litigating lawyers with real litigating practices, we're not bringing these suits for the same reason. I'm just stubborn or bullheaded and I didn't listen to my peers but no big law firms got into it.

The initial resistance was all small firms like mine and at the very, very beginning, it was firms that didn't have anything to lose. And so those were lawyers that usually drafted wills and did things like this and they were totally unprepared for dealing with government lawyers. And they were losing and of course the judges were awful.

And by the way, strategically I knew I was going to lose at this 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 of that court. And I had, that's where I am. I'm in the first DCA.

So that's where I wanted to go. Judges at the circuit level are elected. I just knew, even if I got one of the good ones in my area, they still are going to be thinking about the reelection campaign. Sure.

So I always plan for the appeal.

I design my whole case for to appeal to the first DCA. 'Cause you knew you were going to lose. I knew I was going to lose at the, at the chalk court and she gave me one hour. And by the way, I did get one of the good judges, Judges, 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 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 their in person and to be able to read body language, just get that interaction. He 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, uh, a pellet level decision in the entire country finding that mandatory

As far as I know, and I've looked, nobody else even made it to the appellate level.

“So what happened to the results of that ruling?”

Everywhere, inside 33 counties in Florida, out of 67, all dropped their mask mandates, schools, municipalities, whatever, 20, 21 at this point, yeah, early 2021. So we were on the front, now of course they all did it voluntarily and by their own decision, the emergency has receded to the point and, you know, that kind of thing. But all in the wake of that, of that decision ruling.

And I know for a fact, there were bigger players involved behind my county that were helping them, the quality of their lawyer and when we got to the pellet level, shot up, sure, like a rocket. Well, they, I mean, the stakes are enormous, it's another kind of contagion. That kind of decision.

They had to stop in a matter of what. And then here's the funny thing. They didn't appeal me to the State Supreme Court. I was praying, like, 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.

Did 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 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 it in, Gavin, to Becker, and Dell Big Tree? Why are you talking to Jeff Chilters?" It's like, it's almost impolite because the way they remember it, the way they heard it,

is that a lot of really well-intentioned people got it wrong at a time of extraordinary unrest, and they were just trying to do what was right. Does that hold any water with you? Let me answer by way of a story. So, during that period of three weeks before my hearing, I'm an experienced litigation lawyer,

and I knew I had a lot of tools like Discovery available to me, and I can get limited Discovery before an emergency hearing like that. So I asked it to pose the county's main expert, who was the head of the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida. So, super credentialed expert guy who flies all over the world and does all this stuff.

He just happens to be in my little town of Gainesville, Florida, because that's where the University of Florida is.

He also just was the one who always showed up at school board hearing to explain why

I'm asking the kids two-year-olds is necessary to save the universe or whatever. And so, anyway, I arranged to take his deposition, and they didn't, obviously, they did not want to produce him, but it was still early, and my judge, like I said, I got a good judge, and knew the judge was going to let me do it, because they got an affidavit from this guy, and they were using his affidavit as part of their evidence, so I have a right

to ask him questions.

“So it's really an extraordinary deposition, but there was this one question that I think”

answers it so much of what you're asking. So he's doing a good job, he knows how to talk, he's good at tap dancing, I'm asking and probing questions about the mass and he's given me acronyms and ten syllable words, and all that kind of stuff. And so I get to this point, I've been waiting for for a while in my deposition outline

and I'm like, "Well, Doc, are you an independent researcher that is you do your own research? Yes. You don't just track behind anybody else and adopt their position, do you? You make up your own mind based on your own research, your own mind? Oh, yes, yes.

There's a word 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."

I can't give me an example of the time in your career that you disagree with the CDC. 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 a go further and adopt a position that they might disagree with.

And they have to maintain a kind of cognitive dissonance to do it. I don't believe that they secretly, you know, sometimes they probably do have doubts, but they convince themselves that, you know, well, of course masking is cut up t-shirts is going to make scientific sense, right? And then, oh, later the CDC says, well, 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 pandemics.

“So that's why we want with the t-shirts is 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 going to be, if you don't tell me. And you can't have it. All right.

So I mean, cash, 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? The 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 my neighbors and to my friends and to people who don't

“have a professional skin in the game, but who do believe that the stakes are mortal?”

You know, I tell the, 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, like we had just come out of the phase where all the neighbors would go out onto the deck at night and how all, like wolves, they would do this every night. It ate a clock in solidarity with and support for health care workers.

And at that time, wow, yeah, I mean, it was a little weird, but truly that whole first time. How does howling help healthcare workers? Well, this is a, see, it's science, Jeff. You know, as I said, it's years of science, Bruce.

I mean, I think really it's community. 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, 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

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I was 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'd 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, you know, 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 your 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 where 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, that you've got the president coming on TV every day, given 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, you know, Chinese people in the white spacesuits, springs, stuff in the air, and all of that, and you're trying to decide, okay, and what should I do

to live through this to survive? Yeah, 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 tips, I think, for a lot of people. I don't know, okay, so you win the case, 30 some counties, right, rescind the mandate. And 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 about it. Oh my gosh, it's indescribable. The here on my arms is standing up right now, thinking about that just because of how, I mean, it was like something out of Monti Python. That's what it was like, and you just meet George Orwell. Yes, you know, bizarre and kind of dangerous, but one of the evidence that they use was one of the county commissioners who was a failed real estate broker before he went into politics,

local politics, right? And then that was his career for the rest of his adult life. During that meeting, as evidence to support the indoor outer mask mandate, he held up a little scrap of paper with writing all of it, really look 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.

but our county had a dashboard because of the dashboard. Yes. And every day, they would update the

“dashboard and the new numbers and you know, number of hospitalizations and cases and public”

block. 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. Well, you can't, I mean, it just doesn't work that way. And yet, you know, everybody became

it, who was this guy doing his own calculations? Like not only in his name, but like the county commissioner. He's the, oh my god. 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. It'll just be like a smoking crater, where a led to a county, it probably is single.

“That's what a led to a mean, single in the native Indian. It's not very flattering, but”

smoking, let's go with crater. A smoking crater where the county used to be in, unless they passed this month. 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.

Right. 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 pulled down the, the numbers into my little spreadsheet. And again, you know, I'm a lawyer, not, I'm not a mathematician, and I'm not a doctor or anything. Right. So here I am in my house, lock down, downloading the CSV file into Excel and, you know, 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. And you know, because they were out there beating the bushes to find the cases. Right. But then it leveled off. So when I finished, I had this little spreadsheet that I made for myself. And I'm like, well, damn it, I need to do something with this. I mean, I 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 low and behold, I still had apparently those are permanent,

by the way. I don't think you can get rid of it. Yeah. So I just posted up on my Facebook, and I didn't get that time. I had like 200 accidental friends, you know, people who had

branded me for, I mean, I never posted anything. And I, miracle of miracles like 10 or 12 people

responded. And they're like, oh, that's very interesting. So I decided for purposes of my litigation, and because, you know, some people seem to be interested in this. I would keep my little spreadsheet updated. So I, I updated my spreadsheet every day. And I would post it on the the Facebook. And then I started putting some little comments. 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. You know, that kind of thing. And again, you know, I'm just a hopeless optimist. So I was finding it, it looked a lot like the flu to me. This looked exactly like a seasonal flu. It may be 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. Yeah, they hate 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 that story was on page A16. And, you know, underneath the local sports column. And so, but I would find those cases and then I would profile

“them. I would say aye. So we, you know, this is new. And I only use, because remember now, on the in those”

days, I don't know if you ever got like thrown in Facebook JL or Twitter JL or whatever. Right. So, you know, one wrong word in your post. And that could be it. You know, they'd lock it out for a week

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 the safety first came with all kinds of unintended”

consequences. And I was a big riff. I wrote a bunch about, I thought it was clever. We raised like $100,000 for the foundation, but the Facebook hated that. It hated that. What do you mean safety third? Like, well, where would you put it? Well, it's first. And that opened up this whole conversation that brown 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. And 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, a front to comment 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 and 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, I to get around the sensors. I only sourced the mainstream papers. I quote the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal. If a studies 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. There was open to two interpretations, right? You could read it non-sarcasticly, but my people who read my stuff knew about it. Don't they know better? Yeah. And then when it got to, that's today's, that's it. This is great. When it got to the point where it was becoming, you know, I'm using it quoting the New York Times. And then I draw the logical conclusion, but I don't say it. I do would just say so. Yeah. And that's where the so thing came from. Right. So dot dot dot dot. So so.

So anyways, I was just doing, there was no market for good news. Sorry, nobody was taking advantage of this demand. People were desperate for good news. They were, they were starving for it. And listen, I, at first I, you know, was doing this because of the lawsuit. And because, you know, I'm just stubborn and, you know, a little bit of a contrarian. And 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 grip me right away because it's, you know, deer 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

And like I said, I got, I don't know, probably two dozen like that over 2000 or 21 and 22, which means they're hundreds more. Yeah, the ones that don't write. All right. 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 to bring them some hope. My buddy got called Dave Hinden, sent me your column, late in 21, maybe. I don't know. 21 or 22. But his rail 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 and read the first thing and laughed through most of it. Yeah. Have you stuff? But it was funny. Right. Adding the humor sometimes

if 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 their this audience for instance is probably right of center the majority. But there's a big number that's center or left of center. And the reason I you know, trying to stay mindful of that is that it's I can either evangelize. Right. If I'm in a room where I know everybody agrees with me, I can talk one way. If I want to persuade, I have to talk another way. And if I want to do both, well, I'm still not quite sure

how to do that. But you know, sometimes you I think like I imagine a lawyer might. Like I ask questions, what's persuasive? Do you do that when you write or you're trying to persuade or are you

trying to spread the good news? I'm thinking of that. I've never said what I'm about to say

a lot before. It's much bigger than persuasion. But you're right. A lawyer's job is especially illidigate her. 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 their 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 on certainty 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 in the unbiased. Every jury I've ever had, I can see they're really trying art 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 this 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, understand their propaganda, they're making arguments too. The newspapers trying to persuade you. The New York Times is they're not unbiased. They have a point of view and they want you

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, chops your ass the worst? Is it the existence of a narrative that you believe is genuinely fulacious? Where's 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 not never to lie.

If I can possibly help it. And 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 a, I thought a masterful thing this morning. So in real time, today, where are we Chuck February 23rd? 23rd. Okay. So over the weekend, all hell broke loose in

Mexico. I mean, so by the time this drops, who knows what the headlines will say. But right now, in real time, nobody has written about what seems like an obvious link between Venezuela and Mexico. Right. Between this guy with three unpronounceable names in Mexico. What's his name? He's dead now. Elmencio. Elmencio. 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. 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 king pens in the same hemisphere. Who's connecting the dots in the mainstream media? They're narrative with chaos in Mexico. Right.

“Because that's what the picture showed. So you should be afraid. And these portraits are, you know,”

they can't get out and they're, you know, watching burning Costco. Right. And stuff like that. Right. So you should be afraid too. Because what if the chaos spreads in by that? 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 live 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 the touch of irony, or a little bit of rainous, or some optimism, that, I mean, good on you, man, because purely as a mercenary and a capitalist, I look at that, that's the reverse commute. Nobody's doing that. Certainly nobody's

done it on the left. I've never seen anybody even attempt it. You know, but I don't think anybody's

doing 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 an important position”

somewhere, and they don't want to get connected to me, because I'm just crazy, Jeff. You're crazy, but you're some local, as they say. But I don't want it, let's not leave that. The real narrative

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, it's been going on since we were a fetus, it's finally getting somewhere, and not just, you know, watching the fentanyl death chart get higher and higher in 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, "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, she awawa, "Shine bomb." She awawa, "Shine bomb." That's you can't say that, dude. I mean, her own about face in just the last couple of months. Since what happened? Since Madora. That's right. Since prior to Madora,

she was on the record as saying we will not cooperate with the US in any way. We're not, I mean, it's just like a list of things that she went on the record. Yeah. Deadline after headline. Right. Every one of them's upside down opposite fill. Right. And so even in the New York Times, the earliest morning about chaos in Mexico, there's one sentence that says it was a joint operation with a new US military intelligence division. Nothing about how "Shine bomb"

suddenly cooperating with the US military. Yeah. Right. Even though they reported on how she wouldn't cooperate with the military, a dozen times or hundreds of times. They don't even mention. They just leave it on the cutting room floor. Go back to you were saying that when you hit a

critical mass, 50,000, 80,000, 100,000. Talk more about that because we're saying that when you

structure a story in a certain way, you can be assured that it's gonna 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. I saw it just a prior effect. Yeah. Yeah, the

“force multiplier. Yeah. So I think what I like to hear you talk about is how critical does the”

mass have to be. I think the number 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 engage. I gotta 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? 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 peer's advice. And follow the mask, boss you didn't go out. Not nobody was paying me. Don't you mean listen to your wife? Is it that what you were trying to say, Jeff? Of course, especially since she's sitting in the room, that was like totally unfair. What is that up? Sorry. But so when I travel, I have to have an extra day on both sides. So I've got to

leave 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.

they have a business center on the second floor. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. And we usually try to get a room where

there's, you know, space for me to go work without waking Michelle up. But the rooms are a little bit smaller there. They're intimate. I mean, how much noise do you make on your computer? Well, what inevitably happens is I click the wrong link and it's some loud video. Right. Yeah. It

“doesn't take that happening many times before you learn your lesson. Right. So, so that's how I”

organized my travel. The law firm, I already had a mature law practice. I have terrific staff. I mean, just like you could not ask for better assistance and paralegals and stuff that I have.

I have a new partner who joined the firm last year and he's young and terrific and

you know, wanting to to slay giants and stuff. So you're still doing it. So yeah, I have a staff huddle twice a week. We've got cases. I'm soon in the federal government into a representing Maya Koalski. There's a Netflix documentary take care of Maya. Yeah. A horrible hospital kidnapping case. And, you know, so I, my staff so good. I don't have to do the routine stuff. Just coming to court and make the big appearances 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 fields 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.

It's 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. Daycare 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 million or tripped $1.5 trillion a year.

trillion with a T. Yeah. Out of a $4 trillion budget. It's like mostly frauds. 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 wanted, I mean, do you see parallels? I mean, it it feels if your thesis is right. And I'm, I don't want to put words in your mouth. But the main stream media is not doing a job. Journalists are not doing their job, painting with a broad brush

apologies. But when that 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 shell and burger or you can go down the list of people that 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 people 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 as fodder. Really? Yeah, it's a gift that

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 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 and I guess news and commentary.”

That's the whole article. Essential news and commentary. Essential. Because a lot of you don't need

to know about. I'll tell you about the stuff you need to know about. You can listen to anybody that wants can unplug and just read coughing COVID. Because I promise I will let you know about anything important that happens. I've even been approached by mainstreamish entities, larger, more established entities at this point. Like to buy me or partner up or something. Yeah. Now, 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 they've written three or four stories on me and my foundation. And I told you I've become friends with Jan. You call it whose new book is coming out next month.

You'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 journalist who lived in a lateral county. She had moved out there at the family onto a farm to get away from it all. And somehow they recruited her because epic's growing great, 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 they'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? No, yeah. Half. Yeah. Like they had something like 13 climate reporters. I'll go on now. So there's a natural course correction and it's the it's the cycle of business, right? So the cycle of businesses that, you know, new scrappy new businesses come in and they get successful and they start building a get bigger and bigger and then, you know, they do something wrong

and they die and they don't go away, though. This is the great thing about the cycle is they get financially distressed and then they get bought by a scrappy new entrant and the wheel goes around again.

“And so that, I think, is what's going to happen with traditional media. We see CBS, right?”

Barry Weiss came in. She's poor Anderson had to leave 60 minutes. I know. It's a tragedy. Cuomo. It's how these guys go into podcasting. It's happening so fast, Jeff. I mean, that's that to me, is that an AI combined? Yeah. I guess 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 that 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

Remember to see it in the matrix where, yeah, give me the stake. 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 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 he is more optimistic than that in the context of what we're talking about. And I have a lot to say about AI, but so the scene is, agent Smith has captured more of this.

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 design 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're 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 to 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. Mm-hmm. 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, you know, go and just much detail as you're talking about. So the chat bots that we've been used to, chat GPT, grock, 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. But am I conflating things? 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 it, you know, this rash on my leg. Sorry to take it there for the shell, but we're going to talk about your husband's rash.

Like, "Oh, here we go." And so, you know, I procrastinated. I'm a guy, all right? I'm not,

and it's getting bigger and uglier, and everything. So finally, I take a picture of it with

“myself on, and I give it to chat GPT and chat GPT says, "Oh, it's this. This is what you need to get."”

Tell them what you got. Yeah. You should probably do it quickly, chat GPT said. I mean, can I tell people what you had? I don't want to make 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, "Oh, that wasn't there two weeks ago." Now it's there. And then two weeks later, it's twice the size. And you take a picture of this thing on your leg in US, chat GPT. It says, "Oh, that's ringworm."

Yeah. And you go, "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.

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 a, exactly, the ditch witch. Yeah. So they invented ditch witches. And so you, 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 in now, you can do more projects and be more ambitious

about your projects and so on. Right? So the ditch witch was a good thing. And it's a labor saving device.

And so that's one way to look at AI is that we're going to have to change. I mean, you had to change the way you did, you dug ditches when you got the ditch witch. And so we're going to have to change a lot

“of white collar work as a result of AI. That's one thing. But we're past that now. And that's what”

this open claw phenomenon is. And the, 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 that somebody's already, the open AI's already made a deal with him. We don't know the details yet. So it's going to go mainstream. It's absolutely like a rocket ship. What open claw does, which was just a weekend project by this Australian programmer, New Zealand, I think, but 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, it's not what claw did. Wasn't that the whole anthropic thing? Nope, 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. 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. Nobody. It's all theoretical. I know it's as hard to believe. You'll have to to search and confirm what I'm telling you is true. Hey, oh my god, an ask. Hey, I. You can ask. Yeah, but you're going to have to push it. Weird. Okay, it's weird. Look, I can get the, you know, magical accident discovery, right, like they came up with posted notes and, you know, a Velcro shirt, 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? I'm just, we don't understand how it works

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 large, we've been conditioned to, to accept the fact that understanding of 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. Now, the difference is you don't understand how a combustion engine works.

But somebody does. 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, like, so nobody walking around Elon Musk, you know,

what's just an Alex Carpe? All the big brains in the space really put the screws to him, 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 improving it, right? So, AI keeps getting better and it hallucinates less and, you know, stuff like that. And that's because they're just layering on top of it. So, they're like having multiple AI's check each other's work and things like that.

That basic set of code, the original open source thing that the Google guys allegedly came up with, they don't understand why that starts answering questions and not just predicting words.

It is what it is. Again, I'm not saying, 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.

“Mm-hmm. For this reason. It's almost Promethian. You know what I mean when I say that?”

Primal for sure, but it's like the gods give fire to the humans. The humans don't understand fire. They don't know what it is, but they set the work figuring out how to use the fire. Well, that's the, what the original, open, hyper book. 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 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 wall. Right. And then why? 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. I mean, that's offshore. I'm not sure it's a proverb.

“Honestly. I think you just made that up. Yeah, I may have. But I think the implications are so”

vast that people, I keep coming back to that moment in the Matrix because that to me is the thing that we're all going to have to reckon with. Like, I got a court case going on now. I have a legal matter that's been going on for a couple of years. I asked, and I think I used some pretty good prompts for an analysis of my position. And what came back with respect to my attorneys was just extraordinarily comprehensive, thoughtful, some new arguments that I hadn't seen, and way more concise. So,

I don't know what this is going to do to your profession. And I know most people listening probably couldn't give it to them because they're not going to be in that world. But you know what, we're all 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 tastes

to just like the authentic burger? Or better than the authentic burger? Or better than the authentic burger? Or better? What do you do if that painting you've been looking at, that Picasso that's been handed down is not a Picasso. If we learn that it's, it's been a forgery. Or if that your new favorite song was just dreamt up by open claw. Or down the listed goes, you know,

“we need umpires. We need referees. I think the average person is going to need some source”

unless I'm wrong. And we don't care. In which case, that's the part of the map that truly is your be dragons. Yeah, I'm I'm concerned about non-Christians or I should say concerned for non-Christians.

everything else is deception. So there's the word of God in the Bible and that's all we believe is true.

Everything else we're skeptical about, right? Disney World, that one's still frame from the cartoon, right? You know what I'm talking about? Sure. Uh, it's all potentially the work of the adversary, except for that one thing. So we're already armed against AI. We're an populated 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, well, 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 commuting with God in the at the beach and in the mountains and in the forest and, you know, that kind of stuff, then what is your truth? You don't have one. You're going to take whatever seems the best and most attractive and most believable. You're going

to accept that. It was very conscious pilot of you. What is truth? What is truth? It's truth. It's unchanging law. We both have truths. Where am I the same as yours? Crucified Crucified Crucified Crucified Crucified Crucified Crucified Crucified Crucified. That's Jesus Christ Superstar, by the way, 1973. Tim Raman. Tim Raman. Tim Raman. Tim Raman. Tim Raman. Tim Raman. Tim Raman. Tim Raman. Tim Raman. Wow. Well, it's a lot, Jeff. I mean, it's a lot to think about. Do you see Prager's new book, by the way? No. I saw him

interviewed last night. Mark Levin talked to him. You know, he had that terrible accident and he's basically

“paralyzed from the shoulders down. And he wrote a book, check me on it. I think if not God, what?”

Something like that. But it makes you point. You know, in the end, we're going to have to put our faith in something. Something. All right. And you just talked about how the AI advised you and 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, with the AI, it's 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. Let me show 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? What are you betting on? I got two pages of stuff here.

Basically, ask the AI, you know, what sort of insightful questions might you have for Jeff

Children's based on the millions of words he's written. You got 20 questions here. They're great. I didn't read any of them. Maybe I should have. I mean, look, it's just random one. You've covered exploding fraud cases that have all of everything from nonprofit food programs to medical provider billing scams often with ties to political figures or campaigns if you could design one bold nationwide policy or legal mechanism short of a full audit of every federal program

“to root out and deter this kind of systematic fraud in the future. What would it look like?”

And why do you believe it hasn't been implemented already despite the obvious scale of the problem? No, 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 a 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 and you are. So 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 and the times we're living in so I can't ignore it. So I ask it these things, you know, and I'm, you know, I, if I look this 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 in my job. In your defense, I mean a question like that, you can't spring a question like that on somebody cold. You'd 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?

what's going to happen? Okay. So I sent you these questions and you asked 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? What? That's impossible. Me. So that's the impossible burger. I spend five hours a day on the blog. 35 hours a week of extracurricular time on top of my job. If I used AI to write it, I could knock it out in an hour. attempted. I don't want to do it. 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 help 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 over here. 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 it 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 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. I had a little dog, little havenies 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. A-I-A-P. Okay. Right? So I say, um, 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 hobbies. 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 bit an equitable day comes? That's my prompt, right? 15 seconds later, what comes back is a song called hobbies heaven. It's completely original. And it talks about Freddie and Vivian's life

“affection, balls and just, you know, just live in the best dog life. And then, and then she goes”

to haventy seven 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, his love in haventy seven. And now they're Jason Baldwin. I'm crying like a baby. My neighbors 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 haventy seven. It's just tell me a story about a terrier and a haventies. And that's it, man.

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

you're not. You're just going to say AI needs something. I'm going to write an essay on this and I need 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.

like? You're like, you know, a game of throne style? You're, you know, romances? Yeah.

Whatever. And you always want a happy ending. But you 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 nobody else will hate it. Talk to be fair. A lot of people hate it the first one. Yeah. That was, that's a controversy. Oh, I heard. We can argue about that. But I know Chuck Woodenway, 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 it okay, Tom? 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. 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. Hey, there you go. Which is, which might be 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, the I'll land on a certain word, a certain way. You won't get that. But it, but people who use it, like they complain when it's not working. So it must be doing something right. If I told you the tech existed, where you could just talk for five minutes and give the software the AI. Okay, you know, 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 the heartbeat because that is probably the number one ask is people want the podcast version or the read the audible version. See, this is, it gets so personal because about six months ago, somebody sent me a link. It's a good 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 micro narrating deadliest catch. And honestly, had you sent that thing to me under different auspices? I would have just assumed that was something I'd done. Yeah, years ago. Yeah, if I listen for it, you know, I could hear certain hitches, but again, it's the bottom of the first. Yeah. So Jeff Childers and Micro 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 rest of the species who's going to be

up there in Havanaese heaven right now playing fetch with my dog at this point. But I just don't know, man, it's, this is stupid question, but fundamentally, fundamentally, are you still optimistic about all of it? Oh, yeah. Look, here's your problem. You're ready? Mm-hmm. 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 friends 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. There you realize it. 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 and gilly ad. You know, to heal the sin six soul, if you want to wrap it up”

with a good book, but man, I just, I love second acts if this is what you're having. And I love the fact that you felt called to break a few eggs. And I love the fact that you did it and you're still doing it and you're still doing it with humor. And so, you know, shameless plug, it's coffee and

www.coffee and COVID. Do people still say www.Michelle? Is it just your husband that does this? Such a lawyer. I can't keep up with everything, man. I know, it's a lot.

“And they can sign it 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 drugs. They eyes taken 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, ditch witch operators. Sure. Right. And so everything that you people had listened to, the people who took your advice are sitting pretty right now. After all, and I can't imagine how many slings and arrows you took for taking those positions. A couple. It's funny. 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 in a princess every it's groundhog's 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 because it felt like I had veered outside of my lane. You know, but come on. They're no lanes anymore. I mean, there's nothing but lanes. You're way outside of the lawyer lane. Right. You. You. Hey out there, Matt.

This is 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, uh, the last couple of paragraphs today because it just made me, it made me snort. I was on a delta flight. I was landing, and I was laughing, and the guy next to me was like, "Oh, yeah. What are you reading?" Oh, yeah. 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, like thousands and thousands of words. Oh, Canada. Oh, that was a great bit, too.

“What an amazing. Yeah, offward again. Am I getting close? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. One more, I think.”

Never going. One more. One more. There you go. Yeah.

Today's final I told you so, Mom, it appeared courtesy of science, according to a new major peer reviewed Harvard scientific study, reading CNC might literally add years to your life. Here's the tweet from Sahil Bloom summarizing the findings. And here's the study titled, quote, optimism is associated with exceptional longevity in two Epidemiologic cohorts of men and women, a massive study out of Harvard and Boston, you 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 percent longer than pessimists. They also

have a 50 to 70 percent greater chance of living to 85. These astonishingly strong results held even after controlling for diet exercise smoking alcohol use chronic disease at depression and socioeconomic status in other words, it's not just that optimism has happened 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 jeffy. If a drug produced a 50 to 70 percent improvement

in your odds of reaching 85, Pfizer would charge $40,000 a dose, and the FDA would fast track,

and people would pay for it. But CNC is 85 percent free, and even a CNC supporter subscription is

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 to remember because we optimists turned out to be right about everything.

Yeah, let's just keep going. We were right. The COVID wouldn't kill 2 percent of the population.

We were right that lockdowns wouldn't stop the virus and would devastate everything else. We were right. The 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 alive. 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 VAERS 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 were both. And we were right

“about the most important thing of all that the American people would finally figure it out,”

that the truth would surface, that the institutions demanding blind trust would eventually have to answer for what they did. It took longer than any of us wanted, but it happened. It is happening. So, when Harvard publishes a study showing that optimism adds 11 to 15% of your lifespan, I don't take that as news, I take that as confirmation. This blog has been a longevity program since day one. We just didn't know there was a 30-year long clinical trial underway to back it up.

So, you're welcome. It's been my great pleasure to serve you. Now let's keep the project going optimistically relentlessly, and now with peer reviewed, actuarial prospects. You're welcome. He's a witness. Well, that was Jeff Children's here with his victory lap. I sure hope you'll have many others down the road, and I hope our paths cross again, sometimes soon. When it delighted it's been to be here with you. Thank you for making the trip, Michelle.

Thanks for bringing him out here. I know behind all of it, it's you pulling the strings. Jeff Children's everybody coffee and COVID. You'd be a fool. Not to subscribe. That you'll do tell us who you are, tell us her, and before you go, whoa, whoa, whoa, you leave five. Start by mlausing little stars.