474: Jeff Childers—Coffee & Covid

Mike chats with Jeff Childers—the attorney-turned-writer behind the wildly popular Coffee & Covid https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/ Substack https://substack.com/@coffeeandcovid—for a wide-ranging conversation about media narratives, pandemic politics, and the strange new world of citizen journalism. What began as a daily blog written during lockdown has grown into a must-read for hundreds of thousands of devotees looking for sharp legal insight, media criticism, and a dose of wry humor with their morning coffee. Jeff explains what it takes to crank out 2,000 to 6,000 snarky words every single day of the week, why he started writing in the first place, and how an attorney accidentally became one of the most widely read independent commentators on the internet. Along the way, he talks with Mike about the stories that keep him up at night—and why, despite all of it, he remains surprisingly optimistic about where the country is headed. ☕🎙️

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Mike Rowe?

  Well, here we go again. It's The Way I Heard It. I'm Mike Rowe and he is?

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Chuck Klausmeyer.

• 0:08Mike Rowe?

  And our guest today, dare I say, Charles, is somebody we both have been enjoying slash admiring for the last couple of years.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Let me just tell you, I was really excited knowing that Jeff Childers was coming in to spend time talking to you.

• 0:27Mike Rowe?

  Jeff is a lawyer, but don't hold that against him. He has a practice and has had one for many years in the Gainesville area in the great state of Florida. And he was just being his lawyerly self, you know, minding his own business and the world went crazy and there were lockdowns and there were mask mandates. And Mr. Childers' esquire had objections.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:50Mike Rowe?

  And he began to voice those objections and he was right there at the very beginning of the craziness. And he filed a suit against the county where he lives in northern Florida. Long story short, started a Sisyphean battle. And you'll hear how it turns out early on in our conversation. I really didn't invite him here to talk too much about lawyerly stuff, although, as I think about it, it was really important and it's a really interesting backdrop for what he's become.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Well, it's how he got involved as well, because there were these cases where he had, you know, as a lawyer does, you have people come to you and say, hey, I need a lawyer because I want to sue the county because I don't believe I should have to get this vaccine. And so it forces him, as a lawyer, if he takes that case, to look up stuff. And he said he was never political. He said, I maybe voted in every other presidential election and I didn't have a political bone in my body. And then I started researching this stuff and started going, huh, this is really weird. Like, he looked into the mask studies, the studies that say, or the studies that were determined if masks were useful. And as it turns out, there were tons of studies.

• 2:11Mike Rowe?

  That suggested that they weren't.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:13Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 2:28Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:43Mike Rowe?

  This guy, for the last four or five years, has been writing a blog called Coffee and Covid. He did it initially to keep a few people on Facebook updated. He had some science and some charts that he had designed and found that proved the points he was making in his brief.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:06Mike Rowe?

  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 thirty-five hundred, four thousand words a day.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Seven days a week.

• 3:25Mike Rowe?

  And for those of you who have never written before, trust me when I tell you, that is an extraordinary output of content.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:41Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:03Mike Rowe?

  With friends, not because of their political nature, and yet, spoiler alert, you know, he's coming from a very specific place on the spectrum. But it's the place on the despair optimism spectrum that's the most interesting.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  He's super optimistic.

• 4:20Mike Rowe?

  This is a glass half-full kind of guy. The first blog I read of his was in, I think it was late in twenty twenty-one, 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.

• 4:50Mike Rowe?

  We were just petrified and paralyzed.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:52Mike Rowe?

  As a people. And, um, and this lawyer was just writing with a weird level of joy. And he was saying, from the darkest moments, it's going to be fine. In fact, I don't know when you guys are, I don't know what today this is, but we recorded this on the 23rd of February. And his column on that particular day, which I encourage you to read, was called, I Told You So.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:17Mike Rowe?

  And it just happened to be a really delicious roundup, as all his blogs are, of current events. But in this one, he takes a four-year look back and just said, this is what we said was going to happen. And here's what happened. So call him Cassandra, call him a prognosticator. I call him a very prolific lawyer and author of Coffee and COVID, which you should check out. You can subscribe to it, but you can also read it for free. He makes the vast majority of his material available for free.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Uh huh. And just to put it into perspective, the writing every day, four to six thousand words a day.

• 5:58Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Is like, over the course of the six years that he's done it, or five years, is the equivalent of writing 10 bibles.

• 6:06Mike Rowe?

  Millions of words.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Yes, over eight million words.

• 6:09Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:16Mike Rowe?

  And probably going to make you want to share it. Anyway, it's Jeff Childers, and he's up next.

• 6:26Mike Rowe?

  Here's a crazy idea. What if there was an academy out there that paid students to learn, instead of the other way around? Specifically, men and women who want to work in the skilled trades. And what if this academy not only paid for your training, but also covered all the expenses associated with your training? Like travel and food and lodging? And finally, what if this academy guaranteed you a job at the end of the training period? Well, that's exactly what's happening at America's Workforce Academy by Meta. This is a five-week Highly immersive pre-apprenticeship program that gets you all the necessary certifications you'll need to start a career in the skilled trades immediately.

• 7:09Mike Rowe?

  I'm talking about AI-proof, six-figure jobs, helping to build out the new infrastructure that our economy is depending on. Electricians, plumbers, HVAC techs, welders, fiber optic technicians, these jobs, they are all in demand like never before. And again, every graduate of America's Workforce Academy is guaranteed a job on a Meta website. I first announced this program a few months ago, and I have been watching the response ever since. It's extraordinary. This is a nationwide, unprecedented fast track to a long-term career in a skilled trade. If you, or your spouse, or your kid, or your grandkid are looking for a straight path

• 7:52Mike Rowe?

  into a career with no cost at all, check out the opportunities for yourself at meta.com/america'sworkforceacademy. That's meta.com/america'sworkforceacademy.

• 8:11Mike Rowe?

  All right, first of all, full disclosure, I have not yet subscribed to Coffee and COVID, but I'm going to, because for the last three years, have I been cheating? Like, you make this stuff available, it seems like, for free, but you also have a subscriber base, and you have hundreds of thousands of engaged, voracious readers, and yet the content appears to be available to any scofflaw like me who wants to consume it on the cheap. What's up?

• 8:41Speaker 02

  Six days out of seven, it's 100% free.

• 8:44Mike Rowe?

  Ah-ha.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  Right? So I write a daily blog that, it's not insubstantial. It's at least five hours of work per episode. Every day, seven days a week, I just have my AI count them up. So since I started during the pandemic in 2020, I've got 1,641.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  Posts.

• 9:10Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  Like, man, this is really long. How many words is this?

• 9:22Mike Rowe?

  Well, it was your most recent column, which is called, I Told You So, which is just a love letter to, I've been biting my tongue for a long time. I don't bite it anymore. When I'm wrong, I say I'm wrong. But when I'm right, gosh, there's just a lot of pent up. So like you just took a really fun victory lap with this column. And it was 3,500 words. And people, people should understand, man, 3,500 words is a meaty chapter in a meaty book. And you're doing this at least to that level, four, five times a week? Six?

• 10:00Speaker 02

  Seven times a week.

• 10:01Mike Rowe?

  No.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Every single day. I take off major holidays. That's about it.

• 10:08Mike Rowe?

  Michelle is here. Long-suffering wife? Is that fair, Michelle?

• 10:12Speaker 02

  She's my business partner.

• 10:15Mike Rowe?

  Well, and look, let me just get it out of the way. I'm so flattered that you came. I didn't think you would when I invited you because I know you're on the other side of the country and I know you're busy. But I stumbled across coffee and COVID, I guess in 21, maybe 22. And it resonated with me on so many levels. And I want to talk to you today about many of those levels. We won't get to all of them. But because it's not that I agree with every single thing that you write, but every single thing that you write is interesting to me because I can't decide if you're really, I mean, you're so sarcastic sometimes. And I know that you're such a big-hearted.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  Guilty.

• 10:58Mike Rowe?

  Man of faith, but you're funny and you're sarcastic. And mostly you're just relentlessly optimistic. So let's start there as a writer who's also a lawyer. Or are you a lawyer who's also a writer? How do you even think of yourself, Jeff?

• 11:15Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  And that's how I think of myself. If you actually figured out how much time per week I put into blogging versus lawyering, it's probably more blogging.

• 11:39Mike Rowe?

  You have your own practice?

• 11:40Speaker 02

  I do.

• 11:41Mike Rowe?

  What's it called?

• 11:41Speaker 02

  Childers Law LLC in Gainesville, Florida. Prior to the pandemic, we are a boutique commercial litigation firm.

• 11:51Mike Rowe?

  What kind of cases typically?

• 11:52Speaker 02

  So it's all business cases. In Florida, there's a lot of land development. So a lot of land development related cases, developers who get in trouble with the bank or vice versa, things like that, contract disputes, but involving litigation. So I go to court.

• 12:11Mike Rowe?

  The riveting stuff.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  Well, I have ADHD, so I can't, I can't handle reading, you know, contracts forever. I gotta be in front of people making arguments.

• 12:20Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  It's the glue that holds society together. It's the way we resolve conflicts without violence. And, 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

• 13:08Mike Rowe?

  Superficial things?

• 13:09Speaker 02

  Their superficial things, right. And so, but not to say that money's important to people. I mean, they get pretty exercised about it.

• 13:17Mike Rowe?

  Well, superficiality is only a, a concept in a relative world. When you compare it, as you just did, to death and calamity and truly mortal stakes, then right. But if there's nothing else going on in your world and your entire business is really hanging by a thread on the ruling of a judge you don't really know, and you've put all your faith and all your hope and a fair amount of money in a guy like you to make your case, I'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, is faith the right word?

• 14:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, because you don't have any control. You don't know. All you know is what your lawyer tells you. Your lawyer tells you you have a good case or a bad case. What are you 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.

• 14:24Mike Rowe?

  Forgive me for hopping around, but isn't that sort of the state of play right now? If you try and distill the cause of so much collective angst, isn't it because we've put ourselves in a world where the experts around us don't agree? It's like the wisdom of a second opinion medically anyway is time immemorial. And in law, I would oppose. But the third opinion and the fourth and then the fifth, none of them seem to agree. It feels to me like these last five years, as much as anything else, has been an experiment of living with a front row seat to the demise of the expert class.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. I mean, I rag on experts all the time, as you know, having read Coffee and Covid. And I was prepared for that because as a litigating lawyer, my cases often involve experts. Right? So you got some kind of land dispute and there's an environmental problem. So the county hires an environmental expert and I hire an environmental expert. And guess what the two experts always do?

• 15:32Mike Rowe?

  Disagree.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  They disagree. Now, which one's right? Mine is right, of course. But the truth is that and every lawyer knows this and every judge knows this. The experts will say what you pay them to say. That's how it works. And this is really important. In our legal system, who makes the decision at the end of the case?

• 15:56Mike Rowe?

  The jury.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  The jury does. And is the jury an expert?

• 16:02Mike Rowe?

  No. They're our peers, God help us.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  They're just some random.

• 16:06Mike Rowe?

  That guy, we'll get him.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  The unemployed guy, the student, you know, the stay at home mom. Those are the people who make the decision. And that was the way the founders built our legal structure because we can't trust experts. They're paid mouthpieces. And I don't care. And, you know, we're so far along this, uh, this railway line now away from where we were before the pandemic, which is this sort of consensus that the experts knew what they were doing. Right? So we're like, well, the CDC says it says you have to cut up a T-shirt and wrap it around your head.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  So, you know, obviously that must be true because they're the experts, right? So.

• 16:56Mike Rowe?

  Well, don't you think our credulity, our skepticism diminishes? There's probably some formula that articulates this better than I can, but the more frightened we are, the more venerated our experts become. The more desperate we are for a smooth, sure, steady, believable, consistent voice.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  Only when you're outsourcing because you're afraid and you're afraid to make a move. So you'd rather turn over the decision making to somebody else. And that's always a mistake. Right? Because whoever you're turning the decision making over never has your incentives. And I don't care if that's your lawyer. You should never delegate your whole lawsuit to your lawyer. You should never turn your whole, uh, medical treatment over to your doctor.

• 17:53Mike Rowe?

  What I'm getting at Jeff is it's well and good, I think, for the average person to look around and find elected officials and experts who they agree with and who they admire. But Anthony Fauci was turned into a saint. People had his edifice in their front lawn. They had him in their window. Literally, they beatified him. It couldn't have just been because they agreed with him. It must have been because they were scared right out of their minds and they were looking for something messianic, almost. A savior, really. Let's just get to it. You're a lawyer, doing his thing, property disputes and whatever. Covid

• 18:38Mike Rowe?

  happens and suddenly you're filing a whole different kind of suit and you're entering a whole different life. And it almost beggars belief, but if you're not sick of telling the story, how exactly did this happen?

• 18:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so picking up where we left off, I left the safe world of just fighting about money with relatively low stakes. People don't like to lose money, but again, it's not like your child died or something. And then I transitioned into this extremely high stakes world. It happened in an instant, in late March. So the declaration of emergency was on March 11, 2020. It's the day after my birthday, so it's easy to remember. By the end of March, my county, Alachua County in Florida, which is one of the bluest counties in the state.

• 19:37Mike Rowe?

  It's up north.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  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 Alachua County decided a mask mandate.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  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. And it was the first county commission meeting I had ever seen. I had no idea how bad it was. It's like, you know, the sausage, it's worse than the sausage making. I always kind of, 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. I'm being generous. And so they debated

• 20:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 20:49Mike Rowe?

  Mm hmm.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  And the only reason they didn't is because the county attorney told them that there'd be no way to have

• 20:56Mike Rowe?

  Enforce it.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  police spot check because you need probable cause to enter.

• 20:59Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 21:00Speaker 02

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

• 21:22Mike Rowe?

  Couple of weeks ago, on this very podcast, I talked with Brooke Rollins, our Secretary of Agriculture, about the incredibly complicated business of delivering affordable beef to our citizens without disadvantaging American ranchers. We also discussed the very controversial decision to import 300,000 metric tons of ground beef from various foreign countries, and the maddening policy that allows meat packers to label imported meat as a product of the USA. Well, shortly after that conversation, one of my sponsors, Good Ranchers, reported an unusually high level of interest in their product. And this is not surprising.

• 22:07Mike Rowe?

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• 22:52Mike Rowe?

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• 23:12Mike Rowe?

  Can you describe the meeting a little bit so people understand? The, the setting, the number of people? How many are on this committee? And I assume it was open to the public? Was it crowded?

• 23:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 23:36Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  You couldn't see anybody's face. You know, it was all like this and them talking. One of the five county commissioners crocheted her own face mask.

• 23:49Mike Rowe?

  Crocheted, good.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  Crocheted.

• 23:50Mike Rowe?

  N95, great.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  Yes, back, you know, when we were wearing the, you know, those neck things that you pull up over your face and all that kind of stuff, so.

• 24:00Mike Rowe?

  What do they call those things? Like balaclavas or something? Yeah, it's like a, like a kerchief and you would just pull it up over your face, like the old bank robbers wore in the Wild West, right? Like that, that'll save you. Anyway, go ahead.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  So the upshot is that they wind up passing it. And so we got the first indoor-outdoor mask mandate in Florida.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  And I looked at Michelle and said, there's no way that's constitutional. They can't tell us what to wear. I mean, imagine if they said, we all have to wear a uniform walking around the county. How is this possibly constitutional? Now, mind you, I do commercial litigation, not con law. The last time I had any constitutional law experience was in law school first semester. It's been that long. So I think the same day I wrote my demand letter to the county.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  And I sent them a seven day demand to drop the mask mandate, which of course they ignored.

• 25:01Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, I mean, what do you, what do you mean you demand? How does that, who cares? Jeff Childers has thought it over and he has some demands now. So this is like, how does that work?

• 25:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, you know, this is one of those privileges of being a lawyer, I guess, is you can throw demand letters around everywhere. Govern yourself accordingly.

• 25:19Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Did you insist? I insist that my demand be, it wouldn't have mattered.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  It's a legal threat. It's basically if you don't do it, I'm going to sue you. And that's what I told them. And so I immediately got to work trying to find a plaintiff because I needed to represent, a client to represent. And I had this great guy who runs a nursery, you know, nice, solid, blue collar, hands work. And he's like the way out here on the libertarian scale. And I called him up and I was like, Justin, you know, hey, did you hear about this mask mandate? Yeah. Like, would you be my plaintiff if I sue the county? Hell, yeah, he said. So we were off and running. Now, he didn't realize that he'd be getting death threats and people picketing his nursery

• 26:06Speaker 02

  and all of that kind of stuff, which happened later.

• 26:11Speaker 02

  And so I sued at the peak of mask hysteria. I sued the county over the mask mandate. I went there.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  And never having done any constitutional law before and never having sued a government entity before, I didn't even know like, you know, the basic mechanics, like where do you serve the lawsuit? Yeah. Do you slide it in that little slot at the library where you put the books? I mean. Insert lawsuit here. Especially with the county locked down. I mean, you couldn't get into a county office. Where am I supposed to send the process server? Right. Anyway, so I'm calling my network of peers and, you know, when the lawyers have this thing called the bar and that's like, you know, we have the big bar and you have the local bar and you have even like little commercial litigation bars and stuff.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  So I've got contacts and mentors, you know, lawyers older than me who were smarter and more experienced and that kind of thing. And I'm calling them up and every one of them said the same thing. Now, it's a blue county, so these are, you know, not conservatives. Now, I wasn't really political to start. That shocks a lot of people reading the blog. I probably didn't vote, but every other presidential election. So I'm calling my contacts in the local bar and they all said, Jeff, why are you throwing your career away over this? I said, the mask mandate is temporary.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  It's only going to last a few weeks and then this thing's going to be over and, you know, you're going to get a reputation and there could be bar implications. Mm hmm. 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. Mm hmm. Right? And, and there really is nothing lower in our society than a disbarred lawyer. I mean, really, if you think about it. Mm hmm. That's like somebody that you would be crazy to hire. Right? You don't even need to know the circumstances of the poor guy. He just sued the county over the mask mandate. That's all he did. No, it doesn't matter. He's a disbarred lawyer. Right. Right?

• 28:24Speaker 02

  So we, you know, obviously lawyers are already trained in CYA and so we, most of us, do everything we can to stay far away from any kind of conduct that could potentially be turned against you to disbar you. So that was a very serious issue that I had to think about carefully. Not to belabor it, but people should understand, even, I mean.

• 28:45Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  A clearance issue.

• 28:55Mike Rowe?

  Could be clearance, could be any number of things. To get these guys to affirmatively own an opinion, really, truly would take an act of Congress. They've got no problem generating the invoice, but when it comes right down to saying, based on this, don't do it, or based on this, do it, you never get that. People should understand that level of clarity, that kind of legal clarity is very rare, you know? So what you wind up paying for typically is just a lot of ambiguity, in my experience.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  I call them two-handed lawyers. On the one hand, but on the other hand, right? And, and so when I work for my clients in, 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?

• 29:45Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  Here's the ambiguity, here's the gray area right here, but here's the risk-reward matrix.

• 29:52Mike Rowe?

  Here's your exposure.

• 29:53Speaker 02

  And so I would, if I were you, this is what I would do. Now you can take that and make your own decision.

• 29:59Mike Rowe?

  I just pointed out because the irony is delicious. Now here you are on the other side of this, trying to make sense of the risk-reward matrix, and your friends, your legal peers are telling you this is an act of self-sabotage. What's Michelle thinking? Like, what, like your non-lawyer friends who are around you, were they worried for you?

• 30:21Speaker 02

  Well, I think Michelle was more fired up than I was. I mean, you know, I, as I recall, I don't know, maybe she'll tell me different, but as I recall, she was saying, you've got to do something about this. So I had, uh.

• 30:34Mike Rowe?

  There's your client.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 30:43Mike Rowe?

  Okay. So it's late 2020 and you decide to go to the mattresses. You've got your client, you file it, you serve it, and you're off to the races. What next?

• 30:52Speaker 02

  Makes local media, crazy lawyer, sue's county over mask mandate. We start getting calls.

• 31:03Speaker 02

  Usually the drunk dialers and the, you know, leaving the voicemails on the firms.

• 31:07Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 31:08Speaker 02

  Voicemail system in the middle of the night.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  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.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  I had to make some strategic decisions and I wound up making really good ones. I don't know, how much detail do you want?

• 31:42Mike Rowe?

  Well, I'm curious, like, what was your argument around the idea that this is an emergency? We're being forced to wear these things on our faces. And is it a constitutional emergency? I get that it's a clear violation of the Constitution. I mean, we can see that, I think, pretty clearly today. But what were the stakes? Like, the practical stakes in your mind of being compelled to do this?

• 32:08Speaker 02

  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.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Now, the Weimar Constitution in 1930s Germany had an emergency clause that allowed you to go extra constitutionally in emergencies, and that's what Hitler used to basically remake the government in his own image.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  We don't have that. And in fact, as I argued, the Constitution was drafted in an emergency. They could have put emergency language in there if they wanted to. They didn't want it. So, the government can't just start making stuff up to address some urgent need of a pandemic, or a nuclear war, or a nuclear meltdown, or you name it. You know, all these hobgoblins that they always trot out, you know, well, what if? What if there was a UFO invasion?

• 33:10Speaker 02

  Well, fine, but that's not in the Constitution. So, you're acting extra constitutionally. Now, there's Supreme Court doctrines that allow government to do things that are in the gray area, but they have to meet super high standards.

• 33:29Speaker 02

  And none of those standards could be met by the mask mandate. For one thing, there was, you know, all the evidence that I found when I searched. Now, this is the first time I'd ever even searched PubMed, which is the online database where they put the studies, the scientific studies and the medical studies and stuff. I didn't even know it existed. But there I am, you know, up late at night, searching PubMed for studies about masks. And there's tons of them. They've been studying this for decades because of flu in hospitals. So they want to, you know, protect healthcare workers from passing sicknesses around that patients bring in. They want to protect other patients from, you know, a doctor goes into the flu room

• 34:13Speaker 02

  and then comes into your operating theater and they want to protect you from, you know, getting the flu. So they, they study all kinds of stuff. And they've studied masks and every one of those studies found that it didn't stop transmission of flu.

• 34:26Mike Rowe?

  So, okay, go ahead.

• 34:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I mean, you can imagine what I'm thinking, right? As I'm pulling this stuff up and what I've got, you know, on the other hand, I've got this lady who crocheted her own mask, who made the decision for the rest of us that we have to, right? And, and so I'm studying, you know, all this science and I haven't had science since college and, you know, the flu virus is like 300 times bigger or maybe even more than the COVID virus particle.

• 34:55Mike Rowe?

  And that can pass through.

• 34:57Speaker 02

  Right. So, you know, the, and I was calling OSHA engineers, right? Who, 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.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  And you probably remember all those videos that were going around social media with people like blowing their cigarette smoke through their mask.

• 35:28Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  Stuff like that. So it was obvious if you would just stop and look at it.

• 35:39Mike Rowe?

  Ever since Chapter started advertising on this podcast, I've been getting letters and emails from satisfied customers all over the country. Last week, I got one from Joseph, a retired veterinarian in Texas, who just learned his Medicare plan was shutting down. I can't tell you Joseph's last name because his medical history is complicated and personal, but his situation is not uncommon at all. Given his medical history, Joseph was unable to find a local provider that would include the doctors he'd come to rely on. Happily, Joseph listens to this podcast, and Joseph heard me talking about Chapter just last week. And Chapter exists for one reason:

• 36:21Mike Rowe?

  to help people on Medicare find the plan that's right for them. It's a free service. Anyhow, Joseph called Chapter. He connected with an advisor named Heidi. And Heidi caught something that most people miss because his current plan was about to close. Joseph had a limited window to continue with his current coverage through a new plan without any additional medical underwriting. In other words, Heidi found a way to get Joseph the coverage he needed with the doctors he preferred. Then she found great coverage for his wife, too. Moral of the story? Medicare plans are constantly evolving. You are too. Call Chapter. Make sure you're on the best plan for you.

• 37:05Mike Rowe?

  Also, people who switch plans after calling Chapter save an average of $1,100 a year. 804-Chapter. That's the number. Call it today. It's free. Whole thing takes about 20 minutes. 804-Chapter.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  If you would just, you know, put aside your fear and hysteria and everything and just look at the data and the evidence, it was obvious that the stupid things didn't even work. Which is bad enough, but then ordering everybody to do it is like ordering people to walk on their hands. I mean, it's totally irrational.

• 37:44Speaker 02

  So the more I got into the details of masking, the worse it got. And the more impassioned I became about, you know, this has to stop. And meanwhile, just in those few weeks before my hearing, the other lawsuits, the 40 other lawsuits were failing one by one.

• 38:04Mike Rowe?

  And these were also in Florida or all over?

• 38:06Speaker 02

  Just in Florida, just in Florida, yeah. And just in that three week period. And part of the reason is because the lawyers like me who like, and I don't want to say real lawyers, that are like litigate, regular litigating lawyers with real litigating practices, were not bringing these suits for the same reason. You know, I'm just stubborn or bullheaded and I didn't listen to my peers. But no big law firms got into it. Right? The initial resistance was all small firms like mine. And at the very, very beginning, it was firms that didn't have anything to lose. And so those were lawyers that usually drafted wills and did things like this.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  And they were totally unprepared for dealing with government lawyers. And they were losing. And of course, the judges were awful. And by the way, I strategically, I knew I was going to lose at 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 constitutionalists to that court. And I had, that's where I am. I'm in the first DCA. So that's where I wanted to go. Judges at the circuit level are elected.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  I just knew, even if I got one of the good ones in my area, they still are going to be thinking about the reelection campaign.

• 39:42Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 39:43Speaker 02

  So I always planned for the appeal. I designed my whole case for, to appeal to the first DCA.

• 39:51Mike Rowe?

  Because you knew you were going to lose.

• 39:52Speaker 02

  I knew I was going to lose at the, at the trial court. And she gave me one hour. And by the way, I did get one of the good judges. Judge, you're one of the good ones. And still, she didn't say a word, except for procedural things. Go ahead, Mr. Childers. Go ahead, you know, city attorney. And then at the end, she said, well, I'm ruling against you. I'm dismissing your case, Childers. I'll write an opinion as quickly as possible.

• 40:19Speaker 02

  That was it. Which again, and it was on Zoom, which might have been the first Zoom hearing as a lawyer I've ever done, not to be there in person and to be able to read body language and just get that interaction. I mean, it was totally alien. And half the people on the Zoom were wearing masks. So you can't even see their facial expressions or anything.

• 40:40Speaker 02

  So anyway, we took it up on appeal. And the following April, I had a favorable decision. And I won the only appellate level decision in the entire country, finding that mandatory masking is unconstitutional.

• 40:54Mike Rowe?

  In the whole country?

• 40:56Speaker 02

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

• 41:01Mike Rowe?

  So what happened as a result of that ruling?

• 41:04Speaker 02

  Everywhere inside, 33 counties in Florida out of 67, all dropped their mask mandates. Schools, municipalities, whatever.

• 41:17Mike Rowe?

  2021 at this point?

• 41:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, early 2021. So we were on the front wave. Now, of course, they all did it voluntarily and by their own decision. And the emergency has receded to the point and you know, that kind of thing.

• 41:30Mike Rowe?

  But all in the wake of that.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  Of that decision.

• 41:33Mike Rowe?

  Ruling.

• 41:34Speaker 02

  And.

• 41:36Speaker 02

  I know for a fact there were bigger players involved behind my county that were helping them. The quality of their lawyer and when we got to the appellate level shot up.

• 41:45Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  Like a rocket.

• 41:47Mike Rowe?

  Well, they, I mean, the stakes are enormous. It's another kind of contagion. That kind of decision.

• 41:52Speaker 02

  They had to stop it no matter what. And then here's the funny thing. They didn't appeal me to the state Supreme Court. I was praying, Mike, that they would appeal me to, because if I could have got to the state Supreme Court and if the state Supreme Court had affirmed that, the whole state of Florida would have been free.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  And they stopped. They took their licks in the first DCA. They didn't try to overturn me at the Florida Supreme Court and they just stuck.

• 42:18Mike Rowe?

  Let me ask you something. Do you?

• 42:22Mike Rowe?

  Put, as we look at the other side. To what degree do you think? And to what percentage do you think the people who were firmly in favor of these mandates meant well? In other words, how much good faith do you believe the other side had? Because I mean, to this day, I talk to people who shrug and say, look, Mike, why are you making trouble on your podcast? Why are you bringing in Gavin DeBecker and Del Bigtree? Why are you talking to Jeff Childers? It's like, it's, it's almost impolite because the way they remember it, the way they heard it,

• 43:05Mike Rowe?

  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?

• 43:20Speaker 02

  Let me answer by way of a story.

• 43:24Speaker 02

  So during that period of three weeks before my hearing.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  I'm an experienced litigation lawyer and I knew I had a lot of tools like discovery available to me and I can get limited discovery before an emergency hearing like that. So I asked to depose the county's main expert, who was the head of the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida. So, super credentialed expert guy who flies all over the world and, you know, does all this stuff. He just happens to be in my little town of Gainesville, Florida, because that's where the University of Florida is. He also just was, you know, the one who always showed up at school board hearing to explain why masking the kids, two-year-olds, is necessary to, you know, save the universe or whatever.

• 44:16Speaker 02

  And so, anyway, I arranged to take his deposition. And they didn't want, obviously, they did not want to produce him, but it was still early and my judge, like I said, I got a good judge and they knew the judge was going to let me do it because they, 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 the, there was this one question that I think answers so much of what you're asking. And so, you know, he's doing a good job. He's, you know, he knows how to talk. He's good at tap dancing.

• 45:00Speaker 02

  I'm asking him probing questions about the mask and he's giving me acronyms and, you know, 10-syllable words and, you know, all that kind of stuff. And so I get to this point I've been waiting for, for a while in my deposition outline and I'm like, "Well, Doc, are you an independent researcher? That is, do you do your own research?" Yes. You don't just track behind anybody else and adopt their position, do you? You make up your own mind based on your own research, your own find? Oh, yes, yes. I said, what about like a big agency like the CDC? Well, if the CDC says it, is that you become your position? Or do you make up your own mind?

• 45:44Speaker 02

  No, I make up my own mind, he says. Do my own research. So even if the CDC was wrong, you would then come out and say, I disagree with the CDC. Oh, yes, of course I would. Like, all right, give me an example of a time in your career that you disagreed with the CDC. And it was dead air. We went around and around after that, and he couldn't come up with any examples of ever disagreeing with the CDC. And that's the problem. I'm not saying that he's adopting the CDC's position universally in bad faith.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  He's probably doing it out of self-survival. He didn't get to be the head of the Emerging Pathogens Institute by not playing politics. He knows how it works. And he likes that job. And he wants to keep that job. So there's a bigger problem, right? There is an institutional architecture that forces these experts down certain channels, whether they want to or not.

• 46:59Mike Rowe?

  It discourages skepticism.

• 47:02Speaker 02

  It absolutely discourages skepticism, but it also makes them even go further and adopt a position that they might disagree with. And they have to maintain a kind of cognitive dissonance to do it. Right? I don't believe that they secretly, and sometimes they probably do have doubts, but, you know, they convince themselves that, you know, well, of course, masking is, you know, cut up T-shirts is, makes scientific sense. Right? And then, oh, later the CDC says, well, it's gotta be a, you know, a surgical mask. And then, boop, they just, you know, reprogram. And suddenly, you know, it's like they never said that about the T-shirts. You know, they've always known it was surgical masks, but, you know, they were hard to get in the early pandemic. So that's why we went with the T-shirts, it was better than nothing.

• 47:47Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, you can't say something is critical to your survival if it's not available.

• 47:53Mike Rowe?

  I mean, you were just, that's time for a riot, you know, you're gonna die if you don't have it. And you can't have it. All right. So, I mean, gosh, I think that makes a lot of sense. Like, the same pressure that you were feeling as an attorney to not push this forward. It mutates, right? Surely, a doctor would feel the same pressure, right? Not to blow his own career up by running afoul of the governing authority. You know, these appeals to authority, they're everywhere, and they're almost always acronyms, it seems. But by the time it trickles down to my neighbors, and to my friends, and to people who don't have professional skin in the game, but who do believe that the stakes are mortal, you know?

• 48:38Mike Rowe?

  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 howl like wolves. They would do this every night at 8 o'clock in solidarity with and support for healthcare workers. And at that time.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 49:05Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, I mean, it was a little weird, but truly, that whole first two weeks.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  How does howling help healthcare workers?

• 49:11Mike Rowe?

  Well, this is, see, it's science, Jeff, you know? Years of science has proven.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  I mean, I think, really, it's community, do you know what I mean? Just the idea that you're banding together with other people, cheering on. It's just because we were all separated and not communicating.

• 49:28Mike Rowe?

  It was a kind of connective tissue, like a reminder that, okay, you can't see people.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  Some social engagement that you weren't getting anywhere else.

• 49:36Mike Rowe?

  Right. And oddly, and again, this window wasn't open a long time, but there was this moment where you're like, you know what? It's scary, we're all in it, and this simple expression of gratitude toward first responders is something that anybody can get behind for a period.

• 50:03Mike Rowe?

  I'd like to talk about initiative if I could for just a moment. Here at MicroWorks, we value it a great deal. In fact, it's the most important quality we look for in our work ethic scholarship applicants. But everybody wants it. I'm talking about the quality in a lift driver that inspires him or her to carry your bags to the door without even asking, or the grocery clerk who shows you where an item is on the shelves, or a doctor who personally calls you to explain your test results. If you're hiring, you want to encourage initiative because it's invaluable. And ZipRecruiter has a way to allow a candidate to tell you in their own words why they're interested in your job. Not just why they're qualified, but why they're interested.

• 50:48Mike Rowe?

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• 51:33Mike Rowe?

  Try it free. But the curve didn't flatten and two weeks went to two months. And then the court cases built up and suddenly Chuck and I are just walking around this quiet little bucolic neighborhood. We're not in the city or anything. It's a suburb. Walking the dog and this guy on the other side of the street, he's probably in his early 70s.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:58Mike Rowe?

  He had at least one mask on and he looked at us. We're on the other side of the street. We're outside. We didn't have masks. We're just walking and talking. Chuck, give me your best imitation of what we heard there.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  Shouldn't you be wearing a mask?

• 52:10Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. He was shaking.

• 52:13Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, he was shaking. And this is why I was asking before. Like, it's like...

• 52:19Mike Rowe?

  That guy, I know who that guy is. You know, I'd seen him around. And I don't want to think badly of him. He's my neighbor. And the reason I'm able to not think badly of him is because I don't think about how wrong he was, or how aggressive he was. I think about how scared he was. He was scared, man. And so many people were scared. And I think the reason I'll get blowback for the conversation we're having now, most of it's going to be from people who say, don't you remember how frightening it was? And I'll say, yeah, I do remember it. But just because you're scared doesn't mean you can wrap a T-shirt around your face and say, science.

• 53:00Mike Rowe?

  Maybe as a child, you know, who's putting his faith in, you know, the fat man down the chimney, or the Easter bunny, or some other thing. But we're adults, and the stakes are awfully high. And, you know, we were being told something. It's just so fascinating. Most of us bought it. Most of us took a deep breath and said, okay, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna rock the boat. You didn't. That makes you weird and interesting.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  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 gonna do, right? I mean, you've got the president coming on TV every day, giving us the latest brief, they're shutting down air travel to all these different countries, they're keeping the country under lockdown, you're watching videos on YouTube with the, you know, Chinese people in the white spacesuits spraying stuff in the air. And all of that, and you're trying to decide, okay, what should I do to live through this? To survive? It was a survival thing.

• 54:15Mike Rowe?

  And not kill my mom and dad, right? Not kill my grandparents.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  Don't kill grandma.

• 54:20Mike Rowe?

  Once the conversation became about how to protect the people around you, and not yourself, that's when things tipped, I think, for a lot of people. I don't know. Okay, so you win the case, thirty-some counties rescind the mandate. At what point do you sit down and start writing?

• 54:43Speaker 02

  So it all kind of happened at the same time because remember that county commission meeting I was just telling you about?

• 54:52Mike Rowe?

  The Star Chamber, I like to think of it as.

• 54:53Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh. It's indescribable. The hair on my arms is standing up right now thinking about that just because of how, I mean, it was like something out of Monty Python. That's what it was like. I mean, you just.

• 55:07Mike Rowe?

  Meets George Orwell.

• 55:08Speaker 02

  Yes. You know, bizarre and kind of dangerous. But one of the evidence that they used was one of the county commissioners who was a failed real estate broker before he went into politics, local politics, right? And then that was his career for the rest of his adult life. During that meeting, as evidence to support the indoor-outdoor mask mandate, he held up a little scrap of paper with writing all over it, looked like a cocktail napkin or something. And he says, I've been doing my own calculations. This guy should have been nowhere near a calculation.

• 55:47Mike Rowe?

  But he's doing his own.

• 55:50Speaker 02

  He did his own.

• 55:51Mike Rowe?

  Great.

• 55:51Speaker 02

  That's when I knew we were really in trouble. And he said, you know, at the rate, and remember how, you know, I don't know if they did it here, but our county had a dashboard, a COVID dashboard.

• 56:01Mike Rowe?

  Yes.

• 56:01Speaker 02

  And every day they would update the dashboard and the new numbers and, you know, number hospitalizations and cases and blah, blah, blah. And they're making everybody test and the test results and, you know, I did my own calculations. And according to my calculations, he said, the cases are doubling every two days, which means by the end of this month, the entire county will be infected.

• 56:28Mike Rowe?

  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, who was this guy doing his own calculations? Like, not only his name, but like.

• 56:49Speaker 02

  The county commissioner.

• 56:50Mike Rowe?

  He's the, oh, my God.

• 56:54Speaker 02

  Who is one of the five people making the, and he's trying to convince the others to be afraid.

• 56:59Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 57:00Speaker 02

  Because if they don't do something, it's gonna wipe out the county. It'll just be like a smoking crater. Where Alachua County, probably a sinkhole. That's what Alachua means sinkhole in the Native Indian. It's not very flattering, but a smoking crater, let's go with crater. A smoking crater where the county used to be unless they passed this. And the mask mandate was gonna save us.

• 57:21Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 57:22Speaker 02

  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.

• 57:32Mike Rowe?

  Mm hmm.

• 57:33Speaker 02

  You know, they want me to work hard, so they give me the good polished up version of what happened.

• 57:38Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 57:38Speaker 02

  So I can do a good job telling their side of the story. So I never take anybody's word for it. No, no good lawyer does. I, let me see the numbers.

• 57:51Speaker 02

  So I pull 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, locked down, downloading the CSV file into Excel and, you know, putting the numbers in there and looking at it and it, it would no way were the, the cases doubling every two days. I mean, only if you took like the first three or four days. So like on day one, there was two and on day two, there was four, you know? Cause they were out there beating the bushes to find the cases, right? But then it leveled off.

• 58:26Speaker 02

  So when I finished, I had this little spreadsheet that I had made for myself and I'm like, well, damn it. I need to do something with this. I mean, I gotta show it to someone, but I'm locked down.

• 58:39Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 58:39Speaker 02

  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 them.

• 58:49Mike Rowe?

  Can't get rid of it, no.

• 58:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I just posted up on my Facebook and I think at that time I had like 200 accidental friends, you know, people who had friended me for, I mean, I never posted anything there. And I miracle of miracles, like 10 or 12 people responded and they're like, oh, that's very interesting. So I decided for purposes of my litigation and because, you know, some people seem to be interested in this, I would keep my little spreadsheet updated. So I updated my spreadsheet every day and I would post it on the Facebook. And then I started putting some little comments, like, well, if you look, if you notice this number is lower than it was. And if you divide that by this number, it's actually going down and that's good.

• 59:34Speaker 02

  That kind of thing. And again, you know, I'm just a hopeless optimist. So I was finding it looked a lot like the flu to me. This looked exactly like a seasonal flu, maybe a bad flu, but within the 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.

• 59:56Mike Rowe?

  No, they hated that.

• 59:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, they hated that. So then I started like, well, then I realized something. I realized that the market for bad news at that time was completely saturated. And there was no market for good news. So I decided I'm just going to gather up all the good news that comes like the diamond princess. They figured out that, you know, it wasn't as bad as they originally thought.

• 1:00:25Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  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, hey, so we, you know, this is new. And I only use because remember now on the in those days, I don't know if you ever got like thrown in Facebook jail or Twitter jail or whatever, right? So, you know, one wrong word in your post and that could be it. You know, they'd lock you down for a week or a month, maybe even cancel your account.

• 1:01:00Mike Rowe?

  I sold masks around the same time to raise money for the foundation. The masks said safety third, which was an ongoing bit of shorthand from the Dirty Jobs days that attempted to remind people that. Safety first came with all kinds of unintended consequences. And, oh, it was a big riff. I wrote a bunch about it. I thought it was clever. We raised like a hundred thousand dollars for the foundation, but Facebook hated that. It's hated that. Yeah. What do you mean, safety third? Like, well, where would you put it? And they're like, well, it's first. And that opened up this whole conversation.

• 1:01:41Mike Rowe?

  Around the same time Cuomo was saying, Andrew, you'll remember this. No measure, no matter how draconian can be deemed excessive if it saves a single life.

• 1:01:54Speaker 02

  Just one life.

• 1:01:56Mike Rowe?

  And that's when I, I, I'm not a lawyer or a doctor, but I can be a jagged little pill. And 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, and to nod in agreement.

• 1:02:16Speaker 02

  It's demonstrably false.

• 1:02:18Mike Rowe?

  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 affront to common sense and the other is just scientific lampooning, you know? But I felt like we were surrounded, like we were being double dog dared to question. And I honestly feel like we've been living in a, a version of that ever since. You can fill in the topic, right? You know, the border is secure. Never mind the images of thousands coming over it. You know, just pick your topic. And so that's really why I called you.

• 1:03:01Mike Rowe?

  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 emperor's, you know, got no clothes lens at all of these different things. And yet, it's always optimistic.

• 1:03:42Mike Rowe?

  And that, that's a heck of a thing.

• 1:03:44Speaker 02

  And so that is just what I wrote about this morning.

• 1:03:47Mike Rowe?

  Yep.

• 1:03:49Speaker 02

  I was optimistic at every stage. And by the way, just to finish that thought, I, to get around the censors, I only sourced the mainstream papers. I quote the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal. If a study's published, I find it in one of those outlets and I use their story. Because Facebook can't cancel me for citing the New York Times. But I would write it in a sarcastic way that was open to two interpretations. Right? You could read it non sarcastically, but my people who read my stuff knew better.

• 1:04:28Mike Rowe?

  They know better.

• 1:04:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then when it got to.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  That's today's.

• 1:04:33Mike Rowe?

  This is great.

• 1:04:34Speaker 02

  When it got to the point where it was becoming, you know, I'm using the quoting the New York Times, and then I, I draw the logical conclusion, but I don't say it. I would just say, so.

• 1:04:46Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:46Speaker 02

  And that's where the so thing came from.

• 1:04:48Mike Rowe?

  Right. So, dot, dot, dot.

• 1:04:49Speaker 02

  So, so.

• 1:04:51Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:52Speaker 02

  So anyways, I was just doing, I was, there was no market for good news. Sorry, nobody was taking advantage of this demand. People were desperate for good news.

• 1:05:05Mike Rowe?

  Hungry.

• 1:05:06Speaker 02

  They were. They were starving for it. And listen, I, at first I, you know, was doing this because of the lawsuit and because, you know, I'm just stubborn and, you know, a little bit of a contrarian. And, but then I got my first of several direct messages on Facebook. And it was really sobering. And this one, it was long. And I, I mean, I get tons of them, right? And I don't usually, I'll just like skim it and see if there's something in there. But it gripped me right away because it's, you know, Dear Jeff, I know you don't know me, but I live in New York City. My mom died in the pandemic. I

• 1:05:48Speaker 02

  don't have anybody. I haven't been out of the apartment in six months. And I was thinking about ending it, but then somebody sent me your coffee and COVID. And it kind of made me feel a little bit better. So I'm gonna wait and see how things go.

• 1:06:08Speaker 02

  And like I said, I got, I don't know, probably two dozen like that over 2001 or 21 and 22.

• 1:06:15Mike Rowe?

  Which means there are hundreds more.

• 1:06:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, the ones that don't write, right?

• 1:06:19Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:20Speaker 02

  And then I realized that I was doing something that was more than just like messing with Facebook. You know what I mean? And more than just a method of self-expression in a time of pandemic. It was reaching people in a way that I hadn't even realized. And it was important. And in that category, now that's probably the most important one. I mean, I've never forgotten that. And I remember it to this day. I mean, I'm talking to people who are in all different places in their life. And I'm trying to bring them some hope.

• 1:06:59Mike Rowe?

  What if, say, five years ago, some big oil company offered a promotion that gave you a chance to lock in the price of gasoline at $2.50 a gallon for the rest of your life? Would you have taken that deal? Or what if a nationwide grocery store had given you an opportunity to lock in the price of ground beef at, say, $2 a pound for as long as you live? Would you have taken that deal? Yeah, me too. Unfortunately, those deals were never on the table, but this one is. Today, as in right now, for a very, very limited time, Pure Talk is offering every American the opportunity to purchase unlimited talk, text and data, along with a 30 gig

• 1:07:42Mike Rowe?

  hotspot, for just $29.95 a month for life. Not your phone's life, your life. No contracts, no commitments, just a very rare opportunity to lock into a ridiculously low rate for unlimited talk, text and data for the rest of your life. It's the unlimited data plan from Pure Talk, and it will not be around for long. $29.95 a month for as long as you live. Taxes and fees not included. Some restrictions do apply. See puretalk.com for details. Offer ends 11/15/26, so chop, chop.

• 1:08:26Mike Rowe?

  My buddy, a guy called Dave Hinman, sent me your column, late in 21, maybe, I don't know, 21 or 22, but his ray line simply said, "This guy's a lifeline." And it was a link, didn't tell me anything about it. I just clicked on it and, and read the first thing and laughed through most of it.

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:47Mike Rowe?

  Heavy stuff, but it was funny.

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  Right, adding the humor, sometimes I have to, listen, I'm honest, if there's bad news, and it's legit, I'm gonna deliver the bad news, but I'm gonna give it in with the most optimistic frame I can, and with some humor. So it's easier to swallow.

• 1:09:06Mike Rowe?

  How do you think about your audience, then? What I'm getting at is, I think there, this audience, for instance, is probably right of center, the majority, but there's a big number that's center or, or left of center. And the reason I, you know, try and stay mindful of that, is that it's, I can either evangelize, right, if I'm in a room where I know everybody agrees with me, I can talk one way. If I want to persuade, I have to talk another way, and if I want to do both, well, I, I'm still

• 1:09:45Mike Rowe?

  not quite sure how to do that. But, you know, sometimes you, I think, like I imagine a lawyer, might, like I ask questions, what's persuasive? Do you do that when you write? Are you trying to persuade, or are you trying to spread the good news?

• 1:10:04Speaker 02

  I'm thinking about, I've never said what I'm about to say out loud before. It's much bigger than persuasion. But you're right, a lawyer's job, especially a litigator, my job is to persuade people. I gotta persuade a jury, I gotta persuade a judge, that's my whole job. I mean, that's where the rubber hits the road. If I can't do that well, I'm not a good lawyer. You don't want me. And persuading judges is hard, because they always give you a hard time, and they play poker, so that you don't know what they're really thinking, and they try to mislead you about what they're thinking all the time. So it's especially challenging, and the jury... I love jury trial work. I don't get to do a lot because it's not a big thing in commercial litigation, but I do some and I love them because I've got the jury there,

• 1:10:48Speaker 02

  not a judge. And they're regular people I can talk to. But even that is different than like ordinary persuasion, like sales. It's not like sales because the jury sits there like statues. They have this idea in their head. They're not allowed to show preference or anything. They can't smile at one of my jokes or whatever. I'd get no feedback from them, whatever. So you're talking to a wall.

• 1:11:12Mike Rowe?

  Why is that, by the way? I mean, do you, could it be like that Heisenberg uncertainty principle? Like they've seen it. They've seen jurors for years on TV, just sitting there quietly?

• 1:11:22Speaker 02

  No, they're trying to do a good job and be unbiased. Every jury I've ever had, I can see they're really trying hard to be good jurors.

• 1:11:33Speaker 02

  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, this is what I haven't ever said before, because it's kind of like secret sauce in a way. But at some point, I reached a critical mass of readers. I don't remember what the number was, maybe 100,000. I don't know. But I noticed that if I put a really well-formed idea out there that was stated simply and just made sense,

• 1:12:13Speaker 02

  that it would propagate across social media. And then, because I'm, I understand what the newspapers are doing, I understand their propaganda, they're making arguments too. The newspaper is trying to persuade you. The New York Times is, they're not unbiased. They have a point of view and they want you to agree with them. And so everything, every word choice, every picture, where they put it on the page, the whole thing is designed to convince you to go along with their point of view. And so that, you know, especially during COVID, the propaganda was relentless. And I could see, because I get up first thing in the morning and I read all the papers, I see where they're going with their stupid

• 1:12:54Speaker 02

  narratives that they're coming up with, some new propaganda trick. And then my job is to come up with the antidote to that.

• 1:13:04Speaker 02

  And if I can do a good job of that, I have enough readers that it will squash their stupid narrative.

• 1:13:13Mike Rowe?

  Well, what like chaps your ass the worst? Is it? The existence of a narrative that you believe is genuinely fallacious? Or is it the absence of the truth?

• 1:13:31Speaker 02

  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

• 1:13:44Mike Rowe?

  I thought you said you were a lawyer.

• 1:13:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:13:55Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:56Speaker 02

  It's the ones that hurt people to like.

• 1:14:00Mike Rowe?

  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?

• 1:14:13Speaker 02

  23rd.

• 1:14:14Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 1:14:34Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:14:35Mike Rowe?

  Between this guy with three unpronounceable names in Mexico. What's his name? He's dead now.

• 1:14:42Speaker 02

  Uh, El Mencho.

• 1:14:43Mike Rowe?

  El Mencho. Right. Which basically is

• 1:14:46Speaker 02

  The tough guy.

• 1:14:46Mike Rowe?

  Tough guy. Okay. So tough guy's dead. Former cop, by the way.

• 1:14:50Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:14:50Mike Rowe?

  Who goes profoundly rotten.

• 1:14:52Speaker 02

  I called him the Walter White of Mexico.

• 1:14:55Mike Rowe?

  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?

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  Vacation Fed.

• 1:15:12Mike Rowe?

  That this guy's dead? I mean, you've got two of the biggest drug kingpins in the same hemisphere.

• 1:15:20Mike Rowe?

  Who's connecting the dots in the mainstream media?

• 1:15:23Speaker 02

  Their narrative was chaos in Mexico.

• 1:15:26Mike Rowe?

  Right, because that's what the picture showed.

• 1:15:29Speaker 02

  So you should be afraid and these poor tourists are, you know, they can't get out and they're, you know, watching burning Costco.

• 1:15:37Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:15:37Speaker 02

  And stuff like that, right? So you should be afraid too, because what if the chaos spreads and bah?

• 1:15:42Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:43Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:16:02Mike Rowe?

  Irrespective of your feelings on Trump, it wouldn't matter who's in the Oval. Those two things are massively related, those two.

• 1:16:14Speaker 02

  They're almost identical.

• 1:16:15Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 1:16:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:16:29Mike Rowe?

  Which your point was, that's what I meant by a lie of omission. It's not the false story that's screaming from the headlines. It's the true story that's nowhere to be found. And if you can find a way to present that, you know, with a touch of irony or a little bit of ryness or some optimism, that, I mean, good on you, man. Because purely as a mercenary and a capitalist, I look at that, that's the reverse commute. Nobody's doing that. Certainly, nobody's done it on the left. I've never seen anybody even attempt it, you know? But I, I don't think anybody's doing it anywhere. How many subscribers do you have now? How big has your little empire become?

• 1:17:12Speaker 02

  So formally on the list, I've got, I don't know, 230,000. But I know that it's red much beyond that.

• 1:17:21Mike Rowe?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:17:21Speaker 02

  There are people who like, don't want to put their name on it because they're

• 1:17:25Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:25Speaker 02

  in an important position somewhere and they don't want to get connected to me.

• 1:17:29Mike Rowe?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:17:29Speaker 02

  Because I'm just crazy Jeff.

• 1:17:30Mike Rowe?

  You're crazy, man. You're something. Yeah.

• 1:17:32Speaker 02

  Local, as they say.

• 1:17:38Speaker 02

  But I don't want, let's not leave that. The real narrative is it's not chaos. It's the opposite of chaos. The idea that it's chaos in Mexico is a lie. It's not a lie of omission. It's a lie of commission. They're lying on purpose. They're calling it chaos so that you won't understand that your government is finally working effectively for once in your stupid life. That this war on drugs that's been going on since we were a fetus is finally getting somewhere. And not just, you know, watching the fentanyl death chart get higher and higher and higher every year. It's not chaos. It's organization and plan. I mean, think about what an operation like that requires to pull off.

• 1:18:21Mike Rowe?

  Tell me, what do you think? Like, how did this happen? And but what's her name, the president? Shinal?

• 1:18:26Speaker 02

  Shinebaum.

• 1:18:28Mike Rowe?

  Shinebaum?

• 1:18:28Speaker 02

  Nice Mexican name.

• 1:18:29Mike Rowe?

  It's so classically Mexican, I can't believe it won't stick. I mean, when I've just-

• 1:18:34Speaker 02

  I just Chihuahua Shinebaums.

• 1:18:36Mike Rowe?

  Chihuahua Shinebaum? That's... You can't say that, dude. I mean, her own about-face in just the last couple of months.

• 1:18:50Speaker 02

  Since what happened?

• 1:18:52Mike Rowe?

  Since Maduro.

• 1:18:53Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:18:54Mike Rowe?

  Since, prior to Maduro, she was on the record as saying, "We will not cooperate with the US in any way. We're not..." I mean, there's just like a list of things that she went on the record.

• 1:19:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. Headline after headline.

• 1:19:10Mike Rowe?

  Right. Every one of them's upside down. Opposite, Phil.

• 1:19:15Speaker 02

  Right. And so even in the New York Times story this morning about chaos in Mexico, there's one sentence that says it was a joint operation with a new US military intelligence division.

• 1:19:30Speaker 02

  Nothing about how Sheinbaum suddenly cooperating with the US military.

• 1:19:35Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:36Speaker 02

  Right? Even though they reported on how she wouldn't cooperate with the military a dozen times or hundreds of times, they don't even mention it. They just leave it on the cutting room floor.

• 1:19:46Mike Rowe?

  Go back to, you were saying that you, when you hit a critical mass, 50,000, 80,000, 100,000. Talk more about that because were you saying that when you structure a story in a certain way, you can be assured that it's going to find traction? Or, I mean, you call these guys. It's basically the coffee and COVID army, which I love because I've, you know, in relative ways, I've used my following from time to time to help with a fundraiser, for instance.

• 1:20:20Speaker 02

  And you know, I do some of that, too.

• 1:20:21Mike Rowe?

  I saw it. I saw it.

• 1:20:22Speaker 02

  Multiplier effect, right?

• 1:20:24Mike Rowe?

  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's smaller than most people realize. You don't need millions and millions of people. You need thousands of engaged people who care. That's the name of the game. It's engagement, always engagement.

• 1:20:47Speaker 02

  I gotta keep them engaged.

• 1:20:49Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 1:21:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:15Mike Rowe?

  You know how many pages a book is with 2 million words? It's ridiculous. So I don't know. I don't want to reduce the impact of the content that you're churning out by just pointing to its extraordinary volume. But what are you doing here, man? How did you have time to fly across the country to do this? How do you have time to run a law practice? How do you, what is your life like right now?

• 1:21:43Speaker 02

  I'm so blessed and God has blessed me for following where he led me, you know, making that decision to ignore my peers advice and file the mask lawsuit and go out. Not, nobody was paying me.

• 1:22:02Mike Rowe?

  Don't you mean listen to your wife? Isn't that what you were trying to say, Jeff?

• 1:22:09Speaker 02

  Of course, especially since she's sitting in the room. That was like totally unfair. What a setup.

• 1:22:15Mike Rowe?

  Just sorry.

• 1:22:17Speaker 02

  But, so when I travel, I have to have an extra day on both sides. So I've gotta leave, you know, the day before I need to be there and then I have to wait till the next day because I gotta leave room for blogging.

• 1:22:34Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:22:35Speaker 02

  I gotta get the blog out.

• 1:22:36Mike Rowe?

  We're staying in the same hotel. Did you do the blog from the hotel?

• 1:22:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was down in the coffee shop this morning.

• 1:22:44Mike Rowe?

  That crazy bright coffee shop?

• 1:22:46Speaker 02

  Well, starting at six because they don't open until six o'clock. So they have a business center on the second floor.

• 1:22:52Mike Rowe?

  Oh, okay. Yeah.

• 1:22:54Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:23:02Mike Rowe?

  I mean, how much noise do you make on your computer?

• 1:23:04Speaker 02

  Well, what inevitably happens is I click the wrong link and it's some loud video.

• 1:23:10Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:23:11Speaker 02

  It doesn't take that happening many times before you learn your lesson.

• 1:23:14Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:23:15Speaker 02

  So, so that's how I organize my travel. The law firm, I, I already had a mature law practice. I have terrific staff. I mean, just like you could not ask for better assistance in paralegals and stuff that I have. I have a new partner.

• 1:23:38Speaker 02

  Who joined the firm last year and he's young and terrific and, you know, wanting to slay giants and stuff.

• 1:23:46Mike Rowe?

  So you're still doing it?

• 1:23:48Speaker 02

  So, oh yeah, I have a staff huddle twice a week. We've got cases. I'm suing the federal government in two. We're representing Maya Kowalski, who, there's a Netflix documentary, Take Care of Maya.

• 1:24:03Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:04Speaker 02

  A hospital, a horrible hospital kidnapping case. And, you know, so I, my staff's so good, I don't have to do the routine stuff, just, you know, come into court and make the big appearances and, and do some review and guidance and make decisions and stuff like that.

• 1:24:23Mike Rowe?

  Going back to this sort of what I thought might be a unifying theme, fraud. You know, I want to ask you about that because there seems to be a, I mean, in so many ways, the mask thing was fraudulent. So much of what's happening with immigration feels fraudulent. People are afraid that the AI is really ushering in an age of artificiality, which is a kind of fraud. We're beset.

• 1:24:54Speaker 02

  Deception, maybe?

• 1:24:55Mike Rowe?

  Sure. It's something that's not as advertised, not real, is something malignant. And now, of course, you know, we've got the actual literal mind-boggling financial fraud in Minneapolis. And, I don't know, I mean, as one of your loyal readers, that's what strikes me. I go to your blog because I think you, I think you get that.

• 1:25:22Speaker 02

  You just reminded me, don't let me forget, I want to talk to you about an investment opportunity. It's probably not the right time, but listen, hear me out.

• 1:25:32Mike Rowe?

  Okay.

• 1:25:33Speaker 02

  Daycare centers.

• 1:25:34Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, yeah. Day car centers, right next to the Leering facility.

• 1:25:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:25:40Mike Rowe?

  What did you think when that whole Minnesota thing broke? Were you surprised at the depth of it?

• 1:25:50Speaker 02

  Well, the scale of the fraud is mind boggling. I mean, I suspected there was fraud. I was pretty sure. But not that it could be 1.5 trillion dollars a year. Trillion with a T.

• 1:26:07Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:09Speaker 02

  Out of a four trillion dollar budget. It's like mostly fraud.

• 1:26:13Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:15Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:26:28Mike Rowe?

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• 1:27:10Mike Rowe?

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• 1:27:50Speaker 02

  And so, the Minnesota story was, was just masterfully done. The fraud had been going on for years.

• 1:27:58Mike Rowe?

  Right, but it was this kid, Nick.

• 1:28:01Speaker 02

  Nick Shirley, who, the month before, was at the White House on a panel about Antifa.

• 1:28:06Mike Rowe?

  So, I wonder, I mean, do you see parallels? I mean, it feels, if your thesis is right, and I'm, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but the mainstream media is not doing its job. Journalists are not doing their job. Painting with a broad brush, apologies, but when that happens...

• 1:28:22Speaker 02

  They're not doing journalism, they're doing their job.

• 1:28:24Mike Rowe?

  They're doing a job.

• 1:28:25Speaker 02

  Yes, it's a different job than you think.

• 1:28:27Mike Rowe?

  But, the vacuum that's been created, people will fill it. You're filling it. Citizen journalists fill it. The whole rise of, whether it's Schellenberger, or, you can go down the list of people that...

• 1:28:40Speaker 02

  Independent media.

• 1:28:41Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, they're filling a void, you know? How big is independent media gonna get?

• 1:28:50Speaker 02

  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?

• 1:29:07Mike Rowe?

  Well, you're true, I mean, you're using it as fodder, really.

• 1:29:11Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, it's, it's a gift that keeps on giving. Another example is, of how I can defuse these narratives, is that they'll run some story like about, I don't know, COVID origins, right? And, and they'll run some story about how it really, it's been disproven, that it couldn't have possibly been from the lab in Wuhan. And then I'll just look at that long-form magazine-style report that the New York Times, some exclusive that they did, and point out to my readers that every single citation is from an anonymous person.

• 1:29:46Mike Rowe?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:29:48Speaker 02

  It's 100% anonymous.

• 1:29:49Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:51Speaker 02

  Nobody was willing to go on record.

• 1:29:53Mike Rowe?

  That's a valuable service. A lot of what you do works as a kind of compendium for how to read critically. But that's why you call it's commentary and what is it commentary and I guess news and commentary, that's what Paul Harvey called it.

• 1:30:07Speaker 02

  Essential news and commentary.

• 1:30:08Mike Rowe?

  Oh, sorry, essential.

• 1:30:10Speaker 02

  Because there's a lot of news you don't need to know about. I'll tell you about the stuff you need to know about. You can, listen, anybody that wants can unplug and just read coffee and COVID because I promise I will let you know about anything important that happens.

• 1:30:23Mike Rowe?

  Have you been approached by mainstreamish entities, larger, more established entities at this point?

• 1:30:32Speaker 02

  Like to buy me or partner up or something?

• 1:30:35Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:36Speaker 02

  No, I think I'm, I'm too toxic. I do have a pretty good relationship with the Epic Times.

• 1:30:43Speaker 02

  So I would say I correspond with them and you know, they'll have me on for interviews and things and quote me in articles.

• 1:30:51Mike Rowe?

  How did they, uh, 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 Yekelik, whose new book is coming out next month. He'll be here in a couple of weeks, but how did they get on your radar?

• 1:31:09Speaker 02

  Well, let me just say first, I think Epic is great. Um, 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 Alachua County. She had moved out there with the family onto a farm to get away from it all. And somehow they recruited her because Epic's growing like crazy. And she had been involved in some of the, the local pushback stuff that

• 1:31:52Speaker 02

  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, um, that was my connection.

• 1:32:15Mike Rowe?

  Do you think we'll see more newspapers come back? Do you think there'll be some kind of revival? I mean, is there any hope for old media?

• 1:32:28Speaker 02

  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?

• 1:32:36Mike Rowe?

  Oh, yeah, half.

• 1:32:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, they had something like 13 climate reporters.

• 1:32:43Speaker 02

  All gone now. So there's a natural course correction and it's the, it's the cycle of business, right? So the cycle of business is that, you know, new scrappy new businesses come in and they get successful and they start building, they get bigger and bigger and then, you know, they do something wrong and they die. And they don't go away, though. This is the great thing about the cycle, is they get financially distressed and then they get bought by a scrappy new entrant and the wheel goes around again.

• 1:33:14Speaker 02

  And so that, I think, is what's going to happen with traditional media. We see CBS, right? Barry Weiss came in, she's...

• 1:33:23Mike Rowe?

  Poor Anderson had to leave 60 Minutes.

• 1:33:25Speaker 02

  I know, it was a tragedy.

• 1:33:26Mike Rowe?

  I'm missing.

• 1:33:29Speaker 02

  Cuomo. All these guys go into podcasting.

• 1:33:33Mike Rowe?

  It's happening so fast, Jeff. I mean, that's, that to me is, that and AI combined.

• 1:33:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, AI is a big one.

• 1:33:43Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, you've written a lot about it.

• 1:33:47Mike Rowe?

  How do you think about it in the future? I just talked to Tony Robbins about this. He's, he thinks, I mean, he thinks if we don't get in front of this vis a vis the meaning of work, then we're going to have a kind of crisis that we can't even really contemplate. I'm more of a mind that I feel like we're all gonna be forced real quick to constantly discern the artificial from the authentic. If in fact, we even care, that's the bigger question. Remember the scene in The Matrix where?

• 1:34:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, give me the steak.

• 1:34:25Mike Rowe?

  That's the, Jeff, that's the moment, more so than any of the Terminator stuff and more so than any other moment. That's the moment when the guy is out of the, out of his bubble, but knows, he knows it's fake, but he knows it tastes great. And he just has to decide if he wants to live with the pleasant fake thing or the difficult real thing.

• 1:34:47Speaker 02

  There's another scene in The Matrix that goes the other way. And maybe is more optimistic than that in the context of what we're talking about. And I have a lot to say about AI, but so the scene is, Agent Smith has captured Morpheus and he's tied in a chair and they're torturing him. Right? And Smith starts talking about how he, you know, hates the stink of humanity.

• 1:35:16Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:17Speaker 02

  And he says, you know, the first matrices that we designed were utopian. They gave you humans everything you could want. And we lost crops in the millions. And so we had to come up with this, he says. Disgusting.

• 1:35:40Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:40Speaker 02

  You know, filled with suffering and this is what you want. And the takeaway from that is that utopia maybe isn't what we want. That we already have the perfect environment for humans. And that we're not gonna thrive in a, you know, just living in a video game all day long. That that's, it's not gonna work.

• 1:36:03Mike Rowe?

  We need the struggle, we need the stakes, we need the risk.

• 1:36:07Speaker 02

  We need reality.

• 1:36:10Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 1:36:34Mike Rowe?

  So the question is, what does inevitability sound like to you? What's coming at us?

• 1:36:41Speaker 02

  I have made AI my top priority. I built my own AI computer. It's called Open Claw, which is a whole nother phenomenon. I've written about it. It's hard to describe succinctly and I can, you know, give as much detail as you want. So the chatbots that we've been used to, ChatGPT, Grok and that kind of thing. You know, you get on there and you say, hey, Chad, I've only got some cucumbers, a radish and some tomato sauce. What can I make? And then it, you know, gives you some recipes or whatever. Right?

• 1:37:23Speaker 02

  So it's this interactive process, but the, 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?

• 1:37:35Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:38Speaker 02

  So in December, this retired programmer.

• 1:37:41Mike Rowe?

  Sorry, but am I conflating things? Or did you just write about this vis a vis a weird mark on your leg that you discovered in the shower?

• 1:37:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:50Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:51Speaker 02

  So I had, you know, this, this rash on my leg.

• 1:37:55Mike Rowe?

  Sorry to take it there, Michelle, but we're going to talk about your husband's rash.

• 1:37:59Speaker 02

  She's 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 my cell phone and I give it to ChatGPT and ChatGPT says, oh, it's this, this is what you need to get.

• 1:38:18Mike Rowe?

  Tell them what you got.

• 1:38:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. Would you like me, you should probably do it quickly, ChatGPT said.

• 1:38:25Mike Rowe?

  I mean, what can I tell people what you had?

• 1:38:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, sure.

• 1:38:29Mike Rowe?

  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, mm, that wasn't there two weeks ago. Now it's there. And then two weeks later, it's twice the size. And you take a picture of this thing on your leg and you ask ChatGPT and it says, oh, that's ringworm.

• 1:38:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:46Mike Rowe?

  And you go, huh, huh. And then it says, this is probably what you want to take.

• 1:38:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:51Mike Rowe?

  Would you like me to call the nearest CVS so you can go pick it up? And so I think your point in that story was, never mind how you got the ringworm. That's interesting, too, but maybe for another visit. But it's like, what didn't happen as a result of that? Right? You didn't have to wait four weeks for an appointment. You didn't have to spend half a day waiting for a 15-second diagnosis. The doctor would have figured it out pretty quick. But Chat did it for us and eliminated hours and hours, maybe even days, of medical layers. So that's like a happy AI story.

• 1:39:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think that that tracks with the optimistic take that AI is just a tool. Right? And I'll probably say this wrong. This is more in your wheelhouse. But when they invented, what do they call those little mini diggers? The ditch witch or something?

• 1:39:45Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, that's exactly it, the ditch witch.

• 1:39:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they invented ditch witches. And so you don't need three guys, you only need two guys. Right? And so, oh, it's going to put people out of work. Well, no, because that guy just goes and now you can do more projects and be more ambitious about your projects and so on. Right? So the ditch witch was a good thing.

• 1:40:05Speaker 02

  And it's a labor-saving device. And so that's one way to look at AI is that we're going to have to change. I mean, you had to change the way you dug ditches when you got the ditch witch. And so we're gonna have to change a lot of white collar work as a result of AI. That's one thing, but we're past that now. And that's what this Open Claw phenomenon is. And the only reason we're talking about Open Claw is right now it's the only option. But the big guys are gonna get in it. They already are that somebody's already, the Open AI has already made a deal with him. We don't know the details yet. So it's gonna go mainstream. It's absolutely like a rocket ship.

• 1:40:46Speaker 02

  What Open Claw does, which was just a weekend project by this Australian programmer, New Zealand, I think, but.

• 1:40:55Mike Rowe?

  Same thing.

• 1:40:56Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:41:20Mike Rowe?

  Are we excited by this or freaked out?

• 1:41:23Speaker 02

  Both.

• 1:41:24Mike Rowe?

  I mean, isn't that what Claude did? Wasn't that the whole anthropic thing? It was doing things nobody told it to do. So as some of you may have heard, I went to Congress 16 years ago to testify before a House Subcommittee. And then again, a year later, to testify before a Senate Subcommittee about the need to reinvigorate the skilled trades with some kind of national effort that would make a more persuasive case for a lot of good jobs out there that didn't require a four-year degree. Well, 15 years later, I finally heard back from the government and I am delighted to

• 1:42:06Mike Rowe?

  tell you about a program called BuildFreedom.us. This is the national PR campaign that MicroWorks has been talking about for a decade and a half now, and it's focused on 300,000 or 400,000 excellent jobs in the defense industrial base. These are the electricians and the plumbers and the steam finners and the pipe fitters and the CNC operators and the shipbuilders and so forth. But in this case, all of those trades are focused on building out our national infrastructure through the defense industrial base. So people who are building our autonomous weapons, our planes, our ships, it's only a matter of national security and it's a very big deal.

• 1:42:51Mike Rowe?

  And on a personal level, it's really been very gratifying. Build Freedom donated $10 million to MicroWorks. The money's available right now for you if you want to pursue a skill that's in demand and work in the defense industrial base. I think it's an opportunity of a lifetime. Go to buildfreedom.us, see what's available and then apply for a scholarship from MicroWorks. The money's there, burning a hole in my pocket. Go get some. BuildFreedom.us.

• 1:43:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:43:31Speaker 02

  It's just not reassuring. It was originally designed by, this is the official story. I'm not saying I believe the official story, but a team of Google engineers was creating a word prediction engine. So you know how when you type your Google search bar and you know, it starts to see where you're going and it suggests things? Yeah, fills it out for you. So that's, it's guessing what word you're going to type next and being helpful and 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.

• 1:44:12Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:44:43Speaker 02

  They never expected that. They were just trying to get better at predicting the words. It's a relatively short piece of code and it was open source. They were working on, you know what open source is? So that's where the programmers just, you know, post it online and anybody can look at their source code. And that's why every country in the world has AI. Because it's not really that complicated, but nobody understands how it works, Mike. Nobody does.

• 1:45:12Mike Rowe?

  Nobody?

• 1:45:13Speaker 02

  It's all theoretical. I know, it's just hard to believe. You'll have to to search and confirm what I'm telling you is true.

• 1:45:22Mike Rowe?

  Well, who am I gonna ask? AI?

• 1:45:24Speaker 02

  You can ask, yeah, but you're gonna have to push it.

• 1:45:27Mike Rowe?

  Okay.

• 1:45:30Speaker 02

  So that's weird. Okay, it's weird. Look, I can get the, you know, magical accidental discovery, right? Like they came up with Post-it notes and, you know, Velcro.

• 1:45:46Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 1:45:46Speaker 02

  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?

• 1:46:03Mike Rowe?

  I'm with you.

• 1:46:03Speaker 02

  We don't understand how it works in the first place. So we're learning what it does.

• 1:46:10Mike Rowe?

  Well, I guess my question to that would be, what's the relevance of not understanding how a thing works that you rely upon? I mean, most of us can't really explain the mechanics of a combustion engine. We can't really explain the mechanics of a plasma screen or the electronics in this microphone. But we don't need to, really, because by and large, we've been conditioned to to accept the fact that understanding a thing and using a thing are not the same thing. Here, I'm guessing you're gonna say it's different because the stakes are so extraordinary.

• 1:46:51Speaker 02

  No, the difference is you don't understand how a combustion engine works.

• 1:46:56Mike Rowe?

  But somebody does.

• 1:46:57Speaker 02

  But somebody does.

• 1:47:00Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:47:07Mike Rowe?

  But that's going to freak people out. Are you really say like, so nobody walking around Elon Musk, you know, what's this Alex Karp, all the big brains in the space really put the screws to them and they're not going to be able to tell you here's how it works.

• 1:47:22Speaker 02

  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, they're like having multiple AIs check each other's work and, 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 is demonic or whatever. It might be, but that's not my argument.

• 1:48:06Speaker 02

  It's a tool. It's a different kind of tool than we've had before. For this reason, it's almost Promethean. You know what I mean when I say that?

• 1:48:17Mike Rowe?

  Primal for sure, but.

• 1:48:19Speaker 02

  It's like the gods give fire to the humans. The humans don't understand fire. They don't know what it is, but they set to work figuring out how to use the fire.

• 1:48:30Mike Rowe?

  That's the, what the original Oppenheimer book, what was it? American Prometheus, right?

• 1:48:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:48:36Mike Rowe?

  Heck of a thing. So we're armed with a thing that you say nobody can explain on the most fundamental level and that thing is growing.

• 1:48:47Speaker 02

  And there's no stopping it. The genie's out of the bottle. Look.

• 1:48:54Speaker 02

  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 won't.

• 1:49:07Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 1:49:09Speaker 02

  And then what?

• 1:49:10Mike Rowe?

  That's that old Chinese proverb, you can't put the poop back in the goose, right?

• 1:49:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:15Mike Rowe?

  Google that, Chuck. I'm not sure it's Chinese necessarily.

• 1:49:17Speaker 02

  I'm not so sure.

• 1:49:17Mike Rowe?

  I'm not even sure it's a proverb, honestly.

• 1:49:19Speaker 02

  I think you just made that up.

• 1:49:20Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, I may have. But I think the implications are so vast that people, they, I keep coming back to that moment in The Matrix because that, to me, is the thing that we're all going to have to reckon with. Like, I got a court case going on now. I have a legal matter that's been going on for a couple of years. I asked, and I think I used some pretty good prompts, for an analysis of my position. And what came back with respect to my attorneys was just extraordinarily comprehensive, thoughtful, some new arguments that I hadn't seen, and way more concise. So I don't know what this is going to do to your profession, and I know most people listening probably couldn't give a damn because they're, they're not going to be

• 1:50:05Mike Rowe?

  in that world. But you know what world they're going to be in? It was like with the Impossible Burger, right? Okay, I'll give it a shot. What is it again? And then you, you dig in and you realize, no, you know what? It doesn't taste right, and I don't like what's in it. And no, I choose the authentic burger. But what if it tasted just like the authentic burger? And...

• 1:50:28Speaker 02

  Or better than the authentic burger.

• 1:50:29Mike Rowe?

  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, if we learn that it's, it's been a forgery? Or if that favorite, your new favorite song was just dreamt up by open claw? Or down the list it goes. You know, we need umpires. We need referees. I think, 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, uh, peer B dragons.

• 1:51:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm, I'm concerned about non-Christians.

• 1:51:11Speaker 02

  Or I should say concern for non Christians. The advantage that we Christians have is we have a sole source of truth. And we already think that everything else is deception. So there's the word of God in the Bible. And that's all we believe is true. Everything else we're skeptical about. Right? Disney World, that one still frame from the cartoon, right? You know what I'm talking about.

• 1:51:40Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 1:51:42Speaker 02

  It's all potentially the work of the adversary. Except for that one thing. So we're, we're already armed against AI. We're inoculated, if you want, against the AI virus. But what about people who don't have a source, you know, something to hang on to? Now, leave aside the spiritual part. You know, I believe that that is the word of God, but, but forget about that. Even if I was wrong about that, I still have something to hang on to.

• 1:52:16Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 1:52:17Speaker 02

  And so if you're just sort of, you know, drifting and finding your own spirituality and, you know, that kind of thing and communing with God in the, at the beach and in the mountains and in the forest and, you know, all that kind of stuff. Then what is your truth? You don't have one. You're going to take whatever seems the best and most attractive and most believable. You're going to accept that.

• 1:52:40Mike Rowe?

  That's very Pontius Pilate of you. What is truth?

• 1:52:43Speaker 02

  What is truth?

• 1:52:43Mike Rowe?

  Is truth unchanging law? We both have truths. Am I the same as yours? Crucify, crucify, crucify. That's Jesus Christ Superstar, by the way. 1973. Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd Webber, yeah. Wow, well, it's a lot, Jeff. I mean, it's a lot to think about. Did you see Prager's new book, by the way?

• 1:53:04Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:53:05Mike Rowe?

  I saw him interviewed last night. Mark Levin talked to him, you know, he had that terrible accident.

• 1:53:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:53:10Mike Rowe?

  And he's basically paralyzed from the shoulders down. And he wrote a book. Chuck might check me on it. I think if not God, what? Something like that. But it makes your point. You know, in the end, we're going to have to put our faith in something. Something. All right? And.

• 1:53:29Speaker 02

  You just talked about how the AI advised you on your lawsuit.

• 1:53:32Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:34Speaker 02

  Well, what happens when the AI advises you on everything?

• 1:53:40Speaker 02

  It's giving you good advice. At what point do you surrender your will and just say, you know what? The AI is going to do a better job of managing my life than I am.

• 1:53:50Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 1:53:55Speaker 01

  Well, Prager's book is called, If There Is No God, The Battle Over Who Defines Good and Evil.

• 1:54:01Mike Rowe?

  Right, right. It's just another attempt to ask the question, you know, what are you, what are you betting on? Look at this, I got two pages of stuff here. Basically, ask the AI, you know, what sort of insightful questions might you have for Jeff Childers? Based on the millions of words he's written. You got 20 questions here. They're great.

• 1:54:26Mike Rowe?

  And I didn't read any of them. Maybe I should have. I mean, look, it's just a random one. You've covered exploding fraud cases that involve everything from nonprofit food programs to medical provider billing scams, often with ties to political figures or campaigns. If you could design one bold nationwide policy or legal mechanism, short of a full audit of every federal program, to root out and deter this kind of systematic fraud in the future, what would it look like? And why do you believe it hasn't been implemented already, despite the obvious scale of the problem?

• 1:55:03Mike Rowe?

  Now, it's a good question posed by a tool that no one on the planet understands.

• 1:55:10Mike Rowe?

  What's my obligation to ask it?

• 1:55:13Speaker 02

  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 than you are, so.

• 1:55:33Mike Rowe?

  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 it cheat. I want to have a conversation, and I'm still arrogant enough to think that I'll, I'll get enough good questions out. But I also want to be engaged and informed in the times we're living in. So I can't ignore it. So I ask it these things, you know, and I'm, you know, I, if, you know, look, this is my own arrogance because I didn't hesitate to ask about my legal case. But I'm like, I don't know if I want to read these questions, you know, it sounds like I'm just not doing my job.

• 1:56:06Speaker 02

  In your defense, I mean, a question like that, you can't spring a question like that on somebody cold. You would have to send it to me ahead of time so I could have a smart answer.

• 1:56:14Mike Rowe?

  Well, I wouldn't have to, but you know what would happen?

• 1:56:16Speaker 02

  I'm not as smart as your AI, so it's making assumptions.

• 1:56:19Mike Rowe?

  What about this? You know what's gonna happen? Okay, so I send you these questions and you ask the AI for good answers. And then we just sit down here as two pods and basically I pretend to ask a question I thought of and you pretend to answer it with AI's solution. What is that, man? What? That's impossible meat.

• 1:56:39Speaker 02

  So.

• 1:56:40Mike Rowe?

  That's the impossible burger.

• 1:56:41Speaker 02

  I spend five hours a day on the blog.

• 1:56:45Speaker 02

  Thirty-five hours a week of extracurricular time on top of my job.

• 1:56:51Speaker 02

  If I used AI to write it, I could knock it out in an hour.

• 1:56:56Mike Rowe?

  Tempted?

• 1:56:58Speaker 02

  I don't want to do it. I don't think, 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 gonna do. Now, can I use AI to, you know, help me find stories and, you know, stuff around the edges? Yes, but I'm not turning over the writing to the AI. I won't, you can't make me.

• 1:57:25Mike Rowe?

  No, I can't.

• 1:57:26Speaker 02

  I'm not doing it.

• 1:57:27Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 1:57:45Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, it's better, funnier. They're better than you, but they feel like, they feel so much like you that your readers don't care. And now you're reaching so many more. Now you've got 2 million, never mind 200,000, millions of people hanging on to every word. And it's back to the matrix. Do they care? This is why I think, look, this is a classic micro macro problem. Macro is just the hugeness of it all. Micro is just like, what does this mean for me? What am I gonna do with this?

• 1:58:19Mike Rowe?

  If you work in boots all day long and your feet sweat, I feel your pain. And I'd recommend trying the socks that I wear every day from Camel City Mill. These guys sent me a box as a gift, long before they sponsored this podcast. And I started wearing them and eventually I reached out to them because I love the product. And I wanted more sponsors on the podcast who make things in America. And now here they are again sponsoring another episode. Camel City Mill makes their socks in North Carolina with American wool in an American factory. Their merino wool blends help wick sweat away from your skin and their no sweat vent lets heat and moisture escape. That helps keep your feet dry and comfortable when

• 1:59:01Mike Rowe?

  you're spending long days in work boots. They also reinforce the heel and the toe with double plated nylon to stand up to the wear those boots put on your socks. Remember, it's not the feet that wear out your socks, it's your boots. And they back their socks with a 10-year durability guarantee. If you get a hole or a tear in the first decade, they'll replace them for free. If you're a hardworking guy dealing with sweaty, uncomfortable feet, I'm telling you, these are worth trying. I wear mine every day and I'm glad to have the company on the podcast. CamelCityMill.com. Use code ROW. Get 10% off my favorite work socks. CamelCityMill.com code ROW.

• 1:59:43Mike Rowe?

  I ran into a neighbor the other day. I had a little dog, a little Havanese named Vivian, right? I got a little dog named Freddie. We have this conversation on the street about this thing called Suno. S U N O. It's a songwriting AI app, 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 Havanese. And tell me about the life they spent together and how much fun they have on this earth. And then what happens when that sad but inevitable day comes? That's my prompt, right?

• 2:00:28Mike Rowe?

  Fifteen seconds later, what comes back is a song called Havanese Heaven. It's completely original and it talks about Freddie and Vivian's life of fetching balls and just, you know, just living the best dog life. And then, and then she goes to Havanese Heaven and poor 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 Havanese Heaven. And now they're chasing balls. I'm crying like a baby. My neighbor's devastated and we're sitting here. It's like a really good country song. I mean, I didn't tell it, that's the title.

• 2:01:13Mike Rowe?

  I didn't say, write a song called Havanese Heaven. I said, just tell me a story about a terrier and a Havanese. And that's it, Ben.

• 2:01:22Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:01:23Mike Rowe?

  Now, what am I supposed to do with this song? Do I put it on my playlist? Do I share it with people or do I just pretend it didn't happen?

• 2:01:28Speaker 02

  Okay, you're looking to the next stage that we're headed for. And the next stage that we're headed for is going to change everything. I'm telling you first. People aren't going to consume music the old way. There's not going to be any more Taylor Swifts. You're just going to have songs that you ask for and are perfectly tailored for you and nobody else is going to react to it the way you do. We're not going to have software anymore.

• 2:01:56Mike Rowe?

  Software is a service.

• 2:01:57Speaker 02

  You ever use Microsoft Word?

• 2:01:59Mike Rowe?

  Oh, sure.

• 2:02:00Speaker 02

  How many features in there do you not use?

• 2:02:03Mike Rowe?

  99% of them.

• 2:02:04Speaker 02

  And they just get in the way and your formatting gets weird and wonky because it thinks you're trying to do something.

• 2:02:11Mike Rowe?

  You fat button the thing and now you're in just another alien.

• 2:02:15Speaker 02

  Hit the wrong style or something and you don't even understand styles.

• 2:02:18Mike Rowe?

  Right.

• 2:02:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're not, you're just going to say, AI, I need some, I'm going to write an essay on this and I need a, uh, something to write it in. And it's just going to make it. And it's just going to be a one-off for that purpose and that moment for you. And then when it's done, it's just going to go away forever. And you're never going to buy another word processor.

• 2:02:38Mike Rowe?

  So it's all bespoke. Everything is going to be a bespoke experience.

• 2:02:42Speaker 02

  All media and software, everything electronic is going to be bespoke. Yes. Movies? Why would you go watch somebody else's movie? You say, I like, what kind of movies do you like? Do you like, you know, uh, Game of Thrones style?

• 2:02:58Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 2:02:59Speaker 02

  Romances?

• 2:03:00Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:00Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:03:12Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:12Speaker 02

  Let's see The Last Boy Scout 2. And it's going to make it for you and you're going to watch it and you're going to love it. And everybody else will hate it.

• 2:03:21Mike Rowe?

  To be fair, a lot of people hated the first one.

• 2:03:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was, that's a controversial one, right? We can argue about that, but.

• 2:03:29Mike Rowe?

  Um, I, I know Chuck, what, two hours, 15 minutes or something?

• 2:03:32Speaker 02

  It doesn't matter really.

• 2:03:34Mike Rowe?

  It was a New Year's resolution to try and, you know, keep these things manageable, but here's my ask for you. Um, can I, you had an okay time?

• 2:03:45Mike Rowe?

  You don't regret?

• 2:03:46Speaker 02

  I would say yes, recommend.

• 2:03:50Speaker 02

  And thankfully not unsubscribe.

• 2:03:53Mike Rowe?

  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?

• 2:04:13Speaker 02

  If you use the Substack app, it has a reading mode that works 90% of the time.

• 2:04:20Mike Rowe?

  Hey, there you go.

• 2:04:21Speaker 02

  Which is way better than nothing.

• 2:04:23Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:24Speaker 02

  And people seem to like it. I mean, you're not going to get my voice and you're not going to get, you know, I'll land on a certain word a certain way. You won't get that. But it, but people who use it, like they complain when it's not working. So it must be doing something right.

• 2:04:38Mike Rowe?

  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?

• 2:04:55Speaker 02

  I would in a heartbeat because that is probably the number one ask is people want the podcast version or the red audible version.

• 2:05:03Mike Rowe?

  See, this is, it gets so personal because about six months ago, somebody sent me a link and said, go ahead, click on it. You're not going to like it, but you should know. And the prompt was narrate my corporate film in the style of Mike Rowe narrating Deadliest Catch.

• 2:05:25Mike Rowe?

  And honestly, had you sent that thing to me under different auspices, I would have just assumed that was something I had done.

• 2:05:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:05:33Mike Rowe?

  Years ago. Yeah. If I listened for it, you know, I could hear certain hitches, but again, it's the bottom of the first.

• 2:05:39Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:05:40Mike Rowe?

  So Jeff Childers and Mike Rowe 2.0 are coming. And I doubt that either one of us are going to be able to discern the difference, never mind the rest of the, the rest of the species who's going to be up there in Havene's heaven right now playing fetch with my dog at this point. But I just don't know, man. It's, it, this is a stupid question, but fundamentally, fundamentally, are you still optimistic about all of it?

• 2:06:07Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Look, here's your problem. You ready?

• 2:06:12Mike Rowe?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:06:12Speaker 02

  Your problem is you think you need to know where it's going.

• 2:06:17Speaker 02

  Let loose of that.

• 2:06:20Speaker 02

  Think about it more like going on an adventure.

• 2:06:25Speaker 02

  Where you don't know where the plane's going, your friend's surprising you. If you think about life that way, then you'll realize we're living in an amazing moment that no other human beings ever got to experience. We don't know where it's going.

• 2:06:39Mike Rowe?

  There is no spoon.

• 2:06:42Speaker 02

  Back to the matrix, yeah?

• 2:06:44Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:44Speaker 02

  That's when your mind gets blown, when you realize, and there is no spoon here.

• 2:06:50Speaker 02

  And I think to a large extent, Mike, it's going to be what we make it.

• 2:06:57Speaker 02

  What human beings do with it.

• 2:07:00Mike Rowe?

  Well, here's what I know for sure. You have made an incredible second career out of your first. You've made an extraordinary blog. You've made an extraordinary footprint in a noisy and cluttered landscape. You have hundreds of thousands of people who really do look forward to your stuff. It's a balm. A balm in Gilead. You know? To heal the sin sick soul. If you want to wrap it up with a good book, but man, I just, I love second acts if this is what you're having. And, uh, 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.

• 2:07:44Mike Rowe?

  And so, you know. Shameless plug, it's Coffee and COVID. Where do people subscribe ideally? What do you want them to do?

• 2:07:53Speaker 02

  So, uh, all you have to do is go to www.coffeeandcovid.

• 2:07:58Mike Rowe?

  Do people still say WWW? Michelle, is this, is it just your husband that does this?

• 2:08:04Mike Rowe?

  He's such a lawyer. WWW.

• 2:08:06Speaker 02

  Look, I can't keep up with everything, man.

• 2:08:08Mike Rowe?

  I know, it's a lot.

• 2:08:10Speaker 02

  And they can sign up there. It's on Substack. I think if you Google Coffee and COVID, it should come right up.

• 2:08:16Mike Rowe?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:17Speaker 02

  Uh, but now let me say this. You were the original heterodox thinker.

• 2:08:25Speaker 02

  Long before COVID, you put yourself out there challenging big academics. And your predictions, long before I predicted anything, everything you predicted was 100% true. And it's turning out to be exactly, you told people, don't learn to code, go to trade school. And what's happening to programmers right now? They're getting fired in droves. The AI is taking their job. They're the first ones to go. After all that learn to code nonsense. And what do they need? They need welders. They need construction engineers, site supervisors, ditch witch operators.

• 2:09:06Mike Rowe?

  Sure.

• 2:09:07Speaker 02

  Right? And so, everything that you, people had listened to your, the people who took your advice are sitting pretty right now. After all, and, and you, I can't imagine how many slings and arrows you took for taking those, those positions.

• 2:09:22Mike Rowe?

  Eh, a couple. You know, it's funny, I got, I got permission, at a weird level of permission to mouth off. And it came from dirty jobs, you know, it came from literally 350 of those. I won't say humiliations, but you needed to be humble. You're an apprentice. Every, it's Groundhog's Day, every day.

• 2:09:47Speaker 02

  That's what made it so engaging.

• 2:09:49Mike Rowe?

  And so, over time, I think people cut me a lot of slack. So as I got older, and when I started reading your stuff, and I started mouthing off during the lockdowns, and I started doing things that, you know, I disappointed a lot of fans, I think, not because of what I said, but just because it felt like I had veered outside of my lane. You know? But come on, there are no lanes anymore. I mean, there's nothing but lanes. You're way outside of the lawyer lane. Right? You're way out there, man. It's very nice of you to say, and it is gratifying when the headlines catch up to you. In fact, this is how we land the plane. It's the ultimate I told you so. Can you find this column again?

• 2:10:33Mike Rowe?

  I'm gonna look at the last, the last couple of paragraphs today, because it just made me, it made me snort. I was on a Delta flight, I was landing, and I was laughing, and the guy next to me was like, oh, what are you reading? I'm like, that's.

• 2:10:48Speaker 02

  You probably don't want to know.

• 2:10:49Mike Rowe?

  It's this thing, go all the way down.

• 2:10:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, it takes a minute.

• 2:10:55Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, there's a lot. I mean, look, you gotta scroll through thousands and thousands of words. Oh, Canada. Oh, that was a great bit, too. What an amazing.

• 2:11:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, awesome weekend.

• 2:11:06Speaker 01

  Am I getting close?

• 2:11:07Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:11:10Speaker 02

  One, one more, I think. No, keep going.

• 2:11:12Mike Rowe?

  One more, one more.

• 2:11:13Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 2:11:15Mike Rowe?

  Yeah. Today's final I told you so moment appeared courtesy of science. According to a new major peer reviewed Harvard scientific study, reading CNC might literally add years to your life. Here's the tweet from Sahil Bloom summarizing the findings, and here's the study titled, quote, optimism is associated with exceptional longevity in two epidem- say that word for me.

• 2:11:41Speaker 02

  Epidemiologic.

• 2:11:42Mike Rowe?

  Cohorts of men and women, a massive study out of Harvard and Boston U, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, followed over 70,000 people. That's a huge control group for up to 30 years and found that the most optimistic people live 11 to 15% longer than pessimists. They also have a 50 to 70% greater chance of living to 85. These astonishingly strong results held even after controlling for diet, exercise, smoking, alcohol use, chronic diseases, depression, and socioeconomic status. In other words, it's not just that optimists happen to eat better or exercise more. All

• 2:12:24Mike Rowe?

  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% improvement in your odds of reaching 85, Pfizer would charge $40,000 a dose and the FDA would fast track it and people would pay for it. But CNC is 85% free and even a CNC supporter's subscription is nothing compared to what people would pay for that remedy. Just saying. Back when I started this blog in 2020, I made a big bet. The bet was that everything would be okay.

• 2:13:05Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 2:13:20Mike Rowe?

  I want to take just a moment, not to gloat much, but to remember, because we optimists turned out to be right about everything.

• 2:13:32Mike Rowe?

  Yeah, let's just keep going. We were right that COVID wouldn't kill 2% of the population. We were right that lockdowns wouldn't stop the virus and would devastate everything else. We were right that school closures would damage a generation of children for a disease that barely affected them. We were right that natural immunity was real, durable, and at least as good as vaccine-induced immunity, a position that got you banned from social media in 2021 and published in The Lancet by 2023. We were right that the vaccines didn't stop transmission, something Pfizer eventually admitted it had never even tested for.

• 2:14:15Mike Rowe?

  We were right that masking children was pointless and cruel. We were right that two weeks to flatten the curve was a lie. We were right that the virus almost certainly came from a lab, another quote conspiracy theory that eventually became the US 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, or both. And we were right about the most important thing of all, that the American people would

• 2:15:00Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 2:15:39Mike Rowe?

  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.

• 2:15:54Speaker 02

  You're welcome.

• 2:15:57Mike Rowe?

  Geez, a wiz. Well, that was Jeff Childers here with his victory lap. I sure hope you'll have many others down the road, and I hope our paths cross again sometime soon.

• 2:16:08Speaker 02

  What a delight it's been to be here with you.

• 2:16:09Mike Rowe?

  Thank you for making the trip. Michelle, thanks for bringing them out here. I know behind all of it, it's you pulling the strings. Jeff Childers, everybody. Coffee and COVID. You'd be a fool not to subscribe. When you leave a review, which we hope that you'll do, tell us who you are. And before you go, won't you leave five stars?

• 2:16:46Mike Rowe?

  Lousy little stars.

• 2:16:59Speaker 03

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• 2:17:31Speaker 04

  What's that?

• 2:17:31Speaker 05

  My fresh detector.

• 2:17:33Speaker 04

  Uh, your what?

• 2:17:34Speaker 05

  There it is.

• 2:17:35Speaker 04

  What is it detecting?

• 2:17:37Speaker 05

  Fresh produce? Fresh meat?

• 2:17:39Speaker 04

  Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh?

• 2:17:45Speaker 05

  Apparently, we celebrate.

• 2:17:47Speaker 04

  At Food Lion, you can count on fresh food at fresher prices when your fresh detector is going off. Head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com.