Episode Transcript
[00:00:10] Speaker A: The two biggest stories by far right now, put aside all the noise about Minneapolis and the ICE agents and Nancy Guthrie and all the rest of it, and you got the Epstein disclosures and the AI Tsunami.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: Hey, my name is Zach, and I am your host here on Code Red.
On today's episode, we are honored to have back Jeff Childers. Jeff is a attorney. He is a author with coffeeandcovid.com and he is an analyst of the implications and applications of what is taking place on the world stage. And so take notes, Comment like, share.
Welcome to Code Red.
Jeff Childers. Don't need an introduction anymore. I think everybody knows you by this point.
Coffee and Covid episode. We're kind of covering the top stories for the previous week, month.
So what's your readers been interested in?
What have you been interested in of the many topics floating around?
[00:01:36] Speaker A: Well, we're living through a civilizational singularity right now, and the news is coming so fast and in such a flood that, you know, it's hard to realize you're in it.
[00:01:50] Speaker B: That hit me. That hit me this week. I think I have a. A theory on who kidnapped Nancy Guthrie. Okay, Christy. Norm.
Because the whole focus of the nation had been on the little kid with the backpack holding his teddy bear that the ICE agents took into custody. Every time you turn on the television, what happened, it changed. Every time you turn on the TV today, it's Nancy Guthrie trying to find Nancy Guthrie. Who would have benefited from that? Kristi Noem.
It's either her or Marco Rubio is my theory.
[00:02:30] Speaker A: So that's a bold claim, but it goes right to the heart of what we're living through, because the two biggest stories by far right now put aside all the noise about Minneapolis and the ICE agents and Nancy Guthrie and all the rest of it.
And you got the Epstein disclosures and the AI Tsunami and the short version just to give you a teaser for each one.
The Epstein disclosures are wiping out the last remnants of people's trust and authority.
[00:03:14] Speaker B: And that's across the board.
It's not just right or just left.
Everybody's up for grabs with this.
[00:03:21] Speaker A: Yes. And the people who have been running things now look so awful.
Like, you know, there's not one of them that you would trust to babysit your kids, and you probably wouldn't even loan them money.
And there's been nothing like it in human history.
This worldwide destruction of all of these institutions that we've all just sort of assumed and relied on for our whole lives.
Where is it going?
What comes after that?
And remember the Epstein files thing? We're just in the top 1% of digging through those files and making connections. There's 3 million documents in the last dump.
[00:04:08] Speaker B: 3 million and heavily redacted from what I can tell. A lot of names are out, but.
[00:04:13] Speaker A: A lot of stuff isn't redacted. And people are hard at work making connections. And I mean, if you go on social media, you'll see they're finding keywords like beef jerky, pizza.
Well, the. Yeah, pizza. The ones we already knew, but new ones like this, I don't know. Have you seen the.
[00:04:32] Speaker B: No, I haven't seen the beef jerky one.
Hey, guys, I'm very excited to tell you about the maximum Life plus app. It's available for download today. For $3.99. You can get every resource we produce at Maximum Life in one easy to use location.
Check it out at the App Store in the Google Play Store today you can download it. When you do, be sure to set up a profile and then hit subscribe. That gives you access to everything we have currently and all of the resources that we're soon to release. So download your copy today.
[00:05:12] Speaker A: Yeah, so some heroic individual or individuals threw up a website and it now has a sponsor and it's officially funded and everything.
And the address is JMail World.
JMail World.
And I suggest everybody check it out.
It looks just like Gmail, but it's Jeffrey Epstein's email account.
And so you can search on it and pull up the emails and everything. So you can search on whatever keyword occurs to you and that kind of thing.
[00:05:46] Speaker B: You can do something similar with AI and have it to go through all of the documents released so far. So this is just what a pastor does. The first thing when something like this happens is we start searching for our church. Did we come up anywhere in it? A few churches did, actually.
Saddleback came up in it on the West Coast.
But when it happens, when anything like that happens, we have this.
Oh, my goodness. And there's two or three people that you're like, if their name, if anybody's name would come up, their name might have come up. So you search it real quick, make sure you're safe. So.
[00:06:23] Speaker A: Well, I wasn't worried about that until now.
[00:06:26] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, no, I'll worry about it. I'll worry about it. January 6th, that was another thing. It's January 6th. We might have had a couple of people in that audience. We had a few from Nassau county, but none that were affiliated with our church. And so you just have to Go check, man. You can't be too safe these days.
[00:06:43] Speaker A: So I'm not endorsing this, but I will note that in a podcast interview, our. One of our Florida representatives, Anna Paulina Luna, was asked about the jerky issue and she dissembled about it. So she didn't confirm or deny.
[00:07:03] Speaker B: Was the jerky. Is that a code word for some sexual.
I haven't heard this. First I've heard about this one.
[00:07:11] Speaker A: No, what it is if you look in those files. Epstein and a few particular associates of his were obsessed with beef jerky and they were shipping it in 70 pound shipments.
They were talking about keeping it packed in ice, storing it in the freezer, depending on where you're going now, kneading that jerky.
And so the people who are following this are convinced that jerky is where the babies went to. Just cannibalism, cannibalism and all of that. And one of the guys who's involved was a chef with a restaurant whose name was. Can you guess? Cannibal. That was the name of his restaurant. So it's not even that. You have to look super hard into it now.
I don't know.
But what interests me about it is how this whole thing's been released to the entire world and the entire world's digging into it.
And so.
There are a couple things. First, that you've got this crowdsourcing phenomenon where millions of people are working on, not just a few hundred at the DOJ or whatever. And granted they have better tools than we do and better access and unredacted documents and things like that, but we've got millions of people, smart people, a lot of them, who are just connecting dots.
So I don't know where that's going to go, but that is a template for what we're seeing. And, you know, just in the last couple weeks, the Norwegian royal family is probably going to collapse because of their connections to Epstein.
The British royals are in trouble.
The British government is teetering.
Prime Minister Starmer's probably got minutes left but before he's got to step down.
So that was.
[00:09:28] Speaker B: What was his implication with it? I wasn't familiar with that.
[00:09:31] Speaker A: Well, this is the dot connecting thing. So Starmer apparently never even met Epstein and never went on the plane or to the island or anything like that.
But he approved the hiring of this guy, Peter Mandelson.
And Peter Mandelson is a longtime Deep State political fixer in British politics.
The media nicknamed him the Prince of Darkness.
So a comparable might be Karl Rove from the Bush Administration or Steve Bannon or something like that. Except Mandelson has held all these posts. He's been deputy prime minister at times. He's been, you know, minister of finance and business and, you know, all these different government spots and behind the scenes he's pulled strings and, you know, created prime ministers and destroyed others and all this stuff. Well, anyway, he was good buddies with Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:10:31] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:10:32] Speaker A: And so if you follow British politics, they have some horrible scandals involving pedophilia, mostly related to the BBC.
And so this might be even bigger than that. And so Mandelson was appointed by Starmer to be the U.S. ambassador.
And late last year, when the first tranche of Epstein documents rolled out, Mandelson was in it. And so he got fired, like within 24 hours.
But it's escalated now.
Starmer's chief of staff just resigned under pressure only because he was involved in selecting Mandelson. And now Starmer, whose popularity was already in low double digits, 15%. I mean, imagine if Trump's popularity was 15%, what the media would be saying?
[00:11:35] Speaker B: Well, and they're dealing with, Is it the rape gang situation, which is their own. Is that the BBC?
Is that what you're referring to with the BBC, the big investigation that they're doing currently?
Independent counsels investigating their own mega sexual scandal that's taking place in England?
[00:11:56] Speaker A: No, even before that. So the rape gang scandal's bad enough, but they had this character, Jimmy Savile, who was like a long time, I guess the closest thing might be a late night host, except he was one of the premier actors in the BBC and he had been a pedophile for 40 years and abusing kids that came on set and all this stuff. And the BBC, apparently the official sign, the BBC knew about it and tolerated it because he was a star or whatever.
So this is 10 years ago, something like that. And it's a stain that the British still haven't forgotten. I mean, Jimmy Savile is now like an epithet that you would throw against anybody who was doing something that stinks. But the point is that the British government is teetering on the edge. And here in the States, we've seen big Democrat, super mega donors like Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard.
He's wiped out.
He got canned. He had a cushy job as a professor at Harvard just as a retirement gig where they paid him a million bucks a year or whatever.
He's lost that and probably nobody is returning his calls. And so that's just the beginning. And so what the Starmer episode in particular shows us is that it's not just people in the files. Right. Starmer's not in the files, not as a correspondent, but he's connected to somebody who was. So we've got this second ring now that's getting sucked into the Epstein black hole.
But that's not even the big point. The big point is that people are learning things about elites that the elites never wanted us to know and never thought we would find out.
And so how does that make everybody feel about government and billionaires and celebrities and folks like that? Now, conservatives have been sort of deeply distrustful of the institutions. That's part of our ideological character for a long time. But now people who haven't been as ready to distrust the institutions are seeing all this stuff.
So we're talking about inevitably massive political change.
Massive.
[00:14:38] Speaker B: Worldwide.
Why worldwide? It's not just in the United States, it's worldwide.
[00:14:44] Speaker A: It's worldwide. I mean, and you look at the newspapers from any country you want and there's EPC stories in them.
So. All right, put that one on, on the back burner. And then let's talk about AI. And it's great you mentioned the intersection of AI and Epstein.
But what we've seen in the last. Since December, there's been a.
A whole new paradigm emerging in AI. I wrote about it this morning and I used just one example that I found on X. And it's this guy who has a small business and he's not a techie, but he's using AI like we all are.
And so he has a spreadsheet that he uses to manage his business.
And he was asking the AI, hey, can we add a button over here?
And if I click the button on my spreadsheet, it'll open up this other thing. And the AI said no, buttons don't work well in Excel. It would be much better if we just built you a whole new customized software.
And the guy was like, okay. And three hours later, he has a web based interface to a whole system that runs his business.
Wow.
And the AI suggested it and built it.
Okay, so there's another story that broke this week.
On an earnings call, the CEO of Spotify told investors he was bragging about how efficient they were getting, that all his senior developers haven't written any code since last year that they're just now managing the AIs that are writing the code.
And he talked about how a developer on the subway will get a slack message from the AI at the office saying this is ready and he'll approve the Next step. And the AI will do it while he's on his commute into the office.
So Elon Musk has some interesting ruminations about this. And whatever you think of Elon, he's a very smart guy, obviously, and he says that we're approaching a unique point in human history where the cost of labor is going to go to zero or near zero, which is going to change the whole classic economic dynamic, because you had labor and capital versus your productivity. And this formula that's existed since humans started writing things down.
And that's all about to change.
And so his theory would be that.
[00:17:31] Speaker B: The standard of living will go up because the cost of goods and services will go down.
[00:17:36] Speaker A: Is that exactly correct? So the cost of it, since the cost of labor is going to fall to near zero, all you've got is the cost of capital, electricity and the raw goods costs, right? So you take all the labor costs out of things and everything gets really cheap.
So ordinary people can afford basically anything that they want.
And this is without even getting into robots and all that which is. That's coming. You know what it is.
So, again, we've got this transformational event, this singularity.
By singularity, I mean something that's unique, that's never happened before. So the original singularity was the Big Bang, right? We've never seen another big Bang. We don't know about any ones before that.
And so it only happened once, one time.
And I think we're looking at two of them happening right now, in the political side with the Epstein files, and on the economic side with this AI revolution.
[00:18:47] Speaker B: I was watching Dr. Mohler's briefing this past week, and he was talking about, in the uk, he's an Anglophile, and in the uk, you've got a way of approaching government and politics which would separate the expedited nature of getting things done. So you've got Parliament, you've got a Prime Minister who can have the difficult conversations, and then you've got the Royal family who could maintain decorum, they could maintain civility. They had to do that. That was their role. That's really their only role.
And what brought it to light, the conversation, was Trump's video that came out on X with the Obamas. And so whoever did that, wherever that came from, he was addressing the fact that we're in a situation where we have leaders who are not maintaining the decorum that at one time was presumed upon the presidential office.
And the Epstein situation. However, in reaching into the Royal Family with Prince Andrew, it's former Prince Andrew has he already been removed completely?
[00:20:05] Speaker A: All his titles have been stripped. He's just Andrew Mountbatten or whatever, and he's probably broke.
Well, I mean, we don't know about his personal financials, but he's not allowed to use any of the royal properties anymore.
[00:20:19] Speaker B: So any illusion of decorum was eradicated by the outing of Andrew.
And so, yeah, you're right. Everybody's.
I think there's an idea that there's a class of people who kind of have things together, that we probably shouldn't believe this, especially as Christians, that there's a sin nature, whether it's Mother Teresa, the Pope, Billy Graham.
We all have flaws. We're all touched by sin. That's the doctrine of total depravity. But there's this maybe illusion that we portray and believe in, that there's a group of people, they went to the good schools, they've got things together.
And the release of the Epstein files is just one of many things that it shattered that illusion. And we're seeing that the King has no clothes.
[00:21:15] Speaker A: What did Jesus say about the rich man and entering heaven?
The eye of the needle.
[00:21:21] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:21:25] Speaker A: The House Oversight Committee, among others, they've been very busy. They're managing the Epistein Files rollout in Congress. And one of the many tweets that they put out last week was a picture of Bill Gates and former Prince Andrew.
The context that they were using it for isn't interesting, but what was interesting was they had cropped the picture and people instantly recognized it. And if you.
If you get the full picture from the Epstein files and just slide it a little bit to the right, there's the King at the same little meetup.
Now, I don't know what it proves, but I think that is a metaphor.
This Epstein scandal, I believe, is going to slide to the right and it's going to suck in more royals than just Prince Andrew. He got thrown under the bus. But.
[00:22:32] Speaker B: And from an attorney's perspective, with the redactions, I mean, some of the things. It's my understanding that private people who were not involved in the scandal in any way, people who were government sources, whatever it might be, were included. So they redacted those names, but the redactions seemed to go much further than that. What's your understanding as an attorney of why things are redacted and why the redactions seem to go much further than is necessary?
[00:23:06] Speaker A: So the discharge petition, that was that bill that the House created, that Trump signed, that ordered the DOJ to release the files, had Three exceptions. So they could redact things that were subject to current investigations. They could redact things to protect the identity of victims, and they could redact things for national security.
They've. The DOJ has said that they didn't redact anything for national security. So that just leaves two.
[00:23:40] Speaker B: And it's the Department of Justice. Is their subjective perspective that decides what affects national security, or is it an oversight committee that makes that decision?
[00:23:49] Speaker A: In this case, it would have been the doj, but they said they did not use the national security exemption to redact anything.
So that only leaves protecting victims and ongoing investigations. So what we don't know is whether any of the people whose names are still redacted might be subject to an ongoing investigation.
[00:24:16] Speaker B: There was a release of one of the emails that was talking about beating Jeb Bush. Have you seen that?
And so it was a candidate, obviously, that was competing with Jeb and was talking about defeating him in the primary, I think.
But it was redacted.
So there's only a few people that would include.
But if you're right, that person may be a part of an investigation is what you're suggesting. Whoever that is.
[00:24:44] Speaker A: Correct. And we don't know and we can't know and we shouldn't know.
[00:24:49] Speaker B: What do you think about Massie Massey's kind of the keep sparking about more transparency and fewer redactions, more files being released. How did he become the watchdog for that suddenly?
[00:25:05] Speaker A: That's a fascinating question.
Superficially, Massie's been criticized fairly because he didn't hound Joe Biden for four years to release the Epstein files.
[00:25:21] Speaker B: Massey's Kentucky, right?
[00:25:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:23] Speaker B: Kentucky's an interesting state. And probably Brashear is going to be a candidate. It's looking like he went to the economic forum in Davos. He's.
They're pushing him on the left as one of their candidates in a fairly conservative state. He's a Democratic governor.
And I just found it interesting that Massie in the same state was kind of running point on this stuff.
[00:25:49] Speaker A: Okay. So I'm gonna now throw out a little theory, call it a conspiracy theory if you want to, but it's what I call. I don't call them conspiracy theories when I have them. I have a fancy name.
[00:26:03] Speaker B: They're educated hypothesis.
[00:26:05] Speaker A: It's my working hypothesis.
So I have noticed that Trump has a strategy that he uses over and over again, which is he takes one of his allies and has a fight with them, and then the ally goes out and makes a lot of noise and does something that later in hindsight, you see advance Trump's agenda.
[00:26:28] Speaker B: Yeah, that's very true.
[00:26:30] Speaker A: He did it with Elon Musk. Well, I would argue he did it with Elon Musk. They had the breakup. Elon went out. And what did Elon say? He said, trump's in the Epstein files after Elon quit, you know, publicly and noisily from the White House and swore he was never going to step foot in there again. And Trump said bad things about Elon. And then Elon says, Trump's in the Epstein files, and everybody goes crazy.
And the Democrats get ginned up. And you know, that discharge petition that ordered the DOJ to release all those documents was voted on by all but one Democrat.
So you can't even argue this is a partisan hit job anymore. Right?
Now Elon's back in the White House.
What he said Trump's in the Epstein files, was true. Trump's name is in there.
It exculpates Trump shows that Trump was a whistleblower as far back as 2005, I think, when he was given the Palm beach police information on Epstein. And Epstein hated him, but his name is in there. So what Elon said was true.
But it was in a context that allowed a lot of people to think that they were gonna get Trump with this.
And to Democrats, getting Trump beats everything else.
So they'll throw anybody. They'll throw their own people under the bus to get Trump because that's just acceptable collateral damage.
[00:27:58] Speaker B: Right.
[00:28:00] Speaker A: So is Massie now in the same role as Elon Musk? Is he keeping the pressure going?
Because, listen, from where I'm sitting in the cheap seats, the continuing exposure of these Epstein materials is helping Trump.
[00:28:17] Speaker B: Well, has Trump responded to Massie? Because usually when people are doing something that's making news, Trump will come at it pretty strong just to kind of keep the conversation going, if nothing else. Oh, yeah, but has he. I haven't seen him really attack Massey yet.
[00:28:34] Speaker A: Trump said he's going to fund.
He's going to get Massie primaried. Okay, so there's a big public feud there.
[00:28:45] Speaker B: With.
Speaking of the midterms, what do you think the fallout is going to be? How do you think the Epstein files are going to affect the midterms?
[00:28:59] Speaker A: So we're a long way from the midterms, politically speaking. Right. Three months is a long time in politics. If you look at the November elections, the polls were showing Kamala Harris beating Trump handily six weeks out, maybe even closer, before things just turned around and Trump won in a landslide. So it's Difficult to handicap the race from this far away. But I will say that a lot of Democrat super donors and influencers are getting taken out by the Epstein files right now. So they're not going to be available to help.
So that's one thing, I think, because the.
And it's not all Democrats. There's one or two, you know, Steve Bannon's in there, and he doesn't look very good.
Howard Lutnick is in there a couple times. It's defensible, but it contradicts some earlier statements that he made.
And, you know, Elon Musk was sort of in there, but again, it's defensible.
But by and large, people like Larry Summers are getting wiped out.
So this whole deep bench that the Democrats had is shrinking.
That's not good for them. The optics are terrible.
Right. So there's a lot of crazy Democrats, but there's a lot of, like, normal people who are just progressive in their values and they vote Democrat and they can't like what they're seeing.
[00:30:31] Speaker B: Right.
[00:30:32] Speaker A: And is there going to come a point when it's too much for them?
[00:30:37] Speaker B: Have you watched the Steve Bannon interviews with Epstein?
[00:30:42] Speaker A: No, I haven't watched it.
[00:30:43] Speaker B: They're pretty good. He actually did a good job in asking hard questions to Epstein.
And so. And, you know, he being considered off and on Trump ally.
And he. But he. He asked specifically, he says, you know, people think you're the devil. Are you the devil? And I mean, it seemed like he asked some pretty good questions of Epstein. But it seems at the same time, whoever he was, whoever Epstein was, he didn't do that ignorantly. He didn't just get cornered by a sharp reporter. I mean, this is Steve Bannon. He's got the whole camera crew. They're on the island and they're talking.
Apparently they were buddies previously. So there had to be an angle that Epstein was releasing this. When he did it was after the first arrest, before he was incarcerated.
So I wonder what the angle, how this could have been spun for either Bannon or Trump or Epstein, that this would have. Any of these things would have been helpful in his defense, or was he.
[00:32:03] Speaker A: Even planning on a defense, as I understand it? And remember, we're looking through a glass darkly, so there's a lot of moving parts here that we can't see. We're looking through the keyhole at the elephant, right?
But I find a few things just very curious about the Steve Bannon story in particular.
What I heard is that Bannon convinced Epstein to make this documentary to rehabilitate Epstein's image. Okay.
It was Bannon's idea, which, you know, one level that sounds kind of gross that Bannon's trying to help this pedophile rehabilitate his image.
The documentary never came out, but if you look below that and you're willing to indulge in a little working hypothesis, is it possible that Trump, who was Epstein's enemy From the early 2000s at least, who was best friends with Steve Bannon, did the breakup number the Elon, Thomas Massie, whatever, and Bannon insinuated himself into Jeffrey Epstein's orbit in order to.
[00:33:18] Speaker B: Win favor with Trump or to get intel? Okay.
[00:33:23] Speaker A: I don't know. And I'm not saying that's what happened. I'm just saying that's one possibility.
[00:33:28] Speaker B: Right.
The more that you look at, you know, it's kind of gone back and forth that he was a CIA operative, then he was with Mossad, and all these different things.
It seems to be.
And I guess I'm asking this. I'm bouncing it off you to see if this is your take on it, that he was almost an independent contractor, that he was getting this data, he was getting this bad PR on all these people and selling to the highest bidder. Is that your take on it, or do you think there's something even more nefarious?
[00:34:01] Speaker A: You know what the craziest thing about this whole Epstein story is?
Is that these rich, politically connected, fabulous lifestyles of the rich and famous people were emailing this stuff to Jeffrey Epstein that looks horrible when it sees the light of day. And as a lawyer, I would call that creating evidence against yourself.
I do commercial litigation, so I work with business people.
And when I talk to CEOs, I always tell them, you know, in the first meeting or two, that my. My clients with the least problems don't use email or text message.
Because nowadays the whole game in legal stuff is emails and text messages.
We have whole. You can buy volume.
[00:34:54] Speaker B: There's.
[00:34:54] Speaker A: There's a three volume set in my office on electronic discovery. Hmm.
That's where almost all of our evidence comes from now.
His emails and text messages. So these rich people were busily creating all this evidence that was stacking up in Epstein and Epstein. My goodness, that guy. Did he do anything but text and email?
I mean, it's like tens of thousands of millions of pages.
[00:35:20] Speaker B: Yeah. The Bannon video was like one video that we've got of him having a conversation with somebody, but there's not tons of video of the guy even you don't have A lot of audio recordings of, you know, where somebody's bugged his phone or anything like that that I've been aware of.
[00:35:36] Speaker A: Yeah. And so.
What were these people thinking? That they were creating all this horrible evidence? I mean, obviously they trusted that Jeffrey Epstein had too much to lose to ever expose their emails. Right. So they were very candid with him. And that's why we're getting to see what they really are like, because they dropped all the facade. The facade in their conversations with him. And they didn't figure on Epstein ever getting arrested. And it's not just that he got arrested. Listen, this is something people really need to understand.
Epstein called Kathy Rimler, who is Obama's longest serving White House counsel, who's the head of Goldman Sachs legal department.
She was one of three people he called when he got put in the back of the FBI's car after he was arrested at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey in 2019.
She's a fixer.
She's as politically connected as it gets. She's our Peter Mandelson, if you like.
How long do you think Epstein would have stayed in if he hadn't died? Allegedly.
How long do you think he would have been in there before somebody got around to springing him? As the wheels of politics and everything turned and all these billionaires and royalty and everything focused on. We got to get that guy out of jail before he says something we don't like. Right. He wouldn't have been in there much longer.
So the fact that he died is essential to this whole story.
[00:37:18] Speaker B: I like the fact that you worked the word allegedly in there.
You're a lawyer, man.
[00:37:24] Speaker A: I've got multiple working hypothesis.
[00:37:27] Speaker B: Have you seen the pictures, supposedly from Israel of the bearded gentleman that looks a lot like Jeffrey Epstein?
[00:37:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:37:34] Speaker B: Have you seen them? They look, they look legit, like, I see AI that doesn't look like AI. I would hate to be that fellow. If it's just ordinary, wouldn't it be horrible?
[00:37:45] Speaker A: We all have a double somewhere.
But it doesn't matter.
That's the point I'm trying to make. It doesn't matter if they smuggled him out and faked his death. The point is that for all legal purposes, he's dead, which means his emails open up, his estate opens up and all this stuff and he's not around to testify that, hey, no, Prince Andrew was never on the island or whatever, he's just winked out of the equation and his death was essential to everything else happening that we're seeing. It would not have happened his lawyers, he had unlimited money, essentially. His lawyers would have tied everything up. It would have been 50 years before anything came out of that case.
[00:38:30] Speaker B: So I use this as an illustration. The St. Paul Church riot, where the protesters go into the church and you have Don Lemon, you have different people who are leading the protest.
When the Department of Justice got involved, they went after, I think there were three of the leaders of the protest. And Lemon eventually was.
I don't know if he's been prosecuted yet, but he was arrested.
So they can't, or they won't typically go after the entire group. It will be ringleaders. So with the Epstein situation, who do you think will be in the first crop of people to be prosecuted, indicted because of the Epstein files?
Who's the top of the list from your perspective?
Well.
[00:39:25] Speaker A: So this is another really important question, because everybody wants to see all these elites rounded up and thrown into jail for the rest of their lives. But the question is for what?
Not all of the.
Just delicately, the massage therapists at Jeffrey Epstein was providing to all of his buddies.
They were not all underage.
And there are jurisdictions all over the world where the age of consent is very low, 12, 14 years old. There's even a couple of US states where I think it's as low as 14 or 16.
And they were in international areas on the plain. That's over international water. So what law even applies?
[00:40:15] Speaker B: You know, the first one that went down, the first card to fall, from my understanding, was a little girl in South Florida who was like a 10th grader that got into some trouble.
And as they were investigating the case, she had $300 that no one could account for. Where did you get that money? And then she fessed up that it was related back to something that happened with the Jeffrey Epstein scenario. And that was like the first. The first domino, if you will. And Florida, Florida's not one of those states that you can hide a lot in. We have the sunshine laws. Politicians get involved. You know, things are going to come to light in Florida, our state government, we've got a pretty strong ag that's going to go after, you know, as much. As much as they can.
And so, yeah, I mean, that connection, I just think as a Floridian, that was interesting that the first big domino to fall happened in Florida, not that far from Mar a Lago, actually.
[00:41:23] Speaker A: Palm Beach.
[00:41:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:41:25] Speaker A: And God bless the Palm Beach Police Department because they did heroic work against all odds. Their district attorney was trying to shut the case down. And what's ironic about that is it was the same same district attorney that spent about six years trying to get Rush Limbaugh for pill shopping and had to drop the case eventually, but that guy wouldn't take the Epstein case.
[00:41:48] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:41:49] Speaker A: So, and I mean, the timeline is remarkable. I mean, it's mind blowing. So you've got Trump sitting in Mar a Lago in Palm Beach. You got the Palm Beach Police Department on the case, trying to get Jeffrey Epstein. We know Trump hated Epstein, was helping the cops.
They finally get a prosecution by the feds because the local district attorney won't do it and the feds enter into a sweetheart plea deal that's a slap on the wrist for one count of a misdemeanor.
And so Trump watched all of that in the early 2000s, how Epstein's powerful friends got him out of it in 2019.
Epstein didn't live after his arrest in order to do all those kinds of schemes and call in favors and get the political cavalry coming to help him.
He never had a chance.
It happened totally different.
And so you compare those two events, the 2009 prosecution and the 2019 arrest, and I think it opens up credibly for a hypothesis that it wasn't black hats that got rid of Epstein, but white hats that did.
[00:43:23] Speaker B: Can you connect those dots any further?
Who are you thinking?
[00:43:27] Speaker A: Look, I don't know what the deep skunk works of the US government looks like, but again, had Epstein lived in 2019, he would not have stayed in prison. Right, and his lawyers would have tied it all up.
New Jersey's a blue state.
Political favors, the whole works. Right. And 2019, Trump wasn't going to be president.
A year later, Biden came in. What do you think Biden's DOJ would have done with the Epstein case?
[00:43:57] Speaker B: I'm surprised Maxwell hasn't fessed up more. She seems to be remarkably tight lipped about what happened.
[00:44:06] Speaker A: When she took the fifth this week before Congress and refused to testify. Her lawyer said she would happily testify if she was given a pardon.
[00:44:15] Speaker B: Yeah, right.
[00:44:16] Speaker A: And that makes total sense to me. I wouldn't talk either if until I got a part.
[00:44:20] Speaker B: She still got leverage.
Correct, but a pardon, would that be a presidential pardon? Or would that be one that would come from something from Congress on federal charges?
[00:44:30] Speaker A: It would be a presidential pardon and commutation of her current sentence.
[00:44:35] Speaker B: Okay, so as we opened up, this has exposed reality.
This is the world we live in. These things happen. There are mega donors, there are elite politicians, whatever it might be, who are into some very nefarious things.
But there's Something about for the everyman that feels a little bit of safety. As long as it's on Epstein island, it's in D.C. it's not the kind of thing that we have to deal with in Nassau County.
But what it showed us is this is the reality for big government, world movers and shakers. And if that's true, it's probably the case closer to home. There's probably more things going on that we have to deal with that may come out in the future. And I say that because this week I received an email from Jack Knockey that is pertaining to a local situation with the Nassau County Library.
And I'll put the stats up because I don't want to misquote it, but Jack did what you were talking about earlier. He put AI to work to investigate the purchase of books for the Nassau County Library.
And he's looking at keywords that pertain to things like lgbtq, the pride movement, and witchcraft. Those are his parameters. So he analyzes the brain book purchases over years.
And you know, there's always gonna be a few that pop up along the way. And suddenly in the last six months to a year, it went through the roof. I'm talking the line went off the chart up and to the right of purchases hundreds of these books.
So got involved in it a little bit. I talked to one of the employees at the library and asked, is it like the school system where PA publishers are sneaking in books but nobody's asking for them? And he said no. He says these had to be ordered by title.
Someone had to go and order these books in particular, and there's nothing in place.
So if these books fill the library and a 10 year old kid goes and picks up that book and starts browsing through it, there's no policy. The kid can't take it home if it's of an adult nature, but the kid can sit down and read it in our library and have access to practically everything there, as well as online materials and that sort of thing.
Why would we take tax dollars and buy hundreds of books that are either in the realm of pornography or the occult witchcraft if we're not targeting children in the process?
And so in the, you know, digging a little deeper, a hire was made by one of our county employees of a extremely aggressive, far left woke ideologue to, of all things, be over the public library?
And so how do you change these things?
Who do you call?
We've talked to the person who did the hiring, we've talked to employees at the library. Nothing seems to Be changing.
What do you think on a local level?
What wisdom could you share as to how we could move that process, change that process?
[00:48:21] Speaker A: Yeah, you just segued into exactly where I wanted to go with this, which is the most mind bending question of all.
And it pertains to yours, but it's even bigger than that.
And it's a question that nobody's thought of yet, but they're going to be thinking about it at some point, probably sooner than later. And the question is, what do we need to change culturally, politically and institutionally to prevent anything like a Jeffrey Epstein from happening again?
Now just sit with that for a second and think about how big of a question that is and how profoundly it could affect the way we do politics and communal government going forward.
I don't know the answer.
It's too big of a question.
But I think about it a lot.
And what you just described about the local county library is a microcosm of this bigger problem.
[00:49:28] Speaker B: It's just this week's issue.
It's what's come up this week, this month that I've had to be faced with and been brought into. But you're right, it could be something going on with the school system. It could be something going on with county government, whatever it might be. But these issues, I'm finding that we were talking earlier, I turned 50 this week.
You're a little my elder there. Thank you.
But I'm finding that I'm learning at 50 what can be done.
Who are allies, who can we reach out to, what can be done to correct this? Because I think most of the citizens of this county would agree that we don't want our tax dollars going to make pornographic material available to children and things that are going to indoctrinate them toward a lifestyle that is going to lead to death in the long run. I think most of our citizens would agree we don't need hundreds of those books in our library. But what can you do? How can you get involved?
[00:50:37] Speaker A: So I think the most important thing that you just said was that, that you're just finding out about how this works at age 50.
[00:50:44] Speaker B: Right.
[00:50:45] Speaker A: So what happened to civics education?
[00:50:47] Speaker B: Right.
[00:50:49] Speaker A: We relaxed, I guess, and just assumed that the people who are running things are gonna act in our best interest and are gonna be selfless and sacrificial and make the right decision even when the wrong decision's easier, or could give them some incentives to go that way, but they'll still make the right decision. We just assumed that would happen.
[00:51:12] Speaker B: And the Epstein release has shattered that for all time. Right.
[00:51:17] Speaker A: So back to civics education, like, pretty quick, right? I mean, it's not too late for our high school students even.
They can learn at 18 what it took us to learn in our 50s.
[00:51:28] Speaker B: I totally agree. And I'm going to float something. Okay. That it's been on my mind, it's been on my heart. I want to get your take on it because I think you could be a significant part of it. And so I'm putting you on the spot. Okay. Now, really, right now I'm just wanting to get your feedback because I think I'll have to read things before I sign it. I don't put anything in writing. That's the thing.
[00:51:50] Speaker A: Fair.
[00:51:51] Speaker B: I read a lot of biographies and.
Hey guys, I'm very excited to tell you about the maximum Life plus app. It's available for download today for $3.99. You can get every resource we produce at Maximum Life in one easy to use location.
Check it out of the App Store in the Google Play Store today. You can download it. When you do, be sure to set up a profile and then hit subscribe. That gives you access to everything we have currently and all of the resources that we're soon to release.
So download your copy today.
I'm sure you've read a lot of biographies as well.
In fact, this is the birthday of Lincoln. We've been remembering Lincoln this week.
The Lincoln Douglas debates emerged out of a Lyceum movement. Are you familiar with that movement? Have you heard that term before?
[00:52:50] Speaker A: No.
[00:52:50] Speaker B: So it was one of the most popular things happening across the nation. North, south, little towns, big towns all over the United States. There would be a Lyceum, and it was a society mostly of men that would come together, they would gather, there would be refreshments.
But younger men in particular in their twenties, would debate the issues.
It would be a civilization debate. There would be a moderator who would kind of maintain decorum.
They would function something like a UFC fight.
So if you've got a young man who just needs to kind of build those muscles, but he doesn't have a lot of experience with it.
Say he's 17, 18 years old. He's assigned a topic, he does his research. He meets with someone like a Jeff Childers. You coach him up, you show him the strengths of his argument, the weaknesses of his argument. He comes in at 6pm to the Lyceum.
Men of the community are gathered there, and he has another person of roughly the same age and experience who's taking the opposite position.
The Two of them debate. There's rules, there's no heckling. And at the end of that, the people in the audience respond. Some of the response is a vote of who won. Some of it is, how could they improve?
But the end result would be civic engagement and education.
They're taught how to have these conversations in a public forum, how to argue their case, and you see who has strengths. Maybe we want to have this person run for county commissioner, whatever it might be.
And then, so, like a UFC fight, you've got your lower ranks, you've got your lightweights, and then eight o', clock, you bring in the heavyweights, people who have a lot of experience.
The community comes and gathers, and it might be Representative Bean and his opponent that are going to go at it in a public forum, same rules. There's going to be decorum, going to keep heckling to a medium, and you get to see these things fleshed out in real time.
I believe, as I've read about the Lyceum movement, I believe that we're at a time that we're getting tired of the digital debates happening on social media.
It's overwhelming. It's many times there's no substance to it.
And so when you, if you want real substance and a debate, you have situations like this where we hash things out. You have thoughtful writers who are writing things, like on Substack, it's Coffee and.
[00:55:43] Speaker A: Covid.
[00:55:45] Speaker B: But you don't get to see flesh and blood in the same room being human and trying to sway an audience to their opinion.
I think there might be a time where we could resurrect that.
And so I'm floating it right now.
I talked to James Bruner about it, bounced it off him, said, just give me some feedback on it.
I've talked to Jack, I've talked to several of people in our church, and some that are more from the left perspective. Just so it can't just be one side. You do need to have both sides represented in these debates.
So far, the response has been pretty strong.
What do you think about that kind of pivot?
Well, would you want your children to be a part of something like that?
[00:56:38] Speaker A: Well, absolutely.
I think you identified a gap in our current educational marketplace, whether it's public or private. I mean, I think there might be some private schools that are really doing, like, classic debate.
[00:56:54] Speaker B: The classical schools are doing a great job at it, but it's a microcosm. You know, most of these people are going to be typically of a conservative perspective, and the issues they debate are theoretical.
What I would like to see is the issues debated being things like paid parking in Fernandina Beach.
You know, that's getting debated on Facebook.
But if there are good reasons for it, let's set it out there. Convince the public, the citizens of your perspective. I would love that. I would love to see those things hashed out in real life.
[00:57:35] Speaker A: Yeah, and we've got opportunities now, I think, that Lincoln era folks didn't have, for example, live streaming and ready access to video. I mean, you know, you, with your equipment that you just have here for the podcast, could probably produce a feature film at this point.
[00:57:58] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, we looked into a documentary.
[00:58:01] Speaker A: So the barriers to entry, to producing high quality intellectual property are very low now. And AI is just making it easier and cheaper like we were talking about before.
It's critical that we solve this civics education gap. I would. I'll bet you a steak dinner anywhere in the county that we have people in Congress who don't understand civics.
[00:58:30] Speaker B: Right?
No, I totally agree. And I think even if you understand it, you will understand it on a national level.
That's what's sexy. People want to talk about the presidential election.
The closer you get to home, the less people even know how it works. What does a city manager do? What's the difference between a city manager and a mayor? You know, I can't find three people who understand how a mayor gets elected in Fernandina Beach.
And so if you find anybody who remotely understands it, they're over 50, you talk to kids about it and they're absolutely lost.
And so if our leaders are being exposed as corrupted and most of the people who are in the Epstein files are over 50, so when you look to who's going to be leading when we're gone, it's not an encouraging picture.
And I don't think we can necessarily trust our public schools to do it.
I think they could be involved. I think some of their teachers could be involved in it. But I think it's going to have to happen the way it happened for the Lyceum movement.
And you're going to have to have people in communities come together, form a board and start hosting these kind of events. I don't think it needs to be primarily the church, like the church hosting the event.
I had my assistant reach out to Mocama this week. I think a place like that, a public, highly trafficked place, would be great. Have you been up to the Tiger Island Room in downtown?
No, it's a concert there.
[01:00:22] Speaker A: Yeah, we walked into it during the. The Festival.
[01:00:26] Speaker B: It's a great venue. Just, you know, if you could put seating in there, it would be a great location for it.
We have the amphitheater now, you know, weather permitting. That would be. That would be a cool venue for it.
When I pitched the idea, or my assistant pitched the idea to one of the local businesses, I thought, yeah, you know, they're going. They will not want to touch that. It's too controversial.
But they were very open to it and they could see that. Yeah, you could. If you ticketed this event, then, you know, you could get 70, 80 people to show up for it. That would be really entertaining.
Better than, you know, a cover band on Saturday night, you know, especially for men. I think men would be drawn to it, although I think it could be coed. I think women could participate in it as well.
But I think it could be something that would meet that need.
[01:01:21] Speaker A: The most important thing about classical debate is not that it teaches kids how to argue, it teaches them how to think.
If our kids understood classical logical fallacies, for example, they would be immune to a lot of the propaganda that institutional media pushes out every day.
As just one example, for people who aren't familiar with what I'm talking about, a classic logical fallacy, one of them is called the appeal to authority.
And an example everybody will remember is being told during the pandemic, well, the CDC says that's not an argument.
[01:02:03] Speaker B: Right.
That's not evidence, that's not proof.
[01:02:06] Speaker A: No, it doesn't really get you anywhere. The CDC says it, but they may or may not be right. What is it based on? Tell me the argument for why we need to do this. You know, masking and lockdowns and mandates and arrows in supermarkets and everything else. Let's debate.
Let's get down to the science. Don't just wave your hand and say, well, the CDC says that's a classic logical fallacy. And that fallacy goes all the way back to ancient Greeks.
[01:02:33] Speaker B: Right.
[01:02:34] Speaker A: It's not new.
[01:02:35] Speaker B: Right. And, you know, Wikipedia is not necessarily evidence either. You can quote a Wikipedia article.
It's the authority on it. But what is the source? Get all the way down to the source. Give source documentation, quote the source, produce the facts, correlation, causation, fallacies, recognizing when this is happening. And I think Covid was a good example of being manipulated by a higher authority with poor logic, poor reason, that enough people said, you know, hit critical mass, that enough people said, okay, enough, we're going to push back on this.
And, you know, the same type thing, whether it's Deportation of illegals. Whether it's, you know, right now, you know, in Florida, we are approaching our governor, who's been a phenomenal governor, is coming up on his final days in office.
But have you heard any substantive debates about who may be taking his place?
I've not heard the first debate. I've not heard anything come out so far from the leading candidates. Donald, he's been challenged by a few people, one out of the administration, DeSantis administration. You got Fishback, who seems to be getting traction, and then his house is burnt down, and it's just, you know, drama unfolding.
But I've not heard any of these guys step up to a mic and share their ideas.
[01:04:19] Speaker A: Well, in fairness, I introduced Byron at an event in Ocala in December.
I thought he did a great job.
[01:04:32] Speaker B: No, I don't doubt that he can.
[01:04:35] Speaker A: Make his case, but we haven't debated.
[01:04:38] Speaker B: Will we have an option? Will we hear a debate between the candidates, or will the authorities just tell us this is who you're to vote for?
I think that's where we have a problem.
The last I checked, he had, like, $45 million in the bank.
He's got an endorsement from Trump. That's all well and good, God bless him. He's probably going to be our next governor.
But at some point, it would be nice to, if it's not in the primary, it's in the general, to step up to a mic and present your case.
You do it all the time. You know, tell us why we should vote for you. I don't think we as voters need to just trust the authorities anymore. I think this whole thing has proven that that's not a good idea.
[01:05:29] Speaker A: We're right back to the beginning.
[01:05:30] Speaker B: Right?
[01:05:31] Speaker A: That's the theme of today's episode is nobody trusts the institutions and we have to fix it.
The alternative to fixing that is anarchy, and we don't need that.
But fixing it is going to require more than just polishing it up a little.
[01:05:50] Speaker B: Yeah, and it's not.
It's not a business plan. Nobody's going to get rich by fixing it.
You're going to get rich, or you're going to fix it by getting in a room, having a conversation, which is going to be pro bono.
You're not getting paid to have this conversation. This is pro bono. This is coming in and presenting your ideas.
And for that to happen, if this Lyceum idea, debating society, whatever takes off, I think we all have to lay aside the profit model for it so it can scale, it can go across the state quickly.
And it's gotta be just good people in the community coming together, meeting that need.
[01:06:36] Speaker A: Well, Elon says we won't need money soon, so that's true.
[01:06:40] Speaker B: Well, Jeff, thank you for joining us again. Coffeeandcovid.com Let me encourage everybody to sign up for that if they haven't already done so. We'll put the link in the show notes and some of the other things we've talked about as well.
[01:06:52] Speaker A: Great talking to you.
All right.
