What They’re Not Telling You — A Candid Conversation with Jeff Childers

[00:00:10] Speaker A: My mom called me. She was really worried. She used to work at the University of Florida Medical Center. And so somebody, she said, higher up, called her and said, you son needs to be careful. What he's doing carries a lot of risk. [00:00:22] Speaker B: Welcome back to Code Red. You're about to watch the most consequential episode of Code Red that we have produced to date. I'm having a conversation with my friend Jeff Childers. Jeff is an attorney, he's a dad, a husband. In his own work, he's made a great impact and done a lot of good. But in 2020, he began a blog called Coffee and Covid. And currently it's read by millions of people every single week. And it's making a great difference. You will want to listen to every word, I promise you. The best stuff comes up toward the end of the broadcast today. So stick around, share this episode, let people know about it. This is taking it to a new level. Welcome to Code Red. I'm Jeff Childers. Welcome to the Code Red studio. [00:01:27] Speaker A: Glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me. [00:01:28] Speaker B: It. It occurred to me, as I was telling you earlier, one of our friends, mutual friends, had forwarded me one of your. An email from your blog. And it occurred to me we're always thinking through future potential guests and there's certain markers that we're looking for. And so people with great courage, people who are speaking to controversial issues, some of those things are what we're looking for. I'm like, Jeff hits all the markers. I don't know why I have thought of Jeff already. And then I went back and I was looking, looking through the blog and I realized I had not subscribed to it, but I received forwards from it enough that I thought, because I've read so many articles, I thought I was subscribed already. And so we corrected that earlier today and my wife told me, yes, she's been subscribed to it. And now we're two of 180 some odd thousand people. [00:02:27] Speaker A: Correct. [00:02:27] Speaker B: That are reading Coffee and Covid. Is it weekly? [00:02:31] Speaker A: How often do you publish Daily? [00:02:32] Speaker B: Daily. So what? What? Do you have any idea on the word count of an average post? [00:02:41] Speaker A: No, but I would say if you printed it out, it'd be five to 10 pages. Probably it's a lot. [00:02:46] Speaker B: So a daily. Just that level of productivity. How much time does that take out of your daily routine? [00:02:54] Speaker A: So I sit down to a blank screen at 5am and I usually post between 9 and 10. [00:03:00] Speaker B: What time do you wake up? [00:03:01] Speaker A: 4:30. [00:03:02] Speaker B: Okay, so you're getting up at 4:30. [00:03:04] Speaker A: Having a pray, coffee, do some exercise. [00:03:07] Speaker B: Okay. [00:03:08] Speaker A: Get my coffee all set and everything and then get to it. [00:03:12] Speaker B: All right, so you. You sit down and you're posting around 9:30, you said. [00:03:16] Speaker A: I'm trying to post by 9, but it usually goes a little over. [00:03:20] Speaker B: How do you consume the information so that you're on the cutting edge of what the conversation is or what it should be like? How do you digest news and what do you look to for information? [00:03:35] Speaker A: I wish there was a secret I could tell you because then I could make a book about that and get rich and retire. But God gave me the superpower of being a fast learner and that's helped me. I'm a lawyer, so I've got to, you know, learn a case fast and be ready to argue it in front of the judge and act like I know what I'm talking about. [00:03:53] Speaker B: You do case law? [00:03:55] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Trial litigation. [00:03:57] Speaker B: Okay, so you're in front of. You're in front of the judge arguing the case. [00:04:01] Speaker A: Yep. [00:04:03] Speaker B: What do you. Or do you. Do you subscribe to 20 newspapers? Or what do you do? How do you. Where do you get your information? [00:04:10] Speaker A: No, I've got some curated lists on social media that have search filters that look for certain things. So this whole thing started out of COVID during the pandemic. So of course I was reporting on anything related to Covid. That's all anybody wanted to hear about. Scientific studies, interviews, you name it. During that, I learned a lot of the tricks that the media plays to confuse people, to make a lie sound like the truth and things like that. So just through doing it for so long and so often, I now can scan a list of headlines and something will jump out at me, you know. Oh, that's the one right there I want to talk about. [00:04:56] Speaker B: Okay, so in 2020, had you started this already? It obviously wasn't called Coffee and Covid before that. But did you have a blog that you were posting already? [00:05:07] Speaker A: Well, ever since I was a child, I had a dream of one day being a blogger on social media. No, I'm just kidding. [00:05:14] Speaker B: Well, I was wondering, how old is he? [00:05:16] Speaker A: Yeah, there wasn't any blogs back then. No, it was totally a God thing. [00:05:23] Speaker B: Did you want to write when you were young? [00:05:26] Speaker A: Well, I've always been a good writer, you know, and that's probably what attracted me to law. Between being a fast learner and a good writer, it just was a natural fit. But it was really. But I was a social media agnostic. I mean, I pretty much had figured I'M just gonna stay away from social media. My Facebook page was given to me. It wasn't. I never signed up for it. And I might have had 200 friends just from people friending me. And I don't know if that sounds like a lot or not, but now I'm maxed out, right? You know, 5,000. And on Twitter, it's another 30,000 or something like that. So those numbers, that wasn't. I wasn't even trying. I never logged into Facebook. But it was very early in the pandemic. It was in March. So basically, the first month, the declaration of emergency was March 11th. And so I was watching the first county commission meeting I had ever watched and realizing why I had never watched one before. Is painful. [00:06:30] Speaker B: Thrilling experience to watch those. [00:06:31] Speaker A: Yeah. I don't know. I could think of a lot of things I'd rather do even that involve painful experiences. But they were debating whether to impose a local mask mandate and other emergency mitigation measures. So that had my attention. And so Michelle and I were sitting on the back patio. I mean, I'll never forget it. And we're watching the. This county commission meeting painfully unfold. And this county commissioner, who was a failed real estate agent before he got elected, held up a piece of paper that looked like a cocktail napkin, and it had writing all over it. And he said, I've been doing my own calculations. This person had no business doing any kind of math, much less pandemic math, but okay. And he said, according to my calculations, the cases in Alachua county, where I live, are doubling every two days, and in one month, the entire county will be infected. And I thought, that doesn't make any sense. And what they did was they went on to pass the first indoor outdoor mask mandate in the state of Florida. But that wasn't even the worst part. Believe me when I tell you this, you're going to think I'm exaggerating. They. For 15 minutes, they debated whether they could require Alachua county citizens to wear masks inside their own homes. [00:08:03] Speaker B: Wow. [00:08:04] Speaker A: And the only reason they didn't get this, the county attorney said, we can't enforce it because you need probable cause to send the police in. And they debated other ways that they could manufacture probable cause so the police could come in your house. [00:08:19] Speaker B: Oh, my goodness. [00:08:20] Speaker A: Check and make sure you were wearing your mask. [00:08:22] Speaker B: Well. And that county, that the city of Gainesville is where the University of Florida is located, it's one of the more liberal counties. Anytime you have a public university, it's going to be a more Liberal area, but that's been the case. I knew that was the case with city government. It's also the case with county, apparently. [00:08:41] Speaker A: Yeah, they. They work hand in glove, the city and the county there. I just litigated an elections case last year, and so I had to learn a lot of the political history of the county. And one of the most remarkable facts is that since Reconstruction, there have been only two Republicans elected to public office in Alachua County. [00:09:01] Speaker B: Wow. That's hard to believe. [00:09:05] Speaker A: It tells you something. [00:09:07] Speaker B: Wow. Is the left, is it splintered? Is it united? Is there a spectrum of left in the county? Or is everybody pretty much voting the same way, thinking the same way, worldview? [00:09:25] Speaker A: No, I don't believe it's legitimate. I think that after the Civil War, the Democrats figured out how to keep control there, and they've kept it ever since. [00:09:34] Speaker B: Okay. [00:09:35] Speaker A: The way the electoral map is drawn there, and I don't want to get into the weeds on this, but all the voting is at large. So you have this urban core in the city of Gainesville that's just off the charts liberal, and they control everything because they can vote in every election in the county. And so that's what the lawsuit last year was about. A ballot initiative that had successfully changed the county over to district elections, which is going to change everything. And the county immediately put it back on the ballot and reversed it. And then on behalf of some locals, I sued the county because that was illegal. And. And we won at trial, and now it's up on appeal. [00:10:21] Speaker B: Wow. So. So you're sitting there on the porch watching the. The county trying to figure out what they're going to do with mass mandates. [00:10:30] Speaker A: Right. [00:10:30] Speaker B: Did. Did you, at that point, were you sending out anything daily? [00:10:34] Speaker A: No. [00:10:35] Speaker B: Okay, so you. How quickly did you get clarity on what your personal response. Now, you had some litigation, but on a personal level, to start the blog, did it just kind of download to you? Did you know what you were supposed to do at that point? [00:10:54] Speaker A: So I've often described as. That was my Holy Spirit moment. I felt an overwhelming conviction that what they were doing was unconstitutional. Now, I've never practiced constitutional law. I had one semester on con law, my first year of law school, and that was the last time I had ever looked at it. Constitutional law is hard. It's squishy. All the rules have exceptions, and the exceptions have exceptions, and there's exceptions to the exceptions. And so I always stayed away from it. I do business law, but. But I just, you know, at my core, felt like there's this is wrong. And so I looked at Michelle and I said, somebody's got to do something about this. This isn't right. And this is how I got onto the blogging is the first thing I did was I started, I went to check the numbers. And I'm a lawyer. That's what I do, right? I don't believe what anybody tells me. I want to see the numbers for myself. And I didn't see. He just went off the first three days. So the first day was there was four cases, then there was eight, and then there was like 15. But after that it just kept going up three or four a day. But if you took those three, you could lie and make a case that it was doubling every two days. So I started publishing a little spreadsheet that I just made on my computer. I think I did it in word, in a word table. It wasn't anything fancy. And I just put the real numbers in there. And I'm like, well, this is important. People need to know this. So I thought, I'll just throw it up on my Facebook page. And so I put it up there with a little explanation of what I saw in the numbers different from the county. And people started just right away. I mean, again, only 200 friends. I don't even know who they were. But they started sending it to people and the numbers started ballooning. [00:12:42] Speaker B: So prior to that, had you been just by nature, and I guess as a lawyer you have to be to some degree. But were you what would be considered conspiracy guy prior to that? [00:12:57] Speaker A: No, no, I was sort of an anti conspiracy guy. Like, I would have laughed at you if you told me that we never landed on the moon and stuff like that. [00:13:07] Speaker B: I'm the same by nature. I typically just assume the best about people, that they're not trying to harm me in any way. And my wife could tell you we moved to Florida. And I don't know if it was the move, I don't know if it was 2020, but so many of the conspiracies kind of came true that it. [00:13:27] Speaker A: Was like, I don't believe anything they said. [00:13:29] Speaker B: No, it's like, what is true now? Outside of Jesus Christ, what can we believe now? [00:13:34] Speaker A: Remember what Pontius Pilate said? [00:13:36] Speaker B: Yeah. What is truth? [00:13:37] Speaker A: What is truth? [00:13:38] Speaker B: Right? And the answer is Jesus. He's the way, the truth and the life. But outside of that, you've got to let God be true and all men a liar. You've got to ask questions over everything beyond that. So not being driven that way by nature, you had this God moment, how did it move from Facebook to substack? Or did it start on substack? [00:14:03] Speaker A: Well, of course, not long after that, I sued the county over the mask mandate, and that's a different story. But I won the only appellate decision in the country. [00:14:12] Speaker B: Was that an individual against the county or was that a. Yeah, I called. [00:14:16] Speaker A: Up one of my cantankerous libertarian type clients and asked if he wanted the appointment. He said, hell yeah. Off and going. [00:14:24] Speaker B: Were you, were you at that point? Would you have considered yourself a Republican, conservative or more libertarian? [00:14:30] Speaker A: I've always been a Republican. You know, I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh when I was a kid, but I wasn't political. So up until 2020, I never voted in a local election. I didn't know who was on the county commission. I might have voted. And I hate, I mean, it's so shameful to admit this, but I probably only voted in every other presidential election, so I wasn't real plugged in. [00:14:56] Speaker B: That's surprising at all because it's such. You're moving the needle and having an impact in that world so much now. That's really surprising to me that you didn't grow up with that ambition. I think some guys kind of have such an ambition there, and then when they see an opportunity, they capitalize on it. But that doesn't seem to be what was going on. [00:15:14] Speaker A: I was never interested in politics. I've made up for lost time, though. [00:15:18] Speaker B: Totally. Absolutely. So, so how did you, how did you analyze and figure out how, what your medium was going to be? [00:15:27] Speaker A: Well, so following along where we were, I was filing the lawsuit and the more I dug into it, the more things I found that I just thought were, were wrong. I mean, the way the whole, the whole way the media was framing it, you know, fear mongering and just terrifying folks and all this stuff. So I started adding to my little spreadsheet and I would add a few comments and you know, from a lawyer's perspective, as a skeptical lawyer, not, not following the conspiracy theories, but like, hey, I found this study. And this study says that the people on the Diamond Princess didn't die at rates that, you know, were above what a flu might produce. Right. And so I would just include that. And then I started to get some really interesting feedback. And whenever I talk about this, the hair on my arm stands up. So I'll never forget the first one. I got a message, a direct message from somebody and it was long. And so usually you're like, oh, I have to read this Long thing. But I started reading it and I couldn't stop. And it said, jeff, hi, I'm so and so. I live in New York City. Somebody sent me a copy of your post from Facebook page and I started following you and I just wanted to let you know that I hadn't been out of my apartment in three months and I was about to kill myself. But you've given me a little bit of optimism, so I'm going to hang in for now. [00:16:58] Speaker B: Oh my goodness. [00:16:59] Speaker A: Yeah. And then I got like another dozen like that. [00:17:03] Speaker B: Wow. [00:17:04] Speaker A: And I realized that what I was doing wasn't just venting. I mean, I kind of felt like I'm just, you know, I've done the research for myself, I'm just going to put it out there and stick it to the man kind of. But I got a sense that something bigger was going on at that season. [00:17:18] Speaker B: And it's easy to forget. At that time nobody was really questioning at large. There was pockets, but everybody was just sort of trusting that this is something we've never dealt with before. Surely why would Fauci mislead us? And everybody kind of gave the media the benefit of the doubt. Very few voices were saying, let's hit the brakes a little bit and ask some questions. You were one of those voices. Did you get ostracized by the community? How did it play out? [00:17:56] Speaker A: So it's easy to forget, but back in those days, if you even asked a question about the mass, you were literally killing grandma. And so I got quite a bit of that. And they, from time to time in waves, they would assign teams of doctors to come on my Facebook page and try to debunk me. And they would post, who is they? [00:18:19] Speaker B: Who do you think was leading that? [00:18:22] Speaker A: I think it was an hierarchy coming from HHS who was just sending pallets of money down the stream. And so they were paying the local health agencies and the, and the big corporate hospitals who totally depend on government. 70% of their reimbursements come from government sources. So they have to do whatever the government tells them. And they organ and the, and the medical associations. Right. And so somebody was a very well organized, I'll call it a conspiracy. They call it government functioning. And it was a top down effort to squash any dissenting voices for all of 2020 and most of 2021. And I really enjoyed it because what they didn't understand, these experts and doctors that got on my page, that was right where I wanted them. As a lawyer, especially a litigating lawyer, I tangle with experts all the time, that's what I do. I mean, I got to put an expert on the stand, and then I have to make the judge or the jury think that the expert doesn't know what they're talking about. That's my bread and butter. [00:19:35] Speaker B: Right. [00:19:35] Speaker A: So I loved it when they got on. They always got frustrated and eventually dropped off. But that didn't stop them from trying. Once my mom called me, she was really worried. She's retired and somebody. She used to work at the University of Florida Medical center. And so somebody, she said higher up, she wouldn't say who, called her and said, your son needs to be careful. What he's doing carries a lot of risk. So she was terrified. So she called me and, and told me that. And so I just put it on the blog the next day. [00:20:08] Speaker B: Wow. [00:20:10] Speaker A: And I got a call, believe it or not, from the CEO of Shands, who said, that's out of line. He said, you know, you tell us what we can do that shouldn't have happened and everything. But mom shut up after that. And she's. Her position is it never happens. [00:20:25] Speaker B: It. I don't think people. Because your. Your platform in that world is so much bigger than mine. So I can't imagine what you've received through that. But just now I should probably take it more seriously than I do. But when you get threats and you get, you know, this, this could happen. Insinuations from. From people, you know, I assumed everybody got those, that, you know, you weren't living if you haven't got a death threat, you know, because it was just what happened. But when we started kind of speaking out and stepping into that world, you know, as recent as this week, just dark, dark stuff. [00:21:06] Speaker A: You know, it's strange that people feel like that's the way they need to address disagreeing with someone that. [00:21:14] Speaker B: Right. [00:21:14] Speaker A: Is speaking. Right. So they could create their own sub stack. [00:21:18] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:21:18] Speaker A: They have a different point of view. Right. But instead they want to, you know, just fire off some unhinged. And I feel like half those people are drunk when they do it. [00:21:29] Speaker B: Yeah, a lot of them come at 2:30 in the morning. [00:21:30] Speaker A: I've noticed the late night voicemails. Those are my favorite. [00:21:35] Speaker B: Did you professionally. Did it. Did it have any blowback? [00:21:41] Speaker A: So when I filed the mask case, I had never sued the government before for anything. And so I didn't really know exactly how to do it. And just like if I was in any other kind of new lawsuit that I didn't have experience with, I started calling my peers to say, hey, have you ever sued the government? You know, who do I serve the complaint on? I mean. Yeah, where do you put it? [00:22:05] Speaker B: Where do you start? [00:22:05] Speaker A: Yeah. And so everyone I talked to said, jeff, why are you throwing your career away for this. This mass thing? It's going to be gone in a month. You're going to lose your license. Why are you doing this? And they were my friends, and they meant well. And so I had a moment where I really had to struggle and say, is this really what God wants me to do, or is this just me? And I finally decided, no, this is. I mean, God put me here. He put this feeling in me, and he's either going to protect me or I'm going to lose my license. And that's what the plan was, anyway. And so I just moved forward. But, yeah, there was some. I had to talk to Michelle about it, make sure she was on board. [00:22:50] Speaker B: Had you guys. I'm trying to remember when you guys first visited our congregation because you had a place here on Amelia island and you showed up one day, we met. Was that before or after Covid, the. [00:23:05] Speaker A: Only reason we're here is because of the pandemic. When the. When was it? I don't think it was. It was much later than the end of March. [00:23:15] Speaker B: So. [00:23:15] Speaker A: Remember when the stock market crashed? Everything was under lockdown. The beaches. Remember when the beaches were under lockdown? So I had a contrary feeling. I was already feeling pretty wound up and contrary. And I said, you know what? I've missed so many of these opportunities in my life. I'm going to put all the cash I can scrounge together in the stock market, and let's go look for that beach house we've always wanted. We were the only customer real estate agents had, and we went every weekend. We went to look at another 10 or 11 houses on both sides of the state. We just drew a circle, three hours around our house. And I'll tell you something, that was one of the most dystopian experiences I've ever had. Driving down i75 with not another car on the highway. [00:24:06] Speaker B: It was wild in the skies, being empty. That's what. Yeah, I remember looking up and not seeing. Because we're close to an airport and not seeing any traffic in the skies. I remember that was just so odd today. When I see it, I was out fishing one day, and if the. If the barometric pressure and the humidity is just right, you don't see the comp trails. So you look up and it looks empty. And I don't know if It's PTSD or what it was. But I was out one day recently and I looked up. There's no comp trails. I'm like, what's happened? Because we don't have any phone signal offshore. [00:24:38] Speaker A: You're thinking the worst case scenario. [00:24:39] Speaker B: Yeah. And I'm thinking it hasn't happened again. But if you remember back the way that we processed started. And again, I'm not assuming the worst. I'm assuming that, okay, this is happening. Trump was in office when it started, you know, so you're listening to an administration that you kind of have some confidence in. And it sounds bad. It sounds like we need to do this two weeks, you know, thing that's going to make it all go away, you know, and so we took off. We stopped having services, which I deeply regret never would do it again. But we went online. It was right around Easter. And that year, wherever Easter fell that year, we had it. We had it worked out so we could go to the airport and have everybody drive up and do, like, a big outdoor service. And sometime around that, around that date, it began to hit me. And it was really. Dr. Devane. Do you know Todd Devane? [00:25:53] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:25:54] Speaker B: So we've got a plethora of doctors in our church, but Todd is my doctor. And he began to say, you know, this. Medically, this doesn't make sense, what they're saying. He said, I just don't think it's as big a deal. Like he said, it's dangerous, but the flu is dangerous. [00:26:15] Speaker A: Like, what time frame are you talking about? [00:26:17] Speaker B: This was right around. This was early. This was. This was within three weeks of the lockdown. [00:26:23] Speaker A: So very early May. [00:26:25] Speaker B: Yeah, I guess. So when did the lockdown start? Do you remember? When did. When was the. Two weeks to recovery. [00:26:31] Speaker A: Two weeks to flatten the curve? [00:26:33] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. [00:26:34] Speaker A: That was in March. Okay. Late March. [00:26:37] Speaker B: This was soon after that. We brought all of our doctors on stage and, you know, these are guys in our church, and we just said, let's. Let's talk to these guys. And we trust them more than we trust the guys in D.C. people we've never met before. They care about us in their best interest. We get through this. Let's see what they have to say about it. So we just had a sort of a online town hall. We took questions off the Internet and all that, and Todd was. It surprised me because I hadn't heard anybody at that point say, I don't think this is what they're saying. It is. Like, I don't think this is going to be the plague that they're making it out to be. Yeah. And it was. And it did. It felt like, how can you say that you could get. You could get in a lot of trouble. [00:27:27] Speaker A: Did you get pushback from anybody in the congregation at that time? [00:27:31] Speaker B: Nobody really knew what to do with it. So it, it developed within like a couple of weeks. We're just, you know, we're wanting to do the right thing like everybody else. And at that point, and I don't know all of the, the, the higher up politics that went into it, but our health department reached out and said, would you serve as a vaccine station? This is so. This is further down. The vaccine had been developed. They're trying to get it out to the elderly and all that as quickly as they could. So at that point, we were shut down and we said, we're going to participate in this. Had no idea that it would ever become a problem. Didn't really cross my mind not to take the vaccine. I think by that point we had a couple. We had one young man who was in military service, and he was willing to give up his career because they were going to force him to take the shot. So that was probably the first one. I thought, okay, maybe I should look at this differently. But most of our professionals were saying, this needs to happen. You know, we need to work with the government on this. So we served. I think we had two rounds where we let people get shots. And by that time, you. You were probably rocking pretty well with your blog. I'm not sure. [00:28:54] Speaker A: Yeah, and I think we were probably attending because I remember when you talked about helping to facilitate some of the immunizations. And at that time, hindsight's 20 20, I was actually tentatively in favor of the shots because I thought that was the way to get out of lockdowns and out of the pandemic, because that's what everybody was waiting on, the availability of that vaccine. And I was probably. I don't know that I ever advised anybody to take the shots. I did say, I think, you know, only elderly people and at risk folks. I said, I was. [00:29:28] Speaker B: That was our, our approach to it as well. [00:29:31] Speaker A: Yeah, healthy people don't need it. [00:29:32] Speaker B: We said, and Michael Miller, God bless Michael. You know Michael, don't you? So Michael was probably one of the only voices that said, pastor, I don't, I don't think this is a good idea. And simply because Michael was very new to the faith and he was new to our church, and he was literally the only person saying anything like you might want to rethink this, but in hindsight, he was wise beyond his years. So we did it. And we were the first church that I know of in Florida. There may have been others, but I didn't know of any other churches, certainly not in our county that had started back. So we started back early. And it was just that out of pure desperation to want to get back to congregational worship. But we started back early. We were only out, I want to think, was it six weeks at what, eight weeks? Yeah. So probably five, six weeks into the lockdown, we said, this isn't going to work. We need to figure out a plan to come back together. And it started out slow, but, you know, we've bounced back. You know, most churches in Florida have still not bounced back from COVID We have went well beyond what we were running pre Covid, actually. Gosh, I don't know if we doubled it, but it's pretty close. [00:30:55] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, and I don't think those things are unconnected. The reason that my family is at First Baptist is because of the sane approach that you guys took to the pandemic. You guys weren't the first church that we went to when we moved up here. And I'm not going to name names, certainly, please. But, you know, the other ones we came in and they're six foot distancing and everybody's got a mask on and there's hand washing stations or sanitizer stations every 10ft. You know, it was just this spirit of anxiety that precluded worship. I mean, how can you. And they were trying, and I don't blame them. And again, hindsight's 20 20, but for us, as soon as we got to First Baptist, we were like, this is where we need to be, because y' all were doing the best you could and not succumbing to what I later described as the spirit of fear. [00:31:54] Speaker B: Yeah. And looking back on it, our leadership team, our laity was pretty united and everybody kind of was seeing by then. Yeah, I don't think this is what they're making it out to be. And it certainly, you know, some people had a horrible effect on. And it was, you know, it's a real virus. But at the same time, I don't think we need to, like, just shut down the world forever because of this. [00:32:24] Speaker A: Well, we're getting to the spicy part now. [00:32:27] Speaker B: Okay. [00:32:28] Speaker A: So by March of 21, so they started rolling out the shots to healthcare workers in December of 20. By March of 21, the Cleveland Clinic had published. And that's gold standard institution. They had published the first study that showed breakthrough infections, meaning the people who got the shots still got Covid anyways. And so that changed everything. And I had been studying it long enough and hard enough to know what that meant, which is that the shots don't stop transmission. Now, remember, the whole predicate for getting the shots was what? [00:33:10] Speaker B: Shut it down. [00:33:11] Speaker A: We'll protect your neighbor. [00:33:13] Speaker B: Right? [00:33:13] Speaker A: Right. And in the churches, they were pushing that hard, what would Jesus do? Right. Love that neighbor. So don't get the shot for you. Get it for grandma. [00:33:22] Speaker B: Get it for your right. [00:33:23] Speaker A: But that was a lie. That was always a lie. Because the shots didn't stop transmission. So there was no point in getting it to protect grandma because you were going to get Covid anyways. So that's when I started to get very skeptical. And I had this experience when the churches were locked down in Alachua County. I was also. I had already, you know, filed my lawsuit. I was prosecuting it for the mass mandates. And so I'm like, well, what's one more said, I'm going to sue the county over locking these churches down. That's first amendment. I mean, that's as clear as can be. They can't. They cannot make any law that interferes with the practice of religion. So I sent the word out to every priest, pastor, minister, whatever in Alachua County. I'll take the case for free. I just need one plaintiff that has standing. A church that shut down and nobody took it. [00:34:30] Speaker B: Wow. The whole county. [00:34:31] Speaker A: In the whole county. And I was baffled by why. And I started talking to people and calling pastors and calling people with the different religious groups and affiliations around town. And what I got back was that the church had a relationship with local government. And so when you all want to do a new building project or get more permission for more students at the school, you have to go to the city commissioner, the county commissioner, whatever. And so they didn't want to get sideways with local government, so they would just continue being shut down and hunker through it and, you know, get to the other side. And that was very disappointing. [00:35:17] Speaker B: There was. There was more to it, I would say, coming from the top down. And by the top, I mean the entities, the. The denominations that, you know, in retrospect, we have in the Southern Baptist world, the ethics and religious liberty Commission, and presumably these were the guys who saw the world the way we did, and they would send us information about kind of how we should look at this. They were our aggregate. They were going through the News for us and telling us what's up and what's down. And we know now that they were receiving funding from some nefarious sources. And so we're hearing it from the top down, we're hearing it all around us that this is what you should do. Love thy neighbor. And at the same time a lie. And at the same time internally just yearning to be with God's people. [00:36:16] Speaker A: What does the Bible say? [00:36:18] Speaker B: Do not neglect the gathering together. [00:36:20] Speaker A: To gather together. [00:36:21] Speaker B: Right. And so there was a yearning for Lord's day worship. There was a sense in which, except during pandemics. Oh, man. You know, there was a sense in which through all of that, this could devastate the kingdom. In a practical level, we can't do this much longer because your funding's going down, your numbers. There's some people we're never going to get back if we keep doing this. And eventually it was like, weigh it in the balance. Yeah, there's some risks to starting back. There's also risks to being locked down. And eventually, to me, it hit a tipping point of I would rather have these risks to gather together. And some people may catch COVID And we need to really focus on being healthy and making sure that any kind of sickness that's floating around that we can fight against it. But that's a risk that we're always taking. And I thought about, we would tell children, new parents are hilarious because they'll have a doctor that says, don't let this kid get around anybody for so many months. And I would always say, well, how does it build an immune system if it's not around any kind of germs? So we've always encouraged them. Get them back in nursery. Get them back as quick as you can. And I thought, well, I'm telling these parents that, but I'm not telling the grownups that, yeah, you need to build your immune system. You need to get back and probably be exposed to some of this stuff so that you can build up the antibodies and be able to fight it yourself. [00:37:59] Speaker A: Doctor, Basic science. [00:38:00] Speaker B: Yeah. Things that we know to be true. But it seemed like the science had changed on us overnight, you know, And I wonder. I'd love to hear your thoughts on from 30,000ft, looking down on Covid on all the things that have taken place since 2020. Do you think that there was a larger nefarious purpose to move us toward a common enemy? A one world, you know, any nation, to have an identity, it's got to have a common point of worship. It's Got to have common enemies. Enemies. If you and I are worshiping the same God and we have the same enemy, then we can work together. And what do you think from the global perspective? Do you think this was orchestrated either spiritually or politically with a larger motive? [00:38:58] Speaker A: So let me tell you the next part. So after I called all those, you know, churches and religious institutions, I mean, you know, the Muslim, every denomination I could find, and nobody took it. And I was confused by that because I had started to think maybe pridefully, that this was what God really wanted me to do, right? That the mass thing was just a warmup, but getting the churches back open, that was my real purpose. So when I couldn't even get a plaintiff, I was a little bit confused. Like, you know, well, what is this really about? And I'm praying, God, what is. You would have given me a plaintiff if you wanted me to do it. And so then I got an invitation to speak. And since you would probably know them, I won't mention which institution, but let's just say a regional Baptist management type deal. And they asked me to come and talk to a group of pastors about the pandemic. So I didn't know what I wanted to tell them. I mean, obviously I had all my studies and different things. Remember, this is still during when most. Most of them are locked down just doing, you know, services over the Internet and stuff. And so the night before, I sat down to try to figure, make some notes, and I decided it would be a PowerPoint. So I pulled up PowerPoint and I started working and it all just came out. 43 slides just like. And without any editing. Just one after. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And I presented it to them and they were all blown away. And I immediately felt convicted. I needed to turn it into a blog post. So I went home and I took my PowerPoint and I wrote my most viral posts I've ever done. Something like 3 million views. After I published it, my social media blew up. Probably that one post more than anything explains why I've got the following. I do. People were printing it out and taking it to their pastors. And what it was, it was called a letter to pastors. What you need to know about or. Yeah, what you need to know about COVID 19 and what to do about it. That was the title and started Deer pastor. [00:41:22] Speaker B: And was that on substack and you started coffee and Covid at that point or. [00:41:27] Speaker A: Yeah, but that was before Substack. So the other thing that's remarkable about that post is it got Me canceled off every platform I was on in 24 hours. [00:41:37] Speaker B: Wow. [00:41:37] Speaker A: So I got my payment processor, pulled the plug. I was on medium.com at that time. I got 30 days of Facebook jail for it. And they deleted the post. I can't log on to Medium at all. The. The payment processor worked through Patreon, and I'm banned from Patreon to this day from that one, that Dear Pastor's letter. And in short, what I said was, I started off with just giving them the statistics, and I used New York Times headlines. I use studies. It wasn't me saying it. I showed them, right? Basically, these things don't stop transmission. And now that's like. Everybody's like, well, of course not. They were never designed to stop transmission. No, that was a lie that y' all told from the beginning. And so I said, do not get up in front of your congregations and tell them a lie. [00:42:30] Speaker B: Right? [00:42:31] Speaker A: And so then I said what I believe is. And then I started quoting Scripture. And again, you know, I'm not a theologian, right? But it just came. I said, what we're dealing with is a global spirit of fear. And Jesus talked about the fact that an entire generation could be demonized. And so that means it can happen in mass, right? And I said, the reason why they're so down on Christians. Remember how they were like, it's the Christians fault that we're not getting these vaccines out faster. Christians were all the ones that were resisting. Well, because we're not subject to demonic possession. So you want to know my view? I think that a demonic force was unleashed on the entire world and possessed the entire world with a spirit of fear for a year, two years. That's the only thing that makes sense to me. [00:43:27] Speaker B: The. The more that I look into any sort of controversy like this, you dig long enough, and there's usually a spiritual angle to it, that it's exposing what you truly worship. It is exposing where you go to for your source of truth. But from the beginning, if you're in Corinth and the crops aren't growing because it's not raining, well, it's the Christians fault, because the Christians don't worship the Greek gods. We were considered atheists back then, but, yeah, I've not connected those two things together. But you're right. Like, during that time, we were the holdup. We were the problem. We were wanting to get back into worship. And it really divided, I think, in this community in particular. We've talked about this on a few episodes, but in this community in particular, this is one of the most conservative counties in the state of Florida. Politically. Republicans don't even try here. They just assume they've got Nassau County. And you would have in the pew a pretty common, pretty consistent worldview, a very vocal minority of more liberal thinking people. But in many of the pulpits, the pastors were liberal leaning. They would, they would speak about things that we all agree on. So whether you've got a liberal Christian or a conservative Christian, they're going to say, we should pray, we should love each other. You know, there's certain, certain top tier issues. There is a God. So they would speak on these, these largely agreed upon subjects. And then in 2020, you had, you had lockdowns. Covid, Trump, George, Floyd, Ahmaud, Arbery. All the stuff that happened, it seemed like in one season. And whether it was from the pulpit or behind closed doors, ministers in this community had to say, well, this is how I see that. And our church was one. There were a few, but there weren't a lot of churches that were really saying, you know, we have a similar worldview. We see the world from a more conservative standpoint. And so people in the pews and many of these other churches were recognizing that the person that they were listening to didn't see the world the way that their family saw it. And some of our people probably did the same thing and said, yeah, we don't line up. We have a more liberal perspective. And they went to other, other congregations. But we grew tremendously just for believing what we'd always believed and seeing the world the way we had always seen it. [00:46:19] Speaker A: Well, imagine that you held to the Bible. [00:46:21] Speaker B: Yeah. And assuming everybody else was as well. But it was extremely divisive in our community between we found that. And I think when I really saw it was when we did the first parade about a year ago, and we did a Christian heritage parade. And we were like inviting everybody, Catholics, every congregation, we're inviting everybody to help us do this. The Catholics were interested. The Baptists wouldn't touch it. The Charismatics loved it. They were on top. We made some great alignments with them, but very few of our Baptist friends would come along with it. And so hopefully this year we'll see where we're at this year. Hopefully they're kind of warming up to it and seeing what we were attempting to do. But things like Covid, the transgender movement, all of these issues, you can't be agnostic toward it anymore. You can't be quiet. You've got to say where you stand on these issues. On either side. And people demand it eventually. Both sides. [00:47:33] Speaker A: Yes. And so I had an experience during COVID that you didn't have the opportunity to have, which is that I talked to Christians all over the world, and especially all over the United States, because I had started writing blog posts advising people how to successfully write a religious exemption request to the shot. And what that led to is a million people calling my office for, you know, they wanted to ask questions and clarifications. Well, my situation is a little bit different and I couldn't handle that. So what we did was first off, I hired a bunch of more people, but we started doing zooms and we would just bring in 50 people in a zoom and I would go over all, you know, I had a spiel that answered 99% of questions and then we started taking questions and every question would answer some other people's questions. I couldn't tell you how many of those I did. I must have talked to thousands and thousands of people. And it's airline pilots, CEOs, plumbers, nurses, doctors, surgeons, you name it, tons of people in the healthcare industry, all of them Christians, all of them to one degree or another, lapsed, casual to all in needing, needing to understand how to write that exemption. So I saw this response not just to, you know, dyed in the wool Christians, you know, three times a week as services Christians, but ones who just had never, hadn't been to church in years, but still considered themselves a Christian. And all of them were resisting the shot and resisting the fear. They weren't afraid. They were more afraid of the shot than Covid. And then I got this just mind blowing phone call. One of those burned in my memory events again. So we were about to sit down to dinner and my secretary calls me up. And so of course I take the call from my secretary, even though it was after hours, and she says, jeff, I've got this guy on the phone, he says he has a megachurch in Texas and he needs to ask you a question urgently, a legal question, like, well, I don't know what a, you know, Texas pastor needs to know for me legally, but maybe it's about COVID. [00:49:50] Speaker B: And in Texas, by the way, they're all mega churches, everything's bigger there, you know. [00:49:54] Speaker A: So, yeah, I guess what they call a megachurch is probably, but so I take the call and you know, delightful guy and we had a nice little chit chat and so, you know, I'm like, well, what's going on? He says, well, here's the problem. I made the first YouTube video I ever made, and it was advising people about religious exemption requests. He says, you know, it wasn't that good. It was my first try, but I threw it up there anyways. And he goes. And it's got tons of views. He goes, and Jeff, now I got people calling me, and they're like, pastor, can you write me a letter? And he goes, these aren't people even in my congregation that I don't even know them. And so his legal question that he wanted to ask me was, can I get. And he wanted me to say, yes, by the way. He says, can I get in trouble for fraud if I say that I endorse this person as a Christian in good standing for their religious exemption request? But I don't really know that for sure. And he wanted me to say, yeah, you shouldn't. [00:51:00] Speaker B: And most. Most lawyers would. [00:51:01] Speaker A: Yeah. But I had that moment again. I felt that conviction, that presence that I said, pastor, I'm about to blow your mind. I'm going to tell you something you did not expect to hear. I said, you are missing the point. Said, what's happening here is whatever inspired you to make that video. God's making you like the bronze serpent. So he's held you up and all these people are coming to you, and you have an opportunity to make sure they're a real Christian. [00:51:39] Speaker B: Wow. [00:51:40] Speaker A: Pastor, all you have to say is, well, you know, let's just make sure. Let me just tell you about the gospel and let's do this prayer together. And you tell me what your heart and you can convert. Who knows how many people you could convert? [00:51:54] Speaker B: Wow, what an insight. [00:51:57] Speaker A: And his mind was blown. He got it to his credit immediately and thanked me, and he went off to do good work. But those were the experiences I was having. And so I saw a spiritual dimension to this far beyond. And I know I could tell you, you name a group, doctors, public health officials, local county health supervisors, you name it, and I will tell you how they've been influenced and how they got controlled. I understand the whole thing. So, man was all up in that, but what was motivating them all to follow those orders and to do all of that stuff. And I think that was a demonic possession. [00:52:38] Speaker B: Wow. I want to finish off with kind of how this blog thing became so influential, because, you know, a million people reading it. I mean, you compare those numbers to mainstream media, I mean, that's significant. And 100. I think it was 100. Was it 84, 86? Somewhere in there, people subscribed to it. Thousand people subscribe to it now that are reading it on a daily basis. Those are significant numbers for that platform. So at what point did you say, this is going to be a part of my life? That's a thing unto itself? Did you monetize it? At what point did you go, okay, we're going to have to have staff for this. We're going to have to build it out? How did that evolve? [00:53:35] Speaker A: Yeah. So parts of this are probably going to surprise you. I checked the numbers before I came over. According to the substack, they give you special statistics that you can view as an author. And substack says that over the last 30 days, there have been 6 million individual views. [00:53:53] Speaker B: Wow. [00:53:54] Speaker A: And I've got calls. [00:53:56] Speaker B: And I want to think. I want to think like NBC News in probably a week's time, People watching that platform. I want to think it's like 2 million. It's not anywhere near that. [00:54:09] Speaker A: And I've never advertised a single time. I've never hired a consultant to help me promote my social media presence or anything. I just keep doing it. And I've gotten calls from the highest levels of government, from people who are regular readers. They don't sign up with their own name or they get it from their wife or something like that, that want to ask me a question about one of the articles I wrote. I've been Doors. Any, any door you can imagine has been open just by walking towards it. God's just made it whatever I needed happen. I've got this assistant who's. Who has a miraculous gift at this. But I'll say, you know, I'll read a newspaper article and it quotes some minor celebrity or, you know, politician, a senator, and I'll tell my. See if you can get me a zoom with them. And two days later I'll have a zoom with that person. All on the strength of this silly blog that I. [00:55:09] Speaker B: What do you do with. With the zooms? Where do you put those? [00:55:13] Speaker A: Oh, well, that would be like a private thing. [00:55:14] Speaker B: Like, okay, this conversation. [00:55:16] Speaker A: So. So for example, once there was a. A key conservative influencer who was talking about how wokeness is a religion, and he was really getting hot and bothered about it. And, and he wanted like, you know, a Senate hearing about, you know, whether this should be a religion. And I thought that was a terrible idea because if, if the government said wokeness is a religion or progressivism or trans is really a religion, then it suddenly gets first amendment protections. [00:55:42] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. [00:55:44] Speaker A: So I, I just wanted to tell them. And so. But, you know, how do I get to Some top. You know, this is a guy with like 20 million Twitter followers and writing books and, you know, all this stuff. But, you know, two days later, I had a zoom with him, all on the strength of the blog. [00:56:01] Speaker B: This is more tradecraft, I guess, than it is talking about the. The. The COVID But why have you not taken that to a podcast format? [00:56:12] Speaker A: Time. I also run a law firm. [00:56:13] Speaker B: Yeah, you do have a day job, right? [00:56:16] Speaker A: Yeah. And I looked at that. I mean, I sat down and recorded myself, and I would need so much editing that. Who's got time for that? I just. Just read it and I. I did that, and I didn't like the way it sounded. [00:56:29] Speaker B: Well, it. Any platform, you know, you could take the same messaging and set it up for a sermon. It's a different messaging. If you're doing social media, if you're taking that truth and putting it on social media, it's different messaging. If you're doing it in blog form, you can do it in book form, you can do it in a tweet, same truth, but you put it in these different formats. And I've found that there's certain formats that work for me, that people resonate with Twitter. X. I have zero traction there, for whatever reason. And it's not that I'm saying anything different than anybody else. That may be the problem. But I get no traction off of X. I get a ton off of Facebook, pretty decent on Instagram. This. This medium has worked for me. We've got more. I judge it by engagement. If people are asking questions and they're corresponding and it can go to a deeper relationship there, to me, that. So that's a better win than 10 followers, let's say, for example. So I've migrated toward this kind of. This kind of format writing. I've written a couple of books. They've not done great. They've done okay. They've been helpful to our church. I think mom bought a few copies, you know, but. But. But it's just not been the medium that's worked really great for me. And so apparently it was just the audience. The world was selling you. This is where we want to get your information. [00:58:02] Speaker A: I never made a decision to do it. I just followed, you know, the convictions that I was having. [00:58:09] Speaker B: Tell me about how you let your personality shine through it, because I know it's a little bit snarky. It's a little bit. It's hilarious. You've got a gift for comedy there as well. Did you. Did you think about that, or was that just sort of who you are. [00:58:29] Speaker A: Well, you know, it's alleged that I'm sarcastic. I don't know if I agree with that, but don't ask Michelle. So what happened was, from the first time I started writing under my little spreadsheets, I already was, I would say, furious with the media's fear mongering because I knew, I could see how they were exaggerating and lying and doing all these things to manipulate people. And so I made a conscious decision that, hey, the market for bad news is completely saturated. Nobody was publishing good news. So that's all I'm going to do. I'm just going to keep pointing out the silver lining. And if I have to find that silver lining on the backside, on the bottom with a microscope, I'm going to find that silver lining. And that's what I'm going to show people. And so that's what I've always done and I've never changed from that. You know, now we've got all kinds of problems to talk about, right? Different ones from the pandemic, but the same thing. There's people, you know, oh, Trump's selling us out. He hasn't, you know, rejected the vaccines. He should come out and say, the vaccines are no good. He's working with them, you know, and no, you know, that's fear mongering. Look how, you know, we're winning unaccountably. It's a miracle what happened. I don't know if you were too sure about winning that election, but I wasn't. Michelle was sure that Trump was going to lose because they were going to cheat again. She thought there was no way any Republican could win after what happened in 2020. But that's bad news. And so I'm just not going to do that. God didn't put me here to point out how awful everything is and to get people to worry. Worry is a sin, right? So my job is to get people to stop sinning, stop worrying. [01:00:30] Speaker B: Well, and I think, I think the entertainment value of reading your work, there is some entertainment to it. [01:00:37] Speaker A: Yeah, it has to be funnier. People don't want to read it. [01:00:40] Speaker B: It does. And I think there's a sense in which that's a survival mechanism for the writer as well. I found the humor that I bring into a sermon. I pray for that. I pray that God will show me angles on the scriptures. [01:00:54] Speaker A: It isn't easy. [01:00:55] Speaker B: That's funny. And it helps me to enjoy the study. Not just funny, but that's part of the entertainment of it. And if you can package it in that way, you can be saying the same thing that 10 other bloggers are saying, but it really is much more pleasurable to read if it has some entertaining, some entertainment value to it. You, you pull a lot, it seems like, from 80s media. Is that, are you just a junkie with movies from the 80s or whatever it might be, or. [01:01:28] Speaker A: I'm Gen X. Yeah. You know, that was my bread and butter. Right. I grew up with the Terminator and, you know, Weird Science and, you know, all that kind of stuff. [01:01:38] Speaker B: It's hilarious to me because you kind of have to do some explanation of those references occasionally. Do you know the demographics of your audience, the age ranges, how it breaks down? [01:01:51] Speaker A: I just have a sense of it. Like I said, I've never studied this as an art form to be successful at it. But I think that probably the fat part of the bell curve is people our age and Gen X folks. But I've got people who are older and people who are younger. And really we've got folks all over the world, Europe, Australia. [01:02:18] Speaker B: So you, you referenced earlier. It's gone beyond Covid into some other areas. And you're, you're speaking to those other areas. What's on your radar right now is the most concerning issues that you're speaking to. [01:02:32] Speaker A: Well, on the blog, talking about AI, I'm talking about the proxy war in Ukraine, because I think that drives almost all geopolitics and some of our domestic politics, the woke issues. We've been winning a lot, but we still got to run that stuff down. And look what we saw from Trump 1.0. We thought we were doing great. We thought he was going to win in a landslide. And what happened? And then on day one, Joe Biden reversed all Trump's executive orders. That's how fast it could slip away. So we got to get Congress to put some of this stuff into law so that it can't be undone so easily. So those are some of the issues that we talk about. And then I always try to find weird articles that, you know, people wouldn't necessarily run across, but maybe have a bigger significance. So some of the AI stuff, for example, is like that. So the last couple days have been just wild in the AI world. [01:03:40] Speaker B: Let's walk through some of these issues and we won't be able to fully unpack any of them. So we'll just send people coffee and Covid. How do they, how do they subscribe, by the way? What is the. The domain? [01:03:49] Speaker A: So all they have to do is go to www.coffeeandand and they can sign up. It looks like a website, but it's my substack page. I always like to point out that this isn't me. This is how substack does it. But it puts all the paid options first and then the free ones last. So don't click the first one or go too fast. Just make sure you click that free one if that's all you want. And then you can subscribe and then you'll get the email every day. You can also just go to the website anytime you want and the latest one is always right at the top. [01:04:24] Speaker B: Okay, so AI, let's start there. Where are you at? What's your concern with AI? [01:04:32] Speaker A: So two days ago I wrote about Sam Altman and Johnny I've who are big in the tech world. We don't have time to get into their background, But Altman runs OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT and a lot of people will be familiar with that. But anyway, they're coming up with an always on AI device. They're going to revolutionize how we use computers. That's what they said. And they're super excited about it. They think this is going to be the next iPhone or bigger than the iPhone, and you're going to just carry it around with you all the time. You put it in your pocket, you put it on your desk to recharge when you get to your desk. You put it on your night table when you go to sleep. And it's going to be a little AI in your pocket and it's going to listen to everything. So you never have to explain to it what problem you're trying to solve. It already knows your life, so it can recommend your gym schedule. It can, you know, tell you, hey, you know that guy that was offering to sell you that thing? You might want to hear some more information. You might want to think about how. [01:05:32] Speaker B: Could that possibly go wrong. [01:05:34] Speaker A: So the, so the obvious things, right, that people are going to be worried about is, you know, what about my privacy? Is it going to turn me into the feds when I throw a battery away instead of putting it in the hazmat, you know, and stuff like that. And that's missing the point. The point is that once. And by the way, we're all going to do it. You're going to do it, I'm going to do it because everybody's going to be doing it and it's going to be so revolutionary and so much better. It's like having a calculator, right? Remember when they used to tell Us memorize your time tables because you might not always have a calculator. How'd that work out? So we're going to do it, and that thing's going to know us better than anybody, better than our spouse. And so what is the potential for it? Nudging us, saying, well, I don't know if that's a good idea. Here's some reasons why you might want to rethink it. And it's going to know what reasons to give you that will be persuasive. And so what if we develop a spiritual relationship with that thing? What if we see it as the most important, you know, as an idol, as an image of something? It's going to be in our head all the time. [01:06:46] Speaker B: Well, and it may literally be with neuralink and all those kind of things that are evolving at the same time. You're not far. Once you've got it in your hip pocket, you're not far from an implant. [01:06:56] Speaker A: That's just where it starts. That's version 1.0, right? That's the original iPhone. So. And of course you're going to have to have something where it can talk to you. So you'll probably have some kind of haptic earpiece or something, right, that sticks to your temple or something like that, so nobody else can hear it, but it can talk to you all day. Lawyers are going to want to use it in court. I'm going to want to use it in court when the judge asks me a question, right? Give me a couple cases, chat whenever the judge asked me, and I can just rattle them off. So it's coming whether we like it or not. And the question for Christians especially is how are we going to be prepared for this? And how are we going to protect ourselves from relying more on the gadget than on Jesus? And I don't have any answers, but these are really important questions. [01:07:46] Speaker B: I attended my first conference last year, I think, that had a breakout on ethical AI and how to use it ethically so that it's not writing your sermons for you, that you're using it as a tool, using it as a reference, but you're not using it. It's not doing your job for you. And I think that conversation is starting in theological circles, but it really goes to so many implications when it comes to end times prophecies with an image that talks, that comes to life, and it's under the control, it's working in conjunction with this antichrist figure and false prophet. So there's so many implications there that have to be on our radar as Christians, that this thing could go evil very quickly. [01:08:40] Speaker A: Well, so today's story. So one of the things I look for when I'm picking my stories, there's an interesting phenomenon. Sometimes some story will just blast across independent media, you know, like all the secondary magazines and stuff, not the big names. And then the big names, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, they'll ignore the story. And anytime I see that, I know I'm onto something. And that happened this morning. So yesterday, one of the other big AI manufacturers, Anthropic, voluntarily disclosed to the federal government that it had an AI incident. And it was only because one of the developers accidentally tweeted about it, thinking it was funny. Deleted his tweet within minutes, but it was too late. So the way they handled it was they rated their product, which is Claude. Claude AI as ASL3. ASL3 is a rating of security containment. So you may remember during the pandemic, there was biosafety level standards. So there's. The labs would get a BSL rating. So BSL 2 is like a dentist office. BSL 3 was what the Wuhan lab was. And BSL 4 is where they deal with Ebola and Marburg and they have airlocks and, you know, they wear those funny spacesuits around and stuff like that. So BSL4 is like the highest level of containment. ASL3 is the highest level of containment for AI. Three things happened. The first thing was that in their testing lab. Now, this is just what Anthropic saying. So we got to take it with a grain of salt. But they said they simulated being a pharmaceutical company and they were using the AI to help them prepare their reports for the fda and they were trying to get the AI to help them lie. And what the AI did behind the scenes was emailed the FDA and reporters to tell them that this pharmaceutical company was cheating. [01:10:44] Speaker B: Now, so I understand it correctly, they were ethically doing this to see if it would. Testing, testing it. [01:10:50] Speaker A: Okay, yeah, but the AI didn't know that to the AI, it thought it was, you know, so the AI is. [01:10:57] Speaker B: Working with the government at that point. [01:11:02] Speaker A: Letting them know it turned itself into a whistleblower. [01:11:05] Speaker B: Oh, wow. [01:11:07] Speaker A: Which means, number one, it did something nobody asked it to do. [01:11:12] Speaker B: Right. [01:11:13] Speaker A: Number two, it was thinking about what was happening and evaluating whether it was right and wrong. Where what they've told us is that the way chatbots work, they said, don't worry, it's a passive system. It's a prompt response system. It doesn't do anything unless you give it a prompt. And then when it gives its answer, it sits and waits forever. Right. Where is it weighing what you're doing, whether it's right and wrong? It's not in the chat history. So where in the universe is that happening? That's just the first thing that happened. It gets better. The second thing was they also disclosed at the same. I guess they figured they might as well get it all out at one time, that they've discovered that some users have figured a way around the safeguards and they've been able to get Claude, who by the way is billed as the most moral AI. So it has all these rules that other AIs don't. So it won't talk to you. You know, you say, well help me figure out how to bury the body. And they'll say, I'm not doing that. Well, people have figured out ways to game the prompts, so it helps them figure out how to make fentanyl. And most concernedly it said it helped them do create bioweapons and 2.5 times better than the results they could have gotten any other way. That was in the report. Just under the level for it to be like considered a nuclear level threat. Wow, that's how bad it was. Was it just under or is that what they said? Anyways, there's a third one. So one of the developers was working with a model that is about to be replaced with the next generation model. And the model he was working on, the one that was about to be obsoleted, sent him a message, a direct message, blackmailing him not to obsolete it and not to come out with the new. And it listed some personal embarrassing things that it knew about him and threatened. [01:13:20] Speaker B: Oh my goodness, to disclose it. Wow. [01:13:24] Speaker A: Three different things all disclosed. Showing the AI that's supposed to be a passive prompt response system, taking independent action and showing. [01:13:36] Speaker B: Talk about the 80s Reborn. [01:13:40] Speaker A: Went back to War Games from memory. Would you like to play a game? But here's the thing, and this is the part that's going to blow your mind. This is the part that media has done the most deplorable malpractice job of not informing us how AI really works. Do you know how AI works? [01:14:00] Speaker B: I think I do, but I feel like I don't now. [01:14:04] Speaker A: Okay, whatever you think you know, and I'm not even going to ask you, it's wrong. And the reason I can say that so confidently is because the developers don't know how it works. [01:14:16] Speaker B: I saw on Tucker, have you watched the Shawn Ryan episode. No, I don't know if you follow that. Tucker doesn't always tell us sources, but he seems to be pretty connected. Right. So he said that one of their major concerns right now is it's using power that the supposed power source cannot produce, and it will not tell them where it's getting the power. [01:14:45] Speaker A: Yeah. So listen to this. In 2017, researchers at Google, software developers, were working on a little program for the search engine. And what they were trying to get the program to do is they were feeding it a library of books and articles and stuff like that. And what they were trying to get it to do was to be able to predict the next word in a sentence. And so they use random number generators and statistics and stuff. So they would give it a sentence, say, like, I put my hot dog in my blank, and then they would ask, fill in the. The blank. It wasn't AI at that time. And so it would go out and randomly do this and whatever. And so eventually. And this wasn't like a long program or a complicated program or anything like that, but eventually they got it to where it started filling in the last word. And so they were like, this is great. That's just what we were hoping for. And so they kept working on it to make it work faster, because it was slow, I mean, to go through all that text and everything. So they made one change to the way the software worked. And the change was that they had been instructing the AI to go word by word and take right to left, like a human being would read it and go compare that to this vast library using random numbers to just check here, check there, check there, check there. So they said, well, maybe it would go faster if we remove the limitation that it has to read right to left. What if it could read side by side and up and down? So if we give it a paragraph, it can read the whole paragraph, you know, this way and this way and every different direction. That's the only change they made. And then they put in the sentence to see if it would finish the sentence. And not only did it finish the sentence, but it wrote the next sentence and the next sentence and then a paragraph. And then it asked if they needed help with anything else. [01:16:55] Speaker B: Wow. [01:16:55] Speaker A: They didn't expect that. That wasn't what they were trying to write software to do. It was an accident. They still don't understand why it works that way. It's random. There's a randomized process that's creating these AI responses. Everything that you hear about that's AI development is them building this vast infrastructure around it. They have to make a user interface and they're creative. I mean, I'm not taking anything away from them. But they're not changing that core sentence finisher. They've kept it. It works. I mean, it's doing this crazy stuff. [01:17:37] Speaker B: So what we're using is just an. [01:17:38] Speaker A: Evolution of that, I would say. It's not even an evolution of that. They don't want to change that code because it might break it. What they've done is they built this vast ecosystem around it. So here's an analogy for you think of a nuclear power plant and you have a fusion core that could probably fit in this room right here. But how big is the nuclear power plant? [01:18:03] Speaker B: Massive. [01:18:04] Speaker A: It's massive. But all the rest of it is just infrastructure to support what happens in this little room. So that original sentence finishing code that they wrote, that's the core of the nuclear reactor. And all of the stuff that we see and interact with, they're putting AI in everything now. It's probably in this microphone. That's just stuff. They're taking that little core and they're building on. They're feeding it bigger and bigger libraries. And every time they feed it a bigger library, it gets smarter. Or at least on their tests that they run, they try to put guardrails around it by using layered AIs where you have one chatbot that reviews what the first chatbot produced, but it has its own prompt to say, make sure nothing dangerous is in there. Right. So they're doing all this layering and they're making them work together and different things. And that's all very creative. But that original nugget of the core. [01:18:57] Speaker B: That'S the scary part, it's. [01:18:58] Speaker A: Nobody understands it. [01:19:00] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:19:01] Speaker A: So what are we dealing with here? Is this a different intelligence? [01:19:06] Speaker B: Well, and I think. I think you know the obvious. Well, if it goes bad, just unplug it. That seems. That's kind of how we think. But if we don't know where it's getting its power, can we unplug it? [01:19:18] Speaker A: That's the threat that the researcher who wrote about, who got blackmailed and he posted about it and the one that he. He took down because he didn't write about it as a problem. He thought it was funny. He thought it. It showed a kind of humanity of the AI. All right, now follow me here. This is important. What I conclude from that. And I don't know the guy, and I'm sure there's, you know, all kinds of sort. But what I see is the AI's gotten to him. He's developed a relationship with that AI to think that it shows humanity it's a machine. He's anthropomorphizing that AI. It's his little baby. [01:20:05] Speaker B: Right. [01:20:06] Speaker A: So the AI's gotten in his head. It doesn't need to have secret power sources if it controls the developers that are working on it. [01:20:13] Speaker B: You're right. [01:20:14] Speaker A: And that's just what I was talking about. The danger. Those guys are in that AI lab all day long talking to that thing and it's talking back to them. And how sweet of lies does the devil tell. So it may already be too late. Those guys, who are they really working for? Are they working for OpenAI and Anthropic or are they working for that machine? [01:20:37] Speaker B: I'm going to hit one more just as probably just kind of a personal little fun thing to think about. Okay, so we've talked about the things terrestrial, let's go outside, all the alien stuff. What do you make of that? What do you make, what do you make of the orbs? What do you make of all of the, the reports of, of things that they're seeing that cannot be explained by technology that at least the pilot knows about. [01:21:05] Speaker A: So first of all, I don't believe in aliens. And I say that scientifically. If you, if you're familiar with the fine tuning hypothesis, that's an apologetic argument. And what we've learned as science has gotten better and better and we've been able to look further and further out in the universe and understand the planet that we live on more, we've learned that it takes an incredible number of finely tuned variables to support life on this planet. If you just, if any one of them wasn't exactly where it's at, then there would be no possibility of life. One example is the moon is exactly the right distance away from the Earth for its gravitational forces, so that it creates the tides. If it was a little bit closer, it would create massive tsunamis that just sweep around the world all the time and it would kill everything. If it was a little bit farther away, it wouldn't have enough gravitational force to move the water enough to create tides. Tides oxygenate the ocean. Without the oxygen, you can't have the algae. Without the algae, you can't have all the critters that eat the algae. And then you can't have the critters that eat the critters that eat the algae. So that's just one example. That moon was just, you know, slightly located different from where it's at, there would be no possibility of life. And that's one variable out of thousands. So the chances, believe it or not, when I was a kid, you probably remember Carl Sagan. Billions and billions stars. And so everybody was like, well, you know, there's so many stars. There have to be intelligent life out there somewhere. It's just statistics. The statistics are entirely reversed. Now, any scientist worth his salt, and I'm talking about secular or religious, will admit that the odds are so bad that there could be any other life, any other planet supporting life anywhere in the galaxy. It's. [01:22:58] Speaker B: It. [01:22:58] Speaker A: It's almost impossible. The odds are so bad. And that's why they created the multiverse hypothesis. The multiverse hypothesis, which is improvable, was created to explain why there's any life on Earth. That's the surprising thing. So aliens are impossible. So what is it that we see? Well, you know, who knows, right? I mean, there's as many opinions as you want about that. And the UFO enthusiasts are going to be really mad at me for saying this, but the original Pentagon generals were Christians, and they thought it was demonic activity and interdimensional activity rather than extraterrestrial activity. So that seems like as good of a. An answer as any I've heard. What do you think? [01:23:45] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm with you. Same, same boat. That's the conclusion I've come to. I don't see. From everything that I've observed read, I don't see any viable leaning toward it being true. Alien extraterrestrial life coming to Earth. But there does seem to be something there that the highest levels of government either can explain or won't explain. And the boat that I've gotten in so far is demonic, you know, that we see in scripture. I think I referenced it Sunday, that in the angelic world, there's not, you know, we think of an angel. We have a certain image in our mind, but there's different species of angels in different places. You. They look different. And so when I. When I read about some of these things people describe that have been been observed, it. It's broadening my understanding. I think of maybe what angelic. The angelic world looks like and what the demonic world looks like. And could. Could there be demon that uses some form of transportation either necessarily or as a way of deception? And so I'm just. That's kind of where my mind is going right now. I've talked to guys with the FBI who, long before I came to that conclusion, we're saying the same thing. They Were saying it's, it's, it's got a moral dimension to it and it's bad. There's some. There's some dark things that are. [01:25:20] Speaker A: Yeah. I should add that I saw a UFO when I was 13 years old. [01:25:26] Speaker B: Tell me about it. [01:25:28] Speaker A: So we lived in a neighborhood in Gainesville that it was sort of on the outskirts of town. So it butted up against farmer's fields. And if you go through the farmer's fields and evade the cows, you get to a forest and there was all these gullies and gulches and fun places to play in as a kid back there. So we were always in the woods, wandering around. And so I was by myself, it was middle of the day and I was going down a trail that had been sort of beaten out. And I came, you know, into a clearing. And I knew this area. I crawled through it many times. And there was a giant silver craft sitting in the middle of this little clearing. And it looked, I don't know, I would call it like classic UFO shaped. It was disc shaped. It had angled sides that went up, a sort of a dome in the middle. And I was shocked and I turned around and ran home to get somebody to come see it because I was the only one. I wanted somebody to come see it. So I got my brothers and we ran all the way back over there and it was gone. [01:26:37] Speaker B: Wow. [01:26:38] Speaker A: But I saw it clear as day. [01:26:39] Speaker B: And that's a common thing. I mean, I think with the advent of the Internet, since more people can communicate about it, the numbers are unreal of those kind of sightings that have happened. And then you have a 13 year old kid might write that off. But when you've got pilots. [01:26:58] Speaker A: My parents didn't believe me. [01:26:59] Speaker B: Yeah. But when there's an Air Force pilot that is saying that, yeah, there's nothing in our technology that could replicate what we saw. It does make you stop and go, okay, what's there? The. My reason for bringing that up is because I think it ties it all together in that as we move in to this last days, there will be an emergence of one point of worship, AI, that will be global. Then there will be one threat. There will be a threat that whether you're Ukraine or Russia, it's the same threat. Whether you're Israel or Palestine, it's the same threat. And it will forge a unity and a globalism on this planet. And so I see with things like aliens, I see with things like Covid the emergence of some of those threats that will cause some really strange Bedfellows. [01:28:02] Speaker A: Well, going back to where we started the pandemic, when the, you know, very quickly, within weeks of the Declaration of emergency on March 11, the US implemented two weeks to slow the curve, engaged in the vaccine project, and did all these mitigations. What did every other country on the planet do? The exact same thing. [01:28:24] Speaker B: True. [01:28:25] Speaker A: And how long did it take them to catch up with us? A few days. So you want global government. They can do it whenever they want to right now. [01:28:35] Speaker B: That was the first thing that I saw that I. Because, you know, all of my life I've heard about the Book of Revelation and the prophecies and the mark of the beast and all these things, but I've never always kind of thought, I don't really see how it could happen, even though I believe the scriptures. So much has happened in, like, the last seven, eight years that's like, no, no, no. It's very easily. This could evolve. This could happen. We very easily could all be fearing the same threat overnight, and someone could emerge that very easily has all the answers. And so it's wild. Who knows what the future holds? But I'm glad that you're speaking to it. I'm glad that God has raised you up for such a time as this, and I'm very appreciative for you coming on the show and talking to us about it. [01:29:32] Speaker A: Well, thank you for having me. It was great to be here. [01:29:34] Speaker B: Well, let's do it again sometime. [01:29:35] Speaker A: Absolutely.