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Aug. 20, 2025 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
01:02:11
Mike Adams and Tom Woods: Liberty and Economics Unveiled...
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Welcome to today's interview here on Brighton.com.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighton.
And as you know, we are a pro-liberty, pro-human freedom platform.
And that has defined a lot of my work over the years.
And today, we're very honored to have a really extraordinary guest who's also pro-liberty.
He is pro-human, of course.
And he has worked with the Ron Paul Institute.
He has his own show called The Tom Woods Show.
And it's Mr. Tom Woods, who's also a New York Times bestseller and so much more.
Welcome to the show today, Mr. Woods.
It's an honor to have you on.
Oh, I'm Tom.
Mike, I can't tell you how happy I am to have connected with you after all these years.
I don't know why.
It's only a couple of weeks from now that you'll finally be on the Tom Wood Show.
This had to happen.
I'm glad we got to meet in person at Ron Paul's 90th birthday.
I'm really glad too.
And yeah, it seems like we should have been talking much sooner.
I don't know why we haven't.
I've known, I think I actually met you over ten years ago at another event in Texas.
I think it was like a Tenth Amendment Center event.
Oh, maybe so.
Yeah.
Maybe so.
Yeah.
But for some reason we never connected about doing interviews.
But here we are today.
And wow, what an extraordinary time.
Well, I'll say, I think not only do you and I probably have a lot of the same friends, more importantly, I think we probably have a lot of the same enemies.
Yeah, probably so.
Yeah, indeed.
Because when we are pro-liberty and we support honest money and we need to talk about these things, then of course we're enemies of the system that runs off fiat currency and so on.
But let's let's actually start there.
But I want to give out one of your websites here first and it's woodshistory dot com where people can go and they can get access to some free history classes, right?
You want to tell us a little bit about that, Tom?
Yeah, I mean, obviously we know that there is zero chance somebody sitting in.
a typical classroom is going to learn US history the way we would want it taught.
They're going to learn propaganda.
You and I can script exactly what they're going to say about every president and everything in US history.
So I've devoted my career to smashing that kind of narrative, and I for a while had these history courses behind a paywall, but now I give them away for free.
It's two US history courses spanning the entire period of US history, and now I just give them away for free at woodshistory.com.
And what kind of format is it offered in?
Like PDF files or videos or what is it?
It's, it's, well, let's say for the for the free courses that I give away, it's audio files, but then I have like a big membership with a whole bunch of courses and those are all in video also.
But I think a lot of people listen just while they're driving, they don't really need the video.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
No, that's, that's a great idea.
Okay, again, that's woodshistory dot com just like it sounds.
If you want, if you want to grab those courses.
Now, Tom, let me start out with something that might be controversial to some of our audience.
I tweeted out last night.
I said, you'd have to be a real idiot to think that when Joe Biden prints money, it money, it causes a golden age.
So what I'm trying to point out to people is that all this fiat currency printing always causes inflation and it's it's never going to end from any based on any president.
What what's your take on what's happening with the national debt money creation and how Trump is handling it versus Biden?
Well, the thing is, look, I supported Trump because I felt like it was a matter of I absolutely cannot allow into power a group of people who can't stand the sight of me.
They're going to stand on my side and are going to do everything they can to undermine me and and brainwash my kids and whatever.
So yeah, agreed.
So I'm not embarrassed about that, even though I'm very unhappy about a lot of things.
It's just that I'm faced with these choices and I, unfortunately, in reality is I have to choose one.
Now, I did not support him because I thought he was going to cut spending.
I didn't think he was going to cut spending at all.
There's no reason for that.
So I can't say that that disappoints me.
I didn't expect it to happen.
And the reason I didn't expect it to happen is, unfortunately, Mike, there's no constituency for this.
There's you, there's me, there's seventeen other people.
Most people don't want spending cut.
Even back when the Tea Party was in its heyday, they did a poll of these people.
They polled the Tea Party itself and said, here's a series of categories of federal spending.
Which ones would you like to see cut?
The only category on which even the Tea Party had a majority of them saying they want to see it cut was foreign aid, which is a very small percentage of the budget.
So if even the Tea Party doesn't really want to cut spending, then I mean, I don't expect it to happen.
So my view is, since that's not going to change, I'm going to focus on issues that I care about other than spending.
And I feel like spending, well, that's just going to end up being a fiscal crisis one day because no one wants to stop it.
You know, I accept that.
That's where we are.
But having said that, I would say, given that my expectations are very low when it comes to spending, what started to happen is that people are starting to be told that inflation, like prices rising, is caused by things like, like, left wingers would say it's caused by corporate greed, right?
Things like that.
So that apparently people get greedy only every once in a while.
You know, once in a while we get rising prices.
That's because they're greedy.
But under Biden, we did see some people like Broadley on our side starting to kind of get the idea that maybe the Federal Reserve creating money has something to do with it the prices.
But now we're starting to hear, well, it's high energy prices cause inflation.
You know, like everything we can do to distract attention from the Fed.
And the thing is, I understand why people think high energy prices cause inflation, because energy is necessary for everything.
So if energy prices go up, that pushes all prices up.
I get that sounds plausible.
The reason that's not correct is if you didn't have a Fed creating a whole lot of money, what would happen is energy prices would go up, we'd spend more money on energy, and then we'd have less left over to spend on other things.
And so that would push those prices down.
down and it would just all be a wash.
So how are energy prices able to go up and yet all the other prices still go up?
It's because all the money's being pumped into the system.
But there's no political will to get rid of the Fed.
So therefore you don't talk about the Fed.
You blame this, that or the other cause, but that ain't the real cause.
The cause is the Fed.
Well, and so this more than a hundred year experiment with the existence of the Fed since 1913, I believe, the current, you know, the current Fed that we know, and the Treasury now having more difficulty auctioning off its debt.
But this experiment clearly has some kind of end date on it.
Do we what's your take on how for how much longer can they kick the can down the road on this and keep finding buyers for ten year bonds and keep this thing going?
Well, that's the thing.
I mean, I have to say, I mean, I'm willing to admit that it surprised me that they were able to stumble along this long and that it took until 2008 to have a real, real, a really serious system wide crisis.
So I don't I don't know.
And I also know that there are other countries that are actually even worse than the US in terms of major metrics like, you know, debt as a percentage of GDP and stuff like that.
I mean, it's, well, now what you'll sometimes see is people who are not really being honest with you will say things like, this is not unprecedented in American history, it was even worse during World War two.
But the difference is World War two was an abnormal situation that ultimately ended.
This is just normal, day to day life in America where we're, we're seeing these levels of debt.
That's very different.
You know, we expected at some point World War two was not going to go on forever.
That would stop.
The spending would stop as indeed it did.
The federal budget was cut by about two thirds after that.
There's no prospect of the federal budget being cut by two thirds at this point.
So it's apples and oranges to compare to compare that time period with today.
Well, and you mentioned the debt to GDP ratio, so I brought up usdebtclock dot org, and right here, it shows that the current debt to GDP ratio for the United States is 123 percent.
And we've crossed over 37 trillion dollars in the official US national debt.
But you and I both know, Tom, that the unfunded liabilities are closer to 200 trillion and growing rapidly.
So historically, when we've seen 123% debt to GDP ratio, things have rarely turned around for that country, right?
Oh, right.
Yeah.
So you think in terms of like the French Revolution, which was brought on basically because of a debt crisis, the American I don't know how I feel about calling it the American Revolution.
I think it's the American restoration of self government against the innovating British, but that's my own quirk.
But even there, I mean, the British were finding that because of some of their own wars, they needed to go scrounging around for new sources of funds, and that led to the world exploding.
So these things have real world historic consequences.
And at the same time, Mike, I wouldn't say that I'm unhappy to be living in this particular time period.
I mean, I've been put here for some reason, and there are a lot of great things about life in 2025, but none of them have to do with the regime in charge of the US.
Yeah, I hear you.
I mean, we have incredible access to knowledge, access to food and natural medicines, which is my focus often, never before in history.
The kings of a thousand years ago couldn't imagine living as well as we do today, right?
So, and indeed, and yet it's like we're surrounded by great wonders, and yet you look at the West and they can't even bother to reproduce themselves.
I mean, the US is barely doing so, but that's largely because of immigration in terms of the native born population.
It's like everyone is somehow discouraged or bored or whatever, but they can't bother to reproduce themselves.
They want to just have fun and die.
And, you know, that's a sh, that's a shame.
You know, I have, I'm expecting child number six.
in January.
So I'm doing my part over here, Mike.
Right.
Well, a lot of today's youth, they consider life to be about collecting experiences, right?
So they just, they have a list of experiences that they want to go through and then that's it.
Yeah.
But you know what one of those experiences is having kids?
That's an experience.
I suppose so.
Now, but you talk about history on your website, tomwoods.com.
You say history departments have been captured.
That's, of course, it's absolutely true.
But I want to ask you for audience here, what are a couple of the biggest lies that you've ever heard?
that students are taught about history in our universities, especially?
Well, I'm very happy to answer that.
But I want to start by saying that a lot of the misconceptions are the big picture, are like the vibe of the classroom, which is that the US federal government is populated by wise, public minded people who are just trying to pursue the common good.
And they're here to make things better.
And they want us to look forward to a great, wonderful, progressive future.
But on the other hand, we have stupid, backward people who don't want them to have that much power, who would rather see power more dispersed among states and localities.
And people who, for example, during COVID, wanted to shackle our wise public servants who were simply looking to improve our health and protect us against a deadly pathogen.
So we have wise, well educated elites on the one hand, and stupid, backward rubes who hate science and hate knowledge, who are obstinately trying to throw monkey wrench into the works of the wonderful plans these people have for us.
I think we all recognize that narrative.
We've all heard that implicitly at one time or another.
It is the backdrop of every New York Times article, every CNN spot, all takes that for granted.
And once you start to see that that ain't so, then real learning can take place.
Because, I mean, think about it.
When I look at even the headlines, you notice that even the headlines on, let's say, most of these mainstream news outlets, even the headlines are propaganda.
Before I even get to the article, you know?
Just the way they frame it is propaganda..
So then you think, well, If the headline and the article are propaganda, or they're leaving stuff out that they never even mentioned, which is half the problem, it's not even always that they're lying in what they say, it's what are they omitting?
So we have that problem.
Well, where does our history come from?
It comes in large part from these headlines and these articles.
That's right.
And so it suddenly you realize, well, wait a minute, if I don't trust any of the headlines, then why am I trusting the compilation of headlines that basically makes up the typical textbook?
That's right.
Really, really good point.
And that description you just gave there also applies to the entire history of the climate change narrative.
Yeah.
It's been exactly the same that, oh, if you don't believe in climate change, then you're anti-science.
Yeah, you're stupid.
Right.
And yet, you know, I'm an actual published scientist.
I own a mass spec laboratory.
And I know enough chemistry to know that plants need carbon dioxide for photosynthesis.
So carbon dioxide is plant food.
But we're told, or we were told by the EPA, until Lee Zeldin is turning some of this around, but for all the decades previous, we were told that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant that will kill us all if we don't decarbonize the atmosphere, which...
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, exactly.
Well, I guess so another one of the big picture things that's wrong is we're led to believe that when there's a crisis, like let's say it's the Great Depression or the recession of 2008 or 9/11 or COVID, that what that what's happened here is that the US government was an innocent bystander.
It was just standing there and out of the blue these things occurred and they're and most of them are probably our fault, you know, because, for example, the apparently if you have freedom, a housing bubble just naturally occurs and has no cause.
And so the government has to step in and correct all the stupid things we dumb Rubes did.
And so the impression then is that when there's a crisis, that's when we most need the wise public servants to take charge.
But unfortunately during these crises, again, we have these backward idiots trying to shackle them.
But like, for example, over the past twenty, twenty five years, I have heard on three major occasions, I wouldn't want to be a libertarian nowadays.
So I heard that at 9:11, I wouldn't want to be a libertarian today because don't you know, we need to go and crack some skulls.
Or in 2008, I wouldn't want to be a libertarian today because we need to engage in bailouts to help these failing institutions.
Or with COVID, I wouldn't want to be a libertarian nowadays because we need major government interventions to protect people's health.
None of that was true.
I would, I am in no way apologetic about being a libertarian.
A libertarian approach to every single one of those would have been far superior to what we got, far superior.
Yeah, absolutely.
And each one of those events was exacerbated by the government itself.
It was made far worse.
For example, with COVID, the lockdowns and telling people you can't go outside, you can't jog on the beach deprive people of the sunlight that actually boosts immune function as a protection against any kind of infectious disease, things like that.
But what is it, Tom, about human neurology that where almost by default, humans who lack the kind of education that you offer, they have this unbridled and unjustified obedience to authority.
Why is that?
That is the big, big puzzle.
I have a friend, Jeff Leskovar, who gave an academic paper on this, even though he's not an academic.
He's been thinking about this too.
Why is this?
And also, why is it, for example, that not always, but ninety, ninety five percent of the time, I can predict your views on abortion and the minimum wage based on your views on whether we should fund Ukraine or not?
Yeah, I'm sure.
And yet you realize that there's no necessary connection between funding Ukraine and the minimum wage or abortion.
I mean, these things have nothing to do with each other.
But yet, it's like everyone is willing to accept a cluster of ideas together.
Where is this coming from?
And the best he could come up with was We think back to, let's say, the way human beings lived at the dawn of time.
And, you know, people moved around together in tribal arrangements.
And if you were outside of the tribe, you were as good as dead.
So you became accustomed to just going along with the group, and the worst thing you could possibly do would be to be isolated from the group.
And now we see that in a modern context in the form of, for example, we all remember from high school, there were the popular kids, the weird kids, the nerds, you know, there were all these little groups of people.
And there were some kids we knew in high school who would have died a thousand deaths rather than be in the unpopular group.
And so nowadays, well, look, all the actors believe such and such, all the musicians you like believe such and such.
Well, most people frankly don't have the stamina to stand up to that.
They don't want to be outside the cool group any more than they wanted to be outside the tribe however many thousands of years ago.
And so the simplest thing is just to go along and conform and wait to be told what to think.
Well, yeah, exactly.
But a person we both know, Ron Paul, he stood his ground through his entire career.
He wasn't aft afraid to actually stand on principle.
And what you just said, when people have to, like, they crave conformity and they demonstrate obedience to a tribe, then they have to compromise their principles and usually their morality at the same time.
And so we have become a nation that is very largely immoral and also incompetent and largely compromised at the highest levels.
I would say though that a factor that aggravates this, and I don't mean to sound like a I know this will sound like a cliché, but there's a sense in which social media is aggravating this.
Because in the old days, we didn't know really what every single person's opinion was on every single issue under the sun.
And moreover, we as individuals did not feel compelled to immediately have a comprehensive view of every single controversy.
But now we live in a world in which instantaneously I know that such and such person thinks this, the other person thinks this, the other person thinks this.
So the easiest thing to do is just jump on particular bandwagons to wave a particular flag emoji in your account.
And so I think this kind of thing solidifies.
And now there are good things about being interconnected.
It meant that during COVID, for example, we could, we could, even though there was censorship, we could still find people who disagreed.
And it would have been harder to find them in 1958 when there were just three television channels.
That's true.
You know, so there are good things about it.
But I also think it drives this kind of crowd think in a way.
In ways that are unhealthy.
Well, yeah, absolutely it does.
And also especially among younger people because it takes time to mature your own thinking and, you know, to test out theories.
It takes time to leave the popular tribe.
And, you know, I mean, you and I are of an age where we've lived long enough to learn this lesson.
But when I was in college, I wasn't politically active, but I, by default, I was watching CNN because it was on.
I thought Bill Clinton.
was a pretty cool cat because he played the saxophone, right?
So I didn't know anything about economics.
I didn't, you know, I mean, it's funny because I was studying economics, but I was being taught the university version of supply-demand curves and subsidies and et cetera.
Nothing about the real world.
So I had no way at that time to even have opportunities to expand into my own thinking.
It just took time.
Did you have a similar experience or what was yours?
Well, I was very influenced by my father, who's deceased now, but when I was growing up, he was a he was like a Reagan I wouldn't say he was a Reagan Democrat, but he was like a working class Reaganite.
And I remember him and he was at that time he hadn't finished high school, but he was very he was de always reading.
He was one of the most informed people I knew.
Well, one day I found him reading Candide by Voltaire.
And I said, Dad, you know, enough is enough here.
You have nothing more to prove.
we get it.
You know a lot.
But he would tell me like about, he would tell me about the history of communism and the ways in which the American left made excuses for or covered up atrocities and this just blew me away.
So I just knew right away as a teenager, whatever I am, I could never be a leftist.
I could never be part of a movement that did that.
Wow.
But then, but as time, but I was still like kind of middle of the road Republican.
Like, we need some public spending on such and such.
Like, I was terrible on a lot of things.
But I went to college and the very first event we had for freshmen to get to know each other, I met a guy, another freshman, who told me, you should read a book called Modern Times by Paul Johnson.
And it's a history of the world from the 20s to the 80s, but that includes the US.
And he says, his material on US history is going to show you that the so called great presidents were typically not great, and the so called bad presidents were actually pretty good.
And I thought, ooh, that sounds intriguing.
If that's the truth, I want to know about it.
Now, I was at Harvard, which again, I, you know, it's not my most proud moment.
But I was there and that tells you a little something that I was a nerd and if you tell me to go read an 800 page book, I'm going to just do it because you told me to.
And when I read Paul Johnson's Modern Times, it it solidified that I can't ever be a leftist.
It was talking about it spends a lot of time talking about the the incredible atrocities of the 20th century and the roots of them.
But yeah, I did read those chapters on US history and yeah, I guess I did have a upside down understanding of it.
So it was it was fortuitous that I happened to be born into a family, you know, where I had a dad with his head screwed on right and I happened to run into that guy who gave me the book that changed my whole look on the world.
So those things fell into my lap.
I wish I could say, Mike, I was just so darn clever that I sorted this all out.
See, it took me a lot longer.
It took me graduating from college and then starting, launching my own business.
Once I began to own and run my own business, I began to really see just the idiocy of the government policies and the regulations.
And it didn't take long before I became a fiscal conservative.
I didn't even know the words for it.
Yeah.
You know, and a pro-liberty guy.
Do you mind if just for one question?, I put the interviewer hat on.
Of course.
I'd like to know specifically.
So I just told you about me and history, but I'd like to know with you and health, was there a particular aha moment when you said the medical establishment is not telling me the whole truth?
And what was that moment?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Well, understand that back in those days, I was significantly overweight, borderline type 2 diabetic, and was suffering from chronic pain.
And I was told by my family doctor that there's no relationship between the food you eat and the health outcomes that you get.
Because for a long time, doctors believe all calories were the same.
Many still believe that, right?
And then I was having hypoglycemia, blood sugar problems, and my doctor said, that's made up.
You're imagining that.
And I'm like, no, I'm not imagining that I feel like I'm going to pass out after I eat a high carbohydrate breakfast.
I'm pretty sure that's not my imagination.
And there was a book that I read called Sugar Blues.
So that was the book.
Like you had a book that changed your life for me.
It was Sugar Blues.
Sugar Blues.
Sugar Blues.
And it reveals that sugar, like the toxicity of sugar and all the things that it causes.
And from that moment, I gave up drinking soda and I gave up all the refined carbohydrates.
That put me on a path of discovering nutrition and the relationships between food and results, which leads me to like my modern day smoothie, which is, you know, avocados and turmeric and whatever else.
And then I started teaching that to others in 2003.
So that's a brief history of how I got here.
Okay.
And now I know that type 2 diabetes is type 2 is reversible.
Most cancer cases are reversible.
Heart disease, Alzheimer's.
So many of these conditions are completely reversible and easily preventable, easily preventable, if we just have the knowledge.
So I would guess a lot of people in alternative health have an origin story like that where they themselves were not getting an adequate explanation for what they were facing.
That's right.
Yeah.
And the medical establishment was clearly uninformed and incompetent, which they continue to be to this day, although to the credit of some doctors that go on for complimentary medicine training, naturopathic medicine, et cetera.
I'm referring to just the mainstream pill pushers.
Yeah.
But it all ties into economics, Tom, because there's a financial incentive, of course, for drug companies to bribe the doctors.
Ken Paxton of Texas just launched a lawsuit against, I think it was Eli Lilly, for bribing doctors.
And this is throughout the history of the U.S. government, there have been countless cases of drug companies admitting to felony price fixing, which should.
exclude them from government contracts and yet they've all paid a fine and in the case of Pfizer they set up a shell company and they had the shell company take the the felony and pay the fine so that So the main company could continue to sell vaccines to Medicare recipients, et cetera.
The whole thing has been a massive, total criminal fraud for my entire life.
Well, you know, I was telling you before we started recording that until COVID came along, to my discredit, I, you know, I of course I belong to this broader liberty movement and I know there were people who were, to say the least, skeptical of the medical establishment.
And up until COVID, I had sort of tolerated those people.
I mean, I counted some of them as my friends.
I just thought they were wrong about this because don't they know that, you know, medical science says blah, blah, blah.
For someone who's so critical of the establishment, I was completely blind to this.
And it's, it's, you know, I'm not particularly happy to have to admit to that.
But I mean, my gosh, if COVID doesn't make you understand that something went screwy, I mean, I don't know what would, I mean, and we could, you know, there's no need to rehash every crazy, nonsensical thing they did during COVID, but to discover just how uncurious the average doctor is, you know, like they had no interest in, in hearing anything other than, you know, what some official, you know, boob on the TV had to say.
And it was in doctors' offices that they had different holders for clean pens and dirty pens, because a pen's gonna give me COVID, Mike.
You know, like that's an embarrassment.
Well, these people are taking care of my health.
They themselves suffer from obedience disorder.
They are obedient to their sources of information.
And they are, like you said, uncuriosity.
But this also gets to an argument that you often refer to about government.
You know, the people assume that an individual, once they step into a government position, they suddenly transform into angels who no longer have any self interest.
and are only interested in the greater good of the people.
Well, the same belief exists about doctors.
Most patients believe that when a person puts on the doctor's coat, suddenly they become uninterested in their own wealth, their own payments from drug companies, and that they only care about the well being of the patient.
And that is false with doctors and it's false with government employees.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That was what I missed.
That was one of the things I missed is that, you know, these people are not, they don't belong to a different race than the rest of us.
Right.
They are subject to the same moral fibbles as anyone else.
And yet I think implicitly I went in for this whole modern priesthood.
You know, these these are these priests don't wear the, you know, the old cassock.
They wear the white coat with the footboard and the stethoscope.
And I think I just and the thing is, in a way, you want to believe that though, Mike, you want to believe that there are professionals out there who have the answers to everything.
These are objective answers.
And I can I can be confident that somebody out there will have the answers to what is ailing me.
And yet the thing is, we believe this on the one hand, but on the other hand, we've all had cases where one doctor says one thing, one says the other, the third one throws his hands up in the air.
And yet, for some reason a lot of times that still doesn't crack our confidence in the system well well right and it's further clouded by the fact that there are very competent like er surgeons for example who really are incredible at handling trauma and saving lives from trauma but it's not actually trauma that's the greatest threat to the lives of most people it's chronic degenerative disease and on that subject mainstream medicine is a complete failure You
would have much better success going back to China 2,000 years ago and just using traditional Chinese medicine or, you know, Amazonian medicine or Native American medicine or any other indigenous medical system, even Ayurvedic medicine in the history of India, is much more effective and safe than modern medicine, even at ending pandemics or what have you, infections, you name it.
Well, I'm better late than never, but I finally came around.
Yeah, it's interesting, but it always comes back to economics, so I'll bring it back to you.
You know, the government sets the incentives, and then the incentives determine the outcomes, as you well know.
And so during COVID, the incentives were diagnose these people with COVID, intervene in their treatment in a way that is likely to kill them, and then we'll give you bonus payments for every COVID death in your hospital.
Yeah, and at first, at first, you know, even to some of the more jaded people, that sounded like a conspiracy theory.
They're like, look, they can't be that low.
It's just, this can't possibly be true.
And then even the official sources, now after years had passed and they could safely come out and say something, started to say, yeah, there were bonus payments.
And yeah, we do have this crazy system of coding everything as COVID.
And yeah, so maybe now we have to sort through or maybe we'll never know, well, how many people really?
had this thing and what was this thing after all?
That's all brushed, in fact, that started to get brushed under the rug right around the time of the Ukraine, the Russia-Ukraine war.
All of a sudden, that was just, you know, we're just not going to talk about that anymore because now we have a new thing.
I remember, I live in Florida, and Ron DeSantis had a round table very shortly after the Russia-Ukraine war broke out, because he could see what was happening.
He could see that the establishment was on to a new thing, so we're not going to have to answer for anything.
So we're just going to move on.
on.
And so he had a round table where he brought in, you know, all the sane people.
And then he invited a few, like, so called influencers like me to come sit in on it and live tweet it and whatever.
And he said, I have this fear that they're going to try to use this conflict as an excuse that, hey, we don't have time, there's a big global crisis going on.
We're just going to let that, all that stuff go.
And, you know, even some of my own, not very many, but some of my own newsletter subscribers, I write a daily newsletter.
And even they started to say after a while, okay, you have to let this go.
You know, you have to, and I do, I do mean, most of the time, I hardly ever talk about COVID anymore.
But my point though would be, on some level, we can't let this go.
On some level, we have to return to it because what has been our track record in the past when there's been some crisis and the government screwed it up and then, and we tried to get the word out about what really happened.
Like, for example, what happened in 2008 or the Great Depression or whatever.
We tried to get an alternative explanation out there, but we gave up, went on to the other thing.
And now in the textbooks, the official government explanation is what the kids learn.
Always the case.
And so what I mean, I am very, very, very skeptical.
I'm really concerned, and I think for good reason, that future US history textbooks are going to tell this story from the Fauci point of view, despite the avalanche of evidence against it.
Well, absolutely they will.
And so we can't shut up about it.
Right.
This is why I'm an advocate of decentralization of knowledge, which is a libertarian principle.
And that's why like our AI engine has been trained on a lot of information that's aligned with Ron Paul and with you and with National Health, et cetera.
But in fact, I really wanted to ask you this today.
I want to ask you about the economics of the posthuman.
post human labor era or the post human cognition era that is rapidly arriving.
So we now have very competent AI reasoning models that are beginning to actually replace desk jobs, agentic AI.
And even in my own company, we have deployed AI in a way not replacing humans, but making them far more effective at their jobs.
I could give you examples if you want.
But a few years down the road, we're going to have a lot of labor, AI robot labor coming online.
One of my employees was just in Beijing at the robot conference there, and it's very, very advanced.
This is coming in to warehouses and commercial settings soon.
What do you think the implications are going to be for humans as both cognition and labor are automated with machines?
It's a legitimate question.
And I know that there are people who will say, well, look, we've gone through major transformations before, like the Industrial Revolution, and that turned out well because we all have a better standard of living and, you know, all these other things.
We have more living space per capita and all these good things have occurred because of that.
I feel like this is the most, this has the potential to be the most radical such transformation in history.
If AI lives up to the hype.
Now, there are some people out there who are starting to say.
And say the claim that AI is going to get better exponentially may actually have been an overstatement.
That it, you know, like GPT chat, you know, GPT 5 just came out.
And it's not an explosive revolution compared to the previous iteration.
So some people are wondering if maybe it's been oversold.
I don't know how to adjudicate that because I'm not knowledgeable enough.
And unlike most people on social media, I don't take dogmatic positions on things I don't have enough knowledge about.
Well, then you don't belong on the platform, obviously.
Exactly.
I have no business trying to be a code influencer, which is good because that is, that sounds like a death sentence.
But I just have some random thoughts.
One would be in the past, technological advances have indeed made it easier to do a lot of jobs.
I mean, obviously a railroad and a train can transport freight more easily than can a guy carrying stuff on his back.
And we would all admit that if it means that a few people carrying stuff on their backs have to find some other kind of work, that's a small price to pay for the huge improvement in human welfare that comes about because of the train.
But if this stuff really is as flexible as they say, then you wonder, what is life going to look like?
Now, what could happen is that people will be able to focus on things that are more human about them.
So, for instance, I don't know that I want my loved ones being cared for by robots.
I don't think that's really what I want for them.
I think I'd like them to be cared for by people because there's no substitute for a connection between one human being and another.
So maybe there are more personal services that are offered.
Now I know you could say, but a robot can do your gardening or a robot can come in and cook your food.
Maybe, but I don't know that everybody wants that.
People who are displaced from other kinds of work, well, it's not like I, if you think right now, if you had the labor of four people, could you find something for them to do?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
You know, so that's a possibility that, that, you know, now we have more labor that can help us out in other various ways.
I guess what disturbs me about it is that it is becoming so omnipresent.
Like, I open my email platform and the first line is, let me help you write this or whatever it is.
Like, and I feel like saying, get lost.
I don't need some robot to help me communicate.
You know, because I mean, what I don't want is I'm at my computer with a robot writing for me and the other person has a robot writing for him.
Where's the human connection?
Like, I don't think I was put here to to interact with robots.
You know, and I And you Well, go ahead.
Okay, you've hit upon a really critical point, if you don't mind if I interrupt.
if you don't mind me interrupting, that people like you and I, we are both accomplished writers, we can always return to high level writing and thinking with clarity.
So if you and I use AI tools, it can magnify the skills that we have developed.
But the next generation, the young people that are growing up right now, they will never develop the writing skills.
that you and I possess.
We're seeing this in MBA schools, graduate schools, where the students, they cannot write papers.
Oh, yeah.
Go ahead.
I saw a professor who said, I'm going to DAI my class.
And he said he had people, there was a day, I guess, when ChatGPT was down for part of the day, and students without any self consciousness at all wrote to say, I'll have to get my assignment in late because ChatGPT is down.
Are you out of your mind?
Right.
Like you don't want to have, you don't want to be a real person.
I mean, you think about the whole, you know, you think about at least two thousand years.
I mean, we could even go back further.
We could go back to ancient Greece of ways in which people in the West have contemplated what it means to be a human being and a good human being.
You know, like in the same way that a good bicycle is one that can conveniently get you from place to place.
What is a good human being is a question that we've contemplated forever and it has never involved outsourcing everything that makes you unique to a machine.
It has never meant that.
Now, as I say, technology can make it easier to do what formerly was drudgery.
I mean, like even driving your car with power steering is a lot easier than before you had power steering.
I have no objection to that.
But what's happening now is we're taking things that do make us human, namely like our creative side, our artistic side, and we're outsourcing that to AI.
I don't want to have a painting on the wall made by AI, even if it's in some way, quote, better, because why am I here?
I'm not here to have robot art on my wall.
I'm here to make connections with other people, other members of my species.
But Tom, I just a pushback a little bit.
I do want AI created movies because I get to write the prompt and the movie won't be a woke Disney DEI movie that's totally woke.
Like I can choose, like I want, you know, Die Hard six with Bruce Willis back, you know what I mean?
Before the movies went woke.
So that's just pointing out one thing.
Yeah, no, I've heard that argument.
I get, or people say, look, this will hurt Hollywood.
And look, I admit, you got me on that one.
I I would also like to see that happen.
It's just, but let me just say, wait, wait, wait, wait.
If I'm watching Die Hard six and everything about it is AI, where is that feeling that you get from, from an incredible performance by another human being?
You know, a performance that leaves you breathless because it's unreproducible by a machine, because it's so human., we would lose that.
Okay, all right, good point.
I mean, look, I can see where you're coming from too.
I just absolutely.
I just hate this direction.
Like it's it's everywhere.
And like, and on, and look, I know that if you needed to make a graphic of something, you would have to hire a graphic designer and that would cost you 100 bucks.
But, and you, whereas now you can get it for much cheaper.
But I look at this, maybe, maybe it'll get better.
But I see this AI art all through my social media feed because all the advertisers are using it now and it all looks the same.
It's instantly recognizable as AI.
And I think, you have the money to run this Facebook ad, but you couldn't throw a hundred bucks at a graphic designer to get a unique looking image.
Yeah, I see what you mean.
But let me describe another case where AI robots can support decentralization and liberty at the local level.
So I've done a lot of thinking about this because I work in this realm of AI.
And I would like to grow a lot more of my own food.
I don't have the time to pull weeds.
I don't have time to move dirt around with small shovels.
If I had a weed pulling robot, this is actually, this is on my top 1 ten list of things that I want to see.
I want a weed pulling robot dog that can just pull weeds, you know?
Then suddenly I can grow a lot more food locally.
I can get off the, you know, the corporate food toxic system.
I can be more self reliant.
I can have better nutrition, et cetera, by growing more of my own food.
So, you know, there's one case and there are other cases like that where if we turn to automation locally, then we can decentralize more easily.
Yeah, no, that's a great, that's really a great argument.
I think it's a matter of the attitude we take toward it.
Do we view it as an assistant, as something that can take what, what, you know, what we aspire to and get closer to that.
Or if we're viewing it as, I just don't like the idea.
It seems like we're replacing the human connection.
And I want to, I mean, there are people in AI who are transhumanists.
There are, you know.
And they'll openly admit, yes, I am trying to undermine mankind.
Yes, I am trying to replace it with either robots or some kind of fusion of the two.
And I mean, that stuff creeps me out.
And I don't want those people to win.
If sensible people were behind this, then I would be more likely to view it as benign.
Well, and I was just interviewed by the Epoch Times for a story that they're doing on how especially young men are now forming relationships with AI chatbots.
Yeah.
And apparently there's a whole industry of AI chatbots where they'll present like an avatar, a young female character that then the young human male falls in love with and has a relationship with with all kinds of sexual innuendo as well.
And as a result, that young male is not having human relationships.
They're in love with a machine.
Right.
And so that's what I'm, I mean, I have no problem with your robot that pulls weeds.
Because that gets me closer to some really good outcome, which is good, fresh, locally produced food.
But this thing, like, there's no one should be aspiring to this.
Nobody says, I hope one day you meet a great chatbot that can substitute is a woman.
Right, right, exactly.
Yeah.
No, there's a farm girl chatbot.
Apparently, I was, I was told by the editor that interviewed me, there's, there's like farm girls, there's like a Japanese girl, there's these other girl characters that are all just, you know, fictional avatars.
But they remember everything that you said to them.
So their contact window is millions of tokens is what that means in tech.
But they remember everything that you ever said.
So they can always reference some, you know, a previous conversation from months ago.
And these young men, their lives become totally absorbed into the female chatbot, the fake female.
Yeah.
That is wild.
I mean, there are parts of this world I know nothing about.
I mean, I had heard a little bit about this, but I didn't realize that you had all these possibilities.
So, you know, in high school, my favorite subject., believe it or not, was math.
It was not history.
It was the subject everyone hates, but I love it.
And so I have a very mathematical way.
Like, I like solving puzzles.
That's why I liked math.
And in a way, that's why I like economics.
Because in a way, that's also a question of solving puzzles, trying to understand things.
So it's very unusual for me to have a position, have a subject like AI where my position is not very clear.
And, and, I mean, my position on AI, as you can see, is very fuzzy.
Like, I, I'll admit, yeah, you have a good point.
But, but I'm still worried about it.
It's not like cut and dry.
You know, like, I'm against the Fed, period.
Right.
I'm against the war machine., period.
This, I, you know, I'm still trying to think it all through.
Well, me too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And there, like any technology, there are positive use cases, like I just mentioned, for decentralization, but there are a lot of negative use cases.
And there's also the weaponization of AI, where you have systems like, you know, Palantir is out there where they can use AI analysis of your metadata in order to extract information from you that you didn't volunteer or even psychological profiling that's very accurate with AI.
And it's an invasion of our privacy of our thoughts in a sense, you know, but it's just based on your search queries and it's based on the websites that you visited, it's based on this and then they can extrapolate intimate details about who you are.
You know, In the past, when we would hear about NSA spying, one of the problems that they had was the sheer amount of information they gathered made it so unwieldy that what they could do with it was limited.
But this solves that problem.
It does.
Because you're dealing now with something that can process huge amounts of information.
The question is, and again, I'm not informed enough to know the issue here is the electiontricity problem?
Is the powering of it?
Is it because there are companies that have invested huge amounts of money in AI and got very pitiful returns.
And a small part of that has to do with the energy costs associated with it.
Maybe they'll get to a point where they overcome that, but maybe it will turn out that they've over promised about this technology.
It's too early to say.
Well, if you don't mind hearing my opinion on that briefly, I'd love to hear it.
I agree that there is not a parabolic increase in the effective intelligence of the AI systems, but there is a linear increase.
is very steady.
And it looks like a straight line to me in terms of the functional IQ of the AI agents.
And the power, most of the power goes into training the models, but not running the models.
So once the models are developed, which does require an enormous amount of power, and you're right, the U.S. is trailing far behind China in terms of total power output.
The U.S. is less than half of China at this point.
It doesn't matter how many nuclear power plants we build.
It's not going to compete with China because China's building coal-fired power plants because China didn't sign on to the climate cultism lunacy.
But running AI.
models is very energy efficient.
And I even had a guest here in studio.
We were running one of our company's AI models locally on a Google Pixel phone.
It's like running the model on the phone.
And it was fast.
And I was blown away.
So you're going to see what we call edge models.
See, this is another scary part, Tom.
You're going to have AI embedded into people's glasses and clothing and helmets and everything where they're not going to go out in the world just with their own eyes and ears anymore.
Everything's going to be AI implanted all over their person.
It's like cyborg era.
And so do you think you and I will be viewed as weirdos?
Like, are we going to be like the Amish because we don't want to do this?
Or are they the weirdos?
Well, we are definitely going to be viewed as the weirdos for not being cyborg.
You think most people are going to be drawn into this?
I mean, you're absolutely right.
Well, because see, it augments their intelligence, right?
So, for example, you'll have AI glasses that are listening to your conversation with the other person.
And the other person says something about physics.
And then you want to appear smart, but you're an idiot.
You never studied physics.
But in the glasses on your screen, it's going to say oh yeah occam's razor or whatever this and that and you're going to then be able to reply to the person sounding like you're smart so you're going to have ai augmentation of the perception of intelligence everybody will want that oh it'll become my life's mission to expose these people yeah for using this i'm telling you it's going to be so seductive to people who want the easy route to the perception of being sophisticated or
the perception perception of being educated, etc.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, but, but you know, it's like when the state comes.es up with technology, we often come up with technology to kind of thwart it.
And I wonder if alongside this technology, will some scrappy entrepreneur produce some kind of technology that can instantly detect that you're being a jerk like this and expose you, because I will invest in that.
Yeah, absolutely.
As someone who worked laboriously to acquire knowledge, I resent that.
I did it the hard way.
Yes.
Reading.
Okay.
Well, Tom, we're almost out of time.
I want to mention your website again, woodshistory.com.
And is there anything else you'd like to add here?
before we wrap this up, there's your site, woodshistory dot com dot Well, I mean, I I you know, I have a lot of people on my show who have their own shows.
And, you know, I worry, well, if, what if everybody runs to that other show and they don't listen to me anymore?
I don't have that insecurity anymore.
That's great.
I appreciate you being a good host and having me on.
So I will tell people, you have to listen to all of Mike's material first.
Then you can type into whatever platform you use for podcasts, you can type in the Tom Wood Show.
Try a few of those and see what you think.
But if you have any material by Mike that you haven't listened to, you have to do that first.
Oh, no.
We, look, we're all about sharing knowledge.
And we believe that especially voices like yours are extremely valuable.
I encourage everybody to check out your show.
Listen to it.
Well, in particular, because in the coming weeks, I'm going to have a certain Mike Adams on the topic.
Oh, you are.
Okay.
I'm not even, I don't even know what day that's scheduled.
It's on my calendar somewhere.
It's in a couple of weeks.
Okay, great.
Well, I look forward to that.
And then you can grill me about AI robots or whatever.
Right.
Okay.
All right.
Well, until then, Tom, it's been a pleasure to speak with you.
Thanks.
Thanks for taking the time today.
My pleasure.
All right.
Take care, Tom.
Everybody, that was Tom Woods, a couple of websites again, woods.com is where you can find links to his podcasts and so on.
And apparently, I'm going to be a guest on his show coming up soon, so that'll be all kinds of fun.
In the meantime, if you want to really understand economics and history, then definitely get Tom Wood's history classes that are now free to download at woodshistory.com.
You're going to learn an extraordinary amount of information and you'll also unlearn some of the lies that you were probably taught at the university that you attended or whatever the case may be.
So thank you for listening today.
I'm Mike Adams here of brightion.com.
And feel free to repost this interview on other platforms.
You have our permission to do so.
Thanks for watching today.
Take care.
Okay, welcome to our Ingredients Face Off Challenge.
I'm Mike Adams of healthrangerstore dot com, and today we're going to be comparing the ingredients in Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Deluxe upside down with what I consider to be a real Macaroni and Cheese meal product, which is what we manufacture and sell from healthrangerstore dot com.
Now, this Kraft stuff, it's dirt cheap, and it's consumed by, I think, low-information people who don't really know much about nutrition or ingredients, but it's very popular.
But what are people actually eating when they consume a product like that?
So if we look up the ingredients, and you can show my screen, here it is.
We're just checking the ingredients of Kraft Mac and Cheese Deluxe Original Cheddar.
And, oh, it brags about it.
It's like made with real Cheddar cheese.
If you go down here and you look at the ingredients, here you go.
You have enriched macaroni product, which is a processed wheat flour.
with what is it glycerol monosterate then it's enriched with niacin ferrous sulfate and it's required to be enriched by law because the processing of the wheat strips out so much of the nutritional content, they have to put things back in like folic acid.
Okay, so that's your first clue right there.
Then the cheese sauce is made from the following.
Here it is.
Whey, cheddar cheese.
I don't have any problem with these so far.
And then canola oil.
So here's your seed oil that's in the product, also known as rape seed oil.
And then there's a milk protein concentrate.
Sodium phosphate, milk, whey protein.
And then it goes into these salt lactic acid, sodium alginate, that's like a thickener, sorbic acid as a preservative, milk fat, paprika for color.
This is actually good.
This is to their credit.
They're not using artificial dyes in this.
They've got anatto for color enzymes, modified food starch that's and maltodextrin.
Both of those are usually from genetically modified corn.
And then you got the monoglycerides, salt, and then some medium chain triglycerides that's often used as a flow agent for the powder.
Okay, so it's not the worst label we've ever seen, but it's pretty much processed.
I would consider it processed junk food..
Now compare that to our product when we make macaroni and cheese here at the Health Ranger store.
And yeah, go ahead and show it.
There it is.
We sell it packaged in these buckets, and there are 56 servings per container.
So it's macaroni and cheese dried.
It's 36 ounces.
And if you're wondering what we put into our products, well, check it out.
Here it is.
So the pasta elbows are organic quinoa pasta elbows made out of quinoa, organic rice, and organic amaranth.
And then we have our organic white cheddar powder, which is actual cheddar.
cheese and then organic heavy cream powder, which is actual organic heavy cream.
Organic butter powder, right?
These are expensive ingredients.
I'm not claiming that we're price competitive with Kraft.
We're not.
Organic wey protein powder and then organic onion powder here and organic black pepper powder.
And that's literally it.
Those are the only ingredients in the product.
We don't even add salt because we figure, well, you can add know, again, it contains many, many meals out of this, several individual packs inside the bucket.
And what you get is real organic lab tested food with honest ingredients.
We don't try to create, you know, the impression of cheese powder.
We just use cheese powder.
You know, we don't try to create the impression that there's butter powder in it with butter flavor or something else.
We use real butter powder.
And the same thing with the cream powder.
So the reason it tastes like cream is because it's made with actual organic cream.
And again, you know, Craft isn't the worst.
There are other brands that are even far worse.
Some brands probably you can buy at the dollar stores that are just absolute crap.
That would be quite an experiment to go look at those.
But that's food for people who don't know what they're eating, frankly.
It's people who just don't have any knowledge of health or nutrition.
And sadly, they're going to pay the price with that.
Because those foods with the artificial dyes and all the chemicals and the preservatives and all the refined processed carbohydrates and all that garbage, that's not good for you to keep eating that in the long run.
It's not good for you.
You want to have a good healthy life and good longevity and good both cognitive and physical performance in your life.
You're going to need real food ingredients that are clean, that are lab tested, that are certified organic wherever possible.
It's all non GMO and we do the lab testing ourselves.
So we can assure you that it's clean.
We can show you the heavy metals test.
We can show you the glyphosate test.
We can show you the afetoxin testing or the microbiology, the E. coli, the salmonella testing and other tests for certain products that we conduct as well.
So when you want the best macaroni and cheese that is ready to make, all you need to do is boil water and you put these in and you can make macaroni and cheese.
Add some salt if you want some additional salt.
I actually add salt to this formula because it's completely unsalted.
There's no added salt.
But this is the best macaroni and cheese that you can imagine.
And it's real and it's healthy.
You can find it at healthrangerstore.com.
Just search for macaroni.
And when you purchase any of our products, you're also helping to support our platform.
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