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Sept. 22, 2025 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
01:14:06
Mike Adams with Jonathan Beall: Copper, Craftsmanship, and the Return to Tradition
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Beauty and function.
That's always been kind of uh the guiding principles of the work that we do.
It's not a uh um you know it's not like a disposable piece.
Oh, it's broken, I'm just gonna throw it away.
No.
We don't use any kind of plating, we don't put anything on there just because our pieces are made to be used.
Copper has so many properties, and I I think humanity has only just begun to really discover them all.
Right, or rediscover.
Welcome to today's interview here on Brighttown.com.
I am pleased to be joined today by the founder of a company that makes some incredible uh well, water filters and dishware, I mean, so much more out of copper.
One of the most historically significant elements that's ever been discovered on planet Earth, right, alongside gold and silver.
And it's interesting that they are in the same column on the table of elements as well.
So my guest today is Jonathan Beale, and he's the founder of a company called SERTO, which offers these products.
We're partnering with them at Healthranger Store.com.
I'll tell you about that coming up.
Welcome, Mr. Beale.
It's a an honor to have you here today.
Thank you very much, Mike.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Well, thank you for coming, and uh it's great meeting you uh because when I first saw your products, just the incredible beauty of it and the copper uh craftsmanship and the purity of it, I was stunned.
And I I said to myself, I this is what I want to have in my house.
Tell us a little bit about your company, Sertodo, and uh what you're into and why.
Sure.
Um well, as you mentioned, copper's been around for a long time.
The first minute really bought brought uh humans into the metal age.
Um and it's just been a part of the human hearth and home for thousands of years um and really integral part of many different cultures.
Uh I just really uh fell into this uh copper work um almost 30 years ago, about 27 years ago now, um, driving around in Mexico, and I some man was setting some in ambulant copper vendor was setting some goods out on the side of the road, and I've been driving all night, and you know, the same kind of thing that you that you're noticing here, it just drew me in.
It was shining in the morning light, and I could just really see um just how honest the work was that went into one of these pieces.
Just, you know, if if uh these hammer marks were like an alphabet, you could read the whole story of how these pieces are made here.
So what's incredible to me is that each of these stands as a piece of art in addition to its functionality.
And there's also a health benefit that I'd love to talk about at some point.
But I mean, you you could put this in your home as a as a an artwork, you know.
Definitely, definitely.
I I I totally agree.
Um beauty and function.
That's always been kind of uh the guiding principles of the work that we do.
Um and uh the pieces that we make, the pieces that I originally started making, you know, almost 30 years ago, people are still using those pieces today.
So it's not a uh um, you know, it's not like a disposable piece.
Oh, it's broken, I'm just gonna throw it away.
No.
Um, you know, with time and use, it just continues to you know look better and improve in your house, and it shows all the wear and time, and just like your grandmother's old copper pieces, everybody loves to, you know, have those, and you know, it's the same idea that we have is that um, you know, 50 years from now, when you know our grandkids are looking through the old copper, they're gonna say, oh, this is a Saratoto copper piece, and you know, maybe they'll check in their oculus about where they can get another one, and hopefully we'll still be around doing that.
Well, it's funny you mentioned that because what I love about your products is that I I I think we're having a we're having a backlash against the artificial world, and we're seeing a cultural return to what's real.
And commodities or elements, metals, precious metals.
You know, gold, for example, just hit a new all-time high in terms of dollars.
Silver is being purchased in record quantities, and it's hit a 14-year high.
Uh all over the world, cultures not only have valued gold and silver and copper, which of course has been used as money in other civilizations before, but they valued it for its uh specific physical properties, it's resilience, or like in in in the in the case of gold, it's resistance to oxidation and so on.
But also then it's beauty.
So all three of these have a natural beauty that cannot be synthesized.
Right.
And I would would you agree that our world is I mean, people who are informed really value things that are real now, even in uh a society that's becoming increasingly artificial.
Sure.
I mean, so much is uh abstract and you can't touch it, whether it's social media, internet, which you know is a great medium for communication and information, but you know, having things that are real in your life, things you can like touch, and this is you know a part of my daily routine.
Um it's something that you can you know you can really feel, and and when you're using some of our goods, what I always like to say is it's just you know, when you're grabbing that, it's like, oh, this is you know, this is something that just feels good.
Uh and copper, uh, you know, speaking of money and value, like the copper penny.
Well, pennies aren't really copper anymore.
Even more.
Yeah, yeah.
1982 and before they were solid copper, but you know, it's always been something that just is tactile, wants to be around.
And one thing that I've always noticed is just when I have uh, you know, what I call a critical mass of copper on display somewhere, people just can't help themselves but come up and be like, oh, this is so nice, and they're tuck touching it.
And um yeah, there's something that that you know, just uh throughout our human civilization, we're drawn to this to this material.
And because of the texture, you want to touch it.
You do want to feel it.
And that's that's a an additional piece of sensory input.
Uh walk us through this because this is a water filter.
Sure.
This is a gravity filter.
And and uh actually let's start over here with the side camera.
Can you just tell us what these pieces are?
Oh, certainly.
Um what we have over there, we've got uh some uh my favorite cups, the iced tea cups, um, and also uh some uh Mexican mule cups that we've got over there, whether you want to do tequila, gin or vodka, ginger beer, uh any kind of ice drink, if you want the strong medicine of like uh fire water in there.
Um and then our gango tree pitcher with a lid.
That's the tall one.
Yeah, the tall.
Let me move it because it this is behind it, and it's kind of creating an illusion.
There's the picture.
And here's the lid.
Does that make sense?
Everybody?
Actually, let me let me just point this to the camera to show the inside.
Sure, solid copper in there.
And there's our story in there also.
Solid copper and and a brochure.
Yes.
Um there's the copper that you're looking for right there.
Yeah.
We don't use any kind of plating or or we don't put any kind of uh um sealant or anything on there.
You know, a lot of a lot of the things that people you know maybe have come to expect, which is kind of a new thing, is that oh, this is always gonna look like this.
And uh, you know, when you put some kind of sealant on the copper, it'll look good for maybe you know, two years, but then this oxidization process uh starts to happen underneath the sealant.
And we don't put anything on there just because our pieces are made to be used.
And they're made to interact with their environment.
And um and as you use these, you can see just like a warm pip patina develop, you know, like like you would see on a copper penny.
Uh-huh.
Um, but also at any point that can be easily polished off with uh, you know, whether it's lemon juice and salt or some kind of polishing product that's gonna bring out this inherent shine of uh of the metal.
Yeah, it just takes a little bit of acid to bring back the shine.
Same thing with silver.
Same thing with silver.
Silver coins or silver.
Yeah, gold is really interesting that it does not tarnish.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's it also doesn't harden when you work it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And and with copper, um, as you work it, uh the material it's uh it's a soft material material and malleable, which is how we you know put it through all the processes we do to make something like this.
Um and the hammering that we do on there isn't just uh like an aesthetic detail.
It actually um it does two purposes.
Uh the hammers we use have a real high polished surface on it, so it's like a mirror when you look at it.
Um and when you when you beat it on there, it telescopes that that uh mirror finish onto the material.
Um and then also what happens is uh copper has uh uh like a crystalline structure, and that crystalline structure compacts and work hardens the piece.
So it just makes for a more durable, uh more durable good that you're gonna get.
That's really interesting.
So when people are looking at this, every I don't know facet.
Facet uh on on firearms, it might be called something like stippling or or something.
Right.
Uh-huh.
But ev every little piece here has been struck by a hammer with a human hand.
Every to create all of them.
Right.
Every every one of those.
And uh, you know, I can kind of look at these and see, well, this looks like Jorge was doing it just by the spacing in his lines, the shape of the hammer marks, the hammers, you know, it's it's everyone, it's like a signature.
And each one of these pieces is somebody sitting down putting, you know, an incredibly skilled focus uh into this material to get the results that we that we get out of there.
Trevor Burrus, Jr.
And how many years does it take a new person who wants to learn this art, this craft.
How many years does it take them to get to where they could produce a piece like this?
Oh I would say I did an apprenticeship for about a year.
Um and I learned just some of the basic uh knowledge of you know, we recycle copper, how to reclaim that copper, melt it down, pound it out into an ingot, raise it into a vessel.
Um I would think that for the hammering um to really get the pulse, you know, tempo, it's a good probably two months of you know, we'll have them hammer, you know, starting off on, you know, oh, they might do the bottom of the cups, you know, and get a little get a little technique there.
And then we'll move them up to you know, something that's simpler on a bigger cup.
And then also what happens is, you know, it's a whole interplay between the tools and the maker, um, and just the position it is on the anvil and being able to maintain the shapes.
Um, we're definitely uh our workshop is a mix between you know pre-industrial, uh old world techniques, um with a few modern tools, uh semi-modern, early industrial, I would say, um, and one of the most modern things we have is a TIG welder.
Uh yeah.
Yeah, which is is amazing for for uh welding copper because copper is very sensitive to the uh to especially to oxygen, um, and you have to have a shielded arc to get a really nice uh weld on the uh on the pieces.
Uh let me tell our audience if you'd like to get some of these for yourself, because we've partnered with the Sertolo company, you can get these at HealthRanger Store.com/slash copper.
We just made it very easy for you to spell.
So again, healthranger store.com/slash copper, it will take you here, and you can find any of the Sertolo products, including the water filter here and many other pieces that I'm not even showing you at the moment.
All of these are available now.
And they ship from Texas, correct?
Correct.
Yep.
Right here in Austin.
Now there's there's so much to talk about when it comes to copper.
Uh copper is a it's an extremely high demand for industrial uses.
Uh uh Trump has announced the AI data center expansions in Texas and other places.
Um we're talking like a trillion dollars of AI data centers, right?
Right.
Some significant portion of that is going to be spent on buying copper just for copper wires.
You know, con the conductivity of copper, right?
Yeah.
Uh there's a 50% tariff on copper from some countries.
Aaron Powell Uh there is.
And actually it's on you know, the that went into effect so um early August.
And currently it's for any copper that comes in the United States, including if you buy your copper in the United States, take it out, work it, bring it back in.
Oh, really?
You know, it's kind of the we're just gonna throw it all against the wall and then kind of figure out what sticks.
So this impacts your company too.
Oh, definitely.
Oh, for some reason I thought that maybe because it was from Mexico, it might be currently no excluded.
Currently no.
Yeah, there's uh um you know, it's it just applies to everything.
Wow.
Everything's that's a huge tariff.
It is a huge tariff.
It's a huge table.
Especially on such a material, like I said, data centers.
Right.
Even if people don't enjoy this, you know, you need it in your home wiring and your commercial building wiring and the foundation to the economy and so many things.
Electric motors, electric vehicles, generators, generators, yeah, wiring your house, plumbing.
Well, plumbing not so much anymore.
Right.
Um well, you still can get uh copper plumbing, but I prefer PECS plumbing.
The PEX is easy to work with.
PEX is easy, yeah.
Easy to work with.
But you're right, all the electrical components, copper wiring, you know, copper coils, magnets, motors, think about so many production.
Yeah, so many different aspects of our economy.
And then, you know, throughout time, and whether it's cookware, you know, before plastics, uh, copper was basically like the material that was used for producing everything, pails, buckets, um, you know, it just because it was so easily it was so easy to work and turn into sheet and then turn into products.
Um my grandparents were young uh in World War II.
And I remember them telling me stories about how the government would have metal reclamation drives for you to turn in all your copper here, turn in your steel, turn in this and that.
Oh, yeah.
And they would use they they'd melt it down and smelt it and use it to make you know tanks or whatever.
Airplanes, you know, weapons of war.
Yes.
And the American people, they gathered up all their metal and gave it to the war machine.
You know, which I wouldn't do that today.
Yeah.
But uh but they did.
Yeah.
Different era.
Oh, for sure.
Um actually I uh one of the things I have is uh it's something called a rail gun.
Um it was a friend of mine, her father worked here at UT developing this technology.
Like a a rail gun rail gun?
Like rail gun, yeah.
Like electromagnetic shoots those accelerator.
Yes, right.
It shoots those massive, you know, tungsten bullets that uh anyhow.
Yeah.
Um the uh capacitator for one of those, he gave it to me.
It's just filled with copper.
Oh yeah, yeah.
I'm doing a little I'm doing a little bit of swords to plow shares with with that thing.
All of the copper that we use is actually recycled copper.
You're kidding me.
Right.
I didn't know that.
All reclaimed, it's mostly out of like uh electric motors.
You know, we need a copper that's you know number one shiny bright in the recycling world.
Yeah.
Um, which is a 99% pure copper.
Um that when we in the reclamation process, we add, you know, about two percent zinc to that uh that helps with the the the melting, and then we turn it into sheet, and then those sheets we form into yeah, all the different pieces that we have.
I have so many questions for you about that, but I w I want to make sure that we introduce this.
This is a water filter.
It's a gravity filter, and like a lot of gravity filters, the top part has the ceramic filters in it.
So you fill the water up here, you know, and gravity does the rest and it drips down.
Pardon me.
Yep.
I don't want to damage it.
No, you're we we've already beaten we've already beat the bejesus out of it.
So anything else you do is just gonna add character here.
So then it drains down here, and then the the copper element itself has a natural antibacterial quality to it.
Lots of properties, lots of properties to copper.
Can you talk about that?
Certainly.
I'd love to.
Uh you know, when I first started working with copper, I didn't know that much about the material other than I I had this draw uh to it.
Um and one of the first times I was showing it somewhere, there was an Indian man that came up to me and I was carrying this kind of old um uh basically like a pitcher.
And he says, Oh, this is just like my grandmother had in our house in India.
And I was like, Oh, really?
What for?
He says, Oh, we store water in there because then it just you know, you leave it overnight and and it tastes very good and cool and fresh, and it's good for your health and all of your joints, and and I was like, Oh, interesting.
You know, and I didn't think anything else about it for 10 more years.
Yeah.
Um because at the time I was making a lot of stuff for the food service industry, schafers and things like that.
Um previous incarnation of our business.
And uh and then I just started hearing kind of about the you know, Ayurveda and these ancient traditions of using copper, um, where people would store their water in copper, and it was uh, you know, according to their, you know,
kind of ancient medical, you know, wisdom, it was great for all kinds of things in your body, whether it was to balance your energies or it's great for your skin and your hair, uh all of your joints, similar to wearing, you know, like uh copper bracelet for arthritis or you're having problems with a joint.
Um copper is integral in all this, you know, one in the soft tissue, and then also in our body's immune system.
Uh it's integral into that.
And and on that same principle, which really it was only, I think in the 50s that they rediscovered uh you know what they call the oligodynamic effect.
Um I say rediscover because they always knew that oh, this Copper is clean, it's going to kill anything that's in there.
And you know, one of the reasons I think that copper was used as a water vessel, especially somewhere like India, where you're dumping dead bodies in one side of the river and you're pulling you know your water out of the other side of the river.
Um it it basically kills all of these uh viruses and bacterias.
Um and it's it's just a um you know they're starting to use it a lot in uh uh hospitals.
Absolutely.
Right, because copper surfaces and doorknobs and so on.
Sure.
It kills all these things that are going around in a hospital that you go in and you come out you know worse than you were before, but you know, with copper as a touch surface, it you know, it does that.
Um, there's something else really interesting.
Let me add to this that um so as part of my research into natural health and longevity.
I've come across uh various peptides and peptide therapy.
And I use one of them is called BPC 157 for healing from old sports injuries, and it works great.
But I notice in that that one of the peptides that women especially use for cosmetic improvement is a copper peptide.
Uh-huh.
And so it's actually it they are you know copper atoms that are bound to uh certain protein configuration.
And women use that both internally and externally on their skin for a youthful appearance.
So copper is is like regaining this amazing uh reputation for youthful uh appearance.
It's working very well on you.
Well, no, I'm not using that.
I'm not I use my smoothies.
I'm uh you know I'm into you know turmeric and nutrition and everything.
Definitely.
But the but copper peptides are very you know functional in so many ways as well.
I mean, there's so many things.
There's also I interviewed a man during COVID that was talking about a copper, was it a copper um nasal spray that he said would uh protect you from you know the the pandemic or the viruses or whatever was going around.
I don't have all the details on that in my mind right now, but I remember that copper was the solution in that interview.
I just mentioned that I'm not trying to make health claims on your products, by the way.
I'm just saying that copper has so many properties that I I think humanity has only just begun to really discover them all.
Right.
Or rediscover.
Yes.
Yeah, in some sense.
I think uh one of the first times they figured out modern science figured out was with uh a bunch of uh soldiers were dying of some kind of infection and you know, French legionaire North Africa, and it was water that was going through a system.
They changed the coils out to copper and it just stopped all of that because these um bacteria were growing on these things.
Um yeah, there's uh, you know, I receive a lot of you know, people share a lot of knowledge with me about copper and how it works.
And um, you know, I don't want to say, oh, this is gonna, you know, make you live forever.
No.
Uh but my you know, my personal experience uh is just that when I changed over to um drinking all of my water out of copper, um I noticed uh uh you know a change that year is that I I just didn't get the common colds that were coming through and hitting me in my household two or three times a year.
Um I just you know, my my health just improved.
And I I um there's something about this, whether it's you know, I and I believe very much that the copper definitely has an impact on the health and and and any thing I think that we're you know, you're using this as a daily ritual that's focusing on you know on your health, and this is I'm doing this because it's good for me.
Yes.
And it just is like drinking that intention.
Well, there are there are at least three layers of this that I can think of.
So number one is just let's say the materialist physics point of view.
So water goes into the vessel, uh especially if it's rainwater or a little bit lower pH, it's gonna ionize a certain number of copper ions ionized specifically that will go into the water.
And we actually have a lab, we could measure the copper concentration of the water because we have i ICPMS instruments.
Uh like we test for heavy metals and things like that, but we also test for copper.
So that'd be an interesting experiment, just to just a shess.
Anyway, that's one level.
So there's a certain amount of physical copper ions in the water.
Then secondly, there's an energetic level.
And I don't know it depends on our audience and how how much they've investigated, you know, homeopathy or energy medicine or energy healing.
But there's something really special about the precious metals, uh, copper, silver, and gold.
I wouldn't want to drink silver because it's a heavier metal.
Right.
And gold doesn't ionize very easily, as you know.
Copper is perfect.
It's right there in that sweet spot.
And then the third thing is the geometry of the vessel, I believe that also imparts something energetically to the water.
There's something called structured water.
Right.
There's I've heard all kinds of terms over the years, but water that flows through a stream.
Right.
You know, it it's it's it encounters shapes of stones and rocks and and spheres and circles.
There's something in nature about sacred geometry that many people believe is imparted onto water, that water has a memory.
Uh the work of Dr. Yamoto out of Japan looking at snowflake crystals under a microscope, combined with certain types of intention, showing that the water forms structures based on your intent.
You're speaking by language.
Yeah.
Definitely.
It's cool stuff.
Oh, it's amazing.
It's amazing.
Yeah, the properties of water.
We we work with a man that has he has these structured water systems.
Um that just you know, that's like it passes through a vessel that just like what you're talking about, where uh the way that it flows through there just kind of re-aligns or pulls out some of the maybe not pulls out, but realigns the water as it's been going through all these different systems and is there a vortex in that?
There is, yeah.
It's a vortex, it's a kind of a series of glass marbles that are well, you know, arranged in there, and then also the way that it's that it funnels, it naturally gets the water to uh um spin as it goes.
Water wants to move too.
Right.
Water wants to move.
Yeah, there's have you ever heard of uh Veda Austin?
Yeah.
Her actually, no, it's funny.
Well, I've actually replicated her experiments using freezing xylitol crystals.
Uh-huh.
Right here.
Uh uh, I had our microscope set up and we were replicating that here.
Yeah.
But using xylitol, not water.
Yeah.
But yeah, I I'm very familiar with that.
And Dr. Yamoto.
I've I've thought about doing it with my yeah, with the with the copper that comes out of here, uh, or the copper water that comes out.
It'd be interesting.
It'd be interesting to be a good thing.
That would be interesting.
Yeah.
Indeed.
Yeah.
Or we could we could mix copper with uh liquid xylitol that's melted and see how that impacts the reformation of the physical structures.
Because I don't know if you've ever seen it, but uh I did things here under the microscope where we could watch xylitol render 3D structures in real time as it's freezing at room temperature.
And it would render structures that were absolutely extraordinary.
Some of them look like artwork.
It would sketch out objects in some cases.
I'm only familiar with xylitol and the chewing gum that I just had driving.
It's the same xylitol, you can melt it.
And I I found that like filming water freezing requires a very cold room.
So I realize you can use xylitol and do it at room temperature.
Okay.
Interesting.
Yeah, and it and it has the same effect.
Right.
Right.
So yeah, we should we should put some copper in it.
That'd be fun.
Definitely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Um and yeah, to also speak the you know, the shape and the form of this uh of this uh of this vessel and and copper, you know, the the tradition that I come out of uh in Mexico where they've been working with copper for a thousand years.
Um it originally started off as production of these little copper belts.
Um I was wanting to ask you what what the copper bell is all about.
You know, I I have this life project, it's called the Copper Bell Diaspora, and I just hand them out wherever I go.
Um and they're just they you know, people similar to you know, wanting to touch the copper, just the sound and you know, it whether it's like uh, you know, angel gets its wings or uh the you know your motorcycle the bell on the motorcycles, uh you know, all different um applications.
And originally there in Mexico, uh these bells were used for kind of their you know spiritual practices.
There's this sound that that passed between the veils between the different you know reality, whether it's like you know, the day of the dead is a really big celebration there in the region where I work.
Well, what's really interesting to me, because my background's also in in music and sound engineering, but metals have a multi-harmonic resonance, right?
So the sound actually exists at many different harmonies simultaneously, and the nature of that sound depends on the structure of the metal, the composition of the metal.
Certainly.
Yeah.
So you're actually hearing physics through a bell.
Like a bell translates matter into sound.
Right.
And that's something that's a transformation that I think is symbolic of the transcendence into the spiritual world, from physical to spiritual, from physical to sound, from matter to vibration.
I mean, it makes sense that it's used in spiritual practices.
Right.
I guess, you know, quantum physics, you know, we're all just kind of waves, you know.
Either pinpoint where we are or how we're moving.
And um, and every each one of these bells, they all have their own unique tone.
It you know, there's a whole science to bell making that's just all depends on you know, yeah, the material, the shape of it.
Oh, yeah.
Um, you know, if you probably open that other one over there, it has a totally different tone to it.
And the thickness, everything, the curve, like there's a really interesting curve of how it opens at the bottom.
And I'm sure that's very important for the sound.
Sure.
Oh, definitely.
Yeah.
Well, it it's so interesting to talk to you about all of this, and I really appreciate the fact that you went through the learning of the craft of how to work with copper.
So that when you now oversee the artisans there, or you're you're you're visiting the factory, let's say, and and you want a certain piece made a certain way, like you know what you're talking about.
Right.
And you know what it takes to make it.
Yeah, I you know, I that's one of the things that I feel like we miss so much in our modern education is this like really grounded knowledge and things, and you know, similar to what's happened to our American production, is just a lot of that knowledge has been sent to other places.
Um, regaining that foundation of knowledge, something that you know, my son, he's a sophomore uh in high school, and I'm just you know, I'm like, sh pay attention in class, but uh, you know, really pay attention to the things that you're you know, that you're getting experience from.
Um and I have him, he runs our engraving, we do customization, he's figuring out how to use material.
Oh, okay.
Uh when he was younger, he'd come down to the shop with me and hammer things out and just you know, given him, you know, passing it on.
And this, you know, this business is very much a family business.
Um in Mexico, um, my I studied under a maestro, uh Don Maximo, probably one of the greatest living companies.
Don Maximo.
Don Maximo.
That's actually his name, Maximo.
That's what a great name.
Yeah, oh, it's a great name.
And he's an amazing man.
And like any great maestro, he makes the work look so easy.
Right.
So easy.
Until you try it yourself.
Like, what?
Oh, yeah.
And I I remember when I just when I had to learn how to swing a hammer.
You know, I hammered nails and everything, but uh, you know, it was just like, oh, to really hit a hammer and and get it to do what I want it to do is just you know, it was a whole and and sure I could have read about it, and I did.
I read about it, and you know, and people explained it to me, but it wasn't until I actually like took it up and and did it and messed things up, and then just there's like uh we were talking a little bit about you know, this like kind of how this reminds you maybe mine or Aztec and the crafts in Mexico.
Yeah, there's an amazing manual intelligence.
And in my experience, I see that you know, our you know, our our minds are you know, they're they're great tools, but there's a whole other way that we learn things.
It's just kind of by doing them this tactile experience, and and it's like the minds have the hands have a mind of their own in a way of like learning.
And also when I sit down and work on something where I'm you know hammering something out, it's just you know, all of a sudden I'm just oh I'm in a different place, and everything's just kind of happening.
There's there's something in the Mexican Central and South American culture about craftsmanship that is just extraordinary.
Uh when I lived in South America, I got to watch um a brick layer craftsman actually build a circular brick dome from the ground up all the way to the top keystone pieces.
Right in real time.
And the the way they operate with the mortar and the bricks and the placement and the timing and the structure, so it doesn't cave in on you.
Like if I try to build a dome out of bricks, right?
I'm getting bricks on my head, probably, you know.
But this guy nailed it.
Uh-huh.
And it was just, you could tell this is like 20 years of expertise.
Oh, sure.
You know?
Yeah.
And it's amazing to watch.
And we forget about that because we want everything automated and machine and you know, exactly the same.
And that that's a boring world, actually.
Right.
Very, very.
I want to see the human side of things.
And there's yeah, very much the human element.
Things are you know, I there's like when something's made, it's almost like it's not an imperfection, it's just it's a uniqueness that goes into peace.
It gives it a lot of you know character.
And you know, granted, we have tolerances that we need to meet when we're making things.
Of course.
Um and uh, you know, we're not trying to make the most perfect thing possible.
We just we want it to uh you know, we want it we want to make the best thing that we can do.
And it, you know, we imbue all of this with, you know, just kind of our spirit of work and and in those experiences, uh it also has opened my eyes to just looking at things and you know, appreciating, you know, more around me and the the human element that's in everything.
Yeah.
Um and every time a person purchases a product like this, it infuses you know economic incentive into the human craft.
You know, it it it feeds families, it employs people, it keeps the art alive.
Uh let me mention the website again, folks, if you want to get some of this for yourself, healthranger store.com/slash copper.
And there's the entire uh product line from Sertodo, and right here, look, a mixing bowl.
That's what I I want to eat my organic grapes out of a copper mixing bowl.
Okay.
That's for sure.
And I want grapes with seeds in them because I I'm I I hate seedless grapes because all the nutrition is in the seeds.
Ah, okay.
So and the skin, I should say.
But I want to get uh copper platters and plates.
In fact, I'm I'm gonna be a big customer of yours and I'm gonna actually just restock my kitchen with copper.
I sure appreciate it.
We love we love it.
Yeah, you know, and and very much the you know, I uh it's this relationship with our you know, with our customers and everything that we make has come about from like dialogue like this with people.
Oh, how about something like you know, what about you know, copper.
Actually, it started off with uh with copper cups drinking water.
And I was like, Oh, yeah, it's uh yeah, I'd like to use those myself.
Yeah, we'll make some of those, you know, and then you know, progress to oh, well, what about a you know a water uh a water container?
I'd like to store my water and some copper.
Yeah, well, why is that?
Well, it's you know, it does this.
And I'm like, huh, and you know, and that's where all of our you know, it's uh it's a whole relationship that we have with our you know, with our customers, with our you know, really our patrons as much as anything.
Absolutely.
And let me add this as a as a nutritionist to our audience.
Uh I have often told people that it's it's better to get copper from natural sources than from multivitamins.
And so I've even previously warned people like if you can find a multivitamin without copper in it, and you get copper from natural sources, which includes some types of seafood and meats and things like that, then that's your best bet.
But with with what you offer, this is a great way to get copper that's ionized, which means it's absorbable.
And then I wouldn't get it in supplements.
You know, I I wouldn't get it in what I mean, multivitamins.
Because I think they put too much of the multivitamins actually.
Put like four milligrams in there.
And if you're taking the multivitamin and you're getting other copper, that's actually more than you need.
The thing about copper is it's so potent and powerful.
It's a trace mineral.
Right.
Right.
You don't need to consume copper like calcium or magnesium.
Right.
It's so it's it has a multiplier effect, which I think proves its energetic quality.
A little bit goes a long way.
Definitely.
Definitely.
It is very, yeah, it is a very powerful material.
Um, one of the things that we also would get is you know, people worried about, oh, am I getting too much copper?
And our you know, our bodies uh just naturally process and balance and balance the amount of copper that you have in there.
Unless you have, I think it's called Wilson's disease where a body doesn't process copper, and then even copper coming through your water pipes can you know can can be dangerous.
Yeah, I wouldn't worry about overdosing on copper from dishware, water pitchers and water filters.
Right.
Only if I were supplementing it would it would it be an issue because then your body has a harder time dealing with it.
You're kind of forcing it down your throat in large quantities.
I mean, four milligrams is a lot compared to what you're getting in here, is like parts per million copper.
We're talking orders of magnitude difference in the copper amount that you're getting.
Or does magnitude different, but you know, I just personally noticed a change in my life when uh when I started drinking all of my things out of copper.
Not only that, I noticed also attention to just the water quality, as you mentioned about what's the what's your water source.
Um and uh you know, we we've had a couple times here where the municipal water system failed, and they're like, Oh, there's boil water notices, or my water smelled like fish.
And then they say, Oh, boil your water.
Uh I don't want to have boiled fish water.
That doesn't sound good.
No, no, I think it's the zebra mussels that were going into the the uh the upper lakes that were in the intakes of really for a while.
Um but then the you know, one thing that helps address that along with heavy metals and any kind of uh uh contaminants that are in the water uh are these uh water filters, uh the filters that go in there, the gravity filters.
Uh ceramic elements.
It's a ceramic, it's a diatomaceous earth ceramic shell.
Uh it has a silver impregnation in there.
Uh-huh.
Um that just helps from biofouling if it sits around for a while.
Right.
Um, which you're not really going to get with the copper.
Uh and then it the uh the functional element is uh um carbon, uh carbon filter inside there that removes m most all of these, you know, forever chemicals, uh definitely removes all the chlorines out of your water.
So it'll take a heavy metals.
Yeah, and heavy metals, uh, you know, phosphates.
Um, you know, I I have a client up in Iowa that used this, and they sent me a picture of their water filters after three months.
Yeah.
And they look like the inside of you know old cigarette butts.
From uh from some other filter.
Uh this was just from filtering out the water.
Oh, wow.
The just the contaminants that were in their water.
And I think it's coming up quite a bit right now about the qual that Iowa has the highest cancer rate um and some of the worst quality water from a lot of their agricultural business, which they've had a lot of trouble meant you know, s even speaking about in Iowa because the industrial agriculture is such a powerful in that state.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The Iowa legislature is totally owned by Monsanto or Bayer now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We we've we've talked about that before too.
But something else interesting, even in Texas, uh, did you know that the data centers that are planned by the year 2030, they'll be using 400 billion gallons of groundwater.
And what that means is that the water quality that will be available to people will go down because they'll be using lower and lower grade water sources to make up for the difference in water.
And that means, you know, our water quality is gonna get worse in Texas.
Now I I collect rainwater.
I drink rainwater exclusively.
Uh we collect rainwater because we make colloidal silver using silver plates from Mexico, it turns out.
Oh, right.
But we make our own colloidal silver here using uh ionization off of silver off the silver plates, uh, positive silver ions.
And then we use that to make numerous products that we have that all have these amazing properties.
But um I I mean rainwater is the cleanest water, but for those but very few people actually have rainwater.
Right.
They've got city water, which is usually groundwater or sometimes recycled surface water.
And all that can be problematic.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The filters, I feel like filtering having having a filter is a good thing to have in any in any yeah, any most any water situation.
And it can be for on-grid or off-grid.
It's just gonna really improve the yeah, the quality of the water that you're getting.
I think even with you know the s the standards that they have um and the kind of things they put in, you know, they put in the water.
Um, it's uh you know, not necessarily things that I would you know want to drink.
You know, and they're their levels are you know, they're more like, oh well this this isn't gonna kill you, you know, quickly.
Yeah, quickly, yeah.
But combined with the 300 other chemicals that we also put in there, who knows?
Yeah.
Uh and let me just describe this too.
Now not trying to get you in any trade name trouble.
We've we've been a supporter of the of the Berkey company for you know many years.
And I would describe this in a general sense as kind of like a a big Burkey type of configuration, but made of copper by artisans.
Is that a kind of a fairly general?
You know, I think uh the gravity water systems really a lot of it's you know they've been around forever.
I in Mexico I've seen where they have these basically like uh um I've seen them clay.
yeah, or clay or like a limestone, and it's just got this same shape, and they pour the water on the top and then it just filters through the stone.
And um I've seen a couple filters like that.
You know, they were definitely you know pre-Columbian style filters.
And um over in in uh the United Kingdom, uh there's a company we used to work with them on their filters, Burkefeld.
Um Burkefeld, and they make they make uh also some nice uh uh water filters, and they you know, their gravity water systems they started making in you know over a hundred years ago.
Um and yeah, just this idea that you know you're gonna filter your water through something.
Um so yeah, it just for uh you know, I guess uh name recognition, it's something people might be familiar with.
This is like a Burkey system.
It's just a gravity water purification system.
Got two tanks.
Um when we make things, we like things to be functional and beautiful.
And so I was like, well, let's put a nice little waste on it so it looks, you know, and it just it it helps with the flow of the water.
Um something I want to set out to be.
Yeah, absolutely.
This is again something you'd want to have out even if you're not using it.
Yeah.
It's like it just looks gorgeous.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it has to do also with the tooling, you know, how you know what that influences the shape.
Most of the stuff we spin out on a on a spinning lathe.
And so we're spinning it over a mold.
That shapes the that shapes the metal onto the onto the form.
I would love to see that.
Oh, it's it's a video of that.
So cool.
Yeah, I can send you some of that.
It's it's a fun process.
Now, look let me ask you about the history of art in Mesoamerica and the use of especially copper, silver, and gold over over time, uh spanning really I mean thousands of years, right?
Is how this goes back.
Um I'm I of the places I've toured, I I've toured like ancient civilization sites throughout you know, Central and South America before and uh some in Mexico.
And I've always been struck by the incredible uh detail of the metals.
And I also wonder how much of this artwork has been lost to pillaging because you know, somebody wanted the gold out of the artwork, so they stripped it out, you know.
But uh talk to us about the history of craftsmanship and the appreciation of metals in the art, uh spanning back really, you know, thousands of years.
Right.
Yeah.
Uh you mentioned you'd been in South America.
Where where in South America was really toured in Peru and other places in and in Central America, like Panama and so on.
Yeah.
I I lived down there for a little while myself.
Did you?
Um Yeah, Ecuador's amazing.
Uh and actually the origins of this metal work, the metallurgy in South America was really highly developed.
Um, even more so than in Mesoamerica.
Uh-huh.
Um when I was uh I did Latin American studies at the University of Texas.
Really?
Yeah.
Um just by chance, one of the few people ended up working in their field.
Um when I was in school there, the the dominant theory actually, you know, there was no communication between South America and North America.
You know, people migrated down from you know the Bering Strait or whatever and went down to South America and forgot everything else from where they came from.
And these two places are just two separate worlds.
Uh-huh.
Um and when I came across this uh you know, this copper work, I was really interested in um the in the history, in the history of it and where, you know uh according to their legend, like this copper work just appeared out of nowhere.
Uh huh.
Associated with um what was called uh uh the the uh Quetzal Coatle, it was the feathered serpent.
He was like a harbinger of peace and culture and brought this technology there to the um to this area in western Mexico.
Um and in their codices in the Anthropology Museum in uh Mexico City, which is I think is one of the most amazing museums in the world.
Oh, I'd love to see that.
I love seeing museums in other cultures.
This this museum is uh it's spectacular about all the different cultures in Mexico.
But these people, their codices is you know, their origin is that they arrived through these portals on the backs of turtles.
Uh you know, onto the coast of western Mexico.
And uh maybe they were referring to the Galapagos or something.
I don't know.
I'm not sure.
But as it as it turns out that uh you know, as I I found this, I went to the Benson Library, which is uh, you know, the world's greatest collection on Latin American um literature and documents.
Uh it's an incredible facility.
Uh-huh.
And I could find one like PhD paper from like the 70s, it was like stuffed in the back of a corner somewhere about this copper work.
And this guy said, well, you know, I I think that what's going on here is that there was actually trade going on from these South American civilizations with this region in Mexico, and they were traveling up and down the coast looking for spongulate shells,
which were what was being used in in trade and money and and then they kind of established in settlements and brought this technology for making these copper bells, this casting, which is this technique was like a copycat of stuff that was going on down in um down in South America.
Um when I'd started this, I had I had read this this book that really kind of just opened my mind to the fact that there's so many holes in history and there's lots of ways to build them.
It was a book called Fingerprints of the Gods.
Oh, of course.
Yeah, Graham Hancock.
Yeah, you know, and all of his talking about all of his metallurgy and those things there.
And I and when I started doing this, I was like, oh, I've I've found a fingerprint of the gods at this place in in Western Mexico.
And um, you know, I've interviewed uh uh Randall Carlson.
Okay, and you know, ancient civilizations.
Okay.
Um a lot of theories about the you know the the loss of ancient civilizations and you know what how all that has happened and how many of the ancient ruin sites are covered up to make sure that we don't discover the hidden knowledge.
Right.
You know.
I mean that's that's a that's a very real thing.
Yeah.
And then we find these ancient artifacts that look like motors and gears and batteries and things, and then they just write it off, you know, bury that in the basement of the Smithsonian, you know.
Sure.
Don't want to put that out for people to see.
It doesn't fit with our modern, you know, worldview of you know, this is the pinnacle of how anything is developed.
Right.
You know, there's so many civilizations have come and gone, and each with their own apex and there are currents, I feel like that you know that continue through different things.
And I feel fortunate that I've kind of landed on something that goes back, you know, through a large part of history, which is this copper work and just being a part of that story.
The table of elements has never changed throughout history.
That's what's beautiful about it.
And you know, copper is copper is copper.
I jokingly explain to my audience the reason gold has its own square on the table of elements is because gold isn't any other element.
Like it's only gold, and it can't change without fusion or fission into something else.
Right.
So copper is copper, gold is gold.
And I think ancient, many ancient civilizations had much higher knowledge than we do today about elements and the interaction in the spiritual and physical realms, uh, the the synergistic qualities of these things.
And I even think about to uh think back to ancient cultures and ancient languages like uh the language of Quechua, right?
Which the language itself is predisposed to describing a world, a spiritual world is larger than our material world and Western civilization today.
Right.
The language is like expressively open to bigger ideas.
Yeah, I yeah, I've have heard language described as like it's the architecture that sets up our interpretation of the world.
Yeah.
Um and you know, in some sense, they're just they had a completely different world vision that allowed them to see things in in different ways.
And you know, like Egypt, the the Ankh uh symbol for um you know, life is also the symbol for copper.
Um it's this, you know, this it's interchangeable.
Well, I didn't know that.
Yeah.
Um so it just you know, all these different, you know ways of looking at the world through through so many different lenses.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And anything that helps expand our vision and open open us up beyond, you know, we you know, the kind of the rut that we might find ourselves in, I think is um you know worth exploring.
You know, it's very interesting.
Um I talk about the juxtaposition of the artificial world with the real physical world.
Uh and at the same time, as much as I appreciate all of this, uh I'm also like my company has built an AI engine.
And the AI engine is free.
You know, it's Brighton.ai.
And it's designed to impart human knowledge on things like natural medicine and nutrition and self-reliance and so on.
But as part of the acquisition of materials for training the AI engine, I've collected a massive repository of uh scientific papers in non-English languages, uh including Chinese and a lot of them in Spanish.
And I'm currently working through that to try to discern what's useful.
But almost every book that's been written in Spanish and almost every science paper in Spanish has been digitized.
And there it's more than just me.
There are other people and other entities that have that already have copies of all that knowledge.
Yeah.
So it's not going to vanish.
It just has to be sort of mined, like copper.
It's got to be mined for the the gems of knowledge that have that were even known just a few decades ago but have been forgotten by our modern times.
Yeah.
How do we pass knowledge?
Yeah.
How do we pass knowledge on?
Share, yeah, share knowledge and knowledge can be lost if you're not careful to preserve it.
Yeah.
It has been lost.
The burning of the Library of Alexandria, etc.
Right.
Right.
Look at look, I mean the Roman Empire, you know.
Yeah, burning of the codices in Mexico.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
How how many times throughout history did the emperor say, let's burn down all the knowledge because we want to impart our knowledge onto that slave civilization.
We're going to make them slaves.
Still we persist.
It's a I don't know how we got down this rabbit hole, but it it's it's I'm really glad we're having this discussion because this is really important about how how is human civilization sustainable.
Right.
If we keep making the same mistakes of history and not even realizing that those were already made.
Right.
Yeah.
I I I don't have an answer, but uh I I enjoy that I have something to focus on.
Totally.
Um just I feel like as much as anything that carries us through, you know, whatever it is that we may believe that's almost like gravity, and it'll pull us into AI is going to be a real interesting transformation.
And I I talked to my son quite a bit about it.
Um, what is the you know, what can you do that, you know, the AI is not going to come and take your job.
Um and where AI is taking this like bottom layer of work, well, that's where most everybody got all of their you know, busted their chops to be able to develop up on top of there.
And you know, there's a way that it can definitely, you know, serve us and augment our our experience.
And it's a great research tool.
Yeah.
It can find things like as an example.
When when I I I funneled you know millions of documents of nutrition and health into our AI engine.
And then I was using it for research one day to find out how do you block uh in your neurology, how do you block receptor sites for monosodium glutamate MSG?
Because I'm sensitive to MSG.
And it was giving me a list of things I already knew, and then it popped out, it said methylene blue.
Like, what?
I never knew that.
And it says, yeah, methylene blue blocks glutamate receptors.
And that's crazy, because that's a dye.
It's been used as a textile dye.
Yeah, I tried it one time, my teeth turned really blue.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, so I went out, I I decided to test it.
I went out to a Chinese food restaurant that often uses MSG.
And I said, I'm gonna I'm gonna be the experiment.
So I took the methylene blue, I ate the Chinese food, ready for the big headache and everything.
Yeah.
No headache.
Oh, okay.
It worked.
So the AI engine told me something that I would never have discovered.
Right.
And the same thing can happen with even, you know, the the Spanish PhD papers that have been published before.
There must be hidden gems of knowledge, even about metallurgy, about copper, about gold, that are long since forgotten, but can be re can re-emerge through AI.
Sure.
So it has a use.
Yeah.
Oh, definitely.
Yeah.
Giving us more access to knowledge.
My son's been working on a car that I gave him, just turned 16.
Got wrecked, and a friend of mine gave it to me.
Oh.
Here have a wrecked car.
Yeah, here have a wrecked car.
Oh, okay.
So it's gonna he's gotta work on it.
And uh and I'm like, yeah, you gotta take off the bumper to get to the radiator and say, well, how do I do that?
And I was just like, you know, that's this is this is why I gave it to you.
Yeah.
So he's on there with YouTube and just pulling all that up, and I'm just I'm amazed at what he can, you know, the access that he has to to just to like get things at his fingertips, but then using his fingertips to actually you know put that into put that into play and practice and you know, the actual tactile world.
Yeah, I mean, because computers are great.
I I love my computer, but I bang on that at the end every day, it looks the same.
And well, yeah, and what people need to remember is that you live in the real world, you have a physical body, and that physical body needs water.
Definitely.
The water needs a vessel, you know, you otherwise it's all over the place.
Yeah.
Um, you know, that this is why nutrition matters.
This is why copper matters.
This is why what you do really matters, because we still live in a 3D world.
As much as people want to escape into a virtual world or a deep fake world or artificial girlfriends or whatever they do these days with the chat bots that now are creating like relationships with people.
Yeah.
Which is weird.
Interesting.
Yeah.
That's like uh no thank you.
Um pull yourself out of that world, come back in the real world, have good nutrition, which is what I teach, good food.
Surround yourself with things that are beautiful and things that are functional.
Your life will improve.
I mean, it's a it's a simple rule of thumb that we never had to remind previous generations of this because they didn't live in the virtual world.
Right.
Now we do.
We have to remind people come back.
Right.
Come back to reality.
Touch a piece of copper.
Sure.
You know, like feel the texture of this.
Drink the water, share it with your friends.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
These make great gifts, I would think.
Definitely.
Yeah.
Everybody loves shiny things.
Do you um how's your supply chain?
Like, do you have enough to handle the surge in orders if if like you know, Christmas time or whatever?
Uh yes.
Uh we um well, currently I'm working on the you know, we're we've had our our last production run held up just as we're trying to figure out the new um kind of bureaucratic paperwork situation for the uh to for dealing with the tariffs and the the instruction on it is kind of murky.
Um I would imagine.
Yeah.
And so we're we're about ready to get our last run up through, and we always build up for the um for the holidays.
But you know, that said, we also you know, there's a lot of ham work that goes into this, and it's we don't just turn the machine on and all of a sudden it's cranking out, you know, a million widgets.
Um but uh yeah, we we uh you know we we we deal with surges.
We are always you know, currently we're reworking some tooling in our in our workshop.
Um but are you gonna have to raise your prices because of the tariffs?
Inevitably, yes.
Yeah.
I mean, it's uh how much we have to raise our prices depends on how murky the rules are and what we can what we can, you know how how much we're being tariffed.
Right.
Um you know there's a pending Supreme Court decision on the legality of the emergency economic act that Trump invoked for that terror.
I I've seen that.
If the decision comes back knocking down those tariffs, everybody will have to be issued a refund on the tariffs they paid.
Can you imagine waiting for your government tariff refund?
No.
It's in the mail.
I can't I can't imagine.
Yeah, and during COVID, we didn't apply for any of the any of the government funding things just because I just don't want to deal with all the paperwork.
No kidding.
Yeah.
And um, you know, we've been, you know, we were fortunate that during COVID things, business was really good for us.
All of a sudden people couldn't go to a bar, so they were ordering all of our barware on the city.
Oh, that's interesting.
It just, you know, our business, you know, did really and I was making this transition from doing a lot of wholesale to directly to our you know, website.
I just wanted to have more interaction with my you know, end user.
Uh-huh.
Um, and that that really just kind of flipped the switch for us.
Um yeah, it was a really interesting time for us.
Um business was business was really good.
And then we also had, you know, a couple of this is where I was our our website, our web host wanted to shut us down Because we were saying that copper is antibacterial and antifungal.
So we need we need certification about that.
What?
And so I, you know, sent them all these articles from the Smithsonian and they're like, well, we we need we need a certification for every product that you have.
Oh my goodness.
And I was just like, bureaucracy.
That's yeah, not not my battle.
Um but nevertheless, you know.
I mean it's a natural property of the element.
It's a natural property element.
Right.
It's like saying, yeah, gold is shiny.
Right.
You know.
I'll prove it.
Right.
Uh we need it certified.
Yeah, we yeah, we have to have a stamp.
Yeah.
It needs to be a stamp that says gold is shiny.
Yeah.
And we we didn't want to pay for that stamp.
Um but insane.
Yeah.
And and we have dealt with lots of different hurdles uh throughout um you know the 30 years that I've been doing this.
And you know, actually uh with you know, with the previous administration, the and with what was happening with the onshoring of work.
Um Mexico became you know very strong economically and and the the value of the peso just went way up and you know that was essentially like uh you know all of a sudden our goods were costing 25 percent more.
Yeah.
Just because of this exchange rate.
And the dollar is falling this year compared to and the dollar is falling.
Yeah.
It's you know, and that those things are all over the place.
And um, you know, we we just continue to do what we do um and deal with whatever the circumstances are that that come our way.
And with the tariff being at 50 percent, um it's going to affect our prices.
I won't know until I get this next shipment through the border how exactly we're gonna be tariffed on that.
And so then after that, and then you know what happens with the legal situation.
Right.
Um so um, you know, currently we don't have a you know, our prices haven't gone up in about a year and a half.
Um and we'll see after we get this get this stuff through.
Um I think your prices are very reasonable where what I'm seeing right now on the website, and you know, folks should realize uh look, just go to HealthRanger Store.com/slash copper, and you'll see the prices.
Here's a whole set for 128 dollars.
That's the Moscow mule gift set.
Moscow mule if you like the strong medicine.
Yeah, there we go.
Now, and I think our audience realizes these are handcrafted, it's pure copper, 99% pure.
Uh you said a little bit of zinc in it on purpose.
Right.
Um But does you know, these aren't churned out by robots mindlessly.
Um but that brings me to another question.
And we're I we're we're getting close to the end of the interview, by the way.
Uh and thank you for your time.
I don't mean to keep you over.
If you need to go, let me know.
I'm I'm you're doing okay.
I'm enjoying myself thoroughly.
Okay, me too.
I'm really enjoying having you here.
This is great to be able to talk about all this.
But um, the Trump administration would say that the reason they're putting the tariffs on copper is to encourage American companies to do more copper mining and more copper goods like this.
Um I'm not aware of any American heritage of this kind of work.
Well, actually, I mean North uh North America.
Sure.
Um, it's a great great thing.
I actually am uh working with a man who started a copper cookware company.
Actually, he took over a company that was uh I think they were called Waldo and they produced in Brooklyn, New York.
Yeah.
Uh at the turn of the century.
Uh he revived them with their old tooling uh about 15 years ago and then has since been kind of moving his production around to different places.
Um and everybody that's doing that that's doing that work uh is either dying or retiring.
And uh so we uh have taken over the production of of his uh of his work just because there's not you know that that knowledge isn't here anymore about doing this kind of work.
Uh-huh.
Um that's specifically for like our kind of copper um you know cookware.
Um I I I you know I see the point in the tariffs is that we want to bring some of this industry back into the United States.
I think maybe, you know, the world is you know interdependent and having our maybe North American area where we're you know with our neighbors and working uh that we can complement you know the strengths, you know.
I I couldn't make this stuff here in the United States with the skill that we have.
Um just finding somebody that's gonna spend two years learning how to do all this kind of work and then and then you know be there to work for us, you know, for the next 20 years.
Right.
Um because this this is a family trade technically.
Yeah.
It's part of the culture, it's part of the local town.
Yeah.
The generations of people working in this.
Um but there there are copper sheet manufacturers.
I think there's some like kind of industrial uh copper applications, you know, these and and that's and we can get into the economics, but you know, quite honestly, like our costs and just the cost of life and living in here in the United States, you know, it's difficult to make a living, you know, hammering out uh copper pieces without them being like you know, $200 for a cup.
And regarding the price of our goods, you know, we I I feel like you know, very much from the work that we put into it, it's a a fair price, and this is something that is gonna be here 20 and 30 years from now.
Yes.
So just amortized that over 20 years.
Trevor Burrus, Jr.
And the economics of the situation are complicated, but our audience understands this.
If you think about it, it's it's U.S. government currency printing that creates these inflationary pressures among the domestic population that raise cost of living that make it very difficult for anybody to take on a trade like this, right?
That's not going to pay the salary of you know uh a computer science expert or something.
So inflation actually pushes jobs out of America to other countries.
But then there's the craftsman side of this.
And uh right here, you see this holster?
I do.
This leather, this is a company that we've also interviewed uh 1791 gun leather.
All their leather work is done in Mexico.
And it's outstanding.
It's the best holster I've ever owned, and I've worn it for three years now without it breaking, which has never happened before because I wear it on my ranch.
Right.
Uh and I found that the Mexican culture of leather work, which also does exist in America, in Arizona and Texas and New Mexico, et cetera.
But especially in Mexico, the leather work craftsmanship is just vastly superior.
Oh, yeah.
You know?
That I think the same thing is true with copper in this format.
Trevor Burrus, Jr.
Yeah.
We have highly skilled craftsmen in the United States.
And one of the things is that they're just in such small little pockets, um, and there's not like a a tradition that you know, there was, you know, tradition.
I was just out in Oregon at the timber line lodge out there is built, it was a WPA project, and they brought in all of these you know, metalsmiths, wood, you know, really wood craftsmen.
And the place is amazing.
Um like the work in there, like talking about the stonework and the stonework in there and the the steel work and the woodwork.
It's just it's like wow, somebody is like valuing this work.
And they had you know, whole, you know, it was like two generations of people working on this place.
Wow.
And we just don't see that kind of you know, patronage, I guess, uh anymore.
And and in Mexico, um, you know, another interesting thing about this region where I work out of is that um five hundred years ago, um this area was organized as like a utopian society.
Um Thomas Moore's Utopia was written in like 1510 and in in Britain, Thomas Moore.
Yeah.
He was a Catholic, and then the Catholic church decided they were gonna put that uh those theories into practice in this region in Mexico, which is that you have a kind of a central community, um, and then you have all these satellite communities that contribute to the you know the general economy, and this community is gonna be they're gonna make pottery, this community is gonna do woodwork, this community is gonna do copper work.
Um and that social architecture put into place 500 years ago, like continues.
And continues that region is like, you know, it has a lot of economic independence and just kind of general wealth that you know now there's still a lot of other pressures happening there that's you know, it's but these traditions are still very much alive, and it's uh it's like a community thing that's that's passed down.
See, that's that's so critical because in in Western civilization, we value economies based on GDP.
Uh-huh.
Gross domestic product.
But gross domestic product has no numbers for cultural knowledge or heritage or resilience or happiness, right?
And these things are part of the human condition, And yet they have no value on the on the spreadsheet.
And so, you know, we're living in an artificial set of priorities that were created by the accountants and the governments to say, oh, look, our economy is great.
Yeah, but your people are miserable.
Right.
You know.
So much is missing out of that economic equation.
Right.
Your families are not whole.
Yeah.
You know, your your communities are being torn apart.
The the local hardware shop that used to be run by Bob has been replaced by Home Depot or whatever.
Right.
You know, that's never taken into account in the wealth of a nation.
But the wealth is more than numbers on a spreadsheet.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I I know you get that.
Definitely.
Yeah.
Maybe that's why our money is devaluing so fast.
There's no that the things that are real value are kind of missing out of this.
That's right.
So I would just remind our audience if you want real surround yourself with real things, with real wealth.
To me, this is an example of wealth.
And you know, the the other the the picture, et cetera.
These are real things.
They're beautiful.
They're as you can tell, there's a whole history behind all of these, the craftsmanship, the artisanship, and also the table of elements, the properties of copper that have to be proven piece by piece.
But all of this is fascinating.
We have a stamp on the room.
Yeah, you have a stamp on every piece.
Yeah.
That every piece has to be certified.
Oh yeah.
Not like that.
Yeah.
I think uh yeah, you can see our touch mark on the bottom there.
Oh, that's to know it came out of your that's a long tradition in metallurgy, is that every uh you know every shop has their quinto or their their stamp.
You know, so you know, like I said, in 50 years when the you know the the antique uh you know virtual roadshow comes through, they're gonna turn their oculus on there and see, oh sertodo copper, great stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly.
I I just want to wrap this up by saying I'm I'm really grateful to have met you and to be exposed to what you're bringing to people in America and elsewhere.
And I love the fact that you also studied the history of Latin America as your academic endeavor.
That's really useful.
And I love the fact that you're a hands-on guy who's learned the basics of how to do this, if not more than the basics.
Thank you.
Thank you.
It's been a pleasure.
I really appreciate you bringing me in here and and just sharing the knowledge and you know, this discussion here and just you know, just talking with people and our neighbors.
Yeah, you know, that's that there's a lot of value in that that I really appreciate.
I appreciate you reaching out to us.
Yeah, absolutely.
I I think that part part of I mean, not to make this you know political, but part of the healing of our world has to be that we have to talk to each other.
We have to we have to understand and honor other cultures and other traditions.
And we have to we have to present value to things that are not valued in the GDP.
And that's that's culture and that's joy, that's happiness, that's the the feeling of a job well done.
Right.
And and valuing humanity, not just machines and robots and factories.
You know.
If we can't do these things, then how is humanity going to have a future?
Right.
You know, really.
It all comes it's I mean, we can start with copper, but we get to the big picture, which is the survival of human civilization.
And that's really what this discussion is all about.
Uh-huh.
I think we'll make it through.
I have great hope.
Well, good.
I share that hope with you here today, but sometimes I'm worried about the robots.
Sure.
What they might do to us.
Well, discussions like this, you know, they just add to the hope.
Well, I also have copper bullets that can we can use against the robots.
Yes.
Yes.
Like the 300 wind mag rifle rounds, they're copper.
I've got some copper rifle.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, the copper is great for all kinds of things.
Yeah.
I would rather not use copper kinetically.
You know, silver half- silver for the uh werewolves and uh copper for the robots.
Perfect.
Perfect.
And if you if you can lodge that rifle round right into the robot uh battery, it'll short it out and it'll just drop.
And we'll take the copper out of there.
There we go.
And we'll turn it into take the lithium, take the copper, like strip the robots.
Okay.
A little bit of science fiction in every show.
Uh all right, but uh thank you so much.
It's been an honor meeting you.
Oh, last question.
Can you explain to our audience the origin of the name of the company sertolo?
Oh, sure.
Ser todo.
Um my name is Jonathan Beale.
Um be all, ser todo.
It's uh it's just kind of a direct translation in Spanish, something that I had thought about.
Yeah, of my name.
So be all.
Be all, meaning all.
Total meaning all.
And ser is the form of to be.
Yeah.
And uh, you know, kind of like full of life or the army motto, be all you can be.
And you know, I just thought, uh, I need something that's gonna allow me to do whatever I want.
So that's so perfect.
Um we'll the company is literally named after you, but it doesn't sound like it's because it's it's a translation.
It's a translation.
That's so cool.
It's a great name.
Yeah, thank you very much.
Brilliant.
All right, Mr. Sertodo.
See, senor.
Yeah, perfect.
There you go, my confidence.
Yes, muy bien.
Okay.
Well, muchas.
Yeah.
For all of your time.
Yeah, thank you.
Very nice to meet you.
Pleasures mutual.
All right, and thank you all for watching today.
I hope you found this enjoyable.
You know, we love to share joy and we'd love to share amazing craftsmanship.
And also, of course, you can help support our organization and get yourself some amazing pieces for your kitchen, for your home.
Uh just check out all these products.
You can find them at HealthRangerstore.com slash copper.
Enjoy the copper and also the gold.
And I've looked I've got gold on my desk here too.
I've got gold and silver.
Ah.
Have some silver.
We got silver coins.
Okay.
Oh, this wait a minute.
Here, let me give you this one.
This is uh this is a silver coin of um veterans.
It's a veteran's coin.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, I'll give you that one.
I want I have to keep this one because this is a Texas coin.
The Alamo Tex.
Okay.
Buffalo.
Silver buffaloes, gold, silver.
This is a nice minting.
This is a table of elements day.
Love it.
I love it.
I love it.
Thank you very much.
You're very welcome.
Enjoy.
And thank all of you for watching today.
I'm Mike Adams of Brighton.com.
Take care.
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