All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 29, 2026 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
01:03:27
FBI Whistleblower Kyle Seraphin Exposes Why the Two-Party System Has Failed America
|

Time Text
Why We Left Short-Term Jobs 00:14:51
Our government is not meant to be a democracy despite all the efforts of the Democrats to try to brand it that way.
We're not meant to have a democracy.
We're meant to have kind of an oligarchy and this sort of like filtration where every single level of higher power is distilled to a different level.
We didn't even used to be able to pick the president because he wasn't actually that important historically.
And you weren't supposed to be able to direct elect your senators.
I think that was one of the worst things that ever happened.
And if you guys look at the way that the Senate has played out, the fact that we played 48 to 52 or 49 to 51 or 50-50 and a vice president splits it, that's dysfunctional.
It's meant to have a two-thirds majority.
Welcome to today's interview here on Brighteon.com.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.
And, you know, one of the voices that I love to listen to because he has such great reason, a lot of wisdom and experience.
And he's never been on the show before.
So this is the first time guest.
I'm really honored to have him on is Kyle Seraphin.
And he's got a very popular podcast on Spotify.
You can go to kyleserafinshow.com.
That will forward you to his Spotify podcast.
He does a lot of other interviews on other channels as well.
He's joining us today to talk about what's happening in our world.
So welcome, Kyle Serafin.
It's an honor to have you on, sir.
Mike, thanks for having me on.
I apologize in advance for my voice being a little bit beat up.
I spent a week at a trade show doing the thing that I actually love, which is dealing with guns and gear and technology that's moving in that space.
And I yelled my voice out because for some reason, all these events always turn on high music when you want to make business contacts with people.
Oh, yeah.
But wait a minute.
Isn't it too early for SHOT Show?
No, we just did it.
SHOT SHOW Well, then I'm sorry.
I missed it because I'm usually tuned into all the new announcements coming out of SHOT Show.
Yeah, you'll probably start seeing people talk about some of the technology and some of the weapon systems and stuff like that and whatever sort of the upgraded kit that's coming out.
So the videos are probably on their way, but the week was last week and I got a nice time to meet a bunch of people.
But that's great.
I left my voice in Las Vegas.
That's the best thing.
The best thing I could leave there.
That always happens at SHOT Show.
And that's even without gunfire because they don't allow that in Vegas inside the buildings, I should say.
But outside, it's open range on everything.
That's right.
So, okay.
Then, by the way, are you do you have a specific company that you're with that you want to mention?
I'm with me.
Yeah.
So now I'm with Kyle Serafin and I'm Seraphin Media.
I'm a one-man show and I run a media company.
I'm kind of a reluctant podcaster.
I didn't set out to be in the podcast space and I didn't set out for anyone to know my name.
It's kind of an accident.
So I guess that's part of the origin story, which I'm happy to share with you all.
Please do.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
So quick and dirty, I'm 44 years old.
I thought I would be a quiet, nobody ever heard my name before.
I intentionally had no social media.
I intentionally did not set out to have anybody follow me.
And actually, I deliberately got off Facebook after I got out of college.
I graduated in 05, even though I probably should have been 04.
And so I lived my life like a lot of people.
I did a bunch of different jobs.
I worked in restaurants.
I worked in sales.
And then I found myself wondering why I was here on this earth and what I was creating or what I was destroying.
And I found the answer was neither to both those questions.
So I enlisted in the military and I found a lot of guidance there.
I enlisted at 27 years old, which is an old time to go into the Air Force.
And I went in because I wanted to do something kind of special.
So I ended up in the special operations training community.
And my goal was to be initially a combat controller.
And I just about died doing so.
I was at Fort Bragg in 2000.
I get the date right, 2010.
I had a heat stroke episode where my body temp got up over 106 and I was no longer able to continue.
So that's kind of scary.
I was sent back to Lachlan Air Force Base, given an opportunity to either leave, and I could have left with an admin discharge, but I thought, who wants to be the guy that's 30 years old and has served in the military for 18 months?
So I went and took another shot at the Apple and I went to the Pararescue Indoc program and I graduated that and went through and became a paramedic and did some training in that way.
So I ended up leaving the Air Force without a deployment and without even finishing that training as well, which was another story altogether.
But long and short of it is I had this aspiration to serve.
I wanted to do things that I thought were meaningful.
And that accidentally put me into the space where I became an FBI agent, which is why people know my name.
In between then, I worked on an ambulance and I worked in an ER and I did some medical stuff as well.
So I ended up in the FBI in 2016, almost exactly because I was then considered a disabled vet.
I did some injuries, obviously, from training.
And they didn't have a whole lot of paramedics.
When I finally got into the FBI, they found out that I was one of like 52 people who were in the special agent pool that were also previously trained as paramedics.
So that was kind of a unique skill set or a very small skill set.
There were less of us than there were pilots.
And, you know, it's a pretty applicable skill for law enforcement.
So long and short, go through the academy, got out into Washington, D.C., did some work in counterintelligence, which I think gave me kind of a taste of what the ugly side of the FBI looks like.
And that's been really my drum that I beat for people.
Most people don't realize the FBI considers itself an intelligence agency.
And if you were to ask people, they would say, well, it's a law enforcement agency.
Sure, but that's a second.
The first and maybe 60% of what the FBI does is intelligence.
And I think that's unsettling for folks that know what intelligence is, know that it doesn't require criminal predicate.
In other words, you didn't have to commit a criminal act for someone to look into you for either national security purposes on the counterintelligence or the counterterrorism side.
And a lot of that has been what has made people who are generally speaking conservative or libertarian and historically even liberals really concerned about what the FBI does because when they're looking into you and they don't have criminal predicate, it means you didn't commit a crime and they're still investigating you to find out what you did wrong.
That's all kind of scary.
I did that for two years.
I moved into a surveillance team where I was watching bad guys of various different flavors from white collar to criminal gangs, child sex traffickers, you name it.
We looked into them, including a lot of these so-called terrorist cases.
And that's when the bad taste in my mouth kind of began to develop.
I was on 20 national profile counterterrorism mission sets around the country.
We shipped around and watched these people.
And I found out that the average white supremacist is like a 20-something year old kid who wears khakis and maybe some boat shoes and he tweets racist things on Reddit.
And it's not really the threat that the FBI was going out and talking about.
And certainly not the Biden administration when they were messaging this.
Long and short, I ended up as a whistleblower because when I tried to get out of politics and tried to get away from the politics, the five years in Washington, D.C. was more than enough for me.
I ended up in Las Cruz, New Mexico.
And that's when I got an email from one of my bosses sending it over that said that we were going to be investigating parents at school board meetings, which in and of itself is not an immediate concern, except that they had co-signed by the assistant director of counterterrorism, which is in the national security space.
And we just had our attorney general say that they weren't going to do national security tools.
They weren't going to use Patriot Act tools on parents.
I thought he committed perjury.
That spurred me to go to my congresswoman.
That was right in the middle of the COVID nonsense where they were trying to enforce everybody to go do this thing that I certainly wasn't going to do.
And so I was a COVID vaccine refuser and now this federal whistleblower causing problems on every level.
So my time was short-lived and I left the FBI.
Officially, I was suspended June 1st of 2022.
I did my first podcast with Dan Bongino in September at his request.
And my life has been kind of a, you know, kind of a carousel and a whirlwind at the same time since then.
Yeah, wow.
And then Bongino going to the FBI, not leaving the FBI.
And he's about to start his podcast up again.
That's going to be interesting.
Yeah, I've heard you described as a whistleblower.
And I don't blame you for anything that you did there.
With the FBI going after parents, that's clearly an overreach of power, an abuse of federal power against American citizens who are merely trying to protect their children.
I'm glad you refused the vaccine so you didn't die of clots during this time.
You're still here.
You get to talk to us.
That's awesome.
We need voices like yours, I believe.
We got to bring back some reason and rationality here.
And let me just say, I think you'll agree with this and to the audience.
I am very often critical of law enforcement right now, but I'm not anti-law enforcement.
We need law enforcement, but we need it to have boundaries and ethics and to operate with people.
And also, Kyle, I've done firearms and combat training for 20 plus years with so many members of law enforcement and Navy SEALs and sheriffs and deputies and cops.
I've taught soldiers and cops of edge weapons, combat training, and how to defend themselves against edge weapons.
So I've been around a lot of people that the kind of people that you've been around also.
I know these guys.
Mostly they're good guys.
They want to do good, but we now seem to have an apparatus where if anything goes wrong, they blame the victim.
Like the shooting in Minneapolis, all of a sudden after Predty was shot, then he became a terrorist.
So what would you like to say?
I mean, that's a hot button topic right now.
Yeah, true.
So what's your take on that?
First of all, I don't have all the facts.
I don't think anybody else does either.
So I look at the reasonableness standard.
So that's how we end up evaluating this.
And there's a couple of things that are difficult for people to understand that when you take the emotion out of it, the legality of the situation is going to be very different than what you feel like the moral answer is or even the emotional answer.
The legality is whether a reasonable officer standing in the same position as the person who fired the shot would make that same shot with the information he had available, with the training and experience that he had.
That's a lot of sort of legal jargon.
It falls underneath Supreme Court law.
There was a case called Tennessee.
Sorry, Tennessee versus Gardner was like a fleeing vehicle.
Generally speaking, federal use of force goes under Graham v. Connor.
And there are three things that are required.
It has to be an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury.
I'm not sure that that was met in this case, but I also don't know what that officer saw or thought.
He doesn't have to be right, by the way.
He has to be reasonable.
So this is the litigious end of it.
Imminent danger is the first piece of it.
Death or serious physical injury is the second part.
And then the third piece is to the officer or to another person.
In the Renee Good shooting, I can see it being pretty easily justified, even though it's ugly and even though it's unfortunate that someone lost their life.
In the pretty situation, there's a lot more questions that need to be answered for me to feel confident about making any answer whatsoever, but I could very easily see why people think it's not a good shoot.
And it's going to come down to what that officer saw, what he heard, what he thought was going on, and then whether or not there was a negligent discharge going on in the background and whether someone else made some tactical error in removing a weapon system from this guy.
I mean, there's a lot of questions that are not answered.
So I'm not comfortable saying, yes, I know that it was a bad shoot or yes, it's going to be a good shoot.
I will prepare people mentally that generally speaking, these shoots are justified.
And they are because the federal use of force is very permissive.
It's a long story on this stuff.
It's very permissive in so much as they don't have to be correct.
They have to be reasonable.
And that's so that law enforcement officers can go home.
But I'm with you when it comes down to asking the questions.
And I'm 100% behind accountability and making sure that people are doing the right thing.
There are a lot of cops that we saw that are otherwise good people and they'd shake your hand.
They'd be great to sit and have a beer with.
They'd be fine to like hang out with or meet at church.
And yet they made really, really bad calls when it came to COVID.
They shut down parks.
They gave tickets.
They stopped people for not wearing masks.
They got physical with people for not wearing masks and other sort of ridiculous stuff.
So I'm firmly in this category of people.
There's not a lot of me.
I mean, I already knew I was going to lose my job when I did.
I said, I'm not going to do nasal swabs every 72 hours to prove I don't have a disease that I have no symptoms of.
And when they said, well, you have to, I said, first of all, no, I don't.
It's a free job.
I can leave at any time.
You guys can fire me if you want.
But I've been a paramedic for over a decade at that point.
And I've done thousands of nasal swabs in the clinical environment.
And nobody ever prophylactically tested for a disease that they didn't show symptoms for.
That's not a real thing in medicine.
So I already knew where that was and a lot of people went along with it.
So it's probably worth having people understand the concept of the golden handcuffs.
Mike, have you heard of that before?
Yeah.
But I've heard of that more in dealing with executives and finance in the corporate world.
So in the law enforcement world, it just means that you're married to your pension.
It means that once you've gotten into that job, once you're on the back end of like the second half of your career working towards retirement, number one, what else are you going to do?
You've already kind of, you know, sort of dedicated your life to a certain profession.
And secondly, you've already put in a significant amount of time.
Usually it's north of a decade.
And so people get married to the job when they start sort of allowing things to happen that they shouldn't have.
And that's been one of the things I've been trying to march out for folks.
You know, you can always leave your job.
You can always try to find another way to make a living.
I've, strangely enough, found myself making a living doing this, you know, talking and explaining what I see in the world.
But what you can't do is you can't buy your integrity back once you get rid of it.
And you can't ever really step back over the red line once you've already given up freedom.
Like you never, you never cede freedom and then claim it back again.
That doesn't happen.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Okay.
I've got so many questions for you.
As a former FBI agent, you know, Kash Patel recently said in an interview, and I'm paraphrasing, he said that it's illegal to bring a firearm with two magazines into the street where there's law enforcement.
Now, of course, you and I both know that is not factually correct, but isn't it bizarre that the director of the FBI thinks that's correct?
But so you as a former FBI agent, what do you make of this?
Is it, I mean, I would think that your colleagues in the FBI, they know the law better than the director at this point.
Yeah, I'm starting to wonder what sort of law school Kash Patel went to or if we were all just put on.
Look, I wasn't originally an advocate of Kash Patel's.
I spoke to him a number of times.
In fact, I interviewed him too.
Yes.
I mean, I sat down at a dinner table with him at SHOT Show in 2023, and we discussed things like guns and shooting and private plane usage by the current FBI director, which was Chris Ray at the time.
We've had a bunch of conversations.
I helped prep him for his confirmation hearing, and he used some of the lines that I wanted him to hone in on, which is that the FBI specifically in 2020, September 3rd to September 7th, if people are keeping track on the internet archives, they changed the priorities at the FBI and they downgraded the most important one, which is rigid obedience to the Constitution of the United States of America.
That used to be the number one core value or mission statement that the FBI tried to live out.
And they dropped it to number seven or eight in 2020.
And so I told Cash that, and I said, that would be what I would hope the focus of the FBI would be under the Trump administration, getting back to that rigid constitutionality and really knowing that the mission is you have a Bill of Rights and that is a leash on government power.
And so getting agents to understand that their job is to act within the constitutional framework.
FBI Mission Shift 00:08:28
But, you know, if we're being honest, your average law enforcement officer and certainly your federal agent is not dealing with things under Article 1, 2, 3, 4.
They're not doing that.
They're looking at the Bill of Rights and saying, is my use of executive authority permissive under the restrictions that it were placed in in 1791, 1792?
So that's what I want them to do.
For him to step out on there and say that you can't carry a gun in public, it's absurd.
First of all, I've done it as an FBI agent.
I've gone in plain clothes, dressed about like this and walked out and talked to cops while carrying a gun.
And they had, they were, one, none the wiser I was carrying.
And two, they had no idea I was a federal agent because our badge is about this small in the FBI.
It's like the size of a half dollar.
The second thing is, is that I've done it as a private citizen.
And so has millions of other Americans who carry firearms every day.
I don't have a pistol permit of any kind.
I live in Texas and it's not required because the Constitution is good enough.
And I regularly interact with law enforcement and I'm armed and it's fine.
It's not a big deal.
And I can carry extra magazines.
And it doesn't mean I'm looking for bloodshed.
It means I'm a guy that knows how to use a weapon system.
And sometimes I think there may be more targets, if necessary, that it may need to address because I've done enough shooting to know that I don't hit every single time I pull the trigger.
Well, and also anybody who doesn't carry a spare mag isn't serious about concealed carry, I would say, because we've all had jams, failures, double feeds, mag failures, mag dropouts.
We've all experienced that.
If you haven't, you haven't trained enough.
That's right.
I mean, yeah, look, there's instances when I think a second mag is required or a third mag is required.
I've had some arguments being made by some of the guys that spent a lot of time downrange and certainly have the volume turned down on what kind of potential violence exists in the United States.
And I always refer people to a guy named DJ Shipley.
He was a SEAL Team 6 dev crew guy.
And he said, if I got to carry an extra magazine, then I probably should consider carrying a plate carrier.
If I got to carry a plate carrier, I want to have a rifle slung.
And if I have to have a rifle slung and a plate carrier, then why the hell am I going to this place?
I mostly agree with that on a daily basis.
I carry a high capacity, like an extended capacity for my handgun when I'm carrying concealed.
But that doesn't mean if I don't go to church, I'm always carrying an extra mag when I go to church.
Not because I need to shoot more people, but because if somebody were to assault my church, the angles and the amount of time that it could take for me to make sure I can clear the building, it may actually involve a little bit more shooting than not.
And so that's not great.
I tend to agree with the DJ Shipley thing.
Like, why am I going to places where I might have to get more violence?
But on top of that, there's also, there's nothing wrong that says you can't carry a bag full of ammunition if you want to.
This is America.
I thought, I thought we were in America.
Hearing Donald Trump say just a minute ago that you can't carry a gun, you can't walk around with a gun.
This is decidedly opposite from what they were campaigning on.
But more importantly, it is exactly the way the DOJ has done over the last few months.
We've kind of watched them fight certain things that are mechanisms of control that the federal government really doesn't have any right to do.
So I'm not surprised the FBI director says it.
There's plenty of FBI agents that would love to disarm all the Americans.
And that scares the crap out of me.
For whatever it's worth, I used to buy a gun like almost every two weeks, like almost every pay period.
I would either buy a gun or I'd be buying more than one gun.
And when I would go to the FFL and go pick them up, my buddies that were in the FBI's office out in Las Cruces, New Mexico go, hey, man, I think we could open up a counterterrorism case on how many guns you buy.
And luckily, my partner was standing next to me, and he's a 19th group guy out of, he's a Green Beret Special Forces, and he's also an FBI agent.
He goes, I'll take that case and I'll close it today.
What the hell's wrong with you guys?
But there is an ethos in federal law enforcement, this us versus them, where a lot of them actually don't think you should be carrying a gun.
So he's not saying things that are foreign to the FBI.
I think it's just foreign to regular gun carrying and gun owning Americans.
I mean, you guys can see I've got one over my shoulder right now.
There's others in this room.
I've got a flamethrower on the floor next to me.
So just I believe in people being able to carry weapons and I'm an absolutist.
I was a little bit unusual in the FBI.
I thought people who were convicted felons, once they got out, if you did your time in prison and you're safe to walk amongst us, I think you should be able to get your gun rights back.
I don't know why we're going to call you a citizen if you can't vote and you can't carry a weapon.
Then maybe you should still be in prison.
If we're going to let you out, let's treat you like a real person.
And I don't know anybody who needs a gun more than somebody who used to be in prison.
They probably have a lot more dangerous life than you and I do.
Yeah, Prop, you're exactly right about that.
And thank you for articulating all of that.
Okay, so my next question is about the level of training that these ICE agents are subjected to.
Now, I've got a veteran Homeland Security guy who's one of my sources.
I've known for many years.
He's telling me that the older guys who have been with DHS or CBP, like they had much more training than the new guys that are being rushed into the system right now.
The training has been minimized, including training on the proper use of force.
And could that be part of what's happening right now?
It's just these guys are, you know, they're off the street.
They're a couple of months into ICE and they don't have trigger discipline.
Is that a possible factor?
It's certainly a possible factor.
I think it breaks down to three things if we're being really sober about it.
The first part is obviously a rush training.
Whenever you go out and give testimony as a law enforcement officer, you always cite two things: your training and your experience.
And those are relevant.
If you take somebody who's a former police officer and you put them through ICE and they come out on the street, then they've got a bunch of street time carrying a gun.
So that's not a big deal.
If you take someone who's got a lot of trigger discipline because they've been in the military and they know how to do different ROEs and you put them out on ICE and they only had 16 or whatever it is, 19 weeks of training, that's fine.
That's not a big deal.
It's a little bit different environment.
So the training and the experience part of it, just because you're new to ICE doesn't mean you're new to the world, although the FBI used to treat people like that.
You know, I was 35 when I entered the academy and it's like they go, when you get out there, I'm like, what do you mean when I get out there?
Like, I'm a grown man.
Like, I'm married.
I got things.
I've got life experience.
I've had teams of 50 people that answered to me.
Like, what are we talking about here?
So it's not just that these people don't have experience in this particular space.
And so I don't want to just say light training equals incompetent because that's not understood.
Right.
Depends on what they're doing for.
There's a couple of other things that actually play in that are very different than previously.
Right now, they are running tasks force and the task force have FBI agents.
They have Homeland Security from HSI.
They've got people from ICE.
They've got people from CBP.
That's customs border protection.
Then they've got Border Patrol, which is the green versus the blue uniforms for people keeping track at home.
There's a lot of different federal agencies that are involved in going out and snapping up illegal aliens.
So one of the things that's actually kind of hard to do is get your team to gel together when everybody has a slightly different tactics understanding, has a slightly different set of experience.
And more importantly, they don't work together.
Once they get together and they're kind of gelled, that's great.
But if you're surging people into an area like Minneapolis or Chicago or Los Angeles before that, and you're putting people in that don't generally work together, step up, they're working on new comms, sort of new protocols.
If you're an FBI agent, you're not used to doing fugitive hunts.
If you're a Marshal, maybe you are.
But, you know, if you come from something else, you're not used to necessarily working in that team environment in that way.
And that could be a real problem.
And then it gets me to the third thing, which I actually think is the biggest piece of the puzzle right now.
I have never been on a federal operation and I've been on, I don't know, maybe 100, something like that.
I've never been on a federal operation where we did not have the support for crowd control and traffic control by local PD or state officers.
And that's being black.
That's why the city of Minneapolis.
Exactly.
And that I think is actually the scariest and probably the most dangerous scenario right now.
So you've got local law enforcement being pulled back.
So these guys are having to do their own crowd control.
And I will tell you this: 1811 is the job code that I used to do.
It's a criminal investigator.
So there's no such thing as like a special agent.
Special agents are criminal investigators under the 1811 code generally.
We don't train to do crowd control.
We don't train to do riot stopping.
That's just not something that's in anybody's academy.
And there's not enough time to do that.
There are specialized units that go do that.
The Bureau of Prisons rolled out in 2020 and had to do that outside the White House.
And I got to work with them a little bit.
There are certain parts of Bortak that have some experience in this, but it is not, broadly speaking, a special agent skill set to stop a riot and certainly not the stuff that they're seeing out there.
So I think the local police are doing a disservice.
I don't blame the local cops, although they probably should be getting involved whether or not their management says so.
They're not even protecting the public from their own worst instincts and the potential of all you got to do is shut off the street.
You don't have to agree with what the operation is.
You don't have to co-sign on what ICE does.
If they ask you to go there and, hey, can you shut off the street from this street to this street for the next hour and tie up a couple of squad cars and it saves somebody's life?
Last Phases of Functioning 00:16:06
That seems like a no-brainer to me.
And that's not happening.
And that's very political.
So that's kind of the contentious world we're living in.
That's, that's, you bring up a really critical point there, which is that it seems like the blue cities are actively working against the Trump administration federal agents.
And it's, of course, it's not just Minneapolis.
You could argue the same thing about Seattle or Portland or Los Angeles or even Houston, Texas.
I live in Texas also.
And let me add one more layer to that before you respond, which is that we all know that there's a massive financial fraud crime scene happening in Minneapolis.
All these fronts that are the fake daycare centers and the fake feed the children's centers and whatever else.
But I'm here to tell you, because of my contacts and the other people I've interviewed, that thing is happening nationwide.
It's a massive money laundering, fake front of fake nonprofits in every city in America.
So, how do we as a nation or how does Trump or the FBI, you know, how do you actually root out this massive crime scene without things going kinetic on the streets involving Americans?
Is that possible?
I don't know if it's possible.
Honestly, I kind of live in this space where we're kind of living in this veneer of a constitutional republic.
And I just, I think we're pretending that it's still there.
I look back and I'm kind of a student of history when it comes to politics.
I'm not, I'm not an inherently political guy.
I never was.
I'm not a partisan.
So I always tell people I'm post-partisan.
I'm neither Republican and I'm not a Democrat.
And I think they all kind of screw us over equally because they're all kind of defending a status quo that serves them.
So I look back to 1913, maybe 1908, something like that.
I watched our financial system get screwed up.
So I can't even blame anybody that's alive today for the things that have gone on in our system.
And I also stepped forward and I watched that Congress, you know, ceded their authority in 1929.
They capped the size of Congress in 1946.
They ceded the authority over to the executive with the Administrative Procedures Act so they didn't have to do their job, which is hard to do, I guess.
So now they can do hearings in theater.
There's a lot of people to blame for this stuff, but Donald Trump accidentally actually said the right answer.
I think I don't know that we're ever going to get the fraud money back.
Let's just be real about that.
No, I'm not expecting that at all.
Yeah.
When the money's gone, it's gone.
It's billions that we can account for.
It's probably trillions over the years.
So let me just kind of do a time capsule.
I always look at this, and I don't know why I found this fiction book to be so impactful, but there's a book that was written by a guy named Vince Flynn.
He was a fiction writer, and he wrote kind of fantastical, violent stories about reforming the government.
One of them was this book called Term Limits, and it was published in 1997.
And in the book, the people in the heroes of the book, which are some, well, they're maybe like anti-heroes.
They're these special operators.
They're the ghosts, they kill off a couple of people in politics and they basically threaten the rest of the politicians, like give it up or we're going to kill everybody kind of thing.
And what's wild to me, all of that stuff is fine.
There was a political attitude for it.
There was obviously like a common sentiment before 9-11, where we were looking at these politicians like everybody's a crook and they're all part of the problem.
But the craziest thing for me was that the national debt was under $10 trillion at that point.
It was like something like seven and a half or eight trillion dollars in 1997.
So in my lifetime, we've more than quadrupled the national debt.
And I think that's where, like, if you look at where this money goes, if you put money into government, it's always being spent.
Milton Freeman said, don't ever look at what the budget looks like.
It's always balanced, just coming out of somewhere.
We're all paying for it, either through currency, inflation, or whatever else.
So when you get right down to it, that money is gone and it's only gone because it was available to be taken.
And I think that Trump actually came up with a solution.
I don't know that tariffs are the answer, but what he said about tariffs actually rung true.
I took it to the second order effects.
If he says we're going to get rid of the IRS, which he did, and he said we're going to fund the entire government by tariffs because we used to, it also means that you have to roll back the size and the scope of government about 90% to the point where it's just doing the core functions of government, which by the way, I think every libertarian would lose their mind in celebration.
And so would all real conservatives.
They would look and go, great, less government is what we wanted.
You can only fund a tariff-based government if it's really small.
So as the size and the scope of the government continues, and if it continues on unabated the way it is, there's no solution to this.
You're never going to solve fraud.
It's way too big.
We have government agencies that have billions of dollars in budget that no one's ever heard of outside of the people that work there, including their neighbors.
But what Trump is saying, though, he's saying that he thinks he could get rid of the federal income tax, replace it with tariffs, but he's not talking about shrinking the government 90%.
He's talking about printing the currency to make up the difference, which, as you know, is another tax on the people.
Yeah, no, he's going to fail at that, obviously.
It's just the answer was there.
Yeah.
It was like you almost had it.
Grasp what needed to be done.
I think that the MAGA people right now, and I'll ping this against you and you see what you think.
Sure.
A lot of MAGA people in 2026 are very upset.
I've never been in that camp, but I, you know, a lot of my friends kind of espouse that ideology.
So here's the question.
Are they just now realizing that Donald Trump is not a conservative and that he's essentially like a 90s liberal?
Because 90s liberals and me had a lot in common with a few things about abortion and maybe some other stuff that we were a little bit frustrated with each other.
We would have had some contention about how to solve the problem.
But I think that Trump is a 90s Democrat and they thought that they were getting like some staunch hero of the Republic and he's not.
And so he's just acting the way that you'd expect a guy like that to, you know, it's like having Bill Clinton in.
Yeah.
Well, the DOJ under Trump is not defending the Second Amendment at all.
No.
They're going after, I think, one of the binary trigger companies, for example.
They've not been consistent.
Remember, Trump banned, what were they, the bump stocks in his first administration.
But I think the Supreme Court ruled against that eventually, didn't it?
Yeah, Cargill.
Actually, Mike Cargill was my first concealed handgun instructor when I got out of the military.
And Mike Cargill, who operates out of Austin, he ran that thing all the way through and he actually won that case.
Yeah, wild.
By the way, I tried a bump stock one time.
I'm like, oh my God, I have no control.
Forget it.
I don't want to bump stock.
It's a novelty tool.
It's a novelty tool.
Exactly.
It represents a capability that the government shouldn't take from us.
You know what?
If you want to own a bump stop or if you can afford to just splash ammo down rain into a firm, like it's too expensive to run a bump stock.
It's like a dollar every five seconds or less, actually.
So, okay.
But moving on to other things, I love what you've said so far.
I love the fact that you're a critical thinker and you're not tied to the politics of one party or the other.
And I'm in the same camp as well.
A lot of times people paint me as a conservative because I don't support the transgenderism propaganda on children.
I don't support mutilating children.
You know, those kinds of things.
I also don't support tyrannical government from anybody, any party, however you want to label it, right?
Barack Obama, Joe Biden, or Donald Trump.
You know, I believe in the actual founding vision of America.
I believe in the actual Bill of Rights.
But it seems like, and I want your reaction to this, that makes us very unpopular these days.
Yeah.
Actually, JP Sears just did a whole sort of parody bit on this about how the influencers always are chasing audience.
And people of principle just kind of keep saying the same thing and it resonates with certain people and it doesn't resonate with others.
And that's fine.
If you think, I shared this with my podcast audience the other day.
I said, if you think that you're going to find somebody else in the world, one human being, to include yourself, by the way, over time, that agrees with everything you say, you're a lunatic.
It just doesn't exist.
You will never find another person that agrees with every single thing that you think.
And that's okay.
We're not meant to.
In fact, some of my best friends and I, we agree probably 90, 93% of the time.
When we find where that 7% margin is, it's very interesting.
It's like, whoa, why don't we agree on this?
What do you think that I don't?
What do you know that I don't?
The right answer is tell me more about what you think, not you're my enemy forever.
Yes, you're exactly right.
In the social media world, in the media space, if you have an opinion that is not 100% with the orthodoxy and the team that's in power, then you're some sort of demon or you're a black pillar.
If you listen to Dan Bongino or you're whatever they say, it's like, at the end of the day, I want to be a critical thinker that's not tied to any sort of team.
I don't root for teams.
I root for outcomes.
And my outcomes are more about human liberty, freedom, and the best experience.
I'll throw something else on you, which is kind of funny.
I found that this accidental little device that I've been playing with with people, and I've shared it with some folks in real life, like people at my church, people on my street, neighbors, and stuff like that.
I have this concept that I call bacon cheeseburger nationalism.
And it's kind of funny because people were getting really riled up about the idea of Christian nationalism, and that's really offensive to them.
And it's because the Christian part, it's the specific religion that they don't like because theoretically they don't, you know, they don't want that.
And that's fine.
But if you, generally speaking, hold the beliefs and values of the dominant culture in America, then most people are not going to be offended.
It doesn't mean you're going to consume it, but it means you're not offended by the concept that people eat meat, eat bacon, eat cheese, and maybe eat like a decent whole wheat bun.
And if that doesn't offend you, then you're probably in the dominant culture of what America is about, in which case we probably have some things we could find common ground on and maybe get some progress done.
And I would actually say we should claw back some of this government.
Instead, what you find, I think, is that people are looking for these weird little loyalty tests and whether or not you hold my little fringe or niche beliefs about something.
And then that's a pass-fail mention, whether or not we're going to be able to have any kind of reasonable discourse.
Our whole entire Congress is set up to actually have reasonable discourse.
It's the way it's actually organized in the building and the floor plan.
So it's beyond belief to me that we have this bipartisan possibility where one side versus the other side and one side has been demonized.
It's become like a religious debate in this country about politics.
And by the way, that was in my lifetime because when I was growing up, nobody did that.
Nobody, not in the 80s or the 90s.
That's true.
And I think that you espouse the same philosophy here.
We simply want to encourage people to think for themselves, to have an understanding of history, the understanding of the Bill of Rights, have an understanding of economics.
That's involved in everything.
Where does your food come from?
What is money?
What is not money?
I mean, that's all.
But in the process of doing that, I think that you will tend to attract really high caliber people to your podcast, and then you will offend sort of zombie NPCs who don't want to think for themselves.
I had somebody in my comments earlier today, and he was like, I'm really disappointed that you had this particular belief.
It's like, welcome to reality.
I'm happy that you comment on it.
Please tell me your defense against whatever your position is.
If you want to come out there and tell me you don't like that I don't, that I don't think the way you do, you're expecting like your opinion to come out of my mouth.
That's weird.
But if you want that, then convince me.
Do it with an argument.
Start from a place of honesty and assume that I'm not coming out of there in bad faith.
I always step back.
Like I said, I don't blame the, you know, there's a lot of things that each generation has done badly.
And I'm right on the cusp of being a millennial or Gen X and I have more in common with Gen X probably.
So, you know, the classic thing that you see younger people doing is say the boomers are at fault or maybe the silent generation before them.
There's nobody alive making decisions today on this planet that made the bad decisions that we are all living through because they happened in 1908 and 1913 from the idea of the Federal Reserve to the actual action of the Federal Reserve.
That's a big chunk of it.
And then there were two things that happened at the federal level that have really subverted the House of Cards.
I think they've made us live in the most shaky scaffolding.
And one of them is the 16th Amendment and the other is the 17th Amendment.
And the 16th centralized power and allowed the federal government to come after us.
We talked about the income tax.
That's where it came from, 1913.
And the second thing they did is they broke the Senate because our government is not meant to be a democracy despite all the efforts of the Democrats to try to brand it that way.
We're not meant to have a democracy.
We're meant to have kind of an oligarchy and this sort of like filtration where every single level of higher power is distilled to a different level.
We didn't even used to be able to pick the president because he wasn't actually that important historically.
And you weren't supposed to be able to direct elect your senators.
I think that was one of the worst things that ever happened.
And if you guys look at the way that the Senate has played out, the fact that we play 48 to 52 or 49 to 51 or 50-50 and a vice president splits it, that's dysfunctional.
It's meant to have a two-thirds majority.
So we're living in a time when the systems are broken and we're trying to cobble them together and act like we can find novel solutions.
When the reality is, you have to roll back a lot of this, the governmental problems we have.
And you can look, again, don't take blame for it.
Just point out, hey, this was a bad idea.
We tried it and it was stupid.
It's not good to democratize a republic that's not supposed to be a democracy.
So then what's next?
Because this is just, I'm interjecting my opinion, but I think the system that we're in is in its last phases of functioning.
And yet I also don't think the world's going to end.
Everybody doesn't die.
But clearly the system will fail.
And then we get to build the next system somehow.
What do you suppose that looks like?
Or is that something you're willing to talk about, you know, projecting into the near future?
Yeah, I get chills thinking about it.
Actually, that was exactly the way I think.
I don't think the system lasts forever and I don't think it lasts any much a lot longer.
How fast it goes down is kind of dependent on whether we limp along with sort of Republicans kind of I had somebody point out to me the other day and I can't credit who specifically, but it's like Democrats are pushing things along and their answer to everything is government.
So they're going in the fast lane and Republicans are just doing the wrong thing and the speed, you know, going the speed limit.
And so both of them are continuing.
They all see that the answer to problems either in the world in general, Democrats, or in government, specifically Republicans, think that the answer is more government.
And it's never more government.
It's always less.
I have this sort of, I have this little tagline I share with people when they join my podcast.
And I kind of come to this idea that government is the worst solution to every problem, including when it's the only reasonable solution to the problem.
Like law enforcement is one of those examples and national defense.
So we're dealing with a crappy situation.
I don't think it lasts forever.
And I'm kind of in the accelerationalist camp.
I kind of want to see Eric Swalwell go do whatever California is going to do and just take it off the cliff.
I want to see bad governors with terrible ideas just like say, we're done with the federal government.
Let's just push it off and see what happens next.
Not because I want to see people in chaos.
I don't think it ends up in the zombie apocalypse or I'm watching this post-apocalyptic show right now called Fallout, which is based on a video game.
It's totally fantastical.
It's, you know, you know, 70s or whatever, America, and they drop the bombs.
And then what happens in the wasteland?
I don't think that's where we go.
I think people just revert to the most reasonable level of power, which by the way, was the same one the founding fathers saw.
The states are meant to be the most powerful government that you deal with.
And your local government is supposed to be sort of subservient only to the state.
The federal government's not supposed to come into play nearly as much as it has.
And nobody would have thought of themselves that way.
And I'll suggest this is the case.
If anyone's ever been involved in a federal lawsuit, which I have the unfortunate experience of having the FBI director's girlfriend is suing me right now.
And the one thing that I can't help but make out is that the beginning of it says, you know, when you're in a different district, they say that you are a citizen of your state.
I am a citizen of Texas for the purposes of federal lawsuits, because that's how people were looked at.
And that's how we're still looked at in the federal system.
You're still beholden to the district you actually live in that is not the federal government.
I'm not a citizen of the United States who resides in Texas.
I'm a citizen of Texas.
And that's very unique in the way that the world works compared to like other, you know, other countries.
They don't look at themselves as being citizens of their province and so on first.
It's almost tribal.
So I actually think we roll back to that.
And by the way, the founders actually calculated this out, the Ninth and the 10th Amendment, which nobody ever thinks about or remembers.
They very specifically explain that there are things that are not listed that are still the purview of the states and the people.
And I'd like to see the states and the people kind of say, look, the Constitution doesn't give the federal government charter to do everything simply because there's an interstate commerce clause, which is how most of the government is justified.
Mutual State Commercials 00:06:00
Just because we sell or buy things across state lines doesn't mean it's a federal issue.
No, they cite that in every mass.
Yeah, that's a massive overreach.
That's where I think it goes.
I think that goes away.
I think we start dealing with state governments.
And then we have 50 different laboratories for freedom, whatever that looks like.
Some will be less free than others, obviously.
Yeah, well, and look, I'm a big fan of the 10th Amendment Center, by the way, and have interviewed those guys over the years.
But you and I both live in Texas.
So we've chosen a place that actually is very self-reliant if the states begin to break away or some, and maybe that, maybe it's not even formalized, but maybe it's sort of an economic breakaway because Texas has its own gold depository.
Texas is capable of launching its own currency backed by gold and silver and oil if it comes to that, right?
Not every state is in that situation.
In fact, few are.
If it comes down to a balkanization of the United States of America, what do you suppose that would look like?
I don't know, but I look back at like history to try to see if there's any sort of any parallels, any analogs.
And it does seem like the Articles of Confederation actually would have made sense if you started from the position of we have a ton of money and infrastructure invested.
We already have all the roads and we have all the, you know, we have all the railroads and the crossings and the highway system.
So that's all really good.
What if you did a loose confederation of states that just had sort of a, you know, a mutual, mutual defense clauses and had the ability to maybe negotiate ports and transport.
I mean, that's essentially what America was originally conceived of as a very, very weak centralized government.
The Federalists sort of won out with the Constitution as it stands, but they still had an anti-Federalist bent, which is entirely the reason why we have the Bill of Rights.
So this debate was carried on in the late 1700s.
This is not a new idea of like, how does America exist?
We just have a ton more infrastructure.
We have a ton more sort of common property.
And I don't even know that you have to break it up.
I don't think everybody needs to fight over these things.
I would like to see the concept of American broadly speaking still exist.
I think that's feasible.
I mean, this is kind of revolutionary talk that we're having here.
So who knows what this revolt, what ends up happening when we start talking about this and people consider it, but it doesn't have to be a hostile breakup where, you know, Texas now sets itself against California.
I think that we all speak the same language.
Generally speaking, we share the same culture.
But if we have different values by state, and they're obviously that, I mean, go state to state, and I've lived in a number of them, then people get to pick where they want to be, what they want to be about.
And then, you know, certain, certain things can be, you'd still have to probably have an interchange, but we have all the ability.
We could have a million currencies in this world.
It would be no problem, whether it be from crypto, whether it be from digital exchanges that can happen instantaneously.
We really have the infrastructure to do exactly what the articles would have done if we didn't think we were going to get invaded and overrun.
And that's not going to happen as it stands right now.
That may be the right answer, honest to God.
Well, and I think people, for the last several years, they have been choosing where to live based on an understanding that the current situation is not long-term resolvable.
But even in places like California, you know, you have two Californias, at least two, right?
You've got northern and southern.
You've got the West Coast versus the inland California.
Similar things true with Oregon.
Even though Texas, look, let me run this by you.
I think that it's the currency printing that allows Washington, D.C. to assert centralized control over the states in so many ways, federal grants, funding of universities and highways, military bases, et cetera, Social Security and Medicare.
When the dollar gets in even more trouble, which seems to be accelerating, if the U.S. were to suffer an event like 1991, collapse of the Soviet Union, then you would lose that centralized power.
At that point, it seems like organically a lot of states would have to do something on their own in order to just keep local commerce running.
Have you talked about that on your show?
Yeah, I think, well, you know, I'm jumping on that same, that same timeline, that 1913.
There were two pieces of it.
I agree with you that the printing of the currency is a big chunk of it.
I think the other piece is that the federal government can demand taxes first.
They get the first cut.
They have a like, you know, prima nocta on your, on your, uh, your paycheck for most people if they have a, if they have a W-2 paycheck, which is a lot of Americans.
So the fact that the federal government considers your money theirs first is problematic.
And then they will allow it to go back to the states after the fact.
And they will oftentimes centralize currency in the most inefficient way possible, by the way.
And then they will give it back through whatever departments.
You know, I don't want a Department of Education.
There may be a need for a Department of Energy, but it should be a lot smaller than what it is.
There may be a need for a Department of Transportation for some really narrow niche things, but I'm not sure it should be doing all the tens and tens of billions of dollars per state that it hands out.
And so they get compliance based on that.
I'd rather go the other way.
I'd rather the state tax you first.
They decide what the rule is and whatever they want to hand over to the federal government is their kind of kick into the coffer.
But that only happens when the state is the primary government that you deal with.
And that was the case before 1913.
So yeah, I do think if they fail to have the ability to tax and their dollar is no longer of any value, yeah, we do roll back into something.
And so whether it's printed currency or whether people go to crypto or whatever it may be, the answer is that people have always found a way to do commerce, whether it's in beads or trinkets or whether it's in straight bartering for commodities and so on.
There's a lot of ways that you can set these things up.
It's just we've reached the end of the rope where everybody that is looking around, everybody that's paying attention, which is not everybody, but it's the people that are listening to you.
It's the people that are listening to me.
They go, something's not right.
And I don't think it's sustainable.
And the answer is always, how do we get to the next stage?
How do we do it without destroying things around us?
How can we do it safely?
And how do we do it in a way that also, you know, generally speaking, keeps our quality of life?
I would argue to you that a lot of people found out that sitting at home and doing nothing was a feasible option from 2020 on.
And there are more people doing it than I've ever believed possible.
Sustainable Progress? 00:15:14
Yeah, that's crazy.
It's like, as long as the Netflix is still on, as still as you can get Amazon Prime, I mean, the other day, this is a great example.
I flew to SHOT Show, right?
So I go to Las Vegas and I was packing up stuff because I was going to do the podcast on the road.
And I was like, you know what would be helpful is like a rollerbag.
I've never been a four-wheel rollerbag, but I'd really like one.
I ordered one at 3.15 in the afternoon and it got there before it got dark at night.
And I didn't pay any more than $50.
That's insane.
So we're living in a, I mean, I live near an Amazon hub, but still, like, that's crazy.
So I was able to buy something and have it delivered to me without even leaving my door.
As long as those things are possible and we still have a cost go down the road and you can go to Target and get a million products or a Walmart, I don't think people let everything fall.
And there's not a lot of dominoes between, you know, the dollar collapsing, those systems not working, and then people going, okay, we got to refigure this out because this is not going to work anymore.
Like all of our comfort is gone.
You know, there's no more Uber Eats.
So it's time to get off the couch and figure out what the revolution looks like.
And I hope it's not violent.
I really do because I got little kids.
Yeah.
Well, exactly.
And that's why one of the things that I teach is food, self-reliance, growing food, preserving food, and learning that skill set.
You know, I live on a ranch and I've got goats and chickens and donkeys.
You know, I'm taking care of animals all the time.
And I made a decision to do that over a decade ago simply because I wanted to make sure I had the skills.
It made you look like a genius in 2020.
Yeah, it certainly did.
I had unlimited eggs.
I mean, I have so many eggs that my dogs get fresh farm eggs every day, you know?
And so they're super healthy.
But let me show you this chart.
Show my screen.
Here's silver.
As we're recording this, it's almost $113 spot price.
But the chart I'm showing you is actually gold.
So this is 10 years on gold.
Let me switch it over to silver to be consistent.
Here's the silver chart with this parabolic spike that's happening in silver.
Now, if we look at history, and I know you talk about this quite a bit, but if we look at history, when you see these kinds of charts with metals or let's say, you know, prices of food, this starts to resemble like Weimar, Germany, hyperinflation, currency collapse.
Talk to us about where you think we are in history.
Well, look, people can look at that chart.
They could see.
I did a little look for somebody who did some investment in silver the other day and we were having a discussion about it.
And I said, you know, you might have gotten gouged, but you're still going to come out ahead today because the dollar is so weak compared to the material you bought.
We're talking about like $17, $18 an ounce towards the end of 2019.
Here we are six years later.
Would you say it was $112 an ounce or something like that?
$113.
Yeah.
This is when you started seeing.
And this was just in my awareness as I was coming online as a young, you know, as a young teenager and watching people supposedly having like, you know, barrels of wheelbarrows full of rupees and they couldn't, they couldn't buy anything or ruples or whatever the hell they were.
They were like paper money that they had to bundle up and it was more useful to burn it than they, because they couldn't even buy wood with it.
It had zero value.
And so, you know, whether we hit hyperinflation or not, I don't know that that actually happens anytime soon or whether or not something will happen that sort of tries to hedge that.
I can't imagine that our system is not going to try to compensate.
So I don't know how it compensates and whether it collapses faster or whether it limps along even further.
But yeah, clearly there's a couple of things that people realized starting in 2020 as they looked around and they went, holy crap, the world shut down.
They just told us they were going to put paws on the economy.
How do you even do that?
I was living outside of Washington, D.C. at the time and I just went, this is totally unsustainable.
I got to get out of here.
So I went and lived on acreage in New Mexico when I was working for the FBI.
That was my first move.
And our next move back here was into Texas.
So all of that looks like hard skills.
They'll always have value.
People who can plumb, people who can work land, people who can grow things, people who can mill their own food and things like that.
Like that's always going to be super helpful.
And it's going to be something that's funny because those were skills that we needed 120 years ago.
And now we're going to need them again.
So people are going to find that out.
I've always told people, you know, I don't really invest in gold and silver all that much, although that's where a lot of future technologies and future weapon systems are all.
There's certain things that better conductors are required.
And so that's why they'll have value for different industries and so on.
But they've always had an inherent value.
People have always looked at things with actual scarcity and they went, oh, that's scarce.
For me, stacking brass and lead is always a good idea.
You can always shoot animals.
There's tons of them out there.
You can always keep people away with the right posture and so on.
We talked about at the beginning, my love is firearms.
None of my firearms are worth any less money than I paid for them because those machines, if they stop making those things, mine will, they're durable goods.
I've got a rifle that was built in 1917.
I got a shotgun that was built in the 1860s.
And they still function.
And so, you know, there's some really long-term durability and capabilities, but how many people are doing what my wife is doing, what you're obviously doing?
You look at it and you go, I'm going to make sure I have some kerosene lamps because if we don't have any other options, I still like to be able to see when it's dark outside.
I've got solar and I've got solar generators that can recharge all my flashlights and recharge all my thermal devices.
And I also have night vision and thermal and this kind of stuff because I'm kind of a tactical nerd.
So I want to be able to have superpowers when things look shady.
And if there is a momentary collapse, the first thing that happens is the grids go down.
And we're not even talking about external threats.
But if we fail to maintain some of the basic standards of living, people get wild right away.
I cannot help but remember.
I got a father, father-in-law who grew up in Manhattan and eventually moved to Brooklyn.
And he tells me about the garbage strike in the 1970s.
There's been many garbage strikes.
So this is one particular one that was poignant to him.
Four days without trash pickup in Manhattan and people are ready to kill each other.
Wow.
It gets really, really wild fast when you start shutting these things down.
In fact, the garbage, you know, the sanitation departments get paid and they get to ask for money once they realize what their power is, which is that our entire modem system is that we generate a bunch of crap and it needs to be hauled off for most people in suburbs and high occupancy buildings.
They can't function without a whole bunch of other things.
So, you know, we're living in a really precarious sort of, it's this veil of civility, just like we're in the veil of having a constitutional republic.
I don't like it, the idea of it ripping open, but at some point it will.
I just don't know how fast it'll be.
And I don't know what it'll be currency collapse or what it'll be external threat because the Chinese could collapse most of our power grid or they could shut down a lot of our water systems and some other things that we're, I mean, we're, we're exposed at a lot of levels.
Through cyber attacks, you mean?
Through cyber attacks, correct.
Yeah.
And look, I used to do that work and without giving out anything that people don't know publicly.
The Chinese have been scouting out for weakness in our infrastructure in every county in America and they've been doing it for at least a decade, probably two.
So well, and sometimes it's not that difficult when the local water operator sets the admin password as ABC123.
You know, that's right.
And listen, they'll give you a tour of that thing.
That's the crazy thing.
This is what I learned in the bureau that I had no idea.
We'd have Chinese scientists that would come over from China to go look into stuff.
Let's call Fairfax County, where I used to live, which is the seat of probably a third of the workers in the federal government live there.
They would give Chinese scientists unfettered access to walk through our water treatment facilities, our power structure and our grids.
And I went on these tours and I went, do you show this to the Chinese guys?
And they go, yeah.
I go, what do you get out of it?
And they're like, well, we just like to show off how great our technology is.
Wow.
I was like, look, I pay taxes here.
Can you please not do that anymore?
That's terrifying.
But it's too late.
They put our GIS, all of our, you know, geoinformatics, they're all online and they're available.
Go check out your county, wherever you live.
You probably can find sophisticated maps of where power lines are running, where water is running.
So if somebody external foe, it doesn't have to just be the Chinese, although they're the ones that are the most capable.
They want to come and shut things down.
And some of these things are, you know, they're only not accessible because they're on such old systems.
They're running on like cobalt from the 1950s.
So that's kind of helpful.
But anybody that's updated it, if they have internet connectivity, they're not hardened and they're not paying attention to that.
And they don't realize that shutting down all these systems that kind of enable our modern life will also shut down all the analogous people that are dependent on them, which is, you know, most people.
Unless you live on a well, solar, you know, live on a farm, if you have your own food and animals and you're 100% self-sufficient, which most people are not, then you're, we're all vulnerable at some level or another, or you know people that are.
Worst case scenarios, you're connected to people that are.
So okay, I've got one more question to ask you today, but I want to thank you for your time.
And I love your analysis.
I love how deeply you think about these issues.
But I want to ask you about your former military experience in the context of right now, there is the manufacturing of U.S. weapon systems and fighter jets and cruise missiles depends on a lot of these so-called rare earths, you know, various minerals, terbium, dysprosium, neodymium, titanium, even, and silver, to some extent, a little bit of silver.
It seems like some of the things that Trump is doing right now is a mad dash for control over these mining resources because China controls the vast majority of the output of the refining of these rare earths.
And the U.S. military cannot manufacture much of anything without a steady supply of these minerals.
Is this a topic that you have looked into?
And what's your take on the current situation?
I'm real cautious about jumping into things that I am not pretty steeped in.
And this is one of those.
Geopolitics, it's a little outside of my field inso much as I know it happens.
I'm aware of it.
I have friends who worked in intelligence that did the other side.
I was more domestic.
I do see roughly what you're saying there.
So, you know, I consume news probably at a higher level than most.
And the stuff that we're doing with Greenland and what was going on in Venezuela and all those look like a grab for resources of any kind, whether it be oil or rare earth or whatever.
And yes, a lot of our modern sort of sophisticated technologies are built on that.
So I'm aware of it.
What the end game is, it's hard to say for me.
I look at it and I go, I kind of was hoping that we were going to get exactly what was promised, which was that we were going to worry about our own backyard.
We had enough problems to clean up before worrying about, you know, fighting new wars.
And I don't think anybody is bold enough to come into America and try to fight that war.
But, you know, at the end, as much as I'm an isolationist, I recognize that that's probably not the best option.
So, you know, the people that look at it that I trust think that Donald Trump is doing a relatively good job of what he can at this moment, trying to scavenge up around the globe and hold influence in this hemisphere.
But again, I feel like my concerns with the domestic are so high that it's like, okay, fine.
Yeah, do that.
That's fine.
That's a really good place for you to occupy your energy.
It'd be really good if you could start doing some of the things like, you know, divest things back to the state.
I thought we were going to get rid of a whole bunch of parts of government, in which case, you know, have at it.
If you want to go out there and negotiate deals with Greenland, if you want to go out there and snatch people out of Venezuela, which I'm not super crazy about, to be fair.
Like, I think there's a constitutional issue there.
At least there would have been.
And so we're doing these moves.
You have to do all the things at once, but the thing that we should be doing is not building up more of whatever the hell is going on in government.
I'd love it to see them actually do the thing that they said they were going to do, which was make America great again.
I took that to mean naively, maybe, Mike, but I took it to mean make America constitutional.
And so that's kind of what I was sitting there hoping on.
I kind of would like to see Congress vote on these things if they want to go out there and try to annex things and not just have this president operate unilaterally.
It'd be nice if we had a representative that had a say in that sort of stuff.
Yeah, well, I would love to see America constitutional again, but you're right.
That would require cutting government by 90%, which I'm all in favor of.
I mean, almost all of it is waste and fraud, as far as I can tell.
Even Lee Zeldin went into the EPA.
And what's the first thing he did?
Is he shut down $20 billion of fraudulent climate grants?
That's right.
Yeah.
I mean, it's so easy.
Listen, all people have to do is look, there's government shutdowns.
And when they happen, does your life change?
And the answer is no.
So whatever's going on during that time, that's the core function of government that makes your life continue.
The rest of it is irrelevant.
It's statistics grabbing.
It's a bunch of like scientific griff that could be done, you know, at the industry level.
There's a bunch of garbage that we fund that we'd have no business funding because it's just, it exists because it has.
And that's, that's the nature of what we call the self-licking ice cream cone in Washington, D.C. People forget that the job of government is to serve the people that it governs.
So they think their job is to just do their job.
That's the worst possibility, by the way.
My job exists because I have a job and I need a job and therefore I do that job.
And once I've done the job, that's the reason I have a job.
It's like it's, you know, it's a reflexive answer.
It just goes in a circle and it has zero value to the output.
And they never once consider: is this money well spent?
Is this how our tax dollars should come out?
They don't worry about that kind of stuff.
No, they don't.
I mean, USAID, right?
That largely shut down, but it's still brought into the State Department.
It still happens.
Money laundering to Ukraine and then back into the pockets of senators, et cetera.
It's a giant grift at this point.
Really, it looks like a giant final stage pillaging and looting operation.
That's it.
Somebody wants to be Lord of the Ashes.
I'm not sure why they want to be in charge of the ashes, but that's what it looks like.
I had a standout.
Well, I had a very long line at the TSA in Las Vegas.
And I'm standing there with this woman.
And I said, Have you ever seen what they do with the red cells?
And she goes, I don't even know what that is.
I go, they come in with like a group and they try to see whether they can penetrate TSA security.
And Mike, the worst thing is that it's like well over 90% when they were still publishing the statistics.
They can get bombs and explosives and weapon parts through no problem.
Like almost all the time.
So they just said, well, the solution to this is not beefing up security.
It's just not publishing these bad and ugly statistics anymore.
So now you won't get any red cell.
They may not even do the red cells anymore.
But if you want to know why you do those things, why TSA even exists, look at the scanning machines and the billions and billions of dollars we dump into Lido scanners for everybody.
If you want to know why there's a TSA, stand there in the line with your shoes off, because even though you don't have to have them on, if you have boots, you got to take them off anyway.
You'll notice the branding on the machines.
That's the reason they're there.
And so all these things exist for government contracts so they can get their buddies and somebody got a kickback for picking the right machine and all that.
And so, you know, that's what it looks like.
It looks like who wants to be the Lord of the Ashes when this whole thing collapsed?
We'll have the biggest chunk of the crappy pie.
It's such a strange instinct.
Isn't it, though?
Isn't it?
It's really antisocial.
Yeah.
And people sitting there, you know, collecting payoffs in fiat currency, even as the currency is collapsing.
That's right.
And also, I don't know about you.
You probably agree with me, but I don't want to live in a world where I'm the only guy that's got any money left and I'm surrounded by impoverished, starving neighbors.
You know what I mean?
That's a terribly desperate scenario.
Yeah.
I mean, and this is the funniest thing that Western values actually had everybody kind of bring up that that's what the 90s was all about.
It was that capitalism supposedly won.
That was what we were told, right?
And I'm, even though this has been going on for 70 years at that point, but we were told that the good guys won.
And what did it do?
It raised everybody out of poverty and the standard of living around the world went up dramatically.
And now it's gotten to the point where we've peaked out or we've decided that we're bored with that.
It's really, it's really atrocious and it's incredibly cynical.
If you want to be the person who has all the things, I mean, I don't even think the feudal lords in the Middle Ages wanted to do that kind of thing because at the end of the day, the peasants would eventually just come running in and they burn your house down and they kill you and your family.
So that's what that's what's on you know on the docket.
If you drop that veil of civility, human beings are savages when you get down to it.
And we can overcome that nature, but you got to overcome it with kind of raising everybody up around you.
It's got to be a lot more positive.
I want to live in a community where everybody can afford to eat.
Find Common Ground 00:02:45
That's okay.
Otherwise, they're going to eat you.
Well, yeah, exactly.
Cannibalism is where things sometimes go in a breakdown of society.
But I've kept you over time and I apologize for that, but I kind of lost track of time.
It's been a really amazing conversation.
Is there anything you'd like to add before we wrap it up?
No, I hope people go out there and talk to their neighbors.
This is actually where a lot of this starts.
Go out there and start some common ground because if you think that everybody is your enemy that doesn't agree with you, then that's going to be a thing that's insurmountable.
So, you know, I said this before the election: there's going to be an election.
It may or may not mean anything.
I don't know if they fixed all the election systems and I don't have a lot of trust in that.
I do have trust in my neighbors.
We can find consensus on my cul-de-sac.
We can find consensus in my neighborhood where I used to live in New Mexico.
Like, just go talk to the people that are around you.
The communities that communicate are the ones that will survive anything that comes that's that's bad because you'll already know what people have, what they're willing to do, how they're willing to help you out.
You'll have, they'll see you as a human being and not some sort of like, I don't know, you know, random savage out there in the world.
So I'm still optimistic about people.
I just think that this country is probably screwed, but that doesn't mean that individual communities are at all.
So go out there and fix that.
No, I'm right there with you.
And I love living in rural Texas because the people around me, they know how to change a tractor tire.
They know how to raise cattle.
They know how to fix problems.
They know how to weld.
They know how to do stuff.
And that's who I want to be around.
That's right.
100%.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, thank you so much, Kyle.
The website, folks, is kyle seraphinshow.com.
And seraphin is spelled S-E-R-A-P-H-I-N kyle serifinshow.com.
You want to give out any social handles or anything else like that?
Yeah, it's my name.
It's at Kyle Seraphin.
If you guys want to mix it up on X, I'll engage with anybody.
I don't care how big your account is.
I don't care if you're verified or not.
You know, if you're moderately respectful or extra sarcastic, then you're my people.
So come at me.
Come at me there.
All right.
Sounds great.
Thank you so much, Kyle.
It's an honor to have you on the show today.
Love to have you back again.
Take care.
Appreciate it.
Yeah.
Thanks, Mike.
All right.
All right.
That was Kyle Seraphin, everybody.
What a great patriot.
Just another outstanding American.
So glad to call him a fellow Texan as well.
Check out his podcast.
It's on Spotify.
It's the Kyle Seraphin Show.
That's the name of it.
Or you can get there through his website, kyleserafinshow.com.
And feel free to repost this interview on other channels and other platforms as well.
And thank you for watching.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighton, free speech video platform.
As you can tell from today's interview, we don't censor ourselves on purpose.
So thanks for watching.
Take care.
Craving something sweet but want to avoid processed sugars and candy?
Our delicious and nutritious soft dried apples and mangoes are non-GMO, certified kosher, and organic.
Export Selection