Shaun Newman Podcast - #243 - Drew Weatherhead

Episode Date: January 28, 2022

Father, Former Small Business Owner, Entrepreneur, Brazilian Jiu-jitsu Black Belt, Creator of Because Jitsu - The largest Jiu-jitsu Meme Page in the World followed by people like Joe Rogan. And now, Digital Nomad, living on the road. Let me know what you think Text me 587-217-8500 SNP Presents February 5th snp.ticketleap.com/snp-presents-solutions-for-the-future/ Support here:⁠ https://www.patreon.com/ShaunNewmanPodcast

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followed by people like Joe Rogan. And now a digital nomad living on the road. I'm talking about Drew Weatherhead. So buckle up. Here we go. This is Drew Weatherhead and welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today. I'm joined by Drew Weatherhead.

So first off, sir, thanks for joining me. This week in the podcast has been really weird. I talked to a semi-truck driver while he's parked on the side of the highway. Now I got you sitting at Myrtle Beach sitting in your vehicle. So first off, sir, thanks for hopping on. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Sean. Now, I, like so many guests that have come before you, I'm going to give you the floor to kind of bring us up to speed on who Drew is and let the audience kind of get a feel, you know, for a bit of your story. And by all means, I'll probably stop and poke and prod a bit. But I think all of us are kind of curious who Drew Weatherhead is and a little bit about your story.

All right. So most people who know me, know me online and most people who know me online. And most people who know me online, know me through jujitsu online. So I'm a Brazilian jiu jitsu black belt who owned a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu School, Martial Arts Academy in Alberta, in Blackfaults, Alberta. So kind of a small town. I was starting a small business. I've been doing it for, I've been doing jiu-jitsu for about 15 years now. At that point, I was like a year and a half into my small business. So any small business owners, whether you know in martial arts or not, it still applies. That first year, is really rough for a small business. It's very hard.

It's kind of where the rubber meets the road or it doesn't. It's where a lot of them break. And you have to go through a lot of red, you know, a lot of debts, a lot of trying to work your way out of a hole to get to the point that, you know, now you can actually sustain yourself on your own two legs. You can, I'm a single income provider for a family of six. So it's, it's a precarious thing. And it was a big risk to begin with.

I'm actually a journeyman welder and was a welder for 15 years, again, before I, I stepped out to do my own thing. But at that year and a half, Mark, things were starting to look good for us. They were, we were beyond break-even. We were actually looking at maybe getting a bigger space because we were getting enough students that we needed more space, which is a good problem to have. Things were healthy. And that was in March of 2020.

So if anybody hasn't been paying attention, that was a pretty pivotal moment in time where the pandemic just shut down basically every. business small small ones for sure and so mid-march we got shut down and for two weeks right two weeks to flatten the curve everybody was in this thing together they all grabbed their toilet paper and started panicking together and we were all worried that the apocalypse plague of zombies was coming so we're going to huddle down for two weeks wait for it to pass and get back to life um you know when you when you say it like that how dumb we all were right when you put it like that it's like yeah but At the time, you thought, I thought, two weeks, yeah, that makes sense.

All right, let's just let this thing do what it's got to do. And we'll see, man, was I gullible? Were we all gullible? Yeah, you know, I've thought about this on numerous occasions looking back retrospectively because it was a very different mentality and it was a very different time. People were willing to listen without question to the science, listen without question to the government because, look, this was a crisis. It's a short-term crisis.

Just help us out, help us get out of this. sure it doesn't get out of control and we can all get into the, you know, a safe, respectable version of the normal that we're used to. Didn't turn out that way. The two weeks turned into three weeks. The three weeks turned into six weeks and it just kept on going indefinitely like that. And that's another thing that people have to remember is there was never any, nobody knew the time periods at any given time, right? Indefinite is every single day is, well, maybe it's over today, but maybe it's not. Maybe it's over tomorrow, but maybe it's not. We'll look at the numbers and we don't like these numbers.

numbers are looking good. Now I'm not looking good anymore. And it was that over and over and over and over and over. And for someone who has a mortgage, who has groceries, who has lease payments and all of these overheads that I have to pay monthly, I was being told at the same time, you're not allowed to make money, but also pay all your bills indefinitely.

And it was getting really bad for that first lockdown. The first lockdown lasted in Alberta in, until about the end of June. So it was like three and a half, four months. And at that point, like, we were probably a couple weeks away from breaking. We had pulled all of the tricks out of our hat. We had spent all of our savings. We had, you know, sold some stuff.

All the tricks to try to keep this thing going. We were thinking at that point, like, this is not sustainable. Like, we can't sustain this anymore. And then our Premier gets on and says, oh, good news, everybody. We're going to open up for the summer and we're going to have the stampede and everything is going to be hunky dory and good work. we made sure to get the numbers down. I was so relieved when that happened.

I came back to the academy and we started things back up with about 50% of the of the students that we had before then, which was to be expected because nobody knew that it was ever going to end. So they just started canceling their memberships. You know, four months in, they're paying for nothing. I get it. It was like it could have been 12 months for them and they have their own bills to pay. Everybody was doing the same thing, right?

So, but we were allowed to reopen with restrictions, which meant fewer people were allowed on the mats. We needed the temperature check at the door. There was a whole bunch of things. There was no vaccine at this point, right? We were all kind of in the same boat and trying to do everything as safely as possible. Good news is nobody ever got COVID during the next four, four and a half months that we were open again, where we were training body to body like jitsu is grappling. We're wrestling each other, right?

You can't, if you have something, everybody has this thing, right? And we did a really good job of keeping a sanitary environment and nobody had any of those illnesses. But I mean, all of this is easier to understand retrospectively because at the time we were like, we beat it. We did this thing. We locked down. We barely made it through. But man, we gridded our teeth and made it through. They had one chance to try this lockdown.

They ruined the economy. They'd never play that card again. You know, if this comes back and some people on the horizon are starting to think that this is a seasonal bug and it might come back next fall. And if that comes, man, I wonder what they're going to do because they can't lock down again. That obviously didn't work. Like we can't do that again. Well, they did that again. Like the first chance they had, they locked down again in November because guess what, it's a seasonal bug and it comes back in the fall. Even though this is a novel version of it, this is still a seasonal coronavirus. And guess what? It comes back in the fall. All these things that, you know, we were

supposed to know as a scientific species were kind of like oddly overlooked or or forgotten about. I feel like just the news was, it wasn't palatable to play up like what we already knew. And we knew that like when have we ever gotten rid of the common cold? Of course it was coming back next season. Everybody who was in the know knew that and we're trying to figure it out. But anyways, we shut down again in November and this time it was three weeks. We're going to do three weeks, which led into December. And we're like, well, at least it's going to end before Christmas.

And no, like the day before the three weeks was supposed to end, the premier comes on and says, sorry, guys, I don't like the numbers. We're not having Christmas this year. So we shut down 2020 over Christmas, which led into the new year. And oh, by the way, if you went to visit your family during Christmas, everybody from each household would could be fined up to $1,000 per person, which would increase the next year to $2,000. per person foreshadowing involved. But it kept going.

It rolled the second lockdown, rolled into the third lockdown. They said they were going to open up and they said no. And then we went through Easter. And then it just kept going and going and going in 2021 May was when my back was completely broken. I had been through three lockdowns at that point. Again, indefinite, no end in sight. And I made the decision at that point.

Like, we're at the point where I've used every dollar I have. every dollar. I don't have every credit line. I had all the things to try to save this. And it's, we did our best and I don't think it's going to work. And we decided to close the business at that point to cut our losses, which was a really hard pill to take, to be honest, because this was three years into my small business that I was under restrictions and shutdowns and lockdowns for half of it. Like we tried hard. We tried so hard to keep that thing open. And we had to shut it down. So at that point, though, not only did we have to shut it down, but we had to decide, like, how am I going to make a living? Because I didn't really have a plan B at that point.

Everything was trying to keep this thing alive. We'd burned all of our matches trying to keep it alive and we're left with basically nothing but a house. And so that was the only thing on the table. And my wife came up to me as the homeowner and the breadwinner and had to have a hard conversation with me. because to me as the sole income provider, the head of the family of six, you can't lose the house. Like you can shut down the business,

but you can't lose the house. That's like absolute failure. You might as well be drowning in the ocean at that point. And she had to sit me down and said, Drew, listen, the only equity we have left on God's Green Earth at this point is the house. We have to sell it. And it's okay. I'm okay with it.

I know that it hurts. but listen, we'll be all right. And she laid out this plan where we were going to sell the house, take the equity that we had in it, and put it into a travel trailer and a truck, which we didn't have at that point. I had never used one in our lives at that point and move our four kids and two adults into full time,

which would then save us all the overhead of a mortgage and all of the expenses of utilities per month and just basically be rolling around on a hallway on wheels for the foreseeable future. You know, what we tried to figure things out. Sounds like you got a good woman. She is a whole story.

Yeah, she's been as much of a rock as anybody in this. You know, I don't talk about my wife nearly enough. Not that when I have people on, it's never, you know, it's never about my story. It's about sharing what everyone else is trying to go through and trying to pull some common threads at it and things like that. but where I sit I don't think I could be doing what I'm doing without the woman standing beside me and I truly mean that

and when I hear how she has to come and sit to you and talk to you man that's that's a tough conversation but a conversation that obviously needed to happen yeah it was one that I wasn't willing to succeed to without her intervention I would have I don't know what I would have done but that chip was just never on the table

it didn't occur to me that it could be And obviously, like, it was a way out. It was a way out of the situation presently that I was in. And this is part of the story, too, I haven't even touched on yet, is the people that do know me online through Brazilian Jiujitsu, I'm actually like what people recognize now as an influencer. That's kind of the term that we get nowadays where I have a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu meme page on Instagram that's over 171,000 followers. So it's the largest in the world of its kind. And that was part of the trickery, the wizardry that I used to keep my business alive from February or sorry, January of 2021 through May when I had to shut it down. That was five months where I had to sort of magic sauce anywhere from $5 to $10,000 at a thin air every single month to try to make these bills.

because the thing is if I'm not allowed to use my gym to, sorry, to pay the bills that the gym costs, I got to make that money somewhere. And I ended up making it online through different projects every single month. Every single month I had to do something. One of them I flew down to San Diego to shoot some instructional videos that I would sell in December. And then another one, I shot some in-house for a company out of Boston that I would sell in January. Another one was like a T-shirt release that I had to go really, really well in February. And, you know, all these things over and over to try to make the bills.

But what that did is it sort of helped me generate best practices or process to use my social influence online to turn it into an actual usable income of sorts, or at least some way that I could get some income when I needed it. And that is nowadays the only way up to this point that we've survived. even in the trailer is I don't have a job per se you know I just have to sort of hustle a new project every month through my main page it's pretty cool you got that option though you know like that's it is that's uh that's pretty cool I was listening to to you on the tin foil um and you brought up NFTs and and doing a bunch of things like that like did I hear correctly that you raised like something wild, like $100,000 off of NFTs and the generation of income through that. Is that true?

Yeah, that's maybe the craziest part of the story. And there's all sorts of craziness besides the stuff I've touched on before, just getting us like I mentioned, I'm in Myrtle Beach right now. We've been driving across the U.S. since October of last year. Okay. Well, let's, I tell you what, I throw out the NFT thing. Let's keep us, this is one. I'm going to try and keep us on a path here. Okay, so your wife sits you down.

We'll put a pin in the NFTs. I'm going to even mark it down here because I really want to hear about that. Yeah, I'll go all into it. Sure. So you're sitting here in Canada. You lose your business. You lose your house. You transition into a holiday trailer with a truck that you've never done before, which is awesome.

I mean, you got to love going in feet first into the fire. That's the only way you learn. So now what was the biggest, what was the biggest, What was the thing that troubled you on the holiday trailer? There must have been like, is it like, what was the problem you were like, oh, I didn't realize that. And then it's like super easy. Is there anything right off the hop that comes to mind? Well, probably the thing that is the most, I don't know, hair raising is the actual translocation of it from place to place.

Like if you've never pulled a holiday trailer and I'd never pulled a holiday trailer with this particular truck too. we got an SUV, like a heavy-duty SUV, which is it can technically pull it, but it's not really what it was designed for. So we're pulling it like within one to 1,500 pounds, 1,000 to 1,500 pounds of its maximum towing capacity at all times. And, you know, going up hills and hitting bumps and stuff, you're really like playing with that maximum amount. But the thing is we needed an SUV because we got four kids and it's really hard to jam them all into the back of a truck, you know? How old are you kids? We got a three-year-old, a five-year-old, an eight-year-old, and ten-year-old. So it's a circus.

What are your kids think of this? It's, you know, kids are so weird, man. Like, you would think, before we did this, I thought, like, this is going to be an incredible life experience that they're going to enjoy seeing a new place every day. And they do. And they're going to get to learn all these different things about the world, which they are. But really, like, they don't really care. where they are any given day. It's all about like what's for lunch and I don't want to do math and all the regular things that kids do. They're just on the road while they're doing it. I don't honestly

think that they will appreciate all the things that's happening around them until they're older. And I've talked to people who've done this with their kids and they've all empty nested at this point. And they repeat the same thing. They're like, don't let it get to you if it feels like they aren't appreciating that you're now in Orlando today and, you know, Philadelphia another day. because they'll look back at it fondly when they're in their teens and 20s. I admire your tenacity to go to the south with, I got three kids five and under. That's a handful in itself.

You'd have four kids 10 and under. That's a rodeo. You're having a little bit of fun there. Now, okay, rewind the clock here. So you get the holiday trailer. You got the truck. Did you live in it for a little while here in Alberta or was the immediate idea we're getting the heck out of Dodge? Well, this is where things will start to lean a little more to the politics of it because all we've talked about so far is the economics of the situation.

The politics really started coming into it when the vaccine started getting rolled out in Canada. And it started to become more and more evident that it was less optional than you thought it was. and for reasons we can get into if you want, I decided not to get it and to wait and see because I'm a young, healthy person. I felt like I knew enough about the virus at that point, about a year in to sort of take my chances with the uncommon cold as opposed to a brand new gene therapy

that hadn't really been tested on humans at that point. And I wanted to see, like, I remember when the vaccine was coming out, or the prospects of it in April of 2020, They're like, we've got to get all the scientists, everybody in the same room working on this thing around the world, make sure we have a vaccine now as fast as possible. And I was like, okay, cool, that's a neat idea. I really like that idea. But when it comes out, check me down for round number two, because I don't want to be round number one on that one. I'm going to let you guys figure out all the kinks before I put my

neck on that one, because to me, this isn't like cancer, you know, like I don't feel like this is as dire for me personally. If I was somebody who was like a high risk scenario, yeah, I probably would have got it. You know, I think that's a reasonable thing to do as well. But again, the politics now played into this personal choice where I'm not, I'm no longer

a Canadian citizen, I'm an unvaxed. And that started changing things with the world. So we flash forward to where I'd lost the house, where I'd gotten the trailer, and now I'm an unvaccinated person in Canada where the border is closed on the driven border. So I can't drive my unit down into the U.S.

Well, how did you get to the U.S.? Drew? Well, that's a whole story we're going to get into. Is we started to see a lot of the, the, I don't know what the word is for what Trudeau does when he starts talking about unvaccinated people. It feels like it's threats. There were threats coming down the pipe for what was. He's not the only one.

He's not, our Canadian politicians have, yes, absolutely put out some verbal threats and continue to do so. It's changed a little bit out west, but Trudeau is still marching the same beat, right? Like, it's, we don't have to dance around this on this. I mean, in Canada, what is odd is when your leader and leaders continue to say the same things, even now, where we sit this far into it, knowing that two VACs didn't work. You need a third. and probably if you follow Israel, the third isn't going to work, so you're getting it

fourth. No wait, that ain't going to work either. Now that's a whole story. Lots of people who fall along know all about that. So to back you up on the Trudeau thing, I think it is extremely uncomfortable to have your leaders go basically like you're a second class citizen. And we know in history how this plays out. Exactly.

We don't have to be rocket science. You just got to read a couple things in history to go, this doesn't end well if we keep this up. And Trudeau right now is keeping it up. Yeah. This actually brought back a memory because this is for as short a period as two years is in the long story. There's so much that's happened in that time that it's easy to forget some of these things. But I remember there was a pregnant moment where I was remembering the storyline to the pianist. Do you remember that movie? Yes. Yeah. So it was based off of a pianist in Germany leading up to, what ended up being World War II in the Holocaust.

And he was a Jewish pianist who was trapped behind, well, he was living in Germany. He didn't realize he was trapped until he was trapped. And I remember when I watched that movie first, wondering how it felt to be the person that thought that they were okay until it was too late. And I remember thinking about that as an unvaxed and wondering, at what point do I decide to get out before,

like, well, I still think it's okay, before I realize it's not okay. Like there's historically speaking, there might be a turning point coming up that I don't want to try to catch, they say trying to catch a falling knife. You can never get the timing just right. No, you don't want to try to make that type of timing choice.

And I felt like more and more, it seemed like the choice was being made for me. Like I am not welcome here and I need to decide like what am I willing to do. Thankfully at this point, we were literally mobile. We were gypsies essentially at that point, but the choice became more and more. Like, not only do we have to follow the weather because we're living in a holiday trailer, we don't want to weather in Canada, but we have to get out of this country in the short term because I don't know what they're going to do.

I don't know what they're going to do. And as we were getting in 2021 now, more and more firm in that decision to get down to the states, Trudeau started talking about November 1st is this deadline coming. up where people who are unvaccinated are not going to be allowed to get on a plane. They're not going to be allowed to get on a train. They're not going to be allowed to get on a ferry. Any sort of government transportation or anything that's transportation that's federally overseen, you're not going to be allowed to do that.

And so when we heard that, we were like, well, now we've got a deadline because we can't even get the vaccine fast enough. This was October. We can't even get it fast enough if we wanted to get on a plane for November 1st, because you've got to have a month between each shot. and then it's 14 days after the second one. It's a two and a half month process. So we're like, we got to get out before then.

Otherwise, we're not only trapped in this country during the winter, but we're trapped with a hostile government that doesn't like us, that are changing things to try to keep us in this rat snare. And we saw not only that, but this was during, leading up to his third run at prime ministership, which I always laughed. when I tell my American friends that now because they're like, you mean a second one, right? I'm like, no, this is something you learn up in Canada too, is that there's no term limit on prime minister.

He can be in as many terms as he keeps getting elected. And here's the thing. I remember I went to school in Wisconsin and married an American woman. And I've had many a conversation. And in my younger days, Drew, I thought we had it right. man you get like can you imagine having the best leader why would you want him out i remember thinking that and now i'm like oh you know why you want to have a limit because what we're in right now is why you need to have a limit because there's no end to this if he keeps getting voted back in and right now

i can't figure out how he's voted back in well i mean we don't need to go down that rabbit hole we know how he's back in. But it's like, I really don't want, like, you know, like how many more years of this? Like, how many? Yeah. Yeah. So, well, he was campaigning to get back in for his third term, which I thought was impossible. I'm like, the second time he got in was impossible. There's zero chance he gets in the third time because we're coming through a pandemic where all of the leaders should have their heads rolling by the time that the people have a chance to vote for it. You know, like especially in where I was, nobody like Trudeau on a good year. Now after the pandemic, he's blamed for everything. So there's zero chance that he's getting back in. But I'm watching him the boisterousness

during his campaign speeches are, he always had a portion in there where he was literally threatening unvaccinated people. And this was what he was considering was going to get him re-elected back in, re-elected. I was like, this is what he thinks is most important to make sure. he gets in every speech so that people will vote for him. And one of the things I remember him saying was he had some sort of speech that was outside of a protest, an anti-mandate protest. And he was talking about those people and these people this and those people that. And one of the things he said, which absolutely it was like a knife through my ear and my wife's as well, she was one that showed me the video. She's like, you have to watch this. You listen to what he's just said. He said,

those people are putting our children at risk. And the moment we heard that, we were like, we have to move up our timelines because no longer is this just about our freedom of choice and our living in a free democratic society. Now, if he gets back in, there is a legitimate chance that he can use social services

to take our kids away from us. If we're putting their kids at risk, in the same breath, we're putting our kids at risk. If people believe that, and if the leader of the country who has the power of social services behind them says that that's what's now in,

you get vaxter, we take your kids. We're like, we can't do this. We have to get out. And like we were, it sounds like I'm talking about a dystopia that's impossible. Like, as a Canadian, like this can't be possible.

You're talking about some like a fallen state or old world country that's being overrun by like dictators. But this is Canada. I hear you don't. Yeah, the thing is, the thing is, is when you just sit and walk outside the door, where I am at right now, everything seems fine, everything's fine. But when you add up the sum of events to where we are right now, everything you just said, you go, that doesn't sound fine at all. Like, it doesn't sound fine at all, you know, snitch lines. And, you know, when I talked to Julie Panassi, she was the first one to say it. and talk about these quarantine facilities. I was like, like the look on my face

must have been something to behold. And she's like, oh, I'm dead serious. And she sends me the link, and that's on the government website. Now, is it, is it like this crazy thing? No, it's like the thought process behind it makes sense to the common person. It's for households or apartments

where you can't get away from your family to protect them, so they're building these facilities so that now you have a space to go and quarantine away and blah, blah. But here we are two years into this thing. We're like, that literally could be a very, very bad thing. Most likely that will be a very, very bad thing.

You know, like, you're not allowed to have anyone in your house. Like, I mean, that was literally just, I don't know, even that. There's so many rules. I bring up Harry Potter a lot. You got young kids. I bring up Harry Potter a lot because number five, when Umbrage comes in, a lady from the ministry of magic, She puts up all these rules to the point where you just can't even follow the rules anymore.

There's just so many. And everybody could see it's absolute fucking insanity. It's like, so many rules. I can't, I can't dance. I can't sing. We're not allowed to go to church. Why aren't we allowed to go to church? Does that make any sense?

No, it doesn't make any sense. But we're keeping everybody safe. It's like, yeah, at some point, that makes no sense. And that's what we're in. We're in Harry Potter 5. Um, Britch is leading the charge. It comes in the guise of Trudeau and the health ministry. or whatever, and they're just trying to keep everybody safe,

but in trying to keep everyone safe, now you see the mental health issues. Now you hear about the suicides. Now you hear, well, nobody will talk about the vaccination, adverse events, but now that's starting to come out. And all these things are starting to add up, and you're like, oh, and by the way, the average age of death, and I'm not making light of this, I swear to God I'm not,

but the average age of death in Alberta right now is 78. 75% of people had four core morbidity, of these, which I didn't even know what that word fucking meant two years ago, right? I watched, you know, I got to interview guys like Peter McCullough and anyone can say what they want about Peter, but what he talked about was early treatment. And he's a guy that said, listen, COVID's serious. You get it. You make sure you do the early treatment protocols.

Well, what do we do as a government? We took away any opportunity to do that, any of that early treatment. You know, the horse paste, the warmer thing, Joe Rogan and all that. I mean, that's brought that hugely the light. But here we sit two years in and you watch countries like Mexico, Japan, parts of India. If you get COVID, what do they do? They send you home with the kit. Is it, is it mean you're going to get through this perfectly? No, lots of people, but it alleviates pressure on the, the health care system. Well, what's our problem? Why, everybody's got to get

vaccine because of our health care system. It's like, we can do other things. We shut down gyms. We don't allow people in. We don't allow people to do activities. Well, what happens? The stress goes up. What happens is you stressed? Well, we all know. Like, this is, I'm ranting just to the audience right now because I'm so frustrated when I listen to what you're talking about, so many good people are leaving this country and I go man we have a great country we need to find ways to keep Drew here to keep you here to stand with the rest of us and go no more

like we were talking about this this convoy going to Ottawa yeah you know like I'm really hopeful for it is some bad going to come out of it and by bad I mean like food shortages things like that they're going to harm people yeah probably and like I don't want that I want everybody to be safe and just to be like this rainbow sunshine protest. And I hope that's what it is. The truth of the matter is,

things got to get difficult for some people to wake them and fuck up and go like, listen, this isn't good. And now we got, you know, hundreds of truckers going to jam up our arteries because, you know, Canada's got what,

one major highway. Imagine getting that thing full of trucks. What's going to happen? Not good things. And people are going to realize, man, maybe we should make this weird rule, where everybody's got to get the same treatment and not act like there's other things fucking going on.

Sorry, Drew. You're getting you're getting me on a Sunday night and I'm wound up. I'm all for it. This is this is where I get all my ideas for all my memes. So if we go back to, I guess, October, early October of 2021, where we're starting to hear Trudeau talk like this and we're starting to see like the no fly is coming soon. And at that point, the driven border is still closed. And this is another thing that's indefinite. There's no perspective or foresight on when that might end.

And it just keeps going like, well, check back next month. That's the way that one worked is they had to re-up on the emergency order every single month between Biden and Trudeau since 2020 March all the way up through whenever they decided to change things. But it wasn't happening yet in October of 2021. We're like, okay, we got to get out of here before we can't get out of here anymore. And the only way we're allowed to right now is by flying. Like we have to fly down to the stage, which is another hilarious paradox where you're not allowed to drive across, but you are allowed to fly across. And so.

Isn't that it was a, don't you think that's a money thing? Absolutely. I don't understand what else it could be. Like, I understand that it doesn't take a whole lot of money to keep the border open, like to pay a few guards here and there. it takes tons of money to keep airlines afloat, right? So if they're not getting money every day, lots of money every day, then they die. So yeah, we're going to subsidize that. However, we need to fudge the rules.

I get that. And plus the common person owns a vehicle and can drive across the border. That's true. That's true. That's getting by money. You hear your story. And there's just people that can't find, maybe don't have as strong a relationship as you do with your wife.

Maybe you don't have like the options with some of the online stuff to just like think through a problem like that. Because that's a giant problem. This is a giant problem. Oh yeah. To get a plane ticket to the states plus the PCR test to land there and not have any transportation. And now I live on hotels and like how do we even do that? Right. Like I can just see like this isn't going to cost thousands upon thousands upon thousands of dollars.

What do we do? Yeah. Yeah. And this is where we were. But this is another thing we were talking about just jumping in and figuring out things on the fly. We had no other real good option at that point because to stay stagnant was to die. It felt like there's nothing good that's going to come from us just seeing how it's going to go. Because we've been doing that this far and it's gotten worse and worse and worse.

We have to move our feet at one point. And so the winter was coming. The flights, the no fly was coming November 1st. And we're like, hey, we're putting this plan into effect, however we have to. So we started looking into all the different ways that we could get not only ourselves across the border, but our house that needs to be driven across, which at the time you can't drive across. The only people allowed across the border are considered essential travel, which at that point was basically just doctors, lawyers, politicians, and truckers. They're the only ones that were crossing.

And like, they were very serious at the border. They turned around everybody who I knew that went down there. I was asking people who had tried it. They're like, yeah, they just turn you around. You don't even get to talk. They just turn you around. And so I was looking into how we can do this. I'm like, okay, so truckers are allowed across.

We can hire a trucker to freight our unit across, because that's an essential worker, bringing our shit across. Okay, we looked into that. Yes, that was actually legally possible to do. And yes, it would be probably like $6 to $8,000 to freight our unit and our truck on a flatbed across to the U.S. And by the way, it's not just I'm going to pay the bill. You have to go through brokerages and you have to go through import fees.

And there's a whole legal thing that you have to go through. And we were like halfway through that whole ordeal when my brother-in-law was like, hey, I got an idea. You know our friend Zach? I'm like, I know, Jack. He's an American. Like, yep. He married a Canadian. I'm like, yep.

He lives up here, but he's actually an American. I'm like, yeah. Why don't you get Zach, who's an American, to drive your unit across for you. I'm like, can I do, can I can he do that? And I looked into it. I actually phoned the actual crossing points between Alberta and Montana and I talked to the guard there. I'm like, hey, crazy idea. And he's like, yeah, you can absolutely do that. People do that all the time. We can't legally refuse an American citizen going back to their country. We just, it's the same thing as if you're in the U.S. coming up to Canada. They can't refuse you back to your own

country of your citizenship. So I was like, sweet. It turns out all I needed to do, I didn't need to pay these thousands of dollars to a freight company. I didn't have to go through all these brokerage and imports shit. All I had to do was get like a letter from a lawyer stamped and sealed saying that Zach was allowed to drive this across with our say-so for like $50. And he was allowed to do that.

And so I phoned that crossing area like three times in the three, weeks that we were planning this, just to double check that this was all right, because it seemed too good to be true. And like, our house is on the line, again, if this thing gets fucked up and impounded or sent back or whatever. And so we're, we're like, okay, it seems like it's good. We're going to book our flights, which was, you know, six tickets down to the States was not cheap. That was a few more thousand dollars. And then on top of that, every single person, every single person needed a negative PCR test within 72 hours of our flights or our entry into the U.S. So that was $100 to $150 per person.

That was another almost $1,000 right there on top of a couple thousand dollars for the plane tickets. On top of all this other shit that's been going on. It ended up the bill was like close to between, I can't remember somewhere between $6 and $8,000 by the time we got across between all of the hotels and planes and everything else, the tests. Funny side note, though, about the tests. We had the choice when we did our PCR tests to also do what's called a serology test. Do you know what that is? No, fire away. So a serology test is where they blood test you to see if you have antibodies for COVID.

And we were curious because we had both had what we considered COVID. We hadn't gotten tested for it when we had it. But we were like, yeah, we lost our taste and smell back in June. We're like, I wonder, like just in case, just investing into our future. If they ever decide that if you have natural immunity, that's as good as having the vaccine, maybe we should just get the paperwork since we're getting the test done anyways for an extra 50 bucks for me and the wife. and we both got it. And it both turns out that, yeah, we both had antibodies for it.

But it was hilarious on the piece of paper that they sent us that said, yes, the serology came back positive for antibodies for COVID-19. It also said in a paragraph underneath that, but I forget the exact wording. I'd have to read it for how funny it is. It basically said, but it basically means nothing. Like don't think that that makes you immune. I'm like, wait a second. You just proved scientifically that I had the antibodies that are being developed specifically

to beat this virus that did beat this virus and you've got those cells being replicated in your body right now but don't be tricked into thinking that that can actually beat the virus think about that like think about that hurts my head yeah right like that hurts my head i don't even like to have a government tell you but don't think that gets you off the hook is like yeah what are you talking about. I've had COVID. I literally have the antibodies. No, no, no, no, no. It don't matter. They don't work that way. Yeah. And this was October of 2021. And here we are in 22 in late January where the CDC itself came out saying that natural immunity is what six times more effective during the Delta strains than the vaccine was. The CDC is saying that now.

Hey, are you doing, are you doing research? Don't be doing any research. That's bad. It's not. you that. No, let's not do any research. So we got the serology test. We got the PCR test. And now my my friend Zach is driving down the day before we fly over the border. So we have like, there's no, there's a razor's edge if this whole plan is going to work. There's so many cogs moving at the same time that any one of them can seize the whole machine up. He gets down to the border when we are at the airport in Edmonton that we're, we're staying at a hotel to fly out at 4.30 the next morning with our family to fly to Vancouver where we're going to cross from Vancouver to Seattle because there was no direct flights into Montana where we would pick up a rental vehicle and drive from

Seattle to Montana assuming that our vehicle got across. Now, while we're in the hotel, the night before that, there's like 8.30 at night before we have to get up at 4.30 in the morning for our flights, I get a call from Zach. I was like, sweet. I was hoping you're good a call. So you made it across, right? He's like, actually, I'm down at the border office right now with this kind officer. I'm like, hold up what you're not across yet he's like yeah so do you want to talk to him sir i was like what is going on and this officer picks up zack's phone and says hello is this drew weatherhead i'm like yes um so zachary here was going to drive your unit across my was and um did you realize that

you're not allowed to drive somebody else's vehicle across that isn't already in the in the country that you're driving it to. And I was like, wait a minute. You're saying I have to be in the States first before he can drive it across because Zach is a full-time fireman and this is his day off. He can't be waiting an extra 24 hours to drive my shit across tomorrow because we fly out tomorrow. Like this isn't, what are we going to do? This isn't going to work. And I told him like, I phoned down three different times and got three different officers that told me it was okay for Zach to drive it across first and for us to follow him. And they said, no, that's an old rule. That doesn't work anymore. Oh, so I'm like scratching my head real time thinking like,

officer, what do you want me to do here? Like we're flying out in the morning. Zach has to turn around at this point with our home. And he's like, there's this weird thing sometimes. Like I have a lot of friends who are officers and they're all great people, but not all officers are great people. And I feel like sometimes they just need to let you know that they're in control. And I felt like this guy just needed me to know that he was in control and he could fuck my shit up if you really wanted to because after he put the fear of God in me for no good reason, like I have got every hormone and adrenaline going through my body a full rip. He says, okay, here's what I'm going to do for you, gentlemen. You and Zachary have been very good. And even though this is not

supposed to be how we're supposed to do it, this one time, I'm like, oh my God. Okay, so he's going to let us across. So Zach gets back on the phone. He's like, all right, true, I got to finish up some paperwork here. I'll phone you once I'm across the border. All right. So he gets across the border at like 9 p.m. and still has two or three hours to drive down to Callisbell where he's going to drop off the unit. And we're like, okay, all right, all right. All we have to worry about now is tomorrow, now that our house is in a foreign country, tomorrow we have to fly our six-person family from Edmonton to Vancouver, where we have nowhere to stay in Vancouver. And then at that point, talk to a customer. officer who has decided whether it let us in for six months or not. And that was the play. As we're allowed

into the states, any Canadians is allowed into the states for up to six months as a visitor without a visa. So that was our play because we didn't have a visa. And we had never done that before. I'd even talked to one of my followers of my meme page. I put it out on my stories. I was like, yo, is anybody

an American customs officer out there training jiu-jitsu? Hit me up. And this guy's like, yeah, I work at the border down in Seattle. What's going on? Like, oh, great, I'm actually going to be down there in the next little while. What is the process? Like, I told them what I wanted to do, like, bring my family down for six months. It's like, just honestly, don't, I was like, should I tell them that I'm down for six months or is that a bad idea? Like, I don't understand how pivotal is this. He's like, just be as honest as possible. If you lie about anything, that's where they're going to catch

you and they're going to try to trap you in a lie. And if they can do that, they'll turn you around. So best info I can tell you is just be as honest as possible. So like I'm going into it with that. I'm like, okay, I'm just going to tell this guy whatever he tells what he asked me as honestly as possible. And I hope that that's good enough. And he put me through the ringer when I got there talking. I mean, it was all very reasonable things. It was like, okay, are your kids coming down with you for six months?

Are they homeschooled? What is their curriculum like? How much money do you have? Can you afford to be down here for that long? and we had to show them like our bank statements. And like we went through quite a bit. This is in the lineup of like 50 other people behind us trying to get on a plane and hoping that this is not only going to not take long enough that we miss our flight,

that's like 15 minutes ready to depart from Vancouver, but also that he's going to say yes, so we get across. Long story short and obviously since I'm here now, he led us through. And like at that point it was almost surreal that we're like, wait a minute, Was that the last thing? Was that the last thing we had to check off the list to get out of the country? And it was. And we stepped on to this next plane from Vancouver to Seattle on this little buzzbox that took us about 45 minutes to hop the border.

And when we landed and we saw American flags and like the whole American experience, it was like I couldn't believe that it worked. Like all this up to this point has been doom and gloom and apocalypse. and here we are now in a free country where, I mean, it's different from state to state, and we learned that as we went, but it's not Canada. And thank God, it's not Canada at this point in time. And it was, I've never been so happy in my life. I felt like everything had been validated, all of the hard work and struggle and sacrifice and efforts that we had put into getting out of this situation was worth it.

and we had made it. So we took the rental vehicle from Seattle all the way to Missoula, actually, where we had to drop it off. And I met a friend of mine there. I know you probably heard this story on Sam's podcast, but it is just a really important story to me that that sort of punctuates the whole experience at a visceral level. I like the family level where it meant the most to me is that I was meeting up a friend of mine who I'd never met before. we just knew online who lived in Missoula. I was like, yo, I'm in town. Let's meet up.

He's like, cool, there's a Wendy's by my place. Why don't you hit that up? I'll meet you there in a little bit. All right. So we plug it in. We hit the Wendy's. And as I'm getting out of the truck and getting my kids out, I turned to my daughter, my eldest daughter, my 10-year-old.

And I tell her, why don't you run inside and grab a table for us while I dress the kids out? It seemed like a simple enough thing to ask. And she froze. She looked at me like. cautiously. She almost whispered and she looked at me and said, Daddy, don't I need the thing to go in there? And what she meant by the thing was the vaccine passport. Because we just came from a place where she knew she was not allowed to go and sit down in a restaurant and eat. Now, if you want to believe that we don't live in a two-tier society, you could look into her eyes and tell her that because she knew she wasn't allowed to do that. She wasn't allowed to go into a Wendy's and order a burger and sit down.

And I told her, honey, not only do you not need a vaccine passport to go into Wendy's hair, you don't even have to wear a mask. And she looked at me like I just told her that the pandemic was over. And that look right there was everything to me. I'll never forget that. She lit up with a joy and a life that I hadn't seen in her for so long, for almost a year and a half at that. point where she was told time and time again she wasn't allowed to go play with her friends. She wasn't allowed to go to Jiu-Jitsu anymore. She wasn't allowed to live a normal life as a kid.

You can't go to a playground. You can't play with the other kids that you see at the park. And now she's allowed to actually be a kid and go have a fast food meal. And that was the difference was like we had made it. Again, like it was worth it. Whatever your differences are of ideology from the U.S. to Canada, from left to right, it was such a human moment that I can't overemphasize how much it meant to me. I appreciate you. I appreciate you sharing the story. Sorry, I'm sitting here and I'm just taking it all in, I guess, right? As a guy who's sitting in the middle of it, you slowly become immune or maybe just normalized.

so much of it. Now I was saying you before we hopped on. Went to an oiler game on Saturday. First oiler game I've been to since the pandemic went on. Got my negative test and walked in and not a big deal, but no food, no beverage, 50% capacity. You sit down, you got to have your mask above your nose. I got yelled at twice for having it below my nose, which, whatever. You're just like, but that's where we're at. And the thing is, here's, here's the crazy thing. He's like, everyone around me, you knew it was like, man, just pull your, pull your mask up. Wear your mask properly.

I'm like, this is where we've got to. You know, we're dictating how you wear a mask. I'm like, let's not get into the argument of whether the mask works or not. Let's not get into the argument of so many other things. This has become normalized in an Emmington Oiler hockey game. Right? And you think that it's not affecting your children because I got young children. And we certainly, you know, when I listen to talk about not being able to go play with friends and things like that, I'm really happy that I have chosen my place to live in Redneck, Alberta, Saskatchewan.

I'm going to be honest. I've never been more proud of the area I'm from. And we got our problems. Everybody has the problems. But where we're at, I feel like, you. It sheltered us from some of the absolute harms of what I hear your story and your children. And I've heard this from Mike Kuzmiskis, I-Corp blood services. He's down in Mexico.

He said the same thing about having his kids down and just like the reversal of like how quickly they went from being kind of like, you know, a little bit gun shy of people and gun shy, you know, of going places and doing things. And all of a sudden, they see people's faces again. and everybody's smiling and they get to go places and they don't have to worry about all these random rules that are going on. And the change in his kids, he said, well, he mirrors what you said. And I find that really intriguing because here I sit in the middle of it and I go, and that's not, you know, we're going to get through this. Like I'm trying to find the,

I'm trying to find the hope and positive and the belief that things can get better, that they will get better. But I admire your, I would call it courage to understand that things before they get better, most likely will get worse. And then in order to protect your family, you had to jump through some hoops and really, really go through some tough times. Yeah, you know, there's something you touched on here. I don't want to pass without mentioning was the way that people at the Oilers game were telling you to, you know, just wear your mask right.

Just, you know, I don't really believe it anyways, but just don't, don't be that. guy, you know, in public. It's the way that that governments, the only way that they can control a population, the size of the countries that we're living in now, the only way they can do it is if the people police the people, because there's just not enough police to do it, you know, without something like an actual martial law where we're being like held by violence. If we don't, it's always governed by the people. They let it matriculate down in a way. And, and, And it's not by accident. In fact, it's insidious.

And you know this. I don't have to explain this to you because you're still living in Alberta where they have something called the Restrictions Exemption Program for small businesses. Now, if you're a small business, you don't have to act like it's a pandemic anymore. As far as your capacity is concerned, this isn't 2021 anymore. Like this isn't where, or 2020, I should say, where all of the small businesses had to shut down or they had to do like 10% capacity and like that was just, it was a disaster.

We don't want to do that again. And because we know you don't want to do that again, you don't have to do it again. The only thing that we require of you to make sure you can run at full capacity is just make sure that no unvaccinated people come in. That's all. That's simple. So if you want to be exempt from the restrictions,

just make sure that you check everyone's vaccine passport. Oh, but if that's against your morals or if you feel like that is too intrusive, that's fine. you can just go back to the old restrictions. You're not exempt anymore. You can continue to run your business at 10 or 15% and you can stay open and close between these hours and these types of industries aren't allowed open at this time.

It's your choice, you know, we'll let you guys decide. And so they put these rules in place in a way that you either govern yourself or other people govern yourself for you the way that they would tell you to pull your mask up because, you know, I don't know the science behind it, but they keep telling us to do it and don't be that guy in public, man. Yeah, it's, you hit the nail right on the head, right? And that the people policing people,

and they just keep forcing it down lower and lower and lower, right? They're not doing contact tracing anymore. But they want parents to test, you know, like we're into this world now where you should almost test if you're going to leave your house. If you're going to leave your house, just do a test just to be sure, just to be safe. Because you don't want to get anybody sick. It's like, this is the most fucking stupid thing I've ever heard in my life, right? If you aren't sick, you've got no symptoms, right?

Then just go. And if you're sick, just stay home. It's okay, right? Like, I mean, it's back to where we were before. Before all this goes, if you were sick, you know, like, maybe we should. have told more people to stay home from work instead of trying to tough it out or you know what we really need you tonight for the big hockey game can you make it through you're puking that's great but it's a long way from the heart right like we all did that so maybe the thing that'll come out of

this is like man if you're sick just stay home it's not a big deal right okay that's a healthy change but the rest of it is just like i'm not going to take a rapid test every time i leave the house like it's that's ass it's crazy it's crazy to think that a healthy person, if they get tested positive for something to show them no signs of all sudden, the world has to stop for them. That's wild. It's a wild thing to put into someone's brain. Yeah, you know, with this newest variance that came out, it happened while I was already down in the U.S. So I kind of looked at it as a third person perspective, as opposed to countries who are taking it seriously. But there's Omicron variant that came out. It's supposed to be a whole lot

less virile. It's basically the sniffles from what I hear. Like I understand if you've got 150 comorbidities, yeah, it's probably going to knock you off your horse. But if you're just a regular old person out there, this is maybe the best version of COVID that's ever happened. Yeah, it's going to beat the vaccine apparently because this is a vaccine escape variant, but it's not even as bad as the last two. So I saw that and I was thinking, oh, okay, I guess this is the end now because they can't sound the same emergency alarms, the same like viral horns and play the same card over and over. And I found myself falling into the same trap I fell into after the first lockdown. I was like, well, they could never do that again.

It obviously didn't work. And I did the same thing with Omacron where I was like, well, I mean, this is barely even a virus anymore. They say it's hyper transmissible. Well, good. I guess everybody gets immunity now without having to be in mortal peril. Like it's supposed to be an R value of seven. so just everybody's going to get it. And since we all realize what that is now, we've been in this for so long,

and you don't have to explain what our value is to anybody anymore. Like they understand what the problem is and that, okay, we're all going to get it. It's not that bad sweet. Let's just treat it like a cold and carry on. But they did the same damn thing again where like we're all in this together and we have to shut everything down. We're locking everything and we know the drill guys and we're going to do it again. Like why? Why are you doing that again?

this is hitting a finishing nail with a sledgehammer for no reason. Like what is going on that people, I don't even think people believe it anymore. Like the more I talk to people at the ground level, I haven't run into one person who literally honestly thinks Omicron is as bad as anything else. Or that is even worried about it personally. Like this is something that Eddie brought up on the tinfoil podcast, I thought was hilarious, but actually it's quite profound. He said like when you hear about one of these,

super athletes that gets COVID. And they're like, yeah, I got to miss the big game on Saturday. It's, you know, I wish I could be there. I'm fine, but, you know, I got COVID, so I'm just going to wait it out for a week. And, like, nobody who's watching that as a fan is worried that that guy's about to die. Nobody's worried about that. In fact, they're probably just mad that it fucked up their fantasy draw. Like, nobody believes that it's going to be this big thing.

But at the same time, like, the government is pushing it as if it is. that they're like gaslighting us in a sense of like we know that you know that it's not that bad but you have to pretend that you know that we know that we pretend that it is this is weird little charade that goes on where like no i don't honestly think that even the the politicians and the scientists believe what they're being forced to say but they're not allowed to say anything different because everything's gated on social public platforms you know one of the interesting things about this podcaster is so I started off as a guy, when you can see you by the jerseys on the wall and everything else,

and you've kind of, you know, pieced together my hockey references multiple times that I'm a kind of a hockey guy. And, you know, I got to have some fun. I got to interview guys like Don Cherry and Ron McClain, and I tell a story an awful lot lately. You know, Paul Bissonette, you kind of get the picture, right? Like, I was having a lot of fun. And then it just wouldn't relent. So then I just took a 180. It was uncomfortable.

It has been very uncomfortable. It's introduced me to people like yourself, and I've met some super cool people through this. But there's a lot of people that as soon as you wouldn't shut your yap, like, no, no, no, no, no, no. And I find the biggest issue our society faces, and I mean this is like North America for sure,

is, but Canada. Canada's a tough not to crack. all the things that matter we don't talk about open. I'm not sitting here saying, you know, like you get put on these ideas and then CBC and global and all these big media chains just feed you up, just push, push, push. COVID's one of them. There's multiple. But none of us are allowed to talk about it.

And if you do talk about it, then they throw some slander on you like you're racist or your white male privilege or you just name it. And listen, maybe some of it, maybe I just don't understand the issue. I'm all for asking questions and opening up dialogue. But I found it really interesting because all I did was I just kept bringing people on and asking questions. People lost their shit. And I was like, well, what did I do that was so wrong? Well, you shouldn't use your platform for that.

I'm like, for what? For asking questions and opening up dialogue? Isn't that kind of odd to say that aloud? And shouldn't you catch yourself? We like, yeah, it is kind of odd. Right? Like we don't have, we have one narrative. and that's it. We're not allowed to poke holes in it because heaven forbid you poke any holes in it.

But here in Canada, that's what it is, right? Like, everybody can see. I don't know of a single person. I shouldn't say a single person. I know of a few. Nobody knows what the rules are anymore. Nobody cares. They understand to go into a bar or restaurant. You need to have your Vax pass or a negative test. Everybody gets that. Everybody's moved on from it. They don't think it's a big deal. They think Omicron's a joke. If they came out tomorrow and said Christmas is canceled, nobody abide by it anyways. I mean, I think they may have, I can't even remember what Jason Ketty said at this point. And what I worry about, Drew, is that's the scary part now, is they've almost beaten society into submission to the point where nobody's listening. So if they want to go do something crazy, I don't know, say every trucker needs to get the vaccine to go across the border.

Otherwise, you got this 14 day in quarantine, then they do. And then when the truckers stand up and are like, fuck that. Now they're trying to phrase it in like those dumb truckers can't figure. you're out, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, ooh, that one's going to bite you in the ass. Like, and I hope people are supportive of what's going on because I think they really should be. Because the longer this goes on, everybody just, like, I truly hope, you know, and this is my dumb, naive guy right here, okay?

I truly hope this summer, masks go away, vaccine mandates go away, and everything just smoothes out and we go, well, I mean, UK, look at UK. The UK's, okay, it's over. Do we get a day like that? Or is Canada going to go Australia, New Zealand? Where it's like we're so scared of Omicron. We're going to lock everybody back in again. It's like, I know everybody's having an Omicron right now.

And here's a big exposure. Everybody's vaccinated and they're having Omicron too. All of my friends and family who got vaccinated, they're having Omicron. And it's like, nobody gives a shit. They're getting over it. Whether the vaccine helped, didn't help. Who gives a shit? Who gives a shit?

let's get things open back up. Let's let's let's let's let's let's be kids. Let's play some hockey. Let's allow restaurants to just stop acting like they're the Gestapo and you got to like question. Nobody wants that. And yet here we are. And people just keep going. And you know, you say it, I say it.

We're all sitting here saying the same thing. It's like, I'm almost falling in the same trapper. I'm like, no, no, no, it's going to get better. It's going to get better. They won't do that again. Like, I mean, they got to see clear, concise evidence right in front of them that this is over. I don't know. Like you're in a different country.

I find your perspective very interesting, right? Because now you get to see the United States and you came out of what Canada was doing. You're sitting down in the south. I feel like, yeah, I mean, you got the looming six month thing. And I assume you're working hard to figure that out. But you also get the perspective of like, man, this has got to be nice. Like, I never want to. Like, are you ever coming back to Canada?

Well, in three months, we have to legally. But yeah, we're about halfway through the six month visiting. time period, which it was kind of weird because the first three months has been like nothing but feeling of freedom and it's like, you know, we're exploring and this is adventurous and all the things you would think it would be traveling around the U.S. at will, you know, place to place as we feel, you know, throw a dart at the map kind of deal. What do we want to do? What do we want to explore? All that was the first three months. And that changed about a week ago where we hit the halfway mark. And now all of a sudden, I wasn't expecting this, but every day

feels like a time clock now ticking down to the end of the next three months, where now the sand is majority at the bottom of the hour grass. We're watching each grain fall through. And like, we're very meticulously charting our path back because we can't not get back before this. And my wife tells me almost every day, multiple times a week for sure, sometimes multiple times day that the most stressful thing in her life right now is considering going back to Canada. She knows it's inevitable and she is worried about it constantly because she doesn't know what the politics are going to be like by the time we get there. And so violently that what is it going to look like for us coming back?

And that bothers her and worries her and it is something that we consider a lot. But to answer your question, we are part of why we are traveling so much in the States, besides the fact that I'm just literally making up for lost time. I'm just trying to get around because we weren't allowed to. Like there's a whole lot of that fuck you attitude where we now have the ability to do it. So we're going to do it big. But the other part is actually scouting these societies state to state. Because one of the cool things about the US as opposed to Canada.

And yes, Canada has a bunch of different provinces and territories and they all have their own little oversight. But let's be honest, it's a pretty homogenous country. As the Fed goes, it kind of just leans on all the provinces and they do the same thing. It is not at all that way down here in the states. Every state might as well be its own country. Like they really have autonomy at the governor level. They like look at Ron DeSantis is a great example in Florida. And we're heading down there in the next couple of weeks to check that place out.

Is they the buck stops at the state level. And because it does that, we got to look third person while we were up in Canada. Canada down at the US and starts using it as a litmus test that if this has to happen again, because we just assumed because it had so many times it's going to happen again, whether it's this pandemic or the next, you know, I don't know. But if I ever had to start a business again, it wasn't going to be in Alberta. We made that decision very clearly. Like I can't do what I did and have them do what they did again because they did it once with no remorse

and I have no compunction to believe that they wouldn't do it again without remorse again. So we're looking at all these different states and like where would we rather be the next time this happens that we would have rather been when it happened the first time to us. And we were looking at states like Montana and Utah and some of the southern states like Texas and Florida and Alabama and a few of these places were in South Carolina right now. Some of those places, they weren't what we thought. Some of them were better than we thought. And we got to kind of experience that as we went.

Like we were in Georgia a couple days ago on route to the coast here. And I didn't even realize until I got there, but Georgia is very, at least in the Atlanta area, they were very liberal in a way that everybody was wearing a mask at all times. And a lot of the places we want to go were closed because of Omicron. Like we tried to go down to the Martin Luther King National Historical Monument Museum. And they're closed because of all. Omicron. I couldn't teach my kids about Martin Luther King that day because of Omicron. And it was weird because we had just come from Alabama where nobody cared.

And before that, we were just in Texas where really nobody cared. In fact, they anti-cared about it. They tried to show how much they didn't care about it. And it's strange going state to state to see this, but it's also encouraging because we get to try to make that decision up for ourselves. Like if we try to relocate, which is a whole process that we can go into as well, But if we try to, now we have a bit of a barometer that we can reflect on and be like, where would we like to stay geographically, where we would like to stay societally and sort of figure out where that sweet spot is for our family and our ideals. Yeah, having family, my in-laws in Minnesota, I understand that they've started to introduce a bit of a Vax Pass and certain some of the big centers, the big cities where beer is sold.

and so you understand that by fleeing to the United States doesn't mean you're fleeing all the rules and that different states don't think differently or similar to Canada for that matter. Like the way Canada is approaching this, some people applaud it. Yeah. And some people like me and you look at it and go, I don't know what we're doing anymore, right? Like, you know, this idea of trying to save every life and not acting like you're doing harm in the way you're trying to. save every life is almost laughable at this point except it's so sad. And it's really sad that other people can't see it. It's interesting that I find it very interesting that, you know, that the halfway point has become this dreaded return to Canada. I will say this to you,

Drew. I think when you come back to give your family a little bit of hope, the network that is being formed, the people that have come across my life in the last eight months now, I think you'd be amazed how many good people are here in Canada. And I know you know that they're there, but I don't think you understand how many good people are in Canada. And by, I shouldn't use the word good. Everybody's good. I don't mean that one side of the coin or not, but how many people would probably love to support you and your family and find ways to make living in Alberta an opportunity so that you can go shoulder to shoulder with all of us and not go to the states. I once said to a buddy of mine, he was talking about going to Mexico or the states or he had a multitude of ideas.

And I'll throw this at you as well. And maybe I'm wrong in this. So we'll see what your thoughts are. But I told them, you know, if the world goes to shit and it gets worse than this, which in your case, I don't know how much worse it could have got because you got to see some of the bad sides of all of this, small business owner and everything else. But I said, if the world does go to shit, I would like to be here around the people I love, the people I know, the area and the country I know. And I think we got a better chance of fighting it here than anywhere else. but now you've been all through the states. Do you think what I've said is naive? No, I think what you said is pretty profound. In fact, it's something that's part of the equation that we consider.

And it's never more obvious than when you live in a travel trailer is that you're very, very bound to the functionality of society. So if the truckers are doing what they're doing up in Canada down in the U.S. in a way that ends, I mean, down here, it's 10 times the population. If you think that a supply chain problem up in Canada is bad, and it is, down here it would be 10 times worse because the shelves clear out 10 times faster. We need to go for groceries twice a week because we have a small fridge and nowhere to keep anything and four kids eating it all day long. like if society actually went to shit we're in a really vulnerable position where our supplies run out faster than most people's because we don't have a house full of them you know what i mean and we are not around people that we know like there's friendly people here and there that we touch base with and we meet friends along the way but it's a whole different thing when they need to support somebody else's family if if it comes to that and i'm not saying that there aren't people out there but it is a consideration that i do think you're not wrong in that way like we definitely have strong roots in Canada for that reason. But that being said too, like we have to start thinking about

what does it mean if things go to shit? Because down here, there is a sentiment of individual freedom and autonomy that is a come take it mentality that we don't have up in Canada. We think we have it. We feel like we have it because we watch enough American TV that we're like, it kind of like rubs off on us. But when push came to shove, like what is standing up to your government mean up in Canada? The biggest thing that we've done so far is the truckers, which might be something that actually pushes the government, I hope it does because the supply chain is so vital. But how many rallies have there been?

How many people have spoken out? How many nurses and firefighters and policemen have said that they're not going to stand for it? It hasn't changed anything yet. If shit went down, down here, you've got absolute militias ready to take up arms. Like on a lull, they'll do it for a weekend hoot-nanny. You know what I mean? Like it's a whole different spirit down here when it comes to the government. And it has to be because there's so many people and there's so much power down here that it goes wrong down here.

It goes really wrong. But because of that and maybe since the civil war of old, they understand like they have to be ready to fight their governments. And I feel like it may actually go more. It has the potential to go worse for citizens in Canada faster than it does down here. It would have to be person versus person down here before it would be government first person. I think it's growing. Tell me about that. Well, if you'd ask me, you know, like I've been a guy who's sat and went, man, I wish you.

all Canadians could channel a little more American, you know, like I, I got American buddies who are pro gun, pro fuck the establishment, very at times uncomfortable over like just simple manners. You know, like I just loud, proud American, right? Like it's just, it's uncomfortable because we're Canadian and, you know, taught to be humble and nice and, you know, that's taught us, it's been very, it's taught us very, well, you know, it's been a very, you know, everywhere I've traveled. in the world, everybody enjoys a Canadian, right? Like, they never see you and go, if anything, they think you're American first, and they kind of give you the stiff arm, and then they find your Canadian.

Oh, man, it's a warm welcome. So it's served us very well up until this point. And so what we're slow on the uptake of is like how to be disagreeable with the people in power, the establishment, and everything else. And I would say, if you asked me six months, eight months ago, I would say that you were absolutely right. but what I've seen in the last, well, the more I talk about it, the more I have people like yourself on, you know, like all these different doctors, professors, everyone. The more I do it, the more I see the backbone on what Canadians really have. And I think we have a pretty firm backbone.

It's just we've never been pushed, especially in my lifetime, to ever use it, right? Like, we're the nice, you know, Trudeau doesn't want the oil field going. and we get a little disgruntled, but it's not that big a deal. It's Trudeau. Screw the East, blah, blah, and so we've never really, you know, I'm 35.

In 35 years, it's been pretty good. I had Brian Peckford on, you know, and he talked about signing the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That was in 1982. Think about that. But our Charter of Rights and Freedoms has been,

you know, around for a blink of an eye less than that. Yeah, 40 years. And we just, and we don't even understand the power of that document. People who move here understand the power of that document. The rest of us don't have a clue of what that document truly means. So to get back to my point, I just, I go, the longer this goes, the more the crazy amps up,

I see more people standing up and more doctors, nurses, truck drivers, cops, firefighters, all saying fuck the establishment. You're not getting past this. Here's the line. and the more that that goes on, the quicker this ends. I don't know if I can use the word quick because I assume it's going to take time. But I see more and more people waking up to the fact that something is very wrong and that things need to change. And somehow, Drew, with where I've placed myself, you know, like in this weird role of interviewing people that, you know,

the CBC should be all over this. Not just saying your story, but in general, the differing sides of this, it would make for compelling journalism to have why you need to have a vaccine. Why shouldn't you have a vaccine? It makes for compelling journalism. Instead, they're on the one-way narrative, which they don't realize is putting their foot firmly in the grave. Like, they're going to be done here.

Like, it's going to be over. Like, nobody, by the time the older generation passes on, nobody's going to pay attention to the CBC. So just reminding it, I would say to give you some peace of mind, when you come back to Canada, you make sure you drop me a note. Because I will put you in touch wherever you are with great people. And I think personally, doesn't mean it's going to be easy. No. But man, there's some vigor in people right now that are just like, screw it.

Let's go. Let's get to work. We're a bunch of hard working, survive in the minus 40. You tell us it can't be done. We figure ways out. We've got brilliant people here that have been silenced for so freaking long. They just want to crack at the problem. We're going to figure this out.

We're going to get through this. And if it comes to the part where people start disappearing or they start doing a bunch of crazy shenanigans, I think there will be upheaval. I think there's enough, at least in the West, there's enough farmers, oil field workers, truckers, just blue-collar good people that are like, no more. Like, we're done with this. This needs to end. and I see it happening day by day here.

I don't know if that means in three months it's gone. I have no idea. But to me, I see hope. Even if it's a sliver, I see it right now. And I trust that that is going to lead to better days. I hope you're right. You actually brought up another old memory of a pandemic past. So like I think it was like late 2020, early 2021.

I ran into one of my old welding buddies who we, we welded I don't know like 10 years before this and I hadn't seen him for a good long time and he's he's exactly what you think in alberton welder is he's missing a couple front teeth he's got a big gray beard he swears more than a sailor and he's just a good old guy and we were talking about the pandemic because my my gym was still under lockdown at that point and he was saying what a fucking shame it was and he just the attitude and the nonchalantness but just directness of this statement, he said in passing during a conversation, he said, you know, Drew, you know, the way things are going right now, I think the only way it's going to change is it's probably going to take some good guys doing bad things. And he meant it when he said that. And I think he believed that. And I think that he would be one of those people among many that you're saying there's a silent minority that may end up becoming the silent majority, which may end up becoming the herd majority. If they need,

need to be. I hope it doesn't come to that. But I mean, history is a, is a great teacher and very few major changes in history come without upheaval. And it comes from the people because the people are the only thing that move the governments that don't represent them anymore. Yeah. And so across all of Alberta, all of Saskatchewan, there's these little pockets of these, these groups forming that are having these, let's call them secret. meeting, some have been going longer, some have been going shorter. It's been Zoom calls all over the place, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think what everybody's realizing is for too long, we didn't have the hands on the wheel anymore, you know? Like, we just kind of went, oh, yeah, no, life's good. And,

uh, the politicians got our best interests and, and we'll just carry on. And this has been an opportunity for them to like, just turn the course of everything. And the only, you know, in trying to keep everybody safe, which sounds lovely, right? Everybody's going to be safe. It's going to be good. We're going to keep everybody safe. Nobody's going to die. It's going to be great.

We got everything under control. We know all the answers. We're, you know what? We're working on. We got our best people on it. It's like by doing that and not being truthful when you just can't, when they should have just said, we don't know. You've eroded all this trust.

You've eroded trust from all these different institutions, which maybe people should have saw 10 years ago, I don't know, but that's what's happening right now. And what I see is I see a bunch of people that are motivated now because they understand what needs to be changed. They're going to involved. They're going to sit on your school board, your hockey board, you know, they're going to go into politics. They're going to go into everything because if we don't, we know what the end result is. It's going to be bad. And it does, it sounds so like foreshadowing and terrible. It doesn't mean people at the top are like, oh, we're going to kill off 50% of Canadians. It means that them trying to protect everyone is leading us down this path to where something really bad happens.

And their good intentions are leading us down that path. They're all got these good intentions. No, no, no, but we can't talk about it. We certainly can't adjust our course because if we do that, we admit wrongdoing. We can't, we can't do that. I mean, geez, why would we ever do that? And I don't know. I'm rambling now. I just look at it and I can. go, I feel like there's hope because I see all these people waking up. I see all these good Western Canadians because I, you know, I'm a Western Canadian boy. I see what, I see what they're doing. I see all this positive movement of trying to shake the foundation of, of the institutions to be like, wake up. Like you got to stop what you're doing. We have good people fleeing this country.

Like I almost, like I don't mean to make light of your situation. I hope that's not how it comes across. it's almost laughable that Canada's turned into a place where nobody, you know, like for how long, Drew, have people come to us? And now we've got business owners, we've got families, we've got all these people trying to get the hell out of here before it goes really sideways. And I am pleading with everybody to not flee. Stand your ground. Because if you stand your ground and say no, say no, no, no, no more. what are they going to do? I mean, I bring this up all the time, lots. You know, like, we're far enough into this thing.

They gave you the carrot. They're going to give you a bunch of money, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now they're going to penalize you. You can't go in anywhere and they hit you with a stick. So what comes after that? Like, are you literally going to tackle me and tell me this is the only way out is through me jabbing you? If that's what it comes to, I hope it wakes everybody up.

Because to me, I don't care who you are. Body autonomy is like paramount. I don't think it gets any more serious than that. The censorship that's going on, I don't think it gets any more serious than that. And the harder, you know, I read a thing. It said, you know, the crazier it gets. How did it go, Drew?

You probably know better than I do. The longer it goes, the crazy they get. And the longer you hold off, the crazy they become trying to essentially get you to do they don't want to do, but you say no, and then it just keeps getting crazy. And the more people wake up, the more people wake up, the crazier they get, it just goes on and on and on. And that's playing out right now. It's like, it's almost wonderful to watch because at some point, you just got to think like, okay, we're just done with this. And they're just going to shed it.

But they won't allow that. Government won't allow it. Like, you watch the NHL, right? Like the NHL last night, you got the Battle of Alberta. You got no beer, no food being sold in the building. So everybody's just sitting there enjoying a great hockey game. It's a great game. But you got security yelling at people to put their masks on. I'm telling you, I don't want to go back to another oiler game. I just don't because it's like that wasn't enjoyable. I went there to have my mind taken off COVID.

I took a negative test so I wouldn't have to worry about, you know, like, it's just like, why do we got to wear a mask? If I got no COVID and everybody else is vaxed, oh wait, we know that doesn't work, but that's a side point. What are we worried about? Why do we have to hire guys to police everything in there? Why can't we have a beer or beverage or food? Like all these rules. You know? Yeah, it goes, it lends itself to what you're saying is things getting crazier and you being expected to believe that they're not.

This is this perpetual gaslighting that keeps happening. And it's the same playbook that doesn't change. Like we can talk about boosters and we can talk about fourth boosters. And now they're talking about trying to get kids vaccinated down to age of five and like talk about bodily autonomy. me at that point it comes down to the parents that are supposed to step in and have their best interests of their kids at heart like do you know people who have been injured by the vaccine yeah so the episode right before you uh is a fishing guide um and he got the first shot of Pfizer and has had heart issues for six months and is going in for surgery and they still want him

to get the second shot because now he's vulnerable. And you're, I'm like, I just, you can't make this stuff up. And personally, yeah, I know,

I know several people that have had Bell's palsy, um, and some things like that, you know, they took medication from what I understand. Everything's fine. And I've been trying to figure out for the life of me, Drew,

if, you know, Bell's palsy is like, you know, is it the worst thing in the world or is that, is that fine? Like, I don't know. I'm no doctor, right? I don't want to sit here and say, oh, they have Bell's palsy should be stopped.

But at the same time, it's like, but they got Bell's palsy. That's a pretty serious side effect. So that's where I sit on this entire thing. Like, yeah. Right. So if you're considering these sort of considerations, which are crazy in and of themselves, is it okay to get Bell's palsy for a shot for the calm and uncommon cold, think about how crazy that is to the next step,

that now we're considering putting our kids at risk. for the same possible injuries. We don't know. It hasn't been done yet. We'll find out when our own kids are the guinea pigs. And we're supposed to be okay with that. And on top of that, what's going to happen if slash when, our kids start having the same reaction that everybody else is happening at the adult level.

We're already starting to see young males have heart issues when they get the shot. Like teenagers are having heart issues. Like teenagers don't have heart issues. And we're okay with that. All right. It's a risk we're willing to take down to how young are we willing to take this to kids that really don't have any risk, like mortal risk of COVID? Like the only thing we were ever worried about them was a transmission vector, that they pass it to the grandpa. You know what I mean? Like, why are they getting the experimental therapeutic gene therapy that has been proven to cause horrible debilitating things that we're not allowed to talk about that probably have never happened, realistically to anyone you know except for everybody that you talk to that says it has,

that you've got entire montages online of highly athletic people falling over having heart attacks or issues mid-court, mid-field. And this is, okay, this is normal. Don't talk about it. Drag him off the field. Everybody cheers and we'll hope that he gets well in the hospital, but at least he got his vaccine for the uncommon cold. Now we've got, it's coming down to the parents to speak up for their kids.

And I remember like when when this was rolling out, this was while we were leaving the country, was we saw that on the horizon of they're going to start bringing it onto kids now. And we thought, is that going to be. And this is a morbid thought because it just is. It's reality is if the same negative reactions happen in young kids, young kids that have no business having these type of reactions for something so silly. If they start happening, even at a fraction of the percentage of the fraction that it's happening in the adults, how many of those kids does it take before parents say, no, fuck off. This is done.

We're not doing this anymore because it's one thing when you take the risk for yourself and you're like, well, it didn't turn out for me. I've got never ending migraines now and I don't know if it'll ever end and the doctors don't know what caused it because they aren't willing to say it's the vaccine. So all I'm doing is pumping pain pills every day. Well, what if that's your five-year-old kid? That hits different. And I have a feeling that that's coming if it hasn't started already.

And maybe that's the trigger that requires people to actually stand up and demand bodily autonomy. And to tell the government that they don't get that decision, no matter how many sticks and carrots they throw at you. Like, I know you had heard about my own family's issues with the next. reactions when it comes to my sister. And I don't want to get into too much details because it's her story, not mine, but she has gone public with it, which is the only reason I bring it up in public forum. Because I knew about this since it happened in May of last year.

And she has been dealing with after her first shot of Pfizer, she lost all functionality of her legs. Like they just didn't work. She was paralyzed all of a sudden. And nobody in the health industry was willing to say what it was, was even willing to guess what it was when it came. to the vaccine because we knew that something called Jelaine Barce's syndrome, sorry, Jelaine Bar syndrome is a possible adverse reaction to the shot.

But they went through all sorts of different hoops and explanations and gaslighting of what else it could be and they landed on something they called neurological Lyme disease. It must be neurological Lyme disease because it couldn't be anything else. We've ran all these tests and it couldn't be anything else. And she was under that impression for like nine months of all these different doctors and specialists trying to find something that wasn't the vaccine that it could have been. In the meantime, she's a single mother, low income with as many kids as I got. And she can't move her legs. And today she still has problems getting around.

Like she can move enough to sort of shuffle around. She gets tired and she's off balance and she's having to relearn how to walk still. and she just recently got a doctor willing to write a note that says it's my professional opinion that the effects that so-and-so, I'm not going to say her name on here, had during her first shot of Pfizer was likely related to the vaccine. Likely. That's the most that she's been able to get from the medical industry so far. And that to her, that was actually a relief because up to this point, she's been told she's crazy to even presume that it could have possibly been that.

I don't even know to what degree she thought that it was during the whole process, but she was told the whole time it wasn't. And so, like, how crazy is life that she has to go through all this and then assume, or be told to assume that it couldn't be the elephant in the room the whole time? All the while, now we are in 2022, somebody is finally saying, yeah, it probably is. the elephant in the room. I mean, this is where we're at. Now it's like, okay, we'll pull the, pull the curtain back and it turns out that it was the wizard was behind there the whole time, even though we knew it. We knew it was. And it's, it's just beyond frustrating because what can she

do? She's taken maximum damage physically, financially, emotionally. Her kids have gone, they've, they've suffered during this as their mother suffered. Their young kids having to watch her endure this and it's not easy for them. They're going to take some serious emotional baggage for the rest of their lives through this. And there's nobody to sue. There's nobody to blame. What can you do about it? And that's just a normal story right now. I could tell you a half a dozen more that I know personally that are similar to that boat. What universe do we live in here, Sean? We live in a universe. Well, I'll get your thoughts on this, Drew. And here's here's, here's what I foresee is the biggest, and I take blame on this, being a guy who speaks openly in a public

form and whatever else. I take my lion's share of the credit or whatever you want to call it for not doing something. And that is, we live in a society where we don't talk about things. And it is, you know, whether it's, you list off the things, you know, I just had Billboard Chris, and he talked about gender ideologies, puberty blockers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's an uncomfortable situation, uncomfortable topic to talk about it. Like, do I want to sit in band for the Amidton Oilers? I don't want to talk about that? Nope.

Do I want to have people yell at me? Nope. Like, but that's our society right now. We have journalism in the CBC that doesn't talk about, sure, it, sure, they talk about some tough things. Sure, I'm not going to act like they don't. But overall, the things that truly matter, we aren't talking about right now. And COVID is just is like the obvious elephant in the fucking room. I mean, it's so obvious. It's not even funny, right? It doesn't mean that everything that gets brought on here is exactly right,

or that there isn't two sides to a story. There certainly is. But the big issue plaguing society right now in Canada, I always, I really want to preface Canada because I can't sit here and act like I know the United States, certainly can't sit here and act like I know all of Europe, et cetera, et cetera. But in Canada, there is politically right and then there is just now censored, right?

Like, I've been pulled off YouTube four times now. And one of the conversations, I had to rack, I talked to a marine biologist who studied the data of COVID. And that got yanked. And I thought about that for a long time. I'm like, geez, you know, like, that is wild to me.

And here we sit and I just go, I'll give you a good story. You talk about your sister. I'll talk about Hudson Suva. So I had Brandy Suva come in here. A vet, lovely lady, went to school with her. And her son, they live in rural Alberta. Her son rides the bus an hour both ways, five years old. on the buses in Alberta, you have to wear a mask.

So Hudson falls asleep in his winter gear with his mask on, and when he gets home, he's unresponsive. Now, I'm going to give you the good news. Good news is Hudson is fine. Everything is fine. The story has a happy ending, in my opinion, right? Nobody died. No long-term effects from everything I've heard from Brandi.

Everything's fine. And I hear that story. And I go, holy shit. Like this needs to go to every politician, whatever. Well, it does. Every politician knows this story. Has anything changed for five-year-olds? Has anything changed for being on a bus with kids and Omicron and blah,

fucking blah, and everything else? No. It's like it's just the same old thing. And I go, why hasn't the CBC picked up on that? Why hasn't so many news outlets picked up on that and made it a priority? like our young kids are suffering. The crazy thing about that story was the avalanche of women who emailed texted saying, same thing happened to my kid.

Same thing is going on over here. Wow. Right? Like think about that. This isn't a one-off. We want to say it's a one-off. It isn't. And it's deemed extreme, like you're being extreme to talk about those things.

I'm like, no, that's literally going on in our society. And we're acting like it doesn't exist or that it's, oh, it's. that isn't that common. I mean, that's the one in a million. It's like, no, you talk about your sister

in those stories. There's going to be an avalanche at some point here where all sudden the stories all come out of all the different people who've been harmed or their, you know, their father died or whatever

from taking the vaccine. Does that mean that nobody should ever take the vaccine? I have my thoughts. I would never say what other people should do. I think everybody has the freedom of choice. But as a media, as a as a journalist there's been a disservice to the people of this country by not opening up both sides and allowing people to understand that there's risk in everything we do there's risk in this this is the

like we got to talk about some things there isn't just this is the right way every you know like they say follow the science well the whole point of science is to like debate and to like try and prove that it's wrong and like the whole point is to have discussion and vehemently debate things. And then like a friendly fashion, sure, we're not attacking the person. We're attacking the idea. So we can all get better. And instead, we've just like shut that all down. And I think that's a giant problem we got right now. It's a giant problem. Yeah. I think that that's, this might be an interesting segue here because I feel like a lot of those issues right now are exacerbated by social media and at least the generation of social media we're in right now.

There's this weird thing that's going on online right now. Have you heard much about the term web one, web two, web three? No. By all means. Okay. All right. This is going to be a kind of a strange divergence, but there is a lot of problems with what people are calling web two now.

And I'll give you kind of a rundown of the three and then sort of step back to the number 2 is web 1 is what they consider the internet back in like the I guess late 80s but really early to mid 90s through through the year 2000 where you would you know you had your your netcape browser and you had your GeoCity site and maybe you went on to Napster or whatever that was web 1 where it was mostly about sending emails and checking Yahoo searches for information web 2 happened in the early thousands where most of the internet activities started moving over to social apps and social platforms like Twitter, like Reddit, like YouTube, like Facebook, especially, and into Instagram. And all of a sudden, most of the time that people were spending online were in social apps.

And that was what they deemed Web 2. And before I expand on that, we'll put a little primer in for what Web 3 is. And Web 3 is now the use of the Internet as it pertains to blockchain technology, where we now have these new emergent technology that is by definition decentralized, which has its ups and downs. But what it doesn't have is a major zeitgeist moving organization at the top that can open and close different stopgates and change the narrative and block certain ideas and force certain voices to be heard and other ones not to be.

This is backing up to Web 2. Now, what I feel like that problem is that you're talking about is that a lot. And it's so funny because in reality, like you're talking, you were saying, you talk to somebody down boots on the ground. Most people you talk to, they don't feel like that, like you go inside and it doesn't feel like as dire as it is when you open up your phone and start looking at social media. And it's because most of the peril and the problems are actually on Web 2. they aren't in reality. You know, like Twitter isn't life and Facebook isn't life. It's just where you go to have life kind of blown up to a bigger, unrealistic thing,

where everything is viral that is negative and everybody yelling at everybody is what gets pushed. And anybody with a differing enough opinion, depending on who's pulling what strings and what narrative and who's fleecing whose pockets and what Zuckerberg is trying to do this week, decides whether or not you get to have your stuff seen or not. That's an interesting way. We were talking earlier about how people govern people at the societal level when the government's trying to control them.

Well, in Web 2, it's the algorithms that the oversight bodies get to fiddle with. And you just don't get your voice seen. You can type all you want into empty air, but they just don't, they don't prioritize it. They put these shadow bands and blocks on where you think that you're on the, platform, but you're not really reaching anybody. Whereas if you say the right things, they actually push that and they prioritize that. So there's this weird parlor trick being done behind the scenes to make you feel like reality is one thing, even though it's not. And it's so pervasive that now it's starting to bleed into reality when we need it not to. When we have like an actual

crisis and need to figure out what's going on in real time, all we're seeing. is the most inflammatory version of that. And we believe that that's what's real. And that's why everybody goes out and buys their toilet paper when they think the world's coming to the end because everything online is telling you as much. But the problem with Web 2 is that that's just, that's the structure that it's built around.

It's built around virality. And I think that that's a big problem that I'm hoping, and we're so new to this technology, but I'm hoping that Web 3 has some sort of breaking effect of that because it just doesn't allow that type of censorship. And the basic premise of blockchain is individual ownership. So a lot of people now are buying their domain names for their websites on the blockchain. So they'll buy things that have like a dot I.O or a dot X or a dot crypto or something instead of a dot com.

And they actually own that place. their website resides on the blockchain instead of Web 1 or Web 2, where it can be stifled, it can be deplatformed, it can be whatever, it can be attacked, whether you believe, or the people in charge believe that it should be there or not. It really depends on whether you get to stay around or not. That's not the case as it's coming into Web 3. And I guess I'm hopeful that that will help to start to simmer down the explosiveness. of the way that we interact as a species across the world

because the internet's so important, but it can also turn into this thing that ends up shooting us in the foot if we let it. That sounds extremely hopeful. Like that sounds like that's the first time I've ever had. It's something that I hope to do with this podcast, as it moves along, there's so many,

unique, creative ideas, powerful technology in works, being used, et cetera. And hearing you talk about that, Drew, is, well, I have to think about that. I have to do some reading now about it because I agree with you in the social media realm. And I guess I just didn't realize it was web two. And I sound like a small Saskatchewan farm kid right now. The web two part of it, I just, I go, I think we all understand, or more of us are understanding. I shouldn't say we all, is that you're, you know, you're fed what you want to hear. I mean, honest to God, like, you just got to hop on your Twitter feed and see what it pops up for you over and over and over again.

You think that's the world. And then you go, you go anywhere and realize, oh, that isn't the world at all, right? Like that isn't how people interact. That isn't how all people think. Because all you got to do is hop on somebody else's feed and see what they're being fed. And you go, oh, man. Like, interesting, right? We always come back to the Netflix documentary, the social dilemma.

Social dilemma, yeah. Like, if you haven't watched that yet, you should. Because that'll scare the pants off you, right? Like, that one, and you're just like, hmm, okay. What does that mean? The internet's bad? No. Like honestly, the internet is this wonderful tool.

But wonderful tools can have, you know, holes in them, flaws. And we're seeing a big flaw. I mean, social media right now is a behemoth of a tool that can be used for good and bad. And we've seen both. And right now it is, it's dividing everybody, right? Like there's no way to, you think talking to somebody, the only way you get to talk to them is if you're yelling at them. because that's what it feels like in text.

I mean, like me and you texting, you can't get any sense of what the person's trying to say, like zero. The only way to do that is through discourse, dialogue. And I would hope the next time we sit and talk to, you're sitting in Canada. Not only you're sitting in Canada, you're sitting in the studio. Because although a phone call, although a Zoom call, getting to see one another is good.

Being in the same space, feeling one another, there's energy, seeing the body interactions. All that is so unbelievably important. And what have we done over the last two years? None of it. We've actually made it seem like it's a negative thing, right? Like, don't be around person. Like, don't get too close to people.

It's like, no, that's a complete opposite. Like, I'm not saying, if you're sick, go around people. I'm just saying, like, family, friends, camaraderie, community, love, all that stuff that just seems so, according to say out loud is just so important. And the thing of what we're at right now is all of it just gets pushed away. Like it's it's the most wild thing that you're not supposed to go see your friends, that you're not supposed to go around people, all these crazy things.

And here we sit, you know, like, and we got to find a way to stitch that back together. Because honestly, we all know the most important thing is family and friends. And we have to find a way to. to help heal some parts of society because all this is filtered into every family dynamic everyone i haven't heard of a family that hasn't been impacted somewhat on what's going on right now and that's a crazy thought to have out loud right like this has impacted everyone unbelievable yeah dude it's it's um it's really bad that um speaking to the social dilemma i'm glad that we touched that i won't go too deep because that's a whole thing.

But the takeaway after that film, and I watched it twice in two days, when I watched it the first time, I'm like, I have to watch that again, like, soon because it disturbed me for so deeply every minute of the day after that that I had to watch it again just to see if I missed anything

or misinterpreted something because it was so poignant and time sensitive. You know, it felt like we have to be really, really careful with this technology. But the takeaway at the end for me, it didn't seem that the solution is in the situation. Like even the experts on there were like,

we don't know how to get out of this predicament because the whole machinery is built around facilitating this problem. And it's being so successful and so lucrative to continue that facilitation that there's no incentive or power structure in place that can stop it. So what are we going to do?

And I feel like something like a Web 3 disruptive technology that just by dint of the way that it's set up by decentralizing the power structure to the people, to the owners, to the people involved in the use cases, that might be the thing that has to break it. And I hope it is. And I'm kind of bringing this back around

to the pin you put in the conversation earlier, when we got ahead of ourselves because I don't want to not talk about. I can see the messages coming in already after we close up this podcast. And they're like, we didn't bring up NFTs? Yeah, didn't he say that you made like a crazy amount of money and then we never talked about it? You know, I want to make sure your listeners kind of get a bit of that story too. You know, Drew, here's an idea.

You know, Chris Montoya, you won't know that name. I highly doubt. He's a professor from Thompson Rivers and Bees. he left me on the last podcast with time travel that we've already done it. And I was like, come on. You can't leave me on that. He's like, no, no, no, you think about that for a couple months. So you'll have me back on.

And I go, how about this? Drew's got to come back to Canada in three months, right? I mean, unless something crazy drastic happens, which is fine. I hope that happens for you because if down south is where you need to be, that's where you need to be. But let's assume that you come back to Canada, which means you were going to send me a message, which means we get to sit across from one another and talk about NFTs. What's your thoughts on that? I hope that you set a fair amount of time aside because the small version of the NFT conversation is three hours.

Well, here's the thing. I haven't had the small version of the NFT conversation. I don't understand it. I do not get into it. And we're sitting at two hours right now or close to it. And I go, so what are we going to do? We're going to have the 10 minute little speed off of NFTs. No, we can't do that.

We're going to leave everybody hanging, including myself, with somehow you made 100 grand or whatever it is on NFTs. And everyone's going to be going, they're probably yelling at the radio right now going, Sean, they just ask them more. And I'm going to go, no, I think what we should do is in three months' time, we should have you in, we should talk about NFTs,

and you can give me the four-hour version if that's what it takes, because I honestly don't understand it. I feel like an old man to it, because I'm like, really, non-fungible tokens? Like, what the fuck are we doing? But I know you're probably sitting on the inside

just salivating to talk for three hours. And I go, well, let's do it. Let's do it in three months. Let's have you in studio. I'll feed you a couple of Pilsners and we'll carry on. I'm totally down for that. I'll leave a little bit of taste in people's mouth for it to.

If they want to get just a little idea and do their own research, go to the website, openc.io, and type in ape chakas. That's my project. A-P-E-A-P-Shokas. S-H-A-K-A-K-Z. Chacas, A-Z. I can't spell in real time. A-S-H-H-A-Z-E-S-H-H-A-S.

Shaka's Shaka with a Z. If you can decipher that, go check that out, and you'll see for yourself what's going on there at a glance, and it will make you either super interested or super confused or both, and that is exactly what we need to start the conversation. How much you made on NFATES? Approximately $100,000 US dollars in about a week. Okay, well then here's the hope,

and for some reason you're back in a month. so that we can have the conversation sooner and figure out how we can all make 100 grand on on NFTs but regardless Drew I do appreciate you you cutting out some time um before I let you slide I got to do the final segment the crude master uh geez I tell you what to all the listeners find me what you want the crude master final segment to be called because I keep calling it the final question it was the once upon time the final five and for some reason I I I I bounce around between one and five questions. Tonight, we're going to give you one question

because we've been sitting here talking for a bit. And I'm really excited about the NFT conversation in the future. I think that's going to be fun. And hopefully COVID is changed by then, and we don't have to talk about all the rigmarole getting in and out. Either way, I think it'll be a fun conversation. Here's your final question then. Shout out to Heath and Tracy, by the way,

McDonald, supporters of the podcast since the very beginning. if you could sit down and do what I'm doing you get Drew gets you know it's the Drew Weatherhead show he wants to grab one person he wants to pick their brain and see what they got to say who you take it about any topic yeah

about any topic hmm do they have to be alive is this a living person or is this just a wild out there okay living person all right um you know someone who i respected a lot before the pandemic and i feel like we kind of diverged with which side of which occasion we got siloed into and i would love to actually have a person to

person conversation with is sam harris he's a do you know who sam harris is a podcast or intellectual um he's yeah he's known he was a he was a a neurobiologist, very super intelligent guy, but also like a very critical thinker. And I found it strange in the direction he critiqued and the directions he didn't.

And I don't know if that was on purpose because he's not owned by anybody. He's a podcaster. Or if it would, you know, I would like to get kind of like a debrief after the fact from him. Because I still, even though I don't see eye to eye on everything

he says, I still take his opinion as as weighty. He never says something that he doesn't think about, you know what I mean? Sam Harris would be an interesting conversation. I'll give you that. That's the first time Sam has been brought up on this podcast. I can definitely say that in two. Geez, what are you?

It's going to be 250 episodes, give or take. So Sam, Sam would be a fascinating conversation. Regardless. Well, you know, he was one of those guys. I listened to a lot before this and I actually stopped listening to him. Even though I paid for his podcast, I haven't listened to him in maybe like six months because it started getting really pointed towards people who weren't getting unbacker weren't getting vaccinated as well as, I mean, a couple other political things that

we diverged on to the point that I was like, I don't, I don't want to pay for someone to tell me I'm like an idiot. You know what I mean? And I would like to have like an in-person talk with someone like that. Hasn't it been interesting? You know, you bring up a really interesting point. The, you know, for so long, I don't know if it's 10 years, I don't know if it's 20 years, I don't know what it is. But you're on the side with a bunch of people.

You just, you just work. Then this thing called COVID comes in, and you're still on the same side as all these people. And then they bring in the vaccine mandates and all that stuff. And immediately, it flips. and now you're like I'm on I want to be on the side with all all my friends and family that's what I want I want to be outside with all the people that I've respected for so long and yet because they think the way I do and because the way they think they do all of a sudden overnight what feels like overnight you're on the complete opposite side of the spectrum I can't even put that into words how odd that is

because you just said you're like Sam Harris like I'm droid him pay for a subscription and then I just couldn't anymore and that's wild right like for somebody you respect to just you know like this has to be unique like I'd love to know in history a same similar point where it just something happens and overnight like people that have been on the same side for so long just can't talk to one another anymore or just have completely opposite views on it. Isn't that crazy? And it's over something that is like auspiciously, ostensibly, it's something that should be a personal choice, but has been sort of levered into this societal imperative that, you know, you can't make up your own mind on something because society's depending on you.

It's just really strange lever that has never really been used like that. Definitely not in my life done. Yeah. Well, I appreciate you doing this. I appreciate you giving me a couple hours of your, sitting in your vehicle. The next time we do this, NFTs, I want you in studio. I think that would be a really fun way to spend an afternoon. I certainly don't know enough about it.

You can teach me from the ground up. and I appreciate you coming on and I hope wherever you're at here over the next three months you stay safe and know that when you get back in this country there will be better times ahead and there will be some people that will rally around and we will make sure that we find you some people that are like-minded to help help support you I appreciate it Sean and thank you so much for bringing me on