Shaun Newman Podcast - #317 - Ross Kennedy

Episode Date: September 19, 2022

Ross is a logistics & supply chain consultant. We discuss the domino effects of Russia/Ukraine conflict, rail line strikes & preparing for the future.  November 5th SNP Presents: QDM & 2's.   Get your tickets here: https://snp.ticketleap.com/snp-presents-qdm--222-minutes Let me know what you think   Text me 587-217-8500

What's up guys? It's Kid Carson. This is Alexandra Kitty. This is Danielle Smith. Hey, everybody. This is Paul Brandt. Jeremy McKenzie, Ragingdissident.com. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks. Happy Monday back at her again.

We got a great one on tap for you today. Mr. Ross is back on the podcast. He had been highly, highly requested that he come back on. So we did a little work. We made her happen. And, well, it doesn't disappoint. point and I'll let we'll get there in a second let's get on to today's episode sponsors uh first off canadians for truth non-profit organization consisting of Canadians who believe in honesty integrity

and principal leadership and government leadership in government as well as the canadian i almost said leadership anyways now i have government as well as the canadian bill of rights share of rights and freedoms and the rule of just laws um i'm heading this week uh we're we're closing in on on being on stage with Theo Flurry, Joseph Borgo, and Jamie Saleh, as they open up Canadians for Truth media, which should be very interesting to sit on stage here firsthand all about. Looking forward to that. That's happening in Calgary.

And if you're wanting to fall along with all that they do, Canadians4 Truth on Facebook or CanadiensforTruth.ca, you can find out a whole lot more about the group there. And obviously go back, listen to Theo and Joseph on the podcast, or just recently, Ryan Olson was on and he's also part of that group that's helping out and we go a little bit into what they're talking about and what to expect coming on. And obviously by next Monday I'll have a better idea or feel for what's coming. Clay Smiley, the team over at Prophet River, they help me hook up. They help me hook up with Terry Bryant, the Alberta Chiefs Firearms Officer a few episodes ago. They obviously specialize in importing firearms from the United States of America and pride themselves in making this process as easy.

for all their customers as humanly possible. And speaking of customers, they just had their customer appreciation day here this Saturday. It sounds like a bunch of people were out and about at it. It sounds like they had the old barbecue fired up and we're slinging burgers too. Regardless, if you're a gun lover and you're looking for some expertise in that field, go to Profitriver.com and the team there, they'll help you out. They are the major retailer of firearms, optics, and accessories, and they serve all of Canada. means if you're driving through Lloydminster or you live in Lloydminster, make sure you stop

in their showroom. They've moved into a beautiful new spot. The old cooler for anyone who used to do a little bar hop and a little dancing back in the day. I'm not sure kids do that anymore, but once upon a time, that was the happening place here in Lloydminster. Tyson and Tracy Mitchell with Mitch Coe environmentally. They're a family-owned business and has been providing professional vegetation management

services for both Alberta and Saskatchewan and an oil field and industrial sectors since 1998. I always chuckle when I get to this. You know, way back when folks, I worked for Michko when I came in my summertime in between college semesters, and if you want to be put to work, make some good money, and I mean like work, Mitchco was a fantastic company to work for and made a ton of money, and you just, you didn't have to worry about spending it because you work. When you're going, you're going. And I think when you want to get the rubber hits the road, so to speak, you want a job.

Listen, you want to work? Let's go. They're always looking for good people. It's going to slow down for him here into the fall and in the winter seasons. But in saying all that, they're always looking for great people. And if you fit that definition and you're looking for work, give him a call, 780214,4004. Go to MitchcoCorp.ca.ca. Carly Closson was out playing a little noon.

our hockey against Mr. Charles, or playing with him, I guess. His team over at Windsor Plywood. You know, later on this week we got one of the sponsors in, actually, we got Stephen Barber back in the saddle. It was a fun little chat. And, of course, he sat in the studio, and the reason to bring this up is Windsor Plywood built the podcast table, the river table, and everybody just comes in and is like, oh, man, where did you get this done at?

Well, that's Windsor Plywood. That's Carly Claw and the team over there. So whether you're talking mantles, decks, windows, doors, sheds, or a river table for your man cave or, you know, wherever you're, whatever you're beautifying, who knows. Go to Windsor Plywood. If you're in the area, Windsor Plywood here in Lloydminster, that's Carlycloss and his team. They've been fantastic to the podcast since early on in the early days because this table came from the old studio. So it's still holding up. It is a sharp-looking unit.

And once again, I'll say it one last time. That's Windsor Plywood here in Lloydminster. Gardner Management. They're a Lloydminster-based company specializing all types of rental properties to help me your needs. I can safely say from my end, Wade's been a fantastic landlord. And if you're looking, you know, maybe you're looking to upgrade, you need a small office. Or you've got multiple employees and you're looking for a change of venue. They don't get much better than Wade Gartner.

Give them a call today, 780, 808, 50, 25. Now, let's get on in that tail of the tape brought to you by Hancock Petroleum. For the past 80 years, they've been an industry leader in bulk fuels, lubricants, methanol, and chemicals delivering to your farm commercial or oil fuel locations. For more information, visit them at Hancock, Petroleum.com. He's a logistics and supply chain consultant who works at the intersection of national security and private supply chains. You may know him as his Twitter handle, Huntsman. I'm talking about Ross Kennedy.

So buckle up, because here we go. All right, welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Today I'm joined by Ross Kennedy. Ross, great to have you back on. Hey, it's fantastic to be here, Sean. I appreciate it. And the last one was so much fun. It's a good idea to do it again, right? I think so I had a lot of people reach out to me after you came on, really enjoyed the different perspective.

And if you're just tuning in and you're like, what the heck is Sean talking about? Go back to episode 293 before you start this and listen to the first time Ross came on and you can get a feel for who he is and everything there. and then, you know, we dig deeper into some different things. I want to hop right to it, Ross. I don't have you all night. I want to start here because I've been, it seems everywhere I go in Alberta, I keep having a similar conversation.

Everybody's staring at Europe. And I've been talking to a few different people about energy and that type of thing and the winter that possibly could be happening in Europe. And one of the things you said last time you're on was the true levers of power. And then you said, exercise and application of power through physical things that people need. And you were talking about food, water, and energy. Energy to me seems to be a very common topic lately. And I thought maybe we could start there in your thoughts on Europe and wherever you want to go.

Yeah, it's really one of those things, right? I've always framed food, water and energy as last dollar commodities. You know, if a government only has one dollar left to spend a secure peace, prosperity, or frankly, to secure the power of said government, it's most likely going to spend that last dollar on food, water, energy. Whatever of the three is the most emergent need in that given, you know, in that given community. And energy in Europe has been a really, really interesting topic. Europe has been chasing the climate change.

Dragon for a long time was the first in on the ESG. game as far as a market-moving mechanism, the environmental sustainability and governmental agenda. And it's also, for some people, notably, other people, maybe not so much, but home with the WEF, the World Economic Forum, you know, the group out of Davis, Switzerland. So you've got this really community of people that for 20, 25 years have been all in on this idea that, A, climate change is a severe threat for the world. And B, renewables is the way to address it, but they define renewables very narrowly. And so a lot of them will exclude things like nuclear power, which is a zero carbon emission.

Energy source, you do have to deal with the disposal of spent fuel rods. But some of France, with its Gen 3 and Gen 4 nuclear technology, has, I think, dealt with that somewhat effectively. So these technologies are there, but really when you boil it down, it comes down to essentially, you know, notably wind and solar, also things like geothermal or tidal energy if you happen to be on a coast. And at the end of the day, though, a lot of the things that we consume are both energy source and that would be natural gas as a means of powering vehicles, ocean vessels or trucks, but also as a heating source for homes and also as a raw material feedstock for things like nitrogen production for fertilizer, but also for, believe it or not, powering massive industrial centers

that they have in Germany, for example, where BASF's facility makes vitamins and hundreds of other chemicals using natural gas either as a raw material or an energy feedstock, we're both. And so the politics of energy get very, very interesting in a place that for 20 years has done all it can to wean itself off of natural gas, wean itself off of coal, and not be responsible in its own mind for production of emissions that are harming the environment. But as we have seen, really didn't actually eliminate particularly natural gas as a source. They just shifted the burden or shifted the blame for the extraction of that material and the consumption of it to Russia, mainly. So now you have large parts of the industrial centers of Europe, particularly Germany and Switzerland, that are completely dependent on Russian natural gas in order to operate.

So in the premise, I guess, of trying to do good, that's at least the guys, the people who are in power, the intellectual elites, the ones that really truly think they know better than us, made themselves completely dependent on and fragile to a guy that they now, I'll decry as this great threat to humanity, and that's Vladimir Putin, a guy who has obviously shown the willingness, not just now, but going as far back as 2014, to invade a neighboring country that he feels as, you know, rightfully Russian territory. A guy who is very directly connected to political assassination into serious terroristic threats against people who are political adversaries in his own home country. And Europe said, that's okay. We'll use his natural gas because it lets us feel good about ESG. Right. And so these levers of power that once were exercised by the political elite of individual countries or economic zones, they gave away in Europe

to Vladimir Putin. And now are coming to the U.S. You know, the U.S. is shipping record cargoes of liquidified natural gas on vessels from the United States to Europe, shore this up and it's pushing the balance of power in Europe now to a proxy conflict between who's going to bend or break first is the U.S.'s ability to supply natural gas and Europe's ability to compromise with its own and, you know, ESG climate change agenda, is that going to win? Or is Putin's ability to just deny enough natural gas going to bring them to heal? It's been a super interesting dynamic to watch there. It has significant consequences for industrialism in Europe, but also for the larger state of play involving NATO, transatlanticism, Canada, the U.S.

So what do you think is going to happen here this winter? I look at it and I go, it looks like the deep, dark winter is coming. I mean, I don't know. Can they just flick a switch and everything goes back and everything's sunny and, you know, rainbows and everybody's just happy to be on the same side again. Something tells me that's not quite the case, but, you know, when you look at it, it feels like it could be pretty disastrous. And if it gets disastrous, what are the dominoes that fall after that? Well, if you take natural gas again as really a core example, coal being another really good one, coal is something that by and large you can turn back on pretty quick, as long as the facilities themselves that actually turn coal into energy are not

totally offline. Germany has taken a number, decommissioned a number of these plants and facilities. Some of them can be reactivated fairly quickly. But then they have to dig for coal. And if they don't dig for coal, they've got to import coal. They get imported from other parts of Europe. They've got to import it from the United States where we still produce a lot of coal. In some parts of the world, they still have to bring in a lot of coal that comes from Brazil or comes from Australia. So Europe's in a situation where it really has no great choices. it only has a decision to make about which least bad choice impacts it, right? And that's not an optimal position to be in.

It's hilarious to me that people that, you know, certainly, I mean, I barely graduated. High school, barely graduated college, basically only got into college because, you know, I could hit a baseball long ways and was a decent catcher. And they needed one at the college I went to. So, but, you know, so all that to say, my intellectual credentials maybe aren't quite what the day, you know, quite what the Davos crowd is. But it seems to me that Europe now is in a position where it has to either extract more coal and burn more coal or find alternative sources of natural gas.

That's hopefully increasing production in the North Sea, hopefully increasing production from, you know, Norway and being able to bring in from them. Maybe being able to get additional cargoes in from the Middle East that have to transit the Suez Canal, which nothing bad has ever happened in the Suez Canal disrupting shipping, and bring more in from the United States where we have very little to zero indigenous transportation capacity for LNG. So we're dependent on, you know, vessels that come in that are European-owned or Middle Eastern owned. So there's a lot of these levers and things that just have to go right, where if the worst happens and Europe really does have a cold winter,

It looks like they're going to. Certainly crop production was really impacted by various combinations of drought and also reduced temperatures throughout a lot of parts of Europe this year. The tradeoff is going to be what do we need to survive, not what do we need to thrive from an economic standpoint? And that's a terrible position that Europe has put itself into. They're wholly to blame for that. And that's part of the geopolitical game theory that really in other ways the United States, Canada, faces as well on our side of the pond.

Maybe it's not natural gas related, but in different ways. It's a choice that is at what point do we, at what point do we out of pure ideology, at what point out of just maybe sheer political and economic malpractice, do we submit ourselves to the will of someone who has declared themselves to be an adversary? And just as Europe will now have to reckon with those very difficult choices, it looks like this winter to import and extract more coal, to import and extract more natural gas, both at prices that are significantly higher. You know, famously we're seeing these stories come out in the UK and in Germany and in Poland, people with energy bills or 5 or 10x what they were in the previous month. that has a downstream impact on economies and political circumstances in ways that we can't always predict, but we can broadly, directionally, kind of point at and say, yeah, that's bad. It means instability for the political parties in power. It means instability for economic systems, particularly an interconnected one like the EU.

And now you've got infighting amongst the members about what to do best. You have countries that will decide to do what's best for their country instead of the Eurozone. There's a whole lot of reckonies that happen. The day energy gets 5 or 10x more expensive than it was year over year. From a North American standpoint, do you see any, like when you talk about all these exports coming in the United States, I think the only, if I remember this correctly, the only LNG ports we have or way for us to get our LNG out is through the states. If memory serves me correct on that. So we ship our next. I believe that's correct.

Everything pipelines or rails. that's right so we go to the cell anyways i look at it and i go as they have this huge huge crisis sorry they're going to lean on well i mean geez germany was just over in canada asking for us you know basically can you help us and i don't know what trudeau said nothing great from a canadian standpoint i'm sure um but you look at it and you go this winter although could be horrific for a portion of the world in north america aren't you going to be leaned on to just provide as much energy as you humanly possibly can? I mean, the United States has its own problems.

I mean, rolling blackouts in a couple of places and different stories going like that are certainly not ideal. But is it going to be a huge advantage to the North American side on what's going to happen over in Europe this year, this fall, this winter? Yeah, I'll premise this by saying it would be if, our two countries had people in charge that were first and foremost driven by the question of what is best for Canada, what is best for the United States, what is best for the alliance of anglosphere countries, those that are either UK or UK adjacent, which of course the U.S. very much is with our incredibly deep historical and economic and political ties, you know, to the UK. So if we fail to understand at a leadership level, which I think we have

failed to understand this so far that the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, essentially the Five Eyes countries are in the crosshairs of those countries that have tremendous raw material resource advantages, raw material processing advantages, Russia, Iran. China, mainly as the big three, they have said, look, it is in our best interest that the entire world is fixed in opposition against the five ice countries. And New Zealand, I don't know that Jacinda Adairn's ever going to wake up and understand what the situation is there. I think she's more concerned with being popular and being liked by the UN. But New Zealand, just as much, is very much in the crosshairs. And to the extent that our leaders don't realize that is driving a lot of the motivations and behaviors that they have here.

In Canada, for example, Canada is incredibly abundant in the materials that it needs to be not only wholly self-sufficient, but a massive exporter of all three critical fertilizer ingredients, which are NP and K, nitrogen, and phosphorus and potassium. And famously, Canada is an enormous exporter to the U.S. and to the world of potash, but also as a tremendous producer of natural gas, which is used to make ammonia nitrogen, or refine other nitrogen sources in the things like urea, which we need not only as a raw material for nitrogen production, you know, for nitrogen fertilizer, but also for death diesel exhaust fluid, which our trucks all need to run now. So Canada has this abundance of resources that where it can convert. convert quite literally energy and mineral resources into food. And what does Fidel Castro, excuse me, Justin Trudeau do with this wealth of productive capacity, he says we're going to cut 30% nitrogen

utilization in Canada, a country that is by and large dependent on wheat as its primary cereal crop. and he says we're going to reduce the essential fertilizer source that wheat requires, which is nitrogen, by 30%. And if the Canadian Prucker movement at this point is probably a better way to call it, if what is happening in the Netherlands with the farmers, if similar food and agriculture riots that are happening in like Sri Lanka, Lanka, for example, major disruption that's really simmering beneath the surface from a news standpoint, not yet on the radar, but will be soon in Panama. If we look at these things,

the common connection is that the political leaders have decided that there is a do-good for the world agenda that matters more than feed-the-people agenda. And in the United States, we're not seeing it yet with the fertilizer piece, the same way we're directly seeing it in the Netherlands and in Canada. But we're seeing something almost as stupid, which is this goal that we're going to cut, you know, further cut emissions by a certain amount. Unilaterally, of course, we're not actually going to hold anybody else accountable to it. It's just going to be us putting the knife to our own throat to save the planet. And we're going to limit natural gas expansion and production. We're going to limit crude oil extraction and refining capacity.

for things like gasoline, refined petroleum products, diesel fuel. We're going to limit all of these things that have a direct downstream impact on limiting our ability to produce food. And to the extent that we are cooperating as countries, as neighbors, as, you know, the diabetic underbelly of America's, you know, North American stop at, right? To the extent that we are agreeing and working on things, it is in some really stupid ways. For example, what was a good project, the Transcanadian Pipeline, if you look at Keystone, Keystone XL, would have really had tremendous economic benefit for both countries. Canada increases its productive exports of natural gas. It increases its own methane caps. It gives it the ability to produce more oil out in the Alberta oil patches.

And the United States gets to import additional natural gas that can be partially consumed domestically for additional manufacturing, partially exported to friendly countries. So in the case of the export, it certainly benefits both nations directly and indirectly as well, particularly if we would be, I don't know, sending that to Europe right now. If we take all that and we add that up, we look at, well, now all of a sudden the governor of North Dakota and his industrial commission and a couple of his high priests of the interiors, Energy Mafia in North Dakota, you know, I've said, hey, we've got this new project, right? It's not going to be Keystone XL. It's not going to be that. But we're going to reactivate the Bison pipeline and essentially achieve part of the goal of working with, you know, so TransCanadian, of course, has changed us name to TC Energy. Now you've got TC Energy, which was TransCanadian, working directly with North Dakota to

maneuver natural gas into the U.S. through existing infrastructure in such a way that. that our own regulatory apparatus can't stop it because there's existing permitting. They don't need new permitting to do it. But instead of deferting that natural gas to productive use in North America, 100% of the natural gas that would be produced in this new project that the North Dakota Industrial Commission just announced a week or two ago would go to export out of Port Arthur. And that's fine except for the fact that the counter parties that are said

to be involved in this transaction are a Chinese Canadian joint venture that are involved in the extraction and sales of this natural gas into this new framework. And the buyer on the other end of the deal is a Chinese company. And it's SinoPEC and it's one of the other energy companies in China that Hunter Biden is directly involved with. That, you know, Bohai River or whatever it is that the joint venture that they have that was set up with the chinese nationals to facilitate business dealings between the biden family and china two energy companies that are invested in exist at each end of the transaction one at one at one at the other and it's all facilitated through canadian and american infrastructure networks and by the governors and provincial leaders

of our two nations that just say look the only thing that matters is the dollar and getting this natural gas moving rather than are we choosing the right partners or weakening our competitive stances or we weakening our alliance that that is a way another way a different way and how russia is exploiting natural gas but no less difficult or dangerous for the two countries to reckon with of how our own leaders are choosing to sell us out or choosing to cripple us and hobble us by on one hand going to the Church of Climate Science and saying, we have to do this for the environment, we have to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. But then at the same time, actively aiding and abetting and facilitating a hostile adversary

country that has done nothing to screw with both of our nations for the last 20 years and enable them to increase their consumption of a fossil fuel that they desperately rely on and desperately need. China imports like 90%, I think it is, of its hydrocarbon consumption. and so all of that natural gas is producing Canada that's piped through the U.S. and exported from the U.S. is going to end up on vessels that's bound for China. So they have found a way

to get exactly what they need by using us to do it, even though we're not allowed to use it ourselves. That is 100% right. I know that when you post this and people start listening to it, I'll know exactly when that happens because I'll actually hear the sound of heads exploding in Alberta, right?

And in Saskatchewan, and in all, like, the middle parts of Canada that aren't, you know, really politically aligned with the idiots on the coasts. And they're going to say, what is going on in these two countries to make these decisions? What is going on? Like, what is going on? I've heard you, I haven't heard you, sorry. I've read a lot of your different threads, you know, about how China and Russia in particular, don't operate in a three-year kind of profit cycle.

They operate in this long-term thinking. And part of that is infiltrating their enemies to the nth degree to exploit everything they got to benefit China. That's basically, I don't know if that's just an opposite, but that's what it kind of feels like. That's pretty much what it boils down to. China is not all-knowing, all-seeing omnipotent. People that build the China threat up to be this impossible, insurmountable dragon

that be strides of the galaxies that the U.S. and our allies can't possibly stand against. They've lost their minds. China is incredibly vulnerable and weak in some really significant ways. But what they have done very, very well, in both Canada and the U.S. is they have co-opted the interests of our elites, our existing elites. And I use that term not in a friendly way to suggest that they are actually smarter or better or whatever. And just that they are the elites because right now they control the institutions. They control the levers of political governance.

And have for a while they're really dug in and entrenched. And they're wholly sold out for different reasons on this idea that what's good for China is good for our. countries, China can kick and scream all day and say no matter what happens, we're coming for you guys. And that's essentially what Xi Jinping is done. It's essentially what the young princelings, the the Xi Jinping faction that control, currently control the CCP, it's essentially what they've said is that we are coming for you and you cannot stop us. And the 21st century will be the Chinese century. And other people have lined up behind them, large parts of the world have because of money, because of a sense of self-preservation,

because of a sense that even if they're a bully and a tyrant, they are at least a stable, predictable one. That perception may or may not be true, but it is real. That is something that people are acting on. And even here in the U.S., even in Canada, where our leaders definitely have every reason to stand up and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, we need to do what's best for us.

We need to do its best for our closest allies. We're not doing that. And I think the biggest reason for that is that for the last 50 years, 60 years, 70 years, so many people that are now in charge began to be inculcated and indoctrinated with this idea that the institutions that our countries are, have separately, but also have in common, that we, we that we are built on principles that are no longer worth defending. And, you know, in Canada, it follows more of a constitutional monarchal type of framework, you know, really more in the spirit of what's in the Magna Carta. The U.S. Constitution and political framework also descends from the Magnacarta, although it's filtered a little bit differently. We ended up with the Constitutional Republic

where we have a president, not a monarch. But it's, at the end of the day, the fundamental premise of the Magnicard and of the two political systems that our nations operate under and have successfully cooperated under for a couple hundred years now. You know, I mean, really, since the Brits and Canadians burn the White House down, but we'll let that go. A lot of, a lot of histories happen in between now and then. Snuck up on us, man. Terrible.

Don't piss the Canadians off. Don't piss the Canadians off. They will absolutely, don't take away their little bat. Don't take away their maple syrup and they're Timmy Hortons and you'll be fine. All right. Otherwise, they're skating down. They're waiting to the winter. They skate down.

They'll attack you with hockey sticks and fire. But the common premise of our two countries that these people have grown up being indoctrinated with. And now they're in charge. And we're seeing the fruits of that is that individual liberty, that the rights of life, you know, in the case of It was life, liberty, and ownership of property, private property. And the case of the framers of the Declaration of Independence, it was life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But that these values that the individual has value above the collective,

that we should create systems that, to the best of our ability, uphold individual sovereignty and uphold the sanctity of the people versus the will to power of tyranny or the absolute monarchy, whatever it may be, when we stopped deciding that it was worth defending those things, when the only people who really truly believed we should defend those things are the ones that are being sent off and dying in conflicts. When that happens, we are weakened in such a way that today we're talking about energy as the method of control or food as the method of control tomorrow it could be something else but

the fundamental premise remains the same is that on one side is the absolute will to power on by any means necessary no matter how terrible on the other side is two proud nations you know really five six seven proud nations that once believed in something strong at the leadership level but no longer seem to be willing to act on that because they have larger more global ambitions. We're going to save the world or the World Economic Forum. And we know it's best for people. We want to make people take medicine that has a little bitty microchip center. They can ensure compliance, right? All of these things is that we are ruled now by a cooperative, if not directly colluding, but certainly a cooperative, because their ends more or less.

less align, group or oligarchy of cabals and political and economic interests that, for their own reasons, you know, have decided that it's not worth defending the individual. It's not worth making sure that, you know, the man on the main street and his family are able to eat and, you know, heat their homes in the winter for a reasonable price. It's now about what's in the interest of the greater good. And so when we're concerned about everyone, we're not concerned about anyone individually. You think that's going to change? I mean, here in Canada, Pierre Pollyev just became the new conservative leader federally and certainly has a lot of energy behind him, I would say. You know, you can't speak too quick that he's going to walk in and just become the next prime minister. But there's a lot of people believe that. There's a lot of the country that certainly is behind him. I know there's people that doubt it too, right, obviously.

But there's a lot of push behind them, whether or not that can happen. Here, closer to home in Alberta, you know, you got with Jason Kenny stepping down, you got less than a month now, and we're going to have a new premier apologies for the, you know, the course of until May and then there will be another election. And the one who's in the lead right now, Daniel Smith, is running off of the Alberta Sovereignty Act, which basically is we're going to do, we're going to stand for a lot of what you were just talking about, right? We're going to pull everything back to Alberta.

We're going to take everything out of Ottawa's hands. And if we don't like certain things, and I'm being very general about this, we're just not going to enforce it. We're not going to do that. Now you've got to get into the fine specifics of what the acts talking about. But that's the general consensus. When you hear things like that and you look at the United States,

for instance, you got, you know, 2024, you're going to have, you know is he going to be Donald Trump is it going to be who is he going to be Ross I have no idea can this change in an awful hurry in the United States it certainly can can can it not I mean geez Louise whoever hops in can really make a feels like they can they can flip a page pretty darn quick and can that feels a little more awkward because once again and with prime minister they literally can be prime minister for life not that that hopefully will ever happen but I mean, there's no term, right? When you hear different things going on, I mean, I have a sense of optimism.

Do you go, oh, there's still plenty of game left to be played? Or are you going, yeah, maybe? I do default. And as a first principle above all, that in different ways, but in very similar ways, Canadians and Americans, have this really tremendous ability to course correct. You know, it's an apocryphal quote. I don't know if Churchill actually ever said it,

but it's certainly one that's famously attributed to him that you can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they've done everything else wrong or after they've tried everything else, right? And at some level, you know, that quote does, it could also be said about Canadians, because we've seen it throughout the history of Canada. We will be nice until it's time to not be nice,

and probably we will let it get well past the point of being nice, right? Where the sociopaths well and truly have controlled levers of power, and then the longer you let that go on, the more violent that the response will probably be and that rises in opposition to it. But what Alberta has, in particular is it is a tremendously important province for a few reasons, but one is its geographic location. It's not quite square in the middle of the country, of course, but basically everything

that imports into Canada has to come through the West Coast ports. It comes through Prince of Vancouver, and the railroads have to crisscross Alberta. There's no way around it, right? It's, I think, a function of the fact that the middle provinces are all, like, fairly wide and extremely tall when you look at a map, but there's no way around it, right? The CP and the CN railroads have to move through Alberta. And there's ways that rail can be leveraged to make that painful, or at least bend the will of the nation to the will of the province. Alberta is also a phenomenally important energy and food production resource generator. And so it has the ability to play an outsized role relative to its population, relative to its economic clout, compared to, say, like an Ottawa, for example.

And the power that is inherent in Alberta versus in Ontario or British Columbia, is really phenomenal in the sense that it can play a punch above its weight by traditional economic or political metrics in a way that very few American states can. New York to some extent tries. Florida, under Ron DeSantis and Texas under Greg Abbott, have certainly done a pretty phenomenal job of that in different ways. California on the other side of things tends to punch above its weight

as far as being the tail that wax the dog in a lot of ways in the U.S. But the application of power, if a guy like Daniel Smith has truly committed to the idea that... A woman, Daniels. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Danielle. Danielle, that shows us how much I'm familiar with the individuals, right? That's why I speak in first principles, not details, right? The idea that a province in the case of Canada,

a state in the case of the U.S., and first and foremost, put its own interest in that of its people and its residents first, seems so radical to people. But we had a civil war in the United States 150 years ago to settle that question. It is fairly recent history here in the U.S. of what is state's rights

and the equivalent, of course, in Canada being what is a province, rights and a larger framework of the national governance. And it is a good and necessary thing for an almost radical personality or radical mindset to come along and says we control these resources. And we are no longer going to be subordinate to the will of people who are hundreds of miles away, thousands of miles away, and that think they know better than us, what's best for us right here in our church. or colleges or schools or communities, hospitals, neighborhoods, whatever it may be.

And we're going to use the resources that we have at our disposal to try to correct that balance a little bit. In the U.S. state's rights has sometimes been used for very ugly purposes. We were among the last in the world to ban the institution of slavery, which is a horrible and terrible thing. But institutionalized slavery as a terrible thing was fundamentally premised and endured on the idea that states have the ability to determine for themselves of what's right or wrong. That's a tremendous misstep on our part of the country. But I will say this, we killed more of ourselves than any war killed of us to settle that answer. And that's a terrible way to course correct towards maybe the side of moral righteousness. but we had to do that.

So even in the U.S., when we get it wrong, eventually we do, I think, get it right. I think Canada does too. And so it is a good and necessary thing to see these strong, in some cases, oppositional divides emerge, where we are forced into a reckoning. We can't go along and get along anymore

because an easy current that we can all swim in the middle of usually means that we are under the control of people who have no incentive to keep our best interests at heart before their own. And so that that accountability, that that statement of purpose of our state, our province, our city, our community comes before, if push comes to shove, it comes before the will of a few elected leaders in their bureaucratic regime that upholds them. You know, I'll go with the side of the local people every time even if I don't necessarily agree with it simply because that is the way we preserve these institutions that have kept our nation so safe and prosperous for all these years.

Well, we look from afar down to, you know, you mentioned Florida and Texas in particular over the last, you know, it's been more than two years now. We won't be jealous that we have brisket, bro. You look and you go like, where's our leader that's going to, you know, stand firm and, and weather the storm, so to speak. Because, you know, when you look at what Florida, Ron DeSantis has done, he is a beacon now for people to, oh, we can do that, you know. And I think here in Canada, we look in the West and we're like, oh, and he is one. Like, you get one, you're going to have, you know, he already started. starting to see the effect of even Daniel Smith's campaign on Saskatchewan, Scott Moe,

on what he's starting to talk about, you know, and different things like that. You're starting to see it spread. And it only takes one to just stand there and go, yeah, we're not going to do this anymore. We're done playing games. We're done, you know, just saying a few words or writing a letter or whatever. We're done. And the thing is, is you can see a bunch of people kind of look around and go, can we do that? I don't think we can do that, right?

That's become the conversation. Can we actually do that? Are we allowed? Are we allowed ourselves to say we're just not going to do that? And the thing is, is, yeah, I think, you know, at some point, you get pushed far enough and you talk about being so freaking nice. That is the Canadian, right? You get past like 10 steps past. You're like, wait a second. Yeah, we're mad now. And no, we're not going to go any further. And yet that seems radical, even though they pushed you so bloody far. Right. It's just, it's insane almost.

It is so funny to me that Canada as a nation, for example, so embraces a sport as violent and concussive and exciting and wild as hockey. Right. The last thing I would ever want if I was hockey players to look across and see the freaking Maple Leaf, right? and at the same time be so passive in some ways that like asserting its rights like you know most Canadians will assert that the space in front of the goal is mine before they will assert that this you know these dollars or you know lunies or whatever goose stable coin you guys are using these days before they is before they assert though that that that that the power of that currency the power of that nation, whatever it may be, belongs to them.

But that tells me that there is something unique and interesting and exciting inside the Canadian character, just as there is in the United States in different ways, right? And at some point, at some point of people will be pushed too far. And at some point, I'm not of a revolutionary mindset. I don't believe there's actually going to be a true kinetic civil war. right, but I do think we aren't a cold sevor in a lot of ways in our respective nations. I do think that there are factions within the two nations that are broadly aligned to each other through ideological agreement on certain fundamental principles.

And so while I don't know that it's ever going to get kinetic, I don't think that there's ever going to be pistols at dawn and people taking political leaders hostage and militaries deployed against the population on their own soil. I do think we are in a cold civil war already. It's certainly a battle over control of the institutions and over control of resources and over what is what is what does fundamentally belong to the people as a body politic, what belongs to the nation as a concept, what belongs to the individual, and what belongs to a self-appointed in some ways, self-dealing, certainly,

group of political and business and corporate elites that have manipulated, control of these resources for their own benefit. There is still a reckoning to come on that. And in the U.S. and Canada, we both have to wrestle with some really different fundamental concepts about what that means for us at the local level. How far are we willing to be pushed, right? Are we going to park our asses in front of that goal and shield the, you know, shield the goalie to try to, you know, try to score?

In a baseball analogy, which I'm more familiar and comfortable with, you know, are we going to lean out over the plate and let a hundred mile an hour fastball and drill us in the ribs, because that's what's good for the team, right? If we're going to do these things, if we're going to say that, you know, we glorify these things in our heroes, we glorify these things in our athletes, we glorify these things and our movies, but we're not willing to glorify them in our jobs or in our political systems, then we have a serious disconnect that we need to address. If Top Gun Maverick can be the biggest movie of the year because this idea that a 50

year old fighter pilot has the ability to basically bend the institution in the United States military to his will in order to achieve a mission objective. If we're going to celebrate that and believe in that and say a guy like Maverick is a heroic archetype and my God, is that worth emulating, then it is incumbent on as many of us as possible to identify the companies and the individuals that are following a similar ethos to that. and see that they are successful as a counterbalance and a counterweight from the cultural and economic and political side to the current system. None of these people have to be perfect. You don't have to follow perfect people. They can be sinners. They can be terrible human beings in

some ways. But if they are by and large a step in the right direction, if these projects that are, wow, gosh, man, maybe there's an arguable, deficit to the environment, but a million more people are going to eat and live and thrive because of it, if those are the tradeoffs that we have to make, then we have to make them right now. We don't always have to make them, but we do have to make them now because we have for so long made the tradeoff in the opposite direction that we will trade comfort and safety and security for some semblance of control over our own lives and what we care about. More kids should play hockey, by the way. there's some valuable life lessons in that sport.

Sorry. The audience is going. Where do they go? I'm just thinking on that thought, you know, like how much comfort we have in society right now. You know, I've,

on the hockey note, I've said, you know, that's what I look for in a politician. Listen, I've had great leaders in hockey that I would go through a brick wall for. Like I would,

you go to war for. You go to war for, you go, and I go, why don't any of those people go into politics? And everybody has their coin dance or right, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Whatever, it doesn't matter. But we have the hands off the wheel and we've traded a lot of things for comfort. And comfort is, I don't know, it slowly takes away everything, doesn't it?

Because, you know, you look at what in the string of interviews I've had in the last couple of weeks, Ross, like just talking about, you know, saving the world. Let's just say Ross and Sean want to save the world. And we believe CO2 is one of the huger's culprits. Is our idea then to go to solar, wind, and just get rid of everything else? because, I mean, you know, that is really pushed very hard. And then the more conversations I have, it's like, well, actually, if you want to get rid of CO2, probably nuclear. Like, I mean, you might as just start hammering out the nuclear power plants. And then you start, okay, but I mean, man, nuclear is pretty dangerous.

Chernobyl. I mean, oh. And then you start going through the stats of all these things and you start dealing with the waste and you start talking about all these things. Like, oh, why isn't this talked about more? And you go, there's no way a Joe Blow like my. can figure out that nuclear just seems like I never thought I'd say this a lot like me it seems like it'd be a pretty good thing for not only a lot of people but the environment at the same time and if I can figure that out in the course of a week and a half that means the

people at the top know that but are blindfully not going to do anything about it yeah 100% right because nuclear is an enabling technology. It is a technology that has the ability within a relatively small footprint to provide a phenomenal force multiplier and energy output. And anything that's a force multiplier that produces a dividend or a margin, particularly within a supply chain footprint or standpoint, is something that is often feared because the more there is a surplus of something, whether it's food or whether it's energy, the more there is abundance.

It no longer concentrates power in the hands of a few stakeholders. It enables more people to enjoy the benefits because the natural economic principle of supply and demand takes over. And so if we have abundant nuclear energy, then we have an abundant resource that enables people to put their money and their productive capacity towards other uses. and the more you liberated people to think above the first and second levels of Maslow's hierarchy, the more they begin to think about higher order things like,

who the fuck is this guy that thinks he can say this about my life? Who is this person that thinks they can tell my kid this in school? Who is this mayor in my community that thinks bringing this in the case of Brandon Boshenski and Grand Forks? So you think this is the big push for eating bugs, getting away from meat? Yeah, I'll blow some minds right now on the concept of the bugs. The bugs are useful because they can be grown indoors. It's an industrialized, controllable protein source that you don't need farmers for. It doesn't matter that it's bugs.

It's not about making people eat the bugs, right? As a dehumanization thing, it's about the fact that the bugs are fundamentally If you look at protein per pound, cricket powder, protein powder that's derived from crickets is among the most protein and energy dense feedstocks for food production in the world. It's more efficient on a per ounce or per pound basis to put protein into a human body than beef is. Now, that's protein. You get all sorts of other amazing benefits to your health. for eating beef, right, or for eating animal proteins and whole foods, right?

But the thing of it is, is that if we must produce food that comes from actual live animals, rather than a lab, rather than a factory, right? That means we cannot do it inside of a mega-urbanized area where people can be controlled and monitored much more easily the way China has done with a large part of its population. The whole eat the bugs thing, the whole, we're going to save the planet by reducing cow farts and burps and nitrogen consumption on the farm. Right. Like that whole thing is fundamentally the application of supply chain science to control of people. Because it is more, you can produce with a combination of mechanized insect farming and intermediate material production.

and lab grown meat, you can do all of that in a relatively small footprint and an enormously high scale. And you can technically give people everything they need to eat or to thrive and to survive, right? But you no longer need farmers to do that. You no longer need railroads to do that. You know, or need truckers, really, to do that

because you've concentrated production in such a close proximity to a massive volume of people that now the only thing that matters is who controls the food production, who controls the means of distribution, and that is it. They are the only ones that have any say so. But if you have a food system like we have now that relies on energy that's produced over here from a group of stakeholders that may or may not be politically controllable, and it relies on raw materials that come from over here,

and we're going to transport grain grown from that farm and synthetic fertilizers that are produced by that company here. We're going to combine all that together, and then we're going to push that into various stakeholders that produce amino acids and produce DDGs or soybean meal and produce all of these things that we need, and then that's going to be fed to an animal, and then that animal is going to go through another set of stakeholders

to be processed and distributed to the retail level. You have a lot of players involved in that game that have agency, that have their own political centers of power, the farmers role in different centers of power than truckers. And they're coming from all these different provinces, right? And you have this interplay that makes a consistent control very, very, very difficult. But the day you industrialized the entire food supply chain and concentrated and co-located close to the main production centers, you've isolated and essentially cut, off the potentially dissident centers of power and eliminated them and their input into the body politic because they no longer have a productive capacity that matters to the individual. And so the whole Eat the Bugs thing, the whole WDF thing, all this horse shit that that

Klaus Schwab and his freaking Darth Vader, you know, like evil guy get up that he wears and his, I mean, dude, like that guy straight out of central casting for like the evil over Lord, right? But if you, you know, I don't really care about Klaus Schwab, like, like he's just a man. And a man can be killed, a man can be compromised, any man can be a hero. He's just a guy, right, for better or worse. But the ideals, the system that he advocates for and represents is fundamentally a system that is that is about concentration of control and is in a few of hands as possible. And then the hurting and thin slicing of the global population. into more controllable clusters.

That is about the scariest fucking thought I've heard in a long time. And it's well put. I mean, I hadn't thought of- That's all it is. It's the leveraging of supply chains and logistics. The thing that I know is maybe something about. But it's the natural evolution of how do you control people? You control the things that feed them,

that keep them warm, that nourish them, that actualize them. So we did it backwards. We started with the actualization piece, the entertainment, the higher order, the collegiate, you know, educations, the go to school. If you want to have a good job, if you want to a good job, you got to have a good life and go to Starbucks in the morning, all these things, right? Like they took over the institutions first, and now they've reverse engineered their way back into how do we control the means of production such that the farmers and the truckers, the blue collar guys, the welders, all of them, no longer have any say in the process. because we don't need them anymore. We've eliminated the need for natural or natural adjacent production and it's all in a lab. And it's all in the factory.

So on that on that thought then, if you're if you're not one of those people, you're on the other side. You're sitting here. You're listening to Sean and Ross have this lovely chat where my brain is going like, holy shit. This is about as dark as it gets right here, Ross. You go, okay. So what, what do you do that? I mean, the trucker convoy in Canada, the first. farmers over in Dutch, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

We get the point. And they've shown different ways to really be like, go fly a kite. We ain't doing this anymore. But yet, the cricket farm, you know, these things are being built, the beyond meat. Like, all these things are coming. And they just keep trying it, you know, the 30% emissions rejection. The, you know, you mentioned the cows burps and farts. Like, I mean, they're just everything they can do, you know, whether,

it's, I just, I keep going on. It's because we don't educate the population well enough on, on the importance of farming or gun ownership or, uh, you know, all these different things. The, the, the nutrition that comes from eating meat in general, right? Like, absolutely. Like all these things add up to a lot of different, uh, really key points of life and of a civilization and everything else. And yet they're all, all under attack right now. It's not like I walk out the door and there's bombs going off, but like you said, a cold war?

Yeah, like all of them are under attack. So if you know that and you're sitting there, what is the chess move to start, you know, you talk about close Schwab. I just look at them like it's a soccer game almost, you know, not a soccer guy, but it makes sense to me. We've all been sitting on the bench for the first half, and they're up like 16-0-0.

It's not that we can't go play, and we got some hell of players. We do get to play. So what do you do? How do you step in the game and how do you start to make changes or push back so that the farmer is still there? And the welder, the plumber, the et cetera,

still has a voice. The common person still has a voice, and it's not all these centralized powers because when you talk about the supply chain of just protein, that makes actually a lot of sense. I'm like, God, that is creepy as sure. shit, but it makes sense.

And yet, I don't want it to go there ever. No, I mean, and it's, so if we're going to use a soccer analogy, the, the answer is clearly to fake an injury until the referees rule in our favor. You know, I'd rather use a bit of a, and really a hockey analogy doesn't really work here either, right? Like, we're not going to drop the gloves and peel the jerseys over the head and away we go, right? Actually, you know what, if I tell you what, you can. You go back about 30, 40 years.

That's exactly what we'd do. We would dress the biggest goons and we'd beat the pulp out of everyone. And then what would happen is they'd have nobody left and we just win the game. I've actually witnessed this in my lifetime multiple times. You just get down and you're looking over on the other team. And it's literally like seven guys left on each side. You're like, oh, we'll go play. And they ain't going to play tough anymore because you've literally beat the shit out of their entire team.

And the old boys will tell you other stories exactly like. that anyway 100% it's it is one of my favorite uh you know i love the show letter kerry right i think i consider letter kenne next to maple syrup probably canada's greatest export in the last 15 years um but but like you know so shorzy just came out right like the offshoot of it and and and it's i was watching my wife who you know as american is like what the hell is this and i'm like hans just just go in the other room it's the it's the it's the most beautiful amazing celebration of everything weird and Canadian, right? Like, it's amazing.

And in the same way, Duck Dynasty is amazing for, like, American. No, it's a way bit more clever and creative than that. But one of the things I do love about it, like, if you recall one of the episodes, is, you know, his whole thing, if you can't, if you can't win, don't play, right? And if you say that to someone that sounds like a quitter thing, but their whole version of if you can't win, don't play was like take the biggest goons they could and just start a fight in the hallway before, you know, before the game even starts.

And I loved it, right? It's because the whole thing was, and then again, you see that lesson in the last episode where they say, you know, this team is, man, the Souser is so fucking good, and they're going to beat us. And they're getting the shit kicked out. And what do they do?

They put their three goons in on one line change, and everything is like, we're going to beat the shit out of the other team. And they do. And all of a sudden, they start coming back, and they put the fear of God into them. And that is a, last resort option. But the threat of that always does have to be on the menu. And it always does

have to be in the game theory calculations of the opponent, right? Is that at some point, at some point these guys may just drop the gloves and away we go. Prior to that, though, we do have a lot of really powerful things that we can do. And at the risk of pissing off a nation of people that are part of the Commonwealth, the answer I think is found in Irish, you know, Irish if you've ever heard of that concept. And the concept of Irish democracy is very simple, is that when Ireland as a country in general was still governed by the United Kingdom, any edict that came out from the throne

or from parliament just was, it wasn't protested. You know, the IRA took a different view, but in large parts of Ireland, right? The, they just didn't comply. They just very, very, very quietly just didn't comply. just didn't comply. They kept going about their lives. They complied to the minimum standard to keep them off the radar, but they made it so difficult to govern them at scale that eventually it became just an astonishingly unprofitable enterprise. And there is the ability of that still in Canada and

the United States. We still have enough critical mass of people that have not complied on the issue of the vaccine or they've not complied on the issue of, you know, I don't like what certain things are being taught in school with regards to maybe gender roles and children at six years old. And all of these little ways, people are finding it in them to, in some cases, push back, but in some cases just very silently, they just say, go to hell. I'm not going to do it. I'm going to continue to eat me. You're not going to make me eat the bugs.

I'm not going to live in a pot. I'm going to continue to live in my 3,000 square foot house or whatever it may be. But that first and foremost, I think is the answer is just silent, persistent compliance with all of the stupid things that they say, because at the end of the day, I fundamentally believe the average person, if they're properly motivated, can be more persistent in their lack of compliance than the powers that be can be persistent in their application of control. Another thing that people really need to do is understand that there is the ability with a really truly a bare minimum of cooperation. We don't have to be homesteaders, man. We don't all have to go off and have like our own chickens in our yard and raise our own beef in the backyard. And then we've got corn over here and we've got this over there. And we've got to be fully self-sufficient, a little five acre ecosystem.

We don't have to do that either. Right? We don't have to do that. the ability for humans who we are fundamentally generalists, we're equipped to do a lot of things, right? Our teeth are capable of, you know, omnivorous eating. Our bodies are equipped for both running and for bulking up and becoming powerful, you know, movers of things. We're highly adaptable, right?

So we can specialize in some ways, be generalists and others. And we also have the ability, and this is the most important, to network with and cooperate with one another. in ways where our own self-interest are maximized, but at the same time, we fulfill, you know, and meet the needs of the collective to make sure that we are somewhat stable as a body politic. And people should continue to look for ways to do that.

Instead of buying ground beef and steak at the store, find a farmer in your area that raises cows and find a butcher shop that will process that. and do custom slaughter and cooperate with other people to, if this person makes jelly and this person's got like dairy cows and they can legally produce milk, support those people that have chosen to specialize in some way and fulfill a need that you have

and build your personal supply chain cooperatively, right, to such an extent that you don't need as much, you don't need the resources. of the system. And if enough people do that over a prolonged period of time, you begin to wear down the ability of the system to control you. 80% of your life is autonomous.

You still pay your taxes. You quietly go about your business. You quietly vote in the elections and you do what you can, but you don't get sucked into this, you know, these games, these division games that they want us to play. Because at the end of the day, like even the craziest purple-haired, you know, person from Tumblr or whatever, TikTok, that has these very, uh,

sort of avant-garde ideas about art or sexuality or whatever, that person still has to eat to survive, same way I do. And for those of you, you can't see, you know, we're not on camera, although Sean, they're looking at each other, I definitely don't have purple hair. I don't have hair at all. You don't have hair at all? I don't have hair at all.

So if I can agree with that individual around a fundamental thing, then now we have at least one point of connection that we can agree on. And maybe I can grow the cow, and then they have a skill. set that maybe I don't know about, but I can tap into and pay them for, right? And now we've mutually made a connection that makes us valuable to one another, whatever else we may disagree on. That type of thing, silent noncompliance and then finding in the most free market, invisible hand, spirit of Adam Smith way, that that individual thing that that person does well,

and we meet their needs, they meet our needs. And maybe that's where the agreement stops, but at least it's there. Those two things more than anything. I think if we can just do that long enough and understand that the essential character of the Canadian people that very resilient, hearty, we don't care that it gets down to like so cold that Celsius and Fahrenheit literally have no difference in their scale.

If the character of that people, if the character of the American people, which is like we're going to innovate the most interesting sauce combinations that are absolutely unholy abominations like, you know, like ketchup, mayo, mustard, and saracha altogether. And one, like, if all of that can get together as well and kind of reassert itself, then I do believe, man, like we are unstoppable. At the end of the day, man, supply chains meet needs.

We just find those ways we can meet that for one another at scale. and we do still have the space to do that, then we're kind of, it'll be fine. It'll be painful. It's going to suck getting there. But it is going to work out. It is certainly not hopeless. Yeah, well, it's never hopeless, right? Like, I mean, I was listening to, do you know a guy name?

And I'm working on getting them on right now. Tom Luongo, does that name ring a bell to you at all? Is that anything? He talked about. But if you like him, I'm sure I will. Well, it's my brother Dustin who got me on to you. And then he's the one who passed it along. And so he's probably chuckling right now because he's had a little influence on some of the guests I've brought on.

What he talks about, you know, right now the giants are going to fight. And as people, you just got to dodge the feet essentially. Because no matter what we want, Ross and Sean Harrison, and China's doing what they're going to do, and the United States is going to do what they're going to do, and Russia's going to do it. And you have very little say in it, because at this point the game is playing out,

and moves are being made, and you have power structures and levers being pulled and all these different things. And as people, you've got to look out for the people around you, because that's, you know, without good people around you, what is life? I mean, honestly. And he just talks about the giants figuratively. are stepping and the goal is to not get squashed under a foot essentially and it was it was a really

interesting you know i'm doing probably a poor man's job of it but uh a really interesting take on on on all the things going on on different places and some of the things we've briefly touched on with russia and uh supply change energy china you get the point and uh just tying it in we we somehow always get back to this this barter system of you know you just got to look out for one another. Find out what you can offer the world and your neighbors. And if it does come to tough times, if you look out for one another, there's a way that connections and support of one another of human beings, you can withstand pretty much anything that's thrown at us. You 100% can. And there's a really interesting premise that I think a lot of people miss because people are

impressed by complexity. It's for whatever reason. It's one of things people seem to find interesting about, you know, the content that I put out on social media is the fact that a lot of it deals with very complex, higher order concepts and, you know, self-organized criticality and complex systems and all these other things. But at the end of the day, at the end of the day, if you believe that you're in a crisis, the number one thing you can do is begin to reduce complexity and increase simplicity because simplicity is robust. It's one of the things that Taleb talks a lot about. And he's right. He's wrong about some things. And he'd be a major jerk at times. about his value systems and the things you believe. But I will die on the hill that he's 100% correct in his most fundamental premise is that simplicity is anti-fragile. And complexity is a luxury in a lot of ways. And so if we've been conditioned to believe that the thing we need to most uphold is a complex system of we're going to make a bunch of things over here and then we're going to use financial levers over here. And then we need this like, you know, vastly complex network of shipping to meet all of these things.

and this hyper specialization, right? The whole Tom Friedman, Earth is flat thing. The most rebellious and simplistic and antifragile thing we could do is simplify. We can move production as close as possible to consumption, but do so in ways that are naturalistic, that are in more alignment with how humans are built to interact, how we're built to eat, how we're built to socialize and network, and meet our own needs.

And the more we take complex systems and begin to streamline them and simplify them long term, the better off we're going to be. Because right now, complexity is luxury. We don't have. Everything's collapsing. Right. But when everything is collapsed,

at the end of the day, we still do have the ability to do these things. And like you said, avoid the giant's feet, right? I play at some level and not at the level of giants, but certainly maybe like occasionally like, little angel or demon depending on your view sitting on the shoulder of one of the giants and saying hey maybe we should do this or that but at the end of the day man myself my people as it were like the people that you know i have some obligation to take care of in my life my family all of that right

yeah man i'm just i'm like i'm like there with everybody else is trying to avoid the giant's feet and maybe every now and again, like play traffic cop to avoid the giant's feet for other people. So, yeah, that analogy is a really, really good one. And again, it's a simple analogy, which I like. Well, before I let you go, I'm curious, you know, we've, we, it's funny, talk to you twice, but I feel like it's been more than that because we find, we fall into this deep thought, you know, philosophy, which I, I, I, I think both of us can agree we really enjoy.

On the supply chain side, you've been talking an awful lot about rail being North America's logistical single point of failure, quoting you directly. What concerns you that you think people should know about supply chain wise, whether that's, you know, the farmer's side of it, whether that's, I don't care, whatever way you want to go on this. what's the one thing that you're paying attention to currently that you think is talked about a lot, not talked about it at all? What's catching your attention as we sit here today? The lack of will of the political leaders to do the most simple, basic things to sustain us and keep us, keep us secure, right, from a supply chain side. it feels like if you take a textbook and you say these are the 5,000 principles and tactics and strategies and data points and all the other things, we add all that up and say,

if we do these things, if we optimize for these 5,000 things and processes, we're going to be okay, we're going to make it. And you gave that textbook to the current political leadership of North America and said, guys just do this and we're going to be okay. And they took that and they've been pulling out every page individually and lighting it on fire. and then saying here's what I think about that. That's where we're at right now.

So on the rail side, we're in this position because at some level, unions are a phenomenal thing. Certainly in theory, certainly in practical application, there have been a lot of times in the history, particularly of Western capitalism where unions have served as a very powerful and effective and necessary check on the excesses of the corporate class. There are other ways in which they have dramatically weakened our economies in our countries by co-opting and capturing certain political interests to the exclusion of what's good for the economic order. So you take the good with the bad, right? But we certainly are fragile in the sense that our current political leadership is very hidebound and subordinate to the wills of the unions.

it is good that the union's voice is heard and recognized and that they are effective. It is bad that they have control of the debate because we're out of balance. On the railroad side, the oppositional force of the unions is not good guys either. You're talking about in the United States five class one railroads in Canada, two, for a total of seven. One of the Canadian railroads has merged with one of the U.S. class ones or will be merging. And so we'll be down to five at that point as far as like five, four. towards controlling, right? And so the rail network, you know, people have this very like apocalyptic belief that like day one of a strike, you know, midnight, Thursday, and a Friday

morning is this like, holy shit, the world's coming to an end. And it's not coming to an end. 7, 10, 15 days of carrying capacity of storage for things that must move, of inventory for things that must be bought for big parts of our raw material and intermediate and finished good sectors. autos, grains, fertilizers, natural gas, coal, intermodal containers, import and export goods, mainly import goods. We do have some amount of carrying capacity that we will be able to sustain a 7, 10, 15-day disruption. But the fragility comes from the fact that we are optimized only for these systems that can be carried by rail. we've not invested enough into our additional intercoastal waterways. The Jones Act in some ways is a very good thing.

In other ways, it gets in the way. So we don't have the ability to move some of these things at scale where we have optionality in the event of a rail disruption. And so right now you have the rail issue. Is it apocalyptic day one? No, because people like to freak out about stuff. They don't understand the dynamics at play. If we get into day 45 of a rail strike,

if the longshoremen of the ports carry out of strike at the same time as the rail, you know, in this case the engineers and the crew union, and the West Coast ports of Canada and the United States grind to a hall at the same time the rail networks of the U.S. grind to a hall. And that carries into two weeks, three weeks, four weeks. We've got some real significant challenges that's going to take months and months and months to dig out from just as we were kind of maybe hoping from a supply chain and logistic side to see daylight, even as inflation numbers are going up.

So it introduces a lot of complexity in the near term. It introduces a number of, for some people, maybe Black Swan events that they weren't counting on in their own business or in their own lives. So everybody's watching that right now. But at the end of the day, my concern is that these were, we were in a position where we had a union that had the ability to completely manipulate the behavior. and the operational capacity of just seven, seven companies, seven institutions that control the most critical infrastructure we have in North America. And that level of fragility, that level of, frankly, stupidity on the part of the political and economic class, that more than the strike itself worries me because a strike, the effects of the strike are an output of a complete failure of our political.

political elites to recognize reality. Okay. That was a lot once again. And I would chuckle up myself as I try and like add something to the conversation, but I'm sitting there going, how do you follow that up with anything that, you know, like at this point,

that that rate there, I like how you, you know, I go back to our last conversation, you know, people want to pump fear, fear, fear,

right? Day one of the strike, things are going to fall apart. and, you know, pandemonium's going to ensue. But what you're talking about is a sustained thing where multiple levels of an infrastructure start to fall apart. That's when you get into struggles. But even then, you're not going like pandemonium.

You're saying months upon months to dig out of it. Either way, Ross, I appreciate you coming on and giving me some time and certainly spurring on some thoughts. And I'll see if you text me when all the heads in Alberta start popping off of your one comment. I do appreciate you give me some time here tonight. Yet again, it's always, it's always, um, it's always a pleasure to have you on. And I look forward to our next chat, because as, you know, things evolve, you know, you look at Russia, Ukraine, you look at China. We, we, we didn't get to China really that much because, I mean, with, uh, that's all right.

I talk about it too much anyway. Well, what the thing is is, you know, the first time around, we talked about the first quarter of 2023, late, late 22, uh, with time. and different things there. There's going to be these different things that play out over the course of the next year, which is going to give us ample opportunity to have you back on and talk about some things. And regardless, just appreciate you giving me some time tonight. I kept you a few extra minutes, but either way. No, it's all good, Sean.

Enjoy our chats. It's been a pleasure. Well, thank you, man. And love it, appreciate it. You know, anybody that has also appreciated it, please be sure to support Sean and what he's doing because I can tell you that not a lot of, not a lot of people are wanting to take the time to kind of dig into the deeper dynamics of a lot of this stuff.

They want the quick and easy answer, the seven-minute sound bites on Tucker Carlson, whatever it may be. And, but what we're really talking about here, the things that make the news are fundamentally an output of deeper, more intimate, but also more systemic failures that we've allowed to creep into, you know, our political and economic orders in the last, you know, really half century. And yeah, it sucks,

but the goodness is there are a lot of things we can do about it. So it's, and it's going to be to people like you, Sean, that I think latch onto the answers and are able to spread them and propagate them probably in ways that are only obvious years down the road, maybe like the discussion started with the dissident rebel mindsets. And then it became mainstream and then it became policy. And that's how it works every time. Well, I appreciate that. That's an awfully high compliment, but hopefully somebody stumbles upon it listening to us to Yahoo's and and runs with it. Who knows? I hope so, man.

I just want to, you know, I feel like I'm, what's his pick from office? I'm doing a terrible job of this, Dwight and his beet farm. I just want to go to the beet farm and worry about some beats. And that's, you know, I just want to be, I don't know if I wouldn't need the rest of it. But, geez, like, you know, the more you talk to people like yourself and Brian get was the, the one that was just previously on a few episodes ago, talk about energy. Like to me,

after you talk to a few of you, you're just like, I can't be, like, I don't have this big Ivy League education. And I know I'm saying it again, but like, you know,

at some point, the higher-ups know exactly what's going on and got their heads so far in the ground or are willfully blind, meaning they just, they don't even want to worry about what you're talking about. You talk to textbook, it's,

it's malignant. stupidity, man. Like, that's the only way to explain it. It's, yeah, it's stupid, but it's malignant in the sense that they could know better, they should know better. But generally, at this point, I'm sort of predisposed to the idea that the more someone seeks or the validates an Ivy League degree as the path to understanding, the more I'm pretty certain. They probably have no idea how the world actually works. Well, either way, appreciate it, Ross. I'll let you to your family again. Thanks again for giving me some time tonight. Truly do appreciate it. Thanks, Sean. Take care, bye.