Shaun Newman Podcast - #359 - Chuck Prodonick & David Moriarity

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

Chuck is a former Sergeant who served 4 tours & David is a former Corporal who served 1 tour. Together they were members of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry and toured together in Afghanistan. Let me know what you think Text me 587-21 7-8500

I'm Alex Craneer. This is Sarah Swain. This is Terry Clark. This is Tom Corsky. I'm Trish Wood. This is Dr. Peter McCullough. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks.

Happy Monday. Hope everybody's weekend was good, man. I don't know where you guys are at, but here we got dumped on with snow over and over and over again. I'm tired of shoveling the driveway. I'm not going to lie. Shout out to my neighbor, an act of kindness. He came over. like a foot of snow the one night and he came over I think he's feeling sorry for me

brought the snowblower over and help me out man after uh watching him roll through half my driveway while I was sitting there with the shovel I was rather impressed to say the least I I got to have a little bit of an interesting weekend I went down and saw jamie and Theodoo their show with Ardoloski um in saint albert on uh that would have been would that have been for uh man, Thursday night. And then Friday I was in Calahoo. Oh, kind of in the middle of nowhere. And I mean that with all, as I told them that night, you know,

I come from the middle of nowhere. So I hold it in high regard. Either way, Shane Getskin invited me out there. And we had a little bit of fun in front of a light of audience. So that was pretty cool. And I apologize for not telling anyone sooner. It was Shane's AGM. And I wasn't sure what to do with it.

I wasn't sure what I was going there for. But the next time I get out in that area, I'll make sure that I'll let you know I'm coming. Christmas is just around the corner. Man, it is closing in on us quick. So we got a few more shows coming before Christmas. And then, of course, through the Christmas break, there's going to be shows, but there are a couple that are canned from the archives grouping from a long while back.

So stay tuned for all that. Either way, let's get on in today's show. It's an interesting one with some boys who've served overseas. And before we get there, first off, Canadians for Truth, I went in some. them. They're a non-profit organization consisting of Canadians who believe in honesty, integrity, and principal leadership in government as well as the Canadian Bill of Rights, Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the Rule of Just Laws. Of course, they've got their media company firing up. They got Joseph, Jamie, and of course Theo all doing shows. And then, of course, they were, you know,

Jamie and Theo do their live shows. So they were all there. I got to take a little peek at what they were doing. Pretty cool little venue there at the Art and Theater in St. Albert. I thought that was pretty cool. And I thought they put on a hat. You know, honestly, a really good show. It was a good turnout and everything else. So if you're looking to see what they're up to next, go to Canadiens for Truth.ca or head to their Facebook page. The team over at Prophet River,

yeah, the team over at Profit River, they're back in for 2023, so showed out to Clay Smiley and Mr. Ed, they're signed back on. I'm excited about that. And they were, you know, they sent over a little bit, they're like, hey, would you mind mentioning maybe there's some ladies out there, maybe there's some men out there. Like, I don't know how to get my, you know, significant other or whoever, I should say, for Christmas.

I don't know what to get them. Well, they were like, well, maybe purchasing a gift card for the hunter or sportsman in your life for Christmas, you can easily do that. I don't know of a single guy who wouldn't mind a little gift card to that store. You can purchase those. All you got to do is go online to profitriver.com to take a look. give them a call, all the information's there. And just a reminder, they ship countrywide.

So it doesn't matter where you're tuning in from across this great country. If you're in BC all the way to Newfoundland, up north and the Yukon, northwest territories, et cetera, they ship countrywide, so a gift card, you know, can be purchased anywhere. And then, of course, whatever they end up using it on, I mean, Profit River handles the entire country, right? Just go to Profitriver.com. They are the major retailers of firearms, and accessories serving all of Canada.

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You know, I've been having this reoccurring thought, and I had it way back when I really want a roundtable. So I'm going to have to go in and see what Carly and the team has for chunks of wood that are round. I'm working with a group out of Eminton to kind of have a second home for the podcast. So if I'm out in that neighborhood, I can essentially sit with people in person. I would love to do that. You know, I love doing it.

And sometimes when the distance is what it is, you don't get to do it nearly enough. So we're trying to find different ways to unlock that capability. Either way, when it comes to wood, you know, whether we're talking mantles, decks, windows, doors, sheds, or a podcast studio table, Windsor plywood is the team to go see. They're fantastic and their chunks of wood are, you know, just top-notch. Gartner management, their alloyments based company specializes in all types of rental properties to help me your needs, whether you're looking for an office or, you know, you've got multiple employees, give away Gartner a call 7808-5025. Now let's get on to 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.ca.ca. The first is a former sergeant who did four tours overseas in Bosnia, Kosovo, and twice in Afghanistan. The second, a former corporal who served one tour in Afghanistan. They each have known each other for over 20 years and were both members of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. I'm talking about Chuck Prodnick and David Moriarty. So buckle up. Here we go.

This is Chuck Prodnick. This is David Moriarty and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Today, I'm joined by Chuck Prodnick, and I had to check the name again because I'm like, I want to say, I always want to read it right how it looks. Either way, Chuck. It's great to have you on. It's nice to meet you. And thanks for doing this. That's great to be here and thanks for having me. For the listener, we might have Dave Moriarty. Moriarty. Geez, can't spit it out today. He might be hopping in here in a little bit, so you might hear a second or third voice, I guess, hop in. but either way I'm excited to do this

this has been in the works John Rankima has been a listener of the podcast he's been wanting this pulled off and we've been slowly working it out so either way we're here and I gotta say this is this is a first this is a

it's almost like a I don't know a secret room it's a secret room yeah a secret door so it's pretty cool not many people get back here yeah this is well I guess I'm you know another part of the adventure of a podcaster I guess Chuck you

You've listened to a few of the shows. I just want to start with your background and letting the listener, you can go as long, short as you want, and we'll just see where it goes. Yeah, so I grew up in Ontario on a dairy farm, and my choice was take over the farm or join the infantry, basically, or join the army, which turned out to be the infantry for me. So I joined up straight out of high school. I did 21 years.

I finished in 2011. I retired. And I did four tours. I did Bosnia in 1994, Kosovo in 99, and then Afghanistan in 06 and then again in 08. I finished out as a sergeant. And then after that, I joined corrections. I had a lot of friends who'd retired from the Army, got into corrections. It's kind of like a natural transition point.

And I did that for nine years. And then Dave Moriarty. We'd known each other in Afghanistan. We did our 06 tour together. He started building this cannabis corporation and asked if I'd come on and help him with day-to-day management. And here we are three, almost four years later. Was I'm trying to, I can hear a slight echo. And I don't want to give that to the listener so that they hear it either way.

when it comes to military was that something you mentioned being a dairy farmer small Ontario was military something you know you were drawn to like you always wanted to do it yeah yeah on some level my mom is American or she's duly now but she grew up in the state so she grew up with most of my family on that side having served in one capacity or another so I grew up with relatives when they'd come to visit up to Canada they'd all served or were serving. So for me, it was kind of like, I see this as something I want to do. I didn't particularly want to keep farming my whole life. It's not an easy job. It's worse than the infantry. But it's definitely harder. So it came to it as a point. I knew that going to school for

longer, I didn't know what I wanted to do for that. So I'd seen all my relatives from that side of the family very happy with their choice. They're proud to do what they did. They've been around the world. And for me, it was, it just seemed like a natural fit. So what, how old were you when you went into? I think I had just turned 18. So you would like literally graduate high school and are like, yeah, let's go. I, I had all the paperwork signed up when I was 17. Uh, I just had to wait. I just waited to graduate, graduate high school basically. So I'd have that. And then I went, yeah. Any regrets on that? I mean, obviously it was a huge chunk of your life and obviously a lot of fond memories and everything else. But like 18, I'm like,

Holy man, that's, well, I don't know. At 18, I was. Yes and no. I know a lot of my friends back there from the same era as me. They never left. They, and I'm not. They never left town. They never left town.

And I'm not disparaging that choice, that everybody's got their own path. I would, had I stayed on the farm, I never would have left for nothing either. The army forced me out of a, what was a small town in Ontario from? Near Maxville, Finch. Avenmore area. It's just south of Ottawa, just north of Cornwall. Okay. Okay. Um, so it's all dairy farming community. It's all, that's what it is. And so for me, I saw it as a way out. For me, I saw it as a bit of adventure. Um, Desert Store one was just kind of percolating at this point. So for me, I'm like, I see some American relatives getting ready to go on this

kind of stuff. And I'm like, well, there's an adventure here. And maybe that's naive. But even now at my age, I'm 50 now, I look back and I'm like, yeah, but there's still an adventure. sure in this. There's still a bit of travel in this and who knows what else. So I do regret, the thing I regret is that how difficult it is to raise a family in the military. I raised two kids doing that and you spend too much time away from home. You can't make that time back up and I do, I'll always regret that. Anybody who's got a job or any job were there away from home that much, whether you're an athlete or a pipeliner or whatever. the case may be, you can't make that time back up. All you can do is make the best of the time

you get back at home. So I don't regret my military time, though. It was hard, it was rough, it was brutal, a lot of it, but there was a sense of pride involved in it. So I don't regret that. Yeah, you know, when you talk about, we just, for the, for the listener, we're just messing around with things here. When you talk about being away from, I think, being away from your kids, I think that's something that a lot of Albert and Saskatchew, Westerners in general, and certainly people from all over to the planet know all about, but here in the oil field and, well, the oil field, I mean, like, how many guys work project work where they're gone all the time? I think they can really relate. It's one of the things that I love about my job now, you know, doing this,

is I get to be around my kids all the time. I get to coach their hockey and stuff like that. Yeah. And the only regret I ever hear from older men is usually, something along the lines is how much time you can spend with your kids at a young age because all of them say oh enjoy those years even while you're pulling your freaking hair out you're like this is freaking terrible it's absolutely true yeah yeah i i i missed my son being born by being in bosnia you know he was two weeks early three weeks early my leave was scheduled to be yeah during his due date but that didn't play out um yeah i missed a lot of stuff i wish i hadn't absolutely um there's no making that up or making that right, you can try, but it doesn't work that way. And then like you

said, everybody who has one of these jobs where you, the fellow you met here earlier, he, uh, he is in the oil field. He's, and he's gone from home probably more than he was in the army, you know, he's not getting shot at, but he's, uh, he's gone from home. He's gone from home and it takes a toll. It does. Well, I got, I got friends in the States. My wife's from the States. And I got friends down there and it's uh i think he's gone every second week flying a salesman actually right but flying all over north america and i'm like that doesn't sound that fun you know like for the first little bit sure it might be a little bit of fun you're seeing the country and meeting different people and everything else but eventually it's like i'd rather just be home me too i'm i'm a natural home

body um i'm glad i got to travel the world i'm i've seen well i've seen stuff well you're in a small portion of the human population that has not only seen a huge chunk of the world, but then seeing live combat, seeing, you know, four different tours. Geez, I don't know. Tell me, Chuck, how many people do that? How many soldiers do that? Not too many. People, not too many in soldiers.

Yeah, there's, there are guys who have more tours than I do, definitely. Absolutely. How long is it tour? Six to eight months. Two of mine were six months and two were close to eight months. So how many tours could you do in a career that? I know guys who did back-to-backs. Back in the early 90s when we were in Bosnia,

I know guys who had no family to come home to, they would just sign on and do another quick extension right there. I know guys who every immediate tour they could get on, they would sign up for and go. They'd basically tour hunt. And depending on your position and your qualifications, you could slide on to quite a few tours. I went on the ones my unit was going on, and that worked out to be the ones that they did.

I volunteered for the 08 tour basically immediately after coming back from the 06 tour. I wanted to go back for my own reasons. I wanted to go back and keep doing what we were doing. And so I took that out. I also didn't want to be back in Canada at that point. I didn't, wasn't having, I didn't feel normal here anymore for a while. I felt more normal there. So how so?

What do you, what do you mean by normal is a world? Normal is a word today that I don't know if I understand anymore. It's what today I don't know if anyone does. That's for sure. For me at that point, and not just for me, but for a lot of us, it was 06 is a turning point tour. most guys who served know about that particular tour it's the the height of combat the most intense combat since Korea heavy casualties we did we did the business that we trained to do and this is Afghanistan Afghanistan so that becomes normal as messed up as that condition of living is that

becomes your normal even when we would go back to the big camp that Kandahar airfield which is 40,000 people. It's not a small base. It's like going to a town. It's got Burger King. It's got Pizza Hut, Subway, later tours it had a Timmy's on it. I mean, this is a town. You would go back to this base after being in combat to refit, relax for a minute. And it was a different world. These people didn't live in a condition of war. They didn't understand even what we were doing. And they were soldiers. When you come back to Canada, we were literally two weeks before we came back to Canada shooting at people and getting shot at.

Then we went to Cyprus for like four days of decompression and basically being drunk for four days. Sorry, Cyprus. And then like you're coming up to people, even your own family, you're coming up to other people and they don't, you don't know what to say to them. You know, we talked about World War II vets before a minute before we came on here. and I'd heard for years, well, they don't share their stories because X, Y, and Z. X, Y, and Z.

From my perspective, the reason that the stories don't get shared that much is people wouldn't understand them. It's not because there's not stories to tell. When we all get together, the bunch of us, we'll tell stories all day long. We'll have happy flashbacks all day long. We'll remember people all day long. But when you try and have that conversation, even with your family or your friends who aren't serving or friends.

that are serving but don't do what you do. There's no relation point. There's no connection point. It's hard to say, yeah, on this day I was shooting people. And on this day, I lost this buddy. And on this day, we got blown up and up. But we blew them up pretty good too. And you can't that there's a glaze that goes over people's eyes.

And they don't understand it. Or they don't want to understand it. It's not a delicate subject. I think if more people talked about it and understood it. it would there wouldn't be so much stigma around it but that is the way it is it's the way it's always been

well it's a bit of a hot button issue too right like some people are for war other people you know I don't know I assume they have their thoughts on it right where they probably didn't want you over there and think what you're doing is you know I sit here as just like the layman going I have no idea

I just go, you've lived through an experience and had a life that a very small percentage of the population in Canada, let alone the world, has endured or went through or adventured or I don't know the word, right? Because, you know, we're talking about before. I can only relate it to hockey, which I know it sounds funny probably to the listener. But to me, like parts of it, I'm just like, yeah, it makes sense. When you get back together with a group of hockey guys, you get to share stories that you don't share with everyone. Exactly. That's a light way of explaining what you're talking about. It's just the brotherhood.

It's just the camaraderie. They understand what you're talking about. Yeah. You know, I tell this story when I first came back from overseas and I officially decided the hockey career is pretty much done, right? It's overwhelming what to do. I was like, you can do anything. I'm like, what do you mean I can do anything?

Like, I've been playing hockey for, you know, 26 years at that point. Yeah. All I've done is pretty much live, breathe hockey. And I thought it was only one. And then I got talking to a couple other hockey guys, and they'd all have this kind of like depression moment. If you can believe it, you come back and you can do anything. It could be a salesman, go to a truck, you can do this, you can do that,

you can buy this, you can start a business, and everybody's overwhelmed by it. And if you haven't lived that life, you don't understand. So actually, I completely understand what you're saying in a very non-lethal way, essentially. They are relatable. A lot of things are relatable on that level in a non-relevant. lethal weight. They absolutely are. When you leave the military, like I had done just about 21 years, I was 38, knew that I didn't want to keep, I didn't want to keep going. We weren't looking at any more Afghanistan tours. Honestly, there's a burnout period. Basically, our military is very good at not

capturing the essence of a unit and keeping it together. We would come back as a unit and the military would disband units and send people across the country. So you have all these talented 22-year-olds, 24-year-olds, kids who did more in their first three or four years in the army than some guys did in the previous 20, just because of the Afghan tours. And now they're being bullied into getting out of the army. They're basically being told, well, that was great, but now do your laces this way. This all went on. Like this is we we we made it so it wasn't enjoyable to be in the army at this point for guys who we should have been bending over backwards to keep. And so I reached a point myself that I was like, I'm not playing this game anymore.

I'm 38. I'm going to have a second career. But now what? Now like you said, the panic kicks in. 21 years as an, you know, finishing out as an infantry sergeant, my my resume is like, violence this, violence that. I can blow this up, I can shoot this. What do you put on there? So I went into corrections, like I said, and a lot of other vets went that way, and it's a natural point.

It's structured. It's a shift. You can forget about it. A lot of guys thought when I, you know, you go to corrections as any sort of rank leaving the army, they're like, oh, yeah, but you're not in charge of stuff now. Well, I don't want to be. Honestly, I just want to be a dude, just left alone. I just want to do my eight-hour shift and go home.

Like there's a, there's a relief in that almost. Like there's a, I'm not responsible for nothing anymore. I'm not worried about, nobody's trying to blow me up. Yeah, they might assault me or attack me or whatever, but it's not Afghanistan. So you're kind of like, okay, I'm done with this. But then, you know, I'm here where I am now in this environment. I love it. I have a lot of freedom to do what I want.

But it's, like you said, you've gotten used to something. Something's been a part of your life for so long. hockey, whatever, it's hard to give it up. What's your next path forward? It's really hard to figure that out. And I think having too many choices is almost the worst part of it

because then what do you do? Too many choices is paralyzing just as only having, you know, being stuck in a rut almost, you know? Well, yeah. And we talked earlier about comparing a lot of this to hockey. I've played hockey my whole life,

so it was Dave when he comes in here. We talked about it in the documentary. Like most of what we could relate to for us was hockey. Like it's it's it's a weird thing to apply a sports analogy of any sort to combat, but we were trying to figure it out in our own heads. We didn't have any better or clearer picture of what we had just been involved in and what we're doing every day for weeks on end. You're just trying to put it in the box in your head to be like, well, what did what is this? And well, we all play hockey.

So let's do that. At least we have something to tie it to. to and be done with it kind of deal. You know, we talk about Afghanistan a lot. Obviously, you mentioned it being a turning point. Can we talk about the first two tours? Because you do Bosnia and... Kosovo.

And Kosovo. Yeah. What, I don't know if it's what sticks out about those times, but I was, you know, I was bringing up, shout out to Jamie Sinclair, because he was the one who talked about, I think it was Bosnia, if memory serves me correct. And he just said you want to see what the worst civilization has to offer. You start with a little divide.

And at that time, if we were Ryan the clock listeners, we were in the middle of COVID and Trudeau basically, you know, dividing the population us to them. And then shortly after the convoy happens, right? And it just, you know, it took a, what I was starting to see as a powder keg for violence going to happen. And it, well, I don't know if it's completely diffused, but, I mean, it really brought everyone back around, I think. You know, they're still, you know, they're still trying to divide, but not quite necessarily that. I do the whole gamut here because I come back to your first two tours. You know, you were in two different countries. You got to see what sticks out about the first two tours that you did

because the first one had to have been a little bit eye-opening as it was your first. But even the second being in a different country, I assume, you know, different layout. There's no familiarity. You can't like, you know, lay of the land, that type of thing. There's a, there's, well, okay, so I was very young when I went to Bosnia in 94. And Jamie would have been on that one as well. This was at the height of the Civil War there.

It's really hard to, it's hard to wrap your head around that people who, in a very short period before, had hosted the Olympics. We talked, we talked briefly about that before. This wasn't a third world country. This wasn't a backwater country. This wasn't, this was a fairly, you know, normal place. People had been neighbors there forever. And what we walked into and what they would do with us was they'd put 10 man sections on little observation posts in the middle of warring factions in wherever. We were nowhere near any other supporting Canadian for miles.

I am talking 20, 30 miles. We were off on our own watching people in fights every day or damn near every day. And we couldn't do anything about it. Our rules of engagement under UN are junk. you can get shot at and basically you have to determine if they were just trying to scare you or trying to kill you and this is the radio conversation you have with the big camp is what kind of bullets were coming at you the scary ones or the ones trying to kill you like it this is literally the ridiculousness of the u.n um so we got to know a lot of the locals wherever we were put when

the first post i was on was like two or three months we were there so we got to know a lot of the soldiers and the locals very well and um one of the things i asked i think i just turned 22 because I was curious like how did this come to be. They all said the same thing. Like we didn't hate our neighbors before this, but we, the language all changed. The way we talked about each other changed. The way we saw it.

And then we just started to see each other not as our neighbor anymore. And I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm making it very simple right now. But this is, this was after talking to dozens, if not hundreds of people over my time there.

And it was always the same thing. It was, well, we were great neighbors. An example, we were doing a foot patrol through a town that had been cleansed. In a town of about 4,000 people, there was no one left. It had been a mix of, you know, Croatian, Serbian Muslim population, and at the end of it, there was no one there. It was a battle town now. So we were doing a foot patrol through it one day, and we saw two older fellows, probably about 60,

sitting in front of two houses sharing a bottle of Peevo, Sleevovich and Peevo. Just drink. They were drinking together. And they both had AKs put by the wall beside each of them, just, you know, leaning against the wall. And we walked up and just kind of, hey, what's going on? What are you doing? And we're like, ah, we were neighbors before the war and we're just here, you know, having a drink. Nothing.

We're not doing nothing. So we talked to them for a bit. And one was Serbian, one was Croatian. They'd both been involved in their own part of the dirty fight that had happened in that town. But they were still friends. It's it was they couldn't even explain it to us how after doing what they had done to each other, they were now having a drink together in a town where they'd cleansed each other's population. Yeah. That's how confusing it was there.

It was you would see two of the three factions gang up to try and take the area from the third faction on one day. On the next day in, the allegiance would switch. and they'd go after the other guy. You'd go one town over, and all those allegiances were completely different. You couldn't keep track of it from town to town. There was no way to know who was fighting who. And whatever side was losing would shoot at you

to try and get you involved in it to be like the referee. And it's like, well, we're just here to get shot at. We can't actually referee anything. So that stands out. We did nothing but get shot at and occasionally blown up and watch people do hold. horrible things. We really weren't in a, we didn't have the rules of engagement to do anything. Yeah. That's, uh, that had to have been, you know, when you talk about lessons learned,

I don't know what the lesson is, but, uh, to sit and not be able to do anything while you watch human beings do atrocious things to each other over something so trivial as, you know, what you're talking about. It's like, that must have been difficult. That, if anything, is What will that, if anything, as a soldier, you expect you're going to go in the middle of something. You're going to do your life is going to be at risk. But it better be at risk for the right application for something that's righteous, for something that, even if you don't fully understand it or believe in it, that's what you signed up to do. We, none of us signed up to stand there and watch people do what they did to each other.

that's yeah that if anything is what cracked a few guys heads you know that's what brought a few guys down over there they did it was uh nobody could wrap their head around why we weren't doing something you know we went to afghanistan under op enduring freedom our rules of engagement were were combat rules of engagement we could we could fight yeah you had teeth we had teeth and and canadians are really wicked fighters like historically you go back to world war one world war two korea we are everybody looked for us to do the hard lifting same as afghanistan the americans in any place where they were going in heavy they asked for us to go with them if the british in helman province come come do this stuff with us we got asked to go into places

for the my earlier 15 years of my career we were a joke like we would train with these guys And they'd be like, oh, good, the Canadians are here. Like, yay. We were a joke. We were the B league team. We were like C division team material. We were, we were. Not because we weren't good soldiers.

We didn't have great gear at that point. We didn't have maybe the best of training in a lot of areas. We didn't have any combat experience. These guys had all been around the world and been, they had, if not personal combat experience. They had instructors who did. We didn't. The best we did. had were like old old drunk guys who maybe survived a two-month exercise well good for you you know I did

that on the farm like give me a break you know it wasn't until we started to do our own business that that we we were looked at by other militaries as being like we need these guys and that changed our whole mental attitude like we were no longer and I'll be honest we fought harder knowing we were next to Americans or British because you don't want to be judged poorly. These guys are all three or four tours deep. They've all got 100 firefights. You know, I asked a young lieutenant, American lieutenant, we were ganged up with at a resupply. You know, I've been in like 10 firefights at this point in the tour.

I was like, you know, strutting my stuff. I'm a, you know, I'm the dude. And I walk up to this kid, he's like 26. And I'm like, hey, man, how's it going? We're shooting shit. Traded some patches back and forth. Like, hey, like how many firefights have you been in? He goes, dude, I stopped counting out of a hundred.

And I'm like, I'm Bush League, you know, I'm, I know nothing. And it's very humbling to meet guys like that who this is, he's 26 and he's done nothing but fight his whole life, this guy. He's been, his whole time in the army has been deployed, basically. And you meet these guys and you're like, you're just humbled by them because none of them act like big, big dudes, big brave dudes. They just, they're dudes. They're regular guys.

And it helped us. understand that, yeah, don't go back to Canada with this attitude. And sure, we're proud. Sure, we're, you know, we look after our stuff. But it, that was a wake up for a lot of us when we met these guys that, you know, keep it in check. There's always somebody who's got, who's done a little bit more. And no matter how much we did and we did a bunch, some of these guys had done, you know,

exponentially more. You ever think, you know, when you talk about Bosnia and it being, the way they spoke to each other. I think we'd all be naive enough to think that it could never happen here, but do you ever think, well, not do you ever think, because ever's a long time, but in the world that Justin Trudeau has created here in Canada, and the other leaders too underneath them, geez, it takes more than one, and certainly the leader at the top can lay the groundwork.

Yep. You know, do you ever get the sense that you're ever nervous about that? or you're like, you know, like you. Absolutely. I mean, you can see that you can see the shift in language. And it doesn't have to be about. Any one topic or anyone, um, issue. The language shift towards anybody who doesn't tow the line is extremely similar to

overseas in like Bosnia. To me anyway, I was on the. ground on an observation post that entire six-month tour. These people spoke a lot about the shift in the way they viewed each other just before they started cleansing each other. I'm not saying that we're going to kick off into some sort of genocidal thing here. But I think it's a cautionary tale. It's a tale. And you listen to people who've immigrated from other portions of the world to hear, a lot of them will say and have said openly, like, we need to be careful about how. how we're talking about each other right now.

The chances that it happens identical to Bosnia or, you know, or name the country is like, you know, probably not. No other country in the planet is like Canada. No one, no. Like it's, it's, I always joke, you want to shut down Canada. Put one tank on Highway 1 at the border of Manitoba, Ontario. Yeah. And I mean, the entire place shuts down.

Yeah. We got one railway going across. We've got one road going across. Like, I mean, it's laughable, but at the same time, it's probably true. It's probably true. Yeah. I just think as far as a cautionary tale goes, you know, everybody thinks it has to be something so big as like a bomb going off or tanks rolling down the street or, I don't know, I'm just thinking aloud of some things that would be very serious where it would alert the population. Instead, it's so subtle.

At least that's what it looks like. This is it. It's just like this slow, drawn out thing. And one day you fall off a cliff and when you fall off the cliff, it is a drop. and then you go after each other and it's like, well, this is strange, right? Like when you're talking that many people, they can't be, well, actually, what happened was

they killed our leader and now we're after them, right? It's nothing so serious. Well, they've learned the slow drip process. Hop in, Dave. Slow drip process. So instead of it being as drastic and as violent, it's much more subtle now. It's that shift in language.

It's that shift in positions now where people have to look at each other and say, well, we don't agree. So obviously we must hate each other. And it's funny growing up watching politics when I was a kid, watching my parents had friends who were liberals or people from every political spectrum were still friends. They might not agree. And that was the best part being a kid watched my parents have a party on the farm where it's somebody else's farm. There'd be 20 adults around, you know, getting half lit, but they'd be talking politics because that's what everybody does. And half them wouldn't agree with the other half, but they'd all be joking and laughing. You can't do that.

That isn't a thing now. You either agree or you don't agree. And that's a language shift. A lot of that is, well, then you must be a this. You must be an ist. You must be a, or some sort of phobic of something. You have to be an ism that we could just be in the middle somewhere. That's where Canada is.

Well, that's where majority of people are. Exactly. Actually, I think you raise a very valuable point. Because I was wondering, how could it happen? We were talking about Bosnian and a little bit of what Jamie Sinclair had said on the podcast, and it starts out very small, dividing a population. Then you can see what the worst humanity has to offer. And actually, when you bring up politics right now, that's a very, very, like, real one.

Look at the United States right now. I swear some days you're like, man, this is getting a little insane. Anyway, welcome, Dave. I mentioned at the start you might hop on. Dave Moriarty, did I say the last name right? Yeah, close enough. Close enough. How do you say it?

Moriarty. All right. I was saying to Chuck, you're like Sherlock Holmes's arch nemesis. Yeah, close. Close. Good next try. Fair enough. Here, do you have any thoughts, first off, on...

The question was, could you see Canada, you know, Not ever, because ever's a long time, right? We go 100 years and 10,000 years in advance. You never know what a civilization can do. But right now in the current climate, do you see problems with slow trickling in where you could get to the point of not civil war, but at the same time violence between the population

because of a change in language? I think we're already pretty well at a civil war. With the, you know, there's nobody who identifies as in the center. You're either far right or you're far left. And you're not willing to listen to the other side is what the media portrays. Whereas you talk to people on the street and a lot of people go, well, why can't there be a middle party? You know, everybody wants to vote somewhere in the middle. But you've got extremists on both sides that control the message, control the parties.

And, you know, they need to be polar opposites of the other party. And all it does is divide because you've got to vote for one. and now as soon as you voted for somebody, you're viewed as that in your, I guess your outlook or the way that you're viewed, you know, are you a conservative or a liberal, you know, or an NDP? Yeah, as soon as you say something, then they're like, oh, I know what you're about.

You look at, go back, go back to like the last 20 years of prime ministers. It didn't matter necessarily. My life didn't really change, whether it was a liberal or a conservative prime minister. It really didn't. It was nobody's did in Canada. That was the beauty of having centrist parties. Like, yeah, sometimes they'd get in and it didn't go the way I wanted, but whatever, my life's not changing that much.

Nobody's really did. And that's kind of the really the best part of our Canada, the centrist part of it. Then we get this last few years. Well, we've got gun bans, censorship bills coming through that are being pushed through right now. Like, who knows if you'll be able to do this. Compelled speech. I'm not anti anything. I just want to be left alone and live my life.

Medically assisted suicide. I can go on. You know, there's a lot going on here in Canada right now. We know about that in our community, the veteran community. I mean, I know one of the main guys right now, Mark Menke, who's one of the guys who has offered that initially, who's kind of spearheading getting the list of veterans who've been offered this. and he's compiling, putting names to paper and figuring out just how far and deep this goes. There's a few people involved in that.

And that it's happening in Canada in the first place is a bit of a shame. It's a shame. The slippery slope is already greased with, like, it's greased hard. And now that they're offering it to veterans is like a way out. I mean, they've offered it to several that we know about and that maybe that haven't gotten out there yet. How many they've offered it to that have actually gone through with it. That's the scary number. Yeah, well, it was a thousand people took up the service in 2016,

and I think it's 2021. Don't quote me on this, folks. It's 2020 or 2021, it's 10,000 people in Canada. Yeah. That did medically assisted suicide. No, when I read the stats, I believe majority of these people were 70 plus, blah, blah, blah. I'm not trying to blow it smoke here that they're, you know. But I had Rupa Supermanian, a journalist from O'D East,

and she talked about, you know, mature minors, mentally ill, the fact that you don't have to be terminally ill to be, you know, offered it. Like all these things, that's the slippery slope. Well, you look at the one fellow who kind of, I think he was on the verge of being homeless out east, and he kind of was in the news for a bit of a cycle, maybe three days. He just kind of was back in the news the other day. They'd offered him this. He actually didn't.

He went seeking it because he's like, I don't want to live like this anymore. One of, it's a two-doctor sign off. One doctor actually signed off on it already. Not because he's medically unfit to live, or he has a medical excuse. He just has a lifestyle that he doesn't want anymore.

That's scary that he could find one doctor that would do this. I don't think he's going through with it anymore or seeking to go through with it from what I understand. If it's the guy I'm thinking of, got as soon as he became a news story a go fund me or something was sad for him and he got a bunch of money to pull him out of you know and because he had medication yeah you know you get the point everybody's got their story but uh there's just this huge it well i mean two years of being locked away you just you know there's no like community society we all think we're all alone and and living through a

screen like the human interaction part of life is pretty freaking huge it's huge and uh you You know, like, you know, the amount of fear that media and others put out can leave you feeling pretty, like, there's not a whole lot to live for, or the days ahead are pretty bleak or whatever it is. I mean, all you got to do is turn it off, walk outside and go, actually, it's pretty nice out here. Yeah, even in minus 30. Yeah, well, and I think that's the tricky thing, too, is all the news is, you know, I don't want to say all the news is controlled, but you turn on one. news channel and it's very left you turn it on another channel I think we all know the I think we all know the the news is pretty controlled I don't got much faith I was just trying to avoid the rabbit hole I'm I'm fine with rabbit holes fellas I'm sitting with a couple of a couple of vets who have

seen some things to me I'm just uh you know I just been pulling at the string and asking questions now for for a couple years and there's just strange stuff going on you know Dave we haven't allowed you uh well Dave we've been talking here and I haven't even allowed you to introduce yourself so maybe maybe we'd start with your background you did show up you know an hour in but I mean other than that maybe we could start Dave with your your your background and just kind of letting the listener know who you are wherever you want to go with it yeah sounds good so I'm the CFO of Pure Life cannabis but prior to that grew up in East Vancouver

Join the military at 17. A BC boy. Yeah, BC. BC and Ontario sitting here. It is weird. Even in the Army, this would be weird. Everything was weird in the Army. We made it that way if it wasn't.

Yeah. So, joined the Army and ended up overseas with Chuck here, I think. I was 22 years old in Ganderthar and Helmand Province. And kind of grew up quick and came back. Got out of the military, thought I'd sell my house. in Edmonton because property prices were doing great in 07. They did a whole lot better in Vancouver. So I stayed in Edmonton and, you know, did a few different things,

got in real estate, property development. And then I guess won a poker game. And, you know, about two months afterwards ended up starting a cannabis company from the poker game. Chuck was there, a few of the guys from the military and the prison. and John and John and what a poker game what a poker game you got you got veterans there you got guys working the the prison system you know and now you now you're obviously a business owner but I mean you know it's not like you you went into selling teddy bears you know

you're selling a substance that half the world well I mean is illegal in a huge chunk yeah so it uh poker game escalated yeah no shit quickly can Yeah, so John had mentioned that he was looking to, you know, get into the cannabis space. It was prior to legalization. It was just medical at the time. And Chuck just happened to mention, he's like, well, if you guys ever actually do this and need a security guy, let me know. And so John called me a couple days later, said, I wasn't joking. Do you want to do this?

And said, well, let's go look at some places. So he started looking around and went for a beer and said, partners? 50-50? Sure, why not? So we kind of started down that road, brought in a few other partners along the way, and then, yeah, now we're sitting in the facility right now.

Yeah, we were joking around about this. As a podcaster, I get to go to all interesting places, and a secret room is certainly pretty cool. Certainly on the top, high up on the list. Just starting to, you know, you joke about the poker game. Did you ever have any hesitations of like, you know, like, did you know anything about the cannabis industry? Did you have a back, I mean, like, maybe you smoked it a bit, but like, I mean, other than that, like, did you have any fears of, like, this could be a bad idea? There's always fears of could this be a bad idea, but I grew up in East Vancouver.

So, you know, there's a lot of cannabis around there. And, you know, I grew up a block off East Hastings Street. You grew up a block off East Hastings Street. Yeah, I grew up on East Pender Street. So it goes to East Hastings, East Pender, East Georgia. I feel like a complete moron here. I got the Ontario kid. I got the BC kid.

You got the small town Saskatchewan kid. Was Hastings as bad back then as it is now? You know, I think it's always been an interesting place. You know, I know there's... That's an interesting way to put it, right? You know, Pigeon Park always had a reputation. There was always, you know, different... creatures crawling around the night.

But I think now it's probably maybe a little worse with the big homeless problem down in Vancouver right now. What did living that close to that street teach you? I'd run fast if you needed to, I guess. How to stand your ground when you need to. And, you know, not to be a coward. Did your parents tell you, don't go down? Like, I'm just assuming, you know, that close.

There was a ton of drug use. and well, and with drugs comes nefarious characters. Do they tell you to stay away from there, or they didn't have to tell you those things? I don't think we had to be told. I was one of seven kids, too, so I had three older brothers and, you know, kind of walk you through a lot of situations before you even get into them when you've got, you know, big Irish Catholic family. You know, you're walking across East Hastings Street and grade one on your way to school by yourself.

It's just, you know, that was life. It was just normal. Isn't it fucked up what we can make normal? And I don't mean... Oh, no, it's true, yeah. That's normal. But, I mean, think of some war-toring country, what they make normal. Oh, yeah.

I've seen far shittier normals. Yeah. Yeah. Overseas, I assume. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You see, you know, brothers arguing in a field and putting hatchets through each other's heads because they're having a disagreement while they're working in the field.

And that's their normal. We work with A&A, Afghan National Army guys who get into it, get liquored up. They're not supposed to have booze, but they get liquored up, have a disagreement, shoot each other. Like, that's normal. They're getting high on opium while they're driving around in the back of their Ford Rangers, crash it into the ditch. They all go flying 30 of them out of the back of a Ford Ranger, the music blaring, and they all hop back in the truck dancing and laughing.

And you're like, how are they not dead? You know, but they're all giggling and laughing like little schoolgirls, all high on opium. And hop back in the back of the truck and you're like, why the hell are we taking these guys into the middle of battle with us? Yeah. But we'd have to take the Afghan face to the Afghan problem. And so we would have to roll around with real nefarious characters. Yeah. And so a lot of times, you know, combat would start and we'd be like, where did they go?

And you're like, well, maybe it's better than not up here with us. Yeah. But you had to take that phase to that problem and, you know, to kind of be a united front. But really, nobody there wants to be doing what they're doing. You know, you don't want to have to be defending your country. You don't want to, you don't be involved in that. What was the unemployment rate? Just massive in Afghanistan.

And so what do they have to provide for their families, right? If you're born and raised there, that's your home country, what do you do? So you feel bad for them. And they don't want to be police officers. They don't want to be in the army. But it's the only job they can get unless they want to join the Taliban. We know, guys, I did all three things. I worked with a guy, an Afghan Special Forces guy after a bad event.

And dude had been Mujahjadine fighting the Russians when he was a teenager. Then he'd been Taliban fighting us for five years. Taliban screwed over his family, so he chopped up a bunch of them and came on our side as a Special Forces guy. And he's the scariest human I ever met, the guy in Shane Kay after that one. Scariest human, how so? What do you mean by that? Because when I sit across from your truck, the listener won't get this feel, but I'm like,

I feel like if I went in a bar brawl with you, I'm coming out on top. Like, I mean. Oh, I'm handy in a bar. Yeah, I had. Like, I feel like I bought you on my side is what I'm getting at, right? He's just as handy. But, well, no, no, but Dave, Dave, Dave is, what's the word I'm looking for? I don't think you'd suspect him.

He's under the radar. And knowing he went where he went, I'm like, that's one scary guy, too, because you don't look the part and the fact that you can throw down the way that I've been told. It's like, okay. So either way, I go, these two guys sitting across me, folks, I'm like, if I go to a bar tonight with them and we get into a little fisticuffs, I feel like I'm on the right side of things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But this fella, and we met scary dudes over there. We met a lot of scary dudes. This guy didn't have right eyes.

He didn't, he, this was after Trevor Green took an axe to the head. This was this incident. So this particular Afghan group, Special Forces group, had been brought in, especially to help us determine who in this village was a good guy or a bad guy. this particular guy had his own methods and he I had a long conversation with him a couple times that day and I know guys when they're posing I know guys when they're fronting I know guys who are legitimately who they present to be and this guy had no idea how scary or evil he was he's completely evil this fella but he was on our side of it he's only on our side of things

because his Taliban screwed his family over. He'd happily have chopped us apart if he thought it was going to be beneficial to him. But he was very happily doing what he needed to do to get the answers he wanted in a very bad place. He, yeah, I've met

bad people. I've met some rough people, even in the jail system. I've never met anybody who I thought, well, I've met evil. This is an evil dude. And even for a guy like me, I was like, I'm going to watch this one. I'm going to be careful around this fella. You mentioned a word that I was curious about on the drive here.

You know, when you're in, you know, life or death situations, that type of thing. You can start to ponder, I assume, larger than, you know, quite large ideas. And one of them has been good and evil. And I've often asked different people if they've ever actually seen evil. Have you seen evil? And you're going, you have seen evil, Chuck. Yep. Dave?

Oh, yeah, I've definitely seen evil. I think we've all been evil when we need to be as well. You know, I don't think there's anything wrong with it either, in all honesty. I think there's a time and a place for everything. And sometimes when you've got to man up and face something, sometimes you've got to be the baddest motherfucker in the room. And you just got to fucking take it by the throat and crush it. And it's all in good fun at the end of the day.

Yeah. There should be no illusion or misconception that we're Boy Scouts either. Like, there just isn't. We're not bad guys, I don't think. And I don't think I'm talking in the general sense of the guys like us or the guys that were with us and stuff. But we weren't boys'outs. We're not guys who are, like, singing real loud and quiet. Well, you weren't in a Nerf gun fight.

No. Right? Like, I think I get that. I think the audience gets that. I guess when I say evil, I just mean, like, that's bad. And I get that each human being has a, you know, I forget that. It's the two wolves, right, a dark and a white wolf, you know, the one that grows you, that's the one you feed.

I get that. And I even get that, like, in order to come through something, maybe you got to do some bad things or you got to, like, you just got to man up and whatever. But I'm like, I guess, you know, you guys go to some of the most dangerous places. You know, I'm talking Afghanistan in the height of it. You know, we've been talking back and forth about, you know, Even the documentary you guys sent, the Bards of War, watching that and seeing what you guys went through.

It's like, I don't think, maybe I'm wrong on this. So correct me if I'm wrong. Shooting back and forth at each other, I don't know if that's evil. That's two sides they're trying to do what they believe it's right. Oh, I don't consider that evil either. No, there's nothing wrong with it. No.

Evil is something else that I can't quite articulate. Yeah. But I think even people, that you, you know, like the guy Chuck has mentioned in there, like, I witnessed them. You know, I got to see him in action, you know, live in his best life. And, you know, I think everybody's got that ounce of it in them. Yep. Everybody's also got that ounce of humanity in them.

And I think the people that you'd probably be considering as evil are just people that show it a little bit more. you know everybody you know look at Christmas you know giving are you given to make yourself feel better like what are you giving for you know there's an ounce of evil in everything you know if you're taking pleasure in giving something are you really giving for the right reasons you can you can you know break it down all sorts of different ways everybody coming from different environments you know they could be much worse so maybe are they not evil they could be worse you know, somebody coming from a great upbringing. You know, they might give to charity nonstop and, you know, do all sorts of great things,

but, you know, maybe they could be doing more. Whereas, you know, some of these guys we've met don't come from much of anything. And, you know, they're still functioning. They're alive, you know, looking after, you know, switching sides because the Taliban killed and tortured their family. You know, maybe they're doing the righteous things. right now by being evil. You know, everybody's coming from a different situation.

So, you know, I don't ever feel the ability to judge anybody as evil or as good, you know, even myself. You know, I like to think I'm a good person. I'd give you the shirt off my back. But, you know, am I doing enough? You know, and at the other end of the spectrum, you know, I could be bad, you know, just as bad as anybody else and just as good. So it's, I think sometimes it's perception. And, you know, everybody's got a different standard and a standard on how they conduct themselves, but also a standard

on how you view somebody else. Yeah. So, you know, it's beauty's in the eye of the beholder and so is evil. Yeah. The guys I always wanted to hear me in a gunfight weren't, weren't angels and they sure shit weren't Boy Scouts. It was guys that were like that, you know, you knew you were going to come out of it or you're going to do everything you could to come out of it on a day, on a bad day, you know. Well, I think the big thing in a gunfight is you want somebody who would rather die than let you die. And, you know, I remember the one time had an RPG hit the wall right beside me about five feet away and the blast kind of sent me and kind of shredded the armor around me and I was more looking for the guys thinking my vehicle got hit and trying to make sure

the guys around me are okay. But, you know, going into those fights, you're watching your arc because you don't want to turn, you know, get off of your arc onto somebody else's because you want to get engaged in the fight. What do you mean arc? So say I'm watching the right side, you're watching the left side, you know, these guys are taking the front and these guys have the rear. So if I'm supposed to be watching the right arc. And, you know, there's fighting off to the left and the front. And I'm, you know, screw this. I want to join the fight.

And, you know, lack of discipline by moving away from your objective and go to join the fight, now you get flanked on the right side and you don't see it coming. Now everybody's dead because you couldn't watch your arc. And so there's a lot of, you know, discipline that it takes to do that in the fight. Because trust me, it sucks when you're in a gunfight. And you're not pulling the trigger. Oh, the worst part of, one of the worst feelings is being one radio call away from a gunfight. You can hear it going off two clicks out, you know, down the road from you.

And you're, we're stuck, like, where we were waiting for it to happen where we, we are. And you're like, screw this. We let's just go. We should go. We need to go now. And there's guys crying because you want to get in this fight. You want to not be listening to it. And you need guys.

like that. You need guys that need to get in there, need to get in the fight, but can do it while obeying orders and making sure they don't put everybody else at risk. And I don't even want to say obeying orders, you know, because it takes a, it's that street fight mentality in a lot of ways too. Like, you've got to be calm and cool in the middle of chaos. You know, you've got to be composed. You know, can you get punched in the face and not flinch about it? it kind of enjoy the pain when you need to and just roll into it and I think that's what gunfighting really is you know enjoying taking that hit and get through it because people expect to shoot at you and you turn and run away when you stand up and

you're bigger and batter and you walk right into them they start to shake they're not shooting straight you know they're praying to God their bullets are going to hit you because they know you're not going to stop yeah and so I think that was our big benefit in 2006 is that they would attack us and we'd go, all right, let's do this. You know, there was excitement to it. Like I know probably the first big gunfight we were in, you know, that shit your pants sort of feeling. But also, you know, that listening to a great song and, you know, the adrenaline you feel. And then, you know, the couple, I think the next day we were fighting, we got, we were going

through Pangeway, and we got ambushed and we took out a whole pile of them. And I remember the guy's going down so you don't, you don't rule the ground until you walk it. You know, boots on the ground are what rule. And, you know, the guys dismounted, I think me and Sean there were in the first two vehicles because our lab had already been blown up. So we were in Jeeps and we had machine guns out the roof. And so we were the first two vehicles because they were smaller.

So we weren't sure if the labs were going to be able to fit. And so we got lit up pretty good and took the guys out, guys rolled up on foot and, oh, yeah, we got bodies down here. And so we brood the guys up pretty good. And it was that feeling that's like you're listening to the best music you've ever heard in your life. You just, you want to dance and you feel like you've got an erection. You're like, you know, you're just, it's a different feeling. Yeah, the best overtime win is what that felt like all the time, but more.

Like it's exponential. It's like, for one, this is what we trained to do. For me, it was 15 years at this point. Like, I'd been around a while. I'd done a bit. This was the show. This was our show. And like Dave says, it was this level of it.

There's excitement. Some might call it the show. It's, yeah. We called it the business. The business, yeah. We were doing the business. Yeah. The business of war.

And we were fucking good at it. Yeah. And it was nice to see or hear, because we had our interpreters with little radios listening to the Taliban. The level of panic they had when they realized we weren't American, well, they're Canadian. And then you'd hear them like, I ain't doing it. You do it. You get your guys to fight them then. And this kind of conversation happening, we're like,

Like, they know who we are now. They don't want to mess with us anymore. That's a great feeling. They still fought us. They still fought us heart. But we'd gone up a notch. You'd already become a mind virus to them. Yes.

You know? I'm always going to pull it back to hockey because I don't, you know, I don't know how better to do it, but they talk about the, you know, you got the Detroit Red Wing flu or whatever it is, right? Yes. Like, or your gamers. And you're like, I don't care if it's the Detroit Red Wing flu. wings or, you know, I'm thinking back to the late 90s of Detroit and Colorado, they're going to show up

and some people are going to get a bloody way we go, right? Yeah. It's when you start getting in the minds of the enemy like that, and certainly you can put it to sports easily enough, right? There's a mental side of this. Yeah, foil those knuckles up. Let's go. Well, they got in the minds of a lot of our guys, too.

And we talked about this before the show. Like, they got into a lot of our minds, like, not ours, but they got into, dudes we knew and and it ended them they they didn't want to play anymore and it's and I understand it I can I I get it on a scale of when you're deploying X number of people not everybody's going to want to be in the show and not everybody's ready for what you guys were about the deal mm-hmm no I think we were lucky we were a you know a group of cowboys you know odds and sods we were we weren't all you know the exact same sort of cookie, you know, getting put in there.

We had all sorts of crazy. Our company, the Red Devils, was already a cowboy company run by cowboys. And then our platoon, two platoon, was basically the worst outlaws in the company, who we basically took the toughest troops we could find, like the ones who were problem. Most of my section were problematic children. They were all people who were in, right? I was generally in trouble, like, you know, in shit for something rather, as most of us were. Most of my guys were in trouble for one thing or another, but man, could they fight?

And that's what I wanted. I wanted guys who could fight. So you take that. There was a point where the rest of our battle group of 2,000 plus people, 2400 people, was on some level or other told. don't talk to two platoon. Like don't, please don't interact with them. We were like, we'd heard this from multiple people.

Like, what do you mean you were told not to talk to us when we're back on camp? And they're like, well, you guys are like, not good people. We were different creatures. You know, everybody was a creature and a character. But it wasn't just that the guys were tough. You know, everybody could laugh everything on. Yes, yeah. You know, you'd go sun tanning in the middle of a character.

gunfight, you know, just kind of that mentality. Like, well, what happens? All I can think of is, this is the guy who's never been to war, you know, or been even remotely close. All I can think of is 300, where we'll fight you in the shade and they fire all the arrows out of, you know what I'm talking about, right? And they're all laughing in the middle of getting a hailstorm of arrows on. I think at least twice in the documentary you can hear people yelling, is this where you

want your well, you know, because we've been early part of the tour, they kept telling us, go visit this village and see where they want a well put in for their village. We got, and we get blown up on the way or in a fight on the way. So it became a running joke for us. So in a middle of a, in the middle of a fight, we would yell at the Taliban. Is this where you want your fucking well? And throw grenades at them. Like, that's where your well is going.

You saw, yeah, we're terror. Maybe we don't look scared. I was scared the whole time. We all were. But I was having a blast. And, um, you know, We were making sure we were going to win every time. What do you guys think of everybody pulling out of Afghanistan?

You've seen the videos of the runway and everything else. I mean, you spent, I mean, Chuck, you were two tours and Dave, just the one, I assume. Yeah. You know, when you spent time, you blood, sweat, tears, everything, and then some. When you see the everybody pull out, you know, like, what did you guys think? For me, it was embarrassing to watch how it was executed. I think it could have been done all sorts of different ways, and it didn't have to be so much abandoning the people.

You know, there was a lot of promises made and promises broken with the way that they pulled out. And, you know, when we were over there, a lot of the talk was about hearts and minds. How do you ever win back hearts and minds after you've been seen, you know, executing like that as a government? you know, or not even just a government, but NATO and ISAF as a whole. And it makes you think, you know, do you have to review NATO and ISAF and, you know, break down and

and see who the real problem pieces are in there and where there's got to be some sort of accountability and liability. Because, you know, as much as I loved going to war, I loved the Afghan people as well. The Afghan people were great. Yeah. We were fighting alongside them. And, you know, it wasn't typically Afghans. We were fighting.

We were fighting foreign soldiers. What do you mean? They're all Merks. Most of our fights were against really organized, well-equipped drug lord troops. They were warlord troops, going by the, you know, overall moniker of Taliban. The real background to it all is that they run drugs. This is how they fund themselves. So most of the fights in the regions we were in were warlords pooling their troops together for a push, for a political push or for an objective push.

During harvest season. Yep, harvest season. Harvest season is fighting season. Yeah, it's fighting. Because they need to get the heroin out back into Pakistan. That fight you saw us in in Hyderabad in the show in the movie, the one that starts in the morning and goes. goes on we were told so we got woken up at two in the morning in a middle of nowhere hey you're gonna go in there's gonna be six dudes in this village this is the

building they're in they got they're making IEDs hard knock hard knock means just kill soft knock is like knock before you shoot them kind of thing so we're going in for a hard knock no big deal we're gonna go do this it turns out there were 50 guys all foreign nationals all with varieties of passports that we took off them and they had $25 million in black tar heroin that they were trying to get out of that village before we got in there. So they had to fight us and die

or fight us and get the drugs out. Well, we wound up killing like most of them that day of the 50 of them. And there's like a few of us. So that's the big story that doesn't get told too much. You go into like Helmand province where the British had their area of operations. They had a mandate where they could burn the crops.

They could burn the overall. made for some really awesome fights. The Americans and us didn't have that mandate. No, it's their crop. Well, we're not going to interfere with this. So we're like, this is some bullshit. This is what they're buying their guns with. This is what they're funding themselves with.

Why are we not taking away their economy with this? Give them money for farming other things. There was a program at one point for that. They can grow a lot of crops over there. They're the masters of irrigation. It's like a sea of opium. though. So, you know, there was a big disconnect between the way nations handled things. And like Dave mentioned, ISAF and NATO. We knew August 3rd in 06 that things were not going to go the way we wanted.

We, as Operation Enduring Freedom, that ended August 1st. And NATO took over the fight. They took over command of the fight. Rules of engagement changed. Things happened, you know, where we could get air cover and Arti support, artillery support. That didn't happen. We saw in August 3rd at the big battle at the White School, where like 60 of us took on 400 Taliban. We get no support. So we just fought, fought for our lives

and lost four men and 16 wounded. There are 60 dudes. Not a good day. So why do you think NATO changed the rules of engagement then? Why would they do that? We are winning.

Isn't that the point? Well, you would think. I got asked many times by you know, being here and there, I used to do a little speaking here and there. And I was asked, well, why didn't we win this war? Why didn't, what could we have done different to win this war? Well, we won every fight. We didn't lose a battle. We never, ever lost a fight.

No fight ever. Not us, not the Brits and the Americans. We didn't lose fights. But politicians could manage to lose that war. We gave them every battlefield. We took every objective. If we were assigned, take this town, there's a thousand Taliban, and go get it. 100 of us had mount up, we go knock them out of that town.

We'd hold that town. But the politicians would manage to lose a war that was we were winning. We were winning the war. Then NATO took over. So I talk about us, the Brits and the Canadians being the fighters outside. That's it. There's like 40 other countries that we'd see, you know, running around, you know, with the green beans coffee in their hand on calf, 40,000 people.

There's, you know, Norway had five guns. there and Romania had a couple companies there and Holland had a few people. The Dutch had a few people there. A lot of these guys were paying their ways so because the they had their own political environments to deal with. And you know, politically they couldn't afford having any casualties overseas. Otherwise they'd be forced to pull their troops out. So they're paying off the Taliban to give free range of movement and then they wouldn't do patrols from their patrol bases. So they would essentially have a resort in the middle of, you know, whatever province in Afghanistan that they were paying off the local warlords not to attack them.

Well, that Germans up near Kabul. They couldn't lose a single soldier or they would have lost the mandate to be there. So they basically, they're not the only ones, but they were paying off the Taliban. Don't attack us. Don't do this. They're warlords. The Taliban are all warlords, the ones running it. So they're taking this money.

And of course they're not attacking you because why would they? They don't, they, they're just going to wait for whatever. It's cash cow. They're going to milk the cash cow until you leave. And they, we're not the first guys to say it. The Afghan say it all the time, you know, you've got the clocks, we got the time. They don't care. We don't think.

They think generationally. Yeah. We don't think that way. When we were there, we saw a burnt out Russian equipment from that war. We fought the same battlefields. The difference is we'd win our fights. But politically, there was no will to win, you know. No.

And it was a lot of. money free flowing over there as well. You know the different government contracts and you know seeing KPR everywhere, you know, huge money to be made and huge money to be milked out of that country. KPR, you're throwing acronyms at me. I don't know. KBR. So they were doing a lot of the camp maintenance. Just so all these companies back here, literally run by like Dick, literally run by like Dick Cheney and these people. they own these companies that get the food contract on camp. Well, you're feeding 40,000 people three meals a day.

Well, who's making money? Running bus services. Bus services on the camp. In Kandahar Airfields. You've got a bus service so that you don't have to walk somewhere. You've got pizza huts. You've got green bean coffee. They finally got Tim Hortons there.

You know, the boardwalk. There's a little mini economy in itself. Yeah. And then you'd have the markets on the weekends. Yeah. So we'd get rocketed at the, the airfield, but only so much. And they would never land anywhere near troops.

Yeah. Because if they were too close to the troops and, hey, we're going to take away the weekly market. And so then the locals didn't want to lose that market because that was a big source of economy for them, right? They'd set up on the weekend, all the troops would go through, buy all their bootleg videos and clothes and all this sort of fun stuff. That's really good.

Their souvenirs. Yeah. But if there's no rockets going off, well, we need. still have a reason that you guys are here. Yeah. So a lot of it was just, you know, Poms and circumstance and, you know, BS. Well, even you apply that to today,

what's happening overseas in the war right now. And people go, well, NATO's going to do this. And NATO's got this. And NATO is going to band together. And if NATO does a thing, let me tell you about NATO. NATO is Canada, where it was up until the last few years,

the Americans and the Brits. They're the only fighters. nobody else ever over there that we saw came outside the wire to help us fight not once not ever you know we go into gun fights with a half platoon you know 15 dudes on the ground and fight however many taliban nobody's coming to help you unless it's a brit or american you know unit near you and same vice versa we'd go do the same we'd go on to the big camp in the few days we'd get back to the big camp you know you'd have to wait in line at a burger king because we'd we we'd go want to go back and get some grease into us, you know, we're good Canadian boys and have

our illegal bottles that we weren't supposed to have. But, um, because we're Canadian. You mean mouthwash? And mouthwash, yeah. That's how we got family to send it all over in mouthwash bottles. But, uh, so, um, where the city's dry? Oh yeah, we weren't, we weren't allowed to drink over there. Yeah. But we, we had tons of booze. Um, I assure you. But, uh, you know, we'd, we'd have to wait in line behind these guys with shiny gear and no dirt on them and the rifles are clean. And meanwhile, we look like the gypsy caravan just rolled in because we got like a day, you know, a day to get our vehicles. Half the time is 20 minutes.

Yeah. You'd dismount. They'd be like, okay, go grab some food. Yeah. And then you'd get called back and go, okay, we're rolling out. Yeah. You know, we wouldn't even be able to get through the meal line in the mess hall. Yeah.

And if you're trying just going to grab something, you'd get shit on for it. And you're like, fuck off. Yeah. You know, I remember one time we were back there for like half an hour and I needed a new Gerber, you know, multi-tool, as might have snapped. And I went to the stores to get a new initiate. And they're like, sorry, we're just closing. You'll have to come back tomorrow. I'm like, fuck you tomorrow.

I'm rolling back into fucking combat right now. And I need a fucking multi-tool so I can clean my weapon. They're like, yeah, so you're going to have to come back tomorrow. And it's like, listen, your fuckhead. I'm going to grab you by the throat and fucking ram your head through the wall. get me a fucking multi-tool. Like, it's not up for discussion. And they're like, uh, okay.

And it's like, what the fuck are you doing in Afghanistan? Working business hours. Oh, eight to four, come back tomorrow? Fuck off. That's how it was. That was the disconnect. We would come back to this and be so, I prefer just not to come back. Honestly, we reached a point where I was like, yeah, I'd like to shower.

It's been 50 days. I wouldn't mind a shower and some clean clothes. But I was like, I have to deal with these people. We were our vehicle. used to get parked was about 800 meters from our big ass tents the legendary big ass tents we lived in circus tents with like no AC everybody else had at go trailers lived like camp life like you would up north like pretty Gucci considering it's Afghanistan so we would have to walk with all of our gear back to the big ass

tents and on that 800 meter trek with your hundred pounds of gear on somebody some camp guy with a big guy would want to jack you up for your dress and deportment or you're dirty or this or your hats all tilted out or your boots aren't bloused. Boots aren't bloused. Like you don't have your boot bands in to make you look like you're in the army. This kind of BS. And it got to the point where we used to try and control the boys, you know, if we're bosses. And then we were the worst ones about it.

We'd be like just going after everybody. No wonder nobody want we weren't allowed to talk to us. We were horrible to deal with. Like, this was what would happen to us. We'd get crapped on by people who were showering a couple of times. times a day, eating great meals every day, you know. It's crazy, fellas, I guess, you know, and certainly I think if you wanted to go find it, you could find it.

And yet, you know, I always joke, I live under Iraq because, I mean, to hear about the bureaucracy being over in Afghanistan and probably other places where war is going on, kind of hurts the brain a little bit. Oh, yeah. You know, the way it's painted over here compared to what you're painting. a picture of over there is is starkly different i guess like a certain parts of it i mean there's a disconnect in the army at the best of times even amongst interunit but intertrain like we were infantry so we were considered the lowest of the low and that's how we were treated

and i don't i have no complaint about that we go go for it i'm a caveman giver that's fine but at least i go outside the wire and do business you what do you know oh good you counted my socks today, my spare socks and all this. You didn't give me the gear I needed, like, you know, when my thing broke, whatever, I'll survive, I'll get by. And not, like, you know, just to chime in, like, not that we're shit talking to anybody, but there, like, it's very different factions. Except for the guy who wouldn't give you the multi-tool. Well, exactly. But, you know, there's, you know, different strokes for different folks.

But, you know, I think, you know, every aspect of the military is needed. You know, everybody's got their own saying. Sure. You know, supply guys or, you know, bullets don't fly without supplies. You know, everybody's got their own saying, you know, most of our sayings are more insults to everybody else. You know, ramp and, you know, things like that, like rear echelon motherfuckers, you know, wogs without guts, without guns, without grace, without glory. the guys that aren't fighting. But there's nothing wrong with that either.

Well, you go back, I've read books, and actually I remember this as a kid, I don't know how old I was, probably in high school. When I first read one of the first stories about, I think it's the Roman Army, and what surprised me, and I guess it just hadn't dawned on me is how like pretty much a little city followed the 10,000 men. And why?

Because what did 10,000 men need? Well, they need food. And, you know, back then, They needed a companion and they needed armor fixed. And so what happens is you got all these different little trades fall along, and it's a moving city back in the day. So I guess it shouldn't surprise me that in Afghanistan you had the same thing. It's just the ratio.

Yeah. And it's just interesting to hear that it was, you know, I guess Britain, the empire, and the United States, the biggest military might in the world and Canada. and I give Canada all the time in the world. I've read the stories on World War I and World War II on the things we did there and how impactful we were, listening to you to. I'm like, yeah, don't mess with the Canadians.

But it seems odd, doesn't it? Doesn't that seem odd that it's the states, Britain, Canada? You played hockey. Who'd you not want to be fighting against? You know, it's the Canadian kids. You know, the Saskatchewan Farm Boys, you know, the kids from East Vancouver. Every neighborhood.

If British guys could skate, I wouldn't want to fight them either. Because on dry land, those guys can roll on a fist fight. They got the soccer hooligans. Yeah, they're hoot. It's just another version, right? Well, I guess, you know, right now with Russia, Ukraine, right? Everything, talk about NATO, and if NATO comes in and NATO all these countries, what you're saying, and I'd heard this, I'd read this report probably a month ago,

how nobody in NATO wants to go to war. And when I'm getting out of you to it, I'm like, oh, maybe nobody in NATO ever wants to go to war, right? It's more of fluffing my tail feathers. Like, we mean business. And for the bulk of them, they're not a war. There's no, especially this generation, is not a warlike mentality. Like, it's not, we worked, I've worked with troops from all over the world in my career.

And I can tell you right now, having seen what we saw over there, and my second tour was even worse. They're not fighters. We're not going to send some relief army. Everybody hears NATO when they think, well, there's a NATO army somewhere hidden in Europe. Trained soldiers. There's got to be. They're trained to hide. They're not going to fight.

They're doing two-year contracts. They're not trained any. You can't train a guy in two years. It takes years to train a dude. Like really train a guy. All the guys that were there. Like how many, I couldn't even name the amount of countries that are there. But you never see them leave the wire.

You see the brand new, you know, the Saudis with their dune buggies and, you know, all this. awesome looking gear and you're like, look, these guys are pretty checked out. And then you're like, that's, things still spotless, you know, six, seven months later. Yeah. You know, they're not going and doing anything with it. They've got money to spend on great gear because they never lose any because they never go to battle. Like, you know, they could keep new gear for 40 years, the amount of combat there, they're going through. In the, in the vehicle graveyard on CAF, it was only our vehicles and American vehicles.

There was no other country's vehicles in that graveyard. Like, they're none. It was just hours getting blown up or attacked. It was, you know, you go to the field hospital to visit buddies who were wounded. It was only Canadians, Brits and Americans in there, unless somebody stubbed a toe, you know, from going. Or Afghans. Or Afghans. The Afghan soldiers would get treated in there.

Oh, the Afghan soldiers got slaughtered. Yeah. So the Afghan police. Yeah. We would roll in with armored vehicles. They're rolling in in Ford Rangers. Ford Ranger, yeah. Yeah.

So, like, down in Southern Helmand, we. We went down for the Brit Pathfinders and we fought for, what, two, three days. Almost a week. Yeah, to take that town back. And, you know, so we handed it back over to the Brit Pathfinders and, what, 150 Afghan army? Something around there. And, you know, as we're pulling out, they're getting slaughtered. 800 Taliban pushed back into a town that we took a while to take.

And the British guys saw us leaving. And they're like, well, if you're leaving, we're leaving. So we stayed for an extra day to back them up. But I'll knock on the Afghan police all day. They're useless. They were corrupt and horrible fighters. But the Afghan army, for the most part, tried. You asked earlier about what it felt like to watch Afghanistan fall.

We knew, I bet you by August 3rd of 06, we knew. We knew once NATO took over. But these poor Afghan soldiers who really, for the most part, were, really trying to rebuild a country. They really most, for the most part, they did. We talked to them through interpreters or very, very few of them that knew English, but mostly through interpreters. And even the interpreters we talked to, like, what are you doing this for?

You're going to get executed if they catch you. I don't want Afghanistan, Afghanistan to be medieval forever. They, they wanted something, right? They wanted something better. And not necessarily our lifestyle, just not under Sharia law, like Taliban rule. Well, look at Afghanistan. in the 70s, you know, it wasn't the Afghanistan we've got today. Not that I was, you know, there in the 70s, but, you know, there's still Afghans that

lived through that, you know. So imagine looking at your home neighborhood and then you viewed as Afghanistan now. Like it's so night and day, but, you know, if you had something, would you still be fighting for it? And that's what they're in the middle of and they've got nowhere to go. and you know once they're an Afghan army now they can never switch back to the other side without some sort of you know they could pay a bounty and probably not get executed but you know these poor Afghan soldiers

as soon as the last of us pulled out and by us I mean like us the British and Americans pulled out they had no backbone left there was nothing you know we were very lucky that our first few fights were like feeler fights like feeler battles where it was kind of like maybe who we were fighting weren't

that great either or it was just one of these the kind of fight like you get into where you're like I'm being hit oh I'm hitting back and I learned a whole bunch and then the next fight is a little harder this one was a you know an ambush it was bad or this was a brutal fighter there's some monster battles in all of this like there's a period of time where we fought for like a month

straight day and day and every day you know and every fight was easier did you get I can imagine the adrenaline that comes with that. Did you ever just get so tired or did it not come until after it was done? During. We're always tired. Always tired. The adrenaline dump. You'd sleep in the middle of a gunfight.

You know, you'd take your chance and scrape a little hole and, okay, you're watching the arc. So I'll catch five minutes of sleep and then we'll switch off. Because some battles lasted days, day and night. So the adrenaline dump that would happen in that initial, like, boot contact, and you'd kind of, be like the buck drop and you're just going full tilt and then by third period you're like give me a minute yeah i need a i need a longer uh little sitzy on the bench here i'm gonna take so you two kids pretty much sleep through writing thing then oh yeah we had more yeah but i mean you know you tell me you can sleep through gunfire i assume you're just like ah i'm gonna go to bed

for a little bit yeah i'm going to tune it out yeah you learn to tune it out yeah a big part of that though honest i'll tell you this you know six I could sleep peacefully in the middle of the worst moments because I had him or guys like him with me. Like that's all we had at that point. There was no, by the time we got to that fighting season, all the loser limp guys were gone. They were, they were gone. It was only this left. It was, you know, there weren't many of us left, but that's all you needed.

I went back in 08 and I'll tell you right now. I didn't sleep so good at night. Not, not, there were a lot of guys who shouldn't have been there, but there were enough where I didn't, didn't sleep as good outside at night when we were out hunting. You know, it wasn't as, uh, things had changed. Mentality had changed at the, at the command level. On our tour, our tour is a fighting tour.

So where do you think, uh, foot soldiers go in the next 20 years, 30 years? Ooh, good question. I think you're still going to need them. Not that you don't need them, but, you know, you see the younger generations coming up being, I mean, we're not talking about SAS Farm Boys anymore. No, no knock on SAS Farm Boys. You need, but they're just becoming the family farms are slowly, you know, being bought up and moved, and conglomerates are moving in and more people in the cities and, you know, less manual labor happening every single day.

Like, it's just, you know. We talk about this culture in the Army, and this will be. be the broader stroke of it all, but when I went through in the early 90s, we could get beaten pretty heavily. There was, there was, there was a level of physical punishment or enforcement that you need, that, that was required. There was a lot of bullying, but there was also a level of, I'm not making that mistake twice because I don't want to get swatted again for that. there was a level of pride that you took from being with a group of people who could do the job. There were standards and forcible standards.

If you couldn't do this thing, if you couldn't run the 5K in X amount of time or carry this amount away or shoot this good or do this many chin-ups or push-ups, you weren't, you didn't make it. You were kicked out. And beaten along the way until you were kicked out. The infantry's always had huge failure rates for people trying to get through, which has always been a sense of pride and the guys too.

It's not an easy course and there's no free pass. A lot of the guys in other trades would have failed out of infantry training gone into some other trade where the standards were, show up. And then so they,

but they would spend their career saying, were you stupid infantry guy? Well, yeah, maybe. I don't know. Maybe I'm not that bright. I don't know. I don't know how to spell infantry but I can sure fucking lift it.

I can't count it. But, you know, that is what it is. that's been all armies immortal. But the standard that we once had is no longer there. There is no physical standard anymore. There's no physical standard? There's very little and what there is isn't enforced.

The culture of the army did need a shift. I won't say that it didn't. This culture, you've seen senior officers coming to light in the last few years that have done stupid, horrible, disgusting things, abusing their rank, it's not just senior officers, but senior officers at that command level are notoriously horrible,

but just shitty people. They're politicians. That did need an overhaul. I won't deny it. But where we lost a gap was where they brought in all of this, well, he was mean to me. We used to see timeout cards.

Like, literal, they tried to introduce these timeout cards where I'm yelling at you as a new recruit or a battlefield recruit in Wain, And you get upset because I'm yelling at you for being stupid because you're stupid. And you pull up your card and say you can't yell at me for an hour now. You know, my feelings are hurt. Well, no.

When I went through if I was stupid and I was generally stupid, like I was new. I was dumb. I didn't know anything. If I took a swat in the head or a kick or something or a couple punches in the face, I didn't do the same thing wrong twice. and yeah, it was rough. But I didn't do it twice, and I was only stupid once for every incident.

You've also weeded out the guys that weren't tough enough to take it. Yeah, if you can't handle that, when the Taliban's throwing grenades at you and shit-talking you over the wall that they're going to slice your head off. You're not going to handle a little swat in the head and wane right and give me a break.

Like, come on. That's gone. Taliban whisper and sweet nothing's in English? Broken English. You'd hear it. We heard it. in Sangin when we were cut off. They were screaming over the wall. You know, fuck you, Canada.

Fucking kill you, fucking kill you. Like, then they'd slam dunk a grenade over the wall. You know, like, fuck you, kill you. You know, broken English bullshit. But they didn't like our placement of the walls. We yelled it right back and threw grenades right back at them. Going back, so, like, a time, I don't know. I guess I always thought, if you're going to get in the

army you're going to have to deal with a lot of things that's that's that's kind of what it is and i mean um some of the stories you guys have shed a little bit of light on i'm like man i just can't imagine the stress or the the level of of energy that you know comes and goes from i mean just having a grenade fly over the wall like it's got to be intense like you know so many people are like why i play calling you i kind of get it it's like i don't think so i don't think you get this one i don't don't think yet you can remotely understand. There's very few more naked feelings you have than seeing that grenade come out of the nether, catching that little orb dropping within a few feet and being like, well,

fuck now what? And just flop. You just flop to the ground and hope like, well, hopefully it doesn't take us apart. Frag out. Or grenade or frague. Yeah. And it's like every, you know, people's gears. getting torn apart and, you know, everybody's concussed and there's blood and snot and tears

everywhere because, you know, you're being over-pressurized by this stuff non-stop. Well, and then you're counting in your head. Yeah. Waiting for it to go off so that you can get right back up and go. But you don't want to get up too soon. You know, and then get fragged yourself. So it's one of those things. And then it's like, did I count too slow?

Did it count too fast? And, you know, you don't want to get up and then, you know, it goes off. But there's a lot of times where somebody doesn't pull. the pin before throwing it. You know, because there's two, two pins on them. So, you know, they pull one and not the other. So it's not going to go off. So now what do you do, right?

Do you give it an extra couple seconds or do you get back into the fight yourself? Yeah. So do you guys watch, you know, on a completely, I hope, lighter note? Because this is, I feel like I'm listening to this and my brain is like on overload. Do you guys watch any more movies? Oh, yeah. Do you have a favorite? Like, what sticks out to you as a good warm of you?

Like, man, that was actually good. That's a good question, too. This is a better one for Chucky, because I don't watch too much. Yeah, he's, like, socially weird. He's kind of like a goalie? Yeah, he'd be a, yeah, but he's not a goalie. He's a go-getter. And just as vicious on skates.

For me, there's got to be the story and the realism. And so I really like, one of the first movies I grew up watching was Zulu with Michael Kane and based in Africa, the British Zulu War. And yeah, it's like 1968 or something that's filmed. It's a great movie. It's one of his first movies. It's a classic type movie.

It's a story about like a very few men holding out against the overwhelming odds. Like 11 VCs awarded that day. Like it's a record. I think it's still a record for the most amount of VCs rewarded. it in a day. It's just a great movie. But modern stuff, I'd have to go with like 13 hours maybe. And there's so much to that story that isn't not even not just in the movie, but talked about a bunch, but if you read about these guys or read their books. But the realism of that movie too, that we've both felt and heard that snick whip, the snick, you know, you can tell when

the bullets here, a foot out from your head, and you can tell when it, it breezed you. You can tell, oh it's it's like three feet out I'm not even worried about that you know the feeling of an RPG flying past your face and you feel the wind off the RPG and that you know just ripping getting ready to take your fucking head off and it's like an angry

banshee screaming across the battle it's the worst sound and feeling in in a fight is that RPG sound oh I'd much rather have a machine gun getting shot at me because the RPG's on their shoulder and they're looking down the tube and so they're much more accurate with it

you know I've been I've I couldn't even tell you how many tracer rounds I've watched from machine guns fly at my face and it's almost it's a fun feeling yeah it's uh like you can watch them there you watch those bullets flying at your head so you can kind of duck and dodge them a little bit if you got a little bit of range yeah and you know then fire back so it's it's kind of like you know a two person dance yeah you know where you're reading what the other person's doing from the tracer rounds that you're watching flying at you an RPG that's real personal

yeah real personal Because they're gunners, too. Their RPG gunners are all experienced dudes. You don't give that weapon to some shit heel. That's the guy that's got, like, he's been fighting the Russians, so he knows how to handle an RPG. They're good targets for a lav gunner to take out with high explosives. Yeah, whenever you take one of them guys down, that's a score.

That's like 10 points right there. Big day, big day for you there. All those rounds going off. Yeah. But for movies, there's some good ones. I do appreciate, like, Peter Berg, who's done, like, Lone Survivor. He's done,

he does great movies, right? He cares enough to get the right technical experts involved in the actual guys who were involved in the fights there. But like 13 hours is Michael Bay, I think. And it's shot in a Michael Bay way,

but honestly, he got it right. He got the noises right. And I think people will, for guys like us, when I'm watching a war movie and I'm like, well, he didn't do a mag change there.

You kidding me? Like, I would have done a mag change. there. There's a very like way of the gun with Benicia del Toro, Ryan Felipe. Have you seen that one? I can't say I have. Um, probably James Kahn's in it. It's probably a two mid 2000s movie. It's a kind of a gangster movie. Whoever they had for a technical director on that understood gunfights. Understood gunfights. It was mag change, mag change like wounded mag changes. Dude's wounded and he's doing the proper mag change droll.

These are the little things that a guy like me or him are watching going, I believe you now. I, you got it. The rest of the movie could be shit, but he got that right because mostly it's not that. John Wick, and this isn't more movie stuff, but you watch his drills. Are we at least fans of John Wick? Oh, love it. Love it. I mean, dude does three gun drills.

Like, give Reeves credit. He goes out and does three gun ranges. Like I give him all the credit in the world. I give him credit because you watch too many movies where, you know, they got the bad guy, and you shoot them once in the shoulder, whatever it is. No. And you walk away. That guy puts everybody down.

You light up a guy with a machine gun. He gets up. Yeah. And you shoot him again. Yeah. And then you shoot him again because the adrenaline's gone. Or the opium. And they're high.

Yeah. And you can light up a guy. Do-da-do drops, gets back up, keeps going. Oh, yeah. Keep going. You John Wick the shit out of dudes on the battlefield, man, or they're coming up to haunt you again. They're zombieing your ass hard.

Because they're either adrenaline or hot. Our guys, too. It's hard to kill people. It's much harder to kill people than you think. I mean, the dude I put down in the ditch. Like you saw me, that scene and sang in where I come over the ditch and I derped the dude. I'd slotted him like chest, chin, and forehead. That should have been enough.

No. He was still scrabbling for his AK that he, when he dropped backwards, he was like reaching for it and looking for it and looking for. me and I'm like in my head I'm frozen in time going that should have really killed the guy it should have been enough tip tip tip tip tip put like three more in him and that finished him and there's a lot of you watch the light fade out of a guy's eyes who's got nothing but hate for you as he's as you're watching him die you're like whewf glad he didn't get the AK backup yeah but you know you watch these john wick movies again you're watching the drills yeah it's a movie but he's doing drills

like a madman like beautiful drills really so I watch stuff like 13 hours where they're doing drills like where they're that's important that kind of stuff that attention to detail well you stop watching it if they're doing drills i'll turn it off like fuck am i watching this yeah what else did you get wrong if you couldn't be bothered to get this right like hyena road with uh what's his name there paul gross so i'll give paul gross i at least give paul gross credit that he he He covers Canadian content. You know, I give the man credit. He did Passiondale.

Yep. He covers our regiment, too, the Patricians. Like, he's big on the Patricians. I give the man credit for that, too. I mean, we're Patricious, of course we would. Best unit ever. Best unit ever. No big deal.

Dirty Patricias. But you get to Haina Road. So Afghanistan was our war. So it's a little close to our heart. So when I'm watching this, the first time I watch it, I'm like, what is this piece of shit film? Like, what is this? Who, you know, and then I'm like, because it wasn't, it wasn't us, it wasn't like,

and then I had to watch it a couple more times to get that he did quite a good job with what he had. I give him, I give him props for that. It's a, it's, uh, it actually became a difficult movie to watch because he got lots of that right. It would be impossible to get it all right. Um, and I know people will, other vets will say, what's a cheesy shitty movie of No, it's not that bad. It's actually quite good. And I have to give them props for at least covering it.

We don't have a Hollywood in Canada. No, we do not. No. Nobody knows we've got not just us. Canadian soldiers have stories for years about what happened, not just our tours. Yeah. The RCR have the other Canadian infantry English regiment, the Royal Canadian Regiment. They fought their asses off too.

Hard fights. They took over for us after August 3rd there. third they took they were all medusa those boys fought fucking hard they they did the business too I have no use for the Van do the French Regiment they did shit in my opinion like I took over from them in 08 they did nothing like good luck like you did nothing that politically they're put there on winter tours just not to take casualties and all any guy that wants to call me on on that good luck call me on on that they that's that's the truth Patricia and the Royals took casualties

he's fighting. But back to Paul Gross in his movies, like we don't have a Hollywood, but he tried. And I got to give him some props for that. Otherwise, there'd be no story about it. You know, there'd be nothing. Well, it's one of the things when it comes to

this, the podcast in particular, is I've said for a long time, all the good Canadian talent goes to the south. So when you talk about Hollywood, where does it all go? Are there no good Canadian actors? No, that's not true.

They're just there. They're just there. What all happens is the great Canadian musicians, minus a few, you know. Tragically hip, always were the tragically hip. But for a lot of Canadian artists, what do they do? They go to the States, you know. You got a large population that loves their entertainment, blah, blah, blah, blah, plus you get to go to the warm. I mean, you get to go.

That's the show. That's the show. And so it all disappears. And so one thing you do appreciate about Paul Gross, and if you're not Canadian, you probably have no, if you're Lizzie, you've got no idea who we're talking. talking about it. The fact is the man has tried to remain loyal to Canada and tried to showcase some things. I haven't watched that movie, so I guess I got to. It's worth the watch. Honestly, even for me. After the fourth time of swearing at it, it's worth the watch. Yeah, it grows. It grew on me. And I'm a guy who like you, I'll turn the thing off. I'm like, you know what? You fuck this up,

buds. I got through it because it was Afghanistan. And then I was like, a few days later, I was like, I'm going to give this a shot. And I have to give it. him credit he got so much of that right he got the the tone of it right as well he really did that's a hard thing to capture about a place that is a i'm not sure we understand it you know no i think he captured a lot of smaller details yes in it as well which you know i watched a few minutes of it but uh it's hard to keep my attention on anything that's on a tvs but uh no i you know i think you probably threw it on actually and um you know some smaller details that you wouldn't have expected to see,

which were kind of nice. Little unit intricacies and things like that, which you know, you don't expect to see in a movie. And there are probably things that nobody would even notice unless they were part of the unit. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, as we wrap up, boys, and we can keep going. By all means, don't let this, this is just a, I got to make sure that I have the crewed master final question, and this might spur us on for another hour. I have no idea. But it's crude master final question brought to you by a crewmaster trekking, Heath and Tracy

McDonald. It's eastwards. If you're going to stand behind a cause and stand behind it, absolutely. What's one thing you boys stand behind? Each other. I think, you know, your friends and family are what you have, and that's what you've got to do. And that's, I think that's kind of that national pride too, right? And it's extended friends and family, and it's just you can only extend that family so far at

certain times and you know whether that's this room you know your immediate family your province your country you're you know if you're part of NATO or you know you know whatever bigger conglomerate you know certain times and places you've got a time for it all and I think that's what got us through Afghanistan yeah our platoon was our family and it was that was blood and there was nobody going to get between any single one of us you know you looked at any one of the guys wrong and there was, you know, 30 other guys ready to rip your head off, you know, and that's how you've got to operate your family, you know, somebody looks at your kids the wrong way, you know, mom a bear, papa bear come out. And I think that's where, kind of going into your question earlier on

politics and divide, you know, it's frustrating that, you know, the bigger family is at such a divide right now politically. And, you know, in my opinion, I, I think, you know, we've got a party system. Really, it's a two-party system. They say it's a three or a four or whatever. You know, they're all irrelevant at the end of the day. I think it's, I know it's never a possibility. It won't work, but it's almost got to be a no-party, you know, political system to get past that.

Just because, you know, left and right don't work for the entire country. And I think that's why you see so much divide and, you know, all the Western separation type talk. Because, well, the East has totally different priorities than we do. You know, they've got different ideas on how things should be run, where the money should go, all of this. And out West, we have no say over at all. There's almost no point in voting in the West unless there's a deadlock in the East. By the time, you know, voting hits Quebec, Ontario, it's already decided. It's, I think that's where that frustration is and that's that divide.

And that's why, you know, when I mentioned earlier, I think we are in a civil war. Civil war is no different than an argument within your family, right? So, you know, my frustration with this country and is that that we're all so different regionally. And like you were saying even earlier, like, you know, I'm a BC boy, Chuck's from Ontario. like we're from different areas but we had that united you know yeah I mean from Afghanistan as well like it's I talk about Ottawa all the time right freedom convoy there was people from all across the country that were all there that put aside their differences for the same exact purpose it can be done yeah it just had to

be in this case in Ottawa's case pushed to the absolute extreme to get it there and then everybody thought it was going to be pushed over and violence and everything else and none of that came well you talked earlier at the the beginning of all this like the trickle effect versus what we saw in like bosnia and you're cost of all afghanistan that kind of thing where it gets to that tipping point there how everything here happened organically with that freedom convoy it was and that's the only way it can work if some one person or one group had stood up and said this is what we're doing and this is how organized it and this it's not going to work it's it has to be organic

people just have to either do it or don't whether it ever happens again or not depends a lot on what happens to us. And who knows what will happen. We're in a very chaotic period. Think about that for a second. You might, you know, when you go back to Bosnia and you said, you know, how they changed language and everything and that's, but nobody could explain why they did what they did. When the Freedom Convoy started, I remember the feeling of like, this is going to work.

Like this is it. So I have to assume somewhere along the lines when they went to, when they went to war with each other. They just had to have had a feeling like, this is it. I don't know why this is it, but this is it. Everybody I talked to had that feeling. Like we just knew we all woke up at this one point. They all said the same thing. We heard it happening in the town next to us, so we got ready. Every town that I was ever going through in Bosnia said the same thing. We could hear it in the other town, so we all got ready. Or then it started here right away. They could have heard it. Isn't that wild.

Imagine, imagine that happening in Canada. You hear some gunfire, so everybody just starts locking barrels and like, they literally could have heard a car backfiring one village over. Yeah,

and they took it as... But what they perceived as the threat in the next town governed their next move, which was typically to break into the armory if they didn't already have weapons. Isn't that the... Isn't that pretty much

what happened in COVID? but in a different way. In a much different way. But the neighboring town started doing something, so then the next town. And I've been trying to argue, and I don't know if I've argued it successfully, that the opposite can work too,

where a good thing happens in a town, and the next town hears about it, and then they start doing it, and then they start doing it. That's why I think, using Jordan Peterson as a little bit of a guide, if you start working on yourself and your family, and then your community, good things happen,

and it can spread that way back out because, I mean, geez, you talk about the family unit and all the shit that's going on and end, like it's continuing to go on it, right? Like two-party system, like everything has just divided everybody at this point. And it was cracked wide open here with COVID. This exposed a lot of that divide. Now, a lot of that divide, you know, if you're on Twitter,

that divide is like, holy jumping, we must all hate each. other but I mean that's Twitter. Yeah, Twitter, Twitter land is Twitter land. It's a different battlefield itself. But if you look at like normal Canadians, we're all in the middle somewhere. Maybe we don't all agree 100% on X, Y, and Z.

But I think most of us, regardless if we're left or right, just want to be left the hell along, not taxed into oblivion. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I appreciate taxation. No, he doesn't. He really doesn't. But it we're taxed too much. There's no middle class.

Like we're everybody is struggling. I don't know anyone who isn't struggling. And I'm talking people with great jobs with, you know, have have, have not have set themselves up for success. Everybody is on some level struggling. And I think this is the part that maybe Paul of Yekhan has tapped into a little bit and is kind of, you know, I'll fix this. I will give you some hope. And he's given people hope.

He gave me a little bit of hope when he was elected, and I voted for him in this last leadership runoff. I have some hope. You know, I don't want to get into the whole PPC, CPC crossfire thing going on. I get into that enough on Twitter, but... I don't know. I'll get into that. To me, PPC, even if you think the CP,

even if you think if the conservatives under Pierre are... possibly sheep and wolf skull or wolf and sheep's clothing. I think the PPC has dropped in my opinion. And maybe I'm wrong in that. Maybe my listeners will prove me wrong on that and say differently. But I think with Pierre, with them actually having somebody like Pierre in place that they actually think can win,

I think I just look at it and I go, if they don't win this time, we're in real trouble. Paul Vieux has pulled the PPC polling from like five percent, four percent, five percent down to like two, three percent talks. Well, that's because everybody came. We'll pull it out to something that I understand out West. And I got all the time for the Maverick Party. I think what they talk about is very interesting.

I got nothing wrong with it. But right now, I don't know what they'd even pull. And the reason why is because everybody can see that maybe there's a shot. So nobody's even going to chance it, even though the chancing of it last time didn't even, you know, hardly register. Well, we ran an old tool. I mean, come on. They ran this guy on him being a veteran and all this other stuff. and great.

Well, he's 12 years in the Air Force and no tour. I mean, as soon as I saw that, I was like, come on. Like, dude, you accidentally go on a tour in 12 years. Like, come on. Like, I'm not knocking the guy. I'm not trying to anything like that. But, like, dude, don't run on a platform that maybe, you know, I'm a little, you know, come on. And he's so squishy about everything.

Well, of course, I voted for him just because, you know, at that point. I was very close to voting PPC. I liked Max. I liked Max, I should say. Well, the tough thing, sorry to hop in, is when they had the national leadership debates, they didn't put the PPC on. Actually, you know, and I just go, it makes no sense. I will tell this story, you know, to me the system is broken when. You have a national leadership debate. You have the PPC that were polling higher than the Green Party at that time.

but they still put the Green Party on there. You had the block where he says on the national debate, well, I don't want to be prime minister. So what the fuck are you doing on the stage? Like, well, why am I watching this? You make it a mockery of us. Yep.

Right? So it's like if you're going to actually have not making a two-party system, then let's have the parties that people care about. Agreed. But that world is murky. Real murky. And so they just wiped it off.

It didn't, you know, like didn't have a PPC on. And maybe that was a good. good or bad thing. I have no idea, folks. I just look at it and I go, if we're going to set rules for where you have to be in order to be on the national leadership debate and you're higher than some other party, then chances are you should be there. And if a guy's on there saying, I don't want to be it, you should ask him to leave immediately. I don't know why you're asked to come here. This is a leadership debate. There's the door. There's no point in you stir in the shed. Agreed. Well, I mean, you talk the PPC. I'm good friends with a lot of their

former candidates, guys who had actually, guys and girls who'd actually ran in the last, and these are, they're intelligent, you know, forward thinking, obviously civic-minded people who ran. They won't run for them again. And not because they're anti-PPC or anti-those views. It's just because they've seen something within the party now that they kind of are a little leery. They're a little leery of. I mean, Max has kind of not had his own leadership race, has he? He's just ruling by proxy at this point.

Have your own leadership race. Go for it. Do a thing. I mean, it's funny when every time the CPC has a leadership race, the PPC guys come on Twitter and just hammer at. My rebuttal to that is, like, I would appreciate Maxmore if he'd go up against somebody. I don't even know who they'd put up against them. That's a whole other story. But I hope that everybody can at least get to the point for this next election whenever it is.

There's got to be one consensus, and that's to get this country back on a track where we don't have to go left or right. We just have to get down the middle of the road together. It's all I want. We're not there anymore. And I think Paul O'Vier could do it. And if he's a wolf and sheep's closing, we'll convoy him too.

Whatever. We'll convoy that guy. The good thing about conservatives is we'll call out our own. We're worse about our own than some liberal or other entity coming after us. No, we'll call out ours first. So like we want to be well represented. If you're a liberal with Ethics Commission, you know, problems, left, right and center.

There's no such thing from their voters, right? As a voter, I'm going to call out my guy first. I expect you to represent me well. Well, I'm going to go back now. We got off on the side train. Dave says friends and family. Yeah. What does Chuck say?

I would have to say it's a pretty similar thing. On a political level, I'm loyal to the West. I'm less sure about where this country heads if we don't get Polygian. I'm much less sure about the prosperity and freedom the West has at this point. We've got gun bands going into effect that make no sense. We have criminal laws going into effect that basically protect the criminals. Don't make any sense. We have censorship bills going through right now that we may not have this conversation in six months.

I'll be doing it from some other country. We'll be ricocheting it off some other country is saddling. Some VPN or some of your own secret room. That's right. That's where we're at. We're not far off of that. People that think we're not haven't traveled as much as they think they have and seen what they need to see. But we're almost there.

And other countries with the outside optic lens looking at us are warning us about this. They're watching in real time our dilemma and trying to warn us off. Like, we're dudes, you're in a state. But because we're under the trickle, you know, we might see it. I mean, you know what you've got to do is in the last two years, you had the snitch lines in both provinces, Alberta, Saskatchewan, where they were calling it.

You could call if people were having people over. You had that in Quebec where they were hauling people out of houses. Like, I mean, I literally interviewed a couple women who are not a couple of women, Kate King, who was out there visiting, paramedic from North of Eminton, and she talked about it. You had the quarantine facilities being kind of stationed throughout a bunch of different provinces, right? You start to see the infrastructure going up. You're like, listen, the fact that we're joking about Bill C-11,

is like, yeah, it's a joke, but the fact of the matter remains, like my livelihood on what I'm basically giving an open mic to people to talk to the public. Yeah, that is a... It's at risk. It's at risk, 100%. Yeah. Like 100%.

The thing is, the other side only sees it as we'll be shut up. They'll be shut up too. Like, they don't understand that everybody gets shut up. Nobody will have a voice. Left or right. Middle of anything will have a voice. There'll be no voice. but they don't, they just see us as not being able to talk.

You bullshit about hockey stories or fucking whatever we want to talk about. Everybody has to shut up now. And that's the part that saddens me. And that's the part that, that's the part that if there's any hope that I have, it's that if we go that way, if things actually wind up where I think they might go, the West is what it is at this point. We do think differently out here. Like I go to visit family in Ontario and they don't think,

in this pioneer mindset. I don't know how else to put it, but the West has a pioneer mindset. We're only a little over 100 years since the Settlers game. I mean. Yeah. Like Saskatchewan 1905,

Alberta 19 something. 04? Is it 1904? I can't remember now. That's terrible to me. I'm not a math. But if you get the point, we're under 120 years since like the...

It is a different mentality out here. That's within a generation. roughly right we we do think differently out here like Dave said earlier the election's over by the time it leaves Ontario we don't everybody knows that and now they're starting to talk about it more and more and more because what they're doing is impacting all the lives at West when it didn't impact it you could be sour about it but you just kept on going and that and that was the beauty of it but now yeah they're literally hamstringing us and that's so that's the political side of thing

On the personal side of thing, I'm much like Dave. Family is who you make your family. And it's usually a crossover between family and friends. So for me, you know, Dave and I've been through what we've been through and we're here today doing what we do. I think we count the people we trust, you know, very carefully. For a number of reasons. I'm not just talking the overseas stuff.

I'm talking about business or friendships or people we. trust although they tend to cross over quite a bit there too yeah I think especially in the in the climate we're in right now I appreciate the friends that I have I don't I try to appreciate that part of life more than ever make sure my kids are happy the family that I have is looked after and and just try and take it a day at a time and not stress too much about things, but I'm worried about the future, too. You know, I got to say, folks, I've asked this question. I don't know how many times.

And now I got two guys who've served tours overseas, seeing some things that I think most of us hope we never have to see or deal with or whatever else. And neither one of you said, I don't know, truth, freedom of speech, I can think of a couple others, you said friends and family. I'm sorry, that's like crazy to me. I mean, super cool, but just like so starkly different than anyone

else who's answered the question. That's all that matters, though. When it comes down to it, it's the brass tax. You know, where do you go home at the end of the day? Politically, yeah. There's, I want the West to be prosperous and free if we get the choice. I'd like Canada to come to the middle again

if we have a choice. Well, I think public executions for politicians who get found being corrupt would be a good place to start too. You know, not that I want to advocate too hard, but, you know, I think it's a very hypocritical system that we've got where, you know, everybody's got to be holier than thou unless you're a politician. And then, no, that's okay. Here's a hundred dollar fine. You know, that's okay. You know what? I didn't really mean it that way.

you know what everybody's interpreting things their own way well we can freeze the bank accounts of people who donated to a to an account for the freedom convoy but there's 11 politicians in the GTA who got took Chinese funding communist party funding and they won't even release who it is I mean that wouldn't be fair that wouldn't be who I mean it's just a little bit of Chinese Communist Party money I mean really how bad can that be this is this is the part of our system where I'm like let's just break it apart. Let's just start over.

Let's, you know, believe me, there's a part of me, the chaotic guy who misses what we did for what we did, who would like to see things go a complete way, but there's the realistic part of me that's got friends and family that I will do anything to protect.

And I've seen what happens in places in the world where this does happen. I don't want that to happen here. By any stretch, do I want that to happen? And I see it all the time. Well, we can't vote. way out of it. This is said by people, in my opinion, who never seen the effect of the other side of that, the other option to that. The thing is we need a shift in who our politicians are.

Yeah. We tend to have a woke crowd with nothing better to do than to run for public office. And, you know, they've got a different mentality, a different set of agendas, priorities that then the majority of Canadians do. Look at Vancouver. They just voted out their last city council over bike lanes. Yeah. Vancouver, the most woke city. Tell me this story.

I don't know this story. In your country, yeah. Just voted in the ABC party on the platform of getting rid of the bike lanes through Stanley Park. Really? And the last council kept pushing for. for them. Nobody wanted it. This is Vancouver. Now you look at Edmonton and they're spending a hundred million dollars in this budget. We're proposing a hundred million dollars for bike lanes in Edmonton. I'm looking at the temperature right now, you know, minus eight, today's minus 17.

Yeah. For a winter city. And they're spending a hundred million dollars in Edmonton on bike lanes. All I want to know is, I was saying this the other day. I'm like, can I get the $100 million dollar contract because I feel like I could build you some bike lanes for a million. Dave, I'll do it. I got no problem. We built this facility for pennies on the dollar. Both of us could go do project management for the city and get some shit done for them. We'd save them $100 million by not doing a fucking bike lane.

You can drive a car in this lane now. There you go. People will be happy. But you've got people running for political office. And then take the million dollars and just stick it in your pocket. Thank you. I'll be a... Well, I mean, do you?

greater question though and it's a great question I and I get why people say freedom of speech and and all of those things they're of course they're important then we went to war so that other people might have that you know might have that yeah of course that's at the front of everything but read the real front for us I guess is a whole look after my friends and family anybody that messes with them on any level, not going to work out for you. The greater political part, you know, I think there's a burnout from it too. I think we're all a little burnt out.

You're going to a thing tonight and with some great people talking and I'm glad for people like that, but it's a bit of a burnout for the normies out here. Like, you know, we just want things to go back the way they were, a little left, little right, just get along a little bit better. The question is, boys, does it go back unless you start, not unless you start, but like,

I feel like the only way it goes back, sadly, is if you don't let it off the hook. Because, you know, you think of the convoy, convoy was unreal. And then, you know, everything that's come from there, and you're like, okay,

it's going to go back to normal. But then you got Rachel Notley run against Daniel Smith. And she's been polling, and I put that in quotes because I fucking don't know what the hell the polls mean anymore, but she's been polling ahead. And she's for, you know. The ridiculous stuff she's for. And you're like, okay, well, we can't act like it's just going to go back to normal

because part of the reason we're here where we're at, not you folks, just in general, it feels like we let go of the reins of her own country and allowed a bunch of people get into politics and they just got their own agenda that none of us care about. They know, none of us care about it. Well, and I don't even know if it's that we lost control of it. It's maybe just now that... Product of the Times. Left and right are more visible with social media, the news.

You know, things travel faster. You know, 100 years ago, you were, you know, dealing with information. You were getting told by your neighbor or, you know, reading in a newspaper that was pressed three hours early. earlier, like, you know, with information that, you know, traveled by horseback or by rail car. Like, that was the news. I mean, by Morris Coe. Our electoral reform really needs a shake-up, too.

I mean, you look at, talk about Notley and Alberta, she's got Eminton. Eminton's got X number of seats. You can't go outside of Emmington. I know people in every small town. We all, we know people and not. It's a city thing. It's a city. It's a city.

But we see it in the United States. States too. It's a real problem. It's a real problem. The Democrats take all the cities. Mm-hmm. The coast. They take the coast. Or liberals. Yeah. All the big cities vote. I mean, Calgary's been an anomaly, I would say. It's has been. And if that falls, we're, like, we're, we're, we're, we're, it's such a strange beast. It, it really is. I mean, there's a thing on Twitter today with that, the population map of Canada. And there's that very small line, like, a part above, like, Toronto. cutting across the east.

Yes, yes. 50% of our population lives below that line. Correct. The other 99% of the landmass with the rest of Canada matters too. It's not just the GTA. But unfortunately, it's just the GTA. And in Alberta, it's just Edmonton and the unions in Emmington. Like, this is where we're stuck.

This is the part that needs some reform. But like Dave said, they entrenched themselves in these things. They take the time to run because really they don't really do much else. They accept get involved politically. It's very easy to do that when your main career is basket weaving and banjo playing. It's not like they have to run a business. They're not business people. They're not working.

You're not going to go up north to Fort Mac and find some guy voting for the NDP because he's working. He knows how much taxes he's losing. He knows the job that he's doing is at risk by these people. His family knows this. His relatives know this. But you go into Eminton and it's the snow globe. and it's union this and union that. I'm not knocking unions either.

They have a viable, I have no use for them personally. I had a really horrible one at the jail, but they have a use, but politically they're just a tool now. That's what they've become. And I hate to knock on certain parties, you know, more than any other, you know, myself, by obviously align with the conservatives more than the other party.

but I'm not closed-minded to stupidity. Yeah. I understand all parties are borderline, you know, on the spectrum. We voted for Notley the last time. As a conservative base, we all did it as a lark because of Redford. We needed to get rid of Redford. Sort of like, you know what? Screw it.

We're all going to vote for Notley. You ask any conservative voter out here. He was like, yeah, this will be funny. Oh, man, did we make a mistake? This wasn't funny. Yeah, that was a poor choice. It was a real horrible choice. But our choice before, when it was conservatives, was also stupid.

Yeah. You know, and we've had a couple stupid ones since. Yeah. And that's where the frustration is. And, you know, with the party system is that I just want good decisions to be made. Well, it's, you know. The end of the day, I don't care if it's an A. You know what?

You guys can probably give me one army guy that you'd love to see in politics and do a great job. Colonel Ian Hope. And I always go, I'd love to see one NHL or be a politician. that's Stevie Y. I think he'd just, like, I think he'd just stand up there and just be like, no, no, stupid question, no. And just be like, boop, bo, bo, bo, this is why we're doing what we're doing, right? You wonder if there's a way to push the best people into politics when it controls so much of our damn lives, but I don't know how to do that. It can't happen because they're attacked so viciously, so repeatedly so often. No normal human

wants to go through that. No normal human wants to go over to freaking Bosnia and Afghanistan and everything else and sit there in a firefight and come out going, I slept with bullets going around my head and I, like, no normal human being. I'm sitting here with two of them. The team's pretty good. I just, I go, no normal human being wants to do a lot of different things. I just look at it and I go, but we can all see the problem. So it's like, okay, so how do we create America's got talent or what was the

singing one. What was the where they went? The voice or something. Not the voice. What the hell am I thinking of? That was kitchen. This is terrible. I got two hours. I'm sure that was the last election. I know what you're saying though. We need to weed. It has to be a way to just go around, find like 10 candidates, have a runoff. None of them want to do it, but you know what? Shit, if I get it, let's go. I think it's not that we necessarily go at it from that angle, but clear out the people that

shouldn't be. And that's where it goes. back to my comment on we should hold public executions for corruption in political office they're spending billions of dollars of our money we need somebody who can go into office and view it as their money our money and let's not be frivolous well I think I think it was one of my brothers who traveled over and I forget it I can't remember what maybe you guys could from your experience of traveling could could paint the picture a little better but I can't remember if it's if It's Vietnam or Thailand or somewhere over there.

But they're so against drugs that if you're caught... Both of those countries. If you're caught dealing drugs, it's life imprisonment. So it's like, you do this, you're done. And I tell you what, the punishment's that? You ain't doing it. Like, I mean, can you imagine going to jail for life for slinging some drugs? Well, maybe that's the way it should be.

And so when you talk about politicians, man, I tell you what, I can't figure out why Trudeau can have. have scandal after scandal after scandal after scandal any other business if you were you're working security here right if you let a robber at it he still has to plants you think you got a job no no you're out the door we we touched on this earlier about the media i mean the media is just an entity of the government now it's not a questioning body that's supposed to hold the government accountable it's just there to take the notes from this from the press cow or for to the press gallery from the press office and P.M.O.'s office.

And do you know who Tom Korski is? No. He's Blacklock's reporter. I'll send you. He's been on the podcast a couple times. Okay. And he just got removed from the press gallery, right? Because he's the only non-funded independent reporter, non-funded report.

And they find out everything, those guys. Those Blacklocks are. Oh, man. They're Holly Donne, another one. They're on top of it. They're awesome. And I would be fine if the left had their own. media doing it too but we have nothing but media being paid to do it to hold like

Paul a via accountable like he's not the prime minister yet there's a there's literally an ethics scandal yesterday that broke oh she's not she she said sorry like 16 dollar orange juice I'm old enough to remember that like come on yeah it makes it like reminds me of a saying my grandpa used to always say is too many in the life boat and it sinks the ship mm-hmm we've got too many in the fucking lifeboat with these politicians. And they're sinking the ship left, right and center. Like, you know, it's frustrating to watch.

And, you know, I don't know if there is a way out of it politically, other than a total overhaul, but I don't even know what that overhaul would be. So that's where my frustration is and my fear for this country. Yeah. You know, and... They should do it like they do in Afghanistan politics, maybe. Yeah, they killed a lot of them.

Like, okay, I'm still here. I'm winning. I win. Your polling numbers were really bad. I win. But we're there anyway. People that think that we don't operate that way, but in a nonviolent way, that's how we're here right now. We're one of the most corrupt countries in the world.

When you look at it politically, you know, there's more transparency in a lot of these, you know, quote-unquote corrupt countries than there is in Canada. You know, we just operate under the guise and the optics of transparency and, you know, rainbows and lollipops. And that's all it is. You know, it's corruption followed by corruption, followed by corruption. Eventually you become numb to the corruption. You go nose blind to it. There's so many scandals. Somebody listed them all on Twitter the other day, like from We to Essencey Laveland to the island that he went to there.

What is it, Kahn's Island or whatever the hell, to everything else? it's like this one of those would have sunk any normal politician but we've become so nose blind to it all it's like I expect it now like okay whatever he's done it again well that's just the federal level you get down to municipal and provincial and you know it's just layer after layer of bureaucracy and in BS yeah and the last thing I want to hear is from some rogue party telling me well we're different this time when he has his own runoff election I'll consider different but he he hasn't well but gents i've enjoyed this i appreciate you you guys doing this and sitting down and sharing some stories and making my i'm sure i rub my head a few more times than i've

done in a lot of interviews but uh it's been uh very enjoyable very enjoyable getting to see dave again and meet you chuck and i appreciate you guys doing this and hopefully if we do it again the next time we'll be in the studio uh you know that'd be a lot of fun where it's uh you know the safe room is is pretty cool, but we could probably do this around the podcast studio table and everything else. Either way, thanks guys for sitting down with me. Love to do a road trip. Great to meet you, Sean. Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here with you.