Shaun Newman Podcast - #566 - Ross Kennedy

Episode Date: January 12, 2024

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This is Danielle Smith. This is Tammy Peterson. This is Alex Kraner. This is Curtis Stone. This is Tom Lomago, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to Sean Newman podcast, folks. Everybody got their toke in their winter jacket on. She is frosty.

Good thing. It's January, and we should have known it was going to get frosty, but we've been, man, have we been, has this been a winner or what? I don't know what it is from where everybody's listening today, but here minus 30 and and I think you know like wind chill of like minus 38 or something like just yeah yeah this is winter yeah here it finally it finally showed up um we got some cool news on Tucker carlson tickets I'm gonna hold on that just for a second I'm gonna I'm flip to silver gold bolt North America's premier precious metals dealer and say that we're working on with them a first time buyer promo so I think over the next week I'm gonna have a first time buyer promo essentially if you've never bought from silver gold bull you could go buy from them and get uh and get a discount i think that's going to be

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chain Stafford. So give him a call 78084423. Now, let's get on to that tale of the tape. He's a logistics and supply chain consultant. He's the founder of Fortis analysis. I'm talking about Ross Kennedy. So buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Man, it has been a bit of a workout this morning trying to get Ross on. But we got Ross Kennedy on. Ross, how you doing this morning. Man, I'm fantastic. It's been a weird few months in a good way since the last time you and I got together. Unfortunately, it's not in person with a little bit of whiskey between us, but we'll make do with coffee. We'll make that work in the summer. No worries. We'll make a, we'll make a stop on the, on the way into the down south from here, and we'll make sure we do

an in-person one again, because that was a lot of fun. It was a ton of fun, man. I think, I think I owe you a trip, though, to the frozen north. It's, I love Canada. Well, I love a lot of the people in the scenery in Canada. The country's a bit on the struggle bus. But any excuse to get up, there's a good excuse. Tell me, from where you're sitting, when you talk about Canada on the struggle bus, that's a new one. That's a lightweight to put it.

What do you see from your lens on what's going on here in Canada? Well, I think, I think really under, you know, it's been ongoing for a while, but under the, under the Trudeau regime, uh, dictatorship, whatever, you know, pick whatever term you want to accurately describe what's happening up there. Um, what you've seen is, is the full capture of a, uh, a democratic Commonwealth grounded body politic that, is very distributed, but there's just, you know, there's only a few clusters of power really in the nation. And it's sort of the end stage of what happens when socialism, when certain Western philosophical ideals kind of get together and make an ugly baby. And the people don't have the means or the capacity to push back political. in a really meaningful way. So much of what Chardot has done up there, and, you know,

obviously truckers are near and dear to my heart working in the logistics industry. And so using, you know, using the, you know, the trucker rally across Canada, if you will, the convoy to, which was really a positive sign of pushback. You're talking about, by and large, blue-collar people, the people that make the economy run, in any developed nation, the people that are the taxpaying base that the leaders live so lavishly and selfishly off of, really asserting the dignity of the free man, you know, under Commonwealth rules and historical precedent. And then under even, you know, modern and philosophical paradigms of what it means to live in a free country. And they ultimately got absolute curb stopped.

and it absolutely breaks my heart that we're in a place that the freedom dividend, not necessarily by the people, but by the leaders has been so squandered. But like I have a lot of belief in the American people, because we are certainly not free from our own issues here. But I have a belief in America, Canada, Canada. like really Commonwealth rooted countries for a capacity for self-renewal. And I do think that we will see that in Canada. I do think we will see it in the U.S.

There's something about the Canadian character that's even distinct from the U.S. and it's this absolutely just fearless, rugged, no one is coming to save us frontier mentality. And when that, and that mentality can be pushed a long way because generally people just want to be left alone. But when it gets to a place where there are no options left and that mentality asserts itself, it can get ugly, it may not get ugly, but it certainly can get, um, fisty. And I would always bet on the flannel shirts and the lumber jacks and hockey players to come out on top against a bunch of, you know, soft-handed European social idyllotons. Yeah. You know, when it comes back to, um, for the, for the listener, I guess, you know, it's been, it's been a, it's been a little bit of a spell, you know, or a little bit of a

time since Ross was back on. I, you know, you should probably give a little bit of an introduction on yourself, you know, to the, to the new listener. Um, but Ross, uh, is, uh, is, um, down in the States looking up, well, I'll let you tell the listener who you are. I find it fascinating to have somebody else looking at Canada going like, what is going on? Because, you know, there's a whole bunch of Canadians sitting here going, like, what's going on? You know, we just had a reporter out in Ottawa trying to, you know, interview, I mean, down the street, right, bumps into a cop and then gets arrested. I mean, and then everybody will say, well, he didn't get charged. And I'm like, hey, you got arrested for.

doing his job. You know, it's like, this is Canada right now. This is, this is, you know, like it's, I'm waiting. No, I don't know. I don't want to say I'm waiting for because that, that's a, that's a dark thought. But like, one day I just expect to have a knock on the door and be like, you Sean Newman, I'm like, who's asking, you know? And to have the cops roll in and be like, well, you can't, you can't talk about the government

this way, you know, like that's where it's getting to. And we're not there yet. But at the same time, we're not far off. Um, Ross, give the people a quick two minutes feel on, on who you are. I mean, they can go back, uh, to the episodes and, and, and here are our first two chats as well. But, uh, maybe just quickly, if you wouldn't mind, uh, toss it in who, uh, uh, oh, you want, yeah, we can finish the thought. Yeah, sure. Yep. Um, and then, uh, we'll break, break and resume. That's the, that's the function. That's the fun of pause and re-record, right?

No, no, no, we'll just, we'll just talk about it. I'm not re-recorded in Jack Squat. This is, welcome. Welcome to the show, folks. If you're new to it, this is what we do. We're doing it, Bill O'Reilly style. Just fuck it, we're doing it live. Yeah, absolutely. I don't want to go back and try and piece this conversation again. No, this is how it happens.

I should have, you know, we've been, regardless, finish the thought. Yeah, no. So Ross Kennedy. I thought we're going to finish the thought on, on Canada. About the healing, renewal power of maple syrup? Yeah, absolutely. I have a few first principles that sort of govern the way I look at the world, generally speaking and, you know, when calling my shots on the big picture geopolitical stuff,

it hasn't really served me wrong. But one of those, probably the topmost principle of all is that which cannot endure will not. And there are certain things that just, you know, the thing speaks for itself in the sense of, what the way the average Canadian citizen is, the way the average American citizen is, and still kind of looks at the world and this just foundational worldview that they have. So at odds with this idea that a reporter can't, you know, ask the Deputy Prime Minister on the streets and questions without getting stazied away. I mean, that, that is, that's the shit you would have seen in the Soviet Union. It's definitely what you would

see in modern communist China. pretty much any authoritarian, you know, or totalitarian system is where the people making the decisions on behalf of the people, uh, are, are so unaccountable that an average person, you know, a journalist doing their job, you know, operating under principles of freedom of the press, uh, has to get, you know, squired away in silver bracelets because he, you know, he dared ask the high lord, uh, you know, where, you know, or the emperor where his clothes are. And that, you know, the emperor's new clothes is, you know, that's a parable. It's hundreds of years old by now.

But it still has so much meaning today, which is that when the people are not free to speak truth to power, they will eventually find some way to get the truth out. In this case, it was a little child, you know, pointing out that the emperor is naked because everybody else at the top of the body politic was scared to piss off the emperor and or was not free to speak their mind without really. repercussions and human nature as such, and it has been this way, as long as we've been, you know, carving our news and chisel and stone on rock. And if humans cannot at some level speak, speak truth, have the freedom to be wrong in their thoughts, have the freedom to be right,

but know whether they're right or wrong, the freedom to say them, and to engage in a level of public inquiry on those ideas to find that the balance of the scale between truth and fiction, when all of that is taken away, it doesn't mean that the people just go silent. They find a way. That's how you have Samastat, you know, the concept of passing, you know, underground literature around that's very like anti-regime or whatever it may be. Yeah, this is mezdat. I don't know.

I don't know the pronouncing a issue, but that's the way I've always said that. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're talking soul, prentzine and Soviet Union. Absolutely. It's underground dissident literature and communication between people who, one way or another, will come to a place where they risk it all for the freedom to speak and to be heard. And that is such a clarifying example.

And it's one of many that we've seen and sort of this modern Western world that we live in where people that are rooted in hundreds of years of intellectual tradition of, you know, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, you know, freedom to exist as a human being. And when you start to take that away, man, at some point that goes on so long culturally, that it becomes epigenetic, that desire, that natural capacity. And where where I see this going is, is there will be a snapback for sure, probably not violent, but a snapback where everybody at the top of the system needs to be prepared to lose their seat of power

and watch as a new generation rises and takes control and tries to, for better or worse, make it right. You know, you're mentioning a new generation rising up and trying to make it right. I wonder about that because I'm like, I'm watching, obviously 2024 is going to be a big year. You got the election coming up here. You know, you got Trump being thrown every.

You're just like, can he run? Can't he run? What is going on? I don't know anymore. You know, you got, I just watched it this morning before we hopped on. Aaron Rogers, you know, again talking about Jimmy Kimmel and kind of half apologizing, kind of just not apologizing. I don't even know, but basically like talking Epstein list.

That's supposed to be coming out here. And I'm like, I don't know how a new generation is going to weed through. through all this stuff. I'm having hard enough time. Yeah, it's, well, and that's really the risk that the elites run into with the attempt to stifle, you know, truth and the inquiry of truth. People in the absence of certainty will create or latch on to all manner of scenarios. that's doubly or triply true when there is there's clearly there's clearly the stench of

something wrong or something off and you can only gaslight a body politic for so long before they will in the absence of the best truth available to them they will just start creating their own. And now we live in an information age where information and data is so readily incepted, weaponized, twisted, shared honestly, you know, the whole gamut of white to black behaviors as far as the manipulation of narrative and the manipulation of the information environment that everything becomes fractured. at that point, right? Everything becomes, you know, everybody starts to engage in some level of inquiry with information. They land on whatever fits their biases and their worldview best, and then they tribe up with others who believe that.

And then when you have that, that sort of fractal cultural effect happening and everything's kind of reducing down to tribal level, then you're bringing very natural human dynamics back into it. well, I'm going to defend my friends and attack my enemies. And so you have 86,000 competing narratives kind of at war with each other. And, you know, in the case of an Aaron Rogers, for example, what you then get is a very popular, very well-known athlete who, you know, has a high profile and is attacking someone else with a high profile with by alluding to some pretty serious. types of potential allegations. And then it's dovetailing around an issue that's very much part and parcel of a

large part of Western conservatism worldview, which is like you don't touch kids, right? And then you tie that into the suspicion, rightfully so that at some level or another, the elites are up to some really shady stuff. And then it doesn't help when you have reporters being accosted and arrested. you have the January 6th thing, which the only person who died that day was an Air Force veteran. They got shot by, you know, security detail for one of the, for one of the congressional reps, I believe it was. And so everybody's in this mode of like, you know, being told, you're going to believe me or you're lying eyes. And people know what they know, they see what they see.

And then to explain that to themselves and to each other, you know, the only way a lot of them are finding this information or feeling satisfied that they've learned the truth is to get inside these echo chambers. And then it's just all out war of narratives, which turns into actual, like, you know, tribal conflict and the body politics. So, you know, what we're seeing is, is not a one-off. It's, it's the end state of a long cascade of domino's falling where, you know, it's like, elites did something maybe then they acted in such a way that makes us believe they really did take the cookie from the cookie jar at some level, but then we don't have the ability to find truth. And so it just this, this, you get this very, very toxic stew of truth, fictionalization,

gaslighting, narrative management, and the average person doesn't know what to believe. And that's where I think that you can only push people so far, particularly in the West, where at some point, it all simply becomes too much and they revert to whatever their first principles of life are. And generally speaking, the average person's first principle is, I want to be free to get together with my family. I, you know, I don't want to be called a bunch of names for things that I don't, you know, I don't see myself that way and I don't act that way. I don't treat people that way. When you attack people indefinitely for wrong thing, the whole house of cards always collapses. And so the Rogers thing is really, I can

case of a high-profile person attacking another profile person around an issue that's very complex and multilayered and touches on a lot of the suspicions and fears and anger that the average person has. And it makes for great TV. It's very compelling podcast or TV content or whatever. And so, of course, there's the desire to amplify it on top of all of that because, you know, controversy has always been monetized. If it bleeds, it leads. And now we're in a new paradigm of you know, are the elites hanging out on an island and dittling kids? It's not hard for the average person to believe that people who see themselves as above the law will engage in things like that.

And then they see, you know, and then you have the drama, you know, the two celebrities going at each other. So, yeah, man, it's really, really toxic. But, you know, again, that which can endure won't. And we're reaching, I think, the end stage where the snapbacks coming. You know, I've seen, you know, like, anti-woke comedy is becoming a thing, right? And it's related to that. You know, it's, it's, there's a hilarious video that, that a stand-up comic had just short clip, but it got pushed

around Twitter pretty hard here a few months ago of a comedian talking about how blackface is wrong, but, you know, when the Navy SEALs paint their faces up and look really badass and the commercials like, oh, maybe blackface is okay, but he does like a whole, he does a whole bit that contextualizes it and is really, really funny. It's highly engaging. And, and, And it's so transgressive in this modern world to be able to point at something obvious, like, I look like me, you look like you, let's have some fun with that premise, which people have done since time immemorial. But like it feels transgressive and dirty and fun and exciting to be able to laugh at something that. Well, Dave Chappelle.

Dave Chappelle has made it okay to do all of this again. Dave Chappelle's opening bit with Jim Carrey playing Andy Kaufman was brilliant. It was just brilliant. And it hits the nail on the head. It does. And I love Chappelle. And actually, it's funny, I've never seen him live in a big venue. But, you know, years ago was living in a location close to, living in a location close to what was kind of his hometown.

town and in Ohio. And I got invited to this like kind of bed and breakfast, brewery, hotel has an entertainment room type of concept in that town. And it was like 10 o'clock. Everybody was at least three sheets to the wind. And just Dave Chappelle just like rolls up on stage, you know, like hi and having fun and just spends an hour working his bits out in front of this room. It turns out it's like a facility that he owns and controls.

It's like his private little room. I had no idea. You know, like I was invited by people who did know those. So it was kind of a surprise. And he just rolls on whenever he feels like it. You know, whenever he's home, he wants to work out a routine. And the shit he said was like, you know, and this was several years ago. And when he was really kind of getting his material together to start doing all of the new Netflix specials he's done over the last few years.

And it was just like he was up there just ripping apart every race, every culture. every transgressive idea he could throw at the wall to see what the audience would engage with and honing craft the material. And it was just, it was thrilling. And that's what comedy should be. That's what the media should enable is the court gestures, you know, who the long cultural tradition of the court gesture and of the people speaking truth to power through a medium like comedy or, you know, mockery or whatever it may be, you know, that's what we're, that's why a lot of culture, sport gestures were revered and elevated as key members of the court because their whole thing was to keep the elites grounded and take shots at them and keep

truth moving in some medium. And culture always finds a way. You know, the one I just saw passed around the other day, I don't know, some right-wing influencer on Twitter or Bain Johnson, I think it was. And it was a video of like, you want to make America great again? It's like, You know, he's talking about how like, you know, slavery was, you know, in part was what helped build the railroads. He's like, I didn't see the LGBTs out there swinging hammers or whatever it may be. And again, it was it was like it was transgressive. It was uncomfortable, but it was well crafted. It was funny.

He had good engagement from the audience on it. So that's one example, one very small cultural shift that we're starting to see where people are beginning to seek out and elevate transgressive. ideas that are that are to people who are conservative anti-transgressive right like you you should be able to mock differences but but also respect them and appreciate them and but have some fun with it because that's that's how you maintain a cultural balance of nations like Canada and the U.S. that are that are very melting pot we have a lot of different cultures we have a lot of different influences and if you get to a place where it's it's you can't talk about those things you can't crack a joke without like, I'm going to lose my job, my livelihood, my family.

Cultural will always try to find a way to adapt to that. Well, that's what's been beautiful about, one, my hat's always off to Dave Chappelle because he steers into the stuff every single time. But when you talk about it, podcasts in particular, and maybe social media now, like, I don't know if I'm going to give social media any credit on. I mean, obviously it's a huge connector. Amplifying. Amplifying, sure. But, you know, like how many people got shut down and everything else. But podcasts in particular, you know, have given open access to uncomfortable conversations.

Like, you know, like just where you're like, oh, do I enjoy this? Is this guy right? Is he wrong? And that forces us all to think. And I just think, you know, you go back to what we were talking about with Epstein. Like, could there be an like the island thing and everything else? Well, everybody, you know, it's like, well, how bad is it? And the thing that where the story gets constructed on everybody looking at it,

because we've been arguing about this, I think of the book club, we've been arguing about this for at least three years, right? We started out with Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, because I think Bill Gates has been on the plane once, I think is what it is. And maybe I'm wrong on that, maybe it's been 50 times. Chris Tucker says it's only been one time, right? They did humanitarian work down in Africa, right? And so what we argued about, does one time all of a sudden make you a petto? Right? Does that make you go?

And I'm like, well, no, that makes a zero sense. And then we go, Bill Clinton, though, even on that, playing an awful lot, right? Yeah, there's a there with them, right? That's right. And the problem is, is that they have been holding back the information for so long, and everybody knows it. And now with the, with social media and podcasts and everybody speculating on it, it's created a world among itself.

And it's, it's, it's just gotten worse and more, but they won't, they keep delaying. They keep, they keep, and at some point,

it's going to all come out. And when it all comes out, like, you know, you go like, I just bring it back to hockey. I find hockey really easy to like, really get my head around,

right? Chicago Blackhawks, they had a big, bad scandal. Instead of just like, being like, this is what happened. And we will not,

never allow this to happen again or we're going to try. They tried like sweeping it on the rug. Anytime you try to sweep things under the rug, it always blows up in your face 10 times over. The best coach maybe in NHL history isn't working in the NHL anymore. Why? Because he was part of it. You go to hockey Canada? They had, you know,

a girl come out and she, like the story just seemed to get worse and worse. It was a group of kids, you know, But these would be top prospects of the NHL playing for Team Canada between 18 and 20. They did some terrible things in a hotel room where she may have got gang banged. You know, like, and, you know, golf club was there. Maybe saying you're not leaving this room. Like, you get the idea of like, this is heavy stuff.

And instead of hockey Canada coming out immediately and being like, this does not happen on our watch. He swept it on the rock. What happens? It comes out a couple years later. And now they're like, well, who was it? Are these NHL stars, right? on and on it goes. And every time you just, the transparency thing is so important. And this is what so many people are upset with. Now, do you have to be, well, I don't know, that's, I guess,

where I'm at. And this helps create all these wild theories because now everybody's trying to figure it out because the people at the top are like, well, we'll just sleep on it. Nobody will notice. In today's world, it always comes out. Absolutely. It's, you know, the limited hangout tactic, you know, and for those who aren't familiar, limited hangout is basically kind of what we saw it attempted with Hepstein. We saw it attempted with, you know, UFOs or, you know, we'll call them UAPs now because people are stupid and can't figure out that we mean the exact same thing, right? But, you know, the limited hangout of, okay, we're going to disclose a moderate amount of information that, you know, we're going to throw a little red meat to the wolves and that'll satiate him. And we're not in that world anymore.

we're in a world where people know that they can go on, you know, Brave or Duckt, Go or Google or whatever their search and platform of choices. And they're just going to keep digging. And when they don't find anything because it's been obscured enough, that's not going to satisfy them. They're not going to throw their hands up and be like,

I'll help that, you know, I guess I'm never going to learn. Like, that did used to happen. People did used to have that. But once you turn people loose with this paradigm of any, any information is at my fingertips if I dig hard enough,

you are going to get, and it's not a non-zero number, it's a quite large, you know, raw number of people, even if it's a small percentage of a population, that now have the ability to dig, find truth, bring it to light, or have a platform to be able to tell their story, you know, as in the case of the young lady with the Hockey Canada's challenge. When you look at the playbook that's existed for a couple of hundreds of years, years, you know, of the elites and all, everywhere around the world being able to be like, no, no, we can manage this. You know, it's the first principle of, you know, crisis management is, is manage the communications. And it's not good enough anymore.

We're in a world where every, you know, there's probably 30 sensors in the room I'm sitting in that in some way shape, form or faction are picking up my voice. They're picking up where I'm sitting. They're picking up what I look like, what I'm talking about. You know, it's, it's, I've had a lot of fun with the idea. You know, like, I'll mess with my friends when I'm sitting around them. And I know they got their phones or their watches near them that are listening. And I'll start talking about the craziest stuff because I know it's going to modify their Google AdWords or their Facebook ads or whatever. And they're like, what are you even talking about?

And then like a day later they're calling me. They're like, why am I getting ads in Portuguese for like, you know, bono pills from India, you know, or stupid things like that. And it's just like because I was, you know, but that's an end-order manipulation of sensors. in technology that like a guy like me knows because that's a world I inhabit. And I have some fun with it because it's not weird to me, but it freaks people out when they realize that like literally everything is listening. Everything is being reported. It's being tracked somewhere. And just one motivated person that can get access to a platform is able to shed light on the whole thing. It's why you brought a podcast earlier and it's why

I'm so freaking bullish on podcasts as a medium for truth. And it'll face the same challenge that all the media forms do as it matures and, you know, bifurcates and then just continue just kind of splitting itself off rhizomatically. You get infinitely weirder potential variations in venues. But, you know, the things that you talk about are very transgressive to the regime. When you look at when you, there's a reason Rogan's the biggest media platform in the world now. And is it that people just love Joe Rogan?

No, I mean, he was an average to above average comic. He had moments of brilliance. likeable is the host of his show. He's great, you know, doing MMA commentary. But then he just has emerged over the last 15 years as this just ginormous global cultural force to completely shift narratives. And so when he started digging his heels in on COVID a couple of years ago, and then they tried to cancel him, it's like, well, you fucked up. You done messed up, A.A.A. Ron, right? Because he has a platform that they can't stop. And they can't make Spotify cancel him. Hey, he makes too much money for him.

And B, they've invested too much money into them and C, controversy sells. Consumiversity drives engagement. And it drives, it drives discussion and dialogue and it gets people talking. And so I can't tell you how many times I've heard be like, you know, like, Ross, we've got to get you on Rogue. And I'm like, you know, whatever. You know, maybe I'll go down there and drink bourbon with him if I've ever given the opportunity. But I don't seek that out. But the people he seeks out are the people that manage to get on there, they have this massive platform to tell it.

And so now he's digging in over the last year on the pharmaceutical companies. He's bringing Brigham Bueller on that is like sharing those uncomfortable truths with, here's one of the idiots that's been so disruptive. For the people not watching, what did you say, a Labradoodle? Yeah, it's two Labradoodles, a black one and a red one. And this one is a puppy, and she is an absolutely brilliant moron. It's astonishing. Totally untrainable and incredibly adept at getting into the kind of trouble that you only see after the fact.

So and my office is under renovation right now, which is why I've got this screen up behind me. And there's like a little hole in the world. Hey, I kind of like the screen. Of all the screens I've seen, that's a pretty good one. You know, talk. The banner across the top says, you can't, they won't, we will. It's my, it's Fortis analysis company motto. You can't, we will.

I like that. They won't, we will. You know, it's like, all right, you want the, you know, I just, I kind of lean into the insane because it's the fringes, the fringes of dialogue, the fringes of risk taking is where the opportunities are to actually move the needle in some meaningful way, not just financially, but on really big picture issues. You know, like, you know, that's the red sea. You know, that's a drawing of, you know, the Babelmandam straight. You can actually see it's like a container ship. Yeah. the bottom of it, I'll actually send it to you if you want to use it in the media materials,

but the bottom of it says Babelmandup Cruise 2023. And the idea came up that like, oh, I should design a, I should design like a patch, like the morale patches that like Navy aviators have on their jackets that like shows all the cruises and tours they've been on with the Navy. And they all have their own little theme. It's like, man, I should design a patch for the Babelamanda, you know, 2023, tour that these guys are on right now. And again, you know, the idea of being make it fun, make it mockable, like the incompetence, but also celebrate the amazing work that the sailors

and others are doing there to defend global commerce. And it's having the ability to do that, to come on your podcast and be able to, you know, explain even something as simple and transgressive as like this administration is completely incompetent. They're totally behind the eight ball. they don't know what they're doing and they don't have any way to dig out of it and it's it's there's not a lot of places still in the world where you can do that without like you said like jack boot thugs showing up at your door to you know haul you you you know keel haul you away to jail for for saying a thing that you're not supposed to say to the regime so um human human freedom always finds a way it always does and that's an infinitely that's that's the one capacity humans have for that self renewal like i talked

about earlier is that they will always find a way to do the uncomfortable thing, do the difficult thing, do the deadly and risky thing, but because they believe in it, whether you agree with them or not, if they believe in it, that's not going to stop doing it. So, you know, when, when you bring up Joe Rogan, I don't even have him in my top five comments. Like, he's, I don't know, I don't know, like, before I ever heard his podcast, right? Like, his podcast is monumental because I hear it, and I'm like, Oh my God, I'm going to do this. What he has done, he's been, you know, like love or hate Joe Rogan because there's some people out there just hate him. I'm like, well, do you listen to him?

Like, do you actually, like, and I find a lot of people that hate him. Some listen and just hate him. Others have seen like clips or something and that's it. They've never listened. I'm like, what a strange thing to hate someone for. You've never even listened to their thought process. And what he does is three hours and people are circulating a 15 second clip as if it's like. And trying to like, like, that's who he is.

I find the same thing with Jordan Peterson, though. There's a ton of people who hate Jordan Peterson who's never picked up his book. Like, just go pick up his book and read it. But, you know, in fairness, that's my observation. For me, Joe Rogan wasn't a great comic. And it doesn't mean he was bad. It's just, you know, for me, I wasn't racing out and see Joe Rogan. You know, I wasn't a big UFC guy.

And you think of what makes up part of his show is, comics in UFC. Neither one of those speaks to who I am. I've listened to maybe one or two comics on his show. And in fairness,

I don't even know. Has he had Dave Chappelle on? Yeah. Has he? I got to go back and find that because that's the one comic I would. Yeah, well,

and Dave Chappelle is brilliant. But you know, he gets sitting down and I just think he just found his calling. Like he gets sitting down. It doesn't mean he isn't a good comic. He obviously is. It doesn't mean he isn't good with the UFC.

He obviously, is. It's just those two don't line up for me. Then he starts talking to, you know, Randall Carlson and Jordan Peterson and all these different intellectuals. And he just has a way to pull it out of him. And now his guest list is, I mean, like, who's got a better guest list than Jordan Peter, than Joe Rogan? Nobody. Nobody even comes close. And so you, you mix in this host who can just pull out things that are just like, holy crap, that's interesting. Mix with the cutting edge thinking on the planet right now. And you get what you have.

And then he gets attacked in the middle of it because we are lucky enough, in my opinion, that an act of God literally stops him from getting vaccinated because he was supposed to get vaccinated. Like you listen to him and talk how close he came. You're like, oh my goodness. If he had gotten that, it wouldn't be the same.

It wouldn't be the same. Because now he's galvanized, like, people who already liked him, liked him. But then he became their champion of their ideas as well. well. And he's a guy that likes to steer into bringing other people from the other side on.

And he's, you know, his background as a wrestler and everything else, right? He doesn't mind a little, and a comedian. Like, I've talked to a few comedians now, and I understand, like, crowds can be pretty rough. So, like, he doesn't shy away from, like, oh, you want to have a little bit of a go? Like, okay. Like, Sondre

Gupta, listening to that, I just felt like I was sitting there, I'm like, oh, man, like, the guy walked into a prize fight and he had no idea that Rogan, was going to throw him against the ropes and hit him 80 times and then go, what are you talking about? And then he grabbed him again and he'd do it all over again. Because I mean, at that point in time, CNN, man, I could go on and on about this for us.

Like, fantastic. And it just, as long as, in my mind, as long as Rogan gets to do that, there's going to be so many of us that underneath his umbrella, his shadow, his whatever, get to operate because they can't shut him down. They just can't. Canada's going to try and shut us all down here. but as long as he's doing what he's doing in the States, there's always going to be a free spot to go and,

and carry on open conversations. One of the things that he does really well, and it's a huge benefit of a long-form conversational medium, like podcasts. Podcasts can be tight, lean, you can focus for 15 minutes on, you know, a specific topic or whatever it may be, but his long-form podcast really allows for the development, like it allows for ideas to be brought to the service and breathe a little bit. You're watching real-time intellectual inquiry.

And he's great when he's talking about things that he's in his domain knowledge are very interested in. You know, Big Farm is one that obviously in the last couple of years he's just like, like a glove off. I mean, we're going to bear knuckle this until one of us is dead. But one of the things he does really, really well is when he's got guests on talking about really controversial things or niche things, he does a great job of playing the man in the chair listening in that. that humans hear things and they're engaging with it intellectually in real time and they're formulating pushback or they're formulating, do I agree with that or whatever, he does a really

good job of asking questions that the average person would ask to push back and be like, whoa, wait a minute, what about this? What about this? And he allows the guests to extrapolate or expound on him and then when necessary, he does push back. I don't think that's right. I don't think that data doesn't sound right. Jamie looked that up, right? And so there's like this, this mix of intellectual inquiry, free fire dialogue, fact checking. If he's wrong, you know, he's like, oh, I guess it's, you know, I misremembered. I'm wrong, you know, I just, that's new data. And so you're like, you're watching the, like a mature adult process of intellectual inquiry

happening in real time are on some pretty challenging ideas and topics. And people are hungry for that. You know, the, the magic of Rogan isn't Rogan. The magic of Rogan is that you have an intellectually curious, bright guy that's pretty worldly and well read on a lot of things. And he has the ability to synthesize information, spit it back, draw more out, challenge it, embrace it without ever asking the viewer or the listener to buy into his own side. You know, it's it really is like he's part referee, part combatant in the war of ideas,

but he does a pretty good job of writing that line. And there was a time when even the view, which is just like roundly mocked as a bunch of just like nasty liberal hens with one token conservative allegedly sitting around talking about things. But there was a time when like you went on the view and you would hear some pretty transgressive stuff. Like Norm McDonnell, one of the most famous clips in media, is Norm McDonald going on talking about why he loves George W. Bush and, you know, why Bill Clinton's a scumbag. And, you know, it's like, and Saturday Live was really transgressive, particularly with Norm at the helm for the weekend update. You know, he'd never miss an opportunity when the Clintons would come up and in the Clinton presidency to talk about Vince Foster. And it's, that's the magic of people that are so fearless and smart that they figure out a way to get truth out or at least challenge people to think about what is true. and we need that more than ever because we're now in a world where reporters can be arrested

simply for walking up to an executive of a country on the street and asking some questions in a way that was uncontrolled. Obviously, she couldn't defend her ideas whatsoever. And so it was don't engage arrest. Like the, these elites are so uncomfortable in their positions of power. They're so uncertain about what the masses might do and how they might react to the shenanigans that the elites are getting up to, that the cost benefit calculus now is I'd rather look bad for arresting a reporter for asking a question than for actually having to answer for the shit I'm doing and saying in the capacity of my public office. Like the calculus is now shifted for them towards it's better to arrest and enslave than to worry about the perception of that and have to answer for something.

Yeah, it's, wow, that sums it up pretty good, honestly. You know, it's funny as we go along here, I'm like, we were getting to introduce you, you know, and I have like one thing I want to make sure we talk about. So I'm going to shift gears right now. You know, your background, I was, I looked it up. It's been a while since you've been on. You know, you got it. So for people wanting to find the Ross Kennedy, like the opening act, if you would, you got to go back to episode 293.

That was July of 2022. Wow. And 317 was our last one. That was September of 2022. So it's been a stretch. But if people want to go back and listen to those two, Ross has been on twice. And, you know, you can give a brief, I don't need, they can go back and listen. Logistics and Supply Chain Consultant.

It's, it's, you know, like, with everything going on in the Red Sea, I'm just like, who's the guy that I should be talking to? I'm like, Ross is the guy that should be coming on here to just give me his thoughts on this, because, like, it's not just that they're attacking things. It's like, what are the ramifications of them attacking things? And how does that all just, you know, start to domino effects start to happen? And I don't know, you, you're a guy who stares at this every day. I'm sure you've been, you've been talking a ton about it. what are your thoughts on what's going on over in the you know in the the channels the channels if you will the choke points yes the choke points so uh in brief um you know almost two decades now and and

you know really not exclusively exclusively in logistics but in logistics and supply chain across a number of domains and by my own sort of nature and ideological roots, you know, very early in my career sought out and received opportunities to be able to do a type of logistics and supply chain work that was very useful in the war on terror, which was the ability to smuggle is not the right were, but certainly the ability to a more low visibility way, get, you know, get things delivered to the point of requirement that Uncle Sam and our allies needed at different times. And that really just comes from a phenomenal appetite for risk. You know, that's A, being willing to think outside the box and C actually have, I don't know, that it's courage, maybe just like the complete lack of

self-preservation to actually say yes to really crazy things. And, you know, survived all of them and was successful in nearly all of them. And that's a way of challenging convention that I've always engaged in from a very young age, was pushing back against ideas. I didn't understand or didn't agree with and trying to rip them apart and rebuild them into a model that would work for me. and when you apply those principles to physical things that move, you can get adjacent to a lot of or directly involved in a lot of really interesting things that really expands your worldview. And if you've got the intellectual courage to take that challenge on and go,

okay, what is this really saying to me? What am I really looking at here? What's the problem set? And what's a creative solution? That's the lowest cost, lowest risk way to accomplish the objective. you just keep getting wilder and wilder, you know, things. So I'm not going to say which one, but one of the very famous UAP videos out there.

When I ran across that video on the internet, I'm like, I know what that is. It was just, it was no doubt in my mind because at one time in a moment, I was exposed to some things that it's like, you don't ever talk about it. You don't ever give specifics or details on, but it stays locked in your brain, right? Like, oh shit, that exists.

And so for me, it went from like a notional theoretical construct, but because a physical thing had to move or something for that physical thing had to be able to move from A to B. And I, you know, I got tapped on the shoulder to do it. Now all of a sudden, my whole worldview expanded to the realm of what's possible and what's out there. That is the most gray I've ever heard a UAP describe. You got to, can you give me a touch more than that? I've gotten pretty good at talking around the edges of some of these things. Yeah, you're kind of like a politician. It's like, oh, yeah, and now you're going to have me curious all day if we don't explore that just for two seconds.

Smugglers are trained liars. You know, you got to be able to make the paper trail say what it needs to say, right? So there's a lot of famous videos out there. There's one in particular that takes place within the territory of the continental United States. and you know it's a it's a it's identified visually in the video by uh it's size and its light pattern and which narrows the scope down a lot because a lot of the famous videos are like the you know the gimbal video or whatever where it's like you have this little pill looking thing you're seeing a feature and it's dancing around yeah it's like dancing around it's doing like

really weird physics you know things that shouldn't be possible and it's like you know i've got some I've got some ideas on those too, but, you know, the one in particular, I mean, it took me three seconds of looking at it going, I know that and I know that because I've seen, I've seen a thing with my own eyes. And what's really in that particular case, what really screws with people is it's what you're actually seeing is not one thing. You're seeing several things that appear to be one thing. And it's the design, the design of that particular thing, it was doing its job in that moment where it's it you know so when you say so when you say thing you're not like will you die if you say what thing is is it is this like is this like national security

dive i'll never get to do this kind of work again um you know so yeah you ap caught on video pretty clearly and but caught him video in such a way that just like I forget what the term is but the ability to organize data of something hazy so like you look at a cloud and and you pointed a cloud to a kid and you're like what does that look like it looks like a T-Rex right because that's how they can conceptualize that's the closest conceptualization they have for the vague shape of a cloud. And then you ask another guy and he's like, well, it looks like a spacecraft. And then you ask a third guy and he's like, it doesn't look like anything. It looks like a grove of visual blur of trees, right? And because humans, humans have schemas the way we think,

we orient and sort and filter and comprehend information based around the information we've already encountered. And so the trick, it's like those magic 3D pictures that were like, so popular back in the day, like a lot of people couldn't never get wire their brains and their visual cortex to look deep enough into it to pull the pattern out. And that's not just a while. Those things used to piss me off. Yes. Yeah. They're frustrating, right? But eventually like, I, you know, and they did me too. And then, but like very quickly, I took it as a challenge to be like, how fast can I see these things? And so I had all the books, right? And I had posters on my wall. And it was like how fast can I force myself to look beyond and see the thing within the thing?

And, you know, that was an unconscious intellectual framework of, you know, like engaging with what I was seeing. But your sensors can lie to you, right? So the data you see on a computer can lie to you, a camera can lie to you, particularly now with AI being so pervasive. What you hear can lie to you, right? like all of your sensors can lie to you. So you have to have to have a framework for being able to sort and filter all of not just what you're seeing, but all of the other information you have in your head and your access to new information and go, what is this thing beneath the thing? And in this particular case, like the magic 3D thing, I didn't look at what the thing was. I looked at what it could be. And that's that's the particular gift that I have that makes me very useful in these logistics concepts of like, like, you know, how would I creatively move something through the Babelmandup choke point right now? Well, it depends. How much legal cover do I have to get it done?

Right. So if, you know, SECDF when he's, you know, done with the surgery, you know, were to tap me on the shoulder and say, give me a model that gets things through there safely. Absolutely. Absolutely. I've written up four different models to do that. To my knowledge, none of them have been implemented. But, you know, I've been written up and paid to actually produce that type. of analysis and framework of how do I look how do I look at the thing beneath the thing?

The thing, the issue is not the missiles, it's not the drones. When you're looking at UAP videos, it's not the thing you're fixated on and looking at because as visual creatures, you know, humans, yeah, we have five senses, we actually have six, but you know, our five main sensors are sight, touch, feel, smell, and taste. And we interpret the whole world through the limitations or strengths of those very very, you know, sensors. And so you have to be able to go, okay, well, here's what my five senses are telling me, but then your sixth sense is actually intuition. And most people don't know how to develop it. They don't know how to hone it. Gavin DeBekker did absolutely phenomenal work at bringing the gift

of fear, that book to the masses in the 90s where he talks about how to how to recognize pre-event indicators. Two guys that wrote the Marine Corps Combat Tracker program back in the 90s and the 2000s I wrote a book years ago that's phenomenal. I recommend everybody. It's called Left a Bang. And it's how do you, the things you subconsciously are detecting that give rise to that intuition, oh, I got a heby-gib feeling, right? And women, by the way, are phenomenal.

Yes, they are. It's a survival mechanism, right? Because if you boil it all the way down to the basics, men are built to be predators, women are not built to be predators as far as a fundamental, you know, evolutionary construct or how God designed us, whatever framework you look at from how we became the way we are today as, as, you know, sentient meat machines. And but whatever the worldview is, clearly men are adapted to violence. We're adapted with a higher level of strength, higher level of risk taking, aggression, because we're predator creatures, right? And if there's a stronger, there must be a weaker. And women in a sense,

are physically weaker. They are not adapted to violence in the same way men are, mentally, emotionally and physically, and to some extent spiritually. But as with, you know, you watch a deer in the woods. I love hunting, right? It's like my huntsman is my name. And, you know, Orion is the logo of my company,

you know, the Huntsman of the Night Sky. And because hunting for me, it's not only the challenge, but it's also the, it's the, you're engaging with a prey animal that has high intuition. Its sensors are off the charts. It can smell you. It can't detect you any number of ways. And sometimes it can't even quantify it. It just somehow knows you're sitting in a ground blind and it can't actually see, but some rough shape of the outline doesn't make sense with a pattern from when it walked at five days earlier. and it just throws the white flag up of its tail and it turns off.

And you're like, how did, you know, I covered my boots and deer piss and, you know, I haven't made a sound and I haven't moved and it's still figured out I was here. And the frustration of that becomes the challenge of how do I overcome that animal's ability to detect me and I put meat on the table. And so in a larger framework, you know, bringing in a full circle is when you look at an in particular the incident I'm talking about, I immediately didn't look at what I was supposed to look at. I looked deeper at what it could be and then what could comprise that pattern of lights and that size across a night sky. And if you reconceptualize the problem around what could it be, not what is it?

Not what am I seeing? But what do I think I'm seeing and how am I wrong? And so if you attack yourself from that principle of I'm assuming what I'm looking at is wrong, like my first intuition or my first impulse, so what could it be? And then you begin to build that snowmobile, which is a John Boyd term of, you know, you take the handlebars off a bike and the motor off a motorcycle and the treads off a tank and you put them together. What do you have?

You have a snowmobile, right? You take all these different pieces and components from different things and you assemble them into a new machine. And so that that was how I kind of intuitive. intuitively before I recognized it and then rationally pulled it together. I'm like, I know what that is. It's not one thing. It's several things. And it's several things that are designed to operate at the time.

Nobody knew it was possible. Now, and this is probably the closest I can get to hinting very strongly at things. Now the ability to pull 2,000 small drones with lights on them into these just elaborate moving form. and they look like the murmurings of, you know, the starlings, you know, where you have these just thousands of these birds and these gorgeous organic patterns moving around. And now we can do that with machines. And now we can program the machines to not only operate in that sequence, but to stay at a certain, you know, using their onboard sensors and their gimbals and gyroscopes and all these things to be able to orient themselves continually to everything around them. and X, Y, and Z axis, which is the third dimension, and to do so in a cadence and timing,

that thousands of these things appear to be one thing. That technology is not new, right? Anything crazy like that that's commercialized is 30 or 40 years old, as far as like when it actually began as algorithms on a whiteboard or chalkboard. And so as that technology advances and progresses and eventually components of it get commercialized, a lot of times you see tech in the deep state that's like really spooky or weird if you saw you know what in the hell you know like components of that to pay for those programs they they'll take the mark one version of that stand up a company or sell the intellectual property to a trusted vendor

they scale it as a commercial thing and then it gets deployed in the market as like a retail product so that's where we went from 40 years ago we had predators you know predators or owns up 20,000 feet in the air, just slowly loitering and watching shit. And now you have a level of visual fidelity and capability. The average person go to Walmart by a $300 drone and have a better, clearer, more persistent view than we had 40 years ago. But that technology has continued evolving so much that in order to keep paying for stuff, every now and again, some, you know, it might be the algorithm. It might be a piece of the sensor. It might be, you know, know, one of the control surfaces that helps kind of oriented the flight gets commercialized

out and becomes something that gets adopted in, you know, the commercial world, right? It's a component for an aircraft or it's a, it's a platform, you know, to, you know, mass commercialized, you know, drone tech or whatever it may be. So I looked at that and I'm like, what if that's not one thing? What if it's several things? Let me ask you. Let me tell you a story. I was just saying the story to my brother.

and I've set it on here, I think, once before. Driving from, my wife and I were coming back from Lashburn, Saskatchewan for the local listener. That's 15 minutes west of where, east of where I live on the major highway. And we're just driving and, I don't know, we're talking whatever. And I look up in the sky and there's just like two bright lights. Kind of look like the North Star, but they're not the North Star because he's like, what the heck is that? But I could, I was like, I don't know what the heck that is.

I'm sitting there, I'm driving. And, you know, I'm sitting there thinking like, what? Could that be? Could it be a satellite? Could it be, like, what am I? And then one of them, like, zooms away like you would in a movie. Like, it just was gone. Like, and my eye caught it, and it was just gone. I was like, oh, well, that was something.

And then I'm trying to tell my wife it. I'm like, oh, my God. This thing just, it just, what did it do? And then the other one did the same thing. And she looks up, she's like, oh, yeah, and I'm like, what do you mean? Oh, yeah, yeah, whatever. I'm like, they just both zoomed away. well, Ross, in your infinite wisdom, what the heck was that?

So fun fact about living at the edge of the frontier like you do, which it's not that much far north of you where it's mostly thousands of square miles of uninhabited country. There's not a lot of better environments in the world to be able to test a high performance, low observable platform. then on the frontiers of human development, particularly when you're talking about how cold it gets, the further north you go. So what else would be cold, mostly uninhabited, and a more extreme environment to test a high maneuverability, high-speed platform that maybe has some capabilities

that we don't know about publicly, space, you know, that's like you get up in the northern, you get up in the northern regions of Canada. That's about as close to an extreme space-like environment in some ways, particularly the higher you go, to being able to give you some level of granular testing data on that. And so that's why so many of these encounters are happening out over water. They happen like 80% of the stories or I was driving along and it's an uninhabited part of the world and a place very few humans usually are moving, you know, consistently. And I saw this weird thing.

And it's like, well, it's weird that you're there, not that it's there. Right. So, you know, I, you know, I don't really have any explanation for the stories about, you know, you know, and then I got taken up into a spacecraft and my proctologist was waiting. And he put both hands on my shoulders and gave me an anal probe. Like, you know, those types of stories. I don't really have an explanation for that other than like mescaline or I want a bad ayahuasca trip. But I can promise you I wasn't drinking and I was on no drugs when I was driving.

I was just sitting there and I was like, this is why left out the anal probe part. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Shit gets a little weird in Saskatchew. But no, it's, um, there is a reason that a lot of these things happen out over bodies of water. they happen out and what's called the um uh well i i can't say but there there is a testing there's a testing right i'm making you uncomfortable this morning this is interesting you know we were supposed to be going left and as a good podcast goes it went hard right and now you got

me so curious and you you feel you know you'm like interesting ross really has a real a real grasp on some of these things i uh oh well i mean logistics guy, right? Yeah. You ship B and the faster and most low, low visibility way you can move it, you're occasionally going to see and touch things that, you know, if you're trusted to be involved in something, it's like, well, okay, we can put it on a ship or we can do some really, really weird shit nobody ever thought of and move it a lot faster.

And then suddenly you're like, you're breaking the laws of physics to move a kilogram of something from A to B, right? So. When you say weird shit, are you allowed to talk? about any of that? Like, what's, what's one of the ways, and maybe you go back 10 years, you go, like, you know, the standard way is you put it in, uh, uh, you know, a Canadian mail parcel and you move it and it and it takes seven days and, oh, wait, this thing comes along and, you know, it's pure or it's, or it's, or it's, you know, UPS or whatever, and it can get it there in a day.

Oh, well, that's groundbreaking. Um, is there anything you can talk on that, you know, when you talk about, you know, looking at a problem and be like, well, what have we tried this? Yeah, absolutely. So a really good example, and it's, you know, it's a project of public record, so I'm not like treading out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's illuminating, right? Two things. First, I was really, really fortunate to get brought into something back in 2017. And it was basically a containerized platform that could deploy CubeSats with completely autonomously on no notice and have no thermal signature until it was already in orbit or reaching a very high altitude lower format. Cube SATs? Yeah, CubeSats.

So those are, they range in size, but just. Generally speaking, they're going to be 50 to 250 pounds. Dimensionally, their dimensions change depending on what they're doing. If they're a communication satellite, if they're a, you know, like a geolocation satellite, like GPS or Glouinass or, you know, different cubesats have different functions. Or you can stack sensors on them and they can do some different things and whatever. So, but I mean, it's said like the Starling satellites are quite large, but there's components of them that you could rip off and they would still completely function because

though you put enough kubats up they can create a mesh network around the world and and So a cube set I want to make sure I'm getting this clear. Cub set is a satellite. It's a drone. It's a it's a flying autonomous vehicle. It's no it has to have a launch vehicle. Okay. So it has to be carried into orbit. But once it's up there, it's just going to stay in a zero gravity environment. Okay. Okay. But they're small, and that's the benefit of them, right? You can put a whole lot of them up, and they're very hard to see with all the space debris we have around the world. So, you know, everybody's familiar with like a really big satellites.

We've all seen the videos of like, you know, the Falcon 9 Heavy's module, you know, launching 15 or 20, you know, Starlink satellites. And they, you know, they'll have small onboard systems that allow them to kind of move themselves into position. And then they arrange into coordinates. That's why we see like the satellite train across the sky and the normal. hemisphere, you know, 1530 of these satellites just kind of moving like this across the night sky and there's starlight satellites, right? So, but we have a level of public recognition and awareness of that now, but we were putting satellites up 70 years ago, 60 years ago.

And those would just look like stars and then, if they're fixed, if they're fixed, if they have fixed coordinates, that they're locked, you know, two coordinates and they stay in orbit, over a certain spot to do whatever they do. Because they're a node or a relay in the network up there for passing data around. Or maybe there's sensors that are up there watching a certain patch of the world's surface for some reason. And then you have the ones that actually move.

And they're able to kind of move themselves around a little bit up there. And you can control them from the new ones can do it autonomously or you can take physical control and actually, because you're so high up at that point that you know, in the larger scheme of space, a fractional movement actually changes the parameters of what it can look at by hundreds of miles, right, because of just simple trigonometry and angles. So CubeSats, though, largely are fixed position. They go up, they sit, they serve one purpose because by weight and by size dimensions, you can only put so much on them. So CubeSats are interesting tech, and it's a mature tech.

technology. Like, it's still being iterated and evolved and stuff, but it's a mature platform that's not unfamiliar to, you know, 10,000 people that work in aerospace or telecommunications. Sure. But the idea of this particular thing was how do we have a low observable launch? And the Falcon 9, you know, the heavy lift vehicle that SpaceX operates is a fucking marvel of modern engineering. that you have a multi-use recoverable platform that's able to put stuff up and get 50 or 100 launches out of it before you've got to life cycle it out. And all you have to do is recycle, the fuel and, you know, fix the seals and anything that may get shaken loose in the launch. But generally speaking, your cost for a launch goes from hundreds of millions of dollars down to, I think Estill is at about $75 million for launch now, which is just unbelievable, like to bend the cost curve that much for that type of platform.

But again, Eelan didn't look at the problem. He looked at the problem inside the problem and said the issue is not fuel. It's not rockets. It's not scale the cost of materials down to do it one off. How do we make it a reusable, recoverable platform? And he solved for that problem first. And so this was designed as a commercially oriented solution that could serve multiple purposes, this particular platform and, you know, was done under a, done under an agreement with DARPA,

the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency we have in the U.S., which is really spooky and squirrel. You talk about some fucking brilliant weirdos. DARPA's got them, and they've got a lot of them. And they're like human robots. They're like computers. You know, they're oriented towards like brilliant recognition and solution towards certain problem sets, but they have, like, a lot of them,

have no functional social skills or whatever, right? They're used to looking at math. They're not used to looking at people. And so they have gaps and constraints and the leadership of that. And occasionally their constraint is how do we solve for a fundamentally human problem by leveraging machines, not by replacing humans with the machine. And so they're looking at all these like crazy autonomous launch things. And a very good friend of mine goes, what if we floated at?

up with a weather balloon. It's all stored as a self-contained launch unit in a container. Lid opens up on the container. You float it up with a weather balloon. It takes like 10 minutes to reach altitude. And then when the balloon reaches, you know, where they burst or you jettison the balloon, it's a relatively small and you don't need a massive one like the size of the one the Chinese floated over the US or they floated six of them over Taiwan in the last week. How do we make it just big enough that if they're not really looking for it, they're not going to this balloon carrying the cubes out up to altitude and inside a little launch vehicle. And then when you get to a certain altitude and escape velocity is a lot lower, that's,

that's why rockets need so much fuel and these massive engines on them is because you have to carry a huge payload and engine and fuel just to push a relatively by ratio, smaller weight of something into orbit because you have, you've got to get out of gravity. And so the higher up you go, the lower the gravity and the lower the density of the air. So you need a lot, you know, you can scale then a rocket, you know, a vehicle, a launch vehicle. You can scale that down and scale its fuel requirements and cost down to $2 million to put a satellite more than versus $10 million per unit with like the Starlink satellites going up on the Falcon 9. So it was how do we solve for these problems by attacking them from a completely. fundamentally different level rather than how do we build a better rocket it was no no how do we

reduce the requirements of the rocket to be able to position a small thing in orbit and uh you know the engineers and the guys that were working that project were just so so fucking brilliant and and way ahead of their time um and and everybody kind of laughed at the ability to build that solution and two days ago I was on a call with some folks that were like, hey, remember that, you know, our code name for it was Nemesis. You remember that Nemesis project that you brought to us all these years ago? And I'm like, I've never forgotten how you fuck this. And, you know, they were, yeah, I got alpha-witted by DARPA. That's fun to admit.

But, you know, they loved it. And they took pieces of the tech and they put it in other stuff. But they never commercialized us in our project. And I never held a grudge. I just, I held the data. And I was like, this is going to come back around. We're too far ahead of our time now, but there will become a requirement for it. And so it was a couple days ago after six years, it gets brought up.

You know, like, hey, does that IP, that intellectual property still exists? Could you still build that? And it's like, yeah. Yeah, but it's going to cost you a lot more now. You know, we were hungry to, we were hungry for the contract then. Now you came to us. So it's these things exist, but until you tell someone, like for someone listening to this that really doesn't know how rocket works or how, you know, the constellation of satellites, you know, function on a mechanical and

like engineering level, you hear like this crazy idea of like, yeah, we're going to containerize a satellite and a small rocket and a weather balloon. And then just, you know, with 20 minutes notice deploy this thing into orbit, they're like that bullshit. That's not possible. Well, it is 100% possible because there is a prototype CubeSat sitting up in orbit right now. and we did it six years ago, seven years ago now. So it's like the average mind can't comprehend if it's never been experienced. And so in the absence of any sort of domain knowledge,

they're going to look at the lights in the sky and go, oh my God, it's this, right? It's this thing. Why are the lights all blinking? Why did a constituent component in the night sky would appear to be one big thing? why did one of those things suddenly like race off and then the light pattern, you know, like, real lines and now it looks like something totally different. And I'm looking at that going,

those are visual control sensors. Well, once again, once again, you have background into things that very few do, right? Like I do a military roundtable on here. Why? Because in Canada, specifically, we have such a small portion of the population that's ever been in the Canadian military and then to have active service and done tours and on and on and on they just have a very interesting perspective why do i bring ross on folks well because you sir have a very interesting perspective it's just like how like who else am i going to talk to and in fairness there's probably a few i could i could probably shoulder tap i guess i just i don't know you know once again i hate to i hate to pump my brother's tires too much but it was dust who put me on to you years ago

I was like, this is interesting. We need to sit and have a chat or two. And, you know, and now, you know, when's Ross going to be back on, like publicly? Yeah, well, I mean, it's like, well, you probably should come back on now, you know? And it's funny to me because I'm just like, one of the things, it isn't just my brother Dustin.

There's several people, a ton of people in this audience. You know, when I enlist the thousands of people who listen to me, all of a sudden, I have a unique problem now of like I actually have to like go through like is this a smart person to bring on I didn't used to have to do that now I actually really have to and I do five episodes a week right now Ross. You have a little responsibility to your audience right? Yeah well and at the end of the day like it's not that one episode can derail the podcast anymore. It really can't and it never could actually if I'm really honest with myself. but at the end of the day it's like well the value is what value does this bring now to

to me am I interested in it and it's always been the case but now I I've got a list of like I get throwing people all the time like you should go after this person or would you like to have this person on that's really interesting and you're just another one of these that I'm like no one would ever like how on earth could I possibly know some of this unless I talk to you or other people who can start to piece together the puzzle for me. Because I would have no clue about half the stuff you're talking about. I'm like, honestly, it's what you just talked about with the weather balloon. I'm like, I mean, I wouldn't have known how to do it.

But to me, it makes complete sense. It actually makes a little bit of common sense. You know, like, you know, that's a tab of work these days. Right? It just took the guy in the checkbooks seven years to identify that the requirement, we'd already identified and we're solving for was okay that's useful i just interviewed chase barbary yesterday and and that's um edison motors and you know like i was telling them you know ev is almost a swear word in my vocabulary right now it's getting rammed down our throat i don't like it and then i sit

listen to him and i go hmm he's talking about the world wants to get to ev but we're on d and he's talking diesel and he goes we're missing this part in the middle where we go eve and diesel and then maybe eventually you get to straight EV. And I'm like, man, why aren't the politicians rolling you out to talk about it? Because when you talk about it and you're kind of like, you know, blue collar is what it is. I'm like, I actually get it. That's why I love that guy. I mean, it's, you know, I follow, like, I don't know Chase from Adam.

I've never engaged with him even like on Twitter or anything. But what, what he's doing is such a clear example of why, you know, I say never short America, broadly speaking, never short like, you know, the Western man's capacity and freedom to innovate, even though we don't have as much freedom as we did. There's not a lot of places in the world where a guy like Chase could do what he does and then like to the extent of his ability to fund it, conceptualize new things, iterate, evolve, engage, you know, like the only real self-limiting factor on a guy like that, just like Elon, is him for better or worse, right? Like, but the opportunity is there for guys like that. And so you look at what he did. Really nobody at any sort of like real mechanical level of pursuit. Like how do we actually do this and then how do we actually scale the engineering? Like we bring the cost of the components and the engineering down and then scale the ability to do it. But that hybrid power train, the way he conceptualizes it, you look at a

Stalantis, which is like the parent company that now comprises like Chrysler, Fiat, Ram, Dodge, Jeep. They've got a ram truck coming out in the 2025 model year. So it'll be later this year. And Ford went one direction. They went like all EV with the lightning and it's burned really, really bad, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars and recalls and reengineering and all sorts of things because like fucking trucks run out of batteries after 80 miles, you know. And so Ford like went the traditional route of like, okay, well, how are we going to

out Tesla Tesla? How do we have an all EV platform that, you know, we're betting on, we're betting on physics to not work against us as far as, you know, energy density and, you know, efficiency and all of that. And Stalantus has taken the Edison approach. They're pushing it. They're pushing a ram truck. I think it's called a ram charger or something like that, but I don't know, it's probably got a really stupid branding name. But I'm very inch is the first like ev or largely evy platform i've ever been interested in here's why because it does it it's got it's got the electric motors on it just like an evy does to drive the wheels it doesn't have a centralized power train the normal engine transmission axles all that um but it's got it's got

the motors it's got a big battery pack on board just like a normal eve does but it also has a 33 gallon fuel tank on it that's paired to a v6 engine and it's using it as a 300 horsepower generator for the motors and to charge the battery pack. Like now I'm interested in, as I understand Edison's tech, that's kind of largely what they've got, is this approach where keep the engine, keep the fossil fuel, but use it as a power plant for the things that drive the vehicle. I love that. That's a level of like adaptive problem solving where someone went back to the first principle

and it's like, no, no, no, the current way is not working. We're running into these challenges, whatever it may be. So how do we make a, how do we make a light duty half-ton pickup have a 600, 700-mile range using existing tech? But we imagine the connectivity of them differently. Sounds like they just kind of stole Edison's thing. But, you know, they should just hire Chase and then make like Edison their brand. You know what's crazy boat Chase? He's a, he's a fourth generation trucker.

He's a lot like, it's like logging truck. Logging, logging. Four generation trucker. I'm like, oh, you're heavy duty mechanic or something? He's like, no. No, and I'm like, I don't mean to like come down on trucking. I'm like, my dad's, my dad's a farmer. He trucked all his life.

He's one of the smartest men. You have a problem on a piece of machinery. He can usually piece it together. Like, he's the guy you want to have in a crisis, right? After problem solving man. Right. I call him a guy. I'm like, you just like, you give him a problem and he could just McGiver his way out of it.

It's awesome. Chase reminds me that because he's like, he's not a heavy, doing mechanic. It's not like he went to, you know, I'm asking about the physics of why an electric vehicle can give you more power than just like a diesel, you know, and I'm like, why? And he's like, I don't know, I'm not a physicist. I'm like, that's great. This guy is just like, he's, but he can see the problem and he can, you know, put it together and be like, well, this, this probably makes sense. Yeah, I don't like, right here. And then, and then go and do it. Well, it's interesting we bring that up. So the lead guy, my friend, who really conceptualized and drove, you know, the launch project,

now what he's doing in his spare time, it's him and an engineer, like an actual, like, no-hit, highly talented world-class automotive engineer, are building a hypercar. Like, how do we build something that goes faster than any of the Kennedy's or, you know, the real Gucci shit that portioned Ferrari? put out for the F1 circuit, like, how do we build that level of a high performance machine, but make it completely street legal and scalable? And it's like it's an intellectual curiosity product that he's put a lot of money into because he's been very blessed in his life as far as, you know, having investments in the kind of work that's allowed him to make a lot of money, but just deploy it after his own

pursuit of solving big problems. And so I was, I was badgering about it. I'm like, how the fuck are you getting a car that gets off the line that fast at the same level of speed as these new all-electric, you know, hypercars that are coming out and, and have it not break, have it only be able to run 50 miles because you're draining way too much of the power, you know, the power pack to launch. And, you know, he's like, well, we're doing this and this and this and this. And to him, it seems so simple, but to an average person, be like, how did you even conceptualize that? But he's, he's one of those guys. He's just a high,

like Chase. He's a high appetite for risk and a very bright guy. and and a but but above all intellectually curious like no preconceptions of what the problem is no no going well like it's a silicon valley problem i'll return to that in a minute and i will get back to the battle of mandat by the way and and i should warn you we've we've crossed time threshold are are we okay yeah we're good because it took me like 40 minutes to get my shit together here i'm talking about technology i couldn't make my webcam work for 30 minutes so um it's true we were supposed to start And it was like half an hour in. I'm like, we go in here.

We had to switch platforms. We had to do a whole bunch of things. We're too funny. Anyways, carry on. I was working yesterday, like all day on multiple video conferencing platforms. So anyway, actually four different platforms yesterday. I had Zoom teams, Google Me, and then one I wasn't really familiar with. It's kind of like Stream Yard or Riverside FM or one of those where it's like a hosted platform.

Yes, yes, yeah, for sure. Yeah, the camera worked on all of them. And just today, it was just like, yeah, go fuck yourself. You're not talking to Sean today. Yeah, the Chinese spyware probably on the computer. Probably, probably. But at any rate, but that capacity that guys like Chase have, like my friend has, of coming at a problem from a direction of I have no preconceived notions,

I'm not going to look at what has been done and use that as a blueprint or a foundation to build from. I'm going to look at that and attack it from the first principle. this problem of like, what are they doing wrong that's limiting them today? Like, what did they bake into the foundations of their design and their model of approaching the problem that we can reconceptualize differently? And that's where Chase and now Ram, you know, Stalantis, have landed on this concept of a hybrid power train where the engine is not driving the wheels. And the reason for that is that the power that an engine puts out is not the same power that gets to the wheels. you have a 400 horsepower, you know, V8 hemi power plant in a current RAM, it puts out 398

horsepower stock, or if you have like my RAM has it, it's got a like a mild hybrid, you know, power train where it just basically uses a very small power pact to help you get a little more power at launch. You know, taking that and going, it's because there's so many mechanical things working together to make an engine, like the power that an engine puts out, convert it into actual energy at the wheels. You have a lot of mechanical, physical, metal moving parts where energy is lost in that transition and that sequence of things that energy has to move through from creation in the engine to the wheels.

And the more efficient way is this hybrid power train where the engine is still present, it still burns fuel because it's most mechanically efficient thing is the conversion of fossil fuel to raw energy. Engines are really good at that. Where cars are not efficient, is it getting 100% or as close to 100% as possible the energy created in the engine in the power plant to the wheels on the ground? And then being able to break the laws of physics to move a large thing through time and space. The more efficient way is brushless motors and a lot of these new concepts that we have of putting the motors actually at, wheel because the more efficient way you shorten you shorten the path from final energy source to the wheel and it because it's more physically you know you know laws of physics or such that

it's more efficient to move the energy through as raw energy to the motor and have the have the physical things that actually drive it be closer together that so you use the power plant to do what it does best, you transmit the energy created through the more efficient power transmission medium, and then where your most loss of energy efficiency, you move the problem set closer to where the problem actually is, which is where the tire literally meets the road. And so you're solving for the problems in a different sequence and getting a much more efficient power train as a result. But for 60 years, nobody looked at that, you know, the problem. From that way, they said, well, how do we make the axles more efficient and the

transmission's more efficient? How do we, you know, increase the compression at the time of combustion to produce more power from the same power plant? Ford went the direction of like smaller engines, but using turbos, you know, that's their eco-boose system. I had that on my other truck on my F-150. And it's like, yeah, but those were all like iterative. They were chipping away at the same problem set and advancing technology in that direction, but they never solved for the fundamental problem. How do you make it just more efficient to generate power and put it to the ground? So an automotive engineer is not going to be able to do that because they're trained to think a certain way. Their mental model works a certain way,

and unless they deliberately step outside that and go around that problem, like the obstacle is the way, right? Like that's a stoic concept. If you treat the obstacle as the way and you say, I'm just going to bull head through it, that's not the right way. It's how do you, how does the innate characteristics of the obstacle then define a different approach to solving the objective. And that's what Chase has done. That's what my friend's doing with his supercar. That's what, you know, Stalannis is doing now with the new RAM hybrid concept. And that type of innovative and, you know, thinking doesn't happen when everything is easy. It doesn't happen when everything is simple. It doesn't happen when the cost of being wrong are so low because fuels a buck 50 a gallon.

But suddenly when it's three bucks a gallon, $4 a gallon, $5 a gallon for a gallon of diesel, a power plant in a truck or in a heavy vehicle like Chase is attacking it at the heavy duty platform level, that level of innovation and adaptation is suddenly not crazy or niche or garage tinkering. Now it's evolutionary because the requirement has now met the right man, the right moment, the right mental model has now met the right opportunity in the way. the requirement for that thing to exist. So yeah, have I been a decade ahead of some of my concepts?

This whole thing here, you can't really see it from that. But like the little flag that's at the top of the bridge is a flag, you know, the same guy that designed that picture is a very talented graphic design guy. He's on Twitter at Uda Wiki. That same very talented graphic design guy, you know, I was telling him about my concept, you know, for the American East India company. And that's a very challenging framework, right? Because the East India Company did some really shady shit in the name of colonialism

and left a lot of scars on, you know, in various cultures around the world because they went about things the wrong way. But there were things about what the East India Company did that are relevant, useful, and even evolutionary because we've gone backwards in some ways. In the age of, you know, we went from the age of sale to steam engines, to nuclear power plants on ships and fuel oil boilers. and things like that. But we went backwards in the way

because it was so infinitely cheap to produce these platforms this way as these container ships. And so what I'm doing with the American East India Company framework is taking the components of what the East India Company and the Dutch VOC did and some of these other colonialist models and ripping them out of those domains and going, this thing is useful here. Okay, discard that, discard that, discard that.

Okay, this thing. is useful. I'm going to take that. So you take the best of what works because it's more in alignment with human nature and fundamental principles of economics and capitalism and going, how do we then blend these things together in a new model and a new conception of trade, security, data, economics, and create something value added for the individual. And that's where the battle Amanda thing comes in. It's that same mental model of like the problem is not the problem. The problem is how you

think about what the problem is. And then you move forward from that. And then that's where you start pulling in the pieces of what worked and didn't work in the past. And from what you know in your body of knowledge. And that's for the Babelamandum thing. You know, it's on October 8th, October 7th was when, you know,

Hamas yet again broke bad and and did did the kinds of things that people should literally get their heads cut off for. And horrific, horrible, absolutely satanically evil things. That was October 7. And while everybody's still in the fog of war of like, what does this all mean in the horror that was coming out on social media of some of the images, I was already looking at it from a game theory perspective of like,

okay, the human side of me, I'm going to set the relatively limited capacity I have for compassion and empathy aside. And I'm not going to let that cloud the problem. what's actually happening here? And so even on October 8th, I was talking publicly and I was laying markers down on purpose because I thought I was right, and I am right, that this is just the first opening salvo in a much larger play and realignment of an anti-Israel, an anti-Western faction operationalizing a much larger plan.

This is the first shot fired, but it's not the last and it's not the problem. the problem is why did they choose that moment, that vector, that venue, and that method to attack in that way? What are then the predictable knock-on, adjacent, follow-on types of things that happen that spin out and forward from that into the future? And is it predictable enough that it's possible to plan that with some degree of precision? The answer is absolutely yes. So it was like, this is, you know, disruption in the MET is first. U.S. Navy assets will move in to do. defend our allies and to stabilize the region. And then you're going to start to see disruptions

at these other locations. And that is going to be a fixing, what's called a fixing operation or people have probably heard of like terrain shaping like you shape the terrain. And so when we have a predictable playbook for defense, then certain other things follow on from that very logically in that playbook. And certainly China and Iran and Russia know our playbook very, very well, better than most of our obviously administration does. And you set these sequence ups and you just have to tip the first domino and then everything falls in cadence. So that's why I knew that day and said publicly that like you're going to see a scale and scope

and an expansion of this into other domains. And it's a fixing operation. It's designed to fix U.S. military assets and our relatively limited ability to sustain those assets in locations where it's hard to sustain them. It's easy to disrupt the supply chains. And then the big picture will take shape. And so I said, look, you're going to see, you're going to see things in the Red Sea. It could be in the Suez. It could be in the Babilmandeb. You're going to see things escalating in the Persian Gulf and in the Arabian Sea. And then you're going to start to see things escalating in Asia. And that timing was set up

coming into 24 because all of us in the defense world have drawn a big circle around 24 and said, look, if and when real hostilities erupt in the Pacific Rim, you know, with China as the belligerent, probably against Taiwan, but likely against Korea and Japan as well, possibly drawing in Vietnam and the Philippines, you know, major U.S. allies, major Western allies, if and when these things erupt, the ability of the Navy, which is our first line of defense against hostilities abroad, the ability of the Marine Corps, which rides on the Navy ships, to deliver decisive of force to the fight and sustain a slug fest of attrition, throwing missiles and planes and fuel at the problem, they need to deny the Navy's ability to respond in force with the overwhelming

mind of the U.S. Navy and stop it. They need us to be constrained, choke pointed, stuck in different theaters of conflict that we absolutely cannot get out of. And that's exactly what we've seen. So it was, again, very predictable to see that North Korea was going to start some shit, you know, and towards the end of last year and has again been firing artillery into, you know, Southern Korea territory because it's all terrain shaping. It's all about escalating on a predictable pattern, but what seems predictable, I guess, to me, but not to others. So the Red Sea problem is not solved by defending ships. It's not solved by, uh, more than, multilateral complex agreements of escorting vessels and we're going to shoot down what they throw at us.

Everything in the Babelmand is about serving two functions. It's about A, actually causing disruption, requires us to have naval assets there perpetually to defend the ships. And B, it's a probing operation. It's a real world test environment for how does the U.S. Navy and Air Force primarily deliver defensive force against different types of platforms? And so I was even saying weeks ago, we haven't seen the full playbook open up yet. We haven't even seen coordinated attacks of different platforms. Guess what happened two days ago? Actually, it was just yesterday.

Yeah, it was just yesterday. Sentcom was like 18 different types, you know, 18 missiles of different classes, UAVs, boats on water, all moving to attack an objective. We've gone from like random pot shots of, you know, unguided missiles and rockets to then ballistic missiles. then to drones, then to different types of drones, then to drones and boats on the water working in tandem, and then all three coming. And the whole playbook still hasn't opened up. But the sequencing has been very predictable of what, if and when the next escalation happens, what's it going to be? Because they're testing, and there's Chinese and Iranian ships literally sitting there in the middle of all of this, not stopping.

They're watching. They're observing. How does the Carney? How does the Mason? How did the British, you know, type 46 ships? How do all these frigates and destroyers and carriers working in sequence to defend these vessels? What are they doing to actually defend against different types of threats and different scenarios? And they're just watching and they're observing and they're learning when the data set gets big enough

if they think they being trying to particularly have a deep enough understanding of how we will respond to threat across the whole spectrum, from not just like putting missiles or guns into the fight to shoot drones down or missiles down, but how does the U.S. respond economically? How do we respond politically? What allies do we bring into the fight? Who actually stands with us in a conflict and a very critical choke point of the global trade? And that informs what China is going to do to us. We're going to see mists like, you know, cruise missiles. We are going to see unguided, low observable platforms. We're going to see underwater submersibles. We're going to see suicide boats that remotely operated, right? We're going to see potentially attacks from space or from very, very, very high up, or maybe

the average person doesn't know there's weapon platforms. We're going to see all these things layered in in different ways that are designed to defeat or overwhelm our ability to respond to force because they're now testing those exact capabilities through Iranian and Russian proxies in Ukraine and in the Middle East, they're testing our ability to respond to them. How do we do so? We don't solve for the problem by shooting the drones down. We don't solve for it by whatever. We solve for it by asymmetric means. Asymmetric and absolutely overwhelming use of force where we deny their ability to ever watch a platform and gather that data intelligence. And but this administration in particular is very, very uncomfortable with playing in the

black. And so they're, but they're walking into the hands. of China in this case of like, they're also learning what we're not willing to do. And that's where they'll take the fight to that terrain where the only option left to us is the thing we're not willing to do or the uncomfortable thing. And they're going to force us into that choice of are we going to do certain things that are not okay or that we're not comfortable with or not in our playbook and adapt and respond to the threat to defeat it. Or are we going to allow ourselves to get chipped away and pot-shot at to death and eventually overwhelmed with saturation strikes or kamikaze drones moving in a swarm of 1,000 that were launched from a container on shore,

you know, 10 miles away from a ship, like, are we going to do what it takes to actually stop that, or are we just going to try to keep fighting the way we all has have? That's where the Babo Mandum thing comes together. It's we're solving for the wrong problem. We're solving for the kinetic platforms in flight. We're not solving for what actually takes to deny the ability and break the supply chains, break the ability to launch those platforms, and do it in a way that, that communicates to China and Russia and other belligerents that we're no longer playing the game

by the rules you've built the rules to, you know, on. We're playing a different game. You don't move the goalposts. You move the entire state of play and field of play. And that's the dirty tricks playbook. That's I suggested this idea. It's never going to happen. God help me if it does that I talked about it publicly.

but I actually suggested an idea early on. We need to float a container ship full of explosives right into a port and fire bomb the fuck out of a port in Yemen. And accept that there's going to be civilian casualties, but we're also going to deny a massive base of operations and do so via an asymmetric means that now all of a sudden, holy shit, the Americans are willing to blow up a $200 million ship by loading this thing up with a massive payload

and literally destroying an entire port. that's asymmetric. It's not uncommon. Fireboats have been used for, you know, shit. The Greeks were thrown at each other 15,000 years ago, you know, and the various conflicts in the Aegean and the Med. But, you know, so that's an old concept, but it's asymmetric in the sense of it's a thing they didn't think we would ever do to deny them the ability to attack.

And that's literally kidnapping an engineer from you know, Germany that built the intellectual property that drives the, the path finding and guidance system on the rocket, whatever it may be, and getting those secrets and then beginning to unravel the problem set at its root, rather than just allowing ourselves to constantly respond to provocations and give away data and intelligence on how we do it.

There was a lot there. When you talk about attacking, the ability to launch. Would that not be considered an act of war? Are we already in that? Yeah, it's already an active war. That's the challenge too. We really undermine our ability to fight

in the gray zone or in the black by launching a 20-year-long conflict in multiple theaters that cost thousands and thousands of lives. more innocent lives above and beyond the men and women in uniform of the different countries that were involved. And we did it all without ever declaring an act of war as an authorization for the use of military force on a recurring basis. And then when we wanted to rendition someone, which is just a word for a violent kidnapping and disappearance of that individual to torture information out of them or get information from them, you know, we did all of these things

without following the proper process and protocols. And so because now the world has gotten wise to that, we've also denied our ability constitutionally to respond to certain things as a body politic and a unity of spirit of like, okay, we agree this is an act of war. It's undeclared. Like some formal body of a nation didn't say, well, we're going to war against the United States.

And we declare an act of war and that all the gloves are off. And now it's just, you know, slug it out and see who. standing at the end of 12 rounds. Like that was the old way. The new way is proxies, non-nation state actors, commercial platforms, you know, like Russia's losing tanks left and right in Ukraine because some guy figured out how to hotwire a quadcopter to carry a grenade and just drop it right in the hatch on top of a tank, right? They didn't have to blow the tank up.

They just had to put a grenade in there and kill everybody inside and destroy the electrical guts of it. So that evolution of swarm warfare of everything as a weapon plays against the way we are legally constructed of how we fight and conceptualize warfare to begin with. And so it's entered a domain that we're not constitutionally or legally equipped for in the West. And so the question is, do we adapt and respond or do we do what we've done for the last 20 plus years in the global war on terror of these just like little. iterative hidey hole solutions of like unrestricted warfare with like launching you know CIA operating drones over Yemen and like launching air strikes with reapers and predators uh in into hootie you know encampments which we were doing like a decade ago and like are we going to

continue doing that or are we going to actually take the gloves off and go you absolutely fuck with the wrong group of people the west is now going to fight on a completely different terrain than you expected and we are going to deny and degrade your ability to ever even attack us again. And we're going to do it in ways that are unconventional and dangerous to civilian populations at times, but you raise the stakes to that level, not us. Do you think there's any future here in the coming years where we don't get to that level? I think we're already at that tipping point. And I furthermore think that if nations, states of the West are not willing to respond to those provocations and to move the fight

onto an uglier, more uncomfortable terrain, but one that would be maximally effective, then I think you are going to see non-nation state actors rise in response to the non-nation threat, and you're going to see a level of high intensity, completely unsanctioned conflict between entities that are proxies of their nations or completely nationless in that they see themselves as a nation state, if you will, under their own because they have the ability to deliver force. It's going to get very hazy and very gray in the coming years if the current state of play doesn't change at the nation state level. We are in, you know, Sean McFaite wrote a book and, you know, it's called the, I think it's called the age of durable disorder,

which is a great term for basically the collapse of this nation state, Westphalian era that we've had since the 1400s. And now it's just tribe on tribe, conflict on conflict, and everything is a weapon. That's a bad rule to live in. That's the world we rose out of to create civilizations. But we are retreating very quickly to that and the center cannot hold. I look at Canada. I'm just going to pick on Canada for a second here.

and I go, I don't know what our military looks like anymore, but I know we put tampons in the men's bathroom. And I hear you talking about fighting in the gray zone and doing things unconventionally, and I'm like, I don't know, from a Canadian standpoint, I don't know what we can offer. Has anybody ever tried to build a cavalry where moose, are the conveyances?

You ever seen one of those things run? Holy crap. I tell you what, seeing a moose, out in the wild. What would absolutely floors me is how big they are and how quiet they are when they run. They aren't like this being, you think through this lumbering thing and bumping into trees and rip them. They glide.

Yeah. They're with their big giant antlers that. Yes. Think about it. It's a wild. It's running 40 miles an hour and you can barely hear it. And you can barely hear it. And I was in younger days, a tree planet out in Ontario.

So we're in the. middle of nowhere planting trees and if i hadn't to pick my head up it would have ran right by me probably about i don't know 40 yards off through the bush and i wouldn't hurt it the only reason i heard it if i'm being truthful is because it had a calf and the calf was bawling for it to slow down that that that's why i heard it i picked on holy crap that thing is moving and you can't hear it and i'm in the middle of nowhere yeah they're not they're not like uh black bears like lumbering around with their paws and the leaves and whatever i mean that their hooves are not that big relative to size of the animal and they land with such force that it just,

if you can pick them up and put them down, and they're very, very good at, very good at Elkhart 2, by the way. I'm very good at pathfinding on the ground to avoid, you know, to avoid noise disturbance and things. Yeah. So at that speed, at that size, that animal is still. The Canadian military shows up to a drone fight on Mooseback, you know? but it's like let's go you can't hear us you can't hear us i i don't know why canada has not

brought moose mountain cavalry to the fight uh in you know and adapted to that terrain right in the same way that uh you know camels have been a conveyance for a long long time and in the sands of the middle east and africa and it's like well camels can actually scoot they can go for a week without water and uh they can carry a very large amount of weight on them uh for you know That's a very observant. Someone here is going, that's not a bad idea, you know, let's get, let's get the bullwinkle. The next fucking blackwater. You, uh, you think the United States is ready for that? Like, do you think there's still that? I mean, obviously they're a giant, but you just look at the, or is it just the leadership at the top that's like, if it gets out of the way, it's still there?

I think, yeah. I think that. And I'm really blessed and privileged, you know, a lot of men and women who are like just generally speaking smarter, more connected, equal appetite to risk, but also better human beings. Like, I'm not that great of a human being. Like, I'm pretty self-aware about that. And I've, you know, to some extent, made peace with what I have to and in other ways, really work hard and continue to on changing things about it. But I kind of have a sociopathic view of the world in some ways.

and that's just by my orientation and upbringing. And not to say that's a bad thing, but if you're like an unself-aware sociopath is a very, is a dangerous monster. But like Jordan Peterson, you talked about him earlier, right? And in a lot of ways, one of the intellectual treasures of Canada,

particularly in the current paradigm. But Jordan Peterson has a great soundbite about you shouldn't, you shouldn't train boys. to be empathetic you shouldn't train them that their first principle is nonviolence i'm paraphrasing of course he says it a lot more eloquently um you should be a monster yeah and then learn to control that and the good thing about the u.s and canada and and still in the ukk australia i don't know about new zealand the hobbits are hopelessly lost in some ways but new zealand has as part of it's just absolutely you know, the epigenesis of its cultural heritage includes the Maori,

who are as warlike and brave and brilliant of a war fighting culture as there is. And the national rugby, the number one rugby team in the world, the national treasure in New Zealand, the all blacks, do a haka before every single match in celebration of the Maori culture. And it's a statement of purpose. It's a statement of intent. It's a statement of. What you're saying is, is they could tap into that anytime they want, and that is still very evidently there.

Not anytime they want, but when push comes to shove, when push comes to shove. You just think about it. You just think about it. Like, if we went to Chuck Prodnick, a military guy who's on there quite a bit, he talks a lot about, you know, like, if we're going to go to war, like right now, you think of like Russia and all these different places. Like, they're, they're veterans of war at this point. They've been in war for a long time. They figured out kinks. They're, you know, and on and on and on it goes.

Us Canadians are sitting here worrying about putting tampons in the men's bathroom, right? Like that's where we're at. But in fairness, you give us a few years to get back in the thick of things. The one thing about Canadians, you know, if you look at any of the world wars, we've been no slouches. We've pulled more than our fair share at the size of population we have and everything else. And that's, you know, that's our heritage. That's where we come from.

As bloody and terrible as deed. was in World War II. And as much resources as all the Allied armies threw into the fight, I don't think we get off the beach that day without the Canadians. Because there was a contingent of Canadian mainline in special forces, you know, proto-special forces units that were given the objective of taking one of the most difficult, heavily entrenched, lethal parts of the entire defensive line of the Nazis in France over the beaches that day, and they fucking did it. And they did it. And they took heavy casualties for that. And that is still who the Canadians are. Right. Like the, you know, the Americans, we've adapted a lot of special forces concepts. And we do

small team, you know, black ops and special operations capabilities as good as anybody. but we do it in a certain way. And, you know, I've used this example before. I think it's really relevant. You know, we all know what like a feral pig looks like, you know, like down in Arkansas or Texas or whatever. And like they're, they've got this like long, wiry, thick coat of hair on them. It's not fur, it's hair, which I've had to correct my kids like 10 times.

They're like, why does the pig have fur? I'm like, it's hair. There's difference. You know, baby. You know, it's, you know, it's, you know, there are these like just, mean, nasty, tough foraging creatures with thick hides and thick coats of hair on them and they've got tusks and they look nothing like bathe the pig, you know, with its little unshaven looking body and its little curly tail, well, if it's not docked, and it's little floppy ears and

whatever. But if you take a fully domesticated pig, and we've seen this happen, like we've observe this phenomenon and they get loose and they go feral, it's not a long period of time before they start to in real time revert back to their genetic code that they were, they were bred out of, we thought, and they start to grow longer teeth. They grow tusks. They start to grow hair. They get bigger, right? They get bigger, but they get leaner because they're more active. They're not like in a little repent. And they become over some period of time if they survive, they breed and then their piglets are grown just like them. And then it's only a generation or two, which in pig life is just a couple of years. It's only a generation or two before that like that specially genetically modified

pig is fully reverted to its original completely feral dangerous state. And I think largely speaking, humans are that way because trauma, pain, trial, killer be killed. killed when it comes, like when it really gets down to the marrow, people become who they are fundamentally meant to be only in the most extreme circumstances. And so that's the domain I look at when people are like, oh, Canada is soft, the U.S. is soft, U.S. is soft, Australia, New Zealand, like Akos, you know, the legacy Commonwealth countries, they're soft. We're soft today because we're comfortable. But what happens if you take a Canadian man or woman, an American man or woman, And you throw them into an extreme environment, a killer be killed.

And I've said this time and again, and boy, it's a really uncomfortable concept to say that white people of the Western cultural tradition are better at killing and genocide than any cultures that have ever walked to the face of the earth. And that's not necessarily a good thing, but we are adept at making war when war is the only option on the table. And that's part of who we are. And I look at Canada, I look at it's still a country that it's national herald sport is a sport where literally you're on the most extreme environment, which is ice to do anything athletically. It's a sport where you're firing a several ounce very hard, potentially deadly, as has happened a few times, piece of rubber.

you've got a giant stick in your hands. You're able to fire this projectile 100 miles an hour with big strong guys. And oh, by the way, they're skating on razor blades in order to move most effectively. And then when all else fails and it gets down to it, it's man to man. We're dropping the gloves and we're absolutely going to duke it out on this very dangerous surface on top of razor blades. And we're just going to throw hands until it gets broken. broken up. And by the way, the rest are going to wait like a minute and a half to break it up until somebody hits the ice, right? Because people want their fight. Like, that's still who Canada is.

It's still a frontier country. It's lumberjacks. It's guys working the oil rigs. It's people that have adapted to a more extreme climate and way of living. And yes, the cultural and political centers of the country, British Columbia and, you know, Ottawa and Toronto, like, yeah, they're They're softer than 10 fly. But the average Canadian is not. The average Canadian is still a trucker. There's still a logger. Maybe they have a white collar job,

but that like that gut level of its killer be killed, watch what happens. Watch what happens if we're drawn into the type of conflict where that cultural character has to emerge again. Watch what happens when the, you know, Roberts Rangers, like the predecessors of what today are the Army Rangers. These guys dressed like Indians. They lived in the woods off the land.

They lived off literally what they could, the small amount they could carry on their back. And they didn't carry much. They carried a rifle and ammunition and a basic amount of supplies because their entire thing was move fast, hit hard, and disappear. And then show up an attack a day later after what should be a four days march and attack somewhere else. When you look at like, that's, that's,

that's who canada is and by the way canada is the only nation ever successfully invade washington dc and burn the seed of the nation to the ground like people like oh that was the brits now yeah there was a reason that it was like the canadians that led the assault on the white house and burn that mother than the ground and it's like that's still who the canadians are too and you know i've obviously long since given up that grudge that i have against our you know america's top hat but you know the but but that's a twin spirit to what we have in america like we're still the country that 3% of the population rose up and threw off the chains of this massive, you know, the biggest empire that to that point had occupied the earth because of its naval capabilities,

right, as far as like distribution of the empire to the frontiers. Like we are frontier people in our hearts. The Australians live in literally an environment where you can walk down the street in any city and like 50 things can kill you that are not manmade. Like they're like we are cultures that that have adapted in a modern world and gotten soft. But somewhere inside of us is still that feral wolf, that domesticated dog that gets feral and becomes a wolf within a generation, that pig that becomes a violent 400 pound killing machine.

Right? Like that's still who we are too. We're still animals and so. So if you're the Chinese or whoever, it doesn't matter, then you do what you've been doing, right? Lay out on the domain where we are soft in. Yeah. And you keep us soft. You just keep us, you know, unengaged, if you will. Play the 100-year-long game. I'm betting that enough of those monsters that Jordan Peterson

talks about are still inside us where we are evolved, adapted, the rough edges or maybe sanded off a little bit. But when it really gets down to the marrow, it's time to throw hands on top of ice, I still bet on the Western man. Because we are fundamentally in our hearts and in our spirits, we are ungovernable, unrestrained, mouth-contents that the only way we could ever keep from killing each other is to create a country and a political framework that incentivizes us not to, economically and politically,

to rise up out of tribalism and all of that. But in our hearts, we are still sons and daughters of the frontier, sons and daughters of explorers, the expeditionary forces, the people that go to the edges of the earth and absolutely create massive amounts of mayhem and tilt the balance of power, that's still who we are. And the last thing China wants, they want an expeditionary naval campaign where we're throwing planes and missiles at the problem set, and they're throwing them back, like, they beat us 100% on that terrain. they beat us by sucking us into their killbox and overwhelming us because that's where we've gone soft. Where they lose is the day we turn small teams of a thousand mixed forces of Akos and

Canadians loose inside China coming across the border from Turkmenistan, finding our way through Russia because we're all white people, right? It's a little easier for us to get through Russia and we'll send the Canadians to Russia. They're adapted to the cold. But we look at these concepts, though, and we go, China's least vulnerable to the east. So what our naval forces need to be doing is holding the line there long enough for us to get guys in through India and Myanmar, Burma, to use the Commonwealth term, Turkmenistan, Russia, you ingress from all these unexpected angles. and four guys start blowing dams up and denying China's ability to generate 40% of its power,

which is hydroelectric. And you starve them of their crops. Don't you look at bricks and go, why would India let you through? Why would Russia let you go? I mean, at this point, Russia cannot be a friend of the United States. Like, I mean, the United States has tried pulling them into an all-out war with NATO now. How many times?

Absolutely. Bricks will never. ever work as any sort of coherent, multi-plural, global force, right? Because at the end of the day, economic force is backed by actual force. That's why we put so much money into our Navy. It's why it's such an absolutely proud and amazing institution of the United States. It's why Britain, the Dutch, the French, the Italians, or the Romans at various times came to dominate the entire known world in one way or another, directly or adjacent, was because they were able to project force and economic force on water and they leveraged power at the frontier on the water. And so

that's still our cultural heritage in that regard too, but China knows that and they solve for that problem side. We can build more ships than you. We can hollow out your industrial base and all of that. But the weak link in bricks is India, because India, particularly now under Modi and and under the fully mature cultural independence that they have, they knowingly do business with Iran. They knowingly do business with Russia. And they're not going to walk away from those unless they have a reason to. But the United States certainly isn't going to be able to deny India that.

Brazil has never been any sort of military force, but they're so resource-rich and geostrategically positioned that they will always play a power broker role. South Africa somewhat has to some extent what Brazil has, but South Africa is such a cluster fuck. It's not really an effective member of that coalition. So you're really left with China's ability to hold the center economically and through threats of force or by co-opting allies like Russia. But it would not be a big deal if we change our framework to be able to pull Russia away from China and to dissolve those ties and leave China alone on the island. But we don't think about the problem by say, how do we attack breaks and undermine them by getting India to not cooperate?

You attack it by denying the individual actor's abilities to function while they are part of that coalition. So you back economic force with actual use of force if necessary. You defend the global commons and you basically say you play by the rules all of us are playing by or things get nasty for you in a hurry and in a way you are not expecting. when that threat legitimately gets on the table, that's when you start to see the paradigm shift because communism only understands power and subjugation. And if you cannot subjugate them, then you have to make them operate in a way

that they're denied their own base of power while they understand that the dynamic has shifted against them and they're back to the drawing. But if we're not willing to do those things, if we're not willing to fight asymmetrically and nasty and fight the way Cecil Rhodes fought and fight the way, you know, with that spirit of, you know,

St. Exupri and all these other guys like these guys that conceived, they built the world by conceiving it differently and taking enormous risks and paid off because they believed in what they were doing. If we can't tap into that again, we're host. But I believe when push comes to shove, we will still be that. And we still have that in us.

That's why I will not ever bet on. communism because it seeks to restrain and control and destroy the most fundamental aspects of what it means to be a human. And for all of our problems in the West, our tampons and men's bathroom dispensers and, you know, wokeism bullshit and Pentagon and everything else. Like for all of that, it still hasn't changed enough of us that we don't still have that at enough scale to win any sort of war once it gets down to that. Man, this has been, it's been an interesting a go here, you know, from trying to get you on to camera malfunctions to this, to that, to everything, to keeping you an hour past where we said we were going to stop.

Appreciate you hopping on and doing this, Ross. It's always an interesting chat when you sit down with me. And, well, we'll see if you can't do it in person. Hey? Most of what people ask out of me, hey? Most of what people ask out of me is like, you know, what, you know, like what's going on in Babel Amanda, but then it's like they just want to focus tightly on that problem. and it's like, you know, so much of how I look at the world is informed by like the type of stuff you and I get to talk about, which is why it's way more interesting.

Well, I just give you the platform to talk and I get to, you know, I didn't think I was going to get into UFOs today, but geez, you know, now you got me thinking on a whole bunch of different things and I got to go back and listen to us and be like, the next time we talk, I'm going to ask them these questions about, you know, weaponary platforms and space. I'm like, I need to talk about that, but I'm not going to get into it right now because I'm going to have you here. another hour. Either way, I appreciate you coming on and doing this. And we'll make sure we do it in person, hopefully the next time. Hopefully we get to sit and chat. That would be, I don't know, it's always better in person. It is. It is. It's not, I'll look forward to that. So whether we get to do it again virtually or hopefully in person, yeah, man, I'm grateful that, you know, today happened to be today. I think it was like the 17th reschedule or something in two weeks, but it feels like it. And then the camera malfunctioned. So I'm really glad that we got to

talk. So thank you, Sean. And thank you to the listeners for putting up with me rambling for two hours.