Shaun Newman Podcast - #771 - Ross Kennedy

Episode Date: January 1, 2025

Ross Kennedy is a logistics & supply chain consultant who is the founder of Fortis Analysis. We discuss the drones over New Jersey, memetic warfare, the war in Ukraine and Pierre Poilievre, a threat to the deep state? Cornerstone Forum ‘25 https://www.showpass.com/cornerstone25/ Clothing Link: ⁠⁠⁠https://snp-8.creator-spring.com/listing/the-mashup-collection⁠⁠ Text Shaun 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast E-transfer here: [e-mail] Silver Gold Bull Links: Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/ Email: [e-mail] Text Grahame: [phone]

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Oh, my goodness. People should be smiling. I'm smiling on this side. All right, on to the tail of the day. He is a logistics and supply chain consultant who is the founder of Fortis analysis. I'm talking about Ross Kennedy. So buckle up. Here we go.

Welcome to the Sean Numa podcast. I'm joined by Ross Kennedy. Ross, thanks for hopping back on. Good to be back. It's one of my absolute favorite things to do. Well, it's funny. I was like, when was the last time Ross was on, folks? It was the beginning of this year, right?

So it's been quick 12 months, or maybe a long 12 months. depending on where you sit. We were just chatting about, you know, like the Canadian tire fire that the Liberal Party is, but you were talking about Pollya and his speech from a couple days ago. What, I'm just curious, because here's an American talking about it and his views on a maybe, I think soon to be, but I could be wrong, Prime Minister of Canada. You were mentioning Bucalay and Malay, and I'm like, well, I got a lot of time for those two guys. you put him in the same category.

I do. It's the best allies that America can have, so speaking from my perspective, the best allies that America can have are ones who put the needs of their own people first, not some megalithic global supra state, you know, where we talk about the international community, international rule of law, international, international, international, international, because when you anchor your values and beliefs as a country, and we must weigh the needs of our people against the needs of the global network

that countries inhabit, it, you know, it abrogates, it gives up the rights of the people to choose for themselves what the path of their country is. And people who freely choose to do a thing, They're not coerced into it. They're not manipulated into it. They're certainly not threatened into it, which has really become a hallmark of the Trudeau regime. You know, I don't know, maybe it's genetic,

but it feels almost like some of the stuff that Castro did in Cuba. But the, to hear someone speak so clearly about, we must put our people first. We must think about the single mom has worked three jobs and whose car was just taken from her or, you know, the father who, you know, has a, has a family and the system has failed for him to take the responsibility and say, we as the leaders of this country have failed to protect our people and to preserve their rights and to

build a better life for them. That is a good indicator to me because that's a leader who's anchoring his perspective, as Miele did in Argentina. Yeah, it was theatrical. and there was a lot of antics and stuff, but that's just kind of his style, right? And then you contrast that with what Bucali has done in El Salvador, you know, and by no means am I imputing my own moral or ethical code onto what any other leader does of another country to the extent that it doesn't harm Americans, because that should be for the people of that country to decide for themselves. But you look at what Buckele did. Yeah, it's a draconian way of going about things, but is Buckele's methodology of making El Salvador safe any different really than what

the abuse of power that Trudeau has pushed onto, you know, the Cots 4 or so many other people in Canada who have been, you know, or the J6 people in the U.S., who have been abused and improperly jailed by a regime of power? If a regime of power, if these capabilities must be wielded, And that's an open debate. But if they must be wielded, I would at least for the people of these countries, rather see them be wielded for beneficent ends towards, you know, maximizing freedom, maximizing punishment and penalties for people who abuse the people and abuse the privilege of leadership of a country.

And that resonates to me. You know, a guy like, you know, and I'm going to say it wrong because I barely speak, American English correctly, but Poliard, you know, someone like him. Let's be clear, all of us butcher Pollyev's name. I'm like, I hear five Canadians say it. We might as just call them Pierre because they're, but you know, then in Canada, we think of a different pier that one that, anyways, doesn't matter. We all butcher Pollyev's last name. I'm probably saying it wrong. Carry on. Yeah, we'll call him P squared, right? So, but a guy who anchors his values not in how do I maximize trade or maximize reciprocity and getting along with the

international community and all of that. A guy who's anchoring his values and what's good for his country is actually going to be a better security partner. You know, the Canadian military is in shambles. That's putting it lightly. Yeah, it's it's a humiliation of hundreds of years of of the Marshall heritage that both of our countries, you know, derived from in the sense of pride and purpose and national defense that historically, you know, the American, the UK, the Canadian militaries have had. And so for a guy to say, we got to do right by our people, we have to do right by our country and we have to focus on maximizing freedom and prosperity, that's going to be a better trading partner, a better ally and be more anchored in the conventional Western values that our countries have long cooperated. on. And that to me is such a hopeful sign that we are seeing a revival in the Western Hemisphere to some extent of pro-liberty, of common sense regulation, to the extent regulations are common sense at all. And anchoring that view in, let's walk back towards what can we

not do that will maximize freedom versus where can we put a heavy hand on the scale. and really tread, you know, covertly and overtly into abuse of the people. It's, to me, as an American, it's a super positive development to see, you know, the Meles and the Bucaly's and the trumps of the world and now, you know, Poliath all emerging really as leaders in this hemisphere and thus onto the world stage. It's a very positive development. Yeah, it's crazy to me to think, you know, I just go back to like common sense is such a, I don't know, is it a right wing word? I don't know what it is anymore these days.

I think everything's right wing. That's right. But I mean, like all the things you said like, you know, like putting your country first shouldn't seem like such an insane idea. But in today's world, certainly in Canada, the amount of money we've sent elsewhere, it's pretty insane idea, right? And you just got to look at the crime rates across Canada, this catching reliance. police theory, the free drugs, the maid, the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And you're like, like, it just goes on and on and on. So to have, there's a lot of people, there's a lot of discussion around Piliyev and his ties to the global community. But the way he's talking right now is, well, it gives a guy hope because he's saying the right things, you know, and it'll be curious to see what happens here this coming year. because no matter what, an election, no matter if it's called in, you know, in the next couple months, or it goes right to the distance in October. We're getting a new prime prime minister. The polls are absolutely clear on that. You know, the one thing that's difference between us in the United States, you know, like Donald Trump or Kamala and it was like neck and neck, right? Like right now, the polls show like the liberal party is going to lose everything but like a handful of seats, like everything.

There's just, there's no way it's this is too big to rig. The only way you could do it is a world conflict and martial law. And then you'd have riots in the street, I think, because I think people are so pissed at the Liberal Party. I wanted to bring you on to talk about drones. The last time we chatted, which was the start of this year, I remember thinking when I walked out and I'm like, huh, that was interesting.

Because we were talking about, I believe, how you can take drones to make them look like flying objects. Or, I mean, obviously they're flying objects. I mean like UFOs. And you were talking about that. Like, you know, you had firsthand knowledge basically of how UFO sightings weren't exactly what they were cracked up to be. Then walk onto the stage all of these UFOs and flying objects over New Jersey.

And I'm like, where of Ross would come on? Because I'm like, this is, this seems like our conversation we had from January, if memory serves me, correct? Where we were talking directly about this. And I was like, sure, whatever. When you see everything going on in New Jersey, I don't know, where does your brain go? What can you walk me through? So without at the risk of implying more hidden knowledge or anything like that than I actually have, I do have a functional operational framework for understanding what's going on.

Similar instances. There are a whole lot of things that, you know, first you have to understand where a lot of, of the alarmism is rooted in right it's either rooted in sensationalism for social media and and influence and eyeballs and attention because that's mostly monetized particularly on X and you know people have kind of hacked the algorithm of how to maximize their profitability and so more attention from more blue checkmarked or verified accounts that are paying to be a part of the service the more money they're going to make and sensationalism whether it's social media or anywhere else sells it always has and and that has been really a key characteristic of mainstream mass media

which x is very much part of mass media if not mainstream arguably has become the mainstream in a lot of ways the but you know bernays talked about it uh you know sigmund Freud's nephew of sigmund freud i believe um you know and and you know bernays was a was a propaganda artist and media manipulation artists par excellence and so much of the deep states of to wage memetic warfare, propaganda in the modern age is still rooted in what Bernays was doing back in the early parts of the 20th century. And so you're seeing the very, very long or the fat tale of how attention drives profitability. That's number one. Number two is, is that most people don't know what they don't know. And going back to the Rumsfeld framework of you have no known,

you have known unknowns, you have unknown unknowns, the vast majority of people, when you're talking about very advanced science, which aviation as a general class or discipline of study and of work is, it's an entire discipline built around defying and breaking the laws of physics, fundamentally, right? Big heavy things that shouldn't be able to fly, things that shouldn't be able to be as maneuverable in a gravity environment like ours, all of that. we see the evidence of it every day right now some have forgotten those lessons like Boeing but at the end of the day putting a physical thing in the air and getting it to do things in time

and space and three dimensions is it it's incomprehensible to the mind 500 years ago and it you know the most advanced early things were you know hot air balloons because we figured out that some gases are lighter than air, and that if you heat them, we can create an upward lift effect to a certain, you know, to a certain degree. Flash forward to today, and there are most assuredly, propulsion systems, avionic systems for maneuverability, communication systems and sensor systems, all working together on, in some cases, platforms that are disclosed to the public and other cases platforms that aren't, because the characteristics of how a thing operates can teach an adversary how to defeat it, how to avoid detection, how to do whatever.

So as good as the sensors are, as good as all these things are, there's this recognition that we are still in a lot of ways, primitive minds playing with futuristic science fiction level technology. And so when you have a thing that can take off vertically, hover, it can move very, very quickly, But it's operating with, you know, federal, you know, U.S. Federal Aviation regulation, light schemes for anti-collision. You've got green lights. I believe it's on the right wing.

You've got red lights on the left wing. You've got white lights on the tail. And in a lot of these videos, you're seeing, you can see generally the physical profile of the thing you're looking at. It's either planes. It's V-Tol drones, vertical takeoff and landing drones, which, you know, tend to use, you know, rotors, you know, like a helicopter. It's very plain to someone like me who has experience operationally in the world with these platforms or with ones that are very similar.

But for me, these are known knowns, right, which does introduce other cognitive biases, you know, particularly like, oh, I know what that is. Maybe I don't, but I think I do. But for a lot of people, like, these are known unknowns or unknown unknowns. And so their cognitive bias is taken and they read into it what they want to. based on their motivation. If you want to believe that UFO is real, if you grew up in the 90s and you were a fan of molder and Scolion X-Files,

you're going to see that thing as this absurdly advanced type of technology. If you're manipulating it and propagating these things in a certain way, which it's all memetics, right, which is encoding of information within imagery or audio or within media, that, you know, memetics isn't understood discipline going back 50 years. You know, 1976 was the first time that word was used. I believe it was Dawkins who used it in a book. And not long after that, the CIA picked up, you know,

memetic warfare and memetic information operations as a discipline, a very small discipline, but one that has obviously grown. And so all of these things have kind of come together at this moment where pretty basic things that we have known for a long time exist and that most of us have seen with our own eyes, like drones that can hover, fly, move quickly, take off and land in the same spot, regular aircraft, et cetera. All of these things have come together to confuse people to play on their most biased opinions of what they want to see.

And it obscures it's a smokescreen for what's really going on. So if you understand that these capabilities exist, particularly if you've seen them operate with your own eyes or you know what they could have on them as far as sensor paylil which is just the term for the cameras, the things that are, you know, attenuated or designed to look for radio signals or to look for radiological signals, whatever it may be. I look at that and I go, what's on the loose that they're looking for or is this sort of a live training exercise to see how the appearance of these platforms in daytime, in nighttime, might be received and messaged in public? maybe unethical to say, well, we're starting a panic. We're doing these things, but there are certain precautions being taken place that these things are flying at night. They're not being launched from within population centers. They're being launched from further out, either on water

or on little fingers of land that the U.S. government controls. They're operating for a time, you know, 10, 20, 30 hours at a time, which is well within the operational envelope of a lot of the more advanced technologies that we do know about. And they're obviously up there. They're looking for something, right? They're moving in patterns and, and they're looking for something. So for me, the question is not, what are they, where they come from, is operating. That's kind of a solved problem. For me, it's did a thing get through the port in a container? Or did a bad thing get into the U.S. at one of the major, you know, three major airports that are in the region? You know, two of which comprise, you know, almost 15% of the air cargo that comes into the eastern seaboard of the U.S.,

you know, LaGuardia and JFK, and then you have the Port of Newark, which is a very busy airport as well. Did something get in and it got on the loose? Are they running a test? Where did we lose something? It would not be the first time the U.S. has lost radiological or nuclear material in transport. You know, it's not all that long ago. It's 2018 that material disappeared from one of our research labs, nuclear research labs in Idaho. So all of those things are possibilities. It's hard to say specifically.

Everybody thinks they've got an answer. But three weeks ago, it was, oh my God, there's UFOs. And the only other plausible alternative is that the Iranians have one of their two drone carriers parked in our EEZ and they're launching drones against the U.S. We've gone from that three weeks ago to now it's a lot more specific most people's assumptions is there's a thing out there we're trying to find it or we're testing our ability to find it and nobody's saying anything but they're being really specific about what things aren't this is not a department of defense drone okay well it's not a law enforcement drone it's not a whatever well there's your weasel words there's your hyper specific contextual language that by design the language the language the language

is not lying. They're not saying what it is. They're just specifying very narrowly what it's not because there's a whole other range of possibilities. But three weeks ago, people who thought it was a UAP or Iranian drones now broadly have the assumption that it's ours and that something's going on that's not being discussed. In just three weeks, they've gone from its ET or the bad guys to, no, it's us, but now there's another thing. And three weeks from now we'll probably know more as well. And that's the nature of vague, hard to understand things happening in the world to an average person where we are also in the lowest trust environment and modern memory of the average person believing what the media and the government say for good reason. It has been

five years straight of us being lied to about the efficacy and safety of MRNA vaccines. about the origins of COVID, of witnessing, you know, J6 in the U.S. and, you know, 21, you know, the trucker convoy challenges and can't, not challenges, the overt suppression of freedom of speech during COVID with the truckers in Canada. We now know, and generally the average person assumes that we are being lied to and that suppression is on the other side of knowledge. And that's the lowest, like a low trust information environment plus things that don't make sense or not known to the average person is really where you get this like crazy, wild toxic stew of actual misinformation, actual disinformation, and people simply not knowing what they

don't know. That's funny. I, I, um, I, I, I saw it. And I'm like, my, my brain is probably just conditioned. I don't know if this is good or bad folks. I saw it and I went, what a bunch of malarkey. And then I saw the Iranian stuff. I saw the UFO stuff.

And you know, you go down a couple of rabbit holes because you're just kind of curious what the videos look like and everything else. But at some point I'm like, this is totally the government. This is totally like everything you've just said is kind of where my brain went, right? I can go darker places, but like I don't think aliens. I certainly don't think the Iranians. I'm like, this all seems like it's canned from certain three-letter agencies.

That's what they're going to throw out there just to see how it sticks. with the with the population but the longer it goes the more conversations that start happening i think a lot of us over the course of everything you've just talked about over the last five years for most and then you can go back even further than that for more you're starting to see the the trend like the cycle right and and the cycle is like you just don't bite just wait and see what comes here over the next couple days and chances are more things are going to come out and you're going to be like oh okay let's move on right because one of the things you mentioned earlier the mass media instead of the mainstream media the mass media which x is certainly a part of which you know

like uh um different podcast hosts are certainly a part of now you think of joe rogan or tucker carlson and heck even sean ryan lately has been just banging with some some great content but this mass media thing is starting to be i feel like harnessed a bit more and through COVID it certainly was in an unfair way and you could see that play out right where they were silencing censoring removing anyone who talked about the vaccine or any of those type things but now this mass media is it's almost a new iteration

or maybe my eyes are wrong Ross. No it's there's an entire discipline in western military is called you know variously and sometimes it's segmented really you know along really niche boundaries but broadly speaking influence operations or information operations. You'll hear it usually abbreviated as I.O. That's its own discipline within, certainly within the United States, military, and intelligence communities.

And it is taught to special operations guys. Every one of them has at least an awareness and a contextual training in it at some basic level of how to detect and how to use information in the environment to use it. You'll sometimes use it heard called, you know, information shaping. But the recognition that the the sequencing, the specific data, all the timing, all of these little dials, right, can be turned and adjusted and modulated to essentially manipulate the perspective of outsiders who are not inside the operation, who are not inside the, the strategic effort or tactical level effort, whatever it may be. This has been known for a hundred years.

You know, trade craft is the court, like trade craft as a broad classification of intelligence activity means what are the things that an individual could be a case officer for the CIA. It could be a federal investigator, you know, within, you know, within the Canadian apparatus, you know, this has been a hallmark of Western, uh, strategy and tactics to shape and control the perspective of foreign or domestic populations and all of the rules that are out there about lying to the people go right out the window because it is very, very possible to control what a nation sees or perceives about a topic

simply by what information is allowed into the public domain and when and who's saying it. So that to me, as someone who probably has a better than average person awareness of how these things work, probably better than an average person use of the tools and capabilities to do this. Ironic that I'm saying these things on a well-received podcast that a lot of people will watch, that I'm overtly admitting that there's people in the world who do this for a living. And here I am sitting here talking about it as if I'm not one of them. So full disclosure, you know, it's something I'm pretty familiar with. So, but I do know how it works.

And I do see its fingerprints all over this like New Jersey situation. And like you said, when the New Jersey situation goes away, it's going to be something else. The UAP phenomenon, right now like U.S. Congress was, you know, holding testimony and hearings on this and even has like a special subcommittee that doesn't mean that anybody's actually trying to get at the truth it means they're shaping at minimum shaping the information environment building narratives using procedure and process like if something is a topic of study that has a special committee or subcommittee in the u.s congress that changes the level of disclosures and the tools to not disclose or to disclose, depending on who's in, you know,

who's in power and what their motives are, it changes how things work. But I will never, ever forget March of this year, I kind of go back through my phone, March of this year, I'm on a private jet, not mine, for the record, I'm on a private jet flying home from another country and you know we enter we enter the airspace the continental United States and so we're over you know the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Florida probably 100 nautical miles or so from you know from nearest land but we're inside what's called the Gulf testing range and the Gulf testing range is where maritime surface maritime surface and aviation platforms are tested usually at night, right?

Because a thing that you can plainly see is very different than I saw some lights, right? And everybody on the plane was asleep. It had been a super long day. And except for the pilots, thank God. And so I go up to get some coffee. It's like 10 o'clock at night. And these two pilots, both of whom, one of whom was a Marine Corps aviator and one of whom was a Air Force aviator, you know, combined 70 years flight experience between them, right?

Flying all sorts of different things. One of the guys actually had been a YouTube pilot for a while for the Air Force, which is really cool. So you're talking about a guy that's flying at 60, 70, 80,000 feet looking down at the earth effectively from low Earth orbit for all intents and purposes and flying at extremely high rates of speed. And so these are individuals that are pretty familiar with the aviation capabilities and they're both just staring slackjawed out the windscreen of the plane. And, you know, I didn't even notice that part. And I'm like, hey, guys, you know, I said, I got some coffee here in the galley. You guys want anything? And one of them just goes.

And I'm like, okay. And so I poke my head up in the cockpit and kind of squat down in between them. And I'm like, what are we looking at guys? And, you know, I look at their radar screen, their transponder screen that shows anything that's pinging in the environment, right? Other planes or whatever. And, you know, the screens to the scope's clear. And so I look out and I see what they're looking at. and it's two lights, right, moving at speeds.

And there was a dance clearly going on between them that would look just like if you watched the movie Top Gun, like dogfighting, right? Like they were maneuvering for position. They were changing altitude. They were, you know, move, but they were doing it at such a rate of speed and closing the gap to us and, you know, moving further away. and doing it at an elevation that it was pretty clearly not atmospheric refraction, pretty clearly not at that some points below us, right, below our visibility, which is actually in a plane kind of even with the horizon, but your eyes played tricks on you in the air. But I looked at this and I'm like, I'm seeing what most people would say, these are UAPs.

But then the context kicked in, right? Like learned experience, you know, and I oriented and I thought, okay, I know, I'm over there. the Gulf testing range. I know this is where all sorts of crazy shit happens, uh, what would appear to be crazy, which is just us testing things we don't yet want the public to know about, uh, which is why we do it at night again. And it's, you know, for me, it's settled into not this, oh my God, ET is here and they're, they're monitoring us or whatever, right? For me, it was like, oh, I'm getting to witness the, the dance of two things that in 30 years I'll know about probably, right, doing some things.

things that seems to defy the laws of physics. I got a little video of it on my phone and, and just kind of for memory's sake more than anything. But it was fascinating. It was fascinating to me. And I said to the pilots, you know, 70 years experience between them. I said,

guys, what do you reckon you're seeing here? And one of the guy goes, I don't effing now. And I said, okay, have you ever seen things move like this in time and space? They're like,

yeah, I mean, we've heard rumors of it and stuff. It's pretty cool to us to see, see it with our own eyes. And their cognition immediately had, you know, oriented around like not these are things that are a threat to us per se um but we're getting to see

something not a lot of people will which is the testing of you know a couple of things um you know that presumably are designed to to do physics defying you know information gathering in a foreign whatever it may be it was really neat but i can imagine for a lot of other people who don't really have any awareness let alone my very tiny partial slice of awareness of what's out there, it would have freaked them out. They would come back thinking they saw aliens. Yeah, they'd be like, I saw, I saw E.T.'s crafts. It's like, did you really?

Did you though? You know, it couldn't be any of these other things. You know, I think about, you know, the first time I ever saw a leader follower test of a manned aircraft, a fighter jet. And, you know, the Air Force calls it the loyal wingman program. And you see this just jet, you know, 1,000 feet up just streak by. And it's got this little blur of what looks like a basically a small plane next to it. And someone kind of gives me the elbow and goes, check that out.

And I'm like, that thing is not big enough for a dude. And they're like, there's nobody in it. It's autonomously following at a certain distance and at a certain, you know, distance behind and distance the outboard of the jet and it's designed essentially as a missile truck and I'm like you gotta be kidding me like and it was following the jet as the jet was doing its maneuvers

dumb question missile truck what do you mean like it's carrying missiles for the plane yeah yeah so well it has its own ability right so modern fifth gen fighter aircraft are more properly understood as flight leaders and that have the ability

to like the F-35, this is a publicly known capability. The F-35 is a, is more properly understood as an aviation sensor fusion hub, where the sensors on the plane and available to the pilot are 360. There's data streams coming in that they can work with and operate with. But the plane itself is also a fusion hub where any sensor in the environment that's reading into that plane, it's two-way, right? Commands can be. be given in real time, leader follower technology has been around three years where a sensor can lock on to another sensor source and, you know, the programming of it can be told, do this thing, if this, then that. If the plane turns at this rate of speed, you turn with it and maintain distance or an altitude, right? So now we have, at least in testing, I have no idea if it's operationalized, but at least in testing and there has been for quite a while and multiple countries are testing this stuff,

not just the US, Israel's testing, Russia, China, and, you know, it's the ability for these loyal wingmen to either act as shields for the fighter aircraft to sacrifice itself to save the prime you know save the manned platform or they can carry depending on what they are two four six rockets additional missiles whatever and the pilot can control that as a sort of a second aircraft available to it in the combat environment where he can send a command to it to you know flank an enemy aircraft. So he's no longer one on one. Now he's two on one. So imagine the implications of this whenever it gets done correctly where you can have a large manned aircraft up there with six of these loyal wingmen.

All my brain goes back to, I'm sure, like many of my listeners, I was brought up on Top Gun, you know? And what ends up happening? You run out of missiles and then you're down to so many bullets. And then, you know, what do you do? Right. And he just saves the day because he got him with his last bullet and you get it. And what, this does is it gives more rockets, more, more firing capability, not to mention the two-on-one aspect, if you could direct it to, it could act as a screen, like you say, but it also could, I'm like, oh, man, like my brain, I'm like, what is the next top gun look like, right? Like, I mean, like, obviously.

I really thought that's where they were going with Top Gun Mavericks, especially given how long it took to make the movie. And these are capabilities that have been in testing since early 2000s. Yeah. possibly even before, but I'm aware. No worries. They're going to make a Top Gun 3. Tom Cruise will be 75, still flying planes. But he's going to be flying from a chair.

That's right. Tom Cruise's body won't be able to take the G load, right? So it's really interesting. Like when you, when you understand the theory of the thing or the shape of it, and you can begin to extend rationally into what potential capabilities are, you know, I'm speculating here truly. I have no idea if this is a thing. But presumably if you've got to look like if the sensor range of the radar on the F-35 is X hundreds of miles, right, where it can kind of peek out over the horizon and see what a potential threat was, now all of a sudden, if it has the ability to send its loyal wingman forward 300 miles ahead of it, and it has a same radar system, he's just extended the range of detection and early alert or quantifying data in the information. around him in a dynamic way. He's just extended his sensor envelope and detection envelope to mitigate threat 300 miles further out.

So that's where everybody's freaking out about drones, and rightfully so, right? Because drone swarms are cheap, they're irritable, meaning they can be sacrificed in the cause. And yeah, so small, highly maneuverable, whatever drone swarms are really an emergent threat. but when you're talking about a thing like an F-35, an advanced fifth-generation fighter aircraft, that has the capabilities to be a combat controller for a bunch of other things in the environment, on the ground or in the air with it, now you're talking about a level of, you know, aviation warfare that was science fiction 10 years ago, right? Because now you have a thing that has six large, highly maneuverable fast, attritable,

autonomous systems around it, that he can flip it and put it in a loiter mode where it will hover over a certain area and wait. And then it's more like a conventional predator or reaper drone, right? Or he can send it ahead, and now that leader follower became a scout

ahead of ground forces. It's taking one very expensive machine with, you know, one or two human beings into it into a small maneuverable force where you only need the same amount of mount power correct that's exactly right you're you're creating a little little battalion no i don't know i don't know the the army term or the the military term probably not a battalion battalion's probably too many but a small little unit that instead of it just being a plane flying by itself and it doesn't have a wingman now you have multiple wingmen and you can you can send them off to do multiple different things all at the same time

while receiving their information. That's exactly right. And so the, like the euphemistic shorthand in the Air Force for that, a missile truck or a bomb truck or, like I just, I go back, you know,

like I have a full disclosure on my end for, for people to laugh at me, right? Like growing up in college and everything, you used to play like call of duty, different things like that. Oh yeah. And I,

I haven't played any, I haven't played a video game in a long time. I, you know, like, I just, yeah, I have zero time for it.

But I remember on Call of Duty back then, you know, like, I'm trying to think of when Call of Duty came out where you could put up, I want to say it was a camera so that you could have a second screen in, you know, multiplayer. So you could see when people were coming around corners and different things like that. And they started to have little tools like that. Like all my brain goes. That was like Modern Warfare three or maybe the first black ops because I was still kind of playing intermittently then, you know, with my buddies. Mainly because a lot of the friends, you know, that I had and have, you know, are in the military. They were forward deployed. And so, like, the only fun we could really have together is if they weren't out on patrol or something.

And we're, you know, playing Call of Duty half a world away with each other. Sure. But it wasn't all that long ago, maybe a decade. Yeah, maybe a decade. But a decade ago, you could, so my brain, when you're talking about this, takes me to Top Gun. And I'm like, wow, they're really outdated. And takes me to Call of Duty because I'm like, actually, what you're talking about is having a visual of a, you know, like, my brain can't comprehend 300 miles ahead.

And then another 300 mile, my brain's like, holy crap. That's a big swath of land of like territory, right? But I bring it down to something I can maybe like bite off a little bit. And I go, well, call a duty, you throw up one of those cameras. And now you can see kind of you can protect your back and know when people are coming around trying to get you. I mean, it's a simple, stupid analogy and everybody can laugh at me this morning. People I remember when again, call and it's not really a good analogy. I mean, that's that's, that's a narrative or a framing device that helps people kind of connect like to like.

through similarity or you know shared experience right so sticking with call of duty and i think battlefield did it too around the same time um i was playing with a buddy and they had just introduced as one of the you know one of the care packages or kill streets or whatever the individual drone not a fixed position like sentry camera or gun uh which in real world have been around a long time but a an individual drone that a guy would pull out of his backpack and he'd throw it up in the air and it with loiter or whatever yes and then he control it and dive bomb a target right that capability had been around for at least eight years prior to the introduction of it like we were working on that towards the beginning of the global war on terror and and two three four as like a theoretical

capability that was operationalized not terribly long after in the scale of how these things come to market and so let's say the development curve to information you know informational awareness, right? Because nothing gets into those games as a capability anymore without having been kind of intercepted cooperatively, right? Because if they're going to use U.S. military, imagery, terminology, whatever, games that do that have to go through at least big budget games, you know, with big studios like Activision or whatever, have to go through a DOD review process to make sure that they're not even accidentally disclosing, uh, speculatively, a capability that may actually exist, but is still not publicly revealed.

So like, let's say that the first use of an individual backpack drone to, you know, what we now call loitering munitions, right? Like you throw it up in the air, it can hover for, it's got five, ten minute run time, but its entire job is to give forward situational awareness to the individual operator on the ground and then to have a strike capability at standoff range where if, He can throw that in the air. He finds an ambush with it, and he doesn't want to put his men in harm's way. It doesn't make tactical sense to do it for that particular situation.

He can just give the order to that drone to go dive bomb. It's got a, you know, whatever, two, three pound payload of some techs or whatever, you know, some explosive compound in it and deal with the ambush issue. And that was wild to people in Call of Duty announced and guys over in, you know, the Tier 1, Tier 2 special operations community are going, Those things are pieces of shit. You ought to see what we have now. And I remember those conversations happening. And now we look at how the defining technology to come out of the last two years of war between Russia and Ukraine, which is not properly understood as a war. It's properly understood as a global test bed for emerging war-making technologies.

And are the Ukrainians actually developing drones in their garages? and then like getting them to the front line. Yeah. But generally speaking, generally speaking, you're seeing capabilities that are presented as, oh, some guys figured it out at their garage in Kiev or Zaparisia or whatever. They were handed the schematics for how to do it and the blueprint for how to do it by somebody somewhere, right?

And it's the same for the Russian side. There's Chinese technology. There's North Korean technology. There's Iranian technology. There's all these things that are coalescing into a single, combat environment that have made that war objectively, right? Because the cost of human life has been horrific, right? You're talking at least three quarters of a million dead between the two sides. That's horrible. That's absolutely horrible. And in a relatively small geographic area for that amount of

death and mayhem and destruction, right? But there's hundreds of billions that have poured into this war and all sorts of novel and capabilities because it is fundamentally a testing ground for fourth generation, and fifth generation emergent technologies that will define the shape of warfare for the next 50 years. And so when I stand all the way back and I get far enough away that the horror of the loss of human life and the arguable nature of the necessity of such a war, when I look all the way back and I see it kind of for what it is objectively, like the four corners of it, it is a live fire sandbox for training a bunch of new types of technologies and testing. the efficacy and capability of legacy systems that all of our military still have against

new capabilities, right? How does a Bradley infantry fighting vehicle with its Bushmaster cannon fare when the Russians are throwing up, you know, 20 small drones that are all targeting it at once? How do we adapt to that, right? So that's where when people are like, you know, because I suggested like on the Jesse Kelly show that, you know, the other day that this might be a, you know, the drones over Jersey thing, you know, bringing it closer back to the real time, that it might be done in such a way that they're actually testing not only to find the thing, but it presents an emergent or, you know,

it's an opportunity that presents itself for these platforms to see how the public reacts to them, how it changes pattern of human life in the area, how it changes the flow of traffic, how it propagates on social media, what terms are being used, because you can bet, single thing relating to the drones in Jersey, every single hashtag, every single reference to specific keywords is being hoovered back into some database somewhere and it's being analyzed and machine learning and AI and all of that's churning through it and they're sussing out, they're doing analytic pattern recognition of what keywords play the biggest, what regions and at what time of day or night are taking the most video, which ones are showing,

sharing the most information. All of that data that's gathering information environment can be thin-slice for different effect. And that's the world we live in. And people have generally made peace with the fact that their phones are the most persistent pattern of life tracking technology that has ever existed, right? It's the one thing almost every human being in the developed world has on them at all times. Right. But the 20, 30 years of TV shows teaching us, you know, movies like Enemy of the State, which came out in like 02 or 03 about, you know the NSA making one man's life miserable and targeting for destruction all of that stuff tends to be a decade behind the curve but now technology is iterating and advancing so fast

that what people half believing that actual gray aliens from whatever star cluster showed up in the 50s or 40s in roswell new mexico and then an actual flying saucer craft you know crashed it was really easy to get half the country to believe that back then. Today, though, the curve of scientific evolution is so far outpacing our primitive brains and our situational awareness that it's, that that lengthy decade lag between creation of a thing and public disclosure in some way is now down to months. And some form of fashion, it's going to get down to weeks. Right. And eventually the curve at the rate It's going the curve of technological development, implementation, and operationalizing is going to be two weeks. From someone's big brain idea to a 3D printed a bunch of components for it, we assembled them in the field, and now we're testing it and operating it.

It's astonishing how fast that rate of change is going, and we simply cannot keep up. Does a lot. Right? You're like, I can't keep up to Ross this morning, folks, you know? Yeah. There's just no simple way to explain all of this, though, for like a normal human being who lives a normal life, which in a lot of ways I envy, right? Because sometimes, like, sometimes the curse of awareness is knowing too much because it can twist your brain around. If you're someone like me who's very analytical, it twists my brain a lot.

A lot of things wake me up at three in the morning or the average person, it's like maybe three or four things. Right. Well, let me ask you about this, right? Russia, Ukraine, just, I guess, multiple things, right? Hitting Russia with, you'll know the term, the type of military or technology, the missiles going into Russia hitting there, and then Russia coming out and saying,

less, and we're going to lower the threshold of, you know, what it takes to invoke a nuclear exchange, essentially, you know, you hear all these back and forth, back and forth, where does your brain go? you know, like, you know, I've been talking a lot about it. But as far as, you know, like fully understanding the global world, you know, maybe in 50 years when I'm an older man and I hear these exchanges go back and forth, maybe I'll be a little bit more inclined to be like, oh, there's that. That's what they're doing over here. Everything else.

But like, you know, listen to Tucker and Sacks. Sax is talking about we're 90 seconds away from, you know, essentially Armageddon, right? like their doomsday clock you know you have different people on talking about um just the exchanges and how hard the the neocons among others are pushing for world war three when you hear all this rhetoric when you see the different um you know um jostling back and forth what does ross see i'll worry about it when there's an actual lifeboat for the people that are propagating all of that stuff right um Putin is evil like no two ways about it right there there's a heart of darkness and a will to power in him that is

if not unique in all of human history certainly puts them right up there with gingus khan and you know all of these others that yeah they expanded their empire and maybe they were doing it out of a sense of nationalism but at the end of the day bloodlust tends to originate from a desire for power and it's a means to an it Putin is without a doubt one of the great global gamesmanship, chess players that has existed in the last century, at least. He really, really is. When you think about a guy that rose to power the way he did, the manner in which he did, the ruthlessness by which he did,

and now you have a singular figure in charge of a very large economy and a very capable war machine, we need to update our understandings in the West of what a man like that can do and what he's capable of doing and probably assume that he's reading tea leaves. if not better than our best and brightest, he is probably reading from a different sheet of music because you have, you know, cultural preferences, lived experience, all of those things that come together in one mind. And then when that one mind has seized such total power as Putin has in Russia, the paradigm begins to shift from, you know, is Putin part of some

grand scheme to lure the world into World War III or whatever? Then I'm stepping back and going we can't possibly know what's in Putin's mind with 100% certainty. So now we're left to assess likeliest outcomes, what data do we have, indicators, right? All of those other things that we have to fall back on to create situational awareness and attain some degree of confidence in what's going on. With Putin, number one, Putin is so consumed by power that he's not going to murk himself. right? Like unless he knows he has a 100% chance of surviving that and that his kingdom remains intact,

he's not going to tear down his own kingdom. He is not a madman. He is evil, but he is brilliant. And he is very much operating in a rational framework, even if we don't understand the rationale or the next steps with 100% clarity. The callousness with which he's thrown away his own people's lives is not unique. to Putin. That is a long military tradition in Russia going back at least to the 1700s and well into the Tsarist years of humans are expendable cogs in a machine. It's why communism

caught on as strongly as it did in the World War I era, you know, the Bolsheviks and all of that were able to seize power because the communist ideology of people are cogs or instruments of power in a much larger game was already sort of baked into the cake as a lot of the Russian psyche, the the, the, the almost Nietzschean fatalism and nihilism of not that life doesn't have meaning, but though, you know, some things do mean more than human life. We saw the same thing with the imperial Japanese in World War II. And so what we would conceive as bravery, right, which is like one man, you know, an American with a Browning 1911, spitting in the face of death and, you know, moving to take on, you know,

platoon of Japanese soldiers at Guadalcanal or Midway to defend his comrades and bring them back to the Japanese, that's not bravery. That's the way of things because death is, you know, to the Japanese then at that time under under that culture, you know, death is a necessary, not sacrifice, it's just a necessary component of victory and that there's nothing more noble than dying and honorable death and combat right so we had two we the the the war in the pacific more properly was a war of ideology and a war of almost spiritual frameworks the war in the european theater right against the nazis the nazis did not have an ideology in as much as it was just mad blood lust for power the things that they espouse the tools and tactics and

procedures that they used was pure undiluted will to power. Right. But as a German character, a lot of these guys weren't true believers that were thrown themselves into the teeth and fire for a higher, more evolved, enlightened cause. They were doing it because if they returned, they better be victorious or they're going to get shot. Right? Because they were ruled by people who are absolute evil tyrants. You know, you look at the SS or anybody else at that time.

And so you had two completely different, uh, worldviews and modalities. and modalities that the Christian West, right, had to fight and understand and deal with. And so we are at a same sort of turning point with our understanding of what Putin, Xi Jinping, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Iran, what all of these guys are up to is not a simpatico worldview or ideology, which is the common heritable link between, you know, certainly the Akos, Five Ice countries, right? So the kind of the really closely held appendant bodies or allies of the crown in the UK, it's those are the ties that bind them that are cultural or herald, right?

These other guys are cooperating together because it allows them to carve out the domains of power that they've all agreed belong to them. Iran wants to be the new caliphate and they want to control the world of Islam. Putin wants to revive the Tsarist empire. He sees himself as like Peter the Great kind of thing. She is a pure will to power communist who truly in his heart believes that his people, the Han people, people of China are not Xi Jinping's people. It's the people that he sees with that ancestral heritage going back to the Middle Kingdom when China ruled the world, and that's the Han.

Right. So, you know, she is an overt racist against any religion or any people who are not. not of his particular blood and who subscribed to his particular ideology. But somehow all of these bad guys, right, who seemed bent on global domination, are cooperating together to, for a time, carve out their pieces in the world and take down the imperialist West, the Christian West. And that framework, understanding that informs my view, at least that the talk of nukes is insane, Because these are rational actors, even if they don't share a rational framework with us.

And so I look at the neocons, wanting to do whatever. The neocons are beating that drum, and Putin's playing into it because he knows that one of the manipulation levers that's so effective against the West is the fear of death, the fear of total destruction, mutually assured destruction, right? All of these paradigms, he's very intelligently leveraging as tactics in an information warfare campaign. against the West because he knows that he's smarter than the vast majority, particularly of people in the neocon movement, but he also knows that the base of power of the global neocon movement is the industrial war machines of our countries. And so the more they can ratchet up the tension and the threats,

and the more he can manipulate them with threats of overwhelming global scale destruction, the more that he can control their worldview and manipulate that, the more that these people will play their games to undermine their own countries by propagating war that to the average person looks at, we don't have a dog in that hunt, or at least we don't have $200 billion of money and material in that hunt. But he's ratching that up as a way to weaken and undermine the West from inside, which is a tactic used to great effect for a long time by the Soviet Union. So he's taking from an old playbook, updating it a modern paradigm and then leveraging it against us. So that that that what the Soviets used to call

active measures, right, which is disinformation, spying, sparrow programs, all of that type of stuff of leveraging and leveraging control of information to manipulate perception and action of the enemy very much. Same playbook that leads to him talking about or hinting at expanded use of tactical nuclear weapons may be on the table if you cross these red lines. It's curious then. Because the way that a lot of guests on this show have framed it, you know, you look at Ukraine becoming part of NATO, Finland becoming part of NATO, all these different countries becoming part of NATO. You don't see that as an aggression from the West. You see that as, or maybe you do.

I don't know. I just, to me, the way it looks from my eyes is, oh, we can certainly go down the road of Putin. not being the greatest human being under the sun. But when I look at it, it to me looks like the West stepping across red line after red line after red line. It's important to understand that their red lines are a function of game theory, right, where you're just trying to predict the next move or the next sequencing of moves in your adversaries, you know,

operational cycle. And there's a lot of ways to try to get to that. There's a lot of math and algorithmic expertise that's built into game theory. But we are essentially watching a global version of game theory play out with regard to Ukraine. So when we look at red lines, the U.S. can draw a red line or Ukraine can draw a red line and say, if Russian troops pass this point, then X is on the table. Now we're engaging in brinksmanship or engaging in all manner of sort of polysynchronous, right? like different lanes of activity happening in different time intervals, sequence such that we're trying to drive an effect.

And Putin's doing the same thing when he says these are red lines, right? So it's not to me an ethical question so much of did we offend them, right? It's a question of how serious are they about this red line and one of the consequences likely to be. So then it's just, it's moving. Sorry, Ross. if you go to, you know, all the different agreements from roughly 2014 onwards, the one piece in 2022 when former prime minister of the UK goes over and says you're not signing it, all these different things that have come out, the blowing up of Nord Stream on and on and on it goes.

Maybe I'm wrong and maybe I simplify things way too much, which is probably what I do. But like, I look at it on the flip side. And if any of that was going on near the U.S. border, the U.S. would come absolutely unleashed on anyone who did that, right? Like, I mean, if Russia was doing that in, say, I don't know, Mexico for argument's sake, right? They were turning Mexico into a BRICS country and they were putting capabilities there to attack the United States as a whole. And we're doing things like that. The U.S. would absolutely see that as an aggression and would go after it. And so when I look at Ukraine in particular and the fact that they've shut down peace talks, the fact that they had military capabilities still have military capabilities there on and on it goes, we can look at Putin and go like that guy is not a great human being, but what he's being put up against from a U.S. standpoint or the West standpoint. I don't have to pick on the U.S. I can pick on a lot of different countries. To me, it looks like poking the bear, if you would. It is, right? So,

And generally speaking, and really you can't separate the issue of Russia and Ukraine from 100 years of cultural context to the Russian side. And really understanding that for however much a lot of academic and national security experts pretend to understand it, the vast majority of them don't. I do not pretend to understand it at any level of detail. I do know that my understanding of it is probably more rationally and historically grounded. So from the perspective of did we do a thing that incited a response? Yeah, we did. You know, moving certain types of material and, you know, talking about bringing Ukraine into NATO. And from Putin's perspective, he's looking at Ukraine going, well, this is pretty obviously a money laundering operation,

but it's also a shield wall or a firewall against Russian expansion. And Ukraine, in Putin's mind, is not an independent country. country. It is a breakaway, you know, like a bunch of dissident rebel children who refused to come home. It was only what, 1991 that Ukraine became a country when Soviet Union felt in the grand scheme of geopolitical history. We're 23, 24 years past that now, right? Or 30. 30. 30. Yeah. God, right. But still, not that far in the past. And the Cold War environment that Putin came out of to him, Ukraine, is part of Russia. And now you have the Western apparatus throwing in with the rebel children, right? And it's the same thing.

The Ukraine-Russia issue is actually not as much different from Taiwan and, you know, People's Republic of China as people want to think. They are in a lot of ways. They bear very fundamental similarities from the perspective of the leaders, the totalitarian thugs, that are running the bigger country, right? like these are rebel children it's an internal matter get out of our business and then you know the west is coming in and doing what the west does which is you know trying to influence and and support these rebel children uh against the parent and yeah it absolutely is rational

from the perspective of those guys to see us meddling in their internal affairs in a way that's unacceptable and is worth a kinetic response or worth an escalated response. It is also rational from our perspective, equally so, to degrade the capabilities and to support the desire of the people to be free from these oppressive entities. Right. So Putin holds both of those realities in his brain that I'm acting rationally, but so are they. when we start framing it around, I'm the rational actor and they're acting irrationally, that's where our orientation degrades. And we begin to get behind the information curve.

And that actually gives power to the bad guys, like, you know, to the aggressors, so the belligerents. So everything we've done to support Ukraine, going back to Ukraine gaining its independence, everything that we've done is purely rational from our perspective as a way to push and control and manipulate the boundaries in the state of play with regard to Russia. From his perspective, everything he's done is a rational response. And the issue goes back so far that it's almost impossible to suss out where is original sin in this situation. And it's almost irrelevant except to understand the context.

The thing that everybody should be focusing on is from a co-relevant. rational perspective of two great power adversaries, right, however much it wounds our ego to say Russia is a great power, we threw sanctions at them, didn't stop them, right? We've begun allowing long-range missile strikes, the Ukrainians of, you know, just here in the last few days, car bombed, one of the highest generals in the Russian military, like we're seeing the playbook fully open up now, and it's going to be nothing but horrors on the other side of it. And everybody in their mind has a rational reason to escalate to some degree, but it will stop full short of use of nuclear weapons or conventional nuclear weapons because that's the Pandora's box that no rational actor involved really wants to open. We just want to keep pushing up to that line because it still drives the political and financial motives of everybody on both sides.

Well, I'm going to be just sitting here as a normie civilian going, it's insane. I don't think at this point, I can't think of a rational reason to car bomb anyone in Russia at this point, when we know the stakes are so high and when I've been following enough of it to know that, I don't know, as insane as Putin is, as evil as he is, actually you've never said insane. As evil as he is, it's pretty clear to me that if you continue to do what the U.S. and others, because I won't just blame the U.S. is doing, Pandora's box is the next option. Like, to me, I think we're getting, you know, like it just seems like that.

And it just keeps going up and up and up instead of walking back from that a bit. Maybe I'm wrong, Ross. But when I look at Donald Trump, I see a guy that's coming in that's going to try and de-escalate that situation. Maybe you have different intel on that. But that's my eyes watching the political game. play out. I have no intel on that or any insight into into what his thinking is, but kind of sticking with the theme that we're all doing our best to act rationally here in a difficult situation. And again, rational does not mean moral. There is a massive gulf between those two things.

Rational is simple logic, devoid of any emotion or ethics, right? When we begin to apply an ethical frame or particularly our own to an adversary, we greatly degrade our ability to understand what they're going to do and even what they are doing or what they have done. So sticking with the theme of assuming not necessarily that adults are in charge, but at least rational actors that are acting in some sort of knowable self-interest are operating here. I do think that. Do we think, sorry. I do think that Trump will attempt de-escalation, but it's not going to be de-escalation through capitulation. I see it as Trump walking into the room who Putin respects. He doesn't control Trump. This whole bullshit about Trump's owned by the, that is absolutely patently absurd.

Trump is not an agent of Russian influence. I can say that with 100% confidence, even without knowing for certain. but people will see any, some people, particularly a lot of people inside the Pentagon, will see any sort of brokered ceasefire, and I won't call it a peace because it's not, it's not peace. But just because it's not peace doesn't mean it's our problem either. Like we've got other dogs that we've got to put into the fight in other parts of the world that are actually more emergent and, you know, proximity threats to the U.S. The some people and Trump knows this will see any form of brokered ceasefire as capitulation to

Russia as weakness as the Americans lost the war. We didn't lose anything. Canada didn't lose anything. The UK didn't lose anything. We threw in behind one of the two belligerents and the most rational end to it at that moment in time was. everyone who put their guns away. It's not pistols at dawn anymore, right? Because there is no winner take all here. It is not like World War II. It is not like World War I, right? This is far more akin to the paradigm of Europe in the 1800s that the entire continent at some level was involved in a state of conflict. Like the European continent was defined and reshaped 100 times over the 1800s. What I worry about, is that whatever the next step is, whether it's escalation or some sort of brokered truce,

what we're seeing as a fragmentation of the grand EU experiment back into a bunch of nationalist identities and coalitions of those nations amongst themselves, which is far closer to all these different kingdoms that kind of blurily changed hands and scope and boundaries and shape, all of which set the precedent for World War I. So that's where some people may see it as weakness for Trump to go in. And they may, if they're already inclined to believe it, him as an agent of Russian influence, giving the game away and giving the keys to the kingdom away to the Russians. That's not what it is.

It is Trump making a difficult decision, if you were to do it, making a difficult decision to walk away from something that's a major sunk cost for the U.S., lick the wounds to whatever extent we have any. but go, okay, we are prioritizing around what are the actual real threats here and what are the second tier, third tier, fourth tier threats? And what are the unconventional ways we can continue to apply force of something, force of money, force of power, force of actual force, right, with ordinance? But what are the unconventional ways we can achieve close enough goals without sinking all of our time and attention and resources into a fight on the other side of the world that involves our allies, but not really us? That, I think, is where Trump's rational framework is going to lead him is towards trying to seek de-escalation or detente in some way that is not kicking the can down their own, but does allow us to refocus and reframe. When you talk about proximity threats to the U.S., like if you, let's just assume Trump comes in a truce or, you know, a step back from what's happening in Russia, Ukraine. Let's just say that some, you know, in the future that just dies out. When you talk, there are proximity threats to the U.S.

What threats are you thinking about, I guess, specifically? Well, when you look at what like Josh Steinman says on X all the time, right, how many foreign sabotage teams are operating on U.S. soil and then there's been a few times, he's said the same thing about Canada. The greatest proximity threat to the U.S. is already here, right? you look at how fentanyl has taken over the drug trade in the U.S. and it's just killing many thousands or hundreds of thousands of people a year. Those drugs are getting in somehow, right?

They're getting in across the border. They're getting in and, you know, precursor chemicals are coming in. And, you know, shipments that are being delivered by the postal service every single day, right? And because the cartels are aided and embedded openly by China at this point, right? I would say the proximity threat is already here inside of our cities and inside of our country. I would say that the flood of illegal immigrants is a smokescreen for a lot of people and a lot of resources to be able to enter these countries, Canada is included, that wish to commit harm to our general populations.

The rise of the non-state actor, the rise of unconventional, asymmetric, um, you know, low intensity conflict. The table is already set for that in our cities and in our countries and across our borders. And I don't think that we have taken that problem seriously enough. If we'd taken the $200 billion of the U.S. is sent to Ukraine in the last two years, and we oriented that towards creating a legally defined ethical framework for detecting and interdicting and smoking out and breaking threats and systems of threats within our own homelands, that probably would have been money better spent. We look in our hemisphere and we look at the degree to which China has brought Belt and Road and other programs and thrown many billions of

dollars into that fight to control infrastructure, to control critical choke points, to be able to influence the movement of goods and commerce across borders within our own hemisphere. and the ability to place agents and to place threats within our homelands, but also near to our homelands where it's a day or two away from some form of, you know, unconventional warfare being unleashed. Those to me are the bigger concerns right now than what's happening in Ukraine and Russia. But I'm generally not a person who's subscribe to the sunk cost fallacy. If I arrive at a decision where things not working, then it's time to pivot and reorient and make a new rational decision, and not go, well, we're already in this,

and we've got to be in this forever. Yeah, well, I don't think Donald Trump is the guy that's gonna be, we're gonna be in this forever. I think he's shown in different ways that he can pivot. Do you look to the north, you know, when you talk, a ton of talk about the Arctic and different trade routes going to the north of Canada?

And that the fact that from what I've heard, there's already involvement from a bunch of different countries. I'm trying to get actually a guy, in studio here to come talk about it because I've been hearing lots of chatter about routes to the north and China, not only China, Russia, India, the U.S., Canada, like all these players are looking at the route to the north. Do you know anything about that? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, look at, consider what the transcontinental highway system and the transcontinental railroad systems really are. They are arteries in the body politic. And they are by definition transport mechanisms that by now, there's too much surface area. There's too many branches of the arterial system, right, of the North American continent, that it's no longer that threats have to come in a certain way, and thus we only have to watch those particular vectors of threat. It's now that there's every port, every railroad spur, every truck stop, throughout the three countries of the continent,

is a plausible or potential, however minute the potentiality might be, vector of threat or staging location or a resource to somebody who wishes to commit harm. It would have blown people's minds 20 years ago to suggest that Native American, you know, or First Nations reservations could be hubs of terrorist, narco cartel, and adversary nation activity. The data that's coming out is absolutely that the system of sovereignty that the First Nations and Native American nations operate under in Canada and in the United States has become a breeding ground for potential malign activity against our countries, the general population.

And I look at that and I say, in a lot of ways, we really have no one to blame but ourselves as the dominant surrounding government and culture surrounding these sovereign territories. Well, it's funny you bring up, you bring up those two points because in the last couple weeks, Ross, there's been, I'm not forgetting who it was. Somebody text me because I can't remember. But there was a report on a guy on one of the major networks here in Canada talking about how less than 1% of good ship via rail are searched, like are looked into. And you're like, plus 1% on rail, about 3 to 4% via ocean container, which also moves on. real you think about that and you go holy crap that's just a wide open door like i mean like one like i mean think about that folks just take a just a a quick second just think about that and you go

holy crap are we wide open like when they talk about this being wide open i think of you know the can the u.s border and being able to just walk straight across it nobody's going to find you right like we have this giant border up in North Dakota of course yeah this literally walk straight out of a cornfield or soybean field in this case in North Dakota into Canada and back across just to just to say yeah I could right that's the US has the largest maritime coastline in the world right we have more shoreline to defend if we're looking at that domain of threat than any other country in the world. When you had Canada into that, actually Canada has number one, right, because the Arctic region and all of that. So the U.S. is number two, I believe. So when I look at that and I go, okay,

so collectively the U.S. and Canada, and I know Trump knows this, because I know the guy who wrote his policy paper on it in 2018 for the National Security Council, the amount of shoreline, the amount of terrain, geographic land, airspace, space, space, space, right? Because, it extends from a point in the earth all the way up into orbit, right? When I look at the amount of three-dimensional space that just our two countries have, it is impossible to cover all of it. Even drilling down to, okay, because your first order question when you're looking at, how do we narrow the scope of a potential problem set to like really kind of get closer to a solution, you go, okay, well, we know we can't do that. What is the most, what are the most likely

ways a threat could potentially move. Okay, well, it can move by road, by rail, by waterway, or by air, generally speaking, right? So now we have four domains that limits the scope to what, what terrain, what resources and infrastructure are available to rationally be able to move something in a certain way. So you can begin to narrow the aperture down and get to likeliest outcomes, but it's not even then possible with all of the AI, with all of the sensors and satellites, and no matter how many soldiers and border patrol agents and everything else we put on the problem,

it is not possible to cover that much ground. And the lack of seriousness, the lack of seriousness that Trudeau and Biden have shown, not really Biden, it's, Biden hasn't really been in command of anything. But the lack of seriousness that the two governments, have shown in the last four years towards resourcing and underscoring of nothing else, the understanding and quantification and qualification of potential threats is mind-boggling,

mind-boggling. Trump's not talking about building walls because he's racist. He's talking about building them because it would be a tremendous deterrent that doesn't stop the problem, but it is what you would call a forcing function. meaning it narrows the potential range of options available to an adversary to commit harm to a country. It's a forcing function, right? It's like forcing someone to come to a T in the road and make it right or make a lot. And there's a big giant wall there that's guarded with drones and dudes with guns and sensors and everything else.

Now all of a sudden they have to go above it, they have to go around it or they have to go under it. And that is it. They've got to find some other way to move. So when you do a thing like that, you're not stopping the problem. What you're doing is you're erecting a really big forcing function in place. And is that feasible with both Mexico and Canada? No. Not feasible, right?

Not in any realistic time interval that actually solves for the problem we're all dealing with today. But there are other forcing functions that can be put into place that Trump is likely to explore, that P squared is likely to explore, should he become PM? And that at least is a more rational place to begin and will give me some hope. but I know this for the last four years, the number of unvetted immigrants, illegal immigrants, that have managed to pour into both of our countries. And even using illegal as a framework isn't really properly understood because how many millions of people in our two countries that are here on visas that are barely monitored,

barely, you know, assessed for what the potential threat vectors are through this process, how many millions of people in our countries that could potentially compare? prize. Let's say 1% of the people that have arrived in the U.S. and Canada in the last four years holds potentially hostile threat. That's still tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands. Well, if you got, if you got one percent of rail and you go three, four percent of C, you know, even you go like immigration, well, what's what's the number? I mean, we've had hundreds of thousands. I think it's, I think it's three million over the last three years, something like that in Canada and 1.5 of those. What did something like that? I can't remember the, the numbers. It

doesn't matter. I get what you're talking about. I find it funny. I was chuckling. You said Biden. And I thought earlier when you were talking about rational people, I'm like, neither one of us has a rational leader, right? We could talk about all these, we could use the word rational, but I don't even know where Biden is right now. He's in an old folks home on a feeding tube probably. Like, I mean, he hasn't been, he hasn't been anywhere for. He hasn't been in charge for almost a year. Sure. I mean.

Okay. Yeah, okay. And then on the other side, we got fancy socks who, who is like literally inept in a different type of way, right? He is controlled by global thought, right? Not from, like, this is. He's malignantly stupid. So you can't put rational, like you can use the word rational because I know there are rational people in those frameworks. But like in general, there's no rationality happening from either one of our countries.

Like, we're led by stupidity. And so right now there's a whole bunch of things that are starting to maybe bring some rational thought back to the countries. Maybe I'm wrong, folks. But to me, you know, you talk about Pierre, you talk about Trump, you talk about just, you know, like Bucalay and Malay and different leaders like. that. To me, there's, there's, uh, that's where that gives me hope, Ross. Like I see those things and I, and I, I see hope that way. But when you talk about proximity threats to the US, you talk about protecting the US and, and like starting to focus back on the US instead of somewhere across the world. And when you talk about Canada, specifically, oh man, like we could use a lot of that

money to go into fixing the problems we have in this country. I can't speak to all the US ones, but certainly in Canada, we got our problems. Like, we got some problems that need. to be talked about and dealt with, you know, in the years to come. The U.S. and Canadian strategy over the last, certainly the last four years, has been more whack-a-mole than anything, right? We're just like throwing, reactively throwing irons into the fire anytime something pops up. And what we really need to be doing, both of our countries collectively and individually both, but with, you know, some common operating picture here, is looking more at drawing concentric rings of focus around, you know, the core of that preserving

individual freedom and security and balancing those two. Then outside of that, you look at what are the external potential threats, you know, economic, political, militarily, all that. And then you begin to draw those rings out in terms of time, focus, and attention where you have to solve for, to whatever extent practicable and hold the core and then the next string and then the next string and then the next string and then the next string and you build that out instead of allowing pop-up events all over the world to grab our time and attention and resources and divide us and distract us from what's happening in our own backyard. It is not plausible to most people that someone's going to clack off a vest in the middle of them all. Okay. I can grant that most people consider that an abstract

if a really, really scary one, that something could happen. We look at the number of school shootings that's happened in the United States going back to, you know, there were some before that, but really Columbine, you know, Hitler's birthday in 98, kind of kicked the whole thing off. And you look at the number of school shootings and everybody looked, there's two commonalities, really kind of three commonalities to each of them. And I'm going some more with this, I promise. Not because I'm kind of a Second Amendment maximalist, but.

Number one, the number one commonality is that firearms are used, right? But if we focus just on the firearms, there's a billion other ways to cause mayhem and chaos and death. Firearms are the most convenient, right? But it's just a physical thing, right? You can no more stop the spread or use of firearms at this point in human history than we can stop the sun from being a little bit hotter, a little bit colder, once it reaches the earth. right or its impact on earth's atmosphere there's only so much you can do and focusing so intently on the the medium and not this you know it's a symptom or it's a tool not the problem the other things that are in common is that every one of these students has been bullied marginalized

and fallen through the cracks socially and so they turn to just like people turn to gang violence just like turn to life of crime, human beings will look for opportunities to maximize their own well-being, generally speaking. Right. Now, again, we may not be able to rationalize where they're at, but to them it's rational. It's a course of action that's driven by id ego, super ego, and the complex web of thought in their head. And that does make sense to them. So we can't say because a normal person is not going to shoot up a school, then you need to go, okay, what are the common factors What's causal, what's inferential, all of that. And you rack and stack the pile of data, you throw it down and you say, okay, broadly speaking, people who fit this profile are more likely statistically to commit acts of mass mayhem and to harm others.

Because to them, that's part of their rational worldview. That is the end state of their self-interest is to do a thing. And then you say, okay, what other commonalities? use of SSRI antidepressants, highly common. The last two major school shootings, because you had Yuvaldei, then you had Nashville, and then you had most recently the one of Madison, Wisconsin here earlier this week, when you look at that and you say, okay, at least the last two have involved students who subscribe to the worldview of gender dysphoria, of trans, of all of these things.

and now we're seeing two data points is not a pattern, three is a pattern, right? You know, Ian Fleming said it in one of the Bond novels and even in the movies. Once this happens, stands twice coincidence, three times as enemy action. Now we're starting to see we have an established pattern of mental illness. We have an established pattern of external behaviors amplifying and making mental illness worse. And now we're seeing proxy ideology attached to which just, and rationalizes the evil things that are already in their heads, the unmitigated mental illness, the unaddressed bullying issues and toxic behaviors waged against these people.

And instead of saying, is the core problem actually that these are emotionally disturbed individuals, or is it that these are emotionally disturbed individuals who have access to a force multiplier like a firearm? Which of these two things is the real problem that we need to be looking at? But that same worldview that refuses to properly quantify and brutally, objectively assess the real threat is the same mentality we've seen it work on the immigration issue, on the Russian Ukraine issue. It's whatever. It's that the people in charge change their priorities based on what continues to build their base of power that they have operated on. They are reinforcing their ivory tower and protecting their walled gardens. they are not acting in a way that is in the rational self-interest of the people that they are in

charge of. That's why Trump pisses off the globalists so much, right? Yeah, he's a little bit day-closs and all of that, but at the end of the day, they don't see Trump as one of them, but more than that, they see Trump and Pierre as individuals who are emergent threats to the global order as they wish it would be, and that they're not. they have built their kingdoms and their little fiefdoms upon. That's why guys like that are a threat. If Pierre ends up in charge and he starts doing deals of Trump that undermine the current globalist order, he is going to be just as much at risk of his life as Trump already

provably is. The machine will spin up against him, the Panopticon, the digital surveying and quantification and undermining of him in ways domestically and abroad is going to spin up. The influence machine will spin up. And Pierre was amusing to them when he's staring down a reporter while casually eating an apple. He's less amusing when he's giving a speech that will possibly become a rallying cry for the Canadian people to overthrow the deep state control that Canada has under the Trudeau regime. Pierre is less amusing then. The more he becomes a threat, the more he emerges as a unipolar figure in a rallying point that other people, you know, like a flagpole that everybody rallies around, the greater of a threat he is.

But the more likely he is to stand together with Trump, the more likely the two of them are to stand together with other Western freedom-oriented leaders like Bikalia and Mule. Now all of a sudden, the order of battle has changed for the deep state worldwide. And now they have to turn their focus and attention inward instead of reinforcing these global paradigms of conflict against Xi and Putin and Khomeini and all these others. And now all of a sudden, the system itself is under threat because you have leaders that these countries are emerging around doing deals together because they are reprioritizing. They're saying, what are the real threats, not what are the symptoms of the threat? And I think we're going to see over the next decade,

at minimum, the changes that these guys are likely to make, you know, from their positions of power and that they're likely to make cooperatively represent both the greatest threat to the real bad guys and the greatest opportunity for renewal of positive beneficent national interest that we've seen in the western hemisphere maybe ever and and so I take hope even as things feel really dark and confused and muddled I do take hope at these rays of light that are peeking over the horizon because like new suns and new moons are coming up right in the and the global horizon. A lot of people,

I, um, a lot of people are wary of Pierre because of his affinity to go by the polls, if you would. So if the polls say something, he's, he's going to go with the polls. And he waits for the polls to, you know, he's, uh, he watches what the public is saying and doing very closely.

People are worried that he's going to lead us further into agreements with the global elites and, and on, but you make an interesting point that he's going to have to deal with Donald Trump. Donald Trump has already made it quite clear he's not going along with that group, which that's interesting because if Pierre wants to work with him, which I think he does, right? I don't think Pierre's a dumb guy by any stretch. He could become in the crosshairs like Trump is kind of what you're alluding to, or maybe not even alluding to.

Maybe you're just saying it quite frankly. It's the antibodies of the system will, I think, have more of a shaping impact on Pierre than anything else, right? Because whatever he may have believed, he definitely believed in a different paradigm. To whatever extent, he may not hold any first principles other than just being the alternative to Chaudot and getting to power. That's fine because you can still, that's a devil you can still dance with. as a devil you know, right? Because then it's just about, then it's just about forcing functions and shaping of their behavior through, not only through polls, but through appealing to their own rational self-interest. If Pierre ends up being a guy who is just concerned with getting

into and maintaining power, that's still a lever that can be used against them, right? That's still something that is known and quantifiable and can be shaped. And that's what Trump is already doing. And perhaps Trump's pre-negotiated, his behavior, you know, Canada is the 51st state, talking shit on Trudeau and all that. That doesn't just have to be that. It can also be a pre-negotiation tactic on the assumption that Pierre or somebody like Pierre is likely to end up as the next leader of Canada.

So Trump is already setting the negotiating states at the table and saying, if you want to sit down to this particular poker game, the buy-in is 10,000, the buy-in is 100,000, the buy-in is some terms. And so by the time, whomever it may be, once the elections are called in a new PM and a new government is installed, whoever it may be is going to come to the table that Trump has set. And Trump, in some sense, is coming to the table, re-sitting down at the table he set from 16 to 20 where if you look at at the ripple effect of the first Trump administration, some good, some bad, there are obvious learnings after action reports that these guys conducted. And you look at how he's selecting his transition, you know, the nominations, guys like Hegsith,

whatever. He's he's cutting against the grain in a way he did not in his first time. His first time around, like he put his, he put his bias all over the picks and said, I like Steve Steve Minookin. Well, Steve Minookan turned out to be one of the best agents of foreign influence, particularly for China, that any government, you know, that any foreign governments ever had inside the United States, whether he realized it or not, right? You look at guys like Jim Mattis, you know, the mythos of Mattis, you know, the bulldog, right, patron saint of chaos and all that. Mattis was a horrible secta, who was a known liberal to everybody in the military, right? So you look at those decisions that were made and now you look at the decisions of

people that he's coming in and they are all disruptive types who are all but immune to the antibody attacks on them of the system of oh we're going to drag you in the media and we're going to pull out this and we're going to pull out that and we're going to try to shame you into it and these guys are just going don't care right sorry if you're in the UK it's this so this but the the the degree to which Trump has through sheer force of his personality, his intellect, his narcissistic armor, right? All of these things, the degree to which he believes he's right, also make him immune to a lot of the pressure tactics, and he will jam a lot of things onto that table, that negotiating table,

not only here at home in the U.S., but also with our closest allies like Canada. And he is setting the terms and conditions under which the countries to some extent will engage with the U.S. he knows that Canada's economy is largely dependent on trade with the U.S., particularly for energy, particularly as a main artery into the U.S. He knows that we are a demand bull in this situation, and that playing nice with us will be seen as the optimal, a rational optimal move for whoever emerges in power, because Pierre, if nothing else, is not probably some starry-eyed ideologue

who's willing to manipulate the levers of power towards some globalist agenda, to like Trudeau. Trudeau was quite literally born as a creature of the deep state. Pierre, for whatever faults he may or may not have, which we will find out in due time, most likely. We know he's not that, right? We know he's not the Scion, the son, the heritable, you know, embodiment of Pierre Trudeau and all his bullshit. So it's positive in the sense that what we do know today, is that the potential range of negative outcomes for Canada of selecting a conservative figure who will likely rise as a populist, the same as Trump has, the same as Buckele has, the same as Miele has, you are seeing a proto-nationalist populist movement emerge in this hemisphere.

And if nothing else, Pierre or whomever, will be dragged along with that tide because their options are limited otherwise. Appreciate you coming on today, Ross. As always, it's always you have a very different perspective and different insights into the world. And I appreciate you sharing them with us today. Merry Christmas to you down in. Yeah, man. Well, I mean, it is that time, isn't it?

So I appreciate you coming on. And, you know, I assume drones are going to be a giant talking point over the next year or 10. And so the chance of you never coming back on this side, I think I would. put that at a statistical zero, but you never know. I could be wrong on that too. But either way, thanks for doing this. Thanks for hopping on. And Merry Christmas. Happy holidays to you and yours. Merry Christmas, Sean. Take care, brother.