In this episode of Triggered, host Don Ohanian interviews John Conrad, a brilliant mind when it comes to shipbuilding, maritime security, and so much more. For all of you who love battle history, military strategy, and cutting-edge technology, you re in for a really enlightening interview. This is going to be a wide-ranging discussion and we cover a lot of ground.
00:06:23.000Hey guys, and welcome to another huge episode of Triggered.
00:06:26.000And today is going to be a special one because we have first-time guest, John Conrad, a brilliant mind when it comes to shipbuilding, maritime security, and so much more.
00:06:38.000For all of you who love battle history, military strategy, and cutting-edge technology, you're in for a really enlightening interview.
00:06:48.000This is going to be a wide-ranging discussion, and we're going to cover a lot of ground.
00:06:52.000So make sure you guys are liking, sharing, subscribing, so you never miss one of these major episodes.
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00:09:35.000There were places that you just wouldn't even think of going if you were actually from New York because you probably weren't going to make it out.
00:09:42.000Yeah, he was averaging, he was rescue three, so they were kind of like the Navy SEALs of the fire service, only went to the biggest fires.
00:09:49.000He actually had two SEALs on his team.
00:09:52.000And, you know, the bottom line is we grew up poor because he wanted to help prevent this spread of fire.
00:09:58.000He was averaging two to three fires a night.
00:10:01.000So I grew up in the Bronx and then in grade school, moved to one of the wealthiest, most liberal suburbs, Larchmont.
00:10:10.000And here is a poor kid, very conservative, just thrown into this.
00:10:15.000You know, everyone says that the liberals, the Democrats are this party of empathy.
00:10:20.000I tell you, they've been nasty and mean, you know, at least that upper echelon since I was a kid.
00:10:28.000And I remember going to Fleet Week and seeing a big Navy ship and being like, you mean I can get on there and get on a uniform and leave and actually go out to sea.
00:10:38.000So I went to the Naval Academy, studied up.
00:10:40.000Unfortunately, my dad died of cancer, buried in Arlington, transferred to the Merchant Marine Academy in the Bronx, and worked my way up to captain.
00:10:49.000But as you know, there's nothing like heavy construction.
00:10:53.000I mean, just actually building something with your hands, whether it's buildings or ships.
00:10:58.000So I went into offshore construction, got the Guinness Brooklyn World Record, biggest LNG find in the world, and then built ships in Korea, some of the biggest, most technologically advanced, and worked my way up.
00:11:12.000And then you work six months on, six months off, at six months off.
00:11:18.000All the maritime news in the world was kind of run by the globalists, Lloyds List.
00:11:23.000It was the longest running publication in the entire world at the time.
00:11:28.000And, you know, there was no American perspective.
00:11:31.000So we built G-Captain to be the largest, most read maritime and Navy news site in the world.
00:11:37.000Well, you know, as the saying goes, whoever controls the seas controls the trade of the world.
00:11:42.000And I guess going back for a few years, especially with trade being so relevant right now, we've seen a major convergence of Chinese port investments and Russian naval presence across Latin America.
00:12:07.000We've maintained a strong Navy, but the Navy has really become a support structure for these forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
00:12:15.000Navy recruiting has moved more towards SEALs, which are awesome, and submarines and the aviation aspect.
00:12:23.000But we've really knocked down a notch on the warships.
00:12:29.000The great white fleet of Teddy Roosevelt is no longer.
00:12:34.000And on the other side, the maritime side, the logistics, the one thing I would like everyone to remember is every single lesson from Eisenhower back to Washington, logistics wins wars, and that is critical.
00:12:50.000And we had, you know, after World War II, we had a vast network of bases and ports and slowly atrophy in those.
00:13:00.000And the Chinese have filled that void, and they couldn't build the warships right away.
00:13:08.000But how they did it was filling that vacuum and getting into the ports and getting into our backyard.
00:13:15.000They know we have the best satellite technology in the world, but one EMP up in that space and you're back to surface level, submarines, drones, combatants, and those ports, the cranes, they're all built by China.
00:14:31.000Like your dad, Teddy Roosevelt was a best-selling author.
00:14:34.000He had written the book on the naval battles of the War of 1812.
00:14:39.000So he had that, you know, being an author, understanding the topic, and then brought in Mahan, the preeminent naval thinker of our time, and they built the Great White Fleet together.
00:14:51.000But what the Great White Fleet wasn't just power, strategic power, and guns on ships.
00:14:58.000This is back in the coal days where that was really a signal to the world that not only can we put this firepower forward and send it around the world, but we have the coaling facilities, we have the oil facilities, we have the logistics network to sustain that entire fleet.
00:15:18.000And that's something that China has struggled with.
00:15:20.000They kind of underweight logistics, but how they're doing it otherwise is getting in these ports and particularly these choke points.
00:15:28.000Mahan said you need strong Navy ships.
00:15:31.000And unfortunately, when you go to a Navy conference now, these admirals don't know what they're talking about.
00:15:36.000They talk about the half of the book that's about battleships and destroyers and the surface, but they don't talk about the other half, which is the merchant marine and the power of these logistics hubs.
00:15:47.000Remember, back in World War II, we delayed that D-Day for years.
00:15:52.000We put the Army on the back seat as we built up that naval component into the Pacific, and those ports were the string.
00:16:01.000That's why the Marines had such casualties, because you had to take those islands to be the logistic port.
00:16:08.000Well, the service that lost the highest percentage of people in World War II was the Merchant Marine because these ships were defenseless.
00:16:20.000And these German submarines came in and absolutely obliterated our merchant fleet.
00:16:27.000We did not have enough destroyers and they came in right into the Pacific.
00:16:32.000You go back to Hemingway, had his option, you know, the guy who loved being in the front line.
00:16:37.000He was in the Spanish Civil War and fighting in Italy, and he decided he was going to spend the beginning of the war in the Caribbean protecting it.
00:17:51.000And, you know, literally looking for submarines and other things that would be obstructing those channels in the Caribbean back in the day.
00:17:58.000Because we didn't have enough destroyers and the destroyers we needed, we needed to send out to the Pacific.
00:18:02.000You know, we did, as much as that shipbuilding was awesome in World War II, it didn't really start until 1936.
00:18:10.000It was still ramping up at that beginning of the war.
00:18:12.000So how do you view the critical need for shipbuilding and maritime dominance within the framework of sort of this new Monroe doctrine we're seeing under my father's second term?
00:19:31.000But if we don't invest, if we don't build the ships to actually go out there and drill for this oil to get these resources to spread our trade around the world, our exports.
00:19:44.000Now you have China clamping down on American shipping companies.
00:19:48.000We only have 82 merchant ships in international service right now.
00:21:26.000It's slowly while you're constructing, but then you're just getting rents over the time.
00:21:31.000Every transaction on the sea, when I sell a container ship full of stereos or their grain shipments, every time that's moved from port to port, it's transferred in dollars.
00:21:44.000And that puts liquidity in the system.
00:21:46.000Without the liquidity, you don't have reserve currency status.
00:22:46.000And it all started with a delegate from the International Maritime Organization.
00:22:50.000You look at the Panama Papers did not make a big scene in the U.S. In the UK, it did.
00:22:56.000And all that money tied back to London and the insurance and Lloyd's registry.
00:23:02.000And what happened was it was, you know, America gets blamed for these forever wars.
00:23:07.000And the Middle East and Iraq, it was Margaret Thatcher and the Europeans who convinced Bush to leave Panama and send into the first Gulf War.
00:23:18.000American oil companies, and I worked for them for years, they did not extract a lot of oil during these forever wars.
00:23:24.000It was the Shells and the BPs that were pushing it.
00:23:27.000But really, it was to get us out of our backyard, this Panama, the Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, where all of this, you know, we've totally neglected our own hemisphere.
00:23:39.000But you're saying that was actually by design because, you know, again, I'm no fan of the elites and the globalists, but America has their fair share of elites and globalists as well.
00:23:48.000Well, they love the system because they can put their tax money in the Cayman Islands with everyone else.
00:23:53.000And what happened was the globalists really backed Bill Clinton and Ross Perot to split the money and the ticket so that Bush, after Kuwait, he wasn't able to get back and focus on Panama, back to focus on our backyard.
00:24:07.000And the deal they made with Bill Clinton is, we'll let you be president, but you're not getting into the maritime world.
00:24:19.000Every other country has a full-time maritime ambassador there.
00:24:22.000That was the deal they made, back away and kind of get the mainstream media away from the media, get the education away from sea power and Mahan and everything else and turn our back on it.
00:24:35.000And I think that was the deal that Clinton made in order to win that election.
00:24:40.000And it's just been going downhill ever since.
00:24:43.000And, you know, frankly, the GOP loved it too because it lowered the price of trade without American ships and American crew.
00:25:27.000And number two is this world trade where the complexities of this global network have gotten so complex that they had to create new laws to manage it.
00:25:37.000And after World War II, we took over the system and we took the power.
00:25:43.000We have a lot of things that are baked in the system that people have forgotten about.
00:25:48.000And that's, you know, what I was working with the White House a little bit last week in the State Department, reminding them, we built the system.
00:25:57.000Just because we haven't used it, just because we haven't had a maritime ambassador since Bill Clinton, doesn't mean we don't have the power to reassert our needs here.
00:26:08.000How do we focus back on our hemisphere and regain that kind of control?
00:26:12.000You know, when you're up against, you know, again, you know, multiple decades of sort of policy that was designed to minimize our efficacy and power.
00:26:37.000She went into the Coast Guard and she married an American who happens to be homosexual and they got divorced right afterwards.
00:26:46.000But she got that citizenship, went to the IM, Biden centered to the IMO, and dual citizen, and she was working with the Panama interest and the U.S. interest.
00:26:58.000And this is what Biden and Obama were so good about, telling Americans this isn't important, getting rid of the, you know, demoting the admirals, demoting the maritime ambassadors, demoning that, putting these junior staffers who have no idea, young people, what they're doing in these critical and letting them just write whatever laws and things they want.
00:27:18.000And this is the result with this carbon tax.
00:27:21.000And luckily, no one, you know, up till last week, nobody knew about this maritime tax.
00:27:26.000Yeah, like, listen, I do this, right, for basically for a living at this point.
00:27:30.000And I had no idea this was even coming.
00:27:32.000This was a resolution over at the UN about this carbon tax.
00:27:36.000My father said, you know, you're putting it off for at least a year.
00:27:38.000Can you give us the full background on what it means?
00:28:07.000But this is, these are the globalist family.
00:28:10.000These are the families that have run trade for centuries.
00:28:14.000These are families that have more wealth.
00:28:16.000It's better hidden, but more wealth than Elon Musk.
00:28:20.000Because 90% of everything moves through this organization.
00:28:25.000And like I said, it's been so well hidden by our mainstream media and our education ignoring it that no one knows about it.
00:28:32.000Thank God your father understood this.
00:28:35.000I have no idea how this crossed his radar, how Rubio and Waltz doing an amazing job said, wait, this is important because nobody else in America realizes it.
00:28:46.000But they want to control that 90% of trade and they want to kick us off of the reserve currency status, right?
00:28:53.000So what they came up with was this green tax and the Wall Street Journal said it was $200 billion tax.
00:29:18.000So it was a slush fund, and they were going to use that for these NGOs that Rubio shut down with U.S. aid.
00:29:25.000And this was going to be a U.N. slush fund, not only for the NGOs and all these liberal circumcisions in Uganda and all this nonsense that USAID shut down, but an attack on America reasserting its dominance in the world.
00:29:42.000And I have to tell you, they do this thing.
00:32:01.000Your father created the first shipbuilding maritime office in the White House.
00:32:06.000Now it's with Russ Voigt's team, Jerry Hendricks there.
00:32:11.000We don't have, we have it there, but we don't, you know, Senate's waiting on confirming the U.S. Merchant Marine Commandant, the Maritime Administrator.
00:33:40.000Well, I think people are rightfully skeptical of the forever wars.
00:33:44.000And when you look at what's going on in the Middle East, when you look at what, you know, and 30 years later, people still can't articulate the purpose of why we were there or we were there for just all-out lies.
00:33:56.000I understand some of that, but I understand what you're saying.
00:34:00.000Also, I mean, there's other things, Taiwan especially, that are critical, whether it's the, you know, they produce 90% of the microchips of the world.
00:34:07.000So, why we have to be able to onshore some of these things, why we need to be able to have control of our own shipping and supply lines.
00:34:17.000And, you know, the fight in World War II, if you go back and you read Nimitz, you read MacArthur, the number one thing was the Taiwan Strait and the Philippine Strait right there, because that's that choke point.
00:34:30.000All the ships have to coordinate on that.
00:34:31.000So it's not just chips, it's this choke point that China is focusing on.
00:34:35.000But whether you want to defend Taiwan or not, we have over 300,000 servicemen and dependents within the Chinese missile shield in the Pacific right now.
00:35:21.000A month ago, a Russian captain T-boned right into one of our only 10 tankers, going back to the shadow war thing that your father understands and no one else seems to.
00:35:32.000Wait, when you talk about Millie selling off a big portion of the fleets, obviously the landing crafts wouldn't have been a part of this.
00:35:37.000But is that also why perhaps we left $82 billion worth of equipment in Afghanistan?
00:35:43.000We just didn't even have the ships to bring the stuff back because I was like, it doesn't make it.
00:36:00.000The Trump family just gets right to the heart of it because that's the thing.
00:36:03.000It took us 20 years to get all that equipment in.
00:36:06.000And again, the media and the education, they keep reminding us of the Berlin airlift and saying our air might.
00:36:14.000Well, it was just like it was less than 100 miles from our airfield to Berlin and we barely made that.
00:36:19.000The entire airlift capacity of the Air Force, which I love, and we need to revitalize that too because Obama and Biden killed that.
00:36:27.000But the entire airlift capacity of the Air Force is less than the cargo capacity of one Chinese ship.
00:36:34.000All of that equipment got in there by the Merchant Marine bringing ships into Pakistan and then the Army taking those securities.
00:36:41.000That's why there were so many casualties.
00:36:43.000That's why you look at the Tom Sawyers EOD, these explosive devices, because we had to caravan those in.
00:36:51.000We were not flying these big, massive tanks and ammo and food in through Bagram Air Force Base.
00:36:58.000And when Biden wanted to leave, Pakistan said, no way, you're not using it.
00:37:02.000You're not withdrawing all of this because we don't like the Taliban.
00:37:07.000They're going to use that equipment against us.
00:37:10.000So it was leveraged by Pakistan to make us stay, not letting us export through the port, which is the only way we could have got that amount of equipment out.
00:37:20.000I mean, it's crazy when you think of, when you think about it, it's like, you know, managed decline on purpose by people who should know better.
00:37:27.000Because, again, if you're a general, you should probably understand basic logistics, especially after being in a war for 30 years.
00:37:32.000Yeah, but Biden and Obama specifically went after the guys who are brilliant at logistics.
00:37:38.000The commandant of the Merchant Marine, who hopefully your father's pec, Steve Carmel, will get confirmed today.
00:37:44.000The Senate's been sitting on it, but those are the lobbyists saying, well, we'll confirm everyone else before this because they understand how important this is.
00:37:52.000And not just that, you know, what ships the Army can't get its supplies.
00:37:57.000We can't evacuate soldiers, but the Navy ships need these supplies going back to the coaling stations in Mahan.
00:38:04.000This is why your dad just got me so excited talking about battleships.
00:38:08.000And there was such a pushback from these admirals saying, battleships are ridiculous.
00:38:29.000And once they run out of their missiles, they can carry 96 missiles and only a portion of those are anti-air.
00:38:36.000Once they run out of those missiles, they got to steam for two weeks to get reloaded.
00:38:40.000A battleship is just a big destroyer with more missiles, more sensors, and more fuel because going back to tankers, we only have 10 tankers.
00:38:48.000So we lose a couple of those tankers and suddenly we're not getting aviation fuel to our carriers.
00:38:55.000And your dad just intrinsically understands that a battleship is its own little logistics hub, right, that moves.
00:39:04.000So, you know, John, I guess, you know, given all that, you know, in the last few weeks, I've even had, you know, people talking about sort of, you know, the change of warfare, right?
00:39:09.000The infantry is not the same since the advent of drones, but now you also have maritime drones and these sorts of things where, you know, no different than a crappy IED was taking out tanks with a little cell phone connection to some dynamite or C4.
00:39:25.000You know, how does all of this change as it relates to battleships and destroyers that are out there that now can perhaps more easily be taken out by, you know, these are billion-dollar ships taken out by thousands of dollars drones?
00:39:47.000Because again, it feels like even in the last few years we've seen with the Russian-Ukraine war, you know, the entire battlefield dynamic has changed because of drones and some of these autonomous weapons.
00:39:58.000There are serious problems, the drones.
00:40:00.000These Chinese merchant ships, they have thousands of them.
00:40:02.000They're built to military standards, which means they are hard to sink.
00:40:07.000Well, they can put containerized drones, containerized hypersonic missiles on these, and suddenly there are thousands of merchant ships.
00:43:00.000So where everyone else in the world goes to these minimalist UN standards, I got to do all of the Coast Guard training, and then I got to do all the IMO training, and then I have to do all the Biden DEI leadership training.
00:43:13.000To me, I've been out, I haven't been back to sea in 10 years.
00:43:17.000If I want to go command a ship again, I got to go sit through three weeks of courses on DEI, and then the U.S. very relevant, though, to steering a ship.
00:44:19.000They go out on ships and straight up getting drugged and raped.
00:44:23.000And during the whole Obama and the Biden and your dad's first presidency, because some of his staff weren't very good in there, they did not arrest one person.
00:44:35.000There have been hundreds of rapes of college students at the Merchant Marine Academy.
00:44:39.000There has not been one arrest by the Coast Guard.
00:45:05.000This is why we have huge cruise ships that are owned by foreign companies.
00:45:09.000And, you know, none of them are U.S. flagged.
00:45:13.000You know, the FBI, sometimes, if someone gets brutally murdered and it hits the news, the FBI will go out.
00:45:19.000But they were given very clear instructions by the globalists: do not investigate ports, do not investigate ships, do not investigate any of this.
00:45:28.000And this is, your dad understood this from day one, reopening the port.
00:45:32.000If you looked at the union boss, DAG saying, you know, this is happening.
00:46:42.000They care about it and they care about it because they don't want you guys, they don't want Cash Patel investigating this organization, which traces its back right through the Panama Papers.
00:47:01.000Well, so, I mean, a big theme in all of this is really, I guess, my father refusing to just accept that status quo that's been established by the elite and sort of accepted by the Americans for whatever reason.
00:47:13.000I mean, is there a nexus between the Panama Papers, the cartels, perhaps juxtaposed to my father's agenda against tyrants like Maduro, the cartel traffickers that were shooting down, and yet the MS, the mainstream media, the Democrats seem awfully willing to help them out and protect them at almost all costs.
00:47:37.000Is that what makes my father such a threat to the globalist status quo?
00:47:40.000Or are the globalists in bed with darko-terrorists?
00:47:47.000Well, like I said, we took the reserve currency from the Brits after World War II, and then they were fine for a little while, but they shut down factories and labor took over.
00:47:59.000And they decided they are going to be the reserve currency for this shadow banking.
00:48:04.000And you see it, all of these tags, Apple is incorporated in Ireland, a former British colony.
00:48:12.000You have some of the biggest companies in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda.
00:48:15.000It all ties back to this Panama Papers.
00:48:18.000And the cartels are doing their dark money too.
00:48:22.000So they couldn't control the reserve currency.
00:49:26.000Reuters and the Deutsch, you know, all of these different countries, these journalists go out.
00:49:32.000I was not allowed to get a press pass at the IMO, but all of these Europeans do.
00:49:37.000And they're calling up the Pentagon people to get the information back, feed it to the security states, which are also sucking down this five eyes information and pushing it out.
00:49:53.000And by the way, look at these navies, the Canadian Navy.
00:49:56.000This is something else I want to bring up.
00:49:58.000The Canadian Navy is absolutely pathetic.
00:50:01.000It's not called the Cajun Navy could kick their butt.
00:50:05.000They got like six old ancient destroyers.
00:50:09.000Look at all those missiles coming from China.
00:50:11.000If the Golden Dome, a lot of them are coming over Canadian waterways.
00:50:17.000And Canada, New Zealand, Denmark's Navy is an absolute joke.
00:50:59.000So, you know, just for, you know, for those, because, you know, obviously, you know, we're sort of covering big picture issues that I think we all recognize, but there's a lot of, you know, sort of, you know, small detail in there.
00:51:09.000I mean, for those who aren't that familiar that are watching, can you get into a little bit of the details explaining the Panama Papers and what that means to the average person?
00:51:20.000So everyone knows about Julian Assange and these leaks, the NSA leak.
00:51:29.000Prior to that, there have been these big leaks and they've hit the U.S. news.
00:51:35.000A lot of the times they hit the U.S. news to hurt your dad or other Republicans.
00:51:41.000Well, the one that did not, which was bigger than all of this, bigger than WikiLeaks, bigger than Snowden, was this Panama Papers.
00:51:49.000And it was just a firestorm in Europe of how much corruption led back to Panama.
00:51:55.000And that Panama Papers was started by the delegate in Panama who was friends with the Secretary of General today's dad, Arsinio, who's in charge of this maritime organization, and Biden's junior Coast Guard staffer, Mete Medina, who wrote all of this.
00:52:13.000It all ties back, their fathers in Panama early on were together.
00:52:17.000The UK representatives went and talked to them, read the Taylor of Panama, talking about the absolute surge of MI6 officials into Panama to control that country.
00:52:31.000And it was to establish a hub because you can't just have a reserve currency without the trade and logistics.
00:52:39.000So they wanted to tie all of these networks of shadow banking, Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Switzerland, Ireland, into a logistics hub.
00:53:37.000So for them, it's a fight to the death.
00:53:39.000I mean, every NGO organization, I heard the president of the EU, Ursula, was on the phone the night before, just constantly berating every diplomat.
00:53:55.000Because if we dig into this, if Cash Patels opens an investigation on this maritime, if he ties it back to this Panama and starts asking questions like, who was bussing these millions of migrants over the canal that we built?
00:54:24.000When Clinton pulled this out, Carter sold the canal, and then Clinton pulled this out.
00:54:29.000Where did that Southern Command headquarters, this beautiful building that we built on the canal that was the entire headquarters of our Southern Command, which used to be important with the Monroe document, that was all handed over to NGOs?
00:54:44.000It's filled with these Marxist NGOs now.
00:54:47.000And I don't know who can investigate it on.
00:54:50.000That's not my expertise, but these are American agreements.
00:55:39.000And then we saw him last week going to London and he was campaigning for this slush fund at a maritime organization that for eight years he says he knows nothing about it.
00:55:54.000I mean, yeah, you mentioned Carter being a submarine captain.
00:55:56.000I mean, again, we touched on it a little bit earlier, but looking back to World War II, German U-boats were sinking hundreds of ships in the Caribbean before our Allied forces improved their anti-submarine warfare capabilities.
00:56:08.000Now today, we sort of have a dark fleet of sanctions evading tankers that operate with impunity and a similar stealth, but with a different purpose.
00:56:19.000So maybe I'd like to ask you, what lessons from the Battle of the Caribbean back in the 1940s can impact how we think about this new shadow maritime network?
00:56:31.000Well, this is what the Germans tried to get in the canal.
00:56:40.000They were able to build a number of these.
00:56:42.000And then they had actual logistics submarines, so these whales that went out and they were submarine tankers to provide that logistics chain into the Caribbean.
00:56:58.000Now we have, you know, we have drones.
00:57:00.000I said before, drones don't matter because the Pacific is so big and those drones cannot go out and attack a battleship 1,000 miles.
00:57:08.000Most of them can't even get 100 miles out.
00:57:11.000But now you start putting these containerized drones on container ships.
00:57:15.000And a container ship, I'm thinking, a Chinese container ship passes by a nuclear aircraft carrier in the Singapore Straits and suddenly the containers open up, drones come out and 50 guys come out with javelin missiles.
00:57:30.000We don't have point defense systems for that warfare.
00:57:34.000And this is going back to the Caribbean.
00:58:43.000They're building a bridge over the Panama Canal right now so that when we close down the other three bridges, they can keep that migrant, that illicit stream over.
00:58:54.000These choke points, going back to what Mahan said, are what matter and the potential militarization of, and not just the thousands of container ships.
00:59:04.000They have tens of thousands of fishing fleets just raking the ocean.
00:59:09.000This is what all these Europeans, their number one thing is Trump hates the environment.
00:59:15.000He does not care about the environment.
00:59:18.000You have these tens of thousands of Chinese ships that are absolutely raking all the oceans of fish and all this carbon from going around the Houthis that your dad's trying to solve.
00:59:30.000And the thing that, sorry to go on a rant, the thing that frustrated.
00:59:35.000It's actually fascinating because it's like, it's hard to believe it's, you know, again, I'm not surprised with anything anymore, but it's hard to believe it's this bad and it happened, you know, under everyone's nose.
01:00:07.000If you ask them, they're going to say, well, we've been planning this for years.
01:00:10.000Well, when Trump came in office, they put speed on it.
01:00:14.000And again, it wasn't, it was our person, Mayte Medina, our representative at the IMO, this junior level person, because Biden wanted to appoint a maritime ambassador.
01:00:22.000And if one thing, please ask your dad to appoint a maritime ambassador there.
01:00:26.000Because between sessions, all this happens in the back room, the smoke-filled rooms of London with these NGOs.
01:01:14.000They don't have to pay the carbon tax.
01:01:16.000And we probably would have signed on this slush fund to maybe let them do what they want with their ships.
01:01:22.000But they were so arrogant and so want to attack the United States and attack your dad that they wouldn't even negotiate that minor point to grandfather and 82 ships.
01:01:33.000I mean, there's just no rationality, which means something bigger's at play.
01:01:37.000And what's bigger is at play is this hundreds of billions of dollars of NGO cash.
01:01:43.000So, you know, John, you've compared today's shipbuilding crisis to the destroyer gap that worried naval strategists before Pearl Harbor back in World War II.
01:01:51.000If those admirals were alive today looking at our shipyard capacity versus, say, China's, what would they tell Congress?
01:02:59.000He watched these videos, and I was trying to get him into the Naval Academy.
01:03:03.000And he goes, Dad, why would I go on that rusted ship?
01:03:05.000I want to go on something that looks cool and an F-35 or something.
01:03:10.000So it's just, they've not only attacked shipbuilding, but they attacked the very fabric, this attention to detail I learned at the Naval Academy.
01:03:19.000The only ones to resist it is the Marines.
01:03:23.000They're absolutely been squeezed the last 20 years because they stood up to this.
01:03:28.000And our admirals, they won't talk about it.
01:03:31.000You won't see an admiral go in Congress and say, yeah, it's bullshit that our ships are rusted.
01:03:36.000And I talk to them in private, they're all upset about it, but none of them have that moral courage to get up, stand up and say, we're going to fix this.
01:03:45.000And even this day, they're still fighting behind the scenes, the shipbuilding.
01:03:50.000And that's why I'd love John Phelan is, you know, they wouldn't go to Wall Street.
01:05:30.000Because again, even a guy like me who does this, like still had no idea it was this bad or that this little thing that they were trying to slip through under our noses had such major implications.
01:05:40.000But maybe to close on a broader note, did you see the Secretary of War Pete Hegstein's speech to the Navy football team after their win over Air Force?
01:05:50.000I'm just curious what you think moments like that mean for recruiting.
01:05:54.000And what's our opportunity to really rebuild our military, which clearly needs it?
01:05:59.000Well, my dad was a medic in Vietnam and then a New York City firefighter.
01:06:05.000He gave me three rules in order to live through my 20s.
01:06:08.000He said, if you avoid these three things in your youth, you're going to live.
01:06:15.000Do not ride motorcycles and do not join the Marine Corps.
01:06:19.000He said 90% of all the deaths, and he saw thousands of young guys' death come from those three things.
01:06:24.000And the Marine Corps weren't the intellectual branch.
01:06:28.000And then they got so squeezed by Clinton that they invested in with John Boyd, the fighter squadron guy, invested in higher education and really looking how we do more with less.
01:06:42.000And what they came up with that is while everyone else is closing bases and dropping standards, we're going to double down.
01:06:48.000They fought this DEI from the beginning.
01:08:00.000We got to leave that to the guys watching.
01:08:02.000Make sure they're sharing, liking, sending it out there to the world because, yeah, it's hard to believe something this big just totally went even under my radar.