Steve Kwast
speaker
426 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Steve Kwast’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I mean, the social scoring and the technology to imprison and enslave people, to talk the talk and to do exactly what the Communist Party wants you to do, the lack of freedom and free will is... paralyzing to innovation. So it's not that they don't have innovative people. Those innovative people are not allowed to try and fail. The second one though is over time, China, even their language,
inhibits innovation. I'm not an expert in their language, but I have dear friends that are experts in their language and have lived there their whole life, but they're American. They grew up in America and have lived there as adults studying the language and the culture. And even their language inhibits innovation and the willingness to step out. In America, it is just the opposite.
We are mavericks. We are pioneers. We are innovators. We are risk takers. And we are the envy of the world.
You don't see it if you just live in America, but boy, I tell you, one of the blessings of my life, when I was the general officer working on the joint staff for the chairman in charge of policy and strategy to Russia, Europe, and NATO, I got to travel and visit so many countries, both in NATO, Russia, and Africa and the Middle East, because Afghanistan was in the middle of its aggressiveness. And
They fear us, they hate us, and they are jealous of us all at the same time. They're jealous of us because they are not allowed to do what they see us doing and they wish they could.
But most people that are born around the world are born into a system where there is a glass ceiling, whether it's their socioeconomic status, their political status, their social status, the caste system that get built in, or in Africa, where I grew up, where a youngster looks around and says, There is no way I can be a hero in this condition.
I mean, and so they all want to leave and they want to go to the US or they want to go to Europe. And fewer and fewer now want to go to Europe because they see the suffocation of Europe and the policies that are killing innovation. And there are some good stories about how much they fear us. One of them, and I'll keep this short, because it could be a long story, but the essence is this.
I was in Russia. We were trying to convince the leadership of Russia, okay? This was when Yeltsin was in charge, and Makarov was the equivalent of, General Makarov was the equivalent of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
And we were trying to convince them that our missiles, the Aegis Ashore, Aegis at Sea, this is the SM-3 missile that was primarily on Navy ships, and we were looking at putting it in Poland, designed primarily to defend America from Iran and missiles coming to America from Iran.
Russia was dead afraid of that because they were afraid it was gonna threaten their ICBMs and their nuclear deterrent posture. And our mission was to convince them that it was not a threat.
All of the velocities and all of the physics of proving to them that whether it's at sea or on shore, this cannot threaten your nuclear deterrent posture with America, which would be destabilizing, and rightfully so. And after literally days and weeks of arguing and face-to-face, you know, General Makarov slapped the table at one point and stood up and went on a 20-minute tirade.
And his interpreter, a young 20-something kid scared out of his wits that there was yelling going on with state leaders in a very, very serious conversation, just basically said, you Americans don't understand. We put Sputnik into space in 1957 and you Americans went apeshit and put a man on the moon. You can do anything you put your mind to.
You turn to your industrial base and your innovators and those missiles will kill all of our intercontinental ballistic missiles the moment you tell your industrial base to solve that problem. So we don't give a shit what you say or promise until we get a signed document from President Obama that you will never, Threaten our ICBMs. We have nothing to talk about, so stop wasting our time. Wow. Wow.
And the subtext from the general officers at my level, not the chairman or the vice president or the president's level, was... I wish we had that kind of industrial base. Now, the Russians have some of the greatest innovative minds on the planet. There's something about the culture of Russia, and I know what it is.
Culturally, it's that the Russian youth are forced to fight one another and take risk and be in situations where it's life or death. They use nature, they use fighting, the martial arts, and they celebrate the fact that they put their kids through the crucible. Doesn't mean they don't love them, but they know life is hard, and it's harder when you're stupid, lazy, or weak.
And so their innovators are just killer. They were the ones that created stealth and then we operationalized it. They are doing things in space with hypersonic missiles in the mesosphere that make us look at it and go, holy shit, that is amazing.
Yeah, but those scientists and engineers are jealous of us because the system does not allow them to innovate like America innovates, as quickly as an American can innovate. But America is at risk because there's a military industrial complex. And back to your first question, why are these technologies not coming to the market?
It's because we are becoming our own worst enemy at this superpower we have in our culture, and our mindset of being the innovators, self-sufficient mavericks that are willing to take risk and allowed to take risk. And now the government says, no, I know better and you gotta be safe. You gotta put safety over innovation.
Now we wanna be safe, but I'm here to tell you the two shuttle disasters, when you read the safety reports on that, the reason it happened is because we were trying to be too safe. It's a dilemma.
It is sometimes hard for people to understand, but I challenge you to read the books on the history of both disasters of the space shuttle, and you'll find the root cause of those disasters is that NASA had adapted to a culture where safety was more important than effectiveness. And that's part of why we do not see innovation here now.
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