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Nov. 15, 2025 - Epoch Times
59:27
He Said No to Billions from China. Now They’re After Him | Declan Ganley
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Time Text
99% of global internet traffic relies upon a series of subsea fiber optic cables around the world.
But Chinese cable cutting incidents have shown how easily they can be sabotaged.
I believe that they were testing response times and reactions.
It would be very easy to take down the global internet by targeting those subsea cables.
If that happens, the last thing anybody is going to be thinking of in Poughkeepsky is, is Taiwan being invaded right now?
Telecommunications entrepreneur and Robota Network CEO Declan Ganley has been working on a solution.
It's called the Outernet, the world's first self-contained satellite-based communications network.
And the Chinese regime has been trying hard to get its hands on it.
It was made clear.
You take the money.
We launched this thing from China.
We will be your partner.
When I refused, they decided to launch a torrent, a tsunami of lawsuits.
CCP Lawfer has already cost Ganley and his company over $36 million.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jania Kellek.
Declan Ganley, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Thanks for having me, Jan.
So over the last two and a half years, you've had to spend over $36 million on illegal fees against Chinese Communist Party-affiliated entities.
How is this even possible?
Explain this to me.
The project that I am leading is to build and deploy what we're calling the OuterNet.
So it is a satellite constellation in low Earth orbit that is different to Starlink, very different to Starlink.
It's approximately 600 satellites in polar orbits, but with spectrum, radio spectrum that links from the ground up to the satellite and back again that has high priority.
So it's important block of spectrum and a technology and an architecture that is unique.
And without explaining technically how that's done, not because I'm not willing to do it, it's just it would take too long.
It will create the world's first completely self-contained global communications network.
So every other global communications network that you've ever heard of is actually a patchwork quilt of other people's stuff stitched together.
And you are always going through networks that are attached to other people's networks.
So even say if you take OneWeb or Starlink or so you're on Starlink when you're on Starlink but when you go into a ground gateway and that signal is being carried to its end destination over subsea cables and everything else it's carried over the internet.
So these are internet services ultimately, internet Internet networks, and that data is carried over a kind of public highway, if you will.
The outer net is a completely closed, non-public highway that is completely self-contained, that does not touch the internet.
And so, you can join any point on the planet to any other point on the planet without touching anybody else's network, infrastructure, ground relay station, subsea cable, etc.
What that nets out to mean is that it is inherently the most secure, truly global communications network that will be in existence.
Over about 4,000 kilometers or greater, it will be the fastest network in existence with the lowest latency, and you will be able to guarantee data sovereignty.
So, why does any of that matter?
Because if you are a government, if you are a bank, if you are a large enterprise that wants, for whom, ultra-high speed, low latency, and complete data security, so avoiding the public internet, that that matters.
That's a very important and valuable capability to have.
And it's a capability that, on a global basis, you cannot get anywhere else.
So, it's a combination of different ingredients that creates a completely unique thing that, if you're a government or a large enterprise, is a game changer.
It's a game changer, and it strikes me that this is something that the Chinese Communist Party would be incredibly interested in.
So, they are.
You're not wrong about that, Yan.
And the and this comes back to your first question: why?
Why have we had to spend $36 million defending against the Chinese?
What possible interest could they have in controlling the outer net?
Well, the answer would be very significant, and they have gone to bat to try and take control of and ownership of the outer net.
And they've done that in a number of ways.
But where that has ended up is that when I refused to sell out to them to take their money and walk away, which it seems that they seem quite accustomed to people doing that, they decided to launch a torrent, a tsunami of lawsuits that were baseless,
that were unwinnable, that were almost cartoonish in their flakiness.
But in the full knowledge that we would have to spend money to defend against these insane lawsuits, and we can get into the sort of the detail of how they did it and what they did.
But the idea ultimately is to make your life and your corporate life and your personal life as difficult and stress-filled as possible,
while at the same time dangling a carrot of saying, you know what, we'll buy you out, we'll give you a lot of money, and this stick that is beating you on this side can be massively outweighed by this carrot that we're dangling in front of you.
Take the carrot and the stick will stop.
And that's ultimately what they did.
So we've had $36 million of so far of stick, and we're not taking the carrot, and we will never take the carrot.
And they don't like that.
Incredible because it sounds so much like other scenarios at perhaps a smaller scale that I've heard about with respect to how the Chinese Communist Party works.
Let's go back.
Tell me a little bit about yourself.
How is it that you came to be constructing the OuterNet?
I'm a telecommunications entrepreneur.
I've been in the wireless industry really since I was 19 years old.
I'm now 57, so I've been in it for a while.
And I have built a number of businesses and developed a lot of intellectual property and technology over the course of the last decades now, unfortunately.
But it's been several decades.
I have built a team since really the mid-1990s of engineers, PhDs, and people with a really unmatched track record in the wireless technology sector and develop new technologies that are applied in areas like 5G and 6G to come.
And we have had our battles with Huawei for many, many years.
I was one of the very early voices warning about the threat to Western telecommunications networks from Chinese, compromised Chinese, communist Chinese supplied equipment.
I feel that we were very vindicated in that.
So we had quite a lot of form.
We clashed with them all over the world.
And then I had been involved in the satellite industry very early on in my career, stepped out of satellites to focus on terrestrial wireless technology.
Then about 2005, slowly started to move back into areas that had to do with the satellite technology.
And then encountering opportunity that was coming with new spectrum that was going to be allocated by the ITU, which is the UN affiliated body that licenses satellite spectrum globally, sought an opportunity to develop what is now the outer net.
And my concern there was for years I was watching the concentration risk of subsea cables, that there were so few of these archeries that connect the internet globally.
And it struck me that it would be very easy to take down the global internet by targeting those subsea cables and that we needed a network that was completely independent of those subsea cables and frankly, the internet that would not replace it but that would be available and would survive the internet being taken out by taking out the subsea cables or a massive cyber attack or whatever else,
that there No truly global data network.
That was an alternative if we lost the internet.
So the need for that was very obvious to me, and I focused my teams, my brilliant engineering and research teams on solving that.
And hey, presto, we came up with the outernet.
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And now back to the interview.
So just very briefly, before I started talking about TikTok possibly being a more potent weapon of the Chinese Communist Party against its adversaries, I was talking about Huawei as being possibly the Chinese Communist Party's most potent weapon against everybody.
What's the problem with Huawei, briefly?
Well, I mean, you have an entity that has to comply, even if we look at what's on the surface, what we know, and is indisputably verifiable.
They are legally required as a Chinese company to provide intelligence access and information to the Communist Party of China.
They actually have no choice.
That's not to suggest they're doing it unenthusiastically.
I believe they're very enthusiastic in what they do.
And I'm on record for years talking about this threat because once you have data networks that are providing regular communications for everybody, for people that are watching this show, whatever their walk of life, for businesses, for governments, for the installed everyday communications base, for the Internet of Things, for cars,
for everything is operating over these wireless data networks.
And everything from all the way out to the e-node B, which is the final cell that touches your phone wirelessly and which your phone is communicating with, where that e-node B, that cell, is being patched and updated with software from China every day because the contract with the carrier allows and requires that they do this.
We have handed over the keys to the kingdom.
And when you have an intelligence gathering tool that operates at that level, it's going to know more about what is going on in a given place than the government of that given place can possibly know itself.
Because you can get as granular as knowing how many people are in that apartment on that floor at that moment.
Where did they come from?
Where did they go to?
Who is it?
Who did they text or email while they were there or on the way or on the way back?
And we're relying on encryption to protect messages that are going over these networks.
But the ability of the Communist Party to decrypt these messages is immense.
And then if you apply AI to that and you use AI to do the data mining, good AI will be able to answer a question like, you know, what did John Smith do on the 23rd of October 2022?
Where was he that evening?
Was John Wiz's wife or was he with somebody else?
Who was it?
What were they doing?
I mean, the level of information that you can extract from that data pool using AI is, we've never seen that level of information in history.
There would be no TikTok from China if it hadn't been for the way that the West so mishandled its allocation of radio spectrum because it made carriers,
mobile carriers, dependent upon Chinese financing and technology because the Communist Party of China were willing to subsidize Huawei and other Chinese equipment to be deployed into these countries.
So now you see Germany that has a 5G network and many, many other countries, a 5G network of Huawei equipment, which they now want to rip and replace, but that equipment was financed, it was discounted.
I mean, the Communist Party of China made sure that those networks were put everywhere, but they were put everywhere because the way we allocate radio spectrum in Western countries requires massive upfront payments to governments for spectrum licenses.
And when those companies make those upfront payments, the offer of soft Chinese financing and equipment is too irresistible.
The price of a gigabyte of data in America or in Canada is up here.
It's amongst the very highest and most expensive data in the world on a wireless network.
Whereas in China, it is a tiny fraction of the price.
So because you have a low barrier to entry to the price of data, if you're building an app like TikTok, young people can afford the data.
And so all of these new apps get developed in China first because the price barrier to entry to using then and getting rapid scale adoption, which is what you need for these apps, that shifts to China and out of the United States and the Western countries.
And that's what's happened.
If we had had a healthier system of how we allocate radio spectrum, TikTok would have been invented in the United States years ago and it would be an American innovation.
Are you basically saying that it doesn't matter if Huawei has towers in your country or in your region or whatever?
There's still these patches that you're describing are still coming in because of contracts?
Yes, yeah.
And the governments don't even know this, right?
So the way that the governments got suckered was up until 5G, they talked about the core, that the core of the network, which was like the data centers, the computers, if you will, that ran the network, the brains of the network were in one place or a small number of places.
And the servers that ran these networks, everything was taken back to what they call the core.
So they would say, well, Huawei aren't allowed to have the core.
They're going to just do the edge of the network.
The thing is, is that in 5G, one of the great innovations of 5G and that you have in 6G is it moved the brains of the network away from the core and out to the edge of the network.
Why?
To improve speed and data processing.
So the brain is no longer focused in the core.
It's spread out across all of the network edge.
And it's done to increase speed and efficiency of processing.
And the patches for those edge networks are in many, many cases done under contract from China.
So you have, and the sale to this, to those carriers, those mobile carriers, was you can reduce your overhead, you can reduce your workforce.
You're not going to have these big payroll bills for doing this stuff.
We can run the software updates and the patching from China.
And those are sometimes subcontracts, but that bypass reference to the core, but those updates are being done daily.
And they're being done in many cases from China itself.
I mean, it's nuts.
That's an astonishing reality.
There is a story that came out a few days ago about, I think it was Norway and Denmark shutting down, removing communications chips from their buses because they realized that these buses could be harnessed from China.
Well, guess what?
That's true for so many devices and so many things.
And, you know, the potential to actually harness a vehicle is one thing, but the potential to gather the information and the data is another.
And I mean, the other thing that I've just been recently through some interviews becoming aware of is that there's an astonishing amount of this kind of data available just in the public domain, never mind that deeper level of penetration that you're describing.
I mean, I remember there's one case, I believe, that one of these, you know, people in the know was able to demonstrate the locations of, for example, Delta Force members just through triangulating around certain, you know, taking educated guesses around things like what they might be doing.
And people were shunned how we could.
And this was open source.
This is like, you know, someone that could do it with an AI.
Presumably they fixed that now.
So you know about Salt Typhoon, of course.
Yes.
Anywhere where there is Chinese, and by the way, remember, Salt Typhoon is in networks that aren't Huawei.
Of course.
But what strikes me, I was thinking about Salt Typhoon as you were describing these patches that are basically going into this whole edge of the 5G network.
I mean, you could kind of imagine that the, do we even know that the compromises were possibly in those patches, right?
So you could have, you know, the hackers and the patchers working.
I mean, there's all sorts of opportunities here, aren't there?
Yes.
Yeah.
I mean, we've talked about some of them, but there are more.
And there is no halfway measure or, you know, well, what can we do that's enough?
It's really, You know, on or it's off.
There isn't a halfway measure here.
You cannot allow this stuff into your country.
You have to keep it out.
You have to know what your supply chain is.
The vulnerabilities of these networks.
And by the way, how we got here is a whole other story.
I touched on it a bit because this did not have to happen.
This did not have to happen.
This was indolence, it was frankly a failure of regulatory failure and regulatory capture.
And it was a lot of, and we're seeing it now, a lot of trying to close the stable door after the horse has bolted.
Let's talk about the lawfare because I think you've painted a very compelling picture of why the CCP would really want to get its hands on an outer net or make sure that one doesn't exist without it having that special access that it seems to have to all the other networks.
Well, I mean, the outer net's a whole, I mean, what we've talked about is really the internet, right?
This is internet and terrestrial wireless networks.
Yeah.
The outer net is the thing that survives if you take all that other stuff out.
And it does the most critical data communications it can do then.
And you're absolutely right.
So they either want to have it or they want to make sure that nobody else has it.
And that would be that's sort of choice number two.
And we've heard anecdotally that that's actually what they're looking for.
But just one thing, you know, if they were to cut those underseas cable, I've heard this discussed as a kind of an early, you know, if they were to make an acute military move beyond this unrestricted warfare they've been waging, but actually, you know, go into full kinetic.
But wouldn't that cut them off as well?
Yeah, but they're ready for that, I would argue.
if you know you're going to do that and you have your own closed network in a continent that's continental terrestrial network and you are planning for an event like that and you have stockpiled the things that you would need to have before the internet went down and you had transportation systems that were resilient enough to
operate without the internet, you could do that and look if the internet goes out.
You know today and it goes out globally that the approximately 550 global subsea cables were cut.
The internet goes down, the existing satellite systems that you've heard about go dark.
They won't work because they all use ground gateways and ground relay systems that ultimately require and rely on these subsea cables.
So you will have this cascading domino effect where your phone, your smartphone, will not work.
Your tv will not work because the ip Based signals that are producing that, that tv show and putting it onto your tv, that's going to all fail.
The logistics systems that supply that, that the, the wholesalers use to supply supermarkets, will also fail.
There will be no flights.
Flight aircraft will be grounded because of the ip Based systems that they're relied, rely upon.
Gas stations will not be able to get refueled because of the supply.
When that happens, if that happens, the last thing anybody's going to be thinking of in you know, Poughpski is, Is Taiwan being invaded right now?
And they're not going to think about it or care about it, probably for months, because they're not even going to know it happened for at least days and probably longer.
The first thing that will work reliably will be a transistor radio, and everybody should have one.
But there'll be guys in bootstrapping radio stations to get them, get the older tech, some of the older stuff turned back on so that they will be able to broadcast.
And that scenario is not some dystopian, oh gosh, it would be so hard to do.
It's really like you could do, I could do it for approximately, and I know I'm safe with this number, $60 million will do that job, will take out the global subsea cables.
That's how pathetically vulnerable the global subsea cable infrastructure is, because it's just so big, it's so vast, you cannot protect it all.
And it's not academic.
I mean, we saw these ships, you know, basically dragging anchors and destroying these cables.
We already see how it can be done.
And in a taunt that was a very public taunt for those people that understand what they're looking at, when that Chinese ship cut that cable and then couldn't be boarded afterwards because it stayed in international waters, they stopped it, but they were able to stop it from being boarded and inspected.
At the same time, they released into the public domain a patent application in China for an anchor system that was specifically designed to cut subsea cables.
And that was a taunt.
And what was going on there, I believe, is that they were testing response times and reactions.
Who responds?
They know how many subsea cable repair ships there are, and there aren't many.
They know who the people are that can actually fix these things.
Talking about the granularity of being able to follow data, they know where they live, they know who they're married to, they know where they work.
I mean, mapping these response times, what happens when a subsea cable gets cut, what happens when 20 subsea cables get cut, what happens when 50 subsea cables get cut, what's the point where they can't possibly fix these things in a realistic enough time to get the internet back on for a month, two months, six months, a year, two years.
There's answers to all of those things.
And the cost of doing that is frighteningly low.
It sounds like you've been wargaming these scenarios somehow.
And people looking at this will be, oh, well, look, Declan Ganley's got a, you know, he's got a dog in this fight.
You know, I've got a vested interest.
You know, he wants to get the outer net adopted and everything else.
Yes, I do.
Yeah.
But what I'm saying here on camera with you, Yan, it's so much worse than what I'm saying.
The vulnerabilities there.
I'm not going to tell people how you do this, but we need the outer net yesterday.
It's needed immediately.
And that's not to say that a determined actor like Communist China could even destroy the outer net, but not quickly.
And the thing is, and they certainly couldn't do it covertly.
You would know it was them.
And the data network that can stay up the longest and that can survive that initial event is a highly prized thing.
And that's why they went to lawfare, to war by use of the law, which is Chinese People's Liberation Army published doctrine.
They have published it.
It's in their doctrine that you use the laws and regulatory aspects available in other countries against those target interests.
And they wanted this and they wanted to control it.
And we wouldn't sell it to them.
So now we have 158 different legal actions and counting, all of which they lose.
They are willing to lose as long as it's making us spend money.
Well, spend money and distraction.
I mean, that's with a little bit of experience with lawfare.
It's not just the money.
It's also focus.
Of course.
And here we are, and this is what we're talking about, right?
And the outer net is a phenomenal piece of technology, a remarkable piece of global infrastructure that will change the world for the better and will make the democracies much more secure than they are.
And large enterprises in the banking system and the payment systems and everything else.
But instead of talking about that, we're going to be talking about and are talking about these utterly frivolous, flaky Chinese-backed lawsuits that have had us a new post-startup, but pre-revenue, largely pre-revenue company in terms of the outer net anyway, have to spend $36 million of cash that we have to raise from investors.
Before we dive into a bit of this law fair, we're not going to be able to look at all 158 scenarios.
So we talked about the stick here, but what about the carrot?
What was the carrot?
So the lawfare had started almost three years ago now.
We were at the Paris satellite show, which is one of the two main events of the space industry that happen, the satellite industry that happen globally.
There's one in Washington, which happens early, in the early part of the year, and then there's one that happens in Paris, which generally happens in September.
And we, Rivada, were there.
We had a display.
We had a stand, podium, all the stuff that you have speaking.
And I was actually at our stand, and I got approached by a gentleman who was quite senior on the Chinese side of things.
And he had come from China and he said, Mr. Ganley, I've come here just to see you, just to meet you.
It was a Monday morning.
And I said to him, well, that's very nice, but I have a very full schedule this week.
And he said, I will stay in Paris until I can meet you.
I said, fine.
So I decided that I would meet him on the Thursday.
And I met him at the Place Vendôme.
And we had a walk around.
And during that walk around, he told me how, of course, justified their actions and why it was necessary that they took all of these legal actions.
But that it was nothing personal and nothing against me, and that they think that I'm a great inventor and a wonderful person, and that they really wanted to be my partner, blowing smoke at me, you know, and buttering me up, basically.
And they said that they had $7.5 billion for the project.
And not only did they say that, but at the satellite show itself, they leafleted the show and even had those flyers put on each table at the venue of the hotel where the show was held.
It was the Western Hotel in Paris.
and saying that the funding of the $7-plus billion was there and this project was going to be going ahead by them.
And he said...
Wait, which project?
The OuterNet, that they were going to do it the OuterNet.
Exactly.
What were you thinking of these leaflets?
I mean, it was a topic of conversation because they were claiming at this time, they were claiming that this was their project because they had attempted a hostile takeover of a German company that had developed some of the technology around this.
And they failed in that hostile takeover attempt.
And the German government ruled against them and found against them saying that a Chinese company cannot take over this entity.
But they were saying that they were doing this project themselves anyway.
But this gentleman in our stroll around the Place Vendôme said that they would give me 50% of the equity and they would fully fund my 50%.
So out of the 7.5 billion dollars.
Not quite, but almost.
A lot.
Yeah, $3 plus billion dollars.
Now, did I believe that?
No.
I mean, however, he was pressing upon me that this is what they would do.
He asked if he could have a follow-up meeting.
I had a follow-up meeting.
And in the follow-up meeting, it was made clear.
You take the money, you go in partnership with us.
We launch this thing from China.
We manufacture the satellites in China.
We will be your partner.
And we will be a much better partner for you than anybody else in the world could possibly be.
And he said, we will deliver China, Asia, Latin America, and Europe.
He said, we will deliver those markets.
And he said, we won't be able to deliver North America at the beginning.
But he said, we will immediately be able to deliver all of those other markets as addressable markets for this project.
We will be your partner.
You will have the capital.
You will have the equity.
You will have the equipment.
We will get this thing done.
You will use your team to work with us in China.
You can keep some of the operations in Germany.
And if you, he didn't say it as bluntly as this, but that if you don't do this, your life will be miserable.
The lawfare will increase.
And we are going to make sure that this project will not happen.
I mean, they were ready to give you everything.
That's what he said.
And well, you would, I mean, the price of your soul, perhaps.
Well, that's how I see it.
You know, there were people that said, well, look, just do it.
I mean, this is this is no one's going to care.
No one's going to even know.
Everybody else does it.
And, you know, there are entrepreneurs who have got massive interests in China, and it's never harmed them.
It's never, far from it, it's propelled them.
Why would it be any different in your case?
And for me, I had taken a conscious decision many, many years ago to never do business in communist China.
And the reason for that is I started off as a 19-year-old going to the Soviet Union to seek to do business there.
And I saw that Ronald Reagan was right, that it was the evil empire.
And I had Russians tell me that Ronald Reagan was right, that it was the evil empire.
And the source of that evil was Marxism and was communism, where to be at the top of those organizations, you had to sell your soul.
It wasn't an option to not do it.
You had to do it.
And I know what it is to deal with communists.
And people say, well, they're not really communists.
Well, yeah.
Maybe they're not really communists, but they are individuals who have sold out to be able to harness the power of that communist party, which only can exist by means of oppression and the oppression of the human spirit and of human freedom.
And if you think you're going to convert them, I would say you're being naively optimistic.
And they, it's that old saying about, you know, when they talked, what Lenin talked about, the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we shall hang them.
That's what Lenin said.
And we have been not just selling the rope, but giving the rope to the Chinese communists with which they are hanging us and our economies.
We have transferred our industrial base to China.
We have made our energy prices way more expensive than energy prices in China.
We have absolutely handed them data network dominance on a plate, and now they want this outer net.
And why do they want it?
Because they want the fastest network in the world, the lowest latency network in the world, the most secure network in the world.
And you don't actually have to be Tom Clancy to imagine how that could be used to great effect by them.
You're just reminding me of an episode I did some time ago with John Lenchowski, one of the chief Soviet affairs advisor at the NSC for Ronald Reagan.
And he, very compellingly, to your point, explains how you don't need people to believe in communism for it to actually be operational in a society.
And in fact, in some ways, it's better for them not to believe entirely because it's more compromising.
I mean, this is my true believer, if you're not a true zealot, if you aren't really a Marxist and you know it's just a means to power, you're an even more compromised individual morally and spiritually.
Let's talk about a couple of these cases.
You know, you're involved in court in Europe, in the US, and frankly, even in China itself, which must be Up until the last few weeks, all of the hundreds of legal actions took place in all Western jurisdictions.
For the first time, they are now starting a case in China in a court in Shanghai.
And I won't be traveling.
And they're accusing you of IP theft, which I tell me, tell me what you think about that.
That can be broadcast.
It is Alice in Wonderland.
It is through the looking glass.
It is the inverse and direct opposite of the truth.
It is breathtaking and galling and shocks the conscience that somebody would lie by saying that black is white and just and would take you to court for it.
And it's you, the IP that has been stolen from us is very, very extensive.
And this is the thing.
It's not actually about that.
It's about making us have to hire lawyers and defend against a case and spend money.
Can I give you an example of something in the US, which is really an interesting case?
So they sued the company and me personally for defamation on a zero-win chance defamation lawsuit.
Like just complete nonsense.
And I'm not exaggerating.
Basically, they said I called them Chinese and therefore it was defamatory.
It's like you're Chinese.
I mean, this is who you are.
It's on the documents.
And the defense that we had to mount, if you're suing somebody for defamation or you're suing me for defamation, you would sue where you can get jurisdiction.
And the best places to sue if you want to take a defamation case are London, the UK.
Ireland is also a very good place because the defamation, the hurdle for defamation is a lower hurdle.
Now, the awards in the UK or Ireland are not as high as they are in America because the defamation hurdle in America is much higher.
But if you win a defamation case in America, the awards are much bigger than they would be in the UK or in a place like Ireland.
However, they sued for defamation in America.
Why?
Because when you lose a case in America, generally the courts do not award costs automatically.
If you were to sue me, for example, in London and you lost, it's highly likely that the court will award costs against you.
So you would have to pay my legal fees.
If you were to sue me here in Washington, D.C. for defamation and you lost, you probably wouldn't have costs awarded against you.
And then what you do is when you would lose, you then appeal that decision.
And then when you lose the appeal, you appeal that decision.
And then when you lose that appeal, you keep appealing until the courts say you are no longer allowed to do that.
And that's what happened in the US.
But interestingly, in the US, there was one in one of the appeals where there was a decision made, there was one technicality where they said, well, there's an issue of $4,000 of something, $4,000, which, you know, maybe you have a point on this $4,000 issue, which is just a non-thing.
And they are now suing for the $4,000.
And the cost of that case to take the case and to defend against it will be multitudes of that number.
So it's not about winning a case that says we have to pay you $4,000.
It's about making us spend all the dollars to defend against a case where the only reason to do it is to bleed you out, to make you spend money.
You know, this legal warfare or lawfare, it's described in the book Unrestricted Warfare.
These two Chinese colonels wrote back in the day.
But in 2003, there were three warfares which were codified into Chinese warfare doctrine.
And to your point, I mean, lawfare is one of those sort of key three elements.
There was a hearing on the Hill.
I don't know the expert that gave the testimony.
I've never met them and never spoke to them.
But they selected our example and gave it as an example of Chinese lawfare in action.
Okay, so you've got a $3 billion carrot.
You've got a $36 million stick ongoing.
Could be a lot more than that.
Why do you do it?
A number of reasons.
Commercially, the value of the OuterNet far exceeds any of these numbers, including their $3 billion, far exceeds it.
The OuterNet, once it's up and turned on, as the global, the world's first completely self-contained global communications network, as an entrepreneur, I have a view of what the value of that is.
And it's many multiples of any of the numbers that we've talked about here.
I might be completely wrong about that.
But that's my entrepreneurial sense of what the value is.
That's also my uneducated guess as well.
Right.
It seems, you'd think it, right?
You'd think if it does what it says on the tin, then it really is all these things.
And of course, it's going to be a very, very valuable company in global terms.
So commercially, it's worth it.
I mean, 36 million compared to the value of what that's going to be, it's relatively speaking, a drop in the bucket.
But it's not a drop in the bucket when you have to raise that money from investors because you're pre-revenue on the major project itself.
And so killing things like this in the cradle is the place to kill them.
And killing them by offering a big carrot is the best way to kill them.
But of course, the donkey has to take the carrot.
And this donkey is not taking the carrot.
And it seems that that's not something they're accustomed to.
And the reason the donkey isn't taking the carrot is because I know what the outer net can do.
And I do not want the Communist Party of China to have the OuterNet.
I would rather burn it down than have the Communist Party of China have the OuterNet.
Because my children, my family, our democracies, our way of life could depend upon them not having the outer net.
And I think that the probability of this becoming important is at least it's probably around a 50% probability that this could be a definingly important asset.
And I don't want them to have it.
I'm not a government, I'm just a guy.
Frankly, governments haven't been that motivated by this, but I know how dumb governments are.
I saw them implement policies and regulations that allowed Huawei and China to dominate the global wireless industry and literally deploy 5G networks in Western democracies, not just under the noses of governments, but with governments welcoming them and applauding them.
That's how stupid we can be.
So the fact that you have to wait for a long time for the penny to drop, that you can be in a bar fight with the Communist Party of China for so long without the cavalry showing up, it's no wonder so many people give in.
Now, the system should be better than relying upon individual entrepreneurs and business people to not take the 30 pieces of silver.
Who's the cavalry here?
The cavalry should be the Western democracies, one or more of them, that should have stepped up years ago to make sure that this thing didn't get as far.
Were it not for the fact that the team of people that I work with are so committed to this mission and making sure that the Communist Party of China cannot have this, this would already be theirs.
This would be a fact in space today.
It would already be there.
What would you like to see happen next as we finish up?
I'm executing.
I am executing to the mission.
We are putting the outer net up.
We will fight every lawsuit that the Chinese bring, as we have done.
We will win them all, as we have been doing.
We didn't get into the nitty-gritty of all these little actions.
I mean, they'll never sue you one time for one thing.
They'll sue you three, four or five times for that thing, and they'll try different courts, and they'll try different judges in the same court.
And they'll serve you on one.
You'll beat that, the one on the service, but they won't serve you on another one.
And they'll send it.
In one case, we had it, a case was sent to some lawyer in a jurisdiction where the lawyer said that they were receiving for us.
We never heard of that lawyer before.
They didn't work for us.
It was someone who was willing to risk their law license to say that they were in receipt of a suit.
And because we didn't know that that action had even taken place, we had defended one, we had won it, and then we found out we had an injunction against this.
It was a temporary injunction.
We got it overturned in the end.
But we said, well, hang on, no, we beat that.
We beat that case.
And they said, well, there is an injunction, and it's from this court.
And then we checked, and it was a different judge.
And we found out that this judge, unbeknownst to the judge, the judge didn't know, was told we had been served and had got confirmation from someone saying they had received service for us.
So we beat the case in the injunction in this room of the court.
We lost it in another room of the same course, not even knowing that this one had been taken.
And we found out about it the day after they notified us about it, the day after the final day to challenge it on the simple way of challenging it.
So we had to go through a much more lengthy process to be able to challenge and then overturn that injunction.
And look, that is one place in the weeds.
And then you have things like our people being followed around, where they're not hiding behind trees or wearing false moustaches.
You can see you're being followed.
And that's to get in your head.
And that has stopped, but that went on for a while as well.
And I could go on and on and on, but it's all about creating stick, creating pressure.
And they know how inept Western governments are.
They know how slow they are.
They know how naive they are when it comes to communist China.
I mean, look at this case in the UK, where these two guys that the Crown Prosecution Service wanted to prosecute for spying cases being dropped.
I mean, they know this.
And so the number of instances where if they want to target something, that somebody is going to look around and look at over their shoulders and say, well, do I take the money and run?
Or do I stand and fight?
And the cavalry aren't going to show up for quite a while.
And actually, my message here is, and it's probably not a great message, but understand that if you are in the private sector and you are fighting the Communist Party of China on something, the cavalry ain't coming for a long time, if it comes at all.
And you are on your own.
And you are going to have to find it within yourself to have the spirit and the esprit de corps in your organization to mount that fight.
But remember what we're doing it for.
We're not doing it because a government tells us we shouldn't deal with the Communist Party of China.
We should be doing it because what we're doing is the right thing to do.
Whether our government acts or doesn't act, that's the thing that we have to remember.
So, and look, you see people that go and companies that go and make massive investments in China and become captured by the Communist Party of China's economy and apparatus.
There's no downside consequences for that.
It is rewarded.
So this is a long march.
This is a long march, and we have to have the character and the spirit to make it.
And if you are in the private sector and you are being targeted this way, expect that you're going to have to fight on your own and it's a lonely place sometimes.
But eventually it will be worth it.
The word courage comes to mind.
It does.
And courage, I don't know if you've ever watched that.
There was a British show made in the 80s called Yes Minister.
And of course, people that are familiar with London, Washington will know it very well.
You know it very well, yeah.
And in yes, minister, when Sir Humphrey, the senior civil servant, the Mandarin civil servant of Whitehall, would say to his minister, who then became Prime Minister, the Prime Minister would say, oh, I want to do this thing.
I want to have this policy.
I want to have this fight.
And Sir Humphrey would say, that's very courageous, Minister.
And the Minister would immediately know, oh, he said, is it?
He wouldn't want to do it because he knew that that symbolized recklessness.
And courage is something that has been devalued in the West over the last 40 years.
It is not prized.
It's prized in military action.
It is not prized in private sector action.
It is not prized in commercial action.
Nobody gets thanked for being courageous.
So when you hear that a business leader is being courageous on a point of principle, people hear, this sounds expensive.
That's a broken system, by the way, as you know.
I think that there is long-term value in courage.
And I think there's long-term commercial value in courage on not taking the money and running.
I believe that.
I also believe it's just the right thing to do because I believe I'm a Roman Catholic and I think that ultimately I will be accountable to the final judge for what I do or do not do.
And that certainly motivates how I think about things.
Well, Declan Ganley, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
It's been an honour to be on, Jan.
Thank you very much.
Thank you all for joining Declan Ganley and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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