Salvatore (Sal) Mercogliano: What's Going on With Shipping, YouTube Show Review | Turn the Lens Ep41

Cold Open:3, 2, 1

Jeff Frick:
‍Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here. Coming to you for another episode of ‘Turn the Lens’ with Jeff Frick. And we're going to go a little bit different direction today. You know I was sharing some information with a friend of mine. I spent a lot of time on YouTube. Basically I got commercial free YouTube and once you go commercial free, it's really hard to watch regular TV. Just like if you have commercial free Spotify, it’s really hard to watch or listen to commercials on Spotify. So anyway, so I have paid YouTube, which is great. No commercials. So I watch a lot of stuff and share it with a lot of people. And my buddy said, ‘Jeff, why don't you help other people discover some of these things?’ And really, I think in the context of information, in the context of new sources, in the context of open source, I think it's important that we look at a lot of different sources of information and media, to try to get the information as to what is going on. I don't really watch news, U.S news anymore.

As a lot of you know, I follow the Ukrainian war pretty closely and came across a number of folks there that are publishing stuff, who are Ukrainian, who have access to the open source data, and are subject matter experts, and can give you a little bit more context, and then you've got 3 or 4 of them and they're all using different open source data sources. You can kind of start to triangulate and get a little bit better feel for what's going on. None of us ever really know. But I want to take a minute and just highlight a couple of cool things that maybe you should check out on YouTube. That maybe you didn't think about, but actually have a lot of information about what's going on in the world today. You'll be amazed at how much information these people get from the open source resources.

So the one I want to highlight today is called ‘What's Going On With Shipping?’ It's hosted by a guy by the name of Sal Mercogliano. And you think, ‘What's Going on With Shipping?’ Is that very exciting? Well, it turns out Sal launched his channel when the big Evergreen container ship (Vessel EVER GIVEN) got stuck in the Suez Canal, if you recall, and clogged up the Suez Canal for a little while ago. And you think, okay, well, that's a big global issue, that impacts shipping, that impacts everybody. It impacted the routes that all the ships are going, it impacted global commerce. But there's been other things that have gone on that maybe you didn't think about, like the crash of the ship [MV DALI] into the [Francis Scott Key] Bridge in Baltimore, that knocked that bridge down, which is a horrible tragedy.

But why did that happen? What happened to that ship? And these guys can go in and break it down, even to the level of the engine systems, the electrical systems, if you recall, the lights flickered on and off a couple times before it hit the bridge. Sal and people like Sal will go through the detail as to what happened, what type of electrical system, what can they guess happened from that data?

Another thing that's been happening is the aircraft carrier [USS Harry S. Truman] got run into right outside the Suez Canal. If you recall. Sal breaks it down. Where was the aircraft carrier? Where was it going? Where was the ship that hit it? How did it hit? What direction were they going? What's the most likely cause? And do they have transponders on? All these things that if you don't know much about shipping, maybe you didn't know about this thing.

The Russian oil fleet is breaking apart in the Black Sea. So, Sal will break it down. What ships broke? How old were they? It turns out that they were ships really designed for inter coastal passageway, not out in the ocean. And that's why they—that's why they break.

There's all the issues going on with ships breaking communications and power cables, all around Europe. And we've seen it in a number of places in Taiwan where ships either on purpose or not on purpose, dragging anchors and breaking communication cables and energy cables, which is not good and important to all of us.

There was just recently a crash of a ship into a tanker that was supporting the US Navy. I think it had jet fuel on it, you know, nuclear aircraft carriers run on nuclear power, obviously. So they don't need diesel fuel, but they need fuel for the airplanes. And this ship just ran into a US tanker [MV Stena Immaculate] that was carrying jet fuel for airplanes on an aircraft carrier. Well, that impacts aircraft operations pretty significantly. And we don't have a lot of those ships in the fleet.

There's the whole Houthis fighting with the U.S. Navy and trying to disrupt shipping, which is changing the way that people ship goods. There is, you know, what's going on with Trump and his statements around Panama, his statements around tariffs. And if you're in the shipping industry, how does that impact your planning and what you're trying to do? It's a big deal. And with them changing frequently, it makes it a little bit more difficult.

The list is long and there's more interesting things happening in some of these sectors that you might not have thought. And because of the power of open source and the power of these people that have the context and know where the data is and know how to operate the tools, you will learn a lot more than you probably anticipated.

So check it out. What's Going On With Shipping? [www.youtube.com/WhatisGoingonWithShippingwSalMercogliano] I'll put a link in the description below. Thanks a lot. Let me know if you enjoy it. If there’s any of your favorites, please put them in the comments. Take care, Jeff Frick checking out. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Bye bye.