Erik Prince, son of a conservative billionaire and former Navy SEAL, founded Blackwater, which evolved into a controversial private military contractor accused of reckless tactics, the 2007 Niswar Square massacre killing 17 civilians, and severe security negligence. After selling the firm in 2010, Prince allegedly established an illegal "Kingfish" force for the UAE using slave labor and attempted to build an armed aircraft under code name "Echo Papa," which was exposed but resulted in no charges. Despite claims of sex trafficking, political donations to Trump, and plans for a forward operating base in China, Prince remains free, illustrating how immense wealth and legal maneuvering shield private armies from accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Welcome Back to the Internet00:02:32
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you.
I got you.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello, internet, and welcome back.
I am Robert Evans, and this is Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the worst people in history.
Eric Prince and Blackwater Origins00:15:30
Today, our subject is a little guy named Eric Prince.
Miles, what do you know about Eric Prince?
I know they started Blackwater.
Okay.
Well, I know he's the brother of Betsy DeVos.
Right.
And I just know about like how generally Blackwater is evil and there's some fuckery involved.
But aside from that, I just know Eric Prince equals Blackwater equals military contractors equals war crimes.
Okay, yeah, that's a good, that's a good basic, basic line.
Well, Eric was born on June 6th, 1969.
D-Day.
Yes, but 1969.
Yeah.
So the D-Day of the Summer of Love.
I don't know why I'm obsessed with D-Day.
Well, it's a good day.
Yeah, it was.
I think it's Private Ryan, actually.
Yeah.
He was born in Holland, Michigan.
His father was Edgar Prince, an entrepreneur who built a billion-dollar company, the Prince Machine Corporation from the ground up.
His company built like a type of illuminated mirror that's common in cars today.
So his family got super rich.
Wait off, what do you mean an illuminated, like a backlit mirror?
Yeah, exactly.
So that like you can see in the mirror at night or whatever.
Oh, and they're living off that invention, basically.
Well, that's how his family got rich.
Right, right.
So his dad was like a legitimate, started making 40 cents an hour and like created a business, got super rich.
And then, you know, with his money, decided he should do some good in the world.
But his version of good was founding the Family Research Council.
You know what the Family Research Council does?
I know they were spreading some kind of really bad misinformation back in the day.
Yeah, back in the now, too.
Oh.
One of their staffers wrote in 1999 that gaining access to children was a long-term goal of the homosexual movement.
So it's that kind of like anytime there's family.
You mean facts.
Yeah.
I really, shout out to the Family Research Council for their...
Wow.
So that was his version.
Okay.
That he wanted to spread.
That's what he wanted to do with his money.
Evil fucking conspiracies.
Okay.
Yeah.
Eric's mother, Elza, donated $75,000 to a campaign to stop same-sex marriage in 2004.
Clearly worked.
Elsa and Edgar also formed the Prince Foundation so that they could use their family's wealth to advance general right-wing causes like abstinence-only education, state-sponsored prayer, and the fight against abortion.
In order to get around restrictions on lobbying, the Princes reclassified their lobbying as prayer warrior networks.
So basically they said, like, we're not lobbying politicians.
We're asking them to pray over certain issues.
So we're not saying vote against abortion.
We're saying pray against abortion.
And that's different so we can spend our money with less restrictions.
So they were registered as lobbyists before?
Yeah, and there's more restrictions on how lobbyists can spend your money.
Right.
So they were like, we're not lobbyists.
We're prayer warriors.
Oh, so did they just kind of do that thing where a lot of people, dark money groups, just become 501c4s?
Yeah, it was something like that.
Yeah, like those nonprofits that don't have to disclose any of the origins of their money so they can do whatever.
Yeah, yeah.
They found a shady way to make themselves less accountable with the billions or millions of dollars that they were spending on garbage.
You obviously heard that Eric's sister is Betsy DeVos.
It probably won't surprise you to know that he grew up religious, conservative, and rich.
No.
He donated $15,000 to the Republican Party when he was 19.
$15,000?
Yeah, when he was 199 when he was 19.
So he's a normal guy.
Yeah, I know.
For a second, I forgot that you said he grew up rich, and I was like, what fucking job did he have in high school that he had that much money?
But you're rich.
So his job was being a rich kid.
Or, you know, his parents just used him to make as much of a max out donation to the party.
They love to do that.
Just like, get the kids to donate and we can give you a lot of money.
Right.
Donate a lot of money.
Yeah.
Suddenly a 19-year-old has $15,000.
Yeah, but he was, you know, a normal down-to-earth kid.
Like most people, he got his pilot's license before he got his driver's license.
You know, that old canard.
He attended a Christian high school in Holland, but Holland, Michigan.
Not the cool Holland.
Not the Netherlands.
Yeah.
He went to the Naval Academy, but according to one of his professors, he did not think it was conservative enough.
So he left to attend Hillsdale College.
That the military wasn't conservative?
The Naval Academy is a bastion of left-wing nutjobs.
I know, it's a bunch of cucks and hippies with long hair.
Like, that almost seems like he's trying to impress someone by being like, oh, the Navy wasn't conservative enough for me, so I had to leave.
Well, Eric denies that that's why he left the Navy.
One of his professors is the one saying he was pissed off because we, the Navy, professors, weren't conservative enough for him.
Oh, gotcha.
Yeah, right.
He didn't want people to expand his way of thinking.
Yeah, yeah, that's what it seems like.
So do you know anything about Hillsdale College?
No, I don't know anything about Hillsdale College.
Hillsdale College is like one of the rightest-wing colleges in the country.
They basically worship the economic theories of Ayn Rand.
For some sort of color on what the school's like, in 2015, their school chaplain sent this email out to students and faculty.
Hey, friends, exclamation point.
Just to give you a heads up, ugly things are happening in the Supreme Court right now.
Justice Anthony Kennedy is seen as the, quote, swing vote.
And if that is the case, he will have the power to legalize same-sex marriage, all caps, nationwide.
Yeah.
I do not even think we can imagine the effects this would have on our nation, the church, and families.
So we are praying for God to give the justices and the courts wisdom, courage, and discernment for evil to be revealed and destroyed and for a heart of love and sound mind.
So we want to destroy the gays with a heart full of love.
I love when conservatives like sort of like, you know, sound the war drums of like the gays might be able to have rights.
And like I'm always curious how they play that out in their head.
Like that leads to exactly what like I really want to know.
If they have a very clear vision of what that looks like when, you know, the LGBTQ community has like undisturbed rights.
Like do they think, I don't know.
I mean, it always seems like very aggressive what they think will happen.
Well, if we let gays marry, then we could wind up with a country where like, I don't know, the president sleeps with porn stars and pays them $130,000 to keep quiet.
And that would be just...
It would be a post-morality America.
Yeah, exactly.
Where is Hillsdale College?
It's in Michigan.
So he's not leaving.
He's a Michigan boy.
Well, at least he was a Michigan boy.
Right.
So he's all about his comfort zone.
Yeah, at this point in his life, that's kind of where Eric is.
And yeah.
So in 1990, he gets a sweet job becoming an intern in George H.W. Bush's White House, which you'd think would be like this kid's dream job.
You know, super conservative president.
Not considering to work for him.
Yeah, exactly.
Eric gets pissed off that George H.W. Bush's administration is not conservative enough.
Quote, I saw a lot of things I didn't agree with.
Homosexual groups being invited in.
The budget agreement.
The Clean Air Act.
I mean, that's...
What the fuck?
I don't understand what that means.
Is that like his sort of like, you know, big government philosophy?
Is that what he's sort of putting in?
Yeah, you know, the Clean Air Act is anti-business because it wants people to be able to breathe.
And like, it's better for business if people can't breathe.
I mean, that's basic capitalism.
Because, yeah, Christ professed his love for capitalism.
Hated air.
Yeah.
Hated air because he didn't need it.
Now he's Christ.
Yeah, exactly.
So why should anyone else?
I'm trying to be more like Christ and not breathe air.
Toughen your lungs up.
Right.
Walk on some water.
After his time as an intern, Eric got a gig as a volunteer fire fighter.
So that's nice.
Until in 1992, he joined the Navy SEALs.
He was apparently good at his job.
He was deployed to Bosnia, Haiti, and the Middle East.
But tragically for Eric, his service came during a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity, and he never saw combat.
Oh, he didn't?
No.
Oh, that's a shame.
Oh, that's the shittiest kind of Navy SEAL.
Yeah, that's the garbage Navy SEAL.
Yeah, like you don't even have a fucking good story at a bar when someone's like, yeah, man, what'd you see?
Have you seen G.I. Jane?
I went to Haiti.
You did some fucked up shit in Haiti.
No, we kind of did a lot of push-ups.
Yeah, we're kind of just moving potable water around.
But yeah, oh my, wow, that really, that must have been heartbreaking for him because he seems like somebody who really wants to shoot people.
Yeah, like a war boner.
Right.
No, but he's, he just, I mean, basically, if you're a Navy SEAL and you don't fight, you're just a really good swimmer.
Right.
Yeah.
And like future fitness instructor.
Yeah.
And I'm sure, in fairness to Eric, he's, I'm sure he's a great swimmer.
Oh, yeah.
This dude can tear up an Olympic pool.
No matter what your politics are, your body and your physical fitness is at another level as a Navy SEAL.
Yeah.
And yeah.
I have the body of just a harbor SEAL.
So Eric leaves the Navy SEALs early in 1995 because his dad dies of a heart attack and he's got to deal with that, deal with the family money.
They sell the company and they make like $1.3 billion.
Get split up between him and the rest of his family members.
He gets hit with a second tragedy when his wife gets breast cancer.
She was able to have two kids, but she died not that long after.
But Eric, you know, settled down to a quiet life of being incredibly wealthy and he started a 6,000-acre training facility for security operators.
He named this base Blackwater.
It was a place where you could go if you were a military unit or a police unit, a SWAT team and do training.
They had like a fake high school there so that you could practice like dealing with a Columbine situation where they had like recorded one or perpetrating one.
Right.
Is this a crisis actor conspiracy theory thing that you drop on us, Miles?
Look, Robert, when you're on my podcast, we'll talk about crisis acting.
It's called Inside the Crisis Actor Studio.
Let me just talk about the craziest conspiracies and how everyone's a crisis actor.
No, I'm not.
No, I don't mean to cast dispersions on that person.
But yeah.
Wait, so Black...
Oh, so in a way, he was just kind of like, I want to create like the gym for cops and military people to beef up their It's not an unreasonable thing to do like people who are in SWAT teams and whatever need like fake schools to practice in because that's the thing they might have to do so he's providing that so far relatively reasonable right um but over the next couple of years Prince shifted Blackwater from a training facility to a company that also provided security personnel for the U.S. government.
One of Blackwater's first contracts was actually in China guarding North Korean defectors that the government was afraid the Chinese would abduct to send back to North Korea.
So they didn't want to put U.S. soldiers or CIA guys on these guys because that could be a diplomatic incident.
So they have private security to get them out of the country and stuff.
That they were extracting them from China?
Yeah, that's what I understand was sort of the situation at that point.
So again, not an unreasonable thing.
The government always needs a couple of kind of deniable assets to score that stuff with.
So pretty low level, low-key.
That's kind of what he's moving into.
But it's not total darkness yet, but I'm starting to see the sun start to go down.
Yeah, sun's definitely setting right now.
We're past 4 p.m. here.
So, you know, 9-11 happens after that.
And I'm sorry, what was 9-11?
Oh, I feel like we should stop and pull a Wikipedia page up.
Yeah, can we pull something up?
Oh, that, yes.
Okay, I'm on board.
Also, jet fuel can't melt steel beams.
Yeah, you say that a lot.
Hey, look, what happened to Building 7?
That's my question.
Anyway, so 9-11 goes great for Eric Prince.
He's on the Bill O'Reilly show not that long after, and he notes that his phone is ringing off the hook.
He attempts to join the CIA, but he fails to pass their polygraph test.
Whoa.
Yeah.
Do you know what kind of stuff they ask you in apologies?
No, I mean, I know in general polygraph tests, but I don't know what the CIA was asking him.
Well, clearly, it must not be good to be hooked up to a truth machine and tell lies to the CIA.
Although polygraph tests have been kind of, people say they're dubious a little bit, right?
They're supposed to be pretty sketchy.
I don't know.
I'm not here to defend what's going on, but yes, right.
Yes, he tries to get into the CIA, and the CIA is like, you're a little too shitty for us.
We're going to go continue to smuggle crack into the inner cities.
Exactly.
So Eric isn't going to let the little thing like the CIA stop him from living out his dream of walking around with guns in foreign countries.
He forms Blackwater Security Consulting, and he moves his company into the business of selling mercenaries to the government.
His hope was that Blackwater would, quote, do for national security apparatus what FedEx did for the Postal Service.
Hold on.
Let me process this.
That what?
He wants to do for the national security apparatus what FedEx did for the Postal Service.
Wow.
Like, let me take a little burden off you and also do it in a crazy aggressive way.
I want to be the FedEx of shooting people.
Yeah, right?
Exactly.
Like, look, of course, the U.S. didn't kill those people.
You know, just U.S. contractors did.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
So this is where we're going.
Yeah, he's a visionary.
I'm starting to see the vision.
So 2001, Blackwater has a total of about $730,000 in federal contracts, right?
So kind of small beans at this point.
In 2004, less than a year into the Iraq war, they had $48 million in contracts.
By 2007, they'd made more than a billion dollars in federal contracts.
By 2007?
Yeah.
Wait, when did it start again?
I'm sorry.
2001 is when he started to start.
And then by 2007, he turned that into a billion dollars.
Yeah.
Fuck is it?
So pretty good rate of return.
Yeah.
How do I invest in Blackwater?
You probably don't.
I'm going to get into it.
You don't know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
2001 was the time.
Yeah.
No, 2000 was the time.
Yeah, I guess was the day.
August of 2001.
God.
September 10th was really the time you wanted to put money into mercenaries.
Yeah.
So after the invasion of Iraq, Eric volunteers to provide the government with hundreds and eventually thousands of contractors.
His men carried guns and guarded high-value government officials and convoys.
Since they were private civilians who regularly got into gunfights and war zones for money, some people call Blackwater's contractors mercenaries.
This makes Eric very angry.
Here's a quote from a Newsweek article titled Profile Blackwater's Eric Prince.
Quote, that's a slanderous term, an inflammatory word they use to malign us, says Prince.
Mercenaries, he says, are professional soldiers who work for a foreign government.
Blackwater's men are Americans working for the American government.
Okay, semantics, man.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
So that's this is Eric's point of view on the mercenaries he's providing to the U.S. government.
Yeah.
They're not mercenaries because they're American and so is the government.
You're still a sell sword, though.
Yeah, you're still selling your ability to kill people for money.
Right.
Yeah.
And in a way, it's like shittier because it's like you couldn't even make the real team and be like an actual military person now.
So it's like, I guess I'll do the mall cop version of being a cop, which is a Blackwater guy.
Yeah, it's like one of the things that's respectable about the military is like, oh, you know, you're not making that much money.
Like you get, there's got to be some degree of like something you want to do or like there's some degree of idealism as opposed to like, no, I'm making a quarter of a million bucks a year to go shoot people.
Yeah, because you can argue that someone in the military, like their sort of North Star is being patriotic or being nationalistic or whatever.
Yeah.
Versus like, yeah, you're Blackwater.
You're like, I'm here for the check.
And I get to shoot people for a lot more money than I did when it was not honorable, but I'm making eight times as much money to do the same job.
And I don't have to follow the rules.
Because a lot of their guys are ex-military, right?
Yes.
Absolutely.
So a guy can't just be like, hey, I'm here for the Blackwater tryouts.
We'll get to that a little bit.
Okay.
So in actuality, because he was just saying, you know, his men are Americans working for the American government.
Dangerous Jobs in Iraq00:03:58
In actuality, many of Prince's employees in Iraq were from Pakistan, Yemen, and other countries, collectively known as Not America.
A State Department investigation found that these, quote, third world nationals were often forced to live in horrifying conditions, three people to a tiny room with no bed or air conditioning.
So this actually speaks to a big misconception.
When we think of Blackwater, we think of like big burly mercenaries with beards and machine guns.
They have those guys.
That's a big part of what they do.
But they also, in all of the contracting companies in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of the people they provide are like poorly paid foreigners from Southeast Asia or the Middle East who like run the kitchens and drive trucks and convoys to transport food and ammunition.
And so like those guys are doing horribly dangerous jobs and a lot of them die.
But if they die, the U.S. government doesn't have to say anyone died.
So it's like, oh, six Bangladeshis died driving MREs to troops in this base.
Nobody needs to know.
Yeah.
No U.S. soldiers died.
Yeah.
No Americans died.
So that's a lot of what Prince is doing.
So, and even then, he's even hiring people in like not combat roles necessarily, but just to do sort of other legwork.
Yeah, but they're going to get shot and they're not in armored vehicles.
Yeah, it's really messed up.
So Blackwater's armed contractors, who are the guys who made the company famous, were good at protecting their clients.
They never lost a client in Iraq, but they were bad at the winning hearts and minds thing.
So one of their favorite tactics was to drive on the opposite side of the road as fast as they could and shoot above any vehicle that didn't drive away fast enough, which they said protected their convoys and which Iraqis said was fucking terrifying.
They drove in the opposite direction of traffic and shot above the cars that were coming towards them.
Yeah, if anyone got too close, they would shoot above them.
Just be like, get the fuck out of the way.
Yeah, I know I'm driving on the wrong side of the road.
Yeah.
This is Blackwater.
Yeah.
Now, in a little bit of fairness to Blackwater.
So like one of those.
Traffic is really bad.
So you do drive.
Well, it's not entirely unheard of in Iraq to direct traffic with guns.
When I was there last time, I kind of made friends with a guy, an Iraqi army guy who was directing traffic at this checkpoint in Mosul.
And whenever he'd get to an argument with somebody, he would shoot next to their head with his M16.
And I was like, what are you?
That seems really messed up.
Really?
It was like, well, yeah, but like, I'm doing this 12 hours a day.
And if I yell at everybody, I'm not going to have a voice.
And I got to be out here all the time.
So it's just easier to shoot next to him.
Wow.
Just bucking shots like that.
Yeah, he said he spent about 180 rounds a day doing that.
Just like pop, pop.
Rather than talking.
Yeah.
I'll just squeeze off 180 shots.
Well, just one or two at a time.
Yeah, yeah.
But I mean, a lot of people.
Yeah.
But Blackwater, you know, it's the driving on the opposite side of the road thing that's that's the most controversial thing.
So here's what one Baghdad housewife told a French journalist about them.
They sail off the roads and drive on the wrong side.
They simply kill.
That Newsweek profile in Eric quoted an advisor for the coalition forces who had traveled with both Blackwater guys as her guards and American soldiers as her guards.
And she said that Blackwater guys had explained their attitude towards the Iraqis as, our mission is to protect the principal at all costs.
If that means pissing off the Iraqis, too bad.
So in September of 2006, a Blackwater convoy driving down the wrong side of the road struck an Iraqi car and sent it careening into a telephone pole.
The car caught fire.
Blackwire drove off without rendering aid and the driver died.
It's not the only time that happened.
That's just a time that happened.
Yeah, right, right.
Because they're just always driving on the other side of the road super fast, shooting at people.
Oh, right.
They're like, we don't even know what the right side of the road is.
We just know the Blackwater side.
Yeah.
Here's another quote from a Baghdad traffic cop.
They're impolite and do not respect people.
They bump other people's cars to frighten them and shout at anyone who approaches them.
Two weeks ago, guards of a convoy opened fire randomly and that led to the killing of two policemen.
So, yeah.
Another journalist who spent a lot of time with them, Robert Young Pelton, noted that they use their machine guns like car horns.
So.
Wow.
Wrong Side of the Road Tragedy00:03:58
Eric, you've got a great group of employees here.
Yeah.
It's funny because I only just know of like isolated incidents here or there or that I was familiar with like during the Iraq war about hearing about Blackwater and the kind of shit they did.
But like when you when you really start to like, as you're revealing it to me now, realize like they're like frat bros in a war zone.
It's great that you bring up frat bros.
We've got a break for commercials, but once we come back, we're going to talk about Blackwater's drunken shenanigans in Iraq.
And then we're going to move on to Eric Prince's new job in China.
So all that after some ads.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Stat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He allegedly a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Non-Combat Deaths Explained00:15:18
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
And we're back, and we're about to talk about the frat bro aspect of Blackwater's history.
I could feel it.
I could feel it.
I could feel it coming.
I do want to note, I found a lot of these quotes in a really good Brookings Institute article called The Dark Truth About Blackwater.
So if you're looking for more info on these fucks, that's a good source.
In 2004, Blackwater won an exciting new contract to help deliver kitchen equipment in Fallujah.
They were eager to impress the Emirati company that hired them and they rushed the delivery.
Now, I don't know if Prince was eager to impress this company, but he was the guy running the whole company at this time.
So somebody from Blackwater, Topside, said, get this kitchen equipment to its source as quick as possible.
And the people whose job it is to determine how to do things were like, okay, well, we need at least six armed men and they should all be in armored vehicles.
And whoever was in charge of the mission was like, no, we'll have four guys and they'll drive normal cars.
There'd be four guys in a VWS.
Yeah.
And they were supposed to let the U.S. Marines who were in charge of Fallujah at the time know that they were going to be there in case they needed backup.
It's a good thing to let the Marines know.
Yeah, that someone might be operating that they need help.
Okay.
They didn't.
So these four guys get ambushed and killed.
And a, quote, enraged mob drags their burned bodies through the streets and hangs their corpses from a bridge.
Oh, I remember these.
Yeah, you do.
Yeah, yeah.
That whole incident sparked the Battle of Fallujah, which is one of the bloodiest fights of the entire Iraq war.
Around a thousand or so civilians died.
It's hard to say, along with 95 U.S. soldiers.
Wow.
The kitchen equipment was never delivered.
Yeah.
Someone's got a nice kitchen, though.
Somebody's got a great kitchen, or it all got burnt.
I don't think Blackwater impressed the company.
No, not at all.
I guess they really did try and do their FedEx thing also where they're like, and we will get it there in record time because they'll be so understaffed.
Well, you know, I've lost count of how many times I've ordered something through FedEx and their employees been ambushed and hung from a bridge and sparked a brutal month-long siege of the city.
That's why I don't order from Creighton Barrel anymore.
Yeah.
Because they use FedEx.
Yeah.
It's just too many deaths.
It's messy.
Yeah.
It really is.
Yeah.
Tragic.
So the high-profile murder of four employees did not exactly lower Blackwater's tempo in regards to flipping out at any Iraqis who came near them.
In 2005, the Brigadier General responsible for security in Baghdad noted that in two months, contractors were involved in 12 shootings that resulted in at least six civilian deaths.
On Christmas Eve, 2006, a Blackwater employee got shit-faced and started wandering around the green zone.
He staggered up to the Iraqi vice president's house, got into an argument with his bodyguards, and shot one of them to death.
What the f ⁇ ?
Next, this brave patriot ran back to a checkpoint, guarded by another group of contractors and told them he'd been in a firefight with Iraqis.
He was clearly drunk and waving a gun around.
They disarmed him and tried to question him, but he was just way too hammered to be questioned.
So Blackwater fired the man, flew him home, and paid $15,000 to the family of the dead guard.
It was a tragic incident, but not, they assured, a sign that their employees were a bunch of irresponsibly violent cowboys.
Holy shit.
How is that not an indication that they're a bunch of irresponsible cowboys?
Hey, you know what?
The guy, he got fired.
And, you know, it took him...
$16,000 to that family.
I mean, I get it that in Iraq, that could be a lot of money.
So that's like that, maybe that's the going rate that Blackwater deems as like, you know, consolation pay.
Well, this gets into a really messed up area.
But like the initial amount the U.S. government suggested they give the family was $250,000.
But then other people within the government, so this is in Blackwater, were like, well, if we give that much money to the family for dead areas.
They're going to be broke.
Well, no, people are going to get their relatives killed to get money from us.
That was their fear.
Whoa.
Not that that ever happened because I don't know that it did.
But of course, it's like how all people think when you're talking about destitute communities.
Like, well, they're going to find a way to take advantage of this.
Yeah, they learned out.
Yeah, exactly.
And they'll self-murder and frame us.
And they'll get their kids murdered for cash.
Right.
Holy shit.
And that was the government.
That's not on Blackwater.
Right.
I mean, the murders on Blackwater.
Well, absolutely.
But, you know, you'll be happy to know that the employee, he was fired.
He was sent back to the U.S.
And it took him two months to get another job at a private security firm and wind up in Kuwait with a gun.
Jesus, right back.
You can only fail up.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or at least laterally.
Yeah.
And now I think he's Ryan Zinke, right?
The Interior Secretary.
In August of 2007, the State Department decided they should investigate Blackwater because of everything that I've said so far.
Took them a while, though.
Yeah, they came up with a bunch of fun incidents once they started asking around.
One of the things they found is that several Blackwater employees had gotten hammered as fuck and stolen a $180,000 armored vehicle and driven it to a party where they accidentally crashed it into a concrete wall.
Wow.
What the fuck?
It's so weird to like hear this, right?
Because on one side, it's just like deeply troubling, evil, tragic shit that they do.
And the other side... is not that it's funny, but it's so reckless that you can't believe that.
Well, I guess you can because I've never, you know, I feel like all the things we hear about how the United States operates outside of this country is just in a very sort of haphazard way or irresponsible way.
So yes, okay, go on.
Let this uncomfortable laughter continue.
So the investigation did find that Blackwater had been cutting corners.
They regularly reduced the number of their men guarding high-profile people without actually charging for fewer guards.
Automatic weapons were found stored in private residences, which not supposed to do.
Blackwater employees were found to drink heavily, party with prostitutes, and regularly failed to qualify on their weapons.
They were also found to carry weapons like grenade launchers that they were not certified to use.
What?
Wait, so they're drunk as fuck, and then they'll be like, yo, where did you get that M203 grenade launcher?
They're like, hey, I just bought it on eBay.
Oh, man, you can't get it.
So use it over here.
I think we're talking about like the automatic grenade launchers that you mount on the top of a vehicle.
Oh, right.
Like big, like sort of murder cannons.
Yeah.
Okay.
I don't.
I think that's called like an MK some, I don't look, someone on Twitter.
Now, I've seen him shoot a couple of times.
They're definitely fun looking, but, you know, maybe qualifying.
Wait, so how are they getting it, though?
Do you know, like, are they self-supplying it and they're just simply like, oh, you're actually not supposed to be.
Yeah, the Blackwater has is able to, as one of these companies, they're able to buy that sort of equipment to use in these war zones.
It's just that there are certain standards that like the military has for anyone who's going to be using that shit in a war zone.
Like if you're carrying that weapon and you're a Marine or whatnot, you've done certain things.
Right, clearly.
These guys are required to qualify on those weapons too if they're going to carry them in war zones and they're not.
Blackwater is basically not holding its people to the same standard as the military.
The military, right?
And they're treating it like, yo, I just put rims on my dad's fucking navigator.
Let's take it out for a spin, except this time it's a it's a rocket launcher and you're in a war zone.
Exactly.
Okay.
Yeah.
So in response to this, so the State Department, you know, does this investigation and finds out Blackwater is fucking up all over the place.
So the State Department investigator, you know, is sitting down and talking to the guy Eric Prince appointed to run Blackwater's operations in Iraq.
And this conversation turns heated.
And the Blackwater guy threatens to murder the State Department investigator and says, quote, no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq.
That's the State Department guy recalling the conversation.
This guy's basically like, I'm going to murder you if you don't stop investigating Blackwater.
And we're in Iraq, so nobody's going to give a shit.
Right.
In space, no one can hear you scream.
In Iraq, I can murder, you know, undisturbed and no one will do it.
And you know I can because you just investigated all the times my company's murdered people here.
Yeah, without any kind of repercussion.
Yeah.
You would expect all of this to have some consequences.
But the U.S. military, well, government mainly, was kind of in a bind when it came to Blackwater and other contractors.
So in 2007, there were at least 160,000 contractors in Iraq.
This means they equaled and perhaps, since they weren't required to disclose their true numbers, perhaps exceeded the numbers of the U.S. military in the country.
So Eric Prince's pitch at the start of the whole fighting thing, which the Bush administration had bought Hookline and Sinker, was that contractors would allow the government to vastly increase their presence in the country without paying a political price for it.
So Bush can say, we only need 160,000 troops to keep Iraq safe.
But thanks to contractors, they've got 300,000 plus guys in the country.
The government also loved contractors and needed them because their deaths were easy to ignore.
By 2007, at least 1,000 contractors had been killed and 13,000 wounded.
Nine per day were dying at the height of the surge.
Many of those people were the Third World Nationals we talked about earlier.
Right.
Probably, because we don't actually know how many contractors died.
It could be even higher.
And we don't know where any of them came from because none of that is required to be reported to anybody.
And none of those deaths go on the official tallies of U.S. losses in the war on terror.
Wow.
So the government knows Blackwater is fucking up and they're ruining the Hearts and Minds thing, which is a critical part of being an insurgency.
But also, they can't function the way that they've come used to functioning in Iraq without these guys because they're most of the effort now.
Right, right, right.
Yeah.
And so a lot of these people here saying who are like the Third World Nationals, are they coming with any kind of military training?
Most of them aren't doing military.
I mean, so most of those people are getting killed in sort of non-combat roles.
Exactly.
Whenever you've got a military occupation, like when the U.S. military is in Iraq, there's 160,000 service members in Iraq.
Most of them aren't kicking indoors and getting into gunfights.
Most of them are maintaining vehicles and doing, you know, putting up communications equipment and all that stuff.
It's the same with the contractors.
Most of them are driving trucks or cooking for people or maintaining building spaces.
What do you think that percentage?
How does that percentage you think, or what's the ratio to like...
I'm going to guess most of the people dying are driving trucks.
Wow.
Because there's constant streams of trucks all throughout the day.
And those guys, yeah, those trucks aren't armored.
Right.
Because fuck it.
We don't have to do anything because they're Third World Nationals who are just a digit on a paper or a spreadsheet.
If they die, it doesn't hurt us politically.
Bush isn't being asked to account for dead, you know, foreign national contractors.
How many Bangladeshis were killed?
Yeah, exactly.
I don't fucking know.
Fool me once, man.
You're not going to fool me again.
Yeah.
So despite the rough patches, the first four years of the Iraq war went pretty well for Eric Prince.
It is possible that some of this went to his head.
In mid-2007, he gathered a bunch of contractors at Blackwater's headquarters in North Carolina and mandated they swear an oath of allegiance.
Okay.
I think the text of the oath said a lot about, you know, swearing to fight the war on terror and, you know, loyalty to the principles of America and stuff.
But a former employee, an actual Blackwater armed contractor, told the New York Times it kind of felt like pledging allegiance to Eric.
That's how a lot of us interpreted it.
Wow.
Yeah.
He, I mean, he has such a weird origin story, too.
Like to not watch it starting off as like rich kid who, for whatever reason, was like, I mean, I don't know whatever reason, probably his upbringing was hyper-conservative and now turned into like this sort of demi-god.
Yeah, mini little dictator, his own little fiefdom army thing.
Yeah.
So a couple of weeks after he has them all pledge loyalty, disaster strikes when Blackwater employees freak out and start firing machine guns and grenade launchers into a crowd at Baghdad's Niswar Square.
They killed at least 17 people, wounded dozens more, and one of the people they killed was a nine-year-old boy.
He was like burnt to the bodies of his parents in a car.
It was horrible.
Blackwater's immediate response to the massacre was to take down their website and refuse all interviews.
The company spokesperson sent out an email in English only to Americans that said the civilians reportedly fired upon by Blackwater professionals were in fact armed enemies.
This contrasts with the opinion of the U.S. military who found no evidence of insurgent activity in the square that day.
But that's just the military.
Right, right.
Yeah, what do they know about insurgents?
Right.
Let the contractors do the real work.
That's insane.
And so their account to defend themselves for slaughtering a bunch of innocents was that, like, was there any, like, like in the reporting of it, like anything that someone could even perceive to be as a threat?
Or do people just think like they're so unprofessional that they got spooked and just fired on a bunch of civilians?
Tell you that when you hang out in crowded Iraqi cities, especially when there's a lot of unrest, you're going to hear gunfire regularly.
My guess from what I've read is that somewhere else in the city, there was some shooting or maybe even a fucking backfiring car.
There might have been a bomb that went off somewhere else in the city and these guys got spooked.
Oh, right.
And just said funny.
Maybe they saw a guy who looked shady and they heard a sound that was shady and at the same time and people just started firing.
And maybe a couple of the bullets ricocheted past and that made them keep firing.
Right.
It's hard to say, but the military says there's no evidence that they were under fire at all, that there is any insurgent activity.
After releasing the statement, Blackwater put their website back up.
They made no mention of the massacre and continued to sell Blackwater-branded t-shirts, baseball caps, and baby clothes.
Your strategy is sort of like literally kind of putting their fingers in their ears by taking their website down and like, well, just wait for this to pass, but let's make sure we're getting the merch out there too.
Put the merch out there.
I mean, I've ordered some of the baby clothes for Jack.
I feel like it's a good gift.
I mean, he's wearing the Blackwater hoodie you've got.
Jack loves Blackwater fashion.
Yeah.
He's big into contractor wear.
I mean, if Jack, I think he should really be thinking about in terms of his own powerful ascension.
He should have a private army, too.
Everyone needs a private army.
Nobody's disagreeing with that.
We're talking about Jack O'Brien.
Jack O'Brien.
If you haven't, if you know about this podcast, you know what universe you're in.
The only Jack there is is Jack O'Brien, Blackwater enthusiast.
Yeah.
We could keep talking about Blackwater for several podcasts.
There's so much that I just didn't even include.
But the Eric Prince story is much bigger and dumber than that.
And so we have to move on.
Oh, okay.
So that was an amuse bouche for the main course?
Well, there's just a lot to cover here.
So, you know, after that whole massacre thing, some people go to jail, although their convictions were overturned last year.
What?
Yeah, well, again, that's a lot of stories here.
Layers of Legal Complexity00:06:59
But Prince changed the company's name to XE from Blackwater to avoid the bad press.
Right, right.
And then he sold the company in like 2010.
It's now called Academy with an I because I don't really know why.
Blackwater is no longer Blackwater.
Prince was no longer with Blackwater.
He was still devoted to the company.
And one of the last things he did was work with the games developer to make a Blackwater video game.
According to Prince, the game's purpose was to, quote, give players the chance to experience what it is like to be on a Blackwater team on a mission without being dropped into a real combat situation.
We already have games for that, sir.
They're every other video game.
Yeah, exactly.
If you just want to kill people randomly and whatever.
Okay.
It was like a Kinect Motion game.
I haven't actually played it yet.
It was?
No.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
It was a Kinect Motion video game where you had Blackwater fucking.
Where you were a Blackwater guy.
It was apparently very bad.
All of the reviews I've read are terrible.
Yeah, because I can't imagine like people, I found a lot, like people who are sort of like in the very conservative side of things, they tend to not have the best taste in creatives that they work with.
So I'm sure they probably just found some kid who's like, you know, it's like they went to Infinity Ward who made like Call of Duty and were like, hey, we need you for the new Blackwater game.
They didn't pull all the stops out for this.
Are the gestures like, oh, anyway, I'll have to read some of these.
I've got a couple.
There's a quote from IGN that could double as a review for the actual company Blackwater.
They said, it employs nothing but bad ideas and it fails to do anything exciting with any of them.
Another reviewer from Giant Bomb noted that the game presents Blackwater employees as, quote, a bunch of selfless, good-natured, totally not mercenaries who save hostages and deliver food and totally don't kill civilians.
How could they when there are literally no civilians anywhere in this game?
No margin for error in that one.
Yeah.
Kill them all.
Yeah.
So I know what you're thinking.
Isn't it sad that poor Eric Prince had to give up on his dreams of having his own private army?
Well, don't worry.
Eric does not give up on his dreams.
He's not that kind of man.
After selling Blackwater, he relocated to Dubai.
The Emirati police ponied up $529 million for him to create an 800-man foreign fighting force because, you know, they have internal revolts to suppress.
The Emirates are filled with crowded labor camps.
That's who builds all those famous buildings to buy.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, slave list.
Straight slave label.
Slave labor from Southeast Asia, at best a half step up from object slavery.
Right.
And there's a lot of unrest there.
So the UAE was like, Eric Prince, would you make us an army of foreign soldiers that we can use to brutally suppress people?
I need something to quell the revolts that are impending with your professional killer groups.
Okay.
Eric Prince was just the guy to make that happen.
The whole operation was almost certainly illegal.
American citizens are not allowed to train foreign soldiers without permission from the State Department.
During his last year in charge of Blackwater, the company had paid a $42 million fine for illegally training troops in Jordan.
So this is like a pattern with Eric Prince, illegally training foreign troops.
In order to sidestep any problems this time, Prince just pretended he wasn't involved.
He adopted the code name Kingfish, so no one would know that he was committing blatant international crimes.
Wait, what do you mean the code name?
Like, he was like on transmission the documents.
Oh, so there would never be the words Eric Prince wouldn't show up.
There was a company like RS2 or something like that was the name of the company doing the training, and Prince was connected to them and owned them, but like, didn't, like, it's one of those like when you've got enough lawyers and stuff to figure out the layers of it's it.
There's been some great journalists uh, particularly with the intercept, who have spent years sort of unpeeling the onion of Eric Prince's, so just showing yeah, like sort of the mechanics of his plausible deniability machine.
Basically yeah exactly, but Kingfish is what he goes by at this time.
So, of course yeah yeah uh, not no longer Princefish.
Yeah, he's become king, he's a Kingfish.
Yeah yeah um, so rather than hiring U.s.
Special forces veterans which remember, is what he promised to do and why he said that he wasn't a mercenary warlord because he was, oh right, because I hire American people, right?
Uh, he opted to bring in soldiers from Colombia because they were cheaper.
The project immediately encountered problems when it turned out that many of these soldiers had never even fired a weapon.
Uh, Prince initially hoped that this battalion would be the first of many, but after numerous problems, the force was reduced in size to 580 men.
The men who actually served in the battalion reported being locked indoors all day and being incredibly bored.
The boredom was only broken up by occasional trips, paid for by the company, to Dubai to fuck prostitutes.
Wow, otherwise they're just like sitting in a room, slave kill squad just had to hang out in a room until it was prostituted.
Yeah, they would do some running and training, and then they were locked in a room.
Uh, holy shit.
But every now and then they got some prostitutes.
So that's what the f?
Okay well okay, this this all seems above board.
So yeah, I mean, at this point, Eric Prince's first army had committed numerous war crimes and his second army uh, seemed to be on its way to fizzling out.
Um, so in 2014, Eric Prince decided to take a break from making armies to try a bold new business strategy, making his own air force.
Whoa, what the fuck.
So that year, Eric Prince gets poses up with an investment firm called the Citic Group and founded a company named Frontier Logistics Group.
Now, Citic Group is an investment Company that is owned by the Chinese government.
So, this meant Eric Prince was either in business with or straight up working for China now.
Wow.
So, he doesn't.
He does not give a fuck.
Do you think he's a patriot in any way, or he's just like pure reptilian brain?
Like, I'm just going to do what I want.
I know nothing else but for me to obtain what I want.
I am sure he would consider himself a patriot and have a justification.
What kind of mental gymnastics do you think he's doing to say, like, oh, I made a you know, like a kill squad for the UAE, and now I'm making a weird private Chinese air force?
Well, the UAE are sort of allies of the United States.
He's not making an Air Force for China.
We're about to get into that.
He's just, so the Frontier Logistics Group is supposed to be just a logistics company.
They're the people you call.
If you're a corporation, you're like, we've got a bunch of diamonds in this country.
I'm going to get them shipped here.
Can you help us arrange that?
Or we've got sick executives in Central Africa.
Can you get a Medevact?
We're building an oil field in this country.
Help us figure out how to set it up and organize.
So that's a perfectly legitimate business.
Somebody needs to do that work if you're in that industry.
Right.
So secretly, without getting the approval of the rest of the company, Eric Prince also started trying to use FLG to build his own private air force, which he could then rent out to small African nations who needed to suppress insurgencies.
So the Chinese, as far as we know, have no idea he's doing this.
And neither do the other people he's working with at FLG.
He has his own tiny team within the company, and he decides we're going to build an air force and not tell anyone.
How do you fucking hide your?
It's like you have a, you're making a bong in your room as a teenage.
Your mom's like, what are you doing in there?
You're like, nothing.
I'm just like playing with this cup.
It's like, I smell fire.
I smell plastic melting.
It's like you're building a straight up rental air force and you can keep it under wraps.
Well, you can't keep it under wraps.
Right.
We're getting his mind.
We've got some commercials.
And after that, we're going to talk about how Eric tried to hide his private Air Force and how it didn't quite work out the way he'd planned.
Thanksgiving Commercials Breakdown00:03:03
Oh, it's a good idea.
Big surprise.
So all of that after some capitalism diddies.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, city hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did it.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged you.
A victim of flatmail.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
Homemade Armored Planes Revealed00:15:30
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
We're back and we are talking about Eric Prince's noble quest to build his own private air force without anyone knowing.
So I probably shouldn't have to say it, but I will.
It is illegal to make your own Air Force.
Right.
But the U.S. government doesn't allow that.
You just mean like creating a collection of like fighter jets or armed planes meant to murder people from the sky.
Can you even buy an armed plane?
No.
Right.
No, you cannot.
So you need the cover of a government to even obtain a kill plane.
There are ways for private companies to deploy air assets that can attack people and provide close air support.
There are companies that do that, but there's like a pro like you have to get a lot.
Like the government has to issue you a bunch of shit.
Like it's a thing.
Like some of Prince's competitors were able to get government approval to provide close air support and have small fleets of aircraft.
But like, you know, you agree to government inspections, you get a bunch of, and Eric Prince is not a big fan of licenses or qualifications or not breaking international law.
What are you doing in your room?
Nothing, mom.
It's not an airport force, I swear.
So Eric Prince, so just to catch you up, he starts a company with the Chinese government called Frontier Logistics Group that's supposed to like help companies, particularly working in like Africa and Southeast Asia, you know, get stuff from A to B. Because China's got their eye on Africa right now.
China's got their eye on a lot of places.
Yeah, well, and I think they're smart.
It's funny.
When I was in Ghana in 2008, the African Cup of Nations was happening and they had to build a bunch of new stadiums there.
And when I was like, oh, wow, this is crazy.
Like these are huge modern stadiums, and the locals are like, Yeah, they're all Chinese prisoners building it.
And I was like, Whoa, what?
And I was like, Yeah, they use these guys because if they try and escape, they're in the middle of Africa, and they're just going to be like, Have you seen the Chinese guy?
Yeah.
And they can, like, they just know they don't really have to put them under much, you know, surveillance.
But I mean, at least it could have been a myth, but I feel like, and also a lot of the consumer goods, I was surprised how much of it came from China.
But I guess they see a market.
So, yeah.
What Prince tells CITIC Group, which is the Chinese company that owns Frontier with him, what Prince tells them is that, you know, he thinks there's a market where they can make some quick cash if they have a couple of moderately armored planes with sensors on them.
So that, like, if a company has a mine somewhere and they're worried that insurgents are going to rob the mine, you know, the government can pay us to surveil the area to let them know if an attack's coming.
That's legal.
There's nothing illegal about, you know, a government paying you to provide aerial surveillance for an area like a mine.
So that's what Prince says he's doing to his backers in China and to his other American friends who work in Frontier with him.
Without telling them, he buys 25% of another company, an Austrian company called Airborne Technologies.
So he becomes an owner in this company and he uses them to start producing an aircraft.
They take an old Thrush 510 crop dusting plane and they turn it into an engine of war.
And now at this point, and for most of the Air Force stuff here, I'm quoting from a fabulous article in The Intercept called Echo Papa Exposed.
Now, here's a quote describing the airplane he has built.
In addition to surveillance and laser targeting equipment, Airborne had outfitted the plane with bulletproof cockpit windows, an armored engine block, anti-explosive mesh for the fuel tank, and specialized wiring that could control rockets and bombs.
The company also installed pods for mounting two high-powered 23-millimeter chain guns.
Straight Vulcan cannon on that thing.
So to maintain secrecy, Prince does his best to keep his name out of this project.
So the people at Airborne, other than like a couple of their top people, don't know him as Eric Prince.
He's referred to in all of their papers as Echo Papa.
But he purchased or bought a stake as Echo Papa?
I mean, yeah, essentially.
That's the only name he's known by in any of the public, or not even public, even the documents the engineers see.
So the engineers see that someone with a code name Echo Papa is ordering them to build a military aircraft.
That doesn't seem weird to them initially because they've done some contracts that are secret for like the German government and the Swiss government.
So they think, okay, this is probably a government thing.
Oh, because we've done this kind of work before.
Our bosses assure us it's on the up and up.
We're not breaking any laws.
But they knew they were getting in a bed with Eric Prince, though, right?
A couple of people at the top of the company knew.
The people actually building the plane think they're working for like the German government.
But yeah, but I guess, yeah, to buy a 25% stake in a company, like obviously the people at the top are going to know, oh, I see who this person is.
Okay.
So yeah, one day near the end of finishing this plane, Eric Prince comes by the hangar to inspect it, and one of these engineers recognizes him and knows who he is and is like, oh, fuck.
We're building a military aircraft for Eric Prince.
And so these guys go to their bosses and are like, we're pretty sure we're committing an international crime by making this fit.
Right, right.
But the management assures them things will be fine if they keep their mouth shut.
It's funny.
Everything will be fine if you keep your mouth shut.
It's not like anything.
It's not even illegal.
It's everything will be fine if you can keep your mouth shut.
You don't tell anyone.
We won't get in trouble for building a bomber.
The plane you're talking about that they retrofitted, you said it's a crop dust.
It's a crop dusting plane.
Is it a prop, like a propeller plane?
Or is it a jet engine?
It's got like engines and stuff.
It doesn't look like a prop plane.
Okay, because in my mind, a crop dusting plane is like, you know, like the old propeller plane, like a Wright brothers.
No, it's like a nice crop dusting plane.
Oh, gotcha.
But they had a bunch of problems because it wasn't made to have thousands of pounds of armor.
Right.
They had to build, so like the things that bombs hang on on a plane are called pylons.
And they're either like made for U.S. munitions or Warsaw-packed, you know, Russian munitions.
Right.
And so these guys even designed pylons that could fit both because Eric didn't know what kind of bombs he was going to be able to get.
Yeah, where I can get that stock from.
Yeah.
So like this is the kind of thing he has made.
And before the plane's even finished, Eric goes out to a bunch of prospective clients, mainly people that we would call warlords or dictators, and tries to sell them on his sexy new murder engine.
He told his partners in Frontier, including the CEO, that they were not running a security company.
You know, again, they just thought they were buying surveillance planes.
So nobody knows but Eric Prince and a couple of his close people what he's doing.
Yeah, for the other people, they just think, oh, we've got a surveillance plane.
And he's like, I've got something that can do it all, baby.
Yeah.
So that's the situation.
Nobody but Prince knows that he's planning to put missiles on this plane and use it to murder dissidents.
So having his own Air Force, to track back a bit, has been a goal of Eric since at least 2008 when he purchased an unarmed attack aircraft that he later leased to the Pentagon to use in Afghanistan to test it out to see if it would be good for the Afghan Air Force.
In Iraq, he tried and failed to sell a contract providing close air support to the CIA.
Also in Iraq, Blackwater had a feat of tiny helicopters.
Prince would have men with machine guns hang off them and shoot at people.
Those helicopters came to be known by the Iraqis as little birds.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
But those are unarmed helicopters.
Yeah, but which that's a specific kind of helicopter, though, the little bird, right?
Maybe.
You know, it's not like a Huey or the other ones, but.
It looks a little bit like a Huey, but even tinier.
Yeah, right, right.
I just think of it because I know, like, I read a lot about, like, Somalia 93 kind of stuff, and that was like, those were like a lot of the other guys were in, like, those little bird helicopters.
Yeah, yeah.
The one from the video games I always hop in.
Yeah, yeah.
So Prince had never gotten to order his own private military aircraft to bomb insurgents, and that was his dream.
And in 2014, it seemed like it was finally going to come true.
So the Austrians finish this thing, and they take it on the practice flight, and dozens of problems pop up.
Because you're not supposed to put armaments on a crop duster.
So they fix whatever they can, but Prince rushes them and says, basically, I need this thing in two days.
I've already promised it to somebody, and it needs to be ready.
Oh, my God, what the fuck is wrong with this guy?
So during the plane's first flight, it's grounded for a faulty fuel pump.
That's eventually fixed, and the plane makes it to Juba, South Sudan, where it was expected to help with the civil war.
Unfortunately for Eric Prince, but thankfully for humanity, some random guy in Greece took pictures.
There's this random guy in Greece whose hobby is taking pictures of planes that take off from the city.
Right, right, right, right.
He's just one of those nerds.
And he takes a picture of this thing as it lifts off from Greece.
Oh, because that's how they were getting it into Sudan.
It was taking off from Greece.
They were taking off from Greece, and the plane was registered in San Marino, which is a tiny microstate in northern Italy in that area.
So this thing takes off.
This guy uploads a picture.
It gets back to the authorities in San Marino who realized that the plane that Eric Prince had registered bore no resemblance to the plane on that runway, which is clearly a military aircraft.
Oh, right.
He's like, hi, I want to register my nice little crop duster plane.
It's a hobby plane.
Nothing to see here.
Right.
And they're like, those are missile pylons on the bottom.
No, no, no.
Those are fun holders.
So credit to the government of San Marino.
They pull his registration.
The plane had to be flown to another hangar in a different East African nation, and it's probably still there right now.
The whole project fell apart, and Eric Prince never got to bomb anyone.
Aww.
Yeah.
He really is like a tortured guy with a war boner who never got to get his war penis off, basically.
Yeah.
And credit to Airborne Technologies.
It was one of the engineers who worked on the plane that leaked this story to the intercept, or at least leaked a big part of it to the intercept, who was like, this is fucked up.
I'm okay making a plane for the German government.
I really don't want to make one for this guy.
God, that must have been such a moment, though, too, when he realizes it's Eric Prince.
Yeah, he looks him up on his phone and is like, like in a movie, like he's holding it up next to him, just like going back and forth.
It's the guy.
Yeah, this isn't going to be good for my resume.
Okay, so they clearly say, uh-uh-uh, you made a kill jet.
Yeah.
But is there any trial or like so?
Does anyone get in trouble?
Did anyone have to like release a statement or anything?
No.
As far as I understand at this point, Airborne denies making a fighter jet.
FLG denies that the fighter jet was made with their money.
Prince just doesn't talk about it.
Like, the reason we know about this is the intercept report.
And they have everything.
If you go read Echo Papa Exposed, they have advertising documents he built for this attack craft.
Like you can see like the marketing material.
Yeah, you can see his marketing materials.
It's very well documented.
He's like, this could be yours for if they were just making it up for some reason, all of these companies would have sued them to shit, but nothing's happened.
Like that's the way it went.
Nothing has happened.
The plane is still sitting in a hangar somewhere in East Africa.
As far as we know, it was never used.
Right.
So that's exactly where the situation is.
Is there any like conspiracy or logic to why we think like he has never had to answer for that?
Because clearly those are international crimes.
If he's creating an armed aircraft, that's probably in violation of many laws.
Well, because what they have is the picture, which is why San Marino pulled his registration.
But they don't have, like, you don't have hard documented evidence outside of like what the journalists put up about how it was made or about exactly who ordered it.
Like, Prince doesn't have his name tied to it in legal documents.
These are allegations in a news report that has a significant amount of backing to it.
But also, it's not like he was caught bombing civilians in Sudan.
Right.
It got stopped before that point.
So it's just sort of fizzled out.
It's like being called a homemade gun or something.
Yeah.
Well, it's like Prince didn't get in trouble when like when he was found illegally training troops for a foreign country.
His company got a $42 million loss, like had to pay $42 million in fines, but he didn't get charged anything.
And they consider that an operating cost, probably.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Well, I mean, they made billions.
What's $42 million?
Yeah, what's $42 million?
It's like when you sue Purdue Pharmaceuticals for marketing illegally and hiding the truth about the painkillers they were selling.
They pay 1.5% of the profits that they've made in fines.
And they're like, yeah, it's fine.
Whatever.
Cost of doing business.
It's not like Eric Prince was flying a jet and dropping bombs on people himself.
He had shell companies set up through all this and the plane never actually got to drop anything.
So he's in the clear.
Right.
And it's murky enough that people can just point fingers at thin air and no one really has to take the back.
You can see the plane and you can trace its registration back and you can like it's a picture of the plane.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Picture of the plane.
It's all pretty well documented.
If you go to Echo Papa Exposed on the intercept, it'll be there.
Well, I wonder if too, if because the government has done so much business with him, it's like better to be like, dude, we don't even need to dig that whole part up.
It's possible that if the government filed a case against him, he would win in court because he's a billionaire with a lot of lawyers.
And he's, I mean, it's not like he just like did this haphazardly.
He sat lawyers every step of the way.
How does this have to be structured to minimize my risk?
How does this, like, what do we do to reduce my exposure?
So Eric Prince is still keeping busy today.
His current project involves working with the Chinese government, co-owner of his company, to set up a forward operating base in the Yunnan province of China as part of a Chinese government initiative to help remake the Silk Road.
Prince's quote about the matter is, we're not helping to serve Chinese foreign policy goals.
We're helping to increase trade.
It is possible that's true.
The base's stated goal is to, quote, provide logistics and unarmed security training services to facilitate Chinese trade throughout Southeast Asia.
So I'm sure that's all in the up and up.
And this mercenary warlord won't try to hide committing war crimes in the guise of a legitimate business venture with the same company twice in a row.
So his other hobby right now is trying to convince the U.S. government to hand the war in Afghanistan over to an army of private contractors.
Right, I remember this.
Yeah, about 6,000 mercenaries ought to be enough to really get Afghanistan under control.
Yeah, five, six thousand.
Yeah, this thing in the butt.
And to make sure nothing terrible happens, these guys, they're not going to be lawless out there.
They're going to be commanded by someone Prince thinks should be put in charge of the Afghanistan effort.
And he calls that guy a viceroy.
So that's a good idea.
Mercenary Army for Afghanistan00:03:56
Like, we should go back to that.
Yeah, I love that.
Yeah.
Back when viceroys were, that's really one that's a time we all miss.
The world was great.
Yeah.
So that's, that's, that's it.
You know, simple man.
Um, so far, the Pentagon hasn't bitten.
And in fact, uh, all of like, like Mattis and all of the generals in the world are like, fuck, right.
Yeah.
They're like, I've been around these assholes.
Like, yeah.
They can't even drive on the right side of the road.
Yeah.
But if I know Eric, a little thing like, you know, complete lack of interest isn't going to stop him from trying.
No, clearly not.
He's going to keep plugging away that.
He's going to keep making that bong in his room.
Yeah.
Even when his mom asks, no.
He's got an act of life.
You know, several days before the 2016 election, Prince showed up on Breitbart radio to claim that Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton laundered money and regularly visited a quote sex island with quote underage sex slaves.
And in January of 2017, Prince met with a guy named Kirill Dmitriev, a Russian businessman with strong ties to Vladimir Putin.
They met in the Seychelles.
Right.
Seychelles?
Yeah, Seychelles.
Yeah.
And he claims that the trip was just for business purposes and had nothing to do with the Trump campaign.
But earlier this year, George Nader, a guy who helped organize the meeting, told a grand jury that it was, quote, an effort to establish a back channel between the incoming administration and the Kremlin.
It's also worth noting that Prince donated about $250,000 to the Trump campaign and groups supporting Trump during the election.
Aren't there a representative?
Isn't Nader, he represents the interest of the UAE too, doesn't he?
Probably.
I think because that was like the connection, because now that makes sense to me when you're saying that he created a mercenary army with them, that they've already done business, but also he's like an easy go-between.
Yeah, and Prince was also regularly in contact with Steve Bannon throughout the transition while he's having this meeting with Kirill Demetrius.
I just love the conspiracy about the sex island because it goes back to sort of this bizarre form of what a conservative thinks is like, you know, the most evil shit.
It's like, yeah, sex island.
Man, if Hillary Clinton had a sex island, she would not have lost the election.
No.
There would have been some flavor in that putting.
There would absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's not, that is someone who I don't even think has been to an island, even a restaurant called Islands.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So anyway, that's where we are right now.
The whole incident is of extreme interest to Robert Mueller because it might be proof that Kushner was trying to establish a back channel and a legal back channel to Russia.
So we'll be hearing more about Eric Prince in the future, probably before the time this podcast drops, possibly.
Yeah.
I, again, it's crazy.
I mean, it's not crazy to me, right?
Because we see people like this all the time.
But like that this is the guy who has constantly just been trying to make his secret little play army and do all the fun stuff that he maybe was never able to do.
He's clearly like haunted, you know, from his like familial life.
I'm also curious to know what that, what that upbringing was like.
Like that household must have been a lot of fun.
Yeah.
And there's no, there's nothing that I would call like trustworthy information out about like what that upbringing was like.
Like a lot of these guys, you know, we're able to talk a little bit about like the abuse that Saddam Hussein endured.
I don't know what, I don't know.
It's possible.
He had great parents who were just crazy far-right nutjobs.
And so Prince grew up because maybe he's just a happy guy being a billionaire nutjob.
Right.
Also, he's a billionaire now.
He's like worth two and a half billion dollars.
Wow.
So this has all worked out great for Prince.
And is there, is there, do you think the closest he would come to any kind of liability legally would be through the probe, the Russia probe?
I mean, at this point, aside from the validity of so many international crimes and never gotten in trouble in a meaningful way, I have trouble believing that anything is going to happen that puts this guy away.
Yeah.
God.
Being a rich white guy is the best shit ever.
It's like getting the suit, like the star in Mario.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah, he's, he's, yeah, he's always got that flashing and vulnerability thing on him.
Billionaire Nutjob Conclusion00:03:50
I mean, most of the people we talk about on this podcast have been dead for a while.
Right.
But Eric is still alive.
And yeah, I'd be down with him spending the rest of his life in prison.
Like, that'd be great.
Yeah.
That'd be the bee's knees.
But he'll probably just keep on making more armies.
And I got a feeling one of these days he's going to get his own Air Force.
Right.
Oh, God.
I mean, I believe it.
Yeah.
They'll kill probably, who knows, Prague or Russia or something weird.
You're just going to have a dream and a hope and billions of dollars in a rich white family that's heavily connected to the U.S. president.
Yeah.
That's all you need.
And you can do anything.
Anything.
Guys, don't go to college.
Miles.
Yes.
Thank you so much for your help today.
You've been wonderful.
No, thank you for illuminating this for me.
Yeah.
You got some plugs you want to plug in the plug zone.
Do I want to plug anything?
Yes, I do.
There's a little podcast I do every day with Jack O'Brien called The Daily Zeitgeist.
But you probably knew that, right?
Because everybody knows the most famous podcast out there, not really.
But please listen to that.
We talk about the news and have fun.
And we always have funny comedians and just try and make the news of the day bearable.
And you can follow me on social media and on, you know, all that Twitter, Instagram at Miles of Gray.
And you can find us on all of the various social media platforms as BastardsPod or at behindthebastards.com, our home on the worldwide internetweb.net.
Peace.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world of AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point?
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Stat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.