Blackwater founder Erik Prince | PBD Podcast | Ep. 372
Patrick Bet-David sits down one-on-one with Blackwater founder Erik Prince.
Erik Dean Prince is an American businessman, former U.S. Navy SEAL officer, and the founder of the private military company Blackwater. He served as Blackwater's CEO until 2009 and as its chairman until its sale to a group of investors in 2010. Prince heads the private equity firm Frontier Resource Group and was chairman of the Hong Kong-listed Frontier Services Group until 2021.
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3:47 - Erik's background and his family's business success.
11:19 - Erik discusses why he founded Blackwater.
16:27 - Erik explains who Blackwater's first client was.
27:02 - How the United Nation's hypocrisy led to Blackwater's founding.
29:57 - How the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole led to Blackwater's landing a $7 million a year military contract.
34:27 - The difference between a country's nationals fighting for their countries vs hiring a Private Military Company.
41:26 - Was Blackwater better at training soldiers than the U.S. government?
54:27 - Is there an oath soldiers took to train with Blackwater.
55:16 - Erik discusses the CIA's role in the Ukraine vs Russia war.
1:05:18 - Erik explains why he left defense contracting.
1:14:32 - Was Blackwater hired to train soldiers for The Wagner Group?
1:22:52 - Erik claims a Chinese Cyber Attack was behind the AT&T outage.
1:34:31 - Did "Leave the World Behind" predict a future cyber attack on the U.S. electric grid?
1:41:07 - Erik discusses which social and political issues Americans are united on.
1:48:52 - Erik explains who was behind the Cinema Rex fire that started the Iranian revolution.
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Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Your Next Five Moves” (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Yeah, why would you fat on Goliath when we got pet taved?
Valutament, giving values contagious.
This world of entrepreneurs, we get no value to hate it.
I run, homie, look what I become.
I'm the one.
Okay, we got an interesting guest today.
Let me tell you why.
Blackwater.
You've probably heard the name before.
Some love him.
Some respect him.
Some hate him.
Some say he's misunderstood.
But regardless of what you say, he served in the military as a Navy SEAL.
When he got out, he started a company called Blackwater, December 26, 1996.
In 2010, he ended up selling the company.
During that time, he was awarded $2 billion of government security contract, of which $1.6 billion of it were unclassified federal contracts.
From 01 to 09, the CIA awarded him up to $600 million in classified contracts to Blackwater and its affiliates.
Aside from that, during their course of 40,000 Blackwater personal security missions, I've heard you say 100,000, but here I'm reading 40,000.
Only 200 involved guards firing their weapons, stating no one under our care was ever killed or injured.
We kept them safe.
All the while, we had 30 of our men killed.
I think the number ended up being 41, if I'm not mistaken.
This number may be a little bit out of date.
And then aside from that, he is also from a very special family.
The Prince family, father, I believe Edgar Prince had two kids.
One is Eric Prince, the one we're going to talk to.
He had more than two kids?
Four kids.
He had four kids.
Okay.
Father had four kids.
Two out of the four.
One is you, super successful.
You've done well for yourself.
And you're somewhat involved in politics.
I was the unexpected blessing.
You were the fourth one.
I have three much older sisters.
Okay.
Got it.
Is Betsy the oldest or is Betsy older?
Bets is the oldest.
She's 12 years older.
My next sister is 10, and the next one is 40 years old.
That's right.
It is four.
It's nine years old.
It is four.
So four kids.
But the oldest and the youngest took it to a whole different level.
Betsy DeVos, who is, I believe, married to Dick DeVos.
I know the father, Rich DeVos.
He founded Amway.
Very, very successful family.
Yep.
Loved and admired by anybody you asked that's been close to him has nothing but good things to say about him.
My kids go to a school that he funded at baseball field that we have.
She's successful.
You're successful.
She becomes U.S. Secretary of Education.
I want to know what your father did.
Aside from that, he got 12 kids.
When somebody has 12 kids, you have kids only if you believe the future looks bright.
I want to know if you think the future looks bright.
And I got a bunch of weird questions for you.
I'm going to ask, you know, I asked a couple friends, hey, I'm talking to Eric, you know, what can he say about him?
Is he the American Progosion, Wagner Group?
Apparently you did some business with him, or maybe he hired you guys.
We'll talk about that, whatever the story is behind it.
That's, yeah, that's a hard no.
Okay, great.
Maybe we can talk about it.
For sure.
I did not do anything with that.
You can call any of these things that I bring up.
You can call all of them out and we'll have a good time with it.
PMC, some say you founded PMC, even though it's been done before.
Not in the U.S.
It's been done in the past before.
Again, you'll give your answer to it.
We'll talk Hamas.
We'll talk Israel.
We'll talk the difference between whether we should trust a private military contractor or the national one.
There's a lot to be talked about.
Again, you've lived a very interesting life, but it's great to have you on the podcast.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, so what was it that caused you to say, I'm going to start Blackwater?
How did that happen?
I, well, back to the family policy.
My dad was a very successful, self-made guy, built a business which made first die cast machines, big machine that squeezes a mold and makes the transmission casing of your car, the engine block, and now they're even die casting entire Tesla chassis.
And then he made automotive parts in the early 70s, and the business really grew.
It was privately owned.
But family policy was you don't come and work in the family business.
You have to go do your own thing first.
You can later, but not at the beginning.
You have to go do something completely on your own, not associated with the family.
Did he have a time limit like at what age you can come back?
Was that clear or was it kind of blurry?
Kind of blurry.
I don't think he really bargained that I was going to go join the SEAL teams.
But my plan was to go 10 to 12 years in the SEAL teams, which is a good time to be a SEAL officer.
Much beyond that, you kind of get stuck at a desk.
But he died of a heart attack in 95.
And that kind of threw the family into a bit of a lurch because there wasn't a clear successor to take over the business.
And so my mom made the right decision and she sold the whole thing.
And I got out to help that out.
And at about the same time, right after the birth of our second child, my wife was diagnosed with cancer at 29.
And so I got out of the Navy and started Blackwater really as a way to stay connected to the SEAL teams.
Got it.
And by the way, for folks that are listening, your dad didn't just build a small business.
It's a good-sized business.
I think you sold it for like $1.35 billion or some number like that I read.
Is that correct?
It was a, yeah, it was a 5,000 employee.
It was almost a billion in sales.
Very efficient, very effective at what they did.
Now, you know, what did your other two sisters do, the two middle ones?
What business did they go into?
My middle sister has a, her family has a significant ice cream business.
What I know about it?
Hudsonville Ice Cream, and they make a whole bunch of private label brands for a lot of stuff that you'd see in the grocery store shelves.
And my youngest sister, they have a bunch of car dealerships and injection molding, and she is an ordained minister.
So how is that possible for everybody to be successful?
What did mom and dad teach?
Were there a certain set of clear values and principles?
We expect you to do this and then you do this and then you do that.
I guess they kind of imbued that Dutch Protestant work ethic from a very early age and hard work and excellence was expected.
But was there like, you know, when I talk to my kids, you know, I've had an interview with Kennedy and I've interviewed President Bush and I'll say, and I say Kennedy, I mean R.F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy.
I'm too young to have met.
Great guy.
Very nice guy.
And I would ask, I'd say, so tell me what are the traditions within the family?
Like, what do you do?
What did your father or grandfather expect from you?
What was dinner like?
What did you guys talk about?
You know, we always talk about politics.
We would always debate.
It was always told, go make your money, take care of your wife, take care of your kids, take care of your family, and then give back to public service in your own way, politics, church, nonprofit, whatever it may be.
Was there any set of principles they passed down to you guys, or was it kind of general?
There's got to be some traditions.
There's no way you guys became this by accident.
We certainly went to a K through 12 Christian school.
It was run by the Church Orient members.
And we traveled a lot.
My dad was invited by the Soviets in the early 70s to come there because they wanted to buy his machines.
And so he went off to Moscow, didn't like it at all, didn't like the surveillance state and the whole thing.
And so they made, you know, by the late 70s, the business was starting to do okay.
Because before that, it was really struggled.
I mean, my dad almost died.
He had a heart attack at 42 years old in 1973.
And that really gave him perspective.
But we started to travel, and he actually shipped a Chevy van to Europe, and we did a six-week road trip across Eastern Europe as well.
Czechoslovakia, East Germany, all the rest.
I spent my seventh birthday in 1976 in Berlin.
And I will never forget that.
It was a great, I think, formative moment seeing the guns, the dogs, the tank traps, the minefields, Achtung Meinen signs, all facing in, keeping people prisoner in East Germany.
So even for a seven-year-old, you can figure out maybe the socialist workers' paradise is not such a paradise.
Is he telling you this while you're going through it?
And son, look, this is- Oh, yeah, no, that's he's teaching.
I'm seeing that.
But is he teaching?
Sure.
Okay.
Yeah, yeah.
I remember rolling into Prague then, Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia, and the only bright color in the whole capital was red commie stars in the buildings because the buildings were disgusting, dark gray from all the coal smoke.
My first girlfriend at the refugee camp was Czechoslovakia, Katarina Staff.
Her older brother was my best friend, Jan Staff.
He died very early.
Good friend of mine.
Okay, so you're traveling.
Are you traveling because your dad is at all connected to the government or no?
He's making money and zero.
No, no.
Nothing to do.
That travel was purely educational to my sisters and mine.
And was he ever, but he was never an agent.
He was never linked to the government.
He never worked with them, nothing at all.
Nothing.
That never touched the family at all.
Did he have any interest in politics?
Did he talk politics with you guys?
Not really until 1980.
Because I remember him saying that in the late 70s, he was paying an effective income tax rate of like 90%.
So this is the wonderful Jimmy Carter era.
Yeah.
Right.
Yep.
And, you know, I'd watch the news with him.
We'd talk about it.
And I remember kind of my first, the farthest back moment I remember is Nixon resigning.
Because it was a kind of a traumatic moment for the country.
And I remember seeing the helicopters fly off the rooftop of Saigon in 75.
So I paid attention to those things.
Tall together.
Yeah.
It's interesting.
My family, mother side communist, dad side imperialists.
So they had two divorces within 20 years to each other.
Married, divorce, married, divorce, done.
They cannot be in the same room together.
If they are, I have to call private security.
That's a fundamental difference in a big way.
By the way, to me, I think political difference is more negatively impacting the marriage than religious difference.
You can be a Christian and a Catholic or a Christian or an atheist, but you both believe in the same political ideas.
That's more likely to work out than a Christian and a Christian, but one is a commie, one is a imperialist, less likely for it to work out.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know how.
I don't recommend it, by the way.
I don't know how a communist could be a Christian as well.
Well, you know, it is what it is.
They did escape Russia, go to Iran eventually, and they found each other.
Anyways, okay, so I was curious.
Family, what happened with raising four successful kids while he's building a business that eventually ends up selling for $1.35 billion?
Let's go to Blackwater.
So you read all over the place, the whole concept of, you know, private military contractors.
You hear different names being thrown out by a bunch of different people, right?
Then you're the founder of it in America, and you've told the story of really back in the days, this is nothing new.
We've always had this before.
When you get out, why do you choose to go become a private military contractor?
The SEAL teams had used private facilities since the 70s.
A shooting instructor that was a really good competitive shooter would build a small facility almost like a dojo and teams would go there.
But no one had done it on an industrial scale.
And the tempo that SEAL teams would train at and to for a deployment, like the, I remember the year before I deployed, I was gone 11 of 12 months before even deploying for another six months.
Are you married at the time or no?
Yeah.
Okay.
So that's hard.
And so building a significant training facility where the teams could do a lot of that stuff local and still get home in time for dinner was important to me.
And I wanted to stay connected because I got out of the Navy way earlier than I wanted to.
And I was in the unusual, I mean, I think a lot of guys had the idea.
I'm not original on it.
I was in the unusual position that I could fund it because funding a private training facility in the 1990s when a major base or range facility was being closed under BRAC like once a week, that was very counterintuitive.
It was unfinanceable.
And every smart financial advisor said, that's a dumb idea.
It'll never work.
So started small.
Well, had to buy a lot of land, but I've said that's the 6,000 acres you bought.
Bought 3,100 acres to start, and it was cut over forestry land.
I knew nothing about business, nothing about government contracting, nothing about land development, but just kind of figured it out.
And you go back to the team that you know and trust.
I hired Ken Vieira, who was my training officer at SEAL Team 8.
Al Clark was our first firearms instructor.
And I hired Jim DeHart, who was the guy that managed, actually managed the facility of SEAL Team 6 and built it out.
So, you know, there's just very talented, hard-driving guys that figured it out.
Now, if I would have worked with you and if I was at any of the units you were at, would I have known that you're eventually going to start something?
Would I say, this guy's probably going to start something?
No, not necessarily.
I kept my father's success very hidden.
So did the crew know that you were from a wealthy family?
No, I kept it really quiet the whole time, except after my father died.
And then that was in March of 95, like three weeks later, I had to be out in Fallon, Nevada at the Naval Strike Warfare Center because we were doing combat search and rescue training and strike training.
And we got done on a Friday, and the Navy aircraft wasn't coming to move us all back until the following Tuesday.
And I asked my boss, I said, listen, I got all kinds of family issues because my dad just died three weeks earlier.
Do you mind if I split and I'll see you guys back at the team on Tuesday?
He goes, go.
And my mom sent the plane.
And a couple of the guys from my platoon drove me to the airport outside the base with a truck.
And I said, guys, I got my bags to stay here.
He's like, no, that's okay, Mr. Pete.
I got a private jig on a bank.
Well, you're like, mom, what are you doing, mom?
Why are you doing this?
No, no, it was the only way I was going to get back because it was out in the middle of nowhere.
Got it.
But so that between those two guys, it spilled the beans.
But they asked me, of course, like, wait a minute.
So you could like retire right now?
I was like, well, I guess I could, but who would want to do that?
So anyway, that was the only time the secret cracked.
Very interesting that you're from a very well-off family.
You have money.
You've traveled the world.
You've seen a lot of different things.
You probably stayed at the best hotels.
You probably traveled private like you're talking about.
You guys probably own jets.
You lived in beautiful homes, beautiful vacation homes.
And you chose to go into military to make your life tougher and harder.
Why would anybody in the right mind do that?
Or was it the fact that they just raised you so well that it wasn't right?
Always had a desire to go in the military.
I was a military history geek.
Because remember, my family went to Normandy in 1980 and I was the tour guide at 11.
So, I mean, Pegasus Bridge, and this is Sword Gold, Juno, Utah, Omaha.
A movie, did a movie inspire you?
Typically, it's linked to a movie.
Was it a movie or a movie?
Well, the only movie about Normandy that was out then was The Longest Day, which was made in the 60s.
I probably did see that at that point, but no, I'd read, I just read a lot of that kind of stuff.
It's okay.
So now you're buying the land, 3,100 acres.
You bring your three peers to come start with you.
You have the advantage that you have money, which means you can get started with money.
And now people are kind of realizing your family's got money.
Okay, maybe we're going to do something with this guy.
You start 3,100 acres.
You got your stuff going.
Who's your first customer and how do you find your first customer?
At that point, it was a West Coast SEAL team, actually, that sent their guys all the way across because they didn't have any access to good areas then.
And that's how we started.
Our first big regular customer was actually the Canadian Special Forces.
The Canadian equivalent of Delta Force would come and do their selection January, February, March because it was just too damn cold to be training in Toronto.
Got it.
And how did they find you?
Because it's not like you're doing internet, you're running funnels, you're doing ads, you're running it on a paper.
The soft units would talk.
The soft units would talk even to people in Canada?
Sure.
Yeah.
Tell me more.
Unpack that for me.
Just like that, because the U.S. elite units would train with Canadians, would train with the Brits, would train with the other European countries.
And what are they saying?
Are they saying, hey, did you guys hear about what he's doing?
Did you guys hear about what Edric started?
Is that kind of what the conversation is like?
And what is he doing?
He's doing such and such.
Let me give him a call.
Yep.
And then, so if you've never done this before.
Look, so why we built Blackwater the way it was is because training on government bases was exceedingly bureaucratic.
You'd go to try to check out and use a range and some sergeant wouldn't be around and they wouldn't give you the range brief and your ammo wouldn't show up on time.
And for a SEAL team that's doing 11 out of 12 months where you're on the road and you have all this stuff you have to train for, all these hoops you have to jump through, then having to go through the nonsense of getting jerked around on an Army base, it just didn't work.
So we gave people a country club-like experience.
If you book a tea time, I'm not a golfer, but if you book a tea time, you expect to be ready at 8 a.m.
You expect the greens are going to be raked and it's all going to be in order.
And that's what we did.
Radio, brief, ammo, go.
Lunch at 12.
And it was a customer service organization.
And that's how we ran it.
And at the same time, so Blackwater's getting started, I moved back to Michigan because the original business my dad started, the diecast machine business, because we'd sold the mothership, but the diecast machine business had been kind of bumping along since started.
It was not really making money or losing money.
And I wanted, I didn't have an MBA, but I really wanted to turn around my dad's business and make something run well.
And I remember my dad described the president there as the smartest engineer he ever knew.
And great, great guy, smart guy, would not change anything because we're trying to kind of do a lean transformation kind of based on the Toyota production system to engineer out cost and buy things smarter.
So I had to, at 27, I had to fire him.
And that was quite an experience and kind of restaffed the whole place with people that were much more focused on Six Sigma and lean manufacturing, et cetera.
And that really taught me about linear flow.
If you think about old school factories versus how a Toyota system, a Toyota production system runs.
Yep.
And that really, I mean, even the Japanese, when they came to compete in America in the 80s, it really, it forced American manufacturing to wake up and cut the waste.
Detroit.
Exactly.
And so seeing that in doing that to a machine tool business, which was 30-year-old business and based on very old school practices, I start to think that, okay, we built a training facility, but what does the military do?
It recruits, it vets, vet, meaning vetting, recruits, vets, equips, trains, deploys, and supports people to do a difficult job in a difficult place.
And so really, as Blackwater built out, and there was actually a kind of an aspirational picture made at the day we opened of what we wanted to look like in 10 years.
And that's what it was.
It became a machine which did that.
And so later when 9-11 happened and we got pulled into the security business, doing overseas deployments of people for the USG, that put us in good shape and that allowed us to be the low-cost competitor because we could process and recruit and do all that stuff with and for the guys before they went much much more effectively than our than our competitors.
So you start off with training, 01, so that's 96, December 26th, 97.
We opened in 97.
Okay.
So that means you don't get the real big contracts till 01, 02.
Correct.
The first years were very lean.
What's your revenue first year?
What kind of numbers are you guys?
400,000.
Okay, got it.
Second year was 800, then a million two, then a million six.
So if you're 400 first year revenue, you brought the three guys, the average salary for Navy SEAL today at the median is, I think, 97.
The top one percentile, if I'm not mistaken, is 135, 138 today.
Yeah, look, the first year or two, I still had to, I had to help with payroll.
Got it.
Sure.
But then again, you just find people that will find a way to win.
And we had very destructive customers, meaning they shot a lot of stuff.
Right.
And they ended up destroying all the target systems we bought on the outside.
And so Jim DeHart, the guy that came over from DevGroup, designed fantastic steel targets that everybody loved.
And so the customers started buying them.
And oddly enough, the FBI ordered in the 11th hour of the last day of the fiscal year, ordered $400,000 worth of target systems from us.
That was $400,000 of that million two revenue year.
Third on the last day.
No, literally like at 11.55 p.m. on September 30, the last day of the fiscal year, a fax machine started spitting out.
Oh, God, yeah.
30% of our I know.
That's great.
Of course.
I know what that feels like.
And the irony, it was the FBI.
So our target systems, you know, are probably at 10 or 12 field offices around the country.
Now, I'm assuming you're losing money first year, second year, third year.
Because you're not paying attention to the city.
We broke even at about a million two.
Okay, so you're paying these guys.
Not taking any money off the table because you don't have any money to take off the table.
Negative.
So, when did you know?
And by the way, if I'm working, if I got two options, okay, I'm in the Navy SEAL, I'm making the 9790.
Let's say I'm making six figures, right?
What advantage do I have?
And by the way, that has to do with time and service rank, all this.
Oh, come on, man.
You're 27 years ago.
It wasn't $97,000 of payroll back then.
$60,000, you want to say $60.
Okay, let's say $60,000.
So $60,000, and the best guys are making $80,000.
Is that fair?
We put $60,000 to $80,000.
Something like that.
So why would I work for you instead of staying in the military?
I'm assuming as a private contractor, you probably have way more to offer than the military, does that?
Because they liked the chance to do it right.
What does that mean?
In a non-bureaucratic, non-nonsense way.
I remember being a Hummer mechanic, and we would order parts, and I would look at the number, and I'd say, yeah, this part is $800.
I'm like, why is this $800?
And you'd go look it up.
You talk to Mercedes or who you, you know, yeah, it's a $70 part.
Yep.
We're spending $800 on it.
Yes, we are.
What are you talking about?
It's kind of what happens here.
So is that kind of what you were talking about where money was being wasted?
Yes.
Like our first State Department job, which didn't come until probably 03 or 04, we'd been training high-end special operations units.
We knew what we were doing.
We knew our costs.
The first price we submitted to state, they said, we can't accept this.
They said, why?
It's so low, it's not deemed credible.
That's the idea.
I understand.
Have you been to drive tanks, the facility in San Antonio?
Drive tanks?
Well, no, I used to have tanks on my farm.
Have you heard of drive tanks?
No.
Okay, so this place is called Drive Tanks.
One day, crazy story, I'll tell you.
I had kids.
I had two British Armored personnel carriers.
But I'm going to tell you.
Some people go for hay rides.
We had tank rides.
But you see, you look American.
You are American.
I'm from Iran.
So one day I take my kids.
These guys from Drive Tanks reach out.
They say, Pat, we love the content.
We want you to come out and bring your kids.
We're going to have a lot of good time.
We're going to drive over cars with tanks.
We're going to blow things up.
You're going to do 50 cal.
You're going to say, I'm like, all right, let's go.
We get a big sprinter up.
We get the guys.
We go.
I took both of my boys at the time.
This is five years ago.
So my oldest would be seven, youngest would be five.
We go there.
There's Navy SEALs.
There's Delta.
There's Special Forces, fifth group, everybody.
They're there.
And you're making bombs.
You're driving on tanks.
You're doing all this stuff.
It was an incredible experience.
If a person's never gone to drive tanks, you got to go to it.
It's a great experience.
My kids come back.
That next week, my son goes to school, the younger one, five-year-old.
Teacher says, how was your weekend?
He says, it was great.
So what did you do, Dylan?
My daddy and I made bombs and we blew buildings up.
I get a call from school.
The teacher says, your son can't say stuff like this because I'm from Iran, so they're freaking out.
I said, well, what did my son say?
He said, your son said you and him made bombs and you guys blew up buildings.
I said, my son's not lying to you.
Well, sir, what do you mean you guys made bombs?
I said, ma'am, we went to this place in a military facility.
These are trainers, drive tanks.
Here's the video.
Oh my God, he scared the kids off.
I said, this is an innocent kid.
He's just giving you an experience.
Anyways, we had a great time with it.
I ask you this because was this kind of like a hobby or was it a business?
Did you see it being a billion dollar business?
Was it kind of like, let's see what it's going to turn into?
Was it a clear vision?
You saying, I think we can turn this into a billion-dollar empire.
Another formative moment was seeing the incompetence and corruption of the UN in Bosnia, the Yugoslav Civil War, and, you know, UN forces letting people just get slaughtered at Severnicia.
So yeah, I had, and even seeing the nonsense, what happened in Rwanda.
UN run their mouth and the Houthis kill.
Sorry, no, the Tutsis and the Hoodus.
Yeah.
The hoodoos kill a million Tutsis with basically farm tools in four months in Rwanda.
Come on.
So I definitely saw a need for private peacekeeping as a way to displace the UN, which was in my mind and proven corrupt, immoral, useless.
Beyond useless, they're malign.
In your mind, are you sequencing the process of how this is going to work out?
We're going to start off as a training facility.
We're going to get the word out that we're going to get the right training again.
And then all of a sudden, we're going to be a contractor and we're going to do it better than the military's doing it.
Did you kind of foresee that happening?
Yes.
And seeing what Executive Outcomes did, which is a South African PMC that was formed in the early 90s, the great work they did in ending the war in Angola and literally saving Sierra Leone from almost an ISIS-like force called the Revolutionary United Front.
They cleaned it up in 120 days and then were forced to leave by idiots at the State Department, only to have the country retaken again by the same bad guys.
I knew there was a place to do peacekeeping and stability operations infinitely better than what the status quo was.
Are you and in doing so, saving millions of people from unnecessary suffering?
When you're talking to the first three guys you hired, are you selling them that vision?
No.
Okay, so they don't know.
Their simple wanting to come over to you is the fact that.
The five and ten meter target was we're going to run a fantastic training facility and you get to innovate tactics, techniques, and procedures.
And we wanted to be a place where because at that point, the SEAL teams, the JSOC units were not doing a whole lot of close-quarter battle and door kicking and that stuff.
Actually, the people to really learn from then was LA SWAT.
They taught the best hostage rescue.
LA SWAT.
Yeah.
So we brought Ken Thatcher, senior guy from LA SWAT, out to teach courses at Blackwater.
And so we wanted to make Blackwater the repository, the crossroads of tactical expertise.
When did you get the contract where you said, guys, this thing's about to change?
I know you said 9-11, but when wasn't what that was?
No, it was actually after the USS Cole was blown up in October of 2000, right?
Navy ship blown up by a suicide boat, killed 17 sailors.
They were holding unloaded weapons that they hardly ever fired before because the Navy viewed firearms training as too dangerous.
So they're shooting laser simulators.
So the Navy came to us having, because we are training lots of SAF units, and they said, could you train sailors to protect their ship, retake their ship, all the elements of small arms, which the Navy had basically abrogated knowledge and responsibility of.
So this is still training, though, right?
You're still not deploying.
No, correct.
Okay.
So when?
But that was a $7 million a year contract.
I guess it's real for us.
Now it's official.
Now you're sitting there saying, guys, something happened, but it's still training, right?
Yep.
At this point, how many former military vets, SEALs, I'm talking high-level soldiers do you have when you got the $7 million contract?
How many do you have?
For that kind of training volume, it's probably 30 instructors.
30 instructors.
Okay.
Because we had to stand up facilities in Jacksonville and Groton, Connecticut, and San Diego and Bremerton, Washington.
Okay.
So now that's happening.
You got the $7 million.
What's the next call to say, hey, we actually need a private military contract to send soldiers out?
When was that?
After 9-11, a high-level job for the CIA in Afghanistan.
How big was that?
That was 18 guys.
18 guys.
Yep.
Got it.
18 guys, because the military didn't want to do it with less than 250.
The military didn't want to do it.
They asked the military to do that.
And they wanted 250 people.
They said, we will not do it with less than 250 people.
You were able to do it with 18 people.
Yep.
Okay.
So when that call comes in.
And then the next one after that was a very remote, very important base that enabled a lot of GWAT activity.
And there was 166 soldiers there, and we replaced it with 25 of our guys.
106 with 28.
In that case, they had 28 soldiers, an infantry platoon, and 138 people supporting the 28.
And we could send 25 guys, five of which were dual-hatted, to keep the power, the water, the sanitation, the comms, and the food running.
It's a different model.
I can send 30, 40, and 50-year-olds that have a lot of experience and can fix a generator, run a radio, and fix a desale pump versus the military sends lots of 18 and 20-year-olds that can do barely one thing.
So at this point, what percentage of your business is intelligence?
What percentage is muscle?
What percentage is protection?
The cost of overseas, deploying guys to weird places, that cost gets high fast.
So that starts to skew the revenue.
But as we're growing, it was still probably 40%, 50% training, 50% security.
And then we bought an aviation business in 2003, Presidential Airways, a niche little business.
It was some former TF-160 guys, Richard Pear, Tim Childry.
And they had the licenses and one leased aircraft.
And we bought that.
And six years later, we had 73 aircraft that we owned and operated everything from a 767 to a Super Tacano light attack aircraft that was fitted out with a FLIR, a G-Box, a cell phone intercept system, geolocation, LINC-16, so we could talk to all the fast movers, and it could drop laser-guided bombs.
It was magnificent, and we actually put that on contract to JSOC as a way for them to do very cost-effective close air support cheaply.
And boy, the big Air Force, Big Navy smashed that because anything that threatened the primacy of the trillion-dollar F-35, they wanted nothing to do with.
Now, you know, the difference between PMC and working for national, you know, military, Army, Air Force, you know, Marines, Navy, whatever it may be.
Where is my pride to work for you versus the pride to stay, keep serving the traditional Marines, Army, Navy, Air Force, whatever it may be?
When the debate was happening over whether the U.S. should go to an all-volunteer force, it was in Congress in the early 70s.
And Wes Moreland, who was the idiot general that really screwed up in Vietnam, who then they made the chief of staff of the armed forces, screw up.
Under who?
Under Johnson and then Nixon.
He said, I do not want to lead an army of mercenaries.
That's what Wes Moreland, career army officer, called an all-volunteer force because the men and women were finally going to get paid a fair wage.
And Milton Friedman was debating him in Congress and he said, well, sir, then I am served by a mercenary butcher, accountant, and barber.
Because if you're not getting paid a wage that you're due, a fair wage, then you're not a free man, you're a slave.
So look, the big military can complain about, well, obviously they were, about fair pay, but a contractor is, in our case, was an American veteran that already served their country once, volunteered to, and now they're just volunteering to go back again and do it, you know, for pay.
Of course, they're not doing it for free.
And this idea that our contractors were paid vastly more is also really inaccurate because our guys were only paid for every day they're in the hot zone.
Just like a roughneck gets paid to go to a rig.
They get paid a lot.
The day they come ashore, their pay goes to zero.
So our guys were paid to be in the hot zone to do the dangerous thing.
And as soon as they left, they went to zero.
I saw somewhere $600 a day, if I'm not mistaken.
That's a number I saw on the hot zone.
Sometimes more?
Sometimes more.
Okay.
But again, the military is tax-free in a combat zone and all kinds of other housing allowances and other stuff, which is non-cash compensation that they don't really see and feel.
But in our case, it was simple cash on a barrel head.
So if I'm working for Blackwater, I'm a contractor there.
You pay me $600.
And $600 is not five days a week.
It's seven days a week.
So I'm making $42.
And it could be 18 hours a day or it could be 22 hours a day, right?
I mean, it depends.
If the op temples go, you turn two.
But your day is 600.
Two hours or 24 hours at $600.
Yes, but you're still in a war zone and you're still at risk of being shot.
So we had some of our guys were wounded while asleep in their beds at night.
We have an extremely inspiring story.
There's a West Point grad Army officer, Army Ranger named Derek Wright.
And he was about 2006, asleep in his pod next to the embassy.
And a 107 rocket launched by Iranian surrogates came through, blew up in his pod, and the guys found him with a pool of brain fluid laying on the floor.
And they stabilized him, kept him alive, but they figured he was brain dead.
They flew him to Landstuhl, Germany, where the military hospital was.
And I remember meeting his parents and his wife because they came to our office because we had to quick get him a passport, basically to go say goodbye, to unplug their loved one.
So I remember sitting there praying with them and crying with them, and off they go.
And so they got there like five days after the incident.
And Cindy walks in and there's been no brain activity.
And she takes her husband's hand.
She said, babe, I'm here.
And he squeezes her hand.
And it started a long road back.
And she made videos and she documented it beautifully.
And I tear up every time because he learned to walk again and then he learned to run.
And literally that rocket took the back third of his head off.
And one of his eyes doesn't work well, but God bless him.
He is as resilient as you could imagine.
He's alive and he is a tour guide in the state capital of here.
What a story.
Wow.
Wow.
So yes, people can throw stones at contractors getting paid.
That was a guy that served his country as a ranger, and he goes back serving again, and he takes one to the head while he's in bed.
Yeah, to me, I don't have a problem with the contractors getting paid.
I'm trying to make it as efficient as possible to see what do we get better usage of our money with, paying it to our soldiers that are putting their lives on the line or overpaying for a product by 1,000% they can get somebody else negotiated so you can save some money for the company.
Look, we have an antitrust problem all across America.
We've way overconsolidated every industry.
You used to have 100 major defense contractors.
You're really at five now.
That's right.
And they really behave like a cartel.
And they pay almost a brigade's worth of lobbyists, a couple thousand that infect Washington, D.C. Contractor gets charges way too much for product, who then pays lobbyists to pay politicians to effect more restrictions on competitors and really more nonsense.
And so it's a very unhealthy cycle.
The next president must break up the cartel that is defense contractors, IT, big tech, insurance, banking.
There's a really powerful book I read, actually referred by my daughter.
It's great when your kids start referring you stuff and educating you.
It's called The Myth of Capitalism.
I highly encourage your audience to read it.
And it's by Jake Tepper.
And it basically makes the case that the problem in America with income.
Oh, I've read it.
With income inequality.
Jonathan Tepper.
This is not new.
That's three or four years old.
Okay.
Yeah, I read this book.
And it just, we have way over-consolidated everything.
And man, we saw that loud and clear in the defense space as well.
Yeah, there's five of them now, right?
General Dynamo.
We've gone through the process.
Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop, General Dynamics.
Yeah.
And they're almost one company.
When you're five, you're not really five companies.
No, no, no.
They jointly bid on stuff, and it's coopetition at money.
Right.
You take this one.
I'll take this one.
You take that one.
It's cool.
I'll take the next one.
And they're all bullying the same buyer.
It's a cartel.
Right.
Makes sense.
Now, let me ask you this.
For somebody that's looking on private versus public, right?
If I'm choosing to give you the money, do I want somebody like you to become as powerful as possible where all of a sudden you're saying you have 73 aircraft, 767, you have all these guys.
Was there ever a moment where you're sitting there saying to yourself, I can do this better than you guys.
Flow everything through me?
Did you ever go through that yourself?
No.
I mean, in some areas, we were definitely better because we could operate with such a smaller footprint.
Where were you not better than the U.S. government?
Look, we never attempted to, endeavored to do big line formations, divisions, brigades of tanks, and it was not our thing at all.
But I would argue that for insurgencies, for those problems, we had a much better model, and we could do it better than the U.S. military.
What I wanted, what I really pushed for in 2017 was to get Trump to change tactics in Afghanistan to prevent the debacle that happened.
Bannon, Steve Bannon, a friend of mine, said, we're going to debate Afghan policy, write an op-ed.
So I did.
I wrote it to the Wall Street Journal, submitted for an audience of one.
Trump read it while he was sitting at the Oval Office desk, circled it.
He called in the National Security Advisor who had just asked to send 70,000 more troops to Afghanistan.
Trump said, I don't like your plan.
Do this one.
H.R. McMaster, sure, he's a nice guy, but he was a three-star armor officer who wanted to be a four-star, and he wasn't going to do anything contrary to the Pentagon.
What I advocated was basically a version of what the special operations community had done effectively, which is to train Afghan forces in a way that was cost-effective and you actually live with, train with, and fight with.
Put that mentor model with them so that you have, well, it's the same thing the East India Company did for 250 years, building local forces.
About 5% were expats.
The rest of them were locals.
But by having the continuity with professionals that provide leadership, intelligence, communications, medical logistics expertise attached to them, it's like giving a big brother training wheel support to those units.
And there was like 90-some battalions that we're going to attach to.
So it would have been about 3,600.
And then there was about 90 aircraft we would have bought, brought.
We already had a lot there.
or just taken over the Afghan aircraft, but fly them effectively.
The U.S. makes the mistake that they built the Afghan army in the mirror image of the U.S. military, heavily dependent on contractor support, heavily dependent on high-end laser-guided bombs and all the other stuff, really forgetting how the Afghans wage war and doing the basics of logistics.
So we're going to support the Afghan troops effectively.
People love to say people love veterans, but they hate contractors.
But really, in this case, it was the same thing.
Just a soft guy going back to serve again with reliable air power that would show up.
And then you take away the real source of corruption in the Afghan forces was the fuel, the payroll, the munitions, food.
And you basically take some, put an accounting firm in charge of that, take that away from the Afghans.
And we could have done, we could have saved about 95% of what the U.S. was spending.
Meaning our program costs less than 5%.
And there was a big policy meeting at Camp David in the summer of 2017.
I was supposed to go as a backseat to the agency, and I was blocked by Mattis.
By Mattis?
Yeah.
Mattis was a five-star, basically he was a five-star general as a SECDF, as conventional as the day is long.
And the sad thing is, for all that money and all those flags, nobody has been held account for wasting blood and treasure in Afghanistan.
And it's disgusting.
Those guys, those guys all have board seats.
They all have their full pensions.
And they lost.
They lost us.
They lost the taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.
And we just pissed away a lot of great Americans in an effort that was unnecessarily wasteful.
Eric, how much of your $2 billion contract you got was for Afghanistan?
Probably a third.
A third of it was from Afghanistan.
You guys was $600 plus million dollars of it.
Okay, so let me ask this.
You know, for me, in the last two years, the biggest parts of those would have been building the Afghan border police, building the Afghan Narcotics and Addiction Unit.
We did a lot of aviation support, flying supplies to all the remote bases of the U.S. guys, and then some of it was for diplomatic security.
Do you think, you know, the last few years, lowest trust the U.S. population has in the politicians as well as mainstream media.
They just don't trust them, right?
Why would they?
You can't blame them.
Then you got CIA, FBI, lowest it's ever been in a long time.
Do you think we need those organizations?
And if you had it your way, if you had the influence, would you have the military be set up the way it is right now?
Would you have 50 PMCs compete against each other to provide the best service for the U.S. government?
I think one of the best roles that a PMC could do, here's the thing.
We have a post office.
It's a federal government activity.
Sure.
You have FedEx.
You can drop off a FedEx package.
In some cases, you can pick up at a post office.
But the difference is FedEx operates as a private sector benchmark.
Because, you know, Fred Smith wrote the paper proposing FedEx, I think, while he was at Harvard, and they said, that's a terrible idea.
And they gave him a C.
Yeah, well, hold my beer.
He does it.
And now FedEx serves as a benchmark, and it's definitely made the post office wake up and be more efficient.
Maybe not perfect yet, but it's definitely better than it was.
And that's the best role that the private sector can be is to provide competitive pricing reality checks on what some of these things should be.
You didn't answer the question.
So do you think?
No, should it all be PMCs?
No, absolutely not.
But there's a lot of functions that the government does that can be bid out and let the government bid to do that or let the private sector.
I remember in like 2005, the Bush administration was talking about hiring 2,000 or 5,000 more Border Patrol agents.
And we got called to testify as to how much it would cost to train those.
And CBP, Customs and Border Police, were saying it was going to be like $180,000 to train each Border Patrol agent.
And we got called.
We looked at the curriculum to say, well, we can do that for about $40,000.
And so we were not very popular with CBP because we could, and no shit, we knew our costs.
We could do it for a quarter of what they were.
Who should the American people trust more to do the work better?
PMCs or the U.S. government?
Like if I'm, again, because the government has lost a lot of credibility last few years, right?
Who should they trust more?
You guys are going to be able to do it.
First of all, as a country, we should just spend less.
Our government will suck less if it's smaller.
We spend too much in social programs.
We spend way too much in military spending.
We don't have the money.
I mean, we're 34 trillion in debt.
We have grave danger of our currency collapsing.
Putting the military, putting all the agencies on a severe diet is a very healthy thing because it will force people to start to think outside the box and say, this is the mission I still got to get done.
I don't have this billion-dollar fire hose to throw money at problems.
Anytime a business goes into crisis, right, when it goes into a bankruptcy and you have a bankruptcy trustee and they come in and they force people to realign their thinking, oftentimes it's very healthy for a business.
We need to do that to all aspects of our government.
So I'm not trying to avoid your question, but competitive reality check benchmarking is absolutely necessary to really make our military spend less.
I mean, remember, in defense spending, we spend more than the next 17 countries combined.
It's insane.
It's grotesque.
And we're not that good at it.
I mean, now you have the Houthis, which are basically behaving like long-range pirates armed by the Iranians, have closed the Babel Mandab, the waterway, and is really choking off Egypt.
Egypt is in danger, grave danger.
40% of their GDP depends on Suez Canal traffic, which has now dropped by 90%.
Last week, the Egyptian currency devalued over 25%.
So you have 110 million people, a very poor population, prone towards Muslim Brotherhood, Ikwan attitudes.
The only reason the Ikwan is not in power there is because CC took over.
You talk about danger, all the equipment of the Egyptian army in the hands of a Muslim Brotherhood leader.
That's a big problem.
Yeah, so again, I'm asking this question maybe for my own self-interest.
And I think there's other people like me that are interested.
Meaning, there's a group of people that will sit there and say, well, you know, they're all doing it for money.
The NBA plays the game for money.
People make movies to make money.
If you can do it with your passion and you make the money even better, you know, capitalist builds a business and does it better.
If you're not getting paid a wage, you're not a free man.
You're a slave.
That's right.
And so that goes back to the message you said earlier.
I get and people join the military and you have to pay them well to do so.
We're not.
We're not even giving them a raise.
I mean, according to what's happening with inflation.
We're blowing a lot of money that we should just be paying guys directly on lots of nonsense that's could it actually work if the U.S. government, just like you're talking about the five contractors we have that were buying stuff through Boeing, you know, General Dynamics, all these guys, would it work if we had 50 PMCs that the government hired to work through?
Would that could that work?
Think of it this way: in the continuum of statecraft, you have diplomacy on one end, so you have embassies and international conferences, right?
And on the other end, you have a military that is big and conventional, aircraft carriers and tank divisions and nuclear weapons.
You really don't want to leave the, you don't want to have to deploy that ever because it's very expensive.
They should be there fearsome with maximum deterrence, like a big snapping dog waiting to be let off leash.
But the middle is the intelligence world.
And that's where we've fallen down because the agency, the CIA, is not doing anywhere near the covert actions using the authorities that it was designed to do to solve some of these problems internationally.
And now, and even more so, you have the Pentagon trying to wade into all these little small conflicts, and they basically crowd out the private sector from helping in correcting these situations.
You know, like Guyana?
Guyana is Venezuela, the oil?
Correct.
So Venezuela wants to take 70% of Guyana's land, the Essequibo area.
And that is a perfect example of Guyana needing a PMC.
They need surveillance.
They need some specialty manpower to train and advise them.
They need some Lyft aircraft.
They need some maritime interdiction capability, all of which a PMC can do.
But the Pentagon goes waiting in there, backed by the big five, to say, ah, we're here to sell some helicopters and we're going to sell an aircraft.
And it's all nonsense.
And Guyana is going to get rolled.
And I predict they will get pressurized hard here by April or May.
Okay, so let's.
So now you have another country that's going to get damaged due to a lack of American credibility and success.
I don't disagree.
So if an expat goes to a PMC, you know, when you join the Army, you join the Navy, hey, I solve me swear, and you're kind of giving your oath that, you know, you're going to is there an oath when they join a PMC or no, it's just a job.
So meaning when guys went to work for Blackwater, they swore the same oath that they did when they joined the military.
Why does it matter if I'm doing it for a private contractor, though?
Because we serve, because we're Americans working for America.
Did you guys ever take contracts for countries that are not in America?
Sometimes training contracts, sure.
Training contract.
Yeah.
But nothing more than that.
It was all training.
Nope.
Okay.
Training.
So, you know, when you're watching what's going on today, okay, you watch Ukraine, you watch, let's specifically stick to Ukraine for now, and then we'll get into some of the other ones.
You watch Ukraine, and hey, we're going to do a border bill.
$118 billion.
You guys are saying no to the border bill.
Two weeks later, no, it's a $95 billion bill.
$60 billion is going to Ukraine, right?
Yeah.
And where that money is going to end up, you have no idea where that money is going to end up, right?
And Kamala Hurst is going to say, we're going to keep spending money until dot, dot, dot.
How similar is Ukraine to what we did with Afghanistan and what's different about it?
Ukraine is a, we need to bring that war to a close because all Ukraine is doing now is destroying itself demographically.
They're chewing up the next generation of manpower that they can't really replace right now.
They don't have enough manpower.
The Western defense base is pathetic.
And you're not going to out conventional war, the Russian bear.
And I would say an ugly peace is better than whatever their idea of an ideal war is.
Well, what is an ugly piece, though?
Meaning, freeze the lines, straighten the lines, except let them have Crimea.
Let them keep Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, whatever.
They need to, it is not certainly the tax, it's not the American taxpayer's obligation to spend another $100 billion in Ukraine when there has been significant corruption and really nothing to show for it.
But why do so many people support it, Eric?
I mean, you're saying that.
So somebody may say, it's easy for you to say, so should we just let a dictator do its part and kill all these innocent people that he's killing?
Are you saying we leave it alone and we allow Putin to get what he wants?
I mean, half the country voted for that, right?
You know, the disgusting thing is all these people that say, ah, support Ukraine, spin a globe in front of them.
99% of them couldn't even find Ukraine on the map.
So don't tell me what their opinion is.
Their opinion doesn't really matter because they're idiots.
You think they're idiots.
I think a shocking amount of the people that have these strong social media opinions on Ukraine have no freaking idea where Ukraine is or what the realities are.
And so I think social media is not a great influence on our body politic or on our society at all.
I don't know if I disagree with you, but the question is somebody is converting these people that you claim idiots, right?
So the question to me comes, I read this quote by this lady who said it the other day.
1% of the population controls the world.
It's a smaller percentage, but you get the idea.
4% of the population are their puppets.
90% of the population are zombies.
5% are trying to wake up the zombies.
The 1% make sure that the 4% stops the 5% from waking up the 90%.
I don't know if you caught that whole thing that we're going through.
I think so.
I was trying to do the math.
Okay, so it's a lot of math going on here.
For a guy that made a lot of money, I'm sure you're following through on the math here.
But the point is this.
Forget the 90% of zombies, okay?
The 1% that are advocating to the 5%, the 4% of their, not the prophets, but disciples.
And they're going and selling everybody.
These guys could be in mainstream media.
These guys could be in business.
These guys could be in Hollywood.
Why are those guys, the people that are smart people?
They're not dummies.
Why do they think this is a good idea to keep giving Ukraine money?
Is there an incentive behind closed doors to them that we don't know about?
Is that the only thing that drives them?
Or do some of these guys actually think we're doing it right?
I think people are highly susceptible to propaganda.
Highly susceptible to propaganda.
Yeah.
Look, the Russians were wrong to invade Ukraine, absolutely.
But I don't know that the West could have also handled the whole situation much differently because there was all kinds of assurances made that NATO would not extend eastward after 1992.
And from a Russian perspective, now they lost 22 million people in World War II defeating the Nazis.
And so for them, looking out and seeing more unfriendly countries on their border than at any time since, what, May of 1940, that's a problem.
That's a red line for them.
And they kept saying, stop, stop, stop.
This idea of making Ukraine a NATO member, bad idea.
It shouldn't have been on the table beforehand.
And I even offered the administration before the invasion, because I noticed that the Russians were even canceling orders, defense orders, at the end of 2020, before the end of 2021.
And I wrote a paper, and I sent it up through a friend in JSOC without my name on it, so they can't use the I Hate Eric Prince card.
And it basically laid out that at that point, there was almost 500 aircraft set to be retired from the U.S. inventory.
So literally scheduled to be flown from an active squadron to the desert, Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, the Boneyard, and parked for eternity, written off to zero value to the taxpayers.
I said, make that a lend-lease package.
Almost like, I mean, Roosevelt gave 50 destroyers and some aircraft and a bunch of guns to the Brits in like 1940, lend-lease.
And I said, make it a combination of lend-lease and a flying tigers, a good use of a private contracted capability.
Because Ukraine needed air power.
They needed a lot more air power.
So I said, perfect.
There was 50-some F-16s, 55 F-15s, and another 40 A-10s.
Perfect.
Fly those to Ukraine.
Biden can make an announcement.
Ukraine is not going to be a member of NATO, but they're going to have an Air Force, and here it is.
And I could have put contracted pilots in those aircraft.
And you know what?
If you lose 20 or 30% of the aircraft, that's okay.
That's what ejection seats are for.
That would have been a significant deterrent for us.
The whole program would have cost like $400 million.
This is the one you're talking about.
No.
Okay.
No.
We looked at buying Motorsich, which is a company that makes turbid engines.
And some idiot made wild allegations about that.
This was three years ago.
That was a simple plan to buy a turbine maker.
But no.
Went all the way up to Sullivan and the National Security Council.
And of course, they never acted on it.
But again, because you have people in those jobs without experience that have never deployed aircraft themselves.
They've never done that.
So they get told by some Air Force officer, well, that's impossible.
They could never staff those aircraft.
Nonsense.
There are hundreds of former military aircraft flown by contractors today in America, and they're flown as opposition squadrons training against the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy for their readiness.
So it was a very applicable model, and it could have, I believe, 150 ex-U.S. military combat aircraft showing up in Ukraine.
That's a significant deterrent, and I bet you it would have stopped the war before it even started.
So why'd you stop doing this?
Why'd you stop?
Why don't you still do the business?
I mean, you sound like a business.
Because the left and the idiots in Washington so hate any ideas that are innovative or different that interrupt the money train, the very corrupt money train from the Unit Party.
Lindsey Graham, just as bad as any Democrat on spending more money to defense contractors and washing it through.
And what do we have to show for it?
What great military successes do we have for the last 25 years?
Remember, after 9-11, What did the Pentagon want to do, right?
So Bush goes to meet with his National Security Cabinet five days after 9-11.
While the Pentagon is still smoldering, the most expensive military in the world, but at that point, with like a $700 billion budget, they wanted to do bombs, missiles, and a ranger raid in October of 2001.
And they wanted to wait until the following April and do a mechanized invasion via Pakistan.
That's the best the Pentagon came with.
It was the CIA, Go for Black, and the Counterterrorism Center.
And they said, money, authorities, three weeks, the flies will be walking on the eyeballs of our enemies.
That was innovative.
They had done asymmetric unconventional warfare and with less than 100 special operators and case officers backed by air power, smashed the Taliban.
They were truly on the run.
That model worked for six months until the big conventional Pentagon showed up, and then they screwed it up for the next 19 and a half years and basically replicated the same Soviet battle plan.
If you read a book called The Bear Went Over the Mountain, that's what the Soviets did.
In fact, our base locations were the same places the Soviets were, followed the same plan.
So you telling that story.
What's your point of telling that story?
Are you telling it to say how bad it is right now?
If that's what you're doing, why did you get out of the business if you think you're fully qualified to be able to expose that and make it better?
Why did you get out of the business?
Because the Blackwater was so attacked and the regulatory state was thrown at us.
I paid about $2.5 million a month in legal fees for two years.
$60 million.
Yeah.
Paid the highest per capita fine in State Department history from Hillary Clinton for no actual damage to national security.
So with all the stuff that was thrown at us because Black Order was bad after Nussura Square and the left really came for us.
We fought off all the audits, defense contract management agency, and we came through that all clean.
But the one place we could not fight, we couldn't litigate was on export licenses because if we litigated, they would stop all export licenses and it would stop the business because you have to be able to export body armor or a helmet or a gun to do a security or training job.
And so they stuck us with the highest per capita fine.
And even in their study, they acknowledged that there was no actual export of no damage to national security.
So what they ended up fining us for was exporting helmets, body armor plates, et cetera.
So if we are working for the State Department, diplomatic security, another part of the State Department does the licensing called Defense Trade Controls, and they're kind of moving at their own pace.
And so we have a license into them to export stuff for our guys, which the Diplomatic Security Service is demanding.
I need 50 guys in this town in Iraq, you know, next week.
Go, go, go.
My license is in.
It hasn't come back.
I'm not going to send these guys naked.
Yeah, we sent the body armor, we sent the helmets, and they fined us like $500,000 per helmet.
That kind of nonsense.
And it was just politics.
So I started the business as a way to stay connected to the community I loved and to serve my country.
And to just get repeatedly kicked in the head, yeah, I'm about done with that.
How many people like, how many PMCs do we have right now the size of Blackwater peak when you guys were doing 850 a year in America?
There's really not any integrated ones left.
And they're all, and they've already, you know, like Blackwater now is owned by BlackRock, or no, by Apollo, another freaking New York hedge fund, and it's run like a typical Beltway bureaucratic firm.
Are you getting out?
You're contributing to that, no?
If you get out and because think about it.
Okay, if you, how many people like you are there?
And I know what you're thinking.
You're like, do you know how hard this was?
Do you understand how tough this job is?
I get that.
Honestly, no, it's a fair criticism.
Because if I look back, I was 2007, I was 36 years old, 37 years old.
I did not have an older me as a mentor.
Nobody that I knew in Washington or anywhere had gone through the regulatory proctology that we had, the bureaucratic assault, the media assault.
I mean, at that point, we were doing very legitimate covert action programs for the agency that I was even involved in personally on top of all the training in security, aviation, and stuff.
And so we kind of built and prepared to help our country deal with threats abroad, not planning for the bureaucratic and media and political assault that we came under back in Washington.
But if I could send myself a note back to A, when I started the business, I would have just said, don't work for the State Department.
They're not worth it.
For all the great work we did, I don't care what happens to them.
Not worth my people.
Find somebody else.
That's the one thing.
What else?
But even having gone through all the shit, the gauntlet, even if I had to pare it back down to a 30 or a 50 man business, down from a thousand man or 3,000 man, I would have, hindsight, I probably would have done it.
Because it was such an extraordinary team.
They were the best.
That team, that management team punched so far above its weight, it would run circles around the Fortune 500.
How many of them are still there with?
No, okay.
So your kids, you have 12 kids, right?
So we have a double Brady Bunch family.
I had seven.
She had five.
Seven is still a lot.
So you got a good side.
I got four.
I'm like, you know, I'm a small timer compared to you having seven and 12 kids.
Okay, so seven, 12 kids.
Do you think the future looks bright for those guys if somebody doesn't choose to expose what these guys are doing on the military side?
Because the fewer guys like you out there, you create fewer competition.
If you do, the bullies are just going to go more.
And they're going to be able to take advantage of the system more and have more and more control.
And my concern is the following.
So you ran a PMC, okay?
Successful one, $850 a year.
You know what the next PMC is going to look like?
Probably robots, AI.
God knows what the next level of PMC is going to look like.
We've seen it.
I mean, it's not like it's not a believable thing, right?
You see in the military where a guy creates, he's got all these.
There's an interesting window to what that looks like.
That's what I'm saying.
I think it is a little window.
There's a book called The Profession written by Stephen Pressfield.
And that's the guy that wrote Gates of Fire about Thermopylae.
He also wrote The Lionsgate, which is a very interesting book on the 67 War.
But he wrote The Profession, which is written in like 2030, set in 2030.
And at that point, the Iranians invade Saudi Arabia.
They take the oil fields.
And the U.S., because of basically Middle East fatigue, doesn't send any troops.
And so what do they do?
The Saudis end up hiring the successor company to Blackwater, who cleans up and does it.
And it's a very interesting perspective how that force is organized and a lot more mobile, fast, and drones.
And I would say the real lesson out of the Ukraine conflict now is that small FBV drones or small quadcopters that can drop munitions, even in a high electronic warfare environment, is exceedingly potent and a true asymmetric capability that the U.S. military is.
I mean, the Russians are paying attention.
They are building and learning.
I was just at the Saudi defense show a couple weeks ago, and there's all kinds of Saudi firms marketing their loitering munitions and with videos of them smashing Western tanks, Paladin howitzers, and M777 guns without stopping.
So the U.S. military needs to pay attention to those things because the change of equipment and tactics in warfare is very real.
Who's the modern-day Irk Prince?
Is there Irk Princes right now trying to do what you did or no?
Are they any formidable ones that are ambitious, driven, crazy enough to do it?
I'm not saying I wouldn't build a PMC again.
Okay, good.
All right.
Maybe we're bringing them out of retirement today.
Announcement's been made.
Okay, so let me continue my questions.
This is good.
I'm enjoying where we're going with this.
I mean, look, what I truly tried to get the Trump administration to accept, and even the Biden administration, was a rationalization, a stay-behind plan for Afghanistan to keep the lights on, to keep the Afghan government in power, put the Taliban on their knees and make them take a deal.
Yeah, that would have been a full-spectrum PMC.
But instead, I would now billions of dollars every year in whatever aid.
I would not do a PMC to just play defense and be a bodyguard for the State Department.
No, I would do it if we could actually do offensive combat units that could go and do small-scale counterinsurgency kind of stuff.
The Russians contacted me in 2011.
I went to Moscow November.
They said, please come build a Blackwater here.
Here's the land, all the rest.
I actually went shooting with their alpha group.
And this was before they went into Ukraine, even in 2014.
So there was a preset and peace, love, and happiness with the Russians.
Obviously, I said, no, I can't do that.
But it was interesting.
They fully embraced what the private sector can do.
Are they doing it?
The Russians have never really integrated air land battle and maneuver and integrating, fusing that surveillance.
I would argue I think I could have built a better PMC than Progozhin did.
Wagner Group?
Yeah.
Because it was a very, very conventional force.
Did you guys ever do anything?
Did you ever meet them or no?
Never did.
Never had a communication, nothing.
0.00000.
Got it.
Because somewhere it talks about Blackwater offered service to Wagner Group.
Yeah, that's a newspaper, if you can call it that, funded by an Iranian communist.
From the two-day part, you've got to give them credit.
It's actually a pretty good spin if it's.
Fuck those guys.
Who is this company, by the way?
Do you know?
If you pull this up, I'm actually kidding.
It's funded by Pierre Omedar, whose parents were Iranian communists.
Wish they stayed in Iran.
Yeah, that's from the Mossadegh camp.
Al Jazeera wrote it or who wrote it?
Intercept.
Intercept rotor.
Okay.
So you're there, you're in Russia.
They're wanting you to create a PMC there.
This is a year after you, so 2011.
So this is a year after you sold.
So 13 years ago, you're 41, I want to say, 40 years old.
Okay.
So you still, you know, you have a lot of the stuff that's fresh in your mind.
If you really wanted to do it, you could do it.
Did you ever meet Putin on your trip there or you never met him?
Never.
So let's stay on this point here with the PMCs, but also a little bit with Russia.
So the House and Republicans push back on this border deal that was disguised as a border deal for $118 billion, but only $20 billion was going to the border.
$60 billion was going to Ukraine.
Two weeks later, they just come out and they call it the $95 billion bill.
And all those numbers you're throwing around, it's disgusting.
They say, oh, we're going to spend $20 billion on the border.
It's all nonsense.
It's all a game.
And that's the problem.
We can say the Republicans are in charge of Congress.
Then, if they really are, starve the beast, be thalidomide, cut everything down to size.
We cannot afford all the nonsense that we're spending money on.
And the best thing America could do as a society, as a government, as a people is put the whole thing on a very severe diet.
I think a lot of look at what Milley in Argentina has done in like two months in office.
That's right.
It's the equivalent of him cutting four or five hundred billion dollars out of American budget.
That's what he's done in Argentina.
That's right.
God bless that man.
Yeah, you saw the meeting with him.
I don't know if you saw that.
Oh, yeah, I was there.
Look, anybody that campaigns with a chainsaw, I can identify with.
So let me stay on this.
118, then they go to 95, 60 going to Ukraine, 60 billion going to Ukraine.
They say no, but hear me out.
Let me get my question.
They say no.
After they say no, the media blames the Republicans.
All of a sudden, Navalny dies, okay?
Whether it's a blood cloth, you know, a Ukrainian spy says it was blood cloth, but everybody else says no.
Russian spies killed him.
Whatever the story is, many people believe that Putin may have taken out his opponent.
That's what a lot of people are saying.
And if that's the case, then the following week, the U.S. puts 500 sanctions on Russia, 500 sanctions on Russia.
Three out of four banks in China, largest, four of the largest banks in China, three out of four, all say moving forward, we're not doing business with China.
These are all bigger than JPMorgan Chase and China.
Bigger with China or bigger with the doing business with the U.S.?
They will not do business with Russia.
They will not do business with Russia.
So I can give you the bank's names, Rob, if you want to pull up the bank's names.
I believe you.
I'm not questioning that.
One of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, then China Construction Bank, Bank of China.
ICBC.
The only one that didn't do it that still allows is the Agricultural Bank of China, all bigger than JP Morgan Chase.
How much of this do you think is you worked with the CIA before?
You know how those guys work.
You know, if they want to overthrow a government, a country, a president, a leader that they don't like, they can do it many different ways.
Do you think there's anything going on here?
I don't think you think a little too highly of that organization anymore.
I think too highly of that organization.
I think you're over-projecting what their capability is or what their willingness is.
Let's change the capability.
How about motive?
Is their motive still high if they want to get rid of somebody?
Do they still have high motive when they don't like somebody and say, let's target this guy?
Let's get rid of him.
Is the motive still high?
I don't know.
I come back to the you've heard of Havana syndrome.
No.
Pull up Havana syndrome.
It started in Havana.
There were U.S. diplomats working out of the embassy that suddenly got hit with effectively a microwave weapon.
The sounds, yes.
Yeah, microwave weapon and it's giving them serious TBI and screwing up their vision and hearing.
And then it was in Columbia and Vienna and Delhi and even in Washington, D.C.
And these are real problems, definitely caused by it's not made up in people's minds.
And for the agency to say, well, it's all in your head, that's a problem.
That's an organization I have a problem with if you're asking your people to go do difficult, dangerous things.
Right?
Because if you're sending a case officer out, they're literally committing an operational act, a crime that can get them killed in a country to convince someone to betray their country or their friends, an operational act, an act of intelligence.
And yet they're not even acknowledging these attacks on their own people.
I have a problem with that.
So do you think Navalny was killed by Putin?
Do you think Putin is a bad guy?
Do you think some of this stuff that's happening simultaneously right after them saying no to the 95 billion, do you think games are being played?
Or no, it's just whatever we see is exactly what it is.
No, of course there's games being played.
And look, Putin has a opponents of Putin have a way of falling out of windows a lot.
So yeah, obviously there's a lot of directed hits all through there for anybody that's opponing him.
There is some kind of, there's some kind of a parliamentary election in March.
So Navaldi having a fatal accident or whatever he had doesn't surprise me, sadly.
Doesn't surprise you.
No.
From being on the inside, not on the inside, I know you're not going to say on the inside, but were there things, Eric, were there things you knew that, you know, because you're getting certain contracts, you're communicating with certain people, were there things you knew that the media would report on?
And you're like, no way, that's what's happening.
I'm part of that.
And I know that's not what's going on right now.
Were there things like that?
That happens all the time on an almost daily basis.
How big of a scale was it?
Or just like small things?
Ah, they're bullshitting.
That's not a big deal, but they're bullshitting on this.
Ah, that's not a big deal, but they're lying on this.
Or some of the things were so big where you're like, this is ridiculous how they're selling on America and they're buying it.
Some of, look, some of the nonsense that you see in the media is driven by the competition of the internet.
And so they are all in the race to be the first out with a story, which is not so well checked.
And they try to make it sensational, to make it clickworthy, effectively clickbait.
And so, yeah, truth has definitely been the victim of some really sloppy journalism.
And then you add to that nation-state-sponsored propaganda, whether it's from the Russian side or the Ukrainian side or the Chinese or Qatar or from different interest organizations in the United States.
There's a lot of propaganda in the world.
And so I guess I try to cut through that.
I travel a lot and I meet with a lot of people that are first-hand participants in a lot of those things that are happening.
And I can at least ask them what they saw happen.
Got it.
Got it.
And I give you maybe a different kind of a.
Yeah, because I wonder some of the stuff we're seeing right now just feels like it's coming straight out of a movie.
Like it almost doesn't even make sense when you see some of these things.
Like even maybe a recent event that just happened, AT ⁇ T, a couple of days ago.
I don't know if it happened to you before.
Yeah, I think that was a Chinese cyber attack.
You think so?
Yeah.
Why do you say that?
I would predict that was a warning, a trial run before they go do more aggressive things on Taiwan in April or May.
So is that a weird question?
I would expect provocation by their maritime militia or some of the islands, because there's Taiwan Island, Formosa, and there's smaller ones like Kuimoy and Matsu, which are right up against the Chinese, actually the Chinese mainland.
I can see some incidents there where they seize those or stage an incident or an accident and they end up putting hundreds of Chinese maritime militia, which are just PLA troops called maritime militia, and they'll see what the West does.
Is Biden going to roll an aircraft carrier if that happens?
And so they will test and see if there's consequences, test and see if there's consequences.
They now do hundreds of Chinese Air Force aircraft that overfly Taiwanese airspace all the time without consequence.
They shoot missiles over Taiwan, over Japanese territory even, without consequence.
If you allow them, China is an ancient society and they will salami slice.
They will keep pushing, right?
You know how you can cut it really thin and they might take three little slices, but they've moved.
They've moved the ball in their direction where they want to be.
And Trump was the first president that came along that said, hey, they're like a neighbor that moves the yard fence into your yard six inches a year.
And Trump was the first one that said, hey, get the hell back on your side of the line.
I can tell you, I spent enough time in China during the Trump administration, they were spooked by him.
The trade policies and the controls on certain technologies not going to China really spooked them.
What's your level of speculation on this being China?
If you were to say, you know, over under, I'd say 70% is China, 50% is China.
What would you say on the AT ⁇ T incident?
70%.
Okay.
So let's just say that's 70% China.
Are they doing it and telling U.S. that we did it?
Like, are they doing, okay.
So they're doing it and they're saying.
Did it break contact on Taiwan or more to follow?
Got it.
To say we are capable of doing way more than this if you screw with this.
Okay.
So let me ask, let me go a little bit deeper with this because when we- We have lots and lots of asymmetric capability inside the United States already.
What does it look like?
Give us a paint a picture of how ugly this could be, what China is capable of.
Look, China from a CI counterintelligence perspective, they've had the Confucius Institutes at American Universities for decades, which are Chinese government-funded interest and communication centers on campuses.
They have the Thousand Talents program where they would task smart Chinese to go Thousand Talent Program where they would task smart Chinese to go study in a specific university to gather intel on a specific thing.
So they're tasked to go burrow in, learn, do, follow, take that tech back to China.
They have the United Front Works Department all through the United States.
So you have a lot of Chinese diaspora that are here that the Ministry of State Security still has their hooks in.
And because there's family members back in China that they can hold in danger to make that person in America do what they want.
If the FBI was serious about CI, the Communist Party members have to check in and go for training at least every six months.
So there's a, it's called the general, I think it's called the general management department.
It's like the HR department of the Chinese Communist Party, and they oversee the training you have to do every year.
It's almost like reserve duty, where they have to come in and get their party indoctrination.
If they were smart, surveil every consulate, every known Chinese facility, and see who's going in and out of there.
Those are the CCP members that are here in the United States working, living, studying, and some of them even working for the U.S. government.
So, yeah, they have a massive installed base of influence and covert action already.
And that's mostly on the collection side.
And because of the massive illegal flow of migration, there's a lot of Chinese males, military-age males.
They're not all Chinese soldiers.
They're not all Chinese spies.
There's a lot of men.
There's like 40 million males of marriage age in China with no prospects of marrying a female because of sex selection abortion.
When they had one child policy, the parents would abort a female baby and have a male.
So these dudes are in China with an economy not doing great, with no prospects of a female.
They say, hell, I'm going to America.
Now, if only 2% of those millions are bad, still really bad.
So again, that is a serious CI problem that needs to be mopped up.
On the cyber side, I mean, AT ⁇ T, phone goes out, right?
So can they knock out 911 service?
That's right.
So can they, what is their cyber attack capabilities look like?
Like if you were to paint a picture, what could it look like?
Quite significant.
And if there's Huawei switches and any of that Chinese telecom infrastructure in the United States, which is what Trump was right to ban and to push other allies to ban.
When the daughter was trying to come in from Canada and she was doing business with Iran and Huawei no longer could do business here.
I remember that.
Yep.
But before that, there was a lot of Huawei switches installed.
And so who knows what back doors that Huawei was started by an ex-PLA colonel from the intelligence business.
So yeah, there's no shocker there.
But paint a picture, meaning, for example, do they have the capability of the week of the election to have 300,000 phones and make life challenging in certain zip codes, certain areas that maybe are going to be politically voting on one side or the other to keep the left or Biden in?
Are they capable of being able to do something like that?
They understand asymmetric warfare very, very well.
So yeah, think of the permutations of nonsense that they can pull.
They'll probably do it.
Okay.
So let's just say they do do it.
So what they are doing now is sponsoring the fentanyl epidemic.
China.
Absolutely, unequivocally, fact.
The precursor drugs produced actually around Wuhan, oddly enough, the same place that COVID leaked from.
And the stuff is shipped to Venezuela, Venezuela, to Mexico, formulated into fentanyl.
And think about it.
All these fentanyl deaths, like 109,000 Americans killed by fentanyl.
And it's, you know, a normal drug dealer doesn't want to make a drug that kills his customers.
Dead customers don't pay.
They don't buy, right?
That is absolutely pushed to a fatal level as a true disruptive destruction to American society.
And they need to feel consequences for that.
The son of YouTube's former CEO, Susan, just died from fentanyl.
YouTube's CEO, former, she resigned a couple weeks, couple years ago.
Her son just passed away.
Tragic death from fentanyl.
Yes.
Some are writing about it.
Okay.
But I'm trying to go a little bit.
Did you watch the movie Leave America Alone or Leave America Behind?
The movie with Barack Obama that he was the, have you seen that movie or no?
No.
No, I haven't seen that.
Why are you smiling?
I wouldn't say Barack Obama.
Leave the world behind.
Barack Obama would not be on my top 10 filmmaker list.
Well, if there's anything that I would want you to watch is this one.
Not because it's a great movie.
When you watch it, you'll see why.
I'm surprised you haven't seen it, by the way.
It is a very weird movie.
Very.
There's a scene in this movie where a massive ship, okay, is coming towards, we can't play this, obviously, for obvious reasons, but a massive ship is coming towards the beach.
And the daughter, this baby, is sitting there saying, that ship's getting closer and closer and closer and closer until eventually it just comes through.
Planes start crashing.
Teslas are all driving into each other.
I mean, it's a pretty epic movie if you've not seen this.
And he is the executive producer with Julia Roberts and a couple other people.
Then a movie is being launched right after that called Civil War.
We were talking earlier off camera.
And my question is the following.
If let's just say election day, I think this November 5th is a Tuesday.
If on that day there is some gamification going on where certain people don't have access to voting and others do, and the election goes in a certain way, how ugly do you think it'll be in America?
Gamification?
Yes.
What do you mean by that?
Gamifying, meaning they can gamify and manipulate is what I'm saying.
Look, a lot of countries have moved back to paper ballots and vote on that day.
Let's do that.
Simple.
You know we're going to do that?
No chance of hacking.
We should.
You think we're going to do that?
I think state by state, we should.
Not should.
Not should.
There should is a difference.
There's a lot of things we should be doing.
But as a country, you know, again, if in any possible way there's manipulation gone and there is phones off, phones not working, certain things not happening, you know, places you're going to want to vote.
Maybe it's not working.
There's challenges with technology, with software in that area that is causing you to wait in line for eight hours and families are sitting there saying, dude, I can't wait for eight hours.
My kids are waiting out the house.
I got to put them down.
If there's that level of frustration where a mom or dad is going to say, I just can't wait anymore.
I got to go home.
And that affects the election and there's proof of that.
How ugly could it get in the States?
And if no clear candidate wins 270 electoral votes, the Founding Fathers are so brilliant.
They thought of everything.
So it goes to the House of Representatives and the House decides.
It happened before.
It was John Quincy Adams versus Andrew Jackson.
Nobody won the Electoral College, clearly.
It went to the House.
John Quincy Adams won.
And then Andrew Jackson came back four years later and crushed him.
So you're not worried about it.
You're not worried about 2024.
There's a lot of people that are.
Of course I'm worried about it.
There's a process, and let's follow the Constitution.
I mean, of course.
I mean, people want to follow the Constitution.
You say it in a way where you're assuming everybody will.
Do you think that the concept of civil war is capable of happening in the States anytime soon or not in America?
Not the way the founders created it.
I've read a lot of American Civil War history and the feel and the vibe in the country.
And Yeah, some of that feels like it would today.
But here's the thing.
A civil war would not necessarily be, it's really going to be rural versus urban.
That's the difference.
It's not a regional.
It's not a north versus south.
It's rural versus urban is where this divide is, which is a very different, different equation.
Tell me more.
Trump won, like in 2016, Trump won like 3,100 counties.
Hillary Clinton won like 80.
Yet the ones that she did win are big urban metro top 20 metropolitan cities.
Yes.
So if that becomes a civil war, it becomes a very unpopular place to be.
Because those places don't have enough food, don't have enough water.
That becomes very, very bad for them.
Are you a preparer?
Not really.
No?
No.
Live a simple life.
You're not concerned about what could happen.
Yeah.
I have a few guns.
I have a few.
I have a few friends.
Just a few.
Is that what it is?
Just a couple.
You got like a, you know.
And a great alumni association.
Alumni association.
Who out of all our enemies do you fear the most?
Like, if you were to say our most formidable enemies, who would you say are the enemies that you fear the most?
Look, the sad thing is, if the left had not done the lie of the Trump-Russia collusion bullshit, which is provenly proven to be bullshit after $50 million of investigation, if they'd not done that, Trump could have made a deal with Putin on Ukraine and it would have pulled with Russia, on Ukraine, et cetera, pulled Russia in from the cold and pulled them out of the orbit of China.
The U.S. policy for 100 years and even before we really got involved in Europe, the goal was to keep German industry away from Russian resources.
But now we've pushed Russian resources into the hands of Chinese industry.
And really, Russia is in a subjugated role.
So I think the medium and long-term security interest of the United States is to bury the hatchet with the Russians and pull them away from an orbit of China.
Because culturally, we have a lot more in common with Russia than we do with China or Japan or Korea or India.
Fact.
So our major threat, the major threat to liberty in America is still the Chinese Communist Party.
When you read the statements that Xi makes to the standing committee, there's a great article written in Foreign Affairs by Matt Pottinger.
And he actually takes chunks of Xi's statements that don't normally get translated into English.
And he says, prepare for a great conflict.
And it is basically the job, the mission of this Chinese Communist Party to remake the world in the image of the Chinese Communist Party and to overthrow the Westphalian order.
Now, if you've never heard of the Westphalian order, I know you have, but it's basically the role of the modern nation state and our role as citizens within that.
And they want to remake it into the role of just like China.
Hell no to that.
And I think the next administration, and China has a, for like the last 19 centuries, it's been one of the biggest economies, if not the biggest in the world.
But they have a habit of coming together under a strong dictator and then, you know, a century later, fragmenting apart.
I think it's better for China to be a bit more diffuse and less controlled by Beijing.
And that is in all of our interests.
Especially the neighbors of China would especially agree with that.
Because they don't want to be cenified.
And by the way, their economy isn't as good as people think it is.
They're getting hammered right now.
Correct.
Look, look what they did to Jack Ma, right?
Jack Ma is like a combination of Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs, like literally an amazing tech innovator.
So Jack Ma started Alibaba, which is 10 times the volume that Amazon does.
And he made some comments critical of the government and the central bank and the CCP.
And instantly, he's disappeared from view, like literally one of the wealthiest guys in China.
He disappears.
And some months later, he's found lecturing to an elementary school.
And the media announced that he'd embraced supervision.
Whoa.
Okay.
So that's the message they've done to their tech sector.
I can tell you that the Chinese money is fleeing China as much as humanly possible.
They're going to Europe.
They're going to Dubai, anywhere they can.
There's a huge Chinese population in Australia that's gotten out because they want to live free and not be under the boot of the CCP.
Where is Jack Ma nowadays?
He is in China under supervision.
About three, four years ago, no, not even, three years ago, he made a trip to Spain to basically clear out bank accounts, to sign them over, and he was surrounded by 12 Ministry of State Security agents while his family is held hostage back in China.
So they hold him by the balls.
This all happened after a speech he gave.
I don't know if you saw the speech he gave him.
A little bit critical.
It wasn't like overly critical.
That was it.
He wasn't throwing down.
No, he wasn't throwing down.
Like, this is it.
You can't talk like this.
You can't talk.
Where are we united at in America?
Like, if you were to say the left, right, center, everybody, what topics are we united on that you see?
Is there anything we're united on?
A country is a country when its people have some commonly held beliefs.
And if we can't even agree on what is male and female anymore, we have a problem, right?
The Democrats' last candidate for the Supreme Court could not identify, could not define supposedly some Harvard-trained lawyer, couldn't define what a woman is.
So that's a problem.
The last Civil War kicked off over states' rights.
It was over trade and it was over slavery.
And people went to war over that.
Maybe it's worth going to war over defining what a gender is because I certainly know what a gender is.
And there are some things I'll fight for.
Yeah, that's the part, right?
When you got kids and your kids get into it, you bring them in.
I got grandkids now.
Well, congratulations.
I'm far away from having grandkids.
My oldest is 12.
I swear.
If I become a grandfather soon, I'll be very upset at them.
And impressed slightly, but more upset.
So I got kids, and you know, when these guys get into it and they fight, and as a father, you first let them do their thing.
And there's levels of fights, right?
Level one, level two, level three, they got six, seven, maybe eight, nine, you kind of get involved.
Okay, we got to talk, guys.
And you start off by saying, hey, what do you guys, you know, agree on?
This is your brother.
You'll love him.
You know, this is your this.
And you kind of go through it.
So let's just say we're trying to figure out a way to put the people from the left and the right and the center in the same room.
Okay.
And you're the mediator.
They've hired you, Eric.
That's your new job, okay?
To mediate these guys.
Easy job, not a tough one.
Hell has frozen over.
It's frozen over.
And you show up, right?
And you're trying to bring them together.
What do you ask them?
Like, what do you say to say, hey, guys, can we all agree that America is the greatest country in the world?
No, it's not.
Do you know what we've done?
Okay, let me try a different way.
Do you guys love your family?
I love my family, but I know he doesn't love his family.
How do you start to get these guys to start at a common- I think the amplification of social media of idiots is, look, I think most, I think you're going to see an awakening of what were traditional Democrats that feel abandoned by that party and even black and Hispanic votes that are, you know, most black and Hispanic voters know what a male and a female is.
They know Muslims as well, by the way.
You put Muslims in debt.
Absolutely.
They definitely know it.
Exactly.
And you focus on basic economic opportunity.
Again, a candidate that runs on decartelizing industry wins.
What did the U.S. Army do?
The mission of the U.S. Army after World War II in Germany.
Denazification, demilitarization, and decartelization.
The difference, again, I'm drawing on that book from Tepper.
Seeing what John D. Rockefeller did, controlling most of the hydrocarbon industry in all of America.
And then when the Sherman antitrust laws come along and they break up standard oil and it becomes all kinds of oil companies.
And John Rockefeller made more money doing that because he had a bunch of businesses.
But the Germans saw that and they did that to their industry.
And so it made it very easy in the 20s as they became bigger and bigger cartels after World War II.
Very easy for the Nazi Party to control German industry.
Much easier to control 30 companies than 30,000 entrepreneur-led companies.
We need America, we need hundreds of thousands of entrepreneur-led businesses with a very sharp elbow competition instead of the Fortune 500.
Here's the thing.
Even in the last like 20 years, there is half the amount of public listed companies than there used to be.
Why?
Over consolidation.
And how is that allowed to happen?
Because it's like a $220, for every dollar you spend in lobbying, they get $220 return.
It's like a 20, 22,000%, 22,000% return, which is why we have too many damn lobbyists in Washington, D.C.
And the five counties surrounding Washington, D.C. are the wealthiest per capita in the country.
All of that is not a sign of a healthy society.
So fix that.
Teddy Roosevelt, total badass, got shot while he was campaigning, finished his speech, then he went and got fixed.
He led a very, very rough but effective antitrust effort.
We need that in America.
A rising boat, a rising tide really does lift all boats.
And making it possible, whether you are super poor or you're middle class or whatever, easier to start a business, to get access to capital, all the rest.
And that's even the same argument on governance.
One of my favorite authors is Hernando DeSoto.
And he wrote Invisible Capital and The Other Path.
And he was a Peruvian economist.
Sorry, he was a Peruvian, managed a big construction firm in Switzerland, made all kinds of money, went back to Peru and said, why is Peru so rough?
Why is Switzerland so nice?
And he built a consulting firm around installing the basic building blocks of capitalism, like title for your land, a bank account, a business license, a commercial remediation, a way to commercially adjudicate disputes, all the things we take for granted, right?
If you want a business, you want to form a business in America, you can call 10 states and get it done for 200 bucks in a half an hour.
You can get a bank account.
You can get that stuff exists.
But the more regulation, you know, this runaway regulatory state that now puts out like an average of 78,000 pages of rules, which has the force of law, which has never been voted on, when the regulatory states allowed to do that, we truly have a constitutional crisis because we're supposed to have three branches of government, executive, legislative, judiciary, but we have a fourth permanent state bureaucracy that is not elected, not accountable,
yet can write rules with the force of law.
That must change.
I just ordered a book.
Mystery of capital.
That's what you were talking about.
So, you know, back in the 80s, Peru had a terrible problem with the Shining Path, the Sendero Luminosa, which was a Marxist, Maoist insurgency.
And when they enacted DeSoto's reforms, land for the people that they owned, it was over.
Because the farmer said, the campesino said, this is my land, pal.
Get out.
That's right.
No more commies.
So a couple more topics here before we wrap up.
How much did you study?
How much do you know about what happened with Iran?
Do you know a lot about Iranian history or no?
Okay.
So what really happened with, you know, how the Hezbollahs, how Khomeini, Khomeini, how these guys came in with the Shah, you know, the revolution that took place with the Shah.
How much do you know what happened there?
I know that I think it was Mossadegh.
Mossadegh was before the Shah.
Yes, but he was going to nationalize BP, their oil fields.
And so there was a somewhat of a sponsored coup, which ousted him, put the Shah in place.
And the Khomeini definitely got help from the Soviets to stir up and to oust, right?
Because they hated that there was an American friend on the border of the Soviet Union.
And I think the U.S. largely let the Shah hanging and didn't give him the help.
Again, the CIA in the 70s was a very troubled, weakened, hamstrung organization between the church committee and Stansfield Turner, just kind of threw out all the sharks and they were left with minnows.
And what a strategic error to let it go.
Destroyed an entire region.
Now, a question for you.
Let's just say hypothetically.
You know what?
Someone just told me that the Shah converted to Christianity before he died.
Did he, really?
I've heard that story.
Yeah, this is his last book he wrote before he died, Answer to History.
I just had his son on a couple months ago.
We did a three-page.
Raisa Palavi?
Yeah, we got him on a very, very longest podcast he's done.
Had one of the best conversations everybody around the world was talking about in the Iranian community.
But I got a question with this one.
Say somebody was to call you, okay, and they said, hey, Eric, we would like to hire you as a consultant and we would like some ideas.
If we wanted to bring democracy back to Iran and whether it's a revolution to change the regime.
Come on, man.
How would you go about doing that?
Of course I've thought about that.
But you think I'm going to talk about it on camera?
Give me three things.
I mean, you know, it's just this.
First of all, we have a small podcast.
Probably 17 people will watch this.
And the 17 people that watch it, they're all going to be Iranio, just so you know that.
But if I know you can't, do you in your mind know?
Like, do you.
You know exactly what I do.
You know exactly what you would do.
Absolutely.
Who else knows?
Some of my friends.
Okay, good.
So what I'm saying is.
So if I get clipped, the mission was.
That's not what I'm saying.
What I'm asking is like.
No, look, think about it this way.
Reagan took office in 1981 and he sat in the Oval Office because we'd had a policy of containment for 35 years.
And he said, enough.
We're going to fuck the commies.
We're going to go at them economically, politically, culturally, socially, in all ways we push back.
I remember that speech.
Fuck the commies.
It was a...
No. I don't know.
I get what you're saying.
Maybe he said it behind closed doors.
Watch my podcast off-leash with Eric Prince and see Jack Wheeler.
Put the link below, by the way, so the audience can find it.
Jack Wheeler was the guy that went abroad and brought back all the ideas which became the Reagan doctrine from all the places to push back on the Soviets.
And I mean, he's the closest thing to a real-life Indiana Jones.
Anyway, I digress.
What they did, what the U.S., working in concert with the Catholic Church and MI6 in Poland, provided communications equipment to the shipyard workers, the solidarity movement, students, farmers, the church, all sorts of communications.
And that, you know, the means to communicate is essential.
There's a fantastic book called The Dictator's Handbook.
Great book.
You've read it.
It's small.
It's a phenomenal.
Yeah.
But it's a college study and how dictators stay in power.
So identify who that selectorate is.
Who keeps the supreme leader in power?
Okay.
Obviously, the sad thing is, I think the Arab Spring started in Iran in 2009 with the green movement.
Lots of people in the streets.
And the regime was so threatened that they had to call in Lebanese Hezbollah to crack heads because they didn't trust the Iranian internal capability anymore.
And crickets, nothing from the Obama administration.
Not, we support Iranian freedom, we support your right.
Nothing.
Obviously, no direct help or kinetic help, but not even the equivalent of a tweet or a statement.
And then you have the women like freedom protest where women are protesting they want to show their hair or wear a skirt or drink a beer or listen to rock and roll or drive or whatever.
Be normal and be free.
And you'd think the women's rights groups from around the world would be supporting them, but it's again, crickets from them, crickets from the left.
Empowering those movements with communications tools, with you can make the regime very, very vulnerable.
Now, there's a lot of stuff before that that I'll tell you about after we're off camera.
Yeah.
Yeah, I was talking to Pierce two weeks ago, and he asked me the question.
I said, you know, Iran, what you're Pierce Morgan.
And I said, what Iran fears is not what you fear.
Iran fears the youth.
They fear women.
They fear students.
They fear sanctions.
They fear economy being bad.
Those are some of the things that they fear.
The question is, you know, to go about doing that with Iran, you also need the right administration that's willing to go all the way through for that to happen.
And that's a lot of work.
And yep, you do that.
Why would Russia or China, whatever your plan is, let's just say your plan is a strong plan, effective one.
Why would Russia or China allow you to win?
Well, the Iranian people ultimately get a say.
There's what, 85 million people?
Yeah.
I mean, look, Iran even has a demographic problem themselves.
The women have voted and closed their wombs.
I mean, they went from like five kids per woman to like 0.8.
Right.
They have a severe contraction issue.
Right.
China has it because of force.
They have the reverted pyramid, whatever they call it, inverted payware.
Yeah, and the costs where it's very, very expensive for them to try to start a family and job insecurity and all the rest.
I'm curious to know what your plan is.
I'm very interested to see what your plan is.
And you and I will talk off camera.
Next question.
McAfee, John McAfee.
I don't know if you remember him.
McAfee on the side of the game.
He's an antivirus guy, right?
So I sat down with him six years ago at his place, five years ago at his place.
Very interesting guy, eccentric.
The entire interview, he had a gun on him.
He was smoking cigarettes and he was having whiskey or something while his guys in the back are holding M16.
Some guy knocks on the door.
They run to the door with guns.
The guy's freaking out.
I'm just trying to drop off something.
He said, he looks at me with my phone.
He says, why do you have a regular phone?
I would never have a regular phone.
I said, what do you mean?
He said, I would never have a regular phone.
You know what kind of a phone I got?
Do you know who's spawned on your phone?
I said, John, do you really believe everybody?
He said, you have too much trust.
Okay.
Now, for you, you also, you know, talk about a certain phone, right?
Tell us a little bit more about that phone.
Well, this is an unplugged phone.
Okay.
And this resulted from the nonsense after the 2020 elections.
Big tech was canceling certain apps and shutting off certain voices.
And I said to some of my much smarter friends, I said, we need our own phone that they cannot cancel.
They cannot control.
And so this is an unplugged phone, which is a result.
It's our hardware.
It says unplugged on there.
High-end camera.
Same one that's on the iPhone 15.
But the difference is this is our operating system with our own store, VPN, antivirus, messenger.
But the difference is we don't have an advertising ID.
Your phone has like a 25-digit, basically like a mark of the beast, which follows you everywhere.
And they know where you go, what you buy, where you go, who you call, what you buy, and what you browse.
And the handset, right?
Apple, Google, take that data, export it to the tune of about $180 a year.
And the apps that are on your phone also work with that ad ID to export to the point of even turning on the microphone, turning on the camera, turning on GPS.
I've had so many people I've talked to, they said, yeah, I was talking to my wife in our bedroom about the need for a mattress.
And the next day we're getting advertising for mattresses.
So imagine that phone listening in their bedroom.
So this phone prevents that because it doesn't have an operating system.
We block that.
And it's actually the first one with an actual firewall on it that you can hard off the Wi-Fi, the camera, the microphone.
Who's a service through?
T-Mobile, ATT, Verizon, and we prefer Patriot Mobile.
Got it.
So it's really the internet.
It's really on the.
It allows you to be in the world, but not of the world and not be collected and tracked.
Got it.
And it's called what?
Unplugged?
Unplugged.
Unplugged.unplugged.com.
There you go.
Yeah, we're looking at it.
We delivered, yeah, we delivered 500 of them in November, and I got 10,000 coming, delivering soon.
So you guys just started this.
Well, geez, we went from zero to a fully functioning phone with our own operating system in three years.
That is so cool.
Just, that's great.
If you've ever heard of Pegasus, the guy that developed Pegasus is our CTO.
Got it.
Okay, so he's a good CTO.
But he developed it as a way to do remote phone service.
And then he built a very secure phone used by governments.
And then he built a phone that controls most of the world's pacemakers.
Now, who's behind this phone, by the way?
Investor-wise?
Me.
Just you?
Well, no, me and some others.
And a few others.
Okay.
You haven't done a round.
You haven't brought people in yet or anything.
No, there's, I think we have 10.
Okay.
Got it.
Very interesting concept.
But it is intentionally not a Silicon Valley-backed company.
It will not be a public company ever.
And it is there to be an independent phone platform.
It's not even an American company.
Where's the base out of?
Cyprus.
Cyprus.
Okay.
Cool.
That's a very interesting project.
Last but not least, before we wrap up, I saw an article.
I wonder if this is true or not.
Did you guys train Project Veritas' spies on how to go and get intel from some of the people out there?
Is that somewhat of a true story?
I didn't train anybody, but they did use our ranch at some point.
They did.
Yeah.
Just for open area, and they had, you know, they used a barn and a classroom.
What an interesting model.
Did you see him the other day dressed like a gay man going out there talking to, and he actually pulled it off?
You got to give this guy credit on what obviously he's no longer with Project Veritas.
That's called OMG, you know.
Chutzba.
Yeah, there's no question about it.
There's no question about it.
Eric, your book.
Oh, can you tell us a little bit about the book?
I brought this for you.
Oh, okay.
This is the Civilian Warriors.
It's the book I wrote about starting and running and getting crushed in Blackwater.
But it's a bit cathartic and it sets the record straight.
Well, is the next one going to be I'm back?
Is that like the next one?
I'm back in the PMC side.
Okay.
I'm back.
It's going to be interesting to see what you do with it.
Look, there's a lot of instability in the world, and there's a lot of people suffering unnecessarily.
And it pains me that the U.S. can't ever seem to finish.
And the private sector has the model of how to do that.
Cheaply, practically, ethically, and safely for the people, and not safely for the jihadis that deserve to die.
You know what my interest is?
Here's what my interest is.
Purely competition.
That's my interest.
Because if we have more PMCs, if we, in a perfect world for me at least, as a civilian, if we had 20, 30, 40 PMCs, I feel safer.
And the reason why I feel safer is because the way AI is advancing, I will feel very uncomfortable if it's a monopoly controlled by a government who can impose certain regulations against PMCs, or if it's done by a guy who is a multi-billionaire and not just a billionaire, guy that's worth half a billion dollars or a trillion dollars, who has his own PMC?
Because remember, a lot of people think PMCs are like such a, you know, oh my God, PMC.
Ross Perot, I think, sent, I don't know how many PMCs to go get his 130 employees from EDS when they were working for Deshaun, the 70s.
And they ex-filled him in 79.
Right.
And he brought him back in December.
Yeah.
And he left a few guys to finish the project.
And after Khomeini, he brought them back.
So Ross Perot did that.
I mean, there's a lot of people that have done this to protect their guys.
Nature hates a vacuum.
Yeah.
Private military contractors are, it's kind of the world's second oldest profession.
As long as people have been picking up sticks and throwing them at each other, PMCs were the engineers that built the trebuchets or the super accurate bowmen if you're using a longbow.
Or today, it's the guys that can fix the aircraft or provide very high-end intelligence capabilities.
I'd like to see more of them.
That's where I'm at.
I'd like to see more of them so the government has to compete and get tighter, better, cheaper.
And I can tell you unequivocally that big Washington and big government wants to crush it all.
They want a big monopoly, and our big monopoly military is not very effective at finishing.
And that's the problem.
And by the way, don't get me wrong, I don't trust if there's only one PMC.
I don't know.
Only one PMC.
100 of them.
I want as many PMCs and let the best ones survive.
And then if we have 20, 30 of them, I think we're in a very good place.
The gazelle wakes up in the morning knowing that he has to outrun the lion or he'll be eaten.
The lion wakes up in the morning, knows that he has to outrun the gazelle or he will starve.
That's right.
So whether you're the lion or the gazelle, when you wake up in the morning, you better be running.
