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June 25, 2025 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:06:47
The Truth About Iran, Israel & U.S. War – Erik Prince Breaks It Down - SF603
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Ladies and gentlemen, Russell Brand and Russell Russell Conspiracy Theory.
I want to bring real journalism to the American people.
Hello you Awakening Wonders.
Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
Wherever you're watching us, join us on Rumble and Support.
Thank you Crowder, Mug Club, for the raid.
Thank you Tim Cast for the raid.
This is a special interview show with Eric Prince.
Now the reason you'll like this conversation with Eric Prince, former Navy SEAL founder of Blackwater, currently has a phone called Unplugged, which is like, as the name suggests, a cell phone that's unplugged from the system that you could use and be free from surveillance.
The reason I like this conversation is he's someone that understands from an advisory capacity.
He's worked with the government, the military situation that's unfolding in the Middle East even now.
He's also worked with private armies.
He's got a lot of understanding about the sort of ulterior streams when it comes to global power and geopolitics.
And he, like me, believes that we need to decouple ourselves from state and global power and that we are in a phase of decentralization.
Write it down in your handbooks, everybody.
This is a phase of decentralization.
Individual freedom, community freedom, maybe even state freedom.
Might be a time of radical revision when it comes to the nation state.
Certainly when it comes to the Leviathans.
Can you pluralize that?
The Leviathans that have dominated the world for so long.
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After about four hours, the soft tissues of the body have completely dissolved, leaving only the skeleton.
The remains are then pulverized.
Then you're merely ground into ashes and flushed down the toilet.
Or you could be snorted by Ozzy Osborne in his Black Sabbath heyday.
Now it's time for our interview with Eric Prince.
Stay with us to the very end.
It's a brilliant and inspiring conversation.
Eric Prince founded Blackwater.
He's a former Navy SEAL.
He's advised governments.
He understands global power.
He understands the Middle East as much as anyone can.
And I think you'll enjoy this conversation.
See you in a minute.
Thanks for joining us on Stay Free with Russell Brand.
Nice to be here.
Thanks.
More than ever before, I'm bewildered by the rate of change, the continual, incessant and contradictory updates when it comes in particular to the Iran and Israel conflict.
And in a way, we have to talk about this broadly, even though we'll probably stream this interview less than 24 hours after we record it.
Who knows what changes might have been made?
And I wanted to take advantage of the fact that as the founder of Blackwater and as a former Navy SEAL, you're likely a person who has an understanding of the conflicts in that region that I'm always mentally trying to grasp for when reporting on it of what I intuit is that there's an inaccessible stream of information that the people that are making decisions are using as their reference point that the media
are not gaining access to.
If that's not true, then I don't know why it's all so chaotic and confusing.
And I wonder what you have to say about that.
Is there almost a secondary ulterior narrative that is unfolding?
You're right that the things that the rate of change is faster than humans can keep up with when you think about the targeting that's going on from space-based or aircraft-based sensors to vector in weapons onto a human, a general, a IRGC leader, or for the Iranians to respond to shoot at whatever target of interest they have in Israel.
It is faster than human brains can comprehend.
And then when you have shots taken and you try to do the battle damage assessment or the media spin on it, it becomes increasingly hard to comprehend.
And then when you look at the when a when a society gets stressed, both Iranian and Israeli society, and you see the schisms between the mullahs that are ostensibly in charge of the country, the IRGC, which behaves like the SS did to the German state in the 30s and 40s,
versus the Iranian army, which has been taking the pounding to have a lot of their conventional capabilities just destroyed, their aircraft, their missile systems, et cetera.
It all becomes exceedingly difficult.
And then, you know, when President Trump negotiates a ceasefire and one side starts loading up a whole bunch of bombs before that ceasefire is supposed to take effect, then somebody else responds and he, out of frustration today, you know, the president dropped some 30,000-pound bunker buster bombs, but he dropped an F-bomb today on the south lawn of the White House saying these people have been fighting for so long, they don't know what the fuck they're doing anymore.
And that's a man that's been trying to bring peace to try to be like Solomon and slice, you know, slice right down the middle.
And he is not feeling cooperation from either side.
So I didn't agree with him doing the strikes the way he did because I don't think it's going to be the last time it appears necessary.
I think Netanyahu and the Israelis will try to drag the United States into a conflict.
And the continued shooting, the continued exchanges would, I guess, I hope I'm wrong, but who knows?
The history of that region Is particularly burdened and besmirched with its historical relationship with colonial powers, like the British, I suppose, like a century ago or so ago.
And so the reason I mentioned that is because it seems when you're describing even the last 24 or 48 hours, like such an unmanageable, febrile and explosive situation that you can't help but think that it would be better if America were minimally involved.
But is that impossible?
In fact, in a way, is it impossible to even look at nations in the way that we might on the basis of flags and populations and capital cities and TV shows when there are plainly ulterior relationships, historical and present day, that mean that in a way there is a clear overlap between Israel and the United States or Israel and the United Kingdom when it comes to economic interests and other incentives in that area?
It's not just a matter.
The complexities don't start at a century ago from any colonial issue.
The complexity starts millennia ago, where you have the Persian Empire, which, you know, Zoroastrianism, I think one of the first monotheistic religions took place even before Judaism did.
And then you have the Persian Empire, which rolled across.
And you had the battles of Thermopylae and Plotea and all the rest with Persia trying to exert its influence and control and the complexities of it.
Look, the Persian Empire was an amazing empire.
Iran could be an amazing nation now.
You have very smart people, very hardworking, tons of natural resources, very intelligent, very innovative.
And you see that in their self-developed weapons programs, cheap precision drones, even potentially a nuclear program.
But you have that stimulated by the very extreme view of a Shia set of mullahs, which have had a huge beef against the rest of Islam even, since I think Imam Ali was killed and it became an issue of who was the real descendant, who was the right heir for the Prophet Muhammad.
So you have Sunni versus Shia, you have Shia versus Judaism and all the rest.
So yes, it's super complex.
And the U.S. has a very, I would say, fatigued and troubled, demonstrably ineffective role in the Middle East.
And so taking a step back from that and letting them solve their problems without us having to be directly involved would have been my preference.
Yeah.
And that fatigue is, I think, heightened by how this sort of blizzard of information and this sort of state of flux where it's very difficult to even envisage a pathway.
And I wonder if the reason it's difficult to envisage a pathway through this conflict is because there isn't one.
Is my armchair appraisal, literal armchair in this case, that the last half century has been like proxy wars between near-peer superpowers and their advocates, regional advocates in sort of Southeast Asia or Ukraine-Russia currently, and now whatever's unfolding between Iran and Israel, does that have a proxy component?
Is it likely that if this situation continues to escalate, that it will at some point involve alliances between Iran and Russia?
And is that a significant component in how this will unfold and continue to unfold?
Or is it regional and historic in the way that you alluded to just then?
Well, look, the Soviet Union certainly helped put the Mullahs in charge in 79. That was definitely aided by the KGB.
The Soviet Union hated having a Western-friendly, forward-leaning, progressive in the right sense of the word leader in the Shah.
And so the KGB helped take him down.
But now the major energy supplier for China, for the Chinese Communist Party, is Iran.
One of the logical, one of the easiest ways for the Iranians to really respond hard right now is to shut the Straits of Hormuz, but the little narrow gap at the bottom of the Persian Gulf.
But 20% of the world's oil flows through that every day.
And so if they shut it off, they're hurting their single biggest customer.
So maybe they just go after the ships that are hauling to anywhere but China.
We'll see.
I don't think we've seen the end, despite efforts of a ceasefire.
I don't think you'll actually see a ceasefire because the IRGC and the Mullahs have to continue conflict because they are not popular in the rest of their society.
They've had some significant unrest in the country over the last 15 years, and they've come close.
In the 2009 uprisings, they called it the Green Revolution.
They actually had to import Lebanese Hezbollah forces to smash up the protests because they didn't even trust their own Iranian security forces to do so.
I don't see Russia coming in hard to support the mullahs now, despite the fact that the Iranians have been providing a lot of drones to Russia to use in Ukraine.
Putin just made a statement that he said, well, there's two and a half or three million people in Israel that speak Russian from the amount of Russian Jews that have immigrated to Israel.
So I don't see Israel going in after, or I don't see Russia going hard against Israel on that.
So Iran is kind of standing alone on this.
And a regime that has their back against the wall will continue to lash out because if they kind of let their boot up, they'll probably get overthrown.
So I don't know that a ceasefire is a great idea, but now it's up to the Iranian people what their futures are.
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You lunatic you.
Do you think, nevertheless, that regime change externally activated is an undesirable outcome and that the United States of America shouldn't be sponsoring that kind of regime change?
And how does that connect to like private military overthrows, which I know is something that you know a lot about with regard to Libya, Eric?
Well, Libya was not overthrown by PMC support.
That was overthrown by US bombing and NATO bombing and a lot of Qatari money supercharged some very Islamist militias.
And that's the thing, right?
You went from, I mean, Libya was a stable country.
Gaddafi was no saint, certainly, but it was at least a stable, semi-sane country.
Now Libya is effectively ripped into three countries.
Still very chaotic.
And that's the real risk you run of a regime change attempt in Iran because ethnic Persians are only about 35 or 40% of the country.
There's actually more ethnic Azeris.
And then you have Kurds and Baluch and Akwazi Arabs that are the other ethnic minorities.
And they all kind of hate the Persians or there's entity toward them because the Persians are kind of the elites.
They're the ones that make most of the money off the sanctions and all the rest.
So it is a very volatile thing.
And I don't want the U.S. to get drawn into that because, like in the words of Colin Powell, if we break it, we buy it.
And we completely stuffed up the so-called liberation of Iraq because the Iranians, having fought a, what, a 10-year war, Iran-Iraq war in the 80s, the Iranians made damn sure that Iraq would never threaten them again.
And so they basically, Iran is the real power in Iraq.
I mean, there's a militia there called the Hastashabi, the Popular Mobilization Unit.
It's about 350,000 Shia that are paid by the Iranian government that are led by Iranian officers as part of a semi-government militia, just like Hezbollah was the real power in Lebanon.
A Shia militia there, you have the same thing in Iraq.
And so the likelihood of significant chaos or even dismemberment of what is now Iran is quite possible.
Even 15 minutes of analysis of conflict in this region reveals the lie that modern free market democracies based on trade has ended the kind of imperialist, colonist exploitation of these kind of nations, because it just seems that there are secondary, unaddressed conflicts that are continually playing out.
The more I hear about them, the more I mentally revert either to isolationism, like, you know, at the level of the nation, but certainly at the level of an individual, it's sort of kind of overwhelming to listen to it.
I remember once seeing Colonel Gaddafi at some kind of Arab assembly saying that, you know, Saddam Hussein's been assassinated.
It seems that there's like a general ploy to take over this region, to depose leaders and to assert friendly affiliate governments.
And it seems that he was kind of right about that.
And hasn't part of what Blackwater does, Eric, involved the participation of private military entities in coups?
In my earlier question, I mentioned, thank you for clarifying the nature of the overthrow of the Libyan government.
But was there an operation to overthrow Libya privately or is part of what Blackwater does, provide private assistance in matters of that nature?
So I started Blackwater in 1997 when I got out of the SEAL teams.
It has started as a training base, As a training facility.
SEAL teams, special operations units in America had used private facilities really since the 1970s.
And so we built it as a place for government units to train.
And then when the USS Cole was blown up in 2000, we ended up training 100,000 Navy sailors how to protect their ship.
And then when 9-11 happened, we got pulled into doing security and aviation, logistics support, and more training overseas in Iraq, Afghanistan, other partner nations like that.
I sold that business in 210.
That was a year before any uprising that happened in Libya, had nothing to do with anything in Libya at all.
The only thing we did after I sold that business was Somali piracy.
Remember, there was a time in 2009, 10, 11 when there were 70, 80, 90 ships taken per year, anchored off the coast of Somalia for months at a time, waiting for the ransom to get paid.
So in that case, we worked with the Somali government and we built a police unit called the Puntland Marine Police Force.
And that was kind of an advise and insist where Somalis were trained and advised by Westerners to go interject the pirate logistics.
And that worked.
The unit went active in 2011 and by 2012, there's really no more piracy.
So that was what I was doing in 2010, 11, nothing to do with Libya.
Well, you've really live on the precipice of the extreme.
I wonder if you'll help me to understand this.
I felt like we know that when there's a conflict between a nation like the United States, though there is no nation like the United States, of course, and a country like Iran, that it can't be unbounded warfare because warfare in extremists involves atomic exchanges and annihilation.
So it's sort of always mediated and managed.
And from the other side, it seems that warfare from smaller or militarily inferior nations involves guerrilla warfare or terrorism.
Do you consider that the special forces organizations of which, of course, you are a member, in a sense, are a counter to the novel forms of warfare that emerge when large nations engage smaller ones?
That to counter the threat of terrorism, there has to be a kind of domestic terror force that exists outside of the normal rules of warfare.
Is that what like the SAS or Navy SEALs are sort of engaged with?
Small units with special skills that have to counter the way that warfare has changed.
Now that warfare is not this sort of explicitly agreed upon sort of set of armies engaging in neat lines within neat agreed upon parameters.
And is that how you see it?
And then once it becomes private as well, that's another avenue of conflict that's sort of opened up.
So two ways to think about it.
In a conventional unit, you man the equipment because it's the rockets, the artillery, the tanks that do the fighting and killing.
In a special operations unit, you equip the man because the man is the weapon system.
And when you see the battles playing out in Ukraine now, it is very conventional warfare.
It's literally, you took a picture of a battle scene in Ukraine now.
It's indistinguishable from the Battle of the Somme or Verdun in World War I, trench warfare, just mindless, grinding slaughter, versus what you saw, what the Ukrainians pulled off deep inside Russia,
launching drones from a shipping container hauled there by an unknowing trucker to attack bombers on airfields, or what the Israelis just did by smuggling small drones and to specifically target certain Iranian leadership or Iranian capability.
That is the special operations end of the spectrum.
I mean, there was, and there was a whole host of that activity through World War II, right?
When Churchill, when Britain was in its darkest days, Churchill started the SOE, the special operations executive, and he said, set Europe ablaze.
And they were behind some of the most important missions of World War II, like Operation Gunnerside, which was those guys skied in.
Norwegian trained and British operators skied in hundreds of kilometers into Norway to attack a heavy water reactor, to blow it up, to basically kneecap the German nuclear program.
I mean, hugely relevant because imagine if Hitler got the bomb in 1944 or 45, it all would have ended very differently.
I love that.
But as warfare accelerates and you have the democratization of precision strike and the ability to smack targets with something you can backpack that only cost a few hundred dollars, you're right.
It has accelerated.
It has changed warfare.
And I would argue that societies will even change based on the acceleration of that kind of delivery of energy.
I just finished a book called Firepower, which is basically a history of gunpowder.
And you can see how societies changed in Europe as they went from spears and shields to muskets and cannons because states changed how they even had to organize to pay for warfare.
I think you'll see the same kind of thing.
I think you'll see a fracturing of traditional large Leviathan states because of the difficulty of tamping down that much technology.
That's very interesting to say that because it's something that I think about a great deal.
When you talk about elite special forces, I think there's a, at least to people like myself who know very little about it, a kind of romantic reverence and regard for excellence in any field that contrasts sharply with the brutality that can, the brutality and anonymity that can be provided by advanced technology.
When you say that we might be at some kind of tipping point, of course I would value your opinion on those matters Beyond my own sense, opinion, and intuition, that we are no longer able to manage states of this size precisely because of the way that the technology of the gunpowder had political implications, the technology of mass communication and new and emergent currencies have implications also.
The model of the state that was offered to us as a kind of regulatory body required to provide protection from medieval times onward, feudal systems and hierarchies that provide protection to the peasantry in exchange for taxes seem increasingly obsolete when models of mass communication could be deployed to create confederacies of maximal democracy everywhere,
particularly when the culture seems to be continually telling us, Eric, that we're trapped in constant conflict, whether it's the global yet somehow regional disputes that we spent the first 20 minutes talking about, or the sense that our culture is quaking and broken, that even your country, America, can't continue to accommodate such hot hostility domestically.
Now, I know that you are the founder of Unplugged, which is essentially a smartphone that is private and protects users from surveillance and data mining and cyber threats.
When I thought about that commodity, I thought about how it's analogous to the idea that I have been fostering and reflecting on, that we might live in more independent communities that trade and communicate independently without the need for centralized intervention,
whether that's the state and bureaucracies, national or global, or commercial and corporate interests, in particular now big tech, that are so immersive and tyrannizing that our personal freedom has become kind of a fantasy that we live on rails, we live in cells.
And certainly I'm not making a perjury comparison between a country like the UK and the United States or a more obvious and evident tyranny, whether that's socialist or religious or theocratic, say.
But what I am saying is that we don't seem to be utilizing technology to maximize freedom at the level of the individual or the community, but actually to maximize control and surveillance.
And given what you just said then about the state leviathan quaking and breaking down, do you feel that technology is a participant in that?
Not just military technology, but communications technology.
And do you think the institutions and systems that benefit from this centralization will yield the amount of power that they have and the benefits that they get from this ongoing centralization when it's clear that decentralization is kind of trying to emerge through the technology and through the fractures that appear both domestically and internationally?
I think, yes, that's an excellent question and a lot to unpack there.
So I think we have a competition globally for the paradigm of governance.
Is it one of freedom, individual choice, where people can in small groups collectively decide how they're going to live?
Not collectively.
They have a plebiscite, a vote at that level versus the CCP Xi Jinping thought of everything is centralized and you have zero rights.
You have zero rights of free speech or association and you are absolutely subservient to the state.
And the Chinese Communist Party tries to use every bit of technology to make you subservient to that state to the point of social credit score, of knowing from the ad ID that they're tracking on your phone, whether you're jaywalking.
And because your account is automatically linked, they find it and they can deduct money from your account for jaywalking or automatically for speeding.
That level of state control, something that George Orwell in 1984 was alluding to, but now they're trying to perfect it.
So yeah, we are in a global competition for that governance.
I'm choosing freedom.
We came up with the unplugged phone really after the 2020 election when big tech was really flexing up and shutting off certain voices and between COVID and elections and all the rest.
And I just said, we're never going to make big tech better by complaining about it, only if we can give them, only if we can compete.
And so we had a team together and we decided we're going to build a phone that does not have an advertising ID that stands against all the surveillance capitalism because really, because what happened after 9-11, when government started looking for more 9-11 style hijackers, they went to the advertising firms to collect data, petabytes of data.
And then in like 2009, when smartphones became available, the software developer kits, the APKs, were done in a way so that everything you do on that phone is exported.
And it makes it back to the app makers and the big tech to sell advertising.
I mean, Google is a maximist surveillance company, which collects your data, where you go, what you buy, who you call, what you browse, and they resell it.
And that's why they have a multi-trillion dollar market cap.
Apple collects a lot of data.
And so the unplugged phone doesn't have an advertising ID.
At our root level, we block all the hooks that the apps try to collect from you, all the information.
We prevent that.
So we prevent that super personalized experience, but we maximize your privacy.
And in an era now of AI, which is just vacuuming everywhere, the more of your data that's out there, the more susceptible you are effectively to digital grooming by AI.
So we have some really exciting announcements we'll be making next month.
We have a fantastic new CEO that came out of the big industry, and he just said, I'm tired of working in an industry for companies that hate me.
And we've sold 1,500 unplugged phones so far.
No, sorry, 15,000.
And we have some very cool things coming on that.
but back to the competition of global governance.
I think anything you see that big government touches, whether it's healthcare or the pharmaceutical industry or government regulation of education, the more government touches or even how government did in trying to stabilize Iraq or Afghanistan, we really suck.
And when you compare that to what private industry has done, I mean, I'm just thinking of Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx.
What a life that guy lived.
What an amazing service he gave to the world.
Private innovation that made it possible to ship a package anywhere in the world pretty much overnight.
That didn't exist.
There's no possibility that government could have come up with that and anything like that efficiently.
And he really made the whole global delivery system much better and made people's lives better.
Private sector innovation, the same as what Musk has done with space launch, trying to take it, you know, trying to lower the cost of space launch by a thousand fold.
Truly extraordinary.
So the more small, innovative stuff that's allowed to flourish and grow is better.
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We've got so much more to discuss.
We're talking about global power.
We're talking about ulterior power.
We're talking about the hopelessness of contemporary populism if even a well-supported political figure like Trump, once in office, finds himself subject to tides that are beyond his reach or approach.
I suppose that's the point of the whole, what is his name?
King Knut.
Who's the guy that asked them tides to turn back?
Let me know in the comments and chat.
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I'd say one of our big problems in America is we've allowed industry to consolidate way too much.
We've effectively stopped doing antitrust enforcement.
And so you have way too few banks, way too few insurance companies.
There's not nearly enough competition.
And private equity and their access to very cheap capital has really scooped up a lot of the mom and pop businesses and industries in all sectors and reduced competition.
And that's why we have so much price pressure on the middle class.
And so you either have super elites that have access to unlimited capital right next to the printing press, effectively, or people that are just getting squeezed on the bottom and it's wrong.
So if we have more competition, there's a fantastic book I read called The Myth of Capitalism.
And it talks about how we need more competition.
Like average CEO pay was 12 times the CEO versus the junior man in like 1972.
And now it's 360 times.
And that's because there's just not nearly enough competition.
And we've allowed that massive overconsolidation.
And so if we get back to what made America great, small competition amongst industries versus Fortune 500 companies with overpaid lobbyists influencing Washington the wrong way, that's one of the reasons America has troubles right now.
I agree with you, but I'm confused because if that consolidation is what occurs over time, then isn't that the same as saying that is the result of that kind of capitalism?
And does it, this is a genuine question, not require some external regulatory agency?
And that would sort of sound kind of like government because I think that we agree that the same, we agree that the solution is to somehow prevent this consolidation of private corporate power and state power alloying together to create these elites and tyrannies that are impenetrable.
But isn't, in a sense, you know, when people say it's not a bug, it's a feature.
Isn't the fact that we found ourselves here because the intention was to get here, that the entrepreneurial spirit of like, you know, your Carnegies and your Rockefellers and Rothschilds inevitably and unavoidably somehow leads to that kind of power so great that it automatically aligns with the state.
And also, Eric, what about the entrepreneurialism of these big tech giants, Apple, Google, et cetera?
Or do you think that they have in their history alliances with the state and CIA carve-out type partnerships that mean that that's a bogus analysis?
Someone came on, I think it was Mike Benz, who said that, you know, like, how do you think Google Maps got access to all that satellite imagery?
You know, they're not launching satellites and, you know, like that's obviously an alliance and partnership with state military power.
Look, we have laws on the books.
There is supposed to be a federal antitrust enforcement, but both parties have effectively stopped doing that.
And both parties are bought off by big corporate lobbyists that prevent that from happening.
And so we need to, as a body politic, we need to force those issues to have that competition.
And it's across whether it's in major industries, call it legacy industrial stuff, up to the big tech side.
Look, Google controls like 90% of search.
That's hegemony.
So look, when John D. Rockefeller produced, I think he had 75 or 80% of the market share of hydrocarbons, of oil and refining, the federal government broke it up.
He did better, right?
The sum total of all the different companies that he still owned that he had to somewhat divest of.
He did better financially, but those companies competed and it improved the average American's quality of life.
We need to do that across our industries.
I mean, we have basically five major defense contractors.
That's why we spend more than the next 17 countries combined in defense because we just pay way, way, way Too much for those guys.
They employ a brigade's worth of lobbyists all over Washington, which pay Congress to keep appropriating way too much money for the same kind of programs, and it's a very unhealthy, vicious cycle.
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Great stuff.
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How likely do you think it is that that vicious cycle that's domestically observable when it comes to Pentagon budgets, Pentagon failures to pass audits and the incredible leverage of Norfolk Grumman, Lokida et al., how significant do you think that accumulative power is when it comes to actual foreign policy, for example, the duration of the Afghanistan war?
And even when it comes to the way that this conflict is being organized and executed, do you imagine that part of this monopolization and consolidation impacts the decisions that are made to escalate hostility between the US and Iran, for example?
So when we delinked currency from gold and really allowed runaway deficits, liberty contracts at the expense of government.
As government grows, liberty contracts.
And so as government never had to make a guns or butter choice anymore, it was, hey, more of the same, more guns, more butter.
Keep going, keep going.
It really, so you see that in the early 70s as the deficit spending really accelerated with all that government expansion in social programs and in defense.
And we just spend massively too much in both areas.
And it's allowed almost state capture by the beneficiaries of those big programs.
FAMA, right?
So we have a trillion dollar defense budget, but you know how much of a budget RFK oversees?
It's like $1.9 trillion.
So think of the amount of FAMA dollars that goes to pay advertising on Fox News or all the other big media companies.
That's the kind of problems that we have.
We have that state capture.
So we need from a populist demand.
And we have had those kind of experiences before, that kind of success.
Teddy Roosevelt was a trustbuster.
He broke up some of those companies that were too big off of sheer force of political will, communicating to the people and pushing that legislation through.
It is possible.
It's been done before, and we need to do so again, badly.
Can this current system produce those kind of results?
Or do you think between Roosevelt and Trump, the system has refined to the point where it has eliminated the possibility of its own destruction through legislative change?
And if Trump can't deliver on the populist mandate that seemed to bring him to power, is that an indication, Eric, that there needs to be, in the way that you could argue, that unplugged is an innovation deliberately set against big tech and its imperatives,
that there's a requirement for an almost an independent media and political alliance that focuses on deliberately and specifically decentralization, antitrust legislation, maximal authority within communities, maximum referenda as opposed to the dislocation of power to centralized political entities and DC, et cetera.
Can this system at this point deliver its own destruction, particularly if Trump in office part two has a significant crossover with what we might have gotten under Kamala Harris with regard to, you know, I know there are distinctions and differences, but is it different enough?
Look, we have, what, $35 or $37 trillion in debt.
Our debt service now exceeds the cost of our defense budget.
Our defense budget is already too high, but now just the interest on the debt is higher.
So there's some very unpleasant realities coming that we're going to have to cut because we literally can't afford these things anymore.
But the beauty of our system is we have three layers of government.
We have a lot of very well-run communities, okay?
Villages, counties, towns where people vote, feel empowered, not a huge amount of corporate Interest, et cetera, and they run a balanced budget.
The same for state budgets.
Most states are very, very well run.
Think about how large and powerful some of our states are: Texas, Florida, I mean, even the state of Virginia, Virginia's economy is larger than all of Austria.
So even if the federal government completely blows itself up and melts itself down in a complete fiscal calamity, you still have 50 states that are pretty well run that can survive.
And yes, some painful transitions, but all is not lost.
I still think that good governance models apply.
And there's lots of ways to keep this, not the genie back in the bottle, but to for a United States of America.
But look, here's the thing.
A nation is a nation based on some commonly held beliefs of its people, of its citizens.
And when you have one side that can't even agree on what is male and female anymore, the basics of gender, or even what is citizenship anymore, that's a fundamental problem.
And it might take some very fundamental disagreements and some harsh conversation to come to some common understanding.
And nothing like some true fiscal crisis to make people think a little more really.
It sounds like you think that fiscal crisis is upon us.
I think it's coming soon when you look at the amount of true fraud and waste that was uncovered and even the amount of malign effects a lot of that money was having in other countries.
I was just with the guy from Germany today who talked about all the USAID-funded programs buying media access, promoting leftism, socialism in Germany and all across Europe.
But we, the taxpayers, were funding.
And I said, what the hell are we doing?
So putting the federal government on a severe diet is definitely in the interest of all citizens that love freedom globally because our federal government has become a purveyor of nonsense in many ways across the board.
In a way, your country's been having this conversation with itself from the moment of inception, how much union, how much centralized control versus state freedom.
And with regard to the conversation you just mentioned, I can't imagine it becoming any more vituperative because it's such an ugly cultural conversation that's happening.
And even as the topic migrates from the taxonomies around gender, which one might contest are measurably absolute at the molecular level, to the arguments and conversations around citizenry, the vitriol, it appears to me, Eric, isn't dampened.
And I wonder, given the particular nature of your expertise, if the dominant leverage of fear, to be more specific, the reason that you require a government and a strong military is to protect you from external invasion.
I wonder if there's a requirement for maximal freedom at the level of the state, the village, the town, the community, that we are somewhat decoupled from this idea that you require government at the size and scale that it currently is to protect from forms of foreign invasion.
But nevertheless, it's sort of, you know, this is not an entirely benign world, I accept.
So I wonder where that balance is when it comes to national defense and protection, a sensible level of national defense and protection, and how that relates to state freedom.
Just in the simplest terms, it seems like most of us are terrified into compliance because of the constant talk of whether it's a virus that's going to kill us or a terrorist that's going to kill us or the commies that are going to kill us or the Chinese that are going to kill us.
There is a sort of a state of fear that's engendered and stimulated.
There's no question our government is too big.
We spend way too much on defense.
We spend way too much in social programs.
We just spend way too much at the federal level.
The United States is extremely blessed by having the best geography in the world.
Not an island, but we have massive internal navigable rivers, natural highways.
We have only two neighbors, which really don't want to invade us other than the migration issue, which is fixable.
So the idea that our federal government, that our military is so large and we need such a huge military to prevent from foreign invasion, no.
We've effectively set up a global empire with more than 400 bases.
And the spending and the efforts and the noise without the delivery of results, whether it's in Iraq or Afghanistan, we spent $12 trillion combined in those theaters over those years.
We're on the hook for another trillion dollars in healthcare spending just for wounded veterans from those theaters.
And yet, you know, even earlier this year, when the U.S. military bombed the hell out of Yemen for a month period, trying to get the Houthis to play ball, and then we stopped because it didn't work.
That's the kind of unraveling of global empire, the loss of deterrence, right?
This being able to fly B-2 bombers from the middle of America all the way to strike targets in the middle of Iran, blow up some deep underground bunkers and fly all the way home.
Yes, it's very impressive.
The U.S. military can do some very conventional things extremely well at obviously a very high price point.
The problem is opponents can do that on the cheap.
What the Ukrainians did inside of Russia to take out dozens of strategic bombers and even attack their nuclear base up at Murmansk, where their northern fleet is, that probably cost $2 or $3 million.
So, the asymmetry that high technology gives you gives way more advantage.
It accrues more to the small units that want to rise up and show you the middle finger to big government anywhere.
And so, I think the other place you'll start to see that start to exert itself is in China because they have the Chinese Communist Party, kind of the rule is the people subjugate themselves to the party.
The party delivers economic development and economic growth.
They have had a real problem on the economic growth side of late.
And so they're going to have a more and more ordery populace.
And they actually have a declining populace.
They're going to have an inverted population pyramid now, which is going to be an even bigger problem for them.
And the fact is, all of China is not Han Chinese.
They have, I think, 50-some different ethnic minorities that have been crushed, suppressed, forced into what is now China.
But as the forces of freedom and independence and secure communications, all those things start to make that spin out of control.
And it's harder and harder for the CCP to control that, especially when they send tens of millions of people out to other parts of the world to work or to study.
And they learn more of those habits of freedom.
That's a harder thing for them to control.
You've got such a broad understanding of politics right down to the demographics of these opponent nations of the United States.
What are you doing right now?
Are you like traveling around in order to build out your unplugged business?
What is your purpose and where do you see your personal role in what sounds like a sort of a near-apocalyptic approach in crisis, whether it's financial or military in nature?
And do you believe in the possibility of altering it through personal endeavor?
I suppose you must because you're embarking on that.
Look, my dad was a very successful entrepreneur.
I was able to start Blackwater because of his success, and that was smashed by politics.
And so I'm looking to build, I would say, not another defense contractor this time, but an organization, a consulting entity that can really help countries more fulfill their mandate for their people, right?
So an ability to help, let's say, facilitate trade in difficult places, sometimes perform a function of government, whether that's helping to collect taxes, helping to on imports, on exports, on something like that.
And then when necessary...
Wow.
You must have done a glass of beer.
Eric Prince, we're going to have to detain you now.
Because it seems like ultimately your business interests are going to be at odds with global imperialism.
So would you remain in your chair?
It was a kind of robot AI canine creature.
Elmo.
Yeah.
Thank you.
No, listen.
I'm sorry.
You want me to just wait till she's done?
No, man.
Your audio is much louder in our mix.
Okay.
Or sorry.
Well, just edit out the FU arm.
I guarantee you that's getting caught as a clip.
Don't get me in trouble.
I get myself in trouble enough.
No, look, helping countries fulfill their opportunity that their citizens would expect.
But again, facilitate trade in difficult places, perform a function of government, kick ass when necessary.
In all cases, a lot of countries have huge resources.
They can't make the most of those resources.
I'm a big fan of Hernando DeSoto.
What he's written about called The Mystery of Capital.
You know, he was a Peruvian economist.
No, sorry, he was running one of the biggest engineering firms in Switzerland in the 80s.
He's Peruvian.
He goes back and he says, why is Peru so rough?
Why is Switzerland so nice?
And he really did a study of the basics elements of capitalism that we take for granted in Switzerland or in Delaware in the United States, where you can call, form a company, get a business license, get a bank account.
There's a commercial court system for adjudicating a dispute, an address, all those things.
You can hire and fire somebody.
There's a clear process for that.
In Peru, in lots of dozens, hundreds of developing countries, that kind of stuff doesn't exist, which goes to the elites sit on top and they rake money in off of a very uncompetitive market.
And all the poor people at the bottom just suffer.
I mean, they actually did a study.
If you're trying to be a bread baker in Egypt, it takes you more than a year just to get a license to bake bread, to do it legally.
And what they find is 40, 50, 60% of a lot of these economies are considered gray market, meaning it's not illegal, but it's not part of the legal part of the economy because it's not licensed.
It's informal.
It's cash-based.
And so the more access to capitalism that people have at the very, very bottom, they can start to climb if you're willing to work hard, put in the time.
And there's a set of anything remotely like a set of rules that you can live by for capitalism.
It lets poor people get educated and create wealth.
And at the top, right, that antitrust system, which keeps the big businesses from being predatory and from controlling prices and being monopolistic, that is the job of government.
And so helping countries at the bottom level create the rule of law, create enough security to do better their populations.
That's what I'm spending my time on now.
And obviously, starting a company which takes on not one, but two multi-trillion dollar companies because somebody has to.
It's pretty exciting.
I'm an insurgent at heart.
Yeah, I see that about you.
And what I'm wondering is if, firstly, capitalism isn't where is it idealistic and where is it materialistic?
I suppose it's idealistic and it rewards individual freedom, entrepreneurialism, excellence, brilliance, endeavor, and hard work.
Those are all definitely worthy attributes of a system of economics.
And if you're going to have trade and you're going to have material, you're going to have materialism.
But I wonder what ideology undergirds it to ensure that it doesn't tend towards either nihilism or individualism.
Since our cultures, you know, Anglophonic or Western democracies, it seems, have become less focused on God, this tendency towards what was regarded as capitalism has kind of metastasized into something darker.
You and I apparently seem to at least agree on that.
And I wonder what is, if you can't any longer trust a state to remain true, to use your phrase, the mandate of its people, however that mandate is derived, and whether or not majority rule is even a reliable marker of veracity, truth, decency, and honesty.
It seems to me that in addition to commercial and capital enterprise, there's a requirement for some ideals derived from elsewhere.
Are you a man of faith?
Do you believe in our Lord?
And if you do, how do we ensure that our ultimate goals and aims are derived from eternal principles rather than some mercurial aims that can emerge out of selfishness and individualism that can easily get bolted onto something like commerce and capitalism?
Excellent question.
I think everybody has a hole.
Everybody's kind of born with a hole in their soul, and you can fill it with faith, you can fill it with greed, or you can fill it with anger, right?
And the power, just the will to power.
Do you want to dominate somebody else?
I love an old quote from Margaret Thatcher that she said, Christianity gives people the means to restrain themselves where the state doesn't have to.
And, you know, I grew up, my dad, my parents were Christians and grew up in a Christian home.
And the parable of the talents, right, was one that talked about, right?
To whom much is given, much is expected.
And so, yeah, I was definitely born on the right side of the tracks.
My dad was the biggest employer in town.
And I guess from an early age, I didn't want to let him down.
And so try to work hard to make the most of what the education he provided, the experiences they provided, and the resources they provided.
And what was like, I don't know, I've heard lots of people have gone on to do much bigger things than what their folks left them with.
I mean, look, I just read Fred Smith's obituary.
And his father built a business and he died and he had 200 trucks.
And Fred Smith, after Marine Corps, starts a business, had a good education.
He built a business that had 200,000 trucks.
Good on him.
Fred Smith, the embodiment of how it's supposed to be.
But yeah, it's easy to get caught up into always needing more, more money, another house, another car.
I think that's, it's, it's, I think people eventually find that that's a very empty path to go down.
And I remember my dad talking about one of the most satisfying things is giving people a great job and being able to provide them a means where they can go to work that is clean and respectful and they can make the most of their talents every day and they're paid a fair wage for it and they can do better, right?
They put a roof over their head and send their kids to school.
And I'll never forget the first time I went to Baghdad, we flew three of our helicopters on a U.S. transport, a big C-5 aircraft.
And it's two o'clock in the morning.
We're offloading Little Birds.
And these really the finest mechanics in the world for helicopters came out of TF-160, the most elite U.S. unit.
And these guys were all veterans and they said, hey, Mr. P, thanks for giving us a chance to do this.
This is what we're made for.
And they had all been veterans of Black Lock Down, the big shootout that happened in Somalia just 10 years previous.
And that was, you know, I found that very satisfying with the whole Blackwater crew because it was a lot of really, really type A, high drive motor people.
And they love to work hard, do a good job and, you know, complete the mission.
You're cool.
Even anyway, even with the baggage I bear from the British class system and the chips on my shoulder that it leaves me with, you can't use nepotism to get into the Navy SEALs.
So that's a good way of neutralizing that pathway.
What was he saying, Eric?
Look, there's a lot of benefits in the British system as well.
When you look at the amount of the elites that still join the military, that serve, that's great.
I wish more people, look, doing temporary military service is a great way to get responsibility, to learn the values of dealing with a whole spectrum of people and to embrace the suck and to enjoy good times and bad times.
And at least it taught me to always find a lower speed, a lower gear so that when things are hard, you can find a way to keep going.
And, you know, tough times don't last, tough people do.
Just got to find a way to keep going and move through it.
Thank you, Eric.
Thanks, man.
We've chatted for an hour now, and it's been a really brilliant conversation.
I enjoyed very much The way we started off with the sort of diffuse and unknowable, mad, constant desert sand conflicts of the Middle East.
I like the way that we discussed commerce and duty and family, and I'm very interested to see how your enterprise unplugged us and whether that aligns with something I can't let go of at the moment,
the idea of community autonomy, communities that are able to support and sustain themselves through their own localized agriculture, that trade really only when necessary, when we recognize that sort of regional and local power, first at the unit of the individual,
but then of course at the level of the community, if that power is derived from God and surrender to God, rather than, as you said, in China, surrender to the party, surrender to the state, fealty and loyalty to a culture that doesn't love you, that sees you only as a kind of a sort of either as a parasite on its back or a larvae in its belly.
You know, man, I feel like we need a real sort of spiritual change.
And I recognize that the engine of that change is likely to be men like you, entrepreneurial, that are willing to fight and put yourself through uncomfortable times.
And grateful certainly to the time you've given to me today.
Thank you, Eric.
Russell, pleasure to meet you.
I look forward to meeting you in person sometime.
Yeah, we'll meet in person, I can tell.
As long as you don't get, I don't know where you are in the world now, but on the basis of that announcement, I would say that you're likely to be impounded in the next five to ten minutes.
Negative.
Good to go.
Nice one, man.
It's great chatting.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Cheers.
I've heard aboard.
Peace.
Thanks for joining us today.
We'll be back tomorrow, not with more of the same, but with more of the different.
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