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May 21, 2024 - The Tucker Carlson Show
01:57:40
Tucker Carlson - Erik Prince on the many failures of the U.S. military. (6:40) Erik Prince on The Liz Cheney Wing of Congress (32:45) The Main Villains of The Iraq and Afghanistan Wars (40:48) Where does the Money We Send to Ukraine Really Go? (1:21:34) Why are the Climate Change Zombies
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erik prince
01:21:43
t
tucker carlson
32:08
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Speaker Time Text
tucker carlson
We had this pattern for years of taking, of hoarding tape like you do ammo.
unidentified
Yeah.
tucker carlson
Like, I don't even shoot 7.62x39, really?
It's just not, I'm not that interested, but I have, you know, like, it's unimaginable how many steel case rounds I have.
Like, why do I have those?
Because I'm crazy.
unidentified
Just in case.
It's like, so the prepper- Better to have and not need, than need and not have.
tucker carlson
I totally agree with that.
unidentified
Yeah.
tucker carlson
But I'm not rational about it.
I'm sure you, who's equipped an entire private army, you're pretty rational about it.
I'm not.
I'm not exactly sure what I need.
I don't give a shit.
Gold, ammo, you know, whatever.
I just want to hoard it.
Because I feel, you know, I can feel all this stuff.
And tape is the same way.
erik prince
But dudes with guns are not a match for dudes with drones.
tucker carlson
So if you're the kind of person, and I'm not, You know, naming names or identifying myself by name.
But if you're the kind of person who sees a deal on Steelcase 762x39, you're like, I need another 10,000 rounds.
Because in your gut, you feel like something, you know, volatility is coming.
Is that pointless?
erik prince
I've just been reading a book called Firepower, which is a history of, basically a history of gunpowder.
And you track the change of warfare going from spears and longbows to...
The wheel locks, matchlock muskets, flint locks, artillery with bursting rounds.
And I read that to try to understand we're now through a massive step change.
Because you know, despite all the techno wizardry of the U.S. military, the best weapon the enemy had was an IED. Yes, I noticed.
And the IEDs would be positioned along the road and clacked off remotely.
Now the enemy can fly the IED at you at 120 miles an hour.
Low to the ground, even in a highly jammed environment.
So the threat...
tucker carlson
Highly jamming, there's no way to stop the signal.
erik prince
Highly jammed, right.
Because the Russians are really good at jamming.
tucker carlson
Yes.
erik prince
And the Ukrainians, they've developed, they've innovated taking a cheap racing drone, like with the goggles that somebody wears, FPV drone, and you put a beer can size charge that you can 3D print the casing for it in the field with a little copper disc on the front of it.
And drive that into the back of a tank.
And for $1,500, you destroy a $2 million tank.
So that is like having a sniper rifle versus a guy with a longbow.
It's a step change in warfare.
And we're there right now.
And the longer this combat goes in Ukraine, the Russians are getting a lot better.
Ukrainians have too, but they're just trying to, you know, the battle is the ultimate cauldron of learning.
tucker carlson
Yes.
erik prince
And bad ideas are quickly destroyed and discarded.
And so the proliferation of that knowledge is staggering.
tucker carlson
So what are we learning from watching?
erik prince
I don't think the U.S. military is learning much.
unidentified
Oh, good.
tucker carlson
No learning.
erik prince
Well, no, the problem is the U.S. weapon systems aren't even that high demand because they're not that effective in that highly jammed environment.
For 20 years of global war on terror, you were fighting against a very...
Comparatively unsophisticated enemy.
Now in a big state-on-state type war, the U.S. systems are not holding up.
You know, the Javelin missile, which Raytheon sells to the taxpayers for $200,000 a shot with a $300,000 command launch unit, the Ukrainians can only use that for the first shot in an ambush because their IR detector, if they shoot the first tank, the tank is very hot.
It's burning.
If they try to shoot a second and third missile, the other missiles go for the very hot spot on the battlefield that can't even discern.
So then the Ukrainians shift from a $200,000 missile from the Americans to one that they build themselves for $29,000, and it works just as well.
tucker carlson
And it's delivered on a drone?
erik prince
Delivered on a drone or from an anti-tank missile.
Yeah, so the super high-dollar American stuff is not doing so well in that battle space.
tucker carlson
So I would assume, I mean, the world is watching this.
Potential future adversaries are seeing on display American military capability.
erik prince
And we should be concerned as taxpayers and as citizens that all this money we've spent, we have not gotten very good value for.
In the same way...
tucker carlson
But doesn't it display our vulnerability, too?
If our weapon systems aren't working in Ukraine, why would they work in other parts of the world?
Right?
Aren't we sort of showing our hand?
erik prince
Look, some of the stuff works well, but at what cost?
tucker carlson
Right.
erik prince
Because, you know, the Houthis are using a $20,000 to $50,000 drone to attack commercial shipping or U.S. shipping in the Red Sea Gulf of Aden, and the U.S. has to shoot that down with not one, but two missiles that cost $2 million apiece.
So you're costing us $4 million to shoot down a $50,000 drone.
Bad math.
tucker carlson
Even in Washington, D.C. Why wouldn't, because this is on display and the world is sort of watching, why wouldn't military planners in the United States be taking notes and adjusting accordingly?
erik prince
Because the money flow keeps on going.
The same way with no accountability and no self-introspection, no learning.
Look, who got fired?
Who got punished for a complete debacle in Afghanistan where...
Over 20 years, we replaced the Taliban with the Taliban.
tucker carlson
Yeah.
erik prince
And nobody's been fired.
The only guy that got fired was Stu Scheller.
tucker carlson
What a good man he is.
erik prince
The young Marine who stood up and said, enough.
That's right.
tucker carlson
Scheller went to jail.
erik prince
I know.
Because he said, look, if a couple of my young Marines lost a rifle on the rifle range, they would be punished.
We left 80-some billion dollars worth of military equipment and turned over the country to a terror organization.
And everybody's been promoted, and everybody is just, it's business as usual.
That's a problem.
This kind of incompetence is not going to end well.
tucker carlson
So, I mean, I have too many questions, and I do want to circle back to your initial point that warfare is completely different to step changes, you said.
But how, on this thread, how does the U.S. Congress, how do people who claim to support our troops, back the military, strong defense, the Liz Cheney wing of the...
How do they keep sending money to an organization that's increasingly incapable of defending the country?
erik prince
I spoke to a bunch of members yesterday morning in Congress, and they were at the point of despair because they're trying to restrict the money and to bring some accountability.
And they said the money is the amount of money that is sprinkled around.
The capital, by the defense contractors, by effectively the brigades worth of lobbyists, thousands of lobbyists spreading tens of millions of dollars around politicians, and they just keep the money train going.
It's really disgusting.
And the big thing, in the article I wrote recently, I'd said, you know, in Rome, like when the Romans lost a whole bunch of people at the Battle of Cannae, when their Senate met a couple weeks later, it was 40% undermanned.
Why?
Because the Roman elites actually served in the military and bore the consequences of failure.
Our elites don't serve in the military.
They have very little skin in the game or no skin.
And so for them, it's about money and grift.
tucker carlson
Or their children serve in foreign militaries.
So just back to the technology itself, which you've been watching all your life because you've been around it all your life.
I think you had the world's largest private air force at one point.
Is that true?
erik prince
We had 73 aircraft that we owned and operated and flew into garden spots for the U.S. It was fun.
I was just at a Blackwater reunion last weekend and we had it at the Alamo.
It was really cool standing there on hallowed ground because I didn't realize that across the street from the Alamo is the Menger Bar.
And that's actually where Teddy Roosevelt started the Rough Riders.
So there's all kinds of Rough Rider memorabilia in this bar, raising a glass to a great American.
And if I'd convinced Trump to change policy in Afghanistan to prevent the debacle, which ended up happening, I was going to call that unit the 2nd U.S. Volunteer Cavalry.
The first U.S. Volunteer Cavalry was the Rough Riders.
tucker carlson
Samuel Hill.
erik prince
Exactly.
This was going to be 2USV. It would have worked.
Afghanistan would be stable.
We would have saved America the embarrassment.
tucker carlson
Yes.
erik prince
And really that, I'd say, a pivotal moment for a massive collapse in American credibility and deterrence.
And it would have cost 5% of what the U.S. was already spending.
tucker carlson
So why couldn't I remember that very well?
And in my memory, you were not making the case for a forever occupation.
You were making the case for a sensible...
Drawdown.
That didn't destroy the credibility of the United States.
erik prince
All the conventional forces could have left.
tucker carlson
Right.
erik prince
90% of the contractors could have left.
There would have been a small stay-behind special operations force, 6,000 contractors.
That's it.
And would have kept accountability for the tens of billions of dollars of U.S. equipment that was already there and would have kept the government upright.
And, you know, there's now every Al-Qaeda, every...
Crazy terrorist organization has set up shop there in Afghanistan.
Again, we've not heard the last of Afghanistan.
tucker carlson
It's really sad.
Again, I remember that.
In fact, I know we talked about it at the time.
And it seemed sensible.
It seemed kind of non-ideological, practical.
This is kind of a clusterfuck.
How do we get out in the best way possible?
Preserving our own interests to the extent that we can.
Why didn't the administration, the Trump administration, take you up on that?
erik prince
I would say the same neocon perpetual war presence in Washington that wants to do it the same way that we've been doing for decades.
And I would argue losing doing that.
tucker carlson
Yes.
erik prince
And it's about money and power and perpetuation, not about actually putting a bow on a bad situation.
tucker carlson
How do those people, as they inevitably do, seize the moral high ground in the opening moments of the ideological battle?
And position themselves as, like, the champions of freedom and human rights when, in fact, they're monsters.
Like, how do they get away with that every single time?
erik prince
I think it's a direct result of the all-volunteer force, which seems a good idea.
I'm still supportive of it, but it means it's a very...
The people that actually serve, that bear the cost of these overseas efforts, is maybe one-half of 1% of the population serving.
Three or 4% know that 1%.
And then 95% of America has no clue and no skin in the game, and so they're easily bullshitted by the posturing jackasses in Washington.
tucker carlson
Yeah, that's why Dan Crenshaw has a job.
So I just want to get back to the technology because I'm interested on behalf of all people who sense turmoil ahead and are, say, stockpiling ammo.
Right.
I think there are people like that.
Is that fruitless given the technologies?
erik prince
I would argue for Taiwan, for example, facing a possible invasion or issue coming from mainland China, the best thing they could do is build a home guard because a well-armed, well-motivated people, as we showed in Afghanistan, as the Taliban showed the U.S. military, well-motivated people, even using weapons that are 70 years old, can still beat a superpower with all the techno gimmickry.
It's not the steel and the ships that make a great navy.
It's the steel and the men.
The steel and the crew.
tucker carlson
But are you ever going to see another war between states that's won or lost on the basis of artillery tanks?
I mean, is that...
Are those the cavalry charges of today?
erik prince
Artillery is still the king of battle, as Ukrainians are learning the hard way.
And the Russians have gone from...
You know, if you shot at the Russians a year and a half ago, it would take them about an hour and a half to shoot back accurately.
tucker carlson
Yes.
erik prince
To geolocate and to coordinate with their fire, you know, fire control centers to shoot back.
Now they're down to about two or three minutes.
So they've learned and they're coordinating and they've gotten a lot better.
And it is wrong for us to assume that our Kung Fu is all that good right now.
tucker carlson
And what role do drones play going forward to the extent you can?
erik prince
Very significant.
You know, people say the tank is dead, it's gone forever.
It will go just like chariots were the attack helicopter of 2,000 years ago.
There'll still be a role for tanks, but people are going to have to figure out how to knock down the swarms of incoming drones with hard kill and soft kill, etc.
It is always going to, you know, warfare is going to ebb and flow, but the ability to program Very sophisticated devices that fly very fast, that are very hard to kill.
You know, the first strategic offset after World War II was nuclear weapons.
tucker carlson
Yes.
erik prince
We had nukes, then the Russians did, and then it was about tonnage.
Then the second offset was precision weaponry.
Now everybody has precision weaponry.
So I would argue that the third offset that the U.S. should try to pursue dominance, and we're far from it, is in an AI drone innovation application.
And I would say the most innovation that's happened has been in Ukraine and Russia right now, and we are way behind.
Because, again, Washington procurement people, the appropriate people in Congress, keep spending money in the same way on the same stupid cartel of defense contractors with the same failing results.
When at the bleeding edge of battle, actual innovation is happening by dudes in their garage in Ukraine that are fighting for their lives, and they've innovated, and we ignore that to our detriment.
tucker carlson
So these are countries with fewer marketing majors and more engineers coming out of there, right?
Marketing majors are bad at creating drones.
erik prince
They've done well at STEM. Yeah, they have done well.
tucker carlson
And they're smart people, which no one wants to say, but it's true.
You may have come to the obvious conclusion that the real debate is not between Republican and Democrat or Socialist and Capitalist, right, left.
The real battle is between people who are lying on purpose and people who are trying to tell you the truth.
It's between good and evil.
It's between honesty and falsehood.
And we hope we are on the former side.
That's why we created this network, the Tucker Carlson Network.
And we invite you to subscribe to it.
You go to tuckercarlson.com slash podcast.
Our entire archive is there.
A lot of behind-the-scenes footage of what actually happens in this barn when only an iPhone is running.
You will not regret it.
What will drones be able to do, do you think, in 10 years?
What will that look like?
erik prince
You could load a face and between network surveillance and the facial recognition on that drone, find one person and fly into that person's head that fast.
tucker carlson
Seriously?
erik prince
Yeah.
So identity management, privacy will become even more Essential.
You think about how many cameras, how much data is being constantly collected everywhere from street cameras, from door knock, from doorbell cameras, from facial recognition at the airport.
Privacy is really under attack.
tucker carlson
Yeah, well, I've noticed.
And now TSA has decided to take your photograph every time you walk through.
I went through yesterday.
And they had a, you know, staring to the screen and we'll assess your face.
I said to the guy, is this mandatory?
And he said, no, it's not.
And I said, fuck that.
I'm not doing that.
And he goes, I agree with you.
Okay.
I mean, but like, what is that?
Why are they doing that?
erik prince
Data aggregation.
Because they can.
tucker carlson
So it's not a good sign when your own government is gathering data on you, is it?
Why would they possibly need that?
erik prince
Think about what chipped our founding fathers off.
tucker carlson
Right.
erik prince
Paying some taxes on tea and land taxes.
I mean, I guess our idea of what we will resist over in terms of liberty and government intrusion has been very steadily eroding.
And now it's, I would say, increasingly a steep curve of dissent.
tucker carlson
Yeah, and it does seem like the purpose of politicizing the military and making it left-wing, anti-white, pro-trans, all this stuff, which I think the right just sort of says, well, that's going to be a less effective military.
It's bad.
They make fun of it.
But that seems way darker to me.
I mean, it does seem like it's being weaponized against dissent in the United States.
erik prince
I think, you know, the military was one of the most trusted institutions.
For sure.
And I saw already, even in the 80s, I mean, look, I went to the Naval Academy in 1987 and I left after a year and a half because I found the political correctness and the nonsense already then on the double standards that were pursued by the academy leadership while saying there are no double standards.
I just found ridiculous.
tucker carlson
What were the double standards?
erik prince
I remember going to the O course the first time.
And they said, this is one height of a wall to get over for one gender and one height for the other one.
And they said, oh, the standards are all the same.
unidentified
But wait a minute.
tucker carlson
They're liars.
erik prince
So yeah, if you're going to call it the same, then be the same.
But at least let's be consistent.
And the amount of recruiting for specific sports teams of people that were completely unqualified to be there or to be naval officers was staggering.
I love the Navy.
I just didn't like the...
A school run by the federal government.
tucker carlson
I didn't fully realize it.
So you made it through the first year where people drop out.
unidentified
Yeah.
erik prince
No, I left halfway through my sophomore year.
I finished my finals.
tucker carlson
So you did the hard stuff and you still dropped out.
erik prince
Yeah, it's not that hard.
It's just you have to have a high tolerance for bullshit.
That's all.
tucker carlson
Yeah, that's dropped in you, I notice.
unidentified
Yeah.
erik prince
But I rolled to Hillstale.
So, you know, went quite the opposite to one run by the federal government to one that accepted no federal funding at all.
tucker carlson
Interesting.
So, even in 1987, why didn't anyone say anything about it?
Because women don't fight different wars.
Presumably, it would be the same war.
So, that's, like, very obviously insane.
erik prince
Look, I had no issue with women being at the academies, but at least make equal enforcement.
That's all.
If you're going to call it the same, then be the same.
That's fine.
But what I also found, I went to Hillsdale and I joined the fire department of the local town.
And I learned more about small unit leadership there than I did in the very artificial learning lab that was the academy.
tucker carlson
Why'd you join the fire department in college?
erik prince
Because it was cool.
Because it was fun.
Come on.
I got to do a lot of things in life, but driving a fire truck to a fire, lights and sirens, is definitely in the top five.
tucker carlson
How many kids in your class were in the fire department?
erik prince
None.
Since then, it's been more of a thing.
But I was the first one ever at Hillsdale to join the fire department.
And it was convincing the gruff firefighters.
And it was a full-time, part-time.
So there was a couple of full-time guys.
But the rest were like a butcher and a trash truck driver and building contractors.
So convincing them that this snot-nosed college kid was okay to go through a burning building with them was...
There was no small...
Admissions process.
tucker carlson
One of the things I think is most interesting about you, which I know you hate to talk about, but is the fact that you're from an affluent family, and so you didn't actually need to do any of that at all.
So why did you do that?
erik prince
Sense of mission, sense of service, and mostly a sense of adventure.
tucker carlson
So you never thought, like, you know, we're rich, I don't need to, this is just nonsense, I'm going to...
erik prince
No, that was never...
tucker carlson
Bum around Europe for the summer?
erik prince
Never part of the equation.
tucker carlson
Why?
erik prince
No, I didn't know.
I did.
I got married between my junior and senior year, and I took a long honeymoon, and we went through Eastern Europe.
But the funny thing is, we...
tucker carlson
Went through Eastern Europe.
What year was that?
erik prince
That was 91. That was as the whole Soviet Union was collapsing.
tucker carlson
Yeah, I got married that year.
I remember.
erik prince
And we went to...
We went on the Baltic Liberation Tour with Pat Buchanan and Lou Rockwell from the Van Mises Institute.
And we went to...
Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia.
And we visited the government buildings, which were still surrounded and occupied by Soviet interior ministry troops, but they'd had free elections.
So it was fascinating to see a place literally at the inflection point of embracing...
tucker carlson
What month in 1991 was this?
unidentified
That was May.
tucker carlson
Okay.
So I got married that summer also, and I went to the Mid-Ocean Club in Tuckerstown, Bermuda.
It seemed more romantic than Estonia.
What did your wife think, your young bride think, when you're like...
We're getting married, but actually the honeymoon is in Eastern Europe.
It's like the hellscape of Eastern Europe.
Honey, do you know anything about Stalinist architecture?
I'm going to show you.
erik prince
We road tripped through.
But it was really funny.
I'll never forget.
Babe Buchanan bought an entire uniform off of a Soviet border guard, a captain, for $20.
And we were at a restaurant and it comes back with a whole uniform on the hanger and $20.
And as we're leaving the country, another one of our group had a luggage that you have to put through the scanner.
And you can see in the scanner, it looks like there's a manhole cover in his suitcase.
There's this huge disc.
The Soviet border guard opens the thing.
This is a very big problem.
How much to make the problem go away?
$50.
It was an entire bronze bust of linen that had been yanked off a building.
Our friend was exporting it.
So I thought, you know, if they're selling Lennon for $50 off a government building, this is not long for communism.
tucker carlson
Oh, and in fact, it was, I think it was in August of that year that it ended.
erik prince
Two months later, it was done.
tucker carlson
That's incredible.
So, my final question about the drones.
I mean, is it a crazy thing to consider the possibility that the government might employ this technology against its own citizens, deploy it against those citizens?
If they're putting...
People are still rotting in prison for protesting at the Capitol on January 6th.
A woman got four years in prison yesterday for protesting outside an abortion clinic.
It's a government at war with its own citizens.
So why wouldn't drones be part of that?
erik prince
Entirely possible.
tucker carlson
How hard are they to shoot down with, say, a 12-gauge?
erik prince
That's actually one of the...
It's a big problem for the small FPV drones.
They're so small and so hard to hit.
It's almost like hitting a...
A ptarmigan.
tucker carlson
Very hard to hit that bird.
erik prince
Very fast.
tucker carlson
Very fast.
erik prince
I know you love bird hunting, so I try to correlate it to, you know, or maybe like a quail on cocaine.
tucker carlson
Oh, it's that tough?
unidentified
Yeah.
tucker carlson
It sounds kind of sporty.
So, what is the defense?
Nets.
Nets?
erik prince
Nets are a cheap, simple defense for small FPV drones, because it's a small charge.
If you can keep the charge away from the target, the small charge doesn't have that much effect.
You know, pee for plenty, you can always increase the poundage.
tucker carlson
My sense is that police departments and state police have drones now.
erik prince
For surveillance, yes.
tucker carlson
For surveillance.
How hard is it to alter a surveillance drone to become an offensive weapon?
erik prince
Well, the Ukrainians and the Russians have done that in their garages or in a tent on the edge of battle pretty easily.
tucker carlson
Okay.
So why wouldn't...
I mean, if you care about living in a non...
If you care about America, why wouldn't someone say, actually, no, we're just going to pass a federal law that no law enforcement or intel agency or the U.S. military, these things cannot be used domestically against Americans, period, under any circumstances.
erik prince
Or certainly not armed.
tucker carlson
Or surveillance.
You know what I mean?
erik prince
Look, for stopping a mass shooter or some actual terrorism event, it provides good situation awareness and it protects the cops who are trying to do an honest job.
But the leakage, in the same way that the forever wars of Iraq or Afghanistan and all those surveillance tools that the government tells us they need to protect us, the danger is certainly some of that tech on the arm side leaking back to be used domestically. the danger is certainly some of that tech on the I don't see any effort by the U.S. government to stop mass shootings.
tucker carlson
In fact, they seem to be abetting them.
And time and time again, you find...
In the small print, in the write-up after the shooting, that the person has been detained repeatedly by some branch of government.
You saw in Uvalde, the cops refused to go in and save the kids as they were being executed, etc., etc.
There just doesn't seem any will to stop mass shootings.
There seems to be instead...
erik prince
Yeah, but I don't see that.
The Uvalde one was not a...
I would say that's not a top-down federal conspiracy.
tucker carlson
No, it's not top-down.
erik prince
That was individual inadequacy of training and readiness.
unidentified
100%.
erik prince
Because there's dozens of other ones where the cops have just been spectacular.
Like in Nashville.
tucker carlson
Yes.
erik prince
But then you see the political correctness of them being reluctant to release the writings of this trans shooter who was out to kill Christians.
tucker carlson
Right.
erik prince
So great individual valor by those cops.
Bad by the cop leadership or the law enforcement leadership by not releasing the truth.
Let's have a massive disinfecting effect of truth on this situation.
tucker carlson
So, for sure.
But there's no will, obviously, in the media to get to that information.
So it's left to people on X to do it.
But, I mean, you've been in and around the government since you were 18 and shipped off to Annapolis.
So do you think it's fair for the rest of us who haven't to be skeptical of Massive increases in government power, particularly military and law enforcement power, that are justified by some threat.
erik prince
We should be highly skeptical.
tucker carlson
Yeah!
Mass shooters, child molesters, human traffickers, Islamic terrorists.
I don't think the government does a good job of protecting us from any of those things, but they've certainly increased their power and their power to kill me and my family on the basis of those threats.
erik prince
More on poverty, more poverty.
More on drugs, more drugs.
War on terrorism didn't go so well.
unidentified
Right.
tucker carlson
And just to that, I know we're jumping around, but I have too many questions.
erik prince
Maybe we both suffer from a little ADD. Yeah.
tucker carlson
Well, I mean, there's just a lot to go through.
So you were at the center of the war on terror more than any other American, I would say.
unidentified
No.
tucker carlson
Well, how?
erik prince
We had our shoulder to the wheel pushing like everybody else.
tucker carlson
But the scale was...
I don't think there's ever been a more effective military contractor in a war that I'm aware of in the United States than Blackwater, which you started and ran.
But you were subject to the policymakers as well.
And as in the Afghanistan withdrawal, not one of them, not only was not indicted or punished, but not a single one of them sort of...
Lost a step in career advancement.
They all kind of went on to the Atlantic Council or whatever.
erik prince
Or their board seats.
tucker carlson
Or their board seats.
erik prince
On the big defense contractors.
tucker carlson
Since you watch that, how did that happen?
How did Torian Newland go from Dick Cheney's office to being the number two person in the State Department overseeing the war in Ukraine?
unidentified
That's just crazy to me.
erik prince
Because it's almost a unit party.
It is the party of big government.
tucker carlson
Yes.
erik prince
And big Washington and more spending and more warfare.
And 100% wrong.
tucker carlson
The guys that you serve with in the SEAL teams and who you've been around in the subsequent 30 years, how do they feel about that?
Like guys who did three or four deployments or more.
erik prince
The guys that actually paid the cost of bad policymaker decisions?
tucker carlson
Yeah, where their friends commit suicide and they didn't see their kids grow up or they got killed or lost a limb.
Like those guys.
unidentified
Yep.
tucker carlson
What do they think?
erik prince
They're disgusted.
They're angry.
They're righteously angry because they believe in the Republic.
When you join the military, you swear to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
And you kind of join thinking all those enemies are going to be abroad, but some of the enemies of liberty are probably here.
And when an elite enriches themselves and separates them from the realities of consequences, Of accountability.
That's a pendulum that swings out far, but nature has a way of swinging the pendulum back to the middle.
And so that either gets done within the rule of law and accountability, or things can come apart very quickly.
Frighteningly.
tucker carlson
Part of the accountability is informal.
It's social pressure, which is very effective.
erik prince
Shame.
tucker carlson
Exactly.
erik prince
And humor.
First of all, we need to just laugh at the...
Freaking incompetence.
I'd say, when you track...
I made the last deployment on the USS America.
An old...
It was a fuel-fired aircraft carrier.
And they used to...
Everything is measured on an aircraft carrier.
Especially the landings.
Because it's all about the aviators and who has the best launch and recovery.
Especially the traps.
So they measure which wire you catch and everything.
So once a month, there's a thing called the Fauxhall Follies, which is the front of the ship below the flight deck where the chains come out of the belly.
And so all the air wing and the senior ship's crew would muster there.
And they'd go through all the scores, but then it would go through the most merciful, merciless roasting of anybody.
It was the most vicious humor I've ever seen in my life.
tucker carlson
Like guys who screwed up the landings?
erik prince
Screwed up the landings.
The XO, the CO, it was no holds barred.
It was fantastic.
It was hilarious and very healthy.
But now that you have a much more politically correct military, you can't do that at all.
tucker carlson
They don't do that anymore?
erik prince
Nope.
No.
tucker carlson
But, I mean, if you can't land an aircraft on a pitching deck of an aircraft carrier, I mean, you put your own life...
The hardware and the lives of the sailors at risk, correct?
erik prince
Right.
tucker carlson
Right.
So the stakes could not be higher.
erik prince
High stakes.
Very important mission.
Literally lives on the line.
And it's good to reinforce good behavior and to punish bad behavior.
And shame and derision of your peers matters.
tucker carlson
So looking back, since, again, you were so...
Close to what was happening during that whole period, or at least until maybe 2012, but for the critical years, you were right there.
Who do you blame most for the mistakes made in Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent wars?
Who are the villains?
Who shouldn't get board seats?
erik prince
Look, we went through like 18 different commanders, 18 different four-star generals over the course of Afghanistan.
tucker carlson
We've got a lot of four-star generals.
erik prince
We have as many generals now as we did in World War II when we had 14 million men under arms.
So now you have 10% of that.
So you have basically 1.4 million under arms versus 14. And we have the same amount of flag officers.
So yeah, we are massively overstaffed.
And you think about all the...
I mean, they have...
tucker carlson
All chiefs and no Indians.
erik prince
Each four-star general...
Has a personal butler and a valet and a driver and a cook and all those kind of quaint 18th century habits of staff that they surrounded military generals with.
We have that yet for our generals.
tucker carlson
Back when generals were brave, though.
Generals got killed in the Civil War.
erik prince
Yes.
And not so much now.
So it's just enormous.
There can be a massive winnowing of headcount.
Across the board, in generals, in staffs, and in civilians, the tooth-to-tail ratio of the military, of like how many, when you say teeth, people that put warheads on foreheads versus tail has gotten way out of whack.
We have way too much tail.
Like an alligator-sized tail with a salamander-sized bite.
tucker carlson
It's just, it's so unbelievably corrupt.
So, but again...
erik prince
But again, no, it's...
It's corrupt because we just keep throwing money at it and no one ever calls bullshit.
A business that goes through a massive growth cycle, everybody can get fat and sloppy and lazy because there's always more money and we never have to tighten a belt.
And so the U.S. military has been on like a Krispy Kreme bender of donuts.
Compounding amount of donuts consumed every day.
And no one's ever tightened him up and saying, all right, today we're just PTing and we're not eating donuts.
That's across our entire government, but especially in the military, which is supposed to exist constitutionally to defend and deter.
And I don't think we're not getting the value that we're spending money on right now.
tucker carlson
No, it seems we're at a point where it's dangerous.
Yep.
And it does seem, I just want to restate, I don't know this as a dead certain fact, but I can feel it very strongly.
I think the purpose of it is to keep...
I think the enemy that they're seeking to fight lives here.
I think this is a political...
I think the policymakers feel that way.
They're very anxious to control any instrument of force.
erik prince
I would argue it's about for the defense contractors.
They just want to keep selling expensive weapons.
And they will keep paying politicians to keep buying the expensive weapons.
I almost feel, I don't feel sad, for the White House, as they deal with a problem like in Yemen, where the Houthis have become long-range pirates and have shut off the entire Red Sea.
Like 50% of global container traffic flowed through the Red Sea.
Now it doesn't.
Egypt is losing $800 million a month in lost toll fees from container traffic, and all those ships have to go all the way around South Africa now to make it to Europe, coming out of Asia.
It's a big problem.
And I'm sure the Navy or the DOD policymakers only provide the administration with the $50 and $100 billion solution to go beat down the Houthis to make them behave.
And in that article I wrote, I just come back to there's such a constant rejection of market-based private sector solutions.
Because the Saudis and the Israelis actually had this problem back in the 60s when there was a war in Yemen and they hired David Sterling, the founder of the SAS, and he went there with 30 guys and they kicked ass and it worked and it was cheap and simple and practical.
And this article I wrote just is a litany of those kind of rejections and that's my frustration because I provided a lot of those options even to...
Deter the Ukraine war in the first place.
My internal intel sources gave me a pretty good idea that already in December of 21, three months before the invasion, that the Russians were going to invade.
It was not a song and dance.
And so I wrote a paper proposing a combination of land lease and flying tigers to deter the war.
1940, when Britain was really in it, the U.S. gave 50 destroyers, a bunch of aircraft, guns, gave it to the Brits.
We also provided aircraft and allowed U.S. pilots to take leave and go to work for the nationalist Chinese to stop the Japanese from bombing cities, called the Flying Tigers.
unidentified
Yeah.
erik prince
In this case...
tucker carlson
And we armed Stalin.
erik prince
Yeah.
And made it possible to go from Moscow to Berlin to stop the Nazis.
Biden could have done one very simple thing.
He could have announced, okay, no war necessary in Ukraine.
They're never going to join part of NATO, but they're at least going to have an Air Force.
Because there was already 200 aircraft set to retire from the U.S. Air Force to be flown to the desert in 2022. 50 F-15s, 50 F-16s, some A-10s.
Already written down to zero value to the taxpayer.
They're going to be flown to the desert, to the boneyard, and parked for eternity.
Transfer those to the Ukrainians would have been less than a billion dollars.
Prevent the war and the discussion of NATO done.
tucker carlson
But they wanted the war, obviously.
erik prince
Apparently.
tucker carlson
Why?
erik prince
Or they believed their own bullshit that their PowerPoints and their posturing would dissuade.
Look, I understand why the Russians get ornery about it, because if the Russians or the Chinese were looking to make the northern provinces of Mexico into active parts of a Chinese or Russian alliance, we'd get ornery about that.
tucker carlson
Well, obviously.
unidentified
Yeah.
tucker carlson
If they put, you know...
unidentified
Look at what happened when they put missiles in Cuba in 1962. If they put missiles in Tijuana, it would be unacceptable.
erik prince
Right.
tucker carlson
So my question is, and this is all complex and delicate and...
You know, I understand to some extent, but what I don't understand is sending Kamala Harris to the Munich Security Conference and saying at a press briefing with cameras rolling to Zelensky, we want you to join NATO. You only say that if you want a war.
You want the Russians to invade.
Like, why would they want that?
unidentified
Maybe they're just that dumb.
tucker carlson
I don't think, and I think they are dumb.
I mean, they're...
Well, they're definitely...
Tony Blinken?
I mean, really?
Dumb.
erik prince
Having a rock concert in Kiev during massive combat operations while the Ukrainian army is getting crushed.
He just visited, and he's up there on stage.
tucker carlson
Can you watch this video?
erik prince
He's up there on stage with his guitar.
It's like, that is Nero fiddling while Rome burns.
tucker carlson
Here it is.
So, yeah, I mean, he's a child, obviously, and like an angry, destructive child. obviously, and like an angry, destructive child.
But what happens?
Like, where does this go?
We send another $60 billion to Ukraine.
erik prince
Most of that money goes to five major U.S. defense contractors to replace at five times the cost what the weapons cost that we already sent the Ukrainians.
Meaning, you know, if we send them something that was built 10 years ago, well, now it's going to cost...
Four and five times as much.
So again, it's a massive grift paid by a Pentagon that doesn't know how to buy stuff cost-effectively.
It doesn't change the outcome on the battle.
As the fields dry, it's May now, coming up on tank season.
tucker carlson
Oh, is it tank season again?
erik prince
Weather still matters in warfare.
And if you have a wet, snow-covered farm field, It's very muddy, very gooey.
Not great for tanks.
tucker carlson
Mud season.
erik prince
Mud season.
I think the Russians call it the great Rasputitsa, the great slush.
tucker carlson
Yeah.
erik prince
That's done now.
And as June comes, it'll be game on.
And I think the Russian bear is hungry.
And they're going to have a time.
So the war should have been ended.
Never should have started.
They should have made a deal, froze the lines six months into it.
But the Biden administration believed that all this American weaponry would have saved the day.
It hasn't.
And it's ugly.
And, you know, the Russian commanders are not idiots.
They know their history.
The Battle of Kursk, which happened just north of where the fighting is now, was the largest tank battle in history.
It was the last offensive effort of the German army against the Soviets.
And they tried to push from the north and south on this salient.
It was a bulge.
And the Russians knew they were coming.
And so they built lots of lines of defenses.
It's the same thing they did last summer, which ate up all that equipment.
And now the Ukrainians are very thin.
They've had a lot of corruption issues.
All the defenses that were supposed to be built by the Ukrainians are much smaller or non-existent.
And so now it's allowing maneuvering, especially as the tanks, as the fields dry and you can maneuver, it's going to be a very ugly summer.
Very ugly summer.
tucker carlson
What do you think the Russians want?
erik prince
I'd say now they want to absolutely humiliate the West and make sure that they never have a problem with Ukraine again.
tucker carlson
That seems achievable.
erik prince
I'm afraid so.
tucker carlson
What happens to Ukraine?
erik prince
I don't know if it survives as an independent country.
If they take Odessa, if they take the ability for Ukraine to export its grain, that really threatens the long-term economic viability.
Maybe it goes back to...
Look, Western Ukraine used to be part of Poland.
Eastern Ukraine used to be part of Russia.
So maps move depending on...
Military victories drive diplomatic breakthroughs.
And right now the Russians are winning?
And they're going to have a very good summer.
tucker carlson
Is there anybody who's knowledgeable on this subject who believes Ukraine can, quote, win, which is to say push Russian troops all the way back to the old Russian border?
erik prince
Well, I didn't really believe it ever.
tucker carlson
Oh, I know that.
erik prince
But I don't know who's advising the White House at this point or who they're listening to, but they probably need to change out their advisor list.
tucker carlson
But then you have the Secretary of State, our buffoonish.
Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, boomer parody, showing up and telling the Ukrainians during his rock concert that, you know, we're with you forever.
Like, how could you say something like that when I've never met a single person who knows anything about the region who thinks Ukrainians will achieve victory no matter how much money we send them?
How could you say something like that?
erik prince
It's good money after bad.
And all we're doing now is facilitating the demise of Ukrainian men.
And destroying them for future generations.
tucker carlson
So how many have died?
I've asked members of Congress who are funding this stuff.
erik prince
Hundreds of thousands.
tucker carlson
But here's what I understand.
If you're paying for this war, which the United States is, the U.S. Congress is, Mike Johnson is, don't you have a moral obligation to know its consequences?
How can you get up there with a Ukrainian lapel pin and talk about the brave Ukrainian people who are being killed by the hundreds of thousands and you don't even keep track of the casualties?
Like, aren't you kind of a monster for doing that?
I don't understand.
erik prince
And you look at, if you made the pictures of the modern battle space on the front a little grainy in black and white, it's indistinguishable from the Battle of the Somme or World War I. Well, that's exactly right.
Artillery, a grinding, crushing, pointless loss of humanity.
tucker carlson
But it's being abetted by our policymakers.
They're responsible for this to some extent.
Like, what?
erik prince
And it's shocking how uniparty government has become.
tucker carlson
You don't seem shocked that they don't care about how many Ukrainians have died.
erik prince
They don't care about how many U.S. troops die, really.
tucker carlson
Good point.
No, that's a totally fair point.
erik prince
Because they'll send U.S. troops to war with a whole bunch of cockamamie...
Rules of engagement and policies, and it's just not a serious way to wage warfare.
The whole premise of GWAT was that we could, by American magic and precision, we could always just clip off the head of the snake and the whole body would die of the snake.
And that flies in the face of every kind of warfare.
When you look back to World War II, we killed off 30% of the German male population.
World War I, same.
American Civil War, same.
The Continental Wars in Europe in the 17-1800s, back to the Punic and Peloponnesian Wars.
You destroy their manpower, the logistics, and their finance.
This, cutting off the head of the snake, is a fool's errand.
tucker carlson
Is there any precedent for it in history?
erik prince
No.
tucker carlson
So I thought sort of a key component of education at the military academies was military history.
No, I'm serious.
And you, I mean, you're a living example of it.
You went to one and you know an awful lot about your business.
erik prince
I didn't read, I didn't learn that at the Academy.
tucker carlson
Really?
erik prince
No.
No, that's a lifetime of curiosity.
I was a military history geek as a kid when we, my family went to Normandy when I was 11. And, you know, I was the tour guide.
Sword Gold, Juno Beach, Pegasus Bridge, all that.
Yeah, I was...
I was that nerdy, geeky kid.
tucker carlson
So do you think your average modern flag officer is just sort of not aware of the history of warfare?
erik prince
I'm sure they get some level of it, but they have not made it a career.
I'd say the best book I read on general officers was a British military study.
It's called The Psychology of Military Incompetence.
And it went through five of the biggest disasters in British military history.
Like the surrender at Singapore.
tucker carlson
Yeah, Khartoum.
erik prince
Yeah, Khartoum.
unidentified
Baghdad in World War I. Of course, the Afghan withdrawal.
erik prince
Yes.
tucker carlson
Into Peshawar.
erik prince
Yes.
And it literally looked through the guy's childhood, where he went to school, his relationship with his father, all the rest, and very consistent themes.
What were they?
They're very bookish, very geeky, not self...
No introspection.
tucker carlson
Yeah.
So they're Tony Blinken, basically.
erik prince
Or just not people able to say, okay, this is not working.
We're going to attack the boat because this is not working in this direction.
tucker carlson
They're weak men, in other words.
erik prince
Yeah, look, the anomaly of Patton doesn't occur very often.
tucker carlson
Patton, who's been maligned since his death, remarkable human being.
And of course, Hollywood is, I don't know how many movies they've done telling us Patton was bad.
But there are some suggestions that Patton was also murdered.
Do you think that that's possible?
erik prince
It'd be a hell of a difficult...
Well, I don't know if the traffic accident...
The jeep rollover was an accident?
tucker carlson
But he survived it and then died later.
erik prince
Man, I don't know.
But he hated the Soviets.
He hated communism.
tucker carlson
Oh, I know.
So, I don't want to get too far afield here, but that does seem like a pivot point in world history, where that war, you know, April 1945, Hitler kills himself, Berlin is occupied by the Russians, etc., etc.
We win in Europe.
And then we sort of like...
Kind of pivot toward the Soviet Union for a few years, until maybe the Rosenbergs or slightly before.
erik prince
Well, and even the amount of communist agents that were surrounding Roosevelt.
tucker carlson
Oh, well, yes.
Harry Hopkins is literally a communist Soviet agent.
Yeah, right.
So, like, why did that happen?
Like, how do we fight this war for freedom and then wind up sort of handing Poland to Stalin, for example, or on the side of the totalitarian?
erik prince
Handing all of those countries to the war.
unidentified
Well, of course.
erik prince
Yeah, it showed an exhaustion of moral leadership.
tucker carlson
Who was that?
Who do you think, if we could hold one person responsible for that?
erik prince
Truman was president.
Roosevelt was dead.
So, as Churchill said, he died in the traces.
But I think when you look at history, the lie of socialism, communism, It's easy for elitists to love that paradigm because the right-wing Austrian school economics approach is massive decentralization, decision-making at the micro level.
A farmer knows what prices are, has a good idea what demand is going to be, decides whether he's going to plant more acres that year or not, and takes that risk himself.
The Soviet planner says, I need everyone to plant this many acres and we're going to do it at this price.
And it's the lie of individual incentive versus massive central planning to the betterment of elite thinking with the grift that goes with it.
And that's like a mind-worm disease that so many people continue, generation after generation, continue to fall for.
tucker carlson
Yeah, it's a mom-based system, whereas the let the farmer figure it out, it's a dad-based system.
erik prince
Yeah.
tucker carlson
It's true.
What, are you a farmer?
Like, how do you know?
Like, that's what your dad says.
Your mom's like, no, let's get it all over.
Sorry.
erik prince
But that's why I'm so excited to see Mille having success in Argentina.
For a guy, and maybe it's an analogy to America.
Because he got sick of, I mean, you know, at the end of World War II, per capita living standards in Argentina were higher than Switzerland.
Yes.
Peronistas, socialists take over.
They run the country basically off the cliff.
Hyperinflation, economic wreckage, terrible.
Millet gets sick of not only the Peronistas, but the pathetic so-called right-wing opposition, which is not opposition.
He starts his own political party, and he wins.
I mean, I like any guy that'll campaign with a chainsaw.
tucker carlson
I agree with that.
You think that'll happen here?
erik prince
I don't think the Republican Party is really that salvageable anymore.
tucker carlson
No, of course not.
erik prince
Because it's been gobbled up by corporatists.
tucker carlson
Yes.
erik prince
And the defense industry now spreads money equally, right and left.
Not even really right, just across the Washington insiders.
So yeah, maybe an entirely new political movement.
That's why Trump is transformational because he kind of came outside the Republican Party and did it.
I hope he can move the needle somewhere in the right direction because it's teetering.
tucker carlson
So I got to ask you a personal question.
We were in the Middle East together not that long ago, and I noticed two things.
One, you flew coach to the Middle East, which obviously you don't need to do, but you did it on purpose.
I think that is your custom.
We're the same age, three weeks apart.
And I think most, like, why would you do that?
And the second thing I noticed is you went from there to some...
Far more obscure part of the world.
So explain those things, if you would.
erik prince
When I got out of the SEAL teams earlier than I wanted to, I loved being a SEAL.
I was pretty good at it, I think.
And I would have had a nice career going there.
tucker carlson
For those who don't know the story, if you could explain why you got out.
erik prince
Oh, my dad died.
And when I was 25 and my wife got cancer, no, I was 26, she was 29, and she got cancer.
So I got out to sort out the home front.
And that's really why I started Blackwater, just as a way to stay connected to the SEAL teams.
I knew nothing of business, nothing of land development, nothing of government contracting, but I kind of knew what the special operations community needed.
And building that business was...
It was a really great experience.
It was family policy for my dad to not come and work in the family business after college.
You had to go do your own thing.
I didn't want anything to do with this business.
I don't think I was really suited for it.
But I was going to come and work with him after 12 years or so of being a SEAL. Starting Blackwater, building it, was one of the most satisfying things I've ever done in my life.
Because bringing together...
People with great talents that were really good that they'd gained in the military and they'd retired or gotten out.
And having it smashed the way it was really left a bad taste in my mouth.
And I'll be honest, I carry a big chip on my shoulder yet.
And I try to keep it in perspective.
So look, I had a business that was crushed and lost.
Thousands of guys lost their lives, their limbs, their mental health, their spouses over a badly run war in two theaters by Idiot Washington elites.
Same idiots that smashed my business.
So yeah, I got a chip on my shoulder to do something big and effective and spectacular again and run hard until that happens.
Or I die trying.
tucker carlson
But I mean, you know, 54, 55-year-old guys who've been successful, which you have been despite having your business smashed, they don't fly coach.
Like, what is that?
Is that like just a Spartan impulse?
Or you just don't want to get soft?
erik prince
You get there at the same time.
tucker carlson
Yeah, but it's...
erik prince
Tucker, I fly so much that...
Anyway.
Look.
tucker carlson
This is weird.
I know.
We're the same age.
I know how this works.
erik prince
Look, I'm not a purist.
I do fly business class 10% of the time.
tucker carlson
I mean, that's fine if you're flying to Fort Lauderdale from D.C. or something, but, you know, Dubai's a long way.
I just think it's very, very interesting.
erik prince
Learn to sleep in any position.
tucker carlson
So that's what it is.
erik prince
Yeah.
tucker carlson
Yeah, I like that.
What's the weirdest place you've been recently?
Why are you always in Africa?
What do you do for a living, Eric?
I feel like I knew you pretty well.
I'm not really sure.
erik prince
I would say there are lots of countries that need help organizing.
With the basics of tax collection and security assistance and border security and Police advisement because What we take for granted in America if you want to start a business in America You can call a law office in Delaware get a business in two hours for 200 bucks It's simple and you can get title to your land here and you get a bank account you get a business license you can You can do all those things that make capital formation possible.
There are so many parts of the world where that's not possible.
And so providing them the very basic means of a reliable police department or the means to stop gangs, jihadi gangs, criminal gangs, whatever.
So I do provide some advice to countries how to do that from time to time.
tucker carlson
Judging by what little I know of your travel schedule.
Seems pretty frequent.
That's interesting.
So since you are everywhere all the time, and most Americans are, including me, sort of only dimly aware of what's happening around the world, name three places we should be paying more attention to now than we are.
erik prince
The Chinese Communist Party has been very active in Mexico.
The fentanyl crisis.
Last year, fentanyl in America killed like 109,000 people.
It is funded, organized, logistically facilitated by the Chinese Communist Party to move the precursor chemicals that are actually made near Wuhan, China, shipped to Venezuela or Mexico, fabricated into fentanyl, and basically blended with other common drugs that people are taking.
And it doesn't make any sense to do so.
Because why would a drug dealer want to kill his customers?
That's what's happening.
And it is an absolute...
It's a fuck you from the CCP against the West for the opium wars of the 1840s.
And it's done to...
tucker carlson
To murder American children.
erik prince
100%.
Yes.
tucker carlson
And just to be clear, these are not junkies who took too much.
These are kids who ordered a Valium off Instagram.
erik prince
Yes.
Or a...
A bootleg Percocet or something.
tucker carlson
Yeah, exactly.
erik prince
Exactly.
And so there are people dying.
And that is, you trace that, and I can show all that going right back to mainland China.
tucker carlson
Why are we sending all these armaments to Ukraine and we could bomb those facilities in Mexico?
If they're killing, excuse me, 100,000 Americans a year.
erik prince
You don't need to bomb.
Fire is an underutilized tool.
unidentified
That's true.
tucker carlson
Well, it's happening here.
I noticed there are quite a few manufacturing and agricultural facilities that seem to be going up in smoke in this country.
erik prince
Yeah.
And on that, the last time Blinken was in Beijing, he didn't even call him on it to say, stop.
He said, well, no, yeah, maybe some of the stuff is coming from China, but it's really just an accidental shipping problem.
I mean, it's...
It is such a denial of reality.
tucker carlson
It's hard to stomach.
So I guess what you're saying is you're not speculating about this.
This is known.
erik prince
100%.
tucker carlson
Do the intel agencies, I assume, know this?
erik prince
Yeah, but nobody wants to do anything.
tucker carlson
Why?
erik prince
I think you have an agency that doesn't want to do their job.
tucker carlson
Which agency?
erik prince
The CIA. Because I think, and I know you have, rightly, very mixed feelings on the CIA. However, the mission of the CIA, if you think about the State Department can handle 5% of issues, diplomats and embassies.
You want your military over here, your conventional military.
It's a big, angry dog waiting to be let off leash that hopefully never is.
The middle of the world, those problems, you think about how the Soviet Union was really undermined in the 80s.
There was 20 covert action findings that were signed, coupled by Carter, mostly by Reagan, done to undermine the Soviet Union economically, politically, culturally, socially.
And that was done under Title 50 authorities, and that worked.
Without having to involve big military expenditure, if you want to stop, we know fentanyl is a problem.
We know the Chinese are a problem doing it.
That's specifically what the Title 50 authorities are for.
To say to six guys, go make that problem stop.
And if you have an agency that doesn't want to do their job, that's why it's not happening.
tucker carlson
But they seem to be doing so many other things.
I mean, I applied to CIA. My dad worked with CIA. I was never against CIA. I thought only dumb liberals were against CIA and traitors or whatever.
So my views on CIA have evolved based on things that I have seen and personally experienced.
And my conclusion is not that everyone...
They are particularly, you know, the paramilitaries, I know a million of them seem like great guys, whatever, but on some basic level, it seems totally out of control to me.
erik prince
It is.
I mean, when you have the leadership of the CIA, this Havana syndrome is a real thing.
tucker carlson
What does that mean?
erik prince
It's effectively a microwave weapon that's been used to effectively blast the brains of Americans working out of embassies.
First in Havana, Columbia, Delhi, Hanoi, Vienna, Washington, D.C., lots of places.
Okay?
Hurting, severely hurting, Americans serving abroad, and the CIA director says it's all in their minds.
tucker carlson
It's bulimia.
erik prince
That's wrong.
When your people are getting screwed by a...
tucker carlson
So you think that's...
I don't have a view on that.
I mean, I'm sort of...
I don't know the answer, but I'm sympathetic to...
open to both possibilities being true.
But you think, based on evidence, that this is absolutely real?
erik prince
Yes.
unidentified
I know it to be real.
tucker carlson
Wow.
Who's doing this and why?
erik prince
It was a device that was developed in the Soviet Union in the early 70s, actually in Ukraine.
So, I think the Kharkiv Development Plant.
It had nothing to do with the Ukrainians now, but it's about the size of a beverage cart on an aircraft.
That size device.
And it's very damaging.
And the fact that the Russians can do that to us without consequences, it shows how...
How pathetic they view the CIA and the US government to not push back on consequences.
tucker carlson
So CIA, what motive would they have to pretend this wasn't real?
erik prince
Because it would require pushback somewhere, somehow.
tucker carlson
But they're literally fighting Russia in Ukraine.
CIA is all over Ukraine fighting Russia.
erik prince
Good question.
I mean, put it this way.
They don't like me enough that I was uninvited from a dear friend's retirement.
10 days ago.
tucker carlson
Oh, I bet they don't like you, and you've obviously worked with them most of your life, right?
erik prince
We did a lot of great work for them.
100% success rate.
But, yeah, look, the wrong people being in charge, the agency has also gotten hyper-bloated.
Basically the same number of case officers that there's always been for 25 years, but the place has grown tenfold of all the wrong kind of people under the decision-making of a guy like Brennan.
tucker carlson
Yes.
erik prince
And why does Brennan hate the actual DO, the Director of Operations?
Because he's a failed case officer.
He flunked out of school.
I mean, how did a guy that voted for Gus Hall in 1976, who was Gus Hall?
tucker carlson
Gustavo Hallberg.
He was the Finnish-American head of the American Communist Party in New York City.
erik prince
Exactly.
How does a guy vote for the head of the Communist Party in 1976 at the height of the Cold War and then pass whatever background check the agency is doing and have a security clearance?
I find that...
Stunning.
tucker carlson
He retains his security clearance because the last administration refused to strip him of his security clearance, despite the fact he was actively working to undermine a democratically elected president.
unidentified
Yeah.
tucker carlson
No, I know.
The levels of betrayal and self-betrayal are just almost mind-boggling.
Let me ask you specifically about what the CIA does in Ukraine.
So I think it's fair to say, based on what even the New York Times has reported, that the CIA is running effectively the Ukrainian intel services.
erik prince
I don't know.
I honestly don't know that.
I'm sure they have been there advising and supporting, but I think the Ukrainians probably grew frustrated at, you know, lack of willingness to do certain things.
So I don't know where the U.S. support ends and where the Ukrainian unilateral stuff begins.
tucker carlson
I ask because they've assassinated people.
I think they tried to assassinate me, for example, but they definitely killed Alexander Dugin's daughter.
They, you know, allowed an American critic of the Ukrainian government to die in prison, Lira, Gonzalo Lira.
And you're sort of like, well, wait a second.
If this is a proxy war and we're overseeing it, then is the U.S. government aware of this?
Responsible for it?
Like, what?
U.S. government should protect American citizens, but clearly it's not.
erik prince
And if you had a honest...
Look, Devin Nunes...
Did a good job as the chairman of the HIPSY of trying to dig into the nonsense.
And he obviously met all kinds of resistance, but he had fight in them.
Now, the Republican oversight of the intel committee, of the intel agencies, completely inadequate.
tucker carlson
But even then, and I liked Evan a lot, but those guys are all afraid of the CIA, as you know.
They're afraid of them.
They know they're being spied on by CIA or NSA or any, you know, FBI. They know they're supposed to be in charge of overseeing these agencies, are being spied on by them.
They're fully aware of that.
I know because they've told me to my face.
I'm not guessing.
And that's not democracy.
That's totally crazy.
erik prince
Yeah, that's like Marcus Wolff and the Stasi.
tucker carlson
Well, yeah, exactly.
That's exactly right.
The East German refugee.
erik prince
Because the Stasi was way more effective than any other intel service, even the KGB. Yes.
It was...
The embodiment of German efficiency, innovation, and...
tucker carlson
Well, it's like the only effective institution in the entire country.
erik prince
Alles war in Ordnung.
tucker carlson
What does that mean?
erik prince
Everything was in order.
tucker carlson
Yeah.
Nice.
So, and then I know that CIA runs businesses, like runs businesses outside the country, and those are sources of income for the agency.
That, like, how can a government agency run businesses?
I don't understand that and profit from that.
erik prince
I am truly not aware of any of that.
tucker carlson
Okay.
How do you rein it in?
I mean, because it, of course, could be an essential tool of diplomacy, statecraft, of the projection of power.
I mean, you could see how CIA could be helpful to your country.
erik prince
The agency is the most easy to reform of all federal agencies.
Civil service rules don't apply.
tucker carlson
Yes.
erik prince
You can fire anyone for any reason that fast.
You could clean house, have an all-hands meeting at the bubble on a Friday, and send 50% of them home.
Send them out to their cars and tell them we'll ship your stuff from your desk.
You could clean it out that fast.
tucker carlson
But why does no one do that?
erik prince
Maybe no one's had the balls as the director or the deputy director to do that.
tucker carlson
Do you believe CIA has in the last 25 years used violence against any American citizen?
erik prince
Yeah, Barack Obama killed an American citizen and his 16-year-old son.
Correct.
Alawaki in Yemen.
tucker carlson
Right.
And that's publicly known, but there are all sorts of...
There's evidence that that's not an isolated...
erik prince
Maybe there's more, but I know that one.
tucker carlson
Yeah.
So you don't think it's crazy to assume that?
erik prince
Entirely possible.
Well, there's a lot of...
There's a lot of people that are considered American citizens that probably shouldn't be considered American citizens.
tucker carlson
I agree with that completely.
But in actual America, there's someone who grew up here.
erik prince
Fair.
But the left has so devalued citizenship, it should mean something to be an American.
I mean, a Roman citizen, it meant something.
tucker carlson
A Venezuelan gang member who's here illegally is every bit as American as you who were born in Western Michigan.
So yes, I'm quite aware of that.
erik prince
Anchor babies.
Birthright citizenship, all of that must go.
tucker carlson
Yeah, you wonder if we've reached a point where it's impossible for the country to act in its own interest just because of the changes due to immigration.
erik prince
I read a lot of history, and I know that things have been a lot worse in certain societies, and corrective events can be shocking and traumatic to people, but it's still possible.
tucker carlson
CIA, and not just CIA, but FBI and other agencies supposed to be enforcing the law and gathering intelligence have, this has been shown, withheld information from democratically elected presidents.
A number of them.
Certainly Trump.
That's a crime, is it not?
erik prince
Yeah.
And it should be met with immediate discipline.
And that's a matter of having...
People that will follow through and wade through the bureaucratic process and exercise the authority that they're charged with doing.
When you join the military, you swear to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, we should probably do something similar for any civilian employee of the federal government that they swear to defend the Constitution.
Not swear allegiance to a political leader.
tucker carlson
Of course not.
erik prince
Constitution.
tucker carlson
Right, but it's not a constitutional republic if unelected Employees of the federal government ignore the elected employees.
erik prince
Yeah.
Well, that's something love it or hate it at Blackwater.
Every contractor that worked for us swore to defend the Constitution.
The same oath they swore when they joined the military or law enforcement.
They swore it again in our presence as a reminder that we're here to serve.
tucker carlson
So I want to ask you about spying on American citizens so we know that it's widespread.
It's accelerating.
Data is being collected about every single one of us, and the vector for a lot of that is the phone.
So it's super useful, of course, but it's also the main vulnerability if you care about privacy and freedom.
So you've created a phone that allows people to, to some extent, to opt out of the current spying regime.
erik prince
Let me back up to where, I guess, where this started.
If you think about after 9-11, suddenly, Holy shit, all these federal agencies are waking up and how do we prevent this kind of conspiracy and attack against us again?
And so they start looking at data.
But of course, in 9-11, we didn't have smartphones.
But as smartphones become available and the technology that goes around a smartphone, because what is a smartphone?
It's basically a highly capable personal computer in your hand.
tucker carlson
Yeah.
erik prince
That's constantly linked to a network.
tucker carlson
Yes.
erik prince
As ad data, the private sector always innovates much faster than governments do.
And so as Apple and Google Mobile Services start developing phones, they put ad IDs and tracking information on those phones.
Why?
To micro-target you to sell advertising.
They gather and collect micro-information about you so that they can sell Precision information to advertisers who want to sell you stuff.
tucker carlson
Can you give us a sense of what that information is?
What do they know about you?
erik prince
Well, an advertising ID is like a 25-digit alphanumeric code that sits on your phone.
And it enables to collect where you go, what you buy, who you call, and what you browse.
It even works with the apps sitting on your phone, which are also built with a software developer kit.
That comes from Google and they pay you more to put the Google hooks in so that those apps can also turn on the microphone on your phone or the camera or the GPS so that your phone, yes, it's a computer, but effectively becomes a mobile microphone collection listening device that fits in your pocket or sits in your nightstand and it collects Anything and everything about what you do.
And so it's almost been like a slow boiling of a frog because as smartphones become common, it becomes very convenient and it's wonderful and it becomes more and more pervasive in our lives, providing us music and news and communications and pictures and videos of our family.
Every bit of that data is collected, analyzed, Reparsed and resold advertisers.
The five leading big tech companies have a combined market cap that's like the third or fourth largest nation in the world off of that surveillance capitalism model.
So as smartphones have become available, it's slow-boiled all of us into a point of, holy shit.
And I guess for me, the oh shit moment was after the 2020 election and seeing the power that big tech had to sway that election and to then coordinate, to control who could speak, who could speak on certain platforms and zeroing out certain people.
And I actually had a tech team together at the time doing a forensics thing and in a rage phone call.
I said, fuck it.
We're going to build a phone.
And we pivoted.
And that team then started working and yeah, we built a phone as an answer because we're never going to make big tech change by whining about it.
They're way too much money and way too much power.
We have to provide a means for people to communicate freely, securely.
And most importantly, that they can control their data.
I think it's inherently American that we expect privacy as Americans.
Think about the Constitution.
The First Amendment is free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly.
Second, we know what that guarantees, the first.
What's the Third Amendment?
What was most important for the Founding Fathers?
Privacy.
Get these damn British troops out of my house.
tucker carlson
Of course.
erik prince
No quartering act.
Because there was actually British soldiers being put into people's houses.
Privacy.
Fourth Amendment.
The right to privacy in the searches of our personal data.
tucker carlson
Yes.
erik prince
What big tech has created in surveillance capitalism is more pervasive and more intrusive than anything you could ever possibly...
It's more...
It's more pervasive than Marcus Wolf of the Stasi or Beria of the KGB, of the NKVD, could ever possibly imagine.
tucker carlson
Or anything that happens in contemporary North Korea.
erik prince
Yes, exactly.
And we give it away.
And we give it away freely.
And so people still close the bathroom stall when you go into the toilet.
You still close the shower curtain.
We still do lots of things that we expect to have a privacy, but yet people...
With a regular phone, put it on their nightstand, and are surprised that the microphone is listening.
I've had so many people I've talked to about...
They said, I was talking to my wife about needing a new mattress in our bedroom.
The next day, they're getting advertising for mattresses, which means the camera or the phone was listening to them in their bedroom with all the follow-on conclusions to be drawn from that.
tucker carlson
Yeah, given what happens in...
I mean, so what happens to those recordings?
erik prince
Well, we've been doing a study following our device, a Google Mobile Services phone, any Android running Google Mobile Services, which is all of them, or an iPhone.
And at about 3 a.m., we're seeing a spike of data leaving the phone, about 50 megabytes.
That is basically that phone dialing home to the mothership, exporting.
All of your goings-on...
tucker carlson
All your pillow talk is going to...
erik prince
Pillow talk, whatever.
Right.
So Zuckerberg paid $20 billion for WhatsApp.
Why?
Because every message, call, video, picture, voice note, everything that goes through there, they say, well, it's end-to-end encrypted.
Yeah, it's end-to-end until it passes through their server where it's sliced and diced and analyzed and used to push...
Used to sell advertising to that customer.
If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer, you are the product.
So if you want to get...
Well, I think people right now are used to Mark Zuckerberg listening from their nightstand every night because that's effectively what your phone signal does.
tucker carlson
The creepiest person in world history, if he's listening to what's going on in your bedroom.
erik prince
Because they're able, as big tech, to shape that message.
That's the frightening thing about the power of big tech and their ability to influence what you watch, what you think about candidates.
If you search something, how they score those rankings.
It is shocking.
We have an antitrust problem here in America, vastly worse.
Than in the late 1800s, early 1900s with oil and railways and steel and all the rest.
tucker carlson
This is more important.
erik prince
Yeah.
This is literally how we communicate and interact with other human beings in our lives.
How we gather and share information about the realities of life.
Of food, of medicine, of vaccines, of healthcare issues.
Of truth.
And especially in an era of AI, it's scary stuff.
The average kid in America, by the time they reach the age of 13, has had 72 million data points collected on them by big tech.
So it's almost like that much collection allows digital grooming by big tech to share and to shape your preferences.
How you interact, et cetera.
tucker carlson
Including your sexual preferences.
I mean, if you're being honest here.
erik prince
Yeah, exactly.
tucker carlson
Considering that young people are introduced to sexuality through pornography.
unidentified
Yep.
tucker carlson
Yeah.
Given that there's no privacy, it's probably pretty dumb to watch porn.
erik prince
Yeah.
Nothing's private.
tucker carlson
Right.
So, what happens to all this data?
erik prince
Well, now...
Obviously, it's used and stored.
I mean, it's the bloom of data centers surrounding all these tech hubs around America is horrific.
And all that data is being collected and stored.
tucker carlson
Can I just ask you just a far-field question?
I'm just interested.
So, given that those data centers are some of the biggest users of electricity, they're like a steel plant.
Okay.
Yeah.
Massive electricity draw.
And using electricity is, of course, destroying the planet and accelerating climate change.
Why are the climate change zombies defacing paintings in museums and not protesting data centers?
erik prince
I would say if they were coming after data centers, then they would be getting a nonstop stream of...
Of social media messaging of why they should be attacking art instead of data centers.
tucker carlson
Well, exactly, but like, why are the AI ghouls, why is Mark Zuckerberg, why are they not climate criminals?
Why am I a climate criminal for having a wood stove and a Silverado, but the people who run data centers, which literally draw more power than fucking steel.
erik prince
With 100% backup as well.
tucker carlson
Right.
So, I'm not against using energy.
I'm pro-energy, actually, and cheap energy, but by the current rules, They're criminals.
So why does no one call them criminals?
erik prince
Because big tech has shockingly complete control over how that messaging is.
tucker carlson
Yes, over our minds and what we think.
Sorry, but you brought it right back to the point, which is...
erik prince
And so now, Congress, including a lot of Republicans in their idiocy, Have not only extended FISA, right?
FISA started as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
tucker carlson
Yeah, 1977-ish.
erik prince
Yeah.
Supposed to be measuring, monitoring how you collect intelligence, communications going to foreigners.
Now FISA is really all about Americans.
I guess we're treated as foreigners by our own government.
And so the federal agencies got sick of getting beat up.
When they'd come before Congress for millions of times illegally accessing what was supposed to be FISA unauthorized communications information.
And for buying all this commercial data that's collected and held and disseminated by big tech to facilitate advertising.
And typing and measuring where you go, what you buy, who you call, what you browse.
Everything about you in a way that any previous intelligence boss would have salivated over.
So now the new FISA, it's not an extension, it's a massive enlargement, says that any federal agent, for any reason, without probable cause or a warrant, can compel any company that holds any of that personal data to turn it over.
Allowing A massive fishing expedition on anybody that's considered an opponent of that off-the-reservation federal agent.
It's really disgusting.
Really, if it's not a Stamp Act Tea Party 1775 moment, I don't know what is.
But it is ultimately your government having carte blanche to do a digital proctology exam on you with no questions asked.
tucker carlson
Well, considering that these companies hold, you know, audio of you having sex with your wife, video of you watching pornography, like, stuff that, you know, audio of you telling racial jokes or whatever, like, your most intimate moments, the ones that could be used to blackmail and destroy you, doing things you would not do in public and shouldn't do in public, like, that's just, that's the ultimate power, isn't it?
erik prince
Yeah, I guess, You either have to not give a shit and fight anyway, or...
tucker carlson
Try to live virtuously, too.
It helps.
erik prince
That always helps.
unidentified
Yep.
tucker carlson
So how does your phone protect people against that?
erik prince
Again, like I said, this era started three and a half years ago, and we came at it from a completely contrarian view.
unidentified
Yeah.
erik prince
This phone, it's our hardware, made in Indonesia at a Singaporean facility.
Our operating system, all our code, and we are solely focused on data sovereignty that you control.
tucker carlson
It's pretty cool just that I am kind of impressed that you made hardware.
You didn't just build an app.
erik prince
Correct, because you have to control it down to the root level of the hardware and the software so that we don't have an advertising ID and our operating system blocks.
Any attempt by any app to turn on your camera or your Wi-Fi or your microphone or your GPS or anything, we don't allow any of that leakage.
In fact, we have a privacy center.
tucker carlson
This is called the unplugged.
erik prince
This is an unplugged phone.
And this is effectively a firewall which prevents apps from doing all the things they're used to doing on all the other phones.
So you're in control of what of your data.
Goes out, which is effectively zero.
This is like a safe.
Comes in, doesn't come out.
tucker carlson
So, just to bottom line it, I'm protected from...
What am I protected from if I use that?
erik prince
Here's the thing.
If you're using apps and some federal agency goes to that app purveyor and says, give me everything you have on Tucker that he's been using on that app.
There'll be nothing because there's no data.
Leaking from you, from your device to that app.
If you call somebody, we have our own secure messenger.
For example, you want to call and make a secure call and you call me, it takes about five seconds to connect because it's literally creating a encrypted tunnel between you and me.
Generates a new encryption key every call.
Completely different.
tucker carlson
So the government hates that and there have been all kinds of legal battles over this question.
They don't want secure communication between citizens because all of a sudden they care about human trafficking or something.
erik prince
Yes, and their latest excuse for this massive Pfizer enlargement was drug trafficking.
tucker carlson
Drug trafficking, right.
erik prince
Because they've been failing for 40 freaking years at that.
tucker carlson
Well, they just opened the southern border to fentanyl and human trafficking.
So these exact same people are suddenly really worried about human trafficking and drugs.
erik prince
Yeah, it's a joke.
So we produced 500 units, fielded them last fall.
We did a...
Big data, big beta test, and now we have 10,000 units so people can order and deliver.
And look, it is our effort to fight the power of big tech.
tucker carlson
So what can't I do?
I mean, I'll just confess that I use an iPhone made by a company I actually kind of hate.
That hates my country and me, and I use it anyway because it's super easy.
erik prince
And we figured there's a lot of people like you that would want to digitally opt out of the lie of big tech.
And so what you can't do, obviously we don't have the Apple Store.
We don't have Apple Music, but you can use Spotify.
You can use a lot of the other streaming services on here.
We just prevent them from collecting your data as to what you're listening to or where you are when you do it.
tucker carlson
What about pictures?
erik prince
Of course you can take pictures.
And you can share pictures.
You can send pictures.
We have a lot of the other privacy-related apps, whether it's Signal or Threema or Proton or Telegram.
tucker carlson
Why has nobody done this?
So everyone complains about this.
Everyone who pays any attention at all understands.
Plus, the iPhone's incredibly expensive.
But they have a hammerlock on your life.
And so this seems like a pretty obvious...
erik prince
Other people have tried it before, and they...
They burn through a lot of money, and I don't think the timing is right.
tucker carlson
They're not flying coach to Dubai, are they?
erik prince
We did this.
tucker carlson
Man, you are Dutch.
I love that.
It's like coach to Dubai.
erik prince
This phone also has a kill switch, an actual switch which separates the battery from the electronics.
You can't shut your iPhone off.
tucker carlson
Oh, I know.
erik prince
It's always listening.
It's always pinging towers.
It's always pinging Wi-Fi.
Building a digital breadcrumb trail of where you go and what you do.
tucker carlson
Even if I turn the iPhone off, it's not off.
erik prince
Correct.
This, you turn that off, it's off.
Because it physically separates battery from electronics.
It's just like pulling the battery out of an old Nokia phone.
tucker carlson
I'm sorry I interrupted you.
I love this, of course.
It's incredibly ambitious.
But also on some level, it's kind of obvious.
Like, why haven't we had this before?
So you said people have tried, they spent too much money, and then I interrupted you.
erik prince
And they tried maybe just with an app.
And just with an app doesn't work.
And people have tried to do it with a re-skinned Google phone.
This phone is incapable of running Google mobile services.
So you're not going to get Google Maps.
We have a way to navigate that works well.
But again, so many of the freemium...
Approaches, where they've been boiling the frog of the people of the world, we provide them a digital alternative to that, where you are in control of your First Amendment rights and your Fourth Amendment rights.
tucker carlson
Amen.
How hard is it to text people who don't have that phone?
erik prince
Look, it emits electrons, so ultimately you can see if it's on a tower or not, but we even provide it with a SIM. With a SIM provider, a data provider, a network airtime provider that collects the minimum amount.
Basically, all they need is your zip code where you're buying it.
unidentified
That's it.
tucker carlson
No, but what I'm saying is if I am using an unplugged phone and my wife has an iPhone, I can text her.
erik prince
Yes.
Sure.
And she can even put unplugged messenger on her iPhone as well.
tucker carlson
How much more expensive is that than an iPhone?
erik prince
This is $989.
So it's cheaper.
About $500 cheaper.
And it's comparable in speed, storage, camera quality.
tucker carlson
Can you actually get one?
erik prince
Yeah, you can order it at unplugged.com slash Tucker.
And we will...
Look, we're big believers.
We're a big believer in your audience.
I'm a long, ardent fan.
And we think your fans are our people.
And so we are happy to compensate them.
And you guys, and we want to win in this together and give people a digital alternative to big tech owning their lives.
tucker carlson
Man, so if, I mean, it's not a threat to Apple right now, but if there's big take-up, it could be.
So how do you expect them to try and stifle competition?
It's a monopoly.
unidentified
Sure.
tucker carlson
They want to retain monopoly status.
erik prince
Look, if you search for, if you do a Google search for unplugged phone or things like that, they tend to stack.
Every negative article possible written about it first.
tucker carlson
Oh, there have been bad pieces written?
erik prince
Of course.
Of course, the left will always come after me and hate on me for anything.
tucker carlson
Is it a racist phone?
erik prince
The left used to be about free speech, and now they're really about kind of state control.
tucker carlson
Does the phone deny the election in 2020?
erik prince
I would argue that the phone cares about your First and Fourth Amendment rights.
Okay.
This is not a political phone.
tucker carlson
So there's no QAnon feature on the phone at all?
erik prince
I don't know if there's a QAnon app.
You know, the funny thing is...
It's so lying!
tucker carlson
It's just so funny!
erik prince
We even have an app, a dating app, for people that are unvaccinated.
Because they were thrown out of the Apple and the Google store.
So yes, we are also a repository for the apps that have no home elsewhere.
tucker carlson
So if you want to have like really healthy babies, you can go on to this dating app.
erik prince
If you're not a big fan of the mRNA strand, you know, changing your genetics for future generations, yes.
You need an unplugged phone.
tucker carlson
And let me just ask actually to follow up on that.
I think what you just said the last sentence you uttered is maybe the most interesting story of my lifetime.
The possibility that the mRNA technology could affect your genes, which is not crazy actually.
I don't know if it's true or not.
Do you think it's true?
erik prince
It would be an interesting study to ask how many of the executives of those pharmaceutical companies actually took their own product.
That should be a congressionally...
I don't care if it's a HIPAA issue or not.
Someone should find that out.
tucker carlson
Well, HIPAA doesn't exist.
I mean, when they're...
Forcing you to declare your VAX status to use businesses or travel, clearly HIPAA doesn't mean anything, right?
There's no medical privacy.
erik prince
Look, and since the erosion of that privacy, I just want to encourage everyone to use cash yet as well.
Don't go to these, you know, anyone that goes to these woke coffee shops and they say, we don't accept cash anymore.
Look on the front of a dollar bill.
It says, this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.
No one has the ability to deny you using cash.
So leave them the right change on the table and tell them to have a nice day.
They cannot make you pay with a credit card.
That is actually insurrectionist if these businesses are denying you the ability to use legal tender of the United States government.
tucker carlson
I had never thought of that.
Has anyone tried that?
erik prince
Oh, yeah.
I make an issue of it all the time.
Much to my kids.
Embarrassment.
But yeah, I'm a big advocate.
Cash is freedom.
But the amount of data that is collected on you everywhere.
You want to buy gas?
Buy gas.
Pay cash.
Whatever.
But what we see in China where they really don't accept cash anymore and it's become the ultimate surveillance state.
That's where we're heading unless free people unite.
And resist that kind of totalitarian impulse of big government and big tech working together.
In China, you have to pay with a WeChat app.
So you do your banking through that.
You acquire tickets for a bus, an airplane, a train through that.
You pay road tolls through that.
Everything is through this app controlled by the state.
And so before they even go to a central bank digital currency, They literally have you by the balls, and they can zero you out instantly.
And so we did this because for free people to be able to live in a free society, they have to communicate, they have to be able to hold and store data, and be able to gather that data without someone else filtering it through an app store that the bad guys control, that the big government guys control.
tucker carlson
Where do you get cash?
erik prince
From a bank?
tucker carlson
It sounds like a stupid question, but there seem to be fewer ATMs.
I don't think that's my imagination.
In fact, it's not.
erik prince
Sure.
tucker carlson
Yeah, they don't want you to use cash.
erik prince
There's a de-emphasis on cash.
tucker carlson
Right.
erik prince
Cash equals freedom.
tucker carlson
I could not agree with you more, and there's something kind of old school and cool about it anyway.
erik prince
I used to remember my dad having $500 bills.
tucker carlson
Yeah, why don't we have those anymore?
erik prince
War on drugs.
tucker carlson
Really?
erik prince
Yeah.
That would be a great thing for the next president of the United States.
tucker carlson
What does that mean, war on drugs?
So they stopped?
erik prince
It was a war on cash to cut out illegal activity that was paid for in cash.
William McKinley is on the $500 bill.
I think they should bring it back and put Donald J. Trump on it.
Can you imagine the heads exploding?
tucker carlson
Yeah, that'd be pretty wild.
erik prince
But you know...
So much of this explosion of government, perpetual wars, and perpetual government stupidity comes back to very unsound money.
And when we went off the gold standard, when Nixon did, how was it done?
Was it a vote through Congress?
tucker carlson
No.
erik prince
Was it debated?
It was an executive order.
Which means you can go back on with executive order as well.
tucker carlson
Where are you on gold?
erik prince
I'm very pro-gold.
It has, for millennia, been a store of value.
And I'd say digital blockchain currencies, also interesting.
It's hard.
Look, anything is of value if someone recognizes it as a medium of exchange.
tucker carlson
Right.
erik prince
Right?
I mean, there was a tulip inflation in the Netherlands in like 500 years ago.
tucker carlson
Yes.
erik prince
But tulips were currency.
Tulip bulbs.
So lots of things can become...
tucker carlson
The prettiest currency ever created.
erik prince
If things get really scary, ammunition will be currency.
unidentified
Yes.
erik prince
Always has been.
tucker carlson
Yes, I've had that thought personally.
Ammunition dogs, I have a lot of dogs too.
So I feel like dogs will be more valuable at some point.
So are you a gold buyer without getting too specific about it?
erik prince
Some, yeah.
But I mean...
For heaven's sakes, started a company which took on not one, but two multi-trillion dollar companies.
Because, you know, that was a dumb, crazy idea, you know, three and a half years ago.
So that's, I've been investing in this capability for people to communicate securely and freely.
And I hope it works.
And it will never be a public company.
We've taken no institutional money.
It will be a private company.
Not subject to the SEC and all the other nonsense.
It's not even an American-registered company because I didn't want the U.S. government to be able to shut it down.
tucker carlson
Yeah, it's interesting.
Again, we haven't had a conversation really about your personal story, which is one of the most amazing personal stories of anyone I've ever met.
But among the many twists and turns and ironies of your life is that someone as patriotic as you...
I was basically at one point forced to flee to a foreign country.
erik prince
Well, I didn't flee.
I went there for a job opportunity, but I'd been attacked unbelievably.
tucker carlson
Oh, I remember.
Talking about putting you in jail.
I remember that.
erik prince
Every federal agency in the world was coming after us.
And I paid about $2.5 million a month for two years straight in legal fees.
I paid the highest per capita fine in State Department history.
It was the only federal agency that actually Stuck us with something because we had no means to contest it because they, at that point, we were working for the State Department, doing diplomatic security, protecting Americans, something we did more than 100,000 times with no State Department or U.S. official ever killed or injured on our watch.
And sometimes the State Department would be demanding, I need 50 more men here, I need 30 more men there, go immediately.
But another part of the State Department...
The licensing department of the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls moving at the speed of peacetime would be slow rolling on the licenses, the export license for like body armor or helmets or guns used by our people working for the State Department.
And yeah, I'm not going to send a guy naked to a war zone, so we'd send stuff to do that mission for the State Department in Iraq or Afghanistan or whatever.
And so, yeah, that was what they had us over the barrel.
So they fined me $42 million for that.
tucker carlson
Did you pay?
erik prince
Had to.
unidentified
Yeah.
erik prince
Hillary Clinton.
tucker carlson
Why didn't she like you?
unidentified
I don't know.
tucker carlson
Didn't like your vibe, I guess.
unidentified
Not that so much.
tucker carlson
She doesn't fly, Coach.
Once again, where do people watching get that?
erik prince
So, I've been very active in the media, but they can go to unplugged.com slash Tucker.
tucker carlson
You're very active in the media.
In other words, you're out there talking about this.
erik prince
Yeah, for lack of a better spokesman, I'm kind of it for now, but we're looking for more if you'd like to be it.
But yeah, no, people can order and they'll get it within 36 hours usually.
tucker carlson
How hard is it to operate?
erik prince
It's very simple.
Look, so it's based on the Android kernel.
So anybody, any of the apps built for Android...
Almost 95% of them work on this phone.
They look a little different because they're not blasting all the personal ads at you for using the app.
So again, it's a way for people to be in the world, digitally, but not of the world, and not have all your stuff collected, stored, and disseminated to all kinds of people that hate you.
tucker carlson
Oh yeah, and then it's available, of course, to the U.S. government.
erik prince
And another important feature I think you'll appreciate, on our messenger, we even have a dump feature.
So if you're using Unplug Messenger and someone comes and says, Tucker, give me your phone.
I'm here to inspect it.
You say, sure, officer.
And you unlock it with a certain code.
When you hand it to them, it's a brick.
It's a paperweight because it wipes.
It's an auto dump feature which wipes the messages or it can even dump the entire phone.
Dump as in zero it out, hard factory reset, unrecoverable, F you.
tucker carlson
Seriously?
unidentified
Yep.
tucker carlson
So you're traveling through a foreign airport, which is where this...
In our airports, this has happened.
Yeah.
And you can...
erik prince
Yep.
tucker carlson
Erase the phone.
erik prince
Instantly.
tucker carlson
So one of the reasons that I really passionately dislike Apple and Google is because they'll take your communications and give them to the government without telling you.
erik prince
Yes.
In fact, out of this FISA bill just passed, they're not even allowed to tell you.
That your stuff has been accessed by this random federal agency or whatever.
So it is a big brother expansion bill is what that was.
And this, I mean, luck or timing or, I don't know, anticipating where the problem is going to be, started this journey three years ago.
We're now here.
It's not hypothetical anymore.
These are available.
We've just shipped 3,500 of them, and there's a few left.
tucker carlson
You see this in civil suits, too.
Not that I'm speaking from experience, but, you know, the people who oppose you can wind up with all your text messages, and then it's a short trip from there to say the New York Times.
Exactly.
erik prince
And a text without a context is a pretext for trouble.
tucker carlson
Oh, I love that.
A text without a context is a pretext for trouble.
Luckily, in my case, I wasn't really doing anything wrong other than using naughty language, but...
erik prince
All the better.
To have a burn time on all those messages.
So it's not looked at a year or five years later with some completely different lens.
tucker carlson
I agree with that.
Right.
erik prince
And so, again, it's either on your device.
If you send me a message, it's on this device or your device.
And we can set a burn time where it's gone, unrecoverable, anytime, anywhere.
tucker carlson
But the feds can never come to you and say, as the owner and spokesman for Unplugged, we want the text messages for so-and-so.
erik prince
We got nothing, man.
We store nothing.
It's stored on your device or this device.
tucker carlson
Whereas Apple, if I use iMessage, which I do.
unidentified
Correct.
erik prince
And you can set a burn time on this where it disappears and it's gone.
tucker carlson
This is my grubby iPhone.
But if I'm texting on iMessage and...
erik prince
They're storing all of it.
tucker carlson
Yeah, I got 59 text messages while we were talking this morning.
erik prince
That's why you're so slow to respond to the texts.
You're deluged.
tucker carlson
Well, it's also my birthday.
So lots of people are texting me.
But anyway, the point is, and I don't have any unauthorized birthday messages, but that's a lot.
I mean, people conduct their...
I'll speak for myself.
I conduct my life through text message.
erik prince
Exactly.
tucker carlson
Apple has all of that.
erik prince
For all eternity.
tucker carlson
And they will happily give that to the government.
erik prince
Without question.
And now they're compelled to turn it over without even a warrant or probable cause.
So again, if people are sick of that...
tucker carlson
So users of Unplugged are protective of that, invulnerable.
There's no...
erik prince
If they're using Unplugged Messenger.
If you send a regular text on Unplugged, it's going to pass through a phone carrier.
tucker carlson
Right.
erik prince
They'll have that message.
But if you send a message on Unplugged Messenger, gone.
You can set a burn time on it and it's gone and unrecoverable.
Not stored by us.
Or anybody else.
tucker carlson
Well, that seems like freedom to me.
erik prince
I will always choose freedom.
tucker carlson
Amen.
erik prince
And fight like crazy for it.
tucker carlson
So let me just end this with kind of an apology for interrupting you in the middle of one of the most interesting things you were saying.
So I said, name three places that Americans are not paying attention to since you are...
I don't want to violate your privacy by saying where you are, but I just happen to know that you're like...
You're in places.
I can't even find them on a map, and I'm pretty good at geography.
So I think you are the person to ask, what are three places that we're not paying attention to that we ought to be?
And I interrupted you after the first one because it was so interesting, and you said Mexico.
erik prince
Mexico, fentanyl, the CCP very much promoting.
So AMLO is a super socialist president there now.
tucker carlson
Yeah.
erik prince
There's an even worse leftist female about to take over.
tucker carlson
Leftist female.
unidentified
I love how you describe her.
erik prince
She's very much a Marxist protege.
tucker carlson
Oh, she is.
No, she's a leftist female for sure.
erik prince
With active programs by the CCP to support the most leftist candidates there in Mexico.
That's a problem.
It's become more and more of a narco state with cartels having...
Very significant influence, if not control, locally or regionally throughout the country.
And that's literally our southern border.
And the AMLO government actively promoting and cooperating with that kind of CCP nonsense.
Positive note, just a right-wing guy elected in Panama who says he's going to shut the Darien Gap.
Which is the area that moves all kinds of people.
Now, you asked for three.
I might give you a couple more than three if you've got time.
Please do.
The active spend of NGOs that the U.S. government funds, which enables mass migration into Latin America to walk north to invade across our southern border, is...
Massive and disgusting and illegal and wrong.
I remember three months ago I was contacted by an NGO in Haiti asking if I could organize an aircraft to fly from Port-au-Prince to Managua daily.
I said, why on earth would you want to do that?
They said, well, Haitians can fly to Nicaragua visa-free.
I said, ah, I know why.
It's to facilitate.
Haitians coming to Nicaragua and then walking north to facilitate illegal migration from there.
tucker carlson
Do we have a Haitian shortage here?
erik prince
I don't think so.
No.
And there is a massive network of those NGOs, and some of those guys are making, the CEOs of these things are making a million dollars a year, taking U.S. taxpayer money, facilitating the maneuver,
entrance, I agree completely, but you do sort of wonder since there's no economic justification.
tucker carlson
For this level, millions of uneducated people from the poorest countries of the world coming to your country.
There's no...
Especially with AI. Like, there are no jobs for these people.
They're just...
erik prince
But just the fact that the Democrats were actively seeking to register them as voters and to make it possible to vote, you know exactly what they're doing.
They're trying to stack the deck.
tucker carlson
But, I mean, you've been around wars your whole life.
Like, you tell me, if you've got the mass movement of young military-age males into a country, some of them with prison records, like, what are you looking at here?
erik prince
Yeah.
tucker carlson
Like, does that make you nervous at all?
erik prince
Sure.
But I also know...
Cannon fodder doesn't do very well against a sophisticated capability.
tucker carlson
Yeah.
erik prince
And the fact is, the people that actually did the fighting and the dying and the hard combat in the last 20 years, they don't agree to that kind of nonsense because they've laid their lives and their brothers and their health On the line for America for a long time, and they're not going to sit quietly about that nonsense.
tucker carlson
But there's already an effort in the Congress to make illegal aliens citizens if they serve in the U.S. military.
erik prince
I'm not opposed to a longer-term Legionnaire-type program if someone comes here and actually serves, and with obviously very, very strict performance guidelines.
Don't hire a guy to be a truck driver.
In the army and get citizenship?
No.
But I'm not so opposed to that, but all the other stuff they want to do around voting and driver's licenses and all that stuff, there's a lot of actions that the next administration can take to make it very difficult for those illegals to remain here by debanking and deplatforming them, what the left has been doing to people like us for the last 20 years to make that difficult.
Okay, so Latin America, Big problem.
In Guyana, a country most people haven't heard about other than where Jim Jones served Kool-Aid, made the largest energy discovery in this hemisphere in the last 50 years.
So it's enormous.
And Venezuela has been now declared that 70% of Guyana's territory is theirs, dusting off a 130-year-old border dispute.
And I think you're going to see Venezuela annex or seize.
That with largely impunity in the coming months or years, certainly.
If the Democrat administration continues, they'll take it because there's no consequences for it.
So you're really seeing a complete collapse, an erasure of the Monroe Doctrine, this idea that what happens in the Western Hemisphere is America's business and not the business of Russia and China.
The collapse of credibility of France and of the United States in Africa is now really accelerating.
The jihad problem that was persistent in Mali and Burkina Faso and Niger.
And why do these countries matter?
Huge gold, huge uranium, other minerals there.
And now Chad, Sudan.
The U.S. had two big bases in Niger.
And they were just pushed out.
Cost a billion plus, easily.
Big air bases, drone bases that were trying to do CT support all across Africa, pushed out by a collapse of credibility by the U.S., by the French, and the Russians have pushed in.
And the Russians are using a Wagner capability, a hybrid private military company type capability to enable Yes.
Gold and uranium, an actual green energy.
tucker carlson
That's right.
erik prince
So, there's nothing really that new in warfare.
Just different, maybe a little bit of different tech that changes how things are done, but how nations interact with each other.
I think you'll see a return to privateers and to a lot more private sector because our big bloated super state federal government has proven, well, at least now for the last 30 years, it's not very good at putting the fires out.
tucker carlson
Civilizations.
erik prince
Managing the conflict doesn't work.
Clearing the decks and putting a tourniquet on some of these things is necessary.
tucker carlson
Last question.
It does seem like civilization's in retreat in a lot of places.
Order, free movement, relatively open markets, civility, self-restraint, just all the hallmarkers.
Hallmarks of an open society of Western civilization.
They all seem to be in decline.
Do you see that?
And are you worried about it?
unidentified
Yeah.
erik prince
Look, civilizations ebb and flow.
And I look for pockets of normalcy of however crazy things get.
People still figure out how to get on with it and carry on.
And there's certainly pockets within Europe where they still do that.
There's pockets.
In parts of the Middle East, there's even some pockets in South Africa that I would consider islands of normalcy.
And in Latin America as well.
Again, I come back to Mille.
What a spectacular man who just took on his entire political establishment and said, afuera, out, right?
So I'm still drawn and I recommend the book a lot.
It's called To Dare and to Conquer.
And a friend gave it to me years ago, and it's a history of special operations throughout history, all the way from Alexander the Great and his men that climbed Sogdian Rock to the present of a few picked men and women, very capable warriors that flew in the face of unsurmountable odds and made it happen and change world history.
So I think there's a lot of hope in that.
And big government is really dumb and quite plotting.
And I know folks that have worked in Google and Apple and they pull their hair out at how inane and stupid a lot of those things are.
And so I view them probably as dumb as the U.S. was in Afghanistan.
And an opponent that can be defeated with wily, creative, very focused, and my dad always told me, persistence and determination.
And I try to live by that.
And I come back to...
My favorite quote from Churchill.
And he said, he was speaking before the Canadian Parliament a year after the Battle of Britain said, he said, a year ago, Herr Hitler said he would wring the neck of the British people like a chicken in six weeks.
And I stand before you a year later and I say, some chicken, some neck.
tucker carlson
Eric Prince, thank you.
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