Shawn Ryan Show - #29 Erik Prince - Inside The Rise and Fall of Blackwater

Episode Date: July 4, 2022

Erik Prince is an American businessman, former U.S. Navy SEAL officer, and the founder of the private military company Blackwater USA. On March 31st, 2004 the lives of 4 BlackWater employees were forever changed along with the smear campaign of the company that followed. Erik Prince reveals the truth inside of his company BlackWater and the current events shaping our world. You've never heard anything like this! Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website - https://www.shawnryanshow.com Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/VigilanceElite TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@shawnryanshow Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/shawnryan762 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's Topgolf. Download the app, book a bay, and come play around. Thank you for listening to the Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes and leave the Sean Ryan show review. We read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show. Ladies and gentlemen, it is 4th of July weekend. I'm in Portland, Maine. Getting ready to release my next episode with somebody that has been on my wish list to interview for a very long time.

He's a former boss of mine, former Navy SEAL, CEO of Blackwater, did a ton of work with Central Intelligence Agency until they ousted him. We get the full story. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mr. Eric Prince. And if you want to be a patriot, 4th of July weekend leave me a review on iTunes and sign up for our free email newsletter we push out all kinds of free content on the newsletter links in the description other than that, that's all I'm asking. Have a great fourth of July weekend and God bless America.

Cheers, love you all. I'm in fresh reports of reckless behavior by Blackwater, any rock, Blackwater CEO, Eric Prince, made no apologies to a congressional investigating committee. I disagree with the assertion that they acted like cowboys. And it says three senators, Joe Biden, Chuck Hagel, and John Care, the future vice president, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State, respectively, pose while waiting for blackwater rescue.

Their US Army helicopter got lost in a blinding snowstorm and set down in Taliban territory on the side of a mountain. Do not ever discount the Iranian influence on the Biden Obama administration then, as there is now. He said Mr. President, give us the authorities, and a billion dollars, and three weeks to fly to be walking in the eyeballs of enemies. Prince said his employees act with restraint and professionalism.

He boasted that none of the U.S. diplomats he has paid to protect have been killed or wounded. It was a great honor that they turned to us. It was a very important mission, right? Because the CIA is the ones who made that victory possible in the United States. We've had a better response from Blackwater than we have from the State Department. We fought back on all fronts. The one place that they had us over Barrel was in the State Department. We fought back on all fronts. The one place that they had us over barrel was in the State Department.

Witnesses say the two SUVs were ambushed as they drove through town. Another convoy of guys that got ambushed and shut up on the Baghdad highway. The contractors worked for Blackwater Security, a company that protects coalition personnel. Knowing that the clowns at the State Department and the Obama administration did everything they could to block a program like that, because it's not something they directly controlled,

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Use code Sean. It's time that you enjoyed the finer things in life and get yourself a platinum package for your platinum package. Shave your balls. Be a man. Eric Prince, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Sean. So I worked for you under Blackwater Worldwide, Blackwater USA.

And after I left all that, I started this and not realized what it would turn into. And you were actually the number one person that I wanted to interview. I never actually thought it would happen. So this is all very surreal for me. So I just wanna say thank you for coming. So real honor to have you here. It's always great to see guys that have worked with us

pivot to something else spectacular and do well. Thank you. So congratulations. Thank you. So congratulations. Thank you for that. So just a little introduction, you were a Navy seal on the officer side. You were the founder and CEO of Blackwater,

the largest private military contracting company in the world still to this day. Also the only PMC company to ever not lose an asset or a a a protectie. Yeah protectie. A billionaire until far from that one's that that's a gross distortion. It's a massive inflation of my net worth. Well, thank you for honest. Until recently the head of a private equity equity firm Frontier Resource Group you are on the Iranian hit list and well-known in the media is the guy behind the CIA assassination program and a father of 12 which I recently thought seven but 12. So...

It would double Brady Bunch family. If you're old enough to remember the Brady Bunch. I am. I am. And so in doing some of my research, I talked to some of your colleagues, one of which had mentioned that you are like a modern day Bruce Wayne. You sit at home and you think of out of the box ways to solve a lot of the things that are going on in the world. And I actually thought that was a fairly accurate description, so I wanted to bring that up.

But before we get into the interview which we're going to talk about a lot of different things I get everybody gift. Oh, there you go. Thank you. All right. Gummy bears. Those are gummy bears. Those are fantastic. Vigilance, legal in all 50 states.

All right. Yeah. Good to go. I'm a sucker for Gonser. Thank you. Perfect. So I have a subscription group called on Patreon under the Vigilance Elite,

and I give them an opportunity to ask each guest a question, and I pick one, and I thought this was a fairly good question. With the way the economy is today, everybody is waiting for the rug to kind of get pulled out from under it, and nobody really knows where to put their money. Where does Eric Perence invest his money other than your personal business ventures? The stock market seems certainly overhyped because of the amount of liquidity that's been pumped into the society. And to me, I guess it comes down to what do people have to buy to survive, right?

In a world of turbulence, it comes down to people making choices as to nice to have versus have to have. And so investing in, if you can do any kind of value investing into things that people have to buy versus want to buy That's that's probably the safest bet and And in this argument of cryptocurrencies versus gold and all the rest here the fact is Gold has for millennia been a valued medium of exchange and It's never been worth zero. It's never it's

never quite collapsed and so having a having part of a portfolio in a in a actual hard currency like gold or somebody even say in brass or in loaded ammunition components or look look at the look at the look at even what the cost of that has been over the past few years as the cost of copper has gone to $10,000 a ton and driving all those prices upwards. So it's not a bad hedge. Interesting. Are you into crypto at all? Yes. I bet. You think it's here to stay? I think it is because the increasing cartelization of big banks and their leverage over people that cryptocurrencies will find a way to be an alternative medium of exchange. To the detriment of big banks, which is good. If you think about monetary

history in the United States, there used to be lots of different privately issued currencies, right? You mean even after the American Revolution, you had the continental dollar and you had other people issuing dollars, usually based on issuing currencies, based on some kind of backed by some kind of based on some kind of backed by some kind of silver or gold or backed by a gold mine or something. And so it's not unusual to have a lot of different competing currencies. As you see in an crypto world, yes, there's a lot of noise. There's a lot of nonsense to it, but there's some underpinning value stuff like Bitcoin and some of those mainstream coins. They're very much here to stay. You think Ethereum's here to stay?

Ethereum? Yeah. I think so. Interesting. I wasn't expecting you to say that, but the more I dive in, the more open people are to it, it's a find of fascinating that I feel like we're on a currency revolution. Yes, we are. I think, so one of the things that in Africa, right, you have a thing called M-Pesa, which is cell phone banking, and it was hugely empowering for poor across Africa

that didn't have a bank account, but they had a cell phone, even a little flip phone, because they could transfer or receive a couple of dollars, a few cents, small amounts of money. And because it reduced their transaction costs, they didn't have access or even proximity to a bank to do that, let alone the corruption or other nonsense that might go with banks and some of those jurisdictions. So an M-Payset account allowed them to buy and sell goods or their labor and make it. I think cryptocurrencies are going to do that for the rest of the world with secure wallets, with exchanges that

people will be able to buy and sell goods rapidly and effectively. And for all the noise also about cryptocurrency being used for crime, it's the ultimate in transparency, right? Because it's a blockchain. It's you can trace every transaction in where it's gone and who has it. So. Well, thanks for sharing that. So as far as the interviews concerned, I would like to, we have so much to cover. I want to talk a lot about current events towards the end, but what I really want to do

at the beginning is talk about just your career up to this point and then get into some of the current events. So you grew up, your dad was a monster entrepreneur, very wealthy, not a lot of people can relate to that, and very many people are interested in that kind of lifestyle. And in your book, I think you give a great description of what that was like and some of the lessons that your dad talked to. So can you go into a little bit of your childhood?

What was that like? Sure. Well, I mean, first start by talking about my dad, because both my parents certainly shaped me. And I'm a 100% Dutch born in Holland, Michigan. And it was a Dutch community founded in the 1840s from some religious pilgrims that came from the Netherlands, but it's a very hard-working, very industrious area.

And my dad's dad died when my father was 13 and that was kind of in the great depression. And so he was thrust from being a kid to being the man in the family and my grandmother My grandmother had a as a widow with three kids was very independent and was not accepting or looking for any welfare from anybody, not from the state, not from the church, not from anybody. And so, my dad installed the hot water heater in their house at age 14 by himself. I mean, literally taking one length of pipe at a time, going to a local hardware store, measuring it, cutting it, coming back and you know, sweating the joints and he put it in it, still worked. So my dad worked 40 hours a week in middle school and high school already. And he

he played sports one season, he played football one season, but the rest time he worked. He was managing a card dealership at 16, and he put himself through college and was off in the Air Force for a couple of years after college because it was draft then. He was in the Air Force photo reconnaissance officer. But the man knew how, because he had to work to provide. And when he was, it went to work for a machine tool maker. They made big die-cast machines. And the business was sold, he liked the new ownership. And so he left with six other guys and took, now my dad already had three kids, mortgaging on the house, and he remorgaged everything.

And his mother, who'd managed to save $10,000 as a single mom in the 40s and 50s, put $10,000 on her son as equity into what became Prince Corporation. And my dad started making die-cast machines, and then in the early 70s they patented the light and Sun visor. One of the smart guys at the company Con Marcus developed the you know when you get in a car you tip the visor down you lift the lid up with the lights with the mirror and the lights that come on that was that was their patent and they made the first 5,000 for Cadillac before they ever made one. Wow. Because Dad said they sold it on a bolsa wood model. And then these Cadillac said, yep, we'll take 5,000.

And then it was a scramble to figure out how to make those things. And they just did it. They figured it out. And so the print corporation made all kinds of stuff inside of a car. And that, so that's the environment I grew up in. I remember my dad got invited to go to Eastern Europe and to Russia, right? Because they wanted to buy his machines. And he went to Moscow, had the whole surveillance tale and he hated the whole

fit and feel of the place and he came back and after that we did a long van tour. He shipped a 1975 Chevy van to Europe and we did a six week road trip one summer and we drove through Western Europe and Eastern Europe and I had my my seventh birthday in East Berlin and I'll never forget that as a seven-year-old in the guns, the dogs, the minefields, the tank traps, all of that facing in on East Germany. Literally a national prison camp keeping people from escaping. And I think it had a pretty direct effect on me, because I kind of figured out that communism is not such a great idea if you had to have that level of control to keep people from leaving. Well, I figured that out.

It's seven years old. Well, you know, and it probably stimulated my interest in history and reading and all the rest and I remember we went to Normandy in 1980 and so I was 11 year old. I was the kind of the family geek that gave the tour Right, this is sword gold Juno Utah Omaha Beach. There's Pegasus Bridge and Yeah, so I I kind of lived in and read and consumed that kind of information. I was kind of a loner growing up.

I hunted and trapped. I had a cousin, Derek, who was a great outdoorsman and his dad. A whole side of the Sweet Family, where outdoorsmen, and that's where I got it from. And they, you know, shooting water bugs with a BB gun. And I hunt, I trapped muskrats and raccoons for three years. So, you know, as a, as a fourth, fifth, and a sixth grader, I was out in my bike early in the morning, going to check my traps before school. It was a good experience. Were you involved in the family business at all? Not at all.

Not at all. Not interested or. A, not interested, but B, was also policy that you have to go do your own thing. So even if I was really interested, there was never, never even an option. So my dad's policy for my sisters and I is that he had to go do something else

before he ever come and work in the family business. At what point did that become clear, what age? It was, I think since birth, it was just more time. Yeah, why me as the business grew and became very large. It was 5,000 employees by, by the late 80s. By about the time I was graduating high school. I'd always wanted to be in the military. And I applied to Air Force and Navy. I got into both academies and I went Navy. I was a pilot. I got my pilot's license. All right, so when I was 16, morning my 16th birthday got my license and I was a pilot, I got my pilot's license, or I sold when I was 16, morning my 16th birthday, got my license when I was 17,

and was hell-bent to be a Navy pilot. And truly showing about how low profile the SEAL teams were then, this is, I was a geek that paid attention to all things military, and I didn't even know that much about the SEAL teams, because I went to the Academy knowing, knowing I wanted to be a pilot, and that was, it was even the year after

Top Gun came out. Oh. But I remember I was the spring of my freshman year, plebe year at the academy. And these two seal officers, there were the liaison guys came and gave the brief as to what seal teams do. And they said, hey, if you ever want to, you know, come down and PT with us, you can be at this field at 530 tomorrow. And I showed up there at 530 and they said, okay, today we're just going to run a mile, get a partner, put them on your shoulders. I was hooked, man. I loved it. And I remember I remember going to the pool right because I played sports in high school in middle school but I was not much of a swimmer even having grown up on the lakes and I remember swimming the first 50 meters and I felt like my lungs were gonna fall out of my chest but but 100 meters

became 200 became you know when I became a pretty good swimmer, but yeah that started my trajectory of wanting to be a seal, but I ended up leaving I left the academy After three semesters voluntarily I was not kicked out But I went to Hillsdale College and I had a good experience there. Why did you leave the academy? Because I was not convinced it was I think great leaders went to the academy and survived it because it was not producing them. And it was I'd say it was an early indicator of the kind of political correctness that has infected the rest of many of American schools, right?

And, you know, if you think there's a problem in the university, you imagine one run by the federal government. And so this is 87-88. I mean, growing up in Holland, Michigan, I was active in school. I played, I think, I only missed one season of one year playing some kind of high school sport out of our sea level.

I was involved in all that, but I was so focused on joining the military. I think I missed most of the fun times of high school experience that most kids look back on. Okay. Still have regrets for that. But going to Hillsdale, it was a good experience. I remember I had a, a prof named Alexander Stromas,

who was an exile, he'd been kicked out of the Soviet Union. And so right as a Soviet Union is teetering on collapse, Alexander Stromas had been a law school classmate of Mckayl Gorbachev. So it was a fantastic window into what was actually happening there. And so between a really good economic education, right, because Hillsdale is one of two schools in the country that accepts no federal funding. Why don't they accept federal funding? Because with federal money comes federal strings. So it is, it is a fiercely libertarian school and it was, it was actually one of the first schools in the country to

accept women and minorities as well. Really? Yeah. Does it still not accept zero? Zero. Because I had thought about leaving the academy and trying to go to ROTC or some other commissioning source. And they said, that's great, but you have to go to the ROTC training at Michigan State or somewhere else. But it's not here because it's federal money. Okay. So, but while I was at Hillsdale, I joined the fire department probably within two months

of being there. And that was a, I would say I learn more about leadership and the fire department than in a very artificial lab at the academy, right? Because at the academy, they have the upper class, right? Some classmen that's one or two years ahead of you trying to teach your leadership. And what is a, what is a sophomore or a junior

or a senior in college done to warrant them teaching leadership, right? There's not a lot of Mustang, former listed kids that are going to the academy. It's college kids. And I would compare that to the fire department where earning the trust of the butcher, the carpenter, or the professional fireman that we're on the squad to perform well enough to go inside of a burning building, right? Because Hillsdale County is not a super affluent county, so there was quite a few structure fires. You know, I've got to do a lot

of cool things in my life, but driving a fire truck to a fire lights in siren is still up there on the definitely the top five list but I did that and I Got I dove with the county sheriff's department to embody recoveries Because people would go out in the ice and the lakes during the wintertime running motorcycles and And snowbeams and evidently at least one a weekend somebody was going through the ice and you have to go recover the sled and sometimes have to recover a body. How many bodies do you think you've recovered? Three bodies and many sleds.

Wow. Did that affect you? Do you think? It made me pretty cautious. Yeah. But I was cheap in college because these guys were diving in dry suits. I was diving a wet suit. And it was, it was epically cold until I got smart enough

when I took some milk jugs in a cooler that I would fill with hot water. So I'd pour water in the suit first. So you don't have that first 30 seconds of massive cold as the wet seat becomes wet. Nice. Your dad seemed like he was a great leader as well. And so since we're on the topic of leadership,

the Academy moving into the fire department and learning a lot of leadership lessons, there seems like your dad was a very generous guy that took care of his people, gave back to the community to that carry over to you. Yeah, you know what? It was described to my dad at his funeral that he was a rising tide to lift it all boats. He really believed in community and making the community a spectacular place that people

would want to live in. They did a great carage share program where the company made money if the employees wanted to chip in and pick 10 charities to support the company would match it all. I ended up giving a big chunk of the company to the employees. And you know, he said, and I've really taken this on board, that one of the greatest things you can do for somebody is to give them a great job, where they feel valued, empowered,

and they're happy, they're proud to go home to their families at night. And he told the story, you know, there was one of the very early employees was a guy who was, I guess he was partially mentally disabled, right? But the guy was, he was having a hard time sweeping the floors. And the guy would get overwhelmed, he'd want to quit, and my dad said, nope, you can do it, come on, stay at it, stay at it, stay at it. And after 30 years, and he grew in the janitorial division of the business

because of the employee stock, because of when he started, the guy retired as a multi-millionaire. Wow. And it was a great analogy to how empowering giving somebody a great job is. That's incredible. And employing them at their best level. Well, skipping forward just a little bit

and then we'll come back. When you, when Blackwater was up and going, I know a lot, a lot of those guys were extremely proud to be a part of that outfit. And so I definitely see they're carried over. Did you realize that? How proud a lot of those guys were to work under that umbrella? I was hoping that much of what I had seen before was replicated in the best sense of the word.

And we were, you know, I had intended to go farther. I mean, you know, with, I would intended to go farther. I mean, you know, with the, whether it's a Karen Chair Program for our employees picking local charities that they cared about, and we matched it, and we wanted to make our whole area where we lived much, much better. So, yeah, and it's, well, I'm sure we'll get to it later,

but how the company was treated and the political attack on it is, I wouldn't say it was fair, but it is what it is. And for whatever nonsense I had to put up with and have it the business smashed, it pales into comparison to the guys that lost their lives or lost their liberty for a period of years because of the politics. But their liberty for a period of years because of the politics. But good guys have been dying wrongly in wars for as long as people can pick up sticks and throw them at each other, I guess. Yeah, very true.

So back to college, you graduate? Ah, no, so I'm in college. I go, I go to intern at the White House before Monica Lewinsky makes it popular, right? It's for George Bush senior and I'm there for about six months and the guy I'm working for gets fired. So I'm kind of also at a dead end. So I end up going to work for a Congressman, Dana Warbacher, who had been an original speech writer for Reagan. And I met some great people through that process.

And I took two significant trips as an intern. In fact, well, they tried to hire me as the staffer because his foreign policy guy had been mobilized to go to the Gulf War. A guy became a dear friend Paul Barons but my dad said don't take the job don't accept a dollar because it'll put you in Washington DC's tax bracket and you do not want to pay taxes there so I didn't do that. But I took two trips. I went to Croatia. Well actually it was to Yugoslavia in March of 91 before the war started and Twerd all through the areas because there had already been some fighting between Kroat and Serbian forces and Slovenian forces and

Figured that there was going to be a war there and then I went to Data Warbocker the Congresswoman is going to do a An expose on communist atrocities during the, when the San Anistas took over in the early 80s. And so he sent me and another intern down to Nicaragua to meet a contact there. It was the first time I ever had a shake surveillance. Because the San Anistas were still in charge

of the police and the military there, even though the government had been in the hands of VLET to Chamorro. But we have to go shake surveillance or often four o'clock in the morning and takes us out to this field and then digging away and sure enough, it's a mass grave. Shattered skulls, arms and legs tied at the waist are at the wrists and it was a very sobering moment. A great reminder of how bad things can get quickly. And a week later, I got married in Alexandria, Virginia to a girl I'd met a couple years

before to Joan. And we went on a, that was a great thing about my parents is they really encouraged travel to go see and explore and to do. And so we went a tour called the Baltic Liberation Tour, which was to Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland. We started in Poland and took a train through those areas which was still part of the Soviet Union and you could see it was coming apart and I remember as we were leaving you have to put your luggage we're flying so the whole tour is leaving and we're leaving from

Tallinn Estonia to fly to Finland and one of the one of the guys in our group put his luggage on the scanner, and you could see this bag go through it. It looks like there's a complete manhole cover inside of his bag. And this Soviet border guard opens the suitcase and he says, this is very big problem. It was an entire bronze bust of Lenin that had been yanked off a building that our friend had bought on the street and was taking out of the country. Oh, and our buddy said, well, how much to make the problem go away?

50 dollars. Done. I thought, you know what, if they're letting the bust of Lenin go off of a government building for 50 bucks, this place is not gonna last long. And sure enough, four months later, the Soviet Union collapsed.

Wow. So that was, yeah, that was April that that happened. And by August, there was the tanks in the front of the parliament there with Yeltsin. And so the Union was done. Damn, so you just missed it. Yeah. Wow.

So, and then back to Hillsdale, for that last year, I applied to OCS and I got in and yeah and off to the seal teams. I finished my last college exam, didn't even go to graduation and reported OCS in Newport, did that for four months. Summer in Newport is pretty nice. and reported OCS in Newport, did that for four months. Summer in Newport is pretty nice. And then off to Buds. So. How was Buds for you? It was good.

I liked it. You liked it. It was hard, certainly. But I went through married, and my wife was a fantastic cook. And I'd say the only hardest part of it was obviously sleep deprivation, Because my wife got blessed, she wanted to have a normal social schedule. And she'd been teaching at the local Catholic school

and she'd have the nuns over all the time. So we'd have nuns in her house for dinner and they'd stayed till 10 o'clock at night and I was literally falling asleep in my food. You know how tired you were going through buds. So between shining shoes and sharpening knives and polishing your CO2 cartridges and all that stuff you gotta do, it was good.

Did you make it through all at once? Did you get rolled? I made it through, well yes, first phase, no problem, second phase, no problem, third phase. I fell off the top of the slide for life. And the two guys previous to me, that had fallen, one broke his back, one broke his ankle, and I landed on my hip, and they immediately hospitalized me for two days, convinced I'd broken something. They finally let me out on a Friday. I wasn't walking very well, but I found an osteopath in San Diego, and sure enough he

lined up my legs and one leg was about three inches shorter. And he put me in some weird position and snapped the whole thing back into place. And they still tried to roll me back, but at that point I'd passed every run, every swim, everything else to go to San Clemente. And so they let me go and I finished on time. Nice. It was good. And then where did you go? Well back then they had sealed tactical training so I went to the East Coast, went to Airborne first and then reported a seal teammate, got my trident there. We did a short deployment

for the Haiti invasion in 94. I came back and as an officer, I got to go to sniper school. Oh, really? Which was fantastic. That's where. Yeah. I'd say dollar for dollar, it was good money spent by the SEAL teams because when I later got out, I really wanted a place to go shooting long guns at long ranges. It was one of the reasons I wanted to build blackwater. So, but so short deployment and then long deployment to on a carrier, to the med, to the Middle East, to Bosnia. And well before that deployment my father passed away unexpectedly. And and so then then the pull of trying to help my mom,

because he had a large family business, and there was no plan about what to do next. Or there was, you know, I can show you there's certainly some indecision about what the family should do next. And then when I came back from that deployment, my wife was pregnant with her second, and she was diagnosed with breast cancer at 29.

Wow. Which is a, you know, not a experience I recommend. Yeah. So, yeah, that's a lot to deal with it in a short amount of time. Yeah, I got to, I got to really bad case of hives for a few days. It was, the stress was peaking pretty hard. Yeah.

When in your book you talk about a jet showing up and you had kind of concealed, I'd manage to keep the success of my father pretty much a secret. And I'd say the only nice thing I had was I had a suburban, right? And so guys, like that vehicle, but I don't have a sports car, or anything like that. But yeah, I remember we had been training out in Fallon, doing CSAR and pilot rescue stuff. And also the air to ground strike,

air to ground work for the, the strike aircraft and the carrier. And if we got, I think we were done training on Thursday and the nail of aircraft wasn't coming until Monday. So I asked my boss, hey, you know, my mom wants me to come back for the weekend. There's a bunch of family stuff after my dad died, because this was just like three weeks after he died. He goes, yeah, sure, no problem. We'll see you back there.

And a couple of guys in my betune drove me to this little airport. And I was like, okay guys, thanks. I got it from here. No, no, it's okay, Mr. P. We'll help you anywhere there bags. And they walk and there's one of the pilots with this uniform on, with a tail number 131 EP,

which are my dad's initials, but also my initials. And then they kind of scratch their heads and I got a lot of questions the next week after that. Oh, bad. Yeah. Were you concerned that they cat was out of the bag at that point? No, not really. I mean, look, they knew who I was.

They knew I was the same guy, whether I could retire then or not. They didn't, they didn't matter to them. I didn't let it matter to them. Okay. So your dad died and then how much time was it in between your wife being diagnosed with breath, with breast cancer? He died in March of 90, of 95 and a year, she was diagnosed with breast, less than a year later. And how long after that did you get out of the seal teams?

I got out six months later. Six months later. Because that actually, I already got orders to my next, are, yeah, I got my assigned to the next baton, my OIC, baton, and yeah, I had to undo all that to get out and sort of out the family business. When the doctors have mentioned to your wife that they needed to interrupt the pregnancy, and she didn't want any part of that. It sounded like. Right, that was with our third child. And because she'd had all kinds of treatment, but they were really,

the doctors were really adamant that she'd not get pregnant again. And they said, you need an interruptus pregnancy. And she said, well, when would I resume it? And yeah, that was never a question. And my wife was, was resolute on that. So, how did you feel about that? Were you 100% behind her?

Yeah, I supported that. Absolutely. Not, not all friends and family did, but on the life issue, my wife was absolutely resolute. She's a beautiful person. That sounds like it. It really does. wife has breast cancer, new baby.

You're out of the sealed teams. The idea of black water. Yeah, you know, in my experience in working up for those deployments We moved around a lot and I so I thought training training was very fragmented. You're going to Tennessee, Nevada, West Virginia, Virginia bounce on all over the place Puerto Rico and I thought a lot about We're seeing what the SEAL teams a private facility in Tennessee mid-South, right? Where the SEAL teams, a private facility in Tennessee, mid-South, right, where the SEAL teams used to go, maybe they still do.

I thought, and someone has to do that on an industrial scale. And I was in an unusual position to do that, right? I mean, so in the late 90s, you have this peace dividend and defense cuts, and they're closing a major base per week across the country, right? Whether it's an Army Navy Air, Air Force, Marine Base, there was bases closing and ranges closing and all the rest. So this idea of building a private facility was counterintuitive to most.

Like every smart financial advisor I ever said, said, that's a terrible idea. But build it and they will come. I didn't know anything about development, land development, anything about government contracting, or really anything about business. But a new, I had a pretty good idea that there was a demand, and that the teams needed something like that.

And you go, kind of go back to the well that you know, of the people you trust, right? So I hired the two training officers from Seal Team 8, Ken Vieira, and Jim Seralski. Jim came later because he wanted to go be a cop after you retired. But Ken and a guy named Al Clark, and we got Jim D. Hart, who had been the facilities guy at DevGroup. I mean, you know, unknown secret is that our first shoot house was built by all the dev group maintenance guys who came out on weekends with pizza and beer, and they welded

up one of the largest and still most effective shoot houses in the country. So it was, you know, finding land, I wanted to have it within an hour drive of Norfolk to make it easy for people training or living in Norfolk to come and train and do what they have to do and still make it home in time for their dinner with their families. And I had to go through all kinds of ass pain with the two counties because one county rejected us, the other county accepted us, Camden accepted us, and so went through all the, the massinations of that, and then built it. And actually, our first customer was from the West Coast, a West Coast helipadue

that came to Blackwater and just kind of ground along for the first few years. And it was really our target business that saved the business early on, because we had very destructive customers who destroyed everything that we'd ever bought on the outside. And Jim D. Hart and a very practical down to earth, I would say solid state mentality built these steel targets which were indestructible. And other customers that came loved him. And so I remember at the end of the fiscal year, one night on September 30 at 11.55 pm, the FACS machine started and out came a, in order from the FBI, oddly enough,

to equip like 15 field offices with our target systems. And that really kept the lights on at Blackwater for the year, because the training business wasn't strong enough to pay the bills so training and targets kept it going together and then when Columbine happened we ended up building a big mock-up of a fighting city we built it out as a high school and we called it was called are you ready high school because you know the think

about Columbine is you had all these police departments Columbine was a was a Active shooter incident early in the 90s before Unfortunately it became a more commonplace event We did all these deploy all these departments all this nice gear standing around outside and Nobody going in to solve the immediate threat. And so I guess our contribution in our own way was to train tens of thousands of SWAT officers from a surround to negotiate mentality to a whoever's there, take a stack of two men or four men or however many you could put together to go move to the sound of the guns and put that fire out. And that was, it was the first big volume program

we did. Our first classified program was for the Coast Guard, oddly enough, teaching him how to shoot drug boat motors out of a helicopter with a 50-cal, right? Because he had all kinds of drug boats and the helicopters in her dictum and they'd say stop and they'd say, yeah, fuck off, right? And then we keep going and keep going. And so we taught the Coast Guard how to shoot each of those motors out with a 50-cal. So that by the time they are arrested, the drug runners were very happy to be arrested and rescued.

And then after in October of 2000, the USS Cole was blown up, And then after in October of 2000, the USS Coles blown up, you know, a billion dollar warship that the Navy had optimized to fight at 100 miles, not at 100 meters, and it had gotten, the Navy had gotten so risk averse that they're using unloaded weapons, sorry, that they were training only with laser simulators and boot camp anymore, because guns were not safe. And the sailors that were guarding the ship that day in Yemen, were holding unloaded weapons

that they hardly were fired before. And so the Navy came to us in a hurry after that and said, please put together a curriculum, a way for us to train 100,000 sailors, how to protect their ships, and to retake it if there's an incident. So we did that and that was our first government contract. How long from breaking ground to first government contract? How long did that take?

Well, when I say any, I mean, look, the first seal teams that would come would be a patoon here and a patoon there or maybe an a team or a marine patoon or a SWAT team, and they would pay with a credit card. So that'd be a $25 to maybe a $50,000 purchase. We broke ground in May of 97, but six months after I got out of the Navy. And our first customer was in early 98. And obviously the Navy came about three years later. So yeah, it was lean, find a way to survive for the first two or three years.

You know, you have to find a way to become indispensable to your customer. For somebody that's claims to not know anything about business, it seemed very strategic. The location, close to the seal teams on the East Coast, close to Washington, D.C., close to Quantico. At the, so when my father died, we sold off the big automotive business.

And that had gotten the attention for decades. The original business he started made die cast machines, which is a big machine that squeezes a mold and you shoot in, you inject in at high pressure aluminum or magnesium and you make a rim for a car or an engine block or a transmission casing or a gas grill. So he made the machines that did that. And that business had not gotten a lot of love and attention. It was just kind of lumping along. And so I bought up a bunch of the shares from my family and we took that through a lean transformation. And I read two books. One was called The Machine that changed the

world, which is about the Toyota production system, and the other one was the goal by Ellie Goldrat. I still remember them. And there are two things about how do you make a manufacturing operation better, more efficient, and make it run with great precision. And so we're focused on taking out cost and buying smarter and engineering out dumb stuff that had just kind of always been accepted, and that business had the best year ever in 2000 and we sold it. And so parallel to kind of building black water, I'm doing, I'm trying to help a manufacturing business

get better. And so, and I got to think about black water. It was a training facility. But then as you think, okay, how do you grow beyond that? How do you serve the customer more? And I thought, what does a military do, right? It recruits, it vets, it equips, it trains, deploys and supports people

to do a difficult job in a difficult place. So laying out black water, I said, ah, especially when we got our first job, our first overseas job was a security job, which was for the agency after 9-11. Your first contract was with the agency? Yeah. First overseas job. First time that we deployed anybody anywhere. And early in those days, the agency's director, the director detail had been customers. They came

because they liked, we were kind of an all-in-one spot, shoot houses and ranges and space and privacy. And so they came and so there's again a Busy Cron guard who'd been a one dollar a year advisor to the director and then he became the executive director because Busy in himself had a fantastic life career. All American at Princeton, Marine, CAA case officer, started Alex Brown in the mailroom, and Rose had become the CEO and had been a knock for the agency his last few years. And the right kind of guy you want near or at the helm of the CIA.

And so he'd been helping tenant and because, well, this ties back to who I was working for when I was interning in Congress, right? Dana Warbacher, knew all the Afghan opposition guys, the Northern Alliance, the warlords in the North. And he got me to sponsor a peace conference already in sweet and Switzerland in 1998. Right? So we were trying to get the king then Zahir Shah to return to Afghanistan to have a peace conference. This is law in three years before 911. Okay, to have a big conference called the lawyer year ago.

The king was too comfortable, sadly, in Rome, and we couldn't pull it off, but it would have been an amazing, an amazing turn of events if we could have prevented 9-11 by returning some kind of normalcy to Afghanistan. But anyway, I was in contact with Attenour and Mohawkek and Masoud and Dostum and those kind of people. In fact, Dana Warbacher had a meeting with Kandi Rice, the National Security advisor, the morning of 9-11, warning saying, hey, they just killed Masood, Al-Qaeda did, something bad is going to happen. Obviously, the meeting was cancelled because the bad thing happened. bad is going to happen. Obviously the meeting was canceled because the bad thing happened. But between having met Busy from his time coming to Blackwater and he asked Gary Jackson, the President of Blackwater, who owns this place? How did this get here? He said, we should

meet Eric. So I had lunch with Busy a few times early in those days. And I became a great friend and mentor. But then when 9-11 happened, I said, Busy, anything you need, anything the agency needs, if you need something to sweep a floor, I'm your man. Just, we wanna help. I think as any American wanted to help, right? And at the same time, the worldards are calling saying, hey, we want to help the USG, please connect us.

So I gave those numbers to Busy, and eventually, they, maybe they were in touch with them already, I don't know. But we had current cell phone numbers for all those guys and they're on the lines that wanted to kill Taliban and kill El Qaeda, which was a good thing to do at that point. Yeah. So, and then I got a call in about late March or April. I'll never forget it because I was just sitting down

and dinner with a family and a weird number, a blocked, a weird blocked number rang through of my phone and I answered it, raise your sitting down to dinner, which I normally wouldn't do. But it was a good call. I took and he said, Hey, can you find a bunch of guys like yourself? I said, absolutely.

He said, be in my office tomorrow at 9 a.m. And that's what he had just come back from, from a tour of all the agency facilities in Afghanistan. And he, um, they they need security, right? Because the US military wouldn't do it. They wanted to do it with 150 people and we did it with 18 in the first launch. And that's what started that whole process. How many other government contracts did you have?

We had obviously a lot of training stuff for various soft units and we were just starting that regular Navy training contract And the department you had wound up getting the department state. No, the department state didn't come for years later What about Katrina? Well, that was in 2005 So this is 2002. We're talking. Okay, so yeah, so the business really compounded in those years and the work we did for the agency in Afghanistan and then some other places pulled us to Iraq and

because of the work we did in Iraq as DOD was trying to send Paul Bremer or whoever they were going to do to try to the coalition provisional authority. They asked the agency who you run for security and that's how we got pulled in to protect Bremer with the first. That was really the only no bid contract that we had. I think it was the first six months was no bid. And we did that. And um, yeah, we just compounded and we, you know, I, there's another early book on business

I read on, there's, there's to be successful in business, right? Either have to be super focused on efficiency to drive out every bit of waste, you can be the low cost provider. Or you have to be the next, you have to have the next product that everybody wants to buy, right? So I guess the efficiency model would be Walmart or the product innovation would be the Apple model.

Or there's the customer intimacy model, right, where you so become part of your customer's process that they can't do without you. Like UPS does with all their logistics and product returns and warranty. And I'd say we focused on one and three. Being hyper efficient, applying that Toyota automotive efficiency and discipline to what we did, recruiting, vetting, equipping, training, deploying, and then also serving

our customers so well. Right? If the contract said do this, well, do this, right? Perform above and beyond. Don't go back to your lawyer for every variation just sort of the customer. And we really prefer doing firm fixed price contracts versus cost plus, right? All the typical beltway crowd likes to do cost plus because it actually incentivizes them to spin the meter, to make it more expensive because they get to add their fee on top of it. That's why the United States spends more money than the next 17 countries combined.

It's terrible, right? I prefer to run the business and every chance we had, we do a firm-fixed price, and then the discipline and the risk is on us. Whether it's providing an aircraft or whatever, and well, aside from the politics, the operators, the people we serve in the field were damn happy with this. Yeah.

How fast was it growing at this point? When should picked up the CIA contract? Our revenue, I remember, went from, well, the first year's revenue was 400,000. Second year was 800. And then a million two, and then a million six. And then it went to 12 million, 35, 160, 400.

I mean, so there was a few years, it just, it really rocked, rocketed. And so that's a, that kind of growth also causes enormous stress to an organization, right? There's cash management, there's people, there's all the rest, but we had a, we'd built a pretty good engine, which could process, right? And so, again, going back to the well that you know, I hired more guys that I went to Buds with. Bill Matthews, Chris Burgess, Jeff Gibson, guys I had served in the teams with,

and because there was a known quantity, and in those cases, they'd been off to law school, they got an MBAs and worked in other reports of corporate America. So they kind of know what that expectation was and they brought that, they brought a soft mentality to a corporation and that was the merge and we had a very, very capable organization. I would put our management team up against any management team in the country. We could punch way above our weight. At the height, at the height of black water, there's rumors that you had more spec operators

under the black water umbrella than the United States military had at active beauty. Is there any truth? No, we have probably more in our database, meaning we could have deployed them, but no, I mean, no, look, the SF command has 10 or 20,000 green braze. We are, you know, in the range of range of minutes, a few thousand.

So we didn't exceed, no, we didn't exceed that number by any means, but we had a pretty capable, potent, vertically integrated process that we could recruit, we could vet, we could train, we could equip, and the only acquisition that we actually made as a company was an air operation, and that happened in 2003 with Richard Pair, Tim Childrenry, and the guys from presidential airways, and they had, it was sick, they had a team of six and two least causes right and a caustitude 12 is like a little shrunk c 130 and we bought them we bought the

business and it was a fantastic fit and they came from the night stockers right they came from a TF 160 Army Special Aviation Army Special Operations Aviation mentality. And so their culture fit perfectly with ours and a way we went. And those guys carried right over. Best pilots in the world. And we, and I built them their own hanger. I built them their own runway on the compound.

Well, yes, I built them a proper runway because I'd been, remember I'd been a pilot since I was a little kid and I was making that weekly commute from Northern Virginia down to the Blackwater compound which was 242 miles each way and so I bought a little bush plane early on and I would fly that down. So we ended up scraping off a few of the some of the berm, the last part of the KD range. And so that was the original Blackwater runway, it was the back half of the KD range. And then we built a proper concrete one. but I even land on the Katie range at night and use an old missionary or a bush trick with made my own vassie, right, a vertical approach

slope indicator to know Todd line up and get on the right glide slope and land fully blacked out. I just have Tony, the facility manager sitting at the end of the runway with the brake lights on so I know where the end of the runway was. Nice, nice. But then, so yes, so I had, I guess, the first black water aircraft with that, but then when Richard and the boys came on board, it was a proper part 135, part 145 operation and it grew to 73 aircraft that we owned and operated in all the garden spots. So ranging from a light strike aircraft like a super de conno all the way to a 767. So how were the how hard was it to recruit guys to get in there and I mean Because it was growing so fast and I was in the seal teams when I believe black water was at its prime

2005 2006 yeah Frange your busy years and the rumors that really rumors, but the word going around the team was, you know, a lot of guys were still going to U-Com, a lot of guys weren't doing exactly what they joined the SEAL teams do or SF units to do. And word got around that, hey, you're going to go over there, you're probably gonna see some action. You're gonna get paid three or four times, what you're getting paid here. And so it seemed like, and I had a lot of friends that got out and jumped. They left the SEAL teams just to go to work for you. They, there was a lot of guys that left, but when they do the analysis, there was not a higher departure rate, the normal,

but instead of guys going off to school or going off to another job, yes, they came to work for companies like us. But at the same time, right, the Navy came to us and said, because we were already doing training on their firearms and tactics side, but they said, how are you able to recruit

the right people to do this job? I said, well, why do people rob banks? It's where the money is, right? So if you want to find the right next seal, EOD, diver, boat crewman, whatever, go to the places that those are more likely to be. And so we actually put together a mentor program to take former seals that looked the part to go to the Bud Light Trathlon series or like the Wyoming state wrestling championships. Like the Wyoming Montana wrestler at the state level were the most likely to make it through buds in the first pass, statistically. Right? They kind of an early attempt at big data, finding the right candidates. And so by doing that, we're able to fill the pipeline with a lot of qualified candidates to make it through and to increase the throughput of buds without changing the standards.

You were a part of that. We built that program. Wow. I had no idea. Yeah. That was a black water contract with our mentors, a little of the country, and there's still a version of that still functioning. Interesting. Yeah. So, but again, applying, we're a private company, we had a contract, we had to put so many people with so many qualifications in that job. we had a contract, we had to put so many people with so many qualifications in that job.

So we had to offer competitive pay. We couldn't waste their time. We couldn't, we can't press gang them, right? We can't stop loss them. So it's truly a volunteer program. And so you have to take care of them and respect them and, you know, and so we wanted guys that would work hard for us and they want to go see their families and so we wouldn't belabor the point of for the time they leave the field to their home again and they and they do it in in digestible enough chunks right as you know you deployed 60 days 90 days but then you know you leave Baghdad and you're back in the arms of your wife within a day and a half. Yeah. There's a misconception about our pay versus what active duty was getting paid. If you compare apples to apples of what total compensation was,

yes, our apparent cash compensation was much higher, but when you look at all the other allowances, housing allowances, the exchange, the insurance, all the other stuff, our pay was comparable, but not higher to what an actor do you see it would be getting. But it's just the apparent upfront cash was much more visible. Yeah, it definitely, definitely was. How long was it before you started seeing all these other competitors pop up like triple canopy, NVM, DineCore, were you were first?

No, DineCore was kind of the established State Department contractor. They'd been doing all that service stuff to, to that kind of that installed customer base. But as the Afghan issue flared and then Iraq flared, it so outstripped their ability to grow and I would characterize Dynchor as a very typical beltway run company and quite bureaucratic and quite perfect for the State Department. Directorized Dynchor as a very typical beltway run company and

Quite bureaucratic and quite perfect for the State Department and when the I would say very urgent and very compelling Needs for more security, right because it was on it was dangerous times in Baghdad when all that you know when they started asking for it I mean we we were contacted originally by the DOD after the senior UN diplomat in Baghdad had been blown up the summer of 2003, right? They blew them up with a truck bomb inside of a concrete mixture. It was like a 2,000 pounder. Wow. And so all the people in Washington said, okay, it's real now. And I remember we had immediately had two people that went out with Bremmer. And his original detail was from some National Guard Unit.

And they just hadn't really had the training or the equipment or the the wherewithal to accomplish that mission And the secret service came out Because they thought they were going to sign the secret service to do that mission And they have no way are they you know the secret service mentality is they can shut down Everything around their protectee and create a huge bubble And just lock down entire roads entire routes and they just own it all. You can't really do that in an active war zone and so you have to have a bubble that could move and flex and

and go with it. So between the ground element and the aviation element they no no federal agency want to touch it. And so the State Department turned us and we did it. So one of the one of the fascinating things about you that that I find is you don't mind getting your hands dirty. And so when the when the CIA contract was starting up, you were out there on the ground running operations, correct? Yeah, it was one of the first 18. Yeah. And do you want to talk a little bit about that,

what that was like being, it's your company, you're on the ground running missions and... I look, it was a great honor that they turned to us because it was a very important mission, right? Because the CIA is the ones who made that victory possible for the United States, right? And I mean, digress a minute and say, and this goes in keeping with what I've been saying for the last 10 years, at least. After 9-11, while the Pentagon was still smoldering, right? Bush goes to meet with his National Security

Cabinet at Camp David. And the Pentagon, you know whatering, right? Bush goes to meet with his National Security Cabinet at Camp David. And the Pentagon, you know what their best option was to go to Afghanistan? They want to do bombs, missiles, in a range of raid. And they wanted to wait six months until the following April and do a conventional mechanized invasion of Afghanistan via Pakistan. That is what the United States military came with the most expensive military on the planet. It was the agency, it was Kofra Black and his team. Kofra was the head of the Conor Terrorism Center and because of his experience doing unconventional warfare, hybrid warfare,

against Soviet targets in Libya and Chad and Angola and the DRC in the 80s, he said, Mr. President, give us the authorities and a billion dollars and in three weeks the flies to be walking in the eyeballs of our enemies. So US and obviously Bush made the right decision, said, okay, we're doing that. That's why we had such a lightning victory in Afghanistan. There was a hundred soft guys and agency guys, let off, carnivores let off leash, backed by air power, and they smashed the hell out of the Taliban and the Taliban and Okita were truly running for their lives. And that worked for six, eight months until Bogrum became a saluting zone and you had all the conventional officers show up.

Okay, no, the no beard policy starts, camis goes into effect. We repeated that same failure for 19 and a half years. If they'd kept it small, if Bush had the discipline and the foresight to say, no Pentagon, you don't get to go play now, leave this to that. We're not doing nation building, but we will play Wacomol severely. The Afghans would have understood that, and it would be vastly better there today than be- It is truly a terrorist sanctuary. Again, you have the Hakanis that have high bounty terrorists now running the Afghan government.

Is the interior minister? Did you enjoy running black water? Is the CEO more or running operations under the CIA contract? Both. Both? Sure, it was a macro and a micro. How were you doing that simultaneously? The management team of Black Water was spectacular, right? So I might be the the guy that put the money up that made Blackwater possible, but it was Gary Jackson and Danielle Morrison and Bill Matthews and Chris Burgess and Jeff Gibson and all that team that made it run.

And there's 100 other names I should list, but they ran the business. And there was a reason, right, the normal beltway thing would be, on first of all, nobody had invested in a training facility, right? Like the dime cores, everybody would have a security contract for the government. And they try to rent this range over here or this track. And they have to send medical over here and all the rest. And so in keeping what I was talking about with a lean progression, recruit vet, equip trained deploy, black order was designed to be a machine with everything in house literally within a walking distance.

And so hopefully you experienced that when you recruited the training, the equipment, the medical, all was pretty damn close to each other. Right? So we didn't lose days or weeks moving people through that process. And so that management team was able to efficiently produce a product, meaning a trained and equipped guy to go do something, or an aircraft that could do XYZ job, or a construction crew did do something, they did that in a concise, organized

discipline way. Vertically integrated. It's just, I still don't, I just don't understand how, I mean, because those are some intricate operations that we're doing out there. And we recruited from people that had done intricate operations. I remember I flew over the first, I flew over on the one time the USG provided airlift for us to send aircraft to Iraq was the first time.

And so we got our birds, our little birds that were gonna go do the protection for then-bremmer. We loaded them in Charleston, South Carolina and flew over up in the top deck of the C5 with the guys. And we land at like two o'clock in the morning after the blacked out approach into Baghdad and the guys are uploading the stuff. And a bunch of them were TFO and 60 veterans,

many of whom had been at Black Hawk Down just 10 years before in their career. And they said, Mr. P, thanks so much for giving us the opportunity to do this again. This is what we're good at. Wow. And that was the great thing about starting running whatever black water is given people that were really good, right? The Michael Jordan's of their skill set, giving them a chance to do that again. So they get to work with people they like to work with. They're paid well

for their job and the risks that they take. They're given the right equipment in a no bullshit environment. That's, that was my goal of PW. It worked. At the high point, the absolute peak of black water, how many contracts did you have and what agencies were they with? I don't know about the total contracts number, but it was everything from, well, we'll go by buckets of stuff. Train and equip advisory work for Afghan Army, Iraqi security forces in a host of other friendly partner nations around the world so and this train advisory everything from like bodyguard training to To sniper to every kind of law enforcement or military special operations unit up to including company and battalion size infantry operations, even artillery. On the air side, we did that as well,

like soft aviation capacity building. So teaching, teaching partnerships to fly on night vision goggles and do, you know, night ship boarding or night insert of a team by goggles or by fast drill. Obviously security is what the company got known for and recognized for and that was a big driver of revenue. Sadly a big driver of problems. One of my biggest regrets is ever going to work for the State Department, because I just didn't think they appreciated the work that we did for them. And so if I had said no, the company would still be going and flourishing and carrying on. And maybe the State Department is more, maybe Dynchor is a better vendor for them.

If I can understand that. So at peak, we probably had 3500, 3500 people deployed. People deployed. 300035, that's between Iraq, Afghanistan, aviation, and this also includes we had for Hurricane Katrina, we had about 700 guys deployed for about a year. What were you guys doing down there? So we never had any plan ever to be in the domestic security business to do anything like that inside of America. But I remember I was actually doing a surveillance exercise

for the other team I was doing, right? The last chapter in my book, and I had the radio on, I was talking about, well, and I'd been in South Florida when Hurricane Katrina went over South Florida. So I'd still been there, and then up the hurricane still rolled, and it smacked the, you know, New Orleans area. And we were just taking delivery of a Puma,

a big helicopter, a little bit bigger than a black hawk. And I remember calling our air boss, Richard Pear, I said, hey, put the air crew to bed, reset their crew rest, and as soon as they're in the morning, fly to New Orleans. It was just figured out. And sure enough, they started flying, and one of our management staff had been in a Harvard course, a Harvard executive course, with some senior guy from the Coast Guard. So he literally reached across the aisle of his classroom and said, hey, we got a helicopter,

we can help you guys out in New Orleans, Roger. So November 505, our helicopter became Coast Guard 505 by the time they made it to New Orleans and they have act 128 people and again, it was a great case of Of putting the right people with the right attitude With an objective right? It was it was a it was objective-based leadership. Our goal is to go help and make good things happen and so they did and but then after they were working for a few days, all the Coast Guard provided us was fuel. We sent that gratis. It moved a bunch of people, our cusses were flying a bunch of stuff down from from Wojok and then the private sector started calling right Wal-Mart,

Bell South, insurance companies because there had been a total breakdown of of long order and chaos and so we ended up surging 145 guys from 36 from six states away. We did it in about 36 hours. We beat the Louisiana National Guard into the French quarter. Incredible. Our guys arrived and found bodies in the streets, not from the storm, but from violence from looting. And so, yes, our guys went armed and, you know, full of body armor because they were even shooting at aircraft. But within a couple days, the plates came off and it was just down to side arms. But then, Feeble. So you were able to get back to law and order within a few days of just being down there

with 145 guys. Well, yeah. So we weren't there to secure specific objectives, like Walmart called, because I think they had like five or eight stores looted, picked clean, and they had a central distribution facility was gonna be next. And so in that case, we dropped like a commando team, meaning they had,

we dropped them off with food, water, satcom, and rules of engagement, right? And a copy of our quickly licensed, Louisiana private security and investigations firm, right? So we went there with the right licenses and they go in there, I just sat there and prevented in the looters, right? Because looting only happens when people

knock on the door and nothing happens and you call 911 and nothing happens, and they go. So then FEMA came to us, alright, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which was tasked to stabilize this whole debacle. And they, because they had contacted the Federal Protective Service, which is this Federal Police Force as part of DHS. And they were supposed to send down hundreds and hundreds of police officers, Federal police officers, to secure all these areas. And their employee union said, no,

the conditions were too rough and too unsafe, they wouldn't go. So FEMA asked if we could do it. And we said, okay, sure, right? Because their default answer was, yes, and we're gonna figure it out how to make something happen. And so yes, but then that, you know, the number became 700 quickly, but we had to provide all the life support, all the logistic support. And I'm so proud yet again of the team that just figured this out because at that point between Iraq and Afghanistan

every kind of military tent was on back order for years. So what did they do? They went and bought circus tents and they put them up in various parking lots. Jim D. Hart and his crew of maintenance guys took car trailers and put in shower and sanitation facilities inside that with water treatment and we just figured it out how to support guys in the field. And they ended up buying an RV and put a V-Sat and Tena satellite system on the top of it. So that became the mobile pay wagon in office which could visit all these sites. And it was it it was not the perfect solution, but it was a dam, a dam bit better than nothing. Wow.

How, and that, all that was stood up, how fast? Days. And, and we had, and you know what? We had no plans. Again, there was no prior staging organization to say, let's have a domestic response force ready for, no, nothing like that. Basically, for the first 145 guys, we can pull inventory off the warehouse

of what we would do to provide contractors with, you know, radio or a firearm or body armor or whatever it is. We just kind of cobbled it together. Incredible. How long were you guys down there? I think we were there for three years. Three years? Yeah, at least two, but it was it was far longer than than we ever thought.

Necessary. So we got cleaned up in a couple of days and then they kept it. They kept well. Yeah, because there was a lot of, I mean, it was, because there was a lot of, I mean, it was, sorry, refugee camps, morgue, cash distribution offices. There was a lot of things that needed security because it far outstripped local law enforcement's ability to handle it. So, did you, did Blackwater ever work

in that capacity anywhere else in the US? No. No, No. We had one, there was one other good story that came out of that evacuation because we were actually contacted by Bill Gates' office. Who had lost touch, right? I think like Melinda Gates' sister lived along the Gulf Coast.

And the phones were down, no SATCOM, no nothing. And so a former CIA associate of ours had been working at that office, and he called us and said, hey, could you send somebody to just go A, make contact and bring them supplies to see what's up. Check. So the guys loaded up an ATV with a trailer inside of

Acassa and they flew to an airfield which was actually closed right because of all the storm damage and I think they landed short on a damage runway or they land on a taxiway and off they go miles and miles away from their destination because it's as close as they could get. So they go overland, chain saws, cutting down trees as they go to this specific address, knock on the door, hey, we're from Blackwater, the gate's family sent us, here's a satcom, call them.

Dropped off generator, food, fuel, medicine, left, mission complete, off they go back in the casa back to Virginia, back to North Carolina. We ended up with a nice ATV out of that, but the gauge job paid for the ATV. Nice. But it was a good, it was an example of you give the right people with a clear mission, an objective based, right? Get to them, like that thing, you hopefully read in the military somewhere the message to Garcia, right?

When the US had to get a message to Garcia who was somewhere in the hills of Cuba, right? To organize some kind of resistance against the Spanish. They just sent a guy to say, your job is to get a message to your serious. Not to ask me 10 steps of what to do, get it there, make it happen. Blackwater was good at making it happen.

Yeah. Which is in this day and age of bureaucracy and the foreign policy establishment in Washington, they're not very good at making good things happen. Yeah. I got to be honest, it seems like the common denominator here, or maybe the model of black water should be efficiency.

Not even efficiency, but I would say a real desire to get a mission done. What is the mission? We'll find a way to make it work. One last question, then we'll take a quick break, but what you've built up to this point is just, it's undescribable. And I wanna know where your drive comes from because I do know back to your family

and the success of your dad, he said, you're not getting anything to your 30. You can't be a part of this until you're 30. You got through the SEAL teams, came home and or or it's some point my timeline might be a little off here, but that kind of went away after you became a SEAL. So you didn't have to do all this. What was the driving factor? It was a great, look, I'm a patriot. I love America. The US government, the US military needed our help and we were honored to help in any way we could

And working with the people was great with our people right and and it was You know, I would I like to think that Working with the BW crew was like working with the best elements of a soft unit so People not they're not thinking, you know, there's not at four o'clock, they're not looking for the door at the end of the day,

if it's, you know, seven to seven is a half day, right? Everybody wants to get the child done there. Yeah. I mean, everything was, it was competitive. It was, people liked to run hard. As a company, we didn't do golf outings. We didn't do that kind of team building stuff. We did 12 and 24 hour adventure races.

The whole management team. And I, we kind of picked those kind of races, not triathlons, because that's just an endurance exercise. But having to make decisions in an adventure race, where you have to navigate, and you have to make incomplete decisions based on incomplete information and live with the consequences

was very analogous to our life, into our business life. Fair enough. Yeah. All right, let's take a break. Get it up. I wanna tell you all about this badass company I just found called Bubs Naturals. Bubs Naturals is a tribute company to Navy SEAL, CIA contractor and former colleague

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All right, so we're back from the break and I want to go into some of the incidents that got major press and probably what led to the government vilifying you. And I'd like to start with March 31st, Fallujah. Okay. So that was March 31st, 2004. So that's about eight, nine months after the US originally invades Iraq. And we had, I'd actually been to that area just three weeks before it happened. And we had four guys that were just escorting some trucks to go move some food equipment. That's all it was. It was nothing more elaborate or exotic than that. And they had met with the supposed to be the reliable trusted Iraqis to give them guidance about where to go. And you know

these are, remember the areas of Fallujah and Ramadi had heavy fighting after that because they'd never really been pacified. They'd never really been cleaned out, right? The maneuver warfare lightning approach of the US invasion in 2003 bydpassed many of those spots of hot resistance and Fallujah and Ramadi were where a lot of it was effectively a Iraqi Republican guard retirement area, right? and Fallujah and Ramadi were where a lot of, it was effectively Iraqi Republican guard retirement area. Right, so there was a real hotbed of people that were not happy.

And the guys were basically headed into an ambush and they were shot up immediately and their bodies desecrated, you know, the terrible scenes of them being dragged to the streets and hung from the bridge. It was all done for the propaganda effect to try to terrorize the US presence in the country and I'll never forget it. Like I said, I'd been there. I knew some of those guys. Like, I'd been with Zobco every day for 10 days prior to that happening. And I actually went, and because I knew him, I immediately flew to do the notification for his family in Cleveland, Ohio that night. And Gary went and took care of one of the seal that was lost.

One of our aviators went and took our mic teag. It was personal for all of us. I never lost anyone under my command or authority when I was in the seal teams. This was the first for us as a company and and It was um, you know early in the Iraq days it was went from quite peaceful after the initial shock into The the insurgency kind of exploded March 31 are those guys are ambushed in flusia. Three days later our guys are ambushed on the road between Baghdad and the airport and at least two or three of

our guys are killed and one of them put on a literally a maybe cross-level performance, which saved them. And then by the 4th of April in Fallujah, it's already in the Jaff, right? You have 1,000 plus Shia militiamen attacking a coalition facility, and the initiated attack by taking a Colombian soldier, stuffing a grenade his mouth and pulling the pin. That's how they did that. Yeah. Okay. So it was on and we had eight. We were not supposed to be protecting the facility down in a jaff. We had eight guys there providing PSD support for the lead diplomat that was there.

providing PSD support for the lead diplomat that was there. And that's it. But between, and I'll never forget that phone call, I got it like two o'clock in the morning. And it was our air boss Richard Parr sent, hey boss, our guys are in it and they're surrounded and they're running out of ammo. And we'd like to send the little birds. I said, of course, send them. He says, but remember, we're not insured, right? Because three weeks before the, there was a DHL cargo jet that had been shut down by a missile flying out of Baghdad. And they're insurer, it was our insurer, who promptly told us, hey,

we're canceling your insurance policy. We were on a firm fixed price contract, so I couldn't just say, oh, by the way, I'm gonna add another million and a half dollars to our insurance policy, to our charge, and buy insurance? No, so they canceled it, so the aircraft were self-insured by me, if they were shot down,

I had to replace it within days to have it going again. So he used to call it a tell me to say, it's on us, it's on me. We're sending these aircraft. If it's okay with you, I said, absolutely. And so off they go. And again, the right people with the right experience and the right mission, the TF 160 guys had already taken it upon themselves to have a cache of heavy weapons ready to go staged right there next to the ramp. So that when the alarm bell went up, there was no drama.

They lit it at the birds, asked for volunteers, down go the three helicopters and evacuated a marine who had been shot through. They think the Marine Corps gave him a silver star and Ron Star is to put some other soldiers evacuated a Marine who had been shot through. I think the Marine Corps gave him a silver star and Ron Starrist who went to the other soldiers that day. And the, the ODOT didn't give any of our guys awards. We gave him awards, but that also kind of started our tradition of presenting awards to our guys that

were above and beyond the call of duty. I remember we we ended up coining a metal and it was an image of St. Michael the Archangel with a sword stepping on a demon and on the top of it just said Servium right. Servium is the Latin word for I will serve because our guys were ultimately volunteers. What was going through your head on March 31st, 2004, and when did you see that? I'd gotten phone calls that they were missing,

that we had a team that was not accounted for, and we're missing, and then when the video came in of a Mitsubishi Pajero on fire, then it was, yeah, we knew it was bad. It's a, that is the ultimate gut punch. It's awful. And then to fly to see his parents, remember I told his brother and sister-in-law first, and then his parents came to their house. And we had a connection with the US Marshal, so I had a Marshal come with me. And he just waited outside just so I guess the people knew,

it was an official thing, but yeah, just terrible. With those bodies ever recovered? Yes. Thanks God to the Marine Corps Good Moving into the incident which undoubtedly was the downturn of Blackwater 2007 Missour Square. Yep What's your take?

Well, look, the Iraq War was a maelstrom of conflicting forces, right? You had angry Sunnis, you had angry Shia, you had constant Iranian presence at the IRGCE and the Kudz forces, the Iranians special units, or very, very active in the country, stirring up hate and discontent to make it impossible or difficult for the U.S. to stay. And you know, for people that think it's all peace, love, and happiness and Baghdad at that time that this, that our guys just started shooting willy-nilly, unprovoked and all the rest. It had been a very dangerous week for us just in the seven days prior, right?

We had another convoy of guys that got ambushed and shot up on the Baghdad highway, another one that had been hit by an EFP, right? An EFP is an explosive form penetrator. It's a copper plate on front of a coffee can full of explosives. And when you initiate that, the explosive goes off at 22,000 feet per second, turns that copper plate into a slug of copper going 8,000 feet per second and board right through their armor vehicle. Unfortunately, it didn't kill any of our guys that time, but it sent them to the hospital.

We had a helicopter shot down just days before that, and then the day of Mr. Square, a car bomb goes off, where we had a team... It went off outside of the venue where he had a team protecting a US AID official and instead of hard pointing at that facility which they normally would all the Iraqis had run away so they decided to move and so you know in the in the chaos that follows Raven 23 one of the teams is called and I'm not gonna try to re-describe the the masterful description you did sitting down with those guys, but to suffice to say that traffic circles in Baghdad are like the trail intersections if

you're hunting deer, right? If you're a deer hunter or if you're an insurgent trying to hunt Americans, you hunt the traffic circles and so they go to block the traffic and some traffic doesn't stop and and shooting in tails. What I can tell you though is how badly the Iranians wanted the US out and how badly they wanted blackwater out of Iraq. In 2004 already early, the head of the Iraqi intelligence service came to me, a fantastic guy named Muhammad Shwani. It's another guy you should interview here, okay?

A true Iraqi patriot and a great warrior. And he, he said, he came with his agency handler and said the Iranians are setting up all kinds of direct action, cash offices, political influence operations. They're doing in Iraq what they did in Lebanon with Hezbollah to exert control. And we, the Iraqi government, we the Iraqi intelligence service want to stop it. So please put a program together to help us do that. And so a price of the whole thing out gave it to them. They loved it. The agency was going to fund it. And it was stopped by Kandir Rice and the NSC. No, the Iranians are not our enemy. We have to let the Iraqi political process play out all the rest. I think that's a real sliding door

moment in the history of Iraq Iraq because if we had severed Those talons of Iran sinking their hooks into the Iraqi state Things would be very very different in Iraq right now So they hated us. I look still to this day. I've been denounced in person or I've been denounced by name twice by the Supreme Leader of Iran. Probably why they put me on their sanctioned hit list. Yeah. Up to that point though, it's my understanding Blackwater had a phenomenal reputation. Yeah, correct.

Look, we did. I mean, look, any time in terms of use of force versus total total missions run it was it was tiny I think our guys used to use firearms less than one tenth of one percent of all those missions, right? And so this is in a war zone in an area where people are shooting In surgeons are attacking Americans and you're kind of carrying the most I would call it Al Jazeera worthy targets, right? If they could kill a diplomat it makes a huge splash for For the enemy The other problem we faced is every convoy every PSD was considered a blackwater convoy

Yeah, and so we had dozens of of of times per week where someone call and say, ah, you see, black water guys are doing something bad in Basra. We don't have anybody in Basra. So we literally put trackers on all the vehicles to help delineate where our guys were versus anybody else. And as a company for the non-state department work that we did, we put cameras on all the vehicles. We had asked specifically from the state department

to put cameras like a cruiser cam, like a police officer has in the dash cam in his car, to put those on all our vehicles, to keep, to take away the, he said, she said, claims of these disputes. And we had a number of times where our guys are in a shooting event outside of the State Department stuff where the DOD would come and check the tapes and they say, yep, no problem. That's a absolutely justified shooting. If we had had those cameras on the vehicles that day, I don't think the whole debacle of Nisser square for the guy for the Raven 23 guys ever would have

happened. So you think that whole political agenda to swear the anti war left in the Vietnam war when after troops. And this time they went after contractors. And sadly, a blackwater represented everything they love to hate. I represented everything they love to hate. I was a white male married to a woman, Roman Catholic, with a bunch of kids. I was a soul owner of the business.

I never tried to make the business about me or personalize it, but I was the soul owner. And I didn't have a whole board of former generals or former connected DC people. It was it was run with a pretty simple chain of command. We never paid lobbyists. We didn't have the whole DC Apparachic footprint that is the Norman Washington. And that was our undoing. Look, we focused on doing a great job for the US government in the most difficult places and the most dangerous places without excuses. And it turns out like Bill Donovan said in his book, right, the founder of the USS of all the enemies he faced, the Imperial Japanese Army, the Nazis, the Soviets, the most

dangerous enemies he faced were in Washington, DC, the State Department, the FBI, and the war department. Some things don't change in Washington. There's a lot of speculation whether it was status forces agreement that was the major agenda behind it, or another was some oil contracts going on at that time. The Iranian influence do not ever discount the Iranian influence on the Biden Obama administration then as there is now. Why was the Obama team so quick to get in bed with the

Iranians and literally send them pallets of cash and make a make a bad nuclear deal with them? Why do they so badly want to do something with the Iranians now again? I don't know. They have a misplaced trust in the mullahs. Do you have any more insight on that? On how? On how? On how?

On how? On how? On how? On how? On how? On how? On how? On how? On how? On how? On how? On how? Look, all I know is that there was, there was other surveillance video, there's other stuff that I've been told is out there that we're never able to get our hands on. That would have been very clear that showed a lot of Mosul flashes. Oh, they deleted the drone footage. Yeah.

What I meant was... I mean, look, even when it says, wow, these guys weren't shot at and why was that vehicle disabled. I mean look even when it says wow these guys weren't shot at and why was that vehicle disabled Look they pulled an AK round out of the radiator the FBI did right and and when you when you hit a radiator and the coolant drains out Unfortunately with a modern electronic engine no coolant the engine shuts itself off to preserve itself in this case We would have taken a damaged engine that could have driven, even if it could have moved a quarter mile to move off that X. But that's part of the unfortunateness of it all. What I was referring to is the Iranian influence or the being in cahoots with the administration. I don't know if it's in cahoots, but sadly that could be true. I'm not saying it's not true, but the the

Iranians are a very deliberate society. Remember the Persian society is old and ancient and and you know they put a thousand stitches in a rug into a square inch. So they're after their experience of the Iran-Arrak war, they wanted to make sure that Iraq as a state would never be unified or strong enough to threaten them ever again. And so they got their hooks in, they have built their Shia militias, right? It's called the Hosh-tashabi. They're really the ones, it's the Shia Iranian overreach in Iraq that made ISIS and inevitability. And still to this day, there are Hashashabi units paid for by the Iraqi government using

US provided equipment that are under the leadership of Iranian IRGC Kudzforz officers. So, the US gets rolled, the US placed checkers, the Iranians are playing chess. And because we have a national security apparatus that doesn't want to do what it takes to push them back. When that incident happened, and you heard about it, do you have any idea what that was gonna turn into? I got a call already an hour after the incident by the country manager, Hey Boss, there was a fire fight

and there's a lot of noise here. It's in terms of fire fights. It's, you know, it's a lot less that we've been subject to in the last month here, right? Compared to what we had just in the previous week, helicopter shot down and all the rest. But he said, in case you hear about it, well then the media just picked it up and whipped it into a frenzy. Were there any signs that they were going to do that before that, or was that basically

the... No, not signs, but there'd been, you know, there's always indecision in Washington about, you know, there was legitimately fatigue about, there was a rock fatigue in Washington and they're looking for scapegoats and looking for bad guys. And unfortunately, our company, by working for the State Department under their operational control

performing to a thousand-page contract, uh, walked into that ex and got smacked. How long after that did the indictment start? Well, that was September 16, 2007, and I'd say there was something within nine months to a year, right? And then there was all kinds of questions about jurisdiction and where they do it. And, you know, it also speaks to the how unjust it all is that they somehow horseshoed it all into trying them in Washington, DC. For four patriots that have served their country from around the country, from normal America, if they had a jury of their peers in Washington state, Idaho, Montana, Tennessee, Florida, normal America.

It took them multiple trials to try to find a gated conviction. So it's discussing. I'd funded the company funded all their legal defense and still with the DC jury they managed to get a conviction. What was the aftermath after that for Blackwater? Well, look as part of the part of the onslaught of Washington, there was it really really started a subpoena, right? So I was called before Congress, early October, 2004, and they didn't really want to call me back up there after that hearing again, because I think I'd answered their questions and said, we're doing what we were told. This is the contract, this thousand-page contract, but then a blizzard of subpoenas started right

everything from department of labored you know Treasury customs State Department export issues ATF even the Department of Agriculture was investigating us how we ship dog food are you serious? I'm not kidding literally a blizzard and so It's kind of the DC way right they they hit you with such a with an ambush from all sides that you try to make the organization crumble and We held this together and then they tried to um well, they, they indicted Gary Jackson, Bill Matthews, and the General Counsel, Andy, and two other people over completely bullshit charges. And I'll give you examples, right? And they said, hey, we're not really interested in you, just give us something on Eric Prince. So the political whipping boy, the political prosecution, persecution just continued.

So the indicted Gary and Bill, for example, on weapons charges. Right, so in 2004, the King of Jordan had visited Blackwater, hosted by the CIA, because the US was giving Jordan a big training facility. He wanted to come and see what black order was like a few days before guys from the agency called and say, Hey, we kind of goofed it. We don't have a gift for the king. We need a gift like, well, what does he like? He likes guns. Okay, we can do that. We provided him a kind of a custom-tuned semi-auto M4, 12 gauge shotgun and a glock, right? Not exotic, not full auto. We gave it to him. The secret service took

the boxes. Thank you. Put them in the US Secret Service vehicles. They left the property. Like six months later, the ATF is doing an audit. They're going through the books. They say, what's this? Oh, the KingF is doing an audit. They're going through the books. They say, what's this? Oh, the King of Jordan was here. We transferred those to him. They go, ah, yeah, don't do it this way next time. Do it this way.

No fine. No drama. Nothing. Fast forward to 2007. Ah, they indicted us over that. They considered that a straw purchase like they were giving weapons to a drug dealer. So the same ATF that said, that's an administrative error. Don't do the paperwork

this way for a transfer or do it this way. When it's politicized, they made it that way. So same another one, the agency, right? The agency wanted to, the agency had done away with their paramilitary training as part of their case officer program years before, and they wanted weapons calls for all these students going through the pipeline. And they came to us and said, we want you to do this. They said, okay, fine, give us a contract. Great. We got all the semi-auto guns. came to us and said, we want you to do this. Is it okay, fine, give us a contract, great. We got all the semi-auto guns.

No, it has to be full auto. They have to be able to shoot a full auto M4 and AK. Like, that's dumb, you don't really need to do that. Yes, they have to, fine, make it happen. Give us a contract, no, no, figure it out, make it happen. So we made a donation, right? We already had one law enforcement organization that had permanent residents on the compound, the Virginia Beach Police Department, leased an entire building from us in use ranges.

So we made a donation to the Sheriff's Department, okay? Because a private organization can't buy 25 AKs or M4s. You can buy four, but not 25. Or you can buy two samples of each. So the Camden Sheriff's Department stored those guns on the premises, knowing that they were there for the police to use, but also these federal government employees to use from time to time. They would never leave the premises only for that purpose. The former Inspector General of the Pentagon signed off on it, the

county attorney signed off it, everybody's good. Nope. Straw purchase for illegal weapons. That's the kind of stupid shit that they indicted those guys for, which they had to finally, finally grind through and so millions of dollars later in their legal defense, And so millions of dollars later in their legal defense, when they finally, when the clowns at the DOJ finally realized that I was a knock, I'd had all kinds of authorities from the agency for this program talked about in the last chapter of my book. And the only reason I'm willing to talk about it

is because those assholes already leaked my name. You know, they, they, when Panetta, briefed my name, briefed me by name to Congress, right? When, when the agency is briefing special programs, they're supposed to use code names to protect confidentiality. But he briefed me in true name and within hours of him doing that, the New York Times and the Washington Post were calling me for comment. Just for the audience, Panetta was the director of CIA at the time. Under Obama, yes.

So that's another reason I get mentioned of that now. But when the realities of that finally made it to the idiot prosecutors, and frankly, the idiot senior leadership at the CIA, then the whole case went away. So there was just a wave of, oh, it was, it was like termites. I mean, did you, what did you think?

What was your mindset? Were you ready to combat it? Were you, did you think it was going to go away? Or did you know, paying legal? So I, I saw that Elon Musk is forming an internal law firm to fight a whole bunch of specific cases. Hindsight, I should have done that. It would have been vastly superior to me to hire all my own legal team, and to pay all

these voracious other sets of termites of the Washington DC lawyer crowd. That would have, so for anyone that's watching this, that goes to the same circumstance, hire your own lawyers because most DC lawyers suck. Their most DC lawyers are just as bad as the bureaucrats and regulators that hang out around political parties. So had I done that, it would have been cheaper, the defensive fight would have been more effective.

The only thing we fought back on all fronts. Every audit, every, right, there was even whistleblower, lawsuits brought against us by someone funded by Soros. And we fought that one all the way to the end to the point that, who's a great victory in Alexandria, Virginia, the federal judge said they have not provided a centilla of evidence of wrongdoing by us. And he made the whistleblower's counsel pay our legal fees.

So that's the kind of, we push back on everything. The one place that they had us over a barrel was the State Department with export regulations. Right? And so Hillary Clinton State Department stuck us with the highest per capita fine in State Department history for our illegal arms exports. Right? And let me give you some color on what that looks like. So if you're working

for the State Department, right, you're working for the Bureau of Diplomatic Security. But the export stuff is handled by the DDTC, the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls. So as the State Department, the Diplomatic Security guys are demanding, hey, I need another 50 guys. I need another 200 guys urgently in this town do this mission because people are at risk and you have to export them the body armor the helmets the firearms whatever that might be to send to them the DDC over here is still moving at the pace of peacetime or their own sweet time and so even though the license application was in and we hadn't received

it back, yeah, if I'm expected to send 50 guys into a combat zone, I'm not sending a naked. And so we'd send body armor or helmets or something like that. And so that's what they came back and find us for $500,000 per event. Holy shit. Okay. So for all their noise and all their bullshit and a 42 million dollar fine, they acknowledged in the report that there was no actual damage in any way to national security. It was just a political punishment. Wow. Yeah. 42 million dollars. I have a pretty big chip in my shoulder for that yet. I can imagine. So yeah, looking back, I wish we had never, ever answered the call of helping the State Department because in the end it was the undoing of the company. I remember the first contact we ever got

from the State Department was from the ATAT program, the Anitarrism Assistance Program, the A-TAP program, the Anitarrism Assistance Program, and they wanted us to train the Colombian presidential detail and the Greek presidential detail, because this is right before the Olympics were going to be in Greece. And we put the whole proposal together, gave it to state, and they kicked it back to us and said, you can't submit this. It's just not credible. They said, why? They said, the price is so low.

You can't, and we knew training. We'd been training thousands of guys, thousands of soft guys. They said, you can't submit this into our system because it will not be viewed as credible. It's so low. So we increased the price by 60% resubmitted it. Okay, that was acceptable.

60%? Yeah, it's just disgusting. But coming from our perspective of being vertically integrated and we knew what our costs were, right? One of the great disciplines I tried to push on the team was activity-based costs. Let's figure out what everything costs us to do so we're not guessing. And so we we had gotten good at squeezing all the or as many inefficiencies out of those processes that we could. And so we could we could low bid. So by doing a firm fixed price contract, we had very good margins. And doing that by cutting out the waste meant that we could pay the men and the women a very good wage for doing their job.

Let's talk about the CIA assassination program. Okay. What are they talking about? Well, after 9-11, there was, you know, in that first year or two of real spine of seriousness about going after Okita and hunting them and not letting another 9-11 happen, right? In that brief show of unity with all the members of Congress from both parties singing a song and kumbaya on the front steps of the capital. Wonderful. So the agency figured they needed some kind of unilateral capability to to take out terror targets even in places where they were kind of protected or allowed to exist by semi-friendly countries, like Germany,

like, you know, various countries where, because of local political considerations, they weren't necessarily playing ball with the agency. And so the agency wanted us a mutilateral capability, and they went through some iterations of what that looks like and eventually they asked us to put something together. And yeah. And it was a really, it was a really interesting education because it had to be all unilateral. Moving documents and people and all the rest with no ties back to the US government. So I won't go into a lot of detail on it, but it was a it was a hell of capability. So after all this and I and I never would say anything about it, but they briefed me by name to Congress. Yeah. And which, um, which immediately was leaked to the media, which immediately endangered

my family. Okay. So for all the noise about the media making about CIA leakages for this Valerie Jarrett, no, the Valerie Plame stuff. Hey, I was doing a program that was literally hunting the most wanted terrorists. And so yeah, so that wound up in the okay to hit list from that. So yeah, I do take some issue with the typical Washington game of how they play, because look, I started Blackwater as a way to stay connected to the SEAL teams in a

try to serve my country. We answered the call when the USG called again and again and again from thousands of people. We lost 43 of our men doing that mission, multiple of our aircraft shot, in 43 KIA and hundreds seriously wounded, just like active to be the military, right? People that pay serious costs for a politician's decision to send them in the harms way. And I ended up behind where I was financially having sold the business because it got smashed in valuation and in so what right because men died, men were incarcerated, I think, unnecessarily and unjustly, because of a, I would say a very broken Washington political process. Okay.

When did you sell the company? 2010. After you sold the company, at what point did you move to Abu Dhabi? I'd moved about the same time we sold it. Why did you move? At that time Somali piracy was raging off the coast of Somalia. They were taking 80 to 90 ships per year, taking 1 million to 10 million in ransom per

vessel. And the UAE leadership wanted to do something about it, right? That's a seafaring nation. They depend on trade, Dubai port, and exporting their crude. And they wanted to do something in a chance meeting, explained what should happen, and they said, yellow. Let's go. And so, they didn't want me directly involved with it.

They just said, kind of lay out the, the how and why to do this and the Portland Marine police force was built and that unit went active by early 2012 and you don't hear much about small, they piracy after that. No, you don't. It's funny how that works. Yeah.

But it wasn't, look, the typical bureaucratic approach was ships chasing pirates all over the Indian Ocean. That's dumb, right? If you have a, if you have a wasp problem in your yard, you find the nest and you deal with the nest. It doesn't take a genius to figure out where the pirates are in Somalia. If you fly along the coast, right, you don't need some KH 11 satellite imagery.

You can fly along the coast in a king air and say, oh, there's six ships anchored down there off this fishing village with no port must be pirates, right? And you go after the pirate logistics because when they go to see and they capture a vessel they'd have to drive it back to the coast and they have to put guards on that boat and they have to sit on it for six months to year waiting for the ransom to get paid. Another book that I read called the pirate coast which laid out the how the US dealt with the Barbary Pirates, Olivia in 1804, 1805,

same kind of program. A former American, or a former American army officer, Willie Meaton, eight Marines, 90 contracted mercenaries, French, Greek, and Italian. Right? The Marine Corps him goes from the halls of Montezuma

to the shores of Tripoli. There was eight Marines on that deal, and 90 contracted mercenaries. And that's what ended piracy for the United States in Libya. In this case, a contracted police force working with, by and through the local Somali government, a police force to cut off the pirates logistics so they couldn't pay, feed and resupply their guards, and the problem went away. So it wasn't a hit squad? No. Okay. No. In fact, it really wasn't that kinetic at all.

Yeah, they were armed. I mean, logistically, it was hard. The first mission they had to do was 500 kilometers one way on roads that hadn't been graded or improved in 30 years. So it was those kind of challenges to solve. And it was really a South African guy's, some ex executive outcomes team that came and did it and they built the police force and it worked. There's a documentary that was shot through the process called The Somalia Project.

That answers that question. It's on YouTube and it's free. All right. And it actually won an award at the Toronto Film Festival. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, it's good to know. Well, it's good to know.

Knowing it would be controversial, knowing that the clowns at the State Department and the Obama administration did everything they could to block a program like that, because it's not something they directly controlled, it is such a mess, it is such a fetted swamp, Trump was right to call it a swamp, it is. Don't bad just a little bit. So you moving to Abu Dhabi,

did that not, that didn't have anything to do with the politics, with the political system, smaring your name in the, in the public? Was I sick of the Washington nonsense? Sure. But I, I, I came and went to the United States. It's not like I fled. I didn't go to exile.

I had, I had some kids that still lived in the States. So I'd come back every few weeks to see them. Okay. Yeah. I was coming and going all over the world for, for those three years. Okay. So, coming off of that, I started a small private equity firm to do some exploration and some mining stuff. I got some interesting experience in Africa. And then while I was raising money for that, in Hong Kong, a Hong Kong businessman contacted me and said, hey, please help us build a logistics business based in Hong Kong to do aviation,

transportation, kind of security in Africa for a lot of these big Chinese projects whether they're building a road or a mine or a porch or whatever. And so that was frontier service group. or whatever. And so that was Frontier Service Group. And as that company got more and more investment from the Chinese mainland, it was an interesting but alarming look inside of how the state on enterprises work, that they're very political organizations, not really based on merit or not, not in any way based on mission. It was kind of the antithesis of what I'd ever seen in my professional life before.

And so I left there a year and a half ago, but an interesting window that there is nothing we want in the United States, we do not want to be synthesized, We do not want to be synthesized. We do not want to be to operate the way the CCP does, right? They still have the country locked down in large portions, locking down Shanghai, 30 million people that's the most affluent part of China.

Claiming to be over COVID, really it's over politics because G, Xi Jinping, the Chinese ruler, is trying to be elected to a third, five-year term, and that's kind of unprecedented really since Mao. And there's three factions to the Chinese Communist Party. There's the young Prince Lings, of which he's won. There's the Communist Youth League, and there's the Shanghai faction. of which he's won, there's the Communist Youth League and there's the Shanghai faction. And because of all the wealth that's concentrated in Shanghai, Shanghai is a likely place for opposition to Foment to to G's continued rule. So I think Shanghai is in lockdown right now, literally welding people into their homes with fences because of that. So again, I think the when Ronald Reagan was elected, I think

we're in a very similar time to 1976 to 1980, to the Carter years. Runaway inflation, the economy is going to the tank. A bunch of foreign policy setbacks. And then Reagan is elected on a, hey, we're going to bring America back. America can do better than this. And in the foreign policy side, right, the policy of the United States for 35 years since World War II until 1980 had been containment. We're just going to contain the Soviet Union and the spread of communism. And Reagan said, no, we're going to fuck the commies. He

actually said that in the old office, we're going to push back on them economically, politically, culturally, socially, all the rest. There was 20 covert action findings, some of which were even initiated by Carter because even Carter, the Carter administration, having had their butts kicked, finally came around to their senses, but Reagan fully enacted that to go after the Soviet Union in all those ways to take them down. Not with conventional military forces, but all the other acts of sub-drafuge that the intelligence community should be doing.

And what happened? 89, the Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain comes down, and by 91, the Soviet Union is done. Okay? I think the United States has to push back on the communist party of China the same way Chinese people not our enemy Chinese Communist Party is Antithetical to the American way of life. It is antithetical to the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights and To the things that we appreciate in America That has to stop.

That 100% agree with you on that. And it would be honest when I was researching you and I saw that Frontier, what was it Frontier? Frontier Service Group. Frontier Service Group was so involved with China and building infrastructure in Africa that I was really surprised. Did that review alarmed it all

and how much influence China has over in Africa? They appear to have some influence, but it's really not that hard to push them back. It's not. No, how would we do that? No, no. Look, they're basically pushing into a vacuum, meaning Africans, African countries need infrastructure.

They want electric power. They need a hard surface road. They need ports. They need trade. All the things that we take for granted in the West, right? The ability for a farmer in America to raise his crop, put it on a truck, take it to a co-op, which can then sell it onto the stream of commerce. That, in most cases in Africa, it doesn't exist.

Most African families have less than 100 watt light bulb worth of electricity a day. And so when China comes and promises, hey, let us have this all this concession, And so when China comes and promises, hey, let us have this, all this concession, it will build you this port and road, right? African countries take that deal. If it's even more controversial, right, the Chinese do black bag diplomacy really well, meaning they pay cash. They, I'm told that in the basement of the foreign ministry in Beijing that they take African leaders or not in the African any any leader from all the world that China wants to do business

with or the mining minister or the energy minister or the foreign minister and they take them to this big vault room and their safety deposit boxes and they take them to one box and have their name on it. They open it up and it's gold bars or cash or whatever. And they'll say, this is yours waiting for you here as long as you play ball for us while you're in office. Look, China is an ancient society. It's a, as you know, remember, over the last two thousand years, China for 19 out of those 20 centuries was the largest economy on the planet.

Remember that. So, China views itself as the center of the universe, the middle kingdom. And so, they're trying to restore themselves to that kind of grandeur in world leadership. And the question is, does America want to be, is, are they comfortable being pushed into second place? By a lot of, I would say self-inflicted wounds to ourself, or are we going to rally and organize and do what made America effective and free and wealthy and return to those basic values and focuses, or do we continue on this woke nightmare

and drive ourselves into second or third or worse place? What do you think's gonna happen? Elections do have consequences and they have to have consequences. I think the most important thing And I think the most important thing to focus on in the next election is control the bureaucracy to actually have accountability for the federal government. Because I think the real constitutional crisis is we're supposed to have three branches of government, right? Executive legislative judiciary, but we have four.

We have a permanent state bureaucracy that's accountable to no one. That Congress can yell at, and that really changes the, the White House can yell at, but can't hire and fire most of the bureaucrats under its wing. CIA is different. Actually, CIA and the Peace Corps are the only two federal agencies in Washington where the civil service rules don't

necessarily apply. So the director can change and fire quickly, so the CIA should be quick to fix underwrite leadership. But beyond, call it reform and control of the civil service bureaucracy and to pare it down, right? I hate the fact that the five counties surrounding Washington are per capita the wealthiest in the country. That's a very unhealthy sign that that much wealth is spongeed off the imperial city to the detriment of the rest of the country where actual normal work is done.

And the second thing is I think we have to restore competitiveness in competition inside America. The Federal Trade Commission and the anti-trust parts of the government have to be cleaned out and reworked and the amount of monopolies or do-opolis or oligopolies, right? We have a couple of companies that have such control over the markets that it squeezes all the competition, right? Look at the beef industry. All the beef in America is processed

by I think four major processors. All the farmers who do the hardest part of the work for months and years at a time, they absolutely get screwed because all the processors are controlled by those big four. Okay? Whether it's big beef or big chicken and the same in the airline industry, the same in big tech, America was great when it was lots of small companies with lots of sharp elbows and everybody scrambling and innovating and really pushing that competition. But when you have Washington reinforcing and scratching

the back of big tech and big business, it's extremely dangerous for the future of the country. Back to China or back to Africa, what are they mining there? Well, remember, China over the next five years will have another 300 million people move from rural communities into cities, right? So you have to house 300 million people, or almost the population in the United States, you have to build housing for in the next five years.

So when China goes out looking for energy, right, because they import 90% of their energy, their hydrocarbon energy, they have to build, right, if you're doing even green energy, you need an enormous amount of copper to transmit the power from where you're generated to where you're using it, and iron ore for steel, for rebar, for all the things you build a house with. So they're going out to find those resources. China as a country, as a government, has made a very concerted effort to kind of leapfrog past the internal combustion engine, right? Because it was going to be a cold day in hell before China could build a better car engine than

Porsche, or Toyota, or even a US one, right? So they have gone all in on battery minerals, electric vehicles, and they have made a very concerted effort to control not just the source of rare earths, right? The NDPR, all the things you need to make a very high-end electric motor and a very high-end long duration quick recharge battery, cobalt, nickel, neodymium, all those. I won't go deep on that. But the processing for those minerals is where China controls about 95% of the world supply. And so that's an area that the US should make some strategic investment, right? I certainly believe in capitalism in the free market, as long as everyone else does.

And in the case of China, you have a very state-managed capitalism. They say it's capitalism or, sorry, socialism with Chinese characteristics. For that matter, capitalism also with Chinese characteristics, because they very much with government direction throw hundreds of billions of dollars to target specific industries

that they want to be dominant in, to the point of driving out any of their US competitors, which they have done in particularly in battery minerals in that processing they call them rare earth elements. Like the only producing rare earth mine in the United States now is in Mountain Pass, California and all the off-take goes to China. No shit. Fact. I mean this is just, we we were we were shareholders in a

very rich rare earth mine in Burundi and the processing the off-take from that mine went to Germany where there was a couple stages done but then eventually all that went to China as well. Here's the thing, it's not a $100 billion problem to fix. It's a $10 billion problem to fix or less. So instead of, I would say, pissing away $40 billion in aid like Congress is just doing to Ukraine. For everyone to make noise about strategic minerals and Chinese hegemony in those spaces, $10 billion spent well in America solves that issue.

Some of the processing of those rare earths is kind of a nasty, dirty process. Okay, fine. Except that, do it at Dugway Proving Ground, which is where the US Army does its chemical weapons testing. You're never going to build condos there, but say that's where the United States is going to process those minerals. And you do it like a contractor managed facility like they do for ammunition plants. It doesn't, it might, my biggest frustration in top of the, I would say, the corruption

and competence in Washington is just a lack of imagination on how to solve these problems. Do you think it's just straight-in competence? I think it's, I think it's just reinforced groupthink. I, when I look at, if, if, if the combined Republican and Democrat administrations of the last 20 years, for all the smart people that have come through Harvard and Yale and all these Ivy League schools, in these foreign policy positions, and if this is the best they've got, I would look for another source

for my foreign policy experts going forward. Because whether it's the Iraq invasion and how the war was conducted against really not just Sunni insurgents but the Iranians fighting in Iraq versus the United States as well being defeated in Afghanistan by 90% illiterate goat herders with no external support really. Because remember when we were fighting the Soviets in the 80s, no, when the Mahajidin were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, the US was giving a billion dollars in lethal aid in 1985 dollars, which would be more like three billion in lethal aid,

going to the Taliban now, nothing like that, nobody ever gave them that kind of support. But yet we were defeated all the techno wizardry of the US Army and the US Navy and the US Air Force and the US Marine Corps. Great fighting men and women, great capability, all that equipment with bad weak leadership, with weak political leadership,

and we got our butts kicked. And it's what an embarrassment. And for everybody that lost a loved one or an Alim or a spouse or a relationship over the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, they should be pissed. I'm pissed. I spent a lot of my life and put a huge effort

into helping the US government there to have them piss it away they did. It's just wrong. I'm totally with on that It's a direct result of an all volunteer force. I'm not saying we have to have a draft But if you have one half of 1% serving in the military, right? You have about 1.5 million people give or take in the US forces active duty You have another 3 to 4 percent that knows that half percent, family, friends, that circle, that tribe,

leaving the other 95% of America with no clue and no skin in the game. And so that allows really idiot politicians to be continually disassociated from reality, making those kind of decisions. Well, since we're on the, since we're on the Afghan pullout now, and we're talking about Chinese mining and then incompetent government, China's extracting lithium out of Africa,

China was there when we pulled out of Afghanistan. Afghanistan pullout seemed extremely abrupt, and there was definitely, it's obvious there was no plan Chinese were there to negotiate with Taliban now supposedly they're extracting lithium out of Afghanistan. We have this green initiative which we're going to import all of our solar panels and batteries from China. Do you think that the current administration was paid off by China to pull out of Afghanistan so that they can... No. In fact, if I would imagine, not imagine, I would posit that if China had its choice,

America would have stayed in Afghanistan somehow. Why? Because the one group that the CCP is scared of are the Wiggers. The Wiggers are an ethnic Turkic people. They are not Han Chinese. They are Muslim and they're primarily from the northwest corner of China called Xinjiang Province. They have been in conflict with the CCP because they've tried to hold true to Islam and

they have been resisting it. And there's huge pipelines from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan with the natural gas that flows through Xinjiang province that literally powers Beijing in the whole eastern seaboard. Like I said before, China imports 90% of its hydrocarbon energy. And so the WIGERS, they've not been able to control. And so they've built camps, they build reeducation camps, they're doing some terrible things and getting away with it up there. And the WIGERS that could have sanctuary in Afghanistan is a major threat to China, which is why the Chinese are paying the Taliban, almost whatever it takes, to try to suppress the U.S. from having sanctuary in Afghanistan. China signed up early for a lot

of the concessions in Afghanistan because there's enormous wealth in the ground in Afghanistan, in the disgusting thing, and why... why so your quoted is saying there's over a trillion dollars in the ground there at least yes. And that's not my number. That's the US Geological Survey which flew magnetic and gravity airborne surveys finding enormous amounts of copper hydrocarbons and other minerals of value in Afghanistan. Okay? So let me back up on Afghanistan briefly. I've known Steve Bannon for years since I wrote my book, which I think came out in 2013, and I did a radio event with him, and I've stayed in touch with him ever since. And wrote a bunch of foreign policy papers on positions Trump candidate Trump should take

for the 2016 election. And he contacted me within months of Trump being elected. And he said, hey, we're trying to figure out what to do on Afghanistan, right up what you think should be done, and write an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. So I did and I wrote it for an audience of one and I'm told that by a guy that was in the room that Trump read my op-ed, circled it, called

in the National Security Advisor who was then HR McMaster and said, I don't like your plan, I like this one do this. Because McMaster had just asked to send another 70,000 troops back to Afghanistan in 2017. And so that started back and forth. And of course, McMaster being a three star armor officer from the Pentagon who wanted a four star, of course said no, hell no, right? I went to saw Mattis at White House direction,

at the Pentagon, he said my analysis of the root problems was the best that he saw, but he just couldn't accept contractors doing it. Because what I laid out was basically a repeat of what worked in the first six to eight months of Afghanistan, right? Using special operations veterans, right? Everybody special operations, veterans, right?

Everybody loves the word veterans, they hate the word contractor. It's the same thing. Veterans contractors attached to each Afghan battalion. I wanted to do 36 guys per battalion because I wanted enough. I wanted enough contracted talent there so that every time an Afghan unit left the wire, whether it's a platoon size, company size, whatever, they were mentors with them to provide leadership, intelligence, communications, medical, logistics, expertise, right? The five things you got to get right in a unit and if one

of those fails, it can all go to shit. Right? So I wanted veterans to go live with the Afghans. It's the same. Everything I everything I wrote up was really based on how the East India company functioned in Flores for 250 years right next door. Right? They built units of 19 locals, one expat, and they lived with them for years. They were called the presidency armies. So I kind of modelled a a battalion structure with veterans attached the same way and because of the nature of Employing veteran contractors, I can send a guy for 60 days or 90 days and then he goes home for for 30 days back in But always to the same unit in the same valley

So he knows those Afghans those are his brothers The problem with the US presence in Afghanistan for 20 years is we went through almost 30 true rotations We're used to send guys in they might be a factor for a few months and they leave and they shift and they never come back to the same area More than 30 times so we didn't really fight for 20 years. We fought for 30 different rotations. But our approach, what I recommended was to solve that by attaching at the battalion level, living with, patrolling with, and even fighting with those

guys, not living at some distant US base where they'd kind of commute to mentor them once a week. No, same barracks, same jaw hall. I would have provided air support, about 90 aircraft, again, flown right seat left seat, one contractor, and one Afghan pilot. So if there's any weapon released, it's an Afghan making that decision. The professional pilot there so that you had the night vision time, you had the safety lined up and it kind of took away the The inshallah factor, right? Yeah, don't take away the excuses of, ah, we're not going today. It's too dangerous. No, no, you're going now. It's on

and we could have provided jets the whole package for a fraction, right? I found that entire Israeli squadron of a4s that were for sale. That would have been perfect and cheap and it would have worked. And then the other third part of it we have to do is the combat logistics, right? You have to pay the men on time, feed them on time, resupply them, and take care of them medically. It was so bad, right? In this rush to over empower the Afghans, right? Unlike most people, I've read most of the SIGAR reports, this special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction,

where he just catalogues the same failures made for 20 years. So how do we have these people put in these assistant secretary of whatever positions of responsibility, making the same damn mistakes that they were making a decade or two decades earlier, how do we consider these people smart or qualified when they're just continually failing? So again, you know, you have the issue of ghost soldiers of right in every society where there's corruption, if you throw money at a problem, it grows the corruption. And that's what America does. America knows how to fire hose cash onto a problem which made all those little weeds into major trees of problems. So again putting putting a few dudes in there to control the

pay the parts supply the fuel the ammunition medical, the whole program would have cost less than 5% of what the US was spending. And I trust me, we would have put the Taliban on their knees again, because the hope that package would have performed like a much more robust version of what stomped on the Taliban in Al Qaeda in early early 2002 and late 2001. There was already 140 Taliban sanctuaries in Afghanistan, just in the last months of us being there. And trust me, al-Qaeda is all over the country again.

And so for all the administration assurances that this was never going to be a terror sanctuary again? Absolutely, it will be. Do you think we're going back there? I don't know. I hope we never go back there with the US military. There is not one conventional soldiers that ever set put in that country again. Because, and it's no diss on the soldiers, but it's how they're employed. I heard a fundamental description at an early special operations conference when I was a young officer is the different mentality in a, right, as you're, as we're seeing in Ukraine right now, artillery is still the king of battle in big conventional fights right so in a conventional military you man the equipment because it's the equipment that

does the heavy fighting the killing the artillery the rockets the tanks in a soft unit you equip the man because the man is the weapon system to be employed in very niche very special applications and that's the kind of flexibility and speed and lightweight that you need to operate against an insurgency, right? Because the United States and Afghanistan was defeated by an enemy that was largely illiterate, untrained, using weapons that have been designed 70 years earlier.

And they defeated all the billions of dollars of techno wizardry. I mean, I'd go to the association of the US Army show in 2005 through now and all that stuff and the Taliban kicked our ass. It's disgusting. It didn't kick the ass of the sergeant or or the gunnery sergeant, or the smart captain, but man, it's like once they, once, once officers pass the range at the rank of O4, it's almost like their brains are, are transformed into something that just doesn't, um, doesn't want to fight the way that's, that's, that needs to be done.

Yeah. Damn. Let's take a quick break. Alright. because it won't fight the way that needs to be done. Yeah, damn. Let's take a quick break. All right. Hey guys, I wanna tell you about Kachava, my all in one daily super blend. If you're a word you aren't getting all the nutrients you need or struggling to stay on top of your health,

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Where did it get tied up? Sadly, it died in the womb. It, the bureaucracy around Trump killed it. Unfortunately, I don't think Trump ever really controlled his national security bureaucracy. I think Mike Pompeo is director, dependent on Gina Haspel, a career agency officer that was then made director after him.

She didn't want to do anything, touching anything that would be different or hard or controversial for the agency. It was a big difference between how DOD fights wars under Title X authorities versus the agency, which is Title 50. Remember, when the US went into Afghanistan, right, the the the the the special forces A teams, the

agency officers, how even the aircraft flying overhead were there under Title 50 CIA authorities. That worked. Very flexible, very fast, very maneuverable. When the Pentagon pivoted to become the big titles 10, beast in the room for the next 20 years, that's where we failed. DoD is good at fighting big conventional wars. What they did in 2003 in rolling up Saddam's army, brilliant, fantastic. Fighting the insurgency after that, not brilliant. When the SEAL team guys rolled into a Bada Bada Pakistan to kill Bin Laden, they were not there under Title 10, they were there under Title 50 authorities working for the director of CIA. So I recommended that plan, right, as DoD leaves that a, that a Title 50 authority takeover and that

this kind of advise assist support element to keep the Afghan government from tipping over and to continue a effective counterterrorism mission that it pivot to the agency. Of course, Pentagon is about money and about reach and turf, and they wanted nothing to do with that. And the agency, under a different director, could have seized the thing, could have taken the initiative and said, yep, Mr. Trump will do this. Go. It's really sad because everything I laid out was not theoretical for us. We'd had hundreds, if not thousands of advisors, trainers in country before. We'd had up to 56 of our aircraft in Afghanistan flying, those kind of support missions.

How we'd even, with a super-dicano, right? I owned the first super-dicano aircraft. It's a single engine, Brazilian made, turbo-proo aircraft. It's a single engine Brazilian made turbo prop aircraft. It looks like a little light fighter plane. And I bought one in 2005, took it to the States, and we fitted it out with a FLIR, okay? A big MX-15, so you could with a FLIR with a laser. It had a cell phone intercept equipment on it. It had linked 16 aircraft, so we could talk to every other fast mover in the US military.

And we had it kidded out for a JSOC program so that they could find, fix and finish by themselves with a contractor pilot flying it and an active duty guy running the sensor systems and dropping any weapons. Because that aircraft could even drop to 500 pound laser-guided bombs. It was fantastic.

We actually even did a study that we could have taken over every close air support mission over Afghanistan with that aircraft and had more coverage with all the right kind of hardware and the whole program would have paid for itself in fuel savings in seven months. I mean, so even a private equity guy would have funded it. But those are the kind of cost saving innovations that the military bureaucracy just cannot will not accept. And that's the frustration why we have these perpetual wars which never seem to end and no one is really put in charge. Coming back to the op-ed that I wrote, that Trump liked any circle,

I said, you need to a point of vice-roy, right? And that's a spicy term, it's a loaded term. That's a colonial term. But I wanted it to be spicy. I wanted people to pay attention. He needed one person in charge. Unity of command, one person who's responsible, one person who's accountable. There wasn't one person who was in charge of the effort in

Afghanistan for the entire 20 years we were there. State Department was doing their thing, DOD was doing their thing, CIA is over here, NATO is over there, we never had one person that was in charge. When the British were in India, they appointed one person who represented her majesty's government that had all power to make those decisions. And the issue about Afghanistan, right? Because the other lesson from the East India company is that it's much easier to employ people than to fight them.

And before you'd mentioned about the Chinese, interested in minerals and all the rest in Afghanistan, yeah, there's a trillion dollars of value in the ground. And the US didn't go after any of it while it was there. How long did they know about that? From the Soviet times. The Soviets did a better job of extracting resources in Afghanistan in the 10 years we were there, that they were there, versus the 20 that the US was there. And I'll give you two examples. One, in the southeast corner of Bulk province, there is an Amudaria

oil field, who was drilled, proven, all the wells hit, fully ready for commercialization you could have re-drilled the five wells that were cemented and another 15 and you could have powered the entire country okay of the 60 some billion dollars at the US was spending per year in Afghanistan a huge chunk of that was fuel costs okay and you know that fuel came from? The Mediterranean, a defense logistics agency contract, put it on a boat, down through the Red Sea, across the Indian Ocean, to Karachi, and then on a truck, up into Pakistan, across Pakistan, into Afghanistan, paying all those Taliban tolls.

So by the time that jet fuel or diesel fuel got to where it's used in Afghanistan, the fully loaded cost on it was $250 a gallon. Okay? Our tax money spent that way. While the Amudaria oil field is sitting there untapped largely for the duration of our presence there. Wow, okay. 20 million bucks would have redrialed those wells

100 million bucks to put a mod to the refinery there and you would have powered every jet Every truck everything and then for that matter probably 50 other power plants in Afghanistan That would have burned HFO the the bottoms, the heavy fuel oil, the stuff that you get off the bottom of a refinery, would have made Afghanistan self-sustaining in energy and not have to depend on all the trucks. Second, the Moss-Inaq mine, which is about 50 kilometers, 30-ish miles south of Kabul, one of the largest single copper deposits in the world. And they've known about that for a thousand years because there was all kinds of

archaeological constraints to it. But you know what? If I was in a position of responsibility and so for all the generals that rotated through of the 17 or 18 different commanders we had, now to them said, hey, I'm going to reopen Masanak mine and I can employ 10,000 Taliban, hey, I'm going to reopen Moss-Lonok mine. And I can employ 10,000 Taliban doing it. Because I'm going to give them all a pick in a shovel and three square meals a day. And I can suck an entire infantry division of top Taliban manpower away from the Taliban. Because most of the Taliban were just paid fighters. They weren't like fully

committed jihadis. Right. So if the Taliban's paying $10 a day, and we paid $12 a day and we feed them and we're not gonna kill them, that's great. That's how the British Empire dominated the whole subcontinent for 250 years effectively. And that's my frustration with these so-called smart leaders that are in charge. And they say, well, we can't do that

within our responsibility. Well, then demand that kind of authority, demand that kind of responsibility to fix the problem. Don't piss away our sons and daughters' health or their lives, and don't piss away tens of billions of our taxpayer dollars just managing the conflict. Have enough spine to say, I'm gonna solve that freaking problem

I'm not gonna shut up until I do That's my frustration with them. So laying out a plan That would have given the Afghan forces a reliable way to to be supported to have confidence that they were gonna be Helps I mean it got so bad in the last eight years of US presence there, that the Taliban were resorting to the most ancient of tactics, siege tactics, right? They roll two, three hundred Taliban out of the hills and they'd surround an Afghan combat out post, right? And they'd lay seas to it. Nobody in, nobody out.

And they'd be calling down there, shouting insults, all the rest, hey, we're gonna kill you. If you don't come out, and it got so bad that the Afghan military leaders inside the camp would be calling back to a TV station, back to Tullo News in Kabul, into a call-in show, pleading for someone to come and help them.

With all the wonderful US military helicopters, with all the stuff that the taxpayers spent, nobody had the organization or the responsibility to say, hey, we're gonna come and help you, or even better, hey, now the Taliban have provided us with 200 targets surrounding that camp, and we're gonna smoke them all, right? Why doesn't the AC-130 roll in there in broad daylight and smoke them? Oh wait, why? Because the AC-130

flown by the US Air Force won't fly in daylight. It's a $250 million asset that will not fly in daytime for combat support. That's the kind of bureaucratization of war that I chafe against in the US military that so badly needs reform. It's like a dirty rug that just needs to be shaken. You're the only person I've ever heard to talk about this. This is, well, this is incredible.

So that's just just bureaucratic layer upon layer, right? It's like wrapping a whole bunch of talmuds around the Torah so you never get back to your authorities that you should be doing. And we've allowed lawyers in the military, right? They're now down to very, very low levels of units that all have a jag. And I think we've allowed them to become what's, the Zompholites were in the Soviet Union, right? You know what Zomplits is? I don't. It's a political officer who is literally there to, um, you remember the movie, um, the hunt

for red October? Yes, right? The Zomplits was the guy that that's assigned to like in the Soviet Union, to every ship, submarine, air, uh, Air Force Squadron Army Division. He is there to enforce the will of the Communist Party. In this case, lawyers were there to enforce the will of Washington, and constantly undermining second-guessing the battlefield commanders. I think, okay, fine, if you want to have lawyers at that level, make it like the Marine Corps, make every Marine or Riflemen, every lawyer must be a Riflemen,

make them spend at least one or two combat deployments in the field, getting shot at before they get to make legal decisions about when people can drop bombs and not to. Make them live with those consequences first. I'm a cutting-'m becoming infuriated. Sorry. Let's move into Ukraine.

Ukraine, Russia, conflict. What should we be doing there, if anything at all? Well, I've been to Ukraine quite a bit, not lately, but long before the conflict. Cause there's an amazing amount of tech and amazing amount of industry there. We were actually trying to buy a business, which didn't work out. But I laid out in a document passed up by some people

I know in the chain of command. It did not have my name on it at all so they couldn't play the I hate Eric Prince card. But I basically laid out a combination of lend lease and a flying tiger approach to prevent the invasion from happening. Because I was pretty confident the Russians were going to go in. Well, we had a conversation before we got here and you actually pegged the exact day that had happened. That's based on weather. But in December, I laid out and it was a simple way to back up from that. So in this fiscal year, right, fiscal year 2022, the US Air Force has already announced that

they're retiring 200 combat aircraft. Being taken from an active fighting flying squadron, flown to the desert in Arizona and parked for eternity, written off to zero value to the taxpayers. Including about 50 F-15s, 50 F-16s, and 42 A-10s. For your listeners, F-15 air-spiriority aircraft F15 air superiority aircraft, F16 air superiority and ground attack, and A10, the best tank killing aircraft ever made, literally made back in the 70s to kill Russian tanks. All being flown to the desert, wasted.

I said, fly any combination of those to Ukraine. Right? For a carrot and stick. Carrot is, yes, Russia, don't worry, Ukraine will never be part of NATO. Let's close that discussion. Because they don't need to be, right? Our sons and daughters don't need to be the guarantors and defenders of Europe. Europe can wake up and do the right thing, including Germany, which they still have not really done. Well, they can't really, because their energy dependent off Russia.

Well, yeah, and on top of that, the Germans closed three nuclear power plants in December of last year, earlier than originally planned, just to be in accordance with their green new deal plan that they want to roll out in Germany, making them even more dependent on Russian energy. But back to what I wanted, what I recommended for, for Ukraine, right? So take the NATO thing off the table for Ukraine, no problem. But fly these, some of these old aircraft, do you crane, put you cranium roundels on them, you can use Ukrainian pilots,

you can use contractor pilots, any combination, just like, right, remember, the flying tigers was a, we used for about one year, before the United States was involved in World War II, but we wanted to help stop the Japanese from bombing Chinese cities. They allowed the US aircraft flown by contractor pilots. It did exactly that, working for a foreign entity.

In this case, those old US aircraft that were already written off, transferred them to Ukraine, a budget, I think $250 million would have been enough to make those aircraft flyable, fund the pilots, the fuel, and the weapons, and you would have had all the deterrence needed to prevent a Russian invasion instead of the not close to $50 billion at the US is spent. I would say pissed away in Ukraine now. It's just to pile it wrong. It's the lack of imagination, the lack of any knowledge of history from these so-called smart people, and there's no accountability.

How as taxpayers can we allow such incompetence to rule for the debacle that was Iraq, the debacle that's Afghanistan, and even a preventable debacle of Ukraine, I have that's that's my frustration for all these people that they want to say, ah, it's a it's a terrible plan. He's an evil mercenary. Whatever pejorative they want to throw at me, I say fine. Call me whatever shithead name you want to, but I'd rather be right than a shithead. And on these, I'm right. Okay. If, and, and, and you know what, even President Trump, I saw him in 2019 at a veterans event, oddly enough, and he

came up to me, he said, Eric, you were right. I should have listened to you on Afghanistan. I said, ah, Mr. President, that's the only time I saw him when he was president of the United States in person. I said, please, there's still time. Give us a chance to do this. Sadly, no. But again, he never really controlled his National Security apparatus. Mark Esper, terrible sect F. So again, if you keep drawing from the well that is Washington, DC, we'll

keep having the same failures. And anybody that says Iraq was a great success, or Afghanistan, I mean, I will never forget the image of thousands of people running ahead of alongside of and grabbing onto C-17s that are taking off. What an awful image. Yeah. And from the beginning, in whatever paper I submitted, I said, I want to prevent the rooftop, the helicopter off the rooftop moment, because I was six years old when that happened in Saigon in 75, and I still remember that.

And that image of Afghanistan is one that every friend or foe of America around the world remembers and it is a huge fucking black guy. Yeah. Yes it is. Let's move into the Volgner group. Yes. So. The Russians have woken up to, well, I'd say they continued on with a spectrum of conflict,

right? And I'll back up even further in saying in 2011, while I lived in the Middle East, while the Obama administration was in their great reset with Russia and they're going to be pals with them. The Russians actually invited me to Moscow and pitched me and said, please come and build a black water capability here. In Russia. Yeah. Yeah, I went shooting with their Alpha Group. Their Elite Tier 1 unit had beers with them after that and they'd

explained that they had done 300 kill capture missions inside of Russia in the previous year because they had still problems in Cheshnaya and Dagestan and and remember that they lost 15,000 troops in the late 90s or the 2000s fighting in Cheshnaya and Groasny and Dagestan. So they had their own issues to wrestle with. But they wanted to build a hybrid capability. And I said, thanks, but I can't do that. And sure enough, two, three years later, they roll out, you see here the stories about these

little green men of not necessarily military guys seizing all these key objectives when the Russians seized the Crimea and the Donbass and the contested areas now in eastern Ukraine. And then you see them use them in Syria to pretty great effect, not great, I would say effective for them. They use them in Medigastgar, in Central African Republic, now in Mali, in Libya, and certainly in Ukraine now as part of their major combat operation. Vagra Group offers, I would say, the whole spectrum of support, whether it's political messaging, propaganda,

social media manipulation on one end, through training of police, military, border units, that kind of thing, all the way up to full-on combat formations, battalion size, and brigade size activity. And it's an extension of the Russian state, but yet deniable enough. I mean, the reason, right, you heard about a big fire fight between some US soft guys in Syria.

In the east of Syria, I can't think of where the oil field was. It'll come back to me. But that oil field had been producing 400,000 barrels a day. It was Syrians oil supply. The US was sitting on it. Vognor guys and some Syrian army guys were going to take it. Why?

Because they wanted the oil. They wanted to turn that energy supply back on. It was a prize that they were after. So the Russians use that capability as an extension of Kremlin political desires with the deniability that comes from not being necessarily a function of the Russian state. And they asked you to build that. Yeah. One was a 2011. So if you were a war profiteer, which very commonly follows your name in the press, you 100% would have done that, but you didn't.

Yeah, I would have been a multi-billionaire, which I am definitely not. But no, the funny thing is, you know, there's a lot of contractors in history that have fought under many flags. And even John Paul Jones, who died in the service of Russia, and they brought him back from Russia, he's buried under the chapel in anapolis at the academy. I think he's buried in vodka in a vodka-filled cask. Nice, kind of appropriate. Yeah.

What about, what do you think about the weaponization of government agencies? It's extremely dangerous. And this is why, this is why I hate these perpetual wars, right? Because the state, as any state grows, it grows at the expense of individual liberty. And when you don't put the fires out overseas,

in the smallest, most precise surgical scalpel-like manner when you start using a sledgehammer instead of a needle. And all the bloat and all the other tools that you use to try to fight those wars instead of finishing something quickly, cleverly, all those tools eventually get turned on the populace. And that's hugely dangerous, and that's antithetical to American liberty. And so as I said before, the real constitutional crisis we have in America is that we have four branches of government instead of three. We're supposed to have three, we have four. And that fourth is that permanent state bureaucracy that is

Unaccountable and they start to use and abuse those tools for The benefit of one political party and that's unacceptable and that's the shit that that makes people do more radical things to push back Is that affected you at all personally? Yeah, sure Even when you know the whole reason I got caught up in the Mueller investigation was because I was invited back to meet some UAE leadership after Trump was elected, but before the inauguration, right? So there's still Obama people in charge at the NSC. inauguration, right? So there's still Obama people in charge at the NSC. And months later, they leaked the transcripts and the fact that I was in the UAE and they spun this

wild-ass conspiracy that I was there meeting some Russian fund manager and it was all to establish a back channel to Russia. Wait a minute. This already, this meeting alleged to have happened two months after the US election. How was I establishing some back channels of Russia to affect the US election? So it's just, that's the kind of nonsense. And again, lots of legal fees, seized phones, all the bullshit. And that weaponization, right, whether it's the constant bombardment in the media of bullshit, that makes it banking harder, that makes capital raising harder, all the rest. I'm a pretty stubborn, resilient guy, and I'll keep pushing through it, but that's just gotta end at some point.

There must be consequences. Is the IRS come after you as well? They've all come after me at some point. I mean, it looked that it was the, obviously, it was the hottest by far after the Nistra Square incident when the Democrats just focused on destroying Blackwater and destroying me.

And, you know, that was the re-relief for the Raven 23 guys to finally be pardoned. Those were the last, look, the business had been smashed at that point, but I felt like I had four people held very unjustly, and it was such a relief to have them out and have them back to their families. And you know, to hear the stories from the guys, none of them joined gangs. The the pressure that you hear about being in a maximum security federal prison where there

are some bad ombres. And none of the white supremacist gangs or the Muslim gangs or this gang, none of them came after the Blackwater guys because they had this kind of this aura of they were Blackwater guys so stay away. And and a number of them said that they had corrections officers that would say to them every night when they had shut their cell, I'm so sorry I'd have to do this to you. You don't belong to be here So I'm I commend them for having as potas of an attitude as they do and It puts in perspective whatever bullshit I've had to go through that they literally lost a numbers of years of their life and they're now Doing well putting them back together.

Yeah, I mean, they lost what from 2007 to what a year ago, less than a year ago, last December. Do you feel any resentment towards the country or I mean, how do you, I'm gonna be an I feel resentment on how veterans are treated on when on when I look at the, those pardons up there that are framed when I look at Eddie Gallagher's charges. I feel a lot of fucking resentment towards the American population. Nobody fucking goes to bat for us.

I feel like these guys are being hung out to dry. Nobody gives a shit. It really, really fucking pisses me off. It's not, and I haven't been through, it doesn't even, it's whatever, it's not a fraction compared to what those men went through, what, what, how they've come after and smeared your name, vilified you.

Look, I don't think it's fair to blame the American population per se. And this is why. Because the average American wakes up every morning and they gotta figure out how to get their kids to school, hopefully they did their homework right. They gotta get to work. And increasingly, it has to be a two-sallary home

because of the reduction in real wages that an average worker can earn, right, and we'll go into why that is. And they got to pay taxes and all the rest. And so their 99% of their day is focused on just getting through the day and feeding their family and doing what they're supposed to be doing And they outsource right we have a republic. We don't have a democracy We have a republic that we have elected officials that are supposed to be smart and

and serving the general good that we send forward for us to To make those decisions on our behalf. And I think the real lesson of COVID is the greatness of the federal system, okay? Because my God, if all, any and all decisions were only made in Washington, D.C., then we would truly be screwed. But thank God, all right, I think it's a great lesson

that mayors matter, that county councils matter, and you know, that principle of subsidiarity, that it's best to make decisions as close to where they affect you as possible and to not let that be made in a far off land. And so it's also a reminder that state governments really matter. And good governors are great and bad governors, holy shit. And you see the Exodus from bad poorly run states running towards good run states. And I hope that the people that left those badly run states don't take their leftist bad policies with them. And so now it comes to Washington where we truly have a runaway size and scope of federal government that makes decisions without any accountability.

And some of that comes back to decisions made a long time ago, like in the progressive era, 100 years ago, when they pushed through income tax, right? Because America used to be run only on tariffs, on the import, on the tax on any goods that were imported to America. That's it. The federal government rightly was small. What is the most successful political party platform in the last century? The Socialist Workers Party, their party platform of the 20s

was cradle to grave welfare, social security, direct income tax, basically cradle to grave socialism. That has been not only adopted by the Democratic Party platform, but it's been adopted into law, even voted on and approved on a continuing basis by many Republicans. They also changed to direct election of senators, right? The founding fathers had it right that when a, of course, the House is voted every two years, direct from the people. The Senate was supposed to come from a choice from the state

legislatures so that the state of Tennessee would elect two senators from the Tennessee state legislature and send it forward to Washington. So that those senators did the bidding and did the protection of those states' rights. And when we went away from that, now that Senator, yeah, they might be elected by the state, but all the money for their campaign can come from some national interest group, generally focused on growing the size of government, or enlarging the monopoly or doopoly, enjoyed by some large corporation that's unregulated. So between that, as the government grows, and I'd say the other real thing we need to push back on is to remember the 10th amendment, the Constitution, right?

All powers not specifically delegated to the federal government remain the sole purview of the states. And so that pendulum is swung way too far towards Washington. We need to swing that back towards states' rights, towards smaller government, into more decisions being made at the state and local level. I think the other great challenge we face economically, right? So for the last 70 years we've

enjoyed the dollar being the world's reserve currency right all major trades in oil in in foreign trade and grains and in agri products all clear as in dollars okay and what that allows Washington to do is spend trillions of dollars extra. We spent, now we're at the national debt, it's like $33 trillion, and that's up almost double in the last 15, 18 years. I mean, extraordinary rate of spending. The problem, right, and part of that,

The problem, right, and part of that, part of the aura or the facade of the dollar being the world's reserve currency is that there's this American military hegemony, right? We have this amazing military that can smack any target anytime anywhere. And when you have the debacle that was Afghanistan, a failure in Iraq, a failure of deterrence in Ukraine, and we'll talk about Taiwan next. When you have those kind of setbacks, and now, right, when that failure of deterrence now leads to conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and now everybody goes hog wild on sanctioning everything Russia, right? Russia is still the largest energy producer in the world. They're going to sell their stuff somewhere and somebody's going to buy it, right?

Less than half of the world, less than half of all the countries at the UN actually signed on to sanctions against Russia, right? Which leads all those other countries outside of that sanction still going to trade with Russia. And so what is Russia demand? They want to be paid in rubles. And they'll trade with India who can pay with rupees. And the Chinese will pay with Remindee, right?

So they call it the three Rs. And so they create a trading block to further reduce the hegemony that the dollar has in trade. And so trust me bank on this when when the dollar loses that status, then our idiots in Washington can't spend an extra trillion dollars a year like we do almost every year in debt. And when the America has to finally live within its means and start to pay that debt back, holy shit, that is, that is society transforming level change. What does that look like? And it's coming soon. It's a diet. It is, it's this, this, this nature, and it's good in its, but in Yang and Yang, right? It is short term real pain, recession, depression, severe distortions of the economy, but putting Washington on a diet is not a not a terrible idea because you will throw out a lot

of the crazy woke insanity that has been that has been not just in Washington that's even been insanity that has been not just in Washington that's even been seeping down to the state level with all the federal grants that flow everywhere else. If we have to get back to basics as a country, then it'll be run a lot more like hometown America and not like Washington, you see New York or LA or San Francisco for that matter. How long do you think that could take to play out? And is it inevitable we're going there? I'm not some great economist visionary, but just looking at what's happened in the past, right?

When, in what's scary about it all, you took a country like Germany, that lost World War I, and they printed and printed and printed money. And the mighty history of the German Prussian society collapsed. And all that wealth was destroyed because it went from one mark, one German mark to buy a loaf of bread up to a billion marks to buy a loaf of bread. Just hyperinflation that ran away and the German society elected a psychopath like Adolf Hitler. And that's the kind of insanity we have to prevent. Because look,

the United States and the constitutional government we live under is still the greatest form of government on earth on this planet that has ever been done. And it is worth protecting. It is worth returning to those original roots because the alternatives, right? There's nowhere else to go, right? The other thing that was alarming to me, there was a poll done about three weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was a Quinnipiac poll, right? Not a right wing poll at all. And it said how many people in America, if the country was invaded, would stay and fight. 75% of Republicans said less than 50% of Democrats.

No, I'm sorry, 40% of Democrats said they was saying fight to defend the country. Both those numbers were way too low. Yeah. And so, you know, a country is a country when its people have some commonly held beliefs, right? That's generally a description of what makes a society. And we as a society can't even agree on what is male and female anymore, then we have some real fundamental problems. Yeah. Yeah, we do.

Let's move into China taking Taiwan. Sure. Look, Taiwan, right, was the island of Formosa until 1949 when the Nationalist government got pushed out of mainland China by the Communist Party. The Nationalists lost the Civil War, they go to Taiwan, they go to Formosa, now it becomes the island of Taiwan and be the politics back and forth from 1949 to now. It's not fully independent, not recognized independent, but the Chinese, the Chinese Communist Party hates the idea of Taiwan, wants to reabsorb it exactly like they've

done to Hong Kong fully because Taiwan is Han Chinese culture but on freedom not on communism. And so even that that irritant of 30 million Taiwanese living, breathing, speaking, traveling freely is antithetical to the CCP control that they demand on the entire 1.4 billion Chinese citizens. And so they have made it their policy for a long time now to retake it, and they've spent billions and hundreds of billions of dollars building their military, building a capability to retake it by force. I think the the stumbles of the Russians invading Ukraine have certainly given them some pause because Russia was their main certainly their main military supplier and their mentor and had a lot of respect for the Russian military and to see its stumble as badly as they have will certainly give

them pause and in Phoebe's invasion you know, being a frogman, is the hardest kind of invasion to do, right? And it's one thing if you're a tank division on the Russian side of the border in Ukraine, you let the clutch out and you roll across the border, but doing an amphibious operation across 70 miles of open ocean onto a rocky island, generally into an urban area where there's mount immediately, with a lot of sanctuary inland that opposition forces can hide and fight and rally from and from the Taal and Cave system. That's a

more complex problem. And so I hope the Taiwanese take their defense seriously. The idea of Americans going and fighting there, I have a real issue with when the Taiwanese are not even spending 2% of their GDP, like most of our NATO so-called partners are not spending 2% of their budgets on defense. When the Taiwanese wake up and do that, you know, well, I hope the Taiwanese are not depending on US government to save them because they will be solely disappointed. And the other thing that's challenging, right, if you saw if you're China, I wouldn't lead with a straight-out invasion. They'll probably cause some issue or some crisis on some of the smaller islands owned by

Taiwan, right? Where there's a hundred or 200 man garrison of Taiwanese soldiers and I can see the CCP sending their maritime militia, which is basically a fishing fleet with some soldiers on board to go and see some of those islands like they've done throughout the South China Sea Even some of those from the Philippines in my travels in China I actually met the CEO of the Chinese state-owned enterprise. I think it was like China Port and Dredging Company That built all those islands of the South China Sea.

And he said, we never had it in our wildest dreams to build those islands. But we found the Obama administration to be so vapid that we just took it. Wow. Just like go. And so now they've built dozens of bases all through the South China Sea. And of course, they first said, well, it's just for trade purposes and for we're going to watch the weather. And now, of course, they're fully weaponized with surface air missiles and surface surface and airfields and ports. And they built little fixed aircraft carriers all through the South China Sea. And I understand why

they're doing that. I don't agree with it, but remember every threat, right, you've heard of the Great Wall of China, right? And that was to prevent Mongol horsemen from coming in from the north, right? Off of Mongolia and the Russian step. So they built that wall a millennia ago to stop that. This time, the Chinese built a great maritime wall of China because every problem they've had during what they call the century of humiliation, which started in the 1840s with the opium wars

in the British, right, which led to the Hong Kong Calune trade colony. First it was the bridge, then it to the Hong Kong Kaolun trade colony. First it was the bridge then it was the Americans 20, 30 years later and then the boxer issue where the Chinese resisted against all the western trade colonies that were in China around Shanghai and then of course the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy. All of those problems came by sea. And so China is trying to move their buffer out by doing that to the detriment of all their neighbors.

And it's probably had more of an effect of bringing all the neighbors together against China than what they really bargained for. What does it look like for the world if they do take time on? What does it look like for the world if they do take time on? Well, if they if it's a Here's the thing Putin kind of believed his own

He believed his own bullshit from his generals and intelligence chiefs that hey, don't worry We're gonna roll in there either. We'll come as heroes and it's all going to be over a few days And it was clearly not the case and is imperfect as Ukrainian democracy might be I have to commend the people that they showed up to fight right some of the women left the country The men went and did their part and and got it on Good on them if Taiwan can organize itself to them. If Taiwan can organize itself to to block and hold and to prevent an immediate collapse of the government and to keep resisting, it will force the rest of the world to get them

aid somehow and to close off and to sanction China and to make it more isolated. And so that's the, I think that's the calculus that is using PING and the standing committee and the Polo Bureau have to figure out. Because remember, they've spent hundreds of billions of dollars building their military, still untested, all those senior officers, and as much as we might complain about US senior officers,

all the Chinese senior officers have bought and paid for their positions. Their political generals completely nothing based on merit to get to those kind of ranks in the Chinese Communist Party. So the question of amphibious operation, hard, do they really know what the will of the time of these people are, right? Because if there's 29 million people, and only what, 3% decide to stand and fight,

3% and 29 is still a lot of people, especially fighting from an urban, defendable terrain. What about the computer trip? I mean, if I do take it. Taiwan's, yeah, look, the amount of computer chip production that's in Taiwan is significant and I think Taiwan semiconductor is spending $10 billion in Arizona right now, building factories. That's good. That's again, instead of spending $40 billion to Ukraine, let's spend more money or give a loan guarantee or something to move more of that capacity to America.

I think all the supply chain debacle we're feeling in the United States is a stark reminder that things can go to shit pretty quickly, right? Whether it's to be dependent on China for things as simple as antibiotics and Advil or painkillers or PPP or personal protective equipment or computer chips or batteries for cars or whatever. Look, the the free trade promise of NAFTA and of admitting China into the World Trade Organization was an elite decision made in Washington that has largely enriched the coastal elites and the private equity crowd and it has hollowed out many and most of middle America, right? It's led to wage depression, it's led to a lot of unemployment,

to opiate addiction, all those bad things that come from despair. Like I said a few minutes ago, of that average guy that wakes up every morning and is trying to feed his family, get their kids off to school, and keep a roof open for their head. They outsource the decision making to the people that are

supposed to be smart. And the elites in America have let us down again and again and again. And now I think the next administration, there has to be choices made. When you look at how America right after World, it's like the Cold War started immediately. And so we kind of immediately, it was us, and then it was a pro-freedom capitalism market, versus a Soviet government-controlled no-liberty, you're owned by the state.

With China, the paradigm was, if we, by trading with them and providing them technology, we make China rich that will make them like us, and that is proven to be an absolute fallacy. And so by making them rich, they've actually hurt a huge segment of our economy, of our manufacturing base, which has all been shipped to China. And they continue to steal technology without limitation, and they've kind of continued their same, I would say, totalitarian policies. And now, you know, even at the point now of putting in the whole social credit score and the monitoring in the surveillance state, it's kind of an

anewaly in nightmare going to mock. And so seeing that enough in China, I will fight with every last drop of my blood to prevent that paradigm from soaking into America. Moving into our last topic, what does the future of warfare look like? With all the new tech that's coming out, it's already, I mean, so in the past 20 years, it's completely different out there on the battlefield. And where do you think we're headed? Well as that siege and mario poll showed, that combat still comes down to controlling block by block, bunker by bunker, and that combat is not surgical, clean, technical, or whatever, and that

it still comes down to controlling ground and military victories drive diplomatic breakthroughs. So the future of warfare, however, people wanna think that we can techno wizardry our way into success. Yes, tech certainly has a role, and think about this way. The Pentagon talks about strategic offsets. Like what is the strategic advantage that we have,

that our enemies don't have, so that we can always be assured of a win, right? The first strategic offset was nuclear weapons, right? We're trying to always be out in front of the Soviets to out-nuke them if we had to. And then it went to precision strike, right? Like what we rolled out in the mid 80s to 90s, which you saw in Gulf War I, Gulf War II, now taken to an extreme amount where you can smoke a guy

in a moving, you know, SUV and kill one guy in the car, but not somebody outside the car, right? The most surgical precision strike because, you know, that's the mandate. But now, precision strike is in the hands of everybody from ISIS, right? Who can fly a drone and with a camera, drop a grenade from 2,000 feet in the air and fly and drop that grenade through an open hatch on a Humvee When it's proliferated to that level when you can do precision strike with stuff that you can pull together from a radio shack We clearly don't have the monopoly there anymore. So then it will be I think It's gonna have to come down to autonomy and some kind of autonomous weapons that can fly in a

to autonomy and some kind of autonomous weapons that can fly in a largely 100% jammed environment and still try to find the subjective and destroy it. So communication, navigation become exceedingly difficult. I think if you're in China and you wanna figure out how do we blind America, what are they dependent on? Combs, they've overcome themselves to death. So they probably maybe they crank off an EMP in the atmosphere somewhere to block or to either fry or block that satellite transmission. How do you navigate? I think it's very important to teach people celestial navigate Celestial navigate and and all the basics of of when all the other tech is stripped away. What are you left with?

so it's I think there's nothing that new and warfare It's just how you apply some new toy new new tools and In old ways. What about propaganda? Right here, I think about the other thing, right?

Despite all the tech, weather still matters. Weather so far in Ukraine has totally been on the side of the defender. Because Ukraine has got lots of farm fields. And what are farm fields covered with snow? They're muddy. is got lots of farm fields. And what are farm fields covered with snow? They're muddy. Unless it's frozen super hard, which even by the time Putin had invaded,

that was starting to fade. So now all his heavy armor vehicles and truck and logistic support are channeled onto very narrow, very defined roads, which are easy to target by ambush or artillery or whatever. But now as the fields dry in Ukraine as we get towards June, right, the biggest tank battle in history was June

3, the Battle of Kursk, just north of where they're fighting now, because the fields could dry as you had massive maneuver spaces for those kind of armor forces. So that's still well within the realm of possible. How much propaganda do you think, or how much does propaganda have a role in the future? Of course it does. It's always getting bigger and bigger. It's, it, look, propaganda has always had a role in warfare and it's as we become more and more glued to our phones in what's pushed in front of us. It's um, it definitely affects the morale, the will to fight or the will not to fight or to help somebody. And the Ukrainians have done a very good job of ringing

that bell for propaganda. I mean, again, Zelensky has come out with some great one-liners, very photogenic stuff, and they have... And look, in defense of them, it's their country, they were clearly invaded. It's not like the Ukrainians were actually threatening to invade Russia. Yeah. There's a pretty clear aggressor here, so it's pretty easy to pile on with propaganda on top of that.

What do you think the biggest threat to the United States is at this point? Our biggest threat as internal is again, if we can't even agree on what's male and female anymore, if we can't even agree on what is a free and fair election, if we can't even agree, right? And because the other attribute of a country is something that has defined and defended borders, right?

So we have one party that's intentionally erasing borders that is doing, I would say, some very questionable things around elections. If you haven't seen the movie 2000 Mules, watch it. I don't think anybody can say that the 2020 election was the freest and fairest in history after watching that, right? If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's a duck. And so that kind of election fraud must not happen again.

And I think the rule by elites has led us down an extremely dangerous path. The hegemony that America has experienced, right? Because we came out of World War II with a massive industrial base Undamaged by war, right? Japan smoked Germany smoked Russia smoked

We put some money into some of those places to help rebuild them, but those economies came roaring back But we have been kind of where we've kind of become like an obese triathlete. We're still kind of running, we're still kind of at it. But we're not in our prime shape right now, because we've done a lot of incremental bad habits which have never been cleaned up. So you think the recession is going to pull us out of this? What do you mean, pull us down?

No, pull us, we're going to come out. We would talk earlier about a recession, maybe a depression. Look, there's the monoron. There's definitely going to be... We can't have... There's been so much stimulus thrown at the economy. That's why there's so much inflation right now. And so you have to soak up some of that excess funds

with a higher interest rate, and that's going to cause a contraction in economic activity. And so the question is, you know, like Paul Walker, the chairman of the Fed in the 1980s for Reagan, right? He ran interest rates quite high, and there was some pretty strong medicine for a couple of years

Which soaked up the inflation but at the same time Reagan was cutting cutting taxes and cutting regulations and and kind of taken the boot off the neck of the American entrepreneur In what was then a much more competitive economy that we have now because we've allowed so much concentration in so many industries where you only have one or two major competitors in most of these places. So whether it's a single maker or a single buyer or product, in both cases, the consumer gets screwed. So the next presidency has to have a massively increased Federal Trade Commission DOJ that's

focused on breaking up monopolistic activity in return competition and that will allow people's wages to rise again Well, I want to wrap this interview up and and this is a phenomenal interview. Thank you for being here. Thanks for having me What's next for you? What are you got coming up? Working on some things in the communication space that will be spectacular. I'll come back and talk to you about it. Perfect. All right. Best love to and The Bullwork Podcast focuses on political analysis and reporting without partisan loyalties. Real sense of déjà vu sprinkled on our PTSD. So things are going well, I guess. Every Monday through Friday, Charlie Sykes speaks with guests about the latest stories from

inside Washington and around the world. You document in a very compelling way all of the positive things have come out of this, but it also feels like we have this massive hangover. No shouting or grandstanding. Principles over partisanship. The Bullwalk Podcast. Wherever you listen. feels like we have this massive hangover.

No shouting or grandstanding. Principles over partisanship. The Bullwalk Podcast, wherever you listen.