Shawn Ryan Show - #76 Erik Prince - 6 Enemies of Big Government, Combating Cartels and the Ukraine War | Part 1

Episode Date: September 25, 2023

So much has been happening in the world over the last few months–the war in Ukraine, the value drops in the US dollar, a recession and political turmoil. SRS wanted to get insights from someone who can see beyond the veil. That's why we're welcoming back Erik Prince, Founder of Blackwater and American Entrepreneur, Former Navy Seal. Prince explains the shifts in foreign policy and the looming dangers of a no-end war in Ukraine and the growing threat of the CCP. He shares his experiences contracting with the State Department and gives insights on what Capitol Hill is pushing. Shawn and Erik discuss the decline of American manufacturing and the security threats monopolies have created in business and politics. This episode is a "state of the union" from the perspective of one of the world's most experienced entrepreneurs. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://lairdsuperfood.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://shopify.com/shawn https://drinkhoist.com - USE CODE "SHAWN" https://goldco.com/ryan | 855-936-GOLD #goldcopartner Erik Prince Links: https://www.unplugged.com/upphone Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As a big time CEO, I demand to be the smartest person in the room, which is why I never let Wittenden Lublin Employment Lawyers in my office, because they make employees smarter by putting them in control of their options for workplace harassment, discrimination, and wrongful dismissal, and as someone who condones all those things, being constantly outsmarted would leave no rooms for me to be in. Wittenden Lublin Employment Lawyers Bad bosses hate us, employees love us. This episode is brought to you by Coca-Cola Creations. The sights and sounds of the future are a mystery to us, accessible only through our imaginations, but for the first time ever,

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Go to Sean Ryan, 7-6-2. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome, Mr. Eric Prince to the Sean Ryan show. Cheers, everybody. Much love. One last thing, most of you already know this. We have a ton of free content for you to post. You can monetize it, make money if you want. Go down in the description.

There are thousands of reels down there that you can download for free. All we ask is you promote the show. All right, love you everybody. I will see you very soon, cheers. was in a fragile spot the last time you were here, now more fragile. It's even worse. So you need no introduction, but former Navy SEO, former CEO got broken up by the Obama administration, but just, you're just a fascinating guy. You are brilliant when it comes to what's going on in the world and me and the audience

are all dying to hear what you have to say on all these various topics. So, but you know what the number one question was on our last interview. You know what that was? It was, why aren't you running for president in 2024? Because I think, certainly not the time for me to do that. I think President Trump has a significant momentum. I think he will be the nominee and he may not be the perfect vessel, but as a country we're not hiring a Messiah, we're hiring a president. And his willingness to take on

the political elite, the swamp, as you rightly called it, and when you look at the nonsense that happened around the 2020 election, I think it's a fair shot to give him a chance to go again and to finish what he started. Do you have any hesitations about him taking office again? There is no question that he loves the country. I mean, what guy living that level of life of comfort would step away in 2015 to run in the first place, and then with all the bullshit that they put him through, while he was president, and even after president, all these four sham indictments that they're putting him through, none of that would have happened if he just retired and played golf at Marlago.

But the fact that he's stepping back into the arena and the knives that are out for him shows what a threat that the political elite see in him. So again, an imperfect vessel, but the right vessel to push forward with. One, the only thing that really concerns me is who is he gonna put in his cabinet? Who's gonna work for it?

I agree. That's my concern as well, because he never really got control of his national security apparatus last time. But I think he did not understand. I don't think he fully comprehended the depth of how uniparty Washington had become and that a lot of those changes were not affected by the people he put in place. Do you think there's any other candidates that could take the job?

Look, Rhonda Santis has governed Florida extremely well. The extremely competent proven, I like his policies. He has not ignited the retail politics of it all in appealing to a broader market as much, but I wouldn't rule him out. I saw Vivek Ramaswamy at CPAC, but he's probably nine months ago. And I remember I said to my wife, I said, that guy really is sharp on the issues and he's going somewhere. And so, is America ready to elect a Republican,

an Indian Republican from Ohio? Maybe. I mean, crazy things have happened, but whoever it is, what's unproven about him is, can he take the unrelenting pounding of Washington and the left in the media attacking him in every way. That's a pretty hot fire.

And the one thing about Trump, he has a very stiff neck and it is persisted, unabashed, unafraid through withering fire. It definitely has a hell of a chin. There's no doubt about that. Like, um, I'm one of my favorite quotes from Churchill. He was speaking to the Canadian parliament. And he said a year ago, hair-hitler,

this is right as the bombing of London was starting. He said a year ago, hair-hitler said that he would ring the neck of the British people like a chicken. And I stand before you a year later and I say some chicken, some neck. And so we need a president that has, um, brass ones that are just, because it's a, it is a struggle for what is the future of the Republic? Is it a democratic Republic, or is it a rule of the elites with managed elections? And nothing less is at stake.

Does the president, one thing that I'm starting to realize is maybe the president doesn't have near as much power as what we think think or what the majority of the population thinks. The, the Constitution was well laid out with three branches of government,

legislative executive judicial. The real problem, we have so much funding, so much money has been thrown at the problem that it's created such a permanent state, unaccountable bureaucracy. That in some cases even funds itself off of fines, so the regulatory permanent state has to be reigned in. And actually this started, let's say the worst of it started in 1984 with a court case. And it was the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, versus Chevron.

And the Supreme Court ruled that the federal agencies, that the rules that they came up with, had the force of law. So now you can have bureaucrats writing policy that had the force of law, meaning felonies. And so the administrative state had an inch and they've made it into many, many miles of regulations to where you're like under the Obama administration, there was about 80,000 pages of new regulations coming out every year, not passed into law by Congress, but written by bureaucrats in all the different federal agencies as to food, air quality. I mean, you name it across the spectrum of your life. All those regulations had the force of law. And that's what has to be

curtailed. The Supreme Court just in the last four months, five months, had a positive ruling that actually curtailed some of those federal authorities to start to pair that back. That's the catalyst that caused our current problem. And like mushrooms, those rules and those truly runaway bureaucrats have gotten too much power. I think the most important issue for the president, I would say top three, is to rein in that regulatory state, is to reform civil service laws so that a government bureaucrat can be fired because basically if one's not let out in handcuffs under some indictment now, it's almost impossible to fire a federal employee and that can't be that way.

I mean Andrew Jackson and back in his day talked about the spoil system where the party that won the White House would won the bureaucracy. We probably need to point back to something like that because the permanent state, bureaucracy, and Washington, all tilts hard to the left. Like 92% of the political donations at the Justice Department, guess which party they go to. 75% of the DOD Democrats. That's pretty much across the entire federal bureaucracy is you have a permanent state of Democrats, of people that believe in big government, that believe in the regulatory

state, that don't really follow the same small government's paradigm that you and I do, making those calls and truly unaccountable to anybody and in Republicans with the power of the purse The most important thing they can do is to siphon is not siphon is to close off Is to close off that money supply because nothing will choke you bureaucracy out of existence faster than cutting off its money. And so if there's one thing somebody should do to any Republican is to pound on them to just say no, just just stop bundling all these massive hundreds of billions of dollars appropriations together, make them do their job, do it in smaller chunks, and say no and write much tighter,

fiscally sane policies. We are teetering towards bankruptcy as a country, now with $30 plus trillion in debt. So it's not like we have extra money to burn, especially with a lot of the ways that we waste it now. You want less stupid government, spend less on it. Why do you think there's the litamide? Why is there such a push to

grow the government? Big government. What is I don't understand the logic behind that? What do they want to accomplish? Is it is it total control? The other so the Republican, all the candidates, all the Republican candidates except Trump debated recently. And I was sorry that none of them brought up what I think is the most important topic. You have, you know, first of all, that we have to reign in the administrative state, but the other thing is we have to restore competitiveness across the American industry. A great book that I recently read, actually at the impetus of my daughter,

was called The Myth of Capitalism. By Jonathan Tepper, please read it, please have your audience read it. And it talks about, the real problem in America is that we don't have enough competition amongst industry. And the reason is, um, and, and, and just take a step back and think, you basically have four airlines left. And in most of the super hubs, there's one or two airlines that control most of the slots.

Banking. You have five of the major banks control about 50% of the nation's savings. You have BlackRock and Vanguard, two of the multi-trillion dollar money management firms controlling a lot of pension money and institutional passive investing money. You have beef processors. You have down to three or four beef processors. You have thousands of farmers across America. Those are the guys that do their really hard work, raising cows, doing their thing, and they get screwed by the middleman, the processors. And that's the same for beef, for pork, for poultry.

We've allowed, and again, it started really badly in the 80s. And when you look at the wealth inequality in America, it stems from a massive consolidation of businesses down into a few oligarchies. And that's before even tech. We'll talk about tech next. But the basic things of life, insurance. You buy health insurance, health insurance is regulated state by state by state. And so in your local market, you probably have one or maybe two insurance providers. market, you probably have one or maybe two insurance providers. You have one or two hospitals to compete with. The regulations feed the beast of big business because big business can withstand the delays and all the compliance nonsense that all these extra regulations that Washington

continues to pile on to big business. That's okay, they just stick it to the customers and they pay higher fees. All the small businesses, the little guys that are starting in their garage or their basement with a good idea, they get squeezed out, they cannot survive it. And so even public companies, you have a significantly less public companies now than you did 20 years ago. You have

a A consolidation and an elite that are making those big decisions, which is why They feel confident enough that they can have cancel culture and they throw people out of banks if they don't like your politics The the pricing that is charged is, they have above market average pricing that they get now versus what they've ever had historically because of the effectively, it's not a monopoly, but it's an oligopoly.

When you have a couple of sellers in the market, it's very easy for them to cooperate and to collude on raising prices to stick it to their customers. Or in the market, it's very easy for them to cooperate and to collude on raising prices to stick it to their customers. Or in some cases, what's called a monopsony, which is a, if they're the sole buyer. So if you have one large factory or an Amazon warehouse that's big in the area, they can really control what pricing gets paid for wages. Why are wages going down or not going up,

especially under dams? It's because they love to flood the market with more and more cheap labor that makes big business happy. And more and more regulations which keeps the small guys down and out. That is the paramount question that must be fixed in the American economy or the American Republic with a really healthy middle class is gone. You're going to have elites

and everybody else that is struggling to survive and that is not what made America great. That's a damn good point that I haven't thought of, you know, and listen, I challenge you and your readers. When you go in the grocery store, and you'll see six or eight different kinds of package meets, it's all just brand facade. It's often one or two different companies. It's different brands.

The, it's an umbrella company with a bunch of different names. Exactly. When you look at the consolidation, it's like a matrix that goes from 50 companies down to a few. And they keep a lot of those brand names functioning. So people have the perception

that there's multiple companies in competition, but it's not anymore Beer 80 90% of the beer in America is two companies So again, that's why they can that's why And has your bush can can put people in charge that hate their customers that much, that they do really stupid out of market, offensive stuff, and think they can get away with it. So whatever boycott in righteous anger that normal people feel towards Bud Light, in

the end, it's not going to move the needle because they have 10 other brands that people will still buy from. If you really want to protest against big beer, then buy from your absolutely local micro-brew guys, because that's who needs that help to survive. Very true. Well, Eric, let's keep going down the subject pipeline. But, you know, I know this is probably the only reason he came back for the gift. Came for the gummy bears. Right, well, there's something different in there. So I'm big on brain health now.

So there's some coffee. Okay, functional mushrooms in it. Lord knows I need some brain health. Yeah, so yeah, layered super foods, coffee, creamer and performance mushrooms. Thank you. Sports brain health. But

so I got a ton of questions for you. And then you have a list of stuff you'd like to cover as well. I want to start with the cartel and the border situation. There is roughly about 100,000 deaths a year. 109,000 last year. From fentanyl overdose is coming up through the southern border. We know that China's coming across, teaching these guys how to make the deadliest fentanyl known

to man. Now they're moving on to another drug, which the name escapes me right now, but it's going to be more potent than fentanyl. And China's also shipping in all the supplies for the cartels to make the fentanyl, and China is also shipping in all the supplies for the cartels to make the fentanyl. Now, a lot of these presidential candidates are talking about sending in the military, DeSantis, I interviewed him, and he wants to send in strike teams to hit these cartels, Ram Swamy, I interviewed him. He wants to utilize the military to combat these cartels. Ram Swamy, I interviewed him.

He wants to utilize the military to combat the cartels. What's your take on this? I think you got a very different take. Well, this goes way back to the 1840s when the Chinese started what was called their their century of humiliation. And you had the opium wars where you had trade colonies carved out which what became Hong Kong, Kalloon, on the southern China at the

bottom of the Pearl River. The opium that was pushed into China which came out of India at that point, definitely had adverse effects. And so what China is doing now is a double FU back to the United States for or the West period for that. It is absolutely CCP Chinese Communist Party policy to generate, create the precursor chemicals in China. Actually, not far from Wuhan, oddly enough, the same place that the COVID labs were.

So those precursor chemicals are sent to Mexico and to Venezuela. Eventually, they're made into labs in Mexico and pushed across the border through the cartel network. And worse than that, the Chinese are even directly intervening into Mexican politics to support very leftist candidates. Amlo, the Lopez-Obrador who's the president, is a committed hard leftist, and the Chinese want to keep him in office because he is not the law in order candidate. He was the hugs and love candidate against the cartels, promises to take no stand.

And so Mexico daily, weekly creeps closer to becoming a full-on narco state, where the cartels really have that say. But it is a, the cartels make as much money moving humans as they do drugs. And in some cases, they get both because they'll have the the people that they're smuggling across also carry a backpack of drugs So they get a they get a tofer because they'll charge 15 20 thousand dollars to move a human but when that human moves 50 thousand dollars with the drugs they're they're really making money all the way so it is

The the problem starts to eat much farther upriver than just going after cartels. Action should be taken inside of China. And when the Secretary of State, US Secretary of State goes there, has a meeting in China and they say, well, yes, there's chemicals coming out of China, but it's really just a matter of the mislabeling it and accidental shipping it. It is a willful ignorance and denying the problem that the Chinese are actually behind this because it because the US continues to send Treasury Secretary, Commerce Secretary diplomats pleading to have meetings with the

Chinese, not that they're getting anywhere, but they think the point of a meeting is to have another meeting, and it is a, almost like I said last time, I said, we're going through a period of the late 70s now of a Carter administration, and that's the same outcomes we're seeing in a lot of places, a lot of problem areas around the world. So to answer your question, yes, cartels, big problem, it is funded, directed, organized by the Chinese Communist Party. And so dealing with the cartels is dealing with the symptom. I think we should deal with the root cause, which is in China. And sending... Look, the US's had two major incursions into Mexico. One was about 1845 where we literally invaded and went to Mexico City. We don't need to do that.

And there was certainly banditry in the border areas around 1900, Panchovia, etc. Done with mixed effect. If anything's going to be done on a kinetic basis, it should be done through the smallest and tiniest of covert action and to really put the cartels against themselves. Can you elaborate on that? How would you do it?

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Performance may vary consult with your tax attorney or financial professional before making an investment decision. Fair enough. Would you or would you let me out of life, would it be a good idea to send in special op teams to take out specific leaders? Look, they, the cartels operate without consequences. And so giving them actual consequences, if you say, if you keep moving fentanyl, if you keep moving XYZ,

then this will happen. There's ways that can be communicated to them, that they would respect. The reason the FARC in Colombia was finally brought to heel is because the FARC is a, effectively, it was a leftist guerrilla army which was fighting the government which then effectively merged with a lot of the cartel activity to become the muscle for bigger cartels in the jungles of Colombia. The reason they were brought to heel is because using signals intelligence, flying aircraft around, figuring out exactly where their camps were, and they dropped 500,

500 pound laser-guided bomb in the middle of that camp, again and again and again, and they finally got the message. So yes, there is some nuance, kinetics that can be done, but remember Mexico is also pretty much our largest trading partner. And so, anything that's done has to be done with a mind towards protecting the Mexican people. And it's a it is a terrible. If you're a Mexican policeman, get and pay $100 a week maybe, and some cartel guy comes to you and say Plato e plomo

Silver or lead take my money. Let me pay you Or I'm gonna kill you and I'm gonna kill your family and you're gonna watch them die The biggest issue what's causing that amount of drug demand is the US drug policy. Is the US consumer spending money? So for everybody that's smoking crack or any of the drugs that are coming north of the border, clean up your act. And if America would get healthier society-wise, it's definitely having the most negative policy you can imagine on the Mexican people. What about China? How do you, how do we deal with them? What the cons of this is when it comes to this issue? They are a very heavily trade dependent

economy. Trump was right. When Trump was president, I could say the Chinese were truly scared about what Trump could do with trade policy with tariffs, etc. And the idea of throwing a 20 or 30 or 50 percent tariff on some Chinese goods definitely sends chills into Beijing. And so having a much harder line policy and a reshoring of a lot of the production that we took for granted that was being done in China is now slowly coming back to the Western hemisphere. A lot of that, I mean, I've had a contract manufacturing business since 1997. manufacturing business since 1997. And it's been hard making money as a manufacturer in America,

because of the taxes, the cost of regulation, labor costs, all the rest, it's been very hard. And the wind, it was like a wind era that was pointing one way. And Trump came in and and and and and interiffs and regulatory change and all the rest. The demand signal to make in America again was was marked and distinct. And so a lot of that manufacturing is coming back to America or at least back to friendly more friendly countries. Mexico, Canada, Columbia, even and elsewhere in South America. The US should have a much more of a Monroe doctrine focused policy on the Western hemisphere is the American hemisphere and trade regularly and often with our neighbors to the south.

If we miss that, the Chinese are an ancient society. For 19 to the last 20 centuries, China is one of the single largest GDP in the world. If it wasn't for the anomaly of the Chinese Communist Party taking power in 1949, the Great Leap Forward, it killed 50-something million of their own people, starved them by the worst of worst central planning when Mao said, well, we're going to collectivize farms and then, well, the birds are eating too much of the grain, so we're going to kill all the birds. Literally, task people with killing birds within the insect population exploded and you just had this, it's a fascinating and horrifying read to read about the great leap forward

that happened in China in the 50s and 60s, millions of people starving. Then you had the culture revolution in late 60s, early 70s, which was basically a precursor of what we see with this woke revolution with Mao's little green book on how to be a good communist and how to enforce that. And it really went crazy to the point of arresting any businessman bourgeois, any intellectual, anybody in China like that. And when Mao finally died, Ding Xiaoping said, okay, we're not doing that again. And the first trip he took was to Singapore. That recast, that started the opening of China because Singapore, at the end of World War

II, was a shitty little fishing village and a fort. But Lee Kuan-Yu became effectively the CEO of Singapore, and he dragged them forward and developed the heck out of what is basically a city state on island. And to where, geez, even 20 years ago, they had a sovereign wealth fund north of a hundred billion dollars, a savings account. They did it in a country with no water, meaning no fresh water supply, really no land for agriculture, but they did it on trade. They closed the currency trading loop

from when San Francisco closed and London opened. Now Singapore opens so you could trade currencies 24 hours a day. They made themselves the indispensable economy. China saw that and said, okay, we want to embrace those parts of capitalism and we'll call it capitalism with Chinese characteristics. So that really led to the unleashing of hundreds of millions of Chinese laborers that wanted

to make everything with really no environmental restrictions, with no labor restrictions, none of those things we appreciate in the West. The issue, right, when the Soviet Union, after World War II, the Soviets were allies. But their mandate, their mindset was, we are communists, we're gonna spread this communist revolution and this worker's paradise is gonna overtake the world. That was the Soviet's mandate. And they showed their hand right away,

remember when they blockaded Berlin? Because the Russians had conquered what was East Germany, but then Berlin was declared an open city and you had the Soviets in part of Berlin and you had the French, British and Americans, but later became West Berlin. But in 47, I believe, the Soviets closed off all the road access for the free, for the west to get to Berlin and it necessitated the Berlin air left.

But right away, the Soviets, the Soviets, the Soviets showed themselves to be our opponents, our ideological, economic opponents to Western capitalism, Judeo-Christian way of thinking. The Chinese, on the other hand, have always been communists, and they've 49, they take power, and then they go in the late 70s, dingjiao pang, who's succeeded in Mao takes over in the 80s, they start to open up Western businesses like we who we can make huge money there developing China and the elites in Washington and the capital of Europe said if we can make China rich, they'll become like us. But it hasn't happened.

Yes, we've made China very rich, but they have at their very, very core remain committed Bolsheviks. And so their hooks are in to our institutions, our universities, our business elites, our big money managers, et cetera. When the super elite money managers are managing tens of billions of dollars from China and they're doing it on a percentage basis, they're taking a management fee where the Chinese Communist Party is picking them tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and then these guys are making apologies for China's behavior. That's a problem,

right? That's part of the hooks that have to be clarified. When China is funding movies and they're controlling the content of what's in those movies, Right? Even when good on time crews for at least having the stones, because the Chinese were freaking out that there was an actual patch of Taiwan on the back of Tom Cruise's jacket in Top Gun. The fact, oh my God, showing Taiwan on a cruise patch on a Navy flight jacket. That's the kind of obsession that China has about controlling the message

and influencing that message, and they do that on a daily basis in the United States. American universities take tens of millions of dollars a year in research grants and exchange for a lot of that IP, making its way back to China. We have hundreds of thousands of Chinese students that pay a very full tuition rate to a lot of American universities and they're addicted to that money. And again, that kid is taking the seat of an American

that could be in that seat otherwise. And that Chinese person that comes here and studies, maybe gets comes here and studies, maybe gets an advanced research degree, goes back to China and takes that knowledge with them. The Confucius Institutes, which are funded by the Chinese Communist Party, present on many, if not most, American universities,

large state level, even some private ones, are done to promote the message, the propaganda message of the Chinese Communist Party in talking about their position on the South China Sea and on Taiwan, on trade, everything, basically amplifying everything that's wrong in America and everything that's great about China. Again, funded subversion inside the United States. And then you have it down to the, it's called the United Front Work Department, which is organized in China to send maybe a member of the PLA over to study at a US University or to place them to work

at an American company, you would say, that's just straight out espionage. And the US has not done a very good job at because of fears of racism or all the buzzwords that Washington hates to have on the kind of organized subversion and espionage that's going on against the range of elite American intellectual property development that we have. It's a problem, it's different than what we face in the Soviet Union times because we knew our Soviets were our opponents and we addressed it that way. Here the Chinese have gotten their hooks in a lot over the last 30, 40, 50 years. You know, I just want to reiterate something for the audience. We are scared to call out Chinese spies over fear of racism. That's where we're at right now.

We have Mitch McConnell, who's married to a Chinese woman, has a Chinese shipping company controlled by China. We have our own money and stuff. We have the ESK, my name, the politician that was sleeping with a Chinese spy. They just- That's what we'll. Yes.

We had, was it a couple of weeks ago, we just found out to Chinese spies inside the U.F. Navy, I think, while I was working on a submarine, the other one, I can't remember. Yep. Nothing's being done. Well, at least those guys are removed, but, but the the counterintelligence screening obviously needs to be far more aggressive and diligent because and here's the thing when you when you see what Xi says Xi Jinping, the ruler of China, the dictator, he says prepare for great hostilities not prepare for our pure competitor that are trade rival all the rest the kind of the Washington thinking of what China still is. Oh no, China is talking about full on preparing for full on hostilities. And we sent Janet Eulan

to Farmer in a treasury over there to talk about climate change. Yes. So that's the true disconnect of reality of what's important in Washington versus what our opponents are thinking about. I mean, I just, I don't see a way out of this. I just talked to this guy last week, exporter of the Afghan resistance. I think part of the reason that what draw happened the way it did is because they took over all the lithium mines. No, I don't think we didn't withdraw from Afghanistan to give China the lithium. I, no, I know there's sadly there is a trillion or more dollars of value in the ground in Afghanistan that the U.S. never even helped the Afghans fully develop because we're dumb. And because we have...

How did we miss that? 20 years we've been there. There's been this green initiative for, since I can remember, 20 years we've been there and we don't help them develop minds to get the lithium out so that we could supply ourselves with batteries. So now we're gonna take them off from China. Well, it's worse than that, Sean.

I mean, I talked about it last time, but before it even gets green, the hydrocarbons that the US required, right, to have tens of thousands of forces in Afghanistan requires a lot of gas, diesel and jet fuel. And all of that was coming from the med that we would boat down through the Red Sea to Karachi, truck it up all the way up into Afghanistan, which

is why the fully burdened cost of that gallon of diesel fuel was between $250 per gallon for the time it got there. But in just southeast of Mazar Sharif, up in the north of the country, in bulk province, there's the Amodaria oil field, which was discovered, drilled, proven by the Soviets in the 1980s, and when they left in 1989, they cemented the wells, left it properly, and left. And so, the US is there, and we're there for 20 years. The real problem is the US is a lousy colonial power. And with the mindset of Washington, there's an unending supply of money, to send the money from Washington that's easier than figuring out how to build value locally. The Brits had a great, with the East India company model, and we should talk

about that more later, they had a great saying that a functioning workshop is better than a battalion of soldiers. And, doing, figuring out ways to actually make value and face it. A society needs energy, it needs water, it needs building materials to start building out a society. And what we never did in Afghanistan was, while we over empowered, plounds like Carzai, Organi, who were were just corrupt awful people. Do you know what Karzai was doing before?

He was a hot dog vendor. He had a hot dog cart on Capitol Hill in Washington. And the CIA put him in a position of power because he could speak good English. Not because he was a great unifying candidate. Your kidding me. Fact. Carzai had a hot dog cart. Wow, but.

I mean, Masoud, the lion of the panjir, the kind of the leader of the Northern Alliance, was a great leader and the logical leader to turn to, but Al-Qaeda killed him with a suicide media crew that literally took a camera packed with explosives into an interview with him and blew it up two days before 9-11. So at least the Taliban knew or the Al-Qaeda knew that's guys going to be arrival and they took him out. But over empowering the Afghans to let them make these decisions meant that the Chinese bid for the Amodaria

oilfield, and they sat on it, not because they're waiting for us to leave, it's because they were too scared to operate it. The Moss-Inaq mine, which is one of the largest single copper deposits in the world, is only 30 miles south of Kabul, has been mined for at least a thousand years and still the the the rights were sold to some Chinese entity because they blackbagged meaning paid cash to some corrupt Afghan official to get to the rights to it. But again, functioning workshop better than the battalion of soldiers, a functioning mass INOC mine, we could have sucked 10,000 Afghans, Taliban, out of their

fighting pool, and given them picks and shovels, three square meals a day, prey five times a day, and we would have taken the equivalent of an infantry division worth of Taliban off the battle space and let them produce copper. Generals, the problem with our generals is they don't think about what controls the arteries of commerce what really makes an Economy work because their money their money in their mind comes from Congress and it just appears in an account For them to consume they don't think about how the money gets there in the first place And so generals think about controlling battle space Not about actually controlling hearts of minds by employing people and feeding people.

And so so many opportunities like that were missed. And it really comes down to, well, and this is the problem in the Sahel with collapsing states there, with places America has been, that I think we forget what built our society in the first place. One of my favorite movies is an old Tom Cruise movie called Farneway. Poor Irish kid has nothing in Ireland, makes his way to America. Nicole Cruz is the daughter of some wealthy Irish elite.

And they go together, but they eventually make it to Oklahoma because he wants land. He wants to own land. In America, it gave away a lot of land to settlers that would come in legally and claim their land and they could own it if they could farm it. And I think the, it's really easy to forget what the underpinnings of what made our society function. And that really became a clear to me when I met a guy named Hernando de Soto, he's a proving economist that, so he grew up, he is probably 70 years old now,

but in the 80s, he was managing a construction company in Switzerland. Grip and Peru, somehow winds up in Switzerland, he's managing a construction company that's very well, makes a ton of money, goes back to Peru. Peru is a shithole. They have huge problems. They had this intractable, unsolvable communist insurgency called the Shining Path, the Sanderro Luminoso. And it's raging and it's causing all kinds of problems. And he thought, why is Switzerland great? Why is Peru not? What's the problem? Because the proving people aren't dumb,

they're hardworking, they want to be successful, what made Switzerland successful. So you really dug in, and I think it's important to remind people of what makes capitalism possible. And you said the difference is, you can get titles to land, clearly and simply, and and and defensively, you can get titles to land in Switzerland. You can open a bank account. You can get a business license. You can get a business license. You can get a banking account. You can have, if there is a commercial dispute, you have some means of arbitration or a fairly transparent, honest court system.

And he basically mapped how an economy works from the very bottom of the ladder. Right, think about what you've done here. You did the Sean Ryan show. You had to get a lease on some commercial space. You had to get a trademark on your stuff. You had to be able to enter into contract with advertisers. And you have to have a release form.

You have all those basic elements of contract that we take for granted, right? If you want a new company in America, you can call a Delaware business formation place and you'll have it in an hour for a couple hundred bucks. That wasn't existing. All that basic infrastructure, regulatory, commercial code, etc. It doesn't exist in Peru.

And that's what's keeping people really down. Because if you're in a lead, yes, you can pay this guy and this guy and you get this license you navigate and you coordinate your monopoly, right? And they're doing fine. But the poor guy who's just trying to farm. So he grows something. How does he get it to market? Probably doesn't have a road that's reliable. He can't enter into contract on his very limited number of buyers because he can't advertise because he doesn't legally own his product and he can't, doesn't have a business or a bank account to receive

money. So he's limited to cash only. It literally is the roadmap of how to suppress somebody and keep someone down. So DeSoto made a recommendation because again, he had a communist insurgency just raging, causing carnage in Mayhem. He said, enough, let's give the Compassosinos, the country people, rights to their land, clear title. Within a year of doing that, it was over. People own their land. They started to have a path forward of capitalism to say, this is my land. When I put the trouble into clearing it,

and telling it, and fertilizing it and growing it this is this I will defend and so and and good Good borders, good fences make good neighbors and good trading partners and that started to build the basis of society So just so don't build a consulting business and you wrote a couple of books. One of them is called Invisible Capital, recommended, and the other is the other path. Obviously, the other path other than the shining path. I'd encourage your viewers to read that as well.

It gives a great appreciation of what, when you see what happens in other countries, or it doesn't happen, versus what we really take for granted in America. And why we have to fix the regulatory state? Because all those basics of business formation, of commercial code, all those things, the more we let Washington and big government screw it up, the more it suppresses. It's another rock in the rucksack of the little guy who's starting at the very bottom of the ladder to climb up. I then are reconnected with the Soto about 15 years ago. I mean, so forgive me, but I went to Hillsdale College,

which is a very libertarian school that accepts no money from the federal government. And so reading about DeSoto in Hayek and the Austrian School of Economics and a very free market approach, was that's what I, that was, fortunately, it was my experience in college to do that.

But I reconnected with him because I'd had dinner with a Middle East monarch, and we're talking about the basics of building an economy and affecting reforms like Dishoto had done in small places like Peru or in other countries where he'd kind of built a consulting business about how to declutter their economy. And Dysoto came and gave a... so, this is amazing. The monarch is immediate cabinet. We're there at this lunch. And Dysoto gave this amazing display, talk about something they'd done in Egypt, that they'd

recommended in Egypt just a few years prior. And what they'd done, they looked at Egypt again, Egypt, 100 million people bursting at the seams, got a lot of people, not a lot of capitalism, a lot of corruption, very, very hard for people to climb from the bottom of the ladder to start up. And what they found is about 45% of the Egyptian economy was considered gray market. Not black, it wasn't illegal, it weren't doing criminal stuff, but the fact is the bureaucracy and the corruption made it impossible for a normal guy to start a business

and to make something happen. You're gonna give an example. If you're a baker, right, you're baking bread. You've had a lot of flat bread, you've had a lot of flat bread in the middle east, right? Yes, we have. That poor guy, to be a legal baker and to grow his baking business beyond his hut on land

that he doesn't even own, the licensing process, and he mapped it. It was like 35 steps long. And he paid, and they let him sent people around to figure out, okay, this is the bribe you have to pay for this one, and this signature, and this signature, and this signature, just to do a baking license. How do you get land for it? How do you get the import permits for the wheat or to put the entire supply chain together? It was more than a year. It was 14 months of wages just in bribes to get the license.

It was two years in duration just to try to go through the process just for a baker to become a baker. Worse, about 40 to 50% of the population in the country occupies government housing that they don't own that belongs to the government. And so they can't get a mortgage on it. They can't sell it to their son or daughter, or they can't sell it if they want to move. It's just frozen capital. He identified trillions of dollars of frozen capital in Egypt alone between land that was not owned, real estate that wasn't owned, all of which combines to keep the poor poor and Egypt is run effectively by the military.

The military controls way too much of the economy to the detriment of that society. And that's a model that you could show pretty much anywhere. Pakistan, same problem, all of Africa doesn't have that kind of infrastructure. And that's what the blessings of the founding fathers laying out a new land, and it's interesting. George Washington was his first job. He was a surveyor. He understood land. He understood title. Heck, I even remember I learned a lot about land title when I started Blackwater because I had to, originally contracted for 3,015 acres, and then we did the survey. I picked up an extra 85 acres on the deal because there was a difference between the

Torren system, which was something that went back to the George Washington days up to the present. But the other brilliance of owning land in America is you own it from the surface to the center of the earth. Really, I didn't know that. Yes. So you own unless you conveyed the mineral rights to someone else, you own from the surface to the center. That's why fracking, that's why a lot of the extractive industries flourish in America, not in the UK. Because a UK farmer owns the surface, but the government owns underneath.

And so the farmer doesn't benefit if someone comes and puts a drill rig in his farmland. He doesn't really have a position to take. So that's why so much of that that we that's been effective at making America energy independent doesn't apply in Europe. So the benefit of the new world, of mapping, of codifying private property rights and commercial code so that the very, very poorest, the people with nothing can start to climb the ladder and with hard work, indiligence, and savings, they can make it work. Coming back to the lack of competitive in America, what's eroding the income disparities, all those things is a

direct results of the regulatory state and very big business, which has been allowed to consolidate at a very unhealthy level, is what's causing that income disparity and these costs and this inflation. You've heard of John Rockefeller, right? So he donated Central Park to the city of New York. That's the kind of wealth we're talking.

At its peak standard oil controlled 90% of all the hydrocarbons in America. Think of that. What other country, what other company controls 90% of something in America? Google search. We'll come back to that. So because of the truly robber barons level, right? Vanderbilt controlled the railway, Rockefeller controlled hydrocarbons. They've pushed through laws. The Sherman Antitrust Act and then Clayton, which was another antitrust enforcement. Frank Tetti Roosevelt, a bombastic, balsy guy, his main campaign was in taking on these big trusts,

these big cartel-like behavior of the major industries, which caused really big income disparities in the late 1800s, or the the 1900s as these guys really consolidated and started to dictate terms to the government. Finally, when, and it's actually one thing that Franklin Roosevelt did well in the 30s was anti-trust enforcement. And you can see average wages started to improve and costs normalized. And that worked in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s,

quite well. But then in the 80s, sadly, Judge Bork, who was a Supreme Court nominee of Reagan, was not confirmed, but his stuff on anti-trust enforcement was terrible. Because he thought, well, if only if big business is great, as long as it drives efficiency, ignoring the fact that the fewer and fewer businesses that control everything means that it's very easy for them to coordinate and to cartelize and to set prices and to stick it to the

man. It's a stick it to the little guy. The, what, what, what made the rise of Hitler possible was big cartels, cartel-like industries. There was the guy that built IG Farben, which was the biggest super-conglomerate in all of Germany,

in the 10s, 20s and 30s. He saw what Rockefeller did, and he said, we're doing that in Germany. So they had some super industries, super, as in super large, super industries, super, as in super large, that was very easy for the Nazi party to control the influence. And you think about World War I,

Germany was defeated. I meant to take him, I'm sorry, I didn't, I have a collection of German banknotes. From 1918, 1920, you can see they're beautiful, they're very articulate, it has one mark, five marks, 20 marks, but then their inflation starts, and it goes crazy. Then you have 20,000, 50,000,

one million, one billion,000, 50,000, 1,000, 1,000,000, 5,000,000 mark notes. And it got so bad that you would have a wheelbarrow of 5,000,000 mark notes to just buy a loaf of bread. So hyperinflation takes off in Germany in the 20s because of really bad economic policy, a cartel-wise-like industry, and what do people do? They elect Adolf Hitler. We must never let it come to that, and respect the institutions, respect the Constitution, our founding fathers gave us the document, and we ignore it at our peril. But what really made, going back to Germany and in cartel like businesses, people talk about communism. Communism is state ownership,

state control of the means of production. Fascism, not, was government control of private resources. Much easier to control 10 oligarchs, 10 super wealthy super big companies versus 100,000 small businesses, small business entrepreneurs. So the super controlled cartelized industries, much easier for the Nazi party control and influence and to get them to be fellow travelers in their awful voyage into trying to, for them to launch the Fatherland. I feel like we're sitting there today here in this country. Again, individual, owner operator, entrepreneurship businesses is the enemy of big government and control. So everything we do has to be to promote individual entrepreneurship,

individual liberty, free speech, private land, private ownership, private capital, that is the enemy of big government and big control. The three things, it was the mission of the US Army after the defeat of the Nazis. D-Nazify, demilitarize, and decartelize German industry. So believe it or not, the US Army did a very good job of breaking up those big industries so that they wanted to educate by force, we were occupying the country as necessary, to the German people that you can't have political liberty if you have all your businesses

in the control of a few big super majors. And so literally the US government broke up those German businesses and effectively democratized them in the late 40s, 50s, which is why the German economy came roaring back and is still one of the most productive ones in the world. But US did that. So we have the anti-trust legislation from 125 years, 130 years ago. We've done anti-trust work in the United States before and you can look at the graphs, read that book, the myth of capitalism. It shows it as clear as day. We must do that again to break up all these super major industries. And I challenge your readers or your listeners in their daily

activity as you look at big companies, you think how many of those, how many competitors are there because it's not nearly as it's perceived. And that is the root of what's wrong in America today. How far do you think we're going to see this go? I mean, you're talking about land ownership. Do you think it's going to intrude owning land? Well, look, anytime, anytime what is the, anytime government puts restrictions on what you can do with your land? How much do you, if you're paying the taxes on it, and

they say, and you say you own it, but you can't do 10 things you want to do with land, that's the, that's the issue. Look, if, if, if, if government starts taking away private property ownership, no, it will be in a civil war long before that. I mean, because even as bad as Poland was under Soviet rule, 45 until 1989, a lot of the land in Poland was still actually privately held. Now, they couldn't do a lot of what they wanted with it, but at least there is a, there is a,

it is healthiest for society, the more people own land. And owning it is far better than renting it. I, an immediate problem that I see, even is, is big corporations, big pools of capital that are buying up all kinds of private housing and turning around and renting it.

You're basically making it into Airbnb properties. That must be curtailed. If you're a mayor, if you're a city councilor or a county commissioner, cut that out because the advantage will always, always, always go to the super big guys because when you've had low interest lending by the central bank the people that have the benefit the most from you know quantitative easing low interest rates to infinity like we have the last 30 years it seems is the big bans, sorry, is the big, the big borrowers because they can borrow at the very, very cheapest rates. And so they can always afford to pay a little bit more for that house and always squeeze out the little guy.

The responsibility of government, right? Why did, why did, why did government start after Cain killed April back in Genesis? Government exists to prevent murder and to establish a basic level of justice. The role of the U.S. government should be to ensure individual liberty and ensure equal treatment under the law, not skewed treatment under the law based on wealth accumulation and political access and lobbying access. Thanks a lot of sense. Let's say a quick break.

When we come back, I'd like to start on Ukraine, Russia, why are we actually there? There's a lot of different theories out there and what do we do to get ourselves out of this situation? What's behind a life electrified? What's lighting up our communities? Howling more carbon-free commutes and boosting homegrown innovations?

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And it's on right now, no waiting necessary. You have the latest phone, now take advantage of a great price on a 5G subscription phone plan. It's the perfect deal for anyone who could use some savings right now. Subscribe today at publicmobile.ca. Different is calling. All right, Eric, we're back from the break. Russia Ukraine's always at the top of the media headlines. I got a couple of questions. One, why are we so involved in that conflict? And why is Putin so hell bent on this war as well?

I've heard, I mean, it's obvious that he wants the two locations on the border that are already under Russian influence. But I keep hearing this other thing that he, it has to do with NATO and the woke agenda moving closer to his border. Do you think there's any validity to that or is that just social media internet nonsense? net nonsense. Vladimir Putin is a traditionally trained KGB officer, operated in the 90s, in the 80s at the height of the Cold War. And as Soviet Union collapsed, the Empire collapsed, and I think the West unnecessarily embarrassed Russia, which is an ancient and proud country.

And the promises that were made, hey, we're not going to extend NATO farther east. We're not going to, not a threat all the rest. Of course, the Neocon paradigm that is dominant in the Democrat foreign policy now is one that Russia must be destroyed and embarrassed and brought to heal, etc. I think that's a huge mistake. When you look at the resilience that the Soviets, that the Russian people showed in World War II, I think it's easy for us in America to forget or to ignore history, right? We watch saving private Ryan, and we see movies like that and think we won Russia of Soviet Union died defeating the Nazis.

22 million? Yes. How many Americans died in World War II? 400,000. 250,000 in the European theater, 150,000 in the Pacific theater. That's it. 400,000, 22 million. While the US was just invading North Africa in Morocco Operation Torch, 1943, by then the Soviets had erased 650,000 members of the German order of battle at the Battle of Stalingrad alone. Do you know how many Russians died at Stalingrad? 1.2 million. Okay, so they paid a very heavy price in defeating national socialism. And so if you're a Russian, if you're Putin, a traditionally trained KGB officer who thinks of the days

of Peter the Great and the greatness of the Russian Empire and making St. Petersburg beautiful again and all the rest. At no time since May of 1941, did you have more unfriendly forces at the border of Russia than now with NATO? Look, I get the Baltics, Poland, in wanting to make partners of and allied partners of them, but there's a lot of stuff we do that is unnecessarily antagonistic. You don't need to be flying B-52s across the Baltic Sea constantly in Moch nuclear missile run. So there's a lot of things the US did that were very unnecessarily provocative and the idea of adding Ukraine, which was

never that much of an independent country, always part of the greater ruse. And very much a intermixing of Russian, Ukrainian language, even a lot of the east of Ukraine, speech Russian, Harkiv, Donetsk, Donbass, Crimea, talking about making them part of NATO, don't my idea, really dumb. And so it's all part of the FU Russia, FU Russia, FU Russia of the Neokon agenda, and I would say linked with the permanent state military industrial complex in Washington. The Russians had said consistently, don't do this, or we're going to react. And I guess in keeping with the unsuriusness of how Washington negotiates, just like we sent Janet

Yellen to Beijing to plead for meetings and to talk about climate change, the State Department sends Wendy Sherman, who is the Deputy Secretary of State, to dissuade the Russians, and she had been she'd been a social worker. So you're gonna send a social worker diplomat, sure she's a nice woman, but not the kind of imposing figure to sit across the table from Putin who sits on the top of a gang of oligarchs and Russian generals and badasses

to say, please don't invade Ukraine. We will be very upset if you do. It's just not the right image. I mean, I think back, an early mentor of mine, again, named Dick Allen, who was Reagan's first national security advisor, and he was sent after the election in 1980

to meet with the Mulas in Geneva, because at that point you had 52 American hostages that have been held for a year plus. The failed rescue attempt, very much a low point in American foreign policy mojo. His message is very simple. If the hostages are not released by the time Reagan makes it from the front steps of the Capitol to the White House, we're going to turn your country into a sheet of glass. And he's the right guy to deliver the message. He's a huge Scotch Irishman with huge hands, huge jawline. I'm sure that was delivered with all the necessary bravado. And they got the message,

and sure enough, the Haashtas are released. It is a lack of seriousness in Washington sending unserious people trying to do serious state craft anymore. So long answer to a key topic, why Ukraine, why now? We spent a lot of money. The Europeans have not spent nearly as much. I think it's a great evidence of what a joke NATO is. And even how hollowed out our own industrial bases, that it's a struggle for the US and the West to keep up with just the basics of artillery shells that we have to depend on the Koreans

and Indians and other random supply bases around the world to even fight a very limited front land war or to support a country that's doing so in Ukraine. There was a great book I read called Freedom's Forge. So coming back to who really defeated the Nazis? The Soviets did most of the heavy lifting. They killed most of the Soviet or most of the German army. What made it possible was American industry. How do you go? You know, because the German army was had only like half trucks still used a huge amount of horses to move their logistics stuff. How do you make it

possible for the Soviet army to go for Moscow, to go all the way to Berlin? 600,000 US made trucks. 600,000. Made in Detroit, shipped to Mermansk, down, driven. That kind of American industry cranking out. Freedom's forged talks about an unbiased because I'm from Michigan and come from an automotive manufacturing family. We were making a major combat aircraft every six minutes. A liberty ship, they could put it together in a week, just a staggering amount of production and that's, you know, pee for plenty works Still in that kind of war How does it end

Grille quig, real quig I thought I heard you mentioned that our industrial it's it's it's are you saying it's shrinking? It's it's hollowed out. It's a fraction of what it used to be Do you think that there's a possibility? I mean, I know we're sending a ton of equipment over to Ukraine, which is a ton of money. I don't know if this is just wishful thinking or not, but are we on the precipice of a new era of weaponry? And we're just sending our old junk over there. If we're just sending our old junk over there. Well, I think for all the love affair of this super glorious high-end American weapon systems, they haven't had the catalyst effect of success that has been promised. And the nature of warfare is changing absolutely.

When you think, you know, the first strategic offset, right, with the, with the, you at Cold War starts, US versus Soviet Union, East versus West, the first strategic offset was nuclear weapons. And so we competed with the Soviets as to who could throw more tons of nuclear weapons. And then precision strike. US gets really smart on delivering a bomb from an aircraft or a artillery shell or whatever with high accuracy.

And that starts late 80s, 90s, early 2000. Now that's pervasive. Not you have ISIS, you know, terrorists with a commercial quadcopter can deliver a grenade into the hatch of a humvee from a thousand feet overhead. Right? So everybody has precision strike. The next, and what does that mean?

That it means any weapon or person that can be localized, identified on the battle space can be targeted immediately. So big, heavily armored, slow, or command bunkers, or anything that has emitting a lot of electrons can be targeted for annihilation immediately. So it's gonna rapidly have to disperse, and make your force very small and mobile and agile to be much more cavalry-like in your movements.

And obviously, there's gonna be AI and robotics, and a lot of those things you're gonna drive towards more and more unmanned weapons. It's a stark reminder that big ships can be targeted by lots of missiles and overwhelmed from weapons that are fired a long, long, long ways away, well beyond horizon. So for the aircraft carrier, US Navy, surface vessels, etc, it's a very, very dangerous time. As the Russians have even experienced moving boats around the Black Sea, whether they're targeted by Ukrainian Neptune missiles or jet skis that have been hot-rotted to be operated

from beyond the horizon and even fire or even launched in an autonomous mode. Again, anything that can be found can be targeted. That is a huge problem. And now I even see there's one of the popular weapons being used in Ukraine is a cardboard drone made in Australia. There was originally a resupply drone, possibly repurposed cardboard. It doesn't show up on radar. It's autonomous and it delivers a 5KG warhead P for plenty still applies. And if you can have cheap and accurate, it will have significant effects in the battlefield. The problem is,

the Russians are really good at conventional war. They do the combined arms, infantry, artillery, tank, warfare exceedingly well. In the summer of 1943 was the largest tank battle in the world history. It was 6,000 tanks. Just north of where the heavy fighting is now in Ukraine. It's called the Battle of Kursk. It was the last big offensive push that the Germans tried, because at that point there was a bulge in the line surrounding Kursk that the Soviet's held.

And so the Germans tried to do a pincer movement from the north and from the south. But the Allies, the US, the Brits, specifically the Brits, because they had broken the Enigma codes, the German Army codes, they knew what the intentions of the German Army were. That was passed or leaked to the Soviets, who then proceeded to build up multiple lines of heavy heavy anti-tank defense. And so when the Germans came with thousands of tanks and hundreds of thousands of dudes, they just exhausted themselves and got consumed, and that was the last offensive push the Germans could ever muster and from then it was a slow-manage retreat all the way to Berlin. The Russian generals are not idiots. They know the terrain that the Ukrainians will

want to come through and they have built multiple lines in that in that break from last fall until the summer. The Russians were very, very busy building one, two, and three lines of defenses. Now, when some breathless article comes through this, how the Ukrainians have broken through the first line of defense, yeah, there's at least two or three more to go. And you're going to chew through a lot of manpower and equipment to try to do that. And even once you're through, that doesn't mean you can reinforce that attack because you have to the amount of logistics flow to feed a tank army. And the move is really hard.

It's very, very hard. And it's exceedingly hard if you don't have air power. What made the maneuver warfare blitzkrieg offenses of the German army possible, were stucas and air power over the battle space. And it was really enabled the Russian army flying storm ravix, a Russian plane, and a lot of US made, like P39 and P59s, but aircraft with a 37-millimeter cannon right in the nose, it was air power with ground power that made those breakthroughs possible.

And air power is not made much of an impact over the Ukrainian theater right now because of the amount of missiles both sides have that makes it a very, very unfriendly place to be. So I don't think, well, here's the other thing. Putin got fed a lot of hubris. You'll be, you'll be, you'll be, you know, viewed as liberators. They'll welcome Russian troops.

It'll be great. It's going to be over in five days. There's a great report written by the Royal United Service Institute, which is a British military think tank on the UW Uncommental Warfare preparations that the Russians had all up until their invasion of February of 2022. And they were so confident it was going to go that they'd already rented apartment spaces for their guys in Kiev. Because they thought it was going to be that quick. Obviously, it's not. A daylight assault into an airfield by helicopters didn't go well for them.

The Russians were slaughtered. So all those those soft-type missions really did not go well. And they got bogged down. They're logistics. Usually the stories about the 30 and 40 mile lines of logistics. That's the other thing that really affects warfare, despite all of our technology, is, now this is our Ut tactics professionals, plant logistics, you have fighting seasons, and you have mud seasons. There's even a word for it, it's called the Great Resput pizza, the Great Slush, when you take muddy, great farm fields, and you cover them with snow and

ice, and then it melts, It's not to sink a tank We're reaching the end of fighting season now and then you're gonna go into mud season in the fall or it's impassable and then by December You'll have some very very hard frozen conditions again possible to roll tanks and stuff across the fields So Putin got fed obviously bad intel. And so his invasion didn't go as planned.

And so now he's stuck. He's kind of like riding a tiger that he can't get off. Because if he gets off the tiger and says, oh, okay, now it's peace. And you know, one of the things that really brought down the Soviet Union in 91 was tens of thousands

of pissed off veterans that came back from Afghanistan saying, what the hell do we sacrifice all that for? That helped throw over to the government. He has lots of those problems. Lots of really damaged, I mean, he's lost hundreds of thousands of dudes, so he's got parents, siblings, spouses, and wounded veterans that gave a lot, with nothing to show for it. So if he can't show a win, he's toast.

He's got an election in March of next year, but he has to get through a presidential election. Yes, he's locked up a lot of the opposition, right? His opposition on the left would be the Navalny's and the other free speech guys, but he's also been locking up the really, really right-wing super Russian nationalist hardliners trying to secure his flanks, trying to stay on top of this tiger. It's an exceedingly uncomfortable position for him, I'm sure.

I don't think... I don't think the war is on his side that he's ready to end until... at least until 25. Because of Russians, they look, still making all kinds of money on selling oil and gas and wheat and all those basic commodities, the world still needs those and people will find a way to buy it longer that goes.

And this is where it's really not in our strategic long-term interest. The more we push Russia away from Europe and into the servitude of China, that is not not not in our interest, that is exceedingly bad. Long term, historically, culturally, we in the West and in Western Europe have a lot more in common with Russia than we do with China, or Japan, or Korea, or India. And that's the really the tragic thing, the criminal thing, that the whole Russia collusion bullshit, the lie that was spun by the left to damage Trump. It prevented Trump from making a deal with Putin that would have brought him away from the orbit of China into a, look, we don't have to be their best buddies, but we can trade with them.

And even if it was, best of it was frenemies and not enemies, that's a better position of respect. And a much better in American interest, in Western nation, thinking, making them our trading partner that we don't have to agree with all time, but at least have mutually respect for instead of, well, now we effectively have a proxy war, and it's not healthy. Now I'm hoping that a lot of the previous appropriations were done under a Democrat

control congress or publicans have a obligation to rein in the spending and to try to bring that war to a rapid close because there's a lot of Ukrainians dying and a lot of Russians dying every day. And I don't think the lines are going to move substantially in either direction. And so it's just going to be like a World War I trench warfare scenario where guys are just into the into the cold room and dying. And remember the Battle of the Psalm, the British lost 60,000 dudes in a weekend. Just awful. What the Russians are doing is recruiting widely, and they're paying more and more. It's like a thousand guys a day, sent to the front, and about 400 of them are dying.

So it's just, it is a meat grinder, and I can't imagine it's a lot different on the Ukrainian side. What is our motivation? What is our real motivation to be there? It's that Neokhan attitude of we can rush to destroy Russia all the rest. Do you think there's any validity to the money laundering, these supposed bio-labs?

I don't know about the bio-labs. Look, what I will say is, because I try to buy a business in Ukraine, long before this started, it was Motorzich, which was a company that made most of the jet engines for used in Ukrainian aircraft like Antonovs or in Russian or Ukrainian made helicopters. They made turbine engines, and they were really good at it and they were low cost. It was an interesting window into Chinese interest because one of the things that Chinese still don't do that well is make turbine engines.

And super important for our fighters, F-22, F-35, whatever, to have way better engines that the Chinese had actually spent at a billion dollars to illegally and elicitly through a bunch of shell companies try to buy Motorsich. And then when the Ukrainian government figured it out, they blocked the sale, but by then the Chinese had gotten some hooks in and were basically hiring away a lot of the engineers and line production guys, etc. because they didn't really have a job anymore in Ukraine, brought them to China. And sadly, under the both the Obama and even under the Trump State Department, we were blocked, I was, with some Western investors,

blocked trying to buy MotorsH by largely idiot bureaucrats at the State Department, which is not the, unfortunately, not the first time we've been blocked trying to do something positive for America. Yeah, yeah. So, I don't know about the Biolabs. Yes, there's an enormous amount of money being blown Yes, there's an enormous amount of money being blown in that process. This industrial complex love to spend more stuff and turn the inventory.

Absolutely. It shows how absolutely pathetic our industrial base is compared to what it used to be. 20 years ago, we had 100 major defense contractors. Now we have five. It's in keeping with the rest of the consolidation that's been allowed to happen all across society, especially the case. That's why all of our weapons systems cost way too much, our way too slow to get to market, and our way too overly complex. And so you saw, complex. And so you saw a little bit of faster adaptation during Afghanistan in Iraq because it was different sources of money, where if it was a general or a lower level service

chief that said, I have this urgent and compelling need, I'm going to buy that capability and get it to the field versus the normal procurement process, which is ponderous and ridiculously slow and horrifically expensive. Who are the five defensive contracting companies? Boeing, Northrop, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Lockheed, and Lockheed. Lockheed's the biggest. Lockheed. Lockheed's the biggest. So they're overcharging for all their, they're, they are wastefully charging, meaning they carry such massive overheads because they can, they can. And cost plus contracts do that. There's two ways you do contracts or for government procurement. One is a fixed price. And the other is cost plus.

So fixed price means I'm gonna provide this aircraft service and it's gonna cost this much per hour. You wanna use it? Great, if not, that's it. The cost plus incentivizes the contractor to spend more, to maximize their cost because the higher the cost is, the more they can

add their fee to it. And that's how most of that government procurement stuff is done. And it is the inverse of the kind of competitive stuff. And I even saw a glimpse of that, even with the contract manufacturing business, if we're bidding something that was going in a military vehicle, it had a completely different pricing mentality, what the customer was driving versus if we're making industrial lighting parts. Because that purchasing guy is on it and looking to maximize best quality, best price, best delivery time, completely different priorities for a government buyer.

Blackwater, back in the days when I was doing blackwater, but 95% of our contracts, I wanted to do firm fixed price. And we did. Why? Because coming from an automotive, hyper competitive industry where we really learned to own our costs, we made good margins because we knew what our costs were and we drove our costs down as much as possible. We got hyper-efficient so we could out-compete everybody else.

I think that's one of the reasons the big Washington hated the idea of a black water because we were a tiny company. We never did anywhere close to a billion dollars in revenue, but we our management team and our capability we punched way above our weight in the idea of a of a fast innovative company that would Go and do and go and dare was antithetical to Washington Yeah, like remember Sudan melted down like two months ago? The Wall Street Journal reporter contacted me.

He said, hey, are you doing any evacuations from the 16,000 Americans that are stuck in Sudan? And even General Milley was calling to some of these NGOs trying to get these American citizens out of Sudan. And I said, no, I'm sitting this one out. as NGOs trying to get these American citizens out of Sudan. And I said, no, I'm sitting this one out. I said, but wouldn't it be nice if there was a private military company

that had its own aircraft that were self-insured that would go and solve that? I said, oh, yeah, as a matter of fact, there was, but it was smashed by the Obama administration. What did they say to that? He didn't comment and the Wall Street Journal didn't, didn't quote, didn't run my quote. I'm sure they didn't comment and the Wall Street Journal didn't, didn't quote, didn't, didn't run my quote.

I'm sure they didn't. Is everything happening with that? No, not my, not my problem. Wow. Do you think, what do you think about these black budget programs that everybody's talking about with the, with the five military industrial complex companies? You see all this UFO disclosure, free energy. There was the first congressional hearing about it all.

What does your take on that stuff? Do they have these super weapons? Are they developing them? Within Raytheon Lockheed? I don't know, man. I don't know. I mean, are there black budgets? Absolutely. Should there be black budgets? Absolutely. Should there be black

budgets? Absolutely. When, you know, when in the 50s, when we're trying to figure out what the heck the Soviets are doing and to go to completely end run the ponderous slow DOD production process. The CIA went to Lockheed Martin's Gunc Works and said, build me a plane that'll go Mach 3 Plus, it'll go 80,000 feet, that will fly faster than any Soviet missile even flying can get to it. Make sure enough, Kelly Johnson, with a slide rule, built the SR-71, still the fastest aircraft in the world

when it retired just 15, 20 years ago. It's an amazing piece of engineering. And like I said, they did it with slide rules. So what, what a few people, a few picked men can do, given money and authorities, to affect the course of a nation's history is spectacular. Another book you must read is called To Daren to Conquer. The book is written by Derek Leapart and it's about basically special operations in world history affecting truly the course of history, from Alexander the Great all the way through to today. Oh, that sounds very interesting. It's encouraging, right?

You come from the special operations mindset and you know the kind of people that will do that. And it even makes the point, the guy, the author is Derek Lee Part. It's one of my favorite books. It's probably one of my most recommended reads because people that want to consider joining the military, but being in a soft type unit, it's, uh, it's very empowering because it says because it shows you holy cow.

Well, look at what Cortez did with, with a couple hundred or Pizarro or Sir Francis Drake. I mean, Sirfansha's Drake on behalf of England, because they were raiding against Spain, sailed all the way now in a 150, maybe a 200-foot wooden sailing ship, sailed from England all the way down to the East Coast of Argentina, at tax from Spanish gold ships, sailed all the way around the southern tip of Argentina

through the, what does now the Drake passage, the most dangerous, you know, 50 to 80 mile an hour winds, 40 foot seas, again on a wood sailing boat, up the west coast of Chile, attack some more boats, and you couldn't make it back. So what do you do? He sailed west, sailed all the way around the world, around the southern tip of Africa, back to England. Amazing stories of bold special operations might have people that just kept it together and did not just multi-hour or multi-day, multi-month, multi-year missions. Pretty enlightening. Very interesting. I can't wait to check that out. How do we wrap this up in Ukraine? It is in the interest of the West to bring Russia away from China. And so is it, is it how much of the interest of the US taxpayer is who controls Crimea, or Marriapol, or Dnetzks, or whatever?

Ultimately, those terrain issues, to me, it comes down to matters of governance. Who governs that ground the best? And like we talked about earlier on how do you get land title or a business license or all those basic elements of capitalism that allow people to live in function? That's ultimately the contest that we're in globally between two very different paradigms. One is what built America in the first place, the American individualist capitalist model versus a leadist government run

image of the Chinese Communist Party and it's close, I would say, intellectual second, a global leadist click that controls much of the means of production and dictates terms to the masses of what they will do and how they should live. That's the real competition, and my money is still on having read books like to Daren to Conquer and to see throughout history that the right people properly motivated organizing to compete and to flourish will still win out.

It's hard, a lot of suffering, a lot of struggle, but we stand on the shoulders of giants. When you look at what our forefathers built in the uniqueness of the United States of America, and even the inherent advantages that we have, even by how America is laid out. You have nowhere else on earth, do we have more navigable rivers

that are effectively superhighways for carrying heavy goods, wheat or manufactured goods, whatever. From the Mississippi, all the way up to Ohio, the Missouri, all those rivers, the Great Lakes infrastructure. We have two basic borders of non-hostile countries. One, becoming not hostile, but becoming challenging because it's becoming more of a narco state. So we have to address that. But the tens of millions of acres that we have of really good, arable land, again,

advantage to America, it's ours to screw up. And in this idea of an American Civil War or a great divorce or whatever, no. Now, America needs to stay united and it needs to get back to what made it effective in the first place. Man, that's, it almost seems impossible to me. It was so long ago that it seems like we were united and we're so far apart. Listen, but think about, okay, but think about, we actually fought a war and we killed 600,000 Americans to settle the issue of secession and slavery. And we certainly came together after that. And we came back better than ever.

We did. There's just so many, I mean, you have, it just seems like two totally different ideologies. I mean, you have, you literally have people that are saying that a man can have a baby. There are people that think that it's okay to mutilate children. There are, you know, for the transgender issue, which I know we're going to talk about. And back then, there was a mentality that it was okay to own another human being. Very true. Also pretty diabolical. Exceedingly that pure, unlimited evil. the idea that you can own to their human being okay, maybe that's worth getting in a fight over I mean it took a civil war

Yes, and there is a lot of other issues that have been settled, you know the the the the income disparities and the you know, it's funny You know, it's funny. For as much as the New York Times hates private security and trashes the industries that we came from, there were labor disputes so violent for so many years in New York that they had not just private security in the lobby of the New York Times, but private security with Gatling guns.

Really? Gatling guns. Really? Gatling guns in the headquarters of the New York Times. That's the level of labor violence that occurred there. We're a long ways from that. We've been there and the anti-trust enforcement and the leveling of the playing field for the average American mitigated a lot of those problems. So there's a lot of things that can be done politically,

and it may be it's a uniting of the of the populist left and the populist right to say, business is too big. I can agree with Elizabeth Warren on some of these businesses being way too big and should be broken up and some of these regulations to be fixed. It's a fact. But the more regulations that are thrown on like Dodd-Frank, which was done supposedly

after the financial crisis in 0809, tens of thousands of pages, and effectively outlaws, or makes it exceedingly difficult for small banks to succeed, that cartelizes banking. Lending in finance is certainly a precursor to having a healthy economy for small businesses, small farmers, first time home buyers, et cetera. The basic first few rungs of the ladder of a capitalist climb.

Let's talk about the Wagner group. Okay. Last interview, if I remember correctly, you were approached to stand up the Wagner group, which you declined. Correct. Correct on both. Now, can we actually talk about that? How did you get approached?

There was a Russian guy that made, see, the idea of private weapons manufacturing in Russia for Bowton, but this guy had made basically miniatures. Not a full size AK, it was like a miniature AK used for display purposes, but it fully functions. So you knew a lot of those. They approached me via him, invited me to Moscow in 2011. Now this is during the great love fast and Hillary Clinton's there talking about the great reset between Russia and the United States. And they invited me to Russia. Actually went shooting with Alpha Group guys.

They do some really crazy stuff on the range. Like shoot each other. Oh shit. Yeah. Seriously? Yes. To the point of your, my back to the firing line, a guy will come up and blindside you from behind. the firing line, a guy will come up and blindside you from behind and as you're turning and falling,

you have to draw and shoot the Ipsick target, he's holding on a stick next to him. That shit's real. Oh yeah, did it. You did it, I did it. Now, but what I didn't do is they are actually wearing a plate and they're shooting each other in the center of the plate in their chest. Now, I saw no point in that, nor did I want to be part of that, but they missed their chance to to kill me by accident, at least. But yeah, there was some some craziness. And they were carrying all American weapons. Really? They were carrying rifles that they'd taken off at dead Georgians just three years before.

It would be a tragedy if we were losing one person to drug overdose every day. Even five, seven, or 12 people, it would be unimaginable if 15 families a day received news of a lost loved one to overdose. But in Canada, we lose 20 people to overdose every single day. That's a crisis. At CAMH, we won't back down until there's no one left behind. Donate at CAMH.ca to help us treat addiction and build hope. So they had a high preference for higher end American tech. But they remember they had done,

I'll be with some of those guys after that, and they had done 900 kill capture missions the previous year. 900? Yes. Inside Russia, mostly against Dagestan and Chechnya, because they had their own Islamic terror opposition problems in the south of the country. But they, I was shocked by how they didn't really do mobility very well, because they walked

to every mission. No helicopters, no air, no nothing, the enabling tools that a so-com guy would take for granted and getting to the mission area to do the mission they didn't have. So anyway, hard man. I said, you know, thank you left, never heard from them again, and, um, and sure enough, then a, you know, the little green men, the unconventional hybrid force was used when they seized Crimea and the eastern parts of Ukraine in 2014. And then they used them in, um, in Syria, extensively and effectively. Why?

Because at that point, the Syrian army had gone to exhaustion, was going to fail. The Iranians had sent in thousands of IRGC and Lebanese Hezbollah, Iranian proxies. They were at the point of exhaustion because they had taken so many casualties. So the Russians made an intervention and they used the pointy end of that spear was Wagner group. So they have embraced the capability of a smaller footprint approach to exerting security in presence in countries.

The really frustrating thing is in about 2018 some friends of mine were approached asked by the government of C.A.R., Central African Republic, which four years before had a coup and an uprising and now the country had kind of devolved into two big warring factions, the Salika and the Antiballaka, which were supposedly a Christian and a Muslim gang that were fighting each other. Throughout it, there were just both criminals and they were looting the country. And the country had previously collected about $600 million in tax on all the gold, diamond, copper, tin, valued exports that were leaving the country.

And now they were doing zero. And the mission was to collect the taxes, to basically to establish a mining police force, collect the taxes on behalf of the government. And in doing so, basically choke out this gang activity so that there was safety on the roads, safe trading posts where people could mine legally and trade. The government collected revenue. It would work. Kind of the same way that trading posts guarded by the Pinkerton's would have worked in the American West. Because as much as people think the American West was settled by the US Army,

the Pinkerton Detective Agency was about six times as large as the US Army then. Six times as many armed agents as the US Army settling the American West. Why? Because banks, railways, telegraph operators, needed security, the government wasn't doing that. So back to CAR.

There's a UN embargo in the country. to C.A.R. There was a UN embargo in the country, of course, State Department blocked any such innovation of doing that. The Russians didn't, they rolled in there with 400 their advisors and now effectively Russia owns Central African Republic. Wagner Group takes about a billion dollars a year out of those mines. It's a big funding source for the rest of their efforts. And so that was their first, I would say, success. They had made an attempt to do some things in Mozambique. They did not do well against the jihadis. They had a bunch of their guys killed and beheaded and ambushes. But the Russians have used them as a as a vanguard in controlling some scuttivian gas fields in Libya, now in Mali trying to do in Burkina. They're all over Africa, huh? Yes. Yeah. In the same way, the East India company, which

The East India Company, which, again, I think it's important to remember what built America in the first place. It was companies. I challenge your viewers to look at the American flag and look at the flag of Malaysia and tell me what they see that similar. The American flag was made from the East India Company flag. All that Betsy Ross did was cut the Union jack out and sew in a field of blue stars. The rest of our flag was the East India Company flag. The East India Company operated in India mostly for trade with a security element. And that was the model that worked there for hundreds of years. They overplayed their hand, Britain did in the United States and the colonists rose

up and pushed them out, but put a small number, pushed them out. 40% of the American... no, sorry, yeah, 40% was pro-crown. I was another 30% in the middle that didn't really care. There was 30% that were pro-independence in the American Revolution. Only 10% of that 30%, 3% of the American population actually took up arms against the British crown. Interesting. This competition now in Africa, why have all these French? Right, there's been like seven coups in the last three years. No, eight coups now,

because Gabon just fell as well. All French legacy colonies. It is a collapse of governance. It's a question of the legitimacy of the government that's there. Are those governments, well, first, before even the jihad issue enters in, are those governments providing any means for the people to start crawling off the bottom, wrong of the ladder, to start moving up? There's no land rights, there's no ability to get a banking account, all those, the most basic elements of capitalism, which is what the US should be doing in the capacity building and aid programs that we do, but instead it's mostly spent on gender issues and social engineering issues, which is not important to the people, and actually quite offensive. Yes, the Russians have certainly played a role in stoking the anti-French hate,

doing social media manipulation. That's definitely a Wagner function. They're involved in that. Absolutely. They're interesting. Sure. Look, as a company, that's what I want to ask. What is it? Is it a It's not really, that's what I want to ask. What is it? Is it a brand name? Is it a brand name? Is it government or is it like what you had with black water for our private entity?

It is, I don't know of their corporate structure, but there's not a company called Wagner Group that's hiring these people. There's maybe a company that does some aviation, there's another company that does manning, there's another guy, because Putin, sorry, Pregozion started as a caterer. Well, firstly, as a restaurant,

and he was a popular restaurant, got to know Poutine those guys, and he started doing catering or like log cap type contracts. This is the guy that started it. Pregozion, okay. The guy who's not dead. So, starts as a caterer or a restaurant, catering, log cap type stuff for the Russian Army, builds a PMC, builds horizontally to, you know, basically full spectrum operations from

political messaging, manipulation, social media campaigns to training of police or training of military to blended to fawn combat forces, offensive type stuff, which is what you've even seen them doing in Ukraine. But this competition, these collapses happening all over Africa is a, stimulated by that messaging, b, maybe some recruitment and backing of a few of those military officers to say, yeah, you'd be better at this, you should do it and we'll support you.

And it's a lack of consequences from the west of going after them, right? The US answer to all these clues is, oh, we're gonna to sanction those guys. So they can't get a US or a French bank account or a European bank account. So what? The real scary thing is you have all kinds of different jihad organizations flowing around the Sahel. Ever since Libya, ever since the Obama administration took out Gaddafi in 2011, millions of those arms leaked all over the Sahel and empowered all these

jihadis, and they're basically self-funding off of mining, particularly gold, kidnapping, extortion, etc. If those various different shithead jihadi organizations unite under one strong leader, you're gonna have a super Taliban, al-Qaeda-like capability all over the Sahel that will take out those countries completely. And at the top of that, they've had a demographic bloom because like 20 years ago, the Gates Foundation started doing all kinds of vaccination programs

there. And it reduced the childhood mortality, which is wonderful. Wonderful for the kids, but the law of unintended consequences, you have this bloom of military age manpower in countries with no prospects for a job, no embrace of education, or capitalism, or no plan for them to start climbing the ladder of getting better, except they have access to money, and weapons, and a unifying ISIS-like jihad mindset, which is going to be trouble for a lot of those already very thinly, you know, like, barely functional states. It's tough to call Niger a country. And most of those countries in Africa don't even meet the far-for-meeting the minimum human development index

that the UN sets for these countries. So if the government isn't even doing the most basic of things for its citizens. Is it really a country or is it just a aligned run of a map? It's a, it is a... Interesting reality that we thought of. It's a very challenging, very challenging reality. It's fixable, it's solvable. And if you look back at history as to how it was done in the past, that's what we'll be turned to again. And it is not going to be done by sending the 82nd Airborne Division there.

It's fascinating to see the cause and effect, you know, take place from, from, and again, the vaccination program. You know, what did that cause? And then you just described it. And then I'm not saying it's the vaccination cause problem that caused it, but it definitely caused a massive bloom of more population that survived. Now they're all standing around saying, what do we do? Well, I guess we go make jihad. And this gets solved by establishing some level of credible security,

getting people some kind of property rights where they have the means to farm, or the means to better themselves and defeat themselves. And when you look at what was done in Africa, well, let me back up. I'll tell one story. Back in 2017, when I was really pushing the Trump administration to change the strategy in Afghanistan. I were in Op-Ed and Trump saw it and he wanted to do that,

but really the best way National Security Clicks said, no hell, no, that's a terrible idea. Everything I recommended was based on what worked for the East India Company for 200 years, which was better to employ people than to fight people. Two, if you're going to do security, you have to have locals, but you have to have locals led by professional expats. It's effective like training wheels to keep the bike upright. And I was speaking at the Henry Jackson Society in London, which is like a, almost like a heritage foundation on foreign policy stuff. And I was laying this out,

speaking unabashedly about the positives and some of the negatives about the East India company that it worked and stopped being ashamed of it because this is the nature of how you should do stability operations because, again, much better to employ people and to build out the economy with a credible security capability. At the end of the Q&A, this Pakistani guy stands up and I thought, oh, here it comes. He's going to attack me. And he said, everything that Eric said about the East India Company is exactly right. And he said, I don't like these damn communists that have been trashing everything the East

India Company did. I have gone back to the original records of the company and found the following. Yes. The East India Company built tens of thousands of miles of irrigation and made it possible for the entire subcontinent to feed itself, not just to feed itself, but to export food, so it ended famines. They stopped the debtor prisons, which were common all over the subcontinent, and stopped the warlordism. They stopped the Hindus and the Muslims

from slaughtering each other by the thousands and tens of thousands and they stopped Sati. You know what Sati is? I don't. It's wife burning. Wife burning? Wife burning. Burning your wife alive. Yes, it's a old Hindu awful practice. My favorite statue in London and I was out for a run one morning and I was in Trafalgar Square. So, you know, Lord Nelson, the victor of the battle of Trafalgar, which defeated the French Navy, over in the corner is Charles Napier. And I caught my attention and said this statue was erected from the donation of private soldiers. So I looked into Charles Napier and sure enough, he'd been a battlefield commander for the Duke of Wellington, helped to deliver the victory at Waterloo against the French, and then he shipped off to India.

And he's going to be the governor of one of the four trading colonies, or they called them presidencies in India. I think it was in Kolkata. And as he's getting there, he arrives, and the locals are building this funeral pyre in the center of the city. He goes, what's this? And they said, oh, yes, you must respect our tradition. Tomorrow we will burn into this Indian noble has died.

And tomorrow we're going to burn his wife, and she was alive. He said, come back tomorrow. So that night, he had his East India Company forces erected gallows surrounding that funeral pyre. He said, I will respect your culture and your respect to ours. In our culture, if you burn a woman, you're a murderer, and I'll hang every one of you. If you touch her, no more sahti.

Amazing. If you're not confident enough in your culture to do that once in a while, you're screwed. And I think we, the United States, lost a huge opportunity in Afghanistan by doing something just as bad. You know what botchabazi is? I don't. You probably heard of it, but it's that horrible practice of passing a young boy

around to his uncles and cousins or whatever to be brutally sexually exploited. Awful. Not only do we not stop it, the Obama administration penalized SF guys who stopped that from happening. They didn't kill, they just tuned up some corrupt shit bag police commander who was raping his T-boy. They caught him in the act and they beat him up and they court-martialed him for it. If we had done in 2002 and we said no more, basha basi, we don't care who you are,

if you're a warlord or if you're the junior man, no more, we see you doing it. It's firing squad the next day. Every woman in Afghanistan, even the mothers of every Taliban would have been on our side. Why? Because no woman wants that for their child What?

What a fail what a fail of the generals to say I Represent the United States military We stand for certain things and there's some things I will not overlook and and what a what a what a missed opportunity Thank God for all those women in India. That Charles Napier said, not on my watch. Man, I gotta just, you know, our military leadership is just on a downward slope. It has been for a long time. They're just spying. All things have been flow, man. All things have been flow. What do you think about, come on, even during the American Civil War, how many Lincoln had to fire five heads of the army until he finally gets to grant?

Uh, Winfield Scott, I'm a Klanlin, a couple other guys, he finally arrives on grant. I love, I just read, Ulysses Grant's memoirs. What under-praised American hero? Because Lincoln, right, he gets recognized as the guy that enters slavery. No. Lincoln is the guy that signed the emancipation, emancipation proclamation.

Grant is the guy that made it possible. Because he made it possible with steel and boots. And I love his story because he made it possible with steel and boots. And I love his story because he was in the army in the 40s and 50s. He had a problem with alcohol. And he was basically fired. He either resigned from the army or we're going to court martial you. He wound up at a post out in Oregon.

And so he's a failed army officer. He goes back to Chicago, works for his father-in-law, some shopkeeper in Chicago, the war starts, and so he's hating life. I mean, he had extremely low point in his life. The war starts. Illinois puts some brigades together. He goes to work in the brigade, some junior staff officer, and he just keeps winning. After battle, after battle, after campaign, and he's victorious in the West, Vicksburg defeats the Confederacy in the

West, and then by then Lincoln promotes him. And sure enough, I mean, he had still an alcohol problem. And he said, Lincoln said, I can't do without this man. He fights. And, um, Grant became quite a, quite a war hero in the media praised him and one time he was pictured on horse with a cigar and so he ended receiving thousands of cigars as gifts from a grateful American public and he smoked all of them because he made it through the war victorious but again it was you know remember the 64 election victorious, but again, it was, you know, remember the 64 election was McClellan, who was a youthless coward of a general that Lincoln fired. McClellan was running against Lincoln in the 64 election, where McClellan was running as a Democrat saying, we're just going to settle

this. We're going to stop the war. We're not going to, we're not going to finish it and keep the United States united. And Lincoln's down to the last, you know, ounces of energy and goodwill trying to fix this. And then Sherman, working for Grant, went to Atlanta, went to the sea, huge blow, and it worked. But I love Grant's story because he never really intended to be president, but then Lincoln is assassinated. Johnson was useless. Grant selected right after that. And he's president tried to clean up the swamp and the corruption and all the rest. Mixed results doing it. But then he goes to start some investment fund after that. Having not really made any money, but he took his savings and put it into that. And he gets swindled by a, by a total con. And so

now he's literally the guy that saves the union, former president of the United States. And he's bankrupt and worse than that. He's diagnosed with throat cancer from all the tobacco. And he goes to start writing his memoirs and he gets an awful advance in Samuel Clements. Mark Twain comes to him and says, Mr. President, let me help you. I'm going to publish your biography. And so, Grant, in a race against time, goes up to this cabin up in New York State, not taking any medicine, any pain medicine for the horrific throat cancer,

and he finishes his memoir two days later, he dies. Wow. But it became a national bestseller, amazing and provided for his family to the end, and save the Republic. So I think it's important to remember, and we stand in those kind of giant shoulders to say, shit was real for him.

I mean, he went through tough time, low times, alcoholism, working for a father-in-law that you can imagine the family dynamics there battled through the entire Civil War All those highs and lows, but he kept doing and finished it's finished strong at the end So however bleak it looks it can always be it can always be worse Well, you know, we kind of started on the topic of weak military leadership I wouldn't continue down that road who are some

strong military leaders? Are there any left? I have very little interaction with any of them. And I have skin in the game and that I have sons serving. And so I will hold commentary on that. Roger that. Where do you, but suffice to say, I love the US military. It is a fantastic institution that,

well, anything that has that much money thrown at it can develop a lot of bad habits. It will become like an obese triathlete. And so diets are good and reform is necessary. And it's even seeing the recruiting problems that the Army and the Navy have, Marine Corps doesn't. But what's the difference with the Marine Corps recruiting? I think anybody that served can tell the difference between Marine Corps doesn't, but what's the difference in the Marine Corps recruiting? But I think anybody that served can tell the difference

between Marine Corps recruiting ads versus the other services. Because the Marine Corps says, we're standing on this wall for the last 250 years, and maybe if you're good enough, you can join us. Versus, hey, join up and we're gonna pay for college, and the living conditions are great, and we have excellent golf courses. That's not why warriors join the military.

Mm-hmm. I think the military does a horrific job of managing their manpower. There's an enormous amount of waste. And even in the Blackwater days, one of the things, right, because we employed a lot of military veterans or law enforcement guys,

and the thing the guys really appreciated is that we didn't waste their time. Because whether you're, the danger of the military is that they view the manpower as a free good. Just like if you, if the water, everyone would turn the water off when they're brushing their teeth, if the water was $2 a gallon.

But it's so cheap that it's sometimes easier for you to get in the water on. That's how the military views all their people as a free good. And because I remember one of the jobs that we, it was outsourced when we were doing, we had black water aviation is we put two of our helicopters on board a military sea lift ship to replace the military helicopters that were doing vertical replenishment. Basically, flying loads from cargo ship to warship back and forth, whatever the weather, whatever the seas. And we showed up to do that job with two helicopters and eight guys. That's it. Four crew, four mechanics on the ship, job done. The Navy did that with two helicopters and 70 guys.

That's how many they had to put on that ship because they viewed all those bodies as a free good. And for every, sorry, no, it's two helicopters and 35 guys with the Navy did. And then they had another 70 plus people back in stateside waiting to rotate. So the costs of doing that mission, two helicopters, eight guys versus to keep two helicopters fielded was basically the Navy was two helicopters and a hundred people that are on their payroll to do that. Very easy to do apples to apples comparison of who is cheaper. There's lots of market-based reforms that can be done to make the military wake up.

We even, NSW, Naval Special Warfare came to us because they wanted to put, they wanted to add two more seal teams in about 0, 4, 0, 5 times of increased manning, they wanted to have more guys go to buds, but they didn't want to change the standards. They said, okay, you know, why do people rob banks? That's where the money is. You want to go find recruits for NSW, go to that, we did a study like the chances of a state level wrestler in Montana or Wyoming has a very high pass rate through buds. So that kind of

study and we sent a couple contractors, former seals with a suburban, with a static display, to go appear at those kind of wrestling matches or a triathlon series or whatever. And the the the pass rate and the the amount of really qualified studs that showed up for training, not just benefited NSW but EOD and diver and Swick and all that stuff. Program still running today. Is it really? Yeah. It's the whole mentor program to help guys understand how to get through

that process. How did the week leadership develop? It just seems like everybody now is a yes, man. Is it is it greed? Think about World War Two. where almost every flag officer that started it was fired. In fact, and at peak we had 14 million men and women, mostly men, underarms. We have the same amount of flag officers now, as we did when we had 14 million men and arms. Now we have one and a half million. So we have 10% of the people, the same amount of flag staff and officers at horrific expense and an era of email, video conference, cell phone where you should have instant communication allowing for a flat and fast organization, which is what the private sector is not in most cases across the economy, but in the military,

it's gotten more and more and more bloated, and so that kind of compression and a severe thinning of the military higher ranks is absolutely necessary. I'm talking 80 plus percent gone. Consolidate a lot of those things, eliminate a lot of bureaucracy, and you'll actually start to get faster procurement decisions, faster training, all the rest. If I was over the Secretary of Defense, I would hire the head of training from Chick-fil-A. If you've not been through a Chick-fil-A drive-through, witness what Chick-fil-A manages to do with high school kids in organizing them into a NASCAR style pit crew of flow that's impressive. And so there's a lot of lessons that can be learned and imposed and implemented across the military. There's some great courses, some great elements of courses,

but there's also some really arcane dumb ways of doing things that have no basis in today's. I mean, I just, I get frustrated because it bleeds into the veteran community. You know, I'm not calling everybody a yes, man, but even my friends who own training companies, speaking events, people of real influence. Nobody's having these tough conversations. I'm one of the only guys out there from the community that's having these tough conversations.

It's not just terrible in the DOD, it's also horrific in the VA. I mean, we've had if I had dozens of wounded vet groups, my family has a place in Wyoming. So we take a bunch of truly banged up vets out to the ranch and to hear their stories. In the amount of medications that they're on is horrific when these guys are on 15 and 20 different medications a day. It's no wonder the suicide rate is 20 some a day. It's grotesque and wrong and just flat out evil. The basically the warehousing of the people

that served America, forget about those guys, just put them on drugs and pay them something to sit at home. Every human being wants to know that they're adding value and when they're not adding value and they know it and they're being paid to sit there and drugged up, that's where the despair sets in. In the BW days, how we handled it,

and I wish I still owned that business, I wish I'd never sold it, that was a mistake. Because however shitty, even if the business got 95% smaller, fine, build back. But the way we handled it is we had contractors that were banged up and what do we do? We put them in a house right outside our front gate, living with other guys that had some of the same issues and community, they could rebuild that that brotherhood community there and we get them doing

curriculum development or training or whatever level of physical performance, they could do based on what their wounds were, but they could feel that they were adding value and they were part of the team again, and they gave them meaning. And all the vets that are stuck on too many meds, stuck fighting against a horrifically unresponsive VA system,

I say get rid of the VA and put everybody on the equivalent of campus or get them private insurance and let the guys shop. I'm not saying give them insurance and forget about them, but if you give them the means or their family members, the means to go shop for the best alternative for care, whether that's hyperbaric treatments for PTSD or some of the other psychedelics, let them explore and the best solutions will naturally rise to the surface. 100% with you there.

Let me rephrase my question or my concern because it wasn't about veterans that are struggling. It's about veterans that are in the limelight. We're talking about, I'm talking about active generals all the way down to low and listed who now have a voice like myself, who are not utilizing it. And I'm just venting here, but I see these guys with influence

and they're not having the tough conversations or countries in real trouble right now and they're not talking about it because it might affect their business. Well, I hate to tell you, there's already censorship and if you don't start getting allowed, you're not going to have a business. And yeah, it's a false argument to think, well, if I remain silent, they'll leave me alone. Eventually, they'll get to you. Look, I had never had,

when I started black water, certainly didn't start it to be, I didn't, I certainly didn't have the goal of becoming notorious, or as hated by some as I am. That's okay, I did it because my time in the SEAL teams was cut short because of family issues, because my dad died of my wife had cancer.

And so I had to search some of those things out, but building a facility, knowing what the teams needed, and just saying yes to the government, and run hard and building a great team of veterans, and run hard and building a great team of veterans, which just said yes and found a way to get things done was truly the most satisfying thing I've done. And having it wrecked by politics is truly one of the most miserable things

I've ever experienced. But, you know, we still have, we still have BW reunions. So you should come to one sometime. We had 500 some guys in Orlando in May. It is extremely edifying for them to say it was the best job they ever had. And so being a business owner and having employees, I understand

whatever the pressures of making payroll and trying to take care of their immediate flock now and not risking that, I understand that risk. And everybody has to make that calculation. But I think it's, when you look at the costs, it's a, I don't know them all by heart, but the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Their businesses were burned down.

Some of them were killed. Multiple's had family members arrested and killed. Houses, farms burned. I mean, they paid a price for liberty that we can't yet hardly imagine. And so standing up and being counted and fighting against the dominant elite paradigm is absolutely necessary. One last question, then we'll take a break.

Back to the Wagner group. Leader was just shot down a couple of weeks ago. Yep. What was that? I don't think that was a Putin initiated hit, but I think he didn't protect him. I mean, you see the images of them and say, Peter's broke together and he gives them the embrace.

I don't know, was that like the kiss of death? I think Putin is sitting on top of a tiger and there's all kinds of other tigers, whether it's the intel service or the military or these oligarch factions already that that pagotian had been counter or threatened to and that was the action they took that that speaks to how chaotic and gangster like a society can become and let's stay the hell away from

that that's that is not the right way to settle disputes. Roger that all right let's take a break when we get back. We'll start diving into frontier group Next on the Sean Ryan show one of my favorite sayings God created man But Samuel Colt made them equal. What about the China Taiwan situation? So it was the first we taught us in the Steel Teams, don't pick a fair fight. It's a stated goal that if Beijing has a go at Taiwan, they're gonna do all they can to smash Indian all power, water, and telecom, and to shut it down in Taiwan. Are you saying that Taiwanese don't have that capability? The weird wacky edges of the frontier where you don't have the luxury of having all your

stuff along, you need a highly adaptable, innovative, devious mind that will find a way to win. I don't care how good this guy is. If he looks left and looks right, nobody's there, then it's over. Former Navy SEAL Mike Riddlin keeps it real on the Mike Drop podcast. He's the co-CEO of the All Secure Foundation, which is this special operations in active duty combat that's time-satterly. Nobody helps you shoot your gun.

They trained you, had a shoot your weapon, so we're going to train you on the things you've never been trained for, how to come home for more. Everything else that turns people away from it, we try to brand it, reduce or dismiss the kind of stigma that's associated with you. You have to. Mike Drop, raw, unfiltered, intellectually sound, wherever

you listen. Intellectually sound, wherever you listen.