Erik Prince: CIA Corruption, Killer Drones, and Government Surveillance

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Here's the episode. We had this pattern for years of taking

Speaker 3 of hoarding tape like you do ammo. Yeah.
Like, I don't even shoot 7.62 by 39, really. It's just not, I'm not that interested, but I have,

Speaker 3 you know, like, it's unimaginable how many steel case rounds I have. Like, why do I have those? Because I'm crazy.
Just in case.

Speaker 4 Right? It's like, so the prep. Better to have and not need than need and not have.

Speaker 3 I totally agree with that.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 3 But I'm not rational about it. Like, I'm sure you, who's like equipped an entire private army, is like, you're pretty rational about it i'm not i'm like i'm not exactly sure i need i don't give a

Speaker 3 gold ammo you know whatever i just want to hoard it and um because i feel you know i can feel all this stuff

Speaker 4 and tape is the same way the dudes with guns yeah

Speaker 4 are not a match for dudes with drones

Speaker 3 so if you're if you're the kind of person and i'm not you know, naming names or identifying myself by name, but if you're the kind of person who sees a deal on steel case 762x39, you're like, I need another 10,000 rounds because in your gut, you feel like something, you know, volatility is coming.

Speaker 3 How point, is that pointless?

Speaker 4 I've just been reading a book called Firepower, which is a history of, basically a history of gunpowder.

Speaker 4 And you track the change of warfare going from spears and longbows to the wheel locks, matchlock muskets, flintlocks, artillery with bursting rounds.

Speaker 4 And I read that to Tristram to understand we're now through a massive step change.

Speaker 4 Because, you know,

Speaker 4 despite all the techno-wizardry of the U.S. military, the best weapon the enemy had was an IED.

Speaker 3 Yes, I noticed.

Speaker 4 And now the, and the IEDs would be positioned along the road and clacked off remotely. Now the enemy can fly the IED at you at 120 miles an hour.

Speaker 4 low to the ground, even in a highly jammed environment.

Speaker 3 So the threat... Highly jammed means there's no way to stop the sick.

Speaker 4 Highly, highly jammed. Right.

Speaker 4 Because the Russians are really good at jamming. Yes.

Speaker 4 And the Ukrainians, yeah, they've developed, they've innovated taking a cheap racing drone, like with the goggles that somebody wears, FPV drone, and you put a beer can-size charge that you can 3D print the casing for it in the field with a little copper disc on the front of it and drive that into the back of a tank.

Speaker 4 And for $1,500, you destroy a $2 million tank.

Speaker 4 So that is like having a sniper rifle versus a guy with a longbow. It's a step change in warfare.
And we're there right now.

Speaker 4 And the longer this combat goes in Ukraine, the Russians are getting a lot better. Ukrainians have too, but they're just trying to,

Speaker 4 you know, the battle is the ultimate cauldron of learning. Yes.
And bad ideas are quickly destroyed and discarded. And so the proliferation of that knowledge is staggering.

Speaker 3 So what are we learning from watching?

Speaker 4 I don't think the U.S. military is learning much.

Speaker 4 Oh, good. No learning.
Well, no, the problem is the U.S. weapon systems aren't even that high demand because they're not that effective in that highly jammed environment.

Speaker 4 For 20 years of global war on terror, you were fighting against a very comparatively unsophisticated enemy. Now in a big state-on-state type war, the U.S.
systems are not holding up.

Speaker 4 You know, the Javelin missile,

Speaker 4 which Raytheon sells to the taxpayers for $200,000 a shot with a $300,000 command launch unit, the Ukrainians can only use that for the first shot

Speaker 4 in an ambush because their IR detector,

Speaker 4 if they shoot the first tank, the tank is very hot. It's burning.
If they try to shoot a second and third missile, the other missiles go for the very hot spot on the battlefield.

Speaker 4 You can't even discern. So then the Ukrainians shift from a $200,000 missile from the Americans to one that they build themselves for $29,000, and it works just as well.

Speaker 4 And it's delivered on a drone, delivered on a drone or from an anti-tank missiles. Yeah, so there's the

Speaker 4 super high-dollar American stuff is not doing so well in that battle space.

Speaker 3 So, I would assume, I mean, the world is watching this, potential future adversaries are seeing on display American military capability.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 we should be concerned as taxpayers and as citizens that all this money we've spent, we have not gotten very good value for. In the same way.

Speaker 3 But doesn't it doesn't it display our vulnerability to? If our weapon systems aren't working in Ukraine, why would they work in other parts of the world? Right? Aren't we sort of showing our hand?

Speaker 4 Look, some of the stuff works well, but at what cost? Right. Because, you know, the Houthis are using a twenty to fifty thousand dollar drone to attack commercial shipping or U.S.

Speaker 4 shipping in the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden,

Speaker 4 and the U.S. has to shoot that down with not one, but two missiles that cost $2 million a piece.
So you're costing us $4 million to shoot down a $50,000 drone. Bad math.
Even in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 3 Why wouldn't, because this is on display and the world is sort of watching,

Speaker 3 why wouldn't... military planners of the United States be taking notes and adjusting accordingly?

Speaker 4 Because the money flow keeps on going the same way with no accountability and no

Speaker 4 self-introspection, no learning. Look, who got fired? Who got punished for a complete debacle in Afghanistan where over 20 years, we replaced the Taliban with the Taliban.

Speaker 4 Yeah, that's fine. And nobody's been fired.
The only guy that got fired was Stu Scheller. What a good man he is.
The young Marine who stood up and said, enough. That's right.

Speaker 4 Because if one of his Marines.

Speaker 3 Scheller went to jail. I know.

Speaker 4 Because he said, look, if a couple of my young Marines lost a rifle on the rifle range, they would be punished.

Speaker 4 We left $80 some billion dollars worth of military equipment and turned over the country to a terror organization, and everybody's been promoted and everybody is just, it's business as usual.

Speaker 4 That's a problem.

Speaker 4 This kind of incompetence is not going to end well.

Speaker 3 So, I mean, I have too many questions, and I do want to circle back to your initial point that warfare is completely different to step change, as you said. But

Speaker 3 how,

Speaker 3 on this thread, how does the U.S.

Speaker 3 Congress, how do people who claim to support our troops, back the military, strong defense, the Liz Cheney wing of the of the Congress, how do they keep sending money to an organization that's increasingly incapable of defending the country?

Speaker 4 I spoke to a bunch of members yesterday morning in Congress.

Speaker 4 And they were at the point of despair because they're trying to restrict the money and to bring some accountability. And they said

Speaker 4 money is the

Speaker 4 amount of money that is sprinkled around

Speaker 4 the capital by the defense contractors, by the effectively the brigade's worth of lobbyists, thousands of lobbyists spreading tens of millions of dollars around politicians, and they just keep the money train going.

Speaker 4 It's really disgusting. And the big thing,

Speaker 4 in the article I wrote recently, I said,

Speaker 4 you know, in Rome, like when the Romans lost a whole bunch of people at the Battle of Cannae,

Speaker 4 when their Senate met a couple weeks later, it was 40% under manned. Why? Because the Roman elites actually served in the military and bore the consequences of failure.

Speaker 4 Our elites don't serve in the military. They have very little skin in the game or no skin.
And so for them,

Speaker 4 it's about money and grift.

Speaker 3 Or their children serve in foreign militaries.

Speaker 3 So just back to the technology itself, which you've been watching all your life because you've been around it all your life.

Speaker 3 I think you had the world's largest private Air Force at one point. Is that true?

Speaker 4 We had 73 aircraft that we owned and operated and flew into garden spots for the U.S. It was fun.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 4 I was just at a Blackwater reunion

Speaker 4 last weekend,

Speaker 4 and we had it at the Alamo.

Speaker 4 And it was just, it was really cool standing there on hollowed ground

Speaker 4 because I didn't realize that across the street from the Alamo is the Menger Bar. And that's actually where Teddy Roosevelt started the Rough Riders.

Speaker 4 So there's all kinds of Rough Rider memorabilia in this bar raising a glass to a great American.

Speaker 4 And if I'd convinced Trump to change policy in Afghanistan to prevent the debacle, which ended up happening, I was going to call that unit the 2nd U.S. Volunteer Cavalry.
The first U.S.

Speaker 4 Volunteer Cavalry was the Rough Riders. San Juan Hill.
Exactly. This was going to be two U.S.V.
It would have worked. Afghanistan would be stable.

Speaker 4 We would have saved America the embarrassment.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 4 And really that, I'd say,

Speaker 4 a pivotal moment for a massive collapse in American credibility and deterrence. And it would have cost 5%

Speaker 4 of what the U.S. was already spending.

Speaker 3 So why couldn't I remember that very well?

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 in my memory, you were not making the case for a forever occupation. You were making the case for a sensible drawdown drawdown that didn't destroy the

Speaker 4 conventional conventional forces could have left.

Speaker 4 90% of the contractors could have left. There would have been a small stay-behind special operations force, 6,000 contractors.
That's it.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 would have kept accountability for the tens of billions of dollars of U.S. equipment that was already there and would have kept the government upright.
And, you know, there's now

Speaker 4 every al-Qaeda,

Speaker 4 every crazy terrorist organization has set up shop there in Afghanistan. Again, we've not heard the last of Afghanistan.

Speaker 3 It's really sad.

Speaker 3 And again, I remember that. In fact, I think we talked, and I know we talked about it at the time.
And it seemed sensible. It seemed kind of non-ideological, practical.

Speaker 3 How do we get this is kind of a clusterfuck? How do we get out in the best way possible, preserving our own interests to the extent that we can?

Speaker 3 Why didn't the administration, the Trump administration, take you up on that?

Speaker 4 I would say the same neocon perpetual war presence in Washington that wants to do it the same way

Speaker 4 that we've been doing for decades. And I would argue losing doing that.

Speaker 4 And it's about money and power and perpetuation, not about actually

Speaker 4 putting a bow on a bad situation.

Speaker 3 But how do those people, as they inevitably do, seize the moral high ground

Speaker 3 in the opening moments of the ideological battle and position themselves as the champions of freedom and human rights when in fact they're monsters?

Speaker 3 How do they get away with that every single time?

Speaker 4 I think it's it's a direct result of the all-volunteer force, which seems a good idea. I'm still supportive of it, but it means it's a very

Speaker 4 the people that actually serve that bear the cost of these overseas efforts. It's maybe one half of 1% of the population serving.
3% or 4% know that 1%.

Speaker 4 And then 95% of America has no clue and no skin in the game. And so they're easily bullshitted by the posturing jackasses in Washington.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's why Dan Crenshaw has a job.

Speaker 3 So I just want to get back to the technology because I'm just interested on behalf of all people who sense turmoil ahead and are, say, stockpiling ammo.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 3 I think there are people like that.

Speaker 3 Is that fruitless given the technologies?

Speaker 4 I would argue for Taiwan, for example, facing a possible invasion or issue coming from mainland China, the best thing they could do is build a home guard.

Speaker 4 Because a well-armed, well-motivated people, I mean, as we showed in Afghanistan, as the Taliban showed the U.S. military,

Speaker 4 well-motivated people, even using weapons that are 70 years old, can still beat a superpower with all the techno-gimmickry.

Speaker 4 It's not the steel in the ships that make a great navy, it's the steel in the men, the steel in the crew.

Speaker 3 But are you ever going to see another war between states that's won or lost on the basis of artillery tanks?

Speaker 3 I mean, is that

Speaker 3 the cavalry charges of today?

Speaker 4 Artillery is still the king of battle, as the Ukrainians are learning the hard way. And the Russians have gone from,

Speaker 4 you know, if you shot at the Russians a year and a half ago, it would take them about an hour and a half to shoot back. accurately.
Yes. To geolocate

Speaker 4 and to coordinate with their fire, you fire control centers to shoot back. Now they're down to about two or three minutes.
So they've learned and they're coordinating and they've gotten a lot better.

Speaker 4 And it is wrong for us to assume that our kung fu is all that good right now.

Speaker 3 And what role did drones play going forward to the extent you can predict and imagine it?

Speaker 4 Very significant.

Speaker 4 You know, people say the tank is dead, it's gone forever.

Speaker 4 It will go just like chariots or the attack helicopter of 2,000 years ago.

Speaker 4 There will still be a role for tanks, but people are going to have to figure out how to knock down the swarms of incoming drones with hard kill and soft kill, et cetera.

Speaker 4 It is always going to, you know, warfare is going to ebb and flow, but the ability to program very sophisticated devices that fly very fast, that are very hard to kill.

Speaker 4 You know, the first strategic offset after World War II was nuclear weapons. Yes.
We had nukes, then the Russians did, and then it was about tonnage. Then the second offset was precision weaponry.

Speaker 4 Now everybody has precision weaponry. So I would argue that the third offset that the U.S.
should try to pursue dominance, and we're far from it, is in an AI drone innovation application.

Speaker 4 And I would say the most innovation that's happened has been in Ukraine and Russia right now, and we are way behind. Because, again,

Speaker 4 Washington procurement people,

Speaker 4 the approps people in Congress keep spending money in the same way on the same stupid cartel of defense contractors

Speaker 4 with the same failing results when at the bleeding edge of battle, actual innovation is happening by dudes in their garage in Ukraine that are fighting for their lives and they've innovated,

Speaker 4 and we ignore that to our detriment.

Speaker 3 So these are countries with fewer marketing majors and more engineers coming out of their

Speaker 4 minds.

Speaker 3 Marketing majors are bad at creating drones.

Speaker 4 They've done well at STEM. Yeah, they have done well at STEM.

Speaker 3 And they're smart people, which no one wants to say, but it's true.

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Speaker 3 What can what will drones be able to do, do you think, going in 10 years? What will that look like?

Speaker 4 You could load a face

Speaker 4 and between network surveillance and

Speaker 4 the facial recognition on that drone, find one person and fly into that person's head that fast.

Speaker 3 Seriously? Yeah.

Speaker 4 So identity management, privacy will become even more

Speaker 4 essential. You think about how many cameras, how much data is being constantly collected everywhere from street cameras, from door knock, from doorbell cameras, from facial recognition at the airport.

Speaker 4 Privacy is really under attack.

Speaker 3 Oh yeah, well, I've noticed. And now TSA has decided to take your photograph every time you walk through.

Speaker 3 I went through yesterday and they had a, you know, stare into the screen and we'll assess your face. I said to the guy, is this mandatory? And he said, no, it's not.
And I said, fuck that.

Speaker 3 I'm not doing that.

Speaker 4 And he goes, I agree with you.

Speaker 3 Okay. I mean, but like, what is that? Why are they doing that?

Speaker 4 Data aggregation. Because they can.

Speaker 3 So it's not a good sign when your own government is gathering data on you, is it?

Speaker 3 Like, why would they possibly need that?

Speaker 4 Think about what

Speaker 4 what

Speaker 4 chipped our founding fathers off. Right.

Speaker 4 Paying some taxes on tea and land taxes. And I mean, I guess our idea of

Speaker 4 what we will resist over in terms of liberty and government intrusion has been very steadily eroding. And now it's, I would say, increasingly a steep curve of dissent.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and it does seem like the purpose of politicizing the military and making it left-wing, anti-white, pro-trans, all this stuff, which I think the right just sort of says, well, that's going to be a less effective military.

Speaker 3 It's bad. They make fun of it.

Speaker 3 But that seems way darker to me. I mean, it does seem like

Speaker 3 it's being weaponized against dissent in the United States.

Speaker 4 I think, you know, the military was one of the most trusted institutions. For sure.
And

Speaker 4 I saw already even in the 80s. I mean, look, I went to the Naval Academy in 1987 and I left after a year and a half because I found the political correctness and the nonsense already then on

Speaker 4 the double standards that were pursued by the Academy leadership while saying there are no double standards, I just found ridiculous.

Speaker 3 What were were the double standards?

Speaker 4 I remember going to the O Course the first time, and they said this is one height

Speaker 4 of a wall to get over for one gender and one height for the other one. And they said, oh, the standards are all the same.
But wait a minute.

Speaker 3 They're liars.

Speaker 4 So yeah, so just let's, if you're going to, if you're going to call it the same, then be the same, but at least let's be consistent.

Speaker 4 And so the and the amount of recruiting for specific sports teams of people that were completely unqualified to be there or to be naval officers was was staggering. I love the Navy.
I just didn't like

Speaker 4 a school run by the federal government.

Speaker 3 So I didn't fully realize it. So you made it through the first year where people drop out.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 No, I left halfway through my sophomore year. I finished my finals.

Speaker 3 So you did the hard stuff and you still dropped out.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's not that hard. It's just, you have to have a

Speaker 4 high tolerance for bullshit. That's all.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's dropped in you, I notice. Yeah.

Speaker 3 yeah

Speaker 4 but i i rolled to hillsdale so you know went quite the opposite to one run by the federal government to one that accepted no federal funding at all interesting so even in 1987 why didn't anyone say anything about it because women don't fight different wars presumably it would be the same war so that's like very obviously insane i look i had no issue with women being at the academies, but at least make equal enforcement.

Speaker 4 That's all. If it's going to be, you're going to call it the same, then be the same.
That's fine. But what I also found, I went to Hillsdale and I joined the fire department of the local town.

Speaker 4 And I learned more about small unit leadership there than I did in the very artificial learning lab that was the academy.

Speaker 3 Why'd you join the fire department in college? Because it was cool.

Speaker 4 Because it was fun. Come on.
I got to do a lot of things in life, but driving a fire truck to a fire, lights and sirens. is definitely in the top five.

Speaker 3 How many kids in your class were in the fire department? None.

Speaker 4 Since then, it's been more of a thing, but I was the first one ever at Hillsdale to join the fire department. And it was

Speaker 4 convincing the gruff firefighters, and it was a full-time part-time. So there was a couple of full-time guys, but the rest were like a butcher and a trash truck driver and building contractors.

Speaker 4 So convincing them that this snot-nosed college kid was okay to go through a burning building with them was

Speaker 4 no small admissions process.

Speaker 3 One of the things I think is most interesting about you, which I know you hate to talk about, but is the fact that you were from an affluent family, and so you didn't actually need to do any of that at all.

Speaker 3 So why did you do that?

Speaker 4 Sense of mission, sense of service, and mostly a sense of adventure.

Speaker 3 So you never thought, like, you know, we're rich. I don't need to, this is just nonsense.
I'm going to

Speaker 3 bum around Europe for the summer.

Speaker 4 Never part of the equation. Why? No, I did.
No.

Speaker 4 I did. I got married between my junior and senior year, and I took a long honeymoon, and we went through Eastern Europe.
But the funny thing is, we

Speaker 3 went through Eastern Europe. What year was that?

Speaker 4 That was 91. That was as the whole Soviet Union was collapsed.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I got married that year. I remember.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 we went on the Baltic Liberation Tour with Pat Buchanan and Lou Rockwell from the Vimisas Institute.

Speaker 4 And we went to Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and we visited the government buildings, which were still surrounded and occupied by Soviet interior ministry troops, but they'd had free elections.

Speaker 4 So it was fascinating to see a place literally at the inflection point of embracing.

Speaker 3 What month in 91 was this?

Speaker 4 That was May. Okay.

Speaker 3 So I got married that summer also, and I went to the Mid-Ocean Club in Tuckerstown, Bermuda.

Speaker 3 It seemed more romantic than Estonia.

Speaker 3 What does your wife think, your young bride think when you're like, we're getting married, but actually the honeymoon is in Eastern Europe and this, like the hellscape of Eastern Europe?

Speaker 3 Honey, do you know anything about Stalinist architecture? I'm going to show you.

Speaker 4 We road trip through, but it was, it was really funny. I'll never forget.

Speaker 4 Babe Buchanan bought an entire uniform off of a Soviet border guard, a captain, for 20 bucks. And we were at a restaurant and comes back with a whole uniform on the hangar and 20 bucks.

Speaker 4 And as we're leaving the country, another one of our group had a

Speaker 4 luggage that you have to put through the scanner. And

Speaker 4 You can see in the scanner, it looks like there's a manhole cover in his suitcase. There's this huge disc.
The Soviet border guard opens the thing. This is a very big problem.

Speaker 4 How much to make the problem go away? $50.

Speaker 4 It was an entire bronze bust of linen that had been yanked off a building, and

Speaker 4 our friend was exporting it. So I thought, you know, if they're selling Lenin for $50 off a government building, this is not long for coming to the end.

Speaker 3 Oh, and in fact, it was, I think it was in August of it. Yeah, that it is.

Speaker 4 Two months later, it was done.

Speaker 3 That's incredible.

Speaker 3 So, my final question about the drones.

Speaker 4 I mean,

Speaker 3 is it a crazy thing to consider the possibility that the government might employ this technology against its own citizens, deploy it against its own citizens?

Speaker 3 If they're putting people, if people are still rotting in prison for protesting at the Capitol on January 6th, if they're putting a woman got four years in prison yesterday for protesting outside an abortion clinic, it's a government at war with its own citizens.

Speaker 3 So why wouldn't drones be part of that?

Speaker 4 Entirely possible.

Speaker 3 How hard are they to shoot down, let's say, a 12 gauge?

Speaker 4 That's actually one of the

Speaker 4 big problem for the small FPV drones. They're so small and

Speaker 4 so hard to hit. It's almost like hitting

Speaker 4 a ptarmigan.

Speaker 3 Very hard to hit that bird.

Speaker 4 Very fast.

Speaker 3 Very fast.

Speaker 4 I know you love bird hunting, so I try to correlate it to, you know, or maybe a very like a quail on cocaine. Oh, it's that tough.

Speaker 3 Yeah. It sounds kind of sporty.
So what is the defense? So if.

Speaker 4 Nets.

Speaker 4 Nets?

Speaker 4 Nets are nets are a cheap, simple defense for small FPV drones because it's a small charge. If you can keep the charge away from the target, the small charge doesn't have that much effect.

Speaker 4 But, you know, P for plenty, you can always increase the poundage.

Speaker 3 My sense is that police departments and state police have drones now.

Speaker 4 For surveillance, yes.

Speaker 3 For surveillance. How hard is it to

Speaker 3 alter a surveillance drone to become an offensive weapon?

Speaker 4 Well, the Ukrainians and the Russians have done that in their garages or in a tent on the edge of battle pretty easily.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 3 So why wouldn't, I mean, if you care about living in a non-totalitarian country, if you care about America, why wouldn't someone step up and say, actually, no, we're not, you know, we're just going to pass a federal law that no law enforcement or intel agency or the U.S.

Speaker 3 military, these things cannot be used domestically against Americans, period, under any circumstances.

Speaker 4 Or certainly not armed.

Speaker 3 Or surveillance. Like, why do you need, you know what I mean?

Speaker 4 Look, for

Speaker 4 stopping a mass shooter or some actual terrorism event, it provides good situation awareness and it protects the cops who are trying to do an honest job.

Speaker 4 But the leakage, in the same way that the forever wars of Iraq or Afghanistan and all those surveillance tools that the government tells us they need to protect us, the danger is certainly some of that tech on the armed side leaking back to be used domestically.

Speaker 3 I don't see any effort by the U.S. government to stop mass shootings.
In fact, they seem to be abetting them.

Speaker 3 And time and time again, you find in the small print, in the write-up after the shooting, that the person has been detained repeatedly by some branch of government.

Speaker 3 You saw in Uvalde, the cops refused to go in and save the kids as they were being executed, et cetera, et cetera. There just doesn't seem any will to stop mass shootings.
There seems to be instead...

Speaker 4 Yeah, but I don't see that.

Speaker 4 The Uvalde one was not a...

Speaker 4 I wouldn't say that's not a top-down federal conspiracy. That was not top-down.
That was individual inadequacy of training and readiness.

Speaker 4 Because there's dozens of other ones where the cops have just been spectacular. Like in Nashville.
Yes.

Speaker 4 But then you see the political correctness of them being reluctant to release

Speaker 4 the writings of this trans shooter who is out to kill Christians. Right.

Speaker 4 So great individual valor by those cops.

Speaker 4 Bad by the cop leadership or the law enforcement leadership by not releasing the truth. Let's have a massive disinfecting effect of truth on this situation.

Speaker 3 So for sure, but there's no will, obviously, in the media to get to that information. So it's left to like people on X to do it.

Speaker 3 But I mean, you've been in and around the government since you were 18 and shipped off to Annapolis.

Speaker 3 So do you think it's fair for the rest of us who haven't to be skeptical of massive increases in government power, particularly military and law enforcement power, that are justified by some threat?

Speaker 4 We should be highly skeptical. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Mass shooters, child molesters, human traffickers, Islamic terrorists. Like,

Speaker 3 I don't think the government does a good job of protecting us from any of those things, but they've certainly increased their power and their power to kill me and my family on the basis of those threats.

Speaker 4 War on poverty, more poverty. War on drugs? More drugs.
War on terrorism? Didn't go so well. Right.

Speaker 3 And just to that, I know we're jumping around, but I have too many questions.

Speaker 4 Maybe we both suffer from a little ADD. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, there's just a lot to go through. So you were at the center of the war on terror

Speaker 3 more than any other American, I would say.

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 4 we had our shoulder to the wheel pushing like everybody else.

Speaker 3 But the scale was,

Speaker 3 you know, I don't think there's ever been a more effective military contractor. you know, in a war that I'm aware of in the United States than Black Water, which you started and ran.

Speaker 3 So, but, you know, you were subject to the policymakers as well.

Speaker 3 And as in the Afghanistan withdrawal, not one of them not only was not like indicted or punished, but not a single one of them sort of lost a step in career advancement.

Speaker 3 They all kind of went on to the Atlantic Council or whatever.

Speaker 4 Or their board seats. Or their board seats.
On the big defense contractors.

Speaker 3 So how, since you watch that, how did that happen? Like, how did Torian Newland go from Dick Cheney's office to being like the number two person in the State Department overseeing the war in Ukraine?

Speaker 3 Like, that's just crazy to me.

Speaker 4 Because it's at that, it's almost a uniparty. It is the party of big government and big Washington and more spending and more warfare and 100% wrong.

Speaker 3 The guys that you serve with

Speaker 3 in the SEAL teams and that, you know, who you've been around in the subsequent 30 years, like, how do they feel about that? Like guys who did, you know, three or four deployments or more.

Speaker 4 The guys that actually paid the cost

Speaker 4 bad policymaker decisions.

Speaker 3 Yeah, where their friends commit suicide and they didn't see their kids grow up or they got killed or lost a limb, like those guys. Yep.

Speaker 4 What do they think? They're disgusted. They're angry.

Speaker 4 They're righteously angry because

Speaker 4 they believe in the Republic.

Speaker 4 When you join the military, you swear to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and you kind of join thinking all those enemies are going to be abroad, but some of the enemies of liberty are probably here.

Speaker 4 And when an elite enriches themselves and separates them from the realities of consequences of accountability,

Speaker 4 that's a pendulum that swings out far, but nature has a way of swinging the pendulum back to the middle.

Speaker 4 And so that either it gets done within the rule of law and accountability, or things can come apart very quickly, frighteningly.

Speaker 3 Part of the accountability is informal. It's social pressure, which is very effective.
Shame.

Speaker 4 Exactly. And humor.

Speaker 4 First of all, we need to just laugh at the freaking incompetence. I'd say when you, when you track,

Speaker 4 I made the last deployment on the USS America, an old, it was a fuel-fired aircraft carrier. And they used to,

Speaker 4 everything is measured on an aircraft carrier, especially the landings. Because it's all about the aviators and who has the best launch and recovery, especially the, you know, the traps.

Speaker 4 So they measure which wire you catch and everything.

Speaker 4 So once a month, there's a thing called the Focusle Follies, which is the front of the ship, below the flight deck where the chains come out of the belly. Yep.

Speaker 4 And so all the air wing and the senior ship's crew would muster there and they'd go through all the scores, but then it would go through the most merciful, merciless roasting of anybody.

Speaker 4 It was the most

Speaker 4 vicious humor I've ever seen in my life.

Speaker 3 Like guys who screwed up the landings?

Speaker 4 Screwed up the landings, the XO, the CO, it was no holds barred. It was fantastic.
It was hilarious and very healthy.

Speaker 4 But now that you have a much more politically correct military, you can't do that at all. They don't do that anymore? Nope.

Speaker 3 No. But I mean, if you can't land

Speaker 3 an aircraft on a pitching deck of an aircraft carrier, I mean, you put your own life, the hardware, and the lives of the sailors at risk, correct? Right. Right.
So the stakes could not be higher.

Speaker 4 High stakes, very important mission, literally lives on the line. And it's good to, to reinforce good behavior and to punish bad behavior and

Speaker 4 shame and derision of your peers matters.

Speaker 3 So looking back, since again,

Speaker 3 you

Speaker 3 were so close to what was happening during that whole period, or at least until until maybe 2012, but for the critical years, you were right there.

Speaker 3 Who do you blame most

Speaker 3 for the mistakes made in Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent wars?

Speaker 3 Who are the villains? Who shouldn't get board seats?

Speaker 4 Look,

Speaker 4 we went through like 18 different commanders, 18 different four-star generals over the course of Afghanistan. We had a lot of four-star generals.

Speaker 4 We have as many generals now as we did in World War II when we had 14 million men under arms. So now you have 10% of that.

Speaker 4 So you have basically 1.4 million under arms versus 14, and we have the same amount of flag officers. So yeah, we are massively overstaffed.
And you think about all the, and this, I mean, they have

Speaker 4 each four-star general. has a personal butler and a valet and a driver and a cook and all those kind of quaint 18th century habits of staff that they surrounded military generals with.

Speaker 4 We have that yet for our generals.

Speaker 3 Back when generals were brave, though, generals got killed in the Civil War.

Speaker 4 Yes. And not so much now.

Speaker 4 So it's just, it's just enormous.

Speaker 4 There can be a massive winnowing of headcount across the board in generals, in staffs, and in civilians, the tooth-to-tail ratio of the military of like how many, when you say teeth, people that put warheads on foreheads versus tail has gotten way out of whack.

Speaker 4 We have way too much tail. Like an alligator-sized tail with a salamander-sized bite.

Speaker 3 It's just, it's so unbelievably corrupt.

Speaker 3 But again, the military. But again,

Speaker 4 it's corrupt because we just keep throwing money at it and no one ever calls bullshit. A business that goes through a massive growth cycle,

Speaker 4 everybody can get get fat and sloppy and lazy because you just, there's always more money and we never have to tighten a belt. And so the U.S.
military has been on like a

Speaker 4 Krispy Krembe bender of donuts.

Speaker 4 Compounding amount of donuts consumed every day. And no one's ever tightened them up and saying, all right, today we're just PTN and we're not eating donuts.

Speaker 4 That's across our entire government, but especially in the military, which is supposed to exist constitutionally constitutionally to defend and deter.

Speaker 4 And I don't think

Speaker 4 we're not getting the value that we're spending money on right now.

Speaker 3 No, it seems we're at a point where it's dangerous. Yep.

Speaker 3 And it does seem, I just want to restate, I don't know this as a dead certain fact, but I can feel it very strongly.

Speaker 3 I think the purpose of it is to keep, you know, I think the enemy that they're seeking to fight lives here. I mean, I think this is a political,

Speaker 3 I think the policymakers feel that way. They're very anxious to control any instrument of force.

Speaker 4 I would argue

Speaker 4 it's about

Speaker 4 for the defense contractors. They just want to keep selling expensive weapons.
Right.

Speaker 4 And they will keep paying politicians to keep buying the expensive weapons.

Speaker 4 I almost feel, I don't feel sad,

Speaker 4 for the White House, as they deal with a problem like in Yemen, where the Houthis have become long-range pirates and have shut off the entire Red Sea.

Speaker 4 Like 50% of global container traffic flowed through the Red Sea. Now it doesn't.
Egypt is losing $800 million a month

Speaker 4 in lost toll fees from container traffic. And all those ships have to go all the way around South Africa now to make it to Europe coming out of Asia.
It's a big problem. And I'm sure the Navy or the

Speaker 4 DOD policymakers only provide the administration with

Speaker 4 the $50 billion and $100 billion solution to go beat down the Houthis to make them behave.

Speaker 4 And in that article I wrote, I just come back to there's such a constant rejection of market-based private sector solutions because the Saudis and the Israelis actually had this problem back in the 60s when

Speaker 4 there was a war in Yemen and they hired David Sterling, the founder of the SAS. And he went there with 30 guys and they kicked ass and it worked and it was cheap and simple and practical.
And

Speaker 4 this article I wrote

Speaker 4 just

Speaker 4 is a litany of those kind of rejections. And that's my frustration because I provided a lot of those options even to deter the Ukraine war in the first place.
You know,

Speaker 4 when

Speaker 4 it's pretty,

Speaker 4 my

Speaker 4 internal Intel sources gave me pretty good idea that already in December of 21, three months before the invasion, that the Russians were going to invade, that it was not a

Speaker 4 it was not a song and dance. And so I wrote a paper proposing a combination of Lend-Lease and Flying Tigers to deter the war.

Speaker 4 Because in 1940, when Britain was really in it, the U.S. gave 50 destroyers, a bunch of aircraft, guns, gave it to the Brits.
We also provided aircraft. and allowed U.S.

Speaker 4 pilots to take leave and go to work for the nationalist Chinese to stop the Japanese from bombing cities called the Flying Tigers.

Speaker 3 In this case. And we armed Stalin.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And made it possible to go from Moscow to Berlin to stop the Nazis.
But

Speaker 4 Biden could have done one very simple thing. He could have announced,

Speaker 4 okay, no war necessary in Ukraine. They're never going to join part of NATO, but they're at least going to have an air force.
Because there was already 200 aircraft set to retire from the U.S.

Speaker 4 Air Force to be flown to the desert in 2022.

Speaker 4 50 F-15s, 50 F-16s, some A-10s, already written down to zero value to the taxpayer. They're going to be flown to the desert, to the boneyard, and parked for eternity.

Speaker 4 Transfer those to the Ukrainians would have been less than a billion dollars, prevent the war

Speaker 4 and the discussion of NATO done. But they wanted the war, obviously.

Speaker 4 Apparently. Why?

Speaker 4 Or they believed their own bullshit that

Speaker 4 their PowerPoints and their their posturing would dissuade look i i i understand why the russians get ornery about it because if if the the russians the chinese were looking to make uh the northern provinces of mexico into active parts of a chinese or russian alliance we'd get hornery about that well obviously yeah they're putting if they put you know look at what happened when they put missiles in cuba in 1962

Speaker 3 that would be unacceptable right

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Speaker 3 So, my question is, and this is all complex and delicate, and you know, I understand to some extent, but what I don't understand is sending Kamala Harris to the Munich Security Conference and saying at a press briefing with cameras rolling to Zelensky, we want you to join NATO.

Speaker 3 You only say that if you want a war, you want the Russians to invade. Like, why would they want that?

Speaker 4 Maybe they're just that dumb.

Speaker 3 I don't think, and I think they are dumb. I mean, they're, well, they're definitely Tony Blinken? I mean, really? Dumb.

Speaker 4 Having a rock concert in Kiev

Speaker 4 during massive combat operations while the Ukrainian army is getting crushed.

Speaker 4 He just, who he just visited and he's up there on stage.

Speaker 4 He's up there on stage with his guitar. It's like that is Nero fiddling while Rome burns.
Here it is.

Speaker 4 So,

Speaker 3 yeah, I mean, he's a child, obviously,

Speaker 3 and like an angry, destructive child. But what happens? Like, where does this go? We sent another $60 billion to Ukraine.

Speaker 4 Most of that money goes to five major U.S. defense contractors to replace at five times the cost what the weapons cost that we already sent the Ukrainians.

Speaker 4 Meaning, you know, if we send them something that was built 10 years ago, well, now it's going to cost four and five times as much.

Speaker 4 So again, it's a massive grift paid by a Pentagon that doesn't know how to buy stuff cost effectively. It doesn't change the outcome on the battle.

Speaker 4 As the fields dry,

Speaker 4 it's May now,

Speaker 4 coming up on tank season.

Speaker 3 Oh, is it tank season again?

Speaker 4 Weather still matters in warfare. And,

Speaker 4 you know, if you have a wet, snow-covered farm field, it's very muddy, very gooey, not great for tanks. Mud season.
Mud season. I think the Russians call it the great Rasputica, the great slush.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 That's done now. And as June comes, it'll be game on.
And I think the Russian bear is hungry and they're going to have a time. So the war should have been ended, never should have started.

Speaker 4 They should have made a deal, froze the lines six months into it.

Speaker 4 But the Biden administration believed that

Speaker 4 all this American weaponry would have saved the day.

Speaker 4 It hasn't. And it's ugly.
And

Speaker 4 the Russian commanders are not idiots. They know their history.
The Battle of Kursk, which happened just north of where the fighting is now, was the largest tank battle in history.

Speaker 4 It was the last offensive effort of

Speaker 4 the German army against against the Soviets. And they tried to push from the north and south on this salient.
It was a bulge. And the Russians knew they were coming.

Speaker 4 And so they built lots of lines of defenses. The same thing they've done now, that they did last summer, which ate up all that equipment.
And now

Speaker 4 the Ukrainians are very thin. They've had a lot of corruption issues.
All the defenses that were supposed to be built by the Ukrainians are much smaller or non-existent.

Speaker 4 And so now it's allowing maneuver. And especially as the tanks, as the fields dry and you can maneuver, it's going to be a very ugly summer.
Very ugly.

Speaker 3 What do you think the Russians want?

Speaker 4 I'd say now they want to absolutely humiliate the West

Speaker 4 and make sure that they never have a problem with Ukraine again.

Speaker 3 That seems achievable.

Speaker 4 I'm afraid so.

Speaker 3 What happens to Ukraine?

Speaker 4 I don't know if it survives as an independent country. If they take Odessa, if they take the ability for Ukraine to export its grain,

Speaker 4 that really threatens the long-term economic viability.

Speaker 4 Maybe it goes back to, look, Western Ukraine used to be part of Poland.

Speaker 4 Eastern Ukraine used to be part of Russia. So, you know,

Speaker 4 maps move, depending on, you know, military victories drive diplomatic breakthroughs.

Speaker 4 And right now the Russians are winning, and they're going to have a very good summer.

Speaker 3 Is there anybody who's knowledgeable on this subject who believes Ukraine can, quote, win, which is to say, push Russian troops all the way back to the old Russian border.

Speaker 4 Well, I didn't really believe it ever. Oh, I know that.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 I don't know who's advising the White House at this point or who they're listening to, but they probably need to change out their advisor list.

Speaker 3 But then you have the Secretary of State, our buffoonish Secretary of State, Tony Blinken.

Speaker 3 Boomer parody, showing up and telling the Ukrainians during his rock concert that, you know, we're with you forever.

Speaker 3 Like, how could you say something like that when I've never met a single person who knows anything about the region who thinks Ukrainians will achieve victory no matter how much money we send them?

Speaker 3 How could you say something like that?

Speaker 4 It's good money after bad. And all we're doing now is facilitating the demise of

Speaker 4 Ukrainian men and destroying them for future generations.

Speaker 3 So how many have died? I've asked members of Congress who are funding this stuff.

Speaker 4 Hundreds of thousands.

Speaker 3 But here's what I understand. If you're paying for this war, which the United States is, the U.S.
Congress is, Mike Johnson is, don't you have a moral obligation to know its consequences?

Speaker 3 Like, how can you just, how can you get up there with a Ukrainian lapel pin and talk about the brave Ukrainian people who are being killed by the hundreds of thousands, and you don't even keep track of the casualties?

Speaker 3 Like, aren't you kind of a monster for doing that? I don't understand.

Speaker 4 And you look at,

Speaker 4 if you made the pictures of the modern battle space on the front a little grainy in black and white, it's indistinguishable indistinguishable from the Battle of the Somme or World War I.

Speaker 4 Well, that's what

Speaker 4 artillery, a grinding, crushing, pointless loss of humanity.

Speaker 3 But it's being abetted by our policymakers. Like they're responsible for this to some extent.
Like what?

Speaker 4 And it's shocking how uniparty

Speaker 4 government has become.

Speaker 3 You don't seem shocked that they don't care about how many Ukrainians have died.

Speaker 4 They don't care about how many U.S. troops die.

Speaker 3 Really? Good point. No, it's totally fair point.

Speaker 4 Because

Speaker 4 they'll send U.S. troops to war with a whole bunch of kakamami rules of engagement and policies, and it's just not a serious way to wage warfare.

Speaker 4 The whole premise of GWAT was that we could, by surgic, by American magic and precision, we could always just clip off the head of the snake and the whole body would die of the snake.

Speaker 4 And that's just that flies in the face of every kind of warfare. When you look back to World War II, we killed off 30% of the German male population.
World War I, same. American Civil War, same.

Speaker 4 The continental wars in Europe in the 17, 1800s, back to the Punic and Peloponnesian Wars, you destroy their manpower, their logistics, and their finance.

Speaker 4 This cutting off the head of the snake is a fool's errand.

Speaker 3 Is there any precedent for it in history? No. So I thought sort of a key component of education at the military academies was military history.

Speaker 3 No, I'm serious. And you, I mean, you're the living example of it.
You went to one and you know an awful lot about your business.

Speaker 4 I didn't read, I didn't learn that at the academy. Really? No.
No, that's a lifetime of curiosity.

Speaker 4 I was a military history geek as a kid when we, my family went to Normandy when I was 11. And, you know, I was the tour guide.
Sword Gold, Juno Beach, Pegasus Bridge, all that. Yeah,

Speaker 4 I was that

Speaker 4 nerdy geeky kid.

Speaker 3 So do you think your average modern flag officer is just sort of not aware of the history of warfare?

Speaker 4 I'm sure they get some level of it, but they have not made it a career.

Speaker 4 I'd say the best book I read on general officers was

Speaker 4 a British military study. It's called The Psychology of Military Incompetence.

Speaker 4 And it went through five of the biggest disasters in British military history, like the surrender at Singapore.

Speaker 3 Yeah, Khartoum.

Speaker 4 yeah, Khartoum, Baghdad, and World War One, of course, the Afghan withdrawal, yes,

Speaker 4 um, into Peshawar, yes, and and it went, it and it compared, it literally looked through the guy's childhood, where he went to school, his relationship with his father, all the rest, and very consistent themes.

Speaker 4 And what were they?

Speaker 5 Um,

Speaker 4 they were very bookish, very geeky, not, uh, not self,

Speaker 4 no introspection. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So they're tony blinking, basically.

Speaker 4 Or just

Speaker 4 not people able to say, okay, this is not working.

Speaker 4 We're going to attack the boat because

Speaker 4 this is not working in this direction.

Speaker 3 They're weak men, in other words.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Look,

Speaker 4 the anomaly of Patton

Speaker 4 doesn't occur very often.

Speaker 3 Patton, who's been maligned since his death,

Speaker 3 remarkable human being.

Speaker 3 And of course, you know, Hollywood is, I don't know how many movies they've done telling us Patton was bad.

Speaker 3 But, you know, there are some suggesting that Patton was also murdered. Do you think that that's possible?

Speaker 4 It'd be a hell of a difficult.

Speaker 4 Well, I don't know if the traffic accident, the Jeep rollover

Speaker 4 was an accident.

Speaker 3 But he survived it and then died later.

Speaker 4 Man, I don't know, but he hated the Soviets. He hated communism.
Oh, I know.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 I don't want to get too far afield here, but

Speaker 3 that does seem like a pivot point in world history where that war, you know, April 1945, Hitler kills himself, Berlin is occupied by the Russians, et cetera, et cetera. We win in Europe.

Speaker 3 And then we sort of like kind of pivot toward the Soviet Union for a few years until maybe the Rosenbergs were

Speaker 4 before. Well, and even the amount of communists, agents that were surrounding Roosevelt.
Oh, well, Harry Hopkins.

Speaker 3 Well, Harry Hopkins, literally. a Soviet agent.
Yeah, right. So,

Speaker 3 but

Speaker 3 like, why did that happen?

Speaker 3 Like, how do we fight this war for freedom and then wind up sort of handing Poland to Stalin, for example, or on the side of the totalitarian?

Speaker 4 Handing all of those countries to the world. Of course.
Yeah. It showed.

Speaker 4 So how is this a war for freedom if we're handing an exhaustion of moral leadership? Yeah.

Speaker 4 I think.

Speaker 3 Who was that? Who do you think, if we could hold one person responsible for that? Truman was president.

Speaker 4 Yeah, Yeah, no. Because Roosevelt was dead.
So, as Churchill said, he died in the traces.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 I think when you look at history, the lie of socialism, communism, it is such a,

Speaker 4 it's easy for elitists to love that paradigm because it's because the...

Speaker 4 Because the right-wing Austrian school economics approach is massive decentralization,

Speaker 4 decision-making at at the micro level.

Speaker 4 A farmer knows what prices are, has a good idea what demand is going to be, decides whether he's going to plant more acres that year or not, and takes that risk himself.

Speaker 4 The Soviet planner says, I need everyone to plant this many acres, and we're going to do it at this price.

Speaker 4 And it's the lie of individual incentive versus massive central planning to the betterment of elite thinking. Right.

Speaker 4 With the grift that goes with it. And that's just a

Speaker 4 mind worm disease that so many people continue, generation after generation, continue to fall for.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's a mom-based system, whereas the let the farmer figure it out, it's a dad-based system.

Speaker 4 Yeah. That's true.

Speaker 4 Were you a farmer?

Speaker 3 How do you know? Like, that's what your dad says. Your mom's like, no, let's get it all.

Speaker 4 Sorry. But that's why I'm, I, I, I'm so excited to see Millay having success in Argentina for a guy.
And maybe it's an analogy to America. Because he got sick of, I mean, at the end of World War II,

Speaker 4 per capita living standards in Argentina were higher than Switzerland.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 4 Peronistas, socialists take over. They run the company.
They run the country basically off the cliff. Hyperinflation, economic wreckage, terrible.

Speaker 4 Millay gets sick of not only the Peronistas, but the pathetic so-called right-wing opposition, which is not opposition. He starts his own political party and he wins.

Speaker 4 I mean, I like any guy that'll campaign with a chainsaw.

Speaker 3 I agree with that. You think that'll happen here?

Speaker 4 I don't think the Republican Party is really that salvageable anymore. No, of course.
Because it's been gobbled up by corporatists. Yes.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 the defense industry now spreads money equally, right and left. not even really right, just across the Washington insiders.

Speaker 4 So yeah, maybe an entirely new political movement. That's why Trump is transformational because he kind of came outside the Republican Party and did it.
And

Speaker 4 I hope he can move the needle somewhere in the right direction because it's teetering.

Speaker 3 So I got to ask you a personal question. We were in the Middle East together not that long ago, and I noticed two things.
One, you flew coach to the Middle East,

Speaker 3 which obviously you don't need to do, but you did it on purpose. I think that is your custom.

Speaker 3 We're the same age, three weeks apart. And I think most, like, why would you do that? And the second thing I noticed is you went from there to some far more obscure part of the world.

Speaker 3 So like, explain those things, if you would.

Speaker 4 I, um,

Speaker 4 when I

Speaker 4 got out of the SEAL teams earlier than I wanted to, I loved being a SEAL. I was pretty good at it, I think.
And

Speaker 4 I would have had a nice career going there.

Speaker 3 It goes into another story if you explain why you got out.

Speaker 4 Oh, my dad died

Speaker 4 when I was 25 and my wife got cancer. No, I was 26.
She was 29 and she got cancer. So I got out to sort out the home front.

Speaker 4 And that's really why I started Blackwater, just as a way to stay connected to the SEAL teams.

Speaker 4 I knew nothing of business, nothing of land development, nothing of government contracting, but I kind of knew what the special operations community needed.

Speaker 4 And building that business was

Speaker 4 a really great experience.

Speaker 4 It was family policy for my dad to not come and work in the family business after college. You had to go do your own thing.
I had nothing.

Speaker 4 I didn't want anything to do with this business. I was not, I don't think I was really suited for it.

Speaker 4 But I was going to come and work with him after 12 years or so of being a SEAL.

Speaker 4 Starting Blackwater, building it was one of the most satisfying things I've ever done in my life because bringing together people with great talents that were really good, that they'd gained in the military and they'd retired or gotten out, and having it smashed the way it was

Speaker 4 really left a bad taste in my mouth. And I'll be honest, I carry a big chip on my shoulder yet for it.
And I try to keep it in perspective. So, look, I had a business that was crushed and lost.

Speaker 4 Thousands of guys lost their lives, their limbs, their mental health, their spouses over a badly run war in two theaters by idiot Washington elites, elites. Same idiots that smashed my business.

Speaker 4 So, yeah, I got a chip on my shoulder to do something

Speaker 4 big and effective and spectacular again and run hard until that happens or I die trying.

Speaker 3 But I mean, you know, 54, 55-year-old guys who've been successful, which you have been despite having your business smashed, they don't fly coach. Like, what is that?

Speaker 3 Is that like just a Spartan impulse or you just don't get there? You get soft?

Speaker 4 You get there at the same time.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but it's.

Speaker 4 Tucker, I fly so much much that

Speaker 4 anyway.

Speaker 4 Look. I know, but it's weird.
I know. We're the same age.
I know how this works. Or, look, I'm not.

Speaker 4 I'm not a purist. I do fly business class 10% of the time.

Speaker 3 I mean, that's fine if you're flying to Fort Lauderdale from D.C. or something, but Dubai is a long way.

Speaker 4 I just think it's very, very interesting. Learn to sleep in any position.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 that's what it is. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I like that. What's the weirdest place you've been recently?

Speaker 3 Why are you always in Africa?

Speaker 3 What do you do for a living, Eric?

Speaker 4 I feel like I knew you pretty well. Am I really sure?

Speaker 4 I would say there are lots of countries that

Speaker 4 need

Speaker 4 help organizing

Speaker 4 with the basics of tax collection and security assistance and border security and

Speaker 4 police advisement because

Speaker 4 what we take for granted in America, if you want to start a business in America,

Speaker 4 you can call a law office in Delaware, get a business in two hours for 200 bucks. It's simple.
And you can get title to your land here and you can get a bank account, you get a business license,

Speaker 4 you can do all those things that make capital formation possible. There are so many parts of the world where that's not possible.

Speaker 4 And so providing them the very basic means of a reliable police department or the means to stop gangs, jihadi gangs, criminal gangs, whatever.

Speaker 4 So I do provide some advice to countries how to do that from time to time.

Speaker 3 Judging by what little I know of your travel schedule, it

Speaker 3 seems pretty frequent. That's interesting.
So since you are everywhere all the time,

Speaker 3 and most Americans are, including me, sort of only dimly aware of what's happening around the the world. Name three places we should be paying more attention to now than we are.

Speaker 4 The

Speaker 4 Chinese Communist Party has been very active in Mexico.

Speaker 4 The fentanyl crisis is very much, you know, last year, fentanyl in America killed like 109,000 people. Yes.

Speaker 4 It is funded.

Speaker 4 organized, logistically facilitated by the Chinese Communist Party to move the precursor chemicals that are actually made near Wuhan, China, shipped to either Venezuela or Mexico, fabricated into fentanyl, and basically blended with other common drugs that people are taking.

Speaker 4 And it doesn't make any sense to do so because why would a drug dealer want to kill his customers?

Speaker 4 That's what's happening. And it is an absolute, it's a fuck you from the CCP against the West.
for the opium wars of the 1840s.

Speaker 4 And it's done to

Speaker 3 murder American children.

Speaker 4 100%.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 3 And just to be clear, these are not junkies who took too much. These are kids who

Speaker 3 are killing them. They're calling him off Instagram.

Speaker 4 Yes. Or

Speaker 4 a bootleg Percocet or something.

Speaker 3 Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Speaker 4 And so they're people dying. And that is, you trace that, and I can show all of that going right back to...

Speaker 3 mainland China.

Speaker 3 Why are we sending all these armaments to Ukraine and we could bomb those facilities in Mexico?

Speaker 3 If killing

Speaker 3 100,000 people.

Speaker 4 You don't need to bomb. Fire is an underutilized tool.

Speaker 4 That's true.

Speaker 3 What's happening here? I noticed there are quite a few manufacturing and agricultural facilities that seem to be going up in smoke in this country.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

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Speaker 4 And so, look, at the same, and and on that,

Speaker 4 the last time Blinken was in Beijing, he didn't even call him on it to say, stop.

Speaker 4 He said, well, no, it's, yeah, maybe some of the stuff is coming from China, but it's really just a shipping, accidental shipping problem.

Speaker 4 I mean,

Speaker 4 it's, it is such a denial of reality. It's, it's hard to say.

Speaker 3 I mean, you're, so I guess what you're saying is you're not speculating about this. This is known.

Speaker 4 100%.

Speaker 3 Do the intel agencies, I assume, know this?

Speaker 4 Yeah, but but nobody wants to do anything. Why?

Speaker 4 I think

Speaker 4 you have an agency that doesn't want to do their job.

Speaker 3 Which agency?

Speaker 4 The CIA. Because I think, and I know you have, rightly, very mixed feelings on the CIA.

Speaker 4 However,

Speaker 4 the mission of the CIA, if you think about the State Department can handle 5% of issues, diplomats and embassies. You want your military over here, your conventional military.

Speaker 4 It's a big angry dog waiting to be let off leash that hopefully never is.

Speaker 4 The middle of the world,

Speaker 4 those

Speaker 4 problems,

Speaker 4 you think about how the Soviet Union was really undermined in the 80s.

Speaker 4 There was 20 covert action findings that were signed, coupled by Carter, mostly by Reagan, done to undermine the Soviet Union economically, politically, culturally, socially.

Speaker 4 And that was done under Title V authorities, and that worked without having to involve big military expenditure.

Speaker 4 There are, if you want to stop, like how,

Speaker 4 we know fentanyl is a problem. We know the Chinese are a problem doing it.

Speaker 4 That's specifically what the Title 50 authorities are for to say to six guys, go make that problem stop.

Speaker 4 And if you have an agency that doesn't want to do their job, that's why it's not happening.

Speaker 3 But they seem to be doing so many other things.

Speaker 4 I mean, I have a lot of people. Exactly.

Speaker 3 My dad worked with CIA. I was never against CIA.
I thought only like dumb liberals were against CIA, you know, and traitors or whatever.

Speaker 3 So my views on CIA have evolved based on things that I have seen and personally experienced.

Speaker 3 And my conclusion is not that everyone there, particularly, you know, the paramilitaries, I know a million of them seem like great guys, whatever.

Speaker 3 But on some like basic level, it seems totally out of control to me.

Speaker 4 It is. I mean, when you have the leadership of the CIA,

Speaker 4 this Havana syndrome is a real thing what does that mean it's a

Speaker 4 it's effectively a microwave weapon that's been used to

Speaker 4 effectively blast the brains of Americans working out of embassies first in Havana Colombia Delhi Hanoi Vienna Washington DC

Speaker 4 lots of places okay hurting severely hurting Americans serving abroad and the CIA director says

Speaker 4 it's all in their minds.

Speaker 3 It's bulimia.

Speaker 4 That's wrong. When your people are getting screwed by a

Speaker 3 so you think that's it's I don't have a view on that. I mean, I'm sort of, I don't know the answer, but I'm sympathetic to

Speaker 3 open to both possibilities being true. But you think, based on evidence, that this is absolutely real?

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 4 I know it to be real.

Speaker 3 Wow. Who's doing this and why?

Speaker 4 It was a web, it was a

Speaker 4 device that was developed in the Soviet Union in the early 70s, actually in Ukraine.

Speaker 3 So,

Speaker 4 I think the Kharkiv

Speaker 4 development plant. Not that it had nothing to do with the Ukrainians now, but

Speaker 4 it's about the size of

Speaker 4 a beverage cart on an aircraft, that size device.

Speaker 4 And it's very, very damaging. And the fact that the Russians can do that to us without consequences, it shows how

Speaker 4 pathetic they view the CIA and the U.S. government to not push back on consequences.

Speaker 3 So CIA,

Speaker 3 what motive would they have to pretend this wasn't real?

Speaker 4 Because it would require pushback somewhere, somehow.

Speaker 3 But they're literally fighting Russia in Ukraine. CIA is all over Ukraine fighting Russia.

Speaker 4 Good question. I mean, put it this way.

Speaker 4 They don't like me enough that I was uninvited from a dear friend's retirement 10 days ago.

Speaker 3 Oh, I bet they don't like you. And you've obviously worked with them most of your life, right?

Speaker 4 We did a lot of great work for them.

Speaker 4 100 success rate but yeah look

Speaker 4 people the wrong people being in charge the agency has also gotten hyper bloated basically the same number of case officers that there's always been for 25 years but the place has grown tenfold of all the wrong kind of people under the you know the decision making of a guy like brennan yes and why does brennan hate the actual do the director of operations because he's a failed case officer he flunked out of school

Speaker 4 i mean, how did a guy that voted for Gus Hall in 1976, who was Gus Hall?

Speaker 3 Gustavo Hallberg. He was the Finnish-American head of the American Communist Party in New York City.
Exactly.

Speaker 4 How does a guy vote for the head of the Communist Party in 1976 at the height of the Cold War and then pass whatever background check the agency is doing and have a security clearance?

Speaker 4 I find that stunning.

Speaker 3 He retains his security clearance because the last administration refused to strip him of his security clearance, despite the fact he was actively working to undermine a democratically elected president.

Speaker 3 No, I know. The levels of betrayal and self-betrayal are just almost mind-boggling.
Let me ask you specifically about what the CIA does in Ukraine.

Speaker 3 So I think it's fair to say, based on what even the New York Times has reported, that

Speaker 3 the CIA is running effectively the Ukrainian Intel services.

Speaker 4 I don't know. I honestly don't know that.
I'm certainly they have been there advising and supporting, but I think the Ukrainians probably grew frustrated at

Speaker 4 lack of willingness to do certain things. So I don't know where the U.S.
support ends and where the Ukrainian unilateral stuff begins.

Speaker 3 But I asked because they've assassinated people. I think they tried to assassinate me, for example, but they definitely killed Alexander Dugin's daughter.

Speaker 3 They

Speaker 3 allowed an American critic of the Ukrainian government to die in prison,

Speaker 3 Lira, Gonzalo Lira.

Speaker 3 And you're sort of like, well, wait a second, if this is a proxy war and we're overseeing it, then is the U.S. government

Speaker 3 aware of this, responsible for it? Like, what? U.S. government should protect American citizens, but clearly.

Speaker 4 And if you had a honest...

Speaker 4 Look, Devin Nunes

Speaker 4 did a good job as the chairman of the HIPC

Speaker 4 of trying to dig into the nonsense. And he obviously met all kinds of resistance, but he had fight in him.

Speaker 4 Now, the Republican oversight of the Intel Committee or of the Intel agencies, completely inadequate.

Speaker 3 But even then, and I like Devin a lot, but those guys are all afraid of the CIA, as you know. They're afraid of them.
They know they're being spied on by CIA or NSA or any, you know, FBI.

Speaker 3 They know they're being, members of Congress that are supposed to be in charge of overseeing these agencies are being spied on by them. They're fully aware of that.

Speaker 3 I know because they've told me to my face. I'm not guessing.
And that's just, that's not democracy. That's like totally crazy.

Speaker 4 Yeah, that's like, it's like Marcus Wolf and the Stasi. That's well, yeah, exactly.
That's exactly right.

Speaker 3 The East German referee.

Speaker 4 The most because the Stasi was way more effective than any other Intel service, even the KGB. Yes.

Speaker 4 It was the embodiment of German efficiency, innovation, and it was like the only effective institution in the entire country. Allesvar in Ordnung.

Speaker 3 What does that mean? Everything was in order.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Nice.

Speaker 3 So,

Speaker 3 and then

Speaker 3 I know that CIA runs businesses, like runs businesses outside the country, and those are sources of income for the agency. That, like, how can a government agency run businesses?

Speaker 3 I don't understand that.

Speaker 4 And profit from that.

Speaker 4 I am truly not aware of any of that. Okay.

Speaker 3 But how do you rein it in? I mean, because it, of course, could be an essential tool of diplomacy, statecraft, of

Speaker 3 the projection of power. I mean, you could see how CIA could be helpful to your country.

Speaker 4 The agency is the most easy to reform of all federal agencies. Civil service rules don't apply.
Yes. You can fire anyone for any reason that fast.
You could clean house,

Speaker 4 have a all-hands meeting at the bubble on a Friday and send 50% of them home.

Speaker 4 Send them out to their cars and tell them, we'll ship you your stuff from your desk.

Speaker 3 You could clean it out that fast. But why does no one do that?

Speaker 4 Maybe no one's had the balls as the director or the deputy director to do that.

Speaker 3 Do you believe CIA has in the last 25 years used violence against any American citizen?

Speaker 4 Yeah, Barack Obama killed an American citizen and his 16-year-old son, Alawaki,

Speaker 4 in Yemen.

Speaker 3 Right. And that's publicly known, but there are all sorts of,

Speaker 3 you know, there's evidence that that's not

Speaker 3 an isolated.

Speaker 4 Maybe there's more, but I know that one. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So you don't think it's crazy to assume that?

Speaker 4 Entirely possible. Well, there's a lot of there's a lot of people that are considered American citizens that probably shouldn't be considered American citizens.

Speaker 3 I agree with that correctly. But an actual American, someone who grew up here.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 Fair. But the left has so devalued citizenship,

Speaker 4 it should mean something to be an American.

Speaker 4 I mean, a Roman citizen, it meant something.

Speaker 3 Oh,

Speaker 3 a Venezuelan gang member who's here illegally is every bit as American as you, you, who were born in Western Michigan. So, yes, I'm

Speaker 3 quite aware of that.

Speaker 4 Anchor babies, birthright citizenship, all of that must go.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you wonder, you know, if we've reached a point where it's impossible for the country to act in its own interest just because of the changes due to immigration.

Speaker 4 I read a lot of history, and I know that things have been a lot worse in certain societies, and

Speaker 4 corrective events can be shocking and traumatic to people, but it's still possible.

Speaker 3 CIA and not just CIA, but FBI and other agencies supposed to be enforcing the law and gathering intelligence have,

Speaker 3 this has been shown, withheld information from Democratically elected presidents, a number of them, certainly Trump. That's a crime, is it not?

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And it should be met with immediate discipline. And

Speaker 4 that's a matter of having people that will follow through through and wade through the bureaucratic process and exercise the authority that they're charged with doing, right?

Speaker 4 When you join the military, you swear to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign domestic.

Speaker 4 We should probably do something similar for any civilian employee of the federal government, that they swear to defend the Constitution, not swear allegiance to a political leader. Of course not.

Speaker 4 Constitution.

Speaker 3 Right, but it's not a constitutional republic if

Speaker 3 unelected employees of the federal government ignore the the elected employees.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Well,

Speaker 4 that's something love it or hated at Blackwater. Every contractor that worked for us swore to defend the Constitution, the same oath they swore when they joined the military or law enforcement.

Speaker 4 They've swore it again in our presence as a reminder that we're here to serve.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 I want to ask you about spying on American citizens. So we know that it's widespread.
It's accelerating. Data is being collected about every single one of us.

Speaker 3 And the vector for a lot of that is the phone.

Speaker 3 So it's like super useful, of course, but it's also the main vulnerability if you care about privacy and freedom.

Speaker 3 So you've created a phone that allows people to, to some extent, to opt out of the current spying regime.

Speaker 4 Let me back up to where, I guess,

Speaker 4 where this started. If you think about after 9-11,

Speaker 4 suddenly, holy shit, all these federal agencies are waking up and how do we we prevent this kind of conspiracy and attack against us again? And so they start looking at data.

Speaker 4 But of course, in 9-11, we didn't have smartphones.

Speaker 4 But as smartphones become available and the

Speaker 4 technology that goes around a smartphone, because what is a smartphone? It's basically a highly capable personal computer in your hand that's constantly linked to a network.

Speaker 4 And so as ad data, the private sector always innovates much faster than governments do.

Speaker 4 And so as Apple and Google Mobile Services

Speaker 4 start developing phones, they put ad IDs and tracking information on those phones. Why?

Speaker 4 To micro-target you to sell advertising.

Speaker 4 They gather and collect micro-information about you so that they can sell

Speaker 4 precision information to advertisers who want to sell you stuff.

Speaker 3 Can you give us a sense of what that information is? What do they know about you?

Speaker 4 Well, an advertising ID is a, it's like a 25 digit alphanumeric code that sits on your phone. And it enables to collect where you go, what you buy, who you call, and what you browse.

Speaker 4 It even works with the apps sitting on your phone, which are also built with a software developer kit that comes from Google.

Speaker 4 and they they pay you more to put the Google hooks in so that those apps can can also turn on the microphone on your phone or the camera or the GPS so that your phone, yes, it's a computer, but effectively becomes a mobile microphone collection listening device that fits in your pocket or sits in your nightstand and it collects anything and everything about what you do.

Speaker 4 And so it's been it's almost been like a slow boiling of a frog because we

Speaker 4 as smartphones become common it becomes very convenient and it's wonderful and it becomes more and more uh pervasive in our lives providing us music and news and communications and and pictures and videos of our family every bit of that data is collected analyzed parsed and resold to advertisers that's the five leading big tech companies have a combined market cap that's like the third or fourth largest nation in the world

Speaker 4 off of that surveillance capitalism model.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 as smartphones have become available, it's slowboiled all of us into a point of

Speaker 4 holy shit. And I guess for me, the oh shit moment was after the 2020 election and seeing the power that big tech had to sway that election.

Speaker 4 and to then coordinate and to control who

Speaker 4 who could speak who could speak on certain platforms and zeroing out certain people

Speaker 4 and i actually had a tech team together at the time doing a forensics thing and in a rage phone call i said fuck it we're going to build a phone and

Speaker 4 we pivoted and that team

Speaker 4 then started working and uh yeah we we built a phone um as a as an answer because we're never going to make big tech change by whining about it. They're way too much money and way too much power.

Speaker 4 We have to provide a means for people to

Speaker 4 communicate freely,

Speaker 4 securely, and most importantly, that they can control their data. I think it's inherently American that

Speaker 4 we expect privacy as Americans. Think about the Constitution.
First Amendment is free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly. Second,

Speaker 4 we know what that guarantees, the first.

Speaker 4 What's the third amendment?

Speaker 4 What was most important for the founding fathers?

Speaker 4 Privacy. Get these damn British troops out of my house.
Of course. No quartering act.
Because there was actually British soldiers being put into people's houses. Privacy.
Fourth Amendment.

Speaker 4 The right to privacy.

Speaker 4 in the searches of our personal data. Yes.

Speaker 4 What big tech has created in surveillance capitalism is more pervasive and more intrusive than anything you could ever possibly,

Speaker 4 it's more pervasive than Marcus Wolf of the Stasi or Beria of the KGB, of the NKDVD could ever possibly be.

Speaker 3 Anything that happens in contemporary North Korea.

Speaker 4 Yes, exactly. And we give it away.
We give it away. freely.
And so people still close the bathroom stall when you go into the toilet. You still close the shower curtain.

Speaker 4 We still do lots of things that we expect to have a privacy, but yet people with a regular phone put it on their nightstand

Speaker 4 and are surprised that the microphone is listening. I've had so many people I've talked to about,

Speaker 4 they said, I was talking to my wife about needing a new mattress in our bedroom.

Speaker 4 And the next day they're getting advertising for mattresses, which means the camera or the phone was listening to them in their bedroom with all the follow-on conclusions to be drawn from that.

Speaker 3 Yeah, given what happens in healthy bedrooms, that's a, I mean, so what happens to those recordings?

Speaker 4 Well, we've been doing a study following our device, a Google mobile services phone, any Android running Google mobile services, which is all of them, or an iPhone. And about 3 a.m.

Speaker 4 We're seeing a spike of data leaving the phone, about 50 megabytes that is basically that phone dialing home to the mothership exporting all of your goings-on all your pillow talk is going to pillow talk whatever right it's so zuckerberg paid 20 billion dollars for whatsapp why

Speaker 4 because every message call video picture voice note everything that goes through there they say well it's end-to-end encrypted yeah it's end-to-end until it passes to their server where it's sliced and diced and analyzed and used to push, used to sell advertising to that customer.

Speaker 4 If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer, you are the product. So if you want to get,

Speaker 4 well,

Speaker 4 I think

Speaker 4 people right now are used to Mark Zuckerberg listening from their nightstand every night because that's effectively what your phone is.

Speaker 3 So why isn't he like the creepiest person in world history if he's listening to what's going on in your bedroom?

Speaker 4 Because they're able, as big tech, to shape that message.

Speaker 4 That's the frightening thing about the power of big tech and their ability to influence what you watch, what you think about candidates, if you search something,

Speaker 4 how they score those rankings.

Speaker 4 It is shocking. We have an antitrust problem here in America, vastly worse than in the early 1980s late 1800s, early 1900s with oil and railways and steel additional trust.

Speaker 3 This is more important.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

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Speaker 4 This is literally how we communicate and interact with other human beings in our lives, how we gather and

Speaker 4 share information about the realities of life, of food, of medicine, of vaccines, of healthcare issues, of truth. And so it's, especially in an era of AI,

Speaker 4 it's scary stuff. The average kid in America, by the time they reach the age of 13, has had 72 million data points collected on them by big tech.

Speaker 4 So it's almost like

Speaker 4 that much collection allows digital grooming

Speaker 4 by big tech to share and to shape your preferences, how you interact, et cetera.

Speaker 3 Including your sexual preferences. I mean, if you're being honest here.
Yeah, exactly. Considering that young people are introduced to sexuality through pornography.
Yep. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Given that there's no privacy, it's probably pretty dumb to watch porn.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Nothing's private. Right.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 what happens to all this data?

Speaker 4 Well, now.

Speaker 4 Obviously, it's used and stored. I mean,

Speaker 4 it's

Speaker 4 the bloom of data data centers surrounding all these tech hubs around America is

Speaker 4 horrific. And all that data is being collected and stored.

Speaker 3 Can I just ask just a far field question, but I'm just interested. So given that those data centers are some of the biggest users of electricity, they're like a steel plant.
Okay.

Speaker 3 Massive electricity draw. And using electricity is, of course, destroying the planet and accelerating climate change.

Speaker 3 Why are the climate change zombies defacing paintings in museums and not protesting data centers?

Speaker 4 I would say they're

Speaker 4 if they were coming after data centers, then they would be getting a non-stop stream of

Speaker 4 social media messaging of why they should be attacking art instead of data centers. Well, exactly.

Speaker 3 But like, why, why are the AI ghouls, why is Mark Zuckerberg, why are they not climate criminals?

Speaker 3 Why am I a climate criminal for having a wood stove and a Silverado, But the people who run data centers, which literally draw more power than

Speaker 4 with 100% backup as well. Right.

Speaker 3 So I'm not against using energy. I'm pro-energy, actually, and cheap energy.

Speaker 3 But by the current rules, they're criminals. So why does no one call them criminals?

Speaker 4 Because big tech has shockingly

Speaker 4 complete control over how that messaging is.

Speaker 3 Yes, over our minds and what we think.

Speaker 3 Sorry, but that you brought it right back to the point, which is...

Speaker 4 And so now

Speaker 4 Congress, including a lot of Republicans in their idiocy, have not only extended FISA, right? FISA started as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Speaker 3 Yeah, 1977-ish. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Supposed to be measuring, monitoring how you collect intelligence or communications going to foreigners. Now FISA is really all about Americans.

Speaker 4 I guess we're treated as foreigners by our own government.

Speaker 4 And so the federal agencies got sick of getting beat up when they had come before Congress for millions of times illegally accessing what was supposed to be FISA unauthorized communications information

Speaker 4 and for buying

Speaker 4 all this commercial data

Speaker 4 that's collected and held and disseminated by big tech to facilitate advertising and typing and measuring where you go, what you buy, who you call, what you browse, everything about you in a way that any

Speaker 4 previous intelligence boss would have salivated over.

Speaker 4 So now the new FISA, it's not an extension, it's a massive enlargement, says that any federal agent for any reason, without probable cause cause or a warrant, can compel any company that holds any of that personal data to turn it over.

Speaker 4 Allowing a massive phishing expedition on anybody that's considered an opponent of that off-the-reservation federal agent.

Speaker 4 It's really disgusting. Really,

Speaker 4 if it's not a

Speaker 4 Stamp Act Tea Party

Speaker 4 1775 moment. I don't know what is, but it is ultimately your government having carte blanche to do a digital proctology exam on you with no questions asked.

Speaker 3 Well, considering that these companies hold,

Speaker 3 you know, audio of you having sex with your wife, video of you watching pornography, like stuff that, you know,

Speaker 3 audio of you telling racial jokes or whatever.

Speaker 3 like your most intimate moments, the ones that could be used to blackmail and destroy you, doing things you would not do in public and shouldn't do in public.

Speaker 3 Like, that's just, that's the ultimate power, isn't it?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I guess

Speaker 4 you either have to not give a shit and fight anyway,

Speaker 3 or try to live virtuously too. It helps.

Speaker 4 That always helps. Yep.

Speaker 3 So, how does your phone protect people?

Speaker 3 So,

Speaker 4 again, this, like I said, this era started three and a half years ago, and we came at it from a completely contrarian view yeah

Speaker 4 this phone uh it's our hardware made in indonesia at a singaporean facility um our operating system all our code

Speaker 4 and we are solely focused on data sovereignty that you control it's pretty cool just that

Speaker 3 i am kind of impressed that you

Speaker 3 made hardware. You didn't just build an app like you actually

Speaker 4 because you have to control it down to the root level of

Speaker 4 the hardware and the software so that

Speaker 4 we don't have an advertising ID and our operating system blocks any

Speaker 4 attempt by any app to turn on your camera or your Wi-Fi or your microphone or your GPS or anything. We don't allow any of that leakage.
In fact, we have a privacy center.

Speaker 3 This is called the unplugged.

Speaker 4 This is an unplugged phone.

Speaker 4 And this is effectively a firewall which prevents apps from doing all the things they're used to doing on all the other phones.

Speaker 4 So you're in control of what of your data goes out, which is effectively zero.

Speaker 4 This is like a safe. It comes in, it doesn't come out.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 3 just to bottom line it, I'm protected from what am I protected from if I use that?

Speaker 4 Here's the thing.

Speaker 4 If you're using apps and some federal agency goes to that app, purveyor, and says, give me everything you have on Tucker that he's been using on that app.

Speaker 4 There'll be nothing because there's no data leaking from you,

Speaker 4 from your device,

Speaker 4 to that app.

Speaker 4 If you call somebody, we have our own secure messenger, for example, you want to call and make a secure call, and you call me, it takes about five seconds to connect because it's literally creating a encrypted tunnel between you and me.

Speaker 4 Generates a new encryption key every call.

Speaker 4 It's completely different.

Speaker 3 So the government hates that and there have been all kinds of legal battles over this question.

Speaker 3 They don't want secure communication between citizens because all of a sudden they care about human trafficking or something.

Speaker 4 Yes, and their latest excuse for this massive FIGA enlargement was drug trafficking.

Speaker 3 Drug trafficking, right?

Speaker 4 Because they've been failing for 40 freaking years at that.

Speaker 3 Well, they just opened the southern border to fentanyl and human trafficking. So these exact same people are suddenly really worried about human trafficking and drugs.

Speaker 4 It's just, it's a joke. So we've

Speaker 4 we produced 500 units, fielded them last fall. We did a

Speaker 4 big beta test, and now we have 10,000 units so people can order and deliver. And look,

Speaker 4 it is our effort to

Speaker 4 fight the power of digital.

Speaker 3 So what can't I do? I mean, I'll just confess that I use an iPhone made by a company I actually kind of hate and that hates my country and me. And I I use it anyway because it's

Speaker 4 a lot of people like you that would want to digitally opt out of the lie of big tech. And so what you can't do, obviously we don't have the Apple Store.

Speaker 4 We don't have Apple Music, but you can use Spotify. You can use

Speaker 4 a lot of the other streaming services on here. We just prevent them from collecting your data as to what you're listening to or where you are when you do it.

Speaker 3 What about pictures?

Speaker 4 Of course you can take pictures.

Speaker 4 And you can share pictures, you can send pictures. We have a lot of the other privacy-related apps, whether it's Signal or Threema or Proton or Telegram.
We have

Speaker 4 nobody done this.

Speaker 3 So everyone complains about this. Everyone who pays any attention at all understands.
Plus, the iPhone's incredibly expensive.

Speaker 3 But they have a hammer lock on your life.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 so this seems like a pretty obvious thing.

Speaker 4 Other people have tried it before, and they they burn through a lot of money, and I don't think the timing is right.

Speaker 3 They're not flying coach to Dubai, are

Speaker 4 We did this. Man, you are Dutch.
I love that.

Speaker 4 Flying coach to Dubai.

Speaker 4 This phone also has a kill switch, an actual

Speaker 4 switch which separates the battery from the electronics. You can't shut your iPhone off.
Oh, I know. It's always listening.
It's always pinging towers.

Speaker 4 It's always pinging Wi-Fi, building a digital breadcrumb trail. of where you go and what you do.

Speaker 3 Even if I turn the iPhone off, it's not off. Correct.

Speaker 4 This, you turn that off, it's off because it physically separates battery from electronics. It's just like pulling the battery out of an old Nokia phone.

Speaker 3 So I'm sorry, I interrupted you. So this, I love this, of course.
It's incredibly ambitious, but also on some level, it's kind of obvious. Like, why haven't we had this before?

Speaker 3 So you said people have tried, they spent too much money, and then I interrupted you.

Speaker 4 And they tried maybe just with an app, and just with an app doesn't work. And people have tried to do it with a reskinned Google phone.

Speaker 4 We have, this phone is incapable of running Google mobile services. So you're not going to get Google Maps.
We have a way to navigate that works well.

Speaker 4 But again, so many of the freemium approaches where they've been boiling the frog of the American, of the people of the world,

Speaker 4 we provide them a digital alternative to that where you are in control of your First Amendment rights and your Fourth Amendment rights.

Speaker 3 How hard is it to text people who don't have that phone?

Speaker 4 It's just,

Speaker 4 look, it emits electrons so ultimately you can see if it's on a tower or not but we even provide it with a with a sim

Speaker 4 uh with a a sim provider a data provider uh a network airtime provider that um

Speaker 3 collects the minimum amount basically all they need is your zip code of where you're buying it that's no but what i'm saying is if i am using an unplugged phone and my wife has an iphone i can text her yes

Speaker 4 sure And she can even put unplugged messenger on her iPhone as well.

Speaker 3 How much more expensive is that than an iPhone?

Speaker 4 This is $989. So it's cheaper, about $500 cheaper.
And it's comparable in speed, storage, camera quality.

Speaker 3 Can you actually get one?

Speaker 4 Yeah, you can order it at unplugged.com slash Tucker. And

Speaker 4 we will,

Speaker 4 look, we're big believers. We're a big believer in your audience.
I'm a...

Speaker 4 long ardent fan and we think your fans are our people. And so we are happy to compensate

Speaker 4 them and

Speaker 4 you guys. And we want to win in this together and give people a digital alternative to big tech owning their lives.

Speaker 3 Man,

Speaker 3 so if, I mean, it's not a threat to Apple right now, but if there's big take-up, it could be. So

Speaker 3 how do you expect them to try and stifle competition? It's a monopoly. Sure.
They want to retain monopoly status.

Speaker 4 Look, if you search for, if you do a Google search for unplugged phone or things like that, they tend to stack every negative article possible written about it first.

Speaker 3 Oh, there have been bad pieces written?

Speaker 4 Of course. Of course.
Of course, the left will always come after me and hate on me for anything.

Speaker 3 The only thing is.

Speaker 4 Is it a racist phone?

Speaker 4 The left used to be about free speech,

Speaker 4 and now they're really about kind of state control.

Speaker 3 Does the phone deny the election in 2020?

Speaker 4 I would argue that

Speaker 4 the phone cares about your First and Fourth Amendment rights. And

Speaker 4 this is not a political phone.

Speaker 3 So there's no QAnon feature on the phone at all.

Speaker 4 I don't know if there's a QAnon app. You know, we do have, the funny thing is, we do, we are.
We are lying. It's just so much.

Speaker 4 We even have an app, a dating app for people that are unvaccinated because they were thrown out of the Apple in the Google Store.

Speaker 4 So, yes, we are also a repository for the apps that have no home elsewhere.

Speaker 3 Seriously. So if you want to have really healthy babies, you can go on to this dating app.

Speaker 4 If you're not a big fan of the mRNA strand, you know, changing your genetics for future generations, yes, you need an unplugged phone.

Speaker 3 And let me just ask actually to follow up on that. I think what you just said, the last sentence you uttered, is maybe the most interesting story of my lifetime.

Speaker 3 The possibility that the mRNA technology could affect your genes, which is not crazy, actually.

Speaker 3 I don't know if it's true or not. Do you think it's true?

Speaker 4 It would be an interesting study to ask how many of the

Speaker 4 executives of those pharmaceutical companies actually took their own product. That should be a congressionally, I don't care if it's a HIPAA issue or not.

Speaker 4 Someone should find that out.

Speaker 3 Well, HIPAA doesn't exist. I mean,

Speaker 3 when they're forcing you to declare your vax status to use businesses or travel, clearly HIPAA doesn't mean anything, right? There's no medical privacy.

Speaker 4 Look, and since

Speaker 4 the erosion of that privacy, I just want to to encourage everyone to use cash yet as well.

Speaker 4 Don't go to these,

Speaker 4 you know,

Speaker 4 anyone that goes to these woke coffee shops and they say, we don't accept cash anymore. Look on the front of a dollar bill.
It says, this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.

Speaker 4 No one has the ability to deny you using cash. So leave them the right change on the table.
and tell them to have a nice day. They cannot make you pay with a credit card.

Speaker 4 That is actually insurrectionist insurrectionist if these businesses are denying you the ability to use legal tender of the United States government.

Speaker 3 I had never thought of that. Has anyone tried that?

Speaker 4 Oh, yeah. I make an issue of it all the time, much to my kids'

Speaker 4 embarrassment. But yeah, I'm a big advocate.
Cash is freedom. With the amount of data that is collected on you everywhere,

Speaker 4 you want to buy gas? Buy gas, pay cash, whatever. But

Speaker 4 what we see in China

Speaker 4 where they really don't accept cash anymore and it's become the ultimate surveillance state.

Speaker 4 That's where we're heading unless free people unite and resist that kind of totalitarian impulse of big government and big tech working together. In China,

Speaker 4 you have to pay with a WeChat app. So you do your banking through that.
You acquire tickets for a bus, an airplane, a train through that.

Speaker 4 You pay road tolls through that. Everything is through this app controlled by the state.

Speaker 4 And so before they even go to a central bank digital currency, they literally have you by the balls and they can zero you.

Speaker 3 It's material at that point. Instantly.

Speaker 4 Right. Correct.

Speaker 4 And so

Speaker 4 we did this as because

Speaker 4 for free people to be able to live in a free society, they have to communicate. They have to be able to hold and store data

Speaker 4 and

Speaker 4 be able to gather that data without someone else filtering it through an app store that the bad guys control, that the

Speaker 4 big government guys control.

Speaker 3 Where do you get cash?

Speaker 4 From a bank?

Speaker 3 It sounds like a stupid question, but there seem to be fewer ATMs.

Speaker 3 I don't think that's my imagination. In fact, it's not.
Sure. Yeah, they don't want you to use cash.

Speaker 4 There's a de-emphasis on cash, right?

Speaker 3 Cash equals freedom. I could not agree with you more.
And there's something kind of old school and cool about it anyway.

Speaker 4 But I still remember my dad having $500 bills.

Speaker 3 Yeah, why don't we have those anymore?

Speaker 4 War on drugs.

Speaker 4 Really? Yeah.

Speaker 4 That would be a great thing for the next president of the United States.

Speaker 3 What does that mean, war on drugs? So they just stopped.

Speaker 4 It was a war on cash

Speaker 4 to cut out illegal activity that was paid for in cash. William McKinley is on the $500 bill.
I think they should bring it back and put Donald J. Trump on it.
Can you imagine the heads exploding?

Speaker 4 Yeah, that'd be pretty wild. But, you know,

Speaker 4 so much of this explosion of government, perpetual wars and perpetual government stupidity comes back to very unsound money. And when we went off the gold standard, when Nixon did,

Speaker 4 how was it done? Was it a vote through Congress? No. Was it debated?

Speaker 4 It was an executive order, which means you can go back on with executive order as well.

Speaker 3 Where are you on gold?

Speaker 4 I'm very pro-gold. It is for millennia been a store of value.
And I'd say

Speaker 4 digital blockchain currencies, also interesting. It's hard.

Speaker 4 Look, anything is of value if someone recognizes it as a medium of exchange. Right.
Right. I mean,

Speaker 4 there was a tulip inflation in the Netherlands in like 500 years ago.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 4 But tulips were currency, tulip bulbs.

Speaker 4 So lots of things can become if things get

Speaker 4 really scary,

Speaker 4 ammunition will be currency. Yes.
Always has been.

Speaker 3 Yes, I've had that thought personally.

Speaker 3 Ammunition dogs have a lot of dogs too. So I feel like dogs will be more valuable at some point.

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Speaker 1 Where do you keep your most valuable possessions? Not your necktie or a pair of socks, but things you wouldn't want to replace or maybe couldn't.

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We definitely plus are good looking, I will say.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 are you a gold buyer without getting too specific about it?

Speaker 4 Some, yeah. But I mean,

Speaker 4 for heaven's sakes, started a company which took on not one, but two multi-trillion dollar companies.

Speaker 4 Because, you know,

Speaker 4 that was a dumb, crazy idea, you know, three and a half years ago. So that's, that's, I've been investing in this capability for people to communicate securely and freely.

Speaker 3 And I hope it works.

Speaker 4 And it will never be a public company. We have taken no institutional money.
It will be a private company, not subject to the SEC and all the other nonsense.

Speaker 4 It's not even an American registered company because I didn't want the U.S. government to be able to shut it down.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's interesting. Again, we haven't done had a conversation really about your personal story, which is one of the most amazing personal stories of anyone I've ever met.

Speaker 3 But among the many twists and turns and ironies of your life is that someone as patriotic as you was basically at one point forced to flee to a foreign country.

Speaker 4 Well, I didn't flee. I went there for a job opportunity, but I'd been attacked unbelievably.

Speaker 4 Oh, I remember

Speaker 4 talking about putting you in jail.

Speaker 3 I remember that.

Speaker 4 Every federal agency in the world was coming after us. And I

Speaker 4 paid about $2.5 million a month for two years straight in legal fees. I paid the highest per capita fine in State Department history.

Speaker 4 It was the only federal agency that actually stuck us with something because we had no means to contest it because they,

Speaker 4 at that point, we were working for the State Department, doing diplomatic security, protecting Americans, something we did more than 100,000 times.

Speaker 4 with no State Department or U.S. official ever killed or injured on our watch.

Speaker 4 And sometimes the State Department would be demanding, I need 50 more men here, I need 30 more men there, go immediately.

Speaker 4 But another part of the State Department, the licensing department of the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls, moving at the speed of at the speed of peacetime,

Speaker 4 would be slow rolling on the licenses, the export license for like body armor or helmets or guns used by our people working for the State Department.

Speaker 4 And yeah, I'm not going to send a guy naked to a war zone, so we'd send stuff to do that mission for the State Department in Iraq or Afghanistan or whatever.

Speaker 4 And so, yeah, that was what they had us over the barrel. So they fined me $42 million for that.

Speaker 3 Did you pay?

Speaker 4 Had to.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Hillary Clinton.

Speaker 3 Why didn't she like you?

Speaker 4 I don't know.

Speaker 3 Didn't like your vibe, I guess.

Speaker 4 But not that so much.

Speaker 3 She doesn't fly, coach.

Speaker 3 Once again,

Speaker 3 where do people watching get that?

Speaker 4 So I've been very active in the media, but they can go to unplugged.com/slash Tucker.

Speaker 3 Simple. You've been very active in the media.
In other words, you're out there talking about this. Yeah,

Speaker 4 for lack of a better spokesman, I'm kind of it for now, but we're looking for more if you'd like to be it.

Speaker 4 But yeah, no, people can order and they'll get it within 36 hours usually.

Speaker 3 How hard is it to operate?

Speaker 4 It's very simple. Look, so it's based on the Android kernel.
So

Speaker 4 any of the apps built for Android, almost 95% of them work on this phone. They look a little different because they're not blasting all the personal ads at you for using the app.

Speaker 4 So again, it's a way for people to be in the world digitally, but not of the world, and not have all your stuff collected, stored, and disseminated to all kinds of people that hate you.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah. And then it's available, of course, to the U.S.

Speaker 4 government, which and another important feature, which I think you'll appreciate on our Messenger, we even have a dump feature.

Speaker 4 So if you're using Unplug Messenger and someone comes and says, Tucker, give me your phone. I'm here to inspect it.
You say, sure, officer. And you unlock it with a certain code.

Speaker 4 When you hand it to them, it's a brick. It's a paperweight because it wipes.
It's an auto-dump feature, which wipes the messages, or it can even dump the entire phone.

Speaker 4 Dump, as in zero-it-out, hard factory reset, unrecoverable FU.

Speaker 3 Seriously. Yep.

Speaker 3 So you're traveling through a foreign airport, which is where this, and our airports, this happened. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And you can, yep, erase the phone instantly.

Speaker 3 So one of the reasons that I really passionately dislike Apple and Google is because they'll take your communications and give them to the government without telling you. Yes.

Speaker 4 In fact, out of this FISA bill just passed, they're not even allowed to tell you

Speaker 4 that your stuff has been accessed by this random federal agency or whatever. So it's just

Speaker 4 it is a big brother expansion bill is what that was.

Speaker 3 And this, I mean,

Speaker 4 luck or timing or, I don't know, anticipating where the problem is going to be, started this journey three years ago. We're now here.

Speaker 4 It's not hypothetical anymore. These are available and

Speaker 4 we've just shipped 3,500 of them. And there's a few of them.

Speaker 3 Well, you see this in civil suits, too. Not that I'm speaking from experience, but, you know,

Speaker 3 the people who oppose you can wind up with all your text messages. And then it's a short trip from there to, say, the New York Times.

Speaker 4 Exactly.

Speaker 4 And a text without a context is a pretext for trouble.

Speaker 3 Oh, I love that. A text without a context is a pretext for trouble.

Speaker 3 Luckily, in my case, I wasn't really doing anything wrong other than using naughty language. But

Speaker 4 all the better to have a burn time and all those messages. So it's not looked at a year or five years later

Speaker 4 in some completely different ways.

Speaker 3 I agree with that. Right.

Speaker 4 And so, and again, nothing is stored. It's either on your device.
If you send me a message, it's on this device or your device. And we can set a burn time where it's gone, unrecoverable.

Speaker 3 The feds can never come to you and say, as the owner and spokesman for Unplugged, we want the text messages for so-and-so.

Speaker 4 We got nothing, man. We store nothing.
It's stored on your device or this device. And you can set it up.

Speaker 3 Whereas Apple, if I use iMessage, which I do. Correct.

Speaker 4 And you can set a burn time on this where it disappears and it's on your message.

Speaker 3 So if I'm, this is my grubby iPhone.

Speaker 3 But if I'm texting on iMessage

Speaker 4 and

Speaker 4 they're storing all of it.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I got 59 text messages while we were talking this morning.

Speaker 4 That's why you're so slow to respond to text. You're deluged.

Speaker 3 Well, it's also my birthday, so lots of people

Speaker 4 are texting me.

Speaker 3 But anyway, the point is, and I don't have any unauthorized birthday messages,

Speaker 3 that's a lot. I mean, people conduct their, I'll speak for myself.
I conduct my life through text message.

Speaker 4 Exactly. Apple has all of that for all eternity.

Speaker 3 And they will happily give that to the government without question.

Speaker 4 And now they're compelled to turn it over without even a warrant

Speaker 4 or probable cause. So again, if people are sick of that.

Speaker 3 So users of unplugged are protected from that, invulnerable. There's no that can be.

Speaker 4 If they're using unplugged message, if you send a regular text on unplugged,

Speaker 4 it's going to pass through a phone carrier.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 4 They'll have that message. But if you send a message on unplugged messenger,

Speaker 4 gone.

Speaker 4 You can set a burn time on it, and it's gone and unrecoverable. Not stored by us or anybody else.

Speaker 3 Well, that seems like freedom to me.

Speaker 4 I will always choose freedom.

Speaker 3 Amen.

Speaker 4 And fight like crazy for it.

Speaker 3 So let me just end this with

Speaker 3 kind of an apology for interrupting you in the middle of one of the most interesting things you were saying. So I said, name three places that Americans are not paying attention to.

Speaker 3 Since you are, I don't want to violate your privacy by saying where you are, but I just happen to know that you're like, you're in places I can't even find them on a map and I'm pretty good at geography.

Speaker 3 So I think you are the person to ask, what are three places that we're not paying attention to that we ought to be? And I interrupted you after the first one because it was so interesting.

Speaker 3 And you said Mexico.

Speaker 4 Mexico, Fentanyl, the CCP, very much promoting. So Amlo is a super socialist president there now.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 There's an even worse leftist female about to take over, an absolute leftist female. I love how you describe her.

Speaker 4 She's very much a Marxist protege.

Speaker 3 Oh, she is. No, she's a leftist female for sure.

Speaker 4 With active programs by the CCP to support the most leftist candidates there

Speaker 4 in Mexico. That's a problem.

Speaker 4 It's become more and more of a narco-state with cartels having very significant influence, if not control, locally or regionally

Speaker 4 throughout the country.

Speaker 4 And that's literally our southern border.

Speaker 4 And the AMLO government

Speaker 4 actively

Speaker 4 promoting

Speaker 4 and cooperating with that kind of CCP nonsense.

Speaker 4 Positive note, just a right-wing guy elected in Panama who says he's going to shut the Darien Gap, which is the area that moves all kinds of people. Now,

Speaker 4 you asked for three. I might give you a couple more than three if you guys have.
Please do.

Speaker 4 The active spend of NGOs that the U.S.

Speaker 4 government funds, which enables mass migration into Latin America to walk north, to invade across our southern border is massive and disgusting and illegal and wrong. I was just, I remember

Speaker 4 three months ago I was contacted by an NGO in Haiti asking if I could organize an aircraft to fly from Port-au-Prince to Managua daily. I said, why on earth would you want to do that?

Speaker 4 They said, well, Haitians can fly to Nicaragua visa-free.

Speaker 4 And I said, ah, I know why.

Speaker 4 It's to facilitate Haitians coming to Nicaragua and then walking north to facilitate illegal migration from North Africa.

Speaker 3 Do we have a Haitian shortage here?

Speaker 4 I don't think so. No.

Speaker 4 And there is

Speaker 4 a massive network of those NGOs. And some of those guys are making, the CEOs of these things are making a million dollars a year taking U.S.
taxpayer money, facilitating the maneuver entrance

Speaker 4 of illegal migrants into the United States, funded by the U.S. taxpayers.
It's disgusting. And if Republicans actually have the power of the purse, this needs to stop.

Speaker 4 And the fact that they don't means we have a uniparty problem. So we probably need a melee-type solution of a complete change in parties to fix this.
I agree completely.

Speaker 3 But you do sort of wonder, since there's no economic justification for this level, millions of uneducated people from the poorest countries of the world coming to your country.

Speaker 3 There's no, especially with AI, like there are no jobs for these people. They're just...

Speaker 4 But just the fact that the Democrats were actively seeking to register them as voters and to make it possible to vote, you knew exactly what they're doing. They're trying to stack the deck.

Speaker 3 But I mean, you've been around wars your whole life.

Speaker 3 Like, you tell me if you've got the mass movement of young military-age males into a country, some of them with prison records, like, what are you looking at here?

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Like, does that make you nervous at all? Sure.

Speaker 4 But I also know

Speaker 4 Cannon fodder doesn't do very well against a sophisticated capability. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And the fact is, the people that actually did the fighting and the dying and the hard combat in the last 20 years,

Speaker 4 they don't agree to that kind of nonsense because they've laid their lives and their brothers and their health on the line for America for a long time.

Speaker 4 And they're not going to sit quietly about that nonsense.

Speaker 3 But I mean, so, but there's already an effort in the Congress to make illegal aliens citizens if they serve in the U.S. military.

Speaker 4 I'm not opposed to a longer-term legionnaire type program if someone comes here and actually serves and with obviously very, very strict performance guidelines.

Speaker 4 I mean, we're not not, don't hire a guy to be a truck driver in the Army and get citizenship. No.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 I'm not so opposed to that.

Speaker 4 But all the other stuff they want to do around voting and driver's licenses and all that stuff, there's a lot of actions that the next administration can take to make it very difficult for those illegals to remain here by debanking and de-platforming them, what the left has been doing to people like us for the last 20 years

Speaker 4 to make that difficult. Okay, so Latin America, big problem.
In Guyana, country most people haven't heard about other than where Jim Jones served Kool-Aid.

Speaker 4 made the largest energy discovery

Speaker 4 in this hemisphere in the last 50 years. So it's enormous.
And Venezuela has been

Speaker 4 now declared that 70% of Guyana's territory is theirs, dusting off a 130-year-old border dispute.

Speaker 4 And I think you're going to see Venezuela annex or seize

Speaker 4 that

Speaker 4 with largely impunity in the coming months or years, certainly.

Speaker 4 If the Democrat administration continues, they'll take it because there's no consequences for it.

Speaker 4 And so you're really seeing a complete collapse, a erasure of the Monroe Doctrine, this idea that what happens in the Western Hemisphere is America's business and not the business of Russia and China.

Speaker 4 The

Speaker 4 collapse of credibility of France and of the United States in Africa is now really accelerating.

Speaker 4 The

Speaker 4 jihad problem that was persistent in Mali and Burkina Faso and Niger, and why do these countries matter? Huge gold, huge uranium, other minerals there. And now Chad, Sudan.

Speaker 4 The U.S. had two big bases in Niger, and they were just pushed out, cost

Speaker 4 a billion plus easily.

Speaker 4 Big air bases, drone bases that were trying to do CT support

Speaker 4 all across Africa. pushed out by a collapse of credibility

Speaker 4 by the U.S., by the French, and the Russians have pushed in.

Speaker 4 And the Russians are using a Wagner capability, a hybrid private military company-type capability to enable the expansion of military capability in those countries while at the same time, a voracious appetite for gold and other minerals, uranium of high value there.

Speaker 4 And so you're seeing, to me,

Speaker 4 it's a reversion to the norm of what you saw in the 1600s.

Speaker 3 I was just thinking that exact same thing. As the dollar declines,

Speaker 3 of course, gold becomes more important.

Speaker 4 Yes. Gold and uranium and actual green energy.
That's right.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 there's nothing really that new in warfare, just different,

Speaker 4 maybe a little bit of different tech that changes how things are done, but how nations interact with each other, I think you'll see

Speaker 4 a return to privateers and to a lot more private sector because our big, bloated superstate federal government has proven, well, at least now for the last 30 years, it's not very good at putting the fires out.

Speaker 4 Civilization.

Speaker 4 Managing the conflict doesn't work.

Speaker 4 Clearing the decks

Speaker 4 and putting a tourniquet on some of these things is necessary.

Speaker 3 Last question. It does seem like civilization's in retreat in a lot of places.

Speaker 3 Order.

Speaker 3 free movement,

Speaker 3 relatively open markets,

Speaker 3 civility, self-restraint, you know, just all the sort of hallmarkers, hallmarks of an open society of like Western civilization. They all seem to be in decline.
Do you see that? And

Speaker 3 are you worried about it?

Speaker 4 Yeah, look, civilization is ebb and flow.

Speaker 4 And I look for pockets of normalcy, of however crazy things get, people still figure out how to how to get on with it and carry on.

Speaker 4 And there's certainly pockets within Europe where they still do that. There's pockets

Speaker 4 in parts of the Middle East.

Speaker 4 There's even some pockets in South Africa that I would consider islands of normalcy.

Speaker 4 And in Latin America as well. Again, I come back to Millé.
What a spectacular man who just took on his entire political establishment and said,

Speaker 4 a fuera, out, right? So

Speaker 4 I'm still drawn, and I recommend the book a lot. It's called To Dare and to Conquer.
And a friend gave it to me years ago.

Speaker 4 And it's a history of special operations throughout history, all the way from Alexander the Great and his men that climbed Sogdian Rock

Speaker 4 to the present of a few picked men and women, very capable warriors that flew in the face of unsurmountable odds and made it happen and change world history. So I think

Speaker 4 there's a lot of hope in that. And

Speaker 4 big government is really dumb and quite plotting. And

Speaker 4 I know folks that have worked in Google and Apple and they pull their hair out at how inane and stupid a lot of those things are. And so I view them probably as dumb as the U.S.
was in Afghanistan.

Speaker 4 And an opponent that can be defeated with wily, creative, very focused,

Speaker 4 and very, my dad always told me persistence and determination. And I try to live by that.
And

Speaker 4 I come back to

Speaker 4 my favorite quote from Churchill. And he said,

Speaker 4 he was speaking before the Canadian Parliament a year after the Battle of Britain said. He said, a year ago, Herr Hitler said he would wring the neck of the British people like a chicken in six weeks.

Speaker 4 And I stand before you a year later and I say, some chicken, some neck.

Speaker 3 Eric Prince, thank you.

Speaker 4 Thanks, Tucker.

Speaker 3 Thanks for listening to the Tucker Carlson Show. If you enjoyed it, you can go to tuckercarlson.com to see everything that we have made.
The complete library, tuckercarlson.com.