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

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We had this pattern for years of taking, of hoarding tape like you do ammo. Yeah.
Like I don't even shoot 7.62x39. Really? It's just not, I'm not that interested, but I have, you know, like it's unimaginable how many steel case rounds I have.
Like, why do I have those? Because I'm crazy. Just in case.
It's like, so the prepper- Better to have and not need than need and not have. I totally agree with that.
But I'm not rational about it. Like, I'm sure you, who's like equipped an entire private army, you're pretty rational about it.
I'm not. I'm like, I'm not exactly sure I need, I don't give a shit, gold, ammo, you ammo you know whatever i just want to hoard it and um because i feel you know i can feel all this stuff and tape is the same way the dudes with guns yeah are not a match for dudes with drones so if you're if you're the kind of person i'm not you know naming names or identifying myself by name but if you're the kind of person, and I'm not 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.
How, is that pointless? I've just been reading a book called Firepower, which is a history of, basically a history of gunpowder. And you track the change of warfare going from spears and longbows to the wheel locks, matchlock muskets, flintlocks, artillery with bursting rounds.
And I read that to try to understand we're now through a massive step change. Because you know, despite all the techno wizardry of the US military, the best weapon the enemy had was an IED.
Yes, I noticed. 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, low to the ground, even in a highly jammed environment so the threat highly jamming there's there's no way to stop the city highly highly jam right even because the russians are really good at jamming yes 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 a beer can size charge that you can 3d print the casing for it in the field with a little copper disc on the front of it and drive that into the back of a tank and for 1500 you destroy a two million dollar tank so that is like having a sniper rifle versus a guy with a longbow it It's a step change in warfare. And we're there right now.
And the longer this combat goes in Ukraine, the Russians are getting a lot better. Ukrainians have too, but they're just trying to, you know, the battle is the ultimate cauldron of learning.
Yes. And bad ideas are quickly destroyed and discarded.
And so the proliferation of that knowledge is staggering. So what are we learning from watching? I don't think the US military is learning much.
Oh, good. No learning.
Well, no, the problem is the US weapon systems aren't even that high demand because they're not that effective in that highly jammed environment. For 20 years of global war on terror, you were fighting against a very comparatively unsophisticated enemy.
Now in a big state-on-state type war, the U.S. systems are not holding up.
The Javelin missile, which Raytheon sells to the taxpayers for $200,000 a shot with a $300,000 command launch unit, the Ukrainians can only use that for the first shot in an ambush because their IR detector, if they shoot the first tank, the tank is very hot. It's burning.
If they try to shoot a second and third missile, the other missiles go for the very hot spot on the battlefield they 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 and it's delivered on a drone delivered on a drone or from an anti-tank missiles yeah so there's the the the super high dollar american stuff is not doing so well in that battle space. So I would assume, I mean, the world is watching this.
Potential future adversaries are seeing on display American military capability. And we should be concerned as taxpayers and as citizens that all this money we've spent, we have gotten very good value for in the same way but doesn't it doesn't it display our our vulnerability too if our weapon systems aren't working in ukraine why would they work in other parts of the world right aren't we sort of showing our hand look some of the stuff works well but at what cost right because you know the houthis are using a $20,000 to $50,000 drone to attack commercial shipping or U.S.
shipping in the Red Sea Gulf of Aden, and the U.S. has to shoot that down with not one, but two missiles that cost $2 million a piece.
So you're costing us $4 million to shoot down a $50,000 drone. Bad math.
Even in Washington, D.C.

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

why wouldn't military planners in the United States be taking notes and adjusting accordingly?

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

self-introspection, no learning. Look, who got fired? Who got punished for a complete debacle in Afghanistan where over 20 years we replaced the Taliban with the Taliban? Yeah.
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. Because if of his marines shell went to jail i know it because if he said look if a couple of my young marines lost a rifle on the rifle range they would be punished we lost we left 80 some billion dollars worth of military equipment and turned over the country to a terror organization and everybody's been promoted and everybody is just it's business as usual that's a problem this kind of incompetence is not going to end well so i mean i have too many questions and i do want to circle back to your initial point that warfare is completely different to step changes you said but how on this thread how does the u.s congress how do people who claim to support our troops, back the military, strong defense, the Liz Cheney wing of the Congress, how do they keep sending money to an organization that's increasingly incapable of defending the country? I spoke to a bunch of members yesterday morning in Congress, and they were at the point of despair because they're trying to restrict the money and to bring some accountability.
And they said the amount of money that is sprinkled around the capital by the defense contractors, by 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. It's really disgusting.
And the big thing, in the article I wrote recently, I'd said, in Rome, like when the Romans lost a whole bunch of people at the Battle of Cannae, when their Senate met a couple of weeks later, it was 40% undermanned. Why why because the roman elites actually served in the military and bore the consequences of failure our elites don't serve in the military they have very little skin in the game or no skin and so for them it's about it's it's about money and grift or their children serve in foreign militaries um so just back back to the technology itself which you've been watching all your life because you've been around it all your life.
I think you had the world's largest private air force at one point, is that true? We had 73 aircraft that we owned and operated and flew into garden spots for the US. It was fun.
So what- I was just at a Blackwater reunion last weekend and we had it at the Alamo and it was just, it was really cool standing there on hallowed ground because I didn't realize that across the street from the Alamo is the Manger Bar and that's actually where Teddy Roosevelt started the Rough Riders. So there's all kinds of Rough Rider memorabilia in this bar, raising a glass to a great American.
And if I'd convinced Trump to change policy in Afghanistan to prevent the debacle, which ended up happening, I was going to call that unit the second U.S. volunteer cavalry.
The first U.S. volunteer cavalry was the Rough Riders.

Samwon Hill.

Exactly.

This was going to be two USV.

It would have worked.

Afghanistan would be stable.

We would have saved America the embarrassment.

Yes.

And really that, I'd say a pivotal moment for a massive collapse in American credibility and deterrence. And it would have cost 5% of what the U.S.
was already spending. So why couldn't, I remember that very well.
And in my memory, you were not making the case for a forever occupation. You were making the case for a sensible drawdown that didn't destroy the credibility of the United States.
All the conventional forces could have left. Right.
right 90 of the contractors could have left there would have been a small stay behind special operations force 6 000 contractors that's it um and and would have kept accountability for the tens of billions of dollars of u.s equipment that was already there and would have kept the government upright and you know there's now every al-qaeda every every crazy terrorist organization has set up shop there in afghanistan again we've not heard the last of afghanistan it's really sad why and i remember again i remember that in fact i think we talked i know we talked about it at the time and it seemed it seemed sensible it seemed kind of non-ideological practical how do we get this is kind of a clusterf How do we get out in the best way possible, preserving our own interests to the extent that we can? Why didn't the administration, the Trump administration, take you up on that? I would say the same neocon perpetual war presence in Washington that wants to do it the same way that we've been doing for decades, and I would argue losing doing that.

Yes.

And it's about money and power and perpetuation,

not about actually putting a bow on a bad situation.

But how do those people, as they inevitably do,

seize the moral high ground

in the opening moments of the ideological battle

and position themselves as like the champions

of freedom and human rights, when in fact they're monsters. Like how do they, how do they get away with that every single time? I think it's a direct result of the all volunteer force, which seems a good idea.
I'm still supportive of it, but it means it's a very, the people that actually serve that bear the cost of these overseas efforts is maybe one half of one

percent of the population serving three or four percent know that one percent and then 95 of america has no clue and no skin in the game and so they're easily bullshitted by the uh the posturing jackasses in washington that's yeah that's why dan crenshaw has a job um so i just want to get back to the technology because I'm just, I'm interested on behalf of all people who sense turmoil ahead and are, say, stockpiling ammo. Right.
I think there are people like that. Is that fruitless given the technologies? I would argue for Taiwan, for example, facing a possible invasion or issue from coming from mainland China, the best thing they could do is build a home guard because a well-armed, well-motivated people, I mean, as we showed in Afghanistan, as the Taliban showed the US military, well-motivated people, even using weapons that are 70 years old, can still beat a superpower with all the techno gimmickry.
Yes. It's not the steel in the ships that make a great Navy, it's the steel in the men.
Right. The steel in the crew.
But are you ever going to see another war between states that's won or lost on the basis of artillery tanks i mean is that are those the cavalry charges of today cavalry artillery is still the king of battle as ukrainians are learning the hard way and the russians have gone from you know if you shot at the russians a year and a half ago it would take them about an hour and a half to shoot back accurately.

Yes.

To geolocate and to coordinate with their fire control centers to shoot back.

Now they're down to about two or three minutes.

So they've learned and they're coordinating and they've gotten a lot better.

And it is wrong for us to assume that our Kung Fu is all that good right now.

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

Very significant.

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

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

There'll still be a role for tanks, but people are going to have to figure out how to knock down the swarms of incoming drones with hard kill and soft kill etc um it is always gonna you know warfare is going to ebb and flow but the ability to program very sophisticated devices that fly very fast that are very hard to kill you know the the first strategic offset after world war 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.
Now everybody has precision weaponry. So I would argue that the third offset that the US should try to pursue dominance, I mean, we're far from it, is in an an ai drone innovation application and i would say the most innovation that's happened has been in ukraine and russia right now and we are way behind because again washington procurement people the the approps people in congress keep spending money in the same way on the same stupid cartel of defense contractors with the same failing results when at the bleeding edge of battle, actual innovation is happening by dudes in their garage in Ukraine that are fighting for their lives and they've innovated.
And we ignore that to our detriment. So these are countries with fewer marketing majors and more engineers coming out of there, right? Yeah, they've- Marketing majors are bad at creating drones.
They've done well at STEM. Yeah, they have done well.
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What will drones be able to do, do you think, in 10 years? What will that look like? You could load a face, and between network surveillance and the facial recognition on that drone, find one person and fly into that person's head that fast. Seriously? Yeah.
So identity management, privacy, will become even more essential.

You think about how many cameras,

how much data is being constantly collected everywhere

from street cameras, from door knock, from doorbell cameras,

from facial recognition at the airport.

Privacy is really under attack.

Yeah, well, I've noticed.

And now TSA has decided to take your photograph every time you walk through. I went through yesterday, and they had a, you know, staring to the screen and will assess your face.
I said to the guy, is this mandatory? And he said, no, it's not. And I said, fuck that.
I'm not doing that. And he goes, I agree with you.
Okay, I mean, but like, what is that? Why are they doing that? Data aggregation, because they can. So it's not a good sign when your own government is gathering data on you, is it? Like, why would they possibly need that? Why would they want that? What chipped chipped our founding fathers off right paying some taxes on tea and yeah land taxes and i mean i guess our idea of um uh of what we will resist over in terms of liberty and government intrusion has been very steadily eroding and now it's i would say increasingly a steep curve of dissent 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 gonna be less effective military it's bad they make fun of it but that seems way darker to me i mean it does seem like it's being weaponized against dissent in the United States.
I think, you know, the military was one of the most trusted institutions. For sure.
And I saw already even in the 80s, I mean, look, I went to the Naval Academy in 1987 and I left after a year and a half because i found the political correctness and the nonsense already then on the double standards that were pursued by the academy leadership while saying there are no double standards i just found ridiculous what were the double standards i remember going to the uh the oak horse the first time and and they said, this is one height of a wall to get over for one gender and one height for the other one. And they said, oh, the standards are all the same.
But wait a minute. They're liars.
So yeah. So just let's, if you're going to call it the same, then be the same, but at least let's be consistent.
And so the amount of recruiting for specific sports teams of people that were completely unqualified to be there or to be Naval officers was staggering. I love the Navy.
I just didn't like the school run by the federal government. So I went- I didn't fully realize it.
So you made it through the first year where people drop out. Yeah.
No, I left halfway through my sophomore year. I finished my finals.
So you did the hard stuff and you still dropped out. Yeah, it's not that hard.
It's just you have to have a high tolerance for bullshit. That's all.
Yeah, that's dropped in you, I notice. Yeah.
Yeah. But I rolled to Hillstale.
So, you know, went quite the opposite to one run by the federal government to one that accepted no federal funding at all.

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. Look, I had no issue with women being at the academies but at least make equal enforcement that's all if it's gonna be you're gonna call it the same then be the same that's fine and you but i what i also found i went to hillsdale and i joined the fire department of the local town and i learned more about small unit leadership there than i did in the very artificial learning lab that was the academy.
Why'd you join the fire department in college? Because it was cool. Because it was fun.
Come on. I got to do a lot of things in life, but driving a fire truck to a fire, lights and sirens is definitely in the top five.
How many kids in your class were in the fire department? None. Since then, it's been more of a thing, but I was the first one ever at hillsdale to join the fire department and it was convincing the gruff firefighters and it was a full-time part-time so there's a couple of full-time guys but the rest were like a butcher and a trash truck driver and building contractors so convincing them that this snot-nosed college kid was okay to go through a burning building with them was there was no small uh admissions process one of the things i think is most interesting about you which i know you hate to talk about but um is the fact that you're from an affluent family and so you didn't actually need to do any of that at all so why did you do that uh sense of mission sense of service and mostly a sense of adventure so you never thought like you know we're rich i don't need to this is just nonsense i'm going to no that was never bum around europe for the summer never part of the equation why no i didn't know i did i got married uh between my junior and senior year and i took a long honeymoon and we went through Eastern Europe.

But the funny thing is we-

Went through Eastern Europe.

What year was that?

That was 91.

That was as the whole Soviet Union was collapsing.

Yeah, I got married that year.

I remember.

And we went to,

we went on the Baltic Liberation Tour

with Pat Buchanan and Lou Rockwell

from the Venesis Institute.

And we went to Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia.

And we visited the government buildings,

which is and Lou Rockwell from the Venesis Institute. And we went to Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and we visited the government buildings, which were still surrounded and occupied by Soviet interior ministry troops, but they'd had free elections.
So it was fascinating to see a place literally at the inflection point of embracing freedom. What month in 1991 was this? That was May.
Okay. So I got married that summer also, and I went to the Mid-ocean club in tucker's town bermuda um it seemed more romantic than estonia what did your wife think your young bride think when you're like we're getting married but actually the honeymoon is in eastern you're in this like the hellscape of eastern honey do you know anything about stalinist architecture i'm going to show you we road trip through but it was it was really funny i'll never forget um babe buchanan bought an entire uniform off of a soviet border guard a captain for 20 bucks and we were at a restaurant and it comes back with a whole uniform on the hanger and 20 bucks and as we're leaving the country another one of our group had a uh luggage that you have to put through the scanner and um you can see in the scanner it looks like there's a manhole cover in his suitcase.
There's this huge disc. The Soviet border guard opens the thing.
This is a very big problem. How much to make the problem go away? $50.
It was an entire bronze bust of Lenin that had been yanked off a building. And our friend was exporting it.
So I thought know if they're selling linen for 50 off a government building this is not long for communism oh and in fact it was i think it was in august it was two months later it was done that's incredible um so my final question about the drones i mean is it is it a crazy thing to consider the possibility that the government might employ this technology against its own citizens deploy it against those citizens if they're putting people 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 so why wouldn't drones be part of that um entirely possible how hard are they to shoot down with say a 12 gauge uh that's actually one of the uh it's a big problem for the small fpv drones they're so small and small hard so hard to hit it's almost like hitting a uh a ptarmigan very hard to hit that bird very fast very fast 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 yeah it sounds kind of sporty so what is the defense so if nets net nets 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. But, you know, pee for plenty, you can always increase the poundage.
My sense is that police departments and state police have drones now. For surveillance, yes.
For surveillance. How hard is it to alter a surveillance drone to become an offensive weapon weapon well the ukrainians and the russians have done that in their garages or in a tent on the edge of battle pretty easily okay 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 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 military these things cannot be used domestically against americans period under any circumstances or certainly not armed or surveillance like why do you need you know what i mean look for for stopping a mass shooter or some actual terrorism event it provides good situation awareness and it protects the cops who are trying to do an honest job um but the the 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 the danger is certainly some of that tech on the arm side leaking back to be used domestically.
I don't see any effort by the US government to stop mass shootings. In fact, they seem to be abetting them.
And time and time again, you find in the small print, in the write up after the shooting, that the person has been detained repeatedly by some branch of government. You saw in Uvalde, the cops refused to go in and save the kids as they were being executed, et cetera, et cetera.
There just doesn't seem any will to stop mass shootings. There seems to be instead.
Yeah, but I don't see that. The Uvalde one was not a, I would say that's not a top-down federal conspiracy.
That was individual inadequacy of training and readiness. 100%.
Because there's dozens of other ones where the cops have just been spectacular like in nashville yes but then you see the political correctness of them being reluctant to release the the the the writings of this trans shooter who is out to kill christians right so great individual valor by those cops bad by the cop leadership or the law enforcement leadership by not releasing the truth let's have a massive disinfecting effect of truth on this situation 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 but i mean you've been in and around the government since you were 18 and shipped off to annapolis so do you think it's fair for the rest of us who haven't to be skeptical of massive increases in government power particularly military and law enforcement power that are justified by some threat like we should be highly skeptical yeah Mass shooters, child molesters, human traffickers, Islamic terrorists.

Like, 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 more on poverty more poverty more on drugs more drugs more on terrorism didn't go so well right um and and just to that i know we're jumping around but i i have too many questions but um maybe we both suffer from a little ad yeah well i mean there's just a lot to go through so you were at the center of the war on terror um more than any other american i would say oh well how i mean we had we had our shoulder to the wheel pushing like everybody else

i'm just but the the scale was 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 blackwater which you

started and ran so but you know you were subject to the policymakers as well 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 they all kind of went on to the atlantic council or whatever or their board seats or their board seats on the big defense contractors so how since you watch that how did that happen like how did tory and newland go from dick cheney's office to being like the number two person in the state department overseeing the war in ukraine like that's just crazy to me uh because it's at that it's almost a uniparty it is the party of big government yes big washington and more spending and more warfare and a hundred percent wrong the guys that you serve with um 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 the guys that actually paid the cost that's exactly right bad policymaker decisions yeah where their friends commit suicide and they didn't get see their kids grow up or they got killed or lost a limb. Those guys, what do they think? They're disgusted.
They're angry. They're righteously angry because they believe in the Republic.
When you join the military, you swear to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. And you kind of join thinking all those enemies are going to be abroad, but some of the enemies of liberty are probably here.
And when an elite enriches themselves and separates them from the realities of consequences of accountability, that's a pendulum that swings out far, but nature has a way of swinging the pendulum back to the middle. And so that

either it gets done within the rule of law and accountability, or things can come apart very quickly, frighteningly. Part of the accountability is informal.
It's social pressure, which is very effective. Shame.
Exactly. And humor.
First of all, we need to just laugh at the freaking incompetence i'd say when you when you track um

huh humor. First of all, we need to just laugh at the freaking incompetence.
I'd say when you track, I made the last deployment on the USS America, an old, it was a fuel fired aircraft carrier. And they used to, everything is measured on an aircraft carrier, especially the landings, because it's all about the aviators and who has the best launch and recovery, especially the traps.
So they measure which, why are you catching everything? So once a month, there's a thing called the foc'sle follies, which is the front of the ship, but below the flight deck where the chains come out of the belly. And so all the air wing and the senior ship's crew would muster there and they'd go through all the scores, but then it would go through the most merciful, merciless roasting of anybody.
It was the most vicious humor I've ever seen in my life. Like guys who screwed up the landings? Screwed up the landings, the XO, the CO, it was no holds bar holds barred it was fantastic it was hilarious and very healthy and but now that you've you have a much more politically correct military you can't do that at all they don't do that anymore nope no but i mean if if you can't land an aircraft on a pitching deck of an aircraft carrier, I mean, you put your own life, the hardware, and the lives of the sailors at risk, correct?

Right.

Right.

So the stakes could not be higher. High stakes, very important mission, literally lives on the line.

And it's good to reinforce good behavior and to punish bad behavior and and and shame and derision of your peers matters so looking back since again you were so close to what was happening during that whole period or at least until maybe 2012 but for the critical years you were like right there who who do you blame most for the mistakes made in afghanistan and iraq and the subsequent wars who are the villains who shouldn't get board seats look any we went through like 18 different commanders 18 different four-star generals over the course of afghanistan a lot of four-star generals we have as many generals now as we did in world war ii when we had 14 million men under arms so now you have 10 of that so you have basically 1.4 million under arms versus 14 and we have the same amount of flag officers so yeah we are massively overst massively overstaffed. And you think about all the, I mean, they have-

All chiefs and no Indians.

Each four-star general has a personal butler

and a valet and a driver and a cook

and all those kind of quaint 18th century habits of staff

that they surrounded military generals with.

We have that yet for our generals. Back when generals were though generals got killed in the civil war yes and not so much now so it's just it's just enormous it the the the there there can be a massive winnowing of of headcount across the board in generals in staffs and civilians, the tooth to tail ratio of the military, of like how many, when you say teeth, people that put warheads on foreheads versus tail has gotten way out of whack.
We have way too much tail, like an alligator sized tail with a salamander sized bite. It's just, it's so unbelievably corrupt.
So, but again, but again, no, it's, it's, it's corrupt because we just keep throwing money at it and no one ever calls bullshit. A business that goes through a massive growth cycle, everybody can get fat and sloppy and lazy because you just, there's always more money always more money and we never have to tighten a belt.

And so the US military has been on like a Krispy Kreme bender of donuts, compounding amount of donuts consumed every day and no one's ever tightened them up and saying, all right, today we're just PTing and we're not eating donuts. That's across our entire government, but especially in the military, which is supposed to exist constitutionally to defend and deter.
And I don't think we're not getting the value that we're spending money on right now. No, it seems we're at a point where it's dangerous.
Yep. And it does seem, I just want to restate i i don't know this as a dead certain fact but i

can feel it very strongly i think the purpose of it is to keep you know i think i think the enemy that they're seeking to fight lives here i mean i think this is a political i think the policy makers feel that way they're very anxious to control any instrument of force i would argue it's about for for the defense contractors they just want to keep selling expensive weapons right and they will keep paying politicians to keep buying the expensive weapons i almost feel i don't feel sad for the for the white house as they deal with a problem like in yemen where the Houthis have become long-range pirates and have shut off the entire Red Sea. Like 50% of global container traffic flowed through the Red Sea.
Now it doesn't. Egypt is losing $800 million a month in lost toll fees from container traffic.
And all those ships have to go all the way around South Africa now to make it to Europe europe coming out of asia it's a big problem and i'm sure the navy the or the the the dod policymakers only provide the administration with the 50 and 100 billion dollar solution to go beat down the houthis to make them behave and in that that article I wrote, I just come back to, there's such a constant rejection of market-based private sector solutions because the Saudis and the Israelis actually had this problem back in the 60s when there was a war in Yemen and they hired David Sterling, the founder of the SAS, and he went there with 30 guys and they kicked ass and it worked and it was cheap and simple and practical. And in this article I wrote just is a, is a litany of those kinds 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 um when um it's pretty i i my 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 it was not a song and dance and so i wrote a paper proposing a combination of land lease and flying tigers to deter the war.

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

Yeah.

In this case.

And we armed Stalin.

Yeah.

And made it possible to go from Moscow to Berlin to stop the Nazis.

But Biden could have done one very simple thing. He could have announced, okay, no war necessary in Ukraine.
They're never going to join part of NATO, but they're at least going to have an air force because there was already 200 aircraft set to retire from the US air force to be flown to the desert in 2022, 50 F-15s, 50 F-16s, some A-10s already written down to zero value to the taxpayer they're going to be flown to the desert to the boneyard and parked for eternity transfer those to ukrainians would have been less than a billion dollars prevent the war and the discussion of nato done but they wanted the war obviously apparently why or they or they believe their own bullshit that they that their powerpoints and their posturing would dissuade look 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 ordinary about that. Well, obviously.
Yeah. Right? They're putting, if they put, you know.
Look at what happened when they put missiles in Cuba in 1962. Yeah, if they put missiles in Tijuana, it would be unacceptable.
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That's 1-800-780-8888. 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 munich security conference and saying at a press briefing with cameras rolling to zelinski we want you to join nato you only say that if you want a war you want the russians to invade like why would they want that i i maybe maybe they're just that dumb i don't think and i think they are dumb i I they're well they're definitely tony blinken i mean really dumb having a rock concert in kiev during massive combat operations while the ukrainian army is getting crushed he just he just visited and he's up there on stage video he's on stage with his guitar.
It's like, that is Nero fiddling while Rome burns. Here it is.
So, yeah, I mean, he's a child, obviously. And like an angry, destructive child.
But what happens? Like, where does this go? We send another $60 billion to Ukraine. Most of that money goes to five major U.S.
defense contractors to replace at five times the cost what the weapons cost that we already sent the Ukrainians. Meaning, you know, if we send them something that was built 10 years 10 years ago well now it's going to cost four and five times as much so again it's a massive grift paid by a pentagon that doesn't know how to buy stuff cost effectively it doesn't change the outcome on the battle the the as t as the fields dry it's may now coming up on tank, is it tank season again? Weather still matters in warfare.
And if you have a wet snow-covered farm field, it's very muddy, very gooey. Not great for tanks.
Mud season. Mud season.
I think the Russians call it the great Rasputitsa, the great slush. Yeah.
That's done now. And as June comes, it'll be game on.
And I think the Russian bear is hungry and they're going to have a time. So the war should have been ended, never should have started.
They should have made a deal, froze the lines six months into it. Well,iden administration believed that uh all this american weaponry would have saved the day it hasn't and it's ugly and you know the russian the russian commanders are not idiots they know their history the battle of kursk which happened just north of where the fighting is now was the largest tank battle in history it was the last offensive effort of the of the german army against the the soviets and they tried to push from the north and south on this salient it was a bulge and the russians knew they were coming and so they built lots of lines of defenses it's the same same thing they've done now, that they did last summer, which ate up all that equipment.
And now the Ukrainians are very thin. They've had a lot of corruption issues.
All the defenses that were supposed to be built by the Ukrainians are much smaller or non-existent. And so now it's allowing 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 summer. What do you think the Russians want? I'd say now they want to absolutely humiliate the West and make sure that they never have a problem with Ukraine again.
That seems achievable. I'm afraid so.
What happens to Ukraine? I don't know if it survives as an independent country.

If they take Odessa, if they take the ability for Ukraine to export its grain, that really threatens the long-term economic viability. Maybe it goes back to, look, Western Ukraine used to be part of Poland.
Eastern Ukraine used to be part of Russiaussia so you know maps maps move depending on um you know military victories drive diplomatic breakthroughs so you think and right now the russians are winning and they're going to have a very good summer 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 to the old. Well, I didn't really believe it ever.
Oh, I know that. But I don't know who's advising the White House at this point or who they're listening to, but they probably need to change out their advisor list.
But then you have the Secretary of State, our buffoonish Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, boomer parody, showing up and telling the Ukrainians during his rock concert that we're with you forever. How could you say something like that when I've never met a single person who knows anything about the region who thinks the Ukrainians will achieve victory no matter how much money we send them? How could you say something like that? It's good money after bad.
And all we're doing now is facilitating the demise of Ukrainian men and destroying them for future generations. So how many have died? I've asked members of Congress who are funding this stuff.
Hundreds of thousands. But here's what I understand.
If you're paying for this war, which the United States is, the U.S.s congress is mike johnson is don't you have a moral obligation to know its consequences 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 like aren't you kind of a monster for doing that i don't understand and you look look at, if you made the pictures of the modern battle space on the front, a little grainy in black and white, it's indistinguishable from the Battle of the Somme or World War I. Well, that's exactly right.
Artillery, a grinding, crushing, pointless loss of humanity. But it's being abetted by our policymakers.
Like, they're responsible for this to some extent like what and and it's it's shocking how uniparty government has become you don't seem shocked that they don't care about how many ukrainians have died they don't care about how many u.s troops die really good point no it's totally fair point too because they because they'll send they'll send.S. troops to war with a whole bunch of cockamamie rules of engagement and policies, and it's just not a serious way to wage warfare.
The whole premise of GWAT was that we could, by American magic and precision, we could always just clip off the head of the snake and the whole body would die of the snake. And that flies in the face of every kind of warfare.
When you look back to World War II, we killed off 30% of the German male population. World War I, same.
American Civil War, same. the continental wars in Europe in the 17, 1800s,

back to the Punic and Peloponnesian wars.

You destroy their manpower,

the logistics and their finance this cutting off the head of the snake is a fool's errand is there any precedent for it in history no so i thought a sort of a key component of education at the military academies was military history no i'm serious And you, I mean, you're a living example of it you you went to one and you know an awful lot about your business i didn't read i didn't learn that at the academy really no no that's a lifetime of curiosity i i was a military history geek as a kid when we my family went to normandy when i was 11 and uh you know i was the tour guide

sword gold juno beach pegasus bridge all that yeah i was i was that but i mean nerdy geeky kid so do you think your average like modern flag officers just sort of not aware of the history of warfare i'm sure they get some level of it but they have not made it a career i i'd say the best book I read on general officers was a British military study. It's called The Psychology of Military Incompetence.
And it went through five of the biggest disasters in British military history, like the surrender at Singapore. Yeah, Khartoum.
Yeah, Khartoum baghdad yeah in world war one of course the afghan

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

What were they?

They were

very bookish, very geeky,

not self, no introspection. Yeah.
So they're Tony Blinken basically. Or just not people able to say, okay, this is not working.
We're to attack the boat because this is not working in this direction.

And so the-

They're weak men, in other words.

Yeah, look, the anomaly of Patton

doesn't occur very often.

Patton, who's been maligned since his death,

remarkable human being.

And of course, Hollywood is, I don't know how many movies they've done telling us Patton was bad. But, you know, there are some suggestions that Patton was also murdered.
Do you think that that's possible? It'd be a hell of a difficult, well, I don't know if the traffic accident, the Jeep rollover was an accident. But he survived it and then died later yes i i man i don't know but he hated the soviets he hated communism oh i know so i don't want to get too far afield here but i 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 cetera, et cetera.
We win in Europe. And then we sort of like kind of pivot toward the Soviet Union for a few years until maybe the Rosenbergs or shortly before.
Well, and even the amount of communists, agents that were surrounding Roosevelt. Oh, well, yes.
Harry Hopkins. Harry Hopkins is literally a Soviet agent.
Yeah, right so um like why did that happen like how do we fight this war for freedom and then wind up sort of handing poland to stalin for example or on the side of the totalitarian handing all of those countries of the world of course yeah it showed uh so how is this a war for freedom if we're handing an exhaustion of moral leadership. Yeah.
I think... Who was that? Who do you think, if we could hold one person responsible for that? Truman was president.
Yeah, I know. Because Roosevelt was dead.
So as Churchill said, he died in the traces. But I think...
I think when you look at history, the lie of socialism, communism, it's easy for elitists to love that paradigm. Because the right-wing Austrian school economics approach is massive decentralization.
Yeah. Decision-making at the micro level.
the farmer knows what prices are has has a good idea what demand is going to be, decides whether he's going to plant more acres that year or not and takes that risk himself. The Soviet planner says, I need everyone to plant this many acres and we're going to do it at this price.
And it's the lie of individual incentive versus massive central planning to the betterment of elite thinking right with it with the grift that goes with it and that's just a that's like a mind worm disease that so many people continue generation after generation continue to fall for yeah it's a mom-based system whereas the let the farmer figure it out it's a dad based system yeah it's true yeah what are you a farmer like how do you know like that's what your dad says your mom's like no let's let's get it all sorry but that's why i'm i i i'm so excited to see melee having success in argentina for a guy and maybe it's analogy to to america because because he got sick of i mean you know at the end of world war ii cap per capita living standards in argentina were higher than switzerland yes paranistas socialists take over they run the company they run the country basically off the cliff hyperinflation economic wreckage terrible mile gets sick of not only the Peronistas,

but the pathetic so-called right-wing opposition,

which is not opposition.

He starts his own political party and he wins.

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

I agree with that.

You think that'll happen here?

I don't think the Republican Party

is really that salvageable anymore.

No, of course not.

Because it's been gobbled up by corporatists. Yes.
And the defense industry now spreads money equally, right and left. Not even really right, just across the Washington insiders.
So yeah, maybe an entirely new political movement. That's why Trump is transformational because he kind of came outside the republican party right and did it and um i hope he can i hope he can move the needle somewhere in the right direction because it's it's teetering so i gotta ask you a personal question we're in the middle east together not that long ago and i noticed two things one um you flew coach to the middle east which obviously you don't need to do but you did it on

purpose i think you that is your custom um 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 um so like explain those things if you would i um when i i got out of the seal teams earlier than i wanted to i loved being a seal i was pretty good at it i think and um i would have had a nice career going there those who don't know the story if story, if you could explain why you got out. Oh, my dad died.
And when I was 25 and my wife got cancer. No, I was 26, she was 29 and she got cancer.
So I got out to sort out the home front. And that's really why I started Blackwater just as a way to stay connected to the SEAL teams.
I knew nothing of business, nothing of land development, nothing of government contracting, but I kind of knew what the special operations community needed. And building that business was, um, was a really great experience.
It was, 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, I didn't want anything business. I don't think I was really suited for it.
But I was going to come and work with him after 12 years or so of being a SEAL. Starting Blackwater, building it was one of the most satisfying things I've ever done in my life.
Because bringing together people with great talents that were really good that they'd gained in the military

and they'd retired or gotten out and having it smashed the way it was really left a bad taste in my mouth and i'll be honest i carry a big chip on my shoulder yet and i try to keep it in perspective so look i had a business that was crushed and lost thousands of guys lost their lives, their limbs, their mental health, their spouses over a badly run war in two theaters by idiot Washington elites. Same idiots that smashed my business.
So yeah, I got a chip on my shoulder to do something big and effective and spectacular again and run hard until that happens or I die trying. But I mean, you you know 54 55 year old guys who've been successful which you have been despite having your business smashed they don't fly coach like what is that is that like a just a spartan impulse or you just don't get there soft you get there at the same time yeah but it's i could talk tucker i fly so much that anyway look no that's just weird i know just weird, I know.
No, come on. We're the same age, I know how this works.
Look, I'm not a purist. I do fly business class 10% of the time.
I mean, that's fine if you're flying to Fort Lauderdale from D.C. or something, but, you know, Dubai's a long way.
I just think it's very, very interesting. Learn to position so that's what it that's what it is yeah yeah i like that what's the weirdest place you've been recently why are you always in africa um what do you do for a living eric i feel like i know you pretty well i'm not really sure i would say there are lots of countries that um need help organizing with the basics of tax collection and security assistance and border security and uh police advisement because what we take for granted in America, if you want to start a business in America, you can call a law office in Delaware, get a business in two hours for 200 bucks.
It's simple. And you can get title to your land here and you can get a bank account.
You get a business license. You can do all those things that make capital formation possible possible there are so many parts of the world that's not possible and so providing them the very basic means of a reliable police department or the means to stop gangs jihadi gangs criminal gangs whatever so i do provide some advice to countries how to do that from

time to time. Judging by what little I know of your travel schedule, it seems pretty frequent.
That's interesting. So since you are everywhere all the time, and most Americans are, including me, sort of only dimly aware of what's happening around the world, name three we should be paying more attention to now than we are the chinese communist party has been very active in mexico um the fentanyl crisis is very much you know last year fentanyl in america killed like 109 000 people yes it is funded, logistically facilitated by the Chinese Communist Party to move the precursor chemicals that are actually made near Wuhan, China, shipped to the Venezuela or Mexico, fabricated into fentanyl, and basically blended with other common drugs that people are taking.
And it doesn't make any sense to do so because why would a drug dealer want to kill his customers? That's what's happening. And it is an absolute, it's a fuck you from the CCP against the West for the opium wars of the 1840s.
And it's done to- To murder American children. 100%.
Yes. And just to be clear, these are not junkies who took too much.
No. These are kids who ordered a volume off Instagram.
Yes. Or a bootleg Percocet or something.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
And so they're people dying. And that is, you trace that, and I can show all that going right back to mainland china why wouldn't why are we sending all these armaments to ukraine and we could bomb those facilities in mexico if they're if killing excuse me a hundred thousand you don't you don't you don't need you don't need to bomb fire is an underutilized tool that's true what's happening here i noticed there quite a few manufacturing and agricultural facilities that seem to be going up in smoke in this country yeah i can say to my new samsung galaxy s25 ultra hey find a keto friendly restaurant nearby and text it to beth and steve and it does without me lifting a finger so i can get in more more squats anywhere I can.
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I ain't flying in a small plane like this.

Amazing.

First up in the middle of nowhere.

Oh God, he's not breathing.

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Watch now, only on MGM+. And so, look, and on that, the last time Blinken was in Beijing, he didn't even call him on it to say, stop.

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

I mean, it is such a denial of reality.

It's hard to stomach.

So I guess what you're saying is you're not speculating about this.

This is known.

100%.

Do the intelligences, I assume, know this? this yeah but nobody wants to do anything why i think the um you have an agency that doesn't want to do their job which agency cia because i think and i know you have, very mixed feelings on the CIA.

However, the mission of the CIA, if you think about the State Department can handle 5% of issues, diplomats and embassies. You want your military over here, your conventional military.
It's a big, angry dog waiting to be let off leash that hopefully never is. the middle of the world, those problems.

You think about how the Soviet Union was really undermined in the 80s. There was 20 covert action findings that were signed, coupled by Carter, mostly by Reagan, done to undermine the Soviet Union economically, politically, culturally, socially.
And that was done under Title 50 authorities and that worked.

Without having to involve big military expenditure, there are, if you want to stop,

like how, we know fentanyl is a problem. We know the Chinese are a problem doing it.

That's specifically what the Title 50 authorities are for, to say to six guys,

go make that problem stop. And if you have an agency that doesn't want to do their job that's why it's not happening but they seem to be doing so many other things i mean i applied to cia my dad worked with cia i'm not i was never against cia i thought only like dumb liberals were against cia you know and traitors or whatever so my views on cia have evolved based on things that I have seen and personally experienced.
And my conclusion is not that everyone there, particularly, you know, the paramilitaries, I know a million of them seem like great guys, whatever. But on some like basic level, it seems totally out of control to me.
It is. I mean, when you have the leadership of the at the CIA, this Havana Syndrome is a real thing.
What does that mean?

It's a... It is.
I mean, when you have the leadership of the CIA, this Havana syndrome is a real thing.

What does that mean?

It's effectively a microwave weapon that's been used to effectively blast the brains of Americans working out of embassies, first in Havana, Columbia, Delhi, Hanoi, Vienna, Washington, D.C., lots of places. Okay? Hurting, severely hurting Americans serving abroad.
And the CIA director says it's all in their minds. It's bulimia.
That's wrong. When your people are getting screwed by a- So you think that's just i don't have a view on that i mean i'm sort of i don't know the answer but i'm sympathetic to open to both possibilities being true but you think based on evidence that this is absolutely real yes i know it to be real wow who's doing this and why it was a wet it was a It was a uh a device that was developed in the soviet union in the uh early 70s actually in ukraine so and i think the kharkiv uh development plant not that it had nothing to do with ukrainians now but it's a um uh it's about the size of a um uh like a beverage cart on an aircraft that size device uh and it's very damaging and and the fact that the russians can do that to us without consequences it shows how how pathetic they view the cia and the u.s government to not push back on consequences so cia it what motive would they have to pretend this wasn't real? Because it would require pushback somewhere, somehow.

But they're literally fighting Russia in Ukraine.

CIA is all over Ukraine fighting Russia.

Good question.

I mean, put it this way.

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

Oh, I bet they don't like you.

And you've obviously worked with them most of your life, right?

We did a lot of great work for them 100 success rate but yeah look 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 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 i mean how did a guy that voted for gus hall in 1976 who was gus hall gustavo hallberg he was the finnish american head of the American Communist Party in New York City. Exactly.
How does a guy vote for the head of the Communist Party in 1976 at the height of the Cold War and then pass whatever background check the agency is doing and have a security clearance? I find that stunning. 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 the democratically elected president yeah no i know the the levels of betrayal and self-betrayal are just almost mind-boggling let me ask you specifically about what the cia does in ukraine so i think it's fair to say based on what even the new york times has reported that the uh the ca is running effectively the ukrainian intel services i don't know i honestly don't know that i'm certainly they have they have been there advising and supporting but i think the ukrainians probably grew frustrated at um uh you know lack of uh lack of willingness to do certain things so i i don't know where the u.s support ends and where the ukrainian unilateral stuff begins so but they i asked because they've assassinated people i think they tried to assassinate me for example but they definitely killed alexander dugen's daughter um they you know allowed an american critic of the ukrainian government to die in prison lira consola lira and you're sort of like well wait a second if this is a proxy war and we're overseeing it then is the u.s government aware of this responsible for it like what u.s government should protect american citizens but clearly and if you and if you had a honest look devin nunes did a good job as the chairman of the hipsy yeah of trying to dig into the nonsense and he obviously met all kinds of resistance but he had fight in them now the republican oversight of the intel committee or of the intel agencies completely inadequate even then and I liked like devin a lot um but they're those guys are all afraid of the cia as you know they're afraid of them they know they're being spied on by cia or nsa or any you know fbi they know they're being members they're supposed to be in charge of overseeing these agencies are being spied on by them they're fully aware of that i know because they've told me to my face I'm not guessing and that's just that's not democracy that's like totally crazy yeah that's like it's like Marcus Wolff and the Stasi that's well yeah exactly that's exactly right the East German ref ref the most of me because the Stasi was way more effective than any other Intel service even the KGB yes it was the embodiment of german efficiency innovation and was like the only effective institution in the entire country what does that mean everything was in order yeah nice so and then i know that cia runs businesses like runs businesses outside the country and those are sources of income for the agency that like how can a government agency run businesses i don't understand that i am i am truly not aware of any of that okay um but how do you reign it in i mean because it of course could be a an essential tool of diplomacy statecraft of you know the projection of power i mean you could see fcia could be helpful to your country 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 have have a all hands meeting at the bubble on a friday yeah and send 50 of them home send them out to send them out to their cars and tell them we'll ship your stuff from your desk you could clean it out that fast but why does no one do that maybe no one's had the balls as the director or the deputy director to do that do you believe cia has in the last 25 years used violence against any american citizen uh yeah barack obama killed a american citizen and his 16 year old son correct alawaki in uh in yemen right and that's publicly known but they're you know there are all sorts of you know there's evidence that they're that's not an isolated maybe there's more know that one.
Yeah. So you don't think it's crazy to assume that? Entirely possible.
Well, there's a lot of people that are considered American citizens that probably shouldn't be considered American citizens. I agree with that completely.
But in actual America, there's someone who grew up here. Yeah, yeah.
Fair. But the left has so devalued citizenship.
Right. It should mean something to be an American.
I mean, a Roman citizen, it meant something. Oh, a Venezuelan gang member who's here illegally is every bit as American as you, who were born in Western Michigan.
So yes, I'm quite aware of that. Anchor babies, birthright citizenship, all of that must go.

Yeah.

You wonder if we've reached a point where it's impossible for the country to act in its own interest

just because of the changes due to immigration.

I read a lot of history,

and I know that things have been a lot worse in certain societies.

And corrective events can be shocking and traumatic to people but it's still possible um cia and not just cia but fbi and other agencies supposed to be enforcing the law and gathering intelligence have this has been shown withheld information from democratically elected presidents a A number of them, certainly Trump. That's a crime, is it not? Yeah.
And it should be met with immediate discipline. And that's a matter of having people that will follow through and wade through the bureaucratic process and exercise the authority that they're charged with doing, right? When you join the military you swear to defend the constitution against all enemies foreign domestic we should probably do something similar for any civilian employee of the federal government that they swear to defend the constitution not swear allegiance to a political leader of course not constitution right but it's not a constitutional republic if you know unelected employees of the federal government ignore the elected employees.

Yeah, well, that's something love it or hate it at Blackwater.

Every contractor that worked for us swore to defend the Constitution.

The same oath they swore when they joined the military or law enforcement.

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

So I want to ask you about spying on American citizens. So we know that it's widespread.
It's accelerating. Data is being collected about every single one of us.
And the vector for a lot of that is the phone. So it's like super useful, of course, but it's also the main vulnerability if you care about privacy and freedom.

So you've created a phone that allows people to, to some extent, to opt out of the current spying regime. Let me back up to where, I guess, where this started.
But if you think about after 9-11, suddenly, holy shit, all these federal agencies are waking up and how do we prevent this kind of conspiracy and attack against us again? And so they start looking at data. But of course, in 9-11, we didn't have smartphones.
But as smartphones become available and the technology that goes around a smartphone, because what is a smartphone?

It's basically a highly capable personal computer in your hand.

Yeah.

That's constantly linked to a network.

Yes.

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

And so as Apple and Google mobile services start developing phones, they put ad IDs and tracking information on those phones. Why? To micro-target you to sell advertising.
They gather and collect micro-information about you so that they can sell precision information to advertisers who want to sell you stuff. Can you give us a sense of what that information is? What do they know about you? Well, an advertising ID is like a 25-digit alphanumeric code that sits on your phone.
And it enables to collect where you go, what you buy, who you call, and what you browse. It even works with the apps sitting on your phone, which are also built with a software developer kit that comes from Google, and they pay you more to put the Google hooks in so that those apps can also turn on the microphone on your phone or the camera or the GPS so that your phone, yes, it's a computer, but effectively

becomes a mobile microphone collection listening device that fits in your pocket or sits in your nightstand and it collects anything and everything about what you do. And so it's been, it's almost been like a slow boiling of a frog because as smartphones become common, it becomes very convenient and it's wonderful and it becomes more and more pervasive in our lives, providing us music and news and communications and pictures and videos of our family.
Every bit of that data is collected, analyzed, parsed, and resold to advertisers. The five leading big tech companies have a combined market cap that's like the third or fourth largest nation in the world off of that surveillance capitalism model.
so as smartphones have become available, it's slow boiled all of us into a point of holy shit. And I guess for me, the oh shit moment was after the 2020 election and seeing the power that big tech had to sway that election and to then coordinate and to control who could speak, who could speak on certain platforms and zeroing out certain people.
And I actually had a tech team together at the time doing a forensics thing. And in a rage phone call, I said, fuck it, we're going build a phone.
And we pivoted and that team then started working. And yeah, we built a phone as an answer because we're never gonna make big tech change by whining about it.
They're way too much money and way too much power. We have to provide a means for people to communicate freely, securely, and most importantly, that they can control their data.
I think it's inherently American that we expect privacy as Americans. Think about the Constitution.
First Amendment is free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly. Second, we know what that guarantees, the first.
What's the Third Amendment? What was most important for the founding fathers? Privacy. Get these damn British troops out of my house.
Of course. No quartering act because there was actually British soldiers being put into people's houses.
Privacy, Fourth Amendment,

the right to privacy in the searches of our personal data. What big tech has created in surveillance capitalism is more pervasive and more intrusive than anything you could ever possibly, it's more pervasive than Marcus Wolff of the Stasi or Beria of the KGB, of the NKVD, could ever possibly imagine.
Or anything that happens in contemporary North Korea. 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.
We still do lots of things that we expect to have a privacy, but yet people with a regular phone put it on their nightstand and are surprised that the microphone is listening. I've had so many people I've talked to about, they said, I was talking to my wife about needing a new mattress in our bedroom.
The next day they're getting advertising for mattresses, which means the camera or the phone was listening to them in their bedroom with all the follow on conclusions to be drawn from that. Yeah.
Given what happens in healthy bedrooms, that's, I mean, what so what happens to those recordings 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 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? Because every message, call, video, picture, voice note, everything that goes through there, they say, well, it's end-to-end encrypted.
Yeah, it's end-to-end until it passes through their server where it's sliced and diced and analyzed and used to push, used to sell advertising to that customer. If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer, you are the product.
So if you want to get, well, I think people right now are used to Mark Zuckerberg listening from their nightstand every night because that's effectively what your phone sitting on the nightstand does. So why isn't he like the creepiest person in world history if he's listening to what's going on in your bedroom? Because they're able as big tech to shape that message.
That's the frightening thing about the power of big tech and their ability to influence what you watch, what you think about candidates. If you search something, how they score those rankings, it is shocking.

We have an antitrust problem here in America, vastly worse than in the late 1800s, early 1900s with oil and railways and steel and all the rest. This is more important.

Yeah.

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And so it's, and especially in an era of AI,

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

So it's almost like that much collection allows digital grooming by big tech to

Thank you. um so so it's almost like uh that that much collection allows digital grooming by big tech to to share and to shape your preferences how you interact etc 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 um given that there's no privacy it's probably pretty dumb to watch porn yeah nothing's private right so um what happens to all this data well now obviously that's it's used and stored i mean it's it's the the uh the bloom of data centers surrounding all these tech hubs around america is horrific and all that data is being collected and stored and and i just asked you just for a field question i'm just interested so given that those data centers are some of the biggest users of electricity they're like like a steel plant.
Okay. Yeah.
Massive electricity draw. And using electricity is, of course, destroying the planet and accelerating climate change.
Why are the climate change zombies defacing paintings in museums and not protesting data centers? I would say if they were coming after after data centers then they would be getting a non-stop stream of of social media messaging of why they should be attacking art instead of data centers well exactly but like why why are the ai ghouls why is mark zuckerberg why are they not climate criminals why am i a climate criminal for having a wood stove and a silverado but but the people who run data centers which literally draw more power with 100 backup as well right so i'm not against using energy i'm pro energy actually and cheap energy but but by the current rules they're criminals so why does no one call them criminals? Because big tech has shockingly complete control over how that messaging is. Yes, over our minds and what we think.
Sorry, but you brought it right back to the point, which is... And so now Congress, including a of republicans in their idiocy have not only extended fisa right fisa started as the foreign intelligence surveillance act yeah 1977 ish yeah it's supposed to be measuring monitoring how you collect intelligence uh communications going to to foreigners.
Now, FISA is really all about Americans. I guess we're treated as foreigners by our own government.
And so the federal agencies got sick of getting beat up when they'd come before Congress for millions of times illegally accessing what was supposed to be FISA unauthorized communications information. And for buying all this commercial data that's collected and held and disseminated by big tech to facilitate advertising.
And typing and measuring where you go, what you buy, who you call, what you browse, everything about you in a way that any previous intelligence boss would have salivated over. So now the new FISA, it's not an extension, it's a massive enlargement, says that any federal agent for any reason without probable cause or a warrant can compel any company that holds any of that personal data to turn it over.
Allowing a massive fishing expedition on anybody that's considered an opponent of that off the reservation federal agent. It's really disgusting.
Really, if it's not a Stamp Act Tea Party 1775 moment, I don't know what is. But it is ultimately your government having carte blanche to do a digital proctology exam on you with no questions asked well considering that these companies hold you know audio of you having sex with your wife video of you watching pornography like stuff that you know audio of you telling racial jokes or whatever like your most intimate moments the ones that could be used to blackmail and you, doing things you would not do in public and shouldn't do in public, like that's just, that's the ultimate power, isn't it? Yeah, I guess you either have to not give a shit and fight anyway.
Yeah. Or try to live virtuously too.
It helps. That always helps.
helps yep so how does your phone protect people so again this like i said this uh this era started three and a half years ago and we came at it from a completely contrarian view yeah this phone uh it's our hardware made in Indonesia at a Singaporean facility. Our operating system, all our code.

And... it's our hardware made in Indonesia at a Singaporean facility our operating system all our code and we are solely focused on data sovereignty that you control it's pretty cool just that I am kind of impressed that you made hardware you didn't just build an app like you actually correct this is because you have to control it down to the root level of of the hardware and the software so that our we don't have an advertising ID and our operating system blocks any any attempt by any app to turn on your camera or your Wi-Fi or your microphone or your GPS or anything we don't allow any of that leakage.
In fact, we have a privacy center. This is called the unplugged.
This is an unplugged phone. And this is effectively a firewall, which prevents apps from doing all the things they're used to doing on all the other phones.
So you're in control of what of your data goes out which is effectively zero this is like a this is like a safe comes in it doesn't come out so i'm just to bottom line it i'm protected from what am i protected from if i use that here's the thing the the uh if you're using apps and some federal agency goes to that app purveyor and says, give me everything you have on Tucker that he's been using on that app, there'll be nothing because there's no data leaking from you, from your device to that app. If you call somebody, we have our own secure messenger, for example, you want to call and make a secure call and you call me, it takes about five seconds to connect because it's literally creating a encrypted tunnel between you and me.
Generates a new encryption key every call. It's completely different.
So the government hates that and there've been all kinds of legal battles over this question. They don't want secure communication between citizens because all of a sudden they care about human trafficking or

something yes and their land their latest excuse for this uh massive phyja enlargement was drug

trafficking drug trafficking right because they've been failing for 40 freaking years at that 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 it's, it's a joke. So we produced 500 units, fielded them last fall.
We did a big beta test, and now we have 10,000 units. So people can order and deliver.
And look, it is our effort to fight the power of big tech. 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 use it anyway because it's so crazy.
And we figured there's a lot of people like you that would want to digitally opt out of the lie of big tech. And so what you can't do, obviously we we don't have the Apple store.
We don't have Apple music, but you can use Spotify. You can use a lot of the other streaming services on here.
We just prevent them from collecting your data as to what you're listening to or where you are when you do it. What about pictures? Of course you can take pictures.
And you can share pictures. You can send pictures.
We have a lot of the other privacy related apps whether it's signal or threema or proton or telegram we have why has nobody done this so everyone complains about this everyone who pays any attention at all understands plus the iphone's incredibly expensive um but they have a hammer lock on your life and so this seems like a pretty obvious

other people have tried it before and they they burn through a lot of money and i don't think the timing is right they're not flying coach to dubai are they we we we did this man you are dutch i I love that.

It's like coached in a pie.

For example, this phone also has a kill switch,

an actual 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. It's always pinging Wi-Fi, building a digital breadcrumb trail of where you go and what you do.
Even if I turn the iPhone off, it's not off. Correct.
This, you turn that off, it's off because it physically separates battery from electronics. It's just like pulling the battery out of an old Nokia phone.
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? So you said people have tried, they spent too much money, and then I interrupted you.
And they tried maybe just with an app. And just with an app doesn't work.
And people have tried to do it with a re-skinned Google phone. This phone is incapable of running Google mobile services.
So you're not going to get Google Maps. We have a way to navigate that works well.
But again, so many of the freemium approaches where they've been boiling the frog of the people of the world, we provide them a digital alternative to that where you are in control of your First Amendment rights and your Fourth Amendment rights. How hard is it to text people who don't have that phone? It's just, look, it emits electrons.

So ultimately you can see if it's on a tower or not,

but we even provide it with a SIM provider,

a data provider, a network airtime provider

that collects the minimum amount.

Basically all they need is your zip code

of where you're buying it.

That's it.

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.
Sure. And she can even put unplugged messenger on her iPhone as well.
How much more expensive is that than an iPhone? This is $989. So it's cheaper.
About $500 cheaper. And it's comparable in speed, storage, camera quality.
Can you actually get one? Yeah. You can order it at unplugged.com slash Tucker.
And we will, look, we're big believers. We're a big believer in your audience.
I'm a long ardent fan. And we think your fans are our people.
And so we are happy to compensate them and uh and you guys and we want to we want to win in this together and give people a digital alternative to big tech owning their lives man i really so if i mean it's not a threat to apple right now but if if there's big take up it could be so what how do you expect them to try stifle competition? It's a monopoly. Sure.
They want to retain monopoly status. Look, 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.
Oh, there have been bad pieces written? Of course. Of course, the left will always come after me and hate on me for anything.
Is it a racist phone? The left used to be about free speech, and now they're really about kind of state control. Does the phone deny the election in 2020? I would argue that the phone cares about your First and Fourth Amendment rights and okay we are we are this is not a political phone so there's no q anon feature on the phone at all there's not i don't know there's a q anon app there you know we do have the funny thing is we do we are lying it's just so funny we even have an app a dating app for people that are unvaccinated because they were thrown out of the Apple and the Google store.
So, yes, we are also a repository for the apps that have no home elsewhere. So if you want to have like really healthy babies, you can go on to this dating app.
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.
And let me just ask actually to follow up on that. I think what you just said the last sentence you uttered is maybe the most interesting story of my lifetime, the possibility that the mRNA technology could affect your genes, which is not crazy actually.
I don't know if it's true or not. Do you think it's true? It would be an interesting study to ask how many of the executives of those pharmaceutical companies actually took their own product.

That should be a congressionally, I don't care if it's a HIPAA issue or not.

Someone should find that out.

Well, HIPAA doesn't exist.

I mean, when they're forcing you to declare your VAX status to use businesses or travel, clearly HIPAA doesn't mean anything, right? There's no medical privacy. Yeah.
Look, and since the erosion of that privacy, I just want to encourage everyone to use cash yet as well. Don't go to these, you know, anyone that goes to these woke coffee shops and they say, we don't accept cash anymore.
Look on the front of a dollar bill. It says, this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.
No one has the ability to deny you using cash. So leave them the right change on the table and tell them to have a nice day.
They cannot make you pay with a credit card. That is actually insurrectionist if these businesses are denying you the ability to use legal tender of the United States government.
I had never thought of that. Has anyone tried that? Oh yeah, I make an issue of it all the time.
Much to my kids' embarrassment. But yeah, I'm a big advocate.
Cash is freedom. but the amount of data that is collected on you everywhere you want to buy gas buy gas pay cash whatever but the the what what we see in china where they really don't accept cash anymore and it's become the ultimate surveillance state.
That's where we're heading unless free people unite and resist that kind of totalitarian impulse of big government, big tech working together. In China, you have to pay with a WeChat app.
So you do your banking through that. You acquire tickets for a bus, an airplane, a train through that.
You pay road tolls through that. Everything is through this app controlled by the state.
And so before they even go to a central bank digital currency, they literally have you by the balls and they can zero you out. It's immaterial at that point.
Instantly. Right.
Correct. And so we did this as because for free people to be able to live in a free society they have to communicate they have to be able to hold and store data um and and and be able to gather that data without someone else filtering it through an app store that the bad guys control that the that the big government guys control um you know the the where do you get cash from a bank so do you it sounds like a stupid question but there seem to be fewer atms i don't think that's my imagination in fact it's not sure yeah they don't want you to use cash there's a de-emphasis on cash right so if cash equals freedom i could not agree with you more and there's something kind of old school and cool about it anyway um but i still remember my dad having 500 bills yeah why don't we have those anymore war on drugs really yeah that would be a great thing for the next president united states what does that mean war on drugs so just, they stopped? It was a war on cash to cut out illegal activity that was paid for in cash.
William McKinley is on the $500 bill. I think they should bring it back and put Donald J.
Trump on it. Can you imagine the heads exploding? Yeah, that'd be pretty wild.
But you know, so much of this explosion of government, perpetual wars and perpetual government

stupidity comes back to very unsound money.

And when we went off the gold standard, when Nixon did, how was it done?

Was it a vote through Congress?

No.

Was it debated?

It was an executive order.

Which means you can go back on with executive order as well. Where are you on gold? I'm very pro-gold.
It is for millennia been a store of value. And I'd say digital blockchain currencies, also interesting.
It's hard. Look, anything is of value if someone recognizes it as a medium of exchange.

Right.

Right?

I mean, there was a tulip inflation

in the Netherlands in like 500 years ago.

Yes.

But tulips were currency, tulip bulbs.

So lots of things can become...

The prettiest currency ever created.

If things get really scary,

ammunition will be currency. Yes.
Always has been. Yes, I've had that thought personally.
You're stored up. Ammunition dogs have a lot of dogs too.
So I feel like dogs will be more valuable at some point. If you love a Carl's Jr.
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But I mean, for heaven's sakes, started a company which took on not one, but two multi-trillion dollar companies because that was a dumb, crazy idea three and a half years ago. So I've been investing in this capability for people to communicate securely and freely.
And I hope it works. And it will never be a public company public company we've taken no institutional money it will be a private company not subject to the sec and all the other nonsense it's not even an it's not even an american registered company because i didn't want the u.s government to be able to shut it down yeah it's interesting again we haven't done uh had a conversation really about your personal story which is one of the most amazing personal stories of anyone i've ever met but um 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 well i didn't flee i went there for a job opportunity but i'd'd been attacked unbelievably.
Oh, I remember. Talking about putting you in jail.
I remember that. Every federal agency in the world was coming after us.
And I paid about $2.5 million a month for two years straight in legal fees. I paid the highest per capita fine in State Department history.
It was the only federal agency that actually stuck us with something because we had no means to contest it because they, at that point, we were working for the State Department,

doing diplomatic security, protecting Americans, something we did more than 100,000 times

with no State Department or US official ever killed or injured on our watch.

And sometimes the State Department would be demanding,

I need 50 more men here, I need 30 more men there,

go immediately.

But another part of the State Department,

the licensing department of the Directorate

of Defense Trade Controls,

moving at the speed of peacetime,

would be slow rolling on the licenses,

the export license for like body armor or helmets or guns

used by our people working for the State Department.

And yeah, I'm not going to send a guy naked to a war zone.

So we'd send stuff to do that mission for the State Department

in Iraq or Afghanistan or whatever.

And so, yeah, that was what they had us over the barrel.

So they fined me $42 million for that.

Did you pay?

Had to. Yeah.
Hillary Clinton. Why didn't she like you? I don't know.
Didn't like your vibe, I guess. Not that so much.
She doesn't fly, coach. Once again, where do people watching get that? So I've been very active in the media, but they can go to unplugged.com slash Tucker.
Simply remember. You've been very active in the media.
In other words, you're out there talking about this. Yeah, for lack of a better spokesman, I'm kind of it for now, but we're looking for more if you'd like to be it.
But yeah, no, people can order and they'll get it within 36 hours usually How hard is it to operate? It's very simple Look, so it's based on the Android kernel So anybody, any of the apps built for Android Almost 95% of them work on this phone They look a little different Because they're not blasting all the personal ads at you Right For using the app So again, it's a way for people to be in the world digitally, but not of the world, and not have all your stuff collected, stored, and disseminated to all kinds of people that hate you. Oh, yeah.
And then it's available, of course, to the US government. And another important feature, I think you'll appreciate, on our Messenger, we even have a dump feature.
So if you're using Un using unplugged messenger and someone comes and says, Tucker, give me your phone. I'm here to inspect it.
And you say, sure, officer. And you unlock it with a certain code.
When you hand it to them, it's a brick. It's a paperweight because it wipes.
It's an auto dump feature, which wipes the messages, or it can even dump the entire phone. Dump as in zero it out, hard factory reset, unrecoverable FU.
Seriously? Yep.

So you're traveling through a foreign airport which is where this and our airports this has happened yeah and you can yep erase the phone instantly 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.
In fact, out of this FISA bill just passed, they're not even allowed to tell you that your stuff has been accessed by this random federal agency or whatever. So it's just a, it is a big brother expansion bill is what that was.
And this, I mean, luck or timing or, I don't know, anticipating where the problem is going to be, started this journey three years ago. We're now here.
It's not hypothetical anymore. These are available.
And we've just shipped 3,500 of them. And there's a few you see this in civil suits too not that i'm speaking from experience but um you know um the people who oppose you can wind up with all your text messages and then it's a it's a short trip from there to say the new york times exactly um and a text without a context is a pretext for trouble oh i love that a text without a context is a pretext for trouble yeah luckily in my case i wasn't really doing anything wrong other than using naughty language but um all the better to have a burn time and all those messages so it's not looked at a year or five years later well i agree with some completely different lens because right and so and again nothing is it's it on your device.
If you send me a message, it's on this device or your device. And we can set a burn time where it's gone, unrecoverable, anytime, anywhere.
But the feds can never come to you and say, as the owner and spokesman for Unplugged, we want the text messages for so-and-so. We got nothing, man.
We store nothing. It's stored on your device or this device.

Whereas Apple,

if I use iMessage,

which I do.

Correct.

And you can set a burn time

on this

where it disappears

and it's gone.

But just to be clear,

so if I'm,

this is my grubby iPhone,

if I'm,

but if I'm,

if I'm texting on iMessage

and...

They're storing all of it.

Yeah, I got 59 text messages while we were talking this morning that's why you're so slow to respond to the text texts you're deluged well it's also my birthday so lots of people are texting me but anyway the point is and I don't have any unauthorized birthday messages but um but that's a lot I mean people conduct their all to speak for myself I conduct my life through text message exactly Apple has all of that for all eternity and they will happily give that to the government without question and now they're compelled to turn it over without even a warrant or probable cause so again if people are So users of Unplugged are protected from that, invulnerable. There's no, that can never happen.
If they're using Unplugged Messenger, if you send a regular text on Unplugged, it's going to pass through a phone carrier. Right.
They'll have that message. But if you send a message on Unplugged Messenger, Yeah.
Gone. You can set a burn time on it and it's gone and unrecoverable.
stored by us or anybody else that seems like freedom to me i will always choose freedom amen and fight like crazy for it so let me just end this with um a kind of an apology for interrupting you in the middle of one of the most interesting things you were saying so i said name three places that americans are not paying attention to since you are i don't want to violate your privacy by saying

where you are but i just happen to know that you're like you're in places i can't even find

them on a map and i'm pretty good at geography so i think you are the person to ask what are three

places that we're not paying attention to that we ought to be in the i interrupted you after the

first one because it was so interesting and you said mexico mexico fentanyl the ccp very much

Thank you. we're not paying attention to that we ought to be.
And I interrupted you after the first one because it was so interesting. And you said Mexico.

Mexico, fentanyl, the CCP very much promoting.

So AMLO is a super socialist president there now.

Yeah.

There's an even worse leftist female about to take over.

And absolutely.

Leftist female.

I love how you describe her.

She's very much a Marxist protege. Oh, she is.
No, she's a leftist female i love how you describe her she's a she's very much a a marxist protege oh she is no she's a leftist female for sure um with active programs by the ccp to support the most leftist candidates there uh in mexico that's a problem um it's become more and more of a narco state with cartels having very significant influence, if not control, locally or regionally throughout the country. And that's literally our southern border.
And the AMLO government actively promoting and cooperating with that kind of CCP nonsense. Positive note, just a right-wing guy elected in Panama who says he's going to shut the Darien Gap, which is the area that moves all kinds of people.
Now, you asked for three. I might give you a couple more than three if you've got time.
Please do. The active spend of NGOs that the US 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 three months ago, I was contacted by an NGO in Haiti asking if I could organize an aircraft to fly from Port-au-Prince to Managua daily. I said, why on earth would you want to do that? They said, well, Haitians can fly to Nicaragua visa-free.
I said, ah, I know why. It's to facilitate Haitians coming to Nicaragua and then walking north to facilitate illegal migration from there.
Do we have a Haitian shortage here? I don't think so. No.
And there is a massive network of those NGOs. And some of those guys are making, the CEOs of these things are making a million dollars a year, taking US taxpayer money, facilitating the maneuver entrance of illegal migrants into the United States, funded by the US taxpayers.
It's disgusting. And if Republicans actually have the power of the purse, this needs to stop.
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. Or our country's lost.
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. There's no, especially with AI, like there are no jobs for these people.

They're just.

But just the fact that the Democrats were actively seeking to register them as voters

and to make it possible to vote, you know exactly what they're doing.

They're trying to stack the deck.

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

Like you tell me if you've got the mass movement of young,

of military-age males into a country, some of them with prison records.

Like, what are you looking at here?

Yeah.

Like, does that make you nervous at all?

Sure.

But I also know cannon fodder doesn't do very well

against a sophisticated capability.

Yeah.

And the fact is, the people that actually did the fighting and the dying and the hard combat uh in the last 20 years they don't agree to that kind of nonsense because they've laid their lives and their brothers and their health on the line for america for a long time and they're not going to sit quietly about that nonsense 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.

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.

I mean, don't hire a guy to be a truck driver in the army and get citizenship, no. But I'm not so opposed to that, but all the other stuff they want to do around voting and driver's licenses and all that stuff, there's a lot of actions that the next administration could 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- People were born here.
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 uh made the largest energy discovery in the last in this

hemisphere in the last 50 years so it's enormous and venezuela has been um now declared that 70 of guiana's territory is theirs uh dusting off a 130 year old border dispute and i think you're going to see Venezuela annex or seize that with largely impunity in the coming months or years, certainly. If the Democrat administration continues, they'll take it because there's no consequences for it.
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. The collapse of credibility of France and of the United States in Africa is now really accelerating.
the jihad problem that was persistent in Mali and Burkina Faso and Niger, and why do these countries matter? Huge gold, huge uranium, other minerals there, and now Chad, Sudan. The US had two big bases in Niger, and they were just pushed out, cost a billion plus easily.
Big air bases, drone bases that were trying to do CT support all across Africa, pushed out by a collapse of credibility by the U.S., by the French, and the Russians have pushed in. And the Russians are using a Wagner capability, a hybrid private military company type capability to enable 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.
And so you're seeing, to me a it's a reversion to the norm of what you saw in the 1600s i was just thinking that exact same thing as the dollar declines of course gold becomes more important yes gold and and uranium and actual green energy that's right which uh uh so there's nothing really that new in, just different, maybe a little bit of different tech that changes how things are done, but how nations interact with each other. I think you'll see a return to privateers and to a lot more private sector because our big bloated super state federal government has proven, well, at least now for the last 30 years, it not very good at no at putting the fires out civilization managing the conflict doesn't work um clearing the decks uh and and and putting putting a tourniquet on some of these things is necessary our last question it does seem like civilizations in retreat in a lot of places you know order um free movement you know relatively open markets civility self-restraint you know just all this for the hall markers hallmarks of an open uh society of like western civilization they all seem to be in decline do you see that and are you worried about it? Yeah, look, civilizations ebb and flow.
And I look for pockets of normalcy of however crazy things get. People still figure out how to get on with it and carry on.
And there's certainly pockets within Europe where they still do that. There's pockets

in parts of the Middle East. There's even some pockets in South Africa that I would consider islands of normalcy.
And in Latin America as well. Again, I come back to Mille, what a spectacular man who just took on his entire political establishment and said, afuera, out, right? So I'm still drawn, I recommend the book a lot.
It's called To Dare and to Conquer. And a friend gave it to me years ago.
And it's a history of special operations throughout history, all the way from Alexander the Great and his men that climbed Sogdian rock to the present of a few picked men and women, very capable warriors that flew in the face of unsurmountable odds and made it happen and change world history. So I think there's a lot of hope in that.
And big government is really dumb and quite plotting. And I know folks that have worked in Google and Apple and they pull their hair out at how inane and stupid a lot of those things are.
And so I view them probably as dumb as the US was in Afghanistan. And an opponent that can be defeated with wily, creative, very focused, and my dad always told me persistence and determination, and I try to live by that.

And I come back to my favorite quote from Churchill,

and he said, he was speaking before the Canadian parliament

a year after the Battle of Britain said,

he said, a year ago, Herr Hitler said

he would wring the neck of the British people

like a chicken in six weeks,

and I stand before you a year later, and I say, some chicken, some neck.

Eric Prince, thank you.

Thanks, Tucker.

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