Julian Dorey Podcast - #305 - Blackwater CEO on being CIA Assassin, Navy SEALs & Most Corrupt Politicians | Erik Prince

Episode Date: May 27, 2025

SPONSORS HERE: 1) American Financing: Go to https://www.AmericanFinancing.net/Dorey or call 888-991-9788 today! PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey (***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ Erik Dean Prince is an American businessman, investor, author, and former U.S. Navy SEAL officer, and the founder of the private military company Blackwater. ERIK'S LINKS: X: https://x.com/realErikDPrince BUY HIS BOOK: https://www.amazon.com/Civilian-Warriors-Inside-Blackwater-Unsung/dp/1591847214 BUY HIS UNPLUGGED PHONE: https://unplugged.com/ FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 – Upbringing, Russia Trip, Nicaragua Mass Graves, Socialist Churches 14:51 – Bipartisan System Failure, Founding Fathers, Normandy Visit 24:39 – Navy Story, Hillsdale, Firefighter, Blackwater CEO Moment 32:31 – Bureaucracy vs Private, Hell Week, Leaving Navy (Family) 40:21 – Haiti, Sniper School, Blackwater Start, Leadership Mistakes 54:38 – USS Cole, 9/11, Blackwater Scaling, Cost Efficiency 01:05:31 – Chain of Command, Mental Health, Afghanistan Fallout 01:18:03 – Afghanistan Collapse, Trump’s NatSec Team, USAID & Pentagon 01:26:07 – Afghan/Iraq Invasions, Blocked Plans, Al-Zarqawi Blowback 01:39:05 – CIA NOC Leak 01:47:23 – Nisour Square, CIA NOC Ends, Isolation 02:01:19 – Sentencing, Pardon, Blackwater Fallout, Somali Piracy Pivot 02:09:19 – UAE Life, China Bike Trip, China’s Rise 02:19:49 – Cartels = Terror Orgs 02:25:26 – NOC Leak Explainer, Afghanistan Prediction 02:33:27 – Israel–Hamas, Tunnel Driller, IDF Self-Casualties 02:46:40 - Unplugged Phone CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - In-Studio Producer: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 305 - Erik Prince Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I guess I find in life that I've endeavored to do really hard things. So started Blackwater immediately after getting out of the Navy. We were providing security personnel for the State Department. And in that case, a week before it started with one of our helicopters being shot down and then two other attacks with explosives against our vehicles. Of course, they've gotten a briefing that morning to be on the lookout for a white Kia, which is likely a car bomb. And I get a call that night from our country manager, goes, Hey, boss,

there's a firefight today. This one went absolutely high and right. It wasn't a car bomb. And I get a call that night from our country manager, he goes, hey boss, there's a firefight today. This one went absolutely high and right. It wasn't a car bomb, it was a guy driving his mother. But having followed the rules of engagement, they light it up. But you know, as recently as 2014 or 15 in D.C., there was a woman that drove her car into security barriers outside one of the federal buildings.

And federal law enforcement officers gunned her down and killed her. You know what she had in the back of her car? No weapons, no bombs, a baby in a car seat. Can only imagine the noise that would have been if it was a contractor that took that shot. All the sh- after Misera Square, where they make you toxic and unbankable internationally. I'm not the first patriot to have been screwed

by the US government and certainly won't be the last. Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge huge help. Thank you. You're an intense guy. Anyone ever tell you that? Not really. No? You walk in all business, man. I think I got two words from here until you sat down a minute ago.

See? I got a lot on my mind. What is on your mind, Eric Prince? Um, you know what? I, um... I guess I find in life that I've endeavored to do really hard things. And with it comes all kinds of friction and challenges to be overcome. And, um... So I guess I've found I've developed a really low first gear.

A low first gear. Meaning when things get hard, you just find a way to keep moving and keep pushing through and find a way to win. Yeah. Where do you think that came from? Is that something you developed as a kid or it took a lot of these experiences? I think it, first of all, my dad was very much the embodiment of the American dream. His dad died when he was 13, Great Depression. He had an older sister, younger brother, and yeah, there was not the welfare state. So they had to survive. So he became a significant breadwinner in the family at age 13. And he was managing a car dealership when he was 16.

Whoa. They were both different back then. He found a low gear and he just ground away and did it and so Put himself through college commuting back and forth from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan To sell cars on the weekends hitchhike back hitchhike hitchhike back to Michigan Tech in the Upper Peninsula Eventually finished at University of Michigan, did his two-year Air Force mandatory service, and worked for a tool and die company, basically making machinery which made die cast machines. And then 1965 he left

with six employees, took six guys with him, remortgaged his house and his car and his appliances with three daughters and started. So starting a business in your 20s, if you're not married without kids, you can't fall very far. Right. I tip my hat to my dad for having the spine, the steely spine to just say, I'm going to do it now. I'm in my mid thirties and he had kids and he did it. So yeah, I guess. And then growing up in West Michigan, Holland, Michigan, my dad was far and away the biggest employer in town.

So knowing that his name was on the back of my jersey wherever I went kind of, so I just didn't want to disappoint. Yeah, because obviously, you know, your dad ended up being really successful. And it's not like you grew up poor or anything like that. But you developed an insane work ethic. There's some sort of inner drive there that like, I would imagine had to be a combination of your parents being great parents, but also you like trying to push yourself that a lot of people in your position don't get to that point. You know what I mean? I think we traveled a lot as a family.

So in the early 70s, the Russians wanted to buy machinery from my dad. Yeah, because they made great diecast machinery. And so he goes to Russia in the early 70s. Now, the other thing is my dad had a heart attack in 73, which just about took him out. It was the only time I ever remember coming home with my mom from kindergarten, and my dad was home. He was in bed.

And he said, I just don't feel well. Oh, he hadn't had it yet? Hadn't had it. Took him to the hospital, had the heart attack in the hospital. Thank God. But that put him on his back for a few months and it really made him, I guess, let go a little bit, delegate and have other people want to carry, you know, pull the cart for a while. And then they pivoted from making diecast machines, which is super cyclic.

Some years people buy a bunch of machines, some years you don't, and it really sucks when the market goes dry. So they shifted from making machine tools to making diecast machines. There was a guy that worked for them, Con Marcus, developed it. And when you get in a car and you tip the visor down

with the lid, with the mirror, with the with lights that was their patent oh wow and he sold the first 5,000 of those to Cadillac based on one made in made of balsa wood okay never made a production one Cadillac bought it and they had to figure out how to make them at production scale so say yes and and figure it out was the way. That's definitely something you carried with you too. I think so. I think so. Had your dad served in the military too?

He was in the Air Force for two years. There was a draft back then. It was right after Korea. He was a photo reconnaissance officer. So the funny thing about that is whenever you're flew on a plane with my dad, he could tell you pretty much what kind of factory was down below.

Oh, wow. Because of the the way it's configured, the the smokestacks, the power supply, whatever that's I guess he spent a lot of time looking at overhead imagery. Yeah. So did you was that something that was a kid like because you ended up going into the Navy and there's a whole thing that happened there. But was that something you had kind of dreamed about doing?

I got zero military interest from my dad at all. He was, you know what? He did not have the luxury of hobbies or distractions. He had to, A, feed his family in middle school and high school, and then just ground away, because he had no safety net. And so he left me, my siblings, he left us a safety net. So whatever I've done has been easy compared to what he did

because he was out on the edge of the cliff and he wasn't roped up. Yeah, but you did still pick hard things. I mean, it's a hard thing to be like, you know what, I want to be a Navy SEAL. Like that's not, you don't want to write that off. Well, yeah, but we travel. So anyway, back to the Russia thing. So he goes to Russia in probably 74, 75 and he really doesn't like it.

He doesn't like the surveillance state and they're going through his stuff and it just really, really chapped his ass. Because he had never really been political. He never really traveled much abroad. And so that was, you know, Moscow in the winter of 74, 75, very different experience, I'm sure. Nice and warm. Yeah. He came back with a big fur hat.

But he, um... The next year, he shipped a Chevy van to Europe, and we did a road trip in the summer of 76. Hmm. Across Eastern Europe and Western Europe. So across Czechoslovakia, then which was in the Soviet Union, or in the Warsaw Pact and East Germany and I

remember spending my my seventh birthday in Berlin and seeing the guns and the dogs and the tank traps in the minefields everything facing in keeping people locked into the socialist paradise and it pressed very deeply at my psyche. Maybe socialism is such a great idea. Even at seven though? Oh yeah. I mean, you can see that it's like a representation what you're seeing of impending violence for sure, right?

But the concept of socialism itself driving it, you had an understanding of that? Sure. of socialism itself driving it, you had an understanding of that? Sure, the... A little sign with a skull and the crossbones, akhtum minin, right? A minefield preventing people from even getting close

to the border fence to kill people for trying to escape. That's kind of very indicative of pending violence. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I... I guess the way I should ask that is, you were able to consciously associate that with that full-blown ideology at the time. Because obviously what you're saying is true.

Like, we see this over and over again when communism happens, it's always violent. But like, it's hard for me to understand a seven-year-old getting that. You can vote your way in and shoot your way out. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good way to put it. The other thing I to understand a seven-year-old getting that. You can vote your way in and shoot your way out. Yeah, yeah. That's a good way to put it. The other thing I remember as a seven-year-old was how dark all the buildings were.

Everything was covered with like a coal soot. So the only, I remember that in Prague, the only colorful thing you saw was the red star in buildings. Trying to imagine like what I was doing at 7 if I would have noticed. I don't think I would have noticed stuff like that, but you're there. You're seeing it. Yeah. So that way I remember that was a very formative trip and we did other trips to Europe, to places that definitely opened my eyes to things.

Where in particularly? The Mediterranean, a bit to Latin America, and then I kept doing travel after that even when I was in college. I was a White House intern before Monica Lewinsky made it popular. I hope you didn't blow the president. No, sir. And I remember in April of 91, because I'd been working for a guy named Dana Rohrbacher, congressman from California. I've heard that name.

He was one of Reagan's speechwriters. So very much a freedom fighter. And at that point, Nicaragua, which had been kind of stuck in communism since 79, they'd had a free election. So this woman, Violeta Chamorro, had been elected, but the Camis, the Sandinistas, still controlled all the police. And Dana wanted to have a press conference showing a mass grave of all these farmers

that have been killed by the Sandinistas during the revolution. And he wanted somebody to go verify it. So he sent me, 21-year-old intern. A White House intern. Prices over the last few years have been and continue to be high. And most people unfortunately have to reach for credit cards to cover bills. Credit card debt has reached an all-time high and it's trapping Americans. But luckily, American financing can help homeowners pay off high interest debt

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foundation needs to be strong. That's why our agents go the extra mile to understand your business and provide tailored solutions for all its unique needs. You put your heart into your company, so we put our heart into making sure it's protected. Get insurance that's really big on care. Find an agent today at Desjardins.com slash business coverage. At that point, I'd no, at that point, I'd shifted from the White House to working for Dana's office. He sends me and another intern down to Nicaragua and meet up with his source. It's the first time

I ever had to shake a surveillance tail. And we did. Drove hours out in the countryside, go to this farmer's field, barbed wire fence, and I'd taken an entrenching tool with me. You know, the little foldable shovel? Start digging. And about three feet down, sure enough,

all kinds of human bones. And the arms, you could see where they'd been tied by cord, and the skulls were shattered. They'd been shot in the head. How do you feel? I mean, you're a 21-year-old intern. What do you think when you find something like that? It was really, really sobering.

I took Polaroid photos to make sure I had them, took them back to Dana, and yeah, mess is complete. And that was a week before I got married in 91, April. And also if you're considering getting married, be away from, all brides tend to lose their mind the week before the wedding. It's a good time to be away. And it was righteous work. I've heard that, but it's not like you're away in the Caribbean or something.

You're away finding mass graves as a fucking intern. I mean that's... It was good. Yeah. He couldn't find anyone better. I mean no offense but like you were an intern. You couldn't find like a Special Forces guy to go do that. I feel like he had connections you know. He had... he'd offered me the job because the the full-time staffer, a guy who became a dear friend of mine, Paul Behrens, was a Marine recon and he'd been activated to do something else. So anyway, send me. So it was you.

Yeah. So you find a man, how many bodies approximately did you find? We stopped digging at three. Oh my God. And there was lots more. So they weren't they so we covered it up because they were gonna do a much bigger and they they found dozens and dozens. Now what did you do with that information? You obviously bring it back

to them and then this did something happen there where? Yeah well they had action. They had more hearings and it was all about trying to help the US because remember even then you had the State Department, which was dominated by leftists, that had an aptitude to be apologists for communists. In 91? Oh, yeah. Really? Oh, yeah.

Lots of the very left-wing churches were very, they called them Sandalistas because they were down there. The, the, the, the very long hair NGO hippie types were in love with the, uh, the socialist lie. That's, that's interesting. I mean, obviously like I wasn't around then, but you wouldn't think that considering that's, you got HW in there who's after eight years of Reagan. But you had, but you had people in Congress like Ron Dellums, okay? Super left-wing, Marxist, black guy from California, who's on the Intelligence Committee,

and he is an active apologist for the Soviet Union, for Cuba, for all the communists. So look, there's a... we have a wide... diversity of political thought in Congress. And it certainly existed back then as well. Do you ever think that, you know, we make it a little too binary with some of this stuff? Obviously we have some loony tunes in Congress today.

We've always had loony tunes in there. There's no doubt about that. But sometimes it feels like, especially looking at the political divide we've had since the social media era started, like everything is labeled you're either far right or far left. Do you think there's there are still people that exist, maybe they're not great because they're in Congress, but you think there's still people that exist in Congress that aren't necessarily either one of those labels, meaning they're more

moderate? Yeah probably. I would would say my frustration with members of Congress, House and Senate, is how little experience they've had in life or outside the United States. Touring, I always find it funny when people are gonna run for president and they do it a trip abroad to say they're going to bolster their foreign policy credentials. Like really?

What have you been doing for the first 50 years of your life that you're just now curious enough to go abroad? There's a lot of very unserious people that are put in positions of responsibility. Both elected and appointed. I would agree with that. I was talking with someone yesterday, I won't use names, but I was talking with one guy who's done some shit, seen some shit. He was telling me about another dude who's well known.

And he's like, this guy worked behind the desk for 30 years. You know, he never went, he was talking about all the different places he went, and the missions he did and whatever. He's like, he never worked behind the desk for 30 years. He never went, he was talking about all the different places he went and the missions he did and whatever. He's like, he never went to any of these places. He didn't see it. And yet he was telling us how to do it. And that seems to be, as someone who's never been in Washington DC or seen that like you have, that does seem to be a very common occurrence within the bureaucracy. When you look at the people that built the British Empire or for

that matter that built the American colonies. Think about a guy like Miles Standish or John Smith. Do you think about how America was founded? It was not founded by the British Army, it was founded by companies, effectively listed in the city of London, kind of a joint exchange. Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Jamestown colonies were companies funded by London based investors to go grow tobacco, look for gold, look for tall timber to make masts for, you know, her majesty ships. And think about a guy like Miles Standish or John Smith. You know, John Smith was previously an English soldier, and then he went to work against

the Turks. I think he was captured, imprisoned. He beheaded an enemy in a jousting match. In a jousting match? Yeah. Wow. I mean, life experience. And then he signs on with the Jamestown Company,

and he comes to file the Jamestown colony. And I think they clapped him in chains, because he raised such a ruckus on the ship. And sure enough, he gets to Jamestown, he becomes the governor. There you go. Those are the kind of men that made America. Yeah.

It's crazy. It wasn't that long ago either. 400 and some years, 1607. And then you even look at when we officially made the country. We're not even at 250 years yet. That blows my mind sometimes. These guys had the most simple concerns during the day to like, you know, means of survival. How are we getting food on the table? Stuff like that.

And now, you know, we all live on this thing and have all these distractions in our face. It really puts it in perspective when you study that stuff. I take it you are a student of history. Is that fair to say? Yeah, I'm a bit of a history geek. Were you a history geek growing up too? Yes. And I was also driven by curiosity. Again, my dad was not, and my mom was a school teacher.

We were expected to do well in school, expected to study hard, and you know there was an old New Testament parable, the parable of the talents, right? Too much is given. There's a story that Jesus tells about one guy was given one unit of measure of money to reinvest, another guy was given two, another guy was given five. And, um... Long story short, the guy that's been given five invests it well and does well. The guy that invests two, um, hides it, right? And doesn't make the most of it.

What was kind of pounded into us from the beginning is, you're given much, do much with it. Right. And, um... So I loved history. I remember going to Normandy as a kid in 1980. Whoa. In, um, you know, the beaches and all the rest.

And I was at the... As the 11-year-old, I was a tour guide for the family. And, um... So, paid attention to wherever we did travel, kind of what battles and my kids still give me shit about going to a certain place and say, all right, anybody tell me what happened here. So then they then they would start reading ahead where we were going to try to, you know, crash on the test that they knew they knew would be coming from dad. What was it like being at Normandy at 11?

Well, think about that. That was only 36 years later. We are well past 36 years after 1980. Yeah. So it was closer to, closer to the actual invasion. It was humbling and you see all the white crosses lined up and you could still see big pock marks and gouges out of the bunkers from, from Allied shelling. What Spielberg portrayed in Saving Private Ryan was very accurate in terms of the concentration of fire,

the fortifications, the pounding that area received, because there's still 50-, 60-foot wide craters that are at least 15-foot deep a 12 inch 16 inch shell moving dirt. I had the great fortune of jumping into the 75th anniversary. 2019 static lined out of an original C 47 that made the drop. Oh, you actually you went we literally dropped in jumped in and there was the the guys from horse or soldier whiskey. The original SF team that went into Afghanistan right the horse soldiers you

saw that there was a movie 12 strong. We're going to have a podcast coming about that in a few months. I think good. Yeah, they're cool guys. They're legit. But they sponsored a bird, and I got on there with a buddy of mine from the teams. And yeah, it was amazing. And we wore all period uniforms. Oh, you were in character, too.

Yep. And it was expected. And so even the vibe of... a thousand people getting loaded all in uniform at, you know, zero, 400 that morning, it was, uh, it was pretty special. And then, uh, to jump in and land, and the crowds were amazing, and fortunately, the grass was soft, because jumping,

static line in your 50s can hurt, but it was good. And then being true to our origins, my buddy and I went and swam off of Utah Beach. And it was cold. But it was a great experience and a great reminder. I can't even imagine the fear factor of riding that kind of aircraft across that level of ground fire with shit for navigation, flooded fields, and they did it.

They just turned up and got it done. It's amazing. There's an awesome clip of Dwight Eisenhower sitting right on the, I guess like the wall outside the cemetery maybe 16 years later, something like that or 20 years later I think it was. It was after he was president, it was the 20th anniversary. And it just hits me every time because, you know, he's the guy who obviously ordered that whole thing

and he knew he was basically sending bodies at the problem. He's like, we're just gonna out volume these guys, which means we're gonna take him. Yep, P for plenty. Right, and you know, to sit there and and also a tough call Oh, yeah, because he had to cancel it two days before because of crap weather the winner June 6 is still not great weather, but man, that's the Clausewitz talks about two kinds of courage to fight a war Clausewitz

Carl von Clausewitz a good Prussian military philosopher. Got it. He said it takes two kinds of courage, individual soldier courage to go jump out of that airplane to go get it done, and the moral courage of leaders to commit their people to an uncertain outcome. That entire go-no-go decision was on Ike. Talk about the burden of command. Oh yeah. Yeah. Carl von Klosswitz, there he is. Okay. I never heard of him before. There you go with the history again. Sorry. All right. No, don't be sorry. I love that. I'm a history nerd too. It's very cool. But

you, what made you originally decide to go Navy rather than army or something like that. So my dad's business made automotive interior parts. And so he intentionally kept all the factories in the west side of the state. All the automakers are on the east side of the state of Michigan, and around the Midwest. And he really wanted the salespeople and the engineers to be able to make it home in time for dinner because he wanted to try to keep those families intact.

And so he ended up operating a bunch of aircraft to move people back and forth from customer sites and to take customers in to see their operation. So I grew up around small aircraft, doing that mission, and kind of started my love of flying. And so I took lessons when I was 15. I sold the morning of my 16th birthday, flying a small aircraft.

And I had planned to be a Navy or a military pilot, because I applied to Air Force and Navy, and I got into both and the academies and I ended up going to the Naval Academy and I loved the Navy but I really hated the Academy. I thought it was already in the 80s it was kind of a distillation of 150 years of the dumb parts of the military. I'm pretty conservative guy. I couldn't tell. I like traditions, but don't give me stupid ones. Yeah.

And, um... Uh, and it was there... that, um, and as much of a history geek as I was, and that's, it's truly emblematic of how obscure the SEAL teams were. Even in the 80s, that a military history geek like me had not really learned much of the teams. And there was two like the spring of my plebe year, freshman year, two SEAL liaisons that are stationed at the Academy came and gave a

talk and they said well if you want to join us for PT, be at this field 5.30 the next morning. So I turned up. And they said, OK, today, we're just going to run a mile. Get a partner. Put them on your shoulders. Oh, whoa. And I was hooked. That kind of forcing the drive motor to make you dig deep down.

I guess that's probably that kind of stuff that I have always loved from that day. And I did individual sports, I wrestled, played soccer, did track, but that kind of stuff really made me figure out how to dig deeper. And so I left the academy after three semesters. I went to Hillsdale, which is a small school in Michigan.

Oh, so you just went and like did the one- I just cut away. Kind of one-off training with the- Like, no, no, no. I went and PT'd with the SEALs that morning. That was it. And showed up to a few other ones. And I remember, I remember coming away for that thinking,

yeah, I'd like to be a SEAL someday. I decided I'd better learn to swim. Because even growing up around Michigan, I swam, but not really that well. And man, I remember the first 50 meters, I swam in the pool, and it felt like my lungs were gonna fall out of my mouth. It was bad. Swimming's hard.

But 50 became 100, became 400, became a month, and just grinded out and figured out. Swimming's hard. But 50 became 100, became 400, became a month, and just grinded out and figured out. And left the Academy, went to Hillsdale. Very different experience, because it's one of two schools in the country that accepts no federal funding. Hillsdale.

Hillsdale. It's been independent since 1845. You know all the noise about Harvard losing their federal funds? Hillsdale's never had federal funds. In fact, I couldn't even go there on a ROTC scholarship because they will not, cannot accept federal funds because they don't want the federal strings.

Wow. But while they've got a good education in economics, if you've heard of the Austrian School of Economics, it's kind of the purest free market. Ludwig von Mises, one of the founders of the Austrian school donated his entire library to Hillsdale. But also there, I joined the fire department and had a really good experience.

Wow. I remember showing up at the station, and I was saying, hey, I'd like to be a volunteer firefighter. And nobody from the college had done that before. And so I showed up for training, and it took probably eight months. Got the accreditation licensure done through the state of Michigan.

Got my EMT license as well. But that was a better experience in leadership than I would say the very artificial learning lab that the Academy tried to do. Because the Academy- You're a firefighter. Yeah, because, well, it was serious work. I mean, Hillsdale County is not a super wealthy county.

We had a lot of structure fires. And burning cars and stuff. And so, convincing guys that this snot-nosed kid, because I was, what, 19 then, was good enough to go into a burning house with them, was a good experience and being a good follower and being the reliable one that they could depend on.

And I've, you know, I've not been in a lot of gunfights, but I have been in firefights inside of burning buildings that were fully involved in fire. And it is a very unforgettable experience. I'll bet. I can't imagine that. It seems like you do have a thing throughout your life. Like, obviously, you know, you're the guy who found a black water. And so you're all over the news, always talking about pertinent geopolitical stuff or things you were involved in. But when you actually just look

at the brass tacks of different things you've done, it does seem like there's a pattern of you want to help people out. Like you really you really, you feel a call into people in. You know what? Yeah. That was something I was, I'd say one of my proudest professional moments and it was not me that did it, but it was the team we built at Blackwater. I remember speaking to, like 300 kernels at the War College in Washington probably 2005 or 2006. And they you know I got out of the Navy as a lieutenant,

you know a junior officer. So these 300 colonels popped to attention when I come in and I gave the talk about what we do at Blackwater and why. And yeah, it's a private organization, but we do military adjacent stuff. And we have helicopters and fly on night vision goggles and, you know, all that stuff. And afterwards, a colonel came up to me after that and he said he had just come from brigade command in Baghdad. So he would have had 4,000 or so soldiers. It's the summer big red sale at Canadian Tire. Save up to 50%. What are you doing? These are the biggest deals of the season.

I'm shouting it from the rooftop. You have a radio ad. You don't need to be up there. The summer big red sale is on from June 5th to June 12th. Conditions apply. Details online. Ever feel like your WordPress site is moving in slow motion? Switch to Kinsta's managed hosting for WordPress and watch it fly!

Host your site on Google Cloud's fastest servers with worldwide data centers so your pages load instantly. Need help? WordPress experts respond in under two minutes and will migrate to your site for free. Try it yourself, first month free at Kinsta.com. That's K-I-N-S-T-A dot com. Kinsta. Simply better hosting. Entered his responsibility and he said, I want you to know that my guys in Baghdad, his guys, would have the Blackwater call signs and frequencies on the dash of their Humvees. Because they knew that if they got in the shit, the Blackwater guys would come for them. No excuse, no bureaucracy, no delay. I said, I am very proud to hear that. Because we said the good Samaritan rule applies.

Yeah, and also like, to jump ahead for one second on that, I'll come back to the Navy stuff. But, you know, it's interesting, there's an interesting dichotomy, I don't know if that's the word There's an interesting like dichotomy. I don't know if that's the word I'm looking for, but like this weird thing where the government has the things that they fund that they're directly in control of, like the military, obviously,

and you run into some of these problems like the bureaucracy, chain of command, all that. But then the same government has money that they fund privately, whether it be the Lockheed or whatever company or Blackwater, and you guys, for the better, in a lot of ways, don't have to play by some of the bullshit rules.

You get free rein to do your job and bring in the expertise in some, not carte blanche, but you know what I mean? Like there's a little bit more freedom. Here's the thing, every bureaucracy from inception grows. Here's the thing, every bureaucracy from inception grows. If you have a bush in your driveway and you never prune it, it soon becomes a big, out of control weed. Right.

And whether that is parts of military bureaucracy, whether that's part of Lockheed Martin bureaucracy or the Pentagon Procurement Bureaucracy or anything, every bureaucracy grows unchecked until someone checks it and prunes it back and says, we're going to get back to core mission and we're going to figure out how to make it happen with less of a budget. It is extremely healthy for military, civil, political, business organizations to be pruned and to be right-sized and to continue that. I from the outset implored our people at Blackwater.

I said, we never want to look like our customer. We never want to look like our... We never want to behave like? Yeah. Okay. We never want to look like our co- We never want to behave like? Yeah. Okay, we are here. Most like 90, 98% of our revenue was competitively bid. Meaning this is a statement of work that some government or some customer puts out,

do this, give me a bid, okay? Just like you would generally build a house. Yeah, like construction. Because they're going to say it's going to cost $400,000 to build this house. You don't say, well, it might be 400,000 or it might be a million. I'll tell you about it when it's done. No, who does that? The government does that. Most of our revenue was firm fixed price where we had to say,

it's going to cost you this much. And so we really focused on being efficient and squeezing the waste out of that. So we very much implored our people. At the same time, I get out of the Navy earlier than I planned to, jumping back to the storyline. I served in the SEAL teams for a few years after college. I loved it.

I planned to stay for 12. Do you mind just saying where you served, just for people in context with that? I was in... Bud's, of course, is in Coronado, winter Hell Week. And my class is unique in that our Hell Week was held on San Clemente Island. It's the only one in SEAL Team history. You're a one of one.

One of one. Because there had been so much rainfall and so much sewage and flesh-eating bacteria. Flesh-eating bacteria. Yes. That sounds awesome. Washed in from Tijuana into San Diego Bay and the ocean that it was unsafe to put guys in the water.

And especially as you're in Hell Week, your, your immunoresistance really breaks down. Okay. And so even a scratch after two hours becomes inflamed, red, and infected. So they, not wanting to deprive us the benefit of Hell Week, they put the whole program on a landing craft and drove it out to San Clemente Island, a bombing range, 70 miles off the coast. And as the instructors reminded us, now no one can hear you scream, motherfucker.

So it was good. But again, I had paid no attention, no interest in going to work for my dad's business. And it was not an option anyway, because it was family policy. You have to go do your own thing. Oh, I love that. That's awesome. You have to go do some kind of independent accreditation. And it was my plan to do SEAL teams for about 12 years,

because that was an officer. And so after 12 years, you kind of start getting stuck at a desk. So I figured 12 years, then I'll go do something with my dad or whatever. Was he proud of you for doing that too? Yeah, he was. It was something he didn't understand, really, because he was not... I don't know where that commando gene came from, but, um, but it definitely was there somehow. Ha! But, um, yeah, he was proud.

Um, in fact, they, uh, they gave me a bronze statue after Hell Week. And, uh, it gave me a bronze statue after Hell Week. And it's from a Western artist. And there's a cowboy riding a bucking bronc. There's a plaque that says, in the unwritten law of the range, the work ethic still exists. When you sign for a brand,

when you sign for an outfit, you ride for a brand. True commitment takes no easy way out. And I've kept that in my house ever since. And then for a while I had it in the Blackwater lobby and put a huge Blackwater logo on the front of it. Because that was good branding. Yeah, we rode for a brand. So anyway, my dad died unexpectedly from a heart attack and had to do another deployment after that yet and did.

And then when my wife was pregnant with our second child, she was diagnosed with breast cancer at 29 and which was not a great experience. And so that necessitated me getting out of the Navy just to sort out between the family business, which was 5,000 plus employees. Oh, you had to come in and sort that out. Not me personally, but my mom had not really been part of the business at all.

And so it was a. Obviously the significant family asset and I had three sisters and so we just figured out what to do next. My mom made the right decision. She sold the whole thing, but the original business he started made diecast machines that we talked about. And that business had just kind of lumped along. And we were going to sell it.

And I had just gotten out of the Navy, I remember. And I was in Switzerland because we were going to sell it to our Swiss competitor. And I went for a long run, a very long. It was like a 12-mile run. I remember because my thighs were burned, or just chapped like crazy. But in that run, I thought, what the hell? I never got a business degree or any MBA or anything.

And I never got a chance to work with my dad. I might as well learn business fixing up this original thing that he started. Only 5,000 employees. No, no. We sold that one. OK. The smaller one was 250 employees. That's still not nothing. Which was still not nothing, right.

And so we did that and moved back to Michigan. So started Blackwater immediately after getting out of the Navy. And again, I knew nothing of business, government contracting or land development. But you find a way to figure it out. And hired my SEAL Team Training Officer and the guy that used to run facilities for SEAL Team Six,

like the guy that built and fabricated. And they laid out the original footprint for Blackwater and did a lot of it ourselves. What year is this in again? This is 97. 97. Yeah. So just a question for context here.

What in your, I guess, like five or six years where you were in the Navy SEALs and deployed the places, what types of things did you see that made you scratch this itch? We were part of the Haiti invasion. So swam ashore in Haiti in, when was that, 94? What happened with that again? That was the Clinton administration got involved and they deposed Duvalier to install Aristide, also not a great option, and that started the devolution of Haiti. But I remember swimming ashore in Cap-Patien, which is a city on the north side. And there's about two and a half million people then, and they had no sewage treatment.

And so we got more shots than you can imagine, vaccinations. And we'd planned for high casualty figures, not from enemy fire, but because of the water. And normally when you do amphibious reconnaissance, you want to be nice and low in the water and sneaky. Oh no, extra flotation. And normally when you do amphibious reconnaissance, you want to be nice and low in the water and, you know, sneaky? Oh, no. Extra flotation, you don't want the water splashing in your mouth.

But it was not, well, because of the Nicaragua stuff and because of other play. I'd been to other garden spots before, so it was interesting, but not a kind of a non-event. And then went back to Gitmo to have to wash all the vehicles, everything off, so they didn't carry any weird agricultural diseases back to America.

And then, as an unusual experience as an officer, I got to go to sniper school as a SEAL. Oh, wow. Which was, in hindsight, great investment for the Navy. Because that definitely put the itch of me shooting long guns in place. And so then I made a later deployment on a carrier to the Med and the Middle East. So we did stuff in Saudi and Kuwait and Bahrain.

And that was when the US was bombing the Serbs as part of the whole Yugoslav Civil War. So it was interesting. But then, you know, dad dies right before that deployment and wife gets cancer at 29. I get out and I really wanted to stay connected to the SEAL teams because I liked it. I was okay at it. You wanted to use Blackwater to solve some deficiencies. I wanted to stay in the SEAL teams.

Between disease and family death, I needed to get out. And so Blackwater really, I laid out the business plan before even knowing my wife had cancer about the need for a private training facility. In fact, I still have the letter. Because the SEAL teams had used private facilities since the 70s. We have a gun culture in America,

and there's lots of great shooting instructors, race gun shooters, whatever. And so they've been teaching soft units since then, but no one had done it on an industrial scale that was close to any concentration of military. And so a lot of guys had had the idea, but let's just say because of my dad's success, it made it possible for me to do that.

Because in the 90s, there was a major military base or training range being closed on a monthly basis. Because it was all post-Cold War drawdown, right? The peace dividend. So this idea of building a private military training facility to serve the military was, every smart investment official said, that's a dumb rich boy's idea.

So- Grow in the shrub of the bureaucracy, if you will. I- I didn't- Look, they could not see, they did not have the experience that I had of using private facilities versus government ones. And so yeah, it was a field of dreams.

Build it and they will come. And found the original land, which is as flat as this table, original 3000 acres and I contracted for 3015 and ended up picking up an extra 85 acres as we changed the Even the registration because that land was originally surveyed by George Washington Are we talking in North Carolina? Yeah, it's in North Carolina. It's in the the Great Dismal Swamp What a name Great Dismal Swamp. What a name, Great Dismal Swamp.

And it is dismal. And it is, and we call it black water because when the rain would come through the very organic peat soil, by the time it made it to the dishes, it was black. And we knew it was black because standing in the ditch, putting in the drain culverts, building the facilities, our legs were getting dyed. Okay? Getting dyed dark brown black.

Whoa. And, um, I had to buy an office trailer... for, I remember paying 400 bucks for that office trailer. And, um, it was a thousand bucks to have it delivered, and it was such bad shape, it was safer to do that. Have somebody deliver it than the risk of rolling that thing on the road. But, pizza and beer at the end of a day, the logo was designed because the power poles, because we had to put about five miles of power

lines in. And when we put the power poles in, within days, the bears were coming and ripping when we put the power poles in within days, the bears were coming and ripping their mark. And the bigger the bear, the higher up in the pole they would rip. And it was literally marking their turf. So we had to give some kind of credence to that. And one of the original name ideas was the Tidewater Institute of Tactical Shooting. But we thought the acronym would be a little too spicy. Yeah. So... Blackwater is hard.

That's a hard name. Yeah. And well, there's a Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge not that far away. So it was not, we can't even say it was super original. But the logo came from the Bear Paws. And that was Pizza and Beer Design, not a high dollar marketing firm. What a great experience starting a team from scratch and figuring it out. It was one of the best experiences of my life.

How long did it take to develop all that land and keep that mic pointed to you? Sorry. Thanks. Um, I laid it out the last month, so I was still on active duty. I kind of figured out the, um, uh, the location of the land. There wasn't many big chunks of low value land that was available. And I needed a lot of land so we could catch stray bullets.

You're putting up ranges. And we shot a lot. At peak volume, we were doing like 1.2, 1.3 million rounds a month. A month. Oh, yeah. That was even more than I thought. Magnificent stuff. Yeah.

But the experiences of getting stuck beyond your wildest belief, having heavy equipment bogged in peat, to having to make war on the beavers, because it became a 7,000-acre compound, again, as flat as this table. And the beavers would jam up all their drainage, so it was... They would literally keep it a swamp, so we'd have to trap them. So that...

That harkened back to my childhood skills, because I ran a trap line when I was third, fourth, and fifth grade, growing up, you know, before school, in Michigan, trapping muskrats and raccoons. So I pivoted to the Beavers and we won. But what a great experience to give people with a lifetime of experience in training special operations or building facilities.

You know, our first shoot house was built by, effectively, the maintenance crew from Seal Team Six's compound. Oh, wow. And they came out on weekends, paid in cash, and built one of the largest shoot houses on the East Coast. It's still standing, still working.

And so, yeah, it's, for those of you who are young and you see an arbitrage, you see this is what's needed, this is the skill set we can apply, take the risk, man. Figure it out and find a way to win. And you will look back on it with, even if you try and burn in, you'll learn and have a hell of an education for having done so.

Yeah. I mean, you're talking about finding the problem and solving it to make it really simple. I mean, that's what it is, but... And surround yourself. Go back to the well of the people you know and trust to do that. And I had a great bench to draw from. I had fucking high time seals that understood that.

And they also would, I mean, that's the other thing. They would, when you have high energy people, high competition, high drive motor, they will... everything's a competition. I mean, even... Steel teams, on Fridays, it'll usually be a long run or a long swim or something. But it was so effing competitive that we'd all pile on a school bus

and it would drive us out somewhere to drop off. They'd be opening that door while the bus was slowing down. Okay? Not waiting until it stopped and get off in an early manner. Start. Oh, no. Fuck no. It was, boom, bailout, explode, and it's a race. It's on. It's always on. And building that culture as, you know, from the first six employees of Blackwater,

and not all my... not all my hires were right. I will also admit that because I went to a, I went with, I did what normal corporate America told me to do. I went to a headhunting firm. Oh no. To find, and to find a guy that, cause I said, look, we have to understand,

this is a military training facility, we teach law enforcement, we teach, we're a facility to do that. We also want the hospitality piece. And I've... this high-dollar headhunter found this guy who has a resume perfect. Former Marine, Lieutenant Colonel, logistics officer, who was a specialty in fixing troubled holiday enfranchises. You'd think perfect.

Yeah. Not perfect. Personality clash kind of thing? He just focused more on hospitality than on helping operators be operators and honing that steel. And so, yeah, when you make a mistake in the wrong tactic or the wrong business plan or the wrong people, you know when you've made the wrong decision. And a lot of people will blanch from making the... from cutting away a bad parachute.

Cut away. And cut deeper than you think you need to. And so I did, and, um... You know... The guy who ground away and truly earned the right to be president of Blackwater was a guy named Gary Jackson, who I originally met while doing an investigation for a young SEAL that had gotten into a fight versus four Airmen, four Navy Airmen and he'd bitten the ear off of one of them. So it was four on one, he Yeah. Yeah. But in that process, I met Gary Jackson.

And Gary was an early computer geek. He built our website while he was deployed in the Caribbean hunting narcos. And just never went to college. But he had a lifetime of experience and education and insatiable curiosity and a leadership style that even in a whole bunch of alpha male type people, he was comfortable to find the very best people in each lane

and to give him an intent-based leadership. We want to do this. Not, I expect you to do this by doing 10 steps that I prescribed for you, right? How were the Germans so effective in, at the end of World War I, with fighting the trench warfare? They would give mission tactics. Say, we want you to achieve this,

find a way to make it work. How did the, how did the blip? They're given autonomy essentially. Exactly, how did the blitzkrieg work so well? It was that, it was intent-based leadership. And Gary built, I'm the investor and the original, I guess, vision guy behind Blackwater, but Gary made the whole thing run. And he built a hell of a team.

When did you hire him? Like, because you started in 97, like... Gary came on to do sales in 98, and he was, I'd say, president by 99. And, um, and then the business really started to accelerate, um, by 2001, before 9-11. Oh, before 9-11.

Yeah. That's interesting. Because our first big volume customer was the Navy. They came to us after the coal, USS Coal, Navy destroyer got blown up in Yemen. And the sailors that were guarding the ship were holding pretty much unloaded weapons that they never fired before.

Yeah, we had Mike Ritlin in here. He was one of them guarding that. So the Navy, having lost a, or nearly lost a multi-billion dollar warship and were 17 sailors, they came and said, we want you to do a, you know, show us and help us do a nationwide sailor armed security,board security you know visit board search and seizure training program and we did that and I think we we train almost a hundred thousand sailors safely yeah basically anybody that carried a gun in the Navy was coming through our pipeline how many employees do you have

by this time approximately for that we ramped up to a couple hundred, probably, between instructors and all the rest. That's a lot of people to train still. Crazy. And then, so we had that flywheel spinning when 9-11 happens. And then... Where were you on 9-11? I brought my kids to school that morning in McLean, Virginia.

And I'd heard about the first track, the first then crash of a light aircraft into a building in New York. And then I went to the same place I always got my haircut, to Ali, my Turkish Muslim barber, who, oddly enough, had a razor at my neck, as we're watching the second aircraft crash into the towers.

And he's been a great friend ever since, and we joke about that, but, um... Uh, yeah, it was really sobering. And then, you know, my wife, who was fighting cancer then, her cancer doc and her treatment was at St. Vincent's in New York. And so... she was supposed to be there on like September 13,

which was obviously canceled and delayed. We go up a week later. But I went to Ground Zero and used my ID and, you know, at least had to walk around while she was hooked up getting chemo, but it was a very sobering moment to see that level of destruction. Outside of the odd coincidence with your barber and what was going on that day culturally,

once the second plane did hit, obviously, like a lot of people, civilians even, were thinking... When I saw the first impact, there was no chance that was an accident. So you knew before that. You're like, okay, something's happening here. Did you have any... I'm trying to think of like your timeline when you left the Navy, what you would have been read in on, but like, did you have any inkling of who it was? Um, well, it was, it was an Al-Qaeda stimulus that, that, um, lit up all the Rangers in Mogadishu in 93. And it was Al-Qaeda that hit the embassies in Dar es Salaam in Nairobi.

hit the embassies in Dar es Salaam in Nairobi. It was Al Qaeda certainly that simulated the attack in Yemen. So it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck it's probably a duck. Right away. That's my default was. And I again I had no I was out of the Navy at that point I had no clearance. We had no facility clearance So I had no particular insight to it But your business as you said was ramping up just coincidentally before that happened So you're already because you're training all the sailors with 200,000 people It may be holding a gun After 9-eleven like how quickly does it go to oh shit like now we're now you

become black water as we know it the the agency's protective detail CIA director's protective detail were regular customers because they could rent out the place and do their thing with no, um, with privacy. And, um, we, um, a guy who worked on the seventh floor and in buzzy Chrome guard was, uh, would come down with them sometimes. And he was a former knock himself, hell of a life story. And, um... Buzzy Krongard. Yep. I don't know if I'm familiar with him.

He was an all-American lacrosse player at Princeton in the 50s, Marine, and then, uh, CIA, uh, case officer for a few years. Got out, went to work for Alex Brown, the investment bank, eventually became the CEO, was a knock again, his later years there, did some amazing things for his country as the CEO of an investment bank. That's crazy. And he'd always been a kind of a gun guy. His son was later a SEAL as well.

And Oh, he's still around too. He is. Wow. Uh, and, but Buzzy said, you know, Buzzy had made contact long before nine 11, just, uh, talking about foreign affairs and guns and tactics and all the rest. And I remember calling, um, uh, well, I remember calling, well, as a derivative of working for Dana Orbacher, because when Dana got out of the White House, he first went to Afghanistan in the late 80s, while the Muj were still fighting the Soviets. And he went and saw...

Dostum and Massoud and all the ones from, you know, operating near the Pact border. And he went into country and he kept touch with them. And he came back to me in about 97. It won't take long to tell you Neutral's ingredients. Vodka, soda, natural flavors. So, what should we talk about? No sugar added. Neutral. Refreshingly simple.

And said, Eric, I need your help to sponsor a peace conference because we're trying to get the king of Afghanistan to return because he'd been in exile. Right. His name is Zahir Shah and he lived in Rome. And so I met him also while I was working for Dana and part of that whole process. And I funded a peace conference in Switzerland where Dostum and Massoud and Moha Keck and Atanur and all those guys came because we were trying to have a Loya Yurga in Afghanistan before 9-11 happened to try to bring some kind of peaceful resolution and not have the Taliban run the place into the ground.

And you knew the Taliban was also effectively protecting Al-Qaeda. Bad. Yeah, exactly. And I had a, I mean, already, already before 9-11, I had a beautiful rug gift from Dostum. Huh. So, so then after 9-11, I had a beautiful rug gift from Dostum. So then after 9-11, their phones are lighting up and they're like, hey, put us in touch with the USG because we want to help kill these Taliban and al-Qaeda motherfuckers. And so again, maybe the agency had contact with all of them.

I don't know. But we definitely did because we'd had them all in Switzerland and had multiple talks with them. And I'm still in touch with a number of them. That's cool. But yeah, that was my first call to Buzzy. And then I said, if you need anything ever, if you need a floor sweeper, please, we just want to help. And yeah, you ended up calling about five months later, you'd help for security. And that was our

first overseas deployment. Okay, so that's when the actual security of assets begins on the ground. You hadn't done that before? No. Okay. I imagine you had to spin up an entirely like new part of the company to do that. Are you bringing in a lot of new people or you? We'd had a, we had a, the makings of a, of a security entity together, but not deploying at that kind of scale. And again, say yes and figure it out. Yeah. So where, and where were the first places where you were doing in? What were those missions like?

Oh, they're pretty, um, uh, the biggest issue there. And again, it's the, they, the USG asked the military to do security at these various locations. And the military said, well, we're not going to do that with less than 200 people here or 160 people here. And so we could do it with 18 or 25. So in some cases, we took over entire facilities and I would say guarded them, well, obviously safely, because they were never successfully attacked while we were guarding them.

Or running a remote drone base somewhere where, and we took that over from the military because they had 166 soldiers there, 28 doing security, and 138 people supporting the 28. It's just how the military organizes. They don't really have any understanding of cost. No, because if you're a general and you never have to pay for all the privates and corporals and all the rest, you're just like, send them. And it's like having, and people tend to leave the water on when you're brushing your teeth when it's free water.

Yeah. That's a good, I'm going to use that. That's pretty good. Please do. So because obviously our guys were expensive, we economized. And so we could take over that entire facility, safely run it for years with 25 guys, five of whom

would be dual-hatted to keep the water, the power, the sanitation, the comms, the vehicles running. And it just works. So that's the difference. When Elon Musk attacked the cost of space lift, of putting a payload in orbit, he looked at all the drivers of cost. What's the biggest driver?

Oh, it costs a lot to build this rocket motor. We're not going to make it a one-time use. We're gonna figure out a way to make it reusable. All those things, if you're of the private sector and you can attack the big cost items, you find a way to make it efficient. But if you're never asked to do that, why bother? That's the difference of the private sector

doing something versus government. Was there, I mean, it's hard for me to picture it because I've never been in the military, but when you're first doing this and now actually taking over security and stuff like that, you have a lot of guys working for you. Most of your guys are ex-military or even high level who are doing these jobs, but were there any cultural difficulties being that you guys were private contractors in there and you're going into a war zone where our military is? Were there any cultural difficulties being that you guys were private contractors in there and you're going into a war zone where our military is? Were there any, I don't want to say dust-ups,

but issues in chain of command type things with that? There would be... Stay with the mic. Sorry. Sorry. At some points, there'd be mild issues of jealousy of what the contractors were perceived to being paid per day. But then when we started to break it down as to what our guys were paid versus what a military guys was, it was effectively the same. The difference is, so my guy might be headline paid 500 or $600 a day back in 2004. But they're only paid that for every day they're in the hot zone. The day they leave, their pay goes to zero.

Versus a military guy who's paid day in, day out, whether they're in the hot zone or not, and they might get a little bit of an extra for danger pay. But the military guy also has tax-free in a war zone, and they get per diems and all the rest. And so when you do an apples to apples comparison, it was largely the same. The difference is guys chose our approach because they're much more in control of their life. They could go hard, they could go 90 days, 120 days, and they go home and see their family and be done and not waste their time. And that's the, it was a fundamental difference in recruiting and retention for us.

And also mental health. And mental health. Sure, yeah, because if the guys were getting, if it was a little too rough, then we definitely scheduled more rotations home and they would stay home, be with their family or we put them on a training rotation or something where they were not, uh, at risk of getting blown up. Hmm.

So you're, that starts up and this is when the Afghanistan war is like the hottest at the beginning. This is before Iraq, when you're starting to do these. Yep. Okay. Now obviously you're hands on, you're seeing a lot of this, you're getting all the reports on the ground. What were your thoughts?

You know, hindsight's 2020 now, we saw what happened in Afghanistan in 2021, but what were your thoughts then at the beginning? Funny you say that because I remember seeing the US military showing up in droves and seeing the construction of all the McDonald's, all the other amenities, all the other cost stuff that flows with the US military footprint. I remember a phone call, a sat phone call I had with Gary Jackson while I was on the ground

before I left. I said, Gary, the DOD is going to come here and screw it all up. And this will end up having to be solved by contractors because the DOD will become so expensive and so ineffective. It'll be left to contractors. Now, I wish I was right on that. I was right on half. Yes, the DOD did screw it up. They replicated the Soviet battle plan. We went from the first six months of the war, when it was special operations guys, with a targeting cycle of minutes or seconds,

enemy there, we go send it. Versus hyper-bureaucratic planning cycle with all kinds of approvals. We basically... We allowed lawyers to become what Zampulits were in the Soviet Union. A Zampulit is a political officer, which was in a Soviet Union, which would enforce the will of the Communist Party.

And it was really second guess, unit commanders from what they could do. And that's really how bad lawyers had become in the Pentagon. Even back then. Oh yeah. Yep. So I was right on that. I wish they'd let contractors solve it and towards the end of the Afghan war. I remember right after Trump was elected the first time. So it would have been spring of 2017. Steve Bannon, one of the guest policy advisors to President Trump then said, hey, we're going to debate a change in Afghan policy, write an editorial.

To you. To me. So I did and it got published. And I called out for a different strategy in Afghanistan, which would have massively reduced the conventional footprint of the DOD. And go back to what worked for 250 years, which was kind of the East India Company approach. You've heard of the East India Company? I've heard of that, but how would this work in practice in Afghanistan? So the East India Company...

And sorry, Eric, if you don't mind, just stay like a little closer. I just don't want you getting out of focus. My bad. I'm always out of focus. The East India Company was a private company that did three things. It facilitated trade in difficult places. It performed functions of government, kicked ass when necessary. And the whole problem of the US presence in Afghanistan

is we never got the economy actually going legitimately there. Right. There is so much money, AID and all this, and no proper underpinnings of the economy and dumb things like the fact that the cost of energy, the per dollar cost of a gallon of fuel by the time it made it in Humvee was about $250.

From all the logistics cost. Now, because that oil or that gas or diesel was shipped in from the Mediterranean, shipped to Karachi, put in a truck, Karachi, Pakistan, trucked up into Afghanistan. The Taliban would toll that and that tolling that actually represented about 30% of the Taliban's operating budget. Taliban easy pass. let's go. Yeah, exactly.

But all the generals, the 18 different commanders we had there, never said, excuse me, there's oil and gas in Afghanistan that was drilled and proven by the Soviets when they left. The Amu Darya oil field up in Bulk Province. I know because my friend was the local partner there. And nobody ever said, here's a $20 million drilling program. OK, one Texan reservist could have figured this out.

Probably somebody from the oil and gas industry, a roughneck, drill that, put that in production, spend a hundred million bucks on a refinery, a modular one, and now we have all the oil and gas issues solved in Afghanistan. A company would figure that out. Clearly, the military did not after 20 effing years. So anyway... They figured out the poppy fields.

Not so well either. Yeah. So... You don't out the poppy fields. Not so well either. Yeah. So he's not even getting credit for that. The Brits, the Brits used to have a great saying that a functioning workshop is better than a battalion of soldiers because it's much better to employ the enemy than to fight them. Okay. There was, um, one of the largest copper deposits in the world, the Moss Einoch mine, it was only about 30 miles south of Kabul and it had been

production on and off for almost a thousand years. There's all kinds of archaeological sites there. The Chinese early on bought the concession, corruptly, but again a smart general would have said in two months I want that mine turned on. I don't care who owns it right now. We do now. Turn it on, and you could have employed 10,000 Taliban. Because if the Taliban is paying $10 a day, put the word out to pay $12 a day, and they'll put their guns down.

Give them three square meals. Let them pray five times a day. Give them pick and shovel. Let them mine copper. Great. You've just taken an entire infantry division of Taliban off the battlefield without killing them. That's how the East India Company did business.

I got what you're saying. But you're writing this op-ed. I wrote an op-ed. In 2017. Yes. Laid it out and made the case for how to, because again, it was not a hypothetical situation for us because I'd had dozens of my own aircraft in Afghanistan doing these kind of support missions for DoD.

I'd had a thousand plus people doing security or training or advisory work actually embedding because one of the other big problems in Afghanistan was we had, I think, 31 or 32 troop rotations. So you say we were in Afghanistan for 20 years. Now, you were there for 31 troop rotations for six to nine months at a time, sometimes 12 months. But every time that military unit would leave, they wouldn't go back to the same area. So you'd have all that area knowledge

that you build up over six or nine months leave with those guys. Whose bright idea was that? The Pentagon's. That was their, that was, they never fundamentally adjusted how they rotated troops to affect the realities of the battle space there. Our approach, what I laid out and budgeted, that I could have taken 3,600 contractors. People love the word veterans.

They hate to use the word contractors, right? But I could pay a veteran contractor to go back in and live with, train with, fight with alongside each of those Afghan battalions that are worth saving, live on the same base, guide them so that every time that unit went out in the field, there would be some pale faces with them, providing leadership, intelligence, communications, medical logistics expertise. Kind of like the training wheels on a unit.

So that if you have those units with the basics correctly, they don't get annihilated. And you combine that with a little bit of air support. Again, right seat, my pilot, left seat, Afghan, doing this. Right. Right. So the weapons are released by an Afghan, not by my guy. But you can line up the airplane, and you take away the inshallah factor. The inshallah factor? Yeah, you know, in the Middle East, in Arabic,

they say, well, if God wills it. Right? It's kind of like in Latin culture, they say, well, manana. Maybe, you know, maybe tomorrow. No. There's no room for that. You need air support. You need it now with no bullshit, no excuses. So mentors in the field. And because they're, because I can pay them well, I can pay the same guy to go back to the same battalion in the same Valley, go in for 90 days, home for 60 back in for 90, but they always repeat back to the same.

So we keep that area knowledge the exact same way that East India Company did for decades. With reliable air support, including jets, we could have gotten rid of all the tankers and all the other nonsense and take over the combat support because the main sources of fraud were the Afghans paying ghost soldiers where they'd say, yes, we have 800 men. Now they have like 200 men and they're paying for 600 ghosts. People are skimming. They do the same for ammo, the same for fuel, the same for food.

Take that over and then fix the medical issue because you are seven times as likely to die if you were an afghan and you got wounded Which is wrong. Yeah All everything I just described for you cost 5% of what the US was spending So and they had they had they had 20,000 some US military at that point and about 29,000 contractors. I just advocated a massive rationalization down to about five as a stay behind force would have kept the Afghan military from completely collapsing because the reason they collapsed

and I called it about three months before I made a bet with a buddy of when Kabul was going to collapse and we knew that but did it based on I knew because of the fuel contractor I knew and they were gonna stop delivering fuel to the Afghan Air Force and the US Air Force so the close air support was going to stop. Should have called a hedge fund. They pay a lot of money for this. Yeah. Well, um, the last thing we need to do is help hedge funds. I like that. Good call. Um,

so I knew that if the, if the Taliban were not going to get smashed by grouping up as 50 and 200, then they could go to 5,000. 5,000, they could start running over cities. Exactly what happened. Now cynically, like, because your plan on paper sounds pretty good, but again, you were writing this, not that this is your fault, but you're writing this 16 years in, right? And so when you think about all the things that had led to that, like the...

All kinds of incremental thinking. Oh yeah. Incremental thinking and deprived of any kind of price information, right? It was like the embodiment of socialism. Can you explain that? The problem when the military says, we need this much to do something, they're making that general or that staff person is making that decision, not really understanding how

much something costs. Okay. So it basically is going to be a road paved to hell of inefficiencies if they do that. The road to hell paved by good intentions. Right. Sure. Okay. But you're writing it when all this shit has happened for a long time. Do you think that if you had been given the carte blanche in 2017 after writing this type of op-ed, there would have been a chance that you could have turned it around? 100%. Because it was not theoretical. I knew...

because it was not theoretical. I knew and the one time I saw President Trump while he was president the first term it was on Veterans Day of 2019 and he came up to me said Eric you're right I should have listened you out Afghanistan. I was like Mr. President there is still time we can fix this. Give us a chance. But he never really controlled this national security apparatus the first time around. He never controlled it? The same Mattis and Esper were very much very conventional thinking, completely immune to innovation and Gina Haspel. Because what made sense is to do this

under a Title 50 authority. Title 10 is how the Pentagon goes to war. Title 50 is how the CIA does its stuff. When the SEALs, sorry, when the special forces went into Afghanistan the first time, they were working for the CIA director. That was Title 50 authority. into Afghanistan the first time they were working for the CIA director. Right. Title 50 authority.

Yeah. When the seals went cross border into Pakistan to kill bin Laden, title 50 authority, not title 10. Interesting. And that was like when Kofor Black was running that whole initial one, right? Kofor Black was running the original one. Yeah. Okay.

He worked, didn't he work for black water? He did. He, he retired. He went to work for the State Department. He was the ambassador for counter-terrorism. And then he joined us for a while. He was fantastic. I love that guy. That guy is so interesting. Massive. A true, um, a spy spy.

And he understood unconventional warfare because he'd done it against Gaddafi in the 80s. Against Gaddafi? Oh yeah. Oh, I didn't know about this. What was he doing there? Cause Gaddafi used to invade Chad and push south, pushes army south. And so Kofor would help, uh, push them back. And so if you send a huge convoy of trucks deep into the Sahara desert, how do you make them want to turn back? Poke holes in the water trucks. You don't have to kill them all. Just poke holes in the water trucks.

And he did the same thing to the Cubans and the... Oh, he did to the Cubans too. In Angola. Yep. Wow. Yeah, that guy's been around the block. He has. He's the one with the famous quote about flies crawling across their eyeballs. That was, that was pretty ball. He had a fantastic flare for the dramatic and that's intent based leadership. Right. And, but barring that kind of out of the box

thinking, you know what the Pentagon wanted to do after 9-11, while the Pentagon is still smoldering. They said, we want to wait until the following April and do a mechanized invasion of Afghanistan via Pakistan. Yeah, he wanted six months. Come on, guys. I mean, Rumsfeld wasn't the brightest, you know, he wasn't the sharpest. I look, people want to ding on Rumsfeld. I like him. You like Rumsfeld? Yeah, he at least, he at least understood how broken the Pentagon was,

and it needed to have some business focus, at least to understand how much these things cost. I mean, he is the guy that said, we're missing like $2 trillion. I'll give him that. Like, no one else really ever said that. But I still don't know what happened to that $2 trillion.

Wow, and I think there's more than that missing now. More than $2 trillion now, I'm sure. How do you lose two, three trillion? Like what, is this just like a very slow, steep climb down a, you know? That is the fundamental problem. You have a Congress that appropriates way too much money and all Congress really knows how to do is people say, oh, there's a problem. What's the American response to that?

Throw money at it. Throw money at it. And so our foreign policy has become one of firehosing money at all these problems. And it's like, it's basically watering the weeds in your driveway. It's making all of them grow that much faster and reinforcing all the wrong things.

And the business of America should be business, not warfare, not, not foreign policy largesse. What do you mean by foreign policy largesse? The massive spend of USAID and a massive over bloated Pentagon budget to the point of, of making the Pentagon like an obese triathlete. Right? You should have a Pentagon that is forced to make disciplined decisions for what are priorities versus what are not priorities. And when you have so much of the Pentagon budget is, you have 800,000 civilians, DoD civilians working for the Pentagon now. So for our secretary of Hegs that to try to reform the Pentagon,

it's a lot. It's not just uniform services, but you got to give them, um, true hiring and firing authority to clean out. Cause there is dead wood upon dead wood upon dead wood. You're also set up though, and this is like kind of the catch 22. It's set up to be so compartmentalized for basically intelligence purposes, meaning like this team has a need to know on just this one thing and that team has a need to know just that other thing. But there's people sitting high enough. They can see across those issues. The problem is, is a lot of classification

is used to hide incompetence and waste. I don't disagree with that. Sorry to be bleak on that. No, no. I don't disagree with you. I'm just wondering how much those people in those high places can see all that. I know they can definitely see a good bit of it.

But it's hard to say, well, because some of the guys guys like Mattis, I guess when he was running the Pentagon, like I've had guys in here talk about the things he wasn't read in on. And he's like the head, you know, I would just think the heads read in on everything, but that's not, that's not the case. It's so large that it's almost impossible for anyone to really get a handle of all of it. This is, we talk about this all the time in here.

I've had so many guys who were at different levels of special forces who were in Afghanistan throughout the time in here. I've had so many guys who were at different levels of special forces who were in Afghanistan throughout the 20 years there. And every time someone comes in, we learn something wild and new about what was going on. But it's like, I've always looked at it not to be too black and white about it, but that initial invasion was obviously necessary and very impressive. The one that Kofor was running is one of them. And it should have stayed a Roman style punitive raid. What do you mean Roman style? When you've heard of the Battle of Cannae in Rome, right? What you've heard of the Punic Wars, right? Yeah.

The Carthaginians were ravaging Rome and The Northaginians were ravaging Rome. And Hannibal the barbarian rolls across, and then they do the Battle of Cannae, and it's a single, I mean, they lost like 80,000 people in a morning. Romans, imagine that. I mean, imagine killing that many people by sword. It's nuts. Before noon.

It's nuts. And they stood up in the Roman Senate, they said Carthagio de Lende est Carthage must be destroyed so who'd they send Scipio Africanus and he destroys Carthage and he salts the earth that's what we should have done in Afghanistan we should have done in Afghanistan. We should have sent and allowed Saf to remain off leash and to smash any and all remnants of Taliban manpower or Taliban adjacent people and let them howl in pain and then leave. We're not there to make them a a liberal representative democracy. We're not there to make them a liberal representative democracy. We're there to punish them for accommodating terrorists which hurt America and then leave.

That's how Rome maintained peace for multiple centuries would have been a better approach and vastly cheaper. I don't like to, I really try to look at these situations as 30,000 feet in the air as I can, because I think a lot of people like me can get in the trap of playing Monday morning quarterback having not been to these places, having not seen realities, having not understood what warfare is like up front. But like as a devil's advocate to that, if you were to take that type of approach, are there not a fuck ton of people in Afghanistan who are just living under that thumb who would

be caught in the crossfire, perhaps unnecessarily if we took a more conventional form of warfare that could help avoid that? I would say that you would have liberated the men, women, and children from Afghanistan that did not want to live under a Taliban religious rule. And or or rule by the Pashtuns, which is really what you had. or ruled by the Pashtuns, which is really what you had. And when I say a punitive raid, that means you're killing anybody that's resisting. Okay.

Not killing anything and everything. No, not just wholesale slaughter. If you want to fight, fight. Because that's what Scipio did. Scipio, I mean, like going through that history, like he did wholesale slaughter entire fucking parts of those cities. Well, but they took most of them as captives or slaves. I'm not saying we did that either.

Right, and I'm taking that as the same end result. Nope. Okay, so call it Scipio light. Okay. All right, that's a good distinction. So you think we could have been out of there in a year? Yeah, or eight months. What do you think, what did you think, I mean, going back to put-

I mean, as a, I heard a soft guy, or I read it, and he said, and he was part of that initial push, and it had been in there for months. But then at Kandahar, when they're starting to build a big base exchange with a McDonald's and a Burger King and all the rest, they're like, yep, time for us to leave. Because it really became a money thing for the Pentagon, and that's ultimately what it is about the Pentagon.

SOF did extraordinarily well, fought in unconventional warfare with a small, light, lethal footprint. And then you have all these conventional airborne units and armor and all the rest, and they, wow, we have to get... be part of this. So they come with their very conventional approach to warfare and replicate the Soviet battle plan that had been done from 79 to 89 by the Soviets. It's interesting. Down to the same base, base as?

The history just repeating itself. Yep. It's interesting to hear you give these perspectives because everything you're pointing to, I can appreciate because it's anti the worst parts of the military industrial complex, right? You're trying to say, like, for example, let's end a war in eight months, get the fuck out of there, instead of spending 20 years opening up McDonald's and stuff. And not that this is your fault at all, it's just it's always wild when someone who is in the middle

of it, like you're a part of those groups that people look at and label military industrial complex, is the guy like sounding the alarm saying let's not do this. And I specifically remember that phone call I made to Gary Jackson, the president of Blackwater back at our headquarters saying, holy shit, this is already turning bureaucratic and bloated and ridiculous. What did you think when the rumble started coming in that we were going to do Iraq? If they did Iraq properly, it would have possibly been a different outcome. But again, having a massive conventional military to depose Saddam, the smarter way, if you were absolutely hell bent that you had to depose Saddam,

do it through some kind of covert action and save yourself the massive cost and bloat and infrastructure destruction that would come with rolling 300,000, 400,000 US troops into Iraq. But worse than that, once we were there, I remember in about spring of 2004, so about a year after the UN invasion, the head of the Iraqi intelligence service came to see me, a guy named Mohammed Shawani with a CIA handler. And he was a legendary Iraqi figure,

former head of Iraqi Special Forces back in the 80s. He had done the largest helicopter invasion in history into Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. Oh wow. Okay, and that kind of stuff put him on crossways with Saddam, because Saddam figured, the guy can do it to the Iranians, he can do it to me. But,

Muhammad eventually made it to Jordan because the Iraqis were trying to kill him. Saddam ended up executing both of his sons. But anyway, he came to see me and he said, we're seeing all kinds of evidence of the Iranians setting up political offices, assassination teams, influence operations all through Southern Iraq. And we want a program to find them and to eliminate the Iranian officers. And we priced it up because we were doing some stuff for the agency back then. And it was effectively going to be a kind of small version of the Phoenix program.

And I remember we were going to call it Ted Williams. Why? Because Ted Williams was one of the greatest hitters of all times. Teddy Williams going fucking yard. And the whole thing, the agency was going to fund it and it was blocked by Condoleez Rice. Then why should you do that? Iran is not our enemy.

We have to respect the political process, all the rest. It was to me, it was a massive sliding door moment in the entire Iraq debacle. Because if we had been allowed to sever the Iranians putting their hooks into Iraqi society, because think about the Iran Iraq war. That was a massive loss of life for both sides. And the Iranians are a very deliberate society. Deliberate. Deliberate. And the Iranians are a very deliberate society. Deliberate.

Deliberate. They put a thousand stitches making a Persian rug. Mm-hmm. Okay, thousand stitches into a square inch. Beautiful, planned, deliberate. So they do long-term intelligence planning, long-term influence operations as, so what they were doing in Iraq

is exactly what they'd already done in Lebanon with Hezbollah, what they've done in Yemen with the Houthis. And now they're doing it with in Iraq, which became the Hashd al-Shabi, which is a 250,000 man unit of the Iraqi military now paid by the Iraqi government that are effectively under Iranian control. As that's in its early stage, the Iraqi intelligence service wanted to cut them off

properly and we were blocked from doing so. But if we'd been allowed to, I think Iraq would look much different today. Even with the whole vacuum we created, cause like, yeah, I don't want to be misheard here. Like, Saddam was obviously a terrible guy. There's no one questioning that. But like, I think it's almost impossible to say we didn't create a bigger problem once

he, once he was deposed because it basically allowed Al Zakharoui to come in and eventually form what would eventually become ISIS? Yes, but that was that was a that was almost a Sunni blowback onto the Shia hegemony that was stimulated by Iran. Because the biggest ethnic group, sorry the biggest religious group in Iraq are Shia and then Sunnis and Kurds and the amount of dominance that the Shia and then Sunnis and Kurds. And the amount of dominance that the Shia had with that Iranian control over all parts of society, that stimulated a lot of Sunnis to say, well, maybe we'll go with these radicals,

even if it's Zarqawi, because we're not gonna take it from the Shi anymore. So it definitely, it corked off effectively an internal religious war that we could have prevented if we had kept the Iranians on their side of the border. Even the entire, the EFP, the really nasty roadside bomb, which was, you know what a roadside bomb is, of course. HE, explosive, blows up, energy gets thrown into the vehicle.

And EFP, imagine this is copper, and you put this on the front of a can filled with explosives. The explosive starts here with a cap. The explosive wave goes through what? C4 goes about 22,000 to 25,000 feet per second. It turns this copper plate into a copper slug going about 8,000 feet per second, bores right through the a copper slug going about 8,000 feet per second, bores right through the side of your Humvee or your Abrams tank.

That was built, organized, supplied by the Iranians, the same ones that Condi Rice prevented us from taking out. It's too bad. I feel you. I mean, it's interesting though that like the entire administration that was really pushing this war though would almost get cold feet on something like that once they're there. That's fascinating to me. No place for half measures. If you're going to go... Now that's the thing. We have a lot

of unserious people in Washington making foreign policy decisions with no skin in the game. So if you're going to do the, you know, make the call of sending people into harm's way, then let them finish the job and don't hamstring them with 10,000 lawyers and half measures that devalues the actual human sacrifice of your people and of the damage you're causing on the other side as well. Finish the war, not this managed conflict nonsense. When approximately was that conversation again where she said no? Early 2004. Okay so this is still, that's interesting so they were already hamstrung at that point with legal hurdles on everything.

You wouldn't think that. Well, and again, that was a, that was an, it would have been an intelligence program, not a conventional military thing. Oh, doing that, right, right, right. Taking that action. Is this, you and I were talking before camera because obviously this got leaked, so you

can talk about it, but were you already a knock at this point for CIA? So can you explain what that program was? Because the way I understood it is that it was a CIA assassination program. So what was leaked and this is my beef about it. So that, yeah, the agency had come to me the director himself and said we want a unilateral no attribution back to the USG capability to go after targets globally when was this 2004 and all that 2004. And all of that would have remained silent and sealed. It was never leaked by me. It was never leaked by the agency, but it was leaked by Leon Panetta when the Obama

crowd took over and he briefed the program and me by name to the House Intelligence Committee, who within a half an hour of him briefing it, because one of the members of Congress came out and told me, hey, he just briefed you by name for this program. And within a half an hour of that, the Washington Post and New York Times were calling me for comment. Now, he was headed the CIA though when he did that, or was this before that? Panetta was the head of the CIA when he did it.

When he did this. Why do you think he did that? There's nothing positive I can say about him for doing that. I can imagine. But it's, whether people love me or hate me, fine. I don't care. It's not great for any CIA director to brief people by name that are extending themselves. And it's not very good for the CIA

to promote recruitment of people that will be sticking their neck out for America to get thrown out of the bus by a director, just because you don't like me politically. Have you had previous disagreements with him on other stuff? Nothing ever. You just did that. In fact, the only other interaction the company had with him was they were chicken shit scared.

They wanted to close this drone base, which was essential. Drone base? That we were operating. Okay. In a dangerous part of the world. And my people had to go in and brief him in person to say, we got it, sir. We're not afraid of getting run over. Give us these heavier weapons. We got it. And okay, fine. It was literally the only interaction. And whether he was just a partisan hack or an asshole or weak or whatever, but briefing assets by name is not only wrong, it's illegal.

Right. I was just going to ask that. So why, if he's briefing you by name, and then at least to the press, it's like a valid claim thing. Because the whole idea, if you're a knock, you have a file. It's called a 201 file. I definitely had that to brief it

by name is is really bad intelligence policy and it's a violation of federal law yeah it's like the Valerie Plane thing yeah but worse I mean she was she was an analyst at some nuclear conference and here I was running a killing people a unilateral capability that the US government needed. Right. Time to drive away from the grind and unwind in your new 2025 Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross. No phones, no signal, no meetings. Just the smell of adventure. Lease the Eclipse Cross today for the equivalent of $89 weekly at 3.99% for 36 months. Plus, get a no charge two-year maintenance package.

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So I know you can't comment on specifics of things that happen. Oh, yeah. Level up from bill payer to reward slayer. Terms and conditions apply. So I know you can't comment on specifics of things that happen. Oh, you can. Well, the last chapter of my book is written from open source stuff. So you can infer. Yeah, but yeah, it was a hell of an education. What? All right.

So they come to you in 04. They ask you to do this stuff. I'm so curious by the background with how this stuff works because a knock is someone who's supposed to be completely deniable, meaning like if you are... I mean, here's the thing. The fact is, without any American that volunteers because of their unique access or placement to help their country with intelligence matters or providing cover or providing the means to ship something or whatever, that is run through the NR part of the CIA, National Resources. And so they handle all the knocks.

And that should be a, and they have a huge amount, I mean, Americans globally have a lot of unique access and talents. And that's a huge part of the reliable capability. And so that's my beef with Panetta. You might not like me. I did everything the agency ever asked, and we did it well. And we protected all their people

in the most difficult places. Ad nauseam. The guys that, um, were in Benghazi. Right? After the US ambassador was killed by terrorists, and he was supposed to be being protected by State Department Diplomatic Security people, who incidentally fired how many rounds? How many rounds did the State Department Security people

fire protecting their guy? Zero. The guys that were over at the agency annex, many of them had worked for BW, had worked for us before, before they were direct hired by the agency. So we'd done all of that. And then to get thrown under the bus by the director because he doesn't like me or he's afraid or whatever, that's just bullshit.

I have issue with that. And so the day name on that is I'm living overseas and I get Contacted by the embassy that I'm now on the okay to hit list because of that. I'm sure because there was Well blowback from yeah, whatever but That's got to be crazy. I mean I I would be I can't even imagine how angry you were about that and it's It's part of the, I would say it's part of the lawfare of the left where they make you toxic and unbankable and they just throw a lot of shit at you to make you toxics. You are choked off of access to business banking credit.

They made you unbankable? Oh yeah. Like internationally or? Okay. Because of the type of T but in the US where you unbankable too? Oh, yeah. Really? Yep. Big banks. Sure. Sure. The all the shit that got thrown at us after Nisra Square and all the all that bureaucratic attack. Yeah, that's all that's all part of a kind of a left-wing playbook. So, so you, so did, have you ever talked with Panetta about that? Yeah, I did. I confronted him at an OSS dinner. When was this?

Probably five or six years ago. I said, you know, I said, you know, that's pretty fucked up when you name an asset like that. Well, I, I was under a lot of pressure. Like really you're under pressure. I said, what does that do for recruiting? And he just, he turned and walked away. He was a pussy. Oh, he didn't handle it. No, he didn't stand on business. That's tough. Good for you though for confronting them. I mean, yeah. I'm a pretty direct guy.

Yeah. I kind of got that. What was the, you mentioned Nisour Square though. I have to give credit to Sean for this because he did the podcast with- Sean, and that's why I did his podcast originally because he did those guys so fairly. Yeah. So to be perfectly honest with you, I had found Sean, I think, short, maybe a month or two before I watched that podcast. And when I found him, I was going through his catalog at the time. And I saw he had those guys in. I'm like, oh, he had the Blackwater

guys in. Didn't they like blow everyone away? So I didn't watch it. And then I watched it. And then when reviewed the case and everything that happened and I have to say, it completely changed my mind on it. It feels like when you look at the facts of the case, and I guess you'd call it destroyed evidence to between the drone footage and stuff like that, like those guys got hung out to drive but for people out there who are unfamiliar with the case, can you just walk them through what happened in 07 here? Sure. That was, we were providing security personnel for the State Department where we

would perform under a bid contract, 1100 page long contract of all the things that will be trained to and how supplied and all the rest. And we would send them to the State Department and chop them to their operational control. So I wasn't controlling the mission, drive here, turn there, or there's a State Department, the regional security officer, the chief of security for the State Department would be. And in that case, it's September of 2007 was during the surge, right? So there was a big extra amount of US forces in because they're trying to get a handle on a very aggressive insurgency.

And the week before it started with one of our helicopters being shot down by insurgents and then two other attacks with explosives against our vehicles, put some of our guys in the hospital. And then Nisra Square, September 16, 2007, was a car bomb outside of a building where we had a USAID official. And normally the guys would hard point, meaning wait at a building, but all the Iraqi guards ran away, so they decided to move. And so they called for a support team.

One of these Raven 23, there's a tactical support team, meaning a bigger set of gun trucks to, uh, provide support in a firefight. And uh, so they were to block and were to block certain entrances to a traffic circle so that the fleeing guys could float through there safely. Because if you know anything about deer hunting, you always want to hunt a trailer section. If you want to kill Americans, hunt the traffic circles

because you know they're going to pass through. And so this team is there. And of course, they've gotten a briefing that morning to be on the lookout, a BOLO announcement for a white Kia, which is likely a car bomb. And all the other cars stop in the traffic circle like they're supposed to, except a white Kia, which keeps coming and coming.

And they go through all the different signaling of flashing lights and lasers and smokes and all the other stuff. Keeps coming. They light it up. Sadly, well, it wasn't a car bomb. It was a guy driving his mother. And then a firefight breaks out.

And from other insurgents or somebody firing at the vehicles, one of the vehicles actually takes a round, which skips off the pavement, and it severs the coolant drain line. So all the coolant drains out of this $500,000 State Department armored truck. And of course, modern electronic engines, if no coolant, no motor. the We, uh, there was a firefight today. It's actually much milder than the ones we've had just the previous few days.

Uh, in case there's a, uh, you know, media fury. And this one went absolutely high and right. Um... How quickly did it go? I don't remember. Within hours. Within hours. And so, you know, we'd had indications from the Iranians that they really hated us. They really hate...

I mean, can you imagine we did stuff for the intelligence community? They knew who Blackwater was. And Blackwater protected the most Al Jazeera or newsworthy targets, meaning, you know, because if they catch an American, cut the head, that's their propaganda thing. And so the Iranians knew who we were.

And man, between a left-wing media, which in the Vietnam War, they went after troops. This time they went after contractors. And... Blackwater represented everything they loved to hate, even though we were tiny compared to the Lockheed's and the Bowings and all the rest, because we... I was a sole owner.

Company was successful. I was married to a woman. I had kids. I was Roman Catholic. Right? I mean, I represented everything the left loved to hate. And the business made money. And sometimes our guys were armed. And sometimes they had to use those arms.

And in Iraq, I think we did more than 100,000 missions. And no one under our care was ever killed or injured. And less than 1% of the time, was there ever a firearm used? And all that stuff was logged. But this one went really high and right. And the State Department threw us under the bus you know, all that stuff was logged. But this one went really high and right. And, yeah, the State Department threw us under the bus for doing exactly what their mission was. And, yeah, it was a mess. And yes, it was not a good shoot. But having followed the rules of engagement, when you have, just probably two months before, we had a suburban, a armored suburban

that weighs probably 8,000, 10,000 pounds that was thrown almost 150 meters into a building from a car bank. So when you see your buddies die from that, building from a car bank. So when you see your buddies die from that, then you see a white Kia that doesn't stop in traffic that's coming onto you. Yeah, they engaged and tragically it was the not the right shoot. But you know, as recently as 2000, I think 14 or 15 in DC. There was a woman that drove her car into security barriers outside one of the federal buildings and federal law enforcement officers opened up on her and she drove away, rammed into some other buildings up by the Supreme Court.

Whoa. And they eventually gunned her down and killed her. And you know what? You know what she had in the back of her car? No weapons, no bombs, a baby in a car seat. Why was she doing that? Did they ever figure that out? No idea. But you know what? Was there any human cry for the federal law enforcement? Right.

Killed an innocent woman. Right. I think- I can only imagine the noise that would have been if it was a contractor that took that shot. I can- Instead of a federal law enforcement. I don't disagree with you. I think like looking back on it-

There was dozens and dozens of, it was not just like a mag, it was lots of dudes sending it. It's like, unfortunately, a lot of things in our world is just marketing, you know? And I always wonder if you name the company like Red Hills or something like that instead of Blackwater. Not that that's a bad name or anything, but it's like it's a hard name.

You also have a memorable name, Eric Prince, like also pretty hard name too. He's like, now. You know, but this comes back to, we had asked the State Department for cameras. We wanted to put basically dash cam cameras, like a police car in our vehicles to prevent exactly this kind of, he said, she said disagreements in our vehicles that we were using for security work for NGOs. We had those and probably two weeks before the Nisra Square incident happened, they got called

into about a so-called questionable shoot and the military reviewed all the tapes. They're like, absolutely, clearly was a good shoot for what you did. So, again, State Department forbade us from having those cameras because they said, well, what if it records something? I was like, that's exactly why we want everything on film so that it takes away that decision-making or that opinion made in the comfort of an air-conditioned boardroom.

Did that ever come out in court that they had denied that? Of course. Again, what I've also realized, that was the first time when I got dragged before Congress, I'd been a knock. I'd managed to stay out of the media. And so as I walk into the halls of Congress for that hearing in October of 2007. The, you know, the cameras are cranking away and I thought, shit, my days as a covert operator are truly over now. In fact, two of the guys that were part of the team only knew me as my, as my crypt,

right? As my, as my team name knew me as my, uh, as my crypt, right? Uh, as my, as my team name, not in my name. Oh, you were that. And they go, Hey, that looks just like, and then they realized it was me. So it was funny. That was a, that day ended with a few good things. Yeah. I mean, the, the third part of this though, like the marketing is like, it's just for window dressing. But the third part of this is that the time this happened,

2007, the tiredness of the war has set in. Oh yeah, massive war fatigue. Yeah, and people are legitimately frustrated and pissed because we're not making progress. And also the same left-wing media that, you know, is doing these types of things now, were the same people who were carrying the water for any information, technically like unvetted sometimes, that was getting us into the war and getting the entire society onto the war.

So it's almost like they had like, oh shit, our bad. So they're trying to flip it hard the other way. And so they see a target like you. All to sell advertising Yes, yeah. Yeah, it's effectively a corporate media. It's a crazy time, but those guys, you know They end up getting convicted at the time I think it was four of the five got convicted the fifth became a witness or something Yes, but they they think they tried them four different times

Yeah, it was like 2014 or 2015 when they were finally convicted, maybe something like that. Yes. Yeah. And you know, in talking to the guys, I'm so proud of them for how they handled the situation and how they handle themselves in prison because as they're They told me they're in their orange jumpsuits Manicled taken out the prison van after the first sentencing And they say guys we can come through this as Bittermen or better men. Mm-hmm, and I choose to be better and None of them joined a gang. One of them. They all were

teaching and mentoring in prison. One of them taught himself biblical Greek. And one of them told me that when the guards would come in and close their cells at night doing head count, they'd say, man, it is hard for me to close this door because you don't belong in here. You're a political prisoner. And they found quite a kinship with a lot of the guards because they're all veterans and they realized the politics behind it. So, and then one, I remember talking to it, talking to the guys after, because they weren't exactly sure the pardon was going to come through. And one of them had been in isolation because of COVID, because his cellmate had gotten COVID for like three weeks. And he, I'm sure Evan, this is Evan Liberty. So he wouldn't mind me telling the story. Um, I, I'm sure Evan, this is Evan Liberty. So he wouldn't mind me telling the story. And uh, he was in prison in Pennsylvania and um, all of a sudden, um, this senior guard

barges into a cell. It was holy shit. Pack your stuff complete and total fucking pardon. You're out of here. Shows in the document. He goes, I don't want any of my stuff. Like, okay, let's go. And he says, but then it takes almost an hour to get processed out of a prison after a pardon.

And during that time, word had spread. The whole prison knew. And as he's walking out, they're cheering. Oh, they were all cheering for him. Banging cops there just celebrating for him. Wow. He's beautiful. And he gets out and all he has is a t-shirt and sweatpants and like, flip-flop prison shoes. And it's December 22. Oh.

In Pennsylvania. And of course, they give him $40 on some kind of a debit card from the Bureau of Prisons, which didn't work, and $10 cash. And he caught a ride to town with one of the guards and managed to check into a hotel with called his lawyer, put on his credit card. So he goes from in prison facing many, many more years at 5 30 PM. And by 7 30 PM, he's in a cheap hotel out in town out calling his lawyer. It's gotta be an amazing feeling though.

I mean, that's a lot. I talked to him that night. It was man. How'd you feel when they got sentenced though? And you knew the deal and you knew like this was just a bad shoot they didn't The intention obviously wasn't there they they weren't murders They weren't what they were made out to be and they worked for your company and these guys are getting damn near like life in prison

What does that? Oh beyond that they were given an extra. This is how bad the prosecutors were They gave him an extra 30 years prison based on some old drug war law because they used a machine gun in the commission of their crime. So kind of based on the eighties using machine gun, ignoring the fact that the machine gun had been issued to them by the state department and was required piece of their gear. That's how shitty these prosecutors were. But how is that?

How does, where's the judge on that? Like that's so obvious. Just as bad. So there's a reason the DOJ, Department of Injustice, prosecuted them in Washington, DC, not in Idaho or Montana or Colorado in normal states where these guys came from. Not a jury of your peers in Washington, D.C. Yeah, you're pretty much guilty on those juries, it seems like, with anything.

Pretty much everyone I've talked to is like that. But you were advocating for their pardon, I imagine, directly to the president. Like, because it did take, obviously, like he did it towards the end of his first term, he didn't do it during the term. Like, what were those conversations like? Was saying are they are they really actually innocent was he going back and forth on that? I

Didn't have that level of direct conversation with the president of that kind of relationship with him But certainly talking to the people around him Mmm, a lot of people that reviewed the cage realized how political it was Yeah, and that would you say that that was effectively like the, I mean, obviously Black Water became other things. It was a catalyst that destroyed the company. Right. Yep.

That's got it. You do everything right for so long. You build something. It's your baby. When our shit wipes out a whole lot of attaboys. Yeah. Did that change your worldview significantly as it pertains to the United States and how we operate?

I still believe in the Republic, very much so, and the Constitution and those things. I realize that I'm not the first patriot to have been screwed by the US government and certainly won't be the last Yeah, I don't like and whatever whatever nonsense look the guys lost years of their lives right? Thank God they're out now Thank God for President Trump pardoning them. That was undoing a massive injustice Whatever bullshit I had to put up with and building a business having it smashed I had to put up with and building a business, having it smashed, pales in comparison to vets that have lost their mental health, their marriages, their physical health, limbs, eyes, buddies, right? They paid a huge price and it really pisses me

off. And why I've been an advocate to fix the Afghanistan policy in 2017 and even to the Biden administration before the debacle or to actually sever the Iranian control in Iraq so that Iraq can actually be a free and independent country and not subjugated by Iran is because if you're going to ask soldiers to go do a difficult thing in a dangerous place and you're gonna suffer get injured or die have enough respect to see the job through and don't be a pussy about making difficult dangerous decisions and then we have the problem is in Washington we have way too many of that we don't have the the C is in Washington, we have way too many of that.

We don't have the, the Clausewitz moral courage of people making difficult decisions. How did you pivot after that? As Blackwater got dragged through the mud and... Sold it in 2010 for 0.8 times 2010 for 0.8 times two years previous cash flow. So if you have your hedge fund weenie audience, it was a absolute fire sale. After the banking crisis and all the rest, it was just wrecked because of all the politics and all the, um, the legal assault from every aspect of the federal government,

which was also quite an education. And, uh, I have a true visceral hatred of the bureaucracy in Washington. I can tell. Um, but, uh, at that point, we had done 20 helicopters for the UAE, basically upgraded them, and our price was a third of what Lockheed was going to charge to do the same thing. And so that led to us moving because of smally piracy. the leadership in the UAE wanted to, because, you know, small piracy, 80 to 90 ships taken per year held for six months to a year and a half and get a ransom paid a five to 10 million bucks.

And so the UAE wanted to do something about that. And I laid out a program which tried to coordinate with the State Department. I remember going to the... Keep that mic, sir. I remember going to the Assistant Secretary of State for Africa under Obama. And I said, imagine if we could raise money to do a counter-piracy police program in Somalia. Okay? If I raised money from a Gulf country to do that, would you want to be involved? And I remember him coming back to me three days later.

He says, great idea. Keep it as far away from the US government as you can, because we'll be debating it in the interagency process for the next five years. Oh, wow. Well, wow. Well, okay. Self-awareness. So that led to the Portland Marine Police Force. We made a documentary about it called The Somalia Project,

if people wanna follow up. Probably worth pulling up on. Yeah, let's do that. You've seen that, Leslie? We did it knowing it would be controversial to have, you know, the leftists to throw the pejoratives. Those white mercenaries. That's it right there.

The project. Did that, filmed it. And because again, the UN and the idiots in the Washington bureaucracy came and tried to smash this as well for building the audacity of building a police force of Somalis led by some expats to go after the pirate logistics. And sure enough, the unit went active in 2011, 2012 piracy fell to about zero and you don't hear much about Somali piracy anymore. Shocking how that works. Yeah. Why does the US... And it cost the US tax there zero

zero money in fact the the captain Phillips the rescue and dev group did that that program them rescuing him cost more than what our counter piracy program Oh yeah I would believe that in a second I've heard how big that operation was. Had a couple guys from different agencies. So really since I sold BW, I have not been a US government contractor at all. I've not taken a dollar in any kind of US government contract, but I really figured out how to do that kind of stability operation, that kind of stability operation, policing, security work, aviation in difficult places, all without U.S. stuff. So it's been quite an education.

And you've spent a lot of time in the UAE and live in there as well, right? In Abu Dhabi? I lived there full time for three years with my kids, yeah. What are they like? With four of my kids. Yeah. What, what, what are, what are they like with four of my kids? I feel like they get ignored a lot. Like when we talk about the middle East, you know, it's like they're there, but everyone wants to talk about Saudi Arabia. They want to talk about Israel. Some of these other countries, obviously Iran for another reason there, but what, what,

what attracts you to the UAE? They are a, um, for a Middle East country, what I, well, A, they wanted help, provided help. B, um, they, they've actually respected, uh, religious freedom, uh, quite well, right? There's churches there. There's not even synagogues in, uh, in UAE and, uh, the synagogues came even before the Abraham Accords. But when I lived there with my kids, there was a couple blocks of areas

where there was almost every flavor of Christian church you could imagine. Welcoming place, in a way. It was, yeah. And kids went to the American school there. And they learned a lot., they learned a lot, and they learned, uh, a lot how the rest of the world works. So again, I guess a variation of the travel my dad tried to provide me

when I was a kid, I tried to do the same thing. Took them to South Africa and, um, and Rwanda and, um... You took them to Rwanda. Yep. Took them to the Genocide Museum. It was very instructive for them. You seem to be... We did a bike trip across China. You did a bike trip across China?

Yeah, that was really... They don't even do that anymore. I didn't think so. It's not on my list. But that was a great education. And you understand why the CCP tries to have such an export focused economy because they got to pull hundreds and hundreds of millions of people out of rural China. Because we saw for miles and miles and miles, people harvesting rice, planting and harvesting rice the same way they would have done 200 years previously.

What year approximately is this? 2012. 2012. Okay, so they're starting to boom a little bit though at this point. Oh yeah, the economy's rocking. But you see the second world right there. But it also is a great education of, in direct correlation to how far away you got from Hong Kong, the quality of living, roads, cleanliness went down.

What Hong Kong was as a island of capitalism, of rule of law and governance, that for, what, since... 1847 to 1997, 150 years was the lease, was extraordinary and an incredible generator of wealth, of prosperity, clean water, sanitation, all those positive things. And so I saw from that Hong Kong really start to slide because it's become more and more absorbed into the Chinese communist-run mainland. As an aside here though, we're obviously talking about the country that has the second biggest GDP in the world now. They have totally opposing political paradigm.

Yeah. Do you view China as like the impending threat we need to take the most seriously? Or what are your thoughts from a geopolitical standpoint there? Well, you're right in thinking that China is diametrically opposed to our way of life because they are all about the party, the party rule, and a rule of the elite. And the idea of individual rights of an individual person mattering in China is antithetical.

So democracy is messy. It's imperfect. It's inefficient, but it is the best form of government on the planet. So, and so the idea of even community, like a mayor or local elections or whatever, is smashed out. It's all about the party. I'm kind of surprised China hasn't, you know, when you look at what they've done around the world from an economic standpoint, just buying up everything on countries that can't

possibly pay back the debts, then they get the setup shop there forever. It's like surprising to me that they haven't officially taken Taiwan or something like that. Why do you think they haven't taken an action when we've shown, let's say, foreign policy weakness over the past several years. They can speak out, they can protest, they can, it's imperfect. That is, that is a... So you said this would be the summer of you. But then you remembered? You have kids, and now you spend every sunny day at water parks and petting zoos. So be it. We do the prep,

so you can get your you time back with freshly prepared ready for you dishes from Sobeys. The freedom disease that the Chinese Communist Party just cannot tolerate and that's why they're so obsessed with taking it. It just seems like, you know, when you look at the history of their scale up in 1999, there are metrics with which you could still have called them a third world country. And very quickly, they quadrupled quintupled down on technology and effectively not only became a first world country, but they're like the other world power now.

And I get concerned when I see you know things like the yeah but let me just cut you off sure on this bike trip mm-hmm to go to these spectacularly built hotels with big signs do not drink the water do not because it's chemically, poisonously unsafe. Like Flint kind of stuff. Like war, wait, no, 10X Flint. Oh wow. In lots of places along the way.

So that's what comes from having no property rights and no real means to push back on the all-powerful state. I mean, I've been to Beijing and had black snow. Black snow? Where it's snowing should be white. By the time it gets to the ground, because it's picked up so much coal dust and soot and crap out of the air, it's falling on the ground

right outside of Beijing airport, and it's black. So that is even the irritant of the, the irritant of the U S embassy posting the actual air quality numbers for the rest of the Beijing population to see the fact that the only place you can get a reliable air quality reading is from the U S embassy says it all for what the problem with, with a one party rule unaccountable to the people means. Yeah. And it's, it's also crazy that they can use that against us too. I always cite this. I always cite this example on the podcast because like, like you, I'm not a fan of communism,

obviously, but you know, in their country, because they don't have freedom, for example, their tick tock for their kids turns off at nine o'clock And when it's on, they watch science videos and math videos pushing stem, right? Not titty, transgender, stupidity, social degradation, nonsense, exactly. And my mind melting type stuff. Exactly. And so I always look at this. It's like, you can use our system of freedom and openness. If you're another country, it's not accountable to anything because you don't have that you can use it against itself to turn it in on itself Sure, exactly what they're doing fentanyl right the yeah what the the fentanyl epidemic in America, which The headline number is like a hundred and nine thousand dead last year

It's more like two fifty or three hundred people. That even seems low. Yeah. Exactly. That is organized, facilitated, funded by the Chinese Communist Party. Those precursor chemicals are coming out of Wuhan area. My favorite place. Yeah, exactly. Shipped to Venezuela to start, but then now to Mexico, there are Chinese nationals in Mexico teaching the cartels how to fabricate fentanyl. A normal illicit business is not going to develop a product that kills its customers. It's bad for business.

So it speaks to why, I mean, fentanyl is done to rot American society from the inside. It's a reverse opium war to me. It is. Yeah. And it wasn't even the US that did it, but it's an FU to the West writ large. You ever hear the book Fentanyl, Inc.? No. So this guy, Ben Westoff, wrote this, like this had to be maybe six, seven years ago. And he went on, he went on Joe Rogan also like six seven years ago after he wrote

it and told the story he was working on he was like a music reporter he's working on a story in music and while he's working on it for this magazine some guy makes a comment about fentanyl like an offhand comment he asked him about it more and he gets curious starts pulling on the thread quickly he's like shit, like there's something here, decides to write a book and pretty badass. He decides to fly to China alone, just an author, you know, not a special forces guy or anything, and go undercover and see how easy it would be to get fentanyl. And it was basically, you know, to put the story shorter, it was basically like going to Walmart and walking out with a cart in China itself.

Now fast forward to those guys bringing their people over, shipping that to Mexico where the cartels run the country, who want to get that into America and can get it through the border no problem. I mean, it seems way too easy. The Trump administration has its work to do. Yes. How would you stop that? If they if Trump say if I were Donald Trump and I said Eric, you're in charge, go for

it. Some things are better left unsaid. Oh, what do you think of him declaring the cartels terrorist organizations from a strategic standpoint? Well, it certainly unlocks a lot of additional authorities because there are some Some pretty capable ways of delivering energy onto the enemies when you do that Would you whether it's whether that's drones whether that's JSOC capability the find-fix finish Muscle that was honed over 20 years of GWAT is a very capable apparatus. Does it create any... I mean, obviously the Mexican government is corrupt for one and second. The big danger is to me with... There's so much money made is that Mexico can teeter towards

state capture by the narcos. And that's a problem. So you either should legalize drugs and take all the criminal profit out of it, or you have to find a way to mow the weeds and to, and to degrade the strength of these cartels as on an ongoing basis so that they don't threaten the Mexican state. That's really, that's what had to be done in Colombia. And even so, the cartels are... constantly trying to flex back up.

Yeah. The FARC was taken down a few notches by by finding their camps in the jungle and bombing the shit out of them. Do you think when we did the thing in Colombia though, I don't remember what the specifics were there. Did we do that same thing where we made a designation that they were terrorist organizations officially? I don't think so. But in that case, I think I was not involved with any of that, but there was some good signals intelligence that was provided, but it was mostly enabling the Colombians to do

it themselves. Look, for a Mexican, I feel terrible for the typical Mexican cop who comes on the job and within days he's visited by some cartel member that says, Plata, we plomo, right? Take my silver. I'm going to pay you off or take the lead. And it's not just me and not just you that we're going to kill. I'm going to kill your family and they're all going to suffer. So for everybody in America that thinks taking drugs is harmless to themselves, they are sentencing a lot of normal Mexicans that just want to live their life and raise their kids

to a life of that kind of threat. So we either have to take that threat away, uh, mechanically, or, or you have to just bite the bullet and decriminalize everything. Because remember, Coca-Cola started out being laced with cocaine. Yeah. That, you know, I would love to live in a world where that could be possible. I feel like the, that's not ripping off a band-aid. I go back and forth on this a lot, but if you legalized everything, there would still

be ways that the black market, I feel like, would take control of it. Could be. Right. Yeah. And that's why I think the cartels have shifted towards fentanyl and stronger and stronger stuff, because so much of pot has been largely decriminalized in America that it's taken away a profit center form. Right. And why they make as much money in smuggling people as they did in smuggling drugs.

Yeah. That's the humanitarian part that I feel like when people are talking about the whole border issue, it gets ignored. I mean, the human trafficking that happens there, and that we don't know where these people go, or the horrible fate that they're most likely... And the... and the abuse, yeah. I think our immigration policy should be a, um...

a tall fence but a wide gate. Meaning, let's debi... debiureocratize how you get entrance. Are you coming here to add value? Make it easier to do seasonal visas or actual work permits. You know, that's something about the UAE. They take immigration extremely seriously.

They count if you're there, if you overstay, you're paying fines immediately. If you're disappeared and overstaying, they're fining you and they're deporting you. They take it seriously. We don't take it seriously at all. Trump administration has started to. Borders are supposed to delineate a government paradigm. Supposed to delineate a government in English. If the United States, we are a constitution, we believe in elements of limited government and taxes and all the rest,

and Mexico doesn't have the same paradigm to do that. We have a border which delineates our way of thinking from their way of thinking. Not this borderless soup. Yeah. And it's interesting because like a lot of other countries around the world do have strong borders and force them. And like then... Some do. Some don't. And the ones that don't are are largely being destroyed. Can we go back to the NOC thing real quick? There was some more there I had to ask you about, because you said some of it has been revealed,

so again, if there's stuff you can't talk about, no problem, but you have incredible access as the head of Blackwater. It's obvious why they might come to you and the expertise you have being a Navy SEAL, like you're perfect on a resume. But the government comes to you and says what you said they said to you and they're like, you know, there's people we need to take out and have it untraceable back to us. Is there like any hesitation with you thinking to yourself, damn, like I'm really on my own

doing this? Can isn't there another? aren't there other people that could do this? Couldn't the government actually take care of this themselves or were you just like, let's fucking go? Um, mostly the latter. Yeah. Meaning I always say, why me? Why, why are there not 20 other people that are called. But because of the other work we've been doing for other parts of USG, I had a not perfect, by any means, view of who is doing what and where. So you can certainly see some of the gaps in thinking or in capability and trying to task, trying to do have military guys retask to do some of this stuff is really hard because, you know, the JSOC kind of guys, it's hard

to hide, right? Hard for them to walk down the street and look like anybody else in certain areas. And so having, um, employing chameleons that can do with a very small footprint and, you know, that's all part of the game. Did they give you, like, a hit list? Or are you getting autonomy? Oh, I...

You know. Uh, I got so many questions. Very, very clearly defined instructions. And these would be high place people most of the time? No. Here's the thing that, you know, to build and I, this speaks to the entire US approach to counterterrorism. We have been obsessed. The drone wars, all

the rest has been obsessed with all leadership strikes, thinking that if we just cut the head of the snake off, the rest of the body dies. And that's just not how wars are won. When you look at the history of warfare, the Punic Wars, the Peloponnesian Wars, the American Civil War, World War I and World War II. What's the common theme? The winning side killed off about 30% of the other guy's manpower. You have to go after the manpower, finance, logistics to finish a war. And that's something we've never fully realized as a country. Or we did, but we've forgotten that because we have a lot of unserious people

in positions of responsibility making that call. And they want a headline. They want to be seen to be doing something without having to do... the difficult, dangerous work or taking the hits. I mean, just think about... think about the modern media spotlight on... on how the US did business in World War II.

Right? Think about the invasion of Sicily. Well... Well, or the first outing where the U.S. forces engaged the Germans in North Africa. Kasserine Pass. Slaughter. Right? American slaughtered, total debacle, bad leadership, bad equipment, bad training, bad, bad, bad. They change him out.

They put in Patton, who'd run the armor school. And he whips that place, whips them into shape, and drives the Germans out of North Africa. In a lot of cases leading from the front. When the next go, airborne invasion, airborne and sea, amphibious invasion of Sicily, massive fuck up, a whole bunch of C-47s get shot down by friendly fire, killed like a thousand soldiers. Oh, I never heard about this.

Oh, yeah. I mean, imagine how perfect this one was. Terrible. Patton goes ashore as early as possible after the invasion. He's driving up to see the front. Fortunately, he sees a Ranger pennant hanging from a position. It turns out to be it's the last position before the, before an oncoming onslaught of Panzers.

And he's there as a three-star general hanging mortar rounds at the front, stopping an invasion, which would have gone, if he, his personal fierce leadership stops this German counter-attack because if they'd broken through, it would have drove the US off of Sicily. So yeah, there's a lot of sliding door moments that happen in battle. And we have a, I questioned whether, with as much media attention as there is

in this level of warfare, I guess, but the difference is that war was one of tribal survival. The wars of Iraq and Afghanistan were wars of convenience from the Beltway. They were not, did not, the survival of the United States did not hang in the balance. Right. That's an important distinction. It totally changed it. and it changes the... Changes the math.

Not just that, it changes the attitude of the people at home too. Mm-hmm. Right, like in World War II, it's like everyone had a brother, father, son, you know what I mean? Oh, yeah. And then it's not that way in Iraq. It's not to say, of course, that still happened,

but not at the societal scale. But think about today, you have an all-volunteer force. Mm-hmm. that way in Iraq. It's not to say we didn't, of course that still happened, but not at the societal scale. But think about today, you have an all-volunteer force and you have about 1.4 million people under arms. Population in America of 330 million. So you have less than one half of 1% in the military percent in the military and maybe another four to five percent that knows the half percent. The other 95 percent of America has no effing clue. That's right. And so they make those decisions on what is right or wrong or important or whatever based on some jackass from corporate media saying this is important, this is not important.

And so when you have decision making and opinions completely detached from reality, you get Iraq and Afghanistan. 20 years of continuous loop failure. What did you think four years after you write that op-ed, and you had made a bet with a friend too when it was gonna happen, so you seemed to nail, but what did you think when you saw basically like a second imagery of Saigon in 2021 with Afghanistan? And you know, when I, when I was making the point for a stay behind

small capability, I specifically mentioned, I want to prevent the helicopter off the rooftop moment of Saigon because it's one of the first TV remembrances that I remember as a six-year-old. I was born in 69. I was 75, April. Yeah. Bad that's a serious. And you know what? Our enemies saw that.

Oh yeah. Did they ever come to you and ask you to help find Bin Laden? No. No. No. That was, I'm sure there was billions of dollars spent on that just separately hunting a whole complete and total sell for that. Yeah. Nothing to do with that. All right. The other thing I wanted to talk with you about from a geopolitical standpoint is obviously what's going on in the Middle East with Israel and Gaza.

This is one of those things that the minute you start talking about it, you get to like hardcore opposite sides who are just screaming, it's all them or it's all them. I do see some nuance here. I don't like terrorist organizations. I don't like terrorist attacks. Makes sense. You got to go defend your country when something like that happens. That said, it seems like the response at this point is disorganized and perhaps disproportionate

on what's going on in Gaza, just seeing how they're leveling buildings in places and killing a lot of innocents. What are your thoughts there and do you have, through your work, do you have insight to what's going in on the ground that's not being talked about? I went to Israel about three weeks after October 7, after the initial attack. And I have a lot of friends in the IDF, I've spent a lot of time in Israel, biked across Israel. But I, you know, I knew that Hamas had built 300 plus miles of tunnels all through Gaza. And they had, um, you know, they had, it was a very well planned and executed attack.

They had through 30 breach points almost simultaneously, um, pushed in thousands of fighters. It would have gone even worse. fighters, it would have gone even worse. The minister of defense, the head of Shabak and the head of the Mossad met in the Curia, which is like their Pentagon, at about 2 a.m. the morning of October 7. Because there is so much noise in the system. Right? Sagan said something's not right. But they agreed to reconvene and meet at eight o'clock the next morning.

The only one that did something was the head of the Shabak, the internal service. And he sent, I think, two or three 12-man security teams to the South. The MOD did nothing. He didn't say to the bases, hey, everybody wake up, everybody take your weapon to your bed with you, lock and load, or stand an extra guard post, or put that belt-fed out. Nothing. Did nothing. But these three, these 12-man teams, one of them, there's a, on the north end of Gaza, there's a road that comes out on the way to Ashkelon,

which is a city of like 300,000 people. And Hamas attacked, and this 12-man team fought to the last man. Okay, 11 of the 12 guys died, killed off a couple hundred Hamas guys. If 4, 10, 50 of those Hamas guys made it to Ashkelon, a city of 300,000, there would have been three or four times as many people killed. So look, Hamas killed, what, 1? 1300 that day? Because they didn't know how to kill 13,000 or 130,000. They would have killed as many as they could have. Sure. No excuse for Hamas at all. I agree. Fundamentally disagree. But I knew that they built 300 miles of tunnels and I knew what kind of fight they wanted to have

and when they wanted to suck the Israelis in. They took hostages, used hostages as shields to maximize destruction of Gaza civilians. So I went to Jerusalem, or sorry, to Tel Aviv, down to Gaza, met with the heads of Yachalom which was their elite combat engineering unit with the head of like their Israeli DARPA and I brought the best driller from Texas driller driller okay that makes sense because I've known I have lots of very smart Israeli friends that are in finance, banking,

investment, mining, all the rest. I've never met a Jewish roughneck. I was wondering if he was going to go there. Never met one. So knowing that, that the IDF is staffed with reservists that are doing private sector stuff, they would not know what the current state of the art is from drilling technology from Texas. To get into the tunnels. To get in the tunnels.

To horizontal directional drill. So I took the guy who is the main subcontractor to Exxon and SpaceX for all their horizontal directional drilling. Two pretty sophisticated customers. Yes. You would agree? I would agree.

And the guy's name is Bobby with a great Texas accent. And the first call we had with the Yachalom guys and their DARPA people is, well, we tried horizontal directional drilling five years ago, and it didn't work very well because it was too slow, and there was clay, and it wasn't accurate, and all the rest. And Bobby goes, well, last year, I

had to drill from one side of the Mississippi River to the other. And the boys and I had a bet. And so I was aiming for a stake in the ground, and I hit the stake. Is that good enough for you? It was like it was a fucking great mic drop moment. Like, yeah, I'm from Texas. What do you got?

And we go there. Of course, the guys that are closest to the edge of battle, they love the idea. The weenies at headquarters? No. Because what we wanted to do, and I even had donors lined up. I wasn't asking for any money, not a dollar, not a shekel from them. I had donors lined up to fund an independent drilling program that we could have stayed in Israel, drilled horizontally through right under Sheba Hospital, under any of these areas, and filled it, drilled to the other side, drilled out to sea to a barge,

pulled back through a huge cutter. I had 12,000 horsepower pumps lined up. Because the Israelis say, "'Well, we tried drilling and it didn't work." Yeah, you're trying to fill with a pipe that big? I'm talking... Okay, eight, nine foot pipes flood the fuck out of every tunnel.

So people say, well, what about the hostages? Yeah. They don't want dead hostages. Hamas doesn't want dead hostages. Dead hostages are of no value to them. Right, but if they get flooded, then... The tunnels are not gonna flood at a... First of all, you're gonna hear a cutter

coming through your tunnel. It's gonna say, something is definitely, and my reality has changed. You're really a fucking fool if you stay there. Two, the flood's gonna start, okay? And maybe you only go at 3,000 horsepower setting until you go to 12. But you flood with so much water

that it floods the entire tunnel system. And you raise the water table of all under Gaza to where it's impossible. Here's the thing. Again, I'm not a horizontal directional drilling expert, but I will say I'm expert at drilling, at moving water. Having built Blackwater on something as flat as this table across 7,000 acres, we had fires. We had brush fires. We had to dig ditches and take pumps this big and move water

and bury three, four, 500 acre ground fires. I was going to do the same thing, basically a combination of how you would make a duck impoundment, where you flood a field and you hunt ducks a duck impoundment, where you flood a field, and you hunt ducks on it in North Carolina, to what the boys in Texas were doing. That technology would have worked, and it would have ended this Gaza debacle

for the IDF... probably by March... 24? ...of last year. Whoa. Because we would have flooded the shit. First of all- But they didn't let you do it.

No. Obviously. I mean, in terms of cutting off supply from Egypt, one horizontal shot right along the border, right along the Rafah border crossing, and we could have filled that with ANFO. Okay? Explosive, collected off. It would have severed any tunnel and made anything digging there impossible, and then flooded it with water.

And we could have flooded, so flooding with water, obviously, it would have taken away the enemy's ability to maneuver. It would have destroyed all their underground weapons caches, because trust me, all their stored rockets, missiles, all the rest are not built to be submerged under six feet, 10 feet, 20 feet of water pressure. And the hostages, as risky as that sounds, Hamas would have moved them. It would have flooded up, flushed them to the top. We had a much higher chance of rescuing them.

Why do you think they said no? Pride. Pride. Why do you think they said no? Um, pride. Pride. Not invented here syndrome. Again, it's kind of the same conventional attitude that the U S military suffers from that the really unconventional thinkers tend to get drummed out. So you didn't get to do that. 40% of the IDF's casualties were friendly fire. Really?

Oh yeah. And that's from an IDF friend. That's an ugly secret. They have unleashed a lot of lethality. No wonder there's been a lot of civilians killed. Forty percent of their own casualties were self-induced. And it's also like, again, there's people, there's crazy people who are like, oh, Hamas are just freedom fighters and stuff like that. I'm under no such illusion. I have no problem with

those guys getting wiped off the face of the earth. There's all kinds of funding that goes back to Iran. All that makes sense to me, but they are scumbags. So they do hide and there's a lot of them. And they hide amongst civilians. Right. Yep. And so when you, from just from a high level PR perspective. Don't give them the fight they want. They wanted that fight amongst civilians to maximize carnage. So I was going to give them the fight they would not expect to be flooded out of their tunnel system. But now they have given them the fight they don't want.

So where does it, or the fight they wanted, so where does it go from here? Like, how do you... Look at the international PR debacle. Right. How many friends has Israel lost over fighting a war in a very, I would say, not clever way? A lot.

Yeah, exactly. And the, and. And the... And for all the techno capability of the IDF, when they started tangling with Lebanon in the North, and again, maximum kudos to the intelligence service for figuring out the pager operation. Amazing, right? The pagers are... Oh, my fah, that was amazing.

Think of the guy or girl that came to the Sunday morning staff meeting at Mossad headquarters to say, Pagers. I think our future is in pagers and I'm gonna start a front company to infiltrate the entire supply chain of our main enemy to the North.

I'm going to kill not two of them. We're going to get 34, 3,400 of them simultaneously. Amazing. You have to be a wildcatter. You have to be willing to hit some dry holes to do this business and clearly compliments to them for doing that. And then to follow on with the radio hits, amazing. Conventional military fighting in Gaza in the most, and again, maybe it's that 20 to

30% of Israeli society does want to just extinct Gaza and wreck all the civilians there and they're just done living next to Palestinians. Maybe that's it. I don't know. But again, I don't think it's our problem in America. We keep getting dragged into Israel's issues with its neighbors. We're kind of done. Yeah. What do you think? Like a lot of people go at Israel about the whole APAC thing. I look a little more internal on that. we let that happen right that's a lobbying

organization and it should be treated like any other lobbying organization not with correct not with any other special consideration right so that's something we should fix here okay well I know we're short on time because you you got to get out of town this is this has been awesome I could talk to you for a lot longer it was three hours it's almost three hours yeah so if you're coming back into town let me know would love to talk there for a lot longer shit. It was three hours. It's almost three hours. Yeah, so if you're coming back into town Let me know would love to talk. There's a lot of questions. I did not get to ask today, but you are certainly a Fascinating fascinating guy Eric Prince. I've enjoyed this a lot and and you know a lot about a lot of different shit So thank you for sharing it all with us. Thanks for having me. All right, everyone else, you can buy Eric's book. We're going to have a link down to it

down in the description. Civilian Warriors. So check that out. And until next time. And next time I'll talk about the unplugged phone. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's there's a little controversy around that. We should talk about that next time. It's fine. All right. Cool. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. If haven't already please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video they're both a huge huge help and if you would like to follow me on instagram and x those links

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