The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - Blackwater CEO Erik Prince Gets HONEST About The Israeli Invasion Of Lebanon

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

Erik Prince, the CEO of the notorious private military contractor Blackwater, talks about the recent escalation between Israel, Hezbollah, and Iran. As Israel sends ground forces into Southern Lebanon..., the implications of this move are examined in light of past conflicts and Iran’s missile response. He discuss the broader geopolitical consequences, including the potential for Russian involvement and the role of the U.S. in the region. Erik exposes U.S. military spending, foreign aid, and his vision for a more self-reliant approach to global conflicts. Go Support Erik! YouTube: @OffLeashwithErikPrince Phone: https://unplugged.com/ Book: https://www.amazon.com/Civilian-Warriors-Inside-Blackwater-Unsung/dp/1591847451/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:05 So as of two days ago, Israel is now sent in ground forces into southern Lebanon with the goal of stated goal of eliminating Hezbollah so that the 60,000 or so displaced Israelis in the northern part of the country can return. Is this realistic given that it's been a year now since October 7th and they still cannot defeat Hamas? which is much more poorly funded and disparate and poorly armed compared to Hezbollah. Well, I've just heard now that there has been 400 ballistic missiles fired by Iran that are now arriving in Israel. So they're under a massive barrage attack from Iran happening right now. I think it's Israeli New Year, isn't it, Russia, Shoshana?
Starting point is 00:01:03 today. So it's a big conversion of events. I don't think a ground invasion in Lebanon is going to go particularly well for the IDF. It did not go well in 2006. They lost a lot of troops, lost a lot of equipment. That terrain is also very advantageous for the defender. They've interlaced a lot of interlocking fields of fire and bunkers and minefields. And now they've added suicide drones to the mix of anti-tank missiles. What I suggested to the IDF is that instead of having to do a ground offensive, look, they did a magnificent job with the Pagers, and then the walkie-talkies the next day, and then some very strategic deep bombing into the command bunkers of Hezbollah, wiped out. They decapitated all of Hezbollah, magnificently done.
Starting point is 00:02:00 But you still have a lot of ground forces, that need cleanup. And the rest of Lebanon is really not embracing the idea that has not embraced the idea that Hezbollah is such a military force in the country, actually much more powerful than the Lebanese armed forces itself. So Israel can degrade it a lot with with airstrikes and precision missile capability to try to take out the houses that are storing all these rockets, 150,000-ish, many of which are also being fired into Israel now, I'm sure. But for lasting stability to happen in Lebanon, Lebanon has to get rid of Hezbollah as a military force. Hezbollah as a political party, fine.
Starting point is 00:02:44 Hezbollah as a military force, not really sustainable to have two militaries with the Lebanese armed forces actually being the weaker partner. You know, the Sunnis, the Druze, the Christians in Lebanon don't like the fact that there's Shia have their own Hezbollah force. And so I recommended the use, it's a perfect application for a private military company is to advise and supercharge the capability of the Lebanese armed forces, give them the leadership, intelligence, communications, medical, weapons expertise with some good drone capability to go door to door, block by block, and clean up the rest of the Hezbollah capability. That would have required some fighting, yes, but much better for Lebanon to police its own
Starting point is 00:03:33 backyard than Israel to have to do it, which would guarantee an antibody response from all the Lebanese and actually lead to a lot more fighting and a lot less, a lot more casualties unnecessarily. Now, this big strike with Iran, that's inevitable. They have to strike back. They've lost so much credibility. Their main surrogate that they have been building literally since the first Lebanon war in 1982, they have been building up Hezbollah. 42 years and they just had you know the decapitation done and whether the main body gets chewed up or not
Starting point is 00:04:13 this is Iran's answer to that they are shooting those missiles now so that I guess they don't get destroyed in air strikes possibly in the future but this could be a major major escalation if if and when some of those 400 missiles get through and damage Israeli infrastructure or citizens. Now, two or three days ago, the morning of the announced invasion, Netanyahu goes on TV and tells Iran
Starting point is 00:04:43 that they don't need to worry, basically. I don't know if you saw that, but he's, you know, kind of, he's trying to, yeah, he seemed like he was trying to settle him down or he was saying, hey, look, our fight's not with you. Lebanon, our fight is not with the people of Lebanon, et cetera, it's with Hezbollah. but what does this imply now that Iran has basically ignored that and is now supplying Hezbollah for a counterstrike? What are the implications, one, for a larger conflict? Does this involve Russia? I know the Minister of Defense, I believe, in Russia has visited Iran in recent weeks.
Starting point is 00:05:26 does this, do you see this pulling the Russians in into the conflict? And how would that then force the U.S. to get involved? Look, this is not, this is not the U.S. fight. We do not need to be putting troops in there. It is not in our strategic interest. The last time the U.S. troops put, the U.S. put troops in Lebanon in 1983. That was a disaster. 243 Marines getting blown up one morning for the audacity of being.
Starting point is 00:05:58 peacekeepers trying to bring some stability to Lebanon. Again, it would have been better to use a PMC capability and actually build the Lebanese armed forces enough to clean up their own backyard. I don't see the Russians getting involved. I don't see them having the stomach for another big fight, another big escalation. The United States should not be there and involved. I hope the Israeli defenses are very good and very capable to knock down all those ballistic missiles incoming. Fired from Iran, I'm sure.
Starting point is 00:06:39 I'm sure a lot of them are fired from Iraq. Some of them are fired from Lebanon, certainly. And I'm sure some of them are fired even from Yemen. I just saw a picture of Houthi leaders in Russia buying weapons. from the Russians. And who's doing it? Who's doing the deal? Victor Boot.
Starting point is 00:07:06 Victor Boot, the arms dealer, who is in prison for, I think, a life sentence for trying to sell missiles to communist rebels in Colombia. And the Biden administration traded him away for Brittany Greiner, the American hating basketball
Starting point is 00:07:23 player because she had pot on her when she went to Moscow. Unbelievable. this guy is literally selling weapons to the Houthis that they're firing at U.S. Navy warships. Wow. Again, you can't make it up. The merchant of death, I believe, was his moniker. And he didn't waste any time, did he?
Starting point is 00:07:44 And he's back in the market. No, you know what? No, I am sure he is an indispensable asset to Putin who is buying up, because they're using at a very high rate of speed, artillery shells and rockets and munitions and propellery. and I'm sure his relationships in every other developing country with every factory that's producing that stuff is exceedingly useful to the Russian war machine. It would be like, well, if you're going to play a hockey match and you want your star forward, you want, you want Wayne Gretzky off the bench playing in your front line, that was Victor Boot. And Joe Biden gave him that gift. Yeah. For a girl who had some hash oil on her and got herself arrested.
Starting point is 00:08:29 Unbelievable. Well, look, you say this isn't the U.S.'s fight. And I totally agree with you. However, it's all of our money that's funding what's going on. So my next question to you is, should at this point, it's pretty exceedingly clear that Netanyahu is escalating in order to preserve his political stance, his political power. maybe even his freedom. He might get arrested, you know, on corruption charges. So in knowing that, should the U.S. be funding Israel? Well, they just sent another $8 billion last week on top of another $8 billion to Ukraine, which I am very much opposed to. Again, Israel is not lacking for funds. They have significant national savings. They have plenty of people that support. them financially. It does not need to be the taxpayers, especially when we have millions of Americans just over the last five days, had their homes, their livelihoods, their farms annihilated by a massive hurricane and flooding afterwards. We need to focus on the American people first and not
Starting point is 00:09:52 funding everyone else's border security and everyone else's wars, especially when we can't afford it. So it's a problem. We need actually representatives that represent Americans, American citizens, and not everyone else. Do you see a probable Trump victory as changing the course of, you know, basically this largesse, this government, military, industrial complex, you know, foreign, endless foreign aid that's been going on for, you know, decades now? If Trump is elected, I think he can go a long ways to restoring deterrence by, credibly deploying American power where it has to be and keeping it mostly on the shelf.
Starting point is 00:10:39 I don't think there's an old Roman quote. And I think it applies to the Biden administration in their foreign policy. And it goes like, do not quote laws to men holding swords. and the constant nagging of the Biden administration to always have restraint, restraint, restraint, restraint, restraint, restraint, and, you know, we've effectively allowed the U.S. Navy to be defeated by the Houthis, and they have shut off a major waterway in the Red Sea, the Babel Mandab, to the detriment, massive detriment of global trade. Egypt is losing $800 million a month. That's 40% of their GDP was represented by Suez Canal traffic, gone to zero now. And the sit in your hands in hope, foreign policy of the Biden administration, is alarming. And it's kind of, since it's Jimmy Carter's birthday, I think today, it's the perfect 100-year birthday gift that he is indeed not the worst president we've had. in the last hundred years. Yeah, and he doesn't look as bad as our current president either, which is saying something. Probably, he's probably sharper mentally.
Starting point is 00:11:58 Yeah, I think so. So what would those American power, those strategic American power deployments, where should those be right now? Like, how would you clean it up if we say we cut funding off, which I don't personally think can happen under Trump? Because I think the system is so rigged. I think it's going to take a lot more. I think it's going to take, you know, real contrarians in his cabinet that he staffs,
Starting point is 00:12:26 which it could happen. You know, Tulsi Gabbard, there's talks of her, you know, being high up there, maybe RFK Jr., etc. But what would those like first 90 days to clean up the Middle East and to effectively deploy American power? What would that be? I mean, obviously, you mentioned the Houthis in the Red Sea. What else?
Starting point is 00:12:48 Look, the Houthis. in the Red Sea could be defeated by a combination of local forces led by, when we think about what was effective after 9-11 was 100 soft in Afghanistan that with good communications, good targeting equipment that could call down precision weapons. Now you can do that with very small, cheap drones, not U.S. made ones, because the U.S. defense industry will sell you a $75,000 or $100,000 loitering drone, and you could actually make the same thing now with the tech components for around $3,000 a piece.
Starting point is 00:13:23 So it's staggering how much technology is advanced. Pressure can be applied there. There's just so many places the U.S. has been going through in a very half-assed way in Somalia, in Libya, pretty much anywhere that Afri-Com touches, it's half-assed and ineffective. We've allowed a socialist, now really Marxist-type click a cartel to steal not one, not two, but three elections in Venezuela and continue to
Starting point is 00:13:55 export very leftist, leftist paradigm and politics and all the mistakes of socialism throughout Latin America. There's a lot of places that can be pushed back and tighten up quite quickly. Do you, in your view, is that okay? Is that, is it good and right and necessary for the U.S. to meddle in foreign governments whose elections didn't go the way we thought they should?
Starting point is 00:14:27 Because yes, I totally agree socialism's flawed. It doesn't have to be well, in the case of Venezuela, you have concerted state power of Colombia, of Cuba, Russia, Iran, helping the
Starting point is 00:14:43 Maduro cartel. It doesn't have to be USG money. but they can allow other nations, other free people to go put enough pressure on a, effectively a drug, a narco state to actually revert to a democracy again. I actually, I trolled Maduro in August after the election on Twitter, and I said, if Biden and Harris actually want to support democracy and freedom in Venezuela, they should up the bounties on Maduro and Diastado Cabello, because there's already a wanted, there's a, there's a warrant for the arrest of Maduro with a $15 million bounty. There's a $10 million
Starting point is 00:15:26 bounty on Cabo, his interior minister. I said, raise those to $100 million each. You could use frozen Venezuelan government money. Doesn't even need to be U.S. taxpayers, but raise it to 100 each and sit back and watch the magic happen. Because there would be Venezuelan military that would that would flip, arrest them, deliver them all in zip ties. And you'd go back to having a representative government because they actually had an election. The opposition won by 70-30, more than two to one. And basically that drug cartel in Caracas decided to stay and ignore a third election. So, yeah, there's a lot of ways to solve those problems.
Starting point is 00:16:09 It does not involve U.S. government, U.S. invasion. I mean, the way it was solved in Panama in 1989 when you had a drug cartel running Panama. Noriega. But that was done with 27,000 troops. It doesn't need that many. We'll live it at that. For sure. No, Maduro sucks.
Starting point is 00:16:30 A lot of people suck around the world. I think it just sends a bad message when we support and overthrow governments like the Ukrainian government in 2014. and then I agree you know and then it just looks hypocritical and it's just a bad look for a matter and then allow them to cancel the election
Starting point is 00:16:53 as of last April or May right correct so let's move on to that really quick when we have some time how does Ukraine Russia resolve itself because to me that's much scarier in terms of it breaking out
Starting point is 00:17:08 into a regional perhaps even a nuclear war. What do you think? Look, it's math. And the idea that the Ukrainians are going to magically retake all that terrain, they are outmanned four to one. In a war of attrition, the larger party wins. And there's not any significant tech advancement or miracle tactic that's going to change that. I think it's much better for the survival of Ukrainian society to freeze the lines where they are, go to a North, South Korea-type settlement, and the Ukrainians can focus on making babies and growing their economy
Starting point is 00:17:57 and regrowing their population because it's taken a massive pounding and killed four, five hundred thousand of their most capable males chewed up in a really unnecessary war. It's really, really tragic. How certain are you of those figures that casualty count? Because, you know, obviously from alternative media, you hear numbers like that. And that's all I watch. All I watch is breaking points and Tucker and I watch the internet, right? Like most people my age and below. But then, you know, mainstream media, you never hear figures like that.
Starting point is 00:18:32 All you hear is the body count from the Russian side. So how certain are you about that body count? I'm just curious. The fact is there's people dying on both sides every day in the, the in the dozens or sometimes hundreds per day. And, okay, whether it's 100,000 dead or 500,000 dead, Ukraine could hardly afford that kind of headcount to begin with. And the fact that they have to press gang and arrest young men in Ukraine is an extremely
Starting point is 00:19:02 bad look for society. When you have to coerce people to go to the front lines, I mean, the Russians are shooting people that are deserting as well. that's just a bad there's no way to call that a great move on either side totally um do you think uh trump administration can pick up the phone and uh make it stop like that or is it going to take
Starting point is 00:19:30 uh is it going to take more than that well the u.s is still funding most of the effort despite all the noise of of NATO they're not really doing anything. They've never done anything to affect their industrial capacity or actual real spending. Germany has largely been useless and still remains useless, the largest, single largest economy in Germany, in Europe. You have Schultz, the chancellor of Germany, is a long-time Soviet-controlled, paid agent. He was in the 80s. There's pictures of him at East German-sponsored anti-nuclear rallies,
Starting point is 00:20:11 against the Pershing and cruise missile deployments as a willing leftist student activist, controlled by the Stasi. So this idea that Germany has any kind of right-wing government, that's why you're seeing the AFD make such political strides is because people are sick of the immigration nonsense and really the destruction of German culture at the behest of kind of a common turn. So this war gets settled when the U.S. says no more funding, no more weapons, take the deal. And look, I think what Putin is demanded is Dynetsk, Lahansk, Herzl, and obviously Crimea. And Crimea, they regard as Russia.
Starting point is 00:21:03 But the other areas that I just mentioned, they expected to govern for 20 years and then have a plebiscite, whether those would stay with Russia or go with Ukraine. That's where the demand is. Who knows if that's actually real? But again, it is the long-term interest of the United States to pull Russia away from China. It was the long-term, it was a hundred-year goal of the United States to keep German industry from combining with Russian resources.
Starting point is 00:21:31 And all that this stupid war has accomplished is pushing Russian resources into a subjugated role with the Chinese Communist Party industrial. base. That is a nightmare for the United States. That is not a good outcome foreign policy-wise. And culturally, we have way more in common with Russia than we do with India or Korea or Japan or really any part of Southeast Asia. Russia doesn't have to be our best friend, but they long-term belong much more with Europe than they do with Asia. Medium term, Russia and long-term, Russia has a huge demographic problem as their population shrinks as well.
Starting point is 00:22:11 And they have huge parts of the Russian East that become literally unpopulated and subject to being moved into by Chinese personnel. So it's, again, I think the best way is actually through trade and through climate stuff. if you're worried about the climate, it's not something I'm worried about, but if you are worried about it, the fastest way to reduce the total tons of carbon emitted in the world per year
Starting point is 00:22:46 is by sorting out the thawing tundras of the Russian Arctic that is way cheaper than forcing everybody into electric vehicles and solar energy. Yeah, I agree. Make everyone richer is, you know, bottom line. do you know you hear all you hear about in alternative press is bricks the bricks alliance moving away from the u.s. dollar
Starting point is 00:23:13 the multipolar world no longer a unipoli world it's now multipolar world how much veracity is there to that in your view is is it going to be a russia united states and perhaps a chinese controlled world now is is the u.s after all this no longer the hegemon? Are we still the big daddy? The overuse of sanctions has done more to enhance the bricks as an economic block than their own
Starting point is 00:23:44 than the case for their own economies. Because cutting off Russia from oil trade, right? They're a huge producer of energy and someone's going to buy that and someone is buying that China and India.
Starting point is 00:24:00 and some of the rest of the world. And so they pay with currencies outside of the dollar. And so that de-dollarization of oil sales is hugely problematic. Our way of life, the $33, $34 trillion of debt was funded, created because Congress could print unlimited dollars because the dollar was the world's deserved currency. When you put that under attack by the overuse of sanctions and pushing people to trade outside of that, that threatens all of it. Now, the yin and the yang to that is if the dollar is cut off,
Starting point is 00:24:34 that means we can't spend at deficit levels anymore, and it makes the U.S. government go on a diet, which is, in my mind, a great idea because government expands at the price of liberty. And our government does so much stupid shit because it can spend so much money. So we will be forced to spend less on social programs and less on defense and just less on everything, putting government on a diet is a very, very good idea. I totally agree. And that I guess leads me to this last kind of generalized question, which I've just been, I'm so excited to finally meet you and speak with you.
Starting point is 00:25:10 Because, you know, the military industrial complex, I don't even know if anyone in Washington calls it that anymore. But that's just the classic term for this kind of marriage between the defense industry, the foreign lobbies like APEC, even though I know they're American, right? In my view, that's a treasonous kind of organization, et cetera, et cetera. And politicians who take their mind. Well, I think that any lobby organization advocating for the rights of another country should just be treated like any other foreign lobby organization. That's intellectually consistent.
Starting point is 00:25:45 Yes, yes. But in general. So they should have to register like everybody else. That's right. That's right. And have the oversight of other foreign lobbies. So, but in general, that's kind of what I mean by the military industrial complex or the corporate lobbyist complex. You yourself, the founder of Blackwater, were a benefactor of the military industrial complex when we went to war in the Middle East.
Starting point is 00:26:15 And we saw kind of what good that did, you know. And I'm sure Blackwater was a lot more efficient than, uh, than the U.S. government in achieving certain tasks over there. But, you know, looking back now 20 years later, what do you think the solution is moving forward? Is it using private military as a way that's cheaper and less destructive to, you know, entire regions like the Middle East? because clearly we're worse off than we were before we went to Iraq. Spring weekends are all about family, sunshine, and evenings on the patio. Before everyone arrives, I stop by my local total wine and more to grab a great bottle to share.
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Starting point is 00:27:34 So the thing about the military, the defense budget, it's way too high. But you divide the military budget. It's about half half. About half is personnel costs. And the other half is operations and call it capital, you know, capital purchases. On the personnel side, we should pay the capable soldiers significantly more, but there's a massive top grading that should happen because we have an enormous amount of military people, personnel, that are largely, I would say, not worth what their costs are.
Starting point is 00:28:12 The tooth to tail ratio of the U.S. military is like 12 to 1, meaning 12 tail one tooth. I would advocate to make a lot more teeth and pay them more and get rid of the egregious fat and obesity we have in the support staff and high-cost DOD civilians and contractors. On the equipment side, we used to have 100 major defense contractors. The Clinton administration consolidated that down to five. And that five really behaves like a cartel, which is why overall we spend more than the next six. 17 countries combined in defense. And we don't get great value for it. And so there's breaking that up, causing a lot more efficient purchasing, et cetera, is necessary.
Starting point is 00:29:04 But when it comes to the conduct of whatever it is you're doing overseas, when you remove price from the equation, when generals don't know what anything costs them to do a thing, that removes them of the most important piece of information, which is scarcity. Like, how important is that? And so that's why you had $250 a gallon fuel in Afghanistan by the time it got to the, it put into the Humvee. Right. Because they were importing that fuel from the Mediterranean by ship all the way to Karachi,
Starting point is 00:29:39 Karachi by truck all the way up into Afghanistan delivered to some firebase. and the so-called smart generals that were running the place ignored the fact that there was an oil field in Afghanistan that they could have spent 20 million bucks to drill and $150 million in a refinery and you would have had all the fuel you need to power all of Afghanistan, jet fuel, gasoline, diesel, heavy fuel oil to make electrical power.
Starting point is 00:30:10 And you could have done that in 2002 and literally the U.S. was funding one third of the Taliban's operating budget because they told the fuel. So again, there's so many ways to make things vastly more cost effective by just reminding or educating people what things actually cost. And the reason we were more efficient doing it is because, believe me, if I had to put 100 people in the field, I knew exactly what it cost to train them, feed them, clothe them, ensure them. them, travel them back and forth. Trust me, my people could quote that off the top of their head because we were on the hook for those costs. Right. You're a business. And we were, we were not a line item in a budget where money just fell on our heads. No, we had to bid and we had to live with the cost commitments that we made. No person in the military has to do anything like that exercise. And that's
Starting point is 00:31:05 why it's so disjointed. And I assume when you can print unlimited money, when you are the world's reserve currency, that causes conflicts to go on a lot longer than they need to, right? Because you have no fiscal discipline. You have no budgetary responsibilities. And that's, you know, when you look at the, for example, the East India Company was there not to make war. They were there to trade. They were there to facilitate trade. Secure logistics, collect the taxes, enforce contracts. And not everything the East India Company did was perfect. But it maintained. stability for 250 years and built tens of thousands of miles of irrigation, created millions of acres of fertile land, ended private prisons, ended wife burning,
Starting point is 00:31:57 ended stop the Hindus and Muslims from slaughtering each other in the subcontinent. That is the model, if you're going to be instability operations, not just doing combat. The Brits had an old statement that a functioning workshop was better than a battalion of soldiers. And the U.S. would have been wise to follow that advice. Yeah, yeah. The Brits, man, for all their mistakes, they read a lot more than us. They were a lot more intellectual, you know? Well, they, look, I think it's important to remember how America was even founded.
Starting point is 00:32:32 It was not founded by British soldiers. It was founded by companies. Massachusetts Bay, Jamestown, Plymouth colonies were founded as companies listed effectively as joint stock companies in London in the city of London. And when you think about Miles Standish or John Smith, those guys were private military contractors, former professional soldiers hired on by the company to build and protect those colonies in the new world. To look for gold, to raise tobacco up in Massachusetts. They were there also to look for tall trees. Why? Because His Majesty, Her Majesty needed tall masts for ships. So again, started as trading and grew into established trading colonies which became states.
Starting point is 00:33:19 And I think that's even the model. As you see, millions of people coming to America illegally, what are they coming for? They're coming for a slice of the American dream. Now, they should come in a legal, organized, discipline process, not whoever, pays the cartel to come across our border. But they're coming for American governance. And that's probably what our private sector should be the best at exporting is the model of running small and mid-sized cities with police that work, with water that runs from the tap that you can drink, with a sewage system that flushes and power company that work.
Starting point is 00:33:58 If you get those basic four or five things right plus private property rights in city-states, that's a model that works that the rest of the world is craving because those models that you see in Europe and the United States and not really anywhere else to that depth of the infrastructure. We call it the basic infrastructure of capitalism, title for your land, a bank account, a business license, a letter of credit, an address, all those things that we take for granted. Hernando de Soto does a great job of talking about that in the mystery of capital. Yeah. Yeah, that guy's a G. That guy's a G. I like that dude.
Starting point is 00:34:40 He's Peruvian, I think. Exactly. And he's like, look at how simple it is. You just draw up contracts to show who owns the land and then you guys won't kill each other because it's stated. We got it in a vault. That's exactly how they had a, when he came back from Switzerland in the 80s, he was working at a construction company. And he came back to Peru and said, why is Peru such a shithole? why is Switzerland so nice? And he did a comparison. And at that point, there was a Maoist
Starting point is 00:35:06 communist insurgency going in Peru. And his solution was, hey, let's make sure the farmers had clear title for their land. And that worked. Within months, the farmer was like, hey, man, get off my land. Go away, commie. I got this. Right. And that's, so that's, that should be the export of American foreign policy is the American way. If people want it by choice, the American way of governing things because our cities, our communities, our states in America are really quite well done. The biggest problem in America is an over obese federal government that just does all kinds of stupid shit. So I couldn't agree more. Now, that's, but what you just said there has been the problem, you know, since basically we started printing money, you know, the early
Starting point is 00:35:56 70s, it's exporting the American way of life. One could argue at the barrel of a gun, right? which causes all this illegal immigration from Haiti, which we've been fucking with for a century in Venezuela. Exporting it at the barrel of the gun, that's not what caused Haiti. Haiti caused its own problems. Haiti has been a free country for 220 years. No colonialism. They threw out the French.
Starting point is 00:36:19 Haiti just cannot get its own shit together. Look, we can go back and forth about that. There was massive debt laid on them by the French after that. And you could argue that the IMF, giving out user as loans and forcing, you know, third world countries to take loans, which, like a guy like Buckele and El Salvador is rejecting, which I think is dope. But how, what can like a private, what are you doing right now to further this along? Because I know you're up to something, because you're on all the podcasts. You've got your own channel, which people should absolutely check out.
Starting point is 00:36:56 Eric is like, you know, a political scientist, military strategist, you know, killer businessman all in one. But like, what do you have cracking now? You know, you're popping around, you know, all, every different corner of the earth. We developed a new phone. That's my been my main project the last three years, completely independent of the Google and Apple universe. Wow. Because I was sick of big tech, basically having way too much control over who is on their store and really being able to impair free speech. And so I said, we're never going to make big tech better by complaining,
Starting point is 00:37:32 only if we can compete with it. So we built our own platform, our hardware, our operating system, but the difference is our phone operating system does not collect on your data. It prevents the apps sitting on your phone from collecting and exporting where you go, what you buy, who you call, what you browse, stops the apps from turning on your microphone, your GPS, to your camera, which your phone does 100%, but an unplugged phone does not. So we did 500 units last November as a beta, and then we got 10,000 units in,
Starting point is 00:38:07 and we just ordered our next 10,000. What are they retail for? I'll buy one. I'll promote one for free on this show. This is incredible. $9,989. Okay. It's comparable in speed, storage, camera quality
Starting point is 00:38:21 to the high end from the other guys, but this operating system prevents the export of your data. We have our own store. Most of the apps that you're used to will run on here, just not Google Mobile Services. And yeah, you can order one at unplug.com. Unplug.com and check out your channel, Eric Prince, just Eric Prince on YouTube? It's off leash. Off leash with Eric Prince.
Starting point is 00:38:47 Okay, gotcha. Yeah, Eric with a K. I always spell your name wrong when I'm texting you. That's why it's taking you so long to get on here. Well, thanks for having me. I know you got to take off. Look forward to maybe doing this again, but I appreciate your take, and I really admire what you're doing. So thanks again.
Starting point is 00:39:06 And we'll talk later. Take care. Cheers, guys. Bye-bye.

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