The Eric Metaxas Show - Erik Prince

Episode Date: May 14, 2024

Erik Prince discusses the Deep State and his privacy smartphone: https://unplugged.com/

Folks, welcome to the Eric Metaxus show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's LegacyPMinvestments.com. Welcome to the Eric Metaxe show. Have you heard that some people have a nose for news? Well, Eric has a nose for everything. That's why this is called The Show About Everything. Now welcome your host, who definitely passes the smell test. Eric Monttaxas. Welcome back. We're talking to Oran, A-U-R-O-N, McIntyre.

So, Orin, you were just talking about what I think, with that, you didn't say it, but it's Edmund Burke's little platoons. Talk about Burke when he wrote that, because it's fascinating to me that the kind of liberty that we have in America has been, it would never be able to exist with the little platoons, with the family, with civic organizations, with the church. It can't work. And so this is why those who are behind the total state, the globalists, they want to wipe out the little platoons. They want to wipe out family. But when did Burke say that?

I mean, it's fascinating to me that he did. Burke was, of course, in many ways that one of the most notable critics of the French revolution. And he was talking about how terrifying it was that the French Revolution was able to sweep through the way it did. in some ways people blame actually the centralization that went on that happened under the monarchy that the devolution if you remember louis of course the sun king gathered all of the nobles into versailles so that he could have the more total control he wanted to remove their regional influence and the pockets

of regional control that the nobility normally had because they served as firebreaks to his own power but once that was done at the monarchical level once the french revolution swept through it was just as available, that level of centralization was available to the revolution, the Democratic Revolution, when it destroyed everything. And of course, the first thing the French Revolution did was installed the goddess of reason into Notre Dame, right? They replaced God with the new false God of human reason. They didn't get rid of religion. They simply remade it in their own image, which is always, of course, it's the very first temptation of man. And so, you know, when what Burke was talking about was the necessity of these little platoons, these little parts of, you know,

these, again, these social spheres that would push back against the forces of revolution, that they would tie us to our prejudices and sentiments. And he used prejudice in a positive sense. He said, we as humans, don't have the ability to rationally understand every choice that was made by our ancestors. And so Providence has given us this tradition, this voice of the democracy of the dead, as Chesterton called it, that would speak through the generations and limit the ways that we could remake society, go ahead and inculcate the wisdom of generations into people who otherwise wouldn't understand it.

And so by maintaining these little platoons, these social spheres that would push back against a wider revolution, we were able to forestall these horrendous changes that end up destroying God and the family and others and eventually end up handing over everything to the state in the name of democracy. And that's exactly what we're doing now. We're just doing it a little bit slower,

but then all at once. I mean, I'm, you know, I'm fascinated with everything you're saying and have, as I say, myself written about it because it seems to me at the very heart of where we are right now. And it's fascinating because I say that this is the third existential crisis in American history, the first, the revolution, the second is the civil war. And we're now in the third. And it is a war. we might lose. Everyone has to fight. Will more people fight? Will more people understand what is

required of them? Because it's not looking good very now any more than it was looking good for George Washington in 1776. It was looking very, very bad. But he believed in the cause. He believed that Providence was with us in this cause of liberty. Where do you see things now? where do you see things going from where we are at this moment? I have good news and bad news. I think the short term is not great, but I am long on the American people. I think that in the short term, we need to recognize that we are going through, and I agree with you, I think this is actually an apocal change.

I'm not just in the United States, but I think worldwide. I think we are hitting the limits of liberal democracy. I think we're hitting the limits of managerial structures. I think we're hitting the limits of the Tower of Babel. And I think we're going to have to face the consequences of that. We've gotten very used to a society, like you said, where we hand all of these duties and responsibilities off to Leviathan institutions and experts. We've actually outsourced all of our decision making and all of our sovereignty to these organizations. And we're terrified to take control of it.

In fact, you can see the way that the system fights back against someone like Trump. Trump is not a particularly ideological guy. But what he represents is the ability to once again make decisions. You see the way that people like Sam Harris recall from Trump. And Sam Harris specifically said, I'm worried he'll take away the experts. He'll get rid of the managers. He'll destroy the power of the managerial class of which I am a piece of, the atheistic, systematic construction that is supposed to be ruling our society. They're terrified of that.

And so in the short term, I think that a lot of people are going to have difficulty handling this breakup. I think we're seeing the failure of institutions. I think we're seeing that on the university level. We're seeing that with the FBI. We're seeing all of these things simply become crude weapons of power in the hands of tyrants. I think that that's scary to see our institutions fail this way. I think we're seeing the competency collapse. A lot of people are realizing it's hard to even get a plane to land on time.

We have people who are unable to operate the systems that are critical for our nation's functioning. And that happened because of the way we order society and the way we selected for things inside the manager class. So I think we are going to see those things come apart in a way, and that's going to be a scary time. But the good news is that creates the space for us once again to assume those duties as individuals. We can once again bind ourselves into those organic spheres of family and community and church. And I think that's going to be critical. I think the places that are going to survive this ship are the ones that become local and responsible and rebuild the little platoons. Well, I mean, the question really is whether we have the time to rebuild.

build them or if we've destroyed them enough that we don't. But I think it sounds like you're saying when that we might. I have a buddy Ernst in South Africa. He's part of a organization called Afra Forum. Obviously, a lot of people probably know that South Africa is falling apart. It's a very dangerous place. And the government is unable to protect a lot of people, particularly the Afrikaners in that area. And what they've done is they've created an organization that sets up neighborhood watches. They built their own colleges. They have their own churches. They fill their own potholes. They figure out how to repair their own electrical grids in some in some situations. And the reason they're doing that is simply that they live in a failed state otherwise that won't

protect them. And that's a scary thing to realize, but it's also something and people ask them all the time, well, what happens if the government comes for this or what happens if things fall apart too fast? And his answer is always the same. If we don't protect our children, if we don't protect our families. If we don't bind ourselves into the community and take on these duties, then no one will. And I think the same has to be true for the United States. Will things move too fast? Will we not have time? I don't know the answer to that question. But I do know that if we don't start practicing virtue, if we don't start building those institutions, if we don't start creating that localism and those organic bonds, then if things fall apart, it will be too late. And we have to

start now if we're going to make any difference. You know, as I was saying earlier, I simply see this everywhere. And you said we've reached the limits of a few things. It's the limits of liberalism. It's the limits of, we kept thinking, well, things will be more and more and more efficient. And then you get to a point where, no, you've traded huge things for the quote unquote efficiency. You've traded huge things to get whatever you're buying for 10 cents less. One of the things that we see with this is outsourcing the education of our kids.

it becomes bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And then eventually the people educating your kids say, by the way, we know more than you do about what your kids want. They begin to take the kids away from you. There's this tipping point where it becomes communism. It becomes they own your children. You don't, your children aren't yours. They belong to the state. And the state knows best what's right for your kids.

The state knows best when to talk to your kids about sexuality and to bring these bizarre ideas of gender to little kids to confuse them. Suddenly it's happening in America. This is one of the things, folks, if you're interested in the little platoons, if you're interested in saving things, homeschooling to my mind is the classic example. And it's only liberal elites who are stupid enough to say, I'm not qualified to homeschool my kids. If you aren't a communist, if you love your kids, you're qualified to homeschool your kids. We've talked a lot about homeschooling on this show. But boy, oh boy, that I see the homeschoolers that I meet, they're going to take over the, they're the future. It's amazing when you meet these kids.

So there is hope. Homchooling is just one of these things. Much more to talk about, but we're out of time. Orrin McIntyre. Just grateful for you, grateful for the book. Folks, it's called The Total State, How Liberal Democracies have become tyrannies. Get a copy of the Total State. Orrin, thank you. Thanks for Abney. For 10 years, Patriot Mobile has been America's only Christian conservative of wireless provider. And when I say only, trust me, they're the only one. Glenn and the team have been great supporters of this show, which is why I am proud to partner with them. Patriot Mobile offers dependable nationwide coverage, giving you the ability to access all three major networks, which means you get the same coverage you've been accustomed to without funding the left.

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He's a former Navy SEAL officer. He's a founder of a private military company called Blackwater. Eric, welcome to this program. Thank you, Eric. You are, you are, you're tough to sum up because you are involved in so much. Let's start with the thesis. You wrote an article. I'm not sure where it was published, but I was reading through it. You really talk about how we got to where we are right now.

It's called Too Big to Win, how the military industrial complex and the neocons keep America losing. I think most people listen to this program would agree that what Eisenhower called the military industrial complex, which we now might call the deep state, the uniparty, the neocons, the bad guys that we used to think were the, good guys, how they have really prosecuted a decades-long deception on the American people. It's horrifying. It's difficult for most of us as we've woken up to this. You've been awake to it a lot longer to really see what's been going on and how we need to stand against it. So how did you come to see things as they are? I mean, if somebody had talked to you 20 years ago, were you where you are now then, or were you part of it then and then you

woke up slowly? No, I would say already back in college, I went to Hillsdale College having left the Naval Academy after a year and a half. But I went to Hillsdale and I was actually a district representative for Pat Buchanan for president in 92 already when he was running. So I had awakening to the corporate wing of the Republican Party how much I didn't like it back then. You're like my friend John Zmirich, as soon as you mentioned, you know, Pat Buchanan, I realize, oh, you were on to this, you know, 30 plus years ago. It makes people like me feel ashamed on some level that I was duped.

I remember having a conversation with John Zmirak right just as the Iraq war was beginning. And he was the only conservative I knew who told me why this is a bad idea, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I just remember sitting there thinking, what? And of course, now I get it. But so you got this way back in the beginning when you were part of the Pap Buchanan and not the George W. Bush or George H.W. Bush wing of the Republican Party. Yeah, sure. I was an intern for the George Bush Senior White House.

And I saw what a swamp Washington was already. I mean, you know, me in college walking around Washington, D.C., with a White House badge. I could get into any federal agency and I could just see. It was Hobbs Leviathan embodied, and it was just bureaucratic hell everywhere. So I came away from Washington with a very, well, a very pro-libertarian bent. And I realized, but the difference between a libertarian versus a Pat Buchanan approach, and I agree with Pat Buchanan, is I'm all in favor of free trade, as long as the other countries agree to a free trade policy,

and not their very corporatist, very state-sponsored. advantages. And so growing up in the Midwest in a manufacturing family, I know how hard it is to make stuff and to be cost competitive. And when you have foreign countries colluding to support their manufacturers and you have Washington colluding with big banks and Wall Street to make it much harder for American manufacturers to 16 and people where they'll close a plant and outsource a job for a dollar, it's really problematic. And so a healthy America has a healthy America has a very healthy middle class, and that requires a good manufacturing base, all of which has been shredded over the last 30 years. We actually saw a change start to come back with the policies

that Trump started to put in place, and we need a hell of a lot more than that. Well, yes, we do, and we're going to get to that. We need to drain the swamp, whatever you want to call it. But I want to get back to, I remember waking up to this. I think a lot of America really first woke up to this. During the 2016 debates, when Donald Trump dared to criticize Jeb Bush to his face and criticize Jeb Bush's brothers' policies in Iraq, it was a staggering moment. It was an earthquake, you know, in the Republican world to have this frontrunner openly say what a lot of people had maybe thought a little bit but didn't feel comfortable saying. You thought, well, we can't say that. He said it. And since then, there's been this cascade where more and more people have

woken up to what we got when we elected Bush and Cheney, which many liberals were saying. But as conservatives or Republicans, we said, well, no, they've got to be wrong. Whatever Bush says is right. So Trump was really that earthquake that made it possible for many, many in the Republican Party, many in America to begin to see the reality of the deep state, the reality of the Unip Party, the reality of the military industrial complex, that this is not something that's made up. This is very real. Yeah, it's the five wealthiest counties per capita surround Washington, D.C. That's a very unhealthy example for a society. And between the massive deficit spending that Congress

continues to do and it enriches a federal government, the real constitutional crisis, as we're supposed to have three branches of government. We have four. We have a fourth that is unelected and truly unaccountable. And apparently, you know, I had high hopes for Speaker Johnson when he was elected. I thought he was a conservative guy. And my God, what a sellout he's become. And he just got rolled on funding a wrong effort in Ukraine,

sending money to Israel, sending money to Taiwan. I mean, both of those countries have significant resources themselves. was they can fund themselves and the extension of FISA, one after the other, the guy just gets rolled. Why we truly have a uniparty? Well, this is what's so funny when people say, oh, but he's a Christian. And I've come to the point where I couldn't care less.

Jimmy Carter was a Christian. He taught Sunday school. It's really irrelevant if they can't apply their Christian faith to what their job is, which obviously Mike Johnson, he doesn't seem to understand it. like fighting against evil is a biblical value just in case. You have a biblical worldview. That should be part of it. But look, we've seen this a lot.

What gives you hope? Because I know you're in the fight. I have a favorite book. It's called To Dare and to Conquer. And it's basically a history of special operations throughout history. It goes back a couple thousand years. And it gives examples of a few picked men that change the course of history by carrying out amazing special operations in the face of unbelievable opposition.

And so I still think, you know, the United States, the Patriots, 3% of our population back in 1775 decided, hey, we're going to fight for freedom. And they took on what was then the most powerful military force in the world. And they won. There's a lot of that spirit left in America. And our forefathers resisted far harder against a government far less tyrannical than what we even have in Washington right now. And so it's time for people to wake up. And they probably need to spend more time. And I think to live in a republic is not a spectator sport.

You have to be engaged. And so it's probably time to watch less football, basketball, and baseball, and engage in more school board, town council, and county commission meetings and demand action. And the biggest problem we have, though, is a federal government that is completely off its base. And this gets solved by the states flexing up. and saying no and forcing the government, the federal government to live within its constitutional means. Well, easier said than done, but I'm hopeful. I mean, I really think Trump was the bomb that kind of exposed everything.

Suddenly you saw, because of the way they came after him, I mean, when he was running, when he won. I mean, I was in D.C. for the inauguration, and I'll never forget the march the following day about the resistance. and I thought, what in the world is going on? They're not going to give him five minutes. They have already decided he's Hitler 2.0, and they're going to be doing everything they can. And that's when we first saw the way they went after General Flynn and on and on and on, Russiagate, just to cripple him while he is the president of the United States. And then to steal an election, it's extraordinary, but it's exposed the dark side.

They had been working in the shadows for decades. You know, a lot of people believe the Warren Commission. A lot of people believed like, well, the CIA, the, you know, they're basically good guys. And I think we've now seen that, no, they're not. When you give an asshole a gun on a badge, you get a bigger asshole. And so when you have a federal agency that is truly unaccountable and unelected, it can definitely go off the tracks. And so, but what the shocking thing is, is that. Republicans that are opposed to this kind of nonsense don't take harder action, right?

I would say at this point, it's not even Speaker Johnson. We need to go after the chairman of these appropriations committees and pressure them in a way they've never been pressured and their staffs to cut off the money. Absolutely. That's how you starve the beast is to cut off the money. And it's done at a committee level. Do you think Trump, if he is reelected, understands what we're facing? Look, we're electing a president, not a Mazziah. I think I have, I give that man such credit for having the resolute willpower to just keep fighting and to see it through.

I've been through a lot of government and political attacks, but he has done amazing things. It's a staggering thing. We'll be right back, folks. I'm talking to Eric Prince. Don't go away. Hey, this is Eric Mettaxas. For years, I've told you about Nutrametics, a professional supplement brand trusted by doctors since 1993. Nutrametics offers a variety of health bundles. Whether you want to support your immune system, improve your sleep, promote joint comfort or detoxification support, Nutrimetics has a health bundle right for you. The best part about Nutrimetics, every year they donate a minimum of 50% of their profits to Christian charities and missions. That's right, 50% of their profits. Nutrametics has a goal of surpassing 100 million in giving by 2030. Many of you take supplements already.

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It's in the journal called I am 1776. I am 1776. Okay, you say a lot. You say a lot in this article. All of it is important. You talk about how the neocons, the war monger, who are making a lot of money off of war, time and again, push for their version of how we should respond, for example, to the 9-11 attacks 23 years ago

and how it is about the money. It is about, I mean, in the article, you write about how you, or I don't know who advised that the IDF, the response to Hamas, should be to flood the tunnels with sea water. And they decided, no, we'd rather bomb. What do you make of that?

Talk about that. Look, I knew they were going to have a problem because Hamas had built 300 miles of tunnels under Gaza. And, you know, what does Hamas want? They want to maximize civilian casualties, so they make themselves the victim. And I had it all lined up. I had the best of Texas,

horizontal directional drilling technology to flood with tens of thousands of gallons, a minute. And in the end, they got pressured by the Pentagon to not do it. And I'm astounded. And I, because I know, look, dropping bombs amongst civilians, of course, is going to cause a lot of unnecessary casualties. And so they're left with a lot of, a lot of civilian casualties are ready and a high probability of a lot more if they go hard into Rafa because there's all these civilians stuck down there. And it does nothing but generate sympathy for the Hamas call. So it's bad on them.

So is the Pentagon in love with war? I mean, it sounds so sick and so evil. Here you are proposing something that reduces civilian casualties, that deals with the problem. Why wouldn't they want that? In other words, what would the reason would the Pentagon give in pressuring the IDF not to take that tack? Look, every bureaucracy has a very conventional approach. very risk-averse. They don't really take outsider idea as well. That's just an inherent downside of bureaucracy. And we have one that is so wealthy and so expensive. And the biggest problem is

it's been so insular from any kind of accountability for failure. And that's the biggest problem we have in America, in government, is that we don't hold failures to account. when Elon Musk bought Twitter, he gutted a lot of their headcount because he was keeping the productive people and throwing out the unproductive people. All of Washington is like a very dirty rug that needs to be shaken. And if you get rid of 90% of the headcount,

that you're on the way to a good start. Well, I mean, to me, that's simple, but is there the will to do that? I mean, it really does seem like we're talking about draining the swamp, that there is this unelected bureaucracy, which you've been referring to. It's kind of obvious that this has been, it's taken decades and decades and decades for this Leviathan to get as bloated as it is. It doesn't want to die, but it's our job as American patriots to kill it.

Yes, it is. And so it requires not just electing a president, but it requires electing enough members of Congress, House and Senate that will actually vote to cut large chunks of the government. There needs to be such a clear mandate to change the course of the country that go along to get along, business cannot continue because, look, we're $34 trillion in debt. That's the true constitutional crisis, because we just can't afford it. I mean, we're not at the point where the interest payments exceed that of the defense budget, and our defense budget is already way too high, and we could cut that by 40 or 50 percent, and we'd actually have a more effective military

because you just were like an obese triathlete trying to go to war, it doesn't work. Tell me again where the article Too Big to Win is published. I am 1776. So the letters I am 1776? Correct.com. Dot com. Okay, I am right. I'll ask you again, do you think Trump gets this?

Do you think that he would put in the personnel to go to war? against this bloated deep state bureaucracy? Look, he acknowledges, I believe, that he made some personal some of the wrong personnel choices last time, and they were fixed towards the end of his last administration. And I think they're definitely taking steps to hit the ground running, to govern effectively, because people is policy. And you need people that are wanting to change how Washington does business drastically

because the current state does not represent anything like our founders intended. It just, it seems that he had no idea and almost no one had any idea of what they were going up against. In other words, they were loaded for bears, so to speak, from day one, from before day one with his presidency. And he didn't realize what he was walking into. And, you know, to lose Jeff Sessions and General Flynn and on. and on and on and then to find himself in the midst of that mess, it really did hamstring him and what he had hoped to do. But I don't think he or anyone who didn't already know could have dreamt really that this is the way things work in Washington. Look, what the feds did to General Flynn,

they squeezed him, they threatened his son, threatened with all kinds of super high legal fees to bankrupt the guy who was a retired general. Trump should have. have offered to pay Flynn's legal fees to not take a plea and to fight. The really disgusting thing is if the left had not gone after and created this Trump-Russia collusion lie, which was proven to be a lie, Trump would have had this diplomatic space to make a deal with Putin to pull the Russians away from the orbit of China, which is very much in the long-term interest in the United States. Look, this is huge.

I want to go right back there. I'm talking to Eric Prince. He is the founder of Blackwater. and we're going to talk about a new unplugged smartphone. We've got to get to that. Oh, my goodness. We'll be right back. Three-star general, Michael J. Flynn, head of the Pentagon Intelligence Agency,

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Flynn, deliver the truth, whatever the cost. Available now. Watch it today. Go to salem now.com. Salem now.com. Welcome back. I'm talking to Eric Prince, the founder of Blackwater. You were just talking about China and Russia.

I mean, it seems to me that part of the wake-up call for other people was this obsession with Ukraine, pretending like Ukraine is France and Russia is Adolf Hitler. I think a lot of people like me even don't understand why does NATO exist. I mean, the Soviet Union was defeated 30 plus years ago. Why are we pretending that this thing called Russia is no different than the Soviet Empire under Stalin and Khrushchev and Brezhnev and Andropov? It's a bizarre thing to me. Where we are now is a direct result, I think, of this uniparty, of the neocons, perpetuating the fiction that there's still this thing called the West and that we've got to get Ukraine and these former Soviet republics to be part of NATO.

It's just a bizarre fiction, but they've been pushing it like crazy. And Speaker Johnson just went along with it by funding this nonsense in the Ukraine. Another $62 billion for Ukraine that there's really no accountability for. That's the same amount of money that we were blowing per year in Afghanistan. also losing. All we're doing right now is succeeding in wiping out successive generations of Ukrainians because, look, trying to out conventional war the Russian bear is just dumb. It's just math. They have a lot more manpower. They have a lot more industrial base and a lower cost of production for all these high dollar weapon systems. And so as the fields dry, because now it's May, June,

that becomes tank season in the very flat Ukraine. You're going to see some significant Russian advances, and this war should have been settled a year and a half ago, freeze the lines, let the Ukrainians focus on rebuilding their economy, liberalizing their economy away from the oligarchs, and hell, let them restart their nuclear weapons program for deterrence. But this idea of trying to recapture every bit of Ukrainian territory as a fool's errand, and Washington wants to fight for the last living Ukrainian, and that's a really dumb idea for for the future of their society. Well, you also mentioned how, I mean,

even if you were a cynical, Henry Kissinger-style, Realpolitik guy, and you just said, well, we don't want Russia cozying up to China. If that's the only reason you're doing it, you would understand that that's important. It's a staggering thing

that the Uniparty, the Deep State, the Biden administration have driven Russia into the arms of China, it's astonishing to me that there isn't some adult in the room who understands that's bad. For the entire 20th century, the goal, the U.S. foreign policy goal, was to keep German industry

out of the hands of Russian resources. Now all we've succeeded in doing is pushing the massive Russian resource pool into the hands of the even bigger industrial enemy, the Chinese Communist Party, that hates us, and it is their goal to reorder the world, to undo the Westphalian

order of states and remake it in the image of the Chinese Communist Party. This is extremely bad for the survival of Western civilization, and we should be very angry about it. Let's talk about FISA. Why do you think

a number of otherwise conservative folks in Congress, including the speaker, did not stand against renewing FISA? So this is not just a renewal of FISA. This is a massive enlargement of it.

And what they did is basically any commercial data that's on your phone, okay, because your phone maker, they know where you go, what you buy, who you call and what you browse. And that's all commercially collected by the apps and the phone maker that you use. And now what the Congress just signed off on and signed into law by the president, is that the federal government can, without a warrant, order any company that has any of that data to turn it over without a warrant, without due process, without probable cause. It is such an attack on the Fourth Amendment. It's disgusting. You know, this is something I've been working on hard for the last three and a half years after the last election, the nonsense of them canceling certain Republican, certain conservative voices.

opposed to the regime. And so we built a completely independent phone platform called Unplugged. And the difference is it's our hardware, it's our operating system, it's our own app store, it's based on the Android kernel, but our phone does not have an advertising ID, which is like a 25-digit, alpha-numeric Mark of the Beast, which collects everything about you. And Big Tech sells that and sells your data about $180 a year. of your data to know everything you do. And now that's all available to the federal government

anytime they want it. And the difference is our phone prevents that collection so that you have data sovereignty, your Fourth Amendment, your First Amendment rights are secure. And we even have our own secure messenger, which generates a new encryption key, every call. So it is...

So how does it say... It's called the unplugged phone, you said? The unplugged phone. You can order it at unplugged.com. And we just we did 500 units last October. We did a beta test. We have 10,000 units just arrived. Most of them are sold already.

But this is the answer to a federal government and big tech driven by a super left-wing Silicon Valley that is invading. And it really taking over your digital sovereignty, we protect your digital sovereignty. So unplugged.com. So, I mean, I don't know how any of this works. So if you have an unplugged phone, you have to go through one of the carriers anyway. In other words, I'm not sure. How are you protected? Yes.

So you can use AT&T. You can use T-Mobile. You can use Patriot mobile. The difference is when you call on an unplug phone, you can call peer-to-peer, and it creates an encrypted tunnel that it could be hacked probably in 20 years, but it's not going to be listened to. The big way that you are surveilled right now is through the advertising ID,

which exists on an iPhone or exists on any phone with Google mobile services. Google is the largest advertising company in the world. They do that by collecting and selling your data. So we prevent that collection because we don't give out where you go and what you buy and who you call and what you browse. I have so many people that have said, I was talking to my...

wife talking to my wife about needing a new mattress while we're in our bedroom and the next day I'm getting advertising for new mattresses which means the phone was listening what imagine the phone in your bedroom listening now you're getting advertising I it is it is mine it is mind blowing you can go to unplugged dot com we'll be right back talking to eric prince welcome back talking to Eric Prince, former Navy SEAL officer, founder of the private military company, Blackwater. How did you get the idea to found Blackwater? I mean, a private military company. Most people don't think about that.

How did that idea come to you? Look, the SEAL teams, I was a SEAL in the 90s, and SEAL teams had been using some private facilities really since the 1970s, and no one had done it on an industrial scale. So because of my father's success, I built a large training area that the East Coast SEAL teams could use. It was within an hour of their base. And at the same time, I'm doing Blackwater. And I took over the original business.

My dad started, which made Dicast machinery. And we took it through kind of a lean transformation to make it efficient. And so Blackwater, I looked at, what does a military do? It recruits, it vets, it equips, trains, and deploys people to do a difficult job. difficult place. And so we built a machine to do that for humans. And thus we could produce thousands of highly trained people to do a niche job in law enforcement or disaster response or security for the U.S. government. And that model works quite well. And history is full of those kind of examples. Well, you obviously believe in the private sector. You believe in freedom. You don't

believe in a big government. And so this comes out of that, obviously, and you believe that private solutions are more efficient. You happen to be right. So I'm glad you believe that. Do you see that as the future of this country, that we will scale back our government by God's grace and turn things over to increasingly to the private sector? Eric, I had my seventh birthday, 1976, in East Berlin at the height of the Cold War. And as a seven-year-old, seeing the guns and the dogs and the minefields and the tank traps all facing in, all keeping people hostage inside East Germany. For a seven-year-old, that was an aha moment to say, this communism thing is not a great example of how people should live. and so we can either choose freedom and to scale down our government and live as free people,

or we can go the way of East Germans and live under an increasingly oppressive super states. I will always choose freedom, and we will fight like hell to keep it. That's amazing what you just said for a couple of reasons, not least. It's amazing because I had my eighth birthday in East Germany. That was in 1971. I got a couple of years on you. And I remember crossing the border in the train with my mom and my family and seeing the machine guns, the soldiers, the barbed wire, the dogs, and understanding what my parents had been telling me before we had ever visited our relatives in East Germany. And understanding this is evil, that what we have in America is not normal.

It's a gift from God. we need to do everything we can to preserve it. You know, I think people who've actually seen these things get it. There are a lot of Americans. A big part of the problem in the United States is that we've been so blessed that we're complacent, we're lazy. We don't understand how evil things can be and how bad things can get. I call it affluenza. That's what we suffer from.

There's been so much money and so much wealth and so much success that people have really lost track of how this got here. Well, it's amazing. I could talk to you for a long time, Eric Prince. We'll have to have you back to continue the conversation to repeat. You can be followed at real Eric D. Prince. If people want to find you, Eric with a K, Prince. And the phone is the unplugged phone. People can go to Unplugged.com. Eric, Prince, God bless you. Thanks for being my guest. Thank you, Eric. Have a good day.