The Pomp Podcast - #1429 Erik Prince | Bitcoin Will Protect You From The Government

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

Erik Prince is the former founder of Blackwater, and the current founder of the Unplugged Phone. In this conversation, we talk about geopolitics, American security, national debt, government inefficiency, and what Erik thinks about the various conflicts that are happening around the world.  ======================= Polkadot is a scalable, secure, and decentralized blockchain technology aimed at creating Web3. Created by Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum, Polkadot empowers users to build decentralized applications with ease. Backed by industry leaders, making it a preferred choice for big names, Polkadot stands out as a leading choice for investors seeking a reliable, future-proof solution in the growing world of Web3 technology. Learn more at https://polkadot.com/. ======================= Buy book: https://www.amazon.com/Live-Extraordinary-Life-Anthony-Pompliano/dp/0857199927/ ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's going on, guys? Today, we have a very special episode for you. We have Eric Prince, the former founder of Blackwater and the current founder of The Unplugged Phone. This conversation is wide ranging. We talk about

geopolitics. We talk about American security, the national debt, government inefficiency, and what Eric thinks about the various conflicts that are happening around the world. Eric is one of the foremost experts on warfare. He's got a ton of experience both serving in the Navy SEALs, but also building Blackwater. And he is a great reader of American history, world history, military history, and he's got unique thoughts that he shares throughout this conversation. This is one of the conversations that reminds me why I started this show. It allows me to talk to interesting people who have interesting ideas, and it makes me think more critically about the world. And this conversation does not disappoint. Here is my

latest episode. It is with Eric Prince, the former founder of Blackwater and the current founder of the unplugged phone. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Today's episode is brought to you by polka dot polka dot offers secure scalable and decentralized blockchain technology that perfectly aligns with the needs of innovative projects it was developed by gavin wood one of the co-founders

of ethereum and the creator of solidity polka dot aims to build an internet where users have full control over their data and their applications polka dot offers tons of unique features a shared security model along with the new auction model and significant implementations like asic banking given these characteristics it's easy to understand why polka dot is gaining more and more attraction in the cryptocurrency world. Some people even are talking about it as the AWS of Web3. Now, companies such as Mythical Games, Astro Network, and over 50 other independent blockchains with hundreds of applications already leverage Polkadot's technology to power their platforms. If you're looking for a reliable, scalable, and cutting-edge solution, Polkadot

seems to be the top choice for industry players. Go check them out today at polkadot.com. America is kind of the tale of two stories. We have the greatest nation in the world. We live in the safest, most prosperous time in human history. There's a lot of things we can point to that would give you an optimistic view of the future. At the same time, you can look at America and you can tell a story of a crumbling empire that seems to be almost collapsing on its own success. People don't want to defend the ideals, ethos, and values that have gotten us here. You're very unique, I think, in that you have an understanding of history, you've got opinions about the future, and you've been very involved in a number of the major kind of

developments in the country, both geopolitically and economically over the last couple of decades. And so when you look at where we are today, do you have an optimistic view of the future or do you have a pessimistic view of maybe an alarm sounding that a lot of things need to change? i have a uh i'm kind of an internal optimist and i as i look at what what really made america it was breakthroughs of the private sector it was not some i mean no i will have to say i had i think we really have to give credence maximum kudos to the founding fathers when you look at the constitution and you look at the bill of rights and their ability to see, uh, the problems of the relationship between state and citizens. And, you know, what, what was their, what other

document did they have to reference the Magna Carta? And, but yet they wrote the constitution and the bill of rights and seeing how government always grows government always enriches itself whether you're a monarchist or a federalist or and they put all those checks and balances assuming and understanding that people were always going to grow stupid and the fact that they laid out that kind of framework and as i look at what countries in the world have really prospered versus and long-term have prospered there's fundamental underpinnings of the infrastructure of their governance and of the people that embrace that governance and when you move away from that and you dilute that down you get um you get the crumbling empire

rome right the roman empire grew and prospered that was not one really that was really built on on individual rights as we would. That was definitely an empire of conquest. And when they kind of ran out of conquest, it ran out of gas. And of course they debased their currency and made all kinds of bad decisions. But for a while as it was growing,

the elites were engaged, invested in the society. Remember when the Battle of Cannae happened, the biggest loss in, And I think one of the biggest single-day losses in military history, 80,000 people killed by sword in the morning. When the Roman Senate met a couple weeks later, it was 40% undermanned. Why? Because the elites had actually showed up. Now, America's problems grow from we have too much government. We have way too much government spending.

And things have gotten way out of whack. The 10th Amendment has been ignored, right? Remember, the 10th Amendment says any power not specifically delegated to the federal government remains the sole purview of the states. Because we've gotten away from a healthy rivalry between the state power and federal power, and when the federal government can literally print unlimited money, as we have, and now we're, what, $35 trillion in debt? you enrich and engorge uh a class of people that the exact stuff that the founding fathers were warning about and so we have to trim that down to size i'm hoping that this election has consequences that will actually trim it down to size because if it's not then it's going to be a really ugly transition because i think you're going to have more of a possibly a weimar like transition not a

a smooth line. Well, look, putting any nation on a diet is never pleasant, right? Anybody that starts fasting or starts, you know, cause America is actually physically fat and our government is fat, but we either have to do it the, the discipline way or in a very chaotic, ugly way. There almost seems to be this like chicken or egg problem. The government has grand ambitions. They want to do all these things for their citizens, even if it's ill-placed, you know, kind of hope. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Correct. That is the first thing that people have to remember.

But there's also the government spending problem. And so I've always wondered, is it the intentions of, hey, we want to help the people, that's why we spend a lot of money? Or is it if you give a man a money printer, he's going to print a bunch of money and then look around and say, well, where do I put the money? Right. Like, you know, if you have to kind of get to the root solution, politicians will always respond and pander to a constituency constituency to get elected. And once once they're there and once a program is started, I think I just saw a study. There's like one point eight new government programs per year since the founding in 1789. And there's not really been a calling or a sunsetting of a lot of that stuff. um and so all of that is expanded and compounded and and no force has had the discipline or the

power to actually uh curtail that down so you look at our health care system look at how much we spend and clearly we spend way too much the amount of doctors has not really changed but the amount of health care administrators responding to regulation and nonsense around that and and it's So it's almost uncompetitive behavior because of those well-intentioned regulations. If a lot of the government just said, just get the hell out of the way, I think you'd find it surprising. I always compare the price of LASIK to the price of any kind of government-subsidized or government-regulated surgery process, and it's night and day, right? Because LASIK price goes down every year. The lounges are beautiful.

It's on time because it's private pay. It's not government pay. And that's the root of the problem. It seems like that government pay, insurance pay is a incentive system that is pervasive throughout our society where problems exist. So you have health care, you have student loans. I mean, you can just go down the line. Everywhere the government touches, it inflates costs because people are spending money that's

not theirs. I even noticed it. I have a contract manufacturing business. So we make stuff for industrial power and very, very straight commercial, super competitive markets. versus a defense market, and those costs are easily 30% to 50% to 100% more just because government touches it and it screws it up. Let's go to like a material problem that I think a lot of people care about

but also we can use as an example to explain how some of this works is the southern border. It feels like for years there were people who were always concerned with or focused on securing the border, whatever that meant, call it over the last couple of decades. But in the last four years or so, there's been an explosion of these border crossings, very much determined or described as just an open border. And it feels like now there is a conversation that, hey, this is a problem. One side of the political aisle has been saying that for four years. I think the other side of the political aisle, whether they actually mean it or not, is starting to say, hey, we want to close down the border. What is the ramifications of that open border in terms of there's safety, there's economic strain, there's healthcare strain? There's all these kind of almost like knock-on effects of a single decision of, hey, we're going to open the border, seems to be one of the biggest contributing factors to kind of the decline of American society. Donald Trump was elected in 2016, I would argue, off of a, hey, we're going to lock down the border seriousness.

And yes, America is a nation of immigrants. I'm Dutch. My family came from the Netherlands in 1915. But there was a time in the 1920s, I think 1924, they curtailed it and basically slowed it down and it gave almost 20 years for some homogenization, right? For the, for the melting pot to work to the point that Italian speaking kids from Manhattan went to Italy and fought for America. Imagine. And, but they identified that strongly as America. We don't have anywhere near that kind of um national identity right now um so yes the you know the southern border issue is

not an organized crime it's an industrialized crime there are actual um travel agencies in dubai i just spoke to a couple of them last week where there's travel packages immigration travel packages for people coming out of bangladesh india and pakistan to fly on turkish airways through istanbul they drop them in latin america and they get linked into a bus system to bus them up through mexico it's it's ridiculous so so somebody is coming out of like bangladesh and they say i want to go to america and they literally get in touch with this travel agency and they're paying i don't know hundreds thousands of dollars whatever it is yeah they buy they buy the ticket for a couple grand one way uh-huh they uh but the travel agency is coordinating this

absolutely and then when they get on the ground they're getting told like there's the border go and they literally get handed off almost like a tour operator right i mean if you go to greece you're going to go on a tour you land you get met by a bus you go on your tour to meet the ship in this case you land somewhere in latin america you get met by a bus and you're bussed up in and they tell you okay they hand you off to this coyote it's it's industrialized there was enough pressure from the trump administration last time to curtail a lot of that nonsense all of the uh early biden changes obviously lift that off and so it's been a runaway train since um again that's fixable but when you when you flood a society with that many people that were

not born and then you have a welfare system which reinforces almost ghettoization of people where they're not they're receiving welfare benefits they're not necessarily working and their local their foreign language is now accommodated in the schools, right? The whole premise of a public education system is to be a common bottom few rungs of the ladder so that everybody has a fair chance. And that's another problem of government schools have really severely underperformed what the private sector offers. So again, without sounding like too much of a hardcore libertarian, which I guess I am, everything government touches, it tends to screw up how do we go from government has its hands in all these different industries to it not having

its hand is it just we need a administration to go in and be very committed to kind of ripping this out and firing people or what is that transition two things on the on the migration immigration reform obviously big diplomatic pressure on mexico to knock it off uh second but you have a very left-wing even more so than amlo president there now uh an actual communist um but still possible to pressurize that to uh implement actual pressure on to make it an unpleasant place to be if you're not in america legally so you're not banked you're not going to school um employers are not employing you and so a lot of people will go home two there's a lot of of people that that have committed significant crimes that final deportation orders have already

been administered it's like 1.6 million of those still floating around society wait we say this again there's 1.6 million people with final final deportation orders have been issued already and they haven't been deported yet is that a manpower like uh that's a government competence issue You see the – well, I remember in like 2005, the Bush administration then was talking about adding some Border Patrol agents. And we at Blackwater got called before Congress to testify as a friendly one because they wanted to train these new Border Patrol agents. And I remember the border police, the CBP came with a figure of like $180,000 to train a new border guy versus – and our price was like $40,000 or $50,000. And so Congress was trying to understand why we could do it for so little. And that's just the private sector versus government.

It's a different cost thing. So when you look at how does the next administration deal with deportation of even people that are the 1.6 million that every court has already ruled, they do not belong here, they've committed crimes while here, they need to go, fine. I think that's more of an argument for the private sector to deal with that, deputized. Yeah, part of what I kind of go back to in some of these situations is there's so much, you know, just government waste that occurs. It's very hard for them to give up power. Of course. Right? And, you know, it's human nature, right?

It's, hey, I have a job. I don't want to lose my job. You know, give me more money. Give me more budget. Give me more whatever. I have butted up against that every encounter with the federal government. They hate – every bureaucracy hates competition. they will close ranks and screw the private sector every way they can. Elon Musk is feeling

that as well. I am firmly convinced that NASA issued that license for him to finally do that test and to grab the rocket out of thin air because they thought he was going to fail right then before the election. So let's talk a little bit as to Blackwater and how you were able to win these contracts and serve the country with a very unique, I think, kind of employment model in terms of like who you were actually recruiting and how you were able to do it at a lower cost. Because I do think that there is parallels between you and the global war on terror and what you guys were able to accomplish and Elon and some of the things that he's trying

to do, because he's butting up against the same kind of machine that you were. And so, you know, maybe there's things Elon can learn from your experiences that he could apply now. No, we butted up against the same thing. And I've used this argument. I was born in the summer of 1969, the summer of Woodstock and Apollo 11. And if someone said that 50 years later, the only way the US gets to the International Space Station is on a Russian rocket or on a contractor rocket, they would have laughed you out of Johnson Space Center. But that's exactly the case. And we butted up against that as Blackwater saying, well, you can't be doing that because it's inherently governmental. It's too hard. Only government can do that. And I would call nonsense on that as he is very ably demonstrated. um blackwater started as a training facility seal teams had used private facilities really since the 1970s the seal team in the 90s when i was in um our ammunition budget for 2 000 seals was the same amount as the 150 000 man marine corps right so we had a lot of ammo took training

very seriously and but no one had done a private facility on an industrial scale and you say well you do that when there's government bases because government bases are very bureaucratic and very slow and so when you have a platoon going through a workup uh you didn't have time for a lot of the nonsense delays and so i was in the usual position of having been the seals my father's success i kind of knew what they needed and i did it um i got out in 96 bought the land and built it and at the same time i had taken over my original well my father's original business made die-cast machines big big machines that squeeze a mold and makes aluminum or magnesium castings and i've taken it through a lean transformation really based on the toyota production system so we took a bunch of

cost out and designed out costs and big labor productivity improvement improvements and especially lean flow and as i'm laying out black water i'm thinking what does the military do we recruits vets equips trains deploys and supports people we built a machine to do that and that worked and so as the company grew to do not just training but security and aviation and logistics and medical and we could process thousands tens of thousands of people we built an air wing of 73 aircraft of our company-owned aircraft to to do that and um because we knew our costs and we viciously attacked waste, it was good. And it was antithetical to what government did.

What's so fascinating about your story is that one of my favorite entrepreneurs in all of history is a gentleman named Suleiman Olyan, who comes out of Saudi Arabia. He worked for what at the time eventually became Aramco. And he worked in the warehouse. And what was so fascinating about it is because he worked in the warehouse

and he was seeing what products are coming in or going out, he's very in tune with kind of the business, the unit economics, the suppliers, all this. And they decided they're going to have to build the pipelines to let's get the oil out of here. And so they create a program that does two things. One, we're going to have to use a vendor-based system. We can't do it all ourselves. We're going to have to contract out to people. But two is we're going to give the advantage either in the contract or in the pricing to Saudi-owned businesses. So he basically walks into work one day and he says, hey, I'm putting my two weeks in, but I know that you guys have a contract out for,

I think it started with some trucks. And he says, I'm going to go start that company. Why don't you give me the contract? You guys know me, you trust me, et cetera. I'm going to go and I'm going to go build this out. Long story short, if you fast forward, he creates something called the Olean Group. And he ends up being probably the largest construction kind of conglomerate in the Middle East, simply because every time a contract came up, he was a trusted source.

He had a proven track record of keeping costs low, delivering on time, et cetera. He keeps getting contract for contract for contract. What's fascinating about him is he was a businessman. And so he was always fascinated with the United States. And he constantly wanted to figure out how can he get access to financing. No one in the Middle East was providing financing, especially not to, you know, kind of one of their countrymen. And so he started talking to American banks. And they said, hey, look, we'd love to give you money.

You've got a great business, but you have no collateral in the U.S. And so Suleiman ended up starting to put money in U.S. banks so that he could just buy some stocks. So he had collateral so he could get financing. Turns out he becomes one of the largest investors in the U.S. markets of anyone in the Middle East simply because he did it for a really long time. He was making a lot of money and doing this whole thing. I always think of that story as essentially the private market kept going to, in that case, Aramco, but could have been the government, and said, what do you need now?

Give me the order. I'll go do it. And I think the Blackwater story is so much of, okay, you need a training site. Let's build a training site. Do that well. Okay, what's the next thing you need? And you just kind of continued, they almost like led you to what the business was, which really is an entrepreneurial story of just listening to the customer. I said, I constantly preach to our team, there is no guarantee that we will exist next year.

We are not a line item in the budget. We have to convince our customers to let us solve their problems. And that was our business mantra, I guess. Given the lessons that you learned at Blackwater, when you think of Elon today, are there things that you think he should do that maybe would make his life a little bit easier? What I wish I had done much earlier is diversify the business away from the government. Because the political nature of supporting a military at war, right? The anti-war left went after troops in Vietnam and in the Iraq, the whole GWAT thing. They love to go after contractors and they love to hate me.

Um, he was very wise to build a space business, but he did that. NASA was his first vendor, but then he got smart building his own rockets. And what did he do? He built a, uh, a Starlink fleet of satellites spectacular. And that is all private sector and, uh, yeah, government regulates and, and constricts them. But, uh, that is a very big leverage point that he carries. I mean, you already see it, right? He, the Russia, Ukraine conflict, there's been multiple times where people on both sides

have yelled and screamed about Starlink access. uh you see obviously the natural disaster in north carolina where uh starlix being provided he just keeps running up to an indispensable vendor yeah yeah and we were the blackwater was the indispensable vendor in a lot of places because we would we would show up i mean you know like what six months ago sudan as a country melted down there was 16 000 americans and they needed to be evacuated and um wall street journal called me and said are you involved in evacuations I said, no, I'm sitting this one out. I said, but wouldn't it be nice if there was an American company that owned its own aircraft that would go fly in there? Because nobody could fly aircraft

in. Why? Because there's missiles flying around. So nobody wants to, all the insurers cancel. So we were self-insured. We would fly into those places. So yeah, I'm happy. I'm so happy for his success. I don't think people quite understand in these conflict zones. I recently talked to two different people. One came out of the intelligence world, another was a former special operator. And both of them in different ways have been involved in going and rescuing people, whether it was out of Ukraine during the Russian invasion, there were situations in Palestine, et cetera. And take, for example, this one group that was going and getting people out of Ukraine. They're not talking about like, hey, let me call the person and, hey, go walk to the

airport and we'll make sure that you get on the commercial flight. These guys are going in, their staging vehicles they have communications they have uh manpower they have weapon i mean a very very complex logistical operation and as i was talking to him one thing just kept hitting myself in the head was it used to be that if you had an american passport the u.s military would always come and get you and it feels like today that may not actually be true unfortunately that is very true um as an american they'll tax you anywhere you are in the world but not necessarily rescue but again i i contrast uh haiti in uh may of this year there was um two young missionaries on their first first mission in uh port-au-prince newly married

and um they're on the way back from a youth event and they get attacked by a gang they hardpoint in their house and um the husband has an m4 and he's holding off this gang in a a gunk fight. The wife is on the phone pleading for help, calling the U.S. embassy just one mile away, calling and calling, asking for help, calling the RSO, anybody at the embassy, and they do nothing. They didn't send, I mean, there's probably 12 Marines assigned. Nobody left the confines of the U.S. embassy to drive one mile to help two American kids, missionaries in grave danger. Of course, they're overwhelmed, brutalized, murdered, terrible. And that's just not how it's supposed to be if you're a US citizen calling help for your government. And I contrast that with

a little known story. At the end of, it was October of 2020, so a month before the election, uh a 27 year old missionary on his farm in niger kidnapped by some jihadis and um the jihadis are driving him south to link up with boko haram us is watching with drones based at a uh a base in niger which you've also been kicked out of there's i think that we've looked with the biden administration has lost nine embassy locations nobody talks about that talk about uh when you say lost as in they were disinvited withdrawn closed sudan ukraine afghanistan onward anyway so the jihadis are moving this guy south and trump like nine days before the election authorizes a rescue so the jsoc guys mount up they move them to spain c-130

free fall in uh they land they go in and um the jihadis were bedded down with the one hostage they find the hostage secure him kill everybody else there was one guy off taking a leak they let him live don't with the americans can you imagine the 27 year old kid who goes to sleep surrounded by jihadis in the middle of the desert and he wakes up to space aliens looking at them because they're not coming with two tubes they're coming with four right and was 21s and um to say hey we're americans we're here to get you home that's how it's supposed to be that's why we spend 750 billion dollars i i do so so it's really dangerous for us to equate buying stuff with buying capability and if you don't have the willingness to engage when you're

you're at the threshold and if you don't have the right leadership that will make that decision right what does klauswitz talk about two kinds of courage to win a war individual soldiers courage you saw we have a lot of that but the moral courage of leaders to commit their people to an uncertain outcome that's the problem when you have an elite that has no skin in the game that has no understanding of going to do a difficult thing in a dangerous place and they become bureaucratic cowards that's where it all breaks down so you're a very interesting person to talk to about this because um i try to pay attention i think to society and understand the impact on the military especially the pipeline in the military and if i think of um my experience i

went uh to iraq in 2008 2009 um if you think of the things that happened after that you had the bin laden raid which i think was highly celebritized and people looked at it and said hey like that is america doing what america does yep right we will find you and we will kill you if you are a bad person um if you look at the captain phillips uh rescue and kind of the you know the famous shot off of a moving ship onto another moving ship etc again like that is what america does um but then you have to but there's some nuance to that okay and i think it makes my point exactly because the rules of engagement that had been imposed by team obama was they could not take a shot unless there was an absolutely immediate threat to the hostage

and basically the on-scene commander got sick of waiting hour after hour after hour and nothing was happening finally said he kind of reinterpreted the orders and took a shot that's what finally resolved it it was it was actually a simultaneous shot of a couple of different snipers shooting at the same time correct yeah it was moral courage of the ansi leadership to say enough of this now if we compare that to benghazi if we compare that to a number of different situations that have now become public um it feels like uh again the american passport does it actually represent that they will come and get you if people positions those are actual government employees in a bad place yeah it's it's amazing if you think of there's what 750 800 billion in

the defense budget probably 30 to 50 of that is directly related to csar combat search and rescue and the amount of options that were available in an aircraft carrier battle group with 85 aircraft on board you had a c-130 with a special operations team guns loaded everything that's their mission doing commanders in extremist force out of croatia um other aircraft out of sicily f-16s uh at um siganella or aviano um in in italy and then v-22s in rhoda spain all those things capability no moral courage of leaders to commit their people to an uncertain outcome And the bureaucratic handholding and kumbaya decision in Washington, and people died from it. And it's a bad look.

And what happened there is a microcosm of what happened in Afghanistan when you had, I think, pretty clear indication given by General Miller of what was going to happen. the last commander of u.s forces in afghanistan to say if we pull the u.s aircraft out and we're not bombing the taliban anymore it's going to go from they're grouping up in fives and tens and fifties to two hundred five hundred and thousand and that's what rolls over cities and uh i actually i called it six months before the actual collapse and i was off by two weeks but i based it uh just off of when i knew the fuel contract was ending because when they're not putting gas in u.s aircraft um and they're not doing air support on you know putting warheads on foreheads where they belong uh it went bad so there's this famous story now the radisson blue hotel i think was in somalia

um there's a delta force operator that was in um it's in mali in mali okay and um I think that this is almost like the perfect example of what you're talking about where, for those that don't know, there were some terrorists that went into the Radisson Blue Hotel. They began shooting up. They lighted it on fire. There's American citizens in there. A mile, two miles away, there's a couple of Marines. There's a single Delta Force operator, and I think that there was some CIA personnel. And the way the story gets told by the Delta Force operator is basically he says, I'm going to get my kit, and I'm going to go there.

That's what I do. That's what I was trained to do. Um, and I believe he was discouraged from going, of course, right? I believe the leadership basically said, I know you can hear gunshots. I know, you know, people are dying. I know that you are one of the most proficient warriors we've ever trained and put on the battlefield, but just sit down, stand. Even the guys that when, uh, when Benghazi happened, um, and I contrast this because

a lot of people love to dish on Blackwater. The eight or 10 Diplomatic Security Service government employees that were protecting the U.S. ambassador in Benghazi, how many rounds did they fire when the attack happened? I don't know. Zero. Zero. Okay. How is that possible? How is it possible that your protectee dies and you didn't fight back? Is that cowardice? Is it incompetence? I don't know. But if you want to criticize Blackwater for being too diligent, I'll take that criticism. But no one under our protection ever died. uh but then the agency contractors not agency employees agency contractors many of whom used to work for me uh heard the gunfire were going to move to the sound of the gunfire to actually help americans in danger and they were told not to by their bureaucrat boss i mean eventually they

didn't listen and they moved to help people that were in grave danger and put themselves in danger for doing so sure yeah look even in a little known story i think in 2006 or seven uh it was when the first special forces team started showing up in mali trying to work with the locals and building them and we were hired blackwater was to put a couple of aircraft there for medevac and logistics support and we were flying a little casa 212s it's like a little shrunk c-130 and uh they're They're out at this very remote base in the big, small winds, huge, powerful wind, and it literally ripped the aircraft off its tie-down points, damaged the aircraft and the wing, picked the tent up that the active-duty Army SF guys were in, and tossed it across the ground, killed one guy, broke a guy's spine and pelvis, two others with other fractures, and one guy had major internal bleeding. That was the one that was in real danger. and all their comm gear was trashed.

So our guys got the SATCOM going in the busted airplane, called the other aircraft, which is 800, 1,000 miles away, said, we're stuffed here, help. And so the other CASA launches, and we'd been prevented from having night vision goggles for some stupid bureaucratic reason. And our 18 Delta contractor medic strapped himself to the floor of the aircraft,

and then they land on a single set of Hummer headlights in the desert at night during a storm. Now, if you've ever flown in the desert at night, it's dark. It redefines what dark looks like. And they land, they recover, and this medic starts working this guy, okay? And they put every bit of fluid into this wounded SF guy because his blood pressure was crashing. And they called ahead to Ouagadougou, which is where we were flying in, which is the capital of Burkina Faso, in case you're wondering, to do an emergency blood drive because we needed some kind of trusted blood. And second, to go get some certain pain meds. And so back they land, and this guy is now inflated, right? He's just distended, and the Air Force still hasn't shown up with any kind of emergency surgery capability.

So our medic, moral courage, said, well, shit, I'm not going to let him die. He opens him up. He does field surgery on him, takes the organs out. Sure enough, finds the ruptured spleen, zip ties it, removes it, puts it in a baggie, puts the organs back in, closes him up, saves the guy's life. It's just fantastic. It's my second proudest professional moment. What was the first? I'll get to that.

I was at, uh, Eric Olson's change of command. He was the first four-star seal taking charge of all of SOCOM. And I'm standing in line waiting to go in and Admiral McRaven walks by who was in charge of all special operations in Africa and in Europe. And he goes and said, and he gives me a bear hug in uniform. He goes, that was some really sporty flying you guys did. I said, well, so that's why we have sporty pilots. And, but that's the kind of moral courage. I just, I love employing people like that to just find a way to get it done and win. What was the first? Speaking at the National War College in Washington. And, you know, I got out of the Navy as a Lieutenant. It was nothing. And all 300 colonels popped to attention. And

I gave him the whole brief on what we're doing and why. And at the end of it, this guy came to me and he said uh i was just in command just in baghdad as a commander brigade commander so he had what three four thousand soldiers he said at the top of the dashboards of their humvees that have the blackwater call signs and frequencies because they knew that if the went bad if they called the blackwater guys they would come immediately no questions no bureaucracy said exactly what we want that that is fantastic um if we bring it back to the united states this moral clarity this moral courage that you're talking about um how do we fix the situation here we have an economic pain that's being felt by millions

of americans national debt that is completely uh you know not only just big but accelerating i think we've added 500 billion dollars just in the month of october um like what are the solutions that you think should be implemented uh elon musk is right about doing a massive culling of government bureaucracies uh and that does two things one it's just the spend on the people but two having that many bureaucrats it's like um what did jefferson say in the declaration of independence about the king he has set forth uh thousands of bureaucrats to eat out our substance and the fact is washington is like 70 remote work now so all the bureaucrats in the dc area 70% of them don't even go into the office.

So I'm not thinking there's a whole lot of productivity there, which is good, but let's give them a one year, two year severance, but let's just, just pare down massively. How many, I don't know how many employees work for the federal government, but like what percentage do you think we could fire? Well, there's millions of employees and millions of contractors as well. That 50% of the U S government we could fire and not even notice 70. you think 70 percent absolutely wow elon musk fired 80 of twitter and twitter is better than ever yeah if you think that after 200 and almost 50 years the federal government couldn't go on a

diet having having that many programs i mean what i'm saying was might be considered radical it's we either do it in an organized way or it's going to be fed to us when the dollar collapses the the the problem with that many bureaucrats with all that funding and no accountability is they make a lot of rules and there's like a hundred thousand pages of new regulations come out every year with the force of law which directly impedes and impairs people from starting a business people from innovating from creating and you know who hurts the worst the people at the bottom end of the spectrum, okay? It doesn't hurt the BlackRocks and the Fortune 500 companies because they have the massive compliance programs and lawyers and all the rest, and they can ride

out that kind of time delay. But for the guy or girl that comes up with a great idea in their garage to try to get it to market, and they're just constantly blocked by licensing, it's wrong, okay? So headcount reduction, bureaucracy reduction, the fact that the Supreme Court did curtail the Chevron deference. That was like the 1984 case. They just overturned that about six months ago. That is a huge win. And so you'll see litigation from that that starts to chop away at a runaway regulatory state. And three, the inflation is caused by us, by government, especially just spending way too much money. And I would say the fourth, and certainly not the fourth in priority uh there's a book that really affected my thinking it's called the myth of

capitalism i encourage your readers to watch to read it your viewers to watch it or to read it it is uh and it makes the case that we have massively over consolidated american industry and it is that cozy relationship between big business and government which is happy for regulations because it it it blocks the ladder behind them exactly and it you know it talks about um like the average pay uh pay ratio ceo to junior guy in 1972 was like 30 to 1 now it's 360 to 1 our ceos have not gotten 12 times better since then um the when you look at the over consolidation in data, in search, in IT, in banking, in food processing, all these major industries, the regulatory state has driven the consolidation and the cartelization of many

industries, including defense. And that needs to be broken up. The trust busting done effectively by the Teddy Roosevelt administration needs to be done again. Let's talk about the history of america because i think people actually may have on the way in here we pointed you pointed out these captains of industry phenomenal right they built it but they also consolidated a lot and they really restricted that and what happened when when standard oil was broken up rockefeller ended up making more money but the but the competition brought by having multiple people come to the table help that innovation speed what always is the paradox of rockefeller in my mind is um he's famous for this quote where he says, I'd rather earn 1% off a hundred people's effort than a

hundred percent off of just mine. But Standard Oil obviously was just one large company when it broke up, then he still had ownership in many of the broken up components and he did make more money. And so in a weird way, the way he looked at employees was different than the way he looked at business structure, but it seems like he learned over time that maybe the best way to put together your kind of empire is to just mimic the way that you work with people. And one of my favorite books is the Koch brothers, Charles Koch, I think is the one who wrote it. He wrote a book called Good Profit. And in it, he basically describes their management philosophy and kind of the business structure and everything else at the company. But one of the points in the book that

everyone skips over when they read this book is he went and he studied the great civilizations throughout history. And he said, what are the commonalities? Because actually a company is no different than organizing people, having them all work towards something, et cetera. and what he figured out was hey you actually need to have these decentralized teams you need to push decision making down to the people closest to the problem right all these things that i think kind of have infiltrated into uh management kind of philosophy but he didn't learn it from a business school he learned it by studying civilizations and the ones that rose and and you know created resilience were able to become these like very productive uh organizations of people um and it

sounds like uh you know you're kind of advocating for a very similar thing in business today which the history of america uh which many people don't know was actually built by the private sector and i know yeah look america was started sorry to interrupt you america was started not by the british government or by the british army it was started by three companies listed by this on the basically joint stock companies of the city of london uh massachusetts bay Plymouth, Jamestown colonies were funded as stock companies and they hired private military contractors. Miles Standish, right? When you were a kid, you probably heard about Miles Standish at the first Thanksgiving, right? That guy was a private military contractor that was hired to

protect the colony from Indians, criminals, wild animals, whatever, the same as John Smith in japestown so uh that's what made america and that kind of um thrift innovation daring efficiency that's that is at our core uh of america and we've gotten away from that that's why we have when we tip toward socialism it has the predictable results the building of america is not only just like built by companies it's also financed by the private sector as well and so what are the things that maybe we did to get here that we've kind of lost our way that you think we should go and and re-implement is it something you know nasa versus spacex and and i um push everything into the private sector well when um i think it's after the reconstruction era i think it's called

the golden era like from 1870 to about 1910 and you had this explosion in a good way of capitalism and infrastructure, railroads, telegraphs, farming, steam engines, power, electric lights. That was financed in an era of no income tax. It was tariffs only. Imagine that. And when we got away, when we embraced a Bolshevik Marxist idea of income tax and the progressive era undid a lot of key things right another bad thing that happened was the founding fathers got right of course congress elected by the people very much in touch with communities every two years and if you think we've we've quadrupled the size of the country since we've increased the size of congress now i hate to advocate for more politicians but putting making the house of

representatives much more responsive because right now it's what every about 600 000 voters if you took that down to every two or three hundred thousand voters and make congress that much more responsive i think you'd find it's uh fiscally more conservative but the other bad thing that happened was we got away from how senators were elected because the way the founding fathers laid it out um i think it was the 16th or 17th amendment it's a wilson era thing that they they screwed up it used to be that state represent state legislatures would elect the senators so that the senators were largely doing the bidding of the states but now senators are just elected with money that pours in from special interest groups from all over the country and so they're

beholden to that money not to the state legislature that they're supposed to be representing and that's and that's why we have a runaway very spendy uh you know senate it feels like there's this threat of like accountability right and so um on one hand you hear people uh at least online probably on twitter nowhere else uh talking about like individual accountability and individual responsibility of hey no one's coming to save you uh you know you've got to improve your life make good decisions prepare to self-rescue yeah self-rescue perfect um but at the same time uh how many of the politicians in america actually get held accountable for the decisions they make the outcomes of those uh programs they put in place etc it feels like if the individuals

don't feel accountability or kind of the preparation for self-rescue it's really hard to hold other people accountable right and so it's almost like if the individuals are put in this situation and they're not responding maybe it is actually like we're rotting from within Sure. Look, we suffer from affluenza, right? From so much money, so much wealth, so much comfort. Very easy to be distracted by football or whatever the pop artist du jour is or whatever stupidity. And when the lights go out and when crime runs away and that kind of stuff, then it tends to wake people up. And so maybe in some, some areas people have woken up, uh, we'll see what voter turnout is this election cycle, but I think it's going to be higher than what people have expected before. What is your current view of Trump versus Harris, um, both policies, the candidates,

and then what the outcome of the election will be? Well, I think Trump is going to win. I think he is motivated a lot of, you just look at the, at the people that he attracted to this massive rally he had in new york right asians and blacks and latinos and uh it's funny how the left criticizes a a big rally with 18 000 inside and a hundred and another 80 some thousand people outside they want to disparage that as a nazi rally come on if that's if that's all you can oh with israel flags hanging i think that there was a number of jewish people who spoke uh on stage yeah it's it's um people will lie and eventually they're gonna run out of run a

gas on those lies um policy wise i think a second trump go around he realizes that people is policy and he did not have the depth of a bench ready to go to actually make a lot of the changes especially in the national security apparatus and so that's why we didn't he didn't see a lot of uh in any way fundamental change to to rein in a military industrial complex a neocon uh attempts at foreign policy and just a lot of stupidity so this is fascinating i think to a lot of people because as the founder of blackwater who uh probably is the single most successful uh and effective private military contractor in our lifetime i can say that maybe you're not allowed say that but i can say that um the flying tigers what noah claire chanel did yeah he affected the

outcome of the pacific theater yeah that's that's fair one of maybe we will uh we'll uh use the descriptor but um you understand that world better than almost anybody else definitely anyone i've ever talked with and yet you essentially are advocating for trump's strength as a deterrence without actually having to engage in war there's a continuum of statecraft on one end you have diplomacy and embassies and conferences and the other end you have aircraft carriers nuclear weapons and tank divisions and there's 80 of the middle which i would call the intelligence world and you have an intelligence community that has largely missed its mark and become very risk-averse very bureaucratic

um i really i mean what the masad accomplished with their pager op the next day the walkie talkie strikes in in against hezbollah was absolutely spectacular you have to have an intelligence community with a to be wildcatters at heart right a wildcatter is a guy that drills a well sometimes they hit sometimes they don't go bankrupt a couple times but then you get rich but but you keep you have to have the courage to try and for what we spend as a country for an intelligence apparatus we should accomplish something like that once a month for heaven's sakes um and is that like why why are they specifically um at least the perception is they are so good both in terms of the collection of intelligence but also operations like that is that a cultural thing

is that uh higher iq like what is it it's a matter of being um very focused and having actual existential threats that are facing them and back into a wall yeah look when the when the agency is is doing advertisements about how their most important factors are diversity and uh and gathering intelligence on climate change come on you know i say the chinese communist party and the svr and the fsb and the gru those are and and the iranians and the cubans and of course islamic jihadi uh problems with muslim blood those are the things they should be focused on um so again when any bureaucratic organization is adrift the nice thing is the agency is the most uh quick to be reformed because civil service rules don't apply in the same way that it doesn't

the federal government so you could actually fix that organization quite quickly but i would advocate for less of a government approach and if you lead right the business of america should be business and i've met many many leaders around the world who are so frustrated that the embassy The U.S. embassy in those locations becomes a beacon of forcing green New Deal kind of reform. So a country that's sitting on enormous amounts of hydrocarbons are arm twisted by the embassy to not develop it to be green. but you know we have dozens of african countries where an average family of four has less access they have less than four hours of a hundred watt light bulb equivalent electricity per day and they're sitting on billions of barrels of oil and gas that's wrong it is morally wrong

to deprive them of the ability to develop themselves or to help them um or the transgender or the other social engineering stuff that's what the embassies have become instead of being beacons of what's right in america of capitalism illegal opportunity and and if we wonder people complain well china is really advanced in africa and they're and they're defeating us they're pushing into a vacuum created by our own stupidity and more capitalism more i would say uh off-leash american companies going there and helping and creating and innovating uh are are the american way the way the america west was was settled uh is the way the rest of the world wants to grow with us um not under us grow with us so i comes back to what we opened with i'm an optimistic

person because if the u.s government would just get the hell out of the way be a lot of spectacular things can happen who do you think the biggest american adversary is today is it russia chinese communist party and in what ways are we locked in competition versus actual threat so the the cold war right was a was a scrum between the idea of western capitalism versus the communist party of the soviet union and really the tenets of marxism and it's the fundamental relationship of of an individual with a state right we focus on individual rights and liberty. They focus on state control and everything accruing to the benefit of the state. And we went on for 35 years after World War II to 1980. It had been a policy

of containment. Just stop the spread of communism. Reagan said, enough of this. We're going to F the commies. We're going to go at them economically, politically, culturally, socially, and make it difficult for them to run a communist empire um they never had anywhere near the industrial base that china does now and you know when mao died i think in 76 and deng xiaoping took over he said geez enough of this cultural revolution thing because he'd actually been imprisoned then and the first place they went to was singapore which was han china personnel but on capitalism and said we're doing that and we're doing what you say socialism with chinese characteristics and and china pivoted and grew their economy like crazy and admitted them to the wto

and it absolutely ate the heart out of the out of our industrial base okay whatever damage nafta did the outsourcing of us industry to china did 20x the damage so now china has built a a very nice machine and they've been um growing steadily but but now xi has made himself dictator for life you saw that in the last fall when he literally dragged hu jingtao his predecessor out as the public fu i'm in charge now and but he's also really clamped down on their entrepreneurial class right when jack ma disappears jack ma the founder of alibaba a true unicorn right because he was a like a high school english teacher and he builds something four times the size of amazon in terms of digital sales uh and he disappears and he's embraced he's seen then embracing

amazing supervision teaching at some rural school in China. He's done that a lot. And so the Chinese economy is suffering, but they have a very nice industrial base, but they are all about what the party wants. When I see a lot of the woke nonsense in America, it correlates directly back to the aspects of the culture revolution. It even ties back to even the early communist slogans and sayings of the twenties that you see in, in communist, communist Russia. So there's a lot, there's a lot of bad ideas that keep resurfacing. Yeah. So in my mind, that competition of ideas of what actually made America effective, the governance, right? The, the individual rights, very limited government and equal playing field. And, and it is not, I am not in favor of

unrestrained big business. I'm in favor of unrestrained business and government's job is supposed to be to create some level of, of equal playing field especially needs to be an antitrust enforcer. And we've done no antitrust enforcement for probably 40 years now. And that has to change. There's this idea of American security that I think is permeating throughout the country. It shows up in different ways. We talked a little bit about the border. One of the things the audience is very interested in is Bitcoin. And I think that it's a unique piece of technology because there's an aspect of like securing your economic value, right, as the holder of Bitcoin. But also I've long argued that Bitcoin and the design of it really

takes the ideas of the american ethos and writes it into code so just like the american government has kind of three branches of the government and bitcoin to get things done you've got kind of three different groups of people that all need to come together to get that stuff approved um it takes ideas like freedom of speech censorship resistance etc and kind of puts it into code what is your view on bitcoin and kind of how do you look at this as an asset moving forward well i wish i had taken it more seriously earlier earlier um as with everyone watching same thing Yeah. But to me, so I went to Hillsdale College, Austrian economics major. So very much in favor of the microeconomic approach and decision making. And when you think about money as a means of exchange and throughout history, that's been lots of things. It could be certain seashells. In the Netherlands for a while, it was tulips, right? There was a tulip inflation. So lots of different currencies over time. And so for a digital currency that is based on some unique code makes perfect sense. I am all in favor of a competition to the SWIFT system because I think central banking and the way the government runs banks makes it very possible to politicize banking.

i have i would say i've been a victim of that and i'm not claiming victimhood but it's it's nonsense how politicized everything has gotten have you been debanked oh yeah sure and have you gotten reasons for why um i have wrong ideas so yeah that's a sore subject i'll name names but maybe another time um but having uh the means of um of paying and saving and and uh exchanging goods and services to me i look when i look at what mpeza did in africa which was because there's not a lot of banking infrastructure there's nothing you can trust in africa but mpeza was a way to pay very small amounts through your cell phone and so it was super empowering to the poorest of farmers so that they can grow something transfer their goods and get paid for it

it's fantastic it's the underpinnings of capitalism and so bitcoin is a much bigger next generation version of that do you think that um former president trump has come out and said hey we're going to create this like bitcoin strategic stockpile um and uh maybe even put a dent in the debt is it something that you look at bitcoin as uh for the individuals or do you think that there are things with the government or central bank where bitcoin eventually kind