TRIGGERnometry - Erik Prince - War Will Never Be The Same

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

Erik Prince is an American businessman, investor, author, former U.S. Navy SEAL officer and the founder of the private military company (PMC) Blackwater. Follow Erik on X: https://x.com/realErikDPrince SPONSOR. Venice AI. Go to our sponsor https://venice.ai/triggernometry and use code TRIGGERNOMETRY to enjoy private, uncensored AI. Using code will get you 20% off a pro plan. SPONSOR. Netsuite. Download the CFO’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning at https://NetSuite.com/TRIGGER SPONSOR. Augusta Precious Metals: learn more at https://learn.augustapreciousmetals.com/trigger Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Introduction 11:14 How Does The US Military Compare To That Of Other Countries? 20:42 How Did The US Military Leadership End Up Like This? 28:34 Private Military Companies 38:46 PMCs Being Used In Place Of A Country's Military 41:13 The Development Of Drone Technology In Warfare 47:15 Erik On The Claims Of Israel Committing Genocide 55:01 Iran's Nuclear Capabilities 01:00:15 How Likely Is China To Invade Taiwan? 01:07:37 What's The Thing We're Not Talking About That We Should Be? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is the state of the Western world and its defenses at the moment? How do you assess that? I would say they're massively behind. The revolution and war that's happened in Ukraine, the acceleration with extremely cheap guided weapons, whether it's a cheap drone, cheap missile, all the legacy systems are much less useful in largely just targets. So it's democratized precision strike to everyone. When there's troops in contact in a valley in Afghanistan, and they have to call and talk to a lawyer 2,000 miles away for permission to drop a bomb, you're not serious about waging war. No one's been held to account. Not one flag officer. All the super polished generals, which are now serving on boards and hedge funds and universities and all the rest, they all lost. They were entrusted with our troops' lives with hundreds of billions of dollars.

and they failed to deliver. Eric, great to have you on the show. Nice to be here. Thanks for coming on. Listen, the first question we wanted to ask you is something that we in Europe are increasingly concerned about, which is what is the state of the Western world

and its defenses at the moment? How do you assess that? I would say they're massively behind. The criticism that Trump had in the first administration of only five of the 28 NATO countries actually spending 2% of their GDP on defense is even more stark,

Now, even though that number, I think, is 11 or 12 of the 28 are spending 2%, but the revolution and war that's happened in Ukraine, the acceleration with extremely cheap guided weapons, whether it's a cheap drone, cheap missile, long-range missiles, et cetera, everything, the explosion of that AI on the edge on that individual device and its ability to guide targets is largely rendered. billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of installed legacy military equipment largely useless, or really just targets. So talk to us more about that because the vast majority of the people who watch our show and, frankly, us too, are not military experts. So you say the revolution that's happened in this way, the drones we've seen, but tell us more about it. You say it's made things up.

Is a tank useless now? So the first strategic offset the U.S. had against the Soviet Union in the 50s and 60s was nuclear strike. And then it became a big contest of who could throw more tons. And then shifted towards precision delivery, precision weapons. And you saw that in the first Gulf War, you saw that in 2003 in the invasion of Iraq, aircraft from 25,000 feet, putting a bomb through the window of a building. Now you can carry a small drone on your back. You can carry six of them that you can fly through the window of a building from 15 kilometers away. So it's democratized. precision strike to everyone. And what that means is that anything that can be located on the battlefield,

a tank, infantry on the move, a vehicle is immediately targetable by dozens of different weapon systems. So it's made survivability extremely difficult. And you can't almost carry enough armor to protect yourself. So you either have to deal with speed or extreme stealth again. So it's shifted. You said, is the tank obsolete? no it's different because it's um there are so many weapons that can be be sent at it and it's and it's even made precision weapons much much cheaper for example a javelin missile which the u.s. is provided to the ukrainians it's $200,000 for the launcher 150,000 a shot the Ukrainians make a i would argue a better one for $29,000 but now you can take a small

drone that can carry a charge about this size and you put it together for a few hundred dollars. So a $500 drone, some better software for it with a charge and you're at two grand and you can kill a target out to 15 kilometers away. That's what I'm talking about, that revolution, that acceleration. So all the legacy systems are much less useful and largely just targets. And the obvious question then is who's got the step ahead on? on that stuff. Is it us? Is it the Chinese? Is it the Russians? The Russians have certainly learned. If you shot at the Russians with artillery two years ago, it would take them an hour and a half to

shoot back. And now they're shooting back in two to three minutes. So their communications, their radars, which link, which literally look and spot the incoming round and do the telemetry back to which point of origin to shoot back on, they have, you know, don't listen to the idiot US politicians that say, oh, we're, you know, wiping out the Russian army. No, the Russian army is much better, smarter and more lethal today than then, than it was two years ago. Ukrainians have also learned and had to to survive, but now it's really a battle of, it's a war of attrition and math matters. And the fact that the Russians can throw more bodies and we'll do a general mobilization is a big problem for the Ukrainians.

But I mean on a technological level, in terms of the technology, the drones, the AI, the software, Is the West, have we got the good stuff, or is there other people have got the good stuff? The China has certainly become a significant supplier of the Russian war machine, of the components to make up those drones, of the propellants needed to make the artillery rounds, etc. I mean, look, the war has largely, not frozen, but it's really more of a trench warfare kind of thing because both sides have so much precision weaponry that any breakthrough can immediately be targeted by that many more systems. Now you can even have drones that will deliver landmines

ahead of a of a convoy of tanks. The advantage the Chinese have is an enormous industrial base. I think it's important for the American audience to remember we think, wow, you know, we won the war in World War II? No. We lost 250,000 men in the European Theater of Operations. 250,000. The Russians lost 22 million. And while we were still messing around in North Africa in Morocco and Tunisia, the Russians had erased 800,000 men from the German Order of

Battle at Stalingrad. And they lost a million two doing that. But what made it possible for the Russians to win was to mechanize their forces. And that came from 600,000 vehicles from Detroit. Yes. And thousands and thousands of aircraft and ships and logistic supply. The U.S. industrial base is a hollow fraction of what it was back then, and that's where the biggest, most obvious deficit is now.

So that would suggest that what we're in now is a world where, almost like in World War II, where we have these superpowers who are competing with one another for dominance. Would you refute that? Look, there's always been a competition

for land, for trade dominance, that's as old as people throwing sticks at each other. But the free trade agreements that hollowed out the U.S. industrial base and moved that industrial base to China is certainly shown to not be an advantage to the United States or for Europe, for that matter. And in both cases, the military industrial complex in the United States and in Europe has not done any favors by always trying to offer the most exquisite, most expensive, unique thing instead of the practical thing that actually lasts and works in battle. And so that balance is very skewed. Like I talk about the $150,000 Raytheon missile versus the $29,000 Ukrainian missile,

ultimately war is a battle of math as well in what's affordable. and the U.S. literally shoots itself out of missiles in the first 10 days maximum of full-on-state-on-state combat. And that's just an asinine position to be in. Do you think part of that is because, as with the NHS in this country, where they're overcharged for basic products, that private companies simply wouldn't countenance paying that amount of money for? So the U.S. Army gets overcharged continually for basic things. It comes down to a lack of competition amongst the supply base. So in the 90s, the U.S. or the Clinton administration kind of pushed a consolidation of our defense industry from about 100 defense contractors

down to five. And so that five for the last few decades has behaved like a cartel with less and less competition, kind of a clubby approach to bidding and with a demonstrable failed results. and so antitrust that works across all industries, whether it's in railways or airlines or banking, certainly has to apply in defense as well. So a breakup of those big bloated companies and I would say even by leapfrog that, there's a lot of great innovation happening at the small and midsize level, award more contracts to them and let those guys build and run hard to catch up because big and bloated is, it embodies all the bad habits, and it'll be hard for them to unlearn that. And that puts the U.S. in a very fragile position because there's one thing you don't want to be,

well, you don't want anything to be big and bloated, let's be honest. But above all, you don't want your military to be big and bloated because it needs to be nimble and agile, particularly when you're fighting in territories which are not your own. Particularly when the most expensive weapon system in human history, the F-35, has an operational readiness rate of 29%. 29%. Come on. That's bad. Because you have so many soul-sourced...

Can I just stop you there? What does that mean? Because there's people going to be listening to, so you're going, that sounds terrible. Out of 100 aircraft, if I say, jock up, we're going to war right now. 29 are ready to fly. At fully mission-capable.

But why is that? Maintenance, vendor issues, software issues, over-s sophistication, and just, they've had some that they produced that they couldn't do software upgrades to, so the military is not even taking them

and they're parked forever. It's like Frankenstein's monster because they expected this aircraft to not just do Air Force, Air superiority, but also to have it land an aircraft carrier, and oh, the Marine Corps wanted one that could take off and land vertically. So they expect all this out of one aircraft,

and it's an impossibly overpriced mass. Again, the most expensive, weapon system in human history, which is woefully deficient. And when you look at other armies, how does the U.S. therefore, compare to other armies? We've talked about the Russians. How much do we actually know about the Chinese army? Do they have the same problems? Because I imagine they must have the same challenges when you look at how many people are involved in it, et cetera. It's a military consist of multiple things. It's not just the hardware that's available,

the quantity of hardware, but it's also the heartware, right, of the people, right? There's an old saying, it's not the steel in the ships that makes a great Navy, it's the steel and the men. It might have been a British Admiral that said that, I'm not sure.

China has certainly, on the industrial base side, they have a lot of supply, they can drive that cost very low. They do have quality problems, okay, legitimately. They have a leadership problem, even as bad as the U.S. military's leadership problem,

we have them because we have bureaucrats that have been promoted, not warriors. The Chinese have a problem of corruption of those senior military positions are paid for, through graft. And once they're in that position, they kind of harvest the fruits of their position. So it's not necessarily, you want the very best, right?

A military should be about lethality and merit, nothing else. and the U.S. military has drifted from that course, and I think Pete Higgseth is trying to take him back in the right direction of lethality and merit. China has its corruption problems. But ultimately, I think military, when you look through history, generals make good decisions, but it's the sergeants

and the staff officers that carry it out at the bleeding edge of battle. And in the West, the empowering and the decision-making that an NCO will make is very, very good. It's culturally good in the West because they'll make a decision, they'll take a risk and go left, even though somebody might be saying go right, because they're applying common sense with the most information at hand.

The very, very top-down-driven decision-making of Chinese culture is troubling in an extremely fast-paced modern war. And we saw that in the Russia-Ukraine war as well, initially particularly when the Russians were having a lot of. problems, organizing things, supply lines, et cetera. I'd be curious to ask you, you mentioned lethality and merit.

We talk a lot about, you know, wokeness and DEI on this show. We have done, at least in the past. You know, a lot of people in our space are not military experts will say, well, obviously, you know, if you have DEI in armed forces, they're not going to be good. Is that wrong? Again, if you focus on who, I don't care which bathroom somebody uses or who they sleep with, how well can they drive that ship,

fight that ship, conduct combat operations from their aircraft, or lead a small unit in battle, that's what matters. It's not what their skin color is. It's not an apportionment of the right people, of the right ethnic diversity, having positions of authority.

No, I want decisive, bold leaders, killers in those positions to make those decisions because modern warfare happens at an even faster pace. Well, no, that totally makes sense. So I guess what I was asking really is, do you feel that prior to the new administration, the quality of the armed forces was degraded by this process, of trying to make it inclusive?

Especially the senior leadership, yes. A completely mal-directed leadership when they're enforcing, when they're spending more and more time doing diversity training instead of marksmanship, land nav, gunnery, whatever the lethalities are. Simple examples of U.S. Navy in the 2016, 1718 period killed more sailors by ship collisions, by U.S. warships in the South China Sea or off Singapore

running into commercial vessels. Okay? There's three collisions, two of them with multiple fatalities, of a billion-dollar Burke-class destroyer running into a commercial ship in a seaway. Okay? Now, this is something with a half a million dollar combat information center to fight the ship and organize it, and yet you can't see a 50,000-ton cargo ship coming at you at 25 knots. That's the kind of stupidity.

The Bonham Richard, which was a helicopter carrier that started on fire while it's in port in San Diego, it took them an hour and a half to get first water fighting the fire in the bowels of the ship. The entire ship had to be written off. So it's a billion dollar, you know, oh shit moment. The Navy just in December, operations in the Red Sea, they're doing a lot of sorties because they're shooting down all these incoming drones at the ships. And a U.S. cruiser fires multiple missiles, shoots down one aircraft, shoots a second missile

at another aircraft, he goes to burners and gets away. But yeah, they literally shot down two of their own, well, shot down one, almost shot down a second. And these were aircraft that were not 30 and 50 miles out on patrol.

They were in the traffic pattern on final to land on the carrier. These are the kind of, and this is in peacetime. That's the kind of, oh shit moments you cannot have. But are you right? connect this, look, I hate DEI as much than anybody, but are you right to connect this

to stuff like that, or is this just something that's kind of statistically speaking in a huge organization, someone is always going to wreck something? For example, when those two ships, when they had the ship collisions, they had multiple cases of crewmen instead of manning their damage control station, were cowering in the corners

crying. What? That doesn't sound like that's what they should do. It's fact. The Navy had to change boot camp to do resiliency training after that, to try to tough enough. So that's a a cultural problem, and I would say that derives from either hiring the wrong people or providing the wrong training to say, hey, folks, we are not a cruise ship, we're a fighting ship, and we're here to prepare to wage naval combat, which is brutal and fiery and violent, and if you're

not training with that mentality, you're in the wrong business. That's, I mean, look, I've never been around war. I'm not a military person. in any shape or form. But to me, isn't that just common sense, Eric? Well, your audience may not be military experts, but I hope they're common sense experts. So there's a lot of this that comes down to common sense. Because that to me, if you, the long spot, oh look, in a crisis situation, whatever it is, whatever your area of expertise is, that shouldn't be your reaction, whether you're a medic, whether you're a firefighter, whether you're an ambulance, whatever you may be.

But for the military, I mean, that's unforgivable. I wouldn't expect that of an actor. Yeah, I'm not making it up. I wish I was. And that worries me because that means that when you look at these superpowers, like the Russians and the Chinese, I don't know. And maybe I don't know enough. I can't imagine a situation like that happening

and Chinese soldiers having a meltdown and starting to cry. It's a culture of too many training timeouts where they say, oh, this is too intense for me and I have to take a break from training. No, you don't get to hit pause in a firefight. Do you feel that that's about to change all of this? I think so. I think Pete Hegeseth as SecDef is setting the right tone

and hopefully there's going to be some significant firings of a lot of people that don't belong in the positions that they are anymore. At Trigonometry, we value transparency and expertise in all our partnerships. That's exactly why we've chosen Augusta precious metals. Personally, I've taken steps to protect my wealth with gold. Augusta makes that process simple and trustworthy.

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Do you know what I found weird about this whole thing, Eric, and you emphasise that it's senior leaders in particular that are causing all of this. And I just think, like, how did we get to, you look at the here? history of America's military, from the generals that you had at the time of World War II and since, to generals who are now pushing DEI and talking about, you know, white supremac, and all of this stuff that we've seen. How did that happen? When General Marshall took over his chief of staff in 1939, September, same day that the Germans rolled into Poland, he took over the U.S. military, U.S. Army, and he fired dozens of generals and colonels because they were ready to fight the last

war. They were still wanting to fight trench warfare of World War I. And he prepared. He kind of felt the fight coming, and he made the moves to get it ready. The naval command that started where we're in charge at the beginning of World War II were not the ones that were in charge. We started the global war on terror in 2001, and never was there a house cleaning. So we had peacetime generals, flag officers. And all those people stayed in and it kind of became a self-licking ice cream cone because it was a managed war. I would say a conflict of convenience, not of national survival. And so no one ever said, well, wait a minute.

I want only the most lethal, effective commanders in this role. And it all became a promotion game. I mean, at some point, the U.S. in Iraq had 93 flag officers on the ground. 93, don't imagine. Just their staff and their personal support and all the rest meant they had an entire brigade of staff support supporting 93 flag officers in Iraq alone. So it becomes very bloated, like the hardware side of things. Horrifically bloated. As overpriced and bloated and obese as the defense industry is selling highly overpriced products, you can see the same thing in the flag officer corps. And is that? There's just too many. of them. Is that why, you know, we had Nick Freitas on the show a while back. I'm good. And one of the things she talked about, and we've heard this from a lot of people, anecdotally,

privately as well, is on the show. A lot of people lower down the ranks who wanted to serve their country, who wanted to do that job, leaving after a while because they just got tired of all the BS. Sure, the Warriors leave. And in another bad case, right, so that you get a high utilization rate during the Iraq-Afghanistan conflicts. And normally the U.S. Army promotes 75% of captains to majors, right? From 03 to 04. For a while, they were promoting 95% or 99%. Because everyone was leaving above them, right?

Sure. And so when you don't cut out your bottom quartile of turds, the turds eventually float to the top. And so do that systemically across the organization for 15, 20 years. That's what we have now. So again, there's some great people that are serving, but there's a lot of not great ones. And so it is time to window that down. We have as many flag officers now in the military as we did in World War II, actually more.

In World War II, we had 14 million men under arms in America. Now we have less than 1.4, but the same amount of flag officers in an era of video conferences, emails, right, instant communication, where you should be able to run a flat and fast organization. We have bloat upon bloat upon bloat. And that is the winnowing, the rationalization that I hope Secretary Hegeseth does and cuts our flag officers down probably by 70, 80%, is what the number that should come off.

And how badly has the war in Iraq affected the morale of people in the army and people especially looking to join? Because I remember in 2003, there were marches on the street, of the UK and people were saying this is an unjust war, which is then later proven to be true. So how many people were actually going, I don't want to join the army because we would lie to back then. How can I trust the information that I'm being given now?

I wouldn't say that's not even the issue. The issue is once you're there, how it's conducted. And when you have politicians, so we really allowed lawyers to infiltrate the military to infect it, almost like zampalets, like the political commissars were in the Soviet Union. Okay, in a, in a Soviet naval ship, squadron, ground combat unit, next to the commander would be the zampalit, the political officer, who would enforce the will of the party. We've allowed lawyers to second guess and to undercut command authority at every level. And so the issue is not what happened 20 years ago when this war started. It's how are we getting it on and how are we fighting and how would be allowed to fight.

And when it's constant half measures, when there's troops in contact in a valley in Afghanistan, and they have to call and talk to a lawyer 2,000 miles away in an air-conditioned cubicle in Doha, right, at LUD Air Force Base, where the CENTCOM headquarters are, for permission to drop a bomb, you're not serious about waging war. And it undervalues the value of the troops because it's more important for some lawyer and their ass covering about whether you can drop a bomb or not. that's the thing that really pisses troops off. Because it also compromises troop safety.

Because when you're... Unequivocally, when you over-lawyer and you prevent ground commanders from seeing through and winning fights decisively, you get half-assed managed conflict for 20 years in Afghanistan that ends in a complete blowout, debacle, collapse, embarrassment. And again, no one's been held to account. Not one flag officer. All the super-polished generals

which are now serving on boards and hedge funds and universities and all the rest, they all lost. They were entrusted with our troops' lives with hundreds of billions of dollars, and they failed to deliver. And there's been no accountability for that. The only guy that's been held accountable for Afghanistan is Lieutenant Colonel Stu Scheller. Why? Because he had the audacity on camera in a uniform to call bullshit on the officers to say,

hey, because at that point he was the head of the infantry training, school at Quantico for officers. And he said, if some of my students go to the range and they lose their M-16, they're going to be punished. Who's punished for losing and for completely effing up in Afghanistan? And they drove them out of the military for that. With like 18 or 19 years, no pension. Again, so yeah, there's some raw ire amongst the veterans. And I have suffered this much compared to guys who have suffered their mental health, their physical health. lost limbs, eyes, families, brain health. It's ridiculous that we have no accountability,

and that's ultimately what rots of military. More than overpriced weapons and stupidity, it is a lack of confidence in the leadership to, A, take care of their people, and B, to get the job done that they were hired to do. Because it's about priorities. And if your priority is covering your ass, then your priority...

You're going to cover your ass. to the detriment of your people. Yeah. Then why should people trust you? Because that's the number one thing. It doesn't matter with any type of leader. If you can't trust your leader, if you don't think that your leader has your best interest at heart,

why are you going to listen to them? And especially why are you going to follow them into battle? And why should they be trusted on the boards that they sit now? Because they fucked up what they did before. Well, Eric, it's one of the things that you have, obviously, particular expertise in is private military companies. And this has become a thing that we see in Ukraine with the Wagner group. And I know you've talked at some points about the ability of these units to do a different job

or to do the same job as the main military better. Can you talk a little bit about that? By the way, I notice you tense up as I asked the question. Did I say? Oh, God, no. No, I lifted too hard this morning. That is the most alpha answer to that question. That is your own friend.

It's the truth. Yeah, I just pulled a muscle shooting. massive grenade launch. Yeah. Look, the private sector has been, I think it's a big misnomer for people to think that PMCs are some new invention. They're literally as old as warfare. If you were laying siege to a city in Eastern Europe a thousand years ago and you needed

somebody to run the Trebuechets and the battering ram, those were contracted professionals, those engineers. Right. So all through history, whether it's the artillery men, the other specialists that gets pulled into it. As you get to, so I think a pendulum swinging back towards more use of private military contractors is probably more along the historical norm, right? When America was fighting for his independence, nine out of ten ships taken, the American Revolution were taken by privateers. Private ship, private crew. It was such a thing that it's actually written into the U.S. Constitution.

Before it even talks about Congress raising an army or a Navy, it talks about. a letter of mark and reprisal. So there's even talk of bringing back the letter of Mark as a way to go after cartels in the physical world or in the cyber world. So the idea of private organizations that can organize, and I guess an even simpler example would be what Elon Musk has done in revolutionizing space launch.

If he tried to do that only through a government entity, it was constantly beating his head against the wall, against bureaucracy and nonsense. And he obviously said, look, we're going to lower the cost of launch by a thousandfold, and he's doing it. In an era of vastly quick, evolving technology, the private sector is about the only thing that can keep up at that pace of advance. And so skilled people that can organize the right people with the right mindset, the right incentives, with the right equipment, you'll find that

more and more happening. You could even say, even in your The one smart thing that Zelensky did the whole war was he opened up the arm race when the Russian invasion happened. So people could go grab an anti-tank missile, RPG, or whatever, and they innovated. And that's who really did the first FPV drones with the small charges that they just figured it out out of necessity. What you'll see, I think, going forward, you see a lot of countries that won investment in struggling parts of the world. and people are reluctant to do so because there's no security that goes with it. And you'll see more and more a resource investment or an infrastructure investment that comes with its own almost attached PMC, which is largely, it's not all expats, there's a few expats, largely governing, managing local forces to secure that capability.

almost the same way, you know, the first presence of Britain in the United States, the Massachusetts Bay, Jamestown, Plymouth companies were listed on the city of London Exchange. They hired people like John Smith and Miles Standish, former professional British officers that joined onto these companies and built this trading presence colony. I mean, the ones in up north were there to harvest tall trees. for masts for Her Majesty ships. So this is a reversion to what the historical norm is. After the kind of all-government all-the-time approach,

after World War II for the last, you know, over that 50 years, you're seeing a swing back towards a lot more private sector participation, which, like I said, goes back a couple thousand years. And can you give us some examples? I mean, talk about infrastructure of situations where you really would want a private military company involved versus the military trying to do it in a kind of...

The simplest thing is a PMC can organize much smaller footprint and significantly cheaper. Probably at 10% or less the cost structure of what a military can. And I'll just give a simple example of a place that we took over in the Blackwater days. It was a remote base that had to be secure in a very weird place. And we replaced 166 soldiers of 25 bar guys. Okay, the Army had a 28-man rifle platoon, but they had to send 138 support people to support 28.

I sent 25 guys, and five of the guys were dual-hatted to keep the water, the power, the sanitation, the food, and the vehicles running, and it all just worked. And that's a very simple thing because a private organization has to know what its costs are. You're doing a firm fixed price versus the military. When everything is a free good, you tend to use a lot more free goods. And so the taxpayers get the bill and we realize it's really not so free. Is the danger with this, obviously there was a controversy with Blackwater in Iraq. Sure. But also you see it with the Wagner group in Ukraine where Yvgeny Progogsian, the late Yvgeny Pregozhen, you know, really started to feel pretty powerful.

And, you know, guys who have private armies get a sort of sense of themselves as potential political players and start to mess around. What are the trade-offs of this reversion to what you call the norm? Well, when countries or companies hire this capability, they're doing a defined mission. And I would say it's much cheaper. It doesn't have the long-term cost in insurance and retirements that full-time militaries do. Of course, you have to operate under some countries' letter of the law. And you could argue that people can complain about PMCs, not adhering to the law, but you could also say, well, M23 or any of the 130 different resource gangs that are operating completely without abandon.

I mean, 80% of the women in Eastern DRC are raped. Okay. So people can complain about a private military company being out of control. Well, I would say sending proven people that have served well in a, in a. in a real military with real discipline and real honor before, sending them to do a job is a better predictor of good behavior in future performance than allowing the status quo of total insanity and meltdown when you have 80% rape from 130 different resource gangs and a nation state sponsoring an attack like Rwanda having invaded the DRC. Or in Haiti, where you have

gangs controlling about 90% of the terrain of Porta Prince, where not just gangs, they're cannibals. So you have an entire country of 12 million literally held hostage by completely drugged out psychopaths. There's a lot of countries that deserve better. And I think the space created the last 50 years you've seen the U.S. government with USAID spending wildly and saying, oh, yeah, we got this and we can manage this. and we're great at it. Clearly, they're not. And I'm happy to see Trump clip their wings on that.

And I think you'll see, again, a reversion to actual private sector efficiency and accountability. And if people don't like that, they'll change vendors. They'll find a different solution. But the all-government-all-the-time solution has demonstrably failed. Thanks to today's sponsor, Venice.

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If you want to use AI with privacy, freedom and without censorship, then right now you can get 20% of a pro plan by clicking the link in the description of this episode and using R code trigonometry. That link is venice.a.ai slash trigonometry. And now back to the show. Eric, is there a danger that countries use private military companies when they want to do certain activities, tasks, missions that they don't want to associate it with their military? So, for instance, China would hire a private military company to go somewhere in South America or Africa to take out a hit against a group of people, which they know is illegal, but it can't be traced back to their military. Well, effectively China did that in the last Mexican election cycle because there was 37 political candidates assassinated in Mexico by the cartels and they were all right of center candidates.

So the same China that's been pushing fentanyl precursors into Mexico into Venezuela, now making, fabricating fentanyl in Mexico to make sure that the political scene stayed friendly to the Chinese Communist Party. they whacked that many political candidates. So whether it's whoever blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, was it a PMC, was it an intelligence agency, who knows? But do you have a theory on who did? I think the Brits did it. Really? Because we think the Americans did it. I don't think we're that competent, man.

Why do you think it's the Brits? Because Britain has always taken. And if you look back 200 years of history, Britain has always taken the side of the dominant, they've taken the opposite side of the dominant land power in Europe. Yes. Well, there's been British policy for hundreds of years, right? Exactly. Yeah.

So why not, why not now? And to clip, well, Germany has just gone so completely astray politically that it's, I hope they come back. Well, there's different ways Germany can come back. So what I was going to say is the reason the people, many think people, the Americans did it, is that it's in America's economic interest for Europeans to get their gas from America. I cannot see anyone in the Biden administration having the balls to authorize that. That's interesting. Yeah. Well, I'm glad I asked anyway.

Yeah. And just looking. And to be clear, I haven't had a clearance and I have no inside knowledge of it at all. Yeah, sure. You have no inside knowledge. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, glad we got those disclaimers out there, Eric.

But it's a very interesting world now from a military perspective. And we've had many guests on the show, some of whom have got a military background. And many of them have said, this is the most fraught that the world has been in a long period of time. Do you buy into that or do you think? Yes. The acceleration of precision drone technology is the biggest pendulum swing in military change, really since. Jenghis Khan put stirrups on horses. And we know what that caused, right? I mean, he created the largest empire the world has ever seen from the Pacific coast to Hungary. Because now you

could stand up in the saddle and fire your bow at a high rate of speed. So it accelerated war from walking into battle to now riding into battle. You know, so as he, as they rolled across Asia, he had a hundred and fifty thousand man army with an extra 300,000 horse. So each man had three horses in cycle so they could just move hundreds of miles a day and deliver vast volumes of firepower. And after they conquered some stuff in China, he adapted siege works and battering rams and all that stuff so he could take on fortified cities as well. It was incredible. And the amount of cheap precision weaponry now is making those kind of black swan events, not just possible but likely. I mean, look at what happened in Syria just a few weeks ago.

You know, the entire Syrian Arab army was wiped. That was a combination of small drones, Turkish intelligence, Turkish special operations, kind of hiding behind some. That was not indigenous. That was the Turks taking out Assad. So that must mean that every country now has seen what's happening, particularly the technology, described, and they're preparing, if not literally, but they're certainly preparing mentally for war, because everything is more unstable.

I would say most militaries are too conservative in the wrong sense of the word. They're too slow and I would say not fully aware of just how volatile the change is. Because we had Douglas Murray on and he was talking about how the IDF weren't prepared for the attack from Hamas, which completely bears out what you're saying in that there was a complacency. Correct. They assumed that their sigant listening to everything that was going on in Gaza. and they thought, ah, nothing's happening. So what did Hamas do? They learned, and they had all their meetings face-to-face and didn't send, they kept on their normal activity,

so there'd be no change, and they went to face-to-face meetings to completely un-collectable. And on the morning of October 7th, they went for it. They used small drones with grenades and dropped it on the very expensive watchtowers with the cameras and the remote weapon stations, and they took them out.

they um we talk about uh hardware and hardware um there was um the the head of the military the shabakh the mosade met at 2 a m the morning of october 7 because there was noise of the system they knew there was something happening but they weren't sure what and it was also a religious holiday almost what 50 years to the no uh from yam kippur so a an anniversary of of yom kippur holiday um they met didn't decide much and they said okay let's meet again at eight a m which was two hours after the attack happened the only guy that did something was the head of shabakh and he sent a couple of 12-man teams to the south. Not sure what to do, just like go and be ready. If the military had said, hey, wake all the troops up and at least make him go to sleep with their guns, or, you know,

put them on extra guard stations, those bases would not have been overrun, very different outcome. But again, the guy that the Shabak guy that sent the 12-man teams, one of them, on the north end of Gaza, there's a road that goes north to a city called Ashkelon, which is like 300,000 people. 12-man team occupied a traffic circle and they fought to the last man. Okay. 11 or the 12 were killed, killing hundreds of Hamas guys who were trying to get to Ashkelons. Because imagine if 10 or 100 Hamas dudes made it to Ashkelon,

the number of killed on October 7 would have been four or five times that amount. So individual valor when the game is on still matters as much or more than technology. So, and again, they were not prepared. prepared for drones as much as the IDF could shoot down incoming missiles, shoot down, shoot down incoming rockets with with Iron Dome. They had a hell of a time with small drones coming, coming from Hezbollah in the north. 50% of those were getting through and smashing targets. And again, military bureaucracy, very slow to adapt versus private individual initiative.

I have a friend there. and he just said to hell with it, I'm going to solve this problem. He went and dragged out of the Israeli Air Force Museum an M-1-13 with an M-61 Vulcan cannon. Now, that's a six-barrel 20-millimeter minigone that was designed from the 60s as an air defense gun, drags it out, takes it to his shop, puts a Tesla battery on it, puts a new fire control system on it, and makes it a fully automated anti-dron system, which is still sitting on post, right of along the coast, shooting down incoming Hesbilla drones. And he did it in like four weeks.

Extraordinary. It was kind of the same kind of innovation you saw in Ukraine of adapting toy drones or recreational drones with small explosives. He did the same thing with an automated fire control system. So the more innovation, if you have smart people and you turn them loose, they're going to have some amazing creativity when you needed. Well, it sounds like what you're really telling us is the entire technological and AI revolution that everyone's banging on about.

generally is happening in the military very rapidly as well. But the thing that if you don't mind me asking this, that interests me since we mentioned Israel, you're a guy who's an expert in combat and military and all of that. What do you make of the claims that Israel is committing genocide, that this has been deliberate targeting of civilians, the casualties are off the charts, etc. Do you have any thoughts on that?

I went there three weeks after October 7. and I cannot claim to be any combat expert. I read a lot of military history. But I also understand military bureaucracies pretty well. And I understand, and look, and I said this with great love to my Israeli friends, I've known a lot of Jewish financiers of oil and gas projects. I've never met a Jewish roughneck, okay? The guy that's out there working the rig.

So knowing that or knowing that the IDF draws from its reservists, they're not going to have a lot of current experience in running rigs are what the current state of technology is of directional drilling. And so I brought them the very best in Texas. The guy who does all the drilling for SpaceX and for Exxon, okay, pretty sophisticated customers. Because I think the IDF walked into the exact fight that Hamas wanted to have, which was a conventional fight in Gaza. And Hamas prepared for that by building, what, 500 kilometers of tunnels underneath, which has been a huge problem. for the IDF. And so I said, let's bring great drilling technology and just flood the hell out of

everything. Everything below grade is getting flooded with seawater. You can say, oh, you're going to damage the aquifer. It's easier to fix than 20,000, whatever the tens of thousands of civilian casualties that would have been sustained or deaths. And so drilling rig that can drill a pilot hole that big with a cutter that big. So we had turbine-driven pump. 12,000 horsepower that could deliver 60,000 gallons a minute to literally turn everything underground soaking. Why does that matter? It would have taken away the enemy's ability to maneuver. They can't run and hide, pop up somewhere else. All their underground weapons caches would have been destroyed and it would have forced all the hostages to the surface because Hamas does not want

dead hostages. They can't negotiate with those. And so I think, look, there's some set of the IDF that just wanted to kill as many people as possible as a punitive raid. But I think it's set back, I think the war has set back the image of Israel in a lot of parts of the world quite badly by how that, by by giving Hamas the fight that they wanted to have. I wanted to take away Hamas's ability to use tunnels without the drama of explosives. Zuck can complain as much about water. So why didn't they do that? Senior bureaucratic decision making. Actually, the people closest, like the Yachalom, the combat unit guys, the ones that were close to the field, they were all about doing it because they saw the merit versus it's the classic, the closest you are to the flagpole and the

senior leadership, the more divorced you are from reality. And sadly, they were listening to other idiots in the Pentagon that said, yeah, don't do that. I think it's a bad look for the IDF to have to trade back, to get hostages back 15 months after October 7 and to see a battalion of Hamas guys with their headbands doing the happy dance because for them to survive is a win for them because there is still thousands of Hamas fighters in Gaza. That's a problem that has not been not been dealt with yet. But other than that, I appreciate your idea sounds really good to me as a non-expert. That sounds like a great idea. But given that the decision was made not to do that. Do you think the way that Israel has prosecuted this war has been...

Look, I think it's... Fighting in urban areas is the most difficult. And it's even more difficult when there's civilian refugees living there. And then you're trying to strike targets and you have an enemy that's actively living and hiding and even using humans for shields to maximize civilian casualties. So it's an impossibly difficult task. Of course, if you're going to fight in urban combat with civilians there, there's going to be civilian casualties.

So Israel is damned if they do and damned if they don't. I tried to take away the need for that level of energetics by making it water instead. I mean, I remember having an early conference call with their smart people from their version of DARPA. And Bobby, my lead drilling CEO from Texas. And they said, well, you know, we tried directional drilling six years ago. It didn't work. there was clay and it took too long and it wasn't very accurate. And my guy got on the phone and he goes, well, last year I drilled from one side of the

Mississippi River to the other. And, you know, we had a competition amongst the boys. I was aiming for a stake and I hit the stake. Is that good enough for you? I mean, it's miles across the Mississippi River towards the mouth. It's clay, it's mud. And he hit it. And so, yeah, it was frustrating.

It was frustrating to have a solution. And for the Israeli guys to say, well, we tried drilling and pumping. Yeah, they're pumping water like this. Not this. Size matters. It's the most controversial thing you said, all episode, Eric. But I look at the situation in the Middle East, and we had Tony Abbott on the show,

former Prime Minister of Australia. And he made the point that he thinks that Iran is a few months away from being able to produce a nuclear weapon. And the moment he said that, I felt a chill run down my spine because this changes everything, doesn't it, if they can do that? Yes, because they are crazy enough that they would do it.

They would use it, right? When you have nuclear non-aggression treaties and PACS that you're, you know, when the U.S. was negotiating with Soviet Union, we both had the assumption that we had rational leadership that did not wish to extinct the other side. You can't say that about the Mullis. So what do we do if this intelligence proves to be? true if we know that there are a few months. Do you think it's true, by the way?

They're very close. People have been saying this for years, man. So even though Tony's a friend and I trust him, I don't know what to think about it. Every business owner wishes they had a crystal ball to see what's coming next. But while predicting the future is impossible, preparing for it isn't. That's why over 41,000 businesses trust NetSuite by Oracle. the number one cloud ERP that gives you real-time financials, inventory management, an HR in one streamlined system.

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at net suite.com slash trigger. One more time, that's netsuite.com slash trigger. Now, back to the shot. And when some of the exchanges that were happening, weapons exchanges between Iran and Israel, one of the ones that was problematic for me to see was one of the ballistic missiles that came orching through with some kind of a hypersonic that hit inside Israel.

I think it hit a parking lot. But if that was carrying a nuke, that would have clacked off. And that would have, you know, whether it's 100 meters or a kilometer from an apartment building, it's going to leave a mark. Sure. If it's a nuke. So they maybe have the means to deliver a weapon if they have it or even a dirty bomb, also a big problem because Israel doesn't have that much land.

What I've been advocating for years is that the intelligence services should have done in Iran what we did in Poland in the 80s, which was largely your communications first. You empower, in that case, they reached out to the solidarity movement, the shipyard workers, the farmers, the students, the churches, the other civil rights groups. and you empower other centers of authority that the central party doesn't control. In the case of Iran, you have the Baloch, the Akwazi Arabs, the Kurds, the Azeris, and of course Persians, right? And the Iranian leadership,

even though the Supreme Leader is ethnic Azeri, the rest of them are Persians, and the rest of the country doesn't really like that. And they really hate the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, because they're really like the, they're as hated as the SS was in 1940s Germany. They're the guys that make, the more you sanction Iran, the more money it makes for the IRGC,

to the detriment of the rest of the population. So empowering civil groups, ethnic groups that are opposed to the rule of the mullahs, that's what we should be doing and take it down from the inside. I think history shows that any time that you attack Iran from the outside, from Persia from the outside, it generally unites the population more and it congeals, but it's like putting a firecracker in a hand. You need a lot less of it to pop it from the inside. That's what I would do.

Because when we've seen the war in Gaza, we've come to this point where you could say how much has actually changed, how much has actually changed, particularly when you think that it's Iran funding all of this, because we haven't solved the problem of Iran at all. No, look, you haven't solved the problem of the Houthis. They basically the Iranian supercharged the Houthis in Yemen and they have shut down the Red Sea.

And, I mean, Egypt is losing $800 million a month by not having all the Suez transit fees because the Houthis firing Iranian drones, Iranian cruise missiles or Iranian ballistic missiles at any ship passing through at, and they fired hundreds of those at U.S. or other coalition. vessels trying to do escort duty. The U.S. Navy said they've, they, they claim that they fired a billion dollars worth of missiles knocking all this stuff down. It's a wrong number. It's more like four or five billion because they're counting the inventory cost from when they bought it in the mid-90s. To replace it now, they're going to pay four or five billion dollars. So, so yeah, you have surrogates from the Iranians that have gotten stronger and better, even Hamas still surviving. They have taken, they've unquestionably taken a blow in the law. Lebanon, Hezboa has definitely been degraded. And again, I don't take anything away from the

valor of Israeli soldiers trying to recover their hostages. But leadership matters. And I think decisions, some of the decisions could have made differently to have a better outcome, both for resolution of the hostage crisis, meaning Israel wins, Israel recovered their hostages, unless civilians would have died. I mean, in contrast to that, the brilliance of the brilliance of of the pager strike will go down in history as one of the great asymmetric wins. And I say compliments to an institution that could accept that level of crazy idea, right?

Imagine what probably junior staffer showed up at the Monday morning meeting and said, hey, I get an idea, let's infiltrate the supply chain and put explosives in all their pagers and clack off their hips, right? So that is brilliant to have that level of risk tolerance. I wish the CIA, have that kind of risk tolerance anymore. We do not.

Well, one of the interesting things from J.D. Vance's speech, not the one that everyone was banging on about in Munich, but at the AI summit, really seemed to me like a total reset of America's relationship with risk. He really talked about the fact that we've become very risk-averse as a civilization and as a culture. And it sounds to me, I was enthused by that personally. It sounds to me like you think that's the right direction of travel. Look, what made America great was wildcatters, right? People that would that would bet it all to make something happen. And, you know, there's a great book called the Texas oil patch called The Big Rich. And it talks about these wildcatters that would hit it big and then they'd hit a rough patch and then they literally backed down. They'd go from a mansion to living in the backseat of their car to invest their last few thousand dollars to drill another hole and they'd hit it again. Or I even, I even, I even, admire that when musk right he's he's down to his last few tens of millions and he puts half into tesla and half on space x and he goes out to johnson atoll and he's got enough to fire three rockets

and the first two blow up and they hit it on the third and that that gets them the nassar contract but um call it a bet at all gambler that believes in themselves to to to pursue an idea to make something happen i truly laud that yeah it's it's that thing that makes America great. It's that enterprise. It's that feeling of we can do this, which I feel that we lack in Europe. And I think it's very much needed because we're going to need to call on you again, and I really love your opinion on this. When you look at China looking covetously at Taiwan, how likely do you think it is that China is going to stage an invasion? demographically if the mainland waits just another 10 years

Taiwan will have collapsed that much more right because they're way below the replacement rate with fertility um china is too but they got a whole bigger stack they have a bigger pool to draw from yeah yeah but they but they have they have also the problems of uh of sex selection abortion and a one child policy when you have what 30 40 million males of marriage age with no prospects of marrying a female. You know, for Xi Jinping, every general, every senior general has bought that position.

And they bought a lot of stuff and they'll blow a lot of sunshine at them to say, yeah, yeah, yeah, we can do this. Let's go, go, go. If China is going to physically, forcibly seize Taiwan, it is a very high-risk poker because if she fails,

he'll die. He'll be replaced with a bullet. China imports 80% of their hydrocarbons. Most of it comes through the Straits of Malacca up to the East Coast. So they're highly subject. If they're going to go fast, they cannot be a two-year, two-and-a-half-year Ukraine war. And again, to invade Ukraine, you've got to rev up your tank and let the clutch out and let it roll across the border. Yeah.

To do it in Taiwan, you have to do an amphibious invasion, truly, demonstrably one of the hardest forms of combat. Why is that? because you're just moving stuff by sea. And it's another huge variable because weather has an even bigger factor. Not to mention there's not any real good beaches in Taiwan. And so it's a whole other thing for an untested military. Look, the U.S. and Brits had, we had our problems doing amphibious operations in World War II already. That institutional knowledge has been recorded, but largely forgotten.

there's only so much you can do in practicing and trying to rehearse that, that would not be blatantly obvious. The Chinese just in the last month have fielded some very obvious amphibious barges that are for nothing other than crossing the large mud flats of the flat areas of the tidal areas of Taiwan. So again, if they're going to go, they have to go fast. What I've recommended again and again, and I'll do it here, is the best. thing that Taiwan could do is spend it on a home guard because in an era of precision weapons where China literally has tens of thousands of precision missiles aimed at every known valuable point in Taiwan to be targeted, whether it's an aircraft bunker, a command bunker, a surface-to-air

missile, whatever, what they can't calculate for is the 3% of the population that says not today. When America was fighting for its independence from the Brits, you had 30% that were pro, there were there were loyalists 40% in the middle just trying to survive 30% that wanted liberty 10% of the of the 30% 3% are the only ones that took up arms if you give me 3% of the Taiwanese population whether it's the the marathoners the crossfitters the the um uh active policemen firemen some of the reservists most of the chinese most of the Taiwanese military is is lousy it's woke and soft and not serious at all. What?

The Taiwanese military is woke. Yes. How did that happen? Look, they're drilling, their training is largely consists of sweeping and picking up cigarette butts, and it's not any kind of seriousness of training, okay? But if you find the most interested engaged and you train them, and you then send them back to their homes, and you have now thousands of cachet sites, in police stations and civil defense bunkers, etc.,

where every small village, every urban block becomes another fortified area of roadside bombs, small drones run by a fiber optic cable, so even in a jammed environment, it works, sniper rifles, RPGs. You can make the seizure and holding of Taiwanese territory exceedingly difficult. That's the variability that Xi could not tolerate

to say, go, he can't afford a two-year, one-year, protracted campaign because they import a lot of food and they import almost all their energy. This is one of the interesting things about the Taiwan thing, because I hear a lot of media people and politicians go, oh, Taiwan, it's inevitable. And, you know, you talk to Australians, they all think it's inevitable. Even very serious, credible people. A billion dollars spent well would build a credible home guard, which would be a very difficult thing to CalCAP. Well, this is what I was going to ask, because when I listened to military people, they all go, I wouldn't want to be in charge of that operation if I was Chinese. Like, that is a pretty hard thing to do. Amphibious invasion across that body of water. You know, that's tough. Like, I don't, I've never heard anyone say that. You have, you have certain months of the year where it's largely impossible because you get some big wins through the straits. And in the same way that Eisenhower had to delay the Normandy invasion from June 4 to June 6 because of big wins. You don't want to do an amphibious invasion.

in big shitty winds or an airborne operation even worse. So I guess the question is, why has Taiwan, they know they're under threat, they know that China is looking at them, why haven't they gone all in on revamping the army, training them properly, investing the money? It's not a poor country. It's a rich country. It's a rich country. It's a lot of them just believe that Uncle Sam is going to bail them out. which even if Uncle Sam wanted to bail them out, the tyranny of distance and logistics to move enough combat power across the Pacific

to get to Taiwan is exceedingly difficult. So again, pre-staging tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of small arms of small partisan weaponry to make it an unholdable place for the CCP, that's the answer. Well, Eric, you've been very generous for your time. one thing we didn't tell you, so it'll be a surprise, is the last question we always ask is,

what's the one thing we're not talking about, that we should be, and then we'll go to questions from our audience on Substack. What should we be talking about? Before Eric answers a final question, at the end of the interview, make sure to head over to our Substack. The link is in the description,

where you'll be able to see this. What are your thoughts on Elon Musk and Doge in terms of transparency and the impact it could have on spending for private military contract? When you watch the news, what are the main things you think the old and new media misunderstand about war? Does Eric regret selling Blackwater? What should we be talking about?

So I think in an era of AI and the amount of data that is collected, and I've paid a lot of attention to what's called surveillance capitalism. Okay, tell us about that. After 9-11 happened when the U.S. government rightly is looking for other. people fitting the program, the profile of the 19 hijackers, they start working with ad agencies who's harvesting commercial data. And then fast forward a few years, so that creates an industry. Then as smartphones arrive, that kind of hooks to collect where you go, what you buy, who you call, what you browse, embedded in your smartphone so that every smartphone you use is basically

a constant feed phoning home every night to collect and you use that data. And so it's pervasive. The average kid in America by the time they reached age of 13 has had 72 million data points collected on them. Okay?

By advertising. Whether it's color preferences, sports, food, everything profiled. So now in an Arab AI, it allows the machine to digitally profile you. So we try to do something about that, especially after the 2020 election and seeing how big tech was very much in cooperation with big government and throwing people off of app stores and kind of stopping free speech. We said we're never going to make big tech better by complaining, only if we could compete with it.

So we started something called an unplugged phone. We built it's our hardware. It's our device. It runs on regular phone networks, but it gives you a very different option. At our root core, we're about privacy. We don't have an advertising ID. So the same way that apps sit on your phone and collect and harvest, everything you do, our phone blocks that.

Okay, I've had a lot of people I've talked to who said, yes, I was talking to my wife about needing a new mattress in our bedroom. And the next day they're getting advertising for mattresses ads. I imagine that the device sitting in your nightstand listening to pillow talk or whatever else might be going on on the pillows. Yes, this phone prevents that. And so we kind of, we take the First and Fourth Amendment seriously in America, free speech, and the right to privacy. And, yeah, so we... I couldn't help noticing at the bottom there, there's a self-destruck button. I hope that's not one of those Israeli ones.

That's correct. But if someone says, give me your phone, I'm here to inspect it. And you can enter a code and you hand them a brick. It's an instant hard reset. We have a kill switch. You can't switch your phones off. It's constantly listening. That's why you can find your phone, even your phone is off.

This one physically separates the battery from the electronics so that off means off. So again, we have 10,000 apps in our app store, so it allows you to communicate, navigate, bank, airlines, sports apps, games, social media, all the normal stuff. But we don't give the super personalized thing because we're not harvesting and personalizing all your stuff. Our customers actually find they use significantly fewer megabytes a day because their phone is not, their phone is not spontaneously phoning back to the mothership, exporting their data. Well, you've done a great job selling that, man. Yeah.

I can't lie. All right, head on over to Substack where we ask Eric your questions. If you had the power to reform the private military industry, what changes would you implement to ensure both effectiveness and ethical standards?