YouTube Transcript:
Blackwater CEO on being CIA Assassin, Navy SEALs & Most Corrupt Politicians | Erik Prince • 305

Skip watching entire videos - get the full transcript, search for keywords, and copy with one click.

Video Transcript

View:

I guess I find in life that I've

endeavored to do really hard things. So

it started Blackwater immediately after

getting out of the Navy. We were

providing security personnel for the

State Department and in that case a week

before it started with one of our

helicopters being shot down and then two

other attacks with explosives against

our vehicles. Of course they've gotten a

briefing that morning to be on the

lookout for a white Kia which is likely

a car bomb. And I get a call that night

from our country manager goes, "Hey

boss, there's a firefight today. This

one went absolutely high and right. It

wasn't a car bomb. It was a guy driving

his mother, but having followed the

rules of engagement, they light it up.

But, you know, as recently as 2014 or 15

in DC, there was a woman that drove her

car into security barriers outside one

of the federal buildings and federal law

enforcement officers gunned her down and

killed her. You know what she had in the

back of her car? No weapons, no bombs, a

baby in a car seat. Can only imagine the

noise that would have been if it was a

contractor that took that shot. All the

[ __ ] after Nisser Square where they make

you toxic and unbankable.

internationally.

I'm not the first patriot to have been

screwed by the US government and

certainly won't be the last.

Hey guys, if you're not subscribed,

please smash that subscribe button and

hit that like button on the video. And

if you don't have time to watch this

episode right now, no problem, but I'd

really appreciate it if you would save

it to your watch later playlist.

Finally, if you'd like to follow me on

Instagram and X, those links are in my

description below. Thank you.

You're an intense guy. Anyone ever tell

you that? Not really. No. You walk in

all business,

man. I think I got two words from here

until you sat down a minute

ago. See, I got a lot on my mind.

What is on your mind, Eric Prince?

Um, you know what? I

um I I guess I find in life that I've

endeavored to do really hard things and

with it

comes all kinds

of friction and challenges to be

overcome. And

um so I guess I find I've I've developed

a really low first gear. a low first

gear, meaning when things get hard, you

just find a way to uh keep moving and

keep pushing through and uh find a way

to find a way to win. Yeah. Where where

do you think that that came from? Is

that something you developed as a kid or

it took a lot of these experiences? I

think it first of all, my dad was very

much the embodiment of the American

dream. His dad died when he was 13,

great

depression.

Um there was he had an older sister,

younger

brother and um yeah there was not the

the welfare state. So they had to

survive. So he became a significant

bread winner in the family at age 13.

And he was managing a car dealership

when he was 16. Whoa. They were built

different back then.

he found a low gear and he just ground

away and did it. And so,

uh, put himself through college,

commuting back and forth from the upper

peninsula of Michigan to sell cars on

the weekends, hitchhike back, hitchhike,

hitchhike back to Michigan Tech in the

upper peninsula.

um eventually finished at University of

Michigan, did his two-year Air Force

mandatory

service and

uh worked for a tool and die company,

basically making

um making machinery which made diecast

machines. And then um 1965 he left with

six employee took six guys with him,

reorggaged his house and his car and his

appliances with three

daughters and uh and started. So you

know starting a business in your 20s if

you're not married without kids, you you

can't fall very far, right? I I tip my

hat to my dad for having the the the

spine, the steely spine to just say,

"I'm going to do it now." I'm in my

mid30s and he had kids and he did it. So

yeah, I guess and then growing up in

West Michigan, Holland, Michigan, um my

dad was far and away the biggest

employer in

town.

So knowing that

uh his name was on the on the back of my

jersey wherever I went kind of. So I

just didn't want to disappoint.

Yeah. cuz obviously, you know, your dad

ended up being really successful and

it's not like you grew up poor or

anything like that, but you developed an

insane work ethic. There's some sort of

inner drive there that like I would

imagine had to be a combination of your

parents being great parents, but also

you like trying to push yourself that a

lot of people in in your position don't

get to that point. You know what I mean?

I think

um we traveled a lot as a family. Um, so

in the in the early '7s the

Russians wanted to buy machinery from my

dad. Yeah. Because they made great

diecast machinery. And uh so he goes to

Russia in the early '7s. Now the other

thing is my dad had a heart attack in 73

which just about took him out. It was

the only time I I ever remember coming

home with my mom from kindergarten and

my dad was home. He was in bed. Whoa.

And he said, "I just don't feel well."

Oh. He hadn't had it yet. Hadn't had it.

Took him to the hospital. Had the heart

attack in the hospital. Thank God. But

uh that put him on his back for a few

months. And it really made him uh I

guess let go a little bit, delegate, and

have other people want to carry uh uh

you know, pull the cart for a while. And

then they uh they pivoted from making

um diecast machines which is super

cyclic. Some people some some some years

people buy a bunch of machines, some

years you don't. And it really sucks

when the when the market goes dry. So

they shifted from making machine tools

to making uh diecast machines. There was

a guy that worked for him, Khan Marcus

developed it. And you know when you get

in a car and you tip the visor down with

a lid, with a mirror, with a lights,

that was their patent. Oh wow. And uh he

sold the first 5,000 of those to

Cadillac based on one made made of balsa

wood. Okay. Never made a production one.

Cadillac bought it and they had to

figure out how to make them a production

scale. So say yes and figure it out was

was the way. So that's definitely

something you carried with you too. I

think so. Figured out later. I think so.

Had had your dad served in the military

too or he was in the Air Force for two

years. There was a draft back then. And

it was right after Korea, right? Uh he

was a photo reconnaissance officer. So

the funny thing about that is whenever

you're flew in a plane with my dad, he

could tell you pretty much what kind of

factory was down below. Oh wow. Because

of the the way it's configured, the the

smoke stacks, the power supply,

whatever. That's I guess he spent a lot

of time looking at overhead imagery.

Yeah. So did you was that something

though as a kid like because you ended

up going into the Navy and there's a

whole thing that happened there but was

that something you had kind of dreamed

about doing or I got zero military

interest from my dad at all. He was you

know what he did not have the luxury of

hobbies or distractions. He had to a

feed his family in middle school and

high school and then um just ground away

because he had no safety net. And uh and

so he left me, my siblings, he left us a

safety net. So whatever I've done has

been easy compared to what he did

because he had um he was out over on the

edge of the cliff and he wasn't roped

up. Yeah. But you did still pick hard

things. I mean, that's it's a hard thing

to be like, you know what, I want to be

a Navy Seal. Like, that's not you don't

want to write that off. Uh, well, yeah,

but we travel. So, anyway, back to the

Russia thing. So, he goes to Russia in

probably

74,75 and he really doesn't like it. He

doesn't like the surveillance state and

they're going through his stuff and it

just really really chapped his ass being

because he had never really been

political. He'd never really traveled

much abroad and uh so that was you know

Moscow in the winter of 7475. Very

different experience I'm sure. Nice and

warm. Yeah. Um he came back with a big

uh fur hat. But he

um the next year he shipped a Chevy van

to Europe and we did a road trip in the

summer of 76

across Eastern Europe and Western

Europe. So across

Czechoslovakia then which was in the

Soviet Union or in the Warsaw Pact and

East Germany. And I remember spending my

um my seventh birthday in Berlin and

seeing the guns and the dogs and the

tank traps

um in the

minefields, everything facing in,

keeping people locked

into the socialist paradise. And it

pressed very deeply in my psyche. Maybe

socialism is such a great idea even at

seven though. Oh yeah. I mean you can

see that it's it's like a representation

what you're seeing of impending violence

for sure. Right. But the concept of

socialism itself driving it. You had an

understanding of that? Sure. the

the a little sign with a skull and the

crossbones. Akum Minan, right? A

minefield preventing people from even

getting close to the border fence to

kill people for trying to escape. That's

kind of very indicative of pending

violence. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I

I I guess the way I I should ask that is

you were able to consciously associate

that with that full-blown ideology at

the time because obviously what you're

saying is true. Like we see this over

and over again when communism happens.

It's always violent, but like it it's

hard for me to understand. You can vote

your way in and shoot your way out.

Yeah. Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

The other thing I remember as a

seven-year-old was how dark all the

buildings were. Everything was covered

with like a coal soot. So the only I

remember in Prague the only colorful

thing you saw was the red star in

buildings.

Trying to imagine like what I was doing

at seven if I would have noticed. I

don't think I would have noticed stuff

like that. But you're you're there.

You're seeing it. Yeah. So that was I

remember that was a very formative trip

and we did other um other trips to

uh to Europe uh

to yeah to places that uh definitely

opened my eyes to things where in

particularly

uh the

Mediterranean um a bit to Latin America

and then I kept doing

travel after that. Even when I was in

college, I was a uh I was a White House

intern before Monica Lewinsky made it

popular.

Hope you didn't blow the president. No,

sir.

And uh I remember in April of 91

uh because I'd been working for a guy

named Dana Roacher, congressman from

California. I've heard that name. He was

one of Reagan speech writers. M so very

much a freedom fighter and uh at that

point Nicaragua which had been kind of

stuck in communism since 79

uh they'd had a free election. So this

this woman bea Chammorro had been

elected but this commandistas still

controlled all the police and Dana

wanted to have a press conference

um showing a a mass grave of all these

farmers that have been killed by the

Sanistas during the revolution. Prices

over the last few years have been and

continue to be high, and most people

unfortunately have to reach for credit

cards to cover bills. Credit card debt

has reached an all-time high, and it's

trapping Americans. But luckily,

American Financing can help homeowners

pay off highinterest debt by using their

home's equity. American Financing is a

family-owned mortgage lender that's been

around for 25 years, and yes, they're

licensed in all 50 states. Their

mortgage consultants are salarybased, so

there's no incentive for them to put you

in a loan that doesn't make sense for

you. Furthermore, their customers save

an average of $800 a month. And American

Financing doesn't charge any upfront or

hidden fees to find out how much you can

save later. You may be able to close in

as fast as 10 days. And on top of that,

you may be able to delay up to two

mortgage payments, creating more savings

upfront. American Financing has helped

hundreds of thousands of homeowners

create meaningful savings. and it's

reflected in their reviews on Google.

So, make sure you call today at

888991-9788. That's

8889919788 or

americananfinancing.net/dory. That link

is in the description below. American

Financing, NMLS182334.

And he wanted somebody to go verify it.

So, he sent me 21-year-old intern, a

White House intern. At that point, I'd

no at that point I'd shifted from the

White House to working for Dana's

office. He sends me and another intern

down to Nicaragua and uh meet up with

his source. It's the first time I ever

had to shake uh a surveillance tail. Um

and we did drove hours out in the

countryside, go to this uh farmer's

field, barbwire fence, and I'd taken an

entrenching tool with me, you know, the

little foldable shovel. Mhm. Start

digging and about 3 ft down, sure

enough, all kinds of human bones and the

and the uh the arms you could see had

where they had been band, you know, tied

by cord and the skulls were shattered.

They'd been shot in the head. How do you

feel? I mean, you're a 21-year-old

intern. What do What do you think find

something like that? It was really uh

really sobering. I took Polaroid photos

to make sure I had them. Took them back

to Dana and um yeah, message complete.

And that was uh that was a week before I

got married in 91 April.

And uh also if you're if you're

considering getting married, be away

from all brides tend to lose their mind

the week before the wedding. It's good

time to be away. Yeah. And it was

righteous work. I've heard I've heard

that. But it's not like you're away in

the Caribbean or something. You're away

finding mass graves as a intern. I mean

that's it was good. Yeah. He couldn't

find anyone better. I mean, no offense,

but like you were an intern. and he

couldn't find like a special forces guy

to go do that. I feel like he had

connections, you know? He had

um he'd offered me the job because the

the full-time staffer, a guy who became

a dear friend of mine, Paul Barren, was

a Marine Recon. Uh and he'd been

um activated to do something else. So

anyway, send me So it was you. Yeah. So

you find a How many bodies approximately

did you find? We stopped digging at

three. Oh my god. And there was lots

more. So they weren't they so we covered

it up because they were going to do a

much bigger and they they found dozens

and dozens. Now what did you do with

that information? You obviously bring it

back to them and then does did something

happened there where they had takes

action. They had more hearings and it

was all about trying to help the US

because remember even then you had the

state department which was dominated by

leftists that had uh a an aptitude to be

apologists for communists in ' 91. Oh

yeah. Really? Oh yeah. Lots of lots of

the very left-wing churches were very uh

they called them sandalistas because

they were down there the the the the

very long-haired NGO hippie types were

in love with the uh the socialist lie.

That's that's interesting. I mean

obviously like I wasn't around then. But

you wouldn't think that considering

that's you got HW in there who's after

eight years of Reagan but but you had

but you had people in Congress like Ron

Delums. Okay. super left-wing Marxist

black guy from

California who's on the intelligence

committee and he is an active apologist

for the Soviet Union, for Cuba, for all

the communists. So, look, there's a we

have a wide

um diversity of political thought in

Congress and it certainly existed back

then as well. Do you ever think that,

you know, we make it a little too binary

with some of this stuff? Obviously,

we've we have some Looney Tunes in

Congress today. We've always had Looney

Tunes in there. There's no doubt about

that. But sometimes it feels like,

especially looking at the political

divide we've had since the social media

era started, like everything is labeled

you're either far right or far left. Do

you think there's there are still people

that exist? Maybe they're not great

because they're in Congress, but you

think there's still people that exist in

Congress that aren't necessarily either

one of those labels, meaning they're

more moderate?

Yeah, probably. I would say my uh my

frustration

with members of Congress, House and

Senate, is how little experience they've

had in life or outside the United

States touring. I always find it funny

when um people are going to run for

president and they do it a trip abroad,

right, to say they're going to b they're

going to bolster their foreign policy

credentials. Like really? What have you

been doing for the first 50 years of

your life that you're just now curious

enough to go abroad? It's it's there's a

lot of very unserious people that are

put in positions of

responsibility both elected and and

appointed. So, I would agree with that.

I think there's I was talking with

someone yesterday. I won't use names,

but I was talking with one guy who's

done some [ __ ] [ __ ] seen some [ __ ] He

was telling me about another dude who's

well known and he's like this guy worked

behind a desk for 30 years, you know, he

never went he was talking about all the

different places he went and the

missions he did and whatever and he's

like he never went to any of these

places. He didn't see it and yet he was

telling us how to do it. And that seems

to be as someone who's never been in

Washington DC or seen that like you

have, that does seem to be a very common

occurrence within the bureaucracy.

When you look at the people that

um built the British Empire

or for that matter that built the

American colonies, think about a guy

like Miles Stish or John Smith.

Do you think about how America was

founded? It was not founded by the

British Army. It was founded by

companies effectively listed in on the

city of London. Kind of a joint

exchange. Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth,

Jamestown colonies were companies funded

by Londonbased investors to go grow

tobacco, look for gold, look for toll

timber to make uh masts for, you know,

her majesty

ships. And uh think about a guy like my

Standish or John Smith. You know, John

Smith was

um previously a uh an English soldier

and then he went to work uh against the

Turks. I think he was uh captured,

imprisoned, he beheaded an enemy in a

jousting match. In a jousting match.

Yeah. I mean, life experience. Uh, and

then he signs on with the Jamestown

Company and he comes to to found the

Jamestown colony. And I think they

clapped him in in chains because he

raised such a ruckus on the ship. And

sure enough, he gets to Jamestown, he

becomes the governor. There you go.

Those the kind of men that made America.

Yeah, it's crazy. It wasn't that long

ago either, you know, 400 and some

years. 606007. And then you even look at

when we officially like made the

country. It's we're not even at 250

years yet. That blows my mind sometimes.

These guys had the most simple concerns

during the day to like, you know, means

of survival. How are we getting food on

the table? Stuff like that. And now, you

know, we all live on this thing and have

all these distractions in our face. It

really puts it in perspective. Yep. When

you study that stuff, I I take it you

are a student of history. Is that fair

to say? Uh, yeah. I'm a bit of a history

geek.

Were you a history geek growing up too?

Yes. Um and I was also I you know driven

by curiosity. Um again my dad was not

and mom mom was a school teacher.

uh we were expected to do well in school

uh expected to study hard and uh you

know there was an old two new testament

parable the the parable of the talents

right too much is given it's a there's a

story that Jesus tells about um one guy

was given one unit of measure of money

to reinvest another guy was given two

another guy was given five and

um long story short the guy that that's

been given five, invests it well and

does well. Guy that invests two,

um, hides it, right? And and doesn't

make the most of it. What was kind of

pounded into us from the beginning is

you're given much, do much with it,

right? And

um, so I loved history. I remember going

to Normandy as a kid in 1980. Whoa. In

um, you know, the beaches and all the

rest. And I was at the as the

11-year-old, I was a tour guide for the

family and

um so paid attention wherever we did

travel, kind of what battles and and my

kids still give me about um going to a

certain place and say, "All right,

anybody tell me what happened

here?" So then they then they would

start reading ahead where we were going

to try to uh you know

uh crash in the test that they knew they

knew would be coming from dad. What was

it like being at Normandy at 11?

Well, think about that. That was only

um it was 36 years later. Mhm. We are

well past 36 years after 1980. Yeah. So,

it was closer to closer to the actual

invasion. Uh it was humbling and you see

all the uh the white crosses lined up.

Um, and you could still see big pock

marks and uh gouches out of the bunkers

from um

uh from Allied shelling. What Spielberg

portrayed in uh Saving Private Ryan was

very accurate. Yeah. in terms of the the

concentration of fire, the

fortifications, the pounding that area

received because there's

still 50 60 foot wide craters that are

at least 15 foot deep from a 12 in 16in

shell moving dirt. Uh, I had the uh I

had the great fortune of jumping in to

the 75th anniversary

um 2019 static lined out of an original

C-47 that made the drop. Oh, you

actually you went we literally dropped

in jumped in. And uh there was uh the um

the guys from Horse Soldier Whiskey uh

the original SF team that went into

Afghanistan, right? The horse soldiers.

You saw that? There was that movie 12

Strong. We're gonna have a podcast

coming about that in a few months, I

think. Good. Yeah, they're cool guys.

They're legit. Uh, but they sponsored a

bird and I got on there with uh with a

buddy of mine from the teams and uh

yeah, it was amazing. And we wore all

period uniforms. Oh, you were in

character, too. Yep. And um it was

expected. And so even the vibe

of a thousand

people getting loaded all in uniform at,

you know, 0400 that morning, it was uh

it was pretty special. And then uh to

jump in and land and the crowds were

amazing and fortunately the grass was

soft because jumping static line in your

50s can hurt, but uh it was good. And

then uh being true to our origins, my

buddy and I went and swam off of Utah

Beach. Wow. And it was cold. So, but it

was a great experience and a great

um reminder. I can't even imagine the

fear factor of riding that kind of

aircraft

across that level of ground fire with

[ __ ] for

navigation, flooded

fields, and they uh they did it. They

just turned up and got it done. It's

amazing. There's a there's a there's an

awesome clip of Dwight Eisenhower

sitting like right on the on the I guess

like the wall outside the cemetery maybe

16 years later, something like that. 20

years later, I think it was it was after

he was president. It was the 20th

anniversary. And it just hits me every

time because, you know, he's the guy who

obviously ordered that whole thing. And

he knew he was basically sending bodies

at the problem. He's like, "We're just

going to outvol these guys, which means

we're going to plenty, right? And you

know, to sit there and and also a tough

call. Oh, yeah. Because he had to cancel

it two days before because of crap

weather. The weather June6 still not

great weather, but man, that's the

Clausitz talks about two kinds of

courage to fight a war. Clausowitz, um

Carl Vanlausitz, a good Prussian

military philosopher. Got it. He said it

takes two kinds of courage. Individual

soldier courage to go, you know, to go

jump out of that airplane to go get it

done. And the moral courage of leaders

to commit their people to an out to an

uncertain outcome. That entire go no-go

decision was on Ike.

Talk about the burden of command. Oh

yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Carl von Clauswitz.

There he

is. Okay. I never heard of him before.

There you go with the history again.

Sorry. No, it's No, don't be sorry. I

love that. I'm a history nerd, too. It's

very cool. But you what what made you

originally decide to go Navy rather than

Army or something like that? So my dad's

business made automotive interior parts.

And so he intentionally kept all the

factories in the west side of the state,

all the automakers on the east side of

the state of Michigan and around the

Midwest. and he really wanted uh the

salespeople and the engineers to be able

to make it home in time for dinner

because he wanted to try

to keep those families intact. And so he

ended up operating a bunch of aircraft

to move people back and forth from

customer sites and to take customers in

to see uh their operation. So

uh I grew up around small aircraft doing

that mission and uh kind of started my

love of flying and so I took lessons

when I was 15. I sold the morning of my

16th birthday flying a small aircraft

and I had planned to be a Navy or a

military pilot because I applied to Air

Force and Navy and I got into both and

themies and I uh ended up going to the

naval academy and I loved the Navy but I

really hated the academy. I thought it

was already in the 80s it was kind of a

distillation of 150 years of the dumb

parts of the military.

I'm pretty conservative guy. I couldn't

do I like traditions, but don't give me

stupid ones. Yeah. And um uh and it was

there that um and as much of a history

geek as I was, and that's it's truly

emblematic of how obscure the SEAL teams

were, even in the 80s that a military

history geek like me had not really

learned much of the

teams. And there was two like the spring

of my plebe freshman year

um two the seal leaison that are

stationed at the academy came and gave a

talk and um they said well if you want

to join us for PT be at this field 5:30

the next morning so I turned up and uh

they said okay today we're just going to

run a mile get a partner put them on

your shoulders oh whoa and I was hooked

M that that kind of

um forcing the drive motor to make you

dig deep down. I guess that's probably

that kind of stuff that I've always

loved from that day. And I did, you

know, I did individual sports, I

wrestled, uh I played soccer, I did

track, but that kind of stuff really

made me figure out how to dig deeper.

And so I left the academy after three

semesters. I went to Hillsdale, which is

a small school in Michigan. Oh, so you

just went and like did the one I just

cut away one off training with like No,

no. I I went and pted with the SEALs

that morning. That was it. And and

showed up to a few other ones. And I

remember I remember coming away for that

thinking, "Yeah, I'd like to be a SEAL

someday." I decided I'd better learn to

swim because even growing up around

Michigan, I swam, but not really that

well. And man, I I remember the the

first 50 meters I swam in the pool and

it felt like my lungs were going to fall

out of my mouth. It was bad. That's

hard. But 50 became a 100 became 400

became a M and just grind it out and

figure it out. And um left the academy,

went to Hillsdale, very different

experience because it's one of two

schools in the country that accepts no

federal funding. Hillsdale. Hillsdale.

It's been independent since 1845. You

know, all the noise about Harvard losing

their federal funds. Hillsdale's never

had federal funds. In fact, I couldn't

even go there on a Rosi scholarship

because they will not cannot accept

federal funds because they don't want

the federal strings. Wow. So, but while

they're got a good e uh education in

economics, if you've heard of the

Austrian school of economics, it's kind

of the the purest free market.

Ludis, one of the founders of the

Austrian school, donated his entire

library to Hillsdale.

So, um but also there I joined the fire

department and had a really good

experience. Wow.

Um, I remember showing up at the station

house saying, "Hey, I'd like to be a

volunteer

firefighter." And uh, nobody from the

college had done that

before. And so

I showed up for training and it took

probably eight

months. Got the accreditation lensure

done through the state of Michigan. Got

my EMT license as well. Um but that was

a better experience in leadership than I

would say the very artificial learning

lab that the academy tried to do because

the academy firefighter. Yeah. Because

well it was serious work, right? It was

I mean Hillsdale County is not a super

wealthy county. We had a lot of

structure

fires and uh and burning cars and and

stuff. And so, um, convincing guys that

this snot-nosed kid, cuz I was what, 19

then, was good enough to go into a

burning house with them was

um was a good experience in being a good

follower and uh being the reliable one

that they could depend on. Um, and I've,

you know, I've not been in a lot of

gunfights, but, uh, I have been in

firefights inside of burning buildings

that were fully involved in fire, and

it's a it is a very, uh, unforgettable

experience. I'll bet. I can't imagine

that. It seems like you do have a thing

throughout your life like obviously you

know you're the guy who founded

Blackwater and so you're all over the

news always talking about pertinent

geopolitical stuff or things you were

involved in but when you actually just

look at the brass tax of different

things you've done it does seem like

there's a pattern of you you want to

help people out like you you really you

feel a calling to help people in uh you

know what yeah

um that was something uh I was I'd say

one of my proudest professional moments

and it was not me that did it but it was

the team we built at Blackwater. I

remember speaking to

uh like 300 colonels at the war college

in Washington probably 2005 or

six and they um you know I got out of

the Navy as a lieutenant you know a

junior officer. Okay. So these 300

colonels pop to attention when I come in

and I gave the talk about what we do at

Blackwater and why and yeah it's a

private organization but we do military

adjacent

stuff and we have helicopters and fly on

night vision goggles and you know all

that stuff and uh afterwards a colonel

came up to me after that and he said he

had just come from brigade command in

Baghdad so he would have had 4,000 or so

soldiers

uh in his responsibility and he said I

want you to know that my guys in

Baghdad, his guys would have the

Blackwater call signs and frequencies on

the dash of their

Humvees because they knew that if they

got in the [ __ ] the Blackwater guys

would come for them. No excuse, no

bureaucracy, no delay. I said, I am very

proud to hear that because we said the

good good Samaritan rule applies.

Yeah. And also like to jump ahead for

one second on that, I'll I'll come back

to the Navy stuff, but you know, it's

interesting. There's an interesting like

dichotomy. I don't know if that's the

word I'm looking for, but like this this

weird thing where the government has the

things that they fund that they're

directly in control of, like the

military obviously, and you run into

some of these problems like the

bureaucracy, chain of command, all that.

But then the same government has money

that they fund privately whether it be

to locked or whatever company or

Blackwater and you guys for the better

in a lot of ways don't have to play by

some of the [ __ ] rules. You get free

reign to do your job and bring in the

expertise in some not cart blanch but

you know what I mean like there's a

little bit more freedom. Here's the

thing. Every

bureaucracy from

inception grows.

If you have a if you have a bush in your

driveway and you never prune it, it soon

becomes a big outofc control weed,

right? And whether that is parts of

military bureaucracy, whether that's

part of Lheed Martin bureaucracy or the

Pentagon procurement bureaucracy or

anything, every bureaucracy grows

unchecked until someone checks it and

prunes it back and says, "We're going to

get back to core mission and we're going

to figure out how to make it happen with

less of a budget." It is extremely

healthy

for military, civil, political, business

organizations to be pruned and to be um

rightsized and to continue that. I from

the outset implored our people at

Blackwater. I said we never want to look

like our customer. We never want to look

like our Oh, we never want to behave

like Yeah. Okay. we are here most like

90 98% of our revenue was competitively

bid meaning this is a statement of work

that some government or some customer

puts out do this give me a bid okay just

like you would generally build a house

yeah like construction because they're

going to say it's going to cost $400,000

to build this house you don't say well

it might be $400,000 or it might be a

million I'll tell you about when it's

done. No, who does that? The government

does that.

Most of our revenue was firm fixed price

where we had to say it's going to cost

you this much. And so we really focused

on being efficient and squeezing the

waste out of that.

Um, so

we very much implored our people, you

know, at the same time I get out of the

Navy earlier than I plan to. Jumping

back to Yeah. the

storyline, I served in the SEAL teams

for a few years after college. I loved

it. I plan to stay for 12. Do you mind

just saying where you served just so

people context with that?

Um I was in um uh Buds of course is in

Coronado winter hell week and um my

class is unique in that our hell week

was held on San Clemen Island. It's the

only one in Seal Team history. You're

one of one. One of one. It was a because

there had been so much rainfall and so

much sewage and flesheating bacteria.

Flesh-eating bacteria. Yes. That sounds

awesome. washed in from Tijana into San

Diego Bay and the ocean that it was

unsafe to put guys in the water and

especially as you're in hell week your

um your immuno resistance really breaks

down. Okay. And so even a a scratch

after two hours becomes inflamed, red,

and infected. So they not wanting to

deprive us the benefit of hell week,

they put the whole program on a landing

craft and drove it out to San Clemeny

Island, a bombing range 70 miles off the

coast. And um as the instructors

reminded us, now no one can hear you

scream,

[ __ ] So it was good. But I um

again, I had paid no attention, no

interest in going to work for my dad's

business. Uh, and it was not an option

anyway because it was family policy. You

have to go do your own thing. Oh, I love

that. That's awesome. You have to go do

some kind of independent accreditation.

And it was my plan to do SEAL teams for

about 12 years because I was an officer.

And so after 12 years, you kind of got

start getting stuck at a desk. So I

figured 12 years, then I'll go do

something with my dad or or whatever.

Was he proud of you for doing that, too?

Um yeah, he was it was something he

didn't understand really because he was

not where the commando gene came from,

but um but it definitely was there

somehow, but

um yeah, he was proud.

Um, in fact, they uh they gave me a

bronze statue after hell week and uh

it's from

a uh a western artist and there's a

cowboy riding a a bucking bron. And

there's a plaque that says, "In the

unwritten law of the range, the work

ethic still exists. When you sign for a

brand, when you sign for an outfit, you

ride for a brand. True commitment takes

no easy way out." M and uh I've kept

that in my house ever since. And uh and

then I for a while I had it in the

Blackwater lobby and put a huge

Blackwater logo on the front of it

because that was good branding. Yeah, we

rode for a brand, right? So anyway,

I my um my dad died unexpectedly uh from

a heart attack and uh had to do another

deployment after that yet and uh did and

then um

uh when my wife was pregnant with our

second child, uh she was diagnosed with

breast cancer at 29

and um which was not a great experience

and um so So that necess necessitated me

getting out of the Navy uh just to sort

out between the family business which

was 5,000 plus

employees. Um Oh, you had to come in and

sort that out. I not me personally, but

you know, my mom was my mom had not

really been part of the business at all,

right? And so it was

a obviously the a significant family

asset and I had three sisters and uh so

we just figured out what to do next. My

mom made the right decision. She sold

the whole thing. But um the original

business he started made diecast

machines that we talked about and that

business had just kind of lumped along.

Um, and uh, we were going to sell it and

I had just gotten out of the Navy, I

remember, and I was in Switzerland

because we were going to sell it to our

Swiss competitor and I went for a long

run, a very long, it was like a 12 mile

run and I I remember because my thighs

were burned, were

chapped like crazy. But in that run, I

thought, "What the hell?" Um, I never

got a business degree or a any MBA or

anything and I never got a chance to

work with my dad. I might as well learn

business fixing up this original thing

that he started. Only 5,000 employees.

No, no, that one was we sold that one.

Okay. The the the smaller one was 250

employees. That's still not That's which

was still not nothing, right?

And um so did that and um moved back to

Michigan. So started

Blackwater immediately after getting out

of the Navy. And again, I knew nothing

of business, government contracting or

land development,

but you find a way to figure it out. and

um hired uh my SEAL team training

officer

um and the guy that used to run

facilities for um for Seal Team 6, like

the guy that built and fabricated

and um they laid out the original

footprint for Blackwater and did a lot

of it ourselves. Hey guys, if you

haven't already subscribed, please hit

that subscribe button. It's a huge huge

help. Thank you. What year, what year is

this in again? This is 97. 97. Yeah. So

just a question for context here. What

in your I guess like five or six years

where you were in the Navy Seals and

deployed to places like what types of

things did you see that made you scratch

this itch?

Um we were part of the Haiti invasion.

So swam ashore in Haiti in when was that

94. Um what happened with that again?

That was the Clinton administration got

involved and they deposed um Oh yeah. Uh

Duvalier uh to install

Aristid also not a great option and it

started the devolution of Haiti. Yeah.

So, but I remember swimming ashore in

Capian, which is a city on the north

side, and there's about two and a half

million people then, and they had no

sewage treatment. And so, uh, we got

more shots than you can imagine,

vaccinations. Yeah. And, uh, we'd

planned for high casualty figures, not

from enemy fire, but because of the

water. And normally when you do

amphibious reconnaissance, you want to

be nice and low in the water and, you

know, sneaky. Oh, no. Extra flotation.

You don't want the water splashing in

your

mouth. But it was not

uh well because of the Nicaragua stuff

and because of other play I'd been to

other garden spots before. So it was it

was interesting but not a kind of a

non-event. And um and then went back to

GMO to have to wash all the vehicles,

everything off so that they didn't carry

any weird agricultural diseases back to

America. And um and then uh as an

unusual experience as an officer, I got

to go to sniper school as a SEAL. Oh

wow. Which was in hindsight great

investment for the Navy because that

definitely put the itch of me shooting

long guns in place. And um so then I

made a later deployment on a carrier to

um the Med and the Middle East. Um so we

did stuff in Saudi and Kuwait and

Bahrain and um that was when the US was

bombing the Serbs as part of the whole

Yugoslav civil war. Y

so it was interesting. Um but then um

you know dad dies right before that

deployment and uh wife gets cancer at

29. Yep. I get out and um I really

wanted to stay connected to the SEAL

teams because I liked it. I was okay at

it and uh you wanted to use Blackwater

to solve some? No, no, no. I I

I wanted to stay in the SEAL teams

between disease and family death. I

needed to get out. And so Blackwater

really um I laid out the business plan

um before even knowing my wife had

cancer uh about the need for a private

training facility. In fact, I still have

the letter um because the SEAL teams had

used private facilities since the

70s. You know, we have a gun culture in

America and there's lots of great

shooting instructors, race gun shooters,

whatever. and they so they've been

teaching soft units since then, but no

one had done it on an industrial scale

that was close to any concentration of

military. And so a lot of guys had had

the idea. But

um let's just say because of my dad's

success, it made it possible for me to

do that because in the '9s there was a

major military base or training range

being closed on a monthly basis because

it was all postcold war draw down,

right? The peace dividend. Yeah. So this

idea of building a private military

training facility to serve the military

was every smart investment official said

that's a that's a dumb rich boy's idea.

So grow grow in the shrub of the

bureaucracy if you will. I he look they

they

they could not see they did not have the

experience that I had of using private

facilities versus government ones.

Right. And

um so yeah, it was a like field of

dreams. Build it and they will come. And

uh found the original land which is as

flat as this table. Uh the original

3,000 acres and I contracted for 315 and

ended up picking up an extra 85 acres as

we changed the um even the registration

because that land was originally

surveyed by George Washington. Are we

talking in North Carolina? Yeah, it's in

North Carolina. in the the Great Dismal

Swamp. What a name. Great Dismal Swamp.

And it is dismal. And it is um uh and we

called it Black Water because when the

rain would come through the very organic

pete soil, by the time it made it to the

ditches, it was black. And um and we

knew it was black because standing in

the ditch putting in the drain culverts,

building the facilities, our legs were

getting dyed. Okay. Getting dyed dark

brown. Black. Whoa.

And um I had to buy a uh an office

trailer for I remember paying 400 bucks

for that office trailer and um it was a

thousand bucks to have it delivered and

it was such bad shape it was safer to do

that have somebody deliver it than the

risk of of rolling that thing on the

road. But uh over pizza and beer at the

end of a day um the logo was designed

because the power poles because we had

put about 5 miles of power lines in and

the when we put the power poles in

within days the bears were coming and

ripping oh their um mark. And the bigger

the bear the higher up in the pole they

would rip and it was it were literally

marking their turf. So we had to give

some kind of credence to that.

And um one of the original name ideas

was the Tidewater Institute of Tactical

Shooting, but we thought the acronym

would be a little too spicy. Yeah. So,

uh Blackwater is hard. That's a hard

name. Yeah. And uh and the and well,

there's a Blackwater National Wildlife

Refuge not that far away. So, it was not

We can't even say it was super original.

Um but the logo came from those uh the

bear paws. And that was a Yeah, that was

pizza and beer design, not a high dollar

marketing firm. What a what a great

what a great experience starting a team

from scratch and figuring it out and

um it was it was uh it was one of the

best experiences of my life. How long

did it take to develop all that land and

keep that mic pointed to you if you

don't mind? Thanks.

Um, I laid it out the last month while I

was still on active duty. I kind of

figured out the

um uh the location of the land. There

wasn't many big chunks of of low value

land that was available. And I needed a

lot of land so he could catch straight

bullets. you putting up ranges and we

shot a lot right at peak volume we were

doing like 1.2 1.3 million rounds a

month a month. Oh yeah, that was that

was even more than I thought.

Magnificent stuff. Yeah. But

um you

know the experiences of getting stuck

beyond your wildest belief having having

uh heavy equipment bogged in Pete to

having to make war on the beavers

because you know it it became a 7,000

acre compound again as flat as this

table and the beavers would jam up all

our drainage. So it was they would

literally keep it a swamp so we'd have

to trap them. So that that hearkened

back to my childhood skills because I

ran a trap line when I was third,

fourth, and fifth grade growing up, you

know, before school in Michigan trapping

muskrats and raccoons. So I pivoted to

the beavers and uh and we won.

Um, but what a great experience to give

people with a lifetime of experience in

training special

operations or building facilities. Um,

you know, our first shirt our first

shoot house was built by effectively the

maintenance crew from Seal Team 6's

compound. Oh, wow. and they came out on

weekends, paid in cash and uh built one

of the largest shoot houses on the east

coast is still standing, still working.

And um so yeah, it's um for those of you

who

are young and have you see an arbitrage,

you see a this is what's needed, this is

the skill set we can

apply. Take the risk, man. Figure it out

and find a way to win. And uh and you

will look back on it with even if you

try and burn in, you'll be you'll learn

and and and have a hell of an education

for having done so. Yeah. I mean, you're

talking about finding the problem and

solving it to make it really simple. I

mean, that's what it is. But and

surround yourself, go back to the well

of the people you know and trust to do

that. And I had a I had a I had kind of

a great bench to draw from. I had

[ __ ] high time seals that understood

that and they also would I mean that

that's the other thing they would when

you have high energy people high

competition high drive

motor they they will everything's a

competition. Yeah. I mean, even at the

SEAL teams, uh, on Fridays, it would

usually be a long run or a long swim or

something, but it was so effing

competitive that we we'd all pile on a

school bus and it would drive us out

somewhere to drop off. They'd be opening

that door while the bus was slowing

down, okay? Not waiting until it stopped

and get off in early manner. Start. Oh,

no. [ __ ] no. It was bailout, explode,

and it's a race. It's on. It's always

on.

and building that culture as you know

from the first six employees of

Blackwater and uh and not all my not all

my hires were right. I will also admit

that because the I went to a I went with

I did what normal corporate America told

me to do. I went to a headhunting firm.

Oh no. To find and and to find a guy

that because I said look we have to

understand this is a military training

facility. We teach law enforcement. We

teach. We're a facility to do that, but

we also want the hospitality piece. And

I've this high dollar head hunter found

this guy who was resume

perfect. Former Marine, Senate colonel,

logistics officer who was a specialty in

um uh fixing uh troubled holiday

infranchises.

You'd think perfect. Yeah. Not perfect.

personality clash kind of thing. He just

focused more on hospitality than on

helping operators be operators and and

honing that

steel. And so, uh, yeah. Um, when you

make a mistake in the wrong tactic or

the wrong business plan or the wrong

people, you know when you've made the

wrong decision. And a lot of people will

blanch from making the from cutting away

a bad parachute.

cut away and cut deeper than you think

you need to. And so I did. And um you

know, the the guy who ground away and

truly earned the right to be president

of Blackwater was a guy named Gary

Jackson, who I originally met while

doing an investigation for um for a

young SEAL that I got into a

fight versus four airmen, four Navy uh

Navy airmen, and he' bitten the ear off

of one of them. So it was four-on-one.

He won. Yeah.

Yeah. Uh but I in that process I met

Gary Jackson and

um Gary was an early computer geek. He

built our website while he was deployed

in the Caribbean hunting

narcos and uh uh just, you know, never

went to

college, but he had a a lifetime of

experience and education, an insatiable

curiosity, and a leadership style that

even in a whole bunch of alpha male type

people, he was comfortable to find the

very best people in each lane and to uh

to give them an intentbased leadership.

We want to do this, not I expect you to

do this by doing 10 steps that I

prescribed for you, right? How were the

Germans so effective in um at the end of

World War I uh with fighting the trench

warfare, they would give mission

tactics, say, "We want you to achieve

this. Find a way to make it work." How

did the how did they're given autonomy

essentially? Exactly. How did the

Blitzkrieg work so well? Yeah, it was

that it was intentbased

leadership. And um Gary built I I'm you

know I'm the the investor and the

original uh I guess vision guy behind

Blackwater but Gary made the whole thing

run and he built a hell of a team. When

did you hire him? like because you

started in 97 like Gary came on to do

sales in 98 and he was I'd say president

99 and um and then the business really

started to accelerate

um by 2001 before 911. Oh before 911.

That's interesting because our first big

volume customer was the Navy. They came

to us after the Cole, USS Cole, a Navy

destroyer, got blown up in Yemen and the

sailors that were guarding the ship were

holding pretty much unloaded weapons

that they never fired before. Yeah. We

had Mike Ritlin in here. He was he was

one of them guarding that. Yeah. So, the

Navy having lost a or nearly lost a

multi-billion dollar warship and worse

sailors, they came and said, "We want

you to do a

you know, show us and help us do a

nationwide sailor armed security,

shipboard security, you know, visit

board, search and procedure training

program. And we did that and I think we

we trained almost 100,000 sailors

safely. 100,000. Yeah. Basically,

anybody that carried a gun in the Navy

was coming through our pipeline. How

many how many employees do you have by

this time approximately? Uh for that we

ramped up to a couple hundred probably

between instructors and all the rest.

That's that's a lot of people to train

still. Crazy. Um and then

um so we had that flywheel spinning when

911 happens and then uh where were you

on 911?

I brought my kids to school that morning

in MLAN,

Virginia. And uh I'd heard about the um

the first tra the first then crash of a

light aircraft into a building in New

York. And then I went to uh the same

place I always got my haircut to Ali, my

Turkish Muslim barber who oddly enough

had a had a razor at my neck as we're

watching the second aircraft crash into

the into the towers. And he's been a a

great friend ever since and we joke

about that. But um uh yeah, it was

really sobering. And then you know my

wife who was fighting cancer then oh

yeah her cancer doc and har treatment

was at St. Vincent's in New York and

so she was supposed to be there on like

September 13 which was obviously

cancelled and delayed. We go back, we go

up a week later, but um I went to ground

zero and used my ID and you know, at

least had a walk around while she was

hooked up getting chemo. But it was a a

very sobering Yeah.

uh moment to see that level of

destruction outside of the odd

coincidence with your barber and what

was going on that day culturally when

once it once the second plane did hit

obviously like a lot of people civilians

even were thinking when I saw the first

impact there was no no chance that was a

ch no no chance that was an accident. So

you knew before that you're like okay

something's happening here. Did you have

any I'm trying to think of like your

timeline when you left the Navy, what

you would have been read in on, but like

did you have any inkling of who it

was? Um, well, it was it was an al Qaeda

stimulus that that um lit up all the

rangers in Mogadishu in

93. And it was al-Qaeda that hit the

embassies in Dar Salam and Nairobi. Mhm.

It was um al-Qaeda certainly that

simulated the attack in Yemen.

So if it looks like a duck and quacks

like a duck, it's probably a duck. Right

away my default was and I again I had

no I

was out of the Navy at that point. I had

no clearance. We had no facility

clearance. So I had no uh particular

insight to it. But your business, as you

said, was ramping up just coincidentally

before that happened. So you're already

because you're training all the sailors

with the 100,000 people who may be

holding a

gun after 911. Like how quickly does it

go to, oh [ __ ] like now we're now you

become Blackwater as we know it. Um the

um the agency's protective detail, CI

director's protective detail were

regular customers because they could

rent out the place and do their thing

with no

um with

privacy. And

um we

um a guy who worked on the seventh

floor, guy named Buzzy Coneguard was uh

would come down with them sometimes and

he was a former knock himself.

hell of a life story. And um Buzzy

Crowngard. Yep. I don't know if I'm

familiar with him. He was an

all-American lacrosse player at

Princeton in the 50s, Marine, and then

uh CIA uh case officer for a few years.

Got out, went to work for Alex Brown,

the investment bank. Eventually became

the CEO, was a knock again. his later

years there did some amazing things for

his country as the CEO of a of an

investment bank. That's crazy. And uh

he'd always been a kind of a gun guy.

His uh son was later a SEAL as well. And

um Oh, he's still around too. He is.

Wow.

Uh and but Buzzy said, you know, Buzzy

had made contact long before

911 just

uh talking about foreign affairs and

guns and tactics and all the rest. And I

remember calling

well as a derivative of working for Dana

Warbacher because when Dana got out of

the White House, he first went to

Afghanistan in the late 80s while the

while the Mooj were still fighting the

Soviets and he went and

saw Dostam and Massud and all the ones

from you know

operating on near the the pack border

and he went in country and he kept touch

with

him and he came back to me in about 97

and said, "Eric, I need your help to

sponsor a peace conference because we're

trying to get the king of Afghanistan to

return because he'd been in exile,

right? His name is Zahir Shaw and he

lived in Rome." And so I met him also

while I was working for Dana and part of

that whole process. Um and I funded a

peace conference in Switzerland where

Dostam and Massud and Moakeek and

Atenure and all those guys

came. Um because we were trying to have

a lawyer Jurga in Afghanistan before

9/11 happened to try to bring some kind

of peaceful resolution and not have the

Taliban run the place into the ground.

And you knew the Taliban was also

effectively protecting al-Qaeda. Bad.

Yeah. Exactly. And I had a I mean

already already before 911 I had a

beautiful rug gift from Dostam. Huh.

So, so then after 911, their phones are

lighting up and they're like,

"Hey, put us in touch with the USG

because we want to help kill these

Taliban and al-Qaeda motherfuckers."

And so, again, maybe the agency had

contact with all of them. I don't know.

But, but we definitely did because we'd

had um we'd had them all in Switzerland

and had multiple talks with them. But um

and and I'm still in touch with a number

of them. So, that's cool. Um, but yeah,

that was my first call to Buzzy and then

I said, "If you need anything ever, if

you need a floor

sweeper, please, we we just want to

help." And uh yeah, he ended up calling

uh about five months later, needed help

for security, and that was our first

overseas deployment. Okay. So, that's

when the actual security of assets

begins on the ground. You hadn't done

that before? No. Okay.

I imagine you had to spin up an entirely

like new part of the company to do that.

Are you bringing in a lot of new people

or you We had a we had a the makings of

a of a security entity together but not

deploying at that kind of scale and

again say yes and figure it out. Yeah.

So So where and where were the first

places where you were doing it and what

what were those missions like? Oh, there

are pretty um

uh the biggest issue there and again

it's the

they the USG asked the military to do

security at these various

locations and the military said well

we're not going to do that with less

than 200 people here or 160 people here

and and so we could do it with 18 or 25.

So in some cases we took over entire

facilities and I would say guarded them

uh well obviously safety safely because

they were never successfully attacked

while we were guarding them. Uh or

running a remote drone base somewhere

where and we took that over from the

military because um they had 166

soldiers there 28 doing security and 138

people supporting the 28. It's just how

the military organizes. They don't

really have any understanding of cost.

No, because because if you're a general

and you don't ever have to pay for all

the privates and corporals and all the

rest like send them. Yep. And and it's

like having uh and you know people tend

to leave the water on when you're

brushing your teeth when it's free

water. Yeah, that's a good I'm going to

use that. That's pretty good. Please do.

Um, so look, because obviously our guys

were expensive, we economized and so we

could take over that entire facility

safely run it for years with 25 guys,

five of whom would be dual-headed to

keep the water, the power, the

sanitation, the the comms, the vehicles

running, and it just works. So that's

that's the difference of when when Elon

Musk

attacked the cost of space lift of

putting a payload in orbit. He looked at

all the drivers of cost. What's the He

said, "What's the biggest driver? Oh,

okay. It costs a lot to build this

rocket motor. We're not going to make it

a one-time use. We're going to figure

out a way to make it reusable." All

those things. If you can if you're of

the private sector and you can attack

the big cost items, you find a way to

make it efficient. But if you're never

asked to do that, why bother? That's the

difference of the private sector doing

something versus government.

Was there I mean, it's hard for me to

picture it because I' I've never been in

the military, but when you're first

doing this and now actually taking over

security and stuff like that, you have a

lot of guys working for you. Most of

your guys are ex-military or even high

level who are doing these jobs. But were

there any cultural difficulties being

that you guys were private contractors

in there and you're going in to a war

zone where our military is? Like were

were there any I don't want to say like

dustups but issues in chain of command

type things with

that?

Um there would be stay with the mic.

Sorry. Sorry. At some

points there'd be mild issues of of

jealousy of what the contractors were

perceived to be getting paid per day.

But then when we start to break it down

as to what our guys were paid versus

what a military guys was, it was

effectively the same. The difference is

so my guy might be headline paid $500 or

$600 a day back in

2004, but they're only paid that for

every day they're in the hot zone. The

day they leave, their pay goes to zero.

Mhm. versus a military guy who's paid

day in day out whether they're in the

hot zone or not. And they might get a

little bit of an extra for danger pay,

but the military guy also has taxfree in

a war zone and they get prediums and all

the rest. And so when you do an apples

to apples comparison, it was largely the

same. The difference is guys chose our

approach because they're much more in

control of their life. They could go

hard, they could go 90 days, 120 days,

and they go home. M and see their family

and be done and not waste their time.

And that's the

the it was a it was a fundamental

difference in recruiting and retention

for us and also mental health and mental

health. Sure. Yeah. Because if if the

guys were getting um if it was a little

too rough, then uh we definitely

schedule more rotations home and they

would stay home, be with their family,

or we'd put them on a training rotation

or something where they were not uh at

risk of getting blown up.

So you're that starts up and this is

when the Afghanistan war is like the

hottest at the beginning. This is before

Iraq when you're starting to do these.

Yep. Okay. Now, obviously, you're

hands-on. You're seeing a lot of this.

You're getting all the reports on the

ground. What What were your thoughts?

You know, hindsight's 2020 now. We saw

what happened in Afghanistan in 2021,

but what were your thoughts then at the

beginning? Funny you say that because I

remember seeing the US military showing

up in droves. Yeah. and seeing the

construction of all the

um the McDonald's, all the other

amenities, all the other cost stuff that

flows with the US military footprint. I

remember a phone call, a sat phone call

I had with Gary Jackson while I was on

the ground before I left.

I said,

'Gary, the DoD is going to come here and

screw it all up, and this will end up

having to be solved by contractors

because the DoD will become so expensive

and so ineffective. It'll be left to

contractors. Now, I wish I was right on

that. I was right on half. Yes, the DoD

did screw it up. They replicated the

Soviet battle plan. We went from the

first six months of the war when it was

special operations guys with a targeting

cycle of minutes or seconds. Enemy there

we go send it versus hyperbureaucratic

planning cycle with all kinds of

approvals and we basically we allowed

lawyers to become what zampullets were

in the Soviet Union. M ampulit is a

political officer which was in a Soviet

Union which would enforce the will of

the of the communist party and it was

really second guess unit commanders from

what they could do and that's really how

bad lawyers had become in the Pentagon

even back then. Oh yeah. Yep. So I was

right on that. I wish they'd let

contractors solve it. And and towards

the end of the Afghan war,

um I remember right after Trump was

elected the first

time. So that would have been spring of

2017, Steve Bannon, one of the one of

the guess policy adviserss to President

Trump then said, "Hey, we're going to

we're going to debate uh a change in

Afghan policy. Write an

editorial to you to me." So I did and it

got published and I called out for a

different strategy in Afghanistan which

would have massively reduced the

conventional footprint of the DoD and go

back to what worked for 250 years which

was kind of the East India Company

approach. You've heard of the East India

Company? I've heard of that. But how

would this work in practice in

Afghanistan? So the East India Company

and sorry Eric if you don't mind just

stay like a little closer. I just don't

want you getting out of focus. My bad.

All

right, I'm always out of

focus. Um, the East India Company was a

private company that

um that did three things. It facilitated

trade in difficult places. It um

performed functions of government,

kicked ass when

necessary. And the whole problem of the

US presence in Afghanistan is we never

got the economy actually going

legitimately there, right? there is so

much money aid and all this and and no

proper underpinnings of the economy and

and dumb things like

um the fact that the cost of energy

uh the per dollar cost uh of a gallon of

fuel by the time it made it in Humvey

was about $250

from all the logistics cost now because

that oil or that gas or diesel was

shipped in from the Mediterranean,

shipped to Karach, put in a truck,

Karachi, Pakistan, trucked up into

Afghanistan. The Taliban would toll that

and that tolling that actually

represented about 30% of the Taliban's

operating budget. Taliban easy pass.

Let's go. Yeah, exactly.

But the all the generals, the 18

different commanders we had there never

said, "Uh, excuse me, there's oil and

gas in Afghanistan that was drilled and

proven by the Soviets when they left."

Okay. At the Amudaria oil field up in

Balk Province, I know because my my

friend was the local partner there and

nobody ever said, "Here's here's a $20

million drilling program." Okay. One

Texan reserveist could have figured this

out. Probably somebody from the oil and

gas industry, a rough neck, drill that,

put that in production, spend a hundred

million bucks on a refinery, a modular

one, and now we have all the oil and gas

issues solved in

Afghanistan. A company would figure that

out. Clearly, the military did not after

20 effing years. Anyway, they figured

out the poppy fields. Not so well

either. Yeah. So he's not even giving

them credit for that. The Brits the

Brits used to have a great saying that a

functioning workshop is better than a

battalion of soldiers because it's much

better to employ the enemy than to fight

them. Okay.

There was um one of the largest copper

deposits in the world, the Masoch Mine.

It was only about 30 miles south of

Kabool and it had been production on and

off for almost a thousand years. There's

all kinds of archaeological sites there.

The Chinese early on bought the

concession corruptly. But again, a smart

general would have

said in two months I want that mine

turned on. I don't care who owns it

right now. We do now. Turn it on. And

you could have employed 10,000

Taliban. Because if you're if the

Taliban is paying 10 bucks a day, put

the word out to pay 12 bucks a day and

they'll put their guns down. Give them

three square meals. Let them pray five

times a day. Give them pick and shovel.

Let them mine copper. Great. You just

taken an entire infantry division of

Taliban off the battlefield without

killing

them. That's how the East India Company

did business. I got what you're saying.

But you're writing this oped. I wrote an

oped in 2017. Yes. laid it

out and uh made the case for how to

because again it was not a hypothetical

situation for us because I'd had dozens

of my own aircraft in Afghanistan doing

these kind of support missions for

DoD. I'd had a thousand plus people

doing security or training or advisory

work actually embedding because one of

the other big problems in Afghanistan

was we had I think 31 or 32 troop

rotations.

So you say we were in Afghanistan for 20

years. No, you were there for 31 troop

rotations for six to nine months at a

time, sometimes 12 months. But every

time that military unit would leave,

they wouldn't go back to the same area.

So you'd have all that area knowledge

that you built up over six or nine

months leave with those guys. Whose

bright idea was that?

The Pentagons. That was their that was

they they never fundamentally adjusted

how they rotated troops to affect the

realities of the battle space there. Our

approach, what I laid out and

budgeted that I could have taken uh

3,600

contractors. People love the word

veterans. They hate to use the word

contractors, right?

Uh but I could pay a veteran contractor

to go back in and live with, train with,

fight with alongside each of those

Afghan battalions that are worth saving,

live on the same base, guide them so

that every time that unit went out in

the field, there would be some some pale

faces with them. um providing

leadership, intelligence,

communications, medical, logistics

expertise, kind of like the training

wheels on a on a unit so that if you

have those units

um with the basics correctly, they don't

get annihilated. And you combine that

with a little bit of air support. Again,

right seat, my pilot, left seat, Afghan

doing this. Right. Right. So the weapons

are released by an Afghan, not by my

guy. But you can line up the airplane

and you take away the inshallah factor.

The incha factor. Yeah. You know it in

the Middle East in Arabic, they say,

"Well, if God wills it, right?" It's

kind of like kind of like in uh in Latin

culture, they say, "Well, mñana, maybe,

you know, maybe tomorrow." No, there's

no room for that. You need air support,

you need it now with no [ __ ] no

excuses. So mentors in the field and

because they're because I can pay them

well. I can pay the same guy to go back

to the same battalion in the same

valley, go in for 90 days, home for 60,

back in for 90, but they always rotate

back to the same. So we keep that area

knowledge the exact same way that East

India Company did for decades.

um with reliable air support including

jets, we could have gotten rid of all

the tankers and all the other

nonsense and take over the combat

support because the main sources of

fraud were the Afghans paying ghost

soldiers where they'd say, "Yes, we have

800 men." Now they have like 200 men and

they're paying for 600 ghosts. People

are skimming. They do the same for ammo,

the same for fuel, the same for food.

take that over and then fix the medical

issue because you were seven times as

likely to die if you were an Afghan and

you got wounded, which is wrong. Yeah.

All everything I just described for you

cost 5% of what the US was spending.

So, they had they had they had 20,000

some US military at that point and about

29,000 contractors. And I just advocated

a massive rationalization down to about

five as a staybehind force would have

kept the Afghan military from completely

collapsing because the reason they

collapsed and I called I called it about

three months before I made a bet with a

buddy of when Kabool was going to

collapse. And we knew that but did it

based on I knew because of a fuel

contractor. I knew when they were going

to stop delivering fuel to the Afghan

Air Force. Oh wow. And the US Air Force.

So the close air support was going to

stop. You should have called a hedge

fund. They pay a lot of money for this.

Yeah. Well

um the last thing we need to do is help

hedge funds. [ __ ] those guys. I like

that. Good call.

Um, so I knew that if the if the Taliban

were not going to get smashed by

grouping up as 50 and 200, then they

could go to 5,000. 5,000 they could

start running over cities. It's exactly

what happened. Now, cynically, like cuz

your plan on paper sounds pretty good,

but again, you were writing this, not

that this is your fault, but you're

writing this 16 years in, right? And so

when you think about all the things that

had led to that like the all kinds of

incremental thinking. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Incremental thinking der um um and

deprived of any kind of price

information. Right. It was like the

embodiment of socialism.

Can you explain that? Yeah.

The problem when when the military says

we need this much to do

something they they're making that

general or that staff person is making

that decision not really understanding

how much something

costs. Okay. So it it basically is going

to be a road paved to hell of

inefficiencies if they do that. The road

to hell paid by good intentions. Right.

Sure. Okay. But you're writing it when

all this [ __ ] has happened for a long

time. Do you think that if you had been

given the cart blanch in 2017 after

writing this type of op-ed, there would

have been a chance that you could have

turned it around 100%.

Because it was not theoretical. I knew

I and and the one time I saw President

Trump while he was president the first

term, it was on Veterans Day of

2019, and he came up to me and said,

"Eric, you were right. I should have

listened to you on Afghanistan.

I was like, "Mr. President, there is

still time. We can fix this. Give us a

chance." But he never really controlled

this national security apparatus the

first time around. He never controlled

it. The same

um Mattis and uh Esper were very much

very conventional thinking, completely

immune to um innovation. and um Gina

Haspel because what made sense is to do

this under a title 50 authority. Title

10 is how the Pentagon goes to war.

Title 50 is how the CIA does its stuff.

When the when the SEALs, sorry, when

when the special forces went into

Afghanistan the first time they were

working for the CIA director, title 50

authority. Yeah. When the SEALs went

crossborder into Pakistan to kill Bin

Laden, title 50 authority, not title 10.

Interesting. And that was like when

Kofford Black was running that whole

initial one, right? Kofer Black was

running the original one. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. And he wor Didn't didn't he work

for Blackwater? He did. He He retired.

He went to work for the State

Department. He was the ambassador for

counterterrorism and then uh he joined

us for a while. He was fantastic. I love

that guy. That guy is so in massive

a true um a spy spy and he understood uh

unconventional warfare because he'd done

it against Gaddafi in the 80s against

Gaddafi. Oh yeah. Oh, I didn't know

about this. What was he doing there?

Because Gaddafi used to invade Chad and

push south, push his army south. And so

Topheer would help uh push them back.

And so if you send a huge convoy of

trucks deep into the Sahara desert, how

do you make them want to turn back? Poke

holes in the water

trucks. You don't have to kill them all.

Just poke holes in the water trucks.

Yeah. And uh he did the same thing to

the Cubans and the um Oh, he did to the

Cubans, too, in uh in Angola. Yep. Wow.

Yeah. That guy's been around the block.

He has. He's the one with the famous

quote about flies crawling across their

eyeballs. That was that was pretty ball.

He had a fantastic flare for the

dramatic and and that's intentbased

leadership.

Right. And but barring that kind of out

of the box thinking, you know what the

Pentagon wanted to do after 911? While

the Pentagon is still smoldering, they

said, "We want to wait until the

following April and do a mechanized

invasion of Afghanistan via Pakistan."

Yeah, he wanted six months. Come on,

guys.

I mean, Rumsfeld wasn't the brightest,

you know, he wasn't the sharpest. Look,

I People want to ding on Rumsfeld. I

like him. You like Rumsfeld? Yeah. He at

least he at least understood how broken

the Pentagon was and it needed to have

some business focus at least to

understand how much these things cost. I

mean, he is the guy that said we're

missing like $2 trillion. I'll give him

that. Like, no one else really ever said

that. But I still don't know what

happened to that $2 trillion. Well, and

I think there's more than that missing

now. More than two trillion now. I'm

sure. How do you lose two three

trillion? Like what is this just like a

very slow steep climb down a you know

that's the that is the the fundamental

problem. You have a Congress that

appropriates way too much money and all

Congress really knows how to do is

people say oh there's a problem. What's

the American response to that? Throw

money at it. Right. Throw money at it.

And and so our foreign policy has become

one of fire hosing money at all these

problems. And it's like

um it's it's basically watering the

weeds in your driveway. It's making all

of them grow that much faster and

reinforcing all the wrong things.

The business of America should be

business, not warfare, not not foreign

policy large. What do you mean by

foreign policy large S?

the the massive spend of USID and a

massive overbloated Pentagon

budget to the point of of making the

Pentagon like an obese

triathlete, right? You should have a

Pentagon that is forced to make

um disciplined decisions for what what

are priorities versus what are not

priorities. And when you have so much of

the Pentagon budget is you have 800,000

civilians, DoD civilians working for the

Pentagon now. So for Secretary Hegath to

try to reform the Pentagon, it's a lot.

It's not just uniform

services, but you got to give them

um true hiring and firing authority to

clean out because there is dead wood

upon dead wood upon dead wood. You're

also set up though, and this is like

kind of the catch 22. It's set up to be

so compartmentalized for basically

intelligence purposes. Meaning like this

team has a need to know on just this one

thing and that team is a need to know

just that other thing. But there's

people sitting high enough they can see

across those issues. The the problem is

is a lot of classification is used to to

hide incompetence and waste.

I don't disagree. Sorry to be bleak on

that. No, no, I I I I don't disagree

with you. I'm just wondering how much

those people in those high places can

see all that. I know they can definitely

see a good bit of it, but like it's hard

to say like well cuz some of the guys

like Mattis I guess when he was running

the Pentagon like I've had guys in here

talk about the things he wasn't read in

on and he's like the head you know I

would just think the heads read in on

everything but that's not that's not the

case. It's so large that it's almost

impossible for anyone to really get a

handle of all of it. This is we talk

about this all the time in here. I've

had so many guys who were at different

levels of special forces who were in

Afghanistan throughout the 20 years

there. And every time someone comes in,

we learn something wild and new about

what was going on. But it's like I've

always looked at it, not to be too black

and white about it, but that initial

invasion was obviously necessary and

very impressive. The one that Kofheer

was running, it was one of the and it

should have stayed a Roman style

punitive raid.

What do you mean Roman style?

When um you've heard of the battle of Ka

in Rome, right? What you've heard of the

the Punic Wars, right? When the

Carthaginians were ravaging Rome

and

um Hannibal the barbarian rolls across

all this and then they do the battle of

Ka and it's a single I mean they lost

like 80,000 people in a morning Romans.

Imagine that.

I mean, imagine killing that many people

by sword. It's nuts. Before noon, it's

nuts.

And they stood up in the Roman Senate

and they said, "Kartthagio dende est.

Carthage must be destroyed." So who did

they send? Cypio Africanis and he

destroys Carthage and he salts the

earth.

That's what we should have done in

Afghanistan. We should have

sent and allowed SAF to remain off leash

and to smash any and all remnants of

Taliban

manpower or Taliban adjacent people and

let them howl in pain and then leave.

We're not there to make them a a liberal

representative democracy. We're there to

punish them for accommodating terrorists

which hurt America and then leave.

That's how Rome maintained peace for

multiple centuries would have been a

better approach and vastly cheaper.

I don't like to I I really try to look

at these situations as 30,000 feet in

the air as I can because I think a lot

of people like me can get in the trap of

of playing Monday morning quarterback

having not been to these places, having

not seen realities, having not

understood what warfare is like upfront.

But like as a devil's advocate to that,

if you were to take that type of

approach, are there not a [ __ ] ton of

people in Afghanistan who are just

living under that thumb who would be

caught in the crossfire perhaps

unnecessarily if we took a more

conventional form of warfare that could

help avoid that?

I would say that you would have

liberated the

um men, women, and children from

Afghanistan that did not want to live

under a Taliban

um religious

rule and or or ruled by the Pashons,

which is really what really what you

had.

Um and when I say a punitive raid, that

means you're killing anybody that's

resisting. Okay? Not killing anything

and everything. No. Okay. Not a

wholesale slaughter. If you want to

fight, fight because that's what Scipio

did. Scipio I mean like going through

that history like he did wholesale

slaughter entire entire [ __ ] parts of

those cities. Well, but they took most

of them as

captives or slaves. I'm not saying I'm

taking that as the same end result.

Okay. So, call it call it Scipio Light.

Okay. All right. That's a good

distinction. So, you think we you think

we could have been out of there in a

year? Yeah. Or eight months.

What do you What did you think? I mean,

going back to I mean, as as a as a I

heard a soft guy or I read it and he

said and he was part of that initial

push and it had been in there for

months, but then at Kandahar when

they're starting to build a big uh base

exchange with a McDonald's and a Burger

King and all the rest, yep, time for us

to leave. because it really became a

money thing for the Pentagon and that's

ultimately what it is about the

Pentagon. Soft did extraordinarily

well fought in unconventional warfare

with a small light lethal

footprint and then you have all these

conventional airborne units and uh armor

and all the rest and they wow we have to

get be part of

this. So they come with their very

conventional approach to warfare and

replicate the Soviet battle plan that

had been done from 79 to 89 by the

Soviets.

It's interesting down to the same base

bases

history just repeating itself. Yep.

It's interesting to hear you give these

perspectives

because everything you're pointing to I

can appreciate because it's it's

anti- the worst parts of the

military-industrial complex, right?

You're trying to say like for example,

let's end a war in 8 months. Get the

[ __ ] out of there instead of spending 20

years and open up McDonald's and stuff.

And not that this is your fault at all.

It's just it's always wild when someone

who is in the middle of it like you're a

part of those groups that people look at

and label military-industrial complex is

the guy like sounding the alarm saying

let's not do this. I and I and I but I I

specifically remember that phone call I

made to Gary Jackson the president of

Blackwater back at our headquarters

saying holy [ __ ] this is already turning

bureaucratic and bloated and and

ridiculous.

What did you think when the when the

rumble started coming in that we were

going to do

Iraq?

Um, look, if they did Iraq properly

would have possibly been a different

outcome. But again, having a massive

conventional military to depose Saddam.

the a smarter way. If you were

absolutely hellbent that you had to

depose Saddam, do it through some kind

of covert action and save yourself the

massive cost and bloat and and

infrastructure destruction that would

come with rolling 3 400,000 US troops

into Iraq.

Um, but worse than that, once we were

there, I remember in

about spring of 2004, so about a year

after the UN invasion,

uh, the head of the Iraqi intelligence

service came to see me, guy named

Muhammad Schwani with a CIA handler. And

he was a legendary Iraqi figure, former

head of Iraqi special forces back in the

80s. He had done uh the largest

helicopter invasion in history into Iran

during the Iran Iraq war. Oh wow. Okay.

And that kind of stuff put him in a

crossways with Saddam because Saddam

figured if the guy can do it to the

Iranians, he can do it to

me. But

um uh Muhammad eventually made it to

Jordan because the Iraqis were trying to

kill

him. Um Saddam ended up executing both

of his sons.

But anyway, um he came to see me and he

said, "We're seeing all kinds of

evidence of the Iranians setting up

political offices, assassination teams,

influence operations all through

southern Iraq. And we want a program to

find them and to eliminate the Iranian

officers." And we priced it up because

we were doing some stuff for the agency

back then.

and and it was effectively going to be a

a kind of small version of the Phoenix

program and uh I remember we're going to

call it Ted Williams. Why? Because Ted

Williams was one of the greatest hitters

of all times. Teddy Williams going

[ __ ] yad

and um the whole thing the agency was

going to fund it and it was blocked by

Condise Rice then national security

adviser. Iran is not our enemy. We have

to respect the political process, all

the rest. It was to me it was a massive

sliding door moment in the entire Iraq

debacle because if we had been allowed

to sever the Iranians putting their

hooks into Iraqi society because think

about the Iran Iraq war that was a

massive loss of life for both

sides and the Iranians are a very

deliberate society.

Deliberate. Deliberate. They put a

thousand stitches making a Persian rug.

Okay? Thousand stitches into a square

inch. Beautiful, planned, deliberate. So

they do long-term intelligence planning,

long-term influence operations as so so

what they were doing in Iraq is exactly

what they'd already done in Lebanon with

Hezbollah, what they've done in Yemen

with um with the Houthis and now they're

doing it with in Iraq which became the

Hashtabi which is a 250,000man unit of

the Iraqi military now paid by the Iraqi

government that are effectively under

Iranian

control before as that's in its early

stage. The Iraqi intelligence service

wanted to cut them off properly and we

were blocked from doing so. But if we'd

been allowed to, I think Iraq would look

much different today. Even with the

whole vacuum we created because like I

don't want to be misheard here. Like

Saddam was obviously a terrible guy.

There's no one questioning that. But

like I think it's almost impossible to

say we didn't create a bigger problem

once he once he was deposed because it

basically allowed Alakarawi to come in

and eventually form what would

eventually become ISIS. Uh yes, but that

was that was a it was almost a Sunni

blowback onto the Shia hijgemony that

was stimulated by Iran because the

biggest ethnic group

uh sorry the biggest religious group in

Iraq are are Shia

uh and then Sunnis then Kurds and

um the amount of of dominance that the

Shia had with that Iranian control over

all parts of society

that stimulated a lot of Sunnis to say,

"Well, maybe we'll go with these

radicals, even if it's Zarqawi because

we're not going to take it from the Shi

anymore." So, it it definitely it cked

off a effectively an internal religious

war that we could have prevented if we

had uh kept the Iranians on their side

of the border. And the even the entire

uh the EFP, right, the the the really

nasty roadside bomb, which was, you

know, you know what a roadside bomb is,

of course. Oh, yeah.

H explosive blows up, energy gets thrown

into the vehicle. An EFP, imagine this

is copper and you put this on the front

of a can filled with explosives. The

explosive starts here with a cap. The

explosive wave goes through what C4 goes

about 22 to 25,000 ft per second. It

turns this copper plate into a copper

slug going about 8,000 ft per second.

Bores right through the side of your

Humvee or your Abrams tank. that was

built, organized, supplied by the

Iranians. The same ones that Kandi Rice

prevented us from taking

out. It's too bad. It

was I I feel you. I mean, it's

interesting though that like the

entire, you know, administration that

was really pushing this war though would

almost get cold feet on something like

that once they're there. That's

fascinating to me. no place for half

measures if you're going to if you're

going to if you're going to go that and

that's the thing we have a lot of

unserious people in Washington making

foreign policy decisions with no skin in

the game. So, if you're going to do

the you're going to make the call of

sending people into harm's way, then let

them finish the job and don't hamstring

them with 10,000 lawyers and half

measures that devalues the actual human

sacrifice of your people and of the

damage you're causing on the other side

well. Finish the war, not this managed

conflict nonsense. When approximately

was that conversation again where she

said no? early 2004. Okay. So, this is

still that's interesting. So, they were

already hamstrung at that point with,

you know, legal hurdles on everything.

You wouldn't think that on it. That was

a that was an it would have been an

intelligence program, not a conventional

military thing.

Oh, doing that. Right. Right. Right.

Taking that action. Is this you and I

were talking before camera because

obviously this got leaked so you can

talk about it but were you

already a knock at this point for CIA.

So can you explain what that program was

because the way I understood is that it

was a CIA

assassination program. So what was

leaked and this is my beef about it. So

the yeah the agency had come to me the

director

himself had said we want a unilateral

um no attribution back to the USG

capability to go after targets globally.

When was this?

2004

and

um all of that would have remained

silent and sealed. It was never leaked

by me. It was never leaked by the

agency. But it was leaked by Leon Petta

when the Obama crowd took over and he

briefed the program and me by name to

the House Intelligence Committee who

within a half an hour of him briefing it

because one of the members of Congress

came out and told me, "Hey, he just

briefed you by name for this

program." And within a half an hour of

that, the Washington Post and New York

Times were calling me for comment. Now,

he was headed of the CIA though when he

did that. Or was this before that? Pett

Petta was the head of the CIA when he

did it. When he did

this, why do you think he did that?

I there's nothing positive I can say

about him for doing that. I can imagine.

But it's but it's whether people love me

or hate me, fine. I don't care. It's not

great for any CIA director to brief

people by name that are extending

themselves. And it's not very good for

the CIA to to um promote recruitment of

people that will be sticking their neck

out for America to get thrown under the

bus by a director just because you don't

like me politically.

Had you had previous disagreements with

him on other stuff? Nothing ever. In

fact, in fact, the only other

interaction the company had with him was

they were chicken [ __ ] scared. They

wanted to close this drone base, which

was essential, a drone base that we were

operating, okay,

in a dangerous part of the world. And my

people had to go in and brief him in

person to say, "We got it, sir. We're

not afraid of getting run over. Give us

these heavier weapons. We got it." And

okay, fine. It was literally the only

interaction. And um I whether he was

just a partisan hack or an [ __ ] or

weak or whatever, but briefing briefing

assets by name is not only wrong, it's

illegal. Right. I was just going to ask

that. So why if he's briefing you by

name and then at least to the press?

Because the whole idea if you're if

you're a knock if you're a knock, you

have a file. It's called a 2011 file. I

definitely had that. To brief it by name

is is really bad intelligence policy.

And it's a violation of federal law.

Yeah. It's like the Valerie Pla thing.

Yeah. But worse. I mean, she was she was

an analyst at some nuclear conference

and here I was running a killing people

unilateral capability that the US

government needed. Right. So I know you

can't comment on specifics of things

that happen that Oh, you can. Well, the

last chapter of my book is written from

uh from open source stuff, so you can

infer. Yeah, but we Yeah, it was a it

was a hell of an education.

What? All right. So, they come to you in

' 04, they ask you to do this stuff. I'm

I'm so curious by the by the background

with how this stuff works

because a knock is someone who's

supposed to be completely deniable.

Meaning, like if you are I mean, here's

the thing. The the fact is

without any any American that volunteers

because of their unique access or

placement to help their country with

intelligence matters or providing cover

or providing the means to ship something

or whatever that is run through the NR

department NR part of the CIA national

resources. Okay.

And so they handle all the knocks and

that should be a and they have a huge

amount I mean Americans globally have a

lot of unique access and talents and

that's a huge part of

the reliable capability. And so that's

my beef with

Betta. You might not like me. I did

everything the agency ever asked and we

did it well and we protected all their

people in the most difficult places at

nauseium. The

guys that um were in Benghazi right

after the US ambassador was killed by

terrorists and he was supposed to be

being protected by State Department

diplomatic security people who

incidentally fired how many rounds? How

many rounds did the State Department

security people fire protecting their

guy?

Zero. The guys that were over at the

agency annex, many of them had worked

for BW, had worked for us before before

they were direct hired by the agency.

So, we'd done all of that and then to

get thrown under the bus by the director

because he doesn't like me or he's

afraid or whatever, that's just

[ __ ] I I have issue with that. So

the dam moa on that is I'm living

overseas and I get um contacted by the

embassy that I'm now on the okay to hit

list because of that. I'm sure because

there was well blowback from Yeah,

whatever.

But that's got to be crazy. I mean I I

would be I can't even imagine how angry

you were about that. Uh, and it's it's

part of the um I would say it's part of

the lawfare of the left where they make

you toxic and

unbankable and they just throw a lot of

[ __ ] at you to make you toxic so you are

choked off of access to business,

banking, credit, all they made you

unbankable. Oh yeah. Like

internationally or

Okay.

because of the type of T. But in the US,

were you unbankable, too? Oh, yeah.

Really? Yep. Big banks. Sure. Sure. All

the [ __ ] that that got thrown at us

after Nisur Square and all the all that

bureaucratic attack. Yeah. That's all

that's all part of a kind of a left-wing

playbook.

So, so you so have you ever talked with

Petta about that? Have you? I did. I

confronted him at an OSS dinner. When

was this?

probably five or six years

ago. I said, you know, I said, you know,

that's pretty [ __ ] up when you name an

asset like that. Well, well, I I was

under a lot of pressure. Like, really?

You're under

pressure? I said, what does that do for

recruiting? And he just he turned and

walked away. He was a [ __ ] Oh, he

didn't handle it. No, he didn't stand on

business.

That's tough.

Good for you, though, for confronting

him. I mean, I Yeah, I'm a pretty direct

guy. Yeah, I I kind of got that. What

was the You mentioned Nissour Square,

though. I I have to give credit to Sean

for this because he did the podcast with

Sean and that's why I did his podcast

originally because he did that he did

those guys so fairly. Yeah. So, to be

perfectly honest with you, I had found

Sean I think short maybe a month or two

before I watched that podcast. And when

I found him, I was going through his

catalog at the time and I saw he had

those guys in and I'm like, "Oh, he had

the Blackwater guys in. Didn't they like

blow everyone away?" So, I didn't watch

it and then I watched it and then went

and reviewed the case and everything

that happened. And I have to say it

completely changed my mind on it. It

feels like when you look at the facts of

the case and I guess you could call it

destroyed evidence too between the drone

footage and stuff like that like those

guys got hung out to dry. But for people

out there who are unfamiliar with the

case, can you just walk them through

what happened in ' 07 here? Sure. That

was um we were providing security

personnel for the state department where

we would perform under a bid

contract page long contract of all the

things they will be trained to and house

supplied and all the rest and we would

send them to the state department and

chop them to their operational control.

So I wasn't controlling the mission.

Drive here, turn there or there's a

state department, the regional security

officer, the chief of security for the

state department would be. And in that

case, um, in September of 2007 was

during the surge, right? So there was a

big extra amount of US forces in because

they're trying to get a handle on a very

aggressive

insurgency. And

um the week before it started with one

of our helicopters being shot down by um

by insurgents and then two other attacks

with explosives against our vehicles put

some of our guys in the hospital and

then Niser Square a

September 16, 2007 was a

um there was a car bomb outside of a

building where we had a USA ID official

um and normally the guys would hardpoint

wait at a building, but all the Iraqi

guards ran away. So, they decided to

move. And so, they called for a support

team, one of these Raven 23. There's a

tactical support team, meaning a bigger

set of gun trucks to uh provide support

in a firefight. And uh so they were to

block and uh certain entrances to a

traffic circle so that the fleeing guys

could flow through there safely. Because

if you know anything about deer hunting,

you always want to hunt a trailer

section. If you want to kill Americans,

hunt the traffic circles because you

know they're going to pass

through. And uh so this team is there

and of course they've gotten a briefing

that morning to be on the lookout, a

bolo announcement for a white Kia, which

is likely a car bomb. And all the other

cars stop in the traffic circle like

they're supposed to except a white Kia

which keeps coming and coming and they

go through all the different signaling

of flashing lights and um lasers and

smokes and all the other stuff keeps

coming. They light it up sadly. Well, it

wasn't a car bomb. It was a guy driving

his mother. Mhm. And

um and then a firefight breaks out and

um from other insurgents or somebody

firing at the vehicles, one of the

vehicles actually takes a round which

skips off the pavement and it severs the

um the coolant drain line. So all the

coolant drains out of this $500,000

State Department armored truck. And of

course, modern electronic engines, if no

coolant, no motor. So, they're delayed

further as they're trying to rig a tow

drag this thing out of there. They do.

And I get a call uh that night from our

country manager. He goes, "Hey boss,

just let you know we uh there's a

firefight today. It's actually much

milder than the ones we've had just the

previous few days. Uh in case there's a

uh you know, media fury and and this one

went absolutely high and right." Um, how

quickly did it go? I I don't remember.

Within hours. Within hours. And And so,

you know, we'd had indications from the

Iranians that they really hated us. They

really hated I mean, can you imagine? We

did stuff for the intelligence

community. They knew who Blackwater was.

And Blackwater protected the most alazer

newsworthy targets. Meaning, you know,

because if they catch an American, cut

the head. That's their propaganda thing.

And so the Iranians knew who we were. Um

and um man, between a left-wing media,

which in the Vietnam War, they went

after troops. This time they went after

contractors and

um Blackwater represented everything

they love to hate. Even though we were

tiny compared to the Lockheeds and the

Boeings and all the rest, because we

uh I was a sole owner. Um, company was

successful. I was married to a woman. I

had kids. Was Roman Catholic, right? I

mean, I I represented everything the

left loved to hate. And the business

made money. And sometimes our guys were

armed and sometimes they had to use

those arms. And uh, you know, in Iraq, I

think we did more than a 100,000

missions. Uh, and no one under our care

was ever killed or injured. And in less

than one half of 1% of the time was

there ever a firearm used. And you know,

all that stuff was logged. But this one

went really high and right and um yeah,

State Department threw us under the bus

for doing exactly what their mission was

and uh and

and yeah, it was a it was a mess. and

and yes, it was not a not a good shoot,

but having followed the rules of

engagement. Um, when you're when you

have just probably two months before, we

had a

Suburban, a armored Suburban that weighs

probably 8,000 10,000 lbs that was

thrown almost 150 meters into a building

from a car.

So when you see your buddies die from

that and you see a a white Kia that

doesn't stop in traffic that's coming on

to you. Yeah. They engaged and uh

tragically it was not the right shoot.

But you know, as recently as

200, I think 14 or 15 in

DC, there was a woman

that drove her car into security

barriers outside one of the federal

buildings and federal law enforcement

officers opened up on her and she drove

away, rammed into some other buildings

up by the Supreme Court. Whoa. And they

eventually gunned her down and killed

her. And you know what? You know what

she had in the back of her car? No

weapons, no bombs, a baby in a car seat.

Why was she doing that? Did they ever

figure that out? No idea. But you know

what? I I was there any human cry for

the federal law enforcement, right?

Killed an innocent woman,

right? I think I can only imagine the

noise that would have been if it was a

contractor that took that shot. I can

instead of a federal officer. I don't

disagree with you. I think like looking

back on it it was dozens and dozens of

it was not just like a mag it was lots

of dudes sending it it's like

unfortunately a lot of things in our

world is just marketing you know and I

always wonder if you named the company

like Red Hills or something like that

instead of Blackwater not that that's a

bad name or anything but it's like it's

it's a hard name you also have a

memorable name Eric Prince like also

pretty hard name

Yeah, he's like he's like no

you know but this comes back to we had

asked the state department for cameras.

We wanted to put basically dash cam

cameras like the like like on a police

car in our vehicles to prevent exactly

this kind of he shed he said she said

disagreements in our in our vehicles

that we were using for security work for

NOS's. We had those and probably two

weeks before the Niser Square incident

happened, they got called in about a a

so-called questionable shoot and the

military reviewed all the tapes like

absolutely clearly was a good shoot uh

for what you did. So again, State

Department forbade us from having those

cameras because they said, "Well, what

if it records something?" I was like,

that's exactly why we want everything on

film so that it takes

away that um um that decision-making or

that opinion made in the comfort of a

air conditioned boardroom. Did that ever

come out in court that they had denied

that? Of course. I again what I've also

realized that was the first time

uh when I got dragged before

Congress, I'd been a knock. I'd managed

to stay out of the media. And so as I

walk into the the halls of Congress for

that hearing in October of

2007, the um uh you know, the cameras

are cranking away and I thought, "Shit,

my days as a covert operator are truly

over now."

In fact, two of the

guys uh that were um part of the team

only knew me as my uh as my crypt,

right? uh as my as my team name, not in

my name. Oh, you were that and they go,

"Hey, that looks just like" and then

they realize it was me. So, it was

funny. That was a That day ended more

than a few good things. Yeah. The I mean

the the third part of this though, like

the marketing is like it's just for

window dressing. But the third part of

this is that the time this happened,

2007, the tiredness of the war has set

in. Oh, yeah. massive war fatigue. Yeah.

And and people are are legitimately

frustrated and pissed cuz we're not

making progress. And also the same

left-wing media that, you know, is doing

these types of things now were the same

people who were carrying the water for

any information technically like

unvetted sometimes that was getting us

into the war and getting the entire

society onto the war. So it's almost

like they had like, oh [ __ ] our bad. So

they're trying to flip it hard the other

way and so they see a target like you

all to sell advertising. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. It's effectively it corporate

media. It's crazy time. But those guys,

you know, they end up getting convicted

at the time. I think it was four of the

five got convicted. The fifth became a

witness or something. Yes. But they um I

think they tried him four different

times.

Yeah. When it was like 2014 or 2015 when

they were finally convicted, maybe

something like that. Uh yes.

Yeah. And you know, in talking to the

guys, I'm so proud of them for how they

handled the situation and um and how

they handled themselves in prison

because as they're

um they told me they're in their orange

jumpsuits, manicled taken out of the

prison van after the first

sentencing. And they said, "Guys, we can

come through

this as bitter men or better men, and I

choose to be

better." And um none of them joined a

gang. One of them um they all were

um uh teaching and mentoring in um in

prison. One of them taught himself

biblical Greek. And uh one of them told

me that

um when the guards would come in and

close their cells at night doing

headcount, they'd say, "Man, it is hard

for me to close this door because you

don't belong in here. You're a political

prisoner." That's crazy. And they found

a quite a kinship with a lot of the

guards because they're all veterans and

they realized the politics behind it.

So, and then one I remember talking to

talking to the guys after because they

weren't exactly sure the pardon was

going to come through and one of them

had been in isolation because of COVID

because his cellmate had gotten COVID

for like three

weeks. And he um I I'm sure Evan this is

Evan Liberty so he wouldn't mind me

telling the story. And uh so he's in

prison in Pennsylvania and

um all of a sudden um this senior guard

barges into a cell goes, "Holy [ __ ]

pack your stuff. Complete and total

[ __ ] pardon. You're out of here."

Shows him the document. He goes, "I

don't want any of my stuff." Like,

"Okay, let's

go." And he said, "But then it takes

almost an hour Yeah. to get processed

out of a prison after a pardon. And

during that time, word had spread. The

whole the whole prison knew. And as he's

walking out, they're cheering. Oh, they

were all banging cups there just

celebrating for him. Wow. It was

beautiful. And uh and he gets out and

all he has is a t-shirt and sweatpants

and like flip-flop prison shoes. And

it's December 22. Oh. In Pennsylvania.

And of course, they give him uh

$40 on a some kind of a debit card from

the Bureau of Prisons, which didn't

work, and $10 cash. And uh he he caught

a ride to town with one of the guards

and uh managed to check into a hotel

with um called his lawyer, put it on his

credit card. So, he goes from in prison

facing many, many more years at 5:30

p.m. Mhm. And by 7:30 p.m., he's in a

cheap hotel out in town out calling his

lawyer. It's got to be an amazing

feeling, though. I mean, that's a long I

talked I talked to him that night. It

was man. How did you feel when they got

sentenced though and and you knew the

deal and you knew like this was just a

bad shoot. They didn't The intention

obviously wasn't there. They they they

weren't murderers. They weren't what

they were made out to be. And they

worked for your company. And these guys

are getting damn near like life in

prison. What does that feel like? But

beyond that, they were given an extra

This is how bad the prosecutors were.

They gave him an extra 30 years prison

based on some old uh drug war law

because they used a machine gun in the

commission of their crime. Right? So

kind of based on the 80s in a war zone

using machine gun ignoring the fact that

the machine gun had been issued to them

by the state department and was required

piece of their

gear. That's that's how shitty these

these prosecutors were. But how is how

does where's the judge on that? Like

that's so obvious. Just as

bad. So, there's a reason the DOJ, the

Department of Injustice, prosecuted them

in Washington DC, not in Idaho or

Montana or Colorado, in normal states

where these guys came from. Not a jury

of your peers in Washington DC. Yeah,

you're pretty much guilty on on those

juries, it seems like with anything.

Yeah, pretty much everyone I've talked

to is like that. But you were you were

advocating for their pardon, I imagine,

directly to the president. Like because

it did take obviously like he did it

towards the end of his first term. He

didn't do it during the term. Like what

were those conversations like? Was he

saying are they, you know, are they

really actually innocent? Was he going

back and forth on that? Um I I didn't

have that level of direct conversation

with the president. I have that kind of

relationship with them. But certainly

talking to the people around him.

A lot of people that reviewed the case

realized how political it was.

Yeah. And that would you say that that

was effectively like

the I mean obviously Black Blackwater

became it was it was a catalyst that

destroyed the company, right? Yep.

That's got to you do everything right

for so long. You build something. It's

your baby. Why not [ __ ] right wipes out

a whole lot of attabo. Yeah. Did that

change your worldview significantly as

it pertains to the United States and how

we operate?

Um, I still believe in the republic very

much so and the Constitution and and

those things. I realize that um I'm not

the first patriot to have been screwed

by the US government and certainly won't

be the last.

Yeah. I don't like and whatever whatever

nonsense. Look, the guys lost years of

their lives. Thank God they are out now.

Thank God for President Trump pardoning

them. That was undoing a massive

injustice. whatever [ __ ] I had to

put up with and building a business,

having it smashed pales in comparison to

vets that have lost their mental health,

their marriages, their physical health,

limbs,

eyes, buddies, right? They paid a huge

price and it really pisses me off and

why I've been an advocate

to fix the Afghanistan policy in 2017

and even to the B administration before

the debacle or to actually sever the

Iranian control in Iraq so that Iraq can

actually be a free and independent

country and not subjugated by Iran is

because if you're going to ask soldiers

to go do a difficult thing in a

dangerous place and you're going to

suffer, get injured or

die, have enough respect to see the job

through and don't be a [ __ ] about

making difficult, dangerous decisions

and that we have the problem is in

Washington, we have way too many of

that. We don't have the the Clauswitz

moral courage of people making difficult

decisions.

How did you pivot after that as

Blackwater got dragged through the mud

and sold it in 2010 for

0.88 times

um two years previous cash flow.

So if you have your your hedge fund

weenie uh audience, it was a absolute

fire sale after the banking crisis and

all the rest. It was uh it was just

wrecked uh because of all the politics

and all the

um the legal assault from every aspect

of the federal government which was also

quite an

education and uh I have a true visceral

hatred of the bureaucracy in Washington.

I can tell.

Um but uh at that point we had done um

20 helicopters for the UAE, basically

upgraded them and our price was a third

of what Lockheed was going to charge to

do the same thing.

And so that led to us moving uh because

of Somaly piracy. the leadership in the

UAE wanted to because you know smally

piracy you had 80 to 90 ships taken per

year t held for 6 months to a year and a

half and get a ransom paid of 5 to 10

million

bucks and so the UAE wanted to do

something about that and I laid out a a

program which tried to coordinate with

with the state department as I remember

going to the U keep sir I remember going

to the assistant the secretary of state

for

Africa under Obama and I said imagine if

we could raise money to do a

counterpircy police program in

Somalia okay if I raise money from a

Gulf country to do that would you want

to be

involved and I remember him coming back

to me three days later he says great

idea keep it as far away from the US

government as you can because we'll be

debating it in the inter agency process

for the next five

Oh wow. Said uh well okay

self-awareness.

And um so that led to the Portland

Marine Police Force. We made a

documentary about it called the Somalia

Project if people want to follow up.

Probably worth pulling up on uh Yeah,

let's do that. You seen that? We did it

um knowing it would be controversial to

have, you know, the the left to throw

the poratives. Those white mercenaries.

That's it right there. The project

um did that, filmed it, and because

again the UN and the the idiots in the

Washington bureaucracy came and tried to

smash this as well for building the

audacity of building a police force of

Somali led by some expats to go after

the pirate logistics. And sure enough,

the unit went active in 2011 2012.

piracy fell to about zero and you don't

hear much about smiley piracy anymore.

Shocking how that works. Yeah. Why? Why?

Why does the And it cost the US tax

there zero. Zero money. In fact, the the

Captain Phillips, the rescue when Dev

Group did that, that program, them

rescuing him cost more than what our

counterparty program. Oh, yeah. I would

I would believe that in a second. I've

heard how big that operation was. had a

couple guys from different agencies that

were so really since since I sold BW I

have not been a US government contractor

at all not taken a dollar in any kind of

US government contract but I really

figured out how to

do that kind of stability operation

uh policing security work aviation in

difficult places all without US stuff so

it's been quite an education and you've

spent a lot of time in the UA UAE and

and living there as well, right? In Abu

Dhabi. Uh I live there full-time for uh

three years with my kids. Yeah.

What what what are what are they like

with four of my kids? I feel like they

get ignored a lot. Like when we talk

about the Middle East, you know, it's

like they're there, but everyone wants

to talk about Saudi Arabia, they want to

talk about Israel, some of these other

countries, obviously Iran for another

reason there. But what what what

attracts you to the UAE? Um they are a

um for a Middle East country what

I well a they wanted help provided help

b um they they've actually respected uh

religious freedom uh quite well right

there's churches there there's not even

synagogues in in the UAE and uh the

synagogues came even before the Abraham

Accords but when I lived there with my

kids there was Yeah, there was a couple

blocks of areas where there was almost

every flavor of Christian church you

could imagine. So welcoming place in a

way it was. Yeah. And um kids went to

the American school there. Um and they

uh they learned a lot and they learned

uh a lot of how the rest of the world

works. So again, I guess a variation of

the travel my dad tried to provide me

when I was a kid. I tried to do the same

thing.

took them to South Africa and um in

Rwanda and um Oh, you took him to

Rwanda. Yep. Took him to the genocide

museum. It was uh very instructive for

him.

You seem to be uh We did We did a bike

trip across China. You did a bike trip

across China. Yeah, that was that was

really They don't They don't even do

that anymore. I didn't think so. It's

not on my list. But that was a

um a great education and you understand

why uh the

CCP tries to have such an export focused

economy because they got to pull

hundreds and hundreds of millions of

people out of rural China because we saw

for miles and miles and miles people

harvesting rice, planting and harvesting

rice the same way they would have done

200 years previously. What year

approximately is this? 2012.

2012. Okay. Okay. So, they're starting

to boom a little bit though at this

point, but the economy second world

right there. But you can but it also is

a great education of in direct

correlation to how far away you got from

Hong Kong, the quality of living, roads,

cleanliness went down. Mhm. What what

Hong Kong

was as a island of capitalism, of rule

of law and governance that for what

since 1847 to 1997, 150 years was the

lease was extraordinary and an

incredible generator of wealth, of

prosperity,

uh clean water, sanitation, all those

positive things. And so I I saw from

that Hong Kong really start to slide

because it's become more and more

absorbed into the Chinese communistr run

mainland. Well, as as a as an aside here

though, we're obviously talking about

the country that has the second biggest

GDP in the world now. They have totally

opposing political paradigm. Yeah.

Right.

Do you view China as like the impending

threat we need to take the most

seriously or what what what are your

thoughts from a geopolitical standpoint

there? Well, you're right in in thinking

that China is diametrically opposed to

our way of life um because they are all

about the party, the party rule and a

rule of the elite. And the idea of

individual rights of an individual

person mattering in China is

antithetical. So

um democracy is

messy. It's imperfect. It's

inefficient but it is the best form of

government on the planet.

So, and so the idea of um

even community like a a mayor or local

elections or whatever is

um smashed out. It's all about the

party.

I'm kind of surprised China hasn't, you

know, when you look at what they've done

around the world from an economic

standpoint, just buying up everything on

countries that can't possibly pay back

the debt. So then they get to set up

shop there forever. It's like surprising

to me that they haven't officially taken

Taiwan or something like that. Why why

why do you think they haven't taken an

action when we've shown let's say

foreign policy weakness over the past

several years? They can speak out. They

can protest. They can it's

imperfect. That

is that is

a the freedom disease that the Chinese

Communist Party just cannot tolerate.

And that's why they're so obsessed with

taking it.

It just seems like, you know, when you

look at the history of their scale up in

1999, there are metrics with which you

could still have called them a third

world country. And very quickly, they

quadrupled, quintupled down on

technology and effectively not only

became a first world country, but

they're like the other world power now.

And I get concerned when I see, you

know, things like the Yeah. But let me

just cut you off. Sure.

on this bike trip to go to these

spectacularly built hotels with big

signs. Do not drink the water. Do not

because it's

chemically poisonously unsafe. Like

flint kind of like way no 10x flint. Oh

wow. In lots of places along the way. So

that's that's what comes from having no

property rights and no real means to to

push back on the all powerful state. I

mean, I've been to Beijing and had black

snow. Black snow where it's snowing,

should be white, by the time it gets the

ground because it's picked up so much

cold dust and soot and crap out of the

air, it's falling on the ground right

outside of Beijing airport and it's

black. So that is, you know, even the

the irritant of the US embassy posting

the actual air quality numbers for the

rest of the Beijing population to see.

The fact that the only place you can get

a reliable air quality reading is from

the US embassy says it all for what the

problem with with a one party rule

unaccountable to the people means. Yeah.

And it's it's also crazy that they can

use that against us, too. I always cite

this I always cite this example on the

podcast because like like you I'm not a

fan of communism obviously. N but you

know in their country because they don't

have freedom for example their Tik Tok

for their kids turns off at 9:00 and

when it's on they watch science videos

and math videos pushing STEM not not

titties transgender

stupidity social degradation nonsense.

Exactly. Sure. anything and mindmelting

type stuff. Exactly. And so I always

look at this, it's like you can use our

system of freedom and openness if you're

another country that's not accountable

to anything because you don't have that.

You can use it against itself to turn it

in on itself. Sure. It's exactly what

they're doing with fentanyl, right? The

what the the fentanyl epidemic in

America, which the headline number is

like 109,000 dead last year. It's more

like 250 or 300,000 people. That even

seems low. Yeah, exactly. That is

organized, facilitated, funded by the

Chinese Communist Party. Those precursor

chemicals are coming out of Wuhan area.

Our favorite place. Yeah, exactly.

Shipped to um Venezuela to start, but

then now to Mexico. There are Chinese

nationals in Mexico teaching the cartels

how to fabricate fentanyl. Um, a

normal illicit business is not going to

develop a product that kills its

customers. It's bad for business. So, it

speaks to why I mean fentanyl is done to

rot uh American society from the inside.

It's a reverse opium war to me. It is.

Yeah. And it wasn't even the US that did

it, but it's an FU to the West at large.

You ever hear the book Fentinel, Inc.?

No. So this guy Ben Westoff wrote this

like this had to be maybe six, seven

years ago and he went on he went on Joe

Rogan also like six, seven years ago

after he wrote it and told the story he

was working on he was like a music

reporter he's working on a story in

music and while he's working on it for

this magazine some guy makes a comment

about fentanyl like an off-handed

comment he asks him about it more and he

gets curious starts pulling on the

thread quickly he's like holy [ __ ] like

there's something here decides to write

a book and pretty badass. He decides to

fly to China alone, just an author, you

know, not a special forces guy or

anything, and go undercover and see how

easy it would be to get fentanyl. And it

was basically, you know, to put the

story shorter, it was basically like

going to Walmart and walking out with a

cart in China itself. Now, fast forward

to those guys bringing their people

over, shipping that to Mexico, where the

cartels run the country, you know, who

want to get that into America and can

get it through the border no problem. I

mean, it seems way too easy. The Trump

administration has its work to do. Yes.

How would you stop that if they if Trump

said if I were Donald Trump and I said,

"Eric, you're in charge. Go for it."

Some things are better left unsaid. Oh.

Well, what do you think of him declaring

the cartels terrorist organizations from

a strategic standpoint? Um, well, it

certainly unlocks a lot of additional

authorities because there's

some there's some some pretty capable

ways of delivering energy onto the

enemies when you do that.

Would you elaborate? Whether that's

drones, whether that's J-S capability,

the fine, fix, finish

um muscle that was honed over 20 years

of GWAT is a very capable apparatus.

Does it create any I mean obviously the

Mexican government is corrupt for one

and second the big danger is to me with

um there's so much money made is that

Mexico can teeter towards state capture

by the narcos and that's a problem. So

you either should legalize drugs and

take all the criminal profit out of it

or you have to find a way to mow the

weeds and to and to degrade the strength

of these cartels as on an ongoing basis

so that they don't threaten the Mexican

state.

That's really that's that's what had to

be done in Colombia. Uh and even so the

the cartels are constantly trying to

flex back up. Yeah.

Um, the FARC was taken down a few

notches

by by finding their camps in the jungle

and bombing the [ __ ] out of them.

Do you think when we did the thing in

Colombia though, I I don't remember what

the specifics were there. Did we do that

same thing where we made a a designation

that they were terrorist organizations

officially under? I think so. Okay. But

in that but in that case I I think I was

not uh not involved with any of that.

But um there was some good signant

signals intelligence that was provided.

Um but it was mostly enabling the

Colombians to uh to do it themselves.

Look for a Mexican I feel I feel

terrible for the the typical Mexican

cop who comes on the job and within days

he's visited by some cartel member that

says plateau plommo. Right. take my

silver, I'm gonna pay you off or take

the lead. And it's not just me, not just

you that we're going to kill. We're

going to kill your family and they're

all going to suffer. So for everybody in

America that thinks taking drugs is

harmless to themselves, they are s they

are sentencing a lot

of normal Mexicans that just want to

live their life and raise their kids to

a life of that kind of threat.

So, we either have to take that threat

away

mechanically or

or you have to just bite the bullet and

decriminalize everything because

remember Coca-Cola started out being

laced with cocaine.

Yeah, that you know I would love to live

in a world where that could be possible.

I feel like the that's not ripping off a

band-aid. Like I go back and forth on

this a lot, but like if you legalized

everything, there would still be ways

that the black market I feel like would

take control of it. Could be. Right.

Yeah. Well, and that's why I think the

cartels have shifted towards uh fentanyl

and stronger and stronger stuff because

so much of pot has been largely

decriminalized in America that it's

taken away a profit center for them.

Right. and and why they make as much

money in smuggling people as they did in

smuggling drugs. Yeah, that's the that's

the humanitarian part that I feel like

when people are talking about, you know,

the whole border issue, it gets ignored.

I mean, the the human trafficking that

happens there and that we don't know

where these people go or the horrible

fate that they're most likely and the

and the abuse. Yeah,

I think our immigration policy should be

um a tall fence but a wide gate.

Meaning, let's de debureaucratize how

you get

entrance. Are you coming here to add

value? Um make it easier to do seasonal

visas or actual work permits. You know,

that's something about the UAE. They

take immigration extremely seriously.

They count. If you're there, if you

overstay, you're paying fines

immediately. If you're disappeared and

overstaying, they're finding you and

they're deporting you. They take it

seriously. We don't take it seriously at

all. Trump administration has started to

borders are supposed to delineate a

government

paradigm. Supposed to delineate a

government in English.

But if the United States, we are a

constitution. We believe in elements of

limited government and and uh taxes and

all the rest. And Mexico doesn't have

the same paradigm to do that. We have a

border which delineates our way of

thinking from their way of thinking. I

understand. Not this

borderless soup. Yeah. And it's

interesting because like a lot of other

countries around the world do have

strong borders and enforce them and like

then some do then some don't and the

ones that don't are are largely being

destroyed.

Can we go back to the knock thing real

quick? There there was some more there I

I had to ask you about because you said

you some of it is like been revealed. So

again, if there's stuff you can't talk

about, no problem.

But you know, you have incredible access

as the head of Blackwater. It's obvious

why they might come to you and the

expertise you have being a Navy Seal.

Like the you're perfect on a resume, but

the government comes to you and says

what you said they said to you and

they're like, you know, there's people

we need to take out and have it

untraceable back to us. Is there like

any hesitation with you thinking to

yourself, damn, like I'm really on my

own doing this? Couldn't Isn't there

another Aren't there other people that

could do this? Couldn't the government

actually take care of this themselves or

were you just like let's [ __ ] go?

Um, mostly the latter. Yeah. I mean, you

know, you always say, why me? Why why

are there not 20 other people that are

called? But the

um I had

a because of the other work we've been

doing for other parts of USG, I had a

not a perfect by any means view of who

was doing what and where. Uh so you

could certainly see some of the gaps in

um thinking or in capability and trying

task trying to do have military guys

retask to do some of this stuff is

really hard because you know the J-C

kind of guys it's hard to hide right

hard for them to walk down the street

and look like anybody else in certain

areas. And so having um employing

chameleons that can do it with a very

small footprint and you know that's all

part of the game.

Do they give you like a hit list or are

you getting autonomy? Oh you know

uh very very clearly defined

instructions. Okay.

And these would be high place people

most of the time.

Um, no. Uh, here's the thing. The, you

know, to to build and I, this speaks to

the entire US approach to

counterterrorism. We have been obsessed,

the the drone wars, all the rest, has

been obsessed with all leadership

strikes, thinking that if we just cut

the head of the snake off, the rest of

the body dies. And that's just not how

wars are won. Right?

When you look at the history of

warfare, the Punic Wars, the

Pelpeneisian Wars, the uh American Civil

War, World War I, and World War II,

what's the common theme? The winning

side killed off about 30% of the other

guy's manpower. You have to go after the

manpower, finance, logistics to finish a

war. And that's something we've

never fully realized as a country. or we

did, but we've forgotten that because we

have a lot of unserious people in

positions of responsibility making that

call and they want a headline.

They want to be seen to be doing

something without having to

do the difficult dangerous work or

taking the hits. I mean, just think

about think about the modern media

spotlight

on on how the US did business in World

War II, right? Think about the invasion

of Sicily. Well, well, or the first

outing where the US forces engaged the

Germans in North Africa. Kazarine Pass.

Slaughter, right? American slaughtered.

Total debacle, bad leadership, bad

equipment, bad training, bad

bad. Uh, they change him out. They put

Patton who' run the armor school. and he

whips that place, whips them into into

into into shape and drives the Germans

out of North Africa in a lot of cases

leading from the front. Mhm. When the

the next go airborne invasion, airborne

and sea amphibious invasion of

Sicily, massive [ __ ] a whole bunch of

C-47s get shot down by friendly fire.

Killed like a thousand soldiers. Oh, I

never heard about this. Oh yeah. Wow. I

mean, imagine how perfect this one was.

Terrible. M Patton goes ashore as early

as possible after the invasion. He's

driving up to see the front.

Fortunately, sees a ranger pennant

hanging from a position. It turns out to

be it's the last position before the

before an oncoming onslaught of

panzers. And he's there as a three-star

general hanging mortar rounds at the

front.

stopping an invasion which would have

gone if if he I his personal fierce

leadership stops this German

counterattack because if they' broken

through it would have drove drove the US

off of

Sicily.

So yeah, there's a lot of sliding door

moments that happened in battle. Um, and

we have a I I question

whether with as much media attention as

there is in this level of warfare, I

guess. But but the difference is that

war was one of tribal

survival. The wars of Iraq and

Afghanistan were wars of convenience for

the beltway. They were not did not the

survival of the United States did not

hang in the balance. Right. That's an

important distinction. It totally

changes and it changes the

changes the math. Not just that, it

changes the attitude of the people at

home too, right? Like in World War II,

it's like everyone had a brother,

father, son over, you know what I mean?

Oh, yeah. And then it's not that way in

Iraq. It's not to say we didn't. Of

course, that still happened, but not at

the societal scale. But but think about

today, you have an allv volunteer force.

Mhm. And you have about 1.4 4 million

people under arms. Population in America

of 330 million. So you have less than

one half of 1% in the military and maybe

another

[Music]

um four to 5% that knows the half

percent. Mhm. The other 95% of America

has no effing clue. That's right.

And so they make those decisions on what

is right or wrong or important or

whatever based on some jackass from

corporate media saying this is

important, this is not important. And so

when you have decision-m and opinions

completely detached from reality, you

get Iraq and Afghanistan. 20 years of

continuous loop failure. What did you

think four years after you write that

op-ed and you made a bet with a friend

too when it was going to happen? So you

seem to nail, but what did you think

when you saw basically like a second

imagery of Saigon in 2021 with

Afghanistan? And you know when I when I

was making the point for a stay behind

small capability, I specifically

mentioned I want to prevent the

helicopter off the rooftop moment of

Saigon because it's one of the first

[ __ ] that up TV remembrances. Yep.

that I remember as a six-year-old. I was

born in ' 69. I was 75.

April. Yeah. Bad. That's a ser. And you

know what? Our enemies saw that. Oh,

yeah. Did they ever come to you and ask

you to help find Bin Laden? No. No. No.

That

was I'm sure there was billions of

dollars spent on that just separately

hunting a whole complete and total cell

for that. Yeah. Nothing to do with that.

All right. The other thing I wanted to

talk with you about from a geopolitical

standpoint is obviously what's going on

in the Middle East with with Israel and

Gaza. This is one of those things that

the minute you start talking about it,

you get two like hardcore opposite sides

who are just screaming it's all them or

it's all them. I do see some nuance

here. I don't like terrorist

organizations. I don't like terrorist

attacks. Makes sense. You got to go

defend your country when something like

that happens. That said, it seems like

the response at this point is

disorganized and perhaps

disproportionate on what's going on in

in Gaza, just seeing how they're

leveling buildings and places and

killing a lot of innocents. You know,

what what what are your thoughts there?

And do you have, you know, through your

work, do you have insight to what's

going in on the ground that's not being

talked about?

Uh, I went to Israel about 3 weeks after

October 7, after the initial attack.

Um, and um, I have a lot of friends in

the IDF. I've spent a lot of time in

Israel.

Um, biked across Israel.

Um but I you know I knew that Hamas had

built 300 plus miles of tunnels all

through

Gaza and they had um you know they had

it was a very well planned and executed

attack. They had through 30 breach

points almost simultaneously

um pushed in thousands of fighters.

it would have gone even

worse. Um,

uh, the the minister of defense, the

head of Shabbach, and the head of the

Mossad

met in the Kira, which is like their

their Pentagon

um, at about 2:00 a.m. the morning of

October

7, because there was so much noise in

the system, right? Sig something's not

right.

But they agreed to reconvene and meet at

8:00 the next morning. The only one that

did something was the head of the

Shabbach, the internal service. And he

sent, I think, two or three 12man

security teams to the

south. The MOD did nothing. He didn't

say to the bases, "Hey, everybody wake

up. Everybody, everybody take your

weapon to your bed with you. lock and

load or stand an extra guard post or put

that belt fed out. Nothing. Did

nothing. But these three these 12man

teams, one of

them, there's a

uh on the north end of Gaza, there's a

road that comes out on the way to

Ashcolan, which is a city of like

300,000

people. And uh Hamas attacked and this

12man team fought to the last man. Okay.

11 of the 12 guys died, killed off a

couple hundred Hamas guys.

If four, 10, 50 of those Hamas guys made

it to an Ashkalan, a city of 300,000,

there would have been three or four

times as many people killed. So look,

Hamas killed what 1300 that day because

they didn't know how to kill 13,000 or

130,000. They would have killed as many

as they could have. Sure. No excuse for

Hamas at all. Agreed. fundamentally

disagree, but I knew that they built 300

miles of tunnels and I knew what kind of

fight they wanted to have. And when they

want to suck the Israelis in, they took

hostages, use the hostages as shields to

maximize destruction of Gaza civilians.

So I went to

um Jerusalem or sorry to high to Tel

Aviv to down to Gaza, met with the heads

of Yakalom which was their elite combat

engineering unit with um the head of

like their the Israeli

DARPA and I brought the best driller

from Texas. Driller. Driller.

Oh, okay. That makes sense

because I've known I have lots of very

smart Israeli friends that are in

finance,

banking, investment, mining, all the

rest. I've never met a Jewish rough

neck.

I was wondering if he was going to go

there.

Never met one. So knowing that that the

IDF is staffed with reserveists that are

doing private sector stuff, they would

not know what the current

state-of-the-art is from drilling

technology from Texas to get into the

tunnels to get in the tunnels to

horizontal directional

drill. So I took the guy who is the main

subcontractor to Exxon and SpaceX for

all their horizontal directional

drilling. Two pretty sophisticated

customers. You would agree? I would

agree. And um guy's name is Bobby with a

great Texas accent. And the first call

we had with the

um the Yakalom guys and their DARPA

people, they said, "Well, we tried

horizontal directional drilling five

years ago and it didn't work very well

because it was too slow and there was

clay and it wasn't accurate and all the

rest." And Bobby goes,

"Well, last year I had to drill from one

side of the Mississippi River to the

other, and the boys and I had a bet, and

so I was aiming for a steak in the

ground, and I hit the steak. Is that

good enough for you?" It was It was a

[ __ ] great mic drop moment. Like,

yeah, I'm from Texas. What do you

got? And we go there. Of course, the

guys that are closest to the edge of

battle, they love the idea. the weenies

at headquarters. No, because what we

wanted to do and I even had donors lined

up. I wasn't asking for any money, not a

dollar, not a shekele from them. I had

donors lined up to fund an independent

drilling program that we could have

stayed in

Israel. Drilled horizontally through

right under Sheba

Hospital under any of these areas and

filled it drilled to the other side.

drilled out to sea to a barge with one,

pulled back through a huge cutter. I had

12,000 horsepower pumps lined up because

the Israeli say, "Well, we tried

drilling and it didn't work." Yeah,

you're trying to fill with a pipe that

big. I'm talking, okay, 8, n foot pipes,

flood the [ __ ] out of every tunnel. So,

people say, "Well, what about the

hostages?" Yeah, they don't want dead

hostages. Hamas doesn't want dead

hostages. Dead hostages are of no value

to them, right? But if they get flooded,

then the the tunnels are not going to

flood at a First of all, you're going to

hear a cutter coming through your

tunnel. It's going to say something is

definitely in my reality has changed.

You're a really a [ __ ] fool if you

stay there.

Two, the flood's going to start, okay?

And maybe you only go at 3,000

horsepower setting until you go to 12.

But you flood with so much water that it

floods the entire tunnel system. and you

raise the water table of all under Gaza

to where it's impossible. Here's the

thing. Again, I'm not a horizontal

directional drilling expert, but I will

say I'm expert at drilling at moving

water. Having built black water on

something as flat as this table across

7,000 acres, we had fires. We had brush

fires. We had to dig ditches and take

pumps this big and move water and and

bury three, four, 500 acre ground

fires. I was going to do the same thing.

Basically, a combination of how you

would make um a duck empoundment where

you flood a field uh and you hunt ducks

on it in North Carolina to what the boys

in Texas were doing. that technology, it

would have worked and it would have

ended this Gaza debacle for the

IDF probably by March

24 of last year. Whoa. Because we would

have flooded the [ __ ] First of all, but

they didn't let you do it. No,

obviously. I mean, terms of cutting off

supply

from from

Egypt. One horizontal shot and we right

along the border, right along the Rafa

border crossing. Uh, and we could have

filled that with ANFO, okay? Explosive

collected it off. It would have severed

any tunnel and made anything digging

there impossible. And then flooded it

with water. And we could have flooded.

And so flooding with water obviously it

would have taken away the enemy's

ability to maneuver. It would have

destroyed all their underground weapons

caches because trust me, all their

stored rockets, missiles, all the rest,

are not built to be submerged under 6

feet, 10 ft, 20 ft of water pressure.

And the hostages, as risky as that

sounds, Hamas would have moved them. It

would have flooded, flushed them to the

top. We had a much higher chance of

rescuing them. Why do you think they

said no?

Um, pride.

Pride. not not invented here syndrome.

Again, it's kind of the same

conventional attitude that the US

military suffers from that the really

unconventional thinkers tend to get

drumed out.

So, you didn't get to do that in 40% of

the IDF's

casualties were friendly fire. Really?

Oh, yeah. And that's from an IDF friend.

That's an ugly secret. They have

unleashed a lot of lethality. No wonder

there's been a lot of civilians killed.

40% of their own casualties were

self-induced. And it's also like again

there's people there's crazy people who

are like, "Oh, Hamas are just freedom

fighters and stuff like that. I'm under

no such illusion. I have no problem with

those guys getting wiped off the face of

the earth. There's all kinds of funding

that goes back to Iran. All that makes

sense to me." But they are scumbags. So

they do hide and there's a lot of them

and they hide among civilians, right?

Yep. And so when you from just from a

high level PR perspective, don't don't

give them the fight they want. They

wanted that fight among civilians to

maximize carnage.

So I was going to give them the fight

they would not expect to be flooded out

of their tunnel system. But now they

have given them the fight they don't

want. So where does it or the fight they

wanted? So where does it go from here?

Like how do you look at the look at the

international PR debacle, right? How

many friends has Israel lost over

fighting a war in a

very I would say not clever way. A lot.

Yeah, exactly.

and the and for all the techno

capability of the IDF when they started

tangling with Lebanon in the north and

and and again maximum kudos to the

intelligence service for figuring out

the pager operation.

Amazing, right? The pagers, oh my

father, that was amazing.

Think of the guy or girl that came to

the Sunday morning staff meeting at

Mossad headquarters to say pagers. I

think our future is in pagers and I'm

going to start a front company to

infiltrate the entire supply chain of

our main enemy to the north. I'm going

to kill not two of them. We're going to

get 34 of them. 3,400 of them

simultaneously. [ __ ] Amazing. You see,

you have to be a wildcatterer. You have

to be willing to hit some dry holes to

do this business. And clearly

compliments to them for doing that. And

then to follow on with the radio hits,

amazing conventional military fighting

in Gaza in the most a and again maybe

it's that 20 to 30% of Israeli society

does want to just extinct Gaza and wreck

all the civilians there and they're just

done living next to

Palestinians. Maybe that's it. I don't

know. But again, I don't think it's our

problem in America. We keep getting

dragged into Israel's issues with its

neighbors. We're kind of done. Yeah.

What do you think? Like a lot of people

go at Israel about the whole Apac thing.

I look a little more internal on that.

Like we let that happen, right? It's a

lobbying organization and it should be

treated like any other lobbying

organization, not with correct not with

any other special Yeah. consideration,

right? So, that's something we should

fix here. Okay. Well, I I know we're

short on time because you you got to get

out of town. This is this has been

awesome. I could talk to you for a lot

longer. Holy [ __ ] It was three hours.

So, it's almost three hours. Yeah. So,

if you're coming back into town, let me

know. Would love to talk. There's a lot

of questions I did not get to ask today,

but you are certainly a fascinating

fascinating guy, Eric Prince. I've

enjoyed this a lot and and you know a

lot about a lot of different [ __ ] So,

thank you for sharing it all with us.

Thanks for having me. All right,

everyone else, you can buy Eric's book.

We're going to have a link down to it

down in the description, Civilian

Warriors. So, check that out. And uh

until next time. And next time, I'll

talk about the unplugged phone, right?

Yeah. Yeah, that's there's a little

controversy around that. We should talk

about that next time. It's fine. All

right, cool. Everybody else, you know

what it is. Give it a thought. Get back

to me. Peace. Thank you guys for

watching the episode. If you haven't

already, please hit that subscribe

button and smash that like button on the

video. They're both a huge, huge help.

And if you would like to follow me on

Instagram and X, those links are in my

description below.

Click on any text or timestamp to jump to that moment in the video

Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds

One-Click Copy125+ LanguagesSearch ContentJump to Timestamps

Paste YouTube URL

Enter any YouTube video link to get the full transcript

Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds

Get Our Chrome Extension

Get transcripts instantly without leaving YouTube. Install our Chrome extension for one-click access to any video's transcript directly on the watch page.

Add to Chrome — Free

Works with YouTube, Coursera, Udemy and more educational platforms

Get Instant Transcripts: Just Edit the Domain in Your Address Bar!

YouTube

←

→

↻

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

YoutubeToText

←

→

↻

https://youtubetotext.net/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

YouTube Transcript:Blackwater CEO on being CIA Assassin, Navy SEALs &amp; Most Corrupt Politicians | Erik Prince • 305

Video Transcript

Paste YouTube URL

Transcript Extraction Form

Get Our Chrome Extension

Get Instant Transcripts: Just Edit the Domain in Your Address Bar!

YouTube Transcript:
Blackwater CEO on being CIA Assassin, Navy SEALs & Most Corrupt Politicians | Erik Prince • 305