Erik Prince on Creating Blackwater - One of the Biggest Private Armies in the World (Full Interview)

all right here we go today we have Eric Prince founder of private military contractor Blackwater welcome to Vlad TV nice to be here I don't think I've ever had anyone like you on the show before very interesting story it's your first time here I want to start in the beginning so you're born and raised in Holland Michigan yep very Dutch community and your dad was Edgar prince who was the founder of Prince Corporation yes he started in 1965 from scratch right this became a major corporation at one point it was uh yeah he started well

back up even further his father died when he was 13 in the Great Depression so my dad was the head of the home then and had to work and he worked hard uh was working 40 hours a week in middle school and high school already and managing a car dealership at age 16 I like who does that and uh I remember he told me he installed the hot water heater at 14 oh and he literally didn't really wasn't sure how but uh the the guy at the hardware store showed them how to sweat a joint

and uh we' go and measure each piece of copper tubing and take it there cut it get it swaged and uh installed it and it worked so he um he learned to work at an ear early age put himself through college um worked all through college uh was in the Air Force drafted was did that for a couple of years and then came back to West Michigan worked for a tool and die maker a tool and die is um is a mold MH that you use for either stamping or molding or whatever and and he

didn't really like um well they made that company made diecast machines and it was sold he didn't really like the new owner so he started on his own with a wife three kids a mortgage and um you know he kind of bet the farm again and went for it in 1965 right and your sister is a former US Secretary of Education Bessie DeVos that's right now this company grew quite a bit and eventually your dad became a billionaire it uh they made well the Machinery business struggled but then in the early '70s they patented the

lighted sun visor tipped the visor down the mirror with lights ah okay and uh that was their patent and then the digital compass and digital thermometer in your car they licensed that from NASA wow installed that in cars and so they kind of rode the wave of Outsourcing of Automotive stuff and supplied that to for GM Chrysler the other big transplants and that company grew um quite large yeah yeah it was uh was 5,000 employees about a billion dollars in sales and my father died of a heart attack in 95 yeah I'm sorry for your

loss yeah he was he was a he was a great man he was truly a a rising tide that lifted all boats well I guess at the time that he died the CEO of the company said that it would still be a family-owned business but then a year later the company sold for 1.2 billion the we certainly had the intent that my father had actually uh hired another CEO to kind of take the company onward and then when my dad died he didn't really want to take that job without my dad there to mentor and

do that transition and uh my um my dad had given 20% of the business to the employees wow okay and so it was one thing the company had no debt but it was it was at a pivot point because it now was expected to be not just a domestic supplier but to do the same thing all over the world in Europe in Brazil in Asia so putting a lot of debt and a lot of risk on the company was not something uh my mom really wanted to do so sold it and um I think there

was the right decision at that point well yeah by 2016 forb said that uh you guys were the 88th richest family in America with an estimated net worth of 5.4 billion no that's not true that's categorically not true okay so they is that lower than it should be if you're if you're conflating that with the DeVos family but that's not the prince family okay I see what you're saying okay so if you kind of mush them together possibly my sister married the son of Richard DeVos yeah that's not my family I mean that voses are

great people but that's okay their family is not our family understood okay so you end up going to the Naval Academy I did and was that really the plan to really be have a lifetime career in the military or were you just sort of unsure at that time I'd always wanted to be the I was wanted to serve in the military I was a pilot I soloed when I was 16 got my license when I was 17 planned to be a military pilot um applied to both Air Force and navy I got in it both

I went to Navy um I lik the Navy but I didn't really like the academy and so I left after three semesters and I went to Hillsdale College and it was actually I remember uh the spring of my freshman year ple year at the Naval Academy as much as a military geek historian that I was I didn't really know much of the SEAL Teams and I remember the the two seal aison officers came and gave the presentation they said uh you know described what SEAL Teams do and this was this is in the 80s where

nobody really knew what the seal teams did but they said if you want to come and PT with with us exercise with us come to this field the next morning at 5:30 and uh I showed up they said okay today we're just going to run a mile get a partner put him on your shoulders I was hooked okay and um I left the academy uh knowing that I wanted to go to the SEAL Teams and so I rolled to Hill stale College started right away that next semester like two weeks after I left the academy

and uh kind of worked to build a resume to get back into OCS officer candidate school and be a seal officer and that's what I did well right so you became a Navy SEAL mhm did the training uh almost kill you or no it was a good program it's a it's a great program that makes you reach deep down inside yourself well being a seal you deployed in a whole bunch of places Haiti the Middle East the Balkans yep you're part of the Yugoslav War weren't there for much of it no but the carrier we

we're on a carrier we're doing uh combat search and rescue and uh standby for targeting that kind of stuff to support the airwing and board the carrier I mean during your deployments as a seal what do you think was the most serious situations that you got into um look that was not a time of uh of combat not like the post 2001 uh combat that the military saw I would say the the actuar the U the we plan for 50% casualties swimming into Haiti not because of uh enemy fire but because the water was so

contaminated swimming into capati Harbor on the North Coast of Haiti a area of two and a half million people with no sewage treatment wow you know normally when you uh when you do amphibious reconnaissance you want to be really low in the water and very very tactical yeah so extra rotation you don't want the water splashing in your mouth that's crazy we had so many vaccinations that I couldn't give blood for 5 years after that wow okay was it during the time that you started thinking about you know private training for military personnel and so

forth the seal teams have been using private facilities since the 1970s really okay and uh we used one in Mississippi um while I was training up uh for those deployments and no one had ever done it on an industrial scale and then kind of seeing the horrible job that the UN peacekeeping forces did the the non the non-functioning job uh and knowing what uh Special Operations units needed when um I'd plan to stay for 10 12 years or so in the Navy kind of the good years to be a seal officer and then once I

was going to be more desk born I was going to get out and go work with my dad but uh my dad died unexpectedly in '95 of a heart attack and my wife got cancer few months later at 29 and uh so I got out to sort that out uh both uh you know family business situation and obviously my my home situation and um because of my dad's success and knowing what uh Special Operations units needed I knew they needed a training facility and so that became black qu right your dad passes away you leave

the military I didn't leave early I just left at the end of my obligation cycle okay got it and then you moved to Virginia Beach well I was stationed there you were stationed there yeah okay so you're already there I was stationed on the East Coast seal team8 okay so in Virginia Beach you bought 6,000 Acres uh in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina bought 3100 to start okay and then added uh a few pieces to add more buffer okay and that's where you're formulating blackwat at that point correct okay 6,000 acres in that

region how much did that cost you the original 3,000 acres cost 900 Grand okay good amount of money but you have tons of land now and you want an extra you want you want enough land if you're going to run a training facility and shoot well we ended up shooting a million 1.2 million rounds a month okay you want to have enough buffer that uh you're sure that no rounds are going to leave the property okay and the Blackwater name that came from the bogs that were around so the blackw property is on the southern

end of the Great Dismal Swamp actually an area that was originally surveyed by George Washington okay he was a surveyor and it is as flat as your kitchen table and uh so there's a buildup of probably a meter worth of organic soil when the rain comes through that by the time it makx it to the ditch the water's black and we really learned that clearly um when we're putting in drainage coverts and in roads Etc and uh our literally our skin is dying getting dyed black H and the logo the bear paaw logo with the

reticle actually came from putting in we had to put in about 5 miles worth of power lines and within days of putting in the power poles the Bears were coming out of the woods and ripping oh yeah Big Bear the bigger the bear the higher up he could reach it was impressive big ripping claw marks on those poles marking their Turf I mean if you look at how much money you spent total to just set up blackwat how much would you say that was the initial investment was about $5 million okay was that all your

money or did you get investors uh I was I was the so investor the sole investor okay so basically the money that came from your dad's business being sold you re invested it into black water correct got it okay that's why I said because of my dad's success I was able to do something like that because it was an era of bases being closed ranges being closed there was a major range facility in America being closed pretty much every week on a on a base somewhere okay so it was definitely counterintuitive all the smart investment

manager said this was a terrible idea okay so now Blackwater is up and running and you did 400,000 Revenue the first year it's about right yes but then it started to build up we started yeah it was 400 800 million2 a million 6 right we started with training and we added targets because we had uh very destructive customers and they shredded all the outside systems that we bought and we had a very very clever guy that used to manage sheld team six's facility so we understood state-of-the-art but durable and uh so we started selling those

targets to um federal law enforcement to military customers Etc well and then you guys got really in the system uh from 97 to 2010 you guys rewarded $2 billion in government Security Contracts yeah 1.6 billion of it were unclassified Federal contracts and the rest were classified work is that accurate I think so yeah yeah yeah like 98 99% of that Revenue was competitively bid right it's a misnomer people throw lots of nonsense around to say wow they rewarded all these Soul Source contracts no it was all competitively bid you know at the same time the

same time I'm started Blackwater I took over the original business my dad started which was making diecast machines which was kind of a family run tool and die machine business and we had to put it through because of competition competitive pressures we had to make it more efficient and so the Toyota production system with lean thinking Six Sigma buying smarter labor productivity streamlining the flow all the things that make a car plant a semiconductor plant or in this case a Machinery business run better and smarter I kind of took that mentality to Blackwater and especially

as we started with a training facility and I thought what does a military do it recruits vets equips trains deploys and supports people and so building out blackwat we built it like a machine to process people to go do a thing somewhere difficult and so that led us as that facility and we was the only I was the only one crazy enough dumb enough whatever to build that kind of a facility long before 9/11 knowing what the Special Operations needed and we had enough space that we could scale so we had the almost industrial capacity

as big training contract big security contract Aviation Logistics construction Disaster Response we had the the capability in facilities in people in uh software systems aircraft to to flex and to to support customers doing that work well yeah you guys became the biggest of the three private security companies that the state department employed and at your top you were making $850 million a year uh I think so yeah something like that yeah I mean that was revenue revenue revenue not profit I understand yeah you said making that's different generating revenue is different than generating profit there's

a well you're grossing 850 million a year accurate statement there you go I mean someone wanted to join Blackwater you know as a military person would they need military experience police experience or could they just come off the street and get trained by you guys pretty much every one of our contracts require had a prerequisite of Special Operations experience or certain military experience obviously if you're going to be an pilot for us or a mechanic you need uh certain qualifications in aircraft or an& license for certain type ratings um so there was a lot of

um prerequisites we weren't just taking people off the streets and they would go through obviously criminal background check psychs um lots of testing and proficiency training and judgment training um so we we vetted the only program that we could take not somebody just off the street but where they could have a basic qualification to take them up we actually had something called the Blackwater academy uh which worked out well for the guys and for the company uh and we'd take somebody that had a couple years of military experience and they're going to go do static

static security somewhere and it would be like a 10 we 12we course at Blackwater we would Finance them the cost of tuition and once they're deployed they're going to get paid $400 a day and they pay us back 150 bucks a day of that tuition so they had a great job we had a great operator that we had vetted and trained and that worked I remember 60 Minutes did a special on you guys and they said that at one point you guys were the largest private army in the world I'd say it's not accurate to

call it a private Army okay because there's certainly armed security companies in Scandinavia or Canada that had more people more armed people more gate guards standing outside of a a courthouse or a shopping mall or whatever so we had I'd say we had the largest concentration of former Special Operations people yes and we had we I I am proud to say I was the largest employer of former Special Operations people and uh what a magnificent cast of people that was I mean how many people did you have at the height of Blackwater employed deployed about

33500 got it right and you guys were involved in the Afghanistan Invasion and the Iraqi War not in the invasion no we were there we we started in Afghanistan in May of 2002 okay okay so after the invasion correct okay well like I said you guys were deployed in Iraq and a very serious situation happened in 2007 which is known as the Nur Square massacre yep so I read into this situation so A A Car Bomb ended up exploding near the compound where a bunch of us and Iraqi officials were meeting and you guys sent

a 19-man Tex technical support team for Convoy trucks called raven 23 they were supposed to stay in the in the safe Zone but the commander Jimmy Watson actually went into the actual Square this part accurate uh well there was a car bomb that went off outside of a building where there was a US Aid official that we were protecting mhm and typically after an event like that you would it's called hardpoint you just stay there but because all the Iraqi guards fled the area that team decided to move and when you're going to we're going

to move through a dangerous area of Baghdad and of course the state department mandated that we move in we move the VIPs the protectees in armored Suburbans lights and Sirens very obvious where that Target is I will note that if we're doing security work for a customer or an NGO we used very indigenous looking vehicles and we never had any shootouts for those CU you can't kill what you can't see but the state department mandated you must drive a Suburban with light and Sirens it's an image thing okay and so that team decided to move

off that X and you put a support team into a traffic circle because if you're you know are you a deer hunter at all no okay well if you're um if you're ever hunting deer you hunt to Trail intersection cuz that's the place to Ambush them in the same way if you're going to kill Americans uh you hunt these big traffic circles cuz that's the place to Ambush him so the a support team would go and clear that traffic circle and make it so that the team could flow through there quickly and hopefully avoid that

Ambush and while they're there Raven 23 is in this traffic circle uh they'd actually got in a briefing that morning to be on the lookout for a white Kia which is likely A Car Bomb one of the vehicles that didn't stop in fact the only vehicle that didn't stop was a white Kia and the guys uh engaged it turns out it was not a carbomb it was a uh a male and female uh a female and a I think her son exactly yeah it it was a mother and her adult son the adult son I

believe was a driver correct again the only car that didn't stop for the traffic circle it was engaged and that kicked off a much bigger firefight with a lot of Iraqis shooting at the um at the support Vehicles one of those incoming rounds severed the radiator hose on the St on the state department vehicle which caused all the coolant to drain out of the engine and when you have no coolant in an engine those modern caterpillar engines shuts down so now the vehicle is disabled in this traffic circle taking incoming fire and they had to

stop and rig the toe before they could drag it out of there and that's that's how that tragic event happened right well eventually prosecutors argued that Raven 23 did not face hostile gunfire when they began shooting this came out in court and after after the car was shot up that the driver was killed and then they came in and killed the passenger which was the mother they threw a grenade and blew the car up no they wouldn't no they didn't throw a grenade there was a 40mm grenade fired at the vehicle to stop the vehicle

oh okay got it because then they said that raven23 set off stun grenades to clear the scene then the Iraqi police and soldiers thought they were actual grenades and then fire began to go in both directions um the best analysis of this is uh done by Sean Ryan he does a long interview with the guys from Raven 23 and take you through the uh the blowby blow the sad thing is that doj had to come at them I think four times to finally get a prosecution a conviction well right after the dust settled 17 Iraqi

citizens not accurate no it was 11 11 Iraqi citizens were killed Yeah we actually the company hired the prosecutor the Iraqi prosecutor that prosecuted Saddam Hussein to go meet with all the families there was only 11 okay look I 1117 still tragic but it's 11 the media throws around 17 not accurate right I heard 14 once I heard 17 11 20 wounded is that accurate uh I don't know about the wounded count because there was there was a lot of people showing up at hospitals with AK wounds AK our guys would not have been firing

an AK AK AK-47 fir is a very distinctive round from a uh a round that an American would have been carrying well at one point during the firefight a Blackwater helicopter showed up and people that were there say that the helicopter fired into the crowd as well there was actually like a bullet hole in one of the roofs of the car Blackwater said that never happened yeah they again they log the um the rounds fire the round counts so they would have counted rounds at the end of that mission and if there was full round

count that would have been accurate I mean regardless of the exact details this was a train wreck anytime you have a uh a war zone accidents can happen absolutely and to give and to give perspective on that week prior in Baghdad it was not all peace love and happiness we had a helicopter shot down uh with uh I think seven guys on board they survived uh we had um multiple another Convoy on the Baghdad Highway not far from where this incident happened um that uh put guys in the hospital again explosive Ambush initiated against the

vehicles put guys in the hospital um so yeah it was a dangerous place the the center of gravity of that Iraq fight was in Bagdad and so trying to do Diplomatic Security moving civilians around to have interaction with Iraqi government officials in the midst of a combat zone is hard yeah yeah we did a 100,000 missions between Iraq and Afghanistan um 100,000 protective missions no one under our care was ever killed or injured 41 of black 41 Blackwater Personnel died doing that work wow so war is a tragedy yeah and and and people are right

to be upset at the at the loss of innocent civilians do you know how many civilians have been killed in Iraq since then thousands 85,000 y 85,000 do you know who's responsible for the nonsense in Iraq who was that the Iranians oh really in 2004 here's the thing when you look back in history there has always been major emnity between Iraq and Iran Iran the Persian Empire Wants to Rule the whole place still do yeah you're seeing that played out in Lebanon today with Iranians sponsoring the houis in Yemen and even their support for Hamas

and Gaza so Shia Iran versus largely then Sunni Iraq run by Saddam Hussein huge War Iran Iraq war when the US topple Saddam Hussein Ira Iran went out of their way to subjugate Iraq I remember because I was there in 2004 the chief of Iraqi intelligence guy named Muhammad shwani came to see me with his agency CIA Handler and said we're seeing all kinds of evidence of the Iranians setting up the same kind of tentacles like they've done in Lebanon with Hezbollah political offices assassination teams heavy influence operation and he said we want a program

to find them and to wipe them out to stop the Iranians from controlling Iraqi Society we priced it up CIA was going to pay for it blocked by condalisa rice h no Iran is not our enemy we have to respect the political process that was a single dumb pivot move in Iraq because if we had severed and prevented the Iranians from getting their hooks into Iraq Iraq would be a truly free and I would say much more prosperous society today but now look at um you hear about the drones and missiles and Rocket fire that

attack US troops while they're in IR you know where that comes from the hashash shabi okay it's called the popular mobilization units which are Iranian controlled literally Iranian officers a Hezbollah likee Army inside of Iraq that the Iraqi government has really no power over and in Iran decides who the Iraqi prime minister is going to be and who those cabinet ministers are so the US for all the blood and treasure and effort in Iraq just turned over Iraq to the Iranians not even to Iraqi sovereignty it's a it's a real tragedy crazy well the four

people involved in the shooting that happened in Iraq three were convicted of manslaughter and one convicted of murder but then later on in 2020 Trump pardoned all four of them that's right what was the really like what was the meaning behind the pardon how did that actually happen uh since they' been through they the doj very much stimulated by the Biden Administration by first Obama and Joe Biden were hellbent to get a conviction somehow and the first time the case was thrown out for prosecutorial misconduct and then they came back and tried him again um

uh mistrial and then they came back again uh and and basically overt tried them and again if you if you trying again they instead of trying them in their home States they brought them all to Washington DC to the center of the swamp Okay I'm sorry if you're from Idaho or Montana or Wyoming or Colorado or Texas Washington DC is not a jury of your peers that's an alien alien different set of people and even then after uh weeks and weeks of deliberation the jury finally convicted them and in fact the first the the first

conviction was so disgusting because they tacked on an extra 30 years to their sentence why because they used automatic weapons in the commission of their crime ignoring the fact that those automatic weapons were issued to them by the state department and is a required piece of gear for them to do their job wow okay it shows how bad prosecutors and the judge truly permanent members of the swamp were in this case and it was not not Justice at all but ultimately they were they were pardoned think the main guy ended up doing like six years

they all did they were all uh sense at the same time right so they did about six years but then they all got out and they got all their rights restored they could own guns they could vote everything else like that because of the party Yep they're living their lives and productive citizens one of them taught himself biblical Greek while he was in prison they said the the guards when they would close their cells at night said man it is hard for me to do this because you don't belong in here and none of them

joined a gang none of them did anything they actually did a lot of um education and mentoring other prisoners even teaching other guys how to read so I'm I'm extremely proud of of how the guys um conducted themselves and how they um and how they're living now well by 2010 you end up selling blackwat yep was it a huge profit no um the business you know it generated a lot of Revenue was a very efficient operation it made money I plowed pretty much every dollar back into the business and on the aviation side we bought

an an air operation in 2003 in the spring one leas aircraft and six guys as part of the business and six years later we had 73 aircraft we owned and operated for the US government operating in difficult places multiple aircraft shot down in combat and the lawfare political assault from all aspects of the federal government for two years I was spending about $2 and5 million dollar a month in legal fees two and a half a month wow okay yeah it was disgusting it was all look the the ATF Customs Department of Agriculture came at us

as how we were shipping dog food to Iraq just every kind of proctology a blizzard of subpoenas and um you know we' planned to train US military Special Operations and conduct and do very difficult missions abroad to serve our country not planning on that kind of bureaucratic assault by the government so yeah it's a um I'm a little raw about that yet right so you just wanted to get out of out of it at that point yeah and uh sold the business for a fraction of what it had been worth two years before do you

think the massacre is what kind of caused all the problems and all the media problems that ultimately caused the business to to Dr I think the that was maybe that that was the excuse but uh the fact is we operated extremely efficiently we did things for a fraction of what the government required it to do I we got we got pulled into stuff that we never planned on doing and we answered the call I mean after Hurricane Katrina happened in the Gulf Coast M we had just taken delivery of a helicopter for one of the

overseas jobs and it was in the states and I said hey send as soon as the pilots reset just start flying to Louisiana and we'll figure it out and sure enough one of the guys in our class in our company was in a Harvard Business School class with a senior guy from the Coast Guard so our aircraft November 5 5 became Coast Guard 505 by the time it arrived in Louisiana and we ended up evacuating hundreds of people 128 people um and then private sector started calling for help and so we've been there for probably

two weeks and to be clear we did not take anyone's guns away at all uh when our guys got to the French Quarter in New Orleans and we beat the Louisiana National Guard from five states away beat them to the to the scene yeah there were dead bodies in the streets not from us not from the storm from looters it was chaos there had been 13 Walmarts picked clean we got hired to protect the Walmart Distribution Center for example but then the federal the FEMA came to us and said we need help because they went

to the Federal Protective Service part of DHS and asked for hundreds of police officers and they said their employee union said no the conditions are too rough and too unsafe we're not going to go so AA asked us and we went so again no drama capable people answering the call we didn't really send a lot of military guys we sent mostly law enforcement people M and because we sent the right people with the right logistic support it worked and we were there for probably a year so that's the kind of company and attitude of moving

to the sound of the need urgently well after you sold Blackwater you actually got hired by the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and you moved to the United Arab Emirates and you actually set up an 800 person Battalion of foreign troops to essentially create security out there well no the main reason I moved to UAE was because of piracy okay Somali piracy uhu which was raging then and there was 80 to 90 ships taken per year and they'd sit on these ships for six months to a year waiting for the ransoms to get paid um

and so we ended up building a counter piracy police force to basically go after the pirate Logistics built it with and through the uh the local government and that worked that unit went active in 2011 by 2012 you don't hear about Smiley piracy anymore that worked and the program cost less than what the Pirates were taking in Ransom per year it was a great exercise in how to do this cheaply and practically and actually because you have to do boots on the ground the US Navy the Europeans the EU they were cruising all over the

Indian Ocean Chasing Pirates dumb uh if you have a wasp problem in your yard you don't chase them around the yard with a spray can you go to the nest you deal with the nest it didn't it didn't take a genius to figure out where the Pirates were in Somalia because you could fly along the coast in a turbo prop aircraft and say ah there's a thousand foot ship anchored a mile off that Tiny Village probably Pirates there okay so you actually went after the Pirates where they stayed sure because the for the for the

Pirates it was a business they'd actually have a team that would go in a boat way out to sea A Thousand Miles off grab a ship take it back and they would switch to the B team who would be the guards sitting on that uh vessel waiting for the ransom to get paid so the police force just basically went after anybody that was supporting those guards guarding that ship I mean if a pirate grabs a ship off the coast of Oman and they go to get resupplied in Oman the police are going come and arrest

them that's all the P Marine police force did they provided a level of law enforcement reach for the local government to extend sovereignty along their their Shore we actually made a movie it's called the Somalia project a documentary about that effort and um it actually won I think in the Soho there's a there's a film festival here in New York and it won an award nice um it's still on YouTube people should watch it my favorite part of that movie is there's an interview of this kid probably late 20s Indian kid and he said uh

he was describing being held hostage for a year engineer had been beaten to death another guy had his ear cut off he said one day we heard shooting and we heard a lot of shooting and then we heard a helicopter and we knew someone had finally come to rescue us and there's a great scene where they get rescued and they come to Shore and there's 25 extremely bedraggled dudes and they're kissing the ground they're praying he said we prayed to God and God sent the pmpf and I thought you because we caught all kinds of

[ __ ] for the audacity of building a police force to go after piracy the UN called the program illegal the state department the idiots in the in Washington were doing all they could to block it that's what ended piracy but I remember at one point Obama I think sent uh a team of uh seals that killed Somalian pirates as they were attacking a ship and I remember the Somalians were so outraged like this is so unfair steal we don't kill and it's like you look at this go like come on you go and attack

I think that was the Maris Alabama you know they rescued Captain Phillips sure that that rescue operation probably cost as much as our police force did for a year okay cuz they they flew the entire assault team from Dev group and boats and ships out there and great yeah so great Flex the US military can do that they proved a point they proved a point yeah but very costly y so at what point did you actually meet Trump I met him one time in early during the 16 campaign in his office for like 10 seconds

literally poked my head in he was on a conference call shook his hand and that was it and that's the only time I met Trump until I saw him in 2019 at a veterans event and he came up to me and he said Eric you were right I should have listened to you on Afghanistan what didn't you offer to take over the war in Afghanistan for $5 billion not quite that simple you know what I'm talking about though right sure sure sure I wrote so I've been paying attention to Afghanistan obviously and what a fre

freaking failure it was a a an office of circumlocution fail we've been through 19 commanders in 20 years 32 different troop rotations right so to say we weren't we weren't in Afghanistan as a country for for 20 years we were there for 30 troop rotations and it's extremely disjointed and so Steve mannon policy adviser at the White House then came to me and he said and this is like in April of 2017 he said Afghan policy is going to be debated write write an oped so I wrote an oped in the Wall Street Journal and

making a case for a much smaller footprint a stay behind capacity basically a skeletal structure capacity that could be contracted why to address the issues of 30 different rotations and so that uped stimulated some discussion at the White House definitely blocked by the Legacy swamp Mattis four-star general now SE def so really acting like a five-star McMaster who is the an armor a serving armor officer as National Security adviser who really wanted his fourth star they hated any idea that was not completely Pentagon and so that plan that I laid out uh basically would have

and at that point there was 29,000 contractors in country already so this is not an expansion of contractors this was a reduction of everything yeah and I said I could we could do this and stay behind capacity of 6,000 and it would have been uh there was 91 battalions I would have put a 36- man Mentor team with each of them live with train with fight with but because they're contractors I can pay them to go in for 90 days home for 30 back in and keep that same Mentor with the same unit for years

Afghans want to know who's next to them is it a Brotherhood of arms or is it a revolving door because that's all 30 different trop troop rotations was and when the US lives on one base and the Afghans live in another base didn't have that kind of connectivity so reliable mentors that would train and fight eat the same Chow riding the same Vehicles two reliable air support when the Afghan forces and this was pervasive problem the Afghan Air Force never was really fully effective because trying to take an illiterate population 90% illiterate making them to

fly a sophisticated aircraft and maintain it anybody that was qualified end up getting hired by Airlines so they would wait 7 to 10 hours for air support you're calling I'm in a firefight come help me now 7 to 10 hours not cutting it Base After Base would be surrounded by the by the Taliban just a simple Siege so bad that the base commander would be calling back to T news the news program in Kabul like a call-in show saying I'm at a base help me we're going to die and nobody did a damn thing about

it again and again and again three reliable combat Logistics make sure the men are paid on time fed on time that they have adequate fuel batteries Munitions all the areas of pervasive corrupt I not hard to control and most important and also importantly Medevac because if you're an Afghan Soldier you are eight times as likely to die as a Westerner that gets wounded men will fight harder if they know someone gives a [ __ ] about them so that would have cost three and A5 billion dollar less than 5% to what the US was spending

per year there you have it less than 5% yep Pentagon doesn't like that m so instead they do it pull out you leave tens of billions of dollars of military equipment which is now in the hands of Taliban right and everywhere else Congress appropriated 14 billion to resettle Afghan refugees most of them unvetted I I will debate anybody anywhere on the merits of my plan because it was not theoretical we had done lots of training lots of Aviation Medevac Logistics all the rest operating there cheaply effectively I mean here's the thing there is the US

government was paying $250 a gallon for fuel by the time it gets to where the it gets put into a Humvee wow or vehicle why the fuel they were buying all the diesel fuel all the gasoline was imported defense Logistics agency contract to corrup I trucked from Karachi Pakistan the port up into Afghanistan about a third of the pakist of the Taliban operating budget was tolling that fuel okay so the the taliban's operating budget was about 600 million a year a third in fuel tolls a third in drugs and a third tolling illegal mining there

was a huge oil field that had been drilled and proven during the Soviet times in the 80s called amodar oil field drilled no it's there five Wells capped properly for $20 million you could have drilled expansion Wells powered the entire country 150 million bucks you put a modul of Refinery there you have enough jet fuel Diesel and gasoline and enough hfo to power the entire country this is not rocket science but it's generals that don't understand math and don't understand business they're thinking about only controlling some Geographic battle space it's too bad it's really too

bad we could have done so much better there as a country there was a lot of effort but not very productive effort and I really feel bad for veterans that lost friends limbs spouses mental health to have it pissed away by politicians and Trump tried to Eng engage but he never really his National Security apparatus then was was very much part of the problem well you got tied into the whole Trump Russia investigation there was a controversial secret meeting that happened in uh seels am I pronouncing it right seels seels which was a small island

chained in the Indian Ocean there was a Russian Banker named Kil dimitriev who was the executive of the state-run Russian direct investment fund and also Putin Ally they're saying that you had secret meetings with him on Trump's behalf no categorically no okay and it's funny how the the the leftist media and idiots in Congress really spin nonsense because they say well you went there to spin a or to create a back channel to the Russians before the election yeah this meeting happened in January two months after the US election I went there to see emirati

leadership so was that guy because the emirat are investors in some Russian investment funds and they said hey you should meet that guy while you're here I had a beer with him doesn't take me long I think I had two doesn't take me long to to drink two beers and um that was it no contact before and no contact after so it's uh it's amazing how and the and the I'll take real issue with the illegal weaponization of of intercepts because the Obama administration because they're still in the office while this happens mhm this is

like early January before the inauguration and so they're unmasking American citizen in a private meeting I'm not in the Trump campaign I'm not in the Trump transition at all I'm an American citizen in a meeting and they unmask me illegally and that's [ __ ] and the weaponization and the abuse of the naal security apparatus by the Democrat Party is unconscionable it's repeated and and it must stop I mean because of your position as the former head of Blackwater and all the things you're involved in I mean have there ever been attempts on your life

or is there a price on your head I mean do you need security everywhere you go I've been warned um multiple times by the FBI that I'm on well I'm on the uh Al-Qaeda hit list and I'm on the Iranian hit list okay so yeah no attempts though not that I'll acknowledge okay well around this time your sister Betsy DeVos becomes a secretary of education under Trump yep there was a report that happened in 2020 that said that you recruiting former spies to infiltrate a liberal group that was opposing Trump no there was a newspaper

article that was talking about project Veritas okay they wanted they wanted a training area uh family has a ranch out of Wyoming they used it as a training area I was not involved in the training that's it right there was also uh an investigation that happened with the Rolling Stone in New York Times based on uh internal United Nations report that claimed that you had connections between you and a Libyan warlord Khalifa haftar in an attempt to uh overthrow the UN back government in Libya well I've never met this Khalifa haftar okay ever you know

what I'm talking about though oh yeah look I'm I'm aware of lots of [ __ ] that the un uh spews and and you know particularly annoyed at the UN because we're in New York right now and the traffic is even more screwed up because of this idiot General Assembly I can't think of a more failed globalist institution than the UN because it is a it is just a large grift of money-making wastage of international diplomats to feel good about themselves while doing actual harm all over the world name one place that there's been un

peacekeepers that they've actually made the situation significantly better yeah I feel you and when you say and it's funny when you talk about Libya the UN recognized government the UN recognized government was supposed to be for a one-year period starting in 2013 after Gaddafi got killed after yeah 2013 yeah 11 years ago yeah they're still there the place is so screwed up because of the UN and and just incompetence that we're now 11 years past so it's it's all just a joke well after the election Trump starts the whole stop the steel rhetoric and then

on January 6th the capital attack happened when you saw that considering your relationship with Trump what did you think well consider so you the way you say that is quite misleading okay I mean you do have some sort of I mean you donated money I donated money to the campaign yeah exactly 250,000 right yep MH I had my picture taken with him once okay I saw him once right for 15 seconds before during the campaign or during the 16 campaign right but your sister is the Secretary of Education right there is a connection I'm not

saying that you guys are best friends that's your business but don't go down the road of idiot conspiracies I hope you're smarter than that I feel you but there is some level of relationship that's all I'm saying I'm not saying you guys play golf together every Tuesday I'm saying there's some connection I don't play golf it's too bad it's a good sport but here's the thing yeah so she's she she's there um doing the education thing not taking a salary not getting reimbursed for any travel expenses she is truly there serving yeah as the education

secretary which is great but yeah you guys go down some weird ass rabbit Trails I'm going to call you on it because that's [ __ ] no that's fine and and leave this in the tape no I'm going to leave it in you don't have a real relationship with him you have some association with him I think that's a fair statement I I I respect him trying to serve America and he knows who I am absolutely what did you think of the January 6th Uprising uh it is not an insurrection it would be the first

Insurrection in history where people were unarmed in a country that has 150 200 million personally owned Firearms so it is a gross Distortion to call it an Insurrection are people right to be pissed about elections being stolen absolutely are people right to be um questioning why $400 million went from Zuckerberg into five specific counties to affect how and when Boats were counted in swing states to question that uh when you look at the actual voter turnout in the 2020 election we never really get typically historically we never get much above 65% voter turnout if you

believe that all those people voted in 2020 to be at 92% voter turnout that smells a lot especially when in Australia when they find you for not voting they never get above an 82% voter turnout so if it looks like a duck in a quacks like a duck my friend you're looking at a duck so you feel the election was tellen I feel there was definitely some nonsense around the election in certain swing States absolutely well your own sister though she resigns right after uh you know January 7th she said there's no mistaking the impact

that Trump's rhetoric had on the situation and uh she that's even a mischaracterization yes she resigned I don't with that but but Trump said in his speech peacefully protest it is what it is did you talk to her about resigning no okay you guys never had that conversation I was out in um I was out west on the west coast when that happened well in 2022 Russia invades Ukraine yep and part of their uh military setup is the Wagner group did you ever interact with the Wagner boss uh yevi pren never met him never met

never never met never met him never spoke to him and clearly never made any offers of support or service to the wner group okay again I'm not implying that by the way I'm just asking General but some of your some leftwing [ __ ] have I've never even heard that I'm not I'm not getting at that when but I will say go ahead the Russians pitched me in 2012 while I lived in the UAE and I was invited I went to Moscow remember this was during the reset it was before they invaded Ukraine in in

the DBA in in Crimea in 2014 so in 2012 I went to Moscow met with senior people never met Putin uh and they said please come and build a Blackwater here provide you the land build a training facility that would employ veterans all the rest I said thanks but can't do that would that have been legal uh no okay yeah because I think the us would have had an issue with that but um they were looking for how to build a private sector capability and obviously uh Vagner filled that void I would argue I would

have built a I would have built a much better Vagner okay because at one point Wagner actually turned around and attacked Russia and rolled his tanks into I mean I think they got close to Moscow at one point there is certain reporting about that but again I don't know um all is all is all is not as it may appear in Russia I'm sure it is I'm sure it's not because two months later uh the Wagner boss ends up getting uh killed in a plane crash and not just it was it blew up in air

yeah yes do you think that was an accident no of course not just checking you know what I'm saying just checking so you think that Putin engineered that as a retaliation I think there's there's uh almost like a gang right you have a gang boss and you have different rival factions and uh that was definitely the um the military intelligence or um or the FSB pushing back on on a force that had been rivaling or challenging uh their positions again I don't know the details but that's what I suspect I mean when you look at

the whole Ukraine Russia conflict and the billions of dollars that have been spent and hundreds of billions hundreds of billions and full disclosure I was born in Kiev Ukraine at the time at the time I was part of the USSR so consider myself Russian but technically I was born in Ukraine I mean in the beginning I was very supportive of the whole situation but now years later you know and I've always said this I don't think that the Ukraine could withstand Russia forever nope the US have been propping it up with billions of dollars some

point it's a it's a math problem the math problem you when you fight a war of attrition against someone that's three and four times the size of you you're going to lose that fight you know the sad thing is I actually I quietly offered a solution that I think would have prevented that war which was I had a pretty good idea that the Russians are going to invade certain indications and warnings and so in December of 2021 3 months before they invaded I uh I sent a paper up through a a senior DOD contact without

my name on it so they can't play the I hate Eric Prince card because I already slated in 2022 the US Air Force was retiring 206 combat aircraft 150 of those 140 of those like 50 f-15s 50 f-16s 40 some a10s A10 being the best purpose built tank killing aircraft ever made they were already planned to retire though so fly them to the from a active combat Squad fly it to the desert to the Boneyard Park it for all eternity written off to zero value Biden could have done two things announce of course Ukraine is

not going to be part of NATO we stop that provocation but B they're going to have the means to defend themselves there's three squadrons a significant airwing of deterrence and you can fly it with contractor Pilots for a year until the Ukrainian Pilots are trained 150 combat aircraft in Ukrainian markings showing up in January of 2022 no way they would have invaded and that whole program since the aircraft were already written down to zero 100 million bucks in fuel 100 million bucks in wages $300 million in Old weapon systems again clear out the old back

back end of the garage and yeah so the Russians have a high air defense network fine you have 150 aircraft that's rejection seats are for fight it would have would have caused the Russians to not do it especially if the US had backed off on the stupid unnecessary provocation of saying Ukraine needs to be part of NATO well you actually said that the US should make peace with Russia and pull them away from China because you said China is actually the biggest threat to the US yeah look it's been the long-standing goal of US foreign

policy to keep German industry from combining with Russian industry or with Russian resources all we've done now with this stupid Ukraine thing is push Russia in all those resources gas minerals coal everything into the hands into a subjugated role of the Chinese Communist party that is not in our strategic interest at all mean you think that eventually Russian economy is is stronger now than it was they have made their economy pretty much sanction proof they're selling all the oil that they want to sell to India to the rest of the bricks Nations the Petro dollar

right are our entire way of life and the reason that Congress can appropriate massive budget deficits every year is because of the petrol dollar because of the dollar being the world's Reserve currency by pushing Russia and China in India away from the trade and the dollar that's bad that's dangerous say again Saudi Arabia Saud Arabia yeah exactly I mean as someone who was born in Russia and is now 51 years old I've never seen a peaceful relationship between Russia and America ever I mean there's been some times you know look I'm not saying we they're

not going to be our besties fine but we can have a they can be enemies even but we don't have to be we don't have to be as confrontational look after 9/11 the Russians opened up they were very helpful with intelligence they were very helpful with logistic support flying stuff weapons air aircraft combat aircraft through their airspace and through their periphery into usbekistan um a big um air refueling base in Kyan that is not somebody that's trying to to be an enemy to us I think this this neocon I wrote a big article in uh

1776 Journal uh it was called too big to win and it details 30 years of neocon failure in why we are having so many problems as a country in foreign policy and one of those is we did not have to be nearly as confrontational to Russia and and in instead of embarrassing them in the 90s we could have really embraced them and and helped them down the road of capitalism in instead of the G kind of the gangster capitalism they have now I mean do you think there'll ever be like an actual full-blown conflict with

China you know because I remember at one point china was predicted to be the number one world economy but then they had their own set of problems and so forth but there have been a lot of a conflict with China is exceedingly more C more dangerous if Russians are if the Russians are on their side I see what you're saying and the and the Russians long-term culturally we have a way more in common with Russia than we do with China or India or Japan or Korea Russia really belongs in the orbit in the friendly Association

of Europe not with Asia and even demographically Russia is hurting they need more people they are extremely sensitive about the Chinese expansion into Russian territories like when when the Chinese build a do a big infrastructure project in um in Africa a lot of cases they'll use convict Chinese slave labor because there's 40 million males of marriage age in China with no prospects of marrying a Chinese female why sex selection abortion went on for a single child policy and a preference to have male babies not female babies right you have a math problem so they send

criminals and a lot of people going abroad Chinese uh slow scen ification of Eastern Russia is a big problem for them as well well the Trump assassination attempt uh you've talked about this which one the first one where he actually got hit yep you said that was a total breakdown in terms of uh security terrible what do you think was the biggest problem well when you're doing advanced work you want to secure your perimeter and and and secure that out to at least a th000 meters 1,000 meters cuz that's that's how far someone good with

a sniper rifle can shoot leaving buildings that were only 140 yards away on watching unguarded now part of that is a failure of local police but not having SEC enough Secret Service advaned to making sure that local PE local police were doing their job ultimately the responsibility flows uphill to the secret service for not not having Advanced people not having counter surveillance people and I would say a lack of seriousness by the Secret Service in doing their job I mean the fact that Jill Biden president's wife has no constitutional Authority she was doing an event

nearby in Pittsburgh they had three times as many agents on her as on Trump well yeah but Trump is not actually an active president he's a former president so he's not get the same former former president and the nominee of the party I understand but also a nominee not an actual sitting president so that's what people are saying is the big difference okay the spouse of the sitting president who has no constitutional role gets three times as many Secret Service I see I mean come on this is the same Joe Biden that um uh for

the first time in 200 uh well since 1776 that the Marine band okay the Marine band plays Hail to the Chief when the president arrives in a room Joe Biden had the Marine band generate a new set of music just for her when she walks on who does that okay well the whole uh Hamas Israel conflict recently there was a report that pages and walki Takis exploded on the Hamas side no Hezbollah side on the Hezbollah side my bad that they said Israel was behind as someone who has a computer science degree that's taking some

Electronics courses and so forth I don't see how this is humanly possible unless they actually put some sort of explosive device in these walkie-talkies ahead of time you have to hack the supply chain okay so I was right you can't just someone can't take my existing cell phone and blow it up in my ear yeah I you can't I don't think you can get it to Thermal runaway to have that amount of discharge there was definitely definitely some kind of strip explosive added to the battery pack somehow in that supply chain that's a that is

a long running highly sophisticated effort that they accomplished and I applaud him for doing it I mean that my God it's the ultimate and targeted attack to to Clack off 2700 of Hezbollah leadership and it self selected because it's not there weren just random pagers given to anybody there was a encrypted pager specifically purchased for Hezbollah by Hezbollah and I wish the CIA was capable of that I wish they were that Innovative and uh and willing to take risks to do that kind of operation alas they are not well you actually said that China could

do the same thing to the US because of their grip on the global supply chain so in the in the case of getting after 2700 pagers an intelligence service had to figure out to stimulate that demand to find the supplier to replace and manufacture The Battery Plus explosive plus an initiating device in that the fact is every iPhone made in China enormous amount of batteries for everything made in China uh or or full products made in China from circuitry operators everything made in China it's um something we need to be very very mindful of so

you're saying that hypothetically China could do the same thing absolutely wow well you talked about how defense contractors buy lobbyists and politicians to land defense contracts and you actually compare it to how the cartels work look there's a they pay an enormous amount of money to a almost a brigade worth of lawyer of lobbyists couple thousand in Washington to lobby for specific defense spending in like the the F-35 for Lockheed Martin is built in 45 States it's the most expensive weapon system in human history and the operational Readiness of the aircraft 29% huh fully Mission

capable 29% can fly right now so two-thirds of them is Just Junk down for maintenance yeah that's bad that is not not great value for the taxpayer so look in the Clinton Administration there used to be aund 100ish major defense contractors they pushed it Consolidated down to five Boeing locked Northrup rathon General Dynamics they need to be broken up because that cartel right they're they're they they really control the bidding some will bid on some some will bid on others it's it's a joke how non-competitive most of those bids are and the way Pentagon procurement

works is everybody that has a great idea develops a new thing in their basement or their garage with three of their friends the procurement process is so slow that they get choked off so they get those mid-level good idea guys get squashed and bought for pennies by the big guys who then resell it for example the Drone that was used largely by the US in the in the G in the war on terror um was originally developed for tuna fishing fantastic some Innovative guys in Washington state in the Pacific Northwest built a thing that launched

off the top of their fishing boat and they would recover on a cable fantastic Boeing bought it charged five times as much per aircraft come on I mean I'm Jewish myself I've been to Israel multiple times and I really hate the conflict that's happening right now in Israel with Hamas and I put the blame on both sides I hate conflicts too yeah I hate the fact that the Hamas attack happened and you know over a thousand people got killed and kidnapped I also hate the heavy-handed response that's killing civilians and so forth if you were

in charge of that operation do you think you could actually end it or do you think that this just goes back to Biblical times and it'll never end I knew look I had an idea of the kind of fight that Hamas wanted to have and they built 500 miles 500 kmers of tunnels 300 miles all under Gaza and I knew the IDF was going to have a problem with that and I knew the civilians were going to suffer if there's a whole bunch of urban combat trying to bomb into those tunnels so I went in

November last year I had donors lined up and I had the best drilling technology from Texas horizontal drilling technology to what to sit outside horizontally drill into those tunnels flood it with seawater just destroy all the tunnels take away the SE right yeah destroy the under underground weapons caches with no bombs take away their ability to maneuver with no bombs flush hostages and terrorists out of the tunnels with no bombs so you at least even playing field and make it much less likely that you have to bomb in a civilian area to hasten their ability

to resolve the conflict and especially protect civilians because look that it is a bad look to kill civilians at that level I understand the IDF has to finish Hamas another Ki rice move she was the one that decided we should have a free election in Gaza and they and they elected Hamas exactly look anytime you lock up people in a small area and you they don't have freedom of maneuver and freedom to trade they're going to they're going to team and come up with a way to lash back and so all that productive energy that

could have been done into making a better product or a better thing that Society was was instead innovated to destroy their border wall and to kill as many Israelis as possible it's really tragic yeah I mean it essentially became an open air prison and like I said I feel the the problem is on both sides and and I hope at some point in my lifetime there will be a solution because my entire life Israel and Palestine have been killing each other and I don't see an end to it unfortunately and a lot of that is

stimulated by Iran once again yeah yeah Iran in Lebanon Iran in Gaza and Iran in Iraq in Iran in in Yemen in the houis they have shut down a major Waterway the next country that's at risk because of that is Egypt losing $800 million a month just because the Suz is largely shut down they're losing toll fees huh and Egypt can't really afford that the Egyptian pound has already fallen by half of value because of that well there was uh rumors that you plan on taking the Venezuelan government down with mercenaries um that's a little

strong explain it um I've paid attention to to Venezuela for a long time I'm not look I'm a big fan of Hernando doto uh a great Economist who talks about how to build free uh Equitable wealth generating societies based on private property land rights the basic rungs of capitalism and Venezuela voted in socialism in the late 90s chavismo Chavez yeah and now the chavismo government Maduro has stolen the last three elections this time the opposition won uh won with 70% of the vote clearly they have the receipts 70% 30% not even close and they're just

stealing it and so I have been vocal I trolled Maduro on Twitter and I posted if the Biden Administration wants actual Justice and democracy in Venezuela they should up the bounty on Maduro because he's already there's a US DEA Bounty a warrant for his arrest for $15 million for drug trafficking on the minister of interior there DS C Cabo $10 million wanted by the DEA for drug trafficking I said they should raise those bounties to 100 million dollar a piece and they could use frozen Venezuelan government funds raise the Bounty sit back watch the magic

happen well weren't you involved in uh operation Gideon what is that it was a failed operation where a mercenary Corporation was hired on behalf of the Venezuelan uh opposition leader Juan gdau to Assassin president Maduro not me at all not true nothing to do okay yeah cuz there's articles about this saying you're a part of this lots of idiots type in from their basement that don't know this is why I'm asking the source right now well you actually have a new product called unplugged phone we do okay and it was actually a result of the

2020 election okay but seeing what big Tech was doing right and shutting down platforms certain apps I would say uh I would say impairing free speech is that one of the phones right there this is one of the phones this is an unplugged phone mean it looks like an iPhone same camera okay but when you turn around it's not an iPhone it's our Hardware okay our operating system ah the difference is uh an iPhone or a Google mobile services running Android collects all of your data they know where you go what you buy who you

call what you browse this is your own OS basically correct and our operating system doesn't have an ad idid so on the other guy's phones their ad ID turns on and cooperates with those apps to collect all that information on you and Export it to sell to advertisers this is the antidote to that it prevents all of that from happening it's the act the first phone with a um actual firewall that you can hard off the camera the microphone the touch to pay all those things so you know it's actually a off it even has

a kill switch that separates the battery from the electronic so that off is fully off so you can't track it at all once it's off correct aha okay do you worry about the phone being used by the cartels and various other bad guys as well look there's lots of ways that people can use um sophisticated technology to try to do that um this is designed for free people to be able to communicate freely because I think it's the kind of the prerequisite for to people to live in a public is they have to communicate freely

uh and have their data be their data the last you know the really troubling thing is the fisa extension foreign in foreign intelligent surveillance Act Congress extended it to now any federal government agent can go to any company that has data off your cell phone or off your cell phone and say turn it over to me with no probable cause yeah and no warrant yeah I mean that is the antithesis of the first and the fourth amendments this is the antidote to that and uh we're selling now so we we did 500 units last fall

as a beta test got our first 10,000 units in in May and we just reordered another 10,000 you can order it unplug decom yeah I mean I assume when using my phone every actual voice call is recorded somewhere and stored I assume every text message is recorded somewhere in store every email so I'm aware of it Reon just accept it at this point I'm I haven't okay that's why you built that and it's $989 there's a reason that Mark Zuckerberg paid $20 billion for WhatsApp because every message call picture voice note that passes through there

is analyzed by their algorithm yeah I learned that when I managed to piss off my wife and she sent me a scorcher of a message on WhatsApp and for the next two weeks she's getting advertising from divorce lawyers and from match.com not with unplugged final question before I let you go I've interviewed a few billionaires over the years Grant Cardone he made his you're not one today because I'm today no uh well Gran cardoo made his billions in real estate uh I've interviewed V you know who ran uh for president uh he made his money

through uh you know biotech biotch you know and Healthcare and so forth according to the internet you worth $2 billion once again the internet is is grotesquely off I wish that was the case but that is definitely not the case okay so it's not that number no what about 1 billion would you say worth that way less way less I got crushed I got crushed by by 14 years of canil culture getting denied capital from Banks from loans all the rest it is I'm look boohoo I'm not starving but I'm um I am worth way

less than I was when I decided to serve my country literally I would been better for me to take the proceeds of the sale of my dad's business put it in municipal bonds and go to the golf course maybe that's the lesson is don't serve your country because they'll [ __ ] you for it well right because Blackwater paid the highest per capita fine yep in State Department history $42 million $42 million for actually no damage to National Security that they acknowledge in their report what do they find us for for illegally exporting body armor

helmets zip ties why for a protective team working for the state department US Embassy people overseas while the Bureau of Defense trade controls doesn't process the licenses fast enough Diplomatic Security needs people from us we send them without the license Complete because I'm not sending guys naked into a combat zone yeah and they [ __ ] us for it I mean do you think you'd be worth two billion if you were able to sell black water for what was actually yeah sure yep yeah we not starving these days so I'm not starving um but it's

um yeah it's been an interesting ride Andy look and From perspective I got screwed financially veterans lost lives mental health limbs spouses families they pay a vastly higher price yeah and that's [ __ ] and I take great issue with politicians that send people to war or in a half-ass way there if you're going to do that there is no place for half measures get it done and we have politicians that make decisions that they never have to bear the bad consequences for and that must change well Eric Prince I appreciate you coming in definitely

one of the most fascinating interviews I've ever had to have someone that really function in the military at the highest levels with a private company that you built from scratch and like you said you could have taken the money from your dad's company when you guys sold it put it in the S&P 500 and you'd be a multi-billionaire right now absolutely without even a question but you chose to reinvest into something that you were actually passionate about I Clos with I guess my proudest professional moment was speaking at the uh National War college in Washington

so there's 300 Colonels I got out of the Navy I was like an 03 I was a lieutenant yeah all these guys popped to attention and they um one of the guys came up to me afterwards and he said uh he just came back from Brigade combat or Brigade command in Baghdad and he said at the top of his guys dashboards of the Humvees were the Blackwater call signs and frequencies because they knew that they got in trouble the Blackwater guys would come for them no question that's the that's the reputation we wanted to have

well Eric man I appreciate everything uh you know you talked about today clearly an inspiration for generations to come and I think this is one of the most important interviews that I've ever done appreciate you coming in thanks for having me blad peace