#29 Erik Prince - Inside The Rise and Fall of Blackwater

Erik Prince is an American businessman, former U. S. Navy SEAL officer, and the founder of the private military company Blackwater USA. On March 31st, 2004 the lives of 4 BlackWater employees were forever changed along with the smear campaign of the company that followed. Erik Prince reveals the truth inside of his company BlackWater and the current events shaping our world. You've never heard anything like this! Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website - https://www.shawnryanshow.com Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/VigilanceElite TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@shawnryanshow Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/shawnryan762 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Speaker 01

  Mr. President? My company tore me of the explosion on our rig. On October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 0:46Erik Prince?

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 0:53Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 0:59Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you for listening to the Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes, and leave the Sean Ryan Show a review. We read every review that comes through, and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show.

• 1:19Shawn Ryan?

  Ladies and gentlemen, it is 4th of July weekend. I'm in Portland, Maine.

• 1:28Shawn Ryan?

  Getting ready to release my next episode with somebody that has been on my wish list to interview for a very long time. He's a former boss of mine, former Navy SEAL, CEO of Blackwater, did a ton of work with Central Intelligence Agency until they ousted him. We get the full story. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mr. Erik Prince. And if you want to be a patriot this 4th of July weekend, leave me a review on iTunes and sign up.

• 2:11Shawn Ryan?

  For our free email newsletter, we push out all kinds of free content on the newsletter. Links in the description. Other than that, that's all I'm asking. Have a great 4th of July weekend and God bless America. Cheers. Love you all.

• 2:36Speaker 05

  I solemnly swear that the testimony-

• 2:39Speaker 06

  Amid fresh reports of reckless behavior by Blackwater in Iraq, Blackwater's CEO Erik Prince made no apologies to a congressional investigating committee.

• 2:49Erik Prince?

  I disagree with the assertion that they acted like cowboys.

• 2:54Speaker 06

  And it says, "Three senators, Joe Biden, Chuck Hagel, and John Kerry, the future Vice President, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State, respectively posed while waiting for Blackwater rescue."

• 3:04Erik Prince?

  Their US Army helicopter got lost in a blinding snowstorm and set down in Taliban territory on the side of a mountain.

• 3:15Erik Prince?

  Do not ever discount the Iranian influence on the Biden/Obama administration then, as there is now.

• 3:30Erik Prince?

  He said, "Mr. President, give us the authorities and a billion dollars, and in three weeks, the flies will be walking in the eyeballs of our enemies."

• 3:38Speaker 06

  Prince said his employees act with restraint and professionalism. He boasted that none of the US diplomats he has paid to protect have been killed or wounded.

• 3:47Erik Prince?

  It was a great honor that they turned to us because it was a very important mission, right? Because the CIA is the ones who made that victory possible for the United States.

• 3:57Speaker 05

  We've had a better response from Blackwater than we have from the State Department.

• 4:01Erik Prince?

  We fought back on all fronts. The one place- That they had us over a barrel was in the State Department.

• 4:08Speaker 07

  Witnesses say the two SUVs were ambushed as they drove through town.

• 4:12Erik Prince?

  Another convoy of guys that got ambushed and shot up on the Baghdad highway.

• 4:17Speaker 07

  The contractors worked for Blackwater Security, a company that protects coalition personnel.

• 4:22Erik Prince?

  Knowing that the clowns at the State Department and the Obama administration did everything they could to block a program like that, because it's not something they directly controlled. It is such a mess. It is such a fetid swamp. Trump was right to call it a swamp. It is.

• 4:47Shawn Ryan?

  You know, guys, the older I get, the more obsessed I get with the maintenance of my own lawn. But it's a big job. So I started paying somebody to do it, and I would love when they would put these little designs in my lawn. But one thing I started noticing is I started missing all the little nooks and crannies. And that's an equipment issue. Then I found Manscaped.

• 5:17Shawn Ryan?

  Thanks to the Lawn Mower 4.0, it's real easy to get those wide-open spaces and has light on it, so now I can mow my lawn in the dark. Then there's those hard-to-reach things.

• 5:34Shawn Ryan?

  Thanks to the weed whacker, I'm no longer standing in the front of the mirror on one foot with the other foot above my head, trying to get all those hard-to-reach places, when my wife walks in and you have that awkward look on your face.

• 5:52Shawn Ryan?

  Get 20% off and free shipping with code Shawn. S-H-A-W-N at manscaped.com. That's 20% off with free shipping at manscaped.com. Use code Shawn. It's time that you enjoyed the finer things in life and get yourself a Platinum Package for your Platinum Package.

• 6:16Shawn Ryan?

  Shaver balls, be a man.

• 6:23Shawn Ryan?

  Eric Prince, welcome to the show.

• 6:26Erik Prince?

  Thanks for having me, Sean.

• 6:28Shawn Ryan?

  So I've worked for you under Blackwater Worldwide, Blackwater USA. And after I left all that, I started this and not realizing what it would turn into. And you were actually the number one person that I wanted to interview. I never actually thought it would happen. So this is all very surreal for me. So I just want to say thank you for coming.

• 6:52Erik Prince?

  Thanks for having me.

• 6:53Shawn Ryan?

  It's a real honor to have you here.

• 6:55Erik Prince?

  It's always great to see guys that have worked with us pivot to something else spectacular and do well.

• 7:02Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 7:02Erik Prince?

  So congratulations.

• 7:03Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you for that. So just a little introduction. You were a Navy SEAL on the officer's side. You were the founder and CEO of Blackwater, the largest private military contracting company in the world, still to this day. Also, the only PMC company to ever not lose an asset or a...

• 7:26Erik Prince?

  Protectee.

• 7:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, protectee. A billionaire until...

• 7:33Erik Prince?

  Far from. That's a gross distortion. That's a massive inflation of my net worth.

• 7:40Shawn Ryan?

  Well, thank you for being honest. Until recently, the head of a private equity firm, Frontier Resource Group, you are on the Iranian hit list and well-known in the media is the guy behind the CIA assassination program and a father of 12, which I recently thought, seven, but 12.

• 8:07Erik Prince?

  So we have a double Brady Bunch family.

• 8:13Erik Prince?

  If you're old enough to have remembered the Brady Bunch.

• 8:15Shawn Ryan?

  I am.

• 8:16Erik Prince?

  All right.

• 8:16Shawn Ryan?

  I am. And so in doing some of my research, I talked to some of your colleagues, one of which had mentioned that you are like a modern day Bruce Wayne. You sit at home and you think of out of the box ways to solve a lot of the things that are going on in the world. And I actually thought that was a fairly accurate description. So I wanted to bring that up. But before we get into the interview, which we're going to talk about a lot of different things, I get everybody a gift.

• 8:51Erik Prince?

  There you go. Thank you.

• 9:03Erik Prince?

  Alright. Gummy bears.

• 9:06Shawn Ryan?

  Those are gummy bears.

• 9:07Erik Prince?

  Fantastic.

• 9:08Shawn Ryan?

  Vigilance, legal in all 50 states.

• 9:12Erik Prince?

  Alright.

• 9:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 9:14Erik Prince?

  Good to go. I'm a sucker for gummy bears. Thank you. Perfect.

• 9:21Shawn Ryan?

  So I have a subscription group on Patreon under the Vigilance Elite, and I give them an opportunity to ask each guest a question, and I pick one. And I thought this was a fairly good question. With the way the economic, with the way the economy is today, everybody is waiting for the rug to kind of get pulled out from under it, and nobody really knows where to put their money. Where does Erik Prince invest his money other than your personal business ventures?

• 9:56Erik Prince?

  The stock market seems certainly overhyped because of the amount of liquidity that's been pumped into society. And to me, I guess it comes down to what do people have to buy to survive, right? In a world of turbulence, it comes down to people making choices as to nice to have versus have to have. And so investing in, if you can do any kind of value investing into things that people have to buy versus want to buy, that's probably the safest bet.

• 10:29Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 10:31Erik Prince?

  And this argument of cryptocurrencies versus gold and all the rest, here the fact is, gold has for millennia been a valued medium of exchange. And it's never been worth zero. It's never quite collapsed. And so having a...

• 10:52Erik Prince?

  Having part of a portfolio in a in an actual hard currency like gold, or somebody even say in brass or in loaded ammunition components or look, look at the, look even what the cost of that has been over the past few years as the cost of copper has gone to $10,000 a ton and, you know, driving all those prices upwards. So it's not a bad hedge.

• 11:17Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. Are you into crypto at all?

• 11:19Erik Prince?

  Yes.

• 11:21Shawn Ryan?

  You are. You think it's here to stay?

• 11:24Erik Prince?

  I think it is because the increasing cartelization of big banks and their leverage over people that cryptocurrencies will will find a way to be an alternative medium of exchange to the detriment of big banks, which is good. If you think about monetary history in the United States, there used to be lots of different privately issued currencies, right? I mean, even after the American Revolution, you had the continental dollar and you had other people issuing dollars, usually based on issuing currencies, based on some kind of backed by some kind of silver or gold or backed by a gold mine or something.

• 12:07Erik Prince?

  And so it's not unusual to have a lot of different competing currencies. As you see, in the crypto world, yes, there's a lot of noise. There's a lot of nonsense to it, but there's some underpinning value stuff like Bitcoin and some of those mainstream coins, they're very much here to stay.

• 12:26Shawn Ryan?

  You think Ethereum is here to stay?

• 12:28Erik Prince?

  Ethereum?

• 12:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 12:29Erik Prince?

  I think so.

• 12:30Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. I wasn't expecting you to say that, but the more I dive in, the more, the more open people are to it, it's, I find it fascinating that I feel like we're on a currency revolution.

• 12:43Erik Prince?

  Yes, we are. I think if, so one of the things that in Africa, right, you have a thing called M-Pesa, which is cell phone banking, and it was hugely empowering for poor across Africa that didn't have a bank account, but they had a cell phone, even a little flip phone, because they could transfer or receive a couple of dollars, a few cents, small amounts of money. And because it reduced their transaction costs, they didn't have access or even proximity to a bank to do that, let alone the corruption or other nonsense that might go with with banks and some of those jurisdictions. So an M-Pesa account allowed them to buy and

• 13:24Erik Prince?

  sell goods or their labor and make it. I think cryptocurrencies are going to do that for the rest of the world with secure wallets, with exchanges that people will be able to buy and sell goods rapidly and effectively. And for all the noise also about cryptocurrency being used for for crime, it's the ultimate in transparency, right? Because it's a blockchain. It's you can trace every transaction and where it's gone and and who has it. So.

• 14:00Shawn Ryan?

  Well, thanks for sharing that.

• 14:01Erik Prince?

  You bet.

• 14:02Shawn Ryan?

  So as far as the interview is concerned, I would like to, we have so much to cover. I want to talk a lot about current events towards the end, but what I really want to do at the beginning is talk about just your career up to this point and then get into some of the current events. So you grew up, your dad was a monster entrepreneur, very wealthy, not a lot of people can relate to that. And very many people are interested in that kind of lifestyle. And in your book, I think you give a great description of what that was like and some of the lessons that your dad talked to. So can you go, can you go into a little bit of your childhood? What was that like?

• 14:41Erik Prince?

  Sure. Well, let me first start by talking about my dad, because both my parents certainly shaped me. And I'm 100% Dutch, born in Holland, Michigan. And it was a Dutch colony, it was a Dutch community founded in the 1840s from some religious pilgrims that came from the Netherlands. But it's a very hardworking, very industrious area. And my dad's, my dad's dad died when my father was 13. And that was kind of in the Great Depression. And so he was thrust from being a kid to being the man of the family. And my

• 15:20Erik Prince?

  Uh, my grandmother had a um, as a widow with three kids, was very independent and was not accepting or looking for any welfare from anybody, not from the state, not from the church, not from anybody. And so, you know, my dad installed the hot water heater in their house at age fourteen. By himself. I mean, literally taking one length of pipe at a time, going to a local hardware store, measuring it, cutting it, coming back and, and you know, sweating the joint and he put it in and it still worked. So my dad worked forty hours a week in middle school and high school already. And he, he played sports one season, um, he played football one season.

• 16:03Erik Prince?

  But the rest of time he worked. He was managing a car dealership at sixteen. And he put himself through college and um, was off in the air force for a couple of years after college because it was draft then. He was in the, he was an air force photo reconnaissance officer. But the man knew how, because he had to, work to provide.

• 16:24Erik Prince?

  And when he was, uh, he went to work for a machine tool maker. They made big diecast machines. And the business was sold. He didn't like the new ownership. And so he left with six other guys and took. Now, my dad already had three kids, mortgaging the house and he remortgaged everything. Okay. And, and his mother, who'd managed to save ten thousand dollars as a single mom in the forties and fifties, put ten thousand dollars on her son as equity into what became Prince Corporation. And my dad started making diecast machines and then in the early seventies, they patented the lighted sun visor.

• 17:04Erik Prince?

  Um, one of the smart guys at the company, Khan Marcus, developed the, you know, when you get in a car, you tip the visor down, you lift the lid up with the lights, with the mirror, the lights that come on, that was, that was their patent. And um,

• 17:19Erik Prince?

  They made the first 5,000 for Cadillac before they ever made one. Wow. Cause dad said they sold it on a balsa wood model.

• 17:30Erik Prince?

  And then these Cadillacs said, yep, we'll take 5,000. And then it was a scramble to figure out how to make those things and um, and they just did it. They figured it out. And so the, the Prince Corporation made um, all kinds of stuff inside of a car. And that, so that's the environment I grew up in.

• 17:50Erik Prince?

  I remember um, and my dad got invited to go to uh, to Eastern Europe and to Russia, right? Cause they wanted to buy his machines. And he went to Moscow, had the whole surveillance tail and he hated the whole fit and feel of the place. And he came back and after that, we did a long van tour. He shipped a 1975 Chevy van to Europe. And we did a, a six week road trip one summer and we drove through Western Europe and Eastern Europe. Uh, and I had my, my seventh birthday in East Berlin.

• 18:30Erik Prince?

  And I'll never forget that as a seven year old and the guns, the dogs, the minefields, the tank traps. All of that facing in on East Germany, literally a national prison camp, keeping people from escaping. And I think it had a, a pretty uh, direct effect on me. Cause I kind of figured out that communism is not such a great idea. If you had to have that level of control to keep people from leaving. Wow, figured that out at seven years old? Well, yeah, you know, and it probably stimulated my interest in history and, and reading and all the rest. And I remember we went to Normandy um, in 1980. And uh, so as an 11 year old, I was the, kind of the family geek that gave the tour, right?

• 19:14Erik Prince?

  This is Sword, Gold, Juneau, Utah, Omaha Beach, there's Pegasus Bridge and yeah. So I, I, I kind of lived and, and read and consumed that kind of information. I was uh, was kind of a loner growing up. Um, I hunted and trapped. I had a cousin Derek, who was a great outdoorsman and his dad, the whole side of the Zweet family were outdoorsmen. And that's where I got it from. And they um,

• 19:44Erik Prince?

  You know, shooting, uh, shooting water, water bugs with a, uh, with a BB gun. And, um, I hunt, I trapped, uh, muskrats and raccoons for three years. So, you know, as a, as a fourth, fifth and a sixth grader, I was out on my bike early in the morning, going to check my traps before school. It was a, it was a good experience.

• 20:04Shawn Ryan?

  Were you involved in the family business at all?

• 20:07Erik Prince?

  Not at all.

• 20:07Shawn Ryan?

  Not at all? Not interested or?

• 20:10Erik Prince?

  A, not interested, but B, it was also policy that you have to go do your own thing.

• 20:17Erik Prince?

  So even if I was really interested, there was never, never even an option. So my dad's policy for my sisters and I is that you had to go do something else before you ever come and work in the family business.

• 20:28Shawn Ryan?

  At what point did that become clear? What age?

• 20:31Erik Prince?

  Uh, it was, I think since birth, I was just never even, yeah. I mean, as the business grew and became very large, it was 5,000 employees by, by the late eighties, by about the time I was graduating high school. I'd always wanted to be in the military.

• 20:50Erik Prince?

  And I applied to, uh, Air Force and Navy. Um, I got into both academies and, um, I went Navy. I was a pilot. I got my, uh, pilot's license, or I sold it when I was 16, the morning of my 16th birthday. Got my license when I was 17 and, uh, was hell bent to be a Navy pilot. And, and, and truly showing about how low profile the SEAL teams were then. This is me, I was a geek that paid attention to all things military and I didn't even know that much about the SEAL teams. Cause I went to the academy knowing, um, knowing I wanted to be a pilot. And that was, it was even the year after Top Gun came out.

• 21:27Shawn Ryan?

  Oh.

• 21:29Erik Prince?

  But, um, I remember a year, it was the, it was the spring of my freshman year, plebe year at the academy. And these two SEAL officers, there were the liaison guys, came and gave the brief as to what SEAL teams do.

• 21:46Erik Prince?

  And they said, hey, if you ever wanna, you know, come down and PT with us, you can be at this field at 5:30 tomorrow. And I showed up there at 5:30 and they said, okay, today, we're just gonna run a mile. Get a partner, put him on your shoulders. I was hooked, man. I loved it. And I remember, I remember going to the pool, right? Cause I played sports in high school and middle school, but I was not much of a swimmer, even having grown up on the lakes. And I remember swimming the first 50 meters and I felt like my lungs were gonna fall out of my chest. But, but 100 meters became 200 became, you know, and I became a pretty good swimmer. But, yeah, that, that started my trajectory of wanting to be a SEAL.

• 22:29Erik Prince?

  But I ended up, I left the academy after three semesters voluntarily. I was not kicked out. But I went to Hillsdale College and I had a good experience there. Why did you leave the academy? Because I was not convinced it was, I think, great leaders went to the academy and survived it, cause it was not producing them. And it was, I'd say it was an early indicator of the kind of political correctness that's infected the rest of many of American schools, right? And, you know, if you think there's a problem with universities, imagine one run by the federal government. And so this is 87, 88.

• 23:14Erik Prince?

  I mean, growing up in, in Holland, Michigan, I was active in school. I played, I think, I only missed one season of one year playing some kind of high school sport at a varsity level. I was involved in all that, but I was so focused on joining the military, I think I missed most of the fun times of high school experience that most kids look back on. Okay. Still have regrets for that. But going to Hillsdale was a good experience. I remember I had a.

• 23:52Erik Prince?

  A prof named Alexander Stromas, who was in exile, he'd been kicked out of the Soviet Union. And so, right as the Soviet Union is teetering on collapse, Alexander Stromas had been a law school classmate of Mikhail Gorbachev. So it was a fantastic window into what was actually happening there. And so, between a really good economic education, right? Because Hillsdale is one of two schools in the country that accepts no federal funding. Why don't they accept federal funding? Because with federal money comes federal strings. So it is, it is a fiercely libertarian school. And it was, it was actually one of the first schools in the country to accept women and minorities as well. Really? Yeah. Does it still not accept federal money?

• 24:37Erik Prince?

  Zero. Interesting. Because I had thought about leaving the academy and trying to go to ROTC or, you know, some other commissioning source. And they said, "That's great, but you have to go to the ROTC training at Michigan State or somewhere else. But it's not here because it's federal money." Okay. So, but while I was at Hillsdale, I joined the fire department, uh, probably within two months of being there. And that was a, um, I would say I learned more about leadership at the fire department than in a very artificial lab at the academy, right? Because in, at the academy, they have the upper class, right? Some classman that's one or two years ahead of you, trying to teach you leadership.

• 25:19Erik Prince?

  And what is, what is a, what have you, what has a sophomore or a junior or a senior in college done to warrant them teaching leadership, right? There's not a lot of Mustang, former enlisted kids that are going to the academy. It's college kids. And I would compare that to the fire department where earning the trust of the butcher, the carpenter, or the professional fireman that were on the squad to perform well enough to go inside of a burning building, right? Because Hillsdale County is not a super affluent county, so there was quite a few structure fires. Um, you know, I've got to do a lot of cool things in my life, but driving a fire truck to a fire, lights and siren is still up there on the, definitely the top five list.

• 26:04Erik Prince?

  But, um, I did that and, um...

• 26:08Erik Prince?

  Uh, I got, uh, I dove with the county sheriff's department doing body recoveries. Because people would go out in the ice, uh, in the lakes during the winter time, running motorcycles and, um, and snowmobiles. Inevitably, at least one a weekend, somebody was going through the ice and you have to go recover the sled and sometimes have to recover a body.

• 26:29Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, how many, how many bodies do you think you've recovered?

• 26:32Erik Prince?

  Uh, three bodies and many sleds.

• 26:35Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Did that affect you, do you think?

• 26:38Erik Prince?

  Uh, made me pretty cautious.

• 26:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 26:41Erik Prince?

  Yeah. But I was cheap in college and, uh, cause I, these guys were diving in dry suits. I always dive in a wet suit. It was, it was epically cold until I got smart enough and I took, uh, some, uh, some milk jugs in a cooler that would fill with hot water. So I'd pour water in the suit first. You know, so you don't have that, uh, first thirty seconds of massive cold as the, uh, as the wet suit becomes wet.

• 27:04Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 27:07Shawn Ryan?

  Your dad seemed like he was a great leader as well. And so since we're on the topic of leadership, the academy, moving into the fire department and learning a lot of leadership lessons there, it seems like your dad was a very generous, uh, guy that took care of his people, gave back to the community. Did that carry over to you?

• 27:27Erik Prince?

  Yeah. You know what? My, um, it was described of my dad at his funeral that he was a rising tide that lifted all boats. And, um, he really believed in community and, um, making the community a spectacular place that people would want to live in. And they did a, a great care and share program where, um, the company made money. If the employees wanted to chip in and pick ten charities to support, the company would match it all. Um, ended up giving, uh, a big chunk of the company to the employees. And, you know, he said, and I've, I've really taken this on board.

• 28:04Erik Prince?

  That one of the greatest things you can do for somebody is to give them a great job. Where they feel valued, empowered, and they're happy, they're proud to go home to their families at night. And he told the story, you know, there was one of the very, very early employees was a guy who was,

• 28:25Erik Prince?

  I guess he was partially mentally disabled, right? But the guy was, he was having a hard time sweeping the floors. And the guy would get overwhelmed, he didn't want to quit, and my dad said, nope, you can do it. Come on, stay at it, stay at it, stay at it. And, and, and after 30 years, and he grew in the, the janitorial division of the business, because of the employee stock, because of when he started, the guy retired as a multimillionaire.

• 28:51Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 28:52Erik Prince?

  And it was a, a great analogy to how empowering giving somebody a great job is.

• 28:58Shawn Ryan?

  That's incredible.

• 28:59Erik Prince?

  And employing them at their, at their best level.

• 29:04Shawn Ryan?

  Well, skipping forward just a little bit, then we'll come back. When you, when Blackwater was, was up and going, I know a lot, a lot of those guys were extremely proud to be a part of that outfit. And, and so I definitely see they're carried over. Did, did you realize that? How proud a lot of those guys were to work under that umbrella?

• 29:26Erik Prince?

  Uh, I had been, uh, I, I was hoping that much of what I had seen before was replicated in the best sense of the word. Yeah. And we were, you know, I had intended to go farther. I mean, you know, with, um, with the, whether it's a care and share program for the, our employees picking local charities that they cared about, and we matched it, and we wanted to make our whole area where we lived much, much better. So, yeah, and it's a, well, I'm sure we'll get to it later, but the, how the company was treated and the, the political attack on it is, um, Uh, I wouldn't say it was fair and uh, but it is what it is.

• 30:11Erik Prince?

  And for whatever nonsense I had to put up with and have the business smashed, it pales in comparison to the guys that lost their lives or lost their liberty for a period of years because of the politics. But um, good guys have been dying wrongly in wars for as long as people can pick up sticks and throw them at each other, I guess. Yeah, very true. So back to college, you graduated. Ah, no, so I'm in college. I go uh, um, I go to intern at the White House before Monica Lewinsky makes it popular, right? It's for George Bush Senior.

• 30:53Erik Prince?

  And I'm there for about six months and the guy I'm working for gets fired. So I'm kind of uh, also at a dead end. So I end up going to work for a congressman, Dana Rohrbacher, who'd been an original speechwriter for Reagan. And I met some great people through that process.

• 31:15Erik Prince?

  And I took two significant trips as an intern. In fact, well, they tried to hire me as the staffer because his, his foreign policy guy had been mobilized to go to the Gulf War. A guy became a dear friend, Paul Behrens. But um, my dad said, don't take the job. Don't accept a dollar because it'll put you in Washington DC's tax bracket. You do not want to pay taxes there, so I didn't do that. But um, I took two trips. I went to Croatia, well, actually it was to Yugoslavia in March of 91, before the war started. And toured all through the areas because there'd already been some fighting between Croat and Serbian forces and Slovenian forces. And figured that there was going to be a war there.

• 31:58Erik Prince?

  Uh, and then I went to um, Dana Rohrbacher, the congressman is going to do a um, an exposé on communist atrocities during the um, uh, when the Saint Anisus took over in the early eighties. And so he sent me and another intern down. To Nicaragua to meet a contact there. It was the first time I ever had to shake surveillance. Because the Sanitistas were still in charge of the police and the military there. Even though the government had been in the hands of Violeta Chamorro. But we had to go shake surveillance or often four o'clock in the morning and and takes us out to this field and digging away and sure enough. It's a mass grave shattered skulls, arms and legs tied at the waist or at the wrists.

• 32:43Erik Prince?

  And it was, it was a very sobering moment, a great reminder of of how bad things can get quickly. And a week later, I got married in Alexandria, Virginia to a girl I'd met a couple of years before to Joan. And we went on a um.

• 33:04Erik Prince?

  That was a great thing about my parents is they really encouraged travel to go see and explore and to do. And so we went. A tour called the Baltic Liberation Tour, which was to Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland. We started in Poland and took a train through those areas, which was still part of the Soviet Union. And you could see it was coming apart. And I remember as we were leaving. You have to put your luggage, we're flying. So the whole tour is leaving and we're leaving from Tallinn, Estonia to fly to Finland. And one of the um, one of the guys in our group put his luggage on the scanner.

• 33:46Erik Prince?

  And you could see this bag go through and it looks like there's a complete manhole cover inside of his bag.

• 33:53Erik Prince?

  And this Soviet border guard opens the suitcase and he says, this is very big problem. It was an entire bronze bust of Lenin that had been yanked off a building that our friend had bought on the street and was taken out of the country. Oh. And our buddy said, well, how much to make the problem go away? Fifty dollars. Done. I thought, you know what? If they're letting the bust of Lenin go off of a government building for fifty bucks, this place is not going to last long. And sure enough. Four months later, the Soviet Union collapsed. Wow. So that was, yeah, that was April that that happened and and you know, by August, there was the the tanks in the front of the parliament there with with Yeltsin. And Soviet Union was done.

• 34:38Erik Prince?

  Damn, so you just missed it. Yeah. Wow. So, and then back to Hillsdale for that last year, I applied to OCS.

• 34:49Erik Prince?

  And, uh, and I got in and, um, yeah, and off to the SEAL teams. I finished my last college exam, didn't even go to graduation and, uh, reported to OCS in Newport, did that for four months. Summer in Newport is pretty nice and, um, and then off to BUDS, so. How was BUDS for you? It was good. I liked it. You liked it. It was hard, certainly, but I went through married and my wife was a fantastic cook. And, um, I'd say the only hard, the hardest part of it was obviously sleep deprivation because my wife, God bless her, she wanted to have a normal social schedule and she'd been teaching at the local Catholic school and she'd have the nuns over all the time. So we'd have nuns

• 35:31Erik Prince?

  in our house for dinner and they'd stay till 10 o'clock at night and I was literally falling asleep in my food. You know how tired you are, you were going through BUDS and, uh, you know, so between, uh, shining shoes and sharpening knives and polishing, uh, you know, your CO2 cartridge and all that stuff you gotta do. It was, um, it was good. Did you make it through all at once? Did you get rolled? I made it through, uh, well, yes, first phase, no problem. Second phase, no problem. Third phase, I fell off the top of the slide for life. And, um, the two guys previous to me that had fallen, one broke his back, one broke his ankle. And, uh, I landed on my hip

• 36:13Erik Prince?

  and they immediately hospitalized me for two days, convinced I'd broken something. They finally let me out on a Friday. I wasn't walking very well, but they, uh, I found an osteopath in San Diego and sure enough, he lined up my legs and one leg was about three inches shorter. And he put me in some weird position and snapped the whole thing back into place. And, uh, they still tried to roll me back, but at that point I'd passed every run, every swim, everything else to go to San Clemente. And so they, uh, they let me go and I finished on time. Nice. It was good. And then where did you go?

• 36:48Erik Prince?

  Well, back then they had SEAL tactical training, so I went to the East Coast. Well, went to airborne first and then, uh, reported to SEAL Team Eight, got my Trident there. We did a short deployment for the Haiti invasion in 94.

• 37:04Erik Prince?

  I came back and as a as a as an officer, I got to go to sniper school.

• 37:07Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, really?

• 37:08Erik Prince?

  Which was fantastic.

• 37:09Shawn Ryan?

  That's rare.

• 37:10Erik Prince?

  Yeah. I'd say, dollar for dollar, it was good money spent by the SEAL teams because when I later got out, I really wanted a place a lo- a place to go shooting long guns at long range. It was one of the reasons I wanted to build Blackwater. So, but um, so short deployment and then long deployment to um, on a carrier, to the Med, to the Middle East, to Bosnia. And, well, before that deployment, my father passed away unexpectedly.

• 37:42Erik Prince?

  And

• 37:45Erik Prince?

  and so then the the the pull of trying to help my mom, because he had a large family business and there was no

• 37:53Erik Prince?

  there was no plan about what to do next, or there was, you know,

• 37:57Erik Prince?

  I sure there was certainly some indecision about what we should, what the family should do next. And then when I came back from that deployment, my wife was pregnant with her second and she was diagnosed with breast cancer at 29.

• 38:09Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 38:10Erik Prince?

  Which is a, you know, not a, not a, not a experience I recommend.

• 38:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 38:16Erik Prince?

  So.

• 38:18Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that's a lot to deal with in a short amount of time.

• 38:21Erik Prince?

  Yeah, I got, I got, I got a really bad case of hives for a few days. It was the stress was peaking pretty hard.

• 38:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. When, in your book, you talk about a jet showing up and you'd kind of concealed.

• 38:36Erik Prince?

  I'd managed to keep the success of my father pretty much a secret. And I'd say the only nice thing I had was I had a Suburban, right? And so guys liked that vehicle, but I didn't have a sports car or anything like that. But yeah, I remember we had been training out in Fallon, doing um, CSAR and um, pilot rescue stuff. And uh, and and also the air-to-ground strike, air-to-ground work for the uh, the strike aircraft and the carrier. And um, we got, I think we were done training on Thursday and the Nalo aircraft wasn't coming until Monday. So I asked my boss, hey, can, you know, my mom wants me to come back for the weekend. There's a bunch of family stuff after my dad died, because this was just like three weeks after he died.

• 39:23Erik Prince?

  He goes, yeah, sure. No problem. We'll see you back there. And a couple of guys from my platoon drove me to this little airport. And I was like, okay, guys, thanks. I got it from here. No, no, it's okay, Mr. P. We'll, we'll help you with your bags. And, um, and they walk and there's one of the pilots with this, you know, uniform on with a tail number one, three, one EP. Which are my dad's initials, but also my initials. And then that they kind of scratched their heads and I got a lot of questions the next week after that.

• 39:48Shawn Ryan?

  I'll bet.

• 39:49Erik Prince?

  Yeah.

• 39:50Shawn Ryan?

  Were you concerned that they, Kat was out of the bag at that point?

• 39:55Erik Prince?

  No, not really. I mean, look, they knew who I was. They knew I was the same guy, whether I could retire then or not. That didn't, that didn't matter to them. I, I didn't let it matter to them.

• 40:06Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 40:09Shawn Ryan?

  So your dad died and then how, how much time was it in between your wife being diagnosed with breath, with, uh,

• 40:16Erik Prince?

  He died in March, um, of ninety, of ninety-five and a year later, she was diagnosed with breast, less than a year later.

• 40:26Shawn Ryan?

  And how, how, how long after that did you get out of the SEAL teams?

• 40:31Erik Prince?

  Uh, I got out six months later.

• 40:34Shawn Ryan?

  Six months later?

• 40:35Erik Prince?

  Cause that actually, uh, I'd already got orders to my next, or yeah, uh, I got my assigned to the next platoon, my OIC platoon and yeah, I had to undo all that to get out and sort out the family business.

• 40:53Shawn Ryan?

  When the doctors had mentioned to your wife that they needed to interrupt the pregnancy and she had, she didn't want any part of that, it sounded like.

• 41:02Erik Prince?

  Right. That was with our third child and because she'd had, um, all kinds of treatment, but they were really, uh, the doctors were really adamant that she not get pregnant again. And they said, you need to interrupt this pregnant, pregnancy. And she said, well, when would I resume it? And, um, yeah, that was never a question. And, uh, you know, my wife was, was resolute on that. So.

• 41:29Shawn Ryan?

  How did you feel about that? Were you a hundred percent behind her?

• 41:32Erik Prince?

  Yeah, I supported, absolutely. Not, not all friends and family did, but, uh, on the life issue, my, my wife was absolutely resolute.

• 41:45Erik Prince?

  She's a beautiful person.

• 41:46Shawn Ryan?

  It sounds like it.

• 41:47Erik Prince?

  Yeah.

• 41:47Shawn Ryan?

  It really does.

• 41:50Shawn Ryan?

  Wife has breast cancer. New baby. You're out of the SEAL teams. The idea of Blackwater.

• 41:59Erik Prince?

  Yeah, you know, in my experience in working up for those deployments, um, we moved around a lot and I, so I thought train, training was very fragmented. You're going to Tennessee, Nevada, West Virginia, Virginia, bouncing all over the place, Puerto Rico. And I'd thought a lot about, uh, well, seeing what the SEAL teams, a, a private facility in Tennessee, mid-south, right? Where the SEAL teams used to go, maybe they still do. I thought, now someone has to do that on an industrial scale. And, um, I was in an unusual position to do that. Right? I mean, so in the late 90s, you have this peace dividend and defense cuts and, and they're closing a major base per week across the country.

• 42:43Erik Prince?

  Right? Whether it's an Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine base. There was bases closing and ranges closing and all the rest. So this idea of building a private facility was counterintuitive to most. Like every smart financial advisor I ever said, said, that's a terrible idea. But build it and they will come. I didn't know anything about development, land development, anything about government contracting, or really anything about business. But knew, I had a pretty good idea that there was a demand and, and that the teams needed something like that. And you go, kind of go back to the well that you know, of the people you trust, right? So I hired the two training officers from SEAL Team Eight, Ken Viera and Jim Searawski.

• 43:26Erik Prince?

  Jim's, Jim came later because he wanted to go be a cop after he retired. But, um, uh, Ken and a guy named Al Clark. And we got, uh, Jim DeHart, who had, uh, had been the facilities guy at Dev Group. I mean, uh, you know, unknown secret is that the, our first shoot house was built by all the Dev Group maintenance guys who came out on weekend, on the weekends with, for pizza and beer. And they welded up one of the largest and still most effective shoot houses in the country. So it was, um, you know, finding land. I wanted to have it within an hour drive of Norfolk to make it easy for people training or living in Norfolk to come and train, do what they have to do and still make it home in time for their, you know, dinner with their families.

• 44:09Erik Prince?

  And I had to go through all kinds of ass pain with the two counties because one county rejected us, the other county accepted us, Camden accepted us. And so, uh,

• 44:22Erik Prince?

  went through all the, the machinations of that and then, uh, built it. And actually, our first customer was from the west coast, a west coast heliputun that came to, uh, to Blackwater and just kind of ground along for the first few years. And it was really our target business that saved the business early on because we had very destructive customers who destroyed everything that we'd ever bought on the outside. And Jim DeHart and, uh, a very practical, down-to-earth, I would say solid-state mentality, built these steel targets, which were indestructible. And other customers that came loved them. And so I remember at

• 45:03Erik Prince?

  the end of the fiscal year, one night on September 30 at 11:55 PM, the fax machine started and out came a, an order from the FBI, oddly enough, to equip like 15 field offices with our target systems. And that, uh, that really kept the lights on at Blackwater for that, for the year because the training business wasn't strong enough to, to pay the bills. So, training and targets kept it going together. And then when Columbine happened, we ended up building a big,

• 45:35Erik Prince?

  a big mock-up, uh, of a fighting city. We built it out as a high school and we cut, it was called Are You Ready High School because, you know, the thing about Columbine is you had all these police departments. Columbine was a, was a active shooter incident early in the nineties before unfortunately it became a more commonplace event. We did all these, all these departments, all this nice gear, standing around outside and nobody going in to solve the immediate threat. And so I guess our contribution in our own way was to train tens of thousands of SWAT officers from a surround and negotiate mentality to a whoever's there, take a stack of two men or four men or however many you could put together, go,

• 46:18Erik Prince?

  move this out of the guns and put that fire out. And, um, that was.

• 46:25Erik Prince?

  It was the first big volume program we did. Um, our first classified program was for the Coast Guard, oddly enough, teaching them how to shoot drug boat motors out of a, uh, out of a helicopter with a 50 cal. Right? Because you had all kinds of drug boats and the helicopters interdict them and they'd say, stop. And they'd say, yeah, fuck off. Right? And then we'd keep going and keep going. And so, uh, we taught the Coast Guard how to shoot each of those motors out with a 50 cal. So that by the time they were arrested, the drug runners were very happy to be arrested and rescued. Um, and then after, in October of 2000, the USS Cole was blown up.

• 47:06Erik Prince?

  You know, a billion dollar warship that the Navy had optimized to fight at a hundred miles, not at a hundred meters. It had gotten, the Navy had gotten so risk averse that they were using unloaded weapons. Sorry, that they were training only with laser simulators in boot camp anymore because guns were not safe.

• 47:23Erik Prince?

  And the sailors that were guarding the ship that day in Yemen were holding unloaded weapons that they hardly ever fired before. And so the Navy came to us in a hurry after that and said, please put together a a curriculum, a way for us to train a hundred thousand sailors, how to protect their ships and to retake it if there's an incident. So we did that and that was our first government contract.

• 47:44Shawn Ryan?

  How long from breaking ground to first government contract? How long did that take?

• 47:50Erik Prince?

  Um, well, when I say any, I mean, look, the first SEAL teams that would come would be a platoon here and a platoon there, or maybe an A team or a a marine platoon or a SWAT team, and they would pay with a credit card. So that'd be a a 25 to maybe a $50,000 purchase. Uh, we broke ground in

• 48:14Erik Prince?

  nine, May of 97.

• 48:17Erik Prince?

  About six months after I got out of the Navy.

• 48:20Erik Prince?

  And our first customer was in early 98.

• 48:24Erik Prince?

  And obviously, the Navy came about three years later. So yeah, it was lean. Find a way to survive for the first two or three years. You know, you have to find a way to become indispensable to your customer.

• 48:42Shawn Ryan?

  For somebody that claims to not know anything about business, the it seemed very strategic. The location, close to the SEAL teams on the East Coast, close to Washington DC, close to Quantico.

• 48:54Erik Prince?

  At the so my when my father died,

• 49:00Erik Prince?

  we sold off the big automotive business and that had gotten most of the attention for decades. The original business he started made diecast machines, which is a big machine that squeezes a mold. And you shoot in, you inject in at high pressure molten aluminum or magnesium and you make a a rim for a car or a engine block or a transmission casing or a gas grill. So he made the machines that did that and that business had not gotten a lot of love and attention. It was just kind of lumping along and so I bought up a bunch of the shares from my family. And we took that through a lean transformation. And I read two books, one was called The Machine That Changed The World,

• 49:41Erik Prince?

  which is about the Toyota Production System and the other one was The Goal by Ellie Goldratt. I still remember him. And there are two things about how do you, how do you make a manufacturing operation better, more efficient and make it run with great precision. And so we focused on taking out cost and buying smarter and engineering out dumb stuff that had just kind of always been accepted. And that business had its best year ever in 2000 and we sold it. And so parallel to kind of building Blackwater, I'm doing, I'm trying to help a manufacturing business get better. And so when I got to think about Blackwater.

• 50:23Erik Prince?

  It was a training facility, but then as you think, okay, how do you grow beyond that? How do you serve the customer more? And I thought, what does a military do? Right? It recruits, it vets, it equips, it trains, deploys and supports people to do a difficult job in a difficult place. So laying out Blackwater, I said, ah, especially when we got, our first job, our first overseas job was a security job, which was for, for the agency after nine 11.

• 50:58Erik Prince?

  Your first contract was with the agency? Yeah. I did not know that. First overseas job, first, first time that we deployed anybody anywhere. And early in those days, the, the, the agency's direct, the director detail had been customers. They came because they liked, we were kind of a all in one spot, shoot houses and ranges and space and privacy. And so they came, and so there was a guy named Buzzy Krongard, who'd been, um, uh, he'd been a one dollar a year advisor to the director, and then he became the executive director because Buzzy himself had a fantastic life career.

• 51:39Erik Prince?

  All-American at Princeton, Marine, CIA case officer, started Alex Brown in the mailroom and rose to become the CEO and had been a knock for the agency his last few years. And, um, the right kind of guy you want near or at the helm of the CIA. And so he'd been helping tenant and because, well, this ties back to, to who I was working for when I was interning in Congress, right? Dana Warbacher knew all the Afghan opposition guys.

• 52:15Erik Prince?

  The, the Northern Alliance, the, the warlords in the north. And he got me to sponsor a peace conference already in Sw- in Switzerland in 1998. Right? So we were trying to get the king, then Zahir Shah, to return to Afghanistan to have a peace conference. This is long, you know, three years before nine 11. Okay. To have a big conference called the Loya Yerga.

• 52:43Erik Prince?

  The king was too comfortable sadly in Rome and we couldn't pull it off. But it would have been an amazing, an amazing turn of events if we could have prevented nine eleven by, by returning some kind of normalcy to Afghanistan. But anyway, I was in contact with Attenour and Mohakkek and Masood and Dostum and those kind of people. In fact, Dana Rohrbacher had a meeting with, with, with Condi Rice, the National Security Advisor, the morning of nine eleven, warning saying, hey, they just killed Masood, Al Qaeda did, something bad is gonna happen. Obviously, the meeting was canceled because the bad thing happened.

• 53:24Erik Prince?

  But between having met Buzzy from his time coming to Blackwater and he asked Gary Jackson, the President of Blackwater, who owns this place? How did this get here? He said, well, you should meet Eric. So I had lunch with Buzzy a few times early in those days and he became a great friend and mentor.

• 53:48Erik Prince?

  But then when nine eleven happened, I said, Buzzy, anything you need, anything the agency needs, if you need somebody to sweep a floor, I'm your man. Just, we wanna help. I think as any American wanted to help.

• 54:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 54:01Erik Prince?

  Right? And at the same time, the, the warlords are calling saying, hey, we wanna help the USG, please connect us. So I gave those numbers to Buzzy and eventually they, those, maybe they were in touch with them already, I don't know, but we had current cell phone numbers for all those guys in the Northern Alliance that wanted to kill Taliban and kill Al Qaeda, which was a good thing to do at that point.

• 54:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 54:25Erik Prince?

  So, and then I got a call in about late March or April. I'll never forget it because I was just sitting down at dinner with the family and the, a weird number, a blocked, a weird blocked number rang through my phone and I answered it right as we were sitting down to dinner, which I normally wouldn't do, but it was a good call I, I took. And he said, hey, can you find a bunch of guys like yourself? I said, absolutely. He said, be in my office tomorrow at nine AM. And that's what, he had just come back from, from a tour of all the agency facilities in Afghanistan and he

• 55:03Erik Prince?

  They needed security, right? Because the US military wouldn't do it. They wanted to do it with 150 people and we did it with 18. In the first tranche. And that's what that's what started that whole process. How many other government contracts did you have? We had, uh, obviously a lot of training stuff for various SOF units. And we were just starting, uh, that regular Navy training contract. And the department, you wound up getting the Department of State? Department of State didn't come for years later. What about Katrina? Well, that was in 2005. So this is 2002 we're talking. Okay. So, yeah, so the business really compounded, um, in those years and the work we did for the agency.

• 55:50Erik Prince?

  Um, in Afghanistan and then in some other places, um, pulled us to Iraq. And because of the work we did in Iraq as DOD was trying to send Paul Bremer or whoever they were going to do to try to the Coalition Provisional Authority. They asked the agency, who are you running for security? And that's how we got pulled in to protect Bremer with the first.

• 56:17Erik Prince?

  That was really the only no bid contract that we had. I think it was the first six months was no bid. And, um, and we did that. And, um, yeah, it just compounded and we, you know, I, I, there's

• 56:34Erik Prince?

  another early book on business I read on, um, there's, there's

• 56:42Erik Prince?

  to be successful in business, right? Either have to be super focused on efficiency to drive out every bit of waste. You can be the low cost provider.

• 56:50Erik Prince?

  Or you have to be the next, you have to have the next product that everybody wants to buy. Right? So I guess the efficiency model would be Walmart. Or the product innovation would be the Apple model. Or there's the customer intimacy model, right? Where you so become part of your customers' process that they can't do without you. Like UPS does with all their logistics and product returns and warranty. And I'd say we focused on, on one and three. Being hyper efficient, applying that Toyota.

• 57:24Erik Prince?

  Automotive efficiency and discipline to what we did, recruiting, vetting, equipping, training, deploying, and then also serving our customers so well, right? If the contract said, "Do this," well, do this, right? Perform above and beyond. Don't go back to your lawyer for every variation. Just serve the customer. And we really prefer doing firm fixed price contracts versus cost plus, right? All the typical Beltway crowd likes to do cost plus because it actually incentivizes them to spin the meter, to make it more expensive, because they get to add their fee on top of it. That's why the United States spends more money than the next 17 countries combined.

• 58:07Erik Prince?

  It's terrible, right? I prefer to run the business, and every chance we had, we'd do firm fixed price. And then the discipline and the risk is on us, whether it's providing an aircraft or whatever. And, well, aside from the politics, the operators, the people we serve in the field were damn happy with us.

• 58:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. How fast was it growing at this point when you picked up the CIA contract?

• 58:37Erik Prince?

  Our revenue, I remember, went from, well, the first year's revenue was 400,000. The second year was 800, and then a million two, and then a million six, and then it went to 12 million, 35, 160, 400. And so there was a few years it just, it really rocked, rocketed. And so that's a, that kind of growth also causes enormous stress to an organization, right? There's cash management, there's people, there's all the rest. But we had a, we'd built a pretty good engine, which could process, right?

• 59:20Erik Prince?

  And so, again, going back to the well that you know, I hired more guys than I went to Bud's with. Bill Matthews, Chris Burgess, Jeff Gibson, guys I had served in the teams with. And because there was a known quantity, in those cases, they'd been off to law school or gotten MBAs and worked in other ports of corporate America. So they kind of know what that expectation was. And they brought that, they brought a soft mentality to a corporation. And that was the merge. And we had a, we had a very, very capable organization. I would, I would put our management team up against any management team in the country. We could punch way above our weight.

• 1:00:03Shawn Ryan?

  At the height, at the height of Blackwater, there's rumors that you had more spec operators under the Blackwater umbrella than the United States military had at active duty. Is there any truth to that?

• 1:00:15Erik Prince?

  No, we had probably, probably more than our database. Meaning we could have deployed them, but, but no, I mean, no. Look, SF Command has 10,000 or 20,000 Green Berets. We, we are, you know, the Ranger Regiment is a few thousand. So we didn't exceed, no, we didn't exceed that number by any means. But we had a, a pretty capable, potent, vertically integrated process that we could recruit, we could vet, we could train, we could equip. And, and the only acquisition that we actually made as a company was an air operation. And that happened in 2003. Uh, with Richard Pear, Tim Childery, and the guys from Presidential Airways.

• 1:01:00Erik Prince?

  And they had, it was six, they had a team of six and two leased Casas, right? And a Casa 212 is like a little shrunk C-130. And we bought them, uh, we bought the business. And it was a fantastic fit. And they, they came from the Night Stalkers, right? They came from a TF-160, Army Special Aviation, Army Special Operations Aviation mentality. And so their culture fit perfectly with ours. And away we went.

• 1:01:30Shawn Ryan?

  And those guys carried right over?

• 1:01:32Erik Prince?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:32Shawn Ryan?

  Best pilots in the world.

• 1:01:33Erik Prince?

  And we, and I built them their own hangar. I built them their own runway on the compound. Well, yes, I built them a proper runway because I'd been, remember I'd been a pilot since I was a little kid. And I was making that weekly commute from Northern Virginia down to the Blackwater compound, which was 242 miles each way. And so I bought a little bush plane early on. And I would fly that down. So we ended up scraping off a few of the, some of the berm, the last part of the KD range.

• 1:02:13Erik Prince?

  And so that was the original Blackwater runway was the back half of the KD range. And then we built a proper concrete one. But I even landed on that KD range at night. And I used an old missionary or a bushtrick with, made a, made my own

• 1:02:32Erik Prince?

  VASI, right? A vertical approach slope indicator to know how to line up and get on the right glide slope and land fully blacked out. I just had Tony, the facility manager, sitting at the end of the runway with the brake lights on so I'd know where the end of the runway was.

• 1:02:50Shawn Ryan?

  Nice, nice.

• 1:02:52Erik Prince?

  But then, so yes, so I had, I guess, the first Blackwater aircraft with that, but then when Richard and the boys came on board, it was a proper part 135, part 145 operation and it grew to 73 aircraft

• 1:03:08Erik Prince?

  that we owned and operated in all the garden spots. So, ranging from a light strike aircraft like a Super Decano all the way to a 767, so.

• 1:03:21Shawn Ryan?

  How were the, how hard was it to recruit guys to get in there? And I mean?

• 1:03:27Shawn Ryan?

  Because it was growing so fast and I was in the SEAL teams when I believe Blackwater was at its prime, 2005, 2006.

• 1:03:37Erik Prince?

  Yeah, those were busy years.

• 1:03:39Shawn Ryan?

  And the rumors, not really rumors, but the word going around the team was, you know, a lot of guys were still going to UCOM, a lot of guys weren't doing exactly what they joined the SEAL teams to do or SF units to do. And word got around that, hey, you're gonna go, you're gonna go over there, you're probably gonna see some action, you're gonna get paid three or four times what you're getting paid here. And so it seemed like, and I had a lot of friends that got out and jumped, they left the SEAL teams just to go to work for you.

• 1:04:16Erik Prince?

  They, there was a lot of guys that left, but when they do the analysis, there was not a higher departure rate than normal, but instead of guys going off to school or going off to another job, yes, they came to work for companies like us. But at the same time, right, the Navy came to us and said, how, because we were already doing training on their firearms and tactics side, but they said, how are you able to recruit the right people to do this job? I said, well, why do people rob banks? It's where the money is, right? So if you want to find the right next SEAL, EOD, diver, boat crewman, whatever, go to the places that those are more likely to be.

• 1:05:01Erik Prince?

  And so we actually put together a mentor program to take former SEALs that looked the part to go to the Bud Light Triathlon Series or like the Wyoming State Wrestling Championships. Like the Wyoming, Montana wrestler at the state level were the most likely to make it through BUDs in the first pass statistically, right? They kind of an early attempt at big data, finding, finding the right candidates. And so by doing that, we were able to fill the pipeline with a lot of qualified candidates to make it through and to increase the throughput of BUDs without changing the standards.

• 1:05:40Shawn Ryan?

  You were a part of that?

• 1:05:42Erik Prince?

  We built that program.

• 1:05:43Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, I had no idea.

• 1:05:45Erik Prince?

  Yeah, that was a Blackwater contract with our mentors all over the country and there's still a version of that still functioning.

• 1:05:53Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 1:05:56Erik Prince?

  But again, applying, we're a private company. We had a contract. We had to put so many people with so many qualifications in that job. So we had to offer competitive pay. We couldn't waste their time. We couldn't, we can't press gang them, right? We can't stop loss them. So it is truly a volunteer program. And so you have to take care of them and respect them and, you know, and so we wanted guys that would work hard for us and they want to go see their families. And so we wouldn't belabor the point of by the time they leave the field to their home again, and they, and they do it in, in, in digestible enough chunks, right?

• 1:06:34Erik Prince?

  As you know, you deployed 60 days, 90 days, but then, you know, you leave Baghdad and you're, you're back in the, in the arms of your wife within a day and a half.

• 1:06:45Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:47Erik Prince?

  Um, there's a, there's a misconception about our pay versus what active duty was getting paid. If you compare apples to apples of what total compensation was, yes, our apparent cash compensation was much higher, but when you look at all the other allowances, housing allowances, base, um, um, um, the exchange, the insurance, uh, all the other stuff, our pay was comparable, but not higher to what an active duty seal would be getting. But it's just the apparent upfront cash was much more visible.

• 1:07:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, it definitely, definitely was. How long was it before you started seeing all these other competitors pop up like Triple Canopy, MVM, DynCorp? Were they, were you, you were first, correct?

• 1:07:33Erik Prince?

  No, DynCorp had, DynCorp was kind of the established, um, State Department contractor. They'd been doing all that service stuff, uh, to, to that, kind of that installed customer base. But as the Afghan issue flared and then Iraq flare flared, it so outstripped their ability to grow. And I would characterize DynCorp as a very typical Beltway run company. And, um, quite bureaucratic and quite perfect for the State Department.

• 1:08:09Erik Prince?

  And when the, I would say, very urgent and very compelling needs for more security, right, because it was on. It was dangerous times in Baghdad when all that, you know, when they started asking for it. I mean, we, we were contacted originally by the DOD after the senior UN diplomat in Baghdad had been blown up the summer of 2003, right? They blew him up with a truck bomb inside of a concrete mixer. It was like a 2,000-pounder.

• 1:08:41Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:08:42Erik Prince?

  And so, all the people in Washington said, okay, it's real now. And I remember, we had immediately had two people that went out with Bremer, and his original detail was from some National Guard unit. And they just hadn't really had the training, or the, uh, the equipment, or the, the wherewithal to, to accomplish that mission. And the Secret Service came out, because they thought they were going to assign the Secret Service to do that mission. And they have no way, or they, you know, the, the Secret Service mentality is they can shut down everything around their protectee and

• 1:09:21Erik Prince?

  create a huge bubble, um, and just lock down entire roads, entire routes, and they just own it all. You can't really do that in an active war zone. And so you had to have a bubble that could move and flex and, and, and go with it. So, between the, the ground element and the aviation element, uh, they, no, no federal agency wanted to touch it. And so the State Department turned to us, and we did it. So.

• 1:09:48Shawn Ryan?

  One of the, one of the fascinating things about you that, that, that I find is, you don't mind getting your hands dirty. And so when the, when the CIA contract was starting up, you were out there on the ground, running operations, correct?

• 1:10:04Erik Prince?

  Yeah, I was one of the first 18.

• 1:10:06Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. And do you want to talk a little bit about that, what that was like being, it's your company, you're on the ground, running missions and?

• 1:10:15Erik Prince?

  I, look, it was a great honor that they turned to us, because it was a very important mission, right? Because the CIA is the ones who made that victory possible for the United States, right? And let me digress a minute, and say, and this, this goes in keeping with what I've been saying for the last 10 years, at least. After nine eleven, while the Pentagon was still smoldering, right? Bush goes to meet with his national security cabinet at Camp David. And the Pentagon, you know what their best option was to go to Afghanistan? They wanted to do bombs, missiles, and a Ranger raid. And they wanted to wait six months until the following April

• 1:10:58Erik Prince?

  and do a conventional mechanized invasion of Afghanistan via Pakistan. That is what the United States military came with, the most expensive military on the planet. It was the agency, it was Kofor Black and his team. Kofor was the head of the Counterterrorism Center. And because of his experience doing unconventional warfare, hybrid warfare, against Soviet targets in Libya and Chad and Angola and the DRC in the eighties. He said, "Mr. President, give us the authorities and a billion dollars. And in three weeks, the flies will be walking in the eyeballs of our enemies." Right? So US, and obviously, Bush made the right decision and said, "Okay, we're doing that."

• 1:11:42Erik Prince?

  That's why we had such a lightning victory in Afghanistan. It was a hundred soft guys and agency guys let off, carnivores let off leash, backed by air power, and they smashed the hell out of the Taliban. And the Taliban and al Qaeda were truly running for their lives. And that worked for six, eight months, until Bagram became a saluting zone and you had all the conventional officers show up. Okay? With the no beard policy, starch cammies goes into effect. We repeated that same failure for nineteen and a half years. If they'd kept it small, if Bush had the discipline and the foresight to say, "No, Pentagon, you don't get to go play now.

• 1:12:27Erik Prince?

  Leave this to that. We're not doing nation building, but we will play whack-a-mole severely." The Afghans would have understood that. And it would be vastly better there today than be, it is truly a terror sanctuary. Again, you have the Haqqanis that have high bounty, they're high bounty terrorists now running the Afghan government, is the interior minister.

• 1:12:54Shawn Ryan?

  Did you enjoy running Blackwater as a CEO more or running operations under the CIA contract?

• 1:13:05Erik Prince?

  Both.

• 1:13:06Shawn Ryan?

  Both?

• 1:13:06Erik Prince?

  Sure. It was a macro and a micro.

• 1:13:08Shawn Ryan?

  How were you doing that simultaneously?

• 1:13:12Erik Prince?

  Um.

• 1:13:15Erik Prince?

  The management team of Blackwater was spectacular. Right? So I might be the, the guy that put the money up that put, made Blackwater possible. But it was Gary Jackson and Danielle Morrison and Bill Matthews and Chris Burgess and Jeff Gibson and all that team that made it run. And they, and there's a hundred other names I should list, but they ran the business. And there was a reason. Right? The normal Beltway thing would be, first of all, nobody had invested in a training facility.

• 1:13:53Erik Prince?

  Right? Like the Dyncores, everybody would have a security contract for the government and they'd try to rent this range over here or this track and they'd have to send medical over here and all the rest. And so in keeping with what I was talking about with a lean progression, right? Recruit, vet, equip, train, deploy. Blackwater was designed to be a machine with everything in-house, literally within walking distance. And so you, hopefully you experienced that when you recruited, the training, the equipment, the medical, all was pretty damn close to each other.

• 1:14:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:27Erik Prince?

  Right? So we didn't lose days or weeks moving people through that process. And so that management team was able to um efficiently produce a product, meaning a trained and equipped guy to go do something or an aircraft that could do XYZ job or a construction crew to do something. They did that in a concise, organized, disciplined way, vertically integrated.

• 1:14:54Shawn Ryan?

  It's just, I still don't, I just don't understand how. I mean, because those are some intricate operations.

• 1:15:02Erik Prince?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:03Shawn Ryan?

  That we're doing out there.

• 1:15:04Erik Prince?

  And, and we, but we recruited from people that had done intricate operations. I remember I flew over, um, the first, I flew over on the one time the USG provided airlift for us to send aircraft to Iraq was the first time. And, uh, so we got our birds, our little birds that were going to go do the protection for then Bremer. We loaded them in Charleston, South Carolina and flew over up in the top deck of the C5 with the guys. And we land at like 2 o'clock in the morning after the blacked out approach into Baghdad and the guys are offloading the stuff.

• 1:15:46Erik Prince?

  And a bunch of them were TF-160 veterans, many of whom had been at Black Hawk Down just 10 years before in their career. And they said, "Mr. P, thanks so much for giving us the opportunity to do this again. This is what we're good at."

• 1:16:03Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:16:04Erik Prince?

  And that was the great thing about starting, running whatever Blackwater is giving people that were really good, right? The Michael Jordans of their skillset, giving them a chance to do that again. So they get to work with people they like to work with. They're paid well for their job and the risks that they take. They're given the right equipment in a no bullshit environment. That's, that was my goal at BW.

• 1:16:31Shawn Ryan?

  Worked. At the, at the high point, the absolute peak of Blackwater, how many contracts did you have and what agencies were they with?

• 1:16:45Erik Prince?

  I don't know about the total contracts number, but it was everything from, well, we'll go by buckets of stuff. Train and equip advisory work for Afghan Army, Iraqi Security Forces, and a host of other friendly partner nations around the world. So, and there's train advisory, everything from like bodyguard training to sniper, to every kind of law enforcement or military special operations unit up to, including...

• 1:17:25Erik Prince?

  Company and battalion size infantry operations, even artillery. On the air side, we did that as well, like SOF aviation capacity building. So, teaching, teaching partner nations to fly on night vision goggles and do, you know, night ship boarding or night insert of a team by, by goggles or by fast rope. Obviously, security is what the company got known for and recognized for, and that was a big driver of revenue and sadly, a big driver of problems. You know, one of my biggest regrets is ever going to work for the State Department because I just didn't think they appreciated the work that we did for them.

• 1:18:07Erik Prince?

  And so if I had said no, the company would still be going and flourishing and, and carrying on and, and maybe the, maybe State Department is, is more, maybe DynCorp is a better vendor for them.

• 1:18:22Erik Prince?

  I can understand that. Yeah, so at peak, we probably had thirty-five-hundred. Thirty-five-hundred? People deployed. People deployed. Three thousand, three-five-hundred, that's between Iraq, Afghanistan, aviation, and this also includes, we had for Hurricane Katrina, we had about seven hundred guys deployed for about a year. What were you guys doing down there? So, we never had any plan ever to be in the domestic security business, to do anything like that inside of America, but I remember I was actually doing a surveillance exercise for that other team I was doing, right, the last chapter in my book. And I had the radio on and was talking about, well, and I'd been in South Florida when

• 1:19:05Erik Prince?

  Hurricane Katrina went over South Florida. So I'd still been there and then up the, the hurricane still rolled and it smacked the, you know, New Orleans area. And we were just taking delivery of a Puma, a big helicopter, a little bit bigger than a Blackhawk. And I remember calling our air boss, Richard Pear, I said, hey, put the, put the air crew to bed, reset their crew rest, and as soon as they can in the morning, fly to New Orleans. We'll just figure it out. And.

• 1:19:41Erik Prince?

  Sure enough, they started flying and one of our management staff had been in a Harvard course, a Harvard executive course with some senior guy from the Coast Guard. So he literally reached across the hall, across the aisle of his classroom and said, "Hey, we got a helicopter, we can help you guys out in New Orleans." Roger, so November 505, our helicopter became Coast Guard 505 by the time they made it to New Orleans. And they evacuated 128 people. And again, it was a great case of, of putting the right people with the right attitude with an objective, right? It was, it was a, it was objective-based leadership. Our goal is to go help and make good things happen. And so they did.

• 1:20:23Erik Prince?

  And, um, but then after, um, they were working for a few days, all the Coast Guard provided us was fuel. We, you know, we, we sent that gratis. Um, they moved a bunch of people, our casas were flying a bunch of stuff down from, um, from Moyac. And then the private sector started calling, right? Walmart, Bell South, insurance companies, because there'd been a total breakdown of, of law and order and chaos. And so we ended up surging 145 guys from 36, from six states away. Um, we did it in about 36 hours. We beat the Louisiana National Guard into the French Quarter.

• 1:21:05Shawn Ryan?

  Incredible.

• 1:21:06Erik Prince?

  Our guys arrived and found bodies in the streets, not from the storm, but from violence, from looting. And so, yes, our guys went armed and, um, you know, full armor, because they were even shooting at aircraft. But, um, within a couple of days, the, the plates came off and it was just down to, uh, to sidearms. But then FEMA-

• 1:21:29Shawn Ryan?

  So you were able to- Get back to Law and Order within a few days of just being down there with 145 guys?

• 1:21:37Erik Prince?

  Well, yeah, so we weren't, we weren't there to, we were there to, to secure specific objectives. Walmart called, because I think they'd had like five or eight stores looted, picked clean, and they had a central distribution facility was going to be next. And so in that case, we dropped like a commando team, meaning they had, we dropped them off with food, water, satcom, and rules of engagement, right? And a copy of our quickly licensed Louisiana private security and investigations firm. Right? So we went there with the right licenses, and they, they go, and the guys just sat there and prevented any looters, right?

• 1:22:20Erik Prince?

  Because looting only happens when people knock on the door and nothing happens, and you call 911 and nothing happens, and, and they go. So then FEMA came to us, all right, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which was tasked to stabilize this whole debacle. And they, because they'd contacted the Federal Protective Service, which is this federal police force as part of DHS. And they were supposed to send down hundreds and hundreds of police officers, federal police officers, to secure all these areas. And their employee union said, no, the conditions were too rough and too unsafe, they wouldn't go. So FEMA asked if we could do it, and we said, uh, okay, sure, right?

• 1:23:04Erik Prince?

  Because our default answer was, yes, and we're going to figure it out, how to make something happen. And so, yes, but then, you know, the number became 700 quickly, but we had to provide all the life support, all the logistics support. And, and I'm so proud, yet again, of the team that just figured this out, because at that point, between Iraq and Afghanistan, every kind of military tent was on back order for years. So what'd they do? They went and bought circus tents. And they put them up in various parking lots. Jim Dehart and his crew of maintenance guys took car trailers. Okay, and and put in shower and sanitation facilities inside that with a water treatment.

• 1:23:48Erik Prince?

  And we just figured it out how to support guys in the field. And they ended up buying an RV and put a VSAT antenna satellite system on the top of it. So that became the mobile pay wagon in office, which could visit all these sites. And it was, uh, it was not the perfect solution, but it was a damn, a damn bit better than nothing.

• 1:24:09Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. How and that, all that was stood up how fast?

• 1:24:14Erik Prince?

  Days. And, and we had, and, and you know what? We had no plans again, there was no prior staging or organization to say, let's have a domestic response force ready for. No, nothing like that. Basically, for the first hundred and forty five guys, we can pull inventory off the warehouse of what we would do to provide contractors with, you know, a radio or a firearm or body armor or whatever it is. We just kind of cobbled it together.

• 1:24:43Shawn Ryan?

  Incredible. How, how long were you guys down there?

• 1:24:46Erik Prince?

  I think we were there for three years.

• 1:24:47Shawn Ryan?

  Three years?

• 1:24:48Erik Prince?

  Yeah, at least two, but it was, it was far longer than, than we ever thought necessary.

• 1:24:55Shawn Ryan?

  So it got cleaned up in a couple of days and then they kept it, they kept.

• 1:24:58Erik Prince?

  Well, yeah, because there was a lot of, I mean, it was almost like refugee camps, morgue, cash distribution offices. There was a lot of things that needed security because it far outstripped local law enforcement's ability to, to handle it. So.

• 1:25:15Shawn Ryan?

  Did you, did Blackwater ever work in that capacity anywhere else in the US?

• 1:25:21Erik Prince?

  No. Um, no. We had one, there was one other good story that came out of that, that evacuation. Cause we were actually contacted by Bill Gates office.

• 1:25:35Erik Prince?

  Who had, they had lost touch, right? I think like Melinda Gates' sister lived along the Gulf Coast. And phones were down, no satcom, no nothing. And so a former CIA associate of ours had been working at that office. And he called us and said, hey, could you send somebody to just go, A, make contact and bring them supplies to see what's up? Check. So the guys loaded up an ATV with a trailer inside of a casa. And they flew to an airfield, which was actually closed, right? Because of all the storm damage. And I think they ended, landed short on a damaged runway, or they land on a taxiway.

• 1:26:20Erik Prince?

  And off they go, miles and miles away from their destination, because it was as close as they could get. So they go overland, chainsaws, cutting down trees as they go to this specific address, knock on the door, hey, we're from Blackwater, Gates family sent us, here's a satcom, call them. Dropped off, generator, food, fuel, medicine, left, mission complete, off they go, back in the casa, back to Virginia, back to North Carolina. We ended up with a nice ATV out of that, but the Gates job paid for the ATV.

• 1:26:56Erik Prince?

  Nice. But it was again, it was, it was an example of you give the right people with a clear mission, an objective based, right? Get to them, like that, like that thing you hopefully read in the military somewhere, the message to Garcia, right? When, when the US had to get a message to Garcia, who was somewhere in the hills of Cuba, right? To organize some kind of resistance against the Spanish. They just sent a guy to say, your job is to get a message to Garcia. It's not to ask me 10 steps of what to do, get it there, make it happen. Blackwater was good at making it happen. Yeah.

• 1:27:35Erik Prince?

  Which is in this day and age of bureaucracy and the foreign policy establishment in Washington, they're not very good at making good things happen.

• 1:27:45Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I gotta be honest, it seems like the common denominator here, or maybe the motto of Blackwater should be efficiency.

• 1:27:53Erik Prince?

  Ah, not even efficiency, but I would say a real, a desire to get a mission done. What is the mission? We'll find a way to make it work.

• 1:28:10Shawn Ryan?

  One last question, then we'll take a quick break, but what you've built up to this point is just, it's undescribable. And I want to know where your drive comes from, because I do know, back to your family and the success of your dad, he said, "You're not getting anything until you're 30. You can't be a part of this until you're 30." You got through the SEAL teams, came home, and, or at some point my timeline might be a little off here, but that kind of went away after you became a SEAL. So you didn't have to do all this. What was the driving factor?

• 1:28:48Erik Prince?

  It was a great, look, I'm a patriot, I love America.

• 1:28:59Erik Prince?

  The US government, the US military needed our help, and we were honored to help in any way we could. And working with the people was great, with our people, right? And it was, you know, I would, I like to think that working with the BW crew was like working with the best elements of a SOF unit.

• 1:29:22Erik Prince?

  So, people are not, they're not thinking, you know, they're standing at 4 o'clock and they're not looking for the door at the end of the day. If it's, you know, 7 to 7 is a half day, right?

• 1:29:34Shawn Ryan?

  Everybody wants to get the job done there.

• 1:29:35Erik Prince?

  Yeah. I mean, everything was, it was competitive. It was, people like to run hard. As a company, we didn't do golf outings, we didn't do that kind of team building stuff. We did 12 and 24 hour adventure races, the whole management team, and...

• 1:29:53Erik Prince?

  And I, and I, we kind of picked those kind of races, not triathlons. Because that's just an endurance exercise, but having to make decisions in an adventure race where you have to navigate and you have to make incomplete, you have to make decisions based on incomplete information and live with the consequences was very analogous to our life and to our business life.

• 1:30:17Shawn Ryan?

  Fair enough.

• 1:30:18Erik Prince?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:18Shawn Ryan?

  All right, let's take a break.

• 1:30:20Erik Prince?

  Get you up.

• 1:30:23Shawn Ryan?

  I want to tell you all about this badass company I just found called Bubz Naturals. Bubz Naturals is a tribute company to Navy SEAL, CIA contractor and former colleague of mine Glenn, callsign Bubz, Doherty, who laid his life down saving Americans in Benghazi, Libya. Glenn was one hell of a guy. He was best friends to hundreds of people, to include ski bum's, outdoor enthusiasts, Navy SEALs, pretty much everybody in between, and yes, even the hippies. In fact, Glenn made such an impact on people that his best childhood friend and owner of

• 1:31:02Shawn Ryan?

  the company, Sean, not me, a different Sean, donates 10% of all proceeds to the Glenn Doherty Foundation. And on Veterans Day, he donates 100% of proceeds to the Glenn Doherty Foundation. So I got into a discussion with Sean, the owner of Bubz, and he says to me, he says, Sean, I want you to try our collagen. It's good for joint health, muscle recovery, and this is my favorite part, he claims you will take the best shit of your life after trying their collagen.

• 1:31:41Shawn Ryan?

  So I'm trying it. Not only that, it also has 20 grams of protein and seven essential amino acids in one single ingredient. You put it in your coffee, you take it every morning, and you stay sharp.

• 1:31:57Shawn Ryan?

  So if you're like me and you want to keep your joints healthy, get better muscle recovery, work on your gut health, have beautiful hair, skin and nails, and take literally the best shit of your life, go to Bubsnaturals.com, use the promo code Shawn for 20% off. That's Bubsnaturals.com, use the discount code Shawn, that's S-H-A-W-N for 20% off.

• 1:32:29Shawn Ryan?

  75% of the human population struggles with sleep. I was part of that 75%. I'm a new parent, I'm a business owner, my mind goes about 1,000 miles an hour of all hours of the day and night, and it's hard to sleep. So I started looking into it, it turns out it's a magnesium deficiency. So let me tell you about BioOptimizers. BioOptimizers has identified seven different, unique types of magnesium when put together help you sleep. It's easy, you take two pills before you go to bed, sleep like a baby, you wake up

• 1:33:11Shawn Ryan?

  energized, and your morning routine is just ready to roll. For an exclusive offer for my listeners, go to magbreakthrough.com/shawn to save up to 42%. Again, you can save up to 42% on magnesium breakthrough when you go to magbreakthrough.com/shawn. Alright, so we're back from the break, and I want to go on to some of the incidents that got major press, and probably what led to the government vilifying you. And I'd like to start with March 31st, Fallujah.

• 1:33:55Erik Prince?

  Okay. So that was March 31st, 2004, so that's about eight, nine months after the US originally invades Iraq. And we had, I'd actually been to that area just three weeks before it happened. And we had four guys that were just escorting some trucks to go move some food equipment. That's all it was. It was nothing more elaborate or exotic than that. And they

• 1:34:32Erik Prince?

  had met with the supposed to be the reliable trusted Iraqis to give them guidance about where to go. And, you know, these are, remember, the areas of Fallujah and Ramadi had heavy fighting after that because they'd never really been pacified. They'd never really been cleaned out, right? The maneuver warfare, lightning approach of the US invasion in 2003 bypassed many of those spots of hot resistance. And Fallujah and Ramadi were where a lot of, it was effectively an Iraqi Republican Guard retirement area, right? So there was a real hotbed of people that were not happy. And the guys were basically

• 1:35:16Erik Prince?

  led into an ambush. And they were shot up immediately and their bodies desecrated, you know, the terrible scenes of them being dragged through the streets and hung from the bridge. It was all done for the propaganda effect to try to terrorize the US presence in the country. And I'll never forget it. Like I said, I'd been there. I knew some of those guys. Like, I'd been with Zabko every day for 10 days prior to that happening.

• 1:35:49Erik Prince?

  And I actually went, and because I knew him, I immediately flew to do the notification for his family in Cleveland, Ohio that night. And Gary went and took care of

• 1:36:05Erik Prince?

  one of the SEAL

• 1:36:09Erik Prince?

  that was lost. And one of our aviators went and took care of Mike Teague. And so it was, it was personal for all of us. We never, I never lost anyone under my command or authority when I was in the SEAL teams. And this was the first for us as a company.

• 1:36:25Erik Prince?

  And it was, um, you know, early in the Iraq days, it was, went from quite peaceful after the initial shock into the insurgency kind of exploded.

• 1:36:41Erik Prince?

  March thirty one, those guys are ambushed in Fallujah. Three days later, our guys are ambushed on the road between Baghdad and the airport. And at least two or three of our guys are killed. And one of them put on a, a, a, literally a Navy cross level performance, which saved them.

• 1:37:05Erik Prince?

  And, and then like by the fourth of April, in Fallujah, sorry, in Najaf, right? You have a thousand plus Shia militiamen attacking a coalition facility. And they initiated attack by attacking, by taking a Colombian soldier, stuffing a grenade in his mouth and pulling the pin.

• 1:37:26Shawn Ryan?

  That's how they did that.

• 1:37:27Erik Prince?

  Yeah. Okay. So it was on and we had eight, we, we were not supposed to be protecting the facility down in Najaf. We had, um, we had eight guys there providing PSD support for the lead diplomat that was there. And that's it. But between, I'll never forget that phone call I got at like two o'clock in the morning. And it was our air boss, Richard Pear, saying, hey, boss, um, our guys are, are in it and they're surrounded and they're running out of ammo. And we'd like to send the little birds. I said, of course, send them. He says, but remember, we're not insured. Right?

• 1:38:07Erik Prince?

  Because three weeks before, the, um, uh, there was a DHL cargo jet that had been shot down by a missile flying out of Baghdad. And their insurer was our insurer who promptly told us, hey, uh, we're canceling your insurance policy. Um, we were on a firm fixed price contract. So I couldn't just say, oh, by the way, I'm going to add another million and a half dollars to our insurance policy, to our charge and, and buy insurance. No. So they canceled it. So the aircraft were self insured by me. If they were shot down, I had to replace it, you know, within days to have it going again. So he was telling, calling to tell me to say, hey, it, it's

• 1:38:46Erik Prince?

  on us. It's on me. We're sending these aircraft, um, if it's okay with you. I said, absolutely. And so off they go. And again, the right people with the right experience and the right mission, the TF160 guys had already taken it upon themselves to have a cache of heavy weapons, ready to go staged right there next to the ramp. So that when the alarm bell went up, there was no drama. They lure out the birds, ask for volunteers, down go the three helicopters and, um, evacuated a, um, a marine who had been shot through. The, the Marine Corps gave him a silver star and Ron Starz took much of the other soldiers

• 1:39:28Erik Prince?

  that day. And the, the O D didn't give any of our guys awards. We gave them awards, but that's, that also kind of started our tradition of presenting awards to our guys that, that were above and beyond the, the call of duty. I remember we, um, we ended up coining a medal and it was an image of, uh, St. Michael, the archangel with a sword, stepping on a demon and, uh, on the top of it just said servium, right? Servium is the Latin word for I will serve. Because our guys were ultimately volunteers.

• 1:40:02Shawn Ryan?

  What was going through your head on March 31st, 2004? And when did you see that?

• 1:40:10Erik Prince?

  Um, I'd gotten phone calls that they were missing.

• 1:40:16Erik Prince?

  That we had a team that was not accounted for and were missing. And then when the, the video came in of Mitsubishi Pajero, Pajero on fire, then it was, yeah, we knew it was bad.

• 1:40:31Erik Prince?

  It's a, that is the ultimate gut punch.

• 1:40:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:35Erik Prince?

  You just, it's, it's awful. And then to fly, to see his parents. I remember I told his brother and sister-in-law first, and then his parents came to their house.

• 1:40:47Erik Prince?

  And, um, we had a connection with the US Marshal. So I had a marshal come with me. And he just waited outside, just so I guess the people knew it was a, it was an official thing. But, um, yeah, just terrible.

• 1:41:00Shawn Ryan?

  Were those bodies ever recovered?

• 1:41:02Erik Prince?

  Yes. Thank God to the Marine Corps.

• 1:41:07Shawn Ryan?

  Good.

• 1:41:09Shawn Ryan?

  Moving into the incident, which undoubtedly was the downturn of Blackwater, 2007, Nassau Square.

• 1:41:19Erik Prince?

  Yep.

• 1:41:21Shawn Ryan?

  What's your take?

• 1:41:23Erik Prince?

  Well, look. The, um,

• 1:41:29Erik Prince?

  the Iraq war was a maelstrom of conflicting forces, right? You had angry Sunnis, you had angry Shia, you had constant Iranian presence. The IRGC, the Quds forces, the Iranians, uh, special units were very, very active in the country. Um, stirring up hate and discontent to make it impossible or difficult for the US to stay. And, you know, for people that think it's all peace, love and happiness in Baghdad at that time, that this, that our guys just started shooting willy-nilly, unprovoked and all the rest. It had been a very dangerous week for us just in the seven days prior, right?

• 1:42:13Erik Prince?

  We had, uh, another convoy of guys that got ambushed and shot up on the Baghdad highway. Uh, another one that had been hit by an EFP, right? An EFP is an explosive form penetrator. It's a, a copper plate in front of a... A coffee can full of explosives and when you initiate that, the explosive goes off at 22,000 feet per second, turns that copper plate into a slug of copper going 8,000 feet per second and bored right through their armored vehicle. Fortunately, it didn't kill any of our guys that time, but it sent him to the hospital. We had a helicopter shot down just days before that. And then the day of Misra Square, a car bomb goes off where we had a team, it went outside

• 1:42:58Erik Prince?

  of, it went off outside of a venue where he had a team protecting a USAID official. And instead of hard pointing at that facility, which they normally would, all the Iraqis had run away, so they decided to move. And so, you know, in the, in the chaos that follows, Raven 23, one of the teams is called and I'm not going to try to re-describe the, the masterful description you did sitting down with those guys. But just suffice it to say that traffic circles in Baghdad are like the trail intersections if you're hunting deer, right? If you're a deer hunter, or if you're an insurgent trying to hunt Americans, you hunt the traffic circles.

• 1:43:39Erik Prince?

  And so they go to block the traffic and some traffic doesn't stop and, and shooting entails. What I can tell you though, is how badly the Iranians wanted the US out and how badly they wanted Blackwater out of Iraq. In 2004 already, early, the head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service came to me, a fantastic guy named Mohammed Shwani, that's another guy you should interview here, okay? A true Iraqi patriot and a great warrior. And he, um,

• 1:44:23Erik Prince?

  He said, he came with his agency handler and said, "The Iranians are setting up all kinds of direct action, cash offices, political influence operations. They're doing in Iraq what they did in Lebanon with Hezbollah to exert control. And we, the Iraqi government, we, the Iraqi intelligence service, want to stop it. So please put a program together to help us do that." And so he priced the whole thing up, gave it to them. They loved it. The agency was going to fund it. And it was stopped by Kandi Rice and the NSC. "No, the Iranians are not our enemy. We have to let the Iraqi political process play out, all the rest." I think that's a real sliding door moment in the history of Iraq,

• 1:45:03Erik Prince?

  because if we had severed those talons of Iran sinking their hooks into the Iraqi state, things would be very, very different in Iraq right now. So they hated us. Look, still to this day, I've been denounced in person, or I've been denounced by name twice by the Supreme Leader of Iran. Probably why they put me on their sanctioned hit list.

• 1:45:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Up to that point, though, it's my understanding Blackwater had a phenomenal reputation.

• 1:45:36Erik Prince?

  Yeah. Look, we did. I mean, look, any, any time, in terms of use of force versus total, total missions run, it was, it was tiny. I think our guys used firearms less than one tenth of one percent of all those missions, right? And so this is in a war zone, in an area where people are shooting, insurgents are attacking Americans, and you're kind of carrying the most, I would call it Al Jazeera-worthy targets, right? If they could kill a diplomat, it makes a huge splash for, for the enemy. The other problem we faced is every convoy, every PSD was considered a Blackwater convoy.

• 1:46:20Erik Prince?

  And so we had dozens of, of, of times per week where someone would call and say, "Ah, these Blackwater guys are doing something bad in Basra. Uh, we don't have anybody in Basra." Or, so we, you know, we literally put trackers on all the vehicles to help delineate where our guys were versus anybody else. And as a company, for the non-state department work that we did, we put cameras on all the vehicles. We had asked specifically from the State Department... To put cameras, like a cruiser cam, like a police officer has in the dash cam in his car, to put those in all our vehicles, to take away the he said, she said, claims of

• 1:47:03Erik Prince?

  these disputes. We had a number of times where if our guys were in a shooting event, outside of the State Department stuff, where the DOD would come and check the tapes and they say, yep, no problem, that's an absolutely justified shooting. If we had had those cameras on the vehicles that day, I don't think the whole debacle of Nisara Square, for the Raven 23 guys, ever would have happened. So you think that whole political agenda to smear- The anti-war left, in the Vietnam War, went after troops. And this time, they went after contractors. And sadly, Blackwater represented everything they loved to hate.

• 1:47:45Erik Prince?

  I represented everything they loved to hate. I was a white male, married to a woman, Roman Catholic, with a bunch of kids. I was a sole owner of the business. I never tried to make the business about me or personalize it, but I was the sole owner. And I didn't have a whole board of former generals, or former connected DC people. It was run with a pretty simple chain of command. We never paid lobbyists. We didn't have the whole DC apparatchik footprint that is the norm in Washington. And that was our undoing. Look, we focused on doing a great job for the US government in the most difficult places, in the most dangerous

• 1:48:24Erik Prince?

  places, without excuses. And it turns out, like Bill Donovan said in his book, right, the founder of the OSS, of all the enemies he faced, the Imperial Japanese Army, the Nazis, the Soviets, the most dangerous enemies he faced were in Washington DC, the State Department, the FBI, and the War Department. Some things don't change in Washington.

• 1:48:52Shawn Ryan?

  There's a lot of speculation whether it was the status forces agreement that was the major agenda behind it, or I know there was some oil contracts going on at that time. Uh, the Iranian influence.

• 1:49:06Erik Prince?

  Do not ever discount the Iranian influence on the Biden Obama administration then, as there is now. Why was the Obama team so quick to get in bed with Iranians and literally send them pallets of cash and make a, make a bad nuclear deal with them? Why do they so badly want to do something with Iranians now again? I don't know. They have a, a misplaced trust in the mullahs.

• 1:49:32Shawn Ryan?

  Do you have any more insight on that?

• 1:49:34Erik Prince?

  On, on how, on how Mr. Squares? Look, all I know is that there was, uh, there was other surveillance video. There's other stuff that I've, I've been told is out there that we're never able to get our hands on. That would have been very clear. That showed a lot of muzzle flashes. Um, you know.

• 1:49:55Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, they deleted the drone footage. What I, what I meant was.

• 1:49:59Erik Prince?

  I mean, look, even when it says, wow, these guys weren't shot at and why was that vehicle disabled? Look, they pulled an AK round out of the radiator, the FBI did, right? And, and when you, when you hit a radiator and the coolant drains out, unfortunately with a modern electronic engine, no coolant, the engine shuts itself off to preserve itself. In this case, we would have taken a damaged engine that could have driven off, even if it could have moved a quarter mile to move off that X. But, uh, that's part of the unfortunate ness of it all.

• 1:50:30Shawn Ryan?

  What I was referring to is the Iranian influence or the, uh, being in cahoots with the administration.

• 1:50:36Erik Prince?

  I don't know if it's in cahoots, but.

• 1:50:42Erik Prince?

  Sadly, that could be true. I'm not saying it's not true, but the Iranians are a very deliberate society. Remember, the Persian society is old and ancient and, and you know, they put a thousand stitches in a rug into a square inch. So there, after their experience of the Iran-Iraq war, they wanted to make sure that Iraq as a state would never be unified or strong enough to threaten them ever again. And so they got their hooks in. They have built their Shia militias, right? It's called the Hashashabi. They're really the ones, it's this, it's the Shia Iranian overreach in Iraq that made ISIS an inevitability.

• 1:51:29Erik Prince?

  And still to this day, there are Hashashabi units, paid for by the Iraqi government, using US provided equipment that are under the leadership of Iranian IRGC Quds Force officers.

• 1:51:45Erik Prince?

  So the US gets rolled, the US plays checkers, the Iranians are playing chess. And because we have a, a national security apparatus that doesn't want to do what it takes to push them back.

• 1:51:58Shawn Ryan?

  When that incident happened and you heard about it, do you have any idea what that was going to turn into?

• 1:52:04Erik Prince?

  I got a call, um, already an hour after the incident by the country manager. Hey, boss, there was a firefight and there's a lot of noise here. It's in terms of firefights, it's, you know, it's a lot less than we've been subject to in the last month here, right? Compared to what we had just in the previous week, helicopter shot down and all the rest. But he said, in case, um, um, in case you hear about it. Well, then the media just picked it up and whipped it into a, uh, into a frenzy.

• 1:52:38Shawn Ryan?

  Were there any signs that they were going to do that bef- bef- before that, or was that basically the?

• 1:52:43Erik Prince?

  No, not signs, but there'd been, um,

• 1:52:48Erik Prince?

  You know, there's always indecision in Washington about, you know, there was legitimately fatigue about, there was a rock fatigue in Washington and they're looking for skateboards and looking for bad guys. And unfortunately,

• 1:53:02Erik Prince?

  our company by working for the State Department under their operational control, performing to a thousand-page contract, walked into that X and got smacked.

• 1:53:17Shawn Ryan?

  How long after that did the indictments start?

• 1:53:26Erik Prince?

  Well, that was September 16, 2007. And I'd say there was something within nine months to a year. Right. And then there was all kinds of questions about jurisdiction and, and where do they do it? And, you know, it also speaks to the, how unjust it all is that they, they somehow horseshoot it all into trying them in Washington DC. Okay, that for four patriots that have served their country from around the country from normal America. If they had a jury of their peers in Washington State, Idaho, Montana, Tennessee, Florida, normal America.

• 1:54:09Erik Prince?

  And it took them multiple trials to try to find and get a conviction. So it's disgusting. I'd funded, the company funded all their legal defense. And, and still with a DC jury, they managed to get a conviction.

• 1:54:28Shawn Ryan?

  What was the aftermath after that for Blackwater?

• 1:54:33Erik Prince?

  Well, look, as part of the, part of the onslaught of Washington.

• 1:54:40Erik Prince?

  There was, it really, literally started a subpoena, right? So I was called before Congress, early October 2004. And they didn't really want to call me back up there after that hearing again. Cause I think I'd answered their questions and said, we're doing what we were told. This is the contract, this thousand-page contract and.

• 1:55:04Erik Prince?

  But then a blizzard of subpoenas started, right? Everything from Department of Labor, you know,

• 1:55:13Erik Prince?

  Treasury, Customs, State Department, Export Issues, ATF. Even the Department of Agriculture was investigating us, how we ship dog food. Are you serious? I'm not kidding. Literally a blizzard. And so, uh, it's kind of the DC way, right? They, uh, they hit you with such a, uh, with an ambush from all sides that you try to make the organization crumble. And we held it together and then they tried to, um, well, they did. They indicted Gary Jackson, Bill Matthews and, um, uh, the General Counsel, Andy, and, uh, and two other people over completely bullshit charges. And I'll give you examples, right?

• 1:55:56Erik Prince?

  All, and, and, and they said, hey, we're not really interested in you. Just give us something on Erik Prince. So the political whipping boy, the political prosecution persecution just continued. So they indicted, um, Gary and Bill, for example, on weapons charges. Right? So in 2004, the King of Jordan had visited Blackwater, hosted by the CIA. Because the US was giving Jordan a big training facility. He wanted to come and see what Blackwater was like. A few days before, guys from the agency called and say, hey, um, we kind of goofed it. We, we, we don't have a gift for the king. We need a gift. Like, well, what does he like? He likes guns. Okay, we can do that.

• 1:56:40Erik Prince?

  We provided him a, a kind of a custom tuned semi-auto M4, 12 gauge shotgun and a Glock. Right? Not exotic, not full auto. We gave it to them, the Secret Service, took the boxes, thank you, put them in the US Secret Service vehicles, they left the property. Like six months later, the ATF is doing an audit, they're going through the books, they say, "What's this?" "Oh, the King of Jordan was here, we transferred those to him." They goes, "Ah, yeah, don't do it this way next time, do it this way." No fine, no drama, nothing. Fast forward to 2007, ah, they indicted us over that.

• 1:57:20Erik Prince?

  They considered that a straw purchase, like they were giving weapons to a drug dealer. They invite, so the same ATF that said, "That's an administrative error, don't do the paperwork this way for a transfer, do it this way." When it's politicized, they made it that way. So, same, another one, um, the agency, right? The agency wanted to, um, uh, the, the agency had done away with their paramilitary training as part of their case officer program years before, and they wanted weapons quals for all these students going through the pipeline. And they came to us and said, "We want you to do this." They said, "Okay, fine, give us a contract." "Great."

• 1:58:05Erik Prince?

  "We got all the semi-auto guns?" "No, no, it has to be full-auto, they have to be able to shoot a full-auto M4 and AK." Like, "That's dumb, you don't really need to do that." "Yes, they have to." "Fine, make it happen." "Give us a contract." "No, no." "Figure it out, make it happen." So we made a donation, right? We already had one law enforcement organization that had permanent residence on the compound. The Virginia Beach Police Department leased an entire building from us in used ranges. So we made a donation to the Sheriff's Department, okay? Because a private organization can't buy 25 AKs or M4s. You can buy four, but not 25. Or you can buy two samples of each.

• 1:58:45Erik Prince?

  So the Camden Sheriff's Department stored those guns on the premises, knowing that they were there for the police to use, but also these federal government employees to use from time to time when they needed it. They would never leave the premises only for that purpose. The former inspector general of the Pentagon signed off on it, the county attorney signed off that everybody's good. Nope. Straw purchase for illegal weapons. That's the kind of stupid shit that they indicted those guys for, which they had to finally, finally grind through. And, and so millions of dollars later in their legal defense, when they finally, when the clowns at, at the DOJ finally realized that I was

• 1:59:28Erik Prince?

  a knock, I'd had all kinds of authorities from the agency for this program, talked about in the last chapter of my book. And the only reason I'm willing to talk about it is because those assholes already leaked my name. Uh, you know, they, they, when Panetta briefed my name, briefed me by name to Congress, right? When, when the agency is briefing special programs, they're supposed to use code names to protect confidentiality. But he briefed me in true name. And within hours of him doing that, the New York Times and the Washington Post were calling me for comment.

• 2:00:01Shawn Ryan?

  Just for the audience, Panetta was the director of CIA at the time.

• 2:00:05Erik Prince?

  Under Obama. Yes. So that's the only reason I give mention of that now. But when that, when the, when the realities of that finally made it to the idiot prosecutors, and frankly, the, the idiot senior leadership at the CIA, then the whole case went away.

• 2:00:23Shawn Ryan?

  So there was just, there was just a wave of...

• 2:00:26Erik Prince?

  Oh, it was, it was like termites.

• 2:00:28Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, did you, what did you think? What was your mindset? Were you ready to combat it? Were you, did you think it was gonna go away? Or did you know?

• 2:00:36Erik Prince?

  Look, paying legal, uh, so I, uh, I, I saw that Elon Musk is forming an internal law firm to fight a whole bunch of specific cases. Hindsight, I should have done that. It would have been vastly superior to me to hire all my own legal team than to pay all these voracious other sets of termites of the Washington DC lawyer crowd. That would have, so for anyone that's watching this that goes through the same circumstance, hire your own lawyers because most DC lawyers suck.

• 2:01:08Erik Prince?

  There most DC lawyers are just as bad as the bureaucrats and regulators that hang out around political parties. So had I done that, um, it would have been cheaper. The defensive fight would have been more effective. The only thing, we fought back on all fronts. Every audit, every, right? There was even whistleblower lawsuits brought against us by someone funded by Soros. And we fought that one all the way to the end, to the point that it was a great victory in Alexandria, Virginia, the federal judge said, "They have not provided a scintilla of evidence of wrongdoing by us." And he made the, the whistleblower's

• 2:01:53Erik Prince?

  counsel pay our legal fees. Right? So that's the kind of, we pushed back on everything. The one place that they had us over a barrel was the State Department with export regulations, right? And so Hillary Clinton's State Department stuck us with the highest per capita fine in State Department history for our illegal arms exports, right? And let me give you some color on what that looks like. So if you're working for the State Department, right? You're working for the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, but the export stuff is handled by the DDT C, the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls. So as the State Department,

• 2:02:36Erik Prince?

  the diplomatic security guys are demanding, "Hey, I need another 50 guys. I need another 200 guys urgently in this town to do this mission because people are at risk." And you have to export them, the body armor, the helmets, the firearms, whatever that might be, to send to them. The DDT C over here is still moving at the pace of peacetime or their own sweet time.

• 2:03:02Erik Prince?

  And so even though the license application was in and we hadn't received it back. Yeah, if I'm expected to send 50 guys into a combat zone, I'm not sending them naked. And so we'd sent body armor or helmets or something like that. And so that's what they came back and fined us for $500,000 per event. Holy shit. Okay, so for all their noise and all their bullshit. And a $42 million fine. They acknowledged in the report that there was no actual damage in any way to national security. It was just a political punishment. Wow. Yeah, $42 million. I have a pretty big chip on my shoulder for that yet. I can imagine.

• 2:03:44Erik Prince?

  So, yeah, looking back, I wish we had never ever answered the call of helping the State Department. Because in the end, it was the undoing of the company. I remember the first contact we ever got from the State Department was from the ATAP program, the Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program. And they wanted us to train the Colombian Presidential Detail and the Greek Presidential Detail. Because this is right before the Olympics were going to be in Greece. And we put the whole proposal together, gave it to State. And they kicked it back to us and said, you can't submit this. It's just not credible. They said, why? They said, the price is so low. You can't. And we knew training. We'd been training thousands of guys, thousands of soft guys.

• 2:04:29Erik Prince?

  They said, you can't submit this into our system because it will not be viewed as credible. It's so low.

• 2:04:36Erik Prince?

  So we increased the price by 60%, resubmitted it. Okay, that was acceptable. 60%? Yeah, it's just disgusting.

• 2:04:45Erik Prince?

  But coming from our perspective of being vertically integrated and we knew what our costs were. Right? One of the great disciplines I tried to push on the team was activity-based cost. Let's figure out what everything costs us to do so we're not guessing. And so we, we had gotten good at squeezing all the, or as many inefficiencies out of those processes that we could. And so we could, we could low bid. So by doing a firm fixed price contract, we had very good margins. And doing that by cutting out the waste meant that we could pay the men and the women a very good wage for doing their job.

• 2:05:32Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about the CIA assassination program.

• 2:05:36Erik Prince?

  Okay.

• 2:05:37Shawn Ryan?

  What are they talking about?

• 2:05:40Erik Prince?

  Well, um, after nine eleven, there was, you know, in that, that first year or two of real spine of seriousness about going after Okaida and hunting them and, and not letting another nine eleven happen, right? In that brief show of unity with all the members of Congress from both parties, singing a song and kumbaya on the front steps of the Capitol, wonderful.

• 2:06:09Erik Prince?

  Um, so the agency figured they needed some kind of unilateral capability to, um, uh, to take out terror targets, even in places where they were kind of protected or, or allowed to, to exist by semi-friendly countries like Germany, like, um, you know, various countries where because of local political considerations, they weren't necessarily playing ball with the agency. And so the agency wanted some unilateral capability and they went through some iterations of what that looks like. And eventually they asked, uh, us to put something together. And, um, yeah.

• 2:06:52Erik Prince?

  And it was, uh, it was a really, it was a really interesting education because it had to be all unilateral, moving documents and people and all the rest with no ties back to the US government. So I won't go into a lot of detail on it, but it was a, uh, it was a hell of capability.

• 2:07:13Shawn Ryan?

  So after all this.

• 2:07:14Erik Prince?

  And I, and I, and I never would say anything about it, but they briefed me by name to Congress.

• 2:07:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:21Erik Prince?

  And which, um,

• 2:07:27Erik Prince?

  Which immediately was leaked to the media, which immediately endangered my family. Okay? So for all the noise about the media making about CIA leakages for this Valerie Jarrett, no, the Valerie Plame stuff. Hey, I was doing a program that was literally hunting the most wanted terrorists. And so, yeah, so that wound up, I wound up in the okay to hit list from that. So, yeah, I do take some issue with the typical Washington game of how they play. Because, look, I started Blackwater as a way to stay connected to SEAL teams and to try to serve my country.

• 2:08:06Erik Prince?

  We answered the call when the USG called again and again and again from thousands of people.

• 2:08:15Erik Prince?

  We lost 43 of our men doing that mission. Multiple of our aircraft shot down.

• 2:08:24Erik Prince?

  And in 43 KIA and hundreds seriously wounded, just like active duty in the military, right? People that pay serious costs for a politician's decision to send them into harm's way. And I ended up behind where I was financially, having sold the business because it got smashed in valuation and in...

• 2:08:48Erik Prince?

  And so what, right? Because men died, men were incarcerated, I think unnecessarily and unjustly, as because of, because of a, I would say, a very broken Washington political process.

• 2:09:05Shawn Ryan?

  When did you sell the company?

• 2:09:07Erik Prince?

  2010.

• 2:09:13Shawn Ryan?

  After you sold the company, at what point did you move to Abu Dhabi?

• 2:09:21Erik Prince?

  I'd moved about the same time we sold it. Why did you move? At that time Somali piracy was raging off the coast of Somalia. They were taking eighty to ninety ships per year, taking one million to ten million in ransom per vessel. And the UAE leadership wanted to do something about it, right? That's a seafaring nation. They depend on trade, Dubai port and exporting their crude.

• 2:09:53Erik Prince?

  And they wanted to do something in a, in a chance meeting. Explained what, what should happen. And they said, "Yalla, let's go." And so they didn't want me directly involved with it. They just said, kind of lay out the, the, the how and why to do this. And the Puntland Marine Police Force was built. And that unit went active by early 2012. And you don't hear much about Somali piracy after that. No, you don't. It's funny how that works. Yeah. But it wasn't, look, the, the typical bureaucratic approach was ships chasing pirates all over the Indian Ocean. That's dumb, right?

• 2:10:34Erik Prince?

  If you have a, if you have a wasp problem in your yard, you find the nest and you deal with the nest. It doesn't take a genius to figure out where the pirates are in Somalia. If you fly along the coast, right? You don't need some KH-11 satellite imagery. You can fly along the coast in a King Air and say, "Oh, there's six ships anchored down there off this fishing village with no port. Must be pirates." Right? And you go after the pirate logistics because when they'd go, they'd go to sea and they'd capture a vessel, they'd have to drive it back to the coast and they'd have to put guards on that boat and they have to sit on it for six months to a year, waiting for the ransom to get paid. Another book that I read called The Pirate Coast,

• 2:11:15Erik Prince?

  which lay, which laid out the, uh, how the US dealt with the Barbary Pirates in Libya in eighteen oh four, eighteen oh five. Same kind of program. A former American, or I mean, a former American Army officer, William Eaton, eight Marines, ninety contracted, um, mercenaries, French, Greek, and Italian. Right? The Marine Corps hymn goes from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. There was eight Marines on that deal and ninety contracted mercenaries. And that's what ended piracy for the United States in Libya. In this case, um, a, a contracted police force working with, by, and through

• 2:11:59Erik Prince?

  the local Somali government, a police force to cut off the pirates' logistics so they couldn't pay, feed, and resupply their guards. And the problem went away. So it wasn't a hit squad? No. Okay. No, in fact, it really wasn't that kinetic at all. Yeah, they were armed. I mean, logistically, it was hard. The first mission they had to do was five hundred kilometers one way on roads that hadn't been graded or improved in thirty years. So it was, um, it was those kind of challenges to solve. And it was, it was really a South African guys, some ex-executive outcomes team that came and did it, and they built the police force and it worked. There's a, um, there's a documentary that was shot through the process called The Somalia Project.

• 2:12:45Erik Prince?

  Oh, good. Answers that question.

• 2:12:48Erik Prince?

  It's on YouTube and it's free. All right. And it actually won an award at the Toronto Film Festival. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, I'll have to check it out. Knowing it would be controversial, knowing that the clowns at the State Department and the Obama administration did everything they could to block a program like that because it's not something they directly controlled.

• 2:13:09Erik Prince?

  It's, it's, it is such a mess. It is such a fetid swamp. Trump was right to call it a swamp. It is.

• 2:13:17Shawn Ryan?

  Going back just a little bit, so you moving to Abu Dhabi, did that not, that didn't have anything to do with the politics that, with the political system smearing your name in the, in the public?

• 2:13:27Erik Prince?

  Was I sick of the Washington nonsense? Sure, but I, I, I came and went to the United, it's not like I fled, I didn't go to exile, I had, I had some kids that still live in the States, so I'd come back every few weeks to see them.

• 2:13:39Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:13:40Erik Prince?

  Yeah, I was coming and going all over the world for, for those three years. And so, and so coming off of that, I started a, a small private equity firm to do some exploration and some mining stuff. And I got some interesting experience in Africa. And then while I was raising money for that, um, in Hong Kong, a, a Hong Kong businessman contacted me and said, hey, please help us build a logistics business based in Hong Kong to do aviation, transportation, kind of security uh, in Africa for a lot of these big Chinese projects, whether they're building a road or a mine or a port or whatever. And so that was Frontier Service Group.

• 2:14:24Erik Prince?

  And as that company got more and more investment from the Chinese mainland, it was a, A, it was an interesting but alarming look inside of how the, um, the state-owned enterprises work, that they're very political organizations, not really based on merit, or not, not in any way based on mission. It was kind of the antithesis of what I'd ever, um, seen in my professional life before. And so, uh, I left there a year and a half ago, but an interesting window that there is nothing we want in the United States. We do not want to be cynicized. We do not want to be, to operate the way the CCP does, right?

• 2:15:09Erik Prince?

  They still have the country locked down in large portions, locking down Shanghai, 30 million people, that's the most affluent part of China. Uh, claiming to be over COVID, really it's over politics because Xi, Xi Jinping, the Chinese ruler, is trying to be elected to a third, five-year term. And that's kind of unprecedented really since Mao. And there's three factions to the Chinese Communist Party. There's the young princelings, of which he is one. There's the Communist Youth League, and there's the Shanghai faction. And because of all the wealth that's concentrated in Shanghai, Shanghai is a likely place for

• 2:15:50Erik Prince?

  opposition to foment to to Xi's continued rule. So I think Shanghai is in lockdown right now, literally welding people into their homes with fences because of that. So again,

• 2:16:04Erik Prince?

  I think the um when when Ronald Reagan was elected, I think we're at a very

• 2:16:14Erik Prince?

  similar time to 1976 to 1980, to the Carter years. Runaway inflation, the economy is going to the tank, a bunch of foreign policy setbacks.

• 2:16:28Erik Prince?

  And then Reagan is elected

• 2:16:31Erik Prince?

  on a hey, we're gonna, we're gonna bring America back. America can do better than this. And in the foreign policy side, right, the the policy of the United States for 35 years since World War II until 1980 had been containment. We're just going to contain the Soviet Union and the spread of communism. And Reagan said, no, we're gonna fuck the commies. He actually said that in the Oval Office. We're going to push back on them economically, politically, culturally, socially, all the rest. There was 20 covert action findings, some of which were even initiated by Carter, because even Carter have the Carter administration having had their their butts kicked, finally came around to their senses. But Reagan fully enacted that

• 2:17:15Erik Prince?

  to go after the Soviet Union in all those ways to take him down, not with conventional military forces, but all the other acts of subterfuge that the intelligence community should be doing. And what happened? Eighty nine, the Berlin Wall, the the the Iron Curtain comes down, and by 91, the Soviet Union is done. Okay?

• 2:17:41Erik Prince?

  I think the United States has to push back on the Communist Party of China the same way. Chinese people, not our enemy. Chinese Communist Party is antithetical to the American way of life. It is antithetical to the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights and to the things that we appreciate in America. That has to stop.

• 2:18:04Shawn Ryan?

  I 100% agree with you on that. And I want to be honest, when I was researching you and I saw that Frontier, what was it Frontier?

• 2:18:12Erik Prince?

  Frontier Service Group.

• 2:18:13Shawn Ryan?

  Frontier Service Group was so involved with China and building infrastructure in Africa that I was really surprised. Did that, were you alarmed at all at how much influence China has over in Africa?

• 2:18:30Erik Prince?

  They, they appear to have some influence, but it's, it's really not that hard to push them back.

• 2:18:36Shawn Ryan?

  It's not?

• 2:18:37Erik Prince?

  No.

• 2:18:37Shawn Ryan?

  How would we do that?

• 2:18:38Erik Prince?

  No, no, um, look, they come, they're, they're basically pushing into a vacuum. Meaning Africans, African countries need infrastructure. They want electric power. They need a hard surface road. They need ports, they need trade. All the things that we take for granted in the West, right? The ability for a farmer in America to raise his crop, put it on a truck, take it to a co-op, which can then sell it on into the stream of commerce. That in most cases in Africa, it doesn't exist. Most African families live with, like, have less than 100 watt light bulb worth of electricity a day.

• 2:19:18Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:19:18Erik Prince?

  Okay? And so when China comes and promises, hey, uh, let us have this, all this concession and we'll build you this port and road. Right? African countries take that deal. If it's even more controversial, right? The, the Chinese do black bag diplomacy really well. Meaning they pay cash. They.

• 2:19:39Erik Prince?

  I'm told that um in the basement of the Foreign Ministry in Beijing that um they take African leaders or not just African, any leader from around the world that China wants to do business with, or the Mining Minister, or the Energy Minister, or the Foreign Minister, and they take them to this big vault room and their safety deposit boxes. And they take them to one box and they have their name on it, they open it up and it's gold bars or cash or whatever, and they'll say, "This is yours, waiting for you here as long as you play ball for us while you're in office." Look, China is an ancient society. It's a, it's as a, as, you know, remember, over

• 2:20:20Erik Prince?

  the last 2,000 years, China, for 19 out of those 20 centuries, was the largest economy on the planet. Remember that. So China views itself as the center of the universe, the Middle Kingdom. And so they're trying to restore themselves to that kind of grandeur and world leadership. And the question is, does America want to be, is, are they comfortable being pushed into second place by a lot of, I would say, self-inflicted wounds to ourself? Or are we going to rally and organize and, and do what made America effective and free and, and wealthy, and return to those basic values and focuses? Or do we continue on

• 2:21:05Erik Prince?

  this woke nightmare and drive ourselves into second or third or, or worse place?

• 2:21:12Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think's gonna happen?

• 2:21:15Erik Prince?

  Elections do have consequences. And, and they have to have consequences. And I think the most important thing um to focus on in the next election is uh control the bureaucracy, to actually have accountability for the federal government. Because I think the real constitutional crisis is we're supposed to have three branches of government, right? Executive, Legislative, Judiciary, but we have four. We have a permanent state bureaucracy that's accountable to no one, that Congress can yell at, and that really changes things. The, the White House can yell at, but can't hire and fire most of the bureaucrats under its wing.

• 2:21:56Erik Prince?

  CIA is different. Actually CIA and the Peace Corps are the only two federal agencies in Washington where civil service rules don't necessarily apply. So the director can change and fire quickly. So the CIA should be quick to fix underwrite leadership. But beyond, call it reform and control of the civil service bureaucracy and to pare it down, right, I hate the fact that the five counties surrounding Washington are per capita the wealthiest in the country. That's a very unhealthy sign that that much wealth is sponged off the imperial city to the detriment of the rest of the country where actual normal

• 2:22:36Erik Prince?

  work is done. And the second thing is, I think we have to restore competitiveness in competition inside of America. The Federal Trade Commission and the antitrust parts of the government have to be cleaned out and reworked and the amount of monopolies or duopolies or oligopolies, right, where you have a couple of companies that have such control over the markets that it squeezes all the competition, right? Look at the beef industry. All the beef in America is processed by I think four major processors. All the farmers who do the hardest part of

• 2:23:17Erik Prince?

  the work for years, months and years at a time, they absolutely get screwed because all the processors are controlled by those big four. Okay? Whether it's big beef or big chicken, and the same in the airline industry, the same in big tech. America was great when it was lots of small companies with lots of sharp elbows and everybody scrambling and innovating and really pushing that competition. But when you have, when you have Washington reinforcing and scratching the back of big tech and big business, it's extremely dangerous for the future of the country.

• 2:23:58Shawn Ryan?

  Back to China, or back to Africa, what are they mining there?

• 2:24:03Erik Prince?

  Well, remember, China, um, over the next five years will have another 300 million people move from rural communities into cities, right? So you have to house 300 million people, or almost the population of the United States, you have to build housing for in the next five years. So when China goes out looking for energy, right, because they import 90% of their energy, their hydrocarbon energy, they have to build, right, if you're doing even green energy, you need an enormous amount of copper to transmit the power from where you generate it to where you're using it, and iron ore for, for steel, for rebar, for all the things you

• 2:24:45Erik Prince?

  build a house with. Um, so they're going out to find those, those resources. China as a country, uh, as a government, has made a very concerted effort to kind of leapfrog past the internal combustion engine, right? Because it was going to be a cold day in hell before China could build a better car engine than Porsche, or Toyota, or, or even a US one, right? So they have gone all in on battery minerals, electric vehicles, and they have made a very concerted effort to control not just the source of rare earths, right, the, like the NDPR, all the things

• 2:25:26Erik Prince?

  you need to make a very high-end electric motor and a very high-end, long-duration, quick-recharge battery. Cobalt, nickel, neodymium, all those, I won't go deep on that. But the processing for those minerals is where China controls about 95% of the world's supply. And so that's a area that the US should make some strategic investment, right? I certainly believe in capitalism and the free market, as long as everyone else does. And in the case of China, you have a very state managed capitalism. They say it's capitalism, or so sorry socialism with Chinese characteristics. For that matter, capitalism also with Chinese

• 2:26:10Erik Prince?

  characteristics because they they very much with government direction throw hundreds of billions of dollars to target specific industries that they want to be dominant in, to the point of driving out any of their US competitors, which they have done in particularly in battery minerals in that processing. They call them rare earth elements. Like the only producing rare earth mine in the United States now is in Mountain Pass, California, and all the offtake goes to China.

• 2:26:41Shawn Ryan?

  No shit.

• 2:26:42Erik Prince?

  Fact.

• 2:26:44Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, this is just extremely concerning.

• 2:26:45Erik Prince?

  We were shareholders in a very rich rare earth mine in Burundi, and the processing, the offtake from that mine went to Germany, where there was a couple of stages done, but then eventually all that went to went to China as well. And here's the thing, it's not a it's not a hundred billion dollar problem to fix. It's probably it's a ten billion dollar problem to fix, or less, right? So instead of, I would say, pissing away forty billion dollars in aid like Congress is just doing to Ukraine, for everyone to make noise about, you know, strategic minerals

• 2:27:27Erik Prince?

  and Chinese hegemony in those spaces, ten billion dollars spent well in America solves that issue, right? Some of the processing of those rare earths is kind of a nasty, dirty process. Okay, fine. Accept that. Do it at dugway proving ground, which is where the US Army does its chemical westing, chemical weapons testing. You're never going to build condos there, but say that's where the United States is going to process those minerals. And you do it like a contractor managed facility like they do for ammunition plants. It doesn't it my my biggest frustration in top of the the I would say the corruption and incompetence in Washington is just a lack of imagination on how to solve these problems.

• 2:28:10Shawn Ryan?

  You think it's just straight incompetence?

• 2:28:13Erik Prince?

  I think it's, um, I think it's just reinforced group think. I, I, when I look at if, if, if the combined Republican and Democrat administrations of the last 20 years, for all the smart people that have come through Harvard and Yale and all these Ivy League schools in these foreign policy positions, and if this is the best they've got, I would, I would look for another source for my foreign policy experts going forward. Because whether it's the Iraq invasion and how the war was conducted against really not just Sunni insurgents, but the Iranians fighting in Iraq versus the United States as well, being defeated in Afghanistan by 90% illiterate goat herders with no external support, really.

• 2:28:58Erik Prince?

  Because remember, when we were fighting the Soviets in the eighties, no, when the Mahajuddin were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, the US was giving a billion dollars in lethal aid in 1985 dollars, which would be more like three billion in lethal aid going to the Taliban. Now, nothing like that. Nobody ever gave them that kind of support. But yet, we were defeated. All the techno wizardry of the US Army and the US Navy and the US Air Force and the US Marine Corps, great fighting men and women, great capability, all that equipment with bad, weak leadership, with weak political leadership, and we got our butts kicked. And it's what an embarrassment.

• 2:29:43Erik Prince?

  And for everybody that lost a loved one, or an alim, or a spouse, or a relationship over the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, they should be pissed. I'm pissed. I spent a lot of my life and, and put a huge effort into helping the US government there to have them piss it the way they did. It's just wrong.

• 2:30:04Shawn Ryan?

  I'm totally with you on that.

• 2:30:06Erik Prince?

  This is a direct result of an all volunteer force. I'm not saying we have to have a draft. But if you have one half of 1% serving in the military, right? About 1.5 million people, give or take, in the US forces, active duty. You have another 3% to 4% that knows that half percent. Family, friends, that circle, that tribe. Leaving the other 95% of America with no clue and no skin in the game. And so that allows really idiot politicians to be continually disassociated from reality, making those kind of decisions.

• 2:30:43Shawn Ryan?

  Well, since we're on the Afghan pullout now, and we're talking about Chinese mining and an incompetent government. China's extracting lithium out of Africa. China was there when we pulled out of Afghanistan. Afghanistan pullout seemed extremely abrupt and there was definitely, it's obvious there was no plan. Chinese were there to negotiate with Taliban. Now supposedly they're extracting lithium out of Afghanistan. We have this green initiative, which we're going to import all of our solar panels and batteries from China. Do you think that the current administration was paid off by China to pull out of Afghanistan so that they can extract?

• 2:31:25Erik Prince?

  No, in fact, if, I would imagine, not imagine, I would posit that if China had its choice, America would have stayed in Afghanistan somehow. Why? Because the one group that the CCP is scared of are the Uighurs, right? The Uighurs are an ethnic Turkic people. They are not Han Chinese. They are Muslim and they're primarily from the northwest corner of China called Xinjiang province, okay? And they have been in conflict with the CCP because they've tried to hold true to Islam. And they have been resisting it.

• 2:32:08Erik Prince?

  And there's huge pipelines from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan with the natural gas that flows through Xinjiang province that literally powers Beijing and the whole eastern seaboard. Like I said before, China imports 90% of its hydrocarbon energy.

• 2:32:24Erik Prince?

  And so the Uighurs they've not been able to control. And so they've they've built camps, they build reeducation camps, they're doing some terrible things and getting away with it up there. And the Uighurs that could have sanctuary in Afghanistan is a major threat to China, which is why the Chinese are paying the Taliban almost whatever it takes to try to suppress the Uighurs from having sanctuary in Afghanistan. China signed up early for a lot of the concessions in Afghanistan because there's enormous wealth in the ground in Afghanistan. And the disgusting thing, and why, so- You're quoted as saying there's over a trillion dollars in the ground there.

• 2:33:08Erik Prince?

  At least, yes. And that's not my number, that's the US Geological Survey, which flew magnetic and gravity airborne surveys, finding enormous amounts of copper, hydrocarbons, and other minerals of value in Afghanistan. Okay? So let me back up on Afghanistan briefly. I've known Steve Bannon for years, since I wrote my book, which I think came out in 2013, and I did a, like, a radio event with him. And I've stayed in touch with him ever since. And wrote a bunch of foreign policy papers on positions Trump, candidate Trump should take for the 2016 election.

• 2:33:50Erik Prince?

  And he contacted me within months of Trump being elected. And he said, hey, we're trying to figure out what to do on Afghanistan, write up what you think should be done, and write an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. So I did. And I wrote it for an audience of one. And I'm told that, by a guy that was in the room, that Trump read my op-ed, circled it, called in the National Security Advisor, who was then HR McMaster, and said, I don't like your plan, I like this one, do this. Because McMaster had just asked to send another 70,000 troops back to Afghanistan in 2017. And so that started a back and forth, and of course, McMaster, being a three-star armor

• 2:34:32Erik Prince?

  officer from the Pentagon who wanted a four-star, of course, said no. Hell no, right? I went to saw Mattis at the White House direction, at the Pentagon.

• 2:34:45Erik Prince?

  He said, "My analysis of the root problems was the best that he saw, but he just couldn't accept contractors doing it." Because what I laid out was basically a repeat of what worked in the first six to eight months of Afghanistan, right?

• 2:35:02Erik Prince?

  Using special operations veterans, right? Everybody loves the word veterans, they hate the word contractor. It's the same thing.

• 2:35:14Erik Prince?

  Veteran contractors attached to each Afghan battalion. I wanted to do thirty-six guys per battalion, because I wanted enough contracted talent there so that every time an Afghan unit left the wire, whether it's a platoon size, company size, whatever, there were mentors with them to provide leadership, intelligence, communications, medical, logistics expertise, right? The five things you gotta get right in a unit, and if one of those fails, it can all go to shit, right? So I wanted veterans to go live with the Afghans. It's the same, everything I wrote up was really based on how the East India Company functioned and flourished for two-hundred-and-fifty years right next door, right?

• 2:35:56Erik Prince?

  They built units of nineteen locals, one expat, and they lived with them for years. They were called the presidency armies. So I kind of modeled a battalion structure with veterans attached the same way. And because of the nature of employing contractors, I can send a guy for sixty days or ninety days, and then he goes home for thirty days, back in, but always to the same unit, in the same valley, so he knows those Afghans. Those are his brothers. The problem with the US presence in Afghanistan for twenty years is we went through almost thirty troop rotations, where you send guys in, they might be effective for a few months, and they leave, and they shift, and they never come back to the same area.

• 2:36:41Erik Prince?

  More than thirty times. So we didn't really fight for twenty years. We fought for thirty different rotations. But our approach, what I recommended was to solve that by attaching at the battalion level, living with, patrolling with, and even fighting with those guys. Not living at some distant US base where they'd kind of commute to mentor them once a week. No, same barracks, same chow hall.

• 2:37:06Erik Prince?

  I would have provided air support, about ninety aircraft, again, flown right seat, left seat, one contractor, and one Afghan pilot. So if there's any weapon released, it's an Afghan making that decision. The professional pilot there, so that you had the night vision time, you had the safety lined up, and it kind of took away the inshala factor, right? Yeah. Don't take away the excuses of, "Ah, we're not going today, it's too dangerous." No, no, you're going now, it's on. And we could have provided jets, the whole package, for a fraction, right? I found an entire Israeli squadron of A4s that were for sale, that would have been perfect and cheap, and it would have worked. And then the other,

• 2:37:48Erik Prince?

  the third part of it we have to do is the combat logistics, right? You have to pay the men on time, feed them on time, resupply them, and take care of them medically. It was so bad, right, in this rush to overempower the Afghans, right? Unlike most people, I've read most of the Cigar reports, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, where he just catalogs the same failures made for twenty years. So how do we have these people put in these Assistant Secretary of whatever, positions of responsibility, making the same damn mistakes that they were making a decade or two decades earlier? How do we consider these people smart or qualified when they're just continually failing? So

• 2:38:32Erik Prince?

  again, you know, you have the issue of ghost soldiers, of, right, in every society where there's corruption, if you throw money at a problem, it grows the corruption. And that's what America does. America knows how to fire hose cash onto a problem, which made all those little weeds into major trees of problems. So again, putting a few dudes in there to control the pay, the parts supply, the fuel, the ammunition, and medical, the whole program would have cost less than five percent of what the US was spending.

• 2:39:09Erik Prince?

  And I trust, trust me, we would have put the Taliban on their knees again. Because of the whole, that package would have performed like a much more robust version of what stomped on the Taliban and Al Qaeda in, in early 2002, in late 2001. There was already 140 Taliban sanctuaries in Afghanistan, just in the last months of us being there. And trust me, Al Qaeda is all over the country again. And, and so for all the, the administration assurances that this was never going to be a terror sanctuary again, absolutely it will be.

• 2:39:49Shawn Ryan?

  You think we're going back there?

• 2:39:51Erik Prince?

  I don't know, I, I, I hope we never go back there with the US military. There is not one conventional soldier should ever set foot in that country again. Because, and it's, it's no diss on the, on the soldiers, but it's how they're employed. I heard, I heard a fundamental description at a, at an early special operations conference when I was a young officer, is the different mentality in a, right? As you're, as we're seeing in Ukraine right now, artillery is still the king of battle in big conventional fights, right? So in a conventional military, you man the equipment, because it's the equipment that does the heavy fighting, the killing, the artillery, the rockets, the tanks.

• 2:40:33Erik Prince?

  In a soft unit, you equip the man, because the man is the weapon system to be employed in very niche, very special applications. And that's the kind of flexibility and speed and lightweight that you need to operate against an insurgency, right? Because we, the United States in Afghanistan was defeated by an enemy that was largely illiterate, untrained, using weapons that had been designed 70 years earlier.

• 2:41:02Erik Prince?

  And they defeated all the billions of dollars of techno wizardry. I mean, I'd go to the, the Association of the US Army Show in 2005 through, through now. And all that stuff, and the Taliban kicked our ass. It's disgusting. It didn't kick the ass of the sergeant, or the gunnery sergeant, or the smart captain. But man, it's like, once they, once, once officers pass the range, the, the rank of O4, it's almost like their brains are, are transformed into something that just doesn't, um, doesn't want to fight the way that's, that's, that needs to be done.

• 2:41:41Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Damn. Let's take a quick break.

• 2:41:46Erik Prince?

  All right.

• 2:41:48Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:44:59Shawn Ryan?

  Alright Eric, we took a quick break. Now I want to know, what happened to the plan? Where did it get tied up?

• 2:45:05Erik Prince?

  Sadly, it got, uh, it died in the womb. It, um, the bureaucracy around Trump, um, killed it. Unfortunately, I don't think Trump ever really controlled his national security bureaucracy. I think, um, Mike Pompeo as director depended on Gina Haspel, a career agency officer that was then made director after him. Um, she didn't want to do anything, touching anything that would be different or hard or controversial for the agency. There was a big difference between how DoD fights wars, under Title X authorities, versus the agency, which is Title 50. Remember, when the US went into Afghanistan, right?

• 2:45:48Erik Prince?

  The, the, the S, the special forces aid teams, the agency officers, hell, even the aircraft flying overhead, were there under Title 50 CIA authorities. That worked. Very flexible, very fast, very maneuverable. When the Pentagon pivoted to become the big Title X beast in the room for the next 20 years, that's where we failed. DoD is good at fighting big conventional wars. What they did in 2003 in rolling up Saddam's army? Brilliant. Fantastic. Fighting the insurgency after that? Not brilliant.

• 2:46:29Erik Prince?

  When the SEAL Team guys rolled into Abbottabad, Pakistan to kill Bin Laden, they were not there under Title X, they were there under Title 50 authorities, working for the Director of CIA. So, I recommended that that plan, right? As DoD leaves, that a, that a Title 50 authority take over, and that this kind of advise, assist, support element, to keep the Afghan government from tipping over, and to continue a effective counterterrorism mission, that it pivot to the agency.

• 2:47:02Erik Prince?

  Of course, Pentagon is about money and about reach and turf. And they wanted nothing to do with that. And the agency, under a different director, could have seized the thing, could have, could have taken the initiative and said, yep, Mr. Trump will do this. Go.

• 2:47:19Erik Prince?

  It's really sad because everything I laid out was not theoretical for us. We'd had hundreds, if not thousands of advisors, trainers in country before. We'd had up to 56 of our aircraft in Afghanistan, flying those kind of support missions. Hell, we'd even, with a Super Deccano, right? I owned the first Super Deccano aircraft. It's a single-engine, Brazilian-made, turboprop aircraft. It looks like a little light fighter plane. And I bought one in 2005, took it to the States, and we fitted it out with a FLIR, okay? A big MX-15, so you could, with a FLIR, with a laser. It had a cellphone intercept equipment on it.

• 2:48:01Erik Prince?

  It had Link-16 aircraft, so we could talk to every other fast mover in the US military. And we had it kitted out for a JSOC program so that they could find, fix, and finish by themselves with a contractor pilot flying it and an active-duty guy running the sensor systems and dropping any weapons, because that aircraft could even drop two 500-pound laser-guided bombs. It was fantastic. We actually even did a study that we could have taken over every close air support mission over Afghanistan with that aircraft. It had more coverage with all the right kind of hardware, and the whole program would have paid for itself in fuel savings in seven months. I mean, so even a private equity guy would have funded it.

• 2:48:45Erik Prince?

  But those are the kind of cost-saving innovations that the military bureaucracy just cannot, will not, accept. And that's the frustration, why we have these perpetual wars, which never seem to end, and no one is really put in charge. Coming back to the op-ed that I wrote, that Trump liked, and he circled. I said, "You need to appoint a viceroy." Right? And that's a spicy term. It's a loaded term. That's a colonial term. But I wanted it to be spicy. I wanted people to pay attention. He needed one person in charge. Unity of command. One person who's responsible. One person who's accountable.

• 2:49:27Erik Prince?

  There wasn't one person who was in charge of the effort in Afghanistan for the entire 20 years we were there. State Department was doing their thing. DOD was doing their thing. CIA is over here. NATO is over there. We never had one person that was in charge. When the British were in India, they appointed one person who represented Her Majesty's government. That had all power to make those decisions. And the issue about Afghanistan, right? Because the other lesson from the East India Company is that it's much easier to employ people than to fight them. And before you'd mentioned about the Chinese interested in minerals and all the rest in Afghanistan. Yeah, there's a trillion dollars of value in the ground.

• 2:50:10Erik Prince?

  And the US didn't go after any of it while it was there. How long have they known about that? From the Soviet times. The Soviets, the Soviets did a better job of extracting resources in Afghanistan in the 10 years we were there, that they were there, versus the 20 that the US was there. And I'll give you two examples. One, in the southeast corner of Balt Province, there's an Amudarya oil field. It was drilled, proven, all the wells hit, fully ready for commercialization. You could have redrilled the five wells that were cemented and another 15, and you could have powered the entire country. Okay?

• 2:50:53Erik Prince?

  Of the 60-some billion dollars that the US was spending per year in Afghanistan, a huge chunk of that was fuel costs. Okay? And you know where that fuel came from? The Mediterranean. A Defense Logistics Agency contract. Put it on a boat, down through the Red Sea, across the Indian Ocean to Karachi, and then on a truck up into Paki- up across Pakistan into Afghanistan, paying all those Taliban tolls. So by the time that jet fuel or diesel fuel got to where it's used in Afghanistan, the fully loaded cost on it was $250 a gallon. Okay, our tax money spent that way.

• 2:51:35Erik Prince?

  While the Amudarya oil field is sitting there untapped largely for the duration of our presence there. Wow. Okay, 20 million bucks would have redrilled those wells, 100 million bucks to put a mod to the refinery there and you would have powered every jet, every truck, everything. And then for that matter, probably 50 other power plants in Afghanistan that would have burned HFO, the bottoms, the heavy fuel oil, the stuff that you get off the bottom of a refinery, would have made Afghanistan self-sustaining in energy and not have to depend on all those trucks. Second, the Mas Eynak Mine, okay, which is about 50 kilometers, 30-ish miles south of

• 2:52:20Erik Prince?

  Kabul, one of the largest single copper deposits in the world, and they've known about that for a thousand years because there was all kinds of archaeological constraints to it. But, you know what? If I was in a position of responsibility, and so for all the generals that rotated through of the 17 or 18 different commanders we had, none of them said, "Hey, I'm going to reopen Mas Eynak Mine and I can employ 10,000 Taliban doing it because I'm going to give them all a pick and a shovel and three square meals a day and I can suck an entire infantry division of Taliban manpower away from the Taliban." Because most of the Taliban were just paid fighters. They weren't like fully committed jihadis, right?

• 2:53:02Erik Prince?

  So if the Taliban's paying $10 a day and we pay $12 a day and we feed them and we're not going to kill them, that's great. That's how the British Empire dominated the whole subcontinent for 250 years effectively. And that's my frustration with these so-called smart leaders that are in charge. And they say, "Well, we can't do that within our responsibility." Well, then demand that kind of authority. Demand that kind of responsibility to fix the problem. Don't piss away our sons and daughters' health or their lives and don't piss away tens of billions of our taxpayer dollars just managing the conflict. Have enough spying to say, "I'm going to solve that frickin' problem or I'm not going

• 2:53:46Erik Prince?

  to shut up until I do." That's my frustration with them. So laying out a plan.

• 2:53:53Erik Prince?

  That would have given the Afghan forces a reliable way to be supported, to have confidence that they were going to be helped. I mean, it got so bad in the last eight years of US presence there, that the Taliban were resorting to the most ancient of tactics, siege tactics, right? They'd roll 200, 300 Taliban out of the hills and they'd surround an Afghan combat outpost, right? And they'd lay siege to it. Nobody in, nobody out. And they'd be calling down there, shouting insults, all the rest. "Hey, we're gonna kill you if you don't come out." And it got so bad that the Afghan military leaders inside

• 2:54:35Erik Prince?

  the camp would be calling back to a TV station, back to Tullow News in Kabul, into a call-in show, pleading for someone to come and help them. With all the wonderful US military helicopters, with all the stuff that the taxpayers spent, nobody had the organization or the responsibility to say, "Hey, we're gonna come and help you." Or even better, "Hey, now the Taliban have provided us with 200 targets surrounding that camp, and we're gonna smoke them all." Right? Why doesn't the AC-130 roll in there in broad daylight and smoke them? Oh, wait, why? Because the AC-130 flown by the US Air Force won't fly in daylight. It's a $250

• 2:55:16Erik Prince?

  million asset that will not fly in daytime for combat support. That's the kind of bureaucratization of war that I chafe against in the US military that so badly needs reform. It's like a dirty rug that just needs to be shaken.

• 2:55:33Shawn Ryan?

  You're the only person I've ever heard talk about this. This is incredible.

• 2:55:39Erik Prince?

  So that's just bureaucratic, layer upon layer, right? It's like wrapping a whole bunch of Talmids around the Torah, so you never get back to your authorities that you should be doing. And we've allowed lawyers...

• 2:55:53Erik Prince?

  In the military, right, they're now down to low, very, very low levels of units that all have a JAG. And I think we've allowed them to become what Zompelits were in the Soviet Union, right? You know what a Zompelit is?

• 2:56:05Shawn Ryan?

  I don't.

• 2:56:07Erik Prince?

  It's a political officer who is literally there to, um, do you remember the movie, um, The Hunt for October?

• 2:56:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yes.

• 2:56:14Erik Prince?

  Right? The Zompelit was the guy that that's assigned to liken the Soviet Union to every ship, submarine, air, uh, air force squadron, army division, okay? He is there to enforce the will of the Communist Party. And in this case, lawyers were there to enforce the will of Washington and and constantly undermining, second guessing the battlefield commanders. And I think, okay, fine, if you want to have lawyers at that level, fine, make it like the Marine Corps. Make every Marine a rifleman, every lawyer must be a rifleman, make them spend at least one or two combat deployments in the in the field, getting shot at before they get to make legal decisions about when people can drop bombs and not to.

• 2:56:58Erik Prince?

  Make them live with those consequences first.

• 2:57:04Shawn Ryan?

  I'm becoming infuriated.

• 2:57:05Erik Prince?

  Sorry.

• 2:57:08Shawn Ryan?

  Let's move into Ukraine, Ukraine, Russia conflict.

• 2:57:11Erik Prince?

  Okay.

• 2:57:13Shawn Ryan?

  What should we be doing there, if anything at all?

• 2:57:18Erik Prince?

  Well, I've been to Ukraine quite a bit, not lately, but, uh, long before the conflict. Uh, because there's an amazing amount of tech and amazing amount of industry there. We were actually trying to buy a business, um, which didn't work out. But I laid out, uh, in a document passed up by some people I know in the chain of command, it did not have my name on it at all, so they couldn't play the I hate Erik Prince card. But I basically laid out a combination of lend lease and a flying tiger approach to prevent the invasion from happening. Because I was pretty confident the Russians were going to go in.

• 2:57:57Shawn Ryan?

  Well, we had a conversation before you got here and you actually pegged the exact day that it happened.

• 2:58:03Erik Prince?

  It's based on weather.

• 2:58:06Erik Prince?

  But.

• 2:58:09Erik Prince?

  But in December, I laid out and it was it was a simple way to back up from that. So in this fiscal year, right, fiscal year 2022, the US Air Force has already announced that they're retiring 200 combat aircraft. Okay, being taken from an active fighting flying squadron, flown to the desert in Arizona and parked for eternity, written off to zero value to the taxpayers. Okay, including about 50 F-15s, 50 F-16s and 42 A-10s. For your listeners, F-15 air superiority aircraft, F-16 air superiority and ground attack and A-10, the best tank killing aircraft ever made, literally made

• 2:58:53Erik Prince?

  back in the 70s to kill Russian tanks.

• 2:58:58Erik Prince?

  All being flown to the desert wasted. I said, fly any combination of those to Ukraine.

• 2:59:05Erik Prince?

  Right, for a carrot and stick. Carrot is, yes, Russia, don't worry, Ukraine will never be part of NATO. Let's close that discussion because they don't need to be, right?

• 2:59:17Erik Prince?

  Um, our sons and daughters don't need to be the guarantors and defenders of Europe. Europe can wake up and do the right thing, including Germany, which they still have not really done.

• 2:59:28Shawn Ryan?

  Well, they can't really because they're energy dependent off Russia.

• 2:59:32Erik Prince?

  Well, yeah, and on top of that, the Germans closed three nuclear power plants in December of last year, earlier than originally planned, just to be in accordance with their green new deal plan that they want to roll out in Germany, making them even more dependent on Russian energy. But back to what I wanted, what I recommended for Ukraine, right? So take the NATO thing off the table for Ukraine, no problem.

• 2:59:59Erik Prince?

  But fly these, some of these old aircraft to Ukraine, put Ukrainian Rondelles on them. You can use Ukrainian pilots, you can use contractor pilots, any combination, just like, right, remember, the Flying Tigers was a, used for about one year before the United States was involved in World War II, but we wanted to help stop the Japanese from bombing Chinese cities. They allowed US aircraft flown by contractor pilots, did exactly that, working for a foreign entity. In this case, those old US aircraft that were already written off, transfer them to Ukraine, a budget, I think 250 million bucks

• 3:00:41Erik Prince?

  would have been enough to make those aircraft flyable, fund the pilots, the fuel and the weapons, and you would have had all the deterrence needed to prevent a Russian invasion instead of the, not, not close to 50 billion dollars that the US has spent, I would say pissed away in Ukraine now. It's just a pile of wrong. It's the lack of imagination, the lack of any knowledge of history from these so-called smart people, and there's no accountability. How, as taxpayers, can we allow such incompetence to rule for the debacle that was Iraq, the debacle that's Afghanistan, and even a preventable debacle of Ukraine? I have, that's, that's

• 3:01:26Erik Prince?

  my frustration. For all these people that, that want to say, ah, it's a, it's a terrible plan, he's an evil mercenary, whatever pejorative they want to throw at me, I say, fine. Call me whatever shithead name you want to, but I'd rather be right than a shithead. And on these, I'm right. Okay? If, and, and, and you know what? Even President Trump, I saw him in 2019 at a veterans event, oddly enough, and he came up to me, he said, Eric, you were right. I should have listened to you on Afghanistan. I said, ah, Mr. President, that's the only time I saw him when he was president of the United States, in person. I said, please, there's still time. Give us a chance to do this.

• 3:02:12Erik Prince?

  Sadly, no. But again, he never really controlled his national security apparatus. Mark Esper, terrible SecDef. So again, if you keep drawing from the well that is Washington DC, we'll keep having the same failures. And anybody that says Iraq was a great success, or Afghanistan, I mean, I will never forget the image of thousands of people running ahead of, alongside of, and grabbing onto C-17s that are taking off. What an awful image.

• 3:02:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:44Erik Prince?

  And from the beginning, in whatever paper I submitted, I said, I want to prevent the rooftop, the helicopter off the rooftop moment. Because I was six years old when that happened in Saigon in 75, and I still remember that. And that image of Afghanistan is one that every friend or foe of America around the world remembers, and it is a huge fucking black eye.

• 3:03:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yes, it is. Let's move into the Volgner Group.

• 3:03:16Erik Prince?

  Yes, so

• 3:03:22Erik Prince?

  the Russians have woken up to, well, I'd say they continued on with a with a spectrum of conflict, right? And I'll back up even further in saying in 2011, while I lived in the Middle East, while the Biden, the Obama administration was in their Great Reset with Russia, and they were going to be pals with them, the Russians actually invited me to Moscow and pitched me and said, please come and build a Blackwater capability here. In Russia.

• 3:03:55Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, sure.

• 3:03:55Erik Prince?

  Yeah. Yeah, I went shooting with their Alpha Group, their elite tier-one unit. Had beers with them after that, and they had explained that they had done 300 kill capture missions inside of Russia in the previous year, because they had still problems in Chechnya and Dagestan. And remember that they lost 15,000 troops in the late 90s, early 2000s, fighting in Chechnya and Grozny, and Dagestan. So they had their own issues to wrestle with. But they wanted to build a hybrid capability, and I said, thanks, but I can't do that.

• 3:04:37Erik Prince?

  And sure enough, two, three years later, they roll out, you see, you hear the stories about these little green men of not necessarily military guys seizing all these key objectives when the Russians seize the Crimea and the Donbass and the contested areas now in eastern Ukraine. And then you see them, use them in Syria to pretty great effect. Not great, I would say effective for them. They use them in Madagascar, in Central African Republic, now in Mali, in Libya, and certainly in Ukraine now as part of their, their major combat operation.

• 3:05:16Erik Prince?

  Wagner Group offers, I would say, the, the whole spectrum of support, whether it's political messaging, propaganda, social media manipulation on one end, through training of police, military, border units, that kind of thing, all the way up to full-on combat formations, battalion size, even brigade size, um, activity. And it's a, an extension of the Russian state, but yet, uh, deniable enough. I mean, the reason, right, you heard about a big firefight between some US soft guys

• 3:05:54Erik Prince?

  in Syria, um, in the east of Syria, um, I can't think of where the oil field was. It'll come back to me. But that oil field had been producing 400,000 barrels a day. It was Syrians' oil supply, and the US was sitting on it. And Wagner guys and some Syrian army guys were going to take it. Why? Because they wanted the oil. They wanted to turn that energy supply back on, and it was kind of a, um, it was a prize that they were after. So, the Russians use that capability as a, as an extension of Kremlin

• 3:06:33Erik Prince?

  Political desires with the deniability that comes from not being necessarily a function of the Russian state.

• 3:06:39Shawn Ryan?

  And they asked you to build that?

• 3:06:41Erik Prince?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:42Shawn Ryan?

  When was that?

• 3:06:43Erik Prince?

  Two thousand and eleven.

• 3:06:44Shawn Ryan?

  So if you were a war profiteer, which very commonly follows your name in the press, you one hundred percent would have done that, but you didn't.

• 3:06:54Erik Prince?

  Yeah, I would have been a multi-billionaire, which I am definitely not. But, no, I, in, in, you know, the funny thing is, you know, there's, there's a lot of contractors in history that have, that have fought under many flags. And even John Paul Jones, who's, who died in the service of, of Russia. And they brought him back from, from Russia. He's buried at the, he's buried under the chapel in Annapolis at the academy. And I think he's buried in vodka, in a, in a vodka-filled cask.

• 3:07:28Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 3:07:29Erik Prince?

  Kind of appropriate.

• 3:07:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. What about, what do you think about the weaponization of government agencies?

• 3:07:37Erik Prince?

  It's extremely dangerous. It's, and this is why, this is why I hate these perpetual wars, right? Because the state, as, as any state grows, it grows at the expense of individual liberty. And when you don't put the fires out overseas in the smallest, most precise surgical scalpel-like manner, when you start using a sledgehammer instead of a needle, and all the bloat and all the other tools that you use to try to fight those wars, instead of finishing something

• 3:08:20Erik Prince?

  quickly, cleverly, all those tools eventually get turned on the populace. And that's hugely dangerous, and that's antithetical to American liberty. And so, as I said before, the real...

• 3:08:35Erik Prince?

  The real constitutional crisis we have in America is that we have four branches of government. Instead of three. We're supposed to have three, we have four. And that fourth is that permanent state bureaucracy that is unaccountable and they start to use and abuse those tools. For the benefit of one political party. And that's unacceptable. And that's the shit that that makes people do more radical things to push back. Has that affected you at all personally? Yeah, sure.

• 3:09:04Erik Prince?

  Even when, um, you know, the whole reason I got caught up in the Mueller investigation. Was because I was invited back to meet, um. Some UAE leadership after Trump was elected. Uh, but before the inauguration, right? So there's still Obama people in charge at the NSC. And months later. They leaked the transcripts and, and the, and the fact that I was in the UAE and they spun this. Wild ass conspiracy that I was there meeting some Russian fund manager and it was all to establish a back channel to Russia. Wait a minute. This already, this, this, this meeting alleged to have happened two months after the US election. How was I establishing some back channel to Russia to affect the US election?

• 3:09:49Erik Prince?

  So it's just. That's the kind of nonsense. And again, lots of legal fees. Seized phones, all the bullshit and, and the, that weaponization, right? Whether it's. The constant, um. Uh, bombardment in the media of bullshit that makes it banking harder, that makes capital raising harder. All the rest. I'm a, um, I'm a pretty stubborn, resilient guy and I'll, I'll keep pushing through it, but, um. This shit's gotta end at some point. Yeah.

• 3:10:24Erik Prince?

  There must be consequences. Does the IRS come after you as well? They've all come after me at some point.

• 3:10:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:32Erik Prince?

  I mean, look, it was the, obviously, it was the hottest by far after the

• 3:10:39Erik Prince?

  the Nasser Square incident, when the Democrats just focused on destroying Blackwater and destroying me. And, you know, that was the real relief for the Raven 23 guys to finally be pardoned. Those were the last. Look, the business had been smashed at that point, but I felt like I had four people held very unjustly. And it was such a relief to have them out and have them back with their families. And you know, and to hear the stories from the guys,

• 3:11:11Erik Prince?

  none of them joined gangs.

• 3:11:14Erik Prince?

  The, the pressure that you hear about being in a maximum security federal prison where there were some bad hombres. And none of the white supremacist gangs or the Muslim gangs or this gang, none of them came after the Blackwater guys because they had this, kind of this aura of they were Blackwater guys, so stay away and, and a number of them said that they had corrections officers that would say to them every night when they had to shut their cell, I'm so sorry to have to do this to you.

• 3:11:42Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 3:11:43Erik Prince?

  You don't belong to be here.

• 3:11:47Erik Prince?

  So I, I'm, I commend them for having as positive an attitude as they do. And it puts in perspective whatever bullshit I've had to go through, that they literally lost a numbers of years of their life and they're now doing well at putting it back together.

• 3:12:04Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, they lost what from 2007 to what, a year ago, less than a year ago, last December. Do you feel any resentment towards the country or, I mean, how do you? I'm gonna be, I feel resentment on how veterans are treated on, on when I look at the, those pardons up there that are framed, when I look at Eddie Gallagher's charges. I feel a lot of fucking resentment towards.

• 3:12:35Shawn Ryan?

  The American population. Nobody fucking goes to bat for us. I feel like these guys are being hung out to dry. Nobody gives a shit. It really, really fucking pisses me off.

• 3:12:47Erik Prince?

  It's not.

• 3:12:49Shawn Ryan?

  And I haven't been through.

• 3:12:52Shawn Ryan?

  It doesn't even, it's whatever. It's not a fraction compared to what those men went through, what, what, what, how they've come after and smeared your name, vilified you.

• 3:13:03Erik Prince?

  Look.

• 3:13:05Erik Prince?

  I don't think it's fair to blame the American population per se, and this is why. Cause the average American wakes up every morning and they gotta figure out how to get their kids to school. Hopefully they did their homework, right? They gotta get to work and increasingly it has to be a two salary home. Because, because of the, the reduction in real wages that an average worker can earn, right? And we'll go into why that is. And they gotta pay taxes and, and all the rest. And so their, their 99% of their day is focused on just getting through the day and feeding their family and, and doing what they're supposed to be doing.

• 3:13:47Erik Prince?

  And they outsource, right? We have a republic. We don't have a democracy. We have a republic that we have elected officials that are supposed to be smart and, and um serving the general good. That we send forward for us to, uh, to make those decisions on our behalf. And I think the real lesson of COVID is the greatness of the federal system. Okay? Because my God, if all, any and all decisions were only made in Washington DC, then we would truly be screwed. But thank God, right? I think it's a great lesson that mayors matter, that county councils matter.

• 3:14:29Erik Prince?

  And you know, that principle of subsidiarity, that it's best to make decisions as close to where they affect you as possible. And to not let that be made in a far off land. And so it's also a reminder that state governments really matter. And good governors are great and bad governors, holy shit. And you see the exodus from bad, poorly run states, running towards good run states. And I hope that the people that left those badly run states don't take their leftist, bad policies with them.

• 3:15:02Erik Prince?

  And so now it comes to Washington where we truly have a runaway size and scope of federal government that makes decisions without any accountability. And some of that comes back to decisions made a long time ago, like in the progressive era, 100 years ago, when they pushed through income tax, right? Because America used to be run only on tariffs, on the import, on a tax on any goods that were imported to America. That's it. The federal government rightly was small. What is the most successful political party platform in the last century? The Socialist Workers Party.

• 3:15:45Erik Prince?

  Their party platform of the 20s was cradle to grave welfare, social security, direct income tax, basically cradle to grave socialism. That has been not only adopted by the Democratic Party platform, but it's been adopted into law, even voted on and approved on a continuing basis by many Republicans. They also changed to direct election of senators, right? The founding fathers had it right that when a, of course, the House is voted every two years, direct from the people. The Senate was supposed to come from a choice from the state legislatures, so that the

• 3:16:27Erik Prince?

  state of Tennessee would elect two senators from the Tennessee State Legislature and send it forward to Washington. So that those senators did the bidding and did the protection of those states' rights. And when we went away from that, now that senator, eh, yeah, they might be elected by the state, but all the money for their campaign can come from some national interest group generally focused on growing the size of government or enlarging the monopoly or duopoly enjoyed by some, some large corporation that's unregulated.

• 3:17:05Erik Prince?

  So between that, as the government grows, and I'd say the other real thing we need to push back on is to remember the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, right? All powers not specifically delegated to the state, to the federal government, remain the sole purview of the states. And so that pendulum has swung way too far towards Washington. We need to swing that back towards, um, towards states' rights, towards smaller government, into more decisions being made at the state and local level. I think the other great challenge we face economically, right? So for the last 70 years, we've enjoyed the dollar being the world's reserve currency, right?

• 3:17:49Erik Prince?

  All major trades in oil, in, in foreign trade, in grains, in, in agroproducts, all clears in dollars, okay? And what that allows Washington to do is spend trillions of dollars extra. We spent, now we're at, the national debt is like $33 trillion. And that's up almost double in the last 15, 18 years. I mean, extraordinary rate of spending. The problem, right, and, and part of that, part of the, of the aura, or the, the facade of the, of the dollar being the world's reserve

• 3:18:31Erik Prince?

  currency is that there's this American military hegemony, right? We have this amazing military that can smack any target, anytime, anywhere. And, and when you have the debacle that was Afghanistan, a failure in Iraq, a failure of deterrence in Ukraine, and we'll talk about Taiwan next, when you have those kinds of setbacks, and now, right, when, when...

• 3:18:55Erik Prince?

  When that failure of deterrence now leads to conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and now everybody goes hog wild on sanctioning everything Russia, right? Russia is still the largest energy producer in the world. They're gonna sell their self, they're gonna sell their stuff somewhere, and somebody's gonna buy it, right? Less than half of the world, less than half of all the countries at the UN actually signed on to sanctions against Russia, right? Which leads all those other countries outside of that sanction still going to trade with Russia. And so what does Russia demand? They want to be paid in rubles.

• 3:19:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:31Erik Prince?

  And they'll trade with India, who can pay with rupees, and the Chinese will pay with renminbi, right? So they call it the three Rs. And so they create a trading block to further reduce the hegemony that the dollar has in trade. And so, trust me, bank on this. When, when the dollar loses that status, then our idiots in Washington can't spend an extra trillion dollars a year, like we do almost every year, in debt. And when America has to finally live within its means and start to pay that debt back, holy shit, that is, that is society transforming level change.

• 3:20:09Shawn Ryan?

  What does that look like?

• 3:20:10Erik Prince?

  And it's coming soon. It's a diet. It is, it's this, this nature, and it's good and it's bad, in yin and yang, right? It is short-term, real pain. Recession, depression, severe distortions of the economy, but putting Washington on a diet is not a, not a terrible idea. Because you will throw out a lot of the crazy, woke insanity that has been, that has been, not just in Washington, that's even been seeping down to the state level with all the federal grants that flow everywhere else. If we have to get back to basics as a country, then it'll be run a lot more like hometown

• 3:20:55Erik Prince?

  America and not like Washington DC, New York, or LA, or San Francisco for that matter.

• 3:21:01Shawn Ryan?

  How long do you think that could take to play out? And is it inevitable we're going there?

• 3:21:10Erik Prince?

  I'm not some great economist visionary, but just looking at what's happened in the past, right? When, and what's scary about it all. You took a country like Germany that lost World War I. And they printed and printed and printed money. And the mighty history of the German Prussian society collapsed. And all that wealth was destroyed because it went from, you know, one mark, one German mark to buy a loaf of bread, up to a billion marks to buy a loaf of bread. Just hyperinflation that ran away.

• 3:21:55Erik Prince?

  And the German society elected a psychopath like Adolf Hitler. And that's the, that's the kind of insanity we have to prevent. Uh, because, look, the United States and the constitutional government we, we live under is still the greatest form of government on earth, on this planet that has ever been done. And it is worth protecting. It is worth, um, returning to those original roots. Because the alternatives, right? There's, there's nowhere else to go, right? The other thing that, uh, was alarming to me.

• 3:22:36Erik Prince?

  There was a poll done about three weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was a Quinnipiac poll, right? Not a right wing poll at all. And it said, how many people in America, if the country was invaded, would stay and fight? Seventy-five percent of Republicans said, less than 50% of Democrats. No, I'm sorry, 40% of Democrats said they would stay and fight to defend the country. Both those numbers were way too low. Yeah. And so, you know, a country is a country when its people have some commonly held beliefs, right? That's, that's generally a description of what makes a society.

• 3:23:20Erik Prince?

  And we as a society can't even agree on what is male and female anymore, then we have some real fundamental problems. Yeah.

• 3:23:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, we do. Let's move into China taking Taiwan.

• 3:23:37Erik Prince?

  Sure. Look, Taiwan, right, was the island of Formosa until 1949, when the nationalist government got pushed out of mainland China by the Communist Party. Right, the nationalists lost the civil war, they go to Taiwan, they go to Formosa, now it becomes the island of Taiwan. And a, and be the politics back and forth from 1949 till now. It's not fully independent, not recognized as independent. But the Chinese, the Chinese Communist Party hates the idea of Taiwan, wants to reabsorb it, exactly like they've done to Hong Kong, fully.

• 3:24:21Erik Prince?

  Because Taiwan is Han Chinese culture, but on freedom, not on communism. And so even that, that irritant of 30 million Taiwanese, living, breathing, speaking, traveling freely, is antithetical to the CCP control that they demand on the entire 1.4 billion Chinese citizens. And so they have made it their policy for a long time now to retake it, and they've spent billions and ten, hundreds of billions of dollars, building their military, building a capability to retake it by force.

• 3:25:01Erik Prince?

  I think the, the stumbles of the Russians invading Ukraine have certainly given them some pause because Russia was their main, certainly their main military supplier, and their mentor, and had a lot of respect for the Russian military, and to see it stumble as badly as they have, will certainly give them pause. An amphibious invasion... As you know, being a frogman, is the hardest kind of invasion to do, right? And it's one thing if you're a tank division on the Russian side of the border in Ukraine, you let the clutch out and you roll across the border. But doing an amphibious operation across 70 miles of open ocean, onto a rocky island, generally into an urban area where there's a mount immediately,

• 3:25:46Erik Prince?

  with a lot of sanctuary inland that opposition forces can hide and fight and rally from and from the tunnel and cave system. That is a more complex problem. And so I hope the Taiwanese take their defense seriously. The idea of Americans going and fighting there, I have a real issue with. When the Taiwanese are not even spending 2% of their GDP, like most of our NATO so-called partners are not spending 2% of their budgets on defense.

• 3:26:19Erik Prince?

  When the Taiwanese wake up and do that,

• 3:26:25Erik Prince?

  you know, well,

• 3:26:29Erik Prince?

  I hope the Taiwanese are not depending on US government to save them. Because they will be sorely disappointed. And the other thing that's challenging, right? So if you're China, it wouldn't lead with a straight-out invasion. They'll probably cause some issue or some crisis on some of the smaller islands owned by Taiwan, right? Where there's a 100 or 200-man garrison of Taiwanese soldiers. And I can see the CCP sending their maritime militia, which is basically a fishing fleet with some soldiers onboard to go and seize some of those islands like they've done throughout the South China Sea, even some of those from the Philippines. In my travels in China,

• 3:27:13Erik Prince?

  I actually met the CEO of the Chinese state-owned enterprise. I think it was like China Port and Dredging Company that built all those islands in the South China Sea. And he said, we never had it in our wildest dreams to build those islands. But we found the Obama administration to be so vapid that we just took it.

• 3:27:38Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 3:27:39Erik Prince?

  Go. And so now they've built dozens of bases all through the South China Sea.

• 3:27:48Erik Prince?

  And of course, they first said, well, it's just for trade purposes and for we're going to watch the weather. And now, of course, they're fully weaponized with surface air missiles and surface to surface and airfields and ports. And they built little fixed aircraft carriers all through the the South China Sea. And I understand why they're doing that. I don't agree with it. But remember, every threat, right? You've heard of the Great Wall of China, right? And that was to prevent Mongol horsemen from coming in from the north, right? Off of off of Mongolia and and the Russian steppe. So they built that wall a millennia ago to stop that. This time, the Chinese built a great maritime wall of China.

• 3:28:29Erik Prince?

  Because every problem they've had during what they call the the century of humiliation, which started in the 1840s with the Opium Wars in the British, right? Which led to the the Hong Kong Kowloon Trade Colony.

• 3:28:46Erik Prince?

  First, it was the Brits, then it was the Americans 20, 30 years later. And then the boxer issue where the Chinese resisted against all the Western trade colonies that were in in China around Shanghai. And then, of course, the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy, all of those problems came by sea. And so China is trying to move their buffer out by doing that to the detriment of all their neighbors. And it's probably had more of an effect of bringing all the neighbors together against China than than what they really bargained for.

• 3:29:19Shawn Ryan?

  What does it look like for the world if they do take Taiwan?

• 3:29:25Erik Prince?

  Well, if they, if it's a, here's the thing. Putin kind of believed his own, he believed his own bullshit from his generals and intelligence chiefs that hey, don't worry, we're gonna roll in there, they're gonna welcome us as heroes and it's all gonna be over in a few days. And it was clearly not the case. And as imperfect as Ukrainian democracy might be, I have to commend the people that they showed up to fight. Right? Some of the women left the country, the men went and did their part and, and got it on. Good on them. If Taiwan can organize itself to, to block and hold and to prevent an immediate collapse of the, of the government and to keep resisting,

• 3:30:12Erik Prince?

  it will force the rest of the world to, to get them aid somehow and to close off and to sanction China. Uh, and to make it more isolated. And so that's the, I think that's the calculus that Xi Jinping and the, the Standing Committee and the Politburo have to figure out. Cause remember, they've spent hundreds of billions of dollars building their military. Still untested. All those senior officers, and as much as we might complain about US senior officers, all the Chinese senior officers have bought and paid for their positions. Their political generals completely nothing based on merit to get to those kind of ranks in the Chinese Communist Party.

• 3:30:56Erik Prince?

  So, so the question of amphibious operation, hard.

• 3:31:03Erik Prince?

  Do they really know what the will of the Taiwanese people are? Right? Cause if there's 29 million people

• 3:31:10Erik Prince?

  and only, what, 3% decide to stand and fight? 3% of 29 is still a lot of people, especially fighting from a, from, from an urban defendable terrain.

• 3:31:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:31:24Shawn Ryan?

  What about the computer chip? I mean.

• 3:31:27Erik Prince?

  Taiwan's, yeah, look, the amount of computer chip production that's in Taiwan is significant. And I think Taiwan Semiconductor is spending $10 billion in Arizona right now building factories. That's good. That's again, instead of spending $40 billion to Ukraine, let's spend more money or give a loan guarantee or something to move more of that capacity to America. I think all the supply chain debacle we're feeling in the United States is a stark reminder that things can go to shit pretty quickly. Right? Whether it's being dependent on China for things as simple as antibiotics and Advil or painkillers or PP or personal protective equipment

• 3:32:13Erik Prince?

  or computer chips or batteries for cars or whatever. Look, the

• 3:32:21Erik Prince?

  the free trade promise of NAFTA and of admitting China into the World Trade Organization

• 3:32:30Erik Prince?

  was an elite decision made in Washington that has largely enriched the coastal elites and the private equity crowd. And it has hollowed out many or most of Middle America. Right? It's led to wage depression. It's led to a lot of unemployment, to opiate addiction, all those, those bad things that come from despair. Like I said, a few minutes ago, of that average guy that wakes up every morning and is trying to feed his family, get their kids off to school and, and keep a roof hole for their head. They outsource the decision making to the people that are supposed to be smart. And the elites in America have let us down again and again and again.

• 3:33:11Erik Prince?

  And now I think the next administration, there has to be choices made.

• 3:33:18Erik Prince?

  When you look at how America, right after World War II, it's like the Cold War started immediately. And so we kind of immediately, it was us and them. It was a pro-freedom capitalism market versus a Soviet government-controlled, no liberty, right? You're owned by the state. With China, the paradigm was if we, by trading with them and providing them technology, we make China rich, that will make them like us. And that has proven to be an absolute fallacy. And so by making them rich, they've actually hurt a huge segment of our economy, of our manufacturing base, which has all been shipped to China.

• 3:34:03Erik Prince?

  And they continue to steal technology without limitation. And they've kind of continued their same, I would say totalitarian policies. And now, even at the point now of putting in the whole social credit score and the monitoring and the surveillance state, it's kind of an Orwellian nightmare gone amok. And so seeing that enough in China, I will fight with every last drop of my blood to prevent that paradigm from soaking into America.

• 3:34:40Shawn Ryan?

  Moving into our last topic, what does the future of warfare look like? With all the new tech that's coming out, it's already, I mean, in the past 20 years, it's completely different out there on the battlefield. And where do you think we're headed?

• 3:34:57Erik Prince?

  Well, as that siege in Mariupol showed, that combat still comes down to controlling block by block, bunker by bunker, and that combat is not surgical, clean, technical, or whatever. And that it still comes down to controlling ground. And, you know, military victories drive diplomatic breakthroughs. So the future of warfare, however people want to think that we can techno-wizardry our way into success, yes, tech certainly has a role. And, you know, think of it this way.

• 3:35:41Erik Prince?

  The Pentagon talks about strategic offsets. Like what is the strategic advantage that we have that our enemies don't have? So that we can always be assured of a win, right? The first strategic offset was nuclear weapons. Right, we're trying to always be out in front of the Soviets to out-nuke them if we had to. Then it went to precision strike, right? Like what we rolled out in the mid 80s to 90s, which you saw in Gulf War I, Gulf War II, now taken to an extreme amount where you can smoke a guy in a moving, you know, SUV and kill one guy in the car, but not somebody outside the car, right? The most surgical precision strike because, you know,

• 3:36:26Erik Prince?

  that's, that's the mandate. But now, precision strike is in the hands of everybody from ISIS, right? Who can fly a drone and with a camera, drop a grenade from 2,000 feet in the air and, and fly and, and drop that grenade through a, a open hatch on Humvee. When it's proliferated to that level, when you can do precision strike with stuff that you can pull together from a Radio Shack, we clearly don't have the monopoly there anymore. So then it will be, I think, um, it's gonna have to come down to autonomy and some kind of autonomous weapons that can fly in a largely 100% jammed environment and still try to find this objective and, and destroy it.

• 3:37:09Erik Prince?

  So, communication, navigation, become exceedingly difficult, I think. Um, if you're China and you wanna figure out how do we blind America? What are they dependent on? Comms. They've over-commed themselves to death. Um, so they probably, maybe they crank off an EMP in, um, in the atmosphere somewhere to block or to either fry or, or block that satellite transmission.

• 3:37:39Erik Prince?

  How do you navigate? I think it's very important to teach people celestial navigation and all the basics of when all the other tech is stripped away, what are you left with? So it's, I think there's nothing that new in warfare. It's just how you apply some new toy, new, new tools in, in old ways.

• 3:38:05Shawn Ryan?

  What about propaganda?

• 3:38:06Erik Prince?

  Think about the other thing, right? Despite all the tech, weather still matters. Weather so far in Ukraine has totally been on the side of the defender. The, the, because Ukraine has got lots of farm fields. And what are farm fields covered with snow? They're muddy unless it's frozen super hard, which even by the time Putin had invaded, that was starting to fade. So now all his heavy armor vehicles and truck and logistics support are channeled on to very narrow, very defined roads, which are easy to target by ambush or artillery or whatever. But now as the fields dry in Ukraine, as we get towards June, right?

• 3:38:50Erik Prince?

  The biggest tank battle in history was June 3, the Battle of Kursk, just north of where they're fighting now. Because the fields could dry, so you had massive maneuver spaces for those kind of armor forces. So that's still well within the realm of possible.

• 3:39:08Shawn Ryan?

  How much propaganda do you think? Or how much does propaganda have a role in the future?

• 3:39:14Erik Prince?

  Of course it does.

• 3:39:15Shawn Ryan?

  It's always, it's always had. It's getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

• 3:39:18Erik Prince?

  It's, it, look, propaganda has always had a role in, in warfare and it's, as we become more and more glued to our phones and what's pushed in front of us, it's.

• 3:39:35Erik Prince?

  It definitely affects the morale, the will to fight or the will not to fight, uh, or to help somebody. And the Ukrainians have done a very good job of, uh, of ringing that bell for, uh, for propaganda, right? I mean, again, Zelensky has come out with some great one-liners, very photogenic stuff, and, um, uh, they have, and, and look, in defense of them, it's their country, they were clearly invaded, um, it's not like the Ukrainians were actually threatening to, uh, to invade Russia.

• 3:40:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:40:10Erik Prince?

  There's a, there's a, there's a pretty clear aggressor here, so it's pretty easy to pile on, uh, with propaganda on top of that.

• 3:40:17Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think the biggest threat to the United States is at this point?

• 3:40:22Erik Prince?

  Our biggest threat is internal, is again, if we can't even agree on what's male and female anymore, if we can't even agree on what is a free and fair election, if we can't even agree, right? And because the other attribute of a country is something that has defined and defended borders, right? So we have one party that's intentionally erasing borders, that is doing, I would say, some very questionable things around elections. If you haven't seen the movie 2000 Mules, watch it. I don't think anybody can say that the, the 2020 election was the freest and fairest in history after watching that, right? If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's a duck. Um, and so that kind

• 3:41:02Erik Prince?

  of election fraud must not happen again. And I think the, uh, the rule by elites, um, has led us down a, uh, an extremely dangerous path. Um, the hegemony that America has experienced, right? Cause we came out of World War II with a massive industrial base, undamaged by war, right? Japan, smoked. Germany, smoked. Russia, smoked. We put some money into some of those places to help rebuild them, but those economies came roaring back. But we have been kind of, where we've kind of become like a, an obese triathlete.

• 3:41:46Erik Prince?

  Um, we're still kind of running, we're still kind of at it, but we're, we're not in our prime shape right now because we've done a lot of, um, incremental bad habits which have never been cleaned up.

• 3:42:00Shawn Ryan?

  So you think the recession is gonna pull us out of this?

• 3:42:05Erik Prince?

  What do you mean, pull us down?

• 3:42:07Shawn Ryan?

  No, pull us, we're gonna come out. We had talked earlier about a recession, maybe a depression.

• 3:42:12Erik Prince?

  Uh, well, look, there's, there's, there's definitely going to be, we can't have, uh, the, the, there's been so much stimulus thrown at the economy. That's why there's so much inflation right now. And so you have to soak up some of that excess funds with a higher interest rate. And that's going to cause a contraction in economic activity. And so the question is, you know, like Paul Volcker, the Chairman of the Fed in the 1980s for Reagan, right? He ran interest rates quite high and there was some pretty strong medicine for a couple of years. Um, which soaked up the inflation, but at the same time Reagan was cutting, cutting taxes and cutting regulations and, and kind of taking the boot off the neck of the American entrepreneur.

• 3:42:56Erik Prince?

  In what was then a much more competitive economy that we have now. Because we've allowed so much concentration in so many industries where you only have one or two major competitors in most of these places. So whether it's a single maker or a single buyer of a product, in both cases, the consumer gets screwed. So the next presidency has to have a massively increased Federal Trade Commission, DOJ that's focused on, on, on breaking up monopolistic activity. And return competition, and that will allow people's wages to, uh, to rise again.

• 3:43:35Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I want to wrap this interview up and, and, and this is a phenomenal interview. Thank you for being here.

• 3:43:41Erik Prince?

  Thanks for having me.

• 3:43:42Shawn Ryan?

  What's next for you? What do you got coming up?

• 3:43:46Erik Prince?

  Um, working on some things in the communication space. That will be spectacular and I'll come back and talk to you about it when I do.

• 3:43:53Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect. All right. Well, best of luck to you and seriously, I really appreciate it. It's been an honor.

• 3:43:58Erik Prince?

  Cheers.