Pod Insights Shawn Ryan Show #76 Erik Prince - China vs Taiwan, JFK Assassination, Ad ID Tracking & Social Credit | Part 2 About this episode Part 2 of this episode covers growing conflict on the world stage and secrecy here at home. Shawn & Erik discuss growing tensions between China & Taiwan. How likely is a CCP invasion of the island? What role will the US play in that conflict? Does Taiwan even stand a chance? Have all of these questions answered by Prince, one of the foremost authorities on foreign policy and global security operations.
Prince also brings a new perspective to the JFK assassination and classified reports. We also dig into social credit scores and the future of the US dollar. This episode will keep you "in the know."
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Transcript 12,037 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, theHouseMajorityPact.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
0:30 Speaker 01 Hey, Spotify listeners. When you travel with American Airlines, you'll enjoy comfort and convenience at every altitude. Before takeoff, unwind in the Admirals Club Lounge with curated self-serve offerings of hearty bites and refreshments. In flight, stay connected with high-speed Wi-Fi. Sponsored by AT&T. Your journey is designed to feel easy from the moment you check in to the moment you arrive. No matter where you're going, American gets you there. Book now at aa.com.
0:55 Shawn Ryan? Previously on The Sean Ryan Show.
1:01 Shawn Ryan? I mean, I just, I don't see a way out of this. I just talked to this guy last week. He's part of the Afghan Resistance.
1:08 Erik Prince? That is the true disconnect of reality, of what's important in Washington versus what our opponents are thinking about.
1:15 Shawn Ryan? Russia, Ukraine's always at the top of the media headlines.
1:19 Erik Prince? Vladimir Putin is a traditionally trained KGB officer, operated in the 90s, in the 80s, at the height of the Cold War.
1:30 Shawn Ryan? What is our motivation? What is our real motivation to be there?
1:36 Erik Prince? It's that neocon attitude of weaken Russia, destroy Russia, all the rest. The promises that were made. Hey, we're not going to extend NATO farther east. The neocon paradigm that is dominant in the Democrat foreign policy now is one that Russia must be destroyed, and embarrassed, and brought to heel, et cetera.
1:58 Shawn Ryan? Back to the Wagner Group.
2:01 Shawn Ryan? Leader was just shot down a couple of weeks ago.
2:04 Erik Prince? Yep.
2:04 Shawn Ryan? What was that?
2:06 Erik Prince? You see the images of them in St. Petersburg together, and he gives them the embrace. I don't know, was that like the kiss of death?
2:10 Shawn Ryan? When we get back, we'll start diving into Frontier Group.
2:20 Shawn Ryan? Hey everybody, this is part two of the Erik Prince episode. Once again, this episode has been censored by me to fit the YouTube community guidelines. If you want to see the uncensored version, it is over on my Patreon. Please head over to Apple and Spotify, leave us a review for the podcast. Tell us how we're doing and once again, we see you guys taking our content, making these cool reels and helping promote the show. We made it easy on you. There's a link below. There are thousands of reels from all the episodes. You can download them for free, turn them into your own creation, send them out into the world, make money on them, monetize them.
2:59 Shawn Ryan? All we ask is that you give credit to the Sean Ryan Show. All right, and thank you all for doing it. Cheers, everybody. Have a great rest of your week. Much love.
3:16 Shawn Ryan? All right, Eric, we're back from the break. We're going to talk about Frontier Group. What is it?
3:23 Erik Prince? Well, I, um, after I sold BW, it closed, the sale closed in 210 and I'd moved to the UAE because of Somali piracy and because they wanted to do something about it. And so I was advisor for a program which ended Somali piracy and I talked about that last time.
3:46 Shawn Ryan? We did.
3:48 Erik Prince? And that worked and I thought, you know, if, um, if we can do operations against pirates across hundreds of miles of unmanaged roads in Somalia, then building a mine or doing whatever in, um, in the likes of Africa maybe isn't impossible. So I started Frontier Resource Group, which was focused on Um, early stage development of mining, um, geoscience exploration kind of stuff in the, in the African mineral space. And then, um, while I was traveling around the world trying to raise money, passed through Hong Kong, and a tycoon said, please come and
4:29 Erik Prince? build a logistics company here that will focus on, uh, supporting big Chinese projects in Africa because they have a terrible problem with transportation and security. And so that's what started Frontier Service Group, which was a Hong Kong listed company that, um, ended up, uh, buying and operating an air operation in Kenya, which did medevac and VIP transport. In fact, it actually, uh, did a lot of medevac support for the USG in Somalia. In fact, whenever the Africom commander would visit Somalia, he would fly on a, uh, on an aircraft from Phoenix Aviation, which was based in Nairobi. So, um, and
5:14 Erik Prince? it owned a trucking company in South Africa, which did trucking of groceries and consumer goods from Cape Town and Durban all the way up through the DRC, um, uh, through Malawi, Zim, et cetera. Did a fishing program in Mozambique for a couple of years, managing a tuna fleet, and then also did a, um, air charter operation, air cargo operation out of Malta. And it actually managed some, uh, some business jets there, which for the likes of Madonna and Guns N' Roses and that kind of stuff. So, people have mischaracterized
5:55 Erik Prince? it as a PMC. Uh, there was no armed people, uh, working for the company. It was a really interesting window into how China Inc. works. And I left as more and more mainland money got involved. CITIC Group, which is the, I don't know if it's the largest, but it was the original SOE, state-owned enterprise, became a bigger and bigger investor in the company. And when they, uh, they started requiring CCP membership committee meetings and all the rest, that was, I was out. So I think that was two and a half, almost three years ago.
6:34 Erik Prince? But seeing how slow the decision-making process was and how everything is political on the Chinese side, it really, I got to understand how Beijing makes his decisions and how all things, all decision-making is really directed towards what the CCP wants. And I really, you know, I got frustrated because there was a, we've had a string of bad CEOs and there was a Chinese guy that we just, the board could not fire. All I was, was I was a chairman for a while and then just a board member. Couldn't get rid of this guy. Nobody, it was failing, couldn't do it. And I read a rather interesting book called The Party.
7:18 Erik Prince? And it's a really inside look as to how the CCP is organized. And they actually have a, a general personnel department that assigns people into certain roles, whether it's into a company, into a private company, into a government ministry or whatever. But people are very concerned about China taking over Africa. They have, they have a bit of a head start, but it's a very fixable problem as well because they don't do local development the way a Western company does. Everything, if China goes to build a mine or a project somewhere in Africa, they take everything with them from China, down to the guy that cooks noodles and the barber.
8:03 Erik Prince? I mean, everything. They don't do any kind of local empowerment, extremely racist, extremely abusive towards the locals. And so all those governments are quite happy to have Western capital and Western, Western quality of work, but the Chinese do black bag diplomacy very, very well. And, and so even the, again, the law of unintended consequences of all the anti-corruption stuff that the US pushes for, which is a legitimate noble goal, but it makes it so that it's very difficult for any Western companies to go operate in a Very challenged corrupt environment. Even the French, right?
8:44 Erik Prince? The French have a bribery issue. They can actually deduct it on their taxes.
8:52 Shawn Ryan? Really?
8:53 Erik Prince? Yeah. So it's, it's probably appropriate that it's in some places that are not the United States. That is just how business is done. And yes, we should fight against it, but there are some things that America can't control. And I think Washington needs to probably realize that. But so China pushing into a vacuum. If a country needs, at the same time, the US is saying, we're going to help you with your gender issues and your, whatever that might be, or green transformation in a country where people don't have electricity, don't have a, an all-weather road they can use, or access to clean water, the US is pushing gender issues. It is a mismatch of, of wants versus needs.
9:38 Erik Prince? But China will come in and say,
9:40 Shawn Ryan? It's a huge miscalculation.
9:42 Erik Prince? It's grotesque.
9:43 Shawn Ryan? To think that these people give a shit about gender ideology when they do not have running water or electricity.
9:50 Erik Prince? Correct. Or when the, or when the wife has to walk miles every day to go cut down wood and gather wood to drag it back to cook with, when you could develop hydrocarbons or a lot of other stuff to, to, to make their lives better. But China will come in and offer, if there's a road or a dam or whatever needed, they say, they, they basically come in at about three to four times what should be market retail price. And of course, it's, it's ridiculous, but if they're pushing into a vacuum and that's your only option, they take it and they make it easier because they pay off the president, the minister of mines, the minister of energy or whatever to do that.
10:32 Erik Prince? I talked about it last time, the, in the basement of the foreign ministry in Beijing, there's a hall, there's like a vault room where they take that leader, when they come to Beijing and they walk them to that safe deposit box and it's got their name on it and they open it up and there's gold or cash or diamonds or whatever and they say, this is yours for when you retire, as long as you play ball with us.
10:56 Erik Prince? That's, that is the Chinese way and, but again, most of Africa desperately wants to do business with America. They want Western investors, but it's, it's a, that's probably one of the best things the Trump administration did is they changed development finance. Well, it used to be OPEC, Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and they changed it to Development Finance Corporation, and they grew its balance sheet from 24 billion to like 65 billion. And they, fortunately, they took the money away from AID, USAID, which was just hosing money all over the place with no, with no private capital attached. Because when private capital is the first to be spent, it's generally going to be spent much more carefully. So,
11:40 Erik Prince? that's at least the start of a counterweight to this Chinese money going to a lot of these places. It's, so China shows up with money and infrastructure. We were just talking about Russia shows up with muscle and weapons. And there is definitely a space, there is a niche for the West to show up with, with know-how, governance expertise, with actual capable proper security. What the US has been doing in Africa from a security perspective has been quite pathetic. A couple decades messing around in Somalia and not putting
12:21 Erik Prince? the fire out? Come on. How, the, the, the, some I see, some, some, some Somalis I talked to say it's a conspiracy. They just want to keep us in war to keep our, our gas from being developed. No, it's just our, our infrastructure, our, our bureaucracy is that stupid. That, I think the entire CT approach that the US has been on for the last 25 years is wrong. Because it's all about this. It's all about finding the top guy, cutting the head off the snake, ignoring the fact that there's always some other asshole or five that are happy to step up and do that. If you look at the history of warfare and putting these fires out.
13:07 Erik Prince? The Punic War, the Peloponnesian War, the Punic War, the American Civil War, World War I, World War II, the winning side crushed about 30% of the enemy's fighting power. As brutal as that sounds, these wars, these insurgencies are won by defeating their finance, their logistics, and their manpower. I don't care how good this guy is. If he looks left and looks right, nobody's there, then it's over. So, the hundreds of millions of dollars of high-end drone and surveillance capability to find one asshole, when I have friends that have been in Somalia, as soft guys,
13:51 Erik Prince? or ground branch guys, or whatever, and they're so frustrated because they'll see on video, they'll see 300 jihadis, al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab guys, fighting, or training, doing close-order military drill at a camp in the bush somewhere, and they can't get permission to attack them because the authorities are to go to this guy. Well, this guy is in some village next to a bunch of other civilians, so it's impossible to get permission to take the shot because you might kill an innocent kid. When you have 300 or 500 assholes that one big fire force type operation could take out, that's a serious flaw, and that no serious officer of any rank calls bullshit on that, I find very, very troubling.
14:35 Shawn Ryan? Yeah, me too. Me too.
14:37 Erik Prince? Because it's, you could have said, you've done the same thing about 1,000 different occurrences like that in Afghanistan, when the Taliban are surrounding an enemy camp, they're laying siege to it. Okay, we have guns, we have artillery, we have helicopters, do a fire force, they've just presented you a magnificent opportunity to kill 200 Taliban at one time. Stop this nonsense, go back to actually what works in warfare, in destroying the base of their, of their pyramid.
15:10 Shawn Ryan? Makes a whole of a lot of sense.
15:12 Erik Prince? It's, it's really not an original thought. It's just as old as, as the history of warfare.
15:20 Shawn Ryan? What do you think we should be doing in Africa? Should we be there? Or is it irrelevant at this point?
15:28 Erik Prince? If, if, look, some are, are all, I'm, I'm a, I love internal combustion engines. I will be probably one of the last people driving an internal combustion engine, but if those that wanna transform to a, uh, um, an electric economy, all those minerals are gonna come out of Africa. That's where the vast majority of that supply is. And so, competing there, right? So the, I think one of the reasons the Russians have been helping to tip over all these Francophone countries, Mali, Burkina, Niger, Guinea, um, Gabon.
16:09 Erik Prince? I would say Chad or Congo-Brazzaville, probably be next.
16:17 Erik Prince? Is, that is, that is about dominating the world's supply of yellow cake, of uranium.
16:23 Shawn Ryan? You've spent a lot of time in Africa.
16:25 Erik Prince? Yes, and it continues to be a, a struggle. The Russians have moved in with muscle. They're gonna, they're gonna roll up the Sahel, um, if we're not careful. There are ways that the US should push back, uh, that can, and, and you do it through commercial and through, I hate to sound like I'm beating a drum, but I am, but a, but a, but a private approach because it allows you to operate with and through a foreign government, a host government that desperately wants the help, that doesn't have all the stigma, all the bureaucracy and the expense that comes with sending conventional, uniform US forces.
17:05 Erik Prince? It is a great opportunity. We should use a lot more SOF personnel in a long-term advising, mentoring role where they live with, it's not a J-SET, it's not a two-week exercise where they deploy and they do some training. No, we should have SOF guys that speak the language, that attach themselves in these places because they will, they will serve like a skeletal structure that indigenous military at first depends on, but it learns a lot from. And if you provide that leadership, intelligence, communications, medical logistics expertise to those units, it works a lot better. And you can do that either with an active-duty
17:49 Erik Prince? SOF guy, that you give them a budget to help carry that forward, or you do that with a contracted SOF guy who has that experience, who's there working, whether paid for by the US, paid for by a Western government to secure that supply chain, that works. Because you know, operations in difficult areas are very, very difficult. And if you depend only on the indigenous forces, if you read the after-action report on that, like 2017, there was a US SOF element that was ambushed in Niger, and four Americans were killed. One of their mistakes, they had
18:29 Erik Prince? a long convoy of vehicles, but they'd concentrated the expats into a few vehicles. And so when the shit was on, a lot of those indigenous units ran away immediately. If they had spread their expat big brother mentor in each of those vehicles, he would have said, hey, follow me this way, and they could have kept the unit together. Obviously, they needed air power, a little bit of air power, even very unsexy air power.
19:00 Erik Prince? But again, the procurement process of the DOD is so awful. I remember I bought the first Super Deccano in North America in 2005 already. Had it fitted out with a FLIR and a G-Box, a cellphone intercept kit. We had it set up, we could drop laser-guided bombs. And the idea was that we could do liaison fire support aircraft, provide it to a JSOC element in Afghanistan, or a SOCOM element somewhere in whatever weird African country, where contractor flying the aircraft, either an active-duty guy doing the weapons release, or even better, someone from the host country. So it's always a host country guy deciding that.
19:44 Erik Prince? But that is the cost-effective, practical way of building air power. Cecil Rhodes, contact, you've heard of Rhodes Scholar. He made a lot of money, dominated the whole southern half of Africa in the gold and diamond trade. He dominated the space in Africa with the Maxim machine gun and 3,000 guys. That's it. Air power today is the Maxim machine gun. I would say air power and then maybe a little bit of armed drone capability, which lessons from the Ukrainian war now have shown that an armed drone can be as cheap as a commercial drone that'll drop a grenade. That adaptation of air power gives you an overmatch, right?
20:27 Erik Prince? This was the first thing we taught us in the SEAL teams, don't pick a fair fight. So somehow find a way to bring overmatch with you. That's the paradigm that should be applied. But the existing Africom mess is, it's not right. Look, I think even the whole SOCOM headquarters should be shut and restarted. Really? How many officers at SOCOM headquarters actually come from a soft background?
21:00 Erik Prince? I don't even. Five percent. That's it. Correct. It's become the place where people do their joint tours. And so it should be called NOCOM, Normal Operations Command, not SOCOM. I'm not insulting the guys that come from a tank unit or an infantry unit or a ship. But if they didn't come from a special operations unit, how were they at Special Operations Command Headquarters deciding on plans, policy, procurement, all those things that make SOF unique? The whole reason SOCOM was brought into being was to prevent a Desert One debacle so that you had money that you could spend, authorities, and unique training capability
21:43 Erik Prince? because special operations is different than a normal operation.
21:49 Erik Prince? Again, in a special operations unit, you equip the man. The man is the weapon system. In a conventional unit, you man the equipment. As you're seeing in Ukraine, artillery and tanks, particularly artillery, is still the king of battle. That's a different paradigm to warfare. And if you're going to operate, if you're going to operate in the weird, wacky edges of the frontier, where you don't have the luxury of having all your stuff along, you need a highly adaptable, innovative, devious mind that will find a way to win. And that is not the paradigm that a conventional military operates with.
22:35 Speaker 00 Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, thehousemajoritypact.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
23:05 Speaker 01 Hey Spotify listeners. When you travel with American Airlines, you'll enjoy comfort and convenience at every altitude. Before takeoff, unwind in the Admirals Club Lounge with curated self-serve offerings of hearty bites and refreshments. In flight, stay connected with high-speed Wi-Fi. Sponsored by AT&T. Your journey is designed to feel easy from the moment you check in to the moment you arrive. No matter where you're going, American gets you there. Book now at aa.com.
23:32 Shawn Ryan? So with all of switching gears, or with all the Russian influence in Africa and all the Chinese influence in Africa,
23:41 Shawn Ryan? are those two, are they colliding at all?
23:45 Erik Prince? I wouldn't say colliding, they're cooperating. I would say a lot of the Chinese big infrastructure projects would be trending towards hiring some Russian capacity for security or enforcement. There's some efforts on Chinese, but like I said before on the FSG stuff, the idea of a Chinese PMC being anything like a Blackwater, zero chance of that happening because they are all about maximum control. And we enjoy a bit of a gun culture here in America, where an individual that served in the military that still keeps his skills up with his pistol
24:29 Erik Prince? or his carbine or his long gun, and he hunts and he shoots competitively or whatever, their idea of a great security operator in China is someone that does Kung-Fu.
24:41 Erik Prince? Not a gun culture at all. In fact, it's so uptight about letting any of that...
24:50 Erik Prince? One of my favorite sayings, "God created man, but Samuel Colt made them equal."
24:56 Erik Prince? It's fact, right? There's nothing more empowering for a smaller stature female than being armed, right? That puts her, that puts her on the same playing field as a six foot eight dude.
25:11 Erik Prince? That kind of empowerment to the individual is antithetical to the Chinese Communist Party view of society, period. So bad that a policeman operating a pair, one guy will carry the pistol, the other guy will carry the magazine. And the guy with the pistol has to call back to headquarters to get permission to get the magazine before he loads the weapon. So that's, so the idea of a Chinese robust PMC, no way.
25:40 Shawn Ryan? Not happening. So you don't, you don't see any competition between Russia and China and Africa?
25:48 Erik Prince? Um, not competition, I would say at, at worst, coopetition.
25:53 Shawn Ryan? Okay.
25:54 Erik Prince? But in, in, in, in most ways, they're, uh, if, if Russia can lock up a resource, they'll sell it to the Chinese as well. Just like the gas and mineral trade out of, uh, out of Russia is, and a lot of it is going south to China.
26:12 Shawn Ryan? Okay. What about the China Taiwan situation?
26:19 Erik Prince? Um, it is very real and gonna get even more real and scary soon.
26:27 Erik Prince? Um, there is, so the next thing to think about, so
26:36 Erik Prince? coming back to that statement, novices argue tactics, professionals plan logistics. There are very few months in the year that an invasion works for Taiwan because of the wind and the sea state. I checked today before I came here and the wind was blowing 30 knots through the Taiwan Straits. Not a good day. Not a good day for, for the, for the PLA. Um, so there's very small weather windows where, right? Cause, cause what is it? An amphibious invasion or an airborne strike are really hard to do. You have a hundred miles of open ocean between mainland and Taiwan. Um,
27:21 Erik Prince? In a untested military, where if Xi decides to go for it, it is, he is thrown down. That is his, he's literally putting his life on the line. Because if they fail, kinda like Putin, Putin riding that tiger. If Xi goes down that road to start that kinda contest, there's only one way. He's got to win and win it all, or it's toast. So the next thing to think about is there's an election in January of 2024. So in four months. For the presidency.
27:57 Erik Prince? The existing party that's in power now is from the DPP, the Democratic People's Party. And the Kuomintang, which is the party that's largely dominated politics in Taiwan since Chiang Kai-shek, who was defeated by the Chinese communists and fled there in 49 to the island of Formosa. Now it's Taiwan. The KMT is seen as the very pro-Beijing party.
28:23 Erik Prince? Traditionally, that contest.
28:26 Erik Prince? The DPP candidate is, has said he was pro-independence before. The danger of him being elected
28:35 Erik Prince? is if he says something, and the Chinese, just in the last six months, have recast their law so that even the refusal of an invitation to reunite with the mainland is enough provocation for the Chinese to invade. They've said that. Kyle Bass, a money manager from Texas, did a fantastic video at the Atlantic, at the Hudson Institute, talking about the uneconomic things that China is doing, which points to them getting ready for something kinetic.
29:14 Erik Prince? So watch that election. So you have the DPP candidate, the KMT candidate is pro Beijing. And now you have Terry Guo, who was running for KMT, but they rejected him. He is so pro Beijing. Why? He's the owner of Foxconn. Foxconn is who makes all of Apple's products in China. So he's a Taiwanese businessman with a huge amount of his business in China. They definitely hold him where they want him.
29:49 Erik Prince? If the KMT wins, then I see, I would say, continued salami slicing by the Chinese to take Beijing, sorry, to take Taiwan slowly.
30:04 Erik Prince? All scenarios are not great.
30:07 Erik Prince? Because you have massive firepower organized on the Chinese mainland, all focusing there. And like I said, anything that can be identified as a target can be smashed, including aircraft carriers with 5,000 Americans on board, et cetera.
30:26 Erik Prince? Our submarine fleet will be more important, essential than ever. It's the only thing that could get in any way close.
30:37 Erik Prince? So as you, as you see China making these uneconomic decisions, and I'll give examples.
30:45 Erik Prince? Their aircraft, the big banks, the big state-owned banks have for 25 years been buying more and more Boeing and Airbus aircraft, buying them to lease to the Chinese National Airlines. So literally building a book of business worth tens of billions of dollars over the last 25 years now. All of it's for sale. They're getting ready to be sanction-proof. Chinese banks are moving all of their foreign currency, all their dollars that they hold, away from Western banks where they'd be subject to sanctions.
31:23 Erik Prince? Chinese government has stored up one and a half years' worth of wheat consumption.
31:28 Erik Prince? So just as recently as last fall, when you had severe food shortages during the party convention. So that was October of 2022. Important, Xi.
31:44 Erik Prince? Xi has now been elected to a third term.
31:49 Erik Prince? Really since Mao, the party leader, served two five-year terms, 10 years and out. Xi said, "Oh, no, I'm staying." And so he's now a third term and he's basically president for life.
32:03 Erik Prince? He has replaced all the finance people in his cabinet with people that ran the missiles, the air force, and the eastern combat regions. So he's replacing financial technocrats with pipe hitters.
32:22 Erik Prince? He, at the Party Congress, where he gave his speech to the whole thousand people in this room, Hu Jintao, his predecessor, he literally had them hauled off and dragged out of there as a "I'm in charge now, you're not."
32:44 Erik Prince? He, and then replaced any of the other people in the Politburo from Hu Jintao's clique with his own lackey. So he has assembled absolute, total control of the Chinese state. It's bad. And so when you have no one that's opposing you, or no one that's even going to bring you bad news, tends to cause people to make bad decisions on bad information. Kind of like Putin had, saying, "Oh, yeah, we'll be great in Ukraine, it'll go swimmingly well." At least the defense of Ukrainians has, I would say, caused another level of pause on the Chinese before they go all in on seizing it.
33:28 Erik Prince? Why does Taiwan matter to America? Because they make 90% of all the high-end computer chips that literally make our way of life possible. Whether it's the chips in the camera filming this, the chips in the phone that you're watching this on, to the chips in the car, to the chips in aircraft, you name it. All the high end, 90% of them come from Taiwan and about 50 to 60% of the mid-range ones. So like the, the amount of value to the greater global economy resident there is dangerously high. And there's money, there's billions of dollars being spent to build other chip
34:08 Erik Prince? plants in Korea or Japan or the United States in Arizona. But that's years from now and a lot, it's, it's an exceedingly difficult, precise thing to make, as you can imagine, fitting that many, uh, microprocessors on, on a few millimeters of silicon.
34:28 Erik Prince? So what does this look like? Um, I had an old frogman buddy, Tad Devine, rest, may he rest in peace. He, as a UDT, before there were SEAL teams, he did a hydro survey of all the beaches of Taiwan in like 1959. I said, Tad, is there any good beaches there? He said, no, there's no good beaches for hydro. Thank God. But the few that there are would be right in the north and the southern tips. Taiwan itself is exceedingly difficult terrain. The middle of it is a high mountain range. The east side of the island is largely uninhabited and, and very, very difficult to get to. But all the stuff facing the Chinese
35:08 Erik Prince? mainland is where all the, the, the chip plants are and where all the population is. The best thing that could be done, because there's not any silver bullet weapon system, there's not some magical aircraft or missile or even submarines at this point that would deter an invasion. I think if you built, if the US funded or organized or encouraged a, a serious home guard to be built in Taiwan, like I talked about for the American Revolution, 40% were pro-crown. There's probably about 40% of Taiwan that would be, oh, plenty okay
35:50 Erik Prince? with reuniting with Beijing. They think it's just fine. They don't need their individual freedom. There's 30% in the middle that don't really care either way. There's 30% that want their freedom or at least status quo so they can keep on being Taiwan.
36:05 Erik Prince? All we need is 3% of that population. So there's what 24 million people in Taiwan? That's about 720,000 people. Taiwanese Armed Forces at like a million? No, sorry. No, no. It's like 150 to 200,000 active duty. Useless. Super corrupt, super penetrated, super lazy. Their, their training is a joke.
36:32 Erik Prince? If a home guard of even a half a million people were equipped and trained with basic firearms, basic demolitions, teach them how to do a claymore, an EFP, a good roadside bomb, so that you create real uncertainty about how quickly an invasion and occupation and domination could be accomplished. Anytime you're going to do an invasion, the first 24 to 48 hours are very, very in question for the invading force. Look at any airborne assault, whether it's
37:11 Erik Prince? Normandy. Thank God, the, the, the Nazis have been pinned in place by, by the Jedbergs and by allied bombing. In Operation Market Garden in the, in the Netherlands, US and Brits got slaughtered in an airborne invasion because they, that they're vulnerable. This invasion will be very, very vulnerable in the first hours and days. The thing that the Beijing planner could not account for is 500,000 people that are gunned up, that live in those areas, and they say, not today. I will defend my house, my family, my neighborhood. I prefer to remain free. That's a very, very tough light to extinguish.
37:57 Erik Prince? There should be 100,000 EFPs stockpiled on the island. In lots of different caches, you can do them through fire departments, through civil defense centers, police departments. Yes, a lot of those will be compromised and turned over to the CCP. So what? You could leave enough residual capacity of small units, give them the means to communicate discreetly and covertly. And why? Because if Beijing's gonna go for it, they have to know it can go fast. Why? Because they import about 75 to 80% of all their hydrocarbons. They are extremely vulnerable to a blockade themselves.
38:39 Erik Prince? All the hydrocarbons, oil and gas that come out of the Middle East, comes through the Straits of Malacca, it's only a mile and a half wide. Very easy asymmetrically to shut off tankers from using that. Gotcha. Makes sense. All the gas that comes into the country, comes in through Turkmenistan, through Kazakhstan, through the northwest corner. Accidents happen on pipelines. Another pipeline runs right through Burma, from the port of Jopio, right up the old road to Mandalay that the US used in World War II to support the free Chinese fighting the Japanese.
39:19 Erik Prince? If, and that is the, what should be a soft mission, is figuring out how to, how to, in a, in a deniable or unconventional way, be able to, to clip those resources. Because again, China, China cannot stand the, the negative narrative that would erupt around them going in and being brutal in Taiwan. The reason they couldn't do, the reason they couldn't do Hong Kong at the height of protests in like 2018 to 19, is because there was hundreds of thousands of phones.
40:01 Erik Prince? I mean, hell, there's, there's a Chinese garrison in the city, but they weren't gonna roll them out and do a Tiananmen Square style because there was so much means to communicate to show any kind of brutal crackdown. So if you give the people of Taiwan the, the basic means of communication, of recording mainland badness, and especially the means to defend themselves, even basically, that will deter because that becomes a very incalculable risk.
40:32 Erik Prince? Because look, I remember in the Blackwater days that we could take somebody in five days that had never touched a gun in their lives, that were, they basically had zero martial skills. And we could make them a competent operator with a rifle that could shoot, move and communicate, run through a stress course safely and competently in five days. You give me a Taiwanese guy for three weeks, some basics from small arms, some basic urban tactics, some basic urban ambush capabilities, a couple of days of improvised demo, some comms, some medical, and then some regular reserve training. It's cheap, it's very effective.
41:14 Erik Prince? And it would actually, I think, be a unifying theme across Taiwanese society. They're trying to do it now. They're doing it with airsoft guns. Do it with real guns. Go to the CrossFit gyms, go to the Boy Scout leaders, go to the, the, the, the natural. Again, we only need 2% or 3%, and that's a deterrent. I wish, I wish all the smart people in Washington would listen, but again, they tend to, to listen to the, the siren song of, oh, there's always some other miraculous weapon system that's going to do it.
41:47 Shawn Ryan? What, what smart people in Washington are you referring to?
41:52 Erik Prince? The ones occupying all the e-ring.
41:54 Shawn Ryan? Yeah. Are you, so back to the communications piece, because that made a hell of a lot of sense with, with the phones and being able to record the brutality. Are you saying that Taiwanese don't have that capability?
42:06 Erik Prince? It's a stated goal that if Beijing has a go at Taiwan, they're going to do all they can to smash any and all power, water and telecom, and to shut it down in Taiwan. So that it is completely isolated, completely cut off and blockaded. And I don't know that, here's the thing. Do I want my kids and your kids fighting and dying for Taiwan? No, they shouldn't have to. We can empower Taiwanese, that 3% of that population, give them the means to defend themselves, that's enough of a deterrent factor.
42:50 Erik Prince? Because again, the frustrating thing about the Pentagon for me is that they keep running, they they're going to run the same playbook that the Chinese would be expecting. And then we'll be surprised when aircraft carrier battle groups get smoked.
43:07 Shawn Ryan? Yeah.
43:09 Shawn Ryan? I mean, if Taiwan, were those percentages that you rattled off, was that for global? Was that for the world's computer chips? Or was that US?
43:19 Erik Prince? Global.
43:21 Shawn Ryan? Why aren't more countries involved in this?
43:24 Erik Prince? In producing them?
43:25 Shawn Ryan? Why aren't more countries concerned about Taiwan? It seems like the US is the only one concerned. And it seems like only about half of the US is.
43:34 Erik Prince? Look, the Europeans are waking up. The Koreans are very concerned. They're they're the Samsung, LG, they're spending billions of dollars building more chip capacity, but the really high end chip capacity is still resident only in Taiwan. That needs to be replicated elsewhere.
43:53 Shawn Ryan? How are the how are my how are more nations not?
43:57 Erik Prince? It's a good question. Look, the Japanese are highly concerned.
44:01 Shawn Ryan? I mean, I guess it makes sense. I mean, we saw this, we saw, I mean, I don't know what it's called other than stupidity. We saw the stupidity with the with the with the gas coming from Russia into Europe.
44:15 Erik Prince? Yeah, Trump called it when he said, hey, Germany, wake up or you're going to be, you know, subjugated to Russian gas. And they laughed and they they I look, I don't understand the German mindset because they even even after the invasion, they still shut down nuclear plants. Nuclear is clean, highly efficient, and effectively renewable because you can reprocess the fuel and use more of it and use it again. I don't understand the green mind blob that's overtaken the Germans, but.
44:53 Erik Prince? But even the Japanese are doing significant reforms to their defense and trying that Prime Minister Kishida has been trying to do that, but at the same time, he's getting arm twisted by Rahm Emanuel, the US Ambassador, to adopt all this LBGTQ whatever legislation, which is a complete distraction from a very conservative Japanese society that's trying to prepare to defend themselves from a mortal Chinese threat. But again, gender seems to be a greater priority for the Obama, for the Biden administration than for preparing against or deterring against any conflict from China.
45:29 Shawn Ryan? Why, why, why are we seeing this gender ideology just consume everything? It's just, it's, it's, it's, it's spreading everywhere. It's in schools, it's in advertisements, it's in stores.
45:43 Erik Prince? My uneducated guess is that the massive lobbying and information capacity that was spooled up to promote and get gay marriage approved, when suddenly it was, you had all this idle capacity and somebody put more funds into it to say, all right, let's push gender. And I think I was talking to a psychiatrist friend of mine, because I asked him, I said, what is causing this gender thing? He said, every, every decade or so, there's 3% of population that's highly susceptible to suggestion. And in the 90s or the 2000s,
46:27 Erik Prince? it was anorexia and bulimia, and that was the, that was the issue that people were wrestling with. And now it's become gender. And so to actualize yourself and to get attention and all the rest, and especially reinforced and amplified by all the maladies and bad things that come with social media, you have this, this gender cult, which is wrecking society.
46:54 Shawn Ryan? What do you think it stems from? Is it, is it the money behind it? Is it the surgeries? What is it?
47:01 Erik Prince? I think it's a-
47:02 Shawn Ryan? They've created a lifelong patient.
47:05 Erik Prince? Correct. A lifelong patient and the, and the, the doctors and the surgery centers that actively get involved in this need to be held to account because how is this not a violation of the Hippocratic oath?
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47:48 Shawn Ryan? Let's move into CIA reform.
47:54 Erik Prince? Okay?
47:58 Erik Prince? Look, the United States needs a robust, capable, devious intelligence service that is focused on collecting information and providing information so that policymakers can make very good decisions. They are not in the business of pushing information domestically to pursue a, a, a desired policy outcome. Big difference.
48:27 Erik Prince? The 1947, so, I mean, I, I'm a, I'm a big enough advocate of, of the special operations intelligence world that one of my kids is named after Wild Bill Donovan. An amazing guy, lawyer, Medal of Honor recipient, World War I. Started the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services. I mean, he left at the end of the war and the CIA was, was started in 47.
48:54 Erik Prince? We need covert action. We need daring, daring operations. Talks about Clausewitz, the old Prussian military philosopher, talks about two kinds of courage to fight a war. Individual soldier's courage and the moral courage of leaders to commit their people to an uncertain outcome. We need both of those in Washington, but we're especially lacking in moral courage. You need an agency that's willing to dare to go do high-risk stuff. The issue is, it's become a highly politicized organization that is very risk averse and
49:33 Erik Prince? very tilting towards perpetuation of the status quo of of party power politics. And one of my, you know, one of my grave concerns that even happened under the Trump administration is, and now we're seeing Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy's son, running for office, asking for Secret Service protection, denied by the Biden administration. But whatever happened with the Kennedy assassination, there was a, I think it was a Warren Commission. And because of the, you know, I have a, I have a business partner who's a real ballistics
50:16 Erik Prince? expert, and he's done all the analysis on what the Warren Commission found for, for the shooting of John F. Kennedy, and there's no way it was a lone shooter. And I even read a very urban, a very detailed analysis of urban sniping that said there's no way it was one shooter. So in 1992, Congress passed a law that said, within 25 years, everything related to the Kennedy assassination must be declassified and released to the public within 25 years.
50:51 Erik Prince? The 25 year date is 2017. Mike Pompeo was a CIA director and he didn't release the documents. Nor has the Biden administration. And so I'm wondering, what the hell is it that they're covering? Maybe it points to the agency, maybe it points to organized crime. Who knows? But for heaven's sakes, this, for this republic to function, we need the, the disinfecting effect of transparency and let it go. Let, let those facts out. The same issue, even if you've heard of Havana syndrome, which is started in Havana and
51:34 Erik Prince? there was US diplomats, people assigned to the embassy that were suddenly coming down with terrible blindness and, and, and TBIs, literally traumatic brain injury that you could detect on a, on a brain scan. In one case, there was a guy in Colombia affected, and this has been in India, in Vietnam, in Vienna, even in Washington DC. This has been going on all over the place. And there's a big gap between the agency director saying, well, this is not a foreign power, there's not a hostile power. And there's a hell of a lot of other fact pattern that points to this being done by a Russian hostile foreign power. And I'm, I'm bothered by the fact that the agency would want to gloss over this, telling
52:19 Erik Prince? its own people that they're liars. That is not how you engender the trust and confidence of your people to be going to, to be willing to go do very dangerous things on the behalf of their country, when their country will them over and leave them hanging and tell them they're liars. For, in some cases, a guy had a brain scan two weeks before, was fine. Incident happens and there's definitive measurable damage to his brain caused by this, um, this Soviet designed, uh, actually came from, um, from Kharkiv, uh, back in the, in the early seventies. So that's a problem. We need truth on that.
52:59 Shawn Ryan? You know, I interviewed, I interviewed a case officer on this show all about that, who got, supposedly got hit with one of those microwave weapons.
53:10 Shawn Ryan? Unfortunately, he was also one of the CIA guys that, do you know who I'm talking about?
53:16 Erik Prince? Polimeros.
53:17 Shawn Ryan? Yeah, who's also one of the...
53:20 Erik Prince? Yeah, one of the guys that claimed that Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation.
53:25 Shawn Ryan? Yep, and so I just disregarded the entire episode because, I mean, is he reliable?
53:33 Erik Prince? Look, in that case, that was obviously, that was an attempt by the Democratic Presidential Campaign to enlist as much credibility as they could, and they grabbed every other fellow traveler they could from the intel agency that thought that Trump would be bad for the CIA, and so they say, "Oh yeah, without any real knowledge," they say, "that looks like Russian disinformation." But, I mean, as wrong as it was, and it was 1,000% wrong, it worked for them. A lie told often enough has a way of somehow coming true. That's how Joseph Goebbels did it as well, the Nazi propagandist.
54:14 Shawn Ryan? So you're saying this technology was developed back in the 70s?
54:16 Erik Prince? Mm-hmm.
54:20 Shawn Ryan? Are we using it?
54:21 Erik Prince? I don't think so.
54:22 Shawn Ryan? You don't think we're using it on our own people? I mean, there's reports of this happening at the White House, at the White House stairs, different hotels in DC.
54:33 Erik Prince? I don't know, but I would not be surprised if the Russians felt empowered enough to do it wherever the hell they chose to.
54:40 Shawn Ryan? How do you think it's being employed?
54:43 Erik Prince? What do you mean?
54:43 Shawn Ryan? What does it come from? Does it come from a handheld device? Does it come from a satellite?
54:48 Erik Prince? It's not tiny. It's not satellite. It's gotta be something, a line of sight.
54:53 Erik Prince? I don't know that much of the detail of it.
54:55 Shawn Ryan? Do you know anything about these energy weapons that are kind of starting to show up?
55:01 Erik Prince? You mean lasers or what?
55:03 Shawn Ryan? Well, I mean, there's, I can't remember the name of the company, or I don't know how to pronounce it. It's like Apremus or something, but I've actually...
55:16 Shawn Ryan? I've been talking to the CEO of the company a little bit and he sent me some, I mean, it's on, it's open source, it's on, you can see it on social media, but it's these, these, these, it almost looks like a surface-to-air missile trailer and it will, there's videos of drones coming out and it'll just disable the drones mid-flight, all of them will fall, there's no ammo, there's no sound, there's no nothing.
55:46 Erik Prince? So it's a jamming device, though?
55:48 Shawn Ryan? I don't know, I think there's diff, I think there's different options.
55:51 Erik Prince? Well, here's the thing, the, there's autonomous drones, which is gonna navigate its way, you're gonna launch it, and it's gonna find, it's gonna navigate its way to a point and crash into something. So you need really good targeting information before you launch it to do that. Like the Shahed 136, the, the, the cheap one that the Iranians have developed, that have been smashing into a lot of buildings in Ukraine and hitting their infrastructure. It's like a twenty to fifty thousand dollar drone that they developed. And that actually, the, the first version uses a simple version of terrain contour matching,
56:32 Erik Prince? which is, um, it's what the old Tomahawk missiles did in the eighties, where they'd literally take a map and you'd, you'd have a, a map loaded into it and the camera would follow and it would keep following a river or certain, look for certain nav points. In that sense, it doesn't need, that, that drone doesn't need any outside command input to find where it's going. In fact, it'd even fly into a jammed environment because it's mapping, it's following its way off of what it sees on the ground. So a jamming device is not gonna do much to that. You have to hard-kill that, you have to knock that out of the sky. But all these other first-person drones, or even an AI drone where it's gonna be communicating and coordinating with the drones around it,
57:14 Erik Prince? if you have a big RF jammer, which jams the, the command link, that's where, that's what's making all those things fall down.
57:23 Shawn Ryan? Okay.
57:23 Erik Prince? Unless it's hitting it with some kind of laser energy, where it literally has to burn it out of the sky, that's another option, but that takes a lot of energy. And in a sandy or humid environment, you know, if you remember shooting the soft lambs and you're lazing a target?
57:39 Shawn Ryan? Yeah.
57:39 Erik Prince? Back in the SEAL days? Sand, dust, snow, does terrible things for a laser beam.
57:46 Shawn Ryan? Interesting. I believe it was the laser beam, it was a laser beam that was frying the, frying the circuits or whatever it does.
57:53 Erik Prince? It could be. The Durcom system, which is fitted on,
57:58 Erik Prince? on TF-160 Chinooks, or high-end birds, or Air Force One, is a directional infrared countermeasure, and that's a laser that detects the launch, and the laser literally burns the seeker head to break the lock.
58:13 Shawn Ryan? Interesting, interesting. Also interviewed Chris Miller, which was Trump's last Secretary of Defense, and he is now contracting for some of these defense companies and says, "We're about this close from having that Iron Dome over the US." I don't know.
58:33 Erik Prince? Um, maybe. That would be, uh, that would be amazing. In my, in my travels, I managed to meet the guy that, that made Iron Dome possible in Israel. And it is a hell of a story because his kids were in kindergarten with my, with my buddy's kids. And that, that business was bankrupt, and Rafael came to him and said, "Build us the brain, the, the operating system which will do this." And so,
59:02 Erik Prince? Iron Dome receives the incoming telemetry, the trajectory of where it was launched, where that missile or that rocket is headed, and it does the calculation in about a second and a half of where it is and where it's going to land, and it figures out if it's going to land in an open field, let it go. If it's going to land near a school or apartment building, shoot it down, and it builds the firing system, the firing solution, that quickly to shoot a incoming rocket with another rocket. And they've, and they've got the unit cost down to about $50,000 a shot.
59:35 Shawn Ryan? Damn.
59:35 Erik Prince? Which is spectacular. And the next thing they'll try to do is, is to do that with a laser, which will be a lower cost shot. But again, wait till it's smoky or foggy, and again, advantage back to the attacker.
59:50 Shawn Ryan? Well, since we're on the tech subject, I know you have a new phone coming out.
59:55 Erik Prince? Well, yes, and we talked about, talked about at the beginning about the consolidation of American industries across the board. And whether it's airlines, insurance, food, one of the reasons the tech sector has gone so big so fast is it's also, it was the most unregulated space and they were allowed to consolidate without limits whatsoever. So now you have Google controlling 90% of, of search, so they literally control your access, your search of data. You have Facebook, social media guys, controlling 70 to 80% of all that messaging.
1:00:37 Erik Prince? When, when Zuckerberg paid $20 billion and bought WhatsApp, he did that because every message, call, picture, whatever that passes through from WhatsApp is analyzed by their algorithm to sell advertising. And that became very clear to me when I managed to piss off my wife. And she sent me a scorcher of a text on WhatsApp. And for the next two weeks, she was getting endless advertising from divorce lawyers and from match.com.
1:01:09 Shawn Ryan? Man, are you kidding me?
1:01:11 Erik Prince? Absolute fact. And, and then seeing what, you have effectively a duopoly between Apple and Google.
1:01:25 Erik Prince? Apple about 30% of world market share, Google, the other 70%. Those are the two operating systems which control those phones. So if you're running a, any Android today or any Apple iPhone, they know where you go, who you call, what you buy and what you browse, the companies do. And they resell that data, your, your data to advertisers. And even despite all the nonsense or the noise that, that they're saying, oh, we respect privacy and all the rest, your advertising ID follows you everywhere, even if your phone is switched off, or if you're, if it's in airplane mode.
1:02:07 Erik Prince? It's still pinging Wi-Fi, it's still pinging towers, it knows exactly where you are. And then seeing what happened with big tech deciding who could be on the app stores, throwing them off, and literally controlling and censoring speech.
1:02:26 Erik Prince? I said to a couple of buddies of mine, because we had a project we were working on, a cyber forensic thing, and I said, "Let's pivot, we need to do a phone. An independent phone platform that is not subject to the whims of Google and Apple." And so if you've ever heard of Pegasus?
1:02:46 Shawn Ryan? I have not.
1:02:49 Erik Prince? It's an offensive cyber virus used for hacking phones.
1:02:52 Shawn Ryan? Okay.
1:02:53 Erik Prince? The guy that developed that is our CTO. But he did it, not to be offensive, he did it as a way for a phone company to do remote phone service. They send you a text, they click on it, fix your phone, and then leave. When it became offensive, he left and he went and built a very secure phone, which is still used by governments today. And then he went to build the phone that controls most of the world's pacemakers. You can imagine, you don't want a phone that you can hack if you're going to run a pacemaker with it.
1:03:23 Shawn Ryan? Yeah, no kidding.
1:03:24 Erik Prince? So we'll deliver the first 500 units next month. It's our hardware, it's Android-based, but it's all our code. Our phone, not made in China, supply chain not coming from China, with our operating system, with our own store, antivirus, VPN, and secure messenger. And, look, if you're 16 years old and you posted what you had for breakfast on Instagram, it's probably not for you. But if you're an adult that cares about where you go as your business, and it's not to be, your data is not to be traded on with everyone, that's something to think about.
1:04:08 Erik Prince? So we'll sell the phone for just under a thousand bucks, comparable in speed, storage, camera quality, to the highest end of what the other guys sell. But our operating system does not contain any of those hooks for harvesting and selling your data.
1:04:25 Shawn Ryan? So it's a proprietary phone and hardware?
1:04:29 Erik Prince? Correct. Operating system, hardware, all the rest is called unplugged.
1:04:37 Erik Prince? We're pretty excited about it. It also, you know, it comes with a, with an actual kill switch. Because again, if you, if you turn this phone off and you separate this, it separates the electronics from the battery so that off is off. And, um, uh, so you, you buy it for just under a thousand dollars. The second year, you'll pay $10 a month and we guarantee that none of your data is collected, stored, analyzed, or resold. If you still want to use other secure messaging apps like Signal or Threema or Telegram, that's available in our app store. We even have-
1:05:16 Shawn Ryan? Is it necessary? Would it be necessary at all to have Signal other than Contacts?
1:05:21 Erik Prince? Nope. No, not that. We have our own secure messenger. Um, it works, uh, voice call, video call. Um, and ours, our, huh, our messenger generates a new encryption key every call.
1:05:34 Shawn Ryan? No shit?
1:05:35 Erik Prince? Yes.
1:05:35 Shawn Ryan? Incredible.
1:05:36 Erik Prince? Um, uh, and because it's our app store, it's not Apple's, it's not Google's. We even have a lot of the apps that, that are not allowed in those stores, like even an app for people that, a dating app for people that are unvaccinated, for example, right? Because the, the Silicon Valley Wizards deemed that was too controversial. So people that are in favor of free speech and freedom of expression and thought should find a resonance here in, uh, in what we're doing.
1:06:13 Shawn Ryan? When you use the, the messenger-
1:06:15 Erik Prince? Yep.
1:06:17 Shawn Ryan? So let's say, how do I say this? Does it have to be phone to phone? What's it called? Unplugged?
1:06:26 Erik Prince? Unplugged.
1:06:26 Shawn Ryan? Does it have to be unplugged phone to unplugged phone to get the secure?
1:06:30 Erik Prince? Our messenger also fits. We can, you can put it on a iPhone or you can put it on any other Android right now. Those phones will still have an ID. So if you're using that phone, um- That data will still be tracked, but the but the phone call itself will be secure. Highly secure.
1:06:47 Shawn Ryan? So that phone to iPhone, that's secure?
1:06:49 Erik Prince? Yep.
1:06:50 Shawn Ryan? iPhone to iPhone not? Or whatever WhatsApp?
1:06:54 Erik Prince? Unplug Messenger. We realized that a lot of people communicate through a lot of different means. And so we wanted our messenger to be to be compatible. We'll soon have a function where we can go from Unplug Messenger and push it to a Signal.
1:07:09 Shawn Ryan? Okay.
1:07:09 Erik Prince? You're only using Signal. But unplugged unplugged is far and away the most secure way you can communicate. We even have a dump feature that if someone says unlock that phone and you can enter a code to unlock it, or you can enter another code, which wipes it.
1:07:24 Shawn Ryan? It wipes it 100%.
1:07:26 Erik Prince? Gone, baby, gone.
1:07:29 Shawn Ryan? Nice. Nice. What?
1:07:35 Shawn Ryan? We had a question from the audience about the Patriot Act.
1:07:38 Erik Prince? Okay.
1:07:38 Shawn Ryan? Can you describe what the Patriot Act is?
1:07:41 Erik Prince? I think the Patriot Act was a well-intentioned, but turns out awful overreach and awful over-granting of authorities for the federal government to dig into people's communications. And I think it was it was passed in the recent memory of 9/11, which was shocking and alarming to a lot of people. And the danger of these forever wars is that eventually all these tools get turned back on on the populace, on citizens. And unplugged is an answer to that because I think the hegemony of big government and big tech
1:08:23 Erik Prince? has swung the pendulum of a surveillance state way too far in one direction. And we did this phone as a way for people to reclaim their communications and data privacy. Short of that, I mean, you'll see lots of stories on on on any government agency. Heck, you can, right now, with a credit card and a thousand bucks, buy all the cellphone data on a certain neighborhood or a certain house. And you watch the advertising IDs that are attached to each of those Google and Apple phones.
1:09:02 Erik Prince? Where they go and and over a period of 30 days, you can build a pattern of life and you know where they go, when they go, who they go meet, et cetera. It's alarming and that's not even a, there's no FISA warrant or any warrant that's required for that and that's done routinely. That's even how all, anybody that was on the Capitol grounds on January 6th, that's how they, that's how they were all identified was whose cell phones are registered to towers, uh, what their IMEI's were and, uh, and the cell phone data. We don't have an advertising ID and we have a ability to rule the IMEI.
1:09:38 Shawn Ryan? Man, that's incredible. One, and one of these coming out?
1:09:41 Erik Prince? First 500 come in, uh, end of September and then we'll grow to, uh, a few thousand and then we'll build. We're, we're not a, a super venture capital backed company, meaning we're thin and lean and mean, but, um, uh, you know, we're like the, uh, the little engine that can. We're, we're going to get there.
1:09:58 Shawn Ryan? That's incredible.
1:10:00 Erik Prince? Unplug.com.
1:10:01 Shawn Ryan? Unplug.com.
1:10:02 Erik Prince? You need one.
1:10:03 Shawn Ryan? I do need one. I'll get one. Let's take a break.
1:10:06 Erik Prince? All right.
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1:11:11 Shawn Ryan? Alright Eric, we're back from the break, this last segment. But we covered a lot of ground, a lot of what's going on in the world, a lot of what's going on in the country. How are we gonna turn this ship around? Get it headed in the right direction?
1:11:29 Erik Prince? I think we need to insist that our candidates focus on on making America competitive, that the elements that made the American dream possible are still possible. Because the more regulations that are on top of us, and the less competition is bad, whether you're an entrepreneur or whether you're a labor guy. So this is something that even the most Democrat-voting International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers should be concerned about, is are there enough businesses competing so that he can spend his money effectively and efficiently? And that he's not stuck with only one employer that can pay him.
1:12:14 Erik Prince? Right? That is an issue. Competitiveness for entrepreneurs, for small and mid-sized business, is essential to everyone except the most, highest elites.
1:12:28 Shawn Ryan? Do you think that there are enough... Do you think there are enough people of that intelligence that can piece that together?
1:12:38 Erik Prince? It's on candidates to get to educate them, to make it that way. Look, our education system is really bad. Is, you know, I just saw a statistic, before COVID 2018, graduating every year from Baltimore, only 11% of the graduates can read. And only 10% can do math at the level expected of a high school graduate. So you're saying the Baltimore City Schools, that were spending $18,000 apiece, are graduating 90% illiterate, writing and math-illiterate people?
1:13:20 Erik Prince? I can't think of anything that the Ku Klux Klan could devise to do a better job of keeping minorities down than giving them an absolute shit education. And...
1:13:39 Erik Prince? People need to wake up.
1:13:40 Shawn Ryan? I mean, even common sense is just, it's, it's, it's gone.
1:13:44 Erik Prince? Yes.
1:13:46 Shawn Ryan? It's gone.
1:13:47 Erik Prince? It's not gone. It's maybe diminished, but alternate means of communication, alternate means of conveying information, um, it's coming. And, um, and despite the, uh, the efforts of, of big media and big government and that collusion, um, I mean, thank God Musk bought Twitter, uh, it, it's gonna, uh, free speech must be, must, must never be lost. So you have to be able to educate. You have to be able to debate. You have to be able to compete. And you have to be able to bank. This idea of a central bank digital currency is exceedingly
1:14:27 Erik Prince? dangerous and must be resisted by all means necessary. Because if they can control your ability to spend, a, any kind of medium exchange, then they truly have you by the balls. That then, then it becomes the embodiment of what China has with their social credit score, where, oh, another terrible factoid, um, of the uneconomic things that China's doing, preparing for a conflict with Taiwan. They have a huge shortage of the blood supply. All the people with low social credit score, they can adjust their credit score by giving blood for basically government reserve blood banks. We don't want anything like a social
1:15:09 Erik Prince? credit score, but that's even what our big tech mavens and banking are trying to push here between the BlackRocks and the vanguards with their ESG scores that they're imposing on any business, that if they don't abide by whatever BlackRock wants, they get shut off from the capital, capital markets. That is antithetical to America. And so, again, it comes back to, for me, the most important thing, we must restore competitiveness and do real antitrust enforcement. We don't need an ESG enforcement part of the, of the DOJ. We need an antitrust enforcement part of the DOJ.
1:15:49 Shawn Ryan? How does the country unite?
1:15:51 Erik Prince? You know, good times have a way of producing soft men. Soft men produce hard times. And it comes back around. And I hope that America does not have to go through hard times to, uh, to wake up and to,
1:16:11 Erik Prince? and to be reminded of what, of what, all the things we have to take it granted for. Regardless, even if you are a, a, um, the average American, even the average poorest American, still lives infinitely better than someone did 100 years ago, even the richest of the rich. That's a fact. But I travel to a lot of the real garden spots of the world to realize that, um, the basics of governance really matter. And this is a, this is a competition of governance, whether we want a free and independent republic, or one that is absolutely controlled by a CCP like mandated elite. And, um, I will always bet on liberty.
1:16:55 Erik Prince? But it's not, it's, it's liberty, but it's not without sacrifice.
1:16:59 Shawn Ryan? Do you think?
1:17:04 Shawn Ryan? I think some of this division has come from God being ripped out of education.
1:17:11 Erik Prince? Sure, absolutely. Everyone has a hole in their soul. I think we all have a quest for something that defines our role, our, our place in the world. And you can either fill that with fame, or popularity, or money, or power, or you can fill that with, uh, with faith, in a Judeo-Christian faith, a Judaic, a, an Islamic faith, or something that orders your place in the world compared to the divine. And the rejection of that, the, the kind of the, the, the, the problem in America has been people saying, I am God.
1:17:55 Erik Prince? And, and that they, um, that they can make decisions without any consequences to themselves or others. And, uh, when we, when we put ourselves on the place of, uh, equality with, uh, with a deity, a whole bunch of problems stem from that. I, um,
1:18:18 Erik Prince? That was a
1:18:22 Erik Prince? I'll never forget having to do the first death notifications of the guys that died working for BW and tried to provide them and the families with as much support as possible. And we even hired a chaplain. We hired the former chief chaplain of the Marine Corps, Father George Puccirelli. He'd actually been on the ground in Beirut when the Marine bombings was Marine barracks was bombed in 83. Full career as a Navy captain, but was the chief chaplain of the Marine Corps. And I got him convinced to come out of retirement to be our company chaplain. And he was the design of a great chapel at Blackwater because I figured we'd given our guys the best colleagues,
1:19:05 Erik Prince? the best training, the best equipment. And I wanted to afford them the ability to have some kind of a spiritual understanding, a relation with their Creator and
1:19:19 Erik Prince? and we're going to build a chapel. And instead of building that, the entire federal government came for us and I ended up paying lawyers and ended up selling the business. But it's a it's unfinished unfinished business for me. What was his name? Father George Puccirelli. What drew you to him?
1:19:36 Erik Prince? I looked for a, a strong, old school priest that understood faith and he understood the challenges of wartime and ministering to the men and the challenges that they faced out there doing it. The challenges it put on their marriage, the challenge that it put on their relationship with their colleagues. And so we had two things at BW that were unusual for a private company. We had a company Master Chief, a retired SEAL Master Chief, Herschel Davis, old Vietnam vet. And, you know, he handled a lot of the good order and discipline issues. When you have thousands of guys deployed, some guys do stupid things. And then Father George took care of
1:20:21 Erik Prince? geez, he did baptisms, he did weddings, he did a lot of marital counseling and, and all the things that went with having lots of guys deployed.
1:20:31 Shawn Ryan? I did not know you were tied in with Herschel Davis.
1:20:34 Erik Prince? Of course.
1:20:35 Shawn Ryan? That guy lived on my same block.
1:20:39 Erik Prince? Really?
1:20:39 Shawn Ryan? Where I grew up. He, yeah. Yeah, he used to, he lived on a corner lot and
1:20:47 Shawn Ryan? he always had people driving through his yard. He was always out putting traps and shit out in his yard.
1:20:51 Erik Prince? That sounds like Herschel.
1:20:52 Shawn Ryan? Yep.
1:20:53 Erik Prince? Herschel managed a spot, a remote spot that we managed for, uh, for the government for many, many years and he was the, kind of the chief of that base and that was perfectly in his strike zone.
1:21:05 Shawn Ryan? Yeah, I saw him on the Discovery Channel and I was like, holy shit, that's my neighbor.
1:21:09 Erik Prince? Yep.
1:21:10 Shawn Ryan? And went down to go see him and he had, he was gone. It was just his wife there. But, um, wow, interesting. Do you still have contact with him?
1:21:20 Erik Prince? Of course. Talk to him every, every few weeks. That's been, that was the greatest privilege of
1:21:28 Erik Prince? starting BW and managing it was the amount of colorful characters that, uh, that we got to employ. And, um, I'll never forget offloading the little birds when they first got to Baghdad and there were a bunch of vets from Black Hawk Down that had just happened 10 years earlier. They said, Mr. P, thanks for giving us the chance to do this again. This is what we're good at. And that's, that was, um, that was the culture we tried to build of, uh, of stepping forward when the mission is required and finding a way to get it done.
1:22:05 Shawn Ryan? Wow.
1:22:07 Erik Prince? We need more of that in America.
1:22:08 Shawn Ryan? Yes, we do. Yes, we do. Work. I really appreciate you coming out. It's, it's great to see you and it is an honor to
1:22:19 Erik Prince? Congrats on your success and I'm glad to be back.
1:22:21 Shawn Ryan? Thank you.
1:22:21 Erik Prince? Cheers.
1:22:22 Shawn Ryan? Thanks.
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