#1429 Erik Prince | Bitcoin Will Protect You From The Government

Erik Prince is the former founder of Blackwater, and the current founder of the Unplugged Phone. In this conversation, we talk about geopolitics, American security, national debt, government inefficiency, and what Erik thinks about the various conflicts that are happening around the world. ======================= Polkadot is a scalable, secure, and decentralized blockchain technology aimed at creating Web3. Created by Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum, Polkadot empowers users to build decentralized applications with ease. Backed by industry leaders, making it a preferred choice for big names, Polkadot stands out as a leading choice for investors seeking a reliable, future-proof solution in the growing world of Web3 technology. Learn more at https://polkadot.com/. ======================= Buy book: https://www.amazon.com/Live-Extraordinary-Life-Anthony-Pompliano/dp/0857199927/ ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's going on guys? Today, we have a very special episode for you. We have Erik Prince, the former founder of Blackwater and the current founder of the Unplugged Phone. This conversation is wide ranging. We talk about geopolitics. We talk about American security, the national debt, government inefficiency,

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

  and what Erik thinks about the various conflicts that are happening around the world. Eric is one of the foremost experts on warfare. He's got a ton of experience both serving in the Navy SEALs, but also building Blackwater. And he is a great reader of American history, world history, military history, and he's got unique thoughts that he shares throughout this conversation. This is one of the conversations that reminds me why I started this show. It allows me to talk to interesting people who have interesting ideas, and it makes me think more critically about the world. And this conversation does not disappoint. Here is my latest episode. It is with Eric Prince, the former founder of Blackwater and the current founder of the Unplugged Phone.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Polkadot. Polkadot offers secure, scalable, and decentralized blockchain technology that perfectly aligns with the needs of innovative projects. It was developed by Gavin Wood, one of the co-founders of Ethereum and the creator of Solidity. Polkadot aims to build an internet where users have full control over their data and their applications. Polkadot offers tons of unique A shared security model along with the new auction model and significant implementations like ASIC banking. Given these characteristics, it's easy to understand why Polkadot is gaining more and more traction in the cryptocurrency world. Some people even are talking about it as the AWS of Web3. Now, companies such as Mythical Games, Astro Network, and over 50 other independent blockchains with hundreds of applications

• 2:33Anthony Pompliano?

  already leverage Polkadot's technology to power their platforms. If you're looking for a reliable, scalable, and cutting-edge solution, Polkadot seems to be the top choice for industry players. Go check them out today at polkadot.com.

• 2:47Anthony Pompliano?

  America is kind of the tale of two stories. We have the greatest nation in the world. We live in the safest, most prosperous time in human history. There's a lot of things we can point to that would give you an optimistic view of the future. At the same time, you can look at America and you can tell a story of a crumbling empire that seems to be almost collapsing on its own success. People don't want to defend the ideals, ethos, and values that have gotten us here. You're very unique, I think, in that you have an understanding of history, you've got opinions about the future, and you've been very involved in a number of the major kind of developments in the country, both geopolitically and economically over the last couple of decades. And so when you look at where we are today, do you have an optimistic view of the future?

• 3:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Or do you have a pessimistic view of maybe an alarm sounding that a lot of things need to change?

• 3:37Speaker 02

  I have a, I'm kind of an eternal optimist. And I, as I look at what, what really made America, it was breakthroughs of the private sector. It was not some, I mean, no. I will have to say, I think we really have to give credence, maximum kudos to the founding fathers. When you look at the Constitution and you look at the Bill of Rights and their ability to see the problems of the relationship between state and citizens. And, you know, what was their, what other document did they have to reference? The Magna Carta?

• 4:18Speaker 02

  And, but yet they wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And seeing how government always grows, government always enriches itself.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  Whether you're a monarchist, or a federalist, or... And they put all those checks and balances, assuming and understanding that people were always going to grow stupid. And the fact that they laid out that kind of framework, and as I look at what countries in the world have really prospered, versus in the long term have prospered, there's fundamental underpinnings of the infrastructure of their governance, and of the people that embrace that governance. And when you move away from that, and you dilute that down, you get the crumbling empire. Rome, right, the Roman Empire grew and prospered.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  That was not one really, that was really built on individual rights, as we would. That was definitely an empire of conquest. And when they kind of ran out of conquest, it ran out of gas. And of course, they debased their currency and made all kinds of bad decisions. But, you know, for a while, as it was growing, the elites were engaged, invested in the society. Remember when the Battle of Canae happened, the biggest loss in, I think, one of the biggest, single day losses in military history. Eighty thousand people killed by sword in a morning. When the Roman Senate met a couple of weeks later, it was 40% undermanned. Why? Because the elites had actually showed up.

• 5:57Speaker 02

  Now, America's problems grow from, we have too much government, we have way too much government spending, and things have gotten way out of whack. The 10th Amendment has been ignored, right? Remember, the 10th Amendment says, "Any power not specifically delegated to the federal government remains the sole purview of the states." Because we've gotten away from...

• 6:21Speaker 02

  A healthy rivalry between the state power and federal power. And when the federal government can literally print unlimited money as we have, and now we're what 35 trillion in debt. You enrich and engorge a class of people that the exact stuff that the founding fathers were warning about. And so we have to trim that down to size. I'm hoping that this election has consequences that will actually trim it down to size because if it's not, then it's going to be a really ugly transition. Because I think you're going to have more of a possibly a Weimar-like transition, not a smooth line.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  Well, look, putting any nation on a diet is never pleasant, right? Anybody that starts fasting or starts, you know, because America is actually physically fat and our government is fat. But we either have to do it the discipline way or in a very chaotic, ugly way.

• 7:21Anthony Pompliano?

  There almost seems to be this like chicken or egg problem. The government has grand ambitions. They want to do all these things for their citizens, even if it's ill-placed, you know, kind of hope.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

• 7:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Correct.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  That is the first thing that people have to remember.

• 7:40Anthony Pompliano?

  But there's also the government spending problem. And so I've always wondered, is it the intentions of, hey, we want to help the people, that's why we spend a lot of money? Or is it if you give a man a money printer, he's going to print a bunch of money and then look around and say, well, where do I put the money? Right? You know, if you have to kind of get to the root solution.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  Politicians will always respond and pander to a constituency to get elected. And once they're there and once a program is started, I think I just saw a study, there's like 1.8 new government programs per year since the founding in 1789. And there's not really been a culling or a sunsetting of a lot of that stuff. And so all of that has expanded and compounded and no force has had the discipline or the power to actually.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  Curtail that down. So you look at our healthcare system, look at how much we spend. And clearly, we spend way too much. The amount of doctors has not really changed, but the amount of healthcare administrators responding to regulation and nonsense around that. And it's so it's almost uncompetitive behavior because of those well-intentioned regulations. If a lot of the government just said, just get the hell out of the way, I think you'd find it surprising. I always compare the price of LASIK to the price of any kind of government subsidized or government regulated surgery process. And it's night and day, right? Because LASIK price goes down every year. The lounges are beautiful. It's on time because it's private pay. It's

• 9:20Speaker 02

  not government pay. And that's the root of the problem.

• 9:23Anthony Pompliano?

  It seems like that government pay, insurance pay is an incentive system that is pervasive throughout our society where problems exist. So you have healthcare, you have student loans. I mean, you can just go down the line.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Defense. Everywhere that government touches, it inflates costs because people are spending money that's not theirs. I even noticed it. I have a contract manufacturing business. So we make stuff for industrial power and very, very, very straight commercial, super competitive markets versus a defense market. And those costs are easily 30 to 50 to 100% more just because government touches it and it screws it up.

• 10:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's go to like a material problem that I think a lot of people care about, but also can we can use as an example to explain how some of this works is the southern border. It feels like for years, there were people who were always concerned with or focused on securing the border, whatever that meant, you know, call it over the last couple of decades. But in the last four years or so, there's been an explosion of these border crossings, very much determined or described as just an open border. And it feels like now there is a conversation that, hey, this is a problem. One side of the political aisle has been saying that for four years. I think the other side of the political aisle, whether they actually mean it or not, is starting to say, hey, we want to close down the border.

• 10:42Anthony Pompliano?

  What is the ramifications of that open border in terms of there's safety, there's economic strain, there's healthcare strain, you know, there's all these kind of almost like knock on effects of a, of a single decision of, hey, we're going to open the border seems to be one of the biggest contributing factors to kind of the decline of American society.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Donald Trump was elected in 2016, I would argue off of a, hey, we're going to lock down the border seriousness. And yes, America is a nation of immigrants. I'm Dutch. My family came from the Netherlands in 1915. But there was a time in the 1920s, I think 1924, there was a, they curtailed it and basically slowed it down and it gave almost 20 years for some homogenization, right? For the, for the melting pot to work to the point that Italian speaking kids from Manhattan went to Italy and fought for America.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  Imagine. And, but they identified that strongly as America. We don't have anywhere near that kind of national identity right now. So yes, the, you know, the, the southern border issue is not an organized crime. It's an industrialized crime. There are actual travel agencies in Dubai. I just spoke to a couple of them last week where there's travel packages, immigration travel packages for people coming out of Bangladesh, India and Pakistan to fly on Turkish Airways through Istanbul. They drop them in Latin America and they get linked into a bus system to bus them up through Mexico. It's, it's ridiculous.

• 12:25Anthony Pompliano?

  So, so somebody is coming out of like Bangladesh and they say, I want to go to America and they literally get in touch with this travel agency.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 12:31Anthony Pompliano?

  And they're paying hundreds, thousands of dollars, whatever it is.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, they buy the, but they buy the ticket for a couple of grand one way.

• 12:39Anthony Pompliano?

  They. But the travel agency is coordinating this.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 12:42Anthony Pompliano?

  And then when they get on the ground, they're getting told like there's the border.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  And they literally get handed off almost like a tour operator, right? I mean, if you go to Greece and you're going to go on a tour, you land, you get met by a bus, you go on your tour to meet the ship. In this case, you land somewhere in Latin America, you get met by a bus and you're bussed up in and they tell you, okay, they hand you off to this coyote. It's, it's industrialized. There was enough pressure from the Trump administration last time to curtail a lot of that nonsense. All of the early Biden changes obviously lift that off and so it's been a runaway train since. Again, that's fixable, but when you flood a society with

• 13:26Speaker 02

  that many people that were not born and then you have a welfare system which reinforces almost ghettoization of people where they're not, they're receiving welfare benefits, they're not necessarily working and their local, their foreign language is now accommodated in the schools, right? The whole premise of a public education system is to be a common bottom few rungs of the ladder so that everybody has a fair chance. And we, you know, that's another problem of government schools have really severely underperformed what the private sector offers. So, again, without sounding like too much of a hardcore libertarian, which I guess I am, everything government touches, it tends to screw up.

• 14:08Anthony Pompliano?

  How do we go from government has its hands in all of these different industries to it not having its hand? Is it just we need an administration to go in and be very committed to kind of ripping this out and firing people? Or what does that transition?

• 14:21Speaker 02

  Two things. On the migration, immigration reform, obviously, big diplomatic pressure on Mexico to knock it off. Second, but you have a very left wing, even more so than AMLO president there now, an actual communist, but still possible to pressurize that. Two, implement actual pressure on, to make it an unpleasant place to be if you're not in America legally. So you're not banked, you're not going to school, employers are not employing you, and so a lot of people will go home. Two, there's a lot of people that have committed

• 15:03Speaker 02

  significant crimes that final deportation orders have already been administered. It's like 1.6 million of those still floating around society.

• 15:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Wait, wait, say this again. There's 1.6 million people?

• 15:13Speaker 02

  With final deportation orders have been issued already and they haven't been deported yet.

• 15:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that a manpower, like?

• 15:23Speaker 02

  That's a government competence issue. You see these, you see the...

• 15:29Speaker 02

  Well, I remember in like 2005, the Bush administration then was talking about adding some Border Patrol agents. And we got, we at Blackwater got called before Congress to testify as a friendly one, because they wanted to train these new Border Patrol agents. And I remember the, the Border Police, the CBP came with a figure of like $180,000 to train a new border guy versus, and our price was like 40 or 50. And so Congress was trying to understand why we could do it for so little. And that's just the private sector versus government. It's a, it's a different cost thing. So as, when you look at, um, how does

• 16:11Speaker 02

  the next administration deal with deportation of even people that are the 1.6 million that every court has already ruled, they do not belong here, they've committed crimes while here, they need to go? Fine. That's a, I think that's more of an argument for the, um, for the private sector to deal with that, deputized.

• 16:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Part of what I, I kind of go back to in some of these situations is there's so much, you know, just government waste that occurs. Um, it's very hard for them to give up power.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 16:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And, you know, it's human nature, right? Is hey, I have a job. I don't want to lose my job. I, you know, give me more money, give me more budget, give me more whatever.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  I have butted up against that every encounter with the federal government. They hate, every bureaucracy hates competition. They will close ranks and screw the private sector every way they can. Elon Musk is feeling that as well. I, I am firmly convinced that NASA issued that license for him to finally do that test and to grab the rocket out of thin air because they thought he was going to fail right then before the election.

• 17:17Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's talk a little bit as to Blackwater and how you were able to win these contracts and serve the country with a very unique, I think, kind of employment model in terms of like who you were actually recruiting and how you're able to do it at a lower cost. Because I do think that there is parallels between you and the global war on terror and what you guys were able to accomplish and Elon and some of the things that he's trying to do. Cause he's butting up against the same kind of machine that you were. And so, you know, maybe there's things Elon can learn from your experiences that he could apply now.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  We butted up against the same thing, and I've used this argument. I was born in the summer of 1969, the summer of Woodstock and Apollo 11. And if someone said that 50 years later, the only way the US gets to the International Space Station is on a Russian rocket or on a contractor rocket, they would have laughed you out of Johnson Space Center. But that's exactly the case. And we butted up against that as Blackwater, saying, "Well, you can't be doing that because it's inherently governmental. It's too hard. Only government can do that." And I would call nonsense on that, as he is very ably demonstrated. Blackwater started as a training facility. SEAL teams had used private facilities really since the 1970s. The SEAL team in the 90s, when I was in, our ammunition budget for

• 18:36Speaker 02

  2,000 SEALs was the same amount as the 150,000-man Marine Corps. Right? So we had a lot of ammo, took training very seriously. And, but no one had done a private facility on an industrial scale. And they'd say, "Well, why would you do that when there's government bases?" Because government bases are very bureaucratic and very slow. And so when you have a platoon going through a workup, you didn't have time for a lot of the nonsense delays. And so I was in the usual position of having been in the SEALs, my father's success, I kind of knew what they needed, and I did it. I got out in 96, bought the land and built

• 19:18Speaker 02

  it. And at the same time, I had taken over my original, well, my father's original business made diecast machines, big, big machines that squeeze a mold and makes aluminum or magnesium castings. And I've taken it through a lean transformation, really based on the Toyota Production System. So we took a bunch of cost out and designed out costs and big labor productivity improvements, and especially lean flow. And as I'm laying out Blackwater, I'm thinking, what does the military do? We recruit, vets, equips, trains, deploys, and supports people. We built a machine to do that, and that worked. And so as the company grew to do not just training, but security and aviation and logistics and

• 19:59Speaker 02

  medical, and we could process thousands, tens of thousands of people, we built an air wing of 73 aircraft, of our company-owned aircraft to do that. And because we knew our costs and we viciously attacked waste...

• 20:18Speaker 02

  It was good and it was antithetical to what government did.

• 20:21Anthony Pompliano?

  What's so fascinating about your story is that one of my favorite entrepreneurs in all of history is a gentleman named Sulaiman Oliyan, who comes out of Saudi Arabia. He worked for what at the time eventually became Aramco and he worked in the warehouse. And what was so fascinating about it is because he worked in the warehouse and he was seeing what products are coming in or going out, he's very in tune with kind of the business, the unit economics, the suppliers, all this. And they decided they're gonna have to build the pipelines to let's get the oil out of here. And so they create a program that does two things. One, we're going to have to use a vendor-based system. We can't do it all ourselves. We're gonna have to contract out to people. But two is we're going to give the advantage, either in the contract or in the pricing,

• 21:02Anthony Pompliano?

  to Saudi-owned businesses. So he basically walks into work one day and he says, hey, I'm putting my two weeks in, but I know that you guys have a contract out for, I think it started with some trucks. And he says, I'm gonna go start that company. Why don't you give me the contract? You guys know me, you trust me, etc. I'm gonna go and I'm gonna go put this out. Long story short, if you fast forward, he creates something called the Oliyan Group and he ends up being probably the largest construction conglomerate in the Middle East, simply because every time a contract came up, he was a trusted source. He had a proven track record of keeping costs low, delivering on time, etc. He keeps getting contract for contract for contract. What's fascinating about him is he was a businessman. And so he was always fascinated with the United States. And he constantly wanted to figure out, how can he get access to financing?

• 21:46Anthony Pompliano?

  No one in the Middle East was providing financing, especially not to, you know, kind of one of their countrymen. And so he started talking to American banks. And they said, hey, look, we'd love to give you money. You've got a great business, but you have no collateral in the US. And so Sulaiman ended up starting to put money in US banks so that he could just buy some stocks. So he had collateral, so he could get financing. Turns out, he becomes one of the largest investors in the US markets of anyone in the Middle East, simply because he did it for a really long time, he's making a lot of money and doing this whole thing. I always think of that story as essentially the private market kept going to, in that case, Aramco, but could have been the government, and said, what do you need now?

• 22:22Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 22:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Give me the order, I'll go do it. And I think the Blackwater story is so much of, okay, you need a training site. Let's build a training site, do that well. Okay, what's the next thing you need? And you just kind of continued, they almost like led you to what the business was, which really is an entrepreneurial story of just listening to the customer.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  I said, I constantly preach to our team, there is no guarantee that we will exist next year. We are not a line item in the budget. We have to convince our customers to solve their, let us solve their problems. And that was, was our business mantra, I guess.

• 22:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Given the lessons that you learned at Blackwater, when you think of Elon today, are there things that you think he should do that maybe would make his life a little bit easier?

• 23:07Speaker 02

  What I wish I had done much earlier is diversify the business away from the government.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  Because the political nature of supporting a military at war, right? The anti-war left went after troops in Vietnam and in Iraq, the whole GWOT thing, they love to go after contractors and they love to hate me. He was very wise to build a space business, but he did that NASA was his first vendor, but he got smart building his own rockets. And what did he do? He built a Starlink fleet of satellites. Spectacular. And that is all private sector. And yeah, government regulates and constricts them, but that is a very big leverage point that he carries.

• 23:50Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, you already see it, right? He, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, there's been multiple times where people on both sides have yelled and screamed about Starlink access. You see, obviously, the natural disaster in North Carolina where Starlink's being provided. He just keeps running up to it everywhere.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  Indispensable vendor. Yeah. And we were the, and Blackwater was the indispensable vendor in a lot of places because we would, we would show up. I mean, you know, like, what, six months ago, Sudan, as a country melted down, there was 16,000 Americans and they needed to be evacuated. And Wall Street Journal called me and said, are you involved in evacuations? I said, no, I'm, I'm sitting this one out. I said, but wouldn't it be nice if there was an American company that owned its own aircraft that would go fly in there? Because nobody could fly aircraft in. Why? Because there's missiles flying around. So nobody wants to, all the insurers canceled. So we were self insured. We would fly into those places. So. Yeah, I'm happy, I'm so happy for his success.

• 24:47Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't think people quite understand in these conflict zones. I recently talked to two different people. One came out of the intelligence world, another was a former special operator. And both of them, in different ways, have been involved in going and rescuing people, whether it was out of Ukraine during the Russian invasion. There were situations in Palestine, et cetera. And, you know, take, for example, this one group that is, was going and getting people out of Ukraine, you know, they're not talking about like, hey, let me call the person and, you know, hey, go walk to the airport and we'll make sure that you get on the commercial flight. These guys are going in, they're staging vehicles, they have communications, they have manpower, they have weapon, I mean, a very, very complex logistical operation.

• 25:29Anthony Pompliano?

  And as I was talking to them, one thing just kept hitting myself in the head was, it used to be that if you had an American passport, the US military would always come and get you. And it feels like today, that may not actually be true.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, that is very true. As an American, they'll tax you anywhere you are in the world, but they're not necessarily rescue. But again, I contrast Haiti in May of this year, there was two young missionaries on their first, first mission in Port-au-Prince. Newly married, and they're on the way back from a youth event, and they get attacked by a gang, they hard point in their house. And the husband has an M4, and he's holding off this gang in a gunfight. The wife is on the phone pleading for help, calling the US Embassy, just one mile away,

• 26:27Speaker 02

  calling and calling, asking for help, calling the RSO, anybody at the embassy, and they do nothing. Okay, they didn't send, I mean, there's probably 12 Marines assigned, nobody left the confines of the US Embassy to drive one mile to help two American kids, missionaries in grave danger. Of course, they're overwhelmed, brutalized, murdered, terrible. And that's just not how it's supposed to be if you're, if you're a US citizen calling help for your government. And I contrast that with a little-known story, you know, at the end of...

• 27:04Speaker 02

  It was October of 2020, so a month before the election. A 27-year-old missionary on his farm in Niger kidnapped by some jihadis. And the jihadis are driving him south to link up with Boko Haram. US is watching with drones based at a base in Niger, which you've also been kicked out of. There's, I think that we've, the Biden administration has lost nine embassy locations. Nobody talks about that. You talk about a-

• 27:36Anthony Pompliano?

  When you say "lost," as in they were disinvited from-

• 27:39Speaker 02

  Withdrawn. Closed. Sudan, Ukraine, Afghanistan, onward. Anyway, so the jihadis are moving this guy south, and Trump, like nine days before the election, authorizes a rescue. So the JSOC guys mount up, they move him to Spain, C-130, free fall in. They land, they go in, and the jihadis are bedded down with the one hostage. They find the hostage, secure him, kill everybody else. There was one guy off taking a leak, they let him live. Don't fuck with the Americans. Can you imagine the 27-year-old kid who goes to sleep surrounded by jihadis in the middle

• 28:24Speaker 02

  of the desert, and he wakes up to space aliens looking at him? Because they're not coming with two tubes, they're coming with four, right? Anvis 21s. And to say, "Hey, we're Americans, we're here to get you home." That's how it's supposed to be. That's why we spend $750 billion.

• 28:40Anthony Pompliano?

  I do think-

• 28:41Speaker 02

  So it's really dangerous for us to equate buying stuff with buying capability. And if you don't have the willingness to engage when you're at the threshold, and if you don't have the right leadership that will make that decision, right? What does Clausewitz talk about? Two kinds of courage to win a war. Individual soldier's courage, you saw, we have a lot of that. But the moral courage of leaders to commit their people to an uncertain outcome, that's the problem. When you have an elite that has no skin in the game, that has no understanding of going to do a difficult thing in a dangerous place, and they become bureaucratic cowards, that's where it all breaks down.

• 29:23Anthony Pompliano?

  So you're a very interesting person to talk to about this because-

• 29:29Anthony Pompliano?

  I try to pay attention, I think, to society and understand the impact on the military, especially the pipeline in the military. And if I think of my experience, I went to Iraq in 2008, 2009. If you think of the things that happened after that, you had the bin Laden raid, which I think was highly celebratized and people looked at it and said, hey, like, that is America doing what America does.

• 29:52Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 29:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? We will find you and we will kill you if you are a bad person. If you look at the Captain Phillips rescue and kind of the, you know, the famous shot off of a moving ship onto another moving ship, et cetera. Again, like, that is what America does. But then you have to-

• 30:08Speaker 02

  But there's some nuance to that.

• 30:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  And I think it makes my point exactly. Because the rules of engagement that had been imposed by Team Obama was they could not take a shot unless there was an absolutely immediate threat to the hostage. And basically, the on-scene commander got sick of waiting hour after hour after hour and nothing was happening. Finally said, he kind of reinterpreted the orders and took a shot. That's what finally resolved it. It was-

• 30:40Anthony Pompliano?

  It was a simultaneous shot of a couple of different snipers all shooting at the same time.

• 30:43Speaker 02

  Correct. It was moral courage of the on-scene leadership to say, enough of this shit.

• 30:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, if we compare that to Benghazi, if we compare that to a number of different situations that have now become public, it feels like, again, the American passport, does it actually represent they will come and get you? If people-

• 31:06Speaker 02

  Not citizens, those are actual government employees in a bad place. Yeah, it's amazing. If you think of there's, what, 750, 800 billion in the defense budget, probably 30 to 50 of that is directly related to CSAR, Combat Search and Rescue. And the amount of options that were available in aircraft carrier battle group with 85 aircraft onboard, you had a C-130 with a special operations team, guns loaded, everything, that's their mission, doing commanders in extremist force out of Croatia, other aircraft

• 31:43Speaker 02

  out of Sicily, F-16s at Sigillano in Italy, and then V-22s in Rota, Spain, all those things, capability, no moral courage of leaders to commit their people to an uncertain outcome. And the bureaucratic handholding and kumbaya decision in Washington, and people died from it. And it's a bad look. And what happened there is a microcosm of what happened in Afghanistan, when you had, I think, pretty clear indication given by General Miller of what was going to happen, the last commander of US forces in Afghanistan, to say, if we pull the US

• 32:28Speaker 02

  aircraft out, and we're not bombing the Taliban anymore, it's going to go from, they're grouping up in fives and tens and fifties, to 200, 500, and 1,000, and that's what rolls over cities. And I actually, I called it six months before the actual collapse, and I was off by two weeks. But I based it just off of when I knew the fuel contract was ending. Because when they're not putting gas in US aircraft, and they're not doing air support, you know, putting warheads on foreheads where they belong, it went bad.

• 33:05Anthony Pompliano?

  So, there's this famous story now, the Radisson Blue Hotel, I think it was in Somalia, there's a Delta Force operator-

• 33:12Speaker 02

  No, that was in, it's in Mali.

• 33:14Anthony Pompliano?

  In Mali, okay. And-

• 33:17Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that this is almost like the perfect example of what you're talking about where, for those that don't know, there were some terrorists that went into the Radisson Blue Hotel. They began shooting up. They light it on fire. There's American citizens in there. A mile, two miles away, there's a couple of Marines. There's a single Delta Force operator, and I think that there was some CIA personnel. And the way the story gets told by the Delta Force operator is basically, he says, "I'm gonna get my kit and I'm gonna go there. That's what I do. That's what I was trained to do." And I believe he was discouraged from going.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 33:50Anthony Pompliano?

  I believe the leadership basically said, "I know you can hear gunshots. I know you know people are dying. I know that you are one of the most proficient warriors we've ever trained and put on the battlefield, but just sit down. Stand down."

• 34:02Speaker 02

  Sure. Even the guys that, when Benghazi happened, and I contrast this because a lot of people love to dish on Blackwater, the eight or 10 diplomatic security service government employees that were protecting the US ambassador in Benghazi, how many rounds did they fire when the attack happened?

• 34:25Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  Zero. Zero. Okay? How is that possible? How is it possible that your protectee dies and you didn't fight back? Is that cowardice? Is it incompetence? I don't know. But if you want to criticize Blackwater for being too diligent, I'll take that criticism. But no one in our protection ever died. But then, the agency contractors, not agency employees, agency contractors, many of whom used to work for me, heard the gunfire, were going to move to the sound of the gunfire to actually help Americans in danger, and they were told not to by their

• 35:09Speaker 02

  bureaucrat boss. And eventually, they didn't listen, and they moved to help people that were in grave danger.

• 35:15Anthony Pompliano?

  And put themselves in danger for doing so.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah. Look, even in a little-known story, I think in 2006 or '07, it was when the first special forces teams started showing up in Mali, trying to work with the locals and building them. And we were hired, Blackwater was, to put a couple of aircraft there for medevac and logistics support. And we were flying little Casa 212s. It's like a little shrunken C-130.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  And they're out at this very remote base and the big schmaw winds, huge, powerful wind, and it literally ripped the aircraft off its tie-down points, damaged the aircraft and the wing, picked the tent up that the active-duty Army SF guys were in and tossed it across the ground, killed one guy, broke a guy's spine and pelvis, two others with other fractures, and one guy had major internal bleeding. That was the one that was in real danger. And all their comm gear was trashed, so our guys got the satcom going in the busted airplane, called the other aircraft, which was 800, 1,000 miles away, said, "We're, you

• 36:25Speaker 02

  know, we're stuffed here, help." And so the other Casa launches, and we'd been prevented from having night vision goggles for some stupid bureaucratic reason, and our 18 Delta contractor medic strapped himself to the floor of the aircraft, and then they land on a single set of Hummer headlights in the desert at night during a storm. Now, if you've ever flown the desert at night, it's dark. It redefines what dark looks like. And they land, they recover, and this medic starts working this guy, okay? And they put every bit of fluid into this wounded SF guy because his blood pressure was crashing.

• 37:09Speaker 02

  And they called ahead to Wagadougou, which is where we were flying in, which is the capital of Burkina Faso, in case you're wondering, to do an emergency blood drive, because we needed some kind of trusted blood, and second, to go get some certain pain meds. And so back they land, and this guy is now inflated, right? He's just distended, and the Air Force still hasn't shown up with any kind of emergency surgery capability. So our medic, moral courage, said, "Well, shit, I'm not gonna let him die." He opens him up. He does field surgery on him, takes the organs out, sure enough, finds the ruptured

• 37:46Speaker 02

  spleen, zip ties it, removes it, puts it in a baggie, puts the organs back in, closes him up, saves a guy's life. It's just fantastic. It's my second proudest professional moment. What was the first? I'll get to that. I was at Eric Olson's change of command. He was the first four-star SEAL, taking charge of all of SOCOM. And I'm standing in line waiting to go in, and Admiral McRaven walks by, who is in charge of all special operations in Africa and in Europe. And he goes and said, and he gives me a bear hug in uniform. He goes, "That was some really sporty flying you guys did." I said, "Well, sir, that's why we have sporty pilots."

• 38:30Speaker 02

  And, um, but that's the kind of moral courage I just, I love employing people like that, to just find a way to get it done and win.

• 38:38Anthony Pompliano?

  What was the first?

• 38:40Speaker 02

  Uh, speaking at the National War College in Washington, and, uh, you know, I got out of the Navy as a lieutenant. It was nothing. And all 300 colonels popped to attention. And, um, uh, I gave them the whole brief on what we're doing and why. And at the end of it, this guy came to me and he said, uh, I was just in command, just in Baghdad as a commander, brigade commander. So he had what, three, 4,000 soldiers? He said, "At the top of the dashboards of their Humvees, it had the Blackwater call signs and frequencies." Because they knew that if the shit went bad, if they called the Blackwater guys, they would come immediately. No questions, no bureaucracy. Said exactly what we want.

• 39:17Anthony Pompliano?

  That, that is fantastic. Um, if we bring it back to the United States, this moral clarity, this moral courage that you're talking about, um, how do we fix the situation here? We have an economic pain that is being felt by millions of Americans, national debt that is completely, uh, you know, not only just big, but accelerating. I think we've added $500 billion just in the month of October. Um, like, what are the solutions that you think should be implemented?

• 39:46Speaker 02

  Uh, Elon Musk is right about doing a massive culling of government bureaucracies. Uh, and that does two things. One, it's just the spend on the people, but two, having that many bureaucrats. It's like, um, what did Jefferson say in the Declaration of Independence about the King? He has set forth thousands of bureaucrats to eat out our substance. And the fact is, Washington is like 70% remote work now. So all the bureaucrats in the DC area, 70% of them don't even go into the office. So I'm not thinking there's a whole lot of productivity there, which is good, but let's

• 40:27Speaker 02

  give them a one-year, two-year severance, but let's just just pare down massively.

• 40:33Anthony Pompliano?

  How many, I don't know how many employees work for the federal government, but like, what percentage do you think we could fire and not notice?

• 40:39Speaker 02

  Well, there's millions of employees and millions of contractors as well, that...

• 40:43Anthony Pompliano?

  50% of the US government we could fire and not even notice?

• 40:47Speaker 02

  Seventy.

• 40:48Anthony Pompliano?

  You think 70%?

• 40:49Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 40:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 40:51Speaker 02

  Elon Musk fired 80% of Twitter, and Twitter is better than ever.

• 40:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  If you think that after 200 and almost 50 years, the federal government couldn't go on a diet, adding that many programs, I mean, what I'm saying was, might be considered radical, it's, we either do it in an organized way, or it's going to be fed to us when the dollar collapses. The, the, the problem with that many bureaucrats, with all that funding and no accountability, is they make a lot of rules. And it's like 100,000 pages of new regulations come out every year with the force of law, which directly impedes and impairs people from starting a business, people from innovating, from creating. And you know who it hurts the worst?

• 41:41Speaker 02

  The people at the bottom end of the spectrum. Okay? It doesn't hurt the Black Rocks and the Fortune 500 companies, because they have the massive compliance programs and lawyers and all the rest, and they can ride out that kind of time delay, but for the guy that comes up, guy or girl that comes up with a great idea in their garage, to try to get it to market, and they're just constantly blocked by licensing, it's wrong. Okay? So headcount reduction, bureaucracy reduction, the fact that the Supreme Court did curtail the Chevron deference, that was like the 1984 case, they just overturned that about six months ago, that is a huge win, and so you'll see litigation from that that starts to chop away at a runaway regulatory state.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  And three, the inflation is caused by us, by government especially, just spending way too much money. And I would say the fourth, and certainly not the fourth in priority, there's a book that really affected my thinking. It's called The Myth of Capitalism. I encourage your readers to watch, to read it, or your viewers to watch it, or to read it. It is, and it makes the case that we have massively over consolidated American industry. And it is that cozy relationship between big business and government, which is happy for regulations because it blocks out

• 43:05Anthony Pompliano?

  The latter behind them.

• 43:07Speaker 02

  Exactly. And it, you know, it talks about like the average pay, pay ratio, CEO to junior guy in 1972 was like 30 to one. Now it's 360 to one. Our CEOs have not gotten 12 times better since then.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  The, when you look at the over consolidation in, in data, in search, in IT, in banking, in food processing, all these major industries, the regulatory state has driven the consolidation and the cartelization of many industries, including defense, and that needs to be broken up. The trust busting done effectively by the Teddy Roosevelt administration needs to be done again.

• 43:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's talk about the history of America, because I think people actually may have

• 43:59Speaker 02

  On the way in here, we pointed, you pointed out, these captains of industry, phenomenal, right? They built it, but they also consolidated a lot, and they really restricted that. And what happened when, when Standard Oil was broken up?

• 44:15Speaker 02

  Rockefeller ended up making more money, but the, but the competition brought by having multiple people coming to the table helped that innovation and speed.

• 44:24Anthony Pompliano?

  What always is the paradox of Rockefeller in my mind is he's famous for this quote where he says, "I'd rather earn 1% off 100 people's effort than 100% off of just mine." But Standard Oil obviously was just one large company. When it broke up, then he still had ownership in many of the broken up components and he did make more money. And so in a weird way, the way he looked at employees was different than the way he looked at business structure, but it seems like he learned over time that maybe the best way to put together your kind of empire is to just mimic the way that you work with people. And one of my favorite books is the Koch Brothers, Charles Koch, I think is the one who wrote it. He wrote a book called Good Profit. And in it, he basically describes their management

• 45:06Anthony Pompliano?

  philosophy and kind of the business structure and everything at the company. But one of the points in the book that everyone skips over when they read this book is he went and he studied the great civilizations throughout history. And he said, "What are the commonalities?" Because actually, a company is no different than organizing people, having them all work towards something, et cetera. And what he figured out was, hey, you actually need to have these decentralized teams. You need to push decision-making down to the people closest to the problem, right? All these things that I think kind of have infiltrated into management kind of philosophy. But he didn't learn it from a business school. He learned it by studying civilizations and the ones that rose and, you know, created resilience, were able to become these like very productive organizations of people. And it sounds like,

• 45:50Anthony Pompliano?

  you know, you're kind of advocating for a very similar thing in business today, which the history of America, which many people don't know, was actually built by the private sector. And I know-

• 46:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, look, America was started, sorry to interrupt you. America was started not by the British government or by the British Army. It was started by three companies listed by this, on the, basically joint stock companies of the City of London. Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Jamestown colonies were funded as stock companies and they hired private military contractors. Miles Standish, right? When you were a kid, you probably heard about Miles Standish at the first Thanksgiving, right? That guy was a private military contractor that was hired to protect the colony from Indians, criminals, wild animals, whatever, the same as John Smith in Jamestown.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  So that's what made America and that kind of thrift, innovation, daring, efficiency, that's, that is at our core of America. And we've gotten away from that. That's why we have, when we tip towards socialism, it has the predictable results.

• 47:00Anthony Pompliano?

  The building of America is not only just like built by companies, it's also financed by the private sector as well. And so what are the things that maybe we did to get here that we've kind of lost our way that you think we should go and re-implement? Is it something, you know, NASA versus SpaceX and push everything into the private sector?

• 47:18Speaker 02

  Well, when, I think it's after the Reconstruction Era, I think it's called the Golden Era, like from 1870 to about 1910. And you had this explosion, in a good way, of capitalism and infrastructure, railroads, telegraphs, farming, steam engines, power, electric lights. That was financed in an era of no income tax. It was tariffs only. Imagine that. And when we got away, when we embraced a Bolshevik Marxist idea of income tax and

• 47:58Speaker 02

  the progressive era, undid a lot of key things, right? Another bad thing that happened was the founding fathers got right.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  Of course, Congress, elected by the people, very much in touch with communities every two years. And if you think we've, we've quadrupled the size of the country since we've increased the size of Congress. Now, I hate to advocate for more politicians, but putting, making the House of Representatives much more responsive, because right now, it's what, every about 600,000 voters? If you took that down to every 200 or 300,000 voters and make Congress that much more responsive, I think you'd find it's fiscally more conservative. But the other bad thing that happened was we got away from how senators were elected,

• 48:53Speaker 02

  because the way the founding fathers laid it out, I think it was the 16th or 17th amendment. It's a Wilson era thing that they screwed up. It used to be that state legislatures would elect the senators, so that the senators were largely doing the bidding of the states. But now, senators are just elected with money that pours in from special interest groups from all over the country, and so they're beholden to that money, not to the state legislature that they're supposed to be representing. And that's, and that's why we have a runaway, very spendy, you know, Senate.

• 49:29Anthony Pompliano?

  It feels like there's this threat of accountability, right? And so, on one hand, you hear people, at least online, probably on Twitter, nowhere else, talking about like individual accountability and individual responsibility of, hey, no one's coming to save you, you know, you've got to improve your life, make good decisions.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  Prepare to self-rescue.

• 49:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, self-rescue, perfect. But at the same time, how many of the politicians in America actually get held accountable for the decisions they make, the outcomes of those programs they put in place, et cetera? It feels like if the individuals don't feel accountability, or kind of the preparation for self-rescue, it's really hard to hold other people accountable, right? And so it's almost like if the individuals are put in this situation and they're not responding, maybe it is actually like we're rotting from within?

• 50:15Speaker 02

  Sure, look, we suffer from affluenza, right? From so much money, so much wealth, so much comfort, very easy to be distracted by...

• 50:26Speaker 02

  Football, or whatever the pop artist de jour is, or whatever stupidity. And when, when the lights go out, and when crime runs away, and that kind of stuff, then it tends to wake people up. And so, maybe in some, some areas, people have woken up. We'll see what voter turnout is this election cycle, but I think it's going to be higher than what people have expected before.

• 50:48Anthony Pompliano?

  What is your current view of Trump versus Harris, both policies, the candidates, and then what the outcome of the election will be?

• 50:55Speaker 02

  Well, I think Trump is going to win. I think he is motivated a lot of, you just look at the, at the people that he attracted to this massive rally he had in, in New York, right? Asians, and blacks, and Latinos, and it's funny how the left criticizes a, a big rally with 18,000 inside and 100, and another 80 some thousand people outside. They want to disparage that as a Nazi rally, come on. If that's, if that's all you can-

• 51:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, with Israel flags hanging. I think that there was a number of Jewish people who spoke it onstage.

• 51:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's, people will lie, and eventually they're, they're going to run out of, run out of gas in those lies. Policy-wise, I think a second Trump go-around, he realizes that people is policy, and he did not have the depth of a bench, ready to go, to actually make a lot of the changes, especially in the national security apparatus. And so, that's why we didn't, he didn't see a lot of, in any way, fundamental change to, to rein in a military-industrial complex, a neocon, attempts at foreign policy, and just a lot of stupidity.

• 52:15Anthony Pompliano?

  So, this is fascinating, I think, to a lot of people, because as the founder of Blackwater, who probably is the single most successful and effective private military contractor in our lifetime, I can say that, maybe you're not allowed to say that, but I can say that.

• 52:28Speaker 02

  No, flying tigers.

• 52:32Speaker 02

  What Claire Chano did?

• 52:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  He affected the outcome of the Pacific Theater.

• 52:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that's that's fair. One of, maybe we will, we'll use as the descriptor, but um. You understand that world better than almost anybody else, definitely anyone I've ever talked with. And yet you essentially are advocating for Trump's strength as a deterrent without actually having to engage in war.

• 52:58Speaker 02

  There's a continuum of statecraft. On one end, you have diplomacy and embassies and conferences. And the other end, you have aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons and tank divisions. And there's 80% of the middle, which I would call the intelligence world. And you have an intelligence community that has largely missed its mark and become very risk averse, very bureaucratic. I really, I mean, what the Mossad accomplished with their pager op. The next day, the walkie talkie strikes in against Hezbollah was absolutely spectacular. You have to have an intelligence community with a to be wildcatters at heart. Right? A wildcatter is a guy that drills a well. Sometimes they hit, sometimes they don't.

• 53:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Go bankrupt a couple of times, but then you get rich.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  But but you keep, you have to have the courage to try. And for what we spend as a country for an intelligence apparatus, we should accomplish something like that once a month, for heaven's sakes.

• 53:58Anthony Pompliano?

  And is that like, why, why are they specifically, at least the perception is they are so good? Both in terms of the collection of intelligence, but also operations like that. Is that a cultural thing? Is that a higher IQ of like, what is it?

• 54:13Speaker 02

  It's a matter of being very focused and having actual existential threats that are facing them.

• 54:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And backed into a wall.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, look, when the when the agency is is doing advertisements about how their most important factors are diversity and and gathering intelligence on climate change. Come on, you know, I say the Chinese Communist Party and the SVR and the FSB and the GRU. Those are and the Iranians and the Cubans and of course Islamic Jihad, uh, problems with Muslim brother. Those are the things they should be focused on. So again, when any bureaucratic organization is adrift, the nice thing is the agency is the most quick to be reformed because civil service rules don't apply in the same way

• 55:05Speaker 02

  that it does in the rest of the federal government. So you could actually fix that organization quite quickly. But I would advocate for less of a government approach. And if you lead, right, the business of America should be business. And I've met many, many leaders around the world who are so frustrated that the embassy, the US embassy in those locations becomes a beacon of forcing green New Deal kind of reforms. So a country that's sitting on enormous amounts of hydrocarbons are arm twisted by the embassy to not develop it to be green. But, you know, we have dozens of African countries where an average family

• 55:49Speaker 02

  of four has less access, they have less than four hours of 100 watt light bulb equivalent electricity per day. And they're sitting on billions of barrels of oil and gas. That's wrong. It is morally wrong to deprive them of the ability to develop themselves or to help them. Or the transgender or the other social engineering stuff, that's what the embassies have become instead of being beacons of what's right in America, of capitalism, of legal opportunity. And, and if we wonder, people complain, well, China's really advanced in Africa and they're, and they're defeating us. They're pushing into a vacuum created

• 56:27Speaker 02

  by our own stupidity. And more capitalism, more, I would say, off leash, American companies going there and helping and creating and innovating are the American way, the way the America West was, was settled, is the way the rest of the world wants to grow with us, not under us, grow with us. So I, comes back to what we opened with, I'm an optimistic person, because if the US government would just get the hell out of the way, be a lot of spectacular things can happen.

• 57:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Who do you think the biggest American adversary is today? Is it Russia?

• 57:10Speaker 02

  Chinese Communist Party.

• 57:12Anthony Pompliano?

  And in what ways are we locked in competition versus actual threat?

• 57:19Speaker 02

  The Cold War, right, was a was a scrum between the idea of Western capitalism versus Communist Party of the Soviet Union and really the tenants of Marxism and it's the fundamental relationship of of an individual with a state, right? We focus on individual rights and liberty, they focus on state control and everything accruing to the benefit of the state. And, you know, we went on for 35 years after World War II to 1980. It'd been a policy of containment, just stop the spread of communism. Reagan said, enough of this, we're gonna F the commies.

• 58:02Speaker 02

  We're gonna go at them economically, politically, culturally, socially, and and make it difficult for them to run a communist empire. They never had anywhere near the industrial base that China does now. And, you know, when Mao died, I think in 76, and Deng Xiaoping took over, he said, geez, enough of this Cultural Revolution thing, because he'd actually been imprisoned then. And the first place they went to was Singapore, which was Han China personnel, but on capitalism. And said, we're doing that, and we're doing, what does he say, socialism with Chinese characteristics.

• 58:45Speaker 02

  And and China pivoted and grew their economy like crazy and admitted them to the WTO, and it absolutely ate the heart out of the out of our industrial base. Okay, whatever damage NAFTA did, the outsourcing of US industry to China did 20x the damage. So now China has built a a very nice machine, and they've been growing steadily, but but now Xi has made himself dictator for life.

• 59:18Speaker 02

  You saw that in the last fall when he literally dragged Hu Jintao, his predecessor, out as the public FU, I'm in charge now. And, but he's also really clamped down on their entrepreneurial class, right? When Jack Ma disappears, Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, a true unicorn, right? Cause he was a, I think, a high school English teacher and he builds something four times the size of Amazon in terms of digital sales. Uh, and he disappears and he's embraced, he's seen then embracing supervision, teaching at some rural school in China. He's done that a lot. And so the Chinese economy is suffering, but they have a very nice industrial base,

• 59:57Speaker 02

  but they are all about the, um, what the party wants. When I see a lot of the woke nonsense in America, it correlates directly back to kind of the aspects of the culture revolution, even ties back to even the early communist slogans and sayings of the twenties that you see in, um, in communist, communist Russia. So there's a lot, there's a lot of bad ideas that keep resurfacing.

• 1:00:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:26Speaker 02

  So to, i- i- in my mind, that competition of ideas of what actually made America effective? The governance, right? The, the individual rights, very limited government, an equal playing field. And, and it is not, I am not in favor of unrestrained big business. I'm in favor of unrestrained business and government's job is supposed to be to create some level of, of equal playing field, uh, especially needs to be an antitrust enforcer. And we've done no antitrust enforcement for probably 40 years now. And that has to change.

• 1:01:07Anthony Pompliano?

  There's this idea of American security that I think is permeating throughout the country. Um, it shows up in different ways. We talked a little bit about the border. Um, one of the things the audience is very interested in is Bitcoin. Um, and I think that it's a unique, uh, piece of technology because there's an aspect of like securing your economic value, right? As the holder of Bitcoin. But also, I've long argued that Bitcoin and the design of it really takes the ideas of the American ethos and writes it into code. So just like the American government has kind of three branches of the government and Bitcoin to get things done, you've got kind of three different groups of people that all need to come together to get that stuff approved. It takes ideas like freedom of speech, censorship resistance, etc., and kind of puts it into code.

• 1:01:49Anthony Pompliano?

  What is your view on Bitcoin and kind of how do you look at this as an asset moving forward?

• 1:01:54Speaker 02

  Well, I wish I had taken it more seriously earlier.

• 1:01:58Anthony Pompliano?

  As with everyone watching, same thing.

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. But to me, so I'm a, I went to Hillsdale College, Austrian economics major. So very much in favor of the microeconomic approach and decision making. And when you think about money as a means of exchange, and throughout history, that's been lots of things. It could be certain seashells. In the Netherlands for a while, it was tulips, right? There was a tulip inflation.

• 1:02:31Speaker 02

  Lots of different currencies over time. And so for a digital currency that is based on some unique code, makes perfect sense. I am all in favor of a competition to the SWIFT system, because I think central banking and the way the government runs banks makes it very possible to politicize banking. I have, I would say I've been a victim of that. And I'm not claiming victimhood, but it's nonsense how politicized everything has gotten.

• 1:03:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Have you been de-banked?

• 1:03:07Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Sure.

• 1:03:08Anthony Pompliano?

  And have you gotten reasons for why?

• 1:03:11Speaker 02

  I have wrong ideas. So, yeah, that's a sore subject. I'll name names, but maybe another time.

• 1:03:22Speaker 02

  But having the means of paying and saving and exchanging goods and services. To me, when I look at what M-Pesa did in Africa, which was, because there's not a lot of banking infrastructure, there's nothing you can trust in Africa, but M-Pesa was a way to pay very small amounts through your cellphone. And so it was super empowering to the poorest of farmers so that they could grow something, transfer their goods, and get paid for it. It's fantastic. It's the underpinnings of capitalism. And so Bitcoin is a much bigger next-generation version of that.

• 1:04:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think that former President Trump has come out and said, hey, we're going to create this Bitcoin strategic stockpile and maybe even put a dent in the debt? Is it something that you look at Bitcoin as for the individuals? Or do you think that there are things with the government or central bank where Bitcoin eventually infiltrates?

• 1:04:17Speaker 02

  I hope government stays as far away from it as possible, just because, like we said, like I've said, everything government touches tends to get screwed up.

• 1:04:27Anthony Pompliano?

  And then the banks, which are not the government, but some would argue are pretty damn close, and may even control parts of the government, they seem to be leaning in quite heavily on Bitcoin. Obviously, we have the Bitcoin ETFs.

• 1:04:41Speaker 02

  I think because it's a dam, they see they can't hold back anymore. And so they're either going to deal with it or going to get displaced by it.

• 1:04:49Anthony Pompliano?

  I want to go around the world on some of the conflicts, but I want to actually start in the US, because there's one story that I see from my friends in the military, the intelligence communities, maybe people online who pay attention to this stuff, but I do not see the average American talking about, which is rumors or chatter online about a potential kind of wide-scale attack on Election Day. And it's a little unclear as to how credible these threats or chatter are, and then also what exactly that entails. But how do you view, you know, there's a lot of people here, we may not know who they are, there's a lot of groups who would love to disrupt or to kind of make a statement

• 1:05:34Anthony Pompliano?

  on something like the US Election Day. Do you put any credence to some of these threats? Or do you think that it's just chatter online that is hard to kind of pinpoint?

• 1:05:46Speaker 02

  Here's what I know. For 17 days, there was large drones being flown over Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. Now, Langley Air Force Base is where most of the F-22s, the most capable air defense fighter in the world are located. And the fact that they were permitted and all the different interested parties literally went briefed all the way to the President of the United States and did nothing to stop drones from flying over. Now, what do I think they were? I think they were Chinese drones launched off a vessel off the coast. And that was a probe. And but the fact that nobody put somebody in a helicopter and followed, because the

• 1:06:29Speaker 02

  drones are flying 100 knots, about the speed, there's not some extraterrestrial device going at Mach 2.

• 1:06:35Anthony Pompliano?

  How does that happen?

• 1:06:38Speaker 02

  That comes from bureaucratic handholding and nobody's saying, fuck this, I'm in charge, this is my base, you're not threatening my aircraft, get in that helicopter, follow that drone, or go throw a cable over the pusher prop of that drone, knock it down, and I want to see who's controlling that, what's the code, what's the operating system, where the hell did this thing come from? There was Chinese nationals that were detained, recovering a drone from a tree in that area, and they were released. So again, to me, that is bureaucratic timidity of nobody saying, all right, nobody's, in absence of clear orders from the top, I am assuming common sense is still in charge,

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  and we're going to prevent this threat. Not after, because this wasn't one day or two days, 17 days.

• 1:07:30Anthony Pompliano?

  That's the craziest part to me, is like, it's one thing if-

• 1:07:33Speaker 02

  Who are we paying to be in charge for these positions if nobody's going to make a decision?

• 1:07:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it's like, it's kind of like the balloon thing, right? It's like, if a drone flies over an airbase and no one knew it was coming, or it could be, you know, a local kid, it could be whatever, it happens one time, it's in, it's out, not ideal, but understandable how that could happen. 17 days is basically like you rolled out the red carpet.

• 1:07:57Speaker 02

  Or a high-altitude balloon that's flying slowly at the speed of the winds over the United States, and nobody engages it. It's a, it's a- A large amount of unserious people put in positions that they shouldn't be allowed to make decisions.

• 1:08:10Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's take those two stories as backdrop. There's a story that when I first saw it, had every red flag go off. And I said to my wife, I said, there's going to be more to this story. And basically, the initial report was, I believe that there was an officer, maybe a commander, about 30, 45 minutes from Fort Bragg, who shot and killed a-

• 1:08:37Speaker 02

  A Chechen.

• 1:08:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, the initial story was, he shot and killed someone on his property. And then it came out that he may have shot and killed a telecommunications engineer. And it was positioned almost like a veteran who had an anger problem, or something was kind of the initial reports. Fast forward, the story that I think is the last version that I've seen is that there was two Chechen citizens, one stayed in the car, one had a long camera with a lens, was taking photos of this guy's kids, his house, his property, him, etc. He went out to confront them, a conflict-

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  With the 1911.

• 1:09:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And he killed them.

• 1:09:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:23Anthony Pompliano?

  And of course, very quickly, the internet sleuths begin looking, what is the company, whatever, it goes to a random building and-

• 1:09:31Speaker 02

  In Detroit.

• 1:09:32Anthony Pompliano?

  All this. So like, that to me feels like the next escalation of, you mentioned probe with the drones.

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  It's a probe.

• 1:09:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, there's been probes on bases where people have drawn up-

• 1:09:42Speaker 02

  There's been probes, there's been EFPs fired against key transformers in California, and in North Carolina, and in Washington State, right? Key things. So EFP is a copper plate with explosive behind it, and it creates a high-velocity slug going about 8,000 feet per second, very nasty against armored vehicles in Iraq, I'm sure you experienced, but also very effective for standoff destruction of infrastructure. Yeah. And people have been testing and probing those. I think there's been at least three to five of those. It's 100% a probe. And so we have an FBI, probably not doing its job on the counterintelligence side, but they're busy investigating parents going to school board meetings who are pissed off at transgender stuff.

• 1:10:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, like, and if you go to the Chechen story- I mean, this is, again, one of our elite warriors in the military.

• 1:10:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a guy, it was a Colonel assigned to JSOC.

• 1:10:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Who is, he's not living in like, you know, shotgun housing where his neighbors on each side can basically hear him on the phone in his house, right? He's living in the middle of the woods, from what I understand. And it feels like that story popped its head up and that thing went away very quickly. And maybe for good reason. I always kind of look at these things and I say, listen, we don't have all the information. Maybe there's more to it that we don't know, whatever. But man, does it feel like there is a dotted line between open borders, a lack of strength as deterrents, and a lot more stories like that.

• 1:11:09Speaker 02

  And it's a very dangerous assumption for us to assume what was, will always will be. And yeah, this whole, this whole thing is shockingly fragile. Now, America is a very big and deep and resilient country. Look at what happened on 9/11, backed down buildings, attacked the Pentagon, we got back to work the next day. But attacks on credibility and legitimacy of the, of the election and things around that, it can be dangerous fast, especially when one party is calling the other party Hitler, which unleashes every amount of emotion and anger and irrationality to prevent that person from taking office.

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  And that's, I think people have to de-escalate that kind of language because it can be very, very dangerous if it comes to it.

• 1:12:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Speaking of security of elections, you've been very vocal about the Venezuelan election.

• 1:12:09Speaker 02

  I have.

• 1:12:10Anthony Pompliano?

  And maybe you can give kind of a 30-second just overview for those who haven't been paying attention at all as to what's happened there, but also there are certain similarities to what happened there that I think people have now started to try to tie to US situation. So like, what happened in Venezuela and then why have you been so vocal?

• 1:12:27Speaker 02

  Sure, Venezuela was one of the per capita wealthiest countries in, in the Western Hemisphere. Enormous oil. There's a reason it's called El Dorado, the city of gold. And they voted in Chavismo, right? Hugo Chavez in 99. And he socialized, nationalized many parts of the country. They've had three elections, all of which were stolen by the ruling Chavista leftist party. Chavez died, appointed Chavez's lawyer was Celia Flores. And she got her husband named to be as the successor. Nicolas Maduro was the head of the bus driver union. And so he stole the last two elections.

• 1:13:12Speaker 02

  This last time in July, they lost the election clearly 70 to 30. Wow. The receipts are out there, right? The the actual receipts have been machines printed out. The opposition won clearly 70 to 30. And the Maduro clan is ignoring it as a as a good communist backed communist government would. There's hundreds of Cuban intelligence agents that are around Maduro as his inner coordinate of security. It is they have really perfected drug trafficking and drug processing.

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  So they they process the coca, all the meth that is produced in the neighboring countries and exported to the world. So I trolled Maduro on Twitter a few days after they stole this election. I've had had contact with Maria Carina Machado and with predecessors that we're trying to run against offering support. And so anyway, I trolled Maduro. And I said, if the Biden Harris administration really want to support democracy and justice in Venezuela, they should raise the bounty because there's already a warrant for the arrest of Nicolas Maduro.

• 1:14:33Speaker 02

  For $15 million for drug trafficking by the DEA and 10 million for his Interior Minister, Diestado Cabeo. I said they should raise those to 100 million each, sit back and watch the magic happen. There's like 3,000 generals. One of them is gonna, for 100 million bucks, they were gonna arrest him and make it change. And I said, "You don't even need to use US taxpayer dollars, you could use frozen Venezuelan government money." Well, that went very viral throughout Venezuela, and I had thousands of people contact me saying, "Please do a GoFundMe, we want to help make a change." And so that program was launched, it's called Yacazi Venezuela. 30,000 people have contributed to it.

• 1:15:14Speaker 02

  It's raised 1.6 million, because for no, for literally 25 years, no one has actually pushed back hard on the government. And I won't go into too much detail, but Yacazi Venezuela will seek to restore democracy and normalcy in Venezuela, and there is a warrant for his, for the arrest of Maduro. So it is legal to remove him from power.

• 1:15:39Anthony Pompliano?

  So, if I remember correctly, I think it is in Venezuela, there was a American who went and was training the military?

• 1:15:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, there was some kind of, no, there was a daytime, over the beach effort made by somebody and they arrested, I think that was, it was almost a, almost a false flag. I can't imagine anybody doing daylight over the beach.

• 1:16:02Anthony Pompliano?

  And it was like, almost like he was like trying to train some, some group, but like, it was very obvious that they were training.

• 1:16:09Speaker 02

  I think, I think the regime is very brittle.

• 1:16:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Like attuned to what's, what's happening.

• 1:16:14Speaker 02

  Well, I think there, I think the regime is brittle. They have clearly lost the confidence of the people. There is a massive criminality. The difference in Venezuelan society versus our society is they don't have a Second Amendment. And they, and they don't have, here's the thing, I find the Venezuelan people to be, they've been wronged by socialism and communism, and it's been imposed on them and reinforced by the Cubans.

• 1:16:43Speaker 02

  And the Iranians, there's actually an Iranian presence there, uh, supporting, um, the Maduro security apparatus. I can't imagine, I grew up in West Michigan, and, uh, if, if this, if Michigan was an independent country and the governor of Michigan had, uh, stolen the election for the last 25 years, my people would have made war on that, right? I, the, the Dutch, I, I just, I don't see that. So I guess that's a unique characteristic of America is we have a fierceness and we demand, right? At least a lot of people that I know growing up have a, they have a view of themselves as a citizen with rights in a free republic.

• 1:17:24Speaker 02

  And, um, and you can push and push and push and maybe slowly boil that frog, but eventually that frog's gonna jump and, um, and it's gonna come out swinging.

• 1:17:34Anthony Pompliano?

  What is the difference in your mind between what I will call kind of covert regime change, which the United States is constantly accused of doing all around the world, uh, throughout history versus, hey, here's a hundred million dollar bounty, you know, there's a warrant, um, free for all, somebody go and make it happen? Like, which one's better?

• 1:17:55Speaker 02

  I will not answer that.

• 1:17:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. Um, let's go to a different conflict, which is Russia and Ukraine. And, um, I think that may be the one that people point to as a prime example of the lack of strength, uh, that creates deterrence, where in a weird way, uh, the US, um, if you follow the talk track that, uh, the United States refused to say, uh, in either direction, whether Ukraine was gonna join NATO or not, um, and almost was trying to govern or, uh, have diplomatic action through like, you know, strategic ambiguity.

• 1:18:34Speaker 02

  Strategic stupidity.

• 1:18:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, we kind of just end up in a world where like, people are like, all right, you guys are just kind of clowns and, uh, we're coming in.

• 1:18:45Speaker 02

  I think I read a lot of military history. I know you do. And so I think it's important for Americans to realize that the Russians lost 22 million people, Soviets, in World War II. And while we were still messing around in North Africa before even getting to Normandy, so we're in Morocco and Algeria and Operation Torch. The Russians erased 800,000 Germans from the order of battle at the Battle of Stalingrad, and they lost 1.2 million people doing it. Think of that. You know, how many Europeans, how many Americans were lost in the European theater? 250,000.

• 1:19:30Speaker 02

  As heavy as our losses were, it's nothing in comparison to what they lost. So for a Russian perspective, and you see now with the eastern expansion of NATO, which we had promised not to do, to have more unfriendly troops on their border than at any time than since May of 1941, when the Germans invaded Russia, Barbarossa, they get ornery about that. And then you have a key, not a part of Russia, Ukraine, but a key component, fellow traveler, trade partner, a lot of ethnic Russians in eastern parts of Ukraine.

• 1:20:11Speaker 02

  And then you're right, US is toying with this idea of it's NATO and and I think we just kind of ignored the red lines and sent unserious people, right? We send Wendy Sherman, sure she's a nice lady, as the Deputy Secretary of State. That's she, you know what her job was before becoming at State? She was a social worker. So that's who we sent to go negotiate against Putin and Lavrov and Shoigu to say, "Don't invade Ukraine." Unserious. And and now it's a debacle and the Ukrainians are losing steadily. They have now tipped over the point where they are losing more KIA every day than they

• 1:20:55Speaker 02

  can even recruit. And In a battle of attrition, math matters. And Russian can generate far more troop count. And now they're even apparently drawing in North Korean troops. Cannon fodder, but they will continue to grind away with a with a rototiller. And it's absolutely pointless. And I think it's also exceedingly, um, the idiot politicians in America that say, wow, we're degrading Russian military capability. Bullshit. The Russian military is vastly better and smarter today than they were two years ago. They are learning and innovating. Their electronic warfare is exceedingly good.

• 1:21:40Speaker 02

  Why are a lot of US, very high dollar US systems not on high demand? Because they don't work. Because they might work for a month or two, and the Russians adapt with jamming and with spoofing and, um, uh, that whole thing needs to end as quickly as possible. And I think, and I've also talked to other folks around the world that have attended the BRICS summit recently that was in, um, uh, the ski area off the Black Sea, Sochi, just two weeks ago. And they'd always seen the China Russia, China Russia relationship over the last 20 years had been one of parity.

• 1:22:24Speaker 02

  It's now shifted to where it's, it's a, a junior role compared to China. And that's an exceedingly bad thing for America. Because for 100 years, the policy, US foreign policy goal was to keep German industry from combining with Russian resources. And all we've done is push Russian resources into a junior role with the Chinese Communist Party and their massive industrial base. And that is not good. I think America has far more in common culturally with Russia than we do certainly with China or India or Japan or Korea.

• 1:23:04Speaker 02

  And so we don't have to be our best friends, but we also don't have to be as antagonistic to them.

• 1:23:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Trump says that he can solve the war before he takes office if he's elected. You think that's possible? Whether it's him or just like a quick solution, if you put the right people in the room?

• 1:23:24Speaker 02

  I think, I think some, yeah, I think so. I think some reasonableness is possible.

• 1:23:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:23:34Speaker 02

  Now, is that within six weeks or two months? I don't know, but it's, but it's, um, well, again, also Ukraine, that area of fighting is also driven by seasons. So you have December, January, February, it's cold, you can maneuver, possible to fight. Once you get February, March, April, it's the great slush. And, uh, I don't know where you grew up, but, um, farm fields that have been covered with snow. When they melt, it's one big boggy gooey mess. And, uh, and that's not a great time for, for maneuver.

• 1:24:12Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm laughing because as I am talking to you, it's like talking to, you know, a soldier who understands the realities of combat is some simple things is like, can we actually move on the battlefield?

• 1:24:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Compared to politicians who say, well, like, you know,

• 1:24:25Speaker 02

  Well, there's,

• 1:24:25Anthony Pompliano?

  why don't we fight? It's supposed to get warm then.

• 1:24:27Speaker 02

  There's a unique, there's actually a Russian term specifically for the great slush. It's called the great Rasputinza.

• 1:24:32Anthony Pompliano?

  There you go. Israel feels like, uh, surprise attacked by Hamas. And now it is game on in the region, uh, almost daily. In the American media, we are seeing Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran. I mean, just go down the line. There is, uh, either incoming fire or there is some sort of, you know, outgoing, uh, operation.

• 1:24:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, imagine if, imagine four years ago saying that, uh, Israel was having to launch 100 aircraft.

• 1:25:06Speaker 02

  To fly to Iran to strike targets inside. It's unthinkable as being necessary. But it's a collapse of credibility, collapse of deterrence, ties back to collapse of a great power in Afghanistan, getting beat by, you know, the, um, uh, there's a huge army conference, um, the Association of the US Army at the Washington Convention Center. And I go in there every year. I wish they would invite me as a speaker because I would like to shame them to say, all right, guys, you had all of this stuff, all these hundreds of billions of dollars of stuff, and you get beat by 50,000 largely illiterate goat

• 1:25:46Speaker 02

  herders that didn't receive any outside help. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad leadership, bad innovation, and you got rolled. Um, the IDF, for all their confidence and competence, they got rolled on October 7th. They were surprised. I know that at 2:00 AM on the morning of October 7th, the head of the Mossad, the head of the Shabak, and the head of the, uh, the Chief of Staff of the IDF, met at the Kirya, which is their Pentagon in Tel Aviv. Emergency meeting because they were seeing all kinds of noise in the system, like,

• 1:26:26Speaker 02

  wait, something's happening. We don't know what. Reconvene at 8:00 AM. Instead of, the only person that did something was the head of the Shabak, and I think he sent three 12 man teams to the south. That's it. But one of them, and I say this as an example, that individual soldier's courage still swings outcomes a lot. Sends one team, there's a traffic circle coming out of the north of Gaza. One of the teams went there.

• 1:27:00Speaker 02

  And of course, hundreds of Hamas guys rolled out of the north of Gaza or headed to Ashkalon, which is a city of like 200, 300,000 people. They fought to the last man. 11 of the 12 guys killed in action, killed hundreds of Hamas guys. But imagine if hundreds of Hamas guys had made it to Ashkalon, the death count would have been four or five times what it was. But, but nobody else had done anything to actually prepare. Nobody said, "Wake up on the army bases, stand to, lock and load." Nothing, nothing. And so it's very, it's a great reminder to not, not believe our own bullshit and be lulled into our technical competency and, and I think we're way over dependent on sigint and imint

• 1:27:44Speaker 02

  and all those kinds of things that we, we assume the enemy can't innovate around. I think the IDF did themselves a disservice in how they went into Gaza. I think they went and fought the, the fight that Hamas wanted to have. They built 300 miles of tunnels. They hid the hostages in the tunnels. So IDF bombs like crazy to this day with a lot of civilians around and now a year, a year plus passed and still hostages, still not resolved. I'm still frustrated. I gave them the option a month after, I went there in November, right after the thing happened,

• 1:28:27Speaker 02

  like two weeks after. And I took the best of Texas drilling because if it's one thing I have, I don't know much, but I understand military bureaucracy and I have lots of great Jewish friends, but I've never met a Jewish roughneck or a Jewish driller. And so I didn't think there'd be that level of expertise in the, in their combat engineer corps to not really know what is possible because, because horizontal drilling is really advanced a lot and gave them the option of flooding all the tunnels, pumping millions of gallons of seawater into the tunnels of Gaza, flooding it. That would have done three things. One, destroyed all the underground weapons caches.

• 1:29:12Speaker 02

  Two, prevented them from using it to maneuver.

• 1:29:16Speaker 02

  And hiding and three, it would have flushed all the hostages up to the surface. There's one thing I understand about building Blackwater is moving water because it is as flat as your kitchen table. And so we had to move millions of cubic meters of water to do that. And so pumping that, making basically turning it into a duck impound would have prevented, would have protected the civilians because you don't need to bomb through the tunnels. And who can complain about water? Well, they can complain about anything, but but it's it's so much better for the civilians than than getting than getting bombed. It has caused on top of the civilian death, it has been a huge black eye for the IDF globally.

• 1:29:59Speaker 02

  And and they're having problems with ground combat also in the north because they look the Hezbollah hired North Korean tunnel engineers. I know this because they find North Korean porn in the tunnels when they go in them. And again, I think in the north, they should have a year after, or even a month after, knowing they were going to go into the north, they should have supercharged the Lebanese Armed Forces. Let the Lebanese Armed Forces go after Hezbollah because the Druze and the Christians and the Sunnis are also not fans of the fact that Hezbollah is the real power in Lebanon. They would have been seen as a liberator then, not as an aggressor.

• 1:30:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Why did they not do the water in the tunnels?

• 1:30:47Speaker 02

  I think they were blocked by somewhat from the Pentagon and somewhat of their own hubris or stubbornness. But it's frustrating. That's a that's an out of the box thinking. I mean, I had I had 12,000 horsepower pumps lined up.

• 1:31:02Anthony Pompliano?

  But this is what's so fascinating to me about you is I've never been in the room when you walk in in more of those conversations, but I would have to imagine that two things are both true. When you walk in, you have a lot of credibility. You built Blackwater. You've seen this over and over again. You're very well read on military history. And I think you have a reputation for thinking outside the box. That's how you build a Blackwater. That's how you show up with these ideas, etc. But also too, there's probably

• 1:31:31Anthony Pompliano?

  You're not from the US military, right? In terms of your, your active role today. You did build Blackwater and there's always, you know, Blackwater founder Erik Prince headlines, all that nonsense.

• 1:31:42Speaker 02

  Whatever, but you're only as good as, uh, I don't know. What are you going to do next?

• 1:31:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:47Speaker 02

  And I don't want to live off, live off that. But it has been, I have been, um, man, I've been blocked so many places by the clown show that is the national security apparatus in Washington. We, America does not have to have such a black eye and such a lack of credibility around the world. There's so many of these fires that can be put out.

• 1:32:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And this out of the box ideas, most people I don't think realize that is a lot of what special operations is about. It is not, hey, let's line up in a line, you know, kind of

• 1:32:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 1:32:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Confederate army style, march across the field.

• 1:32:21Speaker 02

  But, but shock troops is necessary in some places, but not all places.

• 1:32:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Uh, another, um, conflict or maybe a brewing conflict that I think a lot of people aren't paying attention to is China and Taiwan. There's a story of, uh, cheap labor and, uh, innovation, um, and technology. There's also just, is the US actually capable of defending Taiwan?

• 1:32:46Speaker 02

  So the other thing we should cover from Ukraine is, uh, is this, right? So this is the size charge that an FPV drone, a small civilian consumer type drone, a seven or a 10 inch blade drone, modified with, um, software with a charge about this size, with a copper disc, gives you the nice EFP jet, uh, with a, uh, with a gap, you fill the, uh, the exterior with, um, steel shot. So you get a nice frag sleeve and now you can fly that sucker. You can carry six, he can carry six, I can carry six. So now together we can go smack 18 targets out to 15 kilometers away. It is the true democratization of precision strike.

• 1:33:29Speaker 02

  And that is the revolution in warfare because it's cheap, man. It's not a $200,000 javelin with a $300,000 launcher. It's 3,000, 3,000, 3,000 and, and that's a revolution in war. It's as big as, as Genghis Khan putting stirrups on horses. It's that big a deal. And so don't assume what was in the past. Is possible going forward. And so any so in why the that paradigm, I think, is worth talking about for China. They have lots of missile capability and all of it is pre-registered

• 1:34:11Speaker 02

  on every known target in Taiwan. If you're dumb enough to drive an aircraft carrier right up the middle, probably a good chance it's going to get smacked. And so having a unconventional warfare approach to if China does flex up and we want to do something to help Taiwan, the single best thing they could do is build a home guard.

• 1:34:32Speaker 02

  When America was fighting for its independence, 30, 40% were pro-crown, 30, 40% just in the middle, just trying to survive, about 30% were pro-liberty, but only 3% of the population actually took up arms against Britain. If you did a home guard in Taiwan, because their military is about 150,000, largely worthless, literally a large collection of soy boys, and not a lot of fight there. But if you find the 3% of population that will fight, the CrossFitters, the Marathoners, the volunteer firemen, teachers, policemen, and some reservists,

• 1:35:17Speaker 02

  give them proper training and give them a force package, an arms cache at each town, village, whatever, so that everything becomes a, an urban fight on top of a very high jungle terrain inland. It takes away the certainty of when you can seize it. Because if Xi is going to go for it, it's got to be quick. They cannot sustain a one or two-year campaign to pacify Taiwan. It's got to be over in a couple of weeks.

• 1:35:45Anthony Pompliano?

  It can't be, it has to be quick because it's going to take some time for the US to get there, and then it turns into a bigger issue or something else.

• 1:35:53Speaker 02

  If the US does decide to go there, it's gonna be bad because there's gonna be indecision. And that, there's friction for that because it's, you have literally the tyranny of logistics of distance. But the bigger thing for China is they import 70, 80% of their hydrocarbons, a big chunk of their food, hugely trade dependent. And so if they have this ugly fight going on in Taiwan and Elon Musk makes it possible for the word to get out through Starlink and et cetera, it's, it's bad. So if Xi's gonna go, he wants to be over quick, has to be over quick. And the uncertainty is 500,000 Taiwanese that say, not today, motherfucker. Sorry.

• 1:36:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Quick is measured in days, weeks?

• 1:36:39Speaker 02

  Weeks.

• 1:36:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Weeks. One other story, and you're touching on it here, that I think is maybe not even known, let alone, there's not an emphasis put on it. Russian oil still made its way to Germany. It just went through China. The Taliban now controls a number of mineral deposits and mines that seem to be pretty important for the world. China has run around Africa and created all sorts of infrastructure, you know, debt contracts, controlling various resources. There's the violent conflict, and then there is almost a kind of a, I'm gonna call it like a mineral

• 1:37:23Speaker 02

  or natural resource. Soft power economic conflict.

• 1:37:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And so that seems to be happening. And I think where my eyes got opened to this was, I remember India, which is largely considered a US ally, when Russia invaded Ukraine, we kind of went around the world and almost like took sticks, right? Hey, you're gonna take their oil or not? Well, you probably shouldn't do that. You want to be our friend? And India essentially told us to kick rocks. They said, we need the oil.

• 1:37:46Speaker 02

  They're, they're, they're saving $400 million a day doing that.

• 1:37:49Anthony Pompliano?

  By still accepting the oil.

• 1:37:50Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:37:51Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when push comes to shove, there's alliances and allies, but they're still people and they need certain resources.

• 1:38:00Speaker 02

  Every country has interests and they're going to pursue those interests. And the elites in Washington that ignore those realities, the neocon paradigm, that's why we have the mess we have. And

• 1:38:18Speaker 02

  Again, the Ukraine debacle should be brought to an end. China is an even bigger economy and to flex up against. Competing with them in Africa, not that hard. They're pushing into a vacuum. It is, there is tons of countries that want more American capital, that want more American presence, but our regulation, our banks, right? I'll give you an example. If I have a mining activity going in an African country, there's not many banks that want to accept, in the United States, that want to accept a wire from an African country. It literally comes with a 10,000 pages of compliance nonsense just for doing that.

• 1:39:02Speaker 02

  So it's, we have regulated ourselves into stasis and incompetence.

• 1:39:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, for Americans who are used to dealing with Bitcoin or crypto, going in and out of these exchanges, has people been de-banked? There's all the regulatory. From Africa is even worse, right? So for the crypto people, it's even worse than that. Well, the last thing I want to talk to you about is when I was a young boy, I think that I got a sense of patriotism from really two things. There was what I will call daily life, which included saying the pledge of allegiance before every single school. There was my parents, that probably, they had a sense of patriotism and it was important to them and they were proud of the country and they kind of instilled it in me and my brothers. And so that daily life just kind of reinforced it over and over again.

• 1:39:52Anthony Pompliano?

  And usually it was implicit, but it became something that you embodied. The second thing was what I would call programming. And so there was TV shows, there was movies, there was a whole bunch of stuff, everything from Saving Private Ryan to name, you know, whatever movie ended up being popular.

• 1:40:11Anthony Pompliano?

  There have been a couple of movies that have been created. There's Lone Survivor. There's 12 Strong. There's been a couple. But it feels like, in the same way that Google and many of the tech companies have heavily been discouraged from participating or working with the government, Hollywood and the entertainment industry is not a fan of continuing to permeate patriotism, these stories of so many of these war heroes, etc. And I think you can draw a dotted line to the recruitment numbers in the military. You can draw a dotted line to the decline of patriotism. Do you ever think that those things are having a bigger impact than maybe people kind of give them credit to?

• 1:40:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, it feels like it's just, there's a hole there that maybe wasn't there 20 years ago when Top Gun and, you know, some of these different movies were popular.

• 1:41:02Speaker 02

  So I went to the Naval Academy the year after the first Top Gun.

• 1:41:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 1:41:05Speaker 02

  And it, well, I was going, I had applied before, but obviously that spiked the applications. And why was the Navy in a big hurry to help Tom Cruise make a second one? Because, of course, it's a freaking love affair. That is a love story of naval aviation and patriotism and all the rest. It was fantastic. He did a magnificent job with it. So Hollywood is super left-wing, but at its core, it's still capitalist. And when scripts like Top Gun come along, and he probably didn't have to go many places for financing for it, but those stories still make it out once in a while, and that resonates.

• 1:41:44Speaker 02

  And those become the fan favorites, and it drives that thinking. Numbers, recruiting numbers are down because you have a very woke military leadership that's saying the biggest threat is white rage. Come on. I mean, it's just stupidity. And people, people join the military. Fundamental difference, right? Marine Corps recruiting. Has consisted, and they have not had a hard time. Well, they have, their, their numbers haven't fallen. But their approach is maybe if you're good enough, you can be one of us, right? They still appeal to that warrior sense. And the army has sadly, or the Navy has gone the way of, hey, join up and we'll pay for college.

• 1:42:29Speaker 02

  And whatever. And that's a different thing.

• 1:42:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Form of socialism.

• 1:42:32Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:42:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. We will give you a bunch of free stuff to do this.

• 1:42:35Speaker 02

  Right. And, and I do remember my, my favorite SEAL Team recruiting ad, they actually made one back in 2005. And it was showing SEAL Teams doing all the cool kind of SEAL Team stuff. And then it said, yep, somewhere, some guy right now is buying a minivan.

• 1:42:56Speaker 02

  And it was, uh, it was easy to, to see what, you know, to attract to that young, um, young hard charger. It's not hard to turn those numbers around. There are still, I went, I was, um, in June, I attended a special forces course graduation. And there was 230 absolute studs. They knew exactly which bathroom to use. They love their country. Their families love their country. And it was a great emblematic of what's right in America yet. And there's a lot of stupid things, but I think it's important to keep perspective. Uh, but leadership does matter.

• 1:43:37Speaker 02

  The, the military in the seventies was a mess. It was a real mess. There was like the, the officer of the deck of a, of an infantry, officer of the day of an infantry company, a Marine Corps would have to be armed, literally because there was that level of violence coming from draftees, criminal draftees doing stupid shit. Obviously the eighties and the military reforms there corrected that. So there's, there's a lot of core belief yet in the military that can be resurrected very quickly.

• 1:44:14Anthony Pompliano?

  I actually.

• 1:44:14Speaker 02

  And, and seriousness of purpose tends to refocus those people's minds very quickly.

• 1:44:21Anthony Pompliano?

  A hundred percent. I'm actually lying. I have one other question for you. Uh, you built a phone, which is probably one of the single hardest things for someone to try to do. Um, but it may be one of the most important things. Uh, the phone is unplugged, I believe is the name of the, the business.

• 1:44:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Why is this such an important thing that, forget capital and money, you're spending your time, your energy, your most valuable resource that you're investing in making this happen? What is it about this that resonates with you?

• 1:44:51Speaker 02

  Well, this is an unplugged phone, and this resulted from a rage phone call after the 2020 election and seeing the hegemony that big tech had on speech and certain apps and throwing people off of certain app stores and platforms. And I said, "We're never going to make big tech better by complaining about it, only if we can compete." And we had a tech team together doing a cyber unlock, and we literally pivoted overnight and said, "We're going to build our own phone." So that's what this is. This is our device, our hardware, unplugged, but it's our operating system. And the difference is, your phone has an advertising ID.

• 1:45:33Speaker 02

  It is built really around the business model of surveillance capitalism. Surveillance capitalism really started after 9/11, when government rightly was looking for data to find more people of the profile of the 9/11 hijackers. And that uncapped a massive demand for consumer data, which combined with smartphones in like 2009 when they started coming out. So now, apps were designed to fit with that app universe and that phone to collect and harvest everything you do. Where you go, what you buy, who you call, what you browse, can turn on your camera and your GPS and your microphone in your phone and listen and export everything you

• 1:46:18Speaker 02

  do. And we know that's to be true because the vendors that make that possible to big tech tout it and sell it and market it. And I've talked to many people and they say, "Yes, I was talking to my wife..." About needing a new mattress in our bedroom. And the next day they're getting advertising, not searching for it, not sending a message, talking about it with the phone on the nightstand. The next day they're getting advertising for mattresses. So imagine your phone listening to your pillow talk with your spouse. I'm not ready to go there. So that's what this phone does. It prevents all of that because we don't have an advertising ID. So we have a huge app store with thousands of the same apps that you're used to.

• 1:47:01Speaker 02

  Banking, travel, nav, sports, games, word processing, finance, whatever. But our phone prevents the collect of any of those apps sitting there. And it's actually the first phone with a an actual privacy center, which has hard off functions. It has a self-destruct function. So if someone says, pump, give me your phone. I'm here to inspect it and you unlock it and you can hand them a brick. Even a kill switch, which separates the battery and the electronics, because you can't shut your phone off. It is continuing to build a digital data trail. Like now that I know where your office is, if I know one other place you've been with

• 1:47:43Speaker 02

  a thousand dollars in a credit card, I can track your location for the last five years.

• 1:47:49Anthony Pompliano?

  I always find it

• 1:47:50Speaker 02

  It's shocking how much digital exhaust you give off. There's a scary book called The Means of Control, which describes that. And it kind of makes the case for this phone. We did, we did 500 units last fall as a beta test and we delivered 5,000 in May. And I've got another 10,000 coming in and in two weeks, just in time for Christmas.

• 1:48:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Can people use the social media apps that exist on their iPhone?

• 1:48:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:48:19Anthony Pompliano?

  On it? And you basically still prevent?

• 1:48:21Speaker 02

  It looks different because it's not giving you the super personalized because it's not giving you that super personalized from your data harvest. But it works all over the world from 2G up to 5G. You can drop a physical SIM, multiple eSIMs, big external, you can put a two gigabyte external drive on there as well.

• 1:48:44Anthony Pompliano?

  How much do you sell a phone for?

• 1:48:46Speaker 02

  989 bucks.

• 1:48:47Anthony Pompliano?

  That's cheaper than an iPhone.

• 1:48:48Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah, look, the last thing I really wanted to do is be in the phone business. But the unique part of our team, the guy that developed Pegasus was our CTO. So he really understands offense, he really understands defense and taken that knowledge of having done things in the space and the team did an amazing job and we're to market and it is working and there are thousands of users around the world. It comes with our own secure messenger, VPN, antivirus, and many of the other encrypted apps that you're used to as well.

• 1:49:25Anthony Pompliano?

  What is your hope for the business or your vision for it? Do you think you can go compete with an Apple?

• 1:49:31Speaker 02

  To be an eternal thorn in the side of big tech. Never going to be public. It will be a private alternative for free people to speak and communicate freely. It is intentionally not an American company.

• 1:49:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain that.

• 1:49:45Speaker 02

  I think the US government at some levels has become destructive to the First and the Fourth Amendments. When you look at what happened, you know, you've heard of FISA, right? Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, supposed to be foreign, but they just did a massive expansion of it so that any federal agent can go to the companies, to Meta, to any of the companies that have your consumer data that you're giving off with all your electronic devices. And they can say, give me everything on Anthony without probable cause, without a warrant, so they can do a massive digital proctology exam on you on a fishing expedition. I find that absolutely unacceptable.

• 1:50:30Speaker 02

  That phone, the unplugged phone, is the only antidote you've got for that because we don't give off any of that exhaust.

• 1:50:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Just unplugged.com?

• 1:50:38Speaker 02

  Unplugged.com.

• 1:50:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Pretty good URL.

• 1:50:40Speaker 02

  Order today, it'll deliver within 48 hours.

• 1:50:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Amazing. Eric, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. You are a wealth of knowledge and I think a lot of people look to you for both insights on the geopolitical side, but increasingly here at home and how we can fix many of the problems that we face. But as we started, you're an eternal optimist, which I appreciate.

• 1:50:57Speaker 02

  I have traveled the world. I've not been to every country, but I've been to most. The United States is still the best on the planet and the last best hope. And so this is, this place is worth fighting and defending for.

• 1:51:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And for anybody who doesn't already follow you on Twitter, you have an excellent, every couple of days, you put out these off-leash updates. And I have a lot of friends who probably, they are envious because I have friends who they actually have paid services to do this for corporations, etc. But yours is free, it's posted on Twitter.

• 1:51:28Speaker 02

  Well, it's amazing. Full disclosure, that's not me. That is my very capable analyst. And she, she is a list of specific targets I wanted to dig for. And so she was sending it to me, and I sent it to some friends. I said, well, why not make it free? So there we go.

• 1:51:44Anthony Pompliano?

  It is, it's incredibly valuable. So people should go follow you on Twitter as well. But thank you for doing this.

• 1:51:48Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:51:49Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up, guys? I hope you're enjoying this episode, but I got a quick message for you. I just released my very first book. It's called How to Live an Extraordinary Life. In this book, there are 65 life lessons that I've picked up over the years. These lessons will teach you about money, investing, relationships, work, health, happiness, and much more. In this book, I wrote letters to each one of my children, and I tried to share those life lessons with them. If you pick up this book, there's three things that I can promise you. The first is that it is very concise. The audiobook is only three hours. You can listen to it on a long drive or on a rainy afternoon. The second thing is that you're going to learn something. It's worth the price of admission just for the lessons themselves. And then the third thing is, it will make you think more deeply

• 1:52:31Anthony Pompliano?

  about your life and how you try to live it. So go pick up How to Live an Extraordinary Life today. It's a quick read. It's very impactful. It's very concise. And it would mean the world to me for the support. Go check it out today on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or wherever you buy your books. Hardcover, audiobook, it all works. Thank you so much for the support, and I'd love to hear what you think about the new book.