00:00:00.000Hey everybody, happy Memorial Day and thank you for all who served.
00:00:02.000Eric Prince, co-founder of Unplugged Technologies and Navy SEAL, joins us to talk about remembering those who have fallen, what's going on in Ukraine, how we could have won in Afghanistan, and also how your phone is constantly listening to you.
00:00:14.000Email me as alwaysfreedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:17.000Again, it's promo code Charlie Kirk for Eric Prince's phone.
00:00:20.000You'll hear that later in the episode.
00:00:21.000Text it to your friends, and I hope you have a relaxing Memorial Day weekend.
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00:01:46.000But what if we look back and we realize we were just inches away from victory and that's when we decided to give up.
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00:02:04.000The biggest speakers in the movement, featuring President Donald J. Trump.
00:02:10.000We're going to fight and we're going to win.
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00:02:34.000June 14th through 16th, 2024 is our final battle in Detroit, Michigan.
00:02:39.000The great silent majority is rising like never before.
00:04:04.000SEAL teams have been using private facilities really since the late 70s, and no one had done it on an industrial scale.
00:04:10.000And so, did that before long before there was a war on terror?
00:04:15.000And really, the Navy was our first big customer after the USS coal was blown up.
00:04:22.000We trained 100,000 sailors to defend their ships much more effectively than the guys did in Yemen and Aden when the ship got hit.
00:04:30.000And then, of course, when 9-11 happened, our same special operations and DOD and CIA type customers needed help overseas, and we responded and we did it.
00:04:43.000So, Eric, this is you know, we're remembering all who passed in the line of duty.
00:04:50.000The last couple of decades, we've known nothing but almost permanent warfare.
00:04:54.000At Blackwater, you tried to solve that through an efficient approach.
00:04:59.000Just give us some idea of how defense contractors get fabulously wealthy while they're unable to even win a war.
00:05:08.000Well, the Pentagon right now is a big bunch of really unhealthy incentives, and it incentivizes the vendors instead of doing burn-fixed price to try to bid something and be as efficient as you possibly love to do cost plus to add as much cost as they can to it so they can add more fee to what they charge the government.
00:05:28.000And you basically have created a very unhealthy triumvirate of politicians which appropriate way too much money for the Pentagon, which spends way too much on defense contractor stuff.
00:05:42.000And then, those defense contractors in turn hire an army of lobbyists in Washington, D.C. to pay politicians to repeat the cycle.
00:05:56.000It was about, it's called 30, it's called Too Big to Win, and it's about 30 years of neocon military-industrial complex policy failure and why we have just not been able to finish on any of these conflicts, whether it's in Somalia or in the Balkans, anywhere for the global war on terror, Iraq, Afghanistan, of course, Syria.
00:06:18.000And it's causing a systemic collapse in American credibility and deterrence.
00:06:59.000The much-wanted offensive that they had thought about doing last summer was a complete disaster.
00:07:08.000You know, the Russian generals are not complete idiots.
00:07:10.000They know exactly where the Ukrainians are going to come, where the terrain is going to work.
00:07:15.000And they prepared very significant defenses and they ate up all that high-dollar Western equipment.
00:07:21.000The math alone of significantly superior Russian numbers is what it makes it one tough.
00:07:30.000B, the industrial base of Russia, now supplemented by China, by North Korea, it also makes it very tough.
00:07:40.000And so it's the administration, both in Washington and Kiev, should have settled this, should have sucked it up and let those eastern provinces go.
00:07:52.000All they're doing right now is chewing up the next generations of Ukrainian men, wiping themselves out demographically.
00:07:59.000It's a troubled, an imperfect peace is better than a sparkly war.
00:08:08.000And as the fields dry and it really becomes tank season in Ukraine, because farm fields that are wet, having been snowed and then rained on, very muddy, gooey, very difficult to maneuver.
00:08:20.000But as all that stuff dries, it gives the attackers significantly more options to attack and they're doing so.
00:08:28.000And so I suspect the Biden administration is going to try hard to miraculously settle something by summer, by the end of August.
00:08:38.000Probably I can see a kind of a Hail Mary of some ceasefire coming out of the Olympics in Paris.
00:08:49.000And I can even see them trying to settle something by the Democratic Convention, which I think is around August 12th.
00:08:58.000I mean, obviously, I don't think that we ever should have been involved in the war.
00:09:01.000And I think that it's done nothing but enrich a bunch of warmongers.
00:09:04.000But let me get this straight: that the settlement would be actually less land for Ukraine than the original offer when Tony Blinken and Boris Johnson blew it up.
00:09:16.000Can you add some detail there, please?
00:09:17.000Yeah, what you're talking about was a deal on the table in September of 2022, almost two years ago, where it would have frozen the lines.
00:09:29.000But now the Russians are actually going to gain additional territory this summer.
00:09:36.000I think they'll take Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhia.
00:09:43.000And Crimea, they already fully control.
00:09:47.000Really, for Ukraine, they need to hold on to Odessa because they're hard to be viable as a country without an ability for them to export grain or coal or anything else that they're producing there.
00:10:04.000But again, it's not the taxpayer of the United States' responsibility.
00:10:08.000It is certainly not our troops' responsibility to go and fight that war.
00:10:13.000Not when we have as many border problems as we have in America, do we need to be worried about plus or minus 50 or 100 miles of somebody else's border in Eastern Europe?
00:10:23.000Just imagine if there was Russian presence in Nueva León, like the province where Monterey, Mexico is, if there was significant Russian presence there, we would not take kindly to that either.
00:10:41.000Victoria Newland and Mike Johnson echoed this, saying that we should bomb the interior of Russia, that the United States should now bomb Russian targets on Russian soil.
00:10:53.000If we were to help facilitate that, what would that possibly mean?
00:10:58.000Well, look, if the U.S. is actually striking targets, that's a long war.
00:11:04.000And that can escalate to not just conventional war, but nuclear war shockingly quickly.
00:11:10.000We do not want a war with Russia, especially not over Ukraine.
00:11:17.000The Russians were very, very specific about this, where their red lines were.
00:11:23.000And the neocon class, the Unit Party in Washington just kept pushing and pushing and prodding.
00:11:31.000And this whole thing was so unnecessary.
00:11:36.000I think what Johnson was talking about was giving the Ukrainians some very high-dollar U.S. weapons that could strike additional targets deep inside Russia.
00:11:46.000And again, the Russians are not going to take kindly to that kind of escalation either.
00:11:51.000I think it's really an act of desperation by the U.S. to try to be doing this now.
00:11:57.000I actually offered, I talk about it in the article.
00:12:03.000My sources were telling me the Russians were going to invade.
00:12:08.000And I knew that by November, December of 2021.
00:12:11.000So about two, three months before they did.
00:12:14.000And I recommended, I wrote a paper, gave it to the administration with my name removed so they can't play the I Hate Eric Prince card.
00:12:21.000And because there was already 200 U.S. combat aircraft set to be retired in 2022, which means flown to the desert, the boneyard out in Davis-Monthan Air Force Base and parked for eternity at zero dollar value to the taxpayer.
00:12:35.000They said, look, look, you can do two things.
00:12:37.000You can announce that NATO, that Ukraine will never be part of NATO.
00:12:42.000It's a red line issue for the Russians, but they're going to have an air force.
00:12:45.000They're going to have the means to defend themselves.
00:12:48.000Just like the destroyers and tanks and firearms that we provided to the Brits in 1940 and Lend-Lease, kind of a model almost like the Flying Tigers when we helped, when a private company helped the nationalist Chinese defend themselves against the Imperial Japanese Air Force from bombing the hell out of their cities.
00:13:07.000It would have been novel, historical, as in with historical precedents.
00:13:13.000And I think it would have worked because an additional, so there is 50 F-15s, 50 F-16s, and 40-some A-10s, all that was built to destroy Russian armor.
00:13:26.000I think it would have been enough to deter a war, which would have been significantly, significant savings in lives and in wealth.
00:13:38.000Because again, all this money we're providing them is not even real money.
00:13:41.000We're just piling on more and more debt.
00:13:44.000You wonder why you're paying more for food and everything else in the United States?
00:13:47.000It's because of the inflation of a completely runaway government, in many ways aided by the unit party of Republican leadership that is completely in hockey with an overspending Democrat Party.
00:14:03.000And then after, Eric, about a minute reaction here, let's play Cut 139.
00:14:07.000It's Victoria Newland saying strikes inside of Russia are fair game.
00:14:11.000They need to be able to stop these Russian attacks that are coming from bases inside Russia.
00:14:18.000So I think there's also a question of whether we, the United States and our allies, ought to give them more help in hitting Russian bases, which heretofore we've not been willing to do.
00:14:28.000I think if the attacks are coming directly from over the line in Russia, that those bases ought to be fair game, whether they are where missiles are being launched from or where they are where troops are being supplied from.
00:14:40.000I think it's time for that because Russia has obviously escalated this war.
00:14:45.000Mike Johnson agrees with her, and he has seconded that.
00:14:48.000Joe Biden has said, no, that's too much of an escalation, actually.
00:14:52.000Eric, your reaction to Victoria Newland, where she says the interior of Russia is now fair game.
00:14:56.000Look, these neocon warmongers that constantly want to endanger America and especially American troops need to have their children serve and actually put skin in the game.
00:15:11.000From them pontificating from their keyboards in Washington, D.C. is wrong.
00:15:16.000And that's why we've had so many wars that have lasted so long without ever finishing to the betterment of America.
00:15:25.000You think back to the Roman Empire when they had 80,000 people lost, men lost at the Battle of Cannae, one of their biggest losses.
00:15:36.000When the Senate rejoined two weeks later, it was 40% understaffed because back then the elites led from the front and they fought with the troops.
00:15:46.000We have this detached elitist class living in a bubble in Washington, D.C., spending limitless amounts of money, making really stupid decisions without any skin in the game, never having to suffer consequences of their bad decisions.
00:16:00.000And it's wrong, and that needs to change.
00:16:03.000Elections have consequences, and this toilet needs to be flushed.
00:16:23.000So Steve Bannon had contacted me in the spring of 2017 and he said, listen, there's going to finally be a policy debate about what we're doing in Afghanistan.
00:16:43.000He called in the National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster, a very much a Beltway thinking guy.
00:16:51.000I take nothing away from his service, but he was a three-star armor officer who wanted a four-star.
00:16:55.000So he wasn't going to do anything contrary to what the Pentagon wanted.
00:16:58.000But what we ended up offering was just a rationalization and a stay-behind package that would have cost 5% of what the U.S. had been spending.
00:17:07.000Because at that point, there was still 15,000 troops in the country.
00:17:11.000So I would have said, all right, you can leave a 1,500-man special operations element there, basically a counter-terrorism strike force.
00:17:19.000There were 29,000 contractors in country, and we'd have taken that number down to 6,000.
00:17:25.000And basically, what would have stayed behind was a skeletal support staff to live with, train with, and fight alongside the Afghan forces that were worth preserving, some manpower to actually staff and run the aircraft to fly them properly.
00:17:40.000And then we'd have taken over the Afghan military's logistics system because that's where all the corruption was.
00:17:48.000The food, the fuel, the pay, the ammunition, the parts provide that in a small, cost-effective, reliable way.
00:17:56.000And that program would have cost less than a quarter of what Congress even ended up spending on resettling Afghan refugees from the total debacle of us of a class.
00:18:54.000I think that part of the incentive of big defense, there's now kind of a cartel of five super major defense contractors that produce almost everything for the DOD.
00:19:06.000And it costs a multiple of three to five times what it should cost.
00:19:12.000So that, like I said at the beginning, it starts a very negative circle of incentives of more spending.
00:19:18.000And then you have very risk-averse bureaucrats, and no one wants to be decisive.
00:19:22.000You know, there's no patent-like attitude of we win, you lose, you know, lead, follower, get the hell out of the way.
00:20:02.000Why is this phone not a smart decision for Charlie Kirk, who loves privacy and is under constant attack from the regime?
00:20:09.000The amount of data that private vendors that were collecting it or advertising, really before smartphones, started to make available to the government.
00:20:19.000And then the government had a program called Total Informational Awareness, which ended up getting shut down, supposedly, by some privacy advocates in Congress.
00:20:32.000It just went to the NSA, which funded all the programs for a massive data collection.
00:20:39.000And then at the same time, the private sector starts collecting all of this data that starts coming off of smartphones.
00:20:45.000And so really, they create an entire industry called surveillance capitalism, which allows everything that comes off your phone.
00:20:55.000And so there's an advertising ID that's built into the code of your iPhone or Google mobile services, which runs on every Android.
00:21:03.000And that ad ID interacts with all the apps and it serves to collect where you go, what you buy, who you call, what you browse.
00:21:11.000It can turn on the microphone, the camera, the GPS of that phone, and it just gives constant electronic exhaust.
00:21:19.000We actually did a comparison between our unplugged phone and the other two guys' competitive products.
00:21:26.000And the other guys' phone seemed to wake up in the middle of the night and start sending up to 50 megabytes of data in the middle of the night, like 2, 3 a.m.
00:21:35.000They're kind of phoning home to the mothership, telling reporting on all you've done for the day.
00:21:40.000I've had so many people I've talked to say that, yes, they can relate to this problem because they actually were talking to their wife in the bedroom about needing a new mattress.
00:21:52.000And the next day they're getting advertising for a new mattress, which means their phone was listening to them in the bedroom.
00:22:01.000So this phone, the unplugged phone, was built as a response really after the 2020 election and all the nonsense around big tech censoring certain voices, throwing people off app stores.
00:22:13.000And we had a tech team together already that just said to hell with this, we're not going to change big tech by complaining about it or whining.
00:22:20.000And so we built a completely independent phone platform outside of the Google and Apple universe that is, it's our hardware, our operating system, and it has no advertising ID and it blocks your apps sitting on your phone from collecting and exporting any of your personal data.
00:22:38.000This phone actually has a privacy center, which is effectively a firewall, hard settings where you can block off the Bluetooth or the Wi-Fi or the camera or the microphone or whatever it is.
00:22:53.000And you have to go through all kinds of settings, which allow an app if you're going to share your position, if you're trying to navigate.
00:23:01.000But then when you turn it back off, it's really off.
00:23:04.000The problem with your iPhone or your Google mobile services phone is even if you turn it to airplane mode or if you're trying to turn it off, it's still on.
00:23:14.000It's still trying to hit Wi-Fi, building a digital breadcrumb trail, constantly collecting data on you because that is their model, because that's how they use it to build a very, very specific electronic data detail on you so they can pinpoint advertising and sell it more, to sell you more effectively.
00:23:36.000Remember, if you're not paying for something, you're not the customer, you're the product.
00:23:39.000And so, this surveillance capitalism model has allowed big tech to aggregate the comings and goings of everyone in America.
00:23:48.000And we decided to do something about it to make that stop.
00:23:51.000A little kid, by the time they reach the age of 13 in America, has had 72 million data points collected on them by big tech.
00:24:00.000So, in an era of AI, that gets pretty scary.
00:24:06.000And so, going to FISA, this massive FISA extension, which never should have been passed, is basically the Bureau and the federal agencies got sick of being a little, you know, beaten up when they go to Congress for buying all this consumer data from big tech.
00:24:23.000So, now they passed a law, passed by a lot of Republicans, even, that not only do they not have to get a warrant, they can go to any company that has any of your consumer digital data and they can order it be turned over without a warrant and without probable cause.
00:24:38.000Basically, if any federal agency, any hyper-partisan federal agent wants to do a phishing, a deep dive on you, just as a phishing expedition, they can.
00:24:53.000And so, they can literally dig into every aspect of your life.
00:24:57.000Again, where you go, what you buy, who you call, what you browse.
00:25:01.000And it's a level of intelligence collection that even the Stasi, the most effective, scary communist-era surveillance state security apparatus in East Germany, this allows big tech and our government to collect a thousand times more data than they ever could.
00:25:54.000This is now, if you lock a 19-year-old turning point activist in a room without their phone, they'll start hitting the table almost compulsively.
00:26:03.000It's almost part of, it's an extension of who they are.
00:26:16.000It is an egregious assault on the First and the Fourth Amendments.
00:26:21.000If you think about the first four amendments of the Constitution, the first, right, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association.
00:26:26.000The second amendment, we love, guarantees the first.
00:26:33.000It was to stop ordering soldiers, exactly.
00:26:37.000And the fourth amendment was to prevent unlawful search of your stuff.
00:26:40.000But now this FISA bill makes it possible for any federal agency to ask any of your personal data, your travel, your medicines, your voice notes, your pictures that you send, anything that can be turned over is now harvested and can be reviewed by a federal agent without any probable cause whatsoever.
00:27:05.000Mark Zuckerberg paid $20 billion for WhatsApp.
00:27:10.000Because it collects every bit of picture, voice note, video message that you pass through it, and it's analyzed to hyper-target you for advertising.
00:27:19.000Now you just made that completely available to the federal government as well.
00:27:23.000And so if you're comfortable with Mark Zuckerberg and Comey, the former FBI director or the current one, sitting on your nightstand listening to every bit of your conversations at night, that's what this is.
00:27:38.000And that's what the unplugged phone prevents.
00:27:44.000So, we're doing a lot at Turning Point Action trying to get Donald Trump re-elected.
00:27:48.000We have meetings where we talk about ballot chasing and what neighborhoods we're hitting.
00:27:52.000If I sit in a room with Tyler Boyer, who is under indictment for being an alternate elector, so the government has probable cause, and I have my phone sitting right there on the table as I'm going through a strategy session talking about what neighborhoods and precincts is it conceivable that the government is listening and harvesting that private conversation?
00:28:13.000Do we have evidence that such harvesting is occurring?
00:28:18.000Well, we know that big tech is listening because that's their model of surveillance capitalism.
00:28:24.000Because the apps that are sitting, those free apps that are sitting on your phone, that's part of their terms of service agreement that you agreed to when you downloaded that app.
00:28:32.000Is yes, they're going to collect and own all that data.
00:28:35.000And so, the fact that a company can do that means the government can do that without a warrant or without any probable cause.
00:28:45.000Yeah, I mean, that's how you destroy political dissident movements: is that a bunch of people are sitting around a table and they're talking about ways to win an election, and big tech is harvesting and maybe sending it back to the New York Times or whatever.
00:29:10.000I thought only a multi-trillion dollar company could do this.
00:29:14.000Well, we decided to take on not one, but two multi-trillion-dollar companies because why not pick a fight?
00:29:20.000But the phone is made in Indonesia at a Singaporean-run facility, and the whole supply chain for this comes not from China.
00:29:30.000And it's our code, and it's our answer for free people to be able to communicate freely and securely because I think that's prerequisite to preserve our republic.
00:30:30.000We don't have as many apps as they do, but you can still get your music, your podcasts, your access to that kind of entertainment via Spotify or other streaming services.
00:30:45.000You can navigate, you can bank, you can book your travel with it.
00:30:49.000But look, Apple's built up a hell of an ecosystem to their credit, but they're making tens of billions of dollars for all this talk about Apple saying, oh, we're honoring privacy.
00:31:00.000No, what they're doing is they're collecting all that user data now and they will sell it themselves.
00:31:05.000That's why they predict in their financial reporting that their ad-based revenue is not going to grow to $30 and $40 billion a year, monetizing you.
00:32:02.000And with that comes a very, very potent VPN, which protects and encrypts your data if you connect to a Wi-Fi, a very secure messenger, and of course, our entire operating system in store.
00:32:13.000An important thing about our messenger is when you generate a call, if you use an app-like Signal, it's pretty good, but you use the same key you got when you downloaded it.
00:32:23.000When you make a call with unplugged, it takes a few seconds to connect because it's my handset connecting to your handset, and it's generating a new encrypted tunnel, a new encryption key every call.
00:32:34.000And if someone takes your phone, can the FBI listen to that?
00:32:40.000Each message is encrypted with its unique encryption key.
00:32:44.000And if some overzealous officer or criminal comes to you and says, give me your phone, I'm here to inspect your messages.
00:32:54.000We have a dump feature called the Clear PIN Data Code, which you unlock the messenger with that code and it wipes it.
00:33:01.000It wipes the hard resets the phone instantaneously.
00:33:04.000So this phone is designed for free men to communicate freely and to protect themselves and to protect their very, very important First and Fourth Amendment rights.
00:34:23.000You need to demand better performance from our politicians.
00:34:26.000That the people that go out and sacrifice blood and treasure and their health, their best years of their lives to serve their country, we deserve, they deserve from us our devotion to get them better leadership.
00:34:42.000So that they're going to be sent into battle, that they're there to win.
00:34:45.000We leave the lawyers at home and we stop this endless loop of insanity of half-assed measures of going to war.