Who does Iran want to be as the next president of the United States? The man who brought us the Abraham Accords, or the woman from the administration that brought us a disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal? Global security and American stability are balancing right now on the razor s edge. And my next guest knows firsthand the cost of war and how to fight it. He s the founder of a private military contractor, Blackwater, has organized operations nationally, internationally, coordinating with major corporations, the CIA, and the government as a whole. He knows what s happening from the inside out. And he s focused on securing a new asset, our data.
00:00:35.960Who does Iran want to be as the next president of the United States?
00:00:40.760The man who brought us the Abraham Accords or the woman from the administration that brought us the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal?
00:00:48.380Global security and American stability are balancing right now on the razor's edge.
00:00:54.720And my next guest knows firsthand the cost of war and how to fight it.
00:00:59.460He's the founder of a private military contractor, Blackwater, has organized operations nationally, internationally, coordinating with major corporations, the CIA, the U.S. government as a whole.
00:01:10.980He knows what's happening from the inside out.
00:01:14.180He's focused right now on securing a new asset, our data.
00:01:19.680Just full disclosure, we are going to talk about this, but I want you to know, this is the UpPhone.
00:01:26.840I'm one of the first people to buy one.
00:01:30.000I think it's fantastic, but they are a sponsor on my program.
00:01:33.220But I don't give special treatment to sponsors or anything else.
00:01:37.620I want to talk to him about not just what's happening around the world, the election, but I also want to talk to him and his partner about technology and the ability of our government and these corporations to spy on you.
00:01:50.840Now, whether online or overseas, Americans no longer trust our government to have our best interest at heart.
00:01:59.160Are we right to distrust the government?
00:02:02.080To answer that question, I want to welcome our guest, a retired U.S. Navy SEAL, businessman, incredible entrepreneur and co-founder of Unplugged, Eric Prince.
00:02:14.580And later on in the broadcast, bring in his business partner, former U.S. Marine and big tech insider, Ryan Patterson.
00:02:25.240All right, before we get to Eric, let me talk to you about my Patriot Supply.
00:02:29.620Our nation is just a week and a half away from, I don't know, a miracle, a disaster.
00:04:12.060You, and in doing the research and homework on you, I could spend hours just exploring different avenues of your life.
00:04:19.860But I want to start with maybe some of the things early in life.
00:04:25.200First of all, your father is one of those guys who you're like, well, why didn't I think of that?
00:04:30.740He had the patent for the lighted visor in your car, right?
00:04:36.700Still have that patent or is that patent worn out?
00:04:38.980I think it's probably worn out, but they still make a lot of them.
00:04:41.540Yeah, and he's also a guy who, I think it's in Holland, Michigan, back in the 80s, was like, why are we plowing the streets all the time with snow, right?
00:04:53.280Yeah, Holland, Michigan is right in the coastal area of Lake Michigan.
00:04:57.580So you get a massive amount of lake effect snow.
00:05:00.140And my dad figured, well, why don't we use the waste heat coming off the coal-fired power plant, and instead of it dumping back into the lake with thermal pollution, to pump that heat through the streets.
00:05:13.680So, yes, whenever it snows in Holland, Michigan, a little switch turns, and the water gets diverted, and the streets are heated to just above melting point, and you have no snow accumulation.
00:05:40.160But, you know, so the company developed the die-cast machine and the lighted sun visor, but he also had some other maybe not great ideas, but I think it speaks to you have to be a wildcatter at heart.
00:05:55.320You have to be willing to try and fail, because he also, the same motion of a die-cast machine, he developed a machine which would automatically take the bone out of a ham.
00:07:39.100Where you're afraid to make mistakes, because you don't want to harm the family name.
00:07:46.080Well, I've made plenty of mistakes, but to keep going and learn and adjust, I guess as a kid, I wanted to try to make the most of whatever I was blessed with, education-wise and all the rest.
00:08:04.880And with education, you went to... you started the Naval Academy.
00:08:10.060And then you transferred to Hill State.
00:08:11.860Just after three semesters, I love the Navy, but not so much the Academy, because even then, the Academy was getting woke and politically correct already back in the 80s.
00:08:20.980Because you imagine America, you know, as crazy as a university has gotten, imagine one run by the federal government.
00:08:52.360Because it is literally life and death matter.
00:08:55.500And when you... when we have, the military has deviated from that, and that's a much bigger problem set that would probably take more time than we have.
00:17:01.000We bid for a, it's called vertical replenishment, which is basically embarking our helicopters on board a supply ship to fly from the supply ship to warships at sea.
00:17:12.740And we showed up to do that job with two helicopters and eight guys.
00:17:16.860The Navy showed up to do it with two helicopters and 35 guys.
00:18:43.800So how do we balance that to where we don't add to the military industrial complex to where we've privatized so much that there's the incentive of, hey, let's go to war some more.
00:19:19.980I would say one of the things that drives the disease is Congress appropriates way too much money on defense, on all things spending,
00:19:31.100goes to defense contractors who spends the big five, spend and pay, well, they pay for about a brigade's worth, thousands of lobbyists and lawyers to infest Washington, D.C.
00:19:46.340to encourage Congress with money to spend more on the program.
00:19:50.060So it's a very unhealthy cycle that has to be broken.
00:20:03.040Look, first of all, veto defense bills.
00:20:06.160Actually, an executive that would enforce fiscal discipline, that we have to make a decision between guns versus butter, not just both and,
00:20:15.740because with a reserve currency where you can spend an infinite amount, that's why we have $35 trillion in debt.
00:20:21.340We're going to either get control of that ourselves and have a painful landing, or we're going to completely ignore it and have an absolute blow-up Weimar Republic disaster.
00:20:35.300Based on our previous record, option two is probably going to be the way we do it.
00:21:37.340Our defense industrial base is extremely anemic.
00:21:43.040When you think about what America's main contribution to World War II was, Soviets lost 22 million.
00:21:52.200While the U.S. was still messing around in North Africa in 1943, the Soviets erased 800,000 Germans from the German order of battle at Stalingrad alone.
00:22:07.280Now, they killed a million two of their own people doing that.
00:22:10.640In the European theater of operations, we lost 250,000 just by comparison.
00:22:14.920But America's main contribution in World War II was industrial might.
00:22:20.080Made it possible for the Russians to go from Moscow all the way to Berlin with like 600,000 trucks.
00:22:29.960We don't have anything like that today.
00:22:32.720And so we delude ourselves in thinking that we have all that we need to go peer-to-peer.
00:22:39.140And we have a lot of people that make decisions that don't have to live with the consequences, which is why stumbling into a really dumb war in Ukraine, which is an absolute loser.
00:22:50.820All we're doing is grinding up the next generations of Ukrainian youth that have zero chance.
00:22:56.640And giving their farmland to places like Black Rock, et cetera, et cetera.
00:23:38.660She just takes it minute by minute what decisions have to be made from, let's say, North Korea's launch, what happens in the first 30 seconds, what happens in the first minute.
00:23:50.740Half the book is the first seven minutes to where the president has to make the decision.
00:25:06.740And using NATO origin weapons to attack targets deep in Russia.
00:25:11.420You know, put it from a flip the tables.
00:25:15.200Imagine if Russia announced that Mexico was joining a Russian alliance and they were going to have Russian trainers, even Russian troops, and a lot of Russian weapon systems staged in Tijuana.
00:25:55.620And they look back and they look out and say, there are more unfriendly troops on the Russian border now than at any time since, what, May of 1941.
00:26:06.080And if someone was flying drones from Tijuana to Los Angeles and blowing up buildings in Los Angeles with drones that they supplied, we would go out of our mind.
00:27:01.040I think it's good to go into a negotiation and not be exactly, for your opponent to not be exactly sure what your position or what you're willing to do.
00:27:08.700To have them walk away from the table and go, I think that guy, he might just do that.
00:28:28.340People do, or people have to respect the people sitting on the opposite side of the table.
00:28:31.900I remember, and I remember, I was told the story of after Reagan was elected, 1980, you have a bunch of American hostages been held for over a year plus.
00:28:43.820A failed rescue attempt, a, a true embarrassment of America.
00:28:49.280And Reagan sent Richard Allen to tell the mullahs what was going to happen.
00:28:53.800And Dick Allen goes with his very large hands and very large Scotch Irish jaw.
00:28:59.360And he said, if the hostages are not released by the time the president makes it from the Capitol to the White House, we're going to turn you into the Stone Age.
00:29:51.220Carter got his butt kicked, but he at least signed a couple of covert action findings to actually go back at the Soviet Union, which weren't really acted upon until Reagan took office.
00:30:00.500But the whole thing about the hostages, no, that was, the mullahs were laughing at the Carter team.
00:30:07.040Let's just finish up on a couple of things with war.
00:30:17.920We had the Middle East coming together.
00:30:20.480Now we've driven the Soviet Union into the arms of China, Russia, and Iran.
00:30:26.140Yeah, look, the strategic goal of the United States and our policy was to keep German industry away from combining with Russian resources.
00:30:35.420And now we've stumbled into pushing Russian resources into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, not an alliance that is in any way good for the West.
00:30:45.480What the Israelis have done, I think they, obviously a massive screw up of their security services, that it's very dangerous to assume that what your enemy has done in the past is what they'll do in the future.
00:31:28.460I brought the best of Texas to Israel, the very best horizontal drilling technology, literally the same guys that do the drilling for Exxon and for SpaceX.
00:31:40.620To drill from inside Israel into Gaza, flood all the tunnels, basically turn Gaza into a duck impoundment.
00:31:51.120So you can take away the arms caches, take away their maneuver, and flush all the hostages to the surface because they don't want dead hostages either because they can't negotiate with dead hostages.
00:33:10.480I'm jealous that they did that, because our CIA should be doing that, should be capable of that.
00:33:15.580For what we spend, 30-some billion dollars in the intelligence community, we should have operations like that once a quarter, at least.
00:33:24.040But when you have a hyper-thick bureaucracy that is risk-averse and no one wants to be the wildcatter to try difficult, dangerous things, you get continued failure.
00:33:38.380I think that idea, though, came from lifetimes of being the target, and the world will wipe you out one way or another.
00:33:48.780Hey, why don't we think out of the box?
00:34:25.920I mean, I know they have the cascading centrifuges to be able to make it.
00:34:35.100I just don't know if they have it or they don't, but I can't believe they're just a couple of weeks from having it.
00:34:42.000But I think because the mullahs are religious zealots that are kind of the, you know, more dangerous type that would love to hasten the return of the promised one.
00:35:50.620Maybe they bought one from AQ Khan, right?
00:35:52.960The guy who gave the nuke deck to the PACs in the first place.
00:35:57.140So, them with a nuke changes everything.
00:36:01.860Their surrogate war, which they've been using in Lebanon and Iraq and Yemen and other places, they're pretty good at that.
00:36:13.080And they cause a lot of pain and a lot of mayhem.
00:36:15.260But their regime is extremely unpopular in Iran.
00:36:19.540And I think the Israelis missed the opportunity.
00:36:22.400Great work on the pagers and the walkie-talkies.
00:36:26.200You know, two years ago, there was the Women Life Freedom Protests.
00:36:29.420We had millions of people, women and kids, in the streets protesting because they didn't want to have to wear a nebaya or a job to listen to rock and roll music and drink Coca-Cola.
00:36:40.420And a missed opportunity to use that to really push out the regime because it is exceedingly unpopular.
00:36:49.340And really, only the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Quds Force and the Besiege are the only elements that they keep a forcible control with.
00:36:59.000If they had provided the means of the people to get rid of those, in Iran, under some kind of a secular or pluralistic government, it would be amazing.
00:37:10.420But when you look at the central role that Persia has played in the Middle East, and even the pluralism of Zoroastrianism and all those things long before Islam even arrived, because you have smart people, hardworking people, lots of natural resources, and 90 million of them, it would drag the Middle East in a very developed direction of freedom.
00:37:38.060But first of all, I want to come back to helping the people on the streets.
00:37:46.560We continue to miss our opportunity on that, as does everybody else.
00:37:51.260But can Israel strike inside of Iran and not hurt the people, just hurt the regime?
00:38:01.280They've certainly degraded their nuclear scientist population.
00:38:05.280Them trying to do deep strikes on the nuclear program, that's hard.
00:38:11.140That's a hard logistic thing to do with refueling and having aircraft heavy enough to carry a very deep penetration bomb.
00:38:20.120They just went deeper and deeper and deeper under more and more concrete.
00:38:23.420So they could hit the oil infrastructure, which really hurts the people and their ability to survive.
00:38:28.380So I'd say, predictably, my prediction would be they smack any element of regime power, whether it's the state security headquarters, the besieged, the IRGC, those kind of targets.
00:39:00.700Explain, first of all, what was released.
00:39:02.820And then I want to talk to you about, we seem to have an administration and people whose loyalties seem to be with some of our biggest enemies.
00:39:17.640And I think some of those people are coming from the highest levels of this administration.
00:39:23.900I think it's exceedingly dangerous to have anyone of any mixed loyalty in any position of responsibility and authority, and especially with a high security clearance.
00:39:35.360The person in question was the chief of staff to the assistant secretary of defense for special operations.
00:39:41.540So that's effectively, you have a secretary of the army for the army, secretary of the navy for the navy.
00:39:46.680The ASD Solick is the secretary for all special operations.
00:39:50.580And so they would see any of that kind of plans and intentions, targets.
00:39:56.960And supposedly that was leaked on a telegram channel to the Iranians.
00:40:14.920Or of the strike that took out Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah.
00:40:20.820Or because when the United States has become that leaky and that unreliable of a partner, then that makes people hunker down and say, no one's coming.
00:41:28.320The purple was shipped over to Hawaii.
00:41:31.060The brown was shipped to the Middle East and we flew all that cash in, but we marked it so if it ever fell into the wrong hands, we could say, if you see a purple seal, it's no longer good.
00:41:46.480You see a brown seal, it's no longer good.
00:42:09.780I fail to understand any way other than we're on the wrong side.
00:42:16.020It's typical of a bloated government that has gotten used to a, not just used to, completely embracing a culture of no accountability.
00:42:27.180Whether it's a secret service that doesn't protect presidential candidates, to a military that fails to deliver victories against goat herders in Afghanistan or against insurgents in Iraq or, you know,
00:42:40.760the first thing you learn when you join the Navy is the mission of the Navy, power projection, sea control, choke point control.
00:42:49.680The U.S. Navy has been defeated in Yemen.
00:42:52.180We've allowed an Iranian surrogate with Iranian weapons to shut off one of the world's major shipping ways, completely in contravention to any kind of credibility of the U.S. Navy.
00:43:04.540So we have setback after setback and no one, no one has been fired, not for Afghanistan, not for losing Iraq.
00:43:12.720And yes, we have lost Iraq because every significant decision in Iraq is made in Tehran.
00:43:55.120I think they're if we hit real times of trouble, we have the men and women, the same people that show up will always show up, will always show up, will always show up.
00:44:07.340So that is it's actually kind of good because we have these people all over all over the world now or all over the country now with a lot of experience.
00:44:22.460If you think about even their neighbors, right, Vietnam is very ornery, but not being cynicized, not being absorbed into the Borg of that Chinese Communist Party.
00:44:38.920When you imagine a society that has a social credit score where they score you on not making any politically offensive statements or public or private or digitally, and they prevent you from buying a train or bus ticket or from moving or from going to school or from banking just off of that.
00:45:00.000Many aspects of what the woke culture is trying to impose in the United States, there's direct correlation when you see even the the echoes of the cultural revolution of the late 60s and 70s see that in the woke culture here in America.
00:45:18.360And they, unlike the Soviet Union, have a significantly more powerful economy with a no kidding, very large manufacturing base.
00:45:26.020They have had some setbacks in the last couple of years.
00:45:29.960They were truly scared of Donald Trump as a president because of the tariffs and the trade control that he actually pushed back because they were like the neighbor that kept moving their fence into your yard.
00:45:43.960And Trump is the first one that came along ever and said, hey, get the hell back on your side of the line.
00:45:48.600Um, so they were truly concerned about that.
00:45:52.380But the the now Xi has made himself basically a dictator for life because usually they would stay for 10 years.
00:45:58.100And now he's in his fifth third term and will be forever because he's removed any other obstacles to his rule.
00:46:06.540Um, and the the anti-corruption campaign has really crushed the entrepreneur class.
00:46:11.980If you think of like a Jack Ma, who's a true unicorn, he was an English, like a high school English teacher and he builds Alibaba massive online portal doing everything.
00:46:22.940And then gone, he disappears and he resurfaces what a year later, lecturing in a kindergarten or elementary school in rural China.
00:46:33.120And they said he'd embraced supervision.
00:46:42.980So they have a very, uh, expensive military that they built a lot of industrial capability, drones and missiles and all the rest.
00:46:51.680And you have every general that's around Xi Jinping has bought that position as, as politically compromised as many of our flag officers are.
00:47:02.920Uh, it's worse in China, much worse because they bought those positions because it's a corruption thing.
00:47:08.420But all of them are saying, yeah, yeah, we can take Taiwan, put us in coach, let us use our new shiny stuff.
00:47:14.880It's a, it's a very, very dangerous mix.
00:47:16.940Um, if we happen to elect, uh, Kamala Harris and we continue with this weakness and policy, I cannot imagine that people like Xi Jinping and, uh, and all of our enemies around the world aren't just salivating for that opportunity.
00:47:35.180Yeah, look, they, they smell the weakness and you see the amount of, um, of setbacks that we're having everywhere.
00:47:42.680Like I said, in Yemen, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in, uh, throughout Africa, right?
00:47:46.820You get pushed out by, by jihadis out of, um, bases in the Sahel.
00:47:51.600There's not one place the U S military can point to to say, yes, there was an insurgency and we finished it.
00:48:19.560Why would they, why would they want someone that would actually stand up to their increasing, uh, I would say bellicose activity, uh, running.
00:48:29.040I mean, look, the Russian economy is doing fine.
00:49:22.620But, but ultimately, um, military victories drive diplomatic breakthroughs.
00:49:28.000Mm-hmm and, uh, the Russian bear is still hungry and it's gnawing away and in a, in a war of attrition size matters.
00:49:38.180And it's, um, Ukraine is now at the point that they're losing more every day than they're able to recruit every day.
00:49:46.980Um, it's a really bad inflection point.
00:49:53.860You look at all the threats on the horizon.
00:49:58.120And then I think of what Lincoln said about, you know, society that is built on freedom.
00:50:05.200Uh, if it would ever go down, it would have to be done by suicide.
00:50:09.140Um, um, Donald Trump this week has been getting a lot of heat because, uh, you know, he, he used the words, the enemy within and the left is trying to say there is no enemy within, which doesn't make sense.
00:50:28.020If you listen to their own rhetoric, I guess we would be the enemy within, um, is China a bigger threat than the enemy within?
00:50:38.260And how would you describe the enemy within if it exists?
00:50:42.800Well, when you join the military, you swear to defend the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
00:50:51.300So already someone had actually thought about domestic threats to the constitution.
00:50:56.140Um, we should not discount covert action by the Chinese, by the Confucius Institutes, by the United Front Works program.
00:51:46.940So, um, the, their ability to manipulate and to message and, and when you, and you combine that with a really corrupted education system, which is become slovenly pro-government, anti-freedom, uh, all the talking points that would be more aligned with a CCP.
00:52:15.100Now, I don't despair when I see all that because I also read a lot of history and my favorite book is, uh, one called To Dare and To Conquer.
00:52:25.780And it is about all the way back in history of a few picked men and sometimes women that have unbelievable outcomes against insurmountable odds, saving the day, redirecting history.
00:52:39.460And so I know a lot of those kinds of people and I know they have unbelievable bravery and innovation and all the rest, and they love this Republic and they are not going to let it go down.
00:52:53.520Would you put Donald Trump in that category?
00:52:55.800Donald Trump is a magnificent presidential candidate, not a perfect, we're electing a president, not a Messiah.