Speaker 1: M Hi everybody. I'm Robert Evans and this is again
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards. Uh. This is part two of our
Speaker 1: of our episode on Eric Prince, and with me in
Speaker 1: the studio today is Miles, how are you doing. I'm good,
Speaker 1: I am great, and I'm just I'm itching to know
Speaker 1: more about Eric Prince because the first round, first episode,
Speaker 1: first part, which was like six months ago. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: I still remember most of it, and I it's it's
Speaker 1: a testament to the American spirit. That's a thing. It's
Speaker 1: a testament to that, among other things. It's a testament
Speaker 1: to being born with hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah,
Speaker 1: testament to all of that stuff. Well, what have you
Speaker 1: been up to in the last six months? Last six months?
Speaker 1: I don't really care. What's your guess as to what
Speaker 1: Eric Prince has been getting up to. I'm going to
Speaker 1: if I'm a bet gambling man and I like to gamble,
Speaker 1: I'll go with a safe bet and I'm just gonna say,
Speaker 1: crimes against humanity, just in general, war crimes, yes, I mean, okay,
Speaker 1: well absolutely has he has been a part of some
Speaker 1: more crimes that have been committed recently, which we'll talk
Speaker 1: about later. But more interestingly, I guess I should be
Speaker 1: more pointed. Do you want to guess as to what
Speaker 1: Erik Prince has bought since you and I talked? Okay,
Speaker 1: so last time he tried to make that his homemade
Speaker 1: fucking fighters yet Yeah, and that went did not work
Speaker 1: out well. Uh so what's easier? Probably boats? I mean,
Speaker 1: I knowing how Betsy Devas loves her yachts, it only
Speaker 1: makes sense that brother Eric is gonna be like, let
Speaker 1: me turn this ship up. Just within the last few
Speaker 1: weeks he purchased or we'll get into what he did later,
Speaker 1: but he basically purchased quote, three high speed catamarans armed
Speaker 1: with electronically aimed and fired machine guns and cannon, three
Speaker 1: trimarans armed with heavy machine guns and cannon, and drones
Speaker 1: which could be armed. They are equipped with military grade
Speaker 1: surveillance radars and high speed, semi rigid inflatable boats that
Speaker 1: can be used to launch commandos and boarding parties from
Speaker 1: the larger ships. Wow, what was the second kind of
Speaker 1: boat you said? Trimaran. It's just it's a boat of
Speaker 1: some sort and it has a lot of guns on it. Right,
Speaker 1: I don't know much about boats, but he bought two
Speaker 1: different kinds of boats with a shiploaded guns on them.
Speaker 1: Can you show me a picture of a catamaran and
Speaker 1: a trimaran, Sophie, perfect, just so I can wrap my
Speaker 1: head around, because what's it Isn't a catamar ran? Like
Speaker 1: when I think of a cataman, I don't think of
Speaker 1: like a warfaring boat. I assume there are arms. I
Speaker 1: mean I think by a basic broader definition, it's like
Speaker 1: a type of boat and they just armored this one
Speaker 1: and put some guns on it. Yeah, yeah, Eric, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so Eric Prince has a okay, so it is the
Speaker 1: thing with like the three okay, because yeah, the catamaran
Speaker 1: is like the two piece thing where you see people.
Speaker 1: It's like we're in Santrope and I'm laying on this
Speaker 1: net in between. It's the boat equivalent of those spaceships
Speaker 1: in Cloud City and thanks. Yeah. Yeah, it's like that, right,
Speaker 1: I think, Uh, which is so funny, Like it's still
Speaker 1: very like waspy, like old money, like a catamaran except
Speaker 1: for war. Yeah. Well he in a little bit of
Speaker 1: defense to Eric. He didn't he didn't just go buying
Speaker 1: armed catama and he bought the navy of Mozambique uh yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah great rates over there. Well, yes, because their their
Speaker 1: economy collapsed recently because their entire country got taken in
Speaker 1: by a giant con scam thing. Basically, they wanted to
Speaker 1: modernize their tuna harvesting fleet and needed like a loan
Speaker 1: for eight hundred million dollars right, which they got in
Speaker 1: which the people of Mozambique were like, yeah, sure, modernize
Speaker 1: the tuna harvesting fleet, will all make more money. But
Speaker 1: the government, working with shadowy foreign interests, secretly took out
Speaker 1: an extra one point two billion dollars in loans that
Speaker 1: they used to buy a navy, and they lied about
Speaker 1: it and so an extra one So the first thing
Speaker 1: is we need eight hundred million for the tuna. They're like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's a it's a sea bound nation. But
Speaker 1: you buy then you secretly borrow even more than what
Speaker 1: you buy a navy. What the fuck? Okay, So they
Speaker 1: bought this navy secretly and then and lied about it.
Speaker 1: And but once they bought it, they'd spent all of
Speaker 1: their money, so they didn't have enough money to man
Speaker 1: the navy, which they were planning to. They were planning
Speaker 1: to leave the navy to a private corporation that would
Speaker 1: then basically be a for profit navy based in Mozambique.
Speaker 1: So the shipping Airbnb their fucking that was the plan. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just like getting the black on this thing. But they
Speaker 1: just didn't. They couldn't actually run the navy, and the
Speaker 1: whole venture sort of collapsed and somehow Eric Prince wound
Speaker 1: up in control of it. Now it's weird because the
Speaker 1: first source I found that from was a website that's
Speaker 1: new to me called Spiked News, which builds itself as
Speaker 1: an outli for stories that have been buried or crushed
Speaker 1: by the daily median noise. So I was a little
Speaker 1: bit like, is this some fake news bullshit? So I
Speaker 1: looked around and I was able to find other sources
Speaker 1: on the article that were a little bit less direct
Speaker 1: than Spiked had been, but said basically the same thing.
Speaker 1: I'm going a quote from this Bloomberg article called Eric
Speaker 1: Prince to partner with Mozambiques hidden debt companies, which that
Speaker 1: sounds above board hidden debt companies, isn't. One of those
Speaker 1: are the companies that helped members of the government of
Speaker 1: Mozambique take on more loans in the count it could
Speaker 1: afford just then bankrupted the nation. Yeah, hidden debt company
Speaker 1: will always sound terrible to make this. Yeah, and these
Speaker 1: are the people Eric is working with. So Blackwater Security
Speaker 1: founder Eric Prince will partner with at least one of
Speaker 1: the state owned Mozambican companies at the center of a
Speaker 1: hidden loan scandal that resulted in the country defaulting on
Speaker 1: its death this year. Prince, chairman of the Hong Kong
Speaker 1: based Frontier Services Group, is forming a joint venture with
Speaker 1: the Tuna Fishing Company and Mattam and may extend this
Speaker 1: to assisting the Southeast African nation with maritime security. I
Speaker 1: wonder if Eric Prince has a navy now it sounds
Speaker 1: like sounds like renting as a navy now, Yeah, at
Speaker 1: least renting and exactly He's like, I don't want to
Speaker 1: go that. I'm not doing that. Well, I'm I'm renting,
Speaker 1: I'm leasing a navy and he's he's doing some counter
Speaker 1: terrorism stuff for the country. So it sounds like he
Speaker 1: has found a country whatever that Yeah, he's he's doing
Speaker 1: something shady and Mozambian as a navy. So that's good,
Speaker 1: that's really nice. Yeah. Um, anyway, we're all caught up.
Speaker 1: Other than the buttfuck he bought it. It's like we
Speaker 1: bought a Sue but with war machine. I know he
Speaker 1: bought a catamaran, a trim Ran with no. Six of them,
Speaker 1: and plus drones, blessed little skiffs, so you can you
Speaker 1: can just have boarding camards because Eric print should have
Speaker 1: more commandos. It worked well. The last the bodies part
Speaker 1: he can figure out. It's the getting around the international
Speaker 1: laws that prohibit private people from owning military hardware. He's
Speaker 1: a master. Yeah, he's he's really is. He's like, he's focused.
Speaker 1: He's focused. If anything, this is a man who said
Speaker 1: I will have some kind of my own military army.
Speaker 1: I want my own military's right, And he's got he's
Speaker 1: got his, he's got his ground gooms. He's got the
Speaker 1: ground game worked out. Now he wanted. He couldn't couldn't
Speaker 1: figure out the skies. Now take him to the sea. Yep, yep.
Speaker 1: So he's he's in the sea. Yeah, and that's uh,
Speaker 1: that's where Prince is now. So now that we're all
Speaker 1: caught up, I would like to talk to you about
Speaker 1: the book that I just read this week. It's called
Speaker 1: Civilian Warriors, The Inside Story of Blackwater and the unsung
Speaker 1: heroes of the War on Terror. First of all, based
Speaker 1: on everything we're talking about last time to cause some
Speaker 1: of these people, well, the people who saw their heroics
Speaker 1: couldn't sing because they were too busy screaming, right because
Speaker 1: Blackwater was firing grenades into a crowd, and they're like,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, man, I haven't I haven't let this thing
Speaker 1: off all day. So obviously the author of that book
Speaker 1: is Eric Prince, um well, and some other guy. Clearly
Speaker 1: Eric Prince outlined it and some other dude filled out
Speaker 1: the writing, right, whoever the ghostwriters, he's credited as the author.
Speaker 1: It's exactly the kind of self serving autobiography you would
Speaker 1: expect from a billionaire whose companies companies have been tied
Speaker 1: to more war crimes than several s S battalions. Um So,
Speaker 1: let's just dive into the introduction. This gives Eric a
Speaker 1: chance to lay out his beliefs on the War on
Speaker 1: Terror in brief. So, yeah, Western governments continue to struggle
Speaker 1: to find real solutions to these crises. They have spent
Speaker 1: trillions of dollars during that Cold War preparing the mightiest
Speaker 1: of hammers. But when you have a magnificent hammer, everything
Speaker 1: looks like a nail. So this is the problem. He's
Speaker 1: accurately identified the problem the US military has with counterinsurgence, right,
Speaker 1: because we do have a really great hammer, and we're
Speaker 1: not dealing with nail problems. You get a penis implant
Speaker 1: and you're like, how do I not funk with this? Yeah,
Speaker 1: but then you wind up in the wall of penis,
Speaker 1: hall of penises, and so your penis is just useless. Yeah, Yes,
Speaker 1: that's the situation. That's a fine analogy to the current
Speaker 1: military strategy and everything is phallic. Yeah, it's it's funny
Speaker 1: to me that he's he's diagnosing the shortcoming and attributing
Speaker 1: it to the U. S. Military that their problem is
Speaker 1: that they have a great hammer and so everything looks
Speaker 1: like a nail, because all Eric has ever done in
Speaker 1: his entire life is build hammers um But he he
Speaker 1: seems to think that what his people do is different
Speaker 1: and more suited to the war on Terror than what
Speaker 1: the U. S. Military does because they don't have rules.
Speaker 1: The hammer of traditional forces lacks the nimbleness and fiscal
Speaker 1: efficiency either small active duty units are contracted special forces.
Speaker 1: Even more troubling, traditional forces can inflame the situation instead
Speaker 1: of pacifying it, instead of pacifying, instead of pacifying it.
Speaker 1: What colorful language that, Yeah, and I love it because
Speaker 1: if there's one thing Blackwater absolutely has done everywhere it's operated,
Speaker 1: it's inflamed the situation, pified it. Well, that's right, I mean,
Speaker 1: I would say Army Colonel Peter Mansoor said this about Blackwater.
Speaker 1: If they push traffic off the roads, or if they
Speaker 1: shoot up a car that looks suspicious, they may be
Speaker 1: operating within their contract, but it is to the detriment
Speaker 1: of the mission, which is to bring people over to
Speaker 1: our side. Uh. There's also another quote I found in
Speaker 1: a textbook called US Domestic and International Regimes of Security
Speaker 1: by Army Colonel Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters, who said arm
Speaker 1: contractors do harm counterinsurgency efforts. Just ask the troops in Iraq.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of military people who have served
Speaker 1: alongside Blackwater where like these guys don't help the effort
Speaker 1: in anyway. It's just like that nepotism, Like suddenly your
Speaker 1: boss is like nephews shows up to work. It's fucking useless,
Speaker 1: but it's like the boss had extra money, so it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: just give it to this guy. Well, it's a mix
Speaker 1: of like the boss had extra money, but also like, boy,
Speaker 1: we only have half as many troops as we need
Speaker 1: to do the job. And these guys don't count as
Speaker 1: humans legally, like we don't have to report that they
Speaker 1: exist or died. It's a whole mess. Ah. So Eric
Speaker 1: has a little bit of a chip on his shoulder
Speaker 1: about the fact that, you know, he had to sell
Speaker 1: his company Blackwater and had to be renamed, and you
Speaker 1: know there were all those murders sakers, and yeah, here's
Speaker 1: how he sums that all up. After failing in their
Speaker 1: multi year effort to win hearts and minds in Iraq,
Speaker 1: the bureaucrats decided a company that had repeatedly answered this
Speaker 1: government's please for help was suddenly more valuable as a scapegoat.
Speaker 1: I was strung up so the politicians could feign indignation
Speaker 1: and pretend my men hadn't done exactly what they paid
Speaker 1: us handsomely to do. Oh what a worldview. I love it,
Speaker 1: because like the major incident that led to him lose
Speaker 1: in Blackwater was a bunch of his guys firing into
Speaker 1: a crowd and it was like a protest, right, No,
Speaker 1: it was just a traffic circle. One of them panicked
Speaker 1: and they just right and there was like no explanation
Speaker 1: and there weren't really any weapons, no one coming fire
Speaker 1: right soever. No, they just massacred fourteen people. And he's like, Ah,
Speaker 1: that's the politicians trying to make me look bad. Maybe
Speaker 1: if your people hadn't shot for And then there was
Speaker 1: that guy who drunkenly shot the vice president of Iraq
Speaker 1: Security Guard and thean Zone. There's a lot of stuff.
Speaker 1: Those guys who crashed an armored vehicle because they were drunk,
Speaker 1: it's just the party crew black Water. Those do sound
Speaker 1: like some fun parties, I mean in the scariest way
Speaker 1: where you're like, I mean, these guys know what they're
Speaker 1: doing with their guns, but I feel like it's going
Speaker 1: to get weird suddenly. Yeah, they don't sound fun to
Speaker 1: drink with getting drunk and having an armored vehicle to
Speaker 1: tool around with. It sounds like, but not in like
Speaker 1: an environment where there's the possibility that they would have
Speaker 1: to be like have some kind of like situation nature
Speaker 1: around you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, Uh, if you're a
Speaker 1: company that makes armored vehicles were open for sponsorships, I
Speaker 1: would love to just get drunk in your bearcat and
Speaker 1: write it right into a fucking wall and show how
Speaker 1: strong it is, how sturdy that armor is. Yeah. Uh
Speaker 1: So Prince's book is surprisingly anti military. Uh He's very
Speaker 1: careful about it because obviously he's a conservative dude, and
Speaker 1: you can't say the military is not heroic. But he
Speaker 1: he's picked specific officers who have said bad things about
Speaker 1: his soldiers and tries to discredit them. Um. And he
Speaker 1: regularly talks about how often the US military screws up
Speaker 1: and jobs that Blackwater is also present at and usually
Speaker 1: will like point out how much better the blackwater contractors. Right. Like,
Speaker 1: there's a picture in his book, like I guess at
Speaker 1: some point John Kerry and some other congressmen were visiting
Speaker 1: Afghanistan and their helicopter was like grounded on like a
Speaker 1: fucking mountain peak or some ship. The picture looks like
Speaker 1: they're on a mountain peak and they they got head
Speaker 1: to get rescued, and the team that came in and
Speaker 1: got them was blackwater stuff. And Eric Prince was like,
Speaker 1: but he thanked US soldiers and not blackwater contractors. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: he was probably thanking the U S soldiers who guarded
Speaker 1: him up on the top of that mountain for hours.
Speaker 1: Not not the toe truck guys. Whatever anyway, uh so, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Prince's book is surprisingly uh anti military. He also cites
Speaker 1: the failure in rebuilding Afghanistan and sort of ignores the
Speaker 1: fact that that effort to rebuild Afghanistan was mainly carried
Speaker 1: out by private companies. Yeah, well again, yes, uh so.
Speaker 1: Here's a quote from his his book on Afghanistan that
Speaker 1: I think is is relevant considering some of his more
Speaker 1: recent plans for Afghanistan. Witness the totally failed economic development
Speaker 1: of the Afghan economy. After nearly thirteen years of US
Speaker 1: special forces on the ground, the AID community spent billions
Speaker 1: and dead in boondoggles while ignoring the mineral and energy
Speaker 1: sectors that could make Afghanistan an independent nation instead of
Speaker 1: a welfare case. Oh wow, what do you think about that?
Speaker 1: I mean, it sounds like there was some stuff to pillage.
Speaker 1: Whoa you are right on? That sounded like he's like, guys,
Speaker 1: there's just fucking money in There's there's a lot of
Speaker 1: money in the ground in Afghanistan. It would be really
Speaker 1: great if there was like some sort of outside document
Speaker 1: that we could look at that would give us a
Speaker 1: better idea of what Eric really meant when he started
Speaker 1: bringing up Afghanistan's mineral and energy wealth. Oh hey, it
Speaker 1: turns out it turns out he's been shopping his plan
Speaker 1: to privatize the war in Afghanistan around d C and
Speaker 1: BuzzFeed actually got a copy of the power point presentation
Speaker 1: that Eric's using to try and sell his privatize the
Speaker 1: war in Afghanistan plan, which is doing quite well, isn't it?
Speaker 1: Probably probably what I hear in the news constantly. It's
Speaker 1: like that's always on the horizon and always being you know,
Speaker 1: promoted at least from the Trump And let's talk about that.
Speaker 1: His his slide show is titled an Exit Strategy for Afghanistan,
Speaker 1: a test case for the Strategic Economy of Force. Why
Speaker 1: don't just call it an exit plan for Afghanistan? Just
Speaker 1: give it to me. Well, there's a reason that he
Speaker 1: made sure the word economy was in there, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And we're about to get into that. So it turns
Speaker 1: out there's a whole slide on this slide show about
Speaker 1: the rare earth minerals that are present in the Helmand Province.
Speaker 1: And Eric makes a big point of the fact that
Speaker 1: there's an estimated one trillion dollars in rare earth minerals
Speaker 1: in the ground, and just this one province of Afghanistan.
Speaker 1: Wasn't there a lot of fighting in Oh? You bet it?
Speaker 1: Like I feel like that's the one province you would
Speaker 1: was like repeatedly referred to. I mean, it's possible at
Speaker 1: least that one one portion of there's debate between like
Speaker 1: what the U. S Military says is controlled in Afghanistan
Speaker 1: and what the Taliban controls and there's debate between that,
Speaker 1: but they probably there's a good chance they control something
Speaker 1: like the country right now. Um So anyway, Yeah, that
Speaker 1: map looks pretty looks pretty juicy. It's interesting that he's
Speaker 1: really specifying how many rare earth minerals are inside Helman
Speaker 1: Province in this I wonder what he intends to do
Speaker 1: these minerals well. In the slide show, he states that
Speaker 1: he states that under his plan, the military effort in
Speaker 1: Afghanistan will be quote strategic mineral resource extraction funded. Prince
Speaker 1: believed that this will break the quote negative security economic
Speaker 1: cycle of the war in Afghanistan. So so we'll dig
Speaker 1: up them where earth mindals and self fund while we
Speaker 1: just destroy the earth there. Yeah, so Eric Prince essentially
Speaker 1: wants to make Afghanistan, take Afghanistan from an expensive peacekeeping
Speaker 1: operation by the United States to a profitable, rare earth
Speaker 1: mineral selling corporate endeavor. Uh, there's no talk or hint
Speaker 1: about how this might make life better for African people.
Speaker 1: He's doing like rich war criminal, poor war criminal, where
Speaker 1: it's like it's about passive income guys. Yeah, a Prince
Speaker 1: company spokesperson said to BuzzFeed when they asked them about
Speaker 1: this quote. What is laid out in the slides as
Speaker 1: a model of an affordable way for the US to
Speaker 1: stabilize a failed state where we are presently wasting American
Speaker 1: youth in tens of billions of dollars annually. So they're
Speaker 1: basically climbing onto the fact that pretty much everyone is like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's dumb that we're still in Afghanistan. Super we're not.
Speaker 1: And he's like the sane people like, it's done that
Speaker 1: we're in Afghanistan. We should leave. He's saying, it's done
Speaker 1: that we're in Afghanistan. You should give it to me
Speaker 1: so that I can mine it, right exactly, That's all
Speaker 1: I'm interested in, because like, there is one I can see,
Speaker 1: like on the face of it, right because since the
Speaker 1: Iraq War in Afghanistan, like that has just been a
Speaker 1: money pit that has just been led to the accelerated
Speaker 1: decline of the American empire, right, Like it's sort of
Speaker 1: these late what Afghanistan does, baby, but it's like it,
Speaker 1: but it follows that trend of like all historical empires,
Speaker 1: like they get into these like glamour wars that end
Speaker 1: up bankrupting the country or whatever. More often than not,
Speaker 1: the war is in Afghanistan. Yeah, and then so on
Speaker 1: one party to go. Yeah, well it is kind of
Speaker 1: a money pit, and that's all money that could have
Speaker 1: been spent in the US on thinking like education, but
Speaker 1: really you some bridges. Yeah right, but you know, let
Speaker 1: him mind it. He's in mining. He can find a guy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he can find a guy has a fucking navy, so mine.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure he can handle some mind if he
Speaker 1: can make the sea his mistress. Uh so yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: Interestingly enough, Eric Prince's stated inspiration for his fucking sweet
Speaker 1: idea seems to be the East India t Company. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: The Wall Street Journal let him write an opinion article
Speaker 1: in May of two thousand seventeen. The article was titled
Speaker 1: the MacArthur Model for Afghanistan. But further into the article
Speaker 1: he cites our favorite corporation, which, if you haven't listened yet,
Speaker 1: we did an episode on the East India Company. They
Speaker 1: conquered India in the seventeen hundreds and star of twenty
Speaker 1: or thirty million people to death through negligence. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: and they also invaded Afghanistan, which is why they went bankrupt.
Speaker 1: Uh In interesting stuff anyway, here's Eric an East India
Speaker 1: Company approach would use cheaper private solutions to fill the
Speaker 1: gaps that plague the Afghan security forces, including reliable logistics
Speaker 1: and aviation support. So bold bold of Eric Prince to
Speaker 1: directly cite a company that was destroyed conquering Afghanistan, right right, right? Yeah,
Speaker 1: well you know, maybe maybe it'll be different this Maybe
Speaker 1: it'll be different this time. Okay, run example, like the
Speaker 1: Soviet Is there something about Afghanistan that makes powerful rich
Speaker 1: white men with armies stupid? Like? Is there like telling
Speaker 1: a magical effect that it has? I don't, I don't
Speaker 1: know because it keeps happening. Did they all know? Did
Speaker 1: the Soviets know the resources that were there back then. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that's not even why they Yeah, but that wasn't
Speaker 1: the motivation to support a government that was socialists. So
Speaker 1: they lost money there. We lost money there. The British
Speaker 1: Empire fought three or four wars there and let itself
Speaker 1: dry there. Like nobody wins in Afghanistan. Afghanistan might just
Speaker 1: be like where God lives, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: It's like, don't come in here, bro, No, this is
Speaker 1: my house. Yeah, like watch this, who's next. I'll take
Speaker 1: all your money? Yeah. Anyway, according to the Atlantic, so
Speaker 1: Eric hasn't been forthcoming on most of the details of
Speaker 1: his plan, but according to The Atlantic, in some other sources,
Speaker 1: we know that he wants a viceroy to run the
Speaker 1: whole operation. He compares this person to a bankruptcy trustee
Speaker 1: who would have full control over hiring and firing US
Speaker 1: personnel and country mentors would be embedded into Afghan units.
Speaker 1: These would be men from any country, according to Prince
Speaker 1: quote with a good rugby team, so British, Australians, any
Speaker 1: country with a good regular that's where he would recruit
Speaker 1: his mercenaries mentors. Yeah, wait, why why the rugby? I
Speaker 1: don't know, that's weird, right, Yeah, he's like, I love
Speaker 1: rugby union. Rugby guys are good at war. Okay, so
Speaker 1: New Zealand South Africa. New Zealand super good at war famously. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I think South Africa is probably he's gonna
Speaker 1: get a lot of South African guys, some crooks out
Speaker 1: of there. It's like, but they can also play rugby. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: interestingly enough, Eric Prince also wants a composite air wing
Speaker 1: to help the Afghan Air Force. In other words, this
Speaker 1: Viceroy would have his own private air force working alongside
Speaker 1: the air force. So with his with his proposal, if
Speaker 1: they were to be like okay, here the Keys, then
Speaker 1: they would have they would loosen laws to allow this
Speaker 1: viceroy to then go to have an air force. Of course,
Speaker 1: of course got to have air superior and so Eric
Speaker 1: Prince would mind Afghanistan's minerals and use it to buy
Speaker 1: himself an air force, which he would then use to
Speaker 1: bomb the Afghan people. It is, it's like a literal
Speaker 1: parasitic relationships. It's in I'm honestly he's the most respectable
Speaker 1: person close in the orbit of the Trump administration right now.
Speaker 1: Because you've got to give one thing to Erik Prince.
Speaker 1: He is persistent, like he wants an air force and
Speaker 1: he's really putting in the groundwork to do. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: he's just leasing that Navy just to get over the
Speaker 1: air force, even though I have that it's about about
Speaker 1: having an air force. I there's something not respectable, but like, no,
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess objective if you removed all the
Speaker 1: actual details that made it about war and killing and
Speaker 1: things like that, and you're just about one person who
Speaker 1: had is a dream and the you know, just whatever
Speaker 1: he has to overcome that he's going to do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's something that that's all I'll say. That is something.
Speaker 1: It is something that is something at the core of
Speaker 1: his being that makes him at least interesting. You have
Speaker 1: a great Erik Prince is my God t shirt on
Speaker 1: right now. I wear that a lot. Actually, yeah, I wasn't.
Speaker 1: He's this guy that lives down the street from me
Speaker 1: and I'm trying to anyway, he's really good. Run ads, yeah, ads, yeah,
Speaker 1: and we're back. Those are some great ads. The quality
Speaker 1: products services also pretty good. Anyway, Let's get back to uh,
Speaker 1: Eric Prince. So, yeah, when we last left Erik Prince,
Speaker 1: he's talking about turning Afghanistan into a rare minerals company
Speaker 1: that he runs via islands against the Afghan people. So
Speaker 1: that's fun. He's not the only guy in DC who's
Speaker 1: shopping around this idea. Stephen Feinberg, who runs Cerberus Capital
Speaker 1: and also the military contractor Din Corp, has been pushing
Speaker 1: a similar plan around Washington. Uh. Feinberg is a close
Speaker 1: friend of President Trump. He was almost given a position
Speaker 1: overseeing an intelligence review this year, but the intel community
Speaker 1: recoiled because he has no background in intel or military,
Speaker 1: doesn't know anything. Cerberus and fucking was the other one,
Speaker 1: Dine Corp. Dine Corp is one of the military contractors
Speaker 1: that doesn't commit rampant war crimes like black Water. Like
Speaker 1: I'm sure they've got in their history, but they're more
Speaker 1: respectable than black Water, right, which is a low bar.
Speaker 1: And then Cerberus and like Serberus Capital sounds like you're
Speaker 1: the good guys. Yeah, exactly, We're a fucking mythical dog monster. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I do want to praise Eric on something real quickly,
Speaker 1: which is his his acumen for this. He's the perfect
Speaker 1: man to take advantage of this time in Republican politics.
Speaker 1: And my evidence for that is one of the slides
Speaker 1: in this docket he put together, which again as a
Speaker 1: slide show that's made for President Trump. In the slide show,
Speaker 1: he builds the privatization of the war in Afghanistan as
Speaker 1: quote the woman ice rink moment of the Trump administration
Speaker 1: at the name of one of the slides, the woman
Speaker 1: ice sprink moment and the Trump administration. Do you have
Speaker 1: any idea what that's a reference to? No, but it's
Speaker 1: probably something very I guarantee you this is one of
Speaker 1: the only things I could reference that President Trump would
Speaker 1: know about and you would not. And that's because back
Speaker 1: in like the nineteen eighties, the woman ice rink in
Speaker 1: New York City stopped making ice or in the seventies,
Speaker 1: I guess. In the nineteen eighty the New York Parks
Speaker 1: Department started working to change that. They spent like six
Speaker 1: years and thirteen million dollars trying to fix this ice
Speaker 1: rink and basically had to announce at that point that
Speaker 1: they were gonna have to start all over again. And
Speaker 1: so it was like this big famous story of government competence.
Speaker 1: They spent millions of dollars. They can't get this ice
Speaker 1: rink going, So Trump starts publicly saying that he can
Speaker 1: do the job like under budget and in less time
Speaker 1: than anybody else, and everybody assumes he's full of ship.
Speaker 1: But he gets the job and he actually does it
Speaker 1: under budget for like three million bucks in like a
Speaker 1: quarter of the times, like the one fucking time he
Speaker 1: did it. The thing that, yeah, he did the thing.
Speaker 1: He got the ice drink working again it made ice
Speaker 1: or he didn't. I mean he hired the people who
Speaker 1: did it, but like made ice, Like they just couldn't
Speaker 1: keep the rink at the temperature to keep Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know whatever, but this is like one failed to
Speaker 1: actually have ice on the ring, yeah, which is important
Speaker 1: for an ice Yeah, and then you have a roller rink.
Speaker 1: So he managed the project that got it fixed, and
Speaker 1: he did it under budget. In anyway, it's a thing
Speaker 1: that Trump talked talked about often on the campaign trail
Speaker 1: when he was running for president. Um, he's smart, right, No,
Speaker 1: he's saying that. Yeah, he's saying that Afghanistan is like
Speaker 1: that ice rink back in the nineteen eighties. So the
Speaker 1: government's just not smart enough to fix it. So he
Speaker 1: knows how to sell this plan to Donald Trunk, right, um,
Speaker 1: and I suspect he'll be successful eventually. I mean, based
Speaker 1: on everything we read all the time in the news,
Speaker 1: it just seems like every day or every story that
Speaker 1: comes out, we inch closer enclosure to the privatization of
Speaker 1: that war. Yeah, which is not the right plant. Just leave,
Speaker 1: Just admit it was a stupid idea, Right, get the
Speaker 1: funk out, Right, say you're sorry, Offer the government some
Speaker 1: aid from moving all the bombs we dropped, Like, just
Speaker 1: get the funk out. But that's what I think. We're
Speaker 1: probably gonna go with Eric's plans. So let's get back
Speaker 1: into the book. This was a long digression because he
Speaker 1: talked about I didn't realize that when this book was
Speaker 1: published back in fourteen, he already had this plan together.
Speaker 1: So this has clearly been on Eric's mind for a while.
Speaker 1: His demo tape that goes around Yeah, and he has
Speaker 1: a real gift for spending his career running a mercenary
Speaker 1: empire into personal heroism. In the beginning of his like
Speaker 1: in the beginning of his book, he tries to present
Speaker 1: himself as a lifetime servant of both his country and
Speaker 1: of course of God. Uh. He says, since I first
Speaker 1: enrolled in the Naval Academy after high school. My life's
Speaker 1: mission has been to serve God, serve my family, and
Speaker 1: serve the United States with honor and integrity. I did
Speaker 1: it first as a midshipment venice a seal, then when
Speaker 1: personal tragedy called me home from the service, as a contractor,
Speaker 1: providing solutions for some of the thorniest problems on Earth.
Speaker 1: The business of war has never been pretty. But I
Speaker 1: did my job legally, and I did it completely too well,
Speaker 1: perhaps growing blackwater until it became something resembling its own
Speaker 1: branch of the military and their government agencies. It's like
Speaker 1: he's winking the whole time, and I did it. So
Speaker 1: we're gonna have another digression now because I couldn't let
Speaker 1: the sentence too well, perhaps too well. So I was
Speaker 1: worried when I started doing this, because I was like,
Speaker 1: we talked about a lot of blackwaters, horrible negligence and
Speaker 1: the deaths associated with the last episode, and I was like,
Speaker 1: am I gonna be able to find more examples of
Speaker 1: that for this episode with the repeating myself. Turns out
Speaker 1: it just took about a second on Google because I
Speaker 1: just typed in a couple of key phrases. And I
Speaker 1: found a two thousand five Washington Post article about a
Speaker 1: plane crash. Of a crash of a plane in Afghanistan
Speaker 1: piloted by a firm that was a part of Blackwater,
Speaker 1: essentially one of Eric Prince's aviation firms, killing all six
Speaker 1: on board. Uh So, the first army report, which was
Speaker 1: released two weeks later, said that the plane, which again
Speaker 1: is essentially a Blackwater plane, was in violation of numerous
Speaker 1: government regulations and contract requirements. Uh So, basically they were
Speaker 1: breaking a bunch of rules. Now, Presidential Airways, which is
Speaker 1: the company that Prince owned, under one of these big
Speaker 1: umbrella things. Right, He's got all these funks. But anyway,
Speaker 1: Presidential Airways was essentially accused of pairing pilots and co
Speaker 1: pilots who both didn't have any experience flying in Afghanistan,
Speaker 1: and then not training them properly for flying in Afghanistan,
Speaker 1: and then not supplying them with communications equipment that they
Speaker 1: needed to properly fly in Afghanistan. So two of their
Speaker 1: guys and I think four US soldiers got killed in
Speaker 1: this crash. Uh And so the families sued Eric Prince,
Speaker 1: and Eric Prince gets sued by families quite a lot.
Speaker 1: That's it's my middle name, Eric getting sued families by families.
Speaker 1: You're you're almost always the bad guy if whole families
Speaker 1: are And also when your negligence is that like acutely criminal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know so. An attorney for the families accused them
Speaker 1: of Presidential Airways of cutting corners. Uh. If they're going
Speaker 1: to outsource to corporation services like flying personnel or in Afghanistan,
Speaker 1: they must do it with corporations that put the safety
Speaker 1: of our men and women in uniform ahead of corporate profits.
Speaker 1: Sadly that wasn't done here. It seems like a reasonable statement.
Speaker 1: Presidential Airways followed with a common Eric Prince tacked, calling
Speaker 1: the army lazy and incompetent. One of Prince's representative said
Speaker 1: in essence that the Army review that made them look
Speaker 1: at fault had been slapped ash and was filled with errors.
Speaker 1: Everyone would need to wait until the National Safety Board
Speaker 1: report came out to really know what had gone wrong
Speaker 1: and if Presidential Airways had done anything wrong. Uh So,
Speaker 1: now I'm gonna read a fun related excerpt from Jeremy
Speaker 1: Scahill's book Blackwater. In two thousand and six. Nearly two
Speaker 1: years after the Army investigators concluded the report, the National
Speaker 1: Transportation Safety Board issued to report of its own. The
Speaker 1: NTSB concluded that Blackwaters pilots were quote behaving unprofessionally and
Speaker 1: we're deliberately flying the non standard route low through the
Speaker 1: valley for fun. Oh yo, the fucking party gang comes back. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's all. It's the same thing. They're just dumb, fucking
Speaker 1: party boys getting people guilt. Fuck that, I guess that
Speaker 1: is the one consistent like with the culture of that company.
Speaker 1: It's sort of like yeah, and also just funk around
Speaker 1: whatever you want, doesn't matter. It's guys who got frustrated
Speaker 1: at all the rules the Army has, some of which
Speaker 1: you're dumb. You talk anyone who served in the Army
Speaker 1: and they'll be able to point out dumb things the
Speaker 1: Army makes you do. But also part of the reason
Speaker 1: the Army has so many dumb rules is so that
Speaker 1: people don't go joy riding planes through valley and killing
Speaker 1: six expensive hardware. Uh. And what's what's usually the background
Speaker 1: of a lot of the guys who end up in
Speaker 1: Black Water. They retired, they like discharge like they're usually
Speaker 1: people who got honorably discharged. I mean it's people who
Speaker 1: a lot of people who were in special Forces and
Speaker 1: then we're like, I want to get paid, which, oh
Speaker 1: so then they kind of leave. Yeah, yeah, they like
Speaker 1: there's a better check, right, So, but it's usually people
Speaker 1: who are like seeing the checks that they're cutting over there,
Speaker 1: and because they'll have a buddy who was with the
Speaker 1: service and then got out a year or two ago,
Speaker 1: and then he's like, I made three dollars in a
Speaker 1: rack last year, and we're doing the same ship, right,
Speaker 1: and he's like, can we play this game with this
Speaker 1: fucking plane where get drunk on the plane, puts a
Speaker 1: bottle on his head, and were trying to just knock
Speaker 1: it off into valley. Some guys died last week, but
Speaker 1: it's still fun. Whatever, dude, they didn't know what they
Speaker 1: were doing. Yeah, as you might have noticed from earlier on,
Speaker 1: Prince has a real bug up is asked about Blackwater
Speaker 1: knock what he's seen as what he sees as the
Speaker 1: proper recognition that it's owed. He had a statement in
Speaker 1: his book that I found kind of funny. Government agencies
Speaker 1: don't want that spotlight being shown on our work, nor
Speaker 1: to applaud the greatest advantage Blackwater offered them increased capability.
Speaker 1: They only want to increased deniability, which is funny because
Speaker 1: that's the only reason why his company couldn't be fired
Speaker 1: from the war is because they needed deniable assets. Yeah. Anyway,
Speaker 1: that Eric Prince doesn't like being a deniable asset and
Speaker 1: it's never not been in the business of providing them,
Speaker 1: right Jesus. Yeah, that must frustrate him when he wants
Speaker 1: to be the star and he's like, I'm made to
Speaker 1: be the scapegoat. Yeah. Man, that's what you're doing. That's
Speaker 1: your job, your job of getting provide the soldiers that
Speaker 1: the government doesn't have to report to anyone have read,
Speaker 1: and you're wasting life and money at the same time.
Speaker 1: That's your whole the whole reason you're a billionaire, other
Speaker 1: than the fact that your dad was right. Yeah. Uh,
Speaker 1: that's the one to being a billionaire. Step one to
Speaker 1: being a billionaire rich dad at the time. Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: move on to squares z or you die for? Yeah,
Speaker 1: where you die for because you don't have enough. You
Speaker 1: can't afford insulin. It's like Oregon Trail. You broke your
Speaker 1: leg and you died, and you died, but Eric Prince
Speaker 1: gets a Navy right, fun world, fun fun world, So
Speaker 1: Princess in his book quote, the true history of Blackwater
Speaker 1: is exhilarating, rewarding, exasperating, and tragic. Don't disagree with that.
Speaker 1: It's the story of men taking bullets to protect the men.
Speaker 1: You take all the credit, a tale of patriots whose
Speaker 1: names became known only when lawyers and politicians needed to
Speaker 1: blame somebody for something, which again is funny because Eric
Speaker 1: is the epitome of the guy who takes all of
Speaker 1: the credit while other people get shot at. He's never
Speaker 1: taken a bullet in his life. He's his like his
Speaker 1: only job, his basically his only job since he was
Speaker 1: thirty has been having other people fight for money that
Speaker 1: he pays them. Right. Yeah, Like he's always taking the credit.
Speaker 1: And like his like scorned attitude, Like he sounds like
Speaker 1: Ed Harris and the Rock, like General Hummel. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was like they don't they don't respect us. You just
Speaker 1: assumed General Hummel saw some ship and he did yeah,
Speaker 1: and he did Bosnia something like that wherever it was,
Speaker 1: which I can think of his wife's tombstone that literally
Speaker 1: just said his wife next to it. It's like, Wow,
Speaker 1: way to give her an identity, Barbara. One of the
Speaker 1: remarkable things about that to me is it was one
Speaker 1: of those few movies made in that era where if
Speaker 1: you needed to have a military character who had seen
Speaker 1: some combat, you had to really stretch to figure out
Speaker 1: where they could have been. Like those two right now,
Speaker 1: it's take your were war in like thirty countries. Well
Speaker 1: at least the ones we acknowledged, you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: No one's going to be there and be like, that's
Speaker 1: a movie ten years from now. So at this point
Speaker 1: in Eric Prince's book, we're just now through the introduction
Speaker 1: um SO. Chapter one opens with Eric claiming to have
Speaker 1: saved several women from a boat explosion when he was thirteen.
Speaker 1: I love how like the intro is just like, man,
Speaker 1: we were spit on, disrespected. We were the ones doing
Speaker 1: the real We're the real patriots. Chapter one, I'm fucking colla.
Speaker 1: I saved some ladies when a boat blew up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And he's specifically notes at the end of this anecdote,
Speaker 1: I never did learn their names or what became of them.
Speaker 1: It's a shame because you're like fucking Spider Man. You
Speaker 1: just come through people like sorry, I gotta keep this moving.
Speaker 1: It's a lie. Yeah, it's a lie. Is there a
Speaker 1: detail of what exactly happened? Yeah? Yeah, he taught like
Speaker 1: these ladies they did something bad to their boat and
Speaker 1: its engine exploded, and they like jumped in the water
Speaker 1: and he and his friend fished them out of the
Speaker 1: water and drew from the shore, and then there was
Speaker 1: an ambulance waiting to take them away or something, which
Speaker 1: maybe a boat exploited. I feel like, at least a
Speaker 1: big part of that story's bullshit. Yeah, I have you know,
Speaker 1: I can see that there were probably people who I
Speaker 1: think a better version is maybe some women who were stranded,
Speaker 1: maybe their boat round out of gas or something something.
Speaker 1: They needed a ride to shore. He provided it. If
Speaker 1: you were a boat explosion in somewhere time in the
Speaker 1: eighties and Eric Prince rescued you, and you're now a
Speaker 1: listener of this podcast, drop us a line on Twitter
Speaker 1: at Bastard's pod. Let us know what really, Let us
Speaker 1: know what really happened that day. It turns out it
Speaker 1: was his boat that exploded and the women saved him.
Speaker 1: Oh that story is completely reversed. Yeah, man, I whatever,
Speaker 1: if if he saved some ladies on a boat and
Speaker 1: they reach out. I'll make a whole apology track for
Speaker 1: Eric and the ladies. Anyway, Prince moves on to talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about his family history. He uses the
Speaker 1: story of his grandfather's untimely death as a justification for
Speaker 1: why welfare is bad. Uh. Quote when Peter died suddenly
Speaker 1: of a heart attack in ninety three, My grandmother's son.
Speaker 1: No government handouts, no charity from the church, not even
Speaker 1: money from family. Edgar, who had two sisters, his dad
Speaker 1: was the man of the house. Now he would provide
Speaker 1: for them. He was twelve. Wait, I'm failing that he
Speaker 1: what is he trying to say that? I mean, how
Speaker 1: is he trying to connect welfare to He's trying to
Speaker 1: talk about how awesome his family is by pointing out
Speaker 1: that his grandma didn't take a fucking penny. My grandma
Speaker 1: wouldn't take any money. She just made my twelve year
Speaker 1: old grand dad at Yeah, he's how cool is my family? Dog?
Speaker 1: Sounds like your family's kind of abusive air. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: sounds like she should have sought for some welfare. Finished
Speaker 1: grade school. Unless that's a lie too. Yeah, unless that's
Speaker 1: a lie too. Who knows. Could you imagine her grandma
Speaker 1: was like the O G. Welfare Queen, the miss school
Speaker 1: where first rolling around in a Bentley. Yeah, and that's
Speaker 1: how my dad became a billion. Yeah. So anyway, Eric
Speaker 1: portrays that as awesome. It's worth noting that his dad
Speaker 1: didn't seem to view this is a good thing, because
Speaker 1: he notes later in the book quote, dad didn't let
Speaker 1: me hold a job during high school on his hard
Speaker 1: scrabble youth. He wanted me to enjoy those years. So
Speaker 1: up st Eric Prince's dad. He broke a cycle exactly right,
Speaker 1: I mean, didn't turn out with a great kid. But no, no, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're achieved. I do feel like Eric missed maybe that lesson, oh,
Speaker 1: which was children ought not to work? Yeah, yeah, who knows,
Speaker 1: Maybe that wasn't his dad's lesson. I don't know the
Speaker 1: guy I bet you're wondering about Betsy Divos, Eric Prince's sister.
Speaker 1: He only mentions his sister by name once in I
Speaker 1: was hoping you're to be like not one mentioned at all,
Speaker 1: and I have a sister. He mentions her wants to
Speaker 1: talk about the guy she married. Wow, So she only
Speaker 1: comes up in the context of her husband yeah, of course.
Speaker 1: I think my sister is referenced a couple of times,
Speaker 1: but Betsy Divas is only named once, as he's introducing
Speaker 1: her husband, and she his only sister. I think, so,
Speaker 1: why why is he creaming his jeans for Mr Devas? Oh?
Speaker 1: Just because he's super rich guy right. I don't remember
Speaker 1: the exact context, but the family died recently, Yeah, the
Speaker 1: only Oh yeah, good. Good because he's the founder of family.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, and you still in the Orlando Magic. He
Speaker 1: has three sisters. So the other times when he's referring
Speaker 1: to a sister who knows who knows, there's a Betsy
Speaker 1: and then the other ones. I didn't even check on
Speaker 1: the others. But he mentions Betsy DeVos once. He's like,
Speaker 1: but hey, Betsy the best one she married for fucking
Speaker 1: I mean, they were already rich. He doesn't give us
Speaker 1: much detail at all about his childhood, but if you're game,
Speaker 1: I did find one anecdote that I want to kind
Speaker 1: of go down a conspiracy rabbit hole. Okay, it's Eric's
Speaker 1: description of his favorite childhood hobby quote. The first group
Speaker 1: of soldiers I ever assembled was made of solid lead,
Speaker 1: two inches high, standing in neat rows on my bedroom
Speaker 1: window sill. There were hundreds of them painted to match
Speaker 1: their real life British Frenchian Continent alarmy counterparts. I created
Speaker 1: them from molds I got on trips abroad and forty
Speaker 1: pounds of lead Dad and I melted down into cast
Speaker 1: iron plumber's pod. Wow, he's a little like war miniatures.
Speaker 1: In fairness, this makes I did. That's exactly what I
Speaker 1: did when I was a kid. I played fucking like
Speaker 1: Warhammer and other I spent my child, but specifically building models.
Speaker 1: That was my whole child. I had a set of
Speaker 1: like Civil War dudes, and I remember I went as
Speaker 1: far as buying like the fake grass to put like
Speaker 1: to create like a battlefield scene and like fake trees.
Speaker 1: And when I realized, like, because I remember the kid,
Speaker 1: like regular toys weren't quite scratching that itch of like
Speaker 1: what like you know, the like military should look like.
Speaker 1: So I was like, oh, you know what him do this?
Speaker 1: It was too much work, though, So I commend you
Speaker 1: for even being a hobby. Yeah, man, that's what I
Speaker 1: did as a child. And I remember, it's like the
Speaker 1: most poison you can exposures health to this little kid,
Speaker 1: because your hands are always covered in paints and god
Speaker 1: knows what's in and like this fucking cyano acrylic glue.
Speaker 1: I was always pulling it off of my fingers and stuff.
Speaker 1: But in Eric's case, he was melting lead. And I
Speaker 1: don't know how much let exposure you get doing that thing.
Speaker 1: But we do have a lot of documentation on why
Speaker 1: lead exposure is really bad for children. I'm gonna site
Speaker 1: from a study made by the College of Family Physicians
Speaker 1: in Canada. Lead is a developmental neurotoxin. Children are most
Speaker 1: commonly exposed, and they are most vulnerable. Let exposure has
Speaker 1: been associated with many cognitive and motor deficits, as well
Speaker 1: as distractability and other characteristics of attention deficit hyperactive disorder.
Speaker 1: Although children's blood lead levels have declined considerably over the
Speaker 1: past three decades with removal of lead from gasoline and paint,
Speaker 1: children can still be exposed to lead from lead paint
Speaker 1: and older homes, toys, and other sources. Because post exposure
Speaker 1: treatment cannot reverse the cognitive effects effects of lead exposure,
Speaker 1: preventing lead exposure is essential. One of the things lead
Speaker 1: exposure is most tied to is violence, crime let exposure.
Speaker 1: It's we've seen crime drop for most of the last
Speaker 1: thirty years, and one of the major theories behind it
Speaker 1: is that we got let out of everything and so
Speaker 1: people aren't being born exposed to lead because we know
Speaker 1: that it's one of the biggest correlators with violent crimes.
Speaker 1: That aligned with like like women's ability to have an
Speaker 1: abortion too, because I know it's another one, like people,
Speaker 1: there's probably yeah, it's certainly a mix of things, but
Speaker 1: it's very incredible that wait, but how do you fucking
Speaker 1: make your own They just bought a shipload of lead
Speaker 1: and melted in the pot. How do you wait? So
Speaker 1: I don't I've never had the privilege now, but what
Speaker 1: do you do? I don't know. I never did that either,
Speaker 1: because by the time I was collecting model soldiers, they
Speaker 1: were man out of plastic because they realized she shouldn't
Speaker 1: expose children like cast iron like. But it sounds like
Speaker 1: he was getting blocks of lead and melting it and
Speaker 1: pouring it into his own mold, so he was without
Speaker 1: any respiratory and exposing himself to lead fumes and everything.
Speaker 1: And I found a study in South Africa that correlates
Speaker 1: lead exposure to interest in firearms because they found that
Speaker 1: competitive shooters had higher regression and much higher blood lead
Speaker 1: levels than competitive archers, which is an interesting group to
Speaker 1: compare it to. Yeah, so this is just a theory,
Speaker 1: but that's amazing too, because like, right, like lead bullets
Speaker 1: to like the bullet in legs like feedback loop or
Speaker 1: you're not going can get lead bullets. I've been a
Speaker 1: shooter most of my life too. And number one, most
Speaker 1: of the bullet you're gonna but I don't have exposed
Speaker 1: lead on him. Some of them do, but it's usually
Speaker 1: jacketed and something. And number two, you're not getting a
Speaker 1: lot of let exposure shooting firing. But I imagine like
Speaker 1: how often, like how often has the like the actual
Speaker 1: rounds themselves been protected from for people from the lead itself? Oh?
Speaker 1: Not not very long. In fact, if you're looking at
Speaker 1: like the Continental Times, not people are probably melting a
Speaker 1: lot of their own balls, right right, So yeah, we're
Speaker 1: making with pewter obvious like it's definitely fed into violence
Speaker 1: throughout centuries because they've been putting a lot of lead everywhere.
Speaker 1: I just think it's interesting that Erik Prince we see
Speaker 1: in his childhood both this joy of making soldiers and
Speaker 1: also maybe the lead exposures led them to be such
Speaker 1: a fucking violence, literally making soldiers out of the thing
Speaker 1: that would that leads to like additional violent tendencies. It's
Speaker 1: almost poetic. Speaking of poetic, these ads are poems for
Speaker 1: your wallet. Oh yeah, go on, here we go and
Speaker 1: we're back, and I'm I'm gonna do a free ad
Speaker 1: right now, one of these great unpaid ads, which are
Speaker 1: such a smart thing to do. I'm eating some Tapatio derritos,
Speaker 1: and folks, oh they've appeared. Oh they're so good. I
Speaker 1: don't like. I can't stand flaming hot cheetos. I like.
Speaker 1: I like spicy stuff in general, but not spicy chips
Speaker 1: I've had. I hate spicy chips. Tapatio derritos are fucking phenomenal.
Speaker 1: These are just delightful little smr for you folks at home.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, have you seen the video of the
Speaker 1: girl who takes a bite of the chip and her
Speaker 1: eyes roll back in her head. It was like an
Speaker 1: old vine. It's amazing. That's how imagine this when you
Speaker 1: hear this, folks, his eyes are rolling back into his head.
Speaker 1: We just saw Miles is d face. Oh yeah, that's
Speaker 1: actually yeah, my derrito face exactly Derito face. There we go,
Speaker 1: there we go, there we got in paign. Yeah, come on, Doritos, Doritos,
Speaker 1: y'all are I'm not even a used profanity. You guys
Speaker 1: are messing You're messing up, and you're missing a massive
Speaker 1: arm Let's be more productive if everybody could get on
Speaker 1: the same hashtag and and in the same tweet Dorito's
Speaker 1: not hashtag Doritos not dictators, and hashtag Doritos because you've
Speaker 1: got a tag or at Doritos, you get a tag
Speaker 1: Doritos in it, and you gotta do hashtag Doritos not dictators.
Speaker 1: If everybody does that, when this episode drops, maybe we'll
Speaker 1: get a sponsorship and I'll get no. You know what
Speaker 1: you do, everybody takes a photo with Doritos and use
Speaker 1: those hashtags, and you do hashtag why I eat Dorritos.
Speaker 1: Oh So they see that and they're like, well, I mean,
Speaker 1: for somehow, this guy has mobilized an army of Doritos eaters.
Speaker 1: You're like the Eric Prince of Doritos. That has always
Speaker 1: been my dream I was gonna and you getting a
Speaker 1: Doritos sponsorship is your air force because I want Doritos
Speaker 1: to pay me to mind Doritos for more common exactly. Wow,
Speaker 1: what a beautiful and now I'm seeing a good spiracy here.
Speaker 1: You heard it here first. This is conspiracy. Has been
Speaker 1: going on since the show began. Yeah, yeah, I've been consistent.
Speaker 1: I mean it is a sincere brand loyalty. It is
Speaker 1: a sincere because I love me some derrito's. Yeah, oh
Speaker 1: they're good. I'm gonna try these tapetito deritos and cooking
Speaker 1: some megas and see how that ship works. Yeah. Almost
Speaker 1: seems sacrilegious, but it is sacrilegious. They're they're bullshit mega's,
Speaker 1: but they're delicious. Yeah. Yeah, anyway out there. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: theat that actually does make me want gaspacco though, just
Speaker 1: because the names are kind of I could go for
Speaker 1: some of that. You make it, you make a no.
Speaker 1: But I have a friend who makes a really good gaspaco.
Speaker 1: Go camping with her every now and then, and it's
Speaker 1: the fucking best thing. I only do it for the gaspacco. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like you bring anyway back to Eric Prince. So, Eric
Speaker 1: portrays himself in his childhood as a quiet, boring kid.
Speaker 1: I didn't smoke, I didn't drink. Being an athlete, gave
Speaker 1: me a social network. Yet I didn't have many close
Speaker 1: friends growing up. Maybe it's because you're a sociopath. I
Speaker 1: don't know. From little information we have about his school years,
Speaker 1: he sounds absolutely insufferable. He portrays himself as the living
Speaker 1: embodiment of one of those Marine with an atheist professor
Speaker 1: in a college class memes that circulates around the internet.
Speaker 1: You know the kind wait, what have you ever? You've
Speaker 1: runder one of those? Like now they're it's gone around
Speaker 1: where most of the memes are mocking the original, but
Speaker 1: there would be like this email forward or whatever kind
Speaker 1: of story that your conservative relatives would send you, and
Speaker 1: it's about like a college professor talks about how there
Speaker 1: is no God and Marine stands up and gives a
Speaker 1: speech about how he saw God on the battlefield. Yeah,
Speaker 1: one of those kind of stories. Eric tells his version
Speaker 1: of that in this autobiography. This is while he's in
Speaker 1: high school. Once in class, I challenge a teacher who
Speaker 1: called then President Ronald Reagan's Cold War military build up
Speaker 1: a waste of taxpayer dollars. I countered by rattling off
Speaker 1: every strategic defense initiative, weapons system we needed to counter
Speaker 1: various Soviet threats. I had analyzed Reagan Star Wars the
Speaker 1: way my classmates picked apart the University of Michigan's football roster. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what's really fun about this to me is that it
Speaker 1: illustrates how bad Eric Prince is it admitting when he's wrong.
Speaker 1: Because by the time Eric was eighteen, we knew that
Speaker 1: almost none of the weapons systems that had been talked
Speaker 1: about for the Strategic Defense Initiative we're ever going to work. Uh,
Speaker 1: and the few that would the directed energy weapons that
Speaker 1: actually did have some potential. In nineteen eighties seven, when
Speaker 1: Eric was eighteen, a government report was released saying that
Speaker 1: essentially these weapons would need to become between one hundred
Speaker 1: and one million times more powerful and more energy efficient
Speaker 1: in order to have a chance at working. So there's
Speaker 1: the railgun count as one of those things. I don't
Speaker 1: think that started out as this take, Okay, I don't.
Speaker 1: That's a futuristic weapon that I've always been obsessed with it.
Speaker 1: Now I've seen that, Yeah, we've got those two Like
Speaker 1: do you see the thing of the Chinese Navy, Like
Speaker 1: they've really figured out the railgun though, and like they've
Speaker 1: look scary, looks scary. I want one well, and I
Speaker 1: feel like the only thing that stops a bad guy
Speaker 1: with a rail guns And that's the real that's really
Speaker 1: the message of a racer is yeah, which is a
Speaker 1: good Yeah. Yeah? Will ever be that small? If big
Speaker 1: Railgun wants to get on a sponsorship deal, all I'll
Speaker 1: talk railguns all day is going to be changed. The
Speaker 1: rail Gun Association. Yeah okay, so h Like nearly all
Speaker 1: people born into incredible wealth, Eric has managed to convince
Speaker 1: himself that he never got any handouts. Quote after the
Speaker 1: heart attack, my father his dad had a heart attack,
Speaker 1: but he survived the first one. My father was generous
Speaker 1: with his time, but never with handouts. He didn't want
Speaker 1: me relying on the family business. He made it clear
Speaker 1: that I've been given every advantage in life and that
Speaker 1: I had no excuse for not making something of myself independently.
Speaker 1: I would not be working for Prince Corporation after college,
Speaker 1: he said, I would receive no trust fund. I had
Speaker 1: to make it on my own. So now do we know,
Speaker 1: can we do we know how true that is? Well,
Speaker 1: he didn't go straight to work for Prince Corporation after
Speaker 1: was there no trust fund? Was there no inherited wealth?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, there was because after his dad dies. A
Speaker 1: few pages later in the book, Eric writes this, just
Speaker 1: over a year after my father's death, my mother's sisters
Speaker 1: and I sold the Prince Automotive unit to Milwaukee based
Speaker 1: Johnson Controls in for one point three five billion, which
Speaker 1: was split split between a number of dad's business partners,
Speaker 1: employee stockholders, and my mother's sisters and me. Now he
Speaker 1: puts himself last in both of those lists very deliberately.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna guess he might have gotten more money than
Speaker 1: his dad's employees stockholders. Probably. I like the idea that
Speaker 1: his sister's got a bitterer, bigger cut. That's like dope,
Speaker 1: Like that's his pain, Like with Betsy, he's like fun.
Speaker 1: I hope, so I hope his dad hated him and
Speaker 1: cut him out of But depending he still don't know
Speaker 1: how true it is, right, because if if his dad
Speaker 1: was that actually much of a hard asss like, dude,
Speaker 1: don't expect to work here, you've been given everything. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there is a version you see that. I doubt that though, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we know he got conservatively a few hundred million dollars, right,
Speaker 1: And also, people who have grown up with privilege I mean,
Speaker 1: if you're if you want to live in denial about that,
Speaker 1: that is usually the first thing you say is like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I know I may come from this fan I didn't
Speaker 1: get a fucking thing though. Yeah, but we also know
Speaker 1: that like when he became a Navy seal, like the
Speaker 1: when he was going for like the office the OCS class,
Speaker 1: and like he had or one of the classes he
Speaker 1: had one of the things he had to do before
Speaker 1: he became a Navy seal. The class was full, and
Speaker 1: his dad pulled some strings to get him in at
Speaker 1: the last moment. So like that I'm getting I'm gonna
Speaker 1: bet that happened to help get him into the Air
Speaker 1: Force Academy too, Like yeah, uh anyway, Yeah, you'll remember
Speaker 1: Eric went for to the the Academy for a hot minute.
Speaker 1: At least one instructor thinks he left because it wasn't
Speaker 1: conservative enough, but in Eric's book he blames something else,
Speaker 1: the movie Top Gun. It wasn't long before I realized
Speaker 1: the Academy wasn't the right fit. It was Jeff after
Speaker 1: Top Gun had come out, and the environment was an
Speaker 1: comfortable mix of Tailhook era frat boys on one hand
Speaker 1: and a nonsensical policing of political correctness. On the other
Speaker 1: I felt as if I was expected to learn from
Speaker 1: graduate student instructors who knew a little more, and the
Speaker 1: fact that they've been there longer than I had. I
Speaker 1: quickly began to wonder whether the academy created great leaders
Speaker 1: or if great leaders just enrolled there and dirt it
Speaker 1: and made it out. On the other side, Eric did
Speaker 1: not endure it. He quit after you know, like a year, right,
Speaker 1: that sounds like some real college dropout ship. Yeah. He
Speaker 1: opted instead for Hillsdale. Uh, he said, remembers liking it
Speaker 1: because everyone there was the same kind of libertarian he was,
Speaker 1: and because they were all rich kids too. Uh, he
Speaker 1: does less diverse than they. He does note proudly that
Speaker 1: the college offered him a full scholarship I'm gonna guess
Speaker 1: because his dad had been giving them some money, but
Speaker 1: that he turned it down and his dad said, leave
Speaker 1: it for someone who needs the money. And he he
Speaker 1: portrays this as like a good thing that he did,
Speaker 1: rather than like, no, of course, if your dad is
Speaker 1: a billionaire, you don't take a free ride to college.
Speaker 1: That's the human thing to do. Wait, pat yourself in
Speaker 1: the back for the Bare Minimum. Yeah. Yeah, and but
Speaker 1: I could almost be the title for this autobiography, Like
Speaker 1: I think the working title for the episode is Eric
Speaker 1: Prince axely wrote a book about why he sucks. But
Speaker 1: the title for this book might as well be Eric
Speaker 1: Prince does the minimum and pretends that hengratulates himself. It's
Speaker 1: it's spectacular. So yeah. He tells stories like how when
Speaker 1: he was working as a volunteer firefighter, they thought he
Speaker 1: was just some rich kid at first, but then he
Speaker 1: kept showing up early and doing a real good job
Speaker 1: of cleaning, and he earned their respect. It's like he's
Speaker 1: rewriting the script of his life again. If you worked
Speaker 1: in that firehouse and have anything to say about Eric Prince,
Speaker 1: positive or negative, drop us a line I'd love to
Speaker 1: hear from you. He wait his Yeah, Now, most Hillsdale
Speaker 1: students came from money. The Butcher's painters, He says it
Speaker 1: as if he's about to say he didn't go now
Speaker 1: most of them, Yeah, not me. The Butcher's painters and
Speaker 1: slaughterhouse workers who volunteered or worked at the firehouse initially
Speaker 1: figured me for a snot nosed college kid. But I
Speaker 1: showed up at the firehouse early, to change the blades
Speaker 1: and the kit well rescue saws, and I stayed late
Speaker 1: to clean the pumps. I handle the heavy canvas hoses
Speaker 1: and carried the ladders after a call, when the other
Speaker 1: volunteers sat back and cracked open a drink, I rolled
Speaker 1: the hoses gradually ironed their respect. It also sounds like
Speaker 1: the equipment manager on a basketball team who sucks and
Speaker 1: the guys are doing the real work, or like, yeah,
Speaker 1: why don't you just do that? And that is my
Speaker 1: suspicion is that maybe he didn't. Actually maybe when there
Speaker 1: was a call, he was never called out because they're like, no,
Speaker 1: that's the fucking that kid. You don't want that kid
Speaker 1: in a dangerous situation at your back. And we there's
Speaker 1: hints of that in his Navy Seals experience too, so
Speaker 1: we'll get to that. Whenever Eric is involved in anything
Speaker 1: sort of cool personally, he writes about it at length,
Speaker 1: Like he repeatedly mentions when Blackwater first showed up in Afghanistan,
Speaker 1: he was there and he actually did guard duties some
Speaker 1: times because there was so he did guard duty in Afghanistan.
Speaker 1: Nothing ever happened, but he did. In the he talks
Speaker 1: about it repeatedly that, like, yeah, and I was there
Speaker 1: in Afghanistan doing guard duty. Like so when anything is
Speaker 1: that close to being cool, he talks about it at length.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna guess he didn't do anything cool as a firefighter.
Speaker 1: Maybe not. Maybe I'm wrong, Maybe I'm being an asshole here.
Speaker 1: I was the first one just to discover the backdraft phenomenon.
Speaker 1: It was around this time that Eric made the first
Speaker 1: political donation of his life, which we talked about in
Speaker 1: the first episode of the fifteen thousand dollars he gave
Speaker 1: to the Republican Party. Uh Now, in that episode, we
Speaker 1: speculated that this may have been an attempt by his
Speaker 1: parents to max out their political donations us and their
Speaker 1: kids as funnels. According to Eric, that's not true. So
Speaker 1: he says that the money was his own and it
Speaker 1: came from quote, investment income from stocks my parents had
Speaker 1: long ago bought for me, So you didn't take any handouts.
Speaker 1: But his parents gave him enough stocks that he was
Speaker 1: able to donate fifteen dollars party at age nineteen. I
Speaker 1: doubt that just be real. That's how these wealthy and
Speaker 1: I'm sure I'm pretty sure we talked about that. That's
Speaker 1: like the standard tactic for wealthy people of just giving
Speaker 1: as much money. It's like, well, let me max out,
Speaker 1: make my dog a max out. It's like if you're
Speaker 1: if you're if you're born rich, and you're listening to
Speaker 1: the show, I'm sure someone is like, fine, just own it.
Speaker 1: Just be like, yeah, I'm a millionaire because my parents
Speaker 1: are rich. Like, okay, just don't lie about it. Don't
Speaker 1: be like President Trump and be like, we've got a
Speaker 1: small loan from my dad that was millions of dollars. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you guys, you had it easier because you were rich,
Speaker 1: except mine. You know, that's the way you didn't ask
Speaker 1: to be born rich. No, No, it's like I have
Speaker 1: a lot easier because I've never had to deal with
Speaker 1: like a major chronic illness. Right, makes my life easier.
Speaker 1: We all have privilege. Just own it. Don't be a
Speaker 1: dick about Eric Prince. Okay, So yeah, you'll remember that
Speaker 1: after college, Eric wound up briefly in turning for the
Speaker 1: George H. W. Bush White House. You recall that he
Speaker 1: wasn't happy there. Uh. He admits in his book that
Speaker 1: he didn't like the fact that President Bush was bargaining
Speaker 1: with people who wanted to wink and weaken the safety
Speaker 1: sanctity of marriage, raised taxes, uh, and push environmental policies.
Speaker 1: So yeah, environmental. Yeah. He admits that he got chewed
Speaker 1: out by the Deputy Chief of Staff Andrew Card because
Speaker 1: he wouldn't shut up about his thoughts on how the
Speaker 1: President ought to do things while he was an intern
Speaker 1: in the White House, which sounds like what would happen
Speaker 1: if you're being an insufferable dick. After five months, his
Speaker 1: internship was not renewed, of course, of course not. And
Speaker 1: that that brings you back to even the firehouse was
Speaker 1: Actually you guys should probably be cleaning it like this,
Speaker 1: like shut the funk up, Eric and clean boy. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you do it, Eric. Fine, let's all have beers since
Speaker 1: we just pulled people out of a fire. Yeah, exactly. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna switch the K twelve blades off the saws
Speaker 1: whatever nobody else's We haven't used that song in four
Speaker 1: years and probably blades fine, I don't know, I don't
Speaker 1: know saw blades. I'm sorry firefighters anyway, So you probably
Speaker 1: remember also that Eric Prince became a Navy seal next
Speaker 1: using a family connection to get into the school. But
Speaker 1: Prince did pass Hell week on his own merits, and
Speaker 1: that's impressive. And when he got back from becoming a
Speaker 1: Navy seal this happened, my parents sent me an extraordinary gift,
Speaker 1: a bronze statue of a cowboy. The artist had inscribed
Speaker 1: in the unwritten loss of the range, the work thick
Speaker 1: still exists. When you sign for an outfit, you ride
Speaker 1: for their brand. True commitment takes no easy way out. Now.
Speaker 1: I think Eric mentioned this because he likes to see
Speaker 1: himself as a cowboy, and like he and his contractors
Speaker 1: as cowboys. I can't imagine a a quote that does
Speaker 1: a worse job of describing Eric Prince is worth work
Speaker 1: ethic than that, because every time he makes a commitment,
Speaker 1: he weasels out of it every single time. That's the
Speaker 1: one thing that is true with Eric Prince, and I
Speaker 1: think that's the case with most people who are very
Speaker 1: insecure with their identity, right like, they try and project
Speaker 1: something that is the complete opposite of their own their
Speaker 1: truth as a person. And so if you're a cowardly,
Speaker 1: sniveling little brad, you're gonna act like the upstanding guy
Speaker 1: who like, hey, first guy for a brand, you read
Speaker 1: for that brand unless it gets hard, then you leave
Speaker 1: because you had a disagreement, unless it gets hard, in
Speaker 1: which case that brand was cheating and there was no
Speaker 1: point committing to that brand to begin with. Oh, Eric, Uh, Yeah,
Speaker 1: So Eric was an a vcal for about two years. Now.
Speaker 1: It costs it's hard to say, probably somewhere around and
Speaker 1: a half a million dollars just to train a Navy seal,
Speaker 1: and as much as a million dollars a year to
Speaker 1: keep that seal, you know, active and trained up in
Speaker 1: the field while they're an active duty Navy seal. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna guess that the government did not get its money's
Speaker 1: use out of Eric's brief stint in the Navy Seals.
Speaker 1: You're supposed to do that job more than two years
Speaker 1: if you commit to it. Uh. He says remarkably little
Speaker 1: about his time doing one of the coolest jobs in existence.
Speaker 1: On guests, that's because he didn't do very much. There
Speaker 1: is one telling paragraph where Eric writes about his experience
Speaker 1: during the Yugoslavian Civil War. In it, he cleverly excures
Speaker 1: the fact that he didn't experience any actual combat or
Speaker 1: real danger during his time there. Did what what what
Speaker 1: kind of action did you hear, I think you'll pick
Speaker 1: up on it. Then, in late nineteen is Yugoslavia broke
Speaker 1: apart in the Warring States, Seal Team eight deployed to
Speaker 1: Bosnia Hurt Sgovina. The shattered buildings in war torn streets
Speaker 1: where a far cry from the peaceful communities I had
Speaker 1: once seen there with my wife. We seals were performing
Speaker 1: combat search and rescue for down pilots or taking direct
Speaker 1: action to rate our sights. Not me, Eric Prince, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we see seals seals. Yeah, it's odd that he's able
Speaker 1: to be somewhat truthful in those instances, right, because like
Speaker 1: it seems like he'll embellish anything, because there's guys who
Speaker 1: like Eric Prince lied about the one third rail. Yeah, now,
Speaker 1: or those seals. If you were in Navy seal in
Speaker 1: Yugoslavia and you served with Erik Prince and I got
Speaker 1: it wrong or I got it right, I'm sure we
Speaker 1: could find that. Yeah. I don't know if you can.
Speaker 1: Probably just already think you just republic knowledge. They don't
Speaker 1: keep it secret. Who right, right, Yeah, we should call
Speaker 1: what's that guy who does like the seal stolen valor stuff?
Speaker 1: Don what's his face? Yeah? The guy who's like the
Speaker 1: fucking o G seal hunter would be like, hey, can
Speaker 1: you find his budge? I mean, he was definitely a
Speaker 1: seal not but you want to hear I do want
Speaker 1: to hear what those guys who are probably like, dude,
Speaker 1: I was a seal for fifteen years. This guy quit
Speaker 1: after two years. I would like to see what his
Speaker 1: time as a seal was like, because again, every time
Speaker 1: he does something he's directly involved in something cool he
Speaker 1: talks about right, and he just he weasels again here
Speaker 1: we'll see. That's then you kind of see the part
Speaker 1: where he is intelligent enough to know how far he
Speaker 1: can struts the truth because he's like, well, there are
Speaker 1: people who are going to be able to corroborate or
Speaker 1: basically debunk what I say. So let me just say
Speaker 1: I was. I was in the Seals during that time,
Speaker 1: and then that's what we see. Well, I was with
Speaker 1: the Seals team, and members of this team did that,
Speaker 1: Seals did act. I was on time out because I
Speaker 1: stole a helicopter and try to race it. Who knows
Speaker 1: what his what his situation was. Eric's time as a
Speaker 1: Navy seal was cut short. He says it's because his
Speaker 1: wife got cancer at age twenty nine, and he needed
Speaker 1: to take care of her and his children. And if
Speaker 1: he were a normal dude, of course that would be
Speaker 1: a good reason stopping. Of course, of course. Uh, and
Speaker 1: he says, my being gone was suddenly impossible. I requested
Speaker 1: my discharge from the navy. Uh. Now, here's the thing.
Speaker 1: Here is the thing you do? You dig something up there? Well,
Speaker 1: it's just that almost as soon as he gets home
Speaker 1: from being a n A vy seal, he starts Blackwater,
Speaker 1: and he's spending weekends and weeks away from his wife
Speaker 1: and children, hiking in the woods and shooting snakes and
Speaker 1: getting the land ready for this thing. I don't know
Speaker 1: exactly how long he waited, but he waited. But yeah,
Speaker 1: he know it's it's hard to speculate on that, but
Speaker 1: it doesn't seem like and it did his wife survive?
Speaker 1: So yeah, we're going to get into how he talks
Speaker 1: about his wife and some other stuff here. Um. So,
Speaker 1: at one point he mentions that he and his wife
Speaker 1: gave half a million dollars to a clinic in Prague
Speaker 1: so they could fund experimental treatments to try on his wife. Uh.
Speaker 1: In in that passage, he praises his wife's courage and
Speaker 1: then says, and through it all, she seemed more concerned
Speaker 1: about my loss, my impending grief, than her own death. Remember, Eric,
Speaker 1: you can live without me, as she would say, but
Speaker 1: you can't live without God. Now Eric starts blackwater, as
Speaker 1: I said, soon after leaving the Seals and spending a
Speaker 1: shipload of time there, and after two thousand one his
Speaker 1: business ramps up. He starts spending less and less time
Speaker 1: at home, even though that's why he left the Navy.
Speaker 1: By two thousands. Wait, so he left the Seals, and
Speaker 1: then at that point, what was his like wealth at
Speaker 1: hundreds of millions already? I mean, I would say conservatively
Speaker 1: at least like a hundred million right from selling the
Speaker 1: family and everybody split one point three billions. He did
Speaker 1: not need to work for money. He could have just
Speaker 1: been a dad and been there with his wife in
Speaker 1: her last years. He probably could have paid guys to, like,
Speaker 1: I'm play war in front of him and actually kill
Speaker 1: it themselves. If he could have gone shooting every day
Speaker 1: if he wanted to, he could have bought a ranches whatever.
Speaker 1: I'm sure there are people listening right now who have
Speaker 1: lost spouses to disease and would have loved to have
Speaker 1: just been able to not work and spend as much
Speaker 1: time with them as possible. That's not the strategy Eric took.
Speaker 1: He started a very involved business, and then after two
Speaker 1: thousand and one he starts going over and spending time
Speaker 1: in Afghanistan, and you know, the contracting business. She's still
Speaker 1: battling cancers. Off and on. She's battling cancer. He goes
Speaker 1: in remission for a while, but then it comes back
Speaker 1: and in like two thousand three, it's it's really bad
Speaker 1: quote and not just that's bad, but the marriage is bad.
Speaker 1: By early two thousand three, my wife and I didn't
Speaker 1: have much time alone together to begin with, and with
Speaker 1: those stresses, as well as the effects of cancer and
Speaker 1: surgery and chemotherapy, eliminated most of the romance or intimacy.
Speaker 1: When we did, I felt as if all I could
Speaker 1: do to keep things from spinning completely out of control.
Speaker 1: I felt as if it was all I could do
Speaker 1: to keep things from spinning completely out of control. And
Speaker 1: I found comfort in the arms of a woman named Joanna,
Speaker 1: who who had worked as our nanny in Michigan. In
Speaker 1: mid two thousand two, when we all moved back to Virginia.
Speaker 1: She was hired to perform administrative functions that are Moyak
Speaker 1: Blackwaters Moyak facilities. She became pregnant before join died. So
Speaker 1: now relationships are hard. If a friend who had had
Speaker 1: a spouse die came to me and confessed that they
Speaker 1: had cheated on their spouse while they was dying as cancer,
Speaker 1: I would not view that as a good thing, but
Speaker 1: I wouldn't take it as a condemnation of the person either.
Speaker 1: It's a nightmare. People have needs. We all fall short
Speaker 1: in difficult time. I mean, I think it's it's always
Speaker 1: it's hard to just judge someone's characters solely based on
Speaker 1: that but everything else. Yeah, But I mean at the
Speaker 1: same time, based on his prior history, even leading up
Speaker 1: to that. Well, and he portrays himself as a moral
Speaker 1: paragon on every page of this book. But in my opinion,
Speaker 1: this cheating is not just a matter of Eric failing
Speaker 1: in the face of terrible sorrow and stress and grasping
Speaker 1: for a moment of joy. It's an example, yet another
Speaker 1: example of his complete inability to to delay his own gratification,
Speaker 1: because that's his thing is he keeps quitting stuff. He
Speaker 1: keeps leaving, he gets bored, He gets bored, he gets bored,
Speaker 1: or he doesn't want to be told what to do
Speaker 1: or whatever. Does he have any like regret or like
Speaker 1: does he talk about in the book? Yeah, yeah, in
Speaker 1: a way that well, I'm not going to say in
Speaker 1: a way that feels believable, but we'll just continue the story. Um.
Speaker 1: I do like I think that that is a big
Speaker 1: through line that he cannot stand. Eric left the Air
Speaker 1: Force Academy because it was hard and he didn't like
Speaker 1: being exposed to other people's points of view. Uh. He
Speaker 1: liked Hillsdale his college, because it was full of people
Speaker 1: he agreed with. He left the Seals, and I mean,
Speaker 1: a guest, part of that was because he didn't like
Speaker 1: being told what to do. I didn't go into it here,
Speaker 1: but he spends pages and pages of his book talking
Speaker 1: about everything he thought that was dumb, about how seals
Speaker 1: had to train and like the way they had to travel,
Speaker 1: and like he sets it up as like, and this
Speaker 1: inspired me to create Blackwater to create a better training
Speaker 1: environment for seals. But I feel like he's just anyway, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you had two years and then you're the expert on
Speaker 1: Eric Prince does not have a good record of sticking
Speaker 1: to things. Now Here is the way he concludes his
Speaker 1: story about his wife's death and his infidelity. In March
Speaker 1: two thousand three, on a ski trip in Vail, Colorado,
Speaker 1: Joan wrote me a long letter. She left it on
Speaker 1: the dresser in our vacation home. There. My wife understood
Speaker 1: it would likely be her last time visiting a place
Speaker 1: we both loved, and that I would find the letter
Speaker 1: when I returned at Christmas time nine months later without her.
Speaker 1: It was the most caring, most awful thing I've ever read.
Speaker 1: She knew everything about everything. With Joanna. I had devastated her,
Speaker 1: yet and her final months, Joan had found the strength
Speaker 1: to forgive me. There are no excuses for what happened.
Speaker 1: There's not a day that goes by that I don't
Speaker 1: regret the way I heard her. After years of pain
Speaker 1: and treatments, on June fourteen three, my beautiful wife surrendered
Speaker 1: her body to her creator and passed from this life.
Speaker 1: She was thirty six years old. I cut out a
Speaker 1: small lock of her hair to keep, and I asked
Speaker 1: the doctor for the chemotherapy port that had been implanted
Speaker 1: in her upper chest. Really, the doctor said, that thing
Speaker 1: was the bane of her existence. That's the closest thing
Speaker 1: to her heart. I said, I've got it to this day.
Speaker 1: So what do you think of that? Or so if
Speaker 1: he looks grossed out, it's just so dark. It's dark
Speaker 1: that it's the thing that she hated. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to criticize that. I don't know. It's
Speaker 1: hard to like, you know, it's like the one terri
Speaker 1: part part of this whole thing where it's hard for
Speaker 1: me to fully be like, fuck you, gross of it.
Speaker 1: I'm sure. I don't know. Everyone grieves in their own way,
Speaker 1: and I don't I don't wish for anyone to live
Speaker 1: through that kind of sid awful like Very had to,
Speaker 1: you know, deal with that. It's just it's an awful office,
Speaker 1: soul destroying and I don't think he had much of
Speaker 1: a soul to begin with. Yeah, but part of me
Speaker 1: just thinks, like, I don't know if he even really
Speaker 1: if he's even really had a real relationship with other
Speaker 1: human It's hard to say because there's some more gross
Speaker 1: stuff coming up. So Eric married his former nanny and
Speaker 1: stayed with her for eight years. They divorced in two
Speaker 1: thousand twelve in two thousands. Well in two thousand nine,
Speaker 1: two anonymous individuals who claimed to be ex Blackwater workers
Speaker 1: filed sworn statements and federal court. One of these men
Speaker 1: claimed quote Mr Prince knowingly hired two persons who were
Speaker 1: previously involved in the Kosovo sex trafficking ring to serve
Speaker 1: at relatively high levels within his company. Mr Prince's North
Speaker 1: Carolina Operations had an ongoing wife swapping and sex ring
Speaker 1: which was participated in by many of Mr Prince's top
Speaker 1: executives x E because his company was exy at this time.
Speaker 1: Spokeswoman Stacy Duluke denied this and called it obvious slander. Also,
Speaker 1: it's like Stacys now Eric Prince's wife, so that seems
Speaker 1: clostively sex ring guys. I didn't even there's more to
Speaker 1: dig into that one. I just didn't have because there's
Speaker 1: so much else to get into. How there's also one
Speaker 1: of the other guys talked about how he's been having
Speaker 1: people assassinated who knew dirt about his company, and like
Speaker 1: made was willing to make a claim in federal court
Speaker 1: about it. I don't know. I have not gotten in all.
Speaker 1: There will be more episodes about Erik Prince in the
Speaker 1: Never Ending there's just too much. You can't even like
Speaker 1: we we've expanded too probably in the second act of
Speaker 1: his life. We're in the second chapter of his book, right, okay.
Speaker 1: Uh so the first third of his book is a
Speaker 1: pretty straightforward autobiography covering, you know, his life and the
Speaker 1: creation of Blackwater. Uh. But then it stops after around
Speaker 1: the time that the Iraq War starts. It stops being
Speaker 1: a normal autobiography, and every chapter start it's being just
Speaker 1: him defending himself and Blackwater against different allegations of Blackwaters failures,
Speaker 1: crimes and massacres and stuff. So how far are we
Speaker 1: in the book until this? About this? About where we
Speaker 1: are about a third of the way, and the one
Speaker 1: third of the book functions somewhat like a biography, and
Speaker 1: then it's just him defending his company and him horrible crimes. Yeah, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: Yeah the whole book, Eric Prince not I'm a hero.
Speaker 1: I'm so good. Okay, So I'm not going to go
Speaker 1: through all of these chapters because we don't have days
Speaker 1: for this podcast. I am going to talk about a
Speaker 1: couple of cases of him defending himself and if you
Speaker 1: want to read the book yourselves, the bullshit tactics he uses,
Speaker 1: and these will be evident, but don't don't actually pay
Speaker 1: for the book. It's bad. He said that. That's not
Speaker 1: bastards Pods official. Oh yeah, sorry, that it would be.
Speaker 1: If it's possible to steal a copy of Eric Prince's
Speaker 1: book and a person out there in the world did that,
Speaker 1: I would not condemn them as a human being for
Speaker 1: that action, although I would not condone or support their decisions.
Speaker 1: I will go a step further and say, go to
Speaker 1: www Dot pirate Bay. You're going to say lime wire.
Speaker 1: You're gonna love it here. Oh boy, we are elderly men. Okay,
Speaker 1: so let's talk about how Erik Prince justifies. Do you
Speaker 1: remember that funk up in Fellujah where four of his
Speaker 1: men got murdered and who him got strung up by
Speaker 1: a bridge and it sparked the Battle of Fallujah that
Speaker 1: killed prinds of thousands or thousands, a lot of people.
Speaker 1: I don't know how many. I don't know. That was
Speaker 1: in the last episode. Let's listen to the last episode.
Speaker 1: It killed a lot of people. Let me hold on,
Speaker 1: let me listen to the last episode really quick. I'll
Speaker 1: be right back and oh my god. Okay, fuck this guy, right, okay. Now,
Speaker 1: if you remember, Eric Prince had taken up a contract
Speaker 1: to deliver kitchen supplies or Blackwater hat. Prince describes them
Speaker 1: as literally pots and pans in the book. Here's how
Speaker 1: he describes the sweet deal he made with the company
Speaker 1: to live her their kitchen supplies. We agreed to provide
Speaker 1: a squad thirty four men to protect SSS personnel and convoys,
Speaker 1: the convoys of kitchen supplies. Regency was to pay my
Speaker 1: company eleven million dollars for a year of work, just
Speaker 1: shy of a million dollars per month, with an option
Speaker 1: to renew for a second year. Now. Eric describes Blackwater's
Speaker 1: mindset at the start of the War on Terror as
Speaker 1: say yes first, iron out the details later. And when
Speaker 1: he said yes to this job, some of those missing
Speaker 1: details included the fact that his men didn't have enough
Speaker 1: armored vehicles machine guns are actual contractors to fulfill the
Speaker 1: mission details. Do you go to like home depot and
Speaker 1: be like, who has a military experience? If you've if
Speaker 1: you've ever talked to a soldier who served in Iraq
Speaker 1: in the early two thousands, they'll all agree that armored
Speaker 1: vehicles are a pretty minor detail when you're driving through
Speaker 1: the streets. Who needs a little bit of armor and
Speaker 1: guns for what? Come on, it's kitchen equipment. Nothing, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's nothing, nothing anyway. Yeah. Eric notes with pride that
Speaker 1: his company got the cooking equipment contract after another private
Speaker 1: security form used due to the obvious risk of the route.
Speaker 1: Uh So a responsible company was like, we can't safely
Speaker 1: do this. I'm sorry, Like you're supposed to do so
Speaker 1: Prince picked up the contract. He blamed. Yeah, he blames
Speaker 1: the fact that they that they had to send in
Speaker 1: a smaller team than advertised without the proper equipment, to
Speaker 1: the actions of another security company that, he says, basically
Speaker 1: forcing them to do the mission before they were ready.
Speaker 1: Because these guys contract they ended it sooner than they
Speaker 1: should have ended it, and we just didn't have enough
Speaker 1: time to do it. Uh. He also claims that the
Speaker 1: extra men and armor and weapons wouldn't have made a
Speaker 1: difference because the ambush was so well set up. Nothing
Speaker 1: could have stopped this from happening. In other words, the
Speaker 1: fact that blackwaters Men weren't prepared and the escort was
Speaker 1: sent out unable to meet the company's own standards was
Speaker 1: not Eric's fault. There was no other way things could
Speaker 1: have gone. And obviously they couldn't have canceled the mission
Speaker 1: because that would have been really bad for them financially.
Speaker 1: And there's pots and pans and needed delivering anyway. So
Speaker 1: just he knew from the beginning was a wash. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Here's a quote from the Prager Security Internet National textbook
Speaker 1: Shadow Force private security contractors in Iraq. It was Blackwater Management,
Speaker 1: not the State Department, that reduced the preparation time for
Speaker 1: the ill fated security details so that they were dropped
Speaker 1: in place in their first day on the job. It
Speaker 1: was Blackwater Management that decided to send out a four
Speaker 1: man detail instead of the usual six. It was Blackwater
Speaker 1: that decided to send the detail and soft skinned instead
Speaker 1: of armored vehicles. It was Blackwater that decided not to
Speaker 1: give the detail but sheet guns as required by contract.
Speaker 1: So reached the kind that just lazy. It's like you
Speaker 1: didn't even fucking follow through on the contract. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: I'm sure. If there's one thing you could have definitely
Speaker 1: found in Iraq at that time, it was extra machine guys,
Speaker 1: Like there's a lot of them. What do they mean
Speaker 1: by that like mounted, Like I don't think I think
Speaker 1: I mean anything bigger than like an M four, But
Speaker 1: I think that's all they were armed with. It was
Speaker 1: just four guys with personal weapons. Oh wow, which you
Speaker 1: don't want to roll through. It's kind of risky to
Speaker 1: roll through fellution to day that just because he's cheap,
Speaker 1: Just because he's cheap and he can he can't ever
Speaker 1: accept that something could be a failure, Like you might
Speaker 1: have to say, we can't do the mission right now
Speaker 1: if the pots and pants, maybe they get stolen, whatever,
Speaker 1: Like it can't go to better than people losing their lives,
Speaker 1: you would think if you were a human being. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when you're looking at eleven million dollar contract, clearly whoever
Speaker 1: was working with the other security company that said no
Speaker 1: was a human being. It was like, no, people are
Speaker 1: gonna get killed, and it's not worth it for positive
Speaker 1: someone with like functional like a basic to be like
Speaker 1: I've been, I've had to deal with that and that's
Speaker 1: not something I want to repeat right Like, this is
Speaker 1: a bad idea. It cannot be responsibly done. So I
Speaker 1: have no battlefield experience and I just be like, what
Speaker 1: are you talking about? It seems like our own rules
Speaker 1: say armored vehicles are necessary and these aren't. I don't
Speaker 1: even take risks when I play like sid Meyer's Civilization,
Speaker 1: let alone like with real people's lives. Oh boy, So
Speaker 1: a lot of Eric Prince's book actually serves as not
Speaker 1: very covert legal defenses against the families of the men
Speaker 1: who died in this attack, all of whom have since
Speaker 1: sued black Water for negligence. U Prince is very careful.
Speaker 1: He provides fawning hagiographies of how wonderful all of the
Speaker 1: guys who died were, even as he throws shade on
Speaker 1: the mission command or a guy named Battlona, for deciding
Speaker 1: to go in quote No one questioned bat Alona's decision
Speaker 1: to accept the mission, especially since his insistence on shrinking
Speaker 1: the convoy showed that he was aware of the risks
Speaker 1: because he asked to transport fewer vehicles because there were
Speaker 1: so few men. But I'm gonna guess bat alone got
Speaker 1: pressured by somebody to do the mission. No ship. It
Speaker 1: was probably like, yeah, we'll we'll give you another extra
Speaker 1: blah blah blat it. You know, who knows what they said,
Speaker 1: and they were all new to the job. He wanted
Speaker 1: to do a good prove that they were company men,
Speaker 1: you know. Uh. Princes unctuously kind of the families in
Speaker 1: his description of them. He listened to tale how he
Speaker 1: visited all of them and how he invited them to
Speaker 1: a thing at the Blackwater Ranch or whatever. Uh. He
Speaker 1: talks about how sad he was, and he quotes from
Speaker 1: thank you letters that the families sent him before it
Speaker 1: became clear that negligence had been responsible for their loved
Speaker 1: one stats and sued him. Um so yeah. He quotes
Speaker 1: from like the letters grieving wife sent him in the
Speaker 1: immediate aftermath of this, before he got ahead of it
Speaker 1: by being really nice to them, basically try and then
Speaker 1: they sent him because they were just grateful that he
Speaker 1: was seemed so caring in this terrible moments, you know,
Speaker 1: because they knew there was danger and then they realized,
Speaker 1: oh there was myrted your kindness. He makes a huge
Speaker 1: point about the fact that one of the men's last
Speaker 1: paychecks for nine thousand dollars was held up because he
Speaker 1: was dead and his wife couldn't cash it. So Prince
Speaker 1: notes that the company cut her a check directly and says, quote,
Speaker 1: if the estate comes after us for the money then
Speaker 1: so be it reads one of our internal staff emails
Speaker 1: from the time, it sounds like the kids need the money.
Speaker 1: So he makes a big show about the fact that
Speaker 1: he made it slightly easier for them to get nine
Speaker 1: thousand dollars that they were owed. But then, you know,
Speaker 1: didn't fought the families in court over paying them out
Speaker 1: anything extra, over the fact that they had, you know,
Speaker 1: sent their loved ones into a dangerous situation without the
Speaker 1: proper equipment, without the equipment that their own company's rules
Speaker 1: said that was necessary. I think moments like these really
Speaker 1: review how little Eric Prince believes human beings ought to
Speaker 1: be expected to do for one another. Like that's one
Speaker 1: of the things that strikes out to me, Like to
Speaker 1: a normal person, this is the least suggestion you would
Speaker 1: expect from a company who had gotten one of your
Speaker 1: relatives killed. And he actually it's a great humanizing anecdote
Speaker 1: from the water, it's he's from outer space. One of
Speaker 1: the funny through lines for this book is Eric's refusal
Speaker 1: to call his men mercenaries. He's continuously offended at the
Speaker 1: mere thought of that, and then he drops in lines
Speaker 1: like this about the men who died in Fallujah and
Speaker 1: the legal complications around that. So they weren't combatants, but
Speaker 1: they weren't non combatants. Batalona, Zovko, Healvins, and Antigue were civilians,
Speaker 1: but they were armed. Ultimately, behest of the Department of
Speaker 1: Defense pursuing dangerous missions, the four fell into a glaring
Speaker 1: gray area of international law that experts in Geneva and
Speaker 1: beyond I continued to debate for years, what do you
Speaker 1: call civilians with guns in a war? Zonetions for money?
Speaker 1: If only there was a term for that, fucking mercenary?
Speaker 1: What is that? I sorry, hessians, because the only thing
Speaker 1: I would call a mission was like in high school,
Speaker 1: would be like go to seven eleven from blunt wraps
Speaker 1: or like something like they're like, yo, busting mish. That's
Speaker 1: only mission as a civilian, you bust. Yeah. Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: if you'd carry guns in to get those blunt wraps,
Speaker 1: you would have been seen them as these guys. The
Speaker 1: value was pretty safe, you know what I mean? Boy? Okay,
Speaker 1: So we're not gonna take again. We're not gonna take
Speaker 1: a point by point look at every fund up defense
Speaker 1: Eric puts together. But we're going to talk a little
Speaker 1: bit more about the Nissaur Square massacre. Now, this is
Speaker 1: where several of Eric's employees fired machine guns and grenades
Speaker 1: into a crowd, killing fourteen and wounding a shipload of people.
Speaker 1: Uh Their story, and the story Prince tells, is that
Speaker 1: they were taking heavy incoming fire. Prince repeatedly references incoming
Speaker 1: a K forty seven fire and points out that a
Speaker 1: bullet damaged the coolant line of one of their vehicles.
Speaker 1: Now that doesn't gell with the testimony of Jeremy Ridgeway,
Speaker 1: a Blackwater X employee who was at I'm going to
Speaker 1: quote Fox News is summary of it, just so you
Speaker 1: know I'm not picking out some lefty source to make
Speaker 1: these guys right. This is the Fox This is probably
Speaker 1: the most charitable version. Ridgeway told a jury that he
Speaker 1: didn't see any Iraqi's pointing guns in Nissar Square, and
Speaker 1: that there were no telltale muzzle flashes in the distance,
Speaker 1: that there was no incoming fire, and that there was
Speaker 1: no sound of a K forty seven rounds going off,
Speaker 1: as would be the case if insurgents were shooting at
Speaker 1: the black Water guards from nearby. Now you'll remember maybe
Speaker 1: that a lot of these people were shot in the back.
Speaker 1: The civilians who died were found who have been shot
Speaker 1: in the back while they were running away, as a
Speaker 1: normal person would say it. Eric Prince praises, as they
Speaker 1: were shot in the back, presumably mistaken for retreating insurgents.
Speaker 1: So the military looked over everything, and their experts, who
Speaker 1: sure as ship had no vested interest in making it
Speaker 1: look like anyone had committed a war crime in Iraq,
Speaker 1: determined that this had been an excessive shooting. Uh, there
Speaker 1: had been no sign of incoming fire. Prince summarizes their
Speaker 1: view of the incident as a one sided shooting rather
Speaker 1: than a massacre. Then he says it's safe to say
Speaker 1: that my men and I disagree with that assessment, except
Speaker 1: for the one that literally the guy who testified it
Speaker 1: yah in a jury right whatever, Uh, let's just get
Speaker 1: hung up. Let's not get hung up on that now.
Speaker 1: Most of Eric's evidence seems to be that the investigators
Speaker 1: or that his own investigators later found a bullet in
Speaker 1: the grill of one of Blackwaters trucks. He says that
Speaker 1: the vehicles had been shot up in all of the fighting,
Speaker 1: but that they had to d o d rules said
Speaker 1: that all of the vehicles had to be in good repair.
Speaker 1: So we were acquired by contract to immediately repair the vehicles.
Speaker 1: And that's why there wasn't right. And we didn't really
Speaker 1: take pictures either, But they were there. He says they
Speaker 1: took pictures. He hasn't, but were there where they at
Speaker 1: it was it did I'm gonna guess if he had
Speaker 1: pictures that went to the army and they did not
Speaker 1: find them compelling. Uh, they did find a bullet in
Speaker 1: the grill of one of Blackwaters trucks. Um, but it
Speaker 1: was just a bullet. We don't know what type of
Speaker 1: bullet it was. It was damaged enough that they could
Speaker 1: not definitively tie it to any particular kind of weapon.
Speaker 1: And we know that Black watersmen were shooting like crazy
Speaker 1: bullets ricochet, you know, you know war zone where people
Speaker 1: are shooting bullets wind up in weird fucking places. It's
Speaker 1: entirely possible one of their rounds ricochet and got embedded
Speaker 1: in the grill of this truck. It's no way to
Speaker 1: no way to say one way there a single bullet
Speaker 1: in the girl of this truck is thin evidence to
Speaker 1: hold against the Army when their investigators say nobody was
Speaker 1: shooting at you right, yeah now. In two thousand fourteen,
Speaker 1: four Prince's men were convicted, three of them from manslaughter
Speaker 1: in one for first degree murder, but last August two
Speaker 1: thousand seventeen, a federal appeals court throughout the convictions for
Speaker 1: three of them in order to retrial. The man with
Speaker 1: the murder conviction, Nicholas Slattin, was a sniper who the
Speaker 1: government accused of having fired the first shots, but during
Speaker 1: the trial another mercenary admitted to shooting first, so his
Speaker 1: conviction was dropped. The other two had their convictions thrown
Speaker 1: out because the prosecutors had used a u s law
Speaker 1: made to prosecute domestic criminals to give them extra long
Speaker 1: sentences since they had committed the crime with machine guns.
Speaker 1: Um So basically, if you commit a crime in the
Speaker 1: use of the machine gun, you get additional sentence. The
Speaker 1: prosecutors were saying, basically, look at all the people these
Speaker 1: guys killed, We owe it to those dead civilians to
Speaker 1: try and get these guys as much time as possible.
Speaker 1: So they used that law. But the jury rightfully was like,
Speaker 1: it was their job to carry machine guns. It is
Speaker 1: bullshit to give them extra time for them. That's not
Speaker 1: what wrong. So they didn't get off the case because
Speaker 1: they were legitimately innocent. It was the prosecutors who are
Speaker 1: a little over zealous. Yeah, exactly. Uh. Now. Eric ends
Speaker 1: his book by talking about his charities and making it
Speaker 1: seem like he's enjoying the peaceful retirement of a true
Speaker 1: American hero quote, it remains to be seen what my
Speaker 1: future might hold. Tomorrow was one less day than I've
Speaker 1: gotten now, and only God knows how many more I'll have.
Speaker 1: But in the meantime, I'm enjoying a quieter life. I
Speaker 1: had a small Hoby Cat, which is a type of boat,
Speaker 1: delivered to our home in Abu Dhabi today, shortly after
Speaker 1: my family relocated. The kids are still learning their way
Speaker 1: around the fiberglass catamaran the same way I once poked
Speaker 1: around with our Boston Whaler back in Michigan. But most
Speaker 1: every day in Abu Dhabi is a good day to
Speaker 1: swim across the bay, catching the next gust of wind,
Speaker 1: and teaching my own children to feel at home on
Speaker 1: the water. Of course, while he was in Abu Dhabi
Speaker 1: writing this, he was also teaching an army of Columbian
Speaker 1: mercenaries to fight on behalf of the Immirati government. Dozens
Speaker 1: of those men, and god knows how many other people
Speaker 1: are now dead and Yemen, So okay, it's hard linked
Speaker 1: to now. Yeah, so it's hard to say what the
Speaker 1: future is going to be for Eric Prince, his new
Speaker 1: navy and the new air Force. I'm sure he's right
Speaker 1: around the corner from getting his hands on. I mean
Speaker 1: to guess, whatever that future is, it's going to involve
Speaker 1: a lot of bodybags. Wow, Eric, Eric, I'm just living
Speaker 1: a quiet life now in Abu Dhabi. Yeah, training a
Speaker 1: small mercenary army for repressive theocratic regime exactly like you do.
Speaker 1: I'm like, I'm like the guys at the end of
Speaker 1: Shoshank Redemption, but with a mercenary army's going to be
Speaker 1: used to commit war crimes in Yemen. Hessions that's call ems.
Speaker 1: Oh well, I it's it's so wild because he really
Speaker 1: is like the physical manifestation of capitalism in the military
Speaker 1: industrial complex, like all in one fucking man. It's like
Speaker 1: the worst parts of all of those things just expressed
Speaker 1: themselves in the goog turned into Eric Prince. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like the military industrial complex had a baby. And yeah,
Speaker 1: with late stage capitalism and in there there it is.
Speaker 1: It's Eric fucking Prince, one of the worst people who's
Speaker 1: ever lived, A true bastard for true starred. Yeah. In fact,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna get I'm gonna bump him above bastard and
Speaker 1: call him a real piece of ship. Yeah yeah, Eric Prince.
Speaker 1: Everybody alright, Miles, you got some plug doubles to plug?
Speaker 1: Oh let's see well yeah, Glade plug ins guys. Uh,
Speaker 1: they're available at most supermarkets right now, please take that.
Speaker 1: Erwick also another plug double I love, but yeah look again,
Speaker 1: look Glaxo Smith Klein. You know S. C. Johnson wax
Speaker 1: Please holler at us. Uh. If you are looking for
Speaker 1: the more podcast route, I'm on the Daily Sight guys
Speaker 1: with Jack O'Brien. We do that every day, uh, talking
Speaker 1: news and culture whatever's in the z geist as it were. Uh.
Speaker 1: And you find me on Twitter and Instagram at Myles
Speaker 1: with Gray. That's about it. You can find me on
Speaker 1: Twitter at I Write o. Okay. You can find my
Speaker 1: book on Amazon, a brief history advice. It's I Recreate
Speaker 1: Weird Ancient Drugs and Damage My Body. You can find
Speaker 1: this uh podcast on the Internet. Behind the Bastards dot
Speaker 1: com where you will find all of the sources for
Speaker 1: this episode. Uh. You can also find us on Instagram
Speaker 1: and Twitter at at Bastards pod so check us out,
Speaker 1: check us out on te public where we have a store,
Speaker 1: you know, behind the Bastards. You can buy our T
Speaker 1: shirts there and some of that money will go to
Speaker 1: me and I will use that money to buy the
Speaker 1: liquor that I will use to drink myself into forgetting
Speaker 1: the Derek Prince exists. So help a brother out with
Speaker 1: buying T shirts. And uh, also, let's get this Dorrito's
Speaker 1: campaign one. Let's let's yeah, yeah, tweet why I eat
Speaker 1: Dorrito's right if you have, Because guys, what we're trying
Speaker 1: to do is connect a action from the consumer to
Speaker 1: a media source. And this is the this is how
Speaker 1: capital and in fairness, hundreds of you have already impressed.
Speaker 1: When I see your guys social media and seeing the
Speaker 1: amount of people just like posing with Doritos, it's like
Speaker 1: dozens of weeks. Sometimes part of me gets really upset
Speaker 1: though that it's this free advertising with no I mean,
Speaker 1: it's a good product. I am all right with that,
Speaker 1: but the Stockholm syndrome, You're like, it's fine. One day
Speaker 1: they'll recognize me, and I do hope one day they will.
Speaker 1: But these are delicious. Well, if anything, we can say
Speaker 1: you are the Eric Prince of Doritos. Thank you make
Speaker 1: me the Eric Prince of Doritos. Tweet why I Love Doritos,
Speaker 1: hashtag why I eat hashtag why eat Dorritos attached at
Speaker 1: the Dorrito's company at this podcast, and we'll see what happens. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe I'll get my own catamaran watch with a
Speaker 1: machine I really hope. So you know what, you know
Speaker 1: what's actually gonna happen. Dorritos is gonna steal your hashtag
Speaker 1: into an actual ad campaign for like themselves and put
Speaker 1: you in the cold. That's how this ship works. If
Speaker 1: that's what happens, that's what happens. And they hope is
Speaker 1: that they buy me a catamaran with a machine gun. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, because that's how this story action is Like, hey, sorry,
Speaker 1: we can optically, we couldn't get in bed with you
Speaker 1: with the Doritos thing. Here's a catam ran with machine
Speaker 1: It is a catam ran with a machine gun. Sorry
Speaker 1: it's soft skinned. You know, we can't we goggle all
Speaker 1: the way. I don't plan on delivering kitchen supply. It's
Speaker 1: much heavier when you have an armored catagory. All right, guys,
Speaker 1: I love about you and Brian H.