He wanted to stay connected to the SEAL teams and provide efficient training facilities.
He found the Academy too woke and politically correct.
He found it to be a pit of snakes rather than a collection of altruistic patriots.
To provide efficient training facilities for SEAL teams and maintain a work-life balance.
He believes many support roles can be outsourced competitively to bring pricing reality.
He believes it's a loser situation and only grinding up Ukrainian youth.
He believes they have the technology but is unsure if they have a functional nuke.
They have a powerful economy, large manufacturing base, and are imposing strict controls.
Smartphones collect extensive data on users, including routines and personal habits.
To provide a secure alternative to smartphones that prevent data harvesting and surveillance.
Criminal organizations can use collected data to voice verify into bank accounts.
It allows government agents to demand commercial data without a warrant, violating privacy.
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Who does Iran want to be as the next president of the United States? The man who brought us the Abraham Accords or the woman from the administration that brought us the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal?
Global security and American stability are balancing right now on the razor's edge. And my next guest knows firsthand the cost of war and how to fight it. He's the founder of a private military contractor. Blackwater has organized operations nationally, internationally coordinating with major corporations, the CIA, the U S government as a whole. He knows what's happening from the inside out.
He's focused right now on securing a new asset, our data. Just full disclosure, we are going to talk about this, but I want you to know this is the up phone. This is his new private phone. I'm one of the first people to buy one. I think it's fantastic, but they are a sponsor on my program.
But I don't give special treatment to sponsors or anything else. I want to talk to him about not just what's happening around the world, the election, but I also want to talk to him and his partner about technology and the ability of our government and these corporations to spy on you. Now, whether online or overseas, Americans no longer trust our government to have our best interest at heart.
Are we right to distrust the government? To answer that question, I want to welcome our guest, a retired U.S. Navy SEAL, businessman, incredible entrepreneur and co-founder of Unplugged, Eric Prince, and later on in the broadcast, bring in his business partner, former U.S. Marine and big tech insider, Ryan Patterson.
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Find the detail that moves you with immersive dining experiences from Sapphire Reserve. Chase, make more of what's yours. Learn more at chase.com slash sapphirereserve. Cards issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank and a member of FDIC. Subject to credit approval. Welcome to the program, Eric. Nice to have you here. Nice to be here. You, and in doing the research and homework on you, I could spend hours just exploring different avenues of your life. But I want to start with...
maybe some of the things early in life, first of all, your father is one of those guys who you're like, well, why didn't I think of that? He had the patent for the lighted visor in your car, right? Yep. Still have that patent or is that patent worn out? I think it's probably worn out, but they still make a lot of them. Yeah. And he's also a guy who, I think it's in Holland, Michigan,
Back in the 80s was like, why are we plowing the streets all the time with snow? Right? Yeah. Holland, Michigan is right in the coastal area of Lake Michigan. So you get a massive amount of lake effect snow. Right.
And my dad figured, well, why don't we use the waste heat coming off the coal-fired power plant and instead of it dumping back into the lake with thermal pollution to pump that heat through the streets. So yes, whenever it snows in Holland, Michigan, a little switch turns and the water gets diverted and the streets are heated to just above melting point temperature.
And you have no snow accumulation. It's unbelievable. I mean, it should be done. And very green. Right. He could never get the city to do it, right? No, he did it with his own money. And they laughed at him and he, you know, he got the last laugh. Oh, amazing. But, you know, so the company developed the die cast machine and the lighted sun visor, but he also had some other designs.
Maybe not great ideas, but I think it speaks to you have to be a wildcatter at heart. You have to be willing to try and fail because he also the same motion of a die cast machine. He developed a machine which would automatically take the bone out of a ham. Wow. And he said, you want to you want to have a hard sales experience. Take that to a union factory to take away all those jobs. Right. And a propeller driven snowmobile.
What was the problem with that one? Other than, you know, people falling off the back end of the prop. Yes, that's a downside. All right.
Yeah, even a sock light, which would go on because he had a terrible time figuring out if he had brown socks or black socks. So again, he had a very inventive mind that never really stopped. And he had the courage to try. So was that his main gig, inventor? I mean, what was his? He loved to build and create and really started from scratch. So what was that like to grow up in that household?
with a dad like that, how did that shape you? - Didn't want to disappoint him. And growing up in a town where it was 30,000 people and 5,000 people in the town worked for my dad. So yeah, you kind of go around with that name on your back and didn't want to screw that up. - It's interesting 'cause my kids kind of had that same thing and we've talked about it several times. They're like,
um you know because why don't you go out and you know blah blah and they're like dad because we're your son or daughter and we don't want to do anything that's going to end up in the papers that's kind of a hard thing to yeah but you're not where you're where you're afraid to make mistakes because you don't want to harm the family name well i i'm i've made plenty of mistakes right and um
but to keep going and learn and adjust. I guess as a kid, I wanted to try to make the most of whatever I was
blessed with. Yeah, yeah. Education-wise and all the rest. And with education, you went to, you started at the Naval Academy. I did. And then you transferred to Hillstall. I left after three semesters. I love the Navy, but not so much the Academy because even then, the Academy was getting woke and politically correct already back in the 80s. Because you imagine America, you know, as...
Crazy as a university has gotten, imagine one run by the federal government. And that was very much the case. So like what was the beginning that you saw? Double standards on admissions and grading and even placement of people in units.
And I believe the military should be an absolutely equal opportunity on everything. Who's the best? But vigorously, viciously merit-based. Because it is literally life and death matter. And when we have, the military has deviated from that. And that's a much bigger problem set that would probably take more time than we have. How did you find Hillsdale?
I mean, what was your experience like? It was really excellent. I shifted. I left the academy in mid-December and rolled into Hillsdale two weeks later. And it was also at a unique time.
taking political science classes. And I actually had for one of my main professors was a guy who was a law school classmate of Mikhail Gorbachev. Oh my God. As the Soviet Union is collapsing. Wow. So he's reading the Soviet newspapers, et cetera, in real time and interpreting it to the class. It was fantastic and a really good economic education. You were against...
communism at an early age didn't didn't you have an experience when you were like seven in berlin yes what was that my well my dad was invited to the soviet union to because they wanted to buy diecast machines from him wow and so he went and he did not like the experience at all the surveillance and the just the control of it all and so he wanted the rest of the family
to do that and so we actually road tripped in a Chevy van across Eastern Europe 1976 I spent my seventh birthday in Berlin and so even as a seven-year-old east or west both drove in through the Czech Republic or Czechoslovakia yeah yeah so even as a seven-year-old seeing the the guns and the dogs and the tank traps in the minefields octum mining signs everywhere
you can kind of figure out that this barrier keeping people in is not such a great look for communism. And I remember the only color that you could see was the big red star on a lot of the buildings. Yeah. Even parts of Poland now still have that kind of depressing kind of gray. That dingy is from burning all that bad coal. Yeah. So you wanted to serve, you became a Navy SEAL.
I went to the academy planning to be a pilot because, again, my dad had aviation in the business, and so I was kind of exposed to that, and I loved flying. Went to the academy with that plan, but when I was there, I remember the two SEAL liaisons came down and gave a presentation the spring of plea beer, and they said, if you want to join us for PT for a workout, come to this field, 5.30 the next morning. So I showed up, and they said,
uh today we're just going to run a mile get a partner put them on your shoulders wow and i was hooked and so i really yeah that would hook me i i left with i left the academy with the plan of going back in through rotc or ocs or something to be a seal because i wanted to serve and uh that was a really good experience and when were you when were you in
92 through 96. So that's right before, right after. Haiti, a little bit of Bosnia, Serbia. Right after the Gulf War then. Correct. And you went, and didn't you serve with, you were an intern maybe at George H.W. Bush's? I was, between my junior and senior year, I took a year off and I was a White House intern. And that was also a real eye-opening experience because you kind of get this image of, I'm going to work at the White House and-
I think it was going to be a collection of altruistic patriots, and it was kind of a pit of snakes. And I did about six months there and then six months on Capitol Hill, and that thoroughly vaccinated me from any desire of working in Washington. Yeah, my son went out for, I don't know, two weeks, and he was working, you know—
trying to set some political things up. He was just interning with somebody and he called me up three days into it. I never want to be a part of this. I never want to be a part of politics. He said, it is ugly. And it is. And I think Churchill had it right. He said, in war, you die once, but in politics, you can die every day. That's exactly right. Exactly right. So when did you start Blackwater?
And what was the idea at first? I had planned. So another family policy was that you did not come and work in the family business. You had to go do something else first. And I had honestly had no desire to join my dad's business. I didn't was interested in it at all. I wanted to be in the military. I wanted to be a commando.
And I was planning to do 10 to 12 years in the SEAL teams because those are kind of the good years to be a SEAL officer. You get to operate with the men. And my father died in 95 and then I had a deployment. And when I came back from deployment, found my wife was diagnosed with cancer at 29. At 29? Yeah. And-
So I got out, but SEAL teams had been using private facilities since the 1970s, but no one had done anything on an industrial scale, big one. And I wanted to do something local so that the guys could train and still make it home in time for dinner. Because the year before I deployed, we were gone training 10 out of 12 months, which is hard to have a work-life family balance. Correct.
And so getting out of the Navy earlier than I planned to, building Blackwater became my goal 'cause I wanted to stay connected to the SEAL teams. And so that's how it worked. And it really started as a training operation, which is what the teams needed. But at the same time, I took over. So we sold the big mothership, the company of my dad that made automotive parts, but the machinery business was smaller. It was 250 employees.
And I took that over and took it through a lean transition, really based on the Toyota production system to get more efficient. And so doing that at the same time really guided one guy to the other to make Blackwater into a integrated, efficient contractor. Because what does the military do? It recruits, vets, equips, trains, deploys, supports people. And how do you do that as efficiently as possible? Which the government doesn't do.
And that's tying back to the Hillsdale Austrian economics education. The most essential piece of information the market needs is price because price tells you how much something is valued. And that's literally what, that's the problem with the military. That's the problem with government. They have no appreciation for what price is. And if you can't correct value it, then you have, then you use an infinite amount of it. I just heard Elon Musk say when he was approached by the government with SpaceX,
He said they didn't care about price. Yeah. I mean, I don't even understand that world. It's not their money. He's like, well, surely you will want it for cheaper. And he's like, they don't care. But look what led to the destruction of the Soviet Union, the collapse. I know. They had no information of what price is, so you can't value it. Whether you have too much grain and not enough grain, too many truck tires, whatever it is, that's the problem with government.
So let me go back to Blackwater, because I'm really torn on this, because you guys have never lost somebody you were protecting, right? Nope. Yeah. You are very, very efficient. But the idea of, because you'd like to privatize the military, wouldn't you? No, I think there are many roles that should remain the sole purview of government, active duty forces to do. But I would say there's a lot of the support training, training,
equipping, a lot of those things can be outsourced competitively to bring pricing reality to the market. And I'll give a simple example. We bid for a, it's called vertical replenishment, which is basically embarking our helicopters on board a supply ship to fly from the supply ship to warships at sea.
And we showed up to do that job with two helicopters and eight guys. The Navy showed up to do it with two helicopters and 35 guys. Oh, my gosh. And for every 35 they had deployed, they had another 70 back stateside waiting to deploy, training, whatever else. So very simple to see who's going to do that cheaper. Because those eight people, I had to pay very well. They were highly experienced. The 35 plus 70...
the Admiral that choose to have that many numbers, he didn't have to pay for them. And so letting a lot of those things be bid out competitively, that's why Musk is crushing all because, because he's the only real private operator operating in space. He knows what his cost is. And he said, well, we're going to make it a thousand times cheaper to put a payload in orbit. Okay. And he's done it. So can that happen with the military? Well, let me finish. I'm sorry. Let me finish my thought on this. I'm,
I'm concerned about, you know, people only pay attention to the military industrial complex part of Eisenhower's speech. They don't listen to the, oh, and the universities will be an industrial complex. Everything that partners with the government becomes a machine that...
It's just heroin for the government. It's a machine of grift and corruption. Yeah, awful. Yeah, and that's problematic and why our republic has so many problems. Right, so how do we balance that to where we don't add to the military-industrial complex to where we've privatized so much that there's the incentive of, hey, let's go to war some more. Let's make some more stuff.
Very fair concern and criticism. We used to have five or sorry, a hundred plus major defense contractors. The Clinton administration consolidated it down to five. And so you get even more cartel behavior when you're over consolidated. It's an antitrust situation. I would say one of the things that drives the disease is Congress appropriates way too much money on defense, on all things spending,
Goes to defense contractors who spends the big five spend and pay. Well, they pay for about a brigade's worth, thousands of lobbyists and lawyers to infest Washington, D.C., to encourage Congress with money to spend more on the program. So it's a very unhealthy cycle that has to be broken. How do you break it? I would cap or prevent it.
Look, first of all, veto defense bills. Actually, an executive that would enforce fiscal discipline
That we have to make a decision between guns versus butter, not just both and, because with a reserve currency where you can spend an infinite amount, that's why we have $35 trillion in debt. We're going to either get control of that ourselves and have a painful landing, or we're going to completely ignore it and have an absolute blow-up Weimar Republic disaster. Based on our previous record, option two is probably going to be the way we do it. Which is really frightening. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, Donald Trump believes in debt. I think a little bit more than I do. I believe in healthy debt. If it's going to help you grow, we haven't bought anything that I know of.
that has made America more competitive or, you know, if you're investing in things. When you see politicians saying, oh, we're investing in this program. No, they're not. Not at all. So do you foresee either of the candidates being disciplined on things like this? I truly hope there is enough new leadership, enough new blood in the Senate, in the House to actually see
And it's ultimately the people that have to get in their members' face to say, no, I'm not spending so much. How much trouble are we in? I've heard we've depleted everything that we had and given it all to Ukraine. How much trouble are we actually in? Our defense industrial base is extremely anemic. When you think about what America's main contribution to World War II was, Soviets lost 22 million. Mm-hmm.
While the U.S. was still messing around in North Africa in 1943, the Soviets erased the
800,000 Germans from the German order of battle at Stalingrad alone. Now they killed a million, two of their own people doing that. In the European theater of operations, we lost 250,000 just by comparison. So, but America's main contribution World War II was industrial might. Made it possible for the Russians to go from Moscow all the way to Berlin with like 600,000 trucks. We don't have anything like that today.
And so we delude ourselves in thinking that we have all that we need to go peer to peer. And we have a lot of people that make decisions that don't have to live with the consequences, which is why stumbling into a really dumb war in Ukraine, which is a absolute loser. All we're doing is grinding up the next generations of Ukrainian youth. They have zero chance. And giving their farmland to Ukraine.
places places like blackrock etc etc i mean we are yeah well at the end of the day it's going to be owned by the russians because they should have taken a deal in 2022 already yep but now the russians i think can go all the way to the the nipa river and yeah it's it's a bad situation really bad
There are so many bad calls from this administration. But let me stay on some of the things that are actually happening, like the Ukraine war. Have you read Annie Jacobson's book, Nuclear War? No, I haven't. Oh, you should. It's terrifying. It's absolutely terrifying. She just takes it minute by minute what decisions have to be made from, let's say, North Korea's launch to
What happens in the first 30 seconds? What happens in the first minute? Half the book is the first seven minutes to where the president has to make the decision. I will commit to you. I'll read that. Yeah, it's amazing. And that's assuming your comms works. Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, no, no. It's not hacked. It is that it's up to date. Yeah. That somebody did the software update that whatever. Yeah, it is. It is so clear that.
No one is prepared to make those decisions like that. No one is prepared to have everything run smoothly. And by a simple wrong call, we blow everybody up. Everybody blows up. Okay. It's insanity. Gorbachev and Reagan were right. It can't be fought because there's no way to win. No, it really is mutually assured destruction. How close do you think we are?
to i mean i hadn't thought about nuclear war since the wall came down i thought we were past that insanity um i i well the fact that the russians are winning means they're i would say less likely to push towards um a nuclear exchange for now but we're so stupid right now agree agree and using nato origin weapons to attack targets deep in russia um you know put it from a
Flip the tables. Imagine if Russia announced that Mexico was joining a Russian alliance and they were going to have Russian trainers, even Russian troops and a lot of Russian weapon systems staged in Tijuana and Nuevo Leon and Monterrey. And has that become a red line for us? Hell yeah, it is. Yeah. Yeah.
And that's what we're doing. And we promised we never would do that. I mean, it's so easy to understand what their red line is and why, you know, they would have a problem with it because we would too. Because they lost 22 million people in World War II. Right. And they look back and they look out and say, there are more unfriendly troops on the Russian border now than at any time since what, May of 1941. That's a problem for them. And if...
If someone was flying drones from Tijuana to Los Angeles and blowing up buildings in Los Angeles with drones that they supplied, we would go out of our mind. We would absolutely pummel them. Absolutely. Okay. So is Trump has said that he thinks he can end that before January 20th. If elected, he can solve that. Do you believe that?
I think he has certainly more credibility as a negotiator and as a statesman than certainly the Biden-Harris team. Do you understand? I've looked for, since Reagan, and Reagan had it somewhat. Donald Trump absolutely has that cowboy twitchy eye. Yeah, exactly. I think it's good to go into a negotiation and not be exactly...
For your opponent to not be exactly sure what your position or what you're willing to do. To have them walk away from the table and go, I think that guy, he might just do that. You know what I mean? That's really good. They claim now that he's weak.
because he likes these dictates. No, I think he understands these dictators. I think he, I mean, he looks at it as a businessman. He wants to negotiate. Oh, I've seen you before. Right. Yeah. And, uh, because of the way he's negotiated before for even Trump tower. Oh, he's,
He's I'm going to pull the pin on this grenade and just leave it here on your table, if that's OK. And look, I think it's very important to have serious people in those roles to interact with your opponents. Yes. Who did the Biden administration send to negotiate with Putin before they invaded? They sent Wendy Sherman, the deputy or the assistant secretary of state.
Nice lady. She was a social worker before. She's a woman who testified in front of Congress, right? And she was like, she couldn't, you know, who would you think should replace the leadership of Hamas?
And she hadn't even thought that through. Yeah. Again, she's sending serious people to interact because countries don't have good relations. Yeah. People do, or people have to respect the people sitting in the opposite side of the table. I remember, and I remember I was told the story of after Reagan was elected 1980, you have a bunch of American hostages been held for over a year. Plus a failed rescue attempt, a, a true embarrassment of America, uh,
And Reagan sent Richard Allen to tell the mullahs what was going to happen. And Dick Allen goes with his very large hands and very large Scotch-Irish jaw. And he said, if the hostages are not released by the time the president makes it from the Capitol to the White House, we're going to turn you into the Stone Age.
message sent. And sure enough, the hostages were out and flying out by the time Reagan made it to the white house. So, uh, you don't believe this new history of this, that Carter did all of it. Reagan sent people in to slow it down until no way. Okay. I didn't either, but, um, no, the only thing I would say is,
Because Carter got his butt kicked. I mean, everywhere in Afghanistan. Not as bad as Biden, but yes. True. Yeah. Carter should be happy. The best 100th birthday present is that he's not the worst president in the last century. Carter got his butt kicked, but he at least signed a couple of covert action findings to actually go back at the Soviet Union, which weren't really acted upon until Reagan took office. But the whole thing about the hostages? No, that was the mullets were laughing at the Carter team.
Let's just finish up on a couple of things with war. Israel and Iran. I mean, this is so crazy. We had a peace deal. We had the Middle East coming together. Now we've driven the Soviet Union into the arms of China, Russia, and Iran.
Yeah, look, the strategic goal of the United States and our policy was to keep German industry away from combining with Russian resources. And now we've stumbled into pushing Russian resources into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, not an alliance that is in any way good for the West. What the Israelis have done, I think they obviously a massive screw up.
of their security services, that it's very dangerous to assume that what your enemy has done in the past is what they'll do in the future, and they won't adapt, and to be way too reliant on signals intelligence. But I think the Israelis definitely messed up in Gaza. They blundered into the fight that Hamas wanted to have. They had 300 miles of tunnels built where they're storing weapons, using them for maneuver, hostages.
And obviously the amount of civilian casualties and carnage that that kind of urban combat causes is bad. I tried to give them a better option. I brought the best of Texas to Israel, the very best horizontal drilling technology, literally the same guys that do the drilling for Exxon and for SpaceX to drill space.
from inside Israel into Gaza, flood all the tunnels, basically turn Gaza into a duck impoundment. Oh my gosh. So you can take away the arms caches, take away their maneuver and flush all the hostages to the surface because they don't want dead hostages either because they can't negotiate with dead hostages.
And they didn't do it. And I think they were blocked ultimately by the Pentagon, which is really too bad because the Gaza operation would have been finished months ago if they flooded everything and taken away that maneuver. Because I think the Pentagon is incapable of thinking unconventionally and they resort to the same playbook and dropping bombs in heavily civilian areas in Gaza is a bad look for the civilians. It's bad for the civilians and it's ultimately bad for the IDF.
So what did you think? Who can complain about water? No. I mean, that would have been brilliant. Oh, Glenn, Glenn, we had turbine-driven pumps, 12,000 horsepower, 60,000 gallons a minute. Oh my gosh. Yeah. That would have been epic. It really would have been epic. It would have been like diverting a biblical river into Gaza. Yeah, yeah. It also would have been a little bit more, and I don't know how you feel about this,
Like the beepers and the cell phones. Fantastic. Brilliant, right? Yeah, yeah. Mega compliments to them. They got that one right. How did they? I mean, that is quite an operation. I'm jealous that they did that because our CIA should be doing that, should be capable of that. For what we spend, 30 some billion dollars in the intelligence community, we should have operations like that once a quarter, at least. But when you have a hyper-
thick bureaucracy that is risk averse and no one wants to be the wildcatter to try difficult, dangerous things, you get continued failure. That I think that idea though, came from, you know, lifetimes of being the target in the world will wipe you out one way or another. Hey, why don't,
Why don't we think out of the box? You know, let's not play the game like everybody else. Cause our opponent doesn't play the game like everybody else. But that's what you pay an intelligence community to be the out of the box thinkers. So let's go to Iran. Iran, now an ally of China, Russia, looks like Saudi Arabia might be coming in. And we've been saying since maybe 2005 that,
They're just weeks away from having, I don't believe that anymore. I mean, when I know they have the, you know, the cascading centrifuges to be able to make it. I just don't know if they have it or they don't, but I won't, I can't believe they're just a couple of weeks from having it. I think because the, the mullahs are religious zealots that are kind of the, you know,
more dangerous type that would love to hasten the return of the promised one. With the hidden imam. With the hidden imam. I think there are those in Iran when they say. They're willing to clack it off if they've got it. They're willing to. Yeah, they are willing to. They don't care. It'll cause chaos, which will bring the promised one back. And so those guys scare me.
Who's actually in charge and what do you think they have and how much of a danger are they? Just first to the Middle East. And then I want to talk about our relationship that seems to be happening. Iran with a known nuke obviously changes the dynamic because they would use that as a sledgehammer over everyone's heads. After using one or just saying they have one? Or having a visible test somewhere. Okay.
And who knows? Maybe they bought one from the Pakistanis. Maybe they bought one from AQ Khan, right? The guy who gave the nuke deck to the Paks in the first place. So them with a nuke changes everything. Their surrogate war, which they've been using in Lebanon and Iraq and Yemen and other places, they're pretty good at that. And they cause a lot of pain and a lot of mayhem. Mm-hmm.
But their regime is extremely unpopular in Iran. And I think the Israelis missed the opportunity. Great work on the pagers and the walkie talkies. You know, two years ago, there was the women life freedom protests. We had millions of people, women and kids in the streets protesting because they didn't want to have to wear a nabaya or a job to listen to rock and roll music and drink Coca-Cola. Right.
And a missed opportunity to use that to really push out the regime because it is exceedingly unpopular. And really only the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Quds Force and the Basij are the only elements that they keep a forcible control with. If they had provided the means of the people to get rid of those in Iran under some kind of a secular or pluralistic government, it would be amazing. Amazing. They're good people. Yeah.
When you look at the central role that Persia has played in the Middle East and even the pluralism of Zoroastrianism and all those things long before Islam even arrived, because you have smart people, hardworking people, lots of natural resources, and 90 million of them, it would drag the Middle East in a very developed direction of freedom. But first of all,
I want to come back to helping the people on the streets. We continue to miss our opportunity on that, as does everybody else. But can Israel strike inside of Iran and not hurt the people, just hurt the regime? They've certainly degraded their nuclear scientist population.
Them trying to do deep strikes on the nuclear program, that's hard. That's a hard logistic thing to do with refueling and having aircraft heavy enough to carry a very deep penetration bomb. Because what did the Iranians do? They just went deeper and deeper and deeper under more and more concrete. So they could hit the oil infrastructure, which really hurts the people and their ability to survive. So I'd say, predictably, my prediction would be they smack any element of regime power.
whether it's the state security headquarters, the besieged, the IRGC, those kind of targets. So now let me switch here to us. Somebody in the DOD, Pentagon, leaked confidential files. Highly confidential. Yeah. Explain, first of all, what was released. And then I want to talk to you about...
We seem to have an administration and people whose loyalties seem to be with some of our biggest enemies. And I think some of those people are coming from the highest levels of this administration. I think it's exceedingly...
dangerous to have anyone of any mixed loyalty in any position of responsibility and authority and especially with a high security clearance The person in question was the chief of staff to the assistant secretary of defense for special operations So that's effectively you have a secretary of the army for the Army sector the Navy for the Navy the ASD Solic is the secretary for all special operations and so they would see
any of that kind of plans and intentions, targets. And supposedly that was leaked on a telegram channel to the Iranians. Really bad, exceedingly bad. And so... Stop. What does that do to our relationship with Israel? That explains exactly why they didn't give any foreknowledge of the Pager operation. Correct. Or of the strike that took out Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. Because...
when the United States has become that leaky and that unreliable of a partner, then that makes people hunker down and say, no one's coming, it's up to us. Yeah. And they got to solve it by themselves. Why hasn't, why haven't we firmly identified the leaker yet? Why have some of these others who have- Maybe those counterintelligence assets are chasing pissed off parents from school boards yet. That can't be it. Well-
What is our relationship in the administration with Iran? We had a pallet of cash. I don't know if you've ever seen the multiple pallets. Yeah. The, the money that we printed during second world war for the middle East and for Hawaii. Have you ever seen these? No, I haven't. So I have a couple of them in the museum next door. They have the seal of the treasury that,
One is brown, and I think the other one is purple. Okay. The purple was shipped over to Hawaii. The brown was shipped to the Middle East. And we flew all that cash in, but we marked it so if it ever fell into the wrong hands, we could say, if you see a purple seal, it's no longer good. You see a brown seal, it's no longer good. Interesting. We just flew pallets of cash into
to the biggest terrorist organization without marking it, without, we'd know how they were spending that cash if it had been marked. Sure. What is wrong with us? What is the, I fail to understand any way other than we're on the wrong side. It's a typical of a bloated government that has gotten used to a, not just used to,
Completely embracing a culture of no accountability whether it's a Secret Service that doesn't protect presidential candidates to a military that fails to deliver victories against goat herders in Afghanistan or against insurgents in Iraq or you know The first thing you learn when you join the Navy is the mission of the Navy power projection sea control choke point control
the u.s navy has been defeated in yemen we've allowed an iranian surrogate with uh iranian weapons to shut off one of the world's major shipping ways
completely in contravention to any kind of credibility of the US Navy. So we have setback after setback and no one, no one has been fired, not for Afghanistan, not for losing Iraq. And yes, we have lost Iraq because every significant decision in Iraq is made in Tehran. It's not made in Baghdad. So all that blood and treasure for nothing. If you're a veteran over the last 25 years, you have a right to be pissed off. Oh, yeah.
However, I have a new theory on this because I have wondered what the hell was that? What was loss of life for if they just pissed it away at the end? What was all that for? I know you were there, but I was there in Asheville as well. And that's all former service people. It's all veterans that were running those things. Yeah. I think they're good. If we hit real times of trouble, we have the men and women, the same people that show up.
We'll always show up. We'll always show up. Exactly. We'll always show up. So that is actually kind of good because we have these people all over the world now or all over the country now. With a lot of experience. Yeah. Who's our biggest foe? Chinese Communist Party. If you think about even their neighbors, right? Vietnam is very ornery about not being scenicized, not being absorbed into the borg of China
that Chinese Communist Party, right? When you imagine a society that has a social credit score where they score you on not making any politically offensive statements or public or private or digitally, and they prevent you from buying a train or bus ticket or from moving or from going to school or from banking,
Just off of that, many aspects of what the woke culture is trying to impose the United States. There's direct correlation. When you see even the, the echoes of the cultural revolution of the late sixties and seventies, see that in the woke culture here in America, that's our main enemy. And they, unlike the Soviet union have a significantly more powerful economy with a no kidding, very large manufacturing base.
They have had some setbacks in the last couple of years. They were truly scared of Donald Trump as a president because of the tariffs and the trade control that he actually pushed back. Because they were like the neighbor that kept moving their fence into your yard six inches a year. And Trump is the first one that came along ever and said, hey, get the hell back on your side of the line.
So they were truly concerned about that. But the, the now Xi has made himself basically a dictator for life because usually they would stay for 10 years and now he's in his fifth, third term and will be forever because he's removed any other obstacles to his rule.
And the anti-corruption campaign has really crushed the entrepreneur class. If you think of like a Jack Ma, who's a true unicorn, he was an English, like a high school English teacher, and he builds Alibaba, massive online portal doing everything, and then gone. He disappears and he resurfaces, what, a year later, lecturing in a kindergarten or elementary school in rural China, and they said he'd embraced supervision. How Orwellian is that?
And so they've done that to many of their very big entrepreneurs. And so their economy is hurting. So they have a very expensive military that they built a lot of industrial capability, drones and missiles and all the rest. And you have every general that surrounds Xi Jinping has bought that position as politically compromised as many of our flag officers are.
It's worse in China, much worse, because they bought those positions because it's a corruption thing. But all of them are saying, yeah, yeah, we can take Taiwan, put us in, coach, let us use our new shiny stuff. It's a very, very dangerous mix. If we happen to elect Kamala Harris and we continue with this weakness in policy, I cannot imagine that people like Xi Jinping and all of our enemies around the world aren't just
salivating for that opportunity. Yeah, look, they smell the weakness and you see the amount of setbacks that we're having everywhere. Like I said, in Yemen, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, throughout Africa, right? You get pushed out by jihadis out of bases in the Sahel. There's not one place the U.S. military can point you to say, yes, there was an insurgency and we finished it. We put that fire out. Not one. They keep saying, the left keeps saying that...
Putin, China, Iran, they all want Donald Trump to win. Can you find a way to that in a credible way? I cannot. Why would they want someone that would actually stand up to their increasing, I would say, bellicose activity running amok? I mean, look, the Russian economy is doing fine. The Russian ruble is doing fine. Yeah, we haven't hurt them. No.
i haven't heard them the overuse of sanctions uh and we delude ourselves and we're really in the end screwing our own economy yeah um which is you know that whole thing was world economic forum kind of 101 uh those sanctions i mean that's that's the you know when mcdonald's said we're no no no we're not going to shut down we have too much there and then all the banks and everything called them and two days later they're like we are on board we're shutting all that mcdonald's down
That tells you there's another game being played, and it's a public-private partnership with stakeholders that are, you're going to play ball or you're not going to have a ball. Yeah, but ultimately, military victories drive diplomatic breakthroughs. And the Russian bear is still hungry, and it's gnawing away. And in a war of attrition, size matters. And it's...
Ukraine is now at the point that they are losing more every day than they're able to recruit every day. It's a really bad inflection point. You look at all the threats on the horizon, and then I think of what Lincoln said about society that is built on freedom. If it would ever go down, it would have to be done by suicide. Donald Trump this week has been getting a lot of heat because he used the words, the enemy within.
And the left is trying to say there is no enemy within, which doesn't make sense if you listen to their own rhetoric. I guess we would be the enemy within. Is China a bigger threat than the enemy within? And how would you describe the enemy within if it exists?
Well, when you join the military, you swear to defend the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. So already someone had actually thought about domestic threats to the constitution. We should not discount covert action by the Chinese, by the
the Confucius Institutes, by the United Front Works Program, by the Thousand Talents Program. They're doing all that for collection and for influence, influence on universities, stealing technology,
dirty money, right? Do not discount the amount of dirty money that can flow into Democrat coffers from abroad. Look at how much, look at how much the Dems are outspending billion dollars, a billion dollars. How does that happen? Harris has rallies and they're busing in 60 to 80% of all the attendees. And you can trace that from the cell phone ad IDs of who's showing up from the same cities for all these different rallies. Come on. So,
Their ability to manipulate and to message, and you combine that with a really corrupted education system, which has become slovenly, pro-government, anti-freedom, all the talking points that would be more aligned with a CCP. Right, anti-family. Mao's little book. That's a problem. Now, I don't despair when I see all that.
Because I also read a lot of history and my favorite book is one called To Dare and to Conquer. And it is about all the way back in history of a few picked men and sometimes women that have unbelievable outcomes against insurmountable odds, saving the day, redirecting history.
And so I know a lot of those kind of people. And I know they have unbelievable bravery and innovation and all the rest. And they love this republic and they are not going to let it go down. Would you put Donald Trump in that category? Donald Trump is a magnificent presidential candidate. Not a perfect. We're electing a president, not a messiah. I know. Okay.
But the fact, because I've had more than my, I would say more than the average amount of shit thrown at me by the government. And he's had 100X. Never seen anything like it. No. With anyone in the world. Exactly. And the fact that he's that resilient and he just keeps going forward. I absolutely commend the guy for that kind of stiff neck. Now, the question is.
Does he get it when he gets in? I mean, he has seen the, the global States against a five eyes against him. Sure. If it, he definitely made some mistakes in personnel. Yes. The first go. And I never think, I don't think he really ever controlled his national security apparatus. No. And if he has not learned his lesson at this point, then it's impossible for him to learn that lesson. So I think, I think he will hopefully do that. Cause look,
All these things are reformable when you have minority tyranny of crazies dragging us in the weird direction. I think most of America is actually quite normal. They know which bathroom to use. They want the normal things that actually made America successful and wealthy and free in the process, regardless of what country they came from.
I think that's why Biden won, because they sold him as he's not crazy. He's just he's he's a Democrat. He's not anti-American. We're going to return to normalcy. Yeah. And they didn't veered hard left. Right. And getting look, a successful Trump presidency would be that the five counties around Washington, D.C., have a lower real estate value by the time it's done.
I told Donald Trump, I said, please, you're a real estate guy. Say the ones that really have to worry are the people in the Beltway area because they should sell their houses now because they're going to be worthless soon. You know, Glenn, 70% of the federal government is still doing remote work.
This nonsense carryover from COVID. So you have 70% of these bureaucrats in Washington. Not showing up. Not even showing up for work.
Simple, baby. Yeah. Gone. I want to bring your partner in for something, and I have to state this for a podcast. Eric and his partner have created Unplugged, which is a company that is a sponsor of this program. But I think I was one of the first people to buy one, wasn't I? Yep. And they are fabulous, fabulous phones that provide security and security
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Ryan Patterson. How are you? Good, Glenn. Thanks for having us. Yeah. So I want to piggyback now before we fully go into this. I want to piggyback on what China is doing. And you said, you know, we're kind of going in that direction. I think that's actually the goal for the people in this country.
the enemy within is to mine us for everything. And if the state is involved, it becomes extraordinarily dangerous because I think right now, and you probably would know, I think if I were in the CIA and I had access to Google, which I imagine they do, I could say, I need 25 people in Texas who are unstable and,
really don't like Donald Trump, have a gun, good shot, whatever I needed, and develop a profile and say, give me a list of those people. I could probably have that in a couple of minutes. And then I could say, now let's turn them into killers. Manchurian stuff, but you don't need to bring them to Russia. They won't even know that they've been turned into
You know, we're kind of in this place where soon we'll free will could be a thing of the past where you don't know if you made the decision or you were turned. Or at least nudged in one direction. Yes. Right. Yeah. This whole this whole problem. Well, after 9-11, the advertising companies, which were collecting a lot of data to sell advertising, started looking for.
needles in a stack of needles to try to find other people of the same profile of the 19 that crashed into the world trade center. And that grew to a, it started an insatiable appetite of government for data. Yeah. And then when you combine that with smartphones, which actively collect off of every app sitting on the phone to, um,
To export that user data, it's where we are today. It's really created an industry called surveillance capitalism. Yeah, and it's terrifying because they know it. They know you better than you know yourself. Your phone knows what you're going to do before it even clicks in your brain. Your phone knows what you're about to click. It'll pause a thing in the right place, but your phone is anticipating what you're going to do before it even registers in your head.
Five years ago, I was walking down the street in Los Angeles and we were talking as a group. We're walking down the street and I don't know how this came up, but I said, who was the king of Sweden back in like 43 or 39? Who was that? And we were going back and forth and guy takes his phone out and he goes to Google and he put W and it came up. Who was the king of Sweden in 1938 or whatever?
He just stood around going... Because the microphone's listening. Oh my gosh, that is terrifying. And all the companies deny that it's listening. Right. But it's like, it has just come out. Like there was an article a few months ago and somebody was selling. Like, we can provide you data to what the conversations are happening in rooms that you're not in. And it was up for about a week. Your phone sitting on your nightstand listening to pillow talk with your spouse. I know. Whoa. I know. I think, honestly...
I've never been a fan of the Third Amendment of the Bill of Rights. I'm like, okay, we're not going to quarter soldiers. They're quartering soldiers in our homes through this. The point of that was the king can't send somebody into the home to go through your papers, go through your information, listen to your conversations to try to find something on you. That's what this is. And it's worse than that because just a few months ago, Congress passed the FISA bill
It wasn't just a reauthorization. It was a massive expansion, right? FISA is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But now, big Washington expanded that so that any of this commercial data, which belongs to the apps or the other phones, the other handset guys, any federal agent can demand that information on Glenn Beck with no warrant and not even with probable cause.
So let's them do a full digital fishing expedition on a mere whim. That is worse than Orwell. It's worse than George Orwell can even imagine. I remember 2003, somebody came into my office and, you know, this is I was against. I was for FISA until like for a week. And then I'm like, wait, I think this is a real, real problem.
And I remember somebody coming in and saying, look at the technology that we have. In a good way, they were saying, look how we can find terrorists. And they had they if they knew these people are terrorists in this house, they also knew all of their contacts and where their contacts and allies lived.
If their power usage went down, it automatically checked for their friends to see if the power usage or the water usage had gone up. It also checked trains, airplanes, every way of traveling to see where that person went. That's like 2003 or four. It was. Yeah. I worked for an agency called DARPA. Um,
a couple of times and i was there in 2003 to 2006 and i remember some of the programs there and look i was a i was a uniform wearing marine at the time we were still reeling from 9 11. um and i thought yeah this this makes a lot of sense there are all these novel data sources and if you put enough data sources together you can find some real insight the issue has become we don't have to put them together anymore like we carry them with us all the time everywhere we go every movement that we make
And it's not just Apple and Google, right? Every application on your phone, they're collecting data on you. The applications have trackers built into them. Every advertisement that is delivered to your computer, phone, tablet has trackers in it and they track everything, screen size. Because the Google and Apple phone are built to interact with those apps to harvest and extract that data to know where you go, what you buy, who you call, what you browse, right?
That's why we did the unplugged phone because it's the antithesis of that because our operate, it's our hardware, our operating system, which prevents those apps from putting their hooks in and exporting any of that data. It's the only antidote to that kind of pervasive big brother, big government, big tech surveillance. Yeah. So this is, this is for public private partnerships. You're worried about private companies, right?
getting your information and that information going to either them in the way they want to use it or colluding with the government. But the government could hack into pretty much anything, can't they? They're pretty strong. There's lots of pathways in. Says the guy from DARPA. So the thing about this is the government does have to collude with those.
With Apple or Google. They can just get it. Yeah, this is now, right, all of this infrastructure was put in order to sell advertisements, more targeted, better advertisements to get a better click-through rate of what you do. Like, I want to deliver the ad on your phone, Glenn, that I know you'll click in action. And so that's what all of this data collection has been about. It's about selling advertisements. And so now all of that data is sitting out there in about five or six different brokers for purchase. And we know from- Like, not much. Like a thousand bucks on a credit card. A thousand dollars.
You can, I mean the things that you can, the things you can do, like we, I did it on my own company headquarters and we wanted to see like how precise can we get? And we had a small office in a rural town in Virginia. It was in a historic home. We drew a little box around it and we said, collect all the advertising IDs that come in and out of this office more than three times in one week. And we're like, yeah, those are probably the employees. Like our customers don't come by all that often. And then we said, okay, let's see where those phones have been for the last 90 days.
Now let's follow those advertising IDs for the next 90 days. And you could find me, my VP, my CTO, everybody in the company. You could figure out exactly who we were if you knew one other piece of information about us. So I saw something, I think it was from you guys, that you were tracking some corporate people and
Somebody you were tracking used to pick up their grandkids from school. Is this you guys? Grandkids from school and then take them to school occasionally. And you could see to the minute where they were every day. And if you have that information. Looking back five years. Looking back. And so you know right where the children. Down to even telling which side of the bed in the house they sleep on. That's crazy. That phone, the unplugged phone prevents that. Yeah.
So make the case, let's start on a couple of things. My daughter, I said to my wife, I want all of you to carry an up phone. And they're like, dad, the Apple phone is the cool phone to have. And I'm like, I said to my daughter, this is the most dangerous. Somebody who knows you and who you are, and she's a beautiful girl.
They will know your pattern of where you're driving, where you're stopping, where you're getting out of your car, all of that stuff. This is like, this is like the biggest anti-kidnapping. Look, the average kid by the time they reached the age of 13 has had 72 million data points collected on them by big tech, by their own use of a phone and even their parents posting pictures, school posting pictures, whatever.
The unplugged phone lets you be in the world, but not of the world. So you can still communicate, you can still navigate, you can still bank and book airplane tickets and check sports scores.
But you control the data and it is not being you're not a sieve being exported and and really exploited Yeah, and it's important I think also for for your listeners to realize that there's not one tool that's gonna solve all of these. Yeah, yeah, right You know, there's there's this guy named Paul or feel he was hired by Meta to come in and do digital protection and on on their platforms and he posted a thing or was at a talk and talked about the fact that
Instagram doesn't make minors friends groups private at all. And the Nigerian gangs that are sexploiting our teenagers will go in, create a female avatar, send a sexy picture to a teenage boy. Teenage boys will do what teenage boys do. They immediately capture all their friends group and start extorting them. And dozens of teenagers have killed themselves in the last six months. And Paul brought that out.
at a conference and then the next day Meta rescinded his offer and that young man is on a tear right now um and there's a couple other things wow they didn't want to fix it they fired him they did Francis Haugen's uh the the Facebook whistleblower same thing like she sat in that community like in the team leading the team for protection and said they're not interested they're not interested in protecting our kids why
Ad revenue. Ad revenue. Completely soulless. Feels that way. Yeah, it does. It does. Make the case to a mom. My wife...
man, she is on her phone all the time. And she says to me, you know how many things, because she's like the CEO of our family. The house, yeah. Yeah, there is like, I couldn't do what I do without her. And she's like, do you know how many things I'm managing? I'm constantly, people need to get in touch. And I said, you know, we used to not have to do that. And she just gives me a dirty look. Tell me. I travel internationally in Europe.
every time zone you can imagine, and I am solely on unplugged. So it works. Because there's no... I haven't run into a single hitch where...
I'm like, ah, I got this phone. It's not like that. It's just not. There are a few. And I wrote an article talking about when I left the government, I was a BlackBerry user and a Windows machine guy. And everybody in the tech sector that I worked in was an Apple user. And I'm like, oh, I've got to be the cool guy now. And I went to Apple. And it was the most painful transition. I remember giving back my first iPhone. I was like, I can't use it. Got to BlackBerry again.
But it took about three months and I got there. And then I was actually called out by a friend of mine who was out at dinner, knew I'm the CEO of this company. And I was still carrying two phones. And he was like, come on. And I went home that day, ripped the SIM card out of my iPhone, made my unplugged phone. Why did you carry two?
Which is the things probably your wife deals with. Like all of my pictures from years and years and years on my iPhone. Now we've got to figure it out. Yeah. We can make the transition much easier for contacts and pictures and all the rest. And all the data. So it's good. I'm like Eric. I've only been on it for the last six months. I also travel around the world and I haven't lost contact with anybody. And I still manage a couple of companies. For those who don't believe that their data, you know,
This is the thing with my wife. She's like, I know you're a target, but I'm just a regular person. I'm like, well, first of all, you're married to me. So if I'm a target, you're a target. But I have so many friends that when I first came out and said...
What do you have Alexa in your house for? Yeah. What are you doing? What are you doing? They just blow it off. I don't have anything to hide. Yeah. Or they got everything anyway. Yeah. Can you make an argument? It's like a boiled frog. I will not be boiled. I'll give one very specific example. Identity theft. So knowing where you've been, knowing where you go, knowing who you're with,
would give a criminal organization the ability to voice verify into your bank account. Happened to me as a former Marine and government employee. My SF-86, the document that we put together to get a clearance, was hacked by the Chinese out of the database of the government who had protected our data. And they had everything. Everywhere I've lived, my brothers, and they voice verified in. And in one day, $40,000 left one of my accounts.
and I couldn't get the bank to shut it down. They're like, there might be somebody else on the account, or somebody else just voice verified in with the correct information. And I said, I'm telling you, shut the account down. And so the amount of data, again, this is commercial data that anybody with a credit card can buy, and if you don't think criminals have thought about how to leverage it for that purpose, you're wrong. Not to mention...
Highly politicized federal agents run amok right because if you if you give a jackass a gun a badge you get a bigger jackass and and that's my concern about
The FISA expansion is the amount of data that is collected in the commercial sphere that is now available to any government agent to go on a fishing expedition because you went to a school board meeting, because you went to a political rally, because you went to hear a... Buy a gun. Buy a gun. Went to a gun show because you went and heard a controversial sermon. And with all of the data points they have, and you don't have it, they can...
pretty much, I think, make a, maybe not a winnable case if it's on the facts, but they can make somebody look really guilty. Can they not? Yeah, they can. And they use this data to get the probable cause to then unleash the rest of the government, the people that can hack, the people that can get a search warrant, the people that can enter your home.
So this is commercial data that's purchasable, and they use it. There's article after article where the government- And they don't even have to purchase it anymore. Now they can just demand it. Right, right. They can demand it to do their own fishing expedition on a whim. It's the antithesis of the Constitution-
And this phone resulted from a rage call between myself and a friend after the 2020 election, seeing they were canceling certain voices and platforms and all the rest. And that's why we wanted our device with our own hardware, our own store. I mean, we even have a dating app for people that are unvaccinated, which was thrown off the other guy's stores just because we believe in freedom.
And this would have prevented or not the government just going to the phone companies and say, tell me everybody who was here. On January 6th? Yeah. Prevented it. No ad ID. Yeah, the ad IDs are what they used. Right. So, you know, the government can still go to AT&T and look at triangulation, but it's not the precision. I mean, if you're a murderer. It's not the precision that the ad IDs give. Like Eric said, what side of the house you're on? Which side of the house am I currently on?
Am I in my office? Am I in my kitchen? Why do they need to know that? I don't know that they need to, but they can. The advertisers do to figure out how to push you. Car ads, clothing ads, movie, whatever it is they're pushing. But it is now the commercial industry give an inch and government's taking it to a mile of extremists. I think when people look at the technology that we have right now, they only see the upside.
They just fail to believe that the government would do nefarious things, which I don't understand anymore. I mean, I was naive once, but I'm not stupid. And look, this goes beyond whoever you're voting for in November.
Right, so I first learned about this danger and it was from my liberal friends in San Francisco in the tech space after the Patriot Act came out. They were like, oh boy, like this is a slippery slope. We should be really careful. And that's what FISA is. And look, you know, there are conservative groups and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is not a conservative group out of San Francisco saying this FISA thing is horrible for everybody. Because again,
we've got biden harris now might be trump there are people that are going to disagree with that and then all of a sudden like if we start allowing our government whichever party to criminalize things that they can't see but now they can because of this data it's really scary if you want to think about that whiplash that's going to go every time to a free society i have to tell you i have to tell you that uh my researchers came to me yesterday and they said
Glenn, we can't find anything on Ryan. We can't find anything on Ryan. And I said, well, somebody, I mean, everybody has a footprint and they're like, not an easy one. Not, not, not. I mean, I think it's you and that kid from Pennsylvania that have no footprint. Yours is reduced, but he had none. And so I'm just, I'm wondering why,
There's some purposefulness in that, for sure. I mean, there's also people that have written things about me that are out there. But it's interesting because you find everything, me find everything. I can find anything about anybody. You know this, you know this.
But you have, because you were in Silicon Valley and you saw all of this stuff coming early, you have already done the things to protect yourself to where your footprint is very low. There's a really funny story when my kids were still in high school and like the Google Maps Street View came out. And like you could dive in and like everybody was at school and they were on their computer diving in and
my daughter went in and so there's a way you can go in and like tell Google maps, this is my house. You may not show it. And it puts like this big green curtain in front of your house. And cause I had seen it, I had seen the street view and there was a picture of my son on a trampoline. He was upside down just on a flip. You can see my dad's car in the driveway. And I was like, Oh no, we were doing some work in counter human trafficking. My company was, my company was format formed around my kitchen table and
And so my daughter's scrolling through and like, oh, she's like, put my address in. And it comes up and it's this big green cloud. And she goes, dad. So is it true? I heard this from Tucker in the hallway. I was at one of his events and we were talking and he said, you know, you know, right? No, not really. I mean, we met. I said to him the other day, you know, you said to him, what are you doing this weekend? And he had something, you know, normal. And he said, what are you doing? And I said,
Do you know this? He said, oh, I just spent the day. We took a helicopter up and jumped out of the helicopter. Is it not you? No, that's not me. Freely. That would have been me. That was you? Unbelievable. I've only jumped out of a perfectly good airplane once. I don't care who did it. That's nuts. That's nuts. You just did that for fun some Saturday.
With one of your kids? Yeah. Yeah. Hanging out with my son. Yeah. Yeah. That's the way my son and I hang out. Not. Not ever. Thank you guys so much for what you do. Before we leave, I want to ask you both about Elon Musk. God bless Elon Musk. Right? What a genius. Right? What a genius.
My great regret is that I didn't meet him in the early 2000s when he was starting because BW was cash flowing then. Imagine if I was Elon Musk business partner. What a dangerous combo that would have been. Oh my gosh. I mean, and I think he... I have so much respect for pushing through the bureaucracy and just getting it done. And he bets on himself. You know, he was down to his last...
tranches of millions, and he puts half on Tesla, half on SpaceX. He's got enough money to do three rocket shots out of Johnson Atoll. The first two blow up. The third one nails it. Good on him. And, you know, I think with this last catch of the big booster rocket just from 10 days ago. Hang on. Can you just...
Tell people who, you know, maybe grew or been growing up now, they're like, ah, we can do anything. How difficult that is to do. That's like impossible. I think NASA finally gave him the permission thinking it was going to blow up.
Really? The politics of it. Yeah. And the fact that they stuck the landing, just magnificent. And the other thing I love about him is, you know, Eric talked about failing. Like, the man is not afraid to fail. I know. He's really not afraid to fail. Well, he shouldn't be. Exactly. I mean, he is as close to Nikolai Tesla. I hate Edison. Hate him. He was a bad guy. But Nikolai Tesla was truly a genius and was very much like Elon Musk, where he
He just was doing it because he thought of it and like, why can't we do that? I don't think we've seen anybody in that category in a hundred years. Have you? No. Nope. And what is it? And you know what? That level of talent can only flourish in America because we still have enough irreverence for authority to
To find a way through. He couldn't do that. No. In the European Union. No. He couldn't do it in Africa or Asia because of the supply chain, but he can do it in America. Well, they're doing their best to stop him. They are. They're trying now, for sure. There's no reason somebody should have that much money, should be that successful. That's so dangerous. That is...
They jail him. They kill him. They take his companies down for whatever political reason. That is, to me, that represents the end of America. We talked about the Chinese Communist Party smashing their entrepreneur class. Yes. Keeping control because the party must be in control. That's exactly what the Democrat Party wants to do. Wow. A bunch of people are asking Elon to put together a secure phone. Like people are realizing it and we're like...
We got that. We got you. We have not spent a lot of money doing this. It works. It's capable. It's flowing out into the public. It's, it's bring it. It's great. Yeah. It's great. We started delivering, we got 10,000 phones in May and we're pretty much sold out of that. And we got another 10,000 arriving in two weeks. Good. Just in time for Christmas. Good. Unplugged.com.
I'm going to have to charge you now. Slash blend. All right. Thanks guys. Appreciate it. God bless you. Cheers. Thank you. Stream and subscribe to more blaze media content at the blaze.com slash podcasts.