Part Two: Blackwater's Erik Prince Wrote A Book About How Much He Sucks

a testament to that, among other things. It's a testament to being born with hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah, testament to all of that stuff. Well, what have you been up to in the last six months? Last six months? I don't really care. What's your guess as to what

Eric Prince has been getting up to. I'm going to if I'm a bet gambling man and I like to gamble, I'll go with a safe bet and I'm just gonna say, crimes against humanity, just in general, war crimes, yes, I mean, okay, well absolutely has he has been a part of some more crimes that have been committed recently, which we'll talk about later. But more interestingly, I guess I should be more pointed. Do you want to guess as to what

Erik Prince has bought since you and I talked? Okay, so last time he tried to make that his homemade fucking fighters yet Yeah, and that went did not work out well. Uh so what's easier? Probably boats? I mean, I knowing how Betsy Devas loves her yachts, it only makes sense that brother Eric is gonna be like, let

me turn this ship up. Just within the last few weeks he purchased or we'll get into what he did later, but he basically purchased quote, three high speed catamarans armed with electronically aimed and fired machine guns and cannon, three trimarans armed with heavy machine guns and cannon, and drones which could be armed. They are equipped with military grade surveillance radars and high speed, semi rigid inflatable boats that can be used to launch commandos and boarding parties from

the larger ships. Wow, what was the second kind of boat you said? Trimaran. It's just it's a boat of some sort and it has a lot of guns on it. Right, I don't know much about boats, but he bought two different kinds of boats with a shiploaded guns on them. Can you show me a picture of a catamaran and a trimaran, Sophie, perfect, just so I can wrap my head around, because what's it Isn't a catamar ran? Like when I think of a cataman, I don't think of

like a warfaring boat. I assume there are arms. I mean I think by a basic broader definition, it's like a type of boat and they just armored this one and put some guns on it. Yeah, yeah, Eric, Yeah, so Eric Prince has a okay, so it is the thing with like the three okay, because yeah, the catamaran is like the two piece thing where you see people. It's like we're in Santrope and I'm laying on this net in between. It's the boat equivalent of those spaceships

in Cloud City and thanks. Yeah. Yeah, it's like that, right, I think, Uh, which is so funny, Like it's still very like waspy, like old money, like a catamaran except for war. Yeah. Well he in a little bit of defense to Eric. He didn't he didn't just go buying armed catama and he bought the navy of Mozambique uh yeah, yeah great rates over there. Well, yes, because their their economy collapsed recently because their entire country got taken in

by a giant con scam thing. Basically, they wanted to modernize their tuna harvesting fleet and needed like a loan for eight hundred million dollars right, which they got in which the people of Mozambique were like, yeah, sure, modernize

the tuna harvesting fleet, will all make more money. But the government, working with shadowy foreign interests, secretly took out an extra one point two billion dollars in loans that they used to buy a navy, and they lied about it and so an extra one So the first thing is we need eight hundred million for the tuna. They're like, you know, it's a it's a sea bound nation. But you buy then you secretly borrow even more than what

you buy a navy. What the fuck? Okay, So they bought this navy secretly and then and lied about it. And but once they bought it, they'd spent all of their money, so they didn't have enough money to man the navy, which they were planning to. They were planning to leave the navy to a private corporation that would then basically be a for profit navy based in Mozambique. So the shipping Airbnb their fucking that was the plan. Yeah, just like getting the black on this thing. But they

just didn't. They couldn't actually run the navy, and the whole venture sort of collapsed and somehow Eric Prince wound up in control of it. Now it's weird because the first source I found that from was a website that's new to me called Spiked News, which builds itself as an outli for stories that have been buried or crushed by the daily median noise. So I was a little

bit like, is this some fake news bullshit? So I looked around and I was able to find other sources on the article that were a little bit less direct than Spiked had been, but said basically the same thing. I'm going a quote from this Bloomberg article called Eric Prince to partner with Mozambiques hidden debt companies, which that

sounds above board hidden debt companies, isn't. One of those are the companies that helped members of the government of Mozambique take on more loans in the count it could afford just then bankrupted the nation. Yeah, hidden debt company will always sound terrible to make this. Yeah, and these

are the people Eric is working with. So Blackwater Security founder Eric Prince will partner with at least one of the state owned Mozambican companies at the center of a hidden loan scandal that resulted in the country defaulting on its death this year. Prince, chairman of the Hong Kong based Frontier Services Group, is forming a joint venture with the Tuna Fishing Company and Mattam and may extend this

to assisting the Southeast African nation with maritime security. I wonder if Eric Prince has a navy now it sounds like sounds like renting as a navy now, Yeah, at least renting and exactly He's like, I don't want to go that. I'm not doing that. Well, I'm I'm renting, I'm leasing a navy and he's he's doing some counter terrorism stuff for the country. So it sounds like he has found a country whatever that Yeah, he's he's doing something shady and Mozambian as a navy. So that's good,

that's really nice. Yeah. Um, anyway, we're all caught up. Other than the buttfuck he bought it. It's like we bought a Sue but with war machine. I know he bought a catamaran, a trim Ran with no. Six of them, and plus drones, blessed little skiffs, so you can you can just have boarding camards because Eric print should have more commandos. It worked well. The last the bodies part he can figure out. It's the getting around the international

laws that prohibit private people from owning military hardware. He's a master. Yeah, he's he's really is. He's like, he's focused. He's focused. If anything, this is a man who said I will have some kind of my own military army. I want my own military's right, And he's got he's got his, he's got his ground gooms. He's got the ground game worked out. Now he wanted. He couldn't couldn't figure out the skies. Now take him to the sea. Yep, yep. So he's he's in the sea. Yeah, and that's uh,

that's where Prince is now. So now that we're all caught up, I would like to talk to you about the book that I just read this week. It's called Civilian Warriors, The Inside Story of Blackwater and the unsung

heroes of the War on Terror. First of all, based on everything we're talking about last time to cause some of these people, well, the people who saw their heroics couldn't sing because they were too busy screaming, right because Blackwater was firing grenades into a crowd, and they're like, I'm sorry, man, I haven't I haven't let this thing off all day. So obviously the author of that book

is Eric Prince, um well, and some other guy. Clearly Eric Prince outlined it and some other dude filled out the writing, right, whoever the ghostwriters, he's credited as the author. It's exactly the kind of self serving autobiography you would expect from a billionaire whose companies companies have been tied to more war crimes than several s S battalions. Um So, let's just dive into the introduction. This gives Eric a chance to lay out his beliefs on the War on

Terror in brief. So, yeah, Western governments continue to struggle to find real solutions to these crises. They have spent trillions of dollars during that Cold War preparing the mightiest of hammers. But when you have a magnificent hammer, everything looks like a nail. So this is the problem. He's accurately identified the problem the US military has with counterinsurgence, right, because we do have a really great hammer, and we're not dealing with nail problems. You get a penis implant

and you're like, how do I not funk with this? Yeah, but then you wind up in the wall of penis, hall of penises, and so your penis is just useless. Yeah, Yes, that's the situation. That's a fine analogy to the current

military strategy and everything is phallic. Yeah, it's it's funny to me that he's he's diagnosing the shortcoming and attributing it to the U. S. Military that their problem is that they have a great hammer and so everything looks like a nail, because all Eric has ever done in his entire life is build hammers um But he he seems to think that what his people do is different and more suited to the war on Terror than what the U. S. Military does because they don't have rules.

The hammer of traditional forces lacks the nimbleness and fiscal efficiency either small active duty units are contracted special forces. Even more troubling, traditional forces can inflame the situation instead of pacifying it, instead of pacifying, instead of pacifying it. What colorful language that, Yeah, and I love it because if there's one thing Blackwater absolutely has done everywhere it's operated,

it's inflamed the situation, pified it. Well, that's right, I mean, I would say Army Colonel Peter Mansoor said this about Blackwater. If they push traffic off the roads, or if they shoot up a car that looks suspicious, they may be operating within their contract, but it is to the detriment of the mission, which is to bring people over to

our side. Uh. There's also another quote I found in a textbook called US Domestic and International Regimes of Security by Army Colonel Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters, who said arm contractors do harm counterinsurgency efforts. Just ask the troops in Iraq. So there's a lot of military people who have served alongside Blackwater where like these guys don't help the effort in anyway. It's just like that nepotism, Like suddenly your

boss is like nephews shows up to work. It's fucking useless, but it's like the boss had extra money, so it's like, yeah, just give it to this guy. Well, it's a mix of like the boss had extra money, but also like, boy, we only have half as many troops as we need to do the job. And these guys don't count as humans legally, like we don't have to report that they

exist or died. It's a whole mess. Ah. So Eric has a little bit of a chip on his shoulder about the fact that, you know, he had to sell his company Blackwater and had to be renamed, and you know there were all those murders sakers, and yeah, here's how he sums that all up. After failing in their multi year effort to win hearts and minds in Iraq, the bureaucrats decided a company that had repeatedly answered this government's please for help was suddenly more valuable as a scapegoat.

I was strung up so the politicians could feign indignation and pretend my men hadn't done exactly what they paid us handsomely to do. Oh what a worldview. I love it, because like the major incident that led to him lose in Blackwater was a bunch of his guys firing into a crowd and it was like a protest, right, No, it was just a traffic circle. One of them panicked and they just right and there was like no explanation and there weren't really any weapons, no one coming fire

right soever. No, they just massacred fourteen people. And he's like, Ah, that's the politicians trying to make me look bad. Maybe if your people hadn't shot for And then there was that guy who drunkenly shot the vice president of Iraq Security Guard and thean Zone. There's a lot of stuff. Those guys who crashed an armored vehicle because they were drunk,

it's just the party crew black Water. Those do sound like some fun parties, I mean in the scariest way where you're like, I mean, these guys know what they're doing with their guns, but I feel like it's going to get weird suddenly. Yeah, they don't sound fun to drink with getting drunk and having an armored vehicle to tool around with. It sounds like, but not in like an environment where there's the possibility that they would have to be like have some kind of like situation nature

around you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, Uh, if you're a company that makes armored vehicles were open for sponsorships, I would love to just get drunk in your bearcat and write it right into a fucking wall and show how strong it is, how sturdy that armor is. Yeah. Uh So Prince's book is surprisingly anti military. Uh He's very careful about it because obviously he's a conservative dude, and

you can't say the military is not heroic. But he he's picked specific officers who have said bad things about his soldiers and tries to discredit them. Um. And he regularly talks about how often the US military screws up and jobs that Blackwater is also present at and usually

will like point out how much better the blackwater contractors. Right. Like, there's a picture in his book, like I guess at some point John Kerry and some other congressmen were visiting Afghanistan and their helicopter was like grounded on like a fucking mountain peak or some ship. The picture looks like they're on a mountain peak and they they got head to get rescued, and the team that came in and got them was blackwater stuff. And Eric Prince was like,

but he thanked US soldiers and not blackwater contractors. It's like, well, he was probably thanking the U S soldiers who guarded him up on the top of that mountain for hours. Not not the toe truck guys. Whatever anyway, uh so, Yeah, Prince's book is surprisingly uh anti military. He also cites the failure in rebuilding Afghanistan and sort of ignores the fact that that effort to rebuild Afghanistan was mainly carried out by private companies. Yeah, well again, yes, uh so.

Here's a quote from his his book on Afghanistan that I think is is relevant considering some of his more recent plans for Afghanistan. Witness the totally failed economic development of the Afghan economy. After nearly thirteen years of US special forces on the ground, the AID community spent billions and dead in boondoggles while ignoring the mineral and energy sectors that could make Afghanistan an independent nation instead of a welfare case. Oh wow, what do you think about that?

I mean, it sounds like there was some stuff to pillage. Whoa you are right on? That sounded like he's like, guys, there's just fucking money in There's there's a lot of money in the ground in Afghanistan. It would be really great if there was like some sort of outside document that we could look at that would give us a better idea of what Eric really meant when he started

bringing up Afghanistan's mineral and energy wealth. Oh hey, it turns out it turns out he's been shopping his plan to privatize the war in Afghanistan around d C and BuzzFeed actually got a copy of the power point presentation that Eric's using to try and sell his privatize the war in Afghanistan plan, which is doing quite well, isn't it?

Probably probably what I hear in the news constantly. It's like that's always on the horizon and always being you know, promoted at least from the Trump And let's talk about that. His his slide show is titled an Exit Strategy for Afghanistan, a test case for the Strategic Economy of Force. Why don't just call it an exit plan for Afghanistan? Just give it to me. Well, there's a reason that he made sure the word economy was in there, right, Yeah,

And we're about to get into that. So it turns out there's a whole slide on this slide show about the rare earth minerals that are present in the Helmand Province. And Eric makes a big point of the fact that there's an estimated one trillion dollars in rare earth minerals in the ground, and just this one province of Afghanistan. Wasn't there a lot of fighting in Oh? You bet it? Like I feel like that's the one province you would

was like repeatedly referred to. I mean, it's possible at least that one one portion of there's debate between like what the U. S Military says is controlled in Afghanistan and what the Taliban controls and there's debate between that, but they probably there's a good chance they control something like the country right now. Um So anyway, Yeah, that

map looks pretty looks pretty juicy. It's interesting that he's really specifying how many rare earth minerals are inside Helman Province in this I wonder what he intends to do these minerals well. In the slide show, he states that he states that under his plan, the military effort in Afghanistan will be quote strategic mineral resource extraction funded. Prince believed that this will break the quote negative security economic

cycle of the war in Afghanistan. So so we'll dig up them where earth mindals and self fund while we just destroy the earth there. Yeah, so Eric Prince essentially wants to make Afghanistan, take Afghanistan from an expensive peacekeeping operation by the United States to a profitable, rare earth mineral selling corporate endeavor. Uh, there's no talk or hint about how this might make life better for African people. He's doing like rich war criminal, poor war criminal, where

it's like it's about passive income guys. Yeah, a Prince company spokesperson said to BuzzFeed when they asked them about this quote. What is laid out in the slides as a model of an affordable way for the US to stabilize a failed state where we are presently wasting American youth in tens of billions of dollars annually. So they're basically climbing onto the fact that pretty much everyone is like, yeah, it's dumb that we're still in Afghanistan. Super we're not.

And he's like the sane people like, it's done that we're in Afghanistan. We should leave. He's saying, it's done

that we're in Afghanistan. You should give it to me so that I can mine it, right exactly, That's all I'm interested in, because like, there is one I can see, like on the face of it, right because since the Iraq War in Afghanistan, like that has just been a money pit that has just been led to the accelerated decline of the American empire, right, Like it's sort of these late what Afghanistan does, baby, but it's like it, but it follows that trend of like all historical empires,

like they get into these like glamour wars that end up bankrupting the country or whatever. More often than not, the war is in Afghanistan. Yeah, and then so on one party to go. Yeah, well it is kind of a money pit, and that's all money that could have been spent in the US on thinking like education, but really you some bridges. Yeah right, but you know, let him mind it. He's in mining. He can find a guy. Yeah, he can find a guy has a fucking navy, so mine.

I'm pretty sure he can handle some mind if he can make the sea his mistress. Uh so yeah. Um. Interestingly enough, Eric Prince's stated inspiration for his fucking sweet idea seems to be the East India t Company. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Wall Street Journal let him write an opinion article in May of two thousand seventeen. The article was titled the MacArthur Model for Afghanistan. But further into the article he cites our favorite corporation, which, if you haven't listened yet,

we did an episode on the East India Company. They conquered India in the seventeen hundreds and star of twenty or thirty million people to death through negligence. Uh yeah, and they also invaded Afghanistan, which is why they went bankrupt. Uh In interesting stuff anyway, here's Eric an East India Company approach would use cheaper private solutions to fill the gaps that plague the Afghan security forces, including reliable logistics and aviation support. So bold bold of Eric Prince to

directly cite a company that was destroyed conquering Afghanistan, right right, right? Yeah, well you know, maybe maybe it'll be different this Maybe it'll be different this time. Okay, run example, like the Soviet Is there something about Afghanistan that makes powerful rich white men with armies stupid? Like? Is there like telling a magical effect that it has? I don't, I don't know because it keeps happening. Did they all know? Did

the Soviets know the resources that were there back then. Yeah, but that's not even why they Yeah, but that wasn't the motivation to support a government that was socialists. So they lost money there. We lost money there. The British Empire fought three or four wars there and let itself dry there. Like nobody wins in Afghanistan. Afghanistan might just be like where God lives, you know what I mean. It's like, don't come in here, bro, No, this is

my house. Yeah, like watch this, who's next. I'll take all your money? Yeah. Anyway, according to the Atlantic, so Eric hasn't been forthcoming on most of the details of his plan, but according to The Atlantic, in some other sources, we know that he wants a viceroy to run the whole operation. He compares this person to a bankruptcy trustee who would have full control over hiring and firing US personnel and country mentors would be embedded into Afghan units.

These would be men from any country, according to Prince quote with a good rugby team, so British, Australians, any country with a good regular that's where he would recruit his mercenaries mentors. Yeah, wait, why why the rugby? I don't know, that's weird, right, Yeah, he's like, I love rugby union. Rugby guys are good at war. Okay, so

New Zealand South Africa. New Zealand super good at war famously. Yeah, I mean I think South Africa is probably he's gonna get a lot of South African guys, some crooks out of there. It's like, but they can also play rugby. Yeah. Now, interestingly enough, Eric Prince also wants a composite air wing to help the Afghan Air Force. In other words, this Viceroy would have his own private air force working alongside

the air force. So with his with his proposal, if they were to be like okay, here the Keys, then they would have they would loosen laws to allow this viceroy to then go to have an air force. Of course, of course got to have air superior and so Eric Prince would mind Afghanistan's minerals and use it to buy himself an air force, which he would then use to bomb the Afghan people. It is, it's like a literal

parasitic relationships. It's in I'm honestly he's the most respectable person close in the orbit of the Trump administration right now. Because you've got to give one thing to Erik Prince. He is persistent, like he wants an air force and he's really putting in the groundwork to do. Yeah, he's he's just leasing that Navy just to get over the air force, even though I have that it's about about

having an air force. I there's something not respectable, but like, no, I mean, I guess objective if you removed all the actual details that made it about war and killing and things like that, and you're just about one person who had is a dream and the you know, just whatever he has to overcome that he's going to do. Yeah, and that's something that that's all I'll say. That is something. It is something that is something at the core of

his being that makes him at least interesting. You have a great Erik Prince is my God t shirt on right now. I wear that a lot. Actually, yeah, I wasn't. He's this guy that lives down the street from me and I'm trying to anyway, he's really good. Run ads, yeah, ads, yeah, and we're back. Those are some great ads. The quality products services also pretty good. Anyway, Let's get back to uh,

Eric Prince. So, yeah, when we last left Erik Prince, he's talking about turning Afghanistan into a rare minerals company that he runs via islands against the Afghan people. So that's fun. He's not the only guy in DC who's shopping around this idea. Stephen Feinberg, who runs Cerberus Capital and also the military contractor Din Corp, has been pushing a similar plan around Washington. Uh. Feinberg is a close

friend of President Trump. He was almost given a position overseeing an intelligence review this year, but the intel community recoiled because he has no background in intel or military, doesn't know anything. Cerberus and fucking was the other one, Dine Corp. Dine Corp is one of the military contractors that doesn't commit rampant war crimes like black Water. Like I'm sure they've got in their history, but they're more respectable than black Water, right, which is a low bar.

And then Cerberus and like Serberus Capital sounds like you're the good guys. Yeah, exactly, We're a fucking mythical dog monster. Yeah. I do want to praise Eric on something real quickly, which is his his acumen for this. He's the perfect man to take advantage of this time in Republican politics. And my evidence for that is one of the slides in this docket he put together, which again as a

slide show that's made for President Trump. In the slide show, he builds the privatization of the war in Afghanistan as quote the woman ice rink moment of the Trump administration at the name of one of the slides, the woman ice sprink moment and the Trump administration. Do you have any idea what that's a reference to? No, but it's probably something very I guarantee you this is one of the only things I could reference that President Trump would

know about and you would not. And that's because back in like the nineteen eighties, the woman ice rink in New York City stopped making ice or in the seventies, I guess. In the nineteen eighty the New York Parks Department started working to change that. They spent like six years and thirteen million dollars trying to fix this ice rink and basically had to announce at that point that they were gonna have to start all over again. And so it was like this big famous story of government competence.

They spent millions of dollars. They can't get this ice rink going, So Trump starts publicly saying that he can do the job like under budget and in less time than anybody else, and everybody assumes he's full of ship. But he gets the job and he actually does it under budget for like three million bucks in like a quarter of the times, like the one fucking time he did it. The thing that, yeah, he did the thing. He got the ice drink working again it made ice

or he didn't. I mean he hired the people who did it, but like made ice, Like they just couldn't keep the rink at the temperature to keep Yeah, I don't know whatever, but this is like one failed to actually have ice on the ring, yeah, which is important for an ice Yeah, and then you have a roller rink. So he managed the project that got it fixed, and he did it under budget. In anyway, it's a thing that Trump talked talked about often on the campaign trail

when he was running for president. Um, he's smart, right, No, he's saying that. Yeah, he's saying that Afghanistan is like that ice rink back in the nineteen eighties. So the government's just not smart enough to fix it. So he knows how to sell this plan to Donald Trunk, right, um, and I suspect he'll be successful eventually. I mean, based on everything we read all the time in the news, it just seems like every day or every story that comes out, we inch closer enclosure to the privatization of

that war. Yeah, which is not the right plant. Just leave, Just admit it was a stupid idea, Right, get the funk out, Right, say you're sorry, Offer the government some aid from moving all the bombs we dropped, Like, just get the funk out. But that's what I think. We're probably gonna go with Eric's plans. So let's get back into the book. This was a long digression because he talked about I didn't realize that when this book was published back in fourteen, he already had this plan together.

So this has clearly been on Eric's mind for a while. His demo tape that goes around Yeah, and he has a real gift for spending his career running a mercenary empire into personal heroism. In the beginning of his like in the beginning of his book, he tries to present himself as a lifetime servant of both his country and of course of God. Uh. He says, since I first enrolled in the Naval Academy after high school. My life's mission has been to serve God, serve my family, and

serve the United States with honor and integrity. I did it first as a midshipment venice a seal, then when personal tragedy called me home from the service, as a contractor, providing solutions for some of the thorniest problems on Earth. The business of war has never been pretty. But I did my job legally, and I did it completely too well, perhaps growing blackwater until it became something resembling its own branch of the military and their government agencies. It's like

he's winking the whole time, and I did it. So we're gonna have another digression now because I couldn't let the sentence too well, perhaps too well. So I was worried when I started doing this, because I was like, we talked about a lot of blackwaters, horrible negligence and the deaths associated with the last episode, and I was like, am I gonna be able to find more examples of that for this episode with the repeating myself. Turns out it just took about a second on Google because I

just typed in a couple of key phrases. And I found a two thousand five Washington Post article about a plane crash. Of a crash of a plane in Afghanistan piloted by a firm that was a part of Blackwater, essentially one of Eric Prince's aviation firms, killing all six on board. Uh So, the first army report, which was released two weeks later, said that the plane, which again is essentially a Blackwater plane, was in violation of numerous

government regulations and contract requirements. Uh So, basically they were breaking a bunch of rules. Now, Presidential Airways, which is the company that Prince owned, under one of these big

umbrella things. Right, He's got all these funks. But anyway, Presidential Airways was essentially accused of pairing pilots and co pilots who both didn't have any experience flying in Afghanistan, and then not training them properly for flying in Afghanistan, and then not supplying them with communications equipment that they needed to properly fly in Afghanistan. So two of their guys and I think four US soldiers got killed in

this crash. Uh And so the families sued Eric Prince, and Eric Prince gets sued by families quite a lot. That's it's my middle name, Eric getting sued families by families. You're you're almost always the bad guy if whole families are And also when your negligence is that like acutely criminal. Yeah, you know so. An attorney for the families accused them

of Presidential Airways of cutting corners. Uh. If they're going to outsource to corporation services like flying personnel or in Afghanistan, they must do it with corporations that put the safety of our men and women in uniform ahead of corporate profits. Sadly that wasn't done here. It seems like a reasonable statement. Presidential Airways followed with a common Eric Prince tacked, calling

the army lazy and incompetent. One of Prince's representative said in essence that the Army review that made them look at fault had been slapped ash and was filled with errors. Everyone would need to wait until the National Safety Board report came out to really know what had gone wrong and if Presidential Airways had done anything wrong. Uh So, now I'm gonna read a fun related excerpt from Jeremy

Scahill's book Blackwater. In two thousand and six. Nearly two years after the Army investigators concluded the report, the National Transportation Safety Board issued to report of its own. The NTSB concluded that Blackwaters pilots were quote behaving unprofessionally and we're deliberately flying the non standard route low through the valley for fun. Oh yo, the fucking party gang comes back. Yeah, it's all. It's the same thing. They're just dumb, fucking

party boys getting people guilt. Fuck that, I guess that is the one consistent like with the culture of that company. It's sort of like yeah, and also just funk around whatever you want, doesn't matter. It's guys who got frustrated at all the rules the Army has, some of which you're dumb. You talk anyone who served in the Army and they'll be able to point out dumb things the

Army makes you do. But also part of the reason the Army has so many dumb rules is so that people don't go joy riding planes through valley and killing six expensive hardware. Uh. And what's what's usually the background of a lot of the guys who end up in Black Water. They retired, they like discharge like they're usually people who got honorably discharged. I mean it's people who a lot of people who were in special Forces and then we're like, I want to get paid, which, oh

so then they kind of leave. Yeah, yeah, they like there's a better check, right, So, but it's usually people who are like seeing the checks that they're cutting over there, and because they'll have a buddy who was with the service and then got out a year or two ago, and then he's like, I made three dollars in a rack last year, and we're doing the same ship, right, and he's like, can we play this game with this fucking plane where get drunk on the plane, puts a

bottle on his head, and were trying to just knock it off into valley. Some guys died last week, but it's still fun. Whatever, dude, they didn't know what they were doing. Yeah, as you might have noticed from earlier on, Prince has a real bug up is asked about Blackwater knock what he's seen as what he sees as the proper recognition that it's owed. He had a statement in

his book that I found kind of funny. Government agencies don't want that spotlight being shown on our work, nor to applaud the greatest advantage Blackwater offered them increased capability. They only want to increased deniability, which is funny because that's the only reason why his company couldn't be fired from the war is because they needed deniable assets. Yeah. Anyway, that Eric Prince doesn't like being a deniable asset and it's never not been in the business of providing them,

right Jesus. Yeah, that must frustrate him when he wants to be the star and he's like, I'm made to be the scapegoat. Yeah. Man, that's what you're doing. That's your job, your job of getting provide the soldiers that the government doesn't have to report to anyone have read, and you're wasting life and money at the same time. That's your whole the whole reason you're a billionaire, other than the fact that your dad was right. Yeah. Uh, that's the one to being a billionaire. Step one to

being a billionaire rich dad at the time. Yeah, No, move on to squares z or you die for? Yeah, where you die for because you don't have enough. You can't afford insulin. It's like Oregon Trail. You broke your leg and you died, and you died, but Eric Prince gets a Navy right, fun world, fun fun world, So Princess in his book quote, the true history of Blackwater is exhilarating, rewarding, exasperating, and tragic. Don't disagree with that. It's the story of men taking bullets to protect the men.

You take all the credit, a tale of patriots whose names became known only when lawyers and politicians needed to blame somebody for something, which again is funny because Eric is the epitome of the guy who takes all of the credit while other people get shot at. He's never taken a bullet in his life. He's his like his only job, his basically his only job since he was thirty has been having other people fight for money that he pays them. Right. Yeah, Like he's always taking the credit.

And like his like scorned attitude, Like he sounds like Ed Harris and the Rock, like General Hummel. Yeah, it was like they don't they don't respect us. You just assumed General Hummel saw some ship and he did yeah, and he did Bosnia something like that wherever it was, which I can think of his wife's tombstone that literally just said his wife next to it. It's like, Wow,

way to give her an identity, Barbara. One of the remarkable things about that to me is it was one of those few movies made in that era where if you needed to have a military character who had seen some combat, you had to really stretch to figure out where they could have been. Like those two right now, it's take your were war in like thirty countries. Well at least the ones we acknowledged, you know what I mean, No one's going to be there and be like, that's

a movie ten years from now. So at this point in Eric Prince's book, we're just now through the introduction um SO. Chapter one opens with Eric claiming to have saved several women from a boat explosion when he was thirteen. I love how like the intro is just like, man, we were spit on, disrespected. We were the ones doing the real We're the real patriots. Chapter one, I'm fucking colla.

I saved some ladies when a boat blew up. Yeah, And he's specifically notes at the end of this anecdote, I never did learn their names or what became of them. It's a shame because you're like fucking Spider Man. You just come through people like sorry, I gotta keep this moving. It's a lie. Yeah, it's a lie. Is there a

detail of what exactly happened? Yeah? Yeah, he taught like these ladies they did something bad to their boat and its engine exploded, and they like jumped in the water and he and his friend fished them out of the water and drew from the shore, and then there was an ambulance waiting to take them away or something, which maybe a boat exploited. I feel like, at least a

big part of that story's bullshit. Yeah, I have you know, I can see that there were probably people who I think a better version is maybe some women who were stranded, maybe their boat round out of gas or something something. They needed a ride to shore. He provided it. If you were a boat explosion in somewhere time in the eighties and Eric Prince rescued you, and you're now a listener of this podcast, drop us a line on Twitter at Bastard's pod. Let us know what really, Let us

know what really happened that day. It turns out it was his boat that exploded and the women saved him. Oh that story is completely reversed. Yeah, man, I whatever, if if he saved some ladies on a boat and they reach out. I'll make a whole apology track for Eric and the ladies. Anyway, Prince moves on to talk a little bit about his family history. He uses the story of his grandfather's untimely death as a justification for

why welfare is bad. Uh. Quote when Peter died suddenly of a heart attack in ninety three, My grandmother's son. No government handouts, no charity from the church, not even money from family. Edgar, who had two sisters, his dad was the man of the house. Now he would provide for them. He was twelve. Wait, I'm failing that he what is he trying to say that? I mean, how is he trying to connect welfare to He's trying to talk about how awesome his family is by pointing out

that his grandma didn't take a fucking penny. My grandma wouldn't take any money. She just made my twelve year old grand dad at Yeah, he's how cool is my family? Dog? Sounds like your family's kind of abusive air. Yeah, it sounds like she should have sought for some welfare. Finished grade school. Unless that's a lie too. Yeah, unless that's a lie too. Who knows. Could you imagine her grandma was like the O G. Welfare Queen, the miss school

where first rolling around in a Bentley. Yeah, and that's how my dad became a billion. Yeah. So anyway, Eric portrays that as awesome. It's worth noting that his dad didn't seem to view this is a good thing, because he notes later in the book quote, dad didn't let me hold a job during high school on his hard scrabble youth. He wanted me to enjoy those years. So up st Eric Prince's dad. He broke a cycle exactly right, I mean, didn't turn out with a great kid. But no, no, yeah,

they're achieved. I do feel like Eric missed maybe that lesson, oh, which was children ought not to work? Yeah, yeah, who knows, Maybe that wasn't his dad's lesson. I don't know the guy I bet you're wondering about Betsy Divos, Eric Prince's sister. He only mentions his sister by name once in I was hoping you're to be like not one mentioned at all, and I have a sister. He mentions her wants to

talk about the guy she married. Wow, So she only comes up in the context of her husband yeah, of course. I think my sister is referenced a couple of times, but Betsy Divas is only named once, as he's introducing her husband, and she his only sister. I think, so, why why is he creaming his jeans for Mr Devas? Oh? Just because he's super rich guy right. I don't remember the exact context, but the family died recently, Yeah, the only Oh yeah, good. Good because he's the founder of family.

Yeah yeah, and you still in the Orlando Magic. He has three sisters. So the other times when he's referring to a sister who knows who knows, there's a Betsy and then the other ones. I didn't even check on the others. But he mentions Betsy DeVos once. He's like, but hey, Betsy the best one she married for fucking I mean, they were already rich. He doesn't give us much detail at all about his childhood, but if you're game, I did find one anecdote that I want to kind

of go down a conspiracy rabbit hole. Okay, it's Eric's description of his favorite childhood hobby quote. The first group of soldiers I ever assembled was made of solid lead, two inches high, standing in neat rows on my bedroom window sill. There were hundreds of them painted to match their real life British Frenchian Continent alarmy counterparts. I created them from molds I got on trips abroad and forty pounds of lead Dad and I melted down into cast

iron plumber's pod. Wow, he's a little like war miniatures. In fairness, this makes I did. That's exactly what I did when I was a kid. I played fucking like Warhammer and other I spent my child, but specifically building models. That was my whole child. I had a set of like Civil War dudes, and I remember I went as far as buying like the fake grass to put like to create like a battlefield scene and like fake trees.

And when I realized, like, because I remember the kid, like regular toys weren't quite scratching that itch of like what like you know, the like military should look like. So I was like, oh, you know what him do this? It was too much work, though, So I commend you for even being a hobby. Yeah, man, that's what I

did as a child. And I remember, it's like the most poison you can exposures health to this little kid, because your hands are always covered in paints and god knows what's in and like this fucking cyano acrylic glue. I was always pulling it off of my fingers and stuff. But in Eric's case, he was melting lead. And I don't know how much let exposure you get doing that thing. But we do have a lot of documentation on why

lead exposure is really bad for children. I'm gonna site from a study made by the College of Family Physicians in Canada. Lead is a developmental neurotoxin. Children are most commonly exposed, and they are most vulnerable. Let exposure has been associated with many cognitive and motor deficits, as well as distractability and other characteristics of attention deficit hyperactive disorder.

Although children's blood lead levels have declined considerably over the past three decades with removal of lead from gasoline and paint, children can still be exposed to lead from lead paint and older homes, toys, and other sources. Because post exposure treatment cannot reverse the cognitive effects effects of lead exposure, preventing lead exposure is essential. One of the things lead exposure is most tied to is violence, crime let exposure.

It's we've seen crime drop for most of the last thirty years, and one of the major theories behind it is that we got let out of everything and so people aren't being born exposed to lead because we know that it's one of the biggest correlators with violent crimes.

That aligned with like like women's ability to have an abortion too, because I know it's another one, like people, there's probably yeah, it's certainly a mix of things, but it's very incredible that wait, but how do you fucking make your own They just bought a shipload of lead and melted in the pot. How do you wait? So I don't I've never had the privilege now, but what

do you do? I don't know. I never did that either, because by the time I was collecting model soldiers, they were man out of plastic because they realized she shouldn't expose children like cast iron like. But it sounds like he was getting blocks of lead and melting it and pouring it into his own mold, so he was without any respiratory and exposing himself to lead fumes and everything.

And I found a study in South Africa that correlates lead exposure to interest in firearms because they found that competitive shooters had higher regression and much higher blood lead levels than competitive archers, which is an interesting group to compare it to. Yeah, so this is just a theory, but that's amazing too, because like, right, like lead bullets to like the bullet in legs like feedback loop or you're not going can get lead bullets. I've been a

shooter most of my life too. And number one, most of the bullet you're gonna but I don't have exposed lead on him. Some of them do, but it's usually jacketed and something. And number two, you're not getting a lot of let exposure shooting firing. But I imagine like how often, like how often has the like the actual rounds themselves been protected from for people from the lead itself? Oh?

Not not very long. In fact, if you're looking at like the Continental Times, not people are probably melting a lot of their own balls, right right, So yeah, we're making with pewter obvious like it's definitely fed into violence throughout centuries because they've been putting a lot of lead everywhere.

I just think it's interesting that Erik Prince we see in his childhood both this joy of making soldiers and also maybe the lead exposures led them to be such a fucking violence, literally making soldiers out of the thing that would that leads to like additional violent tendencies. It's almost poetic. Speaking of poetic, these ads are poems for your wallet. Oh yeah, go on, here we go and we're back, and I'm I'm gonna do a free ad right now, one of these great unpaid ads, which are

such a smart thing to do. I'm eating some Tapatio derritos, and folks, oh they've appeared. Oh they're so good. I don't like. I can't stand flaming hot cheetos. I like. I like spicy stuff in general, but not spicy chips I've had. I hate spicy chips. Tapatio derritos are fucking phenomenal. These are just delightful little smr for you folks at home. Oh my god, have you seen the video of the girl who takes a bite of the chip and her eyes roll back in her head. It was like an

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If everybody does that, when this episode drops, maybe we'll get a sponsorship and I'll get no. You know what you do, everybody takes a photo with Doritos and use those hashtags, and you do hashtag why I eat Dorritos. Oh So they see that and they're like, well, I mean, for somehow, this guy has mobilized an army of Doritos eaters. You're like the Eric Prince of Doritos. That has always been my dream I was gonna and you getting a Doritos sponsorship is your air force because I want Doritos

to pay me to mind Doritos for more common exactly. Wow, what a beautiful and now I'm seeing a good spiracy here. You heard it here first. This is conspiracy. Has been going on since the show began. Yeah, yeah, I've been consistent. I mean it is a sincere brand loyalty. It is a sincere because I love me some derrito's. Yeah, oh they're good. I'm gonna try these tapetito deritos and cooking some megas and see how that ship works. Yeah. Almost

seems sacrilegious, but it is sacrilegious. They're they're bullshit mega's, but they're delicious. Yeah. Yeah, anyway out there. Yeah, I'm theat that actually does make me want gaspacco though, just because the names are kind of I could go for some of that. You make it, you make a no. But I have a friend who makes a really good gaspaco. Go camping with her every now and then, and it's the fucking best thing. I only do it for the gaspacco. Yeah,

like you bring anyway back to Eric Prince. So, Eric portrays himself in his childhood as a quiet, boring kid. I didn't smoke, I didn't drink. Being an athlete, gave me a social network. Yet I didn't have many close friends growing up. Maybe it's because you're a sociopath. I don't know. From little information we have about his school years,

he sounds absolutely insufferable. He portrays himself as the living embodiment of one of those Marine with an atheist professor in a college class memes that circulates around the internet. You know the kind wait, what have you ever? You've

runder one of those? Like now they're it's gone around where most of the memes are mocking the original, but there would be like this email forward or whatever kind of story that your conservative relatives would send you, and it's about like a college professor talks about how there is no God and Marine stands up and gives a speech about how he saw God on the battlefield. Yeah, one of those kind of stories. Eric tells his version of that in this autobiography. This is while he's in

high school. Once in class, I challenge a teacher who called then President Ronald Reagan's Cold War military build up a waste of taxpayer dollars. I countered by rattling off every strategic defense initiative, weapons system we needed to counter various Soviet threats. I had analyzed Reagan Star Wars the

way my classmates picked apart the University of Michigan's football roster. Yeah, what's really fun about this to me is that it illustrates how bad Eric Prince is it admitting when he's wrong. Because by the time Eric was eighteen, we knew that almost none of the weapons systems that had been talked about for the Strategic Defense Initiative we're ever going to work. Uh, and the few that would the directed energy weapons that

actually did have some potential. In nineteen eighties seven, when Eric was eighteen, a government report was released saying that essentially these weapons would need to become between one hundred and one million times more powerful and more energy efficient in order to have a chance at working. So there's the railgun count as one of those things. I don't think that started out as this take, Okay, I don't. That's a futuristic weapon that I've always been obsessed with it.

Now I've seen that, Yeah, we've got those two Like do you see the thing of the Chinese Navy, Like they've really figured out the railgun though, and like they've look scary, looks scary. I want one well, and I feel like the only thing that stops a bad guy with a rail guns And that's the real that's really the message of a racer is yeah, which is a good Yeah. Yeah? Will ever be that small? If big Railgun wants to get on a sponsorship deal, all I'll

talk railguns all day is going to be changed. The rail Gun Association. Yeah okay, so h Like nearly all people born into incredible wealth, Eric has managed to convince himself that he never got any handouts. Quote after the heart attack, my father his dad had a heart attack, but he survived the first one. My father was generous with his time, but never with handouts. He didn't want

me relying on the family business. He made it clear that I've been given every advantage in life and that I had no excuse for not making something of myself independently. I would not be working for Prince Corporation after college, he said, I would receive no trust fund. I had to make it on my own. So now do we know, can we do we know how true that is? Well, he didn't go straight to work for Prince Corporation after was there no trust fund? Was there no inherited wealth?

Oh yeah, there was because after his dad dies. A few pages later in the book, Eric writes this, just over a year after my father's death, my mother's sisters and I sold the Prince Automotive unit to Milwaukee based Johnson Controls in for one point three five billion, which was split split between a number of dad's business partners, employee stockholders, and my mother's sisters and me. Now he puts himself last in both of those lists very deliberately.

I'm gonna guess he might have gotten more money than his dad's employees stockholders. Probably. I like the idea that his sister's got a bitterer, bigger cut. That's like dope, Like that's his pain, Like with Betsy, he's like fun. I hope, so I hope his dad hated him and cut him out of But depending he still don't know how true it is, right, because if if his dad was that actually much of a hard asss like, dude, don't expect to work here, you've been given everything. Yeah,

there is a version you see that. I doubt that though, Yeah, we know he got conservatively a few hundred million dollars, right, And also, people who have grown up with privilege I mean, if you're if you want to live in denial about that, that is usually the first thing you say is like, Okay, I know I may come from this fan I didn't

get a fucking thing though. Yeah, but we also know that like when he became a Navy seal, like the when he was going for like the office the OCS class, and like he had or one of the classes he had one of the things he had to do before he became a Navy seal. The class was full, and his dad pulled some strings to get him in at

the last moment. So like that I'm getting I'm gonna bet that happened to help get him into the Air Force Academy too, Like yeah, uh anyway, Yeah, you'll remember Eric went for to the the Academy for a hot minute. At least one instructor thinks he left because it wasn't conservative enough, but in Eric's book he blames something else, the movie Top Gun. It wasn't long before I realized

the Academy wasn't the right fit. It was Jeff after Top Gun had come out, and the environment was an comfortable mix of Tailhook era frat boys on one hand and a nonsensical policing of political correctness. On the other I felt as if I was expected to learn from graduate student instructors who knew a little more, and the fact that they've been there longer than I had. I quickly began to wonder whether the academy created great leaders or if great leaders just enrolled there and dirt it

and made it out. On the other side, Eric did not endure it. He quit after you know, like a year, right, that sounds like some real college dropout ship. Yeah. He opted instead for Hillsdale. Uh, he said, remembers liking it because everyone there was the same kind of libertarian he was, and because they were all rich kids too. Uh, he

does less diverse than they. He does note proudly that the college offered him a full scholarship I'm gonna guess because his dad had been giving them some money, but that he turned it down and his dad said, leave it for someone who needs the money. And he he portrays this as like a good thing that he did, rather than like, no, of course, if your dad is a billionaire, you don't take a free ride to college. That's the human thing to do. Wait, pat yourself in

the back for the Bare Minimum. Yeah. Yeah, and but I could almost be the title for this autobiography, Like I think the working title for the episode is Eric Prince axely wrote a book about why he sucks. But the title for this book might as well be Eric Prince does the minimum and pretends that hengratulates himself. It's

it's spectacular. So yeah. He tells stories like how when he was working as a volunteer firefighter, they thought he was just some rich kid at first, but then he kept showing up early and doing a real good job of cleaning, and he earned their respect. It's like he's rewriting the script of his life again. If you worked in that firehouse and have anything to say about Eric Prince, positive or negative, drop us a line I'd love to hear from you. He wait his Yeah, Now, most Hillsdale

students came from money. The Butcher's painters, He says it as if he's about to say he didn't go now most of them, Yeah, not me. The Butcher's painters and slaughterhouse workers who volunteered or worked at the firehouse initially figured me for a snot nosed college kid. But I showed up at the firehouse early, to change the blades and the kit well rescue saws, and I stayed late

to clean the pumps. I handle the heavy canvas hoses and carried the ladders after a call, when the other volunteers sat back and cracked open a drink, I rolled the hoses gradually ironed their respect. It also sounds like the equipment manager on a basketball team who sucks and the guys are doing the real work, or like, yeah, why don't you just do that? And that is my suspicion is that maybe he didn't. Actually maybe when there was a call, he was never called out because they're like, no,

that's the fucking that kid. You don't want that kid in a dangerous situation at your back. And we there's hints of that in his Navy Seals experience too, so we'll get to that. Whenever Eric is involved in anything sort of cool personally, he writes about it at length, Like he repeatedly mentions when Blackwater first showed up in Afghanistan, he was there and he actually did guard duties some times because there was so he did guard duty in Afghanistan.

Nothing ever happened, but he did. In the he talks about it repeatedly that, like, yeah, and I was there in Afghanistan doing guard duty. Like so when anything is that close to being cool, he talks about it at length. I'm gonna guess he didn't do anything cool as a firefighter. Maybe not. Maybe I'm wrong, Maybe I'm being an asshole here. I was the first one just to discover the backdraft phenomenon.

It was around this time that Eric made the first political donation of his life, which we talked about in the first episode of the fifteen thousand dollars he gave to the Republican Party. Uh Now, in that episode, we speculated that this may have been an attempt by his parents to max out their political donations us and their

kids as funnels. According to Eric, that's not true. So he says that the money was his own and it came from quote, investment income from stocks my parents had long ago bought for me, So you didn't take any handouts. But his parents gave him enough stocks that he was able to donate fifteen dollars party at age nineteen. I doubt that just be real. That's how these wealthy and I'm sure I'm pretty sure we talked about that. That's like the standard tactic for wealthy people of just giving

as much money. It's like, well, let me max out, make my dog a max out. It's like if you're if you're if you're born rich, and you're listening to the show, I'm sure someone is like, fine, just own it. Just be like, yeah, I'm a millionaire because my parents are rich. Like, okay, just don't lie about it. Don't be like President Trump and be like, we've got a small loan from my dad that was millions of dollars. Yeah, you guys, you had it easier because you were rich,

except mine. You know, that's the way you didn't ask to be born rich. No, No, it's like I have a lot easier because I've never had to deal with like a major chronic illness. Right, makes my life easier. We all have privilege. Just own it. Don't be a dick about Eric Prince. Okay, So yeah, you'll remember that after college, Eric wound up briefly in turning for the George H. W. Bush White House. You recall that he

wasn't happy there. Uh. He admits in his book that he didn't like the fact that President Bush was bargaining with people who wanted to wink and weaken the safety sanctity of marriage, raised taxes, uh, and push environmental policies.

So yeah, environmental. Yeah. He admits that he got chewed out by the Deputy Chief of Staff Andrew Card because he wouldn't shut up about his thoughts on how the President ought to do things while he was an intern in the White House, which sounds like what would happen if you're being an insufferable dick. After five months, his internship was not renewed, of course, of course not. And that that brings you back to even the firehouse was Actually you guys should probably be cleaning it like this,

like shut the funk up, Eric and clean boy. Yeah, yeah, you do it, Eric. Fine, let's all have beers since we just pulled people out of a fire. Yeah, exactly. Well, I'm gonna switch the K twelve blades off the saws whatever nobody else's We haven't used that song in four years and probably blades fine, I don't know, I don't know saw blades. I'm sorry firefighters anyway, So you probably remember also that Eric Prince became a Navy seal next

using a family connection to get into the school. But Prince did pass Hell week on his own merits, and that's impressive. And when he got back from becoming a Navy seal this happened, my parents sent me an extraordinary gift, a bronze statue of a cowboy. The artist had inscribed in the unwritten loss of the range, the work thick still exists. When you sign for an outfit, you ride for their brand. True commitment takes no easy way out. Now.

I think Eric mentioned this because he likes to see himself as a cowboy, and like he and his contractors as cowboys. I can't imagine a a quote that does a worse job of describing Eric Prince is worth work ethic than that, because every time he makes a commitment,

he weasels out of it every single time. That's the one thing that is true with Eric Prince, and I think that's the case with most people who are very insecure with their identity, right like, they try and project something that is the complete opposite of their own their

truth as a person. And so if you're a cowardly, sniveling little brad, you're gonna act like the upstanding guy who like, hey, first guy for a brand, you read for that brand unless it gets hard, then you leave because you had a disagreement, unless it gets hard, in which case that brand was cheating and there was no point committing to that brand to begin with. Oh, Eric, Uh, Yeah, So Eric was an a vcal for about two years. Now.

It costs it's hard to say, probably somewhere around and a half a million dollars just to train a Navy seal, and as much as a million dollars a year to keep that seal, you know, active and trained up in the field while they're an active duty Navy seal. I'm gonna guess that the government did not get its money's use out of Eric's brief stint in the Navy Seals. You're supposed to do that job more than two years

if you commit to it. Uh. He says remarkably little about his time doing one of the coolest jobs in existence. On guests, that's because he didn't do very much. There is one telling paragraph where Eric writes about his experience during the Yugoslavian Civil War. In it, he cleverly excures the fact that he didn't experience any actual combat or real danger during his time there. Did what what what kind of action did you hear, I think you'll pick

up on it. Then, in late nineteen is Yugoslavia broke apart in the Warring States, Seal Team eight deployed to Bosnia Hurt Sgovina. The shattered buildings in war torn streets where a far cry from the peaceful communities I had once seen there with my wife. We seals were performing combat search and rescue for down pilots or taking direct action to rate our sights. Not me, Eric Prince, Yeah,

we see seals seals. Yeah, it's odd that he's able to be somewhat truthful in those instances, right, because like it seems like he'll embellish anything, because there's guys who like Eric Prince lied about the one third rail. Yeah, now, or those seals. If you were in Navy seal in Yugoslavia and you served with Erik Prince and I got it wrong or I got it right, I'm sure we could find that. Yeah. I don't know if you can. Probably just already think you just republic knowledge. They don't

keep it secret. Who right, right, Yeah, we should call what's that guy who does like the seal stolen valor stuff? Don what's his face? Yeah? The guy who's like the fucking o G seal hunter would be like, hey, can you find his budge? I mean, he was definitely a seal not but you want to hear I do want to hear what those guys who are probably like, dude, I was a seal for fifteen years. This guy quit

after two years. I would like to see what his time as a seal was like, because again, every time he does something he's directly involved in something cool he talks about right, and he just he weasels again here we'll see. That's then you kind of see the part where he is intelligent enough to know how far he can struts the truth because he's like, well, there are people who are going to be able to corroborate or basically debunk what I say. So let me just say

I was. I was in the Seals during that time, and then that's what we see. Well, I was with the Seals team, and members of this team did that, Seals did act. I was on time out because I stole a helicopter and try to race it. Who knows what his what his situation was. Eric's time as a Navy seal was cut short. He says it's because his wife got cancer at age twenty nine, and he needed to take care of her and his children. And if he were a normal dude, of course that would be

a good reason stopping. Of course, of course. Uh, and he says, my being gone was suddenly impossible. I requested my discharge from the navy. Uh. Now, here's the thing. Here is the thing you do? You dig something up there? Well, it's just that almost as soon as he gets home from being a n A vy seal, he starts Blackwater, and he's spending weekends and weeks away from his wife and children, hiking in the woods and shooting snakes and getting the land ready for this thing. I don't know

exactly how long he waited, but he waited. But yeah, he know it's it's hard to speculate on that, but it doesn't seem like and it did his wife survive? So yeah, we're going to get into how he talks about his wife and some other stuff here. Um. So, at one point he mentions that he and his wife gave half a million dollars to a clinic in Prague

so they could fund experimental treatments to try on his wife. Uh. In in that passage, he praises his wife's courage and then says, and through it all, she seemed more concerned about my loss, my impending grief, than her own death. Remember, Eric, you can live without me, as she would say, but you can't live without God. Now Eric starts blackwater, as I said, soon after leaving the Seals and spending a shipload of time there, and after two thousand one his

business ramps up. He starts spending less and less time at home, even though that's why he left the Navy. By two thousands. Wait, so he left the Seals, and then at that point, what was his like wealth at hundreds of millions already? I mean, I would say conservatively at least like a hundred million right from selling the family and everybody split one point three billions. He did not need to work for money. He could have just been a dad and been there with his wife in

her last years. He probably could have paid guys to, like, I'm play war in front of him and actually kill it themselves. If he could have gone shooting every day if he wanted to, he could have bought a ranches whatever. I'm sure there are people listening right now who have lost spouses to disease and would have loved to have just been able to not work and spend as much time with them as possible. That's not the strategy Eric took.

He started a very involved business, and then after two thousand and one he starts going over and spending time in Afghanistan, and you know, the contracting business. She's still battling cancers. Off and on. She's battling cancer. He goes in remission for a while, but then it comes back and in like two thousand three, it's it's really bad quote and not just that's bad, but the marriage is bad.

By early two thousand three, my wife and I didn't have much time alone together to begin with, and with those stresses, as well as the effects of cancer and surgery and chemotherapy, eliminated most of the romance or intimacy. When we did, I felt as if all I could do to keep things from spinning completely out of control. I felt as if it was all I could do to keep things from spinning completely out of control. And I found comfort in the arms of a woman named Joanna,

who who had worked as our nanny in Michigan. In mid two thousand two, when we all moved back to Virginia. She was hired to perform administrative functions that are Moyak Blackwaters Moyak facilities. She became pregnant before join died. So

now relationships are hard. If a friend who had had a spouse die came to me and confessed that they had cheated on their spouse while they was dying as cancer, I would not view that as a good thing, but I wouldn't take it as a condemnation of the person either. It's a nightmare. People have needs. We all fall short in difficult time. I mean, I think it's it's always it's hard to just judge someone's characters solely based on

that but everything else. Yeah, But I mean at the same time, based on his prior history, even leading up to that. Well, and he portrays himself as a moral paragon on every page of this book. But in my opinion, this cheating is not just a matter of Eric failing in the face of terrible sorrow and stress and grasping for a moment of joy. It's an example, yet another example of his complete inability to to delay his own gratification,

because that's his thing is he keeps quitting stuff. He keeps leaving, he gets bored, He gets bored, he gets bored, or he doesn't want to be told what to do or whatever. Does he have any like regret or like does he talk about in the book? Yeah, yeah, in a way that well, I'm not going to say in a way that feels believable, but we'll just continue the story. Um. I do like I think that that is a big

through line that he cannot stand. Eric left the Air Force Academy because it was hard and he didn't like being exposed to other people's points of view. Uh. He liked Hillsdale his college, because it was full of people he agreed with. He left the Seals, and I mean, a guest, part of that was because he didn't like

being told what to do. I didn't go into it here, but he spends pages and pages of his book talking about everything he thought that was dumb, about how seals had to train and like the way they had to travel, and like he sets it up as like, and this inspired me to create Blackwater to create a better training environment for seals. But I feel like he's just anyway, Yeah, you had two years and then you're the expert on Eric Prince does not have a good record of sticking

to things. Now Here is the way he concludes his story about his wife's death and his infidelity. In March two thousand three, on a ski trip in Vail, Colorado, Joan wrote me a long letter. She left it on the dresser in our vacation home. There. My wife understood it would likely be her last time visiting a place we both loved, and that I would find the letter when I returned at Christmas time nine months later without her. It was the most caring, most awful thing I've ever read.

She knew everything about everything. With Joanna. I had devastated her, yet and her final months, Joan had found the strength to forgive me. There are no excuses for what happened. There's not a day that goes by that I don't regret the way I heard her. After years of pain and treatments, on June fourteen three, my beautiful wife surrendered her body to her creator and passed from this life.

She was thirty six years old. I cut out a small lock of her hair to keep, and I asked the doctor for the chemotherapy port that had been implanted in her upper chest. Really, the doctor said, that thing was the bane of her existence. That's the closest thing to her heart. I said, I've got it to this day. So what do you think of that? Or so if he looks grossed out, it's just so dark. It's dark that it's the thing that she hated. I don't know.

I'm not going to criticize that. I don't know. It's hard to like, you know, it's like the one terri part part of this whole thing where it's hard for me to fully be like, fuck you, gross of it. I'm sure. I don't know. Everyone grieves in their own way, and I don't I don't wish for anyone to live through that kind of sid awful like Very had to, you know, deal with that. It's just it's an awful office, soul destroying and I don't think he had much of

a soul to begin with. Yeah, but part of me just thinks, like, I don't know if he even really if he's even really had a real relationship with other human It's hard to say because there's some more gross stuff coming up. So Eric married his former nanny and stayed with her for eight years. They divorced in two thousand twelve in two thousands. Well in two thousand nine, two anonymous individuals who claimed to be ex Blackwater workers

filed sworn statements and federal court. One of these men claimed quote Mr Prince knowingly hired two persons who were previously involved in the Kosovo sex trafficking ring to serve at relatively high levels within his company. Mr Prince's North Carolina Operations had an ongoing wife swapping and sex ring which was participated in by many of Mr Prince's top executives x E because his company was exy at this time.

Spokeswoman Stacy Duluke denied this and called it obvious slander. Also, it's like Stacys now Eric Prince's wife, so that seems clostively sex ring guys. I didn't even there's more to dig into that one. I just didn't have because there's so much else to get into. How there's also one of the other guys talked about how he's been having people assassinated who knew dirt about his company, and like made was willing to make a claim in federal court about it. I don't know. I have not gotten in all.

There will be more episodes about Erik Prince in the Never Ending there's just too much. You can't even like we we've expanded too probably in the second act of his life. We're in the second chapter of his book, right, okay. Uh so the first third of his book is a pretty straightforward autobiography covering, you know, his life and the creation of Blackwater. Uh. But then it stops after around

the time that the Iraq War starts. It stops being a normal autobiography, and every chapter start it's being just him defending himself and Blackwater against different allegations of Blackwaters failures, crimes and massacres and stuff. So how far are we in the book until this? About this? About where we are about a third of the way, and the one third of the book functions somewhat like a biography, and

then it's just him defending his company and him horrible crimes. Yeah, yeah, exactly, Yeah the whole book, Eric Prince not I'm a hero. I'm so good. Okay, So I'm not going to go through all of these chapters because we don't have days for this podcast. I am going to talk about a couple of cases of him defending himself and if you want to read the book yourselves, the bullshit tactics he uses, and these will be evident, but don't don't actually pay for the book. It's bad. He said that. That's not

bastards Pods official. Oh yeah, sorry, that it would be. If it's possible to steal a copy of Eric Prince's book and a person out there in the world did that, I would not condemn them as a human being for that action, although I would not condone or support their decisions. I will go a step further and say, go to www Dot pirate Bay. You're going to say lime wire. You're gonna love it here. Oh boy, we are elderly men. Okay,

so let's talk about how Erik Prince justifies. Do you remember that funk up in Fellujah where four of his men got murdered and who him got strung up by a bridge and it sparked the Battle of Fallujah that killed prinds of thousands or thousands, a lot of people. I don't know how many. I don't know. That was in the last episode. Let's listen to the last episode. It killed a lot of people. Let me hold on, let me listen to the last episode really quick. I'll

be right back and oh my god. Okay, fuck this guy, right, okay. Now, if you remember, Eric Prince had taken up a contract to deliver kitchen supplies or Blackwater hat. Prince describes them as literally pots and pans in the book. Here's how he describes the sweet deal he made with the company to live her their kitchen supplies. We agreed to provide a squad thirty four men to protect SSS personnel and convoys,

the convoys of kitchen supplies. Regency was to pay my company eleven million dollars for a year of work, just shy of a million dollars per month, with an option to renew for a second year. Now. Eric describes Blackwater's mindset at the start of the War on Terror as say yes first, iron out the details later. And when he said yes to this job, some of those missing details included the fact that his men didn't have enough armored vehicles machine guns are actual contractors to fulfill the

mission details. Do you go to like home depot and be like, who has a military experience? If you've if you've ever talked to a soldier who served in Iraq in the early two thousands, they'll all agree that armored vehicles are a pretty minor detail when you're driving through the streets. Who needs a little bit of armor and guns for what? Come on, it's kitchen equipment. Nothing, Yeah,

it's nothing, nothing anyway. Yeah. Eric notes with pride that his company got the cooking equipment contract after another private security form used due to the obvious risk of the route. Uh So a responsible company was like, we can't safely do this. I'm sorry, Like you're supposed to do so

Prince picked up the contract. He blamed. Yeah, he blames the fact that they that they had to send in a smaller team than advertised without the proper equipment, to the actions of another security company that, he says, basically forcing them to do the mission before they were ready. Because these guys contract they ended it sooner than they should have ended it, and we just didn't have enough time to do it. Uh. He also claims that the extra men and armor and weapons wouldn't have made a

difference because the ambush was so well set up. Nothing could have stopped this from happening. In other words, the fact that blackwaters Men weren't prepared and the escort was sent out unable to meet the company's own standards was not Eric's fault. There was no other way things could have gone. And obviously they couldn't have canceled the mission because that would have been really bad for them financially. And there's pots and pans and needed delivering anyway. So

just he knew from the beginning was a wash. Yeah. Yeah. Here's a quote from the Prager Security Internet National textbook Shadow Force private security contractors in Iraq. It was Blackwater Management, not the State Department, that reduced the preparation time for the ill fated security details so that they were dropped in place in their first day on the job. It was Blackwater Management that decided to send out a four

man detail instead of the usual six. It was Blackwater that decided to send the detail and soft skinned instead of armored vehicles. It was Blackwater that decided not to give the detail but sheet guns as required by contract. So reached the kind that just lazy. It's like you didn't even fucking follow through on the contract. Yeah, it's I'm sure. If there's one thing you could have definitely found in Iraq at that time, it was extra machine guys,

Like there's a lot of them. What do they mean by that like mounted, Like I don't think I think I mean anything bigger than like an M four, But I think that's all they were armed with. It was just four guys with personal weapons. Oh wow, which you

don't want to roll through. It's kind of risky to roll through fellution to day that just because he's cheap, Just because he's cheap and he can he can't ever accept that something could be a failure, Like you might have to say, we can't do the mission right now if the pots and pants, maybe they get stolen, whatever, Like it can't go to better than people losing their lives,

you would think if you were a human being. Yeah, when you're looking at eleven million dollar contract, clearly whoever was working with the other security company that said no was a human being. It was like, no, people are gonna get killed, and it's not worth it for positive someone with like functional like a basic to be like I've been, I've had to deal with that and that's not something I want to repeat right Like, this is

a bad idea. It cannot be responsibly done. So I have no battlefield experience and I just be like, what are you talking about? It seems like our own rules say armored vehicles are necessary and these aren't. I don't even take risks when I play like sid Meyer's Civilization, let alone like with real people's lives. Oh boy, So a lot of Eric Prince's book actually serves as not very covert legal defenses against the families of the men who died in this attack, all of whom have since

sued black Water for negligence. U Prince is very careful. He provides fawning hagiographies of how wonderful all of the guys who died were, even as he throws shade on the mission command or a guy named Battlona, for deciding to go in quote No one questioned bat Alona's decision to accept the mission, especially since his insistence on shrinking the convoy showed that he was aware of the risks because he asked to transport fewer vehicles because there were

so few men. But I'm gonna guess bat alone got pressured by somebody to do the mission. No ship. It was probably like, yeah, we'll we'll give you another extra blah blah blat it. You know, who knows what they said, and they were all new to the job. He wanted to do a good prove that they were company men, you know. Uh. Princes unctuously kind of the families in his description of them. He listened to tale how he visited all of them and how he invited them to

a thing at the Blackwater Ranch or whatever. Uh. He talks about how sad he was, and he quotes from thank you letters that the families sent him before it became clear that negligence had been responsible for their loved

one stats and sued him. Um so yeah. He quotes from like the letters grieving wife sent him in the immediate aftermath of this, before he got ahead of it by being really nice to them, basically try and then they sent him because they were just grateful that he was seemed so caring in this terrible moments, you know, because they knew there was danger and then they realized,

oh there was myrted your kindness. He makes a huge point about the fact that one of the men's last paychecks for nine thousand dollars was held up because he was dead and his wife couldn't cash it. So Prince notes that the company cut her a check directly and says, quote, if the estate comes after us for the money then so be it reads one of our internal staff emails from the time, it sounds like the kids need the money.

So he makes a big show about the fact that he made it slightly easier for them to get nine thousand dollars that they were owed. But then, you know, didn't fought the families in court over paying them out anything extra, over the fact that they had, you know, sent their loved ones into a dangerous situation without the proper equipment, without the equipment that their own company's rules

said that was necessary. I think moments like these really review how little Eric Prince believes human beings ought to be expected to do for one another. Like that's one of the things that strikes out to me, Like to a normal person, this is the least suggestion you would expect from a company who had gotten one of your relatives killed. And he actually it's a great humanizing anecdote from the water, it's he's from outer space. One of the funny through lines for this book is Eric's refusal

to call his men mercenaries. He's continuously offended at the mere thought of that, and then he drops in lines like this about the men who died in Fallujah and the legal complications around that. So they weren't combatants, but they weren't non combatants. Batalona, Zovko, Healvins, and Antigue were civilians,

but they were armed. Ultimately, behest of the Department of Defense pursuing dangerous missions, the four fell into a glaring gray area of international law that experts in Geneva and beyond I continued to debate for years, what do you call civilians with guns in a war? Zonetions for money? If only there was a term for that, fucking mercenary? What is that? I sorry, hessians, because the only thing I would call a mission was like in high school, would be like go to seven eleven from blunt wraps

or like something like they're like, yo, busting mish. That's only mission as a civilian, you bust. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you'd carry guns in to get those blunt wraps, you would have been seen them as these guys. The value was pretty safe, you know what I mean? Boy? Okay, So we're not gonna take again. We're not gonna take a point by point look at every fund up defense Eric puts together. But we're going to talk a little

bit more about the Nissaur Square massacre. Now, this is where several of Eric's employees fired machine guns and grenades into a crowd, killing fourteen and wounding a shipload of people. Uh Their story, and the story Prince tells, is that they were taking heavy incoming fire. Prince repeatedly references incoming a K forty seven fire and points out that a bullet damaged the coolant line of one of their vehicles.

Now that doesn't gell with the testimony of Jeremy Ridgeway, a Blackwater X employee who was at I'm going to quote Fox News is summary of it, just so you know I'm not picking out some lefty source to make these guys right. This is the Fox This is probably

the most charitable version. Ridgeway told a jury that he didn't see any Iraqi's pointing guns in Nissar Square, and that there were no telltale muzzle flashes in the distance, that there was no incoming fire, and that there was no sound of a K forty seven rounds going off, as would be the case if insurgents were shooting at the black Water guards from nearby. Now you'll remember maybe that a lot of these people were shot in the back.

The civilians who died were found who have been shot in the back while they were running away, as a normal person would say it. Eric Prince praises, as they were shot in the back, presumably mistaken for retreating insurgents. So the military looked over everything, and their experts, who sure as ship had no vested interest in making it look like anyone had committed a war crime in Iraq, determined that this had been an excessive shooting. Uh, there

had been no sign of incoming fire. Prince summarizes their view of the incident as a one sided shooting rather than a massacre. Then he says it's safe to say that my men and I disagree with that assessment, except for the one that literally the guy who testified it yah in a jury right whatever, Uh, let's just get hung up. Let's not get hung up on that now. Most of Eric's evidence seems to be that the investigators or that his own investigators later found a bullet in

the grill of one of Blackwaters trucks. He says that the vehicles had been shot up in all of the fighting, but that they had to d o d rules said that all of the vehicles had to be in good repair. So we were acquired by contract to immediately repair the vehicles. And that's why there wasn't right. And we didn't really take pictures either, But they were there. He says they

took pictures. He hasn't, but were there where they at it was it did I'm gonna guess if he had pictures that went to the army and they did not find them compelling. Uh, they did find a bullet in the grill of one of Blackwaters trucks. Um, but it was just a bullet. We don't know what type of bullet it was. It was damaged enough that they could not definitively tie it to any particular kind of weapon.

And we know that Black watersmen were shooting like crazy bullets ricochet, you know, you know war zone where people are shooting bullets wind up in weird fucking places. It's entirely possible one of their rounds ricochet and got embedded in the grill of this truck. It's no way to no way to say one way there a single bullet in the girl of this truck is thin evidence to hold against the Army when their investigators say nobody was

shooting at you right, yeah now. In two thousand fourteen, four Prince's men were convicted, three of them from manslaughter in one for first degree murder, but last August two thousand seventeen, a federal appeals court throughout the convictions for three of them in order to retrial. The man with the murder conviction, Nicholas Slattin, was a sniper who the government accused of having fired the first shots, but during the trial another mercenary admitted to shooting first, so his

conviction was dropped. The other two had their convictions thrown out because the prosecutors had used a u s law made to prosecute domestic criminals to give them extra long sentences since they had committed the crime with machine guns. Um So basically, if you commit a crime in the

use of the machine gun, you get additional sentence. The prosecutors were saying, basically, look at all the people these guys killed, We owe it to those dead civilians to try and get these guys as much time as possible. So they used that law. But the jury rightfully was like, it was their job to carry machine guns. It is bullshit to give them extra time for them. That's not what wrong. So they didn't get off the case because they were legitimately innocent. It was the prosecutors who are

a little over zealous. Yeah, exactly. Uh. Now. Eric ends his book by talking about his charities and making it seem like he's enjoying the peaceful retirement of a true American hero quote, it remains to be seen what my future might hold. Tomorrow was one less day than I've gotten now, and only God knows how many more I'll have. But in the meantime, I'm enjoying a quieter life. I had a small Hoby Cat, which is a type of boat, delivered to our home in Abu Dhabi today, shortly after

my family relocated. The kids are still learning their way around the fiberglass catamaran the same way I once poked around with our Boston Whaler back in Michigan. But most every day in Abu Dhabi is a good day to swim across the bay, catching the next gust of wind, and teaching my own children to feel at home on the water. Of course, while he was in Abu Dhabi writing this, he was also teaching an army of Columbian

mercenaries to fight on behalf of the Immirati government. Dozens of those men, and god knows how many other people are now dead and Yemen, So okay, it's hard linked to now. Yeah, so it's hard to say what the future is going to be for Eric Prince, his new navy and the new air Force. I'm sure he's right around the corner from getting his hands on. I mean to guess, whatever that future is, it's going to involve a lot of bodybags. Wow, Eric, Eric, I'm just living

a quiet life now in Abu Dhabi. Yeah, training a small mercenary army for repressive theocratic regime exactly like you do. I'm like, I'm like the guys at the end of Shoshank Redemption, but with a mercenary army's going to be used to commit war crimes in Yemen. Hessions that's call ems. Oh well, I it's it's so wild because he really is like the physical manifestation of capitalism in the military

industrial complex, like all in one fucking man. It's like the worst parts of all of those things just expressed themselves in the goog turned into Eric Prince. Yeah, it's like the military industrial complex had a baby. And yeah, with late stage capitalism and in there there it is. It's Eric fucking Prince, one of the worst people who's ever lived, A true bastard for true starred. Yeah. In fact, I'm gonna get I'm gonna bump him above bastard and

call him a real piece of ship. Yeah yeah, Eric Prince. Everybody alright, Miles, you got some plug doubles to plug? Oh let's see well yeah, Glade plug ins guys. Uh, they're available at most supermarkets right now, please take that. Erwick also another plug double I love, but yeah look again, look Glaxo Smith Klein. You know S. C. Johnson wax Please holler at us. Uh. If you are looking for the more podcast route, I'm on the Daily Sight guys with Jack O'Brien. We do that every day, uh, talking

news and culture whatever's in the z geist as it were. Uh. And you find me on Twitter and Instagram at Myles with Gray. That's about it. You can find me on Twitter at I Write o. Okay. You can find my book on Amazon, a brief history advice. It's I Recreate Weird Ancient Drugs and Damage My Body. You can find this uh podcast on the Internet. Behind the Bastards dot com where you will find all of the sources for

this episode. Uh. You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at at Bastards pod so check us out, check us out on te public where we have a store, you know, behind the Bastards. You can buy our T shirts there and some of that money will go to me and I will use that money to buy the liquor that I will use to drink myself into forgetting the Derek Prince exists. So help a brother out with buying T shirts. And uh, also, let's get this Dorrito's

campaign one. Let's let's yeah, yeah, tweet why I eat Dorrito's right if you have, Because guys, what we're trying to do is connect a action from the consumer to a media source. And this is the this is how capital and in fairness, hundreds of you have already impressed. When I see your guys social media and seeing the amount of people just like posing with Doritos, it's like dozens of weeks. Sometimes part of me gets really upset though that it's this free advertising with no I mean,

it's a good product. I am all right with that, but the Stockholm syndrome, You're like, it's fine. One day they'll recognize me, and I do hope one day they will. But these are delicious. Well, if anything, we can say you are the Eric Prince of Doritos. Thank you make me the Eric Prince of Doritos. Tweet why I Love Doritos, hashtag why I eat hashtag why eat Dorritos attached at

the Dorrito's company at this podcast, and we'll see what happens. Yeah, maybe maybe I'll get my own catamaran watch with a machine I really hope. So you know what, you know what's actually gonna happen. Dorritos is gonna steal your hashtag into an actual ad campaign for like themselves and put you in the cold. That's how this ship works. If that's what happens, that's what happens. And they hope is

that they buy me a catamaran with a machine gun. Yeah, I mean, because that's how this story action is Like, hey, sorry, we can optically, we couldn't get in bed with you with the Doritos thing. Here's a catam ran with machine It is a catam ran with a machine gun. Sorry it's soft skinned. You know, we can't we goggle all the way. I don't plan on delivering kitchen supply. It's much heavier when you have an armored catagory. All right, guys, I love about you and Brian H.