On this episode of the podcast, we sit down with author and former Navy SEAL, Chris Pratt, to talk about his new book, "The Girl Who Wasn't There," and how he got into the SEALs. We also talk about what it's like being a SEAL, what it was like serving in the elite elite United States Navy SEALs, and why he decided to leave the military to pursue his dream of becoming an author. We also discuss how he was able to get into writing and what it takes to be a SEAL and stay in it after leaving the service. And, of course, there's a lot more! Check out Chris' book, The Girl Who wasn't There, which is out now! If you haven't read the book yet, you should definitely do so. It's one of my favorite books of all time and I hope you do so too! Thanks for listening and Good Luck Out There! Cheers! -Jon Sorrentino and Cheers, Jon and Matt - Chris and Jason Jon and Jason "The SEALs" Jason Ackerman Chris "The Man Who Didn't See It" Pratt & Jon "The Boy Who Was There" P.S. & Matt "The Devil Next Door" Parker John "The Black SEAL" Smith Sean "The White SEAL" Johnson of the Podcast, we talk about the new book that's coming out soon! Jon talks about how he's going to write a book about the book and how to get out of the Navy SEAL Team Six and get into SEALs and how it's going back to civilian life after the SEAL Team. Jon's experience in Afghanistan. John talks about his experience in the SEAL team. Chris talks about why he's not getting out of his first job after the military. and what he s going to do next. What it s like being in the Navy and what his plans are going to be like as a SEAL Team? What he's the best way to get a job in this book. How he's doing it and why it s a little bit more than a SEALs are better than the real life SEAL Team, and what to do with his time in Afghanistan? And how he s not going to quit the Navy? and so much more. Thank you for listening to this episode, Jon!
00:00:07.000You know, when we first met, I knew you were an author and I knew that Chris Pratt was involved in doing that thing with you and that you guys were working towards making this, which is happening now, which is very exciting.
00:01:25.000It would be strange for me not to talk about gear, just because I was a gear guy before I went in the Navy.
00:01:30.000And then, of course, in the SEAL teams, you're like...
00:01:32.000That's your time to shine and to like go down these rabbit holes and try to make the gear better or anything that's going to make you more effective and efficient on the battlefield.
00:02:02.000And since I was a little kid, my mom was a librarian, so I grew up surrounded by books and this love of reading from a very early age.
00:02:08.000And back then, like so early 80s, there's hardly anything written about SEALs.
00:02:11.000But what there is written is a lot of times from fiction.
00:02:15.000So protagonists in different stories by guys like Tom Clancy, David Murrell, Nelson DeMille, A.J. Quinnell, all these guys in the 80s who had protagonists with backgrounds I wanted to have in real life one day.
00:02:24.000And I enjoyed reading them so much, I knew that after the military, then I would write.
00:02:28.000So I just said, that's going to be the path.
00:02:51.000I'm always a reader, both fiction and non.
00:02:54.000So all those guys I read in the 80s, those are like my professors in the art of storytelling.
00:02:58.000And then I coupled that with the academic study of warfare.
00:03:01.000Terrorism, insurgencies, counterinsurgencies, and then the practical application from Afghanistan, from Iraq, and then it all kind of came together at the right time and place as I was getting out.
00:03:10.000So for that last year, year and a half, then I started writing because I wasn't taking guys downrange anymore.
00:03:15.000My job was essentially to get out of the military.
00:03:19.000You feel like you're the first person to do it, even though people do it every day.
00:03:22.000But you walk in and you need to get something signed or go to a meeting or get read out of a secret program or go to medical or dental.
00:03:28.000So your job becomes to get out of this gigantic bureaucracy.
00:03:43.000Yeah, he didn't do these transition classes you're supposed to do, and you sit there in these rooms, and people drone on and on about transition, and there are some options for you.
00:04:09.000So you were planning all along to write.
00:04:13.000And so during that time, while you were being deployed and while you're being a SEAL, in the back of your head, that was always a part of the plan.
00:05:17.000So that's where Jocko was when he did his last deployment as a troop commander as an 04, which is a major in the other services, a lieutenant commander in the Navy.
00:05:24.000And after that, yeah, you're still a leader, but you're leading from behind, essentially.
00:05:28.000You're in a tactical operations center.
00:05:50.000And my mom introduced me to a guy named Joseph Campbell back in 1987. So he did a series of interviews with Bill Moyers on PBS called The Power of Myth.
00:05:59.000And he wrote a book called Hero with a Thousand Faces.
00:06:01.000So back in 1988. So I'm I don't know, 11 years old or whatever, 12 years old.
00:06:05.000I get introduced to him and I read that book and I watched all those interviews and I read the book that came out called The Power of Myth based on those interviews.
00:06:13.000And I think I applied that paradigm, that model of the hero's journey, the monolith, to really every movie I watched, every series I watched, every book I read from then on.
00:06:23.000And that really helped as I made the transition because I had this foundation.
00:06:26.000It wasn't just like I woke up one day and said, you know what?
00:06:42.000And while I was in the military, I kept reading for fun.
00:06:44.000I read those fiction books still and I discovered Stephen Hunter and Brad Thorne and Vince Flynn and Daniel Silva and now Mark Graney today.
00:06:52.000So those are kind of the bigger names in the genre.
00:06:55.000But then I was also studying, studying all that non-fiction stuff, trying to stay up on my game to make the best decisions I possibly could under fire for the guys when it mattered.
00:07:03.000So just always studying, always reading.
00:07:05.000When I was downrange, I never really watched a movie or played video games.
00:07:09.000It was always, if I wasn't operating or we weren't putting together a target package, I was reading.
00:07:15.000Because I would think that most people that would venture for and become a professional novelist, they would have some sort of background in writing, like some sort of education, some classical education, English literature or something.
00:07:31.000It was all knowing what I liked, knowing what I didn't like.
00:07:33.000And that's why the first novel is really all about revenge, because that theme resonated with me.
00:07:39.000Obviously, it's resonated with people from the told in a way to pass on some sort of a lesson about something to the next generation so they don't have to learn the same lessons in blood but they're told As a story and passed down that way.
00:07:52.000And I think that's why there's so many Death Wish movies.
00:07:56.000Because if someone cuts you off in traffic, you can't go out and do something.
00:07:58.000Or someone, you know, at work, there's some politics, you don't get the promotion or whatever, you get mad.
00:08:17.000But you can explore all that in the pages of a fictional thriller.
00:08:20.000So I think that's why it resonates with people.
00:08:23.000And then in this particular case, I got to take the emotions and feelings behind things I was involved in downrange and then just apply them to a fictional narrative.
00:08:31.000So I didn't have to talk to somebody and say, how did it feel to be a sniper in Ramadi in 2005, 2006?
00:08:36.000And then filter that through whatever biases I had or whatever, my past experience or whatever, and then put it into a fictional narrative.
00:08:43.000No, I just took my experience and then just morphed it and put it into the narrative.
00:08:48.000So it ended up being very therapeutic.
00:10:32.000If you're coming from sports or politics, you can sell that idea because they know they're going to get some sales.
00:10:37.000For this, you have to have the whole manuscript done.
00:10:40.000So the first one took about just two years, and you get it as good as you can possibly get it.
00:10:44.000And then what you're supposed to do is go to an agent.
00:10:46.000But I didn't know that, thank goodness, because I did that research I talked about with Steven Pressfield's books on creativity, War of Art.
00:10:54.000Authentic Swing, Turning Pro, Do the Work.
00:13:08.000So if you write a book, what I can do for you, your friend told me some things you did in the SEAL teams, and as a thank you for that, I'll let my publisher know it's coming.
00:13:16.000I can't guarantee they'll open the package, can't guarantee they'll read one word, definitely can't guarantee that they'll like it, but as a thank you, I can let them know it's coming.
00:14:05.000He said, is it done or is it the best you can possibly make it?
00:14:09.000And I said, well, I could probably edit it a little bit, but it's finished.
00:14:12.000And he's like, alright, call me back again when it's the best you can possibly do.
00:14:16.000So I took another four months of reading it and editing it, sending it to a couple friends, and then called him back four months later and said, this is the best I can possibly get it.
00:14:24.000And he said, alright, I'll let him know it's coming.
00:14:25.000So how many hours a day do you think you were putting in?
00:14:31.000I mean, I would love to get on a discipline-type schedule, like a Jocko-type schedule someday, but I'm not quite there yet, especially at this stage where I still feel like this is a startup.
00:14:41.000And I can't say no to a lot of things.
00:14:45.000I need to take advantage of emerging opportunities just like I would on the battlefield.
00:14:48.000Looking at the enemy, they're learning from us, we're learning from them, and it's really who adapts quicker.
00:14:53.000You're looking for those emerging opportunities, taking advantage of momentum.
00:15:06.000So you're not just writing and sending it to New York, which is what I thought up until about the time I published the first one.
00:15:12.000I thought you just went back and forth with an editor a little bit and then you start the next book.
00:15:16.000Well, really you have to do advertising, branding, co-branding, your marketing stuff, your budgets, your social media.
00:15:24.000Like anything you would have to do with any other business that you're starting up, you have to do as an author.
00:15:29.000So I kind of treated it as a startup and starting it like just like you're starting something in your garage and you're hungry and you're passionate and you're seeing an opportunity here or there and you just want to build this readership and let people know that you have this character and See where it goes.
00:15:46.000So point being, at some point, I think you get to a stage where you can say no and you don't have to sprint off in all these different directions almost at the same time.
00:15:55.000And you can say, okay, you know what I'm going to do?
00:15:57.000I'm going to wake up and I'm going to write for four hours.
00:15:59.000And it doesn't matter if someone calls for an interview or if CNN wants you on or Fox News wants you on.
00:16:16.000And then all of a sudden, no, I'm not writing for those four hours in the morning.
00:16:19.000So usually it's the first novel and all the others.
00:16:24.000We're really done between 10 at night and about 4 in the morning because that's the time it was quiet in our house with three kids, a dog, wife.
00:16:31.000Yeah, that's how I do stand-up writing too.
00:16:37.000But I have friends that feel like they can't work like that and they only work good if they get up in the morning and then write immediately.
00:17:32.000Waking up at 5, getting down there and doing these crazy trail runs, CrossFit stuff, jumping in the pool, doing all sorts of crazy stuff that these guys put together.
00:17:38.000And it's like five or six CrossFit workouts meshed into one with trail running, with the endurance side.
00:17:45.000What group are you in with that's doing this?
00:18:17.000And get up with them, work out, get home, get the kids to school.
00:18:20.000So I had a schedule like that for a little bit, but then it all became, hey, when you're working until four in the morning and getting up an hour and a half later, that's a little much.
00:18:33.000You're testing stuff out, and then you're home, and maybe you get home, and then you're making some...
00:18:37.000But then after you tested out something at the comedy club, you come home and make those notes...
00:18:42.000Yeah, well luckily now the way, well now we can't do shit, but when this crisis, the COVID thing wasn't going on, what I would do is I would record my sets on my iPhone and then on the way home I would listen to this set and then when I got home either I would listen to it more or I would write.
00:18:58.000You know, sometimes I'd listen to it more and then take notes and then write and try to adjust or just write on completely different subjects.
00:19:05.000But I just got to a schedule where the best writing I was doing was when no one was home.
00:19:10.000Because I'd be writing, and then I'd hear, Daddy, I got a question, or Daddy...
00:19:15.000Or my wife would want to know something, or someone else would need something, or phones would ring...
00:19:21.000At 2 o'clock in the morning, no one's calling you.
00:19:38.000And when you're up at 4 and you crash and then try to get up 6 hours later or not even 5 hours later and then get to the gym with a little bit of food in your stomach, you...
00:20:01.000He brings a tripod and a fucking camera, and he sets it up in the back of the room and films every set he does, and then he edits it all himself on his computer.
00:20:51.000Yeah, so for me, I feel like I need to thank everybody at this point because I feel so fortunate that the books are resonating with people and really this whole thing's been at grassroots.
00:21:00.000This third book made the New York Times list.
00:21:02.000And it made it without, like, a national news appearance or with any of these other bigger things.
00:21:17.000And then these companies like Black Rifle Coffee, like those guys, like, you know, veteran-owned businesses or, you know, like Dudley, like those guys that posted, Andy Stumpf, like all those guys that held it up and said, oh, I love this.
00:22:12.000So you treat those people differently.
00:22:14.000So the guy who wants directions and doesn't even want to buy anything, I mean, you treat them, hey, here's how you get back to the interstate.
00:22:29.000I treat people on social media the same way I would If I was interacting with them the way we are right here, but just across the table at my business local general store.
00:22:37.000So I try to treat it like that, but I'm about at that point where there's too many people coming into the store, and I can't say hi to everybody.
00:22:45.000But I still am so sincerely thankful for everyone that took a risk on me as I was starting this out.
00:22:52.000I understand where you're coming from.
00:22:54.000And I used to interact with people all the time online, too.
00:22:57.000But then it got to the point where I was like, I see too many of my friends getting mad about things or engaging back and forth and having these Twitter wars with people.
00:23:06.000And then I realized, like, that's the worst way to communicate ever.
00:23:10.000It's just not a good, effective way to express yourself with another human being if there's any sort of a dispute or disagreement about things.
00:23:20.000The best way to express yourself is in person.
00:23:22.000And I know you can't do that with everybody, but you only have so much time in the day.
00:23:29.000It's not a smart way to value your time.
00:25:55.000You have an automatic weapon guy that has a ton of ammo.
00:25:58.000Then you're going, you're hitting this compound, and you're putting these ladders up, and then you're going through these windows.
00:26:01.000And sometimes there are these spaces you have to get into to clear where people are hiding or they're hiding weapons.
00:26:07.000So encyclopedia of bodybuilding and running as far as you could, as fast as you could in sand, and that being all you did, there's probably a better way.
00:26:15.000So we're kind of forced into it, essentially.
00:26:18.000Do they do any work where they're monitoring heart rate and checking recovery and trying to keep you at a certain heart rate while you're working?
00:26:37.000And one of the things that they did that incorporated a little technology was in Hell Week, like when I went through with Andy, they'd just pull you out of the surf and then they'd walk down the line and shine a flashlight in your eyes.
00:26:49.000And they'd say, okay, this guy is on the verge of hypothermia.
00:28:15.000And everywhere you go, you're going to be tracked.
00:28:16.000You're telling them when they come up with a vaccine, they're going to just drop that tracking and go, hey, go back to being completely free.
00:28:29.000Every week you have people on talking about bills that they're sponsoring.
00:28:32.000Well, are they getting rid of another one to add that one?
00:28:35.000There's a book called Three Felonies a Day, and it talks about how a guy wakes up, and the normal guy gets up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, has dinner, puts the kids to bed.
00:28:44.000And unbeknownst to him, during that day, he has committed three felonies because there are so many laws on the books you can't even keep track.
00:28:51.000The American Bar Association can't even tell you how many laws are on the books, state, local, federal, international ones that play in.
00:28:59.000All sorts of different ordinances, laws, and you're breaking at least three of them a day to commit a felony.
00:29:04.000It's a fascinating book, and they're not going to give those back.
00:29:07.000They're not going to give those freedoms back.
00:29:08.000I read a really disturbing thing today, and I'm not even sure if it's true, so we should find out right now.
00:29:14.000Did the CDC stop tracking flu deaths for this year?
00:29:18.000Because this is what I read, and it might have been some wacko right-wing website that I was on, so you never know.
00:29:24.000But I was like, this can't be true because the real concern is that the CDC tracks flu and they find out that flu is lower or the same as COVID and why we're making a big deal out of COVID and then, you know, people riot in the streets.
00:30:46.000But obviously, this year we've locked everybody down, worldwide even, and there has to be a slower spread because of this quarantining and because of the social distancing.
00:30:58.000So I would imagine you're getting far lower numbers than they would have gotten if everybody had just gone out into the streets.
00:31:07.000But for flu, this is my understanding because that fourth novel that I'm writing right now, I was deep into the study of infectious diseases.
00:31:17.000And then how you weaponize those infectious diseases, what the Japanese did prior to World War II in that space, how they used them in World War II against the Chinese, what happened to that data Afterward, after the war.
00:31:28.000The Soviet program from the end of World War II up to the collapse.
00:33:18.000You send a virus throughout the world.
00:33:21.000And the key is if you make your virus too strong, it's a video game you play on your iPad or your phone.
00:33:26.000If you make the virus too strong, it kills people too quickly, and then it doesn't spread.
00:33:32.000So the way you get a virus everywhere is you have one that sits in your system for a little bit, and it's just weak in the beginning, and slowly spreads its way across the world.
00:33:42.000And that's essentially what this is in a lot of ways.
00:34:31.000If you have a goal and you want your country to survive, then you don't want it to become a global pandemic.
00:34:35.000You want it to hit the city, the country, whatever geographic area you want to hit with a weaponized infectious disease, you want it to burn out in that city.
00:34:44.000So instead of going over and dropping bombs on it, like World War II, like firebombing Dresden or whatever else, or Tokyo, and just destroying those cities, well, you know what?
00:34:54.000After the war, you can go in with an infectious disease and, you know, it's burned out and there's no damage.
00:34:59.000But you don't want it to spread throughout the whole world and come back to your own country.
00:35:02.000So when I first looked at this and I heard about Wuhan, I heard that there was a, not a weapons lab maybe, but maybe it's a weapons lab, but at least a lab doing research in infectious diseases a couple miles from these wet markets where they're saying that this thing broke out.
00:35:19.000There are cases in the former Soviet Union of them doing this research into infectious diseases and weaponizing it and then having it get out because the protocols weren't followed or whatever else and kills a few people and they hush-hush it because it's 1960-something or 1970-something.
00:35:34.000So there is precedent and it wouldn't be beyond the pale to think that, oh, someone was doing some sort of research.
00:35:41.000And it doesn't even have to be weaponization.
00:35:42.000It can just be they're just studying this infectious disease, not even weaponizing it, and someone Contracts it somehow in that lab and then brings it outside.
00:35:52.000Yeah, that's the controversial theory.
00:35:54.000The controversial experiments in Wuhan lab suspected of starting the coronavirus pandemic and says the case against a Wuhan lab.
00:36:02.000And so it says why the Wuhan lab remains a suspect in the coronavirus investigation.
00:36:07.000I mean, it's really likely that we never really will know, but they most certainly were working on viruses similar to this one right there.
00:36:16.000The end of this article says there's another one called RATG13, which is very, very similar to the SARS-CoV-2 one that we're experiencing now.
00:36:33.000It's thought to be the most similar to SARS-CoV-2 of any known virus.
00:36:37.000The two share 96% of their genetic material.
00:36:39.000That 4% gap would still be a formidable gap for animal passage research, says Ralph Baric, virologist, University of North Carolina, probably in bed with the Russians, who collaborated with, like, when you found out that a Harvard guy got arrested because he was taking money from Russia,
00:36:56.000or excuse me, taking money from China because he was doing something with them.
00:37:52.000Yeah, well, in 2018, they were actually cited for violating safety protocols at that same lab in 2018. So there were concerns about that area long before.
00:38:03.000But what's really fucked up is the World Health Organization posted in January that, according to China, there is no evidence of person-to-person transmission of this disease.
00:38:14.000Days after they knew for sure it was being transmitted from person to person.
00:38:19.000So China has been deceptive about this from the very beginning, and they think that if they were honest about it and that they stopped everybody from leaving, they could have covered this in the point where it would have been 95% less.
00:38:51.000It seems like, but the way they handle their own citizens, when their citizens are tested positive, there's this horrible video of this family being dragged out by these people in hazmat suits, and they're trying to resist.
00:39:00.000These people are dragging them away because they tested positive.
00:39:31.000Those concern me, and obviously we've given up a lot of our information in terms of data, where we go, the map information, that kind of shit.
00:39:38.000But this tracking thing really freaks me the fuck out.
00:41:04.000So the first one is really very – I wanted it to be very basic, very visceral, very primal, right out of the gate because I knew – That in New York, Simon& Schuster, all these big publishing houses, they see thousands of these things a year.
00:41:14.000So something needs to make this stand out.
00:41:16.000And a lot of that was the personal experience from Iraq and Afghanistan morphed into the novel to make it feel real personal and visceral.
00:41:22.000So I wanted to come out swinging with that novel of Revenge Without Constraints.
00:41:26.000I'd done that research essentially just as part of my life by going to Iraq, going to Afghanistan, all those sorts of things.
00:41:33.000For the second one, I knew it had to be different.
00:41:34.000So I put in a lot more of the geopolitics of what's going on with Russia, power struggles, all this other, to make it a little different because I didn't want people saying, oh, he's just a one-trick pony.
00:42:13.000At a time to kill, he'd probably still be practicing law somewhere in Memphis.
00:42:17.000So I knew I was always going to write too.
00:42:19.000So off I went to Mozambique to do that research, get that boots on the ground experience like I had in Iraq, had in Afghanistan already for the first novel.
00:42:26.000I had by living in San Diego, knowing LA, knowing New York, and really being able to incorporate what I'd done already.
00:42:33.000But I hadn't been to Mozambique, had to go there.
00:42:35.000So I put boots on the ground and everybody over there wanted to tell me the story of their country, wanted to talk about the politics, wanted to talk about Chinese influence in the region with mining operations, both legal and illegal, and the meat poaching that goes along to feed all the people in those mines, how that's affecting the environment.
00:42:50.000So that couldn't stop them from talking.
00:42:53.000And then for this third one, I thought it would be the same in Russia.
00:42:56.000So I wanted to go to Kamchatka Peninsula and do a hunt, do a little fishing over there at the same time, but it's all part of the research.
00:43:02.000And for one month a year, you can get to Kamchatka Peninsula from Alaska.
00:43:07.000So you don't have to go from here to Germany or London.
00:43:32.000And it's on the military installation because the people guiding us used to have some connection to the government.
00:43:36.000So he has this hunting concession out there in the backcountry.
00:43:39.000And I thought they'd all want to talk to me.
00:43:41.000And then I realized very quickly that for most of Russian history, if someone is asking you pointed questions, that kind of you'd ask if you're writing a political thriller, you are not long for this world.
00:43:50.000It was off the firing squad, gulag, off to Siberia, whatever.
00:43:53.000So they were very hesitant to talk to me.
00:44:34.000Because usually I follow the customs of the local people because I don't want to show up and be kind of the ugly American and show, oh, I'm better than you.
00:45:46.000But I'll tell you, bottled black bear, and maybe it was eating blueberries or whatever, But it was, and it sat on our counter for six months, because my wife was like, hmm, get the fuck out of here with this.
00:45:58.000So then we had all these guys came over, like, that's from Total Artistry Challenge, and we came over to the house, we did a wild game dinner.
00:46:04.000Trevor Thompson came over, and so we were We open it up, and it was everyone's favorite.
00:46:50.000People are so wrapped up in bears because of teddy bears.
00:46:53.000They have this distorted perception of what a bear is.
00:46:56.000And people that have no problem eating cows will get mad at you if you eat a bear.
00:47:01.000Do you know how much nicer a cow is than a fucking bear?
00:47:05.000Cows don't eat their young, I don't think.
00:47:07.000Not only do they eat their children, they'll...
00:47:10.000They kill other people's children, well, other bears' children, rather.
00:47:14.000When I was in Alberta, my friend John and Jen, the people who run the camp out there, the Rivets, their son saw a male bear kill a cub, and then the female bear chased the male bear away and then finished eating her cub.
00:48:02.000There's some animals that we have in our head that you're not supposed to eat.
00:48:06.000And we also, I think, we connect bears to what you would call trophy hunting, meaning like someone who hunts lions, someone who hunts things you don't eat.
00:48:15.000Although mountain lion apparently is very good.
00:49:21.000And it goes off into this thick, thick brush.
00:49:25.000And in the States, because I went and did another hunt in Alaska this year, they won't let you go in after a wounded bear into the thick stuff.
00:49:32.000Maybe some will, but from what I've gleaned, they're going to go in and do it.
00:49:37.000Kind of like going in after a wounded leopard or something in Africa.
00:49:40.000That's where the guides are going to go earn it, go and do that.
00:49:43.000So this thing's wounded, and they hand me this rusty side-by-side shotgun that's at the bottom of this boat that we're in, this little tiny little boat that we're in on this river.
00:49:55.000And the guy hands it to me and then hands me two shells.
00:49:58.000And I'm looking at this rusty thing and I have these two shells in my hand and I'm like, okay.
00:50:02.000And I'm like, no, because he had a couple more.
00:50:05.000And I trained up for Africa with a double rifle.
00:50:08.000I went to FTW Ranch in Texas to get really good with a double rifle because I wanted to do a Cape Buffalo hunt the same way someone would have done it 100 years ago.
00:52:02.000But before we hear the death bellow, the guide in broken English was like, I'm going to go around the other side and I'm going to scare him towards you.
00:53:59.000So when they say we're not doing something and they say it in a way with this Russian accent and there's really – it's not really like, oh, let's talk about it.
00:55:04.000But they had a whole bunch of other stuff too, some crazy Russian stuff, and I got to incorporate those vehicles into the novel as well.
00:55:10.000So you really never know what you're going to get until you get on the ground, talk to people, build those relationships, and then things end up making their way into the stories.
00:55:18.000Have you ever seen that Werner Herzog documentary, Happy People, Life on the Taiga?
00:56:16.000But their life is so compatible with being a human being.
00:56:22.000It's like there's something about our human reward systems that have evolved over thousands and thousands of years that being a hunter-gatherer just completely locks in with all the things that keep you content and happy.
00:57:33.000Like, no one else can have this sort of— Goes back to the government?
00:57:35.000Yeah, I don't think anybody else is going to be allowed, but it's another amazing documentary.
00:57:39.000And he's a guy who's a really—he's an American guy who's really articulate, very interesting guy, very intelligent guy who loves living like this.
00:57:48.000And he raised his family out there, and his wife is American Eskimo.
00:57:53.000It's just a fucking amazing way of life.
00:57:58.000I mean, I like cities, I like cars, I like all that stuff.
00:58:01.000But there's something incredibly compelling about being completely reliant on nature and your own, you know, ingenuity and hard work.
00:58:11.000He was talking about it in this documentary where the Vice people...
00:58:15.000This is back when Vice was, you know, just starting out, too.
00:58:18.000This Vice Guide to Travel was one of their earlier series that they were doing on YouTube.
00:58:23.000And it's really cool when you're seeing this guy who's this reporter who has no experience like this at all interacting with this guy and him explaining his life and why he lives like this and why it's so important to him and...
00:58:38.000I think maybe that's why people find their way back to nature in some way, shape, or form.
00:59:01.000Yeah, for the people I think also, this was a little bit of a wake-up call for people as far as how soft we've gotten generally as a people.
00:59:08.000And I'll say from the end of World War II, for those guys that came back and got back to work, didn't complain, and built this country into what it is today.
00:59:16.000But since then, we've gotten a little soft.
00:59:19.000And people are like, oh, wait a second.
00:59:23.000Maybe it would have been better had I had like a week of food or maybe I would have had Do I have a gun in the house?
00:59:52.000How do you adapt to having your family at home and moving forward here when maybe you don't have a job anymore and you need to get creative?
00:59:58.000So you're worried instead about, oh, how many beans are in the cap?
01:00:02.000But instead, if you had, oh, we have three.
01:00:04.000And everybody's experience is going to be different, like what they're comfortable with as far as their levels of preparedness.
01:00:09.000And it's not really about being paranoid.
01:00:11.000It's just allowing you to focus elsewhere if there's a natural disaster here in California, like an earthquake, you know, other places, you know, tsunami, whatever it is, hurricanes, whatever.
01:00:22.000It allows you then to focus where you need to be focused.
01:00:26.000And some people will be like, three days of food and maybe a little water.
01:00:30.000Do I need something to filter water with in case I turn on the tap and there's nothing that comes out?
01:01:07.000So it was very natural for us to have a couple guns, have some ammo, have some water, have some food.
01:01:12.000Because when this hit, you know what I did?
01:01:14.000A book was coming out, and I had to figure out how to adapt very quickly to the changing environment and launch it.
01:01:19.000To me, it was very important to do it in an appropriate way and do as much good as I could at the same time by helping independent bookstores who have no foot traffic, that sort of thing.
01:01:28.000But very quickly, I had to take that breath, look around, And adapt.
01:01:33.000And I didn't have to worry about food or water or filtration systems or ammo or protecting my family.
01:01:40.000So I got to put all my effort into figuring out how to adapt to these changing conditions.
01:01:44.000Did you get a lot of questions from people like, how do I get a gun?
01:02:00.000And I can't even loan you one because if I loan you one and you walk more than 20 yards away or whatever, now it's an illegal transfer of a firearm.
01:02:07.000So, sorry, I might have 300 of them, but guess who's not getting any?
01:02:21.000Like, this is where people are protected, and when societies weren't running great, and we, you know, up until this pandemic, at least, we had a wonderful society.
01:02:31.000I mean, it's like, I mean, there are problems with every society.
01:02:34.000It's certainly not perfect, and there's certainly a lot of crime, and certainly there's things wrong.
01:02:39.000But, however, it is absolutely the best time in history to be a human being and to be alive.
01:02:57.000There's not enough cops in the world to deal with riots.
01:03:00.000If there's mass riots in the street and people are breaking into people's houses and the world becomes lawless because the economy has absolutely collapsed and people that were maybe like a little bit sketchy Just go on to become a full-on criminal.
01:03:14.000That is absolutely inside the realm of possibility, and we need to recognize that.
01:03:18.000And the people that were anti-gun, there is, I mean, a great percentage of them now are saying to me, like, either I want a gun, or I get it, or how do I get a gun, or how do I train?
01:03:31.000Like, I see those videos of you training.
01:04:08.000This is the first time that you've been somewhere else and you've been able to...
01:04:12.000It's not LA riots and you're seeing the Korean shopkeepers defending their stores.
01:04:17.000It's not Katrina where you're hearing a few things about the police maybe confiscating firearms there, but then not being able to protect yourself.
01:04:25.000But, you know, if you live in Montana or maybe you're in upstate New York or whatever and you're seeing that on the news and then you go back to making your dinner and having whatever...
01:04:56.000It drove home the vulnerability, and I think this is a good dry run, because this is...
01:05:01.000And I don't want to disrespect anybody who's died or anybody who's got sick, but this is not the worst pandemic the world's ever experienced.
01:05:08.000It's not nearly as bad as, like, the 1918 Spanish Flu, which killed 50 million people worldwide.
01:06:34.000That's one of my jobs is to be able to prepare my family and defend my family if need be.
01:06:40.000So my family might be maybe a little bit different, but my wife spent at Thunder Ranch up in Oregon training on both pistols and ARs up there.
01:06:49.000Our daughter has been hunting since she's seven.
01:06:51.000You know, she's very comfortable with firearms.
01:07:31.000Besides 9-11, there's no real attacks on American soil other than that one day.
01:07:36.000So you look at the United States over this long period of time, you're like, wow, this is like the most amazing time ever to be alive and everything's going so great.
01:07:45.000This is just how it's going to be now forever.
01:07:46.000And then something like this happens and people realize, oh...
01:07:50.000And especially, I feel terrible for the people that work hard every day and then their job's taken away from them.
01:08:07.000And it's, uh, yeah, it's also one of the, well, it's the other piece when we talk about being prepared, it's the one that often gets overlooked when you're talking about preparedness is that financial security piece.
01:08:16.000So, and for everybody, it's going to be, going to be different.
01:08:22.000That's what the experts say or whatever.
01:08:24.000Uh, everyone's going to be different, but it's important.
01:08:26.000I think going forward for people to realize if they weren't prepared financially, for this that going forward they need to start putting a little bit away they need to talk to somebody about how they best can do that because things aren't always going to be rows you're going to face adversity in life and we're just like we're facing as a country now like yeah you're gonna face it in life as well it doesn't have to be a pandemic you could just lose your job or something could happen to a family member whatever it may be it doesn't need to be a pandemic or a terrorist attack or anything these global calamities it can just be you losing your job or
01:08:56.000getting sick or whatever it may be so having that foundation of financial security Hopefully that's one of those notes people are taking from this going forward so they can be better prepared, not just for any of these calamities we're talking about, but just for normal, everyday life.
01:09:11.000And you're going to have to get up and keep moving forward.
01:09:13.000And you know what's going to help you with that is not wasting bandwidth on figuring out how you're going to pay that next bill because you're prepared ahead of time.
01:09:20.000I hope people also recognize that if you're in a dead-end job and you've been just playing it safe, and then it got taken away from you because of this pandemic, and even though you played it safe and you did this terrible job that sucks, you realize, maybe I should have chased my dream.
01:10:43.000I went to the UPS store on the main street there called Orange Avenue, and I wanted to get next-day air, tracking, you know, everything, insurance, whatever you could possibly do.
01:10:52.000I'm sure you had other copies of it, right?
01:10:56.000And what I found out from taking those notes in the car when I was talking to Brad Thor, I found out how Emily Bessler, who is his editor, who is Vince Flynn's editor, who did the Mitch Rapp series, who sadly passed away a few years ago, but he wrote a book called Term Limits in the late 90s that really defined the modern political thriller.
01:11:24.000But back then, I wanted to do everything I possibly could to increase my chances of success or making her not just look at it and have anything, even if it was just psychological, like, oh, it's in the wrong font.
01:13:16.000So exploring that, because a lot of us are drawn to these jobs where we're defending our country, defending the guys to our right and left when we're downrange.
01:13:29.000They've been picking up the same type of weapons to provide meals for that tribe.
01:13:32.000They've been passing down lessons on how to hunt and how to defeat other tribes in battle to ensure the success and the continuation of their bloodline.
01:14:08.000So I wanted people to invest in this character, to like him, to want to sit down and have a beer with him.
01:14:13.000But also he needed to have that background, the training, the experience to be able to flip that switch when everything's taken away.
01:14:20.000And essentially become the terrorist, become the insurgent that he'd been fighting for the last, at that point, 16 years at war.
01:14:26.000And use those tactics, techniques, and procedures that work so well against us from the enemy side in Iraq and Afghanistan and use those here on the home front.
01:14:34.000So it's more than just a story of revenge, that first one.
01:14:37.000It's really also about someone who comes home and brings the wars from Iraq and Afghanistan home to people who have been sending young men and women to their deaths for close to 20 years now.
01:14:46.000So you can read it at a couple different levels depending on how deep you want to go into it.
01:14:51.000Now, when you sent it to her, how long did it take before they responded?
01:15:01.000I totally remember because after I put it in, after I mailed it, I'm in the street walking back to the Land Cruiser and this crazy lady walks out into the street from around the corner in this nightgown.
01:15:18.000And it was right there, like 50 feet away, and I couldn't say no.
01:15:21.000So I remember this vividly that I sent this off, had my lifetime dream.
01:15:26.000I get it in the mail to Emily Bessler at Simon& Schuster, and off it goes.
01:15:29.000And I'm taking that breath, and I take a couple steps towards the car, and this lady runs around the corner in this frantic look in her eye.
01:17:03.000So he could have put the kibosh on it if he was a bitch.
01:17:20.000And so for me, from Buds and having that bell right there that's inside of you during Hell Week, we put it in the trailer hitch of these vehicles that follow you everywhere so you don't even have to run anywhere.
01:17:29.000You just have to take a few steps and ring this thing and you're done.
01:17:32.000So that really resonated with me because of that.
01:18:07.000And then the second one, there's another torture scene.
01:18:09.000And then in this other, the first one, there's one that I got from the Shining Path guerrilla movement in South America.
01:18:14.000And what they used to do is, and they got it from somewhere too, but they'd essentially eviscerate you while you're alive and make you walk around a tree.
01:18:22.000So your intestines are now wrapped around this tree and then the jungle eats you alive.
01:18:29.000So I was worried that might be a little off-putting to somebody in New York and publishing.
01:18:32.000But later I found out that that's like everyone's favorite chapter from the book, especially people you wouldn't expect, like librarians and like people absolutely love it.
01:18:41.000But I get to New York and I'm little, like, so now I'm like, okay, I want to make a good impression.
01:20:56.000I haven't broken up with someone in 20 years, but I felt like I was breaking up with someone because I was so invested in both of these agents.
01:21:03.000And I was in Lanai at the time when I made the decision, and I was like, oh, man, it felt like the final rose ceremony.
01:21:09.000And then picked the one with ICM because I thought, You know, for this type of a novel and for where I want it to go with a movie or series or something like that, to be that part of the mosaic and to continue building this foundation of readers, I think that's probably the right choice.
01:21:28.000And so what's crazy is that as I'm writing this, now they tell you not to think of someone playing your character as you're writing.
01:21:33.000But as a child of the 80s, that's almost impossible not to do.
01:21:36.000So as I'm writing, the crazy part is, like, usually you think of, like, Mark Wahlberg, or you think of somebody that had done these sort of things kind of before.
01:22:27.000You know, nothing not to like about Magnum.
01:22:29.000And he also does the first essentially what you would call a murder on national television with the other person not having a firearm or a weapon.
01:22:40.000And it's the end of, I think it's season three.
01:22:43.000But a guy that had him as a POW in Vietnam comes to Hawaii.
01:22:46.000There's a little conspiracy thing involved.
01:22:48.000And at the end, he thinks he's walking away.
01:22:50.000And then Magnum asks him if he's seen the sun rise that morning.
01:22:53.000Because that morning when his friend gets killed, there's a sunrise.
01:22:56.000And the guy turns around and he's like, yes, why?
01:23:39.000But I also thought about, because I've been studying this since my whole life, and I thought about in the 80s, look what Tom Hanks did in the 80s.
01:24:13.000Before the first book came out, I'm at Thunder Ranch training, doing some shooting stuff up there in Oregon, and I get this call from a guy that I knew in the SEAL teams.
01:24:21.000And he's like, hey, bro, do you remember me?
01:24:36.000And he's like, hey, you know, I just want to thank you for a couple when I was leaving the SEAL teams, I don't know if you remember, but you've had me in your office, you sat me down, you talked about transition, you introduced me some people in the private sector, and I've never forgotten it.
01:24:47.000I was like, Oh, wow, hey, of course, I'm gonna do that for you.
01:24:49.000Because I mean, he's awesome to total stud, great operator, and wants to get out of the team.
01:24:53.000So I'm gonna try to help him as best I can.
01:25:22.000So when I was in Ramadi in 2005, 2006, that's where I got to think about this a little bit.
01:25:28.000Because every time you left The Wire, anything could have been an IED. And you could have either spent that time on the way to Target and coming back from Target worried about, oh, is that dead donkey on the side?
01:25:38.000Is that going to blow up and kill me or hit that Humvee in front of me?
01:25:47.000You could spend every single mission, especially going to and from Target and even on Target, Worried about that.
01:25:54.000Or you could focus on the mission, focus on the job, get there, do the job, get back.
01:25:58.000And at that time, I was like, you know, I think I have to resign myself to fate here in a lot of these things.
01:26:05.000Otherwise, my mind is going to be focused not where it needs to be, but on is that an IED? Is that an IED? And so I thought, all right, you know what?
01:26:12.000If I get blown up today, that's just how it was.
01:26:15.000We're doing everything we possibly can to mitigate that.
01:26:17.000But it could happen, and I'm not going to spend an inordinate amount of bandwidth worried about that, other than trying to mitigate it as best we possibly can.
01:26:25.000But that's not going to be the focus of everything that I'm thinking about.
01:27:20.000So I guess, and I haven't really thought of it too much since then, other than that experience in Iraq, and just having to, or feeling like I had to resign myself to it.
01:27:30.000The Chris Pratt thing is eerie, though.
01:29:10.000Like, most of the people that talk about that stuff, they're trying to sell you something that, well, you know, you can make your life happen and you just need a dream board and write all those things down.
01:29:18.000There's a lot of that stuff is horseshit because you got to do the work, right?
01:29:23.000But part of me thinks that if you do do the work and you do have that focus and that intensity, I feel like there might be some sort of frequency that you can tap in where you make things more likely to happen or possibly you can make things happen.
01:29:39.000But the thing is, you only hear those stories from the people that are successful.
01:29:43.000Like how many people are like, I wrote a book.
01:29:45.000I had Chris Pratt in my head, and I said, Chris!
01:29:49.000And he's like, get the fuck away from me!
01:29:51.000No, it's totally crazy how all that stuff kind of comes together.
01:29:56.000You couldn't have picked a better guy than Chris.
01:30:10.000Like, you know, it's like, people love to say that actors are full of shit, and they're gross, and they're self-centered, and narcissists, and it's true a lot of the time.
01:30:20.000And Chris is a great example of a guy who's like, he's a very religious guy, very pro-military, very, he's a really positive guy, very, very, very friendly guy.
01:31:01.000And usually they like to get rid of the author right away when you option something because they're like, I want to get rid of that guy because he's going to be on set and he's going to be like, that's not my vision.
01:31:45.000Another crazy fate thing is because when you were doing that, when you were writing that in 2016, the streaming thing wasn't what it is today.
01:32:20.000It's a really interesting thing today.
01:32:22.000One of the theater chains was saying that they're not going to have Universal Films anymore because Universal released trolls on direct-to-demand with people with Apple TV and Amazon and stuff like that.
01:32:33.000So these cinemas are now going to war, like publicly going to war with the studios because they're saying, hey, you need to release your fucking movies in our theaters.
01:33:05.000They were because, well, I've been saying forever.
01:33:08.000I would love if, you know, I have a big TV at home.
01:33:11.000I would love if I could just watch movies on TV. I don't want to go to the movie and some guy's talking to his girlfriend in the middle of the movie and ruining everything or people are checking I see the light from their phones.
01:33:20.000Some weird guy walks in and all of a sudden you're like, ugh, can I like that?
01:33:47.000But going back to that, going back to the fate thing.
01:33:48.000So it's also like, what if I had not been the operator or whatever that I was?
01:33:54.000What if the guy had a different impression of me that sat next to Brad Thor at the fundraiser?
01:33:58.000He's not going to recommend me to Brad Thor if he had a bad impression of me or if he thought I was a bad operator or had a bad reputation or whatever else.
01:34:06.000Like, he's not going to mention my name to Brad Thor.
01:34:08.000So all those little things that kind of came together.
01:34:12.000What if I didn't read all these guys like David Murrell, who created Rambo in 1972, or read Brotherhood of the Rose early on, which also solidified me to go into the SEAL teams?
01:34:20.000I was already on the path, but he has one sentence in that book, Brotherhood of the Rose, that talks about SEALs.
01:34:26.000And I had such a good time, such a great experience reading that novel, that I knew that one day I'd write in the same genre as he does.
01:34:33.000And now he's a He's a dear friend now.
01:34:37.000So all those little things just kind of happened.
01:34:39.000I mean, they happened, but I did them because I was passionate about them.
01:34:43.000I was passionate about reading, passionate about writing, passionate about serving my country, passionate about being the best operator I could possibly be.
01:34:49.000So I was always focused on those things.
01:34:52.000And then, you know, these other things kind of, it helped.
01:34:55.000It helped propel this whole thing forward.
01:34:57.000That seems like the formula for success in everything.
01:35:12.000Yeah, that whole Pressfield book is called Do the Work.
01:35:14.000You have to do that before anything else can happen.
01:35:17.000You can't just wish that something was going to happen.
01:35:19.000No, you have to sit down and do the work, whether it's write comedy, whether it's write a novel, whether it's start a gym, whatever you're going to do, you have to sit down and do the work.
01:35:28.000And people don't, for whatever reason, don't quantify in their head that all those little things you don't feel like doing, when you just make yourself do them, they all add up.
01:36:15.000There's a few of them, kind of like movies.
01:36:17.000Like all the Avengers and all that sort of stuff makes the money back for the studios for all the other ones that no one sees that maybe win Oscars but aren't making back their money.
01:37:00.000They did their own marketing on advertising on social media platforms.
01:37:04.000And they connected with other people that had similar interests or that they thought might be able to then grow the brand and also help those other brands along the way.
01:38:33.000And then I found out about honey and coffee and honey and tea later.
01:38:36.000But it just was very natural for me to write that into the character because he has a background similar to me as a former Navy SEAL sniper that becomes an officer and he's at this Point in his time in uniform where he's going to get out and take care of his family, which is where I was when I started writing it.
01:38:51.000I didn't want him to be this superhero.
01:38:53.000I wanted him to be someone that was good at some things, like kicking in doors, like taking sniper shots, some of the things that I'm okay at.
01:38:59.000But then also surveillance side of the house, some of the things that we don't typically do in the SEAL team.
01:39:03.000Maybe he's not as good at those sorts of things.
01:39:05.000And maybe he drives a FJ-62 Land Cruiser because I love Land Cruisers.
01:39:09.000And there's also that whole subculture of people that love Land Cruisers.
01:39:15.000So it's very natural for me to talk about those vehicles and then to develop characters by talking about, oh, Defender 110, Land Cruiser, you know, give each other a hard time, whatever else, or 9mm versus 45 or whatever.
01:39:27.000Just use those things as character development tools.
01:39:29.000So it was very natural for me to add honey and cream to the protagonist's coffee because that's what I drink at home daily.
01:39:35.000That's got to be one of the many, many interesting things about writing a character, is that you can incorporate your own little quirks and Resco watches.
01:40:23.000It's like, ugh, I'm going to try not to pay attention.
01:40:25.000It's kind of like watching a movie where they really kind of jack something up and I'm like, ugh.
01:40:28.000Because the worst thing to do is watch a SEAL movie with a SEAL or a police movie with a cop or whatever that's going to tell you about all the mistakes so you can't enjoy the film.
01:40:38.000So I try to just enjoy them for what they are, but it does take you out.
01:40:41.000And it's like, ah, what else did they get kind of not right if the guy's like picking the safety off on this Glock?
01:42:15.000And when that came out, I was so excited because I had read everything you possibly could on SEALs up until that point because I wanted to be a SEAL since I was seven years old.
01:42:21.000I knew I was going to be in the military even before then.
01:42:37.000So when I found out, hey, there's an autobiography coming out about the guy that started this command, Damn Neck on the East Coast, this counter-terrorist unit, I was so excited to read that book.
01:42:45.000Wasn't there an issue, too, where people were kind of upset that he was telling these stories?
01:42:49.000I think so, but as a kid reading that, you don't know any of that.
01:42:53.000You're just like, oh, this is amazing.
01:42:54.000He must have had an incredible life to be able to write a book.
01:42:57.000The first commanding officer of Delta Force wrote a book called The Delta Force in, I think, 1986, which really goes into the Iranian hostage crisis and what happened at Desert One in 1980. And that was a very formative time for me because I knew I was going in the military.
01:43:11.000And at the time, Walter Cronkite's on TV. We're watching it during dinner.
01:43:16.000He's counting down the days that U.S. personnel have been taken hostage in Iran.
01:43:20.000And I'm seeing those click down or click up every single night.
01:43:24.000And I'm wondering, I see the pictures, black and white photos, of US military and people from the State Department.
01:43:32.000I didn't know that at the time, though.
01:43:33.000I just see a guy in a suit and a guy in a military uniform blindfolded in black and white photos on the cover of the newspaper.
01:43:39.000And I'm wondering, why is the United States standing by and letting this happen, even though I'm six years old at the time?
01:44:02.000So about six months after the hostages were taken in Iran, so they were taken, I think, in November of 1979, and about six months, they were eventually held for 444 days.
01:44:14.000But about five, six months into that, we made an attempt to rescue them.
01:44:19.000So they're being held in At the embassy still in an adjacent building, I think.
01:44:23.000And it was the first use that most people know of what's called Delta Force.
01:44:28.000So our premier counter-terrorist unit that is modeled after the British SAS. And the British SAS has been in service for a long time.
01:44:36.000So we had guys that went through their program in the 60s, even.
01:44:39.000And they took those lessons and created ours.
01:44:42.000Because late 60s, mid-70s, there's a lot of hijackings.
01:46:28.000They're going to retake the embassy, they're going to get the hostages, and then the helicopters are going to take back off, land in a soccer stadium next door, and they're going to extract from there, exfil from there.
01:46:37.000So what happened was the planes land, helicopters have some mechanical problems, a couple get lost in the sandstorm.
01:46:54.000So it takes the decision essentially away from the ground force commander because ahead of time, he knows that if we have four helicopters, we can't do this mission.
01:47:02.000So instead of being on the ground saying, okay, we have four.
01:47:44.000And it was a big black eye for his presidency and for special operations in general.
01:47:48.000But the important part, we took those lessons and we applied them going forward.
01:47:54.000So now we train all together instead of having all these pilots and assaulters and all these people that have never really trained together up until that point.
01:48:06.000So when 9-11 hit all those years later, we're much more prepared because of That's how we honor those guys that died.
01:48:14.000That's how we honor that mission, is by taking those lessons and apply them going forward.
01:48:19.000Interestingly enough, that's what you do in life also when you have to learn these lessons and apply them going forward.
01:48:23.000It's all about how you apply them going forward.
01:48:26.000Well, that's a huge advantage for you as an author, to have all that information, to have that legitimate background.
01:48:32.000Like, to be writing about these things, like we were talking about guys who were writing about taking safeties off glocks, people that really don't know what they're writing about, when they do...
01:48:41.000It's like, I mean, you can be creative and pretend you're a ballerina without having ever ballet danced, but I don't think it's going to be the same.
01:48:49.000And there's an authenticity to the way you write and to the one book that I've read, at least, Savage Son, where you...
01:49:00.000There's a frequency that you tap into that is a frequency of a person that has experienced this stuff in real life.
01:49:41.000They do things that take you out of...
01:49:45.000It's a world they don't really know about, and they're writing about this world, whereas you're writing about a world that you were so deeply embedded in for all those years that when you're writing about it, it's really compelling.
01:49:59.000Yeah, and I incorporate some real-world stuff in there, too, like a shot that I didn't take in Ajafarak, and I fictionalize it by having a memory from Fallujah, and so I morph it around a little bit, but the passion...
01:50:11.000Is there, uh, the feelings and emotions behind it are there and it's woven into the first story.
01:50:16.000And then some, and so it was very therapeutic.
01:50:17.000I got to take, uh, and I was very lucky downrange.
01:50:20.000Like you can do all the right things in combat.
01:50:23.000Like if you were to whiteboard something out here and we talk about tactics and all the rest of it, you could make those exact same right decisions downrange and things can still go south and people can die.
01:50:40.000So whether you made mistakes or not, point being, you're going to have a hard time dealing with them later.
01:50:45.000And for whatever reason, whether it was luck or whatever else, I sleep very well at night because of the things that that was involved in downrange.
01:50:51.000But I still got to tap into them and put them into the story.
01:50:54.000Now, going back to what you said about SEALs writing books, interestingly enough, in the first book, there's an interrogation scene, interrogation and interview, meaning not a torture scene, but sitting down with NCIS, the Naval Criminal Investigation Service.
01:52:07.000So when that book came out, that's when everyone said, or not everyone, senior level leaders were like, okay, I'll stop.
01:52:14.000And they really, well, Because of that book, they went and all the investigations that happened, they went in and essentially anyone that had a connection with him, they pulled in and investigated as a way to put pressure on him to get what they wanted.
01:53:02.000So things that you said totally out of context, like joking around about something or just statements about things?
01:53:09.000Yeah, just statements like, what did you mean by this?
01:53:12.000And I used that in the first novel because I'm sitting there in this interrogation.
01:53:16.000You got these guys across from you and essentially NCIS here, from my perspective, are people that they couldn't make it in the FBI or the CIA and they weren't tough enough to be street cops.
01:53:27.000So now they're busting people on piss tests in the military and that sort of thing.
01:53:31.000Actually, my first experience with them was after September 11th, and I think we're all on the same team, and we're doing these shipboardings in the Northern Arabian Gulf to enforce the UN embargo for oil tankers that are leaving Iraq and then going to Iran.
01:53:43.000And so our job was to take those ships down before they got to Iranian waters.
01:53:46.000And then the UN would take over after that.
01:53:50.000But it was a really interesting time because it's like a cop pulling over someone and you're walking up and you don't really know what's going on.
01:53:57.000They had all these metal over all the windows.
01:54:01.000It cut off all the ladders on the ship so you'd have to...
01:54:03.000Use a caving ladder to hook and climb up and then you'd have to breach and get inside these things and get them back into the Gulf before they hit Iranian waters.
01:54:14.000But during what we're doing, a couple nights on, a couple nights off, that sort of thing with another platoon, and then NCIS shows up and they pull us all into these different rooms and they said, hey, so...
01:54:25.000An M60, some sort of a machine gun type thing, has gone missing on one of these ships that you guys were on.
01:55:14.000No, they didn't accuse me, but I could tell that things shifted and I'm getting so creative and telling them how I do it and I mix it in with this and we'd get it off like that.
01:56:37.000And what they've taken out, absolutely ridiculous.
01:56:40.000So the first book, I didn't appeal it because they took 45 days to do it, which I thought was pretty good because they say they'll take 30. And I thought it's pretty good.
01:56:48.000They took out nine lines or something like that, which is fine.
01:56:51.000But the second one, a month goes by, then two, then three, then four, then five, then six.
01:56:57.000And they get almost to the seven-month mark when they finally get back to me.
01:57:01.000So at this point, we had to push the publication date out of April to the summer.
01:57:04.000It's like a movie, trying to figure out when you don't want two Avengers movies coming out at the same time from the same studio.
01:57:09.000So these are thought well ahead of time.
01:57:11.000So it was not convenient to have to push it all the way to the end of July.
01:58:02.000Now, like we talked about those laws earlier, three felonies a day.
01:58:05.000Laws are written, if you look at them, very broadly so that the government can interpret them the way they want to.
01:58:11.000And that didn't always used to be the case.
01:58:13.000If you go back 50 years, the idea was you had to write a law that the average guy could understand when you looked at it one time, read it, it's evident what that law means.
01:58:56.000So he went to that lawyer who said, no, you don't need to submit this.
01:59:00.000So there's lawsuits and all sorts of stuff that are associated with that.
01:59:04.000But for me, what they did, this is years later, his second book, he sends it to me.
01:59:08.000So I'm getting ready to get out of the military.
01:59:10.000He sends me his second book and says, hey, what do you think of this?
01:59:13.000And so I read it and I just, you know, read it quick.
01:59:17.000And then I sent him like one note that said, hey, awesome.
01:59:20.000Maybe in the first part in the preface, maybe talk about your experience over the last couple of years with the first book and what the government did to you and how you reacted.
01:59:27.000Just people would probably be interested in that.
01:59:29.000So now I'm in this interrogation room with these NCIS guys, and that's one of the things that they pull out and said, so why are you editing classified material that hasn't been approved by, like, I don't know.
01:59:43.000Guy's a good friend, sends me the thing, I look at it.
01:59:45.000So what they wanted was to just put pressure on him and said, hey, we're going to go after your buddy if you don't do this for us, which was to probably just say.
01:59:55.000I think they wanted him to admit he was guilty, and they also wanted a statement of not submitting it to the Department of Defense Office of Pre-Publication and Security Review, not going through.
02:00:05.000They wanted to make an example of him so that anybody else getting out would know that they had to do that.
02:00:10.000I don't think it worked because there's plenty of books out there, nonfiction, that have not been through that process.
02:00:54.000Anything money going forward, like if they made a movie from it, all those proceeds, they just wanted to crush him and make an example of him so other people would submit or make people think about not even writing anything anyway.
02:01:59.000Everybody that knew him got pulled into this thing.
02:02:02.000But point being is that had that not happened, then that interrogation scene in my novel where James Reese sits down after what happens to his team, sits down with those guys across the table, and I changed it to Afghanistan, changed it from San Diego to Afghanistan,
02:02:17.000But that's how I felt about the guy sitting across the table from me.
02:02:20.000So it feels real because I wasn't just like, hey, have you written into interrogation room?
02:02:24.000Or I'm arresting a couple of cop shows where they have somebody in an interrogation room.
02:02:27.000I'll just kind of write what that looks like or feels like.
02:02:29.000No, that's what it feels like to be in there, having these eyes on you, having them tell you that there's no cameras on when you know that there are.
02:02:37.000So I got to put all that together and make the book what it is.
02:02:40.000So without that happening, without them trying to go after me to put pressure on him and everyone associated with that, the first book would not be nearly as good.
02:02:49.000Like the combat stuff, yeah, it's different.
02:02:51.000But the other stuff, the conspiracy side of the house and the NCIS guys and that interrogation in particular and some of the bad guys, that once again, you can't kill people in real life, but you know what?
02:03:02.000And so it made it so much better than it would have been otherwise.
02:03:06.000So now looking back, and I thank him to this day.
02:03:08.000I'm like, you know what, that first book, that resonated with Simon& Schuster for some reason.
02:03:12.000And a lot of it's what happened downrange and those feelings and emotions, but a lot of it is because of what happened with you as I was getting out.
02:03:20.000Now when you create these characters, do you write a backstory?
02:03:25.000Do you spend time like writing out this guy's life and then sort of use pieces of that in the story or do you write it along while you're writing the story?
02:03:36.000Because he had a background so similar to mine, I didn't need to do that.
02:03:41.000So now I am for this fourth one because now there's so many characters that it's hard to keep spelling straight and background straight and all that sort of thing.
02:03:47.000So now I have these family trees and these characters written out on Scrivener, which is how I write it.
02:04:14.000It's so nice to use Scrivener like that.
02:04:16.000It just makes it so much easier to do that.
02:04:18.000So now I do, but at the beginning I didn't.
02:04:20.000With one novel and kind of creating, you have the story.
02:04:22.000So I wrote six or seven different ideas down, like one-page executive summaries as I was getting ready.
02:04:28.000And the one I wanted to start with was Savage Son.
02:04:30.000That was the one I wanted to start with.
02:04:32.000But I knew the characters weren't quite at that place where I could explore the dark side of man.
02:04:36.000I needed to get readers invested in them, take him on a journey, much like I learned about Joseph Campbell and the hero's journey and The hero with a thousand faces back in 1988. I had to take him on that sort of a journey and get him to that point where I could explore the dark side of man through these characters.
02:04:53.000So I had to start with that first one.
02:04:56.000It was very evident it's going to be the terminal list.
02:04:59.000So I took that one-page executive summary, turned it into an outline.
02:05:02.000But if I came to a point in that outline where I got stuck, and this is the important part, I didn't say, ah, Man, readers aren't going to figure this out.
02:05:09.000They're not going to come along on me with this journey.
02:05:20.000And I don't have to solve this problem right now.
02:05:23.000I can get five months down the line and just continue going.
02:05:25.000And eventually I'm going to figure this problem out and it's going to work out.
02:05:28.000So I didn't let anything, any obstacle stop me as I was writing that outline.
02:05:32.000And I took that outline and started writing.
02:05:34.000And as I figured out those problems, then I would change the outline and I would adapt it so I could have a visual representation of what was going on.
02:05:41.000And then eventually about the 75% point, then I just discarded the outline completely and just kept writing.
02:05:46.000So Scrivener made that a ton easier for the third book because doing it in Word was a pain.
02:05:52.000There is apparently a way that you could set up Word to behave like Scrivener.
02:06:27.000I just do it in Scrivener and then when I send it to the editor, I did that thing where it changes it to Word and then I worked in Word the rest of the time.
02:06:34.000So I didn't go back to Scrivener after I did that.
02:06:37.000Yeah, as finished as it could be anyway.
02:06:38.000What else has changed from the time you wrote your first book to now in terms of like your process and how you do it and what do you think you're better at now than you were when you started?
02:06:49.000So the timeline is obviously compressed now.
02:06:52.000So I started writing the second one before I'd even submitted the first one to Simon& Schuster because I was always Yeah.
02:07:14.000So point being, for the second one, I wasn't yet on that year timeline because there was no deal, hadn't even gone to Simon& Schuster, and then once the first one did get to Simon& Schuster, then they plotted it out, and I still had another over a year before it came out while I'm working on the other one.
02:07:30.000It's the first one that I've had to be on that year-long timeline for.
02:07:34.000But I've had it in my head for so long.
02:07:36.000So this fourth one now is one where things are really compressed, especially because of COVID-19 and having to adapt at the last second for this book tour and having to think of things that I wouldn't necessarily have had to think of otherwise, like helping these independent bookstores.
02:08:42.000All of that, it was already going 100% to these veteran-focused foundations that I had some sort of a touchpoint with because they'd helped friends of mine or whatever else.
02:09:34.000And the other side of it, the business side of it that we've been talking about, that is interesting to me because I'm learning something new, and I love learning new things, and I wouldn't be learning about branding and marketing and all this sort of thing if I didn't have a product, if I didn't have a book.
02:09:50.000And I can help other people as they're getting out of the military, starting other businesses that aren't even writing related at all.
02:09:55.000I can help them and talk to them about my experience and what I've learned and how I've adapted because I had to.
02:10:00.000No one's going to hand this stuff to you.
02:10:02.000You have to go out there, prove yourself, get after it, do the work.
02:10:21.000That stuff's pretty obvious, like what's appropriate and what's not.
02:10:24.000Like when someone walks into that general store, very clear how you should treat someone, whether they come in yelling and screaming or they come in asking for directions.
02:11:03.000A lot of stuff online, but the online stuff you have to be really careful about and check with other people that really know what they're doing, even though it's fiction.
02:11:10.000So I'd done all that part of it ahead of time.
02:11:13.000So what really changed for me as far as what I'm doing now and what I'm incorporating from this is what our response has been to COVID-19 because it's put obviously our economy into a tailspin.
02:11:26.000The enemy is looking at that and realizing, look what this invisible virus has done to the United States what the Soviet Union couldn't do in 40 plus years of trying.
02:11:35.000So how do we incorporate that into future battle plans?
02:11:38.000Can we have a strategy even of failure?
02:11:40.000What if there's a threat of a bio-attack?
02:11:42.000What if there's a failed bio-attack somewhere?
02:11:44.000It's still going to affect that economy, especially right now with us being so gun-shy about all these sorts of things.
02:11:50.000So what are they taking from that and what are they learning to apply going forward?
02:11:54.000So for my fourth novel, I'm taking those lessons of what the enemy is learning from this and how I think they're going to apply it going forward and incorporating that into a fictional narrative.
02:12:07.000It's always important to learn and apply it going forward.
02:12:09.000And you're also in the middle of writing this story, but you're also living a life of a person that actually has to deal with this coronavirus pandemic where the whole world is kind of shut down.
02:12:20.000Just as a human being, when you're dealing with this, what's frustrating for you about how everything is going down?
02:12:28.000You know, I think it's what we just talked about as far as people not taking these lessons seriously going forward and making this a stronger country because of this.
02:12:37.000So, you know, you get knocked down, you get back up, you're stronger for it.
02:13:36.000You being strong, self-reliant, self-sufficient, and having your kids look up and see how you're handling this and say, well, mom and dad are either in the kitchen talking about how much they're worried about paying that rent or that mortgage, or they're in that kitchen maybe talking about it, even if they are worried, in a way like, hey, how do we do this better next time?
02:13:52.000How do we prepare as on the other side of this?
02:13:54.000And what are the things we can do now to get better prepared if this happens two months from now, a year from now, five years from now?
02:14:10.000And so the kids will take those lessons on, take those to heart, because they're very impressionable right now, especially as we have 14, 12, and 9. And they're definitely processing this.
02:14:21.000They're catching things on the news and they're talking to friends on social media.
02:14:25.000They're texting back and forth, all that sort of thing.
02:14:27.000So this can either make them stronger citizens going forward, or they can see mom and dad.
02:14:33.000Oh, look, mom and dad relied on government.
02:14:41.000So it's a very important time, not just for how you deal with this and how you get through it and how you move forward better for it, but because of the lessons that we're teaching our kids, whether we mean to or not.
02:14:52.000It doesn't have to be a conscious thing.
02:14:55.000And as parents, It's up to us to figure out what those lessons are going to be, and we can morph it and make them stronger, more self-reliant going forward.
02:15:01.000Like our daughter sees our freezer is full of elk and moose, and we pull that out, we frost it, and she's a part of it because she knows she got this elk in Colorado last year.
02:18:32.000Yeah, you're seeing these things over there, and then you're seeing what we're doing to them.
02:18:34.000We have some mechanics over there that are...
02:18:36.000Bolting on armor and they're doing things to the engine and they're putting in these radio console stuff for our secure communications and they're like, wow, this is pretty cool.
02:18:44.000And then I saw the evolution of the Hilux over the next 15 years and got to see these things purpose-built from a factory to an aftermarket place that then does all that stuff that we were doing in Afghanistan with screwdrivers and the rest of it.
02:18:57.000I got to see what those look like and that was pretty sweet and you just see how much abuse they can take and what they're going up and over and so I think it was seeing the Hilux and then looking into maybe I'll get a Tacoma when I get back because I saw these things over there and these things last forever and it was amazing I had some crazy experiences in them and then I was like oh Land Cruisers,
02:19:18.000And it was a natural thing for me to like older stuff and more classic stuff.
02:19:22.000And then to also like classic stuff that looks old, but is really new and can really gas it down.
02:19:29.000Well, Land Cruisers, those 62s, just like that Porsche that I have out there where the metal is thicker and heavier gauge, like you shut those doors.
02:20:33.000And then I drove up from L.A. and had them start working on my FJ62 when we were in San Diego, just doing a stage one, kind of making sure all the belts and stuff were good and, you know, whatever, just kind of making sure it wasn't going to fall apart.
02:20:43.000But I always wanted to do that stage three or that icon-type restoration.
02:23:14.000As I'm talking to them, I'm getting other ideas about how to move the plot forward, different things that can test the protagonist.
02:23:19.000So this theme of this next one is really the ethics, morality, and legality behind targeted assassinations.
02:23:28.000And the bioweapons piece really forms the foundation of that, but really what the protagonist is struggling with is targeted assassinations.
02:23:40.000He went after these people that wronged his family and his troop and put them all in the ground in that first book.
02:23:46.000And now it's a mixture of a personal and professional track that he's now going to take going forward because he still has a little unfinished business to take care of and needs to use the United States government to track these guys down that he still needs to get.
02:24:01.000So as I'm doing that and interviewing all these people, I'm thinking about how that works and I'm reading a book.
02:27:13.000Yeah, authority and resolve and conviction that you know based on statistics of something you read that torture doesn't work.
02:27:20.000It seems to me like if people have information and they don't want to give up that information, yeah, we don't want to think of ourselves as being this barbaric type of civilization that would torture someone to get information out of them.
02:27:34.000But also, if you want to look at it pragmatically, that is how you would get people to talk.
02:27:39.000So to say that torture doesn't work, and in fact people who are tortured will say anything, well that says who?
02:27:47.000I hate that kind of conversation because it's an anti-military conversation in a lot of ways because it's the same kind of mentality that sort of dismisses all sorts of tactics that are used to protect people that don't,
02:28:02.000they have the luxury of not knowing what needs to be done or how it is done.
02:28:08.000So it's very complex, and yet it's very simple.
02:28:12.000And I obviously use this in my writing, and I did in that first book, because the protagonist had to become that terrorist, become that insurgent.
02:28:22.000So he had to adopt those tactics, and he had essentially had to abandon everything that he'd been fighting for for the past 16 years to go after these people that wronged his family and his troop.
02:28:33.000So as far as the torture stuff goes, so I got to explore it in a fictional sense.
02:28:37.000So in real life, it's important to talk about these things with your troops.
02:28:43.000So at the tactical leadership level, where I was my entire career, whether I was just a brand new guy, enlisted guy, or a troop commander at the end, it was important, especially once 9-11 happened, to talk about these things before we're in a situation where we called it,
02:29:00.000first we call it BIT, first we call it Battlefield Interrogation, and then it became BIT. TQ, tactical questioning, a lot more PC to call it tactical questioning rather than battlefield interrogation.
02:29:11.000But you had to talk about it ahead of time so that your guys would know what was appropriate ahead of time so they're not in a situation where an IED has just gone off, one of our guys is killed, and now we have someone we think is responsible for that,
02:29:27.000and there's one or two of us, three of us, in this room with him.
02:29:41.000But point being, before we get there, during training, it can't just be a brief by a pencil-neck lawyer that comes in and says, Yes, exactly.
02:29:52.000It has to be incorporated into the training.
02:29:53.000It has to be discussed by people that are trusted.
02:29:56.000And so that when someone's in that situation, he knows what one is appropriate because of the second and third order effects that may come from it.
02:30:05.000Yeah, you might want to put a bullet in that guy.
02:30:07.000You might want to torture him, whatever.
02:30:11.000Second and third order effects of doing that could be more devastating to this unit, to our strategy as a whole that we're trying to accomplish over there.
02:30:23.000So you need to talk about it ahead of time.
02:30:25.000So for me, it was important for the guys to know that we have to maintain the moral high ground because there's very few things that separate us from our enemy when you get down to it.
02:31:31.000And they waterboarded people in my class if you did something that the instructors thought would get you killed in real life or get somebody else killed in real life.
02:31:38.000So being a model prisoner, it did not happen to me.
02:31:40.000But to my buddy, he got waterboarded because you did something that the instructors thought would get you killed.
02:32:58.000As soon as that can be morphed and called torture and become a distraction and become something that undermines the mission as a whole, then you have to look at it and say, okay, what are we getting by what we're doing in Guantanamo versus how much is that hurting and helping the enemy's recruiting efforts?
02:33:16.000I don't know what those numbers look like or where that tipping point is.
02:33:19.000But as soon as the enemy can get something and use it for their own benefit, like having black sites, if we didn't know that black sites existed, that would be wonderful.
02:33:26.000But everyone knows that black sites Explain Blacksides.
02:33:49.000So it's an off-the-books type site, but everyone knows what it is because it's been on cover of the front page of the New York Times and everywhere else.
02:33:54.000As soon as that becomes something that the enemy can then leverage, at what point does it hurt us more than help us to have those?
02:34:02.000And at what point does it hurt us more than help us to quote-unquote torture someone or continue waterboarding or to put somebody in these seated positions and to have that be the distraction?
02:34:28.000So as a leader, you got to talk about it.
02:34:30.000And the guys have to know that once you have somebody, much like a police officer here in the States, once they have you cuffed and you're on the ground, it's over.
02:34:37.000Your job now becomes to protect that person.
02:34:41.000That makes you different from that criminal.
02:34:43.000That makes us different from the enemy.
02:34:45.000If they have us in that position, they're going to behead us and they're going to hold our heads up on TV and they're going to use it.
02:34:50.000For us, our job is now to protect that person with our life.
02:34:54.000That's the difference between us and the enemy at the base level.
02:34:57.000So it's important to talk about that, important for the guys to understand it, so that when they're in that position and it's a guy's first deployment and his friend is wounded or dead and he thinks this guy is behind it, that he doesn't execute him when he has his hands cuffed behind him.
02:35:10.000So it's important stuff to talk about, important stuff to think about, and it's tough.
02:36:15.000No, I mean, there's a reason people have been doing it from the beginning of time.
02:36:18.000I'm sure in some places it didn't work or whatever.
02:36:21.000But outside that tactical level, when we're talking about that next stage where the world knows about it, where media knows about it, where they're driving that story and they're helping the enemy by shining a light on these things that may or may not work.
02:36:35.000It doesn't matter whether it works or not.
02:36:39.000And whatever that point is, then it's time to abandon it.
02:36:43.000Do you find that now that you're a prominent voice in the world of fiction authors and the fact that your novels have a lot to do with like real places and real things and real issues, do you get asked questions?
02:36:59.000Do you get asked to give statements or have your opinion on things where you have to kind of measure it and go, is there a benefit to this?
02:37:11.000Yeah, am I alienating people, or is this something where you can use your knowledge and your position as a platform to kind of like give your perspective on things from an educated point of view?
02:37:23.000Yeah, so it's, for me, it's hard for me not to tell the truth.
02:37:29.000Like, I'm the worst liar on earth, and my wife will tell you.
02:37:34.000So it's very natural for me to answer honestly, but then also to be thoughtful.
02:37:40.000And that's why the novels, I think, also another reason they resonated with Simon& Schuster is because it's thoughtful violence.
02:38:22.000If you're on social media, I think eventually, if you have a Thousand some posts, people are going to glean and you're doing it and it's not obvious that it's just a manager that's doing it and it's a picture of, you know, you are not really, it's not you.
02:38:53.000It's also like people don't understand the ramifications of posting things.
02:38:57.000And like you were saying, how you got brought in by NCIS, that one thing could be taken out of context and used against you in a really weird way.
02:39:31.000I do go on different shows now as a military analyst.
02:39:34.000They ask me things, and I answer honestly, and I try to do it in a thoughtful way.
02:39:37.000So example being the CEO of the Roosevelt that was relieved the last couple weeks because he wrote this letter and was framed by senior-level officials as he sent out essentially like an open letter.
02:39:51.000They made it sound like he sent it out to his entire address book.
02:39:54.000And he went above the chain of command, and so he was fired.
02:39:58.000And it didn't go through the right proper channels.
02:40:00.000And it smelled weird to me from the beginning, because you don't get to be in command of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier by being like, eh, just some guy.
02:40:38.000I think they had three to start with on an aircraft carrier.
02:40:41.000It had docked in Thailand or something like that, you know, maybe in January, early February, something like that, before really things got out of control.
02:40:48.000So you're in an aircraft carrier, and the only place worse than a ship in a circumstance like this with an infectious disease is probably a submarine.
02:40:56.000But he saw what was happening, and he saw it starting to spread.
02:41:00.000He saw that it was impossible to abide by social distancing guidelines.
02:41:06.000And once you do when you actually have it, not just social distancing, but once you have it, how you isolate somebody.
02:41:47.000And for me, I thought, you know what, this is very strange that he's being attacked like this from senior level leaders, making it seem like he sent it out to his entire Gmail address book.
02:41:58.000No, it's still usnavy.mil or whatever.
02:42:00.000It's not a secret communication, but there's official Navy emails that aren't secret as well.
02:42:06.000And yeah, it bypassed the chain of command, I guess.
02:42:10.000But that, at some point, I think is his responsibility.
02:42:22.000And now, and then the Secretary of the Navy flies from Washington, D.C., To Guam to give a speech to these people on the aircraft carrier, and he says that the captain that has just been relieved of duty was either stupid or incompetent if he thought that what he wrote in that email wasn't going to get out to the press.
02:43:43.000We're supposed to think, kind of red cell things from the enemy's side, think about it from that side of the house, and do what we do, which is why we get in trouble a lot of the time in special operations, because we're kind of not military.
02:43:56.000I mean, we're military, but we like to Not break the rules.
02:44:00.000We like to bend them to a certain extent to get what we need done.
02:44:28.000And if my protagonist is using a certain weapon or a certain knife, it's not just that I googled Navy SEAL knife or someone saying, and then he pulled out his Navy SEAL dagger.
02:44:47.000That's what I owe the people above me in the chain of command.
02:44:49.000No matter what it did, I owe them my honest assessment because that's what they could trust.
02:44:53.000They didn't have to worry about whether I'm just telling them something just because I think that's what they want to hear or I'm looking to get ahead because I never wanted this to be a career in the military.
02:45:02.000I was just in there to fight and to lead.
02:45:05.000But that's what they can trust is my honest assessment.
02:45:07.000And so that's how I I deal with today.
02:45:09.000I'm just going to answer honestly, but it will be thoughtful.
02:45:11.000It's not going to be like an off-the-cuff craziness that I then have to go back and retract or I hope it's not going to be.
02:45:16.000It's going to be thoughtful because that's what I owed the guys also was that thoughtful assessment both up and down the chain.
02:45:21.000So that's just natural for me to do and what you're going to get today.
02:45:24.000Well, this mindset and the discipline and the authenticity, it comes out in your writing, man.
02:45:29.000I know I started with the last one and now I have to start.
02:45:32.000You were a little bummed out that I was starting with the last one, right?
02:45:36.000Well, most people get invested in the character.
02:45:37.000Like, people ask me, like, can I start with this third one?
02:45:39.000And the publisher wants me to say, yes, start with the third one.
02:46:22.000And thank you for what you do for hunting and for those of us that are self-reliant and for giving this really opening people's eyes to what they can do to be better citizens and better prepared going forward.