In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, the guys talk about the benefits of cold showers, saunas, and other cold things you can do in the morning before you get ready for the day. They also talk about how cold is better than hot, and why you should get in a cold shower before you go to bed at night time. Joe also talks about his new cold plunge and why he thinks it's a great way to get some extra rest in between the hot shower and the cold showers. Joe also explains why he doesn't want to get out of his jammies at night because it's cold outside and why it's better than sleeping in the car or on the couch. Joe and his wife also discuss how they're going to get a cold tub installed at their new home and why they don't like the heat in their current place. And they talk about what they're doing to make the cold more bearable for their family and how they plan to get in the cold in the mornings before they go to sleep. Enjoy the episode and tweet us what you think of it! if you like the episode, we'd love to hear what you thought of it :) Timestamps: 1:00 - Joe's morning routine 4:30 - How much sleep you got last night? 6:20 - How cold you need 8:00- How much you like cold showers 9:15 - What do you like your morning routine? 11:40 - What s your favorite cold tub 13:00 16:30 17: How do you prefer the cold tub? 19:00: What are you looking forward to start the day? 21:00 | What s the coldest thing you do to get the most out of your morning 22:30 | How you like it? 27:40 | What's your favorite kind of shower 26:00 // 27:00 What s something you like to do to warm up 29:00 Is it cold? 32:40 35:00 Should you put your body in the most comfortable 36: What s a cold bath 37:00 Do you have a cold place 39:00 / 40:00 Are you ready for some cold tub ? 45:00 Can you do the cold 47:00 Does it feel better than the heat?
00:01:29.000I usually do about 20 minutes in the hot until I can't take it anymore, and then I jump in the cold, and then I do three minutes in the cold, and then I could do another 15, 20 minutes easy in the hot before I start getting hot again.
00:01:49.000It seems like if I got one of those, because we're definitely doing the hot one, it's going to have this nice view over the mountains and everything, and then I'm thinking about putting it in the cold tub and maybe, but I think it would just be almost for looks, because I'd do it once and say, that was horrible.
00:04:16.000I mean, the sleep deprivation part of it in Hell Week, I guess, plays in, but I think it plays in more because the cold's affecting your body more, because you haven't slept in, like, Wednesday night, and you're just freezing.
00:04:26.000But the worst part of it is when they put you on Wednesday night, they let you sleep for a couple hours, so they put you in this tent on the beach.
00:04:32.000So you've been up since Sunday morning, You've been running.
00:05:39.000It sounds like you're doing it each and every time, but I thought about this recently, and I thought that, hey, if you were today, In today's day and age where we're all so comfortable and you were to come up with this program and say, hey, you know what?
00:05:50.000We should make these special operations guys in the Navy and we'll call them SEALs and we'll have this Hell Week thing where we keep them on the verge of hypothermia the whole time.
00:06:14.000The only reason that it's a program is because it's a legacy program.
00:06:18.000There's no way you create a program like that today.
00:06:19.000But that's the only way you're going to make the kind of people that are necessary to do those heavy-duty missions.
00:06:26.000There's no other way, because you've got to have someone who you know is not going to quit, is not going to fall apart, and is going to be able to be there for his fellow soldiers if shit goes sideways.
00:07:08.000I was always shocked how many people got to boot camp, and this is still days before the internet, so late 90s, that hadn't heard of SEALs yet.
00:07:15.000And they were like, oh, I'll give that a shot.
00:07:18.000And then you have guys like me that have been training their whole life for it, and then you have guys training their whole life for it that quit the first day type of a thing.
00:07:25.000And then you get people that find out about it in boot camp that also quit the first day.
00:07:53.000It's part of the Q course for Army Special Forces guys where they go into a made-up country of Pineland and have to deal with a network of agents and tribes and that sort of thing, really based on Counterinsurgency doctrine of the 50s and 60s and 70s.
00:08:11.000But it's a way that they test Special Forces soldiers as part of the last thing they do before they get that Green Beret.
00:08:57.000So this was when it was, was it UDT back then?
00:09:00.000There was the Naval Combat Demolition Units in World War II, and I might have one of those letters slightly off, and then UDT, Underwater Demolition Teams.
00:09:08.000Have you ever heard the Whiskey Meyers song, Frogman?
00:10:42.000If you listen to those old news reels about Attack on Pearl Harbor or Midway, they have that same kind of tone, which is obviously different than We're good to go.
00:11:06.000And what usually happens in Hollywood is someone, like, they break the window of the car, and then there's these two wires that are miraculously just underneath the dash, and they just touch them, and then it starts right up.
00:11:18.000And so, because we wanted to root this in reality, the show...
00:11:22.000There's a part that got cut of Chris driving his Land Cruiser looking for another vehicle because he needs to get another one because the authorities know that the Land Cruiser is there.
00:11:30.000So he has to look for one that he knows how to break into.
00:11:32.000I went to a car stealing school a while back and learned what cars are easier to break into than others and that sort of thing.
00:11:39.000So we did it the exact way that you would break into that particular vehicle.
00:13:05.000Because it has the old engine and it's like a Volkswagen engine.
00:13:09.000I just kind of like that because I have that FJ40 now also that has the original engine in it, rebuilt, but it goes about top speed about 40, 45. And there's just something about like 1968, 912, maybe that slate gray they used to have back then or the British Racing Green or something like that.
00:13:36.000And so, I don't know, I just always had a little affinity for those, because everybody knows the 911, and okay, that's wonderful, obviously, but the 912. Well, it's basically the same look, right?
00:13:51.000They dropped it, it was on, I think Jay Leno's garage showed it, but I forget the name of the company, but they drop it on a Tesla body, so you have this thing that looks old, looks like a 1968 Porsche 912, but it's really all Tesla'd out.
00:14:02.000Well, there is one company that makes an electric 964. I think it's a 964. And it fucking flies.
00:14:24.000Because if you take that insane engine, but the problem with it is, for sure, the problem is that it's going to be an automatic, and it's one gear, and you miss so much of the fun of one of those cars is shifting the gears.
00:18:28.000So I was like, well, why didn't he try to upsell?
00:18:32.000I think he likes to keep things simple and functional.
00:18:36.000And I think the way Jonathan, I'm speaking for him, obviously, I think his deal was, he thinks that the regular eight-cylinder is such a giant upgrade from the four-cylinder that comes, or is it six?
00:19:37.000It's plenty fast for that car, but what it is, man, it's so capable.
00:19:42.000During the freeze last year, I was having the time of my life.
00:19:46.000Everybody was freaking out, because I have those excellent off-road tires, huge clearance, so I'm driving through snow and everything, and it just handled everything.
00:19:56.000I have a Golden Retriever, and he never gets to see snow, but when he does get to see snow, He goes crazy and runs around, circles in it, dives in it, rolls around in his back.
00:23:15.000I think he just looked at the bio and was like, oh, that would be...
00:23:18.000I think he just did it to be a nice guy.
00:23:20.000And then he ended up being great friends.
00:23:21.000And the first one was up for Audiobook of the Year next to Stephen King and Ruth Ware.
00:23:25.000And we went to New York and put on the tuxes for the Audibles, which is like the Academy Awards of the audible industry.
00:23:31.000Now, when you have a movie or a film version of these books, these books starring this gentleman that you've created, this James Reese guy, these books are insanely violent.
00:23:45.000There are wild moments in this book where I'm like, ooh, when I first found out that you guys were going to do an Amazon series, I was like...
00:24:10.000But it was so interesting to see it come to life and to see the Amazon make their notes because you do these scripts and they get approved and then it's like planning something in a boardroom or planning something in a mission planning space in the military where it's air conditioned and you're talking through things and you're looking at the maps and you're saying,
00:24:27.000okay, we're going to put a blocking force here.
00:24:31.000The AC-130 is on station for this amount of time and you plan it out perfectly and then you leave the gate to the base in Iraq and Afghanistan and you get out there.
00:24:38.000And then things change for whatever reason.
00:24:40.000Maybe you hit an IED, or you get out there and you're like, wait a second, that mountain, even though it looks a little higher in me, okay, this isn't exactly how we thought it was going to be.
00:24:48.000Same thing with the scripts, in that you get out there to start filming, and you're on set, or you're in an area location, and you look around and you're like, oh, this is not working with how we envisioned this.
00:24:57.000And you have to morph it on the fly right there.
00:25:58.000So there's a couple scenes in there, and people who have read the first book in particular will know the ones that we're talking about.
00:26:03.000The comment that I got the most when I said that this book is being turned into a film or to a series, people would say, oh, Amazon's never going to let this be shown, or I hope they leave this scene in.
00:26:14.000Those are the two things that I got, and Amazon left this in.
00:26:18.000They had concerns about this one very graphic scene.
00:26:20.000And it's in there, and now it's like one of the iconic scenes of the show.
00:26:25.000And it's in there, and it's going to be in the advertising and all the rest of it when that hits here shortly.
00:26:30.000But yeah, they left it, and they came down on the right side of everything we wanted every single time, which is a little bit shocking because you hear about, hey, they're only making things for people in L.A. and New York and forgetting about the country in between that really has this hunger for good content that's not just...
00:26:45.000Flooded with all these things that might not necessarily connect with a lot of the people in the middle of the country.
00:27:11.000Different parts of Europe, you travel a little bit, and you're in a place that speaks a totally different language.
00:27:16.000But this idea that the middle of the country is different than the edges of the country is very strange.
00:27:22.000Yeah, it's more a figurative way of putting it, but it's really...
00:27:29.000The first person that takes advantage of making content and having production levels at such a high level that isn't infused with all these things that people are kind of tired of, that person's going to do well.
00:27:41.000I like how you're dancing around what it is, the woke shit.
00:27:45.000I wonder how long that's going to keep going for.
00:27:47.000Because it doesn't seem like it's abating.
00:27:50.000It seems like what's happening is the pushback against it is getting more loud and people getting more angry that it's being shoved down their throats.
00:27:58.000But it doesn't seem to be stopping the amount of woke stuff that's being put out.
00:28:05.000And there's definitely an opportunity there for somebody who wants to buy a bunch of soundstages maybe in Atlanta and bring in people that can create things with this super high production and make movies just kind of like we'd like to see without all this other political stuff in there.
00:28:57.000But I don't think that what she said was outrageous or egregious or awful.
00:29:01.000I think she was just trying to say that this political divide in this country that separates people and is so polarizing is unhealthy.
00:29:10.000And there's a natural tribal instinct that people have to look at people from other tribes as being the enemy and that we were doing this in this country.
00:29:17.000But she unfortunately compared it to the Holocaust and they just fired her.
00:29:21.000So the Daily Wire immediately hired her after that, and then they just did a western that looks wild.
00:29:29.000They showed the trailer for it at the last UFC. Nice.
00:32:06.000But going back to the Hollywood side of the house, it's not necessarily I don't think that someone needs to take advantage of there being a gap and go totally right wing.
00:32:24.000Yeah, I mean, in the 80s, we go back, I'm trying to think there were some, I'm sure there were some with political bents, and, you know, that's fine.
00:32:29.000But there were some great films, some great 80s action movies that didn't have, weren't infused with things from either side.
00:32:34.000It was just fun to sit down and experience.
00:32:37.000And then you could look up to those characters, too.
00:32:39.000Like, Rocky films, obviously, starting in the 70s, but continuing to go on today.
00:33:48.000Yeah, and I didn't know how it was going to be when I got to New York Publishing, you know, not known for being a bastion of conservatism.
00:33:54.000But it seems like, at least in fictional books, you're allowed to, you know, because it's not, you can't take it out as a clip and put it out there for people to get angry at.
00:34:09.000And it's also, it's like you're taking into consideration the fact that there's good characters and bad characters and you have to show the evil side of man, you have to show the character and good nature.
00:34:22.000There's so much going on there that you can't monkey with that too much.
00:34:28.000I didn't have any touch points with publishing or with Hollywood before this.
00:34:32.000And I was kind of wondering when I first started down this path and Simon& Schuster first read it, I was wondering, hey, are they going to say, hey, lighten up on the Second Amendment stuff?
00:34:40.000Or, hey, do you really have to talk about the freedom so much as your character have to have these opinions?
00:34:56.000And I think a lot of that has to do with this podcast because I heard Steven Pressfield on this podcast and I misinterpreted something that he said.
00:35:20.000And that just kept me on theme, whether it was directly or indirectly, more importantly, tied to that theme.
00:35:25.000So I think by the time it got to New York and they read it, I had stayed on theme that there are only content edits from Emily Bessler at Emily Bessler Books, who is just amazing.
00:35:36.000She's the only person I wanted to be my publisher-editor.
00:35:38.000Because I saw her thanked in the back in the acknowledgement section of Brad Thor's books and Vince Flynn's books.
00:35:43.000So I just decided as I was writing and had no connections anywhere to decide that she would be my publisher and editor.
00:35:49.000And then she ended up being my publisher and editor.
00:35:51.000But she said, hey, would he really do this here?
00:36:45.000So, and Chris Pratt was the person that I thought of playing the role as I was typing.
00:36:50.000So as I started, it's just as a child of the 80s, it's very natural to think of some Hollywood star that's going to bring your story to life.
00:36:56.000And I thought of Chris Pratt because he had done nothing like this before.
00:37:00.000Most of the things had been, it was only really Guardians, not even Guardians of the Galaxy, not Avengers.
00:37:17.000I just have this connection with him already.
00:37:19.000I don't know how, but this is the guy that's going to do it.
00:37:22.000And so for Jared then to be best friends with Chris, to give him the book, and then Chris read it in the last week of December of 2017, called the next week and wanted to option it.
00:37:46.000Sometimes I wonder if stuff was meant to be.
00:37:48.000Sometimes I wonder that if you write something...
00:37:51.000And put it out there and really focus and really dedicate yourself to creating the best work that you can like you have done with your books that it'll attract the right person to play the role if it ever becomes a theatrical representation of it.
00:38:06.000It's crazy and then as I was writing it also without any sort of touch points with Hollywood or New York, I thought of Antoine Fuqua directing.
00:38:31.000He did Replacement Killers before that.
00:38:32.000Training day with Denzel Washington, which obviously is incredible.
00:38:36.000And then he did Tears of the Sun, he's done Magnificent Seven, Equalizer, Shooter, which is based on Stephen Hunter's book, Point of Impact.
00:38:43.000And I just love everything that he's done.
00:38:45.000But now that I know him, he is much more than a great director.
00:40:20.000Kenny Sheard right behind him right there.
00:40:22.000He writes in Hollywood now, writes for SEAL Team CBS. But all these guys are just fantastic.
00:40:27.000And obviously me and Antoine right there.
00:40:29.000Have you, because of these books, do you think it's opened doors for other SEALs to start writing and making things into these sort of Stories of similar things to what they've experienced they realize this is kind of a path out once you're you know you've retired from the seals or you've decided that you've done your time and to pursue other things in life that sort of using those life experiences to create these
00:40:59.000realistic interpretations realistic versions of that there's that like a new sort of pathway now I I don't know.
00:41:07.000I think it's more, hey, identifying that passion.
00:41:17.000So my call was to service in the military and then to write these thrillers.
00:41:20.000I listened to the call, both of those.
00:41:23.000But a lot of people don't listen to that call, or they get discouraged or something along the way.
00:41:27.000But for people, what I hope anyway, is that if anybody takes anything from this journey, Whether it's the military or transitioning from anything in life, whether it's the job transition, death of a loved one, divorce, it can be any sort of transition in life, is identifying that passion and figuring out your mission and putting those two together to give you purpose going forward.
00:41:46.000So if there's anything that people can take from this or from my journey, that's it, I think.
00:41:51.000But there's a lot of SEALs and Army Rangers.
00:41:55.000So Max Adams, Army Ranger, wrote on the show...
00:41:59.000Jared Shaw was there every day, and Ray Mendoza, who has War Office Productions.
00:42:04.000Those three guys, military, were on set every single day with the actors, with the showrunner, with the directors, and without them, this would be a very different show.
00:42:14.000But they were there every single day, and they were so invested because we're all so close.
00:42:17.000And I went out there like five times for a week each, and so I got to be there intermittently, but they were there every single day.
00:42:27.000They wanted to do such a good job with it.
00:42:29.000So I'm so indebted to those guys for being there and for David Agilio, the showrunner, for trusting us, for trusting them with every single decision that came down to tactics or reality and authenticity.
00:42:52.000So I think that's usually some sort of a deal in there, but nothing like that for this.
00:42:56.000It was all based on the gear that we actually use, gear that I talk about in the books, things that are so personal to me, other seals, other operators.
00:43:03.000So all that stuff is in there because I think Amazon realized how important that was.
00:43:21.000Was that a decision that was made before the film started?
00:43:26.000Yeah, I think the showrunner knew how important that was, and Antoine and Chris were just all about authenticity and all about veterans watching this and not being taken out of it by rolling their eyes and saying, oh, Hollywood screwed it up again, even though it's fiction.
00:43:40.000When things like that happen, when there are product placements in a show, is that initiated by the producers of the show, the network?
00:44:30.000So they usually like to get rid of the author.
00:44:33.000But Chris and Antoine wanted me involved.
00:44:35.000So they connected me with the showrunner the first week that he got hired.
00:44:38.000And we kind of felt each other out, him really feeling me out and seeing if I'm going to just be a pain this whole time.
00:44:44.000And we hit it off right away, and we've talked every day since to include this morning.
00:44:48.000And we wrote, well, he wrote the pilot episode, and I was just learning.
00:44:52.000And he really mentored me along, taught me about screenwriting, and I get to advise on that pilot episode.
00:44:58.000Advise on all the scripts, but primarily that pilot episode we worked together on.
00:45:03.000But then he took it with Chris and Antoine and they shopped it around and went to Netflix and Amazon and Showtime and HBO and Hulu and Apple and it got into some sort of a bidding war at some point and Amazon ended up with it.
00:47:57.000And the book is great, too, for people who haven't read the book, Outsiders, and Rumblefish also.
00:48:02.000But that whole crew back then, when you see those pictures of them from the early 80s, I think it's fantastic.
00:48:06.000And then Taps, and he's done an amazing job.
00:48:09.000Those people who have staying power in Hollywood over decades, because if you look at a lot of actors' careers, it's like a 10-year period where they have this success, and then they do things still, but maybe not at that level they had for this 10-year period Well, he's 60 years old, and he's still in great shape,
00:51:34.000I was always forgiving when I saw things in movies like someone's thumbs in aren't in the right position on that pistol or finger on the trigger type of a thing.
00:51:54.000But it's the one where something was on backwards because they gave it to the actor or whatever else.
00:51:59.000But yeah, I think we accomplished what we set out to do and keep this thing rooted in authenticity and That's because of Antoine and Chris and David DiGilio.
00:53:06.000So after that, Antoine was like, wow, these guys, there's something a little different about these guys, and he's been a supporter of the military.
00:53:12.000He's probably a military supporter before that, but that was his real experience, getting to know team guys, getting to know SEALs.
00:53:18.000When you're saying Vietnam-era tactics, what's the difference?
00:53:25.000If you watched that movie in particular, I'm sure there's some other ones out there, but the way that you would move in the jungle and just lay down suppressive fire and having two elements leapfrogging back to get out of that contact, it was just a little different that you could take that.
00:53:42.000And what we did for training after Vietnam was we'd take those tactics and we dropped them into an urban environment in training, or we dropped them into a mountain environment in training.
00:53:51.000And then after September 11th, we got to over 10,000 feet in Afghanistan and realized, hey, some things are a little different here.
00:53:57.000Like, the enemy's going to be shooting.
00:54:54.000Yeah, those guys are adapting in the field right away, and then they're getting back, and they're doing a hot wash right away.
00:54:58.000What went right, what went wrong, how we can do it better next time.
00:55:01.000And then they put together an after-action review, an AAR, and then send that out to the force.
00:55:06.000So you're going to be back in Coronado, California, Virginia Beach, Virginia, and read this and say, oh, geez, okay, we need to adapt this, this, this, and this.
00:55:23.000Hey, in training here, we've been training for a number of years just to rush into a building doing hostage rescue techniques when there might not be a hostage inside.
00:55:32.000When we might just be going into somebody's house to grab them out of their bed in the middle of the night, let's say in Ramadi.
00:56:07.000Is it one of those situations, though, sometimes where there's an impediment to success in that when you do have situations go sideways, people are reluctant to take the blame, so maybe they don't describe what happened as accurately as possible?
00:56:24.000If you're going to do something in Hollywood, you have so many people involved, it's very difficult to get What you really want out of it because, you know, everybody wants to have their say, everybody wants to kind of manipulate things.
00:56:37.000Is that the case in warfare where if a mission goes sideways, maybe you want to blame it on the operators and maybe someone wants to blame it on the plan initially?
00:56:49.000How do they hash that out and figure out what's the right way or wrong way to handle something?
00:56:58.000My experience was when someone failed in the field, they wanted to pass those lessons along to the force because it makes us a stronger force as a whole, make stronger country as a whole if we pass those lessons on.
00:57:08.000So it's so important to pass those failures on as well as the successes, what's working, what's not working.
00:57:13.000And that means you got to, yeah, that ego has to be subverted.
00:57:36.000And this is how we're going to change it for next time.
00:57:38.000Like just owning it right away to make us all a better way.
00:57:40.000And it increases trust, both up and down the chain of command.
00:57:43.000You're telling your senior leaders, hey, we messed this up, and the guys below you in the chain of command literally say, hey, my leaders want us all to be stronger next time so this doesn't happen again.
00:57:51.000So if you don't do that, it can really erode that trust.
00:57:55.000So it's so important to be honest, especially about the failures.
00:57:58.000One of the reasons why I'm bringing this up is one of the recurring themes in your books with James Reese is these people that are, they're in the military, but they're either corrupt or they're egomaniacs or they're pencil pushers who,
00:58:14.000because of their whatever's going on, whether it's corruption or whatever's happening, They'll come up with ideas that benefit them and put the soldiers lives in danger and It seems like that's a kind of a reoccurring theme that there's people that you have to listen to that are assholes Oh yeah,
00:58:33.000and I get a lot of that from real world.
00:58:37.000Certainly our senior level generals and politicians are giving me a lot to work with when it comes to that side of the house.
00:58:45.000We had 20 years to prepare to leave Afghanistan, and the best we could do is what we saw last August.
00:58:53.000You didn't need a background in military.
00:58:55.000You didn't need to read a book on military history, on strategy, on tactics.
00:58:59.000You could just apply common sense to that problem set.
00:59:02.000And that's what Carl von Klauschwitz, who wrote On War, he described as the most important attribute of a battlefield leader is common sense.
00:59:44.000Put those people in place that we all know today.
00:59:46.000And then something shifted after World War II. And I don't know what it is, but there's a lack of accountability that got attached to senior level leadership.
00:59:55.000And we've seen that time and time again.
00:59:58.000There's a great book called The Afghanistan Papers by Craig Whitlock, and there were these interviews that were done with these senior-level generals leaving Afghanistan in particular, and they thought that these interviews and questions were going to remain classified.
01:00:12.000There were Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, two of them, that got these released.
01:00:17.000And he juxtaposes what they said in these private classified interviews with what they were saying to Congress, the American people, their troops, and their 180 out from one another.
01:00:26.000And if you go back and look at testimony to Congress, you can take the person's name off there, take the date off there, and they say essentially the same things.
01:00:34.000The Afghan military, we're making progress.
01:00:37.000All we need is, we're meeting our milestones, just need more resources, more funding, more troops, whatever it is they're asking for.
01:00:45.000And the one guy, I think it was in 2009, people can go back and check me, the guy that said one thing that wasn't a party line, and he didn't even say anything bad, he said something along the lines of, things aren't going as well in Afghanistan as we think they are.
01:01:00.000The only person held accountable over that 20-year period.
01:01:02.000And then we get to Afghanistan, and look what we have.
01:01:05.000That's why anybody can look at the situation and say, why are we giving up this tactically advantageous position at Bagram, and we're putting America's sons and daughters in a tactically disadvantageous position at this airfield in Kabul?
01:01:39.000And you don't need a military background to look at that situation and say, hey, if we're leaving, why don't we leave from this position that's tactically advantageous?
01:01:46.000And a lot of that falls on politicians.
01:01:48.000But still, we have senior level military leaders for a reason, and their responsibility is to the troops.
01:01:54.000And I don't know why none of them have been held accountable over this last 20 years, particularly for Afghanistan, for that debacle and the way we left that country.
01:02:36.000They asked for 10th Mountain Division.
01:02:37.000Those requests were denied, and Bin Laden escaped.
01:02:41.000And that moment right there, more than any other moment, really defined the next 20 years.
01:02:47.000Now, when you say they requested all these people and those requests were denied, was there a reason given as to why those requests were denied?
01:02:55.000I don't know if there's a reason, but in looking back at it, it is that the senior level leaders didn't want that Soviet experience, which we eventually had.
01:03:08.000They wanted to keep the troop levels to a minimum and do the job with a minimum amount of people on the ground.
01:03:14.000And of course, after that, we ballooned way past what their initial...
01:03:19.000We had more people, I think, at the Salt Lake City Olympics than we had in Afghanistan, which is crazy to think about.
01:03:27.000And what I would hope is that we take those lessons and apply them going forward as a wisdom.
01:03:32.000And we neglect to do that in this country.
01:03:34.000We think of things in terms of four-year election cycles, eight-year election cycles for the real deep thinkers among us.
01:03:39.000But what we owe those people who sacrifice their lives, and it's not just their lives, people coming home with this post-traumatic stress, and it's a generational type of deal because it's going to affect their children.
01:05:27.000Yeah, and then on top of that, just the fucking generations, as you said, of families and loved ones that have to deal with the stress and the chaos and having lost people over there.
01:05:38.000There seems to be a direct connection between the loss of faith in the military in those conflicts, the Korean conflict and then the Vietnam conflict.
01:05:48.000Whereas, we don't think about it that way when we think about World War II. When we think about World War II, we think about it as the good guys versus the bad guys.
01:05:58.000And we won, and we came back, and there's the famous kiss on V-Day in the middle of the street.
01:06:06.000There's all these romantic notions attached to World War II that aren't attached to Korea and aren't attached to Vietnam.
01:06:14.000Yeah, I mean, Eisenhower's speech, people pull out that military-industrial complex line, but people should listen to the whole speech.
01:06:20.000Listen to it and watch it, because it's fascinating.
01:06:23.000But something shifted, and I don't know exactly what it is.
01:06:25.000I can't put my finger on it, but it keeps coming back to accountability.
01:06:28.000But my question is, why do we lose that sense of accountability?
01:06:32.000Why did we lose the importance of accountability following World War II, particularly in 1947 when we reorganized, really, our defense system?
01:06:38.000Our intelligence agencies and the military got reorganized in 1947. We changed the name of the War Department to the Department of Defense.
01:06:47.000So we have precision in language, precision in thought.
01:06:56.000So there's that little thing, little thing, but language is important.
01:07:00.000And then for some reason, we stopped holding our senior level leaders accountable.
01:07:04.000And I don't know why you could point to This essentially a triad of politicians, of think tanks, of the defense industry, kind of how people float between all those things.
01:07:22.000So there's a lot of things that came into play that weren't at play before World War II that become reality after World War II. So I don't know what it is.
01:07:36.000They didn't whine about what they'd been involved in.
01:07:39.000They got to work and they built this country into what it is today.
01:07:43.000And it's so hard to see what we're doing to ourselves really in this country.
01:07:48.000That last book, In the Devil's Hand, I put myself in the enemy's shoes and I thought, hey, what did they learn from us on the field of battle over the last 20 years at war?
01:07:57.000And during the time I was writing that, COVID hit.
01:08:00.000Very contentious political season and election cycle.
01:08:03.000The enemy's learning from all those things.
01:08:05.000And the sad part of my takeaway from that research Was that, hey, if I'm the enemy, I might just watch.
01:08:10.000We're doing a pretty good job of destroying ourselves from the inside right now.
01:08:14.000I might just wait and watch and see what happens.
01:08:17.000But, of course, I had to figure out in a fictional sense how to deal with that, and I did in a very creative way that was fun to figure out.
01:08:23.000But it's sad to think that we've lost this appreciation, I think, for what was sacrificed so we could have these freedoms and options and opportunities that we do today.
01:08:33.000So from the inception of this country up until today, people have sacrificed everything or they've risked everything so that we can have these freedoms.
01:08:39.000And now we have a segment of society that wants to undercut those freedoms because I don't think they appreciate what was sacrificed so we could have them.
01:08:49.000Pearl Harbor for the 80th anniversary commemoration events this last December.
01:08:53.000And we volunteered with an organization called the Best Defense Foundation, Donnie Edwards Foundation, that takes people back to the World War II battlefields primarily so they can say goodbye.
01:09:02.000They can make peace with what they did there.
01:09:04.000And a lot of them, it's their last trips to these places.
01:09:06.000A lot of them, it's their second trip.
01:09:08.000The first one was actually going over the beach in Normandy or going to Iwo Jima and fighting.
01:09:12.000And now they're getting to go there in the last years of their lives and say goodbye.
01:09:16.000But we went to Pearl Harbor, and so my daughter is 16, and she sat it.
01:09:20.000We took 64 veterans, age of 96 to 104. Wow.
01:09:24.000And in wheelchairs, we're getting them on and off the buses, taking them to the events, getting the dinners, making sure they're taking their medications, all that stuff.
01:09:30.000And it was a turning point in her life, because she got to sit down across the table from this generation that, yeah, she's heard me talk about, and she's read about.
01:09:36.000But to hear them tell their stories, and a lot of them haven't even told their stories until just a few years ago.
01:09:41.000There's one guy, Jack Holder, who was on the airfield at Pearl Harbor.
01:09:45.000He watched the planes, Japanese planes, come over the mountains, drop down, strafe the runway.
01:09:50.000He jumps into what was then a sewage ditch, and he showed us the bullet holes in the runway, still there, in the hangar, still there.
01:09:57.000And so he jumps into this sewage ditch, he watches the planes take this left-hand turn, bank, And he jumps up, runs to the edge of Pearl Harbor right there on the water and watches them and watches the first torpedoes get dropped in Pearl Harbor.
01:10:11.000And then he went back, he flew a PBY, which was a seaplane.
01:10:16.000And then he went on to fight in the Pacific and he sunk a Japanese submarine and helped sink a Japanese aircraft carrier.
01:10:23.000And then he goes to the Mediterranean and sinks a German submarine.
01:11:04.000I can't imagine what it must be like for them to go back to Normandy and to be on that beach.
01:11:09.000And I mean, I've seen the photographs and, you know, I think probably one of the best theatrical representations of it is Saving Private Ryan, right?
01:11:24.000I mean, it puts things in relative terms.
01:11:28.000And for me, it was in buds on the beach in Hell Week, you know, doing push-ups, getting yelled at, you're freezing, you're on the verge of hypothermia, people are quitting.
01:11:35.000I'm not coming off of a boat onto a beach in Normandy where I'm running through a hail of machine gun fire that's set up in an elevated position with no cover and concealment between me and...
01:11:46.000I'm like, I can do a few more push-ups here on the beach.
01:11:48.000You know, I can shiver here in the water a little longer here.
01:11:50.000Those guys sacrificed that so I could follow my dream and I could be here on this beach in Coronado, California, testing myself in this crucible of buds.
01:11:57.000So I think about that generation in particular quite a bit and what they gave us.
01:12:02.000Tactically, when they review storming the beach at Normandy, is there alternative methods of approaching that situation that people have proposed that would have caused less casualties?
01:12:16.000Because it's such a crazy thing to just dump everybody off at the beach and run towards the gunfire.
01:12:21.000I mean, I always wonder, like, why didn't they do something differently?
01:12:26.000Why didn't they shoot at them with planes and soften them up first?
01:13:44.000So yeah, it's an amazing place to go for people who haven't been, to go to these memorials, especially to take kids to these memorials, and to go to Pearl Harbor, and to go to Normandy, and to go stand up on Pointe du Hoc and look down.
01:13:54.000And see where the Rangers had to climb up ropes and ladders.
01:13:58.000And the Germans are firing right down on them from these positions.
01:14:07.000It's an old black and white movie that people should watch.
01:14:09.000They should watch that end, Saving Private Ryan.
01:14:11.000And that's the power of popular culture.
01:14:13.000Like, these movies play an important part in our popular culture and in our history because you can show these things and create this appreciation.
01:14:37.000That's why those war films I think are so important because you can watch that and say, oh my gosh, I am so appreciative of what those guys did.
01:14:44.000And you know what, my life here, maybe I can make some changes here and I can appreciate what they did for us so that I can make my own decisions and I can have these freedoms and opportunities rather than just complain about it because really, you know what I'm not doing?
01:14:58.000Running into a hail of machine gun bullets as I cross this beach.
01:15:00.000So there's a lot to appreciate the previous generations and what they did for us.
01:15:06.000This is what I was getting at by saying, trying to figure out what weren't wrong and did it go wrong because after that, the Korean conflict and the Vietnam conflict were not thought of as victories for America in the same way, especially Vietnam.
01:15:23.000I mean, I've talked to people that came back and the things that they endured and the abuse that they took, people calling them baby killers and people saying horrible...
01:16:15.000What we were involved in was essentially war crimes and we did some horrible, horrible things.
01:16:20.000Which was also a part of the Vietnam War.
01:16:23.000What happened in those jungles and the way the war was playing out and the frustration that the soldiers had and the evil potential that men have for evil.
01:16:38.000You see that potential for evil and that's why you have to take such pains to maintain the moral high ground because oftentimes that's all we have that differentiates us from the enemy.
01:16:48.000Is that moral high ground, and when you lose it, you've lost.
01:16:51.000But there was a giant shift in the difference between the way people thought of war...
01:17:39.000Blackout curtains so you wouldn't see a light on at night, so they're worried about another attack, let's say, on the Pacific coast from the Japanese.
01:17:46.000So everybody had to have blackout curtains.
01:18:34.000And we got, we did, there were, I think it was, I'm going to get this exact numbers wrong, but there was a small number, less than 10, of German saboteurs.
01:18:44.000I think there were two U.S. citizens that were involved in it on the East Coast.
01:19:47.000I don't know, but I know that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is in there still, and we're still waiting on his final, what's going to happen to him, so...
01:20:08.000I mean, I guess you can debate that as well.
01:20:11.000But something certainly shifted after World War II. But the main thing I can point to is that accountability or lack of accountability, I should say.
01:20:17.000There's still accountability for the people at the tactical level who mess up, not so much at that strategic level.
01:20:22.000There are very few senior-level generals who have been held accountable for any missteps strategically over the last 20 years.
01:20:31.000How much of a part does it play in the general public's confidence that the war is just and that these actions are just?
01:20:38.000Like, there's a lot of lack of confidence after the weapons of mass destruction debacle.
01:20:43.000I mean, it was promoted by the mainstream media.
01:20:46.000It was promoted by politicians and military industrial complex wanted us to get into Iraq, and they were claiming that there was Unquestionably, weapons of mass destruction.
01:20:56.000We had to stop this before it became another disaster.
01:20:59.000Yeah, that's a tough one because when you see these authoritarian regimes and you see, just like with Putin today, they don't necessarily get the best information from their senior level generals and advisors because if you bring bad news to, let's say, the leader of North Korea or Iran or Russia,
01:21:39.000It's very hard for me to think that, even though I write about in the book all sorts of...
01:21:43.000In my books in general, all sorts of nefarious things at senior levels of government, it's so hard for me to believe that they actually took steps deliberately that they knew were wrong based on faulty intel.
01:21:55.000I have to think that they assumed that they were getting good intel and these things, although later on in the war, I would not have been able to launch a mission based off the kind of intel that we use to actually go to war.
01:22:07.000I would not be able to launch a mission off of single-source intelligence that wasn't corroborated by technical means and another human source, meaning another human on the ground disassociated from the network that's giving me my information on said bad guy.
01:22:21.000Well, I'm not just going to launch based on him because, well, he just might have some sort of a feud with that guy and want me to use the military to take that person out.
01:22:29.000So we saw that a lot in the beginning.
01:22:30.000So you have to Corroborate that with another totally disassociated network and then technical means as well.
01:22:37.000So you really know you're going after the right person for the right reasons and you're not just settling some centuries-old feud.
01:22:43.000But going into the war, I wouldn't have been able to launch a mission 10 years later based on that kind of intel.
01:22:51.000I had a conversation with a guy once, and we were talking about weapons of mass destruction, the way it was promoted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
01:23:01.000And they were saying that it was just obviously that it was not true, but that it was this massive hoax and that it was all designed to get us to enter into the war.
01:23:11.000And I'm like, man, I don't know if people would be willing to accept a coordinated lie that easily.
01:23:19.000I have to think that at least there was some concern that this was real.
01:23:22.000And is that the case that when you're getting military intel on a situation that's ongoing, oftentimes it's cloudy and you're not exactly sure and you have to err on the side of caution.
01:23:34.000And if you decided to ignore whatever intel was saying that they have weapons of mass destruction, it turned out to be true.
01:23:51.000And even though it turned out to be a gigantic, horrific disaster, I'm reluctant to believe that it was this large-scale conspiracy involving everyone, that CNN knew it was a lie, that Colin Powell knew it was a lie.
01:24:06.000I have to think that at least some of them thought that it was real.
01:24:17.000To think that that number of people had to want us to go to war so that their stock could do better or something.
01:24:23.000Right, and then they had a coordinated lie.
01:24:25.000Obviously, it turns out to not be true.
01:24:27.000And obviously, there was lies to support the initial assertions.
01:24:30.000There was obviously some coordinated effort to cover up the initial assertions and to make it seem like they were more accurate than they were.
01:24:41.000Or painting a rosy picture, or you have this outcome that you want, and so what do we need to support that?
01:24:46.000And looking at those things that support that, rather than the things that don't support it.
01:24:50.000So I have to think that they're acting off the best intel that they had at the time, and making decisions that they thought were in the best interest of the American people, and protecting I have to think that, and it just ended up not to be the case.
01:25:03.000And there are many reasons why it's not the case that we just talked about with Saddam thinking that he might have had a more robust capability in the end, because people are telling him that, possibly.
01:25:11.000And that's a distinct possibility as well.
01:25:14.000I always wonder, and then so you take that and you extrapolate 20 years later, right?
01:25:20.000When you follow up 20 years later and you look at the kind of confidence that people have in the military's ability to make the correct decisions, and then You fuck that sideways with the extraction from Afghanistan.
01:25:31.000Because now everybody's like, Jesus Christ, why would you do it that way?
01:25:37.000You know, I've had conversations with people on this podcast that were military people, high-level people that were involved in this, and they said, there's nothing about that extraction that was right.
01:26:05.000But really, it's the responsibility of those leaders to do that for that E1, E2, E3, that lower enlisted person who's going to be standing the gate guard, who's going to be going out there into these streets or out there into the mountains and taking fire and dealing with a car that's coming up that looks like,
01:26:21.000oh, maybe is it bad suspension or is there a family in there or is it packed with explosives?
01:26:55.000So anyone who had any job in Iraq was a Baathist.
01:26:58.000So the person that emptied the garbage, the people that kept the lights on, now de-bathification, those people don't have jobs.
01:27:03.000So now we're fighting an insurgency and we're figuring out how to get the trash picked up, how to keep the power on.
01:27:09.000We're building up an entirely new government.
01:27:12.000And those lessons and those senior-level leaders, they are responsible for making those decisions, just like we would be at the tactical level.
01:27:21.000And they made the wrong decision there.
01:27:23.000And that one, those two things right there, looking back at those two things, like, It's almost unforgivable that they would make those decisions and not correct it immediately.
01:27:34.000We created that insurgency because of those two decisions.
01:27:37.000The hindsight is always 20-20, but looking back on the Afghanistan situation, what is the consensus of what would have been the correct approach?
01:27:48.000It's not lost on many people that we essentially spent 20 years replacing the Taliban with the Taliban.
01:28:04.000I mean, I know when we left Iraq, I was at a lower level, tactical level, so you just kind of hear things, so I don't know how true it is, but how much it costs to bring certain things back rather than leave it there.
01:28:15.000Like the gyms that went up all over the place.
01:28:17.000So there's all these gyms all over Iraq, and you've seen the videos on YouTube of the Iraqis trying to work out.
01:28:30.000I'd use that as the most basic level, but then you apply that to how much does it take to get this helicopter back and that helicopter back and this and that.
01:28:37.000Did we think that we were going to turn those over to the Afghans and leave those with them?
01:29:07.000If you put it on the screen and show the provinces that fall, I mean, yeah, you don't have to be Nostradamus to figure out that, hey, this isn't looking so good, and everything is converging here, and you could extrapolate that, oh, probably every province is going to fall.
01:29:26.000One being, hey, maybe you could leave a small force at Bagram, perhaps, to try to keep this military, keep this intelligence service, keep this government running, maybe after 20 years.
01:29:36.000I don't know how long you can sustain that, but you could have done that.
01:29:39.000And then, if things aren't working out, they're the last people to leave.
01:29:47.000You get everyone out and leave Bagram, and it ends up being the same thing.
01:29:50.000You see, watch the whole government fall, the leader left, of course, but now you're not leaving from a tactically disadvantageous position.
01:29:58.000So you had essentially those two options, to draw down to something, a very small force left there, trying to keep that government going, trying to keep that military going, trying to keep that intelligence service going, and then you could see how that works out.
01:30:11.000Get everybody out in a way that makes sense.
01:30:57.000I talked to somebody about that in 2003 in the back of a Hilux pickup truck in Afghanistan and asking him about what does he think is going to happen when we eventually leave here.
01:31:10.000You're trying to figure out the language barrier and all that, but I did ask that because I was thinking about that because what's our track record?
01:31:19.000And at the time, we had the Kurds at the first Gulf War.
01:31:22.000We had that, leaving them, kind of hanging them out to dry.
01:31:25.000So we don't have a very good track record of supporting people that ally with us in foreign countries when we're doing particularly expeditionary counterinsurgency, meaning a counterinsurgency campaign in another country.
01:31:54.000And then you have, there's talks of China aiding the Taliban and moving in and supplying them and sort of working with them the moment they realize the United States is no longer going to be in power.
01:32:13.000Like they don't seem to have the same qualms that we have about human rights and No, they're not known for that in China, being overly concerned with human rights.
01:32:27.000And once again, that's an interesting one.
01:32:30.000Right there when we talk about big business and their associations with China.
01:32:33.000But when I look at the country and I just look at what's happening today and I see a few things that you could apply common sense to, just like Karl von Klauschwitz and George Marshall talked about, well, if you look at our position in the world today and say, huh, why are we outsourcing our energy to our enemy?
01:32:51.000Okay, the energy, that essentially runs our national security apparatus.
01:32:55.000Okay, and we're outsourcing that to our enemy.
01:33:16.000Wait a sec, so we're dependent on China, Iran, all these people that are essentially our enemies, we're dependent upon them, and we have a porous southern border at the same time.
01:33:26.000Some very basic things that you would think we could address as a nation.
01:33:31.000Would there be an argument that it's good to work with them, and that if our energy systems and our chips and all these other things are dependent upon them, that they wouldn't want the demise of America because it's crucial to their economy?
01:33:46.000And that we could have some sort of a cooperative effort that would at least in some way ensure some level of peace.
01:33:54.000I think that as the companies used to be, America first, these different companies.
01:34:00.000And now when you become these global conglomerates and dependent upon China for a lot of that revenue and to shareholders and to everything else, Well, now you're dependent on an enemy.
01:34:10.000So now you have this company that's an American-based company.
01:34:12.000You had the opportunity to create something and create untold wealth.
01:34:24.000Are we loyal more to these shareholders and our company or to the United States of America?
01:34:28.000What's most beneficial to us and what conditions can we create here in this country to not be reliant on our enemies for those things that keep us safe, that run our defense establishment, our intelligence establishment, and some of the things that we rely on to run mom-and-pop businesses across the country.
01:34:45.000Do you think it's also a function of the fact that the United States essentially, like you were talking about before, we're dealing with four-year time periods or eight-year time periods where that's the time someone's in office as a president, whereas in China they have full control and they can play this long game.
01:35:01.000And also the government and big business are completely entangled.
01:35:38.000And I try to remain as hopeful as I can publicly, but when my wife and I sit down at the end of the night and have a glass of wine on the couch and talk about what world that our kids are inheriting, it's a tough one.
01:35:53.000And I went deep into it in this one, too.
01:35:55.000Looking into quantum computing, looking into artificial intelligence, looking into data storage and surveillance of U.S. citizens and the Internet of Things and how all this is connected.
01:36:12.000And the picture that I paint in this thing, I think it is close.
01:36:15.000Because the people that I talked to that were involved in quantum computing, and for people who haven't seen a quantum computer, look that up and hit images.
01:37:31.000Well, I did a lot of research and reading, but once you read something about quantum computing or artificial intelligence, it's way dated by the time you read it.
01:37:38.000So you read those things so you can ask questions with people that are more current, because it gives you the foundation from which to ask these questions.
01:37:43.000So same thing like I did with the bioweapons research in the last one.
01:37:46.000I talked to a lot of people that are involved in that space, and you get a little sliver, just like a journalist would do, and I take a little bit from each and every one of them to paint that picture and figure out that puzzle.
01:37:57.000And the people that I talked to, they all told me that, hey, we could tell you more, but That would for sure put this book in the science fiction category.
01:38:23.000And I was worried because I saw some people talking when I was doing my research, talking about quantum computing on different news channels.
01:38:30.000And they were talking about China having this edge.
01:38:33.000And when I went deep down the rabbit hole, my take is that we still have the edge in quantum computing right now.
01:38:42.000I don't know if we will tomorrow, but right now we do.
01:39:11.000Specifically to show you what we can do.
01:39:13.000So they spied on the CIA and the NSA. So American phone tracking firm demoed their surveillance powers by spying on the spies and saying, hey, we can spy on you.
01:39:28.000See, this is what I was getting at before when I was talking about China and the government, is that...
01:39:32.000Reluctantly I say this, but I think I might be right.
01:39:36.000The only way to compete with a country that has the government And the businesses inexorably entangled, where the government and the businesses work hand in hand, is for the governments and the businesses of this country to work hand in hand.
01:39:50.000That scares the shit out of me, because what's involved in that is full compliance by the population.
01:39:55.000The only way you get full compliance by the population is you have to be able to control everything they do, including money.
01:40:02.000So some sort of a centralized digital currency where they have in China where they can tell you what you can and cannot buy based on your social credit score, which is something that everybody was very terrified of during this COVID thing when they were starting to at least suggest the possibility of implementing a passport.
01:40:21.000Some sort of a passport of what you can and can't do.
01:40:24.000And the initial suspicion was that if you started off by saying, you know, you have a vaccine passport, and if you do not comply, you will not be able to do these things.
01:40:34.000You won't be able to have access to goods and services and transportation and all these different things based on your compliance with some government regulation that's implemented reluctantly but necessarily because of a crisis.
01:40:50.000Now, once that's in play, then that becomes the norm.
01:40:54.000We get accustomed to it, it becomes a way of life, and then they can implement that and keep pushing that envelope further and further down.
01:41:24.000Or is it that they were scared of COVID and they felt like this is the only way to keep people safe?
01:41:28.000And because of that, because people are scared, and they felt like this is the only way to keep people safe, we've got to get everybody vaccinated, we've got to get everybody saved, we've got to get back to normal.
01:41:37.000But they're reluctant to look at the general history of what happens when people do this.
01:41:45.000And that's why every chance I get, I like to talk about going back into the pages of history and reading about why we have these freedoms that we have today.
01:41:54.000Why were they in place from the beginning?
01:42:20.000I keep going back to Eisenhower, but he had a great quote about farming.
01:42:23.000And he said, hey, farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from a cornfield.
01:42:30.000So you have people in Washington who, you know, they're called to service as politicians, and they also happen to be very savvy investors, if you haven't noticed that.
01:42:47.000But they're career politicians, and that's not how this was set up.
01:42:50.000I had a great conversation with Bill Barr, former Attorney General.
01:42:52.000He was on my podcast a couple weeks ago, and he'll come out here in a little bit.
01:42:56.000But he's so in tune with that side of the House, with these career politicians, because he was in government, he was in private practice, got called back to service, did it, and...
01:43:06.000And what he saw were careerists and people that aren't going to Washington just for a year or two and then going back to the farm.
01:43:14.000I mean, I think we'd be a lot better off if we had some more farmers rather than some attorneys who maybe never even really practiced law in Congress.
01:43:33.000Oh, come on with this deep state talk.
01:43:35.000Because it was kind of connected to what Trump was saying when he got into office and that the deep state is after Trump and people go, oh, shut the fuck up with all this.
01:43:45.000But it seems like that's what the deep state is, right?
01:43:48.000It's career politicians that are inexorably intertwined with business.
01:45:39.000And they're censoring stuff for weird...
01:45:41.000I mean, I don't even understand why they censor some of the stuff they censor.
01:45:44.000It's almost like they're trying to get you accustomed to censorship, like random censorship.
01:45:50.000That is the craziest part of all this, is that our stalwart defenders of the First Amendment used to be lawyers, used to be publishing houses, used to be magazine editors, used to be newspapers, used to be politicians.
01:46:06.000We're in defense of that First Amendment.
01:46:08.000And all of us as citizens, we would say growing up, hey, I will fight and die for your right to say something, especially if I disagree with you because we're Americans.
01:46:16.000That used to be, no matter what you thought of the Second Amendment or what you thought of anything else, that First Amendment bound us all together.
01:46:22.000And now we have those same people that used to defend that First Amendment Now, actively calling for censorship.
01:46:28.000So instead of having that debate and having the best ideas rise to the top in this marketplace of ideas, now if I disagree with you, I just want to censor you and cancel you.
01:46:49.000And we had a glimpse of it at the beginning of COVID, where people were like, oh my gosh, is there going to be some food on the shelves at the grocery store?
01:46:55.000Hey, if I call 911, will someone show up?
01:46:58.000And then we got back to normal-ish, as far as that stuff goes.
01:47:05.000But even if you saw some of the interviews on the streets of Odessa, of Kiev, you saw people not thinking that the Russians were going to invade.
01:47:24.000So we all have ancestors that were good at those two things, or we would not be here today.
01:47:29.000And society can collapse pretty dang quickly.
01:47:31.000And if you've been to Iraq and been to Afghanistan, you can see that.
01:47:34.000I know you have a little glimpse here and there, but we have had so, from the end of World War II up to today, we've had relative peace in our country.
01:47:41.000It's been relatively stable in our country.
01:47:42.000We've got very comfortable, and we've lost this sense of why we have these freedoms.
01:47:47.000And instead, we have this entitlement culture that plays into it.
01:47:50.000And we have this just This comfort that, hey, if I call 911, someone's going to show up.
01:48:24.000And that it's too complicated to think about all the possibilities for the average person.
01:48:30.000The average person's plate is so full with job, family, business, all the stuff that you're obligated to, bills, all the problems you have.
01:48:41.000There's so much going on, so many activities that for you to stop and say, hey, we have to really concentrate on the First Amendment.
01:48:47.000We have to concentrate on freedom of speech and The ability to communicate and express yourself.
01:48:51.000We have to be concerned with other countries that aren't concentrating on those things.
01:48:54.000We have to be concerned with the fact that we could get invaded.
01:48:56.000We have to be concerned that someone could kill our power grid.
01:48:58.000We have to be concerned with all these different things, and it's too much for people.
01:49:10.000Wall Street Journal had a thing called TikTok Brain the other day, and I actually printed it out for our 11-year-old, and I took out the ads, took out everything that was in there when I printed it, and I gave it to him to read, because TikTok Brain, 15 seconds, and then you're ready for the next one.
01:49:23.000You're ready for that next distraction.
01:49:25.000And you're getting all these inputs all the time, and most of them maybe are not that healthy.
01:49:31.000And what are you not doing when you're distracted by those things?
01:49:34.000You're not focused on what you need to do to move forward, to be a prepared citizen, a good citizen of this country.
01:49:40.000Moving that ball forward, being a good inheritor of these freedoms, and then defending them for that next generation so they can then move the ball forward for the following generation.
01:49:59.000how we get rational, how we get objective, how we stop this and say we have to preserve some aspects.
01:50:06.000And even if we did have the inclination to do so, when you see something like quantum computing, when you see this AI that can spy on anyone at any time, and when people do tell you that if we told you everything, it would essentially be science fiction.
01:50:21.000So what is science fiction today, and what is it like in five years?
01:50:24.000Because it's going to be way more invasive.
01:50:28.000I mean, this next decade, I think, is a pivotal decade for the country when it comes to freedoms and what it's like going forward and what opportunities our kids are going to have going forward.
01:50:37.000What's not controlled by the government, what thoughts and behaviors aren't controlled by a government business tech type of an entity.
01:50:43.000What's encouraged by the government, what's encouraged as far as censorship goes by these tech platforms that have so much power concentrated in such a small number of people.
01:50:52.000So these are real decisions and real issues that they need to be contended with, and we haven't had to deal with them.
01:51:08.000Overwhelmingly run by ideologically driven left-wing people who believe in a very specific way of thinking and behaving and living.
01:51:16.000And they're diametrically opposed to people that have a different perspective.
01:51:20.000And they don't welcome free debate and speech and will actively censor and shadow ban and do all sorts of things to people, even if these people are Highly intelligent, articulate, conservative people that aren't outrageous.
01:51:55.000And making friends and having a drink or having coffee.
01:51:57.000I mean, there's a picture of Ronald Reagan going out with the leader of the other party and they're out there with their tuxedos and they're at a show and they're laughing with their wives and all that stuff with Tip O'Neill.
01:52:23.000I know those things, but I'm going to have to go back to that one in particular.
01:52:26.000But going out to dinner just with them together as a couple to enjoy an evening on the town and having a nice steak dinner and then watching a show, like, that doesn't happen.
01:53:02.000It's because, like, that's Civil War talk.
01:53:04.000That's like, you're looking at it like these...
01:53:08.000This sort of absolutist mentality that it's my way or there's no other way.
01:53:14.000And tech companies have power that's never been wielded by any individual company that is a civilian-based company before.
01:53:28.000There's never been the kind of power that tech companies have to shape narratives and to...
01:53:34.000To get people elected or not elected or just to shape how elections run based on what kind of information is distributed or allowed to be distributed or curated.
01:53:48.000But back in the day, you used to have to either bribe a newspaper reporter or you had to get blackmail on them or blackmail a spouse or a child or something like that.
01:56:15.000If I had that kind of money, I'd be living like Jeff Bezos.
01:56:19.000He steps down, he's got this fucking banging hot girlfriend, gets jacked, starts going around the world, balling out of control, wearing tight underwear.
01:59:28.000For a mammal, when they get away from an arrow that's going 290 feet per second and it's within like 10 yards of them and they're like, they're out of there, they move like they're defying time.
02:00:17.000They are switched on out there for sure.
02:00:20.000There can be a lot of pressure depending on what's going on.
02:00:23.000COVID, they took a little break, though, because there was a lockdown, so they got to take a little breath.
02:00:27.000So that was kind of interesting to see them a little more relaxed than they have been in the past when people are just out there constantly because you can do it all year because it's exotic.
02:00:38.000But yeah, what a fantastic spot to go and have the kids have that experience.
02:00:44.000And then bring home the meat, and we're eating it right now.
02:01:15.000We ate wild game for, gosh, so many years in a row.
02:01:18.000Now there's a bunch of different companies out there that do, and there's some veteran-owned ones as well, that send out...
02:01:24.000Send out tenderloin or whatever else from their farm-raised and all that stuff that have social media presence so you can see how they're running things, which is kind of cool.
02:01:32.000So we eat more beef these days than we did for a number of years where it was just all axis, all moose, all elk, and that's all the kids ate as well.
02:01:45.000How did you get involved in that Pineapple Brothers organization?
02:01:48.000Yeah, so John Dubin, former FBI agent, and so we got to be friends, had a mutual friend.
02:01:54.000And when he got it out of the FBI, he's connected to Larry Ellison, and that's what he wanted to do, is he wanted to run the hunting operation out there on Lanai, so put together that business.
02:02:52.000But yeah, he did interviews for a number of years, and then I think I remember that there was some point where someone's like, why are you doing these interviews?
02:02:58.000And he's like, oh yeah, why am I doing these interviews?
02:03:00.000But he'll do one every now and again, and that's where I heard him say about the disadvantages necessary for success.
02:03:07.000But there's a great book called The Billionaire and the Mechanic about how he got the America's Cup, and it's so fun, so fantastic to read, but he's playing tennis in part of this story with Rafael Nadal,
02:03:22.000and they're playing tennis, and And they're talking.
02:03:24.000He asks, hey, Rafa, do you like to win?
02:04:00.000Especially now, these athletes are working from, like, day one.
02:04:03.000That's why it's always so interesting when someone's like, ah...
02:04:06.000I just found this sport two years ago and now you're crushing it like it's some obscure sport like biathlon like you have people in Europe that are just growing up and they're doing the biathlon so the cross-country skiing and the shooting and that's amazing what incredible athletes and then someone in this country like finds it a couple years ago and just puts in the work and now they're they're up there you know near the top Right.
02:04:23.000That's kind of cool, too, because so many people are growing up with tennis balls in the crib type of a thing and kind of just bred for it almost, which is a crazy way to think about it.
02:04:39.000Well, mixed martial artists, I mean, that's obviously my focus is looking at the difference between fighters from the 1990s when the UFC first came around versus guys like Charles Oliveira of today, which is like they're on such a different level.
02:04:54.000Remember the Tough Man Contest before UFC? Remember those guys in there?
02:06:26.000Cannoneer actually started off his career as a heavyweight, and then he got down to light heavyweight, and now he's a middleweight, and he's a big, big middleweight.
02:06:35.000He's a big middleweight and strong as fuck.
02:07:48.000But it was just like, that was the rules.
02:07:49.000And then when the fights went on, you were essentially so fortunate to be in this room where there's only 30 or 40 other people in the whole room watching these world-class, world championship fights.
02:09:35.000And with a respiratory virus that's spreading, like, if you talk to virologists, you talk to people that are, especially if they weren't on camera, especially, they would tell you, like, there is no way to stop this.
02:09:46.000They were like, the best thing you can do is stay healthy, take care of yourself.
02:09:49.000And that's actually initially what even Fauci said.
02:09:52.000He's like, don't drink, take care of yourself, exercise.
02:09:55.000You know, like, this is what you really have to concentrate on.
02:10:19.000You have quiet, uninterrupted time and you just get to sit there.
02:10:23.000And think and just kind of sip something nice and maybe it's worked into the story like a veteran owned whiskey like Horse Soldier and put in this last one.
02:10:29.000We put Hooten Young by these Delta guys that's in the show and it's just you just kind of sipping and typing and alone in your world.
02:10:38.000Like do you wake up in the morning and write immediately or do you have like a routine that you follow?
02:10:44.000I wish I did, and I hope that I can get to a routine at some point, but with all the chaos, it's just crazy working on scripts and juggling the kids and then all the other projects that are going on, the podcast, reading people's books for the podcast, like all those things.
02:11:02.000I probably shouldn't even say it, but this really cool cabin, super small, wood outside.
02:11:07.000I'd go chop wood, throw it in the wood-burning stove, and everything was right there.
02:11:10.000The whole thing was about as big as this room.
02:11:11.000And I had a couch, wood-burning stove, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, and I could just write, and I could still think about writing if I got up to make a sandwich.
02:11:20.000I could sip whiskey or wine at night in front of that fire and just work.
02:11:23.000So I went all in with no interruptions, but I should have a routine where I get up early and I work until whatever time and then I start doing the business side of the house or then I work on the podcast or then I work on scripts or whatever it is.
02:11:36.000I need some of that Jocko discipline to get me into that routine.
02:11:40.000But right now I feel like it's still a startup where you're in your garage and you're just doing things and you're just building this readership and building these books essentially.
02:11:48.000Any product, any entrepreneur that starts something in their garage, very similar.
02:11:52.000But I think now is the time to take a breath and get a routine going.
02:11:55.000But what I've done for all the books, to include this one and the sixth one that I'm working on now, is I write a one-page executive summary, like what you read on the book jacket.
02:12:02.000And I ask myself, hey, was this worth spending a year of my life on?
02:12:07.000And if the answer is yes, then I read it again and I say, if someone read this, would they want to spend time, time they're never going to get back in these pages or listening to this?
02:12:15.000Because that's something I take very seriously is that time.
02:12:19.000So if the answer to those two is yes, then I'm in.
02:12:21.000So I have a theme, I have a title right off the bat, I take that one-page executive summary, I turn that into an outline, and then I start writing.
02:12:28.000And I love every part of the process, and it's just so, I mean, I feel so fortunate to be doing what I love and so thankful to everybody that says, bought a book, took a risk on me, you know, like you did, and then told a friend about it, whether that's one person or 35 million or whatever it might be.
02:12:42.000I'm just so thankful each and every day that I get to do this.
02:12:46.000When you write, do you write for a specific amount of time, or do you just write until you're done?
02:13:59.000And the autobiographical nature of it is even crazier, like getting hit by that van and then waking up and looking up and seeing this person, I think, sitting on a rock that just hit him with this van and thinking, I just got killed by somebody in one of my novels, essentially.
02:15:31.000I used to go down to the public library and go into one of those little rooms that you could rent there for two hours at a time if no one was waiting.
02:15:37.000And oftentimes I get bumped by a high school student that's waiting to do a high school history project.
02:15:41.000But it was just staring at a blank wall and just having my computer right there.
02:15:56.000And then the beautiful stars at night like this were just incredible.
02:16:00.000And so that's where most of this one was written, in the blood.
02:16:03.000So I think I'm going to get a head start on six.
02:16:05.000I'm already writing it, but I need to lock down ahead of time instead of waiting until the fall and just go and get a couple months in this cabin.
02:16:13.000Because it's still fairly close to where we live.
02:16:14.000Well, in the blood, I don't want to give anything away, but the end of it, there's a lot of room.
02:16:28.000Well, the goal is to have someone get to the end of a chapter and then to turn it and keep them up all night.
02:16:32.000And then as the art part of it is having enough resolution to the story, but also leaving that little bit out there that they're going to want to get the next book and keep this thing going, keep that journey going.
02:16:54.000He's not the same guy that's just picked up and dropped in a different scenario every book.
02:16:57.000He's on this journey just like we all are.
02:17:00.000So I think that helps resonate with readers because, once again, life is this journey and he's on that same path.
02:17:05.000Well, he's also very, very likable, even though he's a fucking savage.
02:17:11.000He's a savage, and he can flip that switch.
02:17:13.000That was important to me, too, because if you're going to spend that time that you're never going to get back with somebody in the pages of this novel, I think that it should be with somebody that you want to have a beer with, like we talked about.
02:17:22.000So I wanted him to be someone you'd want to sit down and have a coffee with, sit down and have a beer with, but who could also flip that switch and just put heads on stakes when the time came for it.
02:18:18.000And he's also, what a transition, a transformation that guy made from being this, like, sort of overweight guy on Parks and Rec to being this jacked dude in Guardians of the Galaxy.
02:18:28.000Like, holy shit, what was under there?