The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1467 - Jack Carr

00:00:01.000 And we're live.

00:00:01.000 Hey, what's up?

00:00:02.000 Hey, thanks for having me on.

00:00:04.000 It's just awesome.

00:00:05.000 My pleasure.

00:00:05.000 Good to see you again.

00:00:06.000 Great to see you.

00:00:07.000 You 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.

00:00:17.000 Crazy.

00:00:18.000 But I'd never read any of your work until now.

00:00:20.000 So getting ready for this, I actually listened to the audio book, which is really well done.

00:00:25.000 The guy who reads it, what is his name?

00:00:27.000 Ray Porter. 0.99

00:00:27.000 He's fucking great. 0.99

00:00:29.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:00:29.000 It's a little disturbing when he does a girl's voice. 0.99

00:00:32.000 No getting around that.

00:00:33.000 If a guy's doing a girl's voice, especially putting an accent to it, there's no getting around the creepy part of that. 0.99

00:00:37.000 It's a little weird.

00:00:38.000 But he's so good at Russian accents and then South African accents.

00:00:46.000 It's a really good book, man.

00:00:48.000 Thank you. 0.95

00:00:48.000 It's fucking riveting. 0.95

00:00:50.000 Thank you, man. 0.99

00:00:50.000 It's hard to put down. 0.99

00:00:51.000 It's really good.

00:00:53.000 And most of it I listen to either on workouts, walking, hikes with the dog, or in the sauna.

00:01:00.000 Nice.

00:01:01.000 Perfect place to listen to it.

00:01:02.000 I burn through it in a few days.

00:01:04.000 It's really good, man.

00:01:06.000 Yeah, and you know half the characters are the people that were inspired by actual people.

00:01:10.000 I know!

00:01:10.000 That's what's crazy.

00:01:11.000 So many people, whether it was John Dudley or Barklow or Half-Faced Blades, Black Rifle Coffee, Icon 4x4.

00:01:21.000 There's so many different things.

00:01:23.000 Sitka, so many different things.

00:01:25.000 It would be strange for me not to talk about gear, just because I was a gear guy before I went in the Navy.

00:01:30.000 And then, of course, in the SEAL teams, you're like...

00:01:32.000 That'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.

00:01:39.000 So he really gets a go all in.

00:01:40.000 And then just after the military, same thing.

00:01:42.000 I'm just a gear guy.

00:01:43.000 So it would be strange just to say he pulled out a rifle, you know, or something like that.

00:01:46.000 I couldn't do it.

00:01:47.000 It wouldn't sit right.

00:01:48.000 When you were in the SEAL team, did you think you were ever going to become an author?

00:01:54.000 Is this something that you'd always had in the back of your head you would like to dabble in someday?

00:01:58.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:01:59.000 It wasn't even a thing I was going to dabble in.

00:02:00.000 I was going to do it.

00:02:02.000 And 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.

00:02:08.000 And back then, like so early 80s, there's hardly anything written about SEALs.

00:02:11.000 But what there is written is a lot of times from fiction.

00:02:15.000 So 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.

00:02:24.000 And I enjoyed reading them so much, I knew that after the military, then I would write.

00:02:28.000 So I just said, that's going to be the path.

00:02:30.000 So you had kind of mapped it out.

00:02:32.000 Join the military first, join the SEALs.

00:02:34.000 Yep.

00:02:35.000 And then after you retire, and how many years were you in for?

00:02:40.000 20. And then during that time, you had always mapped out that you were going to be an author when you were done?

00:02:46.000 Yep.

00:02:46.000 I didn't bring any thought of it.

00:02:47.000 While I was in, I wasn't writing, I wasn't practicing, but I was reading.

00:02:50.000 So first, I'm a fan.

00:02:51.000 I'm always a reader, both fiction and non.

00:02:54.000 So all those guys I read in the 80s, those are like my professors in the art of storytelling.

00:02:58.000 And then I coupled that with the academic study of warfare.

00:03:01.000 Terrorism, 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.

00:03:10.000 So for that last year, year and a half, then I started writing because I wasn't taking guys downrange anymore.

00:03:15.000 My job was essentially to get out of the military.

00:03:19.000 You feel like you're the first person to do it, even though people do it every day.

00:03:22.000 But 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.

00:03:28.000 So your job becomes to get out of this gigantic bureaucracy.

00:03:31.000 How long did that take?

00:03:32.000 That takes like a year.

00:03:33.000 I mean, you can probably do it in a week.

00:03:34.000 Really?

00:03:34.000 Like, Jocko didn't do any of it, from what I understand.

00:03:36.000 He's just like, no.

00:03:37.000 And he just laughed.

00:03:40.000 That's not Jocko.

00:03:41.000 I know.

00:03:42.000 I'm done.

00:03:43.000 Bye.

00:03:43.000 Yeah, 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.

00:03:51.000 Awful.

00:03:52.000 Horrible.

00:03:53.000 But I did it.

00:03:53.000 I thought you had to.

00:03:54.000 So you get something signed and off you go.

00:03:56.000 You don't have to do it?

00:03:57.000 I think you do, just Jocko didn't.

00:04:00.000 That's what he told me.

00:04:00.000 He's like, no, I didn't.

00:04:01.000 I'm like, well, who's going to tell him to do it?

00:04:02.000 Right.

00:04:03.000 No one.

00:04:03.000 No one's going to say, you have to do this.

00:04:05.000 Yeah, it's not good luck.

00:04:07.000 Yeah.

00:04:09.000 So you were planning all along to write.

00:04:13.000 And 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.

00:04:23.000 Yep.

00:04:23.000 That was when I'm done with this, then I'll do that.

00:04:25.000 So I wasn't thinking about how to set it up.

00:04:27.000 I didn't know anyone in publishing, didn't know anything.

00:04:30.000 But I knew that one day, that's what I would do.

00:04:32.000 And it wasn't even a question.

00:04:33.000 But you clearly had equal enthusiasm for being a SEAL as well.

00:04:36.000 Yes.

00:04:37.000 Oh, yeah.

00:04:37.000 You have to.

00:04:38.000 That's why they had to be separate.

00:04:39.000 So I had to be 100% all in on being a SEAL because you have to.

00:04:42.000 That's what you owe the guys under your command.

00:04:44.000 When you're going downrange, that's what you owe their families, the country, the mission.

00:04:48.000 But when I got home from that last Iraq deployment and took a breath and looked around and saw, oh, my family needs me.

00:04:54.000 I've been gone for quite some time.

00:04:56.000 Even when you're training.

00:04:57.000 When you're training, you're out for three weeks here, two weeks there, a month there, getting ready to deploy.

00:05:01.000 So it's not just the six to seven month deployments.

00:05:03.000 It's all that time spent training up to go downrange with your team.

00:05:07.000 So I knew that my family needed me.

00:05:09.000 It's time to get out.

00:05:10.000 So it was very clear.

00:05:10.000 It wasn't a hard decision for me.

00:05:12.000 Plus, I'd gotten to the end of my time where I would tactically lead guys on the battlefield.

00:05:16.000 So that's a troop commander.

00:05:17.000 So 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.

00:05:24.000 And after that, yeah, you're still a leader, but you're leading from behind, essentially.

00:05:28.000 You're in a tactical operations center.

00:05:30.000 You're more of a manager-type leader.

00:05:31.000 You're not out there kicking doors with the guys, which is what we all come in to do, or most of us come in to do anyway.

00:05:36.000 So I knew that that part of my life was over, and it was time to transition, take care of the family.

00:05:41.000 It's time to start writing.

00:05:42.000 Did you take journalism classes or writing classes or?

00:05:46.000 Nope.

00:05:47.000 It was all the reading.

00:05:48.000 All that reading I did growing up.

00:05:50.000 And 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.

00:05:59.000 And he wrote a book called Hero with a Thousand Faces.

00:06:01.000 So back in 1988. So I'm I don't know, 11 years old or whatever, 12 years old.

00:06:05.000 I 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.

00:06:13.000 And 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.

00:06:23.000 And that really helped as I made the transition because I had this foundation.

00:06:26.000 It wasn't just like I woke up one day and said, you know what?

00:06:28.000 Can you make money at writing?

00:06:30.000 Oh, that sounds like a good thing to do.

00:06:31.000 I'll go back and read and I'll go back and see, kind of figure out the history of this genre.

00:06:36.000 No, I already had that figured out because I did it my whole life and it was that foundation.

00:06:41.000 So that was already there.

00:06:42.000 And while I was in the military, I kept reading for fun.

00:06:44.000 I read those fiction books still and I discovered Stephen Hunter and Brad Thorne and Vince Flynn and Daniel Silva and now Mark Graney today.

00:06:52.000 So those are kind of the bigger names in the genre.

00:06:55.000 But 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.

00:07:03.000 So just always studying, always reading.

00:07:05.000 When I was downrange, I never really watched a movie or played video games.

00:07:09.000 It was always, if I wasn't operating or we weren't putting together a target package, I was reading.

00:07:14.000 That's interesting.

00:07:15.000 Because 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.

00:07:30.000 Yeah, no, it was all reading.

00:07:31.000 It was all knowing what I liked, knowing what I didn't like.

00:07:33.000 And that's why the first novel is really all about revenge, because that theme resonated with me.

00:07:39.000 Obviously, 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.

00:07:52.000 And I think that's why there's so many Death Wish movies.

00:07:56.000 Because if someone cuts you off in traffic, you can't go out and do something.

00:07:58.000 Or someone, you know, at work, there's some politics, you don't get the promotion or whatever, you get mad.

00:08:02.000 You can't do anything about it.

00:08:04.000 But you can in the pages of a novel.

00:08:05.000 You can escape there or you can escape in the movie theater.

00:08:08.000 And you can see somebody that goes out and gets this revenge and it makes you feel good.

00:08:12.000 Because you know you can't do it.

00:08:13.000 Because in real life, if you do it, you're going to go to jail.

00:08:15.000 You can't get the death penalty.

00:08:16.000 It's not possible.

00:08:17.000 But you can explore all that in the pages of a fictional thriller.

00:08:20.000 So I think that's why it resonates with people.

00:08:23.000 And 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.

00:08:31.000 So I didn't have to talk to somebody and say, how did it feel to be a sniper in Ramadi in 2005, 2006?

00:08:36.000 And then filter that through whatever biases I had or whatever, my past experience or whatever, and then put it into a fictional narrative.

00:08:43.000 No, I just took my experience and then just morphed it and put it into the narrative.

00:08:48.000 So it ended up being very therapeutic.

00:08:51.000 So did you approach an agent first?

00:08:55.000 Like, how did you get started?

00:08:56.000 Thank goodness I didn't know you were supposed to do that.

00:08:58.000 Because I'd probably still be looking for one today.

00:09:01.000 So I did very little research on that front.

00:09:02.000 Because I think that a lot of people can study how to do something too much or too long.

00:09:08.000 And it's going to be different for everybody.

00:09:09.000 But some people can study how to do something their whole life and never actually do it.

00:09:13.000 I love that guy.

00:09:38.000 Listening to him on this show before I started writing gave me the idea of writing a one-word theme down to keep me on point.

00:09:46.000 So I wrote Revenge for that first novel on a yellow sticky.

00:09:49.000 But he didn't really say this on your show.

00:09:50.000 He was talking about somebody else, a playwright, who would write a sentence.

00:09:54.000 To keep him on theme.

00:09:56.000 But somehow, through my filters, I heard him say, oh, a one-word theme on a yellow sticky on my computer.

00:10:02.000 And so I did the same thing.

00:10:04.000 So it's not really what he said on the show, but I took it as what he said and I wrote it down.

00:10:08.000 And that really, for the first book, Revenge.

00:10:10.000 Second book, Redemption.

00:10:12.000 And then fourth book, or third book, I morphed it a little bit, Dark Side of Man.

00:10:16.000 So those are the themes that really kept me on track.

00:10:18.000 And you're on the fourth one right now?

00:10:20.000 On the fourth one, yeah.

00:10:21.000 How long does it take you to do one?

00:10:22.000 The first one can take as long as you want because you have to have for fiction you have to have the finished product.

00:10:27.000 So for nonfiction you can sell like an idea, a chapter, an outline.

00:10:32.000 Something like that.

00:10:32.000 If you're coming from sports or politics, you can sell that idea because they know they're going to get some sales.

00:10:37.000 For this, you have to have the whole manuscript done.

00:10:40.000 So the first one took about just two years, and you get it as good as you can possibly get it.

00:10:44.000 And then what you're supposed to do is go to an agent.

00:10:46.000 But 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.

00:10:54.000 Authentic Swing, Turning Pro, Do the Work.

00:10:57.000 I read those.

00:10:58.000 I read Stephen King's on writing.

00:10:59.000 David Morell's.

00:11:00.000 That's a great book, too.

00:11:00.000 Stephen King's book is fantastic.

00:11:02.000 It's an autobiography, really.

00:11:03.000 It's not just about writing.

00:11:04.000 It's about his entire life.

00:11:06.000 David Morell is the successful novelist.

00:11:09.000 And I think those were the main ones that I read.

00:11:11.000 And then I was like, okay, got it.

00:11:13.000 And I put those within sight of me and my computer.

00:11:15.000 But I didn't touch them again.

00:11:17.000 But they were there.

00:11:18.000 So I would look to them for inspiration as far as, oh, Stephen Pressfield says you're a professional.

00:11:24.000 You're a writer.

00:11:25.000 You sit down and write.

00:11:27.000 Writer's block doesn't exist because it doesn't exist for dentists or truckers or doctors.

00:11:31.000 You don't get doctor's block, so you don't get writer's block.

00:11:33.000 You're professional, and you write.

00:11:35.000 So just having them that close really helped with that transition, and I made the decision once I was a SEAL. And now, I write.

00:11:42.000 So I think that really helped.

00:11:44.000 But I didn't know you needed an agent.

00:11:46.000 And thank goodness I didn't.

00:11:48.000 Because otherwise, like I said, you'd still be looking for one.

00:11:51.000 Because those are the gatekeepers, essentially.

00:11:53.000 And they have assistants that are even gatekeepers to them.

00:11:55.000 So it's tough, I think.

00:11:56.000 But lucky for me, a friend of mine sat next to a guy named Brad Thor, who writes in this genre.

00:12:01.000 There's a character called Scott Harvath, who's a former SEAL. And he's a great guy.

00:12:06.000 My friend sat next to him at one of these events for to raise money for a SEAL Foundation type thing.

00:12:12.000 And as I'm writing, I'm about four months in, and my buddy says, hey, you know this guy named Brad Thor?

00:12:16.000 And I said, oh, yeah.

00:12:17.000 Yeah.

00:12:18.000 I mean, I don't know him, but I've read all his stuff.

00:12:20.000 And he said, do you want to talk to him?

00:12:21.000 I know you're writing a book.

00:12:22.000 And I said, yeah, I'd love to talk to him.

00:12:23.000 Would he talk to me?

00:12:25.000 And he said, yeah, I'll set it up.

00:12:27.000 I helped him out with a couple things in his books.

00:12:29.000 So sure enough, he sets it up.

00:12:31.000 And actually, I'm up here at an event in L.A. at the time.

00:12:33.000 I was trying to find a quiet place to have this call with Brad Thor.

00:12:37.000 So I go to the parking lot at the Terranea Resort parking lot up there.

00:12:41.000 Sun's beating down on my land cruiser.

00:12:44.000 Everything's off, though.

00:12:45.000 The engine's off because it's so loud.

00:12:46.000 And And my pen and paper are there.

00:12:49.000 I'm sweating.

00:12:50.000 But sure enough, we had this great call.

00:12:52.000 And it was like a job interview.

00:12:54.000 I think he wanted to know, like, hey, why do you want to write?

00:12:56.000 And I told him the same stuff I tell you or tell everybody that I grew up loving reading and knew I was going to do this one day.

00:13:01.000 And about my mom being a librarian and knowing the history of the genre and all that and just being excited about it.

00:13:06.000 He could sense the passion.

00:13:07.000 And he's like, all right.

00:13:08.000 So 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.

00:13:16.000 I 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.

00:13:25.000 And I said, that's all I need.

00:13:26.000 And he said, how long until you're done?

00:13:27.000 I said, one year from today.

00:13:29.000 And so he's like, all right, don't call me.

00:13:32.000 Don't send me chapters.

00:13:33.000 How did you know, because this is your first book, how did you know one year from today you'd be done?

00:13:35.000 Because other guys that have serious characters have one book a year.

00:13:39.000 And so I figured, well, doing this sort of thing, I was about four months into it, so I was like, give or take a couple months.

00:13:46.000 So sure enough, I called him back one year from the day.

00:13:49.000 But he said, hey, don't call me.

00:13:51.000 Don't send me chapters.

00:13:52.000 I'm not going to give you any advice.

00:13:54.000 And he did give me some advice on that call, but he didn't want me bugging him throughout the year, which I totally understand now.

00:14:00.000 And called him back a year from then and said, it's done.

00:14:03.000 And to his credit, it was so awesome.

00:14:05.000 He said, is it done or is it the best you can possibly make it?

00:14:09.000 And I said, well, I could probably edit it a little bit, but it's finished.

00:14:12.000 And he's like, alright, call me back again when it's the best you can possibly do.

00:14:16.000 So 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.

00:14:24.000 And he said, alright, I'll let him know it's coming.

00:14:25.000 So how many hours a day do you think you were putting in?

00:14:29.000 Gosh, so it's not like an hour.

00:14:31.000 I 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.

00:14:41.000 And I can't say no to a lot of things.

00:14:45.000 I need to take advantage of emerging opportunities just like I would on the battlefield.

00:14:48.000 Looking at the enemy, they're learning from us, we're learning from them, and it's really who adapts quicker.

00:14:53.000 You're looking for those emerging opportunities, taking advantage of momentum.

00:14:56.000 Looking for gaps.

00:14:57.000 So the same things that you would do for a startup or starting like a coffee shop somewhere, you have to do for writing.

00:15:03.000 And I didn't really get that at the outset.

00:15:05.000 Like how so?

00:15:06.000 So 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.

00:15:12.000 I thought you just went back and forth with an editor a little bit and then you start the next book.

00:15:16.000 Well, really you have to do advertising, branding, co-branding, your marketing stuff, your budgets, your social media.

00:15:24.000 Like anything you would have to do with any other business that you're starting up, you have to do as an author.

00:15:29.000 So 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.

00:15:44.000 So it's been a sprint.

00:15:46.000 So 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.

00:15:55.000 And you can say, okay, you know what I'm going to do?

00:15:57.000 I'm going to wake up and I'm going to write for four hours.

00:15:59.000 And it doesn't matter if someone calls for an interview or if CNN wants you on or Fox News wants you on.

00:16:04.000 It doesn't matter.

00:16:04.000 I'm just going to do my four hours.

00:16:06.000 And then after that, then I'll check my texts.

00:16:08.000 Then I'll check my emails.

00:16:09.000 And if something comes up, yeah, we can schedule it out maybe later in the week.

00:16:12.000 But right now it's just like, oh, really?

00:16:14.000 Fox wants me on?

00:16:15.000 Bam! 0.98

00:16:15.000 I'm on. 0.98

00:16:16.000 And then all of a sudden, no, I'm not writing for those four hours in the morning.

00:16:19.000 So usually it's the first novel and all the others.

00:16:24.000 We'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.

00:16:31.000 Yeah, that's how I do stand-up writing too.

00:16:33.000 Same thing.

00:16:33.000 When everyone's asleep, you do your best work.

00:16:35.000 It's crazy because there's no one interrupting.

00:16:36.000 Those interruptions kill you.

00:16:37.000 But 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.

00:16:43.000 They write even before breakfast.

00:16:45.000 So I was getting up and working out like that up until the publication of the first book.

00:16:50.000 And then things got a little crazy.

00:16:51.000 The publicity stuff.

00:16:52.000 Publicity stuff.

00:16:53.000 And then writing late at night.

00:16:54.000 Also working on the next one, dialing that in.

00:16:57.000 And then you're editing one while you're writing another.

00:16:59.000 So you're kind of juggling at the same time when you're on this book a year type program.

00:17:03.000 That's what you're doing.

00:17:05.000 And maybe I'll get past that at some point.

00:17:06.000 I'll have an end date, and then I'll start the next one.

00:17:09.000 But right now, it's not quite like that yet.

00:17:12.000 So my mornings were taken up with getting up early.

00:17:14.000 And not anymore.

00:17:15.000 I need to get back after it.

00:17:17.000 But in Park City, where we live, there's some crazy in-shape people out there.

00:17:21.000 And I happen to know a couple of them.

00:17:22.000 So as soon as we moved out there after the Navy, they're like, hey, come meet.

00:17:26.000 We've got to go work out.

00:17:27.000 It's 530 in the morning.

00:17:28.000 And I know Jaco's been up for two hours already.

00:17:30.000 But for me, that's pretty good.

00:17:32.000 Waking 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.

00:17:38.000 And it's like five or six CrossFit workouts meshed into one with trail running, with the endurance side.

00:17:45.000 What group are you in with that's doing this?

00:17:47.000 Is it a local gym?

00:17:48.000 Yeah.

00:17:48.000 Yeah, we meet at the local gym, but Hobie Darling, who is the CEO of Skullcandy, he's all into human performance at all levels.

00:17:56.000 Emotional, physical, mental, spiritual, being the best human he can possibly be.

00:18:02.000 You'd love him.

00:18:04.000 And those guys are all out there?

00:18:05.000 They're all out there, yeah.

00:18:07.000 And Eric Snyder is another guy.

00:18:10.000 His Defender 110 is used in some of my videos.

00:18:12.000 He's a big Defender guy.

00:18:13.000 But those guys are animals.

00:18:15.000 They're animals.

00:18:17.000 And get up with them, work out, get home, get the kids to school.

00:18:20.000 So 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.

00:18:28.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:18:29.000 Yeah, that's always been a problem with comedy.

00:18:32.000 Because you have to go late.

00:18:33.000 You're testing stuff out, and then you're home, and maybe you get home, and then you're making some...

00:18:37.000 But then after you tested out something at the comedy club, you come home and make those notes...

00:18:42.000 Yeah, 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.

00:18:58.000 You 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.

00:19:05.000 But I just got to a schedule where the best writing I was doing was when no one was home.

00:19:10.000 Because I'd be writing, and then I'd hear, Daddy, I got a question, or Daddy...

00:19:15.000 Or my wife would want to know something, or someone else would need something, or phones would ring... 0.95

00:19:21.000 At 2 o'clock in the morning, no one's calling you.

00:19:22.000 Exactly.

00:19:23.000 It's free.

00:19:24.000 You're free.

00:19:25.000 And then it's just quiet.

00:19:26.000 Yes.

00:19:27.000 And also, it's creepy.

00:19:28.000 Something about the darkness is creepy.

00:19:30.000 Like, your thoughts are weirder.

00:19:33.000 Yeah, maybe.

00:19:34.000 But it was a real hard time to get up and do, like, I would do, like, a 10 a.m.

00:19:37.000 jujitsu class.

00:19:38.000 Right.

00:19:38.000 And 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...

00:19:46.000 It was too hard.

00:19:47.000 Oh, yeah.

00:19:47.000 Did you just listen to yours, or did you video?

00:19:49.000 I just listened, but video is better.

00:19:51.000 I really need, like, Damon Wayans, who's a hilarious comedian, has a collection of every set that he's ever done since the 90s.

00:19:59.000 Really?

00:20:00.000 Yeah, he films everything. 0.98

00:20:01.000 He 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. 0.99

00:20:09.000 I'm like, that's next level. 1.00

00:20:11.000 That is next level.

00:20:12.000 And do you ever look at, is there like for people on Amazon, you can leave reviews of books.

00:20:16.000 Are there, like for Comedy Club, are there reviews of comics that go in there or anything like that?

00:20:21.000 I don't know.

00:20:22.000 I mean, maybe.

00:20:23.000 That's good that you don't know then. 1.00

00:20:24.000 Yeah, I don't read any of that shit. 1.00

00:20:26.000 You can't. 0.99

00:20:27.000 It's all at scale, right?

00:20:29.000 When you get to a certain number.

00:20:30.000 The number of people that are contacting you.

00:20:33.000 I'm at a place where I can't. 0.96

00:20:35.000 It's like 9 million something Instagram followers or whatever the fuck it is. 0.95

00:20:41.000 You can't read that. 0.98

00:20:44.000 It's not good for you.

00:20:45.000 It's not good for you, positive or negative.

00:20:48.000 You should know what you're doing.

00:20:50.000 Get out of there! 0.65

00:20:51.000 Yeah, 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.

00:21:00.000 This third book made the New York Times list.

00:21:02.000 And it made it without, like, a national news appearance or with any of these other bigger things.

00:21:06.000 It was all great.

00:21:07.000 It was hunters.

00:21:07.000 It was tactical shooting people.

00:21:09.000 It was readers that took a risk on a new author and then told a friend.

00:21:13.000 And then that person took a risk and told another friend.

00:21:16.000 That's awesome.

00:21:16.000 So it's crazy.

00:21:17.000 And 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.

00:21:26.000 But it's still grassroots.

00:21:27.000 Yeah.

00:21:28.000 It's just like instead of around the water cooler at work, it's modern.

00:21:31.000 Yeah.

00:21:32.000 I feel like I need to get on and say, thank you so much.

00:21:35.000 I really appreciate it.

00:21:35.000 Because I do.

00:21:36.000 I feel so fortunate and I really want to thank everyone.

00:21:38.000 But I think I'm about at that stage where I can't.

00:21:41.000 I can't do it anymore.

00:21:42.000 I gotta do a blanket.

00:21:43.000 Thank you.

00:21:43.000 Yeah.

00:21:44.000 I hope people don't think that I'm not thankful.

00:21:47.000 Oh, no.

00:21:47.000 It's not the case.

00:21:48.000 It's just for my own sanity.

00:21:50.000 Oh, yeah. 1.00

00:21:50.000 And I've seen people that do get really too into the comments and they lose their fucking mind. 1.00

00:21:55.000 It's not healthy. 0.99

00:21:56.000 Oh, yeah.

00:21:56.000 You can't do...

00:21:57.000 I don't respond to anything negative.

00:21:58.000 If anything's like a little weird, I do the block.

00:22:00.000 I'm very...

00:22:01.000 And I treat it like...

00:22:02.000 If I owned a general store in Small Town, USA, and I'm behind the counter, I own the place, somebody walks in and they ask for directions.

00:22:09.000 And some drunk comes in screaming the N-word.

00:22:12.000 Yeah, different.

00:22:12.000 So you treat those people differently.

00:22:14.000 So 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.

00:22:20.000 Thanks so much.

00:22:21.000 And he has a good impression that he's left with.

00:22:23.000 Or someone comes in and wants to buy a candy bar, a six-pack, or whatever.

00:22:25.000 You just point them in the right direction.

00:22:27.000 You make conversation.

00:22:28.000 So I treat it kind of like that.

00:22:29.000 I 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.

00:22:37.000 So 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.

00:22:45.000 But I still am so sincerely thankful for everyone that took a risk on me as I was starting this out.

00:22:50.000 Yeah, well, I can relate.

00:22:52.000 I understand where you're coming from.

00:22:54.000 And I used to interact with people all the time online, too.

00:22:57.000 But 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.

00:23:06.000 And then I realized, like, that's the worst way to communicate ever.

00:23:09.000 Yeah, you can't do that.

00:23:10.000 It'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.

00:23:20.000 The best way to express yourself is in person.

00:23:22.000 And I know you can't do that with everybody, but you only have so much time in the day.

00:23:29.000 It's not a smart way to value your time.

00:23:33.000 Oh, yeah.

00:23:34.000 It's that bandwidth.

00:23:35.000 I never worried about how hard it was to get out.

00:23:38.000 I didn't worry about how hard it was to get into the SEAL teams or to get to BUDS. All I knew was that it was very hard.

00:23:43.000 For me, that was enough.

00:23:44.000 It can be done.

00:23:46.000 People have done it before.

00:23:48.000 Even growing up, in the mid-80s, I'm still doing what today people would call CrossFit.

00:23:53.000 I'd get home from school.

00:23:54.000 I'd run the hill by the house.

00:23:55.000 I'd go into the basketball hoop and then pull myself through in these kind of pull-up things.

00:24:00.000 We had a jungle gym in the backyard, so I'd do some regular pull-ups there, change my grip.

00:24:04.000 Put a rope up in the backyard.

00:24:05.000 So I was doing that.

00:24:06.000 I had my bow out.

00:24:07.000 So I'd shoot for the higher heart rate and everything.

00:24:09.000 So I was doing all those things.

00:24:11.000 And then I was reading like Zen and the Art of Archery.

00:24:13.000 And I was reading the nonfiction stuff on warfare.

00:24:16.000 And I was reading those authors I talked about earlier whose genre I'm writing in today.

00:24:20.000 So I was doing all that stuff.

00:24:22.000 But I wasn't focused on how hard it was.

00:24:24.000 Or, oh, maybe I'm not going to make it.

00:24:26.000 Am I good enough?

00:24:27.000 I'm like, well, I'm going to get myself as good as I possibly can by doing all the things that I think I need to do.

00:24:31.000 And now you can type in, like, Navy SEAL workout program, and there's so many.

00:24:36.000 It's hard to pick which one.

00:24:38.000 Back then there was nothing, you know?

00:24:39.000 So I'm like, what did I see?

00:24:40.000 I see him running in the sand.

00:24:41.000 I've seen a couple pictures like that.

00:24:42.000 I see these guys in Vietnam with these guns.

00:24:44.000 And I'm like, okay, I've seen a couple movies.

00:24:45.000 And, okay, what are you going to do?

00:24:47.000 Okay, you're going to climb this tree.

00:24:48.000 You're going to do this rope stuff, do these hill sprints.

00:24:52.000 I just did that.

00:24:53.000 Did you have like a program that you wrote out or did you just wing it?

00:24:57.000 Nope.

00:24:58.000 Just as many.

00:24:58.000 Work out until you're tired?

00:24:59.000 Which is very similar to actually when I got to the SEAL teams where it was pre-CrossFit days and all that.

00:25:04.000 So you ran as far as you could, as fast as you could in sand.

00:25:06.000 And then you came back and you lifted as heavy weights as you possibly could.

00:25:09.000 Like Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know, 1980 Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding.

00:25:13.000 That was the workout up until probably early 2000s.

00:25:16.000 So early 2000s, what changed?

00:25:18.000 CrossFit came on the scene.

00:25:19.000 That was huge.

00:25:21.000 We adapted or adopted it fairly quickly.

00:25:23.000 CrossFit seems great until things go wrong.

00:25:26.000 Seems great until your joints start going or your back starts going.

00:25:29.000 Yeah, in fact, CrossFit, I just kind of mean functional fitness in general.

00:25:32.000 I don't really mean the actual program.

00:25:35.000 But first, yeah, those programs came out and people would get on and say, oh, look.

00:25:39.000 Look at this thing.

00:25:40.000 This is new.

00:25:41.000 Give it a shot with me.

00:25:41.000 It took a little bit of time, but some guys jumped right on.

00:25:45.000 But really what it showed us, and then right about that time also war kicks off, and And all that.

00:25:50.000 And we realized, okay, you're at 10,000 feet in these mountains.

00:25:53.000 You have a ruck on.

00:25:54.000 You're a radio guy.

00:25:55.000 You have an automatic weapon guy that has a ton of ammo.

00:25:58.000 Then you're going, you're hitting this compound, and you're putting these ladders up, and then you're going through these windows.

00:26:01.000 And sometimes there are these spaces you have to get into to clear where people are hiding or they're hiding weapons.

00:26:07.000 So 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.

00:26:15.000 So we're kind of forced into it, essentially.

00:26:18.000 Do 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?

00:26:26.000 No, they might now.

00:26:28.000 So I'm a little dated.

00:26:28.000 So I got out in the summer of 2016. And I know they were trying to modernize a lot of things as I was leaving for those last couple years.

00:26:35.000 But so it's possible.

00:26:37.000 They do now.

00:26:37.000 And 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.

00:26:49.000 And they'd say, okay, this guy is on the verge of hypothermia.

00:26:51.000 He's about to die.

00:26:52.000 Pull him out.

00:26:53.000 But then they have someone that looks totally fine and then that person would just collapse as soon as the doctor walked by.

00:26:58.000 So what they had people do is start to take these little RFID chips and swallow them.

00:27:02.000 And so they'd walk down that line and they'd hit you with like the zapper from Walmart and they'd get your core body temperature.

00:27:08.000 So it lasted for about like two days until you passed it.

00:27:10.000 But for those first couple days, that's how they did it. 0.94

00:27:13.000 So you had an RFID chip in your stomach and then you shit it out after two days. 0.61

00:27:18.000 Yeah. 0.98

00:27:19.000 And so that's how they could tell your temperature?

00:27:21.000 Yep.

00:27:21.000 I don't know when they started doing that.

00:27:22.000 They certainly didn't do it in 97 when I went through. 1.00

00:27:25.000 That's what they're going to do with this fucking COVID virus shit. 1.00

00:27:27.000 Maybe. 1.00

00:27:28.000 They're going to make you swallow an RFID chip.

00:27:30.000 Or put it under your skin or something.

00:27:31.000 I'm really worried about this tracking thing that they're trying to implement, that they're talking about how South Korea is doing that.

00:27:37.000 They're giving up a little bit of personal liberty and freedom. 1.00

00:27:40.000 And I'm like, you can kiss my ass. 1.00

00:27:43.000 They're giving up a little bit of privacy. 1.00

00:27:45.000 Yeah.

00:27:45.000 Like, no, no, I'd rather wash my hands and stay home.

00:27:48.000 Fuck off. 1.00

00:27:50.000 Oh yeah, and they're not gonna give that back. 1.00

00:27:51.000 Exactly!

00:27:51.000 When the government takes something, I don't know how many times they've actually given freedom back.

00:27:55.000 None!

00:27:55.000 Zero!

00:27:56.000 Yeah.

00:27:56.000 There's no way.

00:27:57.000 Once they have that kind of surveillance where they can monitor you, they're tracking you, okay?

00:28:02.000 So they can track everywhere you go and measure you versus all the other people that they know are infected.

00:28:07.000 Did you come in contact with them?

00:28:09.000 This guy's got a recent test.

00:28:11.000 You don't.

00:28:11.000 You need to get a recent test.

00:28:13.000 Now you're registered.

00:28:14.000 Okay, now we're tracking you.

00:28:15.000 And everywhere you go, you're going to be tracked.

00:28:16.000 You'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.

00:28:22.000 Go back.

00:28:23.000 No chance.

00:28:23.000 No, once they take those freedoms.

00:28:25.000 Laws are never, I shouldn't say never, rarely taken off the books.

00:28:29.000 Right.

00:28:29.000 Every week you have people on talking about bills that they're sponsoring.

00:28:32.000 Well, are they getting rid of another one to add that one?

00:28:35.000 There'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.

00:28:44.000 And 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.

00:28:51.000 The American Bar Association can't even tell you how many laws are on the books, state, local, federal, international ones that play in.

00:28:59.000 All sorts of different ordinances, laws, and you're breaking at least three of them a day to commit a felony.

00:29:04.000 It's a fascinating book, and they're not going to give those back.

00:29:07.000 They're not going to give those freedoms back.

00:29:08.000 I read a really disturbing thing today, and I'm not even sure if it's true, so we should find out right now.

00:29:13.000 Clickety-clickety-click.

00:29:14.000 Did the CDC stop tracking flu deaths for this year?

00:29:18.000 Because this is what I read, and it might have been some wacko right-wing website that I was on, so you never know.

00:29:24.000 But 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.

00:29:38.000 That's why people can't.

00:29:39.000 It's hard to tell who to trust.

00:29:41.000 You see politicians and you see you don't trust either side.

00:29:46.000 And you see everyone trying to make a power grab and use this as a way to make power or hurt an opponent or whatever it is.

00:29:52.000 And even with, yes, the CDC, you don't know there.

00:29:55.000 World Health Organization, you obviously can't tell there.

00:29:57.000 You can't trust information coming out of other countries. 0.99

00:29:59.000 So people at home are just like, what do I do?

00:30:02.000 Safest thing to do is just to stay where I am.

00:30:04.000 But you don't know who to trust.

00:30:06.000 It's very hard.

00:30:07.000 It's very hard to figure out who to trust.

00:30:08.000 And doctors are giving despair.

00:30:09.000 What do we got?

00:30:10.000 On our website, I'm seeing information updated as of last week, April 18th.

00:30:15.000 For flu deaths?

00:30:17.000 It's on the CDC, weekly flu surveillance.

00:30:20.000 I mean, it's all the flu information.

00:30:22.000 So how many people have died this year from the flu?

00:30:26.000 I have to dig through here to find that information.

00:30:28.000 Hold on a second.

00:30:29.000 Because the COVID deaths are, what is it now?

00:30:32.000 55,000, I think?

00:30:34.000 Something like that?

00:30:34.000 For this country, yeah.

00:30:35.000 I think it's more, right?

00:30:37.000 Maybe 60,000 now?

00:30:38.000 Closing in on Which is not a small number.

00:30:41.000 It's a lot of people.

00:30:42.000 But then you find out that that's a bad year for the flu.

00:30:45.000 That's normal.

00:30:46.000 But 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.

00:30:58.000 So I would imagine you're getting far lower numbers than they would have gotten if everybody had just gone out into the streets.

00:31:05.000 Oh yeah, no doubt about that.

00:31:07.000 But 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.

00:31:15.000 Perfect timing, right?

00:31:16.000 It was crazy.

00:31:17.000 And 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.

00:31:28.000 The Soviet program from the end of World War II up to the collapse.

00:31:32.000 What happened to that information?

00:31:33.000 And then our programs today from the end of World War II up to and continuing through today.

00:31:38.000 So I was I was keyed in to all that ahead of time.

00:31:40.000 And so it made me a little kind of hypersensitive to this.

00:31:43.000 I've been talking to doctors, people that had worked in that space doing my research.

00:31:47.000 But from obviously I'm not a doctor, but from what I studied, the difference here is that the incubation period.

00:31:55.000 So for us, So in the military, we go overseas and now we're fighting insurgents.

00:31:59.000 And what do they look like?

00:32:00.000 Well, they look like the people that aren't insurgents.

00:32:02.000 What does that car look like that's pulling up to this checkpoint?

00:32:05.000 It looks like the one that didn't have a VBID in it.

00:32:08.000 Or is that one looking a little low on the suspension?

00:32:10.000 So they're not in a uniform.

00:32:12.000 They're not driving a military-type vehicle.

00:32:14.000 So same with this.

00:32:15.000 It's like an insurgent that's adapted.

00:32:17.000 And it's adapted to those other diseases and how we fought them.

00:32:20.000 And it's adapted By the incubation period.

00:32:23.000 By that nine days.

00:32:24.000 So with flu, you get the flu, you're down.

00:32:26.000 You know you shouldn't go into work.

00:32:27.000 If you show up at work, someone's like, bro, go home.

00:32:30.000 You look horrible. 0.98

00:32:31.000 Get out of here. 1.00

00:32:32.000 You're going to infect everybody.

00:32:33.000 You don't know that with COVID-19.

00:32:35.000 So you go out there for this nine days, whatever it is.

00:32:37.000 And you're infecting people during that time frame.

00:32:39.000 So it's like that insurgent that hides amongst the populace.

00:32:43.000 It's the same type of thing.

00:32:44.000 Like, they've adapted.

00:32:45.000 SARS was different.

00:32:46.000 Flu is different.

00:32:47.000 All these other ones have been different.

00:32:48.000 And that's the adaptation of this one, is that you go out and you infect other people without knowing it.

00:32:54.000 So that's the difference between it and the flu.

00:32:56.000 So it's a hard thing to wrap your head around when you just look at numbers, but there is a difference in that flu.

00:33:02.000 You're staying home.

00:33:03.000 You're sick.

00:33:04.000 You know, it's really, in a lot of ways, it's a perfect way to spread a virus because there's a video game that my wife plays. 1.00

00:33:12.000 She used to play.

00:33:13.000 She doesn't play anymore now that this is going down, but it was a virus video game.

00:33:17.000 Really?

00:33:18.000 You send a virus throughout the world.

00:33:21.000 And the key is if you make your virus too strong, it's a video game you play on your iPad or your phone.

00:33:26.000 If you make the virus too strong, it kills people too quickly, and then it doesn't spread.

00:33:32.000 So 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.

00:33:42.000 And that's essentially what this is in a lot of ways.

00:33:44.000 But this is...

00:33:46.000 This one's so weird, man.

00:33:47.000 I mean, Newsweek actually had a story yesterday saying that they think it came from a lab.

00:33:51.000 So now that theory of whether or not it came from a laboratory, I think I tweeted it.

00:33:57.000 I think I tweeted it.

00:33:58.000 So you can find it on my Twitter page, but I was reading it yesterday.

00:34:00.000 I'm like, okay.

00:34:01.000 Newsweek, not really a sensationalistic publication.

00:34:06.000 When they're publishing something like that, you've got to go, hmm.

00:34:08.000 Probably something to this.

00:34:09.000 And there's a lot of speculation.

00:34:11.000 I mean, it's not so hard to imagine.

00:34:13.000 I mean, you're talking about something that literally was a few blocks from the epicenter in Wuhan where they had that level four lab.

00:34:20.000 Right.

00:34:20.000 So the deal is with the video game your wife was playing and the goal of that game, it sounds like, was to infect the world.

00:34:27.000 To kill the world.

00:34:28.000 But if that's not your goal... 1.00

00:34:29.000 Fucked up game. 0.97

00:34:31.000 If you have a goal and you want your country to survive, then you don't want it to become a global pandemic. 0.99

00:34:35.000 You 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.

00:34:44.000 So 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?

00:34:54.000 After the war, you can go in with an infectious disease and, you know, it's burned out and there's no damage.

00:34:59.000 But you don't want it to spread throughout the whole world and come back to your own country.

00:35:02.000 So 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.

00:35:19.000 There 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. 0.59

00:35:34.000 So there is precedent and it wouldn't be beyond the pale to think that, oh, someone was doing some sort of research.

00:35:41.000 And it doesn't even have to be weaponization.

00:35:42.000 It 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.

00:35:52.000 Yeah, that's the controversial theory.

00:35:54.000 So here's the thing.

00:35:54.000 The controversial experiments in Wuhan lab suspected of starting the coronavirus pandemic and says the case against a Wuhan lab.

00:36:02.000 And so it says why the Wuhan lab remains a suspect in the coronavirus investigation.

00:36:07.000 I 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.

00:36:16.000 The 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.

00:36:27.000 Oh, terrific.

00:36:27.000 To share 96% of the same genetic material.

00:36:31.000 Yeah.

00:36:33.000 Wow.

00:36:33.000 It's thought to be the most similar to SARS-CoV-2 of any known virus.

00:36:37.000 The two share 96% of their genetic material.

00:36:39.000 That 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,

00:36:56.000 or excuse me, taking money from China because he was doing something with them.

00:37:01.000 Yeah, I mean, it's real spooky.

00:37:03.000 What's really spooky is the World Health Organization is essentially in bed with China. 0.99

00:37:07.000 And they're not giving us 100% clear, detailed information.

00:37:11.000 Everything gets filtered down through the Chinese propaganda system.

00:37:15.000 Oh, sure.

00:37:15.000 Very dangerous.

00:37:16.000 And they also were exceedingly – we don't know the numbers, right?

00:37:20.000 And we can't trust China.

00:37:21.000 But it seems like they were – Yes.

00:37:26.000 Yes.

00:37:27.000 Yes.

00:37:48.000 A lot of these kits ready to go for testing.

00:37:51.000 I don't know.

00:37:52.000 Yeah, 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.

00:38:03.000 But 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.

00:38:14.000 Days after they knew for sure it was being transmitted from person to person. 0.89

00:38:19.000 So 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.

00:38:34.000 I saw that.

00:38:34.000 Yeah, 95% less people would have gotten infected.

00:38:37.000 Yeah, just lock down Wuhan, deal with it there as much as you can anyway, let the rest of the world know. 0.94

00:38:41.000 I mean, looking back, that seems like, but you're dealing with China.

00:38:43.000 Same thing, you're dealing with Russia, you're dealing with some of these other countries like that.

00:38:46.000 China seems the worst. 0.61

00:38:47.000 It seems like the worst. 0.95

00:38:49.000 It does seem that way.

00:38:50.000 It's a perfect storm.

00:38:51.000 It 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.

00:39:00.000 These people are dragging them away because they tested positive.

00:39:02.000 Oh, yeah.

00:39:03.000 Once again, that government taking a little more control, a little more control, a little more control.

00:39:06.000 And we're just giving it up.

00:39:08.000 And we give up so much.

00:39:09.000 And even before this, obviously, we gave up so much information about ourselves voluntarily.

00:39:14.000 We would, let's say, in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, we never would have given up.

00:39:18.000 And now we're like, oh, click, accept.

00:39:20.000 And bam, there you go.

00:39:22.000 Awesome.

00:39:22.000 I can post a picture.

00:39:23.000 Or whatever it is.

00:39:24.000 You know, this is fun.

00:39:24.000 I can communicate with my friends.

00:39:26.000 We're very accustomed to clicking on those user agreements.

00:39:29.000 I know.

00:39:29.000 No one can figure them out.

00:39:30.000 It's horrible. 0.99

00:39:31.000 Those 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. 0.98

00:39:38.000 But this tracking thing really freaks me the fuck out. 0.97

00:39:41.000 It really does.

00:39:42.000 Because they're going to find another reason why they should be able to track you.

00:39:45.000 Once they do it because of the virus, and then it'll just be next year will be the flu. 0.99

00:39:50.000 They'll find reasons to keep fucking tracking you. 0.98

00:39:53.000 To keep you safe. 0.98

00:39:54.000 And you're like, oh, if you're not doing anything wrong, what are you worried about?

00:39:58.000 Listen. 1.00

00:39:59.000 As soon as someone says that, you're a fool. 1.00

00:40:02.000 Yeah, antennas got to go up. 1.00

00:40:03.000 You don't understand.

00:40:04.000 You don't understand what this could mean. 1.00

00:40:06.000 Look, the fucking mayor of Los Angeles was paying people to rat people out for not following social distancing rules. 0.99

00:40:14.000 Oh, yeah. 1.00

00:40:14.000 There was an article in the fucking newspaper saying, normally snitches get stitches, but here snitches get rewards. 1.00

00:40:19.000 I saw that video. 1.00

00:40:21.000 It's horrible.

00:40:22.000 Do you not know about history?

00:40:24.000 I know.

00:40:24.000 It's crazy.

00:40:25.000 It's just like, so for this third novel, I went to Russia to do some research.

00:40:29.000 And I'd always wanted to go there.

00:40:31.000 I knew that for this third one, because the first one...

00:40:33.000 Did you go before or after you had written about Russia in your books?

00:40:37.000 I was in the process of writing it.

00:40:38.000 I was getting kind of closer to the end, but I finished up edits, gosh, I want to say this January.

00:40:43.000 So I've only read Savage Son.

00:40:45.000 I didn't even read it.

00:40:46.000 I listened to it.

00:40:46.000 People get mad if you say you read an audiobook.

00:40:49.000 I saw that the other day when you posted that.

00:40:50.000 I know.

00:40:51.000 I was like, dang.

00:40:52.000 Yeah, I guess because it's harder to read.

00:40:55.000 But so Savage Son is the only one I've listened to.

00:40:58.000 Did you talk about Russia in the other books?

00:41:01.000 In the second one, I did.

00:41:02.000 It plays in the geopolitics side.

00:41:04.000 So 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.

00:41:14.000 So something needs to make this stand out.

00:41:16.000 And a lot of that was the personal experience from Iraq and Afghanistan morphed into the novel to make it feel real personal and visceral.

00:41:22.000 So I wanted to come out swinging with that novel of Revenge Without Constraints.

00:41:26.000 I'd done that research essentially just as part of my life by going to Iraq, going to Afghanistan, all those sorts of things.

00:41:33.000 For the second one, I knew it had to be different.

00:41:34.000 So 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.

00:41:43.000 He just picked up this revenge thing.

00:41:44.000 Now he drops it in Africa, drops it in China, drops it in Europe.

00:41:48.000 So it had to be different.

00:41:49.000 I had to continue that hero's journey in this story of violent redemption.

00:41:52.000 Yeah, I think.

00:42:13.000 At a time to kill, he'd probably still be practicing law somewhere in Memphis.

00:42:17.000 So I knew I was always going to write too.

00:42:19.000 So 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.

00:42:26.000 I had by living in San Diego, knowing LA, knowing New York, and really being able to incorporate what I'd done already.

00:42:33.000 But I hadn't been to Mozambique, had to go there.

00:42:35.000 So 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.

00:42:50.000 So that couldn't stop them from talking.

00:42:52.000 It was great.

00:42:53.000 And then for this third one, I thought it would be the same in Russia.

00:42:56.000 So 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.

00:43:02.000 And for one month a year, you can get to Kamchatka Peninsula from Alaska.

00:43:07.000 So you don't have to go from here to Germany or London.

00:43:10.000 What month?

00:43:11.000 For all of August.

00:43:12.000 So you get in one flight a day.

00:43:14.000 No, sorry, one flight a week.

00:43:15.000 Only in August.

00:43:16.000 Only in August.

00:43:17.000 Otherwise, you have to go all the way around the world.

00:43:20.000 So much better to fly to Anchorage, then hop on a couple hour flight, and next thing you know you're in Russia.

00:43:24.000 It's awesome.

00:43:25.000 But I thought it was going to be the same.

00:43:27.000 I thought, you know, I'll land.

00:43:27.000 I'll get to this remote backcountry place where we have these guides and all that.

00:43:31.000 And I'll be able to really...

00:43:32.000 And it's on the military installation because the people guiding us used to have some connection to the government.

00:43:36.000 So he has this hunting concession out there in the backcountry.

00:43:39.000 And I thought they'd all want to talk to me.

00:43:41.000 And 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.

00:43:50.000 It was off the firing squad, gulag, off to Siberia, whatever.

00:43:53.000 So they were very hesitant to talk to me.

00:43:56.000 And I left all my computers behind.

00:43:58.000 As soon as I walked through customs, I knew I was going to get everything sucked out of my phone and computer.

00:44:02.000 And I didn't know who sent things to me in email or text over the last 20 plus years.

00:44:07.000 So I just left all that behind, brought a pen and paper.

00:44:10.000 But I was asking these questions.

00:44:11.000 And I thought, oh, here's my book.

00:44:14.000 They're going to know I'm an author.

00:44:15.000 I'm just asking.

00:44:16.000 But no, they were very standoffish and very suspicious of why I was asking them these kinds of questions But it all worked out.

00:44:23.000 I got some great stuff and got to weave that into the third one.

00:44:25.000 What kind of hunting did you do in Russia?

00:44:27.000 It's a brown bear.

00:44:28.000 Oh, wow.

00:44:29.000 Yeah, it was crazy.

00:44:30.000 What does brown bear taste like?

00:44:32.000 I'll tell you that I don't know. 0.64

00:44:34.000 Because 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. 0.94

00:44:45.000 You don't eat this, but I will.

00:44:47.000 So I kind of adopt what the locals do.

00:44:50.000 They don't eat the bear?

00:44:52.000 Interesting.

00:44:53.000 I wonder why.

00:44:54.000 Yeah, I don't know.

00:44:55.000 It's just one of those things that they don't...

00:44:56.000 Well, a lot of times people...

00:44:58.000 I mean, bear is amazing.

00:44:58.000 I had the best bear this year.

00:45:00.000 Black bear.

00:45:03.000 Brian Call gave me some.

00:45:04.000 Oh, incredible.

00:45:06.000 Black bear is delicious.

00:45:07.000 It was so good. 1.00

00:45:08.000 I tell that to people and they're like, shut the fuck up. 0.99

00:45:10.000 Like, my daughter got asked, what's your favorite food? 1.00

00:45:13.000 She goes, bear. 0.78

00:45:14.000 Yeah.

00:45:14.000 And her friends are like, what?

00:45:15.000 Amazing.

00:45:16.000 Amazing.

00:45:16.000 Yeah, like, it's probably not really her favorite food.

00:45:19.000 I think she was probably trying to shock her friends.

00:45:21.000 I don't know.

00:45:22.000 That blackberry that Brian gave me is, I mean, it was canned.

00:45:27.000 So it was just sitting there for a while.

00:45:28.000 Yeah, so it's this canned thing.

00:45:29.000 So how did he make it?

00:45:31.000 You know, what do you boil it and it's in the...

00:45:34.000 Yeah.

00:45:35.000 Wayne Indicott from the Bow Rack up in Springfield, Oregon gave me some canned deer meat and it was really good.

00:45:41.000 Yeah.

00:45:41.000 But it's really bottled.

00:45:42.000 It's like bottled deer.

00:45:43.000 Interesting.

00:45:44.000 I haven't had bottled deer before.

00:45:46.000 But 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. 1.00

00:45:57.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:45:58.000 So 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.

00:46:04.000 Trevor Thompson came over, and so we were We open it up, and it was everyone's favorite.

00:46:11.000 I wish we had more of it.

00:46:12.000 What were the ingredients besides just the bear?

00:46:14.000 He must have put some spices in there of some sort, but I don't know.

00:46:17.000 It didn't look like it.

00:46:18.000 You just open it up, and it looked weird, but then you open it up, and it all of a sudden looked like filet mignon.

00:46:21.000 Was it a metal can?

00:46:22.000 No, like glass, like you would with a jam.

00:46:26.000 Yeah, same as the deer that I had.

00:46:28.000 Same, like one of those vacuum sealed bottles.

00:46:30.000 It was awesome.

00:46:31.000 I want to go down there and get some more from him if he has any more.

00:46:32.000 If he's listening, I'm going to come down and get some of that because that was legit.

00:46:35.000 Maybe my wife loved it. 1.00

00:46:36.000 She's like, wow.

00:46:37.000 As soon as you opened it up and it hit the air, it changed.

00:46:40.000 It didn't look like this murky thing that was in the jar.

00:46:43.000 It looked beautiful.

00:46:44.000 It was amazing.

00:46:44.000 We loved it.

00:46:45.000 It was great.

00:46:45.000 Everybody's favorite.

00:46:46.000 It was awesome.

00:46:47.000 Yeah, that's a weird thing.

00:46:49.000 Like, bear actually tastes good.

00:46:50.000 People are so wrapped up in bears because of teddy bears.

00:46:53.000 They have this distorted perception of what a bear is.

00:46:56.000 And people that have no problem eating cows will get mad at you if you eat a bear. 1.00

00:47:01.000 Do you know how much nicer a cow is than a fucking bear? 0.99

00:47:05.000 Cows don't eat their young, I don't think. 1.00

00:47:07.000 Not only do they eat their children, they'll... 0.99

00:47:10.000 They kill other people's children, well, other bears' children, rather. 0.95

00:47:14.000 When 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.

00:47:32.000 It's amazing.

00:47:33.000 Because he was eating her cub, so she ate her own cub right after she was defending it.

00:47:38.000 It becomes meat once they're dead.

00:47:40.000 Yeah.

00:47:41.000 They're all cannibals. 1.00

00:47:42.000 It's crazy.

00:47:42.000 A lot of that stuff is interesting how people associate bears with, well, and humans.

00:47:48.000 I mean, when you skin them, they do look a little like humans.

00:47:50.000 Sort of. 1.00

00:47:51.000 Someone looks like a fucking bear when they're dead. 1.00

00:47:53.000 You've done something awful with your body. 1.00

00:47:55.000 Yeah, it's a big boy.

00:47:56.000 You're not going to take care of yourself.

00:47:57.000 Steve Rinella calls it best.

00:47:59.000 He says that they're charismatic megafauna.

00:48:01.000 Yeah, that's it.

00:48:02.000 There's some animals that we have in our head that you're not supposed to eat.

00:48:06.000 And 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.

00:48:15.000 Although mountain lion apparently is very good.

00:48:19.000 It's delicious.

00:48:20.000 I've heard this.

00:48:20.000 I've had friends.

00:48:21.000 It's like their favorite food.

00:48:22.000 Yeah.

00:48:23.000 Yeah, Donnie Vincent was saying, I've heard him here, he's talking about how it's the best thing he's ever eaten, I guess.

00:48:27.000 Yeah.

00:48:27.000 And I did my first one this year, and it was amazing.

00:48:30.000 You had a mountain lion.

00:48:31.000 I didn't eat it because the guide didn't really, it was like a no-go.

00:48:35.000 Same thing?

00:48:36.000 Yeah.

00:48:36.000 The guide wouldn't let you eat it.

00:48:37.000 It was very clear to me that that was not something that was done there.

00:48:41.000 Where was this?

00:48:42.000 I probably should have pushed it in Utah, so I probably should have pushed it.

00:48:44.000 I could have pushed that one.

00:48:45.000 Yeah, you should have pushed it.

00:48:45.000 I feel bad about it now.

00:48:47.000 It's hard to get a tag for them, too, so it's not like it's easy to get some mountain lion sticks.

00:48:51.000 It was wild.

00:48:51.000 Yeah, that was amazing.

00:48:53.000 But back to that, the bear experience was incredible, especially with someone that doesn't speak English.

00:48:58.000 Like, you're over there with this guy who's, that's really, he was part of...

00:49:02.000 Well, in the military, and then worked for the government, and then is now...

00:49:05.000 For the people just listening, you're doing air quotes here.

00:49:08.000 Air quotes, yeah.

00:49:08.000 So anyway, really interesting.

00:49:10.000 But yeah, so got my bear, but the craziest part was my friend, who got his, and he wounded it first, by accident, of course.

00:49:19.000 And that happens, like we know.

00:49:21.000 And it goes off into this thick, thick brush.

00:49:25.000 And 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.

00:49:32.000 Maybe some will, but from what I've gleaned, they're going to go in and do it.

00:49:37.000 Kind of like going in after a wounded leopard or something in Africa.

00:49:40.000 That's where the guides are going to go earn it, go and do that.

00:49:43.000 So 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.

00:49:55.000 And the guy hands it to me and then hands me two shells.

00:49:58.000 And I'm looking at this rusty thing and I have these two shells in my hand and I'm like, okay.

00:50:02.000 And I'm like, no, because he had a couple more.

00:50:04.000 I'm like, no, give me some more.

00:50:05.000 And I trained up for Africa with a double rifle.

00:50:08.000 I 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.

00:50:14.000 So no optic.

00:50:15.000 Side by, you know, a double rifle.

00:50:17.000 So it's a rifle, but it looks like a shotgun.

00:50:19.000 Big, big rounds.

00:50:20.000 So there's two rounds.

00:50:21.000 Yep, side by side.

00:50:23.000 Interesting.

00:50:23.000 And so all you have is two shots, but you have two other ones ready to go.

00:50:26.000 And so you practice at FTW, you practice, and they have charging animals that are coming in after you.

00:50:30.000 And you're just like you would in the military, changing mags.

00:50:33.000 But this time you're just getting two more in there and getting it back up.

00:50:35.000 So I trained hard for that.

00:50:37.000 And so when he handed me this old rusty shotgun, and I think someone said, oh, that was made in an AK factory.

00:50:43.000 And I was like, okay, I feel better about this because I've seen a lot of AKs and I've seen a lot of them rusty and working.

00:50:50.000 So I'm like, okay, I'm about to trust my life to this thing.

00:50:53.000 And it's rusty and it's from the bottom of a boat and this guy doesn't even speak English.

00:50:57.000 So, bam.

00:50:58.000 Here we go.

00:50:59.000 How many shells did he get you?

00:51:00.000 Four.

00:51:01.000 And I look at him just to make sure it's not like buckshot or something so I can see that it's a slug.

00:51:06.000 It feels like the double rifle I trained up so hard with to go to Africa.

00:51:10.000 Which was an amazing experience.

00:51:11.000 Couldn't have written that one better.

00:51:13.000 And off we go into the brush.

00:51:15.000 So it's like, they wouldn't let you do this in the States.

00:51:18.000 Like, you're going into this thing, and they have a wounded, huge bear, brown bear.

00:51:22.000 And off you go, and it's just me, the guide, and my friend.

00:51:25.000 And this thing, it's all quiet.

00:51:27.000 And I haven't felt this dialed in since Romadi 06. Like, I was on. 0.87

00:51:31.000 And then, bam, this thing rears up like...

00:51:34.000 I don't know, 15 yards away.

00:51:36.000 Just like a human.

00:51:36.000 Jesus.

00:51:37.000 And I just spin and boom shot him like I would a person.

00:51:39.000 How big was he?

00:51:41.000 Ended up being over 10 feet.

00:51:43.000 Yeah.

00:51:44.000 I'll show you a picture after this.

00:51:45.000 10 foot tall bear.

00:51:47.000 Jesus Christ.

00:51:47.000 But even more than that was the size of the head.

00:51:49.000 And I forget how...

00:51:51.000 Well, I think they measured it, but I forget.

00:51:52.000 It was huge.

00:51:53.000 It was huge.

00:51:53.000 I'll show you a picture after this.

00:51:55.000 So yeah, I shot it like it would a human.

00:51:56.000 And it goes running off like, I don't know, 20 yards or something like that into some more thick stuff. 0.92

00:52:01.000 And then we hear a death bellow.

00:52:02.000 But 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.

00:52:09.000 And I'm like, oh, okay.

00:52:11.000 So I do.

00:52:12.000 I go around to the other side and I get down.

00:52:14.000 I'm like, well, if it charges out, it's probably going to be on all legs and it's going to come charging like this.

00:52:18.000 So I knelt down.

00:52:19.000 And then just got ready to put one in if it's coming charging at me.

00:52:22.000 And I was trying to figure out, okay, face, mouth, right here.

00:52:25.000 You know, it was my first bear hunt.

00:52:27.000 So anyway, we heard the death bellow after that. 0.99

00:52:29.000 God damn. 0.99

00:52:30.000 But it was huge. 1.00

00:52:31.000 It was crazy.

00:52:32.000 That is such a different kind of hunting when you're hunting something that absolutely could tear you apart.

00:52:37.000 Oh, yeah.

00:52:38.000 Like you're made out of tissue paper.

00:52:39.000 Oh, yeah.

00:52:40.000 Yeah, no doubt.

00:52:40.000 I'll show you the picture.

00:52:41.000 Yeah, it's crazy.

00:52:42.000 But what surprised me was how...

00:52:45.000 It wasn't like Wild West over there where you said, oh, can I... Can we get another bear?

00:52:49.000 No, you had your tag, just like you would in the States.

00:52:52.000 It was all science-based.

00:52:53.000 We need to take this many out for the population.

00:52:56.000 It was just like the States, which surprised me.

00:52:58.000 Well, they must have a big business, and people coming over there to hunt.

00:53:00.000 They don't want to deplete the resources by abandoning.

00:53:03.000 Yeah, that's exactly it.

00:53:04.000 Yeah, they're smart.

00:53:05.000 But for some reason, that surprised me.

00:53:06.000 I thought, oh, it's Russia.

00:53:07.000 Because I'd been to Russia before.

00:53:08.000 I'd been to Moscow.

00:53:09.000 I'd been to Ukraine.

00:53:09.000 I'd been to the catacombs for earlier in life, and I wove those into the second novel.

00:53:14.000 But I just figured it would be kind of Wild West-y, kind of like how I remembered it over in Ukraine and Moscow back in the early 90s.

00:53:23.000 But it wasn't.

00:53:24.000 It was all very much, you have your tag, this is yours, and we're not going to deviate from that.

00:53:29.000 It's kind of interesting they wouldn't even entertain eating it.

00:53:33.000 Yeah.

00:53:34.000 And there's a language barrier there, too.

00:53:36.000 So it's hard, especially when you're dealing with people that are tough.

00:53:39.000 I mean, they're living in these huts built into the ground, essentially, for insulation.

00:53:45.000 Just south of Siberia.

00:53:45.000 So Komchak is just south of Siberia.

00:53:47.000 But essentially the same type of thing.

00:53:49.000 And so they're built...

00:53:52.000 Into these small hills for insulation.

00:53:55.000 So, I mean, they're out there.

00:53:56.000 Wow.

00:53:56.000 And it's a rough existence.

00:53:59.000 So 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.

00:54:05.000 Right.

00:54:06.000 No.

00:54:06.000 You would think that those people would want meat more than anybody, you know?

00:54:10.000 I mean, you would think meat would be very valuable. 1.00

00:54:11.000 And a 10-foot bear, you could feed so many goddamn people. 0.99

00:54:14.000 Maybe that's why they told us we couldn't, because they're keeping it. 0.99

00:54:16.000 That's possible, too.

00:54:17.000 Oh, that's possible.

00:54:19.000 That's very possible.

00:54:20.000 I would definitely not discount that in the least.

00:54:24.000 That's possible, yeah.

00:54:25.000 But they have a ton of fish out there, moose, huge moose out there.

00:54:28.000 A lot of northern pike, right? 1.00

00:54:29.000 Well, they might, but we were after Dolly Varden and rainbow trout, brown trout.

00:54:35.000 Oh, wow.

00:54:36.000 Some big ones out there.

00:54:38.000 So it was pretty crazy.

00:54:39.000 It was a good trip.

00:54:39.000 And I got to weave all that stuff in.

00:54:41.000 So I got to weave in some of the people that I met over there.

00:54:43.000 The snowmobiles they have over there have one skid in the front instead of the two.

00:54:47.000 So they're going through this taiga, this tundra.

00:54:49.000 Oh, so it's tight.

00:54:50.000 Yeah, so they're only watching one getting hit by a root or something like that instead of the two.

00:54:55.000 So I got a lot of good stuff by going over there.

00:54:57.000 And I wouldn't have known what to ask.

00:54:59.000 I wanted to see the vehicles that they used over there.

00:55:01.000 I was very happy to see some Land Cruisers.

00:55:03.000 So that was pretty cool.

00:55:04.000 But 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.

00:55:10.000 So 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.

00:55:18.000 Have you ever seen that Werner Herzog documentary, Happy People, Life on the Taiga?

00:55:22.000 No!

00:55:23.000 I need to see that.

00:55:24.000 You need to see it.

00:55:25.000 I wish I'd seen it before I read the third book.

00:55:26.000 It's crazy.

00:55:27.000 It's really good.

00:55:28.000 It's this amazing documentary about these people that live in the taiga in Russia.

00:55:34.000 And it shows them from being in the summertime all the way through into being in the wintertime.

00:55:40.000 And it just...

00:55:41.000 They're just hunters and gatherers, and they're so happy.

00:55:45.000 It's really weird.

00:55:46.000 It's really weird.

00:55:47.000 Like, there's no mental illness, there's no suicide, and everyone's just struggling.

00:55:51.000 I mean, they're making their own skis.

00:55:55.000 They're making their own homes.

00:55:57.000 I mean, they have these cabins set up for trapping, and they use snowmobiles, and they have dogs.

00:56:02.000 They have a very tight relationship with their dogs, and they get fish, and they get meat, and And then that is what they eat.

00:56:09.000 And they bring bread with them.

00:56:10.000 And the bread's all frozen, obviously.

00:56:12.000 So they have these loaves of bread they bring.

00:56:13.000 They store their cabins.

00:56:15.000 They have to bear-proof everything.

00:56:16.000 But their life is so compatible with being a human being.

00:56:22.000 It'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.

00:56:35.000 There's the documentary right now.

00:56:36.000 Oh, awesome.

00:56:37.000 Yeah.

00:56:37.000 Very interesting, their relationships with their dogs.

00:56:39.000 Oh, yeah, the dogs over there were amazing.

00:56:42.000 It's everything.

00:56:42.000 Their dogs are everything.

00:56:43.000 They have a huge, very, very tight relationship with their dogs.

00:56:47.000 That's incredible.

00:56:48.000 You have the dogs that we had in the camp that protected the camp from the bears.

00:56:51.000 Like, that was the bear protection, was these dogs that were specifically trained up to chase bears off.

00:56:55.000 Yeah.

00:56:55.000 I think I called it Lakita.

00:56:57.000 I have to go back and look, but absolutely incredible dogs.

00:57:00.000 They were amazing.

00:57:01.000 It's a really amazing documentary.

00:57:03.000 Absolutely one of my favorite.

00:57:04.000 Yeah.

00:57:05.000 There's another really interesting documentary.

00:57:07.000 Watch this tonight.

00:57:07.000 Well, not a documentary.

00:57:08.000 It's a Vice Guide to Travel, where it's, I think it's called, I think his name's Hymo, Hymo's Arctic Adventure.

00:57:16.000 And it's a guy who got a job in Alaska in like the 1970s.

00:57:22.000 And he owns the, he has like a lease to have a cabin out there in this very remote part of the Arctic.

00:57:29.000 Yeah.

00:57:30.000 And once he's dead, this is it.

00:57:33.000 Like, no one else can have this sort of— Goes back to the government?

00:57:35.000 Yeah, I don't think anybody else is going to be allowed, but it's another amazing documentary.

00:57:39.000 And 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.

00:57:48.000 And he raised his family out there, and his wife is American Eskimo. 0.97

00:57:53.000 It's just a fucking amazing way of life. 0.99

00:57:56.000 I don't want to live. 0.99

00:57:57.000 I don't want to live like that.

00:57:58.000 I mean, I like cities, I like cars, I like all that stuff.

00:58:01.000 But there's something incredibly compelling about being completely reliant on nature and your own, you know, ingenuity and hard work.

00:58:11.000 He was talking about it in this documentary where the Vice people...

00:58:15.000 This is back when Vice was, you know, just starting out, too.

00:58:18.000 This Vice Guide to Travel was one of their earlier series that they were doing on YouTube.

00:58:23.000 And 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...

00:58:38.000 I think maybe that's why people find their way back to nature in some way, shape, or form.

00:58:42.000 They want a cabin somewhere.

00:58:43.000 They like going to the mountains.

00:58:44.000 They like going to Big Sky.

00:58:45.000 They like going to Park City.

00:58:46.000 That's the dream for people.

00:58:48.000 But it's still nice to be able to drive in and go to the grocery store.

00:58:51.000 It's nice to go to a restaurant.

00:58:53.000 But it's good to be prepared.

00:58:54.000 Who's looking smart now?

00:58:56.000 Exactly.

00:58:56.000 That guy might not even know what's going on, but he doesn't even need to.

00:59:00.000 Right.

00:59:00.000 Yeah.

00:59:01.000 Yeah, 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.

00:59:08.000 And 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.

00:59:16.000 But since then, we've gotten a little soft.

00:59:19.000 And people are like, oh, wait a second.

00:59:23.000 Maybe 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?

00:59:30.000 Oh, we do.

00:59:31.000 It's in that safe and I haven't shot it in years or my dad gave it to me.

00:59:34.000 Maybe I should learn how to maybe use it in case the police aren't there for me when I need them to.

00:59:39.000 Do we have fire extinguishers in the house?

00:59:40.000 Do we know how to use them?

00:59:41.000 Are those things expired?

00:59:42.000 Do the kids know how to use them?

00:59:44.000 All those little types of questions, once again, gets back to bandwidth.

00:59:47.000 So if you're worried about that stuff, you know what you're not worried about?

00:59:50.000 How do you adapt your business?

00:59:52.000 How 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?

00:59:58.000 So you're worried instead about, oh, how many beans are in the cap?

01:00:02.000 But instead, if you had, oh, we have three.

01:00:04.000 And everybody's experience is going to be different, like what they're comfortable with as far as their levels of preparedness.

01:00:09.000 And it's not really about being paranoid.

01:00:11.000 It'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.

01:00:22.000 It allows you then to focus where you need to be focused.

01:00:26.000 And some people will be like, three days of food and maybe a little water.

01:00:30.000 Do I need something to filter water with in case I turn on the tap and there's nothing that comes out?

01:00:34.000 It's brown.

01:00:35.000 So everybody's level is going to be different, but I think this was a wake-up call.

01:00:38.000 And I'm not super confident that people going forward will take those lessons and act on them because that's what's important.

01:00:45.000 Most will slide right back into complacency.

01:00:47.000 Unfortunately, I think that you're right.

01:00:50.000 But it's funny because my wife was like, now I see why we have all this stuff.

01:00:54.000 It's not crazy stuff, but I like being prepared.

01:00:57.000 It's not just from being a SEAL. It's from before that.

01:01:00.000 I've always been drawn to the outdoors and wanting to be prepared and know how to To live out there, survive, or whatever else.

01:01:06.000 It's always been a part of me.

01:01:07.000 So it was very natural for us to have a couple guns, have some ammo, have some water, have some food.

01:01:12.000 Because when this hit, you know what I did?

01:01:14.000 A book was coming out, and I had to figure out how to adapt very quickly to the changing environment and launch it.

01:01:19.000 To 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.

01:01:28.000 But very quickly, I had to take that breath, look around, And adapt.

01:01:33.000 And I didn't have to worry about food or water or filtration systems or ammo or protecting my family.

01:01:40.000 So I got to put all my effort into figuring out how to adapt to these changing conditions.

01:01:44.000 Did you get a lot of questions from people like, how do I get a gun?

01:01:47.000 Yes.

01:01:47.000 A lot of California people.

01:01:50.000 The lines around the block out here in front of gun stores were hilarious.

01:01:54.000 They didn't realize you couldn't just walk in.

01:01:55.000 They've heard about this loophole.

01:01:57.000 Where's that loophole that they keep talking about?

01:01:59.000 How do I just get one of these?

01:02:00.000 No.

01:02:00.000 And 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.

01:02:07.000 So, sorry, I might have 300 of them, but guess who's not getting any?

01:02:10.000 You.

01:02:12.000 Because you didn't prepare and I don't want to be a felon.

01:02:14.000 Well, there's also so many people that were anti-gun that now want a gun.

01:02:18.000 I mean, it is hilarious.

01:02:20.000 It's really interesting to see.

01:02:21.000 Like, 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.

01:02:31.000 I mean, it's like, I mean, there are problems with every society.

01:02:34.000 It's certainly not perfect, and there's certainly a lot of crime, and certainly there's things wrong.

01:02:39.000 But, however, it is absolutely the best time in history to be a human being and to be alive.

01:02:44.000 Especially in this country.

01:02:45.000 It's many people like, why would you need a gun?

01:02:47.000 No one needs a gun. 1.00

01:02:48.000 The First Amendment's bullshit. 1.00

01:02:50.000 We need to take all the guns. 1.00

01:02:51.000 Now that the pandemic hits, those same people are like, oh, okay.

01:02:56.000 Now I get it.

01:02:57.000 There's not enough cops in the world to deal with riots.

01:03:00.000 If 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.

01:03:14.000 That is absolutely inside the realm of possibility, and we need to recognize that.

01:03:18.000 And 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?

01:03:31.000 Like, I see those videos of you training.

01:03:33.000 How do you train with a gun?

01:03:34.000 Where do you go?

01:03:35.000 How to just start?

01:03:36.000 And all these questions.

01:03:37.000 Where do you hunt?

01:03:38.000 Like, the Google searches on hunting must be through the roof.

01:03:41.000 I would think so.

01:03:42.000 I would think so.

01:03:43.000 Because if you're worried about food, like my friend went to the grocery store right after the big thing hit and everything was shut down.

01:03:49.000 He said, all I could find was one package of ground beef.

01:03:52.000 Yeah.

01:03:53.000 That's something we're definitely not worried about.

01:03:54.000 Yeah, you're not worried about that.

01:03:55.000 I know.

01:03:55.000 I said, come over here, man.

01:03:56.000 I got three commercial freezers.

01:03:57.000 I'll hook you up.

01:03:58.000 I've been giving a lot of my friends meat.

01:04:00.000 I love doing it.

01:04:01.000 This is all I ask.

01:04:02.000 Send me a picture of your food.

01:04:03.000 I love it.

01:04:04.000 I just want to see what it looks like when you cook it.

01:04:06.000 Yeah.

01:04:07.000 I mean, this isn't the first time.

01:04:08.000 This is the first time that you've been somewhere else and you've been able to...

01:04:12.000 It's not LA riots and you're seeing the Korean shopkeepers defending their stores.

01:04:17.000 It'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.

01:04:25.000 But, 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...

01:04:32.000 It's not real.

01:04:34.000 Now this one, I think, was real for more people.

01:04:36.000 For everybody.

01:04:37.000 Yeah.

01:04:37.000 Because the whole country's locked down.

01:04:38.000 Even Montana, which has a very low number of deaths and a very low number of infections, still has statewide social distancing rules.

01:04:47.000 The mediator crew, those guys are all doing their podcasts from their homes remotely.

01:04:52.000 Yeah, it's a different deal.

01:04:54.000 It drove it home for people, I think.

01:04:55.000 It did.

01:04:56.000 It drove home the vulnerability, and I think this is a good dry run, because this is...

01:05:01.000 And 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.

01:05:08.000 It's not nearly as bad as, like, the 1918 Spanish Flu, which killed 50 million people worldwide.

01:05:16.000 So this is a smaller number.

01:05:20.000 Still bad.

01:05:20.000 Smaller number.

01:05:21.000 But this is a wake-up call that this kind of thing is a real possibility.

01:05:26.000 And then take this and then couple it with, okay, a terrorist attack.

01:05:31.000 Or take this and couple it with a natural disaster.

01:05:35.000 Now you have two things going on.

01:05:36.000 Now you have a pandemic, and now you have a huge earthquake here in California.

01:05:39.000 You have fires, you have a tsunami, whatever it is.

01:05:42.000 So you have those things.

01:05:44.000 Or civil unrest somewhere.

01:05:45.000 So that's three things now.

01:05:47.000 Choose any of those.

01:05:49.000 Or maybe someone's watching, and this is the time because we're weak, and you get hit with a cyber attack from somewhere.

01:05:55.000 Now all of a sudden you're at home and your credit cards don't work.

01:05:57.000 All this data has been gathered over the last 10, 15 years on people.

01:06:01.000 Credit card information.

01:06:02.000 I mean, they're building in China all these huge fields that collect data.

01:06:08.000 Huge hard drives, essentially, that collect data.

01:06:10.000 Data.

01:06:10.000 So now you're at home and you want to order from your Whole Foods delivers or whatever.

01:06:14.000 Oh, not working.

01:06:16.000 Let's try this next one.

01:06:17.000 Oh, this one's not working.

01:06:18.000 Now what do you do?

01:06:19.000 So it can get worse.

01:06:22.000 It can get a lot worse.

01:06:23.000 But being prepared, just a little bit, don't have to get crazy, but it'd be nice to defend your family.

01:06:30.000 For me, as a husband, father, I feel that's my responsibility as a citizen.

01:06:33.000 That's my responsibility.

01:06:34.000 That's one of my jobs is to be able to prepare my family and defend my family if need be.

01:06:40.000 So 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.

01:06:49.000 Our daughter has been hunting since she's seven.

01:06:51.000 You know, she's very comfortable with firearms. 0.86

01:06:52.000 But it's just natural.

01:06:53.000 And I think it's just natural for us as people to want to protect that greatest gift of life.

01:06:58.000 Not just ours, but those that we love as well.

01:07:02.000 Well, I think it seemed like it was not inside the real world of problems that most people are going to have to deal with before this.

01:07:11.000 And now that they've seen like, oh, the actual structure of our civilization is very thin.

01:07:17.000 The veil that keeps you from bad things happening is very small.

01:07:22.000 And it's just we lived in this nice little Goldilocks zone where nothing was happening.

01:07:27.000 Where there wasn't any pandemics.

01:07:31.000 Besides 9-11, there's no real attacks on American soil other than that one day.

01:07:36.000 So 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.

01:07:45.000 This is just how it's going to be now forever.

01:07:46.000 And then something like this happens and people realize, oh...

01:07:50.000 And especially, I feel terrible for the people that work hard every day and then their job's taken away from them.

01:07:55.000 It's no fault of their own.

01:07:57.000 They're not lazy.

01:07:58.000 They're not drug addicts.

01:07:59.000 They didn't gamble it all away.

01:08:01.000 One day they woke up and the world had changed and now they don't have food money.

01:08:05.000 It's tough.

01:08:06.000 It's tough. 0.99

01:08:06.000 It's fucking hard. 0.99

01:08:07.000 And 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. 0.98

01:08:16.000 So, and for everybody, it's going to be, going to be different.

01:08:18.000 Is it a one month worth of bills?

01:08:20.000 Is it two?

01:08:21.000 Is it three?

01:08:22.000 That's what the experts say or whatever.

01:08:24.000 Uh, everyone's going to be different, but it's important.

01:08:26.000 I 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

01:08:56.000 getting 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.

01:09:09.000 Because you're going to get hit.

01:09:10.000 You're going to get knocked down.

01:09:11.000 And you're going to have to get up and keep moving forward.

01:09:13.000 And 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.

01:09:19.000 Yeah.

01:09:19.000 Just a little bit.

01:09:20.000 I 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.

01:09:36.000 Maybe there's a chance.

01:09:37.000 I mean, a guy like you, but I want to get back to this because we never really finished how the book got...

01:09:44.000 You talked about how you wrote it.

01:09:46.000 We went off on some tangents.

01:09:46.000 Yeah, we did go on a tangent.

01:09:48.000 But your story is one of the great American success stories.

01:09:53.000 I mean, that is the story.

01:09:54.000 The story is the guy has a dream, or the woman has a dream, whoever, works hard, and then one day figures out a way to make it happen.

01:10:02.000 That's it.

01:10:02.000 And that's what you did.

01:10:04.000 That's it.

01:10:04.000 And I didn't, that whole thing about just not worried about it not happening.

01:10:09.000 I mean, it can always not happen.

01:10:10.000 It's good to have contingency plans, for sure.

01:10:13.000 I didn't have any specific contingency plans, but I knew I was going to be okay.

01:10:18.000 But when you sent it off...

01:10:20.000 I want to get to a lot of things.

01:10:22.000 I want to ask you how you created Reese, how you created these characters.

01:10:25.000 But when you sent it off...

01:10:27.000 Like, what does it feel like when you've spent a year and, what, eight months or something?

01:10:32.000 Yep.

01:10:32.000 A year and four months first, and then another four months to edit, and then you're like, all right, and you send it off.

01:10:38.000 What is that feeling like?

01:10:40.000 It was awesome.

01:10:41.000 It was awesome.

01:10:42.000 Yeah, Coronado, California.

01:10:43.000 I 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.

01:10:52.000 I'm sure you had other copies of it, right?

01:10:54.000 Yeah.

01:10:55.000 So it's all perfect.

01:10:56.000 And 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.

01:11:12.000 So I knew the font that she liked.

01:11:14.000 I knew the spacing that she liked.

01:11:17.000 What kind of spacing does she like? 0.97

01:11:20.000 Like, Ariel, two and a half.

01:11:21.000 It's in my old notes.

01:11:23.000 Now it doesn't matter so much.

01:11:24.000 But 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.

01:11:35.000 I don't like it.

01:11:35.000 Did you specifically juice up the beginning chapter, the first chapter, just to make it very riveting?

01:11:41.000 Yes.

01:11:41.000 Grabber?

01:11:42.000 Keeper?

01:11:43.000 Absolutely.

01:11:43.000 Yep.

01:11:44.000 Because I knew what I liked.

01:11:45.000 And I knew that I liked reading and I knew I liked sniper stuff and I had that background and I could weave all that in there.

01:11:50.000 You know, I didn't just say he's walking in his shoes, you know, they're Solomon boots.

01:11:53.000 Why?

01:11:53.000 Because that's what I use downrange.

01:11:55.000 Or, you know, why is he in SICA gear?

01:11:56.000 Because, well, my buddy John Hart started SICA and also it would make him blend in to that environment.

01:12:01.000 So he's not dressed in military stuff in the beginning.

01:12:03.000 So I needed to do all these sorts of things that were very natural to do and get him to a place where the reader wants to turn the page.

01:12:11.000 How do I make the reader want to turn to that next chapter and want to keep them up at night?

01:12:15.000 How do I make them want to go through the entire night to finish this thing?

01:12:18.000 Did you spend the most time on the first chapter because of that?

01:12:21.000 Nope.

01:12:21.000 I think it was all pretty much the same on every chapter, I would say.

01:12:25.000 When you go back to edits is really where you spend time dialing it in.

01:12:29.000 And gosh, I'm trying to remember.

01:12:31.000 There weren't very many edits on the first one from New York.

01:12:33.000 I thought there was going to be a ton.

01:12:34.000 But maybe it was because I had that yellow sticky from listening to your show with Steven Pressfield.

01:12:41.000 That's crazy.

01:12:41.000 And I had that thing that said Revenge.

01:12:42.000 I tied every single...

01:12:44.000 Paragraph, chapter, whatever.

01:12:46.000 It had to directly or more importantly, indirectly tie back to that theme to keep the reader going.

01:12:51.000 Same thing with the second one.

01:12:52.000 It had to directly or indirectly tie back to redemption somehow, even if it was very subtle.

01:12:58.000 What was the theme for Savage Son?

01:13:00.000 The Dark Side of Man.

01:13:01.000 So it explores the hunter versus hunted dynamic through the dark side of man.

01:13:05.000 So really finding out, hey, is James Reese the protagonist?

01:13:09.000 Is he a killer?

01:13:10.000 Is he a soldier?

01:13:12.000 What is he?

01:13:13.000 Is he a hunter?

01:13:14.000 Or is he all three of these things?

01:13:16.000 So 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.

01:13:23.000 So why are we doing that?

01:13:24.000 Is it because of his country?

01:13:26.000 Well, people have been doing this from the beginning of time.

01:13:27.000 They've been defending the tribe.

01:13:29.000 They've been picking up the same type of weapons to provide meals for that tribe.

01:13:32.000 They'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.

01:13:43.000 So why are we still doing that today?

01:13:46.000 Is it all for God and country?

01:13:47.000 Or is there something more?

01:13:48.000 And so that's what I was really exploring with the other one.

01:13:51.000 But yeah, the important thing is to get to the end of that chapter.

01:13:55.000 And to have the person want to turn the page and to look forward and also to establish a relationship with the character.

01:14:01.000 Like I knew creating James Roos, I wanted him to be a likable guy.

01:14:04.000 Like I don't want people, people don't want to spend time with someone they don't like.

01:14:07.000 That's like, why would you do that?

01:14:08.000 So I wanted people to invest in this character, to like him, to want to sit down and have a beer with him.

01:14:13.000 But also he needed to have that background, the training, the experience to be able to flip that switch when everything's taken away.

01:14:20.000 And essentially become the terrorist, become the insurgent that he'd been fighting for the last, at that point, 16 years at war.

01:14:26.000 And 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.

01:14:34.000 So it's more than just a story of revenge, that first one.

01:14:37.000 It'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.

01:14:46.000 So you can read it at a couple different levels depending on how deep you want to go into it.

01:14:51.000 Now, when you sent it to her, how long did it take before they responded?

01:14:55.000 Almost immediately.

01:14:56.000 Really?

01:14:57.000 Yeah, it was so cool.

01:14:58.000 So I sent it off.

01:14:59.000 I'm super excited.

01:15:01.000 I 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. 1.00

01:15:11.000 And I'm like, what?

01:15:12.000 What's going on?

01:15:13.000 And she's like, there's a dead rat in my house.

01:15:15.000 Can you help me?

01:15:16.000 I'm like, what?

01:15:18.000 And it was right there, like 50 feet away, and I couldn't say no.

01:15:21.000 So I remember this vividly that I sent this off, had my lifetime dream.

01:15:26.000 I get it in the mail to Emily Bessler at Simon& Schuster, and off it goes.

01:15:29.000 And 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. 1.00

01:15:36.000 And I'm like, yeah, I'll help you.

01:15:37.000 And so we went into this house, and It was like this hoarder house.

01:15:40.000 There was just stuff everywhere.

01:15:41.000 It was crazy.

01:15:42.000 So I had to go up to this top level, this old Victorian house, and take this dead rat and take it down.

01:15:46.000 Did you think you were going to die in there? 0.99

01:15:48.000 Imagine if you send out all the shit you've been through. 1.00

01:15:51.000 It was crazy. 1.00

01:15:52.000 If that's how it ends, it's a fucking serial killer house. 0.99

01:15:54.000 But anyway, I just remember that distinctly because it was so odd. 0.98

01:15:58.000 But yeah, so I sent it off, and then I didn't know.

01:16:00.000 Like, you don't know, are they going to call you back?

01:16:01.000 Are they not?

01:16:02.000 Are they going to read one word of it and just say, eh?

01:16:04.000 Or are they not even opening it all?

01:16:06.000 Who knows?

01:16:07.000 But about...

01:16:08.000 About two weeks.

01:16:09.000 When I say immediately, I mean like two weeks.

01:16:11.000 That's pretty quick.

01:16:12.000 Yeah, pretty quick.

01:16:13.000 I get a call from Brad Thor.

01:16:16.000 And I pull the car over.

01:16:17.000 I'm in Texas.

01:16:18.000 I just finished this hunt.

01:16:19.000 Pull over to the side of the road.

01:16:20.000 And he said, hey, you've been struck by lightning.

01:16:23.000 And I was like, what?

01:16:24.000 And he said, yep.

01:16:25.000 What year was this?

01:16:27.000 I mailed it in November of 2016. So I got out of the military in June 2016. Mailed it in November.

01:16:36.000 And then I heard back at early December.

01:16:39.000 Wow!

01:16:39.000 Yeah, it was crazy.

01:16:40.000 And yeah, he said she loves it and she wants to publish it.

01:16:45.000 And later I found out that she called him because he's their political thriller guy.

01:16:50.000 And she's like, hey, you know, I got Jack Carr's manuscript and I love it.

01:16:56.000 But you're our guy.

01:16:57.000 What do you want me to do?

01:16:58.000 And he's like, I want you to publish Jack.

01:17:01.000 And that was so cool.

01:17:02.000 So cool. 1.00

01:17:03.000 So he could have put the kibosh on it if he was a bitch. 1.00

01:17:20.000 And 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. 0.99

01:17:29.000 You just have to take a few steps and ring this thing and you're done.

01:17:32.000 So that really resonated with me because of that.

01:17:34.000 And I just love that.

01:17:36.000 So I'm like, all right, I can do this.

01:17:38.000 And I always knew I could anyway because I had that background and had that foundation.

01:17:41.000 I knew what I was going to do and I was so excited.

01:17:43.000 So anyway, he told me that next couple weeks later, or mid-December, I fly to New York and we sit down.

01:17:49.000 I think she wanted to make sure that I wasn't a crazy person.

01:17:52.000 So we get to New York.

01:17:53.000 Well, especially after you read your books. 1.00

01:17:54.000 Who the fuck is coming up with this shit? 1.00

01:17:57.000 Good point. 1.00

01:17:57.000 And that first one, well, I'll tell you that. 1.00

01:17:58.000 There's a first one.

01:17:59.000 There's like in this third one, if you've got to the torture scene yet, well, there's something similar.

01:18:02.000 I read the whole book or went through the whole book.

01:18:04.000 Yeah, I've been through the torture scene.

01:18:06.000 Yeah.

01:18:06.000 So there's that one.

01:18:07.000 And then the second one, there's another torture scene.

01:18:09.000 And then in this other, the first one, there's one that I got from the Shining Path guerrilla movement in South America.

01:18:14.000 And 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.

01:18:22.000 So your intestines are now wrapped around this tree and then the jungle eats you alive.

01:18:27.000 Yeah, it was crazy.

01:18:29.000 So I was worried that might be a little off-putting to somebody in New York and publishing.

01:18:32.000 But 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.

01:18:41.000 But I get to New York and I'm little, like, so now I'm like, okay, I want to make a good impression.

01:18:48.000 So I bring a suit.

01:18:49.000 Yeah.

01:18:49.000 And I've never had to do this before.

01:18:52.000 So I heard of people, you hang it in the bathroom and you let the steam get to it to get the wrinkles out of the suit.

01:18:57.000 So I do that and I'm getting ready.

01:18:59.000 And then I go to put the suit on.

01:19:00.000 It's soaking wet.

01:19:01.000 And it's December.

01:19:02.000 It's New York.

01:19:03.000 It's freezing.

01:19:04.000 I don't have like a coat like other people in New York have or scarves or whatever they wear.

01:19:08.000 And so I put this thing on and I walk, I'm like soaking wet and I have to walk to this coffee place.

01:19:13.000 And by the time I get there, I'm like a sheet of ice and I get there, make sure I'm there an hour early.

01:19:17.000 And I gave the guy, I think I'm like 40 bucks or something to try to wait for a table to be ready.

01:19:22.000 That was a little more private than the other tables in the coffee shop.

01:19:25.000 And so in we go, I sit down waiting.

01:19:28.000 I asked her what her favorite coffee is ahead of time.

01:19:31.000 Boom.

01:19:31.000 You know, she shows up, sit down, we have a great conversation for about 45 minutes to an hour.

01:19:36.000 And she said, hey, I want this thing, but do you know you need an agent?

01:19:39.000 And I was like, what?

01:19:41.000 I'm like, you need an agent?

01:19:42.000 To negotiate.

01:19:43.000 Yeah.

01:19:44.000 Like the Pressfield thing didn't say that in there.

01:19:46.000 And when I was learning about the war of art and the resistance and all that stuff, we didn't talk about agents in there.

01:19:51.000 And I'm like, oh, no, how do I get one of those?

01:19:53.000 And she's like, all right, new guy, I'll introduce you to four and then pick one.

01:19:59.000 And I was like, okay.

01:20:00.000 So I interviewed four.

01:20:01.000 How do you know who the pick?

01:20:03.000 So it was crazy.

01:20:04.000 So there was two males, two females.

01:20:06.000 They were all fantastic, all great reputations, all amazing.

01:20:11.000 The guys, I was like, it was very obvious that it wasn't...

01:20:15.000 They would have been great.

01:20:17.000 I'm not going to make a wrong choice here.

01:20:19.000 So in that sense, I was very lucky.

01:20:22.000 But I said, okay, they're probably not the right ones.

01:20:24.000 But between the two females, they were both so amazing, but they were 180 out from each other. 0.78

01:20:28.000 One had been around since the Tom Clancy days.

01:20:31.000 Small boutique agency represents John Grisham.

01:20:34.000 So you go in there and you have all these John Grisham posters all over the place.

01:20:37.000 The whole team comes out, sits down, talks to you.

01:20:39.000 It was amazing.

01:20:40.000 She was so awesome.

01:20:42.000 And then the other one, younger, hadn't found her Tom Clancy or Grisham-type person yet.

01:20:48.000 Bigger agency, ICM, that's out here in Hollywood as well.

01:20:53.000 And it was such a tough decision.

01:20:54.000 It was like a final rose ceremony.

01:20:56.000 I 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.

01:21:02.000 They were both so fantastic.

01:21:03.000 And 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.

01:21:09.000 And 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.

01:21:21.000 And I think it was.

01:21:22.000 So you had this plan to turn this into some sort of a series from the time you released the very first book.

01:21:27.000 Yeah, from before that.

01:21:28.000 And 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.

01:21:33.000 But as a child of the 80s, that's almost impossible not to do.

01:21:36.000 So 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.

01:21:43.000 But I thought of Chris Pratt.

01:21:44.000 And he had just done, you know, all he'd done is Parks and Rec.

01:21:47.000 And he'd done, he had a small role in Zero Dark Thirty, where he plays a seal.

01:21:51.000 He has, like, a couple lines in there.

01:21:53.000 And for some reason, I'm like, that's the guy.

01:21:56.000 Really?

01:21:56.000 I had no connection to him.

01:21:58.000 And it wouldn't have been the obvious choice back then.

01:22:01.000 So I start writing in December of 2014, I think, or early 2015, somewhere there.

01:22:06.000 So he wasn't his giant movie star back then, either.

01:22:08.000 Nope.

01:22:08.000 Hadn't done any of that stuff yet.

01:22:09.000 And I thought, you know what?

01:22:10.000 This is a likable guy.

01:22:11.000 And he seems like an awesome dude.

01:22:13.000 I get a good feeling from him.

01:22:15.000 And I thought, you know...

01:22:17.000 Growing up in the 80s, I love Magnum.

01:22:18.000 He started off as a naval intelligence officer and then they found out about SEALs, the writers.

01:22:22.000 They turned him into a SEAL a couple of seasons into it.

01:22:24.000 I'm like, everybody loved Magnum in the 80s.

01:22:26.000 Women liked him.

01:22:27.000 The guys liked him.

01:22:27.000 You know, nothing not to like about Magnum.

01:22:29.000 And 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.

01:22:40.000 And it's the end of, I think it's season three.

01:22:43.000 But a guy that had him as a POW in Vietnam comes to Hawaii.

01:22:46.000 There's a little conspiracy thing involved.

01:22:48.000 And at the end, he thinks he's walking away.

01:22:50.000 And then Magnum asks him if he's seen the sun rise that morning.

01:22:53.000 Because that morning when his friend gets killed, there's a sunrise.

01:22:56.000 And the guy turns around and he's like, yes, why?

01:22:59.000 And Magnum turns around and boom!

01:23:00.000 And they stop it right there with this fireball coming out of the end of his 1911. And they freeze it right there.

01:23:05.000 And it was the first time on television in that prime time hour Where someone had killed somebody else.

01:23:11.000 The hero had killed someone else who wasn't armed.

01:23:13.000 I've forgotten about that, but I'm remembering it now.

01:23:16.000 Very cool.

01:23:16.000 That was very controversial.

01:23:18.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:23:19.000 So I thought, that's who I need.

01:23:21.000 I need somebody who's a likable guy, who's going to invest in this.

01:23:24.000 And I heard he was pro-military and that sort of thing.

01:23:28.000 And Chris Pratt's the guy.

01:23:29.000 And that's all the thought I gave to him.

01:23:31.000 You couldn't have picked a better guy.

01:23:32.000 So awesome.

01:23:35.000 Who knew what he was going to turn into with Jurassic Park?

01:23:37.000 He hadn't done Passengers.

01:23:38.000 He hadn't done anything serious yet.

01:23:39.000 But 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.

01:23:46.000 He's in Bosom Buddies. 1.00

01:23:47.000 He's in Dragnet.

01:23:49.000 He's in The Burbs.

01:23:50.000 He's in Joe vs.

01:23:51.000 the Volcano.

01:23:52.000 And then he does something called Philadelphia in the early 90s, and he takes that risk.

01:23:57.000 And since then, he's been able to write his own ticket.

01:23:59.000 He's one of the greatest actors of his generation.

01:24:02.000 And I thought, who's that guy in this generation that needs to stretch a little bit, that needs to do something different?

01:24:08.000 And I'm like, that's Chris Pratt.

01:24:09.000 He can do this.

01:24:11.000 And so I thought of it.

01:24:13.000 Before 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.

01:24:21.000 And he's like, hey, bro, do you remember me?

01:24:23.000 And you know him.

01:24:24.000 You know Jared.

01:24:25.000 And he was out there in Utah with us.

01:24:28.000 And he's like, hey, bro, you remember me?

01:24:30.000 I'm like, yeah, of course I remember you.

01:24:31.000 How's it going?

01:24:32.000 I hadn't talked to him in five years or something.

01:24:34.000 And we catch up a little bit.

01:24:36.000 And 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.

01:24:47.000 I was like, Oh, wow, hey, of course, I'm gonna do that for you.

01:24:49.000 Because I mean, he's awesome to total stud, great operator, and wants to get out of the team.

01:24:53.000 So I'm gonna try to help him as best I can.

01:24:55.000 But he really remembered it.

01:24:56.000 And he said, Hey, I heard you wrote a book.

01:24:58.000 I said, yeah, it's coming out in a couple months here.

01:24:59.000 There are these galley copy things, which are early copies of a novel.

01:25:02.000 I can send one to you.

01:25:03.000 I'd love to send it.

01:25:04.000 And he said, yeah, that'd be great, but I'd like to give one to a friend of mine.

01:25:07.000 And I said, yeah, no problem.

01:25:08.000 Who's that?

01:25:09.000 He said, Chris Pratt.

01:25:10.000 I was like, no way.

01:25:12.000 Wow.

01:25:13.000 Yeah.

01:25:13.000 So he gives it to Chris.

01:25:14.000 Chris reads it.

01:25:15.000 And next thing you know, he's optioned it before it even comes out.

01:25:19.000 Are you a guy who believes in fate?

01:25:21.000 Do you believe in destiny?

01:25:22.000 So when I was in Ramadi in 2005, 2006, that's where I got to think about this a little bit.

01:25:28.000 Because 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?

01:25:38.000 Is that going to blow up and kill me or hit that Humvee in front of me? 0.99

01:25:43.000 Is that piece of trash right there? 1.00

01:25:45.000 Is that covering something else? 0.98

01:25:46.000 Is there a wire there?

01:25:47.000 You could spend every single mission, especially going to and from Target and even on Target, Worried about that.

01:25:54.000 Or you could focus on the mission, focus on the job, get there, do the job, get back.

01:25:58.000 And at that time, I was like, you know, I think I have to resign myself to fate here in a lot of these things.

01:26:05.000 Otherwise, 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?

01:26:12.000 If I get blown up today, that's just how it was.

01:26:15.000 We're doing everything we possibly can to mitigate that.

01:26:17.000 But 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.

01:26:25.000 But that's not going to be the focus of everything that I'm thinking about.

01:26:29.000 It can't be.

01:26:30.000 I need to be focused on this mission.

01:26:31.000 I need to focus on contingencies.

01:26:32.000 There's a firefight I need to figure out.

01:26:34.000 What assets are available to come in here for QRF or whatever else?

01:26:37.000 What air we have overhead?

01:26:38.000 How do we maneuver here?

01:26:40.000 All those things.

01:26:41.000 That's what I need to worry about.

01:26:42.000 What's QRF? Quick reaction force.

01:26:44.000 So you have those set up at different places in case you get hit.

01:26:47.000 So they can come on in, usually in like Bradley's or Abrams sometimes.

01:26:52.000 Different vehicles that have a little more firepower than you do as you're sneaking through the streets.

01:26:56.000 So I kind of resigned myself to fate.

01:26:58.000 And there's a book called Bridge at San Luis Rey.

01:27:04.000 There's like, I forget how many people, but let's say five or six people that are on this bridge and it collapses.

01:27:10.000 And the story is how each one of them got to be on that bridge.

01:27:14.000 Why were those six people the ones that were on that bridge at that time?

01:27:18.000 And it's fate.

01:27:20.000 So 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.

01:27:30.000 The Chris Pratt thing is eerie, though.

01:27:32.000 It's crazy.

01:27:32.000 It's a little eerie.

01:27:33.000 It's crazy.

01:27:34.000 I mean, wonderfully eerie.

01:27:35.000 Eerie may be the worst word for it.

01:27:37.000 It's pretty amazing.

01:27:39.000 I feel very fortunate, yeah.

01:27:41.000 And, yeah, it's one of those things that...

01:27:43.000 You kind of maybe made that happen.

01:27:45.000 Like, maybe you kind of put that out there as you were writing it, thinking about him.

01:27:50.000 Maybe.

01:27:50.000 I mean, I don't know.

01:27:51.000 I say that and I say, shut up, hippie. 1.00

01:27:53.000 But part of me is like, oh, what, do you got a crystal up your ass, too? 1.00

01:27:58.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:27:58.000 But who knows? 0.99

01:28:00.000 If I was like, I don't know, I mean, I was, you know, whatever, an average seal or whatever.

01:28:04.000 But if I hadn't taken the time to sit down with Jared and like maybe Chris doesn't even know this exists today.

01:28:10.000 Right.

01:28:11.000 And other crazy part of this, I thought of Anton Fuqua directing it.

01:28:15.000 And he's directing it.

01:28:16.000 Yeah.

01:28:17.000 Why him?

01:28:18.000 Because I love Shooter.

01:28:19.000 Did he do Training Day?

01:28:20.000 He did Training Day.

01:28:21.000 Got the Oscar for Training Day.

01:28:23.000 Magnificent Seven.

01:28:24.000 I knew he'd worked with Chris on Magnificent Seven.

01:28:26.000 I actually did know someone who knew him, so I did have that connection through someone else.

01:28:34.000 But I love Shooter, which is based on the book Point of Impact by Stephen Hunter with Mark Wahlberg.

01:28:38.000 I love that movie because I love the book so much.

01:28:41.000 They made it more modern for today's time, but it's a Vietnam sniper. 0.98

01:28:44.000 It's Bob Lee Swagger.

01:28:46.000 That's who it originally is.

01:28:47.000 But I just thought he's the guy.

01:28:49.000 He's the guy to direct this thing.

01:28:51.000 And now they're both doing it, which is crazy.

01:28:53.000 That is so crazy.

01:28:54.000 Yeah.

01:28:55.000 That's so weird, man, that you had those two people in your head.

01:28:59.000 That's what makes me think I don't...

01:29:02.000 Not believe that it's possible to manifest something. 1.00

01:29:05.000 But I think most of the people that talk about that stuff are full of shit. 0.99

01:29:09.000 That's where it's a problem. 0.99

01:29:10.000 Like, 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.

01:29:18.000 There's a lot of that stuff is horseshit because you got to do the work, right?

01:29:22.000 That's it.

01:29:23.000 But 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.

01:29:39.000 But the thing is, you only hear those stories from the people that are successful.

01:29:43.000 Like how many people are like, I wrote a book.

01:29:45.000 I had Chris Pratt in my head, and I said, Chris! 0.99

01:29:49.000 And he's like, get the fuck away from me! 0.99

01:29:51.000 No, it's totally crazy how all that stuff kind of comes together. 0.99

01:29:56.000 You couldn't have picked a better guy than Chris.

01:29:58.000 He is such a good guy.

01:29:59.000 He's such a great guy.

01:30:00.000 He's almost weirdly nice.

01:30:02.000 Yeah, no, he's so nice.

01:30:03.000 Maybe that's just different for around here, maybe.

01:30:05.000 I don't know.

01:30:05.000 But he's very different in terms of, like, Hollywood actors.

01:30:09.000 Like, there's a few like him. 1.00

01:30:10.000 Like, 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. 1.00

01:30:18.000 Is it really true? 1.00

01:30:18.000 But it's not true all the time. 1.00

01:30:20.000 Yeah.

01:30:20.000 And 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.

01:30:29.000 He's not your typical actor.

01:30:31.000 Yeah, he's been so great to me.

01:30:32.000 But he's also a huge movie star.

01:30:34.000 So it's weird.

01:30:35.000 It's like, he's not that, you know, guy who does coke and goes to parties and he's a different, different animal.

01:30:42.000 They do exist, male and female.

01:30:45.000 There are actresses that are great people.

01:30:48.000 They just really genuinely enjoy acting.

01:30:51.000 But for the most part, the people that get into it are people that need a disproportionate amount of attention.

01:30:55.000 And for the most part, the people that need a disproportionate amount of attention are disproportionately annoying.

01:31:01.000 Yeah.

01:31:01.000 And 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.

01:31:08.000 You're ruining my book or whatever.

01:31:10.000 So they'd like to get rid of you, but Chris wanted me involved.

01:31:11.000 So I got to help out on the pilot script for this thing.

01:31:15.000 That's awesome.

01:31:15.000 And it is so good.

01:31:17.000 Now, is this a Netflix thing?

01:31:18.000 Is that what you're doing?

01:31:19.000 It's still classified.

01:31:20.000 Okay.

01:31:21.000 I think they're doing some announcement at some point, but it's a streaming service.

01:31:24.000 Oh, that's right.

01:31:25.000 Okay, I know what it is.

01:31:26.000 I forgot.

01:31:26.000 Yeah, so it's eight to ten part series, maybe, something like that.

01:31:30.000 Eight to ten parts.

01:31:32.000 That's perfect.

01:31:33.000 Yeah, because if they tried to jam that...

01:31:35.000 Yeah, I don't think it'll work if you try to do a movie.

01:31:37.000 Well, you don't have to anymore.

01:31:39.000 Yeah, it's great.

01:31:39.000 And now he looks genius, right?

01:31:41.000 Yes.

01:31:41.000 Especially now.

01:31:42.000 Yes.

01:31:43.000 It looks like such a good move.

01:31:45.000 Another 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.

01:31:54.000 Right.

01:31:54.000 And even when we did the deal, it was like a movie.

01:31:57.000 It was kind of like that.

01:31:57.000 It was early 2018 when we did the deal.

01:32:01.000 And it's like, well, series or movie?

01:32:04.000 So it's both.

01:32:05.000 It could be both in the contract.

01:32:07.000 And then they decided to do the series earlier on before COVID even was on the radar.

01:32:12.000 But now it looks like, yeah, genius move.

01:32:14.000 Well, now, like, series have a giant advantage over movies.

01:32:18.000 Now, movies are getting released.

01:32:20.000 It's a really interesting thing today.

01:32:22.000 One 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. 0.97

01:32:33.000 So 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. 0.92

01:32:43.000 We've got a business together. 0.89

01:32:44.000 And then the theater's like, you know, the movie production companies are like, you might not have a business in six months.

01:32:52.000 It's tough. 0.99

01:32:52.000 Because who the fuck is going to go to the movies now? 0.99

01:32:54.000 I know. 0.99

01:32:55.000 Even when they're like, okay, it's all good.

01:32:56.000 We're opening up May 1st or whatever it is or June 1st.

01:32:59.000 Who's going to rush right back with their kids? 1.00

01:33:01.000 It's not going to be what it used to be.

01:33:02.000 It's going to take a long time.

01:33:05.000 They were because, well, I've been saying forever.

01:33:08.000 I would love if, you know, I have a big TV at home.

01:33:11.000 I 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.

01:33:20.000 Some weird guy walks in and all of a sudden you're like, ugh, can I like that?

01:33:23.000 For me anyway, I'm looking at that.

01:33:24.000 That's strange.

01:33:25.000 Exactly.

01:33:25.000 He's got a backpack.

01:33:26.000 Great.

01:33:27.000 What does that mean?

01:33:27.000 I'm going to sit here the whole time with my kids, just on edge the entire time, worried about this.

01:33:31.000 What are the exits?

01:33:32.000 That sort of thing.

01:33:33.000 Which is important to do in a movie theater.

01:33:35.000 Exit.

01:33:35.000 There's smoke or whatever.

01:33:36.000 You've got to go to the wall.

01:33:37.000 Use your hand down the wall to get to the exit.

01:33:39.000 That sort of stuff.

01:33:40.000 But yeah, it's...

01:33:41.000 Yeah, why not stay at home?

01:33:43.000 Enjoy it at home.

01:33:44.000 Make your popcorn at home.

01:33:45.000 So it's looking like a good move now.

01:33:47.000 But going back to that, going back to the fate thing.

01:33:48.000 So it's also like, what if I had not been the operator or whatever that I was?

01:33:54.000 What if the guy had a different impression of me that sat next to Brad Thor at the fundraiser?

01:33:58.000 He'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.

01:34:06.000 Like, he's not going to mention my name to Brad Thor.

01:34:08.000 So all those little things that kind of came together.

01:34:11.000 Or what if I didn't read growing up?

01:34:12.000 What 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?

01:34:20.000 I was already on the path, but he has one sentence in that book, Brotherhood of the Rose, that talks about SEALs.

01:34:26.000 And 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.

01:34:33.000 And now he's a He's a dear friend now.

01:34:35.000 He's an incredible guy.

01:34:37.000 So all those little things just kind of happened.

01:34:39.000 I mean, they happened, but I did them because I was passionate about them.

01:34:43.000 I was passionate about reading, passionate about writing, passionate about serving my country, passionate about being the best operator I could possibly be.

01:34:49.000 So I was always focused on those things.

01:34:52.000 And then, you know, these other things kind of, it helped.

01:34:55.000 It helped propel this whole thing forward.

01:34:57.000 That seems like the formula for success in everything.

01:35:00.000 It really does.

01:35:01.000 Like being passionate about something, focusing all your attention and all your energy, and really trying to do your best at something.

01:35:08.000 That seems like the formula.

01:35:11.000 Well, do the work.

01:35:12.000 Yeah, that whole Pressfield book is called Do the Work.

01:35:14.000 You have to do that before anything else can happen.

01:35:17.000 You can't just wish that something was going to happen.

01:35:19.000 No, 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.

01:35:28.000 And 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.

01:35:38.000 You have to.

01:35:39.000 And it really makes something happen that doesn't happen before.

01:35:42.000 It's not going to happen otherwise.

01:35:42.000 No one's going to do it for you.

01:35:44.000 No.

01:35:44.000 No one's going to do it for you.

01:35:44.000 I hear authors talking all the time about what their publisher doesn't do for them.

01:35:48.000 I hear that about comics, too.

01:35:50.000 My agent doesn't do anything for me.

01:35:51.000 Yeah.

01:35:52.000 Be undeniable. 0.97

01:35:53.000 They can't do shit then. 0.99

01:35:54.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:35:54.000 For me, I'm like, well, I have no background. 0.99

01:35:56.000 I'm not coming from politics.

01:35:57.000 I'm not coming from sports.

01:35:58.000 I'm not coming from anything where I have any sort of a following that's going to push me forward in this type of a realm.

01:36:03.000 They don't owe me anything.

01:36:05.000 I owe them something.

01:36:06.000 I need to prove myself to them and prove that I was a good investment because most books don't make back their initial investment.

01:36:14.000 Most books?

01:36:15.000 Yeah, most books.

01:36:15.000 Really?

01:36:15.000 There's a few of them, kind of like movies.

01:36:17.000 Like 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.

01:36:24.000 So same thing in publishing.

01:36:26.000 There's a few at the top, like the Stephen King's and Brad Thor's and Vince Flynn's and all that We're good to go.

01:36:37.000 We're good to go.

01:36:46.000 Guys getting out of the military and out of the agency.

01:36:48.000 How did these guys get together and make some YouTube videos?

01:36:50.000 And all of a sudden now they have this amazing company.

01:36:52.000 Well, it's a great product.

01:36:54.000 Huge company.

01:36:55.000 It's an amazing product at its base.

01:36:57.000 But you know what else they did?

01:36:58.000 Oh, they did some advertising.

01:36:59.000 They did some marketing.

01:37:00.000 They did their own marketing on advertising on social media platforms.

01:37:04.000 And 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.

01:37:11.000 Well, it's also authentic.

01:37:14.000 Evan Hafer, the CEO of Black Rifle Coffee, has always been a coffee freak his whole life. 0.98

01:37:20.000 He used to fucking roast coffee in the back of his Humvee while he was doing deployments. 0.99

01:37:26.000 Amazing. 0.99

01:37:27.000 Yeah, he's great.

01:37:28.000 And when he takes you through, you sense that passion.

01:37:29.000 So when he talks about coffee, it's like me talking about writing.

01:37:32.000 You know, you can sense that passion.

01:37:34.000 And it's incredible.

01:37:35.000 I learned so much about coffee from him.

01:37:36.000 Now I'm turning into more of a coffee snob.

01:37:37.000 Like before, I wasn't.

01:37:38.000 But now that I know him and know those guys and have seen the process, now I'm a total coffee snob.

01:37:42.000 Does he give you a hard time because Reese likes honey and a little bit of cream in his coffee?

01:37:48.000 Not as much as I thought he would.

01:37:50.000 Because, you know, when he makes coffee, it's really good without anything in it.

01:37:53.000 Like when he knows what he's doing and they do that thing with a glass deal and the whole thing, it's awesome.

01:37:56.000 And he measures it out.

01:37:57.000 Yeah, and they weigh it and the whole thing.

01:37:59.000 It's awesome.

01:38:00.000 For me, I mean, getting up in the morning, it's chaos.

01:38:02.000 The kids are, you know, it's insanity.

01:38:04.000 And so we just hit the coffee maker.

01:38:06.000 Black Rival Coffee's in there and I toss in some honey, toss in some cream.

01:38:09.000 So that's you.

01:38:10.000 You're the honey guy.

01:38:11.000 Yeah.

01:38:12.000 Oh! 0.60

01:38:13.000 I want to make my character relatable. 0.99

01:38:15.000 Did anybody give you shit about putting honey in your coffee? 0.99

01:38:17.000 Yes. 0.99

01:38:19.000 Just like the protagonists of these stories, they like their coffee black.

01:38:22.000 Well, in real life, a lot of SEALs and Special Forces guys like their coffee black also.

01:38:26.000 They like to suffer.

01:38:27.000 Yeah.

01:38:28.000 But I always liked, you know, can I get that latte?

01:38:30.000 Can I get that caramel macchiato latte?

01:38:32.000 So I always did that.

01:38:33.000 And then I found out about honey and coffee and honey and tea later.

01:38:36.000 But 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.

01:38:49.000 So I wanted him to be relatable.

01:38:51.000 I didn't want him to be this superhero.

01:38:53.000 I 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.

01:38:59.000 But then also surveillance side of the house, some of the things that we don't typically do in the SEAL team.

01:39:03.000 Maybe he's not as good at those sorts of things.

01:39:05.000 And maybe he drives a FJ-62 Land Cruiser because I love Land Cruisers.

01:39:09.000 And there's also that whole subculture of people that love Land Cruisers.

01:39:13.000 Yes.

01:39:13.000 You can bring into the fold also.

01:39:15.000 So 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.

01:39:27.000 Just use those things as character development tools.

01:39:29.000 So 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.

01:39:35.000 That'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.

01:39:46.000 You notice that?

01:39:47.000 Yeah, Resco watch in there.

01:39:48.000 Sure, I have a Resco.

01:39:49.000 Nice.

01:39:49.000 All the different stuff that you're...

01:39:51.000 And the gear thing, too.

01:39:53.000 It's like you're very meticulous and very specific about the type of gear and how he prepares everything.

01:40:00.000 Yeah, it'd be very...

01:40:02.000 Odd for me not to do that.

01:40:03.000 And some people don't like it.

01:40:05.000 And there are plenty of books where someone takes the safety off on their Glock before they shoot someone or something like that.

01:40:10.000 Or they click it off on a revolver or whatever.

01:40:12.000 There's plenty of books out there that do that.

01:40:14.000 And I won't make a mistake that egregious.

01:40:16.000 I'm sure I'll make a mistake at some point for the people that really get in there.

01:40:19.000 But when you see a mistake like that, doesn't it take you out?

01:40:22.000 A little bit.

01:40:23.000 It's like, ugh, I'm going to try not to pay attention.

01:40:25.000 It's kind of like watching a movie where they really kind of jack something up and I'm like, ugh.

01:40:28.000 Because 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.

01:40:38.000 So I try to just enjoy them for what they are, but it does take you out.

01:40:41.000 And 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?

01:40:45.000 Right, right, right.

01:40:47.000 So for me, it's very natural to incorporate that gear.

01:40:50.000 And it's also very natural for me to talk about it because I was so into it for so long that I know a lot of people in these industries.

01:40:57.000 And this is an Aries watch right here.

01:40:58.000 I was at the CIA. He's friends with Evan Hafer.

01:41:01.000 So I'd talk to Evan and be like, hey, is this dude legit?

01:41:03.000 And he's like, oh yeah, he's legit.

01:41:05.000 So all that stuff gets woven in there as well.

01:41:07.000 It's just so natural for me to do.

01:41:08.000 And also, when I see somebody, I can tell a lot about them by what they're carrying, I know how SF guys work.

01:41:37.000 Travel or how they have their packs, whatever it is.

01:41:41.000 Or I know someone that doesn't really know what they're doing.

01:41:42.000 This character doesn't really know what they're doing.

01:41:44.000 So yeah, he's going to be carrying this 1911 that's brand new that he's not carrying.

01:41:48.000 Cockton lock, doesn't have one in the chamber, whatever it is.

01:41:50.000 Like I can tell a lot about someone just by looking at their setup with a quick glance.

01:41:54.000 So it's very natural for me to do that in stories as well.

01:41:56.000 And it gives me a lot to work with.

01:41:58.000 How many seals are novelists?

01:42:00.000 Is it common?

01:42:02.000 It's not common.

01:42:03.000 There are SEALs, obviously, who get out and write nonfiction.

01:42:07.000 Richard Marcinko, who created...

01:42:09.000 Jack Marcinko.

01:42:09.000 I read those books.

01:42:10.000 Those are the first books that I ever read on military.

01:42:13.000 Oh, nice.

01:42:13.000 Yeah, early 90s.

01:42:15.000 And 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.

01:42:21.000 I knew I was going to be in the military even before then.

01:42:24.000 When did those books come out?

01:42:24.000 Those came out in the 90s.

01:42:25.000 Did they really?

01:42:26.000 Yep, early 90s.

01:42:28.000 That was the first one called Road Warrior.

01:42:30.000 Yeah, I read Road Warrior.

01:42:31.000 I felt like I read them before then, but I guess that makes sense.

01:42:34.000 Yeah, time kind of blends together.

01:42:37.000 So 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.

01:42:45.000 Wasn't there an issue, too, where people were kind of upset that he was telling these stories?

01:42:49.000 I think so, but as a kid reading that, you don't know any of that.

01:42:51.000 You don't know any of that backstory.

01:42:53.000 You're just like, oh, this is amazing.

01:42:54.000 He must have had an incredible life to be able to write a book.

01:42:57.000 The 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.

01:43:11.000 And at the time, Walter Cronkite's on TV. We're watching it during dinner.

01:43:16.000 He's counting down the days that U.S. personnel have been taken hostage in Iran.

01:43:20.000 And I'm seeing those click down or click up every single night.

01:43:24.000 And I'm wondering, I see the pictures, black and white photos, of US military and people from the State Department.

01:43:32.000 I didn't know that at the time, though.

01:43:33.000 I 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.

01:43:39.000 And I'm wondering, why is the United States standing by and letting this happen, even though I'm six years old at the time?

01:43:47.000 Why is this happening?

01:43:48.000 Why don't we go in there and get those guys?

01:43:49.000 And then Desert One happens.

01:43:51.000 And, of course, that's on the mind.

01:43:53.000 It still shades.

01:43:55.000 Everything we do is in special operations.

01:43:57.000 There's a big black eye for the country, special operations in general.

01:44:00.000 Explain to people what happened.

01:44:02.000 So 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.

01:44:14.000 But about five, six months into that, we made an attempt to rescue them.

01:44:19.000 So they're being held in At the embassy still in an adjacent building, I think.

01:44:23.000 And it was the first use that most people know of what's called Delta Force.

01:44:28.000 So our premier counter-terrorist unit that is modeled after the British SAS. And the British SAS has been in service for a long time.

01:44:36.000 So we had guys that went through their program in the 60s, even.

01:44:39.000 And they took those lessons and created ours.

01:44:42.000 Because late 60s, mid-70s, there's a lot of hijackings.

01:44:45.000 We have the Munich Olympics.

01:44:46.000 We have all these terrorist events.

01:44:48.000 And we don't really have a good way to counter them.

01:44:50.000 And so Delta Force is created.

01:44:53.000 And their first test was Operation Eagle Claw to rescue the hostages in Iran.

01:44:59.000 So the anniversary of it just happened the other day.

01:45:03.000 So April 1980, we give it a shot and it didn't work out.

01:45:08.000 So what happened was we have marine pilots flying these sea stallion helicopters off, I think it was the USS Nimitz, I think.

01:45:18.000 So they're flying off an aircraft carrier.

01:45:20.000 They're meeting the assaulters from Delta Force who are flying in on C-130s from an island called Masira in the Gulf of Oman.

01:45:28.000 A place where we would then launch into Afghanistan years later.

01:45:31.000 Interestingly enough, I spent a little time there.

01:45:34.000 And they were going to meet up in the desert outside of Tehran, Iran, a few hundred miles outside the city.

01:45:41.000 So the C-130s land.

01:45:43.000 EC-130s land that have fuel.

01:45:45.000 Helicopters land from the aircraft carrier.

01:45:49.000 They're going to refuel those helos.

01:45:50.000 And the planes are going back to Masira.

01:45:53.000 And the helicopters are going to get closer to Tehran.

01:45:56.000 So they're going to get closer.

01:45:57.000 They're going to land.

01:45:58.000 They're going to get camouflaged during the day.

01:46:00.000 And then some guys who have been on the ground in Tehran.

01:46:02.000 This is the best part of the story that no one really talks about.

01:46:04.000 We've had guys on the ground in Iran.

01:46:06.000 We had an E6 Air Force guy that spoke Farsi.

01:46:08.000 We had a special operations legend, Dick Meadows, who was also on the Sante raid in Vietnam.

01:46:14.000 And we have two special forces guys out of Germany.

01:46:17.000 And then two CIA assets.

01:46:19.000 I think one's called Bob and one's named Mohammed. 0.96

01:46:22.000 And they had to get vehicles out there to the hide site where the Delta Force guys are.

01:46:26.000 And then they're going to assault.

01:46:27.000 They're going to go in.

01:46:28.000 They'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.

01:46:37.000 So what happened was the planes land, helicopters have some mechanical problems, a couple get lost in the sandstorm.

01:46:46.000 They needed six to do the mission.

01:46:47.000 They launched with eight.

01:46:49.000 Less than six make it to that link-up point in the desert, so they have to scrap.

01:46:53.000 It's called no-go criteria.

01:46:54.000 So 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.

01:47:02.000 So instead of being on the ground saying, okay, we have four.

01:47:04.000 How many guys do you have?

01:47:05.000 Can we do it with this?

01:47:06.000 Those decisions have been made ahead of time in the planning process.

01:47:09.000 So the helicopters land...

01:47:12.000 Not enough.

01:47:12.000 They scrapped the mission.

01:47:14.000 They're abort.

01:47:14.000 And what would have happened is they would have gone back and they would have reconstituted and gone after the hostages a few days later.

01:47:19.000 But one of the helicopters in refueling collides with one of the EC-130s.

01:47:24.000 Huge explosion.

01:47:25.000 Eight U.S. servicemen die.

01:47:26.000 And so they don't go take the hostages.

01:47:29.000 They don't go back for the hostages again a few days later.

01:47:32.000 Iran moves the hostages different locations all over Iran to make it a lot more difficult if we had gone after them again. 0.54

01:47:38.000 But the next day, President Carter Makes an announcement.

01:47:41.000 Said we tried to get the hostages.

01:47:42.000 Didn't work.

01:47:43.000 Had this disaster in the desert.

01:47:44.000 And it was a big black eye for his presidency and for special operations in general.

01:47:48.000 But the important part, we took those lessons and we applied them going forward.

01:47:54.000 So 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.

01:48:00.000 Well, now we do.

01:48:01.000 Now we have a special operations command.

01:48:03.000 We all train together.

01:48:04.000 So pilots are trained.

01:48:05.000 You're doing all this stuff together.

01:48:06.000 So when 9-11 hit all those years later, we're much more prepared because of That's how we honor those guys that died.

01:48:14.000 That's how we honor that mission, is by taking those lessons and apply them going forward.

01:48:19.000 Interestingly enough, that's what you do in life also when you have to learn these lessons and apply them going forward.

01:48:23.000 It's all about how you apply them going forward.

01:48:26.000 Well, that's a huge advantage for you as an author, to have all that information, to have that legitimate background.

01:48:32.000 Like, 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...

01:48:41.000 It'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.

01:48:49.000 And there's an authenticity to the way you write and to the one book that I've read, at least, Savage Son, where you...

01:49:00.000 There's a frequency that you tap into that is a frequency of a person that has experienced this stuff in real life.

01:49:06.000 You're not imagining.

01:49:08.000 There's a lot of stuff where people write about things where they're imagining.

01:49:13.000 There's a movie called Warrior, where it's an MMA movie.

01:49:17.000 Oh, yeah.

01:49:18.000 That's a great one.

01:49:18.000 They fight two days in a row.

01:49:20.000 And when they fight two days in a row, I'm like, get the fuck out of here. 0.99

01:49:23.000 I'm like, what are you talking? 0.98

01:49:24.000 You can't fight two days in a row.

01:49:26.000 Have you ever seen someone the day after a fight? 1.00

01:49:28.000 Look at the fucking elephant man. 1.00

01:49:30.000 Their whole body's a mess. 1.00

01:49:31.000 Everything's swollen. 0.73

01:49:32.000 Like, this is nonsense.

01:49:34.000 But someone that doesn't know is like, oh, I'm going to have this in the story.

01:49:36.000 He's going to lose the first night, but the next night he's going to go in and he's going to win.

01:49:40.000 Exactly, exactly.

01:49:41.000 They do things that take you out of...

01:49:45.000 It'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.

01:49:57.000 It's very interesting.

01:49:58.000 Thank you.

01:49:59.000 Yeah, 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...

01:50:11.000 Is there, uh, the feelings and emotions behind it are there and it's woven into the first story.

01:50:16.000 And then some, and so it was very therapeutic.

01:50:17.000 I got to take, uh, and I was very lucky downrange.

01:50:20.000 Like you can do all the right things in combat.

01:50:23.000 Like 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.

01:50:31.000 Then the other is opposite.

01:50:33.000 Truly.

01:50:33.000 You can make all the wrong decisions of quote unquote wrong decisions and things can work out just fine.

01:50:37.000 Uh, It's like life, right?

01:50:39.000 Yeah, like life.

01:50:40.000 So whether you made mistakes or not, point being, you're going to have a hard time dealing with them later.

01:50:45.000 And 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.

01:50:51.000 But I still got to tap into them and put them into the story.

01:50:54.000 Now, 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.

01:51:09.000 And so some bad things.

01:51:10.000 My career wasn't all wonderful.

01:51:13.000 Like the downrange stuff, very lucky, very fortunate to be in a couple of right places at the right time to do some interesting things.

01:51:18.000 But when we got back, a good buddy of mine, Mark Owen, he writes a book called No Easy Day.

01:51:24.000 And that's the one about the Bin Laden raid.

01:51:26.000 And that one, oh, that was like a tipping point.

01:51:28.000 Because in our community at the time, there'd been Act of Valor, that movie with active duty seals playing characters in an actual movie.

01:51:35.000 There were other books out there.

01:51:37.000 So there was already a discussion happening, like, hey, are we too much in the limelight?

01:51:40.000 Here, we're supposed to be these quiet professionals.

01:51:42.000 But, you know, going back in time, I read all these Vietnam books growing up and every autobiography I could about people in the military.

01:51:49.000 You know, Grant has his memoirs or whatever.

01:51:50.000 So there's a precedent, not just in this country, but worldwide of people getting out, talking about their experiences.

01:51:55.000 And that's part of a first-person account that historians will use later.

01:51:59.000 Is it frowned upon at all?

01:52:01.000 So it was starting to get even more and more frowned upon right up to that point.

01:52:06.000 And that was the tipping point.

01:52:07.000 So when that book came out, that's when everyone said, or not everyone, senior level leaders were like, okay, I'll stop.

01:52:14.000 And 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.

01:52:31.000 So I was one of those guys.

01:52:33.000 I've known him since 1999 or something like that.

01:52:36.000 So we've been dear friends since that time.

01:52:38.000 And so we have emails going back all these years.

01:52:40.000 So I got pulled in to this interrogation room.

01:52:45.000 Yeah.

01:53:02.000 So things that you said totally out of context, like joking around about something or just statements about things?

01:53:09.000 Yeah, just statements like, what did you mean by this?

01:53:12.000 And I used that in the first novel because I'm sitting there in this interrogation.

01:53:16.000 You 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.

01:53:27.000 So now they're busting people on piss tests in the military and that sort of thing.

01:53:31.000 Actually, 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.

01:53:43.000 And so our job was to take those ships down before they got to Iranian waters.

01:53:46.000 And then the UN would take over after that.

01:53:50.000 But 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.

01:53:55.000 And so they would come out of Iraq. 0.53

01:53:57.000 They had all these metal over all the windows.

01:54:01.000 It cut off all the ladders on the ship so you'd have to...

01:54:03.000 Use 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.

01:54:11.000 Otherwise, you had to get off.

01:54:12.000 So it was kind of a crazy deal.

01:54:14.000 But 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...

01:54:25.000 An M60, some sort of a machine gun type thing, has gone missing on one of these ships that you guys were on.

01:54:32.000 And I was like, oh, that's terrible.

01:54:33.000 You know, okay.

01:54:34.000 Well, how can I help you?

01:54:36.000 And so we started talking and they're like, how would you get one off a ship if you wanted to steal a machine gun from a ship?

01:54:42.000 How would you get it off?

01:54:42.000 And me, I'm just kind of creative.

01:54:44.000 I'm like, we're all on the same team here.

01:54:45.000 I'm like, oh, this is what I would do.

01:54:46.000 I take it off piece by piece.

01:54:47.000 And whatever I said.

01:54:48.000 So I gave them my...

01:54:49.000 And then as I was nearing the end, I'm seeing it in their face and seeing the notes they're taking.

01:54:53.000 I'm like, wait a second.

01:54:54.000 Are they trying to get me to...

01:54:56.000 I didn't take an M60 off a ship piece by piece.

01:54:58.000 We were only on there for like...

01:54:59.000 The problem is you're an author.

01:55:01.000 And I'm trying to think this all through.

01:55:02.000 Yeah.

01:55:02.000 So I'm like...

01:55:03.000 You're being creative.

01:55:04.000 Yeah, so even back then I had a bad experience with them.

01:55:07.000 So what are they saying to you?

01:55:09.000 Did you do this?

01:55:10.000 Did they just start accusing you?

01:55:12.000 With the Mark Owens.

01:55:13.000 Oh, in there?

01:55:14.000 No, 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.

01:55:20.000 Just get excited and smile at you.

01:55:21.000 Yeah, totally.

01:55:22.000 Yeah, just like I am now.

01:55:24.000 And then these guys are just like...

01:55:26.000 Anyway, so I kind of figured it out near the end, and I'm like, oh, wow, this is not...

01:55:29.000 Something's not feeling quite right here.

01:55:31.000 Like, these guys are just after a win.

01:55:32.000 That's what they're...

01:55:33.000 They're just trying to get somebody.

01:55:34.000 That's their job.

01:55:35.000 And if they can get a seal, even better.

01:55:37.000 So after Mark Owen wrote the book No Easy Day, same thing.

01:55:41.000 And you saw these guys across the table, and...

01:55:46.000 This is years later, so it wasn't like immediately.

01:55:48.000 They went after some guys immediately, whatever, but they put all this together over a long time and followed all these strings.

01:55:53.000 What was their ultimate goal?

01:55:53.000 What do they want?

01:55:54.000 I think they wanted to build a case against him, a criminal case against him.

01:55:59.000 For what?

01:56:00.000 For not submitting his book to the Department of Defense for review.

01:56:05.000 Is that so they can redact certain things that are classified?

01:56:08.000 Yeah.

01:56:08.000 Yeah, which is why I was hypersensitive to it, and even though mine are fiction, I submitted them.

01:56:12.000 Is that protocol?

01:56:14.000 So when all those things in your book where it says redacted, is that why it's redacted?

01:56:18.000 Really?

01:56:19.000 So it's because of them?

01:56:20.000 Yep.

01:56:21.000 So they made me hypersensitive to it.

01:56:23.000 So no other author of fiction that has the security clearances that I had, no one else submits fiction.

01:56:30.000 But I was so just tied to this because of my experience with the Mark Owen book and what they tried to do.

01:56:35.000 I was like, I just want to make sure. 0.80

01:56:37.000 And what they've taken out, absolutely ridiculous.

01:56:40.000 So 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.

01:56:48.000 They took out nine lines or something like that, which is fine.

01:56:51.000 But the second one, a month goes by, then two, then three, then four, then five, then six.

01:56:57.000 And they get almost to the seven-month mark when they finally get back to me.

01:57:01.000 So at this point, we had to push the publication date out of April to the summer.

01:57:04.000 It'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.

01:57:09.000 So these are thought well ahead of time.

01:57:11.000 So it was not convenient to have to push it all the way to the end of July.

01:57:15.000 So it was a pain.

01:57:17.000 And every single thing in there that was blacked out...

01:57:20.000 My attorneys found in publicly available government documents.

01:57:24.000 So not just like on Wikipedia or from somebody else that wrote a book.

01:57:28.000 No.

01:57:28.000 Publicly available government websites, government documents that anyone on earth can download.

01:57:32.000 So they had done their due diligence to check if that stuff had actually been released already publicly?

01:57:37.000 My lawyers did.

01:57:38.000 Yeah, but the people that...

01:57:39.000 The people you submitted to at the Department of Defense, they just have this black pen and they're just taking things out.

01:57:47.000 And then they see, oh, CIA. We'll send it off to the CIA. We can help.

01:57:50.000 I don't know.

01:57:57.000 By precedent, no.

01:57:59.000 Because it's fiction.

01:58:00.000 Because it's fiction.

01:58:01.000 By precedent.

01:58:02.000 Now, like we talked about those laws earlier, three felonies a day.

01:58:05.000 Laws are written, if you look at them, very broadly so that the government can interpret them the way they want to.

01:58:11.000 And that didn't always used to be the case.

01:58:13.000 If 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.

01:58:23.000 Not anymore.

01:58:24.000 The language involved, how long they are, how tough they are to decipher, even for attorneys to decipher.

01:58:31.000 So it's written in a way that they can come after anyone they want for anything.

01:58:37.000 Which is by design.

01:58:39.000 And they used it to go after Mark Owen.

01:58:41.000 They used it, even though that's nonfiction.

01:58:44.000 He went to an attorney that had experience in this space, which you would do.

01:58:49.000 Who's the best attorney for this?

01:58:50.000 Oh, the guy that did a book called Kill Bin Laden with someone from Delta Force.

01:58:54.000 That guy has experience.

01:58:55.000 I'll go to him.

01:58:56.000 So he went to that lawyer who said, no, you don't need to submit this.

01:59:00.000 So there's lawsuits and all sorts of stuff that are associated with that.

01:59:04.000 But for me, what they did, this is years later, his second book, he sends it to me.

01:59:08.000 So I'm getting ready to get out of the military.

01:59:10.000 He sends me his second book and says, hey, what do you think of this?

01:59:13.000 And so I read it and I just, you know, read it quick.

01:59:17.000 And then I sent him like one note that said, hey, awesome.

01:59:20.000 Maybe 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.

01:59:27.000 Just people would probably be interested in that.

01:59:28.000 So I wrote that.

01:59:29.000 So 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.

01:59:43.000 Guy's a good friend, sends me the thing, I look at it.

01:59:45.000 So 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.

01:59:53.000 So what did they want from him?

01:59:55.000 I 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.

02:00:05.000 They wanted to make an example of him so that anybody else getting out would know that they had to do that.

02:00:10.000 I don't think it worked because there's plenty of books out there, nonfiction, that have not been through that process.

02:00:14.000 Right.

02:00:15.000 But that's what they wanted from him.

02:00:17.000 They wanted all the money from it, which was significant.

02:00:19.000 All the money.

02:00:19.000 Yep.

02:00:20.000 And interestingly enough- All the money?

02:00:22.000 All the money.

02:00:23.000 And he was always going to give it all.

02:00:25.000 That's the other part of this is so interesting is because I've known him for so long, he was always going to give it all away.

02:00:29.000 And he had no reason to tell me that, you know, a year before the whatever, however long it was before.

02:00:34.000 Like he wasn't setting this up as some criminal mastermind, but he was always going to give it away to a SEAL foundation.

02:00:39.000 And he- When the book came out, it all went into a bank account.

02:00:42.000 But guess what came out of the bank account?

02:00:43.000 Lawyer fees after that.

02:00:45.000 So he still had all the money except for the lawyer fees.

02:00:48.000 And then they still go after you for taxes that you're supposed to be...

02:00:50.000 Anyway, it's the government.

02:00:52.000 So they wanted that money.

02:00:54.000 Anything 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.

02:01:04.000 How did it all end up?

02:01:06.000 So it's a lawsuit with the attorney that gave the bad advice.

02:01:11.000 I'm not sure exactly where that is.

02:01:13.000 And then all the money went back to the government that was in the account, and he's paying off the rest of it that went to attorney fees.

02:01:19.000 So he didn't make anything?

02:01:20.000 No.

02:01:21.000 Wow.

02:01:21.000 Not one penny.

02:01:22.000 All the money went to the government.

02:01:23.000 All the money went to the government.

02:01:24.000 Plus taxes.

02:01:26.000 So double money.

02:01:28.000 So all the money goes to the government because he lost?

02:01:32.000 Is that the idea?

02:01:33.000 Because they finally put enough pressure on where the lawyers do their thing and they figure out a settlement of some sort.

02:01:39.000 And that was the settlement?

02:01:40.000 All the money.

02:01:40.000 Wow.

02:01:41.000 And his second book the same deal?

02:01:43.000 No, that one went through the process.

02:01:46.000 But after I read it.

02:01:47.000 So he sent it to me before he sent it in.

02:01:48.000 Oh, okay.

02:01:49.000 But, you know, there's nothing.

02:01:51.000 I don't know.

02:01:52.000 But you read it, and that's one of the things they used to try to get him to do what they wanted.

02:01:57.000 And that wasn't the only one.

02:01:59.000 Everybody that knew him got pulled into this thing.

02:02:02.000 But 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,

02:02:17.000 But that's how I felt about the guy sitting across the table from me.

02:02:20.000 So it feels real because I wasn't just like, hey, have you written into interrogation room?

02:02:24.000 Or I'm arresting a couple of cop shows where they have somebody in an interrogation room.

02:02:27.000 I'll just kind of write what that looks like or feels like.

02:02:29.000 No, 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.

02:02:35.000 And all that sort of thing.

02:02:37.000 So I got to put all that together and make the book what it is.

02:02:40.000 So 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.

02:02:49.000 Like the combat stuff, yeah, it's different.

02:02:51.000 But 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?

02:03:01.000 You can.

02:03:01.000 You can in fiction.

02:03:02.000 And so it made it so much better than it would have been otherwise.

02:03:06.000 So now looking back, and I thank him to this day.

02:03:08.000 I'm like, you know what, that first book, that resonated with Simon& Schuster for some reason.

02:03:12.000 And 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.

02:03:19.000 That's interesting.

02:03:20.000 Now when you create these characters, do you write a backstory?

02:03:25.000 Do 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?

02:03:36.000 Because he had a background so similar to mine, I didn't need to do that.

02:03:39.000 So I didn't need to create.

02:03:41.000 So 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.

02:03:47.000 So now I have these family trees and these characters written out on Scrivener, which is how I write it.

02:03:53.000 Yeah, I use Scrivener too.

02:03:54.000 I love it for stand-up.

02:03:55.000 It's so good to organize things on the left side.

02:03:58.000 So cool.

02:03:58.000 You hit that button and it all turns into like a poster board type thing.

02:04:01.000 I absolutely love Scrivener.

02:04:03.000 But I didn't use that one until the third one.

02:04:04.000 Up until that point, I was using Word and copying and pasting and then scrolling and then putting it in where I wanted.

02:04:09.000 And then, you know, maybe I didn't cut because I was worried it was going to delete.

02:04:12.000 So now I go back and now delete it.

02:04:14.000 It's so nice to use Scrivener like that.

02:04:16.000 It just makes it so much easier to do that.

02:04:18.000 So now I do, but at the beginning I didn't.

02:04:20.000 With one novel and kind of creating, you have the story.

02:04:22.000 So I wrote six or seven different ideas down, like one-page executive summaries as I was getting ready.

02:04:28.000 And the one I wanted to start with was Savage Son.

02:04:30.000 That was the one I wanted to start with.

02:04:32.000 But I knew the characters weren't quite at that place where I could explore the dark side of man.

02:04:36.000 I 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.

02:04:53.000 So I had to start with that first one.

02:04:56.000 It was very evident it's going to be the terminal list.

02:04:58.000 That's the one.

02:04:59.000 So I took that one-page executive summary, turned it into an outline.

02:05:02.000 But 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.

02:05:09.000 They're not going to come along on me with this journey.

02:05:11.000 That's not believable.

02:05:12.000 I just went around it because I'm not on the battlefield.

02:05:15.000 I'm solving problems on the page like I am.

02:05:17.000 I'm adapting like I am on the battlefield.

02:05:19.000 But you know what?

02:05:19.000 I can sleep on it.

02:05:20.000 And I don't have to solve this problem right now.

02:05:23.000 I can get five months down the line and just continue going.

02:05:25.000 And eventually I'm going to figure this problem out and it's going to work out.

02:05:28.000 So I didn't let anything, any obstacle stop me as I was writing that outline.

02:05:32.000 And I took that outline and started writing.

02:05:34.000 And 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.

02:05:41.000 And then eventually about the 75% point, then I just discarded the outline completely and just kept writing.

02:05:46.000 So Scrivener made that a ton easier for the third book because doing it in Word was a pain.

02:05:52.000 There is apparently a way that you could set up Word to behave like Scrivener.

02:05:57.000 Oh really? 0.74

02:05:58.000 Yeah, I read an article on it and I tried to do it and I was like, I fucking give up.

02:06:03.000 I'm just gonna keep using Scrivener.

02:06:04.000 I just love how Word...

02:06:05.000 I write bits in Word because I can get it on my phone.

02:06:10.000 I can get it on a computer.

02:06:12.000 I just log into Microsoft Word and it just shows me all the files, any laptop, any computer I use, any phone I use.

02:06:19.000 It just goes right to it.

02:06:20.000 Whereas with Scrivener, you have to upload it to Dropbox and then get it from Dropbox.

02:06:26.000 Oh, that's a pain, yeah.

02:06:27.000 I 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.

02:06:34.000 So I didn't go back to Scrivener after I did that.

02:06:35.000 Once it's a finished product.

02:06:37.000 Yeah, as finished as it could be anyway.

02:06:38.000 What 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?

02:06:49.000 So the timeline is obviously compressed now.

02:06:52.000 So I started writing the second one before I'd even submitted the first one to Simon& Schuster because I was always Yeah.

02:07:00.000 Yeah.

02:07:04.000 Yeah.

02:07:14.000 So 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.

02:07:30.000 It's the first one that I've had to be on that year-long timeline for.

02:07:34.000 But I've had it in my head for so long.

02:07:36.000 So 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.

02:07:51.000 How do I drive business towards them?

02:07:52.000 They are hurting so bad right now.

02:07:54.000 How can I help?

02:07:55.000 They were hurting before this, right?

02:07:57.000 Well, people are going back to them.

02:07:58.000 Yeah, they're hurting for a while.

02:07:59.000 And then people are going back.

02:08:01.000 People like that page in their hand.

02:08:02.000 They like to have that experience with someone that they know in their hometown.

02:08:06.000 So those kind of bookstores were actually on the upswing.

02:08:10.000 It was like the bigger ones.

02:08:11.000 There was a Porter's that shut down years ago.

02:08:14.000 Barnes& Noble adapting-ish.

02:08:16.000 They're kind of hurting.

02:08:17.000 So the little ones were like, hey, they're part of a Main Street Park City.

02:08:22.000 There's a bookstore there at Dolly's.

02:08:23.000 It's right there.

02:08:24.000 Yeah, I've been to that place.

02:08:25.000 Yeah, it's great.

02:08:26.000 Love it.

02:08:26.000 They have a little chocolate place attached to it, get some coffee, whatever.

02:08:29.000 So it's great.

02:08:30.000 So I figured, how do I help them at the same time?

02:08:32.000 And what I did was do these signed book plates that you can only get through those independent bookstores.

02:08:37.000 So if anybody wants a signed book, that's where they have to go.

02:08:40.000 So did that.

02:08:41.000 I have some merchandise on my site.

02:08:42.000 All 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.

02:08:49.000 But now it's all going.

02:08:51.000 Center for Disaster Philanthropy, COVID-19 Response Fund.

02:08:54.000 So there are things to talk about on interviews rather than, oh, I just have a new book out.

02:08:58.000 You can talk about how you're trying to help as you're launching.

02:09:01.000 Or talk about preparedness.

02:09:03.000 Talk about what the enemy's learning by watching our response to COVID-19 and how they're incorporating that into future battle plans.

02:09:09.000 Those sorts of things.

02:09:11.000 So how to adapt.

02:09:11.000 Do virtual book signings, that sort of thing.

02:09:13.000 Or Q&As using the technology that wasn't available 10 or 20 years ago.

02:09:18.000 Certainly 30, certainly 40. I had to spend all that time doing that.

02:09:25.000 Point being, this fourth one, when I get back from here, it's all in back on book four, which will be great because I love writing.

02:09:33.000 That's what I love to do.

02:09:34.000 And 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.

02:09:50.000 And I can help other people as they're getting out of the military, starting other businesses that aren't even writing related at all.

02:09:55.000 I can help them and talk to them about my experience and what I've learned and how I've adapted because I had to.

02:10:00.000 No one's going to hand this stuff to you.

02:10:02.000 You have to go out there, prove yourself, get after it, do the work.

02:10:05.000 And be smart about it.

02:10:06.000 You have to study that landscape.

02:10:08.000 So I studied social media for like a year before I even did my first post.

02:10:11.000 But I saw what people were doing.

02:10:13.000 Did you really?

02:10:13.000 You studied it?

02:10:14.000 I studied it.

02:10:15.000 I saw what do I like, what do I not like, what's appropriate, what's not.

02:10:18.000 Did you write this stuff down or just keep it on the head?

02:10:20.000 No, kept that in my head.

02:10:21.000 That stuff's pretty obvious, like what's appropriate and what's not.

02:10:24.000 Like 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.

02:10:32.000 Same type of thing.

02:10:33.000 So that's some basic stuff that a lot of people don't quite get. 0.99

02:10:36.000 How fortuitous is it that you're writing about infectious diseases and then this shit goes down? 0.96

02:10:43.000 I mean, if there's ever a person who got a gift by a tragedy... 0.97

02:10:48.000 It's crazy because I'd done all that research in the fall and into the early part of the year.

02:10:53.000 Did you go to Galveston, the CDC? No, no.

02:10:55.000 I talked to doctors that have been involved in infectious diseases and with the weaponization of infectious diseases.

02:11:00.000 And then I read some books out there.

02:11:03.000 A 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.

02:11:10.000 So I'd done all that part of it ahead of time.

02:11:13.000 So 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.

02:11:24.000 So what's the enemy doing?

02:11:26.000 The 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.

02:11:35.000 So how do we incorporate that into future battle plans?

02:11:38.000 Can we have a strategy even of failure?

02:11:40.000 What if there's a threat of a bio-attack?

02:11:42.000 What if there's a failed bio-attack somewhere?

02:11:44.000 It's still going to affect that economy, especially right now with us being so gun-shy about all these sorts of things.

02:11:50.000 So what are they taking from that and what are they learning to apply going forward?

02:11:54.000 So 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.

02:12:03.000 In that sense, I'm always learning.

02:12:07.000 It's always important to learn and apply it going forward.

02:12:09.000 And 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.

02:12:20.000 Just as a human being, when you're dealing with this, what's frustrating for you about how everything is going down?

02:12:28.000 You 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.

02:12:37.000 So, you know, you get knocked down, you get back up, you're stronger for it.

02:12:40.000 You've learned something.

02:12:42.000 Like we talk about in jujitsu, you know, it's either you win or you learn.

02:12:45.000 And so what are we going to learn from that?

02:12:47.000 And are we going to apply that?

02:12:49.000 Going forward.

02:12:50.000 Like the whole thing with the Iran crisis, the hostage situation.

02:12:54.000 Yes, exactly.

02:12:54.000 We learned from that, we applied those lessons, and we were more prepared for 9-11 as a special operations force because of it.

02:13:00.000 So for this, I worry, just like you said, are people going to go back to their old ways after this?

02:13:06.000 They can't wait to.

02:13:07.000 They can't wait to slide back into their old ways.

02:13:10.000 Yeah.

02:13:10.000 So are we going to be a stronger citizenry?

02:13:12.000 Maybe a certain percentage?

02:13:14.000 Take these lessons to heart?

02:13:15.000 I don't know.

02:13:16.000 So I think that's probably the...

02:13:17.000 It's knowing that people expect the government to take care of them.

02:13:22.000 And that's the expectation.

02:13:23.000 Not you.

02:13:25.000 You don't have to take care of yourself or your family.

02:13:27.000 The government's going to do it.

02:13:29.000 They're looking for a daddy. 1.00

02:13:29.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:13:30.000 How do I get that $1,200?

02:13:31.000 Whatever money they handed out.

02:13:33.000 Oh, great.

02:13:34.000 Well, you know what's even better?

02:13:36.000 You 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?

02:13:52.000 How do we prepare as on the other side of this?

02:13:54.000 And 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?

02:14:00.000 And the kids can see that, too.

02:14:02.000 Or they see mom and dad in the kitchen talking about, hey, we are so lucky that we prepared for this.

02:14:06.000 We were prepared financially.

02:14:07.000 We had a little food here.

02:14:09.000 Whatever it is.

02:14:10.000 And 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.

02:14:21.000 They're catching things on the news and they're talking to friends on social media.

02:14:25.000 They're texting back and forth, all that sort of thing.

02:14:27.000 So this can either make them stronger citizens going forward, or they can see mom and dad.

02:14:33.000 Oh, look, mom and dad relied on government.

02:14:34.000 We came out the other side of this.

02:14:36.000 We got this check and nothing really changed.

02:14:38.000 So, oh, what lesson are they going to take going forward?

02:14:41.000 Right.

02:14:41.000 So 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.

02:14:52.000 It doesn't have to be a conscious thing.

02:14:54.000 Like, they're going to take lessons.

02:14:55.000 And 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.

02:15:01.000 Like 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.

02:15:11.000 Now she's feeding our family. 1.00

02:15:13.000 How old is your daughter?

02:15:13.000 She's 14. Wow, she shot her first elk at 14?

02:15:16.000 She shot her first elk at 10. Whoa!

02:15:18.000 Yeah, New Mexico.

02:15:19.000 Yeah.

02:15:20.000 No kidding. 0.99

02:15:20.000 Damn, you got a tag in New Mexico at 10? 0.99

02:15:23.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:15:23.000 So somebody, it was a retirement gift, a great guy. 0.99

02:15:27.000 And I said, you know, she gave me two, one for me and one for my wife, or one for me and one for my daughter.

02:15:31.000 And I was like, you know what?

02:15:32.000 I got an elk last year in New Mexico, public land.

02:15:35.000 It was crazy, crazy.

02:15:37.000 But I was like, you know, can I transfer that to my wife and have my wife and daughter go do this together?

02:15:41.000 And I'm with them also, and I've got a family experience.

02:15:43.000 And he was like, yeah, absolutely.

02:15:45.000 Let's do it.

02:15:46.000 And so she was 10, standing off sticks, 300 some yards, one shot.

02:15:51.000 And the guide was, he said, miss.

02:15:54.000 And she'd been hunting before.

02:15:55.000 She's been hunting since she was seven.

02:15:57.000 And she is good.

02:15:58.000 And I was like, oh, you know, it was a tough shot.

02:16:01.000 Hey, it's okay.

02:16:03.000 How'd you feel about that shot?

02:16:04.000 She's like, I felt good.

02:16:06.000 I'm like, oh, it's just a 10-year-old saying that because they don't want to kind of lose face in front of the guide.

02:16:10.000 And mom's there and dad's there.

02:16:12.000 And I'm like, well, it's okay.

02:16:13.000 You know, it's okay to miss.

02:16:14.000 Everybody misses.

02:16:15.000 Let's learn from it.

02:16:16.000 Move forward.

02:16:16.000 She's like, I didn't miss.

02:16:18.000 And so I go up there.

02:16:19.000 There's no blood.

02:16:20.000 There's no anything.

02:16:21.000 We think we're tracking it.

02:16:22.000 We walk up, but I guess, you know, she missed.

02:16:25.000 And we walk back down and there's this little tiny just rivet in the ground.

02:16:28.000 And there it was 20 yards away.

02:16:30.000 Wow.

02:16:31.000 Yeah.

02:16:31.000 Amazing.

02:16:32.000 I'll show you a picture after. 0.99

02:16:33.000 Does the guy feel stupid? 0.99

02:16:34.000 I don't know. 1.00

02:16:36.000 Because he's like, miss.

02:16:37.000 But it really just went all the way through, and he saw an impact behind one shot.

02:16:41.000 Yeah, that's the problem, right?

02:16:43.000 They see the dust kick up behind the animal, and they think that it's a miss.

02:16:46.000 Yeah, but we have that meet from this last year in Colorado.

02:16:50.000 Oh, that's amazing.

02:16:50.000 We talk about it with the family, and she knows that she provided that for all of us.

02:16:54.000 That's got to be very exciting and rewarding for her.

02:16:57.000 And our little guy, he got his first animal in Africa this last year.

02:17:01.000 Whoa.

02:17:01.000 That's a crazy place to get your first animal.

02:17:04.000 Yeah.

02:17:04.000 So crazy.

02:17:05.000 So I'd been over there doing some more research.

02:17:07.000 I went to South Africa to help train up an anti-poaching unit because they hadn't used Glocks, hadn't used M4s.

02:17:12.000 I have a little bit of experience with both those weapon systems.

02:17:15.000 And I wanted to do some research in the art and science of man tracking.

02:17:18.000 So I went to South Africa, helped train up this anti-poaching unit.

02:17:21.000 It was an amazing experience.

02:17:22.000 And then they asked me to come back as a thank you with my family.

02:17:26.000 Over the summer.

02:17:27.000 So I came back with my family and our little guy got his first animal there.

02:17:31.000 They put the blood on his cheeks.

02:17:32.000 I have this amazing picture of him in the back of the Land Cruiser on the way back.

02:17:35.000 He's never had a haircut at age nine, so his blonde hair is blowing in the wind.

02:17:39.000 It's awesome.

02:17:40.000 And then we use every piece of it.

02:17:41.000 That's what's great about over there is they see you use much more than we use over here.

02:17:44.000 I mean, stomach linings, like everything gets used in Africa.

02:17:48.000 Which is cool for them to see because they think we're using it all here.

02:17:50.000 They see us taking that rib meat and that neck meat and all the rest of it.

02:17:53.000 But over there, they see everything get used, which is a pretty cool thing for them to experience at that young age.

02:18:00.000 Yeah, that is a very amazing thing for them.

02:18:03.000 It helps them be self-reliant, too.

02:18:05.000 And they see the people out there working on the Land Cruisers.

02:18:07.000 They see everything you have to do in Africa. 0.96

02:18:09.000 You can just call someone to fix the plumbing or call someone because the electricity is out or whatever.

02:18:13.000 You fix it yourself because you have to.

02:18:15.000 How did you get to be a Land Cruiser fanatic?

02:18:17.000 How'd that happen?

02:18:18.000 Gosh, you know, I found out about Icon 2006 or so, I think it was, maybe five.

02:18:24.000 And it's from seeing them overseas.

02:18:26.000 So I saw the Hiluxes first in Afghanistan, 2003, I think it was.

02:18:31.000 They just last forever.

02:18:32.000 Yeah, you're seeing these things over there, and then you're seeing what we're doing to them.

02:18:34.000 We have some mechanics over there that are...

02:18:36.000 Bolting 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.

02:18:44.000 And 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.

02:18:57.000 I 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,

02:19:16.000 this is pretty sweet.

02:19:18.000 And it was a natural thing for me to like older stuff and more classic stuff.

02:19:22.000 And then to also like classic stuff that looks old, but is really new and can really gas it down.

02:19:29.000 Well, 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.

02:19:39.000 It's just different.

02:19:41.000 They're made different.

02:19:43.000 So I started doing my research.

02:19:45.000 And I think one of the first things that pops up when you put in restoration for Land Cruisers is Icon.

02:19:50.000 Yeah, there's a bunch of other people doing it now, but Jonathan gets really mad.

02:19:54.000 I mean, he gets mad at people doing shitty jobs of restoring Broncos or shitty jobs of restoring Land Cruisers. 0.53

02:20:00.000 And I guess he's got every right to. 0.83

02:20:02.000 I mean, he's so meticulous.

02:20:04.000 Incredible.

02:20:05.000 What they do is just incredible.

02:20:07.000 I mean, it's amazing.

02:20:07.000 It's one of those build-it-and-they-will-come type businesses.

02:20:11.000 Oh, yeah.

02:20:11.000 Who is going to buy a 3,000 man-hour restoration job on a 95 Land Cruiser?

02:20:18.000 It's not that many.

02:20:19.000 It's a niche market.

02:20:20.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:20:20.000 But he owns that fucking niche. 1.00

02:20:23.000 And on so many other cars, too. 0.99

02:20:25.000 I'm so fortunate that he's down the road.

02:20:27.000 I can hang out with him and talk to him.

02:20:29.000 Yeah.

02:20:30.000 And I listened to him on your podcast.

02:20:32.000 I listened to him there.

02:20:33.000 And 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.

02:20:43.000 But I always wanted to do that stage three or that icon-type restoration.

02:20:47.000 And so I always had my eye on that.

02:20:48.000 And then my Land Cruiser broke down.

02:20:51.000 My wife was driving it, and the oil came out, engine seize, crack engine block. 1.00

02:20:56.000 Like, not that it's her fault.

02:20:59.000 But anyway, so it sat in our driveway for a couple years as I'm getting out of the military.

02:21:03.000 And that was kind of a bummer seeing it there.

02:21:05.000 But get that deal.

02:21:06.000 And so one of the first things I did was send that up to Jonathan and get in line.

02:21:10.000 I had to get in line.

02:21:10.000 Mine was behind yours.

02:21:11.000 He's like, yeah, you're just behind Joe.

02:21:12.000 So I had to wait for your 80 to get done.

02:21:14.000 I think I have a few of them working at the same time.

02:21:16.000 But they took a cool picture with yours and yours was just getting done or they were frame off or whatever.

02:21:21.000 And then mine was there kind of looking dilapidated in the back, just waiting.

02:21:24.000 You know, like I said, 18 months you had to wait.

02:21:26.000 That's a long wait.

02:21:28.000 Yeah, that's crazy.

02:21:29.000 So that was cool.

02:21:30.000 So it just showed up the other day.

02:21:31.000 And of course, I'm not, I don't want to really, I want to show people or whatever.

02:21:35.000 But at the same time, people are hurting right now, even though it's been in the works for a long time.

02:21:39.000 It's not appropriate to, you know, show it on social media.

02:21:41.000 Yeah, this is not a time to be flossing.

02:21:43.000 No.

02:21:44.000 It's sweet, though.

02:21:45.000 That thing is legit.

02:21:46.000 So I love it.

02:21:46.000 So it's natural for me to put them in the books and use it like that.

02:21:49.000 And I want to say thank you to Jonathan for doing that.

02:21:51.000 So just like I put Sitka in the books for my friend John Hart who started Sitka.

02:21:54.000 I think it's on the first or second page of my first novel is Sitka Gear.

02:21:57.000 So, you know, that's woven in there and I just love to do that sort of thing.

02:22:00.000 Yeah, it was cool.

02:22:01.000 It gave me a bunch of smiles.

02:22:02.000 All the different things, the Black Rifle Coffee, Sitka, Dudley.

02:22:06.000 Yeah, Barclow in there.

02:22:07.000 Yeah, Barclow.

02:22:08.000 All that stuff is very cool.

02:22:09.000 Now, when you're in the middle of this book now, what is your timeline?

02:22:14.000 How long have you been writing on this fourth book?

02:22:20.000 So I outlined it.

02:22:21.000 I had the idea for a while, but I was still finishing up the third one.

02:22:24.000 So on the way to Russia, I outlined it because I didn't have my computer.

02:22:28.000 When you outlined it, how do you do that?

02:22:30.000 So this time I used the third one.

02:22:33.000 I outlined it in Word, and then I got my Scrivener set up, and then I transferred it over and did the writing in Word.

02:22:38.000 So this one...

02:22:39.000 I did the outline in Scrivener and I'm writing it in Scrivener as well.

02:22:42.000 So I have those little post things or whatever they call them in Scrivener with a little description of the chapter.

02:22:47.000 So I've outlined it that way.

02:22:49.000 But I started doing it longhand because I didn't have my computer with me on the way to Russia.

02:22:52.000 I just didn't want to take it.

02:22:53.000 Didn't want all that information sucked out when I walked through customs.

02:22:55.000 So just legal pad and just wrote it out.

02:22:58.000 And just arrows and things and asterisks and all that.

02:23:02.000 Just a mess.

02:23:04.000 So I did that back then.

02:23:05.000 Got home.

02:23:06.000 Finished up book three.

02:23:08.000 And then started writing book four.

02:23:10.000 But I'm also doing the research.

02:23:11.000 So I'm diving into books.

02:23:12.000 I'm talking to those doctors.

02:23:14.000 As I'm talking to them, I'm getting other ideas about how to move the plot forward, different things that can test the protagonist.

02:23:19.000 So this theme of this next one is really the ethics, morality, and legality behind targeted assassinations.

02:23:28.000 And the bioweapons piece really forms the foundation of that, but really what the protagonist is struggling with is targeted assassinations.

02:23:36.000 And who is he today?

02:23:37.000 Is he now an assassin?

02:23:38.000 He's been a hunter.

02:23:39.000 He's been a soldier.

02:23:40.000 He went after these people that wronged his family and his troop and put them all in the ground in that first book.

02:23:46.000 And 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.

02:24:01.000 So as I'm doing that and interviewing all these people, I'm thinking about how that works and I'm reading a book.

02:24:08.000 It's almost done with it.

02:24:09.000 It's called Rise First and Kill by Ronan Bergman.

02:24:13.000 And it's really about the state of Israel.

02:24:15.000 And because really, we think of targeted assassinations and we don't really associate with our government.

02:24:20.000 I mean, we do.

02:24:20.000 We've done it before.

02:24:21.000 We just did it in January.

02:24:23.000 But Israel, it's much more closely associated with Israel from its inception up until today.

02:24:28.000 And it's a fascinating book.

02:24:30.000 So I'm getting lots of ideas from there.

02:24:32.000 I'm reading David Kilcolan's.

02:24:33.000 It's called The Snakes and Dragons, Dragon and the Snakes.

02:24:37.000 And he's a fascinating guy who's a counter-terrorist advisor for Petraeus during the Surge.

02:24:41.000 He's become a good friend.

02:24:43.000 And so I'm reading, doing all that research, which helps me move the plot forward.

02:24:46.000 So I'm writing it, I'm touching up those outlines, and I'm working that research into the plot.

02:24:52.000 So at this stage, I've written probably about Half of it.

02:24:55.000 And it's hard to say because you never know we're going to get another idea and it's going to take too long.

02:24:59.000 But I'd say a little more than half.

02:25:01.000 Even though it's all outlined.

02:25:02.000 I know where I'm going.

02:25:03.000 I know what I need to do.

02:25:04.000 And that first draft is due in mid-June.

02:25:06.000 When you write out an outline, but then in the middle of your writing, do you ever have these...

02:25:10.000 Like Stephen King apparently doesn't write outlines.

02:25:13.000 Oh, he's a...

02:25:13.000 They call him a pantser.

02:25:14.000 So you're right by the seat of your pants.

02:25:16.000 Ah, yeah.

02:25:17.000 What are your thoughts on that?

02:25:18.000 I mean, like when you read that he does that and he's...

02:25:21.000 I mean, I'm a giant Stephen King fan.

02:25:24.000 I mean, he's probably written some of the most amazing horror novels ever.

02:25:27.000 I mean, not probably.

02:25:29.000 He has.

02:25:29.000 And what an amazing story also about doing the work, being persistent, being resilient.

02:25:33.000 Incredible.

02:25:33.000 I haven't been hit by a bus.

02:25:34.000 I know.

02:25:35.000 Yeah, a van. 1.00

02:25:36.000 Some fucking idiot not paying attention. 1.00

02:25:38.000 And every bone in his body is broken. 1.00

02:25:39.000 Insane.

02:25:39.000 And the story on writing about him starting back up again and his wife setting him up.

02:25:46.000 But what do you think about someone who writes like that?

02:25:49.000 I mean, with his incredible results.

02:25:52.000 Also, by the way, a lot of cocaine, cigarettes, and alcohol. 0.98

02:25:56.000 His earlier shit, like The Shining, and apparently he doesn't even remember writing Cujo. 0.99

02:26:01.000 Wow. 0.99

02:26:02.000 Yeah, he talked about that. 0.99

02:26:03.000 He was so fucked up, he didn't even remember writing it. 1.00

02:26:06.000 Hey, I mean, it makes me want to do more drugs. 1.00

02:26:11.000 I do think about that.

02:26:12.000 When I'm up late and it's 3.30 in the morning, I'm exhausted.

02:26:15.000 I know the kids are going to be up at 6.30, 7 or whatever.

02:26:17.000 I'm like, man, I need a little bump right here to keep me going.

02:26:22.000 It worked for Stephen King. 1.00

02:26:24.000 He wrote just the craziest shit. 1.00

02:26:28.000 But your stuff's pretty fucking crazy too, but your stuff is crazy in a sense that I think these things really happen. 1.00

02:26:36.000 You know, like even like the torture, and I wanted to talk to you about that too, like the torture scene. 0.98

02:26:44.000 I've seen so many pencil necks talk about, and I don't want to be rude about, I shouldn't even have said that.

02:26:51.000 People who talk about torture saying that torture doesn't work.

02:26:54.000 I'm like, how can you say torture doesn't work?

02:26:57.000 By what statistic?

02:26:58.000 And I've seen people say, we shouldn't torture because torture doesn't work.

02:27:03.000 And I'm like, first of all, how do you know?

02:27:05.000 Have you tortured someone?

02:27:07.000 How do you know?

02:27:08.000 What are you basing this off?

02:27:09.000 And why are you saying it with such...

02:27:12.000 Authority and resolve?

02:27:13.000 Yeah, authority and resolve and conviction that you know based on statistics of something you read that torture doesn't work.

02:27:20.000 It 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.

02:27:34.000 But also, if you want to look at it pragmatically, that is how you would get people to talk.

02:27:39.000 So to say that torture doesn't work, and in fact people who are tortured will say anything, well that says who?

02:27:47.000 I 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,

02:28:02.000 they have the luxury of not knowing what needs to be done or how it is done.

02:28:07.000 Yeah.

02:28:08.000 So it's very complex, and yet it's very simple.

02:28:12.000 And 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.

02:28:22.000 So 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.

02:28:33.000 So as far as the torture stuff goes, so I got to explore it in a fictional sense.

02:28:37.000 So in real life, it's important to talk about these things with your troops.

02:28:43.000 So 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,

02:29:00.000 first 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.

02:29:11.000 But 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,

02:29:27.000 and there's one or two of us, three of us, in this room with him.

02:29:32.000 What are those guys going to do?

02:29:33.000 Well, they're emotional, and maybe we haven't talked about it ahead of time.

02:29:38.000 So what are they going to do?

02:29:39.000 Well, who knows?

02:29:41.000 But 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.

02:29:51.000 It can't be that.

02:29:52.000 It has to be incorporated into the training.

02:29:53.000 It has to be discussed by people that are trusted.

02:29:56.000 And 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. 0.99

02:30:05.000 Yeah, you might want to put a bullet in that guy. 0.99

02:30:07.000 You might want to torture him, whatever. 1.00

02:30:10.000 But...

02:30:11.000 Second 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.

02:30:23.000 So you need to talk about it ahead of time.

02:30:25.000 So 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.

02:30:36.000 You're both killing.

02:30:37.000 You're both killing each other. 1.00

02:30:39.000 And I think we're good to go. 0.94

02:30:59.000 The torture thing is so interesting because of definitions.

02:31:04.000 So is making someone uncomfortable torture?

02:31:07.000 Right.

02:31:07.000 Is waterboarding torture?

02:31:09.000 Is that torture?

02:31:09.000 Well, they did it to my SEER class.

02:31:11.000 SEER is Survival Evasion Resistance Escape.

02:31:13.000 And we all go through this training.

02:31:15.000 Back then when I went through it, it was based on Vietnam-era type experiences that people had had in Vietnam.

02:31:23.000 And it's morphed a little bit over time.

02:31:26.000 But it's...

02:31:30.000 They waterboarded people.

02:31:31.000 And 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.

02:31:38.000 So being a model prisoner, it did not happen to me.

02:31:40.000 But to my buddy, he got waterboarded because you did something that the instructors thought would get you killed.

02:31:45.000 And it's crazy.

02:31:46.000 They put you in this prison camp where they're speaking a different language, a made-up language. 1.00

02:31:49.000 There are sites that look like you're in a prison camp because it's built like that.

02:31:53.000 Their smells are cooking weird things.

02:31:54.000 So the smells feel like you're in a different country.

02:31:57.000 So all these different sensory inputs are telling you that you're not in the United States anymore.

02:32:02.000 And you get slapped around.

02:32:03.000 They call it camp slappy.

02:32:04.000 So you're getting slapped around, which is different.

02:32:07.000 But you get waterboarded if you do something wrong.

02:32:11.000 So is that torture?

02:32:13.000 Are they torturing US service members or is it making them uncomfortable for a while?

02:32:17.000 So these definitions are very important when we start talking.

02:32:20.000 We put somebody sitting in a corner and they're in that seat position and they're not sleeping.

02:32:24.000 We're keeping them up at night.

02:32:25.000 Is that torture?

02:32:26.000 Well, we kept BUD students up in SEAL training for almost a week.

02:32:31.000 I think we're good to go.

02:32:58.000 As 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?

02:33:14.000 And I don't know where that is.

02:33:16.000 I don't know what those numbers look like or where that tipping point is.

02:33:19.000 But 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. 0.96

02:33:26.000 But everyone knows that black sites Explain Blacksides. 0.99

02:33:49.000 So 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.

02:33:54.000 As 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?

02:34:02.000 And 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?

02:34:09.000 I don't know the answer.

02:34:11.000 But it's something that needs to be thought of and talked about.

02:34:15.000 And at the tactical level, the guys have to know that we need to maintain that moral high ground.

02:34:21.000 That's the only thing in a lot of cases that differentiates us from the enemy.

02:34:25.000 We have to hold that ground.

02:34:27.000 That's imperative.

02:34:28.000 So as a leader, you got to talk about it.

02:34:30.000 And 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.

02:34:37.000 Your job now becomes to protect that person.

02:34:40.000 That's how it has to be.

02:34:40.000 That's what makes us different.

02:34:41.000 That makes you different from that criminal.

02:34:43.000 That makes us different from the enemy.

02:34:45.000 If 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.

02:34:50.000 For us, our job is now to protect that person with our life.

02:34:54.000 That's the difference between us and the enemy at the base level.

02:34:57.000 So 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.

02:35:10.000 So it's important stuff to talk about, important stuff to think about, and it's tough.

02:35:15.000 It's a tough thing to grapple with.

02:35:17.000 And those are the variables, right?

02:35:19.000 Public perception, whether or not that perception or the knowledge of things that have been done could be used against...

02:35:27.000 Our troops are used against our country as a whole and in social media and perception.

02:35:33.000 But the idea that this is what has driven me crazy about it is that those hard, fast statements that torture doesn't work.

02:35:42.000 And I'm like, I don't know what you're saying.

02:35:45.000 What are you saying?

02:35:46.000 I think it probably works in some situations, maybe not in others.

02:35:48.000 I mean, who knows?

02:35:49.000 But when people say that, I'm like, I bet I can get you to say this. 0.99

02:35:51.000 I bet I can get you to tell me where your fucking car keys are. 0.99

02:35:54.000 Yeah, no, exactly. 0.99

02:35:55.000 I'm like, what are you saying?

02:35:56.000 Of course it works.

02:35:58.000 And they'll say it, and it's always really left-wing people.

02:36:04.000 Statistically, torture doesn't work.

02:36:06.000 Yeah, what's that?

02:36:07.000 Who's been keeping these stats since the beginning of time? 0.99

02:36:09.000 Bitch, have you ever seen anybody tortured? 1.00

02:36:10.000 What are you talking about? 1.00

02:36:11.000 If I kept you up, you would tell me everything.

02:36:13.000 All I'd have to do is keep you up.

02:36:15.000 Yep.

02:36:15.000 No, I mean, there's a reason people have been doing it from the beginning of time.

02:36:18.000 I'm sure in some places it didn't work or whatever.

02:36:21.000 But 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.

02:36:35.000 It doesn't matter whether it works or not.

02:36:37.000 It's detrimental at this point.

02:36:39.000 And whatever that point is, then it's time to abandon it.

02:36:43.000 Do 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?

02:36:59.000 Do 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?

02:37:07.000 Is there a risk to...

02:37:10.000 To be talking about it?

02:37:11.000 Yeah, 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?

02:37:23.000 Yeah, so it's, for me, it's hard for me not to tell the truth.

02:37:29.000 Like, I'm the worst liar on earth, and my wife will tell you.

02:37:34.000 So it's very natural for me to answer honestly, but then also to be thoughtful.

02:37:40.000 And that's why the novels, I think, also another reason they resonated with Simon& Schuster is because it's thoughtful violence.

02:37:45.000 That's how I think of it.

02:37:47.000 It's not just, ah, shoots the guy in the knee or whatever.

02:37:49.000 It's thoughtful violence, which is why those torture scenes are so intricate and involved.

02:37:54.000 Dude, that one with the Russian mobster is heavy.

02:37:58.000 Yeah, there's some good ones.

02:37:59.000 I want that to be a hallmark of the series, is that there are things that people haven't seen before.

02:38:03.000 And it's not just extra violence, it's thoughtful violence.

02:38:07.000 So I don't worry about alienating.

02:38:10.000 It's more about me being honest, because people can tell.

02:38:14.000 Especially today.

02:38:15.000 Maybe 20 years ago, you could have hidden behind managers and reputation, whatever you call it.

02:38:21.000 Today, you can't really hide.

02:38:22.000 If 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.

02:38:33.000 It's obvious it's not you.

02:38:34.000 I'm talking about when it's obvious it's you.

02:38:36.000 It's hard, I think, to not be authentic and to let something slip through.

02:38:40.000 Yeah, I think eventually it slips through.

02:38:42.000 Yeah, I think, I mean, and you can see things that aren't appropriate and you're like, oh my, why would this person say that?

02:38:46.000 Oh, you know why?

02:38:47.000 Because it's them.

02:38:48.000 Like, that's why.

02:38:50.000 Or they were drunk.

02:38:51.000 Maybe a little late at night.

02:38:53.000 It's also like people don't understand the ramifications of posting things.

02:38:57.000 And 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.

02:39:06.000 Oh, yeah.

02:39:06.000 And I used to think, oh, no, we're all on the same side and, you know, it's all about the...

02:39:10.000 No.

02:39:10.000 People are after a win in that situation.

02:39:12.000 That had to be a really disturbing revelation.

02:39:15.000 Oh, it was.

02:39:15.000 And that's why that book is so powerful in that scene and why how those guys go down is so violent because it was therapeutic for me.

02:39:24.000 I didn't have to actually go out and do it myself.

02:39:26.000 I got to do it on the pages of a thriller.

02:39:29.000 But for me, it's interesting.

02:39:30.000 So I do get asked.

02:39:31.000 I do go on different shows now as a military analyst.

02:39:34.000 They ask me things, and I answer honestly, and I try to do it in a thoughtful way.

02:39:37.000 So 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.

02:39:51.000 They made it sound like he sent it out to his entire address book.

02:39:54.000 And he went above the chain of command, and so he was fired.

02:39:58.000 And it didn't go through the right proper channels.

02:40:00.000 And 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.

02:40:08.000 Like, you know the military.

02:40:10.000 You're in for like 25 years at this point.

02:40:11.000 You're a captain.

02:40:13.000 And I would be shocked if he had not exhausted every other avenue to try to get out what he needed to have done.

02:40:22.000 And he's responsible for fighting that aircraft carrier, and he's also responsible for the men under his command.

02:40:28.000 And now we have like 900 cases on that ship.

02:40:32.000 And that's after it's docked.

02:40:33.000 It's a Quran.

02:40:33.000 We explained to people that the ship was infected.

02:40:37.000 Yep.

02:40:38.000 So they had a couple cases.

02:40:38.000 I think they had three to start with on an aircraft carrier.

02:40:41.000 It 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.

02:40:48.000 So 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.

02:40:56.000 But he saw what was happening, and he saw it starting to spread.

02:41:00.000 He saw that it was impossible to abide by social distancing guidelines.

02:41:06.000 And once you do when you actually have it, not just social distancing, but once you have it, how you isolate somebody.

02:41:11.000 Impossible to do on a ship.

02:41:13.000 And so he saw that.

02:41:14.000 And then the story is that he wrote a letter, and it got picked up by the Chronicle in Northern California.

02:41:21.000 And it just went out to this...

02:41:24.000 Huge number of people.

02:41:25.000 So it went out to 20 people.

02:41:26.000 I've read the letter.

02:41:27.000 It's four pages.

02:41:28.000 It's very well done.

02:41:30.000 Very thoughtful.

02:41:32.000 It gives two courses of action.

02:41:33.000 One, if we're at war and how we can keep fighting the ship.

02:41:36.000 And two, if we're not at war and need to take care of these guys and be ready for when war comes.

02:41:41.000 So it's very clearly delineated in these four pages.

02:41:43.000 Very professional.

02:41:44.000 It's on Navy letterhead.

02:41:45.000 And it went out to 20 people.

02:41:47.000 And 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.

02:41:58.000 No, it's still usnavy.mil or whatever.

02:42:00.000 It's not a secret communication, but there's official Navy emails that aren't secret as well.

02:42:06.000 And yeah, it bypassed the chain of command, I guess.

02:42:10.000 But that, at some point, I think is his responsibility.

02:42:13.000 He needs to keep that ship fighting.

02:42:14.000 And who knows what the personal relationship was between him and the guy above him or whatever.

02:42:19.000 I think there's something.

02:42:21.000 Investigation will show it. 0.90

02:42:22.000 And 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. 0.88

02:42:42.000 I think we're good to go. 0.72

02:43:08.000 So it's really interesting.

02:43:09.000 I went on some of these shows and got to sit down with a couple different people with military backgrounds.

02:43:15.000 And I was the only one saying that something doesn't smell right here.

02:43:19.000 And this guy has a responsibility to fight that ship, to support his soldiers or his sailors.

02:43:25.000 And something's just not right about this.

02:43:27.000 And now we'll see what happens.

02:43:28.000 But point being, yeah, I do get asked about these things.

02:43:30.000 And I answer honestly because the...

02:43:32.000 One of the other guys were saying on this show was that, nope, chain of command.

02:43:35.000 He didn't follow the chain of command, and he should have followed that chain of command.

02:43:38.000 You know, the typical Navy type line.

02:43:40.000 But being from special operations and being a free thinker, that's what we're supposed to do.

02:43:43.000 We're supposed to be creative.

02:43:43.000 We'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.

02:43:56.000 I mean, we're military, but we like to Not break the rules.

02:44:00.000 We like to bend them to a certain extent to get what we need done.

02:44:03.000 And that's just very natural for us.

02:44:05.000 But when you're sitting down with people that aren't like that and don't think that way, it's kind of interesting.

02:44:09.000 But point being, I do get asked about these things and I don't really measure it against if I can alienate people or not.

02:44:15.000 It's just, hey, I'm going to be honest.

02:44:16.000 I'm going to be open.

02:44:16.000 I'm going to be authentic.

02:44:17.000 And that's what people can trust about me.

02:44:19.000 And they can trust about my writing is that when they read that, they know that I just didn't get it from somebody else.

02:44:24.000 Like it's a part of me somehow.

02:44:25.000 And it's very personal, even though it's fiction.

02:44:27.000 And that's what you can trust.

02:44:28.000 And 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.

02:44:36.000 No, that's not how it goes.

02:44:38.000 You're going to know exactly who made it, the relationship, all that sort of thing.

02:44:41.000 So what people can trust is that they're going to get my honest assessment.

02:44:44.000 And that's what I owe the guys in the teams.

02:44:45.000 I owe them my honest assessment.

02:44:47.000 That's what I owe the people above me in the chain of command.

02:44:49.000 No matter what it did, I owe them my honest assessment because that's what they could trust.

02:44:53.000 They 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.

02:45:02.000 I was just in there to fight and to lead.

02:45:05.000 But that's what they can trust is my honest assessment.

02:45:07.000 And so that's how I I deal with today.

02:45:09.000 I'm just going to answer honestly, but it will be thoughtful.

02:45:11.000 It'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.

02:45:16.000 It's going to be thoughtful because that's what I owed the guys also was that thoughtful assessment both up and down the chain.

02:45:21.000 So that's just natural for me to do and what you're going to get today.

02:45:24.000 Well, this mindset and the discipline and the authenticity, it comes out in your writing, man.

02:45:29.000 I know I started with the last one and now I have to start.

02:45:32.000 You were a little bummed out that I was starting with the last one, right?

02:45:36.000 Well, most people get invested in the character.

02:45:37.000 Like, people ask me, like, can I start with this third one?

02:45:39.000 And the publisher wants me to say, yes, start with the third one.

02:45:41.000 Like, buy it now.

02:45:42.000 Let me tell you, you could absolutely start with the third one.

02:45:44.000 Maybe I'll be more invested if I start with the first one. 0.98

02:45:47.000 I don't know, man, but the third one was fucking great. 0.78

02:45:49.000 I loved it. 0.92

02:45:50.000 And I'm going to get into the first two now.

02:45:53.000 Listen, you knocked it out of the park, man.

02:45:55.000 It was an amazing, amazing book.

02:45:57.000 I'm excited to read the first two now.

02:46:00.000 Awesome.

02:46:00.000 People can follow you.

02:46:01.000 Is it JackcarUSA?

02:46:03.000 It's JackcarUSA on the socials, most active on Instagram and Twitter.

02:46:07.000 There is a Facebook, but three was too much.

02:46:10.000 Yeah, I feel the exact same way.

02:46:12.000 And then officialjackcar.com is the website, and people can go deep dive into weapons or knives or gear on that sort of thing.

02:46:20.000 All right, man.

02:46:20.000 Well, thanks, brother.

02:46:21.000 I appreciate you.

02:46:22.000 Thanks so much for having me on.

02:46:22.000 And 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.

02:46:32.000 So thank you for all you do.

02:46:33.000 My pleasure.

02:46:34.000 My pleasure.

02:46:35.000 Thank you.

02:46:35.000 Bye, everybody.

02:46:37.000 Yeah, man.

02:46:39.000 Dude!

The Joe Rogan Experience - April 30, 2020

Joe Rogan Experience #1467 - Jack Carr

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Transcript