The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1942 - Mark Greaney

00:00:03.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

00:00:12.000 What's up, Mark?

00:00:13.000 How are you?

00:00:13.000 Nice to meet you, man.

00:00:14.000 It's very nice to meet you.

00:00:15.000 I've read...

00:00:16.000 I'm on the 11th book of yours now.

00:00:19.000 Oh, wow.

00:00:19.000 Yeah, so the whole Gray Man series.

00:00:22.000 I'm on Sierra 6. Yeah, yeah.

00:00:26.000 The new one comes out immediately.

00:00:29.000 Yeah, they sent me the new one.

00:00:31.000 Good.

00:00:32.000 Yeah, so I have a copy of it.

00:00:33.000 That's awesome.

00:00:34.000 I appreciate your reading.

00:00:34.000 It's...

00:00:36.000 You write some fucked up books, man. 1.00

00:00:40.000 You seem like such a normal guy. 1.00

00:00:42.000 I was always wondering, I'm like, how does someone write like this and not be a total psycho?

00:00:48.000 Like the fact that you have those thoughts in your mind and you can envision and create these scenarios in your brain.

00:00:57.000 Yeah, that pops into my head a lot when I'm talking to people.

00:01:00.000 My aunt, who's passed away, but she was 93, and it's like, hey, Dorothy, here's my book about sex trafficking.

00:01:07.000 I hope you enjoy it.

00:01:08.000 She read it.

00:01:11.000 My aunt, if I joined the Taliban, she'd be like, well, they have some nice clothing or something. 0.99

00:01:16.000 She'd find a positive.

00:01:17.000 She'd find a positive, so she never complained about anything.

00:01:20.000 Yeah, I do run into people all the time, you know, kids' parents or, you know, on my soccer team, my kids' soccer team or whatever, and I'm like, I wonder what they think of me.

00:01:30.000 I wonder if they know, like, how many of them have read your books?

00:01:33.000 Yeah, it's the ones that say they've read my books, and then I kind of go like, ah, crap.

00:01:37.000 Yeah, I get that with parents when they say they've listened to my podcast.

00:01:40.000 Oh, I really love your podcast. 1.00

00:01:42.000 I'm like, shit. 1.00

00:01:44.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:01:45.000 I'm like, what kind of psycho stuff do we have to talk about now?

00:01:48.000 But your books are so violent.

00:01:51.000 For me, I listen to them on audio when I'm in the sauna all the time.

00:02:00.000 Oh, great.

00:02:00.000 Because the sauna is so torturous.

00:02:02.000 Because I keep it at 190 degrees and I'm in there for 25 minutes. 0.99

00:02:06.000 It's fucking rough. 0.98

00:02:07.000 And it's like that kind of... 0.99

00:02:11.000 The kind of insane narratives that you create, the kind of situations that you create in your mind, they're very good when you're suffering.

00:02:22.000 Yeah, I have a blue-collar philosophy about writing.

00:02:27.000 I like generating a product that people can use if their flight's delayed or they're snowed in or whatever, and I get people emailing me all the time.

00:02:34.000 It's like, hey, I read your book when My mom was sick and I was in the hospital.

00:02:38.000 I like that, that it serves a sort of physical purpose.

00:02:43.000 It's an instrument.

00:02:45.000 It's not just an idea.

00:02:46.000 It's a great instrument of escapism because it's so compelling and because the books are so interesting.

00:02:53.000 And by the way, shout out to Jack Carr because Jack Carr is the guy who turned me on.

00:02:57.000 That's fantastic.

00:02:58.000 Because I had read his first book and I was like, this is great.

00:03:00.000 Do you have any other authors that you recommend?

00:03:02.000 Like, who are you into?

00:03:03.000 And then he told me about you.

00:03:05.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:03:05.000 We've been friends.

00:03:06.000 Before his first book came out, we were connected with one another through a guy in the firearms industry.

00:03:12.000 And I was like, yeah, I think this guy...

00:03:14.000 I read his book.

00:03:15.000 I was like, yeah, he's going somewhere.

00:03:16.000 Little did I know, I think he'd already had it optioned for TV, so...

00:03:21.000 Yeah, he's just an awesome person too.

00:03:24.000 He's just a really great guy.

00:03:25.000 I met him a few years back in elk hunting camp.

00:03:29.000 It's actually where I met him in Utah.

00:03:32.000 I didn't know who he was.

00:03:34.000 I hadn't read any of his books.

00:03:35.000 He gave me a copy of his book.

00:03:36.000 Just seemed like a really nice guy. 0.99

00:03:38.000 I'm like, this book is fucking great. 0.94

00:03:40.000 He did great with the series too. 0.99

00:03:42.000 I was impressed with it.

00:03:44.000 I was really impressed.

00:03:45.000 Yeah, I enjoyed the Gray Man movie, but it was not as good as your book.

00:03:51.000 Thank you for saying that.

00:03:52.000 I appreciate it.

00:03:52.000 It just wasn't the same story.

00:03:55.000 They Hollywoodized it.

00:03:58.000 Absolutely.

00:03:58.000 I liked it, and what I say, and I don't know how this makes me sound, it's like the movie is the best possible commercial for my writing, and if you're a writer, you want eyeballs on your work.

00:04:09.000 I love the movie.

00:04:11.000 Yeah.

00:04:11.000 You know, there's bits of dialogue in there and things they did with the plot that I really liked.

00:04:16.000 But, you know, it's not as gritty.

00:04:18.000 It's not...

00:04:19.000 Not nearly.

00:04:20.000 Yeah.

00:04:20.000 You know, they do things that they have to do shorthand in a movie.

00:04:24.000 I get 100,000 words to write a book or 150,000 words to write a book.

00:04:28.000 So I have some luxuries that, you know, they don't have putting something on the screen.

00:04:32.000 But I like the fact that they're different because there's still a reason to read my book.

00:04:38.000 If you saw the movie and enjoyed it, hopefully it turns you onto the book and then you see something different in there.

00:04:43.000 No, I definitely think there's that element to it because it's for sure a Hollywoodized version of these gritty books that you write.

00:04:52.000 Yeah.

00:04:53.000 But it's also good.

00:04:54.000 Yeah.

00:04:54.000 Like if you didn't know about the book and you just saw the movie, it's good.

00:04:59.000 Yeah.

00:04:59.000 They're two different things.

00:05:00.000 But the book is so much fucking nastier. 0.97

00:05:03.000 Thank you. 0.97

00:05:04.000 And also court gentry.

00:05:06.000 I said thank you.

00:05:06.000 I don't know if that's what I should say.

00:05:07.000 You should.

00:05:08.000 It's good.

00:05:09.000 But Court Gentry in your books is just so much different than Ryan in the movies.

00:05:13.000 It's just like...

00:05:14.000 Yeah.

00:05:14.000 I mean, they did a lot without dialogue, which I appreciated and I liked.

00:05:19.000 You know, he'd do a lot with a look.

00:05:21.000 But I mean, in a book, you're able to get into the character's head quite a bit more.

00:05:25.000 So it's a different experience.

00:05:26.000 If you could pick a person like an actor, if you could start from scratch, no disrespect to...

00:05:33.000 Is Ryan Reynolds or Ryan...

00:05:34.000 Gosling.

00:05:35.000 Gosling.

00:05:35.000 Yeah.

00:05:35.000 Why do I always fuck that up?

00:05:37.000 I always fuck that up. 0.99

00:05:39.000 I couldn't pick either one of them out of a fucking lineup to save my life. 1.00

00:05:42.000 Gosling. 1.00

00:05:43.000 Ryan Gosling.

00:05:44.000 I really like the guy too, by the way.

00:05:47.000 Who would you pick?

00:05:49.000 If you could just say any actor.

00:05:52.000 Who do you think you would go with?

00:05:54.000 You know, that's a tough question because that thing has been in Hollywood.

00:05:58.000 The Gray Man's been in Hollywood since two months before the little paperback came out in 2009. So it's been bouncing around.

00:06:04.000 And I've heard every actor.

00:06:05.000 At one point, Brad Pitt was signed on to it and Really?

00:06:08.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:06:08.000 Like back 2011 or something.

00:06:10.000 And then it fell apart and it came back.

00:06:12.000 And each time they would send me a script or whoever was doing it.

00:06:15.000 And at one point, Charlize Theron wanted to do it.

00:06:18.000 What?

00:06:18.000 Yeah, they rewrote the whole script.

00:06:19.000 She wanted to be the girl? 0.88

00:06:21.000 No, she wanted to be Court Gentry.

00:06:22.000 Oh, my God.

00:06:23.000 So they wrote a script for it.

00:06:25.000 And it was good screenwriters.

00:06:27.000 And I remember reading the script going like...

00:06:28.000 Was it the gray woman or the gray non-binary person?

00:06:32.000 It was still the Gray Man. 0.98

00:06:33.000 Her name was still Court Gentry.

00:06:35.000 What?

00:06:35.000 But everything was different.

00:06:37.000 They never really explained.

00:06:38.000 Is that short for Courtney or something?

00:06:40.000 Oh, my God.

00:06:41.000 But it was just a completely different plot.

00:06:43.000 Thank God they didn't do that.

00:06:44.000 I thought if they changed, you know, like if...

00:06:46.000 And I love her because she had just done Fury Road.

00:06:49.000 So, I mean, I'd love to write something for her to be in.

00:06:53.000 I didn't see Fury Road.

00:06:54.000 Oh, the Mad Max...

00:06:55.000 Oh, Mad Max.

00:06:57.000 Yeah, okay.

00:06:58.000 She was so good.

00:06:59.000 But as an author, you couldn't put out the Gray Man novel with her face on it, and they opened the book, and it has nothing to do with a woman.

00:07:09.000 And as much as I love her, I was like, well, this isn't going to sell books or get eyes in my work.

00:07:17.000 The screenplay was actually really good, but I remember thinking if I went to the theater and saw it and it had a different title, I would not even know.

00:07:23.000 There'd be like one scene where I'm like, oh yeah, I did a thing on a plane too.

00:07:26.000 It was so different.

00:07:27.000 It was a completely different plot.

00:07:28.000 It was good.

00:07:29.000 I wish they'd make it and call it something else.

00:07:31.000 Yeah, make it and call it something else.

00:07:33.000 Don't call it The Gray Man.

00:07:36.000 That's such a weird choice.

00:07:38.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:07:38.000 At one point, like, real early on, when it first got optioned, people were asking me who should play the character.

00:07:43.000 And I thought it would be somebody who's not, like, you know, Rambo or anything like that.

00:07:49.000 So I was saying, like, Casey Affleck or somebody like that.

00:07:52.000 Oh, interesting.

00:07:53.000 That you wouldn't expect, you know, in a big action film.

00:07:56.000 But wouldn't you need someone who's, like, physically formidable?

00:07:58.000 Yeah.

00:07:59.000 You know, the thing is I've written 12 books and I've never once had him working out.

00:08:06.000 I've never shown him working out or even really training.

00:08:11.000 You talked a couple of times about him doing like calisthenics or something.

00:08:15.000 Yeah, I've thrown it in a little bit because I'm like, all right, how does this possibly happen?

00:08:20.000 How does he keep these perishable skills up and his fitness up?

00:08:24.000 But, you know, there's actors that I really like, like Max Martini.

00:08:28.000 I don't know if you know who that is.

00:08:29.000 I don't know who that is.

00:08:30.000 You'd know him if you saw him.

00:08:31.000 He was in 13 Hours.

00:08:33.000 It was a really good movie, a Michael Bay film.

00:08:36.000 Wow, look at that.

00:08:37.000 That's amazing.

00:08:39.000 Yeah.

00:08:39.000 And so he's like a formidable dude and a really good actor, but I like the physical presence of him.

00:08:48.000 Yeah, he might be good too because even though he's kind of recognizable, it's not Brad Pitt.

00:08:54.000 Every time Brad Pitt's in a movie, it's Brad Pitt.

00:08:56.000 If that guy's in a movie, you could say, oh, I think I've seen that guy in something before.

00:09:00.000 Yeah.

00:09:01.000 But he's court gentry. 0.96

00:09:02.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:09:03.000 Well, I got a ton of people mad that Ryan Gosling was in it before it came out.

00:09:08.000 And they were like, you need to get some unknown guy because nobody recognizes the great man.

00:09:12.000 And I'm like, you probably don't understand how $200 million movies work.

00:09:18.000 What we're going to do is we're going to get this guy out, you know, find the guy at the mall and make him that, you know, it's just not how it works.

00:09:24.000 It's too bad because I don't really know if it makes a difference.

00:09:30.000 I think they think it makes a difference, but I think if you have a movie that has an amazing plot and a great trailer and it looks wild, I think people get sucked into it anyway.

00:09:42.000 Yeah, and honestly, one of the best films I've ever seen in my life, which is an action film, it's a Korean film called The Man From Nowhere, and fortunately it came out after The Gray Man did, otherwise people would think I'd ripped off The Gray Man.

00:09:56.000 Because it's about a former assassin who's trying to lay low and he ends up having to rescue this girl.

00:10:03.000 Well, the book, though, came so much earlier than the movie.

00:10:07.000 How many years was it between you writing the book and then the film coming out?

00:10:10.000 I wrote the book in 2007. It came out in 2009 and the film came out in 22. And so it's like 13 years.

00:10:17.000 I was still lucky.

00:10:18.000 Everybody's like, I bet you hate that you had to wait this long.

00:10:20.000 And I'm like...

00:10:21.000 If I was an 85-year-old man and they made a film out of one of my books, I'd be thrilled.

00:10:26.000 Yeah, it's a rare thing, right?

00:10:29.000 Especially a big blockbuster film with Ryan Gosling?

00:10:33.000 You're getting it.

00:10:34.000 Gosling.

00:10:36.000 There it is.

00:10:37.000 There we go.

00:10:37.000 Chris Evans was great in that, too.

00:10:39.000 Yeah, he was terrific.

00:10:39.000 Yeah, he really played an awesome version of the character you wrote in the book.

00:10:44.000 Yeah, and that's an example of a difference in the film that I liked, you know, because my Lloyd in the book is not like a physical presence.

00:10:53.000 He's more of like the asshole mastermind of the whole thing. 0.86

00:10:58.000 Right. 0.97

00:10:58.000 But, I mean, obviously, if they can get Chris Evans in their film, they're going to beef up his role and make it a more mano-a-mano thing, and I thought that was fabulous. 0.97

00:11:06.000 Yeah, and Chris Evans just really nailed it. 0.99

00:11:09.000 He played the perfect douchebag, asshole, cocky, confident psychopath. 1.00

00:11:14.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:11:14.000 It looked like he was having fun. 1.00

00:11:15.000 Yes.

00:11:16.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:11:17.000 It was great.

00:11:18.000 It was great.

00:11:19.000 You've written a lot of books, man.

00:11:21.000 You're super prolific with these books.

00:11:24.000 It's very impressive.

00:11:25.000 You're basically banging out one, what is it, every 10 or 11 months?

00:11:29.000 Yeah.

00:11:29.000 Yeah, almost two a year, but not quite.

00:11:32.000 So my first book came out in 2009, and Burner, my new one, is my 23rd book.

00:11:37.000 So 23 books in 12 years, something like that.

00:11:41.000 That's incredible.

00:11:42.000 It's because they've asked me to do it, and I have these opportunities.

00:11:46.000 It took me 20 years to get published, and so I've been trying to catch up.

00:11:49.000 I didn't get published until I was 42 years old.

00:11:51.000 And so I'm desperately trying to make up for lost time, I guess.

00:11:56.000 So what were you writing in all those years when you were a publisher?

00:12:00.000 Were you just trying and just...

00:12:02.000 Yeah, I mean, honestly, I was lazy.

00:12:05.000 I never believed anything could happen from it, but I like to write and I like to think about books and stuff.

00:12:10.000 So I spent 15 years writing my first novel.

00:12:13.000 I started it literally in 1990 and finished it in 05. Wow.

00:12:16.000 And never showed it to anybody.

00:12:18.000 I mean, you know, like three friends probably read it.

00:12:21.000 And I put that aside and I wrote my second book in seven months because it's like there's something about, you know, I always say everything in this world is cheapened by my ability to do it, you know.

00:12:31.000 It's like I always wanted to learn a foreign language and, you know, I'm not super fluent in any foreign languages, but I speak some German and some Spanish.

00:12:37.000 And it's like once I learned to do it, I'm like, oh, it's not that impressive because I can freaking do it, you know.

00:12:43.000 Right.

00:12:44.000 And writing a book was the same way for 15 years.

00:12:46.000 It was this big albatross, you know.

00:12:49.000 Just hanging on me, and I didn't know that I could ever do it.

00:12:52.000 And once I finished it, I was like, yeah, how hard did I really work?

00:12:55.000 That was mostly talking about, you know, writing a book and not actually writing books.

00:13:00.000 So then I went out and wrote a book, and Grey Man was actually my fourth completed novel.

00:13:04.000 It was the first one to get published, yeah.

00:13:06.000 So all those years, the 15 years, it was you just sort of not being fully committed to writing?

00:13:12.000 Yes, that's it in a nutshell.

00:13:14.000 15 years for that first book, and then I got some momentum. 0.97

00:13:17.000 Like, once I finished it and I thought, hey, you know, the internet was invented while I was writing the damn thing. 0.51

00:13:23.000 So I, like, looked up, like, how do you get published? 0.79

00:13:26.000 Because I never even looked at that, you know?

00:13:28.000 Right.

00:13:29.000 Everything I'd done in the book was wrong as far as, like, it was too big.

00:13:32.000 There were too many characters.

00:13:33.000 You know, there were just things they'd recommend against.

00:13:35.000 So I tried to write something a little bit more mainstream, and I got that in front of an agent.

00:13:42.000 And he said it wasn't mainstream enough, but I was a good writer, so keep trying.

00:13:46.000 So it was this...

00:13:51.000 I've had very few epiphanies in my life.

00:13:54.000 I'm not one of those navel-gazing people, but I had this epiphany one day that, like, okay, nothing...

00:14:01.000 I was in my late 30s.

00:14:03.000 I was not successful in my job.

00:14:04.000 I worked in a cubicle, and I was destined to do that for the rest of my life.

00:14:08.000 And I was frustrated about not going anywhere, and there was just this point where I said, I like to write.

00:14:15.000 I like to walk down the street and think about some espionage theme or something, and I like to do research, and I like to type stuff out and fix it up.

00:14:25.000 And it's like, okay, nothing's going to come of this, but the thing that's going to come of this is you're doing something you enjoy to do.

00:14:32.000 And honestly, that just let a lot of steam out of the kettle, and suddenly I wasn't like, I'm a 39-year-old man who has no success.

00:14:39.000 And I just became this guy that's like, oh, I like writing books, and I think each one's getting a little better, and maybe something will happen someday.

00:14:46.000 And really quickly, I mean, within a couple years, I was published.

00:14:51.000 That's amazing.

00:14:52.000 So what was your job?

00:14:54.000 I worked for a company called Medtronic.

00:14:57.000 It was a medical device company.

00:14:59.000 It wasn't a dead-end job, but I was making it a dead-end job just because it wasn't really where I wanted to be.

00:15:05.000 I wanted to be a writer.

00:15:07.000 What were you doing for them?

00:15:08.000 I worked in international customer care, so we had subsidiaries.

00:15:12.000 It's a medical device company, and we had subsidiaries in other countries.

00:15:16.000 I would sort of get the supplies to the subsidiaries and go to trade shows and that sort of thing.

00:15:23.000 And so when you left that job, did you say, hey guys, I'm a published author.

00:15:28.000 Gotta go.

00:15:29.000 Yeah, so there's a story to that, that it's...

00:15:33.000 My dad had passed away in 2005, and my dad, he had kind of a white-collar job.

00:15:38.000 He ran the NBC affiliate in Memphis, where I'm from.

00:15:41.000 But he was a very blue-collar mindset, and you had to have a job.

00:15:44.000 And there was no way my dad would have let me quit my job, even though my first book was just a paperback, mass-market paperback.

00:15:51.000 It wasn't a big release.

00:15:52.000 It was Gray Man. 0.96

00:15:53.000 It turned into something, but when it first came out, it was not a big deal, other than the fact that Hollywood was interested.

00:15:59.000 But I had this, you know, it wasn't quit your job money at all.

00:16:04.000 And then they asked me to write two more books and make a series out of it, which I never even had considered.

00:16:10.000 I was just trying to hold something in my hand with my name on it and a title and a cover.

00:16:15.000 I wanted to be, you know, that level of a published author.

00:16:18.000 I had no higher ambition.

00:16:19.000 And they asked me to continue it as a series.

00:16:21.000 And I said yes.

00:16:22.000 And then I realized it's like, oh my god, I've got to crank out three books in the next whatever number of months.

00:16:29.000 It's like, I have to quit my job.

00:16:31.000 And it wasn't quit your job money, as I said.

00:16:33.000 And this was before the Hollywood money came in.

00:16:36.000 So I went to my boss.

00:16:38.000 I'd been at the company for like nine and a half years.

00:16:40.000 I went to my boss and I put my notice in on a Wednesday.

00:16:44.000 And the next Monday, They brought everybody in to the auditorium for a meeting, you know, 800 people there, and they're like, hey, listen, like sales are down or the economy, you know, this is 2009. So, you know, the economy is not doing well or whatever.

00:16:59.000 So we're offering voluntary separation.

00:17:01.000 If you quit your job right now, we will give you a month's pay for every year you've worked here.

00:17:05.000 We will give you insurance for a year.

00:17:07.000 We will do this, this, and this.

00:17:08.000 I'd quit my job four days before.

00:17:10.000 And so you think like, oh my gosh, there's this black cloud over me.

00:17:14.000 And I was scared about quitting my job, obviously.

00:17:16.000 And I remember my boss came into my cubicle right afterwards.

00:17:19.000 She's like, I'm going to talk to HR and see if they will allow you to come in.

00:17:22.000 I'm like, why the hell would they do that?

00:17:24.000 I'm like, I'm the best thing that's happened to HR in a while.

00:17:27.000 This dummy quits three days before they offer you a ton of money to quit. 0.98

00:17:32.000 So for about six months, I just felt like I had this cloud over my head and I'd done the stupidest thing in the world. 0.82

00:17:36.000 And then the film rights got optioned for Gray Man.

00:17:40.000 And it still wasn't quit your job money, but it was like I can eat for a year money.

00:17:45.000 And within a couple of years, I was working with Tom Clancy and things started to really go in the right direction for me.

00:17:50.000 Wow.

00:17:51.000 That's an amazing story, man.

00:17:52.000 I love it.

00:17:53.000 It could have gone either way.

00:17:54.000 But isn't that like always how it works with some of the best stories?

00:17:58.000 Yeah.

00:17:58.000 They could have gone either way.

00:17:59.000 Yeah.

00:18:00.000 Yeah.

00:18:00.000 There's a sad version of that story too.

00:18:02.000 I'm lucky that I didn't have to experience it.

00:18:04.000 That's my problem when people start talking about like manifesting your reality and the secret and stuff like that.

00:18:10.000 Yeah.

00:18:11.000 You know, talk to people that win, and they'll tell you that story, that I knew it was going to happen, I made it happen, I had a vision board.

00:18:18.000 Talk to people that tried and failed and are homeless, and they have a different version of this manifesting reality story.

00:18:24.000 And I've fallen on my face in so many ways in my life that, like, I recognize how lucky this is.

00:18:31.000 And I would not, you know, grab some kid and go, like, quit your job, be a writer.

00:18:34.000 Man, it's going to, you know, just because it worked for me in that one instance doesn't mean it would, you know, work in any instance.

00:18:40.000 Yeah, I think the best inspiration you could give to someone is just your own success.

00:18:45.000 For you to tell people to do what you did, it's almost irresponsible.

00:18:50.000 Right, right, right, yeah.

00:18:52.000 And I feel like everything I've learned, I've learned by doing it wrong a few times.

00:18:57.000 I'm not like Yoda, I'm not this guy on a mountain telling them, it's like, yeah, no, I've done a lot wrong, and what I might tell you could be totally wrong.

00:19:04.000 But learning how to do stuff, that's a part of the process.

00:19:07.000 You do stuff wrong.

00:19:08.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:19:10.000 You can't be scared to do things wrong.

00:19:11.000 Right, you just self-correct and keep self-correcting and hopefully something good happens before you die.

00:19:17.000 Yeah, it's a tricky process and it doesn't always work out.

00:19:21.000 But the problem is you're only hearing from the people where it does work out.

00:19:25.000 Sure, yeah.

00:19:25.000 And some people...

00:19:27.000 Look, there's a hard reality about talent too.

00:19:32.000 Like some people just don't have talent and some people just aren't good writers.

00:19:35.000 Yeah, there's a lot of people that go like, you know, if it's your dream, never quit, blah, blah, blah.

00:19:40.000 It's like, I'd love to be a Formula One driver.

00:19:42.000 I would not ever be a Formula One driver.

00:19:45.000 You know, it's like, I think you sort of have to like play into your strengths and obviously work hard and get better.

00:19:52.000 But it's not just, you know, follow your wishes.

00:19:57.000 It's a balance.

00:19:58.000 Like everything in life is a balance.

00:19:59.000 Yeah.

00:19:59.000 It's not fair and it's very tricky.

00:20:01.000 Yeah.

00:20:02.000 And the idea that all you have to do is just like want it bad enough.

00:20:05.000 Yeah.

00:20:06.000 And I used to sort of give advice to people based on my own problems, you know, like earlier in my career.

00:20:14.000 So like a young person will be like, what do I need to do?

00:20:16.000 And I was like, I wish I believe in myself more because I was very half-assed about everything because it's like I never thought anything would come from it, but I wanted to write a book.

00:20:25.000 So I'd pick here and pick at it here and there.

00:20:27.000 So I used to tell people, you know, believe in yourself, believe in yourself.

00:20:30.000 And then you start learning a little more about these people and it's like, yeah, self-confidence is not this person's problem.

00:20:37.000 It's lack of talent.

00:20:38.000 It's writing or it's editing or it's something like that.

00:20:41.000 And it's like they're very, very confident.

00:20:44.000 There's not one-size-fits-all for helping people.

00:20:47.000 Well, there's also confidence versus confidence that's based on an understanding of your competence and your work ethic and confidence that's built up over time with effort.

00:21:01.000 Versus delusional confidence.

00:21:03.000 Absolutely.

00:21:03.000 And my work ethic came slowly, but by necessity.

00:21:07.000 And it's good now.

00:21:09.000 And, you know, I am a prolific writer.

00:21:10.000 It has to be as much as you're writing long-ass books.

00:21:13.000 Yeah.

00:21:13.000 Although I don't do much else.

00:21:15.000 Although I have a family now.

00:21:17.000 But, yeah, there's so much that I've learned along the way that's made me a little bit more disciplined.

00:21:24.000 Because it's like, okay, if I don't...

00:21:26.000 Average 1200 words a day or something.

00:21:28.000 I'm going to be really far behind by July and the book's due August 1st.

00:21:31.000 So, you know, it's like I got to go bust it out.

00:21:34.000 Yeah, the first time you gave someone one of your books to read, were they all like The Grey Man, like the early book?

00:21:44.000 Yeah, always the same genre, different variations of the same genre.

00:21:48.000 So is this something that you've been interested in in terms of the way you read?

00:21:53.000 Yeah, 100%.

00:21:54.000 I mean, I was just a reader.

00:21:56.000 I don't have military experience.

00:21:58.000 I'm not Jack Carr or Brad Taylor or any of these other guys.

00:22:03.000 I bartended until I was like 31. I always had a couple jobs.

00:22:09.000 I got my degree in international relations and political science, but didn't do anything with it for 20-something years, other than 10 bar with it, I guess.

00:22:18.000 I read every espionage novel, military stuff, fiction.

00:22:25.000 I actually tried to get in the Air Force at one point and didn't get in.

00:22:28.000 I was sort of fascinated by that world, and I'd read The Economist when I was 17 years old.

00:22:33.000 I had a subscription to The Economist and U.S. News and World Report and would read all this.

00:22:39.000 I was just interested in that, foreign policy and that sort of thing.

00:22:43.000 So I loved it, and I loved thinking up kind of like wild, crazy stories and big action set pieces and stuff.

00:22:52.000 Geopolitical, this and that.

00:22:54.000 Clancy, the first book I ever bought in my life or thriller I ever bought was Patriot Games, which was a Tom Clancy novel.

00:23:00.000 I was like 19 years old.

00:23:03.000 How wild is it for you now to be writing that?

00:23:05.000 A quarter century later, I'm in his house sitting there in his office talking to him.

00:23:10.000 Isn't that crazy?

00:23:11.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:23:12.000 It probably could have happened faster if I worked a little bit, if I worked harder.

00:23:15.000 But maybe you wouldn't, because I think some of what comes out in your writing is actual life experience.

00:23:20.000 A hundred percent.

00:23:21.000 You need some of that.

00:23:22.000 A hundred percent.

00:23:22.000 That's what I keep telling myself.

00:23:25.000 So I don't get depressed about not getting published at 25. Well, how can you get depressed?

00:23:29.000 You're very successful now.

00:23:30.000 You can't, you know, it's funny how people are, right?

00:23:33.000 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:23:34.000 I was looking at, like, the things that are wrong with what you've done.

00:23:36.000 What could have been, but no, it's worked out really well. 0.91

00:23:39.000 It's really interesting to me, because you seem to be a very mild-mannered sort of a guy, and you write for such a psychopath.

00:23:49.000 Do you know about Robert E. Howard?

00:23:52.000 Robert E. Howard is the guy who wrote the Conan books.

00:23:55.000 Oh, yeah.

00:23:56.000 And he was kind of like a real quiet guy who lived with his mom.

00:24:02.000 Committed suicide in his early 30s.

00:24:05.000 But he wrote the most savage fantasy novels about Conan the Barbarian.

00:24:11.000 And he did, you know, all of them while he was this sort of quiet, soft-spoken guy.

00:24:18.000 Yeah.

00:24:19.000 Yeah.

00:24:19.000 I mean, there's not necessarily a correlation, you know, between one or the other.

00:24:23.000 I know, you know, guys that were Delta Force and there is mild-mannered...

00:24:30.000 I mean, they weren't then, I'm sure, when they were downrange, but you just never know.

00:24:35.000 And then as far as writers go, you know, there's guys that write pretty, you know, accurate, you know, military or stuff like that.

00:24:45.000 What's different about my character to some degree, I think, is he's a very empathetic guy.

00:24:49.000 I don't want to make him this square-jawed, total badass.

00:24:54.000 He definitely has a screw loose.

00:24:55.000 His moral compass doesn't point true north or whatever, but he wants to do the right thing at the end of the day.

00:25:02.000 And he's empathetic and he's vulnerable in some ways that some of the other characters aren't.

00:25:08.000 And I think that's helped the series over the years.

00:25:11.000 Yeah, no, I think so, too. 0.96

00:25:13.000 I mean, he's got a compass, and it's kind of a fucked up compass, but yeah.

00:25:19.000 Yeah, in one of the books, I think it was Gunmetal Gray, it was the sixth book, I remember near the end, I was like, I'm going to have him do something that makes sense to him, but it's actually the readers, it's not what the readers are going to want him to do.

00:25:34.000 And that had never come up before. 0.97

00:25:36.000 And I was like, okay, if I'm reading this book, I'm going like, don't be an idiot. 1.00

00:25:41.000 Don't do it that way. 1.00

00:25:43.000 It was basically the outcome of the story, what he was going to do with this guy that he rescued.

00:25:48.000 And I was like, but it makes sense to him.

00:25:50.000 So am I okay with having a bunch of readers mad at me?

00:25:54.000 And I'm like, you kind of have to go with your gut.

00:25:56.000 And I was.

00:25:57.000 And I said, all right, I'm going to have him do what makes sense in the story for this character the way that I built him up over six books.

00:26:04.000 And I never really got much negative pushback from that at all.

00:26:07.000 So I guess that was the right decision.

00:26:09.000 No, I like that one.

00:26:11.000 It's just...

00:26:12.000 It's always interesting when you're—reading is so fascinating to me, reading fiction, because someone is creating this world and you're trusting them with all these people in this world for it to not mess with your—it doesn't—you know,

00:26:32.000 there's a suspension of disbelief that's involved in any, you know, reading literature or watching a movie or anything like that.

00:26:39.000 And you just don't want to mess with it to the point where someone's reading it going, ah, come on!

00:26:45.000 You don't want an ah, come on moment.

00:26:47.000 And you do a great job of avoiding ah, come on moments while you're navigating this impossible world of this elite assassin who somehow or another never gets killed.

00:26:57.000 Yeah.

00:26:59.000 Thanks for saying that.

00:27:00.000 And I really know where that came from.

00:27:01.000 It came from a very specific place.

00:27:02.000 So I had an agent interested in me.

00:27:06.000 He turned me down on a couple books, but he kept saying, you know, you're good.

00:27:09.000 Write me something else.

00:27:10.000 And I wrote the opening for The Gray Man.

00:27:14.000 And it's a sniper thing, and an American helicopter gets shot down.

00:27:20.000 And this guy that has nothing to do with the operation with the American soldiers...

00:27:24.000 It's just trying to get out of the kill zone where he's killed somebody, and he takes a sniper shot and kills some of the people that killed the Americans.

00:27:31.000 And so I gave that agent the first 50 pages of the book.

00:27:35.000 I'm still an unpublished author.

00:27:36.000 I'm like, will you tell me what you think?

00:27:37.000 He's like, yeah, it's great that shooting those guys from a mile away, that's really badass, but he needs to save somebody.

00:27:44.000 And I'm like, wait, how's he going to save somebody?

00:27:46.000 He's a mile away, and it's like Al-Qaeda, you know, since 2007. And he's like, I don't know, I'm not the writer, but he needs to save somebody.

00:27:53.000 So I went back into the story and I was like, well, shit, that doesn't really, you know, that's so implausible. 0.94

00:27:59.000 But then I'm like, all right, I guess it's my job to sell that. 0.94

00:28:02.000 And the whole series was informed by that early film.

00:28:07.000 Because what I do is I create pretty outlandish things and then work my ass off to sell them to the reader.

00:28:14.000 You know, put in the real world stuff, the geopolitical stuff, put in all these, you know, explain the hows and the whys to the best if you can.

00:28:25.000 And then at some point, you know, the bad guys have to miss their shots a lot more than the good guys miss their shots.

00:28:32.000 So, you know, it is...

00:28:36.000 It's fanciful.

00:28:37.000 Some people call it gun porn, but at the same time...

00:28:39.000 Gun porn?

00:28:40.000 Yeah, that's the thing. 0.68

00:28:40.000 Is that what they call it? 0.68

00:28:40.000 That's what they call it. 0.68

00:28:42.000 But at the same time, there's a heart to the story and all that, and I'm trying to pull the reader in to where they don't go, this is just way too out of left field.

00:28:53.000 What is your writing process like?

00:28:55.000 Do you have ideas before you sit down and write them?

00:28:58.000 Do you have little notes of maybe that would be fun or maybe he could do this and then sit down and try to piece them all together?

00:29:05.000 How do you do it?

00:29:06.000 Yeah, I write sort of by the seat of my pants, but I do come up with some little, even if it's three pages, of what the story is about.

00:29:15.000 This book is about artificial intelligence and robotics and the bad guy.

00:29:18.000 You know, wants to destroy America or whatever.

00:29:22.000 And then you flesh that out a little more and a little more.

00:29:25.000 And then at some point, and this is what I always recommend to writers, is just sit down and start writing.

00:29:30.000 And you'll figure what your story's about.

00:29:33.000 If you don't have any blueprint, then I think you're going to get yourself in trouble.

00:29:38.000 But I mean, everybody's different.

00:29:40.000 I know some authors that they have every chapter completely plotted out and everything.

00:29:45.000 And then they just go and write a chapter a day because they've spent months plotting it out.

00:29:48.000 And I kind of have to find the story in the story.

00:29:52.000 So I'm writing and, you know, the dialogue, two characters talking to each other and I'm like, well, there's no tension here.

00:29:58.000 I have to create some tension.

00:29:59.000 And you come up with some reason there's tension between these two people and then that informs another part of the story.

00:30:04.000 And then sooner or later, you've got...

00:30:07.000 Every book. 0.98

00:30:08.000 I'm not a super confident writer, so every book, you know, spring, early, summer is the biggest piece of crap in the world.

00:30:14.000 And then somehow by August, I get it turned in and edited by October, and I'm happy with it.

00:30:19.000 I'm proud of it.

00:30:20.000 My friend Ari has a little piece of paper on his laptop.

00:30:23.000 It's a quote by Ernest Hemingway. 1.00

00:30:25.000 It says, every first draft is shit. 1.00

00:30:28.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:30:29.000 I have said, that's good.

00:30:31.000 I've said, if I died when one of my books is like 98% done, it's unusable.

00:30:37.000 Like, they wouldn't be able to fix it.

00:30:39.000 I don't know if that's true or not.

00:30:40.000 But like, you know, as a writer, you know where all the bodies are buried in a 160,000 word book.

00:30:44.000 And it's like, oh, that doesn't make sense.

00:30:45.000 And this connection here isn't there.

00:30:47.000 And so like, it kind of like, weighs on you until you get everything cleaned up to the best you can.

00:30:53.000 Yeah.

00:30:53.000 Yeah, Stephen King said that he doesn't really have an outline.

00:30:56.000 Yeah, I believe it.

00:30:57.000 He just sits down and starts writing.

00:30:58.000 Yeah, he's amazing.

00:30:59.000 He is just another species. 0.85

00:31:03.000 Yeah.

00:31:03.000 I'm so impressed with that guy.

00:31:04.000 Well, certainly in the early days of his career, right?

00:31:07.000 The early days of his career, to me, it's the most interesting.

00:31:11.000 And this is not to disparage people that are clean and sober.

00:31:14.000 It's not to disparage the idea of getting clean and sober.

00:31:17.000 You definitely should do that.

00:31:18.000 Your health is more important than anything.

00:31:20.000 But... 1.00

00:31:21.000 When that guy was fucked up, he was writing some amazing shit. 0.99

00:31:24.000 Yeah, yeah, and he didn't create a genre, but he created a genre, basically. 0.99

00:31:29.000 Kind of did.

00:31:29.000 Yeah, you know, it's like...

00:31:30.000 Kind of did.

00:31:31.000 And the output was so much.

00:31:33.000 Oh, my God.

00:31:33.000 Even in his later years, I don't know if you've ever read 11-22-63.

00:31:37.000 No.

00:31:37.000 Oh, my God, it's a magnificent book.

00:31:39.000 Really?

00:31:40.000 Yeah, it's about a high school teacher who goes back in time to stop the Kennedy assassination.

00:31:45.000 Wow.

00:31:46.000 But, you know...

00:31:48.000 Chaos ensues.

00:31:49.000 It's a Stephen King novel, so you can imagine.

00:31:51.000 And it's probably 700 or 800 pages, and it's really fascinating.

00:31:55.000 And it's a recent book.

00:31:56.000 Yeah, it's been like eight or nine years.

00:31:58.000 They actually made a TV series, I think on Hulu, with James Franco, which was actually really good.

00:32:04.000 But yeah, that book is fabulous.

00:32:07.000 The series is good, too.

00:32:08.000 No, I mean, some of his early stuff like The Shining or Cujo or Pet Sematary or the Tommy Knockers.

00:32:16.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:32:17.000 Like, my God.

00:32:18.000 Yeah.

00:32:19.000 I remember getting light to the theater for Pet Sematary and sitting in the front row and just regretting that decision.

00:32:25.000 It was like so intense.

00:32:28.000 But yeah, Cujo and Carrie.

00:32:30.000 He said he doesn't even remember writing Cujo. 1.00

00:32:32.000 Because he was so fucked up. 0.99

00:32:34.000 Was it cocaine? 1.00

00:32:34.000 Cocaine and booze. 1.00

00:32:36.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:32:36.000 Just getting lit.

00:32:37.000 His book on writing is really inspirational because he didn't have instant success.

00:32:43.000 Even though he got published when he was really young, he was trying really hard for a long time.

00:32:47.000 And then he had to feed a family and all that stuff too.

00:32:50.000 Yeah, the story about when he got the first check, like how crazy that was.

00:32:54.000 He realized, oh my god.

00:32:56.000 Yeah, I have incredible respect for him because, you know, a lot of authors have co-authors or whatever as they get older and, you know, it's just harder to come up with new stuff, something you haven't done before.

00:33:07.000 Well, as you get older, too, you lose your juice.

00:33:10.000 Yeah.

00:33:10.000 You know, you lose your physical juice, you lose your vitality, you lose your energy.

00:33:15.000 Sadly.

00:33:16.000 Yeah, sadly.

00:33:17.000 My concentration levels at this point in my life is not what it was 15 years ago when the only thing competing with me writing my book was my Xbox, you know, when I was off work or whatever.

00:33:29.000 And, you know, now it's kids and dogs and, you know, travel and, you know, other obligations.

00:33:35.000 And so when I do have, like, a three-hour pocket of time to write, it's real easy to kind of lose focus.

00:33:41.000 And I'm like, wow, I remember going to Starbucks at 8.30 in the morning on a Saturday and staying until 9 at night, you know.

00:33:46.000 And it's like, I can't do that anymore.

00:33:48.000 I wish I could.

00:33:48.000 If I did that for a couple weeks, I'd have a book now.

00:33:50.000 Yeah.

00:33:51.000 My friend Steve Rinella talks about that as well.

00:33:54.000 He was at the peak of his writing when he was a single man before he had a family.

00:33:59.000 When he was alone, he could do whatever he wanted to.

00:34:01.000 He could literally just sit in front of a computer for 16 hours in a day and just drink coffee and just get it done.

00:34:08.000 Yeah.

00:34:08.000 I mean, that was me.

00:34:10.000 I lived alone.

00:34:12.000 I've been married on my second marriage, but I didn't get married the first time until I was 47. So, you know, I was in my—I was published and had several books out before I got married.

00:34:23.000 So the first marriage, you were 47?

00:34:25.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:34:25.000 You look like you're 45 now.

00:34:27.000 How long ago was this?

00:34:29.000 How old are you?

00:34:30.000 I'll be 56 in July.

00:34:32.000 Really? 0.99

00:34:32.000 You look fucking great, man. 0.99

00:34:33.000 Thanks, man. 0.97

00:34:34.000 I appreciate that.

00:34:34.000 How do you look so young?

00:34:36.000 What are you doing?

00:34:37.000 It's probably because I didn't have kids in my life until about two years ago.

00:34:40.000 I have three wonderful stuffed kids.

00:34:43.000 What am I doing?

00:34:44.000 I don't know.

00:34:45.000 I mean, I think a lot of it's genetic.

00:34:47.000 I mean, I exercise.

00:34:49.000 I don't do dairy or gluten, but that's pretty recent.

00:34:56.000 Whatever it is, you're onto a good thing or you got great genes.

00:34:59.000 So what is your process like?

00:35:01.000 Do you have a daily routine where you start every day?

00:35:04.000 Do you go for walks before you write?

00:35:07.000 I know a lot of people do things like that to charge the brain up.

00:35:11.000 Yeah, I like to start writing as soon as I possibly can when I wake up, which used to be 5 in the morning.

00:35:19.000 I wrote my first book when I had a full-time job, and I wrote it between 5.30 and 7.30 at Starbucks over a six-month period.

00:35:28.000 Now, you know, there might be carpool or something else where I don't get started, but I have a detached, we have like a pool house that's my office and my house.

00:35:36.000 And so it's 30 steps out my back door and it's a completely different experience.

00:35:40.000 It's like being in, you know, it's like being somewhere else and nobody bugs me or whatever.

00:35:45.000 And so I like to get in there as quickly as possible, look at as few emails as possible.

00:35:50.000 I mean, you kind of look and see if things are, you know, there's chaos that you need to attend to, but if there's not, And I like to start writing and I will write in the mornings.

00:36:01.000 It's only when I'm like way on deadline and I'm going to be overdue where I will write in the afternoons too.

00:36:07.000 So I try to write 7 or 8 till noon or something like that.

00:36:12.000 And then that's done.

00:36:13.000 I'm done with my writing for the day.

00:36:14.000 I'll do...

00:36:15.000 Other stuff, I'll take the dogs to the park and I think about the books when I'm doing that and I'm always jotting stuff down in files for the books.

00:36:23.000 So, you know, there's a lot of, ask anybody in my family, there's times where I'm just sort of not 100% there at the dinner table for a minute because I'm thinking about, well, wait, what if that all happened in Singapore, you know?

00:36:36.000 So my brain resides there even when I'm not working.

00:36:40.000 But I try and like right now my writing goal is 1,500 words a day.

00:36:45.000 Didn't hit it today yet.

00:36:48.000 But that's going to get me a book by the summer.

00:36:51.000 And I have two books to write this year.

00:36:53.000 So then the next book should be done by December.

00:36:56.000 And hopefully that works.

00:36:59.000 And so a lot of guys do that same thing that you're talking about, like there's a process after you're done riding where you're thinking about the riding of the day, and then you just sort of jot stuff down.

00:37:10.000 And a lot of guys like to, like I said, go for walks, or you like to take the dogs to the park.

00:37:15.000 Yeah, we have a big 100-acre off-leash dog park where I live, a few minutes from my house.

00:37:20.000 And those 40 minutes or so where I've got the dogs out there, if I'm by myself, I will...

00:37:29.000 Usually be like really focused on the book or doing some sort of like audiobook research for the book or something like that.

00:37:36.000 And then you're always thinking of the next book you have to write.

00:37:39.000 So I have another book to write this year and so I'm trying to plot that out just in my head for now, not write anything down.

00:37:46.000 In the down time when I'm not thinking about the book that I'm writing now.

00:37:49.000 Do you drink coffee?

00:37:50.000 I drink a lot of coffee.

00:37:52.000 That helps. 0.99

00:37:53.000 I had a buddy of mine who started snorting Adderall to write and his wife was like, what the fuck are you doing? 0.98

00:37:59.000 Does it work? 0.99

00:37:59.000 He's like, I gotta get this done. 0.99

00:38:00.000 Look at me, I'm like, does it work?

00:38:01.000 Apparently it does.

00:38:02.000 I don't know, but his wife had a real problem with it. 1.00

00:38:05.000 Yeah, I guess.

00:38:06.000 It was the snorting, I think.

00:38:08.000 He just took the Adderall, but it's like, I want it to work quick.

00:38:11.000 Yeah, I've tried Adderall because some people told me it was, you know, I got a prescription for it.

00:38:17.000 And it just made me feel kind of wacky.

00:38:21.000 And I remember one time I took Adderall.

00:38:23.000 I'm like, yeah, I was really focused.

00:38:25.000 Took all of my fire logs off the fire log holder and swept that thing up and put all the fire logs back.

00:38:32.000 It's like, meanwhile, I've got to write a book.

00:38:34.000 Yeah, people say it makes you clean.

00:38:36.000 Yeah.

00:38:36.000 It makes you want to clean things.

00:38:37.000 That's what it made me do.

00:38:38.000 And so it was not—I'm always looking for something, you know, like B vitamins.

00:38:43.000 I've tried that.

00:38:44.000 And, you know, I'm always trying to—something that will kind of keep me in the game a little bit more.

00:38:48.000 You ever tried marijuana?

00:38:49.000 No.

00:38:50.000 No.

00:38:52.000 It might help your creativity.

00:38:53.000 Really?

00:38:54.000 Yeah.

00:38:54.000 Oh, it puts you in wild states of mind.

00:38:56.000 Yeah, but for this kind of book, the only time I've ever really had it, it's kind of embarrassing, I don't know why I'm saying this in front of so many people, was when it was put in lime squares and nobody told me.

00:39:07.000 Oh, no!

00:39:08.000 I ate half a tray of lime squares, so I had the paranoia thing, like an absolute freak-out paranoia.

00:39:12.000 You don't want that.

00:39:14.000 First of all, that's a different drug.

00:39:16.000 When you're eating it, it's very different than when you're smoking.

00:39:19.000 When you're eating it, your body produces something called 11-hydroxymetabolite.

00:39:23.000 It's like five times more psychoactive than THC. So it's processed by your liver.

00:39:28.000 It's called a one-pass. 0.98

00:39:29.000 And when that happens, you trip balls.

00:39:32.000 That's why when people eat edibles, they're like, I think it's laced.

00:39:36.000 That's why they think that.

00:39:38.000 It's because it's a completely different drug than smoking it.

00:39:40.000 When you're smoking it, you're getting THC. But when you're eating it, like the 11-hydroxymetabolite, you don't get it from smoking it.

00:39:50.000 So it's a totally different experience.

00:39:52.000 Yeah, that was my only experience.

00:39:54.000 That's not a good experience.

00:39:55.000 It wasn't a good one.

00:39:55.000 I was down in Florida at the time, and I'd gotten jellyfish that day, like in the leg.

00:40:00.000 And went back to the room and ate all these lime squares that somebody else had made.

00:40:05.000 And then I was like, oh my god, I'm going to die from a jellyfish thing.

00:40:09.000 Because I felt like I was dying for like all night.

00:40:13.000 I mean it lasted like hours and hours and hours. 0.92

00:40:15.000 Can jellyfish kill you in America? 0.65

00:40:17.000 Do we have jellyfish that can kill you?

00:40:18.000 I don't think so.

00:40:19.000 But I wasn't working on good information at the end.

00:40:22.000 I know when I was in Australia, they'd warn you. 0.99

00:40:24.000 They're like, that box jellyfish will fucking kill you. 0.99

00:40:27.000 I bet there are. 0.99

00:40:27.000 There's those blue bottles in Hawaii. 0.99

00:40:29.000 They won't kill you, but it's so painful.

00:40:32.000 They have this string that's like five or six feet long.

00:40:34.000 And I was in Hawaii, and I had one wrapped around my leg and my arm.

00:40:37.000 And it hurts so bad.

00:40:39.000 Yeah, my daughter, when she was really young, got stung in Costa Rica.

00:40:43.000 We were swimming in Costa Rica, and she got...

00:40:45.000 What do we got here?

00:40:46.000 Box jellyfish can kill a person within minutes.

00:40:48.000 Yes, but I don't think they're in the United States, are they?

00:40:51.000 I typed in...

00:40:51.000 It says Florida.

00:40:52.000 Some jellyfish from Florida can't fuck you up. 1.00

00:40:54.000 No shit. 1.00

00:40:55.000 Wow. 0.99

00:40:55.000 Florida has several species, including those pictures, that sting. 0.99

00:40:58.000 Yeah, but breathing difficulties, shock, and even death.

00:41:03.000 Oh, jellyfish in Florida can kill you.

00:41:05.000 I need to use that in the book.

00:41:06.000 So maybe you were almost dying.

00:41:08.000 Yeah, maybe it wasn't.

00:41:08.000 Maybe it wasn't the lime squares.

00:41:10.000 Really, like it was probably the lime squares and the poison that was in your system.

00:41:14.000 Yeah.

00:41:15.000 I didn't know that Florida jellyfish can kill you.

00:41:17.000 How many people die?

00:41:19.000 Let's Google how many people die a year from jellyfish in Florida.

00:41:23.000 It's probably only Florida, right?

00:41:25.000 You're going to ruin my family vacation.

00:41:31.000 I'm gonna guess three.

00:41:33.000 Three people a year.

00:41:37.000 Three people die from jellyfish.

00:41:39.000 I think it's 100 overall.

00:41:41.000 In the country?

00:41:43.000 I don't even know if it's the country.

00:41:45.000 100 people overall die from jellyfish?

00:41:48.000 Yeah, I don't think it's that common that jellyfish kill people.

00:41:50.000 That's more than sharks, you know?

00:41:52.000 Right.

00:41:52.000 My wife is totally...

00:41:53.000 I scuba dive, and I got two of my kids certified, and my wife is deathly afraid of sharks.

00:41:59.000 I'm like, I swim with sharks all the time.

00:42:01.000 I mean, there's certain sharks that if it appeared next to me, I'd...

00:42:06.000 My buddy Duncan was in Hawaii, and the week he was there, a woman got killed by a shark.

00:42:13.000 Yeah, this year, right?

00:42:14.000 Yeah, the guy and his wife were scuba diving, and apparently a guy pops up for air.

00:42:20.000 They were snorkeling.

00:42:20.000 A guy pops up for air, and they're yelling, get out of the water, get out of the water.

00:42:24.000 So he runs to get out of the water and then realizes it was his wife.

00:42:26.000 Oh my god.

00:42:27.000 Yeah, and looks back and apparently they saw just blood in the water and thrashing and they never found her body.

00:42:34.000 No body.

00:42:35.000 Yeah, they found part of her bathing suit or something, I think.

00:42:38.000 It's horrible.

00:42:39.000 But it's so rare. 1.00

00:42:41.000 Fuck rare. 0.99

00:42:42.000 If you found out that there were werewolves, that werewolves were real, would you ever go in the woods at night, even when it wasn't a full moon? 1.00

00:42:50.000 You'd be like, fuck that. 0.98

00:42:51.000 But meanwhile, sharks are real, and everybody's like, whoa, it's so rare. 1.00

00:42:55.000 Yeah.

00:42:55.000 Well, I mean, a dog can kill you, but I'm not afraid of a dog.

00:42:58.000 I don't know.

00:42:59.000 That's true.

00:42:59.000 I haven't seen the right shark, maybe.

00:43:02.000 I've been around a bunch of...

00:43:04.000 You know, like reef sharks and mostly stuff like that.

00:43:08.000 I feel like you can give a dog your arm and then cut its neck. 1.00

00:43:12.000 You can kill a dog. 1.00

00:43:13.000 Yeah, yeah. 1.00

00:43:14.000 You know, you'll get fucked up, but you can kill a dog. 1.00

00:43:17.000 Yeah, shark, you're on their territory, so you are limited. 1.00

00:43:20.000 If a dog's got a collar, I'm going to strangle him. 0.51

00:43:22.000 Yeah.

00:43:23.000 But if it's a shark, you can't even move good.

00:43:27.000 Yeah.

00:43:27.000 Like, you're like...

00:43:28.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:43:29.000 First time I went diving on an actual shark feed, and I'd only had 15 dives or whatever.

00:43:34.000 Everybody else was a lot more experienced than me that I was just on a dive boat with.

00:43:38.000 And right before that, they were like, okay, sharks are fine.

00:43:41.000 Just don't provoke them.

00:43:42.000 I'm like, cool.

00:43:43.000 And I jump in the water and you're down underwater where you can't talk to anybody and ask any questions.

00:43:46.000 And I was like, I should have asked if eye contact was a provocation.

00:43:51.000 It's like, God, I wish I could get back up there and ask that question.

00:43:54.000 I was not making eye contact.

00:43:55.000 I think sharks are so simple-minded.

00:43:57.000 I don't even think they understand what eye contact is.

00:43:59.000 I think they're just like... 0.95

00:44:00.000 They're zombies, man. 0.99

00:44:03.000 They scare the shit out of me. 0.99

00:44:05.000 Yeah. 0.87

00:44:05.000 Because they're just feeding machines. 0.87

00:44:07.000 That's all they're doing is just the cleanup crew of the ocean. 0.96

00:44:09.000 Anything weak, anything that's fucked up, anything that's slipping, time to go. 0.98

00:44:14.000 Anything that dies. 0.99

00:44:15.000 You're down there at one of those shark feeds where they have all this chum and a big ball and like hundreds of sharks.

00:44:20.000 And there's times where they're above you and there's the boat and then there's like 50 sharks and you're kind of down at the ocean floor going like, I'll wait for them to move on.

00:44:30.000 We played a video the other day, Jamie pulled up, of this guy that's in one of those shark...

00:44:35.000 Yeah.

00:44:36.000 And this great white just bursts through the bottom of it and literally almost takes his leg off.

00:44:41.000 Yeah.

00:44:42.000 I have no plans to dive in South Africa or wherever those things. 0.75

00:44:45.000 Those people are crazy.

00:44:47.000 Those are some big, big sharks. 0.98

00:44:48.000 I know you like thrills, but please.

00:44:51.000 One of the cool things about sharks, though, is you get your picture in the water with a shark, and you can't tell if it's behind you.

00:44:57.000 You can't tell if it's three feet long.

00:44:58.000 It still looks like a massive thing.

00:45:01.000 It could be a three-foot-long shark.

00:45:03.000 It's like, Jesus.

00:45:04.000 Mark's so brave.

00:45:06.000 Exactly.

00:45:07.000 So do you do anything else that's kind of psycho like that?

00:45:13.000 No.

00:45:14.000 I train with firearms a lot.

00:45:17.000 Have you always done that?

00:45:19.000 No.

00:45:19.000 That was really to get involved with the writing.

00:45:24.000 Yeah, to learn about the writing.

00:45:25.000 And I started training probably in 2005, 4, 5, something like that.

00:45:30.000 Where do you train?

00:45:31.000 Do you train at like a tactical place?

00:45:32.000 Yeah, it's been at different places, but I've done most of my training at a place in Middle Tennessee called Tactical Response.

00:45:39.000 You know, back at that point, they were training a lot of civilian contractors.

00:45:43.000 And so I took a, you know, you take pistol and advanced pistol and rifle and advanced rifle and this and that.

00:45:50.000 And then there's these things called, like, you know, HRCC, high-risk civilian contractor classes.

00:45:56.000 I took a bunch of those, and they're like a week long, and you stay in the bunkhouse or the team rooms with the guys.

00:46:01.000 And I learned really quick that, like, it's cool to learn about the guns and the gear and stuff for your books, but it's so much more impactful to sit there in the team room and drink scotch with, you know, SWAT guys or Special Forces Group dude or whatever, you know?

00:46:16.000 It's just like these been there, done that guys, contractors, Blackwater guys back then.

00:46:22.000 And so, you know, I feel like I kind of became a mascot of that school.

00:46:26.000 I probably took 50 classes.

00:46:28.000 I probably spent close to, you know, a couple hundred days there in Tennessee.

00:46:33.000 And I've done some other training.

00:46:36.000 I own a bunch of the firearms that are in the books and like to train when I can.

00:46:43.000 It's less and less as you get older and busier and more family and all that kind of stuff.

00:46:48.000 But I really do want to get back into it even more.

00:46:51.000 So when you were talking to these Special Forces guys, did you let them know that you're writing, that you write The Gray Man?

00:47:00.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:47:03.000 Early on, I mean, I actually heard the term The Gray Man at one of these classes from a guy, I think it was a contractor, which is just...

00:47:10.000 They would say, you know, be the gray man who just, like, not wear the tactical gear and the 511 pants and the Wiley X glasses and the Luminox watches or whatever.

00:47:20.000 Because they're traveling into the Middle East and, you know, the airport in Dubai or something like that, Al-Qaeda would have, like, watchers there, you know, seeing who was coming in and things like that.

00:47:32.000 And if you're there with Salomon boots on looking tactical.

00:47:34.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:47:35.000 You got your Salons on.

00:47:36.000 Black Rifle Coffee DJ. Yeah, exactly.

00:47:38.000 You're kind of self-identifying.

00:47:41.000 So it's all about, like, not doing that.

00:47:44.000 And that's kind of my character.

00:47:46.000 It's expanded to where he basically, you know, invisible man.

00:47:50.000 Yeah.

00:47:51.000 Yeah.

00:47:53.000 Balancing the incredulity, balancing the plausible aspects of the story, is that difficult? 0.90

00:48:03.000 Because you've got a guy who's constantly involved in gunfights and knife fights, and people are throwing knives at him, he's jumping out of fucking buildings, and there's so much chaos. 0.93

00:48:14.000 Yeah. 0.95

00:48:16.000 Yeah, there always has to be a kernel of some reality in it.

00:48:20.000 In Sierra Six, the book that you're writing now, there's a big scene that takes place on scaffolding.

00:48:27.000 I got through that already.

00:48:28.000 Yeah, and so I was in Hong Kong.

00:48:31.000 I wasn't in India where it took place because this was pre-COVID. I was in Hong Kong researching a Clancy novel.

00:48:37.000 And I saw the scaffolding and I went up to it and I climbed up on part of it and I looked around, you know, and I was like, okay, if you cut this, then this ought to do this.

00:48:44.000 Now, I wouldn't do it, you know, because it's six stories.

00:48:48.000 But in the first Gray Man book, he has to have basically surgery or he has to get sutured up while he's driving, get his gut sutured up.

00:48:57.000 And I talked to, you know, a special forces medic and talked about doing that and plausibility of that and going into shock and all these other things.

00:49:07.000 And a lot of people kind of complained about it and said, that's so impossible, that's so impossible.

00:49:11.000 And I'm like, yeah, but if you read the book again, he passes out while it happens and crashes the car.

00:49:15.000 It's like it was not perfectly successful.

00:49:17.000 You know, it's just like he didn't come out.

00:49:19.000 It wasn't like he's just like, yeah, sew me up while I drive. 0.99

00:49:22.000 People can do wild shit under pressure. 0.99

00:49:24.000 Oh, yeah. 0.99

00:49:25.000 To say that that's not possible, I read about a guy, I believe it was in Antarctica, who was a doctor who had to take his own appendix out.

00:49:32.000 Unbelievable.

00:49:33.000 And I think he might have done it with no anesthesia.

00:49:38.000 Find out that, because there's video of it, or photos of it, of this doctor, like literally on the operating table, cutting himself.

00:49:47.000 The man who cut out his own appendix.

00:49:50.000 Unbelievable.

00:49:51.000 Yeah.

00:49:52.000 So there's photos of this gentleman on the operating table doing his own append.

00:49:57.000 There, right there.

00:49:58.000 Like, look at that.

00:49:59.000 Unbelievable.

00:50:00.000 I like how he gave himself a mask.

00:50:02.000 Like, hey, bro, it's you.

00:50:04.000 Good point.

00:50:06.000 He intended to use a mirror to help him operate, but he found that it's an inverted view too much of a hindrance, so he ended up working by touch without gloves.

00:50:13.000 How crazy is that?

00:50:15.000 I feel like I'd talk somebody else through it before I do it myself, but I don't know.

00:50:18.000 I mean, I guess you didn't trust anybody else.

00:50:21.000 I wonder what...

00:50:23.000 Finally, here it is. 0.59

00:50:25.000 The cursed appendage.

00:50:27.000 Wow.

00:50:45.000 Wow.

00:50:46.000 That's great.

00:50:50.000 Tom Clancy had a saying that the difference between fiction and nonfiction is fiction has to make sense.

00:50:57.000 And like if I'd written that in a book, people would just laugh me off.

00:51:01.000 And there was a Navy SEAL that was shot 18 times and survived.

00:51:06.000 And if I had my hero shot 18 times and survived, no one would ever read me.

00:51:11.000 Wasn't Tupac shot like nine times?

00:51:14.000 Yeah.

00:51:15.000 Oh, no.

00:51:16.000 50 Cent.

00:51:17.000 50 Cent, but Tupac was too.

00:51:19.000 But he was shot a bunch of times.

00:51:20.000 Yeah.

00:51:20.000 But he died.

00:51:21.000 Not from that time.

00:51:23.000 He survived one of those shootings.

00:51:24.000 Right, but he wasn't shot like nine times.

00:51:28.000 Both are correct, I believe.

00:51:32.000 Okay.

00:51:32.000 Yeah, there was a guy, I think, in New York that was shot 20 times by the police with.40 caliber pistols.

00:51:40.000 Jesus!

00:51:40.000 And he survived.

00:51:41.000 They used.40s in New York?

00:51:42.000 They were then.

00:51:44.000 Wow.

00:51:44.000 Isn't it funny?

00:51:45.000 There's some talk on that, like why they use such a high caliber pistol.

00:51:50.000 Are you trying to shoot somebody or not?

00:51:53.000 I don't understand.

00:51:53.000 Do you want to give the cops all.22s?

00:51:56.000 What are you saying? 0.99

00:51:57.000 With.22, they're going to shoot them 12 times. 0.83

00:51:59.000 What do you want? 0.88

00:51:59.000 It's the same amount of lead. 0.88

00:52:02.000 You're trying to stop a threat, whatever tool you need.

00:52:06.000 Do you get people that are upset that you are doing gun porn or that you're doing these...

00:52:14.000 Yes.

00:52:14.000 Sometimes, yes.

00:52:16.000 You know, just people that read the book and say, you know, it's too violent, blah, blah, blah.

00:52:20.000 And it's just not what they were looking for.

00:52:22.000 And so I'm always kind of scratching my head at these reviews.

00:52:25.000 I'm like, why did you read 350 pages of a book that was not what you liked?

00:52:30.000 Yeah.

00:52:31.000 I might not want to read a book about butterflies.

00:52:33.000 I wouldn't be like 293 pages going, I'm going to write a scathing review about a book I don't want to read.

00:52:39.000 That is a problem with people that write reviews on almost anything because when someone enjoys something and they want to go see that something, that's their genre.

00:52:49.000 That's the thing they're interested in.

00:52:50.000 Then they're going to write a review based on someone who actually enjoys the genre.

00:52:53.000 Yeah.

00:52:54.000 But you get a lot of reviewers who are just reviewing things that they have no interest in at all.

00:52:59.000 And they write these horrible negative reviews.

00:53:02.000 And it's like, who are you trying to convince?

00:53:04.000 People that think exactly like you weren't going to like it anyway.

00:53:07.000 It's such a weird way to write things.

00:53:11.000 Jack Carr and I had this conversation with his podcast once where we were talking about the The viewer reviews of our shows, Terminalist and Gray Man, and then the professional reviews or whatever.

00:53:25.000 And the people that watched it loved it overall.

00:53:29.000 The reviewers hated it.

00:53:31.000 But I mean, they're going to hate stuff like that.

00:53:33.000 Of course.

00:53:34.000 I mean, to a large degree.

00:53:35.000 Not everything.

00:53:36.000 You know, there's some things that...

00:53:48.000 Yeah, 100%.

00:53:49.000 That's a great way to look at it.

00:53:51.000 You know who's a good example of that?

00:53:53.000 Adam Sandler.

00:53:54.000 Adam Sandler's movies all get destroyed by the critics. 0.99

00:53:58.000 But I think they're fucking great. 0.98

00:54:00.000 I love his... 1.00

00:54:01.000 They're so silly. 0.99

00:54:02.000 And I love that I watch them with my kids. 1.00

00:54:05.000 And they're easy to digest.

00:54:08.000 Even the Zohan, which is a little racy...

00:54:12.000 Hilarious.

00:54:12.000 Gets torn apart by the critics.

00:54:14.000 Yeah, and I think his stuff does really well.

00:54:16.000 Of course it does.

00:54:17.000 And he's just doing something different than what the critics...

00:54:21.000 I remember David Lee Roth once said the reason that critics all hated him and they all loved Elvis Costello is because all the critics look like Elvis Costello, which I don't know if that's true.

00:54:34.000 Well, that is a part of it, right?

00:54:36.000 Elvis Costello was like the nerdy guy with the glasses, and he wasn't the good-looking guy who had all the chicks with his open shirt.

00:54:43.000 David Lee Roth was this stud who was doing karate kicks on stage.

00:54:47.000 Yeah, there's sour grapes involved in certain places.

00:54:51.000 I mean, people can hate my books for a million different reasons, and that doesn't make them wrong.

00:54:55.000 But it's also the narrative of the critic was always so much more important than it is now.

00:54:59.000 Because now the narrative of the critic gets drowned out by the narrative of the fans.

00:55:03.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:55:05.000 For better or worse.

00:55:06.000 I think it's for better.

00:55:07.000 Yeah.

00:55:08.000 Because you get people that aren't professional critics.

00:55:11.000 You just get informed readers who enjoy it or don't enjoy it.

00:55:15.000 And then they share that...

00:55:17.000 Whenever I go to an Amazon book review and I click on the reviews, I just read the reviews.

00:55:22.000 Some of them are remarkably well-written.

00:55:24.000 Oh, yeah.

00:55:25.000 You see people that are passionate about it, even if they're criticizing something.

00:55:30.000 Yes.

00:55:32.000 I've always had this philosophy, it's like if you read my book, if you spend the 12 hours to read that book or whatever it takes, it's like you get to share your opinion with whoever you want.

00:55:42.000 It's like I can't begrudge that.

00:55:45.000 Sometimes I'll disagree with what they say.

00:55:47.000 Sometimes I'll agree with it.

00:55:48.000 The worst negative reviews are the ones where it's like, oh, this guy, he's got it. 1.00

00:55:54.000 I like it when they're just assholes. 0.99

00:55:56.000 They're just like, oh, this guy's nobody. 1.00

00:55:59.000 But then sometimes you're going like, oh, he sees me.

00:56:01.000 He sees the dark underbelly.

00:56:03.000 But those guys are really good because if someone who can really see it and they expose something that makes you uncomfortable, that gives you an opportunity to get better.

00:56:11.000 Yeah, to think about it.

00:56:12.000 That does happen to me for sure.

00:56:14.000 I feel like the real problem with critics is that most critics wish they were writers, but they just don't have anything to contribute.

00:56:23.000 They're just not good.

00:56:24.000 And so they try to tear down other people's work, whether it's film critics or movie critics or...

00:56:30.000 Even stand-up comedy critics, they don't have anything to contribute, so they're bitter and negative.

00:56:36.000 They don't want to be critics.

00:56:37.000 Nobody sits out and says, like, I really want to be a critic of other people's work.

00:56:41.000 No, most people that are critics, like, when you're writing an article, a criticism article, or writing an editorial, you are a creative.

00:56:50.000 You're being creative.

00:56:52.000 But the predominant creativity involved in criticism is like this negative...

00:56:59.000 Bitchy, creative energy that's not attractive if you're trying to make something. 1.00

00:57:04.000 It's only attractive when you're tearing something down. 0.99

00:57:07.000 So the energy that these people have is this bitter, shitty energy. 0.98

00:57:10.000 It sucks for writing something unique and creative, like coming up with your own book. 0.98

00:57:17.000 But it's good for tearing apart other people's stuff in a really snarky way. 0.78

00:57:22.000 Yeah, I've been saying that for years and years, but never as eloquently.

00:57:24.000 I'm going to watch this later and write down what you just said.

00:57:27.000 Because I have said, like, you'll read a review, and just to make the review a better little piece of writing for them, they basically...

00:57:37.000 Change the story.

00:57:39.000 There's basically really disingenuous stuff in there.

00:57:42.000 Not every review, obviously, but that happens sometimes.

00:57:45.000 And I'm going like, oh, okay, as a writer, I know how you wanted to make these two paragraphs really impactful here, so you just told some bullshit about my story that's not even in the story.

00:57:57.000 Right. 0.78

00:57:57.000 They're just not good. 0.78

00:57:58.000 Yeah.

00:57:58.000 It's what it is.

00:57:59.000 You're getting... 1.00

00:58:00.000 It's like non-athletes talking shit about athletes. 0.99

00:58:05.000 You get that in the sports world. 1.00

00:58:07.000 You get these basketball commentators online and doing podcasts and doing these shows where they're just talking crazy shit about these players. 0.98

00:58:19.000 Right. 1.00

00:58:19.000 We can't fucking play. 1.00

00:58:22.000 They're not players. 0.99

00:58:23.000 You get that in the fighting world, too. 0.99

00:58:25.000 You get these people that are talking shit about fighters. 0.99

00:58:27.000 I'm like, you can't fight. 1.00

00:58:28.000 Shut the fuck up. 1.00

00:58:29.000 Yeah, they can be proved wrong a lot faster than somebody could prove a critic wrong about writing. 1.00

00:58:36.000 Yeah, the writing thing, though, it's a human nature thing.

00:58:41.000 It's a tall poppy thing.

00:58:43.000 You know, it's crabs in a bucket, tearing down people that are more successful than you.

00:58:48.000 Especially if you're a critic, you are a writer.

00:58:51.000 You're involved in the genre of writing.

00:58:53.000 Don't tell me you don't want to write something unique and creative, because you certainly do.

00:58:57.000 Like, I remember Roger Ebert, who's, you know, Siskel and Ebert, classic. 0.99

00:59:03.000 He wrote one of the worst fucking screenplays. 0.99

00:59:06.000 Really? 1.00

00:59:07.000 It's so bad and so crazy that you read it and you're like, oh!

00:59:12.000 Oh! 0.60

00:59:13.000 Wow.

00:59:14.000 Okay.

00:59:14.000 Yeah.

00:59:15.000 Now I get it.

00:59:16.000 Now I know why you're a critic.

00:59:18.000 Yeah.

00:59:18.000 You're this, like, frustrated creative type who didn't have the juice to write something that was actually good.

00:59:26.000 What is the screenplay that Roger Ebert wrote?

00:59:29.000 It's really weird.

00:59:30.000 I read, like, many pages of it and, like, this is crazy.

00:59:33.000 And you can just sort of discount everything that he says after that.

00:59:35.000 It's horrible.

00:59:37.000 It's so bad.

00:59:38.000 It says he co-wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which I don't...

00:59:41.000 Yeah, but what did he write?

00:59:43.000 He wrote something by himself.

00:59:47.000 I mean, I wrote Robert Ebert's screenplay.

00:59:50.000 It says there's a couple screenplays.

00:59:52.000 Yeah, there's...

00:59:53.000 Why don't you Google Robert Ebert terrible screenplay?

00:59:59.000 I mean, this says it'll give me four answers.

01:00:03.000 Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

01:00:05.000 Up.

01:00:05.000 Who killed Bambi.

01:00:07.000 Softcore sex comedy. 0.59

01:00:08.000 Maybe that's it. 0.98

01:00:10.000 There's one of them that's kind of perverted. 0.52

01:00:13.000 Well, I mean, that would be it.

01:00:14.000 That's probably it.

01:00:16.000 Yeah, a man named Adolf Schwartz.

01:00:19.000 Adolf Hitler in hiding.

01:00:21.000 This is it.

01:00:22.000 Oh my god. 0.98

01:00:23.000 Was living in a Bavarian-style castle in Northern California after an orgy in the dungeon with three women. 0.64

01:00:30.000 And a man, he is murdered when someone places a ravenous piranha fish in his bathtub. 1.00

01:00:36.000 This is a fucking dumbness. 0.99

01:00:38.000 A voluptuous woman named Margo Winchester appears later in the town, in the nearby town Miranda, and is spotted by local sheriff Homer Johnson. 1.00

01:00:48.000 He tries to make advances, but Margo rejects flirtatiously.

01:00:52.000 At this point, after that she is picked up by Leonard Box, a known troublemaker and son of a sawmill operator.

01:00:58.000 An argument breaks out the result that Leonard subdues and rapes the unconscious Margot after she accidentally kills him.

01:01:06.000 What?

01:01:08.000 Sounds...

01:01:09.000 Oh, okay.

01:01:10.000 Based on an original idea by... 1.00

01:01:13.000 Yeah, he's out of his fucking mind. 1.00

01:01:15.000 He was out of his fucking mind. 1.00

01:01:16.000 Apparently, it's so bad, people that have read it, like, what the fuck is wrong with you? 1.00

01:01:22.000 But it makes you understand, like, oh, okay, this is why you're so snarky when you're reviewing films.

01:01:31.000 It's a strange thing to be a critic of stuff.

01:01:34.000 Yeah.

01:01:34.000 Because it's like it is a kind of unfocused energy.

01:01:38.000 Yeah.

01:01:38.000 And so much stuff is subjective.

01:01:40.000 I mean, that doesn't mean I don't have – we all have opinions, right?

01:01:43.000 Right.

01:01:43.000 So it's like even though something's subjective, I can go, wow, I don't like that at all.

01:01:47.000 But I don't – it's not that I objectively don't like it.

01:01:49.000 It's not like it's like – These four words should not be – usually if you're published, you're able to write a sentence.

01:01:56.000 It's subjective.

01:01:58.000 I think people are very much entitled to their own opinion.

01:02:00.000 Don't get me wrong.

01:02:00.000 But what I think is that the model of the professional critic, I think it has so many problems with it.

01:02:09.000 And I'm sure there's people out there that are professional critics that are very good.

01:02:13.000 And this is not a blanket statement.

01:02:15.000 But I think we're better served by the unprofessional, by the actual person who's just an intelligent person, who's a fan of the work, who reads the book, and then can write a little Amazon review or some other critique about it.

01:02:32.000 Or a tweet about it.

01:02:34.000 That's What I think is more valuable.

01:02:37.000 And in the aggregate, too.

01:02:39.000 So you say, like, well, you know, this many people liked it.

01:02:42.000 Right.

01:02:42.000 You know, and each individual review, you can sort of, like, maybe throw away the top and the bottom ones.

01:02:48.000 Yes.

01:02:51.000 Frederick Forsyth or whatever, and I go like, all right, I'm discounting you.

01:02:55.000 But somebody that says, hey, I really loved your book.

01:02:56.000 It was fun.

01:02:57.000 I'm like, okay, that I'm accepting.

01:02:59.000 And somebody that says you're the worst thing that ever lived, I'm like, I can discount you. 0.98

01:03:04.000 But there's levels of criticism where I'm like, crap, I can't discount that. 0.98

01:03:08.000 Yeah. 0.64

01:03:09.000 Well, those are valuable, though, right?

01:03:10.000 Yeah, sure.

01:03:11.000 It's like if you crowdsourced all the opinions...

01:03:16.000 The problem is you can game that, right?

01:03:18.000 If a person's problematic, like if you're going to crowdsource a JK Rowling's book today, well, the thing about the criticisms, it would be overrun by people who are like trans activists who are angry at her for her stance on women being women.

01:03:33.000 Sure.

01:03:33.000 That becomes a problem.

01:03:36.000 And I've said that often about fights, that maybe we should crowdsource the scoring instead of having these people that are professional judges, because some of them, they get it so wrong.

01:03:47.000 And some scoring is so...

01:03:50.000 You'll see like 49, 47, 49, 47, and then you'll see one that is just like...

01:03:57.000 50-45.

01:03:58.000 Watching a different fight.

01:04:00.000 How are you watching the same fight?

01:04:01.000 You're so different than everyone else that scored it.

01:04:04.000 Yeah.

01:04:05.000 But then the crowd thing is like then you could game the system and have your fans vote and say you won the fight when maybe you didn't.

01:04:14.000 And I'm sure that happens.

01:04:16.000 I have a lady that... 1.00

01:04:17.000 I won't go into the whole story, but I have a lady that makes an Amazon review every year when my book comes out because she hates me. 1.00

01:04:25.000 Oh, boy.

01:04:25.000 She used to be like my number one fan, and then she...

01:04:29.000 I told another author, it's like, I heard you wrote, you're writing Mark Graney's books now or whatever.

01:04:34.000 And so I emailed her.

01:04:35.000 I was like, hey, I write my own books and authors don't love it when people are saying they don't.

01:04:40.000 And she just came at me with this rage. 1.00

01:04:43.000 And this was seven, eight years ago.

01:04:45.000 And I still hear from her. 0.99

01:04:46.000 And it's F off and die and stuff like that. 0.97

01:04:49.000 She'll send me emails.

01:04:50.000 And she says a one-star review on every one of my books is from this woman named Cheryl.

01:04:56.000 And it's just sort of like, you know, he lives in a mansion now, which I don't know.

01:05:01.000 And, you know, it's like, at one point, in one of the reviews, she's like, I understand why his first wife left him, which she didn't.

01:05:09.000 And you're going like...

01:05:10.000 All right, I guess I'm always going to be skewed.

01:05:13.000 I mean, I can get 15,000 reviews, but it's just funny that this person has a beef with me and they're going to take it to their grave.

01:05:20.000 He lives in a mansion now.

01:05:22.000 It's hilarious.

01:05:23.000 What are you supposed to do when you get successful? 1.00

01:05:25.000 Stay in your shitty fucking apartment. 1.00

01:05:27.000 I don't want to hear from you. 1.00

01:05:29.000 Drive that Volvo.

01:05:30.000 Yeah, it's kind of funny that people just want you to be successful.

01:05:36.000 Like if you become too successful, they want you to be out of touch.

01:05:39.000 Yeah, or they see something in the book that they think is political, which I don't think is political at all.

01:05:45.000 One of the Clancy books, these people, and I think they were like militia people.

01:05:50.000 Started emailing me and they kept saying like, you know, you West Coast liberals don't understand blah, blah, blah.

01:05:56.000 And I'm like, I live in Memphis.

01:05:59.000 I'm sitting in a Starbucks with a gun on my hip and a gun on my ankle.

01:06:03.000 And it was sort of like, you libtard West Coast liberals don't understand anything. 0.98

01:06:07.000 And I'm going like, okay, all right.

01:06:10.000 Well, people want to have a narrative that suits their ideas of what you are and what you should be and who they are.

01:06:19.000 You're not going to make everybody happy.

01:06:20.000 It's absolutely impossible.

01:06:21.000 And some people will get you totally wrong.

01:06:24.000 They'll just come up with some complete...

01:06:27.000 Yeah.

01:06:28.000 False narrative of who you are and why you're doing it and the fact that you're faking it or you're being paid off.

01:06:34.000 Right.

01:06:35.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:06:35.000 You're a propagandist.

01:06:37.000 Oh, yeah.

01:06:37.000 I've gotten the emails where people are essentially saying they think I'm in the Illuminati or something.

01:06:43.000 Oh! 0.60

01:06:44.000 I barely got through high school.

01:06:46.000 I went to public school and got crappy grades and I went to state college.

01:06:52.000 I'm not trying to sell myself out as anything bigger than I am.

01:06:56.000 I'm just trying to write cool books.

01:06:57.000 The Illuminati, that's hilarious.

01:06:58.000 That's a big one.

01:06:59.000 You're in the Illuminati.

01:07:01.000 How do you get in?

01:07:03.000 There's an inverse correlation between how, well, there's a positive correlation between how long someone's email is and how crazy they are.

01:07:10.000 So it's like, oh, it's a manifesto.

01:07:13.000 Okay.

01:07:13.000 You know, it's like the quick ones are like, hey, I really enjoyed your book, you know.

01:07:16.000 But then the non-quick ones are the ones that are like three pages of like, ipso facto.

01:07:22.000 That's a good tip off when someone writes that.

01:07:25.000 I've never used that word in my life.

01:07:27.000 Me either.

01:07:28.000 Me either.

01:07:30.000 Yeah, well, you know, it's part of the beauty of dealing with the general public. 0.93

01:07:34.000 You're going to get a certain amount of crazy people.

01:07:36.000 Yeah.

01:07:36.000 I appreciate them.

01:07:37.000 Yeah.

01:07:37.000 It's okay.

01:07:38.000 Yeah.

01:07:39.000 Some people like that, though, if you do somehow or another get in contact with them and you communicate with them, they realize, oh, you're just a person.

01:07:46.000 Yeah.

01:07:47.000 It happens to me all the time.

01:07:48.000 Isn't that weird?

01:07:49.000 Like, have you met people that were famous and you freaked out and you, like, weirded out around them?

01:07:53.000 Yeah.

01:07:54.000 I mean, but, you know...

01:07:56.000 I just kept it to myself.

01:07:57.000 But it takes a while before, like one of the people that I met that I was like really weirded out was Anthony Bourdain.

01:08:02.000 I'll never forget, this is hilarious.

01:08:04.000 Because I used to love that show No Reservations.

01:08:06.000 I used to watch it religiously.

01:08:08.000 And my wife was like, oh, you're watching your boyfriend.

01:08:10.000 She was always joking around.

01:08:12.000 And so I meet him and I'm starstruck, right?

01:08:15.000 And I say, my wife says you're my boyfriend. 1.00

01:08:17.000 And he's like, what the fuck? 1.00

01:08:21.000 I'm like, oh no! 1.00

01:08:22.000 Anthony 14 thinks I'm a fucking idiot! 1.00

01:08:25.000 Oh no! 1.00

01:08:26.000 And I eventually became good friends with him, and it was cool.

01:08:29.000 It was nice.

01:08:30.000 It was like...

01:08:32.000 It was one of those things where I was like, okay.

01:08:35.000 I have a phone that I'm never going to get rid of because it was the last phone that I texted with him on.

01:08:40.000 He sent me stuff.

01:08:42.000 It was just one of those things where I had to get over the fact that it was this guy that I admired.

01:08:47.000 And then here he is.

01:08:48.000 And now I'm friends with him.

01:08:50.000 Yeah.

01:08:50.000 You know, my eating with them and stuff.

01:08:52.000 We're drinking.

01:08:52.000 Like, this is crazy.

01:08:53.000 Yeah.

01:08:54.000 You know, it's just, it's weird.

01:08:55.000 Like, famous people are weird.

01:08:56.000 It's a strange thing.

01:08:58.000 But as a famous person, I realize, like, we're just all the same.

01:09:03.000 We're all just people.

01:09:04.000 Right.

01:09:04.000 It's just something weird happens when so many people know about you.

01:09:07.000 Yeah, yeah. 0.97

01:09:08.000 And what I used to think before I had any, you know, people knew who I was, I used to think, like, the really successful people turned to assholes because they're not as friendly. 0.95

01:09:19.000 They don't reach out. 0.94

01:09:20.000 But now it's like I'll get, like, you know...

01:09:23.000 90 people a day sending me some sort of thing on social media or an email or something like that.

01:09:28.000 And there's people that if I don't respond to them immediately, they're like, oh, I guess you're too good. 0.99

01:09:33.000 And it's not me being an asshole. 0.99

01:09:36.000 You get a little bit protective because... 1.00

01:09:39.000 One out of a hundred of them can ruin your life.

01:09:42.000 There's a guy who'll watch this, so who knows?

01:09:45.000 He'll probably wear my skin as a suit now. 0.96

01:09:49.000 It'd be all your fault.

01:09:50.000 But no, he thinks that he is the gray man, and he tells me about how we had met, and he gave me the idea for the story, blah, blah, blah.

01:09:59.000 And it's been going on for years, and I replied to him the first couple times, like, yeah, I don't think we met.

01:10:03.000 But he saw something I said publicly about where I got the idea for the story, and I was down in El Salvador when I got the idea.

01:10:09.000 And he's like, I met you at a bar in El Salvador.

01:10:10.000 It was like right out of an interview, you know?

01:10:12.000 And he's been doing it for years, and I'm not sure.

01:10:16.000 He's like, I don't want money.

01:10:17.000 I just want you to tell me that it's me or something.

01:10:21.000 Yeah, well, there's a lot of people that are schizophrenic.

01:10:23.000 I mean, there's a certain percentage of the population, I think it's like 1% or something like that, that is just schizophrenic, period, no matter what you do.

01:10:30.000 It's just the wiring of the brain.

01:10:31.000 I had a guy call my then, like, 90-year-old aunt at 5 in the morning looking for my number because she was in the phone book in Memphis and I wasn't in the phone book in Memphis.

01:10:41.000 And she's like, I need his number, I need his number.

01:10:43.000 And so I figured out who it was because, you know, there's a short list of people that...

01:10:47.000 We're, like, being a little weird.

01:10:49.000 And I figured out who it was.

01:10:51.000 And I was like, look, man, you, you know, I'm going to the cops.

01:10:54.000 You do this again.

01:10:55.000 And he said, instead of him saying sorry, he's like, I hope you see that the links that I went to to reach you shows you how intense I feel about this project that we can work on together.

01:11:08.000 I was like, no, no.

01:11:10.000 What I see is that you called my aunt at 5 in the morning and tried to berate her into giving me a phone call.

01:11:16.000 Well, I think there's also a thing that people don't understand if they're not doing what you do, where you are so busy.

01:11:23.000 You're so involved in your work.

01:11:26.000 And this idea that another person who's not busy, who is obsessed with doing something with you, somehow or another can talk you into that.

01:11:35.000 You're like, I don't have the bandwidth.

01:11:37.000 There's no room for you.

01:11:38.000 There's no time.

01:11:39.000 There's no nothing.

01:11:40.000 There's no way.

01:11:41.000 I don't have any time for anything.

01:11:43.000 Yeah.

01:11:44.000 People want, you know, they're like, oh, I've got a story for you.

01:11:47.000 You're going to want to write this book.

01:11:48.000 And it's like, and my pat answer, I don't usually reply to them now, but my pat answer was like, just as you are passionate about that idea, I have ideas of my own about which I'm passionate.

01:11:58.000 And that's what I'm working on right now.

01:11:59.000 But even people, you know, they're like, will you read my book or whatever?

01:12:03.000 And I blurb people's books all the time.

01:12:05.000 But I'm like...

01:12:08.000 Yeah.

01:12:10.000 Yeah.

01:12:27.000 Well, I don't think anybody who is not in this sort of public sphere has any understanding of how many people are coming at you with projects and ideas on any given day.

01:12:39.000 I can't keep up with the text messages from people that I know.

01:12:43.000 Yeah, like your friends.

01:12:44.000 It's impossible. 0.99

01:12:45.000 Yeah, I'm missing out on opportunities with people that I've been friends with my whole life, and I feel like a jerk. 0.94

01:12:50.000 I don't even mean opportunities.

01:12:51.000 I mean, I can't I can't respond to all the text messages I get, and then I have to answer emails.

01:12:56.000 I can't respond to those. 0.95

01:12:57.000 There's fucking too many. 0.99

01:12:59.000 I would literally have to have another life to just interact with people. 0.99

01:13:05.000 Clone yourself.

01:13:06.000 Yeah, to have a separate me that just interacts with people on social media, interacts with people in email, interacts with people in text messages.

01:13:14.000 It's just not, after a while, it's not possible.

01:13:16.000 So I just change my number every now and again.

01:13:18.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:13:18.000 And just lose people.

01:13:19.000 Sorry.

01:13:20.000 Do what you can.

01:13:21.000 Disappear.

01:13:22.000 Reach out.

01:13:23.000 Stay in contact with the people that you really want to be in contact with.

01:13:26.000 Yeah, it's not even really want.

01:13:27.000 Like some of the people I really do want to be with.

01:13:29.000 Yeah, same.

01:13:30.000 But I can't.

01:13:30.000 Yeah.

01:13:31.000 I just don't have the time.

01:13:32.000 It's like you get to a certain...

01:13:34.000 There's like a certain number of interactions that are just untenable.

01:13:38.000 Yeah.

01:13:38.000 And it's not that I'm more important than anybody else.

01:13:42.000 I was just as important when I was working at Burger King, you know, a long, long time ago.

01:13:47.000 It's just literally hours in the day.

01:13:50.000 And, you know, it's like I have...

01:13:52.000 They have the cover for my book on Amazon for pre-order before I write the first word of it.

01:13:58.000 So, you know, it's coming out next week.

01:14:00.000 Isn't that wild?

01:14:00.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:14:02.000 I talked to Jack about that.

01:14:03.000 I think it's like, you know, like he's ready to go and he's like, okay, time to lock myself up.

01:14:09.000 Yeah.

01:14:09.000 Because it's just, you have a deadline.

01:14:12.000 And then also you want it to be the best fucking thing you could do because you've done so many great books already that this has got, you've got to nail it. 0.95

01:14:20.000 Yeah. 0.97

01:14:20.000 So there's so much pressure and there's so much. 0.97

01:14:22.000 And then I'll, what about this, Mark?

01:14:25.000 Mark, how about me?

01:14:26.000 What about me, Mark?

01:14:27.000 Mark, Mark, Mark, Mark, Mark, I love your work.

01:14:28.000 Mark, I'm your biggest fan.

01:14:29.000 It makes me think of Misery.

01:14:31.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:14:31.000 You know?

01:14:32.000 Oh, my God.

01:14:33.000 Another Stephen King.

01:14:34.000 Amazing book.

01:14:34.000 Oh, gosh.

01:14:35.000 I mean, what was the woman's name that played the- Kathy Bates.

01:14:38.000 Kathy Bates is amazing.

01:14:39.000 We went to the same high school.

01:14:41.000 She's amazing in that movie. 0.99

01:14:42.000 Yeah, she's so good.

01:14:43.000 That was one of those castings where like, oh my god, she nailed it. 0.99

01:14:47.000 Oh yeah. 0.99

01:14:47.000 She fucking nailed it. 0.99

01:14:48.000 Like her career was made. 0.99

01:14:50.000 She got that role and she just made a meal out of it and it was so good.

01:14:54.000 Yeah, that was great.

01:14:56.000 That was a great adaptation and she was perfect.

01:15:00.000 And James Caan was perfect in it, too.

01:15:02.000 Like, oh my god, she's so good.

01:15:04.000 I gotta watch it again.

01:15:04.000 I've seen that ten times, but I'm gonna watch it again.

01:15:06.000 She's so good.

01:15:07.000 There's some people that just like...

01:15:09.000 And Charlize Theron's like that in Monster?

01:15:11.000 Oh my god, when she played Eileen Wuornos? 1.00

01:15:13.000 Holy shit! 1.00

01:15:14.000 She's a different person. 1.00

01:15:16.000 She's so fucking hot. 1.00

01:15:17.000 She's hot as the sun. 1.00

01:15:18.000 And then she gets fat and shaves her eyebrows off, and she looks like this psycho. 1.00

01:15:22.000 And you're like, oh my god, that's not even prosthetics? 0.96

01:15:24.000 You did that to your body?

01:15:26.000 That's insane! 1.00

01:15:27.000 Yeah, she looks like a killer. 1.00

01:15:28.000 And also for a woman who's a gorgeous woman, who's like this A-list actress, to do that to her body. 1.00

01:15:35.000 Yeah.

01:15:36.000 And, you know, probably hard to bounce back from that, too, you know?

01:15:40.000 I bet it was hard.

01:15:40.000 I mean, look at her.

01:15:42.000 Look at how fucking... 1.00

01:15:43.000 Dude. 1.00

01:15:44.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:15:44.000 She fucking nailed it. 0.99

01:15:46.000 But I wonder if there's something, like, liberating about, like, totally changing your identity for something like that. 0.99

01:15:53.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:15:53.000 I bet if you're a sex symbol like her, because, you know, she's so fucking hot. 0.99

01:15:57.000 Like, go to a picture of her just looking hot as fuck, Jamie. 1.00

01:16:01.000 Go to that one with her, the Oscar right there. 0.99

01:16:03.000 The one there, the blue dress where she's wearing.

01:16:06.000 Yeah, that's perfect right there.

01:16:07.000 Make that one bigger. 0.66

01:16:08.000 Like, come on, son. 0.99

01:16:09.000 How are you going to say that that lady's going to be an ugly serial killer? 1.00

01:16:13.000 It's impossible! 0.98

01:16:15.000 But she nailed it, and then she bounced right back. 1.00

01:16:17.000 It's crazy.

01:16:18.000 People like that, that's a rare person, if you can get that person, like a Christian Bales willing to starve himself for the machinist. 1.00

01:16:25.000 You can get someone like that to do your role. 1.00

01:16:27.000 God, damn. 0.99

01:16:29.000 There's a lot of examples of that. 0.99

01:16:30.000 Daniel Day-Lewis.

01:16:32.000 They just become a different human being. 0.98

01:16:35.000 Yeah, but Kathy Bates, god damn, was she perfect for that role. 1.00

01:16:38.000 Yeah, she's so good. 0.99

01:16:39.000 But that's the fear. 1.00

01:16:40.000 It's like this fucking crazy person is completely obsessed with your books. 1.00

01:16:43.000 Yeah, yeah. 1.00

01:16:45.000 I mean, thankfully that had, you know, in the book, he gets his leg chopped off.

01:16:49.000 In the movie, it's hit with a hammer.

01:16:51.000 Yeah.

01:16:52.000 But hit, I mean, which is almost more violent, you know, like the way that it happens.

01:16:56.000 Yes.

01:16:56.000 And she's so nonchalant about it or whatever.

01:16:58.000 She's just kind of like setting it up, and he's so helpless.

01:17:02.000 It was just incredible.

01:17:03.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:17:05.000 I guess this comes with a job, right?

01:17:09.000 Yeah, yeah, and it's a very small part of it.

01:17:12.000 Yeah, it's a very small part of it.

01:17:13.000 But when you finish a book, is there like an apprehension?

01:17:19.000 What does it feel like when you're done?

01:17:21.000 Do you feel done?

01:17:23.000 How many times do you have to go over it after you're done with it?

01:17:26.000 I feel like I ran out of time.

01:17:28.000 I never feel like this couldn't be better.

01:17:31.000 And I hate to say I'm a perfectionist because it sounds like you think you've done something perfect before.

01:17:35.000 But I'm a perfectionist in the sense that at least this aspect of my life, it's never right.

01:17:43.000 It's never good enough.

01:17:44.000 And you just run out of time.

01:17:46.000 So I do go over it.

01:17:48.000 I'll turn a first draft into my editor.

01:17:50.000 It comes back to me.

01:17:52.000 He reads it and gives me his ideas, and I'll do a second draft, and then he'll read it again, and then he'll go to a copy editor, and I'll get it, and then he'll go to a proofreader, and I'll get it.

01:18:00.000 And still, there'll be some mistake that makes it into the book at the end.

01:18:05.000 Last book, Burner, is 165,000 words.

01:18:08.000 So I always say, yeah, in 160,000 words, there's probably five words I wish I could get a do-over on.

01:18:14.000 When you finish your book, do you read it from the beginning to the end?

01:18:18.000 In the editing process, yes.

01:18:21.000 But once it's turned in for the final...

01:18:25.000 I'm the last one that looks at it before a copy editor goes and fixes the little things that I... And I kind of have a bad reputation at my publishing house for making a lot of changes at the end.

01:18:38.000 I crammed 14 pages into a Clancy book once.

01:18:42.000 After Tom had passed away and I was writing the Jack Ryan books, like literally the last go-around, I was like, you know, I really feel it needs this scene.

01:18:50.000 And they came back to me and they're like, we've already measured the spine.

01:18:53.000 And I was like, did not know that was a thing.

01:18:56.000 But to their credit, they made changes and they got it in there.

01:19:00.000 But I never read the books again.

01:19:03.000 I do listen to the audiobooks or at least part of the audiobooks because I think I have a good audio narrator.

01:19:09.000 That gentleman, Ray, what is his name?

01:19:10.000 Ray Porter is fantastic.

01:19:12.000 Jay Snyder is the guy that does...

01:19:14.000 Oh, the Tom Clancy books.

01:19:16.000 No, the gray man is Jay Snyder.

01:19:19.000 Ray Porter does Jack Carp.

01:19:21.000 Oh, that's right.

01:19:22.000 He does Don Winslow, and he does a lot of really, really cool...

01:19:26.000 So Jay Porter?

01:19:27.000 No.

01:19:28.000 No, Jay Snyder.

01:19:29.000 Jay Snyder.

01:19:29.000 Jay Snyder is very good.

01:19:30.000 Ray Porter, Jay Snyder.

01:19:32.000 Yeah.

01:19:32.000 They're both fantastic.

01:19:33.000 They're both very good.

01:19:34.000 Yeah.

01:19:34.000 And it's such a hard job to do the audio work.

01:19:36.000 I can't imagine.

01:19:37.000 Because you have to do girl voices. 0.99

01:19:38.000 Yeah.

01:19:38.000 And then you have to do accents.

01:19:39.000 And your books have a lot of accents.

01:19:41.000 Yeah.

01:19:42.000 Gosh, Ray Porter, and Jay Snyder's probably my favorite, but Ray Porter's right up there.

01:19:47.000 He did the Don Winslow Cartel series.

01:19:50.000 Oh, I never read those.

01:19:51.000 There's one called The Border.

01:19:53.000 I think it's The Cartel, The Power of the Dog.

01:19:57.000 Yeah.

01:19:57.000 It's three books.

01:19:58.000 They're fantastic.

01:19:59.000 And I've listened to the Ray Porter thing and there's like six female Mexican, you know, women in the story and I could tell them all apart. 1.00

01:20:07.000 And I'm like, how do you do that?

01:20:09.000 I wonder if they do it, like, do they have, can they really go from character to character as they're doing it?

01:20:15.000 Or do they have to like set up for each individual character and like practice the voice a little bit before they read the dialogue?

01:20:22.000 Like, I wonder how they do that.

01:20:23.000 I do, too, because there must be some sort of cues to where they can, because, you know, sometimes in writing, you don't identify who's speaking until after the sentence or whatever.

01:20:33.000 So somehow, I don't know how they reverse engineer that to do an audiobook.

01:20:36.000 The worst at it.

01:20:39.000 Unfortunately, is Stephen King.

01:20:41.000 He's the worst at reading his own books. 0.68

01:20:43.000 They're terrible. 0.60

01:20:44.000 Oh no.

01:20:45.000 It's terrible.

01:20:46.000 Don't ever get an audio...

01:20:48.000 I don't want to say this because I love Stephen King, but he's just not good at writing.

01:20:51.000 He's great at writing, but when he reads it, it's like he's reading it.

01:20:55.000 It's not like he's acting it.

01:20:57.000 Whereas like Ray Porter, it's like he's acting out, or Jay Snyder.

01:21:01.000 Yeah, I mean, if I'm Stephen King, I've got enough to do.

01:21:04.000 I know, I don't understand why he did it.

01:21:06.000 I would form that out to somebody else.

01:21:07.000 I think he did The Gunslinger, or he's done some of them, and I started listening to him, like, I'm just going to read this.

01:21:13.000 I can't do this.

01:21:14.000 Oh, wow, yeah.

01:21:16.000 Like, non-fiction books, a lot of times...

01:21:18.000 The narrator is the guy that wrote it, and it's really good.

01:21:21.000 I love that.

01:21:22.000 Did you read the Rob O'Neill, the Navy SEAL guy?

01:21:26.000 No, I didn't.

01:21:29.000 Is it called The Operator?

01:21:31.000 It's a Navy SEAL book, and he read it, and I was like, this guy could be a professional audiobook guy, because there's an intensity to him and all that.

01:21:39.000 It just totally worked for the story.

01:21:41.000 That's great.

01:21:42.000 Yeah, I love it when an author reads their own book, especially when it's someone who has done a lot of podcasts and knows how to communicate.

01:21:50.000 He's already got a distinctive, recognizable voice, like a Malcolm Gladwell or something like that.

01:21:56.000 I love when they read their own stuff.

01:21:58.000 Yeah, same.

01:22:00.000 It's such a tricky world, though.

01:22:01.000 I mean, to hire a person to read your fiction audiobook.

01:22:06.000 Like, you got very lucky having an amazing guy do it, but it's got to be, like, to read someone, bring your characters to life.

01:22:15.000 Like, when you first heard the voice of the Gray Man, what did you think?

01:22:20.000 So they did a tryout.

01:22:22.000 I got to choose Jay Snyder, but I only got to choose between two audiobook narrators.

01:22:27.000 And I actually liked them both.

01:22:30.000 It was really cool.

01:22:31.000 Last year I did an Audible original audio drama.

01:22:35.000 So it's not a Gray Man Story, this other book that I have called Armored.

01:22:39.000 And I wrote an audio play so they have sound effects and music and actual actors instead of narrators doing it.

01:22:47.000 Oh, wow.

01:22:47.000 And it was like 618 pages for the five and a half hour, I think, audio play.

01:22:54.000 And it was so fascinating to hear these things that you write, you know, like audio cue.

01:22:59.000 It's like M249 going cyclic, you know, and...

01:23:06.000 It came out before the film, too.

01:23:08.000 It came out six months before the movie came out.

01:23:10.000 And so that was the first time I heard actors acting out something that I'd written, and it was just mind-blowing.

01:23:17.000 That's a really interesting way to do it, to have audio in it, like gunfire, car screeching.

01:23:23.000 It's like an old-time radio play, if you think about it.

01:23:26.000 And I think it worked pretty well.

01:23:28.000 I ended up writing it as a 150,000-word book, so there's things in the book that aren't in the audio play.

01:23:33.000 But I think it's a fun way to spend five hours listening while you're doing something else.

01:23:39.000 Well, I really enjoy fiction, like I said, specifically in the sauna when I'm suffering because it's a nice escape.

01:23:48.000 I can just concentrate on the characters and just deal with the suffering.

01:23:51.000 Yeah.

01:23:59.000 Yeah.

01:24:08.000 Little environment.

01:24:09.000 But with you, this environment is a very specific genre.

01:24:15.000 So do you have to be careful of not like overusing tropes, not reusing ideas, not like and keeping it fresh?

01:24:23.000 Like, how do you stimulate your creativity in terms of like that one particular genre?

01:24:29.000 Yeah, you're exactly right.

01:24:31.000 The first few books, you're pulling off the low-hanging fruit.

01:24:34.000 You have your whole life to think of these cool ideas and these interesting scenarios, and then you get a little bit more and a little bit more, and then you get to a point where it's like, okay, I've...

01:24:46.000 Taking all the parts off of the cars that I have in the back of my house, you know.

01:24:50.000 And so you just have to go out and get more information.

01:24:54.000 Go to other places.

01:24:55.000 I think I've been to like 38 countries doing research.

01:25:01.000 Talk to a lot of people, read a lot, and try and bring stuff in.

01:25:04.000 The macro level, I'm great.

01:25:06.000 I've got ideas for 20 more books, probably.

01:25:08.000 The micro level, it's like, okay, this guy has got to get on a private jet and fly to Malta.

01:25:14.000 It's like, okay, I've done that.

01:25:16.000 How does he do it differently?

01:25:17.000 Or this guy's following another guy down a street.

01:25:20.000 Or this woman is going to kill her husband or whatever. 1.00

01:25:26.000 It's like those things that you've done.

01:25:28.000 I used to joke, I'm like, there's going to be a point where I'm going to be riding a knife fight in a hot tub and go like, this is my third knife fight in a hot tub.

01:25:37.000 It's like, how many times can you get away with that?

01:25:39.000 Do you feel like there's going to come a time where you can't, like it strains credulity to keep the gray man operational? 1.00

01:25:47.000 No.

01:25:47.000 I mean, look at James Bond.

01:25:49.000 That's 60 years.

01:25:50.000 And everybody's going like, how can you get excited in a book where you know the guy's going to win or survive?

01:25:58.000 It's all superhero novels.

01:26:00.000 Nobody goes to a James Bond film thinking he's going to die eight minutes in.

01:26:05.000 They go for other reasons.

01:26:07.000 And in my books, there is other skin in the game.

01:26:10.000 There's some big geopolitical thing that's really happening in the world.

01:26:13.000 A burner...

01:26:13.000 It involves Russia and Ukraine.

01:26:16.000 None of it takes place in Ukraine.

01:26:17.000 It's not about the war, but it's about Russian foreign intelligence.

01:26:20.000 And so I had to do a year ago when I was writing the book, I had to really sort of prognosticate where we would be a year from now to get all that.

01:26:28.000 So it took a lot of work and a lot of research.

01:26:31.000 And it will there will be a time where, you know, America doesn't have that many peer enemies.

01:26:39.000 You know, obviously there's China and there are near peer enemies.

01:26:42.000 China and Russia and North Korea is nukes. 0.71

01:26:43.000 Otherwise, they wouldn't be on anybody's radar.

01:26:47.000 So when I was doing the Clancy books, I was going like, all right, who's left?

01:26:52.000 You know, we can't bring in people from outer space.

01:26:54.000 You know, it's like, what are we going to do?

01:26:57.000 But there's different ways to skin a cat.

01:27:00.000 But I mean, I think, yeah, ultimately, it's going to just get harder and harder to do.

01:27:05.000 It's harder to write my 24th book than it was to write my 5th book.

01:27:09.000 Really?

01:27:10.000 Yeah, way, way, way harder.

01:27:11.000 That's crazy because you've covered so much of the ground.

01:27:15.000 Exactly.

01:27:16.000 One of the things to me that's been interesting about your books is going from the original Gray Man to Sierra 6, where I'm at now, where you have to deal with the new technology.

01:27:28.000 And you have to deal with new surveillance technology.

01:27:31.000 You have to deal with the internet.

01:27:32.000 You have to deal with the fact that someone's going to be a known person.

01:27:36.000 When you've got a guy like the Gray Man that's been involved in so many operations and so many different missions, at a certain point in time, people are aware of him.

01:27:45.000 They're going to be able to recognize him.

01:27:47.000 Yeah, if you look at it literally, but I'll go back to James Bond.

01:27:51.000 He'd walk into a place and say, my name's James Bond, or Bond James Bond.

01:27:55.000 I'm like, he actually used his real name.

01:27:56.000 That's kind of funny.

01:27:58.000 It's like, I'm an MI6 guy using my real name out there in the field.

01:28:02.000 And Yeah, you know, you just try and sell it as best you can.

01:28:07.000 Like, The Gray Man really hasn't aged in the past 10 years or so.

01:28:11.000 He aged maybe in the first couple of books, but I didn't know it was going to be a series.

01:28:14.000 I had no idea.

01:28:15.000 And so there's Daniel Silva.

01:28:18.000 I don't know if you've read him.

01:28:19.000 He's a fantastic thriller author.

01:28:21.000 He actually ages his character, Gabriel Alon, who's an Israeli former Mossad guy.

01:28:27.000 And his books are fantastic.

01:28:29.000 I mean, I look up to him very much.

01:28:32.000 But that's not what I'm doing.

01:28:34.000 I mean, my guy's going to need to be able to climb that fence and jump off that scaffold and land on a tuk-tuk or something.

01:28:42.000 It's like that's not going to go away as long as I'm writing the series.

01:28:45.000 So if each story on its own stands on its own and is fun and is exciting and has something, some kernel out of what's really going on in the world, hopefully to make it...

01:29:10.000 Do you feel like there's going to come a time when you have to come up with a new gray man? 1.00

01:29:17.000 I have another series.

01:29:19.000 It's Josh Duffy series, which is only one book right now, but I'm working on the other one today.

01:29:24.000 So I like bouncing around.

01:29:26.000 But, you know, as far as exchanging the gray man out in a story like someone younger comes and takes a role, probably not because I'm really not aging him.

01:29:34.000 You know, it's like I mentally I'm going like, all right, so he'd be he'd probably be.

01:29:41.000 By this story, he'd probably be about 46 now or something like that.

01:29:44.000 So he could still do a lot of the stuff and a lot of the stuff he couldn't do.

01:29:48.000 Yeah.

01:29:48.000 I remember, you know, when I wrote the first Gray Man, like the older guy who, you know, was like his boss, Hanley, I think was like 44 or 45 or something.

01:29:58.000 I was like, yeah, it's this old fart, you know, and now I'm 55. And you're going like, what an asshole. 1.00

01:30:04.000 But yeah, I think the books are always going to sort of stand on their own and stand alone, like a James Bond or something like that. 0.99

01:30:15.000 And I want there to be story arcs and I want there to be psychology of interpersonal relationships and all these things in the story.

01:30:23.000 But I'm not looking to make the reality, you know, and have anything to do with time.

01:30:28.000 Right.

01:30:29.000 That's tricky.

01:30:30.000 Yeah, it is tricky.

01:30:31.000 It's tricky when you're dealing with someone who's physical, too, right?

01:30:33.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:30:33.000 That's the big issue.

01:30:34.000 Yeah, and I've had complaints.

01:30:36.000 People go, well, yeah, but you said 12 years ago he was, you know, in Iraq or something.

01:30:42.000 And I'm like, yeah, yeah, I did.

01:30:45.000 Wish I didn't.

01:30:48.000 If you'd like to buy a new book, I'd love to sell it to you.

01:30:51.000 But if not, just shuffle on.

01:30:53.000 You're going to have to forget about that part.

01:30:55.000 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

01:30:55.000 That's tricky.

01:30:56.000 That's why I was saying, like, is there going to come a time where you have to phase them out?

01:30:59.000 Yeah.

01:31:00.000 Because, like, if you're doing these things in chronological order and we get to 10 years from now and you're dealing with a 58-year-old gray man...

01:31:06.000 Unless you're still saying he's 37 and people are able to...

01:31:10.000 They'll either buy it or they won't, you know?

01:31:12.000 That's tricky.

01:31:12.000 I mean, I guess James Bond would be about 130 because the first books came out in the late 50s.

01:31:20.000 Right.

01:31:21.000 That's interesting.

01:31:22.000 I didn't think about it that way, right?

01:31:23.000 But I think we're dealing with a totally different James Bond every time, just like we're dealing with a totally different Spider-Man.

01:31:28.000 A few, yeah.

01:31:29.000 I mean, the...

01:31:30.000 That's true.

01:31:31.000 That's true.

01:31:32.000 They reboot.

01:31:33.000 Yeah.

01:31:34.000 And that was the thing that didn't used to happen.

01:31:36.000 But now it happens and it works.

01:31:37.000 Well, they've rebooted Spider-Man like five times.

01:31:40.000 Yeah, I know.

01:31:40.000 How many times?

01:31:41.000 I know.

01:31:41.000 How many Spider-Mans have there been?

01:31:42.000 At least four, right?

01:31:44.000 Yeah.

01:31:45.000 They're making a new one.

01:31:46.000 Are there new Spider-Man?

01:31:47.000 Spider-Man Noir.

01:31:48.000 It's like a TV show that has nothing to do with this.

01:31:50.000 It's been set in the 1930s.

01:31:52.000 Oh, wow.

01:31:53.000 My favorite was the animated one when they did the Spider-Verse.

01:31:56.000 They just completely changed the world and made it a multiverse thing and had a young kid do it.

01:32:01.000 It was great.

01:32:02.000 Yeah, it's clever.

01:32:03.000 I love that one because also with animation, you can get away with so much more.

01:32:07.000 Physically, it makes sense.

01:32:09.000 You can enjoy it.

01:32:10.000 The suspension of disbelief is so much easier.

01:32:12.000 Yeah, and you're not trying to look through the CGI and see if it's legit or not legit.

01:32:17.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:32:18.000 I saw an early version of the Gray Man film, and they hadn't finished all the CGI. I mean, it was fascinating.

01:32:26.000 I didn't know what I was looking at.

01:32:27.000 Basically, it turns to a cartoon for a couple of seconds, almost, with the characters.

01:32:32.000 It's like that Aha! 0.98

01:32:33.000 video take on me.

01:32:34.000 It sort of looks like that to a degree.

01:32:36.000 Just for a second, you're like, what just happened?

01:32:40.000 Yeah, the process of watching your work become a film has got to be very weird.

01:32:44.000 Yeah, I wasn't closely involved with it.

01:32:48.000 I went out and met the Russo brothers when they were going to write the script and spent a few days with them talking about the story and where the future story, because they wanted it to be a franchise from the beginning.

01:32:58.000 But I wasn't involved in the day-to-day, but I was sent scripts.

01:33:02.000 Joe sent me the script that he wrote, and then I saw the shooting script right when they were shooting.

01:33:09.000 That was my involvement with it.

01:33:11.000 And then I would be on Twitter and I'd see Ryan Gosling dressed up as a gray man on Twitter.

01:33:15.000 I didn't see it any way anybody else would have seen it.

01:33:19.000 Are they doing a series?

01:33:21.000 Are they going to continue?

01:33:21.000 They're doing a second one, yeah.

01:33:23.000 And they're writing a spinoff series, which I know nothing about, but the guy who wrote Deadpool, Rhett Reese, I think is his name.

01:33:31.000 They're writing a spinoff based on who?

01:33:33.000 Someone in the series.

01:33:34.000 And I really don't know.

01:33:36.000 I'm not being cagey.

01:33:37.000 Really?

01:33:37.000 Yeah.

01:33:37.000 I just know that that's happening.

01:33:39.000 That's even weirder.

01:33:40.000 So now someone's like taking your world and it's almost like the Spider-Man thing.

01:33:44.000 Yeah.

01:33:44.000 I mean, it depends on what they do.

01:33:45.000 If they take a character like Zoya, who's this former Russian foreign intelligence officer.

01:33:51.000 I love that character.

01:33:52.000 Thank you.

01:33:52.000 Thanks.

01:33:53.000 If they did something with her, that would be cool.

01:33:55.000 If they did something with Zack Hightower, who's kind of like his...

01:33:58.000 On and off again, sidekick.

01:34:00.000 That would be cool, but I don't know what it is.

01:34:02.000 But they are doing a sequel with Ryan Gosling in the role.

01:34:06.000 Have they started that yet?

01:34:07.000 They're writing the script.

01:34:09.000 Steve McFeely's writing the script, one of the screenwriters on Greyman.

01:34:12.000 And is it based on any of your books?

01:34:14.000 It's going to be based on one of the books.

01:34:16.000 Which book?

01:34:17.000 You don't want to tell?

01:34:18.000 No, I don't know.

01:34:19.000 I didn't ask permission.

01:34:21.000 If you're allowed.

01:34:22.000 I didn't ask permission.

01:34:23.000 I get it.

01:34:24.000 My whole point in coming here today was to walk out of here and not go, oh my God, I can't believe I just said that.

01:34:30.000 I think we're good so far.

01:34:31.000 That was close.

01:34:32.000 Well, you know, you did a good job.

01:34:34.000 You navigated it.

01:34:35.000 Is it a weird thing to watch someone change your script?

01:34:39.000 To change the plot and change how the characters interact?

01:34:43.000 It is really weird.

01:34:45.000 I think I went into it with the right mindset that this was a film representation.

01:34:51.000 And I know that the directors are really creative people and the screenwriters and cinematographers and actors.

01:34:57.000 They don't look at it as their job that they're engineers that are going to take a piece of paper and turn it into celluloid with everyone doing exactly the same thing.

01:35:06.000 So I never expected that.

01:35:07.000 There are places in there where I think I really like what they did, and there's places in there where it's like I think my line landed a little bit better.

01:35:16.000 And that actually made me happy.

01:35:18.000 I wasn't mad that they didn't do it my way.

01:35:21.000 It's more like, okay, I think I have something to offer still instead of all these big shots with all this money come and make something so vastly superior to the little paperback that I wrote.

01:35:32.000 I think there's places where my stuff holds up and there's stuff in there that I think is fantastic too.

01:35:38.000 It is really strange.

01:35:39.000 The toughest thing is the complaints from fans that aren't happy because of the changes.

01:35:44.000 So people just pigeonhole me all the time at a conference or something.

01:35:48.000 And they'll be like, in the movie, they did this.

01:35:50.000 And in the book, they did this.

01:35:52.000 And I was like, yeah, I wrote the book and I saw the movie.

01:35:54.000 So this whole interaction is like, I don't know what to tell you.

01:35:58.000 You know, it's like I can't speak.

01:36:00.000 And people will email me and they're like, you've screwed up.

01:36:03.000 You gave it away.

01:36:04.000 You know, it was all for the money or whatever.

01:36:06.000 And you're like, I didn't have any creative control.

01:36:08.000 I'm not Stephen King or John Grusham or one of these guys.

01:36:10.000 You know, I had this little paperback that I got a little bit of money to advance to put out and they Well,

01:36:31.000 Stephen King famously didn't like The Shining.

01:36:33.000 Yeah.

01:36:33.000 Which is wild, right?

01:36:35.000 Because it's Stanley Kubrick and it's Jack Nicholson and it's an amazing movie.

01:36:40.000 But the movie was very different than his book.

01:36:43.000 In his book, the character Jack, it takes a long time before he goes crazy.

01:36:49.000 And he starts out sane.

01:36:51.000 He starts out just a troubled former alcoholic who's trying to get his life together and do right by his family.

01:36:56.000 And he gets this opportunity to look over this hotel and he's going to write this book.

01:37:01.000 And then along the way, he goes nuts.

01:37:02.000 Yeah.

01:37:03.000 That's the difference between a book and a movie.

01:37:04.000 I like that added stuff.

01:37:07.000 I think Tom Clancy didn't like Harrison Ford in the Jack Ryan films.

01:37:14.000 Really?

01:37:14.000 And I think it was just an age thing because in his head he was pretty literal about – at this stage when I wrote this book, he's a young CIA analyst who – Or whatever.

01:37:24.000 And I think Harrison Ford was older.

01:37:26.000 And I'm not 100% sure about that.

01:37:28.000 But I do know that, you know, I've read places.

01:37:32.000 Tom never told me this, but that he wasn't a big fan of those.

01:37:36.000 And I think those are the best ones.

01:37:38.000 I don't know.

01:37:38.000 Red October was good.

01:37:39.000 I never saw any of his.

01:37:41.000 What ones were his?

01:37:42.000 Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger.

01:37:44.000 And those were all Harrison Ford?

01:37:47.000 Yeah.

01:37:47.000 No kidding.

01:37:48.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:37:49.000 And I think they did a great job.

01:37:51.000 Alec Baldwin was great in Red October.

01:37:53.000 Yeah.

01:37:54.000 And too bad he didn't stick with it.

01:37:56.000 I forgot about Red October.

01:37:57.000 Yeah.

01:37:58.000 Yeah.

01:37:59.000 I forgot about Patriot Games, too.

01:38:01.000 Yeah.

01:38:01.000 Yeah, well, it's so interesting when you get a known commodity, like a famous celebrity that comes in and takes over a role that you've created.

01:38:11.000 Yeah.

01:38:12.000 I was happy with Ryan Gosling.

01:38:17.000 As I described the gray man, the look is pretty similar.

01:38:21.000 And he didn't overbake it.

01:38:23.000 I feel like the scenes with the girl that he's protecting could have turned schmaltzy and cheesy.

01:38:30.000 And they didn't.

01:38:31.000 And I like that.

01:38:32.000 I like it a little bit better.

01:38:54.000 Billy Bob Thornton is a CIA guy sitting in a prison with a dude saying, here's the name of our secret CIA program and here's what it does.

01:39:02.000 Would you like to join?

01:39:03.000 That's how that works.

01:39:05.000 The funniest part was that there's a scene, a big action scene in Prague.

01:39:10.000 It takes place in Prague and the gray man is handcuffed to a bench and he's shooting bad guys and he can't get away and there's cops and dead cops around him and then the bad guys, Chris Evans sending the bad guys in from all directions.

01:39:23.000 And at one point, he reaches over to this cop and pulls a frag grenade off the guy's utility belt.

01:39:27.000 And I'm like, the cops in Prague carry frags? 0.99

01:39:30.000 That's some hardcore cops. 0.98

01:39:33.000 He throws it, blows something up, and I'm like, but it works in the movie. 1.00

01:39:36.000 It's like nobody's spending that much time looking at it unless you're the idiot that wrote it. 1.00

01:39:40.000 Well, that is the problem, because you're the guy that wrote it. 1.00

01:39:42.000 Exactly, exactly.

01:39:44.000 That's why it's got to be weird, I would imagine.

01:39:46.000 Yeah.

01:39:47.000 Do you have any ambitions to completely change genres, to do something that's outside of the realm of success that you found yourself in?

01:39:57.000 Yeah, I've been asked that a lot, and I do have a bunch of ideas for books.

01:40:01.000 They're mostly in the genre.

01:40:04.000 There's some stuff that are a little bit pushing away.

01:40:07.000 There's kind of a romantic suspense story, but it involves CIA stories.

01:40:13.000 That I'm working on it slowly amidst other things and just kind of like plotting out.

01:40:19.000 And someday I'm like, someday I'm going to write this book, you know.

01:40:23.000 But it's still a thriller.

01:40:26.000 It still sort of brushes against espionage, but it's more like a romance angle that my stuff doesn't really have.

01:40:35.000 Is that what you've always gravitated towards?

01:40:37.000 Like what you consume?

01:40:39.000 The kind of books you read?

01:40:40.000 No.

01:40:40.000 I mean, the kind of books I read are the kind of books I write.

01:40:43.000 And I wrote a military thriller, co-authored a military thriller in 2019 called Red Metal with a then active duty Marine Lieutenant Colonel, a good friend of mine, Rip Rawlings.

01:40:54.000 Because I always, even though I wasn't in the military, Tom Clancy wasn't in the military.

01:40:58.000 It's like I always thought that I had one of those in me, like a big military thriller like an old Tom Clancy one.

01:41:05.000 And so I wanted to do it forever.

01:41:07.000 And I met Rip at the Pentagon when I was researching a Clancy book, and he wanted to be a writer.

01:41:12.000 He was a writer, but it hadn't been published.

01:41:14.000 And he and I became friends.

01:41:15.000 And for like four years, we would just bounce ideas off each other.

01:41:18.000 And one day I just said, hey, Rip, I think I could go to my editor or my agent and I can get us a book deal if you want to do this together.

01:41:25.000 So we did.

01:41:25.000 And he and I went to Poland and to Germany and he went to France and we went to Nellis Air Force Base.

01:41:32.000 And we did research and research.

01:41:34.000 And this book came out in 2019. It was a Russia war with NATO. And it did really well.

01:41:39.000 It hit the times list.

01:41:40.000 And we're doing a sequel.

01:41:42.000 But the idea was I wanted to do something that was a little bit out of the spy novel thing.

01:41:48.000 This is big troop movements and aircraft and all this stuff.

01:41:52.000 And I wanted to write something big like that.

01:41:54.000 And I did it and I was really happy with the experience.

01:41:56.000 It was a ton of work, but it was also really fulfilling.

01:41:59.000 So I made...

01:42:02.000 I get a little bit afield in what I write.

01:42:05.000 You know, it's not always going to be like, you know, the assassin walking down the street, you know, chasing a guy.

01:42:09.000 But I probably won't go that wide.

01:42:11.000 I'm not going to be writing, you know, a Bollywood script or anything like that anytime soon.

01:42:15.000 Do you have time in between books where you just...

01:42:20.000 Read or just research and just try to like to fuel your creativity?

01:42:26.000 Yeah, I didn't but now I realize how important it is and so last year I had two books come out and the film came out So I had all these things that didn't involve writing a book and I wrote burner which I went to several countries to research and took probably eight months to write the book and And I was supposed to write something else last year.

01:42:45.000 And both my agent and my editor, who are both great guys, they both said, why don't you just take the rest of the year off?

01:42:51.000 Because you've really been burning the candle at both ends and start fresh next year.

01:42:57.000 And so it was hard, you know, to get up one day and not feel like you have to be on your laptop in four minutes, you know.

01:43:04.000 But I used that time to kind of come up with this year's book to where I have...

01:43:09.000 Pretty more fleshed out outline than I usually do.

01:43:12.000 Significantly more.

01:43:13.000 But yeah, it was just days of going to the park or working out in a little home gym and listening to podcasts about stuff that would be in the next book or reading stuff and slowly taking notes.

01:43:28.000 And I don't really have the luxury of doing that every time.

01:43:31.000 When I finish the new Gray Man book, I've got to get right into the second Armored book, which is the one that will come out next year.

01:43:38.000 And I better have a plot to figure it out on the plane, you know, as I'm on book tour or something.

01:43:44.000 Is that good to have that kind of pressure?

01:43:47.000 If I didn't have it, I'd probably still be writing my second book, honestly.

01:43:52.000 I hate it, but I need it.

01:43:56.000 I've never been able to straighten out my work-life balance the way I would like to.

01:44:02.000 I'm insecure as a writer, so I hate what I'm doing 95% of the way through it.

01:44:09.000 And then tweak, tweak, tweak.

01:44:12.000 And my wife could tell you, like, the last couple years, you know, it's like, I hate the book in July.

01:44:18.000 And then beginning of August, I'm like, well, I mean, there's something in there.

01:44:21.000 There is a heart to this thing.

01:44:22.000 I just got a lot of mistakes.

01:44:24.000 And then by the end of August, you know, it's kind of like, all right, I think this one's actually okay.

01:44:27.000 You know, and then by the time it comes out, it's like, all right, this is done.

01:44:31.000 It's as good as I can make it.

01:44:32.000 I'm proud of it.

01:44:33.000 You know, let's get it out.

01:44:34.000 I think that feeling of never having a good balance is like part of the creative process.

01:44:41.000 Yeah.

01:44:41.000 I've never met anybody who does great work who's like really happy with the whole process.

01:44:46.000 Yeah, but it's fun to fantasize about just like getting up in the morning with a big smile on your face and going like, man, I'm kicking ass. 0.97

01:44:52.000 Right. 0.94

01:44:53.000 It's always like I'm just flailing.

01:44:54.000 Yeah, I have really bad imposter syndrome and I always have and I guess I always will. 0.92

01:44:59.000 So, you know, it's this whole, like, I hope they don't find me out.

01:45:02.000 I'm glad you said that because I think everybody who's good has imposter syndrome.

01:45:05.000 I've talked to great comics.

01:45:07.000 I've talked to great musicians.

01:45:08.000 I've talked to great writers.

01:45:10.000 And almost all of them have this thing like, oh, they're going to find me out.

01:45:14.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:45:15.000 You're like, why am I here?

01:45:18.000 You know, it's like – and I've even – I used to have really, really bad social anxiety when I was trying to get published.

01:45:26.000 Like, I literally had appointments to talk to agents, and I never left my hotel room because I just chickened out, you know?

01:45:32.000 Wow.

01:45:32.000 And that happened.

01:45:33.000 And then, so once I got published, it was still sort of like this, I don't belong here thing.

01:45:37.000 Yeah.

01:45:38.000 And now, you know, like, when I first was asked to write with Clancy, I was like, oh my God, why are they asking me this?

01:45:44.000 You know, it's... 0.53

01:45:45.000 It's like, oh crap. 0.73

01:45:47.000 It's like, how do I get out of this? 0.59

01:45:49.000 Especially Clancy, right?

01:45:50.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:45:51.000 Because you're such a huge fan.

01:45:52.000 Yeah, and I was like, can't I go to the next level above me and not way up there?

01:45:56.000 That's so scary up there.

01:45:57.000 But then I was, after we did three, he passed away right after we, I mean, days after we finished the third book together.

01:46:04.000 And then his family asked me to continue the Jack Ryan series.

01:46:09.000 And if they'd asked anybody else, I'd have been really upset.

01:46:11.000 Like, by then I felt like I was the right guy for the job.

01:46:14.000 And it was the first time in my career I felt like I was, you know, I was like, why are they letting me write for a living? 0.93

01:46:20.000 I get to go to other countries and talk to people and then write fun stuff about shit blowing up.

01:46:24.000 You know, it's like, how cool is this? 0.87

01:46:26.000 And it took me a few years to where it's like, okay, there's something I bring to the table here.

01:46:31.000 Oh, you most certainly do.

01:46:32.000 Yeah, that's great.

01:46:33.000 I'm really proud of you, for you.

01:46:36.000 If I was your friend, I'd be proud of you.

01:46:37.000 Let's be friends.

01:46:38.000 Let's be friends.

01:46:39.000 But I think that's an amazing story, to go from a guy who's a giant Tom Clancy fan to be writing those novels.

01:46:45.000 Yeah.

01:46:46.000 That's amazing.

01:46:47.000 It's great.

01:46:47.000 And to know the language and to know the characters and to keep it true to the original work.

01:46:54.000 Yeah, so I'd only had a couple of paperback books out when they asked me if I was interested in being his co-author, but we had the same editor.

01:47:01.000 Did he know your work?

01:47:02.000 Was he a fan of your work?

01:47:04.000 I don't know.

01:47:04.000 I mean, I think ultimately, yes.

01:47:06.000 I mean, like, we met.

01:47:07.000 But when they first reached out to me, it wasn't a job offer.

01:47:11.000 It was more like, would you be interested?

01:47:12.000 Do you want us to put your hat in the ring for this?

01:47:18.000 Right.

01:47:38.000 And I was like, I bet this book is due on a certain date no matter what.

01:47:42.000 So finally I said, listen, I am a huge Clancy fan.

01:47:45.000 I know these characters.

01:47:46.000 I know these people.

01:47:48.000 Let me write 50 pages as if I was writing a Tom Clancy novel and do that as a tryout.

01:47:54.000 And so I don't think anybody else did that.

01:47:55.000 And so I just wrote 50 pages like in the middle of a book that never existed.

01:47:59.000 You know, just like I didn't worry about plot.

01:48:01.000 I was just like, there's a scene.

01:48:03.000 And I gave them that and then they had me go up to Baltimore and meet Tom and then I had the job.

01:48:08.000 Wow!

01:48:09.000 It was amazing.

01:48:10.000 I was terrified to meet Clancy.

01:48:12.000 Why did they want someone to collaborate with Tom?

01:48:16.000 Do I even know the answer?

01:48:17.000 I really don't know the answer to that.

01:48:19.000 It happens with authors as they get older.

01:48:25.000 I mean, I already don't have the focus.

01:48:27.000 We were talking earlier.

01:48:28.000 It's like I used to be able to write 6, 8, 10, 12 hours.

01:48:32.000 Do you take any nootropics?

01:48:34.000 I don't know what that is.

01:48:35.000 Really?

01:48:36.000 Interesting.

01:48:37.000 I'll get you some.

01:48:37.000 Do you have any?

01:48:38.000 Yeah, I do.

01:48:38.000 Oh, I was kidding.

01:48:39.000 I do have some.

01:48:40.000 I have some right here.

01:48:41.000 Can we take it on camera and see what happens?

01:48:43.000 See if I get more interesting?

01:48:44.000 It'll take a few hours for this to kick in.

01:48:46.000 This is Alpha Brain Black Label.

01:48:49.000 This is my favorite.

01:48:50.000 But I take a bunch of different nootropics.

01:48:53.000 What they are is essentially building blocks for human neurotransmitters.

01:48:56.000 It's just nutrients.

01:48:58.000 Okay.

01:48:58.000 Here, take the six.

01:49:00.000 Is it legal in all 50 states?

01:49:01.000 Yes, 100% legal.

01:49:03.000 You can buy it on Amazon.

01:49:04.000 Here, take six of these.

01:49:05.000 Thanks, man.

01:49:06.000 There you go.

01:49:06.000 I appreciate it.

01:49:07.000 I'll take them, too, so you know I'm not poisoning you.

01:49:09.000 Do you take all six?

01:49:10.000 Yeah, I take all six.

01:49:12.000 Seriously?

01:49:12.000 Yes, I'm going to mess with you.

01:49:14.000 All right, here we go.

01:49:15.000 Here we go.

01:49:18.000 But I take a bunch of different ones.

01:49:19.000 I started taking a new one that they sent me called Magic Mind.

01:49:22.000 And it's nootropics along with lion's mane and a bunch of functional mushrooms.

01:49:29.000 Wow.

01:49:30.000 And I like that one too.

01:49:31.000 There's another one.

01:49:32.000 I got found out about nootropics because of Bill Romanoski.

01:49:36.000 He was a former football player, great football player, and developed some, obviously, some neural issues, post-concussions and impacts and stuff like that.

01:49:47.000 So we created something called Neuro One, and I really liked that.

01:49:50.000 I started taking Neuro One because there was a show called Allison No Name. 0.97

01:49:56.000 Was that Allison No Name? 0.60

01:50:01.000 San Francisco...

01:50:02.000 It was the morning radio show.

01:50:04.000 And the dude, they would call him No Name.

01:50:07.000 And his trainer was Bill Romanowski.

01:50:11.000 And Bill Romanowski got him on this stuff.

01:50:13.000 And this was quite a few years ago.

01:50:14.000 And I go, what is it?

01:50:15.000 And he's like, it's nutrients that help you think better.

01:50:19.000 I was like, well, what do you do?

01:50:20.000 And he gave me some.

01:50:22.000 And I started taking it.

01:50:23.000 I'm like, this is interesting.

01:50:24.000 It helps you form sentences better.

01:50:27.000 It helps your verbal memory.

01:50:29.000 And one of the things we've done with AlphaBrain, because this is a company that I owned, we sent a bunch of it and we funded two double-blind placebo-controlled studies at the Boston Center for Memory.

01:50:43.000 And they showed increase in verbal memory, increase in reaction time, increase in peak alpha flow state.

01:50:51.000 So it enhances your ability to think, and that's the thing.

01:50:57.000 It's not going to make you smarter, but what it does is it provides your brain with the nutrients it needs to function at its best.

01:51:03.000 There is nothing I need more.

01:51:07.000 Last year, I was worrying that I was having some kind of cognitive decline because I was forgetting things.

01:51:12.000 And it's like, wait, did I just do that or was I about to do that?

01:51:15.000 And I think it was because I was just really overloaded, just busy and family and stuff.

01:51:20.000 And, you know, it's like going from two dogs and no family to three stepkids and four dogs and, you know, the movie's out and two book came out.

01:51:30.000 And I just really felt like something was going on in my head.

01:51:35.000 Yeah.

01:51:35.000 And once I turned that book in and took a couple months off or whatever, things have, you know...

01:51:40.000 Recharge.

01:51:41.000 Recharge to some degree, but as you get older, you need that.

01:51:44.000 Well, there's also a thing with the vitality of your body.

01:51:48.000 Like, the more vitality you have, the more robust your body is, the more you can function at a high energy level for longer periods of time, which is, I think, cardio is very important for anybody who's creative.

01:51:59.000 I mean there's a lot of like brilliant creative people that never work out ever and 100% you can do it I know some brilliant comedians and writers and all they do is they force themselves to sit down they create amazing work But I think if you looked at it comprehensively the overall robustness of your physical body the your body's ability to generate energy Function at you know a really good pace and to just be Overall,

01:52:27.000 healthy, I think, is very important for creativity.

01:52:30.000 And I think cardiovascular fitness, in particular, seems to really enhance creativity.

01:52:35.000 I know a lot of people that get very creative when they run, very creative when they'll do something that is a high tax rate on the body, like yoga or CrossFit, something that just keeps your body functioning at a very high level.

01:52:51.000 I think that can enhance it, too.

01:52:53.000 I've had the best...

01:52:55.000 I work out regularly and it started in 2019. I'd just gotten divorced and I'd lost a ton of weight and I wasn't sleeping.

01:53:02.000 I still had trouble sleeping, but I was kind of freaked out.

01:53:06.000 So I went to a psychiatrist, like, what's wrong with me?

01:53:08.000 And talked to him for a while and he said, you are as healthy as anybody's ever walked through my door.

01:53:12.000 You just have these chemicals firing in your head right now because of your divorce and how you're feeling.

01:53:17.000 And he's like... 0.98

01:53:18.000 I could prescribe you some crap, but you should probably just work out. 0.99

01:53:22.000 That's a great psychiatrist. 0.99

01:53:23.000 Yeah, he's fantastic.

01:53:24.000 Thank God you found that guy.

01:53:25.000 Yeah, and so that was July 1st of 2019, and so I'm coming up on five years of keeping my weight.

01:53:32.000 Like, I lost 40 pounds.

01:53:34.000 And I exercise.

01:53:36.000 And when you first start doing it, it makes you really tired.

01:53:39.000 But when you keep doing it, it's like it keeps you from being tired.

01:53:42.000 Yeah.

01:53:42.000 And so I'll work out every afternoon, like 3 or 4 in the afternoon.

01:53:46.000 And I sleep better.

01:53:47.000 And the next day is better until I do it again.

01:53:50.000 And if I don't work out for a couple of days, I feel really lethargic.

01:53:55.000 Yes.

01:53:55.000 I'm with you 100%.

01:53:57.000 And for me, it's...

01:53:58.000 I have this thought that I think that human beings evolved with anxiety and fear because of actual real threats.

01:54:07.000 Sure.

01:54:08.000 Because of threats of animals, of predators, and of neighboring tribes invading and war and chaos and violence.

01:54:15.000 Defense mechanisms.

01:54:16.000 Yes.

01:54:18.000 Right.

01:54:38.000 I think that there's a real physical requirement of taxing your body that comes with that sort of anxiety, that if you don't meet that physical requirement, your body's just like...

01:54:49.000 Because it's like, we've got to run, man.

01:54:51.000 There's something going on.

01:54:53.000 There's something attacking us. 0.99

01:54:54.000 We've got to get the fuck out of here. 1.00

01:54:56.000 Unless you meet those physical requirements, like wear your body out so that it can get back to a normal baseline, it doesn't burn off all that shit. 0.99

01:55:05.000 I'm obviously not talking about it like a scientist, but there's something to that. 0.94

01:55:10.000 For me, in times of peak anxiety and peak stress, nothing makes me feel better than a hard workout.

01:55:17.000 Yeah.

01:55:18.000 A hard workout, hard sauna session, cold plunge, I'm back.

01:55:21.000 Yeah.

01:55:22.000 I agree with that.

01:55:23.000 I got hurt playing soccer in my 30s and had a back surgery and the surgeon botched it.

01:55:29.000 So I have permanent nerve damage in my left leg.

01:55:32.000 Oh, no.

01:55:33.000 And I had since then had four surgeries to try and correct stuff and two of those surgeries didn't go well.

01:55:39.000 So I've spent an entire year and a half of my life on crutches or on a knee scooter and barely able to work out.

01:55:47.000 My gym in my old house was just a playroom, and it was a wooden staircase, and it's like I'm crawling on my couch.

01:55:54.000 Oh, wow.

01:55:55.000 And I was literally just doing Turkish get-ups, and I'd do four on each side and be crippled the next day. 0.95

01:56:01.000 But that was all the exercise I could get.

01:56:02.000 And I was getting depressed and gaining weight, and I just...

01:56:06.000 I'm feeling really just tired and lethargic all the time.

01:56:11.000 And now that I'm able to do—I wear a little brace on my ankle—and I'm able to do most anything that I want to do.

01:56:20.000 And the more active I stay, just the better I feel in a hundred different ways.

01:56:24.000 Did you get disfused?

01:56:26.000 So I have two levels in lumbar discs.

01:56:29.000 I have artificial discs.

01:56:30.000 So it's something that they were...

01:56:32.000 It's approved in other countries, but it's not FDA approved in the U.S. for some reason.

01:56:37.000 Or maybe it is now.

01:56:38.000 I know quite a few people that have artificial discs.

01:56:41.000 They do in their neck.

01:56:42.000 There's a lot in cervical.

01:56:43.000 But lumbar was, at least then...

01:56:46.000 What year was this?

01:56:47.000 2004, when I had that surgery.

01:56:49.000 Oh, very early on.

01:56:49.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:56:50.000 So yours is not an articulating...

01:56:52.000 It is articulating.

01:56:53.000 It is?

01:56:53.000 Yeah.

01:56:54.000 Is it titanium?

01:56:54.000 It's two levels, yes.

01:56:56.000 Interesting.

01:56:56.000 Yeah, it's called a Maverick.

01:56:57.000 Actually, the company I work for made spinal implants, and it was their device.

01:57:03.000 I actually got it.

01:57:04.000 And it's done great for me.

01:57:06.000 I still have chronic back pain, but it's so much less.

01:57:10.000 Did you have stenosis?

01:57:12.000 Yes.

01:57:12.000 So when they put this in, what were you experiencing before they put that in?

01:57:17.000 Was it a bulging disc?

01:57:18.000 Was it herniated?

01:57:19.000 Was it pushing against nerves?

01:57:21.000 So the first surgeon went in to clean up a one-level bulging disc and left sequestered disc material, so the jelly inside the jelly donut that is the disc, in the foramen, which is the Joint area where the nerve root goes,

01:57:39.000 and it crushed off my nerve root, my L4 nerve root, which means I can't dorsiflex my left foot.

01:57:46.000 At all?

01:57:46.000 Uh-uh.

01:57:47.000 Still?

01:57:47.000 Still.

01:57:48.000 But if it was my L5 nerve root, another doctor told me, he's like, look on the bright side.

01:57:55.000 If it was the L5 nerve root, you'd never be able to evacuate your bowels or have sex or anything like that.

01:58:01.000 And I'm like, okay, suddenly, you know, the glass is half full.

01:58:06.000 And so what have they done to correct that?

01:58:07.000 Well, so I had a second surgery to kind of get that disc material out, and then I had a third surgery because I just had so much discogenic pain, so just midline back pain.

01:58:17.000 I was walking with a cane when I was 34, and I'd have been an amateur, but a very intense soccer player.

01:58:25.000 And the third surgery, they went in through my front, and they moved the whole stomach, the whole peritoneum, the bag that holds the stomach, and they put, like, these, like, shoehorn in there, and then they took out the discs, and then they put in these joints that look kind of like an Oreo cookie,

01:58:41.000 but...

01:58:42.000 So I have two levels of that.

01:58:44.000 And my back pain, 65% of my back pain went away immediately.

01:58:48.000 And with therapy, another 20%.

01:58:50.000 I still have.

01:58:50.000 But then in 2017, I went to have a surgery to fix my ankle and give me the dorsiflexion back.

01:58:57.000 They can move a tendon from the inside of your foot behind your shin and attach it to the top of your foot.

01:59:02.000 And after a while, your body learns how to use that tendon right.

01:59:05.000 And so that surgery failed.

01:59:06.000 They did it again.

01:59:07.000 It failed again.

01:59:08.000 And the second time, it got infected.

01:59:12.000 And just a bad doctor, honestly.

01:59:15.000 And I almost lost the foot.

01:59:17.000 I had to go and be hospitalized.

01:59:18.000 Was it MRSA? What does that mean?

01:59:21.000 Staph?

01:59:22.000 Staph infection?

01:59:22.000 Yeah, it was some kind of a staph.

01:59:25.000 Osteomyelitis.

01:59:26.000 It was a bone infection.

01:59:27.000 Oh, Jesus.

01:59:28.000 That's scary.

01:59:29.000 Yeah, I was on crutches and going through the rain to the infusion clinic every day.

01:59:35.000 But I had the right mental attitude.

01:59:37.000 I was like, hey, if I get past this, I can get past anything.

01:59:40.000 I was like, don't let yourself get depressed about this.

01:59:42.000 And all the while you're writing, too.

01:59:43.000 Yeah, I did two books that year.

01:59:45.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:59:46.000 A Gray Man and a Clancy. 0.67

01:59:49.000 It was about a year and a half process, but I won't be getting another surgery.

01:59:54.000 But still, the foot is not functioning properly.

01:59:58.000 Yeah, I just can't dorsiflex.

02:00:00.000 If I wear the right brace, I can cram a soccer cleat on.

02:00:04.000 And, you know, play soccer with my kids and that sort of stuff.

02:00:08.000 And I can go to the park for a few hours a day or whatever, you know, a few miles and no big deal.

02:00:14.000 But if I'm standing, just standing there like at a cocktail party or something like that, it's excruciating.

02:00:18.000 I have hydrocodone is the only thing I do.

02:00:20.000 Wow!

02:00:21.000 It's excruciating.

02:00:22.000 And I've done all the...

02:00:23.000 Anybody that says, you should do physical therapy, it's like I know all the exercises because I've been to like 10, 12 bouts of physical therapy and I do them and it probably makes it somewhat better.

02:00:34.000 Have you done any stem cells?

02:00:36.000 No, I've never done that.

02:00:38.000 You should really look into that.

02:00:40.000 I haven't even had an MRI on this back in like 15 years.

02:00:43.000 I mean, it's because it feels the same.

02:00:45.000 But yeah, I probably should find a doctor.

02:00:47.000 I'll connect you with some people.

02:00:49.000 Stem cells.

02:00:50.000 Well, there's some places that you can go outside of the United States where they can do some pretty phenomenal stuff with stem cells because they don't have the same regulations that we have here because of the FDA. But I know a bunch of people that have had neurological issues and some serious injuries that they've helped recover from.

02:01:06.000 Yeah.

02:01:07.000 Yeah.

02:01:07.000 Oh, that's cool.

02:01:08.000 Yeah, I'll connect you when we get out of here.

02:01:11.000 It's a great parlor trick, though, with my kids.

02:01:13.000 I've actually gotten a pair of pliers and pinched my toe, which is not recommended, you know?

02:01:17.000 You don't feel anything in your foot at all?

02:01:18.000 Not in that part of my foot.

02:01:20.000 Wow.

02:01:21.000 That's got to be crazy.

02:01:22.000 Well, wasn't that...

02:01:23.000 Isn't Hulk Hogan saying that?

02:01:25.000 He can't feel his legs now?

02:01:26.000 I think Hulk Hogan said that because of his most recent back surgeries.

02:01:30.000 Hulk Hogan's had a series of back surgeries and I guess he can't feel his legs.

02:01:35.000 That's the nerve roots that go down your legs.

02:01:37.000 Yeah, but back surgery is a crazy one and I wish I had known you before you had gotten it because there's stuff that you could do with bulging discs now that you can really repair them with stem cells and with There's some decompression exercises that they can decompress the spine.

02:01:56.000 There's a machine called Reverse Hyper that's particularly good at the lumbar area.

02:02:01.000 It was created by this guy, Louie Simmons, who was a famous power lifter, who fucked his back up from compression, and they wanted to fuse his back, and he was like, well, why can't I figure out a way to decompress it?

02:02:17.000 There's got to be a way to decompress it.

02:02:18.000 So we invented this machine called the Reverse Hyper.

02:02:21.000 And what the Reverse Hyper is, we have one out here in the gym.

02:02:23.000 I'll show it to you after we're done.

02:02:25.000 But you lay your stomach down on this flat bench and you hook your ankles up to this thing that's sort of like a leg curl.

02:02:33.000 And you lift up And then you lift your legs up, which strengthens the back.

02:02:39.000 And then as you let it down, it swings and it's actively decompressing your back.

02:02:45.000 This is like traction.

02:02:46.000 This is it right here.

02:02:47.000 So that's the machine.

02:02:50.000 I actually use that today.

02:02:52.000 That's the Rogue version of it, which I think is the best version of that machine.

02:02:57.000 Yeah, that would definitely decompress things down there.

02:02:59.000 Yeah, so as it drops down, you're pulling the back.

02:03:04.000 So you're strengthening it on the up, on the concentric, and then on the eccentric, you're lengthening.

02:03:12.000 Yeah.

02:03:12.000 And it allows the spine to slowly get stretched and pulled apart, and it's been amazing for me.

02:03:18.000 It strengthens that area, and it's alleviated any issues that I had.

02:03:22.000 I used to get the occasional sciatic pain.

02:03:25.000 I don't get any of that anymore.

02:03:26.000 Oh, that's fantastic. 0.99

02:03:27.000 And my back is all fucked up. 0.98

02:03:29.000 From the top of my neck all the way down to my lower back, I've had issues from jiu-jitsu. 0.99

02:03:34.000 Jiu-jitsu is the worst.

02:03:35.000 Jiu-jitsu and wrestling, it's like people are constantly shoving your neck into You're getting stacked, where literally all your weight is on your upper back and your neck, and someone's got a hold of your legs, and you're trying to pass, and you're resisting and moving,

02:03:52.000 and there's so much strain on the spinal column.

02:03:55.000 Unless you strengthen all the tissue around that to keep it stable, you're going to get injuries.

02:04:02.000 So I do something for my neck.

02:04:04.000 I have this thing called an iron neck where I put a halo on and a I have a bungee cord that's like 50 pounds of pressure to pull it back.

02:04:10.000 I've seen that, yeah.

02:04:12.000 So that's how I keep everything strong and functional.

02:04:15.000 And there's ways around the surgery.

02:04:18.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:04:19.000 For some people, for some injuries.

02:04:21.000 I mean, it's not for all of them.

02:04:22.000 But for bulging discs, I had a bulging disc in my neck to the point where it was causing ulnar nerve pain, where I'd have this pain in my elbow and my fingertips were getting numb. 0.96

02:04:32.000 And it was pretty fucked. 0.96

02:04:33.000 And I fixed all that. 0.99

02:04:34.000 Yeah.

02:04:35.000 No surgery.

02:04:35.000 That's awesome.

02:04:36.000 Yeah.

02:04:36.000 Back in 2002, I basically went to the ER because I blew a disc playing soccer.

02:04:41.000 And the surgeon was this British guy who knew all about soccer.

02:04:45.000 And he's like, you know, you might have to sit out the rest of this season, but by the fall, you'll be able to play again if we do this surgery.

02:04:50.000 And I'm like, okay.

02:04:51.000 And I woke up and couldn't feel my leg.

02:04:54.000 That's the problem with when you're dealing with nerves.

02:04:56.000 Yeah.

02:04:57.000 You're dealing with the spine.

02:04:58.000 It's such a delicate place.

02:04:59.000 It really is.

02:05:00.000 My friend, Bas Rutten, who's the UFC heavyweight champion.

02:05:03.000 I've got some of his tapes and stuff.

02:05:05.000 He's great.

02:05:05.000 Bas had his neck fused and one of his arms shriveled.

02:05:09.000 He had atrophy because of nerve damage.

02:05:12.000 And so he's got what he calls baby arm.

02:05:15.000 So his right arm is like half the size of his left arm.

02:05:18.000 His left arm is jacked.

02:05:20.000 And it's not fixable?

02:05:21.000 It's a slow recovery process.

02:05:24.000 Every year he'll gain a little bit more movement, a little bit more strength.

02:05:28.000 But here he was, former heavyweight champion of the world, he couldn't hold up a gallon of milk.

02:05:33.000 Ugh, God.

02:05:34.000 Yeah, just crazy.

02:05:36.000 I don't know how long it's been since I've seen him, but he looked in good shape.

02:05:39.000 I saw him the other day.

02:05:40.000 He looks better.

02:05:41.000 He's getting better constantly, but that one particular area because of the fusion. 0.99

02:05:46.000 And he fucked his neck up, believe it or not. 0.99

02:05:48.000 Well, he had fucked his neck up many times in his career. 1.00

02:05:51.000 He actually fought for the heavyweight title when he... 0.98

02:05:54.000 Was it the heavyweight title?

02:05:55.000 No. 0.99

02:05:56.000 When he fought Teyoshi Kosaka, which was, I think, the first fight that he had in the UFC, he couldn't do any wrestling because his neck was so fucked up.

02:06:03.000 So he just kind of had to like spar and condition himself and get in shape without doing any wrestling.

02:06:08.000 And he still won the fight.

02:06:10.000 But then he was doing Sons of Anarchy. 0.98

02:06:14.000 He was doing a stunt scene and he fell on his neck and just fucked his neck up and then wound up getting it fused. 0.93

02:06:21.000 But now they're doing these articulating discs in the neck that have been very successful. 0.64

02:06:25.000 In fact, Aljamain Sterling, who's the UFC bantamweight champion, he actually had that done.

02:06:31.000 So he had a disc replacement in his neck where he fought Pyotr Jan, fought for the title, got illegally kneed in the head, and won the title on a disqualification, which a lot of people are like, boo, you can't win a title like that.

02:06:47.000 Then had to get this operation, so it was a long time before they had the rematch, and they came and dominated in the rematch with a fake disc in his neck.

02:06:54.000 Wow, he went back to it.

02:06:56.000 Yep, and not only went back to it, he went back to it better than ever.

02:06:59.000 So they can do it now, if you get the right doctor, and it works out well.

02:07:03.000 So with Aljamate, it's worked out amazing.

02:07:05.000 He tried a bunch of different things to try to heal it without that, and they weren't successful.

02:07:10.000 But again, you're dealing with a guy who's a high-level wrestler, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt, a world champion MMA fighter.

02:07:17.000 The kind of pressure and strain that's on his body is just extraordinary.

02:07:23.000 And it works for him.

02:07:24.000 He's got a fake disc in his neck.

02:07:26.000 It works.

02:07:27.000 That's awesome.

02:07:28.000 Yeah.

02:07:28.000 Mine and my low back, definitely better than it was before.

02:07:32.000 My back's never going to not hurt, I don't guess.

02:07:36.000 But it's a lot better than it was.

02:07:38.000 And you look at the...

02:07:40.000 I remember feeling sorry for myself at one point and going at some place to get fitted for a brace.

02:07:46.000 And there was a little child in there that had no legs.

02:07:49.000 And I was like, okay, you need to... 0.99

02:07:51.000 Get your brain right, you know, punch yourself in the face right now because you've got it, you're fine. 0.99

02:07:56.000 Yeah, perspective. 0.99

02:07:57.000 Yeah, it's all perspective.

02:07:59.000 Yeah, that's so important.

02:08:00.000 It's so hard when you get injured because you just, it's amazing how vulnerable the human body is.

02:08:06.000 It really is extraordinary.

02:08:08.000 And then when you do difficult stuff and then you put all these different stresses on, everything seems okay until one day.

02:08:15.000 Yeah.

02:08:15.000 Ah!

02:08:17.000 And then it's not.

02:08:18.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:08:18.000 And then you're fucked. 1.00

02:08:19.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:08:19.000 I do squats now and just on a Smith machine, but like, but like there was a, you know, I was walking with a cane in my thirties. 0.99

02:08:26.000 I was like, it's kind of like the fountain of youth is to be like really fucked up when you're younger and then, and then feel better.

02:08:33.000 You know, it's like, Hey, I've never felt better. 0.93

02:08:35.000 Right.

02:08:36.000 And there's also, there's this perspective that comes from having been debilitated, having been really injured and And then recovering from that, will you really appreciate your ability to move?

02:08:45.000 Totally appreciate it, yeah.

02:08:46.000 And I told myself with my low back, you know, it's like if I can just get functional, I'm going to appreciate every day.

02:08:52.000 And it's been 18, 19 years since the surgery that helped my back where they went in through the front.

02:09:00.000 And I'm so lucky to have had it.

02:09:02.000 Yeah, it's like the same thing that happens when you're really sick, right?

02:09:06.000 When you're really sick, you're like, God, I can't wait to be healthy again.

02:09:09.000 God, I appreciate it.

02:09:10.000 But when you're healthy, you're like, yeah, normal day.

02:09:12.000 Whatever.

02:09:13.000 Everything's fine.

02:09:13.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:09:14.000 Until you're sick again and you're going like, oh, I had it good.

02:09:17.000 And I still sat around and watched TV or something.

02:09:19.000 It's just so hard to keep perspective.

02:09:21.000 It's so hard to realize how fortunate you are, like when you're saying you're looking at the child that doesn't have legs.

02:09:27.000 You can see how lucky you really are.

02:09:32.000 That kid is a lot luckier than somebody else, too.

02:09:36.000 When you're injured like that, does that sort of aid your writing in a way?

02:09:43.000 Because a lot of times when you're dealing with characters, you're dealing with characters that are involved in combat, especially the gray man.

02:09:53.000 He's always injured.

02:09:54.000 Yeah, I've worked all that stuff before.

02:09:57.000 I've done a lot of sort of gunshot wound management and training and stuff like that.

02:10:02.000 So that works itself in there.

02:10:04.000 But just the injuries, at one point he had a hydrocodone addiction or he had some kind of...

02:10:09.000 Pill addiction.

02:10:10.000 Yeah, some sort of opioid.

02:10:12.000 And I don't...

02:10:13.000 It's funny because at the time everybody's like, do you have a drug?

02:10:17.000 Are you trying to drill something, Mark?

02:10:18.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:10:18.000 And I'm like, nobody's asking me if I'm an assassin.

02:10:21.000 They're only asking me if I'm popping pills.

02:10:24.000 But I can understand how somebody could get on, you know, because I was taking them for pain and when the pain got, you know, low enough, I didn't take them regularly.

02:10:35.000 But I still, like, I would have a panic attack if I didn't have some access to hydrocodone because when it flares up, I mean, there's nothing that makes it go away that I know of.

02:10:46.000 I have a good friend who was an MMA fighter who had his nose smashed in a fight and got his nose fixed and like crushed all the bones and he got hit with an elbow.

02:10:56.000 Brendan Chubb.

02:10:57.000 And he fought this guy, Mirko Krokop, who's like a legendary assassin, like one of the greatest MMA fighters of all time, and he got his nose smashed. 0.98

02:11:04.000 Brendan wound up winning the fight by KO, but then afterwards his nose was fucked. 0.72

02:11:09.000 And then he had to get it reconstructed, like literally rebuilt. 0.98

02:11:12.000 And he got hooked on pain pills.

02:11:14.000 And he didn't even realize it.

02:11:15.000 And he was just popping them all day. 0.99

02:11:17.000 And then finally one of his friends was like, hey man, how many fucking pills are you taking? 0.99

02:11:20.000 Like, what are you doing? 0.99

02:11:22.000 And then they took the pills away from him.

02:11:23.000 He just went cold turkey and got off of it.

02:11:25.000 And he's never been back since.

02:11:26.000 But he said it was scary.

02:11:28.000 He's like, I didn't even realize I was hooked.

02:11:30.000 But then the fear is that he gets some other injury and he needs, you know, it's like you hear about these people like, don't give me anything because I'm addicted.

02:11:38.000 It's like, oh my God, that's probably stressful for the doctor too to have to do some procedure without giving somebody.

02:11:44.000 Well, I'm not addicted to painkillers, but I don't like them.

02:11:48.000 I had one knee surgery.

02:11:51.000 I've had three knee surgeries, but I had one of them in 93. And they gave me, I can't remember if it was Percocet or Vicodin.

02:11:57.000 But they gave it to me, and I remember sitting on my couch feeling so stupid. 0.79

02:12:02.000 I was like, oh my god, I'm never taking this again. 0.97

02:12:05.000 I'd rather be in agony than deal with this.

02:12:08.000 But that's just me.

02:12:10.000 My chemistry doesn't work with those things.

02:12:12.000 I don't like it.

02:12:13.000 Yeah.

02:12:14.000 If I'm really in pain, I don't even really notice I take it.

02:12:19.000 I just have less pain.

02:12:20.000 But there's been times where I've been like, all right, I'm going to be standing for a long time.

02:12:24.000 I'm going to take one now.

02:12:37.000 I don't feel dopey at all when I take a hydrocodone unless I take one when I probably shouldn't.

02:12:43.000 Well, that's very fortunate that you haven't had problems with addictions with them, because it is pretty common.

02:12:48.000 Yeah, I mean, I will go six weeks without taking one, and then I'll take two a day for three weeks if I hurt myself or whatever.

02:12:56.000 And then are you aware, like, hmm, I've been doing this a lot.

02:12:59.000 Yeah, and you want to...

02:13:01.000 It's funny.

02:13:01.000 I don't feel like anything's different, but my wife will be like, what's wrong?

02:13:05.000 And I'm like, nothing.

02:13:06.000 And she's like, you take a hydrocodone?

02:13:08.000 I'm like, yeah, but I'm sitting here with a smile.

02:13:10.000 Everything's fine.

02:13:11.000 She's just like, I guess I just...

02:13:13.000 Your frequency's a little different.

02:13:14.000 Yeah, a little glassy or something.

02:13:16.000 I don't even sense it myself.

02:13:17.000 But yeah, no, if I've been taking it for a while, it's just kind of like, all right, really assess whether I need it.

02:13:25.000 But yeah, I probably take...

02:13:28.000 12 a month or something.

02:13:30.000 Do you know Diamond Dallas Page, the pro wrestler?

02:13:34.000 He had a series of pretty horrible back injuries.

02:13:38.000 Obviously, he's doing crazy pro wrestling, a big giant guy.

02:13:40.000 Other giant guys are smashing him and throwing him to the ground.

02:13:43.000 And he developed a yoga program to sort of deal with his pain.

02:13:47.000 And his entire back is arthritic.

02:13:50.000 But because of the yoga and because he does it every day, he's pain-free and super flexible and very agile.

02:13:56.000 Pretty amazing.

02:13:57.000 And his program, I know a lot of grapplers have utilized his program because it's very specific to those kind of dynamic movements.

02:14:05.000 Cool.

02:14:05.000 It's really good.

02:14:06.000 He's got his own kind of yoga.

02:14:08.000 Every fourth day I just do stretching.

02:14:10.000 Like, I don't do weights.

02:14:12.000 But I don't have anything organized.

02:14:14.000 I'm just doing what I think I should do.

02:14:16.000 Do you do it by yourself?

02:14:16.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:14:17.000 Do you find you like doing it by yourself because it's sort of meditative and it sort of helps you think about the stuff you're writing?

02:14:23.000 Yeah, I'm usually listening to an audiobook or something like when I work out.

02:14:27.000 I don't even think about working out when I work out.

02:14:29.000 I'll sort of write down what I'm going to do and I try and do a little bit more than I did last time or another rep or better form or, you know, some little improvement because I can see what I did when I did whatever back and biceps three days ago.

02:14:44.000 But when I stretch, it is meditative because, I don't know, it's kind of like, I hate to use that term, me time, but it's so like this, I go in there and nobody's in there and I'm just kind of doing my thing and it makes me feel good afterwards and I'm happier doing it than not doing it.

02:15:03.000 And I'm able to sort of multitask and get some work done listening to audiobooks.

02:15:08.000 Yeah, that's how I feel about it, too.

02:15:10.000 I think of it as me time.

02:15:12.000 I like working out by myself.

02:15:13.000 I've worked out with trainers before, especially with martial arts, but when it comes to weight training, especially because I don't do stuff where I need a spotter.

02:15:22.000 I don't lift heavy weights.

02:15:23.000 Yeah, same either.

02:15:24.000 Me either.

02:15:25.000 Do you do cold...

02:15:28.000 Yeah.

02:15:28.000 You do?

02:15:29.000 Yeah, I do it first thing in the morning every day.

02:15:31.000 That looks like the hardest thing of all.

02:15:32.000 It's not.

02:15:33.000 It's not?

02:15:34.000 Nah.

02:15:34.000 You get used to it.

02:15:35.000 Wow.

02:15:36.000 It's like everything else.

02:15:37.000 I did it today.

02:15:37.000 But they say it's really good for you.

02:15:38.000 It's great for you.

02:15:39.000 People that I respect say, oh my god, you've got to do this.

02:15:42.000 And I'm kind of like, You should read or listen to or watch YouTube videos from Andrew Huberman.

02:15:48.000 He's a professor out of Stanford who's done a fantastic job of breaking down the benefits of cold and heat therapy.

02:15:55.000 And it ramps up your dopamine by like 200% and it lasts for hours.

02:16:01.000 Reduces inflammation, produces all these cold shock proteins that are fantastic for your body.

02:16:06.000 And heat and cold together, the contrast therapy is also very, very good for you.

02:16:11.000 But just heat alone, you know, they did a study out of Finland that showed that four times a week of the sauna for 20 minutes had a 40% decrease In all-cause mortality.

02:16:20.000 Oh my gosh.

02:16:21.000 Everything.

02:16:21.000 Strokes, heart attacks, cancer.

02:16:23.000 Wow.

02:16:23.000 Everything.

02:16:24.000 Because of the heat shock proteins.

02:16:26.000 First of all, it's a static cardio because you're sitting there and your heart is jacked.

02:16:32.000 Because the heat, your heart rate goes up.

02:16:33.000 Yeah.

02:16:34.000 I mean, when I'm in the sauna, I wear a chest strap.

02:16:36.000 I wear a polar strap so I can see what's going on.

02:16:39.000 And my heart rate regularly would be in the 150s.

02:16:43.000 Oh my gosh.

02:16:44.000 High 140s, 150s.

02:16:45.000 Yeah.

02:16:45.000 Especially when it gets to like 20 minutes, 25 minutes.

02:16:49.000 Because, you know, I've got it to 190, 195 degrees, and I'm sitting there sweating, just suffering.

02:16:56.000 And I generally do it post-training.

02:16:59.000 So I'll go in high heart rate already, just got done with the workout.

02:17:03.000 I try to go in when my...

02:17:05.000 I want to go in at like a 99, 100 beats per minute as I enter. 1.00

02:17:10.000 And then I enter into this fucking sauna that's just hell. 1.00

02:17:14.000 And it's perfect. 1.00

02:17:15.000 It just keeps that heart rate jacked.

02:17:17.000 Do you have somebody like looking out for you, checking in on you?

02:17:20.000 Nope.

02:17:21.000 No, I'm not smart.

02:17:23.000 I went in the cold plunge once for 20 minutes with no one around me.

02:17:26.000 Yeah, you need an ejection seat or something.

02:17:28.000 Well, the cold plunge is the worst because you can't get out.

02:17:30.000 Like with the sauna, you can kind of open the door and just get out of there.

02:17:33.000 But the cold plunge...

02:17:34.000 Like, you're underwater up to your neck. 0.99

02:17:36.000 Like, if something went wrong and I had to get out of there, if I blacked out, like, I'm kind of fucked. 0.99

02:17:41.000 You're going to Jim Morrison. 0.83

02:17:42.000 Yeah, I don't recommend doing that.

02:17:45.000 But three minutes is nothing.

02:17:47.000 Three minutes is normal.

02:17:48.000 It's like, I don't like it, which is why I do it.

02:17:51.000 Like, every morning, I'm like, maybe today I should just not do this on. 1.00

02:17:54.000 I'm like, shut up, pussy. 1.00

02:17:55.000 Yeah, yeah. 1.00

02:17:55.000 Just get in there. 1.00

02:17:56.000 Maybe today I won't wake up with a cold plunge. 1.00

02:17:58.000 Shut up, pussy. 1.00

02:18:00.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:18:00.000 So I have this one part of my brain that tells my body what the fuck to do. 1.00

02:18:04.000 Yeah. 0.98

02:18:05.000 But my body's like sending all these signals like, today maybe we need, maybe today would be a nice day to relax.

02:18:11.000 Yeah.

02:18:11.000 I have all those little games that my brain plays on me.

02:18:14.000 I just don't listen.

02:18:15.000 Seven days a week with working out.

02:18:17.000 When it's about time to work out, it's like, ah, this might be a day.

02:18:20.000 I'm a little tired.

02:18:21.000 Or I can think of nine other things I need to do and blah, blah, blah.

02:18:24.000 And now it takes a while.

02:18:27.000 Discipline is like a muscle.

02:18:28.000 You know this.

02:18:30.000 Because I wasn't.

02:18:31.000 I wish I worked out when I was 25, as hard as I do now.

02:18:36.000 You'd see it differently.

02:18:37.000 You'd be jacked.

02:18:37.000 Yeah, because I probably don't eat enough protein, and I'm 55. But there's definitely benefits.

02:18:45.000 But every day, it's starting from scratch, going like, this might be the day.

02:18:50.000 And I'm always happy I did it. 1.00

02:18:53.000 I call it your inner bitch. 1.00

02:18:55.000 You've got to conquer your inner bitch. 1.00

02:18:56.000 I have a t-shirt that I sell. 1.00

02:18:58.000 It says, conquer your inner bitch with a kettlebell on it. 1.00

02:19:00.000 I think that's what it is. 0.99

02:19:02.000 It's like there's a thing that everybody has.

02:19:04.000 And this idea that these people that are super disciplined don't have that feeling. 0.94

02:19:09.000 David Goggins, who's the most disciplined fucking human being that's ever walked the face of planet Earth. 0.81

02:19:13.000 I love his book. 0.98

02:19:14.000 His first book.

02:19:14.000 His second book's even better.

02:19:16.000 He's amazing. 0.99

02:19:17.000 And David says, Sometimes I look at my sneakers for a half hour before I put those motherfuckers on. 0.99

02:19:22.000 He procrastinates. 0.99

02:19:24.000 He'll think about it because he knows he's gonna push himself through hell. 1.00

02:19:28.000 So he'll be honest about it, but he never lets that inner bitch win. 1.00

02:19:33.000 Yeah, I mean if he's hearing that every day, then that's pretty inspiring. 0.99

02:19:38.000 This is how crazy David is.

02:19:39.000 David sent me a photo of his toe yesterday.

02:19:41.000 I'm gonna send this to you, Jamie, because it's so crazy.

02:19:45.000 Because he was just telling me, he was just sending me some stuff about, like, things he's been doing.

02:19:51.000 And, you know, he thinks of it as, like, he literally says that it's like he's gaining knowledge from these suffer sessions, from these, you know, marathon runs that he'll do on a regular basis.

02:20:04.000 And, like, whatever he's getting out of there, he's like, I'm getting, like, he thinks of it as, like, that's his toe.

02:20:14.000 Oh my god. 0.99

02:20:15.000 Yeah, I told him, I go, bro, that belongs in a fucking mummy's foot in the zoo. 0.99

02:20:20.000 Any of those other toes would be... 0.99

02:20:21.000 Or in a museum, rather.

02:20:22.000 That's like a mummy.

02:20:24.000 Like, that looks like something in a museum.

02:20:25.000 Let me see that again, Jamie.

02:20:27.000 That looks like something on a mummy.

02:20:29.000 Like, that's something in a museum, right?

02:20:32.000 Or that's something...

02:20:33.000 That doesn't look like a human toe.

02:20:35.000 That looks like something different.

02:20:36.000 Like, what is that?

02:20:37.000 What is that toe?

02:20:38.000 That's crazy.

02:20:39.000 And this guy does that to himself all the time.

02:20:43.000 I mean, he runs on the—his toes fall—his toenails fall off all the time.

02:20:49.000 Like, he never keeps toenails.

02:20:50.000 They just fall off. 0.76

02:20:51.000 But that thing is so disgusting. 0.99

02:20:54.000 How crazy is that? 1.00

02:20:55.000 And David doesn't give a fuck. 1.00

02:20:57.000 He's like, tape that bitch up, keep running. 1.00

02:21:00.000 Like, he just doesn't care. 1.00

02:21:02.000 He's so crazy that he had bone on bone on his knee where it was so bad that the bone was starting to deform.

02:21:11.000 Oh my god.

02:21:12.000 And so you know what he did?

02:21:13.000 He went in for an operation.

02:21:15.000 They literally saw his bone, cut it down, and move it so it's parallel.

02:21:23.000 His other toe.

02:21:24.000 His other toe.

02:21:25.000 Insane!

02:21:26.000 How do you know that's his other foot?

02:21:27.000 Oh, he gets his other foot, yeah.

02:21:29.000 Look at it.

02:21:29.000 Insane.

02:21:30.000 Look at his toes. 0.85

02:21:31.000 They're insane.

02:21:32.000 Is that just for miles?

02:21:33.000 I mean, surely he knows something about footwear, so it's not like...

02:21:36.000 It's just the amount of hours and miles and the pain, and it's his mind.

02:21:42.000 It's all in his mind, and that's what he works on.

02:21:45.000 I mean, what he's doing when he's running like that is just...

02:21:50.000 He's extracting the maximum amount of human potential out of what his mind and his body is capable of doing it, and then he goes to sleep and does it all.

02:21:58.000 This is probably back when it started in 2016 when he had almost a full nail.

02:22:03.000 That's after 70 miles.

02:22:05.000 In the snow.

02:22:06.000 Minus 5 degrees, 8 inches of snow with standard running sneakers.

02:22:11.000 Feet pay the price, obviously.

02:22:12.000 Yeah, I think.

02:22:13.000 He was in a reasonable position there.

02:22:15.000 Jesus Christ.

02:22:16.000 So that's no nail.

02:22:17.000 That's his nail fell off there.

02:22:19.000 Yeah, his nails fall off all the time.

02:22:20.000 And he's doing a photo shoot.

02:22:22.000 I would be like, give me the hospital. 1.00

02:22:23.000 Well, he wants everybody to know that this shit doesn't come free. 1.00

02:22:27.000 And the knee, if you see his knee, find that image of his knee. 1.00

02:22:30.000 Do you have that?

02:22:31.000 I can find it if you don't have it.

02:22:33.000 But the image of his knee, like, post-surgery is so gnarly.

02:22:37.000 And I met him in Vegas, and he's walking around with no limp.

02:22:39.000 And then he pulls up his pant leg to show his leg, and he can take his fingers and just...

02:22:46.000 He's got so much edema in his legs that he can just...

02:22:48.000 Look at that.

02:22:49.000 Oh, that's his handprint.

02:22:50.000 Yeah, that's his handprint.

02:22:51.000 So he can grab and, like, smush all the tissue around his shin.

02:22:55.000 So that's what his knee looked like.

02:22:57.000 Oh my goodness.

02:22:58.000 Look at all those screws.

02:22:59.000 So you can see that line?

02:23:01.000 That line, they took like a wedge out of his knee and then had to cut it so that it was parallel.

02:23:10.000 Because one side of it had overgrown because he's just bone on bone.

02:23:15.000 Yeah, osteophytes is the way the bone grows.

02:23:19.000 That's the mind.

02:23:20.000 I mean, that's just...

02:23:21.000 The mind forcing the body to do what the mind wants it to do, regardless of it.

02:23:27.000 It's amazing what humans can do if they have to.

02:23:32.000 Properly motivated.

02:23:33.000 Yeah.

02:23:33.000 But the thing is, he doesn't even have to.

02:23:34.000 No, he doesn't have to.

02:23:35.000 Yeah, he's trained that muscle to an incredible degree.

02:23:39.000 He's so interesting.

02:23:40.000 He's wealthy, but he doesn't even have a car.

02:23:43.000 Really?

02:23:43.000 Doesn't even own a car.

02:23:44.000 Doesn't buy a car.

02:23:45.000 No. 1.00

02:23:45.000 It's like, fuck it. 1.00

02:23:46.000 My wife has a car. 1.00

02:23:47.000 He just has all this money from his book.

02:23:49.000 He has like $20 million.

02:23:51.000 Just runs every day.

02:23:53.000 Tortures himself.

02:23:54.000 Lives Spartan.

02:23:56.000 And just can't stop, won't stop.

02:23:59.000 It's super inspirational for other people.

02:24:01.000 That's the thing.

02:24:01.000 It's like you don't have to be that to get benefit from what he's going through.

02:24:07.000 Exactly.

02:24:08.000 That's the thing.

02:24:08.000 What he's done is provide...

02:24:12.000 Millions of people with this unstoppable fuel, like this fuel for the body and for the mind.

02:24:19.000 Like you see, like if David Goggins can do it, and he talks openly about how he used to be 300 pounds and he was lazy and then became this unstoppable force.

02:24:29.000 And he's just like you.

02:24:31.000 He's just like me.

02:24:32.000 He's just a person.

02:24:32.000 And he talks about his fears.

02:24:34.000 He talks about his anxieties.

02:24:35.000 He talks about his procrastination.

02:24:37.000 He just doesn't let it get him.

02:24:39.000 Doesn't let it get him.

02:24:40.000 Keeps going.

02:24:41.000 Wild!

02:24:42.000 It is amazing.

02:24:44.000 What the human body can do if the mind is on the same page.

02:24:48.000 Right.

02:24:48.000 And the fact that those people are out there, I mean, that kind of understanding of human potential.

02:24:56.000 Yeah.

02:24:56.000 That's gotta fuel your work too, right?

02:24:59.000 That's gotta fuel your creativity.

02:25:00.000 When you're talking about a guy like Court Gentry, who's this insanely exceptional person, knowing that there's insanely exceptional people that are out there that are just one of one, like a David Goggins.

02:25:13.000 Yeah.

02:25:13.000 Yeah, no, you know, there's a farmer that a tree fell on his leg and he had to cut his leg off.

02:25:19.000 We're talking about stuff like that earlier.

02:25:21.000 And crawl, you know, like a mile.

02:25:23.000 And you see these things and you go, like, don't tell me what...

02:25:26.000 And people say that, like, it's unrealistic.

02:25:29.000 It's like, it's improbable.

02:25:30.000 It's not unreal.

02:25:31.000 You know, it's not impossible.

02:25:32.000 Right.

02:25:33.000 You know, it's like I don't think there's anything in my books medically that doesn't make sense if you had the mindset to get through it.

02:25:41.000 And even in the first book, like, he's shooting himself up with, like, veterinary drugs or something, I can't remember what, to, you know, get his heart rate back up for this final fight, even though it's going to make him bleed more.

02:25:52.000 You know, it's just like...

02:25:54.000 He's so goal-driven that that's the only thing that matters.

02:25:58.000 What comes after doesn't matter, you know?

02:26:00.000 Yeah.

02:26:00.000 And you get that from seeing people that are just that committed.

02:26:04.000 And you've read books, I'm sure you know about, like Hell Week and, you know, selection and assessment at Delta Force and stuff.

02:26:12.000 And they just put you through stuff that, you know, I couldn't do it, but I can talk about it.

02:26:18.000 Yeah.

02:26:19.000 Is that a weird part of the imposter syndrome?

02:26:23.000 Because you're writing, you're kind of embodying this character.

02:26:27.000 And then you have to kind of compare yourself to who this human being is.

02:26:31.000 Yeah.

02:26:31.000 And the fact that I don't have military experience, you know, I tried to make up for it by, like, learning specifics and stuff like that.

02:26:40.000 And honestly, people in the military love my books.

02:26:43.000 I've heard from people on FBI hostage rescue team that love something when I wrote about them.

02:26:50.000 And I don't know any of them.

02:26:51.000 You know, it's just like I hear about it after the fact.

02:26:54.000 I think...

02:26:55.000 I was a ghostwriter for a book of a guy that was a military dude early in my career, and he's a brilliant guy, and I'm really proud of the book, but he would just be telling me stories,

02:27:10.000 and the thing that he might have been focused on in the story wasn't the interesting thing to me.

02:27:15.000 I'd be like, wait, what did you say about...

02:27:24.000 Right, right.

02:27:34.000 Yeah.

02:27:54.000 That's what I want to incorporate in the book.

02:27:56.000 So, you know, asking the right questions.

02:27:58.000 I got to fly in an F-18 last year, which was an amazing experience, obviously very rare for a civilian.

02:28:05.000 But every little thing about it, you know, like what the air smelled and tasted like and, you know, like what it felt like.

02:28:11.000 I got to fly a little bit.

02:28:11.000 And, you know, just every little bit of that, you know, works its way into the books.

02:28:15.000 And, you know, sometimes it's mundane stuff, but sometimes it's really cool stuff, too.

02:28:18.000 How difficult is it to when you're writing stuff about like international policy and you're writing stuff about like how people would be deployed and how like a special operations group would be deployed?

02:28:33.000 How difficult is it to kind of even Get a read of what would go on.

02:28:39.000 Like, some of it is, I'm sure, classified.

02:28:42.000 Yeah, a lot of it's classified, and so there is this point where I just make stuff up, but I try and build with as much detail as possible.

02:28:50.000 I mean, I have this book called The U.S. Intelligence Committee, and it's like onion-skinned paper, and it's like that thick, and it's like every unit, everything that's not denied or sub-Rosa.

02:29:01.000 What's sub-Rosa?

02:29:03.000 Just denied, you know, like black ops or, you know, like things that they don't admit.

02:29:08.000 I don't know why they call it Sub Rosa, but it's like under the red.

02:29:11.000 I don't know what that means.

02:29:13.000 But anyway, it's things that they don't, you know, admit to doing.

02:29:19.000 And, you know, they're...

02:29:21.000 There's secrecy.

02:29:23.000 Subrosa literally means under the rose in New Latin.

02:29:28.000 Since ancient times, the rose has often been associated with secrecy.

02:29:31.000 In ancient mythology, Cupid gave a rose to Hippocrates, the god of silence, to keep him from telling about the indiscretions of Venus.

02:29:40.000 Hippocrates.

02:29:43.000 Interesting.

02:29:43.000 Yeah, it's just a term they use in the government a lot for something that's, you know...

02:29:48.000 You have to learn all those terms, too, which is interesting in Sierra 6, where Cort, who doesn't have a military background, gets integrated with this group that does when you go back 12 years. 0.98

02:29:58.000 And, you know, he's got to kind of learn all those phrases, and they're all frustrated that he doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. 0.99

02:30:03.000 Yeah, yeah. 0.95

02:30:03.000 I mean, he literally doesn't know what they call the mess hall or whatever, you know, these different names for different things. 0.95

02:30:09.000 Because he wouldn't.

02:30:11.000 When I wrote him in the beginning, the wars were going on, and I knew that there's going to be a lot of really good authors writing this stuff that are downrange right now.

02:30:21.000 And I ain't one of them, sadly.

02:30:24.000 But I was like, I want my guy to be different.

02:30:27.000 Everybody was a Navy SEAL at that point.

02:30:29.000 This was before Bin Laden.

02:30:30.000 Everybody was a Navy SEAL. In every book.

02:30:34.000 And I wanted somebody that not only wasn't a Navy SEAL, didn't even really have that background.

02:30:38.000 So his backstory is that his father was a police officer that ran a firearms training school in Florida.

02:30:47.000 And he, court as a child, was in these shoot houses with these people.

02:30:53.000 And then he, you know, grew and grew and grew, fired, you know.

02:30:57.000 Tens of thousands of rounds a month and all this other stuff and just turned him into something else.

02:31:03.000 Yeah, it's a very interesting storyline.

02:31:06.000 It's a very interesting origin story.

02:31:08.000 Thanks.

02:31:08.000 Because it's very different.

02:31:09.000 Yeah, I just want a different, you know.

02:31:12.000 And then I do think narratively it adds to the story that he's not, you know, SEAL Team 6 and doesn't have a bunch of buddies, you know, that are team guys.

02:31:22.000 And the guys on his paramilitary team in Special Activities Division in Sierra 6...

02:31:28.000 I don't like him at all.

02:31:30.000 Like, they don't get why he's there.

02:31:32.000 But he's there because he's been an assassin for the CIA since he was 20 and had done some operations in Russia, and they needed a guy on the ground that had a certain level of tradecraft abilities that these former SEALs didn't have.

02:31:47.000 So he's forced into the team.

02:31:49.000 He doesn't want to do it.

02:31:50.000 They don't want him to do it.

02:31:51.000 But he's also a guy that's not going to give up.

02:31:53.000 He's going to die before he gives up.

02:31:54.000 Do you ever run plot lines and things that you're writing about past people that may know the way those things are handled and done and see if you're doing it correctly?

02:32:06.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:32:06.000 I've talked to CIA guys regularly or military people and, you know, I always hear, you know, here's the non-classified version or here's what I can tell you.

02:32:17.000 I've been sitting at the Pentagon and I've asked a question and they're like...

02:32:20.000 You went to the Pentagon?

02:32:21.000 Uh-huh, a few times, yeah.

02:32:22.000 Really?

02:32:22.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:32:23.000 So they bring you in?

02:32:24.000 Yeah, I've been there.

02:32:25.000 They say, hey, Mark, come on down.

02:32:26.000 We want to talk to you.

02:32:27.000 Yeah, the first book I did with Tom Clancy, I wasn't allowed to say that I was working with Tom Clancy because they didn't know if the book was going to be good or come out or whatever.

02:32:35.000 So it was so frustrating because it's like I'm in there going like, hi, I'd like to talk to somebody about something.

02:32:41.000 And they just meet with you?

02:32:43.000 I've written these paperbacks.

02:32:44.000 Yeah, I mean, it's not like I'm talking to the generals or anything like that, but, I mean, it's, yeah, there's people.

02:32:50.000 I've been on, gosh, I've been at, like, Camp Pendleton in California and the Navy base in San Diego, got on the destroyer, got to go out to the A-10 thing at Nellis Air Force where they're the warthogs.

02:33:03.000 I've had some really amazing experiences, and it's all kind of non-classified.

02:33:08.000 There's public information officers with each thing in the military, and you go through them.

02:33:15.000 Or, in some examples, I've just known a guy, like my buddy Rip that I wrote the book with, who now, incidentally, has his own foundation in Ukraine and is supporting a battalion of foreign fighters in Ukraine.

02:33:28.000 Spent his entire career as a Marine Corps officer, retired, and then this war with Russia kicks off, and he's over there trying to support, you know, the war effort.

02:33:38.000 But, you know, he was just a guy I met at the Pentagon.

02:33:42.000 Wow.

02:33:42.000 And he came from there.

02:33:44.000 But, yeah, no, I— How did you even—how does that conversation even get—like, how do you get in the Pentagon?

02:33:50.000 I mean, it's happened a few different ways.

02:33:52.000 I had a guy, a friend of my brother's was a Marine at one point, and he put me in contact with a Marine aviation guy, and he was going to be at the Pentagon, and I went up there and saw him.

02:34:03.000 And Rip was a guy that liked my books, and we were talking, and he just said he worked at the Pentagon.

02:34:08.000 And I'm like, I'm in D.C. all the time.

02:34:10.000 You know, I'd love to come up there.

02:34:12.000 And we did it that way.

02:34:14.000 So...

02:34:15.000 I've met CIA guys, former CIA guys.

02:34:17.000 I've met people that say they're something and you kind of figure out after a while, no, they're not.

02:34:23.000 You know, they're kind of like...

02:34:24.000 Oh, no.

02:34:24.000 Yeah, it's funny.

02:34:26.000 There's a term for it that a buddy of mine used.

02:34:30.000 He calls it institutional puffery.

02:34:32.000 It's like these guys actually are somebody, but they're making themselves out.

02:34:36.000 Like, you know, they're the one that killed bin Laden. 0.93

02:34:38.000 They're the guy that, you know...

02:34:40.000 Institutional puffery is a great term. 0.99

02:34:41.000 Yeah, I love that term.

02:34:42.000 Yeah, Scott Swanson did.

02:34:45.000 It's like people that are legit and they're badass, but they're not badass enough for themselves for this story.

02:34:52.000 My buddy Brad Taylor, who's a fantastic thriller author, a former Delta guy, Army Special Mission Union guy, He's like, you know, you never meet a parachute rigger for Delta Force.

02:35:02.000 Everybody you meet is an operator for Delta Force.

02:35:06.000 There's just a lot of baloney about what people say.

02:35:10.000 He's like, yeah, we loved our parachute riggers, but no one ever says that's what they did.

02:35:14.000 They're always like, yeah, I'm using Delta.

02:35:16.000 It is an interesting thing, like the motivation that people have to puff themselves up.

02:35:21.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:35:24.000 I think one of my real talents is that I like to be the least interesting guy in the room because I like to just learn from other people.

02:35:32.000 And, you know, it's just fascinating to me.

02:35:35.000 I don't need anything.

02:35:37.000 And so if somebody was a parachute rigger for Delta Force, that would be the most fascinating person that I could talk to, probably.

02:35:44.000 It is interesting.

02:35:45.000 Every job in that regard, especially in that space, is very interesting.

02:35:50.000 Yeah, absolutely.

02:35:51.000 And I have such respect for the men and women that go and serve their country because I've met 20-year-old female On a destroyer, it's her job to bring the helicopters in.

02:36:05.000 And you're just like, wow, when I was 20, what was I doing?

02:36:08.000 I was not doing that.

02:36:09.000 I wasn't responsible for a ship and an airframe meeting up at the same place at the same time on a deck, a moving deck.

02:36:21.000 That's one of the things that the military and special operations in particular does is it makes extraordinary human beings.

02:36:29.000 Like those people that can do that job and who have been there, they're just very different than most people that you meet.

02:36:36.000 They're very unique and they're just strong.

02:36:39.000 They just have a different kind of character.

02:36:41.000 There's a different level, a requirement of them that's so different than the average person.

02:36:46.000 That to not know them, to not know that that's even a thing, it's really unfortunate for a lot of people.

02:36:55.000 They don't know the potential that some humans have, and oftentimes this potential only arises out of extreme need.

02:37:05.000 Right.

02:37:05.000 Out of those kind of jobs and those kind of requirements.

02:37:08.000 I mean, the whole point of Hell Week for Navy SEALs is to get you to leave.

02:37:13.000 Because it's like, you know, we're going to give you every reason.

02:37:17.000 So what's left are the people that are like, you can kill me and I'm not going to quit.

02:37:21.000 And I have such respect for that.

02:37:24.000 I don't think I can stay awake for five days.

02:37:25.000 That's the thing that, like, out of all the stuff they do, I'm going like, God, man, I'm tired, I'm tired.

02:37:30.000 But, I mean, you know, it's incredible what they go through.

02:37:35.000 Yeah.

02:37:37.000 Do you feel like a responsibility when you're writing to sort of reflect that, that, you know, you have such a deep respect for these people that you have to write that in a way that sort of portrays that in an accurate sense?

02:37:50.000 Yeah.

02:37:51.000 Yeah, absolutely.

02:37:52.000 And, you know, I've had villains who are U.S. military or U.S. government people or stuff like that.

02:37:58.000 And I've had people, like, complain about that.

02:38:01.000 You know, like, they want all the bad guys to have accents.

02:38:04.000 You know, like, can't be Americans. 0.94

02:38:05.000 But I mean, it's just like, you know.

02:38:08.000 There are all walks of life all over the place.

02:38:12.000 But I do feel a responsibility to...

02:38:16.000 Again, it's sort of the fanboy in me.

02:38:17.000 It's like I have such respect for these people and what they do and the responsibility they have often at very young ages.

02:38:26.000 Yeah.

02:38:27.000 It's a fascinating thing to me to write about and to talk about.

02:38:31.000 And again, it's just I like to build stories around reality and then at some point go off, you know, where the guy's jumping off an airplane and without a parachute and finding a way down, you know.

02:38:45.000 When you're researching villains and corruption, have you ever met with people that are corrupt?

02:38:54.000 Have you met with real villains?

02:38:56.000 Are you just getting this from your imagination?

02:38:59.000 No, I haven't.

02:39:01.000 I mean a lot of reading.

02:39:03.000 My new book involves Russian mafia slash Russian government, which are one and the same in my opinion.

02:39:11.000 And so I'm looking at real cases.

02:39:14.000 I actually had finished the book, and it involves Americans who are being influenced by Russia or taking money from Russian foreign intelligence and Americans in government.

02:39:24.000 And just a couple weeks ago, this guy...

02:39:29.000 FBI guy in New York who was like head of counterterrorism at one point, but he was also involved in the sanctions, Russian sanctions.

02:39:38.000 He just got indicted for taking money from Oleg Darabowski, which is one of the oligarchs that, you know, Putin supports or supports Putin or both.

02:39:47.000 And, you know, these things happen and they just caught a Russian GRU guy that was about to intern at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

02:39:57.000 And they just caught a German BND, the German foreign intelligence, Bundesnachrichtendienst, guy who had been spying for the Russians for a long time.

02:40:10.000 And, like, all that stuff's really fascinating to me.

02:40:12.000 So I want to learn about it as much as I can and then write a fictional, you know, version of it.

02:40:19.000 And I'd actually written this book before these three things came out, but, I mean, the Russians have been doing stuff like that for a while, so... 0.96

02:40:25.000 Yeah, it's disturbing when you find someone like that.

02:40:29.000 Is this the same guy, the guy that was a part of going after Trump for Russiagate, where it turned out that he got indicted for conspiring with Russia?

02:40:44.000 The American guy? 0.58

02:40:45.000 No, that...

02:40:45.000 Yeah, do you know that guy?

02:40:46.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:40:46.000 The most recent one?

02:40:48.000 Yeah, not Manafort.

02:40:50.000 Jamie, see if you can find that guy.

02:40:52.000 Do you know what I'm talking?

02:40:53.000 You know it.

02:40:55.000 There was a gentleman that was involved in Russiagate, involved in going after Trump for his ties with Russia, and it turns out that he was colluding with Russia.

02:41:06.000 And that he was either colluding with oligarchs or there was something involved and he was recently indicted.

02:41:14.000 That might be the same guy because it was an oligarch connection.

02:41:17.000 Yeah, probably the same guy.

02:41:19.000 That's the people that have the money outside of the U.S. I mean outside of Russia.

02:41:22.000 So those are the people that are going to be paying you off.

02:41:24.000 Yeah, that was one of the more wild things about the beginning of the Ukraine war where they were going after the oligarchs and taking their yachts.

02:41:29.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:41:30.000 I was like, well, that's fascinating.

02:41:32.000 Well, my book, Berner, opens with court blowing up Russian yachts just as something to do, just as a side gig, and then he gets pulled into the main part of the story.

02:41:43.000 Yeah, I was down in St. Lucia researching it, and these people came ashore in some kind of a tender from a big yacht.

02:41:50.000 They were all Russian.

02:41:51.000 I don't know anything about their story.

02:41:54.000 They could have been totally on the up and up, but I'm like, that's fascinating.

02:41:57.000 The war had been going on for a few months, but those boats are still out there.

02:42:02.000 Well, the Russian thing is so fascinating in general, right?

02:42:05.000 You have Putin, who's this former KGB guy who's in charge of the entire country, and all the oligarchs have to be with him.

02:42:14.000 Yeah, they're 100% with him.

02:42:16.000 They hold his money, and he allows them to do what they do, and they allow him to do what he does.

02:42:22.000 And, you know, the war isn't affecting their children.

02:42:25.000 Or anything like that.

02:42:26.000 You know, it's the kids from the Urals or the stands or, you know, like somewhere out in Siberia.

02:42:33.000 Those are the ones that are getting thrown into the meat grinder or prisoners or things like that that they're doing.

02:42:38.000 And so, you know, Putin knows how to protect his, you know, the people that support him and he supports.

02:42:47.000 And it's, you know, it's a mafia.

02:42:49.000 It's a kleptocracy.

02:42:49.000 He's an autocratic, you know, kleptocrat.

02:42:54.000 It's a criminal enterprise, and he doesn't care how many people die.

02:43:02.000 They're just putting waves of people through with no training.

02:43:06.000 They had this mobilization last fall, and tens of thousands of them are just running across fields getting killed.

02:43:12.000 It's World War I stuff.

02:43:14.000 It's awful.

02:43:14.000 Not only that, they have a crematorium, a traveling crematorium.

02:43:19.000 So they're literally just throwing these bodies into the burner and they're not giving any sort of an account of how many losses they've had.

02:43:27.000 There's a report that some Wagner troops were stacking their dead guys up as basically sandbags.

02:43:35.000 And, you know, that's pretty awful if you think about it.

02:43:39.000 This is a horrible war.

02:43:42.000 Putin really miscalculated.

02:43:44.000 People in FSB told him what he wanted to hear, and they were supposed to be setting up influence operations in Ukraine for years and years, but they've been stealing the money.

02:43:54.000 And then when he said, you know, is this now the right time to do it?

02:43:58.000 And they basically said, sure it is.

02:44:01.000 Things went really bad.

02:44:02.000 Their fifth service in FSB that does the foreign stuff, I think, really dropped the ball.

02:44:09.000 Not dropped the ball.

02:44:10.000 I'm glad they dropped the ball.

02:44:11.000 But, I mean, they told him what he wanted to hear.

02:44:14.000 I mean, if you're an autocrat like that, you value loyalty over competence.

02:44:20.000 And you've got to have loyalty.

02:44:21.000 People don't have to be competent, but they've got to be loyal for you to survive.

02:44:25.000 And so he has these incompetent people that were all stealing from the government, and they were also telling him, it was kind of this feedback loop.

02:44:33.000 He was hearing what he wanted to hear.

02:44:34.000 That's part of the problem, too, right, that they're hearing what they want to hear because people are terrified to tell them bad news.

02:44:39.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:44:40.000 I wouldn't want to go to Putin and say, yeah, we can't do this.

02:44:44.000 They say it's the same thing with Xi Jinping, that nobody wants to tell him the bad news.

02:44:49.000 He doesn't even find out about things that went wrong until quite a while later.

02:44:52.000 Yeah, and I imagine that's throughout history.

02:44:56.000 It's always been the case for those type of leaders, sadly.

02:44:59.000 When you're writing about all this stuff, it's such a complex and nuanced landscape that you're interacting with.

02:45:10.000 That's got to be one of the most difficult parts of the job, is incorporating these fictional narratives in with this sort of very realistic world of espionage and crime and Yeah, finding out what to use and what to leave out is really,

02:45:25.000 really hard because I will be very fascinated with something and I'm like, it really doesn't push the narrative forward.

02:45:31.000 And early in my career, I would read these like really dry government documents about this thing.

02:45:36.000 And I wanted to prove that I read it by throwing stuff into the story.

02:45:40.000 And my editor would save me from that.

02:45:42.000 Now I'm self-correcting.

02:45:44.000 In that matter.

02:45:45.000 But yeah, there's so much information. 0.93

02:45:50.000 But what really makes me enjoy my books is while I'm doing the research by myself, I come across something and I go like, holy shit, people need to know about this. 0.83

02:46:01.000 And I'm not trying to preach. 0.88

02:46:02.000 I'm not trying to give anybody a political view or anything.

02:46:04.000 But it's like, this happened.

02:46:06.000 And so I'm going to do a version of this.

02:46:08.000 And I've actually had...

02:46:09.000 People complain about my books, and they'll be like, well, there's no way a liberal female lawyer would support an al-Qaeda guy in prison. 0.94

02:46:21.000 And I'm like, okay, here's a picture of her.

02:46:24.000 I changed her name.

02:46:25.000 I changed a couple of details, but the actual real person that was doing that is now in prison.

02:46:32.000 I like to take as much from reality as I can because that's all interesting to me.

02:46:36.000 And then, again, fictionalize it, get wacko with it at some point, and then try and rein it back in a little.

02:46:42.000 Well, Mark, you do a great job.

02:46:44.000 They're very captivating books.

02:46:45.000 I enjoy them very much.

02:46:47.000 And I just want to say thank you for coming in here.

02:46:49.000 Congratulations on all your success.

02:46:51.000 Thank you.

02:46:52.000 Looking forward to your next books.

02:46:53.000 I appreciate it.

02:46:54.000 This is a great opportunity for me.

02:46:55.000 My pleasure.

02:46:56.000 My pleasure.

02:46:57.000 So anybody who wants to get these, they're all available.

02:47:01.000 How many books do you have now that are Gray Man books?

02:47:04.000 The 12th.

02:47:05.000 The 12th one.

02:47:06.000 And it comes out?

02:47:07.000 It comes out February 21st.

02:47:08.000 Oh, so real close.

02:47:10.000 Next week?

02:47:10.000 Yep.

02:47:11.000 Oh, nice.

02:47:12.000 Yeah.

02:47:12.000 And so I got an advanced copy picture.

02:47:17.000 And you're probably already working on the next one?

02:47:20.000 Yeah.

02:47:20.000 How deep are you in the next one?

02:47:22.000 I'm about 40,000 words into the next one.

02:47:24.000 Wow.

02:47:24.000 Yeah.

02:47:25.000 Wow.

02:47:25.000 They keep coming.

02:47:26.000 Well, again, congratulations and thanks for coming, man.

02:47:28.000 I really appreciate you being here.

02:47:29.000 Thanks a lot, Jeff.

02:47:30.000 I appreciate it.

02:47:30.000 My pleasure.

02:47:31.000 All right.

02:47:31.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - February 16, 2023

Joe Rogan Experience #1942 - Mark Greaney

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