On this week's episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the writer/comedian/TV host joins us to talk about what it's like to be a dad to three kids, a husband, and a co-worker, and how he balances it all with a career as a writer and a podcaster. He also talks about how he deals with the pressures of being a new dad, and why it's important to have a good relationship with your kids. And, of course, we talk about his new book, "The Optifade," which is out now! If you haven't read the book, you should definitely do so before listening to this episode. It's a great read, and if you're a fan of the book or have ever read it, you'll definitely want to check it out! It's worth the price of admission if you have a copy of the audiobook version of it on Amazon Prime or wherever else you get your books. And if you don't have a Kindle device, you can get a free eReader app from Amazon so you can read my book on any good ol' laptop, too! I'm giving away a Kindle Fire or other good eReader device! Kindle $9.99, iBook $99, Paperback 4900, and Audible is 4999, 9999, or you can buy a Surface Pro 4 for 9999 for $99.99.00, or use the Amazon Prime membership for 4999.95.00. You get an Audible membership for a year, and get an ad-free version of the podcast for free, and I'll get 10% off the entire service starting at $99 a month, plus shipping free for 7 months, plus an additional 3 months, shipping starts at $49.99 a year. I'll be shipping you a two-and-a-day shipping and shipping shipping starts start-up shipping starts from $49,99, and shipping two months from the first month, shipping free to you'll get a limited edition $99/month, plus two months shipping starts, plus I'll have access to the second year for free shipping, plus a limited shipping offer, shipping will get you a maximum of $99 or two months, and an additional $49/month shipping, and two years, shipping is free, plus they'll get two months free, shipping a maximum, plus you get a discount on your choice of a Prime membership offer.
00:00:19.000How does it feel to have another one done?
00:00:22.000Oh, it feels great, but there's another one in the works, so it doesn't really stop.
00:00:26.000I mean, I hear some guys like John Grisham talk about they do six months of work and six months off, and that's kind of the routine that they've gotten on.
00:00:33.000But for me, it's go, go, go, this, the next one, scripts, although...
00:00:37.000Do you ever anticipate doing like a six-month-on, six-month-off thing?
00:00:45.000It's just like any entrepreneurial type of venture.
00:00:47.000You've got to just go and keep building and take advantage of momentum and look for gaps in the enemy's defenses and adapt and just go, go, go, go.
00:00:54.000So it's a constant thing from the second I wake up until everybody else is in bed and I'm working for a few more hours.
00:01:00.000Yeah, you've got to make hay while the sun's shining.
00:01:02.000Yeah, I think about that too with the podcast.
00:01:05.000I'm like, one day I do so many things.
00:01:07.000Sometimes I'm like, one day maybe I'll just do one thing.
00:02:19.000I'm not changing the dynamic of any room, I don't think, but people definitely in the airport stop and say hi, and I feel so just fortunate that people are interested enough in the books or the podcast or the TV show or whatever to actually recognize me and say hi.
00:02:31.000One guy recognized me by my Sitka backpack last night.
00:02:33.000I was flying out here, and he's like, the backpack gave you away, because I was in the corner calling my wife on Mother's Day and my mom on Mother's Day.
00:03:24.000Well, I don't know, but that's kind of what I think about.
00:03:26.000Like, if I was someone else's parent and was to read this and not know me, never having met me, and all of a sudden you read this thing, like, oh, maybe our son or daughter should find another friend.
00:03:35.000I would worry about that more in California.
00:04:49.000I didn't know how it was going to work with Hollywood because it was my first time down that road.
00:04:52.000And I didn't think they were going to say, hey, you know what?
00:04:54.000You have this, and I know it's important, and I know who the guys are, but how about this company?
00:04:59.000They're paying us, so let's put that in there instead.
00:05:00.000And it wasn't like that at all, which was pretty cool.
00:05:03.000And I think it's all because Chris Antoine Fuqua and the showrunner just held the line and said, hey, no, we're just going to use these things and make it organic and authentic and root this whole thing in this foundation of operator culture.
00:05:13.000It also probably helps that you guys are on Amazon too, which is like a fairly new platform.
00:09:51.000Since we're on alcohol and we're on all that stuff, let me do this before I don't forget because this is pretty amazing here.
00:09:56.000I know you like cigars and as do I. This right here, so these cigars right here, Hooten Young, the guys that we just talked to about this whiskey, that Jack Carr edition right there.
00:10:10.000So what they did, they called me and I was kind of like, a million things going on and I pick up and they started to talk to me about this and it gave me goosebumps.
00:10:20.000This right here is World Trade Center Steel.
00:10:35.000Just incredible human beings who have sacrificed so much for this nation.
00:10:39.000And so they did this, and then he kept talking to me, and he said, under these cigars, under each one right here, so if I pull one of these out, You can see that there is some dirt under each one of these right here.
00:10:54.000And it's laminated in there over the top.
00:10:56.000So there's dirt and there's a little laminate over it.
00:10:59.000And each one of these comes from a special place.
00:11:01.000And right here, D-Day Invasion, Sacred Sand Recovered from Omaha Beach in Normandy.
00:11:12.000Iranian hostage crisis, April 24, 1980, Operation Eagle Claw.
00:11:18.000So that's when they went in to try to rescue the American hostages in Iran, Tehran, and they landed at a place called Desert One.
00:11:24.000One of the refueling birds hit one of the, or one of the refueling C-130s hit one of the helicopters and there was an explosion and people died and they had to abort the mission.
00:11:37.000They didn't have enough helicopters to keep going so they brought dirt back from that.
00:11:40.000There is not much dirt That they brought back, but there's some in here.
00:11:45.000And Battle of Mogadishu, October 3rd to 4th, 1993, Operation Gothic Serpent.
00:11:50.000Sand smuggled from the Black Hawk Down crash site in Mogadishu, Somalia.
00:12:24.000Hooten Young and then some guys that are out there at the tip of the spear that have access to this dirt from places like Operation Eagle Claw.
00:12:32.000Desert One, outside of Tehran, Iran, is in here.
00:13:25.000And what's crazy is you have to go through these patent things, like trademark stuff, you know, with attorneys and things, and there's different little categories.
00:13:33.000So you have to do subcategories if you want to patent the cross tomahawks.
00:13:36.000So I have lawyers doing all that, and part of that's whiskey.
00:13:41.000And like right away, the Jack Daniels lawyers, boom, right on it.
00:13:45.000Like they are very aggressive when it comes to any whiskey that has Jack in it, even though it's obviously a different label, a different style of bottle, different, you know, no connection.
00:16:39.000Yeah, yeah, so there's Car Wine, Car Vineyards, maybe, in Northern California, I think, and, you know, they're out there in all the grocery stores, and they're pretty big.
00:16:48.000But they're good, you know, good solid wine.
00:18:03.000Streaming has been a long time coming.
00:18:06.000So that was coming to a head anyway, and they probably should have negotiated, or not, they should have.
00:18:10.000It's been a long time in the works, just because things have changed so much since the last writer's strike when it comes to streaming.
00:18:15.000But then right when that comes to a head, AI hits the news this January.
00:18:19.000AI with ChatGPT and all that stuff, and people are putting in, as you've seen, people can just say, hey, write a show about X, Y, or Z, and pops out.
00:18:29.000And you don't have to pay a writer's room.
00:18:30.000So if you're an executive and you're beholden to, I guess, shareholders or whatever it is, Maybe that's attractive, but not so attractive to those people who make their living coming up with these ideas in a writer's room and then making all this money.
00:18:42.000Essentially, the foundation of everything that we see in film and television happens in those writer's rooms and happens from these creators.
00:18:50.000It's not huge money they're making anyway, but it's just how do you deal with streaming and how do we deal with AI, and we'll see.
00:18:57.000What is the solution to the AI problem?
00:18:59.000Because we're dealing with ChatGPT4 now, and as ChatGPT5, 6, and 7 roll out, I would imagine they're going to be able to write in the style of Jack Carr and write a perfect James Reese novel.
00:20:22.000I always wanted to evolve, just like anything else in life.
00:20:24.000Like in the SEAL teams, My whole mission was to be a better operator and a better leader today than I was yesterday.
00:20:30.000Personal front, be a better husband and father than I was yesterday.
00:20:33.000And for writing, be a better author for the next book than I was for this one.
00:20:36.000I want my next sentence to be better than the sentence before.
00:20:40.000So this one, James Reese is on a journey.
00:20:43.000And that's one of the one things that we have in common.
00:20:45.000Just with everyone else on this planet, we're all on a journey.
00:20:48.000No matter your race, your religion, your socioeconomic background, you're on a journey, and you don't know how much time you have on this planet.
00:20:55.000You get one ride, and so I've got to make it count.
00:20:58.000So people are trusting me with that time, which is something I take extremely seriously.
00:21:02.000So as much thought goes into any Instagram post or blog or question for a guest on my podcast or whatever it is, as goes into any sentence in the novel, And I want to always improve on that craft every single time.
00:22:08.000Well, they could lay low and hope that somebody else messes up like Miller Lite here a few weeks later, even though it was before we just learned...
00:22:44.000Guys that drink Miller Lite like that.
00:22:46.000But it's this narrow view of what a woman is supposed to be, that a woman is only supposed to be a lady who's succeeding and killing it in the corporate world.
00:25:02.000Yeah, we did like 22 dates and I got to become friends with Charlie and Heffron and we traveled around and that was when Bud Light embraced this humorous, like sort of dopey man version of, you know, beer, which is like what everybody likes.
00:26:59.000I've read this story where this bar owner was saying that he had to stop carrying it because people were attacking people that were drinking it.
00:28:09.000Let's take a break, though, and make a couple calls.
00:28:11.000So we have this podcast that we do called Protect Our Parks that I do with Shane Gillis and Ari Shafir and Mark Normand, and we get hammered most of the time.
00:28:20.000And we're trying to figure out what's the least woke beer to drink.
00:28:25.000And Mark Norman said, Colt 45. And I think he's right.
00:29:03.000Old English 800 is just slightly, well, it raises, it ranges from 5.9 to 8. Maybe we need, well, I would say Canada is the wokest fucking place on earth right now.
00:29:11.000I would have said go with Canadian beer because Canadian beer is like 9%.
00:31:38.000So you don't think that he would do, like, just having talked to him, like, you wouldn't think that his mind would just go there to do that.
00:31:43.000But that was, yeah, it was pretty legit.
00:31:53.000Just because they have an idea of what you should and shouldn't eat.
00:31:57.000And if someone confronted them, like, unless you are growing your own vegetables and you know exactly what happens, you are responsible for animal death 100%.
00:32:08.000I mean, there's a crazy video of this...
00:32:13.000This combine going through a field, and it goes to this patch of, I guess it's probably corn or something like that, and 13 deer run out of there.
00:40:03.000And it's just like the stock market, the ups and downs in the markets for those things.
00:40:07.000Did you see that recent, I think it was in Kenya, I just saw it maybe yesterday or the day before, but the villagers out there killed a lion, an old lion.
00:41:03.000I've seen those videos, those pictures.
00:41:05.000But that's the problem about not putting the requisite time, energy, and effort into studying an issue, no matter what that issue is, and just making a snap decision based on something that someone with a lot of followers puts out there.
00:41:34.000And also, there's the thing about wildlife conservation that's very uncomfortable.
00:41:38.000And what's uncomfortable is that it really bothers us that the only way animals really have value in terms of these wild populations of antelope and...
00:41:50.000Gazelles and all these different things they hunt in Africa, the way they've made them thrive is by putting value on them to hunt them.
00:42:11.000Especially in America, with the Pittman-Robertson Act, where a percentage of all ammunition sales, of all gear, all hunting gear, and it turns into all that goes towards wildlife conservation.
00:42:35.000It's one of the—wildlife conservation in this country and the preservation of public land for recreational use and hunting and fishing and camping is one of the greatest things this country has ever pioneered.
00:43:28.000They're very comfortable hanging out in the backyard.
00:43:30.000But I thought they were going to die this winter because last winter they were here the whole time because we had a very mild winter last year.
00:44:06.000It's pretty cool to see them fly for the first time when you think that maybe they don't, and then you see them go up to roost or come down, and that's pretty cool.
00:44:34.000It says wild turkeys can fly at speeds of up to 40 miles an hour, 50 miles an hour, but only for short distances, usually limit their flight distance to about 100 yards or less.
00:46:49.000Yeah, so October of 1983, there was two actual car bombs, one with the French paratroopers and one with the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon.
00:47:02.000The first large one that really people noticed, the bombing of the American Embassy in Beirut in April 1983. And then there's some newly declassified documents from the Reagan administration that talk about what was going on behind the scenes and who was advocating to put Marines ashore, who wanted to keep them on amphib ships.
00:47:18.000So a little smaller than an aircraft carrier, but...
00:47:21.000Take Marines around who wanted to keep them on those ships in a little safer area out on the water in the Med.
00:48:24.000I wrote about it in the second novel, in True Believer.
00:48:28.000And I got that from someone who's also been on this podcast, Peter Zeehan, wrote a book back in 2014. And so I used that.
00:48:35.000I read that on my flight to Mozambique, where I was doing research for the second novel, even though I didn't have a deal for the first novel yet.
00:48:40.000I hadn't even turned that in, but I always knew I was going to...
00:49:50.000So I incorporated that into my second novel.
00:49:52.000But now Russia actually did invade Ukraine.
00:49:54.000So now when we work on these scripts for the second season of The Terminalist, well, we have to figure that out.
00:49:58.000It's going to change, obviously, because they actually invaded instead of, like in the book, the hero, of course, wins the day.
00:50:04.000But when he talks about that and talks about population decline, very steep population decline in Russia and gives the reasons behind it, and talks about the ethnic Russian population in Ukraine being the largest outside of Russia, and he looked at how long you can field an army before you can't field that army anymore.
00:50:55.000So I like to look at things through the enemy's eyes, which I did in The Devil's Hand, my fourth book.
00:50:59.000But I think it's important to look at things through the enemy's eyes because it allows you to then make decisions taking that into account.
00:51:04.000And so with Russia certainly knowing what our response would be to an invasion of Ukraine, that's what I incorporated into this one.
00:51:12.000So if you knew what we would do if they invaded Ukraine, what should you do now as Russia to set yourself up to...
00:51:20.000Success is the wrong word, but financially.
00:51:23.000So with gas and oil sales and contracts and futures with India and with China.
00:51:40.000People should read those before they just retweet something.
00:51:43.000But he is, I mean, he is detailed in those accounts of where people are, what military exercises are going on that would cover, cover for action we call it, to allow the U.S. to go in and blow up those pipelines.
00:51:57.000So it's very, and now it's, I think, fairly established that what he writes in there is actually true.
00:52:06.000Well, there's a video of Biden saying that they were going to put a stop to the Nord Stream pipeline.
00:52:10.000There was an assistant secretary of state, I think she was, saying similar things out there.
00:52:16.000So when we go back and look at these things and don't apply any political bias to it and just apply common sense, that's the other thing we don't do.
00:52:22.000And it's Carl Klausiewicz, who wrote On War, said the most important attribute of a battlefield leader is common sense.
00:52:29.000George Marshall, World War II, said the same thing.
00:52:31.000And we neglect to apply common sense to a lot of these things, whether it's as a populace or our elected officials or military leaders.
00:52:39.000So there's a lack of common sense and a stark lack of accountability as well.
00:52:45.000So it's very therapeutic for me to write some of these novels because I get to hold people accountable in a fictional sense that you couldn't do in real life.
00:52:52.000Is it a lack of common sense or is it a willingness to ignore consequences because of the financial interest or the political interest in what you're trying to accomplish?
00:53:05.000That's a huge part of it and we can see a change in 1947. So when the defense establishment and the intelligence agencies were all reorganized in 1947, when we changed the Department of War to the Department of Defense, it became an industry.
00:53:19.000And it stopped being a profession of arms and started becoming a career of arms for senior level officers in particular.
00:53:26.000And at the same time, we start seeing a lack of accountability because up to that point, we go back to the Civil War and see Lincoln go through general after general until he got to Grant.
00:53:34.000And same thing in World War II. George Marshall went through general after general after general, admiral after admiral after admiral until he got to those names that we all know today who led us to victory in World War II. And then for some reason, and that means that there were people in those positions before who didn't measure up.
00:53:49.000So George Marshall would give them a chance and maybe a second one, but not a third.
00:53:53.000And then they'd put somebody in place regardless of rank, essentially.
00:53:57.000He'd promote people into the rank they needed to be for those positions if they showed promise.
00:54:02.000And that's how we got to these leaders that we all know the last names.
00:54:06.000And we lost that after World War II, particularly in Vietnam.
00:54:09.000Now we start seeing people not held accountable for mistakes.
00:54:18.000And then the best they can do is what we saw in August of 2021. And someone who has no touch points with the military, never read a book on military history, strategy, tactics, doesn't know anyone in the military, maybe even never seen a military film, can apply common sense to that situation and say, look, Wait, it looks like Bagram here would be the tactically advantageous position,
00:54:37.000Why are we putting our junior level enlisted people at this gate, at this essentially a public airport in Kabul, putting them in a tactically disadvantageous position to get out of there after we had 20 years to prepare to leave?
00:54:50.000And once again, no one held accountable.
00:54:54.000It's called The Afghanistan Papers by Craig Whitlock.
00:54:56.000And after two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits by the Washington Post, they got access to these classified histories of the war.
00:55:03.000And so they took these generals and admirals coming back, and they interviewed them, and they thought these interviews were going to stay classified.
00:55:10.000And so what Craig Whitlock does once he got access to this is he juxtaposes what they said in private that they thought was going to stay classified to what they said in front of Congress.
00:55:37.000But how frustrating is it for you and how infuriating is it as a man who's a veteran, who served, who's been deployed overseas, who's been in these conflicts to see this happening?
00:55:51.000And to see no accountability and to see these poor choices being made over and over again that put veterans' lives at risk, put our lives at risk, and put the entire world in this state right now where we're genuinely concerned.
00:56:45.000You know, for my own sanity, I just go back to taking those lessons learned and applying them going forward in a way that honors the sacrifice of those who did lose their lives, who didn't come home or who came home changed forever because of post-traumatic stress or traumatic brain injury, missing arms and legs.
00:57:00.000And my hope, I hate to say hope, is that we can take those lessons and apply them to the next generation so they don't have to learn those same lessons in blood.
00:57:08.000But I guess I'm not hopeful because we have shown time and time again that we have a very difficult time doing that for some reason.
00:57:15.000And I don't know why that is, but it's extremely disheartening.
00:57:18.000It also sets up that next generation for failure because you have these people coming up the ranks and they see these generals sit in front of Congress, say certain things.
00:57:28.000You can go back to every single testimony from these guys and they all say pretty much the same thing.
00:57:54.000He's just kind of like, you know, it's not going as great as we may have led you to believe.
00:57:59.000And then a few months later, he has quietly moved aside and somebody else is put in.
00:58:03.000So that tells everybody else coming up behind them that if they want to get this next star and they want to sit on the board of company X, Y, or Z, they better tow this line.
00:58:41.000It's an ecosystem that includes politicians, it includes military leaders, both in uniform and just out sitting on these boards, lobbyists, permanent Washington.
00:58:50.000It's all a part of this huge infrastructure that is moving forward.
00:58:54.000And just like any company, you've got to show profits.
00:58:56.000It's just crazy that, you know, less than 100 years ago, Eisenhower warned us about this.
00:59:01.000At the end of World War II, when he's leaving office, he warned us about it in the 50s and said, there is a military-industrial complex.
00:59:10.000And the crazy thing is that speech at that time aired on television.
00:59:37.000It's one of those dichotomies that is very odd.
00:59:39.000And we all thought when you could carry the internet around in your pocket with that first iPhone, I mean, you thought, oh, when we have a discussion and someone says, no, it's this, you know, it's this, guess what?
01:00:12.000Well, politicians that need to galvanize bases, of course, and the social media companies themselves who have lobbyists in Washington who pay a lot of money to these politicians.
01:00:42.000But I want the kids to know that even if they're following somebody on social media, like a person, that's an advertisement for that person and their life.
01:00:49.000And you can see time and time again, beautiful families out there and they're showing here we are in Aruba or whatever.
01:00:54.000And here we are with our Easter photo together.
01:00:56.000And then the next week there's their divorce, and there's abuse, and it's like, this whole thing was all a farce.
01:01:39.000It's kind of like when you have a psychologist or a psychiatrist on, and they're Really getting into your life, maybe, or they're out there giving advice, giving all this advice, and then you find out that in the background there, they're a total disaster, and they're a crazy person.
01:01:51.000That happens more often than I'm not sorry to psychologists and psychologists out there, but you know it's true.
01:02:21.000She grew up on the internet, but she didn't grow up with the amount of input that these kids are getting now at age 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. The TikTok era.
01:03:09.000Other than some catastrophic disaster.
01:03:12.000And the catastrophic disasters that we're talking about are nuclear.
01:03:15.000And if there's a nuclear disaster, you know, it's that Einstein quote, I don't know what weapons World War III will be fought with, but World War IV will be fought with rocks and sticks.
01:03:32.000And that's what scares the shit out of me is that, you know, you got a guy like Putin who may or may not have cancer, you know, who's backed into a corner.
01:03:41.000What does he do if he thinks he's going to lose and he thinks he's going to die?
01:03:54.000So when you look at it logically, maybe they can move some things around on a board and move nuclear weapons closer or farther away or that sort of a thing as kind of pieces on a chessboard.
01:04:04.000But if you want to invade a country because you want its population and because you want its food sources, then to nuke it doesn't really play in.
01:04:13.000Unless they think they're going to lose Russia.
01:04:16.000And that's with the population decline.
01:04:18.000There are essentially a few, according to Peter Zeehan, is there a few generations away from, same thing with China with the one trial policy.
01:04:41.000I'm sure there are people that are drawn to it for fewer reasons and want to serve and they started businesses and made money and want to give back and they're concerned about the future of the country.
01:04:50.000I'm sure they exist, but man, people get into those positions and they sure do pick stocks a lot better than they did before.
01:05:13.000And in my first book, I talk about, hey, you show me a politician in Washington and I'm going to show you a family member who has some sort of a lobbying firm or this or that.
01:05:20.000And then what are we seeing with the Biden administration?
01:05:23.000You're seeing some of that right now on the front pages.
01:05:25.000They are just holding on to that as long as they can.
01:05:29.000Because it seems like that is a crazy mountain of corruption.
01:06:51.000The fact that he's just completely unqualified to be in those positions that he's at making the kind of money that he was making and Doing it for Russia and China.
01:07:03.000Yeah You know, I mean what's crazy is that Ukraine was thought to be one of the most corrupt countries Up until Russia invaded them and now they're the darling you get Sean Penn's given his Oscar to Zelensky and it's like We are so fucking lost That's what goes back to doing the research.
01:07:22.000And really, before you take that step, going back and making sure you're taking the right one.
01:07:26.000But for the American people, it's almost like there's too much research to do.
01:07:32.000For the average person that wants to, if you have a conservative position or a liberal position...
01:07:39.000It's like, boy, you have to trust in these fucking jackasses that are running the country to be steering you correctly, and they never are.
01:08:42.000And then you have, let's say, going back to Hunter Biden laptop, you have 50, what, 51, 52 intelligence officials who signed some letter that's now shown that they were coerced into signing, not coerced into signing this thing, but they signed it for a reason to give their candidate,
01:08:58.000the establishment candidate, a talking point in a debate.
01:09:03.000That undercuts everyone's confidence in those institutions anyway.
01:09:06.000And it was always a little shaky, your confidence in an intelligence service, just in general.
01:09:44.000I mean, when I have conversations with my kids about politics and life and stuff, it's like, you know, my young kids, not my oldest is 26. When I'm talking to my 12, well, now 13 and 14-year-olds and 15-year-olds, when I'm talking to them,
01:10:00.000they're at this point where they're going to be graduating from high school in a few years.
01:10:05.000They're going to be entering into the workforce and doing stuff.
01:10:09.000What do you tell them about this insanely corrupt system that's supposed to be the controlling operating system of this greatest country the world has ever known, this experiment in self-government?
01:10:26.000And so what we do is we go back and talk about all those sacrifices that were made so we can have these options and opportunities in the hopes that our kids take a pause and actually become part of the solution and respect What has happened in the past so that we can be this country we are today,
01:10:42.000even though we seem to be pretty good at destroying ourselves from the inside out right now.
01:10:46.000We did have a civil war, and at the end of that civil war, we did manage to come back together.
01:10:55.000There were people that didn't want it to happen.
01:10:56.000A lot of murder in And we didn't have social media.
01:11:00.000We didn't have this tool that you could use to continue to divide.
01:11:04.000So I often wonder, after the Civil War, if we had iPhones in our pockets and two sides or even some other factions that wanted to continue to divide and either prolong or whatever it was.
01:11:16.000I think social media is a problem, but at least social media has this, at least with Elon on board.
01:12:27.000That's how you get all these fucking loons out there.
01:12:31.000So if you want to maintain hope for the nation, don't go into the comments section of Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube, because very quickly you will come to the conclusion that all is lost.
01:12:58.000First of all, especially if they do a podcast, if you're doing this, like I had my friends Sarah Weinshank and Kim Congdon on, and after the podcast was over, I was like, please don't read the comments.
01:13:22.000Small podcast that might get a thousand downloads or a couple thousand downloads.
01:13:26.000Now you got 11 million people that are commenting on every fucking thing you've said, and the only thing you're gonna think of is the negatives.
01:13:34.000And these girls suck, and they're fucking losers, and they're not funny, they're this or that.
01:13:37.000Those are just unhappy, bitter people.
01:14:09.000I don't not read it because it's not like I'm immune.
01:14:15.000I read it because it's natural human nature to look for threats.
01:14:20.000And if you read a hundred quotes that are great and then one that sucks and that one person says this person should kill themselves and they're a this and a that and a that and a this and like, oh my God, am I that person?
01:15:24.000Sam Harris told me once that he was on a trip in Hawaii with his family and he read something negative about him and it tanked his whole trip because he spent his entire time crafting a response.
01:16:05.000I never respond to it, but I want to say thank you to all those people who, grassroots, like before you were kind enough to invite me on here, before Chris Pratt texted about the show or posted about the show, before I was on Tucker, it was all grassroots.
01:16:17.000It was all somebody taking a risk on me as a new author, telling a friend, and so when people get on and say, hey, I love your book, I gave it to my dad, now he's a fan, I want to say thank you to that person.
01:16:25.000So I'm up late doing that, but it also means that I see...
01:16:27.000Yeah, there comes a point in time where you just have to post things and then say thank you in the post, but you can't respond to people individually just because it's just bad for your brain.
01:17:14.000So I haven't done it in a while, but I used to read, go into the negative reviews on Amazon and then read those and kind of have a little fun with them.
01:17:21.000And when I went on Tucker, I read the negative reviews from the show and that was fun because the Daily Beast was, oh, they were just mean.
01:17:31.000But then the critics weren't big fans.
01:17:35.000But every single day we realized and we're making that show that we're not making it for critics.
01:17:39.000We're making it for that person who went downrange to Iraq and Afghanistan over the last 20 years when they sit down.
01:17:43.000Crack a beer and sit on the couch and turn this thing on that they at least know we put in the effort to make a show For them that pay tribute to them that was rooted in the realities of modern combat And we put in the work you fucking nailed it no doubt and you nailed it on the show though They made that show so fucking gritty and whenever someone makes an adaptation of a very brutal novel or multiple novels like yours You always wonder,
01:18:08.000like, God, are they going to be able to really do it?
01:18:25.000But anywhere we could, anywhere we could root this in the realities of modern combat, we were going to do that.
01:18:30.000And if we had to reshoot something or change something in the script on the fly, we were going to do that.
01:18:34.000And that's Chris and Antoine and the showrunner, David Agilio and Max Adams, former Army Ranger, who's in that writer's room every day, and Jared Shaw, my buddy who was there every day, who gave the book to Chris Pratt, and Ray Mendoza, another SEAL buddy out there doing the technical advising.
01:19:21.000Yeah, and it was fun to read it and have a good time with it on Tucker.
01:19:25.000I got so many people reaching out to me saying they love that, and we just had a little fun on a Friday reading those things and, you know, just reading their own words back to them and having a little fun with it.
01:19:33.000So that's kind of a healthy way to deal with it rather than looking at it and just trying to craft that response or, like, getting mad about it.
01:19:39.000Like, they're going to hate it anyway, and that's okay.
01:20:09.000So spin-off is, there's a character, Ben Edwards, and so spoiler alert for those who have not seen it, we'll just give you two seconds to put the earmuffs on.
01:20:17.000So he's killed at the end, and so it's a prequel that goes back to show how he went from the SEAL teams to the CIA, essentially how he turns bad.
01:20:25.000It's played by Taylor Kitsch, who is just awesome.
01:20:27.000And that's one of the characters I thought was more fully developed than the character in my novel.
01:20:31.000And on the page and then what Taylor Kitsch brought to it was just next level.
01:20:35.000So when we did the premiere in LA in June and it debuted on July 1st, but we did the premiere in June, I came home and for some reason I had a day without interruption.
01:20:46.000I don't know where my wife and kids were, but I was sitting in a chair that I would never sit in if I didn't want to be interrupted.
01:20:50.000And I wrote from the second I woke up all the way through the night until they got back.
01:21:18.000Taylor was all on board and then we put a package together and pitched it to Amazon and they loved it and so off we go to the races with this spin-off which is more of an international espionage type of a show rather than revenge thriller Action thriller, conspiracy thriller like the first one.
01:21:44.000And things in Hollywood, as you know, can go off the rails at any time.
01:21:47.000I always have, you know, that's just how it goes.
01:21:48.000But right now, we're working on those scripts, or well, we put the pencils down about five days ago now, six days ago, seven days ago for the writer's strike, but we were about at episode five, and it's good.
01:22:00.000And so when was that supposed to go into production?
01:22:02.000We're supposed to do it sometime in the fall, or early fall, and start filming then, and then post-production, and who knows when they get it out after that.
01:22:11.000Have they made progress with this strike?
01:23:43.000Me and my wife were having a conversation about actors.
01:23:47.000You know, and she was talking about someone that was very annoying, and I said, yeah, I go, it's rare, but it makes you cherish the ones that are cool, like Scott Eastwood.
01:23:57.000Scott Eastwood, if you didn't know that he was Clint Eastwood's son, if you didn't know he's a big movie star, he's like the fucking nicest, most normal, no-ego-having guy, just friendly and normal.
01:25:12.000But yeah, Chris saw it early because Jared Shaw, my buddy, gave him a copy because of a favor I did for Jared and the SEAL teams, which I just did because, once again, you want to help good guys.
01:25:21.000And he was getting out of the SEAL team, so I introduced him to some people in the private sector and followed up, and I forgot all about it.
01:25:27.000So he called me when he heard that I had a book coming out.
01:25:30.000So a few months before it came out in November of 2017, he called me and said, Hey man, I always wanted to thank you for what you did for me.
01:26:51.000And so I thought about that, flipping that switch.
01:26:53.000I thought about my background in the SEAL teams and coming home to wife and kids and all that stuff and having to flip that switch.
01:26:58.000And I thought, Chris is the guy who can pull this off.
01:27:00.000He hasn't done something like this, hasn't been in action films yet.
01:27:03.000And so I thought of Chris and I thought of Antoine being the director.
01:27:06.000And because I love what he did with Training Day and Tears of the Sun and a movie called Shooter based on Point of Impact by Stephen Hunter.
01:27:13.000And I just loved Antoine's work, so I thought, this is the guy.
01:27:16.000And now we're all three executive producers on it and doing it.
01:27:19.000Do you ever wonder if you made that happen with your brain?
01:27:21.000How much do you think you manifest things with your mind?
01:27:26.000Well, it certainly didn't take up any of that bandwidth, worried about it not happening.
01:27:30.000And I think a lot of that comes from just knowing what I wanted to do from a very early age, serve my country specifically as a SEAL, and then write thrillers back from my earliest days.
01:27:37.000So I started building this foundation at age 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, reading all these guys like Tom Clancy and Nelson DeMille and A.J. Quinnell and J.C. Pollock and Mark Olden and Louis L'Amour and Stephen Hunter.
01:27:48.000All these guys back in the 80s who had protagonists with backgrounds I wanted in real life one day.
01:27:52.000So I read all those and I just loved the magic in those pages and knew that one day I'd write those.
01:28:53.000What are you really going to do when that fails?
01:28:55.000Or you want to be a SEAL? What are you going to do when you don't make it through BUDS? Anybody who says that to you, stop talking to them.
01:29:18.000Yeah, it's that bandwidth, because you're thinking about those other things.
01:29:21.000Where for me, all my heart and soul went into the book, continued to go into the books, every single sentence.
01:29:27.000And for me, writing these kind of books, I don't have to go out there and find a sniper from Ramadi in 2006. I don't have to go find somebody who was in an ambush.
01:30:01.000So I think that helped as well and made it stand out to Simon& Schuster and makes it resonate with readers and resonate to Chris and Antoine because they both loved it and wanted to be a part of it and now they're leading the charge on it and they wanted me involved from the get-go all the way through from writing it to being a part of the writers room and as an advisor and then learning that,
01:30:18.000how that went down, doing the casting, seeing everybody that came through wanting to be in it.
01:30:23.000And then through production and post-production and then marketing and advertising and then the premiere and then negotiations for a second season and a spin-off and being a part of all that from the inside was...
01:30:31.000I learned so much over the last couple years.
01:30:34.000Have you thought about writing new characters?
01:30:37.000Have you thought about making a new James Reese or something similar or some complete different ecosystem, some complete different universe?
01:32:15.000Who, during the time, it's kind of COVID, well, it is COVID time, so they're doing screen tests, and you're seeing these people that everyone knows the name of, like, doing a screen test, wanting to be in the show, and I'm, like, part of that.
01:32:26.000And then Taylor, of course, just knocked it out of the park when we saw the screen test with him and Chris.
01:32:30.000Like, there was no question, like, Taylor is Ben Edwards, and Taylor is just an awesome dude, and he's so fired up to get to where we're just texting on the way over here.
01:32:36.000And he's so excited to get to work on this next one.
01:32:38.000And yeah, he just elevated that character to a new level.
01:34:18.000To Chris and Antoine, to the leadership.
01:34:19.000And it comes down to them setting the tone, like Antoine at that strategic level, so up there as the director, executive producer right there at the top, setting that tone strategically, and then Chris right there also as the tactical level inspiration for everybody on set.
01:34:34.000So everybody wanted to be there, and they're at the top of their games.
01:34:36.000And so many people came up to me on set, and they didn't have to, and they said they'd been on hundreds of sets in Hollywood, and they've never felt like this on a set before.
01:34:51.000Well, there's also not a lot of guys like you that wind up being successful authors.
01:34:55.000It's a very small, tiny group of people that have had the kind of real-world experience that you've had and then conveyed that into fiction.
01:35:04.000Yeah, for me it's very natural and very therapeutic, but also I knew what I wanted to do.
01:35:09.000I didn't wake up at age 45 and say, hey, can you make money at writing?
01:35:12.000What should I have been reading for the last 30 years in preparation for this?
01:35:56.000But audiobooks are the fastest-growing segment of publishing, and I'm so fortunate to have Ray Porter, who's also an awesome guy, by the Shakespearean-trained actor.
01:36:16.000I think about, well, maybe I should say that this person has some crazy accent in the first sentence so that Ray doesn't read and get halfway down the page and have to go back and then start with it again.
01:36:26.000So I do think about Ray as I'm writing and trying to make things that make sense for him.
01:36:57.000We're all products of our experience and what we decide to study.
01:37:01.000So there are maybe some characters in these books that might seem similar to some people at higher levels of government or military.
01:37:09.000And I kind of morph some things together and maybe make them worse or sometimes better than they actually are.
01:37:15.000So yeah, we're a product of our environments and the education we choose to give ourselves these days and what we pay attention to and our life experience.
01:37:42.000Have you encountered that in real life or is that just your knowledge of that?
01:37:47.000Well, we all saw it with Afghanistan, so there is that.
01:37:50.000You see the process of people sitting on these boards after their time in uniform and then approving gigantic contracts for these companies in positions that they were just in prior where they had that chance to approve, and now they're on this board, so that's just a part of it.
01:43:01.000I mean, everybody listening to this has obviously watched the video and seen that drone go in those doors and take the tour of that whole place before the day you opened, I think it was.
01:43:10.000With that rant, the Bill Burr rant, which is like the perfect rant to have over it.
01:43:27.000I remember you telling me about it beforehand, you know, and I was like, oh yeah, you came to the right place when you left L.A. I remember you were looking at a couple different places and I think you chose the right spot to come and then to build this, what you built here is so inspiring and so cool.
01:43:41.000But that one, when I saw that video, I was like, oh, because you told me about like a year in advance, a year and a half, whatever it was.
01:43:46.000And I was so excited when I saw that video and I texted you about it.
01:44:06.000And it was such a weird gamble, because I left L.A. in the middle of this Spotify deal, this enormous deal, and they were like, what the fuck are you doing?
01:44:46.000And there's sometimes where it seems counterintuitive, and other people are going to think it's a terrible idea, and you've got to not listen to them.
01:44:55.000Yeah, we call it in sniper school a bold adjustment.
01:44:57.000So you have a certain amount of time on that line and you have, especially if you're doing something with like an old M14 type of a thing where you're starting out and you're doing these clicks on your scope and On your elevation and like bold adjustments, gentlemen.
01:45:11.000I remember them walking down the line saying that.
01:45:13.000So you're not like taking a tiny click because they've got to get people through this course or get them out of the course or whatever it is.
01:45:18.000So bold adjustment, okay, went there, boom, halfway back, bang, you're on.
01:45:22.000Instead of these little tiny, very safe, tiny little adjustments that keep you on that line for another hour.
01:45:28.000Bold adjustments is what they told us.
01:46:13.000Yeah, because the first time I came out was LA. And that was a crazy time to come out because that was COVID. So the book hit the New York Times list.
01:46:18.000And then you texted and I jumped in the car and drove on out and there was nobody on the roads.
01:46:39.000And I remember just that we talked about it.
01:46:41.000I didn't put it as eloquently as Jon Stewart did when he talked about the Wuhan lab coronavirus thing and the Hershey, the bit where he does on, hey, if there's an outbreak of chocolatey goodness in Hershey, Pennsylvania, you might want to look at the chocolate factory.
01:46:53.000That guy was genius, but we did talk about it.
01:46:55.000And at the time, you know, that was conspiracy theory craziness.
01:46:58.000And I was like, well, there is a lab there.
01:46:59.000So if I was a detective in any big city in the United States, I'd probably call that a clue.
01:47:34.000At the time, I had been very fortunate to be friends with people that actually understood viruses and actually understood the fair and cleavage sites and the way that viruses normally jump from an animal host to a human,
01:48:32.000So these days, I read for people coming on the podcast.
01:48:35.000I've read every book for people that have come on thus far.
01:48:37.000I don't know if I'll always be able to.
01:48:39.000But I think some of those books would have fallen to lower on the priority list if they weren't coming on the podcast.
01:48:45.000But some of those conversations that I've had and the books I've read have made it into the pages of the novel.
01:48:49.000So there's all this overlap to include this one.
01:48:51.000Brian Moore has a book called The Able Archers, and it talks about a nuclear exchange that almost happened between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1983. And there was one guy in the Soviet Union, an officer on watch that night, who was not supposed to be there.
01:49:04.000The guy who was supposed to be there got sick.
01:49:06.000So this one guy steps up, goes in for the person who's sick, and he's the one guy who studied the United States, and he's...
01:49:12.000I'm an intellectual, and he's put in this time and effort into understanding the strategic aspects of this conflict in the Cold War.
01:49:19.000And there's a launch from the United States, ICBMs, heading towards the Soviet Union.
01:49:50.000I might be off by a year or two, but I think it was 1999 when these documents were finally declassified, so well after the end of the Cold War.
01:50:01.000So I read that book and had that conversation with this guy, and he's a really nice guy, great guy, been in the intelligence world his whole career, and that made it into the pages of this novel.
01:50:09.000So there's overlap, but Robert Kennedy has not been on the podcast yet, so I have not read that book, but I've been meaning to read it.
01:50:28.000His ability to just remember all these different pieces that were in play, particularly with the JFK assassination and Lee Harvey Oswald and the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA asset and that he had defected to Russia but it was a fake defection and all the different pieces that were in place that he could point to.
01:52:22.000I mean, in most of my books, I make mention, and this one in particular, go back to the church hearings and the Pike hearings of the 70s that exposed some overreach by agencies in the federal government, particularly the CIA. But as it pertains to the Kennedy assassination, it is so strange.
01:52:37.000All these years later, they still walk into the Oval Office and have a private conversation and walk out, and all of a sudden, these documents that are mandated to be released by law are not.
01:52:48.000But in this one also, a friend of mine married into the Kennedy family, so I went back to Hannesport, got to meet Robert Kennedy, and spent some time with Ethel Kennedy, and it was amazing.
01:52:56.000And that experience also informs, I think you've gotten to that chapter already, where he goes to meet the old woman.
01:53:04.000It inspired this book right here, and that was really cool to be back there and see.
01:53:07.000Look at this chair, and in this chair, there's a little table next to it, and you see a picture of JFK watching the election results come in, and you look at the picture, and you look at the chair, and it's him in that chair right there.
01:54:12.000And Donnie Edwards, who has the best defense foundation, he has a picture of himself with a World War I veteran, which is pretty cool.
01:54:20.000And so my daughter, who's 17, we went to Pearl Harbor and took 62 veterans back to Pearl Harbor for the 80th anniversary commemoration event about a year and a half ago.
01:54:28.000Last June we went to Normandy so she's on Normandy with somebody who is the first out of his landing craft storming the beach and she's there on this beach with him and he's a hundred years old right now hearing that story from him and I'm getting pictures of them talking together and so one day she'll say I have a picture with a World War II veteran.
01:54:46.000What percentage of guys died on that beach?
01:54:49.000I don't know the exact numbers, but it was a lot, and then a lot when you think about the Pacific Campaign, and they did that over and over again, island after island after island.
01:54:59.000And then those guys came home, and what did they do?
01:55:21.000I think that's why they started Outward Bound.
01:55:22.000They did this study and they found, I think it was World War I, I might get this a little off, but the general gist is on track.
01:55:31.000And they found that people dying in the North Atlantic that were there like treading water, trying to survive, trying to signal another boat, were the older guys were surviving and the younger guys that should be in better shape their whole life ahead of them were the ones that weren't.
01:55:44.000And they thought, well, this is because those people haven't faced as much adversity as the older people.
01:55:48.000So they started this Outward Bound thing, get kids in the outdoors, have them do a solo out there by themselves for a couple nights and put them in these positions that are uncomfortable.
01:55:56.000And so I think that's why that started.
01:56:14.000That's an interesting thing in the world of fighting, because as fighters get older, they have more experience, more understanding, more toughness, but the body doesn't work right anymore.
01:56:25.000That's tough, and that's it right there.
01:56:27.000So it's a privilege to be getting old, that's for sure, especially if you spend some time in an occupation where nature balances it out.
01:56:47.000I spent some time with him also on the range out at SIG Freedom Days, but they have this sniper course they do in Utah the last couple of years, and we got to spend some time together out there.
01:57:49.000That dude, he's one of the wildest guys I've ever met because the shit that he does outside of fighting, which is wild, they're always trying to get him to calm down because he's always doing things like Jumping jet skis and snowmobiles and just doing so much wild shit outside of fighting,
01:58:09.000which is the wildest fucking thing you could do as a sport.
01:58:13.000I mean, remember back in the day when Point Break came out and Patrick Swayze was jumping every weekend, like actually jumping out of planes, and they were trying to, with insurance, like trying to get him to not do that.
01:58:53.000And then he's like, well, for the next one, we've got to up it, and I'm going to take this motorcycle and jump off this cliff in, like, was it Norway or something like that?
02:00:05.000We're studying sharks at the University of Hawaii, but they're like 21, maybe.
02:00:09.000And we zip down there, and they're looking at making sure there's no tiger sharks.
02:00:12.000And we go in, and we do this dive, and our little guy's just snorkeling, but you dive down, and they get the picture, and you're seeing these sharks, and you learn a little bit about them.
02:00:20.000And then we get back, and the same day, we find out that on Oahu, somebody got chomped.
02:00:25.000So it was just about a month and a half ago.
02:00:27.000And some girl was diving somewhere, not in Hawaii, but like in the Maldives or somewhere like that.
02:00:32.000I also got chomped doing the exact same kind of snorkeling thing that a little guy was doing.
02:00:36.000But I like how you say, if you're not going into the water like that, then you're not going to get eaten by a shark.
02:00:42.000It's just kind of like if you don't jump out of the plane, then you're not going to burn in.
02:03:42.000And a long, long time ago, when it was all dark outside, I bribed some guards, got some horses, and rode out to that thing in the middle of the night, climbed up to the top, and then watched the sun rise over Cairo.
02:04:27.000And one of the things that Douglas Murray has talked about, and it's really fascinating to me, he said every society, when it's at the verge of collapse, becomes obsessed with gender.
02:05:30.000I don't know what to think about that.
02:05:31.000I go back and forth and back and forth.
02:05:33.000You know, part of me thinks some of it is real.
02:05:35.000And part of me thinks a good percentage of it is probably like some black project that they're not telling us about, that there's some insanely complex drone, an unmanned drone.
02:06:10.000Old World War II planes back in the day, and I always see this stealth bomber that was like an interpretation from the toy company that made these models of a stealth bomber.
02:06:18.000And it was pretty dang close when they actually revealed it years later.
02:06:34.000Commander Fravor was the one that off the coast of San Diego in 2004, he encountered that object that went from more than 50,000 feet above sea level to 50 in less than a second.
02:07:14.000They think there was something else that was under the water, that it was interacting with something that was under the water because there was ripples.
02:08:03.000Yeah, and then there was Ryan Graves who said that I believe it was in 2014 they upgraded all of their equipment and then they started seeing these things because the equipment have new capabilities and they're seeing these things that are 120 knot winds completely motionless just staying and just totally still which is like how no no heat signature no visual means of propulsion they don't know what the fuck these things were doing Moving at insane rates of speed occasionally.
02:09:23.000Bob Lazar is the gentleman that worked on Area S4, Site 4, Area 51. He worked back engineering with this thing that they said that they had recovered.
02:09:35.000And they were trying to figure out how the propulsion system worked.
02:10:04.000He said the problem with it is that science doesn't exist in a vacuum.
02:10:09.000You need a bunch of scientists comparing notes and trying to discuss it, but everything was top secret and classified, so they couldn't do that.
02:10:16.000So they brought in people who were the metallurgy people, and they were not allowed to communicate with the people that were the propulsion experts.
02:10:23.000They were not allowed to communicate with people who supposedly had some sort of contact with the biological entities.
02:10:32.000And then there's this amazing documentary that was just released recently called Moment of Contact about Varginha, Brazil.
02:11:15.000What's incredible too is this one of these guys, one of the soldiers that was in this documentary, they bring him to the crash site and this guy starts weeping and he's talking about it.
02:11:26.000I mean, unless this guy's like the greatest fucking actor the world's ever known, the way he reacts when he sees this site, when he describes his experience, When they found this thing that it crash landed.
02:11:36.000And there's also documentation that the Air Force had flown a jet to Virginia and returned with whatever the fuck they caught, whatever they got there, and brought it back to the United States.
02:12:03.000That Jackie Gleason and him were drinking, and Nixon was like, you want to see a fucking UFO? No way!
02:12:11.000Yeah, and he flew him to see wreckage, and they had frozen biological entities, and they got a chance to see these things that they had frozen.
02:13:54.000I mean, this is the wildest of speculations.
02:13:57.000I would guess that every civilization reaches a point of technological proficiency when they're also dealing with these territorial warring tribes where they have the ability to literally destroy the earth.
02:14:11.000And that if this is a natural course of progression for intelligent beings, they get to this point There's a transition where it gets very dangerous.
02:14:20.000And if I was from another planet and I was monitoring this, I would be there to make sure that they don't launch.
02:14:28.000See, that's the theme of the Mothership Comedy Club, is that the rooms are called Fat Man and Little Boy.
02:14:35.000And the reason why the rooms are called Fat Man and Little Boy is because that is a specific moment in UFO folklore when the aliens start arriving.
02:14:42.000After the detonation of those bombs, that's when you start seeing this massive uptick in sightings.
02:14:49.000And interactions with fighter pilots and these different military bases that have nuclear programs where the bases get shut down and all the power goes off.
02:16:37.000Are they telling us because they really have this information and they want to slowly leak it out because this is an inevitable contact moment and they want to prepare civilization?
02:16:52.000And this is how they, you know, institute this drone program where they have this, you know, anti-gravity device and they can move it in the same rates of speed.
02:17:58.000I mean, you see that in movies, and we all watch it in movies and think it's science fiction, but there's a lot of science fiction that has come to fruition, from submarines to going to the moon, to almost all sorts of space travel in general, flight, just flying.
02:19:31.000It's such a fun thing to be excited about.
02:19:36.000I mean, and it might be the thing that could save us from demise.
02:19:39.000If we really are on this path of mutually assured destruction with Russia and with China, with China invading Taiwan, which seems also inevitable...
02:20:55.000So you have to have a very supportive family that understands that, hey, you're going to Iraq, you're going to Afghanistan, your best friends are in that trench with you to the right and the left, and so that pendulum has to be over here.
02:21:04.000You owe that to them, their families, the country, the mission, the team.
02:21:08.000But once you get out and, you know, can start building.
02:21:13.000You're building, and you're solely focused on it, and your family's over here, and sometimes that does take a backseat when you're building.
02:21:20.000But for me, I know that, yeah, I'm going to miss those times.
02:21:22.000I'm going to miss all those interruptions in a few years here.
02:22:35.000It's, I think, at a certain point in time.
02:22:37.000You want to be able to have a phone that you check every now and again, but have a phone where your wife has, your best friends have, and then don't let anybody give that fucker away.
02:22:46.000Yeah, I tell her, like, if I get a group text, and there's a group text with someone, like, hey man, this guy wants to talk to you about a project.
02:28:28.000I mean, you're an inspiration for a ton of people.
02:28:30.000You'll never even know how many people.
02:28:31.000It's impossible to quantify with how many people listen to this and see you and see what you've created and what you've done and what you've built.
02:28:37.000And that's on a scale that's not close to what I'm doing.
02:28:41.000But I've been busy every single second of my life, just like you.
02:28:44.000And I didn't even look at it as building, just like you.
02:29:36.000So once you recognize that and then realize that you've got this one shot, like, You won the lottery being born here.
02:29:44.000I feel like I won the lottery being born here, not having my buddy give the book to Chris Pratt or having somebody give the book to Simon& Schuster or whatever it was.
02:29:51.000Being born here is winning that lottery.
02:31:02.000And it was right, the Title 42 thing just a few days ago.
02:31:06.000And he talked about people coming across and getting 1,500 bucks, I think it was, and off they go and how they're forced to release and do all these things.
02:31:14.000And their job is to protect, yet they have to let through.
02:31:17.000And they don't know who they're letting through.
02:31:19.000Yeah, it's not a perfect screening process.
02:31:21.000So you're this person that's supposed to protect.
02:31:23.000You're supposed to be on that border, protecting that border.
02:31:35.000Well, I mean, I think there's a voter base that a certain segment of society thinks is going to be more apt to vote for one side than the other.
02:31:41.000But we have – I mean, when you talk about – and people like to make fun of Trump and the wall.
02:31:46.000I mean, there are great memes out there about the wall.
02:31:48.000And then people like to point to places in history where walls were meant to keep people in.
02:31:53.000Well, no, the walls also work to keep people out.
02:32:00.000But you also, at the same time, as a compassionate person, you want to let that person in from Guatemala that worked their way all the way up here and put in that work for a new opportunity for them and their family here.
02:32:10.000And that's going to be probably a productive citizen.
02:32:13.000But along with that person comes other people with nefarious types of ambitions that can also work their way.
02:32:36.000But what a fucking terrible mismanagement.
02:32:39.000Yeah, no, it's the compassion of the American people.
02:32:42.000We're very compassionate, I think, overall.
02:32:44.000And just like when you see somebody who posts a picture of a dead animal and they're so excited, they put in all this work and they got there and they took this picture and they posted it and then they get destroyed.
02:32:53.000Online because of these comments or whatever it might be.
02:32:57.000People that are eating a cheeseburger.
02:33:17.000Internet and social media in particular makes that a lot easier.
02:33:21.000And now these companies that own these things are not American companies.
02:33:23.000They're global multinational corporations and they benefit.
02:33:27.000But America gave them, in most cases, that opportunity to be so successful, to be so wildly wealthy, more wealthy than most anyone in the history of the world.
02:34:28.000And our culture, for whatever reason, doesn't celebrate them like they should.
02:34:31.000Yeah, I appreciate those guys every day, and I think about them every day, so thankful that they're out there every day, willing to do that job, willing to be teachers, willing to put themselves on the line, on the border, willing to suit up and get in that squad car and roll into the city or whatever else,
02:34:46.000knowing that there's a whole segment of society that just wants to vilify them no matter what they do, and it's a tough position to be in.
02:35:06.000You want to teach kids or whatever else, and all of a sudden you find yourself embroiled in some crazy controversy, and you're like, I just want to teach kids some history or want to teach them math.
02:35:16.000I mean, they're getting that squad car to protect and they go out and people make a mistake and there's good people and bad people in every single institution and every single organization.