The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2165 - Jack Carr

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

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

00:00:13.000 What's up, man?

00:00:14.000 Good to see you, brother.

00:00:15.000 What's happening?

00:00:16.000 So good to be here.

00:00:17.000 This is awesome.

00:00:17.000 Man, comedy, mothership, amazing.

00:00:21.000 You had a good time?

00:00:21.000 It was so much fun.

00:00:22.000 So cool.

00:00:23.000 We had a blast up there.

00:00:25.000 And everybody was amazing.

00:00:26.000 Ron White came up to say hi afterward and was in that booth.

00:00:30.000 Somebody...

00:00:31.000 Her last name, Lardner, so Kyle Lardner is her name, and she does piano, music, sells vinyl, and she's up there, but she, I think her, I think she said her grandfather or somebody wrote MASH back in the day.

00:00:46.000 The theme song?

00:00:48.000 The screenplay.

00:00:48.000 Oh, wow!

00:00:50.000 Somebody related to her, anyway, did that.

00:00:52.000 I heard music.

00:00:53.000 Yeah, right, right.

00:00:55.000 It was fun watching the show with her.

00:00:58.000 She knows Ron White, so he came up.

00:00:59.000 That's why he came up and said hi to us.

00:01:01.000 Everybody killed it.

00:01:02.000 It was so much fun.

00:01:03.000 I love how you put your phone in the bag.

00:01:06.000 Turn it off and lock it.

00:01:08.000 We need more of that in life.

00:01:10.000 Uh-huh.

00:01:10.000 Yeah.

00:01:12.000 It's hard for people to not be distracted these days.

00:01:14.000 Everyone's distracted.

00:01:16.000 Yeah.

00:01:16.000 But it was so noticeable.

00:01:17.000 So you're in that VIP balcony.

00:01:19.000 Amazing.

00:01:19.000 And then you're looking down, but it was so noticeable now that no one has their phones out.

00:01:23.000 If you didn't have that, you'd look down from that balcony and you'd certainly see somebody just got a quick text on the kids.

00:01:29.000 If you go to the movies, you just see lit up phones everywhere now.

00:01:32.000 It's crazy.

00:01:33.000 That's what I was saying.

00:01:33.000 I was saying, I wish they did this in movies.

00:01:36.000 I mean, phones are cool.

00:01:37.000 They do a lot of cool things, but man, it's a massive distraction.

00:01:41.000 I'm working towards being able to hand this thing off.

00:01:44.000 Yeah?

00:01:45.000 Hand it off?

00:01:46.000 To who?

00:01:46.000 Somebody else.

00:01:47.000 That's not me.

00:01:48.000 Hand it off and go to the flip.

00:01:50.000 Oh, really?

00:01:51.000 I'm not going to be there for a few years, but...

00:01:53.000 What about texting, though?

00:01:54.000 Well, you can still...

00:01:55.000 Remember the Blackberry?

00:01:56.000 Yeah, David Tell was in here, and he was texting.

00:01:58.000 He has a flip phone.

00:01:59.000 He texts with his flip phone.

00:02:00.000 I'm like, what are you doing?

00:02:01.000 I got pretty quick at that.

00:02:02.000 And his makes the beeps, too, so it's like... 0.99

00:02:04.000 I'm like, what the fuck are you doing? 0.99

00:02:08.000 Uh-huh. 0.99

00:02:08.000 Yeah, I mean, I've never... 0.99

00:02:09.000 We were doing that and we did it.

00:02:10.000 Everybody just kind of figured it out.

00:02:12.000 But it was like, what is it?

00:02:13.000 Three letters or symbols on each thing.

00:02:16.000 But you got pretty good with it.

00:02:18.000 Yeah, you can get pretty good.

00:02:20.000 But it's slow. 1.00

00:02:21.000 It's slow and stupid. 0.99

00:02:22.000 I mean, that's what happened when people started using the letter U. Instead of U and the letter R instead of A-R-E. I can't do it. 1.00

00:02:30.000 Do you do it?

00:02:31.000 No.

00:02:31.000 Okay.

00:02:31.000 Yeah, I don't think so.

00:02:32.000 I'm trying to think of your text.

00:02:33.000 Especially you.

00:02:33.000 You're an author.

00:02:35.000 Nope.

00:02:35.000 I gotta have commas in there.

00:02:36.000 I can't have a U. None of that stuff.

00:02:38.000 Right.

00:02:38.000 So it's noticeable when people send it to me.

00:02:40.000 I'm like, mm.

00:02:41.000 Yeah, little guy's the worst.

00:02:42.000 That 13 years old, that's all they do.

00:02:45.000 Oh yeah, they do.

00:02:46.000 They abbreviate things too. 0.98

00:02:47.000 I always have to ask my kid, what the fuck does that mean? 0.99

00:02:50.000 IDK? Oh, I don't care. 0.99

00:02:53.000 Or I don't know.

00:02:54.000 IDC is I don't care.

00:02:57.000 IDK is I don't know.

00:02:59.000 They have a whole bunch of them that they use all the time that I have to like think.

00:03:03.000 Yeah.

00:03:04.000 What?

00:03:04.000 What are you saying?

00:03:05.000 I know.

00:03:06.000 I look it up sometimes.

00:03:07.000 I Google it.

00:03:07.000 I type it in, what does this mean?

00:03:09.000 And it pops up.

00:03:10.000 Or then I just get the, bruh.

00:03:12.000 Bruh.

00:03:12.000 Bruh's a lot.

00:03:13.000 B-R-U-H. That's it. 1.00

00:03:15.000 I just get that.

00:03:16.000 Bruh.

00:03:17.000 I'm like, what does that even mean?

00:03:19.000 I saw some meme.

00:03:20.000 It was like a mom texting her kid.

00:03:23.000 And it says, texting your 13-year-old boy is like texting someone who's about to break up with you.

00:03:27.000 Because it's like, hey, how was your day?

00:03:28.000 And it's like, okay.

00:03:29.000 Something like that.

00:03:30.000 And it's totally true.

00:03:32.000 It is totally true.

00:03:33.000 But I'd like to go back.

00:03:34.000 I'd like to hand it off at some point.

00:03:35.000 I'm not there yet because it's still my office.

00:03:38.000 That is still my mobile office and all the socials and everything else, the interaction with people.

00:03:43.000 Everything goes.

00:03:44.000 That's it.

00:03:45.000 I think you just have to have discipline.

00:03:47.000 I think my middle ground is have a real phone, real smartphone, but discipline.

00:03:54.000 Just no one to put it away, no one to leave it alone.

00:03:57.000 Are you good with it?

00:03:58.000 Yeah, I'm good with it.

00:03:59.000 I'm pretty good with it.

00:04:00.000 It depends on if I have the day off. 1.00

00:04:02.000 If I have the day off, I'm on that fucking stupid thing six hours. 1.00

00:04:06.000 I'm watching YouTube. 1.00

00:04:08.000 Are you really?

00:04:08.000 Yeah, if I have the day off.

00:04:10.000 Because if I have a day off, I purposely decide to do nothing.

00:04:14.000 If I have a day off, I never have a day of nothing.

00:04:18.000 I have a day of archery, working out, then nothing. 0.91

00:04:24.000 But those days are fucking awesome, man.

00:04:27.000 The nothing to do day, oh my god, I appreciate those so much.

00:04:32.000 Do you build one in?

00:04:34.000 Yeah, I build one in.

00:04:35.000 Yeah, I never work every day.

00:04:37.000 Okay.

00:04:37.000 I won't.

00:04:38.000 I've done it.

00:04:38.000 I mean, I've done a few times, like if I have to go away on vacation or something like that, we have to bank about a bunch of episodes, I wind up doing five in a week.

00:04:46.000 And then at the end of the week, I just, I don't want to lose enthusiasm.

00:04:50.000 Right.

00:04:50.000 Because I feel like there's a balance between discipline and enthusiasm, and you've got to find out where that is.

00:04:56.000 If I lose enthusiasm, then I don't have as much excitement.

00:05:00.000 And then whatever I'm doing is not as good.

00:05:03.000 Right.

00:05:03.000 No, I understand that.

00:05:04.000 Do you ever feel that...

00:05:05.000 That you have that?

00:05:06.000 I can't tell looking at it from the outside and knowing you and then watching an episode or listening to an episode.

00:05:11.000 I can never tell if you're off.

00:05:13.000 Do you ever feel off?

00:05:15.000 I feel it could be coming and then I don't allow it to come because I remind myself how fortunate I am and about how happy I would be to be able to do what I did if I couldn't do it.

00:05:25.000 Right.

00:05:25.000 And then I just put myself in that state of mind.

00:05:27.000 Right.

00:05:28.000 But that also means like day off is necessary.

00:05:31.000 Right.

00:05:32.000 Have that day off.

00:05:33.000 I can chill out.

00:05:34.000 But are there really days off with family?

00:05:36.000 Yeah, just chill.

00:05:37.000 Isn't that exhausting too?

00:05:38.000 Family days?

00:05:39.000 Nah, fun.

00:05:40.000 Like yesterday we did a Father's Day thing.

00:05:42.000 We went and killed zombies.

00:05:43.000 Nice.

00:05:44.000 You ever do sandbox VR? Do you know what that is?

00:05:46.000 Oh my god, it's my favorite thing to do. 0.87

00:05:48.000 I fucking love it. 0.96

00:05:49.000 What? 0.99

00:05:50.000 Yeah, there's this game called Deadwood Mansion.

00:05:52.000 And you put on the VR helmets and you're trapped in a mansion.

00:05:58.000 That gets invaded by zombies.

00:05:59.000 Okay.

00:05:59.000 And you have a shotgun.

00:06:00.000 Just blasting zombies.

00:06:02.000 Okay.

00:06:03.000 Nice. 0.95

00:06:03.000 I fucking love it. 0.95

00:06:04.000 Do you go someplace for it? 0.98

00:06:06.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:06:06.000 It's a place called Sandbox VR, and it's out here in Austin.

00:06:10.000 And there was one in Woodland Hills, too.

00:06:12.000 This is the game.

00:06:13.000 This is what it looks like.

00:06:13.000 Oh, that's crazy.

00:06:14.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:06:15.000 It's fucking dope, dude. 0.99

00:06:16.000 Nice. 1.00

00:06:17.000 Oh, dang.

00:06:18.000 Look at that movie.

00:06:18.000 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:06:19.000 It's like a movie.

00:06:20.000 And these zombies come running at you, and when they grab you, you have a haptic feedback vest, so you feel it when they're grabbing you.

00:06:27.000 What?

00:06:28.000 Yeah.

00:06:28.000 What's a haptic feedback?

00:06:29.000 Like a titans, or you feel like a zap?

00:06:31.000 No, it, like, zaps you.

00:06:32.000 It's like a buzz on your chest.

00:06:34.000 It's really fun.

00:06:36.000 That's awesome.

00:06:36.000 Oh, I love it.

00:06:37.000 They have a ton of games there, too.

00:06:39.000 It's not just that.

00:06:39.000 They have a Squid Games one.

00:06:40.000 They have a Star Trek one.

00:06:42.000 Oh, dang.

00:06:42.000 They have one where you have duels with people, like space weapons.

00:06:46.000 That's wild.

00:06:48.000 It's not just for kids, obviously.

00:06:50.000 No, no, it's for everybody. 0.97

00:06:51.000 Well, obviously, I'm a big kid, but I fucking love it, man.

00:06:55.000 I had the number three score ever in there at one point in time. 0.93

00:07:01.000 Somebody proud of right there.

00:07:03.000 One ham with the shotgun.

00:07:05.000 You train up for it?

00:07:07.000 Just a lot of coffee.

00:07:10.000 Every gun has a laser on it, so you know exactly where you're shooting. 0.99

00:07:15.000 And just take headshots on zombies.

00:07:18.000 I'm going to see if we can have one of those in Salt Lake, see if we can go down there. 0.79

00:07:20.000 They probably do.

00:07:21.000 They have a ton of them.

00:07:23.000 I know there's one, like I said, there's one in Woodland Hills that we used to have right down the studio.

00:07:28.000 In LA. Yeah.

00:07:29.000 So maybe they are.

00:07:30.000 Yeah.

00:07:31.000 Is there one?

00:07:31.000 Yeah.

00:07:31.000 In an area called Murray.

00:07:33.000 Nice.

00:07:33.000 All right.

00:07:34.000 Yeah.

00:07:34.000 Taking my little guy down there.

00:07:35.000 You've got to do it.

00:07:36.000 It's so fun.

00:07:37.000 Oh, that's perfect.

00:07:37.000 That's good to know.

00:07:38.000 Yeah.

00:07:38.000 It's spooky, too.

00:07:39.000 It's really scary.

00:07:40.000 It looks like it.

00:07:41.000 Yeah.

00:07:41.000 They drop out of the ceiling.

00:07:42.000 Oh, man.

00:07:43.000 Yeah.

00:07:43.000 The ceiling breaks open, and a ton of zombies fall down in front of you, and they just run at you.

00:07:48.000 You've got to blast them.

00:07:49.000 Really?

00:07:49.000 My little guy, I like that.

00:07:50.000 He's 13. He loves that stuff, and he loves roller coasters.

00:07:53.000 There's a...

00:07:54.000 In Salt Lake, they have...

00:07:55.000 I forget the name of the place, but it's called the Cannibal.

00:07:57.000 He made me go with him a couple years ago.

00:07:59.000 I'm not a big rollercoaster person.

00:08:00.000 I watch too many Instagram videos of those things going sideways.

00:08:05.000 People go flying off of them.

00:08:06.000 Not fun.

00:08:07.000 No, don't do that.

00:08:09.000 But he loves it, so he'll dig this.

00:08:12.000 I get that people like those thrills.

00:08:14.000 They don't appeal to me.

00:08:16.000 No.

00:08:17.000 I used to do them a lot with my kids when they were younger, especially Disneyland.

00:08:21.000 Disneyland, you know, they're pretty good.

00:08:23.000 They really don't very rarely have a fuck up. 0.98

00:08:26.000 Yeah, good point. 0.65

00:08:28.000 Yeah, their safety record's pretty awesome.

00:08:30.000 Yeah, we did it right before we left and left California to go to Utah.

00:08:34.000 And we thought, okay, we're going to do this one last kind of kid-centric thing with all these amusement parks because my wife and I are not really amusement park people.

00:08:41.000 Just surrounded by real sweating and just eating everything, long lines, crying, whining.

00:08:47.000 So, yeah, we did that, and then I think that's it for us.

00:08:50.000 If you want to find the hazards of the American diet in full effect, go to Disneyland. 0.54

00:08:55.000 It's bad.

00:08:56.000 There's so many people on scooters because they can't walk because they've got too big.

00:08:59.000 Oh, yeah.

00:09:00.000 It's so terrible.

00:09:01.000 Yeah, no.

00:09:02.000 Yeah, sorry kids.

00:09:04.000 That was your last time that we're going to be at one of those places.

00:09:06.000 Now it's outdoor stuff.

00:09:07.000 It's fun. 0.96

00:09:07.000 It's fun for a day just to eat churros and be a pig. 0.96

00:09:11.000 Just fucking, just have a good time. 1.00

00:09:14.000 But, you know, you have to like... 1.00

00:09:16.000 Allow yourself to just fuck off. 1.00

00:09:18.000 Eat ice cream and fuck off for the day. 1.00

00:09:20.000 Just say, today we're going to fuck off. 1.00

00:09:22.000 That's your day off. 0.99

00:09:23.000 That energizes you when you get back into it so you have somebody coming on the podcast. 0.99

00:09:25.000 Also, I feel guilty for fucking off and eating all that garbage. 0.98

00:09:29.000 So you hit it hard the next day? 1.00

00:09:31.000 Yeah.

00:09:31.000 Well, I got that sauna after we talked last time.

00:09:33.000 I think it was getting put in last time we talked.

00:09:35.000 And I still haven't really been in it because I've plugged it in or whatever.

00:09:39.000 Electrician came, plugged that thing in.

00:09:41.000 It's one of those barrel ones.

00:09:42.000 And so it looks out at the mountains.

00:09:43.000 It has like this glass thing on it.

00:09:45.000 Oh, nice.

00:09:45.000 Yeah, but it just gets warm.

00:09:47.000 Oh, really?

00:09:48.000 Yeah.

00:09:48.000 So we need to have...

00:09:49.000 Who made your sauna?

00:09:50.000 I don't even know.

00:09:50.000 My wife will.

00:09:51.000 You've got to get Salusons, the guys that did ours.

00:09:54.000 And they have serious heaters.

00:09:55.000 Mine gets to 200 degrees.

00:09:57.000 Yeah, this was not...

00:09:58.000 This just gets kind of...

00:09:59.000 Not even uncomfortably warm.

00:10:01.000 Is it infrared or is it a regular sauna?

00:10:04.000 No, it has a little thing in it that has the rocks.

00:10:06.000 Wow, it just gets warm?

00:10:08.000 I think it's the altitude.

00:10:09.000 I think it needs some sort of an adjustment for altitude because we're at about just shy of 8,000 feet.

00:10:14.000 Right, but it's electric.

00:10:15.000 That doesn't make any sense.

00:10:16.000 Yeah, I know.

00:10:18.000 I think someone knows what they're doing.

00:10:20.000 Yeah, we'll get those guys from Sulu Saunas to hook you up.

00:10:22.000 They'll just swap out your heater.

00:10:23.000 Okay.

00:10:24.000 We have a Hum.

00:10:26.000 I think it's H-U-U-M is the name of the heater. 1.00

00:10:30.000 That fucking thing cranks. 0.99

00:10:32.000 Same thing we have in here in the studio. 1.00

00:10:34.000 Yeah, you've got to get a real heater.

00:10:36.000 Yeah, I need to do something.

00:10:37.000 So that sits there, unused.

00:10:39.000 But moving forward, so I was hearing you talk about archery.

00:10:42.000 So I have the guys from Total Archery Challenge.

00:10:44.000 They came out and they put up 22 3D targets all around.

00:10:48.000 Oh, nice!

00:10:48.000 It's a good course.

00:10:50.000 But days off, they don't really exist yet.

00:10:53.000 But I need to just make time to get out there in the mornings, drop the kids at school, and just walk that course and shoot.

00:10:59.000 Well, you're cranking out basically a book a year.

00:11:01.000 Yeah.

00:11:02.000 Plus, you're also working on the Terminalist TV series.

00:11:04.000 Yeah.

00:11:05.000 That is a lot of work, my friend.

00:11:07.000 It is.

00:11:07.000 My first nonfiction comes out in the fall on the 1983 Beirut Barracks bombing, so that's a whole other thing.

00:11:13.000 Oh, wow.

00:11:13.000 Okay.

00:11:14.000 So you're getting into historical stuff.

00:11:15.000 Yeah.

00:11:15.000 We have a lot of history in here.

00:11:16.000 I just love history.

00:11:17.000 I always have since I was a little kid anyway, but I really wanted to start down that path and explore a different terrorist event and We're good to go.

00:11:31.000 We're good to go.

00:11:54.000 I mean, it changed the course of U.S. foreign policy for sure.

00:11:57.000 The shadow is still in its shadow today.

00:12:00.000 But yeah, it killed 241 U.S. service members and 58 French paratroopers.

00:12:05.000 And it was the biggest loss of life for the Marine Corps since Iwo Jima and World War II. So it's a seminal event in Marine Corps history and in our history as a nation.

00:12:14.000 But there isn't really the seminal work on it yet.

00:12:16.000 So I wanted to do that and did that with Pulitzer Prize finalist, military historian James Scott.

00:12:21.000 Amazing guy.

00:12:22.000 So we've been working on that for the last two years and that comes out In September, but man, it's go, go, go.

00:12:26.000 How do you collaborate something like that with a historian?

00:12:30.000 How does that work?

00:12:30.000 Do you send him stuff, what you're working on, and he gives you feedback?

00:12:35.000 How does it work?

00:12:36.000 So I had the idea, and I wanted one person.

00:12:39.000 I wanted this guy, James Scott.

00:12:40.000 Amazing guy.

00:12:40.000 He has five other books out there, four on World War II, one on the USS Liberty.

00:12:44.000 And I didn't know him personally, and doesn't really have a social media presence, so I couldn't really get to know him that way, but I just knew his work.

00:12:53.000 And I thought, oh man, it'd be amazing to collaborate with this guy on this project.

00:12:58.000 And so I reached out, and luckily he wanted to do it.

00:13:00.000 He was fired up.

00:13:01.000 Oh, that's great.

00:13:02.000 And he's been amazing.

00:13:02.000 Such a great guy.

00:13:04.000 So thorough.

00:13:05.000 Because when you do something that's...

00:13:06.000 Like here, if you make a mistake, you just say, oh, it's fiction.

00:13:08.000 Right.

00:13:09.000 But in something like that, you can't make a mistake.

00:13:11.000 And every single quote, obviously...

00:13:12.000 You have to attribute that to the right person in the right way.

00:13:15.000 All the photographs, attribute all those to the right people in the right way.

00:13:18.000 Buy them, put them in there, license them, whatever you need to do.

00:13:21.000 So there's a lot more to it on that side that I didn't have any experience with.

00:13:26.000 But he's got that part down.

00:13:28.000 That's awesome.

00:13:29.000 Yeah, so it was an amazing experience.

00:13:31.000 And we're going to hopefully kick off another one here.

00:13:33.000 The idea was to do one nonfiction every year.

00:13:36.000 As soon as I started down that path of research, I realized it was going to be a two-year, every two-year type of a thing because it just so much more goes into it.

00:13:42.000 You just don't create it out of your head, obviously.

00:13:44.000 You have to interview all these people.

00:13:45.000 You have to go and then follow up with everyone, and then you have to confirm things that people said or all these things.

00:13:51.000 So there's a lot more to it than I thought at the outset.

00:13:54.000 How many hours a day do you work?

00:13:57.000 Because I would imagine that particularly with fiction, you have to avoid burnout, right?

00:14:02.000 You have to be enthusiastic about your subject matter to get the best out of your mind.

00:14:06.000 Yeah, I mean, I'm so fired up.

00:14:07.000 And so like you, I feel so fortunate to be doing what I love.

00:14:10.000 And so it doesn't seem like work, although you're putting in hours.

00:14:13.000 You're certainly putting in hours.

00:14:15.000 For this one, it took a lot longer than I thought, because usually these books are about, or in this genre, they're about 115,000 words, between 100 and 115. This one came in at 150. So I kept thinking, oh, it's going to be done December 1st, January 1st, February 1st.

00:14:29.000 And it just kept pushing, which is why we're here in July instead of, or sorry, in June instead of May.

00:14:33.000 So that's this one.

00:14:34.000 That's this one.

00:14:34.000 Red Sky Morning.

00:14:35.000 Yeah, that's this one.

00:14:36.000 Right here.

00:14:36.000 So it took a little longer than I anticipated, but that's just because the story dictates how long, because people are trusting me with their time.

00:14:42.000 They're never going to get that time back, so that's something I take extremely seriously.

00:14:45.000 So all my heart and soul goes into every word, but I love it.

00:14:49.000 When James Reese continues to get older, are you going to let him get older or are you going to go James Bond?

00:14:53.000 I think I go James Bond.

00:14:55.000 I think I'm going to do it slowly, maybe age him slowly, so we'll see.

00:14:59.000 We'll see.

00:15:00.000 It's one of those things you have to think about.

00:15:02.000 Some authors like Stephen Hunter, Daniel Silva have aged their character in real time, but that's a 20-plus year series. 0.98

00:15:10.000 Especially if they're out there kicking ass.

00:15:12.000 Yeah, so if you start that, if they're 40 when they start, you know, they're getting up there now. 0.97

00:15:15.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:15:16.000 So it's a thing, especially if you want them to keep kicking ass. 0.99

00:15:20.000 Yeah, yeah. 0.99

00:15:21.000 I talked to Mark Graney about that, too.

00:15:23.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:15:23.000 The gray man.

00:15:24.000 Right, right.

00:15:25.000 Same thing.

00:15:25.000 He's going to go James Bond.

00:15:26.000 I think so.

00:15:27.000 I think that's it.

00:15:28.000 It's the way to go.

00:15:28.000 Yeah, I think.

00:15:29.000 There's already a precedent set.

00:15:30.000 People accept it.

00:15:31.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:15:31.000 James Bond should be a thousand years old.

00:15:33.000 How the fuck is James Bond still kicking ass? 0.99

00:15:36.000 And they got a new James Bond coming out? 1.00

00:15:37.000 We'll see.

00:15:38.000 We'll see.

00:15:39.000 So what they need to do for that one, what they need to do, if they asked me after what they did at the end, and I don't know if we can say spoiler alert if people haven't seen the last movie, but it ends.

00:15:48.000 It's very final how it ends.

00:15:50.000 Allegedly.

00:15:50.000 Interesting.

00:15:50.000 It's an interesting way to end one of the most successful series of all time.

00:15:55.000 But I think you go back and you do those as period pieces.

00:15:57.000 So you go back and you start with the first book, and you start it in the 50s when it was written.

00:16:02.000 And so you have post-World War II-era Great Britain.

00:16:04.000 Oh, yeah.

00:16:05.000 And you're doing it.

00:16:05.000 You have all the cars.

00:16:06.000 So in the books, he's driving an old Bentley.

00:16:09.000 And it's from the 30s.

00:16:11.000 So even though it's written in the 50s.

00:16:12.000 So it's not the Aston Martin.

00:16:14.000 So you do that, and you do it true to the books.

00:16:17.000 In that time period.

00:16:18.000 Ooh, that would be very expensive, though.

00:16:20.000 But not really today with CGI, with AI, what they're able to do now.

00:16:25.000 You know, Tyler Perry was building an $800 million studio, and he stopped production on it when he saw Sora, which is the new AI program that almost, I mean, really quickly can render spectacular scenes.

00:16:39.000 Have you seen it?

00:16:40.000 Have you heard about it?

00:16:41.000 Is that that one, like, 3D camera?

00:16:43.000 They have one in Australia?

00:16:44.000 No.

00:16:44.000 No, Sora's just AI-generated video.

00:16:47.000 Show him the one with Japan. 0.94

00:16:50.000 It's Tokyo in the snow.

00:16:53.000 It's crazy!

00:16:54.000 You can't believe it's not real.

00:16:56.000 Because it's got people checking their bag, looking at their watch, tying their shoe, like normal stuff, pausing to talk to people.

00:17:04.000 And you're looking at it and you're like, what?

00:17:06.000 This is not real?

00:17:07.000 And apparently they generate them very quickly.

00:17:10.000 Think about it in five years from now.

00:17:12.000 Oh, it's going to be impossible.

00:17:13.000 Think about it in ten years from now.

00:17:13.000 So this is all AI. Beautiful snowy Tokyo.

00:17:17.000 Snowy Tokyo City is bustling.

00:17:19.000 Camera moves through the bustling city street.

00:17:21.000 This is the prompt that made AI create this, following several people.

00:17:26.000 Like, look at this.

00:17:26.000 Oh, wow.

00:17:27.000 This is crazy.

00:17:28.000 This is fake.

00:17:29.000 You would never...

00:17:31.000 You would think, oh, someone got a camera and they're filming all these people.

00:17:35.000 Store of a robot's life in cyberpunk settings.

00:17:37.000 I mean, these videos that they can make now are incredible.

00:17:41.000 And again, this is OpenAI's text-to-video model.

00:17:46.000 That's crazy.

00:17:47.000 Sora.

00:17:48.000 Is that the one that Ashton Kutcher was talking about?

00:17:50.000 I don't know.

00:17:51.000 I don't know if Ashton Kutcher was talking about that.

00:17:52.000 He was in the news yesterday.

00:17:53.000 Something about AI and something about Hollywood was doing this stuff. 1.00

00:17:58.000 They're fucked. 1.00

00:17:59.000 Everyone's fucked. 1.00

00:18:00.000 Actors are fucked. 1.00

00:18:01.000 Everyone's fucked. 1.00

00:18:02.000 I need to read the after the strike last year because there was an actor strike also as you know and then then writer strike as well So I don't know any I was a big part of that, but I don't know it was yeah Yeah, where did it end up? 0.99

00:18:12.000 Do you know where I don't know but they don't have much to negotiate with unfortunately There's there's an inevitability with this kind of technology.

00:18:21.000 It's like would you write books with a feather?

00:18:24.000 No.

00:18:25.000 Would you write all the books with a feather?

00:18:27.000 No.

00:18:28.000 So, like, if I wanted to buy a book from you, I'd have to commission you, and you would have to write out this new book, Red Sky Morning.

00:18:35.000 You'd have to write this out in a feather for every customer. 1.00

00:18:38.000 Fuck that! 1.00

00:18:39.000 You would never do that, right? 1.00

00:18:40.000 Well, that's the thing with AI. Like, instead of having people act out movies and having, like, real scenes and everybody's on set at 6 a.m., that's the thing of the past.

00:18:52.000 Oh, man.

00:18:53.000 I really think it's a thing of the past.

00:18:55.000 What they can do now.

00:18:56.000 This one got announced today.

00:18:57.000 What is this one?

00:18:58.000 It's called Gen 3 Alpha, I think.

00:19:00.000 I don't know.

00:19:00.000 See, there's a bunch of these different competing AI programs as well.

00:19:04.000 It's not just the OpenAI Sora.

00:19:07.000 There's a bunch of them.

00:19:08.000 Microsoft has one.

00:19:10.000 I mean, and then these graphic engines. 0.92

00:19:13.000 The Unreal Engine 5 is fucking insane. 0.96

00:19:17.000 That's crazy. 0.92

00:19:18.000 So they have these graphic models now for video games.

00:19:24.000 That's what it's called, right?

00:19:25.000 Unreal Engine 5? 0.99

00:19:27.000 Unreal Engine 5 is fucking bananas. 0.95

00:19:30.000 So this is for video games. 0.97

00:19:32.000 So video games now look almost indistinguishable from a movie.

00:19:36.000 There's this tiny hint of what they call the uncanny valley, where you can kind of tell that it's not real, especially when you're looking at human faces.

00:19:43.000 But, Jimmy will show you.

00:19:45.000 Dude, are you playing video games?

00:19:48.000 No, I can't.

00:19:49.000 Do you used to?

00:19:49.000 Yeah, I go crazy.

00:19:51.000 I can't do it.

00:19:52.000 You mean you get sucked in?

00:19:53.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:19:53.000 I'll be playing it all day long.

00:19:55.000 I have a real problem.

00:19:56.000 You wouldn't have a podcast?

00:19:57.000 No, I'd probably have a podcast. 0.98

00:19:58.000 It probably would suck, though.

00:20:00.000 I have a very addictive personality with things that are difficult to do.

00:20:05.000 Yeah.

00:20:05.000 You know, when I find, like, as long as it's something physical, like jujitsu, you can only do jujitsu two hours a day, you know, at the most, maybe a little bit more.

00:20:13.000 After that, your body just breaks down.

00:20:15.000 Yeah.

00:20:15.000 And you can only play pool so many hours a day.

00:20:17.000 But you can play video games all fucking day. 0.97

00:20:21.000 And they jazz you up so much. 0.98

00:20:23.000 There's such an adrenaline rush that you're so locked into it. 1.00

00:20:26.000 And then when I shut them off, I always feel like shit. 0.91

00:20:29.000 So this is Unreal Engine 5.4. 0.95

00:20:32.000 I guess this is the newest version of it.

00:20:34.000 What?

00:20:36.000 That's wild.

00:20:37.000 Look how crazy this looks.

00:20:38.000 That's cool.

00:20:39.000 I mean, this is a video game.

00:20:40.000 So imagine playing a video game, and this is the type of graphics that they can do.

00:20:45.000 And again, this is just today.

00:20:47.000 This stuff is moving at an exponential pace to the point where...

00:20:51.000 Five, six years from now, you're going to be experiencing this, but in VR. You'll have the meta headset on, and you'll be experiencing this probably on an omnidirectional floor.

00:21:04.000 They have these omnidirectional...

00:21:06.000 Google that, Jamie, the new omnidirectional floor.

00:21:10.000 Disney's got the best one, I don't think.

00:21:12.000 Do they?

00:21:12.000 Yeah, so the omnidirectional floor, the way you walk is the way the floor moves.

00:21:17.000 So you stay in an area like the size of this room, right?

00:21:22.000 So you stand in the center, and everywhere you walk, the floor walks with you.

00:21:26.000 So you are actually walking, but you're not moving anymore.

00:21:29.000 Oh, I don't know.

00:21:30.000 Are you going to get one?

00:21:32.000 Oh, yeah, for sure.

00:21:32.000 Oh, man.

00:21:33.000 Like, look at this.

00:21:34.000 What?

00:21:35.000 Yeah, this is bonkers.

00:21:36.000 No, I can't.

00:21:37.000 No.

00:21:38.000 No.

00:21:38.000 So everywhere you go, that's actually a lot smaller than this room.

00:21:42.000 I was incorrect.

00:21:43.000 That's really small.

00:21:44.000 That's like the size of this table almost.

00:21:46.000 And so you get on this thing and the game will take you down corridors and alleys and You know, you go cross fields and you'll be able to do this and I'm sure eventually what they'll be able to do is have different terrain.

00:22:02.000 Like you'll have like a textured terrain or maybe even elevation.

00:22:07.000 You'll be able to go up like a treadmill.

00:22:08.000 So you can get a workout in?

00:22:09.000 Oh yeah, you definitely can.

00:22:11.000 I mean, I remember when Dance Dance Revolution came, or Evolution?

00:22:15.000 What?

00:22:15.000 Evolution or Revolution?

00:22:16.000 Revolution.

00:22:17.000 I think I missed that one.

00:22:17.000 Dance Dance Revolution is this game these kids started playing in an arcade and everybody started losing weight.

00:22:22.000 Because, yeah, because it's a dance game where the floor lights up, like, blue, you're supposed to step on blue, and then, you know, there's, like, different things that you're supposed to do, and there's a pattern on the screen that you're supposed to follow.

00:22:34.000 And you get a score based on how well you keep up with the steps.

00:22:38.000 So all these people are, like, playing a video game, but they're burning an insane amount of calories.

00:22:43.000 People lose, like, 50, 60 pounds playing this game, which I support. 0.95

00:22:47.000 Like, if there's a game that can make you healthy, fuck yeah, that's awesome. 0.98

00:22:50.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:22:50.000 Then you get tired, maybe you sit down on the couch and go to the other one where you just sit there. 0.99

00:22:53.000 And then who's creating this, I don't know, who's moving the country forward?

00:23:00.000 That's a real problem, obviously.

00:23:01.000 Well, also, they just announced that the former chief of NSA is going to the board of OpenAI, which has freaked a bunch of people out, including Edward Snowden.

00:23:11.000 Does that freak you out, Jamie?

00:23:12.000 It does, yeah.

00:23:13.000 Yeah, it's a big smile on Jamie's face.

00:23:15.000 Well, I would imagine they would want to get involved in something like that.

00:23:18.000 I mean, I don't know why they wouldn't.

00:23:20.000 I mean, I could see, I could put on my conspiracy tinfoil hat thing and say, oh my god, what are they trying to do with us?

00:23:28.000 But Edward Snowden eviscerates OpenAI's decision to put former NSA director on its board.

00:23:34.000 This is a willful, calculated betrayal of the rights of every person on Earth.

00:23:37.000 Hmm.

00:23:38.000 Hmm.

00:23:39.000 Obviously he has a beef with the NSA. But if you were the, like, let's imagine National Security Agency is an important thing for this country to have, if you're having these fucking eggheads that are developing the next super being, which is essentially what they're doing. 0.97

00:23:55.000 They're gonna develop, whether it exists in a physical form, it only exists on a computer, It's going to be far smarter than us within a matter of a few years. 0.99

00:24:04.000 And so just for national security concerns, you probably would have to have someone go and be there and go, hey, what the fuck are you guys doing? 0.92

00:24:11.000 And report back from the inside. 0.94

00:24:14.000 Wouldn't you kind of have to have it from the...

00:24:16.000 I mean, just to know what they're doing.

00:24:18.000 You can't give them the power.

00:24:21.000 These unelected people, you're going to give them the power to give birth to a god?

00:24:25.000 I mean, that's...

00:24:26.000 I want to get rid of this phone.

00:24:29.000 It's inevitable.

00:24:30.000 Jack, it's not going to help you.

00:24:32.000 Jack, it's not going to help you.

00:24:32.000 That's the whole thing.

00:24:33.000 We're down this path, just like you said.

00:24:34.000 The technology is increasing at an exponential rate.

00:24:38.000 And so what we think is about 20 years off is probably going to be here essentially tomorrow.

00:24:43.000 It's going to be very, very quick.

00:24:45.000 Apparently, what we're at now is ChatGPT 4.0 or 4.0, and the next ChatGPT 5 is going to be exponentially more powerful, and that's in the pipeline.

00:24:57.000 Well, it's the manipulation part that we're already just with social media.

00:25:00.000 I mean, you can take it back 10 years.

00:25:02.000 I mean, Twitter X is similar to when it started, essentially.

00:25:05.000 And you're getting manipulated constantly.

00:25:08.000 And it's not just to buy a new detergent like back in the 80s watching a commercial like that.

00:25:12.000 I mean, your thoughts and behaviors are being manipulated by these algorithms and whoever is writing these algorithms.

00:25:18.000 That's a lot of...

00:25:18.000 And so imagine with AI that just went...

00:25:21.000 And the latest update, didn't our phones just get some sort of crazy AI thing in there without...

00:25:25.000 The iPhones do.

00:25:25.000 Yeah.

00:25:26.000 Yeah.

00:25:26.000 And I have an Android.

00:25:28.000 I have this Samsung Galaxy that I'm switching over to.

00:25:31.000 Really?

00:25:32.000 And this one does a lot of AI things.

00:25:34.000 Like it translates conversations in real time.

00:25:36.000 It'll summarize websites for you. 0.91

00:25:38.000 So if there's a website, you know, like James Webb Telescope found some new galaxy, I'm like, I don't have time for this fucking gigantic article.

00:25:46.000 Give me the summary.

00:25:47.000 And it gives you the summary.

00:25:48.000 It'll summarize it.

00:25:49.000 Oh, man.

00:25:50.000 It's been accurate?

00:25:51.000 Oh, yeah.

00:25:51.000 It's really good.

00:25:52.000 And it does a lot of wild shit. 0.99

00:25:53.000 Like, you could circle a picture. 0.99

00:25:55.000 Like, if you see Jamie's sneakers, like, oh, those are pretty fresh.

00:25:57.000 You circle it.

00:25:58.000 It'll send it right to Google, and it shows you where you can buy them instantly.

00:26:01.000 It tells you what it is.

00:26:03.000 Objects.

00:26:03.000 Man.

00:26:04.000 Like, French press.

00:26:05.000 Oh, what is that thing?

00:26:06.000 What are they called?

00:26:07.000 French press.

00:26:08.000 It'll, like, just from circling.

00:26:09.000 I could take a photo of that, make a circle around it.

00:26:12.000 Here, I'll show you right now.

00:26:13.000 Uh-huh.

00:26:13.000 It's pretty crazy.

00:26:14.000 That is wild.

00:26:15.000 Instead of trying to stay away from it, maybe I should embrace it and put the book in it.

00:26:20.000 People can circle it and do whatever they do.

00:26:23.000 I think you're always going to want fiction.

00:26:26.000 I think people are always going to want fiction, and they're also always going to want to have things that someone has created.

00:26:32.000 I think that's a part of what people enjoy.

00:26:35.000 Yeah.

00:26:36.000 Like this, like the artwork on the walls here that is done by a real person.

00:26:40.000 Took a photo of the French press, circled it, and it's given me links to how to buy a French press.

00:26:46.000 It's crazy.

00:26:47.000 This is complete next level.

00:26:49.000 So is that freeing up time rather than having to go French press?

00:26:52.000 I don't know.

00:26:52.000 It's just cool.

00:26:54.000 It's not freeing up any time.

00:26:55.000 I mean, maybe it is freeing up a little bit of time.

00:26:58.000 I just think it's cool.

00:26:59.000 That's why I like it.

00:27:00.000 You love all that stuff, though.

00:27:01.000 You embrace new technologies.

00:27:03.000 I do, but again, you've got to know what it is.

00:27:06.000 It's like, I like whiskey, but I don't drink it every day.

00:27:09.000 You know?

00:27:10.000 I drink a little bit of whiskey every now and again.

00:27:13.000 All right.

00:27:14.000 And I take big days off.

00:27:15.000 I like to stay healthy.

00:27:16.000 So your personality can get addicted to video games and that feeling, but not to other things like whiskey or whatever else.

00:27:24.000 No, I don't think so.

00:27:26.000 So it's not the same.

00:27:27.000 They're like different.

00:27:28.000 Well, I'm too health conscious.

00:27:29.000 You know, I can never get addicted to a drug.

00:27:31.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:27:32.000 Although I am addicted to caffeine, for sure.

00:27:35.000 I took a whole day off caffeine and documented it on the internet. 0.99

00:27:38.000 At the end of the day, I had a fucking pounding headache. 0.99

00:27:41.000 This is crazy. 0.99

00:27:42.000 I haven't had one of those in a long time, which is because I haven't stopped drinking caffeine in a long time.

00:27:48.000 But when I used to write, back in the day, I used to buy these sodas.

00:27:53.000 There were these bizarre sodas that this liquor store had that were...

00:27:57.000 Filled with caffeine, like insane amounts of caffeine.

00:28:00.000 But they also had like hot sauce in them and these cool colors and flavors.

00:28:05.000 Like some of them were, let me turn my tongue dark blue.

00:28:07.000 They had skull and crossbones on the labels.

00:28:10.000 They were just cool.

00:28:10.000 I remember, this is like in the 90s, I bought them just for fun.

00:28:14.000 I was at a, you know, a liquor store and I saw, what is this stuff?

00:28:18.000 And the guy's like, oh, it's a crazy soda company.

00:28:20.000 I don't even think they're around anymore. 1.00

00:28:21.000 But I bought cases of this shit. 0.99

00:28:23.000 It's probably illegal, you know? 1.00

00:28:24.000 Probably.

00:28:25.000 I mean, I don't know what the caffeine amount was, but it was extraordinary.

00:28:29.000 Is that when you're writing like comedy late at night, like quiet?

00:28:33.000 I think back then I was writing a script.

00:28:34.000 I was trying to write a script.

00:28:36.000 Okay.

00:28:36.000 And I also write comedy late at night, too.

00:28:40.000 Yeah.

00:28:40.000 And I just like to be caffeinated when I'm writing.

00:28:42.000 Yeah.

00:28:43.000 When I'm writing, I like to be jazzed up.

00:28:45.000 Right.

00:28:45.000 You know?

00:28:45.000 Yeah.

00:28:46.000 You know what?

00:28:47.000 Yeah, I do the same thing, I think.

00:28:48.000 I mean...

00:28:49.000 The only time I'm not being interrupted is like 10 a.m.

00:28:51.000 still to like 3, 4 in the morning.

00:28:52.000 I pulled so many all-nighters for this one.

00:28:55.000 10 a.m.

00:28:56.000 to 3 in the morning straight.

00:28:57.000 3, 4 in the morning, sometimes 6, 7. God damn. 1.00

00:28:58.000 If I'm just on a roll, I'm just going to keep going because deadline's looming, but I don't want to rush anything to hit that deadline, if that makes sense. 0.99

00:29:05.000 I want to be the best story I possibly can.

00:29:08.000 I don't want to get to a certain number of words or, oh, the deadline's coming.

00:29:11.000 Let me wrap this up.

00:29:11.000 Yeah.

00:29:12.000 Never, never.

00:29:13.000 I respect my audience too much for that.

00:29:14.000 No, I know you wouldn't.

00:29:15.000 And so it's got to be the best story it can possibly be, but that means a lot of late nights.

00:29:19.000 Yeah.

00:29:20.000 So that goes back to the phone, handing that off to somebody, having other people do some things so that I can focus on the writing, maybe in some hours that are a little more normal or healthy.

00:29:28.000 But do you think you'll ever get to a point where you say, you know what, in order to do a book the right way, I have to do one every two and a half years?

00:29:34.000 Maybe.

00:29:34.000 Maybe that was like the norm in the 80s.

00:29:36.000 The Tom Clancy books weren't every year.

00:29:37.000 Oh, really?

00:29:38.000 Yeah, so there was a couple years.

00:29:39.000 And you didn't know if one was going to come next year, the year after.

00:29:42.000 So is there pressure that comes from...

00:29:44.000 Does it come from the publisher?

00:29:46.000 Does it come from you?

00:29:47.000 Do you, like, make hay while the sun's shining?

00:29:49.000 I think maybe there's a little bit of that, but I think it became what was expected for recurring characters.

00:29:55.000 So it became Clive Kessler.

00:29:56.000 Maybe he was one of the first to start doing it with the Dirk Pitt series that he started.

00:30:00.000 I think the first one was back in the 70s, early 70s.

00:30:03.000 He passed away a couple years ago, but he started doing them more frequently.

00:30:07.000 And then Tom Clancy was every two, two and a half years.

00:30:10.000 And then we get up to the late 90s and you have Daniel Silva, book a year.

00:30:14.000 You have Vince Flynn, book a year.

00:30:16.000 And so it became something that was normal.

00:30:18.000 And now people expect it.

00:30:19.000 So I think it's more that than anything else.

00:30:22.000 Yeah, if people get hooked on a character, they want a new book every year.

00:30:25.000 Like Grainy does a new Gray Man every year. 0.86

00:30:28.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:30:29.000 So that's kind of what the audience expects.

00:30:30.000 And it's fun.

00:30:32.000 It's a timeline that you can hit.

00:30:35.000 Two a year would be difficult to do.

00:30:37.000 That would be extremely difficult to do.

00:30:39.000 That's insane.

00:30:39.000 Does anybody do two a year?

00:30:40.000 I think there's a couple guys who have done it.

00:30:42.000 Well, I think when you get a little, maybe, when you get a little older, like John Grisham, so kids out of the house, that sort of a thing, and you don't do all of the other things.

00:30:50.000 Trying to avoid the wife. 0.69

00:30:51.000 Like podcasts.

00:30:52.000 Lock yourself in your office.

00:30:54.000 Your words.

00:30:55.000 But I think you can get to that stage where you're not doing, if you're not doing a podcast, and you're not doing social media, and you're not writing a blog, and you're not updating your website.

00:31:04.000 Zero of those things, but you love to write, and all the kids are out of the house, and you already have established a readership from the 80s, the 90s, early 2000s, when there were less distractions, when we didn't have all these video games, didn't have social platforms, didn't have YouTube, didn't have on-demand any movie ever made that you can have anytime.

00:31:21.000 So that's essentially what you're competing with, with books.

00:31:24.000 So people read less now.

00:31:25.000 So if you have that base established back from the old days, like a John Grisham, then he can do two a year.

00:31:30.000 So you get two John Grisham books every year, every now and again.

00:31:33.000 I think Michael Connelly does the same thing, but they're not doing the other things.

00:31:37.000 They're not doing that podcast.

00:31:38.000 They're not doing scripts.

00:31:40.000 They're not doing that sort of thing.

00:31:42.000 Especially, like, the script.

00:31:43.000 I mean, the amount of time...

00:31:44.000 How much time does it take, or how much time do you have to spend working on The Terminalist?

00:31:49.000 It's a lot.

00:31:50.000 So the first one, I was learning.

00:31:51.000 So I was new to Hollywood, so I was learning, but Chris Pratt wanted me involved.

00:31:55.000 Antoine Fuqua wanted me involved.

00:31:56.000 Showrunner David DiGilio wanted me involved.

00:31:58.000 But essentially, I'm learning.

00:32:00.000 I'm seeing how this adaptation to film works.

00:32:03.000 And now, after that, it was a few-year process, now I can add more value this time around.

00:32:08.000 So this time I'm involved in all the casting, which I wasn't before...

00:32:10.000 Other than Chris.

00:32:12.000 So this time involved in all the casting, creating the show with David Agilio, writing the outlines, going to the...

00:32:20.000 Oh, nice.

00:32:20.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:32:21.000 Getting those things going.

00:32:23.000 They nailed it, man.

00:32:24.000 That show is as close to the actual book as you're probably ever going to get without it being like 100 hours long.

00:32:31.000 I know.

00:32:31.000 That's the thing.

00:32:33.000 You know, some people get upset that there wasn't this scene or that scene or these characters get morphed together or that sort of a thing.

00:32:38.000 There's a clipper on the back of it.

00:32:39.000 Oh, wow.

00:32:39.000 Look at this.

00:32:40.000 Oh, wow.

00:32:40.000 It's built in.

00:32:41.000 No way.

00:32:41.000 Pretty snazzy.

00:32:42.000 That is.

00:32:43.000 How do you do this?

00:32:43.000 You flip the clipper like this.

00:32:45.000 Oh, it flips out.

00:32:47.000 Yeah.

00:32:48.000 That's nice.

00:32:48.000 Yeah, it's pretty dope.

00:32:49.000 Oh, yeah.

00:32:51.000 Built in.

00:32:51.000 So you never have to wonder if you have a clipper.

00:32:54.000 Yeah, that's fantastic.

00:32:55.000 Yeah, and shout out to Foundation Cigars for looking us up.

00:32:57.000 Oh, nice.

00:32:58.000 Oh, look at that!

00:32:59.000 You've got your own cigars right there.

00:33:01.000 I love it.

00:33:02.000 And they're good.

00:33:03.000 Nice.

00:33:04.000 Let's check this out.

00:33:05.000 Let's do that right there.

00:33:06.000 I was very skeptical when you first made them for me.

00:33:08.000 I'm like, why?

00:33:09.000 You're like, oh, jeez. 0.97

00:33:10.000 It's going to suck. 0.97

00:33:11.000 Yeah.

00:33:12.000 I did a whole cigar lighting scene in this one, in this book.

00:33:15.000 I have one of my favorite chapters in previous books was James Reese talking to Caroline Hastings, who's the matriarch of this Hastings family.

00:33:24.000 It's just a conversation, so nothing's blowing up, no one's getting their head chopped off with a tomahawk and anything like that.

00:33:29.000 It's just a conversation and passing on of wisdom.

00:33:32.000 And I did that again this time with the Patriarch.

00:33:35.000 And so it's Jonathan Hastings talking to James Reese, and he's rolling a cigarette like old school, the way he would have done it back in Africa, in Rhodesia back in the day.

00:33:43.000 And then James is doing a cigar, but he's lighting it in the way that he learned from Jonathan Hastings' brother in what was then Mozambique.

00:33:51.000 Yeah, people get real dorked out on how to light a cigar.

00:33:54.000 I have had conversations.

00:33:57.000 I've done it the right way.

00:33:59.000 I've done it the other way.

00:34:00.000 I can't tell the difference. 1.00

00:34:01.000 I'm too stupid. 0.99

00:34:02.000 So it's like the same way I feel about wine. 0.99

00:34:05.000 I am never going to be a wine connoisseur.

00:34:08.000 I like a nice glass of wine.

00:34:09.000 If someone tells me what the good stuff is, I'll drink that.

00:34:13.000 You can tell the difference, though.

00:34:14.000 Oh yeah, yeah.

00:34:15.000 My friend Matt is like a real wine connoisseur though.

00:34:19.000 He has like a cellar in his house and he puts on his reading glasses when we go out to eat and he goes over all the different vintages. 0.98

00:34:27.000 He knows exactly what the fuck he's ordering. 0.97

00:34:29.000 I don't know what I'm ordering. 0.99

00:34:30.000 I asked the...

00:34:32.000 The lady at the restaurant.

00:34:33.000 Yeah, that's what they do.

00:34:34.000 They're supposed to know all that stuff.

00:34:35.000 Like a full-bodied Cabernet. 0.98

00:34:37.000 I don't know what the fuck anything is. 0.96

00:34:39.000 I put some wine in these. 0.98

00:34:40.000 I like to do that.

00:34:41.000 I like to weave in food.

00:34:42.000 Ian Fleming did it.

00:34:43.000 It's kind of like my nod.

00:34:43.000 It's my 007th book, so there's a lot of references to Bond in here in Fleming.

00:34:47.000 Oh, really?

00:34:48.000 Some that the most casual watcher of a film will get, and some that probably even the most ardent fan won't get.

00:34:53.000 There's something for everybody that I put in here.

00:34:56.000 So that's your seventh book?

00:34:58.000 Seventh book.

00:34:58.000 007. Damn, son.

00:34:59.000 That's an accomplishment. 1.00

00:35:01.000 Thank you.

00:35:01.000 Seven books.

00:35:02.000 That's incredible.

00:35:03.000 Thank you.

00:35:04.000 Thank you.

00:35:04.000 I just think about how many hours it is of just sitting in front of the computer.

00:35:08.000 Oh, my eyes are gone.

00:35:09.000 I mean, it's bad.

00:35:10.000 Do you still use a laptop?

00:35:12.000 Mm-hmm.

00:35:12.000 I would encourage you to not.

00:35:14.000 I need to not.

00:35:15.000 Yeah.

00:35:15.000 You know why?

00:35:16.000 For the keyboard.

00:35:17.000 Keyboard. 0.99

00:35:18.000 Yeah, keyboards on the MacBooks suck. 0.83

00:35:20.000 I do most of my writing even when I write.

00:35:23.000 I either write at home on an Apple.

00:35:26.000 It's a really nice keyboard.

00:35:28.000 There's a lot of trigger travel and it's ergonomic.

00:35:30.000 It's separated.

00:35:31.000 Or I have a ThinkPad.

00:35:33.000 I don't know if you ever use one of those Lenovo ThinkPads.

00:35:35.000 The keyboards are superior.

00:35:39.000 Superior to the Apple ones.

00:35:41.000 First of all, all the keys have like a little dip in them.

00:35:44.000 So your finger settles into that little valley.

00:35:48.000 And then there's a lot of travel.

00:35:50.000 It's like 1.8 millimeters.

00:35:53.000 One of the things I have is 2.2 millimeters of travel.

00:35:56.000 So as you're typing, you're feeling it.

00:35:59.000 Some guys go so crazy that they want a mechanical keyboard.

00:36:03.000 Yeah, not there yet.

00:36:04.000 I do have a really, I have one that Hemingway actually wrote a movable feast on.

00:36:07.000 Somebody, a fan sent it to me.

00:36:10.000 A typewriter?

00:36:11.000 Yeah, he wrote a movable feast on it.

00:36:12.000 It came up for auction right before COVID. So January of 2020, the guy that started Newman's Own with Paul Newman.

00:36:19.000 He was also kind of a manager, this A.E. Hotster, I don't think I'm pronouncing his last name correctly.

00:36:24.000 But he was like a mover and shaker in those types of circles back in the day. 0.99

00:36:28.000 And so he had all this Hemingway stuff.

00:36:30.000 And it went up for auction after he passed away.

00:36:32.000 And so I have, yeah, Hemingway's typewriter.

00:36:34.000 So I typed a Hemingway quote on it when it arrived, and then I let it sit.

00:36:38.000 Of course, the kids have walked by and, like, you know.

00:36:42.000 So it's not exactly Christine anymore.

00:36:44.000 That's kind of fun, though.

00:36:45.000 That makes it funny.

00:36:46.000 It's pretty cool.

00:36:46.000 So I have that right there.

00:36:47.000 But I need to get it.

00:36:49.000 And after we talked about this once, and so I went out and I bought another computer, like we talked about, the one we recommended.

00:36:54.000 So I got it.

00:36:55.000 But it wasn't an Apple one.

00:36:56.000 And, like, Apple got me. 0.92

00:36:58.000 Like, everything is cloud and friggin' phone and computer. 0.88

00:37:03.000 Like, they've just got me.

00:37:04.000 You can get around that, though.

00:37:05.000 I'm not good at that sort of thing.

00:37:06.000 It's not that hard.

00:37:07.000 It's not that hard.

00:37:08.000 You just relearn it, and then once you relearn it, you already have it in your head.

00:37:11.000 You know, I have a lot of cross-platform things that I like, that I use, which helps a lot.

00:37:16.000 Okay.

00:37:16.000 But Apple's Notes is one of the best things ever.

00:37:19.000 Because when I have an idea, I like to just talk it into a note, and then if it's on my Apple Notes, then it's on my computer Notes.

00:37:27.000 Yeah.

00:37:27.000 So if I have an idea for a bit or something like that, I can say it in my notes, and then when I go on my computer and I just press the notes, it's there.

00:37:33.000 I need to get better at that sort of thing.

00:37:35.000 I have notepads everywhere, yellow stickies everywhere.

00:37:38.000 It's chaos.

00:37:38.000 You don't have it on your phone?

00:37:40.000 No, for some reason I just don't.

00:37:42.000 I don't know.

00:37:42.000 There's something about it.

00:37:43.000 The best thing about the phones today is that you can talk to it.

00:37:48.000 On both, like the Apple one and this one, too.

00:37:50.000 You just open up a note, and then when you open up a note, when you're writing a new note, you go down there and you press the microphone thing, and when you press the microphone thing, it just lets you talk.

00:38:02.000 Like, here we go.

00:38:03.000 I need to do that.

00:38:04.000 I need to get better at all that stuff.

00:38:06.000 It's not, yeah, I'm not good at it.

00:38:07.000 I send myself emails.

00:38:08.000 I have an email account that I just send notes to, or emails to.

00:38:11.000 Like, I could do this.

00:38:12.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:38:13.000 Jack Carr is a bad motherfucker, and this is his seventh book. 1.00

00:38:16.000 Bam! 1.00

00:38:16.000 Look how quick that is. 1.00

00:38:17.000 Look at that.

00:38:18.000 I do...

00:38:19.000 Well, it's close. 0.97

00:38:20.000 Pretty fucking close. 0.95

00:38:21.000 Close. 1.00

00:38:22.000 Oh, look, they blocked out bad motherfucker. 1.00

00:38:25.000 See? 1.00

00:38:26.000 It's already controlling you.

00:38:28.000 Why is it doing that?

00:38:29.000 That's probably...

00:38:29.000 The thing about Androids, though, is...

00:38:31.000 I should stop this.

00:38:32.000 It's still recording.

00:38:33.000 Sorry.

00:38:34.000 The thing about Androids, though, is they have so many options of things you could do.

00:38:40.000 You can customize things so much more than you can on an iPhone.

00:38:43.000 Okay.

00:38:43.000 Now, if you're a person that's already busy like yourself, that's probably not attractive to you.

00:38:47.000 No.

00:38:48.000 It's just too much.

00:38:49.000 Yeah.

00:38:49.000 But...

00:38:50.000 Like, I've watched like 10 videos on this phone just trying to figure out all the different stuff you can do.

00:38:55.000 You could use it in split-screen mode where you can watch two different things at the same time, two different websites.

00:39:00.000 You can have an email on the bottom while you're watching a video at the top.

00:39:03.000 Dude, I don't know.

00:39:04.000 And it also has a stylus.

00:39:04.000 I think that might be too much for me.

00:39:05.000 Oh, you can pull the...

00:39:06.000 Oh, yeah.

00:39:08.000 And not only does it have a stylus, but the stylus, it doubles as a remote control.

00:39:13.000 So, like, if you want to take a picture with the family, you set up the phone and then you hold on to this.

00:39:17.000 You go like that.

00:39:18.000 You press the button and it takes the picture.

00:39:20.000 And that has a better camera than iPhone doesn't it?

00:39:23.000 I wouldn't say it's better.

00:39:24.000 I would say it's just as awesome.

00:39:26.000 I mean, there are people that debate things.

00:39:29.000 The Apple camera is amazing.

00:39:31.000 I still have this iPhone 15. It's fucking great. 0.98

00:39:34.000 Don't get me wrong. 0.97

00:39:35.000 And one thing that I really love about Apple is it works with Apple TV. So the best remote for Apple TV is your iPhone.

00:39:44.000 Really?

00:39:45.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:39:45.000 I'm learning so much today.

00:39:47.000 It syncs up, so if you have Apple TV, you scroll down like this, and you press this button right here, and it shows you the remote.

00:39:54.000 It says choose a TV, you choose a TV, and then you control the screen with your remote.

00:40:01.000 So if you want to look something up on YouTube or on Netflix, you type it. 0.97

00:40:06.000 Instead of like going, looking for the fucking, it's like old school texting, but worse, right? 0.99

00:40:12.000 It's horrible. 0.99

00:40:13.000 This is way easier.

00:40:14.000 You just type it on your phone, and then also you can slide back and forth to wherever you want in the movie exactly.

00:40:20.000 Really?

00:40:21.000 Yeah.

00:40:21.000 It's the best remote.

00:40:22.000 All right.

00:40:23.000 I'm going to try that.

00:40:23.000 The remote off your iPhone is the best.

00:40:24.000 I will try that.

00:40:25.000 That's the best.

00:40:25.000 The other stuff, I don't know about, but I will try that, because I'm not good at all that stuff.

00:40:29.000 I'm always yelling at my wife, like, what the password, and what's the thing? 0.99

00:40:33.000 It's attached to your email, it says.

00:40:36.000 Didn't we buy this movie already on another thing?

00:40:39.000 Right.

00:40:39.000 I'm not good at all that.

00:40:40.000 Yeah, that's always an issue.

00:40:42.000 There's a lot going on today.

00:40:44.000 That's why I like to take a breath, go upstairs, but I do need that other computer because I'm feeling it for the first time.

00:40:49.000 I'm feeling it in my hand.

00:40:51.000 Well, the thing is if you use like a cross-platform word processor, Like say if you use Microsoft.

00:41:00.000 If you use Microsoft Word, you can access Microsoft Word through your phone.

00:41:05.000 You can access Microsoft Word through a laptop, a Windows laptop, a Mac laptop.

00:41:11.000 It does not matter.

00:41:12.000 You can access it.

00:41:13.000 So you have a Microsoft Word account.

00:41:16.000 And so then if you store things in the cloud, like if you store your script in the crowd or your book in the cloud, you could access it from anything you want.

00:41:24.000 I know.

00:41:25.000 It's so bad, though.

00:41:26.000 It's not difficult.

00:41:27.000 That's not difficult.

00:41:28.000 We're essentially the same age, but you're so good at all this stuff.

00:41:31.000 I'm not that good.

00:41:31.000 You are.

00:41:32.000 You know what you're doing.

00:41:32.000 Jamie's better than me, and Red Band's better than Jamie.

00:41:34.000 Yeah.

00:41:36.000 That's a lot.

00:41:38.000 Can he come in?

00:41:39.000 Hold on.

00:41:40.000 I said that just to trick you.

00:41:43.000 Yeah, set up a competition.

00:41:45.000 Every red band is a super nerd, though.

00:41:47.000 They're both super nerds.

00:41:48.000 It's a lot.

00:41:48.000 But I need to do something.

00:41:49.000 I need to get definitely another computer for typing.

00:41:51.000 But I have one that's just for writing.

00:41:52.000 It's a whole other computer just for writing.

00:41:54.000 That's smart.

00:41:54.000 Get a new one every time.

00:41:55.000 This might not be so smart.

00:41:56.000 I get a new one for every book.

00:41:58.000 Really?

00:41:58.000 Yeah.

00:41:58.000 Just so it's clean.

00:41:59.000 And it's like a clean piece of paper.

00:42:01.000 And it's a blank slate.

00:42:03.000 And I start again.

00:42:03.000 And I know that's not necessary.

00:42:05.000 Today you could probably make a new screen or minimize everything or do it a better way.

00:42:09.000 But I just like it in my own head.

00:42:11.000 Like I'm starting anew.

00:42:12.000 Yeah, no, that's a good thing to do.

00:42:14.000 Rituals are good, especially for creative people.

00:42:17.000 You know, that's a big part of Steven Pressler's book.

00:42:20.000 Steven Pressfield?

00:42:21.000 Excuse me, Pressfield.

00:42:23.000 Yeah, The War of Art.

00:42:24.000 Amazing.

00:42:24.000 Yeah.

00:42:25.000 His book, you know, is kind of all about summoning.

00:42:29.000 It's about discipline, focus, dedication, but also summoning the muse.

00:42:34.000 Yeah.

00:42:34.000 And then part of that is like this ritual of like showing up.

00:42:38.000 Mm-hmm.

00:42:38.000 Showing up at a very specific time every day.

00:42:41.000 And if you do that enough, the ideas will come to you.

00:42:44.000 And it is true. 0.71

00:42:45.000 Oh, exactly.

00:42:46.000 It's doing the work.

00:42:46.000 Sitting down and doing the work.

00:42:48.000 You've got to do the work.

00:42:49.000 Obviously, if you don't do the work, you're never going to get where you want to go.

00:42:52.000 When I first read it, I felt like Pressfield was using the term the muse as just sort of Maybe it's not a real thing, but you treat it as if it's a real thing and it works that way.

00:43:05.000 Because of the time and focus that you put, it will accumulate over time.

00:43:11.000 You will get creative ideas.

00:43:13.000 But now as I'm getting older, I'm not convinced that I was right, that it's not a real thing.

00:43:20.000 I have a feeling that This is gonna sound so weird, but I'm just gonna say it.

00:43:27.000 I think ideas are an unrecognized lifeform.

00:43:31.000 This is what I think.

00:43:32.000 I think creativity is a very strange thing.

00:43:36.000 Like, what is it?

00:43:36.000 Where is it coming from?

00:43:38.000 Where do ideas come from?

00:43:38.000 Where's a great song come from?

00:43:40.000 Where's a great concept for a book come from?

00:43:42.000 It comes from your mind, right?

00:43:43.000 Your mind pulls it out of a lot of things, like your life experiences, your current state of, you know, depression or happiness and all the things you've read your whole life.

00:43:54.000 There's like so many things that you're pulling creativity out of.

00:43:57.000 But there's a thing that enters into your mind sometimes when you come up with an idea where you're like, that is not from me.

00:44:05.000 That's not from me.

00:44:06.000 I know this is just popping up, and maybe it's just my ignorance of the way synapses fire, but I'm not sure.

00:44:13.000 Because my thought is, everything that exists that human beings have created came from an idea.

00:44:22.000 Like, all cameras, all houses, everything was an idea that we got and then we worked at it and manifested it into form.

00:44:34.000 And if the universe has A driving force.

00:44:40.000 When it comes to intelligent life, that driving force seems to be creating things.

00:44:45.000 And I have a feeling that ideas themselves are almost like a life form that Injects itself into human consciousness and then encourages and guides people to do things,

00:45:02.000 to make things.

00:45:03.000 And then they appear and those things encourage more people to make more things.

00:45:09.000 And I think it works that way with music.

00:45:11.000 I think that works that way with comedy.

00:45:12.000 It works that way with literature.

00:45:14.000 With pretty much everything.

00:45:15.000 Everything that's really good encourages more people to do those things and then more things happen and better things get made.

00:45:24.000 And I think that's how these things work.

00:45:30.000 Will themselves into existence.

00:45:31.000 They do it through our minds.

00:45:33.000 Like almost spiritual?

00:45:34.000 I don't know if I like that word because it's been co-opted by hippie chicks. 1.00

00:45:39.000 And dudes pretending to be spiritual and trying to get laid.

00:45:42.000 Yeah.

00:45:43.000 I think a lot of spiritual hippies are being...

00:45:45.000 Girls are being honest.

00:45:46.000 The guys are probably...

00:45:47.000 80% of them are not being honest.

00:45:49.000 But...

00:45:50.000 Yeah, whatever that word means.

00:45:51.000 It's something.

00:45:53.000 That there's something more to it than this sort of reductionist view of what an idea is.

00:45:59.000 And if someone says, what's your proof?

00:46:01.000 You know, we have evidence of...

00:46:03.000 I have no proof.

00:46:03.000 It's not...

00:46:04.000 I don't...

00:46:06.000 I think the world is way stranger than we think.

00:46:09.000 And I think our existence here is way stranger than we think.

00:46:13.000 I think people have been wrestling with that forever.

00:46:17.000 And for me to just think, oh, the Muse is just this airy-fairy concept that you give to the results of hard work and dedication.

00:46:26.000 No, I think hard work and dedication are important because you summon the muse.

00:46:30.000 I think the muse is a real thing.

00:46:32.000 And you've come to this over time.

00:46:35.000 Yeah.

00:46:35.000 With age, experience.

00:46:38.000 I just don't know. 0.95

00:46:39.000 You know, I mean, if the muse wasn't a real thing, boy, it sure behaves like a fucking real thing. 0.92

00:46:43.000 That's true. 0.89

00:46:44.000 It really does behave like a real thing.

00:46:46.000 And when you're living your life right, it seems like it rewards you.

00:46:51.000 It seems like it rewards you, like, both mentally, emotionally, physically.

00:46:58.000 Like, there's a guiding force.

00:47:00.000 It's just we don't know how to tune into it.

00:47:02.000 And I think that guiding force also exists creatively.

00:47:06.000 I think there's a guiding force in terms of the things you do.

00:47:10.000 If you're living your life right, and you're doing the things you're supposed to do, and you're good to your friends, you're disciplined, and you get to a certain point in your life, you're like, wow, it's almost like fate's real.

00:47:20.000 You know?

00:47:24.000 Guiding forces that are not exact.

00:47:28.000 They're almost like a radio signal that you're tuning in, but you can't quite get it.

00:47:34.000 It's like it's kind of there, but you kind of have a sense.

00:47:38.000 It's not saying everyone head to the exit.

00:47:40.000 It's not that clear.

00:47:41.000 It's just like this very vague thing.

00:47:44.000 It's like, I think I'm supposed to do this.

00:47:46.000 Yeah.

00:47:47.000 Well, fate's an interesting thing, obviously.

00:47:49.000 I thought about it.

00:47:50.000 You know, I thought about it my whole life.

00:47:51.000 My dad gave me a book a long time ago when I was a kid called The Bridge in St. Louis Ray.

00:47:55.000 And it's about these people that are on this bridge.

00:47:56.000 It collapses.

00:47:57.000 And it's in Central South America somewhere.

00:48:00.000 And they all die.

00:48:02.000 And the stories about why are these people, let's say there's seven.

00:48:05.000 There might be more or less, but regardless.

00:48:07.000 About that number.

00:48:08.000 A group of people.

00:48:09.000 Why were they on that bridge at that time when it collapsed?

00:48:13.000 And it's just an interesting thing to think about.

00:48:15.000 And I thought about it again in Iraq back in 2005, 2006 timeframe because anything could have been an IED. And you're going down the road, you're heading to a Target, you're doing a convoy, whatever you're doing.

00:48:25.000 And anything, a dead donkey on the side of the road, trash, whatever, just a disrupted piece of dirt, whatever, anything could be an IED back then.

00:48:33.000 So we got there and I thought, you know what, I can either be worried about that sort of thing or I can just accept the fate part of it and do my job at that time as an officer and do my job as the best leader and operator I can possibly be and focus on the mission and focus on the guys and crush this thing.

00:48:49.000 And that's where my focus needs to be, not on whether that thing's an IED. I got somebody up in the turret as we're going.

00:48:56.000 Right.

00:48:56.000 They're looking.

00:48:57.000 They're doing that thing.

00:48:57.000 We have some technology that's helping counter some of these things.

00:49:00.000 Of course, the enemy, though, is adapting to that technology.

00:49:03.000 That's warfare.

00:49:04.000 You're always adapting to the enemy.

00:49:05.000 The enemy's always adapting to you.

00:49:07.000 You're looking for gaps in the enemy's defenses.

00:49:09.000 You're trying to capitalize on momentum, but they're clever.

00:49:11.000 And they know exactly how we counter things, and they adapt, and in turn, we have to adapt to that.

00:49:16.000 So I decided to resign myself to fate, as far as that stuff goes, so I could just focus on the mission and be the best leader I could be.

00:49:23.000 So fate's an interesting thing.

00:49:25.000 It is, and it's interesting hearing that from you because you're talking about it in the most extreme environment that exists, which is war.

00:49:33.000 And that in order for you to be completely focused, you kind of had to give in to that.

00:49:38.000 That's the only way you'll be able to do your job.

00:49:40.000 And then also, if you're not completely focused, it could wind up costing you or your teammates lives.

00:49:48.000 Exactly.

00:49:48.000 That's the same reason while I was in, all I focused on, and I had to talk to my wife about this, but she understood it, the pendulum's on the side of the team when you're in it.

00:49:57.000 If you're bringing guys downrange, maybe you're in a staff job somewhere, maybe not, but if you're taking guys downrange, you do not want to be 10 years on from whatever's going to happen downrange in Iraq or Afghanistan or somewhere else around the world sitting on that couch after something goes sideways, wondering if you did everything you possibly could have done in preparation for that event to be the best Right.

00:50:36.000 Because it was just something that I was very aware of, just reading histories of Vietnam and thinking about the guys when they came home from that and just how the enemy gets a vote.

00:50:45.000 You can also do all those things I just talked about and things can still go sideways.

00:50:49.000 But I wanted to know that I was as prepared as I could possibly be.

00:50:53.000 And in the margins, in the far ends, those hard days that you put in in training could be the difference between your life or your teammates.

00:51:03.000 Exactly.

00:51:04.000 It's like now it's easy for me to say, I don't think I need to work out today.

00:51:08.000 I need to write a book.

00:51:09.000 Back then, no.

00:51:11.000 I'm going to work out.

00:51:12.000 I'm going to do this run.

00:51:12.000 I'm going to hit that obstacle course again.

00:51:14.000 I'm going to get to the range with the guys.

00:51:16.000 I'm going to do whatever it is.

00:51:17.000 I'm going to read this other book about Afghanistan or read this thing about insurgencies, counterinsurgencies, terrorism.

00:51:22.000 I'm going to know the enemy as well as I possibly can.

00:51:24.000 Because that's what I owe the guys, and not just them, but their families.

00:51:27.000 And by default, the mission and the country.

00:51:29.000 I think that difference is what makes your book so special, that you have that real life experience.

00:51:35.000 This isn't just something you're dreaming up and you've done research on.

00:51:39.000 Your real life experience serving as a Navy SEAL is a big part of why your books are so compelling.

00:51:46.000 I appreciate that.

00:51:47.000 And it's one of those things I also saw as I was getting out.

00:51:50.000 So I went to the training command buds my last couple years in, which is when I started writing the first book.

00:51:55.000 And that's when I wasn't taking guys downrange anymore.

00:51:57.000 I knew I was getting out, so I didn't have to be solely focused on that.

00:52:01.000 And I could start doing these other things and focus on that.

00:52:07.000 I didn't know through my executive summary, through my outline, until I started to write those first words, how personal it was going to be.

00:52:15.000 And it became a very personal writing experience.

00:52:17.000 Initially, I thought, oh, I'll get the sniper stuff right.

00:52:19.000 If I don't know something about an aircraft or a submarine, I can call somebody and at least I know people to reach out to who can connect me with someone who spent time in the submarine force or in an aircraft I need to write about or something like that.

00:52:31.000 But I didn't know how personal it was going to be from a feeling and emotion standpoint.

00:52:35.000 So if my character gets ambushed somewhere, I can remember what it was like in Baghdad 2006 to actually get ambushed.

00:52:41.000 And then I can take those and apply them right here to this fictional narrative.

00:52:45.000 So it's a fictional story.

00:52:46.000 James Reese in the first book gets ambushed on the streets of L.A. by this assassin guy.

00:52:50.000 But I can remember what it felt like to be on the receiving end.

00:52:53.000 And then those feelings and emotions go directly on the page.

00:52:56.000 So I don't have to find a sniper from, let's say, Ramadi at the height of the war and interview him.

00:53:00.000 And then have those answers get filtered through movies I've seen, other interviews I've done, documentaries, other books, whatever it might be, and then fictionalize it and put it on the page.

00:53:08.000 It goes all heart and soul right in here.

00:53:10.000 So it was very personal, much more personal.

00:53:13.000 And it's remained that way.

00:53:13.000 Even though this is the seventh book, it's still just as powerful when I'm writing it and I'm feeling it as it was for that first one.

00:53:20.000 Did you write any short stories first?

00:53:22.000 No.

00:53:23.000 Wow.

00:53:23.000 I was a reader.

00:53:24.000 So I read my whole life.

00:53:26.000 So I got to read all these guys, David Murrell, Nelson DeMille, A.J. Quinnell, J.C. Pollock, Mark Olden, Tom Clancy, Ian Fleming, Jean Le Carré, all these guys who were the masters, who were my professors in the art of storytelling from a very early age.

00:53:37.000 So certainly by sixth grade.

00:53:39.000 Fifth grade was when Hunt for Red October came out, which is why I have a submarine section in the beginning of this as a nod to the 40th anniversary of Of The Hunt for Red October for Tom Clancy and everything he did for the genre.

00:53:49.000 But I just absolutely love it.

00:53:53.000 But I had that foundation.

00:53:54.000 And I had that foundation from an early age.

00:53:56.000 So it wasn't at age 40 when I thought, oh, maybe if I was going to be a writer, what should I have been reading?

00:54:01.000 Or what can I read that has been written?

00:54:03.000 You read knowing you were going to be a writer.

00:54:05.000 But because I loved the magic in those pages.

00:54:09.000 Not because I was like, oh, I'm going to learn this in sixth grade so that then 30 years later I can use it.

00:54:14.000 No, it was just I loved the magic and the pages of all those novels.

00:54:17.000 And it just became a part of me, a part of my being, a part of this foundation that I can now build on.

00:54:22.000 And so I don't think I could have prepared myself any better to be a SEAL or to do what I'm doing now as an author.

00:54:27.000 Because reading is really the foundation of all of it.

00:54:30.000 That's such a great lesson for people listening that you can apply to almost anything in life.

00:54:35.000 Just focus on something, be super dedicated to it, cover all the bases, and then go for it.

00:54:41.000 And you nailed it!

00:54:43.000 If The Terminal List is your first book, that's crazy.

00:54:46.000 How many rewrites were there?

00:54:47.000 Or edits?

00:54:48.000 I thought there was going to be a lot, because you're sending this to Simon& Schuster, it's a publisher of all these books that I've read growing up, and I thought, oh, they know what they're doing back there, so they're going to make all these changes.

00:54:58.000 Very few.

00:54:58.000 The questions that I got back are still the ones that I get, content edits today, which are like, hey, explain this for somebody who wasn't in the military.

00:55:06.000 Or now, hey, explain this for someone who hasn't read the previous six books.

00:55:10.000 Put another sentence in there or two just to explain who this person is and why they're here.

00:55:14.000 So those are the kind of edits that I get, but no real big content edits at all.

00:55:19.000 And I didn't know, because I'm stepping into this for the first time back then, and I didn't know if it was going to be like, Hey, you know what, you should lay off on the violence, or do you have to have so many guns in there, or do you have to describe them?

00:55:30.000 Nothing.

00:55:31.000 There's zero...

00:55:32.000 See, the thing is about books, you can kind of go ham in a book.

00:55:35.000 And people don't really cancel books, you know?

00:55:40.000 You know what I'm saying? 0.93

00:55:42.000 With written fiction, you can get pretty fucking crazy. 0.98

00:55:46.000 Oh, yeah. 1.00

00:55:47.000 To the point where, if that was in a movie, people would be like, what kind of asshole made this movie? 1.00

00:55:52.000 Totally different. 0.98

00:55:53.000 I think we think about movies as movies shaping our narrative of reality in a good way.

00:56:00.000 Like the good guy always wins.

00:56:02.000 You know, bad guy always dies.

00:56:04.000 Like, it's kind of predictable.

00:56:05.000 That's why we like superhero movies, right?

00:56:07.000 Yeah.

00:56:07.000 But in a work of fiction, like a novel, you can get pretty dark.

00:56:12.000 Yeah, I have 100% complete creative control.

00:56:14.000 And I love that my agent or my publisher never suggests anything.

00:56:20.000 And I love that.

00:56:21.000 I didn't know that was how it was going to be going in.

00:56:23.000 Because I saw, you know, you're watching Californication, and you're seeing David Duchovny and his relationship with his agent.

00:56:29.000 Or you're watching, what was that other one?

00:56:32.000 The one about the agent in L.A. with Ari.

00:56:35.000 Oh, uh...

00:56:36.000 Yeah, that one.

00:56:38.000 Entourage?

00:56:38.000 Entourage.

00:56:39.000 So that's what kind of I thought agents were.

00:56:41.000 That's Hollywood agents, though.

00:56:43.000 I think literature agents understand creativity a little bit better.

00:56:46.000 Yeah.

00:56:47.000 Also, Hollywood agents can, you know, they just, it's a different animal.

00:56:51.000 Yeah.

00:56:51.000 Different kind of human.

00:56:52.000 I haven't experienced those ones that are kind of the caricature of an agent.

00:56:55.000 Oh, I've had a bunch of them.

00:56:56.000 Yeah, I haven't experienced that yet.

00:56:57.000 The difference is those guys don't read.

00:56:59.000 They're not reading anything.

00:57:00.000 They're always wheeling and dealing and they're doing their thing. 1.00

00:57:01.000 Yeah, they're doing coke and fucking driving Ferraris. 1.00

00:57:03.000 They don't have time for reading. 1.00

00:57:05.000 No, yeah.

00:57:05.000 They're not reading.

00:57:06.000 So I'm sure that they exist.

00:57:09.000 I just have not experienced that yet.

00:57:10.000 Because now I have like five agents now.

00:57:12.000 There's one forever.

00:57:12.000 There's the literary agent.

00:57:15.000 There's the book adaptation agent.

00:57:16.000 There's unscripted agent.

00:57:17.000 There's podcast agent. 1.00

00:57:19.000 Damn! 0.98

00:57:21.000 So there's a lot now, but none of them give me advice on what to do. 0.99

00:57:26.000 That's very good.

00:57:26.000 So I love having complete creative control.

00:57:28.000 I absolutely love that.

00:57:29.000 And there's no one to blame.

00:57:30.000 If people hate this, all on me.

00:57:31.000 It's not like, ah, my agent, I knew I shouldn't have done that because she said I needed to put this other character in or something. 0.99

00:57:36.000 Fuck. 0.99

00:57:37.000 There's none of that. 1.00

00:57:38.000 Zero.

00:57:39.000 Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, I think it has to come from you.

00:57:43.000 I think that's what makes work of fiction and really good books, makes it so unique, is that you know it's coming from one person's mind.

00:57:51.000 That this thought, these ideas that they had, they wrote it out, and they sat there, and they summoned the muse, and they put it all together, and then I know it's coming out of you.

00:58:03.000 So it's like part of the buzz of it.

00:58:05.000 Yeah.

00:58:07.000 That's one thing that I think is always going to exist even when AI starts writing insane books.

00:58:12.000 You're always going to want a book that came from a person's mind.

00:58:16.000 Just like you want a pair of handmade boots.

00:58:18.000 Yeah, good point.

00:58:19.000 Yeah.

00:58:19.000 Yeah, I know.

00:58:20.000 Very good point.

00:58:21.000 Hollywood, different though.

00:58:22.000 Screenwriting.

00:58:23.000 So I just sent off episode 107 right before I came over from the hotel.

00:58:26.000 I just hit the button on send for episode 107 for this new...

00:58:30.000 It's not really a spinoff.

00:58:31.000 It's its own series, but a prequel origin story.

00:58:33.000 Taylor Kitsch playing Ben Edwards.

00:58:36.000 His origin story that gets him to a place.

00:58:38.000 Shows his journey to get him to a place where he can do the things that he did in the Terminalist, in the book, and in the show.

00:58:44.000 Because he was so good.

00:58:45.000 And that's...

00:58:46.000 Writing those things is a team effort for sure.

00:58:50.000 As you know from writing scripts, there are other constraints, budgetary constraints, the location constraints, there's a story arc within that episode, and then an overarching story arc for the whole, whether it's seven, eight, or whatever, how many episodes there are.

00:59:01.000 So there's all those things to consider.

00:59:03.000 And then there's notes from senior level executives all the way back down.

00:59:06.000 Very collaborative.

00:59:08.000 So it's interesting.

00:59:09.000 Well, that's good, though, that you're collaborating because the other option is you just sell it.

00:59:12.000 And they do it.

00:59:14.000 And that's never fun. 0.98

00:59:15.000 Like everyone that I've ever talked to that ever sold a script or sold a book idea and they turned it into a movie and they didn't have anything to do with it, they fucking hated it.

00:59:24.000 Yeah, I mean you have buy-in, and it's good and bad because it's not going to be a strict adaptation.

00:59:28.000 There's going to be changes.

00:59:30.000 Like the movie, The Gray Man.

00:59:32.000 If you read the book, The Gray Man, and then you watch the movie, The Gray Man, you're like, what is this?

00:59:36.000 This is not the same thing.

00:59:37.000 It's a totally different movie.

00:59:39.000 There's all these people that don't exist.

00:59:41.000 There's all these things that don't exist.

00:59:43.000 The character's not as complex.

00:59:45.000 Yeah.

00:59:46.000 I mean, it's a thing.

00:59:47.000 It's a thing.

00:59:48.000 And there's going to be changes.

00:59:49.000 Obviously, the book First Blood, very different than the movie First Blood.

00:59:52.000 Yeah, I never read that book.

00:59:53.000 It's great.

00:59:54.000 It's so different.

00:59:55.000 I mean, you get Sheriff Tiesel's perspective.

00:59:57.000 There's no knife in it yet.

00:59:59.000 No knife?

00:59:59.000 Sylvester Stallone brought that to the...

01:00:01.000 He knew the importance of props.

01:00:02.000 I think I need a knife!

01:00:03.000 Yeah, he brought it to the...

01:00:05.000 Because he knew the importance of props, which is why I gave James Reese the tomahawks.

01:00:09.000 Because I knew the importance of props as well from that.

01:00:13.000 And actually, Stallone, this was so cool.

01:00:15.000 I got to talk to Stallone.

01:00:16.000 He was fantastic.

01:00:17.000 He was awesome.

01:00:19.000 He wanted to jump on a Zoom with me.

01:00:21.000 And I was like, oh my God, as a child of the 80s, I was so fired up.

01:00:24.000 So I was just like trying to play it cool, right?

01:00:26.000 Like trying to play it cool.

01:00:27.000 I have my phone down in the corner.

01:00:28.000 I'm taking some pictures, you know, just to To commemorate this moment.

01:00:31.000 But he was funny.

01:00:32.000 He was wise.

01:00:34.000 And he passed along some lessons.

01:00:37.000 And yeah, we just got to hang out and talk and see if there was something that we could do together.

01:00:40.000 So I wrote up a little treatment for him specifically.

01:00:44.000 Oh, wow.

01:00:44.000 You know, probably nothing will ever come of it.

01:00:45.000 Because you know how Hollywood works, and you never know.

01:00:49.000 But it was cool to do that.

01:00:51.000 That was a big moment.

01:00:52.000 That's very cool.

01:00:53.000 That was fun. 0.99

01:00:53.000 Yeah, that guy was fucking doing stunts deep into his 60s. 0.99

01:00:57.000 Oh, yeah. 0.99

01:00:58.000 He broke his neck.

01:00:59.000 Yeah, in Expendables.

01:00:59.000 Filming the Expendables, yeah.

01:01:00.000 Like, literally broke his neck.

01:01:02.000 Yeah, we talked about it.

01:01:03.000 Like, he had to get his neck fused.

01:01:04.000 Like, when he moves, he's kind of stiff, and that's why.

01:01:07.000 His neck is fused.

01:01:08.000 Oh, yeah.

01:01:09.000 What an animal, though.

01:01:10.000 In the 60s.

01:01:11.000 Amazing.

01:01:11.000 Doing stunts.

01:01:12.000 Yeah, and now late 70s still crushing. 0.99

01:01:14.000 Like fucking Jean-Claude Van Damme. 0.99

01:01:15.000 Yeah, yeah. 1.00

01:01:16.000 Like, what?

01:01:17.000 Uh-huh.

01:01:17.000 Yeah, but that's how dedicated that guy.

01:01:19.000 And such a great writer.

01:01:20.000 People don't understand just what a great writer he is.

01:01:22.000 What a great mind that is.

01:01:23.000 All those films coming from that mind.

01:01:26.000 Yeah, what a great guy.

01:01:28.000 It's funny that people assume that at a certain point in time someone doing something awesome is going to want to stop.

01:01:33.000 You know?

01:01:33.000 Yeah.

01:01:34.000 Like, why is he still working?

01:01:36.000 Doesn't he have all the money in the world? 1.00

01:01:38.000 What the fuck are you doing? 0.99

01:01:39.000 I think he just loves it. 1.00

01:01:40.000 He must!

01:01:41.000 I mean, that's what you get off on.

01:01:43.000 Now it's not a thing.

01:01:44.000 It's like most people think about work as like a thing you do for money, and then you eventually get enough money, you don't work.

01:01:49.000 But if you actually do something you love, like, why would you just stop?

01:01:52.000 Why do you want to stop?

01:01:53.000 I think that's the difference between thinking of something in terms of a career and thinking of it in terms of a profession.

01:01:58.000 And there's a difference.

01:01:59.000 There's precision in language reflects precision in thought, someone told me a long time ago.

01:02:03.000 And that's a different thing.

01:02:04.000 A career is something, let's say you walk in and you're working your way up that ladder and you have a plan and profession is something that's a calling, it seems.

01:02:14.000 The profession of arms.

01:02:15.000 There's a reason we call it a profession of arms, not the career of arms, although there are a lot of careers in the military that are working their way up that ladder.

01:02:22.000 And you cover that in the book as well.

01:02:23.000 I do cover that, and I get to take them out in all sorts of creative ways.

01:02:26.000 So it's very therapeutic for me to write these things.

01:02:28.000 Yeah, there's a lot of grossness.

01:02:30.000 That's what's really sad, is that you would think that the military would be like the most pure of all institutions, because it has to be, because you're literally...

01:02:38.000 Taking the strongest amongst us and having them go and fight for our country and fight for our interests. 0.98

01:02:44.000 And you would think that there's no room for bullshit, but apparently there's a lot of room for bullshit. 0.98

01:02:49.000 Well, there's a lot of room for advancement, I guess. 0.99

01:02:52.000 If you simply don't pop positive on a piss test, don't get too many DUIs, and don't get arrested for, let's say, domestic violence or something like that, you can stay in the military for a long time.

01:03:03.000 So you don't need to excel when you hit a certain rank.

01:03:08.000 Right.

01:03:08.000 And I think that when you, that's what we see it play out in Afghanistan, August of 2021, that's 20 years of being able to plan for that withdrawal.

01:03:17.000 And that's the best that our military leaders could do.

01:03:21.000 20 years to prepare for that.

01:03:23.000 So somebody can look at that who never had any touch point with the military and apply common sense and logic to that problem set and have a much better plan to extract forces from Afghanistan.

01:03:33.000 That whole thing seemed insane. 0.91

01:03:35.000 Ridiculous. 0.77

01:03:36.000 It seemed insane, and it's for whatever reason, it's not being discussed when people are talking about this presidential race. 0.93

01:03:42.000 That was one of the more insane things of our time.

01:03:45.000 And then when you talk to people that were there, like Tim Kennedy, he's told me some horror stories about what was going on there.

01:03:52.000 All those babies thrown over the fence and the barbed wire.

01:03:54.000 He was saying he saw worse things during that time than all of his tours.

01:04:00.000 The Taliban just killed a woman in front of them, just openly put her head on a truck and shot her in the head in front of everybody.

01:04:08.000 And it was unnecessary.

01:04:09.000 That's the whole thing.

01:04:10.000 It was unnecessary.

01:04:11.000 I just don't understand how you can do that.

01:04:15.000 I don't know.

01:04:16.000 I don't understand.

01:04:17.000 I mean, if you're going to execute something that's as complex as removing all the troops from a place that we've occupied for 20 years, It seems like that would involve a very thoroughly reviewed plan by many experts and come up with what's going to cause the least likelihood of casualties.

01:04:42.000 Yeah.

01:04:43.000 I thought about it in the early days.

01:04:45.000 So in 2003 in Afghanistan, and I thought it was catching the tail end of it then, because the flashpoints before that, we had Mogadishu, we had Panama, Grenada, Desert One.

01:04:55.000 So after Vietnam, you had these flashpoints.

01:04:57.000 And this was now we're moving into extended combat operations.

01:05:00.000 But from the end of Vietnam up to then, our model is a flashpoint, essentially.

01:05:05.000 So We all thought if we weren't there, essentially, right after 9-11, that we were going to miss it.

01:05:09.000 And then we have essentially 20 years.

01:05:11.000 But I remember being in the back of a Hilux pickup truck with an Afghan guy. 1.00

01:05:16.000 And I'd always ask him if they were...

01:05:17.000 Back then, I could ask him if they were Muj, if they fought the Soviets, because I was always interested in that history and their backstories and what that life was like in the late 70s through the 80s into the 90s.

01:05:26.000 And so I was always essentially collecting information just because I was curious.

01:05:30.000 But as I'm talking to this guy, I distinctly remember thinking, man, One day we're gonna leave this place, and this guy is helping us right now.

01:05:37.000 What's gonna happen to his family when we leave this place?

01:05:39.000 And yeah, we saw that all play out.

01:05:42.000 It was 20 years later, but we saw that play out.

01:05:45.000 There was no reporting on it.

01:05:47.000 No, it just disappeared.

01:05:48.000 Yeah, we hear about it from soldiers.

01:05:50.000 We hear about it from people that are, you know, deeply embedded journalists that were there, but most people that...

01:05:57.000 Know about that story.

01:05:58.000 Don't know about all the people that worked with the United States over there. 1.00

01:06:01.000 They're fucked. 0.99

01:06:02.000 We don't even know what happened to them. 1.00

01:06:04.000 Yep.

01:06:04.000 No, it's awful.

01:06:06.000 We have a history doing that though.

01:06:07.000 I mean we did it in Vietnam.

01:06:08.000 Did it with the Kurds after the first Gulf War. 1.00

01:06:11.000 So we don't have a very good track record as far as taking care of those and their families who help us over there.

01:06:16.000 And they get left behind typically and then family slaughtered.

01:06:19.000 It's just hard to imagine that that's how we approach things.

01:06:22.000 Like you don't want to think that the people that are in charge are that incompetent.

01:06:27.000 Or that are that callous.

01:06:29.000 Or that are that...

01:06:30.000 They just look at a numbers thing instead of looking at bodies and human lives.

01:06:35.000 Yeah.

01:06:36.000 Well, all that stuff, I get to write about these guys meeting their ends in horrible ways in the pages of the novel.

01:06:44.000 I guess that's my way to do my part to kind of keep that history alive because you can go back to fiction.

01:06:50.000 Let's say you can go back.

01:06:51.000 Ian Fleming, we talked about him earlier.

01:06:53.000 You can go back and read those books from the 50s and that really is a portal back to post-World War II Great Britain and their changing place in the world.

01:07:00.000 I mean, empire decline and that's Ian Fleming's way to keep that old empire alive is through James Bond and his creation.

01:07:06.000 So they're time capsules back to the time in which they were written.

01:07:10.000 You can go to books in the 70s.

01:07:11.000 Books in the 80s.

01:07:12.000 Go back, reading the Tom Clancy, read The Time for October, Patriot Games, whatever it is.

01:07:18.000 It's a snapshot of what's going on there geopolitically.

01:07:22.000 And then also things like searching for a phone booth and looking for a quarter, that sort of a thing.

01:07:27.000 So all of those things.

01:07:29.000 So I like to weave pop culture and history into the pages of the novels as well, because they are their time capsules for the time in which they're written.

01:07:36.000 It's also a constraint because now you have to think about Teslas and GPSs in cars and GPSs in phones and video cameras everywhere.

01:07:44.000 So you have to think about that, especially when you're writing an espionage type of thriller.

01:07:48.000 You have to think about all that stuff and weave it into every chapter.

01:07:50.000 Same thing with film and screenplays.

01:07:52.000 You have to be like...

01:07:53.000 And this script, why wouldn't he just pick up his phone and call this guy and tell him to wave off or something like that?

01:07:59.000 Whereas in the 80s or 70s, that guy's gone.

01:08:02.000 How are you going to contact this guy?

01:08:03.000 So it's just a different dynamic.

01:08:05.000 And you have to think about that as you're writing these things.

01:08:07.000 So it's just another interesting thing that you need to think through and creatively solve for.

01:08:15.000 I was thinking about this the other day when I knew that we were going to talk.

01:08:18.000 How complicated is it to try to make a reasonable storyline where someone evades capture today?

01:08:27.000 Yeah.

01:08:28.000 It's a thing.

01:08:28.000 Because if someone is using a phone, they know where you are.

01:08:32.000 Yeah.

01:08:33.000 If you're running around in a city, they're going to have access to security cameras, they're going to have street cameras in some countries, and you could be tracked so easily.

01:08:44.000 Yeah.

01:08:45.000 No, it's a thing. 0.99

01:08:45.000 You can be tracked from fucking space. 0.99

01:08:47.000 Yep. 1.00

01:08:47.000 It's a whole thing. 1.00

01:08:48.000 Have you ever seen those photos that they take?

01:08:50.000 Satellite photos from space?

01:08:51.000 I've seen a lot, but I don't know if I've seen the ones you're thinking of.

01:08:53.000 License plates.

01:08:54.000 License plates.

01:08:55.000 Read a license plate from space.

01:08:58.000 Oh, yeah.

01:08:58.000 You've got to think about all this stuff.

01:08:59.000 And this is, like, from years ago.

01:09:01.000 Oh, yeah.

01:09:01.000 You could see your license plates a while back.

01:09:03.000 It's probably full-scale video now.

01:09:06.000 Or facial recognition technology.

01:09:07.000 Oh, yeah.

01:09:08.000 Let's say back in the 60s or something like that.

01:09:10.000 Forging passports and all that sort of a thing.

01:09:12.000 That's a no-go right now.

01:09:13.000 Oh. 0.96

01:09:13.000 I saw the fucking craziest story about this guy who got a bunch of plastic surgery and changed his appearance and changed his name so that he could try to date his girlfriend who had a restraining order on him. 0.96

01:09:26.000 What? 0.99

01:09:27.000 Yeah.

01:09:27.000 What?

01:09:28.000 This fucking psycho changed his face, bleached blonde, dyed his hair. 1.00

01:09:34.000 Lost a ton of weight. 1.00

01:09:35.000 Looked like a totally different guy.

01:09:37.000 So he could date his girlfriend that put a restraining order on.

01:09:41.000 That's a little creepy.

01:09:42.000 It sounds like it should be a movie or some sort.

01:09:43.000 Or a Law& Order SVU episode.

01:09:46.000 That should be a hole in the desert.

01:09:48.000 That's the guy.

01:09:48.000 What?

01:09:49.000 Yeah.

01:09:49.000 That is crazy.

01:09:51.000 Isn't that crazy?

01:09:51.000 What year is this?

01:09:52.000 Is this recent?

01:09:53.000 2020. Some tweets bringing it up.

01:09:55.000 This wasn't recently, but...

01:09:56.000 2020. Four years ago.

01:09:58.000 He gets plastic surgery and name change to date his ex-girlfriend after she obtains a restraining order.

01:10:03.000 Did it work?

01:10:04.000 How far did he get?

01:10:05.000 That's a good question.

01:10:06.000 Did she find out?

01:10:07.000 That's a good question.

01:10:08.000 It seems like there'd be a tell.

01:10:09.000 Or it seems like he'd just be too creepy to even re-engage with anyone, actually.

01:10:14.000 Yeah, I mean, maybe he knew what creeped her out, so he started slowly.

01:10:20.000 Did the opposite?

01:10:20.000 Yeah.

01:10:22.000 Do the opposite of what my real personality would do?

01:10:24.000 It might be a real story.

01:10:28.000 It says, no, this man did not.

01:10:30.000 Look up there.

01:10:30.000 It says, no, this man did not.

01:10:32.000 Was not successful or he didn't do that?

01:10:34.000 He said he didn't get it. 1.00

01:10:35.000 It's bullshit. 1.00

01:10:36.000 Aha, these sons of bitches. 1.00

01:10:38.000 What's the actual truth? 1.00

01:10:40.000 That's the thing.

01:10:41.000 How do you even figure this out?

01:10:42.000 It could just be one of those urban legends and someone just took it too far.

01:10:45.000 We found a disclaimer.

01:10:46.000 World News Daily. 0.95

01:10:47.000 Oh, that's a silly newspaper. 0.99

01:10:49.000 Oh, that's a silly newspaper. 0.99

01:10:52.000 Okay, they got us. 1.00

01:10:53.000 Sons of bitches. 1.00

01:10:54.000 Sons of bitches. 1.00

01:10:55.000 Still, it's a good idea for a script. 0.99

01:10:56.000 What was the script you were working on back then?

01:10:58.000 It was a werewolf movie.

01:10:59.000 Nice.

01:11:00.000 Yeah.

01:11:01.000 What happened to it?

01:11:01.000 I just have it sitting around on my computer.

01:11:04.000 All right.

01:11:04.000 I should do something with it eventually.

01:11:06.000 Yeah.

01:11:08.000 We should do something with it.

01:11:09.000 Speaking of which, Patrick Beddavid was...

01:11:12.000 There was some video where he was showing Obama and he thinks Obama has a mask on.

01:11:19.000 I keep seeing those.

01:11:20.000 Excuse me, Biden.

01:11:21.000 He thinks Biden is not really Biden.

01:11:23.000 It's someone pretending to be Biden that has a mask on because he was talking very clearly.

01:11:29.000 They were just reviewing it.

01:11:31.000 Does that technology exist yet?

01:11:33.000 I'm already on the clip.

01:11:34.000 Does that technology exist?

01:11:35.000 I think it's makeup.

01:11:39.000 I think they can use prosthetic masks and they can do an insane job of changing your appearance.

01:11:45.000 But these guys are accusing Biden of having this on.

01:11:49.000 Which I think, boy, that's a loose end.

01:11:53.000 If that's true, like, there's too many people out there that would know.

01:11:56.000 I know.

01:11:56.000 Oh, like that?

01:11:57.000 Sometimes lighting can look weird.

01:11:59.000 I mean, I see what it looks like.

01:12:00.000 People now claiming that Joe Biden has different skin color on his face than his neck.

01:12:04.000 Yeah, well, they do do the makeup. 0.99

01:12:05.000 Let me see what it looks like.

01:12:09.000 Well, there's the collar.

01:12:10.000 Okay, there's a shadow on the collar.

01:12:12.000 Yeah.

01:12:13.000 No.

01:12:13.000 See, that's just the shadow.

01:12:15.000 I see that clip at the end.

01:12:17.000 Right, but that's a bunch of different lights.

01:12:20.000 That's all that is.

01:12:21.000 Lighting, makeup.

01:12:21.000 It looks bad, but that's also low-resolution video.

01:12:25.000 Yeah. 0.98

01:12:25.000 If they were going to do that, do you think they would keep the fucking neck color different? 0.98

01:12:30.000 I would think that they would be smarter than this. 0.99

01:12:32.000 And can you even do that?

01:12:32.000 But if you can get that good, where you can make the face look that good, and they keep comparing his old face to his new face.

01:12:39.000 First of all, the guy got plastic surgery, clearly.

01:12:42.000 He got a facelift.

01:12:43.000 He's got his face pulled back to try to look younger, which never works.

01:12:46.000 Just makes you look weird.

01:12:47.000 It does look weird. 0.81

01:12:47.000 It makes you look like a lizard. 0.81

01:12:49.000 But the shadows, to me, look like studio lighting.

01:12:53.000 You have multiple lights coming from a bunch of different angles.

01:12:56.000 That's what it looks like.

01:12:57.000 Like he's moving around, but it's because he has a collar, and the collar is catching the light.

01:13:02.000 So there's light down here, there's light above.

01:13:05.000 That's why it looks weird.

01:13:06.000 That's why it looks like two-tone, because it's essentially getting a shadow, but then the shadow is also getting light from the upper light, from the upper cameras.

01:13:14.000 So he looks fake right there, but that's just shadows.

01:13:17.000 It's because he's being lit from below.

01:13:19.000 Right.

01:13:19.000 Yeah, it does look odd.

01:13:21.000 Yeah, he's probably being lit from a couple different spots.

01:13:24.000 I don't think you can...

01:13:26.000 I mean, I definitely think you can get a face-like mask and make you look like him, but how are you going to talk like him?

01:13:32.000 They probably just gave him a solid dose of Adderall that day.

01:13:35.000 I remember seeing this clip.

01:13:36.000 I saw the very end of it where they have an expert of some kind, this guy.

01:13:40.000 He says that they've been using body doubles since Reagan.

01:13:43.000 Yes, they have.

01:13:45.000 And he's like, it's plausible that they could maybe have faked a voice by now.

01:13:48.000 I doubt...

01:13:51.000 So what you would have to do is you'd have to have the person in the mask, and they'd have to talk in their voice, and then what you could do with AI is change the voice to be exactly like Biden's voice.

01:14:02.000 You could do that.

01:14:03.000 But that requires so many people to be in on it, including the person interviewing Biden, all the people that are watching.

01:14:11.000 There's a lot of loose ends there.

01:14:12.000 Yeah, that's where a lot of these things, I think, fall apart.

01:14:14.000 Yeah.

01:14:15.000 In that case, that's a lot of loose ends. 0.97

01:14:17.000 Especially, like, camera guys and a lot of hard-working folks, a lot of fucking probably Republicans that are involved in... 0.88

01:14:25.000 There's a lot of normal people doing that sort of thing. 0.85

01:14:27.000 You know, they'd have to sign NDAs, but people talk.

01:14:29.000 It's like, especially something like that.

01:14:32.000 Like, oh my god, they had a fake president give a conversation, and that's what you're seeing?

01:14:36.000 You're seeing a fake president? 0.68

01:14:37.000 This is crazy?

01:14:37.000 Yeah, it's a lot.

01:14:38.000 Benjamin Franklin said, three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.

01:14:44.000 There's something to that.

01:14:45.000 There's certainly something to that.

01:14:47.000 And yeah, you're right.

01:14:48.000 All the people that actually do the work, the tactical level work.

01:14:51.000 That's what I think about in Hollywood now.

01:14:53.000 When you see, let's say, a star of a show say something on social media that makes everybody crazy.

01:14:58.000 I'm never going to watch that person's show again or see that movie.

01:15:00.000 I'm never going to watch another movie by that person.

01:15:02.000 That's one person.

01:15:03.000 That's the one person who goes up and accepts the award.

01:15:06.000 But there's 300 other people, 400 other people, even more than that, doing all that tactical base level work.

01:15:12.000 The hair and makeup people, the stunt people, all of those people are part of this thing, part of this project.

01:15:17.000 And that's their jobs too.

01:15:19.000 So I think about that now when you see someone say something kind of off the wall.

01:15:23.000 Okay, that person is essentially the spokesperson for that show if they're a star.

01:15:28.000 But there's so many other people that help bring that and put in so much work.

01:15:31.000 And then that person can go spout out some political opinion and then...

01:15:35.000 I mean, like, look what's going on right now with Robert De Niro.

01:15:38.000 Oh, yeah.

01:15:39.000 Robert De Niro, because, look, there's something about being a star where you think your opinion's more important than anybody else's, and you can go give a press conference, and he obviously has been very vocal from 2016 that he hates Trump for whatever reason.

01:15:54.000 Maybe they have some personal things.

01:15:55.000 Yeah.

01:15:55.000 Whatever it is, but...

01:15:57.000 Now he's like holding press conferences.

01:15:59.000 Yeah.

01:15:59.000 So now everyone's heckling him everywhere he goes.

01:16:02.000 That's so bad.

01:16:02.000 It's tough.

01:16:03.000 Like you've opened up this, instead of just being this cranky old liberal, which I know a lot of them, you know, instead of that, now you're this guy that is yelling at other people that are Trump supporters and they're yelling at you. 0.76

01:16:16.000 Like you've opened yourself up to this nonsense. 0.95

01:16:19.000 Right.

01:16:19.000 Like why do that at that age even?

01:16:21.000 Why?

01:16:22.000 Yeah.

01:16:22.000 Now, every movie you go to, 50% of the population is going to not want to go see that movie.

01:16:27.000 I think there's a certain thing involved in being an actor at a very high level, and I think that's one of the reasons why you never see Daniel Day-Lewis give conversations.

01:16:41.000 Well, he disappeared.

01:16:43.000 Where did he go? 0.93

01:16:44.000 He's very rarely talking about things that are in the news, and he's not doing one of those fucking Imagine There's No Heaven videos and everybody's Get COVID. Remember those? 0.79

01:16:54.000 And there's a bunch of celebrities telling you how important it is to not vote for Trump.

01:17:00.000 There was all these videos from 2016. You're not going to see Daniel Day-Lewis in those.

01:17:04.000 No.

01:17:04.000 Because for Daniel Day-Lewis, for the master of masters, to be able to embody these completely different human beings, you kind of don't want to know much about him as a person.

01:17:14.000 Yeah, we don't.

01:17:15.000 And I think he pretty much, did he retire?

01:17:17.000 He became a cobbler for a little while.

01:17:19.000 Yeah, a cobbler in Ireland, right?

01:17:20.000 I think he stopped doing that.

01:17:22.000 Oh, wow.

01:17:22.000 I don't think he acts anymore, though.

01:17:24.000 Yeah, a cobbler in Ireland, right?

01:17:26.000 I don't know.

01:17:27.000 He became a boxer for a full year.

01:17:29.000 Whoa! 0.71

01:17:30.000 Yeah, he did that movie.

01:17:31.000 I think it's called The Boxer.

01:17:33.000 It's about the IRA. It's about a guy who goes to prison and comes out, and he looks like a legitimate boxer.

01:17:39.000 Like, better than anybody else who has ever been in a movie about a boxer.

01:17:43.000 Really?

01:17:44.000 Well, he goes all in.

01:17:45.000 Yeah.

01:17:46.000 The guys in other movies, they box like no one's punched them in the face.

01:17:51.000 Yeah.

01:17:52.000 Or no one's going to punch them.

01:17:54.000 Maybe somebody has, but no one's going to punch them in the face.

01:17:56.000 So they're throwing punches, and it doesn't look real to me.

01:18:00.000 Yeah, that's why you have a hard time with Rocky, right?

01:18:03.000 I know you do.

01:18:04.000 I mean, it's a great movie.

01:18:04.000 I loved it when I was a kid.

01:18:06.000 When I was a kid, I drank raw eggs and I ran around the block the moment I saw it.

01:18:09.000 It was fantastic.

01:18:10.000 It was awesome.

01:18:10.000 And so that's what I miss.

01:18:12.000 I mean, I miss those days.

01:18:13.000 I miss the feeling of watching those movies and getting just fired up and then going out and doing pull-ups and sprinting hills and all that stuff.

01:18:20.000 It's just hard when you know something.

01:18:21.000 Yeah. 0.94

01:18:21.000 When you know something, like if you were watching a movie about the military and they were doing shit that's just absolutely never going to happen and not real. 0.94

01:18:28.000 Yeah. 0.64

01:18:28.000 It takes you out of it. 0.64

01:18:29.000 You're like, ah, the fuck out of here.

01:18:32.000 Yeah, it can be tough. 0.98

01:18:32.000 I know. 0.98

01:18:32.000 And that's what was important to Antoine Fuqua, to Chris Pratt, David DeGilio, to me, was doing something that when somebody who served in the military or law enforcement, firefighter, intelligence officer, somebody that did these things for real can pop that beer and sit on their couch and watch the show. 0.98

01:18:48.000 Yeah.

01:18:48.000 I wanted them to know we at least tried.

01:18:49.000 Right.

01:18:49.000 Or at least tried to get it right.

01:18:51.000 Right.

01:18:51.000 There's going to be some Hollywood hot sauce, of course.

01:18:53.000 Chris talks about it in terms of 80% authenticity and 20% Hollywood hot sauce.

01:18:57.000 You've got to move that story forward.

01:18:59.000 You've got to move it forward.

01:19:01.000 That's a great term, Hollywood hot sauce.

01:19:03.000 But the problem is sometimes it's too much hot sauce.

01:19:05.000 It overwhelms the meal.

01:19:07.000 Or they don't know.

01:19:08.000 And it does take another breath.

01:19:11.000 You have to take a moment to try to get these things right.

01:19:14.000 It's easy, not easy, it's still hard to make any show.

01:19:18.000 And that's why I appreciate all shows out there now because I know how much work goes into making even the bad ones and how easy it is for things to go off the rail.

01:19:25.000 So it's a shocker that anything gets made or anything good gets made, certainly.

01:19:29.000 But you do have to take that extra moment to think about, hey, how is this going to look to somebody who does this for real?

01:19:35.000 Yeah, you have to respect that. 1.00

01:19:37.000 As soon as you make a film about something and the people in the film, like you have a movie about dancing and they dance like shit. 1.00

01:19:46.000 This is stupid. 1.00

01:19:47.000 This movie sucks. 1.00

01:19:48.000 If you were a professional dancer, you'd be mad. 1.00

01:19:50.000 You'd be like, this is horrible.

01:19:52.000 And they do that in some karate movies, but there's a suspension of disbelief aspect of those movies where you jump up and kick two people at the same time.

01:19:59.000 It's kind of fun.

01:20:00.000 Yeah, there's the fun aspect, but if you're trying to make a serious film and try to do this, that's why Daniel Day-Lewis is so great, because he becomes that character.

01:20:07.000 I think you have to talk to him on set like he's that character, is that right?

01:20:10.000 Exactly, yeah.

01:20:10.000 Yeah, he was Abraham Lincoln for like a year.

01:20:13.000 Right, right.

01:20:15.000 It's so interesting, because I don't see that, I have not seen that yet. 0.91

01:20:18.000 Well, that's fucked up, because nobody even watched that movie. 0.86

01:20:20.000 Oh. 0.99

01:20:20.000 You waste your time being Abraham Lincoln for a year and nobody even talks about the movie. 0.99

01:20:24.000 I know, that's tough.

01:20:25.000 That's why I write this one-page executive summary when I start these things and I ask myself, is this worth the next year, year and a half of my life?

01:20:30.000 And if yes, then I go all in.

01:20:33.000 But I read it again and I say, is this worth, if someone was walking by Hudson News and grabs this off the shelf and reads the back of this paperback or whatever, Is it interesting enough for them to devote time?

01:20:40.000 They're never going to get back to this story.

01:20:42.000 I have a hard time with those movies about real people where you don't know what they said to their wife behind closed doors.

01:20:48.000 Like Abraham Lincoln. 0.99

01:20:49.000 Like, how the fuck do you know what he said? 0.99

01:20:51.000 What are you doing here? 1.00

01:20:52.000 You're just putting a bunch of words in his mouth.

01:20:55.000 A little historical fiction.

01:20:56.000 You take a literary license.

01:20:58.000 I don't like it.

01:20:59.000 You don't like that.

01:21:00.000 I don't like it.

01:21:01.000 Either all fake or all real.

01:21:03.000 Documentary or we're going here.

01:21:05.000 What are you doing?

01:21:06.000 We're making it up.

01:21:07.000 I can't get behind these movies about, like, real people.

01:21:10.000 Yeah.

01:21:11.000 You have them talking to their kid. 1.00

01:21:12.000 You don't know what the fuck they're saying. 0.99

01:21:14.000 Unfortunately, no recordings of Lincoln's voice exist since he died 12 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. 0.99

01:21:20.000 The first device to record and play back sound, if anyone had an educated guess as to how it sounded, though, it would be Holzer, who has written 40 books on Lincoln.

01:21:28.000 40?

01:21:29.000 40 books on Lincoln the Civil War. 0.99

01:21:31.000 What a psycho that guy must be. 0.98

01:21:32.000 Wow. 0.99

01:21:32.000 You know that guy's out there reenacting the Civil War? 0.99

01:21:34.000 That's wild.

01:21:36.000 That is wild.

01:21:37.000 40 books on Lincoln and the Civil War.

01:21:40.000 That seems a little crazy.

01:21:42.000 Speaking of Daniel Day-Lewis, I love IRA movies.

01:21:45.000 80s IRA, 70s IRA movies.

01:21:47.000 I think those are good.

01:21:48.000 Even the bad ones are good.

01:21:49.000 I just started watching Peaky Blinders.

01:21:52.000 I've not watched it yet.

01:21:53.000 I need to watch it. 0.99

01:21:54.000 It's fucking great. 1.00

01:21:55.000 It's fucking great. 0.99

01:21:57.000 I burned through The Gentleman, which is Guy Ritchie's new show on Netflix, which is amazing. 0.99

01:22:01.000 It's fucking great. 0.95

01:22:03.000 Prime Guy Ritchie. 0.99

01:22:04.000 It's great.

01:22:05.000 And then a lot of friends have been telling me, like, you've got to watch Peaky Blinders.

01:22:09.000 And Jamie keeps telling me I've got to watch The Wire, and that's next.

01:22:11.000 The Wire's next.

01:22:12.000 But I've got to get through Peaky Blinders.

01:22:14.000 Yeah, I've got to watch that, too. 0.99

01:22:15.000 Peaky Blinders is fucking great. 0.98

01:22:16.000 What do they say? 0.99

01:22:16.000 There are two types of people in this world, those who have watched Peaky Blinders and those who have not. 0.99

01:22:21.000 Really?

01:22:21.000 I think I've seen that.

01:22:22.000 That's ridiculous. 0.79

01:22:23.000 I've seen that meme somewhere. 0.98

01:22:24.000 Tell that someone in Africa. 1.00

01:22:26.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:22:26.000 Bro, you haven't even watched Peaky Blinders.

01:22:28.000 I know.

01:22:28.000 What's going on?

01:22:30.000 There's so many things I want to watch, but I just haven't had time because it's just go, go, go.

01:22:34.000 Well, today is the craziest time ever.

01:22:36.000 So much.

01:22:36.000 For television and films and so many of these incredible series.

01:22:41.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:22:41.000 You know, like these things where they take, like Ozark, where you follow the entire storyline for years.

01:22:48.000 Mm-hmm.

01:22:49.000 And, you know, like, The Sopranos started that, which is still, like, one of the greats.

01:22:54.000 Tony Hinchcliffe just started watching The Sopranos again.

01:22:56.000 Nice.

01:22:56.000 I know.

01:22:56.000 I missed that, too, because that came out right around, when did it come out?

01:23:00.000 Sopranos?

01:23:00.000 2000-ish?

01:23:01.000 So right around September 11th.

01:23:02.000 So as soon as that, I remember it was starting up.

01:23:04.000 That would have been peak, yeah.

01:23:06.000 It was, like, first season, I think, was 2000, at the end of 99 or something like that.

01:23:09.000 And it lasted to 2009. Yeah, I kind of lost a lot of that during that time frame because 9-11, going downrange, focused on that, starting a family, all that stuff.

01:23:18.000 So we kind of missed a little bit in there.

01:23:20.000 So now I need to go back and watch these things.

01:23:22.000 Go back and watch The Sopranos. 0.97

01:23:23.000 It's fucking incredible. 0.98

01:23:24.000 I see scenes all the time. 0.99

01:23:25.000 You know, you see scenes all the time.

01:23:26.000 They pop up on your feed and all that stuff, and it's fantastic.

01:23:29.000 It's hard to believe that you root for a guy who's a criminal and a murderer.

01:23:32.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:23:32.000 Like, he's your hero.

01:23:34.000 Yeah.

01:23:35.000 Well, I kind of write about that in here.

01:23:36.000 My guy goes off the, you know, kind of little...

01:23:40.000 But his is understandable.

01:23:41.000 Yeah.

01:23:42.000 Tony Soprano's a criminal.

01:23:43.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:23:44.000 He's a lifelong mafia guy who's robbing people and stealing things.

01:23:48.000 Yeah, Reservoir Dogs, and you're watching Reservoir Dogs, and you're loving all those guys' conversations and all the rest of it.

01:23:53.000 And they're all bad guys.

01:23:54.000 Yeah.

01:23:55.000 I mean, a lot of those, a lot of Tarantino's stuff.

01:23:57.000 Oh, yeah.

01:23:57.000 Well, I like that.

01:23:59.000 Like a complicated movie.

01:24:00.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:24:01.000 Where people are complicated.

01:24:02.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:24:03.000 Like real people.

01:24:04.000 Interesting.

01:24:04.000 Yeah.

01:24:05.000 Interesting people.

01:24:06.000 And I like...

01:24:07.000 I want to like somebody, too.

01:24:08.000 So you can even like...

01:24:09.000 That's what you're saying.

01:24:10.000 You're saying that you like these guys who happen to be criminals or doing bad things or whatever because of the way they're written, the way they come...

01:24:15.000 You get to know them through these things.

01:24:18.000 I mean, it was crazy.

01:24:19.000 Everybody wanted to be in the mob.

01:24:22.000 The mob probably recruited quite a few people during those days.

01:24:25.000 Well, there's a whole story behind Godfather and all that stuff, too.

01:24:28.000 Oh, I bet.

01:24:29.000 I bet.

01:24:30.000 I mean, that was an amazing movie.

01:24:33.000 I bet that made a lot of people want to become mobsters.

01:24:36.000 Probably.

01:24:37.000 Or have you heard Danny Trejo talk about doing...

01:24:41.000 There's a couple movies that came out about gangs and his affiliation there with those, but he's acting in these same things and having to go and actually get permission from the different gangs to do them.

01:24:53.000 He has it in his biography.

01:24:55.000 It's pretty interesting stuff.

01:24:56.000 But a similar type of a deal.

01:24:57.000 Wasn't that a deal also with Edward James Olmos when...

01:25:00.000 It was one of those movies.

01:25:01.000 What was it, American Me?

01:25:02.000 There was American Me and then there was Blood In, Blood Out.

01:25:05.000 It came out about the same time.

01:25:07.000 Was it the same thing?

01:25:08.000 I don't think that's Edward James Olmos though, right?

01:25:11.000 No, there were two separate ones.

01:25:12.000 Right, right.

01:25:13.000 American Me, I think he got into trouble with some of the Mexican gangs for the way things are depicted.

01:25:18.000 Yeah.

01:25:19.000 You have to have permission for stuff.

01:25:20.000 Yeah.

01:25:21.000 Well, I was going to go to Macau for this one, so...

01:25:24.000 Oh, really?

01:25:25.000 ...part of China, and I don't think I can go there now.

01:25:27.000 I think I needed to do it before I wrote this book.

01:25:30.000 Uh-oh.

01:25:30.000 Yeah, so I think I... Luckily, I went to Russia before for my third novel for Savage Son.

01:25:35.000 I went over to Kamchatka Peninsula, did a hunt over there, and had a crazy experience with a bear over there.

01:25:42.000 But I don't think...

01:25:44.000 I don't know if I should go back.

01:25:45.000 I don't think you should go back.

01:25:47.000 Look what they did to Brittany Griner. 1.00

01:25:49.000 I know, exactly.

01:25:50.000 Yeah, of you, American Patriot.

01:25:52.000 Actor Danny Trejo said in an interview he was aware of 10 people having been murdered for their involvement in the film. 0.99

01:25:57.000 Holy shit, man. 1.00

01:26:00.000 Holy shit. 0.99

01:26:01.000 The first killing occurred 12 days after the film's premiere when one of the film's consultants, Charles Charlie Brown Manriquez, a member of La M.A., was killed in Ramona Gardens, L.A.'s oldest public housing project Another consultant in the film, 0.99

01:26:17.000 49-year-old grandmother, Ana Lazarga, commonly known as the Gang Lady, was murdered when she was gunned down her East Los Angeles driveway while loading luggage into her car the day of her mother's funeral. 0.75

01:26:30.000 Dang.

01:26:30.000 Wow.

01:26:32.000 Wow.

01:26:33.000 Yeah, they were pissed.

01:26:34.000 Be careful.

01:26:35.000 Yeah, it's like dangerous people you're making movies about.

01:26:39.000 Do you ever worry about that with stuff you talk about on here?

01:26:42.000 Yeah, you could always worry about that.

01:26:45.000 I mean, if you're gonna talk about things that are consequential, you know? 0.97

01:26:49.000 I mean, we live in a weird fucking world right now. 0.82

01:26:52.000 We live in a weird world of All kinds of insane things happening simultaneously. 0.99

01:26:57.000 You know?

01:26:58.000 Yeah.

01:26:59.000 It's pretty wild.

01:27:00.000 I got off the plane yesterday and said, I hear this, Jack!

01:27:02.000 And it was a...

01:27:03.000 A guy walks up and he ended up being an Austin detective.

01:27:06.000 Oh.

01:27:06.000 So first I thought I was in trouble.

01:27:07.000 And then he's just...

01:27:08.000 He liked the books and everything.

01:27:10.000 We apparently have some mutual friends.

01:27:12.000 But, yeah, it's crazy out there.

01:27:14.000 And people can find you so much easier now.

01:27:16.000 I don't like that.

01:27:17.000 I don't like that.

01:27:18.000 It's definitely not a safer time to be alive.

01:27:21.000 But it's also...

01:27:23.000 It's interesting that we're moving towards some...

01:27:26.000 I mean, because people can find you.

01:27:27.000 We're moving towards some very weird thing where there's not going to be any secrets anymore.

01:27:31.000 Yeah.

01:27:32.000 And I don't think it's that far from now.

01:27:34.000 No.

01:27:34.000 And I think it might be the only way human beings ever truly understand each other.

01:27:38.000 Oh, really?

01:27:38.000 I think it's going to happen through technology, and I think it's going to happen in our lifetimes.

01:27:43.000 That our relationship to each other is going to be incredibly different than what it is now.

01:27:49.000 Man.

01:27:50.000 Neuralink, we got that coming up. 0.85

01:27:51.000 I think that's a part of it.

01:27:52.000 I have Alice, this character I introduced two books ago for In the Blood, and an AI quantum computer, and people really liked this character, but I didn't want to sideline her for the next one, for the last book, because I didn't want to rely on her like, Michael Knight in the 80s calling Kitkar on his watch and having it jump in Trans Am and zip off.

01:28:09.000 So I sidelined her last book, but I knew I couldn't introduce a character like that and just ignore her forever.

01:28:15.000 So she comes back in this.

01:28:16.000 And even since I did the research for the last book, and that's only two years, things have increased at such an exponential rate as far as AI, quantum computing.

01:28:24.000 And then the military side of that, autonomous control of platforms.

01:28:27.000 So all these new things that are coming out, whether it's submarines or it's aircraft or surface ships, whatever it might be, they're all being built so that they can be autonomously controlled.

01:28:38.000 They may not be yet, but they have that ability.

01:28:41.000 Have you seen that insane new ship that's autonomous?

01:28:44.000 It's all controlled.

01:28:45.000 It looks like a manta ray.

01:28:47.000 Oh, yeah.

01:28:47.000 Yeah, I've seen that one.

01:28:48.000 That one's no passengers, no crew, no one on it at all.

01:28:52.000 It's just a machine. 0.99

01:28:53.000 And it looks like a damn spaceship. 0.99

01:28:56.000 See if you can find it. 1.00

01:28:57.000 It's crazy looking.

01:28:59.000 You look at it, you're like, if this was not ours, if you were living in like 1970 and someone saw something like this.

01:29:07.000 Dang.

01:29:08.000 Look at that.

01:29:09.000 That's crazy.

01:29:10.000 That's wild.

01:29:11.000 No windows?

01:29:12.000 Yeah.

01:29:12.000 You'd be like, oh my god, it's a spaceship.

01:29:13.000 It's from another planet.

01:29:14.000 All new stealth stuff, stealth bombers, the speed that these things go at the altitudes that they travel.

01:29:19.000 Yeah.

01:29:19.000 It's wild.

01:29:20.000 I also think there's new ones that operate on geothermal energy.

01:29:26.000 Oh, wow.

01:29:26.000 And they can make hydrogen out of water.

01:29:29.000 Like, they can do wild shit with some of these new devices that they're creating. 0.93

01:29:34.000 And this is the future. 0.98

01:29:34.000 This is the future right here. 0.98

01:29:36.000 So that's what I'm exploring in this thing.

01:29:37.000 It's like, what happens if you turn over autonomous control or have one of these things just take control?

01:29:42.000 Right.

01:29:43.000 That is a real problem.

01:29:44.000 That's a real problem that people are terrified of when it comes to weapon systems.

01:29:48.000 And if you're doing it, what is China doing?

01:29:50.000 So we're doing it, and China's doing it, and you have to get inside your enemy's decision-making process, and they're making decisions so fast using AI to make... 0.56

01:29:58.000 I mean, you can have missiles raining down Yeah.

01:30:12.000 And not only that, but these supersonic ones can change directions, so you can't even picture where they're going.

01:30:18.000 Hypersonic ones, hypersonic missiles, passive targeting.

01:30:21.000 So you have all of these things.

01:30:22.000 So I got to explore all that in the past.

01:30:24.000 Probably why this book took so long is because I was...

01:30:26.000 Doing that research and it's just new things coming to light every single day and then people you're talking to in that space giving you little hints about what's really out there.

01:30:34.000 And then you talk to somebody else who gives you another little hint and you get to put this mosaic together like a reporter might.

01:30:39.000 And I think what I describe in the book, I think we're way past it.

01:30:44.000 We're already way past it as far as quantum computing, AI and what the ability of those platforms, what they have, what they can do.

01:30:53.000 Yeah, I think so, too.

01:30:54.000 I think what we know is probably really the tip of the iceberg, and I think they're probably far more advanced than we think they are right now.

01:31:02.000 I think that's what a lot of the UAP stuff is.

01:31:04.000 I've been thinking that for a long time.

01:31:06.000 I think it's very possible that we are visited.

01:31:10.000 Tucker Carlson seems to think they're spiritual beings that they've always been here, like they're devils and angels.

01:31:15.000 That might be true, too.

01:31:16.000 I don't know.

01:31:18.000 But also, probably we do get visited, but also, probably some of those are ours.

01:31:23.000 Probably, there's something about the government telling you that these are off-world crafts that we go, oh, you made it.

01:31:30.000 Instantly.

01:31:30.000 My brain goes, you're not square about anything.

01:31:35.000 Right.

01:31:35.000 All those stealth technology, you know, and they finally unveiled it, I think, in the late 80s.

01:31:40.000 Part of that was to let the Soviets know that we do have this capability because they didn't have theirs yet.

01:31:43.000 And so we can get there before they even know.

01:31:46.000 My fear is that they're not ours.

01:31:48.000 Yeah.

01:31:49.000 The big fear is that not only do they exist, but maybe some of them are not ours.

01:31:53.000 And so some other countries have the ability to have these things that move in these insane ways that we can't quite do.

01:32:00.000 That might be possible, too.

01:32:01.000 But if they're telling you that they're from another planet, they're not from another planet.

01:32:06.000 That's my feeling.

01:32:07.000 They're not...

01:32:08.000 They spent three years lying about the Russia collusion story.

01:32:11.000 And they got mainstream media to repeat it all.

01:32:14.000 They spent all these years lying about, like, fill in the blank.

01:32:18.000 Everything.

01:32:18.000 Pretty much everything.

01:32:19.000 Why the fuck would we believe they're telling us the truth about UFOs? 0.64

01:32:23.000 Exactly. 0.95

01:32:23.000 I just think the whole thing seems... 0.95

01:32:26.000 It seems...

01:32:28.000 It seems suspect?

01:32:29.000 Yeah, it just seems too obvious.

01:32:32.000 You know, I just, I don't believe that they would just start telling you that there's off-world crafts.

01:32:38.000 I just like, I don't think so.

01:32:40.000 Right.

01:32:40.000 And all these years, now you guys are just going to start, oh, it's these brave whistleblowers.

01:32:44.000 Are you sure?

01:32:45.000 Are you sure? 1.00

01:32:46.000 Because I smell bullshit. 1.00

01:32:50.000 At least some of this is bullshit. 1.00

01:32:51.000 I don't know how much of it's bullshit, though. 0.99

01:32:54.000 I think there's too many stories from the past when this technology was impossible. 0.98

01:32:59.000 The Kenneth Arnold sightings, when they first started calling them flying saucers.

01:33:03.000 I think he saw them in, was it Washington State?

01:33:05.000 Is that a long time ago?

01:33:07.000 Yeah, it was in the 1950s.

01:33:09.000 Most of them started happening after we dropped the bombs.

01:33:12.000 That's why my comedy club, the rooms are named after the nuclear bombs.

01:33:16.000 Oh.

01:33:17.000 Yeah, it's Fat Man and Little Boy.

01:33:18.000 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:33:19.000 Because in UFO folklore, it's obviously the comedy mothership, and we have a UFO, you walk in the front doors of a UFO. It's fantastic.

01:33:26.000 In UFO lore, they all started appearing shortly after the UFO, the bombs were dropped.

01:33:33.000 1947, and that's when we'd reorganize the military and intelligence agencies.

01:33:37.000 Right there, we changed the Department of War to the Department of Defense, and the Secretary of War to the Secretary of Defense, and everything gets reorganized, right?

01:33:45.000 1947 is a very pivotal year.

01:33:47.000 So look at what it says here.

01:33:48.000 Kenneth Arnold's UFO sighting occurred on June 24, 1947, when private pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed that he saw a string of nine shiny, unidentified flying objects flying past Mount Rainier at speeds that Arnold estimated at a minimum of 1,200 miles an hour.

01:34:04.000 Dang.

01:34:05.000 So he saw these things flying at a rate, you know, in 47, there were propeller planes, and there's no way anything we had can move like that.

01:34:13.000 And he's watching these things go at an insane rate of speed.

01:34:17.000 And so he said they skipped across the sky like flying saucers on a lake.

01:34:22.000 And so it became flying saucers.

01:34:24.000 Flying saucers.

01:34:24.000 Yeah.

01:34:25.000 But people back then that saw those things, there's no way that was the Soviets.

01:34:30.000 There's no way that was the Germans. 0.99

01:34:32.000 No, no, no.

01:34:33.000 That's not ours. 0.98

01:34:34.000 So whatever the fuck that is, if that was real, if the guy really did see those things. 0.97

01:34:38.000 And then there was a string of them that were over the White House in 1950-something. 0.99

01:34:44.000 Really?

01:34:44.000 Yeah.

01:34:45.000 There was photographed ones that were over the White House.

01:34:48.000 There's actually a news story about it, that these things flew over the White House.

01:34:53.000 Okay.

01:34:54.000 And I think they moved at a bizarre rate of speed, too.

01:34:57.000 So those ones give me pause.

01:34:59.000 Yeah.

01:34:59.000 Because, look, the universe is...

01:35:01.000 That's obviously a drawing.

01:35:03.000 That's a drawing.

01:35:04.000 But I think there is a photograph of it.

01:35:07.000 Yeah.

01:35:08.000 I think that's...

01:35:08.000 Is that the photograph?

01:35:09.000 Dude, that's wild.

01:35:10.000 There might not be?

01:35:12.000 Okay.

01:35:13.000 Saucers over Washington, D.C. So what does the story say?

01:35:15.000 It looks like a comic book.

01:35:17.000 Senior Air Route Traffic Controller for the Civil Aeronautics Administration was in charge of the National Airport, Washington, D.C. ART Control Center on the night of July 19, 1952. Briefly, he states in a newspaper article, our job is to constantly monitor skies around the nation's capital with electronic eye of radar.

01:35:34.000 Shortly after midnight on that day, seven pips appeared suddenly on the control center's scope.

01:35:39.000 Ed Nugent, Jim Copeland, and Jim Ritchie all experienced radar controllers, checked the observations.

01:35:45.000 The airport-controlled tower radar operator verified the same sightings.

01:35:49.000 They were over the restricted areas of Washington, including the White House and the Capitol.

01:35:54.000 So those kind of things, you gotta go, well, what is that?

01:35:58.000 Look, the universe is big beyond our wildest imagination.

01:36:03.000 There's no way we could even fathom how big it is.

01:36:06.000 It's not possible.

01:36:08.000 Look at that.

01:36:10.000 Yeah.

01:36:10.000 Oh, man.

01:36:26.000 The sighting, rather.

01:36:27.000 Made the front page headlines in all newspapers.

01:36:29.000 Dang.

01:36:30.000 Yeah.

01:36:31.000 So those kind of things, you go, okay, well, what is that?

01:36:34.000 Right.

01:36:34.000 The universe is...

01:36:36.000 It's impossible for us to even get our heads around how big it is.

01:36:39.000 Yeah.

01:36:39.000 So if there is some...

01:36:42.000 Planet out there that's in the Goldilocks zone, that's gone through what we're going through currently, but is 10,000 years ahead of us, and finds the signature of nuclear bombs on this planet, and they realize, oh, okay, these crazy fuckers have come into this new age where they could split the atom. 0.95

01:37:00.000 And so we should probably take a visit. 0.93

01:37:02.000 Yeah.

01:37:02.000 It was interesting hearing Tucker talk about that part on here, like where that technology came from.

01:37:07.000 Yeah.

01:37:08.000 I hadn't really thought about that before.

01:37:10.000 Well, that's Diana Pasolka's work. 1.00

01:37:11.000 Diana Pasolka and Gary Nolan, who is a legitimate professor, I believe at Stanford, And they, Diana Posalk, who's also a professor, she's a professor of religion.

01:37:23.000 And they have investigated a lot of these crash sites.

01:37:27.000 And the way they describe them, the people that are investigating the crash sites, the actual scientists, they call them donations.

01:37:33.000 What?

01:37:34.000 Yeah.

01:37:34.000 Donations?

01:37:34.000 That's how they, they don't even think they're crashing, like, as an accident.

01:37:40.000 They think some of them they're just sending down here. 1.00

01:37:42.000 Like, hey, figure that out, stupid. 1.00

01:37:44.000 Ugh. 1.00

01:37:44.000 You know, send them to some remote place, slam it down there, and then the government has to rope off the area. 1.00

01:37:51.000 And you can still find parts in this one area of New Mexico where this one crash site was.

01:37:57.000 They didn't tell them where it was.

01:37:58.000 They blindfolded them, took them out to this crash site, let them investigate it.

01:38:02.000 And you can still find these pieces of this, some kind of metal that you can take and you can crumple it in your hand like tinfoil, and then it...

01:38:10.000 It goes right back to the original shape.

01:38:12.000 Really?

01:38:12.000 It's the same thing that was described in Roswell, New Mexico.

01:38:16.000 The people that...

01:38:17.000 The Roswell thing is very hard because there's so many people involved and there's so many similar stories.

01:38:26.000 But the problem is...

01:38:28.000 When a story's been told for so long, people repeat a story.

01:38:32.000 They're told in towns when there's no recording devices.

01:38:36.000 There's no, you know, no one has phones.

01:38:39.000 This is a long time ago.

01:38:40.000 They have, you know, regular phones, but no cell phones, obviously.

01:38:44.000 And what they're doing with all this stuff is they're all talking about it, and then a narrative gets established, and then people tend to repeat narratives that are established.

01:38:53.000 It's hard, because you're talking about something that happened in 1947. Right.

01:38:58.000 There's a lot of things that come almost right after Roswell.

01:39:01.000 One of them is a transistor, and the other one is...

01:39:05.000 Microchips, maybe?

01:39:08.000 What is that stuff called?

01:39:09.000 Fiber optics.

01:39:10.000 Fiber optics.

01:39:11.000 Fiber optics seem to emerge after that.

01:39:13.000 And it's one of the things that's described in the crash.

01:39:16.000 The people that have described it.

01:39:18.000 But the thing is, like, again, you're hearing these things decades later.

01:39:21.000 You're hearing... 0.57

01:39:24.000 It's very difficult to figure out what the fuck actually happened, but something seems to have happened because the Roswell Daily Record, I have a framed cover of the front page of the Roswell Daily Record from 1947, where it says that there's a crashed UFO, that the government flew to the base, 0.95

01:39:40.000 and that, you know, it's like in the news. 0.96

01:39:42.000 Yeah.

01:39:43.000 Which doesn't seem like something back then that you would just make up.

01:39:47.000 Yeah.

01:39:48.000 I don't know.

01:39:49.000 Unless there's a reason behind it, distraction.

01:39:51.000 I mean, who knows?

01:39:52.000 Yeah, who knows?

01:39:53.000 It could be something that the United States was working on.

01:39:56.000 It seems like they were trying to cover it up so much so that they flew the wreckage in two separate planes to Wright-Pattison Air Force Base.

01:40:04.000 And Truman met him there.

01:40:07.000 Yeah.

01:40:08.000 47's a big year.

01:40:09.000 63, obviously, a big year with the Kennedy assassination.

01:40:12.000 59 is a huge year.

01:40:14.000 A lot of things happen in 59. There's a book.

01:40:16.000 Was it Truman or Eisenhower met him there?

01:40:17.000 I forget, but all that time is so filled with deception and weirdness, right?

01:40:23.000 It is.

01:40:23.000 It's also when Operation Paperclip was going on.

01:40:26.000 So they took all these Nazi scientists from Germany and they brought them over and integrated them into NASA. Isn't that wild? 0.92

01:40:33.000 All those people that had those backgrounds, did the things that they did back there and bring them over.

01:40:39.000 And a lot of them had those dueling scars on their face, so they looked sinister.

01:40:43.000 Do you know about the dueling scars?

01:40:45.000 No.

01:40:45.000 So Nazis, I guess, when they were going through this rite of passage, when they were in whatever university they were going to, they would have duels.

01:40:54.000 With real rapiers, like real swords, and they would slice their faces up.

01:40:58.000 Wow.

01:40:59.000 They would wear goggles.

01:41:00.000 What?

01:41:00.000 Yeah, and they would have sword fights.

01:41:02.000 I feel like I should know this. 0.99

01:41:03.000 And these guys got their faces all cut to shit, and that was like part of the pride of being a Nazi, was you had these dueling scars on your face, that you had done this. 0.98

01:41:13.000 And a lot of the guys we brought over from Operation Paperclip had these dueling scars on their face. 0.99

01:41:18.000 And it's one of the ways that future historians identified them as clearly being Nazis.

01:41:24.000 Okay.

01:41:25.000 These weren't just freak accents.

01:41:26.000 These guys all had them.

01:41:28.000 They all had crazy slices in their cheekbones. 0.98

01:41:30.000 Show them some pictures, because it's fucking crazy to see. 0.98

01:41:32.000 I can't believe you don't know about this. 0.95

01:41:33.000 I feel like I'd put this in a book.

01:41:34.000 I can't believe I'm teaching you something.

01:41:35.000 I know.

01:41:35.000 It's awesome.

01:41:35.000 I love it.

01:41:36.000 I forget who told me about it.

01:41:37.000 It's going to make it into a book.

01:41:38.000 It's a weird thing that they all did, and there's photos of them all sliced up.

01:41:44.000 See, they all have these cuts on their faces.

01:41:46.000 Like, look at that.

01:41:47.000 That's what it looked like after the fact. 0.99

01:41:49.000 So they'd wear these goggles on and nose protectors, and they'd slice each other's fucking faces apart. 0.99

01:41:55.000 It looks like a bad idea. 0.99

01:41:57.000 Isn't that nuts?

01:41:58.000 It's a terrible idea.

01:41:59.000 But it was a sign of being a badass.

01:42:01.000 Just like a lot of jujitsu guys today, they like to have cauliflower ear. 0.99

01:42:05.000 Yeah, back then, your face sliced up, you were a psycho. 0.99

01:42:08.000 Oh, wow. 1.00

01:42:09.000 That's crazy.

01:42:10.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:42:10.000 It's fucking nuts. 1.00

01:42:11.000 It seems like they could wear, like, fencing helmets or something. 1.00

01:42:13.000 No, they didn't want to.

01:42:14.000 They didn't want to.

01:42:15.000 They wanted to get cut up.

01:42:16.000 That was part of the thing.

01:42:17.000 That's the thing.

01:42:17.000 Yeah.

01:42:18.000 Yeah.

01:42:18.000 Dang.

01:42:19.000 Weird.

01:42:20.000 That's wild.

01:42:20.000 Yeah, it feels like that needs to make it into one of my novels.

01:42:22.000 Somebody needs to have that background.

01:42:23.000 Yeah, I mean, you'd probably want to dive into it deeper than I have.

01:42:27.000 But it is...

01:42:28.000 The point is, there was a lot of deception that was happening in the world back then.

01:42:33.000 So who knows what the real story was about Roswell.

01:42:36.000 I like to think...

01:42:38.000 That there's something going on that's real.

01:42:40.000 But I also like to think that if the donation thing is true and that's been going on since who knows how long, you know, Bob Lazar claimed in the late 1980s that he had been working back engineering one of these things.

01:42:55.000 And the way he described it is exactly how they see them move today, exactly how there's a video of these things moving in bizarre ways.

01:43:02.000 No heat signature.

01:43:03.000 They seem to be shooting across the sky.

01:43:05.000 They can hold still at 120 knot winds.

01:43:08.000 He was describing it.

01:43:09.000 It's like the Terminator 2 hand, you know, going back in T2 and reverse engineering that technology from T2. It's interesting how movies and books eventually become reality.

01:43:19.000 It would be good if you could travel back and forth through time and you realize that human beings are going to take X amount of steps to get somewhere, but if you can inject some technology into the equation, you could speed up the process considerably.

01:43:34.000 Let them do it on their own.

01:43:36.000 Let them figure this out like, oh, a transistor.

01:43:38.000 Duh! 1.00

01:43:39.000 And all of a sudden, electronics get far smaller.

01:43:42.000 Fiber optics, oh!

01:43:44.000 Why didn't I think of that?

01:43:46.000 Bam! 0.98

01:43:46.000 Everything gets way quicker. 0.98

01:43:48.000 And the other thing that Lazar said about the crafts that was baffling to him in the 1980s, he said there was no seams.

01:43:55.000 He said there was no welds, there's no rivets, there's no seams.

01:43:58.000 But now we know about 3D printing.

01:44:00.000 Now they can 3D print anything.

01:44:02.000 And if you conceivably have a machine that's large enough, you could 3D print a spacecraft.

01:44:08.000 And he wouldn't have any seams.

01:44:09.000 I mean, going back to 1963, did you hear Trump saying he's actually going to release all the JFK documents?

01:44:16.000 But he said that the first time.

01:44:17.000 Yeah, he said that the first time.

01:44:18.000 He also said that if you knew what they told me, you wouldn't tell people either.

01:44:23.000 What could that be?

01:44:24.000 The CIA killed Kennedy.

01:44:26.000 But that seems like we already have...

01:44:28.000 Yeah, but it's not clear.

01:44:30.000 There's a lot of books that are saying that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone that are still pretty good books.

01:44:35.000 Yeah.

01:44:35.000 You know, you...

01:44:36.000 Gerald Posner's book.

01:44:37.000 Yeah.

01:44:37.000 People read them and they believe it.

01:44:39.000 I don't believe it.

01:44:39.000 I think Lee Harvey Oswald was involved.

01:44:42.000 And I think that's the...

01:44:43.000 The thing is, people think it's either one or the other.

01:44:45.000 Either Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone or, you know, someone else was involved and Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy.

01:44:53.000 Lee Harvey Oswald went to Russia during the height of the Cold War.

01:44:57.000 A little odd.

01:44:57.000 Yeah, real odd.

01:44:58.000 They let him come back over here. 0.98

01:45:00.000 Lee Harvey Oswald was clearly involved in some sort of shady espionage type shit. 0.99

01:45:07.000 And married a Russian woman. 1.00

01:45:09.000 The whole deal.

01:45:10.000 The whole thing is crazy.

01:45:11.000 It's insane.

01:45:12.000 The odds that he was completely innocent, very low. 1.00

01:45:15.000 It seems like he was over here doing some shady shit. 0.99

01:45:19.000 He had always been involved in some shady intelligence type shit. 0.99

01:45:22.000 But I think there was a lot of people, and I think they wanted to really make sure that Kennedy got killed. 0.98

01:45:27.000 And I think there was probably a lot of people involved, and I think Lee Harvey Oswald probably was a patsy, and I think that's probably why Jack Ruby shot him.

01:45:34.000 Yep.

01:45:35.000 And all you have to think about as far as mob involvement goes in that is, look at Jack Ruby, his background.

01:45:40.000 Yeah, fully mobbed up.

01:45:41.000 Yeah, fully mobbed up.

01:45:43.000 There's also E. Howard Hunt, who confessed to the killing on his deathbed, said that they were in the grassy knoll.

01:45:49.000 There's other people, like Woody Harrelson's father apparently was supposedly involved.

01:45:52.000 Interesting.

01:45:53.000 Yeah, Woody Harrelson's father was a bad person.

01:45:56.000 Really? 0.70

01:45:56.000 A bad guy, like an assassin. 0.70

01:45:58.000 Really?

01:45:58.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:45:59.000 Yeah, known murderer.

01:46:00.000 Oh.

01:46:01.000 And so I think there was a lot of people that wanted JFK dead.

01:46:06.000 You know, after the Bay of Pigs, there was a lot of people that wanted JFK dead.

01:46:11.000 You know, he wanted to get rid of the NSA. He wanted to get rid of the CIA. He wanted to get rid of the Federal Bank.

01:46:18.000 He wanted to get rid of everything.

01:46:19.000 The Federal Reserve.

01:46:21.000 He wanted to get rid of the Federal Reserve.

01:46:22.000 It's like the whole thing's crazy.

01:46:23.000 Yeah.

01:46:24.000 The Warren Commission Report should have been called the Dulles Commission.

01:46:27.000 Yeah, right.

01:46:28.000 I mean, Alan Dulles, the guy you essentially fire, is now in charge of this investigation?

01:46:32.000 Insane.

01:46:32.000 You fire the guy, now he's in charge of investigating who assassinated you.

01:46:36.000 And, you know, the best book that I ever read about it was David Lifton's book, Best Evidence.

01:46:41.000 And David Lifton was an accountant, and they hired him to go over the Warren report.

01:46:46.000 And so he goes over the Warren Commission report, and he read the entire thing, which is like insanely long.

01:46:52.000 It finds all these inconsistencies and all these things don't make any sense.

01:46:56.000 The difference between the way they viewed the body at Dallas versus the way they saw it at Bethesda, Maryland when they brought the body there. 0.97

01:47:05.000 And then there's the magic bullet, which anybody who's ever shot anything with a gun knows that's horseshit. 0.98

01:47:10.000 I know. 0.97

01:47:11.000 There's so much.

01:47:12.000 1963 was a...

01:47:13.000 Very pivotal year.

01:47:14.000 Nothing's been the same since.

01:47:15.000 Not that things are going to always stay the same.

01:47:17.000 Things are always going to evolve.

01:47:18.000 But that was a turning point, no doubt about it, when it comes to the power of federal government.

01:47:22.000 No doubt about it.

01:47:22.000 And, you know, I didn't know until Tucker explained it on the show about Nixon.

01:47:28.000 About how they forced Nixon, who's the most popular president in history, there was a government orchestrated coup to get him out.

01:47:35.000 That was super interesting.

01:47:35.000 I had not heard that until I listened to Tucker on your show and having him talk about Bob Woodward and where he came from.

01:47:41.000 Crazy!

01:47:42.000 Wasn't that wild?

01:47:43.000 Crazy!

01:47:44.000 Naval intelligence!

01:47:45.000 Yeah, and I listened to that right before I went back to- All of a sudden he has the number one story.

01:47:49.000 Yeah, a brand new guy.

01:47:51.000 Brand new guy.

01:47:51.000 Number one story.

01:47:52.000 It's a great story.

01:47:53.000 It's a great Hollywood story.

01:47:55.000 Right.

01:47:55.000 But it is now when you hear it in those terms, the way Tucker talked about it, that it is suspect.

01:47:59.000 The whole thing's crazy.

01:48:00.000 Yeah.

01:48:01.000 When Tucker explains it, the whole thing makes you go, what?

01:48:04.000 Yeah.

01:48:04.000 It was interesting because I listened to that show right before I went back to New York for the Simon& Schuster 100th anniversary celebration event, and I was speaking there, and so was Bob Woodward.

01:48:13.000 I was sitting next to him in the green room.

01:48:15.000 Did you talk to him?

01:48:16.000 No, I didn't feel it was appropriate to bring that up.

01:48:21.000 Did you talk to him about anything?

01:48:23.000 Not really.

01:48:24.000 More like a nice-to-meet-you type thing.

01:48:26.000 Yeah, nice-to-meet-you suspect person.

01:48:27.000 Exactly.

01:48:28.000 I was looking.

01:48:30.000 It was wild.

01:48:31.000 How's Bernstein?

01:48:32.000 What's his deal?

01:48:32.000 I don't know.

01:48:33.000 That's a good question.

01:48:34.000 Yeah.

01:48:34.000 Do you get dragged along and see a part of it?

01:48:36.000 I don't know.

01:48:38.000 Those guys are alive.

01:48:40.000 But everybody looks at that as the seminal work of investigative journalism.

01:48:44.000 Seminal, what they developed, the story they put out there. 1.00

01:48:49.000 Oh my God, the President of the United States is a crook. 0.99

01:48:52.000 I'm not a crook! 0.99

01:48:54.000 I know.

01:48:55.000 It's wild.

01:48:56.000 And he has to resign.

01:48:57.000 And then Gerald Ford, the only unelected president ever who also was on the Warrant Commission Report?

01:49:02.000 Exactly.

01:49:03.000 What?

01:49:03.000 Exactly.

01:49:04.000 I mean, it's all interconnected.

01:49:05.000 It's all crazy.

01:49:06.000 It would be a great script.

01:49:07.000 It would be a great movie if it was fiction.

01:49:08.000 People might even believe it if it wasn't out there and you wrote it in a book.

01:49:12.000 Let's say you wrote it in 1960 before all that stuff starts happening. 0.98

01:49:16.000 Get the fuck out of here. 0.98

01:49:17.000 That's not how the world works, son. 0.99

01:49:18.000 The world is beautiful and perfect and the United States is good.

01:49:22.000 That's why it's so hard to do these things because fact is stranger than fiction.

01:49:27.000 And all these things that were conspiracy theories are being proved to have been true.

01:49:32.000 And so it's harder to...

01:49:34.000 And people that are in power have always manipulated the truth if they can.

01:49:38.000 If they can get away with it.

01:49:38.000 I think it's part of the fun of being in power.

01:49:40.000 Being able to get away with shit. 1.00

01:49:43.000 It's awful. 1.00

01:49:44.000 I can't imagine running for something.

01:49:46.000 It's very anti-American, which is shocking because they're the people that run America.

01:49:50.000 That's what's weird.

01:49:51.000 That's what's so weird about it.

01:49:52.000 Nothing sounds worse to me than being a politician.

01:49:55.000 It sounds horrible.

01:49:57.000 That's why when I see a good person doing it, I'm like, wow, well, good luck.

01:50:01.000 Good luck to you, sir.

01:50:03.000 You've decided.

01:50:04.000 I mean, there's very few left.

01:50:05.000 There's very few compelling leaders that That step up to the political arena and you go, wow, that's someone who I really like.

01:50:13.000 It's generally, in almost every regard, the lesser of two evils.

01:50:18.000 Yeah.

01:50:19.000 That's why it's amazing when you see Tulsi get sidelined.

01:50:24.000 What's great about her is that she has changed positions on things.

01:50:31.000 But because of that, she gets it from both sides now.

01:50:33.000 So you get the people that say, oh, look, she once had this view of Second Amendment or whatever, And now it's changed, so I don't trust her type thing.

01:50:40.000 Well, how are you going to ever convince someone or talk to someone or open somebody's aperture about how to think if you don't want them to change sides and don't bring them into the fold?

01:50:50.000 Yeah, it seems silly to make people stick to their original idea on something.

01:50:54.000 If they don't, they're flip-flopping. 0.81

01:50:57.000 That seems silly.

01:50:58.000 If you're a human being and you see things... 0.81

01:51:01.000 Like, there's a lot of people that were pretty hardcore leftist liberal progressives that lived in California that were like, okay, these policies are insane. 0.94

01:51:11.000 Like, I'm getting the fuck out of here. 0.88

01:51:12.000 Like, Jillian Michaels was just... 0.70

01:51:14.000 She just did a podcast recently.

01:51:15.000 She discussed it.

01:51:17.000 And she was saying, like... 1.00

01:51:19.000 If I'm saying you're out of your fucking mind, maybe you're out of your fucking mind. 1.00

01:51:23.000 So people change their perspective based on new information. 1.00

01:51:27.000 The people that bury their head in the sand and pretend everything's amazing and we're eventually going to pull out of this and our philosophy is correct, you're not course correcting.

01:51:35.000 If you're not course correcting, you're not learning.

01:51:37.000 And if you're not changing your opinion in light of...

01:51:42.000 Insane information.

01:51:43.000 If you live in California, you get insane amounts of information showing these policies are not working.

01:51:48.000 This approach to law enforcement, this approach to dealing with criminals, it's not working.

01:51:54.000 It's not good.

01:51:54.000 You can't do this.

01:51:55.000 No, it's crazy.

01:51:56.000 That same trip back in New York, I went to this place for dinner called the Time Square Cafe.

01:52:03.000 Yeah, so not being from New York and not really knowing the area that well, I assumed that it was fairly close to Times Square.

01:52:08.000 Apparently it was once near Times Square, not anymore.

01:52:11.000 So I went to dinner there with my agent, then walked her to her apartment and thought, oh, I'll just walk.

01:52:17.000 My hotel is close to Times Square.

01:52:18.000 I'll just walk.

01:52:19.000 Yeah, Times Square Cafe is not anywhere near Times Square.

01:52:22.000 Put in the phone, I'm like, all the buildings are kind of sending you in circles, you know, I'm like, oh yeah.

01:52:27.000 So I walk at night across New York, like a long, like 30 minutes, maybe even 40, and I'm like on E&E, you know, I'm like, I'm on edge, and I'm making my move here across, and it was sketchy.

01:52:39.000 So, move forward another month.

01:52:41.000 A couple weeks ago, I was in Budapest.

01:52:43.000 We're filming the show over in Budapest.

01:52:45.000 Budapest is amazing.

01:52:46.000 It's going to make its way into one of my future novels.

01:52:48.000 There's so much Russian money there, Ukrainian money there, which is probably our money, Chinese money there.

01:52:53.000 There's two Bentleys in front of the hotel every day, two Ferraris, two Lamborghinis, Porsches everywhere.

01:52:58.000 But I had to walk across the city.

01:53:00.000 We watched the first episode, the director's cut of the first episode of this new series.

01:53:04.000 So watch it at everybody's apartment because everyone's been over there for the last few months filming the show.

01:53:08.000 So some are living in hotels, some are living On the economy, in town, in apartments.

01:53:12.000 So we watched it, and it was awesome.

01:53:13.000 And then I decided to walk across Budapest.

01:53:15.000 Totally different.

01:53:16.000 Late at night, past midnight, walking across.

01:53:18.000 Totally safe.

01:53:19.000 I felt so safe walking across that city.

01:53:22.000 It was clean.

01:53:23.000 There was nobody eyeing you up.

01:53:24.000 What's the population there?

01:53:25.000 I don't know.

01:53:26.000 It seems pretty packed.

01:53:27.000 It's pretty...

01:53:28.000 But like any city.

01:53:29.000 But it's not like the size of New York, right?

01:53:31.000 No, no, no.

01:53:31.000 New York's its own animal, as far as that stuff goes.

01:53:34.000 Yeah, what is the population of Budapest?

01:53:36.000 Let's guess.

01:53:37.000 Oh, jeez.

01:53:38.000 I'm the worst at that.

01:53:39.000 I'll say 2 million.

01:53:39.000 Look at that!

01:53:40.000 Oh, 1.756.

01:53:42.000 Come on! 0.61

01:53:42.000 Look at that! 0.61

01:53:42.000 Nice! 0.61

01:53:43.000 I'll do a guess.

01:53:43.000 That was good.

01:53:44.000 That was close.

01:53:45.000 So that's kind of like Austin.

01:53:46.000 You know, Austin's about a million, and then the surrounding outside area of Austin's like a million.

01:53:51.000 Yeah.

01:53:52.000 Nice.

01:53:52.000 And there's not, you know, it's a lot safer here than L.A. I think there's just something happens when you have large populations.

01:53:58.000 And then also, you know, New York is...

01:54:02.000 They're doing this no-cash bail thing where they're just letting people out of jail, including people that assault police officers, including illegal immigrants that assault police officers on video.

01:54:11.000 And they're just letting them out.

01:54:12.000 How do we come back from this?

01:54:14.000 You come back, unfortunately, by going too far in the other direction until you want to bounce back and be liberal again.

01:54:21.000 Unfortunately, this is what happens when people get unreasonable.

01:54:23.000 When they go that far, then you usher in some totalitarian, hard-nosed, sort of right-wing person who also comes with a stripping of certain civil liberties, and also has a more cruel approach to certain social issues.

01:54:42.000 And then people go, we need more kindness, we need more this.

01:54:46.000 But generally, it's like, it used to be at least, that you would get the right wing that were pushing for war.

01:54:53.000 The most bizarre thing about our time is that the left, Is calling for aid to Ukraine and that, you know, I think they just signed a commitment to help Ukraine for the next 10 years.

01:55:05.000 Oh, wow.

01:55:06.000 Wasn't that true?

01:55:07.000 I don't know.

01:55:07.000 I think there's just something that Biden just signed, and I think they're promising like $800 billion, or they're going to need $800 billion over the next 10 years.

01:55:17.000 $800 billion.

01:55:19.000 Chicken feed.

01:55:19.000 Of our money.

01:55:21.000 Don't worry about it, bro.

01:55:21.000 We have plenty of money.

01:55:22.000 We have a lot of money.

01:55:23.000 We've spent on Cheetos.

01:55:24.000 Just send a little of that to our friends in Ukraine.

01:55:26.000 Like, the whole thing is nuts.

01:55:28.000 Look at this.

01:55:28.000 Oh, look at that.

01:55:29.000 They pass it on a Friday.

01:55:30.000 And a $50 billion loan.

01:55:31.000 Nice little loan.

01:55:31.000 Yeah.

01:55:32.000 They'll pay that back.

01:55:34.000 Why do they call it a loan?

01:55:36.000 Yeah, it's funny.

01:55:37.000 A series of pledges of military and financial aid made by Western allies this week, including a 10-year security agreement with the United States, and a $50 billion loan issued by Washington and the European Union.

01:55:48.000 So, interesting.

01:55:49.000 I was in Normandy for the D-Day commemoration events a couple weeks ago.

01:55:54.000 Well, a few days last week, I guess.

01:55:56.000 But it's not just one day.

01:55:57.000 It's not just June 6th.

01:55:58.000 It's like two weeks of events.

01:55:59.000 Went back there with the Best Defense Foundation.

01:56:01.000 I went right from Budapest over to there.

01:56:03.000 48 World War II veterans.

01:56:05.000 So they're all creeping up on 100, at 100, or over 100 years old.

01:56:08.000 And a week's worth of events.

01:56:10.000 So I'm volunteering, helping them get in out of their wheelchairs, making sure they're taking their medicines, eating, getting them to the events, all that sort of thing.

01:56:16.000 But totally inappropriate during the speech is, and even during the benediction or the The prayer at the beginning mentioned, not Ukraine by name, but the storm clouds are coming.

01:56:28.000 So you have all these veterans of World War II, D-Day, on this stage at the American cemetery there overlooking Omaha Beach, and these politicians up there to give speeches can't help themselves.

01:56:39.000 They have to mention storm clouds coming, mentioning it.

01:56:42.000 They have to mention it.

01:56:44.000 They didn't mention it by name.

01:56:45.000 I think the French president did, but he's speaking in French, so I'm not 100% sure.

01:56:50.000 But I think he mentioned it by name.

01:56:55.000 So they use it as a political tool.

01:57:13.000 And now you're using them essentially as a political prop.

01:57:17.000 That part was hard to stomach.

01:57:20.000 But interestingly enough, we went from there to the international ceremony down on Omaha Beach.

01:57:25.000 So from the cemetery down to the beach.

01:57:27.000 And the international cemetery has all these different world leaders there.

01:57:30.000 And Zielinski's there.

01:57:32.000 Oh, wow.

01:57:33.000 Yeah.

01:57:34.000 So it's a visual type of a thing and trying to equate what happened in World War II on D-Day to what's going on with Ukraine.

01:57:42.000 Yeah.

01:57:43.000 Yeah.

01:57:44.000 Not appropriate for the 80th anniversary of D-Day for these guys that jumped out of planes, landed gliders, Back then, imagine landing a glider at night on June 6th in these fields where the Germans have put these poles up so that if you land, 0.70

01:58:00.000 you can just get crushed in your glider.

01:58:01.000 When a guy was talking to you, his glider came in.

01:58:03.000 He went right between two of these poles. 0.51

01:58:05.000 It ripped off the wings. 0.99

01:58:06.000 Holy shit. 0.99

01:58:07.000 And then you have to figure out where your guys are because, you know, obviously there's no GPSs. 0.99

01:58:10.000 You just landed somewhere in northern France.

01:58:12.000 You're alive now.

01:58:13.000 And now you got to link up with people and figure out how to get to the town or the bridge that you're supposed to defend or take.

01:58:20.000 So those guys did that and then you have the audacity to bring up current politics.

01:58:26.000 They can't help themselves.

01:58:28.000 Every opportunity they have to do it.

01:58:30.000 Yep, Biden did it.

01:58:31.000 The person doing the prayer was a great prayer to start everything off.

01:58:34.000 I was like, wow, this is amazing.

01:58:35.000 And then she had to bring up these storm clouds on the horizon type of a thing. 0.63

01:58:39.000 And certainly Austin went up there and did it.

01:58:42.000 Biden did it.

01:58:42.000 And then they have Zelensky sitting there.

01:58:44.000 It's just very disturbing.

01:58:46.000 It's very disturbing that we don't learn, you know.

01:58:49.000 Really is, you know, all the way back to Smedley Butler's War is a Racket.

01:58:54.000 We don't learn, you know, and money always motivates everything.

01:58:59.000 And there's always some way to make some sort of a moral argument why we need to do certain things, why we need to act, and why we need to fund this and fund that.

01:59:08.000 But ultimately, there's a lot of money being moved around. 0.97

01:59:10.000 And we know that once it gets over there, we really don't know where the fuck it's going. 0.96

01:59:14.000 We really don't. 0.75

01:59:16.000 There's a lot of nice cars in Budapest and other places in Europe too.

01:59:19.000 I've talked to people in the intelligence services.

01:59:23.000 There's a lot of money rolling around over there and it's not easy to track and it's not really something that anybody's trying really hard to document.

01:59:32.000 It seems also very dangerous to point out if you were an official person and you started pointing out the fact that this money is moving around.

01:59:39.000 In a certain way.

01:59:40.000 Yeah.

01:59:41.000 Like Tucker Carlson said they tried to kill him.

01:59:43.000 Said that there was an assassination attempt on him.

01:59:46.000 Really?

01:59:46.000 When he was there.

01:59:46.000 Yeah, something was set up.

01:59:48.000 What was it?

01:59:48.000 It was like a bomb someone set up in the basement or something.

01:59:51.000 He talked about it on the show?

01:59:52.000 Yeah.

01:59:52.000 I miss that part.

01:59:53.000 Yeah, and he kind of had a feeling that something was going to happen.

01:59:55.000 And he had this intuition to stay in his room.

01:59:58.000 No way.

01:59:59.000 Yeah.

01:59:59.000 I'm going to ask him about that.

02:00:00.000 I was just texting him the other day.

02:00:01.000 I'm going to ask him about that.

02:00:02.000 That's crazy.

02:00:03.000 Yeah, I mean, this is a wild, wild time that the left is the one that, the left side, the Democrats, the progressives, are the ones that are calling for this crazy war.

02:00:18.000 I know, because when we grew up back in the day, it was the exact opposite.

02:00:21.000 They were trying to get us out of everything.

02:00:22.000 Yeah, they didn't want to have anything to do with anything.

02:00:24.000 They wanted no wars.

02:00:25.000 And everybody's like, great, because this was after Vietnam.

02:00:28.000 And if you wanted to be a Democrat and you wanted to win back then, you had to be anti-war. 0.75

02:00:32.000 You know, you had to be anti anything remotely close to what's going on right now.

02:00:37.000 Especially when you know the history of like NATO and moving arms closer to the Russia's border and saying that right like Kamala Harris saying that Russia's gonna or that Ukraine's gonna join NATO like what?

02:00:49.000 That's pretty wild.

02:00:50.000 That's a crazy thing to say openly in the world.

02:00:54.000 You've got to put yourselves in the other person's shoes.

02:00:56.000 There's something looking at things from their perspective, and that's what we do in the military, trying to put ourselves in the enemy's shoes, figuring out how they're going to adapt to what we're doing right now, and you have to do that at the strategic levels, too.

02:01:05.000 But unfortunately, you get people at these levels who just stuck with it, and they've never created anything in their life, and they don't understand the history, but guess what they can do?

02:01:15.000 They know how to manipulate a population.

02:01:17.000 Yeah.

02:01:17.000 Through their words and through all these things, all these different verticals and institutions that support them to get them into these positions in office.

02:01:25.000 And it's tough.

02:01:26.000 I mean, it's a machine, and that machine is hungry.

02:01:29.000 What do you think about what's going on right now in Cuba, off the coast of Cuba?

02:01:33.000 I saw that the other day.

02:01:34.000 I mean, so we have Russian submarines.

02:01:36.000 Yeah.

02:01:36.000 Jeez.

02:01:37.000 Russian submarines that are like, you know, how many miles?

02:01:41.000 I think at some point in time they're like 30 miles away from Miami.

02:01:46.000 Right there.

02:01:47.000 It's wild.

02:01:47.000 What's the closest they got to Miami?

02:01:50.000 I think, well, Russia, or excuse me, Cuba is what, 90 miles?

02:01:54.000 I think so.

02:01:55.000 90 miles from the point, the furthest south point of Florida.

02:01:57.000 That's close.

02:01:59.000 That's nuts.

02:02:00.000 That's like here to San Antonio.

02:02:01.000 So let's send in a message.

02:02:02.000 And of course, I think I saw one of our spokespeople came out and said something about, don't worry, they're not nuclear. 0.99

02:02:07.000 What the fuck is that? 0.98

02:02:08.000 All right, exactly. 0.99

02:02:10.000 There's warships.

02:02:11.000 Yeah, yeah, right there.

02:02:12.000 Russian warships.

02:02:13.000 So obviously sending a message.

02:02:14.000 Yeah.

02:02:15.000 Obviously.

02:02:15.000 I mean, especially with this new thing where we're sending more money and committing to it for 10 years.

02:02:22.000 Like, holy shit. 0.99

02:02:24.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:02:24.000 I mean, what are we getting into? 0.99

02:02:25.000 The bad part of all this is that if you're the enemy, you almost just want to let us not do anything because we're doing such a good job at destroying ourselves.

02:02:33.000 We are, but they're helping us too.

02:02:35.000 Oh, they can help.

02:02:36.000 They can give a nudge here or there.

02:02:38.000 They're helping us a lot on social media.

02:02:39.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:02:40.000 They can just...

02:02:40.000 There's a lot of that on social media.

02:02:42.000 One of the FBI analysts said that he thinks that...

02:02:46.000 Former FBI analyst said that he thinks it's 80% of Twitter's trolls.

02:02:50.000 Really?

02:02:51.000 U.S. submarine pulls into Guantanamo Bay a day after Russian warships arrive in Cuba.

02:02:55.000 Oh great.

02:02:57.000 Oh wonderful.

02:02:58.000 Oh Jesus Christ.

02:03:00.000 Look at that.

02:03:01.000 U.S. Navy submarines arrived in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in a show of force as a fleet of Russian warships gather for planned military exercises in the Caribbean.

02:03:10.000 U.S. Southern Command said that USS Helena A nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine pulled into the waters near the US base in Cuba on Thursday, just a day after a Russian frigate, a nuclear-powered submarine, an oil tanker, and a rescue tug crossed into Havana Bay after drills the Atlantic Ocean.

02:03:29.000 Yeah.

02:03:30.000 Jesus Christ.

02:03:32.000 Yeah.

02:03:33.000 Is it also or something else?

02:03:36.000 Russian submarines spotted near west coast of Scotland.

02:03:38.000 Oh, great.

02:03:39.000 Yeah.

02:03:40.000 What are they doing?

02:03:41.000 Well, you have, I mean...

02:03:42.000 None of this is good, guys.

02:03:43.000 And to say nothing about what China is doing.

02:03:47.000 Oh, it was spotted there before it arrived in Havana.

02:03:50.000 Yeah.

02:03:51.000 Yeah, all of it's terrifying.

02:03:53.000 Terrifying and...

02:03:54.000 We're, you know, in the middle of this, we're also in a war with them to develop AI. Like, who's going to get to it fast enough?

02:04:02.000 Oh, yeah.

02:04:03.000 Yeah.

02:04:03.000 And that's this book right here was all about that.

02:04:07.000 But from the China-US perspective, those geopolitics, who's doing what?

02:04:11.000 Taiwan, the Taiwan issue in there as well.

02:04:13.000 So it's fascinating to have done that research now and see where China is compared to where they were a few years ago and then think about where we're going in the future.

02:04:23.000 But It's tough to do all that research and remain hopeful.

02:04:27.000 You know what I mean?

02:04:28.000 That's what I love about you.

02:04:29.000 You remain hopeful.

02:04:30.000 You talk to all these different people and you're interested in so many things, but yet you remain so hopeful in all these conversations that you have with people.

02:04:37.000 Yeah, I'm hopeful, but I'm not sure if I'm right.

02:04:40.000 You know, I started getting nervous about China when they banned the Huawei devices.

02:04:44.000 And I was like, wait, what?

02:04:46.000 What's going on?

02:04:46.000 Because as a phone nerd, Huawei had some insane phones.

02:04:50.000 Their phones were, like, more advanced than U.S. phones.

02:04:54.000 And they banned their devices when one of their newer phones was coming out.

02:04:59.000 And apparently, it's not just phones.

02:05:01.000 It was a bunch of different routers and different technology that they had they believed China would be able to access information through.

02:05:09.000 Oh, yeah.

02:05:12.000 It's embedded in almost everything that we have, that we rely upon, not just on the civilian side, but on the military side, the intelligence side.

02:05:19.000 And they think long term.

02:05:21.000 Admiral Rachel Levine is on the case.

02:05:23.000 Don't you worry.

02:05:24.000 We have competent members of our military.

02:05:27.000 It's so bad.

02:05:28.000 And that's why we have these recruiting issues.

02:05:31.000 I mean, if you're going to encourage one of your kids to join the military right now, I mean, I don't know how you can.

02:05:38.000 Well, that's why they're bringing back the registration for the draft.

02:05:41.000 I saw that.

02:05:41.000 Yeah, which is nuts.

02:05:43.000 Like, what are you saying?

02:05:45.000 In the age of AI, you're gonna force people to go into war, and what is going on?

02:05:50.000 What are you doing?

02:05:50.000 Why are you doing this?

02:05:51.000 It's because of lack of recruitment. 0.99

02:05:53.000 You're gonna force them to go in now, and then when you're there, will you indoctrinate them with all this bullshit? 0.67

02:05:57.000 So instead of getting people that want to serve, which is the people that you want, the people that are dedicated to it, that are driven towards this life, Instead of that, you're forcing people to do it, and then once you get them in there, you can kind of force your ideology on them. 0.99

02:06:13.000 The type of people that sign up for the military, they would be way less likely to buy into that horseshit.

02:06:19.000 House passes defense bill. 0.72

02:06:20.000 Service is already mandatory for male ages 18 to 24. Yeah, it's already a thing. 0.97

02:06:26.000 Just it's automatic now.

02:06:27.000 You still have to do it.

02:06:28.000 Ah, so you don't have to go down there and to the post office and do it.

02:06:31.000 That was kind of a cool route of passage, though.

02:06:33.000 Do you remember doing that?

02:06:34.000 They gave me a free razor in the mail, I think.

02:06:36.000 Did they?

02:06:36.000 Wow, that's fantastic.

02:06:37.000 You still have it.

02:06:38.000 I don't remember doing that.

02:06:40.000 You don't remember doing that?

02:06:41.000 So you had to go down at 18, right?

02:06:43.000 Yeah.

02:06:43.000 What year was this and you had to do that?

02:06:44.000 I did it when I was...

02:06:46.000 What year was that?

02:06:48.000 90?

02:06:49.000 Something like that?

02:06:50.000 Yeah, you had to go down and do it.

02:06:51.000 So for me that would have been 85. I don't remember that at all.

02:06:55.000 Yeah.

02:06:57.000 Was that something you had to do back then?

02:06:58.000 Yeah.

02:06:59.000 I don't know.

02:07:00.000 I might be breaking the law.

02:07:01.000 You might be breaking the law.

02:07:02.000 It was just a legal thing.

02:07:03.000 It was one of those things you probably just...

02:07:03.000 I must have did it.

02:07:04.000 I probably don't remember.

02:07:06.000 But I remember when the Gulf, when Desert Storm broke out, I was living with a buddy of mine, and we were watching on TV, and I was like, what?

02:07:14.000 What?

02:07:15.000 Right.

02:07:15.000 A war?

02:07:16.000 I thought we were done.

02:07:18.000 I was alive during Vietnam in San Francisco.

02:07:22.000 I was a kid, and when Vietnam ended, I remember thinking, as a kid, I guess I was like 10 or something, I remember thinking, whew, glad we got over that.

02:07:30.000 No more wars.

02:07:31.000 We figured that out. 0.99

02:07:32.000 But we haven't figured out shit. 0.99

02:07:34.000 Nope. 0.98

02:07:34.000 And now it's even more complicated with all this artificial intelligence stuff and Mike Baker was in here and he was showing us these videos of these fighter jets that are using AI now, that are winning dogfights 100%. 0.98

02:07:46.000 100% of the time over actual human pilots.

02:07:50.000 So human pilots can't beat the AI system.

02:07:53.000 They just can't.

02:07:53.000 They lose 100% of the time.

02:07:56.000 That's nuts.

02:07:57.000 So take that 10 years from now.

02:07:58.000 Right.

02:07:58.000 Then put a jet out there that can do maneuvers At insane g-forces because it doesn't have any humans in it.

02:08:06.000 So it doesn't have to think about that.

02:08:08.000 And so now you add that.

02:08:12.000 I know, you got that.

02:08:13.000 China's doing the same.

02:08:14.000 Yeah.

02:08:15.000 But they're also smart because they're buying up property next to military bases.

02:08:19.000 They tried to buy the Hotel Del, Hotel Del Coronado, right by the SEAL base down there.

02:08:23.000 So that got blocked.

02:08:24.000 But there's also these- That's so crazy!

02:08:26.000 They're called the Shores, and they're these apartments that- I think they're built in the 70s.

02:08:30.000 They're so ugly.

02:08:31.000 But they are super high, like sky rises.

02:08:33.000 And what they look down on- They look down right on the SEAL training compound and WARCOM, which is our admiral and everybody else.

02:08:39.000 And China owns it?

02:08:40.000 No, they don't own that.

02:08:41.000 They tried to buy the Hotel Dell next door, but I would be shocked if they don't own a few floors of that building.

02:08:47.000 And they're looking right down.

02:08:48.000 They bought a...

02:08:49.000 I did some research for this book on it, and a book called The Dragons and the Snakes by David Kilcullen.

02:08:54.000 And he talks about them buying up hotels in Scotland that watch submarines head out there.

02:09:00.000 A few others play one in Italy.

02:09:01.000 So they're buying up properties next to these bases where they can essentially observe and put listening devices out and do all those sorts of things that you need a base of operations.

02:09:10.000 And you don't even need a base of operations for a lot of this stuff anymore because it's all virtual.

02:09:14.000 And where are all these things made?

02:09:15.000 Well, China and Taiwan.

02:09:17.000 It's just crazy that in Taiwan you can't buy anything.

02:09:19.000 Like Americans wanted to go over and buy land next to military bases. 1.00

02:09:22.000 They'd be like, go fuck yourself. 0.99

02:09:24.000 But us being an open country, it's almost detrimental. 1.00

02:09:30.000 Our openness, our strength is almost a weakness.

02:09:33.000 And they can exploit it.

02:09:34.000 So they're very aware of that.

02:09:35.000 So you're looking at your enemy and you're looking at those things that you can do to exploit those weaknesses.

02:09:39.000 And that's what they're doing.

02:09:41.000 That's what we would do.

02:09:41.000 Yeah, Tim Dillon was explaining the real estate hustle, that so many foreign countries use our real estate as money laundering.

02:09:50.000 So there's so many different apartment buildings in New York City that are just empty.

02:09:56.000 Empty.

02:09:56.000 There's no one in them.

02:09:57.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:09:58.000 But they're all bought out.

02:09:59.000 Right.

02:09:59.000 Because, like, Russia buys them.

02:10:01.000 Yeah.

02:10:01.000 Russian oligarchs buy them.

02:10:03.000 It's a nice way to funnel your money around.

02:10:05.000 Yep.

02:10:05.000 You got real estate holdings here and there.

02:10:07.000 You own a billion here and a billion there.

02:10:08.000 All around the world.

02:10:09.000 Yeah, they do that all around.

02:10:11.000 All around the world they do that stuff.

02:10:13.000 So, I mean...

02:10:14.000 Well, then that was weird during the Ukraine invasion where they started stealing their yachts. 0.93

02:10:20.000 I know.

02:10:21.000 They just confiscated their yachts.

02:10:22.000 I was like, what?

02:10:22.000 What happened to that?

02:10:23.000 That kind of went away, too.

02:10:24.000 I don't know.

02:10:24.000 And also, like...

02:10:25.000 What are those things? 0.98

02:10:26.000 You got to fucking maintain those things. 0.98

02:10:28.000 Yeah, are they just... 0.99

02:10:29.000 Like, if you have, like, a Mark Zuckerberg-type yacht, like, he just had some fucking $300 million yacht built. 0.96

02:10:35.000 Nice. 0.96

02:10:36.000 I think actually more than that. 1.00

02:10:37.000 I think it's five hundred million dollars for this fucking yacht. 1.00

02:10:41.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:10:41.000 And how much does that cost? 0.99

02:10:43.000 A year to maintain?

02:10:44.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:10:45.000 Oh, here it is.

02:10:46.000 U.S. government said it's spending more than seven million a year to maintain a super yacht it sees from a sanctioned Russian oligarch and urged a judge to let it auction the vessel before a dispute over its ownership is resolved.

02:10:59.000 Authorities in Fiji seized the 348 foot, 300 million dollar Ameda in May of 2022, pursuant to a U.S. warrant alleging it's owned by Suleiman Kermov, a multi-billionaire sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2014 and 2018 in response to Russia's activities in Syria and Ukraine.

02:11:19.000 Jesus.

02:11:20.000 Dang.

02:11:20.000 Look at that.

02:11:21.000 Wow.

02:11:22.000 Man.

02:11:23.000 Wow.

02:11:23.000 That's crazy.

02:11:24.000 So that's just one.

02:11:26.000 We're paying for that.

02:11:27.000 Here are the super yachts seized from Russian oligarchs.

02:11:32.000 And we're paying to maintain those.

02:11:33.000 Yeah.

02:11:34.000 That's so brutal.

02:11:35.000 How many of them are there? 0.99

02:11:37.000 Boy, there's a lot of fucking clicks. 0.98

02:11:39.000 You've got to go through these things. 0.99

02:11:39.000 I am not. 0.99

02:11:40.000 Yeah.

02:11:41.000 How many of them are there?

02:11:42.000 How many did they get?

02:11:43.000 So that's the one that we just talked about. 0.99

02:11:46.000 This is the Tango, the Lady M, these fucking massive things. 0.96

02:11:50.000 And so these Russian oligarchs, a lot of them, they rush to get their yachts to different countries that are more sympathetic, that let them get away with it. 0.97

02:11:59.000 But I don't even know how that works.

02:12:01.000 Like if they go out into the sea, can they get hijacked?

02:12:03.000 International waters?

02:12:04.000 Yeah, how does that work?

02:12:06.000 I don't know.

02:12:06.000 I was just concentrating on the 7 million bucks a year to maintain.

02:12:09.000 Yeah, our money.

02:12:10.000 Our tax dollars are going to maintain a yacht.

02:12:13.000 Well spent.

02:12:14.000 I don't understand.

02:12:16.000 So are they saying that these Russian oligarchs were a part of the invasion of Ukraine, so they're allowed to steal their yachts?

02:12:21.000 I think they're saying it's Putin's inner circle.

02:12:27.000 Something like that.

02:12:27.000 Yeah, so they're connected to Putin, so they're going to snatch their yachts.

02:12:30.000 Yeah, whoever.

02:12:31.000 I mean, we all know that he's one of the richest guys in the world.

02:12:34.000 He might be the richest guy, they say.

02:12:36.000 I think so.

02:12:36.000 Yeah, he might be worth some insane amount.

02:12:39.000 Isn't that wild, going from the KGB to the richest guy in the world?

02:12:42.000 Well, have you seen that house that they're allegedly building for him?

02:12:45.000 Is it the one on the coast?

02:12:48.000 Yeah.

02:12:48.000 On the cliffs?

02:12:49.000 I put it in the last book, I think, if it's the same one.

02:12:51.000 I think so.

02:12:52.000 Underground bunkers and all sorts of stuff.

02:12:55.000 They haven't even proven that it's his, and he's like, that's not my house.

02:12:58.000 Right.

02:12:58.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:12:59.000 No, I put it in the last book.

02:13:00.000 Yeah, it's wild.

02:13:01.000 You can zoom in on it.

02:13:02.000 You can zoom in on it and check it out and see these different things.

02:13:04.000 It's a multi-billion dollar house.

02:13:06.000 Isn't that crazy?

02:13:07.000 Yeah.

02:13:08.000 Gosh.

02:13:08.000 Whatever this thing is, whether it's his or not.

02:13:10.000 Yeah.

02:13:11.000 But a $500 million yacht from Zuckerberg, he's not missing that, though.

02:13:15.000 Isn't that crazy?

02:13:15.000 That's nuts.

02:13:16.000 You don't even miss $500 million.

02:13:17.000 Yeah, that's when you should get a yacht.

02:13:19.000 You got that kind of money.

02:13:20.000 You got so much money that you don't even notice if you're missing $500 million.

02:13:24.000 No.

02:13:24.000 There's levels.

02:13:26.000 There's levels to this world.

02:13:27.000 Facebook billionaire Zuckerberg takes out his $300 million super yacht and $30 million support boat, complete with helipad.

02:13:35.000 In Mallorca as he celebrates Father's Day with his dad, Ed.

02:13:39.000 I think they used to call them like shadow yachts or something like that, and they'd carry all the toys.

02:13:42.000 So you have the main yacht, and then you have the shadow yacht that has all the toys on it.

02:13:46.000 Look at that thing. 0.99

02:13:47.000 Imagine your kid buys one of those, you're like, man, mine was just a fucking killer. 1.00

02:13:51.000 Look at that. 1.00

02:13:52.000 That. 0.99

02:13:53.000 That is ridiculous. 0.99

02:13:54.000 Is that the sport yacht? 0.99

02:13:54.000 What's that? 0.99

02:13:56.000 That's like a helipad.

02:13:58.000 That's a different one, right?

02:14:00.000 Nah.

02:14:01.000 That's a support boat, yeah. 0.82

02:14:02.000 That's a support boat? 1.00

02:14:02.000 That fucking thing? 1.00

02:14:03.000 It's just got an extra boat on the side. 1.00

02:14:05.000 Extra boat, helicopter.

02:14:06.000 That's insane. 0.99

02:14:07.000 That support boat is fucking huge. 0.98

02:14:08.000 It probably has underneath. 0.98

02:14:10.000 It probably has a submarine.

02:14:10.000 Some of these things have two submarines.

02:14:12.000 I was on one that had two submarines once.

02:14:13.000 One that just goes straight down.

02:14:15.000 And the one that goes in the water and then you can move around in it and explore reefs and stuff like that.

02:14:19.000 So two submarines, a plane that comes out and the wings fold down.

02:14:22.000 I've seen that.

02:14:23.000 I've seen that with helicopters too.

02:14:26.000 Helicopters that land and the wings fold and you drop it down. 1.00

02:14:30.000 What the fuck? 1.00

02:14:31.000 Yeah, that's pretty sick. 1.00

02:14:33.000 There's levels.

02:14:34.000 Yeah, it's all relative.

02:14:35.000 It is all relative, I guess.

02:14:37.000 It's just like, at a certain point in time, like...

02:14:43.000 Like, if you're a Russian oligarch and you have a $300 million yacht and someone steals it, can you even get another one?

02:14:53.000 Are you allowed to get a new one?

02:14:54.000 Probably.

02:14:55.000 You might just get another one.

02:14:56.000 If you have all that money...

02:14:57.000 Right.

02:14:58.000 Can you get another one? 1.00

02:14:59.000 Where the fuck are you getting all that money? 0.99

02:15:00.000 Like, what are you doing? 0.99

02:15:01.000 Yeah.

02:15:02.000 Oh, yeah.

02:15:02.000 I mean, it was such an interesting time, end of the Cold War, that whole period of the 90s for those guys, where really those criminal enterprises really become like government.

02:15:09.000 Yeah.

02:15:10.000 And not to say it's that much different here.

02:15:12.000 We have our own oligarchy here.

02:15:13.000 Well, yeah, that's the thing, too, is, like, how are they governing?

02:15:16.000 Like, what's the experience for the people they're governing?

02:15:18.000 And that's the thing that Tucker said when he went over to Moscow.

02:15:20.000 I was like, it's beautiful.

02:15:21.000 It's, like, real clean, safe.

02:15:23.000 Yeah, interesting.

02:15:24.000 Which is weird.

02:15:24.000 Yeah.

02:15:25.000 I want to go and do some research there.

02:15:26.000 Once again, I'm probably not.

02:15:27.000 But I was lucky enough to have gone there.

02:15:29.000 I don't think you should go.

02:15:30.000 I would advise you to not.

02:15:33.000 I know.

02:15:34.000 But luckily I was there.

02:15:35.000 So I was in Moscow before I joined the military, just traveling.

02:15:38.000 So I was there so I can write about it.

02:15:40.000 I remember the architecture.

02:15:41.000 I remember the feeling there.

02:15:42.000 So that was early 90s.

02:15:43.000 And then I also went to Odessa, Ukraine back then.

02:15:46.000 Oh, wow.

02:15:46.000 So I went to the catacombs under the city, which allowed me to then put it in the second book, True Believer.

02:15:50.000 So I think back to some of those places that I've been and get to weave those in and places that I probably shouldn't go anymore.

02:15:56.000 Yeah.

02:15:57.000 You're too on the nose with a lot of your work.

02:16:00.000 And now it's influential.

02:16:03.000 You should do the same thing that you're thinking about doing with your cell phone.

02:16:06.000 Just farm that out.

02:16:08.000 Have somebody go that you really trust.

02:16:10.000 Tell them exactly what you saw and tell me what it was like.

02:16:14.000 Have them film things.

02:16:15.000 Have them explain it.

02:16:17.000 Just tell them, I want you to get an hour of footage every day of you just filming things so I can absorb it.

02:16:22.000 Yeah, that's a good idea.

02:16:23.000 But it's still different.

02:16:24.000 You don't get the smell.

02:16:25.000 It is different, but it'll keep you alive.

02:16:27.000 Keep you from getting a cell.

02:16:29.000 My publicist might like it.

02:16:30.000 Any publicity is a good publicity type thing.

02:16:33.000 If they get you out.

02:16:34.000 Yeah, that's a good point.

02:16:34.000 The thing is, if they leave you in there, they're missing out on a lot of loot.

02:16:37.000 You can't really write good books from the inside.

02:16:40.000 Putin's Palace.

02:16:41.000 Pole Dancing Room.

02:16:43.000 Refashioned to a church.

02:16:44.000 They said once they published the photos of the inside, it's at the bottom here.

02:16:48.000 They had to change it because they don't want people to know what it looks like.

02:16:51.000 Yeah, I put that in the last book.

02:16:53.000 They have to redo it again, they think.

02:16:55.000 Yeah, put it in the pole dancing thing.

02:16:57.000 What?

02:16:58.000 Isn't that wild?

02:16:59.000 Putin does not use other people's dishes, doesn't go without an army of guards, does not go to the toilet in public places, she said on Monday, by publishing footage from inside his palace and floor plans who make it impossible to use the palace.

02:17:13.000 Wow.

02:17:14.000 Perhaps he will say demolish everything again and the palace will be rebuilt for the third time.

02:17:19.000 But this iteration is definitely over.

02:17:21.000 There was a palace.

02:17:23.000 There is no palace. 0.95

02:17:24.000 We have once again shown not only that he is a luxury-obsessed psychopath, Their words. 1.00

02:17:30.000 But also his security system is complete crap. 1.00

02:17:33.000 Oh, wow. 0.98

02:17:34.000 Interesting.

02:17:35.000 Pevchik.

02:17:35.000 How do you say that guy's name?

02:17:38.000 Pevchik.

02:17:39.000 That's good.

02:17:39.000 The names are tough.

02:17:40.000 Added.

02:17:40.000 Yeah.

02:17:41.000 Yeah.

02:17:42.000 Wow.

02:17:42.000 So now he's got to demolish it and start from scratch because people saw the inside of it.

02:17:46.000 That's why I certainly did.

02:17:47.000 That's what allowed me to describe it for that last book. 0.96

02:17:49.000 Yeah, how did anybody fucking take pictures of that? 0.85

02:17:52.000 How did that security breach get through? 0.98

02:17:54.000 Seriously.

02:17:54.000 Oh, photo was published by Alexei Navalny.

02:17:58.000 The late.

02:17:59.000 Yeah, the late.

02:18:00.000 Anti-corruption foundation.

02:18:02.000 That was the guy that died in jail, right?

02:18:03.000 And that's the good reason why I shouldn't go to Moscow.

02:18:07.000 Yeah.

02:18:07.000 Someone actually warned me not to go to China.

02:18:09.000 They didn't warn me.

02:18:09.000 They just said, hey, they...

02:18:10.000 They stole one of our basketball players.

02:18:13.000 Seriously.

02:18:13.000 And not even a male.

02:18:14.000 And actually, someone had a bit about that last night.

02:18:17.000 They did a bit on that last night and talked about how, from the Russian perspective, us trading, whoever we traded for her, what, the arms dealer or terrorist or whoever we exchanged this for?

02:18:26.000 And he did a bit about them being like, wait, what?

02:18:29.000 They're actually going to go for this?

02:18:30.000 Yeah, what did they call him?

02:18:30.000 What did they call him?

02:18:31.000 They had some crazy name for the guy they traded.

02:18:34.000 Right.

02:18:35.000 It was an international arms dealer who was responsible for thousands of deaths.

02:18:40.000 I forget what his name is.

02:18:41.000 Yeah, we traded people.

02:18:42.000 We traded Taliban. 0.99

02:18:43.000 We traded all sorts of- His name is Victor Bout, but I know he has a nickname.

02:18:46.000 Yeah.

02:18:47.000 Merchant of Death.

02:18:49.000 Boy.

02:18:50.000 That's a solid nickname.

02:18:51.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:18:51.000 That seems like it would be in your book.

02:18:52.000 Yeah.

02:18:53.000 No, no, seriously.

02:18:54.000 There he is, right?

02:18:55.000 He even looks like it.

02:18:56.000 I mean, that's out of central casting right there.

02:18:57.000 And so we let that guy go.

02:18:59.000 I think he wore a Breitling.

02:19:00.000 All the sketchy people wear Breitlings. 0.83

02:19:01.000 Really?

02:19:02.000 Breitlings are sketchy? 1.00

02:19:03.000 Yeah, it's a thing.

02:19:04.000 Really?

02:19:04.000 Interesting.

02:19:05.000 I didn't know that.

02:19:06.000 Now I know.

02:19:08.000 Watches of espionage has a little thing on that.

02:19:10.000 He kept that sharp mustache inside the joint.

02:19:11.000 Respect.

02:19:12.000 Seriously, look at that.

02:19:13.000 Yeah.

02:19:14.000 So they traded him.

02:19:15.000 And there's also U.S. citizens, including there's a Marine that's over there that was accused of espionage.

02:19:20.000 They offered the chance to trade him, and they went with Brittany Griner instead.

02:19:25.000 They can take one.

02:19:26.000 One for one.

02:19:27.000 Yeah.

02:19:27.000 I don't watch basketball, but I heard that league needs...

02:19:29.000 I'll help it can get.

02:19:30.000 I don't know if that's the help that it needs.

02:19:32.000 Yeah.

02:19:33.000 You know, I mean, it's just basketball.

02:19:37.000 And not the best basketball.

02:19:39.000 The best basketball is the NBA, you know?

02:19:40.000 There it is.

02:19:41.000 Ah, look at that.

02:19:42.000 Watch the espionage right there.

02:19:43.000 Yep.

02:19:44.000 Sketchy people wear Breitlings.

02:19:45.000 What is that about?

02:19:47.000 I don't know.

02:19:48.000 It just became a thing.

02:19:49.000 I like Breitlings.

02:19:50.000 Yeah.

02:19:51.000 Does it make me sketchy?

02:19:52.000 I put one in a sketchy person in this. 0.99

02:19:54.000 Damn! 0.99

02:19:54.000 They make a nice watch. 0.99

02:19:56.000 Uh-huh.

02:19:56.000 They make some cool watches.

02:19:57.000 Yeah.

02:19:58.000 Now, all of a sudden, I'll be thinking about them. 1.00

02:19:59.000 Like, fuck. 0.99

02:20:00.000 Yeah, I think in the Blood Diamond, I think Leonardo DiCaprio wears one as his character. 1.00

02:20:05.000 Oh, sketchy.

02:20:06.000 Yeah, a refugee mercenary. 0.79

02:20:08.000 Sketchy.

02:20:09.000 Why Breitling?

02:20:10.000 I don't know where that originated.

02:20:12.000 I think it just started as a thing and then it became what it is and it's just kind of...

02:20:16.000 Do you think sketchy people know and they're doing it on purpose?

02:20:19.000 I think they do.

02:20:20.000 Really?

02:20:20.000 That's kind of a thing.

02:20:20.000 When I typed it in, it's a quote that pops up.

02:20:23.000 Sketchy dudes wear Breitling.

02:20:23.000 There it is, right there.

02:20:24.000 Wow.

02:20:26.000 Look at that.

02:20:26.000 And look on the side there.

02:20:27.000 That's a Winkler blade.

02:20:29.000 No kidding.

02:20:30.000 There it is.

02:20:30.000 There are a lot of misconceptions about this saying.

02:20:33.000 Phrase is not a dig on Breitling at all.

02:20:35.000 I'm a big fan of the brand, own a few of them, and wear it regularly.

02:20:38.000 Sketchy is not necessarily a bad thing.

02:20:40.000 Oh, this is my world, bro.

02:20:41.000 There it is.

02:20:42.000 It's really in the 90s and 2000s.

02:20:44.000 Breitling was worn by a lot of gray area operators, both good and bad, subjective terms.

02:20:48.000 With strong roots in aviation, Breitling is a signal that the wearer is adventurous, but also appreciates fine craftsmanship and utilitarian tools.

02:20:56.000 Mm-hmm.

02:21:07.000 Oh, George Tenet wearing one too.

02:21:12.000 Which one's the aerospace?

02:21:13.000 They got that dope one that's part digital.

02:21:15.000 Right there.

02:21:16.000 So that's the Blackwater symbol.

02:21:18.000 See that Blackwater symbol on the side right there?

02:21:19.000 Is that what that is?

02:21:20.000 Yeah.

02:21:20.000 So I put this exact watch in the book, and I put the bad guy's company symbol on the watch, just like that one.

02:21:26.000 So that's a compass watch, which I've never been able to figure out.

02:21:29.000 I watched a video on one of them, because I think I have a Seiko that's a compass watch.

02:21:34.000 And I was like, what does that mean?

02:21:36.000 How does it work as a compass? 0.98

02:21:38.000 You have to align the fucking hour hand with the sun or some shit like that? 0.99

02:21:43.000 I don't know. 0.98

02:21:44.000 I don't know, but that one has the emergency beacon on it.

02:21:46.000 Oh, right. 0.98

02:21:47.000 So if you get in trouble, you pull that sucker out, right? 0.98

02:21:50.000 You have to sign something that says something you'll pay for the rescue if you do it. 0.88

02:21:55.000 And then they find you if you're in the Alps.

02:21:57.000 Yeah, I think an antenna comes out of it.

02:21:59.000 Yeah, the bottom thing.

02:22:00.000 The bottom thing in the lower right-hand corner. 0.99

02:22:02.000 That's a serious fucking watch. 0.99

02:22:04.000 Yeah, that's pretty serious. 0.99

02:22:05.000 So those are all sketchy people.

02:22:07.000 Interesting. 0.98

02:22:08.000 How the fuck does the compass thing work? 0.97

02:22:11.000 I don't know. 0.98

02:22:12.000 I don't know.

02:22:12.000 Some of them have GPSs, but that's not what you're talking about.

02:22:14.000 No, no.

02:22:15.000 I mean, my watch is a Garmin, and it has a compass feature.

02:22:19.000 But that's like, it's digital.

02:22:21.000 It's electronics.

02:22:22.000 That thing is a mechanical compass feature.

02:22:25.000 Okay.

02:22:25.000 Somehow or another, like, when the sun rises, you know, the sun rises in the east, you point the thing at the sun.

02:22:32.000 I don't know.

02:22:35.000 I had a little compass on mine over in Iraq.

02:22:37.000 But a real compass.

02:22:38.000 A real compass.

02:22:39.000 Yeah.

02:22:39.000 On the band right there.

02:22:40.000 It was like a backup to the backup.

02:22:41.000 Right.

02:22:42.000 So I had the GPS on my rifle stock right here so I could check my point man just to make so I didn't have to ask and I always knew where we were.

02:22:47.000 So I had that there and then I had another one on my belt and then another one right here and then one here for a call on air.

02:22:53.000 So I could look right here and talk to aircraft and call air off that one.

02:22:57.000 So I had a few backups.

02:22:59.000 But nowadays, we got one of the first ones, we got them issued in the SEAL teams.

02:23:03.000 It was the Garmin or the Suunto, whatever it was.

02:23:05.000 But the early ones, they just ran out of batteries so fast.

02:23:08.000 Oh, yeah.

02:23:08.000 And it was one other thing that I had to plug in back then.

02:23:11.000 This one's incredible.

02:23:12.000 This one is at 74%, and I think I charged it three weeks ago.

02:23:18.000 Really?

02:23:19.000 Yeah, it's nuts.

02:23:20.000 I can't do it, though.

02:23:20.000 One more thing to plug in, like we talked about.

02:23:22.000 It's all these things.

02:23:23.000 It lasts like a month and a half, and this is solar.

02:23:25.000 This is the Phoenix 7 Sapphire Solar.

02:23:28.000 So this thing stays charged in the sun.

02:23:31.000 Really?

02:23:31.000 Yeah.

02:23:32.000 So if you're wearing it outdoors, it keeps a certain percentage of it's charged just by solar power.

02:23:36.000 Oh, man.

02:23:37.000 Well, I was locked up for the last four months writing, so that wasn't going to help me too much.

02:23:41.000 I was going to need to plug it in.

02:23:42.000 The sun wasn't really going to help me.

02:23:44.000 Even if you don't plug it in, if it's fully charged, it'll last at least a month.

02:23:49.000 Do you like the Apple Watches and stuff? 0.68

02:23:51.000 I haven't fucked with those because I don't want email. 0.78

02:23:53.000 I don't have this set up. 0.98

02:23:55.000 You could do it.

02:23:56.000 I could get text messages on this.

02:23:58.000 What I like with this is I like the timer, I like the heartbeat monitor, which doesn't work that good because I have tattoos.

02:24:05.000 Oh really?

02:24:05.000 Interesting.

02:24:06.000 It doesn't work that good.

02:24:07.000 The only thing that really works, the things that work the most accurate are chest traps.

02:24:12.000 Those are the most accurate.

02:24:13.000 So I have one of those Morpheus chest traps I like a lot.

02:24:17.000 I have a Garmin that I like too.

02:24:18.000 Those are great.

02:24:19.000 They give you an accurate reading of what is actually going on.

02:24:22.000 Your sleep?

02:24:23.000 Do you do the sleep stuff?

02:24:24.000 Nah.

02:24:25.000 I know how I feel.

02:24:26.000 I used to do that.

02:24:28.000 I think a whoop is a very good tool.

02:24:31.000 It's a very good tool to assess your recovery.

02:24:33.000 And I might go back to wearing one of those.

02:24:35.000 But the aura rings and all that jazz, leave me alone.

02:24:38.000 Those are the ones that people wear that look like a band and have a rectangular thing on them.

02:24:42.000 That's the whoop.

02:24:43.000 The whoop is a bunch of different colors, but I have a black one.

02:24:46.000 It's just like a wristband.

02:24:48.000 I can't do it.

02:24:48.000 I already know I need more sleep.

02:24:49.000 I already know I need to eat better.

02:24:50.000 I already know I need to do a little more exercise.

02:24:52.000 When you look at your recovery, it says 60% is depressing. 0.99

02:24:56.000 Like, damn it. 0.98

02:24:57.000 Yeah, I don't need another thing telling me that I need more sleep. 0.99

02:24:59.000 But you definitely notice the difference between drinking and not drinking.

02:25:02.000 So if I, even a couple of drinks, like if I go out to dinner with some friends and I have a couple glasses of wine, I would notice my recovery score would suck in the morning from just like two glasses of wine.

02:25:13.000 Really?

02:25:14.000 Thing where you're not even drunk.

02:25:15.000 You know, in the next day, you feel fine.

02:25:18.000 You don't feel hungover.

02:25:19.000 Did that make you stop doing that at dinners?

02:25:21.000 No.

02:25:22.000 No, I want to live.

02:25:24.000 But it made me aware of it.

02:25:25.000 And I'm certainly good at not doing it all the time.

02:25:29.000 Unlike some of my friends.

02:25:32.000 I don't want these things to keep controlling.

02:25:33.000 They already manipulate enough.

02:25:35.000 You have to be aware that these things are manipulating you.

02:25:37.000 So I'm aware of that, but I don't want another thing that I am hooked up to that's dictating how I live my life, if that makes sense.

02:25:43.000 There's also an addictive factor, too.

02:25:45.000 You start getting addicted to checking it, and then you start getting addicted to...

02:25:49.000 Which I think would be probably a good thing to be addicted to, a self-improvement aspect of it, like trying to achieve a good score.

02:25:56.000 Right.

02:25:56.000 If you're like, heroin on this side, good score on this side, and you're fine.

02:25:59.000 Good score is probably better.

02:26:00.000 It's a better addiction.

02:26:01.000 But yeah, trying to get that elusive 97% recovery rate when you go to sleep.

02:26:06.000 Yeah.

02:26:07.000 I know.

02:26:07.000 I need more of it and all that with all these projects.

02:26:10.000 We all do.

02:26:10.000 Well, especially if you're working 10 a.m.

02:26:12.000 to 2 a.m.

02:26:13.000 It's not good.

02:26:13.000 I need to change that.

02:26:14.000 That's crazy.

02:26:15.000 I need to change that up.

02:26:16.000 I thought this last winter that I would be able to take my wife to dinners, do a little traveling.

02:26:22.000 Our little guy went overseas.

02:26:23.000 He actually went to Switzerland to do a ski program over there.

02:26:26.000 So he's gone for three months.

02:26:27.000 No phones, no iPads, no computers.

02:26:30.000 Total old school.

02:26:31.000 Milking cows, doing chores.

02:26:33.000 Total old school.

02:26:33.000 That's a great experience, bar none.

02:26:36.000 Amazing.

02:26:36.000 For sure.

02:26:36.000 Amazing for him.

02:26:37.000 But during that time, I thought we would go out to dinners and travel and do all this stuff.

02:26:40.000 And instead, I was just locked down writing.

02:26:42.000 It's funny to make up for that next year.

02:26:44.000 You've got to live, too, right?

02:26:46.000 I mean, but the thing is, you've got to make hay while the sun shines.

02:26:49.000 And, you know, I remember you when you just released your book.

02:26:53.000 And, you know, we really didn't know how good it was going to do.

02:26:55.000 That's when I met you.

02:26:56.000 It was like, it was all just happening.

02:26:57.000 People introduced me to you.

02:26:59.000 I was like, oh, that's cool.

02:27:00.000 I hadn't read it.

02:27:01.000 I hadn't met anybody who read it yet.

02:27:02.000 And then over the years, it just got this snowball effect.

02:27:06.000 Yeah.

02:27:07.000 You know, and now it's insane.

02:27:08.000 I get so many people tell me all the time that they love your books.

02:27:12.000 Oh man, I appreciate that.

02:27:13.000 You're a guy that gets brought up a lot.

02:27:15.000 You know, especially amongst military guys and amongst law enforcement guys.

02:27:19.000 They love your books.

02:27:20.000 Well, I certainly appreciate that and that's why I put so much into them.

02:27:24.000 But I love it.

02:27:24.000 It's like you.

02:27:25.000 I love doing what I'm doing so it doesn't feel like work.

02:27:27.000 I love writing.

02:27:28.000 I love this chapter in life.

02:27:30.000 I love creating things.

02:27:31.000 I love not working for anyone.

02:27:33.000 Oh, yeah.

02:27:34.000 I love all that.

02:27:35.000 Because in the military, you feel like, you know, you have people above you in the chain of command, and you're like, oh, this guy is fine.

02:27:39.000 You express that very well in the book.

02:27:42.000 Thank you.

02:27:43.000 Yeah.

02:27:43.000 Thank you.

02:27:44.000 What's interesting, though, for the nonfiction, the nonfiction coming out.

02:27:48.000 So very different communities as far as the fiction side of the house.

02:27:52.000 Like, I asked for my first book.

02:27:53.000 No one knew me.

02:27:54.000 And you have to ask people for blurbs.

02:27:56.000 And it's tough because, you know, you're going to get people.

02:27:58.000 Some people are going to say no.

02:27:59.000 You put yourself out there to ask.

02:28:01.000 Right.

02:28:01.000 And almost everyone said yes.

02:28:04.000 Even though I was totally like Lee Child, all these people I look up to, they were all about it.

02:28:08.000 Oh, that's great.

02:28:09.000 And so I always do it.

02:28:10.000 So I always...

02:28:11.000 Because it's a subjective art form.

02:28:12.000 So I try to give as many blurbs as I can for people, help as many people as I can.

02:28:16.000 So interesting in the nonfiction space.

02:28:18.000 My first time, I have to go back now because I haven't asked for blurbs in a long time.

02:28:21.000 You don't do it after a while.

02:28:22.000 You just take some things from reviews and stuff like that.

02:28:25.000 So you don't do it after a while.

02:28:26.000 But I had to do it for this nonfiction.

02:28:28.000 And interest in that nonfiction space, very reluctant to give any blurbs.

02:28:33.000 Interesting.

02:28:34.000 Yeah.

02:28:34.000 Even people that write about military history...

02:28:38.000 And they are not about it.

02:28:41.000 Why do you think that is?

02:28:42.000 I think they feel a little bit elitist up there.

02:28:45.000 Interesting.

02:28:46.000 Like you being a fiction author that's now venturing into nonfiction, they want to be a gatekeeper?

02:28:51.000 I don't know.

02:28:53.000 I'm busy too, but I make time for it for sure.

02:28:55.000 Maybe they don't want you delving into their world.

02:28:58.000 I don't know.

02:28:59.000 And some of these guys have made a lot of money writing about military stuff, which is interesting.

02:29:02.000 So I noted.

02:29:03.000 It might work its way into some fiction at some point.

02:29:07.000 And even some senior-level military officers, which is very interesting as well.

02:29:11.000 All said no to the blurbs for the nonfiction as well.

02:29:14.000 But that kind of feeds into my, well, maybe they listened to me on the podcast here.

02:29:19.000 I talked about their, hear me critique their handling of our withdrawal from Afghanistan.

02:29:23.000 So that's possible as well.

02:29:25.000 But also interesting with the show.

02:29:27.000 The military didn't help out with the show.

02:29:29.000 Which is great because sometimes they put constraints on what you can do or say if they help out with a ship or a plane or a base or something like that.

02:29:37.000 So they did not help out with the first show.

02:29:39.000 They didn't want to be a part of it?

02:29:40.000 Yeah.

02:29:40.000 Which I like because now there's no constraints.

02:29:43.000 That is good.

02:29:43.000 Typical.

02:29:44.000 I'm glad.

02:29:44.000 Especially since you know what you're talking about.

02:29:46.000 It's not like someone has to guess on their own without any military help.

02:29:49.000 Yeah, but I find that all very interesting.

02:29:51.000 So, you know, it's all noted.

02:29:52.000 Yeah, duly noted.

02:29:54.000 Exactly.

02:29:54.000 So, was there a negative response by the historians, or was it just no response?

02:30:01.000 Yeah, just busy.

02:30:01.000 And some that got back and said no, it was very nice of them to get back and at least say no.

02:30:05.000 But I thought that was interesting.

02:30:06.000 But could it also be that they just don't want to put themselves out there, that they don't want to be a personality, they just want to be the person relaying the information?

02:30:13.000 Possible.

02:30:13.000 Yeah, because if you do, like, sign off on someone's nonfiction who also writes fiction, you are somehow or another connecting yourself to them.

02:30:21.000 Yeah, that's very possible.

02:30:22.000 Very possible.

02:30:23.000 I would imagine, right?

02:30:24.000 But it's still noted.

02:30:25.000 Yeah, no, I get it.

02:30:27.000 But, yeah, so we'll see, you know.

02:30:30.000 But a ton of people, what made me very, I mean, super excited about this book is the nonfiction, is that the people who are there, the people who are digging their dead friends out of the rubble, That's who I really wanted to honor by writing this nonfiction, to keep those lessons learned and also tell their story,

02:30:48.000 because it really hasn't been told yet.

02:30:50.000 And you have people that are still alive, people who are alive who lost sons in that attack, so you want to do right by them.

02:30:56.000 And I think every single person who has read it, who is there, has said thank you for writing it.

02:31:02.000 Thank you for telling this story.

02:31:03.000 Well, it's also great that it's coming from you because your fiction books are so popular.

02:31:07.000 There's probably going to be a lot of people that read that that wouldn't ordinarily read a book on real history.

02:31:12.000 Yeah.

02:31:12.000 There's people today, some people I've mentioned it to, and they say, what was that?

02:31:14.000 I kind of remember that, but what was that?

02:31:16.000 Yeah, I barely remembered it.

02:31:17.000 I barely remembered it.

02:31:18.000 You started talking about it, and I was like, oh, yeah, that's right.

02:31:21.000 I remember that.

02:31:21.000 I mean, I was in high school at the time.

02:31:23.000 Yeah, so 83, and we had the embassy bombing in April of 83, and then you move into the spring, further into the spring, all through the summer, attack happens in October.

02:31:32.000 But all through that time frame, these guys are in combat, and the administration is saying peacekeeper over and over again, calling them peacekeepers, peacekeepers.

02:31:39.000 But you talk to these guys who were there, who were on patrol, they were in combat.

02:31:43.000 And so I got to capture that and really put that into the book, because that part of the story People don't really understand how many guys had died between the Embassy bombing and the Marine Barracks bombing, how many people were wounded during that time frame, how many people were just engaged in combat during that time period.

02:32:01.000 Because there wasn't social media back then and you're just relying on an administration and then there are talking points, that's what we never really got told.

02:32:08.000 So it's going to get told now.

02:32:10.000 That's one of the things that does keep me hopeful, that there is so much information available today whenever anything happens.

02:32:16.000 You don't have to just rely on mainstream media's depictions of things, everything that's been sanctioned down through the government, whatever narrative they're trying to push.

02:32:24.000 Now you get just so many independent reporters and so many real journalists that are giving you the actual details of it in a very disturbing way and you get angry.

02:32:33.000 And you go, why am I not hearing about this in the news?

02:32:36.000 Like, why is this perspective not being shared everywhere?

02:32:40.000 And then it, you know, unfortunately for the mainstream media, it just makes people distrust them more and more.

02:32:44.000 Oh, yeah.

02:32:45.000 Oh, yeah.

02:32:46.000 The trust with mainstream media and with our senior level elected officials is, I don't know if it's an all-time low, but it feels like it is.

02:32:53.000 It's about as low as I've ever experienced it.

02:32:56.000 Obviously, I wasn't aware, at least, during the Vietnam War.

02:33:02.000 But I would imagine back then, especially after Kent State, it was probably a lot like that back then, too.

02:33:08.000 A lot of distrust.

02:33:09.000 I think even more so now. 0.99

02:33:11.000 But there's also now there's the influence of foreign governments where they create bullshit stories and they create bullshit rabbit holes for people to go down and they suck people into these things and then reinforce it online with troll farms. 0.99

02:33:23.000 And it's like there's so much nonsense. 0.98

02:33:26.000 It's so hard to know what's real and what's not real.

02:33:28.000 Yeah, that's the value of you doing this.

02:33:30.000 That's why I appreciate what you do here with this podcast because it's one of the few places people can go and get these honest conversations.

02:33:37.000 They're long.

02:33:38.000 They're not a 30-second soundbite, a two-minute soundbite.

02:33:40.000 Even if you have someone that knows what they're talking about on mainstream media but you only get two and a half minutes, two minutes.

02:33:46.000 Half of that is the host talking or asking the question.

02:33:49.000 You don't really get a deep understanding of what's going on.

02:33:52.000 You don't really get to conceptualize what's really happening and make it a part of you so you can make informed decisions, whether it's in the voting, when you go to vote, or it's in a conversation with friends or your family.

02:34:02.000 But you get to do that here, which is awesome.

02:34:03.000 Not only that, they usually have someone arguing.

02:34:06.000 At all.

02:34:07.000 They don't like it unless there's sort of an argument that would get people captivated.

02:34:12.000 So you've got someone on the left yelling at someone on the right.

02:34:14.000 They're talking over each other, and you're like, good lord, this is crazy.

02:34:17.000 I know.

02:34:17.000 Everyone's yelling and arguing all the time.

02:34:19.000 So it's tough.

02:34:20.000 I mean, I think about the kids growing up now.

02:34:22.000 That's what I really think of, because we have kids, and our kids are pretty much the same ages.

02:34:25.000 And when I think about them and what they're stepping into, and you remain hopeful on it, but man, I worry about it.

02:34:31.000 I think every generation feels that way.

02:34:34.000 I mean, I certainly remember when I was a kid in high school, we were terrified of being in a nuclear war with Russia.

02:34:40.000 It was hovering over our heads.

02:34:42.000 When the fall of the Soviet Union happened, I remember this huge feeling of relief that swept through the entire country.

02:34:49.000 Because when we were kids, we really thought that we were going to go to war with Russia and there was going to be a nuclear war and everyone was going to die.

02:34:56.000 That was something that hung in the air all throughout the 1980s.

02:35:00.000 We thought of that.

02:35:01.000 The Day After.

02:35:02.000 Remember that show?

02:35:03.000 Oh, yeah.

02:35:03.000 That was big.

02:35:04.000 The Day After was big.

02:35:05.000 Then you also had Wolverines.

02:35:06.000 It was kind of inspirational.

02:35:07.000 You knew your enemy.

02:35:09.000 Red Dawn.

02:35:09.000 Exactly.

02:35:10.000 Red Dawn out there.

02:35:11.000 So you had that stuff, too.

02:35:12.000 I know we've talked about this before, and I've thought about it throughout the last year, but I haven't changed my position on it about going back in time.

02:35:20.000 In fact, I double down on it when I think about it.

02:35:22.000 I'd go 1979 to 1991, I think.

02:35:25.000 That's what I would do if I could go back in that time machine.

02:35:28.000 Yeah, it was just so much fun.

02:35:29.000 Would you live then?

02:35:30.000 Yeah, I'd just keep doing it over and over again.

02:35:31.000 79, 91. Really?

02:35:33.000 Yeah.

02:35:33.000 Or maybe 80. 80, 91. Fuck that.

02:35:36.000 I'd live right now. 1.00

02:35:37.000 I know.

02:35:37.000 You love it.

02:35:38.000 That's why I love it.

02:35:38.000 I love getting that perspective.

02:35:39.000 I love that about you.

02:35:41.000 This is a wild time, man.

02:35:43.000 This is a wild time of unprecedented change, and we're on the precipice of far more unprecedented change.

02:35:50.000 And you like that.

02:35:51.000 It's interesting.

02:35:52.000 It's exciting.

02:35:53.000 I would like it, I think, if it wasn't attached to all these things that I have to plug in and they're trying to manipulate me.

02:35:58.000 I know I keep going back to that, but it makes me a little bit crazy. 0.70

02:36:02.000 It's also a thing that gives you this ability to recognize bullshit because it's coming at you from all these different angles.

02:36:08.000 I think people are a little bit more reluctant to buy into official stories now than they ever have been before, especially after the whole COVID fiasco happened. 0.99

02:36:15.000 I think people are a lot more interested in what the fuck is actually going on than ever before.

02:36:21.000 Because it actually can affect their life, you know? 0.96

02:36:24.000 I mean, it's actually something that's consequential.

02:36:26.000 Oh, yeah.

02:36:27.000 And we all had touch points with it, and now, but just like Afghanistan, I don't really talk about that stuff anymore.

02:36:32.000 We don't really talk about all these businesses that got shuttered, which is why I try to support independent bookstores as much as I possibly can, do things that are only for independent bookstores.

02:36:41.000 To send people there.

02:36:42.000 Started that during COVID, actually.

02:36:43.000 That's great.

02:36:44.000 Started signing book plates.

02:36:45.000 You could only get through independent bookstores because it's harder to do that than just hit the easy button on Amazon.

02:36:49.000 Right, right.

02:36:50.000 So I started doing that.

02:36:51.000 Continued to do that today with Shot Through Pages.

02:36:53.000 So I try to do that to help them out because I remember going to see you in LA and I packed up and I drove out there and there was no one on the road.

02:37:00.000 And then I got to LA on the 405 freeway, driving up to where I was staying, and it was a ghost town.

02:37:05.000 It was crazy.

02:37:07.000 That was May or whatever, April, May of 2020. And I came out to see it.

02:37:11.000 It's horrible, but I'm glad we got to experience it because it's going to be something that we always remember.

02:37:17.000 I think people are going to be probably, I mean, if humans survive, we're going to be talking about these days.

02:37:22.000 And especially the days of COVID. It's going to be a bizarre footnote in American history.

02:37:28.000 So bizarre.

02:37:29.000 Yeah.

02:37:29.000 But I don't know.

02:37:30.000 People have short memories and they get distracted by the squirrel or by the manipulation on the social channels or whatever else.

02:37:35.000 A lot of people do.

02:37:36.000 But I think the overall perception, if you looked at it, has shifted in a way that people are a little bit more aware of horseshit now than ever before.

02:37:45.000 I think.

02:37:46.000 Yeah.

02:37:46.000 Generally.

02:37:47.000 I remember...

02:37:49.000 I want you to get a physical for the first time in a long time, because I hadn't done it for like six years.

02:37:52.000 I left the military.

02:37:53.000 And so I was like, I should probably go down and do something.

02:37:54.000 And it ended up being just kind of old school, hit your knee with the thing.

02:37:58.000 And I thought it was going to be like an executive physical and they were going to do blood and do all that stuff.

02:38:02.000 But it wasn't.

02:38:02.000 It was just like, watch the finger and hit the thing.

02:38:04.000 You're good to go.

02:38:05.000 Get out of here.

02:38:05.000 Yeah, but then he asked me if I wanted to get my flu shot.

02:38:09.000 And I was just like, I couldn't help myself.

02:38:11.000 I just was like, I laughed out loud like that, which I don't usually do.

02:38:15.000 Usually I keep things inside and just kind of make my little notes.

02:38:18.000 But I couldn't help.

02:38:19.000 But like, come on.

02:38:20.000 How'd they react?

02:38:22.000 He understood.

02:38:23.000 He was like, I don't think I'm the first one. 0.99

02:38:26.000 Doesn't fucking work. 0.97

02:38:28.000 Yeah, I'm not the first one. 0.99

02:38:29.000 Yeah, people tell you you should get your flu shot every year.

02:38:32.000 You won't get the flu. 0.99

02:38:33.000 Yeah, also you don't get the flu if you're fucking healthy. 0.97

02:38:35.000 Or if you are, you get over it quick. 0.96

02:38:37.000 Or if you get the flu, take IV vitamins.

02:38:39.000 You know, take Tamiflu.

02:38:40.000 The two times I got my flu shot in the past, like 20 years, I got the flu those years.

02:38:45.000 That's the only time I've gotten the flu is that two years, and I'm like, done.

02:38:48.000 Never doing it.

02:38:49.000 Because in the military, they make you that stuff.

02:38:51.000 So I just had them annotate that it was done.

02:38:54.000 It's called, what do they call it, gun decking?

02:38:56.000 I think so.

02:38:56.000 They just say that you did it, but you didn't really do it.

02:38:58.000 Well, that's nice.

02:38:59.000 Yeah, very nice of my corpsman to do that.

02:39:01.000 Hopefully I can arrest him now.

02:39:02.000 I think he's out now, for anybody listening.

02:39:03.000 I hope he is.

02:39:04.000 I hope he is.

02:39:05.000 Well, hey, brother, thank you very much for doing everything you do.

02:39:08.000 Your books are fucking awesome. 0.90

02:39:10.000 Red Sky Morning, the latest. 0.98

02:39:13.000 And you have seven of these now.

02:39:16.000 And the nonfiction comes out when?

02:39:18.000 September.

02:39:19.000 September 24th.

02:39:20.000 I'll be on that one, too.

02:39:21.000 Thank you, sir.

02:39:21.000 Appreciate you very much, man.

02:39:23.000 Thank you for being here.

02:39:23.000 Take care.

02:39:24.000 Tell everybody, website, anything, social media...

02:39:28.000 OfficialJackCar.com can find there, but usually, you know, type it in the search bar.

02:39:31.000 It'll pop right up.

02:39:32.000 Hopefully.

02:39:32.000 At JackCarUSA.

02:39:33.000 Exactly.

02:39:34.000 At JackCarUSA on the socials, and man, thank you so much for everything.

02:39:37.000 My pleasure, brother.

02:39:38.000 Always good to see you.

02:39:38.000 You too.

02:39:38.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - June 18, 2024

Joe Rogan Experience #2165 - Jack Carr

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript