Legends of the Old West - Legends Interview: Craig Johnson — "Depth of Winter"

Episode Date: September 30, 2018

Craig Johnson is back. He the New York Times bestselling author of the Walt Longmire Mysteries that are the basis for the Netflix show, "Longmire," and he recently joined the show for a second time while on tour to promote his newest novel, "Depth of Winter." We also talked about the annual Longmire Days festival in Wyoming and the origins of his book tours (hint: it involves a motorcycle road trip). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi everyone, welcome to a special interview episode of Legends of the Old West. If you're listening to this right after it's been released, we're just a few short days from the premiere of our new show, Infamous America. It starts in October with season one, Salem, a show that will tell the story of the Salem Witch Trials. And many of you have probably seen the name Black Barrel Media associated with this show or on social media. My sister and I teamed up to form a company to produce audio and video content, and it will be the home for Legends of the Old West and Infamous America. The Legends website and social media channels will all still be active. We're still going to keep posting everything related to this show on those pages. That won't change. But from now on, OldWestPodcast.com will redirect you to our company's website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Head over there and check it out.

It'll be your one-stop shop for information about the shows and the videos we've produced and everything else. That's where you want to go from now on. But all right, at this moment, you're here to listen to Craig Johnson, author of The Walt Longmire Mysteries. here to listen to Craig Johnson, author of The Walt Longmire Mysteries. Craig's books are fixtures on the New York Times bestseller list, and his new novel, Depth of Winter, is no exception. Those of you who have been longtime listeners will know that I spoke to Craig over the summer, so this is a fun follow-up to that interview. He spent the month of September touring the country to promote his book, and I caught up with him in Scottsdale, Arizona. We talked about the annual event Longmire Days and what it's like to be on a book tour, and of course, Depth of Winter. Here's Craig Johnson.

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We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. So, Craig, thank you again. Welcome back to the show. Thank you for doing a second interview with us in, what, three months, I guess?

It is. Something like that. I think, yeah, we met, of course, in Billings, Montana at the Western Writers of America Convention. As I just showed you, I'm using my little Western Writers of America booklet. You are. Got all my notes here ready to go. You drank the Kool-Aid and everything, didn't you? All of it.

It's quite tasty, so I brought some more along with me here today um so i guess as i let me address the new listeners real quick we've accrued a lot of new listeners over the summer as the show has been growing so anyone who has not heard the first interview that i did with craig it was a july issue so we're kind of following up on that at that in that interview you gave us a great tease of the depth of winter which you are now out on tour promoting i am so we're going to talk a little bit about that. And so we have some limitations for what we're going to talk about, but we probably will get into a few spoilers down the road in this podcast. So for you listeners who are hearing this and you're big fans, I will give you a warning.

You will be warned when the spoilers come out. You will hear a noise. You will hear a noise. There will be big sirens and bells. Coyotes howling. Exactly. So you know when to pause it and when to come back to us when we get to that point. But for right now, we're here in Scottsdale, Arizona,

and you are just a couple days into your book tour to support this, to support the new book. We're at the Poison Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona. It's a great little place. If you've ever been in here, any of you Arizona fans, you can come in. You can see all the pictures of the authors on the wall as I look at them right now. Everybody has stopped through here. You've been here probably a couple times, haven't you? Oh, geez. I've been here since the very first book, Cold Dish, back in 05. So yeah, every year. You're a veteran. This is why we stopped on the tour. I am. I am. Well, this is a big deal. This is probably, if you were to pick out,

probably one of the most powerful and astute mystery bookstores, you know, and probably in the world. I think, you know, this one certainly has everybody else running for their money. Yeah, certainly. If anyone lives in the Phoenix area, if you're stopping through Phoenix, if you're in the Scottsdale area, come check it out. It's a great little independent bookstore. There are few and far between anymore. So this is a proud little independent bookstore. Please come by and check it out. So the first thing we want to say before we even dive into the tours, I want to hear a little bit about the tour. But since we last saw you, my sister and I really wanted to try to get to Longmire Days in August. And we could not make it.

We were buried in our production schedule. We tried. We looked at the flights. We tried to pull it off. We couldn't do it. So tell me about Longmire Days. How was the event? Well, first off, don't worry about it because it happens every year.

Yes, we're already planning for next year. And, yeah, even though we're streaming the six seasons of the television show on Netflix, the books are still going great. And the town of Buffalo is wholly behind the idea of continuing to do Longmire Days. And I'm happy to do it. I'm going to write these books until I fall over the computer, whatever I happen to be writing on in 20 or 30 years. And then Robert Taylor said he's going to keep doing Longmire Days if they have to wheel him out in a wheelchair. So he's game. So don't worry about it. It'll be fine. It was incredible this year. It really, really was. I mean, you always think it's going to kind of slack off a little bit, maybe not quite so big as it was, but it just gets bigger and bigger

every year like that. And maybe a little smoother every year. I mean, whenever you've got a town of about 4,500 people that's, you know, trying to host, you know, something of the scope, you know, of Longmire days, you know, which is, you know, all those TV personas, you know, and then like, you know, 15 to 20,000 people, you know, show up. And it's amazing. Like, it really is. Like, that it's not more of a disaster, you know, than it is. Like, and I mean that in the most, you know, charming of senses. Like, it's kind of nice like that because, you know, everybody's really extraordinarily well behaved for a crowd that size. And it's funny like that because every year the sheriff and the chief of police for Buffalo

come out and do a crime report every week, you know, after, you know, Longmire days. And, you know, the thing they're always amazed by is that we have 20,000 extra people in town and there's no extra crime. Nothing happens. And I'm like, well, these are all people whose hero is a sheriff. So it's not like Sturgis or anything. It's actually a pretty well-behaved group. And, hey, this year was fantastic.

I can't remember. I think the charitable auction like that made something like $43,000 at the Occidental Hotel. And the Ferg's motorcycle ride made close to $9,000, you know, for the animal shelter there in Buffalo. Oh, my gosh. We always try to break it up a little bit so that you have a national charity like that and then a local charity. Sure. So we can kind of make it beneficial for all parties like that. But we had a really great group of actors that were there,

just about everybody from the cast, and they were great. Everybody had a wonderful time. Fantastic. Yeah, I was going to say that. I know A. Martinez was there, and thank you for the introduction in Billings. Well, he was there. I'm pretty sure he was there this time around, wasn't he? He was.

Oh, yeah. We've kept in touch with him since you introduced him, since we did an interview, again, for any new listeners, right after Craig's episode in our series is an interview with A. Martinez. And he's a fantastic guy. So we've kept in touch with him. We're talking to him about some things for the future. He's just an extraordinary human being, just an amazing individual.

And to have the pedigree that he has in Westerns, for gosh sakes. I mean, one of the first big movies he ever did was with John Wayne, for goodness sake. And I think he was what? He was six when he was in that movie, wasn he like it feels like it I don't know maybe 12 I don't know we'll give him a little bit but uh but yeah he's just an extraordinary individual like that and uh you know we got an amazing group of people like that I mean you know the show you know it's got six seasons that's streaming on Netflix now like that but I mean I think the the cast is extraordinarily close-knit um and it was

a unique kind of show for them to be involved with I mean I'm going to be doing like a uh an event up in Pueblo a city read for Pueblo Pueblo reads the cold dish the first book in the Walt Longmire series and I lo and behold I was surprised like that I got an email message you know from Lou Diamond Phillips and he says I'm going to be there I'm going to fly in like it and do the do the read with you and I was like wow you know and I mean that's the kind of people they are like that I mean they just you know we really kind of stumbled onto an amazing cast it's incredible that this that the books create led to that TV the cast became so close and oh yeah it's all been infused

and intertwined it is sticking together after the show is finished but the books are obviously still going up everyone still feels a part of it. Oh, yeah. Normally, this kind of thing just doesn't happen all that often. I can't think of another example off the top of my head. I'll have to really start searching my memory to see if something like this, find an equivalent, but I can't think of one at the moment. So, great.

We will certainly plan on it, and I guess I have a new goal for next year, which is to learn how to ride a motorcycle so I can go on the ride with Ferg. If he does it again, I have to go. Well, you can go on the horseback ride, too. Okay. I don't need to renew my license for that one. So you are on a book tour. So tell me about a book tour.

How does your schedule work? You are running around like a madman, crisscrossing the country. By the time people actually hear this interview, it's going to be a couple weeks after we're recording it, you will be on the other side of the country by that point. Oh, yeah. You're getting close to the end so yeah what's the routine like and what are the events that you do at some of the stops oh i mean you know we just finished one just last night up in

denver um at the lone tree event center like that that was like i think it was 478 people i think you know it was uh just an incredible event like it and um you know the books you know got a lot more traction i mean after 14 years of you know of uh of books like getting you know in 10 years you know on the new york times bestsellers list and then six years of a television show certainly doesn't hurt at all like that but uh you know to have all of these things happening i mean you know the big thing is is used to i think it's you know the publishing industry's changed a lot i mean over the years and you know used to the everybody that's that's what they did like they would take authors and they would send them out and have them do book tours is what they did like that and, you know, used to everybody. That's what they did. Like they would take authors and they would send them out and have them do book tours is what they did.

And then, you know, it kind of became, I think, financially prohibitive, like, you know, a lot of times, you know. And also you're up against a lot of competition out there, you know, to try and get people into bookstores to actually, you know, and hear and, you know, and have, you know, writers read their work and that type of thing. It's a little bit more difficult these days like that. And so I'm extremely fortunate, like, that work and that type of thing. It's a little bit more difficult these days like that. And so I'm, I'm extremely fortunate, like that the, the, the publisher

that I've got, you know, is just a strong believer that, you know, if I'm out there, I'm going to sell books, you know? And so, so they're, they've always been, you know, kind of pushed, you know, for, you know, larger scale tours. And, you know, I guess, you know, I kind of pushed for it too, because I got to be honest. I mean, when they first started touring me um it was funny like that because i would get all of these emails from little bookstores up in montana and idaho washington oregon utah and they would write me and they would say when is viking penguin going to send you to baker city oregon and i'd have to write them back and go never they're never going to do that like and uh you know because what they're always trying to do is they're always trying to get you into the largest um demographics

possible so they can get the largest amount of always trying to get you into the largest demographics possible. So they can get the largest amount of sales possible to get you further up on the New York Times bestsellers list as quick as possible. And so, you know, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah. Yeah, we're not high on that demographic list. So what I do is I would tell them, you know, well, I'll tell you what, I'll gather up your information. I'll put it in a file. And then if I get a chance and I'm in the area or something, I'll try and set something up with you like that. Well, you know, a couple of years go by like that. And I had this old motorcycle that I'd bought back in

1996. And I had that thing and it got about 80 miles of the gallon. And I thought, you know what, if you took off on that thing, you could do a great big 5,000 mile loop all the way up through Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Utah, and swing back around into Wyoming. And, you know, it gets 80 miles a gallon. Like if I can find enough sofas, you know, to surf on like that, this would be pretty good to do like it. And so it started out like it with about maybe, I think about a half a dozen bookstores, um, the first year that I did it. And by the time that I finally had to quit doing it, um, I think it was close to 30 bookstores that I was hitting in that motorcycle i did i did like

that and uh and i think you know i think viking penguin also noticed you know that that had a large scale effect because we're in the pacific northwest bestsellers list year after year after year and they started thinking you know we sell books when craig is out on the road you know so maybe we should send him out on the road yeah and so you know they did like that as a matter of fact there was even one one of the executives there at viking penguin and says there any way you think we can get him out on the road and have him do like uh maybe four different motorcycle tours like on the four different sections and find i think catherine court the president of penguin said we do need to give him enough time to go home and write every once in a while

exactly it's a vicious vicious circle is what it is well actually maybe think about it too that before i think were you basically home for the summer i know you were in you were in in europe in the spring yeah and now you're on the road here yeah did you get to finally have some time to just write at home and relax a little bit well yeah i mean whenever i'm at the ranch that's always going to be the priority like is to be able to write right you know because that's what i do that's what i really love doing it's what i enjoy doing it's always funny because i'll be talking to like workshops you know with the would-be writers like that and they're always like well what's it like to go out and have a beer with lou diamond phillips and what's it like to

you know have a book tour in france and all this i'm always looking at them and going you do know that's like three percent of my life right the other 97 is like at my ranch sitting in a room by myself typing about my imaginary friends Okay, and so, you know, it's a little bit different from what people think maybe not quite so romantic as they might think But but yeah, I had plenty of time to write this summer Right, right. Oh absolutely I remember you saying you've had to almost teach yourself how to write in those environments. But now, hopefully you had the summer to relax, and we'll all find out what's coming up next for Walt.

Well, you think it's precious, and you think you have to sit in your chair and your desk with your mug of coffee looking out your window. You get past that after a while. Yep, I totally understand. All right, so at this point, we are going to transition and talk a little bit about the depth of winter. Okay. So anyone who's listening, if you haven't read, we're not going to get too deep into the details and too deep into the spoilers but we are going to talk about a few things a few points that happen so if you have not read the book yet please pause and come back to us when you're done we'll be here waiting for you but for the time being we're going to move on and talk about depth of winter um so i i typically think it's best to begin at the beginning so we'll start

uh right off the bat with when we first spoke you decided that this was this was the book that was going to be the confrontation between walt and the character of tomas bedard his kind of nemesis the most evil character of the series so far yeah what made it what made this the right time to bring that confrontation to it? Well, you know, it actually, you know, I mean, these confrontations started like at the conflict between these two individuals started like in Servant's Tooth, which was about five novels back. And, you know, I wanted to try and see what would happen, you know, with having a, you know, an arc of conflict that would go further, you know, than just one novel. of conflict that would go further, you know, than just one novel, you know, because that's actually one of the hard parts about, you know, whenever you're writing murder mysteries like that, or, you know, crime fiction or whatever you want to call it, you come up with these, you know,

these really, really interesting antagonists, you know, and you develop, you know, backgrounds for them like that and develop them. And then you work so hard to make them and then they're dead by the time the book is over. Like, them you know and so you know I thought well what would happen if maybe I can like you know get this arc maybe just go with a longer arc for this particular character like that and see what can happen to it and also you know Walt you know is pretty much you know I mean he's been confronted before like that but this individual is one of those guys that just keeps coming at him keeps coming at at him. And not only him, but his friends, his family, I mean, everybody around him. And so there don't

seem to be any rules of civility with this individual at all. It's all kind of like, you know, gone down the drain. And so, you know, Walt really just doesn't have any, you know, that much of a choice in the matter anymore. He's going to have to deal with this individual one way or another. And, you know, this is a different kind of book in many ways. It's a thriller, it's not really a mystery. It's very epic in nature. It's also very foreign, to coin the phrase. Walt's not only out of his county,

he's not only out of his state, he's out of his country. He's happening to contend with a situation that's actually in a foreign country. He's not really receiving a great deal of support, you know, from his own government. He's certainly not receiving any support, you know, from the Mexican government. And so he's kind of on his own, you know, in this particular book, you know, without the resources and the background and the individuals that he usually counts on in these situations. And so it made for a much more difficult book to write. And I don't know I guess

the way I look at books is kind of like mountains you know you can you know some mountains are taller than others like it and so it'll take you a while to get the momentum up you know to being able to write you know certain books and I think with this one of course you know I mean with the ending of Western Star you can see that it was more than I could contain in one book you know by the time it got you got to the end of The Western Star, there was a dual narrative going on with that one. And then there were portions of the storyline that had to continue on simply because I needed the momentum of one novel

to just carry me in to the next one. And this one, Depth of Winter, kind of hits the ground running. I was about to say, that's a question I had written down anyway, so we'll just get right into it. You really do dive right into the action. From page one, Walt is in Mexico. He's trying to find his daughter. He's on the adventure.

He's on the trail the entire time. And I thought that was a really interesting way to do it. There's no setup. You could have built up to it. So I guess what made you want to just jump right in and just kind of make references to things that may have happened, but you didn't show any of the buildup and the kidnapping and that kind of thing. Well, it's just there. Right.

Well, I mean, you know, with a thriller like that, you know, you really don't have the luxury of, you know, building up momentum. You really don't have the time. I get to do a lot of expository, you know, in the beginning of the book, you know, because that slows things down. It really, really does. And normally I really enjoy that type of thing. I really enjoy, like, dealing out those, you know, those cards, you know, those plot cards one by one. But in this one, I definitely knew that, OK, you know, with the situation being as dire as it is, Walt is not going to be open to the idea of, you know, a slow, you know, moving, you know, investigation.

Like I had to find out where his daughter is and what it is that's going to happen. He needs to be hitting the ground right away like that and uh that kind of predicated the entire structure of the novel to a certain extent great great and so i i was i was thinking about the the title of it um anyway as to kind of slowly work backwards a little bit the depth of winter felt like i think the average i think the average person as they walk up and see it they're going to assume it takes place in a snowy, wintry environment. And now that your books do take on the seasons, it just kind of takes place in a winter season. Oh, yeah.

Clearly, it's not in a snowy environment. It's almost there's a layer of irony to the title. Oh, absolutely. It's down in Mexico in the heat. Absolutely. How did the title come about? Well, you know, I get emails from people on a periodic basis. They'll write me emails, and they'll say, there's a lot of snow in your books.

And I'm like, well, I don't live in Key West. You know, we have, like, two seasons in Wyoming. We have winter and the Fourth of July and sometimes flurries on the Fourth of July. And so with that, like, and as you said, like, there's a kind of a seasonal kind of structure to the books. And this was going to be the winter book and so when i stumbled you know across that albert camus quote um that even i was surprised to discover that even in the depths of winter i held within me in an eternal summer like that um i it's you know it's it's it touches on a number of different bases first of all like it was a little bit of a a little bit of a curve ball like that to the uh to the readers like that because i figured they would probably think okay

this is the winter book and its depth of winter. Boy, this is going to be one cold book. I'll get it. And as it turns out, it never gets below 92 degrees, I don't think. And then the other one is, is that it kind of speaks a little bit to the humanity aspect of the books, you know, and I mean, and certainly to Walt. Look at I mean, in this book in particular, Walt is facing off, you know, with these this drug cartel in northern Mexico. And these are absolutely ruthless individuals. I mean, brutally violent individuals like that with not much of a sense of humanity like that.

And the question becomes, how can you go up against individuals like that and still retain your own humanity, still retain what it is that makes you a decent human being, but still be capable of stopping them in their tracks. And so that became one of the major questions within the book, I think. Does Wald walk away from this unscathed, or does he walk away perhaps maybe a little bit harmed in some way?

How much like them does he have to become to defeat them? Exactly. Exactly. So I, and actually just a pure curiosity there, I won't give any way away into the details, but how did you, some of the more vicious things that the cartel members are said to have done to victims? There's a couple in particular that I can think of. Oh.

Did you research those and find out that those things actually happened? Yeah, I did. Or did you just dream out, did you just go to the darkest place in your life to the darkest place you know i know what you know what i i don't know if my mind is capable of summing up like what these guys can do like that and uh i started doing a lot of the research like a lot of guardian newspapers like it have you know a lot of like really detailed information you know about you know some of the things that these guys have done and it just is blood curdling it's literally blood curdling oh my goodness like that and you know the beheadings and the you know the i mean and you know liquefying people in 55 gallon

drums like that i mean they're just it's some of those horrific things you've ever heard of it it sounds like it's coming out of like you know something from like you know ancient you know history or something um the brutality of it like that and um it kind of makes sense though like that because i mean tomas bedard is a monster among monsters i think it is that you know one of the one of the ed martinez says like that here is an individual who um who has found a home like that that this is the perfect environment for him carved out a home yeah he was somehow yes he was worse than all of the guys that were there like that and uh and so that just kind of gives you an indication of gives you an indication of what it is that Walt's going to have to go up against. But it's, I mean, Tomas Bedard made the mistake of taking Walt on in Absaroka County one time

when he had both Vic and Henry for backup and all of his jurisdictional applications and all of his resources. And it didn't end well for Tomas Bedard. It didn't end well for tomas badart like it didn't at all like it and so i think you know he learned from that mistake and thought okay you know we're going to have to be in a different uh a different kind of environment field advantage yeah exactly there's going to be the ultimate confrontation he wants it to be on exactly he certainly seems like he has set up his own little world oh yeah to do that oh yeah so walt is definitely walking into the lion's den to try to resolve the conflict of the novel. I'm afraid so.

But you did touch on something that I absolutely want to talk about because I love the fact that you start each book with a quote. I've always enjoyed that. My previous life writing some screenplays, I used to love doing that too. So I wanted to ask you specifically, give me the chicken and the egg scenario here. At what point sometimes do you find the quote and that influences the title of the book or are you writing along and you come up with a title and then you start maybe looking for a specific quote or what point in the process do you find these quotes that seem to work so perfectly with the novel oh thank you look at I think it's a combination of both I mean sometimes you know it is that you know you have such a strong sense of like what the book is

about you know which is always the big indication there I mean you know I never want to write books where I'm just like, you know, stacking up bodies like cordwood. You know, I want to have a message that I'm trying to get across. And so if you do have that message, it sensitizes you to like, you know, quotes and information like that that might coincide with whatever that philosophy might happen to be like that. But then again, it's also a situation where, you know, you'll stumble across one that just sounds just so perfect that you have to use it sure um the second one you know that's used i think it's the profiero diaz quote we've actually got the books right here yeah yeah and rather than like you know to bastardize it like i'd probably just have you read it poor mexico so far from god and so near the united states there you go and i don't think there's any character that may be more you know uh poor Mexico, so far from God and so near the United States. There you go. That's a great one.

And I don't think there's any character that may be more, you know, is more emblematic of that than the seer like that, who is the character that Walt meets in the very first scene of the book. Here's a man who has been poisoned by thalidomide, lost his legs. He's a hunchback. He's blind like that, but he's still referred to as the seer like that. So evidently there's more to him than meets the eye but uh it kind of gives you a little bit of an indication of you know the kind of borderland situation that that walt finds himself in very

colorful characters very different type of characters and a different you know world too like i think there's a point in time when walt's actually um in the desert like that and and talking about the desert you know and finds it surprisingly comforting. He likes it. He actually likes the desert. It couldn't be more foreign from where he comes from. He feels somewhat at home there. I think so. I think also the natural quality of it. He certainly doesn't feel at home with what's going on as far as the society is concerned or the business is concerned or anything like that.

But he can still look at the beauty of the landscape of Mexico and still appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. And you somewhat referenced this a second ago. So we'll wrap up with a couple of last quick questions here. We know you pressed for time as you got to keep a schedule here. So I was enjoying the little flashbacks that you worked in here. We get to see a little bit of the early life of Walt and Katie. I initially thought when I got to the first one,

I thought, oh, I wonder if this is going to be another kind of parallel book where we're going to bounce back and forth and see some more of Walt's early life. And so I was kind of, I won't give anything away to the readers, but I was pleasantly surprised by the way you did that. There's a couple different flashbacks of different things throughout the novel that I really liked, so I wanted to at least throw that out there. Thank you. To say that I appreciated that point, and to say I liked the way you used them to not explain to the reader exactly how you did, but

what prompted the little flashbacks with Katie, and then there's a small one with Vic with the confrontation with Tomas. Right, I think a lot of it has to do with just how it is that the human mind works. A lot of times we work on a very visual, visceral sense. And I guess the way that I looked at those little excerpts was almost like snapshots. Whenever you think about it, especially about people that you care about, family or people that you have a strong emotional tie to. It's very visual. You see them, and you even see them the way they were, whether it was 40 years ago or 30 years ago or 10 years ago.

It doesn't really matter. And it's kind of nice to have those little ideas like that because in a book like this, obviously one of the greatest motivations that Walt has into weighing into this world that's completely alien to him, is that his daughter is really kind of up for grabs here. He has no choice at this point. Bedard set up a situation where Walt really doesn't have any choice.

He's got to go get his daughter back. Well, it's very easy to just see Katie as some sort of MacGuffin, some sort of prop device or something like that, and forget that she's a human being that's very, very important to Walt, that's essential to Walt, Walt's life. And so for me, that was a way of trying to reinforce that with the readers so that they could see just how much she meant to Walt as they worked their way through the book.

Because she does spend a good portion of the book as the name that's being chased after. We don't get to see her that much, obviously. Well, yeah. I mean, the books are written in first person. And so it would have been quite a reach to suddenly change and have Katie's view of what was going on or something. I haven't done that in 14 novels. I mean, I kind of let Walt be the voice of the novels.

And so I thought, okay, well, then maybe those snapshots wouldn't be such a bad idea. This is a way to work her in there. Yeah, I think so. I think it worked. I hope it did. Yeah, it certainly has for me. So the last thing I wanted to bring up was just a fun one.

We'll kind of end on a more lighthearted note. I love the Bob Lilly stuff. Bob Lilly rooms cracked me up for the entire time. So I guess if I'm going to phrase a question in here, how did Bob Lilly become the choice for this device? When you've got a 6'5",

260-pound white guy down in central Mexico or northern Mexico, he's going to kind of stand out. It was really kind of a difficulty because what are you going to do with that guy? How are you going to, you can't, you know, he's, you know, he's, he's big, he's white, like, and he's going to stick out like a sore thumb. And so, you know, when the seer comes up with the first idea, the first idea is that they're going to go on a safari, like for antiquities, you know, and weapons.

Like, they're just going to find old weapons. Well, then, you know, Walt has too high of a persona. I mean, you know, the, the, the federal governments of both, you know, the United States and Mexico are looking for him. And so, you know, whenever this group of individuals, police officers like that finally come to the cathedral and they got it surrounded, basically, and Walt can't get away, the seer comes up with another idea. Yeah. And the idea kind of comes from the fact that they happen to have an old gym bag that a border guard you know of a border patrol guy gave to Walt you know to carry a bunch of old weapons in and it happens to be a Dallas Cowboys duffel bag like that and and it kind of made sense because I thought you know okay Walt's you know

entry point you know into Mexico is Juarez you know right right from El Paso and so I just thought okay well you know who would be you know who would be a good um you know who would be a good you know good dallas cowboy for walt to be mistaken you know for right age has to be a guy who's long retired long retired like that you know and uh you know so that if he doesn't look exactly like he did in his playing days exactly exactly like that and i started doing just a little it did it was very cursory research like it but first thing, I mean, the first guy that I even thought of, I think, might have been Bob Lilly because, you know, he was big. He was huge.

And I remember, I can't remember, Reeves, I think it was. Like it was a wide receiver, and he was the coach for the Broncos. Dan Reeves. Dan Reeves. Yeah. And there was a story that he used to tell like that about Bob Lilly, about how he was like just this big slab of meat, you know, that all these guys, you know, really worked out all the time,

and they had all of this, you know, muscle definition and all this kind of stuff. And Bob Lilly just didn't have any muscle definition at all, but he could pick up the other ten guys on the team and throw them across the field. And I thought, well, that's kind of how I see Walt to a certain extent. And then when I read, you know, that he was like 6'5", and that he weighed 255 pounds, I was like, well, there it is. It's perfect. Like, that's got to be him. And so that's when Walt started signing little plastic footballs in Mexico.

I loved it. It cracked me up, and I thought it was great. Yeah, obviously it ties into the Dallas Cowboys being the most prominent franchise tour in the country. Oh, yeah. I mean, right, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I figured it was probably something in that line. I didn't know if you were like, oh, yeah. I can't I can't wait to hear what Bob Lilly has to think about this.

I was going to think about being disguised. I think it's fantastic. And I was kind of curious. I didn't know if you would go with a Denver Broncos and lots of Broncos fans. I wasn't sure. I couldn't. Carl Mecklenburg. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I could have. But, you know but it had to be right down there on the Mexico border, and I thought, God, it'll probably be Dallas. Yeah, it probably has to be. I love this. We'll wrap it up there.

We don't want to give too much away. We talked about a little detail, but there's still a whole lot more in the book, so please go check it out. You can do like I do and certainly download the audio book. George Goodell has not lost a step. Oh, no, no, no. He's still fantastic. He's still at the top of his game, so I would encourage you to check that out.

He is. Or certainly run to your independent bookstores and pick up a copy. Thank you, sir. All right. Thank you very much, Greg. I appreciate it. We'll see you down the road again, I'm sure. We will.

We will. Talk to you later. Okay. you