The Joe Rogan Experience - #1820 - Jack Carr

Episode Date: May 18, 2022

Jack Carr is a bestselling author, retired Navy SEAL, and host of the “Danger Close” podcast. His latest book, “In the Blood,” is out on May 17. http://www.officialjackcarr.com/

the Joe Rogan experience and we're up we are up in the blood in the blood you are without a doubt the within the last 20 years of my life I've read more of your fiction than anybody else's. Dude, thank you. It's a fact. I am honored. It's kind of a lie because I'm not reading it. I'm listening. I know, but it's kind of interchangeable today. Yes, it's sort of.

But when I say, like, John L. Rawlings gave me a hard time. They do. He goes, how you read while you're just listening? Yeah. He's right. Yeah, it's listening. Reading is harder than listening. But I don't have that time.

So, like, for me, it's like I've finished your books in the sauna and on the commute to work. I'm going to try my best to get that out of my head. I'm wearing underwear. Still. It's after training. It's very manly. Okay. It's very manly.

Don't worry. People think of the sauna as like a leisure activity, but the way I do it is pretty rough. I do it after training, and I do it at 189 degrees, and I do it for 25 minutes. It's hard. We're putting one of those in because of you and a bunch of other people that have talked about the benefits of doing that. So one's going in at the new house. Do you go between that and the cold thing? The cold bath?

Yeah, I go back and forth. It's so easy. Once you go in the cold thing and then go back in 189 degrees. It's so easy. So I wind up doing, I usually do about 20 minutes in the hot until I can't take it anymore. And then I jump in the cold and then I do three minutes in the cold. And then I could do another 15, 20 minutes easy in the hot before I start getting hot again, just because your body is so cold. I know it sounds not healthy though, because it sounds like things are going from open to closed.

I don't know. Bill's resilient. It seems like if I got one of those, because we're definitely doing the hot one. It's going to have this nice view over the mountains and everything. And then I'm thinking about putting in the cold tub and maybe, but I think it would just be almost for looks because I'd do it once and say, that was horrible. I'm not doing that again. Why would one do that to themselves?

It's not that bad. It's themselves? It's not that bad. It's not. It's not that bad. It's good. It's good for you. And you feel good. It wakes you up. Oh, yeah.

I love it. I love it. I needed one this morning because my light got delayed last night, so I was in at like 3.30 in the morning and then up for interviews because the book just came out. And I was actually thinking about that. I was like, I'm going to get in a cold shower. I'm going to turn it on. And when I got in that shower, there was no cold water.

It's hot out. Once it's hot out in Texas, the water's warm. But we're having one installed here. It'll be here at the end of the month. The cold or the hot? The cold and the hot. We'll have one back-to-back next to each other. I didn't take you next door.

Let's check it out. Oh, afterwards, I'll show you the gym. Oh, nice. But we have, at the house, I have a barrel sauna right next to the cold plunge, and it's the best. It's just going back and forth. It's awesome. But Cam Haines says that the way to do the cold is you do the cold and then let your body heat up naturally. And that is the best way to get the most out of the cold.

That sounds more healthy than just going back and forth between the two. I don't know. It's hard. Last night, I went out last night and so before me and the wife went out, I got in the cold plunge for like three minutes and then it took hours before I felt warm enough. I was in the car freezing my ass

off and she's like, oh my god, it's so hot. She's turned the AC up. I'm like, shit. It's your hypothermic, essentially. You're on the verge of it. It's harder for you to warm your body back up. What hypothermia is, you can't warm it back up on your own. So you're close if it's taking a while. I'm fine.

I mean, three minutes, I'm fine. One time I did 20 minutes. That was hard. That time it was in the summer and I was driving. It was like in 90 degree weather and I was driving all the way to work with the windows rolled up and I was still freezing, shivering. No AC on, shivering. Yeah, yeah. I think there's, I don't freezing. Shivering. No AC on. Shivering. Yeah. I think there's... That's not smart.

I feel like I did that in buds and just like that. Like I'm good? You've been there. I think so. I feel like I don't need to keep doing it. The ocean on the Pacific is brutal. It can be a little chilly. Oh my god. People are used to the ocean on the Atlantic. The Atlantic Ocean is not bad. Especially if you're in Florida.

It's pretty nice. Yeah, and you get that warm water that comes up. Pacific just really stays cold the whole time. The whole time. And that's where most of the quitters come from in buds is because of that cold. Really? Yeah, yeah. That's interesting.

The sleep deprivation part of it in Hell Week, I guess, plays in. But I think it plays in more because the cold's affecting your body more because you haven't slept in. For sure. Like Wednesday night and you're just freezing. But the worst part of it is when they put you on Wednesday night, they let you sleep for a couple hours. So they put you in this tent on the beach. So you've been up since Sunday morning. You've been running.

You're in and out of the water. So your body's like that cold, clammy sweat. And they throw a bunch of dudes like age 18 to like 22 into a tent with no ventilation. And you're on these cots and you're just immediately going to rem sleep and so you're just like shaking your eyes rolling around you're just like shaking in the bed there and then it feels like one second but it's really an hour and a half two hours something like that and then they throw a flash crash grenade in and come shoot over the top of your head with m60 with blanks and you're like jolted out of this sleep oh my god

the pacific ocean and you're in there locked arms with your buddies in the Pacific Ocean again. And then you just get droves of quitters, which is great because I told me that the program was working. Yeah. So I did like that. That is a thing that you can't soften up. No. If you want to make seals, you have to make seals the way they make seals.

I think so. I think so. I mean, obviously I've never done it, but I can only imagine that there's only one way to do it correctly. Well, I mean, you're doing it every day, getting in and out of that barrel and then into the cold. Oh, please. It sounds like you're doing it to yourself. Please, I sleep on nice sheets. I wake up, you know, 7 a.m. with alarm clock while rest would be on. No, no, no. Yeah, I know. It sounds like you're doing it each and every time, but I thought about this recently and I thought that, hey, if you were today, in today's day and age where we're all so comfortable, and you were to come up with this program and say, hey, you know what?

We should make these special operations guys in the Navy, and we'll call them SEALs, and we'll have this Hell Week thing where we keep them on the verge of hypothermia the whole time. A guy might die every now and again, but we'll find out through that if they have grit, if they have this intangible thing. And then they would take that up the chain of command and brief that to new admirals and captains up there. There's no way it would get approved. No way. The only reason that it's a program is because it's a legacy program.

There's no way you create a program like that today. But that's the only way you're going to make the kind of people that are necessary to do those heavy duty missions. Yeah. There's no other way because you've got to have someone who you know is not going to quit, is not going to fall apart. That's it. And is going to be able to be there for his fellow soldiers if shit goes sideways. That's right.

You're not going to develop a person like that without some sort of extreme adversity, a test to see what you're made of. And also I would imagine like for a guy like you, you wanted to be a SEAL for a long time before you ever entered. So it was something that you built towards, you worked towards, it was in your mind and you had prepared yourself. You don't want someone who's like, man, maybe I'll try to be a SEAL. I'm pretty badass. My mentality. Sometimes those guys do great. I was always shocked how many people got to boot camp, and this is still days before the internet, so late 90s, that hadn't heard of SEALs yet.

And they were like, oh, I'll give that a shot. And they do great. And then you have guys like me that have been training their whole life for it. And then you have guys training their whole life for it that quit the first day type of a thing. And then you get people that find out about it in boot camp that also quit the first day. So you get everything in between as well. But it's really you're testing for that thing you can't test for other than putting people through a crucible. And throughout history, there have been these different crucibles, these different tests, really to allow men to be part of the tribe and they have to pass these things.

And today it's a Marine boot camp. It's SEAL training, Hell Week in particular. It's Robin Sage in the Q course for special forces. So what is that? Robin Sage, it's a course, it's part of the Q course for Army special forces guys, where they go into a made up country of Pineland and have to deal with a network of agents and tribes and that sort of thing, really based on counterinsurgency doctrine of the 50s and 60s and 70s. But it's a testing, a way that they test Special Forces soldiers as part of the last thing they do before they get that Green Beret.

Wow. Yeah, it's very cool. So is SEALs recognized as the most difficult path to go? Well, that's what I read when I was seven, when I went down to the library with my mom and did some research into what Seals were. That's when you first got into your head? Yep. Yeah, I saw a movie called The Frogmen, which is an old black and white film that showed

these guys coming up over the beach. I forget the guy's name, and I'll remember it as soon as we're off, but it's an actor from like the 50s. Yeah, we can find out right now. Yeah, we have Jamie. Best one-handed Googler on Earth. He's the best, but it's called The Frogman. Yeah, Richard Widmark.

Wow, look how old that looks. It's an old movie. This is from the 1950s? I think so, 51. There it is. Was it UDT back then? There was the Naval Combat Demolition Units in World War II, and I might have one of those letters slightly off. And then UDT, Under Combat Demolition Units in World War II, and I might have one of those letters slightly off, and then UDT, Underwater Demolition Teams.

Have you ever heard the Whiskey Meyers song, Frogman? I don't think so. Fuck. I can't believe I haven't heard that. Fuck. Really? It's great. I'll be listening to that shortly.

Dude, Whiskey Meyers is a shit. But look at this. I saw this. I was a remote control back in the 80s. We didn't have actual remote controls. God, look at the scuba outfits. Yeah, check that out. They're so goofy looking. Look at that. He's carrying...

They fight like men from another world. Men from another world. Texas and Missouri written all over their hearts. You're a brave man, all of you are. You wouldn't be in this outfit. Nobody questions that. But your kind of bravery comes ten cents a dozen and isn't worth a hoot more when the chips are done.

Pause that for a second. One thing is. Pause that for a second. One thing. Fantastic. You know, when people talk about the good old days, they don't make them like they used to. I'll tell you what, that doesn't apply to acting. I was a little different back then. A little bit of overacting going on. And they're all like that, too. They're all like that. Everybody. The best movie stars were terrible.

I know. What is that? I don't know, but it changed. I don't know when it exactly changed, but I think 60s it started to change a little bit. By late 60s, certainly. Then we have a period of time in the 70s where you had certain things going on. So it's interesting how each decade, kind of like with music,

has a different almost style of acting. Yes. It's really interesting. Yeah, but it's just, I wonder, what do you think it is, Jamie? What do you think, why were they bad? Have you thought about it? Maybe it's just different.

Maybe it's subjective. I think you just work off of what you heard before. So all they had heard was people acting on the radio maybe, and these are the first things that they have to grow off of, and they're like, yeah, you're not watching. I bet you just nailed it. I bet that's exactly what it is. Because you had those World War II reels, the newsreels, same thing.

If you listen to those old newsreels about the attack on Pearl Harbor or Midway, they have that same kind of tone, which is obviously different than what you had 10 years later, which is different than you had 10 years after that. Yeah. Maybe it's all connected. Who knows? But there's a lot of that going on. Like if you listen to somebody on the radio and then that's the way you act, same thing. We're figuring out the way to have Chris Pratt in the show, in the Terminalist show, break into a car.

And what usually happens in Hollywood is someone, like, they break the window of the car, and then there's these two wires that are miraculously just underneath the dash, and they just touch them, and it starts right up. And so because we wanted to root this in reality, the show, there's a part that got cut of Chris driving his Land Cruiser looking for another vehicle because he needs to get another one because the authorities know that the Land Cruiser is there. So he has to look for one that he knows how to break into. I went to a car stealing school a while back and learned all these different, what cars are easier to break into than others and that sort of thing. So we did it the exact way that you would break into that particular vehicle. So we had to find one, an older, I think it's an older pickup truck that he finds, and then

he breaks into it the way that you would, and he starts the engine the way that you would. And unfortunately, some of that got cut out in the post-production. But point being, it was written into the script as goes into the car, touches the wires under the dash. Because I think that at one point in Hollywood, they're like, we need to break into this car, let's say 1950 something. And that's what they did.

And then every other movie from then on did essentially the same thing. Yes. Do you remember that movie? There was a movie with Charlie Sheen where he was a Porsche thief. All he did is steal Porsches. Yes. And who was in it with him? Somebody was in it with him.

A guy that he'd been in a bunch of movies, but I don't know his name. And he was like an undercover cop that was like befriending Charlie Sheen. Here we go. D.B. Sweeney. That's who it was. Oh, wow. Jeez. What was the name of the movie?

No Man's Land. No Man's Land. Interesting. That's like the first movie that got me really excited about Porsches. Nice. Because Charlie Sheen called Ferraris Italian trash. All he would steal is Porsches. Nice.

And they would steal Porsches. And then the cops would try to trace them, but of course they couldn't catch them. Of course they couldn't. Because the Porsches handle so good. That's right. Going around corners and everything. And they were cool-looking Porsches. Look at those.

The 1980s. Oh, yeah. Yeah. There we go. Beautiful-looking little zippy cars. Man, I'm looking at that like a 912. I've always wanted a 912. Really?

Why? Just because it has the old engine and it's like an old Volkswagen engine. Yeah, I just kind of like that because I have that FJ40 now

also that has the original engine in it, rebuilt, but it goes about top speed about 40, 45, and there's just something about like 1968,

912, maybe that slate gray they used to have back then or the British Racing Green or something like that. Look at that. There's one. There green or something like that. Look at that. There it is. There it is.

Target top. Look at that. Sweet. So something cool like that. A little Sunday driver. Those cars are so light. It was like the affordable Porsche back then. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so I don't know. I just always had a little affinity for those because everybody knows the 911. And okay, that's wonderful, obviously. Well, it's basically the same look, right? Same look, but different engine. Yeah, big difference. Somebody makes one that's, I think they put it on a Tesla body.

Have you seen that? They dropped it. It was on, I think Jay Leno's Garage showed it, but I forget the name of the company, but they drop it on a Tesla body, so you have this thing that looks old. It looks like a 1968 Porsche 912, but it's really all Tesla'd out. Well, there is one company that makes an electric 964. I think it's a 964, and it fucking flies. But the problem is, it's, oh, look at that.

That's beautiful. Yeah. God, that's beautiful. Look at that forest gray. There it is. That forest green. It's electric right there. Yeah.

We need to reach out to those guys. That must be so fast. Yeah. Because if you take that insane engine. But the problem with it is, for sure, the problem is that it's going to be an automatic. And it's one gear. And you miss so much of the fun of one of those cars is shifting the gears. Let me hear this.

This is blasphemy. I don't hear anything. I know. This should be outlawed. They should go to jail for this. Jesus. hear anything. I know, I know. This should be outlawed. They should go to jail for this. Jesus. Yeah, it's fast, Jay Leno.

But I like that it looks so clean and old. Oh, it's beautiful. It looks like it's just right off the showroom floor in 68. And then it flies like a monocle. I wonder if they're allowed to, or able, rather, to use antilock brakes on something like that I don't know probably the whole thing is I don't know whatever they have in Tesla's I don't know my Tesla that there Well Tesla's are pretty fucking amazing. I have the the newest one which you might as well be riding a roller coaster I have the model s plaid okay. It's preposterous

What is that what is there a new ludicrous mode or is there something else? I don't know I leave it on all the time. I leave it on. It goes zero to 60 in 1.9 seconds. Dang. Really? A four-door sedan that is very sedated looking. It's very family car looking. Yeah. That thing is the fastest car I have.

Really? I have race cars. You have a lot of awesome cars. I have crazy fast cars. I have muscle cars, and I have a Porsche 911 GT3. That's crazy. That car leaves that car in the dust. Yeah. That Tesla buries them all. I know. If I had to choose one car to drive, it would be that car. That's crazy. That car leaves that car in the dust. That Tesla buries them all.

I know. If I had to choose one car to drive, it would be that car. If I could only have to reduce it down to one car, because it's so effortless. Yeah. Like when you merge on the highway, it just goes. Like all of a sudden, you're going 80 miles an hour. I know. There's something to that.

But I like that FJ40 that I have. It's four speed. But you're working it. I mean, you're in there. You can't be drinking coffee. You can't be doing anything else. You have to be. Oh, is this the guy on the Nürburgring?

Yeah. Oh, my God. Which one is this? This is what I have. This is the Model S Plaid. Oh, jeez. Dude, this is a fucking preposterously fast car. It's amazing.

That is crazy. It's so good. But, I mean, it's not designed to handle like this, but it still handles better than... I had a Model S before this, I think it's called the P100D, and that was pretty good. But this one handles a lot better. The new – the Plaid handles better. That is insane. But there's still a company called – I think it's called Unplugged.

That's going to make them even faster? Yeah. Oh, God. They customize them. I don't know if they're – see if they're doing that with the Plaid. But they make them with carbon fiber brakes, a larger brake package. They put high profile, or low profile tires

rather, that are wider. So I think they widened the fenders a bit. They upgraded the Plaid, it says. Oh, well, I know where yours is going next. Ah, Jesus Christ, they turned it into a goddamn race car. Look at that. Front splitter, holy shit. Unplugged performance, aftermarket upgrades for the Tesla Model S Plaid.

Long range and improve your car's suspension, brake system, aerodynamic capabilities, and others. We offer a range of track-oriented safety and performance upgrades, ensuring you get both your track times. Holy sons of bitches. Yeah. They're going to make my car faster. I don't need to work on my track time these days.

Look how beautiful that looks, though. Scroll down to that one right there. Look what they do. They widen the fenders. I don't need to work on my track time these days. Look how beautiful that looks though. Scroll down to the, that one right there. Look at, they do, they, they widen the fenders. I don't know if I can pull that off wheels on. What do you mean? I don't think it's me. What? I don't like that. FJ40 like the FD62. Well, you're a, you're an author and you like to fuck. I bet you use a typewriter, you son of a bitch. I have a typewriter, but it just sits behind me. I should collect them now. I collect these old typewriters and I love having them near me, but I don't use them. There's a difference. I do love, look,

I'm saying all this, but I really love old cars. I love manual transmissions. I love the gears and hearing the engine rev up and everything. I do love all that. There's something about the tactile, soulful experience. It'sful experience it's different

and you really like it because you like them that are slow I like them that are slow but then I also like a couple sleepers so the FJ-62 has the LS3 and I didn't know that there was a different version of the LS3 that's faster than the one I have so you have it it's in your Land Cruiser

but I don't know why Jonathan Ward didn't tell me that that existed. Because he never did it before mine. Well, but you had yours first. Yeah. So I was like, well, why didn't he try to upsell? I think he likes to keep things simple and functional. And I think the way Jonathan, I'm speaking for him, obviously, I think his deal was he thinks that the regular 8-cylinder is such a giant upgrade

from the 4-cylinder that comes with it. Or is it 6? That one had a 6. The 80? Yeah. Well, no, your 80 had an 8 in it, I think. Really? I think so. I think it was an all-wheel drive 8, I think, anyway. But my 6, too, had an inline 6.

Yeah, I had a 95 FJ80, and then they converted it into what is now like one of my favorite cars yeah and it's got that it's basically a supercharged corvette engine yeah yeah so i have the ls3 but i didn't know that it was an option to have something else in there so dang it's still pretty slow yeah well comparatively yes well to me that's as fast as i want to go the all all-time four-wheel drive system robs it of a lot of horsepower. So I think it has like 560 normally. Well, that's not too shabby. But it gets it down to like 360 at the wheels.

Oh, really? Somewhere around 380, something like that. Got it. I forget what he said. But it's plenty fast for that car. But what it is, man, is it's so capable. Like during the freeze last year, I was having the time of my life. Everybody was freaking out

because I have those excellent off-road tires, huge clearance, so I'm driving through snow and everything, and it just handled everything like, oh, you know what it was like? It was like the same, like I have a golden retriever, and he never gets to see snow,

but when he does get to see snow, he goes crazy it runs around circles and it dives in it rolls around his back that's what the car was doing the truck was going like yeah this is it's time to party yeah it's in its element yeah yeah rather than just perfect weather all the time on the street yes well we both love those old land cruisers like your fj62 that you have that's uh that's god that's a beautiful car. It is. Such a classic. And it's a sleeper too. It doesn't look like it from the outside,

but if you know what to look for, you do the double take, so I like that. And James Reese loves those too. James Reese loves those too. Yeah, and I think the one is coming from the show.

From the show, so it's on its way to the house, I think. I don't have it yet. Oh, they're going to give it to you? Well,

I have to purchase it, but yeah. They should give it to you. That would be nice. You fucking wrote the show. Jesus Christ. They had to rent it from somebody who they had to convince to then sell it to them to give to me or to it to you. That would be nice. You fucking wrote the show. Jesus Christ. They had to rent it from somebody.

They had to convince to then sell it to them to give to me or to sell to me. So this is the fourth book? This is book number five. Book number five. Book number five right here, the one that you're listening to, Semi-Naked in the Sauna. Yeah. Semi-Naked.

Fully clothed for the sauna. Read by Ray Porter. He's great. He is awesome. He is such a nice guy. Is he? He's a nice guy, too. Oh, such a good Porter. He's great. He is awesome. He is such a nice guy. Such a nice guy, too. Oh, such a good guy. He does a great job.

He does a great job with different accents, too. Yeah. Because he has to go one accent to the other. He's going like South African to Russian, back to American. Yep. He's doing it all. What does he sound like in real life? Gosh, he has a voice.

He has a traditionally, classically trained Shakespearean actor. So he spent, I think, 20 years up in Oregon at the Shakespeare Festival up there. He was in Almost Famous, the movie. He's been on Sons of Anarchy. He's been on a ton of different shows. Oh, wow. He played Darkseid in the new Snyder Cut of Justice League. So that's him.

That's him and his voice. But he's, yeah, now he does so much narration, but he's at the top of that pyramid as far as narrators go no he's really good because it's it's rough when like somebody recommended a book to me recently and I just started listening but the guy doing the narration just sucked mmm it just was I didn't like his voice yeah that can be a yeah that can be a detriment but Simon & Schuster sent me because I've not really an audiobook listener I'm a reader have been my whole life and so they sent me a clip of somebody who they were recommending for the first novel. And I listened to it.

I hit the button and I was like, ah, this guy sounded really old. And I was like, I don't think this is the right fit. So I wrote back and no one's bought a single book yet. No one even knows who I am. I'm not coming from politics, not coming from sports. I have no social media presence, zero. And I wrote back and I said, uh, can I pick somebody else? This guy didn't sound right. And they said, yeah. And I said, well, how much time do I have no social media presence, zero. And I wrote back and I said, can I pick somebody else?

This guy didn't sound right. And they said, yeah. And I said, well, how much time do I have? And they're like, oh, end of business today. And I'm like, look at my watch in Utah. And I'm like, I know how seriously they take their weekends in publishing in New York. And I'm like, oh geez.

So I just start listening to samples and then I found Ray Porter. And then I started listening to the more of those samples on Audible of things that he'd done. And I said, this is the guy. I had no idea that he was like the top narrator in the country, in the world. And so I sent it to Simon & Schuster and said, hey, how about this guy? And they said, well, we can ask him. And then he said, yes.

Oh, that's nice. And he brought a whole fan base to it. I didn't realize people follow narrators from project to project now. Oh, that's interesting. It makes sense because he's really good. It makes sense that you would assume that if he's also attached to a project that it would have to be a good project. Yep, yep.

Did he get a chance to read it before? Did you just send a few chapters? Like, how did he? I don't know how they did that. They must have sent, I think he just said yes.

I think he just looked at the bio and was like, oh, that would be, I think he just did it to be a nice guy. Oh, wow. And then he ended up being great friends

and the first one was up for Audiobook of the Year next to Stephen King and Ruth Ware. And we went to New York in front of the Tuxes for the the audibles, which is like the Academy Awards of the audible industry. Now, when you have a movie or a film version of these books, these books starring this this gentleman that you've created, this James Reese guy. These books are insanely violent. Like there are wild moments in this book where I'm like,

ooh, when I first found out that you guys were going to do an Amazon series, I was like, how are they going to show this? Like and how much are they going to show and how much are you going to leave to the imagination? Right. Because in the book, it's super graphic. There's some graphic shit. Yeah, yeah. So. Because in the book, it's super graphic. There's some graphic shit. Yeah, yeah.

So that was, I mean, it's an issue. But it was so interesting to see it come to life and to see the Amazon make their notes because you do these scripts and they get approved. And then it's like planning something in a boardroom or planning something in a mission planning space in the military where it's air conditioned and you're talking through things and you're looking at the maps and you're saying,

okay, we're going to put a blocking force here. We'll have the predator over here. The AC-130 is on station for this amount of time. And you plan it out perfectly. And then you leave the gate to the base in Iraq and Afghanistan and you get out there and then things change for whatever reason, maybe you hit an IED or you get out there and you're like, wait a second, that mountain, even though it looks a little higher and me. OK, this isn't exactly how we thought it was going to be. Same thing with the scripts in that you get out there to start filming and you're on set or you're in an area location and you look around and you're like, oh, this is not working with how we envisioned this. And you have to morph it on the fly right there.

And then the actors bring something to it, too. Like Chris Pratt brings something to the character. Jean Triplehorn is amazing. She brings something to it too. Like Chris Pratt brings something to the character. Jean Triplehorn is amazing. She brings something to it. They all bring these different elements that affect episode two, three, four, five, six, seven. So it snowballs and morphs for other episodes and affects those down the line. So you have to edit as you go. So things change throughout the whole process. But Amazon, every change, you have to send it up the chain, just like in the military. It goes up to the top and then it comes back down. Does it go up to Bezos?

I don't think so. It should. Bezos looks like he's jacked lately. I think he's all hopped up on testosterone. I think he might have proved some radical shit now. He's possible. Did you get a hold of him? Give him a shot of whiskey?

It should, yeah. Come on, Jeff. Let's make some fucking history. Give this a thumbs up, buddy. Yeah. Yeah. So it comes back down with their notes. And there were some concerns there about the violence, for sure.

Yeah, but they had to have read the book. Yeah. Well, I don't know how that works up there at those levels. But I'm still shocked about a few things. But they came down on the right side of it every single time. Really? Yeah. So there's a couple scenes in there.

And people who have read the first book in particular will know the ones that we're talking about. But the comment that I got the most when I said that this book is being turned into a film or to a series, people would say, oh, they're never Amazon's never going to let this be shown or hope they leave this scene in. Like those are the two things that I got. And Amazon left this in. They had concerns about this one very graphic scene and it's in there. And now it's like one of the iconic scenes of the show wow and it's in there and like all the average it's going to be in the advertising and all the rest of it when that hits here shortly um but uh but yeah they left it and they came down on the right side of everything we wanted every single time which is a little bit shocking because you hear about uh hey

they're only making things for people in la and new york and forgetting about the country in between that really has this hunger for uh for a good content that's not just flooded with all these things that might not necessarily connect with a lot of the people in the middle of the country. And they kept it all in. The middle of the country. How weird is that? Isn't it? Yeah.

How is that real? Like, what's going on? Like, the whole, like, this idea that, like, there's parts of the country that are so different than other parts of the country. It's almost like we have different countries wrapped. I mean, it's almost like Europe, right, where there's different parts of Europe. You travel a little bit, and you're in a place that speaks a totally different language. Yeah. But this, like, idea that the middle of the country is different than the edges of the country is very strange.

Yeah, yeah. You know, it's more a, you more a figurative way of putting it, but it's really talking about, the first person that takes advantage of making content and having production levels at such a high level that isn't infused with all these things that people are kinda tired of, that person's gonna do well.

I like how you're dancing around what it is, the woke shit. The woke shit. Yeah, the woke shit. I wonder how long that's gonna gonna do well. I like how you're dancing around what it is, the woke shit. The woke shit. Yeah, the woke shit. I wonder how long that's gonna keep going for. Cause it doesn't seem like it's abating. It seems like what's happening is the pushback against it is getting more loud and people getting more angry

that it's being shoved down their throats. But it doesn't seem to be stopping the amount of woke stuff that's being put out, so it's interesting. It is. And there's definitely an opportunity there for somebody who wants to buy a bunch of sound stages, maybe in Atlanta, and bring in people that can create things with this super high production and make movies just the kind that we like to see without all this other political stuff in there.

Isn't Daily Wire doing that? I don't know. They're trying to do right-wing versions of things. They hired Gina Carano right after she got fired from the Mandalorian for, I mean, essentially she was just talking about how we, there's like a tendency in human beings to, uh, to, to think of other people that think differently than you as being others. They're're not us they're others and you know she equated it to the holocaust yeah which is like as soon as you do that people like

oh boy don't fucking compare anything to the holocaust and then they fired her but i don't think that what she said was outrageous or egregious or awful i think she was just trying to say that this political divide in this country that separates people and so polarizing is unhealthy. And there's a natural tribal instinct that people have to look at people from other tribes as being the enemy and that we were doing this in this country. But she unfortunately compared it to the Holocaust and they just fired her. So the Daily Wire immediately hired her after that and then they just did a Western that looks wild. They were, they showed the trailer for it

at the last UFC. Nice. And I was like, oh my God, it's a Donald Cowboy Cerrone's in it. Yeah, I saw them filming that. It looks wild. It looks wild. Like I don't know if it's good.

I haven't seen it, but man, the trailer looks sick. I'm gonna check that out for sure. I think Gina's, I think she's coming to the SIG Hunter Games this year. I'm maybe not supposed to say that. But last year I was there with Bullet Valentina. And so we were out there. She's awesome. She is so great.

And we were partners in this. We were sniper partners in this long-range shooting competition. Me, her, and then an elk guide from Oregon. And so we went through. We got second place. She has some serious gun skills. She does. She's down in Brazil.

She was saying that she did IDPA stuff down there, so mostly handgun stuff. But when I met her, we went up to Oregon, and we got to the range. And I hadn't met her yet, but I see her, and she is focused. She's on the range, and she is, like, learning. And she is, like, you can just tell that it is different than the other people who were on the range getting used to their rifles. And she is just, I mean, she is so focused on there. Nothing else was coming in. And then she got up and totally switched off and was like, oh, hey, nice to meet you.

Hey, we're going to be partners. And she was so fantastic. And she, I mean, it was a long course. You had 12 different stations and you're shooting, I think, four different targets, three times each. And you have to find them, shoot them. You have time limits and all that. But you're packing through this high country in Wyoming. And, yeah, it was a put-out evolution.

She's a scary lady. Well, yeah, in the ring. But as we're just getting to know each other and hanging out around the campfire, she was so nice. Oh, she's wonderful. I mean, she's been on my podcast. She's a wonderful lady. But, I mean, she's scary in her competence and her abilities and her focus and her intensity crushed it out there she crushed it but it was so cool to get second place and interesting we

we beat a bunch of other people uh that had some military background and stuff like that but the people that beat us it was like a bass fisherman and like a bmx racer like they and they were way in front of us like they really beat us. But it was still cool to get second because I've been doing a lot more typing recently than I've been doing shooting. She's an avid shooter. She's so good. Yeah, she went a lot.

Oftentimes when she's in camp, when she goes to places, like she'll show up at a range, a local range, and get some practicing in. I think it, like, helps relax her and calms her down. But the people that I've talked to that have seen her shoot go, man, she's really skilled. Oh yeah.

She is focused. So yeah, we had a great time together. I think she's going back this year. I couldn't, we have to do some filming stuff for, for Amazon here for some like behind the scenes interview stuff that week. But,

but it's a, that's a great event out there. Sig really puts it on. The cowboy was there too. So we got to hang out there and, and, and we talking about the, the thing he was going to do with Gina and it was just,

it's just super cool. But going back to the Hollywood side of the house, it's not necessarily I don't think that someone needs to take advantage of there being a gap and go totally right wing. It's just make a movie without, just make a good movie. Right. Don't make a movie and try to force things down people's throats. Just make a good fiction movie. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, in the 80s, we go back. I'm trying to think there were some, I'm sure there were some with political bents, and, you know, that's fine. But there were some great films, some great 80s action movies that didn't have, weren't infused with things from either side. It was just fun to sit down and experience.

Right. And then you could look up to those characters, too. Like Rocky films, obviously, starting in the 70s, but continuing to go on today. I mean, those were so influential for an entire generation. And what a great message. I mean, underdog, you know, getting the shot, putting in the work, getting knocked down.

You know, it's just so many great things. I mean, they're like mentors without having an actual mentor. Well, that's a movie that was written by Stallone. And, you know, they wanted other people to play him. Oh, yeah. And he held on. And he said no. So he held in there and became an it became an iconic character such a great

story such a great story how all that all that came about and we didn't let anybody do it and it was just them obviously it changed the course of his life did you bring the James Reese books to someone else first or did you just go straight to Amazon and how did you know where to be because I would imagine with this particular character and these particular adventures that he goes on they're so intense and it's so deeply connected to your past as a seal that it has to be very personal and you you can't like if someone tried to inject woke ism into the James Reese books you'd be like oh Jesus Christ What are you doing? You can't do that? Yeah, and I didn't know how it was gonna be when I got to New York publishing

You know not nor known for for being a bastion of conservatism, but it seems like at least in fictional books you're allowed to You know because it's it's not you can't take it out as a clip and put it out there for people to get angry at. It's, you have to read. You have to put in the work. And it's also, it's like you're taking into consideration the fact that there's good characters and bad characters and you have to show the evil side of man.

You have to show the character and good nature. There's so much going on there that you can't monkey with that too much. Yeah, no, I've had complete creative control. That was the, because I didn't know. I didn't have any touch points with publishing or with Hollywood before this. And I was kind of wondering when I first started down this path

and Simon & Schuster first read it, I was wondering, hey, are they going to say, hey, lighten up on the Second Amendment stuff? Or hey, do you really have to talk about the freedom so much as your character have to have these opinions? And they never even mentioned that, have never even hinted at having to do that so i've had complete creative control the entire time what kind of notes did they give you because almost zero other than um and i think a lot of that has to do with this podcast because i heard steven pressfield on this podcast and i misinterpreted something that he said he was

talking about a playwright that used to write a sentence or two that would keep him on theme for a play. And in my mind, somehow that translated into Steven Pressfield used a yellow sticky note and put one word on it, and that kept him on theme for his books. And so I wrote Revenge and had that on a yellow sticky, and that just kept me on theme, whether it was directly or indirectly, more importantly, tied to that theme. So I think by the time it got to New York and they read it, I had stayed on theme that their only content edits from Emily Bessler at Emily Bessler Books, who is just amazing. She's the only person I wanted to be my publisher editor because I saw

her thanked in the back and the acknowledgement section of Brad Thor's books and Vince Flynn's books. So I just decided as I was writing and had no connections anywhere to decide that she would be my publisher and editor. And then she ended up being my publisher and editor. But she said, hey, would you really do this here? Would you really say this here? And one other thing that I can't remember.

So those are like the three notes and that's it. Wow. So I've had complete creative control there. It's been amazing the whole journey. But then the Hollywood side of the house is I got a call from my friend Jared Shaw a few months before the book came out. And he was a SEAL with me and I hadn't talked to him in five years. And he calls me and he says, hey, man, do you remember me? And I did.

And he said, do you remember what you did for me in the SEAL teams? And I did not. And he said, all right, you sat me down in your office. You're the only person that talked to me about getting out of the military. You introduced me to people in the private sector. You're the only person that cared to do that. And I've always wanted to thank you. And I said, no problem, man. How's it going? And he said, it's going great, but I heard you have a book coming out. And I said, yeah, it's coming out in a few months. I can give you a galley copy, which is like a rough draft. And he said, I'd like that, but I'd like to give it to a friend of mine. And

I'm like, no problem. Who's that? And he said, Chris Pratt. So, and Chris Pratt was the person that I thought of playing the role as I was typing. So as I started, it's just as a child of the 80s, it's very natural to think of some Hollywood star that's going to bring your story to life. And I thought of Chris Pratt because he had done nothing like this before. He'd, most of the things had been,

it was only really Guardians, not even Guardians of the Galaxy, not Avengers, not Jurassic World yet. It was only Andy Dwyer on Parks and Rec. Really? And then he played as Seal in Zero Dark Thirty. So I saw the transformation from Andy Dwyer to Seal, and I thought, this is the guy. He's inherently likable.

I just have this connection with him already. I don't know how, but this is the guy that's going to do it. And so for Jared be to be best friends with chris to give him the book and then chris read it in the last week of december of 2017 called the next week and wanted to option it wow fate is a weird thing because everybody wants to poo-poo fate you know yeah and it's uh me too i poo-poo it it's i'm like come on it's just random events but sometimes I wonder sometimes I wonder if stuff was like meant to be like sometimes I wonder that if you write something

and put it out there and you really focus and really dedicate yourself to creating the best work that you can like you have done with your books that it'll attract the right person to play the role if it ever becomes a theatrical representation of it. It's crazy. And then as I was writing it also, without any sort of touch points with Hollywood or New York, I thought of Antoine Fuqua directing. Oh, wow.

And he got it at the same time Chris did through another buddy. He gave it to Antoine. He wanted it. I forgot he was directing it. That's so awesome. He is so fantastic. I can't even, like before this, before I knew him, I thought, Oh, amazing director. That was my, what has he done? What are the, so it was training day with Denzel Washington. That's the one he did replacement

killers before that, uh, training day with Denzel Washington, which obviously is incredible. Incredible. Um, and then he did tears of the sun. He's done magnificent seven equalizer shooter, uh, which is based on Stephen Hunter's book point of impact and I just love everything that he's done but now that I know him now he is much more than a great director I mean he is a visionary and he is he did Southpaw too huh? He is such a great person that's the best like

just salt of the earth amazing guy could not be in better hands because when you give something like this to someone you there's a lot of trust involved because they can butcher it uh sure and for for antoine and for chris and now we're all three executive producers on this so chris antoine called chris and was like hey i know we both have this thing but uh let's just partner up and do it together and chris was like let's do it wow and so um so yeah for them they wanted this series to be rooted

in the dark gritty primal violent nature of the novel so any changes had to be rooted in the dark, gritty, primal, violent nature of the novel. So any changes had to be rooted in that foundation. And then David DiGilio, who's the showrunner, who is like, there's eight parts to this. So there's multiple directors. Antoine is the first director. And then he stayed involved in doing all the editing throughout. So there he is. There we are right there. Look at that.

Look at that. Yep. And look at this. And most of these guys are SEALs. There's a Marine in the back there somewhere with the dog. Yep. Right there. Yep.

Call of Duty Rex right there. Jared Shaw on the left. That's my buddy who gave it. Patrick Schwarzenegger is right behind me right there. So I think the only two non-military are Chris Pratt in the middle and Patrick Schwarzenegger right there. Wait, Patrick Schwarzenegger, like Arnold Schwarzenegger's son? Yep.

Right there. Shut the fuck up. The axe now? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. He's great. And he was so awesome., he's great. Wow. And he was so awesome.

He was so great in this. All these guys are. So I serve the guy to Chris's left right there. That's Ryan Sangster, and he does some stunt doubling on SEAL Team CBS and just another great guy. We were in Iraq together. Kenny Sheard right behind him right there. He writes in Hollywood now, writes for SEAL Team CBS.

But all these guys are just fantastic, And obviously me and Antoine right there. into these sort of stories of similar things to what they've experienced, that they realize this is kind of a path out, once you've retired from the SEALs, or you've decided that you've done your time to pursue other things in life, that sort of using those life experiences to create these realistic interpretations,

realistic versions of that. Is that like a new sort of pathway now? I don't know. I think it's more, hey, identifying that passion. So mine happened to be writing. I happen to know that this is exactly what I wanted to do, but it's not what everybody wants to do. But being able to listen to the call.

So my call was to service in the military and then to write these thrillers. I listened to the call, both of those. But a lot of people don't listen to that call or they get discouraged or something along the way. But for people to, what I hope anyway, is that if anybody takes anything from this journey, um, whether it's the military or transitioning from anything in life, whether it's the job transition, death of a loved one, divorce, it can be any sort of transition in life is identifying that passion and figuring out your

mission and putting those two together to give you purpose going forward. So if there's anything that people can take from this or from my journey, that's it, I think. But there's a lot of SEALs and Army Rangers. Max Adams is Army Ranger. So Max Adams, Army Ranger, wrote on the show. Jared Shaw was there every day. And Raymond Doza, who has War Office Productions, those three guys, military, were on set every single day with the actors, with the showrunner, with the directors.

And without them, this would be a very different show. But they were there every single day and they were so invested because we're all so close. And I went out there like five times for a week each. And so I got to be there intermittently, but they were there every single day and that we're so close. They wanted to do such a good job with it. So I'm so indebted to those guys for being there and for David Agilio, the showrunner, for trusting us, for trusting them with every single decision that came down to tactics or reality and authenticity. There's no product placement in this. No one paid. What I think is unusual. No company's paid for product placement because- That's unusual? I think so. I think they usually have like a, you know, if you pick something up like, hey, Coca-Cola. Yeah, exactly. So I think that's usually some sort of a deal in there,

but nothing like that for this. It was all based on the gear that we actually use, gear that I talk about in the books, things that are so personal to me, other seals, other operators. So all that stuff is in there because I think Amazon realized how important that was to that fan base and how it would just take somebody out of it. If you're a police officer or a first responder or military and you're like, we'd never do that. I'd never carry that thing. I'd never wear that. It just takes you out of it for a little bit. So there's none of, no company could pay for product placement in this. It was all- Was that a decision that was made before the film was started, before the filming rather started?

Yeah, I think it was. The showrunner knew how important that was, and Antoine and Chris were just all about authenticity and all about veterans watching this and not being taken out of it by rolling their eyes and saying, oh, Hollywood screwed it up again, even though it's fiction. When things like that happen, when there are product placements in a show,

is that initiated by the producers of the show, the network? Is it initiated by the right? I mean, are they trying to generate income to offset the cost of the production? Probably. I have no idea because it wasn't a part of the show. So from the beginning, you decided no commercial? Yeah. I think that was, I'm guessing it was David DiGilio and the senior executives at Amazon, I'm guessing.

But they just knew how important it was. And I mean, I think it's very unusual. So I couldn't be more thrilled with how this turned out. It was such a good team. And how did you guys wind up at Amazon? Well, Chris, so in December of 2019, Chris and Antoine linked me up with the showrunner, David DiGiglio. And usually they like to get rid of the author right away because the author could be on set saying, you ruined my vision. It just becomes an issue. So they usually like to get rid of the author. But Chris and

Antoine wanted me involved. So they connected me with the showrunner the first week that he got hired. And we kind of felt each other out, him really feeling me out and seeing if I'm going to just be a pain this whole time. And we hit it off right away. And we've talked every day since to include this morning. And we wrote, well, he wrote the pilot episode and I was just learning. And he really mentored me along, taught me about screenwriting. And I got to advise on that pilot episode, advise on all the scripts, but primarily that pilot episode we worked together on. But then he took it with Chris and Antoine, and they shopped it around and went to Netflix and Amazon

and Showtime and HBO and Hulu and Apple, and it got into some sort of a bidding war at some point, and Amazon ended up with it. Wow. So they wanted it the most, which is perfect. Nice. Wow, that's amazing. I think they're the best place for it anyway

because it's like they have some great shows, and they're kind of under the radar and they have Reacher now Which they did a boy the difference between the Reacher from the Tom Cruise books and this guy this guy is perfect Yeah, what is his name? He's a big boy. I forget his name. I bet I forget his name He's doing a great job. I need to test that guy immediately Check his pee. Yeah. Yeah, but he does a great job. He's perfect. Yeah perfect for that role Yeah, Amazon. I mean they were so great. I can't say enough. That- Jesus Christ Yeah Alan Richson

Richson and he seems like such a good guy. I've seen some interviews with him. Yeah, he seems like such a nice guy Yeah, seems like a sweetheart, but man, he he's fucking, that's the perfect guy for that role. I think so. Because that was the big complaint about, I never read the Reacher books. Yeah, Lee Child. Yeah, the complaint was that the Jack Reacher in the books is this hulking man. Yeah. And Tom Cruise is basically my size.

Yeah. And everybody's like, hey, this is not. Yeah, except not as yoked maybe. Yeah, that's even worse. At least you can believe a short yoked guy can fuck people up. But Tom Cruise is just out there. Yeah, the fans... That guy looks like the guy in the books.

I don't know. It's making me feel inadequate. We're going to have to change that. A little bit. I feel a little bit. Go back to that 1951 show, that 1951 series. Yeah, back when guys barely did push-ups. Exactly.

You had what you had. That was it. That was it. But yeah, I heard Lee Child in an interview once because the fan base of the books was a little upset with tom cruise getting that getting that role um but i heard lee child say something and and he's such an amazing guy lee child has been so nice to me um but he said hey there are worse things in the world than having tom cruise yeah you're you're a hero from your novels like well he's pulled it off before when people complained like lestat when he played in Interview with the Vampire.

Anne Rice's book had this very intense, brooding, romantic, evil character who was the vampire. And they were like, Tom Cruise. People were like, the fucking risky business guy? No. Maverick? Yeah. No! And that one's coming out, too.

So Maverick? Yeah. No! And that one's coming out too, so Maverick's coming out soon. I saw, as I got here last night, it was playing on the big screen when I got off the plane in Austin Airport, and so that's coming out. That's Skydance. David Ellison does that one, so it's going to be, I can't wait to see that. In interview with the vampire, though, he fucking nailed it. I mean, Tom Cruise is weird as he is. He's a very weird guy, but I think you have to be weird to be that good.

Maybe. And maybe we have that level of stardom, too. It's tough. I mean, I don't know. Well, from the time he was a teenager. All whole life. You know, he was in that Outsiders with Johnny Depp. So great.

Those pictures are so fantastic. Those old ones from that. Yeah. Wild. The book is great, too. For people who haven't read the book, Outsiders, and Rumblefish also. But that whole crew back then, when you see those pictures of them from the early 80s, it's fantastic. And then Taps, and he's

done an amazing job. Those people who have staying power in Hollywood over decades, because if you look at a lot of actors' careers, it's like a 10-year period where they have this success, and then they do things still, but maybe not at that level they had for this 10-year period. Well, he's 60 years old, and he's still

in great shape, and he still looks really good. He looks like he's 40. There's a couple guys out there that look very similar to they did 30 years ago. He's one of them. Who else? I don't know.

Who else? Rob Lowe looks pretty. Yeah, he looks great. He looks great. Some of those guys. Tom Cruise keeps it up better than anybody. I don't know what he's doing. He's doing some weird Scientology shit. They got some fucking- Made some sort of a deal. Maybe they got

hyperbaric chambers he sleeps in or something. Yeah. Maybe he did some sort of a deal. I don't know. I don't think so. I don't think Scientologists believe in the devil. Well, I don't know. I don't know. He's doing all right though. He's doing all right. But yeah, he crushes everything. He does his own stunts. Yeah. He still does all his own stunts. He does everything, including flies, helicopters. It's amazing. Yeah. I mean, what his own stunts. He does everything, including flies helicopters. It's amazing. Yeah, I mean, what film was it? One of the Mission Impossible films?

He learned how to fly helicopters so that he could do one of these scenes because you can't fake it. Who does that? So he's literally cutting through these canyons in a fucking helicopter that he's piloting. That's wild. Wild! Remember Patrick Swayze jumping out of planes for Point Break? Oh, yeah. Like it was a big thing back then.

Yeah. What if you burn in? We invested all this money and he would go out and do it on his own anyway. What a great... I love that movie. I'm sure you've seen the Tom Cruise Mission Impossible when he jumps between buildings and shatters his ankle and

keeps the scene going. Hits the wall, jumps off, and clearly he's got a broken ankle and he's running away. Yeah, that happened on the set of The Terminalist with Taylor kitch who was uh friday night lights for like all my wife's friends are like taylor kitch oh my god he's uh he's in uh he looks like yeah pull up uh taylor kitch so girls like him huh so what you're saying yeah yeah they really do thank you more than that other guy that adam richson guy uh i don't know they'd be i'm gonna say no there we go right oh he's a handsome fellow too. Yeah. So he got hurt?

Well, yeah. But he pushed through. I mean, tough. You know, people think that a lot of times Hollywood, oh, you're going to, you know, they're going to baby you around. But he got in this one scene, this gunfight that he's in with Chris, he came off these steps and tripped on something that wasn't supposed to be there. And you can tell, like you can see that he's hurt.

Not just like, oh, I rolled my ankle a little bit. Like it was serious. And he got up and just did it. And then we did more takes. Wow. Yeah, super tough. He was so devoted. And he worked that shotgun.

Ray Mendoza was out there with him working the shotgun. So when you see him work the shotgun in the film, it's him really working the shotgun. And they'd spent weekend time off, you know, I don't know if they're supposed to be doing that or whatever, but they were out there training on that thing in the desert and uh and it shows it's amazing how hard it is to look competent when you're shooting guns especially camera angles and that can mess mess things up and there's a lot so my one of my takeaways from this whole

experience was how how easy it is for productions to go off the rail when it comes like it's a shock that anything gets made in hollywood and, anything good gets made because you have so many people involved. There are so many opportunities to jack these things up. You really have to have this core group that is invested, and that was Chris Pratt. That was Antoine Fuqua. That was David DiGiglio. It was this core group of us, and they were so invested in it. They weren't going to get distracted by anything else and not pay attention to any part of this production.

They were in it, and they made sure that it didn't go off the rails and having those seals there and Max Adams, Army Ranger there each and every day like that kept this thing on the rails. But I can see, I was always forgiving when I saw things in movies, like someone's thumbs in aren't in the right position on that pistol or finger on the trigger type of a thing. Very forgiving. But now I'm even more forgiving because I see just how easy it is to mess these things up. And even if you film something and you're like,

oh, let's do it again. Well, in post-production, someone that doesn't know weapons might be like, oh, let's just use this one. It looks way better. But it's the one where something was on backwards

because they gave it to the actor or whatever else. But yeah, I think we accomplished what we set out to do to keep this thing rooted in authenticity. And that's because of Antoine and Chris and David DiGilio. So when all those got...

Does Antoine have any military experience or any... His first touchpoint with the military that really stands out to him is working with Bruce Willis in Tears of the Sun. And it was a SEAL-centric movie, and they had advisors on set and they had SEALs there. That's typically with Vietnam type of tactics, because that's what we had really up until September 11th was Vietnam tactics, because we hadn't been in sustained combat operations since Vietnam. We had flashpoints in like Mogadishu and Desert One and Panama and Grenada, but those were flashpoints.

That wasn't sustained combat operations. And now, obviously, we have 20 years of that. But the tactics in that movie were Vietnam era tactics, which were what I came into the SEAL teams and what we were doing. And he had this experience with SEALs and he was like, wow, these guys are just saying, yes, let me move that. Let me move that barrier. What do we need done? Let's do it. Instead of having to like ask somebody and worry about unions and all the rest, who's allowed to do what? And these guys just got it done. So after that, Antoine was like, wow, these guys, there's something a little different about these guys.

And he's been a supporter of the military. He's probably a military supporter before that, but that was his real experience, getting to know team guys, getting to know SEALs. When you're saying Vietnam era tactics, what's the difference? So it was in the jungle. And so what we would, if you can, if you watch that movie in particular, I'm sure there's some other ones out there. But the way that you would move in the jungle and just lay down suppressive fire and having two elements leapfrogging back or to get out of that contact, it was just a little different that you could take that. And what we did for training after Vietnam was we take those tactics and we dropped them into an urban environment in training, or we dropped them into a mountain environment in training. And then after September 11th, we got to over 10,000 feet

in Afghanistan and realized, hey, some things are a little different here. Like the enemy is going to be shooting. There's not all this jungle around. They're going to shoot at the muzzle flash. And what we have initially out of the gate, we had M4s with suppressors, but the automatic weapons didn't have suppressors yet. And so where does that mean the enemy fire goes? To those guys on the automatic weapons. So the suppressor hides the muzzle fire? Yeah.

So does the muzzle fire go off inside the suppressor? Is that what happens? Yeah, it just masks it. Right. Yeah. And so you can just see that AW just light it up. And so that's where the enemy fire went. so after that we realized hey how important it is to to suppress that muzzle flash on the automatic weapon as well so just the little things like that shifted and changed a

little bit do they develop body armor that sort of a thing do they develop the tactics like how do they do do they sit down like say if you're going to take Vietnam era jungle tactics and apply them to Afghanistan at 10,000 feet is this something that they sit down discuss with people like how do they or do they just work it in the field like how do they do that yeah those guys are adapting in the field right away and then they're getting back and they're doing a hot wash right away what went right what went wrong how we can do it next better next time and then they put together an actor after action review and AAR and then send that out to the force. So you're going to be back in Coronado, California, Virginia Beach, Virginia, and read this and say, oh, geez, okay, we need to adapt this, this, this, and this.

Let's get to work. What do the next guys going downrange need? Or what do the guys downrange need right now, whether it's suppressors, whether it's the next generation of night vision or whatever it is? Now we have to start adapting. Hey, in training here, we've been training for a number of years just to rush into a building doing hostage rescue techniques when there might not be a hostage inside. When we might just be going into somebody's house to grab them out of their bed in the middle of the night, let's say in Ramadi in Iraq, and then grab them and take them back for questioning and then go do it again. Well, there's no hostage in there. Maybe we should do this a

little differently. And so we started adapting tactics around that. So do you do this in training? Do you adapt it in training? Yep. Then it comes back into training. And then the enemy's adapting too. So they're noticing what you're doing and they're adapting. So warfare is this constant, I mean, not really, I hate using the word game, but it's a game of adaptation, constant adaptation. So you can't just say, oh, now we're in the mountains or now we're in the urban environment. This is what we're going to do. Well, guess what? The enemy is taking notes as well. Is it one of those situations though, sometimes where there's an impediment to success in that when you do have situations go sideways, people are reluctant to take the blame. So maybe they don't describe what happened as accurately as possible. Sort of like if you're going to do something in Hollywood,

you have so many people involved, it's very difficult to get what you really want out of it because everybody wants to have their say, everybody wants to kind of manipulate things. Is that the case in warfare where if a mission goes sideways, maybe you want to blame it on the operators and maybe you want to blame it on the operators, and maybe someone wants to blame it on the plan initially. How do they hash that out and figure out what's the right way or wrong way to handle something?

Right. So I'm sure that some of that went on. I just, that was not my experience. My experience was when someone failed in the field, they wanted to pass those lessons along to the force because it makes us a stronger force as a whole, makes stronger country as a whole if we pass those lessons on. So it's so important to pass those failures on as well as the successes, what's working, what's not working. And that means you got to, yeah, that ego has to be subverted and you have to share those failures. Like Jocko says, extreme ownership.

That's it. You take ownership of it. I'm sure there are instances here and there of something going sideways. And I mean, I'm sure that exists. It's just human nature maybe to cover up something you did wrong. I don't know. But that wasn't my experience. I saw everybody really being completely honest. We get back, hey, I did this wrong. I screwed this up. And this is how we're going to change it for next time. Like just owning it right away to make us all a better. And it increases trust both up and down the chain of command. So you're telling your senior leaders, hey, we messed this up. And the guys up and down the chain of command so you're telling your senior leaders hey we messed this up and the guys below you in the chain of command a lot of my leaders want us all to be stronger next time so this doesn't happen again um so if you don't do that it can really erode that trust so it's so important to be honest especially about the

failures one of the reasons i'm bringing this up is one of the recurring themes in your books with james reese is these people that are, they're in the military, but they're either corrupt or they're egomaniacs or they're pencil pushers who, because of their whatever, whatever's going on, whether it's corruption or whatever's happening, they'll come up with ideas that benefit them and put the soldiers lives in danger. And it seems like that's a kind of a recurring theme that there's people that you have to listen to that are assholes. Oh, yeah. And I get a lot of that from real world. Certainly our senior level generals and politicians are giving me a lot to work with when it comes to that side of the house. I mean, just look at Afghanistan.

We had 20 years to prepare to leave Afghanistan. And the best we could do is what we saw last August. And you didn't need a background in the military. You didn't need to read a book on military history, on strategy, on tactics. You could just apply common sense to that problem set. And that's what Karl von Clausewitz, who wrote On War, he described as the most important attribute of a battlefield leader is common sense to that problem set. And that's what Karl von Clausewitz, who wrote On War, he described as the most important attribute of a battlefield leader is common sense. George Marshall, the same thing. He fired so many people to get to those generals we all know today who won

World War II. They didn't start in those positions. So they made it to those positions because the person before them didn't measure up. And George Marshall, who we know for the Marshall Plan after World War II primarily, but what was really important is the people that he fired in the lead up to World War II that he held accountable and during World War II that could not perform. And so he gave them a chance, gave them a second chance, boom, they were gone. Someone else moved in and they didn't fail forward either. They were gone. And that made us a stronger military, put those people in place that we all know today. And then something shifted after World War II. And I don't know what it is, but there's a lack of accountability that got attached to senior level

leadership. And we've seen that time and time again. We had 20 years in Afghanistan. There's a great book called The Afghanistan Papers by Craig Whitlock. And there were these interviews that were done with these senior level generals leaving Afghanistan in particular. And they thought that these interviews and questions were going to remain classified. There were Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, two of them, that got these released. And he juxtaposes what they said in these private classified interviews with what they were saying to Congress, the American people, their troops, and their 180 out from one another. And if you go back and look at testimony to Congress, you can take the person's name off there, take the date off there, and they say essentially the

same things. The Afghan military, we're making progress. All we need is we're meeting our milestones, just need more resources, more funding, more troops, whatever it is they're asking for, for 20 years, the same things. And the one guy, I think it was in 2009, people can go back and check me, the guy that said one thing that wasn't a party line, and he didn't say anything bad. He said something along the lines of, things aren't going as well in Afghanistan as we think they are. He was removed a couple months later, the only person held accountable over that 20-year period. And then we get to Afghanistan, and look what we have.

That's why anybody can look at the situation and say, why are we giving up this tactically advantageous position at Bagram? And we're putting America's sons and daughters in a tactically disadvantageous position at this airfield in Kabul. And then what do we have? We have 13 Americans dead, numerous others with traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress, missing arms, legs, in wheelchairs. numerous others with traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress, missing arms, legs, in wheelchairs. There's a Marine female who is in a wheelchair now. And a friend of mine at Rescue 22 Foundation have trained up a dog for her. She's an inspiration, just incredible. But why was she there? Why did we give up Bagram? And you don't need a military background to look at that situation and say, hey, if we're leaving, why don't we leave from this position that's tactically advantageous? And a lot of that falls on politicians. But still,

we have senior level military leaders for a reason. And their responsibility is to the troops. And I don't know why none of them have been held accountable over this last 20 years, particularly for Afghanistan, for that debacle and the way we left that country. 20 years to prepare. You didn't have to go back to the Soviets 20 years to prepare. You didn't have to go back to the Soviets in 79, 89. You didn't have to go back to three British incursions in the 1800s and early 1900s. Certainly didn't need to go back to Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great to pull out certain lessons. We fell prey, I think, to imperial hubris. And we thought that we could do this. And we took the wrong lessons from the Soviet experience. What we needed to do in 2001 is flood that country and flood Tora Bora in particular.

We had 100 special operators, CIA guys, on the ground in Tora Bora. That's where bin Laden was. They asked for rangers. They asked for Marines. They asked for 10th Mountain Division. Those requests were denied, and bin Laden escaped. And that moment right there, more than any other moment, really defined the next 20 years. Now, when you say they requested all these people and those requests were denied,

was there a reason given as to why those requests were denied? I don't know if there's a reason, but in looking back at it, it is that the senior level leaders didn't want that Soviet experience, which we eventually had. They wanted to keep the troop levels to a minimum and do the job with a minimum amount of people on the ground. And, of course, after that, we ballooned way past what their initial—we had more people, I think, at the Salt Lake City Olympics than we had in Afghanistan, which is crazy to think about. But hey, lessons learned. And what I would hope is that we take those lessons and apply them going forward as wisdom. And we neglect to do that in this country. We think of things in terms of four-year election cycles, eight-year election cycles

for the real deep thinkers among us. But what we owe those people who sacrifice their lives, and it's not just their lives, people coming home with this post-traumatic stress, and it's a generational type of deal because it's going to affect their children. It's going who sacrificed their lives. And it's not just their lives, people coming home with this post-traumatic stress. And it's a generational type of deal because it's going to affect their children. It's going to affect their spouse. So it's a multigenerational thing that people come home with. But we owe them our best efforts going forward to take those lessons and apply them to the next conflict, apply them going forward as wisdom. And I'm not hopeful that we're going to do that because we don't have a very good track record of that.

word is wisdom. And I'm not hopeful that we're going to do that because we don't have a very good track record of that. So bringing it back to what happened post-World War II, what do you think is the cause of that? I mean, there's two wars, the Korean War and then the Vietnam War that are not thought of favorably. The World War II, the people that came home were heroes. In World War II, we were fighting against this evil empire, the Third Reich and the Japanese and the Russians. There was so much chaos going on during World War II. It was, you know, there was so much happening. And then afterwards, there's the Cold War. There's us and the russians right and then you have this thing that happens in in korea which is it's not publicized it's not a it's not like a

big part of american history a lot of people sort of they go they go world war ii vietnam right and they kind of forget about korea but korea was But Korea was a very fucked up war. And the ramifications of it were very fucked up. And then Vietnam was way more fucked up. Vietnam, no one thinks we should have ever done it in the first place. The pretense for going into Vietnam was fake. The whole Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened. And there was a false flag event that led us to lose untold American lives.

50 over 58,000. Yeah. And then on top of that, just the fucking generations, as you said, of families and loved ones that have to deal with the stress and the chaos and having lost people over there. There seems to be a direct connection between the loss of faith in the military in those conflicts, the Korean conflict and then the Vietnam conflict. Whereas we don't think about it that way when we think about

World War II. When we think about World War II, we think about it as the good guys versus the bad guys. And we won and we came back and there's the famous kiss on V-Day in the middle of the street. There's all these romantic notions attached to World War II that aren't attached to Korea and aren't attached to Vietnam. Yeah. I mean, Eisenhower speech, people pull out that military industrial complex line, but people should listen to the whole speech. Listen to it and watch it because it's fascinating.

But something shifted and I don't know exactly what it is. I can't put my finger on it, but it keeps coming back to accountability. But my question is, why do we lose that sense of accountability? Why did we lose the importance of accountability following World War II, particularly 1947 when we reorganized, really, our defense intelligence agencies and the military got reorganized in 1947? We changed the name of the War Department to the Department of Defense. So we have precision in language, precision in thought. There's a shift there. We used to have a Secretary of War.

What do we have after 1947? We have a Secretary of Defense. So there's that little thing, little thing, but language is important. And then for some reason, we stopped holding our senior level leaders accountable. And then for some reason, we stopped holding reality after World War II. So I don't know what it is. I can't put my finger on it. But then we have that same generation that came home, and what did they do? They got to work. They didn't whine about what they'd been involved in. They got to work, and they built this country into what it is today. And it's so hard to see what we're doing

to ourselves really in this country. That last book, In the Devil's Hand, I put myself in the enemy's shoes and I thought, hey, what did they learn from us on the field of battle over the last 20 years at war? And during the time I was writing that, COVID hit, summer of civil unrest, very contentious political season and election cycle. The enemy is learning from all those things. And the sad part of my takeaway from that research was that, hey, if I'm the enemy, I might just watch. We're doing a pretty good job of destroying ourselves from the inside right now. I might just wait and watch and see what happens. But of course, I had to figure out in a fictional sense how to deal with that. And I did in a very creative way that was fun to figure

out. But it's sad to think that we've lost this appreciation, I think, for what was sacrificed so that we could have these freedoms and options and opportunities that we do today. So from the inception of this country up until today, people have sacrificed everything or they've risked everything so that we can have these freedoms. And now we have a segment of society that wants to undercut those freedoms because I don't think they appreciate what was sacrificed so we could have them. And that part, that's sad. I took my daughter to Pearl Harbor for the 80th anniversary commemoration events this last December. And we volunteered with an organization called the Best Defense Foundation, Donnie Edwards Foundation, that takes people back to the World War II battlefields primarily so they can say goodbye.

They can make peace with what they did there. And a lot of them, it's their last trips to these places. A lot of them, it's their second trip. The first one was actually going over the beach in Normandy or going to Iwo Jima and fighting. And now they're getting to go there in the last years of their lives and say goodbye. But we went to Pearl Harbor, and so my daughter is 16,

and she sat at it. We volunteered. We took 64 veterans, age 96 to 104. Wow. And in wheelchairs. We're getting them on and off the buses, taking them to the events, getting the dinners, making sure they're taking their medications, all that stuff. And it was a turning point in her life because she got to sit down across the table from this generation that, yeah, she's heard me talk about and she's read about. But to hear them tell their stories and a lot of them haven't even told their stories until just a few years ago.

There's one guy, Jack Holder, who was on the airfield at Pearl Harbor. He watched the planes, Japanese planes, come over the mountains, drop down, strafe the runway. He jumps into what was then a sewage ditch, and he showed us the bullet holes in the runway, still there, in the hangar, still there. And so he jumps into this sewage ditch. He watches the planes take this left-hand turn, bank,

and he jumps up, runs to the edge of Pearl Harbor right there on the water, and watches them and watches the first torpedoes get dropped in Pearl Harbor. And then he went back, he flew a PBY, which was a seaplane. And then he went on to fight in the Pacific, and he sunk a Japanese submarine and helped sink a Japanese aircraft carrier. And then he goes to the Mediterranean and sinks a German submarine. I mean, incredible, incredible. That's what this generation did for us. And so she got to see that. But so she appreciates, point being, is that she appreciates what that generation gave us. And then by default, what previous generations have given us. So we're going to go to D-Day here this June, taking her out of school. We're going to go do that and go to Normandy and take the same group of veterans back to Normandy.

And a lot of them, it'll be their last trip. But she'll get to help again, get them to the events, get them to dinners, get them on and off the buses, in and out of the wheelchairs, and experience that place with them. I can't imagine what it must be like for them to go back to normandy and to be on that beach and i mean i've seen the photographs and you know i think probably uh one of the best uh theatrical representations of it is saving private ryan right which is horrific oh yeah imagine that they they nailed that scene oh yeah oh yeah i Oh, yeah. I mean, it's... God.

It puts things in relative terms. And for me, it was in buds on the beach in Hell Week, you know, doing push-ups, getting yelled at, you're freezing, you're on the verge of hypothermia, people are quitting. And I thought, hey, you know what? I'm not coming off of a boat onto a beach in Normandy where I'm running through a hail of machine gun fire that's set up in an elevated position with no cover and concealment between me and that position. Right. I'm like, I can do a few more push-ups here on the beach. You know, I can shiver here in the water a little longer here. Those guys sacrificed that so I could follow my dream and I could be here on this beach in Coronado, California, testing myself in this crucible of buds. So I think about that generation in particular quite a bit and what they gave us. quite a bit and what they gave us.

Tactically, when they review storming the beach at Normandy, is there alternative methods of approaching that situation that people have proposed that would have caused less casualties? Because it's such a crazy thing to just dump everybody off at the beach and run towards the gunfire. I mean, I always wonder, didn't why didn't they do something differently why didn't they shoot at them with planes and soften them up first i mean it seems well we had some of that so we did drop uh uh drop people behind the lines we had gliders going in um we bombarded the shore and gliders is because no no sound you know that's a good i mean

that must be a part of it i can't remember exactly exactly why, but that must be, that must be it. But they have the gliders going in and oh my gosh, what a crazy thing to be involved in, just especially back then. Yeah. In the 1940s, being in the back of a glider, essentially crashing and getting out and then having to figure out where you are and then to figure out without radios who the good guys are, who the bad guys are, which direction are we going, all of that. So we get dropped off in the right place. Right. Some of them are shot down and then they, you know, a lot of them are shot down. But so they did do things. They did do things to soften up those beaches and all of that. But, you know, we're dealing with 1940s technology.

Right. We're coming off of lessons of World War I, which was even more horrific. Did they have missiles back then that are capable of being precise? No. Or did they just sort of launch them in the general direction? No. The Germans had some missile. I believe they had missile technology that was rocket technology that was far superior to ours, I think.

People can check me on that. But no, it was mostly like a gigantic bullet coming out of a battleship. Wow. And hitting something or not. So, yeah, it's an amazing place to go for people who haven't been to go to these memorials, especially to take kids to these memorials

and to go to Pearl Harbor and to go to Normandy and to go stand up on Pointe du Hoc and look down and see, hey, where the Rangers had to climb up ropes and ladders and the Germans are firing right down on them from these positions and they just kept climbing.

The Longest Day, that old movie, it shows that as well and I grew up with that film it's an old black and white movie that people should watch they should watch that and saving private ryan but uh and that's the power of popular culture like these movies play an important part in uh in in our popular culture and in our history because you can show these things and create this appreciation and we're just losing that i think i mean hollywood used to be to be our most prolific and valuable asset that we would export. And so people from all over the world would see these movies and see this opportunity that was the United States. And I think that's shifted.

That's shifted over time. But that's why those war films, I think, are so important because you can watch that and say, oh, my gosh, I am so appreciative of what those guys did. And you know what my life here, maybe I should make it, maybe I can make some changes here and I can appreciate what they did for us so that I can have, make my own decisions. And, uh, and I can have these freedoms and opportunities rather than just complain about it. Cause really, you know what I'm not doing running into a hail of machine gun bullets as I cross this beach. So there's, there's a lot to be

an appreciative to appreciate appreciate previous generations and what they did for us. This is what I was getting at by saying, trying to figure out what weren't wrong and did it go wrong because after that, the Korean conflict and the Vietnam conflict were not thought of as victories for America in the same way they were, especially Vietnam. I mean, I've talked to people that came back and the things that they endured and the same way they were, especially Vietnam. I mean, I've talked to people that came back and the things that they endured and the abuse that they took, people calling them baby killers and people saying horrible. And then some of them, some of it was accurate. You know, like,

I don't remember who the Senator was, but there was a Senator, it was someone who was a politician and may not have been a Senator, he was being they were they were calling him a hero and they had this depiction of his past and you know about what a war hero was do you know i'm talking about it wasn't true and he he came clean and he said listen i killed women i killed children i did some horrible things when i was there i don't know who this guy is because i'm thinking of the person just lied in general and didn't really even serve. There's a few of those guys. This is a different story. This is a story where the guy said, look, I can't do this anymore. This

is not what happened. And what we were involved in was essentially war crimes. And we did some horrible, horrible things, which was also part of the Vietnam War, what happened in those jungles and the way the war was playing out and the frustration that the soldiers had and just the evil potential that men have for evil. Oh, yeah. You see it. I mean, you see that potential for evil. And that's why you have to take such pains to maintain the moral high ground because oftentimes that's all we have that differentiates us from the enemy is that moral for evil. And that's why you have to take such pains to maintain the moral high ground

because oftentimes that's all we have that differentiates us from the enemy is that moral high ground. And when you lose it, you've lost. But there was a giant shift in the difference between the way people thought of war. Yeah. Well, it's televised.

So that was another thing. There's so many factors that come into play. The world changing military industrial complex becoming an actual business and televised war in Vietnam, obviously. But the unnecessary aspect of Vietnam, too. And you're seeing it every day.

So a lot less people killed in Vietnam, but you're seeing it every day. It's on the TV every single night. And it's televised. The body counts are coming in. The protests. The protests start. And so you're seeing that. It becomes a part of everyday life rather than in World War II,

hey, you know what we need to do now? Anybody that has vehicles that have tires, we need that rubber for the war effort. Take it downtown. If you're on the coast, make sure you have those blackout curtains in your house. Like everybody was involved in it somehow. When was that, blackout curtains? Blackout curtains so you wouldn't see a light on at night so they were worried about another attack, let's say, on the Pacific coast from the Japanese.

So everybody had to have blackout curtains in their house on the coast. So did they shut off the streetlights and everything? Probably. I don't know about the streetlights, but yeah, I would assume that all the lights went off and you had these blackout curtains. I never heard this before. Yeah, yeah. So that was the thing. That was the thing. My grandparents had to do it, and everybody was a part of it. It affected everybody. You know, Vietnam affected everybody because you're seeing it. So you're seeing it right there. It's on TV.

Those body counts are coming in, so you have that part of it. And for some reason, once again, this imperial hubris kind of starts. Blackout means black. American poster from World War II reminding citizens of blackouts for civil defense. Wow. Wow. Minimizing outdoor light. light yeah so everybody's a part of this and and and there's a threat of invasion a very real threat of invasion

yeah and yeah and we got we did there were there were I think it was I'm gonna get this exact numbers wrong there was a small number less than 10 of German saboteurs I think there were two US citizens that were involved in it on the East Coast. They came out of a submarine. I think there's an old black and white movie about it. But they were tried in like a month, military tribunals on U.S. soil. And I think two were executed. I think the rest went to prison.

But what do we have now? We still have people attached to 9-11 that are still in Guantanamo that we really don't know what to do with. They're caught up in this legal stuff. We didn't mess around back in the 40s. That generation did not mess around. You're a German saboteur on U.S. soil and you get caught, guess what's happening? You're going to a military tribunal. You're going to be tried, so legally, and executed. But in the Guantanamo Bay situation, isn't there some confusion as to whether or not some of the people that were arrested were Even involved there are so many different different I've read so much about it. It's so confusing. It's kind of like like I know you've had Oliver Stone on here talking about JFK

Yeah, it's just there's so much out there and there's so much information and there's some there's just so much time has passed now and there So it's confusing about all that stuff. I hate was this stuff taken under duress you know didn't he this yes I don't know I don't know but I know that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is in there still and and we're still waiting on on his final what's gonna happen to him so I don't know it's just a different different time so once again all these things come into play so we have 20 years now compared to World War II, one month to deal with someone. Is that better or worse? I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I guess you can debate that as well. But something certainly shifted after World War II. But the main thing I can point to is that

accountability or lack of accountability, I should say. There's still accountability for the people at the tactical level who mess up, not so much at that strategic level. There are very few senior level generals who have been held accountable for any missteps strategically over the last 20 years. So that's a shift. That is a difference. How much of a part does it play in the general public's confidence that the war is just and that these actions are just? Like there's a lot of lack of confidence after the weapons of mass destruction debacle. lack of confidence after the weapons of mass destruction debacle. I mean, it was promoted by the mainstream media. It was promoted by politicians and military industrial complex wanted us to get into Iraq. And they were claiming that there was unquestionably weapons

of mass destruction. We had to get in there and we had to stop this before it became another disaster. Yeah. Yeah. That's a tough one because when you see these authoritarian regimes and you see like, just like with, with Putin today, with Putin today, they don't necessarily get the best information from their senior level generals and advisors. Because if you bring bad news to, let's say, the leader of North Korea or Iran or Russia, well, guess what? Yeah, you might not be long for this world. So it doesn't encourage people to step up and say, hey, you know, this nuclear program that we've been talking about, we don't really have it, if you're telling Saddam Hussein that. So there are plenty of people who thought that they actually had that. And why did they do that? Well, they wanted to deter their neighbors, or they looked

at it as a deterrence, probably. So that comes into play, too. So I have to, it's very hard for me to think that, even though I write about in the book, all sorts of, in my books in general, all sorts of nefarious things at senior levels of government, it's so hard for me to think that even though I write about in the book, all sorts of, in my books in general, all sorts of nefarious things at senior levels of government, it's so hard for me to believe that they actually took steps deliberately that they knew were wrong based on faulty intel. I have to think that they assumed that they were getting good intel and these things were, although later on in the war, I would not have been able to launch a mission based off the kind of intel that we use to actually go to war. I would not be able to launch a mission off of single source intelligence that wasn't corroborated by technical means and another human source, meaning another human on the ground disassociated from the network that's giving me my information on said bad guy. Well, I'm not just going to launch based on him because well he just might have some

sort of a feud with that guy i want me to take you use the military to take that person out so we saw that a lot in the beginning so you have to corroborate that with another totally disassociated network and then technical means as well so you really know you're going after the right person for the right reasons and you're not just settling some centuries-old feud um which is which is but like but going into the war I wouldn't have been able to launch a mission 10 years later based on that kind of intel. I had a conversation with a guy once. We were talking about weapons of mass destruction, the way it was promoted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. had weapons of mass destruction. And they were saying that it was just, obviously that it was not true, but that it was this massive hoax and that it was all designed to get us to enter into

the war. And I'm like, man, I don't know if people would be willing to accept a coordinated lie that easily. I have to think that at least there was some concern that this was real. And is that the case that when you're getting military intel on a situation that's ongoing, oftentimes it's cloudy and you're not exactly sure and you have to err on the side of caution. And if you decided to ignore whatever intel was saying that they have weapons of mass destruction, it turned out to be true, that would be even more disastrous. And the atmosphere in this country was we had just been hit. 9-11 had just happened. We can't take that chance again.

We have to be proactive. And even though it turned out to be a gigantic, horrific disaster, I'm reluctant to believe that it was this large-scale conspiracy involving everyone, that CNN knew it was a lie, that Colin Powell knew it was a lie. I have to think that at least some of them thought that it was real. I would think the same thing. I mean, you'd have to be very, so cynical, not just cynical, but to the extreme. You'd have to be evil. To think that that number of people had to want us to go to war so that their stock could do better or something. Right. And then they had a coordinated lie.

Yeah. I mean, obviously it turns out to not be true. And obviously there was lies to support the initial assertions. There was obviously some coordinated effort to cover up the initial assertions and to make it seem like they were more accurate than they were. Or paint a rosy picture or you have this outcome that you want. And so what do we need to support that? And looking at those things that support that rather than the things

that don't support it. So I have to think that they're acting off the best intel that they had at the time and making decisions that they thought were in the best interest of the American people and protecting this nation. I have to think that, and it just ended up not to be the case. And there are many reasons why it's not the case that we just talked about with Saddam Thinking they might have had a more robust capability. Yeah, because people are telling them that possibly So and that's that's a distinct possibility as well So I always wonder and then so you take that and you extrapolate 20 years later

right when you follow up 20 years later and you look at the kind of confidence that people have and the military's ability to make the correct decisions, and then you fuck that sideways with the extraction from Afghanistan. Because now everybody's like, Jesus Christ, why would you do it that way? Why did anybody do it that way? I've had conversations with people on this podcast that were military people, high-level people that were involved in this, and said, there's nothing about that extraction that was right. No. And no one held accountable. Once again, it goes back to that accountability piece, which what confidence does that give you as the taxpayer that we're going to do something right

in the next theater of war? Not very much confidence there. We have proven that we are unable to take the lessons of the past and apply them to the future in a way that is meaningful. But really, it's the responsibility of those leaders to do that for that E1, E2, E3, that lower enlisted person who's going to be standing the gate guard, who's going to be going out there into these streets or out there into the mountains and taking fire and dealing with a car that's coming up that looks like, oh, maybe is it bad suspension? Or is there a family in there there or is it packed with explosives? And they're 18 years old and they're out there looking at this thing and have to make a decision. And then it pulls up and it detonates or they shoot and guess

what? It's full of a family. Like these things are so difficult and they have to live with that for the rest of their lives. And they're put in that position by senior level leaders who should have known better on a few things. It's to Iraq, disbanding the Iraqi army. OK, so now you have this entirely trained up military that's essentially now an insurgency. OK, we have that debathification. So anyone who had any job in Iraq was a bathest. So the person that emptied the garbage, the people that kept the lights on now, debathification, those people don't have jobs. So now we're fighting an insurgency and we're figuring out how to get the trash picked up, how to keep the power on,

we're building up an entirely new government. So, and those lessons and those senior level leaders, they are responsible for making those decisions, just like we would be at the tactical level. And they made the wrong decision there. And that one, those two things right there, looking back at those two things, like, I don't know, it's almost unforgivable that they would make those decisions and not correct it immediately. We created that insurgency because of those two decisions. The hindsight is always 20-20, right? But looking back on the Afghanistan situation, what is the consensus of what would have been the correct approach? So we essentially, it's not lost on many people that we essentially spent 20 years replacing the Taliban with the Taliban. And well-armed.

And well-armed. Yeah, with our stuff. Yeah, yeah. Now, why did they do that? Why did they leave behind all of our shit? I don't know. I mean, I know when we left Iraq, I was at a lower level, tactical level, so you just kind of hear things. I don't know how true it is, but how much it costs to bring certain things back rather than leave it there.

Like the gyms that went up all over the place. So there's all these gyms all over Iraq. And you've seen the videos on YouTube of the Iraqis trying to work out. They're pretty funny. I think there's quite a few out there. But rather than pack all that up and take it home, just leave it. Well, the gyms are the least concerned. I know. I'd use that as the most basic level. But then you apply that to how much does it take to get this helicopter back and that helicopter back and this and that. And hey, did we think that we were going to turn those over to the Afghans and leave those with them?

Why didn't we blow them up? Well, I think we thought they were going to remain in place as the army that we trained up for the last 20 years. But nobody on the side of the people that were over there believed that was possible. They thought that everyone was going to fold the moment the United States left. Well, you didn't even have to think that. You could see it. You can see the provinces falling from January, February, March, April, May, June, July into August. I mean, you could watch it. If you put it on the screen and show the provinces that fall, I mean, yeah, you don't have to be Nostradamus to figure out that, hey, this isn't looking so good. And everything is converging here.

And you could extrapolate that, oh, probably every province is going to fall. But once again. So what should they have done? In that particular situation? Yes. So you have a couple options. One being, hey, maybe leave it. You could leave a small force at Bagram, perhaps to try to keep this military, keep this intelligence service, keep this government running. Maybe after 20 years, I don't know how long you can sustain that, but you could have done that.

And then if things aren't working out, they're the last people to leave. So that's one. So you could you could have done could have done that. Or you get everyone out and leave Bagram, and it ends up being the same thing. You see, watch the whole government left there trying to keep that government going, trying to keep that military going, trying to keep that intelligence service going. And then you could see how that works out or get everybody out in a way that makes sense. What would be a way that makes sense? How do you get everybody out in a way that makes sense? So Bagram, there's a lot of standoff distance at Bagram Airfield. You can be there, you can look out, you can see people coming from a long way off. We control that wholefield. You can be there. You can look out. You can see people coming from a long way off. We control that whole area. You control the airfield. It's not that chaos that

we saw people hanging on the side of these planes as they're taking off. You control that thing rather than the way we left at the airfield and essentially in town. So yeah, I don't know why we did that. It's just- But not just that, but also leave behind people that work with the U.S. forces to be tortured and murdered. Yeah, and that happens. It's probably still happening right now as we're speaking here. What do we think was going to happen? And I talked to somebody about that in 2003 in the back of a Hilux pickup truck in Afghanistan and asking him about what does he think is going to happen when we eventually leave here.

And I didn't get a good answer. He was trying to figure out the language barrier and all that. But I did ask that because I was thinking about that because what's our track record? Well, we have Vietnam to look at. And at the time, we had the Kurds at the first Gulf War. We had that, leaving them, kind of hanging them out to dry. So we don't have a very good track record of supporting people that ally with us in foreign countries when we're doing particularly expeditionary counterinsurgency, meaning a

counterinsurgency campaign in another country. So I was asking about that. I was thinking about it back then. And I was like, oh, man, I hope this guy's going to be okay when we leave here eventually. And I didn't know if it was going to be a year or two years, 20 years. I didn't know when it was going to be, but I was fairly certain that at some point in time we were going to leave this place. And what's going to happen to all these people that helped us? It doesn't look good. And then you have, there's talks of China aiding the Taliban and moving in and supplying them and sort of working with them the moment they realize the United States is no longer going to be in power. Yep, yep.

Essentially maybe taking over Bagram. Yeah. And working with them. Yeah. Like they don't seem to have the same qualms that we have about human rights. No, they're not known for that in China, being overly concerned with human rights. I mean, just look at the lockdowns. Have you seen those lockdowns of people banging on their doors?

Or what they do with the Uyghurs. Yeah, there's that. Yeah. And once again, that's an interesting one right there when we talk about big business and their associations with China. Yeah. But when we look at this, the things that when I look at the country and I just look at what's happening today and I see a few things that you could apply common sense to, just like Karl von Clausewitz and George Marshall talked about. Well, if you look at our position in the world today and say, why are we outsourcing our energy to our enemy? Okay. The energy that essentially runs our national security apparatus. Okay. And we're outsourcing that to our enemy. We need oil from what countries? And we could be energy independent here. Okay. That's one. The accountability we talked about, obviously.

And hey, where are all these chips coming from that also run our defense establishment and run all our phones? And where are our pharmaceuticals coming from and the precursor drugs for a lot of those pharmaceuticals coming from? Oh, China? Wait a sec. So we're dependent on China, Iran, all these people that are essentially our enemies. We're dependent upon them. And we have a porous southern border at the same time. Like some very basic things that you would think we could address as a nation. Would there be an argument that it's good to work with them? And that if our energy systems and our chips and all these other things are dependent upon them,

that they wouldn't want the demise of America because it's crucial to their economy and that we could have some sort of a cooperative effort that would at least in some way ensure some level of peace? I don't know. I think that as companies used to be, America first, these different companies. And now when you become these global conglomerates and dependent upon China for a lot of that revenue and to shareholders and to everything else, well, now you're dependent on an enemy.

So now you have this company that's an American-based company. You had the opportunity to create something and create untold wealth. But now we're dependent on China. So who are we now loyal to? Are we loyal more to these shareholders and our company or to the United States of America? What's most beneficial to us? And what conditions can we create here in this country to not be reliant on our enemies for those things that keep us safe, that run our defense establishment, our intelligence establishment,

and some of the things that we rely on to run mom-and-pop businesses across the country? and some of the things that we rely on to run mom-and-pop businesses across the country. Do you think it's also a function of the fact that the United States essentially, like you were talking about before, we're dealing with four-year time periods or eight-year time periods where that's the time someone's in office as a president, whereas in China they have full control and they can play this long game. And also the government and big business are completely entangled in China. There is no separation between business and government, and the business always acts in the best interest of the government.

Oh, yeah. If you're dealing with a company in China, you're dealing with the government of China. You're dealing with the defense establishment of China. You're dealing with the intelligence community of China. So these lines are blurred now, and they weren't always blurred, and they're getting more blurry as we continue to go forward. And I don't know what the solution is, but I know that we're on a path right now that the outcome is not hopeful. And I try to remain as hopeful as I can publicly, but when my wife and I sit down at the end of the night and have a glass of wine on the

couch and talk about what world that our kids are inheriting, it's a tough one. They're in a tough position. I don't like it. I know. It scares the shit out of me. I know. It's crazy. And I went deep into it in this one, too, looking into quantum computing, looking into artificial intelligence, looking into data storage and surveillance of U.S. citizens and the Internet of Things and how all this is connected.

That part is scary. It was scarier than the bioweapons research that I did for the last book. No doubt about it. And the picture that I paint in this thing, I think it is close. Because the people that I talked to that were involved in quantum computing, and for people who haven't seen a quantum computer, look that up and hit images. I thought it was just a big computer.

It's not. It is this like Medusa of wires that's suspended in a vacuum. It is a crazy looking thing. And so people should check out what those even look like. Do they have a functional quantum computer? Oh, yeah. So this is it right here? Yep.

Isn't that crazy? The quantum computer that you described, how much of that is based on your own creative imagination? How much of that is based on what is actually possible right now? Yeah, well, I looked at these exact pictures right here. That's the Google guy. You should be scared of that guy. Exactly. He's going to be the king of the world someday.

Look at him. With this, I will run everything. Look at his fingers clasped together. I will run everything from here. Right there. And some of the things I saw in interviews with people. Fuck, that looks amazing. Isn't that crazy?

Like, that's a computer. It's very sci-fi. Yep. And I wanted to keep this book out of the sci-fi section, so I even toned it down a bit to what's probably happening out there. Yep. So what is the woman you have the name for the class? Alice. Alice, yes.

How much access do you have for what's possible? It seems like that would be very, very classified. How much are you guessing? Well, I did a lot of research and reading, but once you read something about quantum computing or artificial intelligence, it's way dated by the time you read it. So you read those things, so you can ask questions of people that are more current, because it gives you the foundation from which to ask these questions. So same thing like I did with the bioweapons research in the last one, I talked to a lot of people that are involved in that space and you get a little sliver, just like a journalist would do. And I take a little bit from each and every one of them to paint that picture and figure

out that puzzle. Same thing with this. And the people that I talked to, they all told me that, hey, we could tell you more, but that would for sure put this book in the science fiction category and that's scary jesus christ so they could tell you more meaning what first of all what alice does in the book is insane yeah but that's not even the full capability of what these quantum computers and ai can do now that's right that's right and's right. And I was worried because I saw some people talking when I was doing my research, talking about quantum computing on different news channels, and they were talking about China having this edge. And when I did my full, when I went deep down the rabbit hole, my take is that we still have the edge in quantum computing right now. I don't know if we will tomorrow, but right now we do.

What did you just pull up, Jamie? I saw this a few weeks ago. This company called Anomaly 6, they were showing what they could do. So in this demonstration, they showed tracing cell phones, you know, anonymous cell phones. And they unveiled two people that were watching this at that event. They worked for the CIA or FBI or something they kind of like look we will tell you who in this building we followed specifically to

show you what we can do so they spied on the CIA and the NSA so American phone tracking firm demoed their surveillance powers by spying on the spies and saying hey we can spy on you. So if this is an American company, see, this is what I was getting at before when I was talking about China and the government, is that reluctantly I say this, but I think I might be right. The only way to compete with a country that has the government and the businesses inexorably entangled, where the government and the businesses work handably entangled, where the government and the businesses

work hand in hand, is for the governments and the businesses of this country to work hand in hand. That scares the shit out of me, because what's involved in that is full compliance by the population. The only way you get full compliance by the population is you have to be able to control everything they do, including money. So some sort of a centralized digital currency where they have in China, where they can tell you what you can and cannot buy based on your social credit

score, which is something that everybody was very terrified of during this COVID thing, when they were starting to at least suggest the possibility of implementing a passport, some sort of a passport of what you can and can't do. And the initial suspicion was that if you started off by saying, you know, you have a vaccine passport and if you do not comply, you will not be able to do these things. You will not be able to have access to goods and services and transportation and all these different things based on your compliance with some government regulation that's implemented reluctantly, but necessarily because of a crisis. Now, once that's in play, then that becomes the norm.

We get accustomed to it. It becomes a way of life. And then they can implement that and keep pushing that envelope further and further down. Yep. Yep. When you don't get rights back once you give them up to government. They're not, they're not in a rush to give them back to you once they take that power.

And we know this, right? Everyone knows this. So why is it so, why are people so reluctant to not just admit that, but why do they push back on it so hard? Civilians? What is it because they don't want to believe that it's true? I think we're comfortable. But is that it? Or is it that they were scared of COVID and they felt like this is the only way to keep people safe? And because of that, because people are scared and they felt like this is the only way to keep people safe, we've got to get everybody vaccinated. We've got to get everybody safe. We've got to get back to normal. But they're reluctant to look at the general history of what happens when people do this. Yep.

Yep. the general history of what happens when people do this. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why every chance I get, I like to talk about going back into the pages of history and reading about why we have these freedoms, what we have today. Why were they in place from the beginning and why are they so important? Why do they give us this opportunity? Why did they allow us to build this into the greatest country on the face of the earth?

And this marketplace of ideas and this debate and letting the best ideas rise to the surface. And now that's all going away. These rights are slowly being eroded over time. And we have these crises where we then take a little more. The government takes a little more power. And you have career politicians in there now. So they're not, I keep going back to Eisenhower, but he had a great quote about farming. And he said, hey, farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from a cornfield. So you have people in Washington who, you know, they're called to service as politicians. And they also happen to be very savvy investors, if you haven't noticed that. They're very savvy investors somehow.

They make a lot of money in politics as politicians. Their family members make a lot of wise investments. They make a lot of wise investments. Very interesting. But they're career politicians, and that's not how this was set up. I had a great conversation with Bill Barr, former attorney general. He was on my podcast a couple weeks ago, and he'll come out here in a little bit. But he's so in tune with that side of the house, these career politicians, because he was in government, he was in private practice, got called back to service, did it. And and and what he saw were careerists and people that aren't going to Washington just for a year or two and then going back to the farm. I mean, I think we'd be a lot better off if we had some more farmers rather than some attorneys who maybe never even really practice law in Congress. And it's just career politicians. So it's a business, essentially.

And this is that term that people don't like because it's kind of like almost like fictional, but the deep state. People don't like that term. Oh, come on with this deep state talk. Because it was kind of connected to what Trump was saying when he got into office and that the deep state is after Trump and people go, oh, shut the fuck up with all this but it seems like that's what the deep state is right is career politicians that are inexorably intertwined with business and they have as look in today this is what my fear was during the election when i was talking about biden i was like do you really think that that guy's in charge of anything or going to be in charge of anything without without any

no judgment about who he is as a politician, but just as a biological entity That's he's not gonna last he's not competent. He's not aware of a lot of things. It's clear He's not good at forming sentences. It's clear, right? It's clear. He's not aware when he starts when he starts rattling off numbers. I clench up I go Oh Jesus, he's gonna fuck this up. The numbers is rough. It's horrible. Yeah, it's clearly he's compromised So it's obvious that he's not the guy that's the puppet master so who the fuck is who's controlling all the strings and if this quantum computer stuff is real and obviously it is and is Google gonna be the master of our domain who's gonna be responsible

for controlling the access to that who gets to decide what gets spied on what gets controlled what doesn't and how do you turn this back it seems like you can't because it seems like technology always moves further and further forward at an exponentially increasing rate well yeah and it's worse than that almost in that now they can control behaviors yes I don't think that was the goal right off the bat you know the goal right off the bat is to sell some advertising and get people to take a hey look at that so now you're controlling behaviors and yeah worse than that the next step is you're controlling thoughts based off what you're fed on these social media platforms that we're all tied to.

And now a lot of us are tied to them for business. Yes. And then they switch it up on you. And now they're controlling your thoughts. And that is scarier than anything. And they're censoring stuff for weird. I mean, I don't even understand why they censor some of the stuff they censor. Censoring stuff for weird, I mean, I don't even understand why they censor some of the stuff they censor.

It's almost like they're trying to get you accustomed to censorship, like random censorship. That is the craziest part of all of this, is that our stalwart defenders of the First Amendment used to be lawyers, used to be publishing houses, used to be magazine editors, used to be newspapers, used to be politicians. They were in defense of that First Amendment. And all of us as citizens, we would say growing up, hey, I will fight and die for your right to say something, especially if I disagree with you because we're Americans. That used to be no matter what you thought of the Second Amendment or what you thought of anything else, like that First Amendment bound us all together. And now we have those same people that used to defend the First Amendment now actively calling for censorship. So instead of having that debate and having the best ideas rise to the top in this marketplace of ideas, now if I disagree with you, I just want to censor you and cancel you.

How did we get so short-sighted? What caused that in your eyes? I think we lost that appreciation for why we have that First Amendment. How did we lose it? Comfort. I think we got so appreciation for why we have that free, why we have that first how did we lose it? Like what, what comfort? I think we got so comfortable, really society's fragile. And we had a glimpse of it at the beginning of COVID, uh, where people were like, oh my gosh, is there going to be some food on the shelves of the grocery store? Hey, if I call 911, will someone show up? Uh, and then we got back to normal ish as far as that stuff goes. Um, but that was a little, so we had a little bit of a scare,

but even if you saw some of the interviews on the streets of Odessa, of Kiev, you saw people not thinking that the Russians were going to invade. And they had these on the street, and then the next day, boom, society is fragile. For most of human history, society has been fragile and you used to have to be good at the fighting and good at the hunting if you were going to survive. So we all have ancestors that were good at those two things or we would not be here today. And society can collapse pretty dang quickly. And if you've been to Iraq and been to Afghanistan, you can see that. I know you have a little glimpse here and there, but we have had so, from the end of World War II up to today, we've had relative peace in our country. It's been relatively stable in our country. We've got very comfortable and we've lost this sense of why we have these freedoms. And instead, we have this entitlement

culture that plays into it. And we have this comfort that, hey, if I call 911, someone's going to show up. Well, guess what? Probably not. They're going to come up after most of the time. They'll be a few minutes late to save the day unless you're a politician with taxpayer-funded security surrounding you at all times. But you have to be good at defending yourself, your family, your community, and you have to be good at putting meat on that table. Otherwise, your lineage is not going to be around that much longer. Isn't there also a thing that happens with people where the way things are now, we just assume they're going to stay this way? Yeah. with people where the way things are now, we just assume they're going to stay this way.

And that it's too complicated to think about all the possibilities for the average person. The average person's plate is so full with job, family, business, all the stuff that you're obligated to, bills, all the problems you have. There's so much going on, so many activities that for you to stop and say, hey, we have to really concentrate on the First Amendment. We have to concentrate on freedom of speech and the ability to communicate and express yourself. And we have to be concerned with other countries that aren't concentrating on those things. We have to be concerned with the fact that we could get evaded. We have to be concerned that someone could kill our power grid. We have to be concerned with all these different things. And it's too much for people. So they

just choose to dismiss it. And we're so distracted. We have our work with us constantly. It's in our hand constantly. TikTok-ing. TikTok-ing. 15 Seconds. Wall Street Journal had a thing called TikTok Brain the other day and I actually printed it out for our 11-year-old and I took out the ads, took out everything that was in there when I printed it and I gave it to him to read because TikTok Brain, 15 seconds and then you're ready for the next one. You're ready for that next distraction. And you're getting all these inputs all the time, and most of them maybe are not that healthy. And what are you not doing when you're distracted by those things?

You're not focused on what you need to do to move forward, to be a prepared citizen, a good citizen of this country. Moving that ball forward, being a good inheritor of these freedoms, and then defending them for that next generation so they can then move the ball forward for the following generation. And I don't know if we get this back, I'm not sure. I don't know either and it scares the shit out of me because I'm not, I mean, I'm not sure how it ever, how we get rational, how we get objective, how we stop this and say we have to preserve some aspects and

Even if we did have the inclination to do so when you see something like quantum computing when you see this AI that can spy on anyone at any time and When people do tell you that if we told you everything it would essentially be science fiction So what is science fiction today? And what is it like in five years? Because it's going to be way more invasive. Oh yeah. I mean, this next decade, I think, is a pivotal decade for the country when it comes to freedoms and what it's like going forward and what opportunities our kids are going to have going forward. What's not controlled by the government, what thoughts and behaviors aren't controlled by a government business tech type of an entity out there. What's encouraged by the government, what's encouraged as far as censorship goes

by these tech platforms that have so much power concentrated in such a small number of people. So these are real decisions and real issues that they need to be contented with, and we haven't had to deal with them before. And it's such a perfect storm. It is. That's the other part. Especially like the tech companies, right? Tech companies are overwhelmingly run by ideologically driven left-wing people who believe in a very specific way of thinking and behaving and living. And they're diametrically opposed to people that

have a different perspective. And they don't welcome free debate and speech and will actively censor and shadow ban and do all sorts of things to people even if these people are highly intelligent articulate conservative people that aren't outrageous don't say wild things that they're not you know QAnon folks they're they're they're regular human beings who happen to have a conservative perspective, and those people are demonized. Yep. We're normalizing censorship. And rather than having a debate and being open to, hey, yeah, well, interesting. I had not thought about that before. And making friends and having

a drink or having coffee. I mean, there's a picture of Ronald Reagan going out with the leader of the other party, and they're out there with their tuxedos and they're at a show and they're laughing with their wives and all that stuff with Tip O'Neill. And would you see that today? No. No. Well, you kind of see it at the White House press conference or the correspondence dinner with Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. That's probably the last time where they're joking around. Remember those things?

I'm going to have to go back. I know those things, but I'm going to have to go back to that one in particular. But going out to dinner just with them together as a couple to enjoy an evening on the town and having a nice steak dinner and then watching a show, that doesn't happen. No, it doesn't happen. No chance. So yeah, sitting down to have a beer with somebody is, I mean, yeah. It's normal. Yeah. I mean, look, I have a lot of friends that think very differently than I do, very good friends that oppose a lot of the things that I think are important. But we can talk, you know, and I don't know how much that's going to be in the younger generations. The younger generations seem to think of people that are ideologically – that differ from them ideologically as the enemy.

Yeah. Which is crazy. It's because that's Civil War talk. That's like you're looking at it like this sort of absolutist mentality that it's my way or there's no other way. And it's also tech companies have power that's never been wielded by any individual company that is a civilian based company before there's never been the kind of power that tech companies have to shape narratives and to like to get people elected or not elected or just to shape how elections run based on what kind of information is distributed

or allowed to be distributed or curated. Yep. Yep. What's up? Didn't newspapers have that power? Yes, they did. Yeah, they definitely did. But back in the day, you used to have to either bribe a newspaper reporter or you had to get blackmail on them or blackmail a spouse or a child or something like that. No, it's a good point, Jamie. They did. But they were, look, if you go back and read like the New York Times from from the 1960s, it was very objective news.

It wasn't opinion based. The difference between what's now is it's so much editorial and opinion, including television news. The predominant television news today, especially on the left wing, and the left side rather, is, well no, that's not true. The right side too. It's so opinion based. It's so editorialized.

It's like, who's the number one guy on the right? It's Tucker Carlson. Who's the number one people on the left? It's like Rachel Maddow. These are very opinionated, editorial-based. It's not like, this is what's happening. These are the casualties in Kiev. This is why it happened. This is the strategic reason why they want to control that aspect of the world. These are the natural resources they seek to possess. This is the strategic reason why they want to control that aspect of the world. These are the natural resources They seek to possess this is their fears about NATO. This is you know, there's none of that. It's everything is From an ideological perspective and there's so much opinion based

Like commentary on this stuff. Well, sometimes just asking the question gets you I mean gets people crazy like Tucker asked questions and then just, just, just, just destroyed for asking the questions that he asked. That's why this is so important because when you go on the show like that, as you, as you know, it's like two minutes and you have two minutes to make a point and you could ask a question. And if you're a politician, you're pretty much going to ignore that question. Just say, get your two minutes in there, get your two and a half minutes in there. Cause that's your soundbite and you get who benefits from a divisive populace. Well, politicians certainly do. So is there an incentive for them not to keep dividing us? I don't know.

Because they're staying in power. They're staying elected. It gets them another term and gets their families being able to make some wise investments at the same time so that all that plays in there. I just sort of snuck that in there. Well it's a thing. It's a crazy thing but it's also a crazy thing being done by people that are almost dead. Like what are you doing? Why are you even trying to make more money now? You're fucking 80 years old.

I think a lot of that stuff is keeping them alive maybe. Yes it's the fun of the game I think I always thought about that in terms of like big business people like I always say that about guys like Bill Gates like why would you even bother trying to make more money why wouldn't you just enjoy yourself if I had that kind of money I would just be I'd be living like Jeff Bezos he steps down he's got this fucking banging hot girlfriend gets jacked yeah Gets jacked. Starts going around the world, balling out of control.

Yeah. Wearing tight underwear. Hey. Having a good time. Hey, why not? Yeah, but that's not what some people are doing. Some people are just trying to make more money, and they're doing it at the expense of the general public.

It's strange. They're making decisions that directly impact the population, and they're doing it for their own benefit. Right. Essentially they're vampires though, because they're not producing anything. There's not a product I can point to that any one of them created that makes our society better.

Right. Like Larry Ellison of Oracle. And I love what he says. He says he had all the disadvantages necessary for success. And so he came from nothing and became one of the richest men in the world. And people have no idea all the things that he does that cancer research and all the things that he funds that are like helping society. He just does it all kind of behind the scenes. Doesn't need the, uh, doesn't need the celebrity status side of things. Uh, but he's doing so much,

but he came from nothing. And I love that. He says, I had all the disadvantages necessary for success. Never complained about it. He just love that he says, I had all the disadvantages necessary for success. Never complained about it. He just worked. And he built this amazing thing called Oracle that we all use today, whether we know it or not. Essentially created cloud-based computing and so many things that we use today. But he created something. He created something that we all use.

What do the politicians create? Not much. Just divisiveness. Well, yeah, especially the politicians that are heavily invested into insider trading in the stock market. What do you think that Larry Ellison thinks about all this quantum computing stuff? When a guy has his whole business is based on cloud computing and the use of technology, I wonder what his perspective is. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, he's a genius. You know, you meet certain people and you're like, hmm, that person is different.

He's one of those guys that's thinking at another level, obviously. I wonder if he's terrified. Doesn't seem like it, but yeah. He'll be protected. He's one of the elites. Yeah. I'm going to ask him. He's got an island.

He does. He does. Very nice island. Pretty dope. We should go there and hunt. I love it there. It's a great place. Yeah. We were just there, actually. Got the kids out there a very nice island. We should go there and hunt. I love it there. It's a great place.

Yeah, we were just there, actually. Got the kids out there a couple weeks ago. Got to go hang out with Bob the Butcher again. Oh. My daughter and little guy. Well, we should tell everybody, you're a part of that hunting operation. Yeah, Pineapple Brothers. Yeah. Pineapple Brothers.

My buddy John Dubin invited me to be a part of it. Yeah, such a great guy. Great guy. But beautiful island out there. It was so nice to get out there and just take a breath and get the kids out hunting. It's one of my favorite places to go. It's so nice. So relaxed.

So relaxing. So relaxing. I heard there's a large die-off of the axis deer out there. Ooh. You know, I'm going to have to ask about that because I heard it from a hunter, so I'm not sure the accuracy of the information. I'm going to get back to you. They said the population was reduced quite a bit from drought and from quite a few other things.

But I'm like, by how much? Exactly. We needed it. There's so many. Yeah. We kind of needed that. What they really need is predators. Yeah.

But then you have another fucking disaster. You got wolves running around. Introduce the lion. Yeah, exactly. Put some mountain lions out there. It would have to be a cat because nothing else is going to catch them. Those are pretty fast. Yeah.

Those things are pretty fast. Axes, too, are the fastest thing I've ever seen in my life. Yeah. They would have to be a cat because nothing else can catch it. Those are pretty fast. Yeah, those things are pretty fast. Axes are the fastest thing I've ever seen in my life. For a mammal, when they get away from an arrow that's going 290 feet per second and it's within like 10 yards of them and they're like they're out of there, they move like they're defying time.

They're pretty quick. But great meat, obviously. And you get out there and you can practice because there are so many. So you can take that shot. And if you mess it up or mess up that stalk or the wind changes, guess what? Well, you can do it again in 10 minutes and start another stalk. Well, we always loved it in June. We would go there to get ready for hunting season for elk.

Because, you know, elk would just hang out a lot more. I mean, obviously, you've got to climb mountains to get to them. And that's not easy by any stretch of the imagination. But in terms of, like, getting close to them, it's so much easier than an animal that evolved to get away from tigers. Oh, yeah. Those things are alert. Because they're switched on. They are switched on out there for sure.

There can be a lot of pressure depending on what's going on. COVID, they took a little break, though, because there was a lockdown. So they got to take a little breath. So that was kind of interesting to see them a little more relaxed than they have been in the past when people are just out there constantly because you can do it all year because it's exotic. But, yeah, what a fantastic spot to go and have the kids have that experience and then bring home the meat. And man, we're eating it right now. It's amazing meat too. It's so delicious.

And isn't it interesting that the animals that are the most difficult to get are the most delicious? I'm trying to think of some that aren't. I mean, I love it all. I love elk. I love moose. I love the axis, of course. I love whitetail.

And even like fish, like salmon. Hard to get. Very delicious. Delicious. Halibut up there. I love going up to, like salmon, hard to get, very delicious. Delicious. Halibut up there. I love going up to Northern British Columbia, going to Alaska and bringing all that down. There's something about that. So I just love doing that.

Wild food. There's something about it. We ate wild game for, gosh, so many years in a row. Now there's a bunch of different companies out there that do, and there's some veteran-owned ones as well that send out tenderloin or whatever else from their farm raised and all that stuff that have social media presence. So you can see how they're running things, which is kind of cool. So we eat more beef these days than we did for a number of years where it was just all

axis, all moose, all elk, and that's all the kids ate as well. That was just normal for them. That's the healthiest food you can get. It is. It is, man. How did you get involved in that Pineapple Brothers organization? That was just normal for them. That's the healthiest food you can get. It is. It is, man. Yeah. How did you get involved in that Pineapple Brothers organization? Yeah. So John Dubin, former FBI agent.

And so we got to be friends. I had a mutual friend. And when he got out of the FBI, he's connected to Larry Ellison. And that's what he wanted to do is he wanted to run the hunting operation out there on Lanai. So put together that business. Does Larry hunt? No. No? He does not. He does not. He's too busy. He's got a lot going on. Yeah. A lot going on. But he's got things going on that are, I don't even know if I'm allowed to talk about too much of it, but like next level stuff, like, hey, wanting to move this world forward in a better way. And he's thinking on other levels.

Anyway, it'd be fascinating to sit down with him and Elon Musk. Does he ever do interviews? Could you have him on a podcast? He does very few, very few interviews. Would he do one with you? I don't know. You never thought about asking him? I've thought about it.

Yeah? I don't know. But sometimes you don't ask. Right, right, right. Yeah, you don't ask. You want almost him to bring it up. Yeah. So a lot of things, you know how that goes. I right, right. Yeah, you don't ask. You want almost him to bring it up. Yeah. So a lot of things, like, you know how that goes.

I do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've got a little taste of it, which is great. It's a great problem to have. But yeah, he did interviews for a number of years. And then I think I remember that there was some point where someone's like, why are you doing these interviews?

They're not, you know. And he's like, oh, yeah, why am I doing these interviews? But he'll do one every now and again. And that's where I heard him say about the disadvantages necessary for success. But there's a great book called The Billionaire and the Mechanic about how he got the America's Cup. And it's so fun, so fantastic to read. But he's playing tennis in part of this story with Rafael Nadal, and they're playing tennis, and they're talking. He asks, hey, Rafa, do you like to win?

And Rapha says, I love the game, and if you love the game, then you're going to win. You're going to love it. You're going to love what you're doing. And I thought that was pretty cool, yeah, because Rapha's obviously amazing, and so is Larry. That's pretty simplistic, though. What if you love the game and your knees are bad?

You're not going to win. Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. Yeah, work on those knees. Yeah, it takes some aspirin. Yeah, there's a lot going on. That's a funny way of saying it. I mean, I'm sure it's accurate if everything else is equal and your genetics and all the other factors.

You've got to put in the work. I mean, those guys put in some work, especially now. These athletes are working from, like, day one. That's why it's always so interesting when someone's like, ah, I just found this sport two years ago. And now you're crushing it. Like it's some obscure sport like biathlon. Like you have people in Europe that are just growing up and they're doing the biathlon. So the cross country skiing and the shooting.

And that's amazing. What incredible athletes. And then someone in this country like finds it a couple of years ago and just puts in the work. And now they're up there, you know, near the top. I love stories like that. That's kind of cool, too, because so many people are growing up with tennis balls in the crib type of a thing and kind of just bred for it almost,

which is a crazy way to think about it. But look at that. It is crazy. But look at the difference in performance. Look at a rugby team in the 60s and 70s compared to today. That's a different group. Well, mixed martial artists, that's obviously my focus, is looking at the difference between

fighters from the 1990s when the ufc first came around yeah versus guys like charles olivera of today which is like they're on such a different level remember the tough man contest before ufc remember those guys in there that was awesome it was on some sort of pay-per-view-ish type thing i remember in the early 90s and seeing those guys get in there and just like bang it oh man that was kind of cool. And then, of course, things evolved. But yeah, I think I'm going to my first UFC, I think on June 2nd. Are you going to be on that one?

Which one is that? Vegas. July 2nd. July 2nd. Yeah, I'm there for sure. Awesome. 100%. Hey, brother, anytime you want to go to the UFC, you got an open invitation.

Oh, I appreciate that. You just reach out. Thank you. I'll hook it up. I appreciate that. That's a good one, though. The July 4th weekend one is always madness. Oh, I appreciate that. You just reach out. Thank you. I'll hook it up. I appreciate that. That's a good one, though. The July 4th weekend one is always madness. Oh, nice.

And that's Israel Adesanya. Nice. Who's the last. Yeah. Yeah, the last style. But he's one of the greatest of all time. He's fighting one of the absolute greatest middleweights of all time. And he's fighting Jared Cannoneer, who's a bad motherfucker.

That's a great fight. Awesome. The whole card is great. Cool. Cool. That is that fight, right? That's a great fight. Awesome. The whole card is great. Cool. Yeah. That is that fight, right? That is the July fight. Who else is?

Oh, that's also Alex Pereira. There it is. Who's on there? There's the card. Yeah. Volkanovski versus Max Holloway III. Woo! And Sean Strickland versus Alex Pereira.

That is a fucking phenomenal fight. Pedro Munoz and Sean O'Malley. Giant fight. Uriah Hall and Andre Muniz. Nice. Andre Muniz is one of the scariest fucking submission artists in the game. This is a great card. Nice.

Great card. Oh, I'm fired up. I'm fired up. A lot of action. Yeah. Yeah. But that'll be good. So that's 4th of July weekend, and that's a day after the terminal list comes out.

Is that the whole fight card, Jamie? Do they have the undercard and everything? That's all that's announced so far? Nice. That's all that's announced so far? Nice. That's a very good fight. Cannonier actually started off his career as a heavyweight, and then he got down to light heavyweight, and now he's a middleweight. He's a big middleweight.

He's a big middleweight and strong as fuck. Nice. Nice. And stylebender is probably the most sophisticated striker that's ever fought in the sport. Nice. Oh, man. Oh, man. Oh, man.

Hey, there we go. Good cards. Those are future cards. Those are different cards, too. There's Glover and Jura Prohaska. Yeah, man. A lot of great fights. That'd be cool.

The UFC is awesome. It's just on so often. There's so much talent, and there's so many events. How crazy was it to do with no audience? I loved it. Oh, you did? I loved it. Really?

Yeah, because you could hear everything. You could hear all the impact of the shots. You could hear the breathing heavy. You could hear the shit talking. You could hear the coaches cornering. Because the first ones we did were literally no audiences. And then the UFC, as time went on, they allowed more people into the Apex Center as the the you know everything sort of relaxed a little bit but the initial days like

everybody had to be tested everybody was in a kovat bubble and we would get to the events and it was just like you know me Daniel Cormier John Anik we would sit there we had to wear masks whenever we got up. And then when we sit down, we took our masks off. It was all weirdness, right? But it was just like that was the rules. And then when the fights went on, you were essentially so fortunate to be in this room where there's only 30 or 40 other people in the whole room

watching these world-class world championship fights. It was incredible. It was like if you were like some sultan and you had your own private arena and you paid the best fighters to come and fight for you. Yeah, that's a little freaky. What did the fighters think? Did most of them like it or not? Some loved it.

Some hated it. Some guys fight off the crowd. They feel the vibe of the crowd. But when we first came back and we had the first events with a full crowd, I believe the first one we had was Jacksonsonville okay i think that's the case the first one we did that was live of course it's florida they don't give a fuck they're just like go ahead yeah and you know it was an amazing event because it was like everyone was so enthusiastic and happy and then i was like okay i love this better but I don't I love them both yeah I love I love the ones where there was no crowd like uh when Francis Ngannou beat Stipe Miocic no crowd

you know won the heavyweight title with no crowd you know I mean a very small amount of people in the crowd a few I mean maybe at that point was like a hundred but cool to hear that here could have both experiences and to have that we're all quiet around you and hear that oh hear that. To have both experiences and to have that all quiet around you and hear that fight going on with no distractions out there. That's wild. Like fighting in a vacuum almost. I felt very, very fortunate. That's one thing that I thought of. Because also it's like it almost kind of went away.

Like almost everything went away. And then it's back. And then at those times it was back for a very small amount of people. I mean, people got to watch it at home. And credit to Dana White and the UFC for having the courage to put on those events in the middle of such extreme criticism. Like there was a lot of people that didn't want anybody to do anything. Oh, wow. They wanted everybody to just hide. And with a respiratory virus that's spreading, like if you talk to virologists, you talk to people that are, especially if they weren't on

camera, right? Especially they would tell you like, there is no way to stop this. They were like, the best thing you can do is stay healthy, take care of yourself. And that's actually initially what even Fauci said. He's like, don't drink, take care of yourself, exercise, you know, like this is what you really have to concentrate on. Whiskey doesn't kill it? Things you can control. I don't think so. Maybe if you poured it on it, but I don't think you can get it in there. Yeah. Dang it. Imagine if whiskey did kill it. That was the way to get better. That's what I've been going with. Yeah, people ask me the secret to writing, and I say, you know, coffee in the morning and whiskey at night.

Just don't mix those two up. You know, when you start doing the whiskey in the morning and coffee at night, there's an issue. How does the whiskey at night help? Because, well, you get to take a breath. Kids are in bed. You have this quiet, uninterrupted time, and you just get to sit there and think and just kind of sip something nice. And maybe it's worked into the story like a veteran-owned whiskey, like Horse Soldier. I put in this last one.

We put Hootin' Young by these Delta guys. That's in the show. And you just kind of sip in and type in and alone in your world. What is your process? Do you wake up in the morning and write immediately, or do you have a routine that you follow? I wish I did, And I'm getting, I hope that I can get to a routine at some point, but with all the chaos, it's just crazy working on scripts and, and juggling the kids. And then all the other projects that are going on the

podcast, reading people's books for the podcast, like all those things, it's just constant chaos. So what I did this last time was I rented Airbnbs around park city and I found this amazing cabin. I probably shouldn't even say it, but it's cool cabin, super small, wood outside. I'd go chop wood, throw it in the wood-burning stove, and everything was right there. The whole thing was about as big as this room. And I had a couch, wood-burning stove, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, and I could just write and I could still think about writing. If I got up to make a sandwich, sat back down, I could sip whiskey or wine at night in front of that fire and just work. So I went all in with no interruptions, but I should have a routine where I get up early and I work until whatever time and then I start doing the business side of the house or then I work on the podcast or then I work on scripts or whatever it is. But I'm not quite there yet.

I need some of that Jocko discipline to get me into that routine. But right now I feel like it's still a startup where you're in your garage and're just doing things. And you're just building this readership and building these books, essentially, and which, you know, any product, any entrepreneur that starts something in their garage, very similar. But I think now is the time to take a breath and get a routine going. But what I've done for all the books to include this one, and the sixth one that I'm working on now, is I write a one page executive summary, like what you read on the book jacket. And I asked myself, hey, would, was this worth spending a year of my life on? And if the answer is yes, then I read it again and I say, if someone read this, would they want to spend time, time they're never going to get back

in these pages or listening to this? Because something I take very seriously is that time. People have trusted me with it. So if the answer to those two is yes, then I'm in. So I have a theme. I have a title right off the bat. I that one page executive summary I turn that into an outline and then I start writing and I love every part of the process and it's just so I mean I feel so fortunate to be doing what I love and so thankful to everybody that says bought a book took a risk on me you know like you did and then told a friend about it whether that's one person or 35 million or whatever it might be I'm just so thankful each and every day that I get to

do this. When you write, do you write for a specific amount of time or do you just write until you're done? Until I'm exhausted, essentially. It's not the best way to go, I don't think. I think you should write for probably a certain amount of time and then switch gears, but I just go. I just go. But if that's the case, if you write for a certain amount of time and then switch gears, what if you're just hitting your stride? Exactly. I don't know. I don't know. But some people do that.

They get up and they have that routine. I think John Grisham does. He gets up and he starts at 7 and he stops at noon, I believe. And he just goes and he does that for six months. And then he's done and he takes another six months off, I believe, or something along those lines. A friend of mine who's a very straight-laced guy said he would snort Adderall. And I go, what? And he goes, yeah, until my wife told me to stop doing it. I go, what? I go, why did you snort Adderall? He goes, hmm, and he goes yeah until my wife told me stop doing it I go what I go. Why did you snort Adderall?

He goes well, I didn't want to fucking swallow it and if you snorted it hits you right away I'm like, how do you even fucking know this and just keep some of what does it do? I'm telling this dude is so straight-laced. You would never imagine that he snorts Adderall I go why and he goes because I had so much fucking energy He goes I'd snort Adderall and I could just fucking write and write and write and write. And I'd get so much done. I get that. I mean, I totally get that.

Many times I have thought about Stephen King in the early days and some of the things that he did to keep writing. You've read on writing? I certainly have. Amazing book. What a great book. And the autobiographical nature of it is even crazier, like getting hit by that van and then waking up and looking up and seeing this person, I think, sitting on a rock that just hit him with this van and thinking, I just got killed by somebody in one of my novels, essentially. Right. And crazy.

Yeah, it is like one of his novels. Yeah. Very much so. Yeah. So I read that. So I understand not just the temptation but the use of doing that sort of a thing, just keep going. But I'm doing the coffee and the whiskey thing. Well, the coffee and the whiskey is way more controllable.

But man, that dude with cocaine and beer created some of the fucking greatest books, the greatest fiction horror stories ever. And some of them he doesn't even remember writing. Isn't that crazy? Cujo, he said he doesn't remember writing it. Insane. And it's an amazing book.

I think in Carrie, he was ready to throw it out, right? Oh, man, I can't remember that part, but I believe it. Crazy. I mean, I don't think it's the healthiest way to go. No, it's not the healthiest way. His whole family stepped in and said, hey, stop. And I think, look, the guy contributed so much. He's so prolific. No reason to do that. But if he ever wanted to write again like he did back then, I would say cocaine's the way to go. It seems for him like there was something about those drugs yeah that gave him this maniacal sort of explosively savage creations like like some of those books

you'd read him he's like holy fuck yeah I think he wrote against like essentially under the stairs against a wall. And I totally understand that too. Like I don't need a view. I don't need this certain scenario. I just need uninterrupted time. Yeah. And so I can stare at a wall. I used to go down to the public library and go into one of those little rooms that you

could rent there for two hours at a time if no one was waiting. And oftentimes I get bumped by a high school student that's waiting to do a high school history project. But it was just staring at a blank wall and just having my computer right there. I like the cabin idea. The cabin idea was nice. I think that's the best. Yeah.

Plus, it fits the James Reese character. It does. Yeah, it's rustic. I had elk going by. I had mule deer going by. It was amazing. And then the beautiful stars at night like this were just incredible.

And so that's where most of this one was written in the blood. So I think I'm going to get a head start on six. I'm already writing it, but I need to lock down ahead of time instead of waiting until the fall and just go and get a couple months in this cabin. Because it's still fairly close to where we live. Well, In the Blood, I don't want to give anything away. But the end of it, there's a lot of room. At the end of it, it's not over.

That's right. Yeah. That's right. I don't want to give anything away. But at the end of it, you're like not over that's right yeah that's right i don't want to give anything away well at the end of it you're like holy shit nice nice well the goal is to have someone get to the end of a chapter and then to turn it and keep them up all night right and then that's the art part of it is having enough resolution to the story but also leaving that little bit out there that they're going to want to get the next book and keep this thing going keep that journey going and that's really what james reese is on he's on a journey just like we all are. And hopefully we're all getting wiser as we go forward. Hopefully

we're asking questions. Hopefully we're taking past successes and failures and applying them to our future. And that's what he's on. He's not the same guy that's just picked up and dropped in a different scenario every book. He's on this journey just like we all are. So I think that helps resonate with readers because once again, life is journey, and he's on that same path. Well, he's also very, very likable, even though he's a fucking savage. He's a savage, and he can flip that switch. That was important to me, too, because if you're going to spend that time that you're never going to get back with somebody in the pages of this novel, I think that it should be with somebody that you want to have a beer with, like we talked about.

So I wanted him to be someone you'd want to sit down and have a coffee with, sit down and have a beer with, but who could also flip that switch and just put heads on stakes when the time came for it. Well, I'm so glad you got Chris. Yeah. Because he fits that. He does. Because he's so nice.

He's such a nice guy, but he could be that guy. Yep. He's got that. Like there's something inside of him where you're like, I'll buy that. Oh, yeah. For people that think, oh, he's too nice where you're like, I'll buy that. Oh, yeah. For people that think, oh, he's too nice to play this role or that sort of thing, oh, no. He goes dark, and people are going to be

surprised when they see this thing. I can imagine. Because they're used to seeing Avengers or Guardians of the Galaxy or Jurassic World, and they're kind of used to that kind of a Chris. Well, when you see this, this is a different Chris. Chris Pat's a bad motherfucker. Such a great guy. He loves UFC, too, so he loves being there and watching the fights. He's a sweetheart, too. Such a different Chris. Chris Pat's a bad motherfucker. Such a great guy. He loves UFC too, so he loves being there and watching the fights. He's a sweetheart too.

Such a good dude. Yeah, he and I have some hilarious text messages back and forth. That's awesome. He's a big boy too. He's a fucking house. He is. He's a fucking house. He's a big fella.

Yep. And he's also, what a transition, a transformation that guy made from being this sort of overweight guy on Parks and Rec to being this jacked dude in Guardians of the Galaxy. Like, holy shit, what was under there? Oh yeah. And you have Jerry Shaw, my seal buddy. They work out together and that's kind of how they keep each other honest. And he's a good wrestler.

Yeah, yeah. He's a high school wrestler. And yeah, I wouldn't want to mess with him. No, he's a big fella. But he's also just like, he's so unusual for like a Hollywood guy. mess with him no he's a big fella yeah but he's also just like he's so unusual there he goes look at that for like a hollywood guy yeah he's he's like you know he's very religious and he's very sweet and very humble and personable and grounded yeah super grounded you know normal guy and everywhere i mean i remember ran into him just by accident on lanai when we were there with my

family and he's just like he couldn't be nicer so nice and it's so genuine yeah yeah totally he says actually that was my takeaway from uh that experience on set was just how many of those actors were totally normal like jean triple horn incredible i just love her she's so great and so great in this role also and she was in basic instinct and the firm and one world and she's just so so smart and so wonderful we had such great conversations uh tyner rushing i think she's going to be a breakout star from this thing she's just so good as liz riley uh like everybody jd pardo who's uh in there in mayans of course he's so great um monica garrett who was just in 1883 crushes in

the terminal list i mean he is so good and such a good guy. Now, Terminal List is your first book, and that is eight episodes on Amazon. So will you then go from there to book two, three, four, and five, and then onward? We'll see. We'll see. That all depends on Amazon and Chris and see what they can work.

Because he's in demand. He has a lot of other options out there. And that's a giant commitment, right? It's a big commitment of time. And with all the other options out there, he that's a giant commitment, right? It's a big commitment of time. And with all the other options out there, he has to weigh family, weigh these other projects. But you can't have someone else play James Reese. I don't think so.

But once you start it with Chris, it's got to stay. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll see. We'll see. I'm hopeful. Working on the outline for the next season right now. And what's interesting is that that last book, well, the next book, True Believer, it was building towards a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

And that was kind of the penultimate thing. And then, well, now that's actually happened. So if we actually stay true to that storyline, well, you can't because now it's actually happened. So you've got to get creative now on that side of things. And that's too bad because I like the way it flowed from the Atlantic to Mozambique up to Morocco and then into Ukraine. Like I liked how that flow worked with the story. And now I'm like, oh, what are we going to do? So I'm writing out this outline for it right now.

And we'll see what Chris's schedule looks like and what Amazon's checkbook looks like for him. So we'll see. Well, I hope it's a gigantic success. Thank you. And the books are fucking awesome. Thanks, brother. I really, really enjoy them. And this is the latest in the blood. That's it. In the blood. It's available right now and uh go get it folks because it's fucking great thanks brother thank you brother thanks

for being here I appreciate you take care bye everybody