The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 436: Getting Revenge with Jack Carr

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

Steve Rinella talks with Jack Carr, Ryan Callaghan, Brody Henderson, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider. Topics include: Opinions on eavesdropping; when you're a New York Times Selling Best Author every time; go get "Only the Dead," Jack Carr's latest novel; novelizations and when a prequel sequel of a movie is a book; show business lessons; when 18,000 dairy cows die in an explosion at a Texas dairy farm; wolverine sightings in Oregon for the first time in three decades; K-leather; conservation surveys; when a flunking soap opera actor narrates your book and you have to wait ten years to re-record it yourself; going into the cave; when you legitimately consider yourself an author; waning accountability; history of war lessons; the Taliban as a guest of Afghanistan; Hemmingway's typewriter; heavy with acronyms; Chapter 10 of “MeatEater” narrated by Steve; and more.  Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop MeatEater Merch See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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First Light, go farther, stay longer. A little inside scoop here for listeners. Brody was just telling me that Brody was just hunting with Hayden Samick. How many times has he won trivia? Three? No. He was on a hot streak and it's been cold for a while.

Well, yeah, because he was the emerging threat and then he became the receding threat. What was the word? Waning. Waning champion. Oh, no then he became the receding threat. What was the word? Waning. Waning champion. Oh, no, the waning champion. Waning champion. So Brody was telling me a story in which, in private between me and Brody.

So we're going to talk about it here. The door must have been open. I don't know. Yep. Because Brody's telling me about him over-calling while turkey hunting, and I just stepped outside. And he's sitting out there. He goes, hey, man, talk to you.

No, I wasn't over calling. He's going to be so embarrassed when he hears this. It's like we're having a private conversation in there. Dude, it sounded like a herd of turkeys down there where he was at. He's eavesdropping. He's got like a recording device. It's like the surveillance state. You know who would appreciate that? Jack Carr.

Hey. What's happening? That's a great transition. That is who'd appreciate that? Jack Carr. Hey. What's happening here with us? That's a great transition. That is. I've never had a transition like that. What are your opinions on eavesdropping? You don't like it? Be careful.

Yeah, I'm not a big fan, but this is probably the most heavily bugged room in Bozeman. That's Steve's paranoia as well. Uh-huh. I get it. I get it. Be careful. That's what I'd say. No, I'm going to ask you a little bit about that.

Jack Carr is here. New York Times bestselling author like multiple times. Yeah, all of them now. All of them. All of them. Crazy. Damn it, man. Crazy.

No, I don't want to have him on. That's a good track record. New York Times bestselling author every time. New book out. releases on, you can pre-order it now, but releases on May 16th, Only the Dead. Five other previous titles. Terminalist. If you guys sit around watching Amazon Prime and you happen to see chris pratt and a thing called terminalist that is and has been for a long time that's jack carr's book that's based

off your book now that jack car you uh i was surprised when we had dinner last night not surprised but pleased to hear when we had dinner last night that you get to be involved in all that yeah like from a writing from a writing standpoint. Yeah. Cause usually they get rid of the author right away. They don't want the author to be there and on set and see what's going on and start yelling, you ruined my vision. And so that I kind of move the author to the side right away and then bring the writing team in and get going. But I went into it kind of being a kid of the eighties. I grew up reading all these thrillers growing up and then watching the movies that were adapted from those books and noting the differences and what worked and what didn't, but more so realizing that there was going to be changes because you are telling a story now through a different medium.

You are telling that story visually. So it's going to change. And you have a writer's room. And people are going to, it's going to be two hours long. And it's going to be, this one is six. No, sorry, eight. So every episode is about an hour. So it's eight episodes.

But yeah, you can't tell everything. You have to kind of morph things a little bit. You have to add things that weren't in the book. So that's just how it goes. But I always thought back, my first conversation with the showrunner, who's like in series television, he's like the director of a feature film. So he's managing multiple directors. And he's like the single point of contact for all these different things that go into making a TV show. Um, we had our first conversation in December of 2019. His name is David DiGilio, amazing guy. And I think

I put him at ease by talking about First Blood and how First Blood and that came out in 1972. Uh, never been out of print since written by David Murrell and the movie with Sylvester Stallone in the early eighties. Those are two very different animals, but they're both awesome, but very different. So I knew that there was going to be changes. And more so it was important to Chris and to Antoine, and to me, was keeping the theme of the book, keeping that spirit alive,

even if there were going to be changes. So that's what we did. As someone who traffics in intrigue and espionage and whatnot, you're familiar with John, is it, does he,

LaCarre or LaCarré? How does he, John LaCarré. So it is LaCarré. Yep. I think so. That's how I've always said it in the last,

almost 50 years. He's got a great quote where he said, watching your book get made into a movie, this isn't your experience, but he said, watching your book

get made into a movie is like watching an ox turned into a bullion This isn't your experience. But he said, watching your book get made into a movie is like watching an ox turned into a bullion cube. Interesting. I've not heard him say that one. I've heard similar ones, but not him say those exact words. But yeah,

I mean, he and his have been, since the 70s, they've been making those into films and TV shows. But I mean, what an amazing track record that guy had.

He had a good run. He had a solid run. And they'll continue to make his books into films and TV shows going forward, I mean, what an amazing track record that guy had. He had a good run. He had a solid run. And they'll continue to make his books into films and TV shows going forward, I'm sure. What the hell was I going to tell you about something about that? Another film quote. Oh, there's a comedy. You're familiar with the comedy, The Producers? I haven't seen it.

It's like a Broadway. Yeah, I know what it is, but I haven't seen it. Yeah, there's a line in there where the producers are producing, and they get so sick of the writer as they're making this play. They get so sick of the writer. One of them says, next time, no writers. No writers. I'm going to have to watch it now because now I can see how that could happen.

But no, I was very fortunate. The team we put together, starting with Antoine Fuqua and Chris Pratt and that showrunner, David Agilio, we put such a solid team together. And now we're continuing that into this next spinoff. So working on those right now, and I'm writing one of those episodes. Um, and then we'll go right from that into true believer, which is the second book in the series. So we'll just keep, uh, keep going. Yeah. Fingers crossed. You never know until it's actually on the screen though. So you can't really get too excited until you actually see it on the screen. Cause there's so many things that can derail throughout the whole process oh sure so it's uh yeah and so i never really talked even

talked about it too much until it actually came out or until until they started putting commercials on tv they put a commercial in front of top gun maverick in the theaters for it and uh so when they started doing that i'm like okay i'm pretty certain this is going to come out on july 1st now but even so i still you know still a little nervous until it actually hits screens. You've got to have a lot of mega fans who are just pissed. When you compare? Yeah.

Yeah. That happens. Well, that's not what happened. And I tried to prep as much as I possibly could through my podcast and social posts and stuff and just kind of prep people kind of slowly, getting them used to the idea of it being a little different. But still, regardless, when it comes out, there are those people who will take your book, watch the show.

This was different. That was different. That was different. I hate it. And that's just going to happen, which is what's great about the spinoff is that there's no book to compare it to yet. So it's just creating those characters that I i've created but it's a backstory so there's no book about the backstory so there's nothing for someone to sit there and just compare it to just looking for something to to nitpick or some looking for a reason to hate it you know

and that's just kind of uh the world we live in today people love they do backstory sequels yes so you're you're positioned perfectly wait a few years and then be like, little guy growing up on the farm. There it is. Did you know that Michael Mann did, was it like after he or prior? He too is a book and it's by my bedside. It's awesome. It's by my bed.

You haven't read it yet? Yeah, it's so good. Here's like this phenomenal, it's a little bit more than a cult classic, but at this point has a very cultish... Yeah. I make a point to watch Heat every two, three years. Me too. I love that movie.

But he's a director. He's not a writer. So the fact that he went and wrote this... But is it after or before? It's like a prequel sequel, I think. It's before and after. It's a great book. Have you read it yet? It is amazing. Meg Gardner wrote it with Michael Mann

and she's an incredible author and I had her on my podcast. We talked about it and she's just amazing. But the book, it exceeded expectations. And that's hard to do when you're writing this movie.

Heat 2. Oh. Yeah. And the cover looks like the movie poster, essentially. Tarantino did something similar with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. He wrote his own novelization of his

movie, but he added scenes and changed dialogue and made it a little bit different. It's kind of fun. Novelizations used to be a big thing in the 80s into the 90s, so you read a book based on a screenplay, but it kind of fell out of favor here. It seems ass-backward for sure, man.

Yeah, so David Morrell wrote a novelization based on the screenplay for Rambo First Blood Part II and for Rambo III. And they're fantastic. They are really good. At least Rambo First Blood Part II made the New York Times list for quite a few weeks when it came out in conjunction with the movie in 1985. Got it.

And yeah, David Morrell is just an incredible talent. Amazing guy. I'm proud to call him a friend now. Just honored to know him but yeah so he did those novelizations and uh i'm collecting them actually that's why i'm so up on the novelization so i'm collecting the old ones from the 80s that i that i had back then that i've kind of misplaced over the years so i'm collecting all those novelizations and some that i didn't know existed that's cool yeah so my buddies and i still uh on occasion uh say I just wanted a cup of coffee

from Rambo for your smaller. He was just looking for something to eat. Oh, that's what it is. I put a little nod to Will Teasel in this upcoming novel in Only the Dead. So for fans such as yourself, you'll be reading through it and be like, so I try to throw a few things in there.

This one I threw, like fans of Magnum will recognize in all my books. I throw a little something in there. They're pretty subtle. So I few things in there. This one I threw, like fans of Magnum will recognize in all my books. I throw a little something in there. They're pretty subtle. So I get those in there. This one I have some Magnum stuff in there. It's all very subtle. James Bond stuff in there, Lethal Weapon in there, and First Blood in there.

Oh, that's amazing. You have to be on your toes, though. It doesn't say the thing and then say, from the movie First Blood or anything like that. It's just woven in to the fabric for people that pretty much the people that grew up in the 80s. Excellent. Yeah. Love it. We're going to, in a little bit, we're going to talk about how your mom was a librarian,

which I love. Yeah. It all starts with books. It all started with books. Speaking of show business and books, God, man, it's another great transition. Did you catch that? I did. That was smooth. Speaking of show business and books, God, man, it's another great transition. Did you catch that? I did. That was smooth. Feel free to pat yourself on the back. Here's a little show

business lesson for you. When I sold my books to Random House, they buy world rights to the book. They can then sell the audio rights to someone else. And a long time ago, a decade ago, they weren't doing a bunch of audio.

Audio just wasn't what it is now. So when I sold Meat Eater, Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter, to Random House, they turned around and sold the audio rights to Brilliance and had some... I don't know if he's listening. Probably is. A feller. They get someone to read it.

And it's just not how it's... It's wrong. It's immoral. But they got someone to read it. But they only had the audio rights for 10 years. So we just got back the audio rights. So was able to go this happened with my buffalo book too a decade went by and i was able to get back my publisher got back the audio rights and then i a couple weeks ago went back into the studio and read 10 years later, wow. My own damn book.

Did you learn anything? Oh, that's what I'm going to get to a lot of things. Like I had a lot of like, not a lot like opinions I had that I don't really have anymore or opinions I had that were accentuated that, that just have gotten more complicated. And when I did my Buffalo book,

there was, there was stuff, there was like scientific understandings about, about like from like genetics work, stuff about the first Americans, um, stuff about when waves of animal migrations came and how things died out and didn't just,

it just changed and became, uh, like objectively different and i fixed some of the objectively different things but yeah and reading it there's everything i'm like yeah i don't know if i'd put it that way now but we're gonna tack on to the end of this episode we're gonna tack on a chapter of it's just gonna be like glued right down to the end of the show we're gonna tap tack on a chapter of a book i wrote a long time ago and just recorded the audio now and if you want to go find that audio book i don't know can you put a link in there yeah if you want to go find

the whole audio book and pick it up go find the whole audio book and you listen to the whole damn thing if you don't like to read. Also at the end of the show. God, the transitions keep coming. Man. Also at the end of the show, we put a song. A lot of love and hate. So many people wrote in about this. Is it mostly hatred? There's some love. There's some not

knowing what the hell it is. There's some like, this is awful. There's a musician. There's some love, there's some not knowing what the hell it is, there's some like, this is awful. There's a musician, Christopher Denny. I understand he likes to pull a cork. This is about our new outro song. I understand he likes to pull a cork, and I understand he likes to party. Steve, I've noticed a lot of your favorite musicians have crippling drug or alcohol addictions. That's very true.

I don't know why. Okay. As someone who doesn't, I don't know why. Yeah. Likes to party. That's a euphemism for likes to party. It's a euphemism for likes to do... Yeah, I don't know where he's at on it right now.

Christopher Denny. Christopher likes to do... Yeah, I don't know where he's at on it right now. Christopher Denny. One day we had a podcast episode where we argued about a thing way too long. Probably not the only time. And it was like, there was a comment like, you beat the horse to death. There's a Christopher Denny song where in the end of the song he says,

we've done beat this horse to death. It's time to ride on. And I wanted to glue it onto the end of that episode, but never got around to it. So now it's glued onto the end of every episode. It somehow seems appropriate. Yet we still beat dead horses into the underworld. So if you're listening at the end of the show and you're annoyed by Chris Denny, who my kids feel is a woman, but it's not. Is it just a clip or the whole song?

No, it's a clip. It's the end of his song, Ride On. It's about having beat a horse to death. I wonder if that song is going to get a bump on Spotify. I would suggest people go listen to the whole album. If the roses don't kill us. Is he local? How do you guys link up with this?

I don't know how I know about him. I just found out about him probably on Spotify. I don't know how I found out about Christopher Denny. You ever hunted alligators? I have. Oh. I have, yeah. Where'd you hunt them I found out about Christopher Denny. You ever hunted alligators? I have. Oh. I have, yep. Where'd you hunt them?

Hey, in Texas. Okay. Yep. Yeah, it was a little while ago, but yeah, about 10 years ago now, I guess. But yeah, it was an interesting experience. Huh. It was quite an interesting experience. You'll appreciate this.

A few episodes ago, on an episode titled, Rassling Gators, we had a crocodilian biologist on. A lot of folks wrote in. And I said, you know, biologists are always very measured. They don't want to say stuff that isn't for positive. Okay. And I said, man, our listeners are going to have a lot of comments that would begin with shit, right? Like shit. He doesn't know what he's talking about. So I said, if you have a lot of comments that begin with shit, send them to us.

A number of them. I'm a bit disappointed that a croc biologist didn't have a good answer for how to easily tell the difference between a croc and an alligator. It's really quite easy. One will see you later. The other, after a while. and an alligator. It's really quite easy. One will see you later. The other, after a while. Bum bum. Mulf. Write that down.

So many people wrote in with that. It's embarrassing. Really? Yeah. Wow. I deleted. Pretty even included many. The alligator experience, though, for me, it was less hunting and more fishing and execution.

Huh. Yeah. That makes sense to those who are- Big baited treble hook. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense to those who are. Oh, yeah. Big baited treble hook. Yeah. Yeah. That was the one.

On jugs. With the chicken that's been sitting out in the sun for a while. You know, that sort of a. So I was just kind of just observing. I hadn't done that before. So yeah, it was interesting. I know a few folks on the Florida side that have an area where, where alligators like to sun. Uh-huh.

And they'll slip up on them with, and half of them hunt with recurves. Oh, wow. And, and stick them on the beach. No kidding. Yeah. I think that'd be a little more sporting perhaps than the way I did it.

It feels a little more like the hunting than the fishing. How are they killing them? I thought they were like a mafioso, you know. How are they killing them fast enough with a bow to like get. Oh, they probably hit them with a bang stick once they get them in. It's like bow fishing rig. I know it's not a bow fishing rig.

That's what I, what? They're just whacking them in the back of the head from what I understand. No. Sounds like a meat eater episode, bro. Go check it out. A couple different ways to do it. It seems like. Sounds like someone's going to write in an email,

shee! Exactly. I'd like to know more details. Really, not putting a rope onto them. No, but I mean, you know, they do like the spin of death and stuff like that, I imagine. Yeah, there's technique behind all of it,

the people who do it well A couple people just got munched in the last week Yes they did That lady and the guy It's the only thing that makes Golf courses intriguing to me A senior citizen got his last week A senior citizen got his leg

Tore off When they showed up the alligator still had his foot in his mouth Golf course There's another thing that I don't want to talk about because it involves kids and that kind of stuff i don't like to talk about uh on that episode we were talking about indigenous uses for alligators and a listener wrote in that when he was at texas tech university he worked on a project about the karen kawa indians from east texas and west louisiana they used uh gator fat as a repellent mosquito repellent interesting they'd render it down and spread it over their bodies and um european explorers would comment that you could

smell them quite a ways off because of that gator fat. Here's a crazy one. They had, so for whatever reason, they have these gator, these crocodile mummies from Egypt. Okay. Which I had no idea. So you have thousands of years of year old

crocodile mummies. And they were doing them with CT scans in 2010. And here they're looking at a thousands year old crocodile mummy with a CT scan. And he's got a fishing hook

in his gut. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. yeah i love that and there's pictures of crocodile mummies they're crazy looking beautiful they didn't say what the hook was made out of did you know that's what the email just if that person's listening that's where the email really fell short because it's like it makes it sound like it's like a modern looking metal fish hook. Kind of. No, it's an old ass hook. I know,

but like it says we notice a perfect fish hook, but I like, I don't know what that means. Like, no, I don't want to criticize him, but since you brought it up. Yeah.

Listener. Pull it together. He, he, it's a deeparbed circle hook. He acknowledges that he didn't include, he includes a picture of their crocodile mummy, but he acknowledges not including a picture of the hook.

Yes. Yeah, you'd think it'd be bone. Yeah, something. Yeah, depending on how old it is. But Iron Age. I said this to Corinne the other day. This defies understanding. A Texas

dairy farm. Yeah. Okay. It defies understanding. 18 thousand dairy cows. I'll repeat that. 18 thousand dairy cows

killed in an explosion at a Texas dairy farm and that's about 20% of cattle slaughtered in this country on any given day yeah it's the largest like loss of cattle life since

like the Galveston hurricane or something like that no I think it was even more than that. 18,000. Stinky. I don't even know what to say. I'm not going to say anything. They're having a hard time. I told that to Doug Duren.

Disposing of carcasses. I told it to Doug, to which Doug said, well, why would you have 18,000 cows together anyways? Wolverine sighting four times outside of Portland, Oregon for the first time in three decades. I have a feeling they're seeing the same Wolverine. They think so. But then for the fourth time, they're not sure. I think that's what it is. 30 years goes by, no Wolverine.

And then all of a sudden there's four outside of Portland. No, I mean, they think it's probably the same, the same one going around. Nike and Puma to stop using kangaroo leather. I wonder if that company, remember when I was a little kid, they had a shoe company called Roo's? Yeah, man. They had the little pocket on the side. Are they fixing to stop? I don't even, maybe they never did use kangaroo.

I think they're called Roo's because of the pocket, not because of leather. Oh, they're phasing it out by the end of 2023. I don't know. You know, I take anything like this. Like, uh, I take anything. I don't, I don't like anything like this. Well, there's a massive population issue with,

with kangaroos. Like they, they breed like crazy. And that, these are like free range animals, not farmed animals that they're rounding up. So it's like, whoa, who's going to pay for taking care of the overabundance of kangaroos? I should conclude that. And we've talked about that in the past,

is they kill absurd numbers of kangaroos every year as conclude that, and we've talked about that in the past, is they kill absurd numbers of kangaroos every year as agricultural control. Yeah, as control, as in somebody else is paying to have it done. So Oregon, this comes after the introduction of a bill in mid-January in Oregon where Nike is headquartered that would ban the sale of any

part of a dead kangaroo or any product containing a part of a dead kangaroo. The punishment would include up to a year in prison a 6 250 fine or both there's also a bipartisan bill that was introduced in the house of representatives the kangaroo protection act. Oh, my God. Yeah, it seems like they got other things they could be focusing on here. No, they have everything else wrapped up.

Everything else is perfect. So now they get to focus on the nitpicky stuff. Yes. The global commercial kangaroo product industry was worth roughly $200 million annually to Australia. The U..s was its second largest global market at 80 million 2021 figures more or less what was kind of staggering is that the government estimated uh the australian government estimated that there were uh 42.7 million kangaroos for 26 million Australians.

And you get a kangaroo. And you get a kangaroo. Yeah. I'm learning so much. This is great. I'm learning so much. Here's who all has ditched K-leather. Yeah.

Versace. Is that how you pronounce that? Mm-hmm. Versace. Diane von Furstenberg. Oh, not Diane. Which doesn't sound like a thing that I would buy. A Diane Von Furstenberg?

That sounds like a person. Sounds like a Nazi billionaire. No, it sounds like someone who inherited a lot of money. If your name's Von Furstenberg, you probably just get money. I thought it was like... Hold on, hear me out my last name

is Von furstenberg yeah you know the harpsichord manufacturer uh Victoria Beckham Salvatore Ferragamo and Paul Smith that just seems like a your HVAC guy, Paul Smith, all have gone, unlike Salvatore Ferragamo and Diane von Furstenberg, even Paul Smith has gone K-free, K-leather free. I wonder how many of those people are associated with PETA as well. I'm going to sleep better tonight knowing all this. This is the last thing. This is the last thing, Jack. I know. I'm going to sleep better tonight knowing all this. This is the last thing. This is the last thing, Jack. I know. I'm taking notes.

This is hot off the press. I was just in Wisconsin I think for my fourth annual spring. My fourth annual... The fourth annual time I've taken my kids to Wisconsin to hunt turkeys, but the third annual youth turkey season.

In which my older boy, who already thinks that he's invincible, I see a strutter coming and it's like, he's not going to get closer. And I see a strutter coming and I just compute in my head that it's pretty far away, but we have like a, you know, we got a good turkey choke, iron sights, spent a lot of time patterning the gun. And I already know it's like a stretch. And I'm like, shoot him, shoot him, shoot him. So by the time he gets around to getting everything lined up and shoots, and the turkey just goes down, but I stand up,

and that turkey is way out there. I pasted off. That turkey was 70 yards away. What? Oh, wow. So I would have never. If I had known that, I stood up, and this turkey is like a speck. He got lucky.

So now he's like, I'm going to start taking all the. He's got the shell, and he wants to put the beard in the shell. He's like, and I'm going to write the distance on the shell and I'm going to do that. Nice. Anyhow, spring turkey in Wisconsin is two days long

and you can get boned by the weather. Like two days, you can have two days of bad weather. So as I'm there, I realized that there's this thing. I asked Dirk, Pat Dkin to explain this a little bit.

Okay, ready for this? I am ready. Wisconsin has... Okay. Wisconsin has a peculiar way... Okay, here's how to get into this. If you listen, you remember we were talking about how it was put to sort of like a public vote of sorts to determine whether you'd be able to start spearing Northerns in Wisconsin.

I was surprised that you can't spear Northerns in Wisconsin, but you cannot spear Northerns in Wisconsin. The thinking being, I guess, that people will accidentally spear Muskies. Pat Durkin points out, how can you be trusted to hit ducks flying through the air and know what they are? In the rain and sleet, you're trusted to identify flying ducks, but you can't be trusted to look down a hole in the ice

and identify a northern and a muskie which is a great point i think that you could trust people to do this and i was surprised by how wisconsin sets these things and there's a thing called uh i don't want to criticize before i even explain it but there's a thing called aldo leopold's worst idea some people know as, but there's this thing called the Wisconsin Conservation Congress. It consists of five elected members from each county, so there are 72

members in all. Doug Duren is one of these from Richland County. He is one of Richland County's, our very own Doug Duren, is one of Richland County's citizen representatives. Everyone listening could learn a lesson from Doug, many lessons from Doug Duren. What you shouldn't pick up from Doug is the idea that it makes sense to drive around listening to Grateful Dead concerts on satellite radio.

That is a bad idea of Doug's. Most everything else that doug says is good uh doug instead of sitting around bitching and moaning about the fish and game laws in the dnr doug gets in there and gets in there always if there's like a public comment period, he makes a public comment. He's on his citizen's advisory panel. He's on the deer citizen's advisory panel. If he's mad, he can be mad. He's got a right to be mad because he got in there and got involved. And he's constantly harassed by people who do nothing but bitch and don't do any of these things.

Yep. But the idea behind this board is they're tackling issues and then they take what they think to the game commission who should then implement these suggestions. Yep. So which they may or may not do. Yeah. This it's such a peculiar way to handle things. I'm going to,

I'm going to dig in a little bit. Dirk had kind of explained it. The Wisconsin already said that. So it's got five elected way to handle things. I'm going to dig in a little bit. Dirk can kind of explain it. Wisconsin already said that. So it's got five elected members from each county. So there's 72 in all. Is that possible? Could something times five be 72? No.

Someone's lying. It's a decimal. Or someone died. The WCC holds a joint hearing each April with the Department of Natural Resources to propose changes, improvements to hunting, fishing, and trapping rules and other conservation matters, air, water, and other environmental issues. This year's ballot. So the Congress puts together questions the questions then go to a public

vote so they can sort of ascertain how the public feels about certain fish and game issues this year's ballot had 76 questions 38 fish and wildlife rule changes and 38 wcc advisory questions to become a state rule a citizen's proposal must go through a five-step process so on and on and on i'm going to get to the main part of this so it's interesting because you can take these little you can take these ideas and put them like very nuanced fish and game ideas and put them to a public opinion. And it's interesting because you can start to get an idea of what the public thinks about stuff. For instance, we talked about, um, we talked about the spearfishing thing in Wisconsin. Should you be able to, uh, spear Northerns through the ice?

Uh, here's the. Here's the results. Yes! 3,143 Wisconsinites said you should. No! 3,355 said no. So it got beat by a

narrow margin. And no opinion. 3,502 had no opinion. So they had 10,000 Wisconsinites weighed in on their opinion about this. And so I think this has a low likelihood of advancing. Now here's an interesting way to measure public sentiment. There's a two-day youth deer season. They put that to a vote. Should we expand it to four days? Youth deer.

Should we expand youth deer to four? Doug was imagining the people down there who are opposed if the kids are gonna hunt i'm gonna hunt and that is true should youth deer season be four days instead of two yes 3492 44 no 3649 or 46%. No opinion, 825. A lot more people had an opinion, but it got shot down. Now, this is the last one we're going to touch on, because here's how nuanced it is. How about youth turkey season? Should we move that from two days to four? Yes, 4,872. turkey season. Should we move that from two days to four? Yes.

4,872. No, 2,855. So there's some bit where you're like, ah, turkeys? Sure. Deer? Uh-uh. These kids are going to get them all. So just a little glimpse into the psychology of it.

Here's the thing. When it comes to wildlife management, people are always, myself included, we're always ridiculing ballot box biology. Leave it to the professionals. Leave it to the professionals. And it shouldn't go to votes. Reintroducing wolves in Colorado. You shouldn't put that to a vote.

Leave it to the professionals. But here, I don't know. There's like an elegance to it. But I think it should be taken as a... It's part of a process. It's part of a step. It's not the end-all be-all. It's not the end all be all. It's not like they just vote in everything.

But when you go to set the law, it gives you, as a law makes you the process, it's like an interesting to get a sense of public opinion. Absolutely. And like, when we talk about making scientific management, the assumption is,

is like, well, that scientific management is going to be on behalf of the hunting community right but often that scientific management takes into account the hunting perspective but also like the rangeland ecology perspective of all these ranchers out there with animals on uh state ground and on public ground that borders state WMAs, et cetera, and how they're going to be affected by those deer elk populations as well. So, and everybody's a voter.

Well, part of making the rules is keeping, you know, people happy and interested and out in the field too, right? Yeah, providing opportunity. What is opportunity? Quality opportunity is a huge, huge phrase. My view on that youth turkey deal, which I'm following closely and I have really leaned on Doug to push on that hard, is that I think it

comes down to who's got kids. I got kids, so I'm a super big supporter. If I didn't have kids, I'd be like, screw those kids. But the soonest it'll get enacted is 2025, so we're still going to be weather vulnerable next year. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law

makes it that they can't join. Whew! Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know sucking a high and titty there on x is now in canada the great features that you love and on x are available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a fully functioning gps with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones aerial imagery aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right, we're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater podcast.

Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand-picked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are

First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.

onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. So your mom was a librarian. Yeah. How about that? Transitions. Jack Carr's mother was a librarian. Yeah. How about that? Transitions. Yeah.

Transitions. Jack Carr's mother was a librarian. Yeah. Before we get to that, though, did you see the wolves in Northern California? Have you seen that yet? I know about them. Yeah. Just migrating through?

Do they have established breeding? I don't know. I think there's a pass. I wasn't sure. I think there's a pass. Ron Shast. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

Trail cams catching them. There's plenty of good country. That'd a pass. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Trail cams catching them. So I don't know. There's plenty of good. That'd be interesting. Good country. I interviewed a very, very nice lady who runs a big operation. I apologize if you're listening and can't remember your name, but they do a lot of like the noxious weed mitigation with sheep and goats.

And they had one of the wolves that came through a few years ago and knocked out some of their mitigation crew. A few years ago in California? Yeah. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. They've been like. Traipsing through.

They've been up there for a while. Yeah. Probably, I don't know, probably originating from that Frank Church group, I'm guessing. Yeah. It got into Oregon California yeah probably yeah that'll be interesting it's hard to imagine I don't picture California firing up a wolf season anytime soon maybe those people surprise you down there oh man like this has gone too far and in your book if you can know your book though by the way uh when you read it have

you read the other ones or was this the first time you've read the full thing? I've read three. You've read three. But that one. You're good at it. You seem like you'd be good at it just from reading right here because I only read the new forward to a new edition of the Terminal List. So I wrote about how I read that forward. So it's a new one about how

the show came to be and how it got to be Chris and Antoine. So it's the one with Chris Pratt on the cover and we put in some pictures from the show in there and stuff like that to make a special limited edition thing. And instead of Ray Porter,

who's my narrator, reading that, we decided I'd do it. So I ran the cord into the closet in the house and I put a bunch of clothes and hangers everywhere

until it sounded okay. A little sound booth. You're speaking Phil's language. Yeah, yeah, you know what I'm talking about. It looked very similar to this. Phil Perch.

That's the direction we're going to go in the new studio. A bunch of t-shirts. Jack's clothes. You use a trained voice actor for yours? Yeah. Ray Porter. He's an amazing guy. Shakespearean trained actor who does it.

It's like a thriller. It's like a thriller too though. It's thriller. It's like a thriller, too, though. So it's got to have like a delivery of cadence. Exactly. You have to have an actor. He had felt that like a flunky soap opera actor had read one of his books. Not that I felt.

I know. That's fantastic. But it was hard. I mean, it was only like five pages, maybe six. And I hadn't written it years ago. I had written it days ago. And I'm reading it, and it was only like five pages, maybe six. And I hadn't written it years ago. I had written it days ago and I'm reading it and it was difficult. So I, now I have, I had an appreciation for Ray and all those guys who do this narration. Um, but now I appreciate it even more.

And they have to do those accents too. I'm just reading my own voice, my own words, just setting up what's coming and how the show came to be and everything. And that was difficult enough for whatever reason. But now, so now when I'm writing, I think about, oh, I should probably put the accent, the Russian accent up front instead of mentioning it like halfway down the page.

So he has to now go back and like put this Russian accent in with a hint of this or that. So, you know, it's, yeah, the German from with the Berlin accent or whatever, that sort of a thing. So he has to go figure out what that is. Better to let him know up front. But anyway, it was difficult.

So anyway, I was just curious if you had read all your books out loud like that. Yeah, and I used to not be allowed to, but now I'm allowed to. I don't like doing it, but I love – I mean, you get a sore throat. Yeah, it's a lot. He said it was about double so if it's a 14 hour read 14 hour book it's about double that what it took him to actually read it and actually do it so about 30 hour deal does he read at the pace that we hear it because i heard the prologue um of your new book but does he read at the pace that we hear it or is there any kind of. That is a good question.

Messing with, you know, just, just because of speed. I think it's the cadence that he, and some people speed books up just to get through them faster, which is kind of, I don't know, kind of strange if you're listening to accents and all that sort of thing and the dramatic pauses and all that. But I think he likes to read it. He just goes, he said he just like skims it a tiny bit, just kind of get the feel. And then he reads it for the first time recording so that you're hearing it the way you would read it for the first time.

Oh, interesting. Not practiced. Yeah, not practiced. Yeah, and I think different narrators do different things, but that's the way he does it.

Probably saves a little bit of time as well rather than reading the whole thing and then going back. But yeah, I try to give him the acronyms, you know, so it's not, uh, you see N-O-D's

capitalized. Oh, like how to do or how to do them? You say N-O-D's, but it's really nods, you know, things like that. Instead of J-S-O-C, it'd be JSOC, like that, that sort of a, sort of a thing. So, uh, there's always those, those types of things come up as well, but it's tough. I mean, that's, that's serious business being a narrator, reading all these books. That's a lot of hours in a room by yourself just for reading.

But he does a great job. More than happy to have him doing it rather than me. I like how you don't disparage. You don't like to disparage the people you work with. I haven't had the cause really yet.

He's probably just a really nice guy. I'm going to pick up on that, man. Is it different around here? Oh, yeah. It's not being like, dude, Phil. I'd be like, man, Phil just does a phenomenal job. Hayden calls just the right amount. The perfect amount.

Hey, I want to go back farther. I do want to get to your mom being a librarian, but I want to go back even farther than that. We took a little walk last night. We did. Your grandfather was killed off Okinawa in World War II. Yep, 1945. Never met his kid.

Never met my dad. So he grew up with the same things that I grew up with from my grandfather, which were those photos of him with his plane. He flew the Corsair, which is a plane that had the goal wings that you'd fold up like that, put on aircraft carriers. And there was a show in the late seventies and I caught it in syndication with my dad in the early eighties called Black Sheep Squadron based off of Pappy Boynton. Had Robert Conrad playing Pappy Boynton. I think I had a lot of my leadership traits from that show.

He was just a drinker and a fighter and it was awesome. I loved it. I thought that's, you know, yeah, it was perfect. Yeah, exactly. That's, you know, that's, yeah, it was perfect. Drinking, fighting. Yeah, exactly. That's how you settle things. You settle with your fists outside and you go out and then shoot down

a bunch of Japanese zeros and have a few beers. And I was like, that's awesome. That's what I'm going to do. But I knew it was just kind of in my blood to join the military, follow his footsteps into the military. I had those, those photos.

I had his, his Marine aviator wings. I had the silk maps they used to give aviators back then, because if you hit the water with a paper map, it would disintegrate in the water, but it's still maps. Yeah. It's beautiful. I mean, they're beautiful maps. Um, have them a frame now, but, uh, so I had all those, those things as metals. And, uh, that's the only touch point that, and this show black sheep squadron, uh, with only touch points. Cause you couldn't get online back then and go to the Facebook group from that squadron and try to meet your dad all these years later. Like he had no touchpoints with anybody from his dad's squadron, nothing like that. What was it that you took your family to, to show them your grandfather's name? Yeah, so it's the MIA wall because they never found his body.

Oh, that's what you mentioned i didn't realize that makes sense so there's a uh punchbowl national cemetery of the pacific is overlooks uh it's punchbowl crater overlooks honolulu yeah my dad's a kid it's so powerful so powerful like going to national cemeteries no matter which one is uh very important for for kids especially and that's middle school high school years, just to appreciate and kind of see, have a kind of a have a visceral reaction to seeing those headstones, seeing those those stones in the ground, seeing those names on the wall. So you realize what was sacrificed so that we could have these freedoms and options and opportunities that we have. So

maybe before we make a snap judgment on something based off somebody's tweet, maybe take a breath, research it a little more, and then make that decision. So I think it's important to take kids there. So that's what we did with our youngest, who's 12. Brought him up there this past week and showed him his grandfather's name up there on that MIA wall. Is that MIA wall? It's massive numbers. Massive numbers. And it's all, they worked their way up this slope of the crater. And it's just wall after wall after wall after wall that leads to the top.

And at the top, there's a statue and a chapel. And then there's the history of World War II on these beautiful murals that spell it all out, all the battles in order up there. So you can walk through the history of World War II in the Pacific. And then you can turn around and look out and just see all those walls with all those names of the bodies that were never recovered. And then you see all the grass where they have all the people that were buried for the bodies that were recovered. So it's a pretty powerful

place. So if you're, like with your grandfather, they don't then, he's on the MIA, but there's no tombstone, there's no tombstone marker. Right, right. And they do recover the bodies because we're actively still out there's no tombstone marker. Right. Right. They have, when they do recover the bodies, cause we were actively still out there looking for bodies from, uh, multiple past conflicts. Uh, and so when they do find the remains, then they make up, put a mark. Um, and they have this star that goes next to the name

that, uh, that lets you know that, Hey, this body's now been recovered. And there's a lot more now than there were when I was a kid up there. You can definitely tell, but, um, yeah, it's something, that's something I always wanted to do in the military that i ever got to do because we got so busy after after 9 11 was be part of that um mia recovery uh group that would go out you got to vietnam you really go out to a bunch of different places and look for the remains of these uh the in vietnam a lot of pilots but people that were were not recovered so it's uh it's a large operation used to be headquartered in hawaii i'm not sure where it's headquartered now. So now we'll get to your mom.

Yes. Librarian. Where was she a librarian? So multiple different, different libraries growing up. But so when I wanted to let her know, I wanted to be a SEAL. So I found out what SEALs were from my dad watching these war movies. So did he call them frog men? So he did, but that was only because it was the name of the movie. So we'd be watching football. So football was big on Sundays in our household.

But I wasn't really interested in football because even back then at age 5, 6, 7, I knew I wanted to join the military. So there was those few channels back then. There was CBS, NBC, ABC, and then there was the Outlier. And that Outlier channel always had a war movie on Sundays. So we'd be watching football and when the commercial came on my dad would look at his watch and say go and i was remote control back in those days so i'd run up and i'd switch it to that outlier channel that fourth channel and there was always a war movie on so i'd watch that he'd be looking at his watch

for two or two and a half minutes and then say turn it back and then we continue watching football and i just kind of wait until the next commercial. Wonder what's happening in your movie. Exactly. So I had a lot of When you tune back in

one of the guys just isn't there anymore. Just gone. Gone. Yep. That can't be good. Yeah. One of those was

the frogmen and it was these guys climbing up over the beach and putting explosives on obstacles and blowing them up and I asked my dad

hey who are these guys and he said those are frogmen named the movie. Uh, and I said, sort of pestering him all about what frog who frogmen were. And then he's like, change it back, change it back. So back to football. And, uh, so I went and asked my mom, uh, and she said, well, let's go for a trip. So down to the library and she took every opportunity to, that we had, when we had questions to take us down to that library and show us how to research and all that sort of thing. So this is early eighties and you could essentially get through everything written about seals in about an hour, maybe hour and a half if you're a slow reader. There just wasn't that much. And then even there was more written about army special forces back then, typically

about Vietnam, but you'd still, you can get through that in a couple hours too. So you could potentially find the end of the internet in the library back then as a kid but then i started reading those same types of books that my parents were reading so it's let's say fifth grade is when hunt for red october comes out and by sixth grade for sure when i'm 11 that's when i start for sure reading all the same kind of uh thrillers that i still read today so i'm reading books by david morel nelson demille aj quinelle jc pollock mark oldenen, Louis L'Amour, Stephen Hunter. And back then all these guys, if you remember movies and television in the eighties, that protagonist usually had a background in Vietnam and he was either a Navy SEAL or army special forces or Marine sniper or CIA paramilitary. And now he's

in the eighties and he's like a private investigator or he's a cop or whatever. You know who follows that though is No Country for Old Men. Oh, do they? What is the guy? All those guys. So in No Country for Old Men, Josh Brolin's character. Yeah.

Lou Ellen. Lou Ellen. He did, you're not quite sure what, but did something heavy duty in Vietnam. The assassin did something you gather really heavy in vietnam and was you know like a you gather some kind of ultimate badass from vietnam and it was because it was a eight it's about eight the 80s and so it's these guys that were yeah the timeline worked kind of a skill set that made sense. It was all these like, kind of like crazy warriors that were wandering the drug lands of the Texas,

Mexico border. Yup. I mean, it makes sense. It makes sense. Um, I never really thought about that formula, but when you mentioned that,

yeah. Oh yeah. They were all, they all had backgrounds like that. And so that's the background I wanted in real life one day. So I figure, Hey, if I'm reading about this,

uh, seal in a book by David Morrell, I'm reading about this, um this Air Force pararescue guy in a book by so-and-so. Well, they must have done their research somehow. They must have connections in there somehow. So as a kid to age 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, I'm just having such a good time in the pages of these novels. I know that after my time in the military, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to write these kind of books. Okay.

Let's say here's what I don't get, though. If someone had said, you will not, like God says, you cannot be a writer. Ever. Would you have then not gone in the military? I probably said, why? Somebody did it. He said, cause. Like your parents, Cause I said so.

Yeah. So whatever. Like, would you have not done it? Um, I've never thought about that. That's a pretty big research stint. And that's a high risk research stint. I didn't realize how high risk it.

A lot of writers are like, I spent six months walking, you know, you're like, I spent 10 years in urban combat so I could be a writer. Yeah. People would be like, that doesn't sound, that's not a very practical.

I thought of them, I thought of the SEAL side and the writing side is totally distinctly different. Okay. I didn't think of one leading to the other. I just knew that, hey, if I want to do these two things with my life because of time and aging, you have to do the military side first. So that's, yeah, there I want to do these two things with my life, um, because of time and aging,

uh, you have to do the military side first. So yeah, there's no really like, what am I going to do first? It's like, no, you're going to, you have to do this first. Um, but I was reading all those guys. And then I found Joseph Campbell through hero with a thousand faces and a series of interviews he did with Bill Moyers on PBS in 1988 called the power of myth. And then they had some books that came out based on that called The Power of Myth as well. And I saw that with my mom. She introduced me to that. And he talked about how his hero's journey was an inspiration for George Lucas in Star Wars.

And of course, as a kid of the 80s, that really stood out to me. So I started applying that hero's journey and Joseph Campbell's thoughts and vision and philosophy to books I'd read, to movies I'd see, TV shows I'd see. And even though I didn't think of it specifically in these terms, I just thought, oh, that movie didn't work because that hero missed a part of that journey. It didn't really take you on this. Well, what is going in, for James Reese, what is going into the cave?

So there's distinct language that I'll use in the book, even if it's just a cabin or it's something and I'll put cavern-like something. So I'll describe something, I'll throw that in there, cave-like, cavern-like, something like that, dark. So I'll describe a cave even though I don't use those words because I'm thinking about that journey and he's getting some sort of information in there. Also, you go into a case repeatedly. Uh, there's, there'll be one, I probably do, but there's one distinct part of each book that I think of as I'm writing. That is his time to change a little bit, learn something a little bit, emerge a little different so that he can solve

this problem. Usually very aggressively and violently in, uh, in my novels. But yeah, with like, uh, so you think a bunch of them where Luke Skywalker, when he has to go to that little, that little swampy island and hangs out with Yoda. Yeah, that's it. He comes back, leaves early, but comes out ready to. That's right.

Exact. That's right. First blood goes into the cave. There's rats all over him. You know, he's throwing those things off there, the cave there. So, uh, so you'll notice it if you've you if you read here with a thousand faces and then start watching Films that take you on a journey through a protagonist eyes

Then then you start noticing that some of these elements are are in some of probably your favorite films It resonates for a reason like there's a mentor along the way. We have obi-wan Kenobi. We have we have Yoda We have someone that helps train that's older and wiser that passes along some training or some information along the way as well. So there's that person in books and movies and television. And it's a very natural way to tell a story because our first story is around the campfire. And they're about the hunt. And they're about warfare because you're passing down lessons from both the hunt and combat to that next generation through a story that you can remember. Why doesn't that get boring?

It is used over and over and over again. They would say it's in your DNA. It's already wired into your brain. I love it every single boxing movie. Every single one. It's like, I'm not going to train that kid. Exactly. You can go what it takes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do. Yeah. For sure. Then you get the montage and you come out stronger and wiser and get in that ring and get it done.

Not only am I going to prove it to you, I'm going to prove it to all of them. That's right. But there's other things that are wired into the human head like if you look globally if you look at world religion the idea that a bad flood came and wiped out most everything is a recurring i mean it's in like native american mythologies it's from the primary like monotheistic religions it's just like this idea that probably because you're look i don't know you're looking

at stuff doesn't make that doesn't make sense to you anymore you find like dinosaur bones whatever and you're like i don't know it must have been right well all those different cultures that had never had any interaction with one another uh China, Native American philosophies, Christianity, all these different religions and different cultures, really is a better way to put it, had very similar stories, very similar mythologies, very similar heroes journeys that they would pass on to that next generation.

So across cultures that never had any interaction, they had these very similar stories because they're passing on some of those same things. It was about survival. And not only was it about survival, it was about prevailing because if you're just going to survive, that's a rough way to go. But you need to prevail. That's the goal.

You like to put elements of hunting in. I do. Now, is that psychology too, or is that just because you like hunting? That's because I like hunting, and it's because other people either don't or can't do that. Um, and so it's different and it's also a way for me to kind of give back, uh, to this community, the hunting community really. Um, cause someone's going through the airport and they, uh, see this thing they think is a spy espionage thriller on the shelf and they grab it. But what they're

really getting is an education in, uh, hunting and conservation along the way. Cause it's woven in there's hunting in all the stories, but particular the second one true believer, so it'll be interesting to see how we take how we deal with that in the visual adaptation of it and then the third one really has His savage son and that's really about the dark side of man through the dynamic of hunter and hunted So the inspiration for that was back in sixth grade when I read the most dangerous game Oh, yeah, Richard Connell and even back in sixth grade I said, one day I'll write the novel that pays tribute to the short story. And it was the one that I wanted to start with. When I started writing, I wrote down six, seven, eight, nine different ideas, different one-page executive summaries, and laid them all out on the table.

And Savage Son was the one I wanted to start with because that's the theme that I wanted to explore. And that's the one I've been thinking about writing since the sixth grade. But I knew that the characters weren't developed enough to tell that story yet. So I had to introduce everyone to these characters in the first book in the terminal list. And then even at the end of that one, I was like, nope, not quite ready yet. I still need to take him now on this journey of redemption because it would be disingenuous to the reader or to the listener to take him after these traumatic events in the first novel. And then just drop him into this second one, the second one as Savage Son. He had, couldn't do it. And I'm surprised that Simon & Schuster, actually my editor there, didn't ask me to change anything

about that second one. Cause it, it, I take him on a pretty long journey, um, where he learns to live again cause he thinks he's dying. And he finds this next mission, this purpose in Africa, in Mozambique, taking his skills from the battlefield and turning those into something positive um against poachers not in africa so he finds this new mission and of course that's when the cia finds him and plucks him back out for a for a new mission but that's a long part of the story and that's probably people that really of my novels savage son is probably people's favorite and uh and in the blood which was the last one those are the two favorites but people that like true believer, love true believer, love that second one because of the hunting and because it's a slower story, a slower buildup because his guy's damaged and he needs to find that, that a reason to live again. And he, he finds that in, in Africa and Mozambique and most people don't explore Mozambique and done and hunting in, in modern thrillers as well.

Uh, most people don't put boots on the ground over there doing their research, which I did. And I didn't even have my deal yet. So I finished my first novel, hadn't sent it to Simon & Schuster yet, got out of the military and knew that I was always going to write two because of the John Grisham story. He wrote A Time to Kill first

and he couldn't give that book away. And then he writes The Firm and that thing takes off and we've had a John Grisham novel every year since. But if you thought, ah, this one didn't really work, I'm just going to go back to practicing law like you'd probably just be retiring now for probably a partner at a law firm and just be just be getting out still be thinking about that book it didn't work called the time to kill which i think is his best work actually

because they republished it after uh the firm came out and hit it so big they went back and republished it and then matthew mcconaughey starred in that movie but it's fantastic if you haven't read a time to kill for those listening and watching, that's amazing. Amazing book. But so I was always going to write too. So before I'd even sent it to Simon & Schuster, before I had an agent or anything, I was on a plane to Africa, to Mozambique, putting boots on the ground over there. I had lists of questions to ask the professional hunters and the trackers and the skinners and everybody else. How do you say things in the different languages over there?

What are the different languages that they're speaking over there? Um, of course, looking at the rocks and the dirt, how am I going to describe that? And what's the situation like over there with hunting and poaching in China and minerals and exploitation and all the rest of it. So, um, so yeah, I was doing that research while I was over there before I had any sort of a deal. Um, but. So you're just, you're just spending money out of pocket. Yeah. Oh yeah. And, uh, as I, I going in, you have to write your occupation in those forms. And so it tells you your name and all that stuff. And it has occupation.

And I wrote author even though I didn't have any publishing deal. Well, the other option would have been probably not that helpful. So I wrote that. But I got that from Steven Pressfield for his books on creativity that he writes, The War of Art, Turning Pro, Authentic Swing. And he said, you're a professional. Flip that switch, turn pro, and write. And so I wrote author before I had met anyone from Simon & Schuster. Because I always knew I was going to write two.

And if both of them didn't work, then I was like, well, think about some fallbacks. But I didn't really want to have to fall back on anything. I remember getting to the point where I felt like I could legitimately, for occupation, put down a writer, and I loved it, man. Nice. Because for a lot of times, I was like, ah, I probably shouldn't put that down. Ah, I did it well before. I'm still like a tree surgeon or whatever, you know? Yeah, no, I did it well before.

Yeah, I was, if you're looking at things professionally as like, oh, professionally, you make money at it. Well, yeah, I jumped the gun. But I still thought of myself. At first, it was a professional soldier, special operator. And now, not that anymore. Now I'm an author. So I just flipped that switch and became a professional author. So before you became an author, was there like external pressure in the military for you to be like a lifer or stay in

and train people or yeah so there is that but um once you i mean less so at 20 years uh as you're creeping up on 20 that's kind of like hey because if you stay in a lot of people say you're working for uh for half pay essentially type of a fan if that's was that true because you could get out and get your retirement which is it's not really half it's way less than half because they don't include your special pays like your demo pay and your jump pay and your combat pay and all that sort of thing so it's uh yeah it's it's not it's not it doesn't really work out that way but i understand what people mean when they say it um but no i was 20 was good it was a good run if i stayed in it was uh i'd done everything that i wanted to do at that point and if if I stayed in, it would be staff job and then come back as a commanding officer at some point, which sounds really impressive if you say you're a commanding officer or something.

But in today's day and age as a commanding officer, you're really back in a tactical operations center when the guys are out there kicking in the doors, doing the job that you really came in to do. And it's good. You need good people to do that. But that just wasn't my thing. I was there to be a tactical level leader on the battlefield, and that time was essentially done. So it was time to flip that switch and take care of my family. And we have three kids,

and one of them has some severe special needs. So that was like they needed me. And so it was time to move on. It was very clear to me that it was time to get out, and it was also very clear to me what I needed to do next. And you never had, like then or now any interest in non-fiction it was always funny you should ask um but not in the same way that uh most people think of non-fiction from someone coming out of the military so i have a not for my first non-fiction book comes out in

fall of 2024 so about a year and a half and And I'm writing it with a historian, James Scott. He's written five books, most of them on World War II. Amazing guy. And my plan was always to write nonfiction on terrorist events. So this first one is about the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing. And so there hasn't really been the seminal work on that yet. Yeah, when you said it to me last night, I was like, that's kind of genius, man. Because there's like nothing about it. I shouldn't say nothing, but it's just not revisited as commonly as other. Yeah. When you said to me last night, I was like, that's kind of genius, man. Cause there's like nothing about it.

I shouldn't say nothing, but it's just not revisited as commonly as other seminal moments in military history. Exactly. And I have those, I mean, I remember distinctly some of my first memories of the 1979 hostage crisis. And I remember going to church and, and praying

for those people over there. I remember Walter Cronkite counting down the days that they'd been held hostage over there. I remember wondering why we hadn't gone and rescued them yet. So some of my earliest memories are those black and white photos of the people from the embassy with their eyes taped over and blindfolded and all that. But yeah, it made sense when I'm looking at all those events that were so impactful during the 80s, 1983 Beirut barracks bombing. And today actually is the anniversary of the embassy bombing in April of 83. And that's how we're looking into that first. And then everything that leads up to the October

bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut. But I'm thinking about TWA 847. I'm thinking of Achille Laurel. I'm thinking of Pan Am 103. I'm thinking of all these different attacks in Europe, whether it's a cafe or a nightclub or whatever it might be, airports, multiple airports. Which one to start with? And the 1983 Barracks bombing was so significant because it showed Hezbollah in particular that terrorism worked. And everyone else that was watching that isn't Hezbollah, that hey, terrorism worked. And everyone else that was watching that isn't Hezbollah, that, hey, terrorism worked. What did they want? They wanted us to leave Beirut. What did we do? We talked tough for a couple months afterward, and then we left more quietly in early 84. So there's the geopolitical aspect of it that continues to shadow our foreign policy today. So there's a lot to explore there. And then there's recently declassified documents about what was going on in the White House, who was advocating for Marines to go ashore, who was advocating that they should stay on an amphib

ship, uh, uh, offshore and how that decision got made. And so we get to explore all that in detail, interview survivors, interview people that came to identify the bodies, which is, uh, the same group that identified the bodies at Jonestown um and so it's uh there's lots of lots of unpack there so that'll be the that'll be the first one so that was a very long way to answer that non-fiction question so yeah non-fiction's coming in uh in fall of 2024 how do you how do you reconcile um that you spent so many years as a federal employee in a chain of command that flowed down from the commander-in-chief, so like a democratically elected individual, and it flows down through all this stuff to the point where you and your guys are have enough faith in that system where you're not only putting your lives at risk but your colleagues and friends of yours are dying okay so you have this you've you've completely bought into or are supportive of this and then your work has like a um conspiratorial tone you know that that not everything

from up above is to be trusted oh yeah is that did you did you feel that way or is that like is that the writer well uh i certainly feel that way now the government has not done a very good job of showing us as citizens that uh they can be trusted over time. And I'm not just talking about recent when you're over there, let's say Iraq and you're there in 2004 and then you come back in 2005, a year later, and you're like, wow, things have gotten a lot worse here. Um, yeah, nothing is better than when I left. Then you come back and they're still there in 2006 and looking around like this continues to get worse. Uh, we continue to do the same things. And if you're a student of history and you're a student of Vietnam, uh, and you're wondering what, uh wondering what lessons we took from that that we're applying to this, or if you're in Afghanistan, like in the early days, which I thought were the late days in 2003, I thought, oh, I'm going to miss this thing. And that didn't end up being the case.

But what lessons did we take from the Soviets? Did we take the right ones. We have 1979 to 89, and we can look at all these, everything that happened there, and we can draw lessons, and we can apply them, hopefully, as wisdom, and we neglected to do that, or we took the wrong lessons. I think we took the wrong lessons.

We didn't even have to go back to the three British incursions. We didn't have to go back to Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan. There was more recent history. Who is it, like Kipling, whatever he's always talking about?

Everything you know about Afghanistan is from the Kublai Khan. Yeah, it's a great, great poem. It was on the wall of one of our CIA houses over there. And I have a picture of it that I posted on social. And I don't call out the quote. Some people, I'm always curious who's going to notice the quote in the background written on the wall. But yeah, we had these lessons.

We had recent history we could have looked at. And we neglected to do that and ended up being there for, for 20 years and then leaving in the, the way that we did. Um, and then we have just, was it just last week? We have officials, uh, appointed officials, uh, talking about, uh, it was a huge success the way we left Afghanistan. And then you can juxtapose that with the photos of people hanging off jets and babies getting thrown over the walls and secured in barbed wire and okay that's your death that doesn't quite look like so get 20 years to prepare for this guys 20 years and this is your only job and this is what you get this is the best you can do but there's so i like to hold them accountable in the pages of my novels because we don't hold them accountable really there's a difference between like inept oh there's

an effort and there's but there's an aptitude but then there's malintent yeah i think a lot of ineptitude is the way uh is if you have to blame something because there's hasn't been accountability really since vietnam since well before vietnam um world war ii there was a lot of accountability like george people know george marshall for the Marshall plan. You think, oh, rebuilding Europe. But really what George Marshall did in the lead up to World War II and during World War II was hold leaders accountable and remove them. He'd give them one chance, maybe two, not a third out of the way, put someone in there that can get this job done. And all those names that we know from Nimitz to MacArthur to Patton, all those guys got there because someone in front of them failed and they

were held accountable. They were removed and we put somebody else in place to see if they could do it. Back to the civil war, Lincoln replaced general after general, after general, after general until he got to grant. Um, then somehow things start to change. Maybe it's in Korea, but for sure by Vietnam. Now we have failure on the battlefield. And what happens? Well, they are not held accountable. They get out. They sit on boards of these different companies. And that has been pervasive all the way through today.

There's a great book called The Afghanistan Papers by Craig Whitlock of The Washington Post who got these interviews through two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits from the Department of Defense. But it was these officers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan being interviewed in a way that they thought was going to remain classified. And then it juxtaposes what they said in those interviews with what they said in front of Congress. So essentially to the American people, to their troops, to our elected representatives. And it's 180 out. And there was one guy guy i think it's 2009 one general or admiral that says something it's not even that bad and he's like hey things aren't really going as well over there as uh as we think if you've been led to believe that's about as as

uh as bad as as it got and he was quietly removed a few months later yeah so it's it's uh that non-accountability that is really I think killing us as a nation. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes.

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onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. I got a friend that spent a lot of years fighting in Afghanistan and he had mentioned that before he went there, his, some commanding officer

had wanted to have a lecturer come to talk about Afghan history. And it wasn't condoned. And he always admired this officer because they paid for the speaker out of their own pocket and flew the speaker out to come. And they basically came in 10 years in advance. He said, looking back, they came and told us what would happen yeah no I mean there's that this was a this was an uncondoned perspective but it was it was it was an Afghan it was in the US and they were I can't remember

they were professor somewhere and he said looking back they came and basically said here's what will happen ten years from now and um and when when when we pulled out and cobble fell uh i texted to say like man this got to be emotional for you or in some way and he just said i've for a long time i just haven't been able to see any other outcome there's nothing we've done on like assessments that would suggest otherwise. To act like this is a surprise is bullshit. Yeah. Was his take on it.

And that's someone who's done a lot of years there. Yeah. No, we had all those years to study, all those years to prepare. You could see from the spring into the summer, province by province falling. And it's, yeah, it's really remarkable, the ineptitude amongst our

senior level leaders that allowed them to put these 18, 19, 20, 22-year-old kids at this gate at Kabul airport in a tactically disadvantageous position when we held the tactically advantageous position for 20 years at Bagram. And it's just, for those who have been there, they'll know exactly what I'm talking about, the standoff distances and everything else involved in securing an area, an airport in this case. I mean, it's criminal. And yet, no one's held accountable. No one was even quietly moved aside at those senior levels. They just continue to do their job and they'll retire with a full pension and then sit on a board, go to a couple meetings a year for some of these defense contracting companies and and uh the machine rolls on unfortunately this is so far removed from

anything to do with hunting and fishing and whatnot but there's a lot of parallels but but i don't even care yeah in hindsight okay with with the gift of hindsight do you have any idea of what, um, when and what should have been done in Afghanistan? Overall? Yeah. I mean, you can go back to December of 2021. That's what I mean. Yeah.

And when I talk about those lessons that we learned from the Soviets, uh, I think our senior level leaders took, Hey, we need a small footprint there. The Soviets went in with too many people, too many targets, too heavy handed. Uh, and it ended up being their, their Vietnam is what they, you know, like to, they like to term it, uh, for 10 years. I think they maybe found a new one. Uh, yeah, they may have found a new one.

We'll see. Yeah. They got nine years to see if that's the case or not. Yeah. And they, yeah, it's a, and they haven't even started really, I don't think as far as throwing bodies at that problem, but, uh.

Not if you look at history. Yeah history at their previous commitments and manpower. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Uh, but yeah, December 2021, multiple, um, requests from guys on the ground, uh, requesting either Rangers or 10th mountain division Marines, somebody come in, block off these passes into Pakistan. We have Osama bin Laden right here in, uh, in these mountains. Uh, all those requests denied and, uh, slips away and we get the next 20 years, um, for whatever reason. So there's, there's one. So there's, there's one. Uh, but then now that you're in this thing, now what do you do? And now why are we there? And then, well, we get distracted by Iraq and all those resources that were focused on Afghanistan shift over to Iraq in 2003. And you could see it on the ground in Afghanistan. You could see all these assets kind of pick up and move and all these people that were doing all

these jobs before just aren't there anymore. And it falls just to a few people to keep things kind of keep things moving, keep these outstations supplied, uh, keep this air overhead in case people need it. Um, so yeah yeah there are so many lessons that we can take and apply going forward and that's what we're not so good at as a country is taking those lessons and applying them going forward as wisdom because we're looking at four-year election cycles eight-year election cycles for the real deep thinkers among us but we're really not honoring all those people that either died or came home damaged from the wars in iraq and afghanistan and the way we can now honor them is by taking those lessons and applying them going forward. So this next generation, so these next,

these kids don't have to do the same things or don't have to suffer through another 20 year war because of the ineptitude of senior level leadership. But really in the military, as long as you don't pop positive on a piss test, as long as you don't get arrested too many times or get arrested for like domestic violence or something like that, you're going to pretty much rise to the top if you just remain quiet. And you're going to see people that are kind of those, those go-getters, those hard chargers, a lot of those people get to a certain level and move on out, um, either because they just want to do something in the private sector or they, uh, they're kind of disenfranchised by what they, what they see

at senior level leaders or see their path ahead. And you're like, Oh, I'm not going to go work for that guy. I'm out. Um, so really So really, it's not the best and the brightest that are, in my experience, I'm sure there are exceptions for those that are listening. Yes, there are exceptions. But for the most part, if you just kind of keep your nose clean and stay out of trouble,

you can rise up in government service in general. I don't mean to keep beating this one into the ground, but do you think that Afghanistan should have just been to focus on Al Qaeda and just that and had that be it? Yeah, we definitely did not understand that Al Qaeda was a guest. They were guests of the Taliban. And over there, if you were the guest of someone, well, guess what? That person or that tribe is now obligated to defend you. And we stepped right into that.

And so we made enemies of the Taliban who, I mean, they're not, you know, not the greatest. They're just destroying the Buddha statues earlier on. And they, you know, obviously. They weren't in New York City. They're not. Well, maybe now it's a little closer from what I've seen on the news and videos I'm seeing, but, uh, uh, we definitely made an enemy of someone. The accidental gorilla is a good way

to put it. David Cocolan has a great book called the accidental gorilla. And, uh, we made a lot, it's also called, uh, insurgent math. So you go in and kill somebody, and guess what? His kid sees you do that, and what's that kid going to do? Well, he's probably going to join the Taliban or whatever organization that's going to allow him to now also honor his tribe by getting revenge, because that's part of the culture as well, deeply embedded. It's deeply embedded in a lot of cultures, not just Afghan, not just Taliban. But we made a lot of enemies for sure. Uh, in the, in 20 years, we had ample

opportunity to do that. Um, so if we'd gone in with, uh, taking a little more lessons from the Soviets and, uh, and realize that if we went in heavy handed, did the job and got out, we would accomplish that goal. But for some reason we stayed. And then for some reason we got out, we would accomplish that goal. But for some reason, we stayed, and then for some reason, we got out the way we did. So you're not a big nation-building guy? No. Expeditionary counterinsurgency is very difficult. So if you have a counterinsurgency campaign on your own soil, it's different than doing it overseas,

doing it on someone else's turf, which can prove to be... There are a couple instances of long-term commitments, uh, playing out, uh, Malaya places like that, but that's a long term commitment, uh, with a cohesive strategy, not shifting here and there, um, and not rewarding people for failure, which is, uh, what we do. People keep failing up in our system. Um, you mentioned to me last night that when you got, when you finally got done with the military, you were looking for, I'm sorry, I don't think

this would be private. You were looking for physical and. Physical and psychological separation. Psychological separation. Yeah. I just saw so many during my last couple of years in, I was at Bud's. So I was at our SEAL training command.

So I wasn't taking guys down range anymore. And I had all this leave built up from all these years that I wasn't really taking leave because I was so focused on being the best leader operator I possibly could. I was so focused. And I think being honest with my wife about that, realizing that, hey, the team is coming first. And that's just how it has to be because you're responsible for those guys' lives down range. That's what you owe it to them, their families, the country, the mission, the team is coming first. And that's just how it has to be because you're responsible for those guys' lives downrange. That's what you owe it to them, their families, the country, the mission, the team.

That's just how it's going to be. Eventually, when we're out, it'll switch back. So when I got to Bud's and I wasn't taking guys downrange anymore, I could kind of take a breath and look around. I realized that I was going to get out.

The pendulum started to swing back because Bud's is a machine and it's push-ups, it's sit-ups, it's pull-ups, it's runs, it's swims. It's what it has been for a long time. Oh, we know all about that because we have a thing down there where you have to do a hundred pushups in a day. Oh my goodness.

You guys do know all about that. Are you guys okay? It's called the Hundo Club. How many guys have you lost? It's called the Hundo Club. Well, it kind of comes and goes. You know. It comes and goes.

80% quit? We'll have it be that we're going to have the hundo club every day but it winds up being like now and then we'll do a hundo club i completely understand now by the way yeah you get it i get it now for sure uh but uh but i got to see people getting out and in my role as the operations officer which is like a coo of a company so you're kind of running day-to-day operations, but at Bud's they're really running themselves because you have an officer and a master chief or a senior chief in every phase of training and they've got it like they don't, they've got it. So you kind of have some, some time. And, uh, I saw people get out of the military and have a hard time leaving it behind because you have this mission. You're so dedicated to it. Your best friends are a part of it.

When you're downrange, they're to your right and your left, and you're not worried about paying bills or leaky faucets or anything like that. You're solely focused on building target packages and going and executing those missions. Then you come home and you transition out, and you think maybe you can recreate that in the private sector or something similar. And for some reason, it's a surprise that you can't. And either you try to get back in or you're calling me as the operations officer saying, hey, can I bring my new boss by for a tour? And I was always like, absolutely, for sure.

Even when I got told no by senior level leadership, I was always like, yeah, just come by at this time because I know that guy's going to be gone and we'll get this done for you. Because I was always trying to hook up good guys in the teams or, or out. But point being, it was hard. It was hard for a lot of people to stay away. All these foundation events that you have to support military families, you know, continuing to go to those, going to the same grocery stores, the same bars, dropping your kids off at the same schools where you're seeing either somebody that was on your team before dropping their kid off because they happen to be at a shore duty, or you see the wife dropping the kid off and wondering where the husband's down range in Iraq or Afghanistan, and you feeling

guilty about not being there. So I saw that for those couple of years that I was at Bud's at the end of my time in the military and decided that, okay, it's probably healthy to make this physical and psychological break and head up to Park City, Utah, raise our kids in a ski town. And that was a good decision for us. Yeah, because talking about that, you know, you're like your boy likes to ski, your daughter likes to hunt. I mean, do you at night feel like you need to at the end of the day be like, you know, I want to remind you that there are horrible things happen to people around this world or are you like that that the point of this is that that's not part of everyday life no i think about it and we uh talk about it and i see that sun setting over the mountains and i

think that it's going down here but it's coming up somewhere else and that somewhere else may have a group of special operators or caa paramilitaryitary guys just coming back from a mission or getting ready to go do some sort of a daylight op somewhere. They're fixing gear from the night before. They're loading magazines. They're treating wounded. They're gassing up vehicles or whatever they're doing. That we'll never hear about unless something goes wrong. And then we'll hear about it in the news.

But if it goes well enough that no one dies, we're probably not going to hear about it. So news but if if it goes uh well enough that no one dies we're probably not going to hear about it um so i think about that i think about that every day um but i don't dwell on it i appreciate that they're out there doing that job so that i can be back here doing what i love which is which is writing but uh but i never forget it i never forget they're out there did you get to it with writing uh did you also one day be like, okay, because you knew you wanted to write since you were a kid. Did you one day be like, okay, now it begins? Oh, yeah. Really?

You just sat down with a typewriter. Yep. Sat down with my computer and MacBooks. It'd be cool. If there's a movie, it'll be a typewriter. Yeah, exactly. I collect old typewriters now. Actually, at Hemingway, somebody gifted it to me um in early 2020 yeah

he wrote a movable feast on it uh published after after he died but um but yeah so i have that that time a bunch of his stuff went up for sale uh yeah the guy that um started uh newman's own with paul newman also was part of that that that crowd and had had purchased this typewriter for hemingway uh to write a movable feast East on in New York, actually. And all of this stuff went up for sale when he passed away. And that was early 2020. And a fan reached out and said that they wanted me to have it. So Hemingway's typewriter.

But I don't work. I typed one thing on it. I wrote one Hemingway quote and put it on there. And I write everything on my MacBook. Corinne, do you think I should put him in his place and tell him about how we have that knife that was used to get the weights out of the walleye at the walleye cheating scandal? Oh, wow. I feel like this is a story that's been told on this podcast before. I think Hemingway's typewriter wins the cake.

I'm not sure the two compare. But you think that's cool. But yes, I did. I sat down, looked around after I was at Bud's and was like, okay, my family needs me. Son needs me. It's time to make this. I'm going to stay in. I'm not going to go through this next 10 years to essentially come back as a commanding officer somewhere.

It's time to get out. It was a good run. Started enlisted. Did all the things I wanted to do. Became an officer. Got out as a troop commander at the end of when we got out of Iraq in 2011. And now got home, looked around, realized that was a good run. Time to, time to get out. Did your wife think you were nuts?

No. To be like, now I will become a famous writer. No, we've known each other since we were 18. And, uh, so the whole time I've wanted to be a seal and an author. And so she's seen all these books travel with us, uh, from the days that I was 18, I still had books all over the place and I still have those books. Um, so she's been, she's, she's used to it. Uh, and she just knows that, yeah, it was, this was my plan. So I don't, she's not, uh, she's not surprised by it. When, when it was time to write, like before that, like leading up to that point, had you done anything to train yourself or school yourself in writing? Or you were just like, I'm going to write a damn book.

Yeah, all that reading that I did. But no like formal, you didn't take any like. Didn't take a class or anything like that. I read On Writing by Stephen King, The Successful Novelist by David Morrell. All the Stephen Hunter books that were out at the time on creativity. There's more of them out now. There's maybe three or four of them out then. There's probably seven of them out now.

Um, so I read those and then I decided, okay, that's enough because today you can essentially study how to do something forever. You can take multiple online classes, multiple masterclasses. You can just essentially research until the end of time on the internet. Uh, eventually if you want to get something done, you have to execute. So, oh, some people that's just what they do. Yeah. And that's fine. And that's fine. But I was ready to write. Um, but more so and, and on writing for people that have read it is more autobiography than a how to book, uh, by Stephen King, but it's, I love reading autobiographies

by authors and typically they write them later, later in life. Uh, there's a few more of them out now that weren't out at the time that I started writing. If they had been, I would have read those as well, but, uh, yeah, it's read those, but luckily I had that foundation already built and then sat down and wrote, but really I started with the title and this is how it's been for every book thus far. Uh, I like to have the title right out of the gate. So I'm not worried. I'm not wasting bandwidth, worried about coming up with a good title. So even if it's a working title, I like to have that down. Uh, even if it's going to change eventually, I like to have that not just book six, but a title, um, a theme that's going to guide the writing process. So each book has a distinctive theme. That's just a sentence. And I got that from Steven Pressfield misinterpretation

of something that Steven Pressfield said on Rogan, but I'm glad that I misinterpreted it. And, uh, I, I interpreted it as he would take a yellow sticky next to his typewriter and write a one word theme. So I was like, ah, wonderful. Revenge. And then I changed that to revenge without constraint. I cheated a little bit. What did he mean? He was telling a story about a playwright in New York who would write a few sentences along a theme that would guide his writing process. And somehow in my head. So high in your head. Yeah. One word.

One word. Yeah. Well, I mean, doesn't hurt to be concise, right? No, no. And now I have the same thing, but it's a little more wordy, not much, but it's definitely not more than a sentence. So I'll start with that.

And then a one page executive summary. And I write that out. And then I ask myself two questions. I say, is this worth a year of my life or a year and a half of my life? And if it's yes, then I ask another question. I say, if someone were to read this, like walking through airport, going into Hudson news, pulling the book off and reading the back or the flap jacket, uh, would they be willing to invest time that they're never going to get back in this story?

And if the answer to both of those is yes, then boom, um, I'm all in. And then I take that, turn that into an outline and then take that outline, turn it into a narrative. But what I don't do is get stuck on the outline because if I get to a place in that outline where I'm like, oh, how is he ever going to get out of this? Uh, is anyone ever going to believe this? Uh, this is going to be terrible. I'm never going to figure this out. If I get to, to that, I just put a bunch of X's and go around it. And I keep writing, knowing that I have a year and a half to figure this out. And on the battlefield, you had seconds to make decisions. Now I have a year, a year and a half.

On that first book, were you working completely solo or did you have an editor or anyone? Yeah. So nobody yet. I sent it to 20 people or so like maybe 25 even maybe 27 maybe 30 um when it was done when i thought i got it to the place where i got it to being the best that i could get it and i told myself hey if one person says comes back and says hey i really didn't like this part this part didn't make sense you need to do this i would discount it two three yeah discount those two but if it was like five six seven of those 25 or 30 people

were like you should think about writing this part again or i didn't really understand this uh then okay roger that um but now i sent it to four people ahead of time um they were part of that original original group but now that's four and i sent it to them before i sent it to my editor and uh they give me different things back and they're all super valuable and they're, they're amazing. I thank them and the acknowledgements in my books. And, uh, then I make those, make those changes or I discard them, um, and then send it to my editor. And so there, so she's getting the best product that me and a little bit of feedback from

like a fan base. Um, and three of those four guys are lawyers. So they, uh, they're good at, uh, finding things in, uh, written documents. So they're good at finding things in written documents. So they're good at finding things that need to be explained a little more. Logical flaws. Yeah, exactly. And usually it's fixed with just a sentence here or there. So I do that and then send it to New York.

And Emily Bessler, my editor at Simon & Schuster, Emily Bessler Books was an imprint of Atria. So she has her own imprint. And she's amazing. And she's the only person I ever wanted to be my editor. And the reason I found her is that I looked in the back of books, uh, people in my genre and I'm like, why is Vince Flynn thanking this person named Emily Bessler? Why is Brad Thor thanking this person named Emily Bessler? And I decided Emily Bessler will be my publisher. And so that's, uh, yeah, she didn't know this. She didn't know this yet. She had no idea I existed. And same thing as I started writing, being a child of the eighties, it only makes sense to pick the star

that's going to star in your adaptation of this book that you have a sentence written of. Um, and I thought, you know what? Chris Pratt's the guy and he hadn't been in guardians of the galaxy yet. Hadn't been in Jurassic world yet. Uh, he had a very small role in zero dark 30 as a seal and he was in parks and rec. So I saw this transformation from Andy Dwyer in Parks and Rec to the SEAL operator. And I also thought, hey, I need someone who's likable on and off screen because this role is going to require an audience to forgive him possibly for a lot of the things that I'm about to write about. And I thought about Magnum back in the 80s. And I thought everybody loved Magnum. All the wives loved Magnum. All the wives loved Magnum, all the dads loved Magnum,

everybody loved Magnum, because he was funny, you wanted to sit down and have a beer with him, he'd sit down and have beers with his buddies at the King Command Mayor Club, but then he could flip that switch, and there were episodes, it was the first time that a protagonist in primetime television had killed an unarmed bad guy.

And that was in Have You Seen the Sun Rise? And yeah, so I love that episode. It's just incredible. And my dad loved that show. It's so great. I don't remember. I remember like the shirts, right? It's fantastic.

I don't remember anything but the shirts. Shirts are big. Yeah, yeah. Very short shorts, shirts. Yep, yep. So I thought about that. I thought Chris Pratt's the guy. He'll star.

And then I'm like, well, I'm choosing my star. Might as well choose my director. And, uh, I thought Antoine Fuqua, uh, love everything that, that he's done. He's amazing. Training day. Training day. Incredible. Denzel Washington, of course.

And, uh, he did shooter, which is an adaptation of, uh, point of impact by Stephen Hunter. And, uh, like, yep. Uh, Antoine Fuqua will direct. And that's who ended up starring and directing. So it's, uh, so it worked out, which I'm told happens all the time. He lives in Utah. Doesn't he? Nope.

Nope. He doesn't know. He's in California. He's California, but from, uh, moved around, but from Washington state, but I'm going to ask if you don't, he's somebody you want to sit down and have coffee with, have a beer with, and just an awesome guy when he optioned it. He came out to Utah. We spent a week together out in the, in the back country and he's just a solid

dude and being on set with him, you can tell everybody is happy to be there on that set because he's setting the tone, him and Antoine. Antoine's like the commanding officer, and Chris is like the troop commander, and they are setting that tone for the entire 350 other people on that set. And so many people came up to me that didn't have to to tell me that they'd been on hundreds of Hollywood sets before, whether it was hair and makeup people or stunt people or whoever it was. And they'd say, I've never felt the way I have on this, on this set, but that's all due to Antoine and all due to Chris setting this tone of positivity and they're mentoring people along and everybody wants to be there doing their best work. But I can see how it would be the opposite too. If you had a crazy director, I can see how that could totally set a negative tone or had a star, the number one on the call sheet who was just crazy person and how that could set the tone and how people would be like, Oh, I can't believe I have to go into work

today and work with this crazy person. Um, so we had the opposite of that. No, it kind of goes back to our earlier conversation about government. It's like, well, why do you put up with those people? In Hollywood? Yeah. Yeah. I guess these are employing so many people, I guess. But it doesn't have to be that way. You get to choose.

And Antoine and Chris choose to be positive and choose to be encouraging and choose to mentor people along. And it's just really cool to see that. And again, the only reason that came to be is because of a good buddy, Jared Shaw, who in the SEAL teams was getting out. And it was when I was at Bud's. And I said, oh, hey, you're getting out. Oh, come, come see me in my office at some point. And just let me know what your plans are and let me know if I can, can help you in any way. So we sat down and talked and I introduced him to some people in the private sector and the industry he wanted to get into and followed up with him. And then I forgot all about it. And then five years later, about six months

before my first book comes out, he calls and I hadn't talked to him in years. And he says, Hey, do you remember me? And I said, yeah, of course, Jared, how are you? And he said, Hey man, I always wanted to call and thank you for what you did for me in the SEAL teams. Nobody else sat me down in their office. No one talked to me about transitioning out. No one introduced me to people in the private sector. No one followed up with me. I was just kind of brushed aside by senior level leadership when I told him I was getting out. Um, and I was like, Oh man, Hey, my pleasure. How's it going? You know, how did, how did everything work out? And, uh, he said, everything's great, but, um, I heard you have a book coming out. And I said, yep, coming out in a few months, I can send you a galley copy, which is like a, I just learned what a galley copy was like a week

earlier. Uh, it's like a rough draft and I can send that to you if you'd like. And he said, yeah, I'd like that, but I'd like to give it to a friend of mine. And I said, who's that? And he said, Chris Pratt. I was like, oh, that's convenient for me. Um, so I sent it to Jared. He read it in November. He gave it to Chris in December. Chris read it in the, at the end of December, uh, and then called a week later, went and option it. So, yeah. Do you have, uh, people who are non like acronym pros that read your, your early drafts and kind of go be like, uh, I don't know about this. Or do people just get on board with the vernacular so fast? And that's my assumption is people.

They do. They just like snap into those. And sometimes you can tell from the context, like, uh, you know, I pulled down my nods and now I can see at night type of thing. You're like, oh, a nod must be some sort of a night vision type of a thing. Yeah. So a lot of times from context you can get it, but my editor will say, hey, can you describe what this is? And then I'll just put like little parentheses and say what it is. But I also brought back, I don't know if I brought it back.

I shouldn't say that. But I thought of it as bringing it back because before the internet, glossaries in the back of books in the eighties were so much fun for me to go through. And I could go through it. It was an extra thing. Look at what these things were. And I was like, oh, this is so awesome. So I wanted to bring that back. If you liked the book, it was just like an extra thing to go through.

So I put the glossary in the back and some things are funny. I put some, some funny things in there and, uh, some things are actual definitions, but I've, so I put that in the back for anybody that needs uh help with the acronyms but otherwise you can pretty much get it and you know if not maybe it's maybe it's not the book for you you know i don't know i mean i think once people get into a story it also is like it's also like it's another language some people are like oh cool what is this uh you can look it up and now you can look it up you know you don't have to go to the library anymore they dig it you can like look it up and be like, oh, that's so cool. Okay, got it. But I try to describe at least what it is.

But sometimes I do. Sometimes I'm just, oh, everybody knows what a NOD is now. Everybody knows what an IED is now after 20 years at war. But now I might have to spell it out, improvised explosive device or explosively formed penetrator or whatever it might be. So sometimes I make assumptions that people are going to understand. And then I go back and I'll add a little something to describe what that means because they are a little acronym heavy at times yeah well i mean that's an acronym heavy profession yes like you listen to a group of you guys getting together you're like what language are they speaking

yeah i find that uh certain conservation meetings similar are like that with the departments and then the package of, oh, it's just like, yeah. Absolutely. But you know, I'd say I'm kind of following. I mediated a panel at Pheasants Forever this year and it was the governance board for PFQF, you know, an open forum. We're talking about the farm bill. And I kept asking questions and they'd kind of pause. And I was like, what is going on with this group?

And then they told me, they ended up telling the whole crowd that they had a bet between the three of them that basically if you used an acronym, you had to buy the other two a beer. Oh, that's rough. Because they were trying so hard to make it user-friendly, make the whole conversation user-friendly. And there was a lot of failures. A lot of failures. Yeah.

It was tough. That was the thing I knew I'd get right in the books was like the acronyms and describing sniper weapon systems and that sort of a thing. Yeah, there's a cool factor to that stuff in a way that there's not around federal policy. Right. Yeah, you might have to work a little harder at the federal policy. You could do it, but yeah, it might be a little harder. But I knew I'd get that stuff. And what I didn't realize was how much of the feelings and emotions

behind what I'd done downrange would make it in to the novel and now novels. But in that first one, even through that whole process I just talked about, until I would make it in to the novel, and now novels. But in that first one, even through that whole process I just talked about, until I started turning that outline into the narrative, I still didn't really think about those feelings and emotions weaving their way into the storyline. But as soon as I started changing that outline into the narrative, it was very apparent right off the bat that this was going to be an extremely personal writing experience, because I'm going to be describing, taking the feelings behind things that happened downrange and applying them to this completely fictional narrative. So if my character gets ambushed in Los Angeles, California, I go back and remember what it was like to get ambushed in Baghdad in 2006.

And then I take those feelings and emotions and I apply them to my protagonist in Los Angeleseles california in present day uh same thing with the sniper stuff i don't have to go seek out a sniper out there and find a guy who was in ramadi at the height of the war and say hey what was it like to set up and pull that trigger and then if i'm taking notes i'm comparing his answers with someone else i might have interviewed another book i might have read another interview i saw on tv another book i might have read fiction or non movies that i've seen biases i have whatever filters i have in place and then putting it onto the page into my story you know it all comes right from my heart and soul directly yeah there's no substitute for a first person yeah right it's like because we have so much input coming in all the time yeah it's kind of impossible to to block that stuff out after a while yeah and i really think that's what

stood out to simon and Schuster because they see thousands of these things every year come across their desks. And I think that's what made it stand out with those feelings and emotions. That's what made it different from some of the other books out there that they had read and why they decided to publish me, which is humbling. Titillate people on your next book. Ooh, Only the Dead. So it's sixth novel in the James Reese series.

And it's the most brutal to date, which is saying something. Come on now. It is the most brutal to date. And I didn't start out that way. I didn't say, all right, I'm going to write the most brutal one now. It just kind of naturally happened that way.

But yes, that one comes out May 16th. And just give the basic, give the basic gist. There are some unanswered questions from my last novel. So for those who have read it, they'll know what I'm, what I'm talking about here, but really it's a novel of truth and consequences. That's the theme to this one. And in my novels, James Reese, he holds those people that we talked about earlier accountable. Those people that don't, you can't really hold accountable in real life.

Cause if you do, you'll go to jail for doing the things that my character you'll probably uh be executed in many states um but you can do it through fiction you can do it in uh in a thriller which is very therapeutic um to write and hopefully to read for for some of us but uh it's him uncovering a lot of his past and his father's past that all connects in present day in a uh of course a conspiracy i love a good conspiracy uh especially in the pages of my novels that's what i i loved about some of the books i read growing up was the conspiratorial element to them so i try to weave that into to my novels as well um so he tends to he's a he's a thinking man but he also is someone very comfortable with violence because it's just a

natural part of his life. And, uh, some people need, uh, need to be dealt with in a very harsh way in this book. So when you mentioned therapeutic, I'm at, yeah, you get to be, um, as the author, you get to be judged jury and execution. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. No, that's fantastic. Guilty. It was so different about, uh different about writing screenplays versus this, is that I can do anything. I don't have to worry about the cost of a set piece. I don't have to worry about flying them to Siberia or down to South America or up to Alaska or wherever.

I can just do it. There's no problem. I can have huge action set pieces and not have to worry about the cost. Now when you start talking to Amazon and start breaking things down, where you're going to film and what these set pieces are going to cost.

Well, now you have to factor that in. You can't just, uh, directly take what you have on the page and transfer it over onto the screen because there are, uh, there are costs involved to a lot of that. So you have to work through some of that, but I love the freedom to be able to do anything that I want on that page. And, uh, I didn't know how it was going to be when I got into this. I thought, ah, Simon and Schuster might ask me to kind of take, do you really need to have all that hunting stuff in there? Or does it need to be so violent? Or do you really need to mention this about concealed carry in here? It seems unnecessary. Can you just never have they even hinted that I need to take any of that out? It's been a hundred percent creative control the entire time, which is, which I love. I didn't know it was going to be like that.

You slip in little bits of political commentary. A little bit in there. Yeah. But a lot of authors don't. And, you know, I didn't really, you don't really get to know them, those characters, in the same way as you do from authors that give you a glimpse into their protagonist through how he feels about certain things. So my character is carrying a pistol in Washington, D.C. He's not is carrying a pistol in Washington, D.C. He's not just carrying a pistol in Washington, D.C. He has to think about the consequences of getting caught. Yeah, it warns common. Yes, because if I'm doing that or if I was to do that,

I would need to, I would think about it and realize, okay, here's the consequences to doing this. So my character does as well, and he has thoughts on it. But a lot of authors don't do that. But I do, and I feel it gives people greater insight into his character. And because you're going to think about it if you're doing something like that.

You're thinking about rules and regulations as we head into the field in these different states and things that you can do in some one state you can't do in another. And I mean, you're going to follow those rules. You're not going to not think about it. And just all of a sudden,

if I was a writer talking about hunting and I'm putting them in the springtime in somewhere else and I have them going deer hunting in a state where you can't do that in that area in the springtime or whatever, whatever it is, um, you're going to lose that hunting audience. And you're like, eh, if he's doing that, he should at least be thinking about it. He should at least be thinking about why he's poaching and it should make sense for the story. Um, but a lot of times you don't, you don't get that. So I try to give the, give what, what I'd be thinking about why he's poaching and it should make sense for the story. Yeah. But a lot of times you don't get that. So I try to give what I'd be thinking in a lot of these situations. Do you read C.J. Box? I have read C.J. Box.

Not all of them because he's in a lot of books out there. And he's amazing. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. Yeah, very good. Very interesting writer and very popular. A lot of hunting in there, you know. Is this character going to be around for a while?

Are you getting antsy to explore a different character? Nope. I feel so fortunate that readership and audience is connected with this character. So the first one, as you're writing it, people don't know. They think it could be just a one-off book. So your first one, as people are reading it,

now people find that first book today, or watch the show first, they realize, oh, or even if they haven't seen the show, they realize, oh, there's four other books, five other books out there. He's probably going to survive. Because that brain tumor wasn't that bad. Exactly. He's going to shake it off. He's going to shake that thing right off. But

the first one, that's why the first one's so fun, because if you're reading that and don't know that it can continue, then you, and the way that I end that one, I kind of leave it up in the air. It's interesting. But now that they're out there, you kind of know that it's a one i kind of leave it up in the air um it's uh it's it's interesting but now that they're out there you kind of know that he's gonna it's a serious i was just wondering if this guy had a lifespan yet or if he's gonna be around for a while yeah i think around for a while it's i've heard other authors talk about how they uh you know they kind

of get connected to their character and they're not they really aren't allowed to do anything else almost but i don't feel that way i love love, I just feel so fortunate. So the 20th book will be like kicking it and relax. Yeah. We get to that 20th book. Uh, yeah. I kind of think about it in terms of Indiana Jones, right. There's a lot, there's a lot across over there. Like people are like, oh yeah.

And you can go back in his story and go forward in a story. And, and he has that longevity. Right. And there's a lot in those series that people love. I mean, I'm familiar with the main one, but I didn't know that there was a lot to it. Well, in every episode, it's like, dad, son. Oh, yeah. You know, it's like, there's a lot there.

I very intentionally wrote things into the novels that I'd be able to explore later. Different families, explore the Hastings family in Africa. A lot of people want me to do that. Explore the Salute Scouts and all that. So that'll be something I'm looking at doing in the future. James Reese's dad in Vietnam, his transition from SEAL into the CIA back in the 70s. So there's a lot to explore there into the 80s. What did he do in the 80s? And his grandfathers on both sides. So I throw that stuff in there too. Sometimes through the history

of the firearms that they use that have been passed down. So I put all that stuff in there very intentionally so that I can, I can go back and also it garners a little interest ahead of time.

And you can turn it into a family business. You can get those kids hacking away on the, on the computers and be like, listen. Some people have. Yeah. Clive C, uh, yeah.

Clive Cussler, uh, his son, Dirk Cussler. And Stephen King too. He's got to leave them all those executive summaries. There you go. Here they are. Yeah. So yeah, there's like, there's a couple of people who have done that.

Nelson DeMille is working on his second book with his, uh, his son. Um, so that has, uh, that has happened. That has, that has been a thing, but yeah. And I just feel fortunate that it's connected and people are reading these things and want more. And, there's a responsibility also because people are trusting me with this time that they're never going to get back. So whether it's a Instagram post or a blog post, those sentences get as much thought as any sentence in my novel because people are trusting me with my time there on the social channels as well, on those blogs, on my podcast, whatever it might be. They're never getting that, getting that back. Did you ever read the book Misery, Stephen King Misery? I only saw the movie. I should read the book. Oh, you should read the book for sure. But that's, that's the other trap you're getting yourself into. At some point you're going to

have some rabid fan who's like, I demand to know what happens to your character because I'm so dedicated to them. Yeah. There's a book, Landon Beach has a book out called narrator where he does something similar with a narrator. Um, and it's a, it's really, it's really good book. It's really clever, really well done. But, uh, but yeah, no, I think I take some security measures. Um, I, I, I tend to still think things that way I did before I went in the military and I continue to think that way today. This is a natural way for me to think. So I do take a little precautions here and there.

You know, it only, only makes sense today where it's so easy to find somebody. Sure. Yeah. All right, guys. Well, may you order it now? Can you pre-order the book and the audio right now? You sure can. You sure can.

Yeah. Audio ebook and hardcover all come out on May 16th. Ray Porter is narrating again and, uh, yeah all come out on May 16th. Ray Porter is narrating again. And yeah, coming in hot May 16th. Order it now. Comes out May 16th. Find it, I'm assuming, anywhere. Everywhere books are sold.

Only the Dead, the sixth book from our guest today. Jack Carr, available from Simon & Schuster. Yep. Only the Dead. It'll ship to you soon. You can buy it now. Thank you very much, Jack Carr. Oh, man. Thank you so much for having me. This has been awesome. This has been awesome, and I can't wait to see the new studio. Not that this one is lacking in any way, shape, or form,

but I'm really looking forward to seeing the new one. We're going to keep the dreams. We've got a lot of art that ain't in here. This is awesome. Thank you, guys. Appreciate everything. Oh, ride on, ride on, let it fly on. I want to see your gray hair shine like silver in the sun Ride on Ride on Ride on Sweetheart

We're done beat this damn Horse to death So take a new one And ride on We're done beat this damn horse to death. So take your new one and ride on. Chapter 10

Killing Proper There is a right way and a wrong way to kill a wild animal, and I don't mean that in a practical sense. An explanation of this is tricky, similar to explaining why it's more pleasurable to spend money earned through hard work than money earned through dubious means. It comes down to metaphysical issues, things of the heart. I was thinking about this one day while I was hunting mountain lions with a pack of about a dozen dogs in southeastern Arizona. They were tall lanky hounds, most with walker bloodlines, owned by my companions Floyd Green and Joe Mitchell, two well-known mountain lion hunters with a combined lion hunting experience spanning about 60 years and 500 cats. Many of their dogs showed physical evidence of past skirmishes with lions,

including slit ears, lacerated noses, and scarred muzzles. The injuries were usually suffered when they brought a lion to bay, a term for when hounds chase their quarry into a tree or corner against a cliff or trap it in a cave and then hold it there until their master shows up to deal with the beast. Earlier, I had mentioned to Floyd that it seemed as though a dog would lose his taste for hunting lions once he got scratched a time or two. It's the opposite of what you'd think, replied Floyd.

It just makes him hungrier. I was camped with Floyd and Joe at an old abandoned ranch house not far from Aravaipa Canyon, at the end of a driveway that takes more than an hour to travel. Along this route, on our way in, we saw where something had been dragged across the road from west to east and then down into a dry arroyo. At the end of the drag marks was a dead buck with picked clean bones that had been buried with leaves and dirt beneath a scrubby little oak. The hide was in pieces but still connected to the carcass here and there, like a person who passed out drunk in bed without getting completely free of his clothes. Floyd tipped his cowboy hat and peeled back the deer's skin to show me the blood clots and teeth marks around the animal's neck.

He also showed me where the spine had been wrung around in circles three or four times. There wasn't a doubt in his mind that we were looking at a lion kill, though it was at least a week old. This was good news. We'd come to hunt this area because a local rancher had lost 50 calves to lions here the previous spring, about nine months earlier, and this was proof that at least one lion was still hanging around. If you had asked me 10 years earlier, I would have told you that I'd never want to hunt a mountain lion. What's the challenge, I would have asked, in shooting a cat out of a tree? The notion of challenge is one of the most hotly debated

aspects of hunting. Definitions of the word evolve so constantly and are so subjective that it's hard to find two hunters who define it in the same way. As a way of dealing with the confusion, some of us abide by a more readily definable synonym known as fair chase. It's an ethical term that provides hunters with a guiding principle to abide by Jim Posowitz, the founder of Orion the Hunters Institute writes that fair chase addresses the balance between the hunter and the hunted It is a balance that allows hunters to occasionally succeed

while animals generally avoid being taken Some hunting strategies are such an affront to the idea of fair chase that hunters share an almost universal disdain for them. For example, most hunters would agree that dynamite shouldn't be used for duck hunting because it would take away the challenge. Most hunters would also agree that night vision goggles shouldn't be used in deer hunting for the same reason. Often, as is the case with these examples, our notions of fair chase are enforced by law. It's illegal to kill ducks with dynamite. It's also illegal to hunt deer with the aid of artificial lights. However, fair chase is

not universally legislated. Certain activities that are definitely not fair chase, such as the pathetic practice of hunting animals inside high wire fences, is permissible in many regions as long as it's done on private property and with the proper legal permits. Whether or not a hunter chooses to participate in this limp-dicked activity comes down to personal choice. Other issues of personal choice are much more nuanced than this example, though they're taken no less seriously by many sportsmen. Over the years, I've met hunters who askew rifles with telescopic scopes because they prefer the challenge of using rifles with open or iron sights. I've met hunters who don't use rifles because they favor the additional challenge

presented by compound bows. And I've met hunters who gave up on compound bows in order to take on the even more difficult challenge of hunting with a handmade longbow. However, some hunters who use handmade longbows hunt deer by sitting in a tree stand next to a bait pile, a practice that is considered unchallenging by many guys who prefer hunting on foot in open country with a rifle and a telescopic scope. I generally believe these differentiations to be positive, however nitpicky, because they demonstrate that hunters are thinking people who struggle to define the limits of their world. I know that I certainly do, though I've come to realize that rigid boundaries are sometimes hard to determine. Consider something that happened to me while I was living for about nine months along the Bighorn River in Wyoming.

While there, I became friends with a hay farmer whom we'll call Bill. He had a side business raising game birds. He would buy pheasant and chukar hatchlings from a wholesaler for around a dollar apiece and then raise the birds to maturity inside huge tent-like structures made of netting. Hawks and falcons would dive at the birds from above and hit the netting so hard that they'd blast through it like it was wet newsprint, so the upper portions were reinforced with wire fencing. Bill fitted each bird with a little piece of plastic called a blinder, which worked like the blinders you see on draft animals. But while the blinder on draft

animals keeps him from getting spooked or distracted by objects in its peripheral vision, the blinder on a pen-raised game bird is meant to keep him from seeing clearly enough to maul his penmates out of the frustration and anxiety that are hallmarks of wild animals that are forced to live in tight confines. When the birds were mature, Bill would sell them to wannabe hunters for $9 or $10 each. When a client called, he'd go into his bird tent and collect the number of birds that the guy wanted to shoot. He'd put the birds in a cage and load the cage on his ATV and then drive them out into a field. One at a time, he'd pick out the birds and twirl them around with the windmill motion that Pete Townsend from

The Who famously used to play his guitar. This would put the birds to sleep, or at least something resembling sleep. Then Bill would form a little hut out of field grass and tuck the bird into it. The timing of this was delicate. He wanted the birds to come to their senses soon enough that they'd fly away when the clients came along, but not so soon that they'd wander off in search of food before that happened. When the clients came out, their activities certainly hinted at hunting. They would lead dogs and carry shotguns and shoot at edible birds that were flying through the air. But while game farm hunting does have these attributes of actual hunting,

it lacks the beautiful essence of uncertainty that is to hunting what pan drippings are to gravy. The hunters' success did not come from the fact that they'd studied the species and learned its ways and scouted its habitat. Instead, it came because they paid some guy to raise the birds and then make sure they were put out in a field where the hunters almost couldn't help but find them. One day, Bill invited me to hunt his place. This seemed like a strange choice of words for him to use. While Bill definitely advertised his business as hunting, he in no way actually thought of it as hunting. For him, hunting was packing his horses 20 miles into the upper Gray Bull region of the Absaroka Mountains to chase mule deer, elk, and sometimes bighorn sheep on a landscape defined by craggy peaks, narrow trails, and big grizzlies.

When I asked him about this, he explained that his season was winding down and that there were months' worth of runaway birds on the property that had either eluded his clients or escaped his nets. At first, I told him that I couldn't. With all due respect, I said it ran contrary to my ethics. But then I got to thinking about it. I thought about how these bird species were not indigenous to this region or even to the continent, about how they'd probably never survive the winter, and about how, if they did, their presence on the land was at least as false a concept as hunting for them would be.

I also considered how tasty they'd be. So I went out with Bill, shot a few birds, boned them out, and cooked them in a stir fry. To this day, I find myself thinking about the rightness and wrongness of that hunt. And I only mention it now so that I don't come across as overly cocky about the certitude of my own moral compass. It's helpful to think of the ethics of hunting as a form of religion and that most people's beliefs are influenced as much by where they were born as by what they've learned since leaving home. I grew up in an area where hunting deer over bait was the normal way of doing things. In late September, we'd sometimes drive to a carrot

processing facility near Grant, Michigan, where we could buy a pickup load of oversized and misshapen carrot rejects for $5. We'd then go to our hunting areas and shovel these carrots into a Duluth pack and lug them into the woods near the intersection of deer trails. Once a pile started getting hit by deer, we'd add more carrots and hang a tree stand in a nearby tree. Hunting over bait, I spent an incalculable amount of cold and miserable hours without seeing a single deer. Sometimes the bow season would pass without my getting a shot at an animal, except maybe a squirrel or grouse that passed beneath my tree.

The limited number of deer that lived in my hunting area had adapted to the absurd abundance of bait piles in the woods and had learned to simply avoid them during daylight hours. After all, there were plenty of other foods for them to eat, such as the apples and corn in the orchards and fields that were often within a few hundred yards of our bait. So, by using a strategy that some might describe as cheating or as taking away the challenge of the hunt, we were doing something that, in hindsight, had the effect of making deer hunting almost too challenging. Twenty-something years later, I no longer hunt over bait at all. My reasons for this are not based entirely on

ethics. Instead, I am not interested in using artificial bait because I am not interested in hunting animals that are doing artificial things. To go out and find a deer by solving the riddle of its natural patterns is far more enticing to me than finding a deer by interrupting those patterns. Baiting is not, in my opinion, a type of hunting that fosters an intelligent understanding of animals. But if you enjoy it, go ahead. My impression of hunting animals with hounds was formed through an equally subjective and haphazard set of experiences. My introduction to this kind of hunting came when I was about 18 years old and was invited to accompany a raccoon hunter whom

we'll call Dave. It was the late summer training season when you're allowed to exercise your coon dogs in the woods but you're not allowed to kill any raccoons. We went out at about 11 p.m. and turned the dogs out of the truck along a two-track. We then drove along with the dogs running out ahead of us the way you see some lazy people exercise their pets. We hadn't gone a mile when the dogs struck a hot trail and bellowed their way down a slope and across a creek and into the darkness. Dave cut the truck's engine and we listened to the dogs. He could tell from the pitch and intensity of their barks

that they had already brought the raccoon to bay. With headlamps, we walked down the slope and across the creek and found the hound scratching at a small oak. Up in the limbs were a female raccoon and several of her young cubs. Dave then explained to me that it wasn't good to pull the dogs away from the raccoons without killing one because they might lose interest in hunting if they weren't properly rewarded. So he raised up a.22 pistol that I didn't even know he had and shot one of the raccoon cubs dead out of the tree. After that, I told him I was done for the night and I honestly figured that I wouldn't be hanging around any more houndsmen for at least a long time. But now, in the deserts of Arizona, I was not only hanging out with a pair of houndsmen,

I was doing everything I could to help them. And, as I was learning, the pursuit of a lion is much more complicated than simply shooting an animal out of a tree. The real challenge was getting an animal into a tree in the first place. Doing that required finding something known in the parlance of lion hunters as an overnight track. That means a lion track that was made within the past eight or nine hours. When conditions are right, not too windy, not too dewy, not too rainy, a track of that vintage is likely to retain enough of the lion's residual odor for dogs to be able to pick up the scent and trail it. Yet despite the slaughter of calves that had occurred here the previous spring, and despite the recently killed deer that we found, we had yet

to locate a promising overnight track after days of searching for one. Every day, Floyd and I would wake up well before sunrise. Joe would already be gone having left so early in the morning that it was more like nighttime. Floyd and I would head into the desert with some predetermined landscape feature as our ultimate destination. Mesas, rocky buttes, deeply incised canyons, high ridge lines, saddles, passes, all places where lions are likely to either hunt, sleep, or travel through. Floyd is in his mid-50s and his appearance brings to mind Robert Redford when the actor was about that same age. He's part owner of Western Hunter and Elk Hunter magazines

and full owner of Outdoorsman's, an iconic Phoenix sporting goods store that specializes in high-end European-made optics as well as Outdoorsman's own lineend European-made optics, as well as Outdoorsman's own line of American-made backpack and tripod systems. His line of work allows him to think of chasing lions as a business-related activity, which means he can hunt as much as he wants to without having to feel guilty about it. Some years ago, he and his girlfriend owned and operated an aerial photography company. This required Floyd to buy a helicopter.

I learned to fly a helicopter in a month, he told me. Meanwhile, I've been hunting lions for 20 years, and I'm still learning stuff. Lion hunting is the hardest thing I've ever done. At least on this hunt, Floyd mostly preferred to look for overnight tracks without the assistance of his dogs. For one thing, he didn't want them to get tired out before it was time to actually chase a lion. For another thing, the passage of all those dogs' paws has the potential to disturb the delicate evidence that a lion might leave while traveling over a portion of the earth's surface that is covered predominantly in rock, cactus, and grass,

surfaces that do not readily collect the tracks of a passing animal. Floyd calls himself a bare-ground lion hunter, a description that differentiates him from guys who hunt colder and wetter regions with predictable and frequent dosages of snow, the world's most track-friendly substance. While a big lion can weigh up to 150 pounds and can kill an elk weighing four times as much, they seem to walk about as gently as a balloon hitting the ground. The only place that they'll leave a track is in the sand, and around here, sand occurs primarily in the same places, creek beds, game trails, that attract a lot of competing traffic from mule deer, javelina, cattle, quail, bobcats, coyotes, bighorn sheep, and dogs if you let them

run out ahead of you. Floyd spends so much time studying the ground for lion tracks that it's begun to affect his posture. His natural stance has his eyes staring at the ground directly ahead of his boots. He's trained himself to tune out everything on the ground except for the tracks of lions. On average, these measure about three and a half inches from front to back and side to side. Perfect, complete lion tracks are far less common

than imperfect, partial lion tracks. You might just see the imprint of a few toes in the sand or the outline of a track that's interrupted by a flat piece of rock. The important part of a lion track, the part that eliminates imposters, is the trailing edge of the heel pad. It leaves an impression in the sand that looks like the bottom of three-letter U's placed together. When we were out looking for tracks, Floyd and I had many conversations that went like this. Here's something interesting, I'd say.

This has got to be a lion. It looks a little like a dog, but it's a lot rounder. You should check it out. Can you see the heel pad, Floyd would ask. No, I'd say. Look for another one, he'd say. Then, finally, it happened. After five long days of doing little but walking and looking for tracks,

I found what we were searching for. It was below a large butte in a dry creek bed where a few boulders funneled the animal traffic into a narrow gap. Here you go, I called out to Floyd. Here's a heel pad sure than hell. Floyd walked over to have a look. His face registered a moment of interest, but then his enthusiasm waned. Looks to me like a coyote track where he spun around in the sand, so it looks bigger than normal, he said. Then a javelina stepped on the back of it. That's what gives it

a lobed look. And notice how you don't see any more good tracks ahead of it or behind it. Just coyote and javelina. Keep in mind, he went on, anything can make a lion track once. It takes a lion to do it twice. You find me two good tracks with lobed pads, and then you've got something worth looking at. While I was disappointed by our inability to find a good lion track, I was hardly surprised. Prior to my visit to Arizona, I had had only three physical encounters with wild mountain lions. Each of those encounters reinforced my notion of the animal

as a secretive and elusive creature. The first encounter stands out in my mind most visibly. It happened near Clearwater Lake in Montana's Swan Mountains just after I moved out west. That night, I'd been fly fishing for cutthroat trout and I stayed on the water until a little past dark. When I was done, I hiked three quarters of a mile through the woods back to where my van was parked on a forest service road. It was pitch black by the time I began the long and bumpy drive out toward Highway 83. About halfway along, I came to a place where the Forest

Service road had been cut into the side of a steep hillside. I rounded a corner and there was a gang of mule deer, does, and fawns all bunched up in the middle of the road. When I got close, they ran to the right and struggled up the steeply pitched hillside in a whirl of hooves and falling rocks. Just as this was happening, I caught in my side view mirror a sudden flash of movement in the halo of the brake lights. I shoved the shifter upward into reverse so that the van's backup lights would come on, and then I stuck my head out the window to look.

There it was, standing within inches of the rear bumper, the first mountain lion I ever saw. He spun himself in a turn that seemed like wine swirling in the glass. With that, the lion vanished into the dark. Over the next few weeks, I thought about that mountain lion far more than I've ever thought about any single living creature besides a dog named Duchess that my family owned for about 13 years. I did a fair bit of thinking about what the lion was doing before I interrupted its hunt that night, but I did a lot more thinking about what it did afterward. To the north of where I

saw the cat was the largest tract of contiguous wilderness in the lower 48. I was baffled by the mystery of that lion amid all that country. What did it do over the next few days? Where did it hunt? What did it eat? Where did it sleep? How did it react to the world that it encountered? Where did it go? As I pondered these questions and researched the answers, I realized that the people with the most sophisticated understanding of mountain lions were the men and women who hunted them with hounds. By following their hounds as they track a lion, houndsmen get to literally walk in the trail of their quarry. They see where the lion hunts. They see where the lion eats. They see where the lion

sleeps. They experience the land on the terms of the lion. They know where the lion goes. The lion hunter is also, I found out, one of the most hated types of hunters in the country. If you think of the conflict between hunters and anti-hunters as a long-term war, the right to hunt lions with hounds is the current front-line battlefield in many western states. This would have been unforeseeable just a hundred years ago when it was common practice for states to offer bounties on mountain lions because of the cats' tendency to prey on livestock. In Arizona, killing a lion would earn you $50. In the 1960s and 70s, western states began to recognize mountain lions as an important part of the ecosystem and also as a species of

interest to big game hunters. Most states reclassified lions as a game species and made it necessary for hunters to buy a legal hunting license and a mountain lion permit in order to kill one. There are several ways to hunt lions. You can attract them with a predator call, which typically mimics the sounds of wounded deer or rabbits. Or you can hang around in good lion country, hoping that one of the cats happens to come along. But by far the most effective way to hunt mountain lions is through the use of dogs. In Montana, 89% of lion hunters use dogs. In Wyoming, it's 90%. Over the last 25 years, 65% of all lions harvested by hunters in Arizona were killed with the help of dogs.

Anti-hunters have long recognized the importance of dogs and hunting lions. I believe that the more organized factions of anti-hunters camouflage their opposition to hunting in general as a more specific opposition to hunting lions with dogs. It allows them to wage small-scale legal battles against the broader spectrum of hunting without having to conquer the issue head on. Some of these battles have proved winnable, as it's easy to convince people who have never once hunted or laid eyes on a wild lion that hunting animals with dogs is somehow a perverse activity. In 1994, Oregon voters passed an initiative that banned hunting lions with dogs, though hunting lions by other means remains legal. The same thing is true in Washington and South Dakota. Hunt lions? Yes. With dogs? No. If you're puzzled about how such laws could

ever come into existence, consider the results of a 2001 poll of Arizona residents. While only 29% of those polled indicated that hunting should be banned outright, 62% indicated that the use of hounds to hunt lions should be illegal. To be perfectly honest, I was inspired by my personal lion experience to reconsider my own suspicions about the practice of hunting them with hounds. I wanted to see one of the animals up close and to experience the thrill of eating its flesh, and the only realistic way for me to do this was to join up with some houndsmen and head into the hills in search of a track. If we got one into a tree and I didn't like the way it felt, I could always walk away without killing it.

While we were hunting lions, Floyd's partner Joe slept in the back of his pickup on a pad of carpet. He kept his dogs tethered outside of the truck scattered apart so that they didn't fight or get tangled up. When he got up at 3 a.m., he would pull on a pair of faded Levi's, Danner hunting boots, and one of Floyd's outdoorsman's backpacks, and then he would un on a pair of faded Levi's, Danner hunting boots, and one of Floyd's outdoorsman's backpacks, and then he would unclip the pack of hounds and they would take off together into the darkness. They would cover several miles before it got light out, and then another six or seven miles after daybreak. This was an impressive bit of walking for a man who'd retired from the concrete laying business with past injuries, including but not limited to a shattered sternum, concrete finisher, a gnawed leg, mountain lion, and a gunshot wound,

sustained after dropping a.357 revolver in such a way that the hammer hit the concrete and discharged around. As Joe walked, he would use a headlamp to study the earth in front of him for tracks. His dogs would range out to the earth in front of him for tracks. His dogs would range out to the sides and ahead of his line of travel with their noses to the ground. By their specific barks, he could tell whether they were detecting the recent passage of a lion. He spent five whole days this way without any significant strokes of luck. Then on our last day of hunting, Floyd and I were getting ready to leave camp when we heard a cacophony of bellows coming from Joe's dogs high on the mountain above us. It sounded like someone torturing a gang of opera singers. Even from a great distance, Floyd knew exactly what Joe's dogs were saying.

That dog you hear there with the low bellow, he doesn't make noise on an old lion trail, said Floyd. He's too old and wise for that. He only makes noise on a good overnight track. We studied the mountainside where the barking was coming from and soon spotted the flickers of light from Joe's headlamp. He was moving quickly across the face of the mountain. There was a notch in the skyline that marked the entrance to a canyon, and soon Joe's light disappeared into that notch. The sound from the dogs barking began to fade as the distance increased. Joe's voice then came over the walkie talkie. He implored Floyd to cut loose some of his dogs. Have you seen a track yet? Asked Floyd. Any idea what way

the lion's going? Is it a tom? No tracks yet, said Joe, but they're really moving the trail. Just get some dogs loose and get them up here. Floyd unleashed six of his own dogs, who immediately headed uphill toward the source of the barking. Floyd then turned to me and said, we better get moving. The canyon that Joe and the dogs entered described a long arc, Floyd explained. He figured that we might catch up with them by following a neighboring canyon through a straighter route. We headed across a sage patch, past some saguaro cactuses, and then into the mouth of the canyon. The daylight grew as we made our way into the dry brown mountains.

As we walked, Floyd explained the trouble of chasing a lion that the dogs could smell but that you haven't seen a track from. While the dogs can certainly tell that a lion has passed through, they are not able to determine which direction it is traveling. This can lead to obvious and considerable confusion. As Floyd put it, there's a 50-50 chance that the dogs are taking you in the wrong direction. After a mile of walking, we still hadn't heard the dogs and we couldn't tell where Joe had gone.

We were unable to reach him on the walkie-talkie as the deeply cut topography interfered with the transmissions. We traveled another mile and then left the canyon bottom and started walking uphill toward a ridgeline. When we got up there, we still couldn't hear anything. I noticed a high thumb-shaped spire of rock that rose out of the mountains like a city skyscraper rising above buildings half its height. I commented to Floyd that the lion was probably headed that way, or at least that's where I'd head if I were being chased and wanted to elude my pursuers Floyd replied that the lion still didn't know it was being chased

he'd been here hours earlier and was probably off sleeping somewhere oblivious to our presence in the world we pressed on hours went by and the day passed into afternoon. As it would turn out, the lion had indeed headed toward the thumb-shaped spire of rock, whether or not he knew he was being followed. Later, Floyd and I would finally meet up with Joe near its base. By then, the dogs would

have lost the lion's trail, and they'd be too exhausted to follow it even if they hadn't. We would find them lolling around on a jumble of rocks. Now and then, one of the dogs would lick a certain rock and bellow, its saliva having released some trace of a lion's odor. Then it would head off in some direction or another, making a ruckus. I would get excited all over again, thinking that I might still get my chance to see a lion up close. But each time, the dog would return, having lost interest in what was becoming an increasingly cold trail. Finally, Joe and Floyd suggested that we start the long walk back toward camp. We all had to be somewhere the next day.

I walked away in silence, disappointed that I was unable to learn whether it was challenging to shoot a lion out of a tree. Getting to that final moment of truth had been, quite simply, too challenging. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season.

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