The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 525: Game Wardens and Grizzlies with CJ Box

Episode Date: February 26, 2024

Steven Rinella talks with author CJ Box, Ryan Callaghan, Brody Henderson, Randall Williams, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider. Topics discussed: Cool stage names; Three Inch Teeth, the 24th Joe Pickett game warden novel out now; when a CJ Box book mentions Steve and MeatEater; novels with an honest portrayal or time and place; how CJ’s wife was called to be on the jury for the Wyoming corner crossing case; get our limited edition “Fresh Set of Eyes…” t-shirt at the MeatEater store now; Clay Newcomb’s high school drawing of a future man with a sci-fi gun pointed at a wild hog; how the next Joe Pickett novel should center around a great vault toilet rescue; audience variations on Steve’s beans saying; NSFW (not safe for work) bird names; how the groundhog can’t tell the weather; hardwired to be a writer; and more.  Outro song: "Mo' Beans" by Raynor Johnson Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light.

Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E dot com. apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. All right, everybody, saddle up. We got a great guest today. Author C.J. Box, who, as we're going to get into, we'll just get it right out in the air right now. I assumed that it was,

I thought CJ box was too perfect for a writer, for a novelist. And I thought his name must be like Morris. No, it's that's, that's my name. Um, I used to be a journalist and by the way,

thanks for having me here. And I, and when I worked for newspapers, I was, I was, all my stories were by Chuck Box. And then I moved to a little town in Wyoming called Saratoga, Wyoming. And I went to a ranch party and a rancher once said, man, we love that crazy name of

yours, you know, because it's on the back of a Chuck wagon. Yep. I never knew that. It seems like you'd be a cowboy poet named Chuck Box. So the next issue of the paper, it was C.J. Box. Yeah. So the next issue of the paper, it was C.J. Box. So you actually had to change your name away from a name that would have been a great stage name. Well, or. Chuck Box.

Or it sounds like a place for utensils on the back of a Chuck wagon. Yeah. But out of Saratoga, Wyoming, like it's all, yeah, it's all too cutesy almost. Like I say, I'm wagon wheel. Yeah. But you were born in Casper. That's right. We'll get into your bio.

But needless to say, best-selling author, New York Times best-selling author. That's not needless to say. I'm going to say that with pride. New York Times best-selling author. Author of 30 books. That's right. And how many in the current series that you're working on now? Because this is your brand new release.

That's right. That is the 24th Joe Pickett novel. Yeah, so we're here celebrating Three Inch Teeth, a Joe Pickett novel, which is the what number again? 24th. Yeah. Did you know that I became familiar with you i had heard your name but i hadn't read your books until it was pointed out to me by a bunch of people that you mentioned my name in one of your books that's right that's right i brought that for you

as well yeah you know i don't know i was i don't know how i i was moderately happy you should i think she's good i thought it would be i was thinking i would open it up thinking maybe i'm I don't know how happy. I was moderately happy. You should be good. I thought it would be, I was thinking, I would open it up thinking maybe I'm. You're the hero. Maybe he really, yeah, like I'm a hero. Like I'm widely celebrated. But you did like what you do with everything you do is you treated it, you know, very fairly. It was a sparse mention, but I took note. Good, good.

Yeah. My father-in-law who reads all of your books. Oh, cool. He didn't catch it. He loves your books. Oh, great. You know what? This is the last time he visited.

He's telling me, you know, he always reads, every time a C.J. Box book comes out, he reads it. And so I knew he read it. And I said, you didn't have noticed anything peculiar in that book did you uh-uh i was like okay so he might not be your closest reader well yeah the background topic of the new book three inch teeth um i feel like he's i feel like he stole it from the podcast. Might have. I listen, you know.

Well, one of the things about the CJ box, uh, the, the, sorry, the picket novels is that it's a game warden protagonist. So you do your homework and you set it, um,

instead of setting it like in some bygone era, you set it, it's contemporary Wyoming. That's right. With all the issues that contemporary Wyoming is dealing with and the changes, like the old ways of life in sometimes in contradiction to intention with new people new ways of life and uh and right away in the book you get into the uh wyoming corner crossers who are not from missouri right uh pennsylvania i think they are but they do have a specialized ladder yes they do and so within this novel is baked in like this sort of like big divisive current event and uh when corinne was reading it she pointed out how um with sort of what generosity and fairness within the novel the generosity and fairness that you applied to the current event so that someone reading the novel might think that this is just

all out of your imagination but it's actually you tap into these very real issues and lay out the you know the the opposing sides of these very real issues as your protagonist takes it in and deals with the different sides. So it's like, it's, it's a really kind of an honest portrayal of a place in time. Well, I, I, that is something I've tried to do since the very first book for, for one thing, I never set out to say, you know, the world is just waiting for a Wyoming game warden series. You know, I wrote one book, a book called Open Season, but the issue in that was the endangered species law. And it was kind of based on a real, the discovery of black-footed ferrets near Matizzi, Wyoming. On the pitchfork. Yeah. I was a reporter at that time. And I thought,

what was so interesting to me, not that, because I'd grown up with little posters around, picture, drawing. If you see this animal, call this number. Oh, is that right? Yes. They thought they might be extinct at that point. It was like, beware if you're going to go prairie dog hunting. Yes. Right.

You can't make little wanted posters for black-footed parrots. Yeah. But then when they were discovered colony outside of Matizzi, I found out when I was a reporter, nearly everybody around there knew they were there. No one ever made the call. And I thought that is kind of a fascinating new west, western story. I want to retell it in this book. And the protagonist was originally going to be a sheriff and then a journalist, which is what I was. And then I made him a game warden because I was doing ride-alongs with game wardens. Oh, wow.

So since the very beginning, I've tried to have issues that resonate among – I always thought if people around me where I live in Wyoming think the books are authentic, that was success. And luckily, it's worked out a lot better than that. But so yeah, the corner crossing thing, that case is right in my backyard. My wife was called to be on the jury for that, actually. How did she do? She didn't get called. Did she make it to the judge's questions? She knew the ranch owner and she knew the foreman and she knew the game warden.

But we're a lot involved in it. So she was gone. One of the- Was she trying to foreman and she knew the game warden. But we're a lot involved in it. So she was gone. One of the. Was she trying to get on? She really wanted to get on. I was going to say a conflict of interest might be that my husband might later write a book about this. That did come up. I actually need to be here because my husband's going to write all about this in a novel, which would be like a big bestseller.

So I want to make sure I'm here to give him like the scoop. Judge be like, yeah, you can take off. But it's such a fascinating, it's one of those, it's so, I can see both sides and I'm not kidding and I try to portray it that way. Yeah. So you had formal training as a journalist then too, so you're able to apply that.

As formal training as a journalist can get. Yeah. Which is, I went to college, that's it. And became a journalist. And yeah, worked for little weekly newspapers. Got it. This is how I see novels come to be, right? to college. That's it. And became a journalist. And worked for little weekly newspapers. Got it. This is how I

see novels come to be, right? You're driving down the road, you're listening to the radio, and you just go, that

sounds like a case for Joe Pickett. It is? You know who can figure that one out? Or something I

overhear in the post office where everybody goes. Or talking to the local game warden. I get lots of things like that. We're going to hit on a couple things, but I got two more things I'm going to mention. One's a question just up top.

You got to have, because living in Wyoming, you got to have people come up to you. You probably can't go anywhere without getting a novel idea, right? From people at the grocery store. I, yeah, I feel like I'm a, like a predator almost, you know, it's like that old saying, you know, if you're, if you walk around with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You know, I feel like I see my wife's hay hook in the barn. I think, oh, God, that's a great murder weapon. So, yeah, it's pretty easy.

And people come up and be like, you know what you ought to be writing about? I get a little bit too much of that, actually. And sometimes I'll say, why don't you write that book? That idea is so good. I'll let you have the honor. When I mentioned when I, the first novel I've read of yours is Dark Sky. Oh, good. And that was that one where you mentioned me and Meteor, and I was joking about what it was. There's this kind of like, sort of a rather unlikable Silicon Valley CEO who has,

was it Steve 2.0 or what the hell is his name? Yeah, Steve 2.0. He's got one of the, he's got like a goofy tech name, kind of annoying. Well, he gets hopped up on watching Meat Eater and decides he wants to go hunt elk. So it's very like Zuckerberg. It's like very Zuckerberg-y.

Like when Zuckerberg announced some year that he was going to only eat stuff he killed. It was like real Zuckerberg-y. And I was sort of like through the inspiration. You know? It was better than being an inspiration for the villain. Yeah, right. That's right. Okay.

Now, you got to hang tight. You can talk about anything you want, but we got to talk about a couple things. Okay. Then we're going to come back to you hardcore. And feel free to chime in whenever you want. Okay. One problem we have is we declared that we weren't going to talk about my old time saying, oh, I'll bring you up to speed.

No, that's not true. We should talk about it all the time. I wanted to invent an an old saying so i came up with um based off pick and pull beans i came up with a fresh set of eyes always finds more beans meaning if you put like a new person into a situation they're gonna find right okay a reality got it a reality that had was hidden from others and we talked about it so much that we kept talking about it and people would send in different versions and now um we've even got listeners saying stop talking about it

a woman wrote in that just like when a child learns a new word and they use it all the time, her husband three times in one Sunday, because it's so annoying, three times in one Sunday found a way to say a fresh set of eyes will always find more beans. She signs it living in bean hell. But I point this out only because we now have a t-shirt. We have a t-shirt. A fresh set of eyes finds more beans, me did your podcast t-shirt. Hunter Spencer did theshirt a fresh set eyes finds more beans media podcast t-shirt hunter spencer did the artwork and he's got a fist it's a fist holding up beans and it says fresh set eyes finds more beans available now i hope they didn't make too terrible many of those t-shirts no it's

supposed to be a limited edition thing. So get them while they're hot. I will say, you might break into the vegan market there, Steve. Yeah. Good. I know. It's not like holding up jerky sticks. Sydney used it the other day.

Oh, she did? Unironically, but she did the version where you sort of trail off after eyes. Yeah, there's a name for that. Do you remember what the word is? No, I don't remember. Can you look that up? As a writer, he might be interested in this you know there's a there's a name for when you only say part of a saying and let it trail off look that up i don't know i've never heard i've never heard of a name

for that and i just put dot dot dot yep so if i say to you fresh set eyes dot dot dot there's a name for that and i don't even know if she was. Birds of a feather. I don't know if she was doing it consciously. Because it didn't register with me. It just sounded very natural. And she said a fresh set of eyes. And like three or four seconds, I realized that she was going with the bean saying.

Sure. She's a podcast listener. I was taken aback. I don't know if I'm pronouncing this properly You might have the right thing because I remember it being hard to pronounce Synecdoche No synecdoche Synecdoche

No it's not Geez Corinne Of all the poetic devices You could have chosen I'm going to move on While you look for it no this is fascinating here's another t-shirt this is a few so we covered off on this this is a future t-shirt design where we're talking um we're talking about what we used to like to draw when we were little kids

and i drew two things i drew amphibious tank battles i like to draw those when i was a little kid and it was like in like tanks that somehow floated assaulting a beach and i like to draw large native american encampments with dozens and dozens of teepees stretching into the horizon and clay was saying how he uh no disrespect couldn't move no matter what he did he couldn't move away from hogs and he kept his drawings going even into high school and so he was talking about i could he said i think it's at my mom's house as he's explaining what he used a common theme he would explore in his drawings as a young man and then promptly his mom uh sent a photo of the picture and i asked clay if i could have it and he sent it to us for the studio so it's a future man i want i Clay to explain how that gun, the construction of that gun works.

Like where the sling is hooked. I got questions about that gun. It looks like when, you know, like if they're making sci-fi movie props and they take a squirt gun and they just, you know, attach some other things to it. It's a future man being charged by a wild hog. But he's got the drop on it. And he has a claw hand as well. Well, he's like an otherworldly. He's not of this planet.

I can tell by the musculature. He's ripped. Yeah. He's enhanced. He's ripped and strapped, and he's being chased by a razor he's in trouble if he doesn't pull that trigger pretty quick i don't is there a trigger on it i might just fire when he thinks i want this to be remember that t-shirt we did of the ice age hunter doing the grip and grin with the saber-tooth tiger saber-tooth cat what do you call those things scimitar cat

saber-tooth cat where it's like a shirt things scimitar cat saber-toothed cat where it's like a shirt but it's just a rectangular box like yeah yay right kind of cross your sternum and that'll that that wonderful picture will just be in that box it's gonna be a good shirt i can't wait i don't think they should make too many of them either could we also just do prints of these i mean like that you could hang on your wall i don't know that was from 1997 oh we should have like a calendar of clay's old art i don't know how many pieces he's got i know about two and one he's got two and one can't go on the calendar as i explained earlier about what is oh the other thing i wanted to touch on but i can't like uh something to happen this weekend but i maybe i should there's like some little more are you

giving me a look like there's a no there's a moratorium on talking about this no i think i just don't know yeah i'll give you the most cursory details me and yanni and my three kids and his two kids Oh, about the dog? Yeah. Went out cat hunting and his dog went off a cliff. He's still alive. And when we found it, I didn't think it was going to live. Kids are all crying.

Blood all over. I still don't understand why I got that in-reach message from you. Because we were on a steep canyon and it was snowing and this track was brand new. And the dog went down

into the bottom of the canyon. I think it jumped the cat. And the cat went up the other side into a cliff band. So, and then all of a sudden, it's brr, brr, brr, right? And all of a sudden, dead quiet. I guess what I'm saying is, why did you not have Giannis' contact info? Just hear me out.

I have his contact info. Hear me out. Okay. Dead quiet. And then he gets a treed symbol at the bottom of a cliff. And an odd line of travel.

So the dog's zigzagging, zigzagging, zigzagging and then it seems like he went a really long ways in a very straight line to a treed symbol. We tell all the kids to hang tight by the snowmobile. This is on Giannis' GPS device. So he can see on a screen

the line of travel of the dog. Tell all the kids to stay put. And we go down to the bottom of the canyon, climb up the other side and find it at the foot of the cliff. And make a plan that he puts it in his backpack

and he's going to go a mile and I'm going to go back up and get the kids and circle around and pick them up on a snowmobile trail. When he doesn't show up, I had his phone number, but I didn't have his, I was on my inReach and didn't have his inReach number. Gotcha. Trying to find out what was going down.

All worked out. Hey, Phil, bleep him saying that. Yeah. I don't want to tell Yanni's story for him. Blood all over. That's how you want it to end. Yeah. To be continued kids are scared blood all over it's snowing crying didn't know where yanni was he didn't show up at the show in that place phone rings and joe pickett's office yeah yep oh that might be a good setup right it would be i

like that hey you know have you you know you ought to work into one of your books is all these people getting stuck in vault toilets trying to get their phones and stuff out be. I like that. Hey, you know what you ought to work into one of your books is all these people getting stuck in vault toilets trying to get their phones and stuff out of there. I like that idea. I like that a lot. I haven't never thought about that. Well, a little comic relief part.

Yeah. It could just be sort of like the intro. Like he had just finished getting the woman out of the vault toilet when he heard a crackle on the radio. Yes. I've got some outhouse hijinks in this current book. Two women trapped inside of an outhouse.

Not in the vault. An angry rancher pounding on the door. Oh. But they're not stuck in the vault. No. No, not yet. Nope. I feel like your guy, I feel like Pickett needing to help someone who dropped an Apple Watch into a vault toilet and crawled in there to get it at a fish and access site.

One, it's just that it's an epidemic. Right. It helped raise awareness about this. Yes. A couple other quick things. I like that one. I usually don't. As long as you don't tell me that I should just write my own book about that.

You know how the author, I took a class in graduate school with the author. You ever hear of author Chris Offit? No. He wrote Kentucky Straight. He's like a Kentucky writer. He was a novelist, but then wrote a book about his family. He wrote a memoir called, I don't know what it was called. Wrote a memoir.

And his family was livid. Oh, yeah. As they are. His response was, you should write your own version of what happened. Yes. I'm not stopping you. Tell the world. That's the problem with a memoir.

You can only do one. Although some people keep doing them. No, I always get worried when a writer, I always get worried for a writer who starts out with their life story. Because that's tough to follow up. It is. And I've known quite a few authors who just came out with that memoir and then struggled and struggled and tried to come up with something for book two. I always get worried about writers get too big, like especially in that situation where you do your memoir and you get a big advance, like a big, big advance because they're real excited about your life story

and then it doesn't earn out. And then you're like, you know, then the thing is like, well, maybe I'll do a book about, you know, business. You know what I mean? It's just a bad path, man. Those Beans shirts are on sale now correct my buddy and i this is this is a listener email my buddy and i are air traffic controllers i can picture joe pickett up in the air traffic tower. He hates planes. My buddy and I are air traffic controllers.

In our particular tower, we prefer to have all the transmissions over the loudspeaker as opposed to wearing a headset with earpieces. I can picture that. The problem, as he goes on to say, is that sometimes the other shift cranks the speaker up to 11. So every now and then, the first call of our shift comes blasting over the speaker so loudly that I'll hear just loud static and miss a call sign, pilot request,

or other pertinent information. It's getting thick. When this happens, I need someone in the back to tell me what the pilot said while i turned the speaker down he goes on to say so my proximity to the speaker hindered my ability to hear the full message or oh he's trying to float his own old time yeah a lot of i didn't know i didn't pre-read this a lot of people have done that corinne vetted it but i didn't pre-read this. A lot of people have done that.

Corinne vetted it. A lot of people have done that. But I didn't pre-read. You just took the bait? No, I just took, like I have so much trust in Corinne. Now Steve's got a crisis on his hands right now. I didn't pre-read.

So now I have all this set up and here I am stuck. And you don't even know if you like this thing or not. He's trying to float his own damn... It's in bold, guys. It makes you feel like it's not. I knew exactly where this was going.

But it's a great saying, dude. You're going to dismiss it and then you're going to think about it. I don't think so. Yes, I'll tell you what the applications are. Great. I could even tie it into the beans. Being too near could make things unclear. Now, Fresh Set of Eyes Always Find More Beans. Being too near could make things unclear. Now, fresh set of eyes always find more beans.

Has accounting, right? Has relevance in accounting. There's also just great imagery that goes along with it. Has relevance in law enforcement. Being too near could make things unclear, I think, has relevance in parenting when it comes to diagnosing health issues. I it was going to be more literal like oh no my kid's just like that i was too he'll just fall asleep out of nowhere he's always been like that right or no no he's just like that i don't know what that's all about always been like that and some might be like i think that kid's got a major problem but the parents too near which makes it unclear that's like kind of a riff of like missing the forest for the trees exactly right oh well what about no i guess i

thought it was a more literal saying too near to here and then it could be oh that's the same no no i mean i thought that's where he's going with it so then you know an outboard motor there's all sorts of very narrowly constructed situations in which that would make sense what about just because it's loud doesn't mean it's legible yeah i like that too but i also see this being applicable in relationships remember john wayne he said big mouth don't make a big man? Didn't he have a big mouth? Like, being too near can make things unclear. You got a buddy, and clearly

your buddy's husband is a lunatic. The only person that doesn't realize it is your buddy. Being too near makes things unclear. 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 high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX 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, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater 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 handpicked 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. What episode number are we on? Five.

20-something. 20-something. So apologies if we're going back to episode 417. But speaking of air traffic controllers. Speaking of air traffic controllers, we had a person on the podcast, CJ, who was a biologist with APHis animal plant inspection services okay they do a lot of predator control but a lot of other things people don't know about like for instance uh keeping stuff off airport runways so wildlife control inside airport circles geese deer whatever deterrent not just lethal but also just deterrent habitat modifications

and this uh woman introduced us to a very interesting term which is when you're trying to find out when you have air collision with a bird there's just a biological substance sometimes you just you don't know what you're looking at. Something came into the jet, spit out the other side, or there's this big smear on the windshield, and part of the job is like, well, what happened? What was that? And she introduced the term, and I thought she was joking, but this is the actual term, is snarge.

Snarge? Someone I've heard that before somewhere. It's just biological detritus. Goo. And then you try to find out what the snarge was from. Anyways, a dead goose just took down a medical helicopter. There was fatalities. How many?

Three. Oh. Do we know? Three or four. Three or four. Yeah. A medical helicopter crashed in Oklahoma with multiple fatalities, and they recovered a dead goose out of that helicopter.

I think that was what she was saying, it was the number one bird, right? Yeah, I think so. I think it is goose, yeah. And I know that there have been like a number of, there were landings, those at the Hudson. Yeah, that's a famous one. A pilot, a flight nurse, and a paramedic all killed in a bird strike. Huh. Yeah, that's a famous one. A pilot, a flight nurse, and a paramedic

all killed in a bird strike. Huh. Yeah, so it's serious shit. Someone wrote in about this. I feel like we should, I want to do this, but I left my drink coasters on my desk. Oh, like you would read out what's on your drink coasters? Well, yeah, because my drink coasters are boobies.

Are they crucial to this? Yeah, they are. You want me to go grab them? No. You can add those to the list, or you're just saying you don't remember what all of them are. It's about bird names. Cal's favorite subject.

Just how graphic some bird names are. Well, I'll bring them next time we record. i'd like the record to show i have nothing wrong with bird names no i know that's the problem is like you don't have any problem with bird names yeah old names new names i like great but the the it's the that you you have expressed that uh you've expressed feeling that there's been a lot of time wasted on a thing that is not an issue. Right. And it's hard for me to draw the parallel between the change of a bird name and the destruction of the United States Constitution

and the downfall of democracy as we know it. I might have come in a little hot. We'll pick it up when I have my drink coasters. My drink coasters are... It's so short. Picture it. Let's read the guy's note.

Okay. In support of Steve... Topic, renaming birds. In support of Steve, here's an idea. If we must rename birds to fit some social justice narrative, let's double down on the borderline not-safe-for-workplace bird names that already exist. And he points out the great tip.

Yeah. The blue footed booty booby, the wood cock, the Dick sizzle. That's a great. And then add your coaster name, Steve. I have drink coasters at my neighbor.

Pottery pack gave me for my birthday. I think it was my birthday, my birthday. And it's a coaster and in big letters up top it says boobies. But then you look and it's all the boobies. Blue footed boobie. And a big coaster says tits.

But it's all the tits. Cocks! But it's all the cocks. Right? How many are there i wouldn't send my kid to school with these drink coasters i would go over if your kid oh that's the exact drink if your kid just said if your kid did sit down at their desk and place a coaster down and then set their drink on that drink coaster. It could be an edifying moment for the teacher. And he'd say something like, what type of cocks do you enjoy the most?

I mean, that's the exact type of thing I would have been doing in school. Let's do one more, Corinne. You want to do the... Why don't more you wanna do the why don't we you wanna do the yeah let's do that that's probably better than the other ones unless we do the

acorn info nah we already talked about clay pita wants to... First, I got to do my little bit that I always do. I'll start. PETA wants to replace Punxsutawney Phil with a coin. Meaning the gopher, the groundhog that they pull out every year

and he sees his shadow and tell you the weather. His track record's horrible. But that's not their... I bet that's not their point.'s, but that's not their, I bet that's not their point. Well, their point, but their point is, why not just flip a coin?

Because he's going to do just as good of a job as Punxsutawney Phil. And you don't have to abuse that poor groundhog. That's their route to where they're getting. But they,

yeah, they specialize, at PETA, they specialize in getting, it's not unintentional, I don't think. No, no. They do like a well what will

they think of next and it gets people like me i get tricked into covering it right because they do like remember they wanted to for a while old sayings that seem mean to animals get rid of old like more than one way to skin a cat oh yeah right and they're like that's mean to beat a dead horse yeah to beat a dead horse is mean and then everybody in the news and fox news they're like oh my god and i'm like oh my god and it works and we're all talking about pita so the latest move is for them to point out that it's mean to Punxsutawney Phil. He's not a meteorologist. To drag him out and show him off to the whole world.

Exploited for tourism. It's probably mean to drop him like they do. Oh, they drop him? Yeah. Well, Bill de Blasio dropped one on accident that died later. Oh. Oh, no kidding. No kidding.

That's great. It doesn't change my mind about the event. There's no shortage of groundhogs. Yeah, like how dare PETA say that he's not a meteorologist? How do they know what's going on? How do they stretch so far? Well, they say that groundhogs are shy, solitary animals. Should be dragged out and shown off to the whole world.

It looks well fed. Every single one that they hold up is a chunk monster. I saw a joke over the weekend that I haven't been able to stop thinking about and it's simply that we haven't applied this concept to enough things. Just grabbing an animal, pulling it out of its hole and asking it

unknowable questions about the future. I haven't been able to stop thinking about that. This is a very peculiar thing that we're invested in. They just stopped short of the groundhog. They need to keep going. The line was like, owls have been claiming they're pretty smart. Let's see them prove it now. A couple of years ago, PETA argued that they should wrap it up with Punxsutawney Phil and swap it out for a, quote, animatronic version.

Oh, I get it. A robot. Equipped with artificial intelligence capable of more accurately predicting the weather. What the strategy is with PETA. I get a kick out of peter uh this stuff i like what they're doing is they're you're demonstrating um it's like a rhetorical strategy you demonstrate absurdity by being absurd so you'd be like here's an absurd. And then it hopefully makes people go like, yeah, it is really weird.

It is absurd. It's not absurd that you propose we stop doing it. It's absurd that we started doing it in the first place. Drag this groundhog out. That's what makes it great, though. Drag this groundhog out. Show him off to the planet. What will the weather be?

There's probably a good history of how many of those little buggers they've been through over the years there's that place in north or south carolina i think that does the possum drop every new year's um and it's just like a country store but they put a possum in a cage they bring it up to the top and they like slowly lower it like the ball dropping but it's a there's put a possum in a cage, they bring it up to the top and then they like slowly lower it, like the ball dropping, but it's a, there's a live possum in there. No harm comes to the possum. Um, but that finally fizzled out.

It, you know, it got some like, uh, Some bad press. But then, you know, that totally went away cause people lose interest in that stuff. But I think people just kinda eventually started being like, hard to explain this to people from out of state. But really who's looking out for possums these days? You know, I'm wondering who, who turned up the heat on that.

People do because I caught a possum, uh, not too long ago. I caught a possum. I was the Kevin Murphy and I'm holding the possum by the tail. And, and, you know, they go into that shock, right? Playing possum. Kevin's got all these dogs running around. And first off, what people didn't know, I saved the possum's life. Cause his pack of beagle dogs were set on killing the possum.

Okay. I picked the possum by up by the tail and he goes into playing possum. I then want to deposit the possum in a safe place. So there's all this grapevine, like an impenetrable mat of grapevine. And I lay the possum who's playing possum up on the mat of grapevine, probably five feet off the ground where those beagle dogs can't get at it. Meanwhile, we had a picture of me holding the possum by his tail. Like I do a grip and grin with the possum, who I'll point out is capable of hanging from a limb from his tail.

And I mentioned how I set him up out of the way. Or maybe we made a video where I set him up out of the way. Either way, people point out, now he's going to come out. You basically killed this poor possum because he's going to fall from that perch and die. And I saved the possum and that possum is not going to fall off that mad, a grapevine. Cause he couldn't fall off if he wanted to.

He's going to have to walk out of there. So people do look out for possums. However misaligned. I stand corrected. However misaligned with reality they are, they look out for possums. I caught a possum in LA once, Corinne. I was like, oh, check this out.

That's pretty cool. Yeah. People didn't think it was cool. There's something about you that when you see a possum makes you want to grab it by the tail. Yeah. It's a nasty tail. Big handle. All right, you ready, CJ Box?

I'm ready. Yep. You grew up around hunting and fishing a little bit? I did, yep. What did it look like in the box household?

What did sporting events look like for the box household? Sporting events? I'm sorry, hunting and fishing type sporting events. Oh, I had a... Did you play sports? Like, organized? I did. Oh, you I'm sorry, hunting and fishing type sport. Oh, I had a. Did you play sports?

Like organized? I did. Oh, you did? I did. I was a wrestler and a cross country rider. But, uh, yeah, it was an, it was a, every year we would go deer hunting around Midwest Wyoming. Okay.

Um, at that point there weren't that many mule deer. There are, you know, like there have been now, but I, I grew up, I was thinking about this yesterday. I was driving up here that I got my first mule deer at age 12 with my grandfather's 25, 35 saddle carbine that he actually used on a ranch. Had to shoot it five times, you know, and hunted every year since.

Did you grow up on a ranch? No, no. I grew up in Casper, but where we would go would be north of Casper. And it wasn't like the good old days for mule deer hunting then? It wasn't. That area wasn't that great. But then it got, then there were more and more. And then I, you know, started antelope hunting.

And I had, even in high school, this is, this is, you know, I'm old. How old are you? You're not that old. I'm 65. Oh, you look good. Thanks. 65. All my buddies and I used to have a, we call it the one-shot prairie dog hunt club.

So we would actually keep our guns in our lockers in high school. And as soon as it, wrestling practice was out, we'd grab them and go out and shoot prairie dogs. With one shot. Well, no. That's just the name. And then cut off their tails, you know. And so I grew up around a lot of guns, around a lot of hunting.

I got, you know, I haven't hunted all my life. I may not even hunt that much now if it weren't for the fact that I've got three daughters who give me such a hard time until I get elk meat. Got it. They love to serve it. They love to eat it. They love to bring friends over. I've got twins who are 34. What?

My youngest is 30 or almost. And what I love to do. You're like all wrapped up on the parenting thing. Yeah. And I also love to go to my son's-in- law and says with, with the meat and say, because, you know, your husband will not provide for you. I have brought you another cooler this Christmas. I still have to do it. I still have to care for my daughter. Yeah. They love that. They're not being adequately supported. Mm-hmm. What was the, what was the first inkling you ever had about writing?

Like, when did you become aware to, when did you become aware that there was a thing called a writer and, you know, you could be one? Ah, geez. You know, I think if you're a writer, I've often, you know, asked that a lot. I think you're, you're hardwired with it. Really? Or you're not. I've worked with people who want to write, but they don't seem hardwired and it's just never going to work. Um, I, I was going to write one way or another, whether it was journalism.

Oh yeah. I mean, I was writing stories, you know, in second, third grade. I never thought about myself as writing a series of books, but I do remember going to our local library and going down the stacks to the B's to see where my book would be someday. I didn't know what it would be about, but I knew that that's someday. Like the old card catalog days. Yeah. Now I know if it's there, that means nobody's checked it out. So it's inventory.

Did your parents emphasize a lot of reading to you or was that something you found on your own? My dad did. He used to read to us. He was a teacher. My mom did not. My mom always said even when I had books out, the only thing she read was cookbooks. What did your dad teach? He taught third grade.

Then he was a principal for a while. Then he taught fifth grade for a while. So elementary school teacher. Got it. So good, honest, middle class Wyoming upbringing. Absolutely. Yep. When you settled, so you did college to learn journalism.

Right. Right. I had a scholarship actually to go to University of Denver in journalism because I was the editor of a high school newspaper that won a bunch of national awards. So I could go to a private school cheaper than I could go to the University of Wyoming. And then studied and majored in that and came out of that? Yep. They called it mass communications, but it was journalism. And then, um, my first job was on a weekly newspaper in Wyoming and, um, did that for a few years, then realized I could make no money being a journalist for a weekly newspaper. So, uh, I had a, uh, syndicated column for a while that was, uh,

mainly about outdoor stuff. And then, um, give me a, give me a, give me an idea of what you'd write about. I would write in your column, uh, ice fishing, snowmob me, give me a, give me an idea what you'd write about. I would write. In your column. Uh, ice fishing, snowmobiling. Like the bites hot down at the local reservoir. Right. It was like that. Um, I called it far afield. Got it.

And, um, you know, I used to, you know, I used to. Would you do local profiles and. Yeah, I would. You know, the guy, the local guy who tight flies and, um, that kind of stuff. Oh, I learned early on. Kind of like that's stay

away from gone away man yeah we had i can't remember i wish i could remember his name mark something like growing up we had a muskegon chronicle where i grew up in western michigan and there was just like the dude i can't remember his name but he was like the outdoor columnist yeah those outdoor columnists are like yeah extinct and it'd be, you know, one week it'd be slaying the white bellies. Mm-hmm. You know, like the white bellies are in the channel mouth. There's still some around. So there's still some around.

This old guy has been selling worms. Yeah. I think the Billings paper still has an outdoor column. Pretty sure. Oh. People still remember reading it. Which is cool. And I got to do lots of things with it.

I got to go whitewater rafting with the Denver Broncos, that kind of thing. So they give you a salary. Not much. And they give you a thing. They give you a salary, and then they say you figure it out, and once a week you write an outdoor column. Right. But I also covered everything else, you know, the 4-H champion cow or the, you know, I remember going, I get to meet everybody, billionaires to survivalists, you know, and did little columns on all of them. And that was fun. I got to, I think the best training for the kind of writing I do now is working at a weekly newspaper where you,'re forced to meet everybody you can't you've

got to get out of a bubble got it get to develop a lot of characters right away right and then be comfortable talking to people in all walks of life and um what I've always found is if you show interest in what somebody's doing all of a sudden they'll you cannot get them to stop talking you know you show up with a blank notebook and they feel compelled to fill it. Got it. After a while, even, you know, people in nuclear facilities and things that I'm doing research, I show up and they first, they're very reticent. And I start asking them about their job and no one has ever asked them about their job before in their lives. And once they start telling you,

then they can't stop. And sometimes they've told me, how do I take down a supercomputer center? They tell me step by step. And I say, that's enough. That's enough. I'm not going to do this, write this all out in this book. When you're doing that line of work, would you try to go in – do you try to go in dumb or do you try to go in and sort of establish your, your bona fides? I try to do,

I do much, some homework so that I'm not completely off base, but, and I, you know, I usually have a list, but I try to like without, we talked earlier about issues in the books.

I always try to talk to people on both sides of the issues and then have a character in the books, espouse those so that, um, so that at least it's a fair portrayal. Yeah. It's not always a fair portrayal, but I try to make it a fair portrayal. I meant that question more as an interview strategy, meaning let's say you develop, let's say you're working on something in your old job and you develop something close to subject matter expertise and you go to interview

somebody do you keep it under wraps that you know the situation pretty well and present it to them as though they're talking to a knucklehead or do you like to go in and say i'm widely read on this what's your take i you know i would go in and say i've done a lot of read on this. What's your take? I, you know, I would go in and say, I've, I've done a lot of research on this. Is this true? Got it. I did a book called the highway a few years ago. It's very creepy.

It's about a serial killer truck driver. Um, and I, I got together with a pair of drivers from Montana and we went across the country and I had a long list of questions I had for them. You know, why, why, why on trucker forums do they laugh about Walmart bags on the side of the road? You know, and the truckers go, cause that's what, that's what they crap in and throw out the window. So I had lots of questions about, I just need to know, are these things true? And then, then that opens things up. Got it. Yeah.

Hmm. Now, oh, sorry. Someone just go to say something? No, but that was a, something I didn't really need to learn. Well, you can tell what they, you can tell what they like to urinate in, that's for sure. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. Yeah. Next time you volunteer for your highway cleanup crew. Yeah, stay away from the Walmart bags. You're going to want to be properly prepared. What was your next jump out of doing the journalism? I started a company.

I worked for a while for, first of all, I worked for Wyoming Tourism, the state agency. I was a state employee and I traveled all over the world. I was in charge of international tourism development. What? Really? Yeah. And saw that it didn't make sense for a state employee to go out there all over the world and say, come visit us. I'm a state employee. So I started a company and included in that company when we would do overseas things, lots of private sector entities, hotels, Yellowstone Park for five different states in the Rocky Mountains. And then we had six offices overseas.

So for 20 years, that's what I did. Really? What'd you do with that? You sold it? I sold it to employees. Yeah. Once the book started making more money than the company did, then I could step away from the day-to-day traveling.

I assume you must have been writing books at the same time. I was. I was writing on airplanes, and I remember writing in a Berlin hotel, finishing up a book, you know. So I have no patience with anybody who says I'd write a book if I had the time. You know, I had a company. I had three kids. I was trying to write a book a year.

Just have to do it. I love hearing those stories because that was not my reality, man. I had like a way different way into it and never had to do that. Well, I didn't have to. I just chose. I didn't have a family or anything when I was starting out as a writer. So I just chose to live like way below the poverty, like way, way below the poverty level in other people's houses and didn't have a house. So I didn't have to compete with my own occupation because I didn't have a family.

Have you ever heard of the, he's dead. You ever, you know, the novels, Larry Brown. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Larry Brown. He wrote his first bunch of books at the fire barn. He was a fireman.

And when everyone else is playing video games and cooking, grilling chicken and throwing horseshoes, Larry Brown would be in his bunk writing novels. That's that hardwired thing. He never learned to type QWERTY. He said, one time I was talking to him, he held up his two index fingers. He said, I wrote seven novels with these two fingers. And like to bring up Yellowstone. So here he's born, he's a fireman in Oxford, Mississippi.

Had never been anywhere. His first novel he wrote about a man-eating bear in Yellowstone National Park. Had never seen a bear and never been to yellowstone national park wrote that book and he's like that method is not gonna work so he started writing about the kind of stuff he runs into as a fireman huh right yeah the kind of people he liked he liked do that. He lived in the town. When he could, he'd go drinking. When he could, he'd go fishing catfish.

And so he's like, I guess I'm going to write about people that like to do that stuff. Well, as a writer and as a reader, I much prefer novels with a great sense of place, like you're talking about. What you can tell, you can always tell when somebody's making up a location. Maybe they've been there on vacation. Maybe they've been through it. But you can always tell. I always thought when I was writing, I want to write from the inside out as opposed to showing. I'm never going to write an urban novel.

I couldn't do it authentically. But I can write about the Mountain West because I can do it from the inside out. And people who live here or have been there can say, yeah, that rings true. And I think that's, for me, that's extremely important. I can't remember who the comedian was that I was recently watching. Was it Dan Aduit maybe did a bit about this? The guy that's been on the podcast? Yeah, it was somebody who moved to Denver, I think, but we didn't. He's never on the show?

No. There's a comedian, and he was talking about when TV productions have to deal with what a working class person does. And so they're describing how there's a person investigating this like horrific murder okay and they go into a bar in the morning to interview someone about this horrific murder and they have them the whole time they're answering questions about this horrific murder they're continuing to stack beer boxes yes like they're no way to pause stacking these beer boxes to answer questions about this horrific triple homicide that they were. Yeah.

That they rolled up and do. Like, I'm picturing he's there in the morning stacking beer boxes. Mm-hmm. Or like scenes with tradesmen. You know, like no one on that production has ever seen a tradesman do anything. You know, trying to think of what. I guess he might have a file wasn't that guy he's like filing a piece of wood trade trade oh that's what it was he was on the podcast oh the liberal right it's a community called the liberal red oh okay i thought it was somebody was

the liberal redneck talking about when they try yeah tv trying to like portray how tv portrays rednecks. And that's right. He's the guy that wouldn't stop stacking beer boxes while discussing a triple homicide. I like that. Then that's true. Yeah. Hey, folks.

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It was more marketing, really. I mean, we work with tour operators, travel agents, and then, um, lots of journalists. I brought lots of journalists over here to the Rocky Mountain West and would take them on. We call them familiarization tours, fam tours. So I got to junkets. Yeah. All kinds of every, every adventure there was, I was their escort. So I got to do stuff. Um, kind of reminded me of what you, I think you do what you like best. And I was able to do that for years and years and years and get a lot of experiences. Yeah, it was. Still in, when I left, it was 24 years old. But that didn't scratch the itch. Yeah. I was done traveling. I'd been to Berlin in March way too many times.

I was ready to settle in. And now I get to go on book tours and kind of do this but i i'm the guy who's but you were making you were making good money decent yeah yeah and you still had to be like i got to be a writer yep when you were when you were a journalist did you were you writing in your free time i mean were you still coming up with book ideas in your free time or sort of when did that transition take place into really working on books you know i'll say i had like a 25 year overnight success story i started working on the book that became open season when i was actually a working journalist on the on the newspaper and but it took all those years to finally get it. And,

and plus doing other things and, um, having a family, my daughters, twin daughters, 14 years old, didn't know that I wrote. They knew I had a home office.

They know I went in there and did stuff, but I never wanted them to think my dad, the failed novelist. So not until I had, not until I had a book contract that I tell them that I wrote a novel. That's amazing. Wow. I can picture him later being like, what was your dad like?

Oh, he's like a failed writer. Yeah. He, uh, he tried. Nice enough guy. Yeah. The travel thing in rural Wyoming, you know, it's like, I knew Wyoming kids in college that, uh, like went on their first plane ride in college. And they're like, oh, hey, you know what I did? Yep.

This is actually kind of a funny story. A buddy of mine road tripped home with a friend of his to Wyoming. I'm not going to say what town, because people who know this story would. I'm probably related to him. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And, uh, cause our buddy who was driving, uh, had to make a court appearance and do a little bit of jail time on something that had come up earlier on. As one does.

And when he got there, uh, you know, it's like you're a college kid. You're not all that serious about stuff. He missed his court appointed deadline and thought like, well, I'm here. And they were like, yeah. And you're going to be here for the next month now in jail. And so that was my other friend's, uh, first time on a plane was, uh, his family chipped in and flew him back to the university of Montana. So he didn't have to wait on his buddy's term.

Yeah. Nope. Absolutely. What, uh, have you, I think of you as kind of apolitical. Are you political, do you feel, in your writing? I have opinions, but I usually try to, like I said, try to show both sides a little bit. By the choice of what I write about, I think I'm pretty much revealing how I think about a lot of things by, by choosing that topic, um, without, I never want to write agenda books. Um, but you know, I can only think of one book

where I couldn't, I could not work up much sympathy for the other side. And that was when it was based on the Sackett case. Um, the, the EPA that went after a couple in Idaho and told them that they, they built on a, uh, wetlands and started suing them $80,000 a day. Not familiar. They went to all the way to the Supreme court, like 10 years. And the Supreme court knocked them, knocked the EPA down nine zero, which you know how many unanimous decisions there are, but it was such harassment of this couple. And I speculated in the book why that was.

The EPA lost nine to zero? Yeah. Twice. With the same couple, because they wouldn't stop. Yeah, it is hard. Those nine people aren't going to agree on anything. No. Because when they know, even when they know,

oftentimes they'll do a dissent just to like articulate a dissenting view do you mean like if you knew like if a supreme court member knew something was going to be like if they knew somehow it was four to four and they have a deciding vote that's a different vote for them then it's going to be like seven to two if it's seven to two I can take almost like a devil's advocate approach and point out. Lay out some concerns or. Yeah. So for something to fall nine zero is. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm not, I never heard of this. Yeah. Yeah. Look that up. Sackett versus EPA. Okay. And, and in the book, I speculated at the end why these agencies were going after this couple.

And my speculation turned out to be true. Um, and it was a private, it was an individual who was an ex federal employee who didn't like the, his, uh, view blocked by this house, but he knew which buttons to push. Um, and I just thought, well, that kind of, you know, and then when I found out that was true, I, I felt quite prescient. Yeah. A personal connected vendetta can I felt quite prescient. Yeah. A personal connected vendetta can do a lot of damage. Yeah.

Huh. Yeah. When did you walk through hitting on, on Pickett? You know, like, like what, what work you were doing? And then when did you say like, well, I need to do a, um, or maybe you didn't intend it this way. I'm assuming you intended that you would find a character that you could serialize. No, I did not intend it. I was just, I was writing about the Endangered Species Act and the black-footed ferrets.

And I fictionalized them into creatures called Miller's weasels that were found. And at the time I was working on. Pause for a minute and tell me why. Why didn't it work as Blackfoot affair? Because then it would be too connected to the reality. Right. I didn't want to actually use the species because I wanted to give them my own characteristics. Because then it would be that you had gotten it wrong.

I got it. It is funny though. Over the time, I still hear from people who say, I looked that up and there is no such thing. I think, yeah. Got me. That's right. But when I was working on the idea for this, doing the research, going to Matizzi, learning it, I was doing ride-alongs with a local game warden and going to his house.

For this research or as your other job? As my other job. Okay. Working for the newspaper and saw that his state-owned home, his kids running around, his wife answering the phone, acting as unpaid secretary receptionist. And the game warden lifestyle, in Wyoming, there's only 50 of them. They're very heavily armed. The guy I was with made the point that no other law enforcement officer is more likely

to encounter armed people than a game warden in the West. And it would amaze me how autonomous they really were. I met a couple of game wardens in Wyoming, old-time ones, who had never been to Cheyenne in their lives, and they would never go. Never been to Capital City. That's right. And if they had to go, they were going to quit. So they ran their district. I thought you were going to D. So they ran their, they ran their district.

It's not going to D.C. It's like going to your own state capitol. So I just found it a fascinating thing. And plus I grew up being a little bit scared of the local game warden. Oh, yeah. Who used to come to our school in Casper, Wyoming, with a little spinning rod with a rubber ball on the end. And if you thought kids weren't paying attention,

you'd just shoot it across the room and bounce it off your forehead. Nice. That's a great idea. Ooh, I might use that at home. Why was the game warden visiting school? Just to talk to you guys or because he was investigating students? No, he would say things like, while you're

here in this place, you listen to your teachers and your parents. If you go outside, I'm your boss. You know? Wow. You have to answer to me. And we were all scared of him. He's more of a fear of God type of guy. Yeah.

Yeah. He's like going right to the source. That's right. And he, uh, he was kind of a famous game warden. I'll spend my whole career writing citations that he speaks. Yeah. Before you stray from the straight and narrow,

he's got to get there and deliver his message. And he arrested me for hunting, shooting dubs off power lines when I was in college. But he let me go because I was in college. So I was on a good path. And he showed me where he had arrested Dick Cheney for fishing out of season. Same guy. In Casper, Wyoming.

And I visited Cheney in the White House a few years later because his wife was a fan. And all we did was talk about this game warden who arrested us both. That's amazing. No kidding. Yeah. Huh. I never heard that about Dick Chaney. Did he get a lot of, probably got a lot of media.

What was he doing? He's like in the wrong, he's in the creek that was closed or something. I don't know because there really aren't fishing seasons. So I don't understand that unless it was some specialized area. Fishing with bait or something. Yeah, some kind of closure. That could have been what it was. Could have been a spawning closure.

Who knows? So then you, I got you sidetracked, but you're talking about the development of running with the serial character. So you started building this character for your ESA. No. Your Miller's Weasel guy.

I wrote a book. I had it for five years before a publisher really bought it. It was Penguin Putnam, which is a big publisher. Yeah. And when they made the offer for the contract, they wanted two more books with Joe Pickett. That's how the series got going. They made the offer off a completed manuscript. Correct.

Yep. And they wanted two more. Can you do this, they said. And I said, of course. So they were going to roll on it before they even saw how it worked. Well, they knew that series, I mean, series work. Yeah. Because it's a pyramid scheme in a way.

You know, somebody might pick up book number 24 and really like it and say, I got to go get all of them to get up to this point. Happens with every hardcover book that comes out, all of mine. The backlist, they call it, all go, you know, all get sold. I mean, it's amazing. Yeah, you ever hear, they ever use the term the halo effect on you? I've not heard the halo effect, but I can say, uh, when the, when this, there was publicity for the current book and then a 24 year old open season appeared on some bestseller lists, uh, around the country last week. Wow.

So it's that kind of thing. Did you start him out like as a rookie? Like, has he aged in his career? Yes. Like, cause he's got to have had a long career. Yeah. Long and distinguished. That's one thing about the books that's unusual from a lot of series is that everybody ages in real time. Right.

So his daughter Sheridan in book number one, seven years old. Yeah, like a lot of the badass espionage guys, like there's just like badass espionage guys. Oh yeah, they go get a new one. One to one gets old. Well, Sean Connery's out. We got to bring in whoever's next. Um, is this cause you have several, uh, recurring characters, but obviously the main one is the

most is the deepest, right? Right. But, um, is it like at this point having like a family member, like, you know, so much about him and how he would react to things like you just like, you know, well, he doesn't like flying on planes. Right. But, and I'm sure he doesn't like certain foods. He only drinks certain beer. He only has certain, you know, he's got all these little idiosyncrasies.

So is it, uh, how close to reality is this fictional character for you? Not that close to reality. I mean – but because I was a state employee and because I've hung out with game wardens and I had this idea for the kind of perfect western iconic kind of guy, Joe. I named him Joe. I thought average Joe. And the picket came from Cheyenne Frontier Days, first champion. So I just had an idea for a guy, a story about that. A few years ago, I was in New York on a book tour, and my publicist heard from this woman who said it turned out to be Gary Cooper's only daughter.

So he spent a lot of time in Montana, had read the book and thought I was channeling Gary Cooper in some way. And we went and had lunch together and she was fascinating. Told me about bird hunting with Ernest Hemingway and her dad growing up. And now she's living in New York. And, uh, but she was sure that I channeled Joe Pickett into Gary Cooper. And, you know, who was I to say I, I didn Right. You know, I wasn't going to argue with her. But it's average character. Yeah, but that's like the beauty of an average character, right?

Like it hits a lot of those points with a lot of different people. Like they recognize things or there's in their family members or people that they know or people that they want to be. And he screws up. I mean. Yeah, he's not a blowhard. No, he's. He's not like Dirty Harry or something, they want to be. And he screws up. I mean. Yeah, he's not a blowhard. No, he's. He's not like Dirty Harry or something, you know?

Right. He's not like, tell me punk. But I think it, I always think it increases the tension because you think he might just screw up again, you know? Yeah, you're never, he's not, he's just not going to win everyone. When they, when the publisher came to you

and they were going to, they're like, okay, we'll take this one. Did they, did, did they make you do like a one-pager or a one-liner about what the other plot lines would be? Or they just trusted you? No, they wanted some descriptions. And I had written a couple of manuscripts before the one was published that weren't very good. But the plots were okay. The subject matter was okay.

So I just made those Joe Pickett books and said, okay, the next one is about a canyon, a crossing of a canyon, and the next one takes place in the winter and it's about federal – a crazy federal land manager. So they bought into that and then I went. But I've never been overseen what are you going to write. Never really – and the other thing that I've been shocked by over the years is I've never had anyone at New York Publishing say, we wish you wouldn't touch that subject. Oh, that's such a – It never happened.

I feel like that's like a myth, man. It is. I think so. It's like a myth. I think we know some of the same people in publishing. We can talk about that. But none of them, they always say they want it to be more authentic, not that they want me to please them. Yeah.

I never, it's a thing that, it's like such a thing in movies and stuff where you, you know, this sort of, this sort of guiding hand. And I'm sure it exists in some aspects. Like I've encountered it in some aspects, in some areas of media. I have absolutely encountered it. I have not encountered it in book publishing. I haven't either. I think there's still, it's like as beat up as book publishing has been with changes in technology and how people use media and what they do

and how much it's had to change. There still is a, within that industry, there still is a sense of higher calling, a sense of purpose, a sense of free exchange of ideas. And they're just not as scared as other people. I think so. I think that's true. I, I think there are exceptions and I hear about things sometimes, but I've never personally run up. I've had a couple copy editors who at times, anonymous copy editors who write some little thing in the side. Yeah, little digs from copy editors. That's what I got. I get that a lot.

It's so funny you run into that. I remember getting in an argument with one where I – because I used the term Indian for Indian country news, which is a real newspaper done in South Dakota. And they changed the name to Native American News. And I said, no, that's what they call it, the people who write the newspaper, who live on the reservation. That's so funny because that's the copy editor digs. That's the digs we'll get from copy editors where they'll kind of do they like to do they do their normal work which is great and then they'll do little gotchas yep yep you know they're suggesting you're wrong you think about this wrong and you kind of want to be like listen buddy i have a lot stay in your lane i have a lot. Stay in your lane. I have a lot of years in this area, and that's the word I'm using.

Given that you didn't envision this as a series, what was the day like when they said, we want this and two more? I mean, was that just like a shock to you or had the idea been floated? I'm just sort of wondering. Did you go on a big bender? What was that day like in your life as like a, you know, a writer and. I was at an international travel trade show at the time.

It was Berlin in the winter. I was surrounded by all my clients. The publisher calls you back, I'm going to have to call you back. Yeah. And I, and I was just beside myself, you know, and none of them understood, none of them knew I wrote and I am going on and on about,

you know, three book deal with, with Putnam. And I think. Like a I wrote. And I am going on and on about three book deal with Putnam. You're like a real publisher. And I thought they just. And they're like, old Chuck finally lost it. Yeah, that's right. That's kind of like beyond what you could have hoped for, right? Oh, yes, by far. Yeah.

Especially because the book had been done for five years before anything happened. Well, that'd be especially cool is to get money for something you'd already done. It's not like getting money for something you gotta do. Yeah, now I gotta do it. Now you gotta do it. Well, no publisher's going to- Would have never taken the money

if I knew I had to do all that work. No publisher's going to take a first novel on spec. I mean, you have to have that book done and polished, really. And it's just not going to happen. Yeah, for novels, sure. Yeah.

Because you can't rely on the concept to sell itself. I'll tell you a quick story about that first novel. Because my wife thought it was good enough. Why didn't the publishers, you know? But I had an agent in New York. This is pre-internet, pre-email, all of that.

I'd gotten the name of an agent. And I sent him physically, sent him the manuscript. And year after year, I would call him. Like slush pile. Yeah. Who's the agent, can you say? And he'd go, what's that? Can you say who the agent was?

He's dead. Oh. So I don't want to say his name. I'll tell you later. But he'd get real, you know, real New York. If he was alive, you'd want to say it. I would. Because I could see it going the bad way.

I'll say stuff about dead people that I wouldn't say about life. Well, he'd say, you know, there's no market for it. It's not really traditional. It takes place in a weird part of the country. I'll let you know if something happens. And I didn't know how the business worked. I waited for four years. And then I finally went to a conference where you pitch your book.

What? I went in Denver, Colorado, and I pitched it to this agent. What was the conference? It's called the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Conference. And I pitched the name of it. And you know, this is what happens. And the agent said, I'm kind of interested in

that. Do you have an agent? And I said, yeah. And he said, who is it? And I told him his name. He goes, you don't know he's dead, do you? Oh my God. He'd been dead for 18 months.

Unreal. Unreal. Nobody thought. You gotta be kidding. Unreal. Oh my God. Unreal. You've got to be kidding. This is like a bad novel about an aspiring writer. Nobody from the agency let me know. And it's a low ceiling, shitty hotel ballroom that you guys are walking from fold up table to fold up table. Exactly.

Exactly. And then the word got around this thing, this guy from Wyoming with his dead agent and a 24-year-old editor from Putnam was there and she had the right to acquire books for the first time. So she was just writing his checks. What? Seriously. I had an editor before I had an agent then. I had to go get one, you know, a live one after that. You're kidding me. No.

They're like, buddy, your agent's dead, but I'm interested in the book and let's get you set up with a live agent to ink the deal. And this is her first time having the authority to do this. Did you catch it? Yeah, she wasn't the one I pitched to. She's the one who heard it over drinks in the bar that night.

And then she reached out. Did she slide in? She goes, you know, the company's paying for these drinks and stuff too. It's pretty cool. I didn't meet her. It came later. At the time.

Did that editor wind up having some good success? She stuck, she stuck with it, I think through six books and then she left publishing. But she did, she was my editor for my first six books. You know, I would have published a novel if my, if I had realized my agent was dead, you know. Randall's like, man, that's, maybe that's what happened to my first novel.

I gotta make a couple of phone calls. It's been 10 years. I'm trying to get to like the what next, but I'm still kind of held up on that little story. Cause that's like a, that's like a, it's like a comedy. It is a bad, really bad comedy. Yeah. And again, it just seems to seem so long ago, but I mean, there was no internet. I couldn't look him up.

I couldn't say, oh God, there's my agent's obituary. I didn't know. So I just, he kept saying, quit calling me. And I did. How long have you been married? Uh, 40 years, soon to be 40 years. What's your wife think about all this? Does she think that she, did she used to think you were nuts or does she think you got what you deserve now?

She has always been very supportive. She's a better reader than I am. Reads more widely, really good editor. She's the one who gets the manuscript first. Um, she was the one who finally said, I think this book's good enough to go out there. So she's always been very supportive. My daughters are as well. They get the manuscript first before anybody else does, all four of them.

That's cool. And they write up their notes to me and sometimes they're kind of cruel and then I go from there. So I'll be kind of a family deal. Seriously, a little family business. Do they discuss it together behind your back and then come to you with their reviews?

No, not behind my back. They all have their own takes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When my, like if my wife looks at stuff I produce, it's 100% like completely critical. There's no like, oh, that's cute. And maybe some of it's based in last week's argument about something totally different.

Well, I don't want to sound like my wife's completely critical, but we have had discussions when she's going over the manuscript where I'll kind of say, you know, you could tell me that you like something. Sure. You know, as opposed to, and she's bitter about that. But she's doing business. When she reads it, she's doing business. A star out there? That's awesome. That's great.

Nice turn of phrase. How many of your projects have you optioned for film and TV? Well, actually all of them. I mean Joe Pickett has been a TV series now two seasons. He was on Paramount+. It has not been renewed for a third season, but it's really complicated about the ownership on it, which has nothing to do with me. And then Big Sky was based on my other set of characters. And that was on for three years on ABC.

So when you do them, it's not like your whole body of work. It's one-offs no when they when they i mean you're like all the whole seat like do you have you have you made a deal for the whole cj box thing or is it just you do like individual pieces well they bought picket in general in general yeah they they actually name each book um you know with then the characters within it with uh with the tv like you you were talking about how you've had total autonomy like writing what's the experience been in tv like have you because you hear a lot of writers like oh you know i i want to just completely take my name away from that vert that television version and other authors that are involved with the tv show may not have that same opinion like where where have you landed it really you know

it really depends on the producers of the tv show itself it's a different with everyone yeah people on joe pickett were completely different than people on big sky in their approach there um i always felt on big sky they just wanted to go their own direction with the character names basically. Um, after two seasons, they had a, uh, a conference call with all their writers and the executive producer saying, Chuck, can you give them some ideas? And I held up the book and I said, why don't you read this? Here's a whole book full of ideas.

And it didn't go over very well. So you just kind of got to like be okay with. You have to. I'm not going to be on the set every day. It's too frustrating to be on the set, I found. You know, when you hear an actress, a character you created say, my character would never say this. I heard that in the headphones. And I thought, lady, I made you.

I could take you out. Your character. Oh, it turns out you get in a car wreck. Your character literally said this already. Yes. But whereas on the Joe Pickett series, they were a lot closer to the books. There's a lot of lines that came out of the books. I was really pleased with that.

But again, I didn't want to be in the set every day. Would you have been welcome on the set every day? Yes. I mean, they're all very friendly, but I feel like I'm in the way and you just sit in the back room and watch the same scene 35 times. And I, I'm about, you know, I've, I would go to visit for three days and leave after one. The one writer I've talked to and, and, and had on that really liked it and had a really great experience with the whole thing is talking Jack Carr. Ah. the team he wound up working with, um, from,

as expressed from him, when we talk about the team, he wound up really working on like would defer to his judgment. Right. So he must've been on the set. Yeah. Well, just very involved,

like very involved in the scripting. You know, you're always like trying to smooth things out and quicken things and cut things and get somewhere quicker. Right. Very involved in that. Um, very involved in like, no, he wouldn't do it that way. trying to smooth things out and quicken things and cut things and get somewhere quicker right very involved in that um very involved and like no he wouldn't do it that way he'd do it this way that's it yeah it came away with a good experience but man most people you most people most writers when you get into that uh they come away feeling burned i brought up with jack card it's a great

quote from uh john la carre la car what does he go by la car i've always i, it's a great quote from John LaCarré. LaCarré, where does he go by, LaCarré? I've always, I think it's LaCarré, I think. He said, watching your novel turn into a movie is like watching an oxen turned into a bullion cube. And that was not Jack Hart's experience, man. So it was nice to hear from someone that liked it. It's really, and like I said, I had two different experiences. One, you know, one, one set was really great. And they went, were more, were closer to the books.

The other one wasn't. It's, but you know, people, I'm an executive producer on both shows. Sure. And the people that, what does that mean? And I would say that means I provide the source material and I cash the check. That's all.

That's, that, that that title while it seems great you should just talk to listeners executive producer um take that with a grain of salt it could mean that they were in there just battling and fighting and like finding the money and cultivating the idea and bled for it and took bullets for it. Or it could mean that it was already made. They were copied on the email. Yeah. It was already made.

And they're like, Oh yeah, I'll sign onto that. It's, it's just, it's the most, it's sort of like, it's the most,

um, it's the, the title that gets the most attention that is subject to the greatest amount of contextual understanding to know what in the hell that means. Because it can mean anywhere from everything to nothing, but it still says executive producer. I've also noticed that executive producers sometimes change from episode to episode.

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Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. your books the joe pickett books deal a lot with hunters and wildlife which is something hollywood like consistently screws up why like why can't they get it right like what like is it just like the people don't bother to do the like right kind of like they get cops pretty good in hollywood right a lot of a lot of cops wouldn't disagree but yeah right but i'm just wondering what like when when you're the shows that were made from your books have had to deal with hunters or wildlife what's your experience you know what brody just you know what he just did what he just committed was um what's that that two names i was real hot on it for a while. It's not Max Planck.

That's a research institute. I know Max Planck, but I'm not sure what you mean. It's the two names. It comes from two journalists. And it describes like a certain... It describes when you are a subject matter expert. Brody just did it.

Brody's a subject matter expert in hunting. He watches media portrayals of hunting. Oh, gel man amnesia. Oh, yeah, right. Oh, it's been a number of episodes. You're still not telling me I have amnesia? No, he just did gel man amnesia. I'll find the official.

It's this. This is the perfect test case for gel man amnesia. Brody's subject matter expert in hunting. He watches movies and he sees that they always get hunting wrong. Or animals or whatever. Okay. He goes, but then he says this. But with cops, they get it right.

Gel man amnesia is when you watch something as a subject matter expert and you realize how wrong it always is and then you forget that and you think that they're right about the other stuff you don't know enough about to know they're wrong meaning if i read an article on let's say i read an article on a grizzly bear dealer. I go to the New York times. I read an article on grizzly bear delisting. You're taking a long time to get where you're going. No, what's taking a long time.

I read it and I'm like, that's really not a great job. Right? They miss this. They miss that. They misrepresented this. But then i go and read a thing about the stock market the quagmire in the russian ukraine war and i come away from that feeling that i now understand what's going on in the russian ukraine i guess i've read a lot

about like actors doing months of ride-alongs with cops and doing a lot of research and things like i'm like i'm not just well he's getting defensive but you shouldn't be getting defensive well no i like you said it and then he said cops would disagree yeah well the answer is probably think they always get cops wrong in the movies but hunters now they get that right this is what's interesting i just i didn't know this this is wikipedia so i have to further fact check but uh gelman amnesia coined by american author michael crichton in a 2002 speech it's maybe just like a case of misremembering quote- named after american physicist murray gel man which is g-e-l-l-m-a-n-n and the gel man amnesia effect is according to wikipedia the phenomenon of people trusting

newspapers for topics which they are not knowledgeable about despite recognizing them to be extremely inaccurate on certain topics which they are knowledgeable about it's a great word it is it's almost as good as the word she couldn't find, which is when he only used part of a saying. I still can't find it, yeah. I think to answer, I mean, there are very few, I have met very few. Can you pause for one moment? Sure.

Brody, I'm not hacking on you, buddy. Oh, that's what it sounded like. Welcome to the podcast. But I don't see Brody getting all spun up here either. No, he's a little, no, he's, he's, because he's. He's simmering. Brody like. No, no, no. Brody's emotional line up here either. No, he's a little, no, he's, he's, because he's Simran. Brody like, Brody's emotional line throughout the day is like,

right? Brody's not like, you don't like wonder what Brody you're going to get on any given day. He's like this. So you need to look for like very slight undulations. He's not wrong. I thought he was telling me i was

like so i think this is a perfect example right like that somebody who understands the subject is awe inspired they're entertained they know it's a majestic animal i'll give you an example hollywood goes but wouldn't it be better if it just stood up and scratched the air and had blood dripping off its face? Here's a great example. Like, I recently watched the first episode of the new season of True Detective because everyone's talking about that show. And in the very first scene, there's a native Alaskan hunter, like, drawing a bead on some caribou. And it's a herd of, like, CGIgi caribou they're all giant bulls and some unknown thing alarms this herd of caribou and they all start roaring and it's like

but like yeah huge roars you know and it's like and then they all like that's not a real thing. They all run off the cliff. But it looked good, you know? But the cop scene. Yeah. Yeah. But the cop from Queens, dead on. Yeah. I don't know how to answer that. It drives me crazy too. Yeah.

And I wouldn't even say, I would even say in the series that are based on my books, there's some things sometimes where I just cringe. Or if I'm watching it with, we did kind of a little local premiere last year of the Joe Pickett series. And there were a couple of things in there that had to do with animals and hunting and people just moaned, you know, and I thought, oh, it didn't click for me.

It's just the fact that the people who are making it have no experience at all and no background. But they don't bother like calling someone. Well, I mean, how many times, I'm a fly fisherman. How many times on TV or movies have you seen a fisherman with a fly rod whipping that thing back and forth like a twitch? And will you think somebody there would say

that's not how you cast? But no one did. What would Joe, what does Joe Pickett think of a fly fisherman? He is a fly fisherman. But what does he think of you? Me? Yeah, give me you through his eyes.

You're out fishing. I think since I have encountered game wardens, I think he'd be respectful and he'd also check my license and make sure I had a conservation tag and arrest me if I didn't. Okay. Not give me a break. check my license and make sure I had a conservation tag and arrest me if I didn't. Okay. Not give me a break. I'm curious once you're, once you've, you

know, you've written all these novels and you probably didn't really have an inkling that they would be, uh, you know, turned into TV. Now, when you write novels, is it different? Not at all. You're not, you don't like see your characters as the actor i mean that's what i was wondering really not at all you're lying no i'm not i i do not um you don't tweak it just to try to increase the odds that it'll be better on it's like one of those things i have to imagine it'd be like one of those things where once you've seen something depicted one way you it's sort of in the back of your mind, even though you're.

Well, you had already written a ton of those books before they became TV. That's the thing. I mean, the Joe Pickett TV show covers the first three books. That's 21 years ago. So I'm not going to write something in the current one where Joe Pickett is 51 to make that make sense. Yeah, that's true and so i don't think about that in the other books the one the big sky cassie dual totally different character totally different i mean they from the get-go completely different than in the book what else i don't

think i want to ask you about with like the fiction and the reality of your existence uh how like how informed is pickett's relationship with his children, with you and your children? Cause there's kind of like a, like an observation of not necessarily hip to the times, not tech savvy. That's right. Misses a lot. Like, is that, was that your experience? To, to a lot, to a, to a large degree, yes. And I have three daughters. Joe Pickett has three daughters. So mine are different ages. All three of my daughters think Sheridan, the oldest one, is based on them.

The other two, you know, I don't know where they come from. But because I know they're going to read the books, I know they're involved with them. I know they're going to offer notes. Um, you know, that, that, that's somewhat limiting at times what's going to happen with the daughters. Cause I don't want to, don't want to make it get personal. Oh. But you've all, you've never taken advantage

of that to like immortalize some major screw up in high school. Suddenly. Right. Suddenly Sheridan realized she'd never shown her father enough respect. Yeah. Right. No taken some of their lines and some of their dialogue and incorporated it at times and they've recognized but you don't like air out their dirty laundry no no has the um with the economics of it does the tv stuff like, does that just immediately eclipse the writing end of it?

Where from like a money-making perspective, you think of yourself more as a person that generates TV ideas? No. The way I look at the TV shows are one-hour commercials for my books. Okay. Not as, and it creates a lot more awareness of the books. But in terms of financially, these days, with a million streamers and a million different ways to either do shows or see them, it's not that lucrative anymore. But the commercial aspect being a commercial has made a big difference. Since the Joe Pickett TV show came out, like we're looking at the current book.

I just heard the other day, the pre-sales are up 49% from the last book. That's huge for a big book. Dude, you're blowing up, man. 49%. And I've got to attribute a lot of that to the TV show. People are interested in the series for the first time because I don't know what else it would come from.

Man. What an interesting career you've had though i've had three really interesting careers yeah i like because it's like it's just it's such a uh oh man it's like american elbow grease you know like going to those lonely ass depressing conferences and well trying to like yes you know it's like a lot of people got too much pride for that man ah i don't know i mean that's it's kind of a glamorous job to do international travel it sounds better than no no i'm not talking about that i'm talking about no no no no i'm sorry i'm not i don't showing up at a please don't anyway think i was disrespecting your business oh not at all i meant going down and and like showing up at a crappy share. Please don't in any way think I was disrespecting your business. Oh, not at all. I meant going down and showing up

at something and just trying to hustle to find an agent, to find an editor. All that. Do you know what I mean? You got to bury the pride and go down there and you're not coming in with connections. That's true. You're walking to the door trying to do it

and it's a tough walking to the door, trying to, you know, trying to do it. And it's like a sort of, it's a tough position to, you know, it's just a tough position to be like, Oh, Hey, you know, check out my book, check out my novel.

It's just hard, man. It is. And it, it, it's, you know, I mean,

this is not, not any secret to you or anything you're not used to, but I mean, um, how many people in their profession have an Amazon comment section about every single thing they do, um, where people from all over the world

can weigh in and they all say, it doesn't matter what book is out there. They're going to say, he's doesn't even write them anymore. You can tell. Oh yeah. He mailed this one in kind of thing, no matter what book it is.

And you just, you've just got to keep cranking away, you know, it's going to happen. All you can do is look at the average not the high super highs and super lows so do you have it be that everything you have to say you just say it through your book if you don't say it through your book you don't say it except privately yes i do yeah i think that's that's a good way to go do you have a um like an agreement with the publisher? Like what's your timeline? Like do you try to get one out every.

One a year, right? I have a contract and a deadline. Yeah. Yeah. Every either October or September. So it's a yearly deal. I'm always ahead of deadline. I've never, never been late.

No. Do you ever bring in a collaborator? No. And I don't think bring in a collaborator? No. And I don't think I could. I, I can't think of the only, I could conceivably maybe write with one of my daughters,

you know, cause I think we think alike, but, um, I even did a short story once with another author who was a great person, but it was not fun and it didn't go well. Hmm.

Just two different processing. When you, uh, I was, I, last week I was at the Bozeman public library and he went, you know, through the stacks and I just figured, oh, I'll go check out your, what turned out to be three shelves. Right. That's good.

And so. Of inventory. Well, and I, you know you know they it's funny because you know some of them were they had one copy others i mean i was i was shocked how many of these books they had like two or three copies on the shelf and i was just it occurred to me as you're talking earlier going to that section in the stacks and looking for where your book would go do you go back to have you been back to the casper the stacks and looking for where your book would go. Do you go back to, have you been back to the Casper public library and just sort of. See if they got you in there.

Reflected on that spot. Cause you probably never imagined it would be a whole half a. No, I never have. I have done that. I still do that. And I also do it in bookstores. It's gotta be pretty surreal.

Fucking airport bookstores. That's always a, you never know. Yeah. I never say who I am until I find out for sure they have the book. pretty surreal um fucking airport bookstores that's always a you never know um yeah i never say who i am until i find out for sure they have the book are you gonna um you're gonna keep going with joe pickett till you can't go anymore you can do something different or no i i have done some other things and i and i've got some ideas down. Some ideas are, can't be Joe Pickett books. Right.

Um, the serial killer highway driver. Yeah. Did that get, did that get optioned? That, that was part of the Big Sky. Oh, that one. That's how it actually started out with that book and that story. But, um, so I'll have, I have some other ideas.

There'll probably be different ones. But you're not going to stop writing and just ride off into the sunset. No. Joe Pickett, like I said, is, I had to stop writing and just ride off into the sunset. No, no. Joe Pickett, like I said, I had to figure that out a few years ago. Go back from the very first book. How old was he? 34?

And then plot him. So you guys like age at the same rate? Right. Actually, I'm older. I'm older than Joe Pickett. Yeah. So when he's ready to retire, I'll be ready to retire, I think. Really?

Yeah, I think so. Well, he's got to have 20 years now. Well, he think so. Well, he's got to have 20 years now. Well, he's got. No, he's got to have 30, right? Right, he's got to have 30. And not every book is a year apart. Some of them are back to back. Some of them are months later.

So I can kind of play around with that. So you picture quitting someday? Although inevitably there'll be some point. I think if I start getting bored with it or if I start thinking I'm retelling the same story, then I think I'll know to pull the plug. I don't want to do that. I think everyone needs to be a standalone in its own way. And when I'm rehashing the formula, which I've – I'm a reader too. And sometimes long-time series, I start thinking, I think I've read this one before.

I want to get out before anybody says that or thinks that. You know what prevents me from being able to watch serial dramas on TV is inevitably you get some number of episodes in. It could be four or five, it could be season two, and you can start to smell the writers. Stretching it out.

Trying to keep it going. Yeah. Uh-huh. I understand. Now you go back to Dukes of Hazzard. And it would be that you have this cast of characters and like every week a bad man. Yeah. A bad person comes to town with some kind of nefarious objective.

They get vanquished and just it's like scooby-doo that's exactly what i was thinking of i was about to say scooby-doo i could somehow i could somehow tolerate that but it's the it's the storyline dramas deadwood which i was enthralled with at first but eventually became like oh i can see now like it's about time someone new comes to town and once you once it seems unnatural and you smell it oh it kills it for me but dude i'm like i'm jealous of uh i'm jealous of your career and program because i because the way i probably imagine it wrong everybody imagines everybody else's life wrong i imagine that you get to just like when professionally for work you're just like you'll you occupy a single space right yes and it rolls along and there's not like these radical resets right i mean yes and i i just

i i was pinched myself you know i have the best job in the world i think you know i go into my little office above our porsche barn and um do so many words a day and then go out and do whatever you know how many words uh minimum of a thousand out and do whatever. How many words? Minimum of 1,000. But some days I can hit 3,000, 4,000. Some days it's a struggle to get that 1,000. What time do you get up? I get up early, but I don't begin writing early necessarily.

It's usually 10 or 11 when I actually start writing. Yeah. What time do you wrap it up? Whenever I hit my word count or whenever I start to just feel kind of mentally tired. Just ballpark it for me. Usually you're at 2, 2.30. Yeah. So I think about it.

I have a three or four hour day. That's not bad. Well, I, but I used to do that when I was just writing, I did the same thing. I'd be done early. But you're always thinking. Oh yeah. That's what I tell my wife when she thinks I'm

just staring. No, I'm thinking, I'm working. But it's also like, you can't write for eight or 10 hours straight. Like nobody, like it's impossible. I've talked to people who say they do. And I kind of doubt that. Oh, that whole, that whole idea, we used to

have this in grad school. That'll put you in the loony bin. That you're like, everybody thought I was going to be like Charles Bukowski, you know, bleeding for your work. Yeah, you're like drunk at three in the morning writing all this genius stuff you know i would be basically if i was writing if i was writing that meant i was probably at night drinking because i was in town home so i'd wake up be kind of hung over do my correspondence like answer emails do whatever i had to do uh do research stuff for a while

and then i would like actually this i would lay down under my desk on my back and fall asleep huh and that would be my that would reset my brain and i would sleep but i can't sleep long on my back so it might be 20 minutes maybe an hour whatever it would be i would sleep, but I can't sleep long on my back. So it might be 20 minutes, maybe an hour, whatever it would be. I would sleep under the desk. I would wake up, bam. I would sit up, get in my desk and do all the writing I was going to do. Two, three hours. And then I would go read and continue doing the research stuff.

And then by early, not early afternoon, by way before dinner. Time to start drinking again. I was i was done and then at that time my wife had worked about 10 at night so i would oftentimes i would make for two of us i would make dinner that would take me four hours to prepare that's when i got like really into cooking that's interesting because i didn't know what to do because she wouldn't she wasn't gonna leave work till a million hours use up that time somehow and i'd be like man that makes the craziest thing anybody's ever eaten that's what's done i was done but yeah i find not the writing the hardest thing as years go on, but making myself get the time to write is harder now than the actual writing is. Because now you're a writing business.

Yeah. There's a lot more demands. There's a lot more things going on. So what I try to do is basically get the book done in the dead of winter when there's not a lot going on so that I'm available to fish as much as I can and play golf as much as I can and float the river as much as I can. So right now it's game on right in time. That's right. And I'm about two thirds done with the next Joe Pickett book, which I think I'll have done before summer starts. Wow.

I've got grandkids too. That's the biggest thing ever. When they're around, I don't want to have to retreat to the barn. I like that, that you still, even though you're a writer, which is so modern-ish, that you still have a sort of, there's a seasonality. You know, there's like an awareness of the solar cycle, right? Like you got to get it done in the winter, you

know? Well, you know what I find, I can write about, I can, I can write about the summer better in the winter and the winter better in the summer. Cause it makes myself make, it forces me to really think of all those things and not just take them for granted. Well, now if not, if you're writing about the

winter and the winter, you'd be like, kind of sucks. Yeah. One thing I noticed like early on in this book was like, this guy has spent a lot, a lot of time outside at a very particular time in the fall. Like you're describing the, the, the brightness and sharpness of the light and the colors of the lead. And there's only like a couple days like that in the fall where it's like everything's super intense. In October.

You always know. Yeah. Early October maybe. And I was like, this guy's been out there on that kind of day. And where this book opens, it's on the bend of a river with real super fall colors and a fly fisherman in the river.

And then a grizzly bear comes pounding down the mountain and hits him. That's where I fish. And, uh, it's actually on a private ranch and the ranch owner, I gave him that chapter and he said, I can't go back there now. and hits him. That's where I fish. And it's actually on a private ranch and the ranch owner, I gave him that chapter and he said, I can't go back there now. That's all I can think about is a bear getting

me, you know? No, but it was like, yeah, that, that's that one or two days in the fall, you know, that you get in the mountains. It's cool. Well, man, like I said, I got a ton of respect for what you've built and and also just how you came up you know that you knew what you wanted to do and and set out to

do it well likewise and it wasn't handed to you no i had to eat i didn't have to do what you did well i just i remember i was actually on a book tour early on at a bookstore and the bookstore owner came to me. He said, you want to know the best book I have read this year? And it gives me American Buffalo. And I. Tell the guy I said thanks. I will. And I loved it.

My wife loved it. And I think I gave it to my daughter who didn't return it. So I had to go get a new copy, but. Hopefully she liked it too. I love that. Tell everyone he wrote that. He used to sleep under his desk. Yeah.

Well, everybody, CJ Box has a new Joe Pickett novel out, Three Inch Teeth. Great cover. Can you see this cover here, Phil? Looks great. A few people are listening and you can't see it. I don't know what to tell you. There's a grizzly bear in the center. Find it at your local bookstore.

That's right. Where you can see the cover. It's got some steam coming up. When you see that steam, are you picturing hot springs or are you picturing steam breathing grizzlies? I'm kind of thinking just foggy. Steam breathing grizzlies. CJ Box. There's an endorsement around the front. Joe Pickett is the one man you'd want by your side in a crisis.

Number one New York Times bestselling author. And the new title is Three Inch Teeth. Check it out now. Available anywhere books are sold. and under the b at the local library that's right he's already cased it out and he's found the slot and it should be full thanks for coming on man i really appreciate it i've i've been looking forward to this for a long time like i'm a fan it's really fun and i appreciate it i appreciate you guys best of luck with your book thank you keep steaming hope it keeps steaming along. I will.

And thanks for being such a, like, I think of you as an American inspiration story. So we need to see more out of you Americans. Yeah, yeah. Look what you can do if you put your mind to it. Thank you. Thanks, man. Maul beans. Maul beans. Paul beans.

Maul beans. talking about beans out there on the pole. Better look hard, find some more, some Mo beans, Paul beans. There's a couple over there. A few more right there. One over there. Beans everywhere. Paul Beans. Paul Beans. Fresh set of eyes.

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