The Team House - Special Ops Trauma Surgeon Jeff Wilson & Submariner officer Brian Andrews : Ep. 64

Episode Date: October 17, 2020

Navy veterans Jeffrey Wilson and Brian Andrews are the writing team behind the #1 Bestselling Tier One Series, the universe from which the Sons of Valor series was born, coming June 2021 in a 3 book deal with Blackstone. Under their brand of Andrews and Wilson, they have now created The Shepherds series coming late summer 2021 in a 3 book deal from Tyndale House and in a soon to be announced deal with Putnam, they will be writing WEB Griffin’s Presidential Agent Series. Brian is a nuclear engineer who served as an officer on a fast-attack submarine in the Pacific. He is a Park Leadership Fellow, has a master’s degree in business from Cornell, and holds a psychology degree from Vanderbilt. In addition to his works with Jeff he is the author of The Think Tank series and the explosive, bestselling Sci-fi thriller, Reset. Brian lives in Tornado Alley with his wife and three beautiful daughters Jeff has at one time worked as an actor, a firefighter, a paramedic, a jet pilot, a diving instructor, a Naval Officer, and a Vascular and Trauma Surgeon. He served in the Navy as a combat surgeon, deploying with the Marines and later with an East Coast based SEAL Team as part of a Joint Special Operations Task Force. He is the award winning author of three supernatural thrillers, Fade to Black, The Donors, and The Traiteur’s Ring as well as the recent faith based, inspirational war time novel War Torn, which he wrote as part of his work with a men’s military ministry. Jeff and his wife, Wendy, are Virginia natives who, with their four children now live in Southwest Florida. Learn more and sign up for the newsletter at www.andrews-wilson.com Get access to bonus segments with our guests: https://www.patreon.com/m/TheTeamHouse Team House Discord: https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links): https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things

to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents, and those with kids under the age of five, with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. All right, we are live. This is episode 64 of the team house.

I'm Jack Murphy here with co-host Dave Park over in this general vicinity. We are on with our guests for tonight. They are former Special Operations trauma surgeon Jeff Wilson and submarine officer Brian Andrews. Together, they are the authors of the Tier 1 series, which I actually have them right back here. I should have done this before. You know, if you reverse these things, they go better, but we do this show live. So this is part of the allure. Authors of the Tier 1 series right here.

They have a new book out called Collateral. We'll talk about that a little bit as well. But these guys have a wide breadth of experience, especially both of them together as co-authors, interesting individuals. So, guys, thank you so much for joining us on the show. Really appreciate you coming on tonight. Oh, man, we love talking to you, Jack. And, David, thanks for having us, man. Good to be back.

And I would like to point out that I am actually below the operating on, like, the submarine guy, you know, stuck submerged. In so many ways. Yeah. I'm used to it. So many ways, bro. And I would point out, I was speaking before we went live to you two a little bit, that this is the second time we've had you on here. I think our first repeat guests. I mean, we have so many people on this show who are such fascinating people. I want to have them on again at some point. Ron Mueller.

Yes, Ron's been on twice. So you guys are the second ones to be a repeat performance. And I'm very glad that you did. The first one was actually episode 19, way back when we didn't have any sort of set. Our audio and video was iffy at best. Dave and I were like kind of blindly pawing our way through this whole thing trying to figure it out. And here we are, episode 64. I'd like to think we came a long way.

Yeah, but maybe we're going to wish it was back at 19 when it was just like crazy and there was a couple of drinks and a padded room. And I think your daughter was there. Like, it was awesome. Yeah, there's still a couple drinks. Yeah, my daughter was here last episode buzzing my hair off with this guy. Plus, it was pre-COVID. And you can't say enough about it.

Yeah, that changes everything. They were wild and crazy times. I mean, four grown men in a room doing a show. Now you would not even conceive of that. De Blasio would come in here and write us all citations. But seriously, I hope that when this whole thing is over, that we can have you guys come back in studio. your next trip through the city whenever you're doing a book tour or whatever else it is.

It would be great. But in the meantime, we're doing things remotely. It's all good. We'll adapt. Well, we definitely want to be the third time guest. We want to be a first or third time. Okay. Right.

We can do that. There is some advantages to this. Like when we wrap this up, I can still put my daughters to bed and all that stuff instead of schlepping back to the hotel in New York. Like, that was a great. Absolutely. That was a great night, though. We had a good time.

It was a really good time. Yeah. Absolutely. We've had several guests who we got shit blasted with and then packed them into an Uber and sent them on their way. Oh, don't tell them that because we gave him a subway. We didn't even give him a subway fair. No, you showed, I think David walked us to the subway. Yeah, I rode the subway with us.

That was nice. Oh, that's right. You did. We all rode back into Manhattan again. You had to work or something. Yeah. That's very considerate. I think I think David had to help Jeff get on he held your hand if I remember correctly

yeah it's scary getting on and off that it is it's a step mind the gap you really mind the gap uh well and the subways are even a little more scarier now or adventures yes they are adventures depending on your take i should say Dave you know have you talked about this on the air much um yeah I heard the assault the event yeah yeah the the person known we did like about a couple weeks out a month out something like that we did uh how's dave doing where's waldo type of they've got his skull bashed in where is he now yeah it's gonna say you look really good for a man who had his face and skull bashed in so i mean it's pretty impressive it's only it's been like what it's been like eight weeks right yeah nine weeks yeah yeah it's been yeah it's

yeah yeah i'm so you know all things considered you look pretty good for a guy that got beat up i'm not saying you look good. I'm saying for a guy that the shit be out of us, you look pretty good. Yeah, I think that was implied. I mean, I don't look any worse than I did before the event. We can confirm that. Yes. Yes. Yeah. You're back to baseline. Yes. For what that to work. Yeah, I had a woman on Twitter actually respond and she was saying, you know, reflecting on your experience and saying, yeah, the last time I was in New York City on the MTA, there were all these deranged crazy people on the subway and like I would have to jump off of the car and go to another car and stuff like that and I told her I was like well wait a second that's like how women respond

to me on the MTA anyway to range psychopaths or not what are you trying to tell me here that's it's a whole different motivation Jack that's not the same thing I'm a creeper what can I say yeah well it just goes to show you got to keep your your head up your eyes open all the time you know yeah I mean I was complacent and things happened so I don't think you should take any blame for this on your book to attack on your person. You did nothing wrong. You should be allowed to read a book on the subway without having your head hit by a rock. Well, you're right.

You're right. And also, you know, we have to take personal responsibility for not, obviously it wasn't my fault. The attack wasn't my fault. But also, you know, I should have been more. just more aware. I mean, I mean, you spend,

you spend all those years in the suck and you think you've developed this innate sense of situational awareness. And, uh, it degrades quick. You know what I mean? Like you shouldn't have, well, first of all,

you shouldn't have to have that level of essay writing on the MTA and reading a book to go home. Obviously that you do when you're like rolling through root. But still, I know what you're, I know where you're coming from, David. There's that sense of like what happened to me. like, you know, oh, that never would have happened.

But that's, that's not real, man. Right. Like it's a level of essay is not the same on the MTA. It's not supposed to be. If so, you're going to be dead from a heart attack in like five more years. Right. Yeah. And the thing is that it's not only that we become complacent, like we try, we actually,

we actively try to learn how to become more complacent. So we're not that the dude who sits down in the restaurant and can never, ever, ever, not sit with our back against the wall, right? Because it just gets, I don't want to say it gets annoying to the people around you. But when you're in a group of people and there are two booth, you know, two seats where the backs against the wall and people sit down, it's kind of hard to be the guy that go, can you get up? So, you know, it's sort of that I don't want to have my head on the swivel all the time.

And like you said, you have a heart attack in five years. Right. Yeah. So. Well, we're glad you're all right, brother. and that's for sure. Well, thanks. I appreciate it.

Or at least, I don't know about all right. You're, at least as you were. I'm doing long. You're, as long as you like, you were at episode 19, the last time we were there. Right. That's all we really can hope for in fairness. Yeah. I want my episode 19, Dave, back.

It's too late. So tell us what's new with you guys since episode 19. we have some pretty big news all right jeff you want to break the news let's hear it oh gee i mean episode 19 there's like all kinds of news but um yeah so we've got it we've had a few things going on we told you about sons of valor it's a spin-off series coming out next year

spin off from the tier one series which we're really excited about but since we told you about that we've actually signed two more deals uh one is we're going to be writing web griffin's presidential agent series moving forward at least uh for the next book or two so there's eight books in that series that he wrote. I mean, obviously writing for an iconic military fiction writer like Webb Griffin is a little bit intimidating. But he did write one series called Presidential Agent, which is a post-9-11 terrorism type story. And we were invited to to write that series moving forward. So we're really excited about that. It's been intimidating, like I said,

but exciting as well. So that's going to come out next year for Putnam, wonderful editor Tom Colgan, who we adore. So that's our one big news. And we got another one too. You want to tell them about the other one? Yeah. So everything, it was sort of a, you know, in this business, we always talk about it's feast or famine.

So you have to take advantage of all these opportunities when they come up. And for us, we're very blessed because a lot of these opportunities happened right before COVID. So we had been, you know, when we were in New York actually, and we saw you guys, we were talking about Webb Griffin with Tom Colgan. at that time, but you also were pursuing something else that's pretty special to us. And we hadn't signed the deal at the time we saw you guys. We didn't talk about it then, but we signed a deal with Tyndall House.

It's going to be three books, at least initially. We'll see how it goes. But it's called the Shepherd series. And what we're doing there is it's our special ops sort of cover operations fiction that we do so well. but also we have a faith-based element. There's a little supernatural activity going on in there. So it's going to be really, really fun for us because we get to sort of branch out in the stuff where we get to not have to worry about, you know, everything being perfectly accurate

and play around with some interesting characters that we couldn't put in, you know, tier one or the other series. Yeah, it's really exciting. Jack, you can appreciate this. That means we're doing four books a year for the next few years. So, you know, you sign all these deals and you're like, this is awesome. And then you look at your calendar and you're like, what have I done? Yeah, you two are psychopaths.

That's what happened there. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, very exciting. We're definitely having a good few years. That's fantastic. And that the both those great news and the book with the sort of the military and covert ops with the supernatural sounds really fun. Yeah. So it's fun to do something a little more speculative, you know, where you can.

use your imagination a little bit more. I mean, we love the tier one. We love doing the research. We love staying up on geopolitics. You know, we follow you, Jack. That's how we get all our ideas if we read all your articles. But that's fun. And it's natural because it's an area of interest.

But being able to, as a writer, you know, being able to sort of separate yourself from that tether a little bit and just go wild with your imagination is fun too. So it's going to be exciting to be able to feed both those sides of your brain, I think. Yeah, to not be constrained by the rules of reality. Yeah, that's right. That's right. I used to write a lot of supernatural fiction in the day. I actually started out.

My first three books were just supernatural thrillers, like almost straight up horror thrillers. And I like what we do now better, but there is an incredible freedom of just sitting and there's no rules. It's like you create your own universe from scratch, and no one can tell you what to do. And there's no one going to write a review that says, well, that's not how it happens.

It's like, how do you know? I invented that damn world. You don't know how it happened. Right. Yeah. Yeah. The ultimate fear, I think. Well, you tell me what you think, but you know, you're writing something like the Tier 1 series or similar type of thriller. What happens if real world events just screw you over in like the conflict you're writing about just completely takes a left turn? And, you know, by the time the book comes out, it's not really relevant or it doesn't feel as relevant as you thought it did. Oh, yeah. You worry about it. that all the time. We've been really lucky. I mean, I think that, you know, if you've been following us, it looks like we're these genius prescient people. We're not. I mean, I'll speak mostly for Brian here. No, no. But we have been really lucky that we've been, and it's a combination of luck

and just being sort of tuned in. You know how it is. You just get, you're an addict to all the geopolitics and you're following it, you're speculating. And if you follow it enough, just especially in the journalism business, eventually you sort of fill in the gaps before they're public. And so it's not that you're a genius, it's just that there's a little bit of luck and there's a little bit of things move

in the directions that they obviously move. But we've been lucky so far, but you're right. You do worry about that because, as you know, that timeline from a book conception to it sitting on the shelf is not 90 days. These things happen faster and faster and faster in our world. So we got lucky with Russia thing. It heated up perfectly for us. Well, and I think

COVID's a perfect example that we were asked the other day, we were doing a virtual event and one of our fans said, hey, are you guys going to, you know, sort of overtly address COVID, or your character's going to be wearing masks, or are they going to talk about the pandemic? You know, and it's funny because Jeff and I had actually talked about that and we said, you know what, because we are world building and our worlds are, they're analogous to this world, but they're not exactly the same. Right. We feel like. Like the people that are reading our books, they're looking for entertainment. They're looking for an escape.

Do they really want to read about our characters wearing masks and having to deal with pandemic? You know, that's a different genre of fiction, I think. So we sort of made this strategic decision that, hey, you know, this is not happening in our universe. Or if it is, you know, it's on a smaller scale. It's happening in the background or happened in the past. It's not really going to drive our narrative because that's not the story that we wanted

to tell. And it's not that it's not important. It's not that we're trying to minimize it. It's simply that, you know, in our universe, because we can create it, we have that, we have that luxury. Yeah. And let's be honest, if you just came back from the grocery store with your mask and your gloves and spraying down your groceries and all that, the last thing you want to do is

escape from that by reading a book about a guy that's spraying his stuff and putting on a mask, right? Like, just get me away from that for a little while and let me do something else. Right. And it feels like it would also be very cumbersome to add every single element to that and then try to rewrite or to write in. how people interact, the engagements, everything else like that. Yeah, well, and then there's also that timeline we just talked about, right?

By the time we write that and it gets edited and it gets on the bookshelves, people are going to be like, oh, yeah, I remember that. Right. Well, that's not what we're looking for. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, you hope that people will still be reading the book 10 years from now. Right. If they do, that's something that will probably seem especially dated, like, oh, wow, like,

blast from the past. Remember when we all had to wear masks? Yeah. Right, exactly. You guys, you keep up on international affairs and politics and things like that. We have people in our audience that are really into that kind of stuff. What are some of your favorite sources and go-to sources to avoid sort of the partisan stuff, anything like that?

But how do you guys get your information? I mean, I think that we start with like Brookings Institute is always putting out, you know, open source information. So open source information is really where we start. So we like to look at the analysts who are actually spending, getting paid to spend time looking at a particular space. So I think for us like Brookings, Defense One, there's all kinds of defense blogs out there now. And these guys are pretty hungry and they jump on stories fast. So we like to follow the defense blogs and the institutes that are sort of writing papers that the policymakers are looking at.

at because the policymakers, they got to get their information from somewhere. So look at the sources that the policymakers are using, and that's a great source for us for coming up with what the policymakers in our fictional universe are doing. Well, and Jack, you and David can both appreciate this. You do that enough. Then you're just watching the news and you're filling in the gaps. You know what I'm saying? Like, you've read enough stuff that when you see that little tidbit on the news that the

people that aren't tuned in, it's just a little snippet that means nothing. Like, you know what that probably really was. And you do that little thing in your head. I'm not saying you're always right. But for a fiction writer, it doesn't matter if you're right. It's still an idea. Like we tied in in not Red Specter, but in, was it Red Spector where we had the gas? Yeah, Nord Stream 2.

Yeah, the Nord Stream 2. We tied that in and, you know, again, lucky, prescient, whatever it was. But I mean, you see that little tidbit and it means nothing to you if you're not in that space or if you're not writing in that space. but those little things that you heard about what was going on in the Balkans and stuff like that. For us, it was like, that's a great spark for where to go next. And, you know, those little things sort of tie together. And you fill in the gaps in the mainstream news just because you're exposed to it all the time. Fascinating.

And, you know, before we get more into this, I know we covered this really in detail in episode 19. But would you guys tell us a bit about your backgrounds? for the viewers who have not yet watched episode 19 and plan on going back and watching it. But, you know, kind of give us, who are you guys? Is that you waiting for me? Okay, all right. Well, I'm on the body. No, that's good.

Right, right. I talk second. So, you know, that's people, people ask me about my background, and it's how I prove I'm a fiction writer, because it sounds like I'm making it all up because I've done two. But I've done a lot of things. You know, growing up, my dad was like, look, dude, what you want to do is find that job where they're going to pay you to do something that you would pay to do. And I just never gave up that struggle. And so as a result, my mom says, I can't keep a job.

So I've been, you know, I've been a pilot. And I was, I worked for another branch of the government for a long time. I've been a diving. And so I've been all kinds of crazy stuff. But in terms of my military career, I was in the Navy. I was going to be a fighter pilot. I got in a motorcycle accident and left. I went through a flu civilian.

aircraft for a number of years and then joined another agency within the federal government. Did that for a couple years and had some up close violence of action kind of experiences and went, you know, this was not after 9-11. This was like, you know, and I'm like, you know, maybe I want to find a life of peace. So I went to medical school with a goal of becoming a surgeon and actually wanted to become an academic vascular surgeon. I wanted to be in a teaching hospital. I wanted to do research.

When I was in training, I wrote a bunch of papers. And then, like happened to so many people in our generation, a bunch of assholes crashed some planes into some towers and the Pentagon and all this. And it just, you know, something snapped. I just pissed me off. And so I was a naval reservist at the time. I transferred back to active duty and reported to Portsman Naval Medical Center deployed six months later with the Marines as a Frist team surgeon. And while I was downrange, I ran into some people I knew from another life. And when I came home, I had a little conversation with some folks in a bar one night.

And then I was working at an East Coast Base SEAL team doing some other stuff. So most of my time in the military was spent in special warfare and support role as a combat surgeon and developing austere environment support systems to do things like that. And then after that, I spent a little time with a joint task force. and did some of that crazy stuff. So kind of all over the map for me, it's a little schizophrenic. You got to tell me how that works, Jeff, because I know people are going to ask me, when you're at a bar having, like, scotches and I just picture some guy smoking a cigarette, like, how do you get recruited for a job like that?

Yeah, so, well, I mean, that's where you meet. Like, I wasn't, like, sitting at a bar and they came up and said, hey, bro, you want to chat. It was more like, I would, I'd been with some guys, I was in Iraq. There was a, there was this thing going on. and they pulled me to do something with them. And I did. And when I got home, I get this call and sort of a cryptic call.

He's like, hey, it's so-and-so. You remember that conversation we had on the roof? We talked about that stuff that you could maybe do. And like, would you really want to do that? I was like, yeah. He's like, well, meet us at so-and-so, you know, tomorrow night at 9.30. And so we went and we had a few drinks and we batted something around. And then, you know, I don't want to make it sound like stupid.

Like after that, there was a formal screening process. I was at the command. I met with the CSO. I mean, we did all the normal stuff. It wasn't some weird back alley smokeful room. But it did start that way and it was a little creepy. It was like, you know, I kept waiting for someone to come out and say, no, we're just kidding, man. We got you.

But yeah, that was how it started. We sat down in a bar and sat in a back booth and had a conversation. And I guess they liked what we talked about. And so it took it from there. And as a surgeon in general in that type of environment, were you like at the MASH unit safely behind friendly wire all the time? No, it wasn't that kind of unit. So I did that with the Marines. And even then, you know, the Frist team was a little bit more like what MASH was supposed to be in the day.

Right. So the Frist teams were designed to move right up to the forward edge of the battlefield. field. We did one real operation as a frist team. Most of our stuff was in garrison, but the one real thing we did during Operation Dagger was we went out and set up right there near Fallujah, outside of Fallujah near Awadi Tar Tar and we set up something real close to the forward edge. And that was sort of what we did. But with this unit, it was, you know, this is very, very small team stuff going into denied areas. If you're going to send six guys and one of them is going to, you know, be there for medical, then everyone's going to have to carry some weight. So it was, it wasn't like that. It was going out there and doing stuff. But yeah, that's about probably all we shouldn't say. Fair enough. And Brian, please. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone

deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit Child and Family Resource. Resource Network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Yeah, no, I was at college and these guys showed up and they put a black bag over my head

and they dragged me off and the next thing I know I wake up on a submarine. This was your fraternity I did. You know, what the hell is this? And they said, you know, we're having trouble getting people to go into this community and this is how we do it now. So you're here. We're underway. They handed me a crawl card and I had to get started.

And that's really just how it worked out for me. You know what I mean? I'm not bitter. I mean, I'm not bitter. If you can do that with a different accent, a twitch in your eye, it would be a way better story. Somebody's got to do it, right? Somebody's got to go to it.

Yeah, no, but I was a submarine officer. So it is a little bit of a funny story. So I was at Vanderbilt. One nice thing about the Navy, I was a Navy RR. C-C guy, I had a scholarship. And one of the nice things about the, I had an Air Force scholarship option,

and they told me I had to be a physics major. And I remember asking the Colonel Wolf, if I'm a physics major, what are you going to have me work on? He's like, you're going to work on lasers. I was like, you mean like, pooh-p-poo! Like lasers from Star Wars? He's like, yeah, well, we haven't made those yet,

but we'd like to make those. He didn't say, okay, okay? But, yeah, lasers starts with lasers. And then when I met with the Navy guy, he said, oh, you can be in any major that you want. I said, all right. I think I'll do Navy. So I show up at, I show up at university.

And I see all these really, all the best looking girls are going into this one building, Wilson Hall. And I said, I wonder what's Wilson Hall? That's the psychology building. So naturally I became a psychology major because we're all the best looking women, or going to class. I say that time in cheek, it's not actually sure I was interested in psychology, but I was a psychology major, and my interest was going into, I wanted to go to Navy Intelligence.

And my senior year, they closed all the restricted line communities, which means you couldn't go into JAG and medical and crypto and intelligence. Those were all closed. I remember looking at my faculty advisor, and I was like, well, what the hell am I going to do now? that's what I've been planning to do for for three years and he's like well you're going to have to pick one of the unrestricted online communities you mean you have to go surface or marines or naval special warfare or subs so I said I had been on my midshipman cruises and stuff and I said well I guess I'm going to go subs that sounds the most interesting you know hunt for red October had been out I'd seen that movie I'd seen crimson tide look pretty cool and And he laughed in my face. He just laughed in my face.

And I said, what are you laughing at? He was like, you can't go subs. And I said, why not? He's like, well, because you didn't take any of the engineering classes. He's like, you're not an engineer. These are nuclear engineers, okay? You have to be a nuclear engineer to go on the subway. And I said, well, how hard could it be?

I got A's and physics and calculus. He laughed again. He's like pretty freaking hard. So I said, well, I'm going to try. And so they, you know, they used a little Navy chair and they gouged me up. So they got some tutors and they got people and they're like, they're trying to teach me elective engineering. Remember, this is my senior year of the year I'm supposed to be parting.

And I'm taking the, you know, after hours that electives engineering and material science and thermodynamics and they're trying to teach them all this stuff. And I was so cocky and stupid. I thought I knew it. So I show up, they fly you up to naval reactors in Washington, B.C. And the guys that actually test you are the actual nuclear engineers, the people who, you know, worked at Bettis and General Electric and the guys that, you know, if you're going in for your thermodynamics, you know, exam,

this is the guy that actually came up with the thermodynamic cycle for the steam cycle on the submarine. Like, you cannot bullshit this guy. He did all the calculations, right? The guy who's asking you about particle physics, like, he designed the, fuel plate for the reactor. He figured out where all the poisons need to be loaded and the geometry to control the nuclear neutron population

and all this, right? So I go in there and I think, I go through all my tests and I think to myself, you know, this is, this was just terrible. There was no way. They were right to laugh at me. There's no way that I'm possibly going to make it in this program. So, you know, a full bird captain comes along

and it's all lined up in the hall and he's the Admiral's aide he's the he's a chief of naval reactor's aide and he's going to bring me in there and at the time that I was going for my test was Adam McKee

and he was a prodigy of Admiral Rickover I don't know if you guys know Adama Rickover he was the father of naval nuclear power this guy was quite a character and he would do all sorts of silly tricks he wanted to test people's

you know not just their knowledge. You wanted to see how they behaved and the pressure. So he'd do things like he saw like, you know, one of the legs on their chair would be short so the chair would be tilting and stuff like that. Or he would put sticky stuff on the chair so they'd sit down and realize that they're sticking or he'd be belligerent or he'd be facing the wrong way when they would come in, all kinds of stories about the things that this guy did. So he sort of had trained Adamal McKee or at least passed on some of that mentality. And I remember when I walked in. He had my

file on his desk. It was open. I could see my picture, my service jacket, and I could see, you know, some other stuff. I couldn't quite read it. He's looking down at it. And he says, it felt like an hour. It felt like he made me wait like an hour. It's probably like 30 seconds, but it felt like forever. And he looks down at it and he finally looks up and

he says, what the fuck business do you have wanting to join my nuclear navy? And I remember, like, in that moment, I was like, what business do I have? That's the thought that went in my head. But I also realized, you know, they always, we write this sort of stuff in our stories. You know, Jeff and I would talk about, like, time slowing down. And I think in that moment, time did slow down for me. And I realized that, you know, this is a make or break moment.

I have to do something. Or he's just going to kick me out of his office. And that switch sort of flipped in my head. And I came right back at him. I said, well, you need me. in your nuclear navy and i screwed up his face and he's like i need you what the hell are you talking about i said you don't have anybody like me i said you got a whole hallway of engineers and scientists and stuff out there but i'm the only non-technical dude who's made it through this

process who wants to be in your nuclear navy and i said quite funny you need somebody like me down there who understands human psychology and the way people think because the last thing you need is just a bunch of engineers down there on a war fighting vessel and uh i guess that that main impact on him because it let me in. That's amazing. So, uh, yeah, that's, that's kind of how I got into the- Or it's horrifying, Brian, that they let someone like you into the nuclear program on friggin' Navy submarines with having not a single college class on, uh, any of these

things you mentioned, electrical engineering, thermodynamics, or, ah, well, you passed a test. It's like getting a driver's license. Like, now you're certified to run a nuclear reactor on a submarine. Is that how? Right, right, right. Right. So, I mean, you've got that story or the black bag story. You can take your story. Well, just to wrap this up, though, because he's a little bit humble. What he's not telling you is there's an actual exam before you get to what he just described. And he takes stacks of book as tall as my kids and crams them into his head in like nine weeks.

And because he's got an IQ of a bazillion, he actually scores like in the upper quarter of everyone that took the exams. It's like him and actual engineers and physicists, and he beat the shit out of half of them and scored so high that he had the opportunity to sit in that in that board. So they'll let them, they'll let him fool you. They didn't, he, his test scores were enough that he had all the smarts too. Brian, what was it to do you to subsurface? Because I, a lot of people who know this. Being with the men in the sub. Yeah. It's very arduous duty. It's, it's tough. It's challenging. And it's, it's a lot of sexy time too right yeah yeah a lot of sexy time and dancing and sharing cuts yeah i didn't have to hot wreck but

but maybe you want to maybe yes when he got out he would still be in if they would have him hot rack but what was it that drew you to that you know that when because you have surface which is kind of you know yeah you know the ships and the other branches but what was it about subsurface I mean, I think that the submarine is the closest thing to, you know, it's the most complicated machine ever built by human beings. It's completely self-sustained. It's nuclear power. It operates in the dark.

You can't see where you're going. And it's the ultimate stealth platform. I mean, you can drive a submarine 12 miles off the coast in another country. They don't know you're there. And if you're a boomer, you've got, you know, trident missiles, one submarine with all the mervs. people wiping out an entire entire entire you know at the time soviet union or Russia or fast attack you know you can sneak up on a battle group you can sneak up on any any ship in the ocean and I don't know I just thought that was really really really cool and you know now having served on one

I think about some of the shit that we did and it still boggles my mind to think that you know like I said you're completely blind you're navigating basically by geometry and some of the stuff we did is insane. So, yeah. Are you sure it wasn't the food? I have food stories. Oh, yeah? Give us a food story.

Because for those of you don't know, food on a submarine is top-notch. Until it runs out. Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, there's all kinds of silly things. You know, and Jeff and I talk about this. These are some of the, the silly things. things that you remember, you know? And a lot of it has to do with, you know, who the chief is and what sort of deals you can get and stuff. So, you know, when we went up to Catch a Can, Alaska,

you know, he came, he was coming back with crab legs. And, you know, we had this amazing crab leg dinner for the whole crew. You know, he bought, you know, I don't know, 100 pounds of crab legs. And, you know, that was fantastic. And you felt like a king. And, you know, on the other side, You know, there was the time I'm coming back from an attack trainer and, you know, the guys are loading stores and they got, you know, the brows lined up and the guys are handing, you know, too. That's how you would load stores is, you know, you'd have everybody on the brow and then there's a line down to the, you know, forward escape hatch and they would hand, you know, just hand over hand, pass that stuff down. And this is one of those no bullshit or stories. So we're coming back from the attack trainer and I'm walking down the aisle and one of the guys I knew who was. Friend of mind, he's like, hey, sir, he's like, check it out.

Only the best for the boys in blue. And I look closely, and it was a beep tenderloin. It was a beef tenderloin. But stamped on it, said, rejected U.S. penitentiary system. Not good enough for prison, but good enough for the boys of the Louisville. That's right. Brian, I don't know how much you would be able to talk about this, particular subject, if at all. But I recently wrote an article for Yahoo about, you know,

deep sea, or not, I shouldn't say deep sea, but undersea espionage, a covert mission that the CIA was doing at the time in 2008. And by doing that story, writing that story, I came in to be acquainted with a lot of former Navy divers and saturation divers. And I learned a lot about undersea espionage done by it with our submarines and there's some stuff that's written publicly some of those guys have even written personal accounts of their time but i mean i just came to really have so much respect for those guys and what they do because everyone thinks about navy seals and navy seals and this and that and not to take cheap shots at them or anything here just to say i think a lot of people don't understand what those guys those navy divers navy saturation divers do oh absolutely yeah i I mean, there's a couple boats. They're called the special project boats. And, you know, over the years, the names of those boats were kept secret. But, you know, Blind Man's Bluff came out, and some of that information is out now in public record.

Like the USS Archie was a special project boat. And now, you know, one of the Sea Wolf-class boats is a special project boat. And they do all kinds of interesting things. But even submarines like the one that I was on, you know, the Louisville was what we called a type A boat, which means that, you know, we were able to. do all kinds of different missions. So we could do, you know, the total surveillance. We could do mine laying. We could launch tomahawks. We could do blue-on-blue, submarine chasing, submarine following, that sort of stuff. We do battle group escort activities. So it's a pretty brosso platform. And, you know, one of the things that submarines do is they do drive in close to other countries, you know, waters. And you are trying to collect intelligence. So you're looking to see, you know, well,

what ships are transiting in and out of these ports? You know, what sort of communications are people doing? And most of this activity is being conducted at periscope debt. So you have your periscope up and you're listening, hoping that you don't see your periscope. The types of things, like the article that you referenced that you wrote, that type of activity, you know,

could be done where a submarine could drive into an area and launch SDV. Jeff knows a lot about SDVs. And, you know, you'd never even have to come up to periscope depth. You'd never have to risk being seen because you could deploy people underwater and they could go do those types of activities. It is interesting that you mentioned this topic, though,

because I just read an article a couple days ago about, I think it's called the Bluefin 1 or Bluefin 2. It's basically submersibly launched drone. So, you know, like on my boat, you know, we had vertical launch tubes, and in those vertical launch tubes, you can load Tomahawks. But you can also load, you know, any other payload that's designed to fit inside that tube. So what they did in this test is that they loaded a, basically a drone carrier into this tomahawk tube. And I don't know what depth they were at, but they were at some submerged depth, and they opened the VLS tube.

This submerged payload comes out. it floats up to the surface, it opens, and out pops a drum or a series of drums. So if you think about that, you know, being a former submarine officer, the most dangerous part of my job was getting in real close and personal and having to be at periscope depth, and that's putting 100 people's lives at risk if you get counter-protected. How cool would it be to be able to drive in, you know, close in person, but not as close and personal as we did,

and be able to have a standoff and now you can put this disposable asset up that can collect all the same intelligence that you were collecting previously off the Periscope. So that's pretty badass. And I think that that's going to change submarine activities and I think it's going to happen pretty quick. One of the things I came across,

and I don't know if you ever heard of this or not, but have you ever heard of upward falling payloads? There's a concept that DARPA worked on and I have no idea how far along it's gotten. But the idea is that you have something on the bottom of the ocean, whatever that payload is, it's something that our government is interested in. You hook something up to it that would inflate a bag. Whatever it inflates with, it's something that's more buoyant than the water around it,

and it fires that payload straight up through the water so that it actually pops up above the surface and could theoretically be caught maybe by a passing aircraft. Oh, wow. That's pretty cool. Something that would be cool in a novel, even if it doesn't work out in reality. Yeah, Jeff, you remember? I'm writing it down. Jeff, do you remember what we did in Red Spector with that tent?

Yeah, that was cool. I don't know, where that idea came from. Would you tell us about it? Oh, there was a scene where we're standing off some, the Ember team being supported by some NSW guys. And there's a new generation of these SDVs that have a much longer range, which is unfortunate for people that have to ride in them because it's horrible being inside of them. But they can now go for like hours and hours at a much higher speed.

And so they can go hundreds of miles in these cramped little things. So we had this infill scene where they were going to, they were trying to infill this team into Russia, into Russian, through Russian waters, through this bay and Finland, all the way to this island. But the time that it takes to get there

under the stealth of night, which is what they needed, just so a fisherman doesn't see the sub, because it's so shallow there, they need to do it at night, drop them and go. So by the time they infill, it's day,

and so they can't conduct their operation until nightfall. So they had this underwater tent. So they deploy, they carry this bag with them, they deploy this, tent, it's stanching to the bottom, it inflates, and it's dry inside, it's got pressurized air, it's got CO2 scrubbers, they can stay in there for up to 12 hours, be dry, be relatively warm,

wait for nightfall and infill. But the thing that was cool about it was you still have the same issue, right? Like some fisherman comes by and says, what the hell is that? So they had these series of cameras along the bottom of this platform that are in real time, filming as they move the bottom of the water and then projecting that image onto the screens on top of this tent-like structure. So if you were in the water and you look down on it, all you'd see is the bottom of the ocean. So, yeah, that was fun. I forgot about that. That was pretty cool.

DARPA, you got to love DARPA. They can't think of some crazy-ass stuff. I don't know how much of it's out there, but it's cool. And that was something that, you know, we had read an article about some research divers that had inflated these, it really is an underwater tent. And the idea was to prevent, to give them a place to decompress or to stay at a particular depth without having to be in your scuba gear. Because maybe they're going to want to go back down.

So they actually invented these underwater tents. They do exist. And when Jeff and I were talking about, we said, okay, well, we can, I just used the same idea we had from submarine air quality control and how we recycle all the airs. So we looked up, you know, okay, yeah, you can die the same CO2 cartridges for the scrubbers aiming cartridges and the like and and we just fictionalized it but if you put all those technologies together

I don't think we've ever seen pictures of the new generation of SDVs if I'm not mistaken because they're they're still secret but I've read that they're completely self-contained and in other words the divers inside them are dry they're in a like a self-contained system Yeah, they have that also. But the thing that actually is really cool, and this is, you know, this is comfortable because this is open source. But they also, this new generation is configured so that it can deliver divers. It can deliver team guys, seals, whatever. But it also can operate autonomously without crew as a drone.

Oh, wow. So it actually fits both of those missions and it's, and they're interchangeable. So that was what I thought in the research we did was the coolest about the generation SDVs that we were looking at was that they could do all these things. And so they could do very deep stuff for ISR that was independent of delivering a combat force, but they could also, you know, deliver combat divers or whatever they needed to do. It's pretty cool. It's a very multifunction platform. And that's the future, right? as we get so specialized, the cost of having technology that is for one specific mission set

and nothing else is prohibitive. Like at some point, we can't spend a gazillion dollars for whatever the number is because we have all these. So you've got to have some ability to use these things in multiple aspects. And so that's what I, that's what resonated with me was it's really cool that they thought that through, that it can do multiple things, all in one platform. It's really neat. And that's all open source. You guys can find that out.

When we're talking about SDVs, we're talking about a short term, the acronym for seal delivery vehicle. It's a submersible vehicle that, you know, seals or other unconvention forces we use for, for transporting long distances, basically. And we're carrying stuff. But they're, you know, correct me if I'm wrong. They're locking out of a dry dock on the submarine itself. And there's like a whole operation they have to go through for the seals to go up

through the hatch through the dry dock. And like it's very, I've been told anyway, it's kind of sketchy because no, any submarine captain is going to be sketchy about this whole concept that you're going to like open this one port. The seals are going to go up into the dry dock. And then you're going to flood it with water. And it's just like a lot of like, well, they and they have,

they have both systems. Yeah, you know, there's a lot of the SDVs that the generation of SDVs that is most deployed now. That's a wet sub. So they don't need to worry about that. They swim the guys out and they get in and they sit there in the wet and the cold in their dive gear crammed like this on a little wooden bench for a few hours. And because it's open and they're not swimming and generating that body heat, their wetsuits aren't really doing anything for them. Yeah, so it's even worse, right?

You're not even generating. You're not hydrolyzing any ATP to make your own heat. And so you're sitting there freezing cold. But yeah, they do have these dry systems now too. that's interesting yeah the please go ahead no please

I was just going to say Jeff and I when we were doing one of our tier one book tours we were fortunate enough to go out to Pearl and we got to tour one of the new

Virginia class submarines and there's a different lock in lockout system for SDVs than they had on the Los Angeles pass which is what I was on you know with the Los Angeles

class it's that you use that escape trunk that multi-purpose escape trunk and The new system is a lot more roomier. Some thought went into making this a little bit more humane, right, and a little bit more functional. So it was pretty cool when we got to see that.

Yeah. I think it was George Hand, wasn't it? Who told us a story about when he, about locking it. He was on a first group dive team and he got sent out with a seal platoon out on a sub. I can't remember which one, him and one other SF guy, and they were doing lockout drills. going in and out of the submarine. Yeah.

That's on a bonus segment of this show for people to support us on Patreon. Only $1 a month. Just throwing that out there. We'll get you all that cool information. Guys, tell us about your new book, though, the newest book in the Tier 1 series, collateral. Let's talk about John Dempsey and Ember. Who are they? And, like, what is this world that we're entering?

So the backstory, you know, and we're not really in the story. spoiler alert area now, right? Because we're in book six. We're working on book seven for next year. But this series got started off under the, with the question, what would happen if the Tier 1 seal unit got wiped out completely? And so

that's the premise of the first book. There's an attack, an ambush, because inside information has been leaked from some of the shady people up in the government, our government, for reasons that are explained later. And this entire

The entire Tier 1 SEAL team is wiped out with a single survivor named Jack Kemper. And he is also presumed dead. And he wakes up on an airplane and his former CSO who has left the Navy but is now working with one of the spooky joint task forces, offers him the opportunity to join this organization called Ember. And he will assume a new identity and his job will be initially to hunt down and bring to justice those responsible for killing all of his brother. So that's sort of how this story, this series gets started. We write these books in, as we told you last time, it's sort of in a three book, it's sort of a trilogy, right?

So each idea takes three books to explain. So in the first one, we start with that idea. It turns out that you have the Iranian connections. We call it our Persian trilogy. Those are the false flag operators that bring us to this. And then in book four, we pivoted and Dempsey and his. team which is now much more mature and they've got a lot of camaraderie and team they've trained together they fought together and now Dempsey has stayed on and he's going to continue this work

by this time his boss has become the director of national intelligence and so this is their their private little super secret army that they can use for the high speed stuff so uh Russia is flaming up and uh starting to poke their nose into stuff and so they become the false flag operators And so starting with, I guess, American operator and then Red Specter, culminating in this book, Collateral, we have Russian False Flag Operations. What's interesting about this that I think will resonate with you guys is that when we did that pivot, one of the questions we asked is, how would that affect an operator who has been working in the Middle East since, let's say, 2002, right? You have had this singular kind of enemy that you have been in his sandbox, no pun intended, for the last 15 to 20 years. And now suddenly you're faced with an enemy that is your technological and geopolitical equal. And that would be a tremendous difficult transition to make, I think, for the average operator that's been in and out of Yemen and Djibouti and Iraq and Afghanistan.

And so that was sort of where we were going with this is what would that be like? You know, this is an enemy not like what these guys have faced before. 20 years, that's a career, right? So these guys have been fighting this same enemy for this period of time. And now they're brought to face this new thing. So that was sort of what we wanted to do in this Russian trilogy, beginning an American operator. And so we have this other organization that is their counterpart, their ember organization that is hunting and trying to kill them. So, Brian, if you want to talk about collaboration.

That sort of sets the stage for that trilogy of which collateral is the third in the installment. Yeah, I think that was a great setup for, I mean, basically you walked everybody through where we got to with collateral. And collateral is just like we talked about before. It's us trying to get our crystal ball and look at current geopolitics. And we always start every book with a what if question, you know. And we, you know, in book five, which you guys read, Red Specter, it was all about the Baltics and Nordstrom 2 and, you know, the fact that energy plays a big role in military operations and power

and projection of power and motives and the like. And we saw all the things that were happening in the time since we wrote that book. We're looking at, well, okay, you know, there's all this messaging that's happening. There's everything that's happening along the Ukrainian eastern border with the DPR. And, you know, what would happen if, you know, Putin likes to talk about Nova Russia? You hear him mention it all the time. You know, is he just talking about it or is he thinking about it? And we said, well, what if our fictional Vladimir Putin, you know, who's Petrov in the books,

what would he do if he wanted to regain that Nova Russia territory? What a lot of people don't realize, it wasn't really talked about a whole lot in the news. They talked about the little green men in Crimea. They talked about the forced vote. But what nobody really talked about is that why did he want to do this? Why did he want to recapture Crimea? It was because he really cared about the Crimean people

and, like, their Russian descent, and he wanted to liberate them from the horrors of living. living in Ukraine? No, it was because Sevastopol was a big loss for the Russian Navy. So that's the largest naval base on the Black Sea. And it's where all his stranded assets were. So when that happened and Sevastopol became under Ukrainian power, they took all of the technology, the base and all the assets that were there. So for Putin to grab Crimea, what it does is it allows him suddenly to dominate the Black Sea. So he gets a base back that he wanted. He loads it up with S-400 missile batteries.

He's built, you know, they put, I think when he took Crimea, there were two kilos. Now there's nine. You know, they had no destroyers, no fast frigates. Now they have 11. So, you know, Russia owns the Black Sea. and Mario Pole is east of

Crimea and Odessa is west and 90% of the shipping traffic in Ukraine goes between Odessa and Maripole well if you want to take Nova Russia back you know you had a pretty easy way to do it now you own Crimea right in between them so we just start playing around with okay the little green men they show up in Maripole

how do they do it they start with civil unrest Okay, then there's civil unrest. There's Russian people being injured. So now we need peacekeepers to come in. So the Russian peacekeepers come in. Who are they? Oh, those are the Russian soldiers. Okay, how would the U.S. respond?

You know, they see the writing on the wall. And this book was really, really fun for us because we looked back at, okay, you know, what's happened in the Black Sea? And the USS Donald Cook, we saw that the Donald Cook's been in the Black Sea a couple of times. They've been harassed by Migs every time. They go in there.

They've been harassed by Niggs in the Baltic when they're up there too. You know, Turkey controls how many boats, how many U.S. warships can be in there? They only allow one at a time. So we said, all right, this will be really, really fun. We want to put in this scenario where Russia wants to reclaim, Nova Russia takes southern Ukraine, and we're going to stick a destroyer in the Black Sea. And they're the only combatant there that can do anything about it. We'll throw our guys in Ukraine, do special operations.

And so for us, this is our biggest novel ever. We sort of tried to elevate it to the level of like a Tom Plancer, where we had global geopolitics, we had multiple branches of the Navy. We had F-22 scenes and F-35s and the Marine Corps, and lots and lots of moving pieces. So I think we pulled it off. The readers seemed to like it. The challenge was, you know, that's all fun, but it's still a Dempsey book, right?

So we wanted to do all these, you know, big white side global stakes, World War III stuff. It required us in the two books leading up to it to destabilize the relationship between Turkey and the United States, right? Like that would be crucial. If we still have great relationship with Turkey, well, then that changes the scenario a lot. And so we sort of set it up that way. But in the end, it's got to be about effort, right?

There's got to be the covert operations. There's got to be that stuff. You've got to have Dempsey and his team down and dirty. And so we tried to use the big global conflict as a backdrop so that we can still do the covert operations and, you know, them doing their thing and fighting against their counterparts in Russia. And in the end, no one knows that stuff went on. But it was really fun to, it was a lot more research than we've had to do in the past, but it was a lot of fun. You both have like this wealth of information from personal experience, from your military backgrounds and from all your research and things like that. how often do you guys reach out to people special operations intelligence you know

people like hey if this were the scenario how would you deal with this or what would happen all the time so you know for one thing we both maintain relationships with people that we've worked with in the past i mean i was doing consulting work with some of the communities i worked with up until just you know even just two years ago so we have a lot of good friends that we can reach out to and say, dude, what if? But for this one, we had to go a step further, which was, you know, because neither one of us has ever worked in surface warfare, and we had this whole surface warfare component to this. And I don't think we could have written it five years ago, because now we've written enough

and people know us enough that we could reach out and say, hey, you know, Brian reached out to a buddy and he knew a guy at the Pentagon. He said, you know, anybody that has been on a, you know, one of this class of boat? and we actually, he hasn't given us permission to use his name so we won't, but we actually had the opportunity to have a very long conversation with someone who's been a skipper of that class of boat ship. I'm sorry, boats or subs. But he was amazing.

And he even went as far as saying, look, once you're done with it, send it to me, let me look at it, and I'll tweak it for you and tell you what doesn't and doesn't work. And it wasn't that, you know, you can get online and you can look and see how a system works. and you can describe it, but you need a guy that's been there to say, well, I would never say that or I would never do it that. You know what I mean? And so having the opportunity to interact with a new community of people was way more exciting

than what you're talking about. Like, you know, I've still got guys that are on active duty that are in NSW and I can call those guys anytime and that's awesome. But being able to make new connections, that was really fun. That was really cool. And it's interesting how factual you want it to be because even if the people who reading your books are not veterans,

a lot of them know this stuff. Like they know it. Better than the veterans sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like, for example, you know, when we were writing all those Arlie Burke scenes,

you know, one of the things that just was sort of over my head is fuel. You know, and I remember this guy who Jeff mentioned, you know, He's a full bird captain now, but he was a skipper or captain of Arley Burke. And he said, you know, you have them drive around at flank. He's like, you know, I'd be worried about fuel.

Well, as a submarine guy, you know, like we had an unlimited gas thing, man. I had 20 years. I could drive around at flank for 10 years if I want to do it. I'm fine. Right. You know, but that Arly Burke, he's got to be thinking strategically. If I'm flanking to a location in the Black Sea, how long can I maintain this bell before I have to have enough gas to come back.

I'm not going to be doing an unripped. Am I going to be pulling into pork somewhere to get gas? I mean, what sort of mission do you want me to execute? You know, that was fascinating. And we had written a scene where we wanted to do Helot recovery. He was, he needed to haul ass up north to do what he needed to do. And we put in this incident where there was a close call and a Russian, a Russian mig, or actually a Russian Sukoy went down.

the pilot ejected. And so they were doing search and rescue operations to pull this guy out of the water. And this captain came back and he said, he said you have the MH60 Lanham at when they're flanking. And I said, what's the problem with that? He's like, well, you got quite a squat on,

you know, anything over, you know, standard belt. And that's dangerous, you know, I wouldn't want to recover a helo at that speed. You know, and those little details are just great things that, okay, well, now it changes the strategic calculus of the captain, too. Well, okay, so now I got to slow down. I can't turn. Okay. So if somebody, let's say there's a Russian kilo down there who's following me and has a firing solution on me, I can't conduct torpedo invasion maneuvers because I'm doing helo recovery or helo takeoffs.

Right. The big risk, right? Right. You're sitting duck when you're driving in a straight line at a single bell. So do those types, does that type of input, are there times when you just ignore the input because it complicates things too much? Or does it always take hold and change the story and change what you guys are doing or at least change that segment? I mean, you got to split the middle sometimes. Like, you know, you have to let you, we, all of us on on this, on this, on this.

podcast are our military guys and we know that in real life there's hours and hours and hours of sheer boredom no one wants to read that book right and so um there's realism and there's and then there's just possible and so you you got to find that balance between realism and possible so that you can make an entertaining book i think would be the short answer so the answer is we try never to go outrageous yeah but sometimes you got to take a little license and say look you got to move the story forward and you're going to have to compromise now and again. But we do pride ourselves in trying to make our books believable to where people from the communities would go, yeah, that's what I would do. And honestly, the best war stories, I mean, through history and whatnot,

and the Medal of Honor winners are usually what's possible, not what's not what's realistic. Right, right. Well, and what we did in this case is we talked about and we said it, let's just work this into the story because these real life constraints create a lot of tension and stress for the captain. So we put those into the narrative. He's having discussions with his Cobb and with his

ex-O about, well, what do we do? Should we recover the helo? Do we keep the helo up? Do we send the helo to, do we lose our helo, which is conducting, you know, can drop sonoboos, it has a dipping sonar. It's our only potential way to keep track of these Russian

submarines. Do I send it over to Constanda to get refueled or do I slow down driving a straight line to recover this bird so I can fuel it up? And so that adds a lot of stress for the character. And I think you feel that as the reader that oh man, what's he going to do? And of course we make him cliffhangers. You know,

the chapter ends, he's not sure what he's going to want to do. And you want to turn, you want to get back to the Donald Cook to see, you know, how's he going to work his way out of this problem. So as we've matured us, right, what we find is when we have these problems invariative the solution as we talk to each other and are like, oh, let's not try to hide it. Let's not try to eliminate it. Let's just put it straight into the story and the characters have to figure out of deal with it. Yeah. So it's almost that not not only do the the real world situations add complexity that you have to deal with, but they also add a tension and a drama that you don't have to fabricate.

Correct. Yeah, that's right. You know, another fun thing about this, these Donald Cook scenes is, you know, the Aegis system, it has a fully automatic mode. You know, that radar system, as, you know, our friend with the Pentagon said, it can detect a bumblebee flying at 200 nautical miles away, right? You know, so like, this thing is incredible. It can track 999 simultaneous contacts. And, you know, one of the things that a CEO has to think about is, do I put this system in automatic or do I put it in manual? Because, you know, if you've got a Russian fast frigate and they have a firing solution on you and they have an anti-ship missile, by the time you can put together a firing solution to fire an SM3 to shoot down their missile that's incoming, it's too late.

So, you know, what this gentleman told me is you have to choose, you know, do you risk your crew's life and put the system in manual? Or do you put it automatic and know you're going to be safe? But now maybe Aegis sees that incoming big who's trying to intimidate you, miscategorizes it as a has an incoming missile and blows it out of the sky and you just started World War III. So Jeff and I, like, we spent a lot of time concentrating. How do we incorporate that? What do we do with that? And again, we just defaulted back to make the captain have to deal with the same decision he would in real life.

That's fascinating. Yeah, because that's like one of those really interesting, like moral and ethical decisions that you have to make. Yeah. Yeah, it really is. I mean, honestly, on a much lower level, it's like the guy on the, corner with a cell phone while your convoy is rolling by, like, what's your call? You know, is the guy a bad guy and going to blow up your convoy? Is he triggering something? Or is he just some moke hanging out with the cell phone? It's the exact same thing. It's, I mean, the scale,

the only thing different is the scale, right? But it's exact, from a moral standpoint, that's the exact same equation. Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating. It was, it was really ironic, because we picked the Donald Cook, for example, simply because Donald Cook had actually been in the Black Sea and it's over there in that group. But what's interesting is, you know, you start looking into the histories. It almost feels sometimes like there is poetry in real life

because the namesake for the Donald Cook was a Marine who was a congressional man of honor winner who got his congressional man of honor because he rescued his fellows in impossible situations. And the plot that we had written was that the Donald Cook was going to have to go in

to rescue this LST in a group of Marines that were trapped in Odessa. And it wasn't until we started digging into the research that we found out how strange, you know, that the namesake for this book did what we're talking about doing.

So again, we worked that into the plot where the CEO of the Donald, the fictional CEO of the Donald Cook said, you know, we're not going to leave any, you know, there's some disagreement, you know, why are we doing this? Should we go do this? That's not our ship. Why are we have to go up there and escort those guys out? And it sort of falls back on the Naval Special Warfare, you know, ethos two of no man left behind. So even you can apply that to warships too. You know, one ship's going to rescue and escort out another ship that can't defend itself. You're not leaving behind an entire crew in that case. Right. Right. You know,

in addition to like how well you guys write characters and the depth that you give your characters, the moral ambiguity, you know, and I don't mean people being morally ambiguous, but situations, you know, do I do this? Even in the first book in Tier 1, the girl, the contact in Germany, right? like leaving what what was to be done with her is she just you know do we save her or is she just kind of a casualty war type of thing how do you guys work with that when you're when you're figuring out these situations i think that i think that um that's the key to writing novels nowadays right it's not it's not black and white and you know everybody on this on this zoom is or on this podcast has been there, there is moral ambiguity. There is no right answer more often than you'd

like to admit, you know, whether it's just, you know, a show of force patrol through Qasim or its warship in the Black Sea. There are decisions that have to be made that have no good answer. And those decisions are made by normal, mortal men who live with the consequences, oftentimes psychologically for the rest of their lives. And I think you do a disservice if you write these, you know, red cape wearing superheroes, black and white, you know, guy stroking the cat, Dr. Evil. Right. I mean, that's fun, but it's, you're cheating your reader and you're cheating yourself as a writer

out of the experience of the gritty reality of it's not clean. It's not clean. It's never clean. There's a lot of casualties of war, innocent bystanders on both sides. that are the victims of choices in the gray. And I think that in, you know, Jack, you guys know, both know, you know, as Rangers, its SF guy, that's a lot of your life is spending the gray. It's just not like the old days when the guys with the red coats and the muskets and the guys

that came and they all lined up and they shot each other until enough of them was dead that someone ran away. You know who the bad guys are, you know who the good guys are. That's not the world we live in. It's not the world we live in in small unit operations, but it's also not the world we live in in global operations anymore. There's going to be people hurt, real people with families. And I think if you don't put that in, then you're not going to ever have a character that's interesting. I mean, you know, we all like to go watch the movie with the badass guy that does a superhero stuff for two hours.

But next day, you don't remember that guy. But a guy like Dempsey, he'll haunt you because, He's so haunted by that moral ambiguity. He makes that immediate decision. He doesn't look back, but we try to take him to the next level where it does affect what he does next after that and he carries it with him. Everybody here on this call is carrying something like that with him. Jack, I read your book.

I know what you're carrying. And so we're all carrying stuff like that. And if we don't put that into our writing for our readers, what a disservice. If you've had that experience and you're not sharing it, what a disservice. And from a business standpoint, it makes a hell of a good novel. Sure. It's even when you go back in time to the World War II generation, and those guys were largely lionized for a lot of good reasons.

You know, there are young men who grew up in the Depression, and they basically saved the world from fascism. So there are a lot of good reasons to admire them. But if you go and you read like real accounts of what happened in World War II, it's not exactly the band of brothers type of story. I mean, there's some really ugly shit that happened in that war on both sides. And there are ambiguities, you know, that you mentioned. But as much as we admire that generation and what they did during the war, I mean, there's some really ugly shit that happened. And a lot of it got whitewashed after the war. And maybe that was okay in that generation.

You know what I mean? We needed heroes. We needed to, we had to rebuild our economy. We had to do it based on patriotism. You know, maybe that was a better time. I agree with you, Jack. I'm not trying to paint a picture that our generational warfare is different in that moral ambiguity. It's always been there.

It's been there since the very, very beginning. But it was the hidden secret. And maybe, you know, that made it harder for that generation because they had to carry it in secret. Because we didn't talk about moral ambiguity. If you're brought home as a hero,

it's hard to sit and talk. over coffee about that hard decision you had to make because that's not how people view you. So you're right. This isn't unique to us. It's been around forever. But it certainly makes it a more interesting story if you can bring those aspects out in the action as well as in the aftermath and show these people as real and people that have to carry the scars that are inside and outside, just like all of us do. Well, it's interesting because, Brian, I think, you know, some mariners have a very specific experience with that because you're completely in the dark. And if you get that flash message that this is going down, launch this, do whatever,

you have no information on what's going on outside the world of your submarine with the exception of that communication. Yeah, it's psychologically challenging because you're launching these tomahawks. You have a, I mean, they're over the horizon. They go off and you don't see the impact of what you do. You know what you're doing, but you don't see where they go. And I don't know. That is different. It's different than actually having to be there, right?

Look your opponent in the eye, your enemy in the eye. There's not a lot of humanity to that, right? Well, it's probably good and bad, right? Like on in some of the scale at which you operate, Brian, is is got to be psychologically devastating. Collateral damage. Speaking of the title of our book, you know, the risk of that tremendous. Whereas, you know, in a, in some sort of urban combat, these guys are clearly trying to kill you. Like it's a little, it's a little easier to justify pulling the trigger when you can see that look in that face.

you see in their eyes, like you, if you've ever been close enough to someone that's trying to kill you, that look in their eyes that, like, they would kill you, piss on your body, and find your family and kill them too. It's a lot easier to do what you need to do in that situation than it is to sit in the sub and then you're going to go get chow and you're going to be like, what the hell that I just do? I mean, I think there's good and bad to both, right? I mean, yeah, it's hard to shake the images of things that you touched and felt and seen. But that scale and the impersonal nature of it, I think, would be very hard to deal with. I don't know.

I've never done it. I'm really curious now that this has come up. Like, have there been, like, psychological studies done on submarine crews about this particular subject? Because philosophically, it's very interesting that you mentioned. You're in a very self, literally a self-contained environment with very few inputs, except those specific. messages. And like, like, I guess my question would be, I mean, you'd have to like sit down and form like a thesis question. You know, it's like a subject for a dissertation or something. But how decisions are made and how people process those decisions on a submarine.

Yeah, there is actually psychological testing before you go to sub-school. So they want to make sure that you're able to function in that sort of environment. But I don't remember any questions pretending to this particular topic. I think it was more about, you know, are you the type of person that can be in a confined environment for long periods of time? And, you know, you're not claustrophobic. You're not. It is not an environment to suffer fools. Let me put it that way.

Okay. Because you can't let people off. Okay. And there's no getting off. So you go to war with the crew that you have and you're stuck with them. And so, you know, I think in personal conflict, you know, deescalation is very important. You have to have the type of personality where you don't hold a grudge. You can deescalate arguments and the like because you're going to be living and operating with these dudes for,

when you go on a deployment for six months, you get in a fight with somebody. You got to live with this dude for another six months and operate with them, you know, and you're stuck. Yeah. And in a very confined space. It's not like a destroyer tender where everybody can go to the corners and only see each other in passing or whatever. There's no personal space at all. Yeah, you're always rubbing, pumping up against people, you know, there's just no room at all. You know, you get used to this idea.

There's a joke, you know, you could tell submariners at a party because they're all the guys standing all real close together. You used to being near people. But I think that, I mean, I remember one particular. incident that when I was going to go on watch, I was going on watch to be OD. And I remember, it sounds so stupid. But I had to put on the gladator music on my, on my headphones before I went on watch.

Because I knew when I was going on watch, I was going to have to do some stuff. And so then I wanted to select myself up for it. And then I think you just kind of go into robot mode. And you say, well, I do what I have to do. You know, because I got to look out for the people inside this tube. And, you know, I'd follow my orders.

Crimson Tide, I think as silly as parts of that movie were, it really tackled this issue. And, you know, it's a much bigger stakes to launch a new than a Tomahawk. There's no comparison, you know. But I used to think about that a lot, you know. Like, there is a certain relativism in war fighting. And, like, you know, launching a Tomahawk is one thing, but could I have launched a new?

I don't know, man. I don't know if I could have. Just be honest. Yeah. It's tough and no matter how many psychological evaluations you do on somebody, you'll never know until that minute. I mean, I don't know if you guys remember the old movie War Games, but the whole premise starts because during a drill of one guy couldn't turn the key on the nuke. Well, yeah, and isn't that like some of the protections on our nuclear arsenal is that some of the clocks on it are technical, but at least one is social. right that you're trusting that these orders that come to you are legitimate and lawful right yeah yeah yeah i mean it's and i go ahead please well i was just to say i think in crimson tide they you know

they did a great job of handling that idea of okay the order comes down but the geopolitical situation above the sea is changing so you're stuck down there you only get your flash message traffic That's all you have. You can't get it. You can't get message traffic when you're submerged. So, you know, you don't know what's happening up there. All you know is the last piece of information that you have. And they really, really played, they did a great job of getting into that moral dilemma.

What if something has changed? Should we still, is this a lawful order? Maybe it was 10 minutes ago. Is it now? Right, right. Right. Interestingly enough, you know, talking about World War II and going back and looking at statistics, and I think the statistics have been challenged. But the idea that when soldiers used to train marksmanship on just round silhouettes, how few soldiers were actually willing to engage an enemy target, an enemy, you know, soldier, then going to sort of E-types to more build that, you know, the human. shaped targets to build that just the reflex where it goes beyond the moral decision that you're just going to smoke up a human being on reflex and that is what it is yeah and that i i remember some of those

articles too david i've read some of those things too like the number the number of people that failed to engage in a normal infantry unit not in special operations or whatever it's like i don't remember the number but i remember going good lord it's it was like it's dramatic It was a big number. It wasn't half, but it was like, it was a double-digit number. You're like, wow, is that right? Is that possible? And part of that is how you train and desensitized, I suppose.

But I also think it's, it was, you know, that was stuff in World War II in Korea, I think is what you're referring to. And that was different because I think that there was still that aspect of like, I'm the soldier for my country. and you're the soldier for your country, but we're just soldiers. Like, I don't have anything against you personally. Right. I'm mad at your dictator and you're mad at my president, but like if not for that,

and you hear that all the time in World War II stories. If not for that, we'd be friends. If not for that, we could have a drink and fighter pilots who would say, you know, in another world we could be friends. There was none of that in Afghanistan, right? Like, these were not people that could have been your friends, if not for the war. This is ideological stuff.

And so I do think that it is a little easier to discharge your weapon at someone who ideologically, their goal is that you cease to exist, you, your children, and all your progeny from the planet. Well, and not only your- A little easier, a little easier than- Not only your kids and your family, but if they just burnt down a school full of girls, there's not a whole lot of, you know, compassion in your heart for them. Yeah. Right.

And I'm not trying to take any. anything away, you know, if you've read much of Grossman's work, you know, on killing and stuff like that, I'm not trying to minimize the psychological impact of taking a human life and the psychological impact of being in a situation where someone wants to take your life. He's written some brilliant stuff on that topic. And I'm not trivializing that based on this modern, this modern war. But it does have to be, you know, and I'm no psychologist, it's got to be easier, right? I mean, I have to imagine that the toll psychologically in that situation is not the same as in another life we'd be friends. Yeah, I agree too.

Yeah. And I mean, I think that a, and looking at like a lot of soldiers during World War II, I don't think they were really aware of the atrocities that were going on, you know, in the concentration camps, things like that. I don't know that was widely known. They were just, they were fighting a fascist who was trying to sleep across Europe. And you're right. It's that in a way you sort of have to demonize the enemy to be able to, to be able to do that job, I think. But yeah. And we hear these Vignancy stories about the Germans and the Americans like during a Christmas day or during a holiday, you know, and sort of this, right? This sort of coming together, hey, we're calling off the war for a day. That doesn't happen in Afghanistan or Iraq or, you know, Somalia or some of these other places.

Because there's no common ground. Right. It's, it's, they're just, they're so ideologically opposed that there's just not a lot of common ground. So, if you, if you look right now, what, what I've noticed, there's been a number of articles, just, especially in the last three to four months about, you know, autonomous warfare, you know, drones. having the ability, you know, do they have the kill decision? Where does the kill decision take place? And, you know, like a lot of these things, it creeps, you know, it creeps. So at first it's okay,

well, the kill decision is always going to be with the operator. But now we have a new technology, just reading something about the other day about how I should remember the name of the system, but basically you can have a drone, it can be forward deployed, and even during the strike,

so the payload can launch, but the AI on the drone, if it decides that it needs to switch to a different HVT, so it's targeted HVT1, or what you thought was HVT1, in mid-flight, they now have a technet where the AI can change and divert the payload to hit a different target.

And that is done without, you know, human being involved in that loop. So does the AI launch the payload or when the operator launches the payload that the AI switches the target? Yes, the second. But I feel like this is creep, right? This is how it happened. So it's like, well, we would never, the killer decision is made by human, but, you know, We're going to, in case there's this scenario where the HP2, we fired it the wrong person,

AI can decide. This is the baby step where we start to get people comfortable with the idea that AI can make kill decisions. And I think you're going to start seeing more and more of that discourse, but also as we get into this environment where it's algorithmic warfare, where things are happening at speeds that we cannot compete. the enemy is conducting operations at calculations at speeds where we have to do tip for tap it might be inevitable right and so this is this is fascinating pop-up I think to delve into

drones drones are the tip of the spear look it's 930 and I know that I don't know how long you guys can stay I mean we would love to explore drones and algorithmic warfare I would really love to but we're on year schedule, whatever's good for you guys. Episode, or third time back, third time's a charm. Yeah. It is a neat topic, though, isn't it?

It's like, that's like talk about falling through the looking glass. It's fascinating. I mean, that's where it gets scary. And it's how SkyNet starts. Right. Exactly. I didn't want to be the first one to say it. Thank you, David.

I'll always be the geek. I mean, always. There's a little bit more just really quick to talk about. I was very interested when I went through the Space Forces first doctrine book, Doctrine Manual that they released. And they talk about the desire to maintain space supremacy. And there is even, I'm looking through it right here, the ability to legally transcend the most remote and protected national boundaries

provides a unique opportunity to enable lethal and non-lethal effects against terrestrial targets. And this is in their published doctrine, you know, open source information. So, I mean, they're putting it out there. They're telling you what's coming. They're not even hiding it. Right. Yeah. And is that, you know, that's part of that hypersonic weapon type of technology, right?

Or you could launch a hypersonic weapon here. They did not say that specifically. So I don't know if it's kinetics, you know, rods from God or what it is that they were referencing there. They don't talk about the specifics of, you know, modern day Star Wars. They also said non-lethal. What kind of, what can you deliver from space that would be non-lethal? Like a big insults?

Maybe electronic warfare. Oh, yeah. Anyway. Well, guys, we really appreciate you joining us for the show this evening. Coming up on the next episode, next Friday, is going to be Jason Bailey. He was an Army Special Mission Unit Operator. I don't think he'll let me say what unit he belonged to. He was a Sergeant Major, really good guy.

He will be on next Friday. Otherwise, please like, share, and subscribe. this video to this video and this channel. Make sure you hit the bell icon so you get notified whenever we go live next time. And if you're interested in supporting the show and getting access to the bonus segments that we do, there's a link to our Patreon down in the description. You will also find a link to find these guys' books. It's down there.

Let me just see what is your guy's website. Go ahead and let us know where we can find you on the internet. we're on it's really easy it's andrews dash wilson.com www.w.w.com that's our website and all the links you need are there for all the series we write and also if you guys have amazon prime um you guys get paid when people read on amazon prime your books are free on amazon prime right uh so if you have amazon prime i i have to say that i am not a fan generally of military uh thrillers it's just not my thing but your books were amazing and I really thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed them.

The characters are so deep. The action sequences are perfect. I can't recommend your books highly enough. Thanks, thank you. Yeah, let me just say one thing. One cool other feature is if you're an audiobook junkie or you commute and you don't have time to read but you have time to listen, one great feature that is available on all of our books is they're on Audible, so you can get them there,

but you can also use the whisper sync feature. For $1.99, you can add narration to any of these free Kindle books. So you can listen to it. We have a great professional narrator, one of the best in the business reporter. So please check out the audio version of the books. Yeah. And we're looking forward to your for your next books, your military thriller, supernatural, if that's what I can say.

But those sound fun too. You guys looking forward to it. Thanks. Thanks, you guys. It's always a great time. Yeah. Take care. And I look forward to doing episode three with your guys. Thanks, everybody. Anytime, man. Anytime. Thanks, guys. All right. Take care. We'll see everyone next week.

All right. All right. We are out, guys.