The Team House - The Team House Ep. 19 w/ Brian Andrews and Jeffrey Wilson, authors of the Tier One series

Episode Date: December 11, 2019

In this episode we interview Brian Andrews and Jeffrey Wilson, the authors of the Tier One series of novels. Loads of interesting information in this interview as Jeff was a trauma surgeon deployed with JSOC and Brian was a Naval officer on submarines. These guys both bring a wealth of experience to the table and it shows in their military thriller series.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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Millions of people depend on these medicines to live healthier, more active lives. And every time you donate with Gryffles Plasma, you're compensated. You can receive over $500 the first month. Learn more about plasma and how it helps people at Gryphalsplasma.com. All right, guys. We're live with episodes. 19 with

lucky number 19 right Jeff and Brian the authors of the tier one series so thank you guys for coming in today really appreciate it

oh anytime man I feel like you know we're like starting to become kind of a deal not a big deal but a deal that like I have PR reps contacting me like can we get our authors

on your show I'm like wow really like we're just me and Dave like in a basement dungeon in Brooklyn and now we have like you know I feel There's a publicist or content. There's a level of legitimacy.

So now you know who to blame. Yeah. Poppy. Yes. She's been really good. You guys are lucky. Like it's hard to find a PR agent that like goes and works for you. Yeah.

As I've come to find out. So you guys are lucky there's somebody out there hustling for you. That's good. Yeah. But yeah, it's awesome. And let's show off the books first of all. And then we'll talk a little bit about, you know, your guy's background and how you met and how you got in all of this.

You want to hold those? I do. I'm going to grab one and hold them up. Which one's, it's that. This is the first one. This is the first one. This is the first one. This is book one.

This is book two. War Shadows. Book three, right? Yeah. Book four is American operator and just out a few weeks ago. Red Specter. You guys have pretty, you have great reviews on Amazon. Yeah, thanks. People are loving your books.

and very compelling, like the way, like the way you write. So, Jack, so why don't just tell us a little bit about yourselves, like your backgrounds and, you know, before you even start, like, before you even start writing, or maybe you've always written, but, you know. And our journey to writing is a little different, the two of us, you know, what we share in common is in military, both Navy. I was actually in and out of the Navy. I was originally slated for aviation and got a motorcycle accident, so that didn't work out. I flew as a civilian pilot for a few years. Then I worked for another government agency for about two years. And after that experience, I was like, you know, maybe there's a more peaceful way to live.

It's, you know, it wasn't, it was before 9-11. There wasn't all, you know what I mean? Yeah. It was just, the violence of it was, I just was ready for a break. And so I went the full other way and I went to medical school. So I went to medical school. And my plan was to become an academic teaching surgeon, right? I was going to be at a university and research.

So I was in my training to become, I was just finishing general surgery, was going to start a vascular surgery fellowship when those jackasses crashed the planes into the towers. Just when I thought. Yeah, just when I was having me back in. They called me back in. Like all, nothing special about my story. Like America in general just rallied, right? Yeah.

From all corners. Everybody was like they wanted to do that. And I felt the same way. So I was still in the reserves at that time. and I contacted the active duty recruiter and I said I want to transition to active duty. He's like, oh, you want to mobilize? I said, no, I don't want to be immobilized reserves. I want to go on active duty.

This is what I'm going to do. So they worked that out, but then they made me finish my fellowship. And I went to Portsmouth in 2004 and immediately deployed with Marines as a frist team surgeon with two MF. And while I was down range, I ran into some people I knew from my prior life. and one thing kind of led to another, and the next thing I knew I was working with Naval Special Warfare as a combat surgeon, developing some lost air environment stuff for them.

So I did that for a number of years, and here we are. This is a, and I mean, feel free to jump in here, but, I mean, were you part of that surgical unit that, like, they would actually take out on target to operate on dudes that they needed it? You were talking about with the Marines or with NSW? With JSW, yeah. So, yeah, I went, I deployed with,

with an East Coast Base SEAL team and that's what we did. Yeah. So when they had a small package, it was going to be somewhere that was austere that, you know, could be some time to get out of there. The model was, as you guys know, there are some units that do that stuff, but they have a very large footprint. Right. So the SEAL team that I was working with, they were looking for something smaller in

flipprint. They couldn't get any smaller than me and another dude. So that's what we did. We trained up this package. It was just me and another dude. Really? So you guys, I mean, how? How does that work as far as the medical package that you're augmenting these guys?

I mean, can you do brain surgery on target if you had to? First of all, probably not brain surgery. But if you need brain surgery, you're screwed. But you'd be amazed. First of all, you'd be amazed what can be done. But you'd also be amazed, this is the best part of this story, is you'd be amazed what a good 18 Delta can do. So you don't really need a surgeon to be there every minute of every day.

I was glad I got to be. I was, you know, excited for the training they gave me, and it was nice to be part of these small units and go out and do stuff. But I was amazed if you put confidence in a guy and you invest in training, you know, these guys, special forces guys, whether it's Army, Navy, these are the brightest guys. You know, these guys, by the time they get to that level, J-Soc aside, if you're operating at that level as an operator, you could have gotten a Ph.D.

Yeah. It would have been a little easier. Right? So they're not dumb guys. These are super intelligent. Our medics are super. No, I'm talking about the operating. You're being self-appreciating. The operators too. I mean, well, there's a couple. I know there's a few that maybe not.

But there's really nothing else they could do. I was an 18 Bravo, so I mean to forget. So for our audience who is not familiar with the special operators community, 18 Delta is the medical course that Green Beret seals. It's a long course where they learn, you know, I mean, It's almost a PA school. I agree with that. It's almost a PA school.

It's way more than a medic. Yeah, it's almost a physician's school. I don't want to dig too, like, go far too down into the weeds, but like the 18 Delta is specifically the special forces. Right, that's the MOS. So like So like Sockham, the special operations medical course, they send seals to that. PJs go to the? PJs, yeah.

But that's mostly a trauma school, though. Yes. So, well, it's the whole... Trauma medicine. It's a long... You're talking about people. The S.F. guys get the dental and veterinary and like some, like, you know, how to stop... How to stop a malaria outbreak.

Right. How to sanitize a well. What are you talking about? That's the army. So that's what in 18 Delta is. When we were talking about in 18 Delta, somebody with some very advanced medical training that, yeah, they're operating in a very high level of knowledge. skill. And so to take a guy like that that's already so highly trained and take him one more level up. So we could take an 18 Delta, especially in this unit where you really have the best

of the best and you can make him into your anesthesiologist. He doesn't have to go to bed school and anesthesia school. It just, hey, here's how the drugs work. I mean, I'm trivializing it and joking a little bit, but it's not far removed from that. And so these guys are incredibly impressive. What I did was not that amazing. What I did was be around some amazing guys and and had the opportunity to share my knowledge so that they could do amazing stuff. It was amazing what these folks can do. It's funny because I think I told you that I was a Died Medtech in the Navy, and one of the challenges with being a medic or a corpsman or anything,

even at a basic level, is that you come out of the military and you're basically overtrained and underqualified. The stuff that you do in the military, you're not allowed to do in a civilian context. You know, you'd have to get like a, you know, so it's interesting. Well, it's funny. I don't want to go too far off this because Brian has a more interesting story than I do. But that was actually a real, that really upset me when I found out that these guys that would be, they'd go to 18 Delta school and they get advanced training with me.

And we would, they were doing, I had a guy operate on somebody in Somalia or actually in Ethiopia. But that's another story. That's neither here. Yeah. There's button hairs. And there was no one else there. And he'd like, the things these guys can do. And then they get out of the service and the best job they can do is being in a.

team. Yeah, or LVN, an LPN, a license. That's the most. And these guys are better trained than many PAs and nurse practitioners out there. And there's no certification that allows them to challenge the exam. And that's what we fought for was in Florida and Virginia. Let's let these, if you think these guys can can't do it, then prove it. Let them take the test, the practical and the written exam. And if they can't pass it, then great. Make them go to the school for two years. Yeah. But if they blow your socks off and their 99th percentile like I predict they will be, and certify them and let them get to work.

But they never went out. As the kids say these days, they're hella trained. Yeah. So. Nice. And Brian, you were a submariner. Yes, I was a submariner. So he's the big brain in the room.

Right. But you were a surgeon, and you're not allowed to say that. Oh, no. But you have been very many submariners? No, a few. They all, they're, like. So they're brain. That's why they call it bubble hens.

That's right. They're brainiacs. So what was your trajectory then and coming into the Navy and going down that road? Sure. So I was a Rati guy. I went to Vanderbilt. So I was there and, you know, I got there. The nice thing about the Navy RTC program, if you're there on scholarship,

is they let you pick your major. So you can sort of go into whatever you want. So I got to Vanderbond looking around like, you know, where are the best looking girls? What building are they going in? The psychology. Psychology. They're all in the Wilson Hall, a psychology building. No big deal.

That's what I said. I'm going to take classes there. So I got into psychology, and then once you start studying the brain, it's pretty fucking cool. So, you know, I actually got into cognitive psychology, and I was doing some undergraduate research on how words and pictures. Like, I don't know if you've ever been curious, but like it is sort of strange that you can see a picture of a dog. And I can say the word dog, so the dog semantically accesses somehow this same construct as a picture. Right. Nothing similar. So I started getting into that and doing...

Isn't that just semiotics? Semantics? You have the semantic meaning and then you have this... Where it's like red is associated with hot and blue is associated with cold, but there's no... Yeah. So there's a real reason why. There's this whole associative priming thing that goes on in the brain. So like, strangely, if you do a test, they'll do simple decision-making tests and

psychology experiments. They might have you. They're telling you that the test is, we just want you to identify. whether this is an animate or inanimate object. You're just going to hit a keyboard yes or no. So the person taking the test just thinks that they're, if they see a picture of a dog, and they say, yes, that's animate. They see a picture of a screw and they say, no, that's inanimate. And they just, they're doing hundreds of trials and they just think that that's what they're doing. But the researcher, what they're really looking at is saying, okay, it's how the test is structured.

So we would structure a test and say, okay, I know cat and dog are highly semantically, related. You have these tables where you'll have people say, I'll say to you, you know, Jack, what's the first word that comes to mind when I say dog? Well, 57% of population will say cat, and then the next people will say fur and then bark. It sort of is this slope of percentage. And so what you find is when you precede the word cat with dog on this simple decision-making test, they're actually faster, like several milliseconds faster hitting the key. Just by being preceded by dogs. So primed. It's primed. It's primed.

Your brain has all these concepts that are linked and so this activation spreads in the brain. It primes your response so you're actually faster. So that was sort of what I was, had my head in, I'm doing this and I thought, you know, all along I'm thinking, I'm going to go into Navy intelligence. That's where I'm going to go.

And my senior year they pull us all into a room and they're like, sorry fellows, looks like they're closing all the restricted line communities for your senior year. So you got to go, you know, SWO or subs

or Marines or aviation. That's your choice. The big branches, basically. Yeah. They needed guys in line service. Yeah. They needed that. All unrestricted. Yeah. Swo is surface warfare officer and then submarines and you said Marines, yeah. Marine. Yeah.

Special warfare. Yeah. No psychology major. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not going to that. You think I can run a five-minute mile? Crazy? Do that? Vanderbell. Bad.

Run? People that do that for me. So, yeah, so then I said, well, I had been on a midshipman cruise, on a destroyer, and I didn't want an oiler. And I said, I don't think I want to go slow. No disrespect to our slow funds, but I didn't want to do that. And wasn't about to do Marines. And we were joking, I probably wouldn't have made it special warfare. So I said, well, to my unit CO, I said, well, I think I'm going to go.

submarines. He just laughed. He's laughed in my face. He's like, you're a psychologist in nature. You haven't taken any engineering classes? And I said, well, how hard could it be? He's like really hard. Everyone else is applying as an engineer. Did you take a lectro engineer? No. Did you take mechanical? No. Thermo, no. Material no. Material science? No. Chemistry, no. So I was like, well, let's try to just couch me up. So don't let himself depreciate to him. I don't brag on him for a minute, which I don't do because I actually don't care for him. The true part of this story is these guys told him, no, you can't be a submariner because you're not an engineer. And he said, well, there must be some way.

And he wouldn't even pass the test. And he goes, oh, there's a test. They said, yeah, there's a test. And you will fail it because you've not taken any of these classes that we just described. He goes, but if I were to pass it, then I could be, then I could be on summaries. And they said, yeah. If you pass it, you can be on submarine. So he went out and bought a thousand dollars worth of books and spent six weeks cramming,

and he's got such a big brain. He was able to absorb an engineering degree in six weeks and had one of the highest scores on the test, so they had to live in that somewhere. Can you believe it? I think I had probably just a fairly passing score. It's the most ridiculous story ever. And yet it's true. That's incredible.

Yeah. So let me in. And now I have to talk to him. So you're a quick learner. Yeah. So I learned that stuff. And they sent me down nuclear power school and eventually, made it out and I was on a fast boat out of pearl so that was fun did the super secret squirrel stuff

right yeah like hunting for Russian subs that kind of stuff yeah we did that sort of stuff we did reconnaissance we did battle group escort we did uh coastal surveillance we did a lot of iSR stuff yeah and our boat was one of the first was the first salvo i wasn't on at the time but it was the first salvo launched in gulf war one with tom ox clue from my boat. Holy shit. Yeah. How did you find submarine?

Because I know it's tough. You know, you're talking about, you know, a ship company, or boat, I guess, boat's company of people, like, crammed into a very small space. So how did you adapt to that? And what did you think of that? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. A lot of people say, how can you, are you claustrophobic? That's the first question I typically get, are you claustrophobic?

And I'm not claustrophobic. And then the second question is, well, how? you how can you be trapped you know inside and my answer typically is you know most of us are inside you know 22 out of 24 hours a day you just have the option to go outside right right right right right right yeah knowing you can't is a big deal yeah to me and and and typically uh like how long would what what was the uh average average amount of time that you would be in the submarine and submerge and not

like not yeah so like a deployment a typical fast attack appointment would be six months and so then it would usually be divided into two missions so each mission would be like two and a half months so you'd be underwater for two and a half months yeah you have transit time then you get on station

to your mission and you come off and there's typically one you know you go in port somewhere you get food you fix things that are broke and then you go out again on your next mission but it could be maybe they want to divide that into three missions maybe you do you know six weeks here six weeks over there whatever but we had one mission that was

a really successful mission on my first deployment so they extended us on station so we were out for 102 days on that there were no food luck I mean we'd eat through everything you know and yeah it was like down to peanut butter and jelly cans of tuna fish shoe leather can they do an interrupt with a sub the way they do

with ships or is that you can help I mean depends on where you are you can help yes you can do an unwrap but i mean or they can just helicopter you know create food out okay you can surface and they can but you got to still got to with iSR stuff you so got to come pretty far off station yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that's what it is fascinating yeah that's a whole other world there yeah it is but i mean i i i i think that even if you're not claustrophobic you know you you can handle that kind of environment and i I know it's different types of personalities, but I think to like being in Ranger Battalion, it's like me and Dave were both Rangers, except he was in the hippie battalion up in 275

up at Lewis. Like, we're kind of like wound up, right? And everyone thinks it's like this band of brothers type of atmosphere. And it sort of is in the sense that like you'll look like go and die for that guy. But like the reality of it is like also we all hate each other. It's just super competitive. Like you're in each other's things. faces, like, brawls break out between guys.

I mean, it happens. A Thunderdome. I'm calling Thunderdome is, like, nothing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Two guys, right. Yeah, yeah. I can't imagine, like, being on a submarine, and it's like, you don't have the option to get away from those guys at all, you know.

No, no, no, no way to run. Yeah, there's nowhere to run. Yeah, yeah. And if you have a, if you have a, disagreeing with somebody, you're going to see that guy 15 minutes later, you're going to, it's impossible to avoid somebody. Yeah. Yeah. Like, how's that go down when there's, like, some sort of,

few of you're just like, I'm going to kill that guy. I swear to God, the next time I see him. Yeah, I think this is interesting, and especially maybe it's just my psychology bent. I think there's this sort of down regulation that happens in people's person. So there are some guys that would maybe be more hotheads, like when they're off the boat or if we're in port, you know, but then once you're underway, people sort of like dial it down. And I think it's because you know, it just doesn't, it's not going to work. Right, right, right. But I will tell you there is something funny,

which is, you know, all the atmosphere is recycled. And as you're breathing oxygen, you have to bleed in oxygen. So we had oxygen tanks, so we're bleeding in pressurized oxygen, or they have these things called oxygen candles, which you can burn, and they create a chemical reaction. Instead of burning smoke and releasing carbon dioxide, they actually, when you burn them, they make oxygen into the air. Oh, fascinating.

Yeah, so that's pretty cool. And then there's an oxygen generator too, so it does electrolysis. It splits the water atoms and makes hydrogen and oxygen. So there's three ways you can get oxygen. But as the officer deck, you're controlling the oxygen bleed. And there's a band. You know, you can't just make it so that it's the, you know, perfectly, it's the same as sea level, the oxygen level at sea level. So if the guys are acting up, you turn it down.

Like, you know what? So my second CO, he's thing. was he liked oxygen at the low end of the band. So that was his stick, like, you know, take oxygen down. Well, if I'm on the midwatch or I'm on watch, dude, I'm going to be freaking sharp. You know, like, this is serious. Like you're watching the son of arm. I got a hundred guys' lives on my hand.

If I'm driving the boat, I need to be sharp. Right, right. So first thing I do is like, come on, I look at this. If the oxygen is down low, I'd be like, chief of the watch, commence oxygen bleed. Yeah. I get that bitch up, you know, top of the bands. and that cavil he'd come out he'd always come and he somehow knew he'd come out he'd like oh i feel good what's going on here he'd come out he'd look around

i'd see this looking and scrunch his face up and he'd look around and then he'd take the logs and he'd like oh sir i thought i told you did you start an oxygen yes sir turn secure the oxygen believe oh i'm sorry sir i forgot she'd watch secure it oxenblee you believe why aren't my lips blue He's checking his capillary and refill. Too much. Too fast. The only time I ever experienced that was going to the Hapst Chamber for Free Fall, the Free Fall course.

And like they have you take that test as they're cutting the oxygen in the chamber. And of course, you know, all big badass Ranger, right? There's no problem. And they asked us to very simple questions. Like one of them was like draw, or the clock was already drawn and they just want you to draw the hands. Like draw like three o'clock. and like I looked at mine after I passed out and it just had like one arrow pointing off in one direction

and then a couple plus marks like outside the clock face like going off the paper they put the mask back on and I'm like holy shit but that's the point of the haps chamber also is to teach you what it's like to go hypoxic because you know like you know this obviously but the average person pride doesn't realize like when you're going hypoxic it's not like being strangled

you don't feel like you're being strangled It's just a lack of oxygen and just things get dark until you pass out. Yeah. And you don't die. You actually feel pretty good. Yeah. You just feel a little goofy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tired. Yeah. And you don't know you're not. You don't know you're suffocating. Yeah. Well, you also don't know that you're not performing. Right, right. And that's the point of that change.

That is to let you know, look, you may. In my mind, you think you're like great. You know, you got the guys doing patty cake and you're doing this. That's what's interesting about, like, like a ship's commander, or captain wanting the oxygen load, it's like, how do you deal with the impairment and cognitive function, or did he feel like he had a little doubt? Oh, no, I mean, I'm joking. It wasn't that low. No, I mean, it's, you know, it's, it's a band around normal. So, you know, I liked it a little extra juice, you know, like you get it above what it is at, at sea level.

It wasn't like it was, okay, 19.7 and then you can only go below that. I mean, no, it could go, I can't remember now. It was up to like 21 or something like that. So I'd crank it up above normal. Yeah. You know, he just liked a little bit lower. Interesting. Yeah.

There's all kinds of funny things about living in that. Yeah. Environment where, you know. I can imagine, like I said, I've never been on a subway, but I've been on one for dive operations, and you go on there and like,

how does anybody live like this? You know? It's interesting. I'm sure, I mean, humans are very adaptable, so. Yeah, I mean, I used to think,

like, I mean, it's a little different now. you have Elon Musk, he's launching, you know, big rockets into space and stuff, and you had the spatial. But really, if you think about it, it is the closest thing to, like, a starship that human beings have built. I mean, it is completely self-contained. It has a nuclear reactor. It never runs out of power, at least in your lifetime, right? Doesn't run out of power. You're just limited by food, you know, it makes its own water, makes its own air, and it's a little

city. It's just a tiny little city under water. So, like, what do you guys do when you're, I mean, I imagine you are working? almost around the clock, but I mean, do you have time to like read books, play checkers? I mean, what do you do on a sub? I mean, now they have switched to a 24-hour day, but when I was in, it was an 18-hour schedule, and that was sort of crazy. So you were on watch for six hours. Your next watch is 12 hours later because you're three sections.

So, you know, that quote 12 hours off, it's not off time because during that time you're doing your maintenance, your work, you're relieving the other guy so you can go to training. And so really, I mean, I never slept more than four hours consecutively the entire time I was deployed. And so everybody's always kind of just weary. You know, it's just like you're not 100% all the time because you're predominantly sleep deprived. Now, as an officer on a submarine, did you have your own cabin or were you in like sort of the general horse like everybody else? How did that work? So the captain, the XO, have their own state.

rooms and then the officers have what are called three man stay rooms so there's three bunks in each state rooms there's three of those and then um the the most junior officers the ensigns they typically was sleep in one of the other burns that's called nine man just had nine bunks in it so they'd be in there until they promote it up enough to get a state room with you know one of the department heads sure and would the unless they would allow them have to hot rack or yeah yeah if you're e5 or below you're probably hot racking so hot rack is basically there's not enough space for everybody. So when you're on shift, you're working and somebody's sleeping, and then when you're off,

you guys switch positions and they sleep in the same bed. Same bed. Yeah. Yeah. And not at the same time unless it's a holiday. That's right. It's not gay if you're underway. Who says that?

I've heard. Friends of mine have told me. So how long were you in the Navy as a sub-exam? guy then. I did one tour so five years. Uh-huh. And then got out. So then I'm interested in like how did you two guys come across each other? How did that happen? We met a writer's. Yeah, we were

already writers by the time we met. Okay. Yeah. So Brian, we are actually debut authors the same year. So both of us had written books before these. He had a cool series. It was the first book was the one when we met. First book. Yeah. So the first book was out of this think tank series. He was writing and

I just had my second book. I was writing. supernatural thrillers then and we're in the same debut class. The thing about these conferences, so Thriller Fest is a conference. I should plug it because it's for any writers out there, this is where you should go. Like if you want to write in the fiction thriller genre and you're not going to Thriller Fest, then you're wasting your time. Yeah, I'm not a good networker. I've told you, man. It's really, I met Brian there. I met my agent there. I met the editor that we're, this new editor that we just started to work with. We met there. We met there. but also the community of writers helping each other out.

It's like no one feels competitive, or at least in this organization. Everybody just helps each other. You know, we've, and there's a huge military presence. And so we have sort of formed this little subgroup in international thriller writers of military guys, and we, you know, we promote each other on social media. Like in February, I'm a buddy of ours, Josh Hood. I'm going to go moderate a book signing for him that he's doing when his, he's doing the treadmill series. Right, right. And when that book comes out, I'm going to do that for him,

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Millions of people depend on these medicines to live healthier, more active lives. And every time you donate with Griffles Plasma, you're compensated. You can receive over $500 the first month. Learn more about plasma and how it helps people at gripplesplasma.com. Help us. So it's this really neat community. But anyway, so we're at Thriller Fest. It's my first one, your first one. And we're debut authors. And I am not a social guy. Like, I mean, I can do it. My wife thinks I make it up that I don't, not social because I'm pretty good at it. But he just don't like it. Like, it just don't like it. It's not complicated. There's like meeting people we've never met before. And it's like that kind of like, they're going to tell me things I don't want to know. Like, I don't want to know. I don't want to know. I don't care. I don't care. I don't care. I don't care. You're going to tell me things about you and I don't care. But it's just awkward, and especially, you know, with a military background, if you deployed a lot, it's just like, you know, what am I going to talk to you about? So I'm sitting him in the hotel where it's the first night and they're going to have this cocktail reception, right?

And Wendy's like, well, you've got to go. Like, we came up here and you have to meet people. Like, it's a networking thing. I was like, no, we'll just go to the thing. We'll do the breakfast. No, we have to go. So I'm looking through this book they have. It's a program and it's got all the writers that are going to be there.

And I'm looking through and I'm finding the pictures of all the guys that are military. military and I'm like burning their faces into my brain so I'm like okay I can talk to that guy oh oh brigadier general Tate I could talk to him oh yeah you know uh whatever brad taylor I could talk to him so I'm getting all these names and I'm trying to memorize their faces so I go down to this cocktail party and I'm with Wendy and Brian had come Karen wasn't there right so you were there by yourself his wife had not come so I'm looking for someone that I memorized from the picture I see him sitting by him he's a submirator so he's sitting completely by himself course.

Was I crying at that time? Right, he had like a tear on and he had his shirt tails on the talk, kept rubbing his nose. Like that sad Keanu mean? He's like sneezing and helping himself to peanuts or whatever and I'm like, man, that is just the saddest thing I've

ever seen. That's got to be a submarrier. I think that's Brian Andrews. He is a submarrier. So I went over and talk to him and all joking aside, I did fine, I stalked him, I guess. I saw him sitting there. I was like, hey, Brian Andrews, right, debut author. It turned out a Our families are the same.

Our values are the same. We were both Navy. We had daughters like the exact same age. So we just hit it off and became friends. And so that's how we connected. But it was a year before we started writing. I'll let you tell that. Right.

Well, Jeff has Tourette, so it was very difficult to get past that. But I accepted him for who he is. True friend. True friend. Yeah. And, no, so the next year, we get back and just, sort of picked up right where we left off and it was very easy we were joking around just like just like we are now and i think you had your next book had come out and we're both in we're both planning our next book

so we're sort of in between i was like yeah see how i was feeling out the other author you're like oh what you're doing next oh can you know can you tell me what it's about and you know see if you can figure out whatever he's doing so we were both planning our next book but we hadn't started and uh and i didn't just popped in my head i was like you know it could be kind of cool we could collaborate on something like seals and subs and like do some military thriller series he's like I don't know he's like how would that work you know like because writing you know you just write by yourself like how I don't see how do you see this collaboration going on and I was like what I don't really know but I mean we you know collaborated the military and all kinds of projects so we'll just sort of structure like a project

and and just try from there he's like okay he's like tell you what, how about this? He's like, if you, he's like, I'm happy to help you. Like, if it's, you need some guidance on seal stuff, like, let me know. Because I really did not want to do. Yeah, he's like, but I don't know if I'm. And it wasn't, like, we were friends. I just like, I've been writing since I was like 14 years old. I wrote short stories all through high school. I published my first story when I was 14. And I'd always written and I just couldn't imagine a system where two people like. Right. How does that work? Yeah. So it wasn't I didn't, and this, and then he came up with

this story that was really good. And I was really. And I was really. relentless. I started stalking him. Yeah. But I offered to help him and so we start brainstorming it was all, he's a psychology guy right? So this was all and he trapped me as he did. So we start brainstorming this story.

Yeah. We start brainstorming this story. And it's tier one, the book tier one. And the story starts getting really good. When he first started, it's like, seals and subs and I'm like, okay. Yeah. But now we have a story and it's getting better and better.

And in my mind, I'm still just I'm a friend, right? And he asked the second time, and I was like, look, dude, it's not, it's nothing personal. I just don't, I, I wouldn't work. Right. So at this point, we have, like, this whole story kind of arched out. And Brian's like, all right, look, dude, here's the deal. I feel like I can't really write the book without you.

I don't really know the special warfare community that well. Let's do this. We'll write five chapters together, however that works. And if it's working great, and if it's not, you can have the story. I was like, I just got a free story. I was like, honestly, I always felt guilty. I was like, okay, let's try five. Yeah.

Hey, honey, guess what? And so we start writing these five chapters and then we never stopped. And we wrote that whole book in like, I don't know, four months. Yeah, less than that, like 14 weeks. Super fast. The whole book. Yeah. And it's the only faster now.

Like it just, it was this synergy that just that I could not have imagined. And what we do is probably completely different from what any other writing. team does. I don't know. So how does it work for you when you write? Whose resource for what or how does that happen? You know, I mean, I do the nouns and he does the verse and we put him in a bucket and we shake him up. Yeah. How do we do? So we, in the first one, we wanted to have some structure and so we sort of talked about it and came with a structure that works, worked very well and now that's the same structure that we use. It's not quite as disciplined as it wasn't the first one, but we write in a three-act structure, which is the same structure

that William Shakespeare used and all of his plays. So it's nice. We set up the first actor, we called Part 1, and we brainstorm, okay, what is the kernel of the idea of this story? So we generate that, and from there we divide up. We write in third person multi-point of view, so we have multiple characters to get inside their heads. So we divide those characters up, and we sort of assign chapters.

So there's a really rough outline. It's basically says, chapter one, this character's point of view, written by Jeff, this location, this is going to happen. And then... Five words, but we know what it means. Yeah. And then so we'll map out maybe eight chapters. And it'll be four for him, four for me, and we just start. And then as we're going, we're emailing the chapters back and forth.

We start to build the manuscript. And then by the time we're done with part one, we read it, we edit it. it and we each take passes on the other guy's stuff. And sort of the secret sauce, I think for us is something that Jeff came up with, I think, from the beginning, which was anything's sort of fair game. Let's put our egos in a drawer. And it doesn't really matter, like, who wrote what. It's just anything can be changed.

And if you start with that mentality and there's no ego to the pros, then it's a lot more fun. Yeah. And a lot more productive. And easy. And when we do these four chapters, we're like, right. simultaneously so I might be writing chapter one and two and he's like still writing chapter five yeah so I know sort of what he's writing but I'm writing so I might be writing Dempsey for example in part one so I'm

writing Dempsey and maybe Jarvis and he's writing the bad guy and Grimes or whatever and so we're writing simultaneously but every few chapters like he said we stop we swap them we rewrite each other stuff and then we stick those in a master file so that does two things one it puts both it makes it one voice right because we both hands on everything. Yeah. But also, we know exactly what they write. I mean, like a 10-minute conversation on the phone,

half of which we're talking about our wives and our kids, I don't really know what he's writing. I basically know. And that'll give me and I guess, oh, you know what, when I do this next Dempsey thing, because he wrote this, that's a great idea. And it makes it go so fast. That's awesome for work.

Yeah. It really, really is fast. But it's also blended really, really nicely. And there's a lot of editing involved. We make a pass through part. and through part two and part three and then we he doesn't pass through the whole thing I followed him behind we do that whole thing I've written five books like what you're describing just sounds like you were initially how is that even fucking possible yeah that's no but you're right because let me just tell you like other writers say the same thing so we've been on a couple of panels now you know because we've been around doing this for a little bit so we'll be on these writer panels where they have co-author teams because it is a fascianoa for people it's like going to you know ringling brothers and looking at flip and lady like how could you do that right so it's her number right so we'll be up there with other writer teams and everyone will say well how do you do it and we'll say it people like what yeah i think

but there's it sounds the same to me like they'll say well here's how i do it i'll be like i'd kill myself before i would do that yeah it was one team that they were like so what we do is i'm on the phone and she's listening on the phone and we're talking and while we're talking she's not gonna you know i think that's on a for something like that i think that it probably really really doesn't matter what the hell the process is. It's just like the personalities mesh. Yeah. And, you know, you guys could probably just like do a totally different process and work off one Google drive document and it would work for you just because you work well together. And because we have, you know, we've sort of set from the very beginning and we're all military guys. So you get this.

Like from the very beginning of any mission, any deployment, you set ground rules for how you're going to work as a team. Right. And when you do your next deployment, those ground rules, are different. I'm not saying you map it all out. But especially if you're an NCO or you're an officer, you've got a different team. You know you're going to structure a little bit. I'm going to be a little tougher. I'm going to be a little harder. I'm going to rein this in or I'm going to give more free rein. It's almost unconscious. And you have to do that. You have to say, look, here's how we do it. And for us, it started with we need to make sure we have the same shared goal. Like, if he's a writer who just loves to see his words in print, I'm not going

to be to work with you. Because I don't feel that way. Like, for me, it's about creating a story that people will enjoy. Well, for Brian, it is too. So that worked out great. Not a lot of ego involved, like he said. That's huge for us. I swear to you, my wife will read something in these books and she'll go, oh, you wrote this to you. And I'll be like, I swear to God, I don't know. Because it becomes such a team thing. It's like, it's like, you know, we talked earlier about some of the jackasses that have written books in special operations, right? And how everybody's like, that's horrible because that's not the military. That's not how special, how special operations work. Special operations is we as a team did this. Right. Most guys would never even think

well, I did. It's like what did our unit do? What did our team do? What did our platoon do? Whatever. That's how we approach this. We as a team are going to create this story. And if me changing something makes it sell three more books because it is a business, then great. Let's do that. Right. Do you ever work it where one of you writes the hero and the other writes the villain? We do, but we swap. So that I guess I, I guess. I guess I started and didn't finish that. So like if in part one I'm writing John Dempsey and he's writing Modiri, then we make sure that in part two he's writing more of Dempsey and I'm writing more of Modir because otherwise

it does start to feel when you read it, you can tell it's a little fragmented. So we have to swap it up frequently. So when you're doing that, how do you ensure that the characters maintain the same voice throughout if you guys are swapping it? Or are you just kind of that in sync where you both know? who these people are. I think it's because like Jeff said, it sounds ridiculous, but we really do make probably four passes before that manuscript is done. And so almost every sentence has changed. And now what's happened is, you know, if you ask people who've read our solo work, they'll say, well, I like your solo works, but you have a different voice. This has a different voice. So this has a third voice. Yeah, it's not either.

of us. It's the combination of us. Yeah. And so that's what's, that's kind of neat. And, you know, now we sometimes get a little lazy. We'll write something to be like, yeah, I'm not really sure how I would solve this problem.

Brian will fix it. I'll just send it to Jeff and he'll fix it. And we sort of do that. But we give the other guy heads up being like, dude, this chapter sort of ends like, you know, two-thirds done because I wasn't sure where you're going. You'll notice it doesn't seem like the end. Yeah. That's because you need.

to finish you need to finish it you know and that's a lot of trust yeah just hand the ball off you know to the other guy and let me take and and we're at that point that's pretty cool not only a lot of trust but also like say like no ego like you know like i'm i'm okay with like somebody else taking this and and doing something with it that i don't know how to do you know that's not easy for a lot of people to do and you're right and so you've got to pick your team very very carefully and some people maybe could never co-write for that reason or they've had a bad co-authoring experience because they were not with the right person and so it didn't work out but you know for us it's just about not having ego and it's about i'm going to use this terrible analogy it's actually a

great analogy but uh i'm embarrassed spryin because it's an analogy in case people think it's stupid it's bryan but um you know we're both family guys and that's like the most important thing in the world to both of us and that's one of the things that our friendship was based on so i have four kids. But Wendy and I don't have like, it's not like, okay, Connor and Ashley are mine. 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. And then Emma and Jack are you. If you need help, let me know, but, you know, that's your, we raise our kids together. And if I, if there's something I'm a little better at, then I do that. And we don't ask, we don't say, you're better at this. When you do it, you just sort of know after a time in your marriage, right? You know, my wife is going to do this part because she's way better at that or whatever.

And in our writing, it's like that. We don't care about who gets credit because, you know, it's on the cover as Andrews and Wilson. It's our book. It's our book. It's our child. And we just want it to be the best child it can be. Right. And the other thing is we go into this knowing what our strengths and weaknesses are.

We're not going to share that with you guys or anybody else. But I know what he does better than me and he knows what I do better than him. And I don't think we've ever really spoken about it, but we do know. Right. And so those things that he's like, oh, I'm going to let Brian fix it. I really do that because I know he's going to do a better job and vice versa. And the other thing is you were talking about the one voice and the rewrites. Those rewrites, when I rewrite his chapters,

there's certain elements that I'm always going to do for every chapter that he does that's a little bit more my strength. Right. And there's, I can think of ten things that he does to mine that are definitely his strengths. And so that gives it that one voice too because we've put those elements in. So, for instance, you might be saying like one of you is more detailed. detail-oriented with like descriptions and another one is more dialogue or any way. One person does dialogue better.

One person does research better or setting better or whatever. And then how do you guys manage, and maybe this hasn't happened, but how do you manage if you have a difference of opinion in how something happens, how it goes down, a plot point, I mean, anything like that. Everybody always asks that question, no one ever believes us. Yeah. The answer is the truth is we haven't had any major. your disagreement. I don't believe you.

So, no. That's amazing now. It's not that we haven't had discussions where I'm like, I think this and he thinks that. It's just that in the end, it sort of comes back to that. Well, this is a little more his area of strength. Yeah. And so I'm going to just trust him. So there's a lot of trust. Yeah. I still kind of feel like mine's going to be better. But I'll be like, okay, well, let's try it. And we know when we're doing it. So he knows when I say, well, why don't you go ahead and write it that way and we'll see

if we like it. Yeah. He knows what I'm saying is I still think I'm right. We do that a lot where we say, we'll say, And now we preempt it. We'll say, this is how I think I'm going to handle this. I'm just going to write it. And we'll see. And then if we don't like it, we'll change it. And we're both like, okay.

And you know what's really cool? Once you've written a number of books, you get to the point where you accept the fact that the first draft is just a draft. Right. And we, in this new book we were working on it called Sons of War, in the very first chapter that I wrote. I wrote this sentence, something like, the guy was very busy at work, and he had a lot of deadlines, and he's an engineer at BAE, and he was under a lot of stress, and his old friend is trying to pull him away to basically recruit him into this organization, but he takes his job very seriously. So the whole book, I'm like, well, you know, how long can you be in Pakistan?

Because he's got this, you know, he's got this deadline. He's got to get back. Weeks this one on. Weeks. It's like, wait, we have to change that because remember we said he's got to get back. Lloyd Wade, he can't do that because he's got to get to housing

communicating with his work. He can't get fired because in the next blah, blah, blah. That makes sense. I called Jeff. I was laughing on the phone. I was like, I solved the problem. He's like, what did you come up with?

I was like, he's not busy. We made, we said he's busy. Right, right. We created it. Right. What we got to do is take that. one word out. 18 chapters.

You get locked. You do. And you know you're a writer. You get into that. You write chapter one and you're like, well, this is the path I'm on. Right. And once you accept the fact that you can change anything you want at any time, you're a complete control, and you accept the fact that rewriting is part of writing,

it's great. Yeah, it's a lot more fun. A lot of weight off your back. Especially in this genre, I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth. I mean, is it a military thriller? Is it a techno throw? It's military covert operations. So, I mean, this is a genre that's, it begets a certain level of technical specificity.

There's, like, in people, the audience kind of expects it. Yes, I agree. But you two both come from a technical background. I mean, a surgeon and a sub-engineer. Yeah. I mean, I got to imagine that really helps you navigate your way through the various plots and those kinds of, blind corners that you can paint yourself into as a writer. Yeah, well, and, you know, take the spotlight off of us and just talk about the writing community now.

The one good thing to come out of 20 years of, you know, sustained combat operations is there's a lot of guys now writing in this genre. We mentioned Tony, we mentioned Brad, we mentioned Josh, who you know. But the list, Don Bentley's coming out real soon, Nachie pilot. There's all these guys that have real world experience and the quality of military covert operations thrillers is better than it's ever been. Like Tom Clancy was an amazing writer, an amazing writer, but he was an insurance salesman. Right. And he researched and I mean the guy was clearly a genius in his ability to see these deeper layers. If you read like Rainbow Six, I mean Clancy will spend like three pages explaining like the Army rank system.

Like this is the Sergeant Stripes with the rocker and I feel like that's like Wikipedia knowledge at this time like people already know this. Yes. And they more they don't they don't care. They just want to know did he go through the door or did he not go through? I think I think that we're at a time now where they want more like guys like you to really like give that kind of like insight. And there's a lot of guys out there. And so I think it's a really exciting time for this genre of thriller because there's a lot of people. And what we decided to do with this book is We used what we called the tick on the hound approach. So we're like, we're going to drop you onto this hound that's running. Right, right. You know, and like, we're not going to explain anything. Yeah. You're in Dempsey's point of view on the first mission. He's going to get this shit.

And like, you know, we talk like Navy guys talk. We use the acronyms. And we don't explain all that stuff. And there's a glossary in the back. You know, you can look it up. But like, there's, if you're in the military and you guys know this, there's no spoon feeding. Right. That's not how it works.

So, like, you come on board, you join your unit. And from day one, they expect you to freaking learn. Yeah. Like, that's sort of the approach we took. Do you find, I think you and I have very much the same approach. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. If you want more, you can get more.

Yeah. Do you find that, even with the glossary, do you find that writing, do you, do you, Do you find that most of your readers are already familiar with all the acronyms and things like that? Or sometimes is there sort of like a gap where people are, you know, like... Yeah. I know what you're saying. I think it's, I think the answer, and it sounds like I'm hedging my bet, but I think it's both. I think we have a lot of readers that have a background that if they know most of what it means and a little bit that they don't, it doesn't affect their enjoyment.

And then we have others that know a lot less. And every now and then we'll get to say, wow, the acronyms were a little hard to wade through. So as a writer, your challenge is if you don't want to be the kind of writer who explains it, because you think that's not enjoyable, then what you have to do is find creative ways to explain it in the context. Right, right. You know, he reached for such and such and does such and such. And so what that thing is that you named the context of what he uses it for, I'm using this as an example, maybe explains it better.

So you can put some context, you can put some dots, dialogue in there that just gives enough clues that it is there is that type of reader also that wants to go and like Google that like holy shit is that real yeah yeah and good for them but you don't want a 700 page book where that is unreadable what we like what we like to say is that readers love to learn they just don't know like to know they're doing it yeah and so and and I'm like that as a reader I'm not I'm not I am not saying I think readers are dumb I'm not I'm saying that they just want to be entertained we're not writing we're not writing We're not writing war in peace.

We're not changing the world. It's entertainment. Sure. And so they want to be entertained. They are more entertained when they learn a little something about what it's like to be in a covert operations team or be in a helicopter or whatever. But they don't want you to feed it to them because that's boring. Right. And so they want to experience it and learn that.

Maybe it's a little patronizing depending on how you get. Yeah. Right. Right. Because we want, we always say, we want, you know, housewife in Oklahoma to be able to pick up this book and enjoy it. and we want a guy who's downrange to pick up the book and be like, yeah, that's bad. That's what I would have done. Yeah.

I mean, and there's drama. I mean, you cannot, we talk about this with television shows like SEAL team, you know, great television show. There have to be dramatic elements because people like that. And they're also, you know, what a lot of people don't understand about storytelling is, you know, we talked, I mentioned earlier that 3-X structure. we've all had that experience where you've read a book and you got to the end and you're like, I didn't like that. And maybe if you're not educated in storytelling,

you might not be able to articulate why you didn't like it, but it wasn't satisfying. You just know you didn't like it. Well, that's because we've all been sort of socialized in this storytelling, all the stories we get from the time that you're a little kid and your parents are reading to you to movies and television shows

and the books we read. There is a structure. And if you deviate too much from that structure, it can be a very unsatisfied experience. So that means that those dramatic elements need to be incorporated or it will be a shitty book. Right, yeah. If the pace things off, if there are too many beats, if all these things, it's just like, it's like, it's like, it like grinds your teeth a little bit. It's like, I don't know what this is, but I don't like it. Yeah.

I know it's not a lot in movies, like if something happens and a character didn't really earn it, you know, if it just kind of happens, like, that wasn't very satisfying. fine. That's something like I kind of struggle with too and maybe you guys also is like the difference between a novel or a movie the fiction of it has to make sense

but if you're actually a soldier in combat a lot of times it just doesn't make any fucking sense. And it doesn't have to. Right, right, right. Yeah and so you don't have the luxury of doing that in fiction, right? And the other thing you don't have the luxury of doing in fiction is showing the nine days of

doing nothing. Right. that went before the mission that actually only took like 12 minutes on the X. Like that's not a very exciting book, 12 minutes on the X. So you can write a 300-page book just about army logistics. Yeah, but no one will read it. No one's interested. The other thing I think is important when you write these kinds of things and the stuff that you're doing is you need to make sure that your characters sell it, right? So this is another element where the reader doesn't know why they didn't really find it satisfying.

They just didn't. And that is when they have these two-dimensional superhero. Right. The one is the long. Gary Stu, Gary Stu's high-suit. They never put like six foot right. Yeah. They'd like three knives.

Bullets bounce off of them. Yeah. And so you have to have, you have to have not flawed characters. You just have to have normal human beings. Right. Like having having had the honor of serving in the special operations community, the thing I always say about the guys I worked with it that I found most awe-inspiring. was how absolutely ordinary they were.

Yeah. And they were guys in, and, you know, at the element that I'm at, it's a very mature unit. And, you know, these guys are older. They're, you know, you've been in 12, 15 years. These are guys that are married. They have kids. They're taking the trash to the curb.

They're going to a little league game. They're picking up milk on the way home. They are ordinary. What's extraordinary about them is how committed they are to doing something impossible. Right. They don't have any special gifts to do it. They're not made of steel.

They just both. believe in their country, they believe in their brothers, and they want to serve. That's what's extraordinary about them. If you write that character, and that's what we've tried to capture in Dempsey and now in this new series, Sons of War that's coming out. So Sons of War is not a Dempsey and Murph story? It is a shared world series. So there's a character in the first introducing of War Shadows.

His name is Redmond, Keith Redmond. He's a seal officer. and this small unit of SEALs augments Dempsey's covert ops unit to do a mission. And we got a great response, and he's a cool character. He's like, he's an amalgam of people, all of us in this room, have him known. He's just like kind of a good old boy, super smart, but you got to know him for a while before he realize he is. And, you know, he's always got a dip in his mouth. But the readers loved him.

And he was, like, pretty small in here. It was like just in the Central America part, really, many disappoint. And so we brought him back in Crusader 1. And then people really loved him. And people are like, oh, when is Chump coming? He's called. His nickname's Chunk. So we were able to spin off a series with another publisher coming out from Blackstone

in 2021. And that new series of Sons of War. And the premise is that in Tier 1, Oh, oh, oh, O'Reilly. Stay cool this summer with AC Pro and O'Reilly Auto Parts. Right now, get a $15 dollar O'Reilly Auto Parts gift card after mail rebate with the purchase of select AC Pro ready to use refrigerant products that include a hose and gauge. Beat the heat before you hit the road with AC Pro at your local O'Reilly Auto Parts store. Oh, oh, oh, O'Reilly! Auto Parts!

The premise is that the entire Tier 1 seal team gets wiped out in an ambush. Okay. The only survivor is this guy who assumes a new identity. He is presumed dead also. His name is Jack Kempel. he takes on the identity of John Dempsey, joins a super secret organization to hunt down the guys that didn't, right? Well, if that happened for real, they would not just never have a tier one seal team again. Right. They would stand it back up. Right. And so the premise of Sons of War is Chunk and his guys are the new tier one seal team.

And so it's going to be all seal team kind of stuff. Right. So we're really excited about the hair products. Right. Right. A lot of book deal. Yeah. A lot of movies, some of appearances, time on Fox News.

Yeah. Question from a viewer. What is your approach to describing the interpersonal interactions between characters and military books? You said before, you know, they're sailors, they talk like sailors. They do talk like this. I think you write him realistically, but I think that, I don't think it's different for a military thriller. I think it's the same thing I did in supernatural thrillers and things that you've done in your books. He's written some great techno thrillers.

Reset. I'm going to give a plug. Great book. You haven't read it. But you write it naturally. The way you don't describe relationships, let it come out in relationships, right? Like, don't you hate that book where this spirit above you narrates what their relationship is?

Right. How does that work? Like, let it come out in dialogue. Let their tensions be seen. Let their awkwardness be seen. You can tell if they like each other, don't like. like each other. If the narration says he didn't like her, I hate that. Right.

I can tell he didn't like her by the way you frame up the dialogue and all those sorts of things. So that'd be the only thing I would say is about that. You'd think to add to that? No, I mean, that's exactly right. And then the only other thing is, you know, as a psychology guy, you know, I like to think about personality profiles for characters. And so, you know, our characters, you could give them all. Briggs and they would have different personality profiles.

Jeff doesn't. I knew it. I do. I knew. Secret sauce. Yeah. I remember when I was working on my first book, I was like, this is by what I was writing by myself. The first book I was like 75% done and I'm going back and read.

I'm like, oh, this is so good. Oh, it's so good. Oh, that's what this, that's exactly what I would do. That's exactly what I would do. And then I realized, oh no. It's not. Oh, just like me. Every single character is just like me.

And that's when I said, I need to make them all different. Give them a different Myers-Briggs. And that helped me to say, okay, like, I need characters that would do absolutely the opposite of what I would do in that situation. Who would say something that I would never say. And so that's what you do is you pit these characters together. And sometimes we don't even know really. I mean, you start the chapter. You have a goal for the chapter,

but it's not until they start button heads. Right. Well, that's what's fun about a series is you can evolve those things. So you read Tier 1. There's a character Elizabeth Grimes that is now actually one of the fan favorites in this series.

That would surprise you if you only ever read Tier 1, right? Because she was... Look ahead, George. Right. Like, she was our devil's... She was devil's advocate, and she didn't really trust these guys, and she was a no at all.

And we have over five, almost six books now, evolved her into this whole different person. And her relationships with all these other characters have evolved also over time through shared experience, just like when you deploy, right? Like there's a guy that when you're in Garrison at home, you wouldn't have a beer with that guy. Right.

But then you deploy with him and you see this other side of him and you come back and your best friends. Sometimes the other way happens, right? That guy that's all fun, Well, he's good at being fun, but ain't that great outside the wire. Right. And so these things change over time. And so you, in a series, you're not trying to compress all that into three or four hundred pages. You can arc it out over several books, and it's so much more fun.

So when it comes to that type of character development, when you develop the character, when you introduce a character, do you have an idea of who that person is at their core, why they're acting that way, and who they'll become in future books, or are you just kind of like, in the next book, like, let's do this with this person and see where it goes. I'm waiting it. Apparently, he's got an entire psychological component with all of these people. I don't know. No, I think what we do is when we start, as the books going on,

there is discussions about the emotional and psychological state of each of the characters. For sure. And they have to have a role. And then, you know, during, and through the first draft, we always go back and we say, okay, now we need to add conflict and tension to the dialogue. So if everybody's getting along swimmingly, we'll say, all right, what are some areas where they actually could be struggling or disagreeing? And that happens in rewrites. And then you'll see growth through that book.

And so then when we start the next book, we're like, okay, Dempsey is here in his evolution. We've taken him from here to here. And you were talking about Elizabeth Grimes, like how much she's changed. She's changed the way some of the other characters think too. So, yeah, she's kind of closer to them, but she's pulled them closer to her too. So that's sort of interesting. And so, yes, at the beginning of each book, we do sit down and say, where are these guys and girls going to end up at the end? And in this book, we have some trauma that happens.

So at the beginning of the book, we said the guy's team's a little overconfident. and we run into right at the way. They're a little overconfident. Things have been going pretty well, and they've been on a little bit on cruise control. They're getting a little big for their britches, and we want that to come out, and there's going to be a little bit of reset.

You know, some stuff's going to happen and knock them back down to earth. And it's interesting. A reviewer texted me. He was about a third way through. He's like, did you guys make a mistake? Like, this such and such happened, like, seems like an oversight,

like on your part. And I was like, no, it's not an oversight on our part. It was an oversight on the character's part. Right. He was overconfident. Right. Keep reading. Keep reading.

Yeah. He messed up. You know, like, and he's like, oh, cool. I'm going to keep reading. And so now for book six, we're at that stage where they're kind of, they're going through some shit. Yeah. You know?

So, like, we've gotten into the nitty gritty a lot, but I want to take, like, a step back just because I'm, um, reluctant to admit it because I do take a lot of pride actually in reading all the books of the people I interview But I just didn't have time to say you a lot of us It was 85 bucks I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm weaking But I mean I I wanted to put you guys on the spot a little bit but also give you the opportunity to sell the series I mean I grew up reading Mac Bowlin

So I mean I like love the genre You know nowadays as we talked about the genre is really flooded. It's really sad created. Some of them are very good. Some of these writers are very good. I really loved the late Dalton Fury before he passed away. Mark Greeny, I really enjoy his work. But there are a lot of these books out there. Others kind of suck. Just to be real about it. I mean, what is this book series about? I mean, there's a lot of these out there. Why do I want to pick up this one? Yeah, this one is, like we said, it is covert ops, but I think what separates us is, the authenticity and just the pacing.

So we, when you start this, any of these books, I mean, we start with action and we really never let the foot off the gas, so to speak. And I think we, if just since you're asking us to tutor, Arlenharland Harbor, we'll go and, yeah, yeah. I think we do geopolitics really, really well. And we're a little lucky. We're a little lucky, but it is. We've been a couple of books for a book and then the book came out and then.

Yeah, we've had that right. Yeah. There's a lot of research that goes into it. Like we had a bunch of people emailing us about that book, American Operator. They're like, wait a minute, this came out last year and all this stuff's happening in Syria that you guys wrote about. And that's part of our what-if scenario. Right, right. We try to be very deliberate about looking at it.

Did you ever fuck yourself, though, because then something in real life happened and you're like, oh, that doesn't really make sense anymore. Oh, you could. It hasn't yet, but eventually, I suppose. Yeah. That's almost inevitable. I think that if you look at the genre in general and you say, describe the technique for most of these books, I think that you would find that most books in this genre are plot-driven. Wouldn't you agree?

I think they're almost all plot-driven. I think what's different about our books is we invest a huge amount of time in what I hope are very exciting plots and storylines, but ours are character-driven. Right. We drive the story with the characters and their sacrifice. and their relationships, and that's a little bit unique in the genre. You use a character to tell the story. We use the character to tell the story. There's very, very little narration in these books.

You see this unfold through the eyes of characters that are very realistic because they're people that we do. And so I think that's, if I had to sum it up in just a couple sentences, what's different about our work, why has it been so successful in the genre? That's probably it. Like we were saying earlier, as a reader, do you sit here and think, well, this is. is incredibly well character driven and no you just say I really liked it I think that's why they really like yeah I think they really like it because they feel like they know these people and and you care about what happens to them really seem real to you well that's I mean that's one of the reasons I like I I mean even just like the relationship right like you say you start off

with action and the characters like like you get us you get a sense of the relationship between the characters like right from the beginning you know just on the heel right out, right? You start to get who these people are to each other, how they relate. And for me, like when I'm reading, when I'm reading, you know, a fiction work, a lot of times I look at and go, could I put, you know, swords and magic, you know, could I take these exact same characters and put them in a completely different environment and will it still be a compelling read? And with these books, it's yes, you know, that, because these are interesting characters. So it doesn't matter, you know, if it's, if it's an M4, it doesn't matter if it's,

if it's a Claymore Sword, that it's the characters that are, you know, that are like, that you're relating to. And that's, that's what drives us, right? Like you say that these, that these people loved, uh, chunk, which I haven't, uh, you know, did you, do you know what it was about that character that people responded to so, you know, so strongly? But, because obviously, if he were just kind of, um, uh, uh, a placeholder or, you know, okay, now we need to have this person who, you know, who fulfills this piece of the plot that we need to move all forward, then people wouldn't have that kind of response to it. Well, we try never to have those characters.

Right. If someone has a reason for the story to have them, then we try to give them a character-driven role in that story. Even if they just come through in one book and they're dead halfway through, we try to bring them to life. So I can't tell you what it was about Chunk, but I think it was just because, I think more than a lot of the other characters. Chuck truly is an amalgam of some people that we know and have relationship with and we put some

so maybe he came a little more to life on the page because he is modeled after and we won't give names of three or four people that he's an amalgam of obviously but maybe that's why maybe we wrote him a little better he came to life a little bit more. I don't know but I think that I think you're right I think

that's the key right is they care about them because they seem real so I grew up reading Stephen King was favorite writer growing up. I wrote extensively in this genre and I wrote read Stephen King and Coons. Those were my writers. And the thing about King that makes him so special isn't that he thinks of these crazy horror things. Because there's literally hundreds of people that do that every day and some of them are

more clever than what King comes up with. What King does is he writes it through the eyes of characters so realistically that you can't not find out what happens next because it's like the guys in the room with you. I used to say he could write a 400 page book about someone reading the yellow pages. I would read it in one sitting and I would be sad when I was done. Yeah. Even if there was no plot. Yeah.

Because it's so real. I am not comparing us to King, but that's what we try to do. We try to emulate that rich character, things that little idiosyncrasies that someone will relate to. There's little things that King does where you're like, no one writes about that, but we all do it. Right. And so it makes them real, right? Stupid little things just don't think to put in a book. And so we work hard to do that with our characters so that they come to life.

And then that drives the story because you care about the people. Right. Yeah, 100%. Let me give the obligatory YouTube call to action real quick. Yes. If we move on, thanks again for everyone who's joining us. There's like 29, 30 people watching live and many more will watch over the subsequent week. So thanks for coming and hanging out with us tonight.

Please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and hit that little bell icon so that you get notified the next time we go live And if you're interested in supporting the stream financially, you'll also find a link for that down in the description if you take a look for it So thanks and if you have any questions for our guests today the authors of the tier one series Please get them in and we'll definitely take some more questions Also big shout out to DJ. Thank you very much and also Walker style Thanks for seeing DJ's donation and raising your savings of one Canadian penny. Thank you.

I like to think that we're a worthy retirement plan yet. Okay, Andrew wants to know, what are your three favorite war movies? Oh, that's a good question. Black Hawk Down. I think you and I are different on this. I really like Zero Dark 30. You're not so... Not enthused.

Not as enthused. Not as 30. American sniper. That's my other one. Yeah. Boy, when he was, when they did the Ramadi thing, it's like, they can't have filmed this in Ramadi. My God, this looks like Ramadi. That it felt like it.

I've never been to Ramadi. It was crazy. Like, yeah, just very, very authentic. Is that three? You need to pick up, though. Oh, I have to pick it? We have to eat. So they're six?

No, that's not fair. No, you just don't like zero. Oh, 13 hours is a good one. Yeah. That's a great movie. What about pre-9-9 movie movies? Oh, I'm digging in a movie. Well, Black Cockdown was...

Right, that's true, yeah. Like the Winter War is one of mine... It's obscure, but it's about the... In Finland and World War II. Oh, yeah. I know what you're talking about. That was good. And here's a shout-out.

If you love the World War II, Norway, Finland, that stuff Andy Gross's book. Andrew Gross has a book out called The Saboteur. Oh my gosh. Oh yeah. I'll take a little best books ever. But we're talking about movies. I loved Hunt for Red October. That was great. And then Crimson Tide. A little shout out to my submarine friend. Yeah. See, Vicks, because I know nothing about submarine so I can enjoy it. Right. We've had this conversation before. He's like, yeah, I can't do that. So is it the inaccuracies in the movies that get you? when it comes to, like that kind of...

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, I get it. I totally get it. No one wants to know the most expensive piece of equipment you broke. Oh. In the books? I suspect he's asking about real life.

You can clarify if he wants to get into it. I mean, did you ever break the nuclear reactor? No. No. That would be... None of us were... be able to one up that. Who asked that? No one.

So has no one actually CID and he's been hanging out on this channel the whole time? He's like checking our TV hands. He's been waiting. He's been waiting for you to come out. Yeah. No, I didn't break anything expensive. Do you even for expensive medical gear that you trashed? I have a buddy that forgot to, it was called pinning the radar mast. So you have to basically, the radar mask on the 688, It has a faring on the top, and you have to pin it so it's held down hydraulically and some of this checklist. And if you do it wrong, then the hydraulics can loop and the faring if it gets any water,

you know, and just a little bit of water, it'll suck it up. And so it happened when they were diving and it sucked off the faring and it went through the screw. And then they were like, Sonar's like, like, Khan, Sona, our own ship is cavitating. and they're like, oh no. And they were leaving on deployment. They'd have turned around, go back into DryDoc and fix the screw. Yikes.

And the other boat that was on station had to stay on station. So he felt pretty bad. He won't remain nameless. How was that fit-rep? What's that? How was his fit-up cycle? He ended up staying in and he became a department head and was an Admiral's aide later. He was super smart.

It didn't end his career, though. No, no. So, yeah. There were some other incidents I'm aware of that in the people's career, but that was not one of them. Yeah. You weren't, you didn't happen to be in Guam during the earthquake. Did you in like 94 or 93? No.

Okay. We were doing a dive-up on a sub there, and it was, it was mayhem. Because it was like an 8.2 earthquake, yeah. We had divers in the water. They thought the sub was sinking. I had no idea what was going on, but, uh, because everything started shaking. so a little bit of a panic fest in the old cofferdam there. Really? They thought like the nuke said flown?

They had no idea what's going on. Because like I said, it was in Guam. There was an 8.2 earthquake. They, you know, when you're doing dive-ops on like subs or other things, you know, they're not dry docking, so you have to create a dry environment if the, you know, if the equipment calls for it. So you build a coffer dam that basically fits up, you know, mold. to the bottom of whatever it is.

It's a big box. It'll look kind of a bench in it. And then you put high pressure air and then to blow the water down so that you have a dry environment. So guys will swim up underneath there, remove their rigs a lot of times and then sit there and work.

Well, this earthquake is, and they don't know what's going on. They think the sub is sinking. Oh. And they're going down and they're trying to get their ricks back on. Yeah, it was mayhem for them. Like one guy was pretty much it for him.

I'm done. done. I mean, it's hard to overcome that, but yeah, it was interesting, but just curious if maybe we had been there. I mean, it's a big world, but it's also a small world, you know, so. I can tell you something about when we're off air. Yeah. So, Nolan also wants to know about how wild would subduits go when they would finally get to port or get to home station? Oh yeah, no, it was, liberty was crazy.

Everybody's a liberty risk. Yeah, yeah. I told him that, well, another off-air story. I told him that, yeah, no, because you're cooped up. Yeah. You're cooped up for months, and then you go and you get, basically, you get a week. And so people go crazy and, you know, here's an interesting, another interesting thing, though, that you wouldn't really think about it. But it's just sort of real life is, you know, you've been in that tube.

and you're all breathing the same air and then you go to another country and now you come up and one guy gets a bug, you know, they're sick. Right. So then you go to sea, now everybody gets to get it. You know, so like literally,

it's like five days underway, whatever that is that people picked up in that new port that nobody had immunity to, it just makes its way through the whole boat. Right. And it's just misery. It's just misery. Until like it cycles through everyone

and then like no one get sick. And that's the other weird thing. Like, you don't get sick. Like, the germs become static and there's no new germs. So, you know, once you're through that new germ period, the rest of deployment, nobody's getting sick. Oh, yeah, right. That makes sense. Yeah. Did you guys have bureausats? Did you guys have, like, beer rations? Oh, no. Okay. Yeah. I was curious. The Brits do, but we didn't do. Yeah. But one other interesting thing is, you know, new words get, I can see how language changes over time. Because new words, Words get made up through, and it's always through jokes, you know, somebody will do something,

and then that becomes an inside joke. And then a term, like some stupid term, like, what's that urban dictionary online? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, that would happen underway, and you'd pull in and you'd come back after deployment. We'd all be using this slang, and you'd run into guys from other boats, and you'd say, and they'd say, and they're like, what does that mean? You're like, oh, yeah. Yeah, that's right, you were with us.

That actually must be like a really, from, as like, as a psychologist must be an interest, like a fascinating study on just like people in an enclosed, it's a self-contained, you know, community. Yeah. It has nothing new. It's like an Appalachian village. Right. Right. I was amazed how fast it happened. And I thought, if we were out over two years, there would be a whole new dialogue by the way that people talk to theirs and stuff.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, they'd probably like get ashore and, you know, have a hard time. communicating with people. Yeah. Speaking of foreign language. Yeah, it's fascinating. I mean, like what, not that long ago, like 200 years ago, I mean, each village kind of had a different dialect, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating. And it's kind of driven by, quite, quite frankly, like a small handful of people. Right. The funny, people who are funny, people who have very, you know.

Extroverted personalities. Yes. They drive it. Right. Yeah. charismatic personalities. Yeah. So when you go to things like Thriller Fest,

is Thriller Fest, is that I was it? Thriller Fest for these other things, is there, do you find that the military riders tend to sort of segregate themselves or sort of like clumped together because that,

not an inability to relate to other people, but almost a lack of desire. It's a camaraderie, shared experience. Yeah. I think there's some of that. I mean, it's not to the exclusion of everyone else.

Sure. We certainly have plenty of friends that didn't serve that are part of the ITW community. But yeah, no question. Just like if there was a bunch of lawyers there that all wrote legal stuff, they would tend to hang out together, I would assume. But yeah, definitely. There's a great community of military guys in that. Yeah.

I think we've served, though, as a resource, too, for a lot of the other. That's one of the things we've tried to do is just be very open to sharing, you know, our experiences with other writers who are very curious, would like to know what it's like to do those things. So we always try to do that. How has your, having not been involved in the spec ops community or anything like that, like have you done a lot of independent research? Is it mostly sort of through his influence? Like how is your knowledge of that world expanded since starting these books?

Oh, because of Jeff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're going to be a thriller for this, right? Now that you hard sold me on it, yes. It's not like you have to fly 4,000 miles. Is it here in New York? Do you know, there's a bridge. Yeah, I believe it is.

There's a bridge over here that is right across. Once you live in Brooklyn, you don't really go to that. You don't like, he does that? Yeah. Actually, again, dragging my daughter around with me. I'm going on a Chris Perontes podcast tomorrow. Okay. Oh, that's awesome.

My old friend Ian, he hosts the show. Yeah. So I'm going on it with him. So, yes, I will be making the trek over to Manhattan tomorrow. But no, I think, yeah, I probably should go to it and go. You know, some of these people, like, Mark Greeny, Josh Hood, who else. A few other guys who, like, I've been talking to off and on for years,

but I've never met him in person, you know, so I probably should. They'll all be there. Yeah. I've been trying to all go out. Yeah, well, I've twisted Mark's elbow to try to get him on, too. Yeah, yeah. He acted, like, all squeamish about it, like, oh, I don't, you've never had, like, a non-military guest on him.

I'm like, Mark, get the fuck out. I'm like, come on. So you'll be nice. I'm always not. Nice. Right. I'm always nice. How much fun of them can you...

I'm mostly nice. How much fun of one person can you make? Okay, so you said there's a spin-off series coming out. We talked about that a little bit. And then there's book six in this series on the way also. September. Okay. Awesome.

I asked Brad Thor one time. I asked him, you don't have to reveal it here, but do you have... have in the back of your mind, does your hero end up retired to a lot, like living in a log cabin somewhere one day, or does he go out in a blaze of glory? Like in the back of your mind, is there an end point for the protagonist? Funny, no one's ever asked us that. So our answers might be very different. I can tell you that for me, I have not thought about how it ends for Dempsey, whether he's retired in a log cabin or eventually finds he can do things other than operate. But other characters in the book, and we can't really talk about it because they're actually

in the plans, but there's most of the other characters in the book, actually. We sort of know where they're going over the next several books and go enough and stuff like that. But I don't think we've ever talked about Dempsey. Like Dempsey's just kind of always there. I almost sort of feel like he's almost like a Batman where like his legend, like what he is will live on. Like the phantom. Like somebody else could take over? Yeah, like even if he retires his knock that somebody else would step into that Dempsey. It becomes sort of an evergreen legend that other people walk into it. Now, there is a neat connection that we'll develop and we can drop a breadcrumb here.

You know, in order for him to become John Dempsey, he had to allow them to bury him in Arlington with the rest of his teammates. Yeah. So John Dempsey is his whole life is a knock. And, but he left an ex-wife and a son behind. and we have teased out this element in his in the first book or two he's obsessed with he's going to get all the guys who killed his teammates and then he's going to let her know he's going to let Kate know that you know I'm still here and it's all going to work out and then he's always kind of she got married and so but the son but it's sad though he's kind of watching her on social media he's not supposed to like the son might be more conform one well the son in this last book we've revealed actually we reveal it in American life of American operator, the son is off to buds. Oh shit. He graduated high school.

And Dempsey doesn't know how he feels about that. Right, right. And this is a kid, imagine the guilt. This is a kid who's off to following his dead father's footsteps and has no idea his dad isn't even dead. Right. Right. And so there's a lot of moral conflict for poor John. I mean, just speaking to like the intergenerational conflict.

And we saw this when we went and saw Scott Mann's play at the end of it. I don't know if you've ever met Scott. He's a retired Special Forces officer. And he has this play called the Last Out. It's really good. And I probably shouldn't give too much way. But towards the end of the play, it plays out this. It's about a Special Forces team sergeant.

At the end of it, his kid is joining the Army. And it's like, how do you feel about that? Like, we are gifting this war to our kids. Like, and how does that play? out. And like, oh, not too many people have really gotten deep into that because it's kind of just starting to happen now, I feel like, but it's like, I know, I'm a father, you know, your father, like that kind of like hits you right in the guts. Oh, absolutely. Like, how would I feel about that, you know, you know what's interesting? Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead. I was going to say, that's the title of the

series is sons of war. Yeah, idea that there's a generation that never knew anything but this war. Right. And how are they different from us? Right. And it went over early in, early in this war. And it is going to be different. But that's an interesting question that we don't really address in Sons of War, which is the dynamic between the two generations. Yeah. You know, I've got a son who, my older son's in college now, but my younger son has got several years to go, but he wants to go to the Naval Academy, and he wants to be a pilot. And he's an incredible young man, so he probably will. And I'm fine with that. Like if he told me he wouldn't be an operator, I don't know, that would be different. But he wants to be a fighter pilot, and his granddad was a fighter pilot, and I started out as a pilot.

But his mom is not as okay. And it's been a struggle for her to come to terms with. And she actually, you know, to get serious for a minute, I guess, she read Aaron Vaughn's mom wrote a book. And I wish I could remember the name of it. But she wrote a book. Aaron was... The seal of him. Yeah, he was killed in extortion 1-7.

So he was one of the 18 guys that was lost. And she wrote a book in the wake of his death that was the complete opposite of what you would expect. And she's got a very strong faith. She's a Christian woman, and her faith is very important to it. It's very evident in this book. But the whole theme of the book is instead of remorse

and sort of honoring her son and telling all these stories, she's saying, as a mother, what is your role when you feel your son? has been called to a job like this. And she said, who am I to question God's plan for my son? It's heartbreaking book to see the love she has for her son and how she's glad that she supported what she felt he was called to do. And that book changed everything for Wendy.

So Wendy read this book because our faith is very, very important to us. She leads a women's ministry at our church. I lead a men's military ministry for our church. And hearing someone else with that same faith background. talking specifically from a parent standpoint because we're we're the kids right like i still think of myself as like my dad how does he feel about the things and we got to go out and do whatever we wanted right and we're just right and we're just now getting to the point where we have to consider what would it be like like as it was for karen vaughn when she lost errand so you know she's a half a generation

ahead of us and but now it's our turn and how are we going to deal with that what are we going to tell our kids your kid comes to you. And so that's a book if there's anybody out there listening that is struggling with those questions. I can't recommend. I wish I could remember the title, but Karen Vaughn is who wrote the book. Amazing, amazing.

Even from just, if we look at it, even just from a secular like, you know, the type of perspective is that we did, we went out and we did what we wanted to do. Like, I wanted to go to war. Jack, you know, like we all did what we wanted to do. And

now, you know, just because of our experience, and just because of our experiences, it's like, well, you know, your kids want to do that exact same thing. You're like, I don't know. Right. But, you know, we never would have denied ourselves that time or our buddies that time. My mom never told me I can't do that. Right. She's never like, no, you're going to be disowned from the family.

If you do that, she's like, well, I love you, Jack. You actually feel both, don't you? Like, yeah, there's that, gosh, I don't want, you know, first of all, they're always that four-year-old. to you. You know when they're 19. Yeah. But you don't want anything bad to happen to them. But on the other hand, you're also filled with this incredible sense of pride in them that they feel that called a service, that they want to serve a cause greater than

themselves. All those things that you hope you were teaching them, right? Like you kind of hope that they got that from you, that you've taught that into them. And then when you do and it's successful and they say, well, now I want to serve you. You're like, well, I don't want you to do that. I want you to take you quite. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I just want you to save the national land.

You want you to need it. Put your hand over your arm. Right, right. Yeah, salute the flag. You know, we're good. We're good. Well, it's also like these two perspectives because on one hand, like, here's your book. Like, oh, this dude running away from an explosion.

Like, how cool is that? I want to go do that right now. Or I did the same thing. Like, whoa, well, the guy's wearing his plate carrier. Right. It's light on. He's in the dark. Like, what's going to happen next?

But then if your kid comes to him, it's like, I want to do. that, like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you talking about? Wait, our government really doesn't have a plan for these countries. You know that, right? We need to have a conversation. You understand that geopolitics are going out right now, like, it's not World War II. There's not a clear issue. Maybe wait and see what happens.

Maybe Air National Guard. Yeah, yeah. Civil Air Patrol. But, yeah, it's like, how do you, like, reconcile? I feel like it's almost like two images of the world, you know, that you have. And, you know, when like my kid, you know, my daughter asked me these questions, like, what are you doing, Army? What's it like? Where do you sleep?

What do you eat? You know, did you go over, you jump out of airplanes? You did all this stuff? And, like, I struggled to like, I want to tell her the truth about it, which is like, yeah, it's pretty fucking cool. Yeah. But on the other end, it's like, you know, I don't want to like propaganda as my kid or like, like, you should go do this. Right. This is the right thing to do.

You need to go do this when you get older. which now a female soldier can apparently do a lot of these things. It's been passed through Congress and all that. So it's like, yeah, I struggle with it. Like, what do I tell my kid about it? Right. Yeah. It was cool when I did it, but you should get an NBA.

Right, exactly. Right. I had a great time. I loved every minute of it. It was just, oh, man, it was that? Now it sucked. No, no, no, no. You don't understand.

Yeah. It's tough. It's one of those situations. where like I mean I did I you know I was in I started out in the Marine Reserve and then I was active Navy and then you know went into other stuff and I loved every minute of it even you know even the suck you know the sucks is actually those are the times you remember right but it sucks the most but I don't know if I would like want to you know say I loved every minute of it you know and and make in I don't know you know it's just it's a weird situation now

to with with these unending wars and no real you know what do we do it's fine for me but i don't and i mean also it's like not to like pat myself on the back or maybe i shouldn't at all but i mean like i've probably put more kids into the military than any recruiter any recruiter's tour ever just but from all these podcasts and everything i've done because i know because these kids contact me and they want to ask questions or they're like oh i'm in basic training now and you know i got really interest and I started listening to your podcast and stuff. It's like on one hand it's like I'm really proud of that. It's like wow, that's really cool. I was able to give these young people additional information and help them make their decision on the other. It's like oh Jesus Christ what have I done

yeah. You know the thing is they probably would have gone in anyway only without the information and listening without information is just a yeah a fool game. That's the way I see it and this is like we all served in the military and like I kind of see this partly as like public outreach. You know, that's like kind of like, these things exist. You know, you could be a submariner, you can be a doctor in the military. These are all these great things you can do. But ultimately, it's up to them to make that decision.

How do writers, aside from using you guys as a resource, like, how do you write or writers, how do they view you? How do they approach you? Do they think that you all have, like, post-traumatic stress? Do they, you know, how, like, how do they treat you? Or is it like awkward? Yeah. That hasn't been my experience, but I think it's, in the writer community, we're their fellow writers.

So it would be different for, you know, if a writer was coming to me and saying, I want to talk to you about your wartime experience, that would be weird, I think. So I don't know. I don't have a satisfying answer to that just because within that community, I'm awkward. Just your writer. Yeah. Okay, that's great. Not that they, you know, obviously we talk about our military experiences. But we, you could talk a little bit about the panels.

You know that we do? Yeah, we've done some really cool panels at Thriller Fest. Oh, that's right. You don't care. At Thriller Fest, what we do is every year. Actually, this year we're not going to have it because they've had to condense the panels. So this will be the first year we haven't done in a number of years, but it'll be back in 21. But we do a couple of panels.

One is there's always some sort of military writers panel where they talk about their experiences and how they incorporate it into that writing. I'm sure they'll have one this year. They always do. And those are great panels. And those readers are really interested in not just your military service, but how you take that and put it into it. And then we do another panel, Brian and I've done for four years now, I guess, where we bring operators that are not writers, and they sit on a panel. And the idea of the panel is that, and this one is very highly moderated.

We don't do a lot of Q&A because it would be uncomfortable if they ask crazy stuff. Right. But I just think of your character putting the dip in the mouth. Let me tell you the story. There was knee deep and hangaried in. And so those panels have been surprisingly focused very little on what you would think. We went in there a little nervous about how tightly we were going to have to moderate these incredibly inappropriate questions we were going to get. What do you really get?

But it does give people a chance to ask real operators questions. And they ask questions more like, you know, what's it like for your family? I mean, it's really actually quite impressive how the panel unfolds. But it's neat because writers who aren't military get an opportunity to have, you know, this year was all NSW guys. But in the past, we've done a mix of green berets and seals. And they can talk to these guys about real questions about what it's like. So that when they write these characters, maybe they won't write the Superman superhero crap.

Yeah, yeah. Did all NSW guys get booked to you? well they're there they mostly have all seven three years exactly yeah did they all she have been on every seven Dave we're gonna get down votes because of you sorry no sorry I know it sorry Dave hits this the seal jokes every time and like I try not to encourage it too much but but a little bit it's hard not to do yeah yeah I know I get it's hard not to egg it on um so you said that you've been

Jeff you said you've been writing your whole lot whole life like when was your first and then the same like for you and well so I started been writing my whole life in that I always wrote short stories mostly so I wrote short stories from the time I was 12 or 13 published one at 14 and then I always wrote I there wasn't a year that I never went a whole year without writing and trying to publish at least one short story I didn't write a full-length novel until much later and to be honest at the time I think I just didn't think I had the attention span to it I mean you look at this yeah you know you write a you write a short story and it's like 20 pages long, and that's a long one.

There's only a handful of magazines you can get those in. And so the idea that you just keep writing the same story for like all these pages. I was a huge reader, but I didn't know that I had the discipline to do it. Right. So the first time I wrote a book, actually I wrote about two thirds of it while deployed to Korean Village near Rupa. So it was when I was with the first team. And what I actually discovered is it's way. to write a novel. I mean, it takes a little longer, obviously, not much longer if you write with Brian, but it's really easy because in a short story, you have to condense all of this character development and interesting arc into like, you know, 6,000 words.

The luxury of having, at times, I will admit, 120,000 words, because we can be a little wordy in rough drafts, to tell the story is like, it makes it liberating. It's so easy. And so I found it that was I guess in 2004 or so that I wrote the first book and after that I've written mostly novel-length stuff. And Brian, what about you? What about the writing and how did you get into it? So there's, as you guys all know, we talk about military experience. It's like long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer tear, right? So it's like there's those long periods of waiting. you know, especially in the submarine and you're on station and you're just rigged for quiet,

you're being quiet. And, you know, a lot of times, you know, especially if you're on watching the engine, I might not change the bell watch. I mean, this might be, no doodoo. So, you know, I would, as the engineering officer watch, I would tell stories to the, at least the maneuvering watch section to pass the time. And I don't remember with guys after a while, they're like, you're pretty good storyteller. You ever thought about writing a book.

And I was like, nope, never, never thought of it. But that sort of stuck with me that put that little bug in my ear, you know. And then later on I got out, I was like, oh, there's so many interesting things to tell stories about. I tell us to Jeff. Like, one of my favorite things when I was in the military, when I had time to myself, was to read, you know, this type of stuff. You know, I liked Michael Crichton was one of my favorites. I love that stuff. And there's nothing really more satisfying.

then going to a great movie or reading a great book, and somebody just told you an amazing story, and you can't stop thinking about it. That is a really impactful feeling, where it changes the way you look at the world because you read that book. You cannot see the world the way you saw it before. And I just thought, if I could do that,

if I could tell a story that left somebody feeling either really entertained or changed the way they thought, that would be cool. You know, that would be cool. So that's kind of why I started doing it. That's fascinating. When you would tell stories, like, what kind of stories would you tell them? Were you just making them up on the spot?

Oh, no, they were stories. They were real stories. Yeah, like, yeah, you know, it would be like, I went to this podcast, I met these guys, you know. Okay, yeah. But a lot of it was just like stories from jackassery that people did, you know, in either underwear and pork calls and stuff, you would tell stories and be humorous. All right, guys. You want to wind it down, like give like five more minutes and then we'll...

Yeah, yeah, sounds good. And if anyone has any questions, they want to get in there before we call it a day. Can I throw out a little plug? Of course, we could. So we have a fantastic voice actor who performs all these books on Audible. So every single one of these novels is also an audiobook, and his name is Ray Porter. And each one of these books is available on the, if you look, have audible you can get it and listen to it on your phone. But also if you have a Kindle and you like

digital books, there is a function. It's very inexpensive actually. So you can pay $1.99 and you can add the audio to your Kindle. Oh really? Yeah. So like it might cost you, this is a little cheap. It might cost you, you know, 1099 to buy the paperback or you know 1499 to buy the audio book. But if you buy the Kindle version of our books, you can add the, you know, $10.99 to buy the paperback or, you know, audio for $1.99, you get it cheaper than either one of those formats doing it that way. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, because the Kindle books like $6. Right. And then it's two bucks to add the audio. Yeah. Even if you don't read the Kindle, you just got the audio for $8. Yeah. Or sometimes these books go on sale for $0.99 on Kindle. Now you get the audio. You can still add it

from $1.99. So I'm losing money by telling you this. But if you wait until it's on sale, you can get it for $3. Well, and you guys still like, because you are on Prime and you guys, or at least I know like tier one is like you guys still get paid when somebody reads your book through prime right like that's still as an author yeah yeah if you if you get the books through the kindle lending library we get paid you know quarters of percentage of a penny or whatever for every page that people read so everybody download tier one uh download each book and even if you don't read it flip through it you know hook these guys up no read the books read the books let's pull these up one more time so people can who are watching it can actually see.

And, you know, one day when I'm not lazy, I'll get one of the other cameras going so that people can see the tabletop. But this is it. This is a Tier 1 series. We're holding up five books so far. And number six is on the way. Well, and a new series, a spinoff series, Suns of War. Coming in 2021.

Yeah. Where did your inspiration, real quick, where did your inspiration from Ember, for Inber come from? That's a good one. So Ember is completely fictitious because we wouldn't want to put anyone in jeopardy. But, you know, we live in a whole new universe now, right? There's all these joint this and joint that. It's a lot. What can you do?

Interagency. And so the inspiration for Ember was these small task forces that all of us have run across, you know, downrange or in Conis. And suddenly these guys show up and they're all named Jones and Smith. And so these were groups that we crossed paths with. And so we took this and fictionalized it for Ember. And it gives us a nice way to manage Opsic. So this is a fictionalized task force. They get to do what they want to do in our stories.

Sometimes they do the things we wish could have been done. Right, right. You don't have to feel obligated to be, you know, accurate. Right. It's right. It's right. Exactly. So, like, yeah, maybe the same team that does, you know,

Mountain Ops doesn't do subsurface ops, but if it's a fictional task force, we do do whatever you want to do. Every now and then we'll run into someone. I've had this happen two or three times where they're like, you know, I don't know that you guys should be writing some of this stuff. It's like, dude, you know that's a novel. Like, I mean, there does happen to be a guy named John Dempsey, but he's a friend of ours. Yeah. But yeah, it's all made up. Like, it's just a story, dude.

It's really, it's going to be okay. Pump brakes. Yeah, pump bricks. Exactly. All right. Someone had a good question here. What was the worst punishment you guys got all of you? Who wants to start?

Punishment. Like in the military, I guess. My answer is boring. I didn't have a punishment. Like the rest of you, I've never done anything wrong. Yeah. In order to get a punishment, you have to commit some sort of war. Or get caught.

Or get caught. Or get caught. So it sounds like it's just you, Jack. Just like when I was a private, I did not have a cell phone initially, so I'm living in the barracks, and the battalion did a recall. They did an RF1 recall. And it wasn't because they were getting deployed to combat, which, so like in Ranger Battalion, when you're on RF1, it's like they say 18 hours to wheels up. They recall the entire battalion and rapidly deploy them overseas. So that battalion that is on standby like that, they are there for global contingency operations if something pops off somewhere.

So PFC, or no, PV2, Jack Murphy, was out on the town and I didn't have any idea that we got recalled. And it wasn't because we were going to get deployed overseas. It was because guys were fucking up and getting DUIs and stuff like that. So they did a recall of the entire battalion to discipline them and just do a smoke fest, right? I had no idea. I came walking back like three hours into the formation. And I'm like looking over like, oh shit. So like I run through and grab my,

throw on my uniform real quick, come running out there. And they're all like, run Murphy, run. I started getting chased around the company formation. And they're chasing me. And then they're telling you, jump. Jump. So I'm like having to jump like Mario, like as high as I'm running around the company formation.

and there's other guys breaking ranks out of the platoon formations and chasing after me to like run me down and kick my ass like squad leaders are coming and like grabbing these privates and pulling them back into the formation having me run in circles around and finally they they finished with that we get up to the platoon uh the squad aos and corporal uh has me get on my rbaa this is an old school body armor like the guys wore this shit in somalia it's like that body armor like had me doing jumping jumping jumping jacks and like elevated push-ups and like flutter kicks in a puddle of my own sweat and like that probably went on for like six hours or some shit like that until my platoon sergeant was like stop it he's gonna die and uh in the end i just got to summarized article 15 for that and life moved on yeah but that was probably the worst punishment i ever received not so much the administrative punishment It was more of the flutter kicks in a puddle. Yeah. Yeah.

That's a good one. It wasn't good, but... No, it's good because it was you. Yeah. I would not call it good. It was a punishment, though. I wasn't late for formation again. I bet.

You got a cell phone. I bet you got a cell phone. Yeah, that too. I mean, you know, you always got smoked for different stuff. I think one of the most ridiculous, like, I don't know what you think of us, but I remember in Marine Boot Camp. You know, we had, our platoon had messed up doing something like that. And we had to take our foot lockers out to the grinder, you know, out to the parade field

and do manual of arms with our, with our foot lockers. Yeah. So that was, how, what did you do to earn that? I don't know. Whatever, whatever young, dumb Marine recruits do, you know. I mean, it wasn't me. I was always an agent. You just were participating for morale.

I was, exactly. Exactly. I was just, it was a team effort. All right. Last question. Best adversary in allied subs. And your take on the supposed narco sub that crossed the Atlantic recently? So we had to do, um, we did some sub on sub with the Japanese diesels.

Interesting. And yeah, and they were, diesel subways are very, very quiet. And they're on their batteries and they're cruising around at four knots. Yeah. And the Japanese are pretty method. about eliminating all their sound vulnerabilities they're on it so yeah we went out we did some exercises with them and yeah we couldn't find them most of time really yeah so on sub yeah bad guys adversaries were the Russians

pretty good I'll touch you about that off line one ping only and the the narco sub that crossed the Atlantic to Spain. Supposedly it's the first time that ever happened. Do you see that in the news? No, don't anything about it. Oh, yeah. It's the, uh, most of those narco subs come up from the Pacific side of Colombia and Atlanta, Mexico.

They all put the drugs there. But apparently one went from Columbia across the Atlantic to Spain. Wow. Just recently. Yeah. Yeah. No, everybody, like... It was just an upside-down bathtub.

A mirror guy fluttered down. Yeah. So that's what makes it really impressive, actually. All right. I think that's, yeah, that's it. We're not going to take any more questions, but thank you guys for chiming in there. Anything else that we failed to cover? I mean, we, uh, what? Did you want to try to do an extra segment? Yeah, if you guys have a few minutes, I know I've kept you quite a while. Do you want to, do you want to pitch that now? Sure, why not? I mean, we are going to do a exclusive video for our supporters that will record and we'll upload later on.

So yeah, what do you guys want to talk? talk about on that. Yeah, let's talk about, we'll give some of the secret, super secret squirrel insights into getting published. So if there's any aspiring authors out there, we'll talk a little bit more about maybe what it takes to get that manuscript out there in the market. Yeah. I could use those tips as well. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right, guys. Thank you. Dave, you got anything? No, thanks to our yes. Brian Andrews and Jeff Wilson. And thanks guys for joining us. Please remember to subscribe to our channel, hit that little bell notification. If you will, if you want to help us pay our rent, we're about halfway to being self-sufficient. You can find our

Patreon link in the description below. And make sure you check out the Tier 1 series by Andrews and Wilson and also their new books come. When is, when is Sons of War coming out? Sons of War is 2021. A bit of a wait on that one. But these are all available now on Amazon and on Apple. Yeah, and Kendall. So, you know, for those of you who, you know, have your phones with you all the time. Don't waste that time, read. Yeah. I hope we can have you guys back on when the new book comes out. Anytime. That'd be great. Happy to come at. Thanks guys. Appreciate you.