#2165 - Jack Carr
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast. Jack Collins, gentlemen. What's up, man? Good to see you, brother. What's happening? So good to be here. This is awesome. Man, comedy mothership, amazing. You had a good time? It was so much fun. So cool. We had a blast up there. And everybody was amazing. And Ron White came up to say hi afterward and was in that booth. Somebody...

Her last name, Lardner. So Kyle Lardner's her name and she does piano music, sells vinyl, and she's up there. But she, I think her, I think she said her grandfather or somebody wrote MASH.

Oh wow. The theme song? Yeah, the screenplay. Oh wow. So somebody related to her anyway did that. I know, I heard music. Yeah, right, right. So it was fun watching the show with her. She knows Ron White, so he came up. That's why he came up and said hi to us. But it was so, everybody killed it. It was so much fun. And I love how you put your phone in the bag, turn it off, put it in the engine, and lock it. We need more of that in life. Uh-huh.

Yeah. It's hard for people to not be distracted these days. Everyone's distracted. Yeah. But it was so noticeable. So you're in that VIP balcony. Amazing. And then you're looking down, but it is so noticeable now that no one has their phones out. If you didn't have that, you'd look down from that balcony and you'd certainly see somebody. Just got to return a quick text. Text on the kids. If you go to the movies, you just see lit up phones everywhere now. It's crazy. That's what I was saying. I was saying, I wish they did this in movies. Okay.

I mean, phones are cool. They do a lot of cool things, but man, it's a massive distraction. I'm working towards being able to hand this thing off. Yeah? Yeah. Hand it off? Yeah. To who? Somebody else. That's not me. Hand it off and go to the flip. Oh, really? I'm working. I don't think I'm not going to be there for a few years. What about texting, though? Well.

Well, you can still remember the Blackberry. Yeah. David Tell was in here and he was texting. He has a flip phone. He texts with his flip phone. I'm like, what are you doing? I got pretty quick with that. And his makes the beeps too. So it's like, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. I'm like, what the fuck are you doing? Yeah. I mean, I remember doing that and we did it. Everybody did it. You just kind of figured it out. But it was like, what is it? Three letters or symbols on each thing. But you got pretty good with it. Yeah. You can get pretty good.

But it's slow. It's slow. I mean, that's what happened when people started using the letter U instead of U and the letter R instead of A-R-E. I can't do it. Do you do it? No. Okay. Yeah, I don't think so. I'm trying to think of your text. Especially U. You're an author. Nope. I got to have commas in there. I can't have a U. None of that stuff. So it's noticeable when people send it to me. I'm like, hmm. Yeah.

Yeah, a little guy's the worst at 13 years old. Yeah. That's all they do. Oh, yeah. They do. They abbreviate things, too. I always have to ask my kid, what the fuck does that mean? IDK? Oh, I don't care. Or I don't know. IDC is I don't care. Okay.

IDKs, I don't know. I figured that or no out. They have a whole bunch of them that they use all the time that I have to think. Yeah. What? What are you saying? I know. I look it up sometimes. I Google it. I type it in, what does this mean? And it pops up. Or then I just get the, bruh.

Bruh. Bruh's a lot. I don't know what... B-R-U-H. That's it. I just get that. Bruh. Bruh. I'm like, what does that even mean? Yeah, I saw some meme. It was like a mom texting her kid, and it says, texting your 13-year-old boy is like texting someone who's about to break up with you. Because it's like, hey, how was your day? And it's like, okay.

You know, like something like that. You know, and it's totally true. It is totally true. But I'd like to go back. I'd like to hand it off at some point. You know, I'm not there. Not there yet because it's still my office. Yeah. This thing is still my mobile office and all the socials and everything else, the interaction with people, like everything goes. That's it. I think it just, you just have to have discipline. I think my middle ground is have a real phone, real smartphone, but discipline. You know, just no one to put it away. No one to leave it alone.

Are you good with it? Yeah, I'm good with it. Yeah, I'm pretty good with it. It depends on if I have the day off. If I have the day off, I'm on that fucking stupid thing six hours. I'm watching YouTube. Are you really? Yeah, if I have the day off. Because if I have a day off, I purposely decide to do nothing. Yeah. If I have a day off, I do. Well, I never have a day of nothing. Right. I have a day of archery. Nice. Working out. Then nothing.

But those days are fucking awesome, man. The nothing to do day. Oh, my God. I appreciate those so much. Do you build one in? Yeah, I build one in. Yeah. I never work every day. Okay. I won't. I've done it. I mean, I've done...

A few times, like if I have to go away on vacation or something like that, we have to bank up a bunch of episodes. I wind up doing five in a week. And then at the end of the week, I just – I don't want to lose enthusiasm. Right. Because I feel like there's like a balance between discipline and enthusiasm, and you got to find out where that is. Like if I lose enthusiasm, then I don't have as much excitement. Yeah. And then my – whatever I'm doing is not as good. Right. No, I understand that. Do you ever feel that –

that you have that like I can't tell looking at from the outside and knowing you and then watching an episode or listening to an episode I can never tell if you're off if you do you ever feel off I feel it could be coming and then I don't allow it to come because I remind myself how fortunate I am and about how happy I would be to be able to do what I did if I couldn't do it right and then I just put myself in that state of mind right but that also means like day

day off is necessary. Right. Have that day off. Fucking chill out. But are there really days off with family? Yeah, just chill. Isn't that exhausting too? Family days? Yeah. Nah, fun. Like yesterday we did a Father's Day thing. We went and killed zombies. Nice. You ever do sandbox VR? Do you know what that is? Oh my God, it's my favorite thing to do. I fucking love it. What? Yeah, there's this game called Deadwood Mansion and you put on the...

the VR helmets and you're trapped in a mansion that gets invaded by zombies. Okay. And you have a shotgun just blasting zombies. Okay. Nice. I fucking love it. Do you go someplace for it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, it's a place called Sandbox VR and it's out here in Austin and there was one in Woodland Hills too. This is the game. This is what it looks like. Oh, that's crazy. Yeah. It's fucking dope, dude. Nice. Oh, dang. It's a movie. Yeah.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like a movie. And these zombies come running at you and when they grab you, you have a haptic feedback vest so you feel it when they're grabbing you. What? Yeah. What's a haptic feedback? Like a Titans or you feel like a zap? No, it's like zaps you. It's like a buzz on your chest.

It's really fun. That's awesome. Oh, I love it. They have a ton of games there, too. It's not just that. They have a Squid Games one. They have a Star Trek one. They have one where you have duels with people with space weapons. That's wild. It's not just for kids, obviously. No, no, it's for everybody. Well, obviously, I'm a big kid, but I fucking love it, man. I had the number three score ever.

in there at one point in time. Dang. Somebody proud of right there. One hand with the shotgun. That's us. We train up for it. You know, we were hit with Taryn. Just a lot of coffee. Oh, there you go. Just get, well, you know, every gun has a laser on it so you know exactly where you're shooting. Nice.

And, you know, just take headshots on zombies. Let's see if we have one of those in Salt Lake. See if we can go down there and... They probably do. They have a ton of them. I know there's one, like I said, there's one in Woodland Hills that we used to have right down the studio in L.A. Yeah.

So maybe they are. Yeah. Is there one? Yeah, in an area called Murray. Nice. All right. Yeah. Taking my little guy down there. You got to do it. It's so fun. Oh, that's perfect. It's good to know. Yeah. It's spooky, too. It's really scary. It looks like. Yeah. They drop out of the ceiling. Oh, man. Yeah. The ceiling breaks open and a ton of zombies fall down in front of you and they just run at you. You got to blast them. Really? My little guy liked that. He's 13. He loves that stuff and he loves roller coasters. There's a, in Salt Lake, they have, I forget the name of the place, but it's called the Cannibal. Cannibal.

He made me go with him a couple years. I'm not a big roller coaster person. I'm not. I watch too many Instagram videos of those things going sideways. Yeah. People go flying off of them. Yeah. Not fun. No. Don't do that. But he loves it. So, man, I don't. So he'll dig this. I get that people like those thrills. They don't appeal to me. No. They never appeal to you. I used to do them a lot with my kids when they were younger, especially Disneyland. Disneyland, you know, it's fun.

They're pretty good. They really don't very rarely have a fuck up. Yeah, yeah. Good point. They're pretty – Yeah, their safety record's pretty awesome. Yeah, we did it right before we left and left California to go to Utah. And we thought, okay, we're going to do this one last kind of kid-centric thing with all these amusement parks because my wife and I are not really amusement park people, just surrounded by real sweating and just eating everything, long lines, going to the park.

Crying, whining. So yeah, we did that. And then I think that's it for us. If you want to find the hazards of the American diet in full effect, go to Disneyland. It's bad. There's so many people on scooters because they can't walk because they got too big.

It's so terrible. Yeah. No. Yeah. Sorry, kids. That was your last time that we're going to be at one of those places. Now it's outdoor stuff. It's fun for a day just to eat churros and be a pig. Just fucking, just have a good time. But you have to allow yourself to just fuck off. Eat ice cream and fuck off for a day. Just say, today we're going to fuck off. That's your day off. And that energizes you when you get back into it. So you have somebody coming on the podcast. Also, I feel guilty.

for fucking off and eating all that garbage. So you hit it hard the next day. Well, I got that sauna after we talked last time. I think it was getting put in last time we talked. And I still haven't really been in it because I've plugged it in or whatever. Electrician came, plugged that thing in. It's one of those barrel ones. And so it looks out at the mountains. It has like this glass thing on it. Yeah, but it just gets warm.

Oh really? Yeah. So we need to have... Who made your sauna? I don't even know. My wife would. You got to get a Solution, says the guys that did ours, and they have serious heaters. Mine gets to 200 degrees. If you want to feel great, have energy, and be healthy, it takes a lot. Not just working out and eating right, but a lot of different vitamins and minerals and probiotics. And the supplements industry does not make it easy, but AG1 does. And that's why I've been using it for years.

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And right now, use the code ROGAN to get $100 off plus free shipping. That's code ROGAN at M-O-E-N dot com slash F-L-O. Automatic shutoff and real-time alert capabilities will operate when the device is configured with the proper settings. Yeah, this was not... This just gets kind of, not even uncomfortable...

uncomfortably warm. Is it infrared or is it a regular sauna? No, it has the rocks. It has a little thing in it that has the rocks and all that stuff. Well, it just gets warm? I think it's the altitude. I think it needs some sort of an adjustment for altitude because we're at about...

just shy of 8,000 feet. Right. But it's electric. That doesn't make any sense. Yeah. I know. Yeah. You just call context. Someone knows what they're doing. Yeah. We'll get those guys from Sulu Saunas to hook you up. They'll just swap out your heater. Okay. You just need a, like we have a hum. It's a, I think it's H U U M is the name of the heater. That fucking thing cranks. Same thing we have in here in the studio. It's a, yeah, you've got to get a real heater. Yeah. Now you do something. So, so that's, it's there unused. Um,

But moving forward, so I was hearing you talk about archery. So I have the guys from Total Archery Challenge. They came out and they put up 22 3D targets all around. Oh, nice. It's a good course. But days off, they don't really exist yet. Right. But I need to just make time to get out there in the mornings, drop the kids at school, and just walk that course and shoot. Well, you're cranking out basically a book a year. Yeah. Plus you're also working on the Terminalist TV series. Yeah. That is awesome.

That is a lot of work, my friend. It is. My first nonfiction comes out in the fall on the 1983 Beirut Barracks bombing. So that's a whole nother thing. Oh, wow. Okay. So you're getting into historical stuff. Yeah. We have a lot of history in here. I just love history. I always have since I was a little kid anyway. But I really wanted to start down that path and explore a different terrorist event that

and capture the lessons learned behind that event so that hopefully moving forward we don't have to relearn those lessons in blood. We're not very good at that as a country. We just tend to relearn things over and over again. We don't translate lessons into wisdom. So I wanted to try to just do my part and see what I could do in this. I remember the 1983 bombing. It stands out in my mind from when I was a little kid. Newsweek, Time Magazine, I remember those on our TV.

kitchen table. I remember the newspaper in the mornings, remember the news, watching the news with my family at five o'clock and six o'clock. And that's an event that, I mean, it changed the course of U.S. foreign policy for sure. The shadow is still in its shadow today. But yeah, I killed 241 U.S. service members and 58 French paratroopers. And it was the biggest loss of life for the Marine Corps since Iwo Jima in World War II.

So it's a seminal event in Marine Corps history and in our history as a nation, but there isn't really the seminal work on it yet. So I wanted to do that and did that with Pulitzer Prize finalist, military historian, James Scott, amazing guy. So we've been working on that for the last two years, and that comes out in September. But-

man, it's go, go, go. How do you collaborate something like that with a historian? How does that work? Do you send him stuff, what you're working on, and he gives you feedback? How does that work? So I had the idea, and I wanted one person. I wanted this guy, James Scott, amazing guy. He has five other books out there, four on World War II, one on the USS Liberty, and it just...

And I didn't know him personally and doesn't really have a social media presence. I couldn't really get to know him that way. And just but I just knew his work. And I thought, oh, man, it'd be amazing to collaborate with this guy on this project. And so I reached out and luckily he wanted to do it. He was fired up.

Oh, that's great. Amazing. Such a great guy. So thorough. Because when you do something that's like here, if you make a mistake, you just say it's fiction. Right. But in something like that, you can't make a mistake. And every single quote, obviously, you have to attribute that to the right person in the right way. All the photographs attribute all those to the right people in the right way. Buy them, put them in there, license them, whatever you need to do. So there's a lot more to it on that side that I didn't have any experience with. So he's he's got that part.

That's awesome. Yeah, so it was an amazing experience, and we're going to hopefully kick off another one here. The idea was to do one nonfiction every year.

As soon as I started down that path of research, I realized it was going to be a two-year, every two-year type of a thing because it just so much more goes into it. You just don't create it out of your head, obviously. You have to interview all these people. You have to go and then follow up with everyone, and then you have to confirm things that people said or all these things. So there's a lot more to it than I thought at the outset. How many hours a day do you work? Because I would imagine that

particularly with fiction, you have to avoid burnout, right? You have to be enthusiastic about your subject matter to get the best out of your mind. Yeah, I mean, I'm so fired up. And so, like you, I feel so fortunate to be doing what I love. And so it doesn't seem like work, although you're putting in hours. You're certainly putting in hours. For this one, it took a lot longer than I thought because usually these books are about

or in this genre, they're about 115,000 words, between 100 and 115. This one came in at 150. So I kept thinking, oh, it's going to be done December 1st, January 1st, February 1st. And it just kept pushing, which is why we're here in July instead of, or sorry, in June instead of May. So that's this one. That's this one. Red Sky Morning. Yeah, that's this one.

Right here. So it took a little longer than I anticipated, but that's just because the story dictates how long. Because people are trusting me with their time. They're never going to get that time back. So that's something I take extremely seriously. So all my heart and soul goes into every word. But I love it. When James Reese continues to get older, are you going to let him get older or are you going to go James Bond? I think I'd go James Bond. I think I'm going to do it slowly, maybe age him slowly. So we'll see. We'll see. It's one of those things you have to think about.

And some authors like Stephen Hunter, Daniel Silva have aged their character in real time. But that's a 20 plus year series. And especially if they're out there kicking ass. Yeah. So if you start that, they're 40 when they start, you know, they're getting up there now. Yeah. So it's a it's a it's a thing, especially if you want to keep kicking ass. Yeah. Yeah. I talked to Mark Graney about that. Yeah. The gray man. Right. Right. Same thing. Same time of day. I think so. I think that's the way to go.

Yeah. There's already a precedent set. People accept it. Yeah, exactly. James Bond should be 1,000 years old. How the fuck is James Bond still kicking ass? And they got a new James Bond coming out? We'll see. We'll see. So what they need to do for that one, what they need to do, if they asked me after what they did at the end, and I don't know if we can say spoiler alert because if people haven't seen the last movie, but it ends, it's very final.

how it ends, but-- - Allegedly. - Interesting way to end-- - Allegedly. - One of the most successful series of all time. But I think you go back and you do those as period pieces. So you go back and you start with the first book and you start it in the '50s when it was written. And so you have post-World War II era Great Britain. - Oh yeah. - And you're doing it. You have all the cars. So in the books, he's driving an old Bentley and it's from the '30s. So even though it's written in the '50s. So it's not the Aston Martin. So you do that and you do it true to the books

in that time period. Ooh, that would be very expensive, though. But not really today with CGI, with AI, what they're able to do now. You know, Tyler Perry was building an $800 million studio, and he stopped production on it when he saw Sora, which is the new AI program that almost, I mean, really quickly can render spectacular scenes. Okay. Have you seen it? Have you heard about it? Is that that one, like, 3D camera? That one in Australia? No.

No, Sora's just AI generated video. Show him the one with Japan. It's Tokyo in the snow. It's crazy. You can't believe it's not real because it's like it's got people checking their bag, looking at their watch, tying their shoe, like normal stuff, pausing to talk to people. And you're looking at it and you're like, this is not real. And apparently they generate them very quickly.

Think about it in five years from now. Oh, it's going to be impossible. Think about it in 10 years from now. So this is all AI. Beautiful snowy Tokyo. Snowy Tokyo City is bustling. Camera moves through the bustling city street. This is the prompt that made AI create this, following several people. Like, look at this. Oh, wow. This is crazy. This is fake. Jeez.

You would never, you would think, oh, someone got a camera. Right. And they're filming all these. Store of a robot's life in cyberpunk settings. I mean, these videos that they can make now are incredible. And again, this is OpenAI's text-to-video model. That's crazy. Sora.

Is that the one that Ashton Kutcher was talking about? I don't know. I don't know if Ashton Kutcher was talking about that. He was in the news yesterday, something about AI and something about Hollywood with doing this stuff. They're fucked. Everyone's fucked.

Actors are fucked everyone's fucked I need to read the after the strike last year because there was an actor strike also as you know and then the writer strike as well so I don't know any I was a big part of that, but I don't know it was yeah, where did it end up? Do you know where I do? I don't know, but they don't have much to negotiate with unfortunately There's there's an inevitability with this kind of technology. It's like would you write books with a feather and

No, would you write all the books with a feather? No, it's like if I wanted to buy a book from you I'd have to commission you and you would have to write out this new book Red Sky morning. You'd have to write this out in a feather for every customer. Yeah, fuck that you would never do that, right? Well, that's the thing with AI like instead of having people act out movies and and having like real scenes and everybody's on set at 6:00 a.m And that's that's the thing in the past. Oh, man

I really think it's a thing of the past. What they can do now. This one got announced today. What is this one? It's called Gen 3 Alpha, I think. I don't know. See, there's a bunch of these different competing AI programs as well. It's not just the OpenAI Sora. There's a bunch of them. Microsoft has one. I mean, and then these graphic engines...

The Unreal Engine 5 is fucking insane. That's crazy. So they have these graphic models now for video games. And Unreal, that's what it's called, right? Unreal Engine 5? Yep.

Unreal Engine 5 is fucking bananas. So this is for video games. So video games now look almost indistinguishable from a movie. There's this tiny hint of what they call the uncanny valley where you can kind of tell that it's not real, especially when you're looking at human faces. But Jimmy will show you. Totally.

Ah, that's crazy. Do you play video games? No, I can't. Do you used to? Yeah, I go crazy. I can't do it. Do you mean you get sucked in? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll be playing it all day long. I have a real problem. You wouldn't have a podcast? No, I'd probably have a podcast. It probably would suck, though. I have a very addictive personality with things that are difficult to do. As long as it's something physical like jiu-jitsu, you can only do jiu-jitsu two hours a day at the most, maybe a little bit more.

After that your body just breaks down and you can only play pool so many hours a day But you can play video games all fucking day You could just and they jazz you up so much. There's such an adrenaline rush You're so locked into it and then when I shut them off, I always feel like shit So this is Unreal Engine 5.4. I guess this is the newest version of it. What?

That's wild. Look how crazy this looks. That's cool. I mean, this is a video game. So imagine playing a video game. Right. And this is the type of graphics that they can do. And again, this is just today. This stuff is moving at an exponential pace to the point where...

Five, six years from now, you're going to be experiencing this, but in VR. You'll have the meta headset on, and you'll be experiencing this probably on an omnidirectional floor. They have these omnidirectional... Google that, Jamie, the new omnidirectional floor. Disney's got the best. Do they? Yeah.

Yeah, so the omnidirectional floor, the way you walk is the way the floor moves. What? So you stay in an area like the size of this room, right? So you stay in the center, and everywhere you walk, the floor walks with you. That's crazy. So you are actually walking, but you're not moving anymore. Oh, I don't know. Are you going to get one? Oh, yeah, for sure. Oh, man. Like, look at this. What? Yeah, this is bonkers. No, I can't...

No. So everywhere you go, so you can, that's actually a lot smaller than this room. I was incorrect. That's really small. That's like the size of this table almost. And so you get on this thing and the game will take you down corridors and alleys and, you know, you go cross fields and you'll be able to do this. And I'm sure eventually what they'll be able to do is have different terrain, right?

Like you'll have like a textured terrain or maybe even elevation. You'll be able to go up like a treadmill. So you can get a workout in? Oh yeah, you definitely can. I mean, I remember when Dance Dance Revolution came or Evolution? Evolution or Revolution? Revolution? I think I missed that one. Dance Dance Revolution is this game these kids start playing in an arcade and everybody started losing weight.

Because, yeah, because it's a dance game where the floor lights up like blue. You're supposed to step on blue. And then, you know, there's like different things that you're supposed to do. And there's a pattern on the screen that you're supposed to follow. And you get a score based on how well you keep up with the steps. So all these people were like playing a video game, but they're burning insane amount of calories. People lose like 50, 60 pounds playing this game, which I support.

Yeah. Like, if there's a game that can make you healthy, fuck yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. Then you get tired, maybe you sit down on the couch and go to the other one where you just sit there, and then who's creating this, I don't know, who's moving the country forward, who's making... Oh, well, that's a real problem, obviously. Well, also, they just announced that the former chief of NSA is going to the board of OpenAI, which has freaked a bunch of people out, including Edward Snowden. Oh, yeah. Does that freak you out, Jamie? It does.

Yeah, it's a big smile on Jimmy's face. Well, I would imagine they would want to get involved in something like that. I mean, I don't know why they wouldn't. I mean, I could see, I could put on my conspiracy tinfoil hat thing and say, oh my God, what are they trying to do to us? But Edward Snowden eviscerates OpenAI's decision to put former NSA director on its board. It's a willful, calculated betrayal of the rights of every person on Earth.

Hmm. Obviously, he has a beef with the NSA. But if you were the... Let's imagine the National Security Agency is an important thing for this country to have. If you're having these fucking eggheads that are developing the next super being, which is essentially what they're doing. They're going to develop... Whether it exists in a physical form or it only exists on a computer...

It's going to be far smarter than us within a matter of a few years. And so just for national security concerns, you probably would have to have someone go and be there and go, hey, what the fuck are you guys doing? And report back from the inside. Wouldn't you kind of have to have it from the – I mean just to know what they're doing. You can't give them the power. These unelected people, you're going to give them the power to give birth to a god? I mean that's –

I want to get rid of this phone. It's inevitable. I know. Jack, it's not going to help you. That's the whole thing. We're down this path. Just like you said, the technology is increasing at an exponential rate. And so what we think is...

about 20 years off is probably going to be here essentially tomorrow. It's going to be very, very quick. Apparently, what we're at now is chat GPT 4.0 or 4.0. And the next chat GPT 5 is going to be exponentially more powerful. And that's in the pipeline. Well, it's the manipulation part that we're already just with social media. I mean, you can take it back 10 years. I mean, Twitter X is similar to when it started, essentially. And that's a

you're getting manipulated constantly. And it's not just to buy a new detergent, like back in the 80s, watching a commercial like that. I mean, your thoughts and behaviors are being manipulated by these algorithms and whoever is writing these algorithms. That's a lot of... And so imagine with AI that just went... And the latest update, didn't our phones just get some sort of crazy AI thing in there? The iPhones do. Yeah. Yeah, and iPads.

I have an Android. I have this Samsung Galaxy that I'm switching over to. Really? And this one does a lot of AI things. Like it translates conversations in real time. It'll summarize websites for you. So if there's a website, you know, like James Webb Telescope found some new galaxy. I'm like, I don't have time for this fucking gigantic article. Give me the summary. And it gives you the summary. It'll summarize it. Oh, man.

It's been accurate? Oh, yeah. It's really good. And it tells a lot of wild shit. Like, you could circle a picture. Like, if you see Jamie sneakers, like, oh, those are pretty fresh. You circle it. It'll send it right to Google, and it shows you where you can buy them instantly. It tells you what it is. Objects. Man. Like, French press. Oh, what's that? What is that thing? What do they call it? French press. It'll, like, just from circling. I could take a photo of that, make a circle around it. Here, I'll show you right now. Uh-huh.

It's pretty crazy. That is wild. Maybe I should feel instead of trying to stay away from it, maybe I should embrace it and put the book in it. People can circle it and do

do whatever they do. I think you're always gonna want fiction. I think people are always gonna want fiction and they're also always gonna want to have things that someone has created. I think that's a part of what people enjoy. Yeah. So look. Like this, like the artwork on the walls here that is done by a real person. See, like I just took a photo of the French press, circled it. And there it is. What? And it's giving me links to how to buy a French press. Man. It's crazy. Dude. This is complete next level. Oh, yeah.

So is that freeing up time rather than having to go French press? I don't know. It's just cool. It's not freeing up any time. I mean, maybe it is freeing up a little bit of time. I just think it's cool. That's why I like it. You love all that stuff, though. Yes. You embrace new technologies. I do, but...

Again, you you got to know what it is. It's like I like whiskey, but I don't drink it every day I Drink a little bit of whiskey every now and again all right. I take big days off I like to stay healthy so the so your way your personality you get can get addicted to video games and that feeling and that but not to other things like Whiskey or whatever I've not no I don't think so. It's not the same. They're like I'm too health-conscious Yeah, you know I could never get addicted to a drug I

Yeah, yeah. Although I am addicted to caffeine for sure. Yeah. I took a whole day off caffeine and documented it on the internet. At the end of the day, I had a fucking pounding headache. That headache, right? This is crazy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's crazy. I haven't had one of those in a long time, which is because I haven't stopped drinking caffeine in a long time. Yeah. But-

When I used to write back in the day, I used to buy these sodas. There were these bizarre sodas that this liquor store had that were filled with caffeine, like insane amounts of caffeine. But they also had like hot sauce in them and these cool colors and flavors. Like some of them were – let me turn my tongue.

Dark blue. They had skull and crossbones on the labels. They were just cool. I remember, this is like in the 90s. I bought them just for fun. I was at a liquor store and I saw, what is this stuff? And the guy's like, oh, it's a crazy soda company. I don't even think they're around anymore. But I bought cases of this shit. It's probably illegal. Probably.

I mean, I don't know what the caffeine amount was, but it was extraordinary. Is that when you're writing comedy late at night, like quiet? I think back then I was writing a script. I was trying to write a script. Okay. And I also write comedy late at night, too. Yeah. And I just like to be caffeinated when I'm writing. Yeah. When I'm writing, I like to be jazzed up. Right. You know? Yeah. Yeah.

But, you know, yeah, I do the same thing. I think, I mean, the only time I'm not being interrupted is like 10 a.m. still to like 3, 4 in the morning. I pulled so many all-nighters for this one. 10 a.m. to 3 in the morning straight. 3, 4 in the morning, sometimes 6, 7. If I'm just on a roll, I'm just going to keep going. This episode is brought to you by Bowl & Branch Sheets.

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O L L A N D branch.com slash J R E for 20% off exclusions apply. See site for details. Um, cause yeah, deadlines looming, but I don't want to rush anything to hit that deadline. If that makes sense. Like I want to get through, I want to be the best story I possibly can. I don't want to get to a certain number of words or, you know, Oh, the deadline's coming. Let me wrap this up. Never, never. I respect my audience too much for that. No, I know you would. And, uh, so it's gotta be the best story it can possibly be, but, uh,

That means a lot of late nights. So that goes back to the phone, handing that off to somebody, having other people do some things so that I can focus on the writing, maybe in some hours that are a little more normal or healthy. Do you think you'll ever get to a point where you say, you know what, in order to do a book the right way, I have to do one every two and a half years? Maybe. Maybe that was like the norm in the 80s. The Tom Clancy books weren't every year. Oh, really? Yeah. So there was a couple of years. And you didn't know if one was going to come next year or the year after. So is there pressure that comes from...

does it come from the publisher? Does it come from you? Do you like make hay while the sun's shining? I think maybe there's a little bit of that, but, uh, I think it became what was expected for recurring characters. So it became Clive Cussler. Maybe it was one of the first to start doing it with, uh, the dark pit series that he started. I think the first one was back in the, back in the seventies, early seventies. Um, he passed away a couple years ago, but he started doing them more frequently. Uh,

And then Tom Clancy was every two, two and a half years. And then we get up to the late 90s and you have Daniel Silva, book a year. You have Vince Flynn, book a year. And so it became something that was normal. And now people expect it. So I think it's more that than anything else. Yeah. If people get hooked on a character, they want a new book every year. Yeah. Like Graney does a new Gray Man every year. Yeah. Exactly. So that's kind of what the audience expects. And it's fun. And again, it is, you know, it's a timeline that you can hit.

Two a year would be difficult to do. That would be extremely difficult to do. Yeah. Does anybody do two a year? I think there's a couple guys who have done it. Well, I think when you get a little, maybe when you get a little older, like John Grisham, so kids out of the house, that sort of a thing. Right. And you don't do all of the other things. Trying to avoid the wife. Podcast. Locked.

yourself in your office. Your words. But I think you can get to that stage where you're not doing, if you're not doing a podcast and you're not doing social media and you're not writing a blog and you're not updating your website, zero of those things, but you love to write and all the kids are out of the house and you already have established a readership from the 80s, the 90s, early 2000s when there were less distractions, when we didn't have all these video games, didn't have social platforms, didn't have YouTube, didn't have on-demand any movie ever made that you can have

So that's essentially what you're competing with, with books. So people read less now. So if you have that base established back from the old days, like a John Grisham, then he can do two a year. So you get two John Grisham books every year, every now and again. I think Michael Connelly does the same thing, but they're not doing the other things. They're not doing that podcast. They're not doing the scripts. They're not doing that sort of thing. Yeah.

Especially like the script. I mean, the amount of time, how much time does it take or how much time do you have to spend working on the terminal list? It's a lot. So the first one I was the learning. So I was new to Hollywood. So I was learning, but Chris Pratt wanted me involved. Antoine Foucault wanted me involved. Showrunner David DiGiglio wanted me involved. So, but essentially I'm learning. I'm seeing how this adaptation to film works. And now after that,

that it was a few year process and now I can add more value this time around so this time I'm involved in all the casting which I wasn't before other than Chris so this time involved in all the casting all that creating the show with David DiGiulio writing the outlines going to the oh nice yeah yeah yeah getting those things going they nailed it man that show is as close to the actual book as you're probably ever gonna get without it being like a hundred hours long

That's the thing. Some people get upset that there wasn't this scene or that scene or these characters get morphed together or that sort of a thing. There's a clipper on the back of it. Oh, wow. Look at this. It's built in. No way. Pretty snazzy. How do you do this? You flip the clipper like this.

Oh, it flips out. Yeah. That's nice. Yeah, it's pretty dope. Oh, yeah. Built in, so you never have to wonder if you have a clipper. Yeah, that's fantastic. Yeah, and shout out to Foundation Cigars for hooking us up. Oh, nice. Oh, look at that. Got your own cigars right there. I love it. And they're good. Nice. Let's check this out. Let's do that right there. I was very skeptical when you first made them for me. I'm like, oh, jeez. It's going to suck. Yeah, that's...

I did a whole cigar lighting scene in this one, in this book. I have one of my favorite chapters in previous books was James Reese talking to Caroline Hastings, who's the matriarch of this Hastings family.

It's just a conversation. So it's not nothing's blowing up. No one's getting their head chopped off with a tomahawk and like that. It's just a conversation and passing on of wisdom. And I did that again this time with the patriarch. And so it's Jonathan Hastings talking to James Reese and they go through. He's rolling a cigarette like old school, the way he would have done it back in Africa, in Rhodesia back in the day. And then James is doing a cigar, but he's lighting it in the way that he learned from Jonathan Hastings' brother in New York.

What was that in Mozambique? Yeah, people get real dorked out on how to light a cigar. I have had conversations. I've done it the right way. I've done it the other way. I can't tell the difference. I'm too stupid. So it's like the same way I feel about wine. I am never going to be a wine connoisseur. I like a nice glass of wine. If someone tells me what the good stuff is, I'll drink that. You can tell the difference, though.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. My friend Matt is like a real wine connoisseur, though. He has like a cellar in his house, and he puts on his reading glasses when we go out to eat, and he goes over all the different vintages. He knows exactly what the fuck he's ordering. I don't know what I'm ordering. I asked the lady at the restaurant. Yeah, that's what they do. They're supposed to know all that stuff. Like a full-bodied...

Cabernet. Yeah. I don't know what the fuck anything is. I put some wine in these. I like to do that. I like to weave in food. Ian Fleming did it. It's kind of like my nod is my 007th book. So there's a lot of references to Bond in here. Oh, really? Some that like the most casual watcher of a film will get and some that probably even the most ardent fan won't get. So there's something for everybody that I put in here. So that's your seventh book? Seventh book.

007. Damn, son. That's an accomplishment. Thank you. Seven books. Seven books. That's incredible. Thank you. Thank you. I just think about how many hours it is of just sitting in front of the computer. Oh, my eyes are gone. I mean-

I mean, do you still use a laptop? Mm-hmm. I would encourage you to not. I need to not. Yeah. You know why? For the keyboard. Keyboard. Yeah. Keyboards on the MacBook suck. Yeah. I do most of my writing even when I write. I either write at home on an Apple with a – it's a really nice keyboard. There's a lot of trigger travel and it's ergonomic. It's separated. Or I have a ThinkPad. ThinkPad.

I don't know if you ever used one of those Lenovo ThinkPads. The keyboards are superior, superior to the Apple ones. First of all, all the keys have like a little dip in them. Yeah. So your finger settles into that little valley. Yep.

And then there's a lot of travel. It's like 1.8 millimeters. One of the things I have is 2.2 millimeters of travel. So as you're typing, you're feeling it. Some guys go so crazy that they want a mechanical keyboard.

Yeah, I'm not there yet. I do have a really, I have one that Hemingway actually wrote a movable feast on. Somebody, a fan sent it to me. A typewriter? Yeah, he wrote a movable feast on it. It came up for auction right before COVID. So January of 2020, the guy that started Newman's Own with Paul Newman. He was also kind of a manager at AE Hotster. I don't think I'm pronouncing his last name correctly. But he was like a mover and shaker in those types of circles back in the day. And so he had all this Hemingway stuff.

and it went up for auction after he passed away. And so I have, yeah, Hemingway's typewriter. So I typed a Hemingway quote on it when it arrived, and then I let it sit. Of course, the kids have walked by and like, you know, so it's not exactly pristine anymore. That's kind of fun, though. Yeah. That makes it funny. It's pretty cool. So I have that right there. But I need to get a different one. After we talked about this once, and so I went out and I bought another computer, like we talked about, the one he recommended. So I got it, but it wasn't an Apple one.

And like Apple got me. Like everything is cloud and frigging phone and computer. Like they've just got me. You can get around that though. I'm not good at that sort of thing. It's not that hard. It's not that hard. Just relearn it. And then once you relearn it, you already have it in your head. You know, I have a lot of cross platform things that I like that I use, which helps a lot.

But Apple's Notes is one of the best things ever because when I have an idea, I like to just talk it into a note. And then if it's on my Apple Notes, then it's on my computer notes. Yeah.

So if I have an idea for a bit or something like that, I can say it in my notes. And then when I go on my computer and I just press the notes, it's there. I need to get better at that sort of thing. I have notepads everywhere, yellow stickies everywhere. It's chaos. You don't have it on your phone? No. For some reason, I just don't. I don't know. There's something about it. The best thing about the phones today is that you can talk to it.

You know, like you can on both like the Apple one and this one too. You just open up a note. And then when you open up a note, when you're writing a new note, you go down there and you press the microphone thing. And when you press the microphone thing, it just lets you talk. Like, here we go. I need to do that. I need to get better at all that stuff.

It's not, yeah, I'm not good at it. I send myself emails. I have an email account that I just send notes to or emails to. Like I could do this. Yeah. Jack Carr is a bad motherfucker and this is his seventh book. Bam. Look how quick that is. Look at that. I do, well, it's close. Pretty fucking close. Close.

Oh, they blocked out bad motherfucker. Look what motherfucker they put a lot of dots in. See? It's already controlling you. Why is it doing that? See? That's probably... The thing about Androids, though, is... I should stop this. It's still recording. Sorry. The thing about Androids, though, is they have so many options of things you could do. You can customize things so much more than you can on an iPhone. Okay. Now, if you're a person that's already busy like yourself, that's probably not attractive to you. No. It's just too much. Yeah. But...

Like I've watched like 10 videos on this phone just trying to figure out all the different stuff you can do. You could use it in split screen mode where you can watch two different things at the same time, two different websites. You could have an email on the bottom while you're watching a video at the top. Dude.

Dude, I don't know. And it also has a stylus. I think that might be too much for me. Oh, you can pull it. Oh, yeah. And not only does it have a stylus, but the stylus, it doubles as a remote control. So, like, if you want to take a picture with the family, you set up the phone, and then you hold onto this, and you go like that. You press the button, and it takes the picture. And that does take... That has a better...

than iPhone, doesn't it? I wouldn't say it's better. I would say it's just as awesome. Okay. I mean, there are people that debate things. Yeah. The Apple camera is amazing. I still have this iPhone 15. It's fucking great. Don't get me wrong. And one thing that I really love about Apple is it works with...

Apple TV. So the best remote for Apple TV is your iPhone. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm learning so much today. And it syncs up. So if you have Apple TV, you scroll down like this and you press this button right here and it shows you the remote. It says choose a TV. You choose a TV. And then you control the screen with your remote. So if you want to look something up on YouTube or Netflix, you type it.

Instead of like, looking for the fuck, it's like old school texting, but worse. It's horrible. It's horrible. This is way easier. You just type it on your phone, and then also you can slide back and forth to wherever you want in the movie. Exactly. Yeah. It's horrible.

It's the best remote. All right. I'm going to try that. The remote off your iPhone is the best. I will try that. That's the best. The other stuff, I don't know about, but I will try that because it's, yeah, I'm not good at all that stuff. I'm always like yelling at my wife, like, what the password and what's the thing? It's attached to your email, it says. Didn't we buy this movie already on another thing? Right. I'm not good at all that.

Yeah, that's always an issue. There's a lot going on today. That's why I like to take a breath, go upstairs. But I do need that other computer because I'm feeling it for the first time. I'm feeling it in my hand. The thing is if you use like a cross-platform word processor –

Like, say, if you use Microsoft. Yeah. If you use Microsoft Word, you can access Microsoft Word through your phone. You can access Microsoft Word through a laptop, a Windows laptop, a Mac laptop. It does not matter. You can access it. Yeah. So you have a Microsoft Word account. Yeah, yeah. And so then if you store things in the cloud, like if you store your script in the cloud or your book in the cloud, you could access it from anything you want.

I know. It's so bad, though. It's not difficult. That's not difficult. We're essentially the same age, but you're so good at all this stuff. I'm not that good. You are. You know what you're doing. Jamie's better than me, and Red Band's better than Jamie. Yeah. Is that her gene? It's a lot. I said that. Hold on. I said that just to trigger you. Hold on.

Yeah, set up a competition. Every Redman is a super nerd, though. They're both super nerds. It's a lot. But I need to do something. I need to get definitely another computer for typing. But I have one that's just for writing. It's a whole other computer just for writing. That's smart. Get a new one every time. This might not be so smart. I get a new one for every book. Really? Yeah. Just so it's clean, and it's like a clean piece of paper. And it's blank slate. And I start again. And I know that's not necessary. Today, you could probably make a new screen or minimize everything or do it a better way. But I just like it in my own head.

Like I'm starting a new... Yeah, no, that's a good thing to do. Rituals are good, especially for creative people. Yeah. You know, that's a big part of Steven Pressler's book. Steven Pressfield? Excuse me, Pressfield. Yeah, The War of Art. War of Art, amazing. Yeah. His book...

you know, it was kind of all about summoning. It's about discipline, focus, dedication, but also summoning the muse. Yeah. And then part of that is like this ritual of like showing up, showing up at a very specific time every day. Like this. And if you do that enough, the ideas will come to you. Yep. And it is true. Oh, exactly. It's doing the work. Yeah. And doing the work. You got to do the work or it's not going to, obviously if you don't do the work, you're never going to get where you want to go. When I first read it, I felt like,

Pressfield was using the term the muse as like just sort of maybe it's not a real thing But you treat it as if it's a real thing and it works that way It worked because of the time and focus that you put like it will accumulate Over time you will get creative ideas, but now as I'm getting older I'm not convinced that I was right that it's not a real thing I have a feeling that this is gonna sound so weird and

But I'm just going to say it. I think ideas are an unrecognized life form. This is what I think. I think creativity is a very strange thing. Like, what is it? Where is it coming from? Where do ideas come from? Where's a great song come from? Where's a great concept for a book come from? It comes from your mind, right? And your mind pulls it out of a lot of things like your life experiences, your current state, whatever.

You know depression or happiness and all the things you've read your whole life There's like so many things that you're pulling creativity out of right But there's a thing that enters into your mind sometimes when you come up with an idea where you're like that is not from me That's not from me. I know this is just popping up and maybe it's just as my ignorance of the way synapses fire But I'm not sure

Because my thought is everything that exists that human beings have created came from an idea. Like all cameras, all houses, everything was an idea that we got and then we worked at it and manifested it into form. And if the universe has...

Driving force when it comes to intelligent life that driving force seems to be creating things and I have a feeling that ideas themselves are almost like a life form that injects itself into human consciousness and then encourages and guides people to do things to make things and

And then they appear, and those things encourage more people to make more things. And I think it works that way with music. I think that works that way with comedy. It works that way with literature, with pretty much everything. Everything that's really good encourages more people to do those things, and then more things happen, and better things get made. And I think that's how these things work.

Will themselves into existence they do it through our minds like almost spiritual I don't know if I like that work because it's been co-opted by hippie chicks And dudes pretending to be spiritual to try to get later Yeah, I think so. Let's go. Hippies are being girls are being honest the guys are probably 80% of them are not being honest but

Yeah, whatever that word means. It's something. That there's something more to it than this sort of reductionist view of what an idea is. And if someone says, what's your proof? You know, we have evidence of... I have no proof. It's not... I don't...

I think the world is way stranger than we think. And I think our existence here is way stranger than we think. I think people have been wrestling with that forever. And for me to just think, "Oh, the muse is just this like airy fairy concept that you give to the results of hard work and dedication." No, I think hard work and dedication are important because you summon the muse. I think the muse is a real thing.

And you've come to this over time. Yeah. With age experience. I just,

Just don't know you know I mean if the muse wasn't a real thing boy it sure behaves like a fucking real that's true that really does behave like a real thing and when you're living your life right it seems like it rewards you it seems like it rewards you like both mentally emotionally physically like there's some there's a guiding force it's just we don't know how to tune into it and I think that guiding force also exists creatively and

I think there's a guiding force in terms of like the things you do. Like if you're living your life right and you're doing the things you're supposed to do and you're good to your friends, you're disciplined and you get to a certain point in your life, you're like, wow, it's almost like fate's real. Yeah. You know, like there's some guiding forces that are not exact. Yeah. They're almost like a radio signal that you're tuning in, but you can't quite get it. Yeah.

It's like it's kind of there, but you kind of have a sense. It's not saying everyone head to the exit. It's not that clear. It's just like this very vague thing. It's like, I think I'm supposed to do this. Yeah. Well, fate's an interesting thing, obviously.

I thought about it. You know, I thought about it my whole life. My dad gave me a book a long time ago when I was a kid called The Bridge in St. Louis, Ray. And it's about these people that are on this bridge. It collapses. And it's in Central South America somewhere. And they all die. And the story is about why are these people, let's say there's seven, there might be more or less, but regardless, about that number, a group of people. Why were they on that bridge at that time when it collapsed? And it's just an interesting thing to think about. And I thought about it again in Iraq back in 2000.

really 2005-2006 time frame because anything could have been an IED and you're going down the road, you're heading to a target, you're doing a convoy, whatever you're doing and anything, a dead donkey on the side of the road, trash, whatever, just a disrupted piece of dirt, whatever, anything could be an IED back then. So we got there and I thought, you know what, I can either be worried about that sort of thing or I can just accept

the fate part of it and do my job as at that time as an officer and, uh, and do my job as the best leader and operator I can possibly be and focus on the mission and focus on the guys, uh, and crush this thing. And, and that's where my focus needs to be. Not on whether that thing's an IED. I got somebody up in the turret,

As we're going, they're looking. They're doing that thing. We have some technology that's helping counter some of these things. Of course, the enemy, though, is adapting to that technology. That's warfare. You're always adapting to the enemy. The enemy is always adapting to you. You're looking for gaps in the enemy's defenses. You're trying to capitalize on momentum, but they're clever. And they know exactly how we counter things, and they adapt and, in turn, fight.

We have to adapt to that. So I decided to resign myself to fate as far as that stuff goes so I could just focus on the mission and be the best leader I could be. So fate's an interesting thing. It is, and it's interesting hearing that from you because you're talking about it in the most extreme environment.

That exists which is war and that in order for you to be completely focused you kind of had to give in to that That's the only way you'll be able to do your job And then also if you're not completely focused it could wind up costing you or your teammates lives Exactly, that's the same reason while I was in all I focused on and I think I

I had to talk to my wife about this, but she understood it. The pendulum's on the side of the team when you're in it. If you're bringing guys downrange, maybe you're in a staff job somewhere, maybe not. But if you're taking guys downrange, you do not want to be 10 years on from whatever's going to happen downrange in Iraq or Afghanistan or somewhere else around the world sitting on that couch after something goes sideways, wondering if you did everything you possibly could have done in preparation for that event to be the best, make the best decisions under fire you possibly could.

So that's why on the weekends, I was training. There were people going around the country and the civilian side of the house. So I'd be out there training pistols, training rifles on the weekend, always working out, always reading military history, always reading about Iraq, Afghanistan, so that I was not going to leave anything on the field. Because it was just something that I was very aware of, just reading histories of Vietnam and thinking about the guys when they came home from that and

just how the enemy gets a vote. You can also do all those things I just talked about, and things can still go sideways. But I wanted to know that I was as prepared as I could possibly be. And in the margins, in the far ends, those hard days that you put in in training could be the difference between your life or life of your teammates. Exactly. It's like now it's easy for me to say,

I don't think I need to work out today. I need to write a book. Back then, no, I'm going to work out. I'm going to do this run. I'm going to hit that obstacle course again. I'm going to get to the range with the guys. I'm going to do whatever it is. I'm going to read this other book about Afghanistan or read this thing about insurgencies, counterinsurgencies, terrorism. I'm going to know the enemy as well as I possibly can because that's what I owe the guys and not just them but their families and by default the mission and the country. Yeah.

I think that difference is what makes your book so special that you have that real life experience This isn't just something you're dreaming up and you've done research on like your real life experience Serving as a Navy SEAL is a big part of why your books are so compelling. Yeah, no, I appreciate that and it's uh, it's one of those thing I also saw as I was getting out so I went to the training command buds as my last couple years in which is when I started writing the first first book and

And that's when I wasn't taking guys down range anymore. I knew I was getting out. So I didn't have to be solely focused on that. And I can start doing these, these other these other things and focus, focus on that. But I didn't know through my executive summary through my outline, until I started to write those first words, how personal it was going to be.

And it became a very personal writing experience. Initially, I thought, oh, I'll get the sniper stuff right. If I don't know something about an aircraft or a submarine, I can call somebody and I'll at least at least I know people to reach out to who can connect me with someone who spent time in the submarine force or in an aircraft I need to write about or something like that.

But I didn't know how personal it was going to be from a feeling and emotion standpoint. So if my character gets ambushed somewhere, I can remember what it was like in Baghdad 2006 to actually get ambushed. And then I can take those and apply them right here to this fictional narrative. So it's a fictional story. James Reese in the first book gets ambushed on the streets of L.A. by this assassin guy. But I can remember what it felt like to be on the receiving end. And then those feelings and emotions go directly on the page. So I don't have to find out.

find a sniper from, let's say, Ramadi at the height of the war and interview him and then have those answers get filtered through movies I've seen, other interviews I've done, documentaries, other books, whatever it might be, and then fictionalize it and put it on the page. It goes all heart and soul right in here. So it was very personal, much more personal. And it's remained that way. Even though this is the seventh book, it's still just as powerful when I'm writing it and I'm feeling it as it was for that first one.

Did you write any short stories first? No. Wow. I was a reader. So I read my whole life. So I got to read all these guys, David Morrell, Nelson DeMille, A.J. Quinnell, J.C. Pollock, Mark Olden, Tom Clancy, Ian Fleming, Jean Le Carre. All these guys were the masters, were my professors in the art of storytelling from a very early age. So certainly by sixth grade. Fifth grade was when Hunt for Red October came out.

which is why I have a submarine section in the beginning of this as a nod to the 40th anniversary of the hunt for red October, uh, for Tom Clancy and everything he did for the, for the genre. But, uh, it's, it's, I, I just, yeah, I just absolutely love it. But I had that foundation and I had that foundation from an early age. So it wasn't at age 40 when I like thought, Oh, maybe I should be, if I was going to be a writer, what should I have been reading? Or what can I read that you read knowing you were going to be a writer, but,

Because I loved the magic in those pages not because I was like, oh I'm gonna learn this in sixth grade so that then 30 years later I can use it now It was just I loved the magic and the pages of all those novels and she became a part of me a part of my being a part of this foundation that I can now build on and so I don't think I could have prepared myself any better to be a seal or to do what I'm doing now as an author because reading is really the foundation of all of it and

That's such a great lesson for people listening that you can apply to almost anything in life. Just focus on something, be super dedicated to it, cover all the bases, and then go for it. And you nailed it. If The Terminal List is your first book, that's crazy. How many rewrites were there or edits? I thought there was going to be a lot because you're sending this to Simon & Schuster. It's a publisher of all these books that I've read growing up. And I thought, oh, they know what they're doing back there, so they're going to make all these changes. Yeah.

Very few. The questions that I got back are still the ones that I get content edits today, which are like, hey, explain this for somebody who wasn't in the military. Or now, hey, explain this for someone who hasn't read the previous six books. Put another sentence in there or two just to explain who this person is and why they're here.

So those are the kind of edits that I get, but no real big content edits at all. And I didn't know it because I'm stepping into this for the first time back then. And I didn't know if it was going to be like, hey, you know what? You should lay off on the violence or do you have to have so many guns in there or do you have to describe them? Nothing. There's zero. See, the thing is about books, you can kind of go ham in a book like and people don't really care.

cancel books you know you know what I'm saying like you can with written fiction you can get pretty fucking crazy to the point where if that was in a movie people would be like what kind of asshole made this movie because we totally different I think we think about movies as movies shaping our narrative of reality in a good way like the good guy always wins you know bad guy always dies like it's kind of predictable that's why we like superhero movies right yeah

But in a work of fiction, like a novel, you can get pretty dark. Yeah, I have 100% complete creative control. And I love that my agent or my publisher never suggests anything. And I love that. I didn't know that was how it was going to be going in because I saw, you know, you're watching like Californication, you know, and you're seeing David Duchovny and his relationship with his agent. Or you're watching, what was that other one? The one about the agent in L.A. with Ari Kahneman.

Oh, yeah, that one. Entourage. Entourage. Entourage. So that's what kind of I thought agents were. That's Hollywood agents though. I think literature agents understand creativity a little bit better. Yeah. Also, Hollywood agents can, you know, they just, it's a different animal. Yeah. Different kind of human. I haven't experienced those ones that are kind of the caricature of an agent. Oh, I've had a bunch of them. Yeah, I haven't experienced that yet. The difference is those guys don't read.

They're like wheeling and dealing and they're doing their thing. They're doing Coke and fucking driving Ferraris. They don't have time for reading. No. Not reading. So I have not, I'm sure that they exist. I just have not experienced that yet. Cause now there's, I have like five agents now. There's one forever. There's a, there's the literary agent. Um, there's a book adaptation agent. There's unscripted agent. There's podcast agent. Um, and I'm forgetting. Um, so there's, there's a lot now, but none of them give me advice on what to do.

to do. So I love having complete creative control. I absolutely love that. And then there's no one to blame. If people hate this all on me, it's not like, Oh, my agent, I knew I shouldn't have done that. Cause she said I needed to put this other character in or something. Fuck. Uh, there's none of that zero. Yeah. It has. I mean, unfortunately I think it has to come from you. Like, I think that's what makes work of fiction and really good books makes it so unique is that, you know, it's coming from one person's mind.

This thought this this these ideas that they had they they wrote it out and they they sat there and they summoned the muse and they put it all together and then it's I know it's coming out of you so it's like part of the Buzz of it. Yeah, is that this person make that's one thing that I think is always gonna exist even when AI Starts writing insane books. You're always gonna want a book that came from a person's mind Yeah, it's like you want a pair of handmade boots. Yeah, good point. Yeah, I

Yeah, no, very good point. Hollywood, different though, screenwriting. So I just sent off episode 107 right before I came over from the hotel. I hit the button on send for episode 107 for this new, it's not really a spinoff, it's its own series, but a prequel origin story, Taylor Kitsch playing Ben Edwards, his origin story that gets him to a place, shows his journey to get him to a place where he can do the things that he did in the terminal list, in the book and in the show, because he was so good. And that's,

Writing those things is a team effort for sure. As you know from writing scripts, there are constraints, budgetary constraints, the location constraints. There's a story arc within that episode and then overarching story arc for the whole, whether it's seven, eight, or whatever, how many episodes there are. So there's all those things to consider. And then there's notes from senior level executives all the way back down. Very collaborative. So it's interesting. Well, that's good, though, that you're collaborating because the other option is you just sell it.

and they do it and that's never fun like everyone that I've ever talked to that ever sold a script or sold a book idea and they turned it into a movie and they didn't have anything to do with it they fucking hated it yeah I mean you have buy-in and it's good and bad because it's not gonna be a strict adaptation there's gonna be changes like the gray man like the movie the gray man yeah

If you read the book, The Gray Man, and then you watch the movie, The Gray Man, you're like, what is this? Yeah. This is not the same thing. It's a totally different movie. Yeah. There's like all these people that don't exist. There's all these things that don't exist. Yeah. Like the character's not as complex. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it's a thing. It's a thing. And there's going to be changes. Obviously, the book First Blood, very different than the movie First Blood. Yeah, I never read that book. It's great. It's so different. I mean, you get Sheriff Teasel's perspective. There's no knife in it yet. No knife? Sylvester Stallone brought that to the— I think I need a knife! Yeah, he brought it to the—because he knew the importance of props, which is why I gave James Reese the Tomahawks. Oh. Because I knew the importance of props as well from that.

And actually Stallone was, this was so cool. I got to talk to Stallone. He was fantastic. He was awesome. He wanted to jump on a Zoom with me. And I was like, oh my God, as a child of the eighties, I was so fired up. So I was just like trying to play it cool. Right. Like trying to play it cool. I have my phone down in the corner. I'm taking some pictures, you know, just to commemorate this, this moment. But he was funny. He was wise.

And he passed along some lessons. And, yeah, we just got to hang out and talk and see if there was something that we could do together. So I wrote up a little treatment for him specifically. Oh, wow. You know, probably nothing will ever come of it because you know how –

Hollywood works and you never know. But it was cool to do that. That was a big moment. That's very cool. That was fun. Yeah, you never, that guy was fucking doing stunts deep into his 60s. Oh, yeah. He broke his neck. Yeah, in Expendables. Filming in Expendables, yeah. Like literally broke his neck. Yeah, we talked about it. His neck fused. Like when he moves, he's kind of stiff and that's why. His neck is fused. Oh, yeah. What an animal, though.

In the 60s. Amazing. Doing stunts. Yeah, and now late 70s, still crushing. Like fucking Jean-Claude Van Damme. Yeah, yeah. Like, what? Uh-huh, yeah. That's how dedicated that guy is. And such a great writer. People don't understand just what a great writer he is, what a great mind that is. All those films coming from that mind. Yeah, what a great guy. It's funny that people assume that at a certain point in time, someone doing something awesome is going to want to stop. You know? Yeah.

Like that's the only why is he still working? Yeah, doesn't he have all the money in the world? How fuck are you doing? I think he just loves it He must I mean, that's what you get off on now. It's not a thing It's like most people think about work as like a thing you do for money and then you get eventually get enough money You don't work

But if you actually do something that you love, like, why would you stop? Why do you want to stop? I think that's the difference between thinking of something in terms of a career and thinking of it in terms of a profession. And there's a difference. There's precision in language reflects precision in thought. Someone told me a long time ago. And that's a different thing. A career is something, let's say you walk in and you're working your way up that ladder and you have a plan and,

profession is something that's a calling, it seems. So the profession of arms, there's a reason we call it a profession of arms, not the career of arms, although there are a lot of careers in the military that are working their way up that ladder. And you cover that in the book as well. I do cover that and I get to take them out and

out in all sorts of creative ways. So it's very therapeutic for me to write these things. Yeah, there's a lot of grossness. That's what's really sad is that you would think that the military would be like the most pure of all institutions because it has to be because you're literally taking the strongest amongst us and having them go and fight for our country and fight for our interests. And you would think that there's no room for bullshit. But apparently there's a lot of room for bullshit. Well, there's a lot of room for advancement, I guess, if you...

Simply don't pop positive on a piss test. Don't get too many DUIs and don't get arrested for, let's say, domestic violence or something like that. You can stay in the military for a long time. So you don't need to excel when you hit a certain rank. And I think that when you, that's what we see it play out in Afghanistan, August of 2021, that's 20 years of being able to plan for that withdrawal. And that's the best that our military leaders could do. 20.

20 years to prepare for that. So somebody can look at that who never had any touch point with the military and apply common sense and logic to that problem set and have a much better plan to extract forces from Afghanistan. That whole thing seemed insane. It's ridiculous. It seemed insane, and it's for whatever reason, it's not being discussed when people are talking about this presidential race. That was one of the more insane things of our time. And then when you talk to people that were there, like Tim Kennedy, he's told me some horrible...

horror stories about what was going on there. All those babies throwing over the fence and the barbed wire. He was saying he saw worse things during that time than all of his tours. Jeez. Taliban just killed a woman in front of them, just openly put her head on a truck and shot her in the head in front of everybody. And it was unnecessary. That's the whole thing. It was unnecessary. I just don't understand how you can do that. I don't know. I don't understand. Like,

I mean, if you're going to execute something that's as complex as removing all the troops from a place that we've occupied for 20 years, it seems like that would involve a very thoroughly reviewed plan by many experts and come up with what's going to cause the least likelihood of casualties and injuries.

Yeah. I thought about it in the early days. So in 2003 in Afghanistan, and I thought I was catching the tail end of it then because the flashpoints before that, we had Mogadishu, we had Panama, Grenada, Desert One. So after Vietnam, you had these flashpoints. And this was now we're moving into extended combat operations. But from the end of Vietnam up to then, our model is a flashpoint essentially. So we all thought if we weren't there essentially right after 9-11 that we were going to miss it. And then we have...

essentially 20 years but I remember being the back of a Hilux pickup truck with with a

Afghan guy and I'd always ask him if they were back then I could ask him if they were moosh if they were they fought the Soviets because I was always interested in that history and their backstories and what that life was like in the late 70s through the 80s into the 90s and so I was always essentially collecting information just because I was curious but as I'm talking to this guy distinctly remember thinking man one day we're gonna leave this place and this guy is helping us right now what's gonna happen to his family when we leave this place and yeah the

We saw that all play out. It was 20 years later. And we didn't, there was no reporting on it. No, it just disappeared. Yeah, we hear about it from soldiers. We hear about it from people that are, you know, like deeply embedded journalists that were there. But most people that know about that story don't know about all the people that worked with the United States over there that are fucked. We don't even know what happened to them. Yeah.

No, it's awful. We have a history doing that, though. I mean, we did it in Vietnam, did it with the Kurds after the first Gulf War. So we don't have a very good track record as far as taking care of those and their families who help us over there. And they get left behind typically and then family slaughtered. It's just hard to imagine that that's how we approach things. Yeah. Like you don't want to think that the people that are in charge are that incompetent. Yeah.

Or that are that callous. Yeah. Or that are that, they just look at a numbers thing instead of look at bodies and human lives. Yeah. Well, all that stuff, I get to, I get to write about these guys meeting their ends in a, in horrible ways in the pages of the novel. So it's, I guess that's, that's my way to do my part to kind of keep that history alive because you can go back to fiction. Let's say you can go back, we

Ian Fleming, we talked about him earlier. You can go back and read those books from the 50s, and that really is a portal back to post-World War II Great Britain, and they're changing place in the world. I mean, empire decline, and that's Ian Fleming's way to keep that old empire alive is through James Bond and his creation. So they're time capsules back to the time in which they were written. You can go to books in the 70s, books in the 80s. Go back to reading the Tom Clancy, read The Greatest Man in the World.

or there's time for October, Patriot Games, whatever it is. It's a snapshot of what's going on there geopolitically. And then also things like searching for a phone booth and looking for a quarter, that sort of a thing. So all of those things. So I like to weave pop culture and history into the pages of the novels as well because they are their time capsules for the time in which they're written. But it's also a constraint because now you have to think

think about teslas and gps's in cars and gps's in phones and video cameras everywhere so you have to think about that especially when you're writing a like espionage type of a thriller you have to think about all that stuff and weave it into every chapter same thing with film and screenplays you have to be like oh man this script why wouldn't he just pick up his phone and call this guy and tell him uh to like wave off or something like that whereas in the 80s or 70s like

that guy's gone how are you going to contact this guy so it's just a different dynamic and you have to think about that as you're writing these things so it's just another another interesting thing that you need to uh think through and creatively solve for i was thinking about this the other day when i knew that we were going to talk how complicated is it to try to make

reasonable storyline where someone evades capture today. Yeah, it's a thing. Because if someone is using a phone, they know where you are. Yeah. If you are running around in a city, they're gonna have access to security cameras, they're gonna have street cameras in some countries,

And, you know, you could be tracked so easily. Yeah. You could be tracked from fucking space. Yep. It's a whole thing. Have you ever seen those photos that they take? Satellite photos from space? I've seen a lot, but I don't know if I've seen the ones you're thinking of. License plates. License plates. Read a license plate from space. Oh, yeah. You've got to think about all this stuff. And this is, like, from years ago. Oh, yeah. You could see your license plates a while back. It's probably full-scale video now. Or facial recognition technology.

Oh, yeah back in the 60s or something like that you forging passports and all that sort of thing. That's a no-go right now I saw the fucking craziest story about this guy Who got a bunch of plastic surgery and changed his appearance and changed his name? So that he could try to date his girlfriend who had a restraining order on him what yeah? What this fucking psycho changed his face bleached blonde? Died his hair

lost a ton of weight, looked like a totally different guy, so he could date his girlfriend that put a restraining order on him. That's a little creepy. It sounds like it should be a movie or some sort. Or a Law & Order SBU episode. Yeah, that should be a hole in the desert. That's the guy. What? Yeah. That is crazy. Isn't that crazy? What year is this? Is this recent? 2020. Some tweets bringing it up.

This wasn't recently, but... 2020, four years ago. Kits plastic surgery and name change to date his ex-girlfriend after she obtains a restraining order. Did it work? How far did it get? That's a good question. Did she find out? That's a good question. It seems like there'd be a tell. Or it seems like he'd just be too creepy to even re-engage with anyone, actually.

Yeah, I mean, maybe he knew what creeped her out, so he started slowly. Did the opposite. Yeah. Did the opposite of what my real personality would do. It might be a real story. It does sound like a movie. It says, no, this man did not. Look up there. It says, no, this man did not. Was it not successful or he didn't do that? It said he didn't get it. It's bullshit. Aha, these sons of bitches. What's the actual truth? Oh.

That's the thing. How do you even figure this out now? Could just be one of those urban legends and someone just took it too far. We found a disclaimer. World News Daily. Oh, that's a silly newspaper. It's a terrible nature. There you go. Oh, that's a silly newspaper. That's how I got it. Okay. They got us. Sons of bitches. Sons of bitches. Still, it's a good idea for a script. What was the script you were working on back then? It was a werewolf movie. Nice. Yeah. I just have it sitting around on my computer. All right. I should do something with it eventually. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

We should do something. Speaking of which, Patrick Bed David was there was some video where he was showing Obama and he thinks Obama has a mask on. I keep seeing those. Yeah. Biden. He thinks Biden is not really Biden. It's someone pretending to be Biden that has a mask on because he was like talking very clearly. They were just reviewing it.

Does that technology exist yet? I'm already on the cliff. Does that technology exist? I think it's makeup. I think it's makeup. I think they can use prosthetic masks and they can do an insane job of changing your appearance. But these guys are accusing Biden of having this on, which I think, boy, that's a loose end. If that's true, there's too many people out there that would know. I know. Oh, like that? Yeah.

Sometimes lighting can look weird. I mean, I see what it looks like. People now claiming that Joe Biden has different skin color on his face than his neck. Yeah, well, they do do the makeup. Let me see what it looks like. Well, there's the collar. Okay, there's a shadow on the collar. Yeah.

No. See, that's just the shadow. I see that clip at the end. Right. But it does look weird. But that's a bunch of different lights. That's all that is. Lighting, makeup. It looks bad, but that's also low-resolution video. Yeah. If they were going to do that, do you think they would keep the fucking neck color different? I would think that they would be smarter than this. Can you even do that? But if you can get that good, where you can make the face look that good, and they keep comparing his old face to his new face, first of all,

The guy got plastic surgery, clearly. He got a facelift. He's got his face pulled back to try to look younger, which never works. It just makes you look weird. It does look weird. It just makes you look like a lizard.

The shadows to me look like studio lighting. You have multiple lights coming from a bunch of different angles. That's what it looks like. He's moving around, but it's because he has a collar and the collar is catching the light. So there's light down here. There's light above. That's why it looks weird. That's why it looks like two-tone because it's essentially getting a shadow, but then the shadow is also getting light from the upper light, from the upper cameras. So he looks fake right there. Right.

But that's just shadows. It's because he's being lit from below. Right. Yeah, it does look odd. Yeah. Do you think he's probably being lit from a couple different spots? Yeah. I don't think you can. I mean, I definitely think you can get a face like mask and make you look like him. But how are you going to talk like him? Yeah. It probably just gave him a solid dose of Adderall. I remember seeing this clip. I saw the very end of it where they have an expert of some kind, this guy.

He says that, like, they've been using body doubles since... Yes, they have. ... Reagan, and he's like, it's plausible that they could maybe have faked the voice by now, but... Well, I doubt...

So what you would have to do is you'd have to have the person in the mask and they'd have to talk in their voice. And then what you could do with AI is change the voice to be exactly like Biden's voice. You could do that. But that requires so many people to be in on it, including the person being interviewed or the person interviewing Biden, all the people that are watching. There's a lot of loose ends there. Yeah, that's where a lot of these things, I think, fall apart. Yeah. In that case, that's a lot of loose ends.

Especially like camera guys and a lot of hard-working folks a lot of fucking probably Republicans involved in normal people Doing that sort of thing. You know they'd have to sign NDAs, but people talk Yeah, it's like especially something like that like oh my god They had a fake president give a conversation, and that's what you're seeing you're seeing a fake president. This is crazy Yeah, it's a lot Benjamin Franklin said three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. Oh

There's something to that. There's certainly something to that. And yeah, you're right. All the people that actually do the work, the tactical level work. That's what I think about in Hollywood now. When you see, let's say, a star of a show say something on social media that makes everybody crazy. I'm never going to watch that person's show again or see that movie. I'm never going to watch another movie by that person.

That's one person. Like, that's the one person who goes up and accepts the award. But there's 300 other people, 400 other people, even more than that, doing all that tactical base level work. The hair and makeup people, the stunt people, all of those people are part of this thing, part of this project. And that's their jobs, too.

So I think about that now when you see someone say something kind of off the wall. Okay, that person is essentially the spokesperson for that show if they're a star. But there's so many other people that help bring that and put in so much work. And then that person can go spout out some political opinion. And then, I mean, like, look what's going on right now with Robert De Niro. Oh, yeah. Robert De Niro, because, look,

There's something about being a star where you think your opinion is more important than anybody else's. And you can go give a press conference. And he obviously has been very vocal from 2016 that he hates Trump for whatever reason. Maybe they have some personal thing. Whatever it is. But.

Now he's like holding press conferences. So now everyone's heckling him everywhere he goes. That's so bad. It's tough. Like you've opened up this, instead of just being this cranky old liberal, which I know a lot of them, you know, instead of that, now you're this guy that is yelling at other people that are Trump supporters and they're yelling at you. Like you've opened yourself up to this nonsense. Right. Like,

Why do that at that age even? Why? Now every movie you go to, 50% of the population is going to not want to go see that movie. Instead of just, you know, I think there's a certain thing involved in being an actor at a very high level. And I think that's one of the reasons why you never see like Daniel Day-Lewis give conversations.

Well, he disappeared. Yeah. Where did he go? He's very rarely talking about things that are in the news, and he's not doing one of those fucking imagine there's no heaven videos and everybody's get COVID. Remember those? You know those? And there's a bunch of celebrities who are telling you how important it is to not vote for Trump. There was all these videos from 2016. That's crazy.

you're not going to see Daniel Day-Lewis in those. Because for Daniel Day-Lewis, for the master of masters to be able to embody these completely different human beings, you kind of don't want to know much about him as a person.

Yeah, we don't. And I think he pretty much, did he retire? He became a cobbler. Yeah, a cobbler in Ireland, right? For a little while. And I think he stopped doing that. Oh, wow. And I don't think he acts anymore, though. Yeah, a cobbler in Ireland, right? I don't know. He became a boxer for a full year. Whoa. Yeah, he did that movie. I think it's called The Boxer. It's about the IRA. Yeah.

It's about a guy who goes to prison and comes out, and he looks like a legitimate boxer. Like, better than anybody else who has ever been in a movie but a boxer. Really? Well, he goes all in. Yeah. The guys in other movies, they box like no one's punched him in the face. Yeah. You know, or no one's going to punch him. Maybe somebody has, but no one's going to punch them in the face. So they're throwing punches, and it's not, it doesn't look real to me. Yeah, that's why you have a hard time with Rocky, right? Yeah.

I know you do. I mean, it's a great movie. I loved it when I was a kid. When I was a kid, I drank raw eggs and I ran around the block. Yeah. That was fantastic. It was awesome. And so that's what I miss. I mean, I miss those days. I miss the feeling of watching those movies and getting just fired up and then going out and doing pull-ups and sprinting hills and all that stuff. It's just hard when you know something. Yeah. When you know something, like if you were watching a movie about the military and they were doing shit that's just absolutely never going to happen and not real. Yeah. It takes you out of it. You're like, absolutely.

Yeah, it can be tough. Get the fuck out of here. I know. And that's what was important to Antoine Fuqua, to Chris Pratt, David DiGiglio, to me, was doing something that when somebody who served in the military or law enforcement, firefighter, intelligence officer, somebody that did these things for real can pop that beer and sit on their couch and watch the show. We wanted them to know we at least tried. Right. We at least tried to get it right.

There's going to be some Hollywood hot sauce, of course. Chris talks about it in terms of like 80% authenticity and 20% Hollywood hot sauce. You've got to move that story forward. You've got to move it forward. That's a great term, Hollywood hot sauce. Yeah. But the problem is sometimes it's too much hot sauce and overwhelms the meal. Or they don't know. And it does take another breath. And you have to take a moment to try to get these things right. It's easy – not easy. It's still hard to make any –

And that's why I appreciate all shows out there now because I know how much work goes into making even the bad ones and how easy it is for things to go off the rail. So it's a shocker that anything gets made or anything good gets made, certainly. But you do have to take that extra moment to think about, hey, how is this going to look to somebody who does this for real? Yeah, you have to respect that. As soon as you make a film about something and the people in the film, like you have a movie about dancing and they dance like shit. Yeah.

This is stupid. This movie sucks. If you were a professional dancer, you'd be mad. You'd be like, this is horrible. And they do that in some karate movies, but there's a suspension of disbelief aspect of those movies where you jump up and kick two people at the same time. It's kind of fun. Yeah, I know. There's the fun aspect, but if you're trying to make a serious film and try to do this, that's why Daniel Day-Lewis is so great because he becomes that character. I think you have to talk to him on set like he's that character. Is that right? Yeah. He was Abraham Lincoln for like a year. Right. Right.

Yeah.

Right? It's so interesting because I don't see that. I have not seen that yet. Well, that's fucked up because nobody even watched that movie. Oh, man. You waste your time being Abraham Lincoln for a year and nobody even talks about the movie. I know. That's tough. That's why I write this one-page executive summary when I start these things and I ask myself, is this worth the next year, year and a half of my life? And if yes, then I go all in. But I read it again and I say, is this worth someone's walking by Hudson News and grabs this off the shelf and reads the back of this paperback or whatever? And is it interesting enough for them to devote time? They're never going to get back to this story. Wow.

I have a hard time with those movies about real people where you don't know what they said to their wife behind closed doors. Like Abraham Lincoln. Like, how the fuck do you know what he said? What are you doing here? You're just putting a bunch of words in his mouth.

A little historical fiction. You take a little literary license. I don't like it. You don't like that. I don't like it. Either all fake or all real. Documentary or we're going here. What are you doing? Yeah. We're making it up. I can't get behind these movies about real people. Yeah. You have them talking to their kid. You don't know what the fuck they're saying. You don't know what they're saying. Unfortunately, no recordings of Lincoln's voice exist since he died 12 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.

the first device to record and playback sound. If anyone had an educated guess as to how it sounded, though, it would be Holzer, who has written 40 books on Lincoln. 40. 40 books on Lincoln in the Civil War. What a psycho that guy must be. Wow. You know that guy's out there reenacting the Civil War? That's wild.

That is wild. 40 books on Lincoln and the Civil War. That seems a little crazy. Speaking of Daniel Day-Lewis, though, I love IRA movies. Oh, yeah. 80s IRA, 70s IRA movies. I think those are good. Yes, yes. Even the bad ones are good. I like that. I started watching Peaky Blinders. I have not watched it yet. I need to watch it. It's fucking great. Yeah, yeah. It's fucking great. I burned through The Gentleman, which is Guy Ritchie's new show on Netflix, which is amazing. It's good. It's fucking great. Nice. Prime Guy Ritchie. It's great.

And then a lot of friends have been telling me, like, you've got to watch Peaky Blinders. And Jamie keeps telling me I've got to watch The Wire, and that's next. The Wire's next. But I've got to get through Peaky Blinders. Yeah, I've got to watch that, too. Peaky Blinders is fucking great. What do they say? There are two types of people in this world, those who have watched Peaky Blinders and those who have not. Really? That's ridiculous. I think I've seen that meme somewhere. Tell that to someone in Africa. Yeah, yeah.

Bro, you haven't even watched Peaky Blinders. I know. What's going on? There's so many things I want to watch, but I'm just having a time because it's just go, go, go. Well, today is the craziest time ever for television and films and so many of these incredible series. Yeah, yeah. You know, like these things where they take, like Ozark, where you follow the entire storyline for years. Mm-hmm.

And, you know, like The Sopranos started that, which is still like one of the greats. Tony Hinchcliffe just started watching The Sopranos again. Nice. I know. I missed that, too, because that came out right around. When did it come out? The Sopranos? 2000-ish? So right around September 11th. So as soon as that. I remember it was starting up. Oh, it had been peak. Yeah, it was like the first season, I think, was 2000 at the end of 99 or something like that. And it lasted to 2009.

Yeah, I kind of lost a lot of that during that time frame because 9-11, going downrange, focused on that, starting a family, all that stuff. So we kind of missed a little bit in there. So now I need to go back and watch these things. Go back and watch The Sopranos. It's fucking incredible. I see scenes all the time. You see scenes all the time. They pop up on your feed and all that stuff, and it's fantastic. It's hard to believe that you root for a guy who's a criminal and a murderer. Yeah. Like, he's your hero. Yeah. Like...

Well, I kind of write about that in here. My guy goes off the, you know, kind of little. But his is understandable. Yeah. Tony Soprano's a criminal. Yeah. A lifelong mafia guy who's robbing people and stealing things. Yeah, Reservoir Dogs. And you're watching Reservoir Dogs and you're loving all those guys' conversations and all the rest of it. And they're all bad guys. Yeah. I mean, a lot of those. A lot of Tarantino stuff. Oh, yeah. Well, I like that. Yeah, it's fun. It's a complicated movie.

Yeah, yeah. Where people are complicated. Yeah, exactly. Like real people. Interesting. Yeah. Interesting people. And I like, you want to like somebody too. So you can even like, that's what you're saying. You're saying that you like these guys who happen to be criminals or doing bad things or whatever because of the way they're written, the way they come, you get to know them through these things. I mean, it was crazy. Everybody wanted to be in the mob. That's crazy.

Hey. The mob probably recruited quite a few people during those days. Well, there's the whole story behind Godfather and all that stuff, too. Oh, I bet. I bet. I mean, that was an amazing...

Yeah. I bet that made a lot of people want to become mobsters. Probably. Or have you heard Danny Trejo talk about doing – there's a couple movies that came out about gangs and his affiliation there with those. But he's acting in these same things and having to go and actually get permission from the different gangs to do them. Mm-hmm.

He has it in his biography. It's pretty interesting stuff. But a similar type of a deal. Wasn't that a deal also with Edward James Olmos? It was one of those movies. What was it, American Me? There was American Me, and then there was Blood In, Blood Out. It came out about the same time. Is that the same thing? I don't think that's Edward James Olmos, though, right? No, there were two separate ones. Right, right. American Me, I think, got into trouble with some of the Mexican gangs for the way things are depicted. Yeah. You have to have permission for stuff. Yeah. Well, I...

Well, I was going to go to Macau for this one. Oh, really? And I don't think I can go there now. I think I needed to do it before I wrote this book. Uh-oh. Yeah. So luckily I went to Russia before for my third novel for Savage Son. I went over to Kamchatka Peninsula, did a hunt over there, and had a crazy experience with a bear over there. But I don't know if I should go back. Okay.

I don't know exactly yeah of you exactly compatriot actor Danny Trejo said in an interview He was aware of ten people having been murdered for their involvement in the film. Holy shit, man Holy shit the first killing occurred 12 days after the film's premiere when one of the film's consultants Charles Charlie Brown Manriquez

A member of La Eme was killed in Ramona Gardens, L.A.'s oldest public housing project. Another consultant to film, 49-year-old grandmother Ana Lazarga, commonly known as the gang lady, was murdered when she was gunned down in an East Los Angeles driveway while loading luggage into her car the day of her mother's funeral. Dang. Wow. Wow. Yeah, they were pissed. Yeah, it's like...

Dangerous people you're making movies about. Do you ever worry about that with stuff you talk about on here? Yeah. You could always worry about that. Yeah. I mean, if you're going to talk about things that are consequential. Right. You know? I mean, we live in a weird fucking world right now. Yeah. We live in a weird world of all kinds of insane things happening simultaneously. Yeah. You know? Yeah.

It's pretty wild. I got off the plane yesterday and I hear this, Jack! And it was a guy walks up and he ended up being an Austin detective. So first I thought I was in trouble. And then he liked the books and everything. We apparently have some mutual friends. But yeah, it's crazy out there. People can find you so much easier now. I don't like that. It's definitely not a safer time to be alive. But it's also...

It's interesting that we're moving towards some – I mean because people can find you. We're moving towards some very weird thing where there's not going to be any secrets anymore. Yeah. And I don't think it's that far from now. No. And I think it might be the only way human beings ever truly understand each other. Oh, really? I think it's going to happen through technology and I think it's going to happen in our lifetimes. That our relationship to each other is going to be incredibly different than what it is now. Man.

We got that coming up. I think that's a part of it. I have Alice, this character I introduced two books ago for In the Blood and an AI quantum computer. And people really liked this character. But I didn't want to sideline her for the next one, for the last book, because I didn't want to rely on her like Michael Knight in the 80s calling Kit Carr on his watch and having it –

to jump in, transam, and zip off. So I sidelined her last book, but I knew I couldn't introduce a character like that and just ignore her forever. So she comes back in this, and even since I did the research for the last book, and that's only two years, things have increased significantly.

It's such an exponential rate as far as AI, quantum computing, and then the military side of that, autonomous control of platforms. So all these new things that are coming out, whether it's submarines or it's aircraft or surface ships, whatever it might be, they're all being built so that they can be autonomously controlled. They may not be yet, but they have that ability. Have you seen that insane new ship that's autonomous? It's all controlled. It looks like a manta ray. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I've seen that one.

That one's no passengers, no crew. There's nobody on it at all. No one on it at all. It's just a machine. And it looks like a damn spaceship. Yeah. See?

See if you can find it. Yeah. It's crazy looking. Yeah. You look at it, you're like, if this was not ours, if you were living in like 1970 and someone saw something like this. Yeah. Dang. Look at that. That's crazy. That's wild. No windows? Yeah. You'd be like, oh my God, it's a spaceship. It's from another planet. All new stealth stuff, stealth bombers, the speed that these things go at, the altitudes that they travel. Yeah. It's wild. I also think there's...

new ones that operate on geothermal energy and they can make hydrogen out of water like they can do wild shit with some of these new devices that they're creating and this is the future there's a future right here so that's what I'm exploring this in this thing it's like what happens if you turn over autonomous control or have one of these things just take control right that is a real problem that that's that's a real problem that people are terrified of when it comes to weapon systems and

And if you're doing it, what is China doing? So we're doing it. China's doing it. And you have to get inside your enemy's decision making process. And they're making decisions so fast using AI to make them. I mean, you can have missiles raining down on the West Coast before our generals and elected leaders are like, I hate calling them leaders, elected representatives, because they're not really, they don't seem like leaders to me. Elected representatives are supposed to represent us before they're even out of bed. Yeah. Yeah.

And not only that, but these supersonic ones can change directions. So you can't even picture where they're going. Hypersonic ones, hypersonic missiles, passive targeting. So you have all of these things. So I got to explore all that in the past. Probably why this book took so long is because I was doing that research and it's just new things coming to light every single day. And then people you're talking to in that space giving you little hints about what's really out there. And then you talk to somebody else who gives you another little hint and you get to put this mosaic together like a reporter might. And...

I think what I describe in the book, I think we're way past it. We're already way past it as far as quantum computing, AI, and the ability of those platforms, what they have, what they can do. Yeah, I think so too. I think what we know is probably really the tip of the iceberg. And I think they're probably...

far more advanced than we think they are right now. I think that's what a lot of the UAP stuff is. Yeah. I've been thinking that for a long time. I think it's very possible that we are visited. It's very... Tucker Carlson seems to think they're spiritual beings that they've always been here, like they're devils and angels. Right. That might be true, too. I don't know. Listen to that. I mean...

But also, probably we do get visited. But also, probably some of those are ours. Probably, there's something about the government telling you that these are off-world crafts that make you go, oh, you made it. Instantly. Right. My brain goes, you're not square about anything. Right.

Right. All those stealth technology, you know, and they finally unveiled it, I think, in the maybe late 80s. Part of that was to let the Soviets know that we do have this capability because they didn't have theirs yet. And so we can get there before they'd even know. My fear is that they're not ours. Yeah. The big fear is that not only do they exist, but maybe some of them are not ours. And so some other countries have the ability to have these things that move in these insane ways.

that we can't quite do. Yeah. That might be possible too. But if they're telling you that they're from another planet, they're not from another planet. That's my feeling. They're not... They spent three years lying about the Russia collusion story. Yeah. And they got mainstream media to repeat it all. They spent all these years lying about... Like, fill in the blank. Everything. Pretty much everything. Why the fuck would we believe they're telling us the truth about UFOs? Exactly. I just think the whole thing seems...

It seems... It seems suspect? Yeah, it just seems too obvious. You know, I don't believe that they would just start telling you that there's off-world crafts. I just, like, I don't think so. Right. All these years? Yeah. Now you guys are just going to start, oh, it's these brave whistleblowers. Are you sure? Are you sure? Because...

I smell bullshit. I smell at least some of this is bullshit. I don't know how much of it's bullshit, though. I think there's too many stories from the past when this technology was impossible. The Kenneth Arnold sightings, when they first started calling them flying saucers. I think you saw them in, was it Washington State? Is that a long time ago? Yeah, it was in the 1950s. Most of them started happening after we dropped the bombs. That's why my comedy club, the rooms are named after the nuclear bombs.

Yeah, it's Fat Man and Little Boy. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because in UFO folklore, it's obviously the comedy Mothership. You have a UFO. You walk in the front doors of a UFO. It's fantastic. In UFO lore, they all started appearing shortly after the bombs were dropped. 1947. And that's when we'd reorganized the military and intelligence agencies.

Right there. We changed the Department of War to the Department of Defense and the Secretary of War to the Secretary of Defense. And everything gets reorganized, right? 1947 is a very pivotal year. So look at what it says here. Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting occurred on June 24th, 1947 when private pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed that he saw a string of nine shiny unidentified flying objects flying past Mount Rainier at speeds that Arnold estimated at a minimum of 1,200 miles an hour. Dang.

So he saw these things flying at a rate, you know, in 47, they're propeller planes and there's no way anything we had can move like that. And he's watching these things go at an insane rate of speed. And so he said they skipped across the sky like flying saucers on a lake.

And so it became flying saucers. Flying saucers. Yeah. And so people back then that saw those things, there's no way that was the Soviets. There's no way that was the Germans. There was no, no, no, no. That's not ours. So whatever the fuck that is, if that was real, if the guy really did see those things,

And then there was a string of them that were over the White House in 1950-something. Really? Yeah. There was photographed ones that were over the White House. There's actually a news story about it, that these things flew over the White House. Okay. And I think they moved at a bizarre rate of speed, too. So those ones give me pause. Yeah. Because, look, the universe is... That's obviously a drawing. That's a drawing. But I think there is a photograph of it. Yeah.

Is that the photograph? That's wild. It might not be? Okay. Saucers over Washington, D.C. So what does the story say? It looks like a comic book.

...

The airport control tower radar operator verified the same sightings. They were over the restricted areas of Washington, including the White House and the Capitol. So those kind of things. Yeah, yeah. You got to go, well, what is that? Right. Look, the universe is big beyond our wildest imagination. There's no way we could even fathom how big it is. It's not possible.

Look at that. Yeah. Oh, man. So they moved at such sudden bursts of intense speed that radar could not track them simultaneously. Those objects seemed to head for the White House, the Capitol building, and the White House in triangular formations. The lighting made the front page... The sighting, rather, made the front page headlines in all newspapers. Dang. Yeah. So those kind of things, you go, okay, well, what is that? Right. The universe is...

It's impossible for us to even get our heads around how big it is. So if there is some planet out there that's in the Goldilocks zone that's gone through what we're going through currently but is 10,000 years ahead of us and finds the signature of nuclear bombs on this planet and they realize, okay, these crazy fuckers have come into this new age where they could split the atom. Yeah.

And so we should probably take a visit. Yeah. It was interesting hearing Tucker talk about that part on here, like where that technology came from. Yeah. I hadn't really thought about that before. Well, that's Diana Pasolka's work. Diana Pasolka and Gary Nolan, who is a legitimate professor, I believe at Stanford University.

And they Diana Pasolka was also a professor. She's a professor of religion. And they have investigated a lot of these crash sites. And the way they describe them, the people that are investigating the crash sites, the actual scientists, they call them donations. What? Yeah. Donations. That's how they they don't even think they're crashing anything.

like as an accident. They think some of them, they're just sending down here. Like, hey, figure that out, stupid. You know, send them to some remote place. Yeah. Slam it down there and then the government has to rope off the area. Yeah.

And you can still find parts in this one area of New Mexico where this one crash site was. They didn't tell them where it was. They blindfolded them, took them out to this crash site, let them investigate it. And you can still find these pieces of this, some kind of metal that you can take and you can crumple it in your hand like tinfoil. And then it goes right back to the original shape. Really? It's the same thing that was described in Roswell, New Mexico. The people that...

The Roswell thing is very hard because there's so many people involved and there's so many similar stories. But the problem is when a story has been told for so long, people repeat a story. They're told in towns when there's no recording devices. There's no – no one has phones. This is a long time ago. They have regular phones but no cell phones obviously.

And what they're doing with all this stuff is they're all talking about it, and then a narrative gets established, and then people tend to repeat narratives that are established. It's hard, because you're talking about something that happened in 1947. But there's a lot of things that come almost right after Roswell. One of them is a transistor, and the other one is...

Microchips, maybe? Optical... What is that stuff called? Fiber optics. Fiber optics. Fiber optics seem to emerge after that. And it's one of the things that's described in the crash. Yeah. The people that have described it. But the thing is, like, again, you're hearing these things decades later. You're hearing... It's...

It's very difficult to figure out what the fuck actually happened, but something seems to have happened because the Roswell Daily Record I have a framed cover of the front page of the Roswell Daily Record from 1947 where it says that we there's a crashed UFO that the government flew to the base and that you know It's like in the news. Yeah, which doesn't seem like something back then that you would just make up. Yeah, I

I don't know unless there's a reason behind it, distraction. I mean, who knows? Yeah, who knows? It could be something that the United States was working on. But it seems like they were trying to cover it up so much so that they flew the wreckage in two separate planes to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. And Truman met him there.

Yeah. 47 is a big year. 63, obviously, a big year with the Kennedy assassination. 59 is a huge year. A lot of things happened in 59. There's a book. Was it Schooner Eisenhower met him there? I forget, but...

All that time is so filled with deception and weirdness, right? It is. It's also when Operation Paperclip was going on. Yeah, yeah. So they took all these Nazi scientists from Germany and they brought them over and integrated them into NASA. Isn't that wild? All those people that had those backgrounds did the things that they did back there and bring them over. And a lot of them had those dueling scars on their face, so they looked sinister. Do you know about the dueling scars? No.

So Nazis, I guess, when they were going through this rite of passage, when they were in whatever university they were going to, they would have duels with real rapiers, like real swords, and they would slice their faces up. Wow. They would wear goggles. What? Yeah.

Yeah, and they would have sword fights. I feel like I should know this. These guys got their faces all cut to shit, and that was part of the pride of being a Nazi, was you had these dueling scars on your face, that you had done this. And a lot of the guys we brought over from Operation Paperclip had these dueling scars on their face. And it's one of the ways that future historians identified them as clearly being Nazis. Okay. These weren't just freak accidents. These guys all had them. Right.

They all like crazy like slices in their cheekbones. Show them some pictures because it's fucking crazy to see. I can't believe you don't know about this. I feel like I would put this in a book. I can't believe I'm teaching you something. I know, it's awesome. I love it. I forget who told me about it. It's going to make it into a book. It's a weird thing that they all did and there's photos of them all sliced up. Like see, they all had these cuts on their faces. Like look at that. That's what it looked like after the fact. So they wear these goggles on and nose protectors and they slice each other's fucking faces apart. It looks like a bad idea.

Isn't that nuts? It's a terrible idea, but it was a sign of being a badass. Just like a lot of jiu-jitsu guys today, they like to have cauliflower ear. Right, right. Yeah, back then, you have your face sliced up. You were a psycho. Oh, wow. That's crazy. Yeah. It's fucking nuts. It seems like they could wear like fencing helmets or something. No, they didn't want to. They didn't want to. They wanted to get cut up. That was part of the thing. That's the thing. Yeah. Yeah. Dang. Weird.

That's wildly, it feels like that needs to make it into one of my novels. Somebody must have that background. You'd probably want to dive into it deeper than I have. But it is, the point is there was a lot of deception that was happening in the world back then. So who knows what the real story was about Roswell. I like to think that there's something going on that's real. But I also like to think that

If the donation thing is true and that's been going on since who knows how long, you know, Bob Lazar claimed in the late 1980s that he had been working back engineering one of these things. And the way he described it is exactly how they see them move today, exactly how there's a video of these things moving in bizarre ways.

No heat signature. They seem to be like shooting across the sky. They can hold still at 120 knot winds. He was describing it. It's like the Terminator 2 hand, you know, going back in T2 and reverse engineering that technology from T2. It's interesting how movies and books eventually become reality. Well, it would be if you could travel back and forth through time and you realize that human beings are going to take everything.

X amount of steps to get somewhere, but if you can inject some technology into the equation, you could speed up the process considerably. Let them do it on their own. Let them figure this out like, oh, a transistor. Duh. And all of a sudden, electronics get far smaller. Fiber optics. Oh, okay. Oh, why didn't I think of that? Bam. Everything gets way quicker.

And the other thing that Lazar said about the crafts that was baffling to him in the 1980s, he said there was no seams. He said there was no welds, there's no rivets, there's no seams. But now we know about 3D printing. Now they can 3D print anything. And if you conceivably have a machine that's large enough, you could 3D print a spacecraft. Sure.

And it wouldn't have any seams. I mean, going back to 1963, did you hear Trump saying he's actually going to release all the JFK documents? But he said that the first time. Yeah, he said that the first time. He also said that if you knew what they told me, you wouldn't tell people either. What could that be? The CIA killed Kennedy. But that seems like we already have. Yeah, but it's not clear.

There's a lot of books that are saying that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone that are still pretty good books. Yeah. Gerald Posner's book. Yeah. People read them and they believe it. I don't believe it. I think Lee Harvey Oswald was involved. And I think that's the thing is people think it's either one or the other. Either Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone or someone else was involved and Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy. No, Lee Harvey Oswald went to Russia.

Like during the height of the Cold War. A little odd. Yeah, real odd that they let him come back over here. Lee Harvey Oswald was clearly involved in some sort of shady espionage type shit. And, you know, married a Russian woman, like the whole deal. The whole thing is crazy. It's insane. The odds that he was completely innocent, very low. It seems like he was over here doing some shady shit. He had always been involved in some shady intelligence type shit.

But I think there was a lot of people, and I think they wanted to really make sure that Kennedy got killed. And I think there was probably a lot of people involved, and I think Lee Harvey Oswald probably was a patsy, and I think that's probably why Jack Ruby shot him. Yeah. And all you have to think about as far as mob involvement goes in that is look at Jack Ruby, his background. Yeah, fully mobbed up. Yeah, fully mobbed up.

There's also E. Howard Hunt, who confessed to the killing on his deathbed, said that they were in the grassy knoll. There's other people, like Woody Harrelson's father apparently was supposedly involved. Interesting. Yeah, Woody Harrelson's father was a bad person. Really? A bad guy. Really? Like an assassin. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, known murderer. Hmm.

And so I think there was a lot of people that wanted JFK dead. Oh, yeah. After the Bay of Pigs, there was a lot of people that wanted JFK dead. He wanted to get rid of the NSA. He wanted to get rid of the CIA. He wanted to get rid of the federal bank. He wanted to get rid of everything. Federal Reserve. He wanted to get rid of the Federal Reserve. It's like the whole thing is crazy. Yeah.

The Warren Commission report should have been called the Dulles Commission report. Yeah, right. I mean, Alan Dulles, the guy you essentially fire, is now in charge of this investigation. Insane. You fire the guy. Now he's in charge of investigating who assassinated you. And, you know, the best book that I ever read about it was David Lifton's book, Best Evidence. And David Lifton was an accountant, and they hired him to go over –

the Warren report. And so he goes over the Warren commission report and he finds all, he read the entire thing, which is like insanely long. And he read all, it finds all these inconsistencies and all these things that don't make any sense. The difference between the way they viewed the body at Dallas versus the way they saw it at Bethesda, Maryland, when they brought the body there.

And then there's the magic bullet, which anybody who's ever shot anything with a gun knows that's horseshit. I know. There's so much. 1963 was a very pivotal year. Oh, yeah. Nothing's been the same since. Not that things are going to always stay the same. Things are always going to evolve. But that was a turning point, no doubt about it, when it comes to the power of federal government. No doubt about it. And, you know, I didn't know until Tucker explained it on the show about Nixon that

About how they forced Nixon, who's the most popular president in history. That was a government orchestrated coup to get him out. That was super interesting. I had not heard that until I listened to Tucker on your show and having him talk about Bob Woodward and where he came from. Crazy. Wasn't that wild? Crazy. Naval intelligence. Yeah, and I listened to that right before I went back to- All of a sudden he has the number one story. Yeah.

A brand new guy. Brand new guy. Number one story. It's a great story. I mean, it's a great story, Hollywood story. Right. But it is now when you hear it in those terms, the way Tucker talked about it, that it is suspect. The whole thing's crazy. Yeah. When Tucker explains it, the whole thing makes you go, what? Yeah.

It was interesting because I listened to that show right before I went back to New York for the Simon & Schuster 100th anniversary celebration event. And I was speaking there. And so was Bob Woodward. I was sitting next to him in the green room. Did you talk to him? No, I didn't feel it was appropriate to –

To bring that up. Did you talk to him about anything? Not really. Not really. More like a nice to meet you type thing. Yeah, nice to meet you suspect person. Exactly. I was looking. I was, you know, I was looking. It was wild. How's Bernstein? What's his deal? I don't know. That's a good question. Yeah. Did he get dragged along? Is he a part of it? I've got to have him on the show. Is he? I don't know. I don't know if those guys are alive. But everybody looks at that as like the seminal work of, you know, investigative journalism. Seminal, like, criticism.

what they developed, the story they put out there. Oh my God, the president of the United States is a crook. I'm not a crook.

You know, and he has to resign. And then Gerald Ford, the only unelected president ever who also was on the Warren Commission report. Exactly. What? Exactly. I mean, it's all interconnected. It's all crazy. It's like, it would be a great script. It would be a great movie if it was fiction. People might not even believe it if it wasn't out there and you wrote it in a book. Let's say you wrote it in 1960 before all that stuff starts happening. Get the fuck out of here. That's not how the world works, son. The world is...

Beautiful. Exactly. United States is good. That's why it's so hard to do these things because fact is stranger than fiction. And it's, and all of these things that were conspiracy theories are being proved to have been true. And so it's harder to, and people that are in power have always manipulated the truth. If they can, if they can get away with it. I think it's part of the fun of being in power, being able to get away with shit.

It's awful. It's awful. I can't imagine running for something. I mean, it's very anti-American, which is shocking because they're the people that run America. That's what's weird. That's what's so weird about it. Yeah. I guess nothing sounds worse to me than being a politician. It sounds horrible. That's why when I see a good person doing it, I'm like, wow, well,

Good luck. Yeah. Good luck to you, sir. Yeah. You've decided. I mean, there's very few left. There's very few compelling leaders that step up to the political arena and you go, wow, that's someone who I really like. It's generally in almost every regard the lesser of two evils. Yeah. That's why it's amazing when you see Tulsi get sidelined. Yeah. I mean, it's amazing.

what's great about her is that she has changed positions on things. Yeah. And, uh, and she's, uh,

But because of that, she gets it from both sides now. So you get the people that say, oh, look, she once had this view of Second Amendment or whatever, and now it's changed, so I don't trust her type thing. Well, how are you going to ever convince someone or talk to someone or open somebody's aperture about how to think if you don't want them to change sides and don't bring them into the fold? Yeah, it seems silly to make people stick to their original idea on something. If they don't, they're flip-flopping.

That seems silly. Yeah, you might not know. If you're a human being and you see things... Like, there's a lot of people that were pretty hardcore leftist liberal progressives that lived in California that were like, okay, these policies are insane. Like, I'm getting the fuck out of here. Like, Jillian Michaels was just... She just did a podcast recently. She discussed it. Yeah. You know, and she was saying, like...

If I am saying you're out of your fucking mind, maybe you're out of your fucking mind. So people change their perspective based on new information. The people that bury their head in the sand and pretend everything's amazing and we're eventually going to pull out of this and our philosophy is correct, you're not course correcting. If you're not course correcting, you're not learning. And if you're not changing your opinion in light of...

insane information. If you live in California, you get insane amounts of information showing these policies are not working. That this approach to law enforcement, this approach to dealing with criminals, it's not working. It's not good. You

You can't do this. No, it's crazy. And that same trip back in New York, I went to this place for dinner called the Times Square Cafe. Yeah. So not being from New York and not really knowing the area that well, I assumed it was fairly close to Times Square. Apparently it was once near Times Square. Not anymore. So I went to dinner there and with my agent, then walked her her apartment and thought, oh, I'll just walk. My hotel is close to Times Square. I'll just walk. Yeah.

Times Square Cafe is not anywhere near Times Square. So I put in the phone. I'm like, all the buildings are kind of sending you in circles. So I walk at night across New York, like 30 minutes, maybe even 40. And I'm on E&E. I'm on edge. And I'm making my move here across. And it was sketchy.

So move forward another month. A couple weeks ago, I was in Budapest. So we're filming the show over in Budapest. Budapest is amazing. It's going to make its way into one of my future novels. There's so much Russian money there, Ukrainian money there, which is probably our money, Chinese money there. I mean, there's...

Two Bentleys in front of the hotel every day, two Ferraris, two Lamborghinis, Porsches everywhere. But I had to walk across the city. We watched the first episode, the director's cut of the first episode of this new series. So I watched it at a buddy's apartment because everyone's been over there for the last few months filming the show. So some are living in hotels, some are living on the economy in town in apartments. So we watched it and it was awesome. And I decided to walk across Budapest.

Totally different. Late at night, past midnight, walking across, totally safe. I felt so safe walking across that city. It was clean. There was nobody eyeing you up. What's the population there? I don't know. It seems pretty packed. It's pretty, but like any city. But it's not like the size of New York, right? No, no, no. New York's its own animal as far as that stuff goes. Yeah, what is the population of Budapest?

Let's guess. Oh, jeez. I'm the worst at that. I'll say 2 million. Look at that. Oh, 1.756. Come on. Look at that. Nice. I'll do a guess. That was good. That was close. So that's kind of like Austin. You know, Austin's about a million, and then the surrounding outside area of Austin's like a million. Yeah. Nice. And there's not, you know, it's a lot safer here than LA. I think there's just something happens when you have large populations. Yeah. And then also, you know, New York is...

They're doing this no cash bail thing where they're just letting people out of jail, including people that assault police officers, including illegal immigrants that assault police officers on video.

They just let them out. How do we come back from from this? You come back, unfortunately, by going too far in the other direction until you want to bounce back and be liberal again. Unfortunately, this is what happens when people get unreasonable. When they go that far, then you usher in some totalitarian, hard-nosed, sort of right-wing person who also comes with a stripping of certain civil liberties.

you know, like thing and also has a more cruel approach to certain social issues. And then people go, we need more kindness. We need more this. Then we, you know, it's, but generally it's like it used to be at least that you would get the right wing that we're pushing for war. The most bizarre thing about our time is that the left is

is calling for aid to Ukraine and that... I think they just signed a commitment to help Ukraine for the next 10 years. Oh, wow. Wasn't that true? I don't know. I think...

I think there's just something that Biden just signed, and I think they're promising like $800 billion, or they're going to need $800 billion over the next 10 years. $800 billion. Chicken feed. Of our money. Don't worry about it, bro. Don't worry about it, bro. We have plenty of money. Money. We have a lot of money. We've spent on Cheetos. Just send a little of that to our friends in Ukraine. Like, the whole thing is nuts. Look at this. Oh, look at that. They passed it on a Friday. And a $50 billion loan. Nice little loan. Yeah. They'll pay that back. What do they call it a loan? What do they call it a loan?

Yeah, it's funny. A series of pledges of military and financial aid made by Western allies this week, including a 10-year security agreement with the United States and a $50 billion loan issued by Washington and the European Union.

So interesting. I was in Normandy for the D-Day commemoration events a couple weeks ago. Well, a few days last week, I guess. But it's not just one day. It's not just June 6th. It's like two weeks of events. Went back there with the Best Defense Foundation. I went right from Budapest over to there. 48 World War II veterans. So they're all creeping up on 100, at 100, or over 100 years old. And a week's worth of events. So I'm volunteering, helping them get in and out of their wheelchairs, making sure they're taking their medicines, eating, getting them to the events, all that sort of thing.

But totally inappropriate during the speech is, and even during the benediction or the prayer at the beginning, mentioned not Ukraine by name, but like the storm clouds are coming. So you have all these veterans of World War II, D-Day, on this stage at the American cemetery. They're overlooking Omaha Beach. And these politicians get up there to give speeches. Can't...

help themselves. They have to mention storm clouds coming. They have to mention it. They didn't mention it by name. I think the French president did, but he's speaking in French, so I'm not 100% sure. I think he mentioned it by name. Biden, Austin,

So they use it as a political tool. They did. They couldn't help themselves. It was disgusting to be there and hear that. And you have these guys on stage and they did so much for our nation, giving us all these freedoms that we have today, freedoms and opportunities. First out of their landing crafts, coming over the beach at Normandy, across that beach, machine gun positions up high and...

Now you're using them essentially as a political prop on this. It was that part, that part, uh, was hard to stomach. Um, but interestingly enough, we went from there to the international ceremony down on Omaha beach. So from the cemetery down to the beach and the national cemetery has all of these different world leaders there. And, and,

Zelensky's there. Oh, wow. Yeah. So it's a visual type of a thing and trying to equate what happened in World War II on D-Day to what's going on with Ukraine and Russia. Yeah. Yeah. Not appropriate for the 80th anniversary of D-Day for these guys that jumped out of planes, landed gliders, backfired.

back then. Imagine landing a glider at night on June 6th in these fields where the Germans have put these poles up so that if you land, you can just get crushed in your glider. When a guy was talking to you, his glider came in. He went right between two of these poles. It ripped off the wings. Holy shit. And then you have to figure out where your guys are because, you know, obviously there's no GPSs. You just landed somewhere in northern France. You're alive now. And now you've got to link up with people and figure out how to get to the town or the bridge that you're supposed to defend or take. Whew.

Um, so those guys did that. And then you have the audacity to bring up current politics. They can't help themselves. Every opportunity they have to do it. Yep. Biden did it. The person doing the prayer was a great prayer to start everything off. I was like, wow, this is amazing. And then she had to bring up these storm clouds on the horizon type of a thing. And, uh, certainly Austin went up there and did it. Biden did it. And then they have Zelensky sitting there. It's just very disturbing. It's very disturbing that we don't learn.

It really is. All the way back to Smedley Butler's War is a Racket. We don't learn. And money always motivates everything. And there's always some way to make some sort of a moral argument why we need to do certain things, why we need to act, and why we need to fund this and fund that.

But ultimately, there's a lot of money being moved around. And we know that once it gets over there, we really don't know where the fuck it's going. Yeah. We really don't. There's a lot of nice cars in Budapest. Yeah. And other places in Europe, too. I've talked to people in the intelligence services. People are making money. Uh-huh. Yeah. There's a lot of money rolling around over there. And it's not easy to track. And it's not really something that anybody's, like,

trying really hard to document. It seems also very dangerous to point out if you were an official person and you started pointing out the fact that this money is moving around in a certain way. Like Tucker Carlson said, they tried to kill him.

So there was an assassination attempt on him. Really? When he was there. Yeah, something was set up. What was it? It was like a bomb someone set up in the basement or something. You talked about it on the show? Yeah. I missed that part. Yeah, and he kind of had a feeling that something was going to happen. And he had this intuition to stay in his room. No way. Yeah. I'm going to ask him about that. We just texted him the other day. I'm going to ask him about that. That's crazy. Yeah, it's, I mean...

That's interesting. This is a wild, wild time that the left is the one that... The left side, the Democrats, the progressives, are the ones that are calling for this crazy war. I know. Because when we grew up back in the day, it was the exact opposite. They were trying to get us out of everything. Yeah, they didn't want to have anything to do with anything. They wanted no wars. And everybody's like, great, because this was after Vietnam. And if you wanted to be a Democrat and you wanted to win back then, you had to be anti-war. You had to be anti-war.

anti anything remotely close to what's going on right now. Especially when you know the history of like NATO and moving arms closer to the Russia's border and saying that Kamala Harris saying that Russia's going to or that Ukraine's going to join NATO. Like what? Yeah.

That's pretty wild. That's a crazy thing to say openly in the world. You've got to put yourselves in the other person's shoes. There's something looking at things from their perspective, and that's what we do in the military, trying to put ourselves in the enemy's shoes, figuring out how they're going to adapt to what we're doing right now. And you have to do that at the strategic levels, too. But unfortunately, you get people at these levels who just stuck with it, and they've never created anything in their life before.

And they don't understand the history, but guess what they can do? They know how to manipulate a population through their words and through all these things, all these different verticals and institutions that support them to get them into these positions in office. And it's tough. I mean, it's a machine, and that machine is hungry.

What do you think about what's going on right now in Cuba, off the coast of Cuba? I saw that the other day. So we have Russian submarines? Yeah. Jeez. Russian submarines that are like, you know, how many miles? I think they're like- Yeah, it's right there. At some point in time, they're like 30 miles away from Miami. Right there. It's wild. What's the closest they got to Miami?

I think that, well, Russia, or excuse me, Cuba is what, 90 miles? I think so. 90 miles from the point, the furthest south point of Florida. That's close. That's nuts. Mm-hmm. That's like here to San Antonio. So that's sending a message. And of course, I think I saw one of our spokespeople came out and said something about, don't worry, they're not nuclear. What the fuck does that mean? All right, exactly. Okay. There's warships. Yeah, yeah, right there. Russian warships. So obviously he's sending a message. Yeah. Obviously. Yeah.

I mean, especially with this new thing where we're sending more money and committing to it for 10 years. Yeah.

Holy shit. Yeah. I mean, what are we getting into? The bad part of all this is that if you're the enemy, you almost just want to let us not do anything because we're doing such a good job at destroying ourselves. We are, but they're helping us too. Oh, they can help. They can give a nudge here or there. They're helping us a lot on social media. Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of that on social media. One of the FBI analysts said that he thinks that, former FBI analyst said that he thinks it's 80%.

of Twitter's trolls. Really? U.S. submarine pulls into Guantanamo Bay a day after Russian warships arrive in Cuba. Oh, great. Oh, wonderful. Oh, Jesus Christ.

Look at that. U.S. Navy submarines arrived in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in a show of force as a fleet of Russian warships gathered for planned military exercises in the Caribbean. U.S. Southern Command said that USS Helena, a nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine, pulled into the waters near the U.S. base in Cuba on Thursday, just a day after a Russian frigate, a nuclear-powered submarine, an oil tanker, and a rescue tug crossed into Havana Bay after drills in the Atlantic Ocean.

Yeah. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Is it also or something else? Russian submarine spotted near west coast of Scotland. Oh, great. Yeah. What are they doing? Well, you have, I mean. None of this is good, guys. And to say nothing about what China is doing. Oh, it was spotted there before it arrived in Havana.

Yeah, all of it's terrifying. Terrifying and we're, you know, in the middle of this, we're also in a war with them to develop AI. Like who's going to get to it fast enough? Oh, yeah. Yeah. And that's this book right here was all about that. But from the China-US perspective, those geopolitics, who's doing what? Taiwan, the Taiwan issue in there as well. So it's, you know, it's fascinating to

to have done that research now and see where China is compared to where they were a few years ago and then think about where we're going in the future. But it's tough to do all that research and remain hopeful. So I try to, you know what I mean? That's what I love about you. You remain hopeful. You talk to all these different people and interested in so many things, but yet you remain so hopeful in all these conversations that you have with people. Yeah, I'm hopeful, but I'm not sure if I'm right.

You know, I started getting nervous about China when they banned the Huawei devices. Yeah. And I was like, wait, what? What's going on? Because as a phone nerd, Huawei had some insane phones. Their phones were, like, more advanced than U.S. phones. Okay. And they banned their devices when one of their newer phones was coming out, and apparently...

It's not just phones. It was a bunch of different routers and different technology that they had that they believed China would be able to access information through. Oh, yeah. Ah.

It's embedded in almost everything that we have, that we rely upon, not just on the civilian side, but on the military side, the intelligence side. And they think long term. Admiral Rachel Levine is on the case. Don't you worry. We have competent members of our military. It's so bad. And that's why we have these recruiting issues. I mean, if you're going to encourage one of your kids to join the military right now, I mean, I don't know how that works.

I don't know how you can, but they make their own decisions. Well, that's why they're bringing back the registration for the draft. I saw that. Yeah, which is nuts. Like, what are you saying? In the age of AI, you're going to force people to go into war. And what is going on? What are you doing? Why are you doing this? It's because of lack of recruitment. You're going to force them to go in now, and then when you're there, what, you indoctrinate them with all this bullshit? So instead of getting people that want to serve, which is the people that you want, the people that are dedicated to it, that are driven towards this life,

Instead of that, you're forcing people to do it, and then once you get them in there, you can kind of force your ideology on them. The type of people that sign up for the military, they would be way less likely to buy into that horseshit. House passes a defense bill. Service is already mandatory for male ages 18 to 24.

And so it was already a thing. Just it's automatic now. You still had to do it. So you don't have to go down there and yeah, and to the post office and do it. That was kind of a cool rite of passage though. Do you remember doing that? They gave me a free razor in the mail. I think they did. Hey, wow. It's fantastic. You still have it. I don't remember doing that. You don't remember doing that? So you had to go down to it at 18, right? Yeah. And what year was this? And you had to do that? I did it when I was, yeah. And the, what year was that? 90, something like that. Um, yeah, you had to go down and do it. You do it at the post office. So for me that would have been 85. Yeah.

I don't remember that at all. Yeah. Was that something you had to do back then? Yeah. I don't know. I might be breaking the law. You might be breaking the law. It was just a legal thing. It was one of those things you probably just back in the day didn't remember doing it.

But I remember when the Gulf, when Desert Storm broke out, I was living with a buddy of mine and we were watching on TV and I was like, what? Right. A war? I thought we were done. I was alive during Vietnam in San Francisco. I was a kid and when Vietnam ended, I remember thinking as a kid, I guess I was like 10 or something. I remember thinking, whew.

Glad we got over that. No more wars. Like, we figured that out. Yeah. But we haven't figured out shit. Nope. And now it's even more complicated with all this artificial intelligence stuff. And, you know, Mike Baker was in here and he was showing us these videos of these fighter jets that are using AI now that are winning dogfights worldwide.

100%. 100% of the time over actual human pilots. So human pilots can't beat the AI system. They just can't. They lose 100% of the time. That's nuts. So take that 10 years from now. Right. Then put a jet out there that can do maneuvers at insane G-forces because it doesn't have any humans in it. Right. So it doesn't have to think about that. And so now you add that. Mm-hmm.

I know you got that. And China's doing the same. Yeah. And, uh, but they're also smart because they're buying up property next to military bases. They tried to buy the hotel Dell, the hotel Del Coronado right by the seal base down there. So that got blocked, but there's also these, that's so crazy. They're called the shores. And there are these apartments that I think you're building like the 73rd. So ugly, but they are super high, like sky rises. And what they look down on, they look down right on the seal training compound and war calm, which is our Admiral and everybody else. China owns it. And, uh,

I would know they don't own that. They tried to buy the hotel Dell next door, but I would be shocked if they don't own a few floors of that building. Oh,

Looking right down. They bought a, I did some research for this book on it, and a book called The Dragons and the Snakes by David Kulcolan. And he talks about them buying up hotels in Scotland that watch submarines head out there. A few other places, one in Italy. So they're buying up properties next to these bases where they can essentially observe and put listening devices out and do all those sorts of things that you need a base of operations to do.

And you don't even need a base operation for a lot of this stuff anymore because it's all virtual. And where are all these things made? Well, China and Taiwan. It's just crazy that in Taiwan you can't buy anything. Like Americans wanted to go over and buy land next to military bases. They'd be like, go fuck yourself. But us being an open country, it's almost to our, you know, it's almost detrimental. Yeah.

Our openness, our strength is almost a weakness. And they can exploit it. So they're very aware of that. So you're looking at your enemy and you're looking at those things that you can do to exploit those weaknesses. And that's what they're doing. That's what we would do. Yeah. Tim Dillon was explaining the real estate hustle that so many foreign countries use our real estate as money laundering.

So like there's so many different apartment buildings in New York City that are just empty. Empty. There's no one in them. Yeah, yeah. But they're all bought out. Right. Because like Russia buys them. Yeah. Russian oligarchs buy them. It's a nice way to funnel your money around. Yep. You got real estate holdings here and there. You own a billion here and there. All around the world. Yeah, they do that all around.

All around the world they do that stuff. Well, then that was weird during the Ukraine invasion where they started stealing their yachts.

I know. It's confiscated their yachts. I was like, what? What happened to that? That kind of went away too. I don't know. And also like- What are those things? You got to fucking maintain those things. Yeah. Are they just cities? Like if you have like a Mark Zuckerberg type yacht, like he just had some fucking $300 million yacht built. Nice. I think actually more than that. I think it's $500 million for this fucking yacht. Yeah. And how much does that cost a year to maintain? Yeah, yeah.

Oh, here it is. Oh.

Authorities in Fiji seized the 348-foot, $300 million Ameda in May of 2022, pursuant to a U.S. warrant alleging it's owned by Suleiman Kermov, a multi-billionaire sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2014 and 2018 in response to Russia's activities in Syria and Ukraine. Jesus. Dang. Look at that.

Wow. Man. Wow. That's crazy. So that's just one. We're paying for that. Here are the super yachts seized from Russian oligarchs. And we're paying to maintain those. Yeah. Oh, that's so brutal. How many of them are there? Boy, there's a lot of fucking clicks you got to go through these things. I am not. Yeah. How many of them are there? How many did they get? So that's the one that we just talked about.

This is the Tango, the Lady M, these fucking massive things. And so these Russian oligarchs, a lot of them, they rush to get their yachts to different countries that are more sympathetic. Yeah. That let them get away with it.

But I don't even know how that works. Like if they go out into the sea, can they get hijacked? International waters? Yeah. How does that work? I don't know. I was concentrating on the $7 million a year to maintain. Yeah, our money. Our tax dollars are going to maintain a yacht. Well spent. I don't understand. So are they saying that these Russian oligarchs were a part of the invasion of Ukraine, so they're allowed to steal their yachts? I think they're saying it's Putin's idea.

Inner Circle? Something like that. Yeah, so they're connected to Putin, so they're going to snatch their yachts. Yeah, whoever. I mean, we all know that he's one of the richest guys in the world. He might be the richest guy, they say. Yeah, he might be worth like...

Some insane amount isn't that wild going to the richest guy in the world well have you seen that house that they're allegedly building for him that is it's one on the He's on the coast yeah on the cliffs. I put it in the last book. I think if it's the same one I think so underground bunkers. I don't even sorts of stuff They haven't even proven that it's his and he's like that's not my house right yeah Yeah, no I put in the last book yeah It's a it's wild you can zoom in on it you can zoom in on it and check it out and see it's a multi-billion dollar house and

Isn't that crazy? Yeah. Whatever this thing is, whether it's his or not.

Yeah. But a $500 million yacht from Zuckerberg, he's not missing that, though. Isn't that crazy? That's nuts. You don't even miss $500 million. Yeah, that's when you should get a yacht. Yeah. You got that kind of money. You got so much money that you don't even notice if you're missing $500 million. No. There's levels. Yeah. There's levels to this world. Facebook billionaire Zuckerberg takes out his $300 million super yacht and $30 million support boat, complete with helipad. Yeah. And Mallorca as he celebrates Father's Day with his dad, Ed.

I think they used to call them shadow yachts or something like that, and they'd carry all the toys. So you have the main yacht, and then you have the shadow yacht that has all the toys on it. Look at that thing. Imagine your kid buys one of those. You're like, man, I'm going to use the fucking killer. Look at that. That is ridiculous. Is that the sport yacht? What's that? That's like a helipad. That's a different one, right? No.

That's a support boat. That's a support boat? That fucking thing? It's just got an extra boat on the side. An extra boat, helicopter. That's insane. That support boat is fucking huge. It probably has underneath, it probably has a submarine. Some of these things have two submarines. I was on one that had two submarines once, one that just goes straight down and the one that goes in the water and then you can move around in it and you'll explore reefs and stuff like that. So two submarines. Yeah.

a plane that comes out and the wings fold down. I've seen that. I've seen that with helicopters too. Helicopters that land and the wings fold and you drop it down. What the fuck? Yeah, that's pretty sick. There's levels. Yeah, it's all relative. It is all relative, I guess. It's just like at a certain point in time, like if you're a Russian oligarch and you have a $300 million yacht and someone steals it,

Can you even get another one? Are you allowed to get a new one? Probably. But I just get another one. If you have all that money. Right.

Where the fuck are you getting all that money? Like, what are you doing? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, it was such an interesting time into the Cold War, that whole period in the 90s for those guys were really those criminal enterprises really become like government. Yeah. And not to say it's that much different here. We have our own oligarchy here. Well, yeah, that's the thing, too, is like, how are they governing? Like, what's the experience for the people they're governing? And that's the thing that Tucker said when he went over to Moscow. It's like, it's beautiful. It's like real clean, safe.

Yeah. Which is weird. Yeah. I want to go and do some research there, but once again, I'm probably not. But I was lucky enough to have gone there. I don't think you should go. I would advise you to not. Yeah.

I know. But luckily I was there. So I was in Moscow before I joined the military, just traveling. So I was there so I can write about it. I remember the architecture. I remember the feeling there. So that was early 90s. And then I also went to Odessa, Ukraine back then. Oh, wow. So I went to the catacombs under the city, which allowed me to then put it in the second book, True Believer. So I think back to some of those places that I've been and get to weave those in and places that I probably shouldn't go anymore. Yeah. You're too on the nose with a lot of your work. Now it's influential. Yeah.

You know, and it's just, you should do the same thing that you're thinking about doing with your cell phone. Just farm that out. Yeah. Have somebody go that you really trust. Right. Tell them exactly what you saw and tell me, tell me what it was like. Yeah. Have them film things, have them explain it. Just tell them like, I want you to get like an hour of footage every day of just you just filming things so I can absorb it. Yeah. And it's a good idea, but it's still different. You don't get the smell. It is different, but it'll keep you alive. Yeah.

You know, keep you from getting in a cell. My publicist might like it. You know, any publicity is good publicity type thing. If they get you out. Yeah, that's a good point. The thing is, if they leave you in there, they're missing out on a lot of loot. You can't really write good books from inside. Putin's Palace, pole dancing room, refashioned to a church. They said once they published the photos of the inside at the bottom here, they had to change it because they don't want people knowing what it looks like. Yeah, I put that in the last book. Now that they put these out, they have to redo it again, they think.

Yeah, I put in the pole dancing thing. What? Isn't that wild? Putin does not use other people's dishes, doesn't go without an army of guards, does not go to the toilet in public places, she said on Monday, by publishing footage from inside his palace and floor plans who make it impossible to use the palace. Hmm.

Wow. Perhaps he will say demolish everything again and the palace will be rebuilt for the third time. But this iteration is definitely over. There was a palace. There is no palace. We have once again shown not only that he is a luxury obsessed psychopath, their words, but also his security system is complete crap. Oh, wow. Interesting. Pevchick. How do you say that guy's name? Pevchick. That's good. Pevchick.

The names are tough. Added. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. So now he's got to demolish it and start from scratch because people saw the inside of it. That's what I certainly did. That's what allowed me to describe it for that last book. Yeah. How did anybody fucking take pictures of that? How did that security breach get through? Seriously. Yeah. Oh, photo was published by Alexi Navalny. The late Alexi Navalny.

Yeah, the late. Anti-corruption foundation. That was the guy that died in jail, right? And that's the good reason why I shouldn't go to Moscow. Yeah. Yeah. Someone actually warned me not to go to China. They didn't warn me. They just said, hey, they- They stole one of our basketball players. Seriously. And not even a male. And actually-

Someone had a bit about that last night. They did a bit on that last night and talked about how, from the Russian perspective, us trading, whoever we traded for her, like the arms dealer or terrorist or whoever we exchanged this for. And he did a bit about them being like, wait, what? They're actually going to go for this? Yeah, what did they call him? What did they call him? They had some crazy name for the guy they traded. Right. It was an international arms dealer who was responsible for thousands of deaths.

I forget what his name is. Yeah, we traded people. We traded Taliban. We traded all sorts of- His name's Victor Bout, but I know he has a nickname. Yeah. Merchant of Death. Merchant of Death. Boy. That's pretty solid. That's a solid nickname. Yeah, yeah. That seems like it would be in your book.

No, no, seriously. That's the guy. He even looks like it. I mean, that's out of central casting right there. And so we let that guy go. I think he wore a Breitling. All the sketchy people wore Breitlings. Really? Yeah. Breitlings are sketchy? Yeah, it's a thing. Really? Interesting. I didn't know that. Now I know. Yeah. Watch his vespinage. He kept that sharp mustache inside the joint. Respect. Seriously, look at that.

Yeah. So they traded him. And there's also U.S. citizens, including there's a Marine that's over there that was accused of espionage. They offered the chance to trade him, and they went with Brittany Griner instead. They could take one, one for one. Yeah. I don't watch basketball, but I heard that league needs all the help it can get. I don't know if that's the help that it needs. Yeah. You know, I mean, it's just...

and not the best basketball. The best basketball is the NBA, you know? There it is. Ah, look at that. Watch the espionage right there. Yep, sketchy people wear Breitlings. What is that about? It's a...

I don't know. It just became a thing. I like Breitlings. Yeah? Does it make me sketchy? I put one in a sketchy person in this. Damn. They make a nice watch. Uh-huh. They make some cool watches. Yeah. Now, all of a sudden, I'll be thinking about them. I'm like, fuck. Yeah. I think in the Blood Diamond, I think Leonardo DiCaprio wears one. It's his character. Oh, sketchy. Yeah, a revision mercenary. Sketchy. Why Breitling? I don't know where that originated. I think it just started as a thing, and then it became what it is, and it's just kind of

Do you think sketchy people know and they're doing it on purpose? I think they do. Really? That's kind of the thing. I typed it in. It's a quote that pops up. Sketchy dudes wear brightling. There it is right there. Wow. Look at that. And look on the side there. That's a Winkler blade. No kidding. There it is. There are a lot of misconceptions about this saying. Phrase is not a dig on brightling at all. I'm a big fan of the brand, own a few of them, and wear it regularly. Sketchy is not necessarily a bad thing. Oh, this is my world, bro. There it is.

It was really in the 90s and 2000s. Breitling was worn by a lot of gray area operators, both good and bad, subjective terms. With a strong roots in aviation, Breitling is a signal that the wearer is adventurous, but also appreciates fine craftsmanship and utilitarian tools. Blackwater Breitling Emergency, former Soviet arms dealer, there he is, Victor Bout's Breitling B1, British SAS officer turned mercenary, Simon Mann's Breitling Emergency, and director of CIA, George Tennant's Breitling Aerospace. Oh.

Oh, George Tenet wearing one too. Which one's the aerospace? They got that dope one that's part digital. Right there. So that's the Blackwater symbol. See that Blackwater symbol on the side right there? Is that what that is? Yeah. So I put this exact watch in the book and I put the bad guy's company symbol on the watch just like that one. So that's a compass watch, which I've never been able to figure out. I watched a video on one of them because I think I have a Seiko that's a compass watch. Yeah.

And I was like what does that mean? How does it work as a compass you have to align the the fucking? Our hand with the Sun or some shit like that. I don't know I don't know but that one has the emergency beacon on it Pull that sucker out right you have to sign something that says right that's something you like pay for the rescue if you do it Yeah, and then they find you yeah, if you're in the Alps. Yeah, I think an antenna comes out of it. I bet

Yeah, the bottom thing. The bottom thing, lower right-hand corner. That's a serious fucking watch. Yeah, that's pretty serious. So those are all sketchy people. Interesting. How the fuck does the compass thing work? I don't know. I don't know. Some of them have GPS, but that's not what you're talking about. No, no. I mean, my watch is a Garmin, and it has a compass feature. But that's like...

It's electronics. That thing is a mechanical compass feature. Okay. Somehow or another, like when the sun rises, you know, the sun rises in the east, you point the thing at the sun. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I had a little compass on mine over and

But a real compass. A real compass, yeah. Yeah. On the band right there. It was like a backup to the backup. Right. So I had the GPS on my rifle stock right here so I could check my point man just to make sure I didn't have to ask and I always knew where we were. So I had that there and then I had another one on my belt and then another one right here and then one here for calling air so I could look right here and talk to aircraft and call air off that one. So I had a few backups. But nowadays...

We got one of the first ones. We got them issued in the SEAL teams. It was the Garmin or the Suunto, whatever it was. But the early ones, they just ran out of batteries so fast. Oh, yeah. And it was one other thing that I had to plug in back then. This one's incredible. This one is at 74%, and I think I charged it three weeks ago. Really? Yeah, it's nuts. I can't do it, though. One more thing to plug in, like we talked about. It's all these things. It lasts, like, a week.

A month and a half. And this is solar. This is the Phoenix 7 Sapphire solar. So this thing stays charged in the sun. Really? Yeah.

Yeah, so if you're wearing it outdoors, it keeps a certain percentage of its charge just by solar power. Oh, man. Well, I was locked up for the last four months writing, so that wasn't going to help me too much. I was going to need to plug it in. The sun wasn't really going to help me. Even if you don't plug it in, if it's fully charged, it'll last at least a month. Do you like the Apple Watches and stuff? I haven't fucked with those because I don't want email. Another buzz. I don't have this set up. You could do it.

I could get text messages on this. What I like with this is I like the timer. I like the heartbeat monitor, which doesn't work that good because I have tattoos. Oh, really? Interesting. It doesn't work that good. The only thing that really works, the things that work the most accurate are chest traps. Those are the most accurate. So I have one of those Morpheus chest traps I like a lot. I have a Garmin that I like too. Those are great. They give you an accurate reading of what is actually going on. Your sleep? Do you do the sleep stuff? Nah.

I know how I feel. You know. I used to do that. I think a whoop is very, it's a very good tool. It's a very good tool to assess your recovery. And I might go back to wearing one of those.

but like the aura rings and all that jazz, like leave me alone. Those are the ones that people wear that look like a band and have like a rectangular thing on them. That's the whoop. Yeah. The whoop is like, there's a bunch of different colors, but I have a black one. It's like, just like a wristband. I can't do it. I already know I need more sleep. I already know I need to eat better. I already know I need to do a little more exercise. When you look at your recovery, it says 60% is depressing. Like,

Yeah, I don't need another thing telling me that I need more sleep. But you definitely notice the difference between drinking and not drinking. So if I, even a couple of drinks, like if I go out to dinner with some friends and I have a couple glasses of wine, I would notice my recovery score would suck in the morning from just like two glasses of wine. Really? Really. Where you're not even drunk. Yeah. You know, in the next day you feel fine. You don't feel hungover. Did that make you stop doing that at dinners? No. No.

No, I want to live. But it made me aware of it. And I'm certainly good at not doing it all the time. Yeah. Unlike some of my friends. Yeah. I don't want these things to keep controlling. They already manipulate enough. You have to be aware that these things are manipulating you. Yeah. So I'm aware of that. But I don't want another thing that I am hooked up to that's dictating how I live my life. There's also like an addictive factor too. Like you start getting addicted to checking it and then you start getting addicted to –

Which I think would be probably a good thing to be addicted to, a self-improvement aspect of it, like trying to achieve a good score. Right. If you're like heroin on this side, good score on this side. Yeah. Good score is better. Probably better. It's a better addiction. Yeah. But yeah, trying to get that elusive 97% recovery rate when you go to sleep. Yeah. I know. I need more of it. I'll let you know.

that with all these projects. Well, especially if you're working 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. It's not good. I need to change that. That's crazy. I need to change that up. I thought this last winter that I would be able to...

Take my wife to dinners do a little traveling as our little guy went over to overseas He actually went to Switzerland to do like a ski program over there. So he's gone for three months No phones, no iPads, no computers Wow old-school milking cows doing chores Total old-school. That's a great experience amazing. Yeah sure amazing for him But during that time I thought we would go out to dinners and travel and do all this stuff But instead I was just locked down writing

It's funny to make up for that next year. You got to live too, right? I mean, but the thing is you got to make Hey, Why the Sun Shines and I remember you when you just released your book and we really didn't know how good it was going to do. That's when I met you. It was all just happening and people introduced me to you. I was like, oh, that's cool. I hadn't read it. I hadn't met anybody ready yet and then

Over the years, it just got this snowball effect. Yeah. You know, and now it's insane. I get so many people tell me all the time that they love your books. Oh, man. I appreciate that. Like, you're a guy that gets brought up a lot.

You know, especially amongst military guys and amongst law enforcement guys. They love your books. Well, I certainly appreciate that. And that's why I put so much so much into them. But I love it. It's like you. I love doing what I'm doing. So I feel like work. I love writing. I love this chapter in life. I love creating things. I love not working for anyone. Oh, yeah. I love all that because the military, you feel like, you know, you have people above you in the chain of command. You're like, oh, this guy.

You know? You express that very well in the book. Thank you. Thank you. What's interesting, though, for the nonfiction, the nonfiction coming out, so very different communities as far as the fiction side of the house. Like, I asked for my first book. No one knew me. And you have to ask people for blurbs. And it's tough because you know you're going to get people and some people are going to say no. You put yourself out there to ask. Right. And...

And almost everyone said yes, even though I was totally like Lee Child, all these people I look up to, they were all about it. Oh, that's great. And so I always do it. So I always, because it's a subjective art form, so I try to do as many blurbs as I can for people, help as many people as I can. So interesting in the nonfiction space. My first time, I have to go back now, because I haven't asked for blurbs in a long time. You don't do it after a while. You just take some things from reviews and stuff like that. So you don't do it after a while. But I had to do it for this nonfiction. And interested in that nonfiction space, I

Very reluctant to give any blurbs. Interesting. Yeah. Even people that write about military history and they are not about it. Why do you think that is? I think they feel a little bit elitist up there. Interesting. Like you being a fiction author that's now venturing into nonfiction. They want to be a gatekeeper. Very interesting.

I don't know. Because I'm busy too, but I make time for it for sure. Maybe they don't want you delving into their world. I don't know. And some of these guys have made a lot of money writing about military stuff, which is interesting. So I noted. Noted. It might work its way into some fiction at some point. Yeah. And even some military, some senior level military officers, which is very interesting as well, all said no to the blurbs for the nonfiction as well. But that kind of feeds into my...

Well, maybe they are. Listen to me on the podcast here. I talked about their – hear me critique their handling of our withdrawal from Afghanistan. So that's possible as well. But also interesting with the show, the military didn't help out with the show, which is great because sometimes they put constraints on what you can do or say if they help out with like a ship or a plane or a base or something like that. So they did not help out with the first show. Did they want to be a part of it? Yeah.

Which I like because now there's no restraints. So I'm like, typical. I'm glad. Especially since you know what you're talking about. It's not like someone has to guess on their own without any military help. Yeah. But I find that all very interesting. So I'm, you know, it's all, it's all noted. Yeah. Yeah. Duly noted. Exactly. So the, was there a negative response by the historians or was it just no response? Yeah, just busy. And some that got back and said, no, it was very nice of them to get back and at least say no. Uh,

But I thought that was interesting. But could it also be that they just don't want to put themselves out there? That they don't want to be a personality, they just want to be the person relaying the information? Possible. Yeah, because if you do sign off on someone's nonfiction who also writes fiction, you are somehow or another connecting yourself to them. Yeah, that's very possible. Very possible. I would imagine, right? But it's still noted. Yeah, no, I get it.

But yeah, so we'll see. But a ton of people, what made me very, I mean, super excited about this book is the nonfiction, is that the people who are there, the people who are digging their dead friends out of the rubble, that's who I really wanted to honor by writing this nonfiction, to keep those lessons learned and also tell their story because it really hasn't been told yet.

And you have people that are still alive, people who are alive who lost sons in that attack. So you want to do right by them. And I think...

I think every single person who has read it, who is there, has said thank you for writing it. Thank you for telling this story. Well, it's also great that it's coming from you because your fiction books are so popular. There's probably going to be a lot of people that read that that wouldn't ordinarily read a book on real history. Yeah. There's people today, some people I've mentioned it to, and they say, what was that? I kind of remember that. Yeah, I barely remembered it. I barely remembered it. You started talking about it. I was like, oh, yeah, that's right. I remember. I mean, I was in high school at the time.

Yeah. So '83, we had the embassy bombing in April of '83. And then you move into the spring, further into the spring, all through the summer, attack happens in October. But all through that timeframe, these guys are in combat. And the administration is saying "peacekeeper" over and over again, calling them "peacekeepers," "peacekeepers." But you talk to these guys who were there, who were on patrol, they were in combat.

And so I got to capture that and really put that into the book because that part of the story, people don't really understand how many guys had died between the embassy bombing and the Marine barracks bombing. How many people were wounded during that time frame? How many people were just engaged in combat during that time period? So it's

Because there wasn't social media back then and you're just relying on an administration and then there are talking points, that story never really got told. So it's going to get told now. That's one of the things that does keep me hopeful, that there is so much information available today whenever anything happens. You don't have to just rely on mainstream media's depictions of things. Everything that's been sanctioned down through the government, whatever narrative they're trying to push.

Now you get just so many independent reporters and so many real journalists that are giving you the actual details of it in a very disturbing way. And you get angry. Yeah.

And you go, why am I not hearing about this in the news? Like, why is this perspective not being shared everywhere? And then it, you know, unfortunately for the mainstream media, it just makes people distrust them more and more. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. The trust with mainstream media and with our senior level elected officials is, I don't know if it's an all-time low, but it feels like it is. It's about as low as I've ever experienced it. Obviously, I'm not...

I wasn't around during the... I wasn't aware, at least, during the Vietnam War. But I would imagine back then, especially after Kent State, it was probably a lot like that back then, too. Yeah. A lot of distrust. Yeah. But I think even more so now. But there's also...

Now there's the influence of foreign governments where they create bullshit stories and they create bullshit rabbit holes for people to go down and they suck people into these things and then reinforce it online with troll farms. And he's like, there's so much nonsense. It's so hard to know what's real and what's not real.

Yeah, that's the value of you doing this. That's why I appreciate what you do here with this podcast, because it's one of the few places people can go and get these honest conversations. They're long. They're not a 30-second soundbite, a two-minute soundbite. Even if you have someone that knows what they're talking about on mainstream media, but you only get two and a half minutes, two minutes long,

a minute, half of that is the host talking or asking the question. You don't really get a deep understanding of what's going on. You don't really get to conceptualize what's really happening and make it a part of you so you can make informed decisions, whether it's in the voting booths

When you go to vote or it's in a conversation with friends or your family. But you get to do that here, which is awesome. Not only that, they usually have someone arguing. At all. They don't like it unless there's some sort of an argument that would get people captivated. So you've got someone on the left yelling at someone on the right. They're talking over each other, and you're like, good Lord, this is crazy. I know. Everyone's yelling and arguing all the time. So it's tough. I mean, I think about the kids growing up now. That's what I really think of because we have kids, and our kids are pretty much the same age as me.

And when I think about them and what they're stepping into, and you remain hopeful on it, but man, I worry about it. I think every generation feels that way. I mean, I certainly remember when I was a kid in high school, we were terrified of being in a nuclear war with Russia. It was hovering over our heads. When the fall of the Soviet Union happened...

I remember this huge feeling of relief that swept through the entire country. Yeah. Because when we were kids, we really thought that we were going to go to war with Russia and there was going to be a nuclear war and everyone was going to die. And that was something that like hung in the air. Yeah. All throughout the 1980s. Yeah.

We thought of that. The Day After. Remember that show? Oh, yeah. That was big. Day After was big. Then you also had Wolverines. It was kind of inspirational. You knew your enemy. Red Dawn. Exactly. Red Dawn out there. So you had that stuff, too. I know we've talked about this before, and I thought about it throughout the last year, but I haven't changed my position on it about going back in time.

And, in fact, I double down on it when I think about it. I'd go 1979 to 1991, I think. That's what I would do if I could go back in that time machine. Yeah, it was just so much fun. Would you live then? Yeah, I'd just keep doing it over and over again. 79, 91, 79, 91. Really? Yeah. Or maybe 80, 80, 91. Fuck that. I'd live right now. I know. You love it. That's why I love it. I love getting that perspective. I love that about you. This is a wild time, man. This is a wild time of unprecedented change.

And we're on the precipice of far more unprecedented change. And you like that. It's interesting. It's exciting. I would like it, I think, if it wasn't attached to all these things that I have to plug in and they're trying to manipulate me. I know I keep going back to that, but it makes me a little bit crazy. It's also a thing that gives you this...

ability to recognize bullshit because it's coming at you from all these different angles. And I think people are a little bit more reluctant to buy into official stories now than they ever have been before, especially after the whole COVID fiasco happened. I think people are a lot more interested in what the fuck is actually going on than ever before because it actually can affect their life.

You know, I mean, it's, it's actually something that's consequential. Oh yeah. And we all had touch points with it and now, but that, that just like Afghanistan, that's like, I don't really talk about that stuff anymore. We don't really talk about all these businesses that got shuttered, which is why I try to support independent bookstores as much as I possibly can do things that

are only for independent bookstores to send people there. Started that during COVID actually. That's great. Started signing book plates. You could only get through independent bookstores because it's harder to do that than just hit the easy button on Amazon. Right, right. So I started doing that. I continue to do that today with Shot Through Pages. So I try to do that to help them out because I remember going to see you in LA and I'd packed up and I drove out there and there was no one on the road. And then I got to LA on the 405 freeway driving up to where I was staying and it was a ghost town. Wow. It was crazy. That was...

May or whatever, April, May of 2020. And I came out to see it. It's horrible, but I'm glad we got to experience it because it's going to be something that we always remember. I think people are going to be probably, I mean, if humans survive, we're going to be talking about these days.

and especially the days of COVID, it's going to be a bizarre footnote in American history. So bizarre. But I don't know. People have short memories and they get distracted by the squirrel or by the manipulation on the social channels or whatever else. A lot of people do. But I think the overall perception, if you looked at it, has shifted in a way that people are a little bit more aware of horseshit now than ever before. I think. Yeah. Generally. I remember...

I went to get a physical for the first time in a long time because I hadn't done it for like six years. I left the military. And so I was like, I should probably go down and do something. And it was ended up being just kind

kind of old school hit your knee with the thing and I thought it was going to be like an executive physical and they were gonna do blood and do all that stuff but it wasn't it was just like watch the finger and hit the thing you're good to go yeah yeah but then he asked me if I wanted to get my flu shot and I was just like I just I was I couldn't help myself I just was like I laughed out loud like that which I don't usually do usually I keep things inside and just kind of make you know my little notes but I couldn't help but like

Come on. How'd they react? He understood. He was like, I don't think I'm the first one. Doesn't fucking work. Yeah. I'm not the first one. Yeah. People tell you you should get your flu shot every year. You won't get the flu. Yeah. Also, you don't get the flu if you're fucking healthy. Or if you are, you get over it quick. Or if you get the flu, take IV vitamins. Yeah. You know, take Tamiflu. The two times I got my flu shot in the past, like 20 years, I got the flu those years.

That's the only time I've gotten the flu is one of that two years and I'm like done never doing it in the military They make you that stuff. Yeah, so I just had them annotate that it was done It's called the what I call it gun decking. I think so. They just say that you did it, but you didn't really do it Well, that's nice. Yeah, very nice of my corpsman to do them and to do that. That's very nice to rest in I think he's out now for anybody listening. I hope he is. I hope he is. Well, hey brother. Thank you very much Thank you doing everything you do your books are fucking awesome Red Sky Morning the latest

And you have seven of these now. And the nonfiction comes out when? September. September. I'll be on that one, too. Thank you, sir. Appreciate you very much, man. Thank you for being here. Take care. Tell everybody, website, anything, social media. Officialjackcar.com. You can find there. But usually, you know, type it in the search bar. It'll pop right up. Hopefully. At Jack Car USA. Exactly. At Jack Car USA on the socials. And, man, thank you so much for everything. My pleasure, brother. Always good to see you. You too. Bye, everybody. Bye.