164 - Crazy Navy Seal Stories, The Terminal List & Chris Pratt ft. Jack Carr | Unsubscribe Podcast Ep 164
02:05:00 Share

- Okay, writing courses. - And I thought, oh, this Chris Pratt guy, he needs this for his career. I'm a Bud Stud, dude. It's absolutely disgusting. No wonder why oral is a thing of recent history. - Jack's like, oh God, what did I sign up for? - What did I sign up for? - I'm gonna go have another drink. - Brandon, where's your popper? - Oh, there we go. - Nice. - So, Mr. Jack, we have a tradition where we count down, you're gonna have to pop this one. We have to count down from three and then at one, we fucking pop that thing. Three, two, one.

Oh, look at that. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Unsubscribe Podcast. I'm joined today by Mr. Eli Dulletap.

The amazing Jack Carr, Brandon Herrera, and myself, Donut Operator, thank you so much for watching our bullshit. We're still here. We're still here. That's quite an intro. And look at that voice, man. It's so good. That's why we asked you to come radio. Yeah. It's fantastic. Gosh, I don't have that voice. You know, I can't listen to myself. I can't watch myself. I fucking hate watching myself, too. Well, I can't. Yeah, I've never watched...

an episode of this and i will never watch and if i'm in one of your videos i will not watch that video i'm a masochist because i watch every single thing we do but not because i love it but because i'm criticizing myself the whole time like what did you do wrong just you talk too much you did like i fucking i am my own worst critic in the congress run did you uh did you watch interviews and go back and see what you could have done better yes that sort of thing oh even better if i fuck something up i didn't have to go back

Oh, well, people let you know. Yeah. My opponent would let you know. Yeah. Would let me know that I fuck something up. How about the smaller tweaks? Like if you're watching, you're like, ah, right there, I should have said this. You know what? I can weave into this next time or. Toward the end, we just did so much media that it was hard to watch. Yeah. When so much starts happening, same things. When you start out, you're like, okay, I'm going to watch this and listen to this one. And now I don't listen to anything or watch anything at all. It's just, it's going to be. Also, I know that I'm never going to get better.

at it like I'm not going to be smooth ever so I'm not going to try to be smooth I'm just going to be me which also I think helps out with that authenticity thing today which is different than being 1985 1995 where maybe some of that smoothness would have been okay because there was nothing else to really look at but now you just be yourself and so I'm just going to do that I feel like you kind of you get it to this degree too because you're again having to do like a lot of press tours and things like that you know how you kind of get in a groove where you're saying the same shit over and over people ask the same

which I hope we're not going to do this. Nice. No, no. Hey, hopefully we explore some new territory, but yeah, we can do that. We should have, it's hard. It's like the hardest part is it was a live shows where we had kind of the same routine and we just flew. That was a weird dynamic where we just went into that and we're like,

This is why live show comedians will have a routine and they stick to that routine. And live show, we really got it hammered by Dallas and everyone was like, joke, joke, joke, joke. We'd have little in-betweens in there. But you leave room for improv. Yeah, improv, fun. But you have your main jokes. Other than that, it's weird as shit doing...

like a live show you're on stage when you're talking about yeah yeah yeah yeah we sold out theater we did the podcast live four times i've heard of people doing that but never seen it so it's uh you're on a stage and it's just kind of like a 500 people just watching you yeah sold out all of them were sold out we went dallas austin san antonio and houston yeah

And Dallas was the big one. Oh, fuck. And it's just this community. You walk out, everyone's roaring. No way. It's an interactive podcast. I forgot to tell you guys. Two days ago, I had a nightmare that we had another live show. And there was like 20 people in the audience out of like 500 empty seats. It was genuinely fucking like it was a nightmare.

Do people ask questions or is it like you have a guest, a different guest at each one? Yeah, we do stuff like that. We had angry cops at one of them. We had Meat Canyon. We had a couple different guests. We'd rotate guests depending on if they were used to being on stage. We had the magicians, Chris, Ramsey, and Wes Barker. They were magicians, so they were really good on stage. But –

Angry Cops and Meat Canyon were like peak comedy because everyone just plays off each other and then we're drinking, we're interacting with the crowd. And Angry Cops going through asking people about their offender's superpower, which we will get to later. We'll get to that later. I obviously did not prep for this at all. No, it's good. It's a little dry for that. We're going to move it up a little bit before we get into the offender's...

Oh, man. So when you bring somebody like that on and do a live show, is it bringing partial of their audience to it as well? Or is it mostly you guys' audience? How does that... Surprise? And me, Canyon, who has a massive audience, he was a surprise guest no one knew about until he showed up on stage. And people were like, what the fuck? Okay. Angry Cops, we gave him. But since, I mean, these guys have like 5 million, 4 million subs across...

They're doing fine with audience. So people show up and just have a blast. Nice. And we have an amazing community. Take a shot. Yeah, it's...

It is. They just kick ass and they just cover down if we're going to live shows or doing like charity stuff. Yeah. They just fucking go above and beyond on everything. Eli, what did we just do for autism? We raised $110,000 by selling shirts. So we sold merch and we cleared $110,000 and donated it all towards three nonprofits. Nice. Has Jack seen your shirt? Oh, yeah. Nice.

Full metal spectrum. Okay. There you go. We make offensive autism shorts. Okay. There you go. I like it. My son has autism. We're not just like coming out like, ah, fucking autistic pit. We do good by being offensive. There you go. I think it's what we do here. Ah.

Love it. Are there places like comedy clubs where people have to come in and do like two drink minimum type thing at tables? Or is it just like a theater? Is there drinking involved out there or just up on the stage? It's mostly just like a theater. Everyone. Like people pre-party for it and come in? One of them was at a brewery. The rest were bars. Oh, perfect. I mean, it was like four or five hundred seats per venue. It was pretty good. It was fun. It was awesome. That was the most like doubtful.

Because none of us have done that at that point. And then we're not, we don't train on like stage where we talk to fucking cameras. We can talk to millions of people like right here. Easy. Second, there is 500 people. You're like,

The crowd's filling up and you're like, oh, Cody loves audiences. I completely love talking in front of an audience. It's your favorite thing? No, I fucking hate it. It was horrifying. It was his nightmare. How come? You didn't feel like the energy from them? I don't know, dude. I don't speak in front of audiences. Each one of my videos gets between a million and three million views per video. And I'm happy just talking to my camera. But as soon as I'm in front of 500 people...

I was just like, I don't know what to do with my hands. Oh, gotcha. That beautiful voice you heard at the beginning. Hi, everyone. We had so many talks. I'm like, you got to get the intro. Just do the voice. And he would go out. And we'd be like, Cody, just remember, you just got to start with your line. He'd sit down. Because it's become a meme when he starts out with the, hi, everyone. Hi, everyone.

Don't. He's got to put like a camera there and just pretend that. Yeah. I should have done that. You guys should have set up a fake camera. Yeah. He doesn't have to be on. Just have it there. Everyone has GoPros on their head. Yeah.

The audience is ready to just watch. I'm comfortable now. I don't like speaking in front of audiences. Like, I hate that it feels kind of like a monkey dance type thing, you know, get on stage and do it. So I hate that. But I like conversations in front of people or taking questions from an audience because then you know at least one person is interested in what you have to say. Otherwise, you're up there talking like someone asked you to do like a leadership thing, which I don't do anymore. But I did it a couple times at the beginning, and I just hate it. You just hate it. Oh, I hate it. You're going to.

Because you're like, if you can't figure this out, it's very basic stuff. And I'm kind of thinking the whole time in my head, if you can't figure this out, none of this is going to help you. When you're coming, because it's a good segue to you had to speak when you went from NCO, but then when you went to officer, you more have to get in front and talk to platoons or teams.

What was where you're like, I'm comfortable. I am no longer comfortable. Now this is a really big audience. Yeah. I totally, that's a great question. Cause I, I totally remember this in that I thought it was very comfortable as an enlisted guy talking in front of the platoon or to the officers or whatever, having the whole thing, but it was different when I became an officer. And for the first time I thought,

I've done it a million times before. I've briefed a ton of times before being the calm guy and the sniper or whatever briefing my parts to the op, whatever it's training or real world. But then it was different when all of a sudden you're there as the O and everyone's just like looking at you. It's like a different kind of interaction than when you're just like the E-dog up there and you're talking and you're just like, it's more like interaction like this. But then when you walk in as the O, it's like...

Like at first, I guess. Maybe, yeah. But then after Bring Us to Know You, it's like totally different. So that's the only thing I'm thinking of right now is the time like,

before people knew me. Like I got to a platoon with newer guys in it and had been around for a while. So I'm coming to them, but I hadn't gone like through the training with them because I was a little farther removed at that point. So I distinctly remember being in there and getting nervous, being like, oh, just why am I, I shouldn't be nervous right now. Like I've done it a zillion times before, but for whatever reason, it was just a different dynamic. And then it switches and gets fine after that.

Super easy. How long were you enlisted before you went off? Six and a half years. Okay. So you joined in 94? 96. 96. Okay. And then I... Brandon was one. What's that? He was one year old. All right. Seriously. I know. It's a thing. If that. Yeah. It's a thing. When you start talking to people who were born in 2001, 2002, 2003, and you're like, that person's 20 years old. It still blows my mind talking to people that I see on the day-to-day that...

weren't born when 9-11 happened. It's crazy. Jesus, do you even have a soul? It's wild. Yeah. Where were you when the world stopped turning? Yeah. It's totally, it's totally bizarre, but yeah, it six and a half years enlisted. And then if I, if September 11th had happened, let's say in,

February 11th instead, 2001, that I don't think I would have gone the officer route. But I already had my package in. It was already through, approved, had my OCS class update after getting back from that deployment. So it was kind of already happening. But had September 11th happened a few months earlier, there's no way I would have done that. Cody, so you did BUDS when you were...

How long were you in before you went into-- Just through boot camp. And then you have to go to your MOS. I think they call it an A school in the Navy, but it's the same thing, your specialty, for those listening or watching. And so mine was Intel. So I did that for way longer than one would need to, like 16 weeks. Having read all the Tom Clancy growing up, I distinctly also remember just thinking-- You don't say. It was still all-- Weird.

Yeah. So, but it was still all like, like Cold War stuff, even though it was 1996. It was still the silhouettes of submarines, silhouettes of ships, planes that you had to identify and that sort of a thing. So I remember having like Tom Clancy, like companion books and all that stuff back in the day. So I think just reading all that stuff really prepared me for Intel school and that I think I could have opted out. Like some things you can, what is it called when you opt out of something? You can just like take the test and not have to go to class.

When you, what is that called? Cody was Navy. Yeah, I don't remember. Well, something, I don't know if it was Navy or not, or just like in life in general, where you take a test and you don't have to do the thing. Like in college, it's like clapping. Maybe something like that. Yeah, something like that. So I could have done that, I feel like. But anyway, right to Bud's. Got there in January 97. Oh, you went January?

Yeah, it was a little cold. Yeah. I like it now. Good old winter class. I like it now. Yeah. So I had the winter class and I do think there is a difference. I mean, for all the summer class people. I always said it like from when you first explained it to me, it should be scored differently. Like winter versus summer class, like holy shit. The fact that they just like you get sent into whatever class you're in. Yeah, I never thought about it. That's your...

Yeah, I didn't think about it until I got there. And then you hear stories about people who didn't make it through, either quit or got hurt or whatever. But then they start trying to time it to get back for a summer class. I heard of this. I don't know if it actually ever happened or not, or if it was just like urban myth. Oh, I felt... Exactly. You try to time it for that summer class, so you get that summer hell week. But now I like having a winter hell week. That was pretty cool. And it was just, yeah, a little chilly, but now no one can say anything. Define cool.

Looking back. It's like one of those things like looking back on things, obviously, you know, things that are, that are hard. We look back on it. They're awesome. In the middle of it. That's what we call it. Okay. That's it. So you look back on it. Awesome. In the middle of it, maybe not so much, but I think it was for me because I thought about it for so long. Like that's all I wanted to do for my whole entire life. Um, and I knew that afterward I'd write, but I knew you had to do

the military side first, just because you're going to get too old. So, uh, so I was in the exact place that I wanted to be testing myself exactly the way that I dreamed of. And now here it is. So I kind of, so I liked that aspect of it. And then also I was thinking about all the P all the P things that people have done that are so much more difficult than buds. Uh,

I thought back to like World War II and guys running over the beaches at Normandy. And I'm like, well, I can do a few more pushups in the sand here in Coronado, California tonight. Yeah, it's a little chilly, but I'm not doing that. I'm not. It's not Iwo Jima. It's not Normandy. I'm not crashing a glider into northern France on June 6th. So I put it in relative terms.

I even thought about the Vietnam guys, like back with whatever, the zero technology, Laos, Cambodia, setting up listening devices, you know, four of them, you know, two Americans and a couple, a couple Indige setting up listening devices on the Ho Chi Minh trail with no backup whatsoever. And I was like, you know what? I can, I can do another sit up. I can run this obstacle course again. So putting these in relative terms, I think was helpful for me. Cody's like, Oh,

I'm a butt stud, dude. What year was it? 2011, November fucking winter class, dude. 292. There you go. Nice. All right. Well, maybe the relative term thing would have helped. I don't know, 12 years earlier. Why wasn't Jack here telling me the relative terms? God damn it.

So I think that helps, but that's the understanding of history side of it. Having read all that stuff growing up, my mom was librarians. I grew up surrounded by books, love of reading. And so I had this foundation upon which to build, not just reading the fiction I read growing up, but reading all the nonfiction too, because I knew I wanted to be an operator. And so I read everything you could possibly find back then before the internet, anything I could find that I thought would make me a better leader or a better operator. So that was the

the foundation. So I don't think you could have prepared for either Bud's or for doing what I'm doing now any better. So I feel very fortunate that I knew what I wanted to do early and then really the reading is the foundation of both, both SEAL Team stuff and what I'm doing now. What was your worst, like in either, probably Bud's, what was your worst experience where you were right there where you're like, ah, you know,

No, I mean, people say... Thinking about quitting, I thought about quitting in terms of it's a possibility, and that's why you're there to test yourself. So obviously, it's there as part of the whole deal. But I think people have been...

there's something in our DNA that makes us want to test ourselves. And you used to have to, you used to have to prove your value to the tribe. So thousands of years ago, you had to go out there, prove that you prove your value. And it would be like, let's say 12 year old, 11, 13 year old, 14 year old, 15 year old, 16, somewhere in there where you had to do that. And I think that's just in our DNA. Um,

And so that's why so many people are drawn to like Marine Corps boot camp typically, but also BUDS or Q course or ranger school or whatever it might be. But there's this thing in there, I think, in our DNA, in our blood that makes us want to test ourselves. We can prove something to ourselves and then to the community, community writ large. And that's just there. So I think when you get you can kind of get a little too old and look back and say, oh, man, I wish I had. That's why people get.

look back and say, maybe I should have tried X, Y, or Z when I was younger because that's the time typically throughout history that you had to test yourself. So it was a good run, but I didn't think about...

Like, oh, I'm right on the edge of it now. One more minute in this cold water submersion or whatever it is. Surf torture, which I think they now call surf conditioning because they had to. Torture is a bad word. Right, right. So it's the exact same thing. They just changed the nomenclature a bit. But it wasn't like, oh, it can only last 30 more seconds. No.

Like it was never like that. It was just, um, it was just like, I knew quitting is an option, but it wasn't an option for me because I wanted to do it my whole life. And I could never go back and tell my friends that I told since I was a little kid, uh, that I wanted to do this. I just couldn't go back and tell them I didn't make it. Um, so yeah, it was, it was fun in that sense that I just knew I was in the right place. Motivated as shit. It's like, no, I'm going to make this happen. But the worst part I guess is when you get woken up, uh,

in Hell Week on Wednesday, you sleep for two hours. But I wish they didn't. It would have been much better if they didn't. Because they put you in these tents, and it's disgusting. You go in these little tents on the beach, GP medium tents. So for people listening, it's like a canvas tent that you saw on MASH, that TV show. But you're in there, and you've been moving. You've been up since Sunday morning, and you've been moving since Sunday, let's say afternoon, evening, running, sweating,

uh and you're just in this tent now a few days later and so you fall into some rem sleep right away but your body is giving off these like horrible it's just disgusting i can just i can it's like walking into a wall but it's like a fog it's so gross in there and you're in there for two hours just like breathing each other's like yeah and then they wake you up throwing another flash crash whatever and then you're back in the in the ocean like a few seconds later just cold again that's good times sounds

Absolutely. It's good times. But I hated taking my boots on and off is where that sounds. That's the thing that gets me. I was a flip-flop guy before that. So taking your boots on and off and having to do it when everyone's yelling at you, I didn't like it. It wasn't fun. Cody, what was yours? Were you like, fuck this? When the Elder Scrolls Skyrim came out.

So your life story is a little bit different.

no no so i got like so a boat fucking we were doing surf passage and a boat crushed our another boat came over us and crushed all of us and then we were on the rope tower one day so that fucked you up originally yeah that's i'm up originally and i'm like i don't feel so good boss and then uh we were on the rope tower and i fell off the fucking rope tower while i was at the top landing on my back why'd you do that they wouldn't roll they wouldn't medically roll me so i ding ding dinged and uh

The video game came out, Elder Scrolls Skyrim, on 11.11.11. And I was like, you know what? I'm just going to go home and play video games now. My favorite part, though, is... Probably smarter, actually. What was going through your mind when you fucking landed on your back and you're just staring at the sky, the way you described it to me? Just staring at the sky, and you're like, you know...

The new Skyrim is out. Yeah. Well, this is the slide for life you're talking about, right? Like the, the, no, no, the, the rope tower on the beach where you, the club rope climb. Yeah. Okay. Gotcha. So I got to the top and I like went to touch it and lost my grip. Cause we, we just did a sugar cookies and I fucking just fell onto the ground onto my back after the surf passes thing. And I'm just laying there like Brandon was saying, it was like,

my son was like one years old, one year old at the time. Oh, that'd be like, I'm just going to go home and play video games, hang out with my son now. Yeah. That's probably the smarter. Yeah. But they said I wasn't, I wasn't, uh, hurt enough to med roll. So I was like, all right, well, I'll just fucking ding, ding. That'd be hard to do that with a family. I think like I had no family out there, dude. That's one thing I always think about. It's like, I should have left him back home. I shouldn't have had him there in San Diego. John's was that buds? Yeah. John, he's one. He's doing surf training.

That'd be tough. That'd be tough because you're focused solely on the task at hand. Like I didn't have anything else to worry about other than prepping for the next day or whatever it was. It wasn't like, oh, geez, my wife's mad at me or I have to spend some time with my kid or whatever else. No, none of that played any factor whatsoever. It was just...

focused on the training and doing the best I could. So it'd be tough, I think. And we had guys in our class who were married or a couple of them had kids, I think, but most of them, a couple of guys that were married were newly married. And that'd be tough, I think, to have to go. They can live in town. Do you live in town?

Yeah, I was living on base housing at the time. So I was able to drive in every day. That'd be tough too because everybody else is living together in these barracks. You're cleaning your uniforms, you're hanging stuff up, but you're together. And then the people that are married go off and have to have this whole other life. Which would be tough, I think. Yeah, no, I mean, I'm not ashamed of it at all. I went and tried. Here you go. That's the great thing about anything, not just this, but anything in life.

is like if you don't try it then you'll be a 90 years old looking back and wondering so i think it absolutely the the whole point is to try it now when you can otherwise you'll be 89 years old saying i wonder if so you don't have that at all you don't have to wonder that's then there's a there's such value in that i mean speaking the truth right now i like it what was that we're getting into motivational already oh man over here yeah motivate motivate

All alone? Time to trim the old pubes. Hey there, beach babe! Are you ready to soak up those summer vibes and get the perfect beach bod? I don't have pants on. Yeah, I noticed. Well, you're in luck, because our friends over at Manscaped.com have you covered from head to toe. With the Performance Package 5.0 Ultra, they'll have you looking and feeling good this summer.

Trust Manscaped to unlock the confidence you need to turn heads this summer season. Join the 10 million men who already trust Manscaped and use discount code UNSUB at checkout to get 20% off your order plus free shipping. Let's make this summer your smoothest one yet. Safe.

Keep your ear and nose as tidy as your hedges. With the Weed Whacker 2.0 Ear and Nose Head Trimmer, you'll be looking classy as ever. The updated Lawn Mower 5.0 Ultra Groin and Body Hair Trimmer got a summer makeover. It's waterproof now. For all those times you need to shave your groin or body hair at a pool party. So get 20% off plus free shipping using code ONSUMMITMANSCAPE.COM. The summer sun is here to stay, so trust MANSCAPE to keep those pubes at bay.

So in the military, you're a fucking military guy. You can be as clean cut as you want. I know you had an embarrassing story, though. Oh, boy. Which one is this? Which one is this? I don't know. Let's rank some. Embarrassing. You can do one or two. I'm trying to think. I might have shut it down. I'm going to put it in a part of my brain that doesn't let me access it. Give me a hint. You're like, ah, no. No. For you, it's like, for me, I have like, hey, getting...

showing up to a piss test where I'm like, I got drunk 4 a.m. And then immediately 5 a.m. We have a surprise piss test. I'm like, Oh, and I just, when were you pretending to be sick? Yeah. I ran to the front. I'm not feeling good. I gotta go pee. So I ran to the front of my seat. Is it like, but you're not testing for no, but it was still as drunk. Cause I went to bed at 4 a.m. Just hammered. Oh, you're still running in trouble for that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

5 a.m. They're like, why do you reek of booze? I'm like, ah. So I just ran to the front. I think most of our class got sent home from jump school because of that. Because we were coming from the push-up capital of the world. At the time, we were going to Benning to do jump school out there, like old school, static line, you know, just like same way. It looks the same like those black and white videos from World War II. I mean, same thing. What is it called? Swing Tower? What's the thing called? Swing Tower. Oh, God.

Something like that, right? Isn't it swing time? It's literally, it has not changed. I don't think it still hasn't. You start with the boxes, like a two-foot box, and you're like, oh, PLF, you know? And then it's a little bigger. So they jam three days of training into three weeks out there. I just did jump school last month,

three weeks ago i still have my parachute gear in the back of the truck okay and yeah i had to realize i had to learn plf and all that shit like but i i crammed it into 24 hours okay that's yeah exactly so i did all all military totally possible i mean just like jump out like that's it pretty much yeah tight body position tight body position right like that and then just like hope for the best count to five is it count to five and then nothing happens like then pull that reserve count to five or seven depending on what kind of shoot i think you're doing or what kind of aircraft

And then, yeah, then realizing it's balls of your feet, calf, thigh, lats, shoulder. Yeah, feet, ass, head. Feet, ass, head. Good, good, good. And you bounce and roll. The thing that I think of often after having done it a bunch, because the next day I woke up after doing five jumps, I woke up feeling like I got hit by a car. And then realizing, like, holy fuck, somebody did this for the first time. How old are you?

28. Oh, wow. So I was going to say that most people doing that are young, but you are young. So never mind. Yeah. But like for people that were doing it like before this was a certified thing, like before they could teach you PLF, before they could teach you when you got an additional how to be a paratrooper. Was it two dollars and 50 cents paycheck? I think back in World War Two. Sounds right. It was something like that. So to be airborne, it doubled your pay.

So you literally just got, I want to say it was like $2.50. It was $50 or maybe it was like $50. It was an absurdly low number. I think combat pay was like $65 for the longest time. I seem to remember that. I think so. God, yeah, that sounds about right. Someone will correct us in comments. I'll be sure to look. Oh, they will definitely. They're going to correct us.

I'll be sure to spend some time in there to make sure I get it right. YouTube comments are the best. Ours are surprisingly nice. Yeah, are they? That's good. Oh, dude, they're very nice. Spend a lot of time in there. It's a good place to spend your time if you're, you know. As a human being. You're a sadist. Man, what was it? It was...

When did they start airborne? That would have been right before World War II, wasn't it? I don't know when they started, but certainly. In preparation for D-Day, of course. What I was amazed by is, like, if you think about it, not even, like, when you're talking about warfare with planes, but, I mean, D-Day, you're talking about, you know, 40 years after the invention of man-made aviation. That's fucking stupid. That's terrifying. I mean, you're talking about almost equal time between that and the invention of the plane, between that and...

Landing on the moon. Yeah, that's a crazy jump.

yeah oh yeah and then you're getting shot at by machine guns not a good time flack and like that's not that's not a joke remember think about the people who lived through all that they got to see essentially you could see the first car you could see the first plane uh world war one uh depression world war ii d-day uh the day all you see all that up to the space shuttle people lived and people are still alive today i was just in d-day uh d-day commemoration events last week um

with 48, we brought back 48 World War II veterans. Sorry, I know there was a passport issue. Oh, so you know about that. I've heard. You were missed. I'm very jealous because, as I said before on the podcast, that is such a crazy event. And I knew this before I agreed to go. That is...

because this is probably the last 10-year increment that the people that were actually there, the men that actually stormed that beach, are going to be there for that event. That's a crazy thing. It was really heavy. Yeah. It was incredible. And I was there for the 78th as well. I brought my daughter for that back when she was 15. And so she's standing on the beach, and she was there for this one for the 80th as well, helping these World War II veterans because they're either closing in on 100, at 100, or over 100 years old now.

And so you have to get them in and out of their wheelchairs, get them to the events, make sure they're taking their medicine, make sure they're eating, like doing all that stuff. So you really have to be, have to be on it. But she gets to stand there on Omaha beach, looking out at the water, looking back at the bluffs behind and having a guy talk to her about being the first out of his landing craft, what that was like coming out into the water and running up this beach. And she's, he's,

was telling her exactly how far the water was out and pointing to different areas up there on the cliffs and the bluffs really where machine gun positions were. Because you can still see the bunkers, but there were other positions as well. They were just sandbag positions or just more temporary. And talking about where he went and there he went to the bottom of that bluff right there and he made it. And just hearing that story firsthand is pretty powerful.

It was amazing. So we did that in 78th. We did that for the 80th here just a couple days ago, a week ago. And we went to the 80th Pearl Harbor as well. So for her, as for her generation, they love talking to someone younger and just having someone younger just listening to those stories. And it's different than reading in a history book or reading, you know, watching a movie. But I think also we're a little...

We think of Tom Hanks and Saving Private Ryan, who he was probably like 45 when they made that show, something like that. Or you think of like the longest day even. You have all these guys like what Robert Mitchum's in that, John Wayne is that. So guys that are a little older. But really, those guys were, I mean, some lied when they were 15 years old. They lied to get in. 16, 17, 18, 19, 20. Those are the people who won the war.

at the tactical level anyway so it was it was pretty powerful being over there just the idea of being the first off the boat and then remembering that like the those boats being the first off that line where mg42s are just cutting down shit like hey here's my target i'm gonna run there hope as many of my team can get there and then you're just reconnecting with random people a lot of the times you're like hey we got to make a new squad and they're just on top of that

remembering exactly where you went, what you did, which bluff you were like right up under 80 years later. Most people at that age don't remember what they had for breakfast and you immediately cue in like, that's where I went. That's what I did. It was amazing. That's incredible. Fucking core memory right there though. That's a good core. It's great. Don't forget. Yeah.

That's what you don't forget. Unfortunately, this is not getting deleted. Yeah. Yeah. And then you have guys that, of course, with that technology, finding these drop zones, finding these areas for the gliders to land. Imagine that, landing a glider in 1944 and getting semi-close to where you're supposed to land and the Germans putting these poles up in the ground so that your glider would come down and just get crushed. Hold on. So this is the one story. Yeah. I don't know this story. Gliders? Gliders.

Yeah, so gliders were a big deal in World War II. And it wasn't the gliders that we typically think of with a pilot and maybe somebody behind going for the ride. I mean, these guys, they're stacked in there. There's Jeeps in some of them. You can put a Jeep in these things. They're towed up, lines cut. And over the English Channel, there they go. And they had their landing zones all set up. But the Germans, of course, knew that these fields, so they flooded the fields. And they also put in these poles so that a glider landing would just get, they just get crushed. So one of the guys we were talking to, he came in, landed there.

And these two poles took off the wings and they landed right in between. So, so it took off the wings and he landed and survived. Yeah. Just, just crazy. So she's talking to people, daughter, my daughter's talking to people that did that. Tom Rice, first out of his stick. He is 101st airborne. He passed away in November of 2022, but she got to be there with him talking to him about what it was like to jump out just into the darkness, you know?

And then of course you're off course a little bit. And you gotta figure out what to do without your GPS, without your cell phone, without your sat phone. That's what we're talking about. I think two podcasts ago we were talking about would you rather be an airborne guy on D-Day or one of the guys coming out of the amphibious landing craft? And I think all of us agreed you'd rather be a paratrooper. But at the same time, you've got to remember you're not going in with any sort of comms. You're going in in the dark.

And when you land, you are in enemy territory with no way of communicating with your guys. And you just link up with fucking whoever speaks English. Yeah. That's terrifying. Oh, yeah. No, it's amazing hearing these guys talk about it. And yeah, yeah.

Also, I don't think there was time to hit that reserve if you needed it. They were coming in pretty low. I forget exactly. I think they were lower than that. I'm not positive. Because it's combat drums, so you're trying to just get to the ground as fast as possible. Because your comments, thankfully, the last time...

If you're shot out of a plane and you have a chute, then you can't be shot at. You can be shot at. You can shoot deployed soldiers, though, if it's like airborne soldiers. If they're in a parachute, you're allowed to light them up. Holy fuck.

500 feet? What is it, Brandon? Ideal conditions on D-Day, like the low jump they allowed us because we were planning on jumping in Normandy, right? And so for jump school, they were saying 1,200 feet is what they told us. Ideal conditions on D-Day were to jump at 600 feet.

But in reality, while anti-aircraft fire are forcing pilots to scramble, paratroopers dropped anywhere between 300 and 2,000. Jeez. Yeah. That's ridiculous. Yeah. Jeez. It's back when it was hard, you know? Fuck. But then those guys came home.

And they started businesses. They started families. They built this country into what it is today. And you don't hear too many stories about them whining, complaining, maybe because there wasn't social media on a place where they could do that. But they came home and got to work. And so talking to these guys, I love talking to these guys. But you're right. They're probably not going to be around for too much longer. So I treasure every moment that we have with them. So I try to tell everybody, if you know a World War II veteran somewhere, go see them. Go talk to them. Record it.

Come to the show. Anyway, if you got family or friends out there that are a World War II vet, we would love, love, love, love. We will love to hear their story. Fly them out. We'll take care of that. We were just talking about this the other day. We would love to have some of those stories recorded forever. Yeah.

Because once they're gone, they're gone, man. Yeah. I was out there with the Best Defense Foundation, and that was the main focus this time was to make sure that they've done it since their inception, but really make sure that they're on Omaha Beach, on Utah Beach, wherever it is, and talking to the guy, telling the story right there, and capturing that forever for future generations, really.

Because this is one of the last chances to do it, especially when even just traveling So some of these guys if they're gonna you know live for a few more years here They might not be able to travel. That's the tough part is getting them all the way over there. But I

Delta, man, Delta hooked it up. So they flew for the first time two years ago. They landed in Normandy, usually go to Paris first and then take a smaller plane up or take a bus up to Normandy or something like that. So they sent out guys to survey the runway and set it all up. And they brought the I was a 747 or whatever it was, but a big plane right into Normandy for the first time. So they want to drive to have these World War Two veterans all the way there. They're all in first class and land right there in Normandy.

Well, them guys live in the dreamland. It's pretty cool. And then they come out and there's all of Northern France is there. More American flags in Normandy in June than I've ever seen on 4th of July in the United States. 101st Airborne flags, 82nd Airborne flags. And it's not just the people who were there that are older or that passed it to their kids who are a little older.

it is the five-year-old kids, the six-year-old kids, the seven-year-old kids. And it's the same look in their eyes. And they are so appreciative of these veterans who were pushing in wheelchairs. And we have these baseball cards that have their, like their stats on the back, like what they did in world war II and their photo and that stuff. And they're signing them. And all these kids just want these cards. It's incredible to see. Oh, it's, it's, it's super powerful to say, I wish every American could see it because of the pride and the appreciation that the people of Normandy have for Americans. Um,

All these years later, I mean, it hasn't, they're doing something right as far as passing this on. And you know it's not something they just talk about one day in school or a week in school. I think they talk about it every single day. They'd have to because of just the feelings and emotions that come out of these kids or everybody from kids all the way up to the oldest adult. It is so authentic and so real. And you know it's not just because mom and dad told them to be there or their teacher made them be there. It's really powerful. It's pretty cool. Damn, man.

Best Defense Foundation. They're the ones that did it. Shout out to them. Yeah. Shout out to them. I want to know what the cards, the stats, the stats. Yeah. All the cards. I have all the cards and my daughter has all the cards, has all the, all the signatures. And it's really cool. Something I do wish we had a lot more of here.

Because a lot of people do forget that. Well, the difference is they were occupied. And then they were liberated. And I felt it a little bit in Hawaii for the 80th Pearl Harbor event. We did a parade there. And I felt it a little bit there because, once again, they weren't occupied, but they were attacked. And so pushing these guys to the streets of Honolulu, I hadn't felt that anywhere until that point. And then you go to Normandy, and it's like times 10. Because now you're in that middle role of Hollywood, military, but...

Is there a line that you're like, hey, because you're still sponsored by SIG. I was like, oh, okay. I don't know if I'm sponsored by them or not. They do the podcast, but nothing like outside of that. When I started out, I always wondered if anybody was going to sponsor the podcast or do anything. It was an easy no if it was like, hey, you can only use our product.

Like there's, we don't have to spend any more time wasting anyone's any time at all on this because no, cause I'm going to, I don't want to have to, if I'm shooting a Glock or shooting a Scott, whatever. Um, I don't want to have to be like, Oh, did someone take a picture of that? I can't, I'm old sponsored by, Oh, never, ever, ever easy. No, never. Okay. So we, we had some Hollywood types come out to the range with us last year. Yeah. And, um,

Some Hollywood types. And they're like, don't take a picture of me with a gun. We just wanted to come out and hang out. Like, have you ran into anything like that? Like with the Hollywood type people? Uh,

Not really because the people that are involved in our show, one, I think in Hollywood you can get away with it if you're training. Keanu Reeves proved that you can do that. You're just training for a role. And you don't have to say what you think about any of this stuff. Will Smith, a bunch of fucking A-listers. Basically anybody who goes to Tarrant gets away with it. So I think that's a way, like I'm just training type thing. But all the guys that I know, they're just like normal dudes. But yeah.

uh but i can see that oh yeah i'm just training so you can kind of get away with it that way if you're worried about it at all and i think you hit a certain level probably i'm just guessing like a keanu type of a level where it doesn't really matter anymore yeah um but i don't know um certainly i don't worry about it because i don't want to spend my life worried about those sorts of things

And especially now, I think we talked about that a little bit earlier, that authenticity piece. Like people, like I can't be anybody but myself, but if I tried to, I think people would see through it in a heartbeat and it'd be exhausting for you anyway. It'd be like, I don't know, it'd be awful. So, so yeah, so I don't really worry about that. So I just try to be thoughtful really about anything that I do. So it's not necessarily a,

being worried about the political side or whatever else. It's more just who I am. I want to be thoughtful about anything that I do in life. So that's just kind of, I mean, so, so you don't ever have to stop yourself from saying certain things in front of that crowd. Not that I wouldn't have stopped myself if there, if I didn't have a,

a book or a show or anything like that just because I just try to be kind of thoughtful about it, you know? So it's just kind of very natural for me to, I guess, take a second to think about things. But, yeah, so I don't really feel like I'm cornered like, oh, man, I wish I could say this, but I can't because I wish I could. Never. Never.

Oh, okay. That's awesome. The thing that I think drove me crazy about it with the Hollywood folks that we had out at the range like the last year or two years is that you could tell that they were yearning to be free in a way. That would be hard. They loved everything we were doing. They loved everything we were about. And they're like, yeah,

We want to do this, but we can't because we have a contract with so-and-so, so please don't get me on camera with a gun. Oh, interesting. That part. If you don't believe in it, that's one thing, but the fact that you do. Oh, that'd be tough. Yeah, I've not run into that. Yeah, not to say that I won't at some point run into somebody that has that sort of, I don't know, contract or whatever else, but I haven't seen it yet.

it's the pushback they get even um i had friends uh they just posted like one went to a gun range to start shooting and training and their community absolutely destroyed them they pulled the video they're like well never mind i cannot do a single post even though i want to show that i'm training and learning how to use this because one of their friends just had a home invasion happen oh wow and it was um

The guy didn't find... They were in the home. They just hid in a closet. Guy was like, waited at the top of the stairs. Top of the stairs, just waited, waited. No one was there. He was trying to take the wife because it was his... Oh, was it the story I told? Yeah. Wait, is it our... My friend? The Austin? No, no, no. Different story. Fuck. Oh, yeah. This is my friend. So they just like... Downstairs, the dude went downstairs, went to his car and bought himself. But they... Because they couldn't find the wife or...

Did the guy break in? Did he one shot himself? Yeah, the guy broke in because he was there just to steal the wife because the wife wasn't happy and he knew that. So he was going to get her, save her. And so he went outside to his car. Boom. Police showed up and they had it all on security cameras. So then other friend group, they're like, uh, we probably should get guns to like protect ourselves. They posted about getting a gun and training and immediately the community is like, you piece of shit. And you're like, wow, I know exactly who the fuck you're talking about. I didn't realize it was the same person. Yeah. Uh,

Somebody who used to work with him told me about that not too long ago. I thought it was, I honestly thought that story was overblown a little bit. Yeah. That was, yeah. I got to watch the footage. Well, didn't know that footage existed. Yeah. Didn't he say afterwards that he still didn't want to get a gun? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He said that. And then the other, my friends were like, I want to fire arm because of that whole situation. At least raffling. I mean,

I mean, at least it woke up some people to it. But if you're too much of an ideologue, like nothing can penetrate that. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's very odd that someone would get mad at these people, whoever it is, for wanting to defend the gift of life. That's pretty much your responsibility. Like that's day one, week one, you know, stuff right there. Not just protecting your life, but if you have a family, then protecting obviously your spouse, your kids, like that's your number one job. Like that's it. And then you can build from there. But that's the one thing that you have to do.

And you used to, for most human history, you had to be good at that. You had to be good at the hunting, had to be good at the fighting. Otherwise you weren't gonna be around much longer and neither was your community, your tribe, society. So it's a very natural thing. So I gave my kids for my retirement ceremony, I gave them a nautical compass and a Bible with their name on it and said, "Hey, here are things to guide you." And then I gave them a leather bound copy of the constitution, bill of rights. And then I handed them this Winkler tomahawk and I said, "And here's the means to defend it."

It's that defense of this gift of life is...

it's so strange that you could think you could be talked out of the importance of defending this gift. So, yeah, so I don't really worry about talking about that sort of thing. Yeah, I like, dude, that is a dad right there where you're like, here, here, here, here, here, and a tomahawk. Fucking get it done. I mean, you used to have to. It used to not be an option. Oh, yeah. A hundred years is literally in the last hundred years is the only time we're not a hunter-gatherer or struggling to survive. If you're going across just

Just to go mine gold back in like 19 or 1800s, 50% of you dying on the trip out there. Well, so we was talking about the other day and they said it was a certain year. I forget what year it is, where the first, where people started to have their first hot showers. Like you used to just not have, let's say, I don't know, a hundred, let's say a hundred years. It wasn't like normal to have a hot shower. And now it's,

quite normal now you don't have a lot of showers it's pretty awesome which you understand back in the day why bathing wasn't super popular if it was always cold you're like all right well at that point i almost get it yeah have you seen shogun that show on uh no but i hear it's really good yeah i've watched the first two episodes i haven't seen the the third one yet i'm about to move into the third one but uh they're talking to the you know the main the main guy and they really want to bathe him you know in japan they want to bathe him he's like i said something about having a bath i bathed already uh

once in the past two weeks already, you know, something like that. Um, so yeah, it used to not be a thing being as glumly as we are cheese all day long. Yeah.

All day long, dog. Stinky nuts all day long. No wonder why oral is a thing of recent history. Babe, I'm not doing that thing. Babe, I taste from there. Jack's like, oh, God, what did I sign up for? That's what the drinks are for. Necessary. Not just earth quenching, but delicious, but necessary. Yeah. And then the community was like, well, fuck.

It's weird watching... Or it's awesome watching certain guests come on and then they... It's this...

it's this veil, like slow, especially with booze. Demetrius is the best. Like Demetrius is like, I'll drink one. Demetrius had like four in a shot. He made, no, he made us do a shot. Oh yeah. I think my shot days are behind me unless it's like for a big thing, not just like just going out like a normal, like going out type thing, but it has to be like an event. You know what I mean? Like someone passed away or somebody did, you know, like it has to be something like, I feel like those days are behind me. Yeah. We weren't going to fight Mighty Mouse on that one.

Okay. If he wants to do shots. Yeah, some people are going to. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yes, Demetrius Johnson, we're going to do shots. Yeah, yeah. You're doing a shot. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, pal. Yeah, we'll do it. Yeah, no, understood. Understood. But yeah, I think some of those things maybe if you don't have to unless it's him, unless it's somebody. That's an event though. That's like a thing. It doesn't happen every day.

Well, sometimes on the podcast it happens too frequently. Let's have a drink. Let's have two drinks. When we only film the podcast like a week and a half out of the month, it kind of happens every day a little bit. Okay. Because we backlog. So we'll do like four in a week. And then that's our month schedule. So it's like...

It's always a hard week. My liver. I'm the old one. Cody's the second oldest. Brandon's young. So he's starting to experience hangovers. You know how they start hitting, dude. I've read about it. One or two hangovers. You can always tell when it's the last podcast we've done out of like a string of five or six. We're like, our clothes are tattered. Something's on fire. We're just like, oh, I'm skinning for the unsubscribe podcast.

Hi, everyone. Where did the name come from? Do you guys talk about where the name came from? Is that a thing people know? I think it was just a funny idea. We just thought, by the way that we speak and the things that we say, people were going to unsubscribe, but they just keep fucking subscribing.

Thank you. Thank you. We love you for that. Hit that button, right? Click that button. That notification bell. There it is. Comment below. Also like, subscribe, whatever. Hit that motherfucking like button. There it is. There it is. Keep fucking clicking. We're like, no, that's awesome. I'm a ghost.

What are you doing? I'm here to tell you about Ghost Bag! Is this an ad? It might be an ad. Why are you in my bedroom? I don't know, scoot over, let's talk about it. Every ghost mattress has a 20 year warranty. Some even have a 25 year warranty. And you can try them out for 101 nights, worry free. If you don't like it, just send it back. I don't like this. No hard feelings.

One of our favorite things about GhostBed is that it has cooling technology. So if you get hot at night like we do down here in Texas, it's a lifesaver. I'm uncomfortable. But you're not hot, are you? I'm uncomfortable. But you're not hot, are you? GhostBed also offers bundles so they have everything you need. Just choose one of their four mattresses and pick your bundle. Why are you doing this to me? Four mattresses! Four?

Right now, GhostBed is offering 50% off all their products. Just use code UNSUBSCRIBE at checkout or go to ghostbed.com slash unsubscribe. Please buy some ghostbed.com slash unsubscribe. I'll be under your bed if you need me. You've been doing, um, what, Terminalist was your first...

Well, okay. Rewind military experience because there's one question. I told them. I was like, I just want to know this piece of information. Were you deployed on 2001 9-11? Yes. Were you already deployed and then it happened or what the fuck was that? See, I didn't learn that until like two hours ago. Yeah. I was like reading that piece of information. I was like, hold up. Were you like, man, I can't wait for this. Joyous. Joyous.

and then you land, it's like, boom! And you're like, shit! Well, I'm here. Yeah, I was about two weeks into it, I think. So it was my second deployment, so I was not a new guy anymore. But first deployment, we weren't at war, obviously. Second deployment, we get over to Guam, and...

And two weeks into it, September 11th happened. And I think it was about midnight over there with the time difference. People start – you don't have all this stuff in your room. You probably do now. No cell phones and that stuff. So people start banging on doors up and down the hallway and come out in the hall. I'm like, wait, what's going on? And we did have phones in our rooms though and just in landlines for those people.

younger is attached to the wall. Exactly. Exactly. Look it up next to the desk on the hotel. That's it. That's what the, and, uh, and so we went down to the, the only one TV in the basement. And so we all convened down there and watch the towers fall on TV.

And so we thought for sure we're going like tomorrow, like we're going. And it ended up being a couple weeks until we went. But I went right away and did some personal protection stuff for what was then called Commander Singpak Fleet. They changed the name since then because they said there can only be one commander in chief. It used to be commander in chief of whatever.

And so there were all these different ones. And this was the Pacific fleet. He went to the Philippines and like Indonesia kind of to shore up, uh, support from allies. Uh, so I was, did a little personal protection with him and it was like, we didn't know anything yet. So we just geared up. So it was like the full on commando predator Rambo, like gear up, like, you know, cause we didn't know what we were doing yet. And, uh, all we're going to do is action montage. Exactly. Yeah. Every morning. Yep.

Yeah, Brian, last name S. I'm not sure if he's still doing stuff in that world or not. And he was a big, big dude. But we went out there and just kind of put a bunch of guns and knives all over us type of a thing. So we didn't know what was happening. And then got back to Guam. All our stuff was palletized. And we thought we were going right into Afghanistan. But instead, Team 3 ended up going to do that. And we landed and took their mission in Kuwait, which was the shipboardings. So it was like, and that was the only game in town before September 11th.

after september 11th that's not what you wanted to be doing you wanted to be in afghanistan so it was like uh to enforce the un embargo so ships coming out of iraq and then they take a hard left-hand turn for iranian waters so you had a certain amount of time to get on those ships take them over and then turn them back in international waters and then have a prized crew who actually knows how to drive these things because they're big tankers um and

And so that was a little dicey because they'd make sure it was bad weather when they would make their break. And they took barbed wire and put them all over the deck so you couldn't do a fast rope because it would get fouled. So they had barbed wire all over the decks. And then they'd cut the ladder. So if you get on that deck, so a class three tanker, I'm going back to the memory banks here. So please correct me in comments. Correct me in the comments. Don't you do it. So it has that like superstructure thing. And then there's the deck with all the stuff on it. So they cut the ladders. So you'd have to,

climb onto the ship from a boat, like you hook, climb up this caving ladder. And then once you got on, you'd have to do that again because they cut the ladder. So you'd have to hook again, climb up here, and then all the doors were welded shut. So then you'd have to use the torch or the quickie, both in conjunction, to get in. And you hopefully weren't in Iranian waters because if you got too close or went over that line, then you'd have to get off pretty quick and get out

there so it's interesting that's fucking gnarly yeah you're just glazing it was like yeah we're like go on

Crazy. I can't remember what the little ladders, like the little wires. Caving ladders. Caving ladders. I think they use them like CrossFit stuff now. Don't they use them like CrossFit stuff? It's like one of those. Oh yeah. You guys have never seen them before. For time. They're hard as fuck to climb up. So Jack was climbing up those on the side of a ship. They're this wide. Yeah.

They suck very bad. Jamie, pull it up. There we go. Jamie, did you get it up? Good, good. Now show a CrossFitter. Jamie, do a pull-up. Now show somebody in full gear trying to climb one of those. That would have been so fucking awkward. And you're an older guy. You're a rival in full gear. You're just like...

Yeah. These suck. Because you were in old gear, too. You weren't in the stuff that we would eventually get. Yeah, you had the old stuff. So it's body armor. I had a radio on my back. We had MP5s, though, which was cool. Oh, that's rad. Yeah, because soon after that, those went by the wayside and everything went to M4s. But we got to have the MP5s, which made you kind of feel like 90s steel, you know, like little Charlie Sheen action, Mark 23. So we did that. We are moving. That's right.

Hold on. What camo pattern were you wearing? Was it the old MA82? We had our issue stuff, which was just, gosh, whatever they called the desert cami at the time. But then we also had the regular woodlands. Gotcha. M82 and Chucky 2. But we bought black stuff. We bought like on just regular black, like ninja cami type stuff. So that's what we wore pretty much. It's just we bought them on...

I think we got them from tactical assault gear in Coronado, California and have it shipped out to Kuwait. And then we just wore blacked out stuff. Yeah. Buying our own gear. Exactly. How cool did you feel though? You're like, Oh yeah, well you're doing something, but you would have felt cool if it was before September 11th because you're like, yeah, nothing else was happening right now. And we're doing the shipboarding stuff. And now all you wanted to do was get into Afghanistan. Cause we thought we'd miss it. We're like, first we're like, awesome. We're deployed. We're going. Yes. Yes.

And then we got over to the, over to Kuwait. Team three's going to Afghanistan. We're doing their mission. Shoot, we're going to miss this thing. And then we had 20 years. 20 years later. Yeah, 20 years later. We're like, okay. The last couple of times we went in the Middle East, it was over in like three days. Yeah. Oh, fuck. It's like,

Give me a piece of that real quick. Exactly. So everybody thought that if they missed, if they didn't weren't there now, you were not going to get after it. That proved obviously not to be true in the long run, but that's what we thought. It was like a Michael J. Fox back to the future. Like, okay, you guys weren't ready for that, but your kids are going to love it. Exactly. Exactly. You're going to love it. And so, and which is true, right? Which is true of people's kids. There was literal dads and then sons in the same combat zone at

the end of the war which is fucking insane to think about you could have enlisted after September 11th or on it and essentially done your 20 years in the military while you're still at war well there goes our Raytheon sponsorship dang it brought to you by Raytheon luckily there's a few others out there Northrop Grumman hates us now really why would you guys say about them

Nothing yet. Raytheon tries to sponsor the podcast. Let's change the topic before we lose Boeing. We're just losing all our sponsors, damn it. We're going to sewer slide tomorrow. I mean, it did become an industry. I mean, I talk about it in this book. It's interesting. The more research that I do, the more you see how things changed post-World War II. And you're vaguely aware of it, obviously, if you're semi-in-tune with history and what's been happening for, let's say, the last decade.

50, 75 years. Eisenhower who warned against it? Yep. In his speech, people always pull out just the military industrial complex piece and that warning, but it's very short, actually, the whole thing in relatively speaking, but people should listen to that whole speech that he gives when he leaves office and issues that warning. But it used to be called the Department of War, and we used to have a Secretary of War.

And then in 1947, with the reorganization of the military and intelligence establishment, it changes to the Department of Defense. And we have a Secretary of Defense. And ironically, we do more war after that happens. But precision in language reflects precision in thought. So you change something from war to defense, and we haven't really done so well in the wars since. Interesting.

Interestingly enough. So, but it is, it becomes an industry because people are held accountable up essentially to World War II through World War II. And then we get to this 1947 and this reorganization. And now what we see in Vietnam in particular, and then we get into some peacetime and some flashpoints and then into global war on terror, of course. And you see people not held accountable for strategic level mistakes. Whereas George Marshall, he held people accountable in,

leading up to World War II, during World War II. He'd give you a second chance, but, and people mostly know him for the Marshall Plan reorganizing, rebuilding Europe after World War II, but really what he did was put the right people in the right place

so we could win World War II. Because a lot of those names that we know today, those admirals and generals, they didn't start there in 1941 or a little bit before then. Other people were. And he put the right people in place because their predecessors didn't do so well. Whereas now, you do your time and you fail upward and then you go sit on the boards of one of your podcast sponsors. They use the right word. You fail upwards. We talked about that multiple times. And it's disgusting where it doesn't matter how good you are or something.

Because that's where you should be placed into a job. Like, no, this person knew that person. Or you failed into this position because you stayed around long enough. Versus, as you're saying, World War II is like, hey, this is the best person for the job. They're going to stay at this fucking job like everyone else. Or most importantly, it didn't matter if your job led to the success of the entity. As long as the entity succeeded, you did well. And so people are failing up even though they were complete shitters. Yeah.

Yeah, in the military today, really, I mean, probably for the last 50 years or so, as long as you don't get arrested for domestic violence too many times, don't get too many DUIs, and don't pop positive on a piss test, that you can be a success. You can stay there as long as you want. I mean, if you want to be a Navy chief, you've got to have at least, like, two DUIs. It used to be that way. Yeah, it used to be that way. It used to be a thing coming in. I don't think it's as tolerated anymore, but...

But that's really -- that was the measure of success right there. It's not really how well you're doing your job. It's not how poorly you're doing your job. But really, I'm talking about those levels, you know, those flag-level officers up there. And even those senior enlisted advisors up at those levels, too. You know, they are all up there as part of this gigantic bureaucracy. And it's moving.

It's moving. It's an industry, and it's hungry. It's hungry, and it's more powerful each and every day, regardless of what happens, as we saw with the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And you cannot fail worse than that, essentially, when you have 20 years to prepare. I'm sure you guys have talked about this on the podcast before. But 20 years, that is the best that our senior-level military leaders could do with 20 years to prepare for that eventuality. And we all got to see it.

So I think about that every time I have to sign a waiver, like if you buy thermal imagery or you buy a night vision goggles, anything like that, like anything of that sort, uh, you know, even just IR lasers, you have to sign a waiver saying that you won't surrender this to foreign countries or our enemies. But we did billions of dollars of that through the federal government. It's like, really? I like, I laugh every time I have to sign it. Like, okay, sure. Whatever you want. I

I know. It's ridiculous. It's so awful. But that's why I think that's why we have these, one of the reasons that we have these recruitment numbers that are just plummeting because you have people with no touchpoint with the military, didn't have to know anybody that served, didn't have to serve yourself, didn't have to ever watch a military movie or a documentary. And you could apply common sense and logic to that problem set and have done such a better job

of withdrawing from Afghanistan than our best and brightest did. It's absolutely disgusting. None of those guys will ever be held accountable other than by people like this out here talking about it, but they won't be held professionally accountable, that's for sure. But I get to do it in the pages of these novels. That's why it's so therapeutic to write these things. What's crazy is that it is. All right, what's the new book called, Jack? This is called Red Sky Morning. Red Sky Morning.

Bam. That is it right there. But, uh, but it is, it's very therapeutic to write these things because I think part of it is that because you do get to help people accountable, although through the medium of popular fiction. Um, and it does, it does feel good, but I think that's why revenge movies do so well. We have so many death wish movies. Uh,

And John Wick, shit like that. Yeah, exactly. There's something about it because you know you can't do it in real life because you'll go to jail forever or you'll go to the electric chair or something like that. But you can sit there and you can watch it in a theater or you can read it in a book and there's a feeling behind it that makes you feel a little cathartic, I guess is the best way to put it. It's like what we were talking about with Michael Douglas with Falling Down. Oh, yeah. Love that movie. You think about it every day, but you can't do it. Not really. I mean, you can, but you shouldn't.

And there will be consequences at the tactical level. When your inside thoughts become outside thoughts. Like, oh, it probably shouldn't happen. But that's what, when you started writing Terminalist, I was, when you were already out and then you were like, hey, this is, or you're on the cycling out. It was my last year in. And then you're like, okay.

did you take it's like hey here's the bureaucracy that's shit and corruption and i'm gonna put that on exactly how i think this story the revenge story would go exactly exactly so i started writing it uh december of 2014 i got out in june of 2016 so i finished it a little over a year and then spent about six months just reading it rereading it editing trying to get it the best i could possibly get it before sending it to new york but that's exactly it there's uh

The military, politicians, they certainly gave me a lot to work with as far as having antagonists and bad guys in those pages. And then I got to get very creative about how my main character takes them down. It goes so fast.

hard to that i was like okay this i always want to say cowries james like i always i'm like god damn he named it so we were talking fucking yeah you said that earlier i'm like i was like terminator terminator i'm like no switch it but how you created that character and then um then watching it come to life on amazon was fucking insanity that was one of the few like series that caught me off guard i was like okay here's the bad guy and

At the point, and then he's gone. And then it's like, you're already at that revenge part, and it's already well past that. It's like, okay, this goes deeper. And how you did a revenge story was more on the lines of, I don't know if you watch Korean revenge flicks. Should I? I think I will. Take some notes. Korea is always going to tell you yes. Korean revenge flicks will go, they go harder than...

American revenge flicks, it's like on the third act, you'll get to the revenge. Korean revenge flicks are like on act in between one and two, homeboy has now found the guy and now torturing him, letting him go, and then really making that revenge happen.

Hey, you fucked with me. Now I'm going to continue to do this through the other two acts of the movie. It's ridiculous. I have a dragon, demon. I met the devil. I met the devil. Okay. Start with that. That's a good starter. Eli. Eli's being Eli. Could you say I met the devil in your Asian accent? I met the devil, you know? Okay. Now say Korean revenge flicks. Korean revenge flick. Okay. There you go.

I gotta watch this. I'm taking notes. I'm gonna watch it. You guys are gonna love it. Because have you guys watched I Saw the Devil? No. No. Every one of my friends that have actually watched it, they're like, holy fuck, America needs to do revenge flicks like this. It goes hard. Homeboys, police detective, this is not spoiling anything. This is like first 10 minutes. Wife and or pregnant wife stuck.

waiting for somebody to come. Person goes to help and they're like, she's like, okay. They get in. He then kills her with a hammer and then it's like, and then everything unfolds and the detective finds him in the first act and he goes fucking insane from there. Oh, and then you realize that's all Korean revenge flicks. They're very much

Hey, punishment, punishment, punishment. Completely different than American. But you did very good on. Oh, thank you. Here? I was like, oh, that happened in the middle of Act 2. Okay, I don't know where this is going now. Yeah. If it's okay, I'd love to talk about how that process proceeded from writing your initial book to getting on Amazon with Chris Pratt playing your main character. Because that is a, in my mind, that is a huge jump from your first book.

to getting it on Amazon pushed to everybody's Burger King cup. Yeah, yeah. No, no. That's awesome. Chris Pratt on the Burger King cup with a tomahawk. That'd be awesome. Yeah, but the craziest part of the whole thing is that as I sit down to write, I'm a child of the 80s, and so it's very natural as I write the first sentence in this book to start thinking about who's going to play the main character and who's going to direct.

Um, and so I'm sitting down to write this thing, December of 2014. I write the first words and I already started thinking, gosh, you should play this. Okay. And not, not, not who is this character, but who could play it. And I thought, you know what? There's this guy, Chris Pratt. And I just saw him in zero dark 30 playing a seal, uh,

But I saw his transformation from Andy Dwyer in Parks and Rec. He was kind of a big, jolly, funny guy. And then I saw him as a SEAL. So I saw this physical transformation. I saw the acting. And I thought, oh, this Chris Pratt guy, he needs this for his career. Like, he needs to do something. He needs to stretch. This one. This will blow him up. Exactly. In between was the MCU. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. So then, yeah. So what you're saying is you saw him before Marvel did? I did. I saw him right there. I knew it. That was the only person I ever thought. Because I didn't want someone who couldn't.

who has done that before, like who had, who's already done action movies, kind of does that sort of thing. I wanted somebody new, somebody different, somebody who was inherently likable because he's going to do some horrible things in this book. So I want the audience to already like him. Uh, and I want him to have this, uh, kind of like Magnum in the eighties, like a lot of the, his banter back and forth with his buddies, Vietnam buddies and all that stuff. Like he was likable, but then there were episodes where he could flip that switch and it's one of the first times, uh,

on in prime time where a protagonist kills an unarmed person and it's the end of an episode. It's amazing. Kills this guy, Ivan. It's awesome. - This one. - Yeah, it's really cool. And he had to fight for that ending. It was groundbreaking ending. So there are a few episodes in there that get serious. So he could flip that switch and get it done. So I thought that's what I need for my character. That's who I want him to be. And Chris Proud would be perfect. So, but I didn't have any connections to Hollywood. And I also thought, you know, who should direct this thing?

Oh, Antoine Fuqua. Awesome. Training Day, Tears of the Sun. That'd be great. But I didn't have any connection to Hollywood, no connection to publishing or anything like that. But I thought that's who's going to direct and that's who's going to star in this thing. So keep typing away. Ended up getting it to Simon & Schuster in New York. They love it. Emily Bessler, Emily Bessler Books. And she tells me then that I needed to get an agent. I didn't know that I needed an agent.

Um, but so I'm glad I didn't know that because I would have tried to find an agent first probably, and I might still be looking. So, uh, I said, well, how do you find one of those? And, uh, she said, well, here, I'll introduce you to four of them and kind of pick one and they'll all want to do it because you already have essentially a deal in place. Uh, so I said, okay. And chose one. And she's still my agent today. She's fantastic. Um,

But then it gets to Simon & Schuster and I thought, oh, they're going to make it amazing. They're going to make all these changes. And because it's Emily Bessler at Emily Bessler Books who does Vince Flynn, Brad Thor, she's incredible. If she wants aliens to come down from outer space, guess what's going on in this thing? Aliens from outer space are going to this thing for sure.

You have a number is what you're saying. Yeah. Well, I just like, I started to make a good. And then James Reese came from this space ship. Way to call him a sellout, Eli. Jesus Christ. But then what happened was there were no changes. There was no changes. And so I thought, oh, that's interesting. It was more content changes were along the lines of. They didn't change anything? More along the lines of, hey, describe this for someone who hasn't been in the military or.

That sort of a thing. That's about it. That's amazing. That's one thing that I've always given you credit for in that regard and in your descriptions. I've read parts of your books where it's like, okay, and then he pulls back the hammer on his custom .45. It's very detailed for gun guys. It would be very odd for me not to do that. I couldn't just say he picked up a pistol or he grabbed a shotgun or whatever. It's not in me to do that because those things tell a story. It's painfully clear.

Dude was a Navy SEAL. Dude was a Navy SEAL. But there's a lot of Navy SEALs who aren't gun guys. People assume that just because you're a SEAL or you're SF or whatever, or a Ranger or whatever it might be, that you know gun stuff. And that's not necessarily the case. You might not even know anything about the Second Amendment.

You might only know what was issued to you. That's that sort of a thing. And that's probably more more prevalent than than the other side. So I was interested in all that stuff before I went in the military. I mean, growing up, I was reading Soldier of Fortune, the gung ho magazine, which was awesome back in the day and get a short lived run. There was a Soldier of Fortune spinoff, but I still have the seal issue to this day.

Um, so it's gotta be more something like my dad, like you were reminding me a lot of my dad cause he used to, he grew up on all the Tom Clancy, the soul fortune, like stuff like that. It was a great time to be alive. I'll tell you that. I love, I love the eighties. Uh, I would go back today if I could, I'd go, I'd go 1980 to eight, I think 91. When did Terminator two come out?

92? Yeah, 91, 92. I think it was 91. That's when it peaked. That's when cinema peaked. I think it peaks right there. At least the 80s cinema peak. You can still call it 80s cinema, I think, even though it's the beginning of the 90s because there's a little bit of overlap every decade. But I'd say, yeah, 80 to maybe even 79 to 1991, I think. Or when did Use Your Illusion come out? Guns N' Roses, probably around the same time.

Same time right there. That's a Brandon question. I think I'm just going to go. Yeah, I'm going to go right then. Why do you think I know that? I know, you like music. Brandon was born in like 2000. Not 2000. Brandon was born way late. It was still... God. It's possible you were made with that in the background. You know? Oh, it's possible.

It's possible. I hate that. That's actually very like this. It's possible. He's like, damn it. Jack, do you know what sucks about Harry Potter? 1991. Man, look at that. Nailed it. I got this. You know what sucks about Harry Potter? I was sitting in eighth grade English class. The first Harry Potter book just came out, right? I was enjoying it so much. Teacher turns on the TV.

And then the second tower goes down. Wow. It's like, so I've always related Harry Potter with 9-11. Wow. I love, like I was loving Harry Potter and then I was like, oh shit, 2000 people just died.

Okay. So I've always related Harry Potter with 9-11. This is one of those connections in my brain now. I read fucking the Death Adder. What's the second one? Deathly Hallows Part 2 in Iraq during mid... Really? Yeah, we were just doing transition to Moktadia. And that's when I read that book. I had a two-week...

leave, came back, and then flew back. - Isn't that weird? Like we didn't get leave, but was it weird doing leave in the middle of a deployment? That seems odd. - Bro, what's it work? Okay, so we did 16 months. I did a 16 month deployment. - Fuck, so during the search. - Yeah, so. - Fuck, dang it. - So, and you weren't the first person to do that. They had, I think in 2004, when I was there, guys were going to the airfield to go home. That advance party had already left at the year mark.

I think it was a year mark, maybe it was 14 months. You can look it up. People had gone home. I think some were from Alaska. I think it was from multiple places. But then they got turned around at the airfield. Everything's palletized. They're going home. They get turned around at the airfield. Actually, I put it in a paragraph in the first book. Guys had to come back. They were already at that advance party that leaves to go home to kind of prep things to accept. Yeah, add one. Add one. And they had to come back to Iraq. And I think that some of those guys didn't make it then after some –

They got hit by something. Dude, that's a, I felt bad for, I remember like a handful of guys, Mulkey and a couple others. So we did a 15 to 16 month deployment. That's insane. And we were searched. I was like, tip of the spear here. Like boom, boom, boom.

I had buddies that one month in, like three weeks into deployment, they're sent on leave. Because you have to stagger everybody. Yep. So they're sent back one month in to combat. And now they have their two weeks on day come back. Now they have literal 14 months in country where mine was perfectly at the seven month mark where I was like, cool, two weeks. And it's weird because you go, you land. Yeah.

Texas is 90 degrees and I'm like wearing full like pants. I'm like, oh, it's really cold here. Cause at the time it's like 130 in Iraq. Cause it was like August, I think, or July. I remember 127. And then rooftops and all that shit. You're just like, this is garbage. And you did sniping. Yeah. You probably did rooftops then. Yeah. Yay. Rooftops at night. Go down a level during the day. Yeah. A hundred. Yeah. A hundred degrees at night. You're like, whew, this is nice. It gets nighties. You at least get a breeze on the rooftop or.

Well, I only went up there at night. So I don't know what other people did, but I only went up there at night on the rooftops. During the daytime, we'd be back inside. So you're like in an urban hide site. So you could make it here. You can make one here. But typically, we liked to be, well, in combat, we wanted to be one room deep. So we found out that when bullets are flying and RPGs and everything are flying, we want to be...

back there, but shooting through something out this way. Now, if no one's firing at you yet, then you can make an urban high sight in a room like this and then tell things start to get... Because you're talking about your cone of fire is... Straightforward. You can break out a big hole in this wall, little hole in that wall, and shoot through it. Exactly. A little more protection, especially when there's mortars and RPGs and stuff coming in. But, yeah. Yeah.

Not so, at least for us anyway. I can't talk about anybody else's units or whatever their experience was. But yeah, being on the rooftops during the day we found wasn't the greatest. But go up there at night because you can use your nods and you have the technological advantages of aircraft. And of course, your nods and thermals and all that stuff. So interesting times, good times, good stuff. Daytime on the roof just as hot as shit. And then you are a target also. You're just like...

I don't want to be up here. You're just moving about. You're like, because the videos they train you on that you probably did the same thing. It's like just to demoralize you to like watch troops move. If they don't move, this is what happens.

And then when you get there, that is in your mind. You're like on patrols or anything. You're like, you're not, you were never stagnant. You were always moving. You're taking these standing up, moving around. You're trying not to be stagnant day missions. When you're on a rooftop, it's hot as fuck, like 130, a hundred and like baking. And then,

You just, does somebody have a bead on me the entire time? And that's why you're always constantly moving. You're like, I just hope I'm not getting shot at night missions, 24 hour OPS greatest thing in the world. Cause that's when we do the same thing. Window pull back, set up desk, lay down, watch,

And then probably did you guys do over OPs over ID placements and everything? Even back then before, I'm sure the technology today allows you to really do it, you know, but instead of like putting pins on a board type thing and saying, oh, this area has, there's heavily ID'd corner or intersection or whatever it is. So you'd go up and set up to try to interdict someone that was going to put another one out there type of a deal.

M20, what was your... So the workhorse ended up being the Mark 11 and the Mark 12. So a 7.62 version and a 5.56 version of essentially an M4 type platform for those listening. So it looks like that, but it's a little more accurate. The Knights...

Initially, yeah, they had the SR-25, and then it became, we actually had the SR-25 first, and then I think we just changed the nomenclature, and then I think we switched the scopes out from the Leupold Mark IVs to the Night Force in about 2003 timeframe, I think, somewhere around there. But those ended up being the workhorse because obviously you could use them for more than just setting up, like with the Bolt Action 301 mag and our 301 mags.

Before September 11th, I would say those are the ones that we trained the most on because you're using essentially that Vietnam sniper type of a paradigm. But then once we got out there in Iraq, it's like, okay, I want some more rounds here. Yeah, we need some more. Exactly. Exactly. But I still love the 301 mag. There's a lot of dudes here who love a law.

I would like more than five rounds, please. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Exactly. But yeah, our 300s were put together by Crane, Indiana. So our weapons department thing out there, whatever they call it. But they were McMillan stocks and Remington 700 actions. And yeah, put together by Crane. So.

So yeah, that's some good stuff. You had a few things to choose from. '50s, same way. Macmillan stocks, from '18 to '50 Cal. We'd never used the Barrett's, so it was a '18 to '700 action. Barrett's we left on-- I remember, I think it was tanks and one sniper team went out. And they're like, there's--

thing weighs so goddamn much we are never bringing this on a mission again and they after that it was just leave it back at bay like leave it back at the cob we lived out of cob so it's just like nope we'll just anything but that heavy ass tank of a weapon and they started issuing m14s at that time so everyone started running it was also before that one it was seven i believe was that no yeah barrett oh yeah seven so like they cut it down by off the top of my head like eight pounds because they they started making shit out of titanium

which cut down on the weight because they realized that you know 32 pounds is way much way too much for a infantry weapon it's not great it's very heavy gun our sponsor for this video is pds debt because everything is really expensive right now i spent 400 at the grocery store i don't even know what i got milk he got milk one milk you may be in debt right now because the economy is in shambles you know what also comes with debt stress anxiety existential doom

P.D.S. Debt has a solution for you. Help is available. Whether it be medical bills, collections, credit card debt, they have customized options for you. If you're making payments on your debt and your balance isn't going anywhere, this is the solution for you. P.D.S. Debt has options that consolidates all of that debt into one low monthly payment.

Everyone with $10,000 or more in eligible debt qualifies, and there's no minimum credit score required. Save thousands in interest and fees. And pay off your debt in a fraction of the time. PDS Debt is a top-rated company on Google and has an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau. They're personable. Go check out all their reviews and see how many specifically mention PDS employees by name.

It's incredible. You can get a free analysis right now by going to pdsdebt.com/unsub. It takes 30 seconds. Go to pdsdebt.com/unsub. Go now! I'm going to get Jack out to shoot the helicopter killer. What's a helicopter killer? So I have a prototype Barrett that they made back in the day. It was, you know, the M82A1. Yeah, which one is that? Is that like the base? The very basic Barrett.

They made a version that was the M82A2 that was meant to be fired with the back of the receiver over your shoulder with the little recoil pad behind the magazine. Okay. It was meant to be fired because the military wanted a weapon to fire at helicopters. Okay. And aircraft or whatever. All right. And so they made it. They made like 12 or 20 of them or some shit. There's only like – it's a sub-two dozen amount in the world. Okay.

And the military said like, wow, this is cool. Sorry. We asked, we don't want that. Right. And so I've got one of the, they're like, it turns out the Taliban doesn't have helicopters until we leave them to them. Now we go back and we're like, Hey, remember that Barrett, which as it turns out, the majority of what we left back in Afghanistan, they crashed in the first week anyway. So, well,

Well, it was funny story. What was it? Chris Barrett called you and was like, how the fuck did you get that? Chris Barrett's a friend. He, uh, he actually commented on that. Cause I said, Oh, we've got a unicorn Barrett. He's like, there's very few things that we consider a unicorn. That is one of that's awesome. Actually, I signed a book for him last night before I came out here. I was up all night, like sign him because I'm going on tour for the next 10 days. And so I'm signing books and getting them out the door. So my wife can, uh, can send them out. Well,

Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and just get them out there while I'm on tour. But I signed one for him. Oh, so you know Chris? Yeah. He's a good guy. I really like him. I love the family story. I love like, hey, you're crazy. You're building this thing in your garage. It's a great American success story. No, I'm going to build it. I'm going to focus on this thing, build it in the garage, and then grow it into what it became. It's such a great American success story. I love it. As somebody who developed a semi-auto 50 Cal, I'm just like sitting there for the first time.

Meeting Ronnie Barrett. Yeah. Yeah and in the back of my mind just like geeking like oh, it's awesome kids. Yeah No, he's fantastic look how he dresses now and everything so we've had some dinners together and gets up to his brain a little bit about things and yeah, he's Fantastic Ronnie's a excuse me. Chris is a bro. Ronnie is a legend. Yeah, it's it's it's really cool. It's

It's a crew family. It's a fucking amazing family. I guess I got to up my game, I guess, as far as the weapons collection goes. I thought going to the Park City Gun Club yesterday and having them telling me that I needed to get my own FFL was a big deal. And then I'm like, oh, jeez. If you were ever in San Antonio, come with us for a couple hours. We'll do a big range day. Come to my facility. And anything you can think of that you ever want to shoot, we will happily hook you up. Except for what, Brandon? MP7?

I'm working on it. Cody's the only thing he wants. Cody's like, I just want an MP side. Do some people have them? They're only $30,000 right now. There's a couple of people that have a civilian side. They're very expensive civilian side where you're talking maybe...

Currently $40,000, $50,000. Oh. If you have an FFL and everything. Really? Well, what's an old school MP5 Fogliato from, let's say, 1984? I bought mine for like $70,000. Not $70,000, excuse me, $7,000. $7,000? Oh, what? So not transferable. Oh, okay. I was like, what? I bought like an MP5 SD, like the Integrally Suppressed version, like $6,000, $7,000. How much is it transferable?

If you're talking transferable stuff that civilians can own, you're talking maybe $30,000, like $40,000 maybe. Yeah, that's exactly, yeah. A couple years ago I had one, but I didn't have any money yet, so I didn't feel like I could do that. The thing is with MP7s, there are zero available that are transferables because they were made after 1986. Oh, man. No civilians that don't have an FFL and all the crazy licensing for the law letters and whatnot.

You can't own them legally. What you do in your own garage with a drill press is up to you. We're not going to judge here. We're not going to sit here and judge. Look, man, that's between you and God. Chase is like, what do I do with this edit right now? No, that's fine. I don't mind. I don't mind sitting behind that.

Disclaimer, the unsubscribed podcast does not endorse the ownership of weapons. Read the small print. Yeah, exactly. Oh, man. How was it when your first book came out, when it actually launched and then it did pretty fucking good? As Brandon was saying, it's

You go from a first-time author, which is unheard of, to, I forget what the award you won. Well, like the New York Times bestselling thing. The other one. I don't know if they're... That's the only one I really think about. Man, there's another one listed. But I mean, that's the big one. That's the one. That's the small one. You want the number one spot. How does it feel to be the second New York Times bestseller on the podcast? Seriously. Seriously. Yeah, yeah. It was...

I knew what I wanted to do for so long. And I had prepared myself from an early age, not, not intentionally, but just because as being a reader, I just love the magic of this page, these pages. So I'm reading guys, Tom Clancy, Nelson DeMille, AJ Quinella, JC Pollock, Mark Olden, Louis L'Amour. All these guys were my professors in the art of storytelling from let's say 1985 onward. So age six grade is where I,

fifth grade is where you're reading young adult fiction still, but starting to make that transition into the same kind of books like adult fiction that I read and write today, sixth grade, certainly reading all those kinds of books. So I just had amazing professors and I didn't have any other distractions. So I had Atari 2600, which you could only play for like 30 minutes tops, you know? Um, so you have that and you,

You can't game all day long. There's no social media. There's no internet. If you're going to watch a TV show, it's on at 8, 9, or 10 o'clock at night. Not available on demand, obviously. And if a new movie is coming out, you're going to go and see that maybe twice a month. Maybe a cool movie comes out. You're going to go on a Friday or Saturday when you're that young with your parents or maybe with some friends on a weekend or something like that. But you're limited. A girl if you're gay. Yeah.

know limited you're limited in like what you can what these what is going to pull you away from reading so i got to really establish this base essentially so when i started down this path i just i i didn't have to start from scratch is what i'm saying i didn't have to wake up i didn't wake up one morning and say what should i do when i get out of the steel teams oh writing would be cool um

How do you do that? Exactly. Exactly. So it's contrary to popular belief. I mean, I don't know like stage how far you made it in the pipeline, but a third phase, they have a whole like three weeks on how to write. That's definitely didn't get there. No, I'm just kidding. Just kidding. That third phase after Halloween, it's like, okay, right. Here we go. This is how you do it. This is how you market yourself. This is how you do it.

This is how you market yourself. This is how you do this. No, they don't have any of that stuff. Exactly. Here's our connections. No, there's none of that. But I felt like I had been doing the work already to prepare me for what I wanted to do next. So I didn't have to go and think, what should I have been reading for the last 30 years? Let me go back and start now. I already had done all of that. So I knew exactly what I liked as a reader from the fan perspective. Kind of like Quentin Tarantino didn't go to film school, but he is a student of film because he loves film.

As it turns out, he innately knew how to say the N-word. Dude, his child... Have you read his book? I read the cinema... What's the last... The book? What's the title? I'm losing it right now. Anyway, the book that he wrote just a year ago or so. Yeah, just a year ago. Which is phenomenal. He does the first chapter. He reads it and then has somebody else take over, which...

phenomenal. I read it. I didn't do a lot of your book. Audio book. He does the first chapter by himself and then transitions into another individual. But again, like his childhood leading up into cinema on how he got into black, black boy, black boy. Yeah. Yeah. How he got into that whole genre. Yeah.

Yeah. And he goes back and he has a podcast and he can recall so many different things from all these films from, he likes the seventies, like he loves the seventies cinema. Um, but I love listening to that. And you learn so much about the history of film by listening to that podcast, by reading that book. Um, I mean, it's encyclopedia, but not because he studied it because he loves it. And so that's his passion, obviously. And that was yours. This was mine. Yeah, exactly. So, uh,

So I never really thought about it in terms of like the odds or anything like that. So I just thought this is what I'm going to do next. And all my bandwidth went into making it the best book it could possibly be. Next one, I was already writing the second book before I even submitted the first book to Simon & Schuster. Flew to Mozambique to go do some on the ground research over there because I knew that that was going to be a very significant part of this next project.

phase of the journey for my character. Um, but I, cause I knew that, that John Grisham, he wrote a time to kill first and he couldn't give that book away. Then he writes the firm, Tom Cruise's in the movie off it goes. And we have a John Grisham novel every year or two a year ever since. Uh, but if he had stopped after that first book, then we wouldn't. And

And he'd probably just be retiring from law practice right now, probably miserable and hating it. But then they make the movie of A Time to Kill. I think A Time to Kill is arguably his best book. I haven't read some of the more recent ones because I got a little busy. But of the earlier ones, I do love A Time to Kill. And that's the one that for some reason he couldn't give away. Yeah.

And by that, I mean it didn't sell as well as the next ones, obviously. Which is how it works a lot. Yeah. So I was like, well, if the second one, I'm going to write two. And if the second one doesn't do well, then I'll reevaluate and figure something out.

some things out. I didn't know A Time to Kill was a book. Yeah. Like the movie is incredible. Yeah, it's a great movie. They did a great job with it. Great adaptation. Obviously, Matthew McConaughey, you know, he's already kind of on that path. What is it? Days Unconfused? All right, all right, all right. Oh, we're in Austin. That's right. Yeah, we're kind of in Austin right now. Endorsing my opponent. Yeah, he's a great guy. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Wait, he didn't come on the podcast? Well, never say never, but we'll see. Yeah, yeah. But,

But yeah, he was great in that, obviously. And like all those films, they did a great job with those Grisham adaptations in the 90s. And that was a good time. Like that was a great time to be writing and having your stuff adapted to film because there was box office. And today, there's no box office. There's no VHS. There's no DVD. There's none of that. Streaming is a little tough because who controls that data? So it's a very interesting landscape to navigate now. But I'm essentially...

a student of it. I've always been a student of warfare. I'm a student of still a student of warfare. I'm a student of my craft, always trying to get better on my next book to be better than this one. That's always the goal. And thus far, I think I've done that. So this is my favorite one to date because I think I accomplished that by having to be better than the one before. But, uh,

But yeah, it feels, I mean, getting into Chris. So that was going back to that. We took a segue. We took like a 30-minute segue. We are known for segues here at Segways. It's a weird. I'm mostly curious, though, about the time between, okay, you release your first book. It's doing really well. What is the conversation like when Amazon reaches out to you?

It happened before the book even came out. So my friend calls me out of the blue in November of 2017. The book came out in March of 2018. 2017, I hadn't talked to this guy for five years. His name's Jared Shaw.

Awesome guy who calls me out of the blue. I know exactly where I am. I'm at Thunder Ranch in Oregon. Very nice. That's a range. Exactly. Doing some, some training up there. And I get this call from, from Jared hadn't talked to him five years and he's like, Hey man, do you remember me? And I'm like, Jared, of course I remember you. How's it going? And he's like, man, I always wanted to thank you for what you did for me in the SEAL teams. And I was like, I couldn't remember what that was. Um,

And so he told me. Not a corps member. Yeah, I'm like, I don't remember. I'm like, what did I do? And he's like, man, when I said I was getting out of the military, you're the only person that sat me down in your office, talked to me about transitioning to the private sector. You introduced me to people in the private sector. Then you followed up with me to see how it was doing. And if you needed anything else, you're the only person that did that. And I always wanted to thank you.

And I was like, dude, no problem. How's it going? And he said, it's going great, but I heard you have a book coming out. And I said, yeah, I can send you. I have an early copy. It's called The Galley. And I just found out what a galley was like two weeks before. I didn't even know what that was. It's like a paperback of this that you send out to reviewers ahead of time. And I'm like, I can send you this galley thing if you want to check it out. And he said, I'd like that, but I'd like to give it to a friend of mine. And I was like, who's that? And he said, Chris Pratt. I was like, oh.

That's interesting because it's very convenient for me because that's why I envisioned playing this role. So I sent it to Jared. Jared read it. He gave it to Chris. They met when Chris came down to Bud's to do some training for Zero Dark Thirty. So Jared was an instructor at Bud's at the time, SEAL training, and they got to know each other and hit it off. They became best friends. Yeah, they're best friends. Jared was in Chris's wedding, and Jared, awesome, awesome dude. So he gave it to Chris. Chris read it and called the next week and wanted to option it.

So he optioned it first out of the gate. And then from there, he takes it and takes it to Amazon from there. So it was before. So Chris was the one who took it to Amazon. Yep. Oh, shit. That's fucking rad.

There's a production company, kind of middle production company, MRC, who gets it first. So there's like multiple kind of levels as far as financing and all that stuff. But so Chris got it, got a showrunner, David DiGilio, who's awesome. Antoine wanted it at the same time. So that's the other crazy part of the story is the director, exact director that I wanted, another buddy, unbeknownst to me, gave him a copy. Antoine Fuqua, yep. Yeah.

gave him a coffee as well before it even came out. And so Antoine wanted it at the same time that Chris wanted it. And then those guys are friends from doing Magnificent Seven together. So they just called and said, let's do it together. You weld that shit into existence. It's crazy. That's one show. So Terminal List is one show that I automatically go into any sort of gunplay, military, any sort of fucking TV show or movie I watch. I'm very critical of.

i'm just like ah okay this is hollywood's gay idea of how military works or how tactics or guns or whatever that was the one show that by episode two i'm like all right you got me oh thank you like i was i was completely sold yeah from from the very beginning it was that was very good well i appreciate that because that's one thing we wanted we all agreed so me antoine chris and david de jellio the showrunner um what we wanted to do is stay true to that mindset of a modern day warrior like that's what we wanted we wanted somebody who's a

former military, cop, let's say firefighter, intelligence, whatever, somebody like that who sits down on their couch, cracks a beer, turns this thing on. We wanted them to know that we at least tried, that we at least put in the effort to try to get it right. And there's going to be Hollywood hot sauce to move the story along and that sort of a thing. But we wanted them to realize, okay, they at least put in the effort to do this. And so that was very important to us and still is on the one that we're filming right now. But we had a

I'm also now I was forgiving before, like when I watched military stuff, unless it was so, you know, it's like, oh, come on. I really tried to like not ruin it for everyone around me and not ruin it for myself. Also, like I tried to I try to let go with it. But there's a point, though. Yeah. I mean, there's there's certainly there certainly is. But now I'm even more forgiving because I see how many how many.

how easy it is for these things to go off the rails. Cause there are so like, this is just me. This is one person, uh, goes to my editor and her day, her, uh, her comments content wise are the same as they were for that first book. Explain this a little more for someone who wasn't in the military or explain this a little more for someone who hasn't read all the books up to this. Like those are kind of the, the only kind of content edits that I get. But now when I see how easy it is for like 350 people working on a show or how, yeah,

All these moving pieces. If this is horrible, it's all on me. There's no one else to blame. Now, when you're dealing with 350 people or you're going all the way up to the top execs at Amazon and back down with notes just on scripts and everything else, when you're dealing with time constraints, budgetary constraints, you might not be able to get the weapon systems that you want because of FFLs or what's in your...

what state you're filming in or now internationally, it's crazy. Seriously. Yeah. It's a whole thing. Like the ATF is involved in all this stuff. It's like serious problems. Yeah. So that's why sometimes you can't get the exact thing that you need. Like there's just one weapon that I want to get in this final episode. So I'm writing the final episode of this new show. All right. Well, I'm not going to say what it is because it's kind of like saying that you,

that you want a certain actor to play something and then you don't get it. We can cut this if we need, we can cut this, but it's in Budapest. So it means you had to have figured that out six months ago in order to do all the paperwork to get it there for filming now. So it's like one of those things. Yeah. So it's one of those. So I, so now when I watch a show, I realize all these factors come into play. Like if I see guys running around and it looks like they're running around with like kind of ARs from the nineties, but it's a contemporary show. Yeah.

And then you're like, wait, what's going on? What happened here? Well, maybe they're filming in a country where that's all they have access to type of a thing. So there's so many different, when you're talking about weapons and all that stuff now. It's kind of like Lord of War if you think about it. When they do the scene about like the AK-47, everything in the back rack is a VZ-58. Oh, was I going to watch that again? They were filming in Czechoslovakia.

So that's all I can get. See, so that's exactly it. Exactly it. So, so now those are not AK 47s. I know you're going to ruin it for everybody around you. You know, yeah. So yeah, yeah. Yeah. But now I'm much more forgiving because I see just how difficult it is. One to make anything and then two to make anything good.

So it's really interesting. But I'm a student of it. I love it. I love learning. I love learning the screenwriting side of the house. Hopefully that makes me better at this and vice versa. So it's fun. Remaining a student is, I think that's my thing. You're fucking crushing it. I have a request. Not quite a request. I'm just throwing this out here. We all want to get killed by you. If yours are done. Yeah, yeah. That's how we're ending this podcast.

- You're gonna kill us. - Yeah, yeah. If there's any scene whatsoever where a terrorist could die, just random terrorist number four. - Or two Mexicans. I mean, Brandon got you covered on the Mexican one. - We would love to die. - Got it, got it. - It's fun, you know, it's fun. And I think we're filming the next one. I'm actually not sure exactly where we're gonna film it yet. "True Believer," the second book. We'll start filming that. I think it's sometime in 2025 we start it, but I'll keep you guys in mind.

It's cool to see how they do it. Because when I got killed in Terminalist, so episode three, beginning of episode three, shootout with Chris Pratt. But what they do to make bullet holes, you know, about this, they put bullet holes into, well, in glass. So I'm in the car, and it's a shootout between me and Chris Pratt. I'm shooting through. He's shooting through glass. And they take these, like, you know, the metal straws. They line those up under the dash so the camera can't see them in. And they have little ball bearings in there. And they have a little explosive charge in them. That's right.

And so there's all these wires. So it looks like you're wired for some sort of a car bomb type thing is how it looks. And there's somebody on the side over there that has their iPad or whatever else. And they're touching these things off. And they're shooting into the glass. So it looks like bullet holes.

Did you do the paintballs with the sparks too? No, didn't do that one. They might have done it in another scene, but I don't think so. But in this one, it was just blanks in the pistols and then those ball bearings going into the glass. So I had to wear the gaiters so the glass wouldn't get in my eyes and they put the blood squib in the headrest so when he shoots me in the head, I throw my head to the side and it goes up there like that. I was that fucking guy. You know how life's cool.

virgins will watch Lord of the Rings. They're like, oh, did you know when he kicked the f***ing helmet, he broke his foot? Like that sort of shit. I was like, hey, do you know that's the writer? That's the writer of the book. Right there. Right there. Yeah. That entire shootout's f***ing insane. That was killer. No, it was fun to do. And they wouldn't let me do the stunt. So the stunt was Chris back in the Land Cruiser, which looks almost exactly like my real Land Cruiser, into the car that I'm in. And I was kind of like, you know, I can do that. It's just a little fender bender. I can do that. And they said, no, you're not contractually or whatever. You have to have a stuntman do it.

And so I said, OK. But then I saw it in real life. And I was like, ooh, I'm kind of glad I didn't do that. Because in real life, it looked-- Not really. Yeah, in real life, it doesn't look as bad on film. But in real life, I was like, oh, yeah, OK, maybe I shouldn't have done that. I'm glad they didn't let me do that. Kind of like hitting a tree, maybe.

Yeah, it was pretty cool. We're not going to talk about that. Okay, all right. But the guy who doubled me is Mick Rogers, who's a legendary Hollywood stuntman who was Mel Gibson's double in Lethal Weapon where he gets handcuffed to the guy on the top of the roof and jumps off with that guy. And so that was Mick Rogers that did that stunt. So it was cool. Stunt guys go through. Thankfully, they just did Fall Guy, which was Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling. And that movie, they literally... He's literally me. Yeah.

It was directed by a stunt guy and the level of shit those guys go through. I did a little stuff in LA and Hollywood and watching what they, they experienced. It's insane. They get beat up. They get, it's rough. It is serious. Learning how to fall down stairs.

That, like, concrete stairs? That scares the fuck out of me. You're gonna get hurt, right? The pads? They have pads, but you're still just following the guys in. What was one of the worst stunts in Terminal List? Ooh, one of the worst ones. I'm trying to think. Well, from the viewer perspective, what did it look like? I'm trying to think of ones where someone got really beat up. I don't know if it was the worst. He was falling down.

Oh, I know. The mountainside stuff. Yeah, the mountainside. Yeah. That's Chris Romero. Awesome dude. Any mountainside where you're just falling, I know they're doing that. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. It was all physical. So that's him jumping. You can go to Chris Romero's Instagram and the picture on his thing is him doing that jump. That's his little his picture. And it is an amazing picture. But he's cool. He's a big guy like Chris is a big dude. And Romero, he can like just like stand here and do a backflip. You know, he's like that agile is a big dude. It's crazy.

So that one was probably it. But then in the tunnel sequence, when the guys are attached to the cables and there's in the beginning, there's that explosion and they all go flying in before they take that out with visual effects, the cables yank these dudes and it throws them hard. Yeah, it's pretty serious.

But it's cool. - Is there anything in the book that you wish made it to the show? - I knew there was gonna be changes. So I remember "First Blood", the book from 1972 written by David Morrell, very different than the Sylvester Stallone movie, both fantastic, both very different from one another. And so I was going into it, I knew there would be differences.

In my head, before Chris, or as I'm writing it, I'm thinking, oh, you do one killing episode. Like in my head, I'm like, okay, that'd be awesome. And then when you get everyone together in the writer's room together and put the outline together and all that stuff, and you see it starting to take shape, you realize there are story arcs per episode and then story arcs over the entire season and all of those sorts of things. So I went into student mode once again, just absorbing, learning, learning.

So maybe cutting the – but I think we're going to move into another episode, another season. Like you can take things that maybe didn't make it in from the first book and then because of how you're adapting the second one or the third one or the fourth one, you can kind of move some things around and use some of those things. There's a scene in the book where James Reese cuts somebody's heads off and leaves it on a gate.

and throws an ISIS flag over the top of it. It'd be kind of cool to do that. So we might see that next season. I think I should work it in somewhere. It's like a natural thing to work in somewhere.

God dang. So you took everything you learned from that, like first writing and then you're like, okay, I'm going to start using and incorporating everything I'm learning from the Hollywood style of screenwriting and then adapt it together. And that helped you with the last couple of books or did you start incorporating a little bit of measures in that? Yeah, I wouldn't say that. So I don't write this and think about how it'll be adapted. I don't do that. But I think the more natural things, like if you were to,

the first book that would have been influenced by the terminalist tv show would have been in the blood just because of timing so i can definitely look at that and see that the flashbacks that i give my main character were almost certainly influenced by the flashbacks that james reese has in the tv show of his wife and daughter um so it's more things like that rather than um than

than like strict rules or something like that. It's more like more feelings, emotions, storytelling, rather than, oh, how would this adapt? - 'Cause you do like, even in that one, you do really good with flashbacks. It's like those moments where it's like he wakes up, it's like PTSD or just memories and he's waking up from a dream. You do a fantastic job of that.

of that. Thank you. I like writing those because I think we're all, when we're making a decision in life, you're thinking about past experience. You're trying to take those past lessons, apply them going forward as wisdom. And so he's doing the same thing as a different guy. Each book, he's not just the same person that's plopped into a different scenario. Every book, he's a different person in each book because he's evolving, hopefully like we all are on this journey

called life. Hopefully we're not the exact same person today than we were yesterday. Hopefully we learned something from yesterday. And so I try to incorporate that in here, but it's a very natural thing. And I think that's why these books have really resonated with people is because everyone is on a journey and James Reese is on a journey. He's not the same person in every book. So I think that I didn't think about that at the outset when I started writing it, but now looking back, I think that's probably part of the appeal.

How many books do you think you're going to get out of James Reese? I don't know. People are going to have to read this one to see what happens. Maybe this is the last one. We'll see. You tell me you didn't finish any last. No, I've not finished. I had like...

I'll be honest. I was like three days and I was like, I must write. And I started like plowing through this thing. I was like, okay, I got this. I got this. But I'll be writing in some way, shape or form, depending on who we'll see what, you know, which character follows and that sort of thing. I gave myself, very intentionally gave myself options from the very beginning. Because I have another character intertwined with it. There's multiple generational differences.

characters that I can go back to. I talk about James Reese's grandfather in World War II, another family called the Hastings family and their history in Rhodesia. So I have all these different and that was done very intentionally. And I like that from Stephen Hunter's writing. If you guys read Stephen Hunter, Point of Impact, they made it in the movie Shooter with Mark Wahlberg, directed by Antoine Foucault. And

And so he has multi-generational characters as well. So part of the same family, part of the same universe, but you can go back to World War II era and then contemporary as well. So you seem like a student of history in that way that you've looked into things like the Rhodesian Bush War and stuff like that. Has that kind of had an impact on the way you write? I think so because it's something that –

differentiates these books in that I hadn't read about that in other books before. So for me, it was very natural having gone to Africa, having talked to professional hunters who some of them that had very close touch points with Rhodesia, even though we're almost a generation removed now.

That's wild to think about. Isn't it? It's crazy. But growing up, Soldier of Fortune, again, seeing those pictures, not really understanding the geopolitics of anything or whatever, but just seeing the pictures, seeing the guys in essentially UDT shorts and FNFALs out there, seeing those helicopters. I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right, the Alouette 3s, is that how you say it? I have no idea. Just all those kind of very – you can see a picture and you know that it's Rhodesia.

If you see a picture of a certain helicopter or a certain person wearing UDT shorts, essentially, and a camouflage blouse and all that stuff. Yeah, exactly. You like Blood Diamond? Yeah. Yeah. Is that it? The Brightling? Nice. Sketchy people with a Brightling. Yeah.

Is that the exact watch? I had to get the blood diamond watch. Is that the exact one? Exact one. Dude, nice. Yeah, sketching people with Breitling. That's it. And I put one in here. The fuck is that? That's awesome. Not that exact one, but a different one in here on the bad guys. Oh, yeah, man. Dude, that's right. The Breitling Military Industrial Complex. Exactly. Seriously. It's a thing. It's a real thing. You're brand-nailing it, Brandon. Now they're not going to be sponsors now. Sorry. History nerd. Because that's one segment is out of this.

you transitioned perfectly into it. It's like, what is your favorite part of history? Like wars where like you have Rhodesia, World War II, which ones you're like, okay, I really gravitated towards this. Yeah. Clearly you're a student of history, but there's a lot of like the lesser known. There's the, the very popular, like the Normandy beach D-Day, World War II. Like certain things are like, they're, they're, they're very well known, but there's a lot of lesser known parts of history that are still like

I would say equally important and historically significant, even though a lot of people don't talk about them. Right. Well, certainly Radija's one. And I think people are just kind of...

almost, I don't want to say scared, it's not the right, I guess it's a sensitive topic, I guess is the best way to put it. So why do that when you could do something else, I guess, maybe, or maybe people just don't know about it or it didn't interest them or whatever reason. Even things like Mogadishu. Yeah, the Mog. A lot of people don't talk about it. Like Black Hawk Down got made and then everybody after that was like, yeah, that sums it up. And it got left behind. It's an insane battle. There was other things going on before and after, of course, the battle. But yeah,

Yeah, I just like pulling out different things that you can really dive into. Like if you were to take D-Day, of course, people know D-Day. They know June 6th. They know that story for the most part. But now you can watch it through the eyes of Saving Private Ryan. You can watch it through Tom Hanks' character. And you can do that. So you have a mission within, kind of buried within that. So I like that. I like that historical type fiction, both in books and in film, because I think it makes it more palatable, I guess is one way to put it, which is fun. Thank you.

I think I got a little bit more left, but I should keep this guy cold. So I don't know if there's a favorite. Favorite's not the right, maybe the right term, but if you saw my library at home, it's organized by period and then by generally terrorism, generally insurgencies, like that sort of a thing. Or here's Iraq, here's Afghanistan, here's Africa, and then there's subsections there, and it's all broken down that way. So it's not a very...

I guess no one else could really figure out where to find something there. Yeah. It's all somebody, I was on a thing the other day and he's a guy I was talking to. He's a reader and he came home from work and his wife had arranged all his books by color and had taken off the dust jackets and thrown them away to include, uh, to include a, uh, a first edition signed Ayn Rand, uh, Atlas shrugged. And, uh, and so I asked him on air, it was live. And I, and I said, well, what is your new wife knows not to do that. Right.

jesus christ yeah so yeah crazy so we put him back in his order but i think everybody has a different way they organize things you know maybe by color might not be the i don't know i just picture that like babe look what i did for you i know oh and then turns around and walks outside i love you honey yeah i love you all right

Yeah. I love you. Uh, hubby's going to Tijuana for the weekend. Yeah. Um,

Yeah, but I love those little other stories that are lesser known kind of histories within histories that I like to bring out or highlight in the pages of the book, even if it's just something that I'm interested in and want to go back to later or think a reader might be interested in because I loved growing up where I could figure out what was going on by context. So let's say I'm a sixth grader, seventh grader, eighth grader. I'm reading one of these books. I'm reading, let's say, The Brotherhood of the Rose by David Murrell. And I'm reading this thing and there's a sentence in there.

that I don't really understand because I'm not old enough to understand what he's talking about. I'm not familiar with that part of history, but I understand it by context because it doesn't take me out of the story, but it's something I want to go back to and accuse my interest in it. So I do the same thing. I think that's because of the history I have just as a reader, as a fan.

a fan. That's insane. That is that level of, it's Tarantino level of writing and then being like, I want to do this, I'm going to do this, and I'm going to be the best at this. Yeah, just saying the N-word a lot. Yeah, yeah. Do you like feet? Do

I feel like I missed a portion of an earlier episode. Tarantino. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Tarantino. He has his little tropes. What's the shot? When do you have to take the shot when you say, was it a community earlier? When somebody says something, you just have to take the shot. It's when Eli and I used to say community. I just say community just because we have, I

I don't know why we, I just always said, because I'm very thankful for the audience we have. So I always call them a community. Cause they like rally behind everything we do. We did like my kiddo last, uh, last week or two weeks ago, I just did a quick segment where I was like, Hey, right in my son did, uh, he's autistic and he just did his first YouTube channel. He launched it and, uh, he had two subscribers and then he went to his mom and was like, I have zero comments. Um,

So I asked everyone out there, I was like, hey guys, Ryan just started a thing. Can you just leave a quick comment? There was 3,500 comments on his first video. And then like five and Ryan Autism is reading all of them and we have to film all.

So he's like, all right, this person said this and they're all super positive. They're all good. Oh dude. It's like all like 99.9% of our YouTube community is just fucking the kindest humans in the world. And they rally behind it. That's why you'll see nothing but positivity, even though we have our jokes, like even that's what people, the way I describe our community is like, we are chaotic, chaotic,

Chaotic good. Yeah. Yeah, sure. We make a bunch of offensive jokes and we make a bunch of jokes about shit that people don't think is funny. But like it's super dark. But at the same time, we're also like here on a very positive sense. We raise a lot of money for good causes. And like at the end of the day, everybody's here to support each other. I think that's –

That's what's important. Veteran, especially do veteran, like the veteran causes we do. That's where we will do above and beyond in the veteran world, especially for PTSD and raising awareness. Which ones do you guys do? Uh, right. Dude, like boot campaign. Yeah. We've raised, yeah.

This year at the end of November, we'll do our Veterans Charity Month. And in two days for boot campaign, streaming being drunk, being chaos, we raised $250,000 playing video games. Dang. As a goal of mine, I would love to raise another quarter mil for the boot campaign in November. Oh, yeah. 100%. Some veteran cause in November. I would love to do that.

What's one of your veteran causes? We can do something with you guys too. Yeah, Rescue 22. They train up service and support dogs for veterans. Oh, fuck it. I already know that. Yeah, so John Devine, buddy of mine from the SEAL teams started that one. Best Defense Foundation, taking these World War II veterans back to these battlefields on which they fought.

We're in June right now, obviously. So those are two of the big ones. One more contemporary, obviously, and then the other focused on honoring those veterans who gave us the ability to be here right now. Jack, you said Rescue 22? Rescue 22. Hey, if you guys want to donate to a very good cause, check out Rescue 22. Bam. Look at that. Nice.

Nice. It's right here. It's right here. Right around this area. As it's busing around because we're all talking. Oh, does it float? Oh, man. So when you say hit the subscribe button, it pops up? Yeah. Like that sort of thing? Jamie, pull up Rescue 22, please. You guys are next level. Yeah, you're going to see. You'll be like, it's one of those weird things where it is. It's coming onto a podcast where we're like, ah, ah.

I should have watched an episode before I was on it. But then you see the support and then everyone is so fucking positive, especially because like because we have the best. What Eli? What do we have? Community. Yeah, there we go. Take a shot. Take a shot. But because of them, we are we can do amazing things. It's fucking dope. We are super blessed with it.

Love it. Dark humor man. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Reigns. Well, yeah, Rescue 22 for Contemporary, and I'd say bestdefensefoundation.org then to honor those guys who aren't going to be with us. And then where can we find your fucking book, dog? Bam! Anywhere books are sold, but officialjackcar.com. That's probably the hub of everything right there. That's the podcast is there, the merch is there, all the other books, a little bit about the television show, all that sort of thing. So...

officialjackcar.com but Jack Car USA is the handle for the social channels. And then any tour you're doing for autographs or anything? Yeah, yeah. So start this tomorrow night. Not sure when this drops. We'll get it out. We'll probably push this out a week.

This coming Saturday since you have a book release we can pop it up to the front of the awesome thing So I'll stop a few more days left after that. So I do book tour start today It's tomorrow in Austin and then go through the next ten days and then back to Budapest to wrap the show out there do a few more weeks of filming out there and And wrap that thing. They'll be filming my episode During that time so that'll be pretty cool. And what can we expect from you in the future? Ooh?

Ooh. Well, uh, it's true. Fucking fuck your Beirut book. Are you doing that? Yes. Yes. What? Uh, so my first nonfiction. Yeah. Yeah. So, well, this, this, uh, this TV show right now is the, uh, it's an origin story prequel. Uh, Taylor Kitsch plays Ben Edwards and it's kind of the story of how he takes this journey to get him to a place where he can do the things, uh, that he does in the terminal list, I guess is the best way to say it for people who haven't watched yet. So it's not, it doesn't spoil it for him. Uh,

but it's pretty cool because it starts kind of action and then moves into espionage thriller. There was still a lot of action, but whereas Terminalist was a revenge thriller, psychological thriller, political thriller, this is more of an espionage thriller, which is really cool to see, and the scripts are next level. I think we...

like anything else, you build up political capital working with a, with a group and you prove your value to them. So there are a lot less questions this time than there were last time. You mentioned how it was a little different terminal list about like when we killed that, well, this isn't too much of a spoiler because it happens in like the first page of the book, essentially. And then the,

the first episode. Um, but that typically doesn't happen in shows like this. They, it's a little bit different the way that arc goes. Um, so there are a lot of questions about that and people were very nervous about that, but they trusted us and we got to do it and then they'll never share the exact data, but it paid off. Um, and we have the spinoff and then true believer coming, uh, after that. And that's the second book in the series. But, uh, my first nonfiction for a into nonfiction Beirut, um,

1983 is about the Marine Barrier Barracks bombing. And it was so impactful to me as a kid because I saw those news. I knew what I was going to do already in life. I knew I was going into the military already at that age. And then I saw Newsweek and I saw Time Magazine. Those are the two magazines we got at our house.

I got to see the news that we watch on TV at 6 o'clock, got to see the newspaper in the morning, and these visuals of what happened there in October of 1983, and how that really set the tone for everything else that was to follow. It was really a seminal moment in our history as a country,

when you think about it in terms of our foreign policy because we talk tough right afterward and then we quietly leave in early 1984. so essentially we taught the enemy a lesson that terrorism works and it started back then really in beirut 1983. there was an embassy bombing in april of that year so there's a lead up and the talking points from the administration at that time where the marines there were peacekeepers and in talking to these guys and doing the interviews for this book that comes out in october in september um they were

They were in combat. These guys were 100% in combat during that time. And then it culminates with the bombing in October of 83. So it was to hear these guys tell that story because it impacted everything that they've done.

And then to also have declassified documents from the Reagan administration that show what was happening back in the White House, who was advocating to put Marines ashore, who wanted to keep them on ships in the Med. Like all that stuff allows you to now get a more fuller picture of what was actually happening. So that's the first one in this nonfiction series that comes out in September. And there's a few other projects in the works as well. So it's go, go, go. Fucking love it. Yeah.

Cody, do your magic. Guys, thank you for joining the unsubscribed podcast. I was joined today by Eli Doublesap, Jack Carr, with his new book, Red Sky Morning.

Buy that fucking thing. I swear to God. It's got a glorious mugshot. I love that. That is sexy. Our good friend Brandon Herrera and myself, Donut Operator. Check out the unsubscribed after show on Patreon. We would love to see you there. Cheers! ... ... ... ...

You won't.