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Train by day.

Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

Jack Crawleys and gentlemen.

What's up, man?

Good to see you, brother. What's happening?

So good to be here. This is awesome, man. Comedy mothership, amazing. You had a good time, so much fun. So cool. We had a blast up there and yeah, everybody was amazing. Ron Waite came up to say hi afterward and was in that booth. Somebody, her last name, Lardner. So Kyle Lardner is her name. And she does piano music, sells vinyl and she's up there. But she, I think her, I think she said her grandfather or somebody wrote Mash back in the day. The theme song, the screenplay.

Oh, wow.

So somebody. There's somebody related to her anyway. Yeah, right, right. So it was fun watching, watching the show with her. She knows Ron White, so he came up. That's why he came up and said hi to us. But it was so. Everybody killed it. It was so much fun. I love how you put your phone in the bag. Turn it off.

Yeah.

And lock it.

We need more of that in life. Yeah. It's hard for people to not be distracted these days. Everyone's distracted.

Yep. It was so noticeable. So you're in that vip balcony. Amazing. And then you're looking down, but it is so noticeable now that no one has their phones out. If you didn't have that, you'd look down from that balcony and you certainly see somebody. Just gotta try a quick shot.

You see everywhere. If you go to the movies, you just see lit up phones everywhere now. It's crazy.

That's what I was saying. I was saying, I wish they did this in movies.

Phones are cool. They do a lot of cool things. But man, it's a massive distraction.

I'm working towards being able to hand this thing off. Yeah, yeah.

Hand it off.

Yeah. Somebody else. That's not me. Hand it off and go to the flip.

Oh, really?

I'm working. I don't think I'm not gonna be there for a few years.

But what about texting, though?

Well, you can still remember the BlackBerry like.

Yeah. David tell was in here and he was texting. He has a flip phone. He texts with his flip phone. I'm like, what are you doing? I got pretty confident his makes the beeps too. So it's like, I'm like, what the fuck are you doing?

Uh huh. Yeah. I mean, I've never doing that. And we did it. Everybody did it. You just kind of figured it out. But it was like what is it? Three letters or symbols on each thing. And you can. But you got pretty good with it.

Yeah, you can get pretty good, but it's slow. It's slow and stupid. I mean, that's what happened when people started using the letter u instead of u and the letter r instead of.

A R e. I can't do it. Do you do it?

No.

Okay. Yeah, I don't think so. I'm trying to think of your tax.

Especially you. You're an author.

Nope. I gotta have commas in there. I can't have a you. None of that stuff. So it's noticeable. And people send it to me, I'm like, yeah, little guy's the worst. That 13 years old.

Yeah.

All they do.

Oh, yeah, they do. They abbreviate things, too. I always have to ask my kid, what the fuck does that mean? Idk. Oh, I don't care. I don't know. IDC is. I don't care. Idks. I don't know.

I figured.

I don't know. They have a whole bunch of them that they use all the time that I have to, like, think.

Yeah.

What are you saying?

I know I look it up sometimes. I google it. I, like, I type it in. What does this mean? And it pops up. Or then I just get the bruh.

Bruh? Yeah, bruh's a lot. Yeah.

I don't know. B r u h. That's it.

Yeah, I get that. Bruh, bruh.

I'm like, what is that? What does that even mean? Yeah, I saw some meme. It was like. It was like a mom texting her kid. And it says, texting your 13 year old boy is like texting someone who's about to break up with you. Because it's like, hey, how was your day? And it's like, okay. You know? Like something like that, you know? And it's totally true. It is totally true. But I'd like to go back. I'd like to hand it off at some point. You know, I'm not there. Not there yet, because it's still my office.

Yeah.

This thing is still my mobile office and all the. All the socials and everything else. The interaction with people. Like, everything goes. That's.

I think it just. You just have to have discipline. I think my middle ground is have a regular. A real phone, real smartphone. But discipline, you don't. Just. No one to put it away. No one to leave it alone.

Are you good with it?

Yeah, I'm good with it. Yeah, I'm pretty good with it. It depends on. If I have the day off, I have the day off. I'm on that fucking stupid thing. 6 hours watching YouTube.

Are you really?

Yeah, if I have the day off. Because if I have a day off, I purposely decide to do nothing.

Yeah.

If I have a day off, I do. Well, I never have a day of nothing.

Right.

I have a day of archery, working out, then nothing. But those days are fucking awesome, man. The nothing to do day. Oh, my God, I appreciate those so much.

Do you build one in?

Yeah, I build one in. Yeah. I never work every day.

Okay.

I won't. I've done it. I mean, I've done a few times, like, if I have to go away on vacation or something like that, we have to bank up a bunch of episodes. I wind up doing five in a week, and then at the end of the week, I just. I don't want to lose enthusiasm because I feel like there's, like, a balance between discipline and enthusiasm, and you got to find out where that is. Like, if I lose enthusiasm, then I don't have as much excitement, and then my. Whatever I'm doing is not as good.

Right. No, I understand that. Do you ever feel that you have that? Like, I can't tell. Looking at it from the outside and knowing you and then watching an episode or listening to an episode. I can never tell if you're off. If you. Do you ever feel off?

I feel it could be coming, and then I don't allow it to come. Cause I remind myself how fortunate I am and about how happy I would be to be able to do what I did if I couldn't do it. And then I just put myself in that state of mind.

Right.

But that also means, like, day off is necessary.

Right?

Have that day off. Fucking chill out.

But are there really days off with family? Like, is that just. Isn't that exhausting too?

Family days?

Yeah.

Nah, fun. Like, yesterday, we did a father's day thing. We went and killed zombies.

Nice.

You ever do sandbox VR? Do you know what that is? God, it's my favorite thing to do. I fucking love it. Yeah. This is game called Deadwood Mansion. And you put on the VR helmets, and you're trapped in a mansion that gets invaded by zombies.

Okay.

And you have a shotgun just blasting zombies.

Okay, nice.

Love it.

Do you go someplace for. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like. It's a place called Sandbox VR. And out here in Austin, and there was one in Woodland Hills, too. This is the game. This is what it looks like.

Oh, that's crazy.

Yeah, it's fucking dope, dude. And so you're. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's like a movie. And these zombies come running at you and when they grab you, you have a haptic feedback vest. So you feel it when they're grabbing you?

What?

Yeah.

What's a haptic feedback? Like, it tightens or you feel like a zap.

It, like, zaps you. It's like a buzz on your chest. It's really fun.

That's awesome.

Oh, I love it. They have a ton of games there, too. It's not just that. They have a squid games one. They have a Star Trek one. They have one where you. You have duels with people. Like space weapons.

That's wild. Is it? It's not just for kids, obviously.

No, no, it's for everybody. Yeah, well, obviously I'm a big kid, but. But I fucking love it, man. I had the number three score ever in there at one point in time. Something proud of right there. One hand with the shotgun.

That's us. You train up for it. You know, we ran up with Taran.

Just a lot of coffee.

There you go.

Just get. You know, every gun has a laser on it so you know exactly where you're shooting. And, you know, just take headshots on zombies.

Let's see if we have one of those in Salt Lake. See if we can go down there. And they probably do.

They have a ton of them. I know there's one. Like I said, there's one in Woodland Hills that we have right down the studio.

Yeah.

In LA.

Yeah. So maybe they are. Yeah.

Is there one area called Murray?

Nice. All right.

Yeah.

Taking my little guy down.

You gotta do so fun.

Oh, that's perfect.

Good to know. Yeah, it's spooky, too. It's really scary.

It looks like.

Yeah, they drop out of the ceiling. Yeah. The ceiling breaks open and a ton of zombies fall down in front of you and they just run at you. You gotta blast them.

My little guy like that, he's 13. He loves that stuff. And he loves, like, roller coasters. There's a. In Salt Lake, they have. I forget the name of the place, but it has. It's called the cannibal. He made me go with him a couple years. I'm not a big roller coaster person. I'm not.

I watch too many instagram videos. Yeah. And those things going sideways.

Yeah.

People go flying off of them.

Yeah.

Not fun.

No, don't do that. But he loves it. So. Man, I don't. So he'll dig this.

I get that people like those thrills, but they don't. They don't appeal to me.

No, they've never.

I used to do them a lot with my kids when they were younger, especially Disneyland. Disneyland. You know, they're pretty good. They really don't very rarely have a fuck up.

Yeah. Yeah.

Trust.

Yeah.

Yeah. Their safety record's pretty awesome.

Yeah, we did it right before we left and left California to go to Utah, and we thought, okay, we're gonna do this one last kind of kid centric thing with all these amusement parks, because my wife and I are not really amusement park people. Just surrounded by real sweating and just eating everything. Long lines, crying, whining. So, yeah, we did that, and then I think that's it for us.

If you want to find the hazards of the american diet full effect, go to Disneyland.

It's bad.

There's so many people on scooters because they can't walk because they've got too big. Oh, it's so terrible.

Yeah, no, yeah, sorry, kids, we're. That was your last time that we're gonna be at one of those places now. It's outdoor stuff.

It's fun. It's fun for a day just to eat churros and be a pig. Just fucking. Just have a good time. Just. But, you know, you have to, like, allow yourself to just fuck off. Eat ice cream and fuck off. Right.

Yeah.

Just say, today we're gonna go off.

That's your day off. And that energizes you when you get back into it. So you have somebody. Come on.

Also, I feel guilty for fucking off and eating all that garbage.

So you hit it hard. Yeah, well, I got that sauna after we talked last time. I think it was getting put in last time we talked, and I still haven't really been in it because I've plugged it in or whatever electrician came plugged that thing in. It's one of those barrel ones. And so it looks out at the mountains. Has, like, this glass thing on it. Yeah, but it just gets warm. Yeah. So we need to have.

Who made your son?

I don't even know. My wife.

You got to get a solution. Says the guys that did ours, and they have serious heaters.

Okay.

Mine gets to 200 degrees.

Oh, yeah. This was not. This just gets kind of. Not even comforting. Uncomfortably warm.

Is it infrared or is it a regular.

No. Has the rocks. Has a little thing in it. Has the rocks.

Well, it just gets warm.

I think it's the altitude. I think it needs some sort of an adjustment for altitude because we're about just shy of 8000ft.

Right. But it's electric. It doesn't make any sense.

Yeah, I know. Yeah, you just know what they're doing.

Yeah. We'll get those guys from so loose saunas to hook you up. They'll just swap out your heater.

Okay.

You just need a, like we have a hum. It's. I think it's hum is the name of the heater. That fucking thing cranks. Same thing we have in here in the studio. It's. Yeah, you got to get a real heater.

Yeah. You do something so that sits there unused but moving forward. So I was here. You talk about archery. So I have that the guys from total archery challenge, they came out and they put up 22 3d targets all around. Pretty sick. Good course, but days offer, they don't really exist yet, but I need to just make time to get out there in the mornings, drop the kids at school and just walk that course and shoot.

Well, you're cranking out basically a book a year. Plus you're also working on the terminalist tv series.

Yeah.

That is a lot of work, my friend.

It is. My first nonfiction comes out in the fall on the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing.

Getting into historical stuff.

Yeah, we have a lot of history in here. I just love history. I always have since I was a little kid anyway, but really wanted to start down that path and explore a different terrorist event and capture the lessons learned behind that event so that hopefully moving forward, we don't have to relearn those lessons in blood. We're not very good at that as a country. We just tend to relearn things over and over again. We don't translate lessons into wisdom. So wanted to try to just do my part and see what I could. I remember the 1983 bombing. It stands out in my mind. When I was a little kid, Newsweek, Time magazine, I remember those on our kitchen table. I remember the newspaper in the mornings, remember the news. Watching the news with my family at 05:00 and 06:00 and that's an event that, I mean, it changed the course of us foreign policy for sure. The shadow still in its shadow today. But yeah, it killed 241 us service members and 58 french paratroopers. And it was the biggest loss of life for the Marine Corps since Iwo Jima in World War two.

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

How do you collaborate something like that with a historian? How does that work? Do you send him stuff, what you're working on, and he gives you feedback? How does it work?

So I had the idea and I wanted one person. I wanted this guy. James Scott, amazing guy, has five other books out there, four on World War two, one on the USS Liberty. And I didn't know him personally and doesn't really have a social media presence. I couldn't really get to know him that way, but I just knew his work, and I thought, oh, man, it'd be amazing to collaborate with this guy on this project. And so reached out, and luckily he wanted to do it. He was fired up and amazing. Such a great guy. So thorough. Because when you do something that's like here, if you make a mistake, you just say it's fiction. But in something like that, you can't make a mistake. And every single quote, obviously, you have to attribute that to the right person in the right way. All the photographs attribute all those to the right people in the right way. Buy them, put them in there, license them, whatever you need to do. So there's a lot more to it on that side that I didn't have any experience with. So he's got that part down.

That's awesome.

Yeah. So it was an amazing experience, and we're going to hopefully kick off another one here. The idea was to do one nonfiction every year. As soon as I started down that path of research, I realized it was going to be a two year, every two year type of a thing, because it just so much more goes into it. You just don't create it out of your head. Obviously, you have to interview all these people. You have to go and then follow up with everyone, and then you have to confirm things that people said or all these things. So there's a lot more to it than I thought at the outset.

How many hours a day do you work? Because I would imagine that particularly with fiction, you have to avoid burnout. Right. You have to be enthusiastic about your subject matter to get the best out of your mind.

Yeah, I mean, I'm so fired up, and so, like you, I feel so fortunate to be doing what I love, and so it doesn't seem like work. Although you're putting in hours, you're certainly putting in hours for this one. It took a lot longer than I thought, because usually these books are about, or in this genre, they're about 115,000 words between 100 and 115. This one came in at 150. So I kept thinking, oh, it's going to be done December 1, January 1, February 1. And it just kept pushing, which is why we're here in July instead of or, sorry, in June.

So that's maybe this one. That's red sky more.

Yeah, that's this one right here. So it took a little longer than I. Than I anticipated, but that's just because the story dictates how long, because people are trusting me with their time. They're never going to get that time back. So that's something I take extremely seriously. So all my heart and soul goes into every word.

But. But I love it when James Reese continues to get older. Are you going to let him get older or you're going to go James Bond?

I think I go James Bond? I mean, I think I'm going to do it slowly, maybe. Hm. Slowly. So we'll see. We'll see. It's one of those things you have to think about. Some authors, like Stephen Hunter, Daniel Silva, have aged their character in real time, but that's a 20 plus years series.

Especially if they're out there kicking ass.

Yeah. So if you start that, they're 40 when they start. They're getting up there now.

Yeah.

So it's a thing. Especially if you want to keep kicking ass.

Yeah, yeah. I talked to Mark Graney about that, too. The gray man.

Right, right.

Same thing. He's going to go with James Bond?

I think so. I think that's it.

It's the way to go.

Yeah.

There's already a precedent set. People accept it, do it.

Exactly.

James Bond should be a thousand years old. How the fuck is James Bond still kicking ass? And they got a new James Bond coming out.

We'll see, we'll see. So what they need to do for that one, what they need to do, if they asked me after what they did at the end, and I don't know if we can say spoiler alert, because if people haven't seen the last movie, but it ends. Its very final how it ends. But allegedly. Interesting way to allegedly one of the most successful series of all time. But I think you go back and you do those as period pieces. So you go back and you start with the first book and you start it in the fifties when it was written. And so you have post World War two era Great Britain and you're doing it, you have all the cars. So in the books, he's driving an old Bentley, and it's from the thirties, so even though it's written in the fifties, so it's not the Aston Martin. So you do that and you do it true to the books in that time period.

Ooh, that would be very expensive, though. But not really today with CGI, with AI, what they're able to do now. You know, Tyler Perry was building an $800 million studio, and he stopped production on it when he saw Sora, which is the new AI program that almost, I mean, really quickly can render spectacular scenes. Okay, have you seen it? Have you heard about it?

Is that that one, like, 3d camera? That one in Australia?

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

I think about in five years from now. Oh, it's going to be about ten years from now.

So this is all AI.

So snowy Tokyo.

So Snowy Tokyo City is bustling. Camera moves through the bustling city street. This is the prompt that made them, that made AI create this. Following several people, like, look at this. Oh, wow, this is crazy. This is fake. You would never, you would think, oh, someone got a camera, right? And they're filming all these store of a robot's life in cyberpunk settings. I mean, these videos that they can make now are incredible. And again, this is a open a eyes text to video model.

That's crazy.

Sora. And is that the one that Aston.

Kutcher was talking about?

I don't know. I don't know if Ashton Kutcher was talking.

He was in the news yesterday. Something about AI and something about Hollywood with doing this stuff. But they're fuck killer.

Everyone's fucked. Actors are fucked. Everyone's fucked.

I need to read the. After the strike last year, because there was an actor strike also, as you know, and then the writer strike as well. So I don't know. Nai was big part of that, but I don't know.

It was. Yeah.

Where did it end up? Do you know where?

I don't know, but they don't have much to negotiate with, unfortunately. There's an inevitability with this kind of technology. It's like, would you write books with a feather? No. Would you write all the books with a feather? No. So, like, if I wanted to buy a book from you, I'd have to commission you and you would have to write out this new book, Red Sky Morning. You'd have to write this out in a feather for every customer. Yeah, fuck that. You would never do that, right? Well, that's the thing with AI. Like, instead of having people act out movies and having, like, real scenes and everybody's on set at 06:00 a.m. and that's. That's the thing of the past.

Oh, man.

I really think it's a thing of the past what they can do now.

This one got announced today.

What is this one? Twitter? It's called Gen three Alpha, I think. I don't know. See, there's a bunch of these different competing AI programs as well. It's not just the open AI Sora. There's a bunch of them. Microsoft has one. I mean, and then these graphic engines. The Unreal engine five is fucking insane.

That's crazy.

So they have these graphic models now for video games and. Unreal. That's what it's called, right? Unreal Engine five. Unreal engine five is fucking bananas. So this is for video games. So video games now look almost indistinguishable from a movie. There's this tiny hint of what they call the Uncanny Valley, where you can kind of tell that it's not real, especially when you're looking at, like, human faces. Yeah, but Jamie will show you like this.

Ah, that's crazy. Are you playing. Do you play video games?

No, I can't do you. Crazy. Yeah, I go crazy.

I can't do it. You mean you get sucked in?

Yeah, yeah, I'll be playing it all day long. I have a real problem.

You wouldn't have a podcast?

No, I'd probably have a podcast. It probably would suck, though. I have a very addictive personality with things that are difficult to do. Yeah, I like, you know, when I find, like, as long as something physical, like with Jiu Jitsu, you can only do Jujitsu 2 hours a day, you know, at the most, maybe a little bit more. After that, your body just breaks down and you can only play pool so many hours a day, but you can play video games all fucking day. You could just. And they jazz you up so much. There's such an adrenaline rush. You're so locked into it. And then when I shut them off, I always feel like shit. So this is Unreal Engine 5.4, I guess this is the newest version of it.

What? That's wild.

Look how crazy this is. I mean, this is a video game. So imagine playing a video game, and this is the type of graphics that they can do. And again, this is just today. This stuff is moving at an exponential pace to the point where, you know, five, six years from now, you're going to be experiencing this. But in VR, you'll have, like, the meta headset on, and you'll be experiencing this probably on an omnidirectional floor. They have these. Omnidirectional. Google that, Jamie. The new omnidirectional floor. Disney's got the best one. Do they? Yeah. So the omnidirectional floor, the way you walk is the way the floor moves. So you stay in like, an area like the size of this room, right? So you stand in the center, and everywhere you walk, the floor walks with you. So you are actually walking, but you're not moving anywhere.

I don't know. Are you gonna get one?

Oh, yeah, for sure.

Oh, man.

Like, look at this.

What?

Yeah, this is bonkers.

No, I can't. No.

So everywhere you go, so you can. That's actually a lot smaller than this room. I was incorrect. That's really small. That's like the size of this table almost. And so you get on this thing and the game will take you down corridors and alleys and, you know, you go cross fields and you'll be able to do this. And I'm sure eventually what they'll be able to do is have different terrain. Like, you'll have like a textured terrain or maybe even elevation. Go up like a treadmill.

You can get a workout in.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, you definitely can. I mean, I remember when a dance dance revolution came. Or evolution. Evolution. Or revolution. Revolution. Dance dance revolution is this game. These kids start playing in an arcade and everybody started losing weight because. Yeah, because it's a dance game where the floor lights up like blue. You're supposed to step on blue and then, you know, there's like, different things that you're supposed to do and there's a pattern on the screen that you're supposed to follow. And you get a score based on how you. Well, you keep up with the steps. So all these people are like, playing a video game, but they're burning insane amount of calories. People lose like 50, 60 pounds playing this game, which I support. Like, if there's a game that can make you healthy, right? Fuck, yeah. That's awesome.

Yeah. Then you get tired. Maybe sit down on the couch and go to the other one where you just sit there and then we're creating this. I don't know who's moving the country forward, who's making.

That's a real problem, obviously. Well, also they just announced that the former chief of NSA is going to the board of OpenAI, which has freaked a bunch of people out, including Edward Snowden. Does that freak you out, Jamie? Yeah, it's a big smile on Jimmy's face. Well, I would imagine they would want to get involved in something like that. I mean, I don't know why they wouldn't. I mean, I could see, I could put on my conspiracy tinfoil hat thing and say, oh, my God, what are they trying to do? But Edward Snowden eviscerates OpenAI's decision to put former NSA director on its board. This is a willful, calculated betrayal of the rights of every person on earth. Hmm. Obviously he has a beef with the NSA, but if you were the, like, let's imagine national security Agency is an important thing for this country to have. If you're having these fucking eggheads that are developing the next super being, which is essentially what they're doing, they're going to develop, whether it exists in a physical form, it only exists on a computer, it's going to be far smarter than us within a matter of a few years.

And so just for national security concerns, you probably would have to have someone go and be there and go, hey, what the fuck are you guys doing? And report back from the inside, like, you'd have to, wouldn't you? Kind of have to have it from the. I mean, just to know what they're doing. You can't give them the power, these unelected people, you're going to give them the power to give birth to a God.

I mean, that's why I want to get rid of this phone.

It's inevitable.

I know. That's the whole thing. We're down this path, just like you said. I mean, the technology has increasing at an exponential rate. And so what we think is up to about 20 years off is probably going to be here essentially tomorrow.

It's going to be very, very quick. Apparently what we're at now is chat GPT 4.0 or 4.0, and the next chat GPT five is going to be exponentially more powerful. And that's in the pipeline.

Well, it's the manipulation part that we're already just with social media. You can take it back ten years. I mean, Twitter X is similar to when it started, essentially, and you're getting manipulated constantly. And it's not just to buy a new detergent like back in the eighties, watching a commercial like that. I mean, your thoughts and behaviors are being manipulated by these algorithms. And whoever is writing these algorithms, that's a lot of. And so imagine with this, with AI that just went, and latest update, didn't our phones just get some sort of crazy AI thing in there?

The iPhones do. Yeah, yeah. And I have an Android. I have this Samsung galaxy that I'm switching over to.

Really?

This one does a lot of AI things. Like, it translates conversations in real time. It'll summarize websites for you. So if there's a website, you know, like James Webb telescope found some new galaxy. I'm like, I don't have time for this fucking gigantic article. Give me the summary. And it gives you the summary. It'll summarize it.

It's been accurate?

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

That is wild. Maybe I should feel instead of trying to stay away from it, maybe I should embrace it and have put the book in it. People can circle it and do whatever they do.

I think you're always gonna want fiction. I think people are always gonna want fiction. And they're also always gonna want to have things that someone has created. I think that's a part of what people enjoy.

Yeah, so look like this. Like, the artwork on the walls here, that is done by a real person.

See, like, I just took a photo of the french press. What? And it's given me links how to buy a french press, man, it's crazy, dude. This is complete next level.

So is that freeing up time rather than having to go french press?

I don't know. It's just cooling up anytime. I mean, maybe it is freeing up a little bit of time. I just think it's cool. That's why I love you.

Love all that stuff, though. You know, you're embraced. You embrace new technology.

I do. But again, you got to know what it is. It's like, I like whiskey, but I don't drink it every day. I drink a little bit of whiskey every now and again.

All right.

And I take big days off. I like to stay healthy.

So your personality, you can get addicted to video games and that feeling and that, but not to other things like whiskey or whatever else.

I've not. No, I don't think so.

It's not the same.

They're like, I'm too health conscious. You know, I could never get addicted to a drug, although I am addicted to caffeine, for sure. Yeah. A couple of days, I took a whole day off caffeine and documented it on the Internet. Like, at the end of the day, I had a fucking pounding headache.

Right? Yeah.

Yeah, it's great. I haven't had one of those in a long time, which is because I haven't stopped drinking caffeine in a long time.

Yeah.

But when I used to write back in the day, I used to buy these sodas. There were these bizarre sodas that this liquor store had that were filled with caffeine. Like, insane amounts of caffeine. But they also had, like, hot sauce in them and these cool colors and flavors, like some of them were. They turn my tongue dark. That skull and crossbones on the labels, they were just cool. I remember this is like, in the nineties. I bought them just for fun. I was at a, you know, a liquor store and I saw, what is this stuff? And the guy, this crazy soda company. I don't even think they're around anymore. I bought cases of this shit.

It's probably illegal, you know, probably.

I mean, I don't know what the caffeine amount was, but it was extraordinary.

And you said when you're writing, like, comedy late at night, like, quiet.

Back then I was writing a script. Oh, no, I was trying to write a script.

Okay.

And I also write comedy late at night too. And I like to. I just like to be caffeinated when I'm writing.

Yeah.

When I'm writing, I like to be jazzed up.

Right.

You know?

Yeah. You know what? Yeah, I do the same thing, I think. I mean, the only time I'm not being interrupted is like 10:00 a.m. still to like three, four in the morning. I pulled so many all nighters for this. 01:10 a.m. to three in the morning, straight in the morning, sometimes six, seven if I'm just on a roll. Just got to keep going because deadlines looming. But I don't want to rush anything to hit that deadline if that makes sense. Like, I want to get through. I want to be the best story I possibly can. I don't want to get to a certain number of words or the deadlines coming. Let me wrap this up. Never. Never. I respect my audience too much for that.

No, I know you would.

And so it's got to be the best story it can possibly be. But that means a lot of late nights. So that goes back to the phone, handing that off to somebody, having other people do some things that I can focus on, the writing maybe in some hours that are a little more normal.

Do you think you'll ever get to a point where you say, you know what, in order to do a book the right way, I have to do one every two and a half years?

Maybe. Maybe that was like the norm in the eighties. The Tom Clancy books weren't every year.

Oh, really?

Yeah. So there was a couple years and you didn't know if one was going to come next year or the year after.

So is there pressure that comes from, does it come from the publisher? Does it come from you? Do you, like, make hay while the sun's shining?

I think maybe there's a little bit of that, but I think it became what was expected for recurring characters. So it became, Clive Cussler maybe was one of the first to start doing it with the Dirk pit series that he started. I think the first one was back in the seventies, early seventies. He passed away a couple years ago, but he started doing them more frequently. And then Tom Clancy was every two, two and a half years. And then we get up to the late nineties and you have Daniel Silva book a year. You have Vince Flynn book a year. And so it became something that was normal and now people expect it. So I think it's more that than anything else.

Yeah. If people get hooked on a character, they want a new book every year.

Yeah.

Like Granny does a new gray man every year.

Yeah, exactly. So that's kind of what the audience expects. And it's fun. And again, it is, you know, it's a, it's a timeline that you can hit. Two a year would be difficult to do. That would be extremely difficult to do. Yeah.

Does anybody do two a year?

I think there's a couple guys who have done it. Well, I think when you get a little, maybe when you get a little older, like, like John Grisham. So kids out of the house, that sort of a thing. Right. You don't do all of the other things.

Trying to avoid the wife podcast, lock.

Yourself in your office, your words but I think you can get to that stage where you're not doing, if you're not doing a podcast and you're not doing social media, and you're not writing a blog and you're not updating your website, zero of those things. But you love to write, and all the kids are out of the house, and you already have established a readership from the eighties, the nineties, early two thousands, when there were less distractions, where we didn't have all these video games, didn't have social platforms, didn't have YouTube, didn't have on demand, any movie ever made that you can have anytime. So that's essentially what you're competing with, with books. So people read less now. So if you have that base established back in from the old days, like a John Grisham, then he can do two a year. So you get two John Grisham books every year, every now and again. I think Michael Connolly does the same thing. But, but they're not doing the other things. They're not doing that podcast, they're not doing scripts. They're not doing that sort of.

Yeah. And especially, like, the scripts. I mean, the amount of time, how much time does it take or how much time do you have to spend working on the terminal list?

A lot. It's. So the first one, I was the learning. So I was new to Hollywood, so I was learning, but Chris Pratt wanted me involved. Antoine Fuqua wanted me involved. Showrunner David Dijilo wanted me involved. But essentially, I'm learning. I'm seeing how this adaptation to film works. And now after that, it was a few year process. Now I can add more value this time around. So this time I'm involved in all the casting, which I wasn't before, other than Chris. So this time involved in all the casting, all the creating the show with David Agilio, writing the outlines, going to the. Oh, nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Getting those things going.

They nailed it, man. That show is as close to the actual book as you're probably ever gonna get without it being like a hundred hours long.

That's the thing, you know, some people get upset that there wasn't this scene or that scene or these characters get morphed together or that sort of a thing. Oh, wow, look at, this is.

Oh, wow.

No way.

Precious nazi cleaners. How do you, uh, you flip the clipper like this?

Bump on out. Yeah, that's nice.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. So you never have to wonder if you have a clipper.

Yeah, that's fantastic.

Yeah. And shout out to foundation cigars.

Oh, nice. Oh, look at that. Get your own cigars right there. I love it.

And they're good.

Nice. Let's check this out. Let's do that right there.

I was very skeptical when he first made it for me.

I'm like, oh, geez.

Sucks.

Yeah, that's. I did a whole cigar lighting scene in this one. In this book, I have, one of my favorite chapters in previous books was James Reese talking to Caroline Hastings, who's the matriarch of this Hastings family. It's just a conversation. So it's not. Nothing's blowing up. No one's getting their head chopped off with a tomahawk, anything like that. It's just a conversation and passing on of wisdom. And I did that again, this time with the patriarch. And so it's Jonathan Hastings talking to James Reese. And they go through. He's rolling a cigarette like old school, the way he would have done it back in Africa, in Rhodesia, back in the day. And then James is doing a cigar, but he's lighting it in the way that he learned from Jonathan Hastings brother in what was then Mozambique.

Yeah. People get real dorked out on how to light a cigar. I have had conversations. I've done it the right way, I've done it the other way. I can't tell the difference. I'm too stupid. So it's like the same way I feel about wine. I am never gonna be a wine connoisseur. I like a nice glass of wine. If someone tells me what the good stuff is.

Yeah, yeah.

I'll drink that.

You can tell the difference, though.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I have. My friend Matt is like a real wine connoisseur, though. He's. He has, like a cellar in his house, and he looks so. He puts on his reading glasses when we go out to eat, and he goes over all the different vintages. He knows exactly what the fuck he's ordering. I don't know what I'm ordering. I asked the lady at the.

Yeah, that's what they do. What's supposed to know, all that stuff.

Like a full body cabernet.

Yeah.

I don't know what the fuck anything is.

Put some wine in these. I like to do that. I like to weave in food. Ian Fleming did it kind of like my nod is my zero zero 7th book. So there's a lot of little references to bond in here, in Fleming, really. Some that, like, the most casual watcher of a film will get and some that probably even the most ardent fan won't get.

So I.

There's something for everybody that I put. That I put in here, but.

So that's your 7th book.

7Th book. Zero, zero, seven.

That's an accomplishment.

Thank you.

Seven books.

Seven books.

That's incredible.

Thank you. Thank you.

I just think about how many hours it is of just sitting in front of the computer.

Oh, my eyes are gone.

I mean, do you still use a laptop?

Mm hmm.

I would encourage you to not.

I need to not.

Yeah. You know why? For the keyboard.

Keyboard?

Yeah. Keyboards on the MacBook suck.

Yeah.

I do most of my writing, even when I write. I either write at home on Apple with a. It's a really nice keyboard. There's a lot of trigger travel, and it's ergonomic, it's separated or. I have a thinkpad. I don't know if you ever use one of those Lenovo think pads. The keyboards are superior. Superior to the apple ones? First of all, all the keys have, like, a little dip in them. So your finger settles into that little valley.

Yep.

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

Yeah, I'm not there yet. I do have a really? I have one that Hemingway actually wrote a movable feast on. Somebody. A fan sent it to me when.

A typewriter.

Yeah. He wrote a movable feast on it. It came up for auction right before COVID So January of 2020, the guy that started Newman's own with Paul Newman, he was also kind of a manager, this ae Hotchster. I don't think I'm pronouncing his last name correctly, but he was like, a mover and shaker in those types of circles back in the day. And so he had all this Hemingway stuff, and it went up for auction after he passed away. And so I have. Yeah. Hemingway's typewriter. So I typed up a Hemingway quote on it when it arrived, and then I let it sit. Of course, the kids have walked by, and, like, you know, so it's not exactly.

Yeah, that makes it funny.

It's pretty cool. So I have that right there, but I need. I need to get it. After we talked about this once, and so I went out and I bought another computer, like, we talked about, the one you recommended. So I got it, but it wasn't an Apple one. And, like, apple got me. Like, everything is cloud and friggin phone and computer. Like, they've just got me.

You can get around that, though.

I'm not good at that sort of thing.

It's not that hard. It's not that hard. Just relearn it. And then once you relearn it, you already have it in your head. You know, I have a lot of cross platform things that I like, that I use, which helps a lot.

Okay.

But Apple's notes is one of the best things ever because when I have an idea, I like to just talk it into a note and then if it's on my Apple notes, then it's on my computer notes. So like, if I have an idea for a bit or something like that, I can say it in my notes and then when I go on my computer and I just press the notes, it's there.

I need to get better at that sort of thing. I have notepads everywhere, yellow stickies everywhere. I get chaos.

You don't have it on your phone?

Oh, no, I. For some reason, I just don't. I don't know if there's something.

The best thing about the phones today is that you could talk to it. You know, like you can on both. Like the Apple one and this one too. You just. You just open up a note, and then when you open up a note, when you're writing a new note, you press. You go down there and you press the. The microphone thing. And when you press the microphone thing, it just lets you talk. Like, here we go.

I need to do that. I need to get better at all that stuff. It's not. Yeah, I'm not good at it. I send myself emails. I have an email account that I just send notes to or emails to.

Like, I could do this.

Yeah.

Jack Carr is a bad motherfucker. And this is his 7th book.

Bam.

Look how quick that is.

Look at that. I do. It was close.

Pretty fucking close.

Close.

Oh, they look at they face it. Blocked out. Bad motherfucker. Look. What?

Motherfucker controlling you.

Why is it doing that? Probably the thing about androids, though is I should stop this. It's still recording.

Sorry.

The thing about androids, though is like, they have so many options of things you could do. You can customize things so much more than you can on an iPhone. Okay, now if you're a person that's already busy like yourself, that's probably not attractive to you. No, it's just too much. Yeah, but like, I've watched like ten videos on this phone just trying to figure out all the different stuff. You could use it in split screen mode where you can watch two different things at the same time, two different ways. You have an email on the bottom while you're watching a video at the top.

Dude, I don't know.

And it also has a. I think.

That might be too much for me. Oh, you can pull the stuff.

And not only does it have a stylus, but the stylus, it doubles as a remote control. So, like, if you want to take a picture with the family, you set up the phone, and then you hold onto this. You go like that. You press the button, it takes the.

Picture, and those take. That has a better camera than iPhone?

I wouldn't say it's better. I would say it's just as awesome.

Okay.

I mean, there are people that debate things. The Apple camera is amazing. Have this iPhone 15. It's fucking great, don't get me wrong. And one thing that I really love about Apple is it works with Apple TV. So the best remote for Apple TV is your iPhone.

Really?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm learning so much today.

Syncs up. So if you have Apple TV, you scroll down like this, and you press this button right here, and it shows you the remote. It says, choose a tv. You choose a tv, and then you control the screen with the. With your remote. So if you want to look something up on YouTube or. Yeah, you type it instead of, like. Instead of looking for the fuck. It's like old. Old school texting.

All right. Worse, right? It's horrible. This is horrible.

Way easier. Just type it on your phone, and then also you can slide back and forth to wherever you want in the movie. Exactly. Yeah, it's the best remote.

All right, I'm gonna try.

IPhone is the best.

I will try.

That's the best.

The other stuff, I don't know about, but I will try that. Cause it's. Yeah, that. I'm not good at all that stuff. I'm always, like, yelling at my wife, like, what the. What the password? And what's the friggin. It's attached to your email. It says, didn't we buy this movie already? On another thing, like.

Right.

I'm not good at all that.

Yeah, that's always an issue. There's a lot going on today.

That's why I like to take a breath, go upstairs, but I do need that other computer. Cause I'm feeling it for the first time. I'm feeling it in my hand.

Well, the thing is, if you use, like, a cross platform word processor, like, say, if you use Microsoft.

Yeah.

If you use Microsoft Word, you can access Microsoft Word through your phone. You can access Microsoft Word through a laptop, a Windows laptop, a Mac laptop, it does not matter. You can access it. So you have a Microsoft Word account?

Yeah.

And so then if you store things in the cloud, like if you store your script in the crowd or your book in the cloud, you could access it from anything you want.

I know. It's so bad.

Not difficult. Not. That's not difficult.

We're essentially the same age. But you're so good at all this stuff. You are.

You know, Jamie's better than me, and red band's better than Jamie.

Yeah, it's. That's a lot.

Yeah.

Set up a competition.

Red man is a super nerd, though. They're both super nerds.

It's a lot. But I need to do something. I need to get definitely another computer for. For typing, but I have one that's just for writing. So a whole nother computer just for writing.

That's smart.

Get a new one every time. This might not be so smart. I get a new one for every book.

Really?

Yeah. Just so it's all clean and it's like a clean piece of paper and as if it's blank slate. And I start again. And I know that's not necessary today. You could probably make a new screen or minimize everything or do it a better way. But I just like it in my own head, like I'm starting anew.

Yeah. No, that's a good thing to do. Like, rituals are good, especially for creative people.

Yeah.

You know, that's a big part of Stephen Pressler's book.

Steven Pressfield.

Excuse me. Press field. Yeah. The war of art.

Amazing.

Yeah. His book, you know, was kind of all about summoning. It's about discipline, focus, dedication, but also summoning the muse.

Yeah.

And then part of that is like, this ritual of, like, showing up. Showing up at a very specific time every day like this. And if you do that enough, the ideas will come to you.

Yep.

And it is true.

Oh, exactly. It's doing the work. Sitting down and doing the work. You got to do the work or it's not gonna. Obviously, if you don't do the work, you're never gonna get where you wanna go.

When I first read it, I felt like Pressfield was using the term the muse as, like, just sort of that maybe it's not a real thing, but you treat it as if it's a real thing. And it works that way. It worked because of the time and focus that you put. Like, it will accumulate over time. You will get creative ideas. But now, as I'm getting older, I'm not convinced that I was right, that it's not a real thing. I have a feeling that this is going to sound so weird, but I'm just going to say it. I think ideas are an unrecognized life form. This is what I think. I think creativity is a very strange thing. Like, what is it? Where is it coming from? Where do ideas come from? Where's a great song come from? Where's a great concept for a book come from? It comes from your mind, right? Your mind pulls it out of a lot of things, like your life experiences, your current state of depression or happiness, and all the things you've read your whole life. There's so many things that you're pulling creativity out of, but there's a thing that enters into your mind sometimes when you come up with an idea where you're like, that is not from me.

That's not from me. I know this is just popping up, and maybe it's just my ignorance of the way synapses fire, but I'm not sure because my thought is everything that exists that human beings have created came from an idea. Like all cameras, all houses, everything was an idea that we got, and then we worked at it and manifested it into form. And if the universe has a driving force when it comes to intelligent life, that driving force seems to be creating things. And I have a feeling that ideas themselves are almost like a life form that injects itself into human consciousness and then encourages and guides people to do things, to make things, and then they appear, and those things encourage more people to make more things. And I think it works that way with music. I think that works that way with comedy. It works that way with literature, with pretty much everything. Everything that's really good encourages more people to do those things, and then more things happen and better things get made. And I think that's how these things will themselves into existence. They do it through our minds, like, almost spiritual.

I don't know if I like that word because it's been co opted by hippie chicks and dudes pretending to be spiritual to try to get lame. Yeah, I think a lot of spiritual hippies are being. Girls are being honest. The guys are, probably 80% of them are not being honest. But yeah, whatever that word means, it's something that, there's something more to it than this sort of reductionist view of what an idea is. And if someone says, what's your proof? You know, we have evidence of. I have no proof. It's not. I don't. I think the world is way stranger than we think. And I think our existence here is way stranger than we think. I think people have been wrestling with that forever. And for me to just think, oh, the muse is just this, like, airy fairy concept that you give to the results of hard work and dedication. No, I think hard work and dedication are important because you summon the muse. I think the muse is a real thing.

And you've come to this over time with age, experience.

I just don't know. You know, I mean, if the muse wasn't a real thing, boy, it sure behaves like a fucking real thing.

That's true.

It really does behave like a real thing. And when you're living your life right, it seems like it rewards you. It seems like it rewards you, like, both mentally, emotionally, physically. Like there's some. There's a guiding force. It's just we don't know how to tune into it. And I think that guiding force also exists creatively. I think there's a guiding force in terms of, like, the things you do. Like, if you're living your life right, and you're doing things you're supposed to do, and you're good to your friends, you're disciplined, and you get to a certain point in your life, you're like, wow, it's almost like fate's real.

Yeah.

You know, like there's some guiding forces that are not exact. They're almost like a. Like a radio signal that you're tuning in, but you can't quite get a. It's like it's kind of there, but you kind of have a sense. It's not saying, everyone head to the exit. It's not that clear. It's just like this very vague thing. It's like, I think I'm supposed to do this.

Yeah, well, fate's an interesting thing. Obviously, I thought about it. You know, I thought about it my whole life. My daddy gave me a book a long time ago when I was a kid called the bridge in San Luis Rey. And it's about these people that are on this bridge. It collapses and it's in central South America somewhere, and they all die. And the story is about, why are these people, let's say they're seven. There might be more or less, but regardless about that number, a group of people, why were they on that bridge at that time when it collapsed? And it's just an interesting thing to think about. And I thought about it again in Iraq, back in really, 2005, 2006 timeframe, because anything could have been an IED. And you're going down the road, you're heading to a target, you're doing a convoy, whatever you're doing. And anything. A dead donkey on the side of the road. Trash, whatever. Anything. Just a disruptive piece of dirt. Whatever. Anything. Could be an IED back then. So we got there, and I thought, you know what? I can either be worried about that sort of thing, or I can just accept the fate part of it and do my job at that time as an officer and do my job as the best leader and operator I can possibly be and focus on the mission and focus on the guys and crush this thing.

And that's where my focus needs to be, not on whether that thing's an IED. I got somebody up in the turret. As we're going, they're looking, they're doing that thing. We have some technology that's helping counter some of these things. Of course, the enemy, though, is adapting to that technology. That's warfare. You're always adapting to the enemy. Enemy is always adapting to you. You're looking for gaps in the enemy's defenses. You're trying to capitalize on momentum. But they're clever, and they know exactly how we counter things. They adapt, and in turn, we have to adapt to that. So I decided to resign myself to fate as far as that stuff goes, so I could just focus on the mission and be the best leader I could be. So fate's an interesting thing.

It is. And it's interesting hearing that from you, because you're talking about it in the most extreme environment that exists, which is war, and that in order for you to be completely focused, you kind of had to give into that. It's the only way you'll be able to do your job. And then also, if you're not completely focused, it could wind up costing you or your teammates lives.

Exactly. That's the same reason while I was in, all I focused on, and I think I had to talk to my wife about this, but she understood it. The pendulum's on the side of the team. When you're in, if you're bringing guys downrange, maybe you're in a staff job somewhere, maybe not. But if you're taking guys downrange, you do not want to be ten years on from whatever's going to happen downrange in Iraq or Afghanistan or somewhere else around the world, sitting on that couch after something goes sideways, wondering if you did everything you possibly could have done in preparation for that event, to be the best operator, make the best decisions under fire that you possibly could. So that's why on the weekends I was training, there are people going around the country and the civilian side of the house. So I'd be out there training pistols, training rifle bells on the weekend, always working out, always reading military history, always reading about Iraq, Afghanistan, so that I was not going to leave anything on the field because it was just something that I was very aware of. Just reading histories of Vietnam and thinking about the guys when they came home from that and just how the enemy gets a vote.

You can also do all those things I just talked about, and things can still go sideways, but I wanted to know that I was as prepared as I could possibly be.

And in the margins, in the far ends, those hard days that you put in in training, could be the difference between your life or lifemates. Life for your teammates.

Exactly. It's like now it's easy for me to say, I don't think I need to work out today. I need to write a book back then. No, I'm gonna work out. I'm gonna do this run. I'm gonna hit that obstacle course again. I'm gonna get to the range with the guys. I'm gonna do whatever, whatever it is. I'm gonna read this other book about Afghanistan, or read this thing about insurgencies, counter insurgencies, terrorism. I'm gonna know the enemy as well as I possibly can, because that's what I owe the guys, and not just them, but their families, and by default, the mission and the country.

So I think that difference is what makes your book so special that you have that real life experience. This isn't just something you're dreaming up and you've done research on, like, your real life experience. Serving as a Navy SEAL is a big part of why your books are so compelling.

Yeah, no, I appreciate that. And it's. It's one of those things I also saw as I was getting out. So I went to the training command buds as my last couple years in, which is when I started writing the first 1st book, and that's when I wasn't taking guys downrange anymore. I knew I was getting out, so I didn't have to be solely focused on that, and I could start doing these, these other things and focus, focus on that. But I didn't know through my executive summary, through my outline until I started to write those first words how personal it was going to be. And it became a very personal writing experience. Initially, I thought, oh, I'll get the sniper stuff right if I don't know something about an aircraft or a submarine, I can call somebody, at least I know people to reach out to who connects me with someone who spent time in the submarine force or in an aircraft I need to write about or something like that. But I didn't know how personal it was going to be from a feeling and emotion standpoint. So if my character gets ambushed somewhere, I can remember what it was like in Baghdad, 2006 to actually get ambushed.

And then I can take those and apply them right here to this fictional narrative. So it's a fictional story. James Reese in the first book gets ambushed on the streets of LA by this assassin guy. But I can remember what it felt like to be on the receiving end. And then those feelings and emotions go directly on the page so I don't have to find a sniper from, let's say, Ramadi at the height of the war and interview him and then have those answers get filtered through movies. I've seen other interviews I've done documentaries, other books, whatever it might be, and then fictionalize it and put it on the page. It goes all heart and soul right in here. So it was very personal, much more personal. It's remained that way. Even though this is the 7th book, it's still just as powerful when I'm writing it and I'm feeling it as it was for that first one.

Did you write any short stories first?

No, I was a reader, so I read my whole life. So I got to read all these guys. David Morell, Nelson Demille, AJ Quinnell, JC Pollock, Mark Golden, Tom Clancy, Ian Fleming, Jean le Carre. All these guys were the masters who were my professors in the art of storytelling from a very early age. So certainly by 6th grade, fifth grade was when Hunt for Red October came out, which is why I have a submarine section in the beginning of this as a nod to the 40th anniversary of the hunt for Red October, for Tom Clancy and everything he did for the. For the genre. But it's. It's. I just. Yeah, I just absolutely love it. But I had that foundation, and I had that foundation from an early age, so it wasn't at age 40 when I, like, thought, oh, maybe I should be. If I was gonna be a writer, what should I have been reading? Or what can I have read that.

You read knowing you were going to be a writer?

But because I loved the magic in those pages, not because I was like, oh, I'm gonna learn this in 6th grade so that then 30 years later I can use it. No, it was just I loved the magic and the pages of all those novels and just became a part of me, a part of my being a part of this foundation that I can now build on. And so I don't think I could have prepared myself any better to be a seal or to do what I'm doing now as an author, because reading is really the foundation of all of it.

That's such a great lesson for people listening that you can apply to almost anything in life. Just focus on something, be super dedicated to it, cover all the bases, and then go for it. And you nailed it. If the terminal list is your first book, that's crazy.

Yeah, that's what it was.

How many rewrites were there? Or edits?

I thought there was going to be a lot because you're sending this to Simon and Schuster. It's a publisher of all these books that I've read growing up, and I thought, oh, they know what they're doing back there, so they're going to make all these changes. Very few. The questions that I got back are still the ones that I get content edits today, which are like, explain this for somebody who wasn't in the military or, now, hey, explain this for someone who hasn't read the previous six books. Put another sentence in there or two, just to explain who this person is and why they're here. So those are the kind of edits that I get, but no real big content edits at all. And I didn't know it, because I'm stepping into this for the first time back then, and I didn't know if it was going to be like, hey, you know what? You should lay off on the violence. Or do you have to have so many guns in there, or do you have to describe them? Nothing. There's zero.

See, the thing is about books, you can kind of go ham in a book, like, and people don't really cancel books. You know, they don't get. You know what I'm saying? Like, you can. With. With written fiction, you can get pretty fucking crazy.

Oh, yeah.

To the point where if that was in a movie, people like, what kind of asshole made this movie?

Because we totally different.

I think we think about movies as movies shaping our narrative of reality in a good way. Like, the good guy always wins, you know, bad guy always dies. Like, it's kind of predictable. That's why we like superhero movies, right? But in a work of fiction, like a novel, you can get pretty dark.

Yeah, there's. I have 100% complete creative control. No one. And I love that my agent or my publisher never suggests anything. And I love that. I didn't know that was how it was going to be going in, because I saw, you know, you're watching, like, californication, you know, and you're seeing David Duchovny and his relationship with his agent. Or you're watching. What was that other one? The one about the agent in LA with re.

Oh, boo.

Yeah, that one.

Fucking entourage.

Entourage, entire. So that's what kind of. I thought agents were. That's Hollywood.

It's different. I think literature agents understand creativity a little bit better.

Yeah.

Also, Hollywood agents can, you know, they just. It's a different animal. Human.

I haven't experienced those ones that are kind of a caricature of an agent.

I met a bunch of them.

Yeah. I haven't experienced that yet.

The difference is those guys don't read.

They're always wheeling and dealing, and they're doing their thing.

They're doing coke and fucking driving ferraris. They don't have time for reading.

No, they're not reading, so I'm sure that they exist. I just have not experienced that yet, because now I have, like, five agents. Now. There's one forever. There's the literary agent. There's a book adaptation agent. There's unscripted agent. There's podcast agent. Damn, I'm forgetting. So there's a lot now, but none of them give me advice on what to do. So I love having complete creative control. I absolutely love that. And there's no one to blame if people hate this all on me. It's not like my agent. I knew I shouldn't have done that because she said I needed to put this other character in or something. Fuck. There's none of that. Zero.

Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, I think it has to come from you. Like, I think that's what makes work of fiction and really good books, makes it so unique is that, you know, it's coming from one person's mind that this thought, these ideas that they had, they wrote it out, and they sat there and they summoned the muse, and they put it all together, and then I know it's coming out of you. So it's like, part of the buzz of it is that this person make. That's one thing that I think is always going to exist. Even when AI starts writing insane books, you're always going to want a book that came from a person's mind, just like you want a pair of handmade boots.

Good point. Yeah, yeah, no, very good point. Hollywood different, though, screenwriting. So I just sent off episode 107 right before I came over from the hotel, I hit the button on send for episode 107 for this new. It's not really a spinoff. It's its own series, but a prequel origin story. Taylor Kitsch playing Ben Edwards. His origin story that gets him to a place, shows his journey to get him to a place where he can do the things that he did in the terminal list in the book and in the show because he was so good. And that's writing those things is a team effort, for sure. As you know from writing scripts, they're constraints, budgetary constraints, the location constraints. There's a story arc within that episode and then overarching story arc for the whole, whether it's seven, eight, or whatever, how many episodes there are. So there's all those things to consider, and then there's notes from senior level executives all the way back down. Very collaborative. So it's interesting.

It's good, though, that you're collaborating because the other option, you just sell it and they do it, and that's never fun. Like, everyone that I've ever talked to that ever sold a script or sold a book idea, and they turned it into a movie and they didn't have anything to do with it. They fucking hated it.

Yeah. I mean, you have buy in, and that's good and bad because it's not going to be a strict adaptation. There's going to be changes.

Like the gray man. Like the movie the Gray man.

Yeah.

If you read the book the gray man, and then you watch the movie the gray man, you're like, what is this?

Yeah.

This is not the same thing. It's a totally different movie.

Yeah.

There's, like, all these people that don't exist. There's all these things that don't exist.

Yeah.

Like the characters, not as complex.

Yeah. I mean, it. It's a thing. It's a thing. And there's gonna be changes. Obviously, the book first blood, very different than the movie first blood. Yeah.

I never read that book.

It's great. So different. I mean, you get sheriff's perspective. There's no. There's no knife in it yet. No. Sylvester Stallone brought that to the. He knew the importance of prop. Yeah. He brought it to the. Because he knew the importance of prop, which is why I gave James Reese the tomahawks, because I knew the importance of props as well from that. And actually, Stallone, this was so cool. I got to talk to Stallone. He was fantastic. He was awesome. He wanted to jump on a zoom with me. I was like, oh, my God. As a child of the eighties. I was so fired up, so I was just, like, trying to play it cool. Trying to play it cool. I have my phone down in the corner. I'm taking some pictures just to commemorate this moment. But he was funny, he was wise. He passed along some lessons, and we just got to hang out and talk and see if there was something that we could do together. So I wrote up a treatment for him specifically. You know, probably nothing will ever come of it because you know how Hollywood works and you never.

You never know. But. But it was cool to cool to do that. That was a big moment.

That's very cool.

That was fun.

Yeah, you never. That guy was fucking doing stunts into his. Deep into his sixties.

Oh, yeah.

Broke his neck.

Yeah.

Put him in the expendables. Yeah. Like, literally broke his neck. We talked about it.

Yeah.

His neck fused. Like, when he moves, he's kind of stiff and that's why his neck is fused.

Oh, yeah. What an animal, though, in a sixties, amazing.

Doing stunts.

Yeah. And now late seventies, still like fucking.

Jean Claude Van Damme.

Yeah. Yeah.

Like what?

Uh huh. Yeah. That's how dedicated that guy. And such a great writer. People don't understand just what a great writer he is. What a great mind that is. All those. All those films coming from that mind and. Yeah, what a great. What a great guy.

Funny that people assume that a certain point in time someone doing something awesome is going to want to stop, you know?

Yeah.

Like, that's the only, like, why is he still working?

Yeah.

All the money in the world. Fuck are you doing?

I think he just loves it.

He must. I mean, that's what you get off on now. It's not a thing. It's like, most people think about work as, like, a thing you do for money, and then you get. Eventually get enough money, you don't work. But if you actually do something you love, like, why would you stop? Why do you want to stop?

I think that's a difference between thinking of something in terms of a career and thinking of it in terms of a profession. And there's a difference. There's precision in language, reflects precision and thought. Someone told me a long time ago, and that's a different thing. A career is something. Let's say you walk in and you're working your way up that ladder and you have a plan, and profession is something. That's a calling, it seems so. The profession of arms. There's a reason we call it a profession of arms, not the career of arms, although there are a lot of careers in the military that are working their way up that ladder.

And you cover that in the book?

I do cover that, and I guess to take them out in all sorts of creative ways. So it's very therapeutic for me to write these things.

Yeah, there's a lot of grossness. That's what's really sad, is that you would think that the military would be, like, the most pure of all institutions. Cause it has to be. Cause you're literally taking the strongest amongst us and having them go and fight for our country and fight for our interests. And you would think that there's no room for bullshit, but apparently there's a lot of room for bullshit.

Well, there's a lot of room for advancement, I guess, if you simply don't pop positive on a piss test, don't get too many duis, and don't get arrested for, let's say, domestic violence or something like that, you can stay in the military for a long time, so you don't need to excel when you hit certain rank. And I think that when you. That's what we see it play out in Afghanistan. August of 2021, that's 20 years of being able to plan for that withdrawal. And that's the best that our military leaders could do. 20 years to prepare for that. So somebody can look at that who never had any touch point with the military and apply common sense and logic to that problem set and have a much better plan to extract forces from Afghanistan.

That whole thing seemed insane.

Ridiculous.

It seemed insane. And it's. For whatever reason, it's not being discussed when people are talking about this presidential race. That was one of the more insane things of our time. And then when you talk to people that were there, like, Tim Kennedy told me some horror stories.

Oh, yeah.

About what was going on there.

All those babies thrown over the fence.

And the barbed wire, saying he saw worse things during that time than all of his tours. Geez, they were Taliban. Just killed a woman in front of them. Just openly, like, put her head on a truck and shot her in the head in front of everybody.

And it was unnecessary. That's the whole thing. It was unnecessary.

I just don't understand how you can do that. I don't know. I don't understand. Like, I mean, if you're going to execute something that's as complex as removing all the troops from a place that we've occupied for 20 years, like, it seems like that would involve a very thoroughly reviewed plan. One would thank many experts and come up with what's going to cause the least likelihood of. Of casualties.

Yeah, I thought about it in the early days. So, in 2003 in Afghanistan, and I thought I was catching the tail end of it then, because the flash points before that, we had Mogadishu. We had Panama, Grenada, desert one. So after Vietnam, you had these flash points, and this was. Now we're moving into extended combat operations. But from the end of Vietnam up to then, our model is a flashpoint, essentially. So we all thought if we weren't there, essentially right after 911, that we were going to miss it. And then we have essentially 20 years. But I remember being in the back of a Hilux pickup truck with a afghan guy, and I'd always ask them if they were back then. I could ask them if they were moose, if they fought the Soviets, because I was always interested in that history and their backstories and what that life was like in the late seventies through the eighties into the nineties. And so I was always essentially collecting information just because I was curious. But as I'm talking to this guy, I distinctly remember thinking, man, one day we're gonna leave this place, and this guy is helping us right now.

What's gonna happen to his family when we leave this place? And, yeah, we saw that all play out. It was 20 years later, but there.

Was no reporting on it.

No, it just disappeared.

Yeah, we hear about it from soldiers. We hear about it from people that are, you know, like, deeply embedded journalists that were there. But most people that know about that story don't know about all the people that worked with the United States over there that are fucked. We don't even know what happened to them.

Yep. No, it's awful. We have a history doing that, though. I mean, we did it in Vietnam, did it with the Kurds after the first Gulf war. So we don't have a very good track record as far as taking care of those and their families who help us there. And they get left behind, typically, and then family slaughtered.

It's just hard to imagine that that's how we approach things. Yeah, like, you don't want to think that the people that are in charge are that incompetent or that are that callous or that are. That they just look at a numbers thing instead of looking at bodies in human lives.

Yeah, well, all that stuff I get to. Yeah, I guess you write about these guys meeting their ends in a horrible ways in the pages of the novels. So it. I guess that's. That's my way to do my part to kind of keep that history alive, because you can go back to fiction. Let's say you can go back Ian Fleming, we talked about him earlier, you can go back and read those books from the fifties, and that really is a portal back to post World War Two, Great Britain, and they're changing place in the world. I mean, Empire decline. And that's Ian Fleming's way to keep that old Empire alive is through James Bond and his creation. So they're time capsules back to the time in which they were written. Books in the seventies, books in the eighties, go back reading the Tom Clancy read, the time for October, Patriot games, whatever it is, it's a snapshot of what's going on there geopolitically, and then, and also things like searching for a phone booth and looking for a quarter, that sort of thing. So all of those things. So I like to weave pop culture and history into the pages of the novels as well, because they are their time capsules for the time in which they're written.

But it's also a constraint because now you have to think about Teslas and GPs in cars, and GPS's in phones and video cameras everywhere. So you have to think about that, especially when you're writing like, espionage type of a thriller. You have to think about all that stuff and weave it into every chapter. Same thing with film and screenplays. You have to be like, oh, man, this script. Why wouldn't he just pick up his phone and call this guy and tell him to like, wave off or something like that? Whereas in the eighties or seventies, like, that guy's gone, how are you going to contact this guy? So it's just a different dynamic and you have to think about that as you're writing these things. So it's just another interesting thing that you need to think through and creatively solve for.

I was thinking about this the other day when I knew that we were going to talk. How complicated is it to try to make a reasonable storyline where someone evades capture today? Yeah, it's a thing, because if someone is using a phone, they know where you are.

Yeah.

If you are running around in a city, they're gonna have access to security cameras, they're gonna have street cameras in some countries. And, you know, you're, you could be tracked so easily.

Yeah, no, it's not.

You tracked from fucking space.

Yep. It's a, it's a whole thing.

So you've seen those photos that they take satellite photos from space?

I've seen a lot, but I don't know if I've seen the ones you're thinking of licensed links.

License plates. Read a license plate from space.

Oh, yeah, you gotta think about all this stuff.

And this is like from years ago.

Oh, yeah, you could see your license plates a while back. It's probably full scale video now or facial recognition technology. Oh, yeah, back in the sixties or something like that. Forging passports and all that sort of thing. That's a no go right now.

I saw the fucking craziest story about this guy who got a bunch of plastic surgery and changed his appearance and changed his name so that he could try to date his girlfriend who had a restraining order on him.

What?

Yeah.

What?

His fucking psycho changed his face. Bleached blonde, dyed his hair, lost a ton of weight, looked like a totally different guy. So he could date his girlfriend. That put a restraining order on.

That's a little creepy and sounds like it should be a movie or some sort or a law and order.

That should be a hole in the desert. That's the guy.

What?

Yeah.

That is crazy.

Here.

Is this. Is this recent 2020 tweets bringing it up? This wasn't recently, but 2024 years ago.

Gets plastic surgery and name change to date his ex girlfriend after she obtains a restraining order.

Did it work? How far did he get?

That's a good question. Did she find a question?

It seems like there'd be a tell. Or it seems like he'd just be too creepy to even reengage. Really. Or with anyone, actually.

Yeah. I mean, maybe he knew, like, what creeped her out, so he, like, started slowly.

Opposite. Yeah, I just do the opposite of what my real personality would do, but.

It might be a real story. This man did not look up there. It says, no, this man did not.

Was not successful, or he didn't do that.

Said he didn't get it. It's bullshit. Aha. These sons bitches. What's the actual truth?

That's the thing. How do you even figure this?

One of those urban legends and someone.

Just took it too far.

We found a disclaimer. World news Daily. Oh, that's a silly. Oh, that's a silly newspaper. Okay. They got us sons of bitches.

Still, it's a good idea for a script. Or. So was the scripture working on back then?

It was a werewolf movie.

Nice.

Yeah, I just have it sitting around on my computer.

All right.

I should do something with it eventually.

Yeah. Yeah, we should do something.

Speaking of which, Patrick Bette David was. There was some video where he was showing Obama, and he thinks Obama has a mask on, not keep seeing us.

Yeah.

Biden. He thinks Biden is not really Biden. Someone pretending to be Biden that has a mask on because he was, like, talking very clearly. They were just reviewing it.

Does that technology. Does that. Does that technology exist? Is that pop up as well?

I think it's make it make up. Like, they can use prosthetic masks and. And they can do an insane job of changing your appearance. But these guys are, like, accusing Biden of having this on, which I think, like, boy, that's a loose end if that's true. Like, there's too many people out there that would know.

I know like that.

I mean, it looks like people now claiming that Joe Biden has different skin color on his face than his neck.

Yeah, well, they do do the makeup.

Let me see what it looks like. Well, there's the collar. Okay. There's a shadow on the collar. Yeah, no, see, that's just the shadow.

I think that I see that clip at the end.

Right, but that's. But that's a bunch of different lights. That's all that is lighting. Maybe it looks bad, but that's also low resolution video.

Yeah.

If they were gonna do that, do you think they would keep the fucking neck color different?

I would think that they would be smarter than this. And can you even do that?

But if you can get that good, where you can make the face look that good. And they keep comparing his old face to his new face. First of all, the guy got plastic surgery. Clearly, he got a facelift. He's got his face pulled back to try to look younger, which never works. Just makes you look weird.

It does look weird.

It makes you look like a lizard. But the shadows, to me, look like studio lighting. You have multiple cameras, multiple lights coming from a bunch of different angles. That's what it looks like. Look, he's moving around, but it's because he has a collar, and the collar is catching the light. So there's light down here. There's light above. That's why it looks weird. Yeah, that's why it looks like two tone, because it's essentially getting a shadow. But then the shadow is also getting light from the upper. Light from the upper case. See? Looks fake right there. But that's just shadows. It's because he's being lit from below, right?

Yeah, it does look odd.

Yeah. Do you think he's probably being lit from a couple different spots? I don't think you can. I mean, I definitely think you can get a face like mask and make you look like him. But how are you gonna talk like him? Yeah, they probably just gave him a solid doze Adderall. I remember seeing this clip. I saw the very end of it where they have an expert of some kind, this guy. He says that, like, they've been using body doubles since. Yes, they have.

And he's like, it's plausible that they could maybe have.

Well, but I doubt you would have to. So you would. What you would have to do is you'd have to have the person in the mask and they'd have to talk in their voice. And then what you could do with AI is change the voice to be exactly like Biden's voice. Yeah, you could do that. But that requires so many people to be in on it, including the person being interviewed or the person interviewing Biden. All the people that are watching. There's a lot of loose ends there.

Yeah. That's where a lot of these things, I think, fall apart. Yeah.

In that case, that's a lot of loose ends, especially, like, camera guys and a lot of hardworking folks, a lot of fucking, probably republicans that are involved.

In normal people doing that sort of thing.

You know, they'd have to sign NDAs, but people talk. Yeah, it's like, especially something like that. Like, oh, my God, they had a fake president give a conversation. And that's what you're seeing. You're seeing a fake president. This is crazy.

Yeah, that's a lot. Benjamin Franklin said, three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. So there's something to that. There's certainly something to that. And. Yeah, like, you're right. All those, all the people that actually do the work. The tactical level work. Yeah. Like, as I think about in for Hollywood now, when you see, let's say, a star of a show, say something on social media that makes everybody, everybody crazy, I'm never going to watch that person's show again or see that movie. I'm never going to watch another movie by that person. That's one person. That's the one person who goes up and accepts the award. But there's 300 other people, 400 other people, even more than that, doing all that tactical base level work, the hair and makeup people, the stunt people, all of those people are part of this thing, part of this project, and that's their jobs, too. So I think about that now. When you see someone say something kind of off the wall, okay, that's the, that's that person is the, essentially the spokesperson for that show, if they're a star. But there's so many other people that help bring that, then put in so much work.

And then that person can go spout out some political opinion. And then, I mean, like, look what's going on right now with Robert De Niro. Robert De Niro. Because, look, there's something about being a star where you think your opinion's more important than anybody else's, and you can go give a press conference. And he obviously has been very vocal from 2016 that he hates Trump for whatever reason. Maybe they have some personal things, whatever it is. But now he's, like, holding press conferences, so now everyone's heckling him everywhere he goes, so bad. You opened up this instead of just being this cranky old liberal, which I know a lot of them, you know, instead of that, now you're this guy that is yelling at other people that are Trump supporters, and they're yelling at you. Like, you've opened yourself up to this nonsense.

Right? Like, why do that at that age even?

Why now every movie you go to, 50% of the population is gonna not want to go see that movie.

Yeah.

Instead of just, you know, I think there's a certain thing involved in being an actor at a very high level, and I think that's one of the reasons why you never see, like, Daniel Day Lewis give conversations, you know, like, well, he disappeared. Yeah.

Where did he go?

He's very rarely talking about things that are in the news, and he's not doing one of those fucking imagine there's no heaven videos and everybody's get Covid. Remember those? You know, and there's a bunch of celebrities telling you how important it is to not vote for Trump. There was all these videos from 2016. You're not gonna see Daniel Day Lewis in those. No, because for Daniel Day Lewis, for the master of masters to be able to embody these completely different human beings, you kind of don't want to know much about him as a person.

Yeah, we don't. And, yeah, I think he pretty much. Did he retire?

He became a cobbler.

Yeah, cobbler.

I think he stopped doing that. I don't think he acts anymore, though.

Yeah. A cobbler in Ireland. Right.

I don't know. He became a boxer for a full year.

Whoa.

Yeah, he did that movie. I think it's called the boxer. It's about the IRA. It's about a guy who goes to prison and comes out and he looks like a legitimate boxer. Like, better than anybody else who has ever been in a movie about a boxer.

Really? Well, he's. He goes all in.

Yeah. The other. The guys in other movies, they box like no one's punched him in the face.

Yeah.

You know, or no one's going to punch. Maybe somebody has, but no one's going to punch them in the face, so they're throwing punches and it's not. It doesn't look real to me.

Yeah. That's why you have a hard time with Rocky, right?

I have a hard time.

I know you do.

I mean, it's a great movie. I loved it when I was a kid. When I was a kid, I drank raw eggs and I ran around the block. Yeah, I saw it.

It was fantastic.

It was awesome.

And so that's. That's. That's what I miss. I mean, I miss those days. I miss that. The feeling of watching those movies and getting just fired up and then going out and doing pull ups and sprinting hills hard.

When you know something.

Yeah.

When you know something, like if you were watching a movie about the military and they were doing shit, that's just absolutely never going to happen and not real.

Yeah.

Takes you out of it. Like, ah, yeah, it can be tough out of here.

I know. And that's what we. That's what was important to Antoine Fuqua. So Chris Pratt, David Agilio, to me, was doing something that when somebody who served in the military or law enforcement, firefighter, intelligence officer, somebody that did these things for real, can pop that beer and sit on their couch and watch the show, wanted them to know we at least tried, at least tried to get it right. Maybe some Hollywood hot sauce. Of course, we, Chris talks about it in terms of, like, 80% authenticity and 20% Hollywood hot sauce. Gotta move that. Gotta move that story forward, you know? You gotta. Yeah, I gotta move it forward.

Great term, Hollywood hot sauce. Yeah, yeah. But the problem is sometimes it's too much hot sauce and overwhelms the meal.

Or they don't know. And it does take another breath. And I take. You have to take a moment to try to get these things right. It's easy. Not easy. It's still hard to make any show. And that, that's why I appreciate all shows out there now, because I know how much work goes into making, even the bad ones and how easy is for things to go off the rail. So it's a shocker that anything gets made or anything good gets made, certainly. But it's. So you do have to take that extra moment to think about, hey, how is this gonna look to somebody who does this for real? Yeah.

You have to respect that. As soon as you make a film about something and the people in the film like, you have a movie about dancing and they dance like shit. This is stupid. This movie sucks. If you were a professional dancer, you'd be mad. You'd be like, this is horrible. And, like, they do that in some karate movies. But there's a suspension of disbelief aspect of those movies where you jump up and kick two people at the same time. Yeah, it's kind of fun.

Yeah, no, there's the fun aspect. But if you're trying to make a serious film and try to do this, like, that's why Daniel Day Lewis is so great, because he becomes that character.

Yeah.

You have to talk to him on set. Like he's that character.

Yeah, yeah. He was Abraham Lincoln for, like, a year.

Right, right. It's so interesting because I don't see that. I've not seen that yet.

That's fucked up because nobody even watched you waste your time being Abraham Lincoln for a year, and nobody even talks about the movie.

I know that's tough. That's why I write this one page executive summary when I start these things, and I ask myself, is this worth the next year, year and a half of my life? And if it's if? Yes, then I go all in. But I read it again and I say, is this worth if someone was walking by Hudson news and grabs this off the shelf and reads the back of this paperback or whatever, and is it interesting enough for them to devote time? They're never gonna get back to this story.

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

Historical fiction. You take a little license and I don't like. You don't like that we're making it up.

I can't get behind these movies about, like, real people. Yeah, you have them talking to their kid.

You know, the fuck you don't know what they're saying.

Unfortunately, no recordings of Lincoln's voice exists since he died. Twelve years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, the first device to record and play back sound. If anyone had an educated guess as to how it sounded, though, it would be Holzer, who has written 40 books on Lincoln.

40?

40 books on Lincoln. The Civil War. What a psycho that guy must be.

Wow.

You know, that guy's out there reenacting the civil war. 40 books on Lincoln in the Civil War. That seems a little crazy.

Fucking speaking Daniel Day Lewis though. I like that. Like, I love IRA movies. Oh, yeah, Ira. Seventies, like, ira movies. I think those are. Those are good.

Yes.

Even the bad ones are good.

I started watching Peaky blinders.

I haven't not watched it yet. I need to watch it.

Fucking great. It's fucking great. I burned through the gentleman, which is Guy Richie's new show on Netflix, which is amazing. It's fucking great.

Nice.

Prime guy Richie. It's great. And then a lot of friends have been telling me, like, you got to watch Peaky blind. And Jamie keeps telling me, I got to watch the wire. And that's not. Next. Wires. Next. But I got to get through Peaky Blinders.

Yeah.

Fucking great.

What do they say there. There are two people, kind of types of people in this world. Those who have watched Peaky Blinders and those who have not.

Really.

I think that's in that meme somewhere.

Someone in Africa.

Yeah.

Bro, you haven't even watched Peaky Blinders.

I know what's going on. No, I know. I. There's. There's so many things I want to watch, but I just haven't had time.

Because, well, today is the craziest time ever. So much for television and films and so many of these incredible series.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, like these things where they take, like, Ozark, where they. You follow the entire storyline for years and, you know, like, the Soprano started that.

Yeah.

Still, like, one of the greats, Tony Hinchcliffe, just started watching the Sopranos. Nice.

I know. I missed that, too, because that came out right around. When did it come out? When the. Right around ish. So right around September 11. So as soon as that, I remember it was starting up peak.

Yeah, it was like the first season.

I think was 2000 at the end.

Of 99 or something like that.

Lasted to 2009. Yeah, I kind of lost a lot of that during that time frame because.

Sure.

Right. 911 going downrange focused on that, starting a family, all that stuff. So we kind of missed a little bit in there. So I need to go back.

Go back and watch the Sopranos. Incredible.

I see scenes all the time. You see scenes all the time. They pop up on your feed and all that stuff. And it's fantastic.

It's hard to believe that you root for a guy who's a criminal and a murderer.

Yeah. Yeah.

Like he's your hero.

Yeah.

Like.

Well, I kind of write about that in here. My guy goes off the, you know, kind of little.

His is understandable.

Yeah.

Tony Soprano is a criminal.

Yeah.

Lifelong mafia guy who's robbing people stealing things.

Yeah. Reservoir dogs. You're watching reservoir dogs and you're loving all those guys conversations and.

Right.

All the rest of it, they're all bad guys. Yeah. I mean, a lot of those. A lot of tarantino stuff.

Oh, yeah. Well, that's. I like that complicated movie.

Yeah, yeah.

Where people are complicated.

Yeah, exactly. Real interesting. Yeah, interesting people. And I like. You want to like somebody too, so you can even like. That's what you're saying. You're saying, yeah, you like these guys who happen to be criminals, are doing bad things or whatever because of the way. The way they're written, way they come. You get to know them.

Yeah.

These things.

I mean, it was crazy. Everybody wanted to be in the mob. The mob probably recruited quite a few people during those days.

Well, there's the whole story behind Godfather and all that stuff, too.

Oh, I bet. I bet. I mean, that was an amazing movie. I bet that made a lot of people want to become mobsters, probably.

Or you. Have you heard Danny Trejo talk about doing. There's a couple movies that came out about gangs and his affiliation there with those, but he's acting in the same things and having to go and actually get permission from the different gangs to chew them. He has it in his biography. It's pretty. Pretty interesting stuff, but similar type of a deal.

Wasn't that a deal also with Edward James almost when one of those was an american me.

There's american me, and then there was blood in, blood out. It came out about the same time.

Is that the same thing?

I think there was.

I don't think that's ever James almost, though.

Right. No one.

Right, right. American me. I think he got into trouble with some of the mexican gangs. The way things are. Are depicted.

Yeah.

You have to have permission for stuff.

Yeah. Well, I was gonna go to Macau for this one, so China. And I don't think I can go there now. I think I needed to do it before I wrote this book. Uh.

Oh.

Yeah. So I think I. Luckily, I went to Russia before for my third novel for Savage Son. I went over to Kamchatka Peninsula, did a hunt over there, and had a crazy experience with a bear over there. But I don't think. I don't know if I should go back.

I don't think I did. A Brittany Griner.

I know. Exactly.

Yeah. Of you. American patriot actor Danny Trejo said in an interview he was aware of ten people having been murdered for their involvement in the film. Holy shit, man. Holy shit. The first killing occurred twelve days after the film's premiere, when one of the film's consultants, Charles Charlie Brown Manriquez, a member of La Eme, was killed in Ramona Gardens, LA's oldest public housing project. Another consultant to film, 49 year old grandmother, Anna Lazarga. Lazarga, commonly known as the gang lady, was murdered when she was gunned down her East Los Angeles driveway while loading luggage into her car the day of her mother's funeral.

Dang.

Wow. Wow. Yeah, they were careful. Yeah. It's like, dangerous people you're making about.

Do you ever worry about that? With stuff you talk about on here?

Yeah, you could always worry about that.

Yeah.

I mean, if you're gonna talk about things that are consequential.

Right.

You know, I mean, we live in a weird fucking world right now.

Yeah.

We live in a weird world of all kinds of insane things happening simultaneously, you know?

Yeah, it's pretty wild. I got off the plane yesterday, and so I hear this jack, and it was a guy walks up, and he ended up being an Austin detective.

Oh.

So. First I thought I was in trouble, and then he was just. He liked the books and everything. Apparently have some mutual friends, but. Yeah, it's crazy out there, and people can find you so much easier now. I don't like that.

I don't like that. It's definitely not a safer time to be alive, but it's also. It's interesting that we're moving towards some. I mean, because people can find you. We're moving towards some very weird thing where there's not going to be any secrets anymore.

Yeah.

I don't think it's that far from now.

No.

And I think it might be the only way human beings ever truly understand each other. I think it's gonna happen through technology, and I think it's going to happen in our lifetimes that our relationship to each other is going to be incredibly different than what it is now.

Neuralink. We got that coming up. I talk.

I think that's a part of it.

I have Alice's character I introduced two books ago for in the blood and an AI quantum computer. And people really liked this character, but I didn't want. I had to sideline her for the next one, for the last book, because I didn't want to rely on her. Like Michael Knight in the eighties, calling Kit Carr and his watch and having it jump in Trans am and zip off. So I sidelined her last book, but I knew I couldn't introduce a character like that and not. And just ignore her forever. So she comes back in this. And even since I did the research for the last book, that's only two years, things have increased at such an exponential rate as far as AI, quantum computing, and then the military side of that, autonomous control of platforms. So all these new things that are coming out, whether it's submarines or it's aircraft or surface ships, whatever it might be, they're all being built so that they can be autonomously controlled. They may not be yet, but they have that ability.

Have you seen that insane new ship that's autonomous? It's all controlled. It looks like a manta ray.

Oh, yeah, yeah, I've seen that one.

That one's. No passengers, no, no crew. No one on it at all. It's just a machine. And it looks like a damn spaceship.

Yeah.

See if you can find it.

Yeah.

Crazy looking.

Yeah.

You look at it, you're like, it's. If this was not ours, if you were living in, like, 1970 and someone saw something like this.

Yeah. Dang, look at that. That's crazy.

That's wild. No windows. You'd be like, oh, my God, it's a spaceship. It's from another planet.

All new stealth stuff, stealth bombers. The speed that these things go at, the altitudes that they travel, it's wild.

I also think there's new ones that operate on geothermal energy, and they can make hydrogen out of water. Like, they can do wild shit with some of these new devices that they're creating.

And this is the future. This is the future right here. So that's what I'm exploring this in this thing. It's like, what happens if you turn over autonomous control or have one of these things just take control?

Right? That is a real problem. That's a real problem that people are terrified of when it comes to weapon systems.

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

Yeah. And not only that, but these supersonic ones can change directions, so you can't even picture where they're going.

Hypersonic ones, hypersonic missiles, passive targeting. So you have all of these things. So I got to explore all that in the past. Probably. This book took so long, is because I was doing that research, and it's just new things coming to light every single day. And then people you're talking to in that space giving you little hints about what's really out there, and then you talk to somebody else who gives you another little hint, and you get to put this mosaic together like a reporter might. And I think what I describe in the book, I think we're way past it. We're already way past it as far as quantum computing, AI, and what the ability of those platforms, what they have, what they can do.

Yeah, I think so, too. I think what we know is probably really the tip of the iceberg, and I think they're probably far more advanced than we think they are right now. I think that's what a lot of the UAP stuff is.

Yeah.

I've been thinking that for a long time. I think it's very possible that we are visited. It's very. Tucker Carlson seems to think they're spiritual beings, that they've always been here. Like they're devils and angels.

Right.

That might be true, too. I don't know. I mean, but also probably we do get visited, but also probably some of those are ours. Probably. There's something about the government telling you that these are off world crafts that may go, oh, you made it. Instantly my brain goes, you're not square about anything.

Right? All the stealth technology, and they finally unveiled it, I think, in the maybe late eighties. Part of that was to let the Soviets know that we do have this capability because they didn't have theirs yet, and so we can get there before even know.

My fear is that they're not ours.

Yeah.

The big fear is that not only do they exist, but maybe some of them are not ours. And so some other countries have the ability to have these things that move in these insane ways that we can't quite do. Yeah, that might be possible, too. But if they're telling you that they're from another planet, they're not from another planet. That's my feeling. Okay. They're not. They spent three years lying about the Russia collusion story, and they got mainstream media to repeat it all. They spent all these years lying about, like fill in the blank everything. Pretty much everything. Why the fuck would we believe they're telling us the truth about UFO's?

Exactly.

I just think the whole thing seems. It seems.

It seems suspect.

Yeah, it just seems too obvious. You know, I just. I don't believe that they would just start telling you that there's off world crafts. I just thought, like, I don't think so.

Right.

And all these years.

Yeah.

Now you guys are just gonna start. Oh, it's these brave whistleblowers. Are you sure? Are you sure, cuz?

Yeah, yeah.

I smell bullshit. I smell. At least some of this is bullshit. I don't know how much of it's bullshit, though. I think. I think there's too many stories from the past when this technology was impossible. The Kenneth Arnold sightings, when they first started calling them flying saucers, I think he saw them in. Was it washed state?

Is that. Is that a long time ago?

Yeah, it was in the 1950s. Most of them started happening after we dropped the bombs. That's why my comedy club, the rooms are named after the nuclear bombs. Yeah. It's fat man and little boy.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because in UFO folklore, it's obviously the comedy mothership. UFO. You walk in the front doors of UFO fantastic. In UFO lore, they all started appearing shortly after the UFO. The bombs are dropped.

1947. And that's when we reorganized the military and intelligence agencies right there. We changed the department of War to the Department of Defense and secretary of war to the secretary of defense, and everything gets reorganized. Right? 1947 is a very pivotal year.

So look at what it says here. Kenneth Arnold in the UFO sighting occurred on June 24, 1947, when private pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed that he saw a string of nine shiny, unidentified flying objects flying past Mount Rainier at speeds that Arnold estimated at a minimum of 1200 miles an hour. So he saw these things flying at a rate, you know, in 47, they were propeller planes. And there's no way anything we had can move like that. And he's watching these things go at an insane rate of speed. And so he said they skipped across the sky like flying saucers on a lake. And so it became flying saucers. Yeah. And so. But people back then that saw those things. There's no way that was the Soviets. There's no way that was the Germans. There was. No, no, that's not ours. So whatever the fuck that is, if that was real, if the guy really did see those things. And then there was a string of them that were over the White House. Really? 1950 something.

Really?

Yeah, there was a. There was photographed ones that were over the White House is actually like a news story about it. It. That these things flew over the White House.

Okay.

And I think they moved at a bizarre rate of speed, too. So those ones give me pause. Yeah, because, look, the universe is. That's it. Drawing. That's a drawing. But I think there is a photograph of it. Yeah, I think that's. Is that the photo? There might not be. Okay. Saucers over Washington, DC. So what does the story say?

It looks like a comic book.

Senior air route traffic controller for the Civil Aeronautics Administration was in charge of the national airport, Washington, DC Art Control center on the night of July 19, 1952. Briefly, he states in a newspaper article, our job is to constantly monitor the skies around the nation's capital with electronic eye of radar. Shortly after midnight on that day, seven pips appeared suddenly on the control center scope. Ed Nugent, Jim Copeland, and Jim Richie, all experienced radar controllers, checked the observations. The airport control tower radar operator verified the same sightings. They were over the restricted areas of Washington, including the White House and the Capitol. So those kind of things. Yeah, yeah, you got to go. Well, what is that?

Right?

Look, the universe is big. Beyond our wildest imagination, there's no way we could even fathom how big it is. It's not possible. Look at that. Yeah. So they moved at such sudden bursts of intense speed that radar could not track them. Simultaneously, those objects seemed to head for the White House, the Capitol building and the White House. Triangular form, and the White House in triangular formations. The lighting made the front page. The sighting, rather, made the front page headlines in all newspapers.

Dang.

Yeah. So those kind of things you go, okay, well, what is that?

Right?

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

Yeah. It was interesting hearing Tucker talk about that part on here, like, where that technology came from. I hadn't really thought about that before.

Well, that's Diana Pasoka's work. Diana Pasolka and Gary Nolan, who is a legitimate professor, I believe, at Stanford. And Diana Pasaka is also a professor. She's a professor of religion. And they have investigated a lot of these crash sites. And the way they describe them, the people that are investigating the crash sites, the actual scientists, they call them donations.

What? Yeah, donations.

That's how they. They don't even think they're crashing, like, as an accident. They think. Some of them, they're just sending down here, like, hey, figure that out. Stupid. You know, send them to some remote place.

Yeah.

Slam it down there. And then the government has to rope off the area. And you can still find parts in this one area of New Mexico where this one crash site was. They didn't tell them where it was. They blindfolded took them out to this crash site, let them investigate it. And you can still find these pieces of this, some kind of metal that you can take, and you can crumple it in your hand like tin foil, and then it goes right back to the original shape.

Really.

It's the same thing that was described in Roswell, New Mexico. The people that. The Roswell thing is very hard because there's so many people involved and there's so many similar stories. But the problem is, when a story's been told for so long, people repeat a story they're told in towns when there's no recording devices. There's no. No one has phones. This is a long time ago. They have regular phones but no cell phones, obviously. And what they're doing with all this stuff is they're all talking about it. And then a narrative gets established, and then people tend to repeat narratives that are established. It's hard because you're talking about something that happened in 1947, but there's a lot of things that come almost right after Roswell. One of them is a transistor, and the other one is.

Microchips, maybe.

What is that stuff called? Fiber optics. Fiber optics. Fiber optics seem to emerge after that. It's one of the things that's described in the crash.

Yeah.

The people that have described it. But the thing is, like, again, you're hearing these things decades later. You're hearing. It's. It's very difficult to figure out what the fuck actually happened, but something seems to have happened because. The Roswell Daily Record. I have a framed cover of the front page of the Roswell Daily Record from 1947, where it says that we. There's a crashed UFO that the government flew to the base and that, you know, it's, like, in the news.

Yeah.

Which doesn't seem like something back then that you would just make up.

Yeah. I don't know. Unless there's a reason behind it. Distraction. I mean, who knows?

Yeah. Who knows? It could be something that the United States was working on, but it seems like they were trying to cover it up. So much so that they flew the wreckage in two separate planes to Wright Patterson Air force base, and Truman met them there.

Yeah. 47 is a big year. 63, obviously, a big year. With the Kennedy assassination. 59 is a huge year. A lot of things happen in 59.

Was it true when her Eisenhower met him there? I forget. But all that. That time is so filled with deception and weirdness. Right. It's also when Operation Paperclip was going on. So they took all these nazi scientists from Germany and they brought them over and integrated them in NASA.

Isn't that wild? All those people had those backgrounds, did the things that they did back there.

Yeah.

Bring them over.

And they all. A lot of them had those dueling scars on their face so they look sinister. Oh, you know about the dueling. So Nazis, I guess, when they were going through this rite of passage, when they were in whatever university they were going to, they would have duels with real rapiers, like real swords, and they would slice their faces up.

Wow.

They were goggles.

What?

And. Yeah, and they would have sword fights.

I feel like I should know this.

These guys got their faces all cut to shit. And that was like part of the pride of being a Nazi was you had these dueling scars on your face that you had done this. And a lot of the guys we brought over had that from Operation paperclip, had these dueling scars on their face. That's one of the ways that future historians identified them as clearly being nazis. These weren't just like freak accents. These guys all had them. They all, like, crazy, like, slices in their cheekbones. Show them some pictures because it's fucking crazy to see. I can't believe you don't know about it.

I feel like I put this in a book.

You believe I'm teaching?

I know, it's awesome. I love it.

I forget who told me about gonna.

Make it, make it into a book.

It's for sure a weird thing that they all did. And there's photos of them all sliced up. Like, see, they all had these cuts on their faces. Like, look at that. That's what it looked like after the fact where these goggles on and nose protectors, and they slice each other's fucking faces apart.

It looks like a bad idea.

Nuts. It's a terrible idea. But it was the sign of being a badass. Just like a lot of jujitsu guys today. They like to have cauliflower ear, right? Yeah. Back then you have your face sliced up, you were a psycho.

Oh, wow. That's crazy.

Yeah, it seems like a nuts.

They could wear like, fencing helmets or something.

No, they didn't want to.

Didn't want to.

They wanted to get cut up. That was part of the thing.

That's the thing. Yeah.

Yeah. Dang weird.

That's wildly. I feels like that needs to make it into a, one of my novels. Somebody has to have that background.

You'd probably want to dive into it deeper than I have.

But.

But it is. There was. The point is there was a lot of. Of deception that was happening in the world back then, so who knows what the real story was about Roswell. I like to think that there's something going on that's real, but I also like to think that if the donation thing is true, and that's been going on since who knows how long. You know, Bob Lazar claimed in the 19, late 1980s that he had been working back engineering one of these things. And the way he described it is exactly how they see them move today. Exactly how there's a video of these things moving in bizarre ways. No heat signature. They seem to be, like, shooting across the sky. They can hold still at 120 knot winds.

He was terminator two hand, you know, going back in t two and reverse engineering that technology from t three. It's interesting how movies and books eventually become reality.

Submarines travel back and forth through time, and you realize that human beings are going to take x amount of steps to get somewhere. But if you can inject some technology into the equation, you could speed up the process considerably. Let them do it on their own. Let them figure this out like, oh, a transistor. And also, electronics get far smaller. Fiber optics. Oh, okay. Oh, why didn't I think of that? Bam. Everything gets way quicker. And the other thing that Lazar said about the crafts that would, was baffling to him in the 1980s, he said there was no seams. He said there was no welds, there's no rivets, there's no seams. But now we know about 3d printing. Now they can 3d print anything. And if you conceivably have a machine that's large enough, you could 3d print a spacecraft and it wouldn't have any seams.

I mean, going back to 1963, did you hear Trump saying he's actually going to release all the JFK documents? But he said that the first time.

Yeah, he said it the first time. He also said that if you knew what they told me, you wouldn't tell people.

What could that be?

The CIA killed Kennedy.

But that seems like we already.

Yeah, but it's not clear. There's a lot of books that are saying that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone that are still pretty good books.

Yeah. You know, you Gerald Posner.

Yeah. People read them and they believe it. I don't believe it. I think Lee Harvey Oswald was involved, and I think that's the. The thing is, people think it's either one or the other. Either Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone or, you know, someone else was involved and Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy. No, Lee Harvey Oswald went to Russia, like, during the height of the cold War.

Odd.

Yeah, real odd. They let him come back over here. Lee Harvey Oswald was clearly involved in some sort of shady espionage type shit and, you know, married a russian woman. Like, the whole deal, the whole thing is crazy.

It's insane.

The odds that here he was completely innocent, very low. It seems like he was over here doing some shady shit. He had always been involved in some shady intelligence type shit. But I think there was a lot of people, and I think they wanted to really make sure that Kennedy got killed. And I think there was probably a lot of people involved, and I think Lee Harvey Oswald probably was a patsy, and I think that's probably why Jack Ruby shot him.

Yep. And all you have to think about as far as mob involvement goes in, that is, look at Jack Ruby, his background.

Yeah, fully mobbed up. Yeah, fully mobbed up. There's also E. Howard Hunt, who confessed to the killing on his deathbed. Said that they were in the grassy knoll. There's other people, like Woody Harrelson's father apparently was supposedly involved.

Interesting.

Yeah. Woody Harrelson's father was a bad person. Or a bad guy. Like an assassin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Known murderer. And so I think there was a lot of people that wanted JFK dead. You know, after the Bay of pigs, there was a lot of people that wanted JFK dead. You know, he wanted to get rid of the NSA. He wanted to get rid of the CIA. He wanted to get rid of the federal bank. He wanted to get rid of everything.

Yeah.

Federal Reserve. He wanted to get rid of the Federal Reserve. It's like, the whole thing's crazy.

Yeah. The Warren commission report should have been called the Dulles commission report.

Yeah, right.

I mean, Allen Dulles, the guy you essentially fire, is now in charge of this investigation.

Insane. You fire the guy, now he's in charge of investigating who assassinated you. And the best book that I ever read about it was David Lifton's book, best evidence. And David Lifton was an accountant, and they hired him to go over the Warren report. And so he goes over the Warren commission report, and he finds all. He read the entire thing, which is, like, insanely long. And he read all. He finds all these inconsistencies and all these things that don't make any sense. The difference between the way they viewed the body at Dallas versus the way they saw it at Bethesda, Maryland, when they brought the body there. And then there's the magic bullet, which anybody who's ever shot anything with a gun knows that's horseshit.

I know. There's so much. 1963 was a very pivotal year. Nothing's been the same since. Not that things are going to always stay the same. Things are always going to evolve, but that was a turning point, no doubt about it, when it comes to the power of federal government.

No doubt about it. And, you know, I didn't know until Tucker explained it on the show about Nixon, about how they forced Nixon, who's the most popular president in history, there was a government orchestrated coup to get him out.

That was super interesting. I had not heard that until I listened to Tucker on your show and having him talk about Bob Woodward and where he came from.

Crazy.

Wasn't that wild? That was. Wow. I hadn't heard about that.

Political intelligence.

Yeah. And I listened to that right before I went back to.

All of a sudden, he has a number one story.

Yeah. A brand new guy.

Brand new guy, number one story.

It's a great story. It's a great story. Hollywood story.

Right.

But it is now, when you hear it in those terms, the way Tucker talked about it, that it is suspect.

The whole thing's crazy. Yeah. When Tucker explains it, the whole thing makes you go, what?

Yeah, it was interesting. I listened to that show right before I went back to New York for the Simon and Schuster 100th anniversary celebration event, and I was speaking there, and so was Bob Woodward. I was sitting next to him in the green room. Yeah. No, I didn't. I didn't feel it was appropriate to bring that up. But not really. Not really. More like a nice to meet you type thing.

Nice to meet you. Suspect person.

Exactly. You know, I was looking. It was wild, but how's Bernstein?

What's his deal?

I don't know. It's a good question.

Yeah. Get dragged along. Is he a part of it?

I gotta have on this? What is he.

I don't know if these guys are alive, but everybody looks at that as, like, the seminal work of, you know, investigative journalism.

Right?

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

I know.

You know, and has to resign. And then Gerald Ford, the only unelected president ever, who also was on the warrant commission report.

Exactly. What? Exactly? I mean, it's all interconnected. It's all crazy. It's like, be a great script, be a great movie. If it was fiction, people might even believe it. If that. If it wasn't out there and you wrote it in a book back, let's say you wrote it in 1960 before all that stuff starts happening.

Get the fuck. That's not how the world works, son. The world is beautiful, perfect. United States is good.

That's why it's so hard to do these things, because fact is stranger than fiction. And it's, and all these things that were conspiracy theories are being proved to have been true. So it's harder to.

And people that are in power have always manipulated the truth if they can. If they can get away with it. I think it's part of the fun of being in power, being able to get away with shit.

It's awful. It's awful. I can't imagine running for something.

I mean, it's very anti american, which is shocking because they're the people that run America. That's what's weird. That's what's so weird about it.

Yeah. Nothing sounds worse to me than being a politician.

It sounds horrible. That's why when I see a good person doing it, I'm like, wow. Well, good luck. Good luck to you, sir. You've decided, I mean, there's very few left, there's very few compelling leaders that step up to the political arena and you go, wow, that's someone who I really like. It's generally, in almost every regard, the, you know, lesser of two evils.

Yeah. That's amazing. When you see, I mean, you see Tulsi gets sidelined. She's, I mean, what's great about her is that she has changed positions on things.

Yeah.

And she's, but she gets, because of that. She gets it from both sides now. So you get the people that say, oh, look, she once had this view of second amendment or whatever, and now her change, so I don't trust her type thing. Well, how are you going to ever convince someone or talk to someone or open somebody's aperture about how to think if you don't want them to change sides and don't bring them into the fold?

Yeah, it seems silly to make people stick to their original idea on something. If they don't, they're flip flopping. That seems silly. If you're a human being and you see things like, there's a lot of people that were pretty hardcore leftists, liberal progressives that lived in California that were like, okay, these policies are insane. Like, I'm getting the fuck outta here. Like, Gillian Michaels was just. She just did a podcast recently. She discussed it.

Yeah.

You know, and she was saying, like, I. If I'm saying you're out of your fucking mind, maybe you're out of your fucking mind. So, like, people change their perspective based on new information. The people that bury their head in the sand and pretend everything's amazing, and we're eventually gonna pull out of this, and our philosophy is correct. Like, you're not course correcting. If you're not course correcting, you're not learning. And if you're not changing your opinion in light of insane information, like, if you live in California, you get insane amounts of information showing these policies are not working, that this approach to law enforcement, this approach to dealing with criminals, and it's not working. It's not good. You can't do this.

No, it's crazy. And that same trip back in New York, I went to this place for dinner called the Times Square Cafe. Yeah. So not being from New York and not really knowing the area that well, I assumed that it was fairly close to Times Square. Apparently, it was once near Times Square. Not anymore. So went to dinner there and with my agent, then walked her apartment and thought, I'll just walk. My hotel is close to Times Square. I'll just walk. Yeah, Times Square Cafe is not anywhere near Times Square. So put in the phone. I'm like, all the buildings are kind of sending you in circles, you know? I'm like, oh, yeah. So I walk at night across New York, like, a long. Like 30 minutes, maybe even 40. And I'm like, on e, you know, I'm like, I'm on edge, and I'm making my move here across. And it's. It's. It was sketchy. So move forward another month. A couple weeks ago, I was in Budapest, so we're filming the show over in Budapest. Budapest is amazing. It's gonna. It's gonna make its way into one of my future novels. There's so much.

It seems like russian money there, ukrainian money there, which is probably our money, chinese money there. There's two bentleys in front of the hotel every day. Two ferraris, two lamborghinis, porsches everywhere. But I had to walk across the city. We watched the first episode, the director's cut of the first episode of this new series, so watched it at Buddy's apartment because everyone's been over there for the last few months filming the show, so some are living in hotels. Some are living on the economy in town and apartments. So we watched it and it was awesome. And I decided to walk across Budapest totally different, late at night, past midnight, walking across, totally safe. I felt so safe walking across that city. It was clean. There was nobody eyeing you up.

What's the population there?

I don't know. It seems pretty packed. It's pretty. It's. But like any city.

But it's not like the size of New York, right?

No, no. You're New York's its own animal as far as that stuff goes.

Yeah. What is the population of Budapest? Yeah, let's guess.

Oh, geez. I'm the worst at.

I'll say 2 million.

Look at that.

Oh, 1.75.

Look at that. Nice.

Yes, that was good. So that's kind of like Austin, you know, Austin's about a million and then the surrounding outside area of Austin is like a million.

Yeah. Nice.

And there's not, you know, it's a lot safer here than la, I think. There's just something happens when you have large populations and then also, you know, New York is, they're doing this no cash bail thing where they're just letting people out of jail, including people that assault police officers, including illegal immigrants that assault police officers on video, and they just let them out.

How do we come back from, from this?

He come back, unfortunately, by going too far in the other direction until you want to bounce back and be liberal again. Unfortunately. This is what happens when people get unreasonable, when they go that far. Then you usher in some totalitarian, hard nosed, sort of right wing person who also comes with a stripping of certain civil liberties, you know, like thing, and also has a more cruel approach to certain social issues. And then people go, we need more kindness. We need more of this. Then we, you know, it's. But generally it's like it used to be at least that you would get the right wing that were pushing for war. The most bizarre thing about our time is that the left is calling for aid to Ukraine and that, you know, I think they just signed a commitment to help Ukraine for the next ten years.

Oh, wow.

Wasn't that true?

I don't know.

I think. I think there's just something that Biden just signed and I think they're, they're promising like $800 billion or they're going to need $800 billion over the next hundred billion dollars. Chicken feed of our. Don't worry about it.

Money.

Don't worry about it, bro. We have plenty of money.

Money.

We have a lot of money. We spend on Cheetos. Just send a little of that to our friends in Ukraine. Like, the whole thing is nuts.

Look at this. Look at that.

They pass on a friend dollar loan. Nice little loan. Yeah. They'll pay that back with a sigh.

Why do they call it a loan?

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

So interesting. I was in Normandy for the D Day commemoration events a couple weeks ago. Well, a few days last week, I guess. But it's not just one day. It's not just June 6. It's like two weeks of events. Went back there with the best defense foundation. I went right from Budapest over to there, 48 World War two veterans. So they're all creeping up on 100 at 100 or over 100 years old, and a week's worth of events. So I'm volunteering, helping them get in other wheelchairs, making sure they're taking their medicines, eating, getting them to the events, all that sort of thing. But totally inappropriate during the speech is even during the benediction or the prayer at the beginning mentioned not Ukraine by name, but like, the storm clouds are coming. So you have all these veterans of World War 2D Day on this stage at the american cemetery. They're overlooking Omaha beach. And these politicians get up there to give speeches. Can't help themselves. They have to mention storm clouds coming. Mentioning it. They have to mention it. They didn't mention it by name. I think the french president did, but he's speaking in French, so I'm not 100% sure, but I think he mentioned it by name.

Biden, Austin.

So they use it as a political tool.

They did. They couldn't help themselves. It was disgusting to be there and hear that. And you have these guys on stage and they did. So much for our nation, giving us all these freedoms that we have today. Freedoms and opportunities. First out of their landing crafts coming over the beach at Normandy, across that beach, machine gun positions up high, and now you're using them essentially as a political prop on this. That part was hard to stomach. But interestingly enough, we went from there to the international ceremony down on Omaha beach. So from the cemetery down to the beach, and the national cemetery has all these different world leaders there and Zelensky's there.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. So it's a visual type of a thing and trying to equate what happened in World War Two on D day to what's going on with Ukraine. Yeah, yeah. Not appropriate for the 80th anniversary of D day for these guys that jumped out of planes, landed gliders back then. Imagining landing a glider at night on June 6 in these fields where the germans have put these poles up so that if you land, you can just get crushed in your glider. When a guy was talking to you, his glider came in. He went right between two of these poles. It ripped off the wings.

Holy shit.

And then you have to figure out where your guys are, because obviously there's no GPSS. You just landed somewhere in northern France. You're alive now. And now you got to link up with people and figure out how to get to the town or the bridge that you're supposed to defend or take. So those guys did that, and then you have the audacity to bring up current politics.

They can't help themselves. Every opportunity they have to do it.

Yeah. Biden did it. The person doing the prayer. It was a great prayer to start everything off. I was like, wow, this is amazing. And then she had to bring up these storm clouds on the horizon type of a thing. And certainly Austin went up there and did it. Biden did it. And then they have Zelensky sitting there.

It's just very disturbing. It's very disturbing that we don't learn. You know, it really is, you know, all the way back to Smedley Butler's wars racket. Yeah, we don't learn, you know, and money always motivates everything. And there's always some way to make some sort of a moral argument, why we need to do certain things and why we need to act and why we need to fund this and fund that. But ultimately, there's a lot of money being moved around, and we know that once it gets over there, we really don't know where the fuck it's going. Yeah, we really don't.

There's a lot of nice cars and other places in Europe, too. I've talked to people in the intelligence services.

There's a lot of money rolling around over there, and it's not easy to track. And it's not really something that anybody's, like, trying really hard to document.

No.

It seems also very dangerous to point out if you were an official person and you started pointing out the fact that this money is moving around in a certain way.

Yeah.

Like Tucker Carlson said, they tried to kill him. So there was an assassination attempt on him, really? When he was there. Yeah, there's something. Something was set up. What was. It was like a bomb. Someone set up in the basement or something.

Talked about it on the show.

Yeah. Yeah. And he kind of had a feeling something was gonna happen, and he like, this.

What?

Intuition to stay in his room?

No way.

Yeah.

I'm gonna ask him about that. We just texted him the other day. I'm gonna ask him about that. That's crazy.

Yeah, it's. I mean, that's interesting. Wild. Wild time that the left is the one, that the left side, the Democrats, the progressives, are the ones that are calling for this crazy war.

I know, because when we grew up, back in the day, it was the exact opposite.

He was trying to get us out of everything.

Yeah.

They didn't want to have anything to do with anything. They wanted no wars, and everybody's like, great. Because this was after Vietnam, and if you wanted to be a Democrat and you wanted to win back then, you had to be anti war. You know, you had to be anti anything remotely close to what's going on right now, especially when you know, the history of, like, NATO and moving arms closer to the Russia's border and saying that Kamala Harris saying that Russia's gonna. Or that Ukraine's gonna join NATO. Like, what?

That's pretty wild.

That's a crazy thing to say openly in the world.

Gotta put yourselves in the other person's shoes. There's something looking at things from their perspective, and that's what we. That's we do in the military, trying to put ourselves in the enemy's shoes, figuring out how they're gonna adapt to what we're doing right now, to do that at the strategic levels, too. But unfortunately, you get people at these levels who just stuck with it, and they've never created anything in their life, and they don't understand the history. But guess what they can do? They know how to manipulate a population through their words and through all these things, all these different verticals and institutions that support them, to get them into these positions in office. And it's tough. I mean, it's a machine, and that machine is hungry.

What do you think about what's going on right now in Cuba, off the coast of Cuba?

I saw that the other day. So we have russian submarines.

Yeah.

Geez.

Russian submarines that are like, you know how many miles? I think they're right there. At some point in time, they're, like, 30 miles away from Miami.

Right there. It's wild.

What's the closest they got to Miami? I think that. Well, Russia, or, excuse me, Cuba is what, 90 miles?

I think so.

90 miles from the point the furthest south point of Florida.

That's close.

That's nuts.

Mm hmm.

That's, like, here to San Antonio.

So let's send in a message. And, of course we have. I think I saw one of our spokespeople came out and said something about, don't worry, they're not nuclear.

What the fuck does that.

All right, exactly. Okay.

Warships.

Yeah. Yeah, right there.

Russian.

Obviously sending a message.

Yeah, obviously. I mean, especially with this new thing where we're sending more money and committing to it for ten years. Like, holy shit.

Yeah.

I mean, what are we getting into?

The bad part of all this is that if you're the enemy, you almost just want to let us, like, not do anything because we're doing such a good job at destroying ourselves.

We are, but they're helping us, too.

Oh, they can help. They can give a nudge here or there.

They're helping us a lot on social media.

Yeah, exactly. They can just.

There's a lot of that on social media. You know, one of the FBI analysts said that he thinks that. Former FBI analyst said that he thinks it's 80% of Twitter's trolls.

Really?

Us submarine pulls into Guantanamo Bay a day after russian warships arrive in Cuba. Oh, great. Oh, wonderful. Oh, Jesus Christ, look at that. Us navy submarines arrived in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in a show of force as a fleet of russian warships gather for planned military exercises in the Caribbean. US Southern Command said that USS Helena, a nuclear powered fast attack submarine, pulled into the waters near the us base in Cuba on Thursday, just a day after a russian frigate, a nuclear powered submarine, an oil tanker and a rescue tug crossed into Havana Bay after drills in the Atlantic Ocean. Jesus Christ.

Yeah.

Is it also. There's something else. Russian submarines spotted near west coast of Scotland. Oh, great. What are they doing?

Well, you have.

I mean, none of this is good, guys.

And. And this is to say nothing about what China is doing.

I was spotted there before it arrived in Havana.

Yeah, yeah.

All of its terrifying and terrifying. And we're, you know, in the middle of this. We're also in a war with them to develop AI. Like, who's gonna get to it fast enough? Oh, yeah, yeah.

And that's. That's. Yeah, that's. This. This book right here was all about that. But from the China US perspective, those geopolitics, who's doing what? Taiwan. The Taiwan issue in there as well. So it's fascinating to have done that research now and see where China is compared to where they were a few years ago, and then think about where we're going in the future, but it's tough to do all that research and remain hopeful. So I try to. You know what I mean? That's what I love about you. You remain hopeful. You talk to all these different people and interested in so many things, but yet you remain so hopeful in all these conversations that you have with people.

Yeah, I'm hopeful, but I'm not sure if I'm right. You know, I started getting nervous about China when they banned the Huawei devices.

Yeah.

And I was like, wait, what? What's going on? Because as a phone nerd, Huawei had some insane phones. Their phones were, like, more advanced than us phones.

Okay.

And they banned their devices when one of their newer phones was coming out. And apparently, it's not just phones. It was a bunch of different routers and different technology that they had. They believed China would be able to access information through.

Oh, yeah. It's embedded in almost everything that we have that we rely upon, not just on the civilian side, but on the military side, the intelligence side. And they think long term. I know.

I've told them Admiral Rachel Levine is on the case. Don't you worry. We have competent members of our military.

It's so bad. And that's. That's why we have these recruiting issues. I mean, if you're gonna encourage one of your kids to join the military right now, I mean, I don't. I don't know how that. I don't know how you can, but.

Well, that's why they bring it back to registration for the draft.

I saw that.

Yeah. Which is nuts. Like, what are you saying? In the age of AI, you're gonna force people into go into war? And what is going on? What are you doing? Why are you doing this? It's because of lack of recruitment. You're gonna force them to go in now, and then when you're there, what? You indoctrinate them with all this bullshit. So instead of getting people that want to serve, which is the people that you want, the people that are dedicated to it, that are driven towards this life, instead of that, you're forcing people to do it. Then once you get them in there, you can kind of force your ideology on them. The type of people that sign up for the military, the type of. They would be way less likely to buy into that horseshit.

House passes, defense bills, services already mandatory for mail ages 18 to 24. Yeah, and so it's already a thing.

Just. It's automatic now.

You still had to do it so you don't have to go down there and. Yeah. Into the post office and do it. That was kind of a cool route of passage, though. Do you remember doing that?

They gave me a free razor in.

The mail, I think. Did they? Fantastic. You still have it.

I don't remember doing that.

You don't ever do that?

Three razor.

So you had to go down to it at 18, right? Yeah.

To do that.

I did it when I was. Yeah, no, geez. What year was that? No, 90, something like that.

Yeah.

You had to go down and do you do it? So stop me.

There was 85. I don't remember that at all. Yeah.

Yeah.

Something you had to do back then.

Yeah.

I might be breaking the law.

You might be breaking my command.

Illegal thing.

It was one of those things.

I must have did it. I probably don't remember doing it, but I remember when the Gulf, when Desert Storm broke out, I was living with a buddy of mine, and we were watching on tv, and I was like, what? Right, a war.

Because you're like, done, right.

I was alive during Vietnam in San Francisco. I lived. I was a kid. And when Vietnam ended, I remember thinking, as a kid, I guess I was like, ten or something. I remember thinking, shoo. Glad we got over that. No more wars. Like, we figured that out. Yeah, but we haven't figured out shit.

Nope.

And now it's even more complicated with all this artificial intelligence stuff. And, you know, Mike Baker was in here and he was showing us these videos of the, these fighter jets that are using AI now that are winning dog fights 100%, 100% of the time over actual human pilots. So human pilots can't beat the AI system. They just can't. They lose 100% of the time. That's nuts.

So take that ten years from now, right?

Then put a jet out there that can do maneuvers at insane G forces because it doesn't have any humans in it, right. So it doesn't have to think about that. And so now you, you add that.

Mm hmm. I know you got that. And China's doing the same.

Yeah.

And. But they're also smart because they're buying up property next to military bases. They tried to buy the Hotel dell hilted, El Coronado, right by the seal base down there. So that got blocked. But there's also these that's so crazy. They're called the shores, and they're these apartments that I think you're building, like the seventies. They're so ugly, but they are super high, like skyrises. And what they look down on, they look down right on the seal training compound, and warcom, which is our admiral and everybody else.

China owns it.

And I would. No, they don't own that. They tried to buy the hotel dell next door, but I would be shocked if they don't own a few floors of that building. And looking right down, they bought a. I did some research for this book on it and a book called the Dragons and the Snakes by David Cilkulen. And he talks about them buying up hotels in Scotland that watch submarines head out there. A few other play one in Italy. So they're buying up properties next to these bases where they can essentially observe and put listening devices out and do all those sorts of things that you need a base of operations, and you don't even need a base operation for a lot of this stuff anymore because it's all virtual. And where are all these things made? Well, China and Taiwan.

It's just crazy that in Taiwan you can't buy anything. Like, Americans wanted to go over and buy land next to military bases. They'd be like, yeah, fuck yourself. But us being an open country, it's almost to our, you know, it's almost detrimental. Our openness, our strength is almost a.

Weakness, and they can exploit it. So they're very aware of that. So you're looking at your enemy and you're looking at those things that you can do to exploit those weaknesses, and that's what they're doing. That's what we would do.

Yeah. Tim Dillon was explaining the real estate hustle that so many foreign countries use our real estate as money laundering. So, like, there's so many different apartment buildings in New York City that are just empty, empty, empty. There's no one in them.

Yeah, yeah.

But they're all bought out.

Right?

Because, like, Russia buys them.

Yeah.

Russian oligarchs buy them. It's a nice way to funnel. Funnel your money around.

Yep.

You got real estate holdings here and there. You own a billion here.

All around the world. Yeah, they do that all around. All around the world. They do that stuff. So, I mean.

Well, then that was weird during the Ukraine invasion where they started stealing their yachts.

I know. What happened to that? That kind of went away, too.

I don't know.

And also, like, those things.

You gotta fucking maintain those things.

Yeah, they just, like, if you have.

Like, a Mark Zuckerberg type yacht. Like, he just had some fucking 300 million dollar yacht built.

Nice.

I think actually, more than that. I think it's $500 million for this fucking yacht.

Yeah.

And how much does that cost a year to maintain yeah.

Yeah.

Us government said it's spending more than 7 million a year to maintain a super yacht it sees from a sanctioned russian oligarch and urged a judge to let it auction the vessel before a dispute over its ownership is resolved. Authorities in Fiji seized the 348 foot, 300 million dollar ameda in May of 2022 pursuant to a US warrant alleging its owned by Suleiman Kuromov, a multi billionaire sanctioned by the US Treasury Department in 2014 and 2018 in response to Russia's activities in Syria and Ukraine.

Hey, look at that.

Wow. Wow. That's crazy. So that's just one.

One for that.

Here are the super yachts seized from.

Russian oligarchs and we're paying to maintain those?

Yeah.

Oh, that's so brutal.

How many are there? But, boy, there's a lot of fucking clicks. You gotta go through these things.

I am not. Yeah.

How many of them are there? How many did they get? So that's the one that we just talked about. There's the tango, the lady M. Fucking massive things. And so these russian oligarchs, a lot of them, they rush to get their yachts to different countries that are more sympathetic.

Yeah.

That let them get away with it. But I don't even know how that works. Like, if they go out into the sea, can they get hijacked?

International waters?

Yeah. How does that work?

I don't know. I just was concentrating on the $7 million a year to maintain. Yeah.

Our money.

Yeah.

Our taxpayer, our tax dollars are going to maintain.

AI well spent.

But I don't understand, like, what is. So are they saying that these russian oligarchs were a part of the invasion of Ukraine? So they're allowed to steal their yachts?

I think they're talking. They're saying it's Putin's, I guess, inner circle, something like that.

Yeah. So they're connected to Putin. So they're going to snatch their yachts.

Yeah, whoever. I mean, we all know that he's one of the richest guys in the world.

He might be the richest guy, they say. Yeah, he might be worth, like, some insane amount.

Isn't that wild? Going from the kingdom? They don't really know the richest guy in the world.

Well, have you seen that house that they're allegedly building for him?

Is it the one on the. It's on the coast, yeah, on the cliffs. I put it in the last book. I think if it's the same one.

I think so.

Underground bunkers?

I don't even know. It's a stuff they haven't even proven that it's his. And he's like, that's not my house.

Right? Yeah, yeah, no, I put in the last book. Yeah, it's wild. You can zoom in on it. You can zoom in on it and check it out and see.

It's a multi billion dollar house.

Isn't that crazy?

Yeah, God, whatever this thing is, whether it's his or not.

Yeah, but the 500 million dollar yacht from Zuckerberg, he's not missing that, though. Isn't that crazy?

That's nice.

You don't even miss 500 million.

Yeah, that's when you should get a yacht. Yeah, that kind of, you know, you got so much money that you don't even notice if you're missing 500 million. No, there's levels. Yeah, there's levels. Facebook billionaires takes out his 300 million dollar super yacht and $30 million support boat, complete with helipad.

Yeah.

And Majorca is. He celebrates Father's day with his. What? His dad, Ed, I think they used.

To call him, like, shadow yachts or something like that. And they'd carry all the toys. So you have the main yacht and then you have the shadow yacht that has all the toys on it. Look at that thing.

Imagine your kid buys one of those, like, man, I'm raised a fucking killer.

Look at that. Yeah.

That is ridiculous.

Is that the sport yacht? What's that?

That's like a helipad. That's a different one, right?

Man, that's a support boat.

That's a support boat. That fucking thing just got an extra.

Boat on the extra boat. Helicopter.

That's insane. That support boat is fucking huge.

It probably has underneath. It probably has a submarine. Some of these things have two submarines. I was on one that had two submarines once. One that just goes straight down and one that goes in the water and then you can move around in it and you like, explore reefs and stuff, like. So two submarines, a plane that comes out and the wings fold down.

I've seen that. I've seen that with helicopters and the helicopter. Yeah, helicopters that land. Wings fold. Yeah, you drop it down. What the fuck?

Yeah, that's pretty sick.

So there's levels.

Yeah, it's all relative, you know?

It is all relative. I guess it's just like at a certain point in time, like. Like if you're a russian oligarch and you have a 300 million dollar yacht and someone steals it.

Mmm.

Can you even get another one? Are you allowed to get a new one?

Probably buy.

Get another one if you have all that money right where the fuck are you getting all that money? Like, what are you doing?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, what an interesting time. End of the cold war, that whole period, the nineties for those guys were really. Those criminal enterprises really become, like, government.

Yeah.

And not to say it's that much different here. We have our own oligarchy here.

Yeah. That's the thing, too, is, like, how are they governing? Like, what. What's the experience for the people they're governing? And that's the thing that Tucker said when he went over to Moscow. It's like. It's beautiful. It's, like, real clean, safe.

Yeah.

Which is weird.

Yeah. I want to go and do some research there, but once again, I'm probably not. But I was lucky enough to have gone there.

I would advise you to not.

I know, but luckily I was there. So I was in Moscow, in. Before I joined the military, just traveling. So I was there so I can write about. I remember the architecture. I remember the feeling there. That was early nineties. And then I also went to Odessa, Ukraine, back then.

Oh, wow.

So I went to the catacombs under the city, which allowed me to then put a. In the second book, true believer. So I think back to some of those places that I've been and get to weave those in and places that I probably shouldn't go anymore.

Yeah. You're too on the nose with a lot of your work, and it's now it's influential, you know? And it's just. You should do the same thing that you're thinking about doing with your cell phone. Just farm that out.

Yeah.

Have somebody go that you really trust.

Right.

Tell them exactly what you saw, and tell me. Tell me what it was like.

Yeah.

Have them film things. Have them explain it. Just tell them, like, I want you to get, like, an hour of footage every day of just you just filming things so I can absorb it.

Yeah, that's a good idea. But it's still different. You don't get the smell.

It is different, but it'll keep you alive.

Yeah.

You know, keep in a cell.

My publicist might like it. You know, any good publicity. Any publicity is good publicity type thing.

If they get you out.

Yeah, it's a good point is if.

They leave you in there, they're missing out on a lot of loot.

Yeah.

Well, you write good books. Putin's palace, pole dancing room.

Hey, that's the one.

Do a church.

Yeah. They said once they published the photos of the inside at the bottom here.

They had to change it because they.

Don'T want people knowing what it looks like. Yeah. I put that in the blast.

They have to redo it again.

They think.

Yeah.

I put in the pool dancing thing.

What?

Isn't that wild?

Putin does not use other people's dishes, doesn't go without any army of. Without an army of guards. Rather does not go to the toilet in public places.

That's understandable.

She said on Monday, by publishing footage from inside his palace and floor plans, we make it impossible to use the palace. Wow. Perhaps he will say demolish everything again. And the palace will rebuilt for the third time. But this iteration is definitely over. There was a palace. There is no palace.

Yeah.

We have once again shown not only that he is a luxury obsessed psychopath, their words. But also his security system is complete crap.

Oh wow. Interesting.

Peb chick. How do you say that guy's name? Pev.

That's good.

Chit chicken.

The names are tough added. Yeah.

Yeah. Wow. So now he's got a demolish it and start from scratch. Cuz people saw the inside of it.

That's why. I certainly did. That's what allowed me to describe it for that last book.

Yeah. How did anybody fucking take pictures of that? How did that security breach get through?

Seriously? Yeah.

Oh, photo was published by the Vexi Alexi Navali.

The late.

Yeah, the late anti corruption foundation. That was the guy that died in jail, right?

And that's the. That's a good reason why I shouldn't go to Moscow.

Yeah, yeah.

Someone actually warned me not to go to China. They don't warn me. They just said, hey, they stole one.

Of our basketball players. Seriously, not even a male.

And actually someone had a bit about that last night. They did a bit on that last night and talked about how from the russian perspective, us trading who we traded for her. What, the arms dealer, terrorist or whoever we. Whoever we exchange this for. And he did a bit about them being like, wait, what? They're actually over there?

What did they call? They had some crazy name for the guy traded.

Right.

National arms dealer was responsible for thousands of deaths. I forget what his name is.

Yeah, we traded people. We traded. Taliban. We traded.

But I know he has a nickname. Yeah.

Merchant.

Merchant of Dungeon of death boy.

Solid.

That's a solid dick name. Yeah, that seems like it'd be in your book.

Yeah, no, no, it's. Seriously. There he is. Right. It looks like it's out of central casting right there.

And so we let that guy go.

I think he wore a breitling. All the sketchy people were breitling.

Really?

Yeah.

Breitlings are sketchy.

Yeah. It's a thing really interesting.

I didn't know that. Now I know.

Yeah. Watches of espionage has a little thing.

Kept that sharp mustache inside the joints. Respect.

Look at that.

Yeah. So they traded him. And there's also us citizens, including. There's a marine that's over there that was accused of espionage. They offered the chance to trade him, and they went with Brittany Griner instead. They can take one. One for one.

Yeah. I don't watch basketball, but I heard that league needs all help it can get.

I don't know if that's the help that it needs.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, it's just basketball and not the best basketball. The best basketball is the NBA, you know.

There it is. Ah, look at that. Watches espionage right there. Yep. Sketchy people wear breitlings.

What is that about? It's a.

Just became a thing.

I like Breitlings.

Yeah.

That's what make me sketchy.

I put it one in a sketchy person in this.

Damn, they make a nice watch. They make some cool watches.

Yeah.

Now all sudden, I'll be thinking about them like, fuck.

Yeah. I think in that, in the blood diamond, I think Leonardo DiCaprio wears one, is his character.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Why breitling?

I don't know. I read that it where that originated. I think it just started as a thing, and then it became what it is. And it's just kind of.

Do you think sketchy people know and they're doing it on purpose?

I think they do. It's kind of a thing.

That's a quote that pops up sketchy dudes wear. There it is right there.

Look at that. And look on the side there. That's a Winkler blade.

No kidding.

There it is.

There are a lot of misconceptions about this. Saying frase is not a dig on Breitling at all. I'm a big fan of the brand. Own a few of them and wear it regularly. Sketchy is not necessarily a bad thing. Oh, this is my world, bro.

There it is.

It's really the nineties and two thousands. Breitling was worn by a lot of gray area operators, both good and bad. Subjective terms with strong roots in aviation. Breitling is a signal. Wear is adventurous, but also appreciates fine craftsmanship and utilitarian tools. Blackwater, breitling emergency. Former soviet arms dealer. There he is. Victor bouts Breitling B. One british SAS officer turned mercenary. Simon Mann's breitling emergency. And director of CIA George Tenet's breitling aerospace.

Oh, George Tenet wearing one, too.

Which one's the aerospace? They got that dope one that's part digital right there.

So that's the blackwater symbol. See that blackwater symbol on the side right there?

Is that what that is?

Yeah. So I put this exact watch in the book, and I put the bad guy company symbol on the watch just like that one.

So that's a compass watch, which I've never been able to figure out. I watched a video on one of them because I think I have a seiko. That's a compass watch. And I was like, what does that mean? How does it work as a compass? You have to align the fucking hour hand with the sun or some shit.

I don't know. But that one has the emergency beacon on it right there.

So you pull that sucker out.

Right. You have to sign something that says something. You'll like, pay for the rescue if you do it.

Yeah. And then they find you.

Yeah.

If you're in the alps.

Yeah. I think an antenna comes out of it.

Yeah. The bottom thing. The bottom thing, lower right hand corner. Yeah. That's a serious fucking watch.

Yeah. That's pretty serious.

So those are all sketchy people.

Yeah.

Interesting. How the fuck does the compass thing work?

I don't know. I don't know. Some of them have gps if you're. That's not what you're talking about.

No, no. I mean, my. My watch is a Garmin and it has a compass feature, but that's like. It's digital, it's electronics. That thing is a mechanical compass feature.

Okay.

Somehow or another, like when the sun rises. You know, the sun rises, you point it up, you point the thing at the sun.

I don't know. I had a little. Little compass on mine over in Iraq.

But a real compass.

Yeah.

Yeah.

On the band right there was like a backup to the backup. So right at the GPS on my rifle stock right here, so I could check my point man just to make. So I didn't have to add. And I always knew where we were. So I had that there. And then I had another one on my belt and then another one right here and then one here for. For calling air. So I could look right here and talk to aircraft and call air off that one. So I do a few backups, but nowadays we got one of the first ones, we got them issued in the SEAL teams. I was the Garmin or the Sunto, whatever it was. But early ones, they just ran out of batteries so fast.

Oh, yeah.

And it was one other thing that I had to plug in back then.

So this one's incredible. This one is at 70, 24%, and I think I charged it three weeks ago.

Really?

Yeah. It's nuts.

I can't do it, though. One more thing to plug in, like we talked about, it's all these things.

Like a month and a half. And this is solar. This is the Phoenix seven sapphire solar. So this thing stays charged in the sun.

Really?

Yeah. So if you're wearing it outdoors, it, like, keeps a certain percentage of its charge just by solar power.

Oh, man. Well, I was locked up for the last four months writing, so that was. That wasn't gonna help me too much. Yeah, I was gonna need to plug it in. The sun wasn't really. Yeah, gonna.

Even if you don't. I mean, even if you don't plug it in, if it's fully charged, it'll last at least a month.

Do you like the apple watches and stuff?

I haven't fucked with those because I don't want email. I don't have this set up. Text message. You could do it. I could get text messages on this. What I like with this is, like, I like the timer. I like the heartbeat monitor, which doesn't work that good because I have tattoos.

Oh, really?

Yeah. Doesn't work that good, huh? Yeah. The only thing that really works, the things that work the most accurate, are chest traps. Those are the most accurate, you know, so I have one of those morpheus chest straps I like a lot. I have a Garmin, and I work, too. Those are great. They give you an accurate reading of what is actually going on your sleep.

Do you do the sleep stuff?

Nah, I know how I feel. You know, I used to do that. I think a whoop is very. It's a very good tool. It's a very good tool to assess your recovery. And I might go back to wearing one of those, but, like, the aura rings, all that jazz, like, leave me alone.

Those are the ones that people wear that look like a band and have, like, a rectangular.

That's the whoop. Yeah. The whoop is, like. There's a bunch of different colors, but I have a black one. It's like, just like, a wristband.

I can't do it. I already know I need more sleep. I already know I need to eat better. I already know I need to do a little more exercise.

When you look at your recovery, it says 60% is depressing.

Like, yeah, I don't need another thing telling me that I need more sleep.

But you definitely notice the difference between drinking and not drinking. So if I even a couple of drinks, like, if I go out to dinner with some friends and I have a couple glasses of wine, I would notice my recovery score would suck in the morning from just like, two glasses of wine.

Really?

Thing where you're not even drunk, you know, in the next day, you feel fine. You don't feel hungover.

Did that make you stop doing that at dinners or.

No, no, I want to live, but it made me aware of it, and I'm certainly good at not doing it all the time, unlike some of my friends.

Yeah. I don't want these things to keep controlling. They already manipulated enough. You have to be aware that these things are manipulating you, so. I'm aware of that. But I don't want another thing that I am hooked up to that's dictating how I live my life.

There's also, like, an addictive factor, too. You start getting addicted to checking it, and you start getting addicted to, which I think would be probably a good thing to be addicted to. A self improvement aspect of it, like trying to achieve a good score.

Right. If you like heroin on this side, good score on this side, scores. Yeah, probably better.

It's a better addiction.

Yeah.

But, yeah. Trying to get that elusive, you know, 97% recovery rate when you go to sleep.

Yeah, no, I'm now I need more of it and all that. With all. We all do these projects.

Well, especially if you're working. 10:00 a.m. to 02:00 a.m. it's not good.

I need to change.

That is. That's crazy.

I need to change that up. I thought this. This last winter that I would be able to take my wife to dinners, do a little traveling. As our little guy went over to overseas, he actually went to Switzerland to do, like, a ski program over there. So he's gone for three months. No phones, no iPads, no computers. Total old school. Milking cows, doing chores. Total old school.

That's a great experience. Amazing for sure.

Amazing for him. But during that time, I thought we would go out to dinners and travel and do all this stuff, and instead I was just locked down writing. So I need to make up for that, that next year.

You got to live, too, right? I mean, but the thing is, you got to make hay. Why the sun shines. And, you know, I remember you when you. You just released your book and, you know, we really didn't know how good it was gonna do. That's when I met you. It was like it was all just happening. People introduced me to you. I was like, oh, that's cool. I hadn't read it. I hadn't met anybody read it yet. And then over the years, it just got this snowball effect, and now it's insane. I get so many people tell me all the time that they love your books.

Oh, man. Appreciate that.

You're a guy that gets brought up a lot, especially amongst military guys and amongst law enforcement guys. They love your books.

Well, I certainly appreciate that. And that's why I put so much, so much into them. But I love it. It's like you. I love doing what I'm doing, so I just feel like work. I love writing. I love this chapter in life, and love creating things. Love not working for anyone.

Oh, yeah.

I love all that. Because the military, you feel like, you know, you have people above you in the chain of command.

You're like, you know, you expressed that very well in the book.

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

Right.

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

Interesting.

Yeah. Even people that write about military history, and they are not about it.

Why do you think that is?

I think they feel a little bit elitist up there.

Interesting. Like you being a fiction author that's now venturing into nonfiction, they want to be a gatekeeper.

I don't know. I'm busy, too, but I make time for it for sure.

Maybe they don't want you delving into their world.

I don't know. And some of these guys have made a lot of money writing about military stuff, which is interesting. So I noted it might work its way into some fiction at some point, and even some military, some senior level military officers, which is very interesting as well. All said no to the blurbs for the nonfiction as well. But that kind of feeds into my. Well, maybe they listened to me on the podcast here. I talked about their hear me critique, their handling of our withdrawal from Afghanistan. So thats possible as well. But also interesting with the show. The military didnt help out with the show, which is all great because sometimes they pull, put constraints on what you can do or say. If they help out with, like, a ship or a plane or a base or something like that. So they did not help out with the first show.

Did he want to be a part of it?

Yeah, which I like, because now there's no constraints.

So I like that is good.

Typical.

I'm glad, especially since you know what you're talking about. It's not like someone has to guess on their own without any military help.

Yeah, but I find that all very interesting. So, you know, it's all. It's all noted.

Duly noted.

Exactly.

So the. Was there a negative response by the historians, or was it just no response?

Yeah, just busy and something got back and said no. It was very nice them to get back and at least say no.

Could it also be that they just don't want to put themselves out there, that they don't want to be a personality, they just want to be the person relaying the information?

Possible.

Yeah, because if you do, like, sign off on someone's nonfiction who also writes fiction, you are in somehow or another connecting yourself to them.

Yeah, that's very possible. Very possible, I would imagine. Right, but it's still noted. Yeah, but, yeah, so we'll see. You know, but a ton of people. What was. But what made me very, I mean, super excited about this book is the nonfiction is that the people who are there, the people who are digging their dead friends out of the rubble, that's who I really wanted to honor by writing this nonfiction, to keep those lessons learned and also tell their story, because it really hasn't been told yet. And you have people that are still alive, people who are alive, who lost sons in that attack, so you want to do right by them. And I think. I think every single person who has read it, who is there has said, thank you for reading. Thank you for telling the story.

Well, it's also great that it's coming from you because your fiction books are so popular. There's probably going to be a lot of people that read that that wouldn't ordinarily read a book on real history.

Yeah. Today some people, I've mentioned it, too, and they say, what was that? I kind of remember that.

But, yeah, I barely remembered it. I barely remembered it. You started talking about it. I was like, oh, yeah, that's right. I remember. I mean, I was in high school at the time.

Yeah. So, 83. And we had the embassy bombing in April of 83. And then you move into the spring, further into the spring, all through the summer, attack happens in October. But all through that timeframe, these guys are in combat. And the administration is saying peacekeeper. Over and over again, calling them peacekeepers. Peacekeepers. But you talk to these guys who were there, who were on patrol, they were in combat. And so I got to capture that and really put that into the book because that part of the story people don't really understand how many guys had died between the embassy bombing and the marine barracks bombing, how many people were wounded during that timeframe, how many people were just engaged in combat during that time period. So it's because there wasn't social media back then, and you're just relying on an administration, and then there are talking points. That story never really got told, so it's going to get told now.

That's one of the things that does keep me hopeful that there is so much information available today. Whenever anything happens, you don't have to just rely on mainstream media depictions of things, everything that's been sanctioned down through the government, whatever narrative they're trying to push now, you get just so many independent reporters and so many real journalists that are giving you the actual details of it in a very disturbing way, and you get angry and you go, why am I not hearing about this in the news? Like, why? Why is this perspective not being shared everywhere? And then it, you know, unfortunately for the mainstream media, it just makes people distrust them more and more.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. The trust with mainstream media and with our senior level elected officials is, I don't know if it's an all time low, but it feels like it is.

It's about as low as I've ever experienced it. Obviously, I'm not. I wasn't around during the, you know, I wasn't aware, at least during the Vietnam war, but I would imagine back then, especially after, like, Kent State, it was probably a lot like that back then, too.

Yeah.

A lot of distrust.

Yeah.

But I think even more so now. But there's also, now there's the influence of foreign governments where they create bullshit stories and they create bullshit rabbit holes for people to go down. And they suck people into these things and then reinforce it online with troll farms. And you just like, there's so much nonsense, it's so hard to know what's real and what's not real.

Yeah. That's the value of you doing this. That's why I appreciate what you do here with this podcast, because it's one of the few places people can go and get these honest conversations. They're long. They're not a 32nd sound bite, a two minute sound bite. Even if you have someone that knows what they're talking about, about on mainstream media. But you only get two and a half minutes. Two minutes. A minute. Half of that. Is the host talking or asking the question? You don't really get a deep understanding of what's going on. You don't really get to conceptualize what's really happening and make it a part of you so you can make informed decisions, whether it's in the voting, when you go to vote, or it's in a conversation with friends or your family. So. But you get to do that here.

Not only that, they usually have someone arguing at all. They don't like it unless there's sort of an argument to get people captivated. So you got someone on the left yelling at someone on the right. They're talking over each other, and you're like, good lord, this is crazy.

I know. Everybody's yelling and arguing all the time, so it's. It's tough. I mean, I met, I think I thought the kids growing up now, that's what I really think of, because we have kids, and our kids are pretty much the same ages. And it's when I think about them and what they're stepping into, and you remain hopeful on it. But, man, I worry about it.

I think every generation feels that way.

Yeah.

I mean, I certainly remember when I was a kid in high school, we were terrified of being in a nuclear war with Russia that was hovering over our heads. When the fall of the Soviet Union happened, I remember this huge feeling of relief that swept through the entire country, because when we were kids, we really thought that we were going to go to war with Russia and there was going to be a nuclear war and everyone was going to die. And that was something that, like, hung in the air all throughout the 1980s.

We thought of that the day after. Remember that show?

Oh, yeah.

Big day after was big. Then you also had wolverines. You know, it was kind of, like, inspirational. You knew your enemy you know, exactly red dawn out there. So you had that stuff too. I know we've talked about this before and I thought about it throughout the last year, but I haven't changed my position on it about going back in time. And in fact, I doubled down on it when I think about it about. I'd go 1979 to 1991. I think that's what I would do if I could go back in that time machine. Yeah, it was just so much fun.

Would you live then?

Yeah, I just keep doing it over and over over again. 79, 91, 71. Really? Yeah. Or maybe 80, 80, 91.

Fuck that. I'd live right now.

I know you love it. That's why I love it. I love getting that perspective. I love that about you.

Because this is time, man. It's a wild time of unprecedented change. And we're on the precipice of far more unprecedented change.

And you like that?

It's interesting. Yeah, it's exciting. You know, I would like it, I.

Think, if it wasn't attached to all these things that I have to plug in and they're trying to manipulate me. I know you're going back to that, but it makes me a little bit crazy.

It's also. It's a thing. It gives you this ability to recognize bullshit because it's coming at you from all these different angles. And I think people are a little bit more reluctant to buy into official stories now than they ever have been before. Especially after the whole Covid fiasco happened. I think people are a lot more interested in what the fuck is actually going on than ever before because it actually can affect their lives, life, you know, I mean, it's actually something that's consequential.

Oh, yeah. And we all had touch points with it and now. But that just like Afghanistan. I was like, I don't really talk about that stuff anymore. We don't really talk about all these businesses that got shuttered. Which is why I try to support independent bookstores as much as I possibly can. Do things that are only for independent bookstores to send people there started that during COVID actually send started signing book place. You could only get through independent bookstores because it's harder to do that than just hit the easy button on Amazon. So I started doing that, continue to do that today with shot through pages. So I try to do that to help them out because I remember Tony Cu in LA and I packed up and I drove out there and there was no one on the road. And then I got to LA on the 405 freeway, driving up to where I was staying, and it was a ghost town. Wow. Crazy. That was what, may or whatever or April, May of 2020, and I came out to see it.

It was horrible. But I'm glad we got to experience, because it's going to be something that we always remember. I think people are going to be probably. I mean, if humans survive, we're going to be talking about these days and especially the days of COVID It's going to be a bizarre footnote in american history.

So bizarre. But I don't know. People have short memories and they get distracted by the squirrel or by the manipulation on the social channels or whatever.

Else a lot of people do. But I think the overall perception, if you looked at it, has shifted in a way that people are a little bit more aware of horseshit now than ever before, I think.

Yeah. Generally, I remember I want to get a physical for the first time in a long time because I hadn't done it for like, six years. I left the military, and so I was like, I should probably go down and do something. And it was. Ended up being just kind of old school. Hit your knee with the thing, and I thought it was gonna be like an executive physical and they were gonna do blood and stuff, but it wasn't. It was just like, watch the finger and hit the thing.

You're good to go.

Yeah, yeah. But then he asked me if I wanted to get my flu shot. Shot, and I was just like. I just. I couldn't help myself. I just was like. I laughed out loud like that, which I don't usually do. Usually I keep things inside and just kind of making, you know, my little notes, but I couldn't help but like.

Come on, how'd they react?

He understood. He was like, I don't think I'm the first one.

Doesn't fucking work.

Yeah, I know I'm not the first one. Yeah.

People tell you get, you should get your flu shot every year. You won't get the flu. Yeah. Also, you don't get the flu if you're fucking healthy. Or if you are, you go eat over it quick. Or if you get the flu, take IV vitamins, you know, take tamiflu times.

I got my flu shot in the past, like, 20 years. I got the flu those years. That's the only time I've gotten the flu is when that two years, and I'm like, done never doing it in the military. They make you that stuff? Yeah. So I just had them annotate that. It was done. It's called. What do they call it. Gun decking? I think so. They just say that you did it, but you didn't really do it.

Well, that's nice.

Yeah, very nice. Mike Corman to do that. I think he's out now. For anybody listening.

I hope he is. I hope he is. Well, hey, brother, thank you very much.

Thank you.

Doing everything you do. Your books are fucking awesome. Red Sky Morning, the latest. And you have seven of these now. And the nonfiction comes out when?

September.

September 24. I'll be on that one, too. Thank you, sir. Appreciate you very much, man. Thank you being here. Tell everybody, website, anything social media, officialjack.

Car.Com can find there, but usually, you know, type it in the search bar. It'll pop right up, hopefully at Jack R. Exactly. At Jack Carusa on the socials. And, man, thank you so much for everything.

My pleasure, brother. Always good to see you.

You too.

Bye, everybody.