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He is a former Navy SEAL and now a New York Times best selling author and the author of a book that I just finished. I just finished it on Audiotaping. It's fantastic. It's called Savage Sun. This is the latest in his series of books. I was actually supposed to start with the terminal list and then go to True Believer and then Savage Sun, but I fucked up and I did it this way. But either way, I'm very happy.

Is a great book, a riveting thriller.

And they're going to turn into a series starring Chris Pratt, which is very exciting. He's just a great guy. I can't say enough good things about him. It was a pleasure having him on the show. And a very interesting conversation.

Please welcome the great and powerful Jack Carr government by casting doubt the Joe Rogan experience, trained by Joe Rogan podcast by night all day. And we're like, hey, what's up? Oh, hey, thanks for having me on. My pleasure. My pleasure. Good to see you again. Good to see you. You know, when we first met, I knew you were an author and I knew that Chris Pratt was involved in doing that thing with you and that you guys were working towards making a scene, which is happening now, which is very exciting.

Crazy. But I never read any your work until now. So getting ready for this, actually, listen to the audio book, which is really well done. The guy who reads it, what is his name? Reporter He's fuckin great. Yeah, he's a little disturbed when he does a girl's voice, but no getting around that like you guys do in a girl voice, especially with an accent to it.

There's no getting around the creative part of that.

It's a little weird, but you take he's so good at like Russian accents and then South African accents.

And it's a really good book, man. It's fucking riveting.

Like it's like you. It's hard to put down. It's really good.

And most of it I listen to either on workout's walking hikes with the dog or in the sauna.

That's a perfect place to listen to it. I burn through it in a few days, though. It's really good.

Yeah. You know, like half the characters are the one people that were inspired by actual.

I know that was what's crazy is like so many people, whether it was, you know, John Dudly or Bach Low or, you know, half faceplates, like Black Reifel coffee icon four by four or six. So many different things. Sitka. Yeah. So many different things that be strange.

Not for me not to talk about gear just because I was a gear guy before I went the Navy. And then, of course, in the SEAL teams, you're like, yeah, it's your time to shine until I go down these rabbit hole and try to make the gear better or anything that's going to make you more effective and efficient on the battlefield. So you really get to go all in and then just after the military, same thing or just a gear guy.

So it'd be strange just to say he pulled out a rifle or something like that. I couldn't do it. It wouldn't sit right.

When you were in the SEAL team, did you think you were ever going to become an author? Is this something that you'd always had in the back of your head you would like to dabble in some day? Like, yeah, yeah.

It wasn't even a thing I was going to dabble in. It was I was going to do it. And since I was a little kid, my mom was librarian. So I grew up surrounded by books and this love of reading from a very early age. And back then and like so early 80s, there's hardly anything written about SEALs. But what there is is a lot of times from fiction. So protagonists in different stories about guys like Tom Clancy, David Morrell, Nelson Dumbell, AJ Quenelle, all these guys in the 80s who had protagonists with backgrounds I wanted to have in real life one day, and I enjoyed reading them so much.

I knew that after the military then I would write.

So I just said, wow, the path. So you had kind of mapped it out, join the military first joined the SEALs and then after you retire then. And how many years were you in for? Twenty year end. And then during that time you had always mapped out you were going to be an author when you were done. Yep, yep, yep.

I thought it was while I was gone. I wasn't writing, I wasn't practicing, but I was reading. So I'm first I'm a fan, I'm always a reader, both fiction and non. So all those guys I read in the 80s, those are like my professors in the art of storytelling. And then I couple that with the academic study of warfare, terrorism, insurgencies, counterinsurgencies, and then the practical application from Afghanistan, from Iraq. And then it all kind of came together at the right time and place as I was getting out.

So for that last like year, year and a half, then I started writing because I wasn't taking guys downrange anymore. My job was essentially to get out of the military. And because it's you feel like you're the first person to do it, even though people do it every day. But you walk in and you need to get something signed or go to a meeting or get read out of a secret program or a medical or dental. So your job becomes to get out of this gigantic bureaucracy.

So that's to that's like a year. I mean, you can really do it in a really like JoCo didn't do any of it. What I understand he's just like now and he just laughed like, you know, but you can do those. And I know he's done it. Yeah.

I didn't do these transition classes you're supposed to do. And you sit there in these rooms and people drone on and on about transition and options for you.

An awful, horrible. But but I did it. I thought you had to go get something signed and off you go. You don't have to do it. I think you do. Just JoCo didn't like you like. That's what he told me. He's like, no, I didn't. Who's going to tell him to do it, you know? Right. No one no one's going to say you have to do this. Yeah. It's not good luck.

Yeah.

So so you were planning all along to. Right. And so during that time while you were being deployed and while you're, you know, you're being a seal in the back of your head, that was always a part of the plan.

Yeah, that was when I'm done with this, then I'll do that. So I wasn't thinking about, like, how to set it up and, you know, anyone in publishing didn't know anything. But I knew that one day that's what I would do. And it wasn't even a question.

But you clearly had equal enthusiasm for being a seal. Well, yes. Oh yeah. You that's why they had to be separate. So they had to be 100 percent all in on being a SEAL because you have to that's what you owe the guys under your command when you're going downrange. That's what you owe their families, the country, the mission. But when I got home from that last Iraq deployment and took a breath and looked around and saw, oh, my family needs me, I've been gone for quite some time.

Even when you're training, come on. You're training. You're out for three weeks here. Two weeks. They're a month. They're. Getting ready to deploy, so it's not just the six to seven month deployments, it's all that time spent training up to go downrange with your team. So I knew that my family needed me. It's time to get out. So it was very clear, wasn't a hard decision for me, but I'd I'd gotten to the end of my time where I would tactically leave guys on the battlefield.

So that's our troop commander. So that's where Jocke was when he did his last deployment as a troop commander, as in 04, which is a major in the other services, a lieutenant commander in the Navy. And after that, yeah, you're still a leader, but you're leading from behind essentially or in tactical operations center and more of a manager type leader. You're not out there kicking doors with the guys, which is what we all come in to do or most of us come in to do anyway.

So I knew that that part of my life was over and it was time to transition, take care of the family. So it's time to start writing.

Did you take journalism classes or writing classes or. Nope, it was all the reading, all that reading I did growing up. And my mom introduced me to a guy named Joseph Campbell back in 1974. So he did a series of interviews with Bill Moyers on PBS called The Power of Myth, and he wrote a book called Hero With a Thousand Faces. So back in 1988. So I'm, I don't know, 11 years old or whatever, I get introduced to him and I read that book and I watched all those interviews and I read the book that came out called The Power of Myth based on those interviews.

And I think I applied that paradigm, that model of the hero's journey, the monolith to really every movie I watched, every series I watched, every book I read from then on.

And that really helped as I made the transition because I had this foundation, it wasn't just like I woke up one day and said, you know, what, can you make money writing? Oh, that sounds like a good thing to do.

I'll go back and read and I'll go back and see kind of figure out the history of this genre. No, I already had that figured out because I did it my whole life and it was that foundations that was already there. And while I was in the military, I kept reading for fun, read those fiction books still, and I discovered Stephen Hunter and Brad Thor and Vince Flynn and Daniel Silva and and now Mark Graney today. So those are the kind of the kind of the bigger names in the genre.

And but then I was also studying, studying all that non-fiction stuff and trying to stay up on my game to make my make the best decisions I possibly could under fire for the guys when it mattered. So I'm just always studying, always reading. When I was downrange, I never really watched a movie or played video games. It was always if I wasn't out operating and we weren't putting together a target package that was reading.

That's interesting because I would think that most people that would venture and become a professional novelist, they would have some sort of background in writing, like some sort of education, some classical education, English literature or something.

Yeah, no, it's all reading. It was all what I liked, knowing why I didn't like. And that's why the first novel is really all about revenge, because that theme resonated with me. Obviously it's resonated with people from the beginning of time and telling those stories around campfires usually told in a way to pass on some sort of a lesson about something to the next generation. So they don't have to learn the same lessons in blood, but they're told as a story and passed down that way.

And I think that's that's why there's so many Deathwish movies. There's just because you can't get someone cut you off in traffic, you can't go on do something or someone you know at work. There's some politics. You don't get the promotion or whatever. You get mad. You can't do anything about it. But you can in the pages of a novel, you can escape there or you can escape in the movie theater and you can see somebody that goes out and gets this revenge and it makes you feel good because, you know, you can't do it in real life.

If you do it, you're going to go to jail. You get the death penalty. It's not possible, but you can do it and you can explore all that in the pages of a fictional thriller. So I think that's why it resonates with with people. And then in this particular case, I got to take the emotions and feelings behind things I was involved in downrange and then just apply them to a fictional narrative. So I didn't have to talk to somebody and say, hey, how did it feel to be a sniper in Ramadi in 2005, 2006?

And then filter that through whatever biases I had or whatever my past experience or whatever, and then put it into a fictional narrative? No, I just took my experience and then just morphed it and put it into the narrative. So it ended up being very therapeutic.

So did you approach an agent first? Like, how did you get started?

Thank goodness I didn't know you're supposed to do that because I'd probably still be looking for one today. So I did very little research on that front because I think that a lot of people can study how to do something too much or too long and is going to be different for everybody. But, you know, some people can study how to do something their whole life and never actually do it because you only have a certain amount of bandwidth.

And for me, I read so Steven Pressfield, he's become a great friend now who was on this show a while back. Yeah, I love that guy. So great. Yeah, wrote Gates, a fire legend about your of the Afghan campaign and then has those series of books on creativity, the war of Arts.

Yeah. Just to you say that out to people. Right. For a stack of them nowadays to keep in the studio.

Yeah. So he's he's amazing. Actually listening to him on this show before I started writing, gave me the idea of writing a one word theme down to keep me on onepoint. So I wrote revenge for that first novel on a yellow sticky. But he didn't really say this on your show. He's talking about somebody else who a playwright who would write a sentence to keep him on theme. But somehow, through my filters, I heard him say, oh, a one word.

I'm on a yellow sticky on my computer, and so I did the same thing, so it wasn't it's not really what he said on the show, but I took it as what he said and I wrote it down. And that really for the first book, Revenge, second book, Redemption, and then fourth book, I'm her third book. I'm after a little bit Dark Side of man. But so those are the themes that really kept me on track.

But then you're on the fourth one right now. You're on the fourth one. How long does it take you to do one?

The first one can take as long as you want because you have to have four fiction. You have to have the finished product. So for non-fiction, you can sell like an idea, a chapter and outline something like that coming from sports or politics, you know, you can sell that idea because they know they're going to get some sales for this. You have to have the whole manuscript done. So the first one took about just shy of two years and you get it as good as you can possibly get it.

And then you're supposed to do is go to an agent. But I didn't know that, thank goodness, because I didn't do I did that research I talked about with Stephen Pressfield, books on creativity, war of art, authentic swing, turning pro, do the work, read those, read Stephen King's on writing about scripts to Stephen King's book.

So it's so it's an autobiography, really. It's not just about writing about his his entire life. David Morality's was a successful novelist, and I think those were those are the main ones that I that I read. And then I was like, OK, got it. And I put those within sight of me and my computer, but I didn't touch him again. And I but they were there, so I would look to them for inspiration. As far as Stephen Hunter says, you're sorry.

Steven Pressfield says you're a professional, you're a writer. You sit down and write writer's block doesn't exist because it doesn't exist for dentists or truckers or doctors. You don't get doctors block, so you don't get writer's block. You're professional and you're right. So just having them that close really helped with that transition. And I made the decision to not once I was a CEO and now I write. So I think that really helped. But I didn't know you needed you needed an agent.

And thank goodness I didn't, because otherwise, like I said, I'd still be looking for one because those are the gatekeepers, essentially, and they've assistants that are even gatekeepers to them. So it's it's tough, I think. But lucky for me, a friend of mine sat next to a guy named Brad Thor, who writes in the genre, has a character called Scott Horvath, who's a former SEAL. And he's a he's a great guy. My friend sat next to him at a one of these events for raise money for a SEAL Foundation type thing.

And as I'm writing about four months in and my buddy says, hey, you know, this guy named Bradshaw? And I said, oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't know him, but I read all his stuff and he said, Do you want to talk to him? I know you write in the book. And I said, yeah, I'd love to talk to him. He would he talk to me. And he said, yeah, I'll set it up.

I helped him out with a couple things in his books. So sure enough, he sets it up. And actually I'm up at here at an event in L.A. At the time, I was trying to find a quiet place to to have this call with Brad Thor. So I go to the parking lot at the well, the Toronto resort parking lot up their sons beating down on my old my Land Cruiser. So everything's off, though. The engine's off because it's so loud and and I get my pen and paper there.

I'm sweating. But sure enough, we had this great call in and it was like a job interview. And he wanted to know, like, hey, why do you want to write? And I told the same stuff. I tell you or tell everybody that I grew up loving reading and knew I was going to do this one day. And by my mom being a librarian and know knowing the history of the genre and all that and just being excited about it, he could sense the passion.

And he's like, all right. So if you write a book, what I can do for you, your friend told me some things you did in the SEAL teams and as a thank you for that, I'll let my publisher know it's coming. I can't guarantee they'll open the package, can't guarantee they'll read one word, definitely can't guarantee that they'll like it. But as a thank you, I can let them know it's coming. And I said that's all I need.

And he said, How long till you're done? I said, one year from today. And so he's like, All right, don't call me.

How did you chapters your first book? How did you know one year from today you'd be done? Because I was because other guys that have serious characters have one book a year. And so I figured, well, you're doing this. I don't think I was about four months into it. So I was like, I give or take a couple of months. So sure enough, I call them back one year from the day.

And he's like, but he said, hey, don't don't call me, don't send me chapters. I'm not going to give you any advice. You need to give me some advice on that call. But he didn't really bugging him throughout the year. Right. Which I totally understand now, and call them back a year from that and said it's done. And to his credit, it was so awesome. He said, is it done or is it the best you can possibly make it?

And I said, well, I could probably edit it a little bit, but it's finished. And he's like, All right, call me back again. What is the best you could possibly do is I took another four months of reading it and editing it, sending it to a couple of friends and then called them back four months later and said, this is the best I can possibly get it. And he said, all right, I'll let him know it's coming.

So how many hours a day do you think you were putting in? Gosh.

So it's not like I mean, I would love to get on a discipline type schedule, like a JOCO type schedule someday, but I'm not quite there yet, especially at this stage where I'm still feel I still feel like this is a startup and I can't say no to a lot of things. I need to take advantage of emerging opportunities, just like I would on the battlefield looking at the enemy. They're learning from us. We're learning from them, and it's really who adapts quicker.

You're looking for those emerging opportunities, taking advantage of momentum, looking for gaps. So the same things that you do for a startup or. Starting like a coffee shop somewhere you have to do for writing, and I didn't really get that at the outset. How so? So how did you you're not just writing and sending it to New York, which is what I thought up until about the time I published the first one. I thought you just went back and forth as an editor a little bit and then you start the next book.

Well, really, you have to do advertising, branding, co branding, your marketing stuff, your budgets, your social media, like anything you would have to do with any other business that you're starting out, you have to do as an author. So so I kind of treated it as a startup and starting it like just like starting something in your garage and you're hungry and you're passionate and you're seeing an opportunity here or there. And you just want to build this readership and let people know that you have this character and see where it goes.

So so it's been a sprint. So point being, at some point, I think you get to a stage where you can say no and you don't have to sprint off and all these different directions almost at the same time. And you can say, OK, you know what I got to do?

I'm going to wake up, am I right, for four hours. And it doesn't matter if someone calls for an interview or if CNN wants you on or Fox News wants you on, it doesn't matter. I'm just gonna do my four hours and then after that, then I'll check my texts, then I'll check my emails. And if something comes up, yeah, we can schedule out and maybe later in the week. But right now it's just like, oh really?

Fox wants me on, bam, I'm on. And then all of a sudden I'm not writing for those four hours.

So usually it's the first novel and these and all the others were really down between 10:00 at night and about 4:00 in the morning because that's the time it was quiet in our house with three kids. Dog, wife. Yeah.

That's how I just end up writing to the same thing when everyone's asleep. It's your best work because there's no one interrupting, because I have friends that feel like they can't work like that and they only work good if they get up in the morning and then right immediately they're right even before breakfast.

So I was getting up and working out like that up until up until the publication of the first book.

And then things got a little crazy, the publicity stuff and stuff, and then writing late at night, also working on the next windmilling that in. And then you're editing one while you're writing another.

Oh, same time which a book, a year type program. That's what you're that's what you're doing. And maybe I'll get past that at some point I'll have a and date and then I'll start the next one. But right now it's not not quite like that yet. So my mornings were taken up with getting up early and not anymore. I need to get back after it. But in Park City where we live, there are some crazy injured people out there.

Yeah. And I happen to know a couple of them. So as soon as we moved out there after the Navy, they're like, hey, come, come. We got to go work out. It's five thirty in the morning. And I know Jack has been up for two hours already, but for me that's pretty much I wake up at five getting down there and doing these crazy trail runs. Crosthwaite stop, jump in the pool, do all sorts of crazy stuff that these guys put together.

And it's like five or six crosthwaite workouts meshed into one with trail running with the endurance side and.

Yeah, what group are you in with that's doing this? Is it a local gym or. Yeah, we go we meet at the local gym. But Hobie Darling, who is the CEO of Skullcandy, he's like well into human performance at all levels. Emotional, physical, mental, spiritual, like being the best like human he can possibly be. You love them like and those guys are all out there.

They're all out there. Yeah. Yeah. And Erik Snider is another another guy big his defender, one that is used in some of my videos. He's a big defender guy. But those guys are animals. They're animals. And get up with them, work out, get home, get the kids to school. So I had a schedule like that for a little bit, but then it all became, hey, when you're working till 4:00 in the morning and getting up an hour and a half later, that's a little much.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's that's always been a problem with comedy, you know, because you have to go late, you're at the you're testing stuff out and then you're home and maybe you get home and then you're at home. Yeah. But then after you, after you test it out, something at the comedy club you come home and make those notes.

Yeah. Well luckily now the way home now we can't do shit. But when this crisis, the covid thing wasn't going on, what I would do is I would record my sets on my iPhone and then on the way home I would listen to the set. And then when I got home, either I would listen to it more, I would write, you know, sometimes I listen to it more than take notes and then write and try to adjust or just write on completely different subjects.

OK, but I just got to a schedule where the best writing I was doing was when no one was home because I'd be writing and then I'd hear, Daddy, I got a question or daddy or my wife would want to know something or you know, someone else would need something or phones would ring at two o'clock in the morning. No one's calling you. Exactly. It's free. You're free, and then it's just quiet. Yes.

And also it's creepy. Something about the darkness is like give your thoughts are weirder. Yeah. It was a real hard time to get up and do like I would do like a 10 a.m. jujitsu class. Right. And when you're up at four and you crash and then try to get up six hours later or not even five hours later and then get to the gym, a little bit of food in your stomach, it was too hard. Oh, yeah.

And you just listen to yours or do you video? I just listen. But video is better. I really like Damon Wayans is a hilarious comedian, has a collection of every set that he's ever done since the 90s. Really? Yeah, he films everything, he brings a tripod and a fucking camera and he sets it up in the back of the room and films, everybody does. And then he edits it all himself on his computer. I'm like, no way.

That's next level.

That is next level. Do you ever look at is there like four people on Amazon? You can leave reviews of books. Are there like for comedy club or there are reviews of comics that go in there?

Oh, no. I mean, that's good that you don't know that. Yeah, I don't read. I mean, you can't. Okay, it's all at scale, right. When you get to a certain number, like the number of people that are contacting you, like I'm at a place where I just I can't know. It's like nine million something on Instagram followers or whatever the fuck it is.

It's like you can't you post in your get a it's not good for you, it's not good for you. Positive or negative. Like just you should know what you're doing. Get out of it.

Yeah. So for me I feel like I need to thank everybody at this point because I was fortunate that the books are resonating with people. You know, really this whole thing's been a grassroots like it made this third book made The New York Times list and it made it without like a national news appearance with any of these other bigger things. It was all right. It was hunters. It was tactical shooting people. It was readers that took a risk on a new author and then told a friend.

And then that person took a risk and told another friend, that's also it's crazy. And then these companies like Black Raffle Coffee, like those guys like, you know, veteran owned businesses or, you know, like Dudly, like those guys that post it and stuff, like all those guys that held it up and said, oh, I love this, but it's still grassroots.

Yeah. It's just like instead of around the water cooler at work, it's modern. Yeah, it's social. I feel like I need to get on and say thank you so much. I really because I do I feel so fortunate and I really want to thank everyone. But I think I'm about at that stage where I but I can't do it anymore. I got to do a blanket. Thank you. Yeah.

I don't I hope people don't think that I'm not thankful but that's not the case. It's just for my own sanity. Oh yeah. And I've seen people that do get really too into the comments and they lose their fucking mind.

It's not healthy. Oh yeah.

You can't respond to anything negative. If anything, it's like a little weird. I do the block. I'm very and I treat it like if I owned a general store in small town USA and I'm behind the counter, I own the place, somebody walks in and they ask for directions and some drunk comes in screaming the N-word.

So you dip, you treat those people differently. So so the guy wants directions and doesn't want to buy anything.

I mean, you're like you treat the hey, here's how I get back to the interstate. You're so much, you know. Right. Right. He has a good impression that he's with or someone comes in wants to buy a candy bar or a six pack or whatever. You know, you put him in the right direction, make conversation. So I treat it kind of like that. Like I treat people on social media the same way I would if I was interacting with them the way we are right here.

But just across the table at my my business local general store. Yeah. So I try to treat it like that. But I'm about at that point where there's too many people coming into the store and I can say hi to everybody. Yeah, but I still am so sincerely thankful for everyone that took a risk on me is starting this out.

Yeah well I can, I can relate. I understand where you're coming from and I, I used to interact with people all the time online too. But then it got to the point where I was like I see too many of my friends like getting mad about things or or engaging back and forth and having these Twitter wars with people. And I realized, like, the worst way to communicate ever. Yeah.

You can't you know, it's just not a good it's also not it's just not a good effective way to express yourself with another human being. If there's any sort of a dispute or disagreement about things like the best way to express yourself is in person. Yeah. And I know you can't do that with everybody, but it's just it's not you. You only have so much time in the day. It's not that it's not it's not a smart way to value your time.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, that is that bandwidth. So I never worried about how hard it was to get out. Like I didn't worry about how hard it was to get into the SEAL teams or get to get to Buddz. I knew that it was very hard and that for me that was enough. So it can be done, but I've done it before. Yeah.

And so even growing up on mid 80s, I'm still doing like what today people would call Crosthwaite. So I get home from school. I'd run the hill by the house, I'd go into the basketball hoop and then pull myself through, you know, these kind of pull up things. You know, we had a jungle gym in the backyard. So I do some regular pull ups there, changed my grip, but put a rope up in the backyard.

So I was doing that, had my bow out so I could shoot for the heart rate and everything. So I was doing all those things that I was reading like Zen in the art of Archery. And I was reading the non-fiction stuff on warfare. And I was reading these those authors I talked about earlier that day, who was Jonathan writing in today? So I was doing all that stuff, but I wasn't focused on how hard it was or oh, maybe I'm not going to make it.

Am I good enough? I'm like, well, I'm going to get myself as good as I possibly can by doing all the things that I think I need to do. And now you can type in like Navy SEAL workout program. And there's so many. Yeah, hard to pick. Which one back then there was nothing, you know. So I'm like what I see. I see I'm running in the sand. I seen a couple of pictures like that.

I see these guys in Vietnam with these guns and I'm like, OK, I've seen a couple of movies at OK, what are you going to do? OK, are you going to climb this tree? You're going to do this rope stuff, do these hills Brant's. So I just did that.

And did you have like a program that you rode out or did you just. Nope. Wing it. Nope. Just as many workout. Which is very similar to actually when I got to the SEAL teams, were those pre Crossfade days and all that, so you ran as far as you could as fast as you could in sand, and then you came back and you lifted as heavy weights as you possibly could like that, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know, 1980 Encyclopedia of bodybuilding.

That was the workout up until probably early, two thousands.

So early 2000s. What changed across? It came on the scene. That was huge. We adapted or adopted it fairly quickly because it seems great until things go wrong.

So great until your joints start going or your back starts going. Yeah.

And by Crossfade, I just kind of mean functional fitness in general. Yeah.

I mean the actual actual program. But but first, yeah. Those programs came out and people would get on and say, oh look, look at this thing. This is new. Give it a shot with me. And it took, it took a little bit of time, but some guys jumped right on and and but really what it showed us and then right about that time also for kicks off and and all that and we realized, OK, you're at 10000 feet in these mountains.

You have a rock on your radio guy, automatic weapon guy that has a ton of ammo. Then you're going right in this compound and you're putting these ladders up and then you're going through these windows. And sometimes there are these spaces you have to get into to clear where people are hiding or they're hiding weapons. So encyclopædia, body-building running as far as you could, as fast as you could in sand. And that being all you did, they're probably better way.

So we're kind of forced into it, essentially.

Did they do any work where they're monitoring heart rate and checking recovery and, you know, and trying to keep you at a certain heart rate while you're working? No, they might now seem a little dated.

So I got out summer of 2016 and I know they were trying to modernize a lot of things as I was leaving for those last couple of years. But so it's possible they do now. And one thing that they did to that incorporated a little technology was in Helwig, like when I went through with with Andy, they just pull you out of the surf and then they'd walk down the line and shine a flashlight in your eyes and they'd say, OK, this guy is on the verge of hypothermia.

He's about to die, pull him out. But then you have someone that looks totally fine and then that person would just collapse as soon as the doctor walked by. So if they had people do start to take these little RFID chips and swallow them. And so they'd walk down that line and they'd hit you with, like the zapper from Wal-Mart and they'd get your core body temperature. So it lasted for about like two days until you passed it.

But for those first couple of days, that's how they did it, because you had RFID chip in your stomach and then you shit it out after two days. Yeah. And so that's how they could tell your temperature. Yeah.

I don't know when they started doing that, they certainly didn't do it in 97 when when I went. That's what they're going to do with this fucking covid virus. Maybe they're going to make you swallow an RFID shirt and you put it under your skin. I'm really worried about this tracking thing that they're trying to implement, that they're talking about. South Korea is doing that. They're giving up a little bit of personal liberty and freedom and don't like you can kiss my ass.

They're giving up a little bit of privacy. Yeah, no, no. I'd rather wash my hands and stay home. Fuck off. Oh, yeah.

And they're going to give that back when the government released something. Thank you. I don't know how many times they've actually given nonzero. Yeah. There's no way once they have that kind of surveillance where they can monitor you, they're tracking you. OK, so you can track everywhere you go and measure you versus all the other people that they know are infected. Did you come in contact with them? This guy's got a recent test. You don't. Well, you need to get a recent test now.

You're registered. OK, now we're tracking you. And everywhere you go, you're going to be tracked. You tell me when they come up with the vaccine, they're going to just drop that tracking. You go ahead. Hey, go back to being completely free. Go back. No chance.

No. Once they take those freedoms like you, never lozar, never rush and say never, rarely taken off the books. Right. Every you have people on talking about bills that they're sponsoring. Well, are they getting rid of another one? Add that one. Are you act like there's a book called Three Felonies a Day and it talks about how a guy wakes up, a normal guy gets up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, has dinner, puts the kids to bed.

And unbeknownst to him during that day, he has committed three felonies because there are so many laws on the books, you can't even keep track. The American Bar Association can't even tell you how many laws are on the books, state, local, federal, international ones that play in all sorts of different ordinances, laws. And you're breaking at least three of them a day to commit a felony. It's a fascinating book. And that they're not going to give those back.

They're not going to give those freedoms back. I read a really disturbing thing today and I'm not even sure if it's true. So we should find out right now. Click, click, click.

Did the CDC stop tracking flu deaths for this year? Because this is what I read and might have been some wacko right wing website that I was on.

So you never know. But I was like, this can't be true, because the real concern is that the CDC tracks flu and they find out that flu is lower or the same as covid. And why are we making a big deal out of covid? And then, you know, people right in the streets.

That's why people can't it's hard to tell who to trust. Yeah. Do politicians and you see, you don't trust either side and you see everyone trying to make a power grab and use this as a way to make power or hurt an opponent or whatever.

Exactly. And even with. Yes. ECDC, you don't know their World Health Organization. You obviously can't tell there. You can't trust information coming out of other. Countries, so people at home are just like washed away. What do I do? Safest thing to do is just to stay where I am. Yeah, but you don't know who to trust. It's very hard.

It's very hard to figure out who to trust and doctors are giving to on the website. I'm seeing information updated as of last week, April 18th, for flu deaths for like it's on the CDC weekly flu surveillance. I mean, it's all of the flu information.

So how many people have died this year from the flu?

I have to dig through it to find that information because the covid deaths or what is it now? 55000, I think something like that for this country. Yeah, I think it's more maybe 60000 now closing in on that, which is not a small number.

It's a lot of people. But then you find out that that that's a bad year for the flu. That's normal. But obviously this year we've locked everybody down worldwide even. And, you know, there's just there has to be a slower spread because of this quarantining and because the social distancing. So you're I would imagine you're getting far lower numbers than they would have gotten if everybody had just gone out into the streets. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, no doubt about that. But no doubt for for a flu, it is my understanding, because in that fourth novel that I'm writing right now, I was deep into the study of infectious diseases.

Perfect, perfect timing. That's crazy. And then how you weaponize those infectious diseases, what the Japanese did prior to World War Two in that space, how they use them in World War Two against the Chinese. What happened to that data afterward, after the war, the Soviet program from the end of World War Two up to the collapse. What happened to that information? And then our programs today from the end of World War Two up to and continuing through today.

So I was I was keyed in to all that ahead of time. And so it made me a little kind of hypersensitive to this. I'd be talking to doctors, people that had worked in that space, doing my research. But from obviously I'm not a doctor, but from what I studied, the difference here is that the incubation period, so for us, so in the military go overseas and now we're fighting insurgents. And what do they look like?

Well, they look like the people that aren't insurgents. What does that car look like that's pulling up to this this checkpoint?

It looks like the one that didn't have a VBIED in it. Or is that one looking a little low on the suspension? So they're not in a uniform, they're not driving a military type vehicle. So same with this. It's less like an insurgent that's adapted. It's adapted to those other diseases and how we fought them. And it's adapted by the incubation period, by that nine days. So hopefully you get the flu, you're down. You know, you shouldn't go into work if you show up at work, someone's like, Ro, go home.

You look like you look horrible. Get out of here and infect everybody. You don't know that with iodine. So you go out there for this nine days, whatever it is, and you're infecting people during that time frame. So it's like that insurgent that hides amongst amongst the populace. It's the same type of thing, like they've adapted. SARS was different. Flu is different. All these other ones have been different. And that's the adaptation of this one, is that you go out and you infect other people without knowing it.

So that's the difference between it and the flu. So that's a hard thing to wrap your head around. We just look at numbers. But but there is a difference in that flu. You're staying home if you're sick.

You know, it's it's really in a lot of ways, it's a perfect way to spread a virus because there's a there's a video game that my wife plays. She used to play. It doesn't play anymore now that this is going down. But it was a virus video game, really. You send a virus throughout the world. And the key is if you make your virus too strong, it's a video game.

You play on your iPad or your phone. If you make the virus too strong, it kills people too quickly and then it doesn't spread. So the way you get a virus everywhere is you have one that sits in your system for a little bit weak in the beginning and slowly spreads its way across the world.

And that's essentially what this is in a lot of ways. But this is this one. So weird, man. I mean, Newsweek actually had a story yesterday saying that they think it came from a lab. So now that that theory of whether or not it came from a laboratory, I think I tweeted it.

I think I tweeted it so you could find it on my Twitter page. I was reading it. Yes. OK, Newsweek not really sensationalistic publication, right. When they're publishing something like that, you got to go. Hmm. Probably something to this. And there's a lot of speculation. I mean, it's not so hard to imagine. I mean, you're talking about something that literally was a few blocks from the epicenter in Wuhan where they had that level four lab.

Right.

So the deal is with like the video game your wife was playing and that the goal of that game, it sounds like, was to, in fact, the world to kill the world. But if that's not fucked up, if you if you have a goal and you want your country to survive, then you don't want it to become a global pandemic. You want it to hit the city, the country, whatever geographic area you want to hit with a weaponized infectious disease, you want it to burn out in that city.

So instead of going over and dropping bombs on it like like World War Two, like firebombing Dresden or whatever else, or Tokyo and just destroying those cities. Well, you know what? After the war, you can go in with an infectious disease and you know, it's burned out and there's no damage. Yeah. But you don't want to spread throughout the whole world and come back to your own country. So when I first looked at this and I heard about Ruwan, I heard that there was a man it's not a weapons lab maybe, but maybe it's a weapons lab, but at least a lab doing research in infectious diseases a couple of miles from these wet markets where they're saying that this thing broke out.

There are cases in the former Soviet Union of them doing these this research into infectious diseases and weaponized it and then having it get out because the protocols weren't followed or whatever else and kills a few people and they hush hush it because it's in 1960 something or 1970 something. So there is precedent and it wouldn't be beyond the beyond the pale to think that, oh, someone was doing some sort of research and it doesn't even have to be weaponization. It can just be they're just studying this infectious disease, not even weaponize it.

And someone contracts it somehow in that lab and then brings it outside. Yeah, that's the controversial theory.

So here's the thing. The controversial experiments and one lab suspected of starting the coronavirus pandemic and says the case against a human lab. And so it says why the human lab remains a suspect in the coronavirus investigation.

I mean, it's really likely that we never really will know. But they most certainly were working on viruses similar to this one right there.

At the end of this article says there's another one called Rat RTG 13, which is very, very similar to the sars-cov-2 one that we're experiencing now. Oh, terrific.

This year, 96 percent of the same genetic material. Yeah. Wow.

It's thought to be the most similar to the sars-cov-2 of any known virus to share 96 percent of the genetic material, that four percent gap, but still be a formidable gap for animal passage research, says Ralph Burek, Virologist University, North Carolina, probably in bed with the Russians who collaborated with like when you found out that a Harvard guy got arrested, that because he was taking money from Russia or excuse me, taking money from China because he was doing something with them.

Yeah, I mean, it's real spooky. What's really spooky is the World Health Organization is essentially in bed with with China. Yeah. And they're not giving us 100 percent clear, detailed information. Everything gets filtered down through the Chinese propaganda system. Oh, sure. Very dangerous.

And they also were exceedingly little on the numbers. Right. And we can't trust China, but it seems like they were a little more prepared for this than we were with so far as testing gets goes and all that.

So if you're doing this, if there's a lab where you're doing research similar to this close by, there are there's a history of other countries, maybe even China, too, of doing research into infectious diseases, not following protocols that we would hear in the United States are not always as safe as they are. Shocker here in the United States where we're doing the same type of research, then it gets out and then they just happen to have a lot of these kits ready to go for testing.

I don't know.

Yeah, well, in twenty eighteen they were actually cited for violating safety protocols at that same lab in twenty eighteen. So there were there were there were concerns about that area long before. But what's really fucked up is the World Health Organization posted in January that according to China, there is no evidence of person-to-person transmission of this disease. This is days after they knew for sure it was being transmitted from person to person. So China has been deceptive about this from the very beginning.

And they think that if they were honest about it and that they they stopped everybody from leaving, it could have covered they could have covered this in the point where it would have been 95 percent less. Saw that. Yeah. Ninety five percent less people would have gotten, in fact, just lock down. Want to deal with it there as much as you can anyway that the rest of the world now. I mean looking back that seems like. But you're dealing with China, you're dealing with Russia, you're dealing with some of the countries like China.

It seems the worst. It seems like the worst. It does seem that way. It's a perfect storm, it seems like.

But the way they handle their own citizens, when their citizens are tested positive, this is horrible video, this family being dragged out by these people in hazmat suits and they're trying to resist. These people are dragging them away because they tested positive. Oh, yeah.

Once again, that government taking a little more control. Yeah. Control, a little control. And we're just giving it up and we give up so much.

And even before this, obviously, we gave up so much information about ourselves voluntarily.

We would, let's say in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, we never would have given up.

And now we're like, oh, click, accept and bam, they go, awesome, I can post a picture or whatever it is. You know, this is fine.

I can communicate with my friends. We're very accustomed to it. Clicking on those user agreements. I know no one can figure them out. All those those concerned me. And obviously we've given up a lot of our information in terms of data where we go, the map information, that kind of shit. But this tracking thing really freaks me the fuck out. It really does, because they're going to find another reason why they should be able to track you once once they do it because of the virus.

And then it'll just be next year. It will be the flu. You know, they'll find reasons. Keep fucking tracking you, would you safe. You like if you could, you know, do anything wrong. What are you worried about? Listen. As soon as someone says that, yeah, yeah, you're a fool, that intent has got to go up. I don't understand. You don't understand what this could mean. Look, the fucking mayor of Los Angeles is paying people to rat people out for not fining social justice, not following social social distancing rules.

Oh, yeah. There was an article in the fucking newspapers saying that normally snitches gets shot, you just get rewarded. I saw that video. It's horrible, you know.

I know this town is crazy. It's just like so for this third novel, I went to Russia to do some research and I'd always wanted to go there. I knew that for this third one is the first one to go before or after August.

Have written about Russia in your books?

I was in the process of writing it. I was getting kind of closer to the end, but I finished up its cash and I said this January, so I've only read Savage Sun is that I didn't read and listen to it.

People get mad. If you say you read and saw the other day you posted that. I know. I was like, okay, now I guess because it's harder to read, but so Savage Sun is the only one I've listened to it.

Did you talk about Russia and the other books in the second one?

I did. It plays in the geopolitics I saw. The first one is really very I wanted it to be very basic, very visceral, very primal, right out of the gate, because I knew that in New York, Simon and Schuster, all these big publishing houses, they see thousands of these things a year. So something needs to make this stand out. And a lot of that was the personal experience from Iraq and Afghanistan morphed into the novel to make it feel real personal and visceral.

So I want to come out swinging with that novel of revenge without constraint. So I'd I'd done that research essentially just as part of my life by going to Iraq, going to Afghanistan, all those sorts of things. For the second one, I knew it had to be different. So I put in a lot of more of the geopolitics of what's going on with Russia, power struggles, all this other to make it a little different. I didn't want people saying, oh, he's just a one trick pony.

He just picked up this revenge thing. Now he drops it in Africa, drops it, and in China drops in Europe. That's what had to be different, had to continue that hero's journey in this story of violent redemption. But I went to Mozambique as part of it to do that research because I knew this is before I even had a publishing deal. I knew that. Hey, John Grisham, he wrote A Time to Kill First, and he couldn't give that book away.

And then he wrote the firm. And that's the one that takes off with the movie with Tom Cruise. Then later then they go back and they publish a time to kill Matthew McConaughey. He makes the movie. But if he'd stopped at a time to kill, he'd probably still be practicing law somewhere in Memphis. So I knew I was always going to write to. So off I went to Mozambique to do that research, get that boots on the ground experience like I had in Iraq had in Afghanistan already for the first novel had by living in San Diego, knowing L.A., knowing New York and really being able to incorporate what I'd done already.

But I hadn't been in Mozambique had to go there. So I put boots on the ground and everybody over there wanted to tell me the story of their country. I want to talk about the politics. I want to talk about Chinese influence in the region with mining operations both legal and illegal and the poaching that goes along to feed all the people in those mines, how that's affecting the environment. So they just that couldn't stop them from talking. It was great.

And then for this third one, I thought it would be the same in Russia. So I wanted to go to Kamchatka Peninsula and do a little fishing over there at the same time. But it's all part of the research. And you can for one month a year, you can get to Kamchatka Peninsula from Alaska. So you don't have to go from here to Germany or London and some for all of August. So you get and one flight a day, an hour later, one flight a week, only in August, only in August.

Otherwise, you have to go all the way around the world. So much better to fly to Anchorage than hop on a couple hour flight. And next thing you know, you're in Russia. It's awesome. But I thought it was going to be the same. I thought, you know, land, I'll get to this remote backcountry place where we have these guides and all that and I'll be able to really and it's on the military installation because the people guiding us used to have some connection to the government.

So he has this hunting concession out there in the backcountry. And I thought they'd all want to talk to me. And then I realized very quickly that for most of Russian history, if someone is asking you pointed questions that kind of you to ask, if you're writing a political thriller, you were not long for this world. It was the firing squad gulag off to Siberia, whatever. So they were very hesitant to talk to me.

And I left on my computers behind. As soon as I walked through Customs, I knew there was going to get everything sucked out of my phone and computer. And I know who who sent things to me, an email or text over the last 20 plus years. That is, you know, so I left all that behind, brought a pen and paper. But I was asking these questions and I you know, I thought, oh, you know, here's here's my book.

You know, they're going to know I'm an author. I'm just asking.

But no, they were very standoffish and very suspicious of why I was asking, you know, these kind of questions. But it all worked out some great stuff and got to weave that into the to the third one. What kind of hunting did you do in Russia? So brown bear. Oh, wow. It was crazy. What does Brown Bear taste like? I tell you that I don't know because usually I follow, not you. Well, yeah, usually I follow the customs of the local people because I don't want to like, show up any kind of the ugly American and show I'm better than you.

You don't you know, you don't eat this.

But I well, this is what we so I kind of adopt what the locals do and they don't eat the bear now. Interesting. I wonder why. Yeah, I don't know. It's just one of those things that they don't get a lot of times people.

I mean it is the. Best bear this year, Black Bear Bryant call gave me some. Oh, incredible, it was the Bears.

It was so good. I tell that to people in like shut the fuck up. Like, my daughter got asked, what's your favorite food? She goes, Bear. Yeah. And her friends like, what? Amazing. Yeah. Like, it's probably not really her favorite food. I think she was probably trying to shock her friends.

I don't know that black bear that that Brian gave me is I mean, is canned. So it was just sitting there for a while. Yes, it was canned thing. So how did he make it? You know, so what do you boil it?

And it's in the. Yeah. And how are you? Wayne Endecott from the Bow Rack up in Springfield, Oregon, gave me some canned dear me. And it was really good. Yeah, but it's really bottled. It's like bottled, dear. Interesting, but bottled that had bottled dear before.

But I'll tell you a bottled BlackBerry and if this maybe it was eating blueberries or whatever, but it was and it sat on our counter for six months because my wife was like the fuck out of here with us.

Exactly. So so that we had all these guys came over from the larger challenge.

And yet we came over to the house, we did a wild game dinner. Trevor Thompson came over.

And so we opened it up and it was everyone's favorite.

I wish we had more of it. What were the ingredients behind besides just the need to put a couple of some spices in there of some sort? But I don't know. It didn't look like it.

You just opened it up and look weird, but then you open it up and it can look like glass, like you would like it. Like a bottle. Yeah. Like you would with a jam.

Yeah. Same as the deer that I had. It seemed like one of those vacuum sealed bottles. That was awesome. I wanna go down there, get some more for him if he has any more. If he's listening, I'm going to come down and get some of that because that was legit. Yeah. My wife loved it. She's like wow this.

And as soon as you open it up and it hit the air, it changed like it changed. It didn't look like a murky thing that was in the jar. Like it looked beautiful. Amazing. We loved it. It was great. But his favorite is awesome.

Yeah, that's a weird thing. Like beer actually tastes good. People are so wrapped up in bears because of teddy bears. They have this distorted perception of what a bear is. And people that have no problem eating cows have get mad at you if you eat a bear. Do you know how much nicer a cow is than a fucking bear?

No. Cows don't eat their young. I don't think they do. They eat their children. They'll they'll they kill other people's children. And then the well, other bears, children, rather. And then the mother. When I was in Alberta, my friend John and Jen, the people who run the camp out there, the rivets, their son saw a male bear kill a cub, and then the female bear chased the male bear away and then finished eating her cub.

It's amazing he was eating her cubs. So she she ate her own cub right after she was defending it. It becomes meat once they're dead. Yeah, they're all cannibals.

It's crazy.

A lot of that stuff is interesting how people have while associate bears with. Well, in humans. I mean, they do look, when you skinned them, they do look a little like humans, sort of if someone looks like a fucking bear when they're dead.

Look, you've done something awful with your body. That's a big boy. You know, take care of yourself. But Steve Rinella calls it boss.

He says they're charismatic megafauna. Yeah. And there's oh, yeah. There's some animals that we have in our head that you're not supposed to eat.

And we also I think we connect bears to what you would call trophy hunting, meaning like someone who hunts lions something and someone who hunts things you don't eat. Although Mountain Lion apparently is very good.

It's delicious. I've heard this and I've had friends. It's like their favorite food.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't even know it was saying I've heard him here. He's talking about is the best thing he's ever, ever eaten I guess. Yeah. And I, I did my first one this year and it was amazing. You had Mountain Lion. I didn't eat it because the guide didn't really was like, it was like a no go. Same thing.

Yeah. The guide wouldn't let you eat it.

It was very clear to me that that was not something that was done there. You know, I sure was the I should have pushed it in Utah, so I should have pushed it. I could have, but yeah, you should have pushed it. I feel bad about it now.

It's hard to get a tag for them, too, so it's not like it's easy to get. It was my fault lines. It was wild. Yeah, that was amazing. But the back back to that, that, that their experience was incredible, especially with someone that doesn't speak English. Like you're over there with this guy who's that's a really he was part of well in the military and then worked for the government.

And then is now the sense that the people just listening you doing air quotes across.

Yeah. So really interesting. But yeah. So got my bear and then but the craziest part was my friend who got his and he wounded it first by accident of course. And it happens like we know and it goes off into this thick thick brush in the States because I went and did another hunt in Alaska this year, like they won't let you go in after a wounded bear into the thick stuff, like maybe some. Well, but my from what I've gleaned, they're going to go in and do it.

Kind of like going in after a wounded leopard or something in Africa, like the guides. That's where the guys are going to go earn it, go and do that. So this thing's wounded and they hand me this rusty side by side shotgun that's at the bottom of this boat that we're in, this little tiny little boat that we're in on this river. And the guy hands it to me and then hands me two shells.

I'm looking at this right thing, and I'm have these two shells in my hand and I'm like, OK. And I'm like, no, because he had said a couple more. I'm like, oh, give me some more. And I trained up for Africa with a double rifle. I went to a ranch in Texas to get really good with a double rifle because I wanted to do a Cape Buffalo hunt the same way someone would have done it 100 years ago.

So no optic side by, you know, a double rifle. So it's a rifle, but it looks like a shotgun.

Big, big rounds. So there's two rounds. Side by side. Interesting. And so I have two shots, but you have two other ones ready to go. And so you practice at STW practice and they have charging animals that are coming in after you and you're just like you would in the military changing bags. But this time you're getting two more in there and getting it back up. So I trained hard for that. And so when he handed me this old rusty shotgun and I think someone said, oh, that was made in an AK factory.

And I was like, OK, I feel better about this because I've seen a lot of acres and I've seen a lot of them rusty and working. So I'm like, OK, I'm going to trust my boss, to trust my life to this thing. And it's rusty and it's from a bottom of a boat and this guy doesn't even speak English. So, bam, here we go. I'm going to show you for so and I look at him just to make sure it's not like buckshot or something so I can see the slugs.

So I see that it's a slug. It feels like the double rifle I trained up so hard with to go to Africa, which was an amazing experience, going to return that one better, but and off we go into the brush. So it's like they wouldn't let you do this in in the states, like you're going in to this thing. And they were wounded. Huge bear, brown bear, and off you go. And it's just me, the guy to my friend.

And this thing, it's all quiet. And I haven't felt this dialed in since Ramadi 006 like I was on. And then, bam, this thing rears up like, oh, 15 yards away, just like you and I just spin and boom shot him like I would a person. How just how big was he ended up being? Over ten feet.

Yeah. I'll show you a picture after this.

Ten foot tall bear and he's even more than that was the size of the head and I forget how well I think I measured it. You shoot it was you. I'll show you a picture out of this. So, yeah, I shot like a what a human that it goes it goes running off like twenty yards or something like that into some more thick stuff. And then we hear a death blow. But before we hear the death blow, the guide in Broken English was like, I'm going to go around the other side and I'm going to scare him towards you.

And I'm like, oh, OK. So I do.

I go around the other side and I get down. I'm like, well, if it charges out, it's probably going to be on all legs. It's going to come charging like this. So I knelt down and then just got ready to to put one if it's coming charging at me.

I'm trying to figure out a face mouth right here. You know, it's my first bear hunt.

So anyway, it where the death blow after that, God damn it was it was huge. It was crazy.

That is such a different kind of hunting when you're hunting something that absolutely could tear you apart. Oh yeah. Like you're made out of tissue paper. Oh yeah. Yeah. No doubt I'll show you. Yeah it's crazy.

But what it would surprise me was how it wasn't like Wild West over there. You said, oh, can I, can we go get another bear.

It was very like, no, you had your tag just like you would in the States. It was all science based. We need to take this many out for the population, like it was just like the states, which is big business.

And people coming over there, they don't want to deplete the resources. But yeah, that's yeah. Yeah, they're smart. But for some reason that surprised me. I thought, oh it's Russia because I've been to Russia before I went to Moscow, I'd been to Ukraine to move into the catacombs for earlier in life and I wove those into into the second novel.

But I just figured it would be kind of Wild West, kind of like how I remembered it over in in Ukraine, in Moscow back in the early nineties.

And but it wasn't it was all very much. You have your tag now. This is yours. And and we're not going to deviate from that.

It's kind of interesting. They wouldn't even entertain eating it. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a language barrier there, too.

So it's hard, especially when you're dealing with people that are tough. I mean, they're living in these huts built into the ground, essentially vibration just south of Siberia. So which is just south of Siberia, but essentially the same same type of thing.

And so they're built these into these small hills for insulation.

So, I mean, they're out there. Wow. And it's it's it's a rough existence. So when they say we're not doing something and they say it in a way with this Russian accent, it is really it's not really let's talk about it right now.

You would think that those people would want me more than anybody, you know? I mean, you would think meat would be very valuable in a ten foot bear. You could feed so many goddamn people.

Maybe that's why they told us we couldn't because they're keeping it. That's possible.

Oh, that's possible. That's very possible. I would definitely not discount that.

Yeah, at least that's possible.

Yeah, but a ton of fish out there, moose, huge moves out there on the northern pike.

Right. That well they have they might but we were after Dolly Parton and rainbow trout, brown trout, some big ones out there.

So it was pretty great. It was a good trip and I got to weave all that stuff in. So I got to weave in some of the people that I met over there. The snowmobiles they have over there have one skate in the front instead of the two. So they're going through this taiga, this tundra so tightly. And so they're only watching one getting Bierut or something like that instead of the two. So I got a lot of good stuff by going over there and I wouldn't have known.

What to ask? I want to see the vehicles that they used over there. I was very happy to see some Land Cruisers, so that was pretty cool. But they had a whole bunch of other stuff to some Russian, some crazy Russian stuff. And I got to incorporate incorporate those vehicles into the novel as well. So you really never know what you're going to get until you get on the ground, talk to people, build those relationships, and then things ended up end up making their way into the stories.

Have you ever seen that Werner Herzog documentary Happy People Life on the Tiger? No need to see that. You'd need to see it. I wish I'd seen it before I read the third book. It's crazy. It's really good. It's and it's this amazing documentary about these people that live in the taiga in Russia. And it shows them from being in the summertime all the way through into being in the wintertime. And it just they're just hunters and gatherers and they're so happy.

It's really weird. It's really weird. Like there's no mental illness, there's no suicide and everyone's just struggling. I mean, they're just they're making their own skis. They're making their own homes. They're making their own. I mean, they have these cabins set up for trapping and they use snowmobiles and they have dogs. They have a very tight relationship with their dogs and they get fish and they get meat. And then that is that was what they eat and they bring bread with them.

And the bread is all frozen, obviously. So they have these loaves of bread. They bring in the store, their cabins, they have to bear proof, everything. But it's just their life is so compatible with being a human being. Right. It's like there's something about our human reward systems that have evolved over thousands and thousands of years, that being a hunter gatherer just completely locks in with all the things that keep you content and happy. There's the documentary, right?

Oh, awesome. Yeah, very interesting. The relationships are dogs.

They have dogs over there were amazing everything. Their dogs are everything. They have a huge, very, very tight relationship with their dogs.

That's incredibly of the dogs that we had in the camp. They protected the camp from the bears like that was the bear protection was these dogs that were specifically trained up to chase bears off? Yeah, I think I called Lakita to go back and look. But absolutely incredible dogs. They were amazing.

It's a really amazing documentary. Absolutely one of my favorite. Yeah. There's another really interesting documentary. Well, not a documentary.

It's a vice guide to travel where it's like it's called him. I think his name is Hymel Heimowitz Arctic Adventure. And it's a guy who got a job in Alaska in like the 1970s.

And he owns the he has like a lease to have a cabin out there in this very remote part of the Arctic. Yeah. And once he's dead like this, is it like no one else can go back to the government? Yeah, I don't think anybody else is going to be allowed, but it's it's another amazing documentary. And he's a guy who's a really he's an American guy who's really articulate, very interesting guy, very intelligent guy who loves living like this and raise his family out there.

And his his wife is American Eskimo. And it's a fucking amazing way of life. I don't want to live I want to live like that. I mean, I like cities. I can't I like all that stuff. But there's something incredibly compelling about being completely reliant on nature and your own, you know, ingenuity and hard work. And he was talking about it in this documentary where the vice people this is back when Vice was, you know, just starting out to this vice guide to travel was one of their earlier series that they were doing on on YouTube.

And it's it's really cool when you're seeing this guy who's this reporter who has no experience like this at all, interacting with this guy and him explaining his life and why he lives like this and why it's so important to him.

And I think maybe that's why people find their way back to nature in some way, shape or form, like they want a cabin somewhere.

They they, like go into the mountains and I go in a big sky. They're like going to Park City. That's the dream for people.

Yeah, I think like but it's still nice to be able to, you know, drive in and go to the grocery store.

It's nice to go to a restaurant. You know, it is not the one that's going to be prepared. I was looking smart now. Exactly. I might not even know what's going on, but it doesn't even need to. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

For that people, I think also this is a little bit of a wake up call for people as far as how soft we've gotten generally as a people. And I'll say from the end of World War Two for those guys, they came back and got back to work, didn't complain, and built this country into what it is today. But since then, we've gotten a little soft and people are like, oh, wait a second, maybe it would have been better had I had like a week of food or maybe I would have had, you know, maybe two.

I need to go to have a gun in the house. And all we do, it's in that safe. And I haven't shot it in years or was saved. My dad gave it to me. Maybe I should learn how to maybe use it in case the police aren't there for me when I need him to. Or do we have fire extinguishers in the house? Do we know how to use them or those things expired? The kids know how to use them, like all those little types of questions once again gets back to bandwidth.

So if you're worried about that stuff, you know what you're not worried about? How do you adapt your business? How do you adapt to having your family at home and moving forward here when maybe you don't have a job anymore and you need to get creative? So you're worried instead about how many beans are in the cap, but instead if you had oh, we have three and everybody's experience is going to be different.

What they're comfortable with as far as their levels of preparedness, and it's not about being paranoid, it's just allowing you to focus elsewhere. If there's a natural disaster here in California, like an earthquake, you know, other places, you know, tsunami or whatever it is, hurricanes or whatever, it allows you then to focus where you need to be focused. And some people will be like three days of food and maybe a little water. And I need something to filter water with in case I turn on the tap and there's nothing and comes out.

It's brown. So everybody's level is going to be different.

But I think this is a wake up call and I'm not super confident that people going forward will take those lessons and act on them, because that's what's important. Most will slide right back into complacency. Unfortunately, I think that you're that you're right. But it's funny.

When my wife was like, oh, now I see why we have all this stuff. And, you know, it's that crazy stuff, but it's just I like being prepared. It's not just from being a SEAL. It's from before that I had always been drawn to the outdoors and wanting to be prepared and know how to to live out there, survive or whatever else I have to spend. It's always been a part of me, so I was very natural for us to have a couple of guns, have some ammo, have some water or have some food.

Because when this hit, you know, what I did book was coming out and I had to figure out how to adapt very quickly to the changing environment and launch it in. To me, it was very important to do it in an appropriate way and do as much good as I could at the same time by helping independent bookstores who have no foot traffic, that sort of thing. But very quickly, I had to take a breath, look around and adapt.

And I didn't have to worry about food or water or filtration systems or ammo or because prepared, we already had that.

So I got to put all my effort into figuring out how to adapt to the changing conditions.

Did you get a lot of questions from people like how do I get a gun?

Yes, a lot of California people, the lines around the block in front of gun stores were hilarious.

They didn't realize you couldn't just walk in. They've heard about this loophole. How can I what was that loophole that they keep talking about?

How do I just get one of these? No, I can't even loan you one, because if I loan you why you walk more than about 20 yards away or whatever, now it's an illegal transfer of a firearm. Yeah. So sorry, I might have 300 of them, but guess who's not getting any you because you didn't prepare. And I don't want to be a felon.

Well, there's also so many people that were anti-gun that now want a gun. I mean, it is hilarious.

It's really interesting to see like this is where people are protected. And when societies weren't running great and we, you know, up until this pandemic, at least we had a wonderful society. I mean, it's like I mean, there are problems with every society. There's it's certainly not perfect. And there's certainly a lot of crime. And certainly certainly there's things wrong. But however, it is absolutely the best time in history to be a human being and to be alive, especially in this country.

It's so many people like, why would you need a gun? No one needs a gun. The First Amendment's bullshit, when you take all the guns, now that the pandemic hits, those same people are like, oh, OK, now I get it.

There's not enough cops in the world to deal with riots. If if there's mass riots in the street and people are breaking into people's houses and the world becomes lawless because the economy has absolutely collapsed and people that were maybe like a little bit sketchy just go on to become a full on criminal that is absolutely inside the realm of possibility.

And we need to recognize that. And the people that were anti-gun there is I mean, a great percentage of them now are saying to me, like, I either want a gun or I get it or how do I get a gun or how do I train like I see those videos. Are you training? How do you train with a gun? Where do you go? How do you how did you start? And then all these questions, where do you hunt?

Like the Google search is on hunting must be through the roof. I would think so. I would think so. Because if you're worried about food, like my friend went to the grocery store right after the big thing hit and everything was shut down, he said all I could find was one package of ground beef.

Yeah, I said, we're definitely not worried about. Yeah, you're not one of us to come over here, man. I got three commercial free. I'll hook you up. I'll give you. I've been given a lot of my friends, me, I love doing it. I do this all. I send me a picture of your food lot as well. See, I want to see what looks like when you cook it. Yeah.

I mean, this isn't the first time. This is the first time that you've been somewhere else and you've been able to.

It's not L.A. riots and you're seeing the Korean shopkeepers defending their stores. Yeah, it's not Katrina where you're hearing a few things about the police, not maybe confiscating firearms there, but then not not being able to protect you. But, you know, if you live in, you know, Montana or you're maybe you're in upstate New York or whatever and you're seeing that on the news and then you go back to making your dinner and having whatever, it's not real.

Now, this one, I think, was real for more people. For everybody. Yeah. Because the whole country is locked down. Even Montana, which has a very low number of deaths and a very low number of infections, still has state wide social distancing rules. The media to screw those guys are all doing their podcast from their homes remotely.

It's such a different deal. This drove it home for people. I think it did.

It drove home the vulnerable. And I think this is a good dry run, because this is and I don't want to disrespect anybody who's died or anybody who's got sick, but this is not the worst pandemic the world's ever experienced. It's not it's it's it's not nearly as bad as like the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed 50 million people worldwide. So this is a smaller number, still bad, smaller number. But this is a wake up call that this kind of thing is a real possibility.

And then take this and then couple it with, OK, a terrorist attack or take this and couple it with a natural disaster. Now, you have two things going on. Now you have a pandemic and now you have a huge earthquake here in California. You have fires, you have a tsunami, whatever it is.

So you have have those things or civil unrest somewhere. Yeah. So that's three things. Now, choose one or choose any of those or maybe someone's watching and this is the time because we're weak and you get hit with a cyber attack from somewhere and all of a sudden you're at home and your credit cards don't work.

And all this data has been gathered over the last 10, 15 years on people credit card information. I mean, they're building in China, all these huge fields of that collect data, huge hard drives. Essentially, they collect data. So now you're at home and you want to learn from your Whole Foods deliveries or whatever, not working credit cards. Try this next one. Oh, this one's not working now. What do you do? So there's so it can get worse.

You can get a lot worse. Yeah. And but being prepared just a little bit, it's OK to get crazy, but it'd be nice to prepare to defend your family.

For me as a husband father, I feel that's my responsibility as a citizen, that's my responsibility, that's one of my jobs is to be able to prepare my family for and defend my family if need be. So my family might be maybe a little bit different, but my wife's been to Thunder Ranch up in Oregon, training on both pistols and ours up there. Our daughter has been hunting since she's seven. You know, she's very comfortable with firearms, but it's just natural.

And I think it's just natural for us as people to want to protect that. The greatest gift of life. Yeah, not just ours, but those that we love as well. So I think it seemed.

Like it was not inside the real world of problems that most people are going to have to deal with before this and now that they've seen like, oh, the the actual structure of our civilization is very thin. The veil that keeps you from bad things happening is very small.

And it's just we lived in this nice little Goldilocks zone where nothing was happening, where there wasn't any pandemics, it wasn't any like besides 9/11, there's no real attacks on American soil other than that one day. So you look at the United States over this long period of time, you're like, wow, this is like the most amazing time ever to be alive and everything is going so great. This is just how it's going to be now forever. And then something like this happens and people realize like, oh, and especially I feel terrible for the people that work hard every day and then their jobs taken away from them.

That's no fault of their own. They're not lazy. They're not drug addicts. They're not they didn't gamble it all the way. One day they woke up in the world had changed and now they don't have food, money. It's tough. Talk hard.

And it's yeah. It's also one of the well, that's the other piece. When we talk about being prepared, it's the one that often gets overlooked. When you're talking about preparedness, is that financial success? So, yeah. And for everybody, it's going to be going to be different. Is it one month worth of bills? Is it two? Is it three?

That's what the experts say or whatever.

Everyone's going to be different. But it's important, I think, going forward for people to realize if they weren't prepared financially for this, that going forward they need to start putting a little bit of where they need to talk to somebody about how they best can invest because things aren't always going to be rose. You're going to face adversity in life. We're just like you're facing it as a country now. Like, yeah, you're going to face it in life as well.

It doesn't have to be a pandemic. You could just lose your job. Yeah. Or something could happen to a family member, whatever it may be. It doesn't need to be a pandemic or a terrorist attack or anything. These global calamities, it can just be you losing your job or getting sick or whatever it may be. So having that foundation of financial security, hopefully that's one of those notes people are taking from this going forward so they can be better prepared, not just for any of these calamities we're talking about, but just for normal everyday life, because you're going to get hit, you're going to get knocked out and you're going to have to get up and keep moving forward.

And, you know, it's going to help you with that is not wasting bandwidth on figuring out where that are going to pay that next bill because you're prepared ahead of time.

Yeah, a little bit. I hope all people also recognize that if you're in a dead end job and you've been just playing it safe and then it got taken away from you because this pandemic and even though you played it safe and you did this terrible job that sucks, like you realize like maybe I should have chased my dream, you know, maybe there's a chance. I mean, like a guy like you who takes. But I want to get back to this because we never really we never really finished how the book got.

You talked about how you wrote it off on some tangents. Yeah, we did go on tangent, but that your story is one of the great American success stories. I mean, that is the story. The story is the guy has a dream or the woman has a dream, whoever works hard and then one day figures out a way to make it happen. That's it. And that's what you did.

That's it. And I didn't that whole thing about just not worried about it not happening. I mean, it can always not happen. It's good to have contingency plans for sure. I had I didn't have any specific contingency plans, but I, I knew I was I was going to be OK.

But you when you sent it off, I want to get to the I want to get a lot of things. I want to ask you how you created Reese, how he created these characters. But when you sent it off, like what does it feel like when you've spent a year and, what, eight months or something, a year and four months first and then another four months to edit and then you're like, all right? And you send it off?

What does that what does that feel? And like, it was awesome.

It was awesome. Coronado, California, I went to the Appstore on on the main street there called Orange Avenue. And I wanted to get next day er tracking, you know, everyday insurance, whatever you could possibly do, and show your other copies of it yourself. So it's all perfect.

And what I found out from taking those notes in the car when I was talking to Brad or I found out how Emily Bezler, who is his editor, who is Vince Flynn's editor, who did the Mitch rap series, who sadly passed away a few years ago. But he wrote a book called Term Limits in the late 90s that really defined the modern political thriller. So I knew the font that she liked. I knew the spacing that she liked. And also I made a space and she like the aerial two and a half.

It's in my old my old notes now. It doesn't matter so much. But back then I wanted to make it as I wanted to do everything I possibly could to increase my chances of success or making her not just look at it and have anything.

If it was just psychological, like, oh, it's in the wrong font, I did you specifically juice up the beginning chapter, the first chapter just to make it very riveting. Yes. Rahbar Keeper. Absolutely. Yep. You like that? Because I knew what I liked and what I liked reading and I knew I like sniper stuff and I had that background and I could weave all that in there. And, you know, I didn't just say he's walking in his shoes.

You know, they're solemn and boots. Why? Because that's what I use downrange are utilizing second gear, because while my buddy John Hart started Zica and also it would make him blend in to that environment. So he's not dressed in military stuff in the beginning. So I. To do all these sorts of sorts of things were very natural to do and and get him to a place where the reader wants to turn the page right. How do I make the reader want to turn to that next chapter and I want to keep him up at night?

How do I make them want to go through the entire night to finish this thing?

Did you spend the most time on the first chapter because of that? Nope. I think was all pretty, very pretty much the same on every chapter. I would say when you go back to edits, is really where you spend time dialing it in and trying to remember there weren't very many edits on the first one from New York.

I thought there was going to be a ton, but because maybe it was because I had that yellow sticky. From listening to your show with Steven Pressfield, I had that thing that said revenge. I tied every single paragraph, chapter or whatever had to directly or more importantly, indirectly tie back to that theme to keep the reader going. Same thing with the second one. I had to directly or indirectly tie back to redemption somehow, even if it was very subtle.

What was your savage son? The dark side of man. So it's explores the Hunter versus Hunter dynamic through the dark side of man. So really finding out A is James Reese the protagonist? Is he the killer? Is he is he a soldier? What is he as a hunter or is he all three of these things? So exploring that, because a lot of us are drawn to these to these jobs or defending our country, defending the guys to our right and left home or downrange.

So why are we doing that? Is it because of this country where people have been doing this from the beginning of time? They've been defending the tribe. They've been picking up the same type of weapons to provide meals for that for that tribe. They've been passing down lessons on how to hunt and how to defeat other tribes in battle to ensure the success and the continuation of their bloodline. So why are we still doing that today? Is it all for God and country or is there something more?

And so that's what I was really exploring with with the other one. But but the other one. But but yeah, the important thing is to get to the end of that chapter and to have the person want to turn the page and then look forward and also to establish a relationship with the character. Like I knew creating James Reese. I wanted to be a likable guy. Like I want people, people that want to spend time with someone they don't like.

That's like, why would you do that? So I wanted people to invest in this character, to like him, to want to sit down and have a beer with him. But also he needed to have that background, the training, the experience to be able to flip that switch when everything's taken away and essentially become the terrorist, become the insurgent that he'd been fighting for the last at that point, six years at war and use those tactics, techniques and procedures that worked so well against us from the enemy side in Iraq and Afghanistan and use those here on the home front.

So it's a it's more than just a story of revenge, that first one. It's really also about someone who comes home and brings the warriors from Iraq and Afghanistan home to people who have been sending young men and women to their deaths for close to twenty years now. So it's you can read it a couple of different levels, depending on how much you want to admit how deep you want to go into it.

Now, when you sent it to her, how long did it take before they respond? Almost immediately.

Really? Yeah, it was so cool. So I sent it off. I'm super excited. I totally remember because after I put it, after I mailed it, I'm in the street walking back to the Land Cruiser and this crazy lady walks out into the street from around the corner in this nightgown. And I'm like, what's going on? And she's like, there's a there's a dead in my house. Can you help me? I'm like, What?

And it was right there, like fifty feet away.

And I couldn't say no. So I remembered it vividly that I sent this off. I had my my lifetime dream. I get it in the mail to Emily Bessler, Simon and Schuster and off it goes. And I'm taking that breath and I take a couple of steps towards the car. And this lady runs around the corner, like in a in just frantic look in her eye. And I'm like, yeah, I'll help you. And so I went into this house and it was like this Horder House.

There were just stuff everywhere. I was crazy. So I had to go to this top level, this old Victorian house and take this dead rat and take it down.

You think you're going to die in there? Imagine if you send out it was all shaky, you know, it was how it ends. It was like a serial killer. But I just remember that distinctly because it was so odd. But yeah. So set it off. And then I didn't know, like, you don't know. Are they going to call you back. Are they not are they going to read one word of it and just say or I have an opening at all.

Who knows.

But about two weeks or about two weeks when I say immediately, I mean like two weeks, it's pretty quick. Yeah, pretty quick. I get a call from from Brad Thor and the car over. I'm in Texas. I'm on. I just finished his hunt and I pull over the side of the road and he said, hey, you've been struck by lightning. And I was like, what? And he said, Yeah, well, here was a this is true.

I mailed it in November of twenty sixteen. So I got out of the military in July or June 2016, mailed it in November, and then I heard back at early December. Wow. I was crazy. And yeah, she said she loves it and she wants to publish it. And later I found out that she called him because he's their political thriller guy and she's like, hey, you know, I got Jack Haaz manuscript and I love it, but you're ah, you're a guy would you want me to do.

And he's like, I want you to publish Jack. And that was so cool. So cool. So he. To put the kibosh on it, if you know, maybe I don't know, he's so great, he's so awesome and what he told me when we first talked, like I said, he didn't he said, don't call me throughout this next year when you're writing. But he did say, is that the only difference between a published author and an unpublished author is that the published author never quit.

And so for me from Buddz and having that bell right there that's within sight of you during hell week, we put it in the in the trailer hitch of these vehicles that follow you everywhere. So you don't even have to run anywhere. You just have to, like, take a few steps and ring this thing and you're done. So that really resonated with me because of that. And I just I love that. I'm like, all right, I can I can do this.

And and I always knew I could anyway, because I had that background and had that foundation I knew I was going to do. And I was I was so excited. So anyway, he told me that that next couple of weeks later or mid-December, I fly to New York and we sit down. I think she wanted to make sure that I wasn't a crazy person. So we get to new specially after you read your books. But who the fuck is coming up with this shit?

Good point. In that first one, we'll tell you that there's a first one. There's like in this third one if you've got to the torture scene yet. Well, there's something similar. I read the whole book and I went through the whole book. So tortures through the torture scene. Yeah. So there's that one. And then the second one, there's another torture scene. And then in this other, the first one, there's one that I got from the Shining Path guerrilla movement in South America.

And what they used to do is and they got it from somewhere too, but they actually eviscerate you while you're alive and make you walk around a tree. So your intestines are now wrapped around this tree and then the jungle eat you alive. Yeah, it's crazy. So I was worried that might be a little off-putting to somebody in New York in publishing. But later I found out that that's like everyone's favorite chapter from the book, especially people you wouldn't expect, like librarians and like it.

People absolutely love it. But I guess in New York and I'm little economic, OK, I run to make a good impression. So I bring a suit and I have never had to do this before. So I heard of people. You hang it in the bathroom and you let the steam get to it to get the wrinkles out of the suit. So I do that and I'm getting ready. And then I go to put the suit on. It's soaking wet and it's December.

It's New York. It's freezing. I don't have like a coat like other people in New York have or scarves or whatever they wear. And so I put this thing on and I walk. I'm like soaking wet and I have to walk to this coffee place. And by the time I get there, I'm like a sheet of ice and I get there, make sure I'm there an hour early. And I gave the guy I'm like forty bucks or something to try to wait for a table to be ready.

That was a little more private than the other table in the coffee shop. And so when we go I sit down waiting. I ask her what her favorite coffee is ahead of time, but, you know, she shows up. Sit down. We have a great conversation for about 45 minutes to an hour. And she said, hey, I want this thing, but, you know, you need an agent.

And I was like, what do you need to negotiate? Yeah. Yeah, like the Pressfield thing. Didn't say that in there. And when I was learning about the war of art and the resistance and all that stuff, we talk about agents in there. And I'm like, oh, no, how do I get one of those? She's like, All right, new guy.

I'll introduce you to four and then pick one. And I was like, OK, I also interviewed for and how do you know who the pick.

So it was crazy. So there was two two males, two females. They're all fantastic, all great reputations, all amazing.

The guys I was like it was very obvious that it wasn't they would have been great. You're not going. Yeah, I'm not going to make a wrong choice here. So it was in that sense, I was very lucky. But I said, OK, they're probably not the right ones. But between the two females are both so amazing. But there are 180 out from each other. One had been around since the Tom Clancy days. Small boutique agency represents John Grisham.

So you go in there and you have all these John Grisham posters all over the place. The whole team comes out, sits down and talks to you. It was amazing. She was so awesome.

And and then the other one younger, hadn't really hadn't found her Tom Clancy or Grisham type person yet. Bigger agency that ICM that's out here in Hollywood as well. And it was such a tough decision. It was like a final rose ceremony. I haven't broken up with someone in twenty years, but I felt like I was breaking up with someone because I was so invested in both of these agents. I just like they were both so fantastic. But I felt like I was in Lana'i at the time when I made the decision.

And I was like and I felt like the final rose ceremony and then pick the one with ICM because I thought, you know, for this type of novel and for where I wanted to go with a movie or series or something like that, to be that part of the mosaic and to continue building this foundation of readers, I think that's probably the right choice and I think it was.

So you have this plan to turn this into some sort of a series from the time you release the very first book.

Yeah, from before that. And so what's crazy is that as I'm writing this and they tell you not to think of someone playing your characters, you're writing, but as a child of the 80s, that's almost impossible not to do.

So as I'm writing, the crazy part is like usually you think of like Mark Wahlberg, you think of somebody that had done these sort of things kind of before. But I thought of Chris Pratt and he had just done all he'd done as Parks and Rec. And he'd done he had a small role in Zero Dark Thirty where he plays the seal. He has like a couple of lines in there. And for some reason I'm like, that's the guy really had no connection to him.

And no, it wouldn't have been the obvious choice back then. This is twenty. So I start writing in December of 2014. I think, or early 2015 somewhere there, so so he wasn't this giant movie star that hadn't done any of that stuff yet, and I thought, you know, this is a likable guy and he seems like an awesome dude.

I've got a good feeling from him. And I thought, you know, growing up in the 80s, I love Magnum. Well, you know, he started off as a naval intelligence officer and then they found out about SEALs, the writers. They turned him into a SEAL a couple of seasons into it. And like everybody, love Magnum in the 80s. Women liked him. The guys liked him. You know, nothing not to like about Magnum.

And he also does the first essentially what you would call a murderer on national television with the other person not having a firearm or a weapon. And at the end of I think it season season three by the guy, a guy that had him as pure in Vietnam comes to Hawaii. There's a little conspiracy thing involved. And at the end, he thinks he's walking away. And Magnum asks him if he's seen the sun rise that morning because that morning when his friend, his friend gets killed, there's the sunrise and the guy turns around.

He's like, yes, why? The Magnum turns around and boom. And they stop it right there with this, like, fireball coming out of the end of his 1911. And they freeze it right there. And it was the first time on on television in that primetime hour where someone had killed somebody else. The hero had killed someone else who wasn't armed. I forgot about that.

Very remembering it. Now, that was very controversial.

Yeah. Yeah. And so I thought that's who I need. I need somebody who's a likable guy who's going to invest in this. And I heard he was like pro military and that sort of thing. And and that's the guy. And that's that's all the thought I gave to it. He couldn't have picked a better guy. So awesome. And yet who knew he was going to turn into a drastic park and he hadn't had passengers hadn't done anything serious yet.

But I also thought about because I've been studying this since up my whole life and I thought about in the 80s, look at Tom Hanks did in the 80s. You know, he's in Bosom Buddies. He's in Dragnet, he's in the burbs, he's in Joe versus the Volcano.

And then he does something called Philadelphia in the early 90s and he takes that risk. And since then, he's been able to write his own ticket. He's one of the greatest actors of his generation. And I thought, who is that guy in this generation that needs to stretch a little bit, that needs to do something different. And I'm like, that's that's Chris Pratt. He can do this. And so I thought and then even crazier, before the first book came out, I met Thunder Ranch training, doing some shoot and stuff up there in Oregon.

And I get this call from a guy that I knew in the SEAL teams, and he's like, Hey, bro, do you remember me? And you know, you know, Jared and I, he he was out there in Utah with us and he's like, Hey, bro, you remember me? I'm like, Yeah, of course I remember. You have to go in and talk to him in five years or something.

And we catch up a little bit and he's like, hey, you know, I want to thank you for leaving the SEAL teams.

Don't know if you remember, but you've had me in your office. You sat me down, you talked about transition. You introduced me some people in the private sector and I've never forgotten it. I was like, oh, wow. Hey, of course I do that for you because, I mean, he's an awesome dude, total stud, great operator and wants to get to the team. So I try to help him as best I can. But he really remembered it and he said, hey, I heard you wrote a book.

And I said, yeah, it's coming out in a couple of months here that these Gallie copy things, which are early copies of a novel, I can send one to you. I'd love to send it. And he said, yeah, that'd be great, but I'd like to give one to a friend of mine. And I said, yeah, no problem. Who's that? He said, Chris Pratt. It's like, no way. Wow. Yeah.

So he gives us Chris.

Chris reads it. And next thing you know, he's optioned it before it even comes out.

Are you a guy who believes in fate? Do you believe in destiny?

So when I was in Ramadi in 2005, 2006, that's where I got to think about this a little bit, because every time you left the wire, anything could have been an IED and you could have either spent that time on the way to target and coming back from Target, worried about, oh, is that a dead donkey on the side? Is that going to blow up and kill me or kill that hit that Humvee in front of me? That piece of trash right there is that covering something else?

Is that it is? Or why are there you could spend every single mission, especially on to and from Target and even on target, worried about that. Or you could focus on the mission, focus on the job, get there, do the job, get back. And at that time I was like, you know, you know, I think I have to resign myself to fate here in a lot of these things. Otherwise, my mind is going to be focused not where it needs to be, but on is that an is that night.

And so I thought, all right, you know what? If I get blown up today, that's just that's just how it was. And everything everything we possibly can to mitigate that. But, you know, it could happen. And I'm not going to spend an inordinate amount of bandwidth worried about that other than trying to mitigate it as best we possibly can. But that's not going to be the focus of my everything that I'm thinking about. It can't be I need to be focused on this mission.

I need to focus on contingencies. There's a firefight. I need to figure out what assets are available to come in here for Karaf or whatever else, whatever we have overhead. How do we how do we maneuver here? All those things like that's what I need to worry. What's your quick reaction force? So you have those set up at different places in case you get hit so they can come on and usually in like Bradleys or Abrams, sometimes different vehicles that have a little more firepower than you do as you're sneaking through the streets.

So so I kind of resigned myself to fate. And there's a book called The Bridge at St. Louis Rey. And it was like, I forget how many people say five or six people that are on this bridge and it collapses and the story is how each one of them got to be on that bridge. Why were those six people, the ones that were on that bridge at that time and its fate? So so I guess and I really thought about it too much since then, other than that experience in in Iraq and just having to or feeling like I had resigned myself to it.

That thing is eerie, though. It's crazy. It's a little eerie. I mean, wonderfully eerie.

No eerie may be the worst word for it because pretty amazing. I feel very fortunate.

Yeah.

And yeah, it's one of those things that you kind of maybe made that happen, like maybe you kind of put that out there as you were writing it, thinking about him, maybe. I don't know.

I say that and I said, shut up, hippie like before. But he's like, oh, do you got a crystal up your ass to you know, it's like but you have know.

And if I hadn't if I was like, I don't know.

I mean, I was, you know, whatever an average deal or whatever. But if I hadn't taken the time to sit down with Jared and like maybe Chris doesn't even know this exists today. Right. And other crazy part of this, I thought of Antoine Fuqua directing it. Really directing it. Yeah. Why? Why why him?

Because I love shooting training day. He did training day. I got the Oscar for training day, Magnificent Seven. I knew we'd worked with Chris on on Magnificent Seven. I actually did know someone who knew him, but so I so I did have that connection through someone, someone else. But I love Shooter, which is based on the book Point of Impact by Stephen Hunter with Mark Wahlberg. I love that movie because I could I love the book so much.

They made it more modern for today's time. But it's a Vietnam sniper is probably Swiger who had originally is. But I just thought he's the guy he's the guy to direct this thing. And now they're both doing it, which is crazy. That is crazy. Yeah.

That's so weird, man, that you had those two people in your head. Like, that's what makes me think.

I don't I don't not believe that it's possible to manifest something, but I think most of the people that talk about that stuff are full of shit. Yeah. That's where it's a problem. Like most of the people that talk about that stuff, they're trying to sell you something that, well, you know, you can make your life happen and you just need a dream board and write all those things down. There's a lot of that stuff is horseshit because you got to do the work right.

That's it. But part of me thinks that if you do do the work and you do have that focus and that intensity, I feel like there might be some sort of frequency that you can tap in where you make things more likely to happen or possibly you can make things happen. But the thing is, you know, like you only hear those stories from the people that are successful. Like how many people? Like I wrote a book had Chris Pratt in my head and I said, Chris.

Yeah. And he's like, get the fuck away from me.

You know, it's totally crazy how all that all that stuff kind of comes to comes together.

You couldn't have picked a better guy than he is such a good guy. He's such a great guy. He's almost weird. Weirdly nice.

Yeah. No, he's not. I mean, it's just different from around here.

Maybe I don't know, but he's very different in terms of like Hollywood actors, like there's a few like him, like, you know, it's like people love to say that actors are full of shit, they're gross and they're self-centered narcissists. And yeah, it's true. A lot of times it's it really. But it's not true all the time. Yeah. And Chris is a great example of a guy who's like he's a very religious guy, very pro military, very he's a really positive guy, very, very, very friendly guy.

He's not your typical actor. Yeah. No, it's so great to me. Also a huge movie star. So it's weird. It's like he's not that, you know, guy who does Coke and goes to parties and he's different. Different animal. Yeah, they do exist. Male and female. There's there are actresses that are great people. They just they just really genuinely enjoy acting. But for the most part, the people that get into it are people that need a disproportionate amount of attention.

And for the most part, the people that need a disproportionate amount of attention are disproportionately annoying, you know.

Yeah. And usually they like to get rid of the author right away when you option something, because they're like, I want to get rid of that guy because he's going to be on set and he's to be like, that's not my vision. You're ruining my book or whatever. So I'd like to get rid of you. But Chris wanted me involved, so I got to help out on the on the pilot script.

I just think that's awesome. It is so good.

Now, is this a Netflix things that we're doing? It's still classified. OK, they're doing some some announcement at some point, but it's a streaming service.

Oh, that's right. OK, I know what it is. I forgot. Yeah. Just get to ten part series, maybe something like that. Eight to ten parts per. That's part. Yeah. Because if they tried to jam that, you know, I don't work, I do a movie. Well you don't have to anymore. Yeah. It's great.

People like oh he looks genius right. Yes. Especially now. Yeah. It's like such a good move.

Another crazy fate thing. Because when you were doing that, like when you were writing that in 2016, the, the streaming thing wasn't what it is today. Right. And even when we did the deal, it was like a movie.

It was kind of like that, that it was early twenty, twenty, eighteen when we did the deal. And it's like, well. Your series or movie, so it's both. It could be both in the contract and now and then they decided to do the series, you know, earlier on before covid even was on the radar. But now it looks like. Yeah, genius move.

Well, now, like series have a giant advantage over movies. Now movies are getting released on. Yeah, it's a really interesting thing. Today, one of the theater chains was saying that they're not going to have Universal Films anymore because Universal release troll's on direct to demand with people with Apple TV and Amazon and stuff like that. So these cinemas are now going to war, like publicly going to war with the studios because they're saying, hey, you need to release your fucking movies in our theaters.

We got a business together. And then the theaters like, you know, the movie production companies like you might not have a business and six months off because who the fuck is going to go to the movies now?

I know even when they're like, OK, it's all good, we're open up May 1st or whatever it is or June. Yeah. Who's going to rush right back with our kids?

It's not going to be what it used to be. Yeah, it's going to take a year all the way down in time. Yeah, they were because.

Well, I've been saying forever. I would love if you know I a big TV at home. I would love if I could just watch movies on TV. I don't want to go to the movie and some guy's talking to his girlfriend in the middle of the movie and ruin and everything, or people are checking their phones or see the light from their phone or some weird guy walks in.

All of a sudden you're like a kind of like right away. I'm like looking at that. Yes, exactly. He's got a backpack. Does that mean. Yeah, I'm going to see here the whole time with my kids just on edge the entire time he's worried about this. Where are the exits? You know, that sort of thing, which is important to do in the movie theater. It's like there's smoke or whatever. You know, you can go to the wall and down the wall to get like that sort of stuff.

But yeah, it's yeah. Why don't stay and stay at home, enjoy it at home, but make your popcorn at home. So it's looking like a good move now. But going back to that, going back to the fate thing.

So it's also like what if I had not been a you know, the operator or whatever that I was? What if the guy had a different impression of me that sat next to Brad Thor at the fundraiser? He's not going to recommend me to to Brad Thor. If I was if he had a bad impression or I'm here to talk about I was a bad operator or had a bad reputation or whatever else, he's not going to mention my name to Brad Thor.

So all those little things that kind of came together or what if I didn't read growing up? I didn't read all these guys like David Morrell created Rambo in 1972 and a Brotherhood of the Rose early on, which also solidified me to go into the SEAL teams. I was already on the path, but he has one sentence in that book, Brotherhood of the Rose, that talks about SEALs. And I had such a good time, such a great experience reading that novel that I knew that one day I'd write in the same genre as he does.

And now he's a he's a dear friend. Now he's an incredible guy. So all those little things just kind of happened. I mean, they happened, but I did them because I was passionate about the most passionate about reading, passionate about writing, passionate about serving my country, passionate about being the best operator I could possibly be. So I always focused on those things. And then, you know, these other things kind of it helped it helped propel this whole thing forward.

So that seems like the formula for success and everything really, really does, like being passionate about something, focusing all your attention and all your energy and really trying to do your best. It's something that seems like the formula.

Well, to the work, yeah. It's that whole Pressfield book is called Do the Work. You have to do that before anything else can happen. You can't just wish that something was going to happen. And, you know, you have to sit down and do the work, whether it's right comedy, whether it's write a novel. Yeah, it's a start again. Whatever you're going to do, you have to sit down and do the work.

And people, don't they, for whatever reason, don't quantify in their head that all those little things you don't feel like doing when you just make yourself do them, they all add up. Yeah. And it really make something happen that doesn't happen before.

It's not going to happen otherwise. No one's going to do it for you know, no one's going to hear authors talking all the time about what their publisher doesn't do for them.

So I hear that about comics, too. My agent doesn't do anything to be undeniable. They can't do shit then. Yeah, for me, I'm like, well, I have no background. I'm not coming from politics. I'm not coming from sports. I'm not coming from anything where I have any sort of a following that's going to, you know, push me forward in this type of a realm. What do they they don't owe me anything. I owe them something.

I need to prove myself to them. Yeah. And prove that I was a good investment because most books don't make back their initial investment. So you have to make most books. Yeah. Most real. There's a few of them. I like movies like all the movie, all the Avengers and all that sort of stuff. Makes the money back for the studios, for all the other ones that no one sees that maybe when Oscars but aren't making back their money.

So same thing in publishing. There's a few at the top like the Stephen Kings and Brad and Vince Flynn's and all that. They make it back for all the books that don't make back their investment. So I was like, I need to prove myself to Simon and Schuster. How am I going to do that? Well, I owe them. They gave me this shot. And so I'm not going to leave any rock unturned. I'm going to look at things like from other industries, like black rifle, coffee, how do they build a coffee company?

I got to get out of the military and out of the agency. How did these guys get together and make some YouTube videos and all of a sudden now they have this amazing company?

Well, if you'd bought a huge company, it's amazing product at its base. But you know what else they did? Oh, they did some advertising. They did some marketing. They did their own marketing on. Advertising on. Social media platforms and they connected with other people that had similar interests or that they thought might be able to then grow the brand and also help those other brands along the way.

Well, it's also it's authentic. Look, Evan, really. Oh, Evan Hafer, the CEO of Black Coffee, has always been a coffee freak like his whole life used to fucking roast coffee in the back of his home.

Unemployment is amazing. Yeah, he's great. And he takes you through. You sense that passion when he talks about coffee.

It's like me talking about writing. You know, you can sense that passion. And it's incredible. I learned so much about coffee from him. Now I'm turning into more of a coffee snob like before I wasn't.

But now that I know him and all those guys and have seen the process and now I'm a total coffee snob, does he give you a hard time because Reece likes honey and a little bit cream in his coffee? Not as much as I thought he would, because, you know, when he makes coffee, it's really good without anything in it, like when he knows what he's doing and they do that thing with a glass deal and the whole thing, it's only made it out.

Yeah. And they weigh it and the whole thing. It's awesome for me. I mean, getting up in the morning, it's chaos. The kids or, you know, it's insanity. And so we just hit the coffee maker like rival coffees in there and toss in some honey tossing some cream. So that's you.

You're a funny guy. Yeah. Oh, yes, I do.

You I want to make my career and anybody give you shit about putting honey in your coffee? Yes. So it's just like the protagonist of these stories, they like their coffee black. Well, in real life, a lot of SEALs and special forces guys like their coffee black also. They like to suffer and yeah, I guess. But I always liked, you know, that latte and get that caramel macchiato latte. So I always I always did that.

And then I found out about Honey in coffee and honey and tea later. But it just was very natural for me to write that into the character because he has a background similar to to me as a former Navy SEAL sniper that becomes an officer and he's at this point in his time in uniform or he's going to get out and take care of his family, which is where I was when I started writing it. So I wanted him to be relatable.

I didn't want him to be the superhero. I wanted it to be someone that wasn't was good at some things like cooking indoors, like take a snapshot, some of the things that I'm OK at, but then also surveillant side of the house, some of the things that we don't typically do in the SEAL team, maybe he's not as good at those sorts of things. And maybe he drives a F.J. six to Land Cruiser because I love Land Cruisers.

And there's also, you know, that whole subculture of people that love Land Cruisers you can bring into the fold also. So it's very natural for me to talk about those vehicles and then to develop characters by talking about a defender, 110 Land Cruiser, you know, give each other a hard time, whatever else, or nine. Mm, 45 or whatever, just use those things as character development tools. So it was very natural for me to add honey and cream to the protagonist coffee because that's what I drink at home daily.

That's got to be the interesting one of one of the many, many interesting things about writing a character is you can incorporate your own little quirks and Resko watches, you know.

Yeah, sure.

I have a Rusko, all the different stuff that you're you mean and the gear thing too. It's like you're very meticulous and very specific about the type of gear and and how he prepares everything. Yeah.

Be very, very odd for me not to do that. And some people don't like it. And there are plenty of books where someone takes the safety off on their block before they shoot someone or something like that or they, you know, click it off on a revolver or whatever. Like there's plenty of books out there that do that. And, you know, I won't make a mistake that egregious. I'm sure I'll make a mistake at some point for the people that really.

But when you see a mistake like that, doesn't it take you out a little bit? It's like, oh, I'm going to try not to pay attention.

It's like watching a movie where they really kind of jack something up. And I'm like, oh, because the worst thing to do is watch like a SEAL movie with a seal or a horror movie or a police movie with a cop or whatever. That's all going to tell you about all the mistakes so you can enjoy the film. So I try to just enjoy them for what they are. But it does take you out. It's like, oh, what else did they get?

Kind of right at the guys, like writing the safety off on this guy. Right. So so for me, it's very natural to incorporate that gear. And it's also very natural for me to talk about it because I was so into it for so long that I know a lot of people in these industries. And like this is an Aries watch right here. I was at the CIA as friends with Evan Hafer, you know, so I talk to him and be like, hey, this dude legit?

And he's like, oh, yeah, he's legit. So so, like, all that stuff gets woven in there as well. It's just so natural for me to do. And also, you know, when I see somebody, I can tell a lot about them by what they're carrying, how they're carrying it, you know, kind of belt they're they're using, you know, what kind of shoes they're wearing, what kind of knife is in their pocket.

Like, I can tell a lot about them. It tells a story immediately. So I'm reading them without them saying one word. And so my characters do that as well. And then I use those tools to describe other characters that that that aren't me, that aren't a seal, that aren't somebody else. Well, I know how ASDF guys travel or how they how they have their packs or whatever, whatever, whatever it is, or I know someone that doesn't really know what they're doing.

This character doesn't really know what they're doing. So yeah, he's going to be carrying his 1911. That's brand new that he's not carrying cockblock doesn't have one of the chamber, whatever it is like. I can tell a lot about someone just by looking at their setup with a quick glance. So it's very natural for me to do that in stories as well. And it gives me a lot to work with. How many how many seals are novelists?

So it's not common and. Our SEALs, obviously, who go out and write nonfiction. Yeah, the Richard Marcinko who created Dick Marcinko, I read those books. Yeah. Those are the first books I've ever read on military and. Oh, nice. Yeah.

Early 90s. And when that came out, I was so excited because I had read everything you possibly could on SEALs up until that point because I wanted to be a SEAL since I was seven years old, I knew I was going to be in the military even before those books come out.

Those came out in the 90s. So I was didn't really. Yeah, early 90s. That was the first one.

I don't feel like I read them. Yeah. I read World War I felt like I read them before then, but I guess that makes sense. Yeah. Nine times, you know, times kind of blends together.

So when I found out, hey, there's an autobiography coming out about the guy that started this command, Damasak on the East Coast is counterterrorist unit. I was so excited to read that book.

Wasn't there an issue? Two people were kind of upset that he was telling these stories. I think so. But as a kid reading that, I didn't know any of that, you know, any of that backstory, it was like, oh, this is amazing because I've had an incredible life to be able to write a book. And the first commanding officer of Delta Force wrote a book called The Delta Force and I think 1986, which really goes into the Iranian hostage crisis and does what happened at Desert One in 1980.

And that was a very formative time for me because I knew I was going in the military. And at the time, Walter Cronkite's on TV were watching it during dinner. He's counting down the days that U.S. personnel have been taken hostage in Iran. And I'm seeing those click down everything I pick up every single night. And I'm wondering and I see the pictures, black and white photos of U.S. military and people in the State Department. I didn't know that at the time.

I'm going to see a guy in a suit and a guy in a military uniform blindfolded in black and white photos on the cover of the newspaper. And I'm wondering, why are why is the United States standing by and letting this happen, even though I'm six years old at the time? Why is this happening? Why don't we go in there and get those guys and then desert what happens? And of course, that's that's on the mind. It's still shades.

Everything we do is a special. This Special Operations was a big black eye for the country special operations.

And explain to people what happens. So many people. So about six months after the hostages were taken in Iran. So they were taken, I think, in November of 1979 and about six months. They were eventually held for 444 days. But about five, six months into that, we made an attempt to rescue them. So they're being held at the embassy, still in an adjacent building, I think. And we was the first use that most people know of of what's called Delta Force.

So our premier counterterrorist unit that is modeled after the British SAS and the British SAS has been in service for a long time. So we had guys that went through their program in the 60s even, and they took those lessons and created ours because late 60s, mid 70s, there's a lot of hijackings. We have that Munich Olympics. We have all of these these these terrorist events, and we don't really have a good way to counter them. And so Delta Force is created and their first test was Operation Eagle Claw to rescue the hostages in Iran.

So it's just an anniversary of it just happened the other day. So April 1980, we give it a shot and it didn't work out. So what happened was we have Marine pilots flying these Sea Stallion helicopters off. I think it was the USS Nimitz. I think so they're flying off an aircraft carrier. They're meeting the assaulters from Delta Force who are flying in on C-130 from an island called Massara in the Gulf of Oman, where a place where we would then launch into Afghanistan years later.

Interestingly enough, I spent a little time, time there, and they were going to meet up in the desert and outside of Tehran, Iran, a few hundred miles outside the city. So the C-130 land is C-130 land that have fuel. Helicopters land from the aircraft carrier there in refuel those helos and the planes are going back to MASSARA and the helicopters are going to get closer to Tehran. So they're gonna get closer. They're going to land. They're going to get camouflaged during the day.

And then some guys who have been on the ground in Tehran, this is the best part of the story that no one really talks about. We've had guys on the ground in Iran. We had an E6 Air Force guy that spoke Farsi. We had a special operations legend, Dick Meadow's, who was also on the Sonti raid in Vietnam. And we have two Special Forces guys out of Germany and then two CIA assets. He once called Bob and one of the named Mohammed, and they had to get vehicles out there to the hide site where the Delta Force guys are.

And then they're going to assault. They're going to go in, they're going to retake the embassy. They're going to get the hostages. And then the helicopter is going to take back off land in a soccer stadium next door and they're going to extract from their exfil from there. So what happened was the planes land helicopters have some mechanical problems. People get lost in the sandstorm. They needed six to do the mission. They launched with eight. Less than six make it to that linkup point in the desert.

So they have to scrap it's called nogo criteria. So it takes a decision essentially away from the ground force commander, because ahead of time, he knows that if we don't have if we have four helicopters, we can't do this mission. So instead of being on the ground saying, OK, we have four, how many guys do you have? Can we do it with this? Those decisions have been made ahead of time in the planning process. So the helicopters land not enough.

They scrapped the mission abort. And what would have happened is they would have gone back and they would have reconstituted and gone after the hostages a few days later.

But one of the helicopters in refueling collides with one of the AC 130, a huge explosion. Eight U.S. servicemen die and so they don't go take the hostages. They don't go back for the hostages again. A few days later, Iran moves the hostages, different locations all over Iran to make it a lot more difficult if we had gone after them again. But the next day, President Carter makes an announcement, said we tried to get the hostages, didn't work, had this disaster in the desert, and it was a big black eye for his his presidency and for special operations in general.

But the important part, we took those lessons and we we applied them going forward. So and how we train all together instead of having all these pilots in assaulters and all these people that have never really trained together up until that point. Well, now we do. Now we have a special operations command. We all trained together. So pilots are trained. You're doing all this stuff together. So when 9/11 hit, all those years later, we're much more prepared because of what happened to Desert One.

So that's how we honor those guys that died. That's how we honor that mission is by taking those lessons and apply them going forward. And that's what you know, interestingly enough, that's what you do in life. Also, when you have to learn these lessons and apply them going for it's all about how you apply them going forward.

Well, that's a huge advantage for you as an author, to have all that information, to have that legitimate background, like to be writing about these things, like we're talking about guys who were writing about taking safeties off Glocks, people that really don't know what they're writing about when they do.

It's like I mean, you can be creative and pretend you're a ballerina without a ballet dancer, but I don't think it's going to be the same.

And there's there's an authenticity to the way you write and to the one book that I've read, at least Savage, where you just it there's a frequency that you tap into that is a frequency of a person that has experienced this stuff in real life. You're not imagining you know, there's a lot of there's a lot of stuff where people write about things where they're imagining, you know, there's a movie called Warrior or it's a movie. Oh, yeah, that's great.

They fight two days in a row and when they fought days around, like, get the fuck out of here, much like what do you talk you fight two days in a row. You ever seen someone the day after a fight, the fucking elephant man, the whole body's a mess. Everything swollen like this is nonsense.

But someone that doesn't know is like this in the story. They're going to he's going to lose the first night. But the next night he's going to go ahead. He's going to win. Exactly. Exactly.

They do things that take you out of like you. It's a world they don't really know about. And they're writing about this world, whereas you're writing about a world that you were so deeply embedded in for all those years that when you're writing about it, it's just it's really compelling. It's very interesting. Thank you.

Yeah. I got to incorporate some real world stuff in there, too, like a shot that I didn't take in Najaf, Iraq. And I fictionalize it by having it a memory from Fallujah. And so I morph it around a little bit. But the passion is there. The feelings and emotions behind it are there. And it's woven into the first story. And then and so it was very therapeutic. I get to take and I was very lucky downrange.

I you can do all the right things in combat. Like if you were to have whiteboard something out here and we talk about tactics and all the rest of it, you can make those exact same right decisions downrange and things can still go south and people can die then the other as opposite drooler. Truly, you can make all the wrong decisions of quote unquote wrong decisions and things can work out just fine.

Let's like life. I like life. Yeah.

So you could so rather you made mistakes or not point then you're going to have a hard time dealing with them later. And for whatever reason, whether it was locker or whatever else, I sleep very well at night because of the things that that was involved in downrange, but I still got to tap into them and put them into the story. Now there's going back to what you said about SEALs writing books. Interestingly enough, in the first book, there's an interrogation scene, interrogation, an interview, meaning not a not a torture scene, but sitting down with NCIS, the Naval Criminal Investigation Service.

And so some bad things. My career wasn't all wonderful, like the downrange stuff. Very lucky. Very fortunate to be in a couple of right places at the right time to do some interesting things. But when we got back, a good buddy of mine, Marco, and he writes a book called No Easy Day, and that's the one about the bin Laden raid and that one that was like a tipping point, because in our community at the time, there'd been act of valor, that movie with SEALs, active duty SEALs playing characters in an actual movie.

There are other books out there. So there's already discussion happening like, hey, are we too much in the limelight here? We're supposed to be these quiet professionals. But, you know, going back in time, I read all these Vietnam books growing up and every autobiography I could about people in the military, you know, Grant has his memoirs or whatever. So there's a precedent not just in this country, but worldwide of people getting out, talking about their experiences.

And that's part of a first person account that historians will use later. Is it frowned upon at all?

So it it got. It was starting to get even more and more frowned upon right up to that point, and that was a tipping point. So in that book came out, that's when everyone said not everyone, senior level leaders were like, OK, stop, I'll stop.

And they really well, because of that book, they went in and all the investigations that happened, they went in and essentially anyone that had a connection with him, they pulled in and investigated as a way to put pressure on him to get what they wanted. So so I was one of those guys I've known him for since nine or something like that. So we've been dear friends since that time. And so we have emails going back all these years.

So I got pulled in to this interrogation room and they pulled out single personal emails, single sentences, totally out of context to try to get me for something that would put pressure on him. And they did that not just with me, but with almost anyone that had some sort of a connection with him. They investigated because he's already out of the military.

So so things that you said totally out of context, like joking around about something or is just statements about just statements like what did you mean by what did you mean by this? And I used that in the first novel because I'm sitting there in this interrogation.

He got these guys across from you.

And essentially NCIS, er from my perspective, are people that they couldn't make it to the FBI or the CIA and they weren't tough enough to be street cops. So now they're busting people on piss tests in the military and that sort of thing. Actually my first experience with them was after September 11th. And, you know, I think we're all on the same team and we're doing these shipboard things in the Northern Arabian Gulf to enforce the U.N. embargo for oil tankers that are leaving Iraq and then going to Iran.

And so our job is to take those ships down before they got to Iranian waters and then the U.N. would take over after that. But it was a really interesting time because like a cop pulling over someone and you're walking up and you don't really know what's going on. And so they would come out of out of Iraq. They had all these metal over all the windows. It cut off all the ladders on the ship. So you'd have to use a caving ladder to hook and climb up, and then you'd have to breach and get inside these things and get them back into the Gulf before they hit Iranian waters.

Otherwise, you cut off. So it was kind of a crazy deal.

But during what they were doing a couple of nights, on a couple of nights off that sort of thing with another platoon and then NCIS shows up and they pull us all of these different rooms and they said, hey, so an M 60, some sort of like machine gun type thing was has gone missing on one of the ships that you guys were on. And I was like, oh, it's terrible, you know, OK, well, how can I help you?

And so I start talking in, like, how how would you get one off a ship if you wanted to steal a machine gun from a ship, how would you get it off? And me, I was kind of creative and like, we're on the same team here. I'm like, oh, this is what I would do. I take it off piece by piece and whatever I said, yes, I gave him my and then as I was nearing the end, I'm seeing it in their face and seeing the notes they're taken.

I'm like, wait a second. Are they, like, trying to get me to like I didn't take out a shit piece by piece. We were on there for like the problem is you're an author and I'm trying to think of it all through.

Yeah. So like you're being creative. Yeah.

So even back then, I had a bad experience with that, but so what are they saying to you anyway.

So this they start accusing you in in with the mark in there. No, they didn't accuse me, but I could tell that things shifted and I'm getting so creative and telling them how I do it and mix it in with this and we'd get it off. I get excited, smiling totally. Yeah. I was like, I am now. And these guys are just like, anyway, so I kind of figured it out near the end and I'm like, oh wow, this is not something to feeling quite right here.

Like these guys are just after a win. That's what they're they're trying to get somebody that's their job. And if they can get a seal, even better. So after after Mark Owen wrote the book, No Easy Day, same thing. And you saw these guys across the table. And this is years later. So it wasn't like immediately they went after some guys immediately, whatever, but they put all this together over a long time.

And what was their ultimate goals and what do they want?

I think they wanted him to it. They wanted to build a case against him. A criminal case against him. For what? For not submitting his book to the Department of Defense for review. And is that so they can redact certain things that are classified?

Yeah, which is why I was hypersensitive to it. And even though minor fiction, I submitted them and that is a protocol.

So when all those things in your book where it says redacted, is that why it's redacted? Really. So it's because of them. Yeah. So they may be hypersensitive to it.

So no other author of fiction has the classic the the security clearances that I had. No one else submits fiction, but I was so just tied to this because of my experience with the Mark Owen book and what they tried to do. I was like, I just want to make sure.

Right. And what they've taken out. Absolutely ridiculous. So the first book, I didn't appeal it because they took 45 days to do it, which I thought was pretty good because they say they'll take thirty and that's pretty good. They took out nine lines or something like that, which is fine. But the second one, they a month goes by and two, then three, then four and five, then six. And they get almost to the seven month mark when they finally get back to me.

So at this point, we had to. The publication date out of April to the summer. It's like a movie trying to figure out, like when you don't want to Avengers movies coming out at the same time from the same studio. Right.

So it so these are thought well ahead of time. So it was not convenient to have to push it all the way to the end of July. So was a pain and every single thing in there that was blacked out. My attorneys found in publicly available government documents, so not just like on Wikipedia or from somebody else that wrote a book or have no publicly available government websites, government documents that anyone on Earth, so they don't done their due diligence to check if that stuff had actually been released already publicly.

My lawyers did.

Yeah, but the people the you know, the the people who submitted to it, the Department of Defense, they just have this black pen and they're just just taking things out.

And then they say, oh, CIA will send it off to the CIA even though I don't work for the CIA. But they sent it off and then that starts the CIA clock looking at it.

It's just it's ridiculous. And this is not something you had to do. It's by precedent. No, because it's fiction. Because it's fiction by precedent. Now, like we talked about those laws earlier, three felonies a day. Yeah. Laws are written if you look at them very broadly so that the government can interpret them the way they want to. And I didn't always used to be the case. If you go back 50 years, the idea was you had to write a law that the average guy could understand in one.

When you looked at it one time, read it, it's evident what that law means. Not anymore. The language involved, how long they are, how tough they are to decipher even for attorneys to decipher. So it's it's written in a way that they can come after anyone they want for anything, which is by design. And they used it to go after Marco and they used it. You know, that's nonfiction. You know, maybe should have he went to an attorney that had experience in this space.

What you would do who's the best attorney for this? Oh, the guy that did a book called Kill bin Laden with someone from Delta Force. That guy has experience. I'll go to him. So he went to that lawyer who said, no, you don't need to submit this. So there's lawsuits and all sorts of stuff that are associated with that. But for me, what they did this is years later, his second book, he sends it to me.

So I'm getting ready to get out of the military. He sends me his second book and says, hey, what do you think of this? And so I read it and I get, you know, really quick. And then I sent him, like, one note. That's awesome. Maybe in the first part in the preface, maybe talk about your experience over the last couple of years with the first book and what the government did to you and how you reacted.

Just people were probably interested in that. So I wrote that. So now I'm in this interrogation room with these NCIS guys, and that's one of the things that they pull out and said. So why are you editing classified material that hasn't been approved by, like, I don't know, like guys, guys, a good friend. Somebody sends me the thing. I look at it. So what they wanted was to put pressure on him and said, hey, I'm going to go after your buddy if you don't do this for us, which was to try to say, so what did they want from him?

I think they wanted him to admit he was guilty. And they also wanted a state of not submit, of not submitting it to the Department of Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review, not going through. They want to make an example of him so that anybody else getting out would know that they had to do that. And I don't think it worked as there's plenty of books out there that nonfiction that have not been through that process. Right. But that's what they wanted from him.

They wanted all the money from it, which was all the money. Yeah. And interestingly enough, all the money.

All the money. And he was always going to give it all. That's the other part of this is so interesting because I've known him for so long, he was always going to give it all away and he had no reason to tell me that, you know, a year before the whatever however long it was before, like he wasn't setting this up as some criminal mastermind, but he was always going to get away with whole foundation. And when the book came out, it all went into a bank account.

But guess what came out of the bank account, lawyer fees after that. So he still had all the money except for the lawyer fees. And then they still go after you for taxes that you're supposed to be anyway. It's the government. So so they wanted that money, anything money going forward, like if they made a movie from it, all those proceeds, they just wanted to crush them and make an example of him so other people would submit or make people think about not not even writing anything anyway.

How did it all end up? So it's a lawsuit with the attorney that gave you bad advice? I'm not sure exactly where that is. And then all the money went back to the government that was in the account and he's paying off the rest of it. That went to attorney fees. So. So he didn't make anything? No.

Why one penny? All the money went to the government. All the money went to the government and plus taxes.

So double money. So so all the money goes to the government because he lost the idea because because they finally put enough pressure on where the lawyers do their thing and they figure out a settlement of some sort.

And that was the settlement. All the money. Wow.

And his second book, the same deal I know that went through the process, went through the but after I read it.

So he sent it to me before he sent it in. Oh yeah. But you know, there's nothing but you read it and that's what they that's what one of the things they used to try to get him to, to do what they wanted. So and that wasn't the only one. There's all everybody that knew him got got pulled into this thing and. But point being is that had that not happened, then that interrogation scene in my novel where James Reese sits down after what happens to his team, sits down with those guys across the table and I change to Afghanistan, Jaser from San Diego to Afghanistan.

But that's how I felt about the guy sitting across the table from me. So it feels real because I was just like, hey, have you read into interrogation room or I'm arresting you.

A couple of cop shows where they have somebody in the interrogation room. I just kind of write what that looks like or feels like. No, that's what it feels like to be in there, having these eyes on you, having them tell you that there's no cameras on when you know that there are and all all that sort of thing. So I got to put all that together and make the book what it is.

So without that happening, without them trying to go after me to put pressure on him and everyone associated with that, the first book would not be nearly as good like the combat stuff. Yeah, it's different. But the other stuff, the conspiracy side of the House and the NCIS guys in that interrogation in particular, and some of the bad guys, that's once again, you can't kill people in real life. But you know what? You can't. You can't in fiction.

And so it made it so much better than it would have been otherwise. So now, looking back and I thank him to this day, I'm like, you know, that first book that resonated with Simon and Schuster for some reason. And a lot of it's what happened downrange and those feelings and emotions. But a lot of it is because of what happened with with you as I was getting out. That's interesting.

So now when you create these characters, do you write a back story? Do you spend time, like writing out this guy's life and then sort of use pieces of that in the story? Or do you write it along while you're writing the story? Because he was had a background so similar to mine? I didn't need to do that, so I didn't need to create. So now I am for this fourth one because now there's so many characters that it's hard to keep spelling straight and background straight and all that sort of thing.

So now I have these family trees in these characters written out on Scrivner, which is how I write it. Yeah, I used to love her stand up. Amazing. So good to organize things on the left side.

So you hit that button and it's all turns into like a poster board type thing. Absolutely. Scrivner. But I didn't use that one until the third one. Up until that point I was using word and like copying and pasting and then scrolling and then putting it in where I wanted. And then, you know, maybe I didn't cut because I was worried it was going to delete and I go back and now delete it. So it's so nice to use it.

Scrivner like that. It just makes it so much easier to do that. So. So now I do. But at the beginning I did with one novel and kind of creating. You have the story. So I did. I wrote six or seven different ideas down like one page executive summaries as I was getting ready and the one I wanted to start with was Savage Sun. That was the one I wanted to start with, really. But I knew the characters weren't quite at that place where I could explore the dark side of me and I needed to get readers invested in them, take him on a journey much like I learned about Joseph Campbell and the hero's journey.

And here with a thousand faces back in 1988, I had to take him on that sort of a journey and get him to that point where I could explore the dark side of man through these characters. So so I just had to start with that. That first one, it was very evident it's going to be the terminal list. That's the one. So I took that one page executive summary, turned into an outline. But if I came to a point in that outline where I got stuck and this is the important part, I didn't say and readers aren't going to figure this out, they're not going to come along on me with this journey.

That's not believable. I just went around it because I'm not on the battlefield. I'm solving problems on the page like I am. I'm adapting like I am on the battlefield. But you know what? I can sleep on it. And I don't have to solve this problem right now. I can get five months down the line, just continue going, and eventually I'm going to figure this problem out and it's going to work out. So I didn't let anything, any obstacle stop me as I was writing that outline.

And I took that outline and started writing. And as I figured out those problems, then I would change the outline and I would adapt it so I could have a visual representation of what was going on. And then eventually about the 75 percent point that I just discarded the outline completely and just kept writing. So Scrivner made that a ton easier for the third book because doing it in word was a pain.

There is apparently a way that you could set up word to behave like Scrivner.

Oh, really? Yeah, I read an article on it and I tried to do it and I was like, I can give up. Just going to keep using Scrivner. I just love how word I write bits in word because I can get it on my phone, I can get it on a computer, just log in to Microsoft Word and it just shows me all the files, any laptop, any computer I use, any phone I use just goes right to it.

Whereas like with Scrivner you have to upload it to Dropbox and then to get it from drop was a little bit of a yeah, no more Scrivner.

And then when I sent it to the editor, I did that. I think we're changing it to word and then I would word the rest of the times I didn't go back to right after I did. That was a finished product as finished as it could be.

Anyone else has changed from the time you wrote your first book to now in terms of like process and and how you do it, and what do you think you're better at now than you were when you started? So the timeline is obviously compressed now.

So I started writing the second one before I'd even submitted the first one to Simon and Schuster because I was always going to write those two because of that John Grisham story and him not being able to give a time to kill away. So I was always going to write to you. So I. Already in Mozambique, I was already doing that, that research over there already writing that second one, and if both of them didn't work out, then I was going to re-evaluate my life choices, but I was always going to go all in on two.

So now it's point being for the second one, I wasn't yet on that year timeline because there was no deal, hadn't even gone to Simon and Schuster. And then once the first one did get to Simon and Schuster, then they plotted it out and I still had another over a year before it came out while I'm working on the other one. So this third one is the first one that I've had to be on that year long time line four.

But I've had it in my head for so long. So this fourth one now is one where things are really compressed because especially because of covid-19 and having to adapt at the last second for this book tour and having to think of things that I wouldn't necessarily have had to think of otherwise, like helping these independent bookstores, like how do I drive business towards them? They're hurting so bad right now, how can I help them?

They were hurting before this. Right. And well, people are going back to them. Yeah, they are hurting for a while and then people are going back. Yeah, it's people like that page in their hand. They like to have that experience with someone that they know in their hometown. So so those kind of bookstores were actually on on the upswing. It was like the bigger ones. There was a borders that shut down years ago. Yeah.

Barnes and Noble adapting ish. They're kind of hurt so that the little ones like, hey, they're part of a you know, just a main street in Park City.

There's a bookstore there. The it's right there. Yeah. Yeah, it's great. Love it. They've got a chocolate place attached to it, get some coffee, whatever. So it's great. So I figure how do I help them at the same time. And what I did was with a signed book plates, you can only get through those independent bookstores. So if anybody wants a signed book, that's where they have to go. So did that.

I have some merchandise on my site, all of that. It was already going 100 percent to these veteran focus foundations that I had some sort of a touch point with because it helped friends of mine or whatever else. But now it's all going Center for Disaster Philanthropy, covid-19 Response Fund. So there are things to talk about on interviews rather than, oh, I just have a new book out. I can talk about how you're trying to help as you're launching or talk about preparedness, talk about what the enemy's learning by watching our response to covid-19 and how they're incorporating that into future battle plans, those sorts of things.

So I had to adapt, do virtual book signings, that sort of thing. Arjuna's using the technology that wasn't available ten, twenty years ago, certainly 30, 30, 40 years ago to do today. So I had to spend all that time doing doing that. So point being, this fourth one, when I get back from here, it's all in back on book four, which should be great because I love writing. That's what I love to do.

And the other side of it, the business side of it that we've been talking about, that is interesting to me because I'm learning something new and I love learning new things. And I wouldn't be learning about branding and marketing and all this sort of thing if I didn't have a product, if I didn't have a book. And it and I can help other people as they're getting out of the military, starting other businesses that aren't even writing related at all, I can help them and talk to them about my experience and what I've learned and how I've adapted because I had to.

No one's going to hand this stuff to you. You have to go out there, prove yourself, get after it, do the work and be smart about it. You have to study that landscape. So I studied social media for like a year before I even did my first post. And but I saw what people really I studied, I studied. I said, what do I like? What do I not like, what's appropriate, what's not good?

You write the stuff down and just keep it on the head. No, kept that in my head. That's pretty obvious. Like what's appropriate and what's not.

Like when someone walks into that general store very, very, very clear what's how you should treat someone, whether they come in yelling and screaming or they come in asking for directions like. Right. Same thing. So that's some basic stuff that a lot of people don't don't quite get.

How fortuitous is it that you're writing about infectious diseases and then this shit goes down?

I mean, if there's ever a person who got a gift by a tragedy, it's crazy because I'd done all that research in the fall and into the early part of the year.

Did you go to Galveston, the CDC? You go? No, I talked to doctors that have involved in infectious diseases and with the weaponization of infectious diseases. And then I read some books out there, lot I stuff online with the online stuff you have to be really careful about and check with other people that really know what they're doing, even though it's fiction. So I done all that part of it ahead of time. So what really changed for me as far as what I'm doing now and what I'm incorporating from this is what our response has been took over in nineteen because it's put obviously our economy into a tailspin.

So what's the enemy doing? The enemy is looking at that and realizing, look, this invisible virus has done to the United States with the Soviet Union, couldn't do in forty plus years of trying. So how do we incorporate that into future battle plans? Can we have a strategy, even a failure? What if there's a threat of a bio attack? What if there's a failed biotech somewhere? It's still going to affect that economy, especially right now with us being so gun shy about all these sorts of things.

So what are they taking from that and what are they learning to apply going forward? So for my fourth novel, I'm taking those lessons of what the enemy is learning from this and how they're going to how I think they're going to apply it going forward and incorporating that. To a fictional narrative, so in in that sense, you know, I'm trying to learn, I'm always learning, it's always important to learn and apply it going forward.

And you're you're also you're in the middle of writing this story, but you're also living a life of a person that actually has to deal with this coronavirus pandemic where the whole world is kind of shut down, like as a just as a human being when you're dealing with this.

What's frustrating for you about how everything is going down?

You know, I think it's what we just talked about as far as people not taking these lessons seriously going forward and making this a stronger country because of this. So, you know, you get knocked down, you get back up, you're stronger for it. You've learned something we talk about in jujitsu. You know, it's either you win or you learn and.

Yeah, and so what are we going to learn from that?

And we're going to apply that going forward.

So like the whole thing with the Iran crisis, with the hostage situation, we learn from that.

We applied those lessons and we were more prepared for 9/11 as a special operations force because of it. So for this, I worry, just like you said, our people are going to go back to the old ways after this. They can't wait to say can't wait to slide back into their old ways. Yeah.

So are we going to be a stronger citizenry, maybe, maybe a certain percentage take these lessons to heart? I don't know.

But so I think that's probably the it's it's knowing that people expect the government to take care of them. And that's the expectation. Not you. It's not you. You don't have to take care of yourself or your family.

The government is going to go looking for a daddy. Yeah. How do I get that? Whatever whatever that whatever money they handed out.

Oh, great.

Well, you know what's even better, you being strong, self-reliant, self-sufficient, and having your kids look up and see how you're handling this and say, OK, well, if mom and dad are either in the kitchen talking about how much they're worried about paying that rent or that mortgage or they're in that kitchen, maybe talking about it, even if they are worried in a way like, hey, how do we do this better next time?

How do we prepare as on the other side of this? And one of the things we can do now to get better prepared if this happens two months from now, a year from now, five years from now, and the kids can see that, too, or they see mom and dad in the kitchen talking about, hey, we are so lucky that we prepared for this.

We're prepared financially. We had a little food here, whatever it is. And so the kids will take those those lessons on take those to heart because they're very impressionable right now, especially after 14, 12 and nine. And they're definitely processing this and they're catching things on the news. And they're talking to friends on their on social media. They're texting back and forth, all that sort of thing. So this can either make them stronger citizens going forward or they can see mom and look, mom and dad relied on government.

We came out the other side of this. We got to check and nothing really changed. So, oh, what lesson are they going to take going forward from that? So it's a very important time, not just for how you deal with this and how you get through it and how you move forward. Better for it.

But because of the lessons that we're teaching our kids, whether we mean to or not, it doesn't have to be a conscious thing like they are going to take lessons. And as parents, it's up to us to figure out what those lessons are going to be. And we can morph it and make them stronger, more self-reliant going forward. Like our daughter sees our our freezers full of elk and moose. And she we pull that out, we'd frost it.

And she's she's a part of it because she knows she got this elk in Colorado last year. Now she's feeding on.

How old is your daughter? She's fourteen. Wow. She shot her first elk at fourteen and obviously at ten.

Well, oh, let's go. Yeah, no kidding.

Did you get a tag in New Mexico at ten? Yeah. So somebody it was a retirement gift, a great guy. And I said, you know, she gave me two one for me and one for my wife, one for me. I want my daughter. And I was like, you know what? I got an elk last year in New Mexico public land. It was crazy, crazy.

But I was like, you know, can I transfer that to to my wife and my wife and daughter, go do this together and I'm with them also and get a family experience. And he was like, yeah, absolutely, let's do it. And so she was ten standing off sticks, three hundred yards, one shot.

And the guide was he said Miss and she'd been hunting before she went hunting and she was seven and she is good. And I was like, oh you know, I was a tough shot. Hey that's OK. How do you feel about that shot. She's like, I feel good. I'm like, oh it's just a ten year old saying that because they don't want to kind of lose face in front of the guy and mom's there and Dad's there.

And I'm like, oh, it's OK. You know, it's OK to miss everybody misses. Let's learn from it. Move forward. She's like, I didn't miss and say, go up there. There's no blood, there's no anything. We think we're tracking it. We walk up. Yes. She you know, she missed and we walk back down. There's just little tiny just in the ground there. It was twenty yards away. Wow.

Yeah. Amazing show you picture after.

So God feel stupid. I know he's like this but it really just went all the way through and now he's on impact behind you know. And but yeah. That's the problem.

Right. They see the dust kick up behind the animal and they think that it's a mess. Yeah.

So yeah. But you know, we have that meat from this last year in Colorado. That's a talk about it with the family. And she's like she knows that she provided that for all of us.

And we just got to be very exciting and rewarding for her. And a little guy. He's he got his first animal in Africa this last year, so. Yeah. So. That's a crazy place to get your first and so crazy, so I'd been over there doing some more research. I went to South Africa to help train up an anti poaching unit because they hadn't used Glock's and used them for years, have a little bit of experience with those weapons systems.

And I want to do some research in the art and science of man tracking. So I went to South Africa, helped train up this anti poaching unit. It was an amazing experience. And then they asked me to come back as a thank you to with my family over the over the summer. So I came back with my with my family and our little guy got his first animal there. They put the blood on his cheeks and I was always picture him in the back of the Land Cruiser.

On the way back is he's never had a haircut at age nine. So blond hair blowing in the wind. It's awesome that we use every piece of it. That's what's great about over there, is they see you use much more than we use over here. I mean, stomach linings, like everything gets used in Africa, which is cool for them to see because they think we're using it all here. They see us taking that remain Necmi and all the rest of it.

But over there they see everything get used, which is a pretty cool thing for them to experience at that at that young age.

So, yeah, that is that is a very amazing thing for them, help them be self-reliant to it. And they see the people out there working on the Land Cruisers. They see all everything you have to do in Africa that you can just call someone to fix the plumbing or call someone because the electricity's out or whatever. You fix it yourself because you have to.

How did you get to be a Land Cruiser fanatic? How'd that happen? Gosh, you know, I found out about Ikon 2006 or so. I think it was maybe five ads from CNM overseas.

So I saw the Hyflux first in Afghanistan, 2003. I think it was 2003.

Yeah. You're seeing these things over there and then you're seeing what we're doing to whom. We have some mechanics over there that are bolting on armor and they're doing things to the engine and they're putting in these radio console stuff for our secure communications. And they're like, wow, this is pretty cool. And then I saw the evolution of the Hilex over the next 15 years and got to see these things purpose-built from a factory to an after marketplace that then does all that stuff that we were doing in Afghanistan with the screwdriver's and the rest of it.

I got to see what those look like. And that was pretty sweet. And just see how much abuse they can take and what they're going up and over. And so I think it was seeing the Hilux and then looking into maybe going to Tacoma when I get back, as I saw these things over there and these things last forever, it was amazing and some crazy experiences in them. And then I was like, oh, Land Cruisers, this is pretty sweet.

And I just it was a natural thing for me to like older stuff and more classic stuff and then to also like classic stuff that looks old, but it's really new and can really can really gas it out.

Well, Land Cruisers as well, Sixtus, just like that Porsche that I have out there where the metal is thicker and heavier gauge like you shut those doors like, oh, this is not a it's just different.

They're just they just made they're made different. Yeah. So I started doing my research and I think on the first thing that pops up, when you put in like, you know, restoration for Land Cruisers is, is Ikon. Yeah.

There's a bunch of other people doing it now. But John McCain gets really mad, John. I mean, he gets mad at people doing shitty jobs of restoring broncos' or shitty jobs, restoring land cruisers. And I guess he's got every right to I mean, he's so meticulous and they're so what they do is just incredible. I mean, it's amazing. Like, it's one of those build it and they will come type businesses because, you know, who was going to buy a 3000 man hour restoration job on a 95 Land Cruiser?

It's not right. Not that many. It's a niche market. Yeah, but he's he owns that fucking niche, you know, and on so many other cars, too. I'm so fortunate that he's, you know, down the road. Yeah. I can hang out with him and talk to him.

And I listen to him on your podcast. I listen to him there. So and then I drove up from L.A. and gave him had them start working on my F.J. six when we were in San Diego, just doing a stage one, kind of making sure the belts and stuff were good and, you know, whatever is kind of making sure it was going to fall apart. But I always want to do that stage through that icon type restoration. And I always had my eye on that.

And then my Land Cruiser broke down. My wife was driving it and oil came out. Engine sees crack, engine block like not that it's her fault, but anyway, so it sat in our driveway for a couple of years as I'm getting out of the military. And that's kind of a bummer seeing it there. But get that deal. And some of the first things I did was send that up to Jonathan to get in line. I had to get the was behind.

Yeah, he's like, yeah, you're just behind Joe. So I had to wait for your eighty to get down and get a few of working at the same time. But that whole picture with yours and mine, hers was just getting done or frame off or whatever. And then mine was, they were kind of looking dilapidated in the back, just waiting, you know, like say you have to wait months.

You had to wait. That's too long, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's crazy.

So that was cool. So it just showed up the other day. And of course I'm not I don't really want to show people or whatever, but at the same time, people are hurting right now, even though it's been for a long time. It's not appropriate to, you know, show it. Yeah. This is not a time to be flossing now.

Yeah, it's sweet, though. That thing is legit. So I love it. So it's natural for me to put them in the books and that's kind and use it like that and want to say thank you to Jonathan for doing that. So just like I put it in the books for my friend John Hart, who started like I think it's on the first or second page of my first novel is like a year. So, you know, that's woven in there.

And I just love to do that sort of thing.

Yeah, it was cool. Gave me a bunch of. Miles, the all the different things, the black rifle, coffees, Dudley and all that stuff is very cool.

Now, when when you're in the middle of this book now, what is your timeline like? How how far have you been how long have you been writing on this fourth book?

So I outlined it. I had the idea for a while, but I was still finishing up the third one. So on the way to Russia, I outlined it because I didn't have a computer.

When you actually did it, how do you do that?

So this time I used the third one. I outlined it in word, and then I got my Scrivner set up and then I transferred it over and did the writing in words of this one. I did the outline in Scrivner and I'm writing it in Scrivner as well.

So I had those little things, whatever they call them, it's Scrivner with little description of the chapters. I outlined it that way, but I started reading it longhand so I didn't have my computer with me on the way to Russia. I didn't want to take it, didn't write all that information sucked out when I walked through customs. So just legal pad and just wrote it out and just arrows and things and Asterix and all that, just a mess.

So I did that back then, got home, finished up book three and then started writing book four. But I'm also doing the research. So you have to I'm diving into books, I'm talking to those doctors as I'm talking to them and getting other ideas about how to move the plot forward, different things that can test the protagonist. So this theme of this next one is really the ethics, morality and legality behind targeted assassinations. And the bio weapons piece is really forms the foundation of that.

But really what the protagonist is struggling with is targeted assassinations. And who is he today? Is he now an assassin? He's been a hunter. He's been a soldier. He went after these people that wronged his family and his troop and and put them all in the ground in that first book. And now he has a he has both. It's a mixture of a personal and professional track that he's now going to take going forward because he still has a little unfinished business to take care of and needs to use the United States government to track these guys down.

But he still needs to needs to get so in as I'm doing that and interviewing all these people and thinking about how that works and I'm reading a book, it's almost done with it. It's called Rise First and Kill by Ronen Bergman. And it's really about the state of Israel. And because really we think of targeted assassinations and we don't we associated with our government. I mean, we do. And we've done it before and we just did it in January.

And but Israel, it's much more closely associated with Israel from its inception up until today. And it's a fascinating book. So I'm getting lots of ideas from there. I'm reading David Kilcullen. It's called The Snakes, Snakes and Dragons, Dragon and Snakes. And he's a fascinating guy who's a counterterrorism adviser for Petraeus during the surge. He's become a good friend. And so I'm reading doing all that research, which helps me move the plot forward. I'm writing it.

I'm touching up those outlines and I'm working that research into the plot. So at this stage, I've written probably about half of it. And it's hard to say because you never know. We're going to get another idea or what it's going to take too long.

And I'd say I'd say a little more than half, even though it's all outlined. I know where I'm going, what I need to do. And that first draft is due in mid-June when you when you write out an outline. But then in the middle of your writing, do you ever have these, like Stephen King apparently doesn't write outlines or does they call him a Panzner?

You're right about your pants. Oh, yeah.

What are your thoughts on that? I mean, like when you read that he does that and he's I mean, I'm a giant Stephen King fan. I mean, he's probably written some of the most amazing horror novels ever. I mean, not probably has.

And what an amazing story also about doing the work, being persistent, being incredible, being hit by a bus. You know, if you been fucking idiot, not paying attention and every bone in his body broken his and the story in on writing about him starting back up again and his wife setting him up and. But what do you think about someone who writes like that? I mean, with his incredible results? I mean. Yeah, no, it's all also, by the way, a lot of cocaine and cigarettes and alcohol because earlier shit like The Shining and apparently he doesn't even remember writing Kujo.

Wow. Yeah. He talked about that. He was so fucked up he didn't even remember writing it.

Hey, I mean, it makes me want to do more drugs like it's and I do think about that when I'm up late and it's three thirty in the morning, I'm exhausted. I know the kids are going to be up at six thirty seven or whatever, like man. I mean any little bump right here to keep me going. I made one for Stephen King but know he wrote just the craziest shit.

But your stuff's pretty fucking crazy too.

But your stuff is crazy in a sense that I think these things really happen. You know, like you like, even like the tortures. And I wanted to talk to you about that, too, like the torture scene.

Like there's I've I've seen so many pencil necks talk about, you know, be rude, but I shouldn't even said that. But people who talk about torture are saying that torture doesn't work. I'm like, how can you say torture doesn't work? Like by what statistic? And I've seen people say these. We shouldn't. Torture because torture doesn't work, and I'm like, how do you first of all, how do you know have you tortured someone? Like, how do you know where are you?

What are you basing this off?

And why are you saying it was such a celebrity? And resolve the authority and resolve and conviction that, you know, based on statistics of something rather that torture doesn't work. It seems to me like. If people have information and they don't want to give up that information, yeah, we don't want to think of ourselves as being this barbaric type of civilization that would torture someone to get information out of them. But also, if you want to look at it pragmatically, that is how you would get people to talk.

So to say that torture doesn't work and in fact, people who are tortured will say anything and. Well, that's says who? I hate that kind of conversation because your because it's an it's an antimilitary conversation a lot of ways, because it's the same it's the same kind of mentality that sort of dismisses all sorts of tactics that are used to protect people that don't they have the luxury of not knowing what needs to be done or how it is done.

Yeah, so it's very it's very complex and it's very simple. And I obviously use this in my writing and I did in that first book because the protagonist had to become that terrorist. Become that insurgent. Yeah. So he had to adopt those tactics and he had essentially to have had to abandon everything that he'd been fighting for for the past six years to go after these people that wronged his family and his troops. So as far as the torture stuff goes, so I got to explore it in a fictional sense.

So in real life, it's important to talk about these things with your troops at the tactical leadership level where where I was my entire career, whether I was just a brand new guy, enlisted guy or a troop commander at the end, it was important, especially once 9/11 happened, to talk about these things before. We're in a situation where we called it first, we call it bit first, we call it battlefield interrogation. And then it became TCU Tactical questioning more PC to call it tactical questioning rather than battlefield interrogation.

But you had to talk about it ahead of time so that your guys would know what was appropriate ahead of time. So they're not in a situation where an IED is just gone off. One of our guys is killed and now we have someone we think is responsible for that. And there's one or two of us, three of us in this room with him. What are those guys going to do? Well, they're emotional and maybe we haven't talked about it at a time.

So what are they going to do? They're going to do well, who knows? But point being, before we get there during training, it can't just be a brief by, like a pencil neck lawyer that comes in and says, all right, this is not this is appropriate.

It can't be that.

It has to be incorporated into the training, has to be discussed by people that are trusted. And so that when someone's in that situation, he knows what one is appropriate because of the second and third order effects that may come from it.

Yeah, you might want to put a bullet in that guy. You might want to torture him, whatever. But second third are effects of doing that could be more devastating to this unit, to the the ah. Strategy as a whole that we're trying to accomplish over there. So we need to talk about it ahead of time. So for me, it was important that for the guys to know that we have to maintain the moral high ground because there's very few things that separate us from our enemy.

When you get down to it, you're both killing, you're both killing each other. And there has to be something that makes it different for us and that's maintaining the moral high ground. We do not deliberately target civilians. That's a big differentiation. They they target civilians on purpose to get the political end that they want. So that is a huge differentiator right there. The torture thing is so interesting because of definitions. So is making someone uncomfortable torture.

Right. Is waterboarding torture?

Is that torture? Well, they did it to my senior class. There is survival, evasion, resistance, escape. And we all go through this training. Back then when I went through it, it was based on Vietnam era type experiences that people had had in Vietnam. And it's morphed a little bit over time. But it's they waterboarded people and they waterboarded people in my class.

If you did something that they thought the instructors thought would get you killed in real life or get somebody else killed in real life. So being a model prisoner, it did not happen to me, but to my buddy, he got waterboarded because he did something that the instructors thought would get you. And it's crazy they put you in this prison camp where they're speaking a different language, a made up language, their sights. You look like you're in a prison camp because it's built like that.

Their smells are cooking weird things. So the smells feel like you're in a different country. So all of these different sensory inputs are telling you that you're not in the United States anymore. And you get slapped around. They call it Camp Slopy, so you're being slapped around. So which is different, but you get waterboarded if you do something wrong. So is that torture? They torture in U.S. service members or is is making them uncomfortable for a while?

So these definitions are very important. We start talking. We put somebody sitting in a corner and then. They're there in that seat position and they're not sleeping. We're keeping them up at night, is that torture? Well, we kept bud students up in SEAL training for almost a week. So is that torture? I guess it's self-imposed. We were all volunteering to do it. This guy's not volunteering to sit there in the corner, but we also snatched him off the battlefield and we think he might have some information and it's putting him in an uncomfortable seated position.

Is that torture? Some would say yes. So it's crazy in that when it becomes politicized and the enemy gets to use it. And when I say the enemy, I also mean all their social media type networks, all journalists that are sympathetic to the cause or whatever, as soon as that can be morphed and called torture and become a distraction and becomes something that undermines the mission as a whole, then you have to look at it and say, OK, what are we getting by what we're doing in Guantanamo?

What, what, what, how versus how much is that hurting and helping the enemies recruiting efforts? And I don't know where that is. I don't know what those numbers look like or where that tipping point is. But as soon as the enemy can get something and use it for their own benefit, like having black sites, if we didn't know the black sites existed, you know, that would be wonderful. But everyone knows that black sites exist to explain black sites.

It's just a a base that is typically set up by another government agency with the knowledge of a different government.

And so it's not in the United States, it's not on U.S. soil to let the other government do the things that they can do that we can't essentially.

So it's off the books type site, but everyone knows what it is because it's been on the front page of The New York Times and everywhere else. As soon as that becomes something that the enemy can then leverage, at what point do does does it hurt us more than help us to have those?

And at what point does it hurt us more than help us to quote unquote torture someone to continue waterboarding or to put somebody in these seated positions and to have that be the distraction? And I don't know the answer, but it's something that needs to be thought of and talked about. And at the tactical level, the guys have to know that we need to maintain that moral high ground. That's the only thing and a lot of cases that differentiates us from the enemy and we have to hold that ground.

That's imperative. So as a leader, you got to talk about it and the guys have to know that once you have somebody much like a police officer here in the States, once they have you cuffed and you're on the ground like it's over, like your job now becomes to protect that person. That's how it has to be. That's what makes us different. That makes you different for that criminal. That makes us different from the enemy. They're going to if they have us in that position, they're going to behead us and they're going to hold our heads up on TV and they're going to use it for us.

Our job is not to protect that person with our life. That's the difference between us and the enemy at the base level. So it's important to talk about that important for the guys to to understand it so that when they're in that position, it's a guy's first deployment and his friend is wounded or dead and he thinks this guy is behind it, that he doesn't execute him when he has his hands cuffed behind him. So it's important stuff to talk about, important stuff to think about.

And and it's it's tough. It's a tough thing to grapple with.

And those those are the variables, right. Public perception, whether or not that perception or the knowledge of things that have been done could be used against our troops or used against our our country as a whole and in social media in perception. But the idea that this is what is driving me crazy about it is that those hard, fast statements that torture doesn't work. And I'm like, what's I don't know what you're saying. Yeah.

What do you think? It probably works in some situations. Maybe not. I mean, who knows when people say that. I bet I can get you to say yes, I can get you to tell me where your fucking car keys are. Yeah, I know exactly what he's saying. Right. Of course it works. Yeah. I like the idea of the deli and they'll say it. It's always really left wing people that'll stay statistically. Torture doesn't work.

Yeah. What do they say? Because he's been keeping these stats since the beginning of time. Bitch.

Have you ever seen any torture. Look, what are you talking about. I kept you up. You would tell me everything I have to do is keep you up. Yeah.

No, I mean there's a reason people have been doing it from the beginning of time. I'm sure some places that didn't work or whatever.

But at that outside that tactical level, when we're talking about that next stage where the world knows about it, where media knows about it, where they're driving that story and they're helping the enemy by shining a light on these things that may or may not work, doesn't matter whether it works or not, it's it's detrimental at this point. And whatever that point is, that it's time to abandon it.

Do you find that now that you're a prominent voice in the world of fiction authors and the fact that your your your novels have a lot to do with, like real places and real things, real issues, do you get asked questions?

Do you do get asked to give statements or have your opinion on things? Well, you have to kind of measure it and go, is there a benefit to this? Is there a risk to to be talking about it?

Yeah. My alienating people or is this something where you can use your your knowledge in your position as a platform to kind of like give your perspective on things from an. Educated point of view, yeah, so it's for me, it is very it's hard for me not to tell the truth like I'm the worst liar on the earth and my wife will tell you.

So it's very natural for me to answer honestly, but then also to be thoughtful. And that's why they're not novels. I think also another reason they resonated with Simon and Schuster is because it's thoughtful violence. That's how I think of it. It's not just she's the guy that he or whatever.

It's thoughtful violence, which is why those terrorists torture scenes are so intricate and involved, too.

That one with the Russian mobsters have the. Yeah, there's some good ones.

So I won't come want that to be a kind of a hallmark of the series is that there are things that people haven't seen before. And it's not just extra violence, it's thoughtful violence. So I don't worry about alienating.

It's it's more about me being honest because people can tell, like if you especially today, like maybe 20 years ago, you could have hidden you behind managers and reputation, whatever you call it today. You can't really hide if you're on social media. Like, I think eventually if you have a thousand some posts people are going to glean and you're doing it. And it's not obvious that it's just a manager that's doing it. And it's a picture of, you know, you are not really it's not you.

It's obvious. It's not you I'm talking about when it's obvious to you. It's hard, I think, to not be authentic and to let something slip through. Yeah, I think eventually it slips through.

Yeah. I think I mean, and you can see things that aren't appropriate. You're like, oh my God, why would this person say that.

Well, you know why. Because it's them like that's, that's why.

Or they were drunk maybe. Maybe a little. Not like people don't understand the ramifications of posting things that like you were saying how you got brought in by NCIS, that one thing could be taken out of context and used against you in a really weird way.

Oh, yeah.

And I used to think, oh, no, we're on the same side. And, you know, it's all about the right.

No, people are after a win and has a really disturbing revelation. Oh, it was. And that's why the book is so powerful in that scene and why or how those guys go down. It's so violent because it was therapeutic for me. I didn't have to actually go out and do it myself. I got to do it on the pages of a thriller. But for me, it's interesting. So I do get asked. I am I do go on different shows now as a military analyst, they ask me things and I answer honestly and I try to do it in a thoughtful way.

So example being the this was the CEO of the Roosevelt that I was relieved last couple of weeks because he wrote this letter and, you know, is framed by senior level officials as he sent out essentially like an open letter. It sounded like they made it sound like he sent it out his entire address book and he went above the chain of command.

And so he was fired and it didn't go through the proper channels and smelled weird to me from the beginning, because you don't get to be in command of a nuclear powered aircraft carrier by being like just some guy, like, you know, the military you're in for like 25 years. At this point. You're a captain. And I would be shocked if he had not exhausted every other avenue to try to get out what he needed to have done. And he's responsible for fighting that aircraft carrier.

He's also responsible for the men under his command.

And he and now we have like 900 cases on that ship to explain to people that the ship was infected.

Yeah. So they had a couple of cases, like they had three to start with on an aircraft carrier to docked in Thailand or something like that, you know, maybe in January or early February or something like that before really things got out of control. So you're an aircraft carrier and the only place worse than a ship in a circumstance like this with an infectious disease is probably a submarine. But he saw what was happening and he saw it starting to spread.

He saw it as he saw that it was impossible to abide by social distancing guidelines.

And once you do, when you actually have it, not just social distancing, but once you have it, how you isolate somebody, impossible to do on a ship. And so he saw that. And then the story is that he wrote all that, wrote a letter, and it got picked up by the Chronicle in Northern California, and that it just went out to this huge number of people. So it went to twenty people. It was I've read the letter.

It's four pages. It's very, very well done, very thoughtful. It gives two courses of action, one, if we're at war and how he can keep fighting the ship and to if we're not at war, need to take care of these guys and be ready for when war comes. So it's very clearly delineated in these four pages, very professional. It's on Navy letterhead and it went out to twenty people.

And for me, I thought, you know, this is very strange that that he's being attacked like this from senior level leaders, making it seem like he sent it out to his entire, like, Gmail address book. Now it's still U.S. Navy dot mil or whatever. It's not a secret secret communication, but there's official Navy emails that aren't secret as well. And, yeah, it bypassed the chain of command, I guess. But that at some point, I think is his responsibility.

He needs to keep that ship fighting. And who knows what the personal relationship was between him and the guy above him or whatever. I think there's something. Investigation will show it, and now and then the secretary of the Navy flies from Washington, D.C. to Guam to give a speech to these people on the aircraft carrier. And he says that the captain there's just been relieved of duty, was either stupid or incompetent if he thought that what he wrote in that email wasn't going to get out to the press.

Meanwhile, the ironic part is that whole thing is videotaped. That whole speech is taped and there's audio that makes it out to the media. So that's a funny part for me. But then also. So then he's fired a couple of days later and then the the secretary of the army or that secretary defense now writes a letter, an open letter that says essentially the same thing as the captain of the aircraft carrier wrote a few days earlier that got him fired.

So it's really interesting. And I went on some of these some of these shows, I got to sit down with a couple different people with military backgrounds. And I was the only one saying that something doesn't smell right here. And this guy has a responsibility to to fight that shift, to support his soldiers or sailors. And something's just not right about this. And now we'll see what happens. But but point being, yeah, I do get asked about these things.

And I answer honestly because the one of the other guys were saying on this show is that no chain of command who didn't follow the chain of command and he should have followed that chain of command, you know, the typical Navy type. But being from special operations and being a free thinker, as we're supposed to do, is let's be creative. We're supposed to think think red cell things from the enemy side. Think about it from that side of the house and do what we do, which is why we get in trouble a lot of the time in special operations, because we're kind of a not military and I mean, we're military.

But, you know, we'd like to like to not break the rules. We like to bend them to a certain extent to get what we need done. And that's just very natural for us. But when you're sitting down with people that aren't like that, I don't think that way. It's kind of interesting. But point being, I do get asked about these things and I don't really measured against if I can alienate people or not. It's just happened to be honest and be open and be authentic.

And that's what people can trust about me and they can trust about my writing, is that when they read that, they know that I just didn't get it from somebody else. Like it's a part of me somehow. And it's very personal, even though it's fiction. And that's what you can trust. And if my protagonist is using a certain weapon or a certain knife or a sword, it's not just that I Googled Navy SEAL knife and so on or someone saying and then he pulled out his Navy SEAL dagger and stuff like, no, that's not how it goes.

You know exactly who made that relationship, all that sort of thing. So what people can trust is that they're going to get my honest assessment. That's what I owe the guys in the teams. I owe them my honest assessment. That's what I owe the people above me in the chain of command. No matter what it did, I owed them my honest assessment because that's what they could trust. They didn't have to worry about whether I'm just telling them something just because I think that's what they want to hear or I'm looking to get ahead because I never wanted this to be a career in the military.

I was just in there to fight and and to lead. But that's what they can trust is my honest assessment. And so that's how I deal with it. I I'm just going to answer honestly, but it will be thoughtful. It's not going to be like an off the cuff craziness that I didn't have to go back and retract or I hope it's not going to be it's going to be thoughtful because that's what I that's what I owe the guys also was that thoughtful assessment both up and down the chain.

So that's just natural for me to do. And what you're going to get today?

Well, this mindset and the discipline and the authenticity, it comes out in your writing, man. I know I started with the last one and I have to start. Yeah. You were a little bummed out that I was like, starting with the last one. Right.

Well, most people get invested in the character. Like, people ask me, like, can I start with this third one? And the publisher wants me to say, yes, start with the third one.

Now, let me tell you, you could absolutely start with the third. Maybe I'll be more invested if I start with the first one. I don't know, man, but the third one was fucking great. I loved it. And I'm going to get into the first two. Now, listen, you knocked it out of the park, man. It was amazing. Amazing book. I'm excited to read the first two now. Awesome people can follow you.

Is it Jack Car U.S.A. USA on the Sociales most active on Instagram and Twitter. There is a Facebook but a three was too much. So yeah, same way USA then official Jack Dotcom is the is the website and people can go deep, dive into weapons or knives or gear on that sort of things. All right man. Well, well thanks brother. I appreciate you.

Thanks so much for coming on and thank you for what you do for for hunting and for those of us that are self-reliant and forgiving, this really opening people's eyes to what they can do to be better citizens and better prepare going forward. So thank you for all you do. My pleasure.

My pleasure. Thank you. Bye, everybody. Thank you, friends.

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Love to you all. Thank you. Bye bye. My.