Jack Carr, ex-Navy SEAL sniper and author, blends military realism with fiction—his third book draws from a 2019 Kamchatka bear hunt where locals used pen-and-paper research to avoid surveillance, mirroring themes of trust and control in his protagonist’s descent into terrorism. His fourth novel explores bioweapons, inspired by COVID-19’s economic fallout and post-9/11 interrogation tactics like waterboarding, which he defends as pragmatic but politically weaponized. Carr critiques the Roosevelt carrier captain’s firing, arguing the media misconstrued his professional letter on infectious disease protocols, while emphasizing special ops’ need for adaptability over rigid hierarchy. His books, rooted in firsthand experience—from Operation Eagle Claw’s 1980 failure to NCIS interrogations—prioritize authenticity, with Chris Pratt even optioning his work before release, proving fiction can thrive when grounded in truth and resilience. [Automatically generated summary]
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 this, which is happening now, which is very exciting.
It would be strange for me not to talk about gear, just because I was a gear guy before I went in the Navy.
And then, of course, in the SEAL teams, you're like...
That's your time to shine and to like go down these rabbit holes and try to make the gear better or anything that's going to make you more effective and efficient on the battlefield.
So he really gets a go all in.
And then just after the military, same thing.
I'm just a gear guy.
So it would be strange just to say he pulled out a rifle, you know, or something like that.
And since I was a little kid, my mom was a librarian, so I grew up surrounded by books and this love of reading from a very early age.
And back then, like so early 80s, there's hardly anything written about SEALs.
But what there is written is a lot of times from fiction.
So protagonists in different stories by guys like Tom Clancy, David Murrell, Nelson DeMille, A.J. Quinnell, 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.
While I was in, I wasn't writing, I wasn't practicing, but I was reading.
So 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 coupled 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 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.
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 go to medical or dental.
So your job becomes to get out of this gigantic bureaucracy.
Yeah, he 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 there are some options for you.
So I had to be 100% 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.
When you're training, you're out for three weeks here, two weeks there, a month there, 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.
It wasn't a hard decision for me.
Plus, I'd gotten to the end of my time where I would tactically lead guys on the battlefield.
So that's a troop commander.
So that's where Jocko was when he did his last deployment as a troop commander as an 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.
You're in a tactical operations center.
You're 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.
And my mom introduced me to a guy named Joseph Campbell back in 1987. 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, 12 years old.
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 at 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 foundation.
So that was already there.
And while I was in the military, I kept reading for fun.
I read those fiction books still and I discovered Stephen Hunter and Brad Thorne and Vince Flynn and Daniel Silva and now Mark Graney today.
So those are kind of the bigger names in the genre.
But then I was also studying, studying all that non-fiction stuff, trying to stay up on my game to make the best decisions I possibly could under fire for the guys when it mattered.
So 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 operating or we weren't putting together a target package, I was reading.
Because I would think that most people that would venture for 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.
It was all knowing what I liked, knowing what 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 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 why there's so many Death Wish movies.
Because if someone cuts you off in traffic, you can't go out and 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.
Because in real life, if you do it, you're going to go to jail.
You can't get the death penalty.
It's not possible.
But you can explore all that in the pages of a fictional thriller.
So I think that's why it resonates 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, 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.
And I put those within sight of me and my computer.
But I didn't touch them again.
But they were there.
So I would look to them for inspiration as far as, oh, Stephen 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 doctor's block, so you don't get writer's block.
You're professional, and you write.
So just having them that close really helped with that transition, and I made the decision once I was a SEAL. And now, I write.
So I think that really helped.
But I didn't know you needed an agent.
And thank goodness I didn't.
Because otherwise, like I said, you'd still be looking for one.
Because those are the gatekeepers, essentially.
And they have assistants that are even gatekeepers to them.
So it's tough, I think.
But lucky for me, a friend of mine sat next to a guy named Brad Thor, who writes in this genre.
There's a character called Scott Harvath, who's a former SEAL. And he's a great guy.
My friend sat next to him at one of these events for to raise money for a SEAL Foundation type thing.
And as I'm writing, I'm about four months in, and my buddy says, hey, you know this guy named Brad Thor?
And I said, oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know him, but I've read all his stuff.
And he said, do you want to talk to him?
I know you're writing a book.
And I said, yeah, I'd love to talk to him.
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 here at an event in L.A. at the time.
I was trying to find a quiet place to have this call with Brad Thor.
So I go to the parking lot at the Terranea Resort parking lot up there.
Sun's beating down on my land cruiser.
Everything's off, though.
The engine's off because it's so loud.
And And my pen and paper are there.
I'm sweating.
But sure enough, we had this great call.
And it was like a job interview.
I think he wanted to know, like, hey, why do you want to write?
And I told him 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 about my mom being a librarian and 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.
Because other guys that have serious characters have one book a year.
And so I figured, well, doing this sort of thing, I was about four months into it, so I was like, give or take a couple months.
So sure enough, I called him back one year from the day.
But he said, hey, don't call me.
Don't send me chapters.
I'm not going to give you any advice.
And he did give me some advice on that call, but he didn't want me bugging him throughout the year, which I totally understand now.
And called him back a year from then 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, alright, call me back again when it's the best you can possibly do.
So I took another four months of reading it and editing it, sending it to a couple friends, and then called him back four months later and said, this is the best I can possibly get it.
And he said, alright, I'll let him know it's coming.
I mean, I would love to get on a discipline-type schedule, like a Jocko-type schedule someday, but I'm not quite there yet, especially at this stage where 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 would do for a startup or starting like a coffee shop somewhere, you have to do for writing.
So 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 with 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 up, you have to do as an author.
So I kind of treated it as a startup and starting it like just like you're 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 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 in all these different directions almost at the same time.
And you can say, okay, you know what I'm going to do?
I'm going to wake up and I'm going to write 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 going to 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 it out 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, no, I'm not writing for those four hours in the morning.
So usually it's the first novel and all the others.
We're really done between 10 at night and about 4 in the morning because that's the time it was quiet in our house with three kids, a dog, wife.
And then you're editing one while you're writing another.
So you're kind of juggling at the same time when you're on this book a year type program.
That's what you're doing.
And maybe I'll get past that at some point.
I'll have an end date, and then I'll start the next one.
But right now, it's 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's some crazy in-shape people out there.
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 meet.
We've got to go work out.
It's 530 in the morning.
And I know Jaco's been up for two hours already.
But for me, that's pretty good.
Waking up at 5, getting down there and doing these crazy trail runs, CrossFit stuff, jumping in the pool, doing all sorts of crazy stuff that these guys put together.
And it's like five or six CrossFit workouts meshed into one with trail running, with the endurance side.
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 until four in the morning and getting up an hour and a half later, that's a little much.
Yeah, well luckily now the way, well 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 this set and then when I got home either I would listen to it more or I would write.
You know, sometimes I'd listen to it more and then take notes and then write and try to adjust or just write on completely different subjects.
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 someone else would need something, or phones would ring...
At 2 o'clock in the morning, no one's calling you.
And when you're up at 4 and you crash and then try to get up 6 hours later or not even 5 hours later and then get to the gym with a little bit of food in your stomach, you...
He brings a tripod and a fucking camera, and he sets it up in the back of the room and films every set he does, and then he edits it all himself on his computer.
Yeah, so for me, I feel like I need to thank everybody at this point because I feel so fortunate that the books are resonating with people and really this whole thing's been at grassroots.
This third book made the New York Times list.
And it made it without, like, a national news appearance or with any of these other bigger things.
It was all great.
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.
And then these companies like Black Rifle Coffee, like those guys, like, you know, veteran-owned businesses or, you know, like Dudley, like those guys that posted, Andy Stumpf, like all those guys that held it up and said, oh, I love this.
So the guy who wants directions and doesn't even want to buy anything, I mean, you treat them, hey, here's how you get back to the interstate.
Thanks so much.
And he has a good impression that he's left with.
Or someone comes in and wants to buy a candy bar, a six-pack, or whatever.
You just point them in the right direction.
You make conversation.
So I treat it kind of like that.
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 business local general store.
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't say hi to everybody.
But I still am so sincerely thankful for everyone that took a risk on me as I was starting this out.
And 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 getting mad about things or engaging back and forth and having these Twitter wars with people.
And then I realized, like, that's the worst way to communicate ever.
Yeah, in fact, CrossFit, I just kind of mean functional fitness in general.
I don't really mean the actual program.
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.
It took a little bit of time, but some guys jumped right on.
But really what it showed us, and then right about that time also war kicks off, and And all that.
And we realized, okay, you're at 10,000 feet in these mountains.
You have a ruck on.
You're a radio guy.
You have an automatic weapon guy that has a ton of ammo.
Then you're going, you're hitting 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 encyclopedia of bodybuilding and running as far as you could, as fast as you could in sand, and that being all you did, there's probably a better way.
So I got out in the summer of 2016. And I know they were trying to modernize a lot of things as I was leaving for those last couple years.
But so it's possible.
They do now.
And one of the things that they did that incorporated a little technology was in Hell Week, like when I went through with Andy, they'd 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, okay, this guy is on the verge of hypothermia.
He's about to die.
Pull him out.
But then they have someone that looks totally fine and then that person would just collapse as soon as the doctor walked by.
So what they had people do is 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 Walmart 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 days, that's how they did it.
Every week you have people on talking about bills that they're sponsoring.
Well, are they getting rid of another one to add that one?
There's a book called Three Felonies a Day, and it talks about how a guy wakes up, and the 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 they're not going to give those 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.
Clickety-clickety-click.
Did the CDC stop tracking flu deaths for this year?
Because this is what I read, and it 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 we're making a big deal out of COVID and then, you know, people riot in the streets.
But then you find out that that's a bad year for the flu.
That's normal.
But obviously, this year we've locked everybody down, worldwide even, and there has to be a slower spread because of this quarantining and because of the social distancing.
So I would imagine you're getting far lower numbers than they would have gotten if everybody had just gone out into the streets.
And then how you weaponize those infectious diseases, what the Japanese did prior to World War II in that space, how they used them in World War II against the Chinese, what happened to that data Afterward, after the war.
The Soviet program from the end of World War II up to the collapse.
What happened to that information?
And then our programs today from the end of World War II 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've been 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, we 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 checkpoint?
It looks like the one that didn't have a VBID 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 like an insurgent that's adapted.
And 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 with flu, you get the flu, you're down.
You know you shouldn't go into work.
If you show up at work, someone's like, bro, go home.
You look horrible.
Get out of here.
You're going to infect everybody.
You don't know that with COVID-19.
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 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 it's a hard thing to wrap your head around when you just look at numbers, but there is a difference in that flu.
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, and it's just 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's so weird, man.
I mean, Newsweek actually had a story yesterday saying that they think it came from a lab.
So now that theory of whether or not it came from a laboratory, I think I tweeted it.
I think I tweeted it.
So you can find it on my Twitter page, but I was reading it yesterday.
I'm like, okay.
Newsweek, not really a sensationalistic publication.
When they're publishing something like that, you've 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.
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 World War II, 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.
But you don't want it to spread throughout the whole world and come back to your own country.
So when I first looked at this and I heard about Wuhan, I heard that there was a, not a weapons lab maybe, but maybe it's a weapons lab, but at least a lab doing research in infectious diseases a couple 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 this research into infectious diseases and weaponizing 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 1960-something or 1970-something.
So there is precedent and it wouldn't be 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 weaponizing it, and someone Contracts it somehow in that lab and then brings it outside.
It's thought to be the most similar to SARS-CoV-2 of any known virus.
The two share 96% of their genetic material.
That 4% gap would still be a formidable gap for animal passage research, says Ralph Baric, virologist, University of North Carolina, probably in bed with the Russians, who collaborated with, like, when you found out that a Harvard guy got arrested 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 China.
And they're not giving us 100% clear, detailed information.
Everything gets filtered down through the Chinese propaganda system.
And they also were exceedingly – we don't know the numbers, right?
And we can't trust China.
But it seems like they were – Yes.
Yes.
And all that.
So if you're doing research, there's a lab where you're doing research similar to this close by there.
There's a history of other countries, maybe even China, too, of doing research into infectious diseases, not following protocols that we would here in the United States.
They're not all 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.
Yeah, well, in 2018, they were actually cited for violating safety protocols at that same lab in 2018. So 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.
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 stopped everybody from leaving, they could have covered this in the point where it would have been 95% less.
It seems like, but the way they handle their own citizens, when their citizens are tested positive, there's this horrible video of 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.
So 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& 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 wanted to come out swinging with that novel of Revenge Without Constraints.
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 more of the geopolitics of what's going on with Russia, power struggles, all this other, to make it a little different because 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 in China, drops it in Europe.
So it had to be different.
I 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, and 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 makes the movie.
But if he'd stopped at A Time to Kill, he'd probably still be practicing law somewhere in Memphis, right?
So I knew I was always going to write too.
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.
I had by living in San Diego, knowing LA, knowing New York, and really being able to incorporate what I'd done already.
But I hadn't been to 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, wanted to talk about the politics, wanted to talk about Chinese influence in the region with mining operations, both legal and illegal, and the meat poaching that goes along to feed all the people in those mines, how that's affecting the environment.
So 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 hunt, do a little fishing over there at the same time, but it's all part of the research.
And 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.
Otherwise, you have to go all the way around the world.
So much better to fly to Anchorage, then 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, I'll 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'd ask if you're writing a political thriller, you are not long for this world.
It was off the firing squad, gulag, off to Siberia, whatever.
So they were very hesitant to talk to me.
And I left all my computers behind.
As soon as I walked through customs, I knew I was going to get everything sucked out of my phone and computer.
And I didn't know who sent things to me in email or text over the last 20 plus years.
So I just left all that behind, brought a pen and paper.
But I was asking these questions.
And I thought, oh, here's my book.
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 them these kinds of questions But it all worked out.
I got some great stuff and got to weave that into the third one.
Because usually I follow the customs of the local people because I don't want to show up and be kind of the ugly American and show, oh, I'm better than you.
But I'll tell you, bottled black bear, and maybe it was eating blueberries or whatever, But it was, and it sat on our counter for six months, because my wife was like, hmm, get the fuck out of here with this.
They kill other people's children, well, other bears' children, rather.
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.
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, someone who hunts things you don't eat.
But yeah, so got my bear, but the craziest part was my friend, who got his, and he wounded it first, by accident, of course.
And that happens, like we know.
And it goes off into this thick, thick brush.
And in the States, because I went and did another hunt in Alaska this year, they won't let you go in after a wounded bear into the thick stuff.
Maybe some will, but 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.
That's where the guides 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.
And I'm looking at this rusty thing and I have these two shells in my hand and I'm like, okay.
And I'm like, no, because he had a couple more.
I'm like, no, give me some more.
And I trained up for Africa with a double rifle.
I went to FTW 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.
And it goes running off like, I don't know, 20 yards or something like that into some more thick stuff.
And then we hear a death bellow.
But before we hear the death bellow, 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, okay.
So I do.
I go around to the other side and I get down.
I'm like, well, if it charges out, it's probably going to be on all legs and it's going to come charging like this.
So I knelt down.
And then just got ready to put one in if it's coming charging at me.
And I was trying to figure out, okay, face, mouth, right here.
So when they say we're not doing something and they say it in a way with this Russian accent and there's really – it's not really like, oh, let's talk about it.
Yeah, so they're only watching one getting hit by a root 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 wanted 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 too, some crazy Russian stuff, and I got to 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 end up making their way into the stories.
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 making their own skis.
They're making their own homes.
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 And then that is what they eat.
And they bring bread with them.
And the bread's all frozen, obviously.
So they have these loaves of bread they bring.
They store their cabins.
They have to bear-proof everything.
But their life is so compatible with being a human being.
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.
Like, no one else can have this sort of— Goes back to the government?
Yeah, I don't think anybody else is going to be allowed, but 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 he raised his family out there, and his wife is American Eskimo.
It's just a fucking amazing way of life.
I don't want to live.
I don't want to live like that.
I mean, I like cities, I like cars, 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.
He was talking about it in this documentary where the Vice people...
This is back when Vice was, you know, just starting out, too.
This Vice Guide to Travel was one of their earlier series that they were doing on YouTube.
And 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...
That guy might not even know what's going on, but he doesn't even need to.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, for the people I think also, this was 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 II, for those guys that 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 Do I have a gun in the house?
Oh, we do.
It's in that safe and I haven't shot it in years or 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 them to.
Do we have fire extinguishers in the house?
Do we know how to use them?
Are those things expired?
Do the kids know how to use them?
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, oh, 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, like what they're comfortable with as far as their levels of preparedness.
And it's not really 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, whatever it is, hurricanes, 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.
Do I need something to filter water with in case I turn on the tap and there's nothing that comes out?
It's brown.
So everybody's level is going to be different, but I think this was 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.
But it's funny because my wife was like, now I see why we have all this stuff.
It's not crazy stuff, but I like being prepared.
It's not just from being a SEAL. It's from before that.
I've always been drawn to the outdoors and wanting to be prepared and know how to To live out there, survive, or whatever else.
It's always been a part of me.
So it was very natural for us to have a couple guns, have some ammo, have some water, have some food.
Because when this hit, you know what I did?
A book was coming out, and I had to figure out how to adapt very quickly to the changing environment and launch it.
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 that breath, look around, And adapt.
And I didn't have to worry about food or water or filtration systems or ammo or protecting my family.
So I got to put all my effort into figuring out how to adapt to these changing conditions.
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.
It's certainly not perfect, and there's certainly a lot of crime, and certainly there's things wrong.
But, however, it is absolutely the best time in history to be a human being and to be alive.
Now that the pandemic hits, those same people are like, oh, okay.
Now I get it.
There's not enough cops in the world to deal with riots.
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, either I want a gun, or I get it, or how do I get a gun, or how do I train?
Like, I see those videos of you training.
How do you train with a gun?
Where do you go?
How to just start?
And all these questions.
Where do you hunt?
Like, the Google searches on hunting must be through the roof.
This is the first time that you've been somewhere else and you've been able to...
It's not LA riots and you're seeing the Korean shopkeepers defending their stores.
It's not Katrina where you're hearing a few things about the police maybe confiscating firearms there, but then not being able to protect yourself.
But, you know, if you live in Montana or 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...
Well, 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 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.
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's going so great.
This is just how it's going to be now forever.
And then something like this happens and people realize, oh...
And especially, I feel terrible for the people that work hard every day and then their job's taken away from them.
It's no fault of their own.
They're not lazy.
They're not drug addicts.
They didn't gamble it all away.
One day they woke up and the world had changed and now they don't have food money.
And it's, uh, yeah, it's also one of the, well, it'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 security piece.
So, and for everybody, it's going to be, going to be different.
Is it a one month worth of bills?
Is it two?
Is it three?
That's what the experts say or whatever.
Uh, 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 away they need to talk to somebody about how they best can do that because things aren't always going to be rows you're going to face adversity in life and we're just like we're facing as a country now like yeah you're gonna face it in life as well it doesn't have to be a pandemic you could just lose your job 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 down.
And you're going to have to get up and keep moving forward.
And you know what's going to help you with that is not wasting bandwidth on figuring out how you're going to pay that next bill because you're prepared ahead of time.
I hope 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 of this pandemic, and even though you played it safe and you did this terrible job that sucks, you realize, maybe I should have chased my dream.
Maybe there's a chance.
I mean, a guy like you, but I want to get back to this because we never really finished how the book got...
I went to the UPS store on the main street there called Orange Avenue, and I wanted to get next-day air, tracking, you know, everything, insurance, whatever you could possibly do.
And what I found out from taking those notes in the car when I was talking to Brad Thor, I found out how Emily Bessler, who is his editor, who is Vince Flynn's editor, who did the Mitch Rapp 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.
But back then, 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, even if it was just psychological, like, oh, it's in the wrong font.
So it explores the hunter versus hunted dynamic through the dark side of man.
So really finding out, hey, is James Reese the protagonist?
Is he a killer?
Is he a soldier?
What is he?
Is he a hunter?
Or is he all three of these things?
So exploring that, because a lot of us are drawn to these jobs where we're defending our country, defending the guys to our right and left when we're downrange.
So why are we doing that?
Is it because of his country?
Well, 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 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 the other one.
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 to look forward and also to establish a relationship with the character.
Like I knew creating James Roos, I wanted him to be a likable guy.
Like I don't want people, people don't 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, 16 years at war.
And use those tactics, techniques, and procedures that work so well against us from the enemy side in Iraq and Afghanistan and use those here on the home front.
So it's more than just a story of revenge, that first one.
It's really also about someone who comes home and brings the wars from Iraq and Afghanistan home to people who have been sending young men and women to their deaths for close to 20 years now.
So you can read it at a couple different levels depending on how deep you want to go into it.
I totally remember because after I put it in, 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?
What's going on?
And she's like, there's a dead rat in my house.
Can you help me?
I'm like, what?
And it was right there, like 50 feet away, and I couldn't say no.
So I remember this vividly that I sent this off, had my lifetime dream.
I get it in the mail to Emily Bessler at Simon& Schuster, and off it goes.
And I'm taking that breath, and I take a couple steps towards the car, and this lady runs around the corner in this frantic look in her eye.
And I'm like, yeah, I'll help you.
And so we went into this house, and It was like this hoarder house.
There was just stuff everywhere.
It was crazy.
So I had to go up to this top level, this old Victorian house, and take this dead rat and take it down.
And one thing he told me when we first talked, like I said, he said, don't call me throughout this next year when you're writing.
But what 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 Buds and having that bell right there that's inside of you during Hell Week, we put it in the trailer hitch of these vehicles that follow you everywhere so you don't even have to run anywhere.
You just have to take a few steps and ring this thing and you're done.
So that really resonated with me because of that.
And I just love that.
So I'm like, all right, I can do this.
And I always knew I could anyway because I had that background and had that foundation.
I knew what I was going to do and I was so excited.
So anyway, he told me that next couple 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.
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'd essentially 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 eats you alive.
Yeah, it was crazy.
So I was worried that might be a little off-putting to somebody in New York and 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 people absolutely love it.
But I get to New York and I'm little, like, so now I'm like, okay, I want to make a good impression.
They were 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.
I'm not going to make a wrong choice here.
So in that sense, I was very lucky.
But I said, okay, they're probably not the right ones.
But between the two females, they were both so amazing, but they were 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, talks to you.
It was amazing.
She was so awesome.
And then the other one, younger, hadn't found her Tom Clancy or Grisham-type person yet.
Bigger agency, 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 20 years, but I felt like I was breaking up with someone because I was so invested in both of these agents.
They were both so fantastic.
And I was in Lanai at the time when I made the decision, and I was like, oh, man, it felt like the final rose ceremony.
And then picked the one with ICM because I thought, You know, for this type of a novel and for where I want it 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 so what's crazy is that as I'm writing this, now they tell you not to think of someone playing your character as 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, or 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, you know, all he'd done is Parks and Rec.
And he'd done, he had a small role in Zero Dark Thirty, where he plays a seal.
Who knew what he was going to turn into with Jurassic Park?
He hadn't done Passengers.
He hadn't done anything serious yet.
But I also thought about, because I've been studying this since my whole life, and I thought about in the 80s, look what Tom Hanks did in the 80s.
He's in Bosom Buddies.
He's in Dragnet.
He's in The Burbs.
He's in Joe vs.
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's that guy in this generation that needs to stretch a little bit, that needs to do something different?
And I'm like, that's Chris Pratt.
He can do this.
And so I thought of it.
Before the first book came out, I'm at Thunder Ranch training, doing some shooting 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 him.
You know Jared.
And 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.
How's it going?
I hadn't talked to him in five years or something.
And we catch up a little bit.
And he's like, hey, you know, I just want to thank you for a couple when I was leaving the SEAL teams, I 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'm gonna do that for you.
Because I mean, he's awesome to total stud, great operator, and wants to get out of the team.
So I'm gonna try to help him as best I can.
But he really remembered it.
And he said, Hey, I heard you wrote a book.
I said, yeah, it's coming out in a couple months here.
There are these galley 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.
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 dead donkey on the side?
Is that going to blow up and kill me or hit that Humvee in front of me?
Is that piece of trash right there?
Is that covering something else?
Is there a wire there?
You could spend every single mission, especially going 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, 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 IED? Is that an IED? And so I thought, all right, you know what?
If I get blown up today, that's just how it was.
We're doing everything we possibly can to mitigate that.
But 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 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 QRF or whatever else?
What air we have overhead?
How do we maneuver here?
All those things.
That's what I need to worry about.
What's QRF? Quick reaction force.
So you have those set up at different places in case you get hit.
So they can come on in, usually in like Bradley's or Abrams sometimes.
Different vehicles that have a little more firepower than you do as you're sneaking through the streets.
So I kind of resigned myself to fate.
And there's a book called Bridge at San Luis Rey.
There's like, I forget how many people, but let's 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 it's fate.
So I guess, and I haven't really thought of it too much since then, other than that experience in Iraq, and just having to, or feeling like I had to resign myself to it.
That's so weird, man, that you had those two people in your head.
That's what makes me think 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.
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?
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 only hear those stories from the people that are successful.
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, and they're gross, and they're self-centered, and narcissists, and it's true a lot of the time.
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.
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 going to be like, that's not my vision.
You're ruining my book or whatever.
So they'd like to get rid of you, but Chris wanted me involved.
So I got to help out on the pilot script for this thing.
Well, now, like, series have a giant advantage over movies.
Now, movies are getting released.
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 released trolls 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've got a business together.
And then the theater's like, you know, the movie production companies are like, you might not have a business in six months.
They were because, well, I've been saying forever.
I would love if, you know, I have 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 ruining everything or people are checking I see the light from their phones.
I'm going to sit here the whole time with my kids, just on edge the entire time, worried about this.
What are the exits?
That sort of thing.
Which is important to do in a movie theater.
Exit.
There's smoke or whatever.
You've got to go to the wall.
Use your hand down the wall to get to the exit.
That sort of stuff.
But yeah, it's...
Yeah, why not stay at home?
Enjoy it at home.
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 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 Brad Thor if he had a bad impression of me or if he thought I was a bad operator or had a bad reputation or whatever else.
Like, 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?
What if I didn't read all these guys like David Murrell, who created Rambo in 1972, or read 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 them.
I was passionate about reading, passionate about writing, passionate about serving my country, passionate about being the best operator I could possibly be.
So I was always focused on those things.
And then, you know, these other things kind of, it helped.
Yeah, 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.
No, you have to sit down and do the work, whether it's write comedy, whether it's write a novel, whether it's start a gym, whatever you're going to do, you have to sit down and do the work.
And people don't, 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.
Like 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 win 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 Thors 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 & 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 from other industries like Black Rifle Coffee.
How did they build a coffee company?
Guys getting 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.
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.
But I always liked, you know, can I get that latte?
Can I get that caramel macchiato latte?
So I always did that.
And then I found out about honey and 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 me as a former Navy SEAL sniper that becomes an officer and he's at this Point in his time in uniform where 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 this superhero.
I wanted him to be someone that was good at some things, like kicking in doors, like taking sniper shots, some of the things that I'm okay at.
But then also surveillance 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 FJ-62 Land Cruiser because I love Land Cruisers.
And there's also that whole subculture of people that love Land Cruisers.
So it's very natural for me to talk about those vehicles and then to develop characters by talking about, oh, Defender 110, Land Cruiser, you know, give each other a hard time, whatever else, or 9mm versus 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's coffee because that's what I drink at home daily.
That's got to be one of the many, many interesting things about writing a character, is that you can incorporate your own little quirks and Resco watches.
It's like, ugh, I'm going to try not to pay attention.
It's kind of like watching a movie where they really kind of jack something up and I'm like, ugh.
Because the worst thing to do is watch a SEAL movie with a SEAL or a police movie with a cop or whatever that's going to tell you about all the mistakes so you can't enjoy the film.
So I try to just enjoy them for what they are, but it does take you out.
And it's like, ah, what else did they get kind of not right if the guy's like picking the safety off on this Glock?
Right, right, right.
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 this is an Aries watch right here.
I was at the CIA. He's friends with Evan Hafer.
So I'd talk to Evan and be like, hey, is this dude legit?
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, what kind of belt they're using, 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 aren't me, that aren't a seal, that aren't somebody else.
Well, I know how SF guys travel or how they have their packs, 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 this 1911 that's brand new that he's not carrying.
Cockton lock, doesn't have one in 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 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 then.
So when I found out, hey, there's an autobiography coming out about the guy that started this command, Damn Neck on the East Coast, this counter-terrorist unit, I was so excited to read that book.
I think so, but as a kid reading that, you don't know any of that.
You don't know any of that backstory.
You're just like, oh, this is amazing.
He must have had an incredible life to be able to write a book.
The first commanding officer of Delta Force wrote a book called The Delta Force in, I think, 1986, which really goes into the Iranian hostage crisis and 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. We're 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 or click up every single night.
And I'm wondering, I see the pictures, black and white photos, of US military and people from the State Department.
I didn't know that at the time, though.
I just 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 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 One happens.
And, of course, that's on the mind.
It still shades.
Everything we do is in special operations.
There's a big black eye for the country, special operations in general.
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 in At the embassy still in an adjacent building, I think.
And it was the first use that most people know of what's called Delta Force.
So our premier counter-terrorist 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 the Munich Olympics.
We have all 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 the 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-130s from an island called Masira in the Gulf of Oman.
A place where we would then launch into Afghanistan years later.
Interestingly enough, I spent a little time there.
And they were going to meet up in the desert outside of Tehran, Iran, a few hundred miles outside the city.
So the C-130s land.
EC-130s land that have fuel.
Helicopters land from the aircraft carrier.
They're going to refuel those helos.
And the planes are going back to Masira.
And the helicopters are going to get closer to Tehran.
So they're going to 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 Meadows, who was also on the Sante raid in Vietnam.
And we have two special forces guys out of Germany.
And then two CIA assets.
I think one's called Bob and one's 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 helicopters are going to take back off, land in a soccer stadium next door, and they're going to extract from there, exfil from there.
So what happened was the planes land, helicopters have some mechanical problems, a couple get lost in the sandstorm.
They needed six to do the mission.
They launched with eight.
Less than six make it to that link-up point in the desert, so they have to scrap.
It's called no-go criteria.
So it takes the decision essentially away from the ground force commander because ahead of time, he knows that if we have four helicopters, we can't do this mission.
So instead of being on the ground saying, okay, 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.
They're 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 EC-130s.
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 presidency and for special operations in general.
But the important part, we took those lessons and we applied them going forward.
So now we train all together instead of having all these pilots and 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 train 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 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.
Interestingly enough, that's what you do in life also when you have to learn these lessons and 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 were 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 having ever ballet danced, but I don't think it's going to be the same.
And there's an authenticity to the way you write and to the one book that I've read, at least, Savage Son, where you...
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.
There's a lot of stuff where people write about things where they're imagining.
There's a movie called Warrior, where it's an MMA movie.
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 really compelling.
Yeah, and I incorporate some real-world stuff in there, too, like a shot that I didn't take in Ajafarak, and I fictionalize it by having a memory from Fallujah, and so I morph it around a little bit, but the passion...
Is there, uh, the feelings and emotions behind it are there and it's woven into the first story.
And then some, and so it was very therapeutic.
I got to take, uh, and I was very lucky downrange.
Like you can do all the right things in combat.
Like if you were to whiteboard something out here and we talk about tactics and all the rest of it, you could make those exact same right decisions downrange and things can still go south and people can die.
You can make all the wrong decisions of quote unquote wrong decisions and things can work out just fine.
Uh, It's like life, right?
Yeah, like life.
So whether you made mistakes or not, point being, you're going to have a hard time dealing with them later.
And for whatever reason, whether it was luck 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, going back to what you said about SEALs writing books, interestingly enough, in the first book, there's an interrogation scene, interrogation and interview, meaning 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, Mark Owen, he writes a book called No Easy Day.
And that's the one about the Bin Laden raid.
And that one, oh, that was like a tipping point.
Because in our community at the time, there'd been Act of Valor, that movie with active duty seals playing characters in an actual movie.
There were other books out there.
So there was already a 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.
So it was starting to get even more and more frowned upon right up to that point.
And that was the tipping point.
So when that book came out, that's when everyone said, or not everyone, senior level leaders were like, okay, I'll stop.
And they really, well, Because of that book, they went 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 I was one of those guys.
I've known him since 1999 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.
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.
Yeah, just statements like, what did you mean by this?
And I used that in the first novel because I'm sitting there in this interrogation.
You got these guys across from you and essentially NCIS here, from my perspective, are people that they couldn't make it in 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 I think we're all on the same team, and we're doing these shipboardings in the Northern Arabian Gulf to enforce the UN embargo for oil tankers that are leaving Iraq and then going to Iran.
And so our job was to take those ships down before they got to Iranian waters.
And then the UN would take over after that.
But it was a really interesting time because it's 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 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 had to get off.
So it was kind of a crazy deal.
But during what we're doing, a couple nights on, a couple nights off, that sort of thing with another platoon, and then NCIS shows up and they pull us all into these different rooms and they said, hey, so...
An M60, some sort of a machine gun type thing, has gone missing on one of these ships that you guys were on.
And I was like, oh, that's terrible.
You know, okay.
Well, how can I help you?
And so we started talking and they're like, 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'm just kind of creative.
I'm like, we're all 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.
So I gave them my...
And then as I was nearing the end, I'm seeing it in their face and seeing the notes they're taking.
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 I mix it in with this and we'd get it off like that.
So no other author of fiction that has 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.
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 30. And I thought it's pretty good.
They took out nine lines or something like that, which is fine.
But the second one, a month goes by, then two, then three, then four, then 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 push the publication date out of April to the summer.
It's like a movie, trying to figure out when you don't want two Avengers movies coming out at the same time from the same studio.
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 it 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.
No.
Publicly available government websites, government documents that anyone on earth can download.
Now, like we talked about those laws earlier, three felonies a day.
Laws are written, if you look at them, very broadly so that the government can interpret them the way they want to.
And that 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 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 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 Mark Owen.
They used it, even though that's nonfiction.
He went to an attorney that had experience in this space, which 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 just, you know, read it quick.
And then I sent him like one note that said, hey, 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 would probably be 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.
Guy's a good friend, sends me the thing, I look at it.
So what they wanted was to just put pressure on him and said, hey, we're going to go after your buddy if you don't do this for us, which was to probably just say.
I think they wanted him to admit he was guilty, and they also wanted a statement of not submitting it to the Department of Defense Office of Pre-Publication and Security Review, not going through.
They wanted to make an example of him so that anybody else getting out would know that they had to do that.
I don't think it worked because there's plenty of books out there, 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 significant.
That's the other part of this is so interesting is 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 give it away to a SEAL foundation.
And he- 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 they wanted that money.
Anything money going forward, like if they made a movie from it, all those proceeds, they just wanted to crush him and make an example of him so other people would submit or make people think about not even writing anything anyway.
But you read it, and that's one of the things they used to try to get him to do what they wanted.
And that wasn't the only one.
Everybody that knew him got pulled into this thing.
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 changed it to Afghanistan, changed it 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 wasn't just like, hey, have you written into interrogation room?
Or I'm arresting a couple of cop shows where they have somebody in an interrogation room.
I'll 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 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 and that interrogation in particular and some of the bad guys, that once again, you can't kill people in real life, but you know what?
You can.
You can 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 what, that first book, that resonated with Simon& 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 you as I was getting out.
Now when you create these characters, do you write a backstory?
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 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 and these characters written out on Scrivener, which is how I write it.
You hit that button and it all turns into like a poster board type thing.
I absolutely love Scrivener.
But I didn't use that one until the third one.
Up until that point, I was using Word and 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.
So now I go back and now delete it.
It's so nice to use Scrivener like that.
It just makes it so much easier to do that.
So now I do, but at the beginning I didn't.
With one novel and kind of creating, you have the story.
So 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 Son.
That was the one I wanted to start with.
But I knew the characters weren't quite at that place where I could explore the dark side of man.
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 The hero 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 I had to start with 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 it 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, ah, Man, 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 and 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% point, then I just discarded the outline completely and just kept writing.
So Scrivener made that a ton easier for the third book because doing it in Word was a pain.
I just do it in Scrivener and then when I send it to the editor, I did that thing where it changes it to Word and then I worked in Word the rest of the time.
So I didn't go back to Scrivener after I did that.
What else has changed from the time you wrote your first book to now in terms of like your process and how you do it and what do you think you're better at now than you were when you started?
already writing that second one and if both of them didn't work out then I was gonna reevaluate my life choices but I was always gonna go all in on two so now so 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 & Schuster and then once the first one did get to Simon & 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 It's the first one that I've had to be on that year-long timeline for.
But I've had it in my head for so long.
So this fourth one now is one where things are really compressed, 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.
They have a little chocolate place attached to it, get some coffee, whatever.
So it's great.
So I figured, how do I help them at the same time?
And what I did was do these signed book plates that 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% to these veteran-focused foundations that I had some sort of a touchpoint with because they'd 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.
You 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 how to adapt.
Do virtual book signings, that sort of thing.
Or Q&As using the technology that wasn't available 10 or 20 years ago.
Certainly 30, certainly 40. I had to spend all that time doing that.
Point being, this fourth one, when I get back from here, it's all in back on book four, which will 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 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.
That stuff's pretty obvious, like what's appropriate and what's not.
Like when someone walks into that general store, very clear how you should treat someone, whether they come in yelling and screaming or they come in asking for directions.
Same type of thing.
So that's some basic stuff that a lot of people don't quite get.
I talked to doctors that have been involved in infectious diseases and with the weaponization of infectious diseases.
And then I read some books out there.
A lot of stuff online, but 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'd 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 to COVID-19 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 what this invisible virus has done to the United States what the Soviet Union couldn't do in 40 plus years of trying.
So how do we incorporate that into future battle plans?
Can we have a strategy even of failure?
What if there's a threat of a bio-attack?
What if there's a failed bio-attack 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 I think they're going to apply it going forward and incorporating that into a fictional narrative.
In that sense, I'm always learning.
It's always important to learn and apply it going forward.
And you're also 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.
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.
Like we talk about in jujitsu, you know, it's either you win or you learn.
You being strong, self-reliant, self-sufficient, and having your kids look up and see how you're handling this and say, well, 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 what are 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 were prepared financially.
We had a little food here.
Whatever it is.
And so the kids will take those lessons on, take those to heart, because they're very impressionable right now, especially as we have 14, 12, and 9. And they're definitely processing this.
They're catching things on the news and they're talking to friends 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 dad.
Oh, look, mom and dad relied on government.
We came out the other side of this.
We got this check and nothing really changed.
So, oh, what lesson are they going to take going forward?
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're 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 freezer is full of elk and moose, and we pull that out, we frost it, and she's a part of it because she knows she got this elk in Colorado last year.
Yeah, you're seeing these things over there, and then you're seeing what we're doing to them.
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 Hilux over the next 15 years and got to see these things purpose-built from a factory to an aftermarket place that then does all that stuff that we were doing in Afghanistan with screwdrivers and the rest of it.
I got to see what those look like and that was pretty sweet and you 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 I'll get a Tacoma when I get back because I saw these things over there and these things last forever and it was amazing I had some crazy experiences in them and then I was like oh Land Cruisers, this is pretty sweet.
And 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 is really new and can really gas it down.
And then I drove up from L.A. and had them start working on my FJ62 when we were in San Diego, just doing a stage one, kind of making sure all the belts and stuff were good and, you know, whatever, just kind of making sure it wasn't going to fall apart.
But I always wanted to do that stage three or that icon-type restoration.
And so I always had my eye on that.
And then my Land Cruiser broke down.
My wife was driving it, and the oil came out, engine seize, crack engine block.
Like, not that it's her fault.
But anyway, so it sat in our driveway for a couple years as I'm getting out of the military.
And that was kind of a bummer seeing it there.
But get that deal.
And so one of the first things I did was send that up to Jonathan and get in line.
I had to get in line.
Mine was behind yours.
He's like, yeah, you're just behind Joe.
So I had to wait for your 80 to get done.
I think I have a few of them working at the same time.
But they took a cool picture with yours and yours was just getting done or they were frame off or whatever.
And then mine was there kind of looking dilapidated in the back, just waiting.
I outlined it in Word, and then I got my Scrivener set up, and then I transferred it over and did the writing in Word.
So this one...
I did the outline in Scrivener and I'm writing it in Scrivener as well.
So I have those little post things or whatever they call them in Scrivener with a little description of the chapter.
So I've outlined it that way.
But I started doing it longhand because I didn't have my computer with me on the way to Russia.
I just didn't want to take it.
Didn't want 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 asterisks 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 I'm diving into books.
I'm talking to those doctors.
As I'm talking to them, I'm 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 bioweapons piece 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 put them all in the ground in that first book.
And now 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 that he still needs to get.
So as I'm doing that and interviewing all these people, I'm 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 Ronan Bergman.
And it's really about the state of Israel.
And because really, we think of targeted assassinations and we don't really associate with our government.
I mean, we do.
We've done it before.
We just did it in January.
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 Kilcolan's.
It's called The Snakes and Dragons, Dragon and the Snakes.
And he's a fascinating guy who's a counter-terrorist advisor 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.
So 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 and it's going to take too long.
Yeah, authority and resolve and conviction that you know based on statistics of something you read 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, well that says who?
I hate that kind of conversation because it's an anti-military conversation in a lot of ways because 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.
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.
So he had to adopt those tactics, and he had essentially had to abandon everything that he'd been fighting for for the past 16 years to go after these people that wronged his family and his troop.
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.
So at the tactical leadership level, 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 BIT. TQ, tactical questioning, a lot 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 has 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 ahead of time.
So what are they going to do?
Well, who knows?
But point being, before we get there, during training, it can't just be a brief by a pencil-neck lawyer that comes in and says, Yes, exactly.
It can't be that.
It has to be incorporated into the training.
It 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 and third order effects of doing that could be more devastating to this unit, to our strategy as a whole that we're trying to accomplish over there.
So you need to talk about it ahead of time.
So for me, it was important 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 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.
And they waterboarded people in my class if you did something that 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 you did something that the instructors thought would get you killed.
And it's crazy.
They put you in this prison camp where they're speaking a different language, a made-up language.
There are sites that 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 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 slappy.
So you're getting slapped around, which is different.
But you get waterboarded if you do something wrong.
So is that torture?
Are they torturing US service members or is it making them uncomfortable for a while?
So these definitions are very important when we start talking.
We put somebody sitting in a corner and they're 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.
I mean, we're 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 become something that undermines the mission as a whole, then you have to look at it and say, okay, what are we getting by what we're doing in Guantanamo?
What versus how much is that hurting and helping the enemy's 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 that black sites existed, that would be wonderful.
It's just 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 cover of 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 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 or continue waterboarding or to put somebody in these seated positions and to have that be the distraction?
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 in a lot of cases that differentiates us from the enemy.
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, it's over.
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 from that criminal.
That makes us different from the enemy.
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 now 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 understand it, so that when they're in that position and 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 it's tough.
No, I mean, there's a reason people have been doing it from the beginning of time.
I'm sure in some places it didn't work or whatever.
But 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.
It doesn't matter whether it works or not.
It's detrimental at this point.
And whatever that point is, then 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 novels have a lot to do with like real places and real things and real issues, do you get asked questions?
Do you get asked to give statements or have your opinion on things where you have to kind of measure it and go, is there a benefit to this?
Yeah, am I alienating people, or is this something where you can use your knowledge and your position as a platform to kind of like give your perspective on things from an educated point of view?
I want that to be 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 more about me being honest, because people can tell.
Especially today.
Maybe 20 years ago, you could have hidden behind managers and reputation, whatever you call it.
Today, you can't really hide.
If you're on social media, 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 it's you.
It's hard, I think, to not be authentic and to let something slip through.
And that's why that book is so powerful in that scene and why how those guys go down is 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 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 CEO of the Roosevelt that was relieved the last couple weeks because he wrote this letter and was framed by senior-level officials as he sent out essentially like an open letter.
They made it sound like he sent it out to his entire address book.
And he went above the chain of command, and so he was fired.
And it didn't go through the right proper channels.
And it 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, eh, 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, and he's also responsible for the men under his command.
I think they had three to start with on an aircraft carrier.
It had docked in Thailand or something like that, you know, maybe in January, early February, something like that, before really things got out of control.
So you're in 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 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 a letter, and it got picked up by the Chronicle in Northern California.
And it just went out to this...
Huge number of people.
So it went out to 20 people.
I've read the letter.
It's four pages.
It's very well done.
Very thoughtful.
It gives two courses of action.
One, if we're at war and how we can keep fighting the ship.
And two, if we're not at war and 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 20 people.
And for me, I thought, you know what, this is very strange that he's being attacked like this from senior level leaders, making it seem like he sent it out to his entire Gmail address book.
No, it's still usnavy.mil or whatever.
It's not a 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 that has 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 the funny part for me.
But then also – so then he's fired a couple days later.
And then the Secretary of the Army or the Secretary of 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.
I went on some of these shows and 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 fight that ship, to support his soldiers or his sailors.
And something's just not right about this.
And now we'll see what happens.
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 was that, nope, chain of command.
He didn't follow the chain of command, and he should have followed that chain of command.
You know, the typical Navy type line.
But being from special operations and being a free thinker, that's what we're supposed to do.
We're supposed to be creative.
We're supposed to think, kind of red cell things from the enemy's 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 not military.
I mean, we're military, but we 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 and 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 measure it against if I can alienate people or not.
It's just, hey, I'm going to be honest.
I'm going to be open.
I'm going to 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, it's not just that I googled Navy SEAL knife or someone saying, and then he pulled out his Navy SEAL dagger.
No, that's not how it goes.
You're going to know exactly who made it, the relationship, all that sort of thing.
So what people can trust is that they're going to get my honest assessment.
And 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 owe 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 to lead.
But that's what they can trust is my honest assessment.
And so that's how I I deal with today.
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 then 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 owed 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.
And thank you for what you do for hunting and for those of us that are self-reliant and for giving this really opening people's eyes to what they can do to be better citizens and better prepared going forward.