Jack Carr, a former SEAL and bestselling author, reveals how Amazon’s The Terminal List adaptation—directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Chris Pratt—kept brutal authenticity intact, consulting real operators like Jared Shaw and Ray Mendoza to ensure military accuracy. He critiques modern accountability gaps in the Pentagon, citing the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal (13 U.S. deaths, abandoned Bagram Airfield) and Iraq’s de-Baathification as avoidable failures fueled by careerist politicians who prioritize power over service, like Bill Barr noted. Carr warns of China’s quantum computing and AI threats, alongside tech-driven censorship eroding free speech, while Rogan speculates Biden may be a "puppet" influenced by surveillance-capable entities. Their discussion ties military and political missteps to broader societal fragility, where distraction and ideological polarization risk repeating past mistakes—underscoring how modern freedoms hinge on vigilance, not complacency. [Automatically generated summary]
Once you go in the cold thing and then go back in 189 degrees, It's so easy.
So I wind up doing...
I usually do about 20 minutes in the hot until I can't take it anymore, and then I jump in the cold, and then I do three minutes in the cold, and then I could do another 15, 20 minutes easy in the hot before I start getting hot again.
It seems like if I got one of those, because we're definitely doing the hot one, it's going to have this nice view over the mountains and everything, and then I'm thinking about putting it in the cold tub and maybe, but I think it would just be almost for looks, because I'd do it once and say, that was horrible.
And that's where most of the quitters come from in BUDS is because of that cold.
Really?
That's interesting.
I mean, the sleep deprivation part of it in Hell Week, I guess, plays in, but I think it plays in more because the cold's affecting your body more, because you haven't slept in, like, Wednesday night, and you're just freezing.
But the worst part of it is when they put you on Wednesday night, they let you sleep for a couple hours, so they put you in this tent on the beach.
So you've been up since Sunday morning, You've been running.
You're in and out of the water.
So your body's like that cold, clammy sweat.
And they throw a bunch of dudes, like age 18 to like 22, into a tent with no ventilation.
And you're on these cots and you're just immediately going to REM sleep.
And so you're just like shaking and your eyes rolling around.
You're just like shaking in the bed there.
And then it feels like one second, but it's really an hour and a half, two hours, something like that.
And then they throw a flash crash grenade in and come shoot over the top of your head with M60 with blanks.
It sounds like you're doing it each and every time, but I thought about this recently, and I thought that, hey, if you were today, In today's day and age where we're all so comfortable and you were to come up with this program and say, hey, you know what?
We should make these special operations guys in the Navy and we'll call them SEALs and we'll have this Hell Week thing where we keep them on the verge of hypothermia the whole time.
A guy might die every now and again.
But we'll find out through that if they have grit, if they have this intangible thing.
And then they would take that up the chain of command and brief that to new admirals and captains up there.
There's no way it would get approved.
The only reason that it's a program is because it's a legacy program.
There's no way you create a program like that today.
But that's the only way you're going to make the kind of people that are necessary to do those heavy-duty missions.
There's no other way, because you've got to have someone who you know is not going to quit, is not going to fall apart, and is going to be able to be there for his fellow soldiers if shit goes sideways.
I was always shocked how many people got to boot camp, and this is still days before the internet, so late 90s, that hadn't heard of SEALs yet.
And they were like, oh, I'll give that a shot.
And they do great.
And then you have guys like me that have been training their whole life for it, and then you have guys training their whole life for it that quit the first day type of a thing.
And then you get people that find out about it in boot camp that also quit the first day.
And everything in between as well.
But it's really, you're testing for that thing you can't test for other than putting people through a crucible.
And throughout history, there have been these different crucibles, these different tests, really, to allow men to be part of the tribe.
And they have to pass these things.
And today it's a Marine boot camp.
It's SEAL training, Hell Week in particular.
It's Robin Sage in the Q course for Special Forces.
It's part of the Q course for Army Special Forces guys where they go into a made-up country of Pineland and have to deal with a network of agents and tribes and that sort of thing, really based on Counterinsurgency doctrine of the 50s and 60s and 70s.
But it's a way that they test Special Forces soldiers as part of the last thing they do before they get that Green Beret.
There was the Naval Combat Demolition Units in World War II, and I might have one of those letters slightly off, and then UDT, Underwater Demolition Teams.
Because you had those World War II reels, the news reels.
Same thing.
If you listen to those old news reels about Attack on Pearl Harbor or Midway, they have that same kind of tone, which is obviously different than We're good to go.
And what usually happens in Hollywood is someone, like, they break the window of the car, and then there's these two wires that are miraculously just underneath the dash, and they just touch them, and then it starts right up.
And so, because we wanted to root this in reality, the show...
There's a part that got cut of Chris driving his Land Cruiser looking for another vehicle because he needs to get another one because the authorities know that the Land Cruiser is there.
So he has to look for one that he knows how to break into.
I went to a car stealing school a while back and learned what cars are easier to break into than others and that sort of thing.
So we did it the exact way that you would break into that particular vehicle.
So we had to find one.
I think it's an older pickup truck that he finds.
And then he breaks into it the way that you would, and he starts the engine the way that you would.
And unfortunately, some of that got cut out in the post-production.
But point being, it was written into the script as it goes into the car, touches the wires under the dash.
Because I think that at one point in Hollywood, they're like, we need to break into this car, let's say 1950-something.
And that's what they did.
And then every other movie from then on did essentially the same thing.
Man, I'm looking at that like a 912. I've always wanted a 912. Really?
Why?
Because it has the old engine and it's like a Volkswagen engine.
I just kind of like that because I have that FJ40 now also that has the original engine in it, rebuilt, but it goes about top speed about 40, 45. And there's just something about like 1968, 912, maybe that slate gray they used to have back then or the British Racing Green or something like that.
And so, I don't know, I just always had a little affinity for those, because everybody knows the 911, and okay, that's wonderful, obviously, but the 912. Well, it's basically the same look, right?
Somebody makes one that's, I think they put it on a Tesla body.
Have you seen that?
They dropped it, it was on, I think Jay Leno's garage showed it, but I forget the name of the company, but they drop it on a Tesla body, so you have this thing that looks old, looks like a 1968 Porsche 912, but it's really all Tesla'd out.
Because if you take that insane engine, but the problem with it is, for sure, the problem is that it's going to be an automatic, and it's one gear, and you miss so much of the fun of one of those cars is shifting the gears.
I think he likes to keep things simple and functional.
And I think the way Jonathan, I'm speaking for him, obviously, I think his deal was, he thinks that the regular eight-cylinder is such a giant upgrade from the four-cylinder that comes, or is it six?
It's plenty fast for that car, but what it is, man, it's so capable.
During the freeze last year, I was having the time of my life.
Everybody was freaking out, because I have those excellent off-road tires, huge clearance, so I'm driving through snow and everything, and it just handled everything.
I have a Golden Retriever, and he never gets to see snow, but when he does get to see snow, He goes crazy and runs around, circles in it, dives in it, rolls around in his back.
But Simon& Schuster sent me, because I'm not really an audiobook listener.
I'm a reader.
have been my whole life.
And so they sent me a clip of somebody who they were recommending for the first novel.
And I listened to it, I hit the button, and I was like, "Oh, this guy sounded really old." And I was like, "I don't think this is the right fit." So I wrote back, and no one's bought a single book yet.
No one even knows who I am.
I'm not coming from politics, not coming from sports, I have no social media presence, zero.
And I wrote back and I said, "Can I pick somebody else?
This guy didn't sound right." And I said, well, how much time do I have?
And they're like, oh, end of business today.
And I'm like, look at my watch in Utah.
And I'm like, I know how seriously they take their weekends in publishing in New York.
And I'm like, oh, geez.
So I start listening to samples.
And then I found Ray Porter.
And then I start listening to more of those samples on Audible of things that he'd done.
And I said, this is the guy.
I had no idea that he was like the top narrator in the country, in the world.
And so I sent it to Simon& Schuster and said, hey, how about this guy?
Now, when you have a movie or a film version of these books, these books starring this gentleman that you've created, this James Reese guy, these books are insanely violent.
There are wild moments in this book where I'm like, ooh, when I first found out that you guys were going to do an Amazon series, I was like...
How are they going to show this?
And how much are they going to show?
And how much are you going to leave to the imagination?
But it was so interesting to see it come to life and to see the Amazon make their notes because you do these scripts and they get approved and then it's like planning something in a boardroom or planning something in a mission planning space in the military where it's air conditioned and you're talking through things and you're looking at the maps and you're saying, okay, we're going to put a blocking force here.
We'll have the Predator over here.
The AC-130 is on station for this amount of time and you plan it out perfectly and then you leave the gate to the base in Iraq and Afghanistan and you get out there.
And then things change for whatever reason.
Maybe you hit an IED, or you get out there and you're like, wait a second, that mountain, even though it looks a little higher in me, okay, this isn't exactly how we thought it was going to be.
Same thing with the scripts, in that you get out there to start filming, and you're on set, or you're in an area location, and you look around and you're like, oh, this is not working with how we envisioned this.
And you have to morph it on the fly right there.
and then the actors bring something to it too like chris pratt brings something to the character gene triple horn is amazing she brings something to it they all bring these different elements that affect episode two three four five six seven so it snowballs and morphs for other episodes and affects those down the line so you have to edit as you go so So things change throughout the whole process.
But Amazon, every change, you have to send it up the chain.
Just like in the military, it goes up to the top, and then it comes back down.
So there's a couple scenes in there, and people who have read the first book in particular will know the ones that we're talking about.
The comment that I got the most when I said that this book is being turned into a film or to a series, people would say, oh, Amazon's never going to let this be shown, or I hope they leave this scene in.
Those are the two things that I got, and Amazon left this in.
They had concerns about this one very graphic scene.
And it's in there, and now it's like one of the iconic scenes of the show.
And it's in there, and it's going to be in the advertising and all the rest of it when that hits here shortly.
But yeah, they left it, and they came down on the right side of everything we wanted every single time, which is a little bit shocking because you hear about, hey, they're only making things for people in L.A. and New York and forgetting about the country in between that really has this hunger for good content that's not just...
Flooded with all these things that might not necessarily connect with a lot of the people in the middle of the country.
Yeah, it's more a figurative way of putting it, but it's really...
The first person that takes advantage of making content and having production levels at such a high level that isn't infused with all these things that people are kind of tired of, that person's going to do well.
It seems like what's happening is the pushback against it is getting more loud and people getting more angry that it's being shoved down their throats.
But it doesn't seem to be stopping the amount of woke stuff that's being put out.
And there's definitely an opportunity there for somebody who wants to buy a bunch of soundstages maybe in Atlanta and bring in people that can create things with this super high production and make movies just kind of like we'd like to see without all this other political stuff in there.
But I don't think that what she said was outrageous or egregious or awful.
I think she was just trying to say that this political divide in this country that separates people and is so polarizing is unhealthy.
And there's a natural tribal instinct that people have to look at people from other tribes as being the enemy and that we were doing this in this country.
But she unfortunately compared it to the Holocaust and they just fired her.
So the Daily Wire immediately hired her after that, and then they just did a western that looks wild.
They showed the trailer for it at the last UFC. Nice.
But going back to the Hollywood side of the house, it's not necessarily I don't think that someone needs to take advantage of there being a gap and go totally right wing.
But it seems like, at least in fictional books, you're allowed to, you know, because it's not, you can't take it out as a clip and put it out there for people to get angry at.
And it's also, it's like you're taking into consideration the fact that there's good characters and bad characters and you have to show the evil side of man, you have to show the character and good nature.
There's so much going on there that you can't monkey with that too much.
I didn't have any touch points with publishing or with Hollywood before this.
And I was kind of wondering when I first started down this path and Simon& Schuster first read it, I was wondering, hey, are they going to say, hey, lighten up on the Second Amendment stuff?
Or, hey, do you really have to talk about the freedom so much as your character have to have these opinions?
And they never even mentioned that.
I've never even hinted.
I've had complete creative control the entire time.
And I think a lot of that has to do with this podcast because I heard Steven Pressfield on this podcast and I misinterpreted something that he said.
He was talking about a playwright that used to write a sentence or two that would keep him on theme for a play.
And in my mind, somehow that translated into Steven Pressfield used a yellow sticky note and put one word on it and that kept him on theme for his books.
And so I wrote Revenge of the Book.
And had that on a yellow sticky.
And that just kept me on theme, whether it was directly or indirectly, more importantly, tied to that theme.
So I think by the time it got to New York and they read it, I had stayed on theme that there are only content edits from Emily Bessler at Emily Bessler Books, who is just amazing.
She's the only person I wanted to be my publisher-editor.
Because I saw her thanked in the back in the acknowledgement section of Brad Thor's books and Vince Flynn's books.
So I just decided as I was writing and had no connections anywhere to decide that she would be my publisher and editor.
And then she ended up being my publisher and editor.
So I saw the transformation from Andy Dwyer to Seal, and I thought, this is the guy.
He's inherently likable.
I just have this connection with him already.
I don't know how, but this is the guy that's going to do it.
And so for Jared then to be best friends with Chris, to give him the book, and then Chris read it in the last week of December of 2017, called the next week and wanted to option it.
Fate is a weird thing because everybody wants to poo-poo fate.
Me too.
I poo-poo it.
I'm like, eh, come on.
It's just random events.
Sometimes I wonder.
Sometimes I wonder if stuff was meant to be.
Sometimes I wonder that if you write something...
And put it out there and really focus and really dedicate yourself to creating the best work that you can like you have done with your books that it'll attract the right person to play the role if it ever becomes a theatrical representation of it.
Have you, because of these books, do you think it's opened doors for other SEALs to start writing and making things into these sort of Stories of similar things to what they've experienced they realize this is kind of a path out once you're you know you've retired from the seals or you've decided that you've done your time and to pursue other things in life that sort of using those life experiences to create these
realistic interpretations realistic versions of that there's that like a new sort of pathway now I I don't know.
I happen to know that this is exactly what I wanted to do, but it's not what everybody wants to do.
But being able to listen to the call.
So my call was to service in the military and then to write these thrillers.
I listened to the call, both of those.
But a lot of people don't listen to that call, or they get discouraged or something along the way.
But for people, what I hope anyway, is that if anybody takes anything from this journey, Whether it's the military or transitioning from anything in life, whether it's the job transition, death of a loved one, divorce, it can be any sort of transition in life, is identifying that passion and figuring out your mission and putting those two together to give you purpose going forward.
So if there's anything that people can take from this or from my journey, that's it, I think.
But there's a lot of SEALs and Army Rangers.
Max Adams is an Army Ranger.
So Max Adams, Army Ranger, wrote on the show...
Jared Shaw was there every day, and Ray Mendoza, who has War Office Productions.
Those three guys, military, were on set every single day with the actors, with the showrunner, with the directors, and without them, this would be a very different show.
But they were there every single day, and they were so invested because we're all so close.
And I went out there like five times for a week each, and so I got to be there intermittently, but they were there every single day.
And that we're so close.
They wanted to do such a good job with it.
So I'm so indebted to those guys for being there and for David Agilio, the showrunner, for trusting us, for trusting them with every single decision that came down to tactics or reality and authenticity.
I think they usually have like a, you know, if you pick something up, like, hey, Coca-Cola.
Yeah, exactly.
So I think that's usually some sort of a deal in there, but nothing like that for this.
It was all based on the gear that we actually use, gear that I talk about in the books, things that are so personal to me, other seals, other operators.
So all that stuff is in there because I think Amazon realized how important that was to that fan base and how it would just take somebody out of it.
If you're a police officer or first responder or military and you're like, "We'd never do that.
I'd never carry that thing." It just takes you out of it for a little bit.
So there's none of... no company could pay for product placement in this.
Yeah, I think the showrunner knew how important that was, and Antoine and Chris were just all about authenticity and all about veterans watching this and not being taken out of it by rolling their eyes and saying, oh, Hollywood screwed it up again, even though it's fiction.
Well, Chris, so in December of 2019, Chris and Antoine linked me up with the showrunner, David Agilio.
And usually they like to get rid of the author right away because the author could be on set saying, you ruined my vision!
It just becomes an issue.
So they usually like to get rid of the author.
But Chris and Antoine wanted me involved.
So they connected me with the showrunner the first week that he got hired.
And we kind of felt each other out, him really feeling me out and seeing if I'm going to just be a pain this whole time.
And we hit it off right away, and we've talked every day since to include this morning.
And we wrote, well, he wrote the pilot episode, and I was just learning.
And he really mentored me along, taught me about screenwriting, and I get to advise on that pilot episode.
Advise on all the scripts, but primarily that pilot episode we worked together on.
But then he took it with Chris and Antoine and they shopped it around and went to Netflix and Amazon and Showtime and HBO and Hulu and Apple and it got into some sort of a bidding war at some point and Amazon ended up with it.
And the book is great, too, for people who haven't read the book, Outsiders, and Rumblefish also.
But that whole crew back then, when you see those pictures of them from the early 80s, I think it's fantastic.
And then Taps, and he's done an amazing job.
Those people who have staying power in Hollywood over decades, because if you look at a lot of actors' careers, it's like a 10-year period where they have this success, and then they do things still, but maybe not at that level they had for this 10-year period Well, he's 60 years old, and he's still in great shape, and he still looks really good.
He looks like he's 40. There's a couple guys out there that look very similar to they did 30 years ago.
Especially with camera angles, and that can mess things up.
One of my takeaways from this whole experience was how Right.
anything gets made in Hollywood and to anything good gets made because you have so many people involved.
There are so many opportunities to jack these things up.
You really have to have this core group that is invested.
And that was Chris Pratt.
That was Antoine Fuqua.
That was David DiGiulio.
It was this core group of us and they were so invested in it.
They weren't going to get distracted by anything else and not pay attention to any part of this production.
They were in it And they made sure that it didn't go off the rails.
And having those seals there and Max Adams Army Ranger there each and every day like that kept this thing on the rails.
But I can see...
I was always forgiving when I saw things in movies like someone's thumbs in aren't in the right position on that pistol or finger on the trigger type of a thing.
Very forgiving.
But now I'm even more forgiving because I see just how easy it is to mess these things up.
And even if you film something and you're like, oh, let's do it again.
Well, in post-production, someone that doesn't know weapons might be like, oh, let's just use this one.
It looks way better.
But it's the one where something was on backwards because they gave it to the actor or whatever else.
But yeah, I think we accomplished what we set out to do and keep this thing rooted in authenticity and That's because of Antoine and Chris and David DiGilio.
If you watched that movie in particular, I'm sure there's some other ones out there, but the way that you would move in the jungle and just lay down suppressive fire and having two elements leapfrogging back to get out of that contact, it was just a little different that you could take that.
And what we did for training after Vietnam was we'd take those tactics and we dropped them into an urban environment in training, or we dropped them into a mountain environment in training.
And then after September 11th, we got to over 10,000 feet in Afghanistan and realized, hey, some things are a little different here.
Like, the enemy's going to be shooting.
There's not all this jungle around.
They're going to shoot at the muzzle flash.
And what we have initially out of the gate, we had M4s with suppressors, but the automatic weapons didn't have suppressors yet.
Say if you're going to take Vietnam era jungle tactics and apply them to Afghanistan at 10,000 feet, is this something that they sit down and discuss with people?
Yeah, those guys are adapting in the field right away, and then they're getting back, and they're doing a hot wash right away.
What went right, what went wrong, how we can do it better next time.
And then they put together an after-action review, an AAR, and then send that out to the force.
So you're going to be back in Coronado, California, Virginia Beach, Virginia, and read this and say, oh, geez, okay, we need to adapt this, this, this, and this.
Let's get to work.
What do the next guys going downrange need?
What do the guys downrange need right now?
Whether it's suppressors, whether it's the next generation of night vision, or whatever it is.
Now we have to start adapting.
Hey, in training here, we've been training for a number of years just to rush into a building doing hostage rescue techniques when there might not be a hostage inside.
when we might just be going into somebody's house to grab them out of their bed in the middle of the night, let's say in Ramadi in Iraq, and then grab them and take them back for questioning and then go do it again.
Is it one of those situations, though, sometimes where there's an impediment to success in that when you do have situations go sideways, people are reluctant to take the blame, so maybe they don't describe what happened as accurately as possible?
If you're going to do something in Hollywood, you have so many people involved, it's very difficult to get What you really want out of it because, you know, everybody wants to have their say, everybody wants to kind of manipulate things.
Is that the case in warfare where if a mission goes sideways, maybe you want to blame it on the operators and maybe someone wants to blame it on the plan initially?
How do they hash that out and figure out what's the right way or wrong way to handle something?
My experience was when someone failed in the field, they wanted to pass those lessons along to the force because it makes us a stronger force as a whole, make stronger country as a whole if we pass those lessons on.
So it's so important to pass those failures on as well as the successes, what's working, what's not working.
And that means you got to, yeah, that ego has to be subverted.
I'm sure there are instances here and there of something going sideways.
And I mean, I'm sure that exists.
It's just human nature, maybe to cover up something you did wrong.
I don't know.
But that wasn't my experience.
I saw everybody really being completely honest.
We get back, hey, I did this wrong.
I screwed this up.
And this is how we're going to change it for next time.
Like just owning it right away to make us all a better way.
And it increases trust, both up and down the chain of command.
You're telling your senior leaders, hey, we messed this up, and the guys below you in the chain of command literally say, hey, my leaders want us all to be stronger next time so this doesn't happen again.
So if you don't do that, it can really erode that trust.
So it's so important to be honest, especially about the failures.
One of the reasons why I'm bringing this up is one of the recurring themes in your books with James Reese is these people that are, they're in the military, but they're either corrupt or they're egomaniacs or they're pencil pushers who,
because of their whatever's going on, whether it's corruption or whatever's happening, They'll come up with ideas that benefit them and put the soldiers lives in danger and It seems like that's a kind of a reoccurring theme that there's people that you have to listen to that are assholes Oh yeah, and I get a lot of that from real world.
Certainly our senior level generals and politicians are giving me a lot to work with when it comes to that side of the house.
Let me just look at Afghanistan.
We had 20 years to prepare to leave Afghanistan, and the best we could do is what we saw last August.
You didn't need a background in military.
You didn't need to read a book on military history, on strategy, on tactics.
You could just apply common sense to that problem set.
And that's what Carl von Klauschwitz, who wrote On War, he described as the most important attribute of a battlefield leader is common sense.
George Marshall, the same thing.
He fired so many people to get to those generals we all know today who won World War II. We're good to go.
And so he gave them a chance, gave them a second chance.
Boom.
They were gone.
Someone else moved.
And they didn't fail forward either.
They were gone.
And that made us a stronger military.
Put those people in place that we all know today.
And then something shifted after World War II. And I don't know what it is, but there's a lack of accountability that got attached to senior level leadership.
And we've seen that time and time again.
We had 20 years in Afghanistan.
There's a great book called The Afghanistan Papers by Craig Whitlock, and there were these interviews that were done with these senior-level generals leaving Afghanistan in particular, and they thought that these interviews and questions were going to remain classified.
There were Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, two of them, that got these released.
And he juxtaposes what they said in these private classified interviews with what they were saying to Congress, the American people, their troops, and their 180 out from one another.
And if you go back and look at testimony to Congress, you can take the person's name off there, take the date off there, and they say essentially the same things.
The Afghan military, we're making progress.
All we need is, we're meeting our milestones, just need more resources, more funding, more troops, whatever it is they're asking for.
For 20 years, the same things.
And the one guy, I think it was in 2009, people can go back and check me, the guy that said one thing that wasn't a party line, and he didn't even say anything bad, he said something along the lines of, things aren't going as well in Afghanistan as we think they are.
He was removed a couple months later.
The only person held accountable over that 20-year period.
And then we get to Afghanistan, and look what we have.
That's why anybody can look at the situation and say, why are we giving up this tactically advantageous position at Bagram, and we're putting America's sons and daughters in a tactically disadvantageous position at this airfield in Kabul?
And then what do we have?
We have 13 Americans dead.
Numerous others with traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress, missing arms, legs, in wheelchairs.
There's a Marine, a female, who is in a wheelchair now.
And friends of mine at Rescue 22 Foundation have trained up a dog for her.
She's an inspiration, just incredible.
But why was she there?
Why did we give up Bagram?
And you don't need a military background to look at that situation and say, hey, if we're leaving, why don't we leave from this position that's tactically advantageous?
And a lot of that falls on politicians.
But still, we have senior level military leaders for a reason, and their responsibility is to the troops.
And I don't know why none of them have been held accountable over this last 20 years, particularly for Afghanistan, for that debacle and the way we left that country.
20 years to prepare.
You didn't have to go back to the Soviets in 79-89.
You didn't have to go back to three British incursions in the 1800s and early 1900s.
Certainly didn't need to go back to Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great to pull out certain lessons.
We fell prey, I think, to imperial hubris, and we thought that we could do this, and we took the wrong lessons from the Soviet experience.
What we needed to do in 2001 is flood that country and flood Tora Bora in particular.
We had 100 special operators, CIA guys, on the ground in Tora Bora.
That's where Bin Laden was.
They asked for rangers.
They asked for Marines.
They asked for 10th Mountain Division.
Those requests were denied, and Bin Laden escaped.
And that moment right there, more than any other moment, really defined the next 20 years.
I don't know if there's a reason, but in looking back at it, it is that the senior level leaders didn't want that Soviet experience, which we eventually had.
They wanted to keep the troop levels to a minimum and do the job with a minimum amount of people on the ground.
And of course, after that, we ballooned way past what their initial...
We had more people, I think, at the Salt Lake City Olympics than we had in Afghanistan, which is crazy to think about.
But hey, lessons learned.
And what I would hope is that we take those lessons and apply them going forward as a wisdom.
And we neglect to do that in this country.
We think of things in terms of four-year election cycles, eight-year election cycles for the real deep thinkers among us.
But what we owe those people who sacrifice their lives, and it's not just their lives, people coming home with this post-traumatic stress, and it's a generational type of deal because it's going to affect their children.
It's going to affect their spouse.
So it's a multi-generational thing that people come home with.
But we owe them everything.
Our best efforts going forward to take those lessons and apply them to the next conflict, apply them going forward as wisdom.
And I'm not hopeful that we're going to do that because we don't have a very good track record of that.
Yeah, and then on top of that, just the fucking generations, as you said, of families and loved ones that have to deal with the stress and the chaos and having lost people over there.
There seems to be a direct connection between the loss of faith in the military in those conflicts, the Korean conflict and then the Vietnam conflict.
Whereas, we don't think about it that way when we think about World War II. When we think about World War II, we think about it as the good guys versus the bad guys.
And we won, and we came back, and there's the famous kiss on V-Day in the middle of the street.
There's all these romantic notions attached to World War II that aren't attached to Korea and aren't attached to Vietnam.
Yeah, I mean, Eisenhower's speech, people pull out that military-industrial complex line, but people should listen to the whole speech.
Listen to it and watch it, because it's fascinating.
But something shifted, and I don't know exactly what it is.
I can't put my finger on it, but it keeps coming back to accountability.
But my question is, why do we lose that sense of accountability?
Why did we lose the importance of accountability following World War II, particularly in 1947 when we reorganized, really, our defense system?
Our intelligence agencies and the military got reorganized in 1947. We changed the name of the War Department to the Department of Defense.
So we have precision in language, precision in thought.
There's a shift there.
We used to have a Secretary of War.
What do we have after 1947?
We have a Secretary of Defense.
So there's that little thing, little thing, but language is important.
And then for some reason, we stopped holding our senior level leaders accountable.
And I don't know why you could point to This essentially a triad of politicians, of think tanks, of the defense industry, kind of how people float between all those things.
So it became big business.
NATO became big business.
So there's a lot of things that came into play that weren't at play before World War II that become reality after World War II. So I don't know what it is.
I can't put my finger on it.
But then we have that same generation that came home and what did they do?
They got to work.
They didn't whine about what they'd been involved in.
They got to work and they built this country into what it is today.
And it's so hard to see what we're doing to ourselves really in this country.
That last book, In the Devil's Hand, I put myself in the enemy's shoes and I thought, hey, what did they learn from us on the field of battle over the last 20 years at war?
And during the time I was writing that, COVID hit.
Summer of civil unrest.
Very contentious political season and election cycle.
The enemy's learning from all those things.
And the sad part of my takeaway from that research Was that, hey, if I'm the enemy, I might just watch.
We're doing a pretty good job of destroying ourselves from the inside right now.
I might just wait and watch and see what happens.
But, of course, I had to figure out in a fictional sense how to deal with that, and I did in a very creative way that was fun to figure out.
But it's sad to think that we've lost this appreciation, I think, for what was sacrificed so we could have these freedoms and options and opportunities that we do today.
So from the inception of this country up until today, people have sacrificed everything or they've risked everything so that we can have these freedoms.
And now we have a segment of society that wants to undercut those freedoms because I don't think they appreciate what was sacrificed so we could have them.
And that part, that's sad.
I took my daughter to...
Pearl Harbor for the 80th anniversary commemoration events this last December.
And we volunteered with an organization called the Best Defense Foundation, Donnie Edwards Foundation, that takes people back to the World War II battlefields primarily so they can say goodbye.
They can make peace with what they did there.
And a lot of them, it's their last trips to these places.
A lot of them, it's their second trip.
The first one was actually going over the beach in Normandy or going to Iwo Jima and fighting.
And now they're getting to go there in the last years of their lives and say goodbye.
But we went to Pearl Harbor, and so my daughter is 16, and she sat it.
We volunteered.
We took 64 veterans, age of 96 to 104. Wow.
And in wheelchairs, we're getting them on and off the buses, taking them to the events, getting the dinners, making sure they're taking their medications, all that stuff.
And it was a turning point in her life, because she got to sit down across the table from this generation that, yeah, she's heard me talk about, and she's read about.
But to hear them tell their stories, and a lot of them haven't even told their stories until just a few years ago.
There's one guy, Jack Holder, who was on the airfield at Pearl Harbor.
He watched the planes, Japanese planes, come over the mountains, drop down, strafe the runway.
He jumps into what was then a sewage ditch, and he showed us the bullet holes in the runway, still there, in the hangar, still there.
And so he jumps into this sewage ditch, he watches the planes take this left-hand turn, bank, And he jumps up, runs to the edge of Pearl Harbor right there on the water and watches them and watches the first torpedoes get dropped in Pearl Harbor.
And then he went back, he flew a PBY, which was a seaplane.
And then he went on to fight in the Pacific and he sunk a Japanese submarine and helped sink a Japanese aircraft carrier.
And then he goes to the Mediterranean and sinks a German submarine.
I mean, incredible.
Incredible.
That's what this generation did for us.
And so she got to see that.
Point being is that she appreciates what that generation gave us.
And then by default, what previous generations have given us.
So we're going to go to D-Day here this June, taking her out of school.
We're going to go do that.
Go to Normandy and take the same group of veterans back to Normandy.
And a lot of them, it'll be their last trip.
But she'll get to help again, get them to the events, get them to dinners, get them on and off the buses, in and out of the wheelchairs.
And for me, it was in buds on the beach in Hell Week, you know, doing push-ups, getting yelled at, you're freezing, you're on the verge of hypothermia, people are quitting.
And I thought, hey, you know what?
I'm not coming off of a boat onto a beach in Normandy where I'm running through a hail of machine gun fire that's set up in an elevated position with no cover and concealment between me and...
Right.
I'm like, I can do a few more push-ups here on the beach.
You know, I can shiver here in the water a little longer here.
Those guys sacrificed that so I could follow my dream and I could be here on this beach in Coronado, California, testing myself in this crucible of buds.
So I think about that generation in particular quite a bit and what they gave us.
Tactically, when they review storming the beach at Normandy, is there alternative methods of approaching that situation that people have proposed that would have caused less casualties?
Because it's such a crazy thing to just dump everybody off at the beach and run towards the gunfire.
I mean, I always wonder, like, why didn't they do something differently?
Why didn't they shoot at them with planes and soften them up first?
So yeah, it's an amazing place to go for people who haven't been, to go to these memorials, especially to take kids to these memorials, and to go to Pearl Harbor, and to go to Normandy, and to go stand up on Pointe du Hoc and look down.
And see where the Rangers had to climb up ropes and ladders.
And the Germans are firing right down on them from these positions.
And they just kept climbing.
The Longest Day, that old movie, it shows that as well.
And I grew up with that film.
It's an old black and white movie that people should watch.
They should watch that end, Saving Private Ryan.
And that's the power of popular culture.
Like, these movies play an important part in our popular culture and in our history because you can show these things and create this appreciation.
And we're just losing that, I think.
I mean, Hollywood used to be our most prolific and valuable asset that we would export.
And so people from all over the world would see these movies and see this opportunity that was the United States.
And I think that's shifted.
That's shifted over time.
That's why those war films I think are so important because you can watch that and say, oh my gosh, I am so appreciative of what those guys did.
And you know what, my life here, maybe I can make some changes here and I can appreciate what they did for us so that I can make my own decisions and I can have these freedoms and opportunities rather than just complain about it because really, you know what I'm not doing?
Running into a hail of machine gun bullets as I cross this beach.
So there's a lot to appreciate the previous generations and what they did for us.
This is what I was getting at by saying, trying to figure out what weren't wrong and did it go wrong because after that, the Korean conflict and the Vietnam conflict were not thought of as victories for America in the same way, especially Vietnam.
I mean, I've talked to people that came back and the things that they endured and the abuse that they took, people calling them baby killers and people saying horrible...
Some of it was accurate.
I don't remember who the senator was, but there was someone who was a politician.
It may not have been a senator, but they were calling him a hero, and they had this depiction of his past about what a war hero he was.
This is a story where the guy said, look, I can't do this anymore.
This is not what happened.
What we were involved in was essentially war crimes and we did some horrible, horrible things.
Which was also a part of the Vietnam War.
What happened in those jungles and the way the war was playing out and the frustration that the soldiers had and the evil potential that men have for evil.
You see that potential for evil and that's why you have to take such pains to maintain the moral high ground because oftentimes that's all we have that differentiates us from the enemy.
Is that moral high ground, and when you lose it, you've lost.
And there's a threat of invasion, a very real threat of invasion.
Yeah.
And we got, we did, there were, I think it was, I'm going to get this exact numbers wrong, but there was a small number, less than 10, of German saboteurs.
I think there were two U.S. citizens that were involved in it on the East Coast.
They came out of a submarine.
I think there's an old black and white movie about it.
But they were tried in like a month.
Military tribunals on U.S. soil.
And I think two were executed.
I think the rest went to prison.
But what do we have now?
We still have people attached to 9-11 that are still in Guantanamo that we really don't know what to do with.
How much of a part does it play in the general public's confidence that the war is just and that these actions are just?
Like, there's a lot of lack of confidence after the weapons of mass destruction debacle.
I mean, it was promoted by the mainstream media.
It was promoted by politicians and military industrial complex wanted us to get into Iraq, and they were claiming that there was Unquestionably, weapons of mass destruction.
We had to get in there.
We had to stop this before it became another disaster.
Yeah, that's a tough one because when you see these authoritarian regimes and you see, just like with Putin today, they don't necessarily get the best information from their senior level generals and advisors because if you bring bad news to, let's say, the leader of North Korea or Iran or Russia, well, guess what?
You might not be long for this world.
So it doesn't encourage people to step up and say, hey, you know this nuclear program that we've been talking about?
We don't really have it.
If you're telling Saddam Hussein that.
So there are plenty of people who thought that they actually had that.
And why did they do that?
Well, they wanted to deter their neighbors.
Or they looked at it as a deterrence, probably.
So that comes into play, too.
It's very hard for me to think that, even though I write about in the book all sorts of...
In my books in general, all sorts of nefarious things at senior levels of government, it's so hard for me to believe that they actually took steps deliberately that they knew were wrong based on faulty intel.
I have to think that they assumed that they were getting good intel and these things, although later on in the war, I would not have been able to launch a mission based off the kind of intel that we use to actually go to war.
I would not be able to launch a mission off of single-source intelligence that wasn't corroborated by technical means and another human source, meaning another human on the ground disassociated from the network that's giving me my information on said bad guy.
Well, I'm not just going to launch based on him because, well, he just might have some sort of a feud with that guy and want me to use the military to take that person out.
So we saw that a lot in the beginning.
So you have to Corroborate that with another totally disassociated network and then technical means as well.
So you really know you're going after the right person for the right reasons and you're not just settling some centuries-old feud.
But going into the war, I wouldn't have been able to launch a mission 10 years later based on that kind of intel.
I had a conversation with a guy once, and we were talking about weapons of mass destruction, the way it was promoted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
And they were saying that it was just obviously that it was not true, but that it was this massive hoax and that it was all designed to get us to enter into the war.
And I'm like, man, I don't know if people would be willing to accept a coordinated lie that easily.
I have to think that at least there was some concern that this was real.
And is that the case that when you're getting military intel on a situation that's ongoing, oftentimes it's cloudy and you're not exactly sure and you have to err on the side of caution.
And if you decided to ignore whatever intel was saying that they have weapons of mass destruction, it turned out to be true.
That would be even more disastrous.
And the atmosphere in this country was, we had just been hit.
9-11 had just happened.
We can't take that chance again.
We have to be proactive.
And even though it turned out to be a gigantic, horrific disaster, I'm reluctant to believe that it was this large-scale conspiracy involving everyone, that CNN knew it was a lie, that Colin Powell knew it was a lie.
I have to think that at least some of them thought that it was real.
Or painting a rosy picture, or you have this outcome that you want, and so what do we need to support that?
And looking at those things that support that, rather than the things that don't support it.
So I have to think that they're acting off the best intel that they had at the time, and making decisions that they thought were in the best interest of the American people, and protecting I have to think that, and it just ended up not to be the case.
And there are many reasons why it's not the case that we just talked about with Saddam thinking that he might have had a more robust capability in the end, because people are telling him that, possibly.
I always wonder, and then so you take that and you extrapolate 20 years later, right?
When you follow up 20 years later and you look at the kind of confidence that people have in the military's ability to make the correct decisions, and then You fuck that sideways with the extraction from Afghanistan.
Because now everybody's like, Jesus Christ, why would you do it that way?
Why did anybody do it that way?
You know, I've had conversations with people on this podcast that were military people, high level people that were involved in this and they said there's nothing about that extraction that was right.
Once again, it goes back to that accountability piece, which what confidence does that give you as the taxpayer that we're going to do something right in the next theater of war?
Not very much confidence there.
We have proven that we are unable to take the lessons of the past and apply them to the That is meaningful.
But really, it's the responsibility of those leaders to do that for that E1, E2, E3, that lower enlisted person who's going to be standing the gate guard, who's going to be going out there into these streets or out there into the mountains and taking fire and dealing with a car that's coming up that looks like, oh, maybe is it bad suspension or is there a family in there or is it packed with explosives?
And they're 18 years old and they're out there looking at this thing and have to make a decision.
And then it pulls up, and it detonates.
Or they shoot, and guess what?
It's full of a family.
Like, these things are so difficult.
And then they have to live with that for the rest of their lives.
And they're put in that position by senior-level leaders who should have known better on a few things.
Specifically to Iraq, disbanding the Iraqi army, okay?
So now you have this entirely trained-up military that's essentially now an insurgency, okay?
We have that de-Baathification.
So anyone who had any job in Iraq was a Baathist.
So the person that emptied the garbage, the people that kept the lights on, now de-bathification, those people don't have jobs.
So now we're fighting an insurgency and we're figuring out how to get the trash picked up, how to keep the power on.
We're building up an entirely new government.
And those lessons and those senior-level leaders, they are responsible for making those decisions, just like we would be at the tactical level.
And they made the wrong decision there.
And that one, those two things right there, looking back at those two things, like, It's almost unforgivable that they would make those decisions and not correct it immediately.
We created that insurgency because of those two decisions.
I mean, I know when we left Iraq, I was at a lower level, tactical level, so you just kind of hear things, so I don't know how true it is, but how much it costs to bring certain things back rather than leave it there.
Like the gyms that went up all over the place.
So there's all these gyms all over Iraq, and you've seen the videos on YouTube of the Iraqis trying to work out.
They're pretty funny.
I think there's quite a few out there.
But rather than pack all that up and take it home, just leave it.
I'd use that as the most basic level, but then you apply that to how much does it take to get this helicopter back and that helicopter back and this and that.
Did we think that we were going to turn those over to the Afghans and leave those with them?
You can see the provinces falling from January, February, March, April, May, June, July.
I mean, you could watch it.
If you put it on the screen and show the provinces that fall, I mean, yeah, you don't have to be Nostradamus to figure out that, hey, this isn't looking so good, and everything is converging here, and you could extrapolate that, oh, probably every province is going to fall.
One being, hey, maybe you could leave a small force at Bagram, perhaps, to try to keep this military, keep this intelligence service, keep this government running, maybe after 20 years.
I don't know how long you can sustain that, but you could have done that.
And then, if things aren't working out, they're the last people to leave.
So that's one.
So you could have done that.
You get everyone out and leave Bagram, and it ends up being the same thing.
You see, watch the whole government fall, the leader left, of course, but now you're not leaving from a tactically disadvantageous position.
So you had essentially those two options, to draw down to something, a very small force left there, trying to keep that government going, trying to keep that military going, trying to keep that intelligence service going, and then you could see how that works out.
It's probably still happening right now as we're speaking here.
What do we think was going to happen?
I talked to somebody about that in 2003 in the back of a Hilux pickup truck in Afghanistan and asking him about what does he think is going to happen when we eventually leave here.
You get a good answer.
You're trying to figure out the language barrier and all that, but I did ask that because I was thinking about that because what's our track record?
Well, we have Vietnam to look at.
And at the time, we had the Kurds at the first Gulf War.
We had that, leaving them, kind of hanging them out to dry.
So we don't have a very good track record of supporting people that ally with us in foreign countries when we're doing particularly expeditionary counterinsurgency, meaning a counterinsurgency campaign in another country.
So I was asking about that.
I was thinking about it back then.
And I was like, oh man, I hope this guy's going to be okay when we leave here eventually.
And I didn't know if it was going to be a year or two years, 20 years.
I didn't know when it was going to be, but I was fairly certain that at some point in time, we're going to leave this place.
And what's going to happen to all these people that helped us?
And then you have, there's talks of China aiding the Taliban and moving in and supplying them and sort of working with them the moment they realize the United States is no longer going to be in power.
Like they don't seem to have the same qualms that we have about human rights and No, they're not known for that in China, being overly concerned with human rights.
Right there when we talk about big business and their associations with China.
But when I look at the country and I just look at what's happening today and I see a few things that you could apply common sense to, just like Karl von Klauschwitz and George Marshall talked about, well, if you look at our position in the world today and say, huh, why are we outsourcing our energy to our enemy?
Okay, the energy, that essentially runs our national security apparatus.
Okay, and we're outsourcing that to our enemy.
We need oil from what countries?
And we could be energy independent here?
Okay, that's one.
The accountability we talked about, obviously.
And hey, where are all these chips coming from that also run our defense establishment and run all our phones?
And where are our pharmaceuticals coming from and the precursor drugs for a lot of those pharmaceuticals coming from?
Oh, China?
Wait a sec, so we're dependent on China, Iran, all these people that are essentially our enemies, we're dependent upon them, and we have a porous southern border at the same time.
Some very basic things that you would think we could address as a nation.
Would there be an argument that it's good to work with them, and that if our energy systems and our chips and all these other things are dependent upon them, that they wouldn't want the demise of America because it's crucial to their economy?
And that we could have some sort of a cooperative effort that would at least in some way ensure some level of peace.
I think that as the companies used to be, America first, these different companies.
And now when you become these global conglomerates and dependent upon China for a lot of that revenue and to shareholders and to everything else, Well, now you're dependent on an enemy.
So now you have this company that's an American-based company.
You had the opportunity to create something and create untold wealth.
But now we're dependent on China.
So who are we now loyal to?
Are we loyal more to these shareholders and our company or to the United States of America?
What's most beneficial to us and what conditions can we create here in this country to not be reliant on our enemies for those things that keep us safe, that run our defense establishment, our intelligence establishment, and some of the things that we rely on to run mom-and-pop businesses across the country.
Do you think it's also a function of the fact that the United States essentially, like you were talking about before, we're dealing with four-year time periods or eight-year time periods where that's the time someone's in office as a president, whereas in China they have full control and they can play this long game.
And also the government and big business are completely entangled.
If you're dealing with a company in China, you're dealing with the government of China.
You're dealing with the defense establishment of China.
You're dealing with the intelligence community of China.
So these lines are blurred now, and they weren't always blurred, and they're getting more blurry as we continue to go forward.
And I don't know what the solution is, but I know that we're on a path right now that...
The outcome is not hopeful.
And I try to remain as hopeful as I can publicly, but when my wife and I sit down at the end of the night and have a glass of wine on the couch and talk about what world that our kids are inheriting, it's a tough one.
Looking into quantum computing, looking into artificial intelligence, looking into data storage and surveillance of U.S. citizens and the Internet of Things and how all this is connected.
That part is scary.
It was scarier than the bioweapons research that I did for the last book.
No doubt about it.
And the picture that I paint in this thing, I think it is close.
Because the people that I talked to that were involved in quantum computing, and for people who haven't seen a quantum computer, look that up and hit images.
I thought it was just a big computer.
It's not.
It is this medusa of wires that's suspended in a vacuum.
It is a crazy looking thing.
And so people should check out what those even look like.
Well, I did a lot of research and reading, but once you read something about quantum computing or artificial intelligence, it's way dated by the time you read it.
So you read those things so you can ask questions with people that are more current, because it gives you the foundation from which to ask these questions.
So same thing like I did with the bioweapons research in the last one.
I talked to a lot of people that are involved in that space, and you get a little sliver, just like a journalist would do, and I take a little bit from each and every one of them to paint that picture and figure out that puzzle.
Same thing with this.
And the people that I talked to, they all told me that, hey, we could tell you more, but That would for sure put this book in the science fiction category.
So they spied on the CIA and the NSA. So American phone tracking firm demoed their surveillance powers by spying on the spies and saying, hey, we can spy on you.
So if this is an American company...
See, this is what I was getting at before when I was talking about China and the government, is that...
Reluctantly I say this, but I think I might be right.
The only way to compete with a country that has the government And the businesses inexorably entangled, where the government and the businesses work hand in hand, is for the governments and the businesses of this country to work hand in hand.
That scares the shit out of me, because what's involved in that is full compliance by the population.
The only way you get full compliance by the population is you have to be able to control everything they do, including money.
So some sort of a centralized digital currency where they have in China where they can tell you what you can and cannot buy based on your social credit score, which is something that everybody was very terrified of during this COVID thing when they were starting to at least suggest the possibility of implementing a passport.
Some sort of a passport of what you can and can't do.
And the initial suspicion was that if you started off by saying, you know, you have a vaccine passport, and if you do not comply, you will not be able to do these things.
You won't be able to have access to goods and services and transportation and all these different things based on your compliance with some government regulation that's implemented reluctantly but necessarily because of a crisis.
Now, once that's in play, then that becomes the norm.
We get accustomed to it, it becomes a way of life, and then they can implement that and keep pushing that envelope further and further down.
Or is it that they were scared of COVID and they felt like this is the only way to keep people safe?
And because of that, because people are scared, and they felt like this is the only way to keep people safe, we've got to get everybody vaccinated, we've got to get everybody saved, we've got to get back to normal.
But they're reluctant to look at the general history of what happens when people do this.
And that's why every chance I get, I like to talk about going back into the pages of history and reading about why we have these freedoms that we have today.
Why were they in place from the beginning?
Why are they so important?
Why did they give us this opportunity?
Why did they allow us to build this into the greatest country on the face of the earth?
And this marketplace of ideas and this debate and letting the best ideas rise to the surface.
And now that's all going away.
These rights are slowly being eroded over time.
And we have these crises where we then take a little more.
The government takes a little more power.
And you have career politicians in there now.
So they're not...
I keep going back to Eisenhower, but he had a great quote about farming.
And he said, hey, farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from a cornfield.
So you have people in Washington who, you know, they're called to service as politicians, and they also happen to be very savvy investors, if you haven't noticed that.
They're very savvy investors somehow.
They make a lot of money in politics as politicians.
Their family members make a lot of wise investments.
They make a lot of wise investments.
Very interesting.
But they're career politicians, and that's not how this was set up.
I had a great conversation with Bill Barr, former Attorney General.
He was on my podcast a couple weeks ago, and he'll come out here in a little bit.
But he's so in tune with that side of the House, with these career politicians, because he was in government, he was in private practice, got called back to service, did it, and...
And what he saw were careerists and people that aren't going to Washington just for a year or two and then going back to the farm.
I mean, I think we'd be a lot better off if we had some more farmers rather than some attorneys who maybe never even really practiced law in Congress.
And this is that term that people don't like because it's kind of like almost like fictional, but the deep state.
People don't like that term.
Oh, come on with this deep state talk.
Because it was kind of connected to what Trump was saying when he got into office and that the deep state is after Trump and people go, oh, shut the fuck up with all this.
But it seems like that's what the deep state is, right?
It's career politicians that are inexorably intertwined with business.
And they have as much...
And today, this is what my fear was during the election when I was talking about Biden.
I was like, do you really think that that guy's in charge of anything or going to be in charge of anything?
No judgment about who he is as a politician, but just as a biological entity.
That is the craziest part of all this, is that our stalwart defenders of the First Amendment used to be lawyers, used to be publishing houses, used to be magazine editors, used to be newspapers, used to be politicians.
Yeah.
We're in defense of that First Amendment.
And all of us as citizens, we would say growing up, hey, I will fight and die for your right to say something, especially if I disagree with you because we're Americans.
That used to be, no matter what you thought of the Second Amendment or what you thought of anything else, that First Amendment bound us all together.
And now we have those same people that used to defend that First Amendment Now, actively calling for censorship.
So instead of having that debate and having the best ideas rise to the top in this marketplace of ideas, now if I disagree with you, I just want to censor you and cancel you.
And we had a glimpse of it at the beginning of COVID, where people were like, oh my gosh, is there going to be some food on the shelves at the grocery store?
Hey, if I call 911, will someone show up?
And then we got back to normal-ish, as far as that stuff goes.
So we had a little bit of a scare.
But even if you saw some of the interviews on the streets of Odessa, of Kiev, you saw people not thinking that the Russians were going to invade.
And they had these on the street.
And then the next day, boom, society is fragile.
For most of human history, society has been fragile.
And you used to have to be good at the fighting and good at the hunting.
If you were going to survive.
So we all have ancestors that were good at those two things, or we would not be here today.
And society can collapse pretty dang quickly.
And if you've been to Iraq and been to Afghanistan, you can see that.
I know you have a little glimpse here and there, but we have had so, from the end of World War II up to today, we've had relative peace in our country.
It's been relatively stable in our country.
We've got very comfortable, and we've lost this sense of why we have these freedoms.
And instead, we have this entitlement culture that plays into it.
And we have this just This comfort that, hey, if I call 911, someone's going to show up.
Well, guess what?
Probably not.
They're going to come up after most of the time.
They'll be a few minutes late to save the day, unless you're a politician with taxpayer-funded security surrounding you at all times.
But you have to be good at defending yourself, your family, your community, and you have to be good at putting meat on that table.
Otherwise, your lineage is not going to be around that much longer.
Wall Street Journal had a thing called TikTok Brain the other day, and I actually printed it out for our 11-year-old, and I took out the ads, took out everything that was in there when I printed it, and I gave it to him to read, because TikTok Brain, 15 seconds, and then you're ready for the next one.
You're ready for that next distraction.
And you're getting all these inputs all the time, and most of them maybe are not that healthy.
And what are you not doing when you're distracted by those things?
You're not focused on what you need to do to move forward, to be a prepared citizen, a good citizen of this country.
Moving that ball forward, being a good inheritor of these freedoms, and then defending them for that next generation so they can then move the ball forward for the following generation.
I don't know either, and it scares the shit out of me because I'm not...
I mean, I'm not sure how it ever...
how we get rational, how we get objective, how we stop this and say we have to preserve some aspects.
And even if we did have the inclination to do so, when you see something like quantum computing, when you see this AI that can spy on anyone at any time, and when people do tell you that if we told you everything, it would essentially be science fiction.
So what is science fiction today, and what is it like in five years?
I mean, this next decade, I think, is a pivotal decade for the country when it comes to freedoms and what it's like going forward and what opportunities our kids are going to have going forward.
What's not controlled by the government, what thoughts and behaviors aren't controlled by a government business tech type of an entity.
What's encouraged by the government, what's encouraged as far as censorship goes by these tech platforms that have so much power concentrated in such a small number of people.
So these are real decisions and real issues that they need to be contended with, and we haven't had to deal with them.
Overwhelmingly run by ideologically driven left-wing people who believe in a very specific way of thinking and behaving and living.
And they're diametrically opposed to people that have a different perspective.
And they don't welcome free debate and speech and will actively censor and shadow ban and do all sorts of things to people, even if these people are Highly intelligent, articulate, conservative people that aren't outrageous.
Don't say wild things.
They're not, you know, QAnon folks.
They're regular human beings who happen to have a conservative perspective.
And rather than having a debate and being open to, hey, yeah, well, interesting.
I had not thought about that before.
And making friends and having a drink or having coffee.
I mean, there's a picture of Ronald Reagan going out with the leader of the other party and they're out there with their tuxedos and they're at a show and they're laughing with their wives and all that stuff with Tip O'Neill.
I know those things, but I'm going to have to go back to that one in particular.
But going out to dinner just with them together as a couple to enjoy an evening on the town and having a nice steak dinner and then watching a show, like, that doesn't happen.
This sort of absolutist mentality that it's my way or there's no other way.
And tech companies have power that's never been wielded by any individual company that is a civilian-based company before.
There's never been the kind of power that tech companies have to shape narratives and to...
To get people elected or not elected or just to shape how elections run based on what kind of information is distributed or allowed to be distributed or curated.
But back in the day, you used to have to either bribe a newspaper reporter or you had to get blackmail on them or blackmail a spouse or a child or something like that.
Look, if you go back and read the New York Times from the 1960s, I mean, it was very objective news.
It wasn't opinion-based.
The difference between what's now is like it's so much editorial and opinion, including, like, television news.
Like, the predominant television news today, especially on the left wing and the left side, rather, is, well, no, that's not true.
The right side, too.
It's so opinion-based.
It's so editorialized.
It's like, who's the number one guy on the right?
It's Tucker Carlson.
Who's the number one people on the left?
It's like Rachel Maddow.
These are very opinionated, editorial-based.
It's not like, this is what's happening.
These are the casualties in Kyiv.
This is why it happened.
This is the strategic reason why they want to control that aspect of the world These are the natural resources they seek to possess.
This is their fears about NATO.
This is you know, there's none of that It's it's everything is from an ideological perspective and there's so much opinion based Like, commentary on this stuff.
I always thought about that in terms of big business people.
I always say that about guys like Bill Gates.
Why would you even bother trying to make more money?
Why wouldn't you just enjoy yourself?
If I had that kind of money, I'd be living like Jeff Bezos.
He steps down, he's got this fucking banging hot girlfriend, gets jacked, starts going around the world, balling out of control, wearing tight underwear.
For a mammal, when they get away from an arrow that's going 290 feet per second and it's within like 10 yards of them and they're like, they're out of there, they move like they're defying time.
There can be a lot of pressure depending on what's going on.
COVID, they took a little break, though, because there was a lockdown, so they got to take a little breath.
So that was kind of interesting to see them a little more relaxed than they have been in the past when people are just out there constantly because you can do it all year because it's exotic.
But yeah, what a fantastic spot to go and have the kids have that experience.
And then bring home the meat, and we're eating it right now.
We ate wild game for, gosh, so many years in a row.
Now there's a bunch of different companies out there that do, and there's some veteran-owned ones as well, that send out...
Send out tenderloin or whatever else from their farm-raised and all that stuff that have social media presence so you can see how they're running things, which is kind of cool.
So we eat more beef these days than we did for a number of years where it was just all axis, all moose, all elk, and that's all the kids ate as well.
Yeah, so John Dubin, former FBI agent, and so we got to be friends, had a mutual friend.
And when he got it out of the FBI, he's connected to Larry Ellison, and that's what he wanted to do, is he wanted to run the hunting operation out there on Lanai, so put together that business.
But yeah, he did interviews for a number of years, and then I think I remember that there was some point where someone's like, why are you doing these interviews?
And he's like, oh yeah, why am I doing these interviews?
But he'll do one every now and again, and that's where I heard him say about the disadvantages necessary for success.
But there's a great book called The Billionaire and the Mechanic about how he got the America's Cup, and it's so fun, so fantastic to read, but he's playing tennis in part of this story with Rafael Nadal, and they're playing tennis, and And they're talking.
He asks, hey, Rafa, do you like to win?
And Rafa says, I love the game.
And if you love the game, then you're going to win.
You're going to love it.
You've got to love what you're doing.
And I thought that was pretty cool.
Yeah, because Rafa's obviously amazing, and so is Larry.
Especially now, these athletes are working from, like, day one.
That's why it's always so interesting when someone's like, ah...
I just found this sport two years ago and now you're crushing it like it's some obscure sport like biathlon like you have people in Europe that are just growing up and they're doing the biathlon so the cross-country skiing and the shooting and that's amazing what incredible athletes and then someone in this country like finds it a couple years ago and just puts in the work and now they're they're up there you know near the top Right.
I love stories like that.
That's kind of cool, too, because so many people are growing up with tennis balls in the crib type of a thing and kind of just bred for it almost, which is a crazy way to think about it.
It is crazy.
But look at the difference in performance.
Look at a rugby team in the 60s and 70s compared to today.
Well, mixed martial artists, I mean, that's obviously my focus is looking at the difference between fighters from the 1990s when the UFC first came around versus guys like Charles Oliveira of today, which is like they're on such a different level.
Cannoneer actually started off his career as a heavyweight, and then he got down to light heavyweight, and now he's a middleweight, and he's a big, big middleweight.
Because the first ones we did were literally no audiences.
And then the UFC, as time went on, they allowed more people into the Apex Center as everything sort of relaxed a little bit.
But the initial days, everybody had to be tested.
Everybody was in a COVID bubble.
And we would get to the events.
And it was just like...
You know, me, Daniel Cormier, John Anik, we would sit there.
We had to wear masks whenever we got up, and then when we'd sit down, we'd take our masks off.
It was all weirdness, right?
But it was just like, that was the rules.
And then when the fights went on, you were essentially so fortunate to be in this room where there's only 30 or 40 other people in the whole room watching these world-class, world championship fights.
It was incredible.
It was like if you were some sultan and you had your own private arena and you paid the best fighters to come and fight for you.
And with a respiratory virus that's spreading, like, if you talk to virologists, you talk to people that are, especially if they weren't on camera, especially, they would tell you, like, there is no way to stop this.
They were like, the best thing you can do is stay healthy, take care of yourself.
And that's actually initially what even Fauci said.
He's like, don't drink, take care of yourself, exercise.
You know, like, this is what you really have to concentrate on.
You have quiet, uninterrupted time and you just get to sit there.
And think and just kind of sip something nice and maybe it's worked into the story like a veteran owned whiskey like Horse Soldier and put in this last one.
We put Hooten Young by these Delta guys that's in the show and it's just you just kind of sipping and typing and alone in your world.
I wish I did, and I hope that I can get to a routine at some point, but with all the chaos, it's just crazy working on scripts and juggling the kids and then all the other projects that are going on, the podcast, reading people's books for the podcast, like all those things.
It's just constant chaos.
So what I did this last time was I rented Airbnbs around Park City.
And I found this amazing cabin.
I probably shouldn't even say it, but this really cool cabin, super small, wood outside.
I'd go chop wood, throw it in the wood-burning stove, and everything was right there.
The whole thing was about as big as this room.
And I had a couch, wood-burning stove, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, and I could just write, and I could still think about writing if I got up to make a sandwich.
Sat back down.
I could sip whiskey or wine at night in front of that fire and just work.
So I went all in with no interruptions, but I should have a routine where I get up early and I work until whatever time and then I start doing the business side of the house or then I work on the podcast or then I work on scripts or whatever it is.
But I'm not quite there yet.
I need some of that Jocko discipline to get me into that routine.
But right now I feel like it's still a startup where you're in your garage and you're just doing things and you're just building this readership and building these books essentially.
Any product, any entrepreneur that starts something in their garage, very similar.
But I think now is the time to take a breath and get a routine going.
But what I've done for all the books, to include this one and the sixth one that I'm working on now, is I write a one-page executive summary, like what you read on the book jacket.
And I ask myself, hey, was this worth spending a year of my life on?
And if the answer is yes, then I read it again and I say, if someone read this, would they want to spend time, time they're never going to get back in these pages or listening to this?
Because that's something I take very seriously is that time.
So if the answer to those two is yes, then I'm in.
So I have a theme, I have a title right off the bat, I take that one-page executive summary, I turn that into an outline, and then I start writing.
And I love every part of the process, and it's just so, I mean, I feel so fortunate to be doing what I love and so thankful to everybody that says, bought a book, took a risk on me, you know, like you did, and then told a friend about it, whether that's one person or 35 million or whatever it might be.
I'm just so thankful each and every day that I get to do this.
And the autobiographical nature of it is even crazier, like getting hit by that van and then waking up and looking up and seeing this person, I think, sitting on a rock that just hit him with this van and thinking, I just got killed by somebody in one of my novels, essentially.
Well, the goal is to have someone get to the end of a chapter and then to turn it and keep them up all night.
And then as the art part of it is having enough resolution to the story, but also leaving that little bit out there that they're going to want to get the next book and keep this thing going, keep that journey going.
And that's really what...
James Reese is on.
He's on a journey just like we all are.
And hopefully we're all getting wiser as we go forward.
Hopefully we're asking questions.
Hopefully we're taking past successes and failures and applying them to our future.
And that's what he's on.
He's not the same guy that's just picked up and dropped in a different scenario every book.
He's on this journey just like we all are.
So I think that helps resonate with readers because, once again, life is this journey and he's on that same path.
That was important to me, too, because if you're going to spend that time that you're never going to get back with somebody in the pages of this novel, I think that it should be with somebody that you want to have a beer with, like we talked about.
So I wanted him to be someone you'd want to sit down and have a coffee with, sit down and have a beer with, but who could also flip that switch and just put heads on stakes when the time came for it.
And he's also, what a transition, a transformation that guy made from being this, like, sort of overweight guy on Parks and Rec to being this jacked dude in Guardians of the Galaxy.