Jack Carr, Navy SEAL and author, dives into his upcoming book on the 1983 Beirut Barracks bombing—researched with historian James Scott over two years—while contrasting Hollywood’s creative liberties (like The Gray Man’s knife-wielding spy) with military fiction’s evolving tech challenges, from IEDs to China’s AI-driven hypersonic missiles. Rogan questions UAP claims as potential disinformation, citing 1947’s Mount Rainier sightings and 1952’s D.C. radar anomalies, but Carr focuses on overlooked wartime narratives, like abandoned allies post-Afghanistan withdrawal, and foreign influence—$800B U.S. aid to Ukraine, Russian oligarchs’ seized yachts, or China’s strategic real estate buys near U.S. bases. Both critique media manipulation, from the Warren Commission’s Cold War ties to Operation Paperclip’s unchecked legacy, warning of history repeating as politicians exploit veterans for modern geopolitical messaging while younger generations drown in misinformation. Carr’s September 24th nonfiction release aims to honor lost SEALs, bypassing mainstream gatekeepers who ignored his work. [Automatically generated summary]
Ron White came up to say hi afterward and was in that booth.
Somebody...
Her last name, Lardner, so Kyle Lardner is her name, and she does piano, music, sells vinyl, and she's up there, but she, I think her, I think she said her grandfather or somebody wrote MASH back in the day.
I mean, I've done a few times, like if I have to go away on vacation or something like that, we have to bank about a bunch of episodes, I wind up doing five in a week.
And then at the end of the week, I just, I don't want to lose enthusiasm.
I feel it could be coming and then I don't allow it to come because I remind myself how fortunate I am and about how happy I would be to be able to do what I did if I couldn't do it.
Yeah, we did it right before we left and left California to go to Utah.
And we thought, okay, we're going to do this one last kind of kid-centric thing with all these amusement parks because my wife and I are not really amusement park people.
Just surrounded by real sweating and just eating everything, long lines, crying, whining.
So, yeah, we did that, and then I think that's it for us.
I always have since I was a little kid anyway, but really wanted to start down that path and explore a different terrorist event and capture the lessons learned behind that event so that hopefully moving forward, we don't have to relearn those lessons in blood.
We're not very good at that as a country.
We just tend to relearn things over and over again.
We don't translate lessons into wisdom.
So I wanted to try to just do my part and see what I could do in this.
I remember the 1983 bombing.
It stands out in my mind when I was a little kid.
Newsweek, Time Magazine, I remember those on our kitchen table.
Remember the newspaper in the mornings.
Remember the news, watching the news with my family at 5 o'clock and 6 o'clock.
And it's an event that, I mean, it changed the course of U.S. foreign policy for sure.
The shadow is still in its shadow today.
But yeah, it killed 241 U.S. service members and 58 French paratroopers.
And it was the biggest loss of life for the Marine Corps since Iwo Jima and World War II. So it's a seminal event in Marine Corps history and in our history as a nation.
But there isn't really the seminal work on it yet.
So I wanted to do that and did that with Pulitzer Prize finalist, military historian James Scott.
Amazing guy.
So we've been working on that for the last two years and that comes out In September, but man, it's go, go, go.
He has five other books out there, four on World War II, one on the USS Liberty.
And I didn't know him personally, and doesn't really have a social media presence, so I couldn't really get to know him that way, but I just knew his work.
And I thought, oh man, it'd be amazing to collaborate with this guy on this project.
And so I reached out, and luckily he wanted to do it.
And we're going to hopefully kick off another one here.
The idea was to do one nonfiction every year.
As soon as I started down that path of research, I realized it was going to be a two-year, every two-year type of a thing because it just so much more goes into it.
You just don't create it out of your head, obviously.
You have to interview all these people.
You have to go and then follow up with everyone, and then you have to confirm things that people said or all these things.
So there's a lot more to it than I thought at the outset.
And so like you, I feel so fortunate to be doing what I love.
And so it doesn't seem like work, although you're putting in hours.
You're certainly putting in hours.
For this one, it took a lot longer than I thought, because usually these books are about, or in this genre, they're about 115,000 words, between 100 and 115. This one came in at 150. So I kept thinking, oh, it's going to be done December 1st, January 1st, February 1st.
And it just kept pushing, which is why we're here in July instead of, or sorry, in June instead of May.
So what they need to do for that one, what they need to do, if they asked me after what they did at the end, and I don't know if we can say spoiler alert if people haven't seen the last movie, but it ends.
But not really today with CGI, with AI, what they're able to do now.
You know, Tyler Perry was building an $800 million studio, and he stopped production on it when he saw Sora, which is the new AI program that almost, I mean, really quickly can render spectacular scenes.
I need to read the after the strike last year because there was an actor strike also as you know and then then writer strike as well So I don't know any I was a big part of that, but I don't know it was yeah Yeah, where did it end up?
Do you know where I don't know but they don't have much to negotiate with unfortunately There's there's an inevitability with this kind of technology.
It's like would you write books with a feather?
No.
Would you write all the books with a feather?
No.
So, like, if I wanted to buy a book from you, I'd have to commission you, and you would have to write out this new book, Red Sky Morning.
You'd have to write this out in a feather for every customer.
Fuck that!
You would never do that, right?
Well, that's the thing with AI. Like, instead of having people act out movies and having, like, real scenes and everybody's on set at 6 a.m., that's the thing of the past.
So they have these graphic models now for video games.
That's what it's called, right?
Unreal Engine 5?
Unreal Engine 5 is fucking bananas.
So this is for video games.
So video games now look almost indistinguishable from a movie.
There's this tiny hint of what they call the uncanny valley, where you can kind of tell that it's not real, especially when you're looking at human faces.
I have a very addictive personality with things that are difficult to do.
Yeah.
You know, when I find, like, as long as it's something physical, like jujitsu, you can only do jujitsu two hours a day, you know, at the most, maybe a little bit more.
So imagine playing a video game, and this is the type of graphics that they can do.
And again, this is just today.
This stuff is moving at an exponential pace to the point where...
Five, six years from now, you're going to be experiencing this, but in VR. You'll have the meta headset on, and you'll be experiencing this probably on an omnidirectional floor.
They have these omnidirectional...
Google that, Jamie, the new omnidirectional floor.
So everywhere you go, that's actually a lot smaller than this room.
I was incorrect.
That's really small.
That's like the size of this table almost.
And so you get on this thing and the game will take you down corridors and alleys and You know, you go cross fields and you'll be able to do this and I'm sure eventually what they'll be able to do is have different terrain.
Like you'll have like a textured terrain or maybe even elevation.
Dance Dance Revolution is this game these kids started playing in an arcade and everybody started losing weight.
Because, yeah, because it's a dance game where the floor lights up, like, blue, you're supposed to step on blue, and then, you know, there's, like, different things that you're supposed to do, and there's a pattern on the screen that you're supposed to follow.
And you get a score based on how well you keep up with the steps.
So all these people are, like, playing a video game, but they're burning an insane amount of calories.
People lose, like, 50, 60 pounds playing this game, which I support.
Like, if there's a game that can make you healthy, fuck yeah, that's awesome.
Well, also, they just announced that the former chief of NSA is going to the board of OpenAI, which has freaked a bunch of people out, including Edward Snowden.
Obviously he has a beef with the NSA. But if you were the, like, let's imagine National Security Agency is an important thing for this country to have, if you're having these fucking eggheads that are developing the next super being, which is essentially what they're doing.
They're gonna develop, whether it exists in a physical form, it only exists on a computer, It's going to be far smarter than us within a matter of a few years.
And so just for national security concerns, you probably would have to have someone go and be there and go, hey, what the fuck are you guys doing?
And report back from the inside.
Wouldn't you kind of have to have it from the...
I mean, just to know what they're doing.
You can't give them the power.
These unelected people, you're going to give them the power to give birth to a god?
If I'm just on a roll, I'm just going to keep going because deadline's looming, but I don't want to rush anything to hit that deadline, if that makes sense.
I want to be the best story I possibly can.
I don't want to get to a certain number of words or, oh, the deadline's coming.
And so it's got to be the best story it can possibly be, but that means a lot of late nights.
Yeah.
So that goes back to the phone, handing that off to somebody, having other people do some things so that I can focus on the writing, maybe in some hours that are a little more normal or healthy.
But do you think you'll ever get to a point where you say, you know what, in order to do a book the right way, I have to do one every two and a half years?
Well, I think when you get a little, maybe, when you get a little older, like John Grisham, so kids out of the house, that sort of a thing, and you don't do all of the other things.
But I think you can get to that stage where you're not doing, if you're not doing a podcast, and you're not doing social media, and you're not writing a blog, and you're not updating your website.
Zero of those things, but you love to write, and all the kids are out of the house, and you already have established a readership from the 80s, the 90s, early 2000s, when there were less distractions, when we didn't have all these video games, didn't have social platforms, didn't have YouTube, didn't have on-demand any movie ever made that you can have anytime.
So that's essentially what you're competing with, with books.
So people read less now.
So if you have that base established back from the old days, like a John Grisham, then he can do two a year.
So you get two John Grisham books every year, every now and again.
I think Michael Connelly does the same thing, but they're not doing the other things.
I did a whole cigar lighting scene in this one, in this book.
I have one of my favorite chapters in previous books was James Reese talking to Caroline Hastings, who's the matriarch of this Hastings family.
It's just a conversation, so nothing's blowing up, no one's getting their head chopped off with a tomahawk and anything like that.
It's just a conversation and passing on of wisdom.
And I did that again this time with the Patriarch.
And so it's Jonathan Hastings talking to James Reese, and he's rolling a cigarette like old school, the way he would have done it back in Africa, in Rhodesia back in the day.
And then James is doing a cigar, but he's lighting it in the way that he learned from Jonathan Hastings' brother in what was then Mozambique.
So if I have an idea for a bit or something like that, I can say it in my notes, and then when I go on my computer and I just press the notes, it's there.
The best thing about the phones today is that you can talk to it.
On both, like the Apple one and this one, too.
You just open up a note, and then when you open up a note, when you're writing a new note, you go down there and you press the microphone thing, and when you press the microphone thing, it just lets you talk.
Well, the thing is if you use like a cross-platform word processor, Like say if you use Microsoft.
If you use Microsoft Word, you can access Microsoft Word through your phone.
You can access Microsoft Word through a laptop, a Windows laptop, a Mac laptop.
It does not matter.
You can access it.
So you have a Microsoft Word account.
And so then if you store things in the cloud, like if you store your script in the crowd or your book in the cloud, you could access it from anything you want.
When I first read it, I felt like Pressfield was using the term the muse as just sort of Maybe it's not a real thing, but you treat it as if it's a real thing and it works that way.
Because of the time and focus that you put, it will accumulate over time.
You will get creative ideas.
But now as I'm getting older, I'm not convinced that I was right, that it's not a real thing.
I have a feeling that This is gonna sound so weird, but I'm just gonna say it.
I think ideas are an unrecognized lifeform.
This is what I think.
I think creativity is a very strange thing.
Like, what is it?
Where is it coming from?
Where do ideas come from?
Where's a great song come from?
Where's a great concept for a book come from?
It comes from your mind, right?
Your mind pulls it out of a lot of things, like your life experiences, your current state of, you know, depression or happiness and all the things you've read your whole life.
There's like so many things that you're pulling creativity out of.
But there's a thing that enters into your mind sometimes when you come up with an idea where you're like, that is not from me.
That's not from me.
I know this is just popping up, and maybe it's just my ignorance of the way synapses fire, but I'm not sure.
Because my thought is, everything that exists that human beings have created came from an idea.
Like, all cameras, all houses, everything was an idea that we got and then we worked at it and manifested it into form.
And if the universe has A driving force.
When it comes to intelligent life, that driving force seems to be creating things.
And I have a feeling that ideas themselves are almost like a life form that Injects itself into human consciousness and then encourages and guides people to do things, to make things.
And then they appear and those things encourage more people to make more things.
And I think it works that way with music.
I think that works that way with comedy.
It works that way with literature.
With pretty much everything.
Everything that's really good encourages more people to do those things and then more things happen and better things get made.
And when you're living your life right, it seems like it rewards you.
It seems like it rewards you, like, both mentally, emotionally, physically.
Like, there's a guiding force.
It's just we don't know how to tune into it.
And I think that guiding force also exists creatively.
I think there's a guiding force in terms of the things you do.
If you're living your life right, and you're doing the things you're supposed to do, and you're good to your friends, you're disciplined, and you get to a certain point in your life, you're like, wow, it's almost like fate's real.
You know?
Guiding forces that are not exact.
They're almost like a radio signal that you're tuning in, but you can't quite get it.
It's like it's kind of there, but you kind of have a sense.
My dad gave me a book a long time ago when I was a kid called The Bridge in St. Louis Ray.
And it's about these people that are on this bridge.
It collapses.
And it's in Central South America somewhere.
And they all die.
And the stories about why are these people, let's say there's seven.
There might be more or less, but regardless.
About that number.
A group of people.
Why were they on that bridge at that time when it collapsed?
And it's just an interesting thing to think about.
And I thought about it again in Iraq back in 2005, 2006 timeframe because anything could have been an IED. And you're going down the road, you're heading to a Target, you're doing a convoy, whatever you're doing.
And anything, a dead donkey on the side of the road, trash, whatever, just a disrupted piece of dirt, whatever, anything could be an IED back then.
So we got there and I thought, you know what, I can either be worried about that sort of thing or I can just accept the fate part of it and do my job at that time as an officer and do my job as the best leader and operator I can possibly be and focus on the mission and focus on the guys and crush this thing.
And that's where my focus needs to be, not on whether that thing's an IED. I got somebody up in the turret as we're going.
That's the same reason while I was in, all I focused on, and I had to talk to my wife about this, but she understood it, the pendulum's on the side of the team when you're in it.
If you're bringing guys downrange, maybe you're in a staff job somewhere, maybe not.
But if you're taking guys downrange, you do not want to be 10 years on from whatever's going to happen downrange in Iraq or Afghanistan or somewhere else around the world sitting on that couch after something goes sideways, wondering if you did everything you possibly could have done in preparation for that event to make the best decisions under fire that you possibly wondering if you did everything you possibly could have done in So that's why on the weekends, I was training.
There were people going around the country on the civilian side of the house.
So I'd be out there training pistols, training rifles on the weekend, always working out, always reading military history, always reading about Iraq, Afghanistan, so that I was not going to leave anything on the field because it was just something that I was very aware of, just reading histories of Vietnam and thinking about the guys when they came home from that and just how just reading histories of Vietnam and thinking about the guys when they came home from You can also do all those things I just talked about and things can still go sideways.
But I wanted to know that I was as prepared as I could possibly be.
And it's one of those things I also saw as I was getting out.
So I went to the training command buds my last couple years in, which is when I started writing the first book.
And that's when I wasn't taking guys downrange anymore.
I knew I was getting out, so I didn't have to be solely focused on that.
And I could start doing these other things and focus on that.
I didn't know through my executive summary, through my outline, until I started to write those first words, how personal it was going to be.
And it became a very personal writing experience.
Initially, I thought, oh, I'll get the sniper stuff right.
If I don't know something about an aircraft or a submarine, I can call somebody and at least I know people to reach out to who can connect me with someone who spent time in the submarine force or in an aircraft I need to write about or something like that.
But I didn't know how personal it was going to be from a feeling and emotion standpoint.
So if my character gets ambushed somewhere, I can remember what it was like in Baghdad 2006 to actually get ambushed.
And then I can take those and apply them right here to this fictional narrative.
So it's a fictional story.
James Reese in the first book gets ambushed on the streets of L.A. by this assassin guy.
But I can remember what it felt like to be on the receiving end.
And then those feelings and emotions go directly on the page.
So I don't have to find a sniper from, let's say, Ramadi at the height of the war and interview him.
And then have those answers get filtered through movies I've seen, other interviews I've done, documentaries, other books, whatever it might be, and then fictionalize it and put it on the page.
It goes all heart and soul right in here.
So it was very personal, much more personal.
And it's remained that way.
Even though this is the seventh book, it's still just as powerful when I'm writing it and I'm feeling it as it was for that first one.
So I got to read all these guys, David Murrell, Nelson DeMille, A.J. Quinnell, J.C. Pollock, Mark Olden, Tom Clancy, Ian Fleming, Jean Le Carré, all these guys who were the masters, who were my professors in the art of storytelling from a very early age.
So certainly by sixth grade.
Fifth grade was when Hunt for Red October came out, which is why I have a submarine section in the beginning of this as a nod to the 40th anniversary of Of The Hunt for Red October for Tom Clancy and everything he did for the genre.
I thought there was going to be a lot, because you're sending this to Simon& Schuster, it's a publisher of all these books that I've read growing up, and I thought, oh, they know what they're doing back there, so they're going to make all these changes.
Very few.
The questions that I got back are still the ones that I get, content edits today, which are like, hey, explain this for somebody who wasn't in the military.
Or now, hey, explain this for someone who hasn't read the previous six books.
Put another sentence in there or two just to explain who this person is and why they're here.
So those are the kind of edits that I get, but no real big content edits at all.
And I didn't know, because I'm stepping into this for the first time back then, and I didn't know if it was going to be like, Hey, you know what, you should lay off on the violence, or do you have to have so many guns in there, or do you have to describe them?
Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, I think it has to come from you.
I think that's what makes work of fiction and really good books, makes it so unique, is that you know it's coming from one person's mind.
That this thought, these ideas that they had, they wrote it out, and they sat there, and they summoned the muse, and they put it all together, and then I know it's coming out of you.
So it's like part of the buzz of it.
Yeah.
That's one thing that I think is always going to exist even when AI starts writing insane books.
You're always going to want a book that came from a person's mind.
So I just sent off episode 107 right before I came over from the hotel.
I just hit the button on send for episode 107 for this new...
It's not really a spinoff.
It's its own series, but a prequel origin story.
Taylor Kitsch playing Ben Edwards.
His origin story that gets him to a place.
Shows his journey to get him to a place where he can do the things that he did in the Terminalist, in the book, and in the show.
Because he was so good.
And that's...
Writing those things is a team effort for sure.
As you know from writing scripts, there are other constraints, budgetary constraints, the location constraints, there's a story arc within that episode, and then an overarching story arc for the whole, whether it's seven, eight, or whatever, how many episodes there are.
So there's all those things to consider.
And then there's notes from senior level executives all the way back down.
Well, that's good, though, that you're collaborating because the other option is you just sell it.
And they do it.
And that's never fun.
Like everyone that I've ever talked to that ever sold a script or sold a book idea and they turned it into a movie and they didn't have anything to do with it, they fucking hated it.
I think that's the difference between thinking of something in terms of a career and thinking of it in terms of a profession.
And there's a difference.
There's precision in language reflects precision in thought, someone told me a long time ago.
And that's a different thing.
A career is something, let's say you walk in and you're working your way up that ladder and you have a plan and profession is something that's a calling, it seems.
The profession of arms.
There's a reason we call it a profession of arms, not the career of arms, although there are a lot of careers in the military that are working their way up that ladder.
That's what's really sad, is that you would think that the military would be like the most pure of all institutions, because it has to be, because you're literally...
Taking the strongest amongst us and having them go and fight for our country and fight for our interests.
And you would think that there's no room for bullshit, but apparently there's a lot of room for bullshit.
Well, there's a lot of room for advancement, I guess.
If you simply don't pop positive on a piss test, don't get too many DUIs, and don't get arrested for, let's say, domestic violence or something like that, you can stay in the military for a long time.
So you don't need to excel when you hit a certain rank.
And I think that when you, that's what we see it play out in Afghanistan, August of 2021, that's 20 years of being able to plan for that withdrawal.
And that's the best that our military leaders could do.
20 years to prepare for that.
So somebody can look at that who never had any touch point with the military and apply common sense and logic to that problem set and have a much better plan to extract forces from Afghanistan.
I mean, if you're going to execute something that's as complex as removing all the troops from a place that we've occupied for 20 years, It seems like that would involve a very thoroughly reviewed plan by many experts and come up with what's going to cause the least likelihood of casualties.
So in 2003 in Afghanistan, and I thought it was catching the tail end of it then, because the flashpoints before that, we had Mogadishu, we had Panama, Grenada, Desert One.
So after Vietnam, you had these flashpoints.
And this was now we're moving into extended combat operations.
But from the end of Vietnam up to then, our model is a flashpoint, essentially.
So We all thought if we weren't there, essentially, right after 9-11, that we were going to miss it.
And then we have essentially 20 years.
But I remember being in the back of a Hilux pickup truck with an Afghan guy.
And I'd always ask him if they were...
Back then, I could ask him if they were Muj, if they fought the Soviets, because I was always interested in that history and their backstories and what that life was like in the late 70s through the 80s into the 90s.
And so I was always essentially collecting information just because I was curious.
But as I'm talking to this guy, I distinctly remember thinking, man, One day we're gonna leave this place, and this guy is helping us right now.
What's gonna happen to his family when we leave this place?
Well, all that stuff, I get to write about these guys meeting their ends in horrible ways in the pages of the novel.
I guess that's my way to do my part to kind of keep that history alive because you can go back to fiction.
Let's say you can go back.
Ian Fleming, we talked about him earlier.
You can go back and read those books from the 50s and that really is a portal back to post-World War II Great Britain and their changing place in the world.
I mean, empire decline and that's Ian Fleming's way to keep that old empire alive is through James Bond and his creation.
So they're time capsules back to the time in which they were written.
You can go to books in the 70s.
Books in the 80s.
Go back, reading the Tom Clancy, read The Time for October, Patriot Games, whatever it is.
It's a snapshot of what's going on there geopolitically.
And then also things like searching for a phone booth and looking for a quarter, that sort of a thing.
So all of those things.
So I like to weave pop culture and history into the pages of the novels as well, because they are their time capsules for the time in which they're written.
It's also a constraint because now you have to think about Teslas and GPSs in cars and GPSs in phones and video cameras everywhere.
So you have to think about that, especially when you're writing an espionage type of thriller.
You have to think about all that stuff and weave it into every chapter.
Same thing with film and screenplays.
You have to be like...
And this script, why wouldn't he just pick up his phone and call this guy and tell him to wave off or something like that?
Whereas in the 80s or 70s, that guy's gone.
How are you going to contact this guy?
So it's just a different dynamic.
And you have to think about that as you're writing these things.
So it's just another interesting thing that you need to think through and creatively solve for.
If you're running around in a city, they're going to have access to security cameras, they're going to have street cameras in some countries, and you could be tracked so easily.
I saw the fucking craziest story about this guy who got a bunch of plastic surgery and changed his appearance and changed his name so that he could try to date his girlfriend who had a restraining order on him.
But the shadows, to me, look like studio lighting.
You have multiple lights coming from a bunch of different angles.
That's what it looks like.
Like he's moving around, but it's because he has a collar, and the collar is catching the light.
So there's light down here, there's light above.
That's why it looks weird.
That's why it looks like two-tone, because it's essentially getting a shadow, but then the shadow is also getting light from the upper light, from the upper cameras.
So he looks fake right there, but that's just shadows.
So what you would have to do is you'd have to have the person in the mask, and they'd have to talk in their voice, and then what you could do with AI is change the voice to be exactly like Biden's voice.
You could do that.
But that requires so many people to be in on it, including the person interviewing Biden, all the people that are watching.
Robert De Niro, because, look, there's something about being a star where you think your opinion's more important than anybody else's, and you can go give a press conference, and he obviously has been very vocal from 2016 that he hates Trump for whatever reason.
Like you've opened up this, instead of just being this cranky old liberal, which I know a lot of them, you know, instead of that, now you're this guy that is yelling at other people that are Trump supporters and they're yelling at you.
Now, every movie you go to, 50% of the population is going to not want to go see that movie.
I think there's a certain thing involved in being an actor at a very high level, and I think that's one of the reasons why you never see Daniel Day-Lewis give conversations.
He's very rarely talking about things that are in the news, and he's not doing one of those fucking Imagine There's No Heaven videos and everybody's Get COVID. Remember those?
And there's a bunch of celebrities telling you how important it is to not vote for Trump.
There was all these videos from 2016. You're not going to see Daniel Day-Lewis in those.
Because for Daniel Day-Lewis, for the master of masters, to be able to embody these completely different human beings, you kind of don't want to know much about him as a person.
When you know something, like if you were watching a movie about the military and they were doing shit that's just absolutely never going to happen and not real.
And that's what was important to Antoine Fuqua, to Chris Pratt, David DeGilio, to me, was doing something that when somebody who served in the military or law enforcement, firefighter, intelligence officer, somebody that did these things for real can pop that beer and sit on their couch and watch the show.
You have to take a moment to try to get these things right.
It's easy, not easy, it's still hard to make any show.
And that's why I appreciate all shows out there now because I know how much work goes into making even the bad ones and how easy it is for things to go off the rail.
So it's a shocker that anything gets made or anything good gets made, certainly.
But you do have to take that extra moment to think about, hey, how is this going to look to somebody who does this for real?
And they do that in some karate movies, but there's a suspension of disbelief aspect of those movies where you jump up and kick two people at the same time.
Yeah, there's the fun aspect, but if you're trying to make a serious film and try to do this, that's why Daniel Day-Lewis is so great, because he becomes that character.
I think you have to talk to him on set like he's that character, is that right?
That's why I write this one-page executive summary when I start these things and I ask myself, is this worth the next year, year and a half of my life?
And if yes, then I go all in.
But I read it again and I say, is this worth, if someone was walking by Hudson News and grabs this off the shelf and reads the back of this paperback or whatever, Is it interesting enough for them to devote time?
Unfortunately, no recordings of Lincoln's voice exist since he died 12 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.
The first device to record and play back sound, if anyone had an educated guess as to how it sounded, though, it would be Holzer, who has written 40 books on Lincoln.
And it lasted to 2009. Yeah, I kind of lost a lot of that during that time frame because 9-11, going downrange, focused on that, starting a family, all that stuff.
You're saying that you like these guys who happen to be criminals or doing bad things or whatever because of the way they're written, the way they come...
There's a couple movies that came out about gangs and his affiliation there with those, but he's acting in these same things and having to go and actually get permission from the different gangs to do them.
Actor Danny Trejo said in an interview he was aware of 10 people having been murdered for their involvement in the film.
Holy shit, man.
Holy shit.
The first killing occurred 12 days after the film's premiere when one of the film's consultants, Charles Charlie Brown Manriquez, a member of La M.A., was killed in Ramona Gardens, L.A.'s oldest public housing project Another consultant in the film, 49-year-old grandmother, Ana Lazarga, commonly known as the Gang Lady, was murdered when she was gunned down her East Los Angeles driveway while loading luggage into her car the day of her mother's funeral.
I have Alice, this character I introduced two books ago for In the Blood, and an AI quantum computer, and people really liked this character, but I didn't want to sideline her for the next one, for the last book, because I didn't want to rely on her like, Michael Knight in the 80s calling Kitkar on his watch and having it jump in Trans Am and zip off.
So I sidelined her last book, but I knew I couldn't introduce a character like that and just ignore her forever.
So she comes back in this.
And even since I did the research for the last book, and that's only two years, things have increased at such an exponential rate as far as AI, quantum computing.
And then the military side of that, autonomous control of platforms.
So all these new things that are coming out, whether it's submarines or it's aircraft or surface ships, whatever it might be, they're all being built so that they can be autonomously controlled.
So we're doing it, and China's doing it, and you have to get inside your enemy's decision-making process, and they're making decisions so fast using AI to make...
Probably why this book took so long is because I was...
Doing that research and it's just new things coming to light every single day and then people you're talking to in that space giving you little hints about what's really out there.
And then you talk to somebody else who gives you another little hint and you get to put this mosaic together like a reporter might.
And I think what I describe in the book, I think we're way past it.
We're already way past it as far as quantum computing, AI and what the ability of those platforms, what they have, what they can do.
1947, and that's when we'd reorganize the military and intelligence agencies.
Right there, we changed the Department of War to the Department of Defense, and the Secretary of War to the Secretary of Defense, and everything gets reorganized, right?
Kenneth Arnold's UFO sighting occurred on June 24, 1947, when private pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed that he saw a string of nine shiny, unidentified flying objects flying past Mount Rainier at speeds that Arnold estimated at a minimum of 1,200 miles an hour.
Senior Air Route Traffic Controller for the Civil Aeronautics Administration was in charge of the National Airport, Washington, D.C. ART Control Center on the night of July 19, 1952. Briefly, he states in a newspaper article, our job is to constantly monitor skies around the nation's capital with electronic eye of radar.
Shortly after midnight on that day, seven pips appeared suddenly on the control center's scope.
Ed Nugent, Jim Copeland, and Jim Ritchie all experienced radar controllers, checked the observations.
The airport-controlled tower radar operator verified the same sightings.
They were over the restricted areas of Washington, including the White House and the Capitol.
So those kind of things, you gotta go, well, what is that?
Look, the universe is big beyond our wildest imagination.
There's no way we could even fathom how big it is.
Planet out there that's in the Goldilocks zone, that's gone through what we're going through currently, but is 10,000 years ahead of us, and finds the signature of nuclear bombs on this planet, and they realize, oh, okay, these crazy fuckers have come into this new age where they could split the atom.
Diana Pasolka and Gary Nolan, who is a legitimate professor, I believe at Stanford, And they, Diana Posalk, who's also a professor, she's a professor of religion.
And they have investigated a lot of these crash sites.
And the way they describe them, the people that are investigating the crash sites, the actual scientists, they call them donations.
It's the same thing that was described in Roswell, New Mexico.
The people that...
The Roswell thing is very hard because there's so many people involved and there's so many similar stories.
But the problem is...
When a story's been told for so long, people repeat a story.
They're told in towns when there's no recording devices.
There's no, you know, no one has phones.
This is a long time ago.
They have, you know, regular phones, but no cell phones, obviously.
And what they're doing with all this stuff is they're all talking about it, and then a narrative gets established, and then people tend to repeat narratives that are established.
It's hard, because you're talking about something that happened in 1947. Right.
There's a lot of things that come almost right after Roswell.
One of them is a transistor, and the other one is...
And it's one of the things that's described in the crash.
The people that have described it.
But the thing is, like, again, you're hearing these things decades later.
You're hearing...
It's very difficult to figure out what the fuck actually happened, but something seems to have happened because the Roswell Daily Record, I have a framed cover of the front page of the Roswell Daily Record from 1947, where it says that there's a crashed UFO, that the government flew to the base, and that, you know, it's like in the news.
And these guys got their faces all cut to shit, and that was like part of the pride of being a Nazi, was you had these dueling scars on your face, that you had done this.
And a lot of the guys we brought over from Operation Paperclip had these dueling scars on their face.
And it's one of the ways that future historians identified them as clearly being Nazis.
Yeah, I mean, you'd probably want to dive into it deeper than I have.
But it is...
The point is, there was a lot of deception that was happening in the world back then.
So who knows what the real story was about Roswell.
I like to think...
That there's something going on that's real.
But I also like to think that if the donation thing is true and that's been going on since who knows how long, you know, Bob Lazar claimed in the late 1980s that he had been working back engineering one of these things.
And the way he described it is exactly how they see them move today, exactly how there's a video of these things moving in bizarre ways.
It's like the Terminator 2 hand, you know, going back in T2 and reverse engineering that technology from T2. It's interesting how movies and books eventually become reality.
It would be good if you could travel back and forth through time and you realize that human beings are going to take X amount of steps to get somewhere, but if you can inject some technology into the equation, you could speed up the process considerably.
Let them do it on their own.
Let them figure this out like, oh, a transistor.
Duh!
And all of a sudden, electronics get far smaller.
Fiber optics, oh!
Why didn't I think of that?
Bam!
Everything gets way quicker.
And the other thing that Lazar said about the crafts that was baffling to him in the 1980s, he said there was no seams.
He said there was no welds, there's no rivets, there's no seams.
But now we know about 3D printing.
Now they can 3D print anything.
And if you conceivably have a machine that's large enough, you could 3D print a spacecraft.
The odds that he was completely innocent, very low.
It seems like he was over here doing some shady shit.
He had always been involved in some shady intelligence type shit.
But I think there was a lot of people, and I think they wanted to really make sure that Kennedy got killed.
And I think there was probably a lot of people involved, and I think Lee Harvey Oswald probably was a patsy, and I think that's probably why Jack Ruby shot him.
It was interesting because I listened to that show right before I went back to New York for the Simon& Schuster 100th anniversary celebration event, and I was speaking there, and so was Bob Woodward.
I was sitting next to him in the green room.
Did you talk to him?
No, I didn't feel it was appropriate to bring that up.
That's why it's amazing when you see Tulsi get sidelined.
What's great about her is that she has changed positions on things.
But because of that, she gets it from both sides now.
So you get the people that say, oh, look, she once had this view of Second Amendment or whatever, And now it's changed, so I don't trust her type thing.
Well, how are you going to ever convince someone or talk to someone or open somebody's aperture about how to think if you don't want them to change sides and don't bring them into the fold?
Yeah, it seems silly to make people stick to their original idea on something.
If they don't, they're flip-flopping.
That seems silly.
If you're a human being and you see things...
Like, there's a lot of people that were pretty hardcore leftist liberal progressives that lived in California that were like, okay, these policies are insane.
Like, I'm getting the fuck out of here.
Like, Jillian Michaels was just...
She just did a podcast recently.
She discussed it.
And she was saying, like...
If I'm saying you're out of your fucking mind, maybe you're out of your fucking mind.
So people change their perspective based on new information.
The people that bury their head in the sand and pretend everything's amazing and we're eventually going to pull out of this and our philosophy is correct, you're not course correcting.
If you're not course correcting, you're not learning.
And if you're not changing your opinion in light of...
Insane information.
If you live in California, you get insane amounts of information showing these policies are not working.
This approach to law enforcement, this approach to dealing with criminals, it's not working.
That same trip back in New York, I went to this place for dinner called the Time Square Cafe.
Yeah, so not being from New York and not really knowing the area that well, I assumed that it was fairly close to Times Square.
Apparently it was once near Times Square, not anymore.
So I went to dinner there with my agent, then walked her to her apartment and thought, oh, I'll just walk.
My hotel is close to Times Square.
I'll just walk.
Yeah, Times Square Cafe is not anywhere near Times Square.
Put in the phone, I'm like, all the buildings are kind of sending you in circles, you know, I'm like, oh yeah.
So I walk at night across New York, like a long, like 30 minutes, maybe even 40, and I'm like on E&E, you know, I'm like, I'm on edge, and I'm making my move here across, and it was sketchy.
So, move forward another month.
A couple weeks ago, I was in Budapest.
We're filming the show over in Budapest.
Budapest is amazing.
It's going to make its way into one of my future novels.
There's so much Russian money there, Ukrainian money there, which is probably our money, Chinese money there.
There's two Bentleys in front of the hotel every day, two Ferraris, two Lamborghinis, Porsches everywhere.
But I had to walk across the city.
We watched the first episode, the director's cut of the first episode of this new series.
So watch it at everybody's apartment because everyone's been over there for the last few months filming the show.
So some are living in hotels, some are living On the economy, in town, in apartments.
And there's not, you know, it's a lot safer here than L.A. I think there's just something happens when you have large populations.
And then also, you know, New York is...
They're doing this no-cash bail thing where they're just letting people out of jail, including people that assault police officers, including illegal immigrants that assault police officers on video.
You come back, unfortunately, by going too far in the other direction until you want to bounce back and be liberal again.
Unfortunately, this is what happens when people get unreasonable.
When they go that far, then you usher in some totalitarian, hard-nosed, sort of right-wing person who also comes with a stripping of certain civil liberties, and also has a more cruel approach to certain social issues.
And then people go, we need more kindness, we need more this.
But generally, it's like, it used to be at least, that you would get the right wing that were pushing for war.
The most bizarre thing about our time is that the left, Is calling for aid to Ukraine and that, you know, I think they just signed a commitment to help Ukraine for the next 10 years.
I think there's just something that Biden just signed, and I think they're promising like $800 billion, or they're going to need $800 billion over the next 10 years.
A series of pledges of military and financial aid made by Western allies this week, including a 10-year security agreement with the United States, and a $50 billion loan issued by Washington and the European Union.
I was in Normandy for the D-Day commemoration events a couple weeks ago.
Well, a few days last week, I guess.
But it's not just one day.
It's not just June 6th.
It's like two weeks of events.
Went back there with the Best Defense Foundation.
I went right from Budapest over to there.
48 World War II veterans.
So they're all creeping up on 100, at 100, or over 100 years old.
And a week's worth of events.
So I'm volunteering, helping them get in out of their wheelchairs, making sure they're taking their medicines, eating, getting them to the events, all that sort of thing.
But totally inappropriate during the speech is, and even during the benediction or the The prayer at the beginning mentioned, not Ukraine by name, but the storm clouds are coming.
So you have all these veterans of World War II, D-Day, on this stage at the American cemetery there overlooking Omaha Beach, and these politicians up there to give speeches can't help themselves.
They have to mention storm clouds coming, mentioning it.
They have to mention it.
They didn't mention it by name.
I think the French president did, but he's speaking in French, so I'm not 100% sure.
Not appropriate for the 80th anniversary of D-Day for these guys that jumped out of planes, landed gliders, Back then, imagine landing a glider at night on June 6th in these fields where the Germans have put these poles up so that if you land, you can just get crushed in your glider.
When a guy was talking to you, his glider came in.
It's very disturbing that we don't learn, you know.
Really is, you know, all the way back to Smedley Butler's War is a Racket.
We don't learn, you know, and money always motivates everything.
And there's always some way to make some sort of a moral argument why we need to do certain things, why we need to act, and why we need to fund this and fund that.
But ultimately, there's a lot of money being moved around.
And we know that once it gets over there, we really don't know where the fuck it's going.
There's a lot of money rolling around over there and it's not easy to track and it's not really something that anybody's trying really hard to document.
It seems also very dangerous to point out if you were an official person and you started pointing out the fact that this money is moving around.
Yeah, I mean, this is a wild, wild time that the left is the one that, the left side, the Democrats, the progressives, are the ones that are calling for this crazy war.
Yeah, they didn't want to have anything to do with anything.
They wanted no wars.
And everybody's like, great, because this was after Vietnam.
And if you wanted to be a Democrat and you wanted to win back then, you had to be anti-war.
You know, you had to be anti anything remotely close to what's going on right now.
Especially when you know the history of like NATO and moving arms closer to the Russia's border and saying that right like Kamala Harris saying that Russia's gonna or that Ukraine's gonna join NATO like what?
You've got to put yourselves in the other person's shoes.
There's something looking at things from their perspective, and that's what we do in the military, trying to put ourselves in the enemy's shoes, figuring out how they're going to adapt to what we're doing right now, and you have to do that at the strategic levels, too.
But unfortunately, you get people at these levels who just stuck with it, and they've never created anything in their life, and they don't understand the history, but guess what they can do?
Through their words and through all these things, all these different verticals and institutions that support them to get them into these positions in office.
And it's tough.
I mean, it's a machine, and that machine is hungry.
The bad part of all this is that if you're the enemy, you almost just want to let us not do anything because we're doing such a good job at destroying ourselves.
U.S. Navy submarines arrived in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in a show of force as a fleet of Russian warships gather for planned military exercises in the Caribbean.
U.S. Southern Command said that USS Helena A nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine pulled into the waters near the US base in Cuba on Thursday, just a day after a Russian frigate, a nuclear-powered submarine, an oil tanker, and a rescue tug crossed into Havana Bay after drills the Atlantic Ocean.
And that's this book right here was all about that.
But from the China-US perspective, those geopolitics, who's doing what?
Taiwan, the Taiwan issue in there as well.
So it's fascinating to have done that research now and see where China is compared to where they were a few years ago and then think about where we're going in the future.
But It's tough to do all that research and remain hopeful.
You know what I mean?
That's what I love about you.
You remain hopeful.
You talk to all these different people and you're interested in so many things, but yet you remain so hopeful in all these conversations that you have with people.
In the age of AI, you're gonna force people to go into war, and what is going on?
What are you doing?
Why are you doing this?
It's because of lack of recruitment.
You're gonna force them to go in now, and then when you're there, will you indoctrinate them with all this bullshit?
So instead of getting people that want to serve, which is the people that you want, the people that are dedicated to it, that are driven towards this life, Instead of that, you're forcing people to do it, and then once you get them in there, you can kind of force your ideology on them.
The type of people that sign up for the military, they would be way less likely to buy into that horseshit.
I was a kid, and when Vietnam ended, I remember thinking, as a kid, I guess I was like 10 or something, I remember thinking, whew, glad we got over that.
And now it's even more complicated with all this artificial intelligence stuff and Mike Baker was in here and he was showing us these videos of these fighter jets that are using AI now, that are winning dogfights 100%.
But they're also smart because they're buying up property next to military bases.
They tried to buy the Hotel Del, Hotel Del Coronado, right by the SEAL base down there.
So that got blocked.
But there's also these- That's so crazy!
They're called the Shores, and they're these apartments that- I think they're built in the 70s.
They're so ugly.
But they are super high, like sky rises.
And what they look down on- They look down right on the SEAL training compound and WARCOM, which is our admiral and everybody else.
And China owns it?
No, they don't own that.
They tried to buy the Hotel Dell next door, but I would be shocked if they don't own a few floors of that building.
And they're looking right down.
They bought a...
I did some research for this book on it, and a book called The Dragons and the Snakes by David Kilcullen.
And he talks about them buying up hotels in Scotland that watch submarines head out there.
A few others play one in Italy.
So they're buying up properties next to these bases where they can essentially observe and put listening devices out and do all those sorts of things that you need a base of operations.
And you don't even need a base of operations for a lot of this stuff anymore because it's all virtual.
U.S. government said it's spending more than seven million a year to maintain a super yacht it sees from a sanctioned Russian oligarch and urged a judge to let it auction the vessel before a dispute over its ownership is resolved.
Authorities in Fiji seized the 348 foot, 300 million dollar Ameda in May of 2022, pursuant to a U.S. warrant alleging it's owned by Suleiman Kermov, a multi-billionaire sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2014 and 2018 in response to Russia's activities in Syria and Ukraine.
This is the Tango, the Lady M, these fucking massive things.
And so these Russian oligarchs, a lot of them, they rush to get their yachts to different countries that are more sympathetic, that let them get away with it.
But I don't even know how that works.
Like if they go out into the sea, can they get hijacked?
I mean, it was such an interesting time, end of the Cold War, that whole period of the 90s for those guys, where really those criminal enterprises really become like government.
Putin does not use other people's dishes, doesn't go without an army of guards, does not go to the toilet in public places, she said on Monday, by publishing footage from inside his palace and floor plans who make it impossible to use the palace.
Wow.
Perhaps he will say demolish everything again and the palace will be rebuilt for the third time.
But this iteration is definitely over.
There was a palace.
There is no palace.
We have once again shown not only that he is a luxury-obsessed psychopath, Their words.
And actually, someone had a bit about that last night.
They did a bit on that last night and talked about how, from the Russian perspective, us trading, whoever we traded for her, what, the arms dealer or terrorist or whoever we exchanged this for?
And he did a bit about them being like, wait, what?
Breitling was worn by a lot of gray area operators, both good and bad, subjective terms.
With strong roots in aviation, Breitling is a signal that the wearer is adventurous, but also appreciates fine craftsmanship and utilitarian tools.
Mm-hmm blackwater Breitling emergency former Soviet arms dealer There is Victor bouts Breitling b1 British SAS officer turned mercenary Simon Mann's Breitling emergency and director CIA George tenants Breitling aerospace Oh, George and it wearing one too Which one's the aerospace?
But you definitely notice the difference between drinking and not drinking.
So if I, even a couple of drinks, like if I go out to dinner with some friends and I have a couple glasses of wine, I would notice my recovery score would suck in the morning from just like two glasses of wine.
And some of these guys have made a lot of money writing about military stuff, which is interesting.
So I noted.
It might work its way into some fiction at some point.
And even some senior-level military officers, which is very interesting as well.
All said no to the blurbs for the nonfiction as well.
But that kind of feeds into my, well, maybe they listened to me on the podcast here.
I talked about their, hear me critique their handling of our withdrawal from Afghanistan.
So that's possible as well.
But also interesting with the show.
The military didn't help out with the show.
Which is great because sometimes they put constraints on what you can do or say if they help out with a ship or a plane or a base or something like that.
But could it also be that they just don't want to put themselves out there, that they don't want to be a personality, they just want to be the person relaying the information?
But a ton of people, what made me very, I mean, super excited about this book is the nonfiction, is that the people who are there, the people who are digging their dead friends out of the rubble, That's who I really wanted to honor by writing this nonfiction, to keep those lessons learned and also tell their story, because it really hasn't been told yet.
And you have people that are still alive, people who are alive who lost sons in that attack, so you want to do right by them.
And I think every single person who has read it, who is there, has said thank you for writing it.
Yeah, so 83, and we had the embassy bombing in April of 83, and then you move into the spring, further into the spring, all through the summer, attack happens in October.
But all through that time frame, these guys are in combat, and the administration is saying peacekeeper over and over again, calling them peacekeepers, peacekeepers.
But you talk to these guys who were there, who were on patrol, they were in combat.
And so I got to capture that and really put that into the book, because that part of the story People don't really understand how many guys had died between the Embassy bombing and the Marine Barracks bombing, how many people were wounded during that time frame, how many people were just engaged in combat during that time period.
Because there wasn't social media back then and you're just relying on an administration and then there are talking points, that's what we never really got told.
That's one of the things that does keep me hopeful, that there is so much information available today whenever anything happens.
You don't have to just rely on mainstream media's depictions of things, everything that's been sanctioned down through the government, whatever narrative they're trying to push.
Now you get just so many independent reporters and so many real journalists that are giving you the actual details of it in a very disturbing way and you get angry.
And you go, why am I not hearing about this in the news?
Like, why is this perspective not being shared everywhere?
And then it, you know, unfortunately for the mainstream media, it just makes people distrust them more and more.
Obviously, I wasn't aware, at least, during the Vietnam War.
But I would imagine back then, especially after Kent State, it was probably a lot like that back then, too.
A lot of distrust.
I think even more so now.
But there's also now there's the influence of foreign governments where they create bullshit stories and they create bullshit rabbit holes for people to go down and they suck people into these things and then reinforce it online with troll farms.
And it's like there's so much nonsense.
It's so hard to know what's real and what's not real.
That's why I appreciate what you do here with this podcast because it's one of the few places people can go and get these honest conversations.
They're long.
They're not a 30-second soundbite, a two-minute soundbite.
Even if you have someone that knows what they're talking about on mainstream media but you only get two and a half minutes, two minutes.
Half of that is the host talking or asking the question.
You don't really get a deep understanding of what's going on.
You don't really get to conceptualize what's really happening and make it a part of you so you can make informed decisions, whether it's in the voting, when you go to vote, or it's in a conversation with friends or your family.
I mean, I certainly remember when I was a kid in high school, we were terrified of being in a nuclear war with Russia.
It was hovering over our heads.
When the fall of the Soviet Union happened, I remember this huge feeling of relief that swept through the entire country.
Because when we were kids, we really thought that we were going to go to war with Russia and there was going to be a nuclear war and everyone was going to die.
That was something that hung in the air all throughout the 1980s.
I know we've talked about this before, and I've thought about it throughout the last year, but I haven't changed my position on it about going back in time.
In fact, I double down on it when I think about it.
I'd go 1979 to 1991, I think.
That's what I would do if I could go back in that time machine.
It's also a thing that gives you this ability to recognize bullshit because it's coming at you from all these different angles.
I think people are a little bit more reluctant to buy into official stories now than they ever have been before, especially after the whole COVID fiasco happened.
I think people are a lot more interested in what the fuck is actually going on than ever before.
Because it actually can affect their life, you know?
I mean, it's actually something that's consequential.
And we all had touch points with it, and now, but just like Afghanistan, I don't really talk about that stuff anymore.
We don't really talk about all these businesses that got shuttered, which is why I try to support independent bookstores as much as I possibly can, do things that are only for independent bookstores.
To send people there.
Started that during COVID, actually.
That's great.
Started signing book plates.
You could only get through independent bookstores because it's harder to do that than just hit the easy button on Amazon.
But I think the overall perception, if you looked at it, has shifted in a way that people are a little bit more aware of horseshit now than ever before.