Jack Carr dives into his Vietnam War novel 1968, researched with 1969 dictionaries and immersive era media, contrasting it with Rogan’s claims about the Gulf of Tonkin fabrication while emphasizing fiction’s role in empathy. They debate AI’s $1.5B settlement threat to creativity—Carr likens it to Waylon Jennings’ "one album behind" critique—while Rogan defends its potential despite voice-cloning controversies like Muhammad Ali or 50 Cent’s Many Men renditions. Carr’s military-inspired storytelling, from SEAL watches to True Believer’s tunnel combat, mirrors Vietnam-era sacrifices and modern conflicts like Ukraine, but he warns of surveillance overreach via digital IDs and social credit scores, exposing hypocrisy in politicians like Biden and Harris. Rogan shares his distrust of mainstream media scripting, citing unfiltered podcast/YouTube clips, while Carr’s Alaska bear encounters and orcas’ sudden boat attacks fuel speculation on human-wildlife tensions. The episode concludes with Rogan pitching Carr’s Vietnam-era espionage thriller as a potential series, celebrating his blend of gritty realism and timeless storytelling. [Automatically generated summary]
And I thought this was going to be the book that was going to take me the least amount of time because I thought I had this foundation of knowledge when it comes to warfare, Vietnam in particular, those lessons.
I've had the influence of popular culture when it comes to the 60s and Vietnam as well growing up.
So I thought I was well prepared to dive into this world.
And I didn't want to just say that they're listening to Creedon's Clearwater Revival and that it's 1968 and then essentially drop a contemporary thriller into the 60s, into Vietnam, 1968.
Instead, I wanted someone who lived through that era to know that I put in the effort.
And any sentence had to be written through the lens of 1968 without the benefit of 50 plus years of hindsight.
So if someone is 70 years old, 50 years old, 20 years old, they only have their life experience up to that point to make a decision for perspective on an event.
And that took a lot more time than I thought.
I got a dictionary from 1969.
I couldn't find the one from 1968 I wanted, so I got a dictionary from 1969 to look how terms were defined back then.
A lot of maps from the era.
And it was just a, it took a lot longer, which is why we're here in October and not in January, June when the book was supposed to come out.
We were stopping the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich.
World War II was just.
Vietnam was fucking nonsense.
And it's still, to this day, it infuriates people that participated in it.
It infuriates people who lost family members.
It didn't make any sense.
It was birthed on a lie.
It was a complete false flag event that our own government, They lied to us and told us that the Gulf of Tonkin, there was an incident where one of our battleships was attacked and it wasn't.
It was all a lie.
And it was just to get us into this fucking war.
And there's a whole bunch of people that made a whole bunch of money and a bunch of people died.
And at the end of it, everybody felt broken.
And during it, there was a gigantic cultural revolution in the middle of it.
They had all that to deal with, all of that baggage to deal with.
And that left a scar on an entire generation.
It really, you know, a lot of that started with the Kennedy assassination in 1963.
And then we move on into the war, and this becomes the first televised war.
So there were photographs of the Civil War.
There's photographs, World War I, World War II.
We're getting the newsreels when you go to the movies on Saturday and see the matinee and you're getting those.
But that's a very different type of way to get your news because you're seeing it once a week or you're seeing a still photograph in a paper.
Then we get to Vietnam and now you're seeing it every day on the news.
You're seeing Walter Cronkite there giving you that news and you're watching these guys in foxholes and you're seeing this shooting and you're seeing this chaos.
And then also the media, I think this is the first time where the media realizes they have, they're not just a pillar as a check on government.
They realize at this point that they actually have power to influence events and policy.
So how they report from Vietnam, very different from how reporters, even in Korea, but let's say World War II, very different from how reporters reported on that war.
And now I think in Vietnam, you have these guys in Saigon and they realize, and they're staying at these amazing hotels and they're partying it up at night and some of them are going to the outskirts of town.
So it looks like they're out in the rice patties or whatever.
And then they're going back to their hotel for drinks.
But they realize during this time that they can influence policy.
And so that's what we see with the Tet Offensive.
We see that as a complete, it's a complete tactical win for the United States.
But it becomes a loss for us, a huge strategic loss for us because of the way that it's reported.
Yeah, the media distorted what was going on and talked about this huge victory for the NVA and for North Vietnam.
And it wasn't really, but it was when they reported it that way.
And then we see more of America turning against this war and policy shifts and more people shipped into Vietnam.
So it's a, I mean, the whole thing is so sad.
And I try to humanize it and personalize it in this book because you can read about, I think that's the importance of reading fiction also, because you get a compassion there and an empathy for people because you're living something through their eyes, even though it's fiction that you don't get really through through nonfiction.
You can read about all these numbers.
You can read about 58,000.
But when you read a story like this, then you're getting to know these characters and you're going through this thing with them.
And then it becomes part of your experience.
So even, say, let's say Buds going through SEAL training.
Yeah, I'm thinking back to Normandy and I'm thinking back to Iwo Jima.
I'm thinking back to Vietnam and what these guys had to go through.
And then I'm realizing I can do a few more push-ups in the sand here in Coronado, California.
All those guys died and sacrificed so much so that I could be here.
But some of that comes through the works of fiction, too.
The thrillers that I was reading growing up from guys who had backgrounds in Vietnam or just from things they were dealing with in contemporary thrillers of the day.
But that became part of my experience.
And I didn't have to, and it's almost like you're living it, even though it's all made up.
So that's the important of reading in general.
And the beacon of reading, when we go, when we look at 2003 to 2025 and the drop off in reading that has occurred, that is scary.
I mean, it corresponds almost directly with the rise of the smartphone.
And of course, it continues to drop today.
So I think I'm getting into publishing and Hollywood in probably one of the worst times in the last hundred years that one could decide to do something like this with AI and all the rest of it.
I think CAA, my talent agency, just sent me a thing the other day and said that one of these open AI deals, I think it was a $1.5 billion settlement or something, and that they'd used my books.
And I'm sure they've used this podcast.
I'm sure they've used all sorts of things.
But the settlement out of that for me is possibly $1,000.
It's going to be hard to, like, some of these things, it's going to be hard to figure out at some point.
But I almost think there needs to be, remember the parental advisories in the 80s, they put on CDs and stuff like that back then.
Like, at least you know, like, if I want to go and I want to buy this piece of art right here, and I walk into that store and I love this thing, and I put it in my house and it's there for 10 years, and I show everybody that comes in.
But what if that thing is, I don't know that no one actually made that.
Yeah, I don't think it's possible to avoid change.
And this is the direction that change is going.
And so at your essence, like, what are you and who are you?
You have to search for that in different ways.
And you're probably not going to be able to search for it the same way through music and books if you find out that these music and books weren't actually written by like-minded people.
Or is it that the lessons and the energy, say the energy of the music and the lessons of the books, it is from people.
Because what AI's done is they've absorbed all of the art that everyone has ever created ever in terms of literature and music and even comedy and whatever.
And it's combined it together in a style that's completely variable.
You can have it like Amy Winehouse.
You can make it sound like Biggie Smalls.
You can make it sound like anything.
But it is all imitating everything that humans have created and will still affect humans and maybe inspire us more and maybe put a premium on something that's created by an actual human and not by AI.
I think if you learn to, if you learn to think for yourself, you think logically, if you read kids today, if they put that down that phone and just read, that is a superpower.
They will get out there and crush.
Read, work out, do some MMA, BJJ stuff, do a little boxing, but read, you are going to just leave everyone else in the dust when it comes to whatever you want to do next in life, out of high school, out of college, whatever it is.
If you have that foundation, then you're once you're going to be a more empathetic, compassionate person, but you're going to have this knowledge base that other people are relying on, chat GPT, whatever it is, their phone, whatever, to do that thinking for them.
Like I said, about the time enter attention or publishing.
I think a great time is the 90s for that because you had, let's see, Michael Crichton and then you had John Grisham.
Like every other year, there was some Michael Crichton movie and then a John Grisham movie and they had the best directors, actors of the day, producers of the day.
And then people bought books they were still reading back then because there wasn't yet the internet.
There wasn't yet all these other things that distract you.
So those guys got to crush.
That was like, I think that was maybe the golden age of being an author and adapting your stuff to film or television, mostly film back then.
So once again, now, I think we'd like, for some reason, if we'd started with that or if I'd started with that as a book, then it would have been much more difficult because Amazon would have been much more hesitant.
But since we had a success with the terminal list, now they're taking this risk with us, just like my publisher did.
It would have been very easy as a publisher to say, hey, just do what you did in that first book.
That was successful.
So just take that same kind of stuff and just drop it maybe internationally or something like that.
Instead, I had this whole journey across in the book, it's the Atlantic in the show, it's going to be the Pacific.
But going across this, this journey of violent redemption.
He still thinks he's going to die, gets to Mozambique, still thinks he's going to die, doesn't die yet.
And so, because he has his tumor and then uses the skills from Iraq and Afghanistan to help with the poaching problem over there.
And then the book really, this actual story kicks off from there.
But I thought it was going to be, would be disingenuous to the reader to have this character that went through all the things that he went through in the terminal list, all this traumatic stuff, losing his family, losing his whole troop in Afghanistan.
And then all of a sudden he's okay and just out to save the world in the next book.
And so I had to take him on this journey.
And I kind of thought that my editor and publisher would say, hey, cut out the first third of this book and we got something here.
Instead, they didn't say any of that.
And they took this risk with me.
And it really differentiated that book and me as an author.
And now Amazon's doing the same thing.
So we have Chris Pratt going across the ocean.
He's got this crazy long hair.
He lost a ton of weight for this thing.
He's like battling the storms and his demons and then gets to Mozambique and same thing.
Goes through this second episode where he's out there doing this poacher thing, using his skills out there.
And we filmed in Africa.
So we got these amazing, just the landscapes, beautiful.
It's probably one of the most beautiful visions of Africa that I've ever seen on film.
It's just incredible.
And Chris is totally into it, of course.
And the guy who got to play Rich Hastings, I don't know if we can say his name yet, but he's awesome.
He's so good.
And so he's kind of like the older guy, kind of mentoring James Reese Along, Chris Pratt, and he's a guy's guy.
And so you didn't need to tell him like what to do with the rifle.
Like he knew.
He knew what to do with that double rifle.
He's not messing around.
Yeah.
So it was so fun to do that.
But that is a risk that Amazon's taking is to do those first two episodes to invest all this money in this thing where, yeah, it has something to do with the development of the character, but not really to do with the rest of the story and him than saving the world.
But they went along with it.
And that's because they saw the numbers from the first season.
And they'll never share those numbers with us, but we know what they are because there have been like almost no notes in this one.
Like the first one, there was notes constantly.
Like they didn't want Chris to get somebody.
They didn't want that to happen.
And then we did it anyway.
And they ended up being on every billboard in LA for the opening month.
Episode five, maybe, maybe six, there's a, there's a, with this guy and the big dude and one of the girls in the show getting this fight in this apartment.
I don't know if you saw that episode, but the stunt person who got thrown into this refrigerator, oh my, and there was like a tiny little pad in the refrigerator, and she just gets thrown into this thing.
And we try to keep every of the fights realistic.
So we made a very deliberate decision at the beginning of the terminal list not to do the John Wick style because you just don't want to do John Wick style, but not as good.
You don't want to have everything authentic and realistic and then have this choreographed fight sequence that everyone that looks visually stunning, but is not really realistic for anybody who's ever been in a fight or watched UFC or anything like that.
So we wanted to make sure that these things are primal, visceral, and just physical and brutal.
But it's a smaller girl against this huge guy.
So we didn't want to have the girl power thing.
And all of a sudden, people roll their eyes and say, you know, one punch from this guy and she's done.
So she shoots him like three times before the fight as he's rushing in on her.
So, okay, we're going to even this out.
And still, some people got upset about it online.
They're like, how could she, you know, how did she, you know, best this guy in a fight?
He's huge.
And well, because she shot him three times and then in the fourth time in the middle of the fight, and she takes a beating.
And but the stunt, the stunt lady who did this was amazing.
And she, she took a beating too, especially when she got thrown into that fridge.
That was, and it's hard to watch because you're talking to them and then they go on set and do their thing and you're like, oh, but you feel like you know them now.
So you feel like you just know this person that's now getting beat up and you're watching from that video village and you're like, oh, just cringing seeing this stuff.
Actually, watched on the plane back because we did a my flight like last second.
So I was in economy between two people.
And so when I do that, I can't work.
And so on like a 10-hour flight, I decided to watch the movie.
So I watched Fallout again just because of that because I wanted to see if I could tell what was filmed after and what was filmed before that sequence.
And it's hard to tell.
It's really hard to tell how much they filmed after he shatters his ankle and limps off because you see him kind of limp off.
And I put myself at the bottom of my priority list and focus on family and writing and then the screenwriting and all the other projects that are out there.
And it's amazing.
I feel very fortunate for that.
But I did get way out of shape and the worst shape of my life.
And it showed in that photo that we took.
I'm like, oh, look at Joe.
He looks in such great shape.
I'm like, so like August 1st or something, I'm like, all right, I'm in.
And I started doing the hang, of course, and then I have this outside workout area.
It's like kind of like Rocky IV style.
And so it's right there in the mountains.
And so I'm just, I'm just all in, getting after it.
I'm doing the sauna.
We rented a place in town that had a sauna to get our kids closer to school for a year because we're kind of remote.
We're kind of up there and remote.
And so we wanted him to have our son to have the experience of riding his bike to school and all that stuff.
So we rented a house, but it had an amazing sauna in it.
So I was doing that exactly, what, 17 minutes and 30 seconds, whatever you're supposed to do.
Whenever I heard someone on this podcast tell me I was supposed to do it, whatever you told me to do, I was doing that.
And I was going outside, getting like 10 minutes of sun here, 10 minutes of sun there, doing the workouts, doing the cardio stuff, doing all of it.
And I got in great, probably one of the best shapes of my life.
I think it contributes to the culture of journalism in the modern era, with this sort of like really shitty attack journalism that's become very prevalent.
I don't think it's a small factor.
I think Adderall consumption has, it plays a factor in that.
And particularly when people are dealing with sleep deprivation, it also, for some reason, has like pretty great benefits, more so even for women and sleep deprivation.
There's been a bunch of different studies going, but in terms of cognitive performance after sleep deprivation and reaction time after sleep deprivation, both of those things fall off.
And there's a noticeable rise in improvement with creatine.
I was reading everything I could possibly find on Vietnam from the day.
There's old Army Special Forces manuals that they had before the guys would go over there that talked about the Montanard tribes they were going to be working with.
For those that are watching or listening, it's like Apocalypse Now, like the Montanards, like tribes and all that stuff.
So I was doing that.
And then I was reading the more modern stuff too.
I was reading things from the 70s, 80s.
I got National Geographic magazines from the 60s.
I think there's one from the late 50s even.
So I was doing everything I possibly could to transport myself back, listening to some history podcasts about JFK, about Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, things that were happening here about the election, Nixon's elections, everything that was happening in 1968.
I was just trying to immerse myself in that world so that when I sat down to this, I didn't have to do a huge shift.
And it would be, it was already had this, I was building on this foundation, whatever foundation I already had.
As then I sat down in front of the computer to write rather than watching something here contemporary, getting all upset about something that X is feeding me to keep me enraged.
And then trying to jump back to 1968.
Instead, I just transported myself back there for, it felt like months at a time.
I feel like a lot of Aussies love them because you can kind of just go right from the factory.
And, you know, a lot of those guys like to go off-road and you could get your factory setting in the back where it's got all the electrical and everything.
Yeah, if you're into that style of like defender-looking car, but you don't want all the bullshit that comes with owning a defender, either get a refurbished one, like East Coast Defenders does a great job.
They'll put a big engine in it and do it all right.
The guys got over to Africa to start filming this thing in, we got there in February or March.
Anyway, we went over there and the advanced crew went over first to get everything set up.
And then Chris and I came over a little bit later and when everything was all set up, but the guys were texting back after they were doing all the advanced work for the different places we're going to go shoot.
And they're like, now we understand your obsession with the land cruiser.
Yeah, I collected all the SOG Seikos because this is MAC V song.
So I collected all those.
I think there's four of them that they've seen pictures of Mac V Saw guys wearing going into Laos, Cambodia, North Vietnam, which is what the book is focused on.
So not only did I try to transport myself back by listening to all these things, but I had the watch right there.
Like this is 1968 Rolex.
So I got that thing, the Submariner.
So I surrounded myself with things that are like totems from the book.
So this is what Tom Reese and I had a cool way that he wins this.
And I'll see you where something like this or like that, then people like watch people know.
They'll see it and be like, oh, okay.
It's not like some guy that went out and bought an expensive watch.
They're like, okay, if someone put a lot of thought into this, like you wearing the Willard and me having those Mac V SOGs and this one from 1968, it tells you put a little more thought into this sort of thing than like just what's an expensive watch or something.
I love these old ads, Rolex ads from, it must be the 60s.
I think they're 60s, 70s, 80s.
I mean, there's some from the early 80s where they have a guy like with a rhino, and it's like the editor of Guns and Ammo magazine with his dead rhino wears a Rolex.
And they had at least, yeah, they had like two of those types of ads back then.
I don't like to acknowledge that today, I don't think.
Just weird that that became, it went from being like this manly, super durable thing to like, when did people really start getting into watches and collecting them?
I mean, I think it's always been a thing because you can go back and find like amazing Patti Philippes and stuff like that and go back, find the Omegas, the old Rolexes, and it's a thing.
You see somebody with that, that tells me something about you.
You see something with the Richard Mill, whatever you say.
Richard Machine, I think it is.
It probably is Richard Mill, but it's like, dang, when you add another zero, then it goes to Joe Dirte, you know?
Yeah, exactly.
So it changes things a little bit.
But it tells me a story, just like the characters in the books.
But the watches in particular are important.
One, because it's important to me as a watch guy my whole life.
For some reason, I just had this connection with time and the value of time.
And so I've always been a watch guy my whole life.
And so putting these watches on characters that tell you something about that character, like in Dark Wolf, they have to get rid of their G-Shocks and go get something that would make look a little more European.
And for when they transition over from being these SEAL guys to being these CIA operatives and dropped, get rid of the Gators.
Get rid of the Gators, get some sunglasses, get some expensive watches, that sort of thing.
But I still wanted something that had a connection to the SEAL team.
So I picked a tutor for Taylor Kitch's character.
And I got that one.
I got to keep that one.
So that was pretty cool.
And then put a pan of eye on Rafe Hastings, Tom Hopper's character, to differentiate him a bit from Ben Edwards, the Taylor Kitch character.
And also, Tom's a big dude, so you need a big watch on that guy.
I think all the, like my wife and her friends were so excited about Taylor being in the show because Texas Forever, you know, and they were all coming up during that timeframe where he's on Friday Night Lights and all that stuff.
And then Tom Hopper gets out of the pool without a shirt on.
It's also, what is it like, like having this thing that you sat down by yourself, this world that you created, and now you're not just selling books, but you're filming the visual representation of your work.
I just feel so much gratitude towards everyone involved.
And of course, the people who made it happen, most specifically Chris, because if Chris didn't want to do it, didn't want to option, it probably wouldn't happen.
It wouldn't have happened.
We wouldn't be on this journey together.
And he's so invested in it.
And you mentioned some other shows earlier.
And there's a difference between an actor who gets paid to do something, does it, and moves on to the next project, and somebody like Chris who is so invested in this.
And I think the other actors see that.
And Taylor's like this by nature, like American Prime Evil, any role Taylor takes on, he is just so invested in it.
It's not just a paycheck, like it is, it's going to now become part of his experience.
And he really looks at it through that kind of a lens.
So to have guys like that involved that are so personally connected to the material and also to the community, like the veteran community at large, it means something to them.
And so they put so much into it.
So when I walk on set, it is surreal.
And to know that everybody is, and people come up to me all the time on set and thank me for creating this universe, allowing them to be there.
But not just that they can be there working on a set, it's that we have created mostly through Chris, Antoine Fuqua, David DeGilio, all these guys at the top.
David DeGilio is the showrunner and to build this family.
And people come up to me all the time and they say that they've been involved in hundreds of Hollywood productions and they've never felt this way on a set before.
And that's because you're filming these things for seven, eight months.
And that doesn't count all the work that goes into the scripts ahead of time and all the post-production.
So just being on set.
And so during that time, people are going to get married, get divorced, lose loved ones.
Life is going to happen.
And David DeGilio, in particular, is the showrunner.
He makes sure that everyone is taken care of.
And we're also bringing people along with us.
So if they're in a department this season, they're going to move their way up in that department next season.
So they really feel taken care of.
And it's all genuine.
And I think that helps everybody bring their A-game.
And everyone is so happy to be there on these sets.
It's really cool.
And people tell me how different they want to make sure that I know that it's not like this on every Hollywood production.
I think he's just a bit from wrestling and from all this other stuff, breath control stuff.
He's such an athlete that I think it was just kind of natural.
I don't think he was prepping for it.
I think he just did it.
But it looks so good.
It looks crazy, all the stuff that he gave us down there.
It's amazing.
And that's how we finished up the show, just to finish that, all the casting crew around at night, all the lights, underwater stuff, Chris getting yanked out of the water, and then that was the end.
Every book, I think it's gotten better as I go along.
And if I can say that truthfully to myself, then I feel like I'm doing my job and doing my service to the story, which in turn serves the reader, people who are trusting me with this time that they're never going to get back.
And this one, I mean, like, there's a lot of pressure from publishers also to get things in on time because now I sell, like, maybe at the beginning it didn't matter, but at this stage, it matters because of the number of books that are being sold.
So they need to, and it's a business, and so they need to make their numbers.
And so as a creative person, they are putting a lot of pressure to get it done.
Just get it done.
And I have to fend that off.
I have to like be, hey, whatever pressure is put on me from the outside, I've got to focus on this story, and it's going to be done when it's done because it has to be the best that it can possibly be.
And that's a lot of, that's a lot of pressure coming in from the outside, and you have to fend it off.
But I can see, you know, how if you're, I can see it being very easy to just say, okay, I got to 100,000 words.
I have a guy who's actually based on a real person in the book he lives in real life.
He died in, I think, 1965.
But it was a Finnish officer who got the whatever the Finnish cross is.
It's in the book.
I forget exactly what it is.
But then fought for the Germans and got like the German Mannheim cross or something.
And then after World War II, they tried to grab a bunch of people who had experience in essentially Eastern Europe to bring over to our military so that we would have experience if we went to war with the Soviets.
And so they brought all these guys in into the military.
And so then he gets a bronze star in the United States Military Army Special Forces.
His helicopter went down.
I think it was 1965, but he was part of Mac V Sog.
So I fictionalize his character in here.
So I had to give those three.
So I have to have, so Finnish, German, and English kind of a morph.
And Ray Porter has to do that.
And so he has to read that and come up with something like that.
So he's in almost famous, a bunch of sitcoms in the 90s.
But just an awesome dude.
But yeah, audiobooks.
I think it's because of podcasts.
I think people listen to a podcast, and it is a very natural way to then get whatever you're talking about on the podcast through the same medium.
So over to an audiobook.
It's just a very natural transition to listen to the audiobook.
And a lot of people are doing both, thank goodness.
So they're getting the hardcover and then they're listening on the car on the way home and then they get inside and they're reading a little bit before bed, get up to go to work in the morning, pick up again where they left off reading.
This is what I told people: like, you can't be normal if you're on the set of Apocalypse Now when you're 10 years old, and then 10 years later, you're in platoon.
And also, I went to see Navy SEALs the day before it came out.
There was a showing at like midnight on Thursday or something like that before it came out on Friday back when I was in high school and I knew I was going to be a SEAL.
So I was so excited.
I'm like, they cast Charlie Sheen, the guy from Platoon in this.
I'm like, ah, perfect casting.
And so I went and saw it then.
So it'll be fun to talk to him about that stuff.
And I do remember I did meet him at a Red Sox game?
Is that the one that they watch?
Is that his team?
I think so.
But him and his dad were in a box next to us.
So I was still in the SEAL teams, and I was with some of the guys that were on the bin Laden raid.
And we were in one of the owner's boxes.
And Charlie Sheen was next to us with his dad.
And somehow they got to talking or whatever.
And so we went over there.
He came over to us, I can't remember, with his dad and said hi.
And he was fantastic.
His dad was such a gentleman.
That stands out to me.
But Charlie Sheen was awesome, so personable.
He was great, but his dad was so nice and stand like an old school type gentleman, is what stood out about Martin Sheen.
And then what also stands out is then we then left there at the end of the game, and there was a line of girls down.
I'll tell him this when I see, I see if he remembers, he might not remember, but because it probably happened almost every day for him, just a line of girls down the hallway outside of the owner's box.
Like, what have we done to people's minds with social media and with political discourse that you are thrilled that someone was murdered in front of his children on the internet for the world to see?
And you are celebrating because you didn't like his ideas.
And as much as I tried not to look at all these reactions, it's being fed to me because of the algorithm and everything else.
So there were two in particular, one guy, one lady, and they were like cackling like a witch's cackle, like out of a, like some sort of a some sort of a fairy tale that's meant to scare kids that, you know, but in real life, celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk.
And I mean, that was revolting, but you could feel the evil through the cackles.
You want that attached to you for the rest of your life?
And you don't take one second to say, ah, maybe, even from a practical standpoint, like maybe I should just sit this out.
Even if I feel happy, maybe I should do some reevaluations.
But even if that's not the case, like maybe I should just sit this one out type of a thing.
But instead, they feel comfortable to jump on and say those things.
I mean, it was ridiculous.
And I mean, you felt the, I mean, I could feel the evil coming through the phone, which is a strange thing to say.
And I've been in Bagram early on in the war in Afghanistan.
I remember the, I forget, I don't know if it was really a black site prison, but it was like a nasty prison.
They had this smell and you could feel like this, like kind of this overriding sense of, I don't know, you had despair, but also like this little bit of a current of evil in there.
And then same thing in Baghdad where they held Saddam, like being in there.
I've been in both those places.
And you kind of feel a little, but even more so, you feel it with Saddam's kids.
And they're like, they have these little islands and palaces and you know what they did there.
They could pull in girls off the street and that sort of thing and you just feel dirty and you feel or you feel evil.
I mean you sense it in some of those places.
But I felt that same kind of thing coming through the phone and then I felt it again.
It's weird to feel it so many times.
My wife and I were in Paris, like I said, right before I came out here.
So it was Morocco finishing the show for about a month, then to Paris, and it happened to be Fashion Week and we weren't there for Fashion Week.
It just happened to be Fashion Week.
So which is still going to now, I think.
But we were in this, we wanted to go to one dinner where we could see some people, kind of do some people watching, and I could store some of it away for books.
And that's what I'm always collecting, always collecting.
And so we went to the place that Kardashians, again, where they stay called like COTIS.
Anyway, I went to this hotel that's where a lot of the fashion people stay.
And it was interesting at first.
We're seeing some people just treat the weight staff horribly.
And so you're kind of taking some notes on that.
And then this guy walks in with like two minions and you don't see his face because he's got this like hood on, but there are these earrings that are attached to the outside and they're hanging down and he's this like fairly obese person.
And so you never saw his face the way he was, he walked in and then sat in front of us with these two guys on either side that had their sunglasses on and they were like both dressed very similarly and both sides of him and they just were looking at him like this and just it was so odd but you felt this sense of evil and I hate I don't really like using that word too much but you felt something odd so much so that we paid the bill and left it was odd it was so odd and a similar thing that I felt coming across the phone with those people that celebrating I don't know.
We were going to go back to our hotel and look up, like, try to see like, who's at Fashion Week?
Yeah, but attached through the, through the, like, like your hoodie's on and kind of like clipped the outside or something and coming down like from the outside of like this thin hoodie.
But when I'm thinking about it, if I think about it logically, you know, when you like throw something into a fire, like at Buds, guys would burn their dungarees and dungarees are like a regular Navy uniform.
And if you make it through Buds and don't get kicked out of the teams, you'll never have to wear that uniform again.
And it's like, it was awful.
It was bell-bottom jeans and a denim shirt, like tucked in that you had to starch, you know, especially in boot camp in a way that like, well, you hold it out flat.
It's awful.
And a little Dixie Cup hat.
Like that's the uniform, like the worst uniform in the history of uniforms.
Like it is nothing tough about that.
But people would burn them.
And so like never going back, you know, like that sort of a thing.
And then 80% would quit.
But they burn their uniform.
So I think it may be something like that.
You know, you want to burn something.
unidentified
Like, that's, that's what I think it might be, but I don't know.
Most people will be performance dropped after that for not being comfortable in the water for pool comp when you're getting pounded off the bottom of the pool by instructors and then you're having to go through the right procedures to get your air turned back on and continue to crawl.
And then they come and hit you again and rip your mask off and hit you in the gut.
So you expel your air, turn off your air, tie your, because it's the two hoses, super old school, tie them in a knot, and they back off to see that you're comfortable in the water and that you're going to go through the right procedures to get everything working again and continue on.
So that's about 15 minutes of doing that.
And some people just aren't comfortable in the water.
And it's like, meh, not crazy pressure test that has to be done.
I mean, there's no real job that's similar other than Rangers and other elite special forces teams where you have to get through this horrific thing to prove that you're the type of person that they want to train.
And then so the standard part, so even if they say that they're not lowering the standards, this is how they get around it.
And this is military in general, that they give you more chances.
So before, if you only got one or two chances, maybe three, something like that, to pass an evolution, maybe the standard remains the same.
But in order to get this person, said person through, now you get four chances, five chances, six chances, seven chances, eight chances.
So they say the standards have not changed.
Well, okay, not really, but you gave them a lot more chances, which you didn't give other people before who were washed out of the program because they only got one chance or two chances or three.
unidentified
So it's like what would it be that you would get more chances doing?
I'm saying that's how you would get around the standards.
Like you'd be able to say that we haven't lowered the standards, sir, type of a thing when you're in front of Congress and they don't know to ask those kind of questions.
Well, did you, okay, well, did you give them more chances?
I think there were a couple that tried it and haven't made it.
I'm not sure because I'm so removed from it now.
But I think they're at the, I don't know if there's a push for it, but it's open now.
And the part of that, it's for me, it's, you know, I'll probably get canceled now.
But, you know, or maybe we're past that.
I don't know.
But to me, it's not.
And what they say now, what you have to say officially, I think, is that the standards are the same.
It doesn't matter if you're male or female.
Standards remain the same.
Okay, fine.
But when you get to an elite unit like that or any unit, and this might be a failing on my part, I fully admit that.
I mean, I was raised when a woman enters the room, you stand up, you open the door for a lady type of a thing, like those things.
You stand up for, you're chivalrous, you're a gentleman type of a thing.
And now all of a sudden, in a leadership position, I'm supposed to treat a female the exact same way that I treat a male going into combat.
There's no way I could possibly ever do that.
I'm going to be much more concerned about her than I am him.
And once again, that might be a failing on my part.
I fully accept that.
But I'm glad I never had to deal with it in real life.
But I see that being something that comes into play, especially if you're raised to protect as a protector, as a sentinel, as a guardian.
And now all of a sudden you're supposed to treat said female who've been raised to protect, treat them exactly the same way as a guy going into combat.
Because as soon as you do that and you are physically far weaker and far slower and you're just, you're not a man.
It's a different thing.
I feel the same way about women.
Like if you wanted to have a cross-gender combat sports, if you wanted to biological men fighting biological women, I don't care if they're the same weight.
And I don't want to limit anybody's choices in this life.
But if you want the best people for the job, I can't see how they're going to be weaker people.
That doesn't really make sense.
And if you have a physical requirement for all the men, and that physical requirement involves a lot of like heavy physical working out and labor, I don't know that a woman can pass that.
And then you're supposed to all of a sudden change because of a policy directive.
But yeah, I mean, we're going back to it.
I mean, it's causing ruffling a lot of feathers within the military right now, changing the Department of Defense to the Department of War, which is, and I'm not saying that they got this from me.
I'm just saying that I've never heard anyone talk about it until I talked about it back in 2001.
And I wrote some articles after the Afghanistan withdrawal and went on Fox a bunch of times and talked about how we needed precision and language reflects precision and thought.
Department of Defense Defense has a sort of connotation to it, a definition to it.
And the Department of War is different than a Department of Defense, just the language of it.
And I said, it's time to change the Department of Defense back to the Department of War.
And I used the Afghanistan withdrawal as that example and put that in two articles.
Because one of the things that you talk about, especially in the terminal list, is horrific government corruption and the willingness to put soldiers' lives as expendable in order to profit.
One of my favorite chapters is these two characters, Tom Reese and his buddy Quinn.
So one Special Forces guy, one SEAL, and they're having this conversation on China Beach.
And it was great to write those chapters and do all this research into China Beach and Da Nang and what kind of surfboards they were using, how they were shaped, like all this stuff just to bring you back to that timeframe.
Or just people in power in general or just a part of a readership, maybe.
I'm just going to focus on that story.
I have to focus on that story.
I'm not doing this.
I'm not writing this for a reader.
I'm writing this for the story.
And that's the way I honor that reader.
So it's all about that story.
But the CIA has been very nice.
We got to film the end of Dark Wolf at CIA headquarters.
And I hadn't been back there since I was in the SEAL team.
So I'm at CIA headquarters.
I have a cameo in there that I live through at the end of the show on episode seven.
I'm the guard that takes the guy's ID as he's leaving the, and I have one line.
I think it's, I say, I say something anyway.
But it was very cool to be there in front of that memorial wall, that wall of stars, especially knowing some of those guys that are on there that are memorialized by those stars.
So the CIA was very kind to let us use that lobby.
They didn't ask us to change anything in the show, didn't put any restraints or restrictions on anything.
They just let us use it.
And that was very cool.
Some guys came down that didn't need to come down that day, which was really cool.
They wanted to talk to me about some stuff that I did in Iraq.
And it was very, very cool to talk to them.
Very cool to see the CIC, the museum.
There, I got a little tour of the CIA Museum, all that stuff.
So they've been very helpful.
The military, not so much.
The military does not let us use any aircraft carriers, submarines, helicopters, anything like that, like they do for some other shows.
And I think that's probably because I blew an admiral up in his office in the first episode, first series in the book.
I knew the people would eventually come through a line, signing line, and say, I joined the military because of you, or I became a police officer because of something I read in your books.
And because that's me, I was influenced by popular culture growing up, and that helped me on my path into the SEAL teams.
So I knew it would happen.
I didn't really conceptualize it any further than that.
But when it happened, I was first time, which was a couple of years ago, because the first book came out in 2018.
So someone reads that at 16, 17, 18.
Now they're a few years into this career in law enforcement or in the military.
And guys have come up and said that now.
And I'm always like, oh, man, I hope you made the right choice.
I'm like, oh, I hope that was just one part of a lot of information that you took in in order to make this decision.
But they do say it now.
And like with David Morrell in Phoenix the other night for the launch of the book, he has been through like burn units and stuff, saying hi to people as part of like USO tours and stuff.
And people like missing arms and legs are totally burned.
Say, hey, I joined the military because of Rambo.
And him, it's like, oh, he's such a nice guy.
He's just like, oh.
I mean, it's like devastating, devastating.
Yeah.
But for me, it's like, hey, it's always going to be about the story.
I knew that would happen, but it was a surprise the first time.
Kind of like the tattoo was the first surprise.
It was a surprise the first time I saw it.
Like the baby the other night was the first surprise.
For this one in particular, that's what I wanted to do.
I wanted those guys who were not just Mac V Sog going over the borders and fighting in denied areas where they weren't supposed to be in Cambodia, Laos, North Vietnam, but anyone who stood up and went down there to serve.
I wanted to make sure I honored them and gave my heart and soul to every word.
And I felt that responsibility as I was writing this.
I wanted those guys to read it and say, oh, he put in the effort to get it right.
And even for people that just lived through the 60s that didn't go downrange, I wanted them to read it and say, oh, he tried to, he got close.
Even if I made a mistake, he were there.
Like, he put in the effort to try to capture the essence of 1968.
That's got to be some of the toughest fighting one can do in the dark, in a tunnel, under the ground, essentially by yourself because you can't fit anybody else in there with you.
Yeah, like those videos that we just saw that look like Muhammad Ali is on the show.
I mean, all that sort of stuff.
I mean, it's going to, we're getting to that point where it's going to identify you somehow, some sort of an identification through your eyes, through blood, through facial recognition, a combination of all three.
And then that is going to allow you to access whatever it is, information online, credit cards, all the rest of it, of course.
But what it's really doing is allowing something, whether it's the government or big tech, more control over you because eventually you're going to go in and, okay, to make sure this is you paying for, let's say, a steak.
And now all of a sudden, oh, you've had your allotment of steak because of the environment, because of how many cows and whatever they're doing.
You can't buy this steak.
Or your allotment of power for your vehicle.
You've used yours up for the mother gas in your car.
All of those things.
But it's going to know exactly because you're going to have to do it to access information online.
It's really crazy to watch because the mass immigration is not an accident.
If I was going to destroy a country, I would do it exactly the way they're doing it.
I'd take away their freedom, take away their ability to protest, take away their guns, which they did in the 90s, and then you start tightening that noose tighter and tighter, add more restrictions, more this, more that.
When you arrest 12,000 people for social media posts, you don't just arrest people for social media posts.
You change people's ability to post about things because of fear.
So they self-censor.
So you don't even, you're hitting them with like this one guy who complained about there's a famous video where this fucking idiot in a wig, he's one of them judges and they wear the wigs, the white powdered wigs, and he's sentencing this guy for 20 months for social media posts that are normal.
Like normal complaints about mass immigration of illegals from other countries that aren't assimilating and that they believe are ruining their society, which there's a real argument for.
And that's what online discourse is supposed to be about.
Like having conversations, like I'm voicing my concern for the way society is running right now because of what's happening and no one's doing anything about it and no one's protecting anybody.
So it's not just an invasion of It's like they're doing it.
They're letting people do it.
They're enabling these people doing it.
And they're putting them on the dole, too, which is even crazier.
And, you know, you're seeing that in America as well, where they just uncovered a bunch of people that were illegals that had been given social security numbers and were already voting.
And this is nuts, man.
It's like it's a concerted effort.
And this was one of the main focuses that a lot of people had in the 2024 campaign.
There was one side that wanted to stop that and one side that wanted to pretend that it was a good thing.
And like that you have an open border and criminals and cartel members are just flooding through.
People from foreign countries of military fighting age just flooding through and you're pretending there's nothing wrong with that.
Like you're setting us up for a real big fucking problem.
Being in the room with all the lizard people that run the world is so strange.
It's so weird.
It was like seeing Hillary and seeing Obama and seeing Kamala Harris and Biden and Bush and all those people there.
It's very weird.
It's really weird, man.
It's real weird.
It's real weird being in the Capitol and realize how strange this whole process is.
I mean, there's this like a public humiliation ritual where Trump goes on stage and talks shit and they're right behind him.
And they have to eat it.
And everybody cheers and claps and is very surreal.
Very surreal.
Surreal also that I'm right there too on the stage.
Like, what is going on?
Five rows back from the president's.
Like, the strangest fucking thing on earth.
And it's also strange just that this is this weird ritual that they do, this changing of the control.
And then, you know, the beginning of the battle for the next four years where everybody is like slinking away to try their strategy and figure out what to do next and who's our warrior.
So we decided not to go to this last one because we felt like we experienced it last time and there was all the limos on fire and all the chain link fences as we were getting, you know, going to all this stuff.
So we decided not to go to this one.
But then Tulsi called and asked if I'd go to her swearing in.
And so I was like, yeah, of course.
And so we went to that one.
And that was really cool.
That was really cool to be in the room with her when she got sworn in.
But yeah, the next one, it's, I mean, I haven't read the book, but it's Kamala's book where she says she didn't choose Pete Buttigedge because of his sexual orientation.
And you say something else, like, oh, they're not qualified.
You cannot, I mean, I believe, well, someone can tell us if we're, if I'm wrong, we can probably look it up, but I do not think you can discriminate against someone strictly because of that.
If they're not qualified, of course, you choose someone else, fine.
But she goes ahead and says that's the reason that she didn't hire this guy to be her VP.
Do you think you could have had that conversation, let's say, 15 years ago, that kind of a conversation with Kamala if she was around back then?
Let's back up 15 years or is talking to all these amazing people that you've talked to over the time this podcast has been in existence, has given you this incredible foundation from which to be able to ask such incredible questions of people and get this stuff out of them.
15 years ago, I would have never thought that it would have mattered at all if I had an opinion on anything.
It would be like most comics that are doing podcasts today where they're just shooting the shit to their friends and no one cares.
No one cares.
You know, I want to vote for this guy because I think we need try libertarianism and this is why I think it.
Like, oh, who cares?
And then interesting conversation moves on.
Not that like so many people care what my fucking opinion is.
Like that to me is a sign of the times.
Like if you're coming to a cage-fighting commentator and a dirty comedian, like this is this is the guy that you need an opinion for, that means the media's failed you.
Like what I am, I'm a symptom of a broken system.
Like if I'm a source of information, like we've got like a bit of a supply chain problem.
I think it's being a little humble on that as well, because where else could someone get this three hours where they can really listen to maybe two sides of a right?
But my point is, why didn't somebody else do that already?
Why didn't mainstream media figure that out?
Why did you need someone to figure it out on a laptop in a fucking spare bedroom of their house?
Like, how is that possible?
The number one media show in the world that's birthed out of a laptop in a spare bedroom.
It doesn't make any sense.
Well, it means you failed.
No, no, no.
It means they failed.
Because there's a lot smarter people than me, a lot better people at dissecting what's actually going on in the world than me.
But for whatever reason, they can't do it.
So how come?
There's a bunch of people from the New York Times that try, but they're all bullshitting.
They're never free to give their real opinion.
They're never free to say, you know what, actually, this person that I disagree with fundamentally has a really good point about this.
You know, they have, instead of being ideologically captured, which is like most of them, most of them on the right and most of them on the left, instead of just being able to look at things and go, this is the actual reality that we're living in.
That's a failure.
That's a failure of media.
It's a failure of journalism.
It's a failure.
And they say, oh, you know, he's not a journalist.
You're right.
So how come people are listening?
Like, what is that about?
You tell me why no one else can have these kind of conversations with people and break it down this way.
Well, it's because you're limited by your whole system.
If you're involved in mainstream media, you're limited by the format.
The format sucks.
You have to break for commercials.
You're sponsored by, brought to you by Pfizer.
So either there's certain things you can't talk about.
You've got handcuffs on.
And if you're on the internet and you're ideologically aligned with either the left or the right, well, now you're captured by this box of predetermined opinions that you're supposed to subscribe to.
Like when you think about communication in general, and a long time ago, the telephone used to connect us with our grandparents, let's say, states away, used to connect us.
And now the telephone, it disconnects us from that person who's sitting right here next to us on the couch, our spouse or our kids or anything else.
So it used communication, used to connect us.
Now a communication device, which does obviously a lot more than that, is a tracking device, surveillance device, all these other things.
But it disconnects us from those that we're in the same room with.
And that's a different deal.
And that's why when I look at long term, when we're talking about, you always remain so hopeful about the future, and I love it.
And I try to remain hopeful as well.
But when you think about it in those types of terms, like this thing's not going away.
I mean, I hope it works out well, but it's change is inevitable, and our change is technologically driven.
And it's an integration.
The integration between this incredible technology that's available now to everybody through these AI platforms and then your phone and then your biology.
Like many people are wearing them Apple watches and they're getting text messages and emails and making phone calls on their watch.
I judge someone immediately when I see an Apple Watch, unless it's for health reasons.
But I see someone with an Apple Watch, I immediately judge.
But that's the same thing, using the watch to tell a story about the person or gear, whatever it might be.
1911, 1945, the new staccato that tells me something about that person, you know, what kind of hat they wear, belt they wear, leather setup, okay, a kydex setup, like all those things, Solomon shoes versus, you know, whatever, Oakley's versus Gators, like all those things tell me something about a person, but I immediately judge.
I make judgments based on very little information, and that watch tells me something.
And then they get into the Tesla, and I'm like, oh, okay.
Apple Watch, Tesla, you know, and some of those things that seem like they just have no soul.
What I like about them is like you could sync it up to your range finder.
There's a bunch of different things you do.
You could have maps on it.
And if you had to get out of somewhere and you're fucked and you're in the woods, you could pull up the GPS on your watch and you could figure out where the trailhead is.
And you can get out.
You could figure out where the road systems are and you can get out.
And you can just say, okay, I just have to go due north for six miles, and I'm going to hit a road.
Like, that could save your life.
Like, if you're in the middle of the woods, you don't know what the fuck is going on, and something happens, and you're like, okay, we have to get out of here.
But that scene in particular, I think a lot of people who are in Iraq and Afghanistan that spent time around the fire or any warriors who spent time around a fire or hunters that spent time around a fire will identify with that scene, the sharing of stories between hunters and warriors.
And that's one of the cool things about if you stay on Lanai, which is there's two four seasons there, and the four seasons that's on the water is incredible.
While some initial reports suggested that the Iberian orcas could be carrying out revenge against the ships, this has been dismissed by many orca experts.
Why?
The encounters often involve young orcas going straight for the rudders.
Scientists have suggested the orcas are likely just bored teenagers with more free time since Atlantic bluefin tuna populations, their favorite prey in the region, recovered, meaning they need to spend less time hunting.
Open letter regarding Iberian orcas and their interactions with boats.
Undersigned are experts in biology and behavior of cetaceans with several specializing in orcas, also known as killer whales.
There's been intense public interest in interactions between orcas as the Iberian orcas and marine vessels along the coast of the Iberian Peninsula and in neighboring waters.
We are concerned that factual errors regarding these interactions are being repeated in the media along with a narrative lacking a basis in science or reality that the animals are aggressively attacking vessels or seeking revenge against mariners.
I think it's probably people are, oh, the whales have shown a wide range of behaviors during the interactions, many of them consistent with playful social behavior.
Yeah, because they're having a good time sinking these boats.
Push plane and into camp one night and then get on the horses and then going up into the mountains with the horses and then make camp there and then push out from that every day.
Well, it's the only place in this country at this point where you can hunt grizzlies.
And they really need to do something about that.
Some of these other states where they're talking about opening it up because they are not scared of people anymore.
And the interactions are getting more and more frequent.
And they're not doing anything to curb the populations.
And that's the thing we're talking about with Lanai.
And people that are not involved in hunting and don't understand the conservation aspect of it.
You can't just have an unchecked population of animals, including predators.
And all these fucking people are voting with their heart instead of letting wildlife biologists say, no, this is actually bad for the animals, for the overall population of them.
Huge one came through, which is good because well-fed.
And it's the one and they get skinny and get a little dicey.
Huge one came through right around Thanksgiving when all the families in town and we're up in the mountains right there, pretty remote and everybody's there.
The kids are there.
So I'm kind of like, oh man.
And I'm sure they've seen me a ton of times and I've never seen that.
But I want to get some game cams on them to see what the interaction is because the moose come through, the elk come through, the mule deer come through, and I want to see those interactions.
We're about 200 turkeys, it seems, probably like more like 150, but a lot come through every day.
So I do love it up there.
And you know, if someone's up there, that you know if they shouldn't be there.