Oct. 8, 2025 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:33:18
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|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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The Joe Logan Experience. | |
| Train by Day, Joe Relgan podcast by night! | ||
| All day. | ||
| What's happening? | ||
| How are you? | ||
| Great to see you. | ||
| Always great to see you. | ||
| I've been so looking forward to this. | ||
|
unidentified
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We're going a thousand miles an hour for it seems like Me too, Mom. | |
| And I've been really looking forward to talking to you about this book because I know that you've been obsessed. | ||
| You've been obsessed by this era in human history. | ||
| And tell us about it. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| So this 1968 Vietnam. | ||
| And uh just launched the book tour, not last night, but the night before, because last night was comedy mothership, Kill Tony, which was amazing. | ||
| Did they vet any of those people by the way before they come up? | ||
| Yeah, didn't look insane people, brilliant people, great comics, terrible comics. | ||
| That was fantastic. | ||
| That's the best show. | ||
| That was fantastic. | ||
| But yeah, I kicked off the book tour with uh David Morel, who created Rambo back in 1972 with First Blood. | ||
| So that was a huge honor for me. | ||
| He's been an inspiration to me my whole life. | ||
| And uh wrote a series of books uh in the 80s Brotherhood of the Rose, Fraternity of the Stone, League of Night and Fog, which were just incredible. | ||
| And uh got to kick off the book tour with him out there, signed a baby for the first time. | ||
| I've never signed a baby, so someone brought a baby through and asked me to sign their kid. | ||
| I was like, it does. | ||
| And then uh then I realized they just wanted me to sign the shirt on the baby, which is a little better than the actual skin of the baby. | ||
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unidentified
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So uh so I did that. | |
| That was uh two new tattoos came through. | ||
| So saw two new very large tattoos of crossed on the cross talk. | ||
| Yeah, nice. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| I mean, you've been had that for a while. | ||
| You've had people doing that for a while for you, but I remember the first time I got one. | ||
| I think it was after I think it was after that was on, or right around the same time the first time I was on, so like 2020, the first time I saw it, and I texted you and sent it. | ||
| And it was like someone tattooed the cross tomahawks on themselves. | ||
| And you know, I because I know you you've had that with uh with you for a while, and if it was weird the first time, some you see it. | ||
| Like now it's kind of must be kind of normal because a lot of people have tattoos of you. | ||
| It's not normal. | ||
| It's not normal. | ||
| You know, it's weird. | ||
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unidentified
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It's very weird. | |
| They'll probably grow to regret them. | ||
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unidentified
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Never. | |
| That doesn't happen with tattoos, does it? | ||
| No. | ||
| Not mine. | ||
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unidentified
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No. | |
| I don't regret mine. | ||
| I like mine. | ||
| It's a life story. | ||
| It's a life story. | ||
| Yeah, it's you know, uh it depends on what you got. | ||
| Yeah, you know. | ||
| And timing and who maybe if you got someone's name on there that's no longer a part of your life. | ||
| Yeah, maybe the wife wants you to get that removed. | ||
| Perhaps turn it into a snake. | ||
| I've heard that exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But uh but yeah, the book, 1968, Vietnam, and I thought this was gonna be the book that was gonna 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. | ||
| Uh 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 I was well prepared to dive into this world. | ||
| And I didn't want to just say that they're listening to Credence Clearwater Revival and that it's 1968, and then essentially drop a contemporary thriller into the 60s, into Vietnam, 1968. | ||
| Uh 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 you know 70 years old, 50 years old, 20 years old, they only have their life experience up to that point to uh make a decision for perspective on an event. | ||
| Uh and that took a lot more time than I thought. | ||
| I got a dictionary from 1969. | ||
| Uh I couldn't find the one from 1968 I wanted, so I got a dictionary from 1969 to look how that how terms were defined back then, a lot of maps from the era, and it was just a 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. | ||
| Oh wow. | ||
| So what so when you get a dictionary from 1968, what is the difference? | ||
| Well, that's what I wanted to find. | ||
| Is there a lot of difference? | ||
| Uh I'm sure there is, but I was looking at just some specific terms that I can't even remember what they are right now. | ||
| And you just wanted to look them up through that. | ||
| I didn't want to look up to Google something today. | ||
| I wanted to be doing this research as if I was in the 60s. | ||
| And so if I needed to look something up, whether it was spelling or whatever else, I wanted to use that instead of like asking Google machine. | ||
| So I just wanted to transport myself back in time. | ||
| And uh yeah, that was that was quite the endeavor. | ||
| I didn't expect at the outset. | ||
| So I feel like this that war in particular is uh it's like World War II was what we think America is. | ||
| Vietnam is what America really is. | ||
| That is a very perceptive insight. | ||
| So World War II, we were fighting evil. | ||
| Yeah, we were stopping the rise Of Hitler and the Third Reich. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| World World War II was just Vietnam was fucking nonsense. | ||
| And it's still to this day, it it infuriates people that participated in it. | ||
| It infuriates people who lost family members. | ||
| It does it didn't make any sense. | ||
| It was birthed on a lie. | ||
| It was a complete false flag event that our own government. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They 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. | ||
| That's the real America. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's uh it's something that I explore in the book, and the benefit of hindsight, it's certainly more um i it it's more not relevant, but uh you you can you can draw that out for sure at the benefit of hindsight. | ||
| And I'm trying to write this thing in 1968 from these guys. | ||
| So they're having these conversations with only that information. | ||
| So they don't yet know who's making a ton of money. | ||
| They're not knowing about Bell helicopters and and all the rest of this stuff. | ||
| They're not they don't really know yet about Gulf of Tonkin. | ||
| Um they just know that 1968 is the bloodiest year thus far of the war, and it's gonna be the bloodiest year of the war so far, which is why I said it in that year. | ||
| How many people died that year? | ||
| Uh yeah, well, 58 over 58,000 in total. | ||
| And I forget uh exactly how many for that particular year, but we lost more people that year and had more people wounded than in any other year of the war. | ||
| But over 58,000 people died in Vietnam on our side, to say nothing of the Vietnam. | ||
| Um NVA, Viet Cong, civilians, you know, all put together, but uh certainly a lot more than 58,000. | ||
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unidentified
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Um over what? | |
| Yeah, looking back, so I'm trying to look at it uh through the lens of the day. | ||
| And when you look at that, the domino thing, we look back and say, and of course the rest of the world wouldn't have fallen to communism. | ||
| Um but at the time I trying to put myself into the shoes of the people making these decisions. | ||
| And uh there at least for Southeast Asia, there was the threat of other countries falling. | ||
| Even if they did, would that have meant anything long term for the rest of us today? | ||
| It's it's hard to say that it would have. | ||
| But uh it I mean the whole thing is so is so heartbreaking. | ||
| Um and you're right, when we got back from from World War II, uh those guys had parades, they got back to work, they used the GI Bill, they built this country into what it is today. | ||
| Uh Vietnam, those guys, it was looked at like they went bankrupt. | ||
| It was like a company going bankrupt. | ||
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unidentified
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and not only that when they came back they were called baby killers they were met at the airport by protesters They had all that to deal with, all of that baggage to deal with. | |
| And uh and that left a scar in 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, um, there's uh photographs, uh World War I, World War II, we're getting the news reels 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 uh because you're seeing it once a week, or you're seeing a still photograph in a paper. | ||
| Uh, then we get to Vietnam, and now you're seeing it every day on the news. | ||
| You're seeing Walter Cronkite there give 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 not they're not just a uh 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 uh 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 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 is 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. | ||
| And the uh the media is involved in that. | ||
| So they didn't know it before. | ||
| What was the issue? | ||
| The media distorted what was going on. | ||
| Yeah, the media media were distorted what was what was going on and uh and talked about this huge victory for the uh for the NVA and uh for for North Vietnam. | ||
| And it 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 uh and and policy shifts and more people shipped into Vietnam. | ||
| So it's uh I mean it's the whole thing is so is so sad, and I try to rehumanize it and personalize it in this book because you can read about I think that's what the importance of reading fiction also because you're you can it you get a compassion there uh and an empathy for people because you're living something through their eyes, even though it's fiction, uh 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, uh then you're getting to know these characters and you're going through this thing with them, and that but then it becomes a part of your experience. | ||
| Uh so even say, let's say Buds going through going through SEAL training. | ||
| Yeah, I'm I I'm thinking back to Normandy and I'm thinking back to to uh 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 Cornado, California. | ||
| Oh, those guys died and sacrificed so much so that I could be here. | ||
| But some of that comes through the uh works of fiction too, the thrillers that I was reading growing up from guys who had backgrounds in Vietnam or just from things they're dealing with in contemporary thrillers of the day. | ||
| But that became part of my experience, and I didn't have to uh and it it's almost like you're living it, even though it's all made up. | ||
| So uh that's the important of the important of reading in general, and the speaking of reading. | ||
| When we go when we look at 2003 to 2025 and the drop off in reading that has occurred, that is scary. | ||
| Is the do you think that's because of the internet? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's quite uh it corresponds uh almost directly with the rise of the smartphone. | ||
| And uh, 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 and all the rest of it. | ||
| It's uh and less people reading and less people, there's no backside there's no box office for movies anymore. | ||
| No, the worst time to get into it is tomorrow. | ||
| Yeah, good point. | ||
| I'm gonna way better that you already have the terminalist and the dark wolf on TV. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, you're way better off. | ||
| Trying today, they'd be like, We have no use for scripts. | ||
| Oh man. | ||
| We wrote our own, we wrote a hundred scripts in the time it took you to walk up the stairs. | ||
| Oh man, I know. | ||
| Yeah, we pr put in prompts. | ||
| I want a Vietnam thriller involving uh handsome football player who tries to go do the best for his country, but realizes like Pat Tillman style gets disillusioned when he gets there. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's it's uh it's a thing. | ||
| I think I'm CAA, my talent agency just sent me a thing the other day and said that uh one of these uh open AI deals, they I think it was a 1.5 billion dollar settlement or something, and that that they'd use my books, and I'm sure they've used this podcast, I'm sure they've used all sorts of things. | ||
| But uh, but the settlement out of that for me is possibly a thousand dollars. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| And uh I thought, well, my attorney's gonna run that money. | ||
| Is my attorney only gonna take an hour to do this? | ||
| Because that's about makes it a uh you know a watch. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So uh but then do you not do it because then they just hold them up? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's it's crazy. | ||
| Take the thousand. | ||
| Yeah, but they have to pay like six thousand to get the thousand. | ||
| I would think they're gonna spend they're gonna spend like six hours. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I mean, if I even asked the question, the thousand's gone. | ||
| Cut me a check, bitch. | ||
| It's I don't think it works that way. | ||
| Oh, so I don't even know. | ||
| But the AI part is interesting. | ||
| I was talking to um so I was in Morocco filming uh True Believer, yeah, just a couple weeks ago. | ||
| So we finished up filming out there with Pratt and everybody, it was amazing. | ||
| And uh and I yep from Morocco you fly through France on the way home. | ||
| So I stopped in Paris for a few days, met my wife out there, met some other friends out there, went to a bunch of dinners and things like that. | ||
| But one of them's got named Rick Rosenfield, he started California Pizza Kitchen back in 1985, and uh they were gonna put one in one of the win hotels in Vegas, and uh we're talking about AI, and that's how this this plays in here. | ||
| And he said he told me the story, and I'll get this is the general gist, it might be not the exact detail, but the general gist is right. | ||
| They're gonna put one into one of the win casinos. | ||
| And so he goes in there with uh with Steve Wynne and they're walking through and Waylon Jennings is with them. | ||
| So they're all there's three these three guys, Steve Wynn, Rick Rosenfield, and Waylon Jennings, and they go in and Steve Wynn says, Hey, uh Waylon, we have this cover band, we have this guy that does just your cover tunes. | ||
| He's a huge fan of yours, and I'd appreciate it if you said you said hi to him. | ||
| And Waylon Jennings is like, yeah, no problem. | ||
| So the cover band guy is like Jalen Wennings or something, let's call him that. | ||
| I don't know what his real name is. | ||
| But uh sits down and they're having drinks, and the guy's like, I I love I love all your stuff. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| I hope it's okay that that I'm doing these cover bands, but you're I just idolize you. | ||
| And Waylon Jennings is sitting there, he goes, Oh yeah, no, no problem. | ||
| Uh only there is one problem though, uh, with what you're doing. | ||
| And the guy's like, Well, what? | ||
| And he said, You're always one album behind. | ||
| And I was like, oh. | ||
| And this guy told me the story in the context of AI and someone using my books to write another book that is has a similar tone. | ||
| Or write this in the style of Jack Carr with some prompts. | ||
| And I was saying that I was a little concerned about this and just don't know what's going to happen in the future. | ||
| And he told me that story. | ||
| And so I'm like, oh, that's fantastic. | ||
| They're always gonna be a book behind. | ||
| Yeah, but AI is not a cover band. | ||
| AI's a lot smarter than us. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| The problem is, you know, I don't know if you're paying attention to what it's been doing with music. | ||
| But like so, Jamie, show them some of the interviews. | ||
| Some of the interviews that you made. | ||
| I showed them up there. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Those are crazy. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| So Muhammad Ali. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| On the podcast. | ||
| Yeah, Michael Jackson. | ||
| Yeah, Michael Jackson on the podcast. | ||
| And it's not, it's not difficult for it to do stuff like that. | ||
| And so that we're not talking about a cover band. | ||
| We're talking about someone that can do something or something that can accomplish a task that human beings can't. | ||
| Man, well now I'm bummed out again. | ||
| I was all positive a second ago. | ||
| Play that. | ||
| This is so crazy. | ||
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unidentified
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But never doubting yourself. | |
| You still carry that mindset. | ||
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unidentified
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Oh, it's in me for everybody. | |
| You don't stop being the champion just because the bell ain't ringing. | ||
| When you sit down like this with a microphone, you can't hide anything. | ||
| Your breathing, your hesitation, even your heartbeat comes true. | ||
| If you try to be someone, you don't grow up with nothing, man. | ||
| You learn quickly, you can trust every smile, every handshake you wave. | ||
| That's terrible. | ||
| They might they might figure that one out. | ||
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unidentified
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It helps them. | |
| That's terrible. | ||
| That's someone else. | ||
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unidentified
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Do you ever notice how life sneak up on you like a bill, you forgot your head? | |
| One day you're cool, next day you're gonna be a little bit more than that. | ||
| That's terrible at this responsibility on my porch. | ||
| Stop that. | ||
| But there are some that are the first time. | ||
| Stop that. | ||
| That's not Richard Pryor's voice. | ||
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unidentified
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The trick is figuring out how to join in without losing your own. | |
| I would say hearing it through these ones now. | ||
| You can hear that weird tinge. | ||
| Like that's supposed to be Lee Harvey Oswald, doesn't really look like them. | ||
| A little bit like a really young Lee Harvey Oswald. | ||
| Anyway, uh we're fucked. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| We're fucked. | ||
| Bottom line is and music is really fucked. | ||
| Like we were playing this uh 50 cent cover. | ||
| Yeah, they did a song the song Many Men, but they did it with like a soul singer from like the 1950s or 1960s. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| It's so good. | ||
| It's like one of my favorite songs. | ||
| Really? | ||
| It's not even a real person. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| It's not even a real person. | ||
| We're aware of it. | ||
| It's so good. | ||
| We were all in the green room the other night. | ||
| We're like, if this guy was a real dude, he would be like biggest star in the world right now. | ||
| Because everybody would want to hear him sing. | ||
| I mean, Millie Vanilli just did it a little too early. | ||
| Well, Millie Vanilli just lip synced. | ||
| You know, this is a totally different experience. | ||
| This is like they're gonna create stuff with your voice better than anything you can do. | ||
| Oh, it's so brutal. | ||
| But for the kids, at least we're aware of it. | ||
| So we can choose. | ||
| Maybe we can choose. | ||
| It's gonna be hard to fit like some of these things, it's gonna 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. | ||
| That was just uh AI made that. | ||
| Yeah, and I find out ten years later. | ||
| Did that what is that different? | ||
| Is that a different experience now for me? | ||
| Do I feel cheated? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You should feel cheated. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But if you but if you buy it, there has to be a little thing on it. | ||
| I don't know, that tells you, and then you're aware. | ||
| Well, part of what art is is someone made it. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you know, that's what makes it it kind of cool. | ||
| Yeah, you know, if it was made by a computer, it doesn't seem I don't it doesn't have a piece of a person in it, you know. | ||
| And are people gonna care? | ||
| Like our kids, are they gonna care? | ||
| I don't know because I don't care about that song, so I don't know what to say. | ||
| It's like I don't want to be a hypocrite, but it's uh it's inevitable. | ||
| It's happening. | ||
| You know, you're gonna have to deal with it and adapt. | ||
| And I think what it means to be a person is going to change. | ||
| Oh that's so brutal. | ||
| Yeah, I I don't think it's possible to avoid change. | ||
| And this is the direction that change is going. | ||
| And so uh 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 gonna 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 the lessons and the 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 it's imitating everything that humans have created and would still 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. | ||
| Maybe it'll become more valuable. | ||
| Hope so. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Hope so. | ||
| But the books on like hey, this is made by an actual human, no AI was used. | ||
| I haven't used it yet. | ||
| I haven't used uh chat GPT or anything like that. | ||
| I can barely update my word. | ||
| That's what I want to do. | ||
| Like keep my word uh updated, that's the main thing. | ||
| But I know a lot of people that are that are using it and love it. | ||
| And they have a relationship with this thing. | ||
| Yeah, I use perplexity for questions on the show now. | ||
| It's a sponsor, and so like every time we have questions, we'll look it's a valuable resource. | ||
| I feel like uh especially for someone who does something like this, it'd be crazy to not use something like that. | ||
| I don't think it's everyone's thinks that change is bad. | ||
| Everyone's scared of change. | ||
| They were scared of the printing press. | ||
| I mean, people have been scared of the wheel, they were scared of the locomotive. | ||
| People are scared of everything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm not scared of it. | ||
| Um I'm I I'm scared that it could potentially fuck up society, but uh I feel like that's just what's gonna happen. | ||
| You know, it's just we go through cycles. | ||
| Go to Rome. | ||
| Go look around. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| Where'd everybody go? | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, there's there's still people living here, but that society that built that fell apart. | ||
| Same thing with Athens, same thing with many, many, many places in the world. | ||
| Societies crumble. | ||
| There's a cycle. | ||
| We were not immune to that cycle because we're aware of it. | ||
| They are aware of it too. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| They were all aware of crumbling civilizations and once great civilizations that had fallen. | ||
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| But I think if you learned a 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 uh excel 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. | ||
| Uh if you have that foundation, then you're wondering to be a more empathetic and passionate person, but you're gonna have this knowledge base that other people are are uh relying on chat GPT or whatever it is, uh their phone, whatever, to do that thinking for them. | ||
| Yeah, it's um amazing how many people just don't consume any nonfiction or fiction. | ||
| They don't consume anything but like TikTok and Netflix. | ||
| Yes, it is absolutely nuts. | ||
| Like I said about the the time uh enter it to enter publishing. | ||
| Um if you were I think the a great time is the nineties 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, uh producers of the day, and then people bought books they were still reading back then because there yet 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 uh and adapting your stuff to to film or television, mostly film back then. | ||
| But those guys got to crush. | ||
| And uh today not as not as much. | ||
| But it's fun though. | ||
| It's still fun to create, still fun to do all this, still fun to be in Morocco doing this stuff and there's guys like you that are still doing it. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's still it's still doable. | ||
| Yep, still doable, that's for sure. | ||
| But uh you did the right Way though. | ||
| You know, you did it on Amazon. | ||
| They gave you a lot of creative freedom. | ||
| You got great people to work with. | ||
| That's the right way. | ||
| I mean, I'm a big fan of the gray man series. | ||
| I think he does uh he's a great writer, but his stuff is so much more violent and gritty than what was portrayed in the film. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The film glossed it up and you know and made it a little pretty. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's what happens for the most part. | ||
| It's uh Carl Island. | ||
| Did you see a bad monkey with uh with uh Vince Vaughn? | ||
| No. | ||
| So it's on Apple. | ||
| And uh he's a a cop that's uh kind of down on his luck and he's uh he's on suspension or whatever, and uh he lives in the Keys, so it has that whole keys vibe, and they film it down there, and so you recognize if you've been there, you recognize all these places. | ||
| But uh Carl Hyaston is the author, and he he has he's uh he has this uh he's very unique style. | ||
| But what he says about Hollywood is he drives to the border of California, he throws his book over the border, they throw a bunch of money back at him and he drives back to back to Florida, and that's how and whatever happens, happens. | ||
| You know, it's uh so that's that's one way to look at it. | ||
| But most authors aren't involved in their in their in uh in whatever happens. | ||
| They like to get rid of that author right away so you're not on set saying you ruined my vision. | ||
| Yeah, I get that. | ||
| I could I get that, but it seems like what you're doing is better because you're involved in it, and then it reaches your vision. | ||
| Or as close as you're gonna get. | ||
| You help add value. | ||
| Yeah, you want to make it the best show you possibly can. | ||
| Yeah, when I saw the terminal list, I was like, this is about as close as you can get and do a TV show in you know, and not have it rated you know, NC17, like super hypergraphic. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But you know, it's uh it's way harder to do that in a movie. | ||
| Because you only wait an hour and a half, two hours. | ||
| Your books take hours to read. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we have seven hours for Dark Wolf, eight hours for uh for the terminal list, we'll have eight hours for True Believer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| That's the way to do it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that one, I that has the hunting stuff in it. | ||
| So once again, now I think if we'd like for some reason, if we'd started with that, or if I'd started with that as a book, that it would have been much more difficult because Amazon uh would have been much more hesitant. | ||
| But since we had a success with the terminal list, now they're taking this risk with us. | ||
| Uh 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Instead, I had this whole journey across in the book, It's the Atlantic and the show It's gonna be the Pacific. | ||
| But going across this, this uh this journey of violent redemption, he still thinks he's gonna die, gets to Mozambique, still thinks he's gonna 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 the s actual story kicks off from there. | ||
| But I thought it was gonna 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 uh so I had to take him on this journey. | ||
| And I kind of thought that my a 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 uh 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 uh 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 uh uh visions of Africa that I've ever seen on film. | ||
| It's just incredible. | ||
| And Chris Pratt 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 uh he's just awesome. | ||
| He is so good. | ||
| And uh so he's kind of like the older guy kind of mentoring James Reese along, Chris Pratt, and uh and he's a guy's guy. | ||
| Like he uh I'll say his name, Arnold Vosslou. | ||
| And uh so he's the b the bad guy from Blood Diamond and uh the mummy, and uh just such an awesome guy. | ||
| And he's a guy, he's like one of us. | ||
| 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 he's not messing around. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So uh 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 in him than save the world. | ||
| Uh but they went along with it. | ||
| And uh and that's that's because they saw the numbers from the first from the first season. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And they'll never share those numbers with us, but uh 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 were very they they didn't want that to happen, and then we did it anyway, and they uh they ended up being on every billboard in LA for the opening month. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Uh all that they didn't want the uh the Secretary of Defense to die. | ||
| They didn't want so uh there was all sorts of things that uh that they they were very nervous about, but they ended up going with us, they ended up trusting us. | ||
| But now we didn't have to fight for it in the second season of Dark Wolf because we have that trust. | ||
| So that's that's pretty cool. | ||
| That is nice. | ||
| That's that's the beautiful thing about a successful series. | ||
| They leave you alone. | ||
| gives you more freedom. | ||
| Don't fuck it up. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, exactly. | ||
| Instead of like we gotta make it better because it's not a hit, it's don't fuck it up. | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| You had Taylor and Taylor was here. | ||
| So what a great guy. | ||
| Such a good dude. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| He's so cool. | ||
| So it's so different than like that character that he plays in American Prime Will is so scary. | ||
| So good. | ||
| So good, so realistic. | ||
| Like you really believe he's a fucking savage. | ||
| Like you really believe everything about it, the way he fucks people up, like what he even what he looks like. | ||
| Like he talked about how much weight he lost for that. | ||
| When he takes his clothes off and you see the scars all over his body, like, whoa. | ||
| Yeah, they went through it on that one. | ||
| And too, yeah. | ||
| Pete Berg was on, was on the biggest. | ||
| He's awesome. | ||
| It's like when you see that, you like you believe that guy. | ||
| I'm like, that guy looks like someone who would be living like that back then. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| And uh and he got beat up on that. | ||
| He went right from that into our show where he gets beat up again. | ||
| And uh we had to do this show, this thing in episode four where I have my cameo where I get stitched up the side and get uh killed. | ||
| I got part of it to be part of the stunt man killed again. | ||
| I got killed again. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I got I get killed in True Believer too, and it's a good one. | ||
| It's uh But are people gonna see that it's you this time? | ||
| You gotta give yourself a fake nose. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's the same. | |
| It's kind of like uh we're kind of making a little thing about the show, like I always die. | ||
| Stephen King does like I don't think he dies in him, though. | ||
| I think they just kind of do a He's been in a bunch of his movies. | ||
| He doesn't die in his movies, not who killed Kenny. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So this would be this would be a little different. | ||
| Our twist on it, or our take on it. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| Yeah, so that's fun to do that stuff. | ||
| But Taylor had to run through this uh cobblestone, these cobblestone streets through this tunnel, uh, and that's the one where I get stitched up and and fall over, so I get the little stuntman pay out of that. | ||
| That might uh quite a not quite a thousand dollars, I don't think, for take taking that big fall. | ||
| Bro, nobody works harder than stunt man. | ||
| Seriously, those guys and girls take a friggin' beating. | ||
| They take a fucking beating. | ||
| They really did horrible. | ||
| Episode five, maybe, maybe six. | ||
| There's a there's a um uh with uh uh uh this guy and the big big dude uh and uh and one of the girls in the show getting this this uh fight in this apartment. | ||
| I don't know if you saw that that episode, but the stunt person who got thrown into this refrigerator. | ||
| Oh my it was and there was like a tiny little pad in the refrigerator, and she just gets thrown into this thing. | ||
| And uh we try to keep every fights realistic, so we made a very uh 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 know, you don't want to have everything authentic and realistic and then have this choreographed uh fight sequence that everyone that looks visually stunning but is not really uh realistic for anybody who's ever been in a fight or watched UFC or anything like that. | ||
| Um so we so we wanted to make sure that these things are are are primal, visceral, and uh just physical and brutal. | ||
| And uh but it's a smaller girl against this huge guy, so we didn't want to have that like 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. | ||
| Uh so she shoots him like three times before the fight, as he's rushing in on her. | ||
| So okay, we're gonna we're gonna uh we're gonna even this out. | ||
| And still some people got upset about it online. | ||
| They're like, how could she uh you know, how did she, you know, uh 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 uh, 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. | ||
| God, especially stunt women. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| That's even harder. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, that was and it's hard to watch because you're talking to him 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. | ||
| Uh but it's good, it came out came out fantastic. | ||
| That's why guys like Tom Cruise are so nuts. | ||
| So he does his own stunts. | ||
| So crazy. | ||
| He's worth a billion dollars and he jumps off roofs. | ||
| He jumps from rooftop to rooftop and breaks his fucking ankle. | ||
| Did you ever see that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, Mission Pot. | |
| Sure. | ||
| Shatters his ankle and then keeps running. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Keeps running. | ||
| From falling out, I think. | ||
| See the ankle shatter. | ||
| You see the ankle, hit the side. | ||
| Yeah, and you can see him humble. | ||
| See it give in. | ||
| You see the ankle give in. | ||
| He'll go, that ankle's fucked. | ||
| And then he lands on it, and he just fucking hobbles off running. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And save the scene. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Actually, watched it on the plane back because there we did a uh uh my flight like last second, so I was in uh economy between two people, and so when I do that, I can't work. | ||
| And uh so on like a 10-hour flight, uh 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. | ||
| But then he's running again. | ||
| Yeah, you're like, what? | ||
| How did so yeah, that's amazing. | ||
| They probably just got a court his own shot, Tape it up, tape it up. | ||
| Dealt with the pain. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| I don't get it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's nuts. | ||
| He did he did that one thing where he he he uh lit a parachute on fire and then had a pull a second paraphrase. | ||
| In the last one. | ||
| And it turns out that they did that scene like four or five times. | ||
| Or the jumping off the cliff with the motorcycle. | ||
| That was a fucking all day they did that. | ||
| Maybe multiple days. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But that's incredible. | ||
| So insane. | ||
| What kind of insurance do they have on those movies? | ||
| I don't think uh I think he does it probably himself. | ||
| He probably insures it himself. | ||
| I don't think anybody would uh actually ensure that. | ||
| I might be wrong. | ||
| That's just a guess. | ||
| What a nut. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What if maybe Scientology works. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I mean, what a fucking nut. | ||
| No one's like that guy. | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, there's no one that is that successful that text that takes those kind of risks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And all the other actors say the same thing. | ||
| They're like, uh no, that's what the stunt people do. | ||
| He's one one of one. | ||
| You know, he gets in motorcycle races, like he's in he does those scenes. | ||
| He does car chase scenes. | ||
| It's pretty cool. | ||
| I mean, uh, it does add a level of authenticity, and you go to before that. | ||
| So you can see Tom Cruise doing his own stunts. | ||
| You know, fly a helicopter. | ||
| Yeah, fly the helicopter in that one, two, two, three of them ago. | ||
| But uh that was killer too. | ||
| Fucking crazy. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Jumping out with uh was it Henry Cavill and him jump out the back of the plane and fall out and they're uh but yeah, they he's jumping out of those planes and it's legitimate for him. | ||
| Yeah, it's fucking mine. | ||
| Separated his finger joints or something in this one. | ||
| Of course he did. | ||
| Oh man, it's fantastic. | ||
| Let's have a dude, do you know how hard it is to hang? | ||
| I just don't hang. | ||
| I do it every day. | ||
| I do a minute and thirty seconds every day. | ||
| I've decided to try this to see like what it does like for my back, like because it decompresses your back. | ||
| And I've heard that if you just do it every day, it's like a life changer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I'm like, okay. | ||
| So I'm like 10 days in now. | ||
| Ten days of every day, minute 30. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I hang. | ||
| At that minute and 20, I gotta check the phone. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| No, I was doing the same. | ||
| So after I was here last time, we took a picture together and I saw it, and I'm like, oh, oh my gosh, I look horrible. | ||
| I was so out of shape. | ||
| And uh, it wasn't the height of my out of shapeness, because we I think we did that in June. | ||
| By late August, or no, late July. | ||
| That was about six years of not doing anything. | ||
| We talked about saunas, you know, we talked about all that stuff. | ||
| Um and I'm like, I've got to do something. | ||
| Just writing. | ||
| So he's just been writing. | ||
| It's been so many projects, and I put myself at the bottom of my priority list uh and focus on family and writing and then the screenwriting and all the other projects that are out there, and it's it's 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 uh August 1st or something, I'm like, all right, I'm in. | ||
| And uh I started doing the hang, of course, and then have my outside workout area that's like um like Rocky Four style, and uh so it's right there in the mountains, and so I'm just starting I'm just all in getting after it. | ||
| I'm doing the sauna. | ||
| We rented a place in town that uh that had a had a sauna to get our kids closer to school for a year to see because we're kind of remote. | ||
| We're kind of up there and remote. | ||
| And uh 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 he's supposed to do. | ||
| Whatever I heard someone on this podcast tell me I was supposed to do 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 doing all of it. | ||
| And uh, I got in great it's probably one of the best shapes of my life. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| I was feeling so good. | ||
| I felt like I could just throw people through walls every time I'm feeling so great. | ||
| And uh, and but I was doing everything. | ||
| I was doing the sun, I was eating right, I was not eating the bread, so I did I did everything. | ||
| And then I got to January 1st, and I'm out there in the snow. | ||
| I dug a path out to my thing in the gym and I'm working out in my outside gym, doing the hangs, all that in the snow. | ||
| And then I was like, oh, I think I had a deadline December 1st a month ago for this book. | ||
| I'm like, I I gotta start writing, so I all stop, I'll stop, and I haven't done anything since. | ||
| It was only only writing, only screen writing, everything else. | ||
| I haven't find that balance. | ||
| I need to find that uh that balance. | ||
| I'm not quite there yet. | ||
| How many hours do you write a day? | ||
| Well, as I get closer to the as I pass these deadlines, I should say it becomes all consuming. | ||
| And it's uh especially for something like this when I'm in 1968. | ||
| I mean, I really felt like I had to transport myself back to that time to write this thing. | ||
| And uh so that was all as soon as I woke up, bam, I'm in, and it is all day long. | ||
| And uh until you go to sleep. | ||
| And uh until I go to sleep, until super late, and then I'm up because the kids still get up at the same time, and so I'm up, so I'm maybe an hour of sleep, two hours of sleep, whatever, and then I'm up out of a canon and it's going. | ||
| So it's not not healthy, not healthy. | ||
| So I'm gonna get on a better uh a better schedule here. | ||
| Our son's going to uh a boarding school now, our daughter's in college. | ||
| We have our middle child with severe special needs, so he's still at home with us, he'll be with us forever. | ||
| Um and he's a sweet, sweet little guy. | ||
| But uh but it that I think will give me a little more time to maybe find some balance with the health and the writing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I need to do that at some point. | ||
| But typically a lot of writers aren't very especially the older ones uh from back in the day, they're not uh not the healthiest of individuals. | ||
| The opposite. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, we've talked about it a bunch of times in this podcast, but my favorite Stephen King books were all when he was doing Coke. | ||
| He doesn't even remember writing a couple of them, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| If I was his friend, I'd get him do Coke in it. | ||
| I I tell my publisher that I'm like, I feel like I need to uh to to do some of that uh just to get this to get this done. | ||
| I need to take a turn here. | ||
| A lot of guys use Adderall. | ||
| A lot of writers use Adderall. | ||
| A lot of uh journalists use Adderall as well. | ||
| And I think also that makes them like a little more impulsive, their work gets a little aggressive. | ||
| Yeah, like you kind of see, especially journalists when they get real shitty, like oh, he's probably out at all. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| I think it contributes to the culture of journalism in the modern era, with this uh sort of like really shitty uh attack journalism that's become very prevalent. | ||
| I I don't think it's a small factor. | ||
| I think uh Adderall consumption has it plays a fa a factor in that. | ||
| It I'm sure it does. | ||
| I mean it changes something. | ||
| And social media, of course. | ||
| It changes something. | ||
| Yeah, social media. | ||
| Nicotine does it, nicotine is uh has been very helpful for authors. | ||
| Uh, nicotine's great. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Do you use cigars or do you do like pouches? | ||
| What do you think about it? | ||
| Don't do anything. | ||
| Don't do anything coffee. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Coffee and uh and coffee, water, red wine, whiskey. | ||
| Uh but not too much inspiration. | ||
| Yeah, but not too much, you know, just uh just uh little bit every now and again. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, nothing too crazy. | ||
| Just to say fuck it. | ||
| Yeah, just I feel like it's I should be doing something like that, but not uh not too much. | ||
| I mean, having my I built a library and one side of it was a bar, and I never got to touch anything because at book signings people bring me a lot of uh a lot of whiskey. | ||
| And uh so I I have it in my bags or I s mail it from the road or whatever, and uh so I have this whole wall of whiskey uh and other stuff too. | ||
| But I never get to partake in it because I'm always writing. | ||
| I'm always like I could pour something, but no, I gotta this is my time, it's quiet, I'm not being interrupted. | ||
| Go, go, go. | ||
| And it's just uh it's just all on. | ||
| So I haven't used any performance and half enhancing supplements. | ||
| I need to do some like alpha brain or something, probably. | ||
| That helps. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| Alpha brain's great. | ||
| There's uh alpha brain black label that's a new one that's a stronger version of Alpha Brain. | ||
| I think we have some. | ||
| I'll give you some when we leave. | ||
| We also have Alpha Brain Gummies. | ||
| Do we have any on the table? | ||
| No. | ||
| I probably should I I eat those things like candy. | ||
| But uh there's a bunch of really good neutropics that you should look into. | ||
| Another one is uh neurogum. | ||
| We have some of that stuff. | ||
| I like that because uh it's just it tastes good, it's gum, and it it gives you a little neutropic boost. | ||
| But I understand why authors do that. | ||
| Creatine is another great one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And creatine is really great for people with sleep deprivation. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I was using that too, so I did some supplements um when I started working out again. | ||
| I I stopped it when I stopped working out, but uh, I was doing the is it thro Thorne, is that the one that you see on the UFC now? | ||
| Sure, yeah. | ||
| So I was doing that. | ||
| Yeah, so I was using that their creatine and um some just uh just some vitamins. | ||
| You want like a lot though. | ||
| Like people are taking five grams a day. | ||
| You really want like 20 grams a day. | ||
| And uh particularly when people are dealing with sleep deprivation. | ||
| It also uh for some reason has like pretty great benefits uh m more so even for women uh and sleep deprivation. | ||
| There's been a bunch of different studies going, but it's in terms of cognitive performance after sleep deprivation and reaction time after sleep deprivation. | ||
| Both of those things fall off. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And there's a noticeable rise in improvement with creatine. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think I was taking it. | ||
| I was taking one scoop. | ||
| Whatever it says on the bottle. | ||
| Uh I'll turn the one scoop, whatever that's. | ||
| I probably bet it's five grams. | ||
| I do four of those scoops. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Well, when I get back after this and see myself in our photo today, I will uh uh get back to uh I'll use I'll use four scoops. | ||
| Well, it it'll definitely make your muscles a little stronger and larger, but the reason I'm doing it is not just for that, it's for the brain. | ||
| It's really good for the brain. | ||
| I was getting sleep during that time too, which is why I didn't have a book on time. | ||
| Uh one of the one of the reasons. | ||
| One, I was going back to 1968, took a lot ta longer than I thought for this research, and then two, I was getting in shape at the same time. | ||
| Were you listening to like 1968 music back then? | ||
|
unidentified
|
And like what did how are you doing? | |
| Put on uh Spotify. | ||
| Um so I was doing that. | ||
| I was watching the Vietnam documentaries, I was reading everything I could possibly find on Vietnam from the day. | ||
| Um these old Army Special Forces manuals that they had before the guys would go over there that talked about the Montyard tribes they were gonna be working with. | ||
| Uh for those that are watching or listening, it's like Apocalypse Now, like the Montyards like tribes and all that stuff. | ||
| So I was doing that. | ||
| Um and uh then I'll then I was reading the more modern stuff too. | ||
| I was reading things from the 70s, eighties. | ||
| I got um National Geographic magazines from the 60s. | ||
| Uh I think there's one from the late fifties even, so I was doing everything I possibly could to transport myself back. | ||
| Um listening to some history history podcasts about uh JFK, about uh uh 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. | ||
| Um 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 uh I was building on this foundation, rubber 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 uh then trying to jump back to 1968. | ||
| Instead, I just like transported myself back there for uh it felt like months at a time. | ||
| That's probably healthier anyway. | ||
| I think it's much healthier. | ||
| Much I think so. | ||
| I think it was uh a much healthier way to live in general. | ||
| So just live in the past, folks. | ||
| That's what I try to do. | ||
| Today's too fucking confusing. | ||
| It is just go live in the past. | ||
| I mean, I've I'd love to go back. | ||
| I I know I can't though, but uh but I still try to go back through my vehicles through movies, through things like that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Um I did I I tried to get two modern vehicles. | ||
| I had to turn them back in. | ||
| I know you were telling me you got a grenadier. | ||
| I did a grenadier, and yeah, and I was so excited to get it. | ||
| I think I was the first person in Utah to get one. | ||
| At least they told me I was anyway. | ||
| And I got this thing, I was so excited. | ||
| And this is not a hit on on Venos Grenadiers, this is a hit on me not being able to adapt to a uh to the to the current times. | ||
| It's a great vehicle. | ||
| I it was fast. | ||
| They let me borrow one for a few months. | ||
| Yeah, it's a gr if you're looking for an off-road vehicle that's like fully outfitted from the factory, you could do no better. | ||
| It was awesome. | ||
| I mean, it uh I did of course I put every possible thing you could put on there. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So I'm like, I don't have time. | ||
| I'm like, what put everything on that for me? | ||
| Just do the whole thing. | ||
| And so they did. | ||
| And uh it showed up. | ||
| I was so excited for it. | ||
| And then it started beeping at me, you know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
| And it was I'm like, ah, that's that's my complaint. | ||
| It beeps when you go one mile an hour, just a few miles an hour over the speed limit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Um, I don't like that. | ||
| I don't like where the speedometer is in the da it's in the screen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, too. | |
| So there's no dashboard in front of you, there's no like speedometer attack, it's not in front of you. | ||
| You just see numbers to the right. | ||
| So you have to look over to the right to see how fast you're going, which is why they justify the beep. | ||
| So it makes you look over to let you know, like, oh look, you're going see the beep. | ||
| Oh, let me look. | ||
| I don't want to look to the right at a screen ever if I don't have to. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I want to look at it only if I'm following directions, and that's it. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I want my fucking speedometer right in front of me. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It's fast though. | ||
| That you hammer that thing. | ||
| It was fast. | ||
| I mean, you have some faster cars than I do. | ||
| It's capable. | ||
| And it's really capable off-road. | ||
| Like if you drive that thing, and it's fucking built like a tank. | ||
| It is like a tank. | ||
| If you look at like an like the the idea was that they copied uh a Land Rover Defender, which they definitely did. | ||
| But if you look at a Land Rover Defender, shut the doors on those things. | ||
| They feel like shit. | ||
| It feels like it's made of a Pepsi can. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's their their aluminum fac there's those are like agriculture vehicles. | ||
| Those are not vehicles for like rugged travel. | ||
| That's a G Wagon. | ||
| A G-Wagon is like a that was designed for military applications. | ||
| It's a fucking stamp steel. | ||
| I don't know if it's stamp steel, but whatever. | ||
| There's steel heavy fucking doors. | ||
| When you shut those doors like and that's how the Graniteer is. | ||
| Grenadier's like heavy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like thick. | ||
| It's like a very durable vehicle. | ||
| I feel like a lot of Aussies love them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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 uh setting in the back where it's got all the electrical and everything. | ||
| So you could set up a stove, you can set up a little refrigerator back there. | ||
| It's all plugged in, ready to go. | ||
| I love I mean that I love all that stuff. | ||
| And it's uh it's like the what do they say? | ||
| It was like a Defender 110 and uh G-Wagon had a baby for the Grenadier. | ||
| I would say that's the thing. | ||
| That's gonna be just like the sides where you can put all the jerry cans and everything. | ||
| It's all set up to mount stuff on it. | ||
| I got it all set up, man. | ||
| I was so excited. | ||
| And then I called them and I was like, hey, can I get rid of this click? | ||
| And they said, yeah, and they walk me through the thing, and I whatever. | ||
| I this is why I don't want to have an iPad. | ||
| I I there's I just want a car. | ||
| I don't want to drive a computer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And uh so I'm in there, I turn it off, and uh I'm like, oh thank you so much. | ||
| I'm driving, I'm like, oh, it's not doing the clicking anymore. | ||
| I stop, I get out, I go in and do something, I get back in the car, immediately it's back on again. | ||
| Click, click, click, click, click, click, click. | ||
| I'm like, I'm like, we're getting rid of this. | ||
| I'm like, told my wife, I'm like, get let's get rid of this thing. | ||
| Well, it is awesome. | ||
| Old land cruiser guy. | ||
| The problem is those cars have a charm. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's a charm to those old land cruisers, especially the one that you have, the 60s series. | ||
| Like you drive one of those things, man. | ||
| It's like that feels like you're involved in every part of the driving. | ||
| It is. | ||
| You feel the steep. | ||
| My time machine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it's like I love it. | |
| And you have a V8 in it too. | ||
| Which is like so you got modern power, L S V eight. | ||
| Yep, LS3s in there, so that's nice. | ||
| But that's has thick doors too. | ||
| Much thicker than the 80s. | ||
| Yeah, and I do have much theater, but much thicker, but thicker. | ||
| I like the 80 series. | ||
| I have two eighty series now, both stock uh 96. | ||
| And I love those because they're just modern enough, but they're they need someone to do a little work on them. | ||
| They make some strange noises, but they they work. | ||
| But they uh my son like pick them up in school in it, and he's like, ah, dad. | ||
| Because they're still making this crazy it's it's almost like it's the it's going over the speed limit thing, but it's constant, so it's just performed. | ||
| Fucking hundreds of thousands of miles. | ||
| Yeah, these have over a hundred uh both of them, but uh so I love that and have a 78 FJ 40 that I love. | ||
| Um so that's pretty uh I love that one, and it's uh it's all completely restored, so it's all all original for the most part. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So it doesn't matter. | ||
| It's fun getting on the highway with that thing, isn't it? | ||
| Yeah, you go about 40 miles an hour tops. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Tops. | |
| I mean you're in that slow lane. | ||
| Yes, so slow. | ||
| It's so slow. | ||
| But it's cool for zipping around town. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| And then I just get an icon to make you one of those. | ||
| I know it's on the list. | ||
| It's on the last or crystal. | ||
| Because they they make them with the giant V8s in them. | ||
| Yeah, they do some serious work. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I'm thinking the land cruiser guy, and I tested out the United States didn't work out for me, but that's not to say that they won't work out for someone else. | ||
| They're awesome vehicles. | ||
| And if you're a modern type person, yeah, get one for sure. | ||
| Yeah, if you're into that style of like defender looking car, but you don't want all the bullshit that comes with only the defender. | ||
| Yeah, 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. | ||
| But yeah, there's a bunch of them now that do that. | ||
| The Grenadier is a great solution. | ||
| I think they're gonna come out with a new one that has uh uh a more horsepower and they're probably improve some things. | ||
| But I would like them just give me a fucking dashboard. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is that how so hard? | ||
| I mean, they're doing everything else old school. | ||
| You have all these buttons and everything, it's all fucking all old school looking like a jet fighter pilot. | ||
| Yeah, with all the locking differential in it. | ||
| Give me a fucking speedometer, just a regular speedometer and attack, put it right in front of me. | ||
| Thanks to you. | ||
| And also make the lights so that the the auxiliary lights will turn on when it's not in the off-road mode. | ||
| If I don't know if you tried that, but they're the auxiliary lights. | ||
| They uh except for the light bar on the top, but the other ones in the front, like you have to be in off-road mode for some legal reason. | ||
| So you have to, I mean, sure someone can bypass it somehow, but when I come up to our house, there's no there's no lights and it's a long drive up there into the mountains, and I just want to hit the switch and have just daylight in front of me. | ||
| And uh that was not possible with that. | ||
| I got my land cruiser set up where if I was in a dark field, you would think a UFO land. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nice. | |
| And yours is a hundred series, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is that that? | |
| No, I have an eighty. | ||
| Here's the eighty that's okay. | ||
| Yeah, Icon built me that one. | ||
| It was TLC at the time. | ||
| Um but they they put bars all around it. | ||
| I think sick bar and bars in the back. | ||
| So like you could park and like light up the perimeter. | ||
| That's what I want. | ||
| I want daylight. | ||
| It's awesome. | ||
| And then you put a tent on the roof and you're out there in nature. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I did drive an I drove a uh G-Wagon yesterday. | ||
| So we landed, went right to Staccato, and uh so they had a uh uh a portion of G-Wagon right there, and I was like, oh man, I was I'm I'm I think my wife's telling me I need to get something more modern that's gonna be reliable. | ||
| We're not gonna just break down all the time. | ||
| And uh and so I'm like, they said, we'll drive it, drive this thing. | ||
| And so I got in it. | ||
| It was like a 2016, so it was before some changes I guess were made. | ||
| And uh I think it was nice. | ||
| Yeah, so 2016 would have two live axles. | ||
| I think uh they got independent front suspension later. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that was like the 2022 or something like that. | ||
| They started doing that. | ||
| But I still can't do it. | ||
| It's too true LA, too Kardashian. | ||
| Yeah, it's very Kardashian. | ||
| But the reality of it is it's uh and it's a military vehicle. | ||
| The thing about G-Wagons though, is people do take them and then they build them out for off-road. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've seen it. | ||
| They don't do it with like the AMG turbo fucking thing. | ||
| But the regular one is a V8 anyway. | ||
| It's got plenty of power. | ||
| I like the old ones. | ||
| Yeah, but you can you can get one of those old ones, and people have done amazing builds where they put like large tires on them, they raise it up a little bit, and they put like strong steel bumpers and like rock sliders on the side, and you know, it's a beast of a truck. | ||
| I'll probably need something new at some point. | ||
| Something newer. | ||
| Yeah, because the platform is amazing. | ||
| I mean, the platform is really designed um for military application. | ||
| Yeah, the new the new Land Cruisers are not quite uh quite there. | ||
| Yeah, they like the old stuff, you know, like the newer ones. | ||
| Uh I mean they're they're probably great. | ||
| But the new new one is like really more modest. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, it is, yeah. | ||
| They dropped the price on them. | ||
| Yeah, it's not like what they were getting to, which is basically like trying to compete with Range Rover. | ||
| But they were also fucking themselves because they have Lexus. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And Lexus is like the best version of that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Those is it the 550 GX? | ||
| What's the new one that they have this kind of thing? | ||
| Well, did they have the smaller one, which is more like land cruiser size, like 80 series size, and they have the larger one. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I I had three of the larger ones. | ||
| This 570s, I had three of those. | ||
| Yeah, there's they never break. | ||
| They were like my favorite family car to drive around in. | ||
| It's awesome four-wheel drive. | ||
| They're great in snow and anything else. | ||
| And they fucking always work. | ||
| Always work. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Hard to beat that. | ||
| Toyota is so good. | ||
| I know. | ||
| They're so reliable. | ||
| I know. | ||
| The guys got over to Africa to start filming this thing in uh we got there in February or March. | ||
| Anyway, we went over there and uh 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 um uh the the advanced work for the different places we're gonna go shoot, and they're like, now we understand your obsession with the land cruiser. | ||
| Yeah, they're all driving land cruisers in Africa. | ||
| Oh yeah, once you get over to any rough place and you realize like, oh, you want a car that one hundred percent is gonna work for you. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| There's a reason why they became so popular. | ||
| It's not it's not a mystery. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Same thing. | ||
| It's like the say is that a Seiko? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| It's like they said that's the Toyota of watches. | ||
| That's the Willard. | ||
| That's the one that Captain Willard wore in apocalypse now. | ||
| Absolutely, which I think came. | ||
| I do too. | ||
| I have an original. | ||
| I have one 1971, I think it is. | ||
| 70 or 71. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, I collected all the uh the SOG Seiko's because this is Mac V songs so I collected all those. | ||
| I think there's four of them that uh that they've uh they've seen pictures of Mac V saw guys wearing going into Laos, Cambodia, North Vietnam, which is what the book is uh 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 uh Rolex, like I'm gonna do it. | ||
| So I got that thing, the submariner. | ||
| So I cr surrounded myself with things that are like totems from the book. | ||
| So this is what uh Tom Reese and I had a a cool way that he wins this. | ||
| How'd you get it at 68? | ||
| Where'd you find that? | ||
| Uh a buddy of mine who's a Rolex dealer out in uh in PA found it for me. | ||
| Oh wow, that's fucking cool. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So I like the I like the older stuff now. | ||
| I'm finding it crazy. | ||
| It looks exactly the same. | ||
| Yeah, pretty much. | ||
| I mean, there's little the uh the crystals different and stuff like that, but the uh the alum's different, that sort of thing. | ||
| Uh a utility watch. | ||
| It used to be that used to be a tool watch, which is crazy because you think of them today as being luxury. | ||
| Yeah, but the reason why they were built so well was just for you to use them diving. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| And also you wear 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 just 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 MacVie sogs and this one from 1968. | ||
| Um it's uh it it it tells you put a little more thought into this sort of thing than like just what's an expensive watch or something. | ||
| Right, something along those lines. | ||
| But yeah, uh but I yeah, I mean this it tells a story. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty dope. | ||
| And uh it's pretty thin too. | ||
| Yeah, it's a little thinner than I than I thought when it came though in the band's a little different, it kind of makes some noise there, but I I love this. | ||
| And so it's these and the tutors that guys were wearing back in Vietnam, the SEALs in particular. | ||
| The tutor submariner. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So I got one of those recently. | ||
| I've been wanting to get one for years because when I got to the SEAL teams, they were this is a rumor, so I never saw it with my own eyes. | ||
| But uh so it's secondhand information, is that they're in supply, they were destroying the tutors with hammers. | ||
| And I can't then because now we're getting issued Seiko's, and so they'd issued these to the guys that actually they jumped in to get the Apollo uh spacecraft. | ||
| Uh seals jumped in after those things, UDT seals, uh, to get those guys out of the water. | ||
| And uh and uh these people in supply, I think in the the 90s were destroying the tutors for some reason, probably because they were told to, uh so guys wouldn't get them and sell them or something like that. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But uh but I did I track one down recently through the through uh watches of espionage and uh he found me a new tutor and then or uh an old tutor, but I got that, and then we did a little documentary with some old guys from uh the 70s from in the 60s that were SEALs in Vietnam and they were pulled out of Vietnam, they were in Vietnam one day, and then the next day they were off the in the Pacific on an aircraft carrier waiting to recover the uh the Apollo astronauts. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Yeah, pretty cool. | ||
| We did a documentary on it for for Tudor. | ||
| And uh it was it was pretty cool to talk to those guys. | ||
| I mean, just amazing. | ||
| Because now they're kill they were taking lives in Vietnam, and then they're supposed to they're now they're just throwing into this this on these helicopters to jump into the ocean to save lives. | ||
| It's kind of a cool juxtaposition. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| It is interesting that their their equipment became luxury. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Weird. | ||
| Well, you can go back. | ||
| I love these old ads, Rolex ads from it must be the sixties, I think they're sixties, seventies, eighties. | ||
| I mean, there's some from the early eighties where they have a guy like with a rhino, and it's like the editor of Guns and Ammo magazine with his dead rhino, where's 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 all that's but uh but they had but that was like in the early 80s, that's what they were they were still marketing towards that. | ||
| So yeah, really still rugged. | ||
| Well, think about didn't James Bond always have if you were looking for Lost Empires here tomorrow, you'd wear a Rolex. | ||
| There's one. | ||
| There's one crazy. | ||
| But you gotta find the one with the rhino. | ||
| Well, there's there's the one at the will to be fucking dependable. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Frederick Forsyth, the author actually had one. | ||
| They used to do they used to do uh had a relationship with him in the 70s and 80s, and they're like, here's Frederick Forsyth who wrote Day of the Jackal, wearing his jackal coat uh in front of this Jaguar. | ||
| And uh it's just you never see that today. | ||
| Yeah, but there it is, yeah. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| If taming oil well fires were your job, you'd wear a Rolex. | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Let's see if we can find the uh find the hunting one. | ||
| Maybe Rolex hunting or something. | ||
| Um but they're just look at that racing here. | ||
| Like it's for anybody that's doing anything difficult. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's kind of crazy. | ||
| And now it's now it's tennis and it's golf. | ||
| That's well now it's just like you know, looking fancy in a restaurant or whatever you're doing. | ||
| Yeah, we go, there's Connery right there, the Thunderbolt action. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| Love it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fleming had one. | ||
| They he doesn't say which specific model it is in the books. | ||
| Um of course Omega sponsored the the the movie starting with Bronson, I think. | ||
| But uh, but the in the books it's a Rolex. | ||
| He doesn't say what specific model, but he wore it, I think with Fleming Warren Explorer, I think. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| It's uh oh, there you go. | ||
| Have you hunted big game over the world? | ||
| Kate Buffalo. | ||
| There's Kate Buffalo, right? | ||
| Pretty cool. | ||
| Weird. | ||
| Yeah, they don't do that today. | ||
| 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? | ||
| And when did it become like a fetish? | ||
| Must be the eighties. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Must be the eighties, I would guess. | ||
| I mean, I think it's always been a thing because you can go back and find like amazing uh Paddock Phillips and stuff like that and go back and find the Omegas, the old Rolexes, and it's a thing. | ||
| So uh it's kind of nuts. | ||
| Yeah, now it's gotten a little crazy, which why I like the vintage stuff because it puts a little more just like the cars, just like it's my time machine. | ||
| Now when people have like those Richard Millet watches, and you hear they're a half million dollars like more. | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why are you buying that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like what's going on here that I'm missing. | ||
| That's an amazing story. | ||
| Like I think I it's not like that has a huge history to it. | ||
| It's fairly recent for those watches. | ||
| Do you know what the rumor is? | ||
| The rumor is that one of the first watches that he was supposed to sell was supposed to be fifteen thousand dollars, but someone put an extra zero on it. | ||
| No way. | ||
| Really? | ||
| This is what someone told me. | ||
| Hey, let's go with that. | ||
| It might not be true. | ||
| But then it's and then people bought it, it's like, hey, hey, hey. | ||
| Let's try 300. | ||
| Sometimes that's how it works. | ||
| I mean, people love the watches. | ||
| It's a beautiful if you're into that style of watch. | ||
| I like simple. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what I like. | ||
| This is why I like the Seiko. | ||
| Nobody gives a shit about it. | ||
| It's not impressing anybody. | ||
| Well, it just if you know. | ||
| If you know. | ||
| But it's like it's a really well-made watch. | ||
| It'll never fuck up. | ||
| It's got I think it's got a fifty-two-hour time reserve. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, no, I love that stuff. | ||
| We've very intentional with all all the gear and the TV shows. | ||
| I know you are, yeah. | ||
| It's uh and your books as well. | ||
| Yeah, in the books as well. | ||
| So it tells a story. | ||
| You know, you see somebody with that that tells something that tells me something about you. | ||
| Uh you see something with uh the Richard Mill, or whatever you say. | ||
| We're sharding. | ||
| I think it is. | ||
| It probably is Richard Mill, but it's like, dang it. | ||
| When you add another zero, then it goes to like Joe Durte, you know. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So it's uh it changes things a little bit. | ||
| So uh but that's but it tells me a story, just like uh like the characters in the books, but the watches in particular are important. | ||
| Um one because it's important to to me as a watch guy my whole life. | ||
| For some reason, I just had this connection with with time and the value of time, and so I've always been a watch guy my whole my whole life. | ||
| And uh so putting these watches on characters that tell you something about that character, uh like in Dark Wolf, they have to get rid of their G Shocks and go get something more that would make look a little more European and uh for when they transition over from being these SEAL guys to being these CIA operatives and uh drop get rid of the gators, but we say, 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 uh picked a tutor for uh for Taylor Kitch's character, and uh I got that one. | ||
| I got to keep that one, so that was that was pretty cool. | ||
| Um and then put a panor eye on um on Rafe Hastings, Tom Hopper's character, uh, to differentiate him a bit from uh from um Ben Edwards, the Taylor Kitch character, but and also Tom's a big dude, so you need a big watch on that guy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He's huge. | ||
| He is huge. | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| I think all the all the Like my wife and her friends were so excited about Taylor being in the show because the Texas Forever, you know, and they were all coming up during that time frame where he's on Friday Night Lights and all that stuff. | ||
| And then uh then Tom Hopper gets out of the pool without a shirt on, and they're like, Oh, Tom Hopper. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| It is. | ||
| And so I told Tom that probably if we do Savage Sun as a uh as a movie, he's probably not gonna have his shirt on much in there. | ||
| So gotta expand the audience. | ||
| We gotta sell streamers. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
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Exactly. | |
| But he's such a good dude. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| Yeah, all those guys are great. | ||
| It's also what is it like having this thing that you sat down by yourself, this world that you created, and now you're you're not just selling books, but you're filming the visual representation of your work. | ||
| It's gotta be kind of surreal. | ||
| It is surreal. | ||
| Every time I walk on the set, I feel that way. | ||
| I feel as grateful for the most part. | ||
| I just feel so much gratitude towards everyone involved. | ||
| And uh, 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. | ||
| Um wouldn't have happened, and we wouldn't be on this journey together, and he's so invested in it. | ||
| Um you mentioned some other shows earlier, and there's just 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. | ||
| Uh like American Primeval, any role Taylor takes on, he is uh just so invested in it. | ||
| It's not just a paycheck, like it is it's gonna now become part of his experience. | ||
| Yeah, and uh and he really looks at it through uh 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 writ large, um, it means something to them. | ||
| And so they put so much into it. | ||
| So when I walk on set, uh 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. | ||
| Um, but not just that they can be there working on a set, it's that we have created mostly through Chris, Antoine Fukua, David A Gilio, all these guys at the top, David DiGulio's the showrunner, and to have 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 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 gonna uh get married, get divorced, uh lose loved ones. | ||
| Um life is gonna happen. | ||
| And David DiGilio in particular is the showrunner, and he makes sure that everyone is taken care of. | ||
| And uh, we're also bringing people along with us. | ||
| So if they're in a department uh this this season, they're gonna move their way up in that department next season. | ||
| So it's uh they really feel taken care of, and it's all genuine. | ||
| And I think that helps bring their 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. | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| Yeah, that's gotta feel great. | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| I it is and uh I mean it trickles down from the top, yeah, you know, comes out comes down from the top for sure. | ||
| Um and even at the rap party, uh people these guys hang out after, like all the actors hang out afterward. | ||
| The cast, the crew, everybody's hanging out after hours. | ||
| They're not just turning into ghosts, they're hanging out, having a great time. | ||
| Uh rap party, like uh I've heard that a lot of the the like number one on the call sheets, maybe they'll make a quick appearance and leave or something like that. | ||
| I mean, Chris is there, he's in it, having a great time. | ||
| Uh everyone thanking everybody, and such a such a great guy. | ||
| Uh he's a very normal guy for a movie star, he's oddly normal. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, he's a normal guy that's like I mean, just like us. | ||
| We spent time with him, you know, outside of anything. | ||
| Well, I hung out with him in hunting camp. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You know, we okay together. | ||
| So it was like he just hangs out with everybody. | ||
| He was like so cool, yeah, so normal. | ||
| Yeah, you know, for a movie star, yeah. | ||
| Just be chilling. | ||
| Such a great guy. | ||
| We uh we we've like speaking of Tom Cruise and all the stunts. | ||
| So the last thing that we filmed in Morocco was underwater sequences, so it was was not filmed linear in a linear style. | ||
| So from so it's from the first episode. | ||
| So it's Chris falling off the boat and being underwater. | ||
| And he's in this pool underwater, not a stunt double. | ||
| We had some stunt double do some falls and stuff like that. | ||
| Uh Chris Romro, who's awesome, looks like Chris, takes some crazy beatings. | ||
| He's amazing. | ||
| Um, and he's a huge dude. | ||
| He can just stand right here and do a backflip. | ||
| Like it's it's insane. | ||
| It's it's awesome. | ||
| Uh, and such a nice guy, too. | ||
| But uh Chris underwater, like, and you can have this underwater like uh communication system. | ||
| And they're like, all right, ready, three, two, one, action. | ||
| And he takes a thing from a regulator, and then it goes away, and then we're filming. | ||
| And he was under there for like three plus minutes holding his breath, doing this stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And for anyone who's tried to hold their breath for three minutes, that's holding a breast for three minutes just sitting still is hard. | ||
| But underwater. | ||
| And we're like nuts. | ||
| And we'll be watching this thing, we're like, Uh is he okay? | ||
| Uh and now he's just showing off at certain point we're like, cut, and he stays down there like, what? | ||
| Like he's just now he's just showing off at this point. | ||
| Did he play that? | ||
| I think he's just a bit from wrestling and from all this other stuff, breath control stuff. | ||
| He's such an athlete uh that I think it was just kind of natural. | ||
| I don't think he was prepping for it. | ||
| I think he just did it. | ||
| And uh 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 is 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, and we went right to the party from there. | ||
| So that's awesome. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Then we have to talk about the future of the show. | ||
| We stayed up pretty late. | ||
| Um, and uh and me and Chris and the showrunner and Jared Shaw, who you you met when we were hunting that time, who gave Chris the book, former CEO buddy of mine, and uh and so we all had to talk about the future of the show. | ||
| So hopefully it's uh Savage Sun next. | ||
| And that's people's favorite, I think, of the books. | ||
| That and Red Sky Morning, the last one, and and mine is this one. | ||
| Everyone has been my favorite thus far. | ||
|
unidentified
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But uh uh This Vietnam book's your favorite book you've written. | |
| Yep, hands down. | ||
| Uh one because how much I put into it, and one, I want to get better with everything that I every book I think has gotten better as I go along. | ||
| And if I can say that truthfully to myself, then I feel like I'm doing doing my job and doing my service to the story, which in turn serves the reader, people who are trusting me with his time that they're never gonna get back. | ||
| Well, it's like every other skill, right? | ||
| The more time you invest in it, and the more you hone it, and the more attention. | ||
| Yeah, it has to. | ||
| It should be getting better. | ||
|
unidentified
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It has to. | |
| You have to get better. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because you can tell when people start phoning it in. | ||
| You can tell. | ||
| You know, they're not enthusiastic anymore. | ||
| 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 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 their numbers. | ||
| And so, as a creative person, they are putting a lot of pressure to get it done. | ||
| Just get it done. | ||
| And uh and I have to fend that off. | ||
| I have to like the hey, whatever pressure is put on me from the outside, I've got to focus on this story, and it's gonna be done when it's done, because it has to be the best that it can possibly be. | ||
| And uh, but 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 a hundred thousand words, I gotta wrap this thing up. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I'll never I'll never do that. | ||
| My readers mean too much to me. | ||
| The story means too much to me. | ||
| This profession means too much for me to ever do something like that. | ||
| How many what is the percentage of audio books versus hard copy? | ||
| A lot more audio. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| A lot more. | ||
| Like how much more? | ||
| I don't know, because I don't look at the numbers. | ||
| I'm not a business guy, I'm more of an entrepreneurial type of mind. | ||
| Um so just knowing that Simon and Schuster is incredibly happy across the board. | ||
| So these the hardbacks. | ||
| They they do have numbers, yeah, and they share them, and I just see numbers, and but I couldn't tell you exactly what it's like. | ||
| But it's a lot more. | ||
| Yeah, it's a lot more interesting. | ||
| And I think that's Ray Porter. | ||
| I mean, incredible. | ||
| He's really good. | ||
| Fantastic, such a good human being, too. | ||
| He we use his voice in uh in Dark World for those those listening. | ||
| They'll uh they'll be able to recognize it. | ||
| But that's awesome skill to be able to do all those different voices and accents and then not have it jarring that a man is playing a woman. | ||
| Yeah, you know, which is weird because he plays he's gotta play a woman's voice. | ||
| That's a tough one for any guy. | ||
| Fucking weird. | ||
| You know, it's weird because you have to kind of like there's a suspension of disbelief. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You know, in the in the real world. | ||
| You're like, hey, fuck off. | ||
| That's not a chick. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, if you get a phone call from a lady, so where are we gonna meet? | ||
| Yeah, it's at the barber shop. | ||
| Like, what they call that a clue. | ||
| What the fuck is going on? | ||
| Yeah, call that a clue. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| You probably listen to it. | ||
| Unless you're looking for it, I guess. | ||
| His girl voice is oddly believable. | ||
| Yeah, I mean I can own anybody else who can do it, do it better. | ||
| That's uh that's a tough one. | ||
| That's a tough position to put a person in. | ||
| Like they do this. | ||
| Like Rafa. | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| I gave him a tough one in this one too. | ||
| 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 uh a Finnish officer who uh got the uh whatever the Finnish uh cross is, it's in the book. | ||
| I forget exactly what it is, but then fought for the Germans and got like the German Manheim Cross or something, and then after World War II, they tried to grab a bunch of people who had uh 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 fictionalized 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 uh and come up with something like that, and he he pulls it off. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| I was just texting up him before I came in here, actually, and he's uh filming a play up in in Oregon waiting for Godot I think right now. | ||
| So I'd love to see him on stage and see uh just see him not just doing the voice but acting. | ||
| Yeah I don't I've never seen him in anything I don't think he's dark side he's dark side in that uh Justice League. | ||
|
unidentified
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So but that's a bunch of you can't really you know seen that. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So he's in he's in that. | ||
| So he's in uh Almost Famous uh a bunch of sitcoms in the 90s and uh just but just an awesome dude but 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 audio book. | ||
| It's just a very natural transition to listen to the audio book. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So a lot of people are doing both. | ||
| Well you know Audible the way it works with Tinder Tinder Kindle rather there's uh there's an app where it'll pick up where you are what is it exactly what is it? | ||
| Whisper? | ||
| Whisper sync I believe Whisper sync something like that. | ||
| So it picks up exactly where you left off reading and it'll pick up with the audio on a Kindle though. | ||
| And then the audio book will know that you uh you're you're reading at night. | ||
| Interesting and so pick up where you left off the next day. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| But that's not beyond a Kindle. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| I can't do the Kindle I feel that I do so much work on a screen that I don't want to have something I read for enjoyment to be the same thing. | ||
| So I want it to be I'm in a physical book to go through I just I'm just that kind of guy. | ||
| The dope thing about a Kindle though is you can get 80 books on it or probably 8000 instead of my luggage I don't even know how many you can get on him honestly but and then though also the white paper screen where it really does look like paper. | ||
| Pretty fucking incredible. | ||
| Yeah still for me once again like the watches like the cars I have a thing it's a theme. | ||
| Oh listen my wife's the same way she won't she only reads book books to feel the books. | ||
| I love that a lot of people are like it's like there's a it's a thing that you have in your hands and you're turning the pages is like the tactile feeling and you gotta have that when you're halfway into the book like oh my God things are getting crazy I'm halfway in here. | ||
| This is how's he gonna wrap this up you can't see it rather than I'm at 37%. | ||
| Exactly I mean anything just a different type of uh type of a deal but I picked up uh Charlie Sheen's book in the airport on the way here oh did you and uh so I'm reading that about halfway through because he's coming on my on the podcast and I want to talk to him and ask him about you know apocalypse I'm gonna keep it to apocalypse now platoon navy seals kind of like keep it in in that kind of thing but reading that book oh my gosh it's it's amazing but I had to buy it I couldn't just get it on the P I already had the PDF they sent it to me but I wanted to buy the book. | ||
| I wanted to physically have it and make my notes in there and all that so um so I'm so I'm doing that but listening to him on this on your podcast was uh it was so interesting. | ||
| Oh you should yeah 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. | ||
| Yeah you're the lead yeah in platoon ten years later like how is yeah how do you expect that guy to be normal yeah no one can handle that it's not handleable. | ||
| Yeah that level of stardom is uh especially in the eighties before phones and everything else when they got after it and the drugs yeah I mean he was involved in so much drugs from early on. | ||
| Yeah and back then you could do drugs you didn't die. | ||
| He didn't die was in all fentanyl actually one of the ladies he talked about in the documentary that gave him a blowjob while he was smoking crack for the first time. | ||
| I saw that she died of an overdose but you gotta try hard it's not like today you gotta accidentally do a snort of Coke and then it's fentanyl as and you're dead. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And that's a hundred thousand people in America every year. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But what he was doing was just going hog wild. | ||
| That he's alive. | ||
| And he's alive. | ||
| Yeah and he looks good. | ||
| He looks yeah he looks great dude he looks a lot better than he's looked in p in the past. | ||
| Like when he came in here I'm like dude you look healthy. | ||
| I think he said he'd almost been sober for eight years been sober for seven plus years. | ||
| It's coming on eight years. | ||
| I think he said December I forget. | ||
| But it was very impressive. | ||
| And he's like really nice guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know it seems like it he uh he he he likes a fan of the books beforehand so he likes all this stuff likes Dark Wolf likes Terminal List all that stuff. | ||
| So yeah so that'll be fun to fun to talk to him and also I went to see Navy SEALs the 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 uh in high school and I knew I was going to be a SEO 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 uh and so I went and saw it then so it'll be fun to talk to him about that stuff. | ||
| And I do remember we I did meet him at a is it 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 the owners boxes, and uh and Charlie Sheen was next to us with his dad. | ||
| And uh 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 uh said hi, and he was 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 I 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 the I'll tell him this when I see if he remembers you might not remember. | ||
| But it probably happened almost every day for him. | ||
| Just a line of girls down the hallway outside of the owner's box. | ||
| Trying to meet him. | ||
| Yeah, they weren't there for me. | ||
| Well, what are you gonna do? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But they were there for Charlie. | ||
| And uh that was pretty cool. | ||
| Must be rough. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And then you guys came back in and had to deal with the the Charlie Kirk assassination, and I thought you guys handled that in such a such a thoughtful way, real time. | ||
| Uh that's a tough position for both you guys to be in. | ||
| I hadn't seen it yet, you know. | ||
| I just heard, and then I really didn't want to see it. | ||
| I said I wasn't gonna see it, but then someone someone texted it to me, and I just couldn't help myself. | ||
|
unidentified
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I clicked on like, oh wanted to watch that. | |
| I know. | ||
| So sad. | ||
| I was signing the those books. | ||
| I was signing the the books right there that day with my chief of staff, and and uh she was passing me the books and I'm signing them. | ||
| We're checking off the the names for these pub boxes, and uh all of a sudden her phone goes off and I hear she screams and uh it's like whoa, what happened? | ||
| And her husband is uh in the security field. | ||
| Um, and uh she said Charlie Kirk's been shot in Utah. | ||
| I'm like so I of course go to X and then see it. | ||
| And I think I didn't get to my kids in time because uh my daughter and our youngest son are both uh follow him, think feel like they know him essentially, and I didn't get to them in time before they they saw it. | ||
| So our youngest I was most concerned about uh seeing that, being away from home at boarding school, and uh anyway, called the school, one of the guys uh there's like a trusted agent, he's like a guy's guy like us, and went over and tracked him down and he was doing fine. | ||
| But it's uh it's different than seeing in the paper or on having Walter Cronkite report that JFK was killed. | ||
| That's that's different, I think. | ||
| Uh challenger for us in school when you're growing up, like we saw it explode, but you're not seeing the people, you're not seeing it as viscerally it from all these different angles from cell phones immediately, so graphic. | ||
| Uh just so heartbreaking, so so heartbreaking. | ||
| Um but you guys, I mean you guys were had to do it like real time, and uh you guys were very thoughtful about how you don't know. | ||
| It was weird. | ||
| It it always feels surreal when someone dies, but when someone gets assassinated like that, and then there was the weirdness of the reactions of people that that was the most disturbing aspect of it where I was like, what is what have we done? | ||
| I know 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're you are celebrating because you didn't like his ideas. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like that is so crazy that we've gone that far. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you feel you could feel the the evil, and as much as I tried not to look at all these reactions, it's just being fed to me because of the 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 uh 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. | ||
| I've never felt like that before. | ||
| I've I mean very few times I should say. | ||
| I think a lot of it is very performative, and I think a lot of people are doing it for clicks and likes, and they think that there's a lot of like-minded people that feel the way they feel, and then there was a a wave of people that were like excited about losing someone who was a right-wing influencer. | ||
| They were happy about it. | ||
| It was real weird. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And continues to really kind of fuck with my head because I didn't think that that would be the case. | ||
| I had hoped it would be very few people. | ||
| I I'd I'd hoped, but it wasn't. | ||
| It was a lot. | ||
| It was a lot in real life, too. | ||
| It wasn't just social media. | ||
| You know, I have I've had multiple friends that encountered people celebrating in real life. | ||
| One of my friends w was at a cafe writing, and this lady came in and she was on a Zoom call, and uh she it was right after the assassination, and she gets in the Zoom call and she's like, Well, I don't know about you guys, but I am having a great day now. | ||
| And they were like, This is a great day. | ||
| I'm having a great day too. | ||
| I'm having a great day. | ||
| The events of the day have made me very happy. | ||
| And they were laughing and smiling and like clapping about publicly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like in in a cafe. | ||
| It was a very obvious what they were talking about. | ||
| Like, that's so gross. | ||
| Uh and feel comfortable enough to do that. | ||
| Right, that that's acceptable. | ||
| You're you're you want that attached to you for the rest of your life, and you don't take one second to say, uh, 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, uh 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 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 like in Bagram early on in the war in Afghanistan. | ||
| I remember the uh I forget for I don't know if it was a really a black site prison, but it was like a nasty prison. | ||
| Like had this smell and you could feel like this like kind of this overriding sense of I don't know, yeah, despair, but also like this little little bit of uh 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 uh and you kind of feel a little and 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, uh they could pull in girls off the street and that sort of thing, and you just feel dirty or you feel evil. | ||
| I mean you sense it in some of those places, but uh 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 when I were in Paris, like I said, right before I came out here. | ||
| Uh 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 it's uh which is still going on now, I think. | ||
| But we were in this uh we wanted to go to one dinner where we could see some people, kind of do some people watching, and I could uh store some of it away for books and that's what I'm always collecting. | ||
| Always collecting. | ||
| And so we went to the one at the place that uh Kardashians again where they stay called like COTIS or co- Anyway, went into this hotel that's that's uh 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. | ||
| Um and so you're getting kind of taking some notes on that, and uh 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 we 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 side of them and they just were looking at him like this and just it it was so odd, but you felt this sense of evil, and I hate I I don't really like using that word too much, but you felt something odd so much so that uh we paid the bill and left. | ||
| It was odd. | ||
| It was so odd. | ||
| And uh similar thing that I felt coming across the phone with those people celebrating. | ||
| Who was like I don't know, we were gonna go back to our hotel and look up, like try to see like who's at Fashion Week, who dresses this way, because it was very strange. | ||
| It was like these black robes, and it was just the weirdest thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So odd. | |
| Yeah, but attached through the through the like like your hoodies on and kind of like clipped to the outside or something and coming down like from the outside of like this thin hoodie, it was very bizarre. | ||
| Very bizarre. | ||
| But you felt like that person was evil. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've never I mean, very rarely do you feel do I feel that anyway. | ||
| You know, it's very strange feeling. | ||
| But I've learned to listen to my to those feelings. | ||
| Listen to the gut, listen to the sixth sense that's kept us alive as a species for so long. | ||
| If you went to Davos when they have like those W World Economic Forum conferences, I'd bet you'd smell brimstone. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I bet you would be a good idea. | ||
| I'd be looking for it, though. | ||
| That's different. | ||
| You know, that might be different if you're actually looking for it. | ||
| It's kind of a difference. | ||
| I can go. | ||
| But I bet like whenever you can get a bunch of billionaires together that are trying to decide the fate of the world, I bet you feel evil. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I'm I'm gonna have to go to one of those at some point. | ||
| I did I did uh I did go to Bohemian Grove, I don't think you're supposed to talk about it, but it's uh I didn't feel that there. | ||
| Like it was more like guys getting away for the weekend to drink. | ||
| I've heard a lot of people say that about Bohemian Grove recently. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And and and I know people that have gone, like that have been invited. | ||
| Kid Rock told me he went. | ||
| A couple other guys told me they went, they're like, I want to see what the fuck it is. | ||
| And so they went. | ||
| I'm like, but did you ever watch the Alex Jones video? | ||
| Like when Alex Jones and John Ronson snuck in that's back when Alex Jones and John Ronson were united. | ||
| Who is John Ronson? | ||
| John Ronson is the British journalist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Uh he's the guy who wrote So You've Been Publicly Shamed. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'll have to look that up. | ||
| It's uh about like one of the it's it's about like the first m mass cancellations through social media. | ||
| Oh, and like this new public shaming thing that happens. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Uh Very interesting guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But there it is. | ||
| There's Ronson. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And so he snuck in with Alex Jones. | ||
| Yeah, I saw someone. | ||
| So I didn't see anything weird like that. | ||
| And uh but I know what you're talking about. | ||
| When I think about it, because I didn't see any of that stuff. | ||
| But uh I think it may be a good thing. | ||
| You probably don't do that anymore. | ||
| Maybe not. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But I but's probably ruined the party. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| But I th when I'm thinking about it, if I think about it logically, you know when you like throw something into a fire, like at uh at Buds, guys would burn their dungarees and dungarees are uh 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 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 will you hold it out flat. | ||
| It's the it's awful. | ||
| Um 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 about that. | ||
| Uh 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 the uh their uniform. | ||
| So I could think it may be something like that. | ||
| You know, you want to burn something, like I that's that's what I think it might be, but I don't know. | ||
| 80% will quit before they get through buds. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Along the way. | ||
| Most in Hell Week, but uh but at some point along the way, typically 80% give or take, you know, won't make it. | ||
| But uh but burning that thing is kind of like burning the boats, which is not a real Hell Week, and then they still quit. | ||
| Some. | ||
| Some, not many, not many. | ||
| Most people will be performance dropped after that for uh not being comfortable in the water for pool comp when you're getting pounded off the the bottom of the pool by uh uh by instructors and then you're having to go through the right procedures to get your air turned back on and continue to 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, tire 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 gonna go through the right procedures to get everything working again and continue on. | ||
| So that's about 15 minutes of doing that. | ||
| Uh and some people just aren't comfortable in the water. | ||
| And so they'll just a panic thing? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean your air's cut off, uh, and it's easy to get more air. | ||
| I mean, you're only 10 feet or 15 feet, whatever it is, uh back to air. | ||
| So it's very easy to get that air. | ||
| But you have to go through the right procedures and just like you've been taught and be very comfortable. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And yeah, that's that's what the test is all about. | |
| Yeah, so you're you lose some air. | ||
| So it's just it just makes you even more uncomfortable. | ||
| But that makes a big difference. | ||
| Like who's punching you? | ||
| Yeah, instructor, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and where they're hitting you. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| That it's a yeah, and they pounce you off the bottom. | ||
| You kind of just go limp. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Just relax, just like in Jiu-Jitsu or something like that. | ||
| Like, okay, relax, and then okay, now I'm gonna get into this. | ||
| So uh I love I love that sort of thing, because that was the only time in Buds where it was like mono imano against the instructor. | ||
| The rest of the time she's getting yelled at, being told you're worthless, push-ups, sit-ups, run, swim. | ||
| But now it's like, okay, you and me. | ||
| I I love that. | ||
| Same thing, like it's called uh life saving. | ||
| So that's the other time you get to put your hands on the instructors is you have to go out and they'll act like a different type of person drowning, so they'll fight you or they're just dead weights or something like that, and they're different body types. | ||
| And so you get to go, you swim out towards them, and then you have to get them back, and they'll take you down to the bottom, hit you off the bottom, and so they're doing the work in that in that that situation. | ||
| And you just relax, hold on, just like you've got someone in like a rear naked choke type thing. | ||
| And uh and then they have to go up, they're expending their energy keeping you down there. | ||
| They're gonna have to go up and get the air. | ||
| So just wait, up to the top, grab a little bit of air, get closer to the side of the pool, then they take you down again, type of a thing. | ||
| And I love that because that's the only time you can put your hands on an instructor. | ||
| Uh I thought that was that was good. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| So but you have to put your hands on them like you're rescuing them. | ||
| Yeah, you can't just choke them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I'm gonna put him to sleep. | ||
| Yeah, no, but there's some similarities there, just some similarities with body positions and and all that sort of thing, just being comfortable uh with uh with how to do it. | ||
| But there's limitations on how you grab them. | ||
| Yeah, they teach you how to how to how to grab them and how to get towards the side of the pool type of thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You can't keep them down if you get better breath than they do. | ||
| No. | ||
| You can't like hold on to them. | ||
| No, I don't think so. | ||
| I don't think it's a good idea. | ||
| But today on motherfuckers. | ||
| I mean, I guess somebody could, you know, but that's uh that's like if you're a world champion free diver, if you're one of those 10 minute dudes. | ||
| You do have some people like that to come through. | ||
| I bet. | ||
| You know, you do have some really incredible athletes that come through. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I bet. | |
| And a lot of them don't make it because they're being treated like uh Ferraris or Lamborghinis most of their life if they're really an elite athlete. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And then all of a sudden they're being treated like a like a Chevy, you know, and just thrown through walls or whatever, and it's like eh. | ||
| Not uh crazy pressure test that has to be done. | ||
| I mean, there's no real job that's similar other than you know, 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. | ||
| Yeah, you've got to be able to do that. | ||
| Like we're not sure if we want to train you even. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So we we don't we don't know if we're ever gonna use you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so we're gonna try to break you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Gonna prove that you want to be here. | ||
| And that you have the mental fortitude to be here. | ||
| Um and that you have uh you can work as a team. | ||
| There's a few different things that they're they're looking for, but uh it's worked for a while. | ||
| You know, it's worked for a long time, it's a good test. | ||
| But it was getting really weird during the wokey wokey years where they were talking about lowering the standards. | ||
| Right, there is that. | ||
| And then the 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, um, 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. | ||
| So it's uh like what would it be that you would get more chances doing? | ||
| Like that pool comp thing. | ||
| I think you got uh yeah, two chances on the first day and two chances on the second day. | ||
| And uh I passed the first day uh just I happen to be comfortable in the water, but uh but some guys made it through on that fourth one, like oh, made it just made it. | ||
| But they didn't get a fifth. | ||
| They did not get a sixth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And now maybe I don't I don't know if this is true, but this is a way around the standards. | ||
| Uh give somebody a fifth, give them a sixth, something like that. | ||
| Or you failed the old course. | ||
| Uh okay, one time you get some sort of a like a warning or something like that, and then you do it again, second time you're out, or whatever it is. | ||
| Well, now you can just just as many times as it takes. | ||
| Oh, they passed it. | ||
| They passed it once. | ||
| Let's move them on. | ||
| Were they doing that to just expand the ranks or were they doing it to get a specific demographic? | ||
| Well, I'm not saying that they did it, I'm saying that's how you would get around the standards. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Uh like the you'd be able to say that we haven't uh we haven't lowered the standards type of a thing when you're in front of Congress. | ||
| And they don't know that to ask those kind of questions. | ||
| Well, did you okay? | ||
| Well, did you give them more chances? | ||
| Did you change anything? | ||
| Yeah, that something like that. | ||
| So they can get away with uh yeah, telling the truth-ish, but not expanding on that. | ||
| So that's just a way to do it. | ||
| So um bizarre sign of the times to make elite special forces units more easy to get into. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's uh it's a thing. | ||
| Strange. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Because there was a push to lower standards. | ||
| There's a push to try to get women in it too, right? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I don't know how much of a push it is or for it. | ||
| I don't know how far they've gotten. | ||
| 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 uh 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 is it's for me, it's you know, I'll probably get canceled now. | ||
| But uh, you know, or we maybe we're past that, I don't know. | ||
| But uh to me it's it's not and what they what they say now we 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. | ||
| Um but when you get to an elite unit like that or any unit, and this might be a failing on my part, I fully uh admit that. | ||
| I mean, I was raised uh when a woman enters a room, you stand up, you open the door for a lady type of a thing, like those things. | ||
| You stand up for like you're you're you're chivalrous, you're a gentleman type of a thing. | ||
| Um 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 gonna 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 uh 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 as a protector, as a sentinel as a guardian, and uh now all of a sudden you're supposed to treat said female who've been raised to protect, uh treat them exactly the same way as a guy going into combat. | ||
| That would be difficult for me. | ||
| There's certain physical realities I feel that we just have to address. | ||
| When people want to talk about equality – I understand that when you're talking about jobs that don't require shooting people and stabbing people in hand-to-hand combat. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Because as soon as you do that and you are physically far weaker and far slower, and you're you just 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 want to have m biological men fighting biological women. | ||
| I don't care if they're the same weight. | ||
| Like don't it's not fair. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not fair. | ||
| It's not it's not smart for them to be doing that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That said, I feel like you should be able to do what you want to do. | ||
| I know it's tough. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like I've seen what you guys had to go through to get through buds. | ||
| And like, okay. | ||
| You have to be strong. | ||
| Like you have to, there has to be a certain amount of physical strength that you have to be able to do that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| For me, it even comes, yeah. | ||
| I guess that it comes down to to that. | ||
| And it's probably my failing, but maybe not. | ||
| Maybe we're supposed to be. | ||
| I think we're supposed to be protectors. | ||
| All throughout human history, that's been the case. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then you're supposed to all of a sudden change because of a policy directive. | ||
| Um but yeah, I mean, we're going back to it. | ||
| I mean, it's causing a little ruffling a lot of feathers with in the military right now, uh 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 they I've never heard anyone talk about it until I talked about it back in 2001. | ||
| And uh I wrote some articles after the Afghanistan withdrawal, and I call and went on Fox a bunch of times and talked about how we need to 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 we it's time to change the Department of Defense back to the Department of War, and I use the Afghanistan withdrawal as that example and put that in two articles. | ||
| I think they both went on Town Hall, I believe. | ||
| And then but I talked about it, and I had never heard anybody mention that before. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So is that what it used to be? | |
| It used to be the Department of the United States. | ||
| And then it changed, and then it was uh official in uh 1947 with the reorganization of the military and our intelligence apparatus. | ||
| Uh so 1947 onward became the Department of Defense. | ||
| Do you take any heat in your books? | ||
| Because one of the things that you talk about uh especially in the terminal list is horrific government corruption and the willingness to put soldiers' lives uh as expendable in order to profit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I certainly talk about it in here. | ||
| I was a great conversation. | ||
| One of my favorite chapters is these two characters, Tom Reese uh and his buddy Quinn. | ||
| So one special forces guy, one SEAL, and they're having this conversation on China Beach. | ||
| And uh it was great to write those chapters and do uh all this research into China Beach and Denang and uh who what kind of surfboards they were using, how they were shaved, like all this stuff just to bring you back to that uh to that time frame. | ||
| But that's what they're talking about. | ||
| So this is about James Reese's dad. | ||
| Yeah, 1968, his dad. | ||
| And uh people find out where the tomahawk came from, where the watch came from, where honey and the coffee came from. | ||
| So all these little things are kind of woven in there as well. | ||
| But exactly what you just talked about is a conversation in this book in 1968, and it's the same conversation that we're having today. | ||
| Um but uh I don't want to say I take heat over it, and I'm never gonna worry in a chapter or a book about uh who's who I'm gonna alienate by writing something uh here are criminals. | ||
| Are you gonna piss off the criminals? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Or the people in power. | ||
| Just being honest about what we did. | ||
| Or or just people in power in general or uh or any, or or just a part of a readership, maybe. | ||
| I'm just gonna 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 um the CIA was has been very nice. | ||
| We got to film the uh 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 uh at the end of the show on episode seven. | ||
| I'm the guard that uh that takes the guy's ID as he's leaving the uh and I have a one line, I think it's I say I say something anyway. | ||
| But uh it was very cool to be there in front of that memorial wall, that wall of stars, uh especially knowing some of those guys that are on there that are memorialized by those stars. | ||
| Um so the CIA was very uh kind to let us use that lobby. | ||
| Um they didn't ask us to change anything in the show, didn't put any restraints or restrictions on anything. | ||
| Um 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. | ||
| Um, that wanted to talk to me about some stuff that I did in Iraq, and it was very, very cool to talk to them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Very cool. | |
| See the C the Museum there, I got a little tour of the CIA museum, all that stuff. | ||
| Um they've been very helpful. | ||
| The military, not so much. | ||
| The military does not let us use uh uh 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 or stuff, her series and then in the book. | ||
| So I don't think the military is. | ||
| Is that really what it is, you think? | ||
| I think it probably is, because we were gonna use for the first show we were gonna use um Camp Pendleton. | ||
| And uh the Marines were all on board. | ||
| And uh then their Department of the Navy, so then the Navy found out about it and quashed it. | ||
| So we did not get to use Camp Pendleton. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So it's uh and like in Jack Ryan and stuff, I think they use actual military helicopters and uh maybe an amphibi ship or something like that. | ||
| So they get some support from they didn't. | ||
| They did exactly. | ||
| They're not blowing up admirals, they don't have corrupt admirals getting blown up in their offices with S fests. | ||
| So I don't think the military is a big fan. | ||
| The uh the rank and file are those guys are awesome. | ||
| But my book signings it's there's so many military, so much law enforcement, firefighters, first responders. | ||
| Um the audience is full of those guys, and it's so fantastic. | ||
| That's fiction though. | ||
| That seems so bitchy. | ||
| I know. | ||
| And it seems like also that that would be a very good recruitment tool because these guys look like badasses. | ||
| People are like, fuck, I want to be a SEAL. | ||
| Yeah, it's like fucking badass. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And so a lot of guys would probably join because of that series, and they're like, you uh bad guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a bad guy. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| What are you guys gonna let all the bad guys off the hook? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| You got a murderous bad guy that happens to be an admiral. | ||
| You don't want to see him get whacked. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| It's fiction. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I knew that would happen at some point. | ||
| I knew the uh 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 I was influenced by popular culture growing up and that helped me on my path into the SEAL teams. | ||
| So I 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 years ago, because the first book came out in 2018. | ||
| So someone reads that at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. | ||
| Now they're a few years into this career in law enforcement or in the military. | ||
| And uh 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 won't just I hope I was just one part of a lot of information that you took in in order to make this decision. | ||
| Um but uh but but they do say it now. | ||
| And uh like with David Morrell in uh 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, saying 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, so it's uh but for me it's like hey, it's uh it's always gonna be about the story. | ||
| I knew that would happen, but it was a surprise the first time. | ||
| Kind of like the tattoo is the first surprise was a surprise the first time I saw it. | ||
| Like the baby the other night was the first I was surprised. | ||
| So it's uh yeah, it's uh it does that. | ||
| You really honor the actual experiences that these people have in your books. | ||
| It's it's very believable and realistic and it it does honor those people. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's what I it's 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 uh and fighting this in denied areas where they weren't supposed to be in uh Cambodia Laos, North Vietnam, but uh 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 uh 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 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 here or there, like he put in the effort to try to capture the essence of 1968, and uh and that's so that's why so much work went into this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But those guys that went into the tunnels like that. | |
| That is some of those are some of the fucking craziest stories. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're going into the tunnels hand to hand. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, with a 1911 and a flashlight and looking for Viet Cong and not knowing what you're gonna find. | |
| Crazy. | ||
| Not knowing who's in there, not knowing what's waiting for you, what's booby trapped. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| That's gotta 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. | ||
| Did you watch Peaky Blinders? | ||
| No, I need to watch it. | ||
| It's really awesome. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But one of the uh aspects of these characters is that the the peaky blinders were all veterans. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
| And they were all in World War One in trench warfare. | ||
| Oh wow. | ||
| And they were in the tunnels. | ||
| Uh like the trenches, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so like they they came back and they have flashbacks and there's a lot of like shell shock. | ||
| Yeah, waking up in the middle of night stabbing people, thinking thinking you're there again. | ||
| It's there's some wild scenes of them in the trenches. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's just like, Jesus. | ||
| And we're seeing some more of that trench stuff in uh in uh Ukraine. | ||
| I mean, whoa. | ||
| But live video though. | ||
| I mean, you're seeing like four K video off cell phones and drones and the drone stuff is scary. | ||
| I'm so glad that we don't have I didn't have to deal with that during my time. | ||
| It's fucking nuts. | ||
| There was watching a guy, he was in the back of a truck and uh they were running and the drone is coming out and he's firing at the drone and shoots it maybe three, four yards from him. | ||
| I saw that one. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Fucking nuts. | ||
| Fucking nuts. | ||
| And you realize like this is what they're dealing with. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Exploding drones that are whizzing towards them, and someone on the other end somewhere in the world has got a fucking joystick and trying to get you with it. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I put that in True Believer, second book, and we put it in the show. | ||
| We filmed it in the second show out of a drone attack in there. | ||
| Um but that was a few few years ago. | ||
| And just imagine when it gets to the next stage where it sends a a uh mosquito in here, a fly and it's looking at your face and it's like, oh, warrant out for your arrest, boom, lands on you, over you go. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And uh and that sort of thing. | ||
| It's you with some toxic shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's so weird time. | ||
| 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 gonna 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 gonna allow you to access whatever it is, information online, uh uh 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 gonna go in and okay, to make sure this is you paying for let's say a stake, and now all of a sudden, oh, you've had your allotment of stake because of the environment because of the how many cows and whatever they're they're doing. | ||
| You can't buy this stake or uh your allotment of power for your vehicle, you've used yours up uh for the for the mother gas in your car, all of those things. | ||
| Uh but it's gonna know exactly because you're gonna have to do it to access information online. | ||
| Uh and we're getting closer and closer to that. | ||
| Well, anyone's just submitted to it, they just submitted to digital ID. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Yeah, these motherfuckers are pushing digital ID on these people. | ||
| And once they do digital ID, they're gonna attach it to a social credit score, they're gonna attach it to a carbon footprint score, and then they'll be able to control your movement and control you entirely, and mo most importantly, they've already arrested twelve thousand people for social media posts. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| Above and beyond every other country, way above Russia, Russia was like four hundred last year. | ||
| The UK's twelve thousand. | ||
| There any criticism of immigration, any crimin criticism of grooming gangs and people being raped, any talk about how horrible this is, they come visit you. | ||
| It's like someone's trying to destroy England. | ||
| It's literally like they they've got a concerted effort to destroy England and they're getting away with it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And what happens over there? | ||
| It's really crazy. | ||
| It's really crazy to watch. | ||
| Because the mass immigration's not an accident. | ||
| It's on it. | ||
| If I was gonna 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 nineties, and then you start tightening that noose. | ||
| Tighter and tighter, add more restrictions, more this, more that's uh we're getting closer. | ||
| And just the arresting people. | ||
| 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 to post about things because of fear. | ||
| So they self-censor. | ||
| So you don't even you're you're getting 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 in a they wear the wigs, the white powdered wigs, and he's uh sentencing this guy for twenty 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 are 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 v uh 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 no one's protecting anybody. | ||
| It's nuts, man. | ||
| Any time in human history that would be called an invasion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And uh and now it's it's not just an invasion, 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 uh a bunch of people that were illegals that had gid been given social security numbers and were already voting. | ||
| And this is nuts, man. | ||
| It's like it's a it 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Have you seen the videos? | ||
| Uh I'm sure you have it's Bill Clinton, it's uh Hillary Clinton, it's uh Schumer, it's Pelosi, it's Biden from the nineties. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Like giving these speeches on the floor of Congress that uh today would uh would be extremely right wing. | ||
| Extremely normal. | ||
| It's Hillary Clinton. | ||
| In I think it was two thousand and twelve? | ||
| Like whatever it was where she was running for uh for president, and she's more MAGA than MAGA. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like she is talking about if you're if you're a criminal, you know, no if ands are but you get kicked out, and if you're here you pay a stiff fine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because you cut the line. | ||
| Like wild. | ||
| Yeah, like what happened to that? | ||
| It's out there, but then we're not getting you know, most people don't know about her, they don't see it. | ||
| You have to look for it or something like that in those lines. | ||
| They don't have principled stances on things. | ||
| They go with wherever their party's leaning and wherever the v majority of people believe is the direction to go. | ||
| And they might not even implement these things, but just to say it in order to get elected and get people to vote for them. | ||
| And that's what they did. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's insane. | |
| Yeah, all polling, I guess, right? | ||
| But it's it's the manipulation and it's also manipulation of the populace through through the all these uh all these different different platforms. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And uh and what did you think also of the uh uh and I don't like to call them leaders, I like to call them elected representatives. | ||
| That's what they're supposed to be. | ||
| It's uh supposed to represent us, and they send they get there and they represent themselves. | ||
| But uh how is the uh how's the inauguration? | ||
| I didn't get to to ask you. | ||
| Being in the room with all the lizard people that run the world is so strange. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's so weird. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| It was like seeing like Hillary and seeing Obama and seeing Kamala Harris and Biden and and Bush and all those people there. | ||
| It's very weird. | ||
| It's it's really weird, man. | ||
| It's real weird. | ||
| It's real weird being in the Capitol, and they realize like how strange this whole process is. | ||
| I mean, there's this like public humiliation ritual where Trump goes on stage and talks shit and they're right behind him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they have to eat it. | ||
| And everybody cheers and and claps and is very bizarre. | ||
| Yeah, very surreal. | ||
| Very surreal. | ||
| Surreal also that I'm right there too, right? | ||
| On the stage, like, what's going on? | ||
| Five rows back from the president. | ||
| It'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 the beginning of the battle for the next four years where they everybody is like slinking away to try their strategy and figure out what to do next and who's our warrior, and now they're trying to figure it out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now they're talking about Pete Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris. | ||
| That's what they're gonna run. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like Yeah. | |
| You don't fight against that. | ||
| They apparently they did they don't have any faith in Gavin Newsom. | ||
| Oh. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Which is kind of funny because he wants to be president so bad. | |
| That's what it that's sure what it looks like. | ||
| You can't ruin a city and then go on to ruin a state and say, guys, that was just practice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| Once I get it as a president, I'm gonna fix it. | ||
| Fix it all. | ||
| I mean, it's so crazy, but he's such a great politician. | ||
| I mean so smooth. | ||
| He's not thinking so. | ||
| No, I think he's terrible. | ||
| How does he remain in power for so long? | ||
| Low competition. | ||
| Uh no one who's good is competing against him. | ||
| There's no sensation. | ||
| I should say he's not a good one I should say he's smooth. | ||
| He comes in. | ||
| I mean he's a good bullshit artist. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I mean. | ||
| But it's like what the things that he says when he gets confronted with things, we're the high highest this and the highest that like everybody's leaving. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You have the highest unemployment. | ||
| Yeah, you have the highest homelessness. | ||
| Money's missing. | ||
| You killed Hollywood. | ||
| Like Hollywood doesn't exist anymore. | ||
| It's literally gone. | ||
| That was such a mandated vaccines for kids that didn't need them. | ||
| You guys he did horrible shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's awful. | ||
| We uh I went to the one in 2017, so January 2017, so we decided not to go to this last one. | ||
| And uh because we felt like we experienced it last time and there was all the the lemos on fire and the 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 uh then Tulsi called and asked if I'd go to her uh her swearing in, and so I was like, yeah, of course. | ||
| And uh 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. | ||
| That is cool. | ||
| Have you talked to her about her experience there? | ||
| Uh I haven't I don't want to bother her too much, but we just she just posted about the book actually. | ||
| I didn't expect her to do that, but she did that today, which is very very kind. | ||
| But the reality of the the work, the reality of being in the organization is very sobering, apparently. | ||
| I bet. | ||
| Oh my gosh, it's gotta be like nothing you whoever you think it is from the outside before you step in, it's gotta be a thousand times worse at least when you step into it. | ||
| It's bad and it's very compartmentalized. | ||
| There's a bunch of people that run various offices and they're all working against you and the bureaucracy is so huge. | ||
| And I hope she stays in it. | ||
| I mean, she's such a a great person. | ||
| I mean, I'd support her as we were friends, but uh but I mean it it's gotta be hard to stay in that fight when you see it. | ||
| She's got a lot of character, and that's that not that doesn't get rewarded there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I'd I'd uh I mean I would support her if and there's a path for her, you know, and there's a there is definitely a path for her to uh to get into the the White House. | ||
| Um Yeah, it could be. | ||
| She could be our first female president, especially after you know, we've seen like what they tried to do to her. | ||
| Uh they put her on the quiet skies thing. | ||
| So they put her on a terrorist watch list. | ||
| She was a US Congresswoman for eight fucking years. | ||
| She served overseas in uh uh a medical unit, right? | ||
| So she was deployed twice in a medical unit in the middle of the fucking war, and you you're labeling her a terrorist. | ||
| Like whoever did that, like whoever signed off on that should be in fucking jail. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| I mean, that's such an abuse. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's such an abuse of power. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And you you want to talk about like going after your political enemies in it in a in a sick third world country way. | ||
| That's a great example of that. | ||
| You put a s a congresswoman for eight years on the terrorist watch list. | ||
| For what? | ||
| Right. | ||
| For what reason? | ||
| None? | ||
| No reason? | ||
| There's not like some crazy tweets where she's m is made and there's nothing like she's so thoughtful. | ||
| It's not even like Marguerite Taylor Green, who gets hog wild sometimes. | ||
| She's not like Tulsi's not like that at all. | ||
| And you put her on a terrorist watch list. | ||
| Shame on you. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Fucking shame on you. | ||
| Yeah, she's the director of national intelligence. | ||
| Crazy, right? | ||
| Boy, it's weird how that happens. | ||
| Yeah, that's fantastic. | ||
| But yeah, the next one, it's uh I mean I I I haven't I've read the book. | ||
| Um but uh it's uh Kamala's book where she says she didn't choose Pete Buddha Jesus because of his sexual orientation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I I'm not sure about this. | ||
| People can correct in the comments, please. | ||
| But I believe that's illegal. | ||
| Like if you didn't hire someone because they were at a certain sexual orientation, I believe that's illegal. | ||
| Well, you're allowed to choose who you think is gonna work the best, but not somebody. | ||
| And you'd 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 could probably look it up, but I do not think you can uh do the uh 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| I believe that is illegal. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I never even thought of that. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| Well, she also has been saying something really crazy. | ||
| She's been saying that this is the closest race of the twenty-first century, and then it wasn't a mandate. | ||
| That's just not true. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| B Gore and Bush was much closer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I think that was a half of a percent. | ||
| It's yes. | ||
| I don't know why she keeps saying this. | ||
| She's it's just a lie. | ||
| And then also she's she's leaving out the fact that she lost every swing state. | ||
| Every single one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So like what are you talking about? | ||
| I know. | ||
| He won the popular vote and he won the electoral college vote. | ||
| And that's a mandate. | ||
| I think that it's not a mandate. | ||
| It's like but it's almost like if you say it to the c the converted that they're gonna listen and repeat it. | ||
| Yeah, he barely won. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, no, he won. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He won every swing state. | ||
| He won the popular vote. | ||
| That's called winning. | ||
| You win the house and you win the Senate. | ||
| That he won. | ||
| That means he won. | ||
| Charlie Sheen calls that winning. | ||
| This is crazy talk. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| It is so she's probably hammered. | ||
| She's probably up there drinking wine. | ||
| Oh fucking kick his ass next time. | ||
| Fuck him. | ||
| It's so brutal. | ||
| And uh And I think she's took credit for the no tax on tips things in the book as well. | ||
| That's hilarious, because that was clearly his. | ||
| Clearly. | ||
| He said it first and they copied it. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Did she really say that in the book? | ||
| I haven't read it, but I uh I I have heard from someone who did read it that she did. | ||
| So I you know, people didn't know. | ||
| She had an address not coming on here in the book too, which I thought was funny. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That was interesting. | ||
| Yeah, they're her team was not truthful about that encounter at all. | ||
| They never committed to doing the show ever. | ||
| They they said that, you know, I said that I had a personal day, which is not true. | ||
| I said I am not available the day that Trump was here. | ||
| I said that day's not I didn't say that I was have a personal day. | ||
| They just made that up. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| And then they also said that they sent someone here to go through the studio, like sent someone to do a walkthrough. | ||
| Not true. | ||
| No. | ||
| Not true. | ||
| That how could they I mean it's just you repeat it and you say it and your side believes it? | ||
| But why would they do that when I can just say that's not true? | ||
| It's bizarre. | ||
| But who's gonna who do they gonna believe? | ||
| They're gonna believe me or a person who literally says whatever the audience wants them to say. | ||
| Which is what they did. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm not why would I lie? | ||
| I have no reason to lie. | ||
| So is that it would have been interesting to do. | ||
| If I fucked her over, I would tell the truth. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If I was like, we lied, we told her I was taking a personal day, but realized I wanted to get Trump in. | ||
| Not true. | ||
| I tried to do both of them on the same day. | ||
| That was my idea. | ||
| My idea was to do Trump during the day and then her to come, she had a a thing she was doing in Houston after the thing with Houston. | ||
| I go, I'll fucking do it at midnight. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| We'll do it whenever you want to do it. | ||
| Yeah while you're in Texas, but I I just can't do during the day because Trump's gonna be here. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But they had to have known. | ||
| I mean, the Secret Service was there was two hundred guys here. | ||
| They they had fucking In Texas. | ||
| No, in this fucking studio. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| There's two hundred people here for Trump. | ||
| I mean, I'm not exaggerating. | ||
| It was packed. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It was packed. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Bro, they didn't fuck around. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| They did not fuck around. | ||
| They surrounded the building. | ||
| It was it was nuts. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They they made sure that everything was safe and secure. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So like someone had to know something that he was here. | ||
| It's not a mystery. | ||
| But I said dogs through. | ||
| But I wasn't trying to be deceptive. | ||
| I said I'll do it later. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I just can't do it during this time. | ||
| That's the excuse they took it. | ||
| That's like, okay. | ||
| They took that excuse. | ||
| They never wanted to do the whole thing. | ||
| Never. | ||
| They wanted to meet do like a 45 minute thing in an un in a different place. | ||
| They didn't say scripted, but they they did say that there's some things that she didn't want to talk about. | ||
| Then they denied that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what I meant by scripted, yeah. | ||
| I said I don't care. | ||
| I'll talk to you about cooking. | ||
| I don't give a fuck. | ||
| I just want to know who are you. | ||
| I'll figure you out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'll figure you out in a few hours. | ||
| Yeah, in three hours you can't fake your way through the conversation. | ||
| No, I'll find you. | ||
| I'll find you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'll ask you controversial things. | ||
| Like is all I have to do is ask you why's the border open. | ||
| We could talk about that for three hours. | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| What are you trying to do? | ||
| Like you could close that border. | ||
| Trump closed that border in a day. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| In a day. | ||
| You could say, I hate what's going on with ice, and I don't like it either. | ||
| I don't like this thing of taking people... | ||
| And here's the thing. | ||
| Well, they should have done it the right way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But if you're poor and you live in a third world country, that's not an available option. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| What is an available option is this one administration over four years is encouraging people to go through. | ||
| Not only they encouraging you to go through, there's Red Cross stops along the way. | ||
| They give you maps. | ||
| They tell you how to do it. | ||
| People are being they're funding people getting in. | ||
| They're paying for air flights. | ||
| They're flying people in. | ||
| They're moving people into swing states. | ||
| They're getting them on Medicare. | ||
| They're getting them on Social Security. | ||
| There's we talked to about this one lady who did an interview, saying she was being told to try to get people on permanent disability. | ||
| So she was told to ask them, Do you have back problems? | ||
| And they're like, yes. | ||
| Okay, great. | ||
| Personal disability. | ||
| Now that she she said I was told to view them as a client now. | ||
| And so you're trying essentially to bribe people to now once you get them in to move to a swing state, then they count on the census. | ||
| Once they count on the census, it adds congressional seats. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| So it's like you're you're rigging elections by bringing in immigrants. | ||
| And then you're giving them money. | ||
| And all these people that live in these poor communities, they're like, hey, where was all this money for us? | ||
| Where was all this money for the people in Chicago? | ||
| Where was all this money to the people in Baltimore? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, it's they're they're doing it because they're Trying to manipulate the election. | ||
| It didn't work. | ||
| You know, it didn't work. | ||
| Like I had an argument with someone about it, but yeah, it didn't work though. | ||
| I go, yeah, but they tried to do it. | ||
| It didn't work. | ||
| But they did move people to swing states. | ||
| They did leave the border open for four years. | ||
| They did let in millions of people. | ||
| They don't even know how many. | ||
| They don't know how many people got through. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Once they got him here, they did give them EBT cards. | ||
| They did give them cell phones. | ||
| They did. | ||
| They moved him into the fucking hotel. | ||
| That Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, this luxury hotel, filled with migrants. | ||
| They paid for their food. | ||
| They did do this. | ||
| They encourage people. | ||
| They did have sanctuary cities where they weren't gonna arrest them. | ||
| They let them come in. | ||
| Still do Portland right now. | ||
| It's uh contentions. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| But what do you think you could have that conversation, let's say 15 years ago, um that kind of a conversation with Kamala if she was around back then, let's let's fat back up 15 years. | ||
| Or is talking to all these amazing people that you've talked to over the time of the the time this podcast has been in existence has given you this incredible foundation from which to be able to ask like such incredible questions of people and get this stuff out of them and and 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No one cares. | ||
| You know, I want to vote for this guy because I think we need to try libertarianism and this is why I think it's 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 needed an opinion for. | ||
| That means the media's failed you. | ||
| Like what I am a I'm a symptom of a broken system. | ||
| Like if I'm a source of information, like we've got a like a bit of a supply chain problem. | ||
| That's how I don't know. | ||
| I think it's being a little humble on that as well, because where else could someone get this three hours uh where they can really listen to maybe two sides uh of uh right? | ||
| But my point is why didn't somebody else do that already? | ||
| Why didn't why didn't mainstream media figure that out? | ||
| Why did you need someone to figure it out in 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 fail. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| It means they failed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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? | ||
| How you know, and like they've tried like there's a bunch of people from the New York Times that try the 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, they have the 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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 and and break it down this way. | ||
| Well, it's because you're limited by your whole 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 you 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. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| But you recognize an opportunity and prepared. | ||
| I didn't actually. | ||
| But I didn't. | ||
| Well, well, you didn't. | ||
| This is the thing. | ||
| I just kept doing this. | ||
| I'm telling you, man, this is not a plan. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I just kept doing that. | ||
| But yeah. | ||
| I just kept doing it, and then all of a sudden it became what it is. | ||
| But you're not sure if you're not just you could plug in a laptop and you could have a video, you could have a conversation. | ||
| But it was all just for fun. | ||
| See, that's why it worked. | ||
| It worked because there was no plan. | ||
| It was just like, let's do this and it'll be fun. | ||
| And then people tune in because it's fun. | ||
| And then I start getting like Graham Hancock on and Anthony Bourdain on. | ||
| I'm getting some guests, and it's kind of fun and it's kind of cool. | ||
| And then it becomes a cool thing that if you know, you know, like, oh, you listen to podcasts, check this one out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Yeah, Joe Rogan's got good guests, and ask good questions. | ||
| And then it became what it is now. | ||
| But it's it's all just because I enjoyed doing it. | ||
| It was never because I recognized, like, oh, there's an opening out there. | ||
| No, no, I didn't mean it like that. | ||
| I meant like it's very natural. | ||
| That's uh that's also a part of it. | ||
| Like it's not like you're like, what can I do? | ||
| Like, no, that's not that. | ||
| No, where some people do do that. | ||
| Like, hey, what can be my thing? | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| X, Y, and Z. Okay, I'll give speaking about events on this certain thing, and okay, that's my thing now. | ||
| Because I realize there's a gap. | ||
| Okay, I'm gonna do that. | ||
| That's different. | ||
| That's not moving the needle, probably for anybody in that audience, maybe for one person or something like that. | ||
| And uh, you're not looking at it like that. | ||
| You're doing it because it was this very natural thing for you to do, and it happened to grow into what it is today, which is amazing, which makes it even more powerful that it was natural, and then you weren't this artificial guy over here saying, What's the opportunity? | ||
| Oh, I can get make X dollars by speaking about this topic to this audience. | ||
| Okay, I'm gonna do that and be happy or whatever. | ||
| Instead, it was the opposite of that. | ||
| It's very natural. | ||
| And so it's a very different thing as far as opportunity goes. | ||
| Well, that's the weirdness about today, right? | ||
| Is because you could just start a YouTube channel. | ||
| Like anybody who's a doctor or a historian could just start a YouTube channel and just start talking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like just think about all the stuff that you learned about Vietnam from from writing this book. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You could just break down moments like Dan Carlin style about Vietnam and just sit there and and talk about it, and people be like, that's fascinating. | ||
| Jack Carr on Vietnam, you've seen this video, and then it'll get passed around. | ||
| Next thing you know, it's got a half a million views. | ||
| Next thing you know, it's got a million, and then everybody's sharing it in social media. | ||
| That's the most fascinating thing about today. | ||
| Like if you say something cool and it becomes a part of a clip and somebody likes it, it gets blasted all over the whole world. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's on TikTok, it's on X, it's on Instagram, and then it's on YouTube and like a hundred different channels. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's all these channels that pop up and they take advantage of the algorithms. | ||
| So they take these little clips. | ||
| I can't do that. | ||
| I can never do something for clicks or for anything like that. | ||
| I don't either. | ||
| No, other people will. | ||
| I know. | ||
| You don't have to do it. | ||
| That's what's interesting. | ||
| The vast majority of our clips online have nothing to do with us. | ||
| I didn't put them up there. | ||
| I don't know who the fucking person is that's editing them and clipping them together. | ||
| Some of those cuts even put their own watermark on it. | ||
| Like whoever you are, cut the shit. | ||
| That's not you know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I go I added it to mind of a winner, like dot com. | |
| Fuck off. | ||
| Oh boy. | ||
| They do that stuff. | ||
| And they put their own little fucking website on it. | ||
| But it's just i it's a weird time. | ||
| It's a weird time for the distribution of information. | ||
| And mainstream media they drop the ball. | ||
| They they missed these openings. | ||
| They and they're not capable of being free. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| There's too many cooks in the like all the notes that you were getting on season one, right? | ||
| You don't get them anymore because it's successful. | ||
| Like, that's kind of every show on television has got to deal with all these goddamn cooks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All these chefs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, add a little of this and add a little of that. | ||
| You can't do it. | ||
| No, it's like we're talking about earlier. | ||
| Now people are trying to get that clip. | ||
| So their life and their their their their income is reliant on trying to get that clip. | ||
| But I think what they don't realize is that that's a blip. | ||
| You know, like that's a that's a one thing, and then it's back down, back down here. | ||
| It's not a boom, and then going from there. | ||
| You have to continually add value to people's lives, I think, long term if you're gonna build something of substance. | ||
| And that's what you you have done, obviously. | ||
| And uh it's incredible to watch and uh you know, via part of from the audience side and then to to you know do you mind all that stuff. | ||
| Fucking weird shit. | ||
| Uh weird. | ||
| But then we see that stuff like with Charlie Kirk, and people trying to take advantage of that to get a click. | ||
| I know. | ||
| And it's so it's brutal. | ||
| And I don't know what it is, what going forward. | ||
| Like when you think about communication in general, and a long time ago, the telephone used to connect us with our 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, uh, which does obviously a lot more than that is a tracking device, surveillance device, all these other things. | ||
| Um, but it's uh it disconnects us from those that are we're in the same room with. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's a 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, and what's next? | ||
| Metaglasses. | ||
| Okay, we got the metaglasses. | ||
| They gave me some at UFC actually. | ||
| Me too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did they? | |
| Have you fucked with them yet? | ||
| No, because I left them under my seat, and as soon as they gave them to me, I knew I was gonna leave them under that seat. | ||
| They handed it to me when I came in, and I'm like, I'm a hundred percent leaving this behind. | ||
| Put it under the seat. | ||
| I told the monica, I'm like, Monica, remind me to bring these things with me. | ||
| And then we just had such a great time. | ||
| We totally forgot. | ||
| The Chicago one. | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| They gave them to me as I was leaving. | ||
| So that would have made more sense. | ||
| I'm like, thank you very much. | ||
| And I have them. | ||
| Have you done it? | ||
| Have you put them on? | ||
| I put them on when they were here. | ||
| I haven't done the new ones. | ||
| Um, but I I've I've done several versions. | ||
| I've tried them. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| They're pretty fucking incredible. | ||
| It's pretty incre I'm not wearing them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But we've had to stop people from wearing them at the comedy club. | ||
| They try to film things with meta glasses on. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| All glasses have to go in the pouch, just like the phones last night. | ||
| Everybody who works there knows what a meta glass is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But now they do. | ||
| But then what happens five years from now when you can put them in anything. | ||
| Well, it's going to be contact lenses. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| And then it's going to be over. | ||
| And then it's going to be in the brain, some sort of implant. | ||
| Yeah, there'll be a there'll be some sort of a hard drive that you go by. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Not for me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| No, not for me either, but we're the last. | ||
| We're the last of the regular people. | ||
| Because it's going to be normal now. | ||
| Yeah, it's going to be a cyborg nation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ah. | |
| I I like how you're hopeful. | ||
| You're hopeful earlier. | ||
| No, I am still hopeful. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The the 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 we this many people are wearing them Apple watches and they're getting text messages and emails and making phone calls on their watch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| It's awful. | ||
| I 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, 45, the new staccato that tells me something about the person, you know, what that kind of hat they wear, belt they wear, leather setup, 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. | ||
| Uh make judgments based on very little very little information, and that that watch tells me something. | ||
| And then they get into the Tesla and I'm like, oh, okay. | ||
| Apple watch Tesla, you know. | ||
| And uh some of those things that seem like they just have no soul. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's just like a the Apple Watch thing is weird because it's like do you really need it all on your wrist? | ||
| Buzzing all the time. | ||
| And it you have to charge it every day. | ||
| And then like I have a garment. | ||
| Uh and it's uh digital watch. | ||
| It's got maps on it, stuff like that, but I use it when I go hunting, and I can put that fucker on full charge. | ||
| It'll go like a month and a half. | ||
| And it'll charge partially because of solar. | ||
| I can do less than that. | ||
| I can't I gotta nothing else to charge. | ||
| I did they give me something else to charge? | ||
| I can't. | ||
| But the thing about those garments, 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. | ||
| Yeah 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. | ||
| You can just say, okay, I just have to go due north for six miles, and I'm gonna hit a road. | ||
| Like that's take 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. | ||
| We can't go back the way we came. | ||
| How do I how do I get to some form of civilization? | ||
| I'm a mapping compass guy. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| Map compass, the yeah, the Waltham Compass. | ||
| I put that in the it's in the book right here. | ||
| The Vietnam guys had them on their on their Sablex. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Those are awesome. | ||
| So I had one of those near me as I was writing the book as well. | ||
| And uh we put one into the show, Dark Wolf, the guys are on the fire in the first episode, Jared's there as boozer, and Pratt's there, and Taylor's there, and uh Tom Hopper's there on this fire, and that scene I think is one of the best ones, and uh uh Tom gets a gift from from Reese from from Chris Pratt and he opens it and it's that uh that wrist compass from Vietnam. | ||
| That's really cool. | ||
| And that was that scene was really cool to see. | ||
| See Jared in particular, um, buddy from the SEAL teams who gives Chris the book. | ||
| Now he's an actor, he's a executive producer, yeah, writer, right wrote an episode and technical advising four things on that show. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| I hope nobody's poaches him away from us. | ||
| He's so good in it at all of those things. | ||
| So gotta keep close hold with uh uh on Jared. | ||
| He's so fantastic in it. | ||
| But uh 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 any warriors who spent time around a fire or hunters that spent time around a fire will uh identify with that scene, the sharing of stories uh between hunters and warriors, and that was it. | ||
| That was a powerful scene to fill them. | ||
| And we did that early on. | ||
| That was the first like week of filming. | ||
| It's pretty cool. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| Most people don't know how to use a compass at all. | ||
| See me, I'd I'd I I'd do well with the compass and the map, but not so good with the garment. | ||
| I'd be like, Where's my have you ever figured out a way to use your watch as a compass? | ||
| I know there's a uh a thing that we can do, but I don't know how to do it. | ||
| So it looks like a diver dial, but it's north south east west. | ||
| I think you have to wait on the the shadow or something. | ||
| You can do that with a stick in the ground also the whole whole thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| There's like a whole process to figuring out where east north west east and then somehow or another you use your watch. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, there is something like that. | ||
| But uh yeah, map compass, the uh the sun across the sky, where it is, time of day. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well hopefully, rises in the east, that's in the west. | ||
| But when you're basics. | ||
| When you're looking at your watch, there's some sort of way to figure out where everything is. | ||
| I don't get it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think there was on uh uh what is it, the wild, what was the bear grill show? | ||
| I think you talked about it in one of those whole shows. | ||
| Yeah, I went I watched a whole YouTube video on it. | ||
| I don't get it. | ||
| I still don't get it. | ||
| Oh man. | ||
| But there's um you know, everybody has a compass on their phone now, too. | ||
| Uh I know it. | ||
| And then that thing dies. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's probably plug anything in. | ||
| But uh did you get a hunting this year? | ||
| What time? | ||
| Did you get hunting this year? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Utah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nice. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I think I remember when you were there and we I was I was in Morocco, I think. | ||
| The last couple months I've just been totally on the road. | ||
| Um, I was there the week of the fifteenth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| Right after okay. | ||
| It was great. | ||
| We caught it right in the rut. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| I was in Morocco. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| But you uh was it was good time. | ||
| Yeah, we had a good time. | ||
| Yeah, it was awesome. | ||
| It was beautiful. | ||
| I've been out in a while. | ||
| Then been to Lanai, done that just because it's an easy, you know, flight out there. | ||
| Did you bow hunting that stuff? | ||
| Uh no, some right. | ||
| I went with the kids. | ||
| So for me when I go out now, it's all about the the kids and getting them out there on the rifle. | ||
| Rifle hunting in Lanai is infinitely more effective. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Bow hunting in Lanai is really hard. | ||
| And it seems crazy because there's so many animals. | ||
| But the success rate is really low. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Especially th those winds and swirling and everything like that. | ||
| But uh but if you're on the timeline and you need to get back to Nobu uh in time for dinner, then uh I'm you use that rifle. | ||
| You know, yeah. | ||
| Also it's the best way to get the meat. | ||
| And there that's the best meat. | ||
| Like it right up there with elk almost. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's just like slightly less desirable to me than elk. | ||
| Is it axis deer. | ||
| Axis deer's really good. | ||
| So good. | ||
| Delicious. | ||
| And that's one of the cool things about um if you stay on the Nye, which is uh there's two four seasons there, and the four seasons that's on the water is incredible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But they have these um these axis burger sliders. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Oh axis deer sliders are so good. | ||
| Oh, and the capace, if you have the carpaccio there. | ||
| It's friggin' great. | ||
| Yeah, it's great, but it's uh what a weird place where you can hunt deer during the day and then stay at the four seasons. | ||
| Not bad. | ||
| The other one's a sensei spa now up top, so they switched it up, and so it's this crazy high-end spa in the old four seasons. | ||
| The one that looked used to look like a hunting lodge type of a thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Uh so that's a Sunsay spa now. | ||
| But uh yeah, it's a good time. | ||
| So that's the only hunting I've been doing the last few years. | ||
| Well, you are part of the Pineapple Brothers, right? | ||
| Like you're one of the organization that runs the Johnny outfitting out there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Alec out there who's they have a lot of people come out there every year. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty pretty booked. | ||
| Yeah, pretty booked all year. | ||
| Because the family gets to go. | ||
| It's very unique in that respect. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's also like such a there's first of all, you have to hunt them. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| There's 30,000 deer on an island with 3,000 people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That is so crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And if you see them at night in particular, can you like shine a headlight out to the field, you're like, there's no way this is sustainable. | ||
| And it's not. | ||
| So they they literally have to hunt them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And hunting is such a big part of the Hawaiian culture too. | ||
| People don't realize that. | ||
| They think of the beaches and everything else, don't realize how how big a part of the culture that really is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's where the luau's all about, right? | ||
| It's wild pig hunting. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| They're using they're not using farm raised pigs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe now they might be in some places. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure some resorts are using that. | ||
| But for the traditional way, it was like you're hunting pigs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And those pigs were brought over by sailors. | ||
| That's how they got on that island the first place. | ||
| Well the axis came over from India, so it's all coming over from some place. | ||
| But it's nice there's no snakes too. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| That is nice. | ||
| And there's nothing that's an animal that can kill you on land. | ||
| That's that's pretty good. | ||
| Different than Australia. | ||
| But in the water. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| You want to hence why you don't surf. | ||
| It gets a little squirrely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a little squirrely out there with the tiger sharks. | ||
| Yeah, a hundred percent chance of not getting eaten by a shark if you don't go in the water. | ||
| Yeah, fuck all that, dude. | ||
| Same thing with skydiving. | ||
| Like I'm done with the skydiving. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No more. | |
| No more of that. | ||
| Please. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That seems unnecessary at the time. | ||
| Stop Tom Cruise. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Tom Cruise. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| We can do it on the green screen now. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Enough, buddy. | ||
| Enough. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So no, yeah, no more of that sort of sort of thing. | ||
| Uh as fun as it as fun as it was. | ||
| The flying around was always fun. | ||
| But the jumping, eh. | ||
| The flying around, great. | ||
| And then when you have to go to pull through that sequence, it's like that's when that's the moment of truth. | ||
| And if you know this doesn't work, then there are procedures you need to go through in order to get this secondary shoot going. | ||
| Nightmare. | ||
| Yeah, no, no. | ||
| Not good. | ||
| No, no, I'm good. | ||
| But uh I'll go in the water, though. | ||
| I'll still go in the water with the sharks, but not uh much about the planes. | ||
| But uh yeah. | ||
| We're down in Nicaragua last uh what a few months ago. | ||
| No, the kids were surfing and all that stuff, but I'm thinking about sharks the whole time. | ||
| You know Adam Green Tree? | ||
| Uh yeah, I don't know personally about any of these. | ||
| Adam um told me that um I'm sorry if I told this story yesterday, folks, but Adam uh spearfishes. | ||
| He said that the sharks have learned the sound of the spear gun going off. | ||
| And so somebody gave him flippers that had scales on them because they thought it was cool to give them flippers, and these bull sharks showed up after he shot a fish and they bit his fucking flippers off. | ||
| Stop. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, don't use those anymore. | ||
| Yeah, fuck all that. | ||
| I'm like, why did you he goes? | ||
| I was thinking about it, Mike. | ||
| This isn't good. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, it's not good. | ||
| It's not good. | ||
| He goes, then they bit him off me feet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, oh my god. | ||
| Oh have you seen the lady that swims with the sharks? | ||
| Have those popped up on your YouTube channel? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's like the I mean, I hate to say it, but like the grizzly guy, what happened to the grizzly guy. | ||
| Well, I think she knows what she's doing, and I think it's a little different because sharks don't target people. | ||
| Most of the times when they're killing people, it's an accident because they think the people's a seal. | ||
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
| Maybe right? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I mean, there's what the Sea World one remember the Sea World That's different thing, like took that lady down. | ||
| Yeah, but that's different. | ||
| They don't ever do that in the wild. | ||
| Orcas in the wild don't kill people. | ||
| They only kill people when people fuck with them. | ||
| That's all it is. | ||
| One of the one of the things that's been happening lately is they've been sinking boats. | ||
| I saw those videos. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, they decide fuck you and you start sinking boats. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| And that's something that we haven't seen before, right? | ||
| No, it's very new. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| It's like within this decade. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a very recent thing, and it's one particular part of the world where it seems to be occurring over and over again. | ||
| And I don't know what happened. | ||
| Like maybe somebody fucked with a killer whale. | ||
| Like maybe somebody did something terrible. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| And then that that sonar, whatever they talk, goes out and they're like where they're attacking killer whales. | ||
| Because like you're talking about evil and wealthy people, and we're getting into that thing. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, and they're attacking yachts. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Like how many how many cunts are on a yacht that are like, let's shoot the killer whale. | ||
| And they're firing rifles at killer whales. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| And they're like, oh yeah? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How about some of this action? | ||
| Boat roaming orcas. | ||
| Oh, there's a new theory about why orcas are targeting sailboats in the Iberian Peninsula. | ||
| They're using them to practice hunting their favorite food. | ||
| I don't like your theory. | ||
| I think your theory sucks. | ||
| I bet somebody was an asshole. | ||
| I bet someone killed one of those orcas. | ||
| Would you go down with the uh within the shark cage off of like uh no fucking way? | ||
| No, I didn't know the guy's thing with my family once a long time ago. | ||
| We did uh we uh not scuba die, but snorkeled. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| We snorkeled with dolphins. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That was pretty badass. | ||
| So you find a pot of dolphins and then you jump overboard. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| And you can get, you know, within like 50, 60 yards of them and they're swimming around. | ||
| It's kind of cool. | ||
| You see them swimming underwater and shit. | ||
| It's pretty badass. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was cool. | ||
| But they they don't they're not interested in you. | ||
| They're like, get out of here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But if you're on a boat, they are interested in you. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| Like when maybe it was just the the circumstance that we had, maybe sometimes they come and play with you. | ||
| But I've been on boats before where they come right up next to the boat and they jump and they're they're putting on a show for you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like as the boat is moving its way through the water, they're they're flipping and they're looking at you. | ||
| They're like looking at you and they come out of the water. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's really clear that they're kind of playful. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they're interacting with people. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Different than the sharks that come into the shark cage and just crunch it. | ||
| You see the one with the guy I got I would have done that a long time ago. | ||
| I don't know if I'd do it now. | ||
| Or the one guy with the shark. | ||
| When it comes in, yeah. | ||
| I mean, come on. | ||
|
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|
This is an updated article from last month about the same group of Jaws came out again. | |
| It was like a 50th anniversary or something. | ||
| So I saw it in the theater with my son, and uh it was pretty cool to see in the theater. | ||
| Okay, here it is. | ||
| The 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? | ||
| Um the encounters often involve young orcas going Straight for the rudders. | ||
| Uh scientists have suggested the orcas are likely just bored teenagers with more free time since Atlantic bluefin tuna populations, their favorite prey pre prey in the region recovered, meaning they need to spend less time hunting. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Say click on dismissed by many orca experts. | ||
| Click on that link. | ||
| I want to find out why they think it's dismissed. | ||
| Like what's their rationalization? | ||
| Oh wow. | ||
| Open letter to regarding Iberian orcas and their interactions with boats. | ||
| Undersigned our experts in biology and behavior of cetaceans with several uh specializing in orcas, also known as kill killer whales. | ||
| There's been intense public interest in interactions between orcas as the uh 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. | ||
| Well, first of all, stop right there. | ||
| They are aggressively attacking vessels. | ||
| I watched it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a video you can watch it. | ||
| These people are on the boat and it starts slamming in the boat and it sticks the boat. | ||
| Like what is that's people are freaking out on that boat too. | ||
| Of course you would. | ||
| I think it's probably people who 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. | ||
| Like I don't know. | ||
| People and their fucking narratives. | ||
| All I'm saying is the grizzly guy gets eaten by the grizzly. | ||
| The rattlesnake guy gets bit by the rattlesnake. | ||
| The shark person, I mean, I just... | ||
| I worry. | ||
| It could certainly happen. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It certainly could happen. | ||
| Yeah, the grizzly guy, though. | ||
| I think that was suicide by bear. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Did you watch that documentary? | ||
| No, I just I've heard about it so many times. | ||
| I feel like I've seen it. | ||
| It's a fun documentary. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| It's Werner Herzog, right? | ||
| He's brilliant and he he turns it into a comedy. | ||
| It is kind of a comedy. | ||
| It's like an unintentional comedy about a guy who's really fucking stupid and hangs out with bears way too long. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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Man. | |
| I went up there in Alaska going up the rivers bear hunting. | ||
| And uh I mean you're walking right by him. | ||
| It is insane. | ||
| Just looking for the right one. | ||
| And uh someone it's crazy how close you you get and how comfortable the guides are working their way up these river systems off of boat. | ||
| Stay on a boat, you go in and then you work your way up to the day and come back. | ||
| And um But it was it was wild to be so close. | ||
| I'm like I'm very nervous because you always hear about don't get between the mom and the cubs type thing. | ||
| And you're walking right by 'em. | ||
| You're like, okay. | ||
| You know, here we go. | ||
| And they're so big. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, the 375 for uh for that one. | ||
| It's iron sight 375. | ||
| Iron sights? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| How come? | ||
| Uh just because it's gonna be close. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| Yeah, fog. | ||
|
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Yeah, yeah. | |
| Fuck yeah, fog. | ||
| I don't want to worry about like the the uh condensation on the on the you're right down there. | ||
| How close was the shot? | ||
| It's very good. | ||
| I didn't take it I didn't take one, but we had one. | ||
| Yeah, very wet. | ||
| Yeah, everything's just soaking wet. | ||
| And it's just fog, mist, the whole the whole thing. | ||
| So uh the only one we had, we had a charge. | ||
| And uh I think I told you that I can't remember. | ||
| Had a charge, and the thing guy came in, he was a little young. | ||
| She was like it that my guide said it was a female guy, she's amazing. | ||
| She said he's legal. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, that's not what you want to hear. | ||
| You know, you want something that's really old. | ||
| And uh you want to be contributing to this you know conservation. | ||
| He's young, you know, I don't I didn't want to be able to do that. | ||
| Yeah, illegal's not a word you want to hear when you're hunting. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| And that but it was curious also, so it was young, so it's curious. | ||
| So it kept coming in, kept coming in, and she's yelling at it, and I'm just right there, just on the trigger, like ready to go, and it's coming it, coming in, and then it gets close and it stops and it starts doing that, like going back and forth type thing. | ||
| And it's pretty close. | ||
| I had most of it on video, and then I didn't want to be the guy that has the phone out and gets eaten, and uh and so I like so I put it down so you can so he gets close and then he I put it down so you can still hear it because it's still running, so I still have the the video you can hear. | ||
| And uh he's he goes like this and he starts to charge and he veers the other way, though. | ||
| He veers off so she goes, she goes, she's yelling at him and she says, shoot, and I start to press the trigger, and she goes, No, no, no, no, like in the same sentence, like there's no 'cause he veered off. | ||
| He looked like he was gonna come. | ||
| And it was so close. | ||
| I was like, oh that's all right. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| So uh then we made our way back out and didn't get one on that trip. | ||
| But it was beautiful up there. | ||
| It was beautiful. | ||
| I love it up there. | ||
| It's the last frontier for real. | ||
| I'd go for it. | ||
| I'd go up there. | ||
| I'd go live up there. | ||
| Would you? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| My wife wouldn't, so I think we'll stay in Park City. | ||
| Um but I'd go up there for sure. | ||
| It's a crazy place. | ||
| It's Park City on steroids. | ||
| It's uh well without I mean not Park City, but it's not like the Utah Mountains. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's uh I mean it is so vast. | ||
| I love it. | ||
|
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|
I love it. | |
| When you're up there, you the feeling of insignificance when you realize like, oh, that's just us. | ||
| There's no people anywhere near us. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For a long time, for like a few hours in a plane. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| That's what we did when the Wrangle Mountains my last trip. | ||
| I think it was my last trip up there. | ||
| And uh see wolves? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Got a wolf, got a bear, got a moose all in one trip. | ||
|
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It was crazy. | |
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, big ones of everything too. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| Moose is awesome because you could eat that sucker for a whole year. | ||
| Yep, got it on it. | ||
| We gave but much of it to the guides and their families and all that stuff because there's so much to, you know, to take back. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| But uh yeah, that was John Dubin and uh and uh Frank LaCrone, who were also in Pineapple Brothers, but we went up there just to this to us and a guide, two guides that know what they're doing up there. | ||
| And uh did you guys fly in like a push plane? | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| It was fantastic. | ||
| Yeah, it was beautiful. | ||
| That was beautiful. | ||
| That was 2022, I think. | ||
| Oh sure, I mean everything's so vast, and I love Alaska. | ||
| I was trying my plan was to go to Alaska and Africa, like back to work every other year, and then uh that didn't happen. | ||
| 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 in some of these other states where they're talking about opening it up because like they 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 you you can't just have an unchecked population of animals, including predators. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, and they you know, all these fucking people are voting with their heart instead of like letting wildlife biologists say, no, no, this is actually bad for the animals for the overall population of them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And it's also gonna be bad for people and animals and people collide with a lot of mountain lines in California. | ||
|
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|
Of course. | |
| Utah's changed their laws. | ||
| Utah is it like they're like coyotes now. | ||
| Oh, is that right? | ||
| I didn't even know that. | ||
| Yeah, well, there's too many interactions. | ||
| Yeah, I got a big one a couple years ago. | ||
| One came on our neighbor's game cam, huge one came through, which is good because well fed. | ||
| And uh it's the one that they get skinny and you know, getting 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 and everybody's there, the kids are there, so I'm kinda like, oh man. | ||
| And I'm sure they've seen me a ton of times and I've never seen never seen that. | ||
| They've probably been watching you. | ||
| I gotta get my game cams up. | ||
| Gotta get those game cams up. | ||
| Uh I have a bunch of them. | ||
| I just need to figure out how to link them all up. | ||
| I need someone to help me link them all up and the Wi-Fi and the whole thing. | ||
| Well, they could set up with cell phones now. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That's what's cool. | ||
| So you get text messages every time something walks through your camera. | ||
| Yeah, I need to do that. | ||
| I put the about 25 different uh 3D targets up. | ||
| The archery challenge guys came up, so I have a course that I can I can walk that I that I don't usually do. | ||
| But uh that's great though. | ||
| That's great to just have in the backyard. | ||
| Yeah, that's awesome. | ||
| That's pretty sweet. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| But I want to get some game camps 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. | ||
| There are about two hundred turkeys, it seems probably like more like a hundred or fifty, but I'm but a lot come through every day. | ||
| So I do I do love it up there. | ||
| And uh, and you know if someone's up there that you know if they're shouldn't be there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And it was crazy. | ||
| That's uh sort of Charlie Kirk. | ||
| Remember, the only thing we had was that this guy was in black, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So everybody's on I'm on edge. | ||
| I'm like devastated by this thing. | ||
| I'm like really feeling it. | ||
| I met him once, uh, didn't know him, but I've our mutual friends who are who were very close to him. | ||
| So um so anyway, I was devastated by this thing. | ||
| And the kids saw it, so I'm devastated by that. | ||
| It's just you know, it's awful all the way around. | ||
| And uh there's a knock at our door, and I'm like, and this is like this is like the next day. | ||
| And I'm like, no one's supposed to be here. | ||
| Our gate was busted, so we're getting a whole new security system, but the gate was busted then, and uh and it's being fixed now. | ||
| So I'm like, what is this? | ||
| And I look at I can look out from a place where no one can see me, and it's this guy in all black. | ||
| Oh I knew it wasn't in my mind, I knew this isn't the person. | ||
| But you're hearing that's the only description. | ||
| This guy is head to toe black up in the mountains where I've never seen him before. | ||
| Like you have to work to get up to us. | ||
| And but his car was semi-nice parked outside. | ||
| I'm like, what is this? | ||
| I feel like an out here or something. | ||
| I'm like, this is weird. | ||
| And uh he was overweight, he didn't clearly didn't fit the description. | ||
| Right, but all black. | ||
| So I'm like on edge already. | ||
| And uh so I grabbed the pistol and uh go down to the door, and his back's to the door. | ||
| So you can't see his face. | ||
| So I'm like, what? | ||
| So I had the pistol behind my back, a little two two six behind my back, uh, because I can do some work with that thing. | ||
| And uh I'm like, yeah. | ||
| And he's like, Oh, we're doing some work around the corner with uh some some cement. | ||
| Do you need some any work with some men around here? | ||
| I'm like, No. | ||
| Like you're pretty nice to people. | ||
|
unidentified
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But I was I was like and he's okay. | |
| Walks by you guys just walk up people around here like that without an appointment. | ||
| Clearly at the gate is meant to keep people out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And you come up all dressed in black the day after this thing happens and you randomly knock on a door. | ||
| And you have your back to the door. | ||
| That's so weird. | ||
| Bizarre. | ||
| Do you know who the guy is? | ||
| No, I was just like, I mean he's doing he was doing some work on one of the other places. | ||
| You want to know if you need cement? | ||
| Needed some cement. | ||
| Isn't that odd? | ||
| But in my mind, I'm like, well, I was just casing for something. | ||
| That found where you are, and that was his excuse. | ||
| I didn't think about that. | ||
| I was more thinking about just the the uh description of the Charlie Kirk personality. | ||
| Yeah, like why do you have extra cement, dude? | ||
| Bizarre. | ||
| You knocking on people's doors asking if they need cement. | ||
| And I think it was really somebody hustling, like trying to do some work, like hanging man type stuff, whatever. | ||
| But that was that was crazy. | ||
| One other person came up to the house when they shouldn't have, and uh that was like it was very strange. | ||
| Uh and anyway, if you're in the mountains and someone visits you can't get away. | ||
| Especially in the middle of the night, like that was during the day. | ||
| But this other one was in the middle of the night. | ||
| The middle of the night, like how late. | ||
| Like midnight. | ||
| Oh Jesus. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And so that one I put the AR by the door, had the had the pistol, and uh and went over. | ||
| They were looking. | ||
| It ends up they were looking for another house up there. | ||
| But it was very bizarre. | ||
| Yeah, it's late, late in a storm. | ||
| Oh yeah, coming down. | ||
| So you're like, was this one of those things where you open the door and the other guys rush in? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Type of a thing because it was a lady stumbling down through the snow with what I thought was a headlamp ended up being her. | ||
| I saw a video like that online where this lady knocked on a door and a bunch of dudes came in. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So uh anyway, yeah. | ||
| So working on the new security system. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Get some uh uh but it's it's if you come knocking on the door, it's uh and you shouldn't be there. | ||
| People need to have a little more common sense. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Or you're gonna get, you know. | ||
| Isn't it terrible though that you have to think like that? | ||
| Like someone could just have a car broken down and just need help. | ||
| I know you have to be on edge completely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And if that was the case, of course I'd go up, but then you're still thinking like maybe someone's waiting to get you out of the house. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's gotta be smart. | ||
| Maybe call, hey, why don't you call some authorities up here and we'll just wait, you know? | ||
| We'll just get right here until they get here and they can help you with your car or whatever it was. | ||
| But um, yeah. | ||
| So trying to get a little better with the security type things. | ||
| Yeah, there's something about the woods and the mountains alone when you're by yourself that you worry about people coming to visit you anyway. | ||
| You worry about people just showing up. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's not natural. | ||
| No, and if you're a person that just shows up, you have to recognize that. | ||
| That that's a very vulnerable position. | ||
| Right. | ||
| By yourself in a house in the woods or with your family in a house in the woods, and you just show up while it's snowing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| This is a beginning of a movie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's a horrible movie. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So and when we lived in town, people did come by and kind of expect it. | ||
| You live in town, there's no role of security, whatever, you know, it's kind of like more expected. | ||
| That's more normal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you're way up there, and especially on the the guy dressed in work was weird. | ||
| Like when it gets darker, like when you're rather in in the woods and it gets darker, and then people show up. | ||
| Those people immediately seem like danger. | ||
| Suspect. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, that's the old instinct that kept us alive for so long. | ||
| Like, I need to be on edge here. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Until who's his friend or foe? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Type of a thing until you know. | ||
| Some invading tribe member of the night. | ||
| Until you absolutely know you're gonna uh err on the side of caution and protecting your life and the lives of your loved ones. | ||
| Well, listen, brother. | ||
| Oh man. | ||
| I'm very excited about this book. | ||
| I want to get into it. | ||
| Uh is the audio available, right? | ||
| Audio available, Ray Porter. | ||
| That's uh out right now. | ||
| And uh yeah, audio ebook hardcover. | ||
| I like how you went back to James Reese's day, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ah, there it is. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And we're pitching this to Amazon here, I think in the next month or so as a series, so you never know if it's gonna happen or not. | ||
| But uh that'd be a cool one. | ||
| I think people are ready for a uh another Vietnam style TV show or movie. | ||
| It's been a while. | ||
| It's been a while since we've had a good one. | ||
| At the very least, book. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I'm excited. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And this one was uh essentially it's a espionage thriller set in uh in Saigon, but set in in Southeast Asia uh more specifically. | ||
| And no one's really done that since Quiet American Graham Green, Tears of Autumn, uh and Graham Green was 1955, and uh Tears of Autumn was 1974, and and uh Jean Le Corre was the honorable school boy in 1977, So it's been a uh it's been a while. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Cry havoc. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Available right now. | ||
| Congratulations on everything, brother. | ||
| I'm very, very happy for you. | ||
| So great to see you. | ||
| This is awesome to see you killing out there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks, brother. | |
| Appreciate everything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
My pleasure. | |
| Bye everybody. |
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