May 22, 2022 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| It's crazy. | ||
| It's, uh, once again, if I was to write this, let's say 10 years ago as a political thriller, it would go in the science fiction, this dystopian thriller aisle at the bookstore. | ||
| No one would have believed it if I had written the exact same things that are going on in this country today and internationally and put that into a novel. | ||
| It would have been unbelievable. | ||
| The reviews on Amazon would say, ah, I can't believe any of this. | ||
| Uh, you know, this would never happen. | ||
| That sort of thing. | ||
| One star. | ||
| But lo and behold, look what's going on. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is a Navy SEAL sniper, a number one New York Times bestselling | ||
| author and now author of the brand new book, In the Blood, Jack Carr. | ||
| Finally, welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me on. | ||
| Great to see you. | ||
| I have wanted to have you on for quite some time. | ||
| First off, I gotta say, I had to say number one New York Times best-selling author even though the New York Times left me off their bestseller list Just weeks ago, but you got the number one spot. | ||
| It's still credit to you. | ||
| So it sort of stabbed me a little bit I'm kind of in the blood right now, but you deserve the credit and I went ahead and did it anyway Well, I sincerely appreciate that and as we know, you know, it's hard the number one and number two maybe number three slots on that list like it's hard for them to ignore and But they have some flexibility down there with those other ones. | ||
| As an editorial, I think it was found, I don't know, 30, 40, 50 years ago, whenever that was brought up to the court. | ||
| So they have a little flexibility there. | ||
| But that's why the goal has to always be number one, so they can't ignore you. | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| Well, you did get number one. | ||
| It says it right here. | ||
| I just said to you before we started, the cover of this book is just awesome. | ||
| The colors, it just freaking hits. | ||
| You got a couple of them behind you. | ||
| So first off, I just got to start with, I mean, your whole operation there, I'm feeling very stuffy right now. | ||
| You are obviously, you are in your bunker somewhere safe. | ||
| What's going on over there? | ||
| This is true. | ||
| Undisclosed location, but I like to be surrounded by things that mean a lot to me. | ||
| The crossed Winkler tomahawks that are used in the book and that Amazon actually allowed us to use in the series and feature prominently with Chris Pratt that's coming out this summer. | ||
| But I probably like this one. | ||
| This is Hemingway's typewriter right here. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| A movable feast on this. | ||
| It went up for auction with a bunch of other Hemingway stuff in January, early February of 2020. | ||
| So right before the COVID panic really hit. | ||
| And a fan got it for me and didn't want to be recognized, but knew I had this just fan of Hemingway and thought that I would enjoy this and that I would appreciate it. | ||
| And so they sent it to me with all the documentation and the whole thing. | ||
| And yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| So that inspires me as I write. | ||
| Man, you know you've done something right in life when someone you don't know buys you Ernest Hemingway's typewriter. | ||
| It's crazy, crazy. | ||
| Pretty solid, pretty solid. | ||
| So for my audience that does not know you or only knows about you from your writing, et cetera, et cetera, give me a little bit of the history, the Navy SEAL, all that stuff, because you have pretty extraordinary history yourself. | ||
| Well, I appreciate that. | ||
| And yeah, I feel very fortunate in that I always knew I wanted to serve my country in uniform. | ||
| Very early age, my grandfather, Served in World War II and didn't make it home. | ||
| He was killed in the Pacific in May of 1945. | ||
| But I grew up with the maps that they used to give aviators back then, which were silk, so that if they got wet, you could still use them and they didn't disintegrate like paper. | ||
| Pictures of him and his squadron, his medals, his wings. | ||
| He was a Marine aviator. | ||
| So I was just drawn to the military from a very early age. | ||
| And then at the ripe old age of seven, I found out about SEALS. | ||
| And my mom was a librarian, so we went down to the local library to do some research. | ||
| And there wasn't very much written about SEALs or special operations back then. | ||
| There were a few articles here and there, a couple of chapters in a book or two. | ||
| But my takeaway was that, hey, these guys are some of the most elite special operators in the world, and the training is some of the toughest ever devised by a modern military. | ||
| So whether that was true or not, a seven-year-old Jack was all in, and the recruiter had to do nothing, essentially. | ||
| I made their job very easy. | ||
| So I kept my eyes on that for really my entire life. | ||
| But I also started reading the books that my parents were reading in about fifth grade. | ||
| That's when Tom Clancy's Hunt for Red October comes out, and I'm reading David Morrell, and Nelson DeMille, and H.J. | ||
| Quinnell, and J.C. | ||
| Pollock, and Mark Olden, and all these guys whose protagonists, whose main characters, had backgrounds in Vietnam. | ||
| Either as, like, Marine snipers back then, or it was Navy SEALs, or Army Special Forces, or CIA paramilitary. | ||
| That was the typical background of your 80s action hero in the thriller genre, and then on screen as well. | ||
| It was so magical for me to read these books. | ||
| And I, those guys were really my, uh, my professors in the art of storytelling, although I didn't look at it like that at the time they were, I was just a fan. | ||
| And I knew that after my time in the military, I would write books like this, the books that I was enjoying as a kid growing up. | ||
| So I never stopped that reading, never stopped that studying of warfare, whether, uh, terrorism, insurgencies, counterinsurgencies, special operations, uh, that was all just a part of my upbringing. | ||
| And it was part of the foundation that allowed me to be the operator that I was the leader that I was in the SEAL teams. | ||
| And then. | ||
| All of that comes together as I'm getting out to write these thrillers. | ||
| So I did 20 years on the SEAL team, started out enlisted, was a sniper, then became an officer, finished up as a troop commander, and interestingly enough, that's where the reader meets my protagonist in my first novel. | ||
| He's a troop commander on his way out, and then disaster and conspiracy strikes, and off we go to the races. | ||
| Crazy how those things connect, huh? | ||
| It is, and it wasn't the intent. | ||
| I thought there were going to be two separate chapters in life. | ||
| But when I sat down to write that first one, it became readily apparent that it was going to be more than just the technical details of a sniper weapon system or something like that. | ||
| It was really the emotions and the feelings behind certain events that I was involved in that I could bring to a completely fictional narrative. | ||
| So if my main character, James Reese, is getting ambushed in Los Angeles, I can go back and remember what it was like to be ambushed in Baghdad in 2006 at the height of the war. | ||
| And I can take those feelings and emotions and apply them to this completely fictional narrative, which is why I think it stood out to Simon & Schuster. | ||
| who sees thousands of books like these cross their desks every year. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| Give me, give me like the best and worst moment of, of being a seal. | ||
| I suspect I can guess the worst, but maybe, maybe the best. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The worst obviously is, uh, you know, when your friend doesn't make it home and you go to those funerals and you pound your trident into the coffin and you see that widow or the kids. | ||
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Um, and so that's obviously the worst part of it. | |
| Um, but, uh, the best part of it, gosh, you know, I never really thought of the best part of it, but I think it's the entire experience in that you are, you have a purpose, you have a mission. | ||
| Uh, your passion is being the best operator that you can possibly be. | ||
| Uh, you owe that to the guys to your right and left, to their families, uh, to the team, to the country as a whole, to that entire, entire mission. | ||
| So I think it's that, I guess it would be the, uh, having that purpose that is so clearly defined. | ||
| And when you're downrange, being solely focused on that task at hand, and not having to worry about anything else, not worrying about the leaky faucet, or the gutters, or the baby that's crying, or whatever it is, you are solely focused on that task at hand, building patterns of life on your targeted individuals, and then going out and grabbing them in the middle of the night to bring them back, ask them a couple questions, and then go take out the rest of that network. | ||
| So, having that purpose that is so clear, I think, is probably one of the best parts. | ||
| So one of the things that I'm always amazed by is that those of you guys that have been in the military, been SEALs, been in the Navy, whatever it is, or people that have been in the CIA, the FBI. | ||
| Just a couple of weeks ago, I had Brian Dean Wright on the show. | ||
| I don't know if you know who he is, but he's a former CIA guy. | ||
| People that get out and then do things that are ancillarily related to this, whether it's talking on YouTube for a living, whether it's writing books that are either fiction or nonfiction, everything else, how do you blend You know some stuff that they probably don't want you to talk about. | ||
| There's a way that you have to fictionize some of these things. | ||
| You don't want to get in trouble. | ||
| You don't want to become a character in one of your books. | ||
| How do you take all of those things and make it honest and sensible and also, you know, not so you're going to get yourself killed, literally? | ||
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Right. | |
| So a lot of people think on the outside looking in that Navy SEALs know all sorts of secret stuff. | ||
| You know, maybe there's a couple of things here and there, but really what we're doing is what every major city SWAT team is going to do tonight. | ||
| They're going to go serve a warrant. | ||
| They're going to go do a do either a no knock or a knock warrant somewhere. | ||
| They're going to bust in and they're going to grab a fugitive. | ||
| So we're doing that same thing, except ours happened to be in Baghdad or Kabul or somewhere somewhere like that. | ||
| And we have a few more maybe assets at our disposal to build these, these targets, uh, build these target packages and then go prosecute these targets. | ||
| But there's not much secret about it. | ||
| I mean, you're just, you're going up and kicking a door in the middle of the night and grabbing somebody out of their bed, essentially. | ||
| Uh, and, uh, but, but, you know, uh, I still wanted to make sure that I was, uh, complying with all the, everything that I'd signed in the military and I didn't want to give anything, anything away. | ||
| And at the, I was still closely related, closely connected to my military time for that first novel. | ||
| So I submitted it. | ||
| I got some lawyers and they said, yeah, we recommend you submit this. | ||
| So I did. | ||
| And they took out, I think like nine sentences. | ||
| So not, not much. | ||
| It was pretty good. | ||
| And they came back to me with, uh, 45 days. | ||
| They advertise, uh, 30 and what you sign says they will get back to you in 30. | ||
| They got back to me in 45. | ||
| I thought that was pretty good for, uh, for the government. | ||
| So I did the second one as well. | ||
| That one, monmouth went by, then two, then three, then four, then seven. | ||
| And we had to push the publication date. | ||
| Uh, and they got back and they took out 54 sentences, passages, words, So at this point I can afford a little bit, afford some more attorney fees. | ||
| So we go and we appeal and we tie each and every one of those redactions to a publicly available government document. | ||
| So not to someone's book or to Wikipedia, but something anyone in the world can download from our very own government. | ||
| They let me win on 37. | ||
| So now you can go to the paperback and you can look in there and you compare it to the hardcover and you can see what they were concerned about, but that I won on appeal. | ||
| One of those things that made up a completely fictitious CIA black site in Morocco. | ||
| They took out Morocco, they took out Moorish architecture, they took out the Atlas Mountains, they took out everything that could pinpoint what country. | ||
| And I had no, in my military experience, no touch points with Moroccan intelligence services or military or anything like that. | ||
| I just made it up. | ||
| But by doing that appeal, what are they telling us? | ||
| Well, now they're telling us that there's probably a CIA black site. | ||
| So if they'd done nothing, it would have been more beneficial to them than had they gone through this process. | ||
| So I did that for the first three novels. | ||
| The third one, when we appealed, they got back and said, hey, we're not going to let you appeal. | ||
| And I took that as, you know, quit bothering us, kid, with this fiction. | ||
| We're not going to let you appeal. | ||
| That's probably the best thing you can hear from the government. | ||
| I'll take it. | ||
| So the next one was, I went deep down the rabbit hole in my fourth one into bioweapons and bioweapons research. | ||
| And so I'm glad I didn't submit that one. | ||
| Once again, I had no touch points with bioweapons in the military, but I went deep down the rabbit hole. | ||
| And then on this one, I'm in the blood, deep down the rabbit hole on quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and mass data surveillance and data storage of US citizens. | ||
| And that was more terrifying than the bioweapons research that I did on the previous novel. | ||
| That sort of tells you everything you need to know about that. | ||
| So you're making the movie, and as you mentioned, Chris Pratt is gonna be in the movie. | ||
| And Chris Pratt, who's an awesome actor, and what I think is so interesting about him, is the guy has managed to stay in Hollywood despite his politics being outside of the norm of Hollywood. | ||
| How involved were you in the casting and just the creation of the movie? | ||
| Because obviously you writing a book Exactly. | ||
| I didn't know what to expect going in. | ||
| over there, or I don't know how, I can't say little, but your very cool operation over there is very different | ||
| than when you hand your baby over to Hollywood and Hollywood may not be so in line | ||
| with perhaps some of the things in the book, perhaps the type of people that you want involved, | ||
| et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| Exactly. I didn't know what to expect going in. | ||
| Just like I didn't know what to expect from Simon and Schuster going in. | ||
| I thought, you know, they might want to change everything and give me some, at least maybe hint | ||
| Do you really have to put this in there about the Second Amendment? | ||
| Or does your character really have to think this way? | ||
| They have never even hinted at me changing anything. | ||
| I've had complete creative control, which is amazing. | ||
| But when you option something, especially when it's before your first novel even hits shelves, you're not really getting from a position of strength. | ||
| And so they have all the rights can do whatever they want. | ||
| And so when you're in that position, there's a lot of trust involved. | ||
| And I was so lucky that I had Chris Pratt and Swan Fuqua as the director, an incredible showrunner. | ||
| And the three of us just got together in the beginning. | ||
| And what was important to all of us was keeping that dark, gritty, violent, primal nature of the book, because that's really what resonated with people and broke it out from maybe others in the genre. | ||
| But the way that Chris Pratt even found out about it before it hit shelves is interesting, in that I got a call from a SEAL buddy in November of 2017, so a few months before the book's going to come out. | ||
| And first he asked if I remembered him, which I did. | ||
| And then he asked if I remembered what I did for him in the SEAL teams, which I did not. | ||
| And he said, uh, you're the only person that sat me down in your office, helped me through the transitioning out of the military, introduced me to people in the private sector. | ||
| Nobody else did that. | ||
| Always wanted to say you. | ||
| And I said, how's it going? | ||
| And he said, well, it's going great, but I heard you wrote a book. | ||
| And I said, yeah, it's coming out in a few months. | ||
| I can send you a galley copy. | ||
| It's like a rough draft thing. | ||
| And, uh, and he said, yeah, I'd like that, but I'd like to give it to a friend of mine. | ||
| And I said, who's that? | ||
| And he said, Chris Pratt. | ||
| And what was even more interesting about that is that as I was writing, I thought of Chris Pratt playing the main character, and I thought of Antoine Fuqua directing. | ||
| And another Steel Buddy got it to Antoine Fuqua, who wanted it, and Chris and Antoine wanted it at the same time, so finally Antoine called Chris and said, let's do this together, and now we're all executive producers on this thing. | ||
| It's a credit to Amazon for the things that they could, well, they were concerned about a few things from the book, but really all that ended up being was concern. | ||
| And once we talked about different scenes that we needed in there and wanted to have in there that the fans would want in there, they came down on the right side of it each and every time as uncomfortable as it may have been for them. | ||
| They sided with us and it's all in there. | ||
| So I couldn't be happier with how that worked out. | ||
| What do you make of the state of sort of the, well, what do you, what do you call the genre actually? | ||
| You call it like military thriller or like, what are you? | ||
| If you have to put it in something, it's a political thriller for the most part, but there's all sorts of thrillers out there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a lot of legal thrillers and medical thrillers. | ||
| Dystopian thrillers and all that stuff. | ||
| But yeah, it's a political thriller. | ||
| So political thrillers and I think of the more in certain, like there's certain political ones that are very much in the politics part and then ones that are a little more in the military part. | ||
| I can think of so many, you mentioned Tom Clancy, I mean I can think of so many incredible movies from the 80s or really sort of early 90s that were just like, there were just every other week there was just another awesome movie. | ||
| You mentioned Hunt for Red October. | ||
| What do you make of the state of the genre right now? | ||
| Because, you know, everything is so politicized these days. | ||
| I find when I open up Netflix or Hulu or Amazon, for me personally as a politics guy, I'm often trying to avoid politics a little bit. | ||
| That's just me. | ||
| But what do you make of the general state of things? | ||
| And I'm a guy, I love explosions, I love thrillers, I love all of these movies. | ||
| I'm just curious what your take on that is. | ||
| Yeah, it was something that I was concerned about going in that other people that were involved in the project were concerned about as well, because as we all know, if you scrolled through any of the streaming platforms or gone to a movie recently, it seems like a lot of the movies are made for people in LA or New York and forget about everyone in between. | ||
| So we really wanted to make sure we didn't forget about everybody in between. | ||
| And it was interesting in that a lot of people's view of Hollywood comes from seeing maybe a clip of the Academy Awards or Golden Globes and sets an actor, a director, or producer on stage saying something kind of crazy. | ||
| And you're kind of like, Oh, Hollywood people are all totally weird. | ||
| And I'm like, goodness, I can see where this is going. | ||
| Um, but on set it was, I had 350 people on set making this, uh, series. | ||
| It's an eight part series, uh, for, for Amazon. | ||
| And, uh, I admit this thing called video village. | ||
| So the executive producers, we have our screens and we have our headphones on and we can watch what's going on and make notes and, and all the rest of it. | ||
| And the other executive producer told me they hadn't seen this before. | ||
| But so many people on that set would come up, track me down there, and the hair and makeup person would come in and say, hey, my son is going to boot camp tomorrow. | ||
| He's a huge fan. | ||
| He follows you on Instagram. | ||
| Would you sign a book? | ||
| And I always had a big box of books there. | ||
| I would sign away. | ||
| Or someone would come up and say, hey, my son's going on his first deployment. | ||
| Can you sign this for him? | ||
| And absolutely. | ||
| And so we talk about guns. | ||
| We talk about land cruisers. | ||
| We talk about knives. | ||
| We talk about hunting. | ||
| And just normal people talk. | ||
| What was so extraordinary is that they're so good at their job, but also they just want to put food on their family's table. | ||
| And these are just normal Americans that are working hard. | ||
| And we had American flags up, all the Teamsters truck had their American flags flying, and it was a special set. | ||
| And people made a point to tell me that they've been on hundreds of sets and they've never felt one that was as open and welcoming and encouraging and positive and just a cool and American as this one. | ||
| And I thought that was, that made me feel good anyway. | ||
| I can tell you as somebody that just fled Los Angeles after eight years there, there were an awful lot of people that I knew that were in the biz that were waking up, you know, that were sort of lefties their whole life or were into a lot of the craziness. | ||
| And suddenly they were going, wait a minute, I can't get a job because I'm a 60 something year old white guy, or I don't fit this diversity thing or something else. | ||
| Or the street that they live on was burning down and they suddenly got guns. | ||
| I was one of those people in LA that didn't have guns before all this craziness. | ||
| And then suddenly reality hits you in the face and you kind of change your view on things. | ||
| Yeah, I got so many texts when first when COVID hit and people were a little worried about, hey, is there gonna be food on the shelf? | ||
| Or is somebody gonna be there at the other end of when I call 911? | ||
| And then of course, when the summer of civil unrest hit us a few months later, the same thing, I was getting texts and phone calls and emails from people in California in particular, asking about what gun should I get? | ||
| and then them being surprised that they just can't run down and just get one. | ||
| Most people pay cash and walk out with one the same day, or why they couldn't get ammunition | ||
| sent to their house in Los Angeles. | ||
| These things were a shock to a lot of people who just, from what you think in the news, | ||
| is that, oh yeah, anybody can just walk in, you walk out with some fully automatic boom boom | ||
| and stacks of ammo and all that stuff, yet they've been voting people into office there | ||
| for so long that they don't have those rights anymore. | ||
| They've outsourced those to a government that is surrounded, whose leaders are surrounded | ||
| by taxpayer-funded security when they're trying to take your rights away. | ||
| And we see that, of course, all across the country now, but California, Chicago, of course, | ||
| a couple of other places, New York, stands out, stand out from the crowd in that regard. | ||
| So I did get a lot of phone calls like that, and there were a lot of shocked people | ||
| that they couldn't just go in and get any firearm that they wanted. | ||
| You are preaching my language, brother. | ||
| Actually, I can't say who it is out loud, but when all hell was breaking loose in LA, I happened to say on the show one day, I'm thinking about getting guns for the first time. | ||
| And I got a call from a major Hollywood sitcom star, a woman, who would never want me to say her name on air. | ||
| And she said, hey, if you need guns, let me know. | ||
| And she ended up connecting me with people, and that's how I was able to get guns. | ||
| Because yeah, you're right, you couldn't get ammo either in LA, because so many people We're flipping on all of this stuff. | ||
| Do you feel a certain... Sorry, go ahead. | ||
| You couldn't even order it. | ||
| You can't even order and get it delivered in Los Angeles. | ||
| I think that's just a county thing. | ||
| But anyway, yeah, they make it extremely difficult. | ||
| In the military, it would be like motorcycles on base. | ||
| So they didn't want you to ride a motorcycle on base. | ||
| First they did, okay, you have to take this course. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So you have to take like three days to take, take this course. | ||
| So, okay. | ||
| You're going to take this course. | ||
| You have to do like an up, you do it every year. | ||
| And then you have to have gloves. | ||
| You have to have shoes that cover your ankle. | ||
| You have to have long sleeves, helmet, reflector vests. | ||
| They started adding all these administrative requirements. | ||
| And finally it's like, okay, you win. | ||
| I'm exhausted. | ||
| My whole, this whole year is going to be trying to figure out how to ride my motorcycle onto base here. | ||
| You're fine. | ||
| You've got it. | ||
| So that's kind of what governments do to try to make it, if they, oh, we're not making guns illegal, well, you're making them administratively impossible to get, like you've done with concealed carry permits in a lot of states. | ||
| That's actually a perfect segue to what I wanted to get to next, relative to just generally what's going on with the military. | ||
| What do you make of the state of the military at the moment and the state of the way that it seems politics has really infected the military, at least in the last, say, five, 10 years? | ||
| It didn't seem it did before. | ||
| Maybe we didn't know about it before. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| So, uh, obviously politics has been creeping into all aspects of our culture for a long time. | ||
| Uh, people like to point to Hollywood, but Hey, look at there's, there's wall street more and more into sports. | ||
| I mean, almost every as education, of course, um, literally every aspect of society, we thought the military was immune from that. | ||
| And, uh, we found out the last couple of years that it is most certainly not. | ||
| Um, and really not even talking about that, the wokeness in the military or anything like that. | ||
| We can just go and look at 20 years of our experience in Iraq and Afghanistan and how none of our senior military leaders have been held accountable for the decisions that they made. | ||
| And we can go back and look at each and every one of these guys with stars on their shoulders, sitting in front of Congress, saying the exact same things year after year. | ||
| You can take the year off there and it's a different person, but the audio will be exactly the same. | ||
| Meeting our milestones. | ||
| The Afghan National Army is getting closer to being able to stand up on their own. | ||
| We just need more resources, more people, more funding, more equipment, whatever it is. | ||
| And then the Afghanistan Papers was published, and I hope more people read the Afghanistan Papers by Craig Whitlock, because what he does is takes these interviews that these senior level leaders thought were going to remain classified, juxtaposes it with what they were saying in front of Congress, so to the American people, to Congress, to their troops, and essentially you have Two separate stories, one idiot from one another. | ||
| And so they are essentially lying to their troops, lying to Congress, lying to the American people. | ||
| And these senior level leaders continue to fail up. | ||
| And we see what happens when we continue to do that year after year and hold no senior level leaders accountable. | ||
| We have a withdrawal from Afghanistan that looks like what we saw last August, which the media, of course, doesn't even talk about anymore. | ||
| But we all got to watch with our own eyes. | ||
| And it's also why everyone in this country with a little bit of common sense could could comment on it. | ||
| Because you didn't need to have a touchpoint with the military or study strategy or tactics or military history at all. | ||
| You could just look at that and apply some common sense, which is something that Karl von Clausewitz said was most important aspect of any military leader, any combat leader is having common sense. | ||
| And so anyone could look at that and say, why are we giving up this tactically advantageous position at Bagram and putting America's sons and daughters in a tactically disadvantageous position when we've had 20 years to prepare for this eventuality and this is the best the United States | ||
| military can do. This is the best that we have. This is what we are giving our sons and | ||
| daughters as we're putting them in this position. Now if you've done that at the tactical level as | ||
| an old three so as a captain in the army or lieutenant in the navy or something like that or as a | ||
| chief in the navy or something a sergeant you'd be court-martialed sent home if you just and our | ||
| senior level leaders what do they do they All those people are still in those positions. | ||
| If they've retired, they're on the board at Raytheon or General Dynamics or something like that. | ||
| So when we look at lobbyists and politicians and think tanks and that military industrial complex, that's a real thing. | ||
| That's an animal. | ||
| And when it's not held to check and no one's held accountable, you get things like the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, essentially rushing to our death. | ||
| After 20 years of being able to prepare and plan for that eventuality, it's inexcusable. | ||
| So I don't know if you know this about me, but every August I go off the grid for a month. | ||
| No phone, no news, no communication with the outside world. | ||
| I literally disappear for a month. | ||
| So this past August, obviously, was the Afghanistan withdrawal. | ||
| So I did not know that until September 1st. | ||
| I come back and I have a guest host. | ||
| It was Adam Carolla this past year, who kind of caught me up to speed on everything. | ||
| So I was seeing all those videos, you know, two weeks later, all in real time for the first time in front of my audience. | ||
| And what I said to Adam watching them in real time was, from what I could tell, just seeing it all right in front of me, right at that moment, all at once, That this could not have been worse. | ||
| That if you had intentionally tried to bungle something at the highest level, that that's pretty much what it would have looked like. | ||
| Do you think that's a fair estimation? | ||
| I mean, 20 years from now, when we look back on this thing, what do you think the post-mortem is gonna look like? | ||
| Well, if it's honest, it's gonna be exactly what you just said right there. | ||
| You could not have bungled this worse had you actually been trying. | ||
| And once again, it's that accountability piece. | ||
| You know, what we had, we had 20 years of our own experience to look back on, to, uh, to take lessons from, to apply going forward as wisdom. | ||
| We didn't even have to go back to the Soviets. | ||
| I mean, we should have earlier on gone back to 79 to 89, the Soviet experience in Afghanistan. | ||
| We didn't have to go back to the three British incursions in the 1800s, early 1900s. | ||
| Certainly didn't have to go back to Alexander, the great Genghis Khan, although we could have, and we could have taken lessons from all of those things. | ||
| and apply them to our present situation as wisdom. Yet we did not. We think of things in terms of | ||
| four-year election cycles, eight-year election cycles for the real deep thinkers among us, | ||
| but what we neglect to do is go back in the pages of history, take those lessons, | ||
| and apply them going forward. And that's obviously the detriment of our sons and daughters who are | ||
| out there on the front line. And we saw in Afghanistan, 13 lost their lives, to say nothing | ||
| of those who lost arms and legs and can't walk anymore, or are dealing with the post-traumatic | ||
| stress or traumatic brain injury from a position that they were put in by our senior level leaders. | ||
| Is it crazy to you how quickly we just move off things like that? | ||
| I mean, as you said, it was the longest war in American history. | ||
| We were there for 20 years. | ||
| It was very unclear to a lot of people sort of why we were there and how it was connected to 9-11 and all of that stuff. | ||
| But that basically, we had two or three weeks of sort of news cycle and outrage, and now it's completely not talked about. | ||
| And, you know, we've got this situation in Ukraine right now, and it's like, do our allies trust us? | ||
| Does anyone believe what we're doing? | ||
| Do we have the right people in charge? | ||
| Any of that. | ||
| Yeah, no, those are valid, valid questions. | ||
| And as it pertains to what's going on in Afghanistan vis-a-vis, or in Ukraine vis-a-vis Russia, once again, we had a lot of data in which to look at and predict what was going to happen. | ||
| In my second novel, True Believer, I actually use a false flag operation that came out in 2019, but I use a false flag operation to instigate a Russian invasion of Ukraine. | ||
| And I got that just by studying the situation at the time. | ||
| So I was writing that in Uh, 2016, 2017, um, editing it in 2018. | ||
| So it could come out in 2019, but, uh, that research should have shown anybody that, Hey, this is essentially inevitable because the, uh, the Russian population, uh, is in a steep decline. | ||
| It has been since the end of the cold war. | ||
| And they are very, a couple of generations away from there being no ethnic Russians. | ||
| And they're certainly very close to not being able to field an army and the numbers that they have had have been able to in the past. | ||
| Uh, and at the time it was about 2022. | ||
| Uh, there's actually a book, uh, called the accidental superpower ball. | ||
| Peter, Peter Zeon, who looks at geography and demographics as far as world history and superpowers and how that has, has played in. | ||
| And, uh, yeah, 2022 was about the last year that, uh, Russia had before they would not be able to field an army capable of invading Ukraine because they need those ethnic Russians. | ||
| and Ukraine has the largest population of ethnic Russians in the world outside of Russia. | ||
| So these things were predictable. | ||
| And then of course, we can go back to World War I, World War II, end of the Cold War, promises made. | ||
| We rarely put ourselves in our enemy's shoes and red game things from that position, | ||
| red sell things from that position. | ||
| But we should do that more often because we'd make wiser decisions. | ||
| What do you think the role of the American military should be at this point? | ||
| It seems like it really has sort of changed, or it seemed like it was changing at least, you know, under Trump. | ||
| There basically, there was a lot of peace. | ||
| There was a lot of like, oh, if we mess with this guy, we don't know what he's gonna do. | ||
| You remember he dropped that mother of all bombs in Iraq. | ||
| Nobody understood why. | ||
| And it was like, well, it got pretty quiet there pretty quick. | ||
| And now we're in this Ukraine situation. | ||
| What do you think the general role of America worldwide should be? | ||
| Well, it should be one of respect and fear that goes along with that. | ||
| Because that that military is really what backs like the Second Amendment to the First Amendment. | ||
| The military backs up everything that we say and that we do. | ||
| So if we have this strong military, that is more concerned with other people's borders rather than than our own. | ||
| Well, essentially, we're seeing an invasion across our southern border right now that's Once again, not really talked about in the mainstream press. | ||
| It's been for quite some time. | ||
| But we have all sorts of issues like that. | ||
| And if we have a Department of Defense after World War Two, it used to be the Department of War, the War Department. | ||
| Then it changed in 1947. | ||
| And really, since then, we haven't done very well in conflicts. | ||
| And that's the exact same time that accountability shifted. | ||
| And by shifted, I mean that we started Not holding our senior level leaders accountable when we talk about George Marshall, he's most known for the Marshall Plan after World War Two. | ||
| But really, what's more important is what he did in their lead up to World War Two and during World War Two, which were fire those leaders who didn't cut it. | ||
| So he put all those guys in positions whose names we know today. | ||
| As leading us through that led us through World War II to victory. | ||
| Um, but had he not done that and just let those people who are in those places that weren't cutting it, I mean, who knows how World War II would have turned out, but he fired people that didn't cut it after World War II. | ||
| And we shift over to the department of defense, things start to change Korea, Vietnam, and obviously what we see today. | ||
| And we, for whatever reason, we're hesitant to hold these senior level leaders accountable. | ||
| Um, but we can trace it all the way back to the end of World War II and, uh, in 1947. | ||
| But today, we're in an interesting position in that, yes, we have a technological, we have 20 years of experience, and we have this technology that has just been racing forward when it comes to our weapon systems. | ||
| And so we take those tactical lessons learned, take these new weapons and the technology as far as tracking and targeting and all the rest of it, we should have the most feared military on the planet. | ||
| yet we have a border that's just porous, essentially. | ||
| And we see what we saw in Afghanistan. | ||
| So with all that technology, all those lessons, we still get that outcome in Afghanistan. | ||
| So if I'm the enemy and I'm looking at that, that gives me some wiggle room | ||
| and that gives me some lessons learned to apply to my future battle plans | ||
| that probably go more than four to eight years in advance. | ||
| I can think decades. | ||
| I can think even centuries if I'm China, and I can apply these lessons to those battle plans. | ||
| So it's not that hopeful, I sense is what you're saying. | ||
| Well, my audience knows, I always try to, I try to talk about the serious stuff and then I try to, there's gotta be something on the horizon, some hope. | ||
| I mean, what are some of the mechanisms we could do to fix some of this stuff? | ||
| I mean, I don't sense that this administration is gonna go in and fix the things you're talking about, because they seem to be aiding and abetting it. | ||
| You talk about the Southern border, it's like, they're the ones that are freaking opening this thing up. | ||
| 900,000 new people, roughly, in the country in the last year. | ||
| According to Mayorkas from the Department of Homeland Security. | ||
| So, like, what are some of the things that maybe could be done to reverse some of the damage here? | ||
| Yeah, first, like, the top three things, holding senior level leaders accountable, just like you hold junior level leaders or soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines accountable. | ||
| So that's one, that sends a message. | ||
| Because when you don't, what message does that send to those people who want to put a star on their shoulder or want to put another one? | ||
| On their shoulder, you're sending a message regardless of which one of those things that you do. | ||
| So holding those guys accountable, one of the top priorities. | ||
| Next one, border, sealing that border, that has to happen. | ||
| And then third, biggest one is becoming less reliant on China, particularly where it comes to technology side of the house and pharmaceutical side of the house. | ||
| So things that we're, I mean, it's just insane that we are reliant on essentially our enemy for things that are paramount to our national security. | ||
| So those three things right there, and they seem so simple. | ||
| Once again, apply common sense to this problem. | ||
| I mean, that's what I did on the battlefield. | ||
| You just look at the chaos that's going on. | ||
| You look for gaps in the enemy's defenses. | ||
| You look to capitalize on momentum. | ||
| You look to adapt because the enemy is certainly adapting to you. | ||
| That's what I do in the pages of my novels. | ||
| And you can do that same thing looking strategically at an issue. | ||
| So those three things, I think, are as simple as they sound, somehow escape The, I don't know, the thought process and the strategies being put forth by our senior level elected officials, not leaders. | ||
| I'd like to make sure that I differentiate that. | ||
| Indeed, they are elected. | ||
| I'll grant them that. | ||
| Leaders, I'm not so sure, at least this current crop. | ||
| Are you kind of amazed though at the level of incompetence or just general ridiculousness? | ||
| I mean, during the State of the Union Address, Biden's talking about COVID and he keeps saying, we're gonna get everybody, you know, COVID tests. | ||
| And then he's also saying that we're going to, you know, we're going to be making things in America again. | ||
| He's suddenly repeating a lot of the Trump stuff. | ||
| But, you know, when Trump said it, it was racist. | ||
| Now it's not racist. | ||
| OK. | ||
| And then the tests show up at everybody's house if you ask for them. | ||
| And you're not going to believe where they were made. | ||
| Made in China. | ||
| Can you believe it? | ||
| Like that level of disconnect between I think this is what you're getting to. | ||
| They say one thing. | ||
| Then the stuff shows up at your door. | ||
| Oh, COVID test made in China. | ||
| We can't even make the COVID test here. | ||
| This is one of the two big things you were talking about, although it was mostly about Ukraine. | ||
| Yes, no, the made in China, I think when they first gave, they changed Rangers in the army to Tanberets. | ||
| And I think when those first bats showed up, they all said made in China. | ||
| And I think this is pre-September 11th. | ||
| You know, I'm going back into memory banks a little bit here, but I seem to remember that being an issue. | ||
| But the levels of incompetence, Across the board and it's sad that I have to include the | ||
| military in that but for sure in the political space Um, I mean, it's it's staggering. Um, but I think what we're | ||
| getting are people that uh, It's well, it's interesting the people that are called to | ||
| serve our nation as politicians also happen to be very savvy investors | ||
| It's it's incredible It's it's so strange. Uh, they uh enter politics and you | ||
| know, they get 60 grand a year 100 grand a year 120 and then | ||
| You know leave with the bank account significantly | ||
| fuller than when they entered because of some very savvy investment moves. | ||
| So there there is that. | ||
| But the levels of incompetence and the hypocrisy that is just ignored by most of the media. | ||
| And that means and this all also ties into big tech, where you can now control Not only behaviors, but thoughts. | ||
| So it's not just buying something. | ||
| It is, it's controlling our thoughts now. | ||
| Um, and that part is, uh, is then of course, now we have the ministry of truth and this misinformation homeland security department. | ||
| I mean, oh my goodness. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's, uh, once again, if I was to write this, let's say 10 years ago as a political thriller, it would go in the science fiction and this dystopian thriller aisle at the bookstore. | ||
| No one would have believed it if I had written the exact same things that are going on in this country today and internationally. | ||
| And put that into a novel, it would have been unbelievable. | ||
| The reviews on Amazon would say, ah, can't believe any of this. | ||
| You know, this would never happen. | ||
| That sort of thing. | ||
| One star. | ||
| But lo and behold, look what's going on. | ||
| So with all that in mind, although I sense that you're above ground because I think I can see a window, or at least a reflection of a window over there, my guess is that you're a little bit of a prepper to a certain degree and that you're obviously at least self-reliant to a fairly high degree, let's say. | ||
| What do you recommend people kind of do in terms of not being so reliant on all of these systems that don't really seem to be working that well? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I've always been into being prepared in general. | ||
| Cause I was a little kid. | ||
| It just was natural to me. | ||
| And as I put more thought into it, as I got older, it, uh, I realized that, Hey, for only a very slim portion of human history, have we been able to outsource our protection by calling 911 or having a standing military? | ||
| Um, and then also being able to outsource where our food comes from and just having something that's wrapped in cellophane that's labeled meat of some sort that you grab off the shelf and throw in a car without a second thought of where it comes from, what went into getting that. | ||
| To the to the shelf, we become very comfortable in this country. | ||
| And for whatever reason, my whole life, I've recognized that and just taken steps to be as self-reliant as I as I can. | ||
| But we had a very slim window there where people started. | ||
| We talked about the guns in L.A. | ||
| and where people realize, hey, maybe society is a little more fragile than I thought here. | ||
| And for most of human history, yes, it has been very fragile. | ||
| And for most of the world today, it is fragile. | ||
| Look at Ukraine, of course. | ||
| So for a little bit of time there, Some people questioned how prepared they were, how reliant they were on the government, how reliant they were on our systems that get food into our grocery stores. | ||
| And maybe they took some steps like you did to get a firearm and get training with that firearm. | ||
| But a lot of people went right back when things started to kind of calm down a little bit, went right back to the old ways and got very comfortable again. | ||
| But I think it's just recognizing that a society is fragile and as a provider, For me, as a children wife, I'm responsible for them and recognizing that we have this responsibility. | ||
| And what does that mean then? | ||
| Well, it means that I need to be able to defend myself, this gift of life and the lives of my children, my spouse, and then be able to put food on this table. | ||
| If we can't go to the grocery store, how are we going to get food on that? | ||
| How am I going to provide for them in that respect? | ||
| And you can go from the smallest, most seemingly insignificant thing until you need it, like a fire extinguisher. | ||
| Does the babysitter know how to use that? | ||
| Do you know how to use that? | ||
| Let's go in the backyard with the kids, make a little fire and have them put it out so that the first time they need to do that, they're not scrambling to figure out and read the directions on this thing. | ||
| So something from as basic as that, to having a little bit of food, a little bit of water, just so that maybe you can make it a couple weeks. | ||
| And then of course you can take that as far as you want to go. | ||
| And so we're fairly prepared here, if that makes sense. | ||
| But it seems like a very natural thing to do, is just to be prepared to protect that gift of life. | ||
| And once again, if you were dropped into this country, or into this planet, let's say, | ||
| and were suddenly attacked by someone, you wouldn't need a document, | ||
| you wouldn't need someone to tell you that you need to protect this gift of life. | ||
| You would just do it because it is natural. | ||
| That's a natural thing and a natural right. | ||
| So for some reason over the years, we've lost touch with how important those things are | ||
| and gotten soft and I think that will eventually, No, no! | ||
| You're giving me a lot... Well, first off, you're very much speaking to the way I've tried to live over the last couple years, because I really was... I felt that I was too reliant on the entire thing, which then I got guns, I started doing gardening, we had backyard chickens in L.A. | ||
| We're gonna get them here in... We're gonna get them here in Florida, too. | ||
| I wanna know, you know, I started learning how to do just a little bit more, I love doing house projects now | ||
| and knowing how to do a little electrical stuff and knowing how to do things, because you're right, | ||
| like we all became reliant on things that, man, they can go away pretty quickly. | ||
| So I got one more for you that I think ties this all together | ||
| and so it won't be so depressing, but I don't think it has been, which is, | ||
| so for a guy that writes about some pretty serious stuff, and we've talked about some pretty serious stuff | ||
| and that our systems don't seem to be working as we wished, either domestically or internationally and everything else, | ||
| are you hopeful and what do you see as the course correction for all this? | ||
| I mean, beyond just, okay, we can maybe fire some people, elect better people, but what do you see as, if you see a real course correction to get us to that better place? | ||
| Gosh, we were trying to stay positive and the course correction is horrible as it is. | ||
| I think it's going to be imposed upon us by some sort of a seismic shift, a seismic event, something like that, that forces that hand. | ||
| So you think it's a rock bottom first? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I mean, when you have two paths and one is very easy and comfortable, most of the country seems like that's the way that they're going to go. | ||
| And you have to really make an effort to go that other way, to be prepared, to be self-reliant, to educate yourself, to read books on history and appreciate why we have these rights and options and opportunities that we do. | ||
| And go back to the inception of this country up until today and realize the sacrifices that were made for us. | ||
| And now we have people in this country that are actively trying to restrict those rights that people died to give us over the course of our history. | ||
| So there's an appreciation aspect there. | ||
| I took my daughter to Pearl Harbor this last December for the 80th anniversary commemoration events. | ||
| We volunteered with the Best Defense Foundation and we took 64 veterans aged 96 to 104 back to Pearl Harbor. | ||
| And these guys, a lot of them lied to get in because they were too young to go defend their country. | ||
| And so she had this touchpoint. | ||
| With this generation that sacrificed so much for us and then came home and got back to work. | ||
| You know, she'd read about him. | ||
| She'd heard me as a parent talk about it, but it was different for her to sit down across the day of table, share a meal with these guys, hear their stories. | ||
| And they loved talking to someone. | ||
| She's 16 and talking to someone of her generation. | ||
| Um, it was just a, it was an incredible event for her. | ||
| And I think it changed the direction of her life actually. | ||
| So that ties back into that appreciation of what we have in this country. | ||
| And then what is our responsibility to those people who sacrificed so much for those next | ||
| generations? | ||
| What do we have to do now so that future generations will have those options and opportunities | ||
| that we enjoyed? | ||
| And we're at a pivotal moment in U.S. history. | ||
| And we talked about the First Amendment. | ||
| I mean, we're on this platform right now. | ||
| We're talking, we're free to say whatever we like here ish. | ||
| Uh, but hey, what about this ministry of misinformation campaign, uh, uh, ministry of truth and all that, all that sort of a thing. | ||
| And when we have people who typically were the guardians of that first amendment, so let's say lawyers, publishing houses, newspapers, magazines, um, that used to be the frontline of calling for censorship. | ||
| I mean, that is that's a seismic shift right there. | ||
| That should be alarming because the one thing that used to bring us all together, no matter what your thoughts are on the Second Amendment or whatever else was going on, that First Amendment bound us all together as Americans because we'd stand up and fight and die for your right to say something, especially if we disagreed with you. | ||
| And now that's changing and what the social media is weaponized and politicians want to weaponize against one of each other. | ||
| So we can be more divisive so that they can stay in power and make those savvy investments that they are so good at making. | ||
| Jack, I think the final summation is get a chicken coop. | ||
| Is that what you were basically trying to say? | ||
| The way you lit up when I said chicken coop. | ||
| It's the water. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, because we have one going in right out here. | |
| But yeah, I think it's just appreciating where we came from and taking some steps to be a little more self-reliant and educating yourself and your children along the way. | ||
| Sometimes that's all we can do. | ||
| Right on, man. | ||
| The book is in the blood. | ||
| I'm telling you guys, this cover, it's just, and it feels like a freaking book. | ||
| I should have, the book should be here. | ||
| We dropped the ball on that one. | ||
| The book should have been there. | ||
| We're going to link to it down below. | ||
| I've enjoyed talking to you. | ||
| I hope you'll come back. | ||
| Great talking to you. | ||
| Take care out there. | ||
| Thanks so much. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about lifestyles instead of non-stop yelling, check out our lifestyle playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're both right over here. |
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