True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 219: Clear and Present Clancy
Aired: 2022-04-06
Duration: 01:40:15


=== Aoc On The Show (02:51) ===

[00:00:00]  So AOC is on our episode today.
[00:00:02]  Honestly, she's giving she's giving great interview.
[00:00:08]  She's giving great interview.
[00:00:09]  She's honestly serving great.
[00:00:12]  She's serving the American people in Congress.
[00:00:14]  I'd love to serve her a subpoena.
[00:00:16]  You know, oh my God, why do you say it's so weird?
[00:00:19]  You know what would be the best April Fool's joke next year?
[00:00:22]  What?
[00:00:23]  Actually, having her on the that would be good.
[00:00:25]  You know what?
[00:00:26]  And mention this, but like people who got mad at us for that episode fucking lucky stars that we did not go.
[00:00:34]  Thank you.
[00:00:35]  You should be thanking Liz and Young Chomsky right now for outvoting me on making that a paywalled episode.
[00:00:41]  I did want to paywall.
[00:00:43]  I did want to pay while that.
[00:00:44]  Yeah.
[00:00:45]  Here's the April Fool's Day should be like the purge where no one can get mad at you if you were just playing a I want to give a shout out to all the people who got mad at us because they said it proved we were a CIA because we were interviewing AOC.
[00:00:57]  And I just want to say, I see you, I hear you, and I am so fucking blessed for your existence.
[00:01:02]  Honestly, I want to say to all our listeners, I do see you.
[00:01:05]  I actually see you.
[00:01:06]  And I literally hear you right now.
[00:01:10]  Yeah, he's watching you.
[00:01:12]  No, I'm not watching you.
[00:01:13]  with you.
[00:01:37]  Call my ass Strom Clancy.
[00:01:39]  Strom?
[00:01:40]  Strom?
[00:01:41]  Strom Thurmond?
[00:01:42]  Yeah, that's why I was thinking of that.
[00:01:43]  No, I know, but like, no one's named Strom anymore.
[00:01:46]  No one's named Strom.
[00:01:47]  I mean, imagine.
[00:01:48]  Is it short for something?
[00:01:50]  Stromond?
[00:01:51]  Joe's Stromather?
[00:01:56]  Stromboli?
[00:01:57]  So his full name would be Stromond Thurmond?
[00:02:00]  Strom Thurmond.
[00:02:01]  Yeah.
[00:02:01]  Could you imagine if one of your girls was like talking in the group text?
[00:02:09]  They're like, hey, guys, don't be weird, but I'm bringing my boyfriend on Friday.
[00:02:13]  His name is Strom Thurmond.
[00:02:15]  Is that you guys?
[00:02:16]  Don't, I mean, he's, I don't, don't.
[00:02:20]  He's a Klansman.
[00:02:21]  Yeah, he's in, he's in, he's in the Klan, but he's like cool about it.
[00:02:26]  Like, he's not like, he won't like argue with you or whatever.
[00:02:28]  Hello, everyone.
[00:02:29]  Hi.
[00:02:30]  My name is Strom Thurmond.
[00:02:33]  I'm Liz.
[00:02:34]  We are, of course, joined by Jesse Helms, aka Young Chomsky.
[00:02:38]  I always think of Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond as like a duo.
[00:02:42]  Yeah, I mean, I think they were married for a number of years.
[00:02:44]  I always thought of them as the kind of like racist old Waldorf and Statler of the U.S. Congress.
[00:02:50]  Yeah, I know.

=== Jesse Helms & Strom Thurmond (02:13) ===

[00:02:51]  Well, they didn't let them vote.
[00:02:52]  They just yelled down at the down at the people voting, the congressman.
[00:02:59]  But uh this is I this is I'm losing my mind, baby.
[00:03:03]  Why?
[00:03:04]  We just did a hell of an interview, but now all of the all of the performance-enhancing ginkgo bilboa that I took beforehand, all the ginseng, uh, the tapping.
[00:03:16]  I just found out what tapping is.
[00:03:17]  What's tapping?
[00:03:18]  People are just tapping themselves and saying things.
[00:03:20]  What?
[00:03:21]  I don't know.
[00:03:22]  What are you talking about?
[00:03:22]  I just look it up.
[00:03:23]  It's the people who are doing it.
[00:03:26]  Anyways, we interview today Matt Farwell, author of the blog, The Hunt for Tom Clancy.
[00:03:34]  And yeah.
[00:03:35]  Check it out.
[00:03:52]  Wideshot, the Pentagon, at dusk.
[00:03:56]  The camera pans down the pentagonal-shaped building, zooming in on the only porthole-type window where a dim light is shown.
[00:04:07]  In it are three of the highest-ranking naval officers in United States history: Ultra Admiral Liz Francak, Supreme Grand Admiral Brace Belden, and double vice secret admiral Matt Farwell.
[00:04:27]  Welcome to the show, Matt.
[00:04:29]  How you doing?
[00:04:30]  We have with us here today Matt Farwell.
[00:04:33]  All right, I'm going to do the whole introduction here.
[00:04:35]  Husband of Tony Jensen, author of American Cypher, Bo Bergdahl and the U.S. Tragedy in Afghanistan 2019.
[00:04:44]  Former U.S. infantryman, reporter, and the author of one of my favorite blogs, The Hunt for Tom Clancy up on Substack, here to talk with us today about, well, kind of about the military, about Tom Clancy, and about his effect on American culture.
[00:05:02]  Matt, welcome to the show.
[00:05:03]  How you doing?

=== Growing Up Military (02:51) ===

[00:05:04]  Hey, I'm great.
[00:05:04]  Thank you so much for having me.
[00:05:06]  And I'm going to apologize in advance if you hear like dogs barking.
[00:05:10]  We have two dogs who are crazy and they'll bark at the UPS man because they hate the UPS man.
[00:05:16]  Not as much like they don't hate the FedEx man.
[00:05:19]  They don't hate the mailman.
[00:05:20]  They'll bark at him.
[00:05:21]  They don't hate the mailman.
[00:05:24]  They greet the mailman.
[00:05:26]  They don't hate the mailman.
[00:05:27]  Gotcha.
[00:05:27]  And there's a difference.
[00:05:30]  And I didn't grow up with dogs.
[00:05:32]  So like my wife and I started dating and then she had a dog and then she got another dog.
[00:05:37]  So I'd never had him before.
[00:05:39]  And so they surprised me sometimes.
[00:05:40]  So that's it.
[00:05:42]  Well, speaking of growing up, we are going to talk a little bit about you before we're going to establish your credentials here.
[00:05:49]  Oh, yeah.
[00:05:49]  I'm looking at one of the dogs right now.
[00:05:52]  We're going to establish some of your credentials here before we get into Clancy and your take on him.
[00:05:59]  So you grew up, were your parents in the military?
[00:06:02]  Yes.
[00:06:03]  My dad was a veterinarian in Utah who had previously been in the Navy submarine service and then in the Air Force's veterinary corps, then got fed up with the Air Force and did time in the reserves and then got fed up with Utah.
[00:06:19]  And so we moved to Turkey when he went back on active duty in the Air Force.
[00:06:25]  And I was like six years old when that happened.
[00:06:27]  So it was really cool.
[00:06:28]  Like I got to, I got baptized as a Mormon person in the Aegean Sea on my eighth birthday while at Discotech like down the street played.
[00:06:39]  I got the power.
[00:06:40]  I mean, this was like near Bodrum, which is where like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos parked their yachts.
[00:06:47]  So, you know, and I'm no longer a Mormon, but, you know, that was like kind of the milieu in which I grew up.
[00:06:53]  And it was really fucking interesting, especially when you look back on it.
[00:06:58]  Like my wife and I were over at my parents' house and they were busted out the slides.
[00:07:03]  And there was this one, like, we had a Mormon state conference where they paid the guy that, like the caretaker at Ephesus, like 300 bucks to rent out the amphitheater for the day.
[00:07:16]  And so like Seven Wonder of the Ancient World, Ephesus, like where Mary went, you know, and where like John is supposed to be buried.
[00:07:27]  All these guys in dark suits and sunglasses like sitting there talking about Mormon stuff in like 1990.
[00:07:34]  And my wife is like, so were they like Mormons or were they in the CIA?
[00:07:38]  And I'm like, I mean, what's the difference?
[00:07:40]  What's the difference?
[00:07:41]  Like, yeah.
[00:07:44]  So you, you're, all right, your dad had this, let's say, mixed experience with the United States Armed Forces.
[00:07:50]  But you yourself and your brother end up eventually joining the Army, right?

=== Left the Battalion (06:46) ===

[00:07:56]  Yeah.
[00:07:56]  And I mean, he had, he had a, like, he talks really fondly of his Navy time and he likes the Air Force stuff.
[00:08:03]  It's just, you know, he was an officer.
[00:08:06]  And I think being an officer is a little different with like how kind of the lifestyle is.
[00:08:11]  And so both my brother and I enlisted as like grunts.
[00:08:15]  We were infantry dudes.
[00:08:17]  And then my brother eventually became a helicopter pilot because he was in the Ranger Battalion.
[00:08:22]  And he's like, these guys suck.
[00:08:23]  Like, I got to get out of here.
[00:08:25]  Like, they're, and this was pre-9-11.
[00:08:27]  He's like, and so when I, when I was going through basic training and they're like, Farwell, do you want like a Ranger contract?
[00:08:33]  And I'm like, fuck yeah, I'll be a ranger.
[00:08:34]  I'll be like, murder some motherfuckers.
[00:08:36]  And then I called my brother and he's like, dude, like, are you stupid?
[00:08:40]  Like, do you just want to go get like hazed and abused for a while?
[00:08:43]  Like, is that what you're into?
[00:08:44]  And I'm like, no, not really.
[00:08:46]  He's like, go to 82nd or 10th Mountain or something.
[00:08:49]  Like, and so I did.
[00:08:51]  I went to 10th Mountain and they were great.
[00:08:53]  And the Rangers shot at our alpha company.
[00:08:56]  So, you know, like, that's cool.
[00:08:59]  They're trigger happy.
[00:09:02]  And so you eventually do get deployed to Afghanistan.
[00:09:05]  And from what I understand, you were in the unit that was there, the longest deployed unit of any unit in the Global War on Terror.
[00:09:14]  Yeah, we were there for 16 months.
[00:09:16]  And I went on leave early.
[00:09:18]  Like, I went to Germany to visit my brother in like March.
[00:09:22]  So I was there for like a year straight.
[00:09:24]  And you can, if you look at the yearbooks and shit, like, or look at the pictures, you're like, oh, you were kind of like burnt out at the end of that year, huh?
[00:09:33]  Like, and then you were really burnt out at the end of the 16 months.
[00:09:36]  And like, we got extended on, we were supposed to go home.
[00:09:41]  Our alpha company had got home to Fort Drum, New York.
[00:09:45]  So picture this scene, like the reserve detachment commander saying, yes, we know your husbands are on the tarmac.
[00:09:53]  However, the Secretary of Defense extended our tour like four months.
[00:09:58]  So we're going to let them off.
[00:09:59]  They can kiss you and say hi.
[00:10:01]  And then they're going to get back on.
[00:10:04]  And that's how it's going to go.
[00:10:05]  They'll be gone for another four months.
[00:10:07]  Don't worry about it.
[00:10:08]  The like colonel had to wear body armor and have two MPs with him because the wives and husbands were about ready to like murder him.
[00:10:17]  I bet.
[00:10:19]  Yeah, it was.
[00:10:20]  So like, what year was it?
[00:10:21]  And then we just like, this was 2006, 2007.
[00:10:26]  So it was like the Taliban were just that had kind of licked their wounds across the border.
[00:10:36]  We're just starting to just regrouping and coming back, right?
[00:10:40]  Around this time.
[00:10:41]  And we were a victim of our own success because we killed like 260 of them with massed artillery fire.
[00:10:48]  I mean, I say we, it was my battalion.
[00:10:50]  I wasn't near any of it.
[00:10:51]  But, and so they were like, oh, there's like a lot of them.
[00:10:56]  And these guys are good at killing them.
[00:10:57]  So like, we'll just keep them here.
[00:11:00]  Which, I mean, worked out like I got paid extra.
[00:11:03]  I didn't have like, I had my like mom and dad and sisters and brothers back home, but I don't give a shit.
[00:11:09]  Like, that's fine.
[00:11:09]  I'll do.
[00:11:10]  And I was in like a fairly cushy job at that point, like working for the company commander, the first sergeant.
[00:11:16]  So I was like, wait, like, I have like internet in my room now, guys.
[00:11:20]  Like, this fucking rules.
[00:11:21]  I'm getting an extra thousand dollars.
[00:11:23]  Like, I have to be back at drum.
[00:11:24]  Like, this is all right.
[00:11:26]  But I think it fucked us all up because we have like the highest suicide rate in the army.
[00:11:32]  It's through the roof.
[00:11:35]  And part of I got off like the Hunt for Tom Clancy Twitter account is me dipping my toe back into social media after like completely getting off of it for two to three years for just mental health shit.
[00:11:48]  Like, because you can't go online and see, like all you're like, oh, my buddy's dead, my other buddy's dead oh, this nice guy.
[00:11:56]  I grew up with fentanyl oh, all right.
[00:11:59]  Well, like you know, this sucks.
[00:12:01]  So then you just don't look at any of it and you go plant flowers and it's nicer.
[00:12:07]  I think it just like cultivates our worst impulses.
[00:12:10]  Absolutely yeah absolutely, I mean, we have, we have.
[00:12:12]  I think we've made that point.
[00:12:14]  So I had nauseum to the almost to the point of annoyance of many of our listeners.
[00:12:18]  Um, but I, I think it's a, it's a point that cannot be stressed enough.
[00:12:22]  It's almost like the internet as a whole was like built by the Defense Department as a massive counterinsurgency uh program and strategy, and it's working as intended.
[00:12:34]  Yeah, I mean another point that we are fond of reiterating, on this too um right, so I mean I think kind of like, I don't, I mean I, I don't.
[00:12:46]  I don't think this is out of place for me to say I feel like you've been pretty open about this, but you had your own struggles after getting back.
[00:12:51]  Yeah man, I was up yeah like yeah I uh, I got, I drank a lot, that's I.
[00:12:58]  I don't drink at all anymore but um, I got arrested like nine times for, like this was excluding my two two duis which were when I like crashed my um, I didn't hurt anyone, I hurt myself, I hurt my back um, I hurt my truck, I hurt my wallet um like, because Virginia really like sticks it to you, um for drinking and driving, which is a bad thing to do and no one should do it.
[00:13:26]  I'm not endorsing it.
[00:13:27]  Don't come after me.
[00:13:28]  I've already been come after for it.
[00:13:30]  It was like 10 years ago, leave me alone.
[00:13:33]  Um, but like yeah, man and uh, and then I was in the Nut House uh, in Menlo Park okay, classic which was like I was in the men's trauma recovery program there until I uh got kicked out for coming back drunk from a date with a Latvian girl I met on Match.com who I then moved in with her name's Lita.
[00:13:58]  She's super nice um, I hope she's doing well, the uh uh, I used to go to like orthodox church with her mom Renata um, which was like really in Santa Clara, which is not something you really think of, but like you know um, and then was in the like Nut House out here, Ward 1A, a couple of times.
[00:14:20]  The first one was, I almost said the best time, but I mean, really, if you haven't ever been like psychiatrically hospitalized, I highly recommend it.
[00:14:31]  To many of our listeners, I would stress that do you need to take his advice immediately?
[00:14:36]  It's a good idea.
[00:14:37]  I mean, it's a, the guy here called it the, he was a butcher from Fort Smith.

=== Needle Jammed Through Neck (05:29) ===

[00:14:43]  And he like drank a lot.
[00:14:44]  And he was like, this is the flight deck.
[00:14:48]  Like, this is where you crash and burn.
[00:14:51]  This is 1A.
[00:14:52]  It ain't spitting out winners here.
[00:14:54]  And I was like, holy shit.
[00:14:57]  Like, wait, I just have to play puzzles.
[00:14:59]  And like, you guys are all way more fucked up than I am.
[00:15:01]  Like, this is great.
[00:15:03]  So, yeah, I, it was, uh, and then I got a stellic ganglion block in like 2015 and kind of a like Hail Mary.
[00:15:12]  Like Playboy Magazine had asked me for a piece and they were like, what do you want to do?
[00:15:17]  And I told them I wanted to go to the tri-borders area in South America.
[00:15:22]  And they, and they were like, do you have any other ideas?
[00:15:25]  And I was like, I could go get this injection on my neck for PTSD that like my Green Beret buddy got and this shrink told me about, but I don't really think it's anything.
[00:15:33]  I think it's stupid.
[00:15:35]  And they're like, go do that.
[00:15:36]  And so it actually like worked out shockingly well.
[00:15:43]  My dad took me up there.
[00:15:44]  I, again, thought it was just going to be bullshit.
[00:15:46]  Like hope.
[00:15:46]  Wait, can you explain what this is exactly?
[00:15:49]  Yeah.
[00:15:49]  And I can, Playboy.com shit is all down, but I can send you guys a PDF of the article I wrote about it.
[00:15:57]  And Playboy Magazine like saved my life and the non-nude issues.
[00:16:01]  Which is a very cool thing to say, by the way.
[00:16:03]  It's amazing.
[00:16:04]  No, and my like, my Mormon mom could like see the magazine, you know, and not be like totally mad about it.
[00:16:14]  But it's called the stellate ganglion block.
[00:16:18]  It's an anesthetic procedure that's been done since like the 1920s where this sounds horrible, but a needle, a long needle is threaded through the neck to kind of the front of the spine where the basal ganglion like grow.
[00:16:35]  And the idea is in trauma that you, you know, like a garden, you know, if the roots don't have water, they grow down, right?
[00:16:47]  So the first time you hear a gunshot, you get little nerves grow down from your brainstem.
[00:16:53]  And this, this theoretically, they don't really know why it works or how it's effective, but they think it might like prune those back to kind of pre-trauma state.
[00:17:05]  And so I was knocked out for mine because it sounded like horrible.
[00:17:10]  I don't like needles.
[00:17:11]  I think they're not going to be able to do that.
[00:17:14]  My, my Green Beret friend that told me about it.
[00:17:17]  I mean, he was the guy that got Hamid Karzai in country.
[00:17:20]  So he's a lunatic.
[00:17:22]  But he was like, he's like, no, I just like sat there and the doc came up and was like, I think this will work for you.
[00:17:28]  So like, just sit here and I'm going to like, and I'm like, you let that guy fucking jam a needle like through your neck?
[00:17:35]  And he's like, yeah, you know, like, whatever.
[00:17:38]  That sounds more traumatic than any amount of gunshots.
[00:17:43]  I was, I mean, yeah, no, I said, I was like, my dad went up there with me.
[00:17:48]  No, my dad went up there with me.
[00:17:50]  And they were the doctor who, this really nice Ukrainian guy named Dr. Eugene Lipov.
[00:17:57]  Highly recommend him.
[00:17:58]  He's in Chicago.
[00:17:59]  He has a thing.
[00:18:02]  But the, he's like, do you want, you know, do you want to do it while you're awake or while you're knocked out?
[00:18:08]  I'm like, knock me the fuck out, man.
[00:18:10]  Give me that.
[00:18:11]  Like, and it was propofol.
[00:18:12]  It was the same like shit Michael Jackson used.
[00:18:15]  So it ruled.
[00:18:17]  And I woke up from it.
[00:18:19]  You go back the next day.
[00:18:21]  You're kind of a little bit like groggy and, you know, your neck hurts because you've had a needle jammed through it.
[00:18:27]  And then the, I woke up and my dad, old world, old submariner in Vietnam, who was on like World War II submarines during Vietnam, like, and I didn't realize any of this, but like his submarine was doing crazy shit during Vietnam, like bringing people in and out, you know, mapping Soviet installation, all sorts of shit.
[00:18:50]  And so he's like, let's go to the Museum of Chicago, like of science and industry and see the U-boat.
[00:18:57]  And so we went on a U-boat and PTSD, like a enclosed metal space that's clangy with lights and a bunch of people.
[00:19:07]  Like my dad just kind of looked at me and was like, hey, Matt, do you notice anything?
[00:19:11]  And I'm like, oh, I'm not flipping out.
[00:19:16]  And so yeah, it just, again, I, I, since I'm a, since I'm a like not Mormon anymore person who grew up Mormon, I hate to evangelize anything, right?
[00:19:29]  And I hate to like preach like that, this will change your life or this will be good for you or whatever.
[00:19:35]  But if you have fucking really bad PTSD and you've tried other shit and like it doesn't seem like it's worked, this worked for me and it worked for some of my hard case buddies.
[00:19:47]  I mean, Dakota Meyer had one.
[00:19:49]  He's not my buddy because I never met him, but high-profile people, high-profile lunatics like Dakota Meyer.
[00:19:58]  You know, he swears by it.
[00:20:01]  And the VA wouldn't do it for the longest time because they're the second largest purchaser of bulk pharmaceuticals in the world after the DOD.

=== Jail Time Following Correct Behavior (12:59) ===

[00:20:13]  And so I went off all my psych meds and I could show you the before and after photos too.
[00:20:19]  Like it looked horrible, you know?
[00:20:21]  And when you're depressed and like your dick doesn't work right or like, you know, or the function doesn't work and you're like all bloated and all.
[00:20:31]  it doesn't make any shit better, you know?
[00:20:33]  No, I mean, I was just talking with my buddy about that the other day.
[00:20:36]  It's like, you really got to weigh out the effects of erectile dysfunction with how much depression the meds are curing.
[00:20:43]  Or an orgasmia, because like you think that's going to be great.
[00:20:47]  And maybe the first time you feel cool with it, but then you're like, no, it's been like a feature film length and like nothing's happening except I'm really happy.
[00:20:58]  And having sex.
[00:20:59]  Yeah.
[00:20:59]  Like, oh, I didn't know I could chafe there, but I'm chafing there.
[00:21:04]  Like, this is time to be done.
[00:21:08]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:21:09]  Man, you, yeah, wow, you should have written more stuff for Playboy.
[00:21:11]  That's a, that's a, uh, um, well, speaking of you writing stuff.
[00:21:16]  So, all right, we've, we've established, you know, you enter the army, um, you know, you got out of the army, you're, y'all fucked up from it, you know, you're in, you've been in almost every single American institution except for being a politician.
[00:21:29]  You've been in the nut house.
[00:21:31]  I assume you've probably gone to a rehab at some point, or if the nut house didn't.
[00:21:34]  Yeah, okay, there we go.
[00:21:36]  You've been in the army, you've been in jail, which you didn't describe, but you arrested nine times.
[00:21:41]  One can infer.
[00:21:42]  The longest stretch, my longest bid was 10 days in Orange County, Virginia for like my second DUI.
[00:21:52]  That was the, my lawyer got me a very good deal.
[00:21:55]  Um, and it was a holding cell.
[00:21:58]  Like, I was just in a bay with like 70 other fuck ups, except it was also a holding cell for like federal prisoners that were awaiting transfer.
[00:22:09]  So I got, I like to tell people that I got my ass beat by like this six foot five Nation of Islam dude at Scrabble because he was a fucking Scrabble whiz and just, that's all we did.
[00:22:21]  Uh, there was a TV.
[00:22:22]  I watched Katy Perry music videos and I talked to a guy who used to sell meth to Georgetown law students until he ignored all the warnings from his law student clients who had gone up to DOJ that he, that they were closing in on the meth ring at Georgetown Law, but he was doing meth too.
[00:22:42]  And he was just like a nerdy guy with like prison issued glasses like this.
[00:22:45]  These are my VA shits, you know?
[00:22:48]  And I was like, wait, you did what?
[00:22:50]  Like, he's like, what are you here for?
[00:22:52]  I'm like, I, I don't know.
[00:22:53]  I had like my second fucking DUI, man.
[00:22:55]  I like, I don't know.
[00:22:58]  I'm here, you know?
[00:22:59]  And so, yeah, I've been jail was and Boy Scout camp.
[00:23:04]  I went to Boy Scout camp.
[00:23:05]  Are you a Boy Scout too?
[00:23:06]  Yeah.
[00:23:06]  Much like Clancy.
[00:23:08]  Yeah.
[00:23:08]  Was he a Boy Scout?
[00:23:09]  Yeah, I guess he was.
[00:23:10]  Yeah, he was.
[00:23:10]  Yeah.
[00:23:11]  Chest too.
[00:23:13]  And I know your brother also died during the war in Afghanistan as well.
[00:23:17]  Well, he died in Germany after, but he had two tours in Iraq, two tours in Afghanistan, and then he bites it in like Bavaria, you know, on a safe tour.
[00:23:30]  Jesus Christ.
[00:23:31]  Yeah.
[00:23:32]  So that was like kind of a, that fucking sucked, man.
[00:23:35]  I escorted his body home too to Salt Lake and then up to Idaho.
[00:23:40]  And then they didn't pick up all the pieces.
[00:23:42]  And so the next year.
[00:23:43]  Jesus.
[00:23:44]  Oh, you'll love that.
[00:23:45]  This ties into what we were just talking about.
[00:23:46]  The next year, we got to go bury him again with his crew and their commingled remains, which is how the army describes it, commingled remains that they hadn't found, right?
[00:23:56]  Like they found other body parts that were put together that they couldn't separate.
[00:24:02]  So then they just put them all together in a casket and had the Kayson like roll down the street and invited everyone there and tax dollars paid for us to all go.
[00:24:11]  And we reburied him with like the old guard in Virginia.
[00:24:16]  And then on that same day, wearing that same suit, I had to drive down with my dad and my other brother to check myself into jail because that was the deal we'd worked out with the prosecutors.
[00:24:29]  It gets better.
[00:24:30]  I was sitting in the waiting room for like two hours because I'm wearing a fucking suit and I'm clean cut and they think I'm a lawyer.
[00:24:39]  And so I go up and I'm like, hey, my name's Matt Farwell.
[00:24:42]  Like, I think I don't know, like, if is this like a hotel?
[00:24:45]  Like, every other time I've been to jail, someone has involuntarily brought me there.
[00:24:49]  Like, I don't know the procedure here.
[00:24:52]  And so they're like, oh, we were about to put a warrant out for your arrest because you're late.
[00:24:56]  And I'm like, I'm not fucking late.
[00:24:57]  I've been here for like two hours, you know?
[00:25:00]  I've been sitting there.
[00:25:02]  Okay, well, come on back.
[00:25:03]  And then I find out I go, I had gone to like Target on the way back, on the way down there to get the shit on the packing list because there's a packing list for jail.
[00:25:12]  And I'd bought size medium t-shirts, but they were children's size mediums.
[00:25:20]  And so while I'm like checking myself into jail, I put on my shirt, which comes just below like my nipples and just above where the jumpsuit like connects.
[00:25:32]  So I can wear it, but it's like a tuxedo shirt that you wear.
[00:25:36]  Yeah.
[00:25:37]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:25:38]  You're wearing a tank top or not a tank top.
[00:25:40]  What's the, what's it, what's that shirt where you have your midriff out?
[00:25:44]  Yeah, it was a real crop type situation.
[00:25:46]  And you don't know, like, that's a little anxiety producing when you're going to do 10 days in a place that, you know, again, it turned out fine.
[00:25:54]  Like, I watched like fuck ups, like, trying, like, it was really weird to see like 19-year-old fuck-ups like tattoo themselves after like, like, dude, you're in here for like five days.
[00:26:06]  Like, what the fuck are you doing?
[00:26:07]  Are you shitting me?
[00:26:10]  But, you know, takes all types, I guess, for crime.
[00:26:13]  So, many, many years after this, you end up publishing this book called American Cypher.
[00:26:18]  Yes.
[00:26:19]  And I want to ask, how did this happen?
[00:26:22]  Because how did your road from like that point then lead you to the story of Bo Bergdahl?
[00:26:28]  Okay, so co-committingly with like being a fuck up, I was also writing this whole time and fairly like good at it, I guess, because I got the my first thing was published when I was in Afghanistan.
[00:26:44]  I'd written like a fuck you to my old college and published it in like their alternative paper.
[00:26:50]  And then it got published in a book.
[00:26:52]  And then I was writing little things here and there.
[00:26:56]  And then I, in 2011, 2012, I linked up with Michael Hastings at Rolling Stone.
[00:27:03]  We got like talking on Twitter and he's like, you're a fucking lunatic.
[00:27:06]  Like, what are you working on?
[00:27:07]  I'm like, oh, this, there's this Bo Bergdahl shit.
[00:27:10]  And I think like the army's being dirty on it.
[00:27:12]  He's like, well, let's talk about it.
[00:27:15]  And so I give him a bunch of credit.
[00:27:16]  Like he took me from, you know, kind of obscurity and let me work with him and, you know, taught me how to be a journalist and a reporter.
[00:27:27]  And so then I plotted along, worked with him, and then he was killed in LA.
[00:27:34]  And so then, you know, I wound up in the mental hospital again after found out that he and I had been under FBI surveillance.
[00:27:43]  I was like, fuck, like the things you find out from FOIA requests after one of your good friends dies in a car crash in LA, you know.
[00:27:51]  In one of the most notoriously mysterious car crashes in LA.
[00:27:55]  Yeah.
[00:27:56]  I mean, you know, it's not something that's like, and that was, I was living in Berkeley with an ex-girlfriend who, you know, I love very dearly and hope is doing very well.
[00:28:11]  But we weren't good for each other.
[00:28:13]  And so I was kind of going crazy there too.
[00:28:16]  So yeah.
[00:28:17]  So this was after you guys published the piece in Rolling Stone, The Last American Prisoner of War.
[00:28:23]  Correct.
[00:28:24]  Yes.
[00:28:25]  Yeah.
[00:28:25]  Just so for our listeners who don't know, the I think it was Vice had like basically sent out a FOIA request.
[00:28:34]  Someone from Vice, Jason Leopold from Vice, put out a FOIA that like revealed that you guys, you, Matt, and Michael Hastings were under FBI surveillance when you were talking to Bo Bergdahl's family.
[00:28:52]  And that would wait.
[00:28:53]  Was up in where that would have been in the Bay Area, correct?
[00:28:56]  In no, in Sun Valley, I'm in Sun Valley, of course.
[00:28:59]  So, yeah.
[00:29:03]  So that, yeah, that must have, that must have been a very weird.
[00:29:06]  And you write about it on your sub stack, though, that, like, you know, finding that out from a Vice article.
[00:29:13]  Yeah.
[00:29:13]  And I, I don't write about like how, you know, I'm, I'm in much better mental health, like shape right now.
[00:29:19]  I'm, I'm way less raw from the war, right?
[00:29:22]  Like, I'm less raw from a lot of things.
[00:29:24]  And I've got a great like family structure and life around me.
[00:29:29]  But at the time, I was a maniac living in Berkeley, walking, you know, 12, 13 miles a day around Oakland and a night.
[00:29:40]  And that news comes out.
[00:29:42]  And then, you know, you start wondering, are people following you?
[00:29:45]  Who is following you?
[00:29:47]  And then you're like, oh, actually, wait, fuck, somebody is following me.
[00:29:50]  Like, fuck, really?
[00:29:54]  So, yeah, that culminated with my dad, like my girlfriend was like, you are a fucking lunatic.
[00:30:00]  Like, be out of the house by the time I get back from Christmas.
[00:30:02]  And I'm like, that seems fair.
[00:30:04]  I don't know how to do that, though, because I'm crazy.
[00:30:06]  My dad came out, God bless him, put me in his truck, like loaded up all my shit.
[00:30:12]  And then I thought he was delivering me coded messages that the truck was going to explode at 10, 10 p.m. on Christmas Day.
[00:30:20]  Uh-huh.
[00:30:21]  That's very specific.
[00:30:22]  Yeah, it was, I mean, it was an interesting, like now I, I attribute it more.
[00:30:28]  It's, it was almost a religious experience, like, uh, or what, what I had visions, you know?
[00:30:34]  Um, and so I, I fucking jumped out of his truck, um, 10 miles north of Jackpot, Nevada, when it was going like 45 miles an hour.
[00:30:44]  And uh, so that winded me up in a, or wound, I wound up in a psych hospital after that, after spending some time in the emergency room in Idaho.
[00:30:57]  Um, yeah, that wasn't like, that wasn't the most, and then I went to Turks and Caicos.
[00:31:03]  You'll love this.
[00:31:04]  Um, no, no.
[00:31:06]  So two months later, you guys will love this shit.
[00:31:08]  So two months later, I get back and I get this email and it's from a men's journal, you know, because they were part of the Rolling Stone Empire, the winter media thing.
[00:31:18]  We're like, hey, Matt, like, you know, we want you to write some for us.
[00:31:23]  And I'm like, okay.
[00:31:25]  And then this psychiatrist named Frank Ockberg, who was the guy that told me about the stellic ganglion shot, and he's been a, you know, trauma guy, but also like, he's been a government-affiliated like psychiatrist that did high-level consultations with the Secret Service and like ran a thing called like the critical incident like response group.
[00:31:44]  And so he's like a spooked out like yeah, great classic name for a critical guy.
[00:31:52]  Still talk to him.
[00:31:52]  He lives in the West, but I let him and all these other government affiliated shrinks hip fucking hypnotize me in Turts and Ceikos.
[00:32:00]  Oh my god yeah, for like a week.
[00:32:03]  Um, that's incredible a week.
[00:32:08]  Yeah, I mean they only did like three things, but you guys should look up doctor uh, dr Peter Levine and his uh, like the somatic Experiencing tiger method where you out your trauma.
[00:32:25]  He's in Encinitas, California, which is a fact that like freaked me out because I was like, wait, I know this place.
[00:32:31]  And then I went out there to interview Tom DeLange and Lou Elizondo, the UFO people.
[00:32:36]  Yeah.
[00:32:37]  And the Blink 182 guy.
[00:32:42]  I was like, wait a second, like this is Encinitas.
[00:32:45]  Like, this is where Dr. Levine is from.
[00:32:47]  Like, oh, oh.
[00:32:50]  And then I was like, but it, my wife has, she's like, hey, I understand that's weird.
[00:33:01]  Would you stop talking about it though?
[00:33:03]  Like, like always, because it's getting a little, I'm wondering about it.
[00:33:08]  You're scaring the hoes.
[00:33:10]  Yeah, it seems strange, though, honey.

=== Why Tom DeLange Got an Invite (15:04) ===

[00:33:12]  Yeah, that is, that is, we haven't even gotten to what we're interviewing you about yet.
[00:33:17]  This isn't, but I've already have, this is, this is, I'm having a blast here.
[00:33:22]  So you, you, we are at this point.
[00:33:25]  The book is out and you have started putting, or the Boberg doll book is out, and you started putting up, um, it looks like a proposal to write another book.
[00:33:35]  And this one is focused on Tom Clancy.
[00:33:38]  Correct.
[00:33:38]  Yeah.
[00:33:39]  I thought, like, here's the thing, that Boberg doll book, it was not that hard to get the book proposal like done.
[00:33:47]  And then everyone was excited about it because he was big national news.
[00:33:50]  Yeah.
[00:33:51]  Yeah.
[00:33:51]  Right.
[00:33:51]  Like, I caught the good title wave with that.
[00:33:54]  Um, and I, a stupid person, thought that was me and like my skill and force of personality and how great I was for like a second.
[00:34:05]  And then I was like, oh, wait, I got to like do this again?
[00:34:08]  Fuck.
[00:34:09]  You know, and so you start thinking about, so this all started as a joke with my wife when I was like, Tom Clancy sold his name to Ubisoft for like $45 million.
[00:34:22]  So they would use it.
[00:34:24]  But if I use it in a title about Tom Clancy, then it's fair use and it's free.
[00:34:32]  And so the, and then I got thinking about it and was like, oh, that would be funny.
[00:34:37]  Like, that's actually a good sales mechanism, you know, because you put that shit at Sam's Club.
[00:34:42]  That'll sell out.
[00:34:45]  And then, yeah, it went from there.
[00:34:48]  And I thought the, I actually thought the idea would sell because so many people's parents, grandparents, uncles, you know, whatever.
[00:34:56]  Tom Clancy.
[00:34:57]  Yeah.
[00:34:57]  It did not sell.
[00:34:59]  Everyone loved it.
[00:35:00]  Everyone thought it was a great idea and they couldn't wait to read it when someone else published it.
[00:35:06]  And this is like 20 different imprints my agent sends it out to.
[00:35:10]  And my agent's not like, he's a good agent.
[00:35:13]  Like he's an old school guy, you know?
[00:35:17]  So.
[00:35:18]  Yeah, so then I just put it on Substack because like, fuck it, you know?
[00:35:21]  Well, we should talk a little bit about what that proposal is because it's not, it's not a biography of Clancy.
[00:35:28]  It's really like you, you call the substack the hunt for Tom Clancy, which obviously is a play on the hunt for Red October, which I immediately, obviously, especially when you talked about U-boats, I was like, how did we not mention Red October, right, when you said you were going to the U-Boat with your dad?
[00:35:48]  But it isn't a biography of Clancy, right?
[00:35:52]  You say that it's kind of like using Clancy as a kind of lens through which to understand, I don't know, American military and intelligence activities, policy projections for the past, what, like two decades, ever since Clancy has kind of been around.
[00:36:11]  Yeah, I got interested in this idea of how to use a single person story to tell a larger story with American Cypher, right?
[00:36:19]  Because Bo Bergdahl and his family's like experience turned out to be kind of a perfect microcosm of the American experience in Afghanistan, right?
[00:36:28]  So then you want to get, you want to get deeper.
[00:36:31]  You want to understand, well, what drives that?
[00:36:33]  And like, what drives that thought process and who drives that thought process?
[00:36:38]  And I mean, a guy like Dick Cheney or Doug Fythe or Abram Shulski or any of those dudes would be like fascinating, right?
[00:36:45]  Condoleezza Rice?
[00:36:46]  Sure.
[00:36:47]  Well, let's not go too far.
[00:36:49]  I mean, look, here's the thing.
[00:36:53]  I was up at Thanksgiving in Minneapolis with my brother-in-law and we're watching football.
[00:36:58]  And like, I'm like, wait, is that fucking Condi Rice?
[00:37:02]  Yeah.
[00:37:02]  She was on there.
[00:37:03]  Football comedy.
[00:37:05]  Like, like, what?
[00:37:08]  And like, I mean, talk about someone who did a lot.
[00:37:10]  She had an Exxon tanker named after her, one that didn't.
[00:37:13]  To be fair, her doing NFL commentary is technically still military duty.
[00:37:17]  Well, and she's also still ensuring that like young men in their prime get brain damage.
[00:37:23]  Exactly.
[00:37:24]  Yeah.
[00:37:24]  Exactly.
[00:37:25]  It's all one.
[00:37:26]  That's what being a leader means.
[00:37:29]  Oh, yeah.
[00:37:30]  Okay.
[00:37:30]  So Clancy.
[00:37:31]  So what was it about him?
[00:37:33]  So, well, part of it was I really like, I unironically love Tom Clancy books and Tom Clancy shit.
[00:37:41]  Like I grew up reading Tom Clancy stuff.
[00:37:44]  Part of the reason I wound up in the light infantry was fucking Domingo Chavez was the coolest dude.
[00:37:50]  Oh my God, he's such a badass.
[00:37:51]  He's the best.
[00:37:52]  Domingo also, just of the names of the world, Domingo's really good one.
[00:37:58]  Yeah, so I mean, and I thought that if I thought that way, and also it was a way of, you know, in high school in Yorktown, Virginia, when one of your friends' dads is the navigator on the USS Harry Truman, right?
[00:38:12]  And so you're over there and you're like, hey, Captain so-and-so, like, what about this?
[00:38:17]  And it's from a Tom Clancy book.
[00:38:18]  That's a way of like relating to the older generation.
[00:38:21]  Sure.
[00:38:23]  And so it was also kind of a way of, you know, I've spent a lot of time with my dad over the last 10 years and I have a different appreciation for him than I did, you know, as a kid when he was in the military and gone a lot, right?
[00:38:38]  Like I understand the dude a lot better now.
[00:38:41]  And so it's kind of also, my dad was on submarines, you know, there's a certain like, like, I'm searching out not just my like, like my country's experiences here, but like kind of, and my dad was not a Clancy fan at all.
[00:38:55]  He just did all the shit that Clancy wrote about.
[00:38:58]  Like, and so it was a way of kind of discovering my own background as well and reinterpreting it.
[00:39:06]  Because again, like when you know, when you're like, oh, I know about all about Dev Soul, the revolutionary left in like Izmir Turkey, because they shot Lieutenant Colonel Mackie.
[00:39:18]  Like, I remember those guys.
[00:39:19]  Like, they got Dev Soul too.
[00:39:21]  Yeah.
[00:39:22]  Yeah.
[00:39:22]  Like, you know, they, they have a great logo.
[00:39:26]  Um, the really great logo.
[00:39:29]  Dev is also, because Devrim, I think, means revolutionary in Turkey.
[00:39:34]  And so all the groups there have dev in the, in Turkish rather.
[00:39:37]  So all the groups there have dev in their title, which is for sort of the communist technique of always shortening words to the first three letters.
[00:39:44]  Yeah.
[00:39:44]  Dev is a classic.
[00:39:45]  It's very, it flows very well.
[00:39:47]  It's no, I mean, even as a kid, like knowing I was supposed to be afraid of them because like, you know, we had an armed guard outside my apartment building and I rode a bus with like a Turkish soldier, right?
[00:40:00]  We were targets.
[00:40:02]  But I was like, that's a cool name.
[00:40:04]  Like, you know, that's a fucking rad name those guys have.
[00:40:09]  So, yeah.
[00:40:30]  So, let's talk about Clancy.
[00:40:32]  I know it's not a biography of Clancy, but you do have a lot of biographical notes about him in here.
[00:40:36]  And one thing that really sticks out about Monsieur Clancy is that his eyesight was too shitty for him to actually join the military, which I don't know if that's true.
[00:40:47]  I mean, I've read that a few places.
[00:40:48]  That's what they say.
[00:40:49]  That's also something I would say if I became a very popular military writer later in my life and people started asking why I didn't do it ever.
[00:41:00]  And instead you went into insurance.
[00:41:02]  Exactly.
[00:41:03]  I would be like, oh, well, it's my, it's my eyes, my flat-footed, and my flat-footedness, and also I can't read.
[00:41:11]  But he, so he's, he, he is basically one of the most boring all-American guys that there is, right?
[00:41:18]  Like he is, you know, he's a Boy Scout.
[00:41:20]  I think he's a Catholic.
[00:41:21]  Chess club at Loyola in Baltimore.
[00:41:24]  Not that good of a student, like not an outstanding guy.
[00:41:27]  Insurance, you know, has this life insurance company.
[00:41:30]  I think he buys.
[00:41:30]  Kids call this type now a midwit.
[00:41:33]  He bought it from his mother in there too.
[00:41:36]  Yeah.
[00:41:36]  Yeah.
[00:41:37]  And high interest rates.
[00:41:39]  And he gets, and this is funny because my dad is also really into the Naval Institute.
[00:41:44]  Yeah.
[00:41:44]  Because my dad, I think like many dads, has an undue fascination with Allied shipping during World War II to the point where he makes spreadsheets and lists and all my guy.
[00:41:55]  I love that shit.
[00:41:56]  Can you send me those spreadsheets?
[00:41:57]  They are in my dad has been making spreadsheets.
[00:42:00]  At one point, he got, I think he, he, all of Vienna's like interwar train timetables, like he like translated and he's like just useless.
[00:42:13]  By the way, my dad is as far as I know, not autistic either.
[00:42:17]  He just enjoys making lists.
[00:42:19]  It's fantastic.
[00:42:21]  But my dad is also a Naval Institute guy.
[00:42:24]  And I think, in fact, he got me a couple of books in the Naval Institute for my birthday last year.
[00:42:29]  But Clancy is a subscriber and a letter writer.
[00:42:34]  And he hits them with his first novel, The Hunt for Red October.
[00:42:38]  I think it's 82.
[00:42:41]  He publishes his first thing with them in 82, which is a proposal to put the MX missile on hovercraft.
[00:42:50]  Okay.
[00:42:50]  That would then be able to just go anywhere in the Midwest because it's flat.
[00:42:55]  Which is funny because that actually does tell us why he never joined the military.
[00:42:58]  It just unintentionally tells us.
[00:43:00]  I'm sorry.
[00:43:01]  Hovercraft is like a hovercraft.
[00:43:04]  I know, but I was like, maybe this is like a, isn't that like a swamp type vehicle?
[00:43:08]  It is.
[00:43:09]  And he's just like, let's deploy these on the plains.
[00:43:11]  On the Great Plains and in flat areas of like Nevada and Utah, where it would be unpredictable where they are.
[00:43:21]  You can see actually he has like little drawings.
[00:43:23]  It's amazing.
[00:43:24]  It's like little, a total, yeah, he was really like gunning for the patent on that one.
[00:43:30]  looks like the gi joe vehicle too that came out around that time like the killer whale um which just always i mean it really tickled me when i found that like that's incredible no it was the best and so no then in uh he he hits them up with like i'm writing this novel and they're like okay and they're like yeah it's all right but like you should revise it and he's like okay And he goes back and just fucking knocks it out in like six months and brings it back.
[00:44:00]  And they're like, yeah, we'll publish this.
[00:44:02]  Like, this is fine.
[00:44:04]  Okay.
[00:44:04]  Like, thanks, Tom.
[00:44:06]  When's your next Hovercraft proposal?
[00:44:09]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:44:10]  I mean, The Hunt for Red October was a huge hit.
[00:44:13]  Massive.
[00:44:15]  Yeah, Reagan himself.
[00:44:17]  I mean, he, he famously said that, like, like praised it, right?
[00:44:21]  A crackling good yarn, I believe.
[00:44:24]  Oh, my God.
[00:44:25]  That's such a fucking Ronald Reagan thing.
[00:44:26]  Yeah.
[00:44:27]  It's funny because, I mean, Reagan's voice is anything but, but that is a very like mid-Atlantic.
[00:44:31]  Like, you know, you should listen, hear that in a mid-Atlantic accent.
[00:44:35]  No, it's like what you think Paul Harvey would tell, tell you about.
[00:44:38]  Yeah.
[00:44:39]  Yeah.
[00:44:39]  And so, yeah, Reagan, Reagan gives us this public endorsement and it sells like hot cakes, which is one of the best-selling breakfast foods, I think, available on any market.
[00:44:49]  But I think what's crazier about it is that Red October, for whatever reason, like it got the FBI even, you're right about this, got him a little spooked because they thought it was so accurate that they worried that there was like a leak.
[00:45:02]  Yeah, coming out of the agency.
[00:45:04]  They went and so he got, he sold life insurance to retired submariners that worked at the nuclear plant at Calvert County.
[00:45:14]  That's how he got all his info.
[00:45:15]  It's so good.
[00:45:17]  And from a board game called Harpoon by a Larry officer named a naval officer named Larry Bond that was like Dungeons and Dragons for Navy.
[00:45:27]  From what I understand is that Clancy was a bit of a war gamer, I think, in his life, in his life.
[00:45:33]  I know he played Harpoon or at least read the rules for Harpoon.
[00:45:36]  And I think read a couple other accounts of him, him playing other sort of unspecified games with military personnel.
[00:45:43]  No, and when I was like 12, I will freely admit this, living in Yorktown, Virginia.
[00:45:49]  When I was in middle school, I played Star Wars, the customizable card game, which was like Magic the Gathering, but with Star Wars cards.
[00:45:57]  And I was the top-ranked youth player in the Avin 4 region, by the way.
[00:46:02]  Just brag, brag, brag.
[00:46:03]  Well, I mean, I will.
[00:46:05]  But I think about that now.
[00:46:07]  And I'm like, I played with like, there were like 34, 35 year old dudes in there that had like families that would like bring their like baby, you know, because I'm going to play in the Star Wars card tournament and get my ass kicked by like this 11-year-old kid and then go home.
[00:46:23]  And I think about that now.
[00:46:25]  I think about that's the Tom Clancy type.
[00:46:28]  He was back there, like, yeah, like playing harpoon and thinking about how he would, you know, prosecute a campaign in the North Atlantic if he were the Soviets.
[00:46:39]  And he was able to like knit this information together in such a way that it like, it got him an invite basically to the Pentagon.
[00:46:49]  The other thing about him is, and I want this to be clear, he's a good writer and a great storyteller.
[00:46:56]  Yeah.
[00:46:56]  Like his shit, there's a lot of lessons to be learned from it.
[00:47:01]  When he loses his editors, he fucking like sucks.
[00:47:04]  But with a lot of his stuff, yeah, he got him, he wrote himself a seat at the big table.
[00:47:12]  Yeah, I mean, that's, that's, I think, it's funny because in that way, and actually, I think in a bunch of different ways for Tom Clancy, he so encompasses, for me at least, a certain era of like older, usually fairly portly, at least pot-bellied white guy in like khaki pants dreams, like the life insurance guy's dreams of just like, I know so much about militaria and I'm so like,
[00:47:37]  I'm thinking so outside the box with this kind of stuff that I can literally write my way into like the highest levels of power into the CIA director's office, into the White House.
[00:47:46]  Colin Powell's going to be shooting in my basement in 10 years.
[00:47:49]  Exactly.
[00:47:50]  Yeah.
[00:47:52]  Shooting prisoners.
[00:47:53]  No, but his wife buys him a fucking World War II tank to put in the front yard.
[00:47:58]  Yeah.
[00:47:59]  Which is awesome.
[00:48:01]  That actually, I got to be honest.
[00:48:02]  That's good.
[00:48:03]  No, Wanda sounded really cool.
[00:48:06]  Or sounds like she's still alive and in litigation over his estate.
[00:48:12]  So, I mean, this first book blows up and he comes to national attention.

=== Why Jack Ryan Is Boring (09:01) ===

[00:48:16]  And tell me about like, you know, like Liz mentioned, the FBI is looking into him.
[00:48:20]  And then, you know, all of these, these people, the top levels of government are just so impressed by this book.
[00:48:25]  What impressions is Clancy actually making on these people?
[00:48:28]  Like, what doors specifically kind of does this stuff open?
[00:48:32]  Okay, I think one, you got to understand how in the 80s, especially in the early 80s, how enigmatic the figure of Ronald Reagan was to the official bureaucracy in Washington, D.C.
[00:48:49]  The same way Donald Trump sort of terrified like and like weirded out the residents of D.C., Reagan did the same thing.
[00:48:58]  So they don't know, like, they don't know how to get through to this fucking guy because he won't read the briefings.
[00:49:05]  He falls asleep during shit.
[00:49:07]  He won't pay attention.
[00:49:08]  The Pentagon winds up having a special animation unit at Fort Meade that I swear to God, this is like real, that produces cartoons for Ronald Reagan.
[00:49:19]  And so when they hear that this motherfucker spent two days like in his bed reading Tom Clancy books, they're like, we've got a way to get the president's attention, right?
[00:49:35]  Which is a weird thing to think about, right?
[00:49:40]  But senior officials have the same problems anyone else has, right?
[00:49:45]  Especially with that sort of access.
[00:49:48]  How do we get our program past so-and-so?
[00:49:51]  Right, right, right.
[00:49:52]  Right.
[00:49:52]  Like, I just, I watched and talked about the movie Dreamscape from 1984, where Dennis Quaid has to go prevent the assassination of the president in a dream.
[00:50:02]  Yeah.
[00:50:03]  I never heard of that, but I could easily also do that in real life.
[00:50:06]  Dude, it's fucking amazing.
[00:50:07]  It's like better than Inception.
[00:50:10]  I highly recommend it.
[00:50:11]  And it seems, to my mind, that movie was put out specifically with an audience of Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan so that SRI would get more funding for their psychic spying programs.
[00:50:27]  I imagine for Obama, they had to develop a like 12-part HBO prestige dramedy series to get him to pay.
[00:50:34]  Or just like write a book and musical about a guy that was really into banking and trading stuff out of the Virgin Islands.
[00:50:46]  Which, I mean, all the good people at trading things seem to wind up in the Virgin Islands.
[00:50:52]  It's true.
[00:50:53]  It's a great place to trade.
[00:50:56]  And no one Shady ever went to Columbia.
[00:50:58]  Exactly.
[00:50:59]  Now I'm just letting all my biases hang out.
[00:51:03]  So we got, I mean, listen, this is a bias.
[00:51:07]  They ever the opposite of a bias for the zone.
[00:51:09]  We're the bias zone.
[00:51:10]  Yeah.
[00:51:11]  They call me and Liz the Bias Brothers at the podcast and conventions we go to.
[00:51:16]  So, I mean, all right.
[00:51:17]  He's got Hun for Red October out.
[00:51:19]  I think the next book he writes is it, I'm going to fuck this up because he has very similar sounding titles for several of his books, but I think it's Red Storm Rising.
[00:51:29]  Yeah, and but that's not in the Jack Ryan chronology.
[00:51:32]  And that one's co-written with Larry Bond.
[00:51:35]  So it's kind of came up with Harpoon.
[00:51:39]  And so Jack Ryan, let's talk a little bit, I think, about Jack Ryan, because that is a central character of many of Tom Clancy's books.
[00:51:50]  Jack Ryan always stuck out to me because I'm aware of Jack Ryan.
[00:51:54]  I think I was explaining this to Matt before we started recording, but I had never seen a Tom Clancy movie or a movie based on one of Tom Clancy's books before a couple of nights ago.
[00:52:04]  That is mostly because I don't watch a lot of movies.
[00:52:08]  But I know who Jack Ryan is.
[00:52:09]  I know there was like a big Amazon series with, what's that guy?
[00:52:14]  The Office Jim fucking, you know, playing Jack Ryan.
[00:52:18]  I mean, that is one of the most annoying.
[00:52:19]  Obnoxious human beings of all time.
[00:52:21]  So, so Jack, so we got, I mean, Jack Ryan is possibly one of the most boring protagonists ever written for a series, at least from my perspective, from, from watching the couple movies that I did and from reading about, you know, sort of studies of the character of Jack Ryan.
[00:52:41]  I mean, this guy is a naval historian, a CIA analyst, a think tank guy, a banker and stock trader, millionaire stock trader.
[00:52:52]  Railroads.
[00:52:52]  He made his money on railroads.
[00:52:54]  At railroads.
[00:52:56]  I mean, and it's, it's, um, and married to a successful doctor.
[00:53:01]  Um, what about this character who on paper?
[00:53:06]  Well, I guess that's maybe a bad metaphor to use, but uh, is, is, seems like some of one of the most boring, you know, characters you could ever come.
[00:53:15]  I mean, he lacks the sort of suaveness of James Bond or like, you know, the real action here.
[00:53:19]  I was, I was surprised Harrison Ford maddeningly just basically refuses to pick up a gun during, uh, was it Clear and Present Danger?
[00:53:28]  Um, it, uh, what about this character so fascinates people?
[00:53:33]  I think he's the ideal vehicle for someone to, he's the Walter Mitty like avatar.
[00:53:41]  He's the ideal vehicle if you're a mid-level manager at Raytheon to project yourself into, right?
[00:53:49]  Because at any time the CIA could come tap you for a mission or you could save the Prince of Wales and the Princess Diana from a splinter faction of the Irish Republican Army assassinating them.
[00:54:03]  You know, like it could be your dream.
[00:54:05]  You know, you could hang out with Prince Charles.
[00:54:10]  Yeah.
[00:54:11]  You could end up becoming best friends with Prince Charles and Princess Diana.
[00:54:14]  In fact, he founded my high school.
[00:54:17]  He now, Clancy modeled Jack Ryan after Robert Gates, right?
[00:54:21]  He made that assertion, didn't he?
[00:54:23]  He told, that's what he told Tom Clancy when they met each other at a summer program for gifted youth.
[00:54:32]  I thought they were both giving presentations out there.
[00:54:35]  Oh my God.
[00:54:36]  Yeah, he said, for many years, I modeled Jack Ryan's career on you.
[00:54:41]  But then, of course, Jack Ryan becomes president.
[00:54:43]  And like, Bob Gates never did that.
[00:54:46]  So I know that's, that's one of the funniest things.
[00:54:48]  I was, when I was reading the, uh, like some article about Jack Ryan, it was, I did not know that he later becomes president in some of these books, which is and it kind of goes downhill once he he's always good when he's like when he's kind of Ferris Bueller, right?
[00:55:04]  Going up against the like Ed Rooney's of Washington.
[00:55:08]  He's a good character.
[00:55:09]  But when he's the Ed Rooney, What I thought was so fascinating, at least about the movie version of Clear and Present Danger, is basically any, nobody delegated anything.
[00:55:22]  Like for some reason, the highest commanders have to go into the field and get the job done themselves.
[00:55:29]  They never get anyone else to do it for them.
[00:55:31]  They're always the lone survivor of whatever accident befalls them and are able to like exercise incredible prowess under fire, whether, you know, figuratively or literally, and get the job done sort of by the hair of their skin of their teeth, but also maintain an incredible degree, at least the protagonist, of integrity, which, I mean, for those who don't know, Clear and Present Danger, much of it takes place in Colombia.
[00:56:01]  And while some of the movie deals with this, the American presence in Colombia has not been a story filled with honorable men doing honorable things.
[00:56:14]  Oh, I mean, you're not a Planned Columbia fan?
[00:56:16]  No, no, no, I'm not a huge fan of Plan Columbia.
[00:56:19]  No, like you, so wait, what you're saying is that the film and movie and book version of Clear and Present Danger may in fact have been a fictional recasting of historical events in and around South America in the 1980s, where remarkably, no U.S. government planes were transporting weapons or cocaine.
[00:56:43]  Yeah.
[00:56:44]  You say that this is kind of like Clancy's MO, right?
[00:56:47]  With all his books, that that's what he kind of does is he takes these sort of bungles, we'll say, in like FBI, CIA, you know, DOD, whatever history, these sort of like epic bungles, in this case, what we're talking about is Aran-Contra, really, and kind of like reimagines it as the CIA winning.
[00:57:09]  Yes.
[00:57:11]  And it ends up really like gaining a lot of purchase with, you know, senior officials for that reason, it seems.

=== Everyone Wants In (02:42) ===

[00:57:18]  Well, and with just the common public, too.
[00:57:21]  Yeah, totally.
[00:57:22]  Everyone wants to be in on the secret.
[00:57:24]  Everyone wants to like be in on the know, right?
[00:57:27]  And so if you're like, oh, actually, it went this way and that was a good thing, you know, then, hey, who's to say?
[00:57:40]  It doesn't get, I mean, did you hear much discussion reading any of the stuff about the Clear and Present Danger movie?
[00:57:47]  There wasn't much like, hey, but actually, like, remember Rand Contra when like Oliver North was doing all that crazy shit?
[00:57:54]  Like, anyone remember that?
[00:57:56]  Like, no, he's fine.
[00:57:58]  Yeah.
[00:58:00]  I heard he's like an uptight stepdad in real life, which really disappointed me.
[00:58:05]  Oh, man.
[00:58:05]  Well, you thought he was going to be like a sort of like a roguish mercenary?
[00:58:10]  Always kind of wanted to hang out with Oliver North because I thought it would be like interesting.
[00:58:15]  Yeah.
[00:58:15]  You know, like, no, it probably sucks.
[00:58:17]  I think, I think it sucks.
[00:58:19]  I think he's just like mad about stuff, irritated all the time.
[00:58:23]  He's one of those guys that, like, I mean, it's funny because he never really, I mean, well, he did lead the limelight.
[00:58:29]  I don't know.
[00:58:29]  I don't know if that's the best way to describe it, but like he's been back for kind of a while.
[00:58:34]  You know, he makes media appearances.
[00:58:35]  He was president of the NRA for a second.
[00:58:38]  Yeah.
[00:58:39]  But it's, he, he has like a, I feel like despite his kind of like high position, um, you know, or at least uh availability to the media and you know, high position NRA, which is a very large group.
[00:58:51]  Um, I don't know if he's still the president, but he sort of I think fails to find purchase in the popular consciousness now.
[00:58:58]  Um, you know, it's it's it's like he's kind of a ghost drifting through these various positions he has.
[00:59:04]  Um, but yeah, I mean, he is obviously a complete psycho who never really none of these people got their come up.
[00:59:09]  Yeah, I think most of the Contra guys, I mean, everyone, I would, I would say, probably every one of them.
[00:59:15]  Well, no, he clearly was heavily involved in Bergdahl.
[00:59:18]  Yeah.
[00:59:19]  But I was going to say, everyone either, you know, it's like, what, a handful got burned, right?
[00:59:24]  But then everyone else just kind of like got reshuffled or just sort of like you say, like, I mean, even Oliver North is just sort of like, ooh, lost to being, he's just a stepdad now.
[00:59:33]  He's just kind of floating around.
[00:59:35]  Robert Gates was the prudent Secretary of Defense under President Obama.
[00:59:40]  I know.
[00:59:41]  That was such a crazy hire.
[00:59:43]  Like, you know, I mean, no, it's, it's, they're, and, and they're all fucking coming back for more with like, it's all the same con artists from the war on terror that are now talking about like the wars in Europe, you know?
[00:59:59]  Ugh.

=== West Point Simulations Exist (15:58) ===

[01:00:01]  I know.
[01:00:01]  Yeah.
[01:00:01]  I mean, I know we're running out of guys.
[01:00:04]  Like, no, I mean, how is what, what are we going to do if Kim Kagan fails?
[01:00:10]  Like, what, what, what happens if David Kilcullen's corporation in Colorado Springs called CAG isn't successful?
[01:00:22]  Yeah.
[01:00:23]  I mean, I'll probably just hang myself.
[01:00:25]  Yeah.
[01:00:25]  Ooh.
[01:00:26]  Red rose.
[01:00:27]  Well, I mean, I do that when any corporation fails.
[01:00:31]  Yeah, yeah, with a bye-bye doorknob.
[01:00:34]  I mean, you know, you write, you write in your sub stack that Clear and Present Danger almost seems like a whitewash, essentially, in service of George H.W. Bush.
[01:00:43]  Yeah.
[01:00:43]  I mean, I think it, it, the whole thing kind of is in Cardinal of the Kremlin, that's all how Star Wars worked and how when the FBI just straight up fucking shoots first, it's a good thing.
[01:01:00]  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's from what I understand, this is from what I understand even before reading your, your, your sub stack is that like Tom Clancy's novels essentially serve as a way to advertise how great America is when it really wants to be at getting this foreign policy stuff done, this sort of like tough, but, you know, tough but fair country.
[01:01:23]  But also these like, you know, sometimes these weapon systems that Clancy is fascinated by too.
[01:01:28]  I mean, he describes himself as a technology guy.
[01:01:30]  Yeah.
[01:01:31]  And that is one thing like, I know you've written about a lot is that like how he can explain these like really complex technical topics in approachable and sort of understandable, plain English.
[01:01:42]  Well, and really like normalize it.
[01:01:46]  I was driving through, I was going to Dallas, Fort Worth to do this story on my interpreters who now live in Fort Worth and are long-haul truck drivers that got commissioned and then killed by the economist because at the time it wasn't good to talk about Texas or truck drivers positively.
[01:02:03]  So that's fine.
[01:02:04]  But as I was driving through, there's like a big billboard for Northrop Grumman, right?
[01:02:12]  Just, you know, like Northrop Grumman protecting America, you know, big, like cool airplane.
[01:02:17]  I always thought that.
[01:02:18]  And those exist in Hampton Roads.
[01:02:20]  I've seen them outside DC.
[01:02:22]  I've seen them in California, like especially down in San Diego areas.
[01:02:27]  And those don't exist so that the normal person drives by and like buys a Northrop Grumman product because they can't afford or a Raytheon product because they can't afford it.
[01:02:38]  That shit exists because if I like looked at all of my friend's parents who now work for Raytheon or Lockheed or Northrop Grumman or any of those and said, hey, you guys are facilitating like murder.
[01:02:51]  You understand this, right?
[01:02:53]  Like you're murderers.
[01:02:56]  That doesn't go over very well, right?
[01:02:58]  Because everyone does it.
[01:02:59]  No, that's how we pay the mortgage.
[01:03:01]  We go and we design smart bombs.
[01:03:03]  Like, I know it kills people at some point, but I don't do that.
[01:03:08]  I just design the guidance package.
[01:03:12]  And so I think Tom Clancy books do a similar function, right?
[01:03:16]  Like when you're learning about the impressive spread of the GBU84 cluster munitions, right?
[01:03:24]  You're not, and how they can take out tanks.
[01:03:26]  You're not learning about the seven-year-old kid that goes to pick one up because he thinks it's pretty and wants to bring it to his mom and like fucking blows up him and his sister.
[01:03:36]  Yeah.
[01:03:37]  Yeah.
[01:03:38]  I mean, again, I'm not intensely familiar with Tom Clancy's work, but it seems like showcasing technology is a huge part of that.
[01:03:46]  And I think that like when we, especially even talking about the video game stuff, I think when it's attracting people to, you know, to the CIA or the military or something like that, the technology is a huge component of that, right?
[01:03:59]  Like I think there is a high familiarity with military gear beyond even just small arms that sort of young people have basically through video games, right?
[01:04:11]  And absolutely.
[01:04:13]  The Tom Clancy video game franchises, I think, are a huge part of that.
[01:04:16]  I know a big thing in video games now is highly customizable, you know, modular weapon systems, right?
[01:04:23]  So people can put, you know, their, their fucking, I don't know, I have no real familiarity with like lasers or IR laser or any of that shit, but you know, they can put the specific branded laser of like that exists in real life on the side of their M4 that they're using the video game, the specific site, the specific stock, all this kind of stuff.
[01:04:44]  And I mean, I think that like Tom Clancy's novels seem to really like have a similar effect on people, right?
[01:04:53]  Where it's like you can, instead of just like reading about maybe the after effects of this stuff in the, you know, whatever newspaper or, you know, seeing maybe some footage of soldiers on TV or something like this, you can actually almost live vicariously through it and imagine yourself, like I think a lot of people do, in kind of the driver's seat of the people using this weapon system, whether it's like some missile guided bottle, whatever, or just like a, you know, a sidearm or something like that.
[01:05:22]  Well, and Clancy has like a huge, massive video game empire.
[01:05:24]  I mean, that's a big part of the Clancy brand, right?
[01:05:28]  Yeah, and you write about that aspect on the substack as well.
[01:05:32]  I think you had this great line that I keep thinking about, which is a simulation tool that becomes a game remains a simulation tool.
[01:05:40]  Yes.
[01:05:41]  And the fact that these games, you know, it's like, okay, you had, you know, you've got military contractors that then take these video games and modify them or modify simulations in order to then make new video games, which then they remodify to then become simulators for, to train actual new recruits.
[01:06:02]  But there's like this bizarre cycle between or kind of like, you know, yeah, like cycle that's happening with, You know, both the, but the, what the military is developing in terms of simulations, but then bringing that then to retail to then recruit people into the military, which are then using those games to then create new simulations or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
[01:06:23]  Well, and to, I couldn't get over watching.
[01:06:27]  I saw the stuff that happened on January 6th from my living room in Arkansas, where in the console of my Xbox was a Tom Clancy video game called The Division 2, where at the end of a pandemic, you were like a secret government agent capping Americans on like national monuments, you know, to bring back the government.
[01:06:49]  And what does that kind of stuff that makes you bug out a little bit?
[01:06:53]  But what does that, what does that also, what are we training up a general, like, I, I got really interested in alternative information streams, right?
[01:07:02]  Because I write for largely like mainstream publications that, you know, are financed by God knows who and, you know, all that shit.
[01:07:12]  And like, that are, but also on drives across the country, I would listen to a lot of right-wing Christian radio because it was all I could get on the radio.
[01:07:25]  Yeah.
[01:07:25]  Right.
[01:07:25]  Like certain stretches of town, that's all you can get.
[01:07:29]  And you just get two totally different like versions of what's going on from those, you know?
[01:07:36]  And I got, and then the idea that people now don't talk to each other from any of the alternative information streams because they're heretics was really fascinating to me.
[01:07:49]  Right.
[01:07:50]  And that doesn't exist without an incentive for that to exist.
[01:07:56]  You know what I mean?
[01:07:57]  Totally, totally.
[01:07:59]  Yeah.
[01:07:59]  I mean, my first introduction to Tom Clancy was through the original Rainbow Six video game, which I think came out in the 90s.
[01:08:09]  And one of the, I mean, I think there's been like a million Ghost Recon games, but I remember the one that I played.
[01:08:15]  And I think this was the same thing with the Rainbow Six game, although I was too young, I believe, to actually appreciate these features, was that like you planned out your assault and like chose your operatives beforehand.
[01:08:26]  And their gear.
[01:08:27]  And their gear.
[01:08:28]  Exactly.
[01:08:29]  A lot of planning, a lot of military decision-making process stuff.
[01:08:33]  Like, look, if I put on my paranoia hat, like my real paranoia hat, I would say there's no better way to covertly and under everybody's nose, train up a large segment of the populace in pretty advanced military techniques than we're doing right now with video games and have been doing for the last 20 years,
[01:08:55]  which again are all funded by a place out of USC called the Institute for Creative Technology that you would never think was a U.S. Army weapons lab.
[01:09:06]  And you've been there.
[01:09:08]  Yeah, in the army with my boss who was like this old green beret dude who had been in Somalia and like who didn't want to get in a cab in LA because like some of the cab drivers were Somalis and he had a bounty on his head.
[01:09:22]  Oh my God.
[01:09:23]  Yeah, it was like it was kind of complicated.
[01:09:26]  Yeah.
[01:09:27]  And I was still in the army and I went in my very first weed shop there in Marina del Rey and I was like, fuck man, I got to get out of the army.
[01:09:36]  Like this sucks.
[01:09:41]  I mean, what kind of stuff did you use when you were there?
[01:09:43]  We just got.
[01:09:44]  It's not the weed shop, though.
[01:09:46]  No, no.
[01:09:46]  So they hooked me up briefly to a kind of shoot, no shoot PTSD simulator thing that they were working on.
[01:09:57]  Sounds like the worst video game of all time.
[01:09:59]  A PTSD simulator?
[01:10:01]  The idea was like you step through like, or a PTSD tool.
[01:10:06]  Like you step through this virtual simulator that's supposed to.
[01:10:10]  And I was like, I was out of my mind with PTSD at the time.
[01:10:13]  Like this was when I'm supposed to be this sergeant major's driver.
[01:10:17]  And they're like, yeah, but you, you fucking crashed your car outside of Camp Perry and then fought with like five cops.
[01:10:24]  And so you can't drive anymore.
[01:10:28]  I think you're going to write speeches now.
[01:10:30]  Like, you know, so they had me, and then they just talked about all the other shit, all the other programming and stuff they were doing.
[01:10:40]  And, you know, then my boss goes back and tells his boss, who was General Dempsey at the time, like, hey, they're doing great stuff in LA, you know, like keep giving them money.
[01:10:48]  And then they do.
[01:10:49]  Like, that's how it works, you know?
[01:10:51]  Yeah.
[01:10:53]  I got a coin from there and I talked with some of the dudes, but like, yeah, I remember being hooked up to that simulator and that's about it.
[01:11:02]  I'm not saying this, this isn't like Turks and Caicos.
[01:11:04]  It's not like I was saying, yeah, I don't know.
[01:11:07]  Maybe I'm a fucking Manchurian candidate.
[01:11:09]  Who knows?
[01:11:12]  Time will tell.
[01:11:15]  Well, I mean, I'm praying that you're not, although I'm not getting a real Manchurian candidate vibe from this.
[01:11:21]  Although, I mean, I guess if they were really good at it, I wouldn't get one at all.
[01:11:25]  I mean, Raymond Shaw is the kindest, decent, most wonderful guy I've ever remembered in my life.
[01:11:33]  But I mean, with Clancy, you know, it's, it's his, are his video games integrated into this like military sort of, because I mean, for those who don't know, there was, I think the most famous military game that the military actually, I believe, used to recruit, and they say train their soldiers on, I don't know, if that's really true.
[01:11:51]  They did, was a game called America's Military.
[01:11:54]  America's Army.
[01:11:55]  America's Army, excuse me.
[01:11:56]  Yeah, not a very cleverly named game.
[01:11:59]  No.
[01:12:00]  But at least it doesn't, it's not just like an acronym, which is what I would usually expect from the, from the, the U.S. Armed Forces.
[01:12:06]  But is the Clancy stuff, I mean, is that used at all by the military?
[01:12:11]  I mean, do they have any interaction with that?
[01:12:13]  Yeah, the underlying artificial intelligence that is used, like the game engines in those are developed by that army lab and then kind of licensed out to the various game companies, right?
[01:12:29]  So yes, the very, like the inner mechanics of it are RG, you know?
[01:12:35]  Yeah.
[01:12:36]  And then two, the America's Army thing.
[01:12:39]  I want to tell you a quick story about that.
[01:12:41]  So my buddy Jason Amarine, the Green Beret guy that convinced me to get the Stellit shot, he has an action figure and he's a character in America's Army because he helped develop it at West Point.
[01:12:54]  So he didn't tell me this story, but a person in the company of former Congressman Duncan Hunter in the basement of a Capitol building, Capitol Club, told me this, which was, and he seemed to know he was a retired guy that was selling the Congressman on like struts, like truck struts that he was going to sell.
[01:13:12]  But he wanted to tell me the story about video games in West Point.
[01:13:16]  So they noticed at West Point that they were getting, during the Iraq War, 07 timeframe, they were getting a lot of downloads from Ramadi.
[01:13:28]  And so they tracked the downloads, right?
[01:13:30]  And they figured out, oh, like the like whoever's fighting us in Ramadi, I was never in Iraq.
[01:13:38]  So like, I don't fucking know how it went there.
[01:13:40]  But like whoever's fighting us in Ramadi, they're using America's Army to war game their like training.
[01:13:47]  Like they're, they're doing small unit tactics on America's Army, right?
[01:13:51]  That's so fun.
[01:13:52]  My buddy, well, he's dead now, but a guy new got like half his face blown off there.
[01:13:57]  Okay.
[01:13:58]  So that guy who blew half his face off could have learned it from America's Army.
[01:14:01]  Well, it gets, here's, here's where it gets, here's where the twist comes in.
[01:14:05]  So they noticed this at West Point and they're like, oh, they're learning like TTPs from America's Army.
[01:14:11]  Well, we put in accurate like TTPs, like tactics, techniques, and procedures.
[01:14:15]  I'm sorry.
[01:14:17]  So let's just have the like, let's tweak the code and have the American soldiers behave differently.
[01:14:25]  And so, and do it in such a way.
[01:14:29]  Basically, they trained up these guys through a fake version of America's Army, like a modded version, to attack American soldiers in a way that they would just be slaughtered immediately rather than have a good chance.
[01:14:41]  Wow.
[01:14:45]  This is the kind of stuff Mac and America have never dreamed of.
[01:14:47]  Well, I mean, it was the dream that Phoenix dreamed.
[01:14:51]  Yeah, I mean, kind of, right?
[01:14:52]  It's like hijacking the brain.
[01:14:55]  No, and then that guy Furlong that was working with Dewey Claridge in this private spy ring, he was using video games, a Czech video game company called U-Turn to do like psychological operations in Mesopotamia.
[01:15:11]  And so, you know, like down to what billboards were written down.
[01:15:15]  But then he noticed, and he tells me all this shit in Tampa, like while we're doing research for the book, and he's one of Dewey Claridge's guys or like, you know.
[01:15:24]  They work together.
[01:15:25]  But um, the one of those weird military operators where you're like you know, and uh, like just fat and sweaty and like smoking Marlborough lights I still smoked cigarettes at the time, so I loved him like we're just, you know, being like just fucking dirtbags together.
[01:15:41]  It was great.
[01:15:42]  And um, the uh, he starts telling me like no, so we would, we would sell these in the bazaar and then figure out, like you know, these guys like this one, pretty soon we'd figure out whose computers we were targeting and we wouldn't say, like you've won this.

=== Rick Prado's Tale (16:25) ===

[01:15:59]  And these are different games, this isn't the West Point one.
[01:16:02]  But you've, you've won this many tokens in this one game.
[01:16:05]  Like come to Dubai for a free sex weekend, you know, with like a Russian whore okay, i'll be real.
[01:16:11]  You know, stop here.
[01:16:12]  I actually have won that in a few games.
[01:16:15]  And that offer is, it's honestly, if you're good enough at games, that offer is not fake.
[01:16:19]  It's not fake, it's real.
[01:16:21]  Okay, I went no okay no no, but what would happen?
[01:16:23]  What would happen when they did this?
[01:16:25]  Well, so then they would, they would invite these dudes and these, you know, fucking Gomers, get on the like like horny Gomers, get on the plane go to Dubai and like get there.
[01:16:34]  And it's not a like Russian prostitute, it's like a dude in a suit, right yeah.
[01:16:40]  It's like a dude from the embassy who's like hey, you motherfucker, like we're either gonna send you to Guantanamo or you're gonna work for us, Jesus Christ.
[01:16:48]  Um, and like you don't think about that shit with video games right yeah, but they're, they've been effectively, they've been weaponized in the war on terror.
[01:17:00]  And also you don't think about like you're developing really good marksmanship in little kids with fucking duck hunt from Nintendo, which was a Japanese electronics company founded post-war by army intelligence people shit yeah hell i've, I, I mean, I played the Hunt for Red October with the gun on the NES.
[01:17:25]  Yes.
[01:17:26]  I think.
[01:17:26]  Yeah.
[01:17:28]  My friend's mom's house.
[01:17:30]  That's all.
[01:17:30]  Do you have the power pad, anyone?
[01:17:32]  I don't.
[01:17:33]  I never had the system.
[01:17:34]  She had it.
[01:17:35]  So I would go over there and play.
[01:17:39]  I grew up notoriously bad at video games.
[01:17:43]  And so I think that actually did worse for my marksmanship than anything else because I could never get the two sticks to go to the same place that I wanted them to be in.
[01:17:52]  But you're still thinking tactically, right?
[01:17:54]  Like there's always thinking tactic.
[01:17:56]  You know me.
[01:17:57]  I'm always ascertaining.
[01:17:58]  I see Liz.
[01:17:59]  She's like scoping the corners of the room.
[01:18:01]  I'm always scoping.
[01:18:02]  I got my guys on the web.
[01:18:04]  I read, you have no idea.
[01:18:06]  I have listed every little detail about the background in that room and I've got it cataloged in my brain.
[01:18:12]  My wife hates it.
[01:18:13]  We'll be out somewhere.
[01:18:14]  And like, we were out, we were out at Cane Hill.
[01:18:16]  She's doing this program.
[01:18:19]  She's a writing, she's a professor of writing at the University of Arkansas as well.
[01:18:23]  And she's doing this program with the Smithsonian where they're doing like a writing workshop out at this old nice place in Arkansas called Cane Hill.
[01:18:33]  And we're walking along this nature trail.
[01:18:35]  And I like look over to my stepdaughter and I'm like, hey, Eva, this is a great place to in place a Claymore mine.
[01:18:44]  And Tony's like, Jesus Christ, Matt, like, what is wrong with you?
[01:18:48]  And I'm like, the kid has to know small unit infantry.
[01:18:52]  I thought we had to.
[01:18:53]  You never know.
[01:18:53]  The Division II could become real.
[01:18:56]  I mean, we do live in Arkansas.
[01:18:59]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:19:00]  We're getting a lot of fucking Texas people here, though, and a lot of New Yorkers.
[01:19:03]  Really?
[01:19:03]  And California.
[01:19:04]  Because everyone's getting priced out of Texas.
[01:19:06]  Yeah.
[01:19:07]  And Alice Walton has gone insane as far as like building shit in Bentonville.
[01:19:12]  Like Bentonville used to be small town USA, like in G.I. Joe comics, that town Cobra owned.
[01:19:21]  You know, but no one knew.
[01:19:23]  Sorry, Cobra owned.
[01:19:24]  I didn't know that.
[01:19:24]  No, I didn't.
[01:19:25]  Cobra had an entire town in New Jersey called Braca Beach that they ran through brainwashing.
[01:19:34]  Oh, yeah.
[01:19:35]  I like, if I hadn't done something with Tom Clancy, I would have done something with G.I. Joe because like their G.I. Joe is actually like super subversive because it was written by a Japanese American Vietnam veteran who used to carry an Uzi in his briefcase and hung out with the Black Panthers.
[01:19:52]  Larry Hama.
[01:19:54]  Do you guys like Larry Hama is the coolest human being on the planet?
[01:19:58]  Oh, okay.
[01:20:00]  He wrote all the file cards for G.I. Joe's, which are all like weird and like, you know, like they're all background.
[01:20:07]  I just remember snake eyes because I was cool.
[01:20:09]  No, but like they're all much like the real military.
[01:20:12]  They're all uniquely damaged individuals before they get in the military.
[01:20:17]  And then they just become like more uniquely damaged.
[01:20:21]  And the file cards all reflect that.
[01:20:24]  And like Hama's comic books, I remember during the first Gulf War, we lived in Turkey and that was when Dev Soul, you know, and so we were, I would be reading G.I. Joe comics about the invasion of benzene by Cobra forces.
[01:20:39]  Benzene was a fictional country.
[01:20:41]  Yeah, which is what they call gas.
[01:20:43]  Yes.
[01:20:43]  Yes.
[01:20:44]  And the Amir of Benzene.
[01:20:46]  Like it was amazing.
[01:20:50]  That's incredible.
[01:21:13]  Well, back to Tom Clancy a little bit, because we're running up against time here.
[01:21:19]  I mean, one thing that Tom Clancy is sort of known for is we mentioned early in the episode, selling his name essentially to Ubisoft, which is, I think, known as sort of one of the, from what I know, the kind of kings of microtransactions, which is like when you buy little things in video games for like $2.99.
[01:21:38]  Oh, you mean what Steve Bannon was working on before he went on?
[01:21:41]  Exactly.
[01:21:42]  Yes.
[01:21:43]  I know.
[01:21:44]  Pioneered by guys like Bannon in World of Warcraft and shit like that.
[01:21:47]  Fascinating.
[01:21:47]  Yeah.
[01:21:49]  But no Pentagon involvement though.
[01:21:51]  $45 million fucking dollars.
[01:21:54]  And they sort of turn out.
[01:21:55]  I know there's a couple of Ghost Recon games that came out.
[01:21:58]  The Division, like you mentioned, which having sort of seen both of those, they look like they're pretty similar to the Ghost Recon games that came out.
[01:22:06]  Yeah.
[01:22:08]  I still think they should make a Tom Clancy is Tom Clancy's Assassin's Creed.
[01:22:13]  I think that would be a great crossover.
[01:22:16]  And Ubisoft, if you're listening to this, get on that.
[01:22:20]  But yeah, I mean, he's now known.
[01:22:23]  I feel like, I mean, obviously, he's not writing books anymore.
[01:22:25]  He's been dead.
[01:22:27]  But these video game series have taken sort of a life of their own.
[01:22:30]  And they're actually like, they seem like they're almost far away from anything he's actually ever written.
[01:22:34]  Well, yeah.
[01:22:35]  And the Amazon series at this point are as well.
[01:22:39]  You know, like he's in death.
[01:22:43]  I mean, he's Obi-Waned it, right?
[01:22:45]  Like, in death, he's become more powerful than he ever was in life, even when he was pretty fucking powerful in life.
[01:22:52]  But all these little Tom Clancy, like Amazon uses Tom Clancy to sell shit during the Super Bowl.
[01:23:02]  In 2022.
[01:23:04]  In 2022.
[01:23:05]  And the man's been dead since 2013.
[01:23:07]  Yeah.
[01:23:08]  And it's wild to think about too, because like you say, like in life, you know, he was pretty fucking powerful.
[01:23:13]  And it's like, you know, this guy had apparently an open invitation could just walk around the halls of the CIA, which is wild.
[01:23:20]  That blew my mind.
[01:23:21]  Rick Prado told me that, which like that's the guy we should talk about.
[01:23:26]  Yeah.
[01:23:26]  All right.
[01:23:27]  You got to explain who that is.
[01:23:28]  And that, because that's a really interesting facet of this, too.
[01:23:31]  Okay.
[01:23:32]  So Rick Prado is this ex-CIA dude, paramilitary dude, Blackwater dude, assassin dude.
[01:23:43]  He ran like CIA wet work stuff.
[01:23:47]  Cuban-American guy.
[01:23:48]  And Evan Wright, who wrote Generation Kill, wrote a piece that was originally for Vanity Fair, but then Vanity Fair got cold feet.
[01:23:56]  So he did it on Byliner.
[01:23:57]  I'm a fucking like media nerd with this shit.
[01:23:59]  I'm sorry.
[01:24:00]  No, no problem.
[01:24:01]  Yeah, it's good.
[01:24:02]  It's good for me.
[01:24:03]  Vanity Fair getting cold feet.
[01:24:05]  Yeah.
[01:24:07]  I've written for them.
[01:24:09]  And I have friends who work for them.
[01:24:10]  They're, you know, they sure.
[01:24:12]  Anyways, the we'll pause there.
[01:24:17]  And so I had reached out to Rick Prado because I thought Tom Clancy based John Clark on Rick Prado and Domingo Chavez on Rick Prado.
[01:24:29]  He just split one man into two individuals.
[01:24:31]  I'd like to say that to some men I know.
[01:24:34]  Because they'd gone to similar college.
[01:24:36]  Like Domingo Chavez goes to George Mason University and is very proud of that.
[01:24:40]  Rick Prado did the same thing.
[01:24:42]  John Clark in the movies murdered a bunch of guys, freelance in a heroin ring in Baltimore.
[01:24:51]  Evan Wright of Rolling Stone Byliner accused Rick Prado of credibly, fairly credibly, accused Rick Prado of murdering a string of cocaine dealers in Miami in 1979 when he was.
[01:25:08]  I mean, to be fair, that's a great, that's one of the most ever times in history to kill cocaine.
[01:25:13]  It was, well, I mean, and he must have impressed somebody because he got a job offer from CIA shortly after that.
[01:25:20]  It's a kind of a thing that goes very well on your resume.
[01:25:23]  Right.
[01:25:23]  So like, I'm out at Fort Sill trying to track down this other story and I'm at an estate sale and I get a call from like an unlisted number and I think it's the general on Fort Sill because I just show up like these places and the guys are like, what the fuck?
[01:25:36]  And sometimes they talk and it's Rick Prado instead.
[01:25:41]  And he's like, hey, like, I'm really flattered, but like, I never talked to Mr. Clancy.
[01:25:46]  Like, he walked around.
[01:25:47]  He, he and Vince Flynn had walk around privileges.
[01:25:50]  And I was like, what?
[01:25:52]  Like, fucking for real?
[01:25:54]  Like, no way.
[01:25:56]  And then we just like bullshitted about some other stuff.
[01:25:59]  And he had a book coming out and wanted to know like how to promote it.
[01:26:02]  And I'm like, why would you ask me?
[01:26:04]  My book sold like three copies.
[01:26:06]  You know, like, I can't, I have no advice on that shit.
[01:26:09]  Um, he had a race car painted up with black ops on it.
[01:26:13]  Um, because a friend of his, you should have gotten a Bo Bergdahl race car, dude.
[01:26:17]  I mean I should have.
[01:26:19]  It's not too late.
[01:26:20]  I thought about the.
[01:26:21]  I thought like when they were going through the right stuff, I was like Bo Bergdahl the musical actually could be done fairly well because it's all in a confined space.
[01:26:31]  A musical boy yes yeah, it was.
[01:26:35]  I wanted to do Intelligence, the musical too, where this was like an idea I was kicking around in like 2016, where you would have drones that were on wires oh, and they would shoot nerf gun things pellets, at two randomly selected audience members but not that randomly selected, not that randomly selected and then those two people would be banned from the show for life.
[01:26:59]  So, like they would not, they would symbolically die.
[01:27:03]  You could show up and then you might get droned.
[01:27:06]  And then the other thing I wanted was like those Ed Snowden bots all dancing in choreography.
[01:27:12]  You know um sure, but that never got off the ground.
[01:27:15]  I think you found your new Colin.
[01:27:17]  Um well, I mean, you know it would be.
[01:27:21]  It would be a difficult bridge for us to cross to interview you if you did become a musical theater guy.
[01:27:27]  Well, I mean, that's how Aaron Sorkin got a start right.
[01:27:30]  That's true, and you know what i've always said.
[01:27:31]  You do remind me of Aaron Sorkin.
[01:27:33]  He's I mean well, it's, uh I, to my knowledge, have not cashed any checks from the Central Intelligence Agency.
[01:27:40]  I can't say that about the author of Mr Sorkin's War screenplay.
[01:27:45]  Yes oh, did he write Charlie Wilson's War?
[01:27:47]  Yes dude yes, that's incredible.
[01:27:50]  Yeah no, and i'll be, i'll be real guys.
[01:27:53]  I've actually never really seen anything he's ever made.
[01:27:55]  I just know about him because people make a fun of him.
[01:27:56]  Oh no, I mean, look you go, I you could do a version of the Hunt For Tom Clancy.
[01:28:02]  That's the West Wing and how the West Wing has influenced foreign, like how uh, my favorite William And Mary Kyomega Jensaki is acting out as Cj oh absolutely, role every time that she is up, could say the same thing about Jake Sullivan and all the rest of the State Department.
[01:28:21]  Absolutely no no no like okay, that's everyone's.
[01:28:24]  The Obama boys.
[01:28:25]  I think they've actually even openly talked about this uh this, like the, the Pod Johns and those guys who were the Obama boys.
[01:28:33]  I know they've talked about how they would like imagine themselves as like walking and talking like the West Swing characters and they're like, I mean, I know, like I know, Tommy Tommy's a nice guy.
[01:28:44]  Um, they have a really well-funded podcast operation out of a massive building in Los Angeles.
[01:28:51]  Um, and uh, the I wore a Golden Girls t-shirt and hot pink shorts when I went on that show.
[01:28:58]  Um, and Ben Rhodes was not impressed.
[01:29:00]  The uh, he wasn't like.
[01:29:03]  I wanted to meet Ben Rhodes after and I made like these like booty short short, short pinks And I'm like, what's up, Ben Rhodes?
[01:29:11]  How are you?
[01:29:12]  Like, I was writing the 9-11 commission report with my old professor, Phil Zelico.
[01:29:18]  Hi.
[01:29:19]  Yeah, Phil Zelico.
[01:29:20]  I had lunch with him one time and he told me that he still had questions about like the Bush family in 9-11.
[01:29:29]  And I was like, man.
[01:29:31]  But you're Phil Zelico.
[01:29:32]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:29:33]  Totally.
[01:29:34]  Sir, you literally wrote the report.
[01:29:36]  He's like, yes, but all I want to talk to you now, this was 2013, was like massive online courses, which he was developing at UVA.
[01:29:44]  And I was like, I don't want to talk about this shit.
[01:29:46]  I want to talk about 9-11.
[01:29:47]  Like, you know, come on, man.
[01:29:49]  Give me some more.
[01:29:52]  He's a weird guy.
[01:29:53]  They're all.
[01:29:54]  Can you imagine?
[01:29:54]  No, I mean, and like Ned Price, the State Department dude.
[01:29:58]  Yeah.
[01:29:59]  He was the guy when Hastings and I were doing the story on the profile of John Brennan.
[01:30:06]  He was the guy that like CIA had passed.
[01:30:10]  He was like our media handler guy.
[01:30:12]  So I know, like, after I went crazy, I sent Ned Price's CIA account a like 4,000 word email about how, and I got to find this email.
[01:30:24]  You definitely have to find this email.
[01:30:26]  It was, I stayed up like all, I couldn't sleep for like three nights.
[01:30:29]  This is after we got back to Arkansas and I was convinced like the ghosts were still going to get me.
[01:30:33]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:30:34]  And so I wrote like this thing where I was like, listen, I don't have a problem with intercepting radio waves.
[01:30:41]  Like I feel like that's fine, but you guys are tapping into fiber optic cables and that means you're intercepting light.
[01:30:48]  And like that seems like an affront to God.
[01:30:52]  So I would like you to like think about that as you continue to work for your evil organization.
[01:30:56]  I absolutely need to see this email.
[01:30:58]  Yeah.
[01:30:58]  That's actually a good point.
[01:31:00]  It is a good point.
[01:31:01]  I was like, I mean, it is an it is an affront to God.
[01:31:03]  I know, but then you're like, fuck, man.
[01:31:05]  Wait, I got to call like state for this thing.
[01:31:07]  And oh, fuck, Ned's there.
[01:31:09]  Like, he thinks I'm nuts.
[01:31:10]  Can you FOIA your own letter?
[01:31:12]  Probably.
[01:31:13]  Yeah.
[01:31:14]  Yeah.
[01:31:14]  I should be a benefit.
[01:31:16]  No, I was sending like one of the other benefits of like being no longer drunk all the time is I remember all this shit I did.
[01:31:24]  Yeah.
[01:31:24]  And so, you know, as somebody who has found themselves in a similar place.
[01:31:30]  Yeah, I would actually say one of the worst parts about not being loaded all the time is remembering everything I did and do.
[01:31:37]  Going through though and finding some bonus emails where you're like, wait, like, was I trolling an assistant secretary of defense at that time?
[01:31:46]  Like, oh, fuck.
[01:31:47]  Like, I was.
[01:31:48]  Why was I doing that?
[01:31:49]  Like, oh, because I was drunk.
[01:31:50]  Okay.
[01:31:51]  Yeah.
[01:31:51]  Like, that makes sense.
[01:31:53]  Well, I was on a lot of meth and you tend not to, um, I don't think I had a way to thank God have a way to email anybody.
[01:32:00]  But if I had, I think that I probably would, I don't know who the fuck I would have sent emails to.
[01:32:04]  Oh, my God.
[01:32:05]  So meth wouldn't make your I have I've only done meth like twice and it was accidentally much like crack where I've done that twice and it was both well one time was to be polite, but um yeah, you know, as you do.
[01:32:20]  And the dudes, anyways, but meth wouldn't make like your emails very nice either.

=== Fascinating Character Insights (07:49) ===

[01:32:25]  Like you can be playful if you're drunk, but you're just kind of going to be like intensive.
[01:32:30]  It's a little bit of an edge.
[01:32:31]  Yeah.
[01:32:32]  Well, we got to wrap up.
[01:32:34]  Yeah.
[01:32:35]  This is, I mean, I think we could go on for four times its length, but we should again.
[01:32:40]  We should again.
[01:32:41]  I think we got to have you back on again because we only covered a fraction of the shit that I want to talk to you about.
[01:32:45]  Yeah, we didn't talk about Mike Flynn once.
[01:32:48]  We didn't talk about Flynn.
[01:32:49]  I don't think we talked about Steve Pieczenik, which is related to Flynn.
[01:32:52]  I mean, we should say that for another episode.
[01:32:54]  Can I say something about Steve Pieczenik?
[01:32:56]  The op center games of state.
[01:33:00]  Go back and reread Steve Pieczenik's Op Center Games of State number three, I think.
[01:33:06]  And it's all about Nazis radicalizing people through online games.
[01:33:12]  It's fucking prophetic for like the late 2000s or late 2020s.
[01:33:18]  It's weird how much like, huh, all that shit kind of came true.
[01:33:23]  Yeah.
[01:33:24]  Yeah.
[01:33:25]  And it's, it's, Pachenek is one of the, I mean, I think we, I guess, I guess we mentioned him earlier in the episode, but we've done, we did an episode with Robbie Martin where we talked a little bit about him.
[01:33:33]  And he is a, I watched some of his videos last night.
[01:33:36]  I mean, he is a fascinating character.
[01:33:38]  I think he came up to again recently because I think Ginny Thomas was watching his videos and sending them along to Mark Meadows or whoever, which is such a funny psychotic.
[01:33:50]  Delighted Pachenek to no end to find himself.
[01:33:54]  I mean, my God, I also, I know he's lying about having three degrees, but I respect him for coming along so far with having that lie just still be on his Wikipedia page.
[01:34:03]  Oh, it's, I mean, just, I have to, like, like, I don't, it's like watching an athlete or someone else of like a certain amount of performance and intensity that like you don't understand, but you're just like, I can't believe you can keep all those wheels spinning, man.
[01:34:23]  Like, I basically have to tell the truth at all times or I don't keep shit straight.
[01:34:28]  You know, like my wife is always like, I'm like, hey, honey, you don't mind if I like go to the Trump Hotel and stay there for like three days and come back.
[01:34:38]  And she's like, no, because you're going to come back.
[01:34:41]  And if anything happened, you're going to tell me the truth.
[01:34:43]  And I'm like, oh, yeah, that's true.
[01:34:45]  Like, that sounds like how things go.
[01:34:47]  Yeah.
[01:34:48]  Yeah.
[01:34:49]  Like, fair enough.
[01:34:50]  Good call.
[01:34:51]  This is a mature adult relationship.
[01:34:53]  I've never had one of these before.
[01:34:55]  Yeah.
[01:34:55]  Yeah.
[01:34:58]  This is great, actually.
[01:35:00]  Like, it's been, I have to give a like, at the end of this, like, a shout out for, like, if you're not married, like, maybe think about getting married.
[01:35:09]  It's pretty good.
[01:35:10]  I liked it.
[01:35:11]  I like it.
[01:35:12]  Like, not liked it.
[01:35:13]  That implies past tense, but I like it.
[01:35:15]  It's very nice.
[01:35:17]  This is, I think this is the first true, we are bookending this with wife shout outs on both ends, which is, you know, honestly, we should do this every episode.
[01:35:27]  Absolutely.
[01:35:27]  No, she's, she's, she's a better writer than me, smarter than me, better looking than me.
[01:35:34]  And most years, she makes more money than I do.
[01:35:36]  This motherfucker just gained a thousand.
[01:35:39]  All five of our lady fans just signed up for this motherfucker sub stack.
[01:35:44]  Oh my god.
[01:35:44]  Tony Jensen.
[01:35:46]  We have lots of lady fans.
[01:35:47]  A memoir of survival on stolen land.
[01:35:49]  That's the book you should read.
[01:35:51]  Well, I think they should also read your goddamn sub stack, The Hunt for Tom Clancy.
[01:35:56]  Read the man's Boberg doll book.
[01:35:58]  And also check out, what is that fucking website?
[01:36:01]  Muckrack?
[01:36:02]  What's the one that takes all your damn Reddit?
[01:36:03]  Yeah, that's the journalist.
[01:36:05]  This guy, I mean.
[01:36:05]  I'm not linked to all of it.
[01:36:07]  I will say, I actually DM'd you about this late the other night, but I realized that you actually had written one of my favorite articles from the entire sort of like when I think it was 2019 it came out, which is your article about Epsy, New Mexico.
[01:36:20]  Oh, yeah.
[01:36:21]  I love it.
[01:36:22]  One of my favorite ones.
[01:36:23]  Yeah, thank you.
[01:36:24]  Yeah, there's a lot to say about New Mexico.
[01:36:27]  Well, we got to have you back on school there.
[01:36:30]  It is.
[01:36:30]  Oh, brother.
[01:36:32]  At a school founded by Lord Mountbatten, Prince Charles, and Carmen Hammer.
[01:36:37]  All right.
[01:36:37]  Maybe you are.
[01:36:38]  I'm sorry.
[01:36:38]  You are.
[01:36:39]  Yeah, you're, I'm sorry.
[01:36:40]  You're going to.
[01:36:40]  I mean, but like, I'm like, I'll be real, though.
[01:36:42]  If there's like a Manchurian candidate, like, what, he's going to kill Joe Biden?
[01:36:45]  Not my problem, you know?
[01:36:47]  I, I just, yeah, I'm, uh, I don't take phone calls from certain people at certain times, you know?
[01:36:53]  Yeah.
[01:36:54]  I worry that the code word might be activated.
[01:36:56]  Well, I can't, I got it.
[01:36:57]  I got a watch the other day at a pawn shot, like one of these fucking electronic watches.
[01:37:02]  Don't know how to turn the alarm off.
[01:37:04]  So it's been going off.
[01:37:05]  And that's kind of similar.
[01:37:06]  And that makes me annoyed and crabby.
[01:37:08]  And so it's like, it's kind of like my code word or whatever.
[01:37:12]  Yeah.
[01:37:12]  All right.
[01:37:14]  Well, Matt, it's been a pleasure having you.
[01:37:17]  Again, that's the hunt for Tom Clancy, his sub stack.
[01:37:20]  And we are, we will be delighted to have you back.
[01:37:24]  That's great.
[01:37:24]  Thank you.
[01:37:25]  Well, we'll link to his blog in the notes.
[01:37:53]  We always say that, but we really will.
[01:37:54]  I really recommend you guys check out All the entries.
[01:38:00]  I don't know.
[01:38:00]  I just like fully inhaled.
[01:38:01]  I meant to say this when we were interviewing him, but I fucking love this vlog.
[01:38:06]  I read like so much of it.
[01:38:07]  It reminds me so much of my grandpa that it got me real nostalgic.
[01:38:11]  So I would check it out.
[01:38:13]  He goes down some real interesting, real interesting little passages and little trails that he takes, including a lot on 9-11, which I highly recommend.
[01:38:25]  Fuck, we didn't talk about the 9-11 stuff.
[01:38:27]  I know.
[01:38:27]  We barely talked about Contra.
[01:38:28]  You know, we're going to have to have him back and do a Berg Doll app.
[01:38:31]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:38:32]  In fact, we'll do a whole series.
[01:38:33]  I was about to say, we should do, because you know, like, I mean, how many episodes did Serial do?
[01:38:38]  Uh, 47 of them about Berg Doll.
[01:38:40]  But, like, you know, for those of you who might have read in the trade papers, like, Liz and I, um, you know, we took a meeting with Sarah or Miss Koenig the other day.
[01:38:51]  Um, young Chomsky has been, of course, working on serial for a number of years now, doing their interstitial music.
[01:38:57]  Uh, and we're pleased to announce that we've purchased them.
[01:39:00]  Yeah, Truanon's Cereal.
[01:39:01]  Truinon's Cereal, exactly.
[01:39:03]  Uh, and we've actually sold the serial franchise to Ubisoft.
[01:39:06]  Yes.
[01:39:07]  And they're planning on making an Assassin's Creed Adon Said.
[01:39:11]  Um, which is now very confusing because now the podcast now, after we've sold the rights, is now Serial's Truanon's serial, which is just exactly.
[01:39:18]  Yeah, you know, it'll be a little confusing for people, but you get the hang of it.
[01:39:22]  And you, you do get to play as Adan, where he does, unfortunately, murder his girlfriend and then tricks a reporter into falling in love with him and putting out several episodes to that effect.
[01:39:31]  It's a really immersive game.
[01:39:34]  You know, the wristblades are back.
[01:39:36]  It's, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a fantastic, just really proud to be working in this partnership.
[01:39:41]  As close as I'm Liz, my name is Brace.
[01:39:44]  We are, of course, joined by Ultra producer Young Chomsky.
[01:39:48]  And the podcast is called Truan's Truanon, the Division Truan.
[01:39:54]  We'll see you next time.
[01:39:55]  bye Come out.