Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listeningcast. You can't
Speaker 1: predict anything. The meat Eater Podcast is brought to you
Speaker 1: by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands,
Speaker 1: or scouting for el, First Light has performance apparel to
Speaker 1: support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at
Speaker 1: first light dot com. F I R S T L
Speaker 1: I T E dot com. All right, everybody, saddle up.
Speaker 1: We got a great guest today, author CJ. Box, who
Speaker 1: as we're gonna get into We'll just get it. We'll
Speaker 1: get it right out on the air right now. I
Speaker 1: assume that it was. I thought CJ. Box was too
Speaker 1: perfect for a writer, for a novelist, and I thought
Speaker 1: his name must be like Morris.
Speaker 2: No, it's that's that's my name. I should be a journalist.
Speaker 2: And by the way, thanks for having me here. And
Speaker 2: when I worked for newspapers, I was all my stories
Speaker 2: were by Chuck Box. And then I moved to a
Speaker 2: little town in Wyoming called Saratoga, Wyoming, and I went
Speaker 2: to a ranch party and a rancher once said, man,
Speaker 2: we love that that crazy name of yours. You know,
Speaker 2: because it's on the back of a chuck wagon.
Speaker 1: I never like to be a cowboy poet named chuck Box.
Speaker 2: So the next issue of the paper it was C. J. Boss.
Speaker 1: So you actually had to change your name away from
Speaker 1: a name that would have been a great stage name.
Speaker 2: Well or or it sounds like a place for utensils
Speaker 2: on the back of a chuck Yeah, but.
Speaker 3: Out of Saratoga, Wyoming, Like it's all yeah, it's all
Speaker 3: too cute.
Speaker 2: Like I said, I'm I'm wagon wheel. Yeah, but you
Speaker 2: were born in Casper, that's right. That's right.
Speaker 1: We'll get into your bio, but uh, needless say, uh,
Speaker 1: best selling author, New York Times Best that's not needless
Speaker 1: to say. I'm gonna say that with pride, New York
Speaker 1: Times bestselling author, author of thirty books, that's right. And
Speaker 1: in how many? In how many in the current series
Speaker 1: that you're working on now, because this is your brand
Speaker 1: new release.
Speaker 2: That's right. That is the twenty fourth Joe Pickett novel.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so we're we're here celebrating three Inch Teeth, a
Speaker 1: Joe Pickett novel, which is the what number.
Speaker 2: Again, twenty fourth? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Do you know that I became familiar with you. I
Speaker 1: had heard your name, but I hadn't read your books
Speaker 1: until it was pointed out to me by a bunch
Speaker 1: of people that you mentioned my name in one of
Speaker 1: your book.
Speaker 2: That's right, that's right. I brought that for you as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, I don't know. I was. I
Speaker 1: don't know how. I was moderately happy.
Speaker 2: Shit's good.
Speaker 1: I thought I was sick. I would open it up,
Speaker 1: thinking maybe I'm here. Maybe he really Yeah, like I'm
Speaker 1: a hero, I'm widely celebrated. But you did, like what
Speaker 1: you do with everything you do, is you treated it,
Speaker 1: you know, very fairly. It was. It was a sparse mentioned,
Speaker 1: but I took note good.
Speaker 2: Good. Yeah.
Speaker 1: My father in law, who reads all of your books,
Speaker 1: he didn't catch it. He loves your books. I'm like,
Speaker 1: you know what, this is the last time he visited you.
Speaker 1: Tell me, you know you always read every time a CJ.
Speaker 1: Box book comes out, he reads it, and so I
Speaker 1: knew you read it. And I said, you didn't have
Speaker 1: noticed anything peculiar in that book, did you? I was like, okay,
Speaker 1: so you might not be your closest reading Well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the background topic of the new book, three Inch Teeth.
Speaker 1: I feel like he's I feel like he stole it
Speaker 1: from the podcast, might have. I Well. One of the
Speaker 1: things about the c J Box, uh, the Sorry the
Speaker 1: Pickett novels is that it's a game board and protagonist.
Speaker 1: So you do your homework and you set it. Instead
Speaker 1: of setting it like in some bygone era, you set
Speaker 1: it these it's contemporary Wyoming with all the issues that
Speaker 1: contemporary Wyoming is dealing with and the changes like the
Speaker 1: old ways of life in sometimes in contradiction to intension
Speaker 1: with new people, new ways of life and uh, and
Speaker 1: right away in the book you get into the Wyoming
Speaker 1: corner Crossers, who are not from Missouri, right Pennsylvania. They
Speaker 1: have a specialized yes, they do. And so within this
Speaker 1: novel is baked in like this sort of like big
Speaker 1: divisive current event. And when Krin was reading it, she
Speaker 1: pointed out how with sort of what generosity and fairness
Speaker 1: within the novel, the generosity and fairness that you applied
Speaker 1: to the current event, so that someone reading the novel
Speaker 1: might think that this is just all out of your imagination,
Speaker 1: but it's actually you tap into these very real issues
Speaker 1: and lay out the you know, the the opposing sides
Speaker 1: of these very real issues as your protagonist takes it
Speaker 1: in and deals with the different sides. So it's like
Speaker 1: it's it's a really kind of an honest portrayal of
Speaker 1: a place in time.
Speaker 2: Well, that is something I've tried to do since the
Speaker 2: very first book. For one thing, I never set out
Speaker 2: to say, you know, the world is just waiting for
Speaker 2: a wyoming game Warden series.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: I wrote one book, a book called Open Season, but
Speaker 2: the issue in that was the endangered species law, and
Speaker 2: it was kind of based on a real the discovery
Speaker 2: of blackfooted ferrets nearing a Metitzi wyoming on the Pitchfork. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I was a reporter at that time, and I thought
Speaker 2: it was so interesting to me, not that because I'd
Speaker 2: grown up with little posters around the picture drawing if
Speaker 2: you see this the animal, call this number. Yes.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: They thought they might be extinct.
Speaker 3: It was like beware if you're going to go prairie
Speaker 3: dog hunting, yes, right right, Yeah, and then became.
Speaker 1: A little wanted posters for blackfooted ferrets.
Speaker 2: Yeah. But then when they were discovered calling outside of Metzi,
Speaker 2: I found out when I was a reporter, nearly everybody
Speaker 2: around there knew they were there. No one ever made
Speaker 2: the call and I thought, that is a kind of
Speaker 2: fascinating New West Western story. I want to retell it
Speaker 2: in this book. And uh, the protagonist was originally going
Speaker 2: to be a sheriff and then a journalist, which is
Speaker 2: what I was, and then I made him a game
Speaker 2: warden because I was doing ride alongs with game wardens.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: So since the very beginning, I've tried to have issues
Speaker 2: that you know, resonate among I always thought, if I could,
Speaker 2: if people around me where I live in Wyoming think
Speaker 2: the books are authentic, that was success, and luckily it's
Speaker 2: worked out a lot better than that. But so, yeah,
Speaker 2: the corner crossing thing, that case is right in my backyard.
Speaker 2: My wife was called to be on the jury.
Speaker 1: How did she do?
Speaker 2: She didn't get called?
Speaker 1: Did she make it to the judge?
Speaker 2: She knew a ranch owner, and she knew the foreman,
Speaker 2: and she knew the game warden. But we're involved in it,
Speaker 2: so she was gone.
Speaker 1: One of these was she trying to get on?
Speaker 2: She really wanted to get on.
Speaker 5: I was gonna say a conflict of interest might be
Speaker 5: that my husband might later write a book about this.
Speaker 2: That did comebody.
Speaker 1: I actually need to be here because my husband's going
Speaker 1: to write all about which would be like the big
Speaker 1: best seller. So I want to make sure I'm here
Speaker 1: to give him like the scoop judge be like you
Speaker 1: could take off.
Speaker 2: But it's such a fascinating it's it's one of those
Speaker 2: it's so I can see both sides and I'm not kidding,
Speaker 2: and I try to portray it that way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you had formal training as a journalists then too,
Speaker 1: so you're able to apply.
Speaker 2: That as formal training as a journalist can get. Yeah,
Speaker 2: which is I went to college, that's it, and became
Speaker 2: a journalist and yeah, worked for a little weekly newspapers.
Speaker 1: Got it.
Speaker 3: This is how I see uh novels come to be Right,
Speaker 3: you're driving down the road, you're listening to the radio,
Speaker 3: and you just go that sounds like a case for
Speaker 3: Joel Picket.
Speaker 2: It is, or something over here in the post office
Speaker 2: where everybody goes, or talking to the local game warden.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: I get lots of things like that.
Speaker 1: Well, we're gonna we're gonna hit on a couple of things.
Speaker 1: I got two more things I'm gonna mention. One's a
Speaker 1: question just up top. You gotta have because like living
Speaker 1: in Wyoming. You gotta have people come up to you.
Speaker 1: You probably can't go anywhere without getting a novel idea
Speaker 1: right from people at the grocery store.
Speaker 2: I yeah, I feel like I'm like a predator almost.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It's like that old saying, you know, if you if
Speaker 2: you walk around with the hammer, everything looked like a nail,
Speaker 2: you know. I like, I see my wife's hay hook
Speaker 2: in the barn, I think, oh god, that's a great
Speaker 2: murder way. So yeah, it's pretty easy.
Speaker 1: And people come up and be like, you know what
Speaker 1: you ought to be writing about? Is?
Speaker 2: I get a little bit too much of that atal
Speaker 2: And sometimes I'll say, why don't you write that book?
Speaker 6: Idea is so good? I'll let you have the honor.
Speaker 1: When I mentioned, uh, what I mentioned when I the
Speaker 1: first uh novel I've read here is a Dark Sky?
Speaker 1: And and uh that was that one where you mentioned
Speaker 1: me and media and I was joking about the What
Speaker 1: it was is there's this kind of like sort of
Speaker 1: a rather unlikable Silicon Valley CEO who has what was
Speaker 1: the Steve two point oher or what the hell's his name?
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, Steve two point.
Speaker 1: He's got one of them. You know he's got like
Speaker 1: a goofy tech name, kind of annoying. Well, he gets
Speaker 1: hopped up on watching me eater and decides he wants
Speaker 1: to go on out. So it's very like Zuckerberg. It's
Speaker 1: like very Zuckerberg. Ye, like when Zuckerberg announced some year
Speaker 1: that he was gonna only eat stuff he killed. It
Speaker 1: was like real Zuckerberg. And I was sort of like
Speaker 1: the through the the inspiration. You know, it's better than
Speaker 1: being an inspiration for the villain.
Speaker 2: Yeah right right.
Speaker 1: Uh, Okay, now you gotta hang tight. You can talk
Speaker 1: about anything you want, but we got to talk about
Speaker 1: a couple of things. Okay, they're gonna come back to
Speaker 1: you hardcore and.
Speaker 7: Feel free to chime in whenever you want.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: Uh. One problem we have is we declared that we
Speaker 1: weren't gonna talk about my old time saying, Oh I'll
Speaker 1: bring you up speed.
Speaker 7: No that's not true. We should talk about it all
Speaker 7: the time.
Speaker 1: I wanted to invent an old saying, so I came
Speaker 1: up with based off pick and pole beans, I came
Speaker 1: up with a fresh set of eyes always finds more beans,
Speaker 1: Meaning if you put like a new person into a situation,
Speaker 1: they're gonna find right, Okay, got it a reality that
Speaker 1: was hidden from others, And we talked about it so
Speaker 1: much that we kept talking about it, and people would
Speaker 1: send in different versions. And now we've even got listeners
Speaker 1: saying stop talking about it. A woman wrote in that,
Speaker 1: just like when a child learns a new word and
Speaker 1: they use it all the time, her husband three times
Speaker 1: in one Sunday because it's so annoying, three times the
Speaker 1: one Sunday found a way to say a fresh set
Speaker 1: of eyes will always find more beans. She signs it
Speaker 1: living in bean Hell. But I point this out only
Speaker 1: because we now have a T shirt. We have a
Speaker 1: T shirt of fresh Set Eyes finds More Beans. Mean
Speaker 1: to your podcast. T shirt. Hunter Spencer did the artwork
Speaker 1: and he's got a fist. It's a fist holding up
Speaker 1: beans and it says fresh set Eyes finds more beans available. Now.
Speaker 1: I hope they didn't make too terrible many of those
Speaker 1: T shirts.
Speaker 7: No, it's supposed to be a limited edition thing, so
Speaker 7: get them all.
Speaker 8: I will say, you might break into the vegan market there, Steve.
Speaker 1: I know Sydney like holding up jerky sticks.
Speaker 5: Sydney used it the other day, Oh sh un ironically
Speaker 5: but she did the version where you sort of trail
Speaker 5: off after eyes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a name for that. Do you remember the
Speaker 1: word is no?
Speaker 7: I don't remember.
Speaker 1: And you looked that up as a writer, he might
Speaker 1: be an interest in you know, there's a there's a
Speaker 1: name for when you only say part of saying and
Speaker 1: let it trail off look at up.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I've never heard. I've never heard of
Speaker 2: a name for that. And I just put dot dot
Speaker 2: dot yep.
Speaker 1: So if I say to you fresh set eyes.
Speaker 2: Dot dot dot, there's a name for that.
Speaker 6: And I don't even know if she herds of a feather.
Speaker 5: I don't know if she was doing it consciously, because
Speaker 5: it didn't register with me. It just sounded very natural
Speaker 5: when she said a fresh set highs and like three
Speaker 5: or four seconds I realized that she was going with
Speaker 5: the beans saying, and.
Speaker 1: I was podcast listener.
Speaker 6: I was taken aback.
Speaker 7: I don't know if I'm pronouncing this properly.
Speaker 1: You might have the right things. I remember it being
Speaker 1: hard to pronounces. She's Corinth.
Speaker 6: Of all the poetic devices you could have chosen.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna move on while you look for it.
Speaker 3: This fascinating.
Speaker 1: Here's another T shirt. This is a few so we
Speaker 1: covered off on this. This is a future T shirt design.
Speaker 1: Where we were talking, we're talking about what we used
Speaker 1: to like to draw when we were little kids. And
Speaker 1: I drew two things. I drew amphibious tank battles. I
Speaker 1: like to draw those when I was a little kid,
Speaker 1: and it was like like tanks that somehow floated assaulting
Speaker 1: a beach. And I like to draw large Native American
Speaker 1: encampments with dozens and dozens of teepees stretching into the horizon.
Speaker 1: And Clay was saying how.
Speaker 2: He uh no disrespect. He couldn't move.
Speaker 1: No matter what he did, he couldn't move away from hogs.
Speaker 1: And he kept his drawings going even into high school.
Speaker 1: And so he was talking about I could He said,
Speaker 1: I think it's at my mom's house. As he's explaining
Speaker 1: what he used, a common theme he would explore in
Speaker 1: his drawings as a young man, and then promptly his
Speaker 1: mom sent a photo of the picture, and I asked
Speaker 1: Clay if I could have it, and he sent it
Speaker 1: to us for the studio. So it's a future man.
Speaker 1: I want.
Speaker 8: I want Clay to explain how that gun, the construction
Speaker 8: of that gun works like where the sling is hood.
Speaker 9: I got questions about that.
Speaker 5: It looks like when you know, like if they're making
Speaker 5: sci fi movie props and they take a squirt gun
Speaker 5: and they just attach some other things to it.
Speaker 1: It's a future man being charged by a wild hog,
Speaker 1: but he's got the drop on.
Speaker 5: It, and he has a claw hand as well.
Speaker 1: Well. He's like, he's otherworldly. He's not of this planet.
Speaker 6: I can tell by the musculature.
Speaker 1: He's ripped. Yeah, he's ripped and strapped and he's being
Speaker 1: chased by a razor.
Speaker 8: He's in trouble if he doesn't pull that trigger pretty quick.
Speaker 6: I don't is there a trigger on it?
Speaker 2: Am?
Speaker 6: I just fire when he thinks I want this to
Speaker 6: be Remember.
Speaker 1: That t shirt he did of the ice age hunter
Speaker 1: doing the grip and grim with the saber tooth tiger,
Speaker 1: sabertooth cat. What do you call those things? Scimitar cat,
Speaker 1: sabertooth cat where it's like a shirt but it's just
Speaker 1: a rectangular box like yay, right kind of cross or
Speaker 1: stern them and then that that wonderful picture will just
Speaker 1: be in that box.
Speaker 6: I can't wait.
Speaker 1: I don't think they should make two many of them either.
Speaker 5: Could we also just do prints of these? I mean,
Speaker 5: like that you could hang on your wall.
Speaker 1: I don't know that was from nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 7: Oh, we should have like a calendar of Clay's old art.
Speaker 1: I don't know how many pieces he's got. I know
Speaker 1: about two and all. He's got two and one. Can't
Speaker 1: go on the calendar. As I explained earlier about what
Speaker 1: is Oh the other thing I wanted to touch on,
Speaker 1: but I can't, like, uh, something that happened this weekend,
Speaker 1: But maybe I should there's like some little more. Are
Speaker 1: you giving me a look like there's a there's a
Speaker 1: moratorium on talking about this?
Speaker 7: I think I just don't know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll give you the most cursing. Me and Yanni
Speaker 1: and my three kids and his two kids. The dog, Yeah,
Speaker 1: went out cat hunting and his uh dog went off
Speaker 1: a cliff.
Speaker 7: He's still alive, And when we.
Speaker 1: Found it, I didn't think it was gonna live. Kids
Speaker 1: are all crying blood all over.
Speaker 9: I still don't understand why I got that.
Speaker 1: Underach message because we were on we were on a
Speaker 1: steep canyon and it was snowing and this track was
Speaker 1: brand new, and the dog went down into the bottom
Speaker 1: of the canyon. I think it jumped the cat, and
Speaker 1: the cat went up the other side into a cliff
Speaker 1: band so, and then all of a sudden it's right
Speaker 1: and also dead quiet.
Speaker 9: I guess what I'm saying is, why did you not
Speaker 9: have you honest?
Speaker 1: I have his contact info. Hear me out, dead quiet,
Speaker 1: and then he gets a trade symbol at the bottom
Speaker 1: of a cliff and an odd line of travel. So
Speaker 1: the dog's zigzag and zigzag and zigzag, and then it
Speaker 1: seems like he went a really long ways in a
Speaker 1: very straight line to a tread symbol. We tell all
Speaker 1: the kids to hang tight by the snowbill.
Speaker 3: This is on's on his GPS, so you can see
Speaker 3: see on a screen the line of travel of the dog.
Speaker 1: Tell all the kids stay put, and we go down
Speaker 1: to the bottom of the canyon, climb up the other side,
Speaker 1: and find it at the fourth of the cliff, and
Speaker 1: make a plan that he puts it in his backpack
Speaker 1: and he's gonna go a mile and I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: back up and get the kids and circle around and
Speaker 1: pick them up on a snowmill trail. When he doesn't
Speaker 1: show up, I had his phone number, but I didn't
Speaker 1: have his I was on my inReach and didn't have
Speaker 1: his inReach number, gotcha, trying to find out what was
Speaker 1: going down.
Speaker 10: All worked out the phill bleep him saying that, yeah,
Speaker 10: I don't want to tell Yanni's story for him.
Speaker 1: Blood all over.
Speaker 3: That's how you want damp Yeah to be continued. Kids
Speaker 3: are scared, blood all over. It's snowing, crying.
Speaker 6: Didn't know where Yannie was. He didn't show up at
Speaker 6: the show in the place.
Speaker 3: Phone rings and Joe Pickett's office.
Speaker 1: Yep, Oh, that might be a good setup.
Speaker 2: I like that.
Speaker 1: Hey, you know, have you you know you ought to
Speaker 1: work into one of your books. Is all these people
Speaker 1: getting stuck in vault toilets trying to get their phones
Speaker 1: and stuff out of there.
Speaker 2: I like that idea. I like that a lot. I
Speaker 2: have never thought about that.
Speaker 1: Well, little comic good part.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it could just be sort of like the intro.
Speaker 5: He had just finished getting the woman out of the
Speaker 5: vault toilet when he heard a crackle on the radio.
Speaker 2: Yes, I've got some outhouse high jinks in this current book.
Speaker 2: Two women trapped inside of it of an outhouse in
Speaker 2: it not in the vault and Green Rancher pounding on
Speaker 2: the door.
Speaker 1: But they're not stuck in the vault.
Speaker 2: No, no, not yet.
Speaker 1: I feel like your guy. I feel like Pickett needing
Speaker 1: to help someone who dropped an Apple watch into a
Speaker 1: vault toilet and crawledon there to get it. At a
Speaker 1: fishing access site. One, it's just a there's a it's
Speaker 1: a epidemic, right.
Speaker 6: It helped raise awareness about this.
Speaker 2: Yes, a couple of that one. I usually don't.
Speaker 1: You don't tell me that I should just write my
Speaker 1: own book. You know how the author I took a
Speaker 1: class in graduate school with the author. You ever hear
Speaker 1: of an author? Chris Offitt? No, he wrote Kentucky straight. He's
Speaker 1: like a Kentucky writer. Uh. He wrote he was a novelist,
Speaker 1: but then wrote a book about his family, wrote a
Speaker 1: memoir called I don't know what it was called wrote
Speaker 1: a memoir and his family is livid.
Speaker 2: Oh, yes, as they are.
Speaker 1: His response was, you should write your own version is
Speaker 1: what happened? Yes, I'm not stopping you tell the world.
Speaker 2: That's the problem with a memoir. You can only do one,
Speaker 2: although some people keep doing them.
Speaker 1: No, I always get worried when a writer. I always
Speaker 1: get worried for a writer who starts out with their
Speaker 1: life story mm hmm, because that's tough to follow up.
Speaker 2: It is, and a guy. I've known quite a few
Speaker 2: authors who just came out with that memoir and then
Speaker 2: struggled and struggled and tried to come up with something
Speaker 2: for book two.
Speaker 1: I always get worried about writers get too big, like
Speaker 1: especially in that situation where you do your memoir and
Speaker 1: you get a big advance, like a big big advance
Speaker 1: because they're really excited about your life story, and then
Speaker 1: it doesn't earn out, and then and then you're like,
Speaker 1: you know, then the thing is like, well, maybe I'll
Speaker 1: do a book about you know, business.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's just a bad path.
Speaker 7: Man.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: Those beans shirts are on sale now, correct, my buddy,
Speaker 1: not because this is a listener email. My buddy and
Speaker 1: I are air traffic controllers. I can picture Joe pick
Speaker 1: it up in the air traffic tower.
Speaker 2: He hates planes.
Speaker 1: My buddyne a air traffic controllers. In our particular tower,
Speaker 1: we prefer to have all the transmissions over the loud speaker,
Speaker 1: as opposed to wearing a headset with earpieces. I can
Speaker 1: picture that the problem as he goes on to say,
Speaker 1: is that sometimes the other shift cranks the speaker up
Speaker 1: to eleven. So every now and then, the first call
Speaker 1: of our shift comes blasting over the speaker so loudly
Speaker 1: that I'll hear just loud static and miss a call sign,
Speaker 1: pilot request, or other pertinent information.
Speaker 2: It's getting thick.
Speaker 1: When this happens. I need someone in the back to
Speaker 1: tell me what the pilot said while I turned the
Speaker 1: speaker down. He goes on to say, so my proximity
Speaker 1: to the speaker hindered my ability to hear the full message.
Speaker 1: Or oh, he's trying to float his own old time
Speaker 1: a lot.
Speaker 4: I didn't know.
Speaker 1: I didn't pre read this. A lot of.
Speaker 7: People have done that, betted it, but.
Speaker 6: I didn't read just he just took the bait.
Speaker 1: No, I just took like I'd have so much trust
Speaker 1: in Krin. Now, Steve's got a crisis on his hand,
Speaker 1: all this set up, and here I am stuck, and
Speaker 1: you don't even know if his own damn, this saying.
Speaker 9: Better than.
Speaker 6: I know exactly where this was going.
Speaker 1: But it's a great saying. Dude, you're gonna dismiss it
Speaker 1: and then you're gonna think about it.
Speaker 2: I don't. I don't think so.
Speaker 1: Yes, I'll tell you where. I'll tell you what the
Speaker 1: applications are.
Speaker 9: I could even into the beans.
Speaker 1: Being too near could make things unclear. Now, fresh set
Speaker 1: of eyes always find more beans. Has accounting, right, has relevance,
Speaker 1: and accounting.
Speaker 9: There's also just great imagery that goes along with.
Speaker 1: It has relevance and law enforcement. Being too near could
Speaker 1: make things unclear. I think has relevance in parenting when
Speaker 1: it comes to diagnosing health issues. I thought it was
Speaker 1: going to be more literal, like like, oh no, my
Speaker 1: kids just like that.
Speaker 2: I was too.
Speaker 1: You just fall asleep out of nowhere. He's always been
Speaker 1: like that, right or no, No, he's just like that.
Speaker 1: I don't know what that's all about. Always been like that.
Speaker 1: And some might be like, I think that kid's got
Speaker 1: a major problem, but the parents too near, which makes
Speaker 1: it unclear.
Speaker 7: That's like kind of a riff of like missing the
Speaker 7: forest for the truth.
Speaker 2: Exactly what.
Speaker 5: I thought it was a more literal saying too near
Speaker 5: to hear, and then it could be that's the saying
Speaker 5: no no. I mean I thought that's where he's going
Speaker 5: with it. So then you know, at outboard motor there's
Speaker 5: all sorts of very narrowly constructed situations in which that
Speaker 5: would make sense.
Speaker 3: Just because it's loud doesn't mean it's legible.
Speaker 1: M Yeah, I like that too. But I also see
Speaker 1: this being applicable in relationships.
Speaker 3: Remember John Wayne and said a big mouth don't make
Speaker 3: a big man.
Speaker 9: Didn't he have a big mouth like the engineer?
Speaker 1: The engineered to make things unclear? You got a buddy, yeah,
Speaker 1: and clearly your buddy's husband is a lunatic. The only
Speaker 1: person that doesn't realize it is your buddy.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Being too near it makes things unclear. What episode number
Speaker 1: are we on? Five twenty? Okay, so apologies that we're
Speaker 1: going back to episode four seventeen.
Speaker 7: But speaking of air traffic controllers.
Speaker 1: Speaking of air traffic controllers, we had a person on
Speaker 1: the podcast, cj Uh who was a biologist with APHIS
Speaker 1: Animal Plant Inspection Services. They do a lot of predator control,
Speaker 1: but a lot of other things that people don't know about, like,
Speaker 1: for instance, keeping stuff off airport runways, so wildlife control
Speaker 1: inside airport circles, geese, deer, whatever, deterrent not just lethal
Speaker 1: but also just deterrent habitat modifications. And this woman introduced
Speaker 1: us to a very interesting term, which is when you're
Speaker 1: trying to find out when you have an air collision
Speaker 1: with a bird, there's there's this biological substance. Sometimes you
Speaker 1: just you don't know what you're looking at. Something came
Speaker 1: into the jet and spit out their side orders this
Speaker 1: big smear on the windshield and you got a part
Speaker 1: of the job. It's like, well, what happened? What was that?
Speaker 1: And she introduced the term, and I thought she was joking,
Speaker 1: but this is the actual term is snarge.
Speaker 2: Snarge is just.
Speaker 1: Detritus goo and then you try to find out what
Speaker 1: the snarge was from. Uh. Anyways, A dead goose just
Speaker 1: took down a so a medical helicopter. There was fatalities
Speaker 1: how many three? Oh do we know that?
Speaker 7: Three or three or four?
Speaker 1: A medical helicopter crash in Oklahoma with multiple fatalities and
Speaker 1: they recovered a dead goose out of that helicopter. I
Speaker 1: think that was what she's saying with the number one bird, right.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think so. I think it is goose. Yeah,
Speaker 7: And I know that there have been like a number
Speaker 7: of there were landings. I was at the Hudson.
Speaker 1: Flight nurse and a paramedic all killed in a bird strike.
Speaker 7: Huh yeah, so it's serious ship.
Speaker 1: Someone wrote in about this. I feel like we should
Speaker 1: I want to do this, but I left my drink
Speaker 1: coasters on my desk.
Speaker 7: Oh, like you would read out what's on your drink coasters?
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, because my drink coasters have are they crucial
Speaker 1: to this?
Speaker 7: You can add those to the list, or you're just
Speaker 7: saying you don't remember what all of them are.
Speaker 1: It's about bird names. Cale's favorite sect. Just how graphics
Speaker 1: and bird names are. Well, I'll bring I'll bring them
Speaker 1: next time we record.
Speaker 3: I like the record to show I have nothing wrong
Speaker 3: with bird names.
Speaker 1: No, I know. That's the problem, is like you don't
Speaker 1: have any problem with bird names.
Speaker 3: Yeah, old names, new names.
Speaker 2: I like. Great.
Speaker 1: But it's that you have expressed that you've expressed feeling
Speaker 1: that there's been a lot of time wasted on the
Speaker 1: thing that is not an issue.
Speaker 3: Right, And it's hard for me to draw the parallel
Speaker 3: between the change of a bird name and the distruction
Speaker 3: of the United States Constitution and the downfall of democracy.
Speaker 1: As we might come in a little hot it up.
Speaker 1: We'll pick it up when I have my drink coasters.
Speaker 7: My drink coasters are let's read the guy's note.
Speaker 1: Okay, in support of Steve topic renaming birds and support
Speaker 1: of Steve, here's an idea. If we must rename birds
Speaker 1: to fit some social justice narrative, let's double down on
Speaker 1: the borderline not safe for workplace bird names that already exist.
Speaker 1: And he points out the great tit, Yeah, the blue
Speaker 1: footed booty, Booby, the wood cock, the dick Sissel, and
Speaker 1: then a name Steve. I have drink coasters at my
Speaker 1: neighbor pottery, Pat gave me for my birthday. I think
Speaker 1: a my birthday, my birthday, and it's a coaster and
Speaker 1: in big letters up top it says boobies. But then
Speaker 1: you look and it's all the boobies, bluefooted booby. And
Speaker 1: a big coaster says tits, but it's all the tits. Cocks,
Speaker 1: but it's all the cocks, right?
Speaker 6: How many are there?
Speaker 1: I wouldn't send my kid to school with these drink coasters.
Speaker 1: I would go over if your kid, If your kids
Speaker 1: just sit, If your kid did sit down at their
Speaker 1: desk and place a coaster down and then set their drinking,
Speaker 1: it could.
Speaker 7: Be an edifying moment for the teacher.
Speaker 6: Mm hmmm, mm hmm.
Speaker 3: And he'd say something like, what type of cocks do
Speaker 3: you enjoy them?
Speaker 6: All?
Speaker 3: I mean, that's the exact type of thing I would
Speaker 3: have been doing in school.
Speaker 1: Uh, let's do one.
Speaker 2: More, Krinn.
Speaker 7: You want to do the Why don't you want to
Speaker 7: do the Yeah, let's do that. That's probably better than
Speaker 7: the other ones, unless we do the acorn. Mm hm No.
Speaker 1: We already talked about Clay. Peter wants. First, I gotta
Speaker 1: do my little bit that I always do with. I'll
Speaker 1: start Peter wants replaced punks a tawny Phil with a
Speaker 1: coin meaning the gopher, the groundhog that they pull out
Speaker 1: every year, and he sees his shadow and tell you
Speaker 1: the whether his track records horrible.
Speaker 6: But he's But.
Speaker 3: That's not the I bet that's not their point.
Speaker 1: Well the other point. But the point is why not
Speaker 1: just flip a coin? Yea, this is gonna do is
Speaker 1: just as good of a job as punks tawny Phil,
Speaker 1: and then you don't have to abuse that poor groundhog.
Speaker 9: That's their route to where they're getting.
Speaker 1: But they yeah, they specialize at Peter, they specialize in getting.
Speaker 1: It's unintentional. I don't think they do like a well,
Speaker 1: what will they think of next and it gets people
Speaker 1: like me, I get tricked into covering it right, because
Speaker 1: they did do like remember they wanted it for a while.
Speaker 1: Old sayings that seem mean to animals get rid of
Speaker 1: old like more than one way to skin a cat, right,
Speaker 1: And they're like, that's mean. To beat a dead horse, Yeah,
Speaker 1: to beat a dead horse is mean. And then everybody
Speaker 1: in the news and the Fox News they're like, oh
Speaker 1: my god. And I'm like, oh my god. And it
Speaker 1: works and we're all talking about Yeah, we're all talking
Speaker 1: about peda. So the latest move is for them to
Speaker 1: point out that it's mean, that it's mean to punks,
Speaker 1: the tawny.
Speaker 9: Phil he's not a meteorology.
Speaker 1: To drag him out, to drag him out and show
Speaker 1: him off to the.
Speaker 9: Whole world exploited for tourism.
Speaker 2: It's probably mean to drop them like they do.
Speaker 1: Oh they drop them well.
Speaker 3: Built later Oh oh no kidding, no, kid, that's great.
Speaker 3: It doesn't change my mind about the event. There's enough
Speaker 3: shortage of groundhogs.
Speaker 9: But yeah, like, like, how.
Speaker 3: Dare Peter say that he's not a meteorologist. How do
Speaker 3: they know what's going on? How do they stretch so far?
Speaker 1: Well, they say the groundhogs are shy, solitary animals should
Speaker 1: be dragged out and shown off to the whole world.
Speaker 3: It looks well, every single one that they hold up
Speaker 3: is a chunk monster.
Speaker 5: I saw a joke over the weekend that I haven't
Speaker 5: been able to stop thinking about. And it's simply that
Speaker 5: we haven't applied this concept to enough things. Just grabbing
Speaker 5: an animal, pulling it out of its hole, and asking
Speaker 5: it unknowable questions about the future.
Speaker 6: I haven't been.
Speaker 5: Able to stop thinking about that, Like, this is a
Speaker 5: very peculiar thing that they just.
Speaker 3: Stop groundhog, they need to keep going back.
Speaker 5: The line was like owls. Owls have been claiming they're
Speaker 5: pretty smart. Let's see them prove it now.
Speaker 1: A couple of years ago, Peter argued that they should
Speaker 1: wrap it up with punk Satawani Phil and swap it
Speaker 1: out for a quote and a matronic version. Oh, I
Speaker 1: get it, a robot equip with artificial intelligence capable of
Speaker 1: more accurately predicting the weather. What the strategy is with
Speaker 1: with with with Peter and I I'm a I get
Speaker 1: a kick out of Peter. Uh this stuff. I like
Speaker 1: what they're doing is there, You're demonstrating. It's like a
Speaker 1: rhetorical strategy. You demonstrate absurdity by being absurd, so you'd
Speaker 1: be like, here's an absurd solution, and then it hopefully
Speaker 1: makes people go like, yeah, it is really weird. It
Speaker 1: is absurd. Not it's not absurd that you propose we
Speaker 1: stopped doing it, it's absurd that we started doing it
Speaker 1: in the first place. Drag this groundhog.
Speaker 9: Out, that's what makes it great.
Speaker 1: Drag this groundhog out, show them off to the planet,
Speaker 1: and oh, will the weather be ye. There's probably a
Speaker 1: good history of how many those little buggers they've been
Speaker 1: through over the years.
Speaker 3: There's that place in North or South Carolina. I think
Speaker 3: that does the possum drop every New Year's And it's
Speaker 3: just like a country store, but they put a postum
Speaker 3: in a cage. They bring it up to the top
Speaker 3: and they like slowly lower it like the ball dropping,
Speaker 3: but it's a there's a live possum in there. No
Speaker 3: harm comes to the possum. But that finally fizzled out.
Speaker 3: It you know, it got some like some bad press,
Speaker 3: but then you know that totally went away because people
Speaker 3: lose interest in that stuff. But I think people just
Speaker 3: kind of eventually started being like hard to explain this
Speaker 3: to people from out of state.
Speaker 5: This really, who's looking out for possums these days? You know,
Speaker 5: I'm wondering who turned up the heat on.
Speaker 1: That people do because I caught a possum. Uh not
Speaker 1: too long ago. I caught a possum. I was the
Speaker 1: Kevin Murphy and I'm holding the possum by the tail,
Speaker 1: and you know, they go into that shock right playing possum.
Speaker 1: Kevin's got all these dogs running around, and first off,
Speaker 1: what people didn't know I saved the possum's life because
Speaker 1: his pack of beagle dogs were set on killing the possum. Okay,
Speaker 1: I picked the possum by it up by the tail,
Speaker 1: and he goes into playing possum. I then want to
Speaker 1: deposit the possum in a safe place. So there's all
Speaker 1: this grapevine, like an impenetrable mat of grapevine, and I
Speaker 1: lay the possum who's playing possum, up on the mat
Speaker 1: of grapevine, probably five feet off the ground where the
Speaker 1: beagle dogs can't get at it. Meanwhile, we had a
Speaker 1: picture of me holding the possum by his tail like
Speaker 1: I do a gripping grin with the possum, who I'll
Speaker 1: point out is capable of hanging from a limb from
Speaker 1: his tail, and I mentioned how I set him up
Speaker 1: out of the way, or maybe we made a video
Speaker 1: where I set him up out of the way. Either way,
Speaker 1: people point out, now he's gonna you basically killed this
Speaker 1: poor possum because he's gonna fall from that perch.
Speaker 2: And die.
Speaker 1: And I saved the possum, and that possum is not
Speaker 1: gonna fall off that mat a grapevine because he couldn't
Speaker 1: fall off if he wanted to. Hmmm, he's gonna have
Speaker 1: to walk out of there. So people do look out
Speaker 1: for possums. However, however, miss the line with reality. They
Speaker 1: are they look out for possums.
Speaker 3: I got a possum in La wants Coren. I was like, oh,
Speaker 3: check this out. That's pretty cool. People didn't think it
Speaker 3: was cool.
Speaker 1: There's something about you that, when you can see a possum,
Speaker 1: makes you want to grab by the tail.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a nasty tail, big handle.
Speaker 1: All right, you ready to see J Box?
Speaker 2: I'm ready. Yep.
Speaker 1: Uh. You grew up around hunting fishing a little bit,
Speaker 1: I did, ye, What what did it look like in
Speaker 1: the in the box household. What did sporting events look
Speaker 1: like for the box household? Sporting events like I'm sorry
Speaker 1: and fishing type sports? Oh, I had a Did you
Speaker 1: play sports like organized?
Speaker 2: I did? I did. I was a wrestler and a
Speaker 2: cross country rider. But uh yeah, it was an It
Speaker 2: was a every year we would go deer hunting around
Speaker 2: midwest Wyoming. At that point, there weren't that many mule
Speaker 2: there there are, you know, like there have been now.
Speaker 2: But I grew up. I was thinking about this yesterday.
Speaker 2: I was driving up here that I got my first
Speaker 2: mule deer at age twelve with my grandfather's twenty five
Speaker 2: thirty five saddle car, being that he actually used on
Speaker 2: a ranch. Had to shoot it five times, you know,
Speaker 2: but and a hundred every year.
Speaker 1: Did you grow up on a ranch?
Speaker 2: No? No, I grew up in Casper, But where we
Speaker 2: would go would be north of Casper.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't like the good old days from mule
Speaker 1: you're hunting then.
Speaker 2: It wasn't that area wasn't that great. But then it
Speaker 2: got Then there were more and more, and then I,
Speaker 2: you know, started antelope hunting, and I had even in
Speaker 2: high school. This is this is you know I'm old.
Speaker 2: I sixty five.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, good, thanks sixty five.
Speaker 2: All my buddies and I used to have that. We
Speaker 2: call it the one Shot Prairie Dog Hunt Club. So
Speaker 2: we would actually keep our guns in our lockers in
Speaker 2: high school and as soon as it were wrestling practice
Speaker 2: was out, we'd grab them and go out and shoot
Speaker 2: prairie dogs with one shot well no usually the name,
Speaker 2: and then cut off their tails, you know. And so
Speaker 2: I grew up ran a lot of guns round, a
Speaker 2: lot of hunting. I got. You know, I haven't hunted
Speaker 2: all my life. I may not even hunt that much
Speaker 2: now if it weren't for the fact that I've got
Speaker 2: three daughters who give me such a hard time until
Speaker 2: they get elk meat. God, they love to serve it,
Speaker 2: they love to eat it. They all do their friends over.
Speaker 2: Got twins who are thirty four, my youngest is thirty
Speaker 2: or almost.
Speaker 1: And I love to all wrapped up on the parenting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I also love to go to my sons
Speaker 2: in law and says with with the meat and say,
Speaker 2: because you know your husband's will not provide for you,
Speaker 2: I have brought you and.
Speaker 1: I still have to do it. I still have to
Speaker 1: care for my daughter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they love.
Speaker 1: That they're not being adequately supported. What was the what
Speaker 1: was the first inkling you ever had about writing? Like,
Speaker 1: when did you become aware to the when did you
Speaker 1: become aware there was a thing called a writer and
Speaker 1: you know you could be one?
Speaker 2: Ah jeez, you know, I think if you're a writer,
Speaker 2: I've often, you know, asked that a lot. I think
Speaker 2: you're you're hardwired with it or not. I've worked with
Speaker 2: people who want to write, but they don't seem hardwired
Speaker 2: and it's just never going to work. I I was
Speaker 2: going to write one way or another, whether it was
Speaker 2: oh yeah, I mean I was writing stories, you know,
Speaker 2: in second third grade. I never thought about myself as
Speaker 2: a writing a series of books. But I do remember
Speaker 2: going to our local library and going down the staff
Speaker 2: to the bees to see where my book would be someday.
Speaker 2: You know, I knew that I didn't know what it
Speaker 2: would be about, but I knew that that's that's some day.
Speaker 2: The card catalog is yeah, now you know that. Now
Speaker 2: I know if it's there, that means nobody's checked it out.
Speaker 2: So did inventory did your parents emphasize a lot of
Speaker 2: reading to you or was that something you found on
Speaker 2: your own. My dad did. He used to read to us,
Speaker 2: he was a teacher. My mom did not. My mom
Speaker 2: always said, even when I had books out, the only
Speaker 2: thing she read was cookbooks.
Speaker 1: What'd your dad teach?
Speaker 2: He taught third grade, and then he was a principal
Speaker 2: for a while, and then he taught fifth grade for
Speaker 2: a while. So elementary school teacher.
Speaker 1: Uh so good, honest, good on his middle class Wyoming upbringing. Absolutely, Yep,
Speaker 1: when uh you settled? So you did college to learn journalism?
Speaker 2: Right? Right? I went. I had a scholarship actually to
Speaker 2: go to University a Denver in journalism. I was the
Speaker 2: editor of a high school newspaper that won a bunch
Speaker 2: of national awards, so I could go to a private
Speaker 2: school cheaper than I could go to the University of Wyoming.
Speaker 6: M.
Speaker 1: And then studied in major and that came out of that.
Speaker 2: Yep, they called it mass communications, but it was journalism.
Speaker 2: And then my first job was on a weekly newspaper
Speaker 2: in Wyoming, and did that for a few years. Then
Speaker 2: realized I could make no money being a journalist for
Speaker 2: a weekly newspaper, so I had a syndicated column for
Speaker 2: a while that was mainly about outdoor stuff and then give.
Speaker 1: Me, give me a give me an idea what you'd
Speaker 1: write about.
Speaker 2: I would write in your column ice fishing, snowmobiling.
Speaker 1: Like the bite's hot down at the local reservoir.
Speaker 2: Right, it was like that. I called it far Afield
Speaker 2: And I used to, you know, I used to.
Speaker 1: Would you do local profiles?
Speaker 2: And yeah, I would you know the guy, the local
Speaker 2: guy who type flies and that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: Like that's stay away, gone away man. Yeah, we had
Speaker 1: I can't remember. I wish I could remember his name,
Speaker 1: mark something like. Growing up we had the Mosquite Chronicle
Speaker 1: where I grew up in western Michigan, and there was
Speaker 1: just like the dude I can't remember his name, but
Speaker 1: he was like the outdoor columnist. Yeah.
Speaker 9: Those outdoor columnists are.
Speaker 1: Like, yeah, extinct, and it'd be you know, one week
Speaker 1: could be slaying the white bellies, you know, like the
Speaker 1: white bellies are in in the Channel Mouth.
Speaker 8: There's still I think the Billings paper still has an
Speaker 8: outdoor column pretty sure.
Speaker 2: But people still remember, which is cool. But and I
Speaker 2: got to do lots of things, you know, with that
Speaker 2: water rafting with the Denver Broncos, you know, that kind
Speaker 2: of thing.
Speaker 1: So they give you a salary, and they give you
Speaker 1: a thing like they give you a salary and then
Speaker 1: they say you figure it out, and once a week
Speaker 1: you write an outdoor column.
Speaker 2: Right, And but I also covered everything else, you know,
Speaker 2: the four eight Champion cow or the you know, I
Speaker 2: remember going. I get to meet everybody, billionaires to survivalists,
Speaker 2: you know, and did little columns on all of them.
Speaker 2: And that was fun. I got to I think the
Speaker 2: best training for the kind of writing I do now
Speaker 2: is working at a weekly newspaper where you're forced to
Speaker 2: meet everybody. You can't. You've got to get out of
Speaker 2: a bubble, got.
Speaker 6: It, get to develop a lot of characters right right.
Speaker 2: And be comfortable talking to people in all walks of life.
Speaker 2: And what I've always found is if you show interest
Speaker 2: in what somebody is doing, all of a sudden, they'll
Speaker 2: you cannot get them to stop talking. You know, you
Speaker 2: show up with a blank notebook and they feel compelled
Speaker 2: to fill it. God after a while. Even you know,
Speaker 2: people in nuclear facilities and things that I'm doing research,
Speaker 2: I show up and they first they're very reticent, and
Speaker 2: I start asking them about their job, and nobody has
Speaker 2: ever asked them about their job in their lives, and
Speaker 2: once they start telling you, then they can't stop. And
Speaker 2: and sometimes they've told me how do I take down
Speaker 2: a supercomputer center? They tell me step by step, and
Speaker 2: I said, that's enough. That's enough. I'm not going to
Speaker 2: do this, write this all out in this book.
Speaker 1: When you're doing that, when you're doing that line of work,
Speaker 1: would you try to go in do you try to
Speaker 1: go in dumb or do you try to go in
Speaker 1: and sort of establish your your bona fides?
Speaker 2: I try to do. I do much some homework so
Speaker 2: that I'm not completely off base, but and you know,
Speaker 2: I usually have a list, but I try to, like
Speaker 2: without we talked earlier about issues in the books. I
Speaker 2: always try to talk to people on both sides of
Speaker 2: the issues and then have a character in the books
Speaker 2: espouse those so that so that at least it's a
Speaker 2: fair portrayal. It's not always a fair portrayal, but I
Speaker 2: try to make it a fair portrayal.
Speaker 1: I meant that question more as an interview strategy, meaning
Speaker 1: let's say you developed Let's say you're working on something
Speaker 1: in your old job and you develop something close subject
Speaker 1: matter expertise, and you go to interview somebody. Do you
Speaker 1: keep it under wraps that you know the situation pretty
Speaker 1: well and present it to them as though they're talking
Speaker 1: to a knucklehead. Or do you like to go in
Speaker 1: and say, I'm widely read on this, what's your take.
Speaker 2: I don't. I would go in and say I've done
Speaker 2: a lot of research on this. Is this true? God?
Speaker 2: I did a book called The Highway a few years ago.
Speaker 2: It's very creepy. It's about a serial killer truck driver.
Speaker 2: And I got together with a pair of drivers from
Speaker 2: Montana and we went across the country and I had
Speaker 2: a long list of questions I had for them. You know, why,
Speaker 2: why why do on truck or forums do they laugh
Speaker 2: about Walmart bags on the side of the road, you know,
Speaker 2: and the truckers goes because that's what that's what they
Speaker 2: crap in and through out the window. So I had
Speaker 2: lots of questions about I just need to know are
Speaker 2: these things true? And then that opens things up?
Speaker 1: God yeah hmm, now, oh sorry, someone just going to
Speaker 1: say something.
Speaker 8: No, but that was something I didn't really need to learn.
Speaker 1: You can tell.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, Next time you had volunteer for your highway
Speaker 3: clean up?
Speaker 6: Here away from the Walmart bag, be properly prepared.
Speaker 1: What was your next What was your next jump out
Speaker 1: of doing the journalism?
Speaker 2: I started a company. I worked for a while for Uh.
Speaker 2: First of all, I worked for Wyoming Tourism, the state agency.
Speaker 2: I was a state employee, and I traveled all over
Speaker 2: the world. I was in charge of international tourism development.
Speaker 2: Really yeah, and saw that it didn't make sense for
Speaker 2: a state employee to go out there all over the
Speaker 2: world and say, come visit us. I'm a state employee.
Speaker 2: So I started a company and included in that company
Speaker 2: when we would do overseas things lots of private sector entities, hotels,
Speaker 2: Yellowstone Park for five different states in the Rocky Mountains,
Speaker 2: and then we had six offices overseas. So for twenty years,
Speaker 2: that's what I did.
Speaker 1: Really, what did you do with that? You sold it?
Speaker 2: I sold it to employees. Yeah. Once the books started
Speaker 2: making more money than the company did, then I could
Speaker 2: step away from the data traveling.
Speaker 9: I assume you're you must have been writing books at
Speaker 9: the same time I was.
Speaker 2: I was writing on airplanes and I remember writing in
Speaker 2: a Berlin hotel finishing up a book. You know, that's
Speaker 2: so so I have no patience with anybody who says
Speaker 2: I'd write a book if I had the time. You know,
Speaker 2: I had a company, I had three kids. You know,
Speaker 2: I was just trying to write a book a year.
Speaker 1: To that that I have to do it. I love
Speaker 1: hearing those stories because that was not my reality. Man.
Speaker 1: I had like a way different way into it and
Speaker 1: never had to do that. Well, I didn't have to.
Speaker 1: I just chose. I didn't have a family or anyth
Speaker 1: when I was starting out as a writer, So I
Speaker 1: just chose to live like way below the power, like
Speaker 1: way way below the poverty level in other people's houses
Speaker 1: mm hmm. And didn't have a house, so I didn't
Speaker 1: have to compete with my own occupation because I didn't
Speaker 1: have a family. Have you ever heard of the not
Speaker 1: He's Dead? Have you ever heard you know, the novels
Speaker 1: Larry Brown?
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, yes, Larry Brown.
Speaker 1: He wrote his first bunch of books at the firebarn.
Speaker 1: He was a fireman. And when everyone else is like
Speaker 1: playing video games and cooking, grilling chicken and throwing horseshoes,
Speaker 1: Larry Brown would be in his bunk writing novels.
Speaker 2: That's that hardwired.
Speaker 1: He never learned to type quirty m hm, he said
Speaker 1: he one time I was talking to me, held up
Speaker 1: his two index fingers. He said, I wrote seven novels
Speaker 1: with these two things, and like to bring up Yellowstone.
Speaker 1: So here he's born in. He's a fireman in Oxford, Mississippi,
Speaker 1: had never been anywhere. His first novel he wrote about
Speaker 1: a man eating bear and Yellowstone National Park. Had never
Speaker 1: seen a bear and never been to a Yellowstone National Park.
Speaker 1: Wrote that book, and he's like, that method is not
Speaker 1: going to work. So he started writing about the kind
Speaker 1: of stuff he runs into as a fireman. Huh right, yeah,
Speaker 1: And they're kind of people he liked. He liked to
Speaker 1: do that. He lived in the town. When he could,
Speaker 1: he go drinking. When he could, he'd go fishing catfish.
Speaker 1: And so he's like, I guess I'm going to write
Speaker 1: about people that like to do that stuff.
Speaker 9: Well.
Speaker 2: As a writer and as a reader, I much prefer
Speaker 2: novel with a great sense of place, Like you're talking
Speaker 2: about what you can tell. You can always tell when
Speaker 2: somebody's making up a location. Maybe they've been there on vacation,
Speaker 2: maybe they've you know, been through it, but you can
Speaker 2: always tell. I always thought when I was writing I
Speaker 2: always want. I want to write from the inside out
Speaker 2: as opposed to showing you know. I'm never going to
Speaker 2: write an urban novel. It's just like I couldn't do
Speaker 2: it authentically, but I can write about the Mountain West
Speaker 2: because I can do it from the inside out, and
Speaker 2: people who live here or have been there can say, yeah,
Speaker 2: that rings true, and I think that's for me that's
Speaker 2: extremely important.
Speaker 1: I can't remember who the comedian was that I was
Speaker 1: recently like, was it Dan? A dude maybe did a
Speaker 1: bit about this, the guy that sper he's been on
Speaker 1: the podcast.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it was somebody who moved to Denver, I think,
Speaker 7: but we we didn't.
Speaker 1: He's never on the show. There's a comedian and he
Speaker 1: was talking about when TV productions have to deal with
Speaker 1: what a working class person does, and so they're describing
Speaker 1: how like a there's a person investigating this like horrific murder, okay,
Speaker 1: And they go into a bar in the morning to
Speaker 1: interview someone about this horrific murder, and they have them.
Speaker 1: The whole time they're answering questions about this horrific murder,
Speaker 1: they're continuing to stag beer boxes like they're no way
Speaker 1: gonna was stacking these beer boxes to answer questions about
Speaker 1: this like horrific triple hoppicide that they were. Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: rolled up and dude, like I'm picturing he's there in
Speaker 1: the morning stacking beer boxes or like scenes with tradesmen.
Speaker 1: You know, like no one on that production has ever
Speaker 1: seen a tradesman doing anything, you know, trying to think
Speaker 1: of what I guess he might have a file filing
Speaker 1: a piece of wood trade past the liberal red community,
Speaker 1: liberal red somebody was the liberal redneck talking about when
Speaker 1: they tried, yeah, TV trying to like portray how TV
Speaker 1: portrays rednecks. And that's right. He's like, he's the guy
Speaker 1: that wouldn't stop stacking beer boxes while discussing a triple.
Speaker 2: I like that, and then that's true.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: With the with the PR was it PR? Is that
Speaker 1: how you described the PR business?
Speaker 2: It was? It was more marketing really. I mean we
Speaker 2: work with tour operators, travel agents, and then lots of journalists.
Speaker 2: I brought lots of journalists over here to the Rocky
Speaker 2: Mountain West and would take them on We called them
Speaker 2: familiarization tours fam tours. So I got to junk. Yeah,
Speaker 2: all kinds of every adventure there was. I was there escort,
Speaker 2: so I got to do stuff kind of reminded me
Speaker 2: of you. I think you do what you like best.
Speaker 2: And I was able to do that for years and
Speaker 2: years and years, and was that experiences. Yeah, it was
Speaker 2: still in when I left, it was twenty four years.
Speaker 1: Old, and I didn't scratch the itch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was done traveling. I'd been to Berlin in
Speaker 2: March way too many times. I was ready to settle in.
Speaker 2: And now I get to go on book tours and
Speaker 2: kind of do this. But I'm the guy who you
Speaker 2: were making.
Speaker 1: You were making, you were making good money, decent, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and you still.
Speaker 5: Had to be like, I got to be a writer, yep,
Speaker 5: when you were when you were a journalists, did you
Speaker 5: were you writing in your free time? I mean, were
Speaker 5: you still coming up with book ideas and your free timer?
Speaker 6: Sort of?
Speaker 5: When did that transition take place into really working on books?
Speaker 2: You know, I'll say I had like a twenty five
Speaker 2: year overnight success story. I started working on the book
Speaker 2: that became Open Season when I was actually a working
Speaker 2: journalist on the newspaper. But it took all those years, yes,
Speaker 2: to finally get it, and plus doing other things and
Speaker 2: having a family. My daughter's twin daughters, fourteen years old,
Speaker 2: didn't know that I wrote. They knew I had a
Speaker 2: home office. They know I went in there and did stuff,
Speaker 2: But I never wanted them to think my dad the
Speaker 2: failed novelists. So not until I had a not until
Speaker 2: I had a book contract did I tell them that
Speaker 2: I wrote a novel.
Speaker 3: That's amazing.
Speaker 7: Wow.
Speaker 1: I can picture him later being like, what was your
Speaker 1: dad like, Oh, he's like a failed writer. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he tried, nice enough guy.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The travel thing in rural Wyoming, you know, it's like
Speaker 3: I knew Wyoming kids in college that like went on
Speaker 3: their first plane ride in college and they're like, oh, hey,
Speaker 3: you know what I did. Yep, this is actually kind
Speaker 3: of a funny story. Buddy mine road tripped home with
Speaker 3: a friend of his to Wyoming. I'm not going to
Speaker 3: say what town because people who know this story.
Speaker 2: Was I'm probably related to it. Yes, exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And because our buddy who was driving had to
Speaker 3: make a court appearance and do a little bit of
Speaker 3: jail time on something that had come up earlier on
Speaker 3: as one does, and when he got there, you know,
Speaker 3: it's like your college kids, you're not all that serious
Speaker 3: about stuff. He missed his court appointed deadline and thought like, well,
Speaker 3: I'm here, and they were like, yeah, and you're going
Speaker 3: to be here for the next month now in jail.
Speaker 3: And so that was my other friends first time on
Speaker 3: a plane was his family chipped in and flew him
Speaker 3: back to the University Montana, so you didn't have to Yeah, no, absolutely,
Speaker 3: what uh have you?
Speaker 1: I think of you? Was kind of a political have
Speaker 1: you are you? Are you political? Do you feel? In
Speaker 1: your writing?
Speaker 2: I have opinions, but I usually try to, like I said,
Speaker 2: try to show both sides a little bit. By the
Speaker 2: choice of what I write about, I think I'm pretty
Speaker 2: much revealing how I think about a lot of things
Speaker 2: by by choosing that topic. Without I never want to
Speaker 2: write agenda books, but you know, I can only think
Speaker 2: of one book where I couldn't. I could not work
Speaker 2: up very much sympathy for the other side, and that
Speaker 2: was when that was based on the Sacket case. The
Speaker 2: e p A that went after a couple in Idaho
Speaker 2: and told them that they had built on a wetlands
Speaker 2: started suing them eighty thousand dollars a day. Not familiar,
Speaker 2: and it went all the way to the Supreme like
Speaker 2: ten years and the Supreme Court knocked them, knocked the
Speaker 2: EPA down nine zero, which you know how many unanimous
Speaker 2: decisions there are, but it was such harassment of this couple.
Speaker 2: And I speculated in the book why lost nine to zero, Yeah,
Speaker 2: twice with the same couple because they wouldn't stop.
Speaker 1: And yeah, it is hard. Those nine people aren't agree
Speaker 1: on anything, no, because when they know, even when they know,
Speaker 1: oftentimes they'll do a descent just to like articulate a
Speaker 1: dissenting view. Do you I mean, like if you knew,
Speaker 1: like if a Supreme Court member knew something was going
Speaker 1: to be, like if they knew somehow it was four
Speaker 1: to four and they have a deciding vote, that's a
Speaker 1: different vote for them, then it's going to be like
Speaker 1: seven to two. If it's seven to two, I can
Speaker 1: take almost like a Devil's Advocate approach and point out
Speaker 1: they out some concerns or yeah, so for something to
Speaker 1: fall nine zero is yeah, yeah, I've never heard of
Speaker 1: this one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I look that up Sacket versus EPA. And
Speaker 2: in the book I speculated at the end why these
Speaker 2: agencies were going after this couple, And my speculation turned
Speaker 2: out to be true, and it was a private It
Speaker 2: was an individual who was an ex federal employee who
Speaker 2: didn't like his view blocked by this house, but he
Speaker 2: knew which buttons to push, and I just thought, well,
Speaker 2: that kind of And then when I found out that
Speaker 2: was true, I felt quite pretient.
Speaker 3: A personal connected vendetta, Uh huh can do a lot
Speaker 3: of damage.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, When did you walk through hitting on picket,
Speaker 1: you know, like like what work you were doing? And
Speaker 1: then when did you say like, well I need to
Speaker 1: do a or maybe you didn't intend it this way.
Speaker 1: I'm assuming you intended that you would find a character
Speaker 1: that you could serialize.
Speaker 2: No, I did not intend it. I was just I
Speaker 2: was writing about the Endangered Species Act and the blackfooted ferrets,
Speaker 2: and I fictionalized them into creatures called Miller's weasels that
Speaker 2: were found and at the time I was working on.
Speaker 1: Pause from it and tell me why why why didn't
Speaker 1: it work as blackfoot a fair because and then to
Speaker 1: be too connected to the reaction.
Speaker 2: Right, And I didn't want to actually use the species
Speaker 2: because I wanted to give them my own characteristic.
Speaker 1: Because then it would be that you had gotten it wrong.
Speaker 2: It is funny though, over the time, I still hear
Speaker 2: from people to say, I look that up and there
Speaker 2: is no such thing. Yeah. But when I was working
Speaker 2: on that, the idea for this, doing the research that
Speaker 2: going to MATEITSI learning it. I was doing ride alongs
Speaker 2: with the local game warden and going to his.
Speaker 1: House for this research or as your other job.
Speaker 2: As I was working as my other job, working for
Speaker 2: the newspaper, and saw that his you know, state owned home,
Speaker 2: his kids running around, his wife answering the phone, acting
Speaker 2: at unpaid secretary receptionist, and the game warden lifestyle. You
Speaker 2: know there's in Wyoming. There's only fifty of them. They're
Speaker 2: very heavily armed, you know. They The guy I was
Speaker 2: with mid the point that no other law enforcement officer
Speaker 2: is more likely to encounter armed people than a game
Speaker 2: warden in the West. And then and then it would
Speaker 2: amaze me how autonomous they really were. I met a
Speaker 2: couple of game wardens in Wyoming, old time ones who
Speaker 2: had never been to Cheyenne in their lives, and they
Speaker 2: would never go, never been to Capital City, that's right,
Speaker 2: and they would if they had to go. They were
Speaker 2: going to quit. So they ran there. They ran their districts.
Speaker 1: It's like going to their own state cabinal.
Speaker 2: So I just found it fast a fascinating thing. And
Speaker 2: that plus I grew up being a little bit scared
Speaker 2: of the local game warden who used to come to
Speaker 2: our school in Casper, Wyoming with a little spinning rod
Speaker 2: with a rubber ball on the end and if kids
Speaker 2: weren't paying attention to just shoot it across the room
Speaker 2: and bounce it off your forehead.
Speaker 9: Oh, I might use that at home.
Speaker 1: Why was a game warden visiting school to talk to
Speaker 1: you guys? Because he's investigating students.
Speaker 2: No, he would say things like, why you're here in
Speaker 2: this place? You listen to your teachers and your parents.
Speaker 2: If you go outside, I'm your boss. You know you
Speaker 2: have to answer to me. And he's.
Speaker 1: He's like going right to the source, that's right, and
Speaker 1: he uh, he was famous spent. I'll spend my whole
Speaker 1: career writing citations that.
Speaker 5: Before you stray from the straight and arrow, he's got
Speaker 5: to get there and deliver his message.
Speaker 2: And he arrested me for a hunting shooting doves off
Speaker 2: power lines when I was in college, but he let
Speaker 2: me go because I was in college, so I have
Speaker 2: on a good path. And he showed me that where
Speaker 2: he had arrested Dick Cheney for fishing out of season,
Speaker 2: same guy in Casper, Wyoming. And I when I visited
Speaker 2: Cheney in the White House a few years later because
Speaker 2: his wife was a fan, and all we did was
Speaker 2: talk about this game board and who arrested us both.
Speaker 2: That's amazing, no kidding, Yeah, huh.
Speaker 1: I never heard of that about Dick Cheney did get
Speaker 1: a lot of but probably got a lot of media. Well,
Speaker 1: he's like in the wrong. He's the creek that was
Speaker 1: closed or something.
Speaker 2: I don't know, because there really aren't fishing seasons, so
Speaker 2: I don't understand that unless it was some specialized area.
Speaker 6: Fishing with bait or something.
Speaker 9: Could have been a spawning closure.
Speaker 2: Who knows.
Speaker 1: So then you I got you sidetracked. But you're talking
Speaker 1: about the development of running with the serial character. So
Speaker 1: you started building this character for your es A Miller's
Speaker 1: Weasel Guy.
Speaker 2: I wrote a book. I had it for five years
Speaker 2: before a publisher really bought it. It was Penguin Putnam,
Speaker 2: which is a big publisher, and when they made the
Speaker 2: offer the contract, they wanted two more books with Joe Pickett,
Speaker 2: so they made.
Speaker 1: The offer off a completed manuscript.
Speaker 2: Correct, yep. And then they wanted two more. Can you
Speaker 2: do this? They said, And I said, of course.
Speaker 1: So they were. They were they were going to roll
Speaker 1: on it before they even saw how it worked.
Speaker 2: Well, they knew that series, I mean series work. You know,
Speaker 2: it's because it's a it's a pyramid scheme in a way.
Speaker 2: You know, if somebody might pick up book number twenty
Speaker 2: four and really like it and say, I gotta go
Speaker 2: get all of them to get up to this point.
Speaker 2: Happens with every hardcover book that comes out, all of mine,
Speaker 2: the back list. They call it all go, you know,
Speaker 2: all get sold.
Speaker 1: I mean here they ever throw they ever use the
Speaker 1: term the halo effect on you.
Speaker 2: I've not heard the halo effect, but I can say
Speaker 2: when the when this there was publicity for the current book,
Speaker 2: and then twenty four year old Open Season appeared on
Speaker 2: some bestseller lists around the real country last week. Wow,
Speaker 2: So it's that kind of thing.
Speaker 8: Did you start him out like as a rookie? Like
Speaker 8: has he aged in his career?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 8: Like, because he's got a had a long career, ye, distinguished.
Speaker 2: That's one thing about the books is unusual from a
Speaker 2: lot of series that everybody ages in real time, right,
Speaker 2: so his daughter shared in the book number one seven
Speaker 2: years old.
Speaker 8: Yeah, like a lot of the polespionage guys, like there's
Speaker 8: just like badass espion.
Speaker 5: Old.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, Sean Connery's out. We got to bring
Speaker 1: in Whoever's next?
Speaker 3: Is this because you have several recurring characters, but obviously
Speaker 3: the main one is the most is the deepest, right,
Speaker 3: But is it like at this point having like a
Speaker 3: family member, like you know so much about him and
Speaker 3: how he would react to things like you just like
Speaker 3: you know, well, he doesn't like flying on plants, right, right,
Speaker 3: But and I'm sure he doesn't like certain foods. You
Speaker 3: only drinks certain beer, he only has certain you know,
Speaker 3: He's got all these little idiosyncrasies. So is it how
Speaker 3: close to reality is this fictional character for you?
Speaker 2: Not that close to reality? I mean, But because I
Speaker 2: was a state employee, and because I've hung out with
Speaker 2: game wardens and I and I had this idea for
Speaker 2: the kind of perfect Western, iconic kind of guy Joe,
Speaker 2: and I named Joe. I thought average Joe, and the
Speaker 2: picket came from a shy in Frontier days, first first champion,
Speaker 2: So I just I had an idea for a guy.
Speaker 2: A story about that. A few years ago, I was
Speaker 2: in New York on a book tour and my publicist
Speaker 2: heard from this woman who said it was turned out
Speaker 2: to be Gary Cooper's only daughter. So he spent a
Speaker 2: lot of time in on Tana had read the book
Speaker 2: and thought I was channeling Gary Cooper in some way,
Speaker 2: and we went and had lunch together, and she was fascinating,
Speaker 2: told me about bird hunting with Ernest Hemingway and her
Speaker 2: dad growing up and now she's living in New York.
Speaker 2: But she's sure that I channeled Joe Picket into Gary Cooper.
Speaker 2: And you know, who was I to say? I didn't
Speaker 2: you know, I wasn't going to argue with her. But
Speaker 2: it's average character.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but that's like the beauty of an average character, right,
Speaker 3: Like it hits a lot of those points with a
Speaker 3: lot of different people. They recognize things, or there's in
Speaker 3: their family members or people that they know or people
Speaker 3: that they want.
Speaker 2: To be and he screws up.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's not a blowhard no here, He's not
Speaker 1: like dirty Harry or something. You know, right, He's not
Speaker 1: tell me, but.
Speaker 2: I think it. I always think it increases the tension
Speaker 2: because you think he might just screw up again. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you're never here, just not gonna win everyone.
Speaker 1: When they when the publisher came to you and they
Speaker 1: were gonna they're they're like, okay, we'll take this one.
Speaker 1: Did they did? Did they make you do like a
Speaker 1: one pager or a one liner about what the other
Speaker 1: plot lines would be, or they just they trusted you.
Speaker 2: No, No, they wanted it. They wanted some descriptions. And
Speaker 2: then and I had written a couple of manuscripts before
Speaker 2: the one was published that weren't very good, but the
Speaker 2: plots were okay, the subject matter was okay. So I
Speaker 2: just made those Joe Pickott books and said, Okay, the
Speaker 2: next one's about, you know, a canyon crossing of a canyon,
Speaker 2: and the next one takes place in the winter, and
Speaker 2: it's about federal a crazy federal land manager. So they
Speaker 2: bought into that. And then I then I went, but
Speaker 2: I've never been overseen what are you gonna write?
Speaker 1: Never?
Speaker 2: Really. And the other thing that I've been shocked by
Speaker 2: over the years is I've never had anyone at New
Speaker 2: York Publishing say I wish you wouldn't touch that subject.
Speaker 1: Oh that's that's never happened that that's like a myth.
Speaker 2: Man it is.
Speaker 1: I think so it's like a myth.
Speaker 2: I think we know some of the same people in publishing.
Speaker 2: We can talk about that, but none of them. They
Speaker 2: always say they want it to be more authentic, not
Speaker 2: that they want me to please them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I never it's it's a thing that it's like
Speaker 1: such a thing in movies and stuff or you know,
Speaker 1: the sort of this sort of guiding hand. And I'm
Speaker 1: sure it exists in some aspects, like I've encountered it
Speaker 1: in some aspects, in some areas of media, I've absolutely
Speaker 1: encountered it. I've not encountered it in book publishing.
Speaker 2: I haven't either.
Speaker 1: I think there's still it's like a it's like a
Speaker 1: it is beat up as book publishing has been, you know,
Speaker 1: with with changes in technology and how people like, how
Speaker 1: people use media and what they do, and how much
Speaker 1: it's had to change, there's still is a within that industry.
Speaker 1: There still is a sense of higher calling, a sense
Speaker 1: of purpose, a sense of free exchange of ideas, and
Speaker 1: they're just not as scared as other people.
Speaker 2: I think so. I think that's true. I think there
Speaker 2: are exceptions, and I hear about things sometimes, but I've
Speaker 2: never personally run again, run up. I've had a couple
Speaker 2: of copy editors who at times anonymous copy editors who
Speaker 2: write that.
Speaker 1: Little digs from copy editor.
Speaker 2: That's what I got. I get that, you know. I
Speaker 2: remember getting an argument with one where I could because
Speaker 2: us I used the term Indian for Indian Country News,
Speaker 2: which is a real newspaper done in South Dakota, and
Speaker 2: they change the name to Native American News, and I said, no,
Speaker 2: that's what they call it. The people who write the
Speaker 2: newspaper who live.
Speaker 1: On the res So funny because that's the copy editor digs.
Speaker 1: That's the digs we'll get from copy editors where they'll
Speaker 1: kind of do they like to do. They do their
Speaker 1: normal work, which is great, and then they'll do little
Speaker 1: gotcha's yep yep.
Speaker 6: You know they're testing you're wrong, you think about this wrong, and.
Speaker 1: You kind of want to be like, listen, buddy, I
Speaker 1: have a lot lane, I have a lot of years
Speaker 1: in this area. And that's the word I'm using.
Speaker 5: Given that you didn't envision this as a series. What
Speaker 5: was the day like when they said we want this
Speaker 5: and two more? I mean, was that just like a
Speaker 5: shock to you or had the idea been floated. I'm
Speaker 5: just sort of wondering what day, what was that day
Speaker 5: like in your life as like a you know, a writer.
Speaker 2: And I was at an international travel trade show.
Speaker 9: It was Berlin.
Speaker 2: I was surrounded by all my clients.
Speaker 1: The publisher calls, I'm gonna have to call you back, yeah.
Speaker 2: And I was just beside myself, you know, and none
Speaker 2: of them understood, none of them knew I wrote. And
Speaker 2: I am going on and on about, you know, a
Speaker 2: three book deal with with.
Speaker 1: Puttnam and a real publisher.
Speaker 2: And I thought they called Chuck finally lost. Yeah, that's right, that's.
Speaker 5: Kind of like beyond what you could have hoped for, right, oh, yes,
Speaker 5: by far.
Speaker 2: Yeah, especially because the book had been done for five
Speaker 2: years before anything happened.
Speaker 1: Well, that'd be especially cool to get money for something
Speaker 1: you'd already done. It's not getting money I got to do,
Speaker 1: got to do it well, No publishers never taking the money.
Speaker 1: But I knew I had to do all that work.
Speaker 2: No publisher is going to take a first novel on
Speaker 2: spec I mean, you have to have that book done
Speaker 2: and polished. Yeah, and it's just not going to happen yeah.
Speaker 1: For novels, sure, yeah, because you can't rely on the
Speaker 1: concept to sell it.
Speaker 2: So I'll tell you a quick story about that first
Speaker 2: novel because I, I, my wife thought it was good enough.
Speaker 2: Why didn't the publishers? You know? But I had an
Speaker 2: agent in the New York. It's this pre internet, pre
Speaker 2: email all of that. I'd gotten the name of an
Speaker 2: agent and I sent him physically send him the manuscript,
Speaker 2: and a year after year, I would like, yeah, and
Speaker 2: he goes, what's that?
Speaker 1: Can you say who the agent was?
Speaker 2: He's dead, so I don't want to say his name
Speaker 2: multipell you later, but uh, he gets real, you know,
Speaker 2: real New York. If you live, you'd want to say it, mate,
Speaker 2: I would, because.
Speaker 1: I'll say stuff about dead people that I wouldn't say
Speaker 1: about life.
Speaker 2: Well, he'd say, you know, it's digital market for it.
Speaker 2: It's not really traditional. It takes liice in a weird
Speaker 2: part of the country. I'll let you know if something happens.
Speaker 2: And I didn't know how the business worked. I waited
Speaker 2: for four years and then I finally went to a
Speaker 2: uh conference where you pitch your book, and I was
Speaker 2: I went in Denver, Colorado, and I pitched it to this.
Speaker 2: What was the agent. It's called the Rocky Mountain Fiction
Speaker 2: Writers Conference, and I pitched the name of it, and
Speaker 2: you know, this is what happens. And the agent said,
Speaker 2: I'm kind of interested in that. Do you have an agent?
Speaker 2: And I said yeah, and he said who is it?
Speaker 2: And I told him his name. He goes, you don't
Speaker 2: know he's dead, do you?
Speaker 6: Oh my god?
Speaker 2: It had been dead for eighteen months.
Speaker 5: Kid, this is like a bad novel about him in
Speaker 5: aspiring writer.
Speaker 2: Nobody from the agency let me know.
Speaker 3: And it's a low ceiling, shitty hotel ballroom that you
Speaker 3: guys are walking from fold up table to fold.
Speaker 2: Up exactly exactly. And then the word got around this thing,
Speaker 2: this guy from Wyoming with his dead agent, and twenty
Speaker 2: four editor from Putnam was there and she had the
Speaker 2: right to acquire books for the first time. So I
Speaker 2: had an editor before I had an agent. Then I
Speaker 2: had to go get one, you know, a live one.
Speaker 2: After that.
Speaker 1: You're kidding me, no, like, buy of your agent's dead.
Speaker 1: But I'm interested in the book, and let's get you
Speaker 1: set up with a live agent to ink the deal.
Speaker 3: Well, this is her first first time having the authority
Speaker 3: to do this.
Speaker 2: Did you catch it. Yeah, she wasn't the one I
Speaker 2: pitched you. She's the one who heard it over drinks
Speaker 2: in the bar that night and she reached out.
Speaker 3: Did she slide in? And she goes, you know, the
Speaker 3: company's paying for these drinks and stuff too.
Speaker 2: It's I didn't meet her. It came later at the time.
Speaker 1: Did that editor wind up having some good success? She stuck.
Speaker 2: She stuck with it, I think through six books and
Speaker 2: then she left publishing. But she did. She was my
Speaker 2: editor for my first six books.
Speaker 5: You know, I would have published a novel if my
Speaker 5: if I had realized my agent was dead, you know.
Speaker 1: Rand That's maybe that's what happened to me.
Speaker 6: I make a couple of phone calls, spent ten years.
Speaker 1: Uh, I'm trying to get to like the next one.
Speaker 1: I'm still kind of held up on that little story.
Speaker 1: That's like a that's like a it's like a comedy.
Speaker 2: It is bad, really bad comedy. Yeah, and again it
Speaker 2: just seems to seem so long ago. But I mean,
Speaker 2: there was no internet. I couldn't look him up. I
Speaker 2: couldn't say, oh, oh, there's my agent's obituary. I didn't know,
Speaker 2: so I just he kept saying quit calling me and
Speaker 2: I did. How long you've been married forty years soon
Speaker 2: to be forty years?
Speaker 1: What's your wife think about all this? Does she think
Speaker 1: did she used to think you were nuts? Or does
Speaker 1: she think you got what you deserve now?
Speaker 2: She has always been very supportive. She's a better reader
Speaker 2: than I am, reads more widely, really good editor. She's
Speaker 2: the one who gets the manuscript first. She was the
Speaker 2: one who finally said, I think this book's good enough
Speaker 2: to go out there. So she's always been very supportive.
Speaker 2: My daughters are as well. They get the first. They
Speaker 2: get the manuscript first before anybody else does, all four
Speaker 2: of them, and they write up their notes to me,
Speaker 2: and sometimes they're kind of cruel, and then I go
Speaker 2: from there.
Speaker 1: So family business.
Speaker 5: Did they discuss it together behind your back and then
Speaker 5: come to it their.
Speaker 2: Not behind my back? They all have their own takes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. When my like, if my wife looks
Speaker 1: at stuff I produce, it's like completely critical. There's no like,
Speaker 1: oh that's.
Speaker 3: Cute and maybe something based in last week's argument about
Speaker 3: something totally.
Speaker 2: Well, I don't want to see my watch completely critical.
Speaker 2: But we have had discussions when she's going over the manuscript.
Speaker 2: We're all kind of say, you know, you could tell
Speaker 2: me that you like something, sure, you know, as opposed
Speaker 2: to she said, she's bitter about that.
Speaker 1: But she's doing business.
Speaker 2: Little she reads, she's doing Yeah, that's nice turn of
Speaker 2: free How many how many of your how many of
Speaker 2: your projects have you optioned for film and TV?
Speaker 6: Well?
Speaker 2: Actually all of them? I mean the Joe Pickett was
Speaker 2: has been a TV series now two seasons on Paramount Plus.
Speaker 2: It has not been renewed for a third season. But
Speaker 2: it's really complicated about the ownership on it, which has
Speaker 2: nothing to do with me. And then Big Sky was
Speaker 2: based on my other set of charricter and that was
Speaker 2: on for three years on ABC.
Speaker 1: So when you do them, it's not like it's not
Speaker 1: your whole body of work. It's one offs.
Speaker 2: No, when they when they.
Speaker 1: I mean you're like all the whole have you have
Speaker 1: you made a deal for the whole CJ Box thing?
Speaker 1: Or is it just you do like individual pieces They
Speaker 1: bought Pickett in.
Speaker 2: General in general. Yeah, they they actually name each book,
Speaker 2: you know, with the characters within.
Speaker 9: It, with the with the TV.
Speaker 8: Like you you were talking about how you've had total autonomy,
Speaker 8: like writing what's the experience been in TV? Like have
Speaker 8: you Because you hear a lot of writers like, oh,
Speaker 8: you know, I I want to just completely take my
Speaker 8: name away from that vert that television version, and other
Speaker 8: authors that are involved with the TV show may not
Speaker 8: have that same opinion, like where where have you land?
Speaker 1: It?
Speaker 2: Really, you know, it really depends on the producers of
Speaker 2: the TV show itself. It's so different with everyone. People
Speaker 2: on Joe Pickett were completely different than people on Big
Speaker 2: Sky in their approach there. I always felt on Big
Speaker 2: Sky they just wanted to go their own direction with
Speaker 2: the character names. Basically, after two seasons, they had a
Speaker 2: conference call with all their writers and the executive producer saying, Chuck,
Speaker 2: can you give them some ideas? And I held up
Speaker 2: the book and I said, why don't you read this? Yeah,
Speaker 2: here's a whole book full of ideas. And it didn't
Speaker 2: go over very well. But whereas so you just kind of.
Speaker 9: Gotta like be okay with you have to.
Speaker 2: I'm you know, it's it's too frustrating to be on
Speaker 2: the set I found. You know, when you hear when
Speaker 2: you hear an actress who a character you created say
Speaker 2: my character would never say this. I heard that in
Speaker 2: the hair headphones, and I thought, lady, I made you,
Speaker 2: I could take you out your character.
Speaker 3: Oh it turns out you get in a car wreck.
Speaker 6: Your character literally said this already.
Speaker 2: Yes, But whereas on the Joe Pickett series, they were
Speaker 2: a lot closer to the books very much. There's a
Speaker 2: lot of lines that came out of the books. I'd
Speaker 2: really pleased with that, But again, I didn't want to
Speaker 2: be in the set every day.
Speaker 1: Yeah, would you have been, well, come on the set
Speaker 1: every day on the Yeah, I mean they're all they're
Speaker 1: all very friendly, you know, but I feel like I'm
Speaker 1: in the way and you just sit in the back
Speaker 1: room and watch the same scene thirty five.
Speaker 2: Times, and I'm you know, I I would go to
Speaker 2: visit for three days and leave after one.
Speaker 1: The one writer I've talked to and had on that
Speaker 1: really liked it and had a really great experience with
Speaker 1: the whole thing is talking Jack car the team he
Speaker 1: wound up working with from as expressed from him when
Speaker 1: we talk about the team he wound up really working on,
Speaker 1: Like would defer to his judgment, right, So he must
Speaker 1: have been on the set, yeah, well, very involved, like
Speaker 1: very involved in the scripting you know, you're always like
Speaker 1: trying to smooth things out and quicken things and cut
Speaker 1: things and get somewhere quicker. Right, very involved in that,
Speaker 1: very involved, and like, no, he wouldn't do it that way,
Speaker 1: He'd do it this way.
Speaker 6: That's it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it came away with a good experience. But man,
Speaker 1: most people, you most people, most writers, when you get
Speaker 1: into that, uh, they come away feeling burned. I brought
Speaker 1: up with Jack card it's a great quote from John
Speaker 1: Lockrea Lacar. Where's he go? By Lacar?
Speaker 2: I've always I think it's Lockay.
Speaker 1: I think he said watching your novel turn into a
Speaker 1: movie is like watching an oxen turned into a bowllyon
Speaker 1: cube and uh, and he that was not Jack Carr's experience. Man,
Speaker 1: so it's nice to hear from someone that liked it.
Speaker 2: It's really and and like I said, I had two
Speaker 2: different experiences, you know, when one set was really great
Speaker 2: and they went were more more closer to the books,
Speaker 2: the other one wasn't. It's but you know, people, I'm
Speaker 2: an executive producer on both shows, and the people that
Speaker 2: what does that mean? And I would say that means
Speaker 2: I provide the source material and I cash the check.
Speaker 2: That's all.
Speaker 1: That's just that that title, while it seems great, you
Speaker 1: should just talk to listeners. Executive producer. Take that with
Speaker 1: a grain of salt. It could mean that they were
Speaker 1: in there just battling and fighting and like finding the
Speaker 1: money and cultivating the idea and bled for it and
Speaker 1: took bullets for it. Or it could mean that it
Speaker 1: was already made.
Speaker 6: They were copied on the email it was.
Speaker 1: Already made, and they're like, oh yeah, I'll sign on
Speaker 1: to that. It's it's just it's the most It's sort
Speaker 1: of like it's the most. It's the title that gets
Speaker 1: the most attention, that is subject to the greatest amount
Speaker 1: of contextual understanding to know what in the hell that means,
Speaker 1: because it could mean anywhere from everything to nothing, but
Speaker 1: it still says executive producer.
Speaker 2: I've also noticed the executive producer sometimes changed from episode
Speaker 2: to episod out, So I think there's just favors being
Speaker 2: paid back. Who these people are?
Speaker 9: Your books?
Speaker 8: The Joe Pickett books deal a lot with hunters and wildlife,
Speaker 8: which is something Hollywood like consistently screws up.
Speaker 9: Why like why can't they get it right?
Speaker 8: Like what like is it just like the people don't
Speaker 8: bother to do the like right kind of like they
Speaker 8: get cops pretty good in Hollywood, right, A lot of a.
Speaker 2: Lot of cops wouldn't disagree. But yeah, right.
Speaker 8: But I'm just wondering, what like when when you're the
Speaker 8: shows that were made from your books have had to
Speaker 8: deal with hunters or wildlife?
Speaker 1: What's your you know what? Bro he just you know
Speaker 1: what he just did where he just committed was what's
Speaker 1: that that two names? I was real hot on it
Speaker 1: for a while. It's not Max Plank, that's the research institute.
Speaker 7: I know Max Plank.
Speaker 1: No Max Plant It's uh uh, it's the two names.
Speaker 1: It comes from two journalists.
Speaker 7: And it describes like a cert.
Speaker 1: It describes when you are a subject matter expert. Brody
Speaker 1: just did it. Brody's the subject matter expert hunting. He
Speaker 1: watches media portrayals of hunting. Oh, jeil Man amnesia.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah right, Oh, it's been a number of episodes.
Speaker 1: He just did jel Man amnesia. It's this, This is
Speaker 1: the perfect test case for jail man amnesia. Brody's subject
Speaker 1: matter expert hunting. He watches movies and he sees they
Speaker 1: always get hunting wrong, or animals or what Okay, he goes,
Speaker 1: but then he says this, But with cops, they get
Speaker 1: it right. Jail man amnesia is when you watch something
Speaker 1: as a subject matter expert and you realize how wrong
Speaker 1: it always is, and then you forget that and you
Speaker 1: think that they're right about the other stuff you don't
Speaker 1: know enough about to know what they're wrong. Meaning if
Speaker 1: I read an article on let's say I read an
Speaker 1: article on grizzly Bear dealer, I go to the New
Speaker 1: York Times, I read an article on grizzly Bear delisting.
Speaker 9: You're taking a long time to get where you're going.
Speaker 1: Well, no, what's taking a long time? I read it,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, that's really not a great job, right,
Speaker 1: they missed this, They missed that, they misrepresented this. But
Speaker 1: then I go and read a thing about the stock Mark,
Speaker 1: the Quagmar and the Russian Ukraine War, and I come
Speaker 1: away from that feeling that I now understand what's going
Speaker 1: on in the Russian.
Speaker 8: Uk I guess I've read a lot about like actors
Speaker 8: doing months of ride alongs with cops and doing a
Speaker 8: lot of research and things like like I'm not.
Speaker 1: Just well, he's getting defensive. You shouldn't getting offensive. Well, no,
Speaker 1: like you said it, and then he said cops would disagree.
Speaker 9: Yeah, well the answer.
Speaker 1: Is probably think they always get cops wrong in the movies,
Speaker 1: but hunters now they get that right.
Speaker 7: This is what's interesting. I just I didn't know this.
Speaker 7: This is Wikipedia, so I have to further fact check.
Speaker 7: But uh. Gelman amnesia coined by American author Michael Crichton
Speaker 7: in two thousand and two speech, named after no you're
Speaker 7: it's maybe just like a case of misremembering quote unquote,
Speaker 7: named after American physicist Murray Gelman, which is g E
Speaker 7: L L DASH M A N N, and the Gelman
Speaker 7: amnesia effect is, according to Wikipedia, the phenomenon of people
Speaker 7: trusting newspapers for topics which they are not knowledgeable about,
Speaker 7: despite recognizing them to be extremely inaccurate on certain topics
Speaker 7: which they are knowledgeable about.
Speaker 1: It's a great word, it is. It's almost as good
Speaker 1: as the words she couldn't find, which is what he say.
Speaker 2: I think to answer it, I mean, there are very
Speaker 2: few people I have.
Speaker 1: Meant, very moment sure brocking anybody.
Speaker 9: Oh that's that's what it sounded.
Speaker 3: But I don't see Brody getting all spun up here either.
Speaker 1: You know, he's a little No, he's he's because he's simmering. No, no,
Speaker 1: he's emotional line throughout the day is like, right, Brody's
Speaker 1: not like you don't like wonder what Brody you're gonna
Speaker 1: get on any given day. He's like this, so you
Speaker 1: need to look for like very slight undulations. Actually he's
Speaker 1: not wrong.
Speaker 9: I thought he was telling me.
Speaker 3: I was like, so, I think this is a perfect example, right,
Speaker 3: Like that somebody who understands the subject is they're entertained.
Speaker 3: They know what's a majestic animal.
Speaker 1: I'll give you an example.
Speaker 3: Hollywood goes, but wouldn't it be better if it just
Speaker 3: stood up and scratched the air?
Speaker 9: Here's a great example.
Speaker 8: Like I recently watched the first episode of the new
Speaker 8: season of True Detective because everyone's talking about it the show.
Speaker 8: And in the very first scene, there's a Native Alaskan
Speaker 8: hunter like drawing a bead on some cariboo and it's
Speaker 8: a herd of like cgi caribou. They're all giant bulls,
Speaker 8: and some unknown thing alarms this herd of cariboo and
Speaker 8: they all start roaring and.
Speaker 2: It's like but like.
Speaker 8: Huge roars, you know, And it's like that's.
Speaker 2: But it looked good, you know.
Speaker 1: But the cop scene. Yeah, but the cop from Queens
Speaker 1: Dead On.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know answer that. It drives me crazy too,
Speaker 2: yeah even and I wouldn't even say. I would even
Speaker 2: say in the series that are based on my books
Speaker 2: or something sometimes right, yeah, cringe, or if I'm watching
Speaker 2: it with it. We did kind of a little local
Speaker 2: premiere last year of Joe Picket ser a couple of
Speaker 2: things in there that had to do with animals and hunting,
Speaker 2: and people just moaned, you know, and I thought it
Speaker 2: didn't click with me. It's just the fact that the
Speaker 2: people who are making it have no experience at all
Speaker 2: and no background, but they don't bother like calling someone well,
Speaker 2: I mean, how many times I'm a fly fisherman? How
Speaker 2: many times on TV or movies have you seen a
Speaker 2: fisherman going the fly rod whipping that thing back and
Speaker 2: forth like a twitch? And will you think somebody there
Speaker 2: would say that's not how you cast? But no one did.
Speaker 1: And what would Joe What does Joe Pickett think of
Speaker 1: a fly fisherman? What does he think of you? Me? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Give give me you through his eyes, you're out fishing.
Speaker 2: I think since I haven't countered game wardens. I think
Speaker 2: he'd be respectful, and he'd also check my license and
Speaker 2: make sure I had a conservation tag and arrest me
Speaker 2: if I didn't not give me a break.
Speaker 6: I'm curious once you're.
Speaker 5: Once you've you know, you've written all these novels, and
Speaker 5: you probably didn't really have an inkling that they would be, uh,
Speaker 5: you know, turned into TV. Now when you write novels,
Speaker 5: is it different? You're not you don't like see your
Speaker 5: characters as the actor.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's what really not on your line. No,
Speaker 2: I'm not. I do not.
Speaker 1: You don't tweak it just to try to change increase.
Speaker 1: It's like.
Speaker 5: It's like one of those things I have to imagine
Speaker 5: to be like one of those things where once you've
Speaker 5: seen something depicted one way, it's sort of in the
Speaker 5: back of your mind, even though you're.
Speaker 8: You had already written a ton of those books before
Speaker 8: they became.
Speaker 2: That's the thing I did. Joe Pickett TV show is
Speaker 2: covers the first three books. That's twenty one years ago.
Speaker 2: So I'm not going to write something in the current
Speaker 2: one where Joe Pickett is fifty one to make that
Speaker 2: make it. Yeah, that's true, and so I don't think
Speaker 2: about that in the other books. And what the Big
Speaker 2: Sky Cassie Duel totally different character, totally different. I mean
Speaker 2: they from the get go, completely different than in the books.
Speaker 1: What also that I want to ask you about with
Speaker 1: like the fiction and the reality of your existence?
Speaker 2: Uh?
Speaker 1: How like how informed is Pickett's relationship with his children
Speaker 1: with you and your children? Because there's kind of like
Speaker 1: a like an observation of not necessarily hip to the times,
Speaker 1: not tech savvy, miss is a lot like is that
Speaker 1: was that your.
Speaker 2: Experience to a lot to a large degree. Yes, And
Speaker 2: I have three daughters. Joe Pickett has three daughters, so
Speaker 2: different ages. All three of my daughters think Sheridan, the
Speaker 2: oldest one is based on them. The other two. You know,
Speaker 2: I don't know where they come from. But because I
Speaker 2: know they're going to read the books, I know they're
Speaker 2: involved with them. I know they're going to offer notes.
Speaker 2: You know that that that's some what limiting at times
Speaker 2: what's going to happen with the daughters because I don't
Speaker 2: want to, I don't want to make it get personal.
Speaker 3: You've never taken advantage of that to like immortalize some
Speaker 3: major screw up in high school.
Speaker 5: Suddenly shown her father enough respect.
Speaker 2: No sort of their dialogue and incorporated it at times,
Speaker 2: and they recognize it.
Speaker 1: But you don't like air out their dirty laundry. No,
Speaker 1: No has the with the economics of it. Does the
Speaker 1: TV stuff like financially does that just immediately eclipse the
Speaker 1: the writing end of it. We're from like a money
Speaker 1: making perspective. You think of yourself more as a person
Speaker 1: that generates TV ideas.
Speaker 2: No, the way I look at the TV shows are
Speaker 2: one hour commercials for my books, not as and and
Speaker 2: they and and and. It creates a lot more awareness
Speaker 2: of the books. But in terms of financially these days,
Speaker 2: with a million streamers and a million different you know,
Speaker 2: ways to either do shows or see them, it's not
Speaker 2: It's not that lucrative god anymore. But the commercial aspect
Speaker 2: being a commercial has made a big difference since the
Speaker 2: Joe Pickett TV show came out. Like we're looking at
Speaker 2: the current book. I just heard the other day the
Speaker 2: pre sales are up forty nine percent from the last book.
Speaker 2: That's huge for a big you're blow and I've got
Speaker 2: to tribute a lot of that to the TV show.
Speaker 2: People are interested in the series for the first time,
Speaker 2: because I don't know what else it comes. It would
Speaker 2: careme from.
Speaker 1: Man, So what an interesting cree you had, though, I've.
Speaker 2: Had three really interesting careers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I like because it's like it's just it's such
Speaker 1: a oh man, it's like American elbow grease, you know,
Speaker 1: like going to those lonely ass depressing conferences and well
Speaker 1: trying to like, yes, you know, it's like a lot
Speaker 1: of people got too much pride for that. Man.
Speaker 2: Ah, I don't know. I mean that's it's kind of
Speaker 2: a glamorous job to international travel. It sounds better than No.
Speaker 1: No, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about no, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I'm not anyway. I think I was disrespecting
Speaker 1: your business, not at all. I meant going down and
Speaker 1: like showing up at something and just trying to hustle
Speaker 1: to find to find an agent, to find an editor
Speaker 1: all that. Do you know what I mean? Like you
Speaker 1: got to bury the pride, you know, and go down
Speaker 1: there and you're not coming in with connections. You're walking
Speaker 1: to the door trying to you know, trying to do it,
Speaker 1: and it's like a sort of it's a tough position
Speaker 1: to you know, it's just a tough position to be like, oh, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, check out my book, check out my novel.
Speaker 1: It's just hard man.
Speaker 2: It is, and it's you know, I mean, this is
Speaker 2: not any secret to you or anything you're not used to.
Speaker 2: But I mean, how many people in their profession have
Speaker 2: an Amazon comment section about every single thing they do
Speaker 2: where people from all over the world can weigh in
Speaker 2: and they all say, it doesn't matter what book is
Speaker 2: out there, they're going to say, he's don't even write
Speaker 2: him anymore. You can tell he mailed this one in
Speaker 2: kind of thing, no matter what book it is, and
Speaker 2: you just you gets got to keep cranking away. You
Speaker 2: know it's going to happen. All you can do is
Speaker 2: look at the average, not the super highs and super low.
Speaker 1: So do you have to be that everything you have
Speaker 1: to say you just say it through your book, And
Speaker 1: if you don't say it through your book, you don't say.
Speaker 2: It except privately. Yes, I do. Yeah, I think that's
Speaker 2: that's a good way to go.
Speaker 9: Do you have a.
Speaker 8: Like an agreement with the publisher, like what's your timeline?
Speaker 8: Like do you try to get one out every one
Speaker 8: a year?
Speaker 2: Right? I have a contract on a deadline. Yeah, every
Speaker 2: either October or September day. I'm always ahead of deadline.
Speaker 2: I've never never.
Speaker 1: Really No, do you ever bring in the collaborator?
Speaker 2: No? And I don't think I could. I I can't
Speaker 2: think of the only I could conceivably maybe write with
Speaker 2: one of my daughters, because I think we think alike.
Speaker 2: But I did a short story once with another author
Speaker 2: who was a great person, but it was not fun
Speaker 2: and it didn't go well. Just two different processing when you.
Speaker 5: I was last week, I was at the Bozeman Public
Speaker 5: Library and I went, you know, through the stacks, and
Speaker 5: I just think, oh, go check out. You're what turned
Speaker 5: out to be three shelves, right, that's good and well,
Speaker 5: and you know they it's funny because you know some
Speaker 5: of them were they had one copy, others. I mean
Speaker 5: I was I was shocked how many of these books
Speaker 5: they had like two or three copies on the shelf.
Speaker 5: And I was just it occurred to me, as you
Speaker 5: were talking earlier, going to that section of the stacks
Speaker 5: and looking for where your book would go? Do you
Speaker 5: go back to Have you been back to the Casper
Speaker 5: Public libr and just.
Speaker 1: Sort of they got in there.
Speaker 5: Reflected on that spot because you probably never imagined it
Speaker 5: would be a whole half a Okay, I never have.
Speaker 2: I have done that. I still do that, and I
Speaker 2: also do it in bookstores. It's got to be pretty
Speaker 2: surreal fu airport bookstores. That's always you never know. I
Speaker 2: never say who I am until I find out for
Speaker 2: sure they have the book.
Speaker 8: Are you gonna You're gonna keep going with Joe Pickett
Speaker 8: till you can't go anymore?
Speaker 9: You can do something different or no.
Speaker 2: I have done some other things, and I've got some
Speaker 2: ideas down. Some ideas can't be Joe Pickett books. The
Speaker 2: serial Killer Highway Driver.
Speaker 1: Optioned that.
Speaker 2: That was part of the Big Sky. That's how it
Speaker 2: actually started out with that book and that story. But
Speaker 2: so I'll have I have some other ideas. They'll probably
Speaker 2: be different ones.
Speaker 9: So you're not going to stop writing and just ride
Speaker 9: off the sun.
Speaker 2: Joe Pickett, like I said, is fit to figure that
Speaker 2: out a few years ago. Go back from the very
Speaker 2: first book. How old was he? Thirty four? And then
Speaker 2: plot him at age at the same rate. Right, Actually,
Speaker 2: I'm older. I'm older than to Pickett. Yeah, so, and
Speaker 2: he's ready to retire. I'll be ready to fire, I think, really, yeah,
Speaker 2: I think, so.
Speaker 1: Well, he's got to have twenty years now, he's well,
Speaker 1: he's gone, he's gotta have thirty, right right, I've gotta
Speaker 1: have thirty.
Speaker 2: And not every book is a year apart. Some of
Speaker 2: them are back to back, some of them a month later,
Speaker 2: so I can kind of play around with that.
Speaker 1: M hm. So you picture quitting someday.
Speaker 2: Although inevitably there'll be some point. But I think if
Speaker 2: I start getting bored with it, or if I start
Speaker 2: thinking I'm retelling the same story, then I think I'll
Speaker 2: know to pull the plug. I don't want to do that.
Speaker 2: I think everyone needs to be a standalone in its
Speaker 2: own way. And when I'm rehashing the formula, which i
Speaker 2: I'm a reader too, and sometimes long time series, I
Speaker 2: start thinking, I think I've read this one before. I
Speaker 2: want to get out before anybody says that or thinks that.
Speaker 1: You know. What prevents me from being able to watch
Speaker 1: serial dramas on TV is, inevitably you get some number
Speaker 1: of episodes in. It could be four or five, could
Speaker 1: be season two, and you can start to smell the
Speaker 1: writers stretching it out, trying to keep it going.
Speaker 2: I understand now, you go back.
Speaker 1: To Dukes of Hazard, and it would be that you
Speaker 1: have these cast of characters and like every week a
Speaker 1: bad man, a bad person comes to town with some
Speaker 1: kind of nefarious objective. They get vanquished and.
Speaker 9: Just it's like Scooby Doo.
Speaker 6: That's exactly what I was about to say.
Speaker 1: I could somehow, I could somehow tolerate that. But it's
Speaker 1: the it's the storyline dramas Deadwood, which I was enthralled
Speaker 1: with that first, but eventually came like, oh, I can
Speaker 1: see now, like it's about time someone new comes to town.
Speaker 1: And once you once unnatural and you smell it, oh,
Speaker 1: it kills it for me. But dude, I'm like, I'm
Speaker 1: jealous of uh, I'm jealous of your career in program
Speaker 1: mm because because the way I probably imagine it wrong,
Speaker 1: everybody imagines everybody else's life wrong. I imagine that you get
Speaker 1: to just like when professionally for work, you're just like
Speaker 1: you'll you occupy a single space, right, yes, and it
Speaker 1: rolls along and there's not like these radical resets.
Speaker 2: Right, I mean yes, And I just I was pinched
Speaker 2: myself and you know, I have the best job in
Speaker 2: the world. I think, you know, I go into my
Speaker 2: little office above our porch barn and do so many
Speaker 2: words a day, and then go out and do whatever.
Speaker 6: You know, how many words?
Speaker 2: Uh, minimum of a thousand, But some day I can
Speaker 2: hit three four thousand. Some days it's a struggle to
Speaker 2: get that thousand.
Speaker 1: What time you get up?
Speaker 2: I get up early, but I don't begin writing early necessarily.
Speaker 2: It's that usually you know, ten or eleven when I'm
Speaker 2: actually start writing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what time you wrap it up?
Speaker 2: Whenever I hit my word count or whenever I start
Speaker 2: to just feel kind of mentally tired, I'll.
Speaker 1: Part for me.
Speaker 2: Uh usually two two thirty, So I think about that
Speaker 2: I have it three or four hour day. That's not bad.
Speaker 1: Well, but I used to do that when I was
Speaker 1: just writing. I did the same thing. I'd be done early.
Speaker 2: But you're always thinking, oh, yeah, that's what I tell
Speaker 2: my wife when she thinks I'm just staring. No, I'm
Speaker 2: thinking I'm working.
Speaker 8: But you can't write for eight or ten hours straight
Speaker 8: like nobody, Like.
Speaker 2: I've talked to people who say they do, and I
Speaker 2: kind of.
Speaker 1: All that whole that whole idea we used to have
Speaker 1: this that you're like everybody thought it could be like
Speaker 1: Charles Bikowski. You know you're.
Speaker 6: Bleeding for your way.
Speaker 1: You're like drunk three in the morning writing all this
Speaker 1: genius stuff. You know. I would be basically if I
Speaker 1: was writing. If I was writing, that meant I was
Speaker 1: probably at night drinking because I was in town home.
Speaker 1: So I'd wake up, be kind of hungover, do my correspondence,
Speaker 1: like answer emails, do whatever I had to do, uh,
Speaker 1: do research stuff for a while, and then I would like,
Speaker 1: actually this, I would lay down under my desk on
Speaker 1: my back and fall asleep.
Speaker 2: Huh.
Speaker 1: And that would be my That would reset my brain
Speaker 1: and I would sleep. But I can't sleep long on
Speaker 1: my back, so it might be twenty minutes, maybe an hour,
Speaker 1: whatever it would be. I would sleep under the desk.
Speaker 1: I would wake up bam. I would sit up, get
Speaker 1: in my desk and do all the writing I was
Speaker 1: gonna do two three hours, and then I would go
Speaker 1: read and continue doing the research stuff. And then by
Speaker 1: early night, early afternoon, by way before dinner.
Speaker 6: To start, I was done.
Speaker 1: I was done. And then at that time my wife
Speaker 1: had worked about ten at night, so I would oftentimes
Speaker 1: I would make for two of us. I would make dinner.
Speaker 1: That would take me four hours to prepare. That's when
Speaker 1: I got like really into That's interesting because I didn't
Speaker 1: know what to do because she wouldn't she wasn't going
Speaker 1: to leave work till million hours at that time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I'd be like, man, that makes the craziest thing
Speaker 1: animays every evening that is done, I was done.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I find not the writing the hardest thing
Speaker 2: as years go on. But but making myself get the
Speaker 2: time to write is harder now than the actual writing.
Speaker 1: Is because now your writing business, Yeah.
Speaker 2: There's a lot more demands. There's a lot more things
Speaker 2: going on. So what I try to do is is
Speaker 2: basically get the book done in the dead of winter
Speaker 2: when there's not a lot going on, so that I'm
Speaker 2: available to fish as much as I can, and play
Speaker 2: golf as much as I can, and folk the river
Speaker 2: as much as I can.
Speaker 1: So right now, it's game on, right in time, that's right.
Speaker 2: And I'm about two thirds done with the next Joe
Speaker 2: pick A book, which I think i'll have done before
Speaker 2: summer starts. I got grand kids too, that's the biggest
Speaker 2: thing ever. When they're around, I don't want to have
Speaker 2: to retreat to the barn.
Speaker 1: I like that that you still, even though you're a writer,
Speaker 1: which is so modernish, that you still have a sort
Speaker 1: of there's a seasonality, you know, there's like an awareness
Speaker 1: of the solar cycle, right, like you gotta get it
Speaker 1: done in the winter. You know.
Speaker 2: Well, you know what I find I can write about.
Speaker 2: I can write about the summer better in the winter
Speaker 2: and the winter better in the summer because it makes
Speaker 2: myself make it forces me to really think of all
Speaker 2: those things and not just take them for granted.
Speaker 1: Well now, if not, if you're writing about the winter
Speaker 1: and the winter, you'd be like kind of sucks.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 8: One thing I noticed, like early on and this book,
Speaker 8: was like, this guy has spent a lot, a lot
Speaker 8: of time outside at a very particular time in the fall,
Speaker 8: Like you're describing the brightness and sharpness of the light
Speaker 8: and the colors.
Speaker 2: Of the lead.
Speaker 8: And there's only like a couple of days like that
Speaker 8: in the fall where it's like everything super intense in
Speaker 8: October you always know, yeah, early October maybe, And I
Speaker 8: was like, this guy's been out there on that kind
Speaker 8: of day.
Speaker 2: And where this book opens, it's on the bend of
Speaker 2: a river with super fall colors and a fly fisherman
Speaker 2: in the river and then a grizzly bear comes pounding
Speaker 2: down the mountain and hits him. That's where I fish,
Speaker 2: and it's actually on a private ranch in the ranch
Speaker 2: owner I gave him that chapter and he said, I
Speaker 2: can't go back there now. It's all I can think
Speaker 2: about is a bear getting me.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 7: No.
Speaker 8: But it was like, yeah, that's that one or two days.
Speaker 9: In the fall.
Speaker 1: You know that you get in the mountains.
Speaker 2: It's cool.
Speaker 1: Well, man, like I said, I got a ton of
Speaker 1: respect for what you've built. And also just how you
Speaker 1: came up. You know that you knew what you wanted
Speaker 1: to do and set out to do it well. And
Speaker 1: it wasn't handed to you. No, I had to eat.
Speaker 1: I didn't have to do what you did well.
Speaker 2: I just I remember I was actually on a book
Speaker 2: tour early on at a bookstore and the bookstore owner
Speaker 2: came to me. He said, you want to know the
Speaker 2: best book I have read this year, and it gives
Speaker 2: me American Buffalo and.
Speaker 1: Uh, and I tell you guy, I said, thanks.
Speaker 2: I will and I loved it. My wife loved it,
Speaker 2: and I think I gave it to my daughter who
Speaker 2: didn't return it. So I had to go get a
Speaker 2: new copy. But hopefully I love that.
Speaker 1: Tell heveryone. He wrote that he's asleep under his desk. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well everybody. C J Box has a new Joe Pickett
Speaker 1: novel out, three Inch Teeth. Great cover. Can you see
Speaker 1: this cover here?
Speaker 2: Film looks great.
Speaker 1: A few people are listening and you can't see it.
Speaker 7: I want to tell you there's a grizzly bear in
Speaker 7: the center.
Speaker 6: Fight it at your local bookstore. You can see the cover.
Speaker 1: It's got some steam coming up when you see that steam.
Speaker 1: Are you picturing hot springs? Are you picturing, uh, steam breathing.
Speaker 2: I'm kind of thinking just foggy, foggy steam breathing grizzlies.
Speaker 1: CJ Box. There's an endorsement around the front. Joe Pickett
Speaker 1: is the one man you'd want by your side in
Speaker 1: a crisis. Number one New York Times best selling author,
Speaker 1: and the new title is three Inch Teeth. Check it
Speaker 1: out now available anywhere books are sold, and under the
Speaker 1: b at the local library. He's already cased it out
Speaker 1: and he's found the slot. It should be full. Thanks
Speaker 1: for coming on, man, I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2: I've been looking forward to this for a long time.
Speaker 2: Like I'm a fan. It's really fun and.
Speaker 1: I appreciate it.
Speaker 2: I appreciate you guys.
Speaker 1: Best of lucky with your book. I can keep steaming along.
Speaker 1: I will And thanks for being such a like A
Speaker 1: think of you as an American inspiration story. So we
Speaker 1: need to see more out of you, Americans. Look what
Speaker 1: you can do.
Speaker 2: Your thank you.
Speaker 4: Mo beans, mo beans, pole beans, mo beans. Talking about
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Speaker 4: over there, a few more right there, one over there.
Speaker 4: Beans everywhere, mo beans, pole beans. Fresh set eyes find
Speaker 4: more beans, mo beans, pole beans,