Speaker 1: If this is the me Eater podcast coming at you, shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear.
Speaker 2: Listeningst you can't predict anything presented by First Light creating
Speaker 2: proven versatile hunting apparel from Marino bass layers to technical outerwear.
Speaker 1: For every hunt, First Light Go Farther, stay longer, Little
Speaker 1: inside scoop here for listeners. Brody was just telling me
Speaker 1: that Brody was just hunting with Hayden Sam. How many
Speaker 1: times has he won trivia three?
Speaker 3: No, he was on a hot streak and it's it's
Speaker 3: been cold for a while.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, because he was the emerging threat and then
Speaker 1: he became the receiving threat or what was waning champ,
Speaker 1: the waning championing champion. So Brody's telling me a story
Speaker 1: in which in private between me and.
Speaker 3: Brody, so we're gonna talk abouts.
Speaker 1: Have been open. I don't know, yep, because Brody's telling
Speaker 1: me about him overcalling Turkey Hunt. And I just stepped
Speaker 1: outside and he's sitting out there and goes to hey, man,
Speaker 1: talk to you know. I wasn't overcalling. He's gonna be
Speaker 1: So it's like, uh were having a private conversation in there.
Speaker 4: It sounded like I heard it where he was at.
Speaker 1: He's eaves dropping. He's got like a recording device. It's
Speaker 1: like the surveillance state. You know, whould appreciate that, Jack
Speaker 1: car great transition, that.
Speaker 5: Is, I've never had a transition.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what are your opinions on eves dropping?
Speaker 5: You don't like it? Be careful. Yeah, I'm not a
Speaker 5: big fan, but this is probably the most heavily bugged
Speaker 5: room in Bozeman.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's that's Steve's paranoia as well.
Speaker 5: Uh huh, I get it, I get it. Be careful,
Speaker 5: that's what I say.
Speaker 1: No, what we're gonna I'm gonna ask you a little
Speaker 1: bit about that. Uh, Jack Cars here, New York Times
Speaker 1: best selling author, like multiple times.
Speaker 5: Yeah, all of them now, all of them, all of them. Crazy,
Speaker 5: damn it, man, crazy.
Speaker 1: No, I don't want to have mine. That's a good
Speaker 1: track record, New York Times best selling author. Every time
Speaker 1: a new book out releases on you can order you
Speaker 1: can pre order it now, but releases on May sixteenth only.
Speaker 1: The Dead five other previous titles Terminal list. If you
Speaker 1: guys sit around watching Amazon Prime and you happen to
Speaker 1: see Chris Pratt and a thing called Terminal list that
Speaker 1: is and has been for a long time. That's Jack
Speaker 1: Carr's book that's based off your book now that Jack
Speaker 1: card I was surprised when we had dinner last night.
Speaker 1: Not surprised, but pleased to hear when we had dinner
Speaker 1: last night that you get to be involved in all that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like from a writing from a writing standpoint, yeah, becau.
Speaker 5: Usually they get rid of the author right away. They
Speaker 5: don't want the author to be there and on sat
Speaker 5: and see what's going on and start and you ruined
Speaker 5: my vision. And so I like to kind of move
Speaker 5: the author to the side right away and then bring
Speaker 5: the writing team in and get going. But I went
Speaker 5: into it kind of being a kid of the eighties.
Speaker 5: I grew up reading all these thrillers growing up, and
Speaker 5: then watching the movies that were adapted from those books
Speaker 5: and noting the differences and what worked and what didn't,
Speaker 5: but more so realizing that there was gonna be changes
Speaker 5: because you are telling a story now through a different medium.
Speaker 5: You are telling that story visually, so it's going to change.
Speaker 5: And you have a writer's.
Speaker 1: Room and your people are gonna it's gonna be two
Speaker 1: hours long, and.
Speaker 5: It's gonna be this one is six, so sorry eight.
Speaker 5: So every episode is about an hour, so those eight episodes.
Speaker 5: But yeah, you can't tell everything. You have to kind
Speaker 5: of morph things a little bit. You have to add
Speaker 5: to things that weren't in the book. So it's just
Speaker 5: how it goes. But I always thought back when I
Speaker 5: my first conversation with the show runner, who's like in
Speaker 5: series television. He's like the director of a feature film,
Speaker 5: so he's managing multiple directors and he's like the single
Speaker 5: point of contact for all these different things that go
Speaker 5: into making a TV show. We had our first conversation
Speaker 5: in December of twenty nineteen. His name is David Digilio,
Speaker 5: amazing guy, and I think I put him at ease
Speaker 5: by talking about First Blood and how First Blood and
Speaker 5: that came out in nineteen seventy two, it's never been
Speaker 5: out of print since, written by David Morrell, and the
Speaker 5: movie with Syvester Stallone in the early eighties. Those are
Speaker 5: two very different animals, but they're both awesome, but very different.
Speaker 5: So I knew that there was going to be changes,
Speaker 5: and more so it was important to Chris and to
Speaker 5: Antwine and to me was keeping the theme of the book,
Speaker 5: keep in that spirit alive, even if there were going
Speaker 5: to be changes. So that's what we did.
Speaker 1: As as someone who traffics an intrigue and espionage and whatnot.
Speaker 1: You're familiar with John is does he lock Lacar Leacre?
Speaker 5: How does he lare? So it is Lacar Yeah, I
Speaker 5: think so. That's how I've always said it in the
Speaker 5: last almost fifty years.
Speaker 1: He's got a great quote where he said, watching your
Speaker 1: book get made into a movie, this isn't your experience,
Speaker 1: but he said, watching your book get made into a
Speaker 1: movie is like watching an ox turned into a bowllyon cube.
Speaker 5: Interesting, I've not heard him say that one. I've heard
Speaker 5: similar ones, but not in say that those exact words.
Speaker 5: But yeah, he and his have been since the seventies.
Speaker 5: They've been making those into the films and TV shows.
Speaker 5: And but I mean, what an amazing track record that
Speaker 5: guy had. He had a good run, you have a
Speaker 5: solid run, and they'll continue to make his books into
Speaker 5: films and TV shows going forward. I'm sure what E
Speaker 5: was I.
Speaker 1: Going to tell you about? Something about that another film quote. Oh,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a comedy. You're you're with the comedy
Speaker 1: the producers I haven't seen Broadway.
Speaker 5: I know what it is, but I haven't seen it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a line in there where the producers are
Speaker 1: producing and they get so sick of the writer. As
Speaker 1: they're making this play, they get so sick of the writer.
Speaker 1: One of them says, next time, no writers.
Speaker 5: No writers, have to watch it now because now I
Speaker 5: can see how that can happen. But now, I was
Speaker 5: very fortunate the team we put together, starting with Antoine
Speaker 5: Fuqua and Chris Pratt and that show runner David Gillio.
Speaker 5: We put such a solid team together, and now we're
Speaker 5: continuing that into this next spin off, So working on
Speaker 5: those right now, and I'm writing one of those episodes,
Speaker 5: and then we'll go right from that into True Believer,
Speaker 5: which is the second book in the series. So we'll
Speaker 5: just keep keep going. That's great, Fingers crossed. You never know.
Speaker 5: So it's actually on the screen, though, So you can't
Speaker 5: really get too excited till you actually see it on
Speaker 5: the screen because there's so many things that can derail
Speaker 5: throughout the whole process. Sure, So it's uh yeah, And
Speaker 5: so I never really talked even talked about it too
Speaker 5: much until it actually came out, or until until they
Speaker 5: started putting commercials on TV and they put a commercial
Speaker 5: in front of Top Gun Maverick in the theaters for it,
Speaker 5: and uh so when they started doing that, I'm like, Okay,
Speaker 5: I'm pretty certain this is going to come out on
Speaker 5: July first now, But even so, I still, you know,
Speaker 5: still a little nervous until it actually hits screens.
Speaker 1: You got to have a lot of mega fans who
Speaker 1: who are just pissed.
Speaker 5: When you compare Yeah, yeah, that happens.
Speaker 1: That's not what happened, because you.
Speaker 5: Know, I tried to prep as much as I possibly
Speaker 5: could through my podcast and social posts and stuff and
Speaker 5: just kind of prep people, kind of slowly getting them
Speaker 5: used to the idea of it being a little different.
Speaker 5: But still regardless when it comes out, there are those
Speaker 5: people who will take your book, watch the show. This
Speaker 5: was different, that was different, that was different. I hate
Speaker 5: it and that's just gonna gonna happen. Which is what's
Speaker 5: great about the spin off is that there's no book
Speaker 5: to compare it to Yeat, so so it's just creating.
Speaker 5: There's characters that that I've created, but it's a backstory,
Speaker 5: so there's no book about the backstory. So there's nothing
Speaker 5: for someone to sit there and just compare it to
Speaker 5: just looking for something to nitpick or someone looking for
Speaker 5: a reason to hate it, you know, And that's just
Speaker 5: kind of the world we live in today.
Speaker 3: People love backstory. See yes, your position perfectly, wait a
Speaker 3: few years and then be like little little guy growing
Speaker 3: up on the farm.
Speaker 5: There it is.
Speaker 1: Did you know that Michael Man did? Was it like
Speaker 1: after you?
Speaker 6: It's by my bedside?
Speaker 5: It's awesome.
Speaker 1: Yeah, here's like this phenomenal. It's it's it's it's a
Speaker 1: little bit more than a cult classic, but at this
Speaker 1: point has a very like cultish. Yeah, like I make
Speaker 1: a point to watch Heat every two three years.
Speaker 5: Me too.
Speaker 1: But but he's a director, he's not a writer. So
Speaker 1: the fact that he went and wrote this, but is
Speaker 1: it after before?
Speaker 4: It's like a prequel sequel.
Speaker 5: I think, Yeah, it's a great book. Have you ever
Speaker 5: read it yet? It is amazing. Meg Gardner wrote it
Speaker 5: with Michael Mann, and she's an incredible author, and I
Speaker 5: had her on my podcast we talked about it and
Speaker 5: she's just amazing. But the book it exceeded expectations and
Speaker 5: that's hard to do. Moe Heat two. Oh yeah, and
Speaker 5: that the cover looks like the movie poster.
Speaker 7: Essentially, Tarantino did something similar with Once Upon a Time
Speaker 7: in Hollywood. He wrote, he wrote his own novelization of
Speaker 7: this movie, but he added scenes and changed dialogue and
Speaker 7: made it a little bit different, like it's kind of fun.
Speaker 5: Yeah, novelizations used to be a big, big thing in
Speaker 5: the eighties into the nineties. So you read a book
Speaker 5: based on a screenplay, but it kind of fell out
Speaker 5: out of favor here.
Speaker 1: It seems aspect for sure.
Speaker 5: Man. Yeah, there's so. David Morrell wrote a novelization based
Speaker 5: on the screenplay for Rambo First Blood Part two and
Speaker 5: for Rambo three, and they're fantastic, They're really good. And
Speaker 5: they at least Rambo First Blood Part two made the
Speaker 5: New York Times list for quite a few weeks when
Speaker 5: it came out in conjunction with the movie in eighteen
Speaker 5: eighty five. And yeah, David Morrel is just something incredible talent,
Speaker 5: amazing guy. I'm proud to call him a friend now,
Speaker 5: just honor to know him. But yeah, so we did
Speaker 5: those novelizations and I'm collecting them. Actually, that's why I'm
Speaker 5: so up on the novelization. So I'm collecting the old
Speaker 5: ones from the eighties that I've that I had back
Speaker 5: then that I've kind of misplaced over the years. So
Speaker 5: I'm collecting all those novelizations and some that I didn't
Speaker 5: know existed.
Speaker 3: That's cool. Yeah, So my buddies and I still on
Speaker 3: occasion say I just wanted a cup of coffee from
Speaker 3: Rambow first.
Speaker 5: He was just looking for something, to just look for something.
Speaker 7: That's what it is.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I put I put a little nod to uh
Speaker 5: will teasel in this upcoming novel and only the Dead.
Speaker 5: So for for fans such as yourself, you'll be reading
Speaker 5: through it and be like, so I try to throw
Speaker 5: a few things in there. This one I through, Like
Speaker 5: fans of Magnum will recognize in all my books, I
Speaker 5: throw a little something in there. They're pretty subtle. So
Speaker 5: I get those in there. This one, I have some
Speaker 5: Magnum stuff in there. It's all very subtle. Bond stuff
Speaker 5: in there, lethal weapon in there, and First Blood there. Yeah,
Speaker 5: you have. You have to be on your toes though,
Speaker 5: you know, it's not just it's not it's not doesn't
Speaker 5: say the thing and then say from the movie First
Speaker 5: Blood or anything like that. It's just it's just woven
Speaker 5: in and to the fabric for for people that pretty
Speaker 5: much the Preey grew up in the eighties. Excellent, Yeah,
Speaker 5: I love it.
Speaker 1: We're gonna in a little bit, we're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: how your mom was a library and which I love.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it all starts with books. All started with books.
Speaker 1: Uh, speaking of show business and books. God, man, it's
Speaker 1: another great transition. Did you catch that I did?
Speaker 5: That was smooth?
Speaker 1: Speaking of show business? Or so here's here's a little show.
Speaker 1: Here's a little show business lesson for you. When when
Speaker 1: I sold my books a Random House, like, they buy
Speaker 1: world rights to the book, and so they can then
Speaker 1: sell they can then sell the audio rights to someone else.
Speaker 1: And a long time ago, a decade ago, they weren't
Speaker 1: doing a bunch of audio. Audio just wasn't what it
Speaker 1: is now, so they I think. So when I sold
Speaker 1: me Eater Ventures from the Life of an American Hunter
Speaker 1: to Random House, they turned around and sold the audio
Speaker 1: rights to Brilliance and had some I mean, man, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know, if he's listening, probably is a feller.
Speaker 1: They get someone to read it and it's just not
Speaker 1: how it's it just it's wrong, it's immoral. But they
Speaker 1: got someone to read it, but they only had the
Speaker 1: audio rights for ten years, so we just got back
Speaker 1: the audio rights, so I was able to go. This
Speaker 1: happened with my Buffalo book too. A decade went by
Speaker 1: and I was able to get back my publisher got
Speaker 1: back the audio rights, and then I a couple of
Speaker 1: weeks ago, went back into the studio and read ten
Speaker 1: years later, Wow, my own damn book.
Speaker 5: Did you learn anything?
Speaker 1: Oh, that's what I'm gonna get to, a lot of things,
Speaker 1: like I had a lot of like not a lot,
Speaker 1: like opinions I had that I don't really have anymore,
Speaker 1: or opinions I had that were accentuated that that just
Speaker 1: have gotten more complicated. And when I did my Buffalo book,
Speaker 1: there was there was stuff. There was like scientific understandings
Speaker 1: about about from like genetics work, stuff about the first Americans,
Speaker 1: stuff about when waves of animal migrations came and how
Speaker 1: things died out and didn't just had just changed and
Speaker 1: became like objectively different. And I fixed some of the
Speaker 1: objectively different things. But yeah, and reading it, there's everything.
Speaker 1: So I'm like, I don't know if I'd put it
Speaker 1: that way now, but we're going to tack on to
Speaker 1: the end of this episode, We're gonna tack on a
Speaker 1: chapter of it's just gonna be like glued right on
Speaker 1: to the end of the show. We're gonna tack on
Speaker 1: a chapter of a book I wrote a long time
Speaker 1: ago and just recorded the audio now. And if you
Speaker 1: want to go find that audio book, I don't know,
Speaker 1: can you put a link in there? Or yeah, if
Speaker 1: you want to go find the whole audiobook and pick
Speaker 1: it up, go find the whole audiobook and you listen
Speaker 1: to the whole damn thing. If you don't like to read. Also,
Speaker 1: at the end of the show, just transitions, keep coming man.
Speaker 1: Also at the end of the show, we put so
Speaker 1: there's a song a lot of love and hate? Is
Speaker 1: it mostly hatred?
Speaker 6: There's some love, there's some not knowing what the hell
Speaker 6: it is, There's some like this is awful.
Speaker 1: Musicians. Is a musician, Christopher Denny. I understand he has
Speaker 1: a he likes to pull a cork.
Speaker 6: This is about our new outro song.
Speaker 1: I understand likes the pull of cork, and I understand
Speaker 1: he's got it. He's had a lot of uh. He
Speaker 1: likes to party.
Speaker 7: Steve, I've noticed a lot of your favorite musicians have
Speaker 7: like crippling drug or alcohol addiction.
Speaker 1: That's very true. Yeah, I don't know why as someone
Speaker 1: who doesn't, I don't know why. Uh yeah, likes the party.
Speaker 1: That's a euphemism for like to you know, like to
Speaker 1: party as a Houston vism for likes to do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know where he's at on it right now.
Speaker 1: Christopher Danny. One day we had a podcast episode where
Speaker 1: we like argued about a thing way too.
Speaker 6: Long that's probably not the the only and it was.
Speaker 1: Like someone there was a comment like, you'd like beat
Speaker 1: the horse to death. There's a Christopher Danny song where
Speaker 1: in the end of the song he says, we've done
Speaker 1: beat this horse to death. It's time to ride on.
Speaker 1: And I wanted to glue it onto the end of
Speaker 1: that episode but never got around to it. It's not
Speaker 1: it's glued onto the end of every episode.
Speaker 5: Somehow seems appropriate.
Speaker 6: Yet we still beat dead horses into the underworld.
Speaker 1: So if you're listening at the end of the show
Speaker 1: and you're annoyed by Chris Danny, who my kids feel
Speaker 1: is a woman, but it's not.
Speaker 4: Is it just a clip or the whole song?
Speaker 1: Oh, it's a clips. The end of his song ride
Speaker 1: on it's about having beat a horse to death.
Speaker 4: I wonder if that song is going to get a
Speaker 4: bump on Spotify.
Speaker 1: Uh, I would suggest people go listen to the whole album.
Speaker 1: If the Roses don't kill us.
Speaker 5: Mhm, local how do you?
Speaker 1: How do you? Guys? I don't know about them. I
Speaker 1: just found out about them, probably on Spotify. I don't
Speaker 1: know how I found out about Christopher Danny. You ever
Speaker 1: a hundred alligators?
Speaker 5: I have?
Speaker 1: Oh? I have?
Speaker 5: Yeah? Where'd you hunt hey in Texas?
Speaker 3: Okay?
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, it was a little a little while ago,
Speaker 5: but uh yeah, about ten years ago now, I guess.
Speaker 5: But yeah, it was an interesting experience. It was quite
Speaker 5: an interesting experience.
Speaker 1: I appreciate this. A few episodes ago, on an episode
Speaker 1: titled Wrestling Gators, we had a crocodilian biologist on a
Speaker 1: lot of folks rode in and I said, the bio.
Speaker 1: You know, biologists always like very measured. They don't want
Speaker 1: to say stuff that isn't for positive And I said, man,
Speaker 1: our listeners are gonna have a lot of comments that
Speaker 1: would begin with shit, right like shit. He doesn't know
Speaker 1: what he's talking about. So I said, if you got
Speaker 1: any if you have a lot of comments that begin
Speaker 1: with shit send them to us, a number of them.
Speaker 1: I'm a bit disappointed at a crock biologist didn't have
Speaker 1: a good answer for how to easily tell the difference
Speaker 1: between the crock and an alligator. It's really quite easy.
Speaker 1: One will see you later, the other after a while.
Speaker 3: But embarrassed really.
Speaker 1: Even included many.
Speaker 5: The alligator experience though for me, wasn't more. It was
Speaker 5: less hunting and more fishing and execution. That hook, yeah,
Speaker 5: that was the one on jugs with the chicking, this
Speaker 5: sitting out in the sun for a while, you know
Speaker 5: that sort of a So I was just kind of
Speaker 5: just observing. I hadn't done that that before, so it's interesting.
Speaker 3: I know a few folks on the Floorida side that
Speaker 3: have an area where where alligators like the sun, and
Speaker 3: they'll slip up on them with and half of them
Speaker 3: hunt with recurves and and stick them on the beach.
Speaker 5: No kidding, Yeah, I think I gotta be a little
Speaker 5: more sporting.
Speaker 3: Perhaps it feels a little more like the hunting than
Speaker 3: the fish house.
Speaker 4: So you know, how are they killing him fast enough
Speaker 4: with a boat to like get the.
Speaker 1: Probably hit him with a bang stick once they get
Speaker 1: him in. It's like bowtfish and rig.
Speaker 3: I know it's not a boat fishing, but they're just
Speaker 3: whacking them in the back of the head from what
Speaker 3: I understand. No, sounds like a mediater episode. Bro go
Speaker 3: check it out.
Speaker 1: Sounds like I was going to write in an email
Speaker 1: exactly exactly.
Speaker 4: I'd like to know more details.
Speaker 1: Well, I really not not putting a rope onto him.
Speaker 3: No, but I mean, you know they also they do
Speaker 3: like the spin of death and stuff like that. I imagine. Yeah,
Speaker 3: there's there's technique behind all of it. The people who
Speaker 3: do it, well.
Speaker 5: A couple of people just got munched in the last week.
Speaker 5: Then yes they did that well guy and the guy And.
Speaker 3: The only thing that makes golf courses intriguing to me exactly.
Speaker 1: The senior citizen goud is. Last week a senior citizen
Speaker 1: got his leg tore off when they showed up. The
Speaker 1: alligator sought his foot in his mouth.
Speaker 3: Golf course.
Speaker 1: There's another thing that I don't want to talk about
Speaker 1: because it involves kids and that kind of stuff I
Speaker 1: don't like to talk about. Uh. On that episode, we
Speaker 1: were talking about indigenous uses for alligators, and the listener
Speaker 1: wrote in that when he was at Texas Tech University.
Speaker 1: He worked on a project about the karen Kawa Indians
Speaker 1: from East Texas and West Louisiana. They used gator fat
Speaker 1: as a repellent, mosquito repellent.
Speaker 5: Interesting.
Speaker 1: They'd render it down and spread it over their bodies
Speaker 1: and European explorers would comment that you could smell them
Speaker 1: quite a ways off because of that gator fat. Here's
Speaker 1: a crazy one they had. So for whatever reason, the
Speaker 1: they have these gator These crocodile mummies from Egypt, okay,
Speaker 1: which I had no idea. So you have thousands of
Speaker 1: year old crocodile mummies and they were doing them with
Speaker 1: CT scans in twenty ten. And here they're looking at
Speaker 1: a thousands of year old crocodile mummy with a CT
Speaker 1: scan and he's got a fishing hook in his gut.
Speaker 3: Oh that's amazing. Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 1: And there's pictures of crocodile mummies. They're crazy looking beautiful.
Speaker 4: They didn't say what the hook was made out of.
Speaker 1: You know, that's where the email just if that person's listening,
Speaker 1: that's where the email really fell short.
Speaker 4: Because it's like it makes it sound like it's like
Speaker 4: a modern looking metal fish hook. Kind of an old
Speaker 4: ass hook, I know, but like it says, we notice
Speaker 4: a perfect fish hook, but I like, I don't know
Speaker 4: what that means.
Speaker 1: Like like he felt, I don't want to criticize him,
Speaker 1: but since you brought it up, yeah, listener, pull it together.
Speaker 3: He he it's a deep barbed circle hook.
Speaker 1: He acknowledges that he didn't include he includes a picture
Speaker 1: of their crocodile mummy. But does he acknowledges not including
Speaker 1: a picture of the hook.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, you'd think it'd be bone, yeah, something, depending
Speaker 3: on how old it is. But I said, iron edge.
Speaker 1: I said this to Crind the other day. Just this
Speaker 1: defies understanding a Texas dairy farm. Yeah, okay, it defies understanding.
Speaker 1: Eighteen thousand dairy cows.
Speaker 5: I'll repeat that.
Speaker 1: Eighteen thousand dairy cows killed in an explosion at a
Speaker 1: Texas dairy farm.
Speaker 6: And that's about twenty percent of cattle slaughtered in this
Speaker 6: country on any given day.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's the largest like loss of cattle life since
Speaker 3: like the Galveston hurricane or something like that. Or no,
Speaker 3: I think it is.
Speaker 6: Even more than that.
Speaker 1: Eighteen thousand stinky, I don't even know what to say,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna say anything.
Speaker 6: During a hard time.
Speaker 1: I told that Doug Darren carcases. I told the Doug,
Speaker 1: to which Doug said, well, why would you have eighteen
Speaker 1: thousand cows together? Anyways, Wolverine sighting four times outside of Portland,
Speaker 1: Oregon for the first time in three decades. I have
Speaker 1: a feeling they're seeing the same wolverine.
Speaker 6: They think so, but then for the fourth time, they're
Speaker 6: not sure. I think that it is.
Speaker 1: Thirty years goes by, no wolverine, and then all of
Speaker 1: a sudden there's four outside of Portland.
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 6: They I mean they think it's probably the same, the
Speaker 6: same one going around.
Speaker 1: Nike and Puma to stop using kangaroo leather or if
Speaker 1: that company. Remember when I was a little kid, they
Speaker 1: had a shoe company called Ruse.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Man, they had the little pocket hocket.
Speaker 1: Are they fixing the stop? I don't even Maybe they
Speaker 1: never did use kangaro I.
Speaker 4: Think they're called Ruse because of the pocket, not because
Speaker 4: of leather.
Speaker 1: Oh, they're phasing it out by the end of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty three. I don't know. You know, I take anything
Speaker 1: like this like I take anything. I don't like anything
Speaker 1: like this.
Speaker 3: Well, there's a massive population issue with with kangaroos, like
Speaker 3: they breed like crazy, and that these are like free
Speaker 3: range animals, not farmed animals that they're rounding up. So
Speaker 3: it's like whoa who's going to pay for taking care
Speaker 3: of the over a London.
Speaker 1: So I shouldn't conclude that, And we've talked about that
Speaker 1: in the past, as they kill absurd numbers of kangaroos
Speaker 1: every year as agricultural control.
Speaker 3: Yeahs control is and somebody else is paying to have
Speaker 3: it done.
Speaker 1: So Oregon, Oregon. This comes after the introduction of a
Speaker 1: bill in mid January and Oregon, where Nike is headquartered,
Speaker 1: that would ban the sale of any part of a
Speaker 1: dead kangaroo or any product containing a part of a
Speaker 1: dead kangaroo. The punishment would include up to a year
Speaker 1: in prison, a six and fifty dollars fine, or both.
Speaker 1: There's also a bipartisan bill that was introduced in the
Speaker 1: House of Representatives, the Kangaroo Protection Act.
Speaker 4: My god, Yeah, it seems like.
Speaker 5: They got other things they could be focusing on here.
Speaker 3: No, they have everything else apped up. Everything else is perfect,
Speaker 3: so now they get to focus on the nitpicky stuff.
Speaker 1: Yes, the global commercial kangaroo product industry was worth roughly
Speaker 1: two hundred million dollars annually to Australia. The US was
Speaker 1: its second largest global market at eighty.
Speaker 6: Million twenty twenty one figures more or less. But was
Speaker 6: kind of staggering is that the government estimated the Australian
Speaker 6: government estimated that there were forty two point seven million
Speaker 6: kangaroos for twenty six million Australians.
Speaker 3: And you get a kangaroo, and you get a kangaroo. Yeah,
Speaker 3: here's learning so much.
Speaker 5: This is great. I'm learning so much.
Speaker 1: Here's who all has ditched k leather Versace's how you
Speaker 1: pronounce that? For sach, Diane von Furstenberg not sound like
Speaker 1: a thing that I would buy a Diane von Furstenburg.
Speaker 1: That sounds like a person.
Speaker 4: Sounds like a Nazi Allien.
Speaker 1: It sounds like someone who It sounds like someone who
Speaker 1: inherited a lot of money.
Speaker 3: If your name.
Speaker 1: Is von Furstenberg, you probably just get money.
Speaker 5: I thought it was.
Speaker 1: Like like no, no, no, no, no, hold hear me out.
Speaker 1: My last name is von Furstenberg.
Speaker 3: You know the maybe cord manufacturer.
Speaker 1: Uh, Victoria Beckham, Salvator Farragamo and Paul Smith that just
Speaker 1: seems like your you're h vat guy Paul Smith, all
Speaker 1: have gone unlike Salvator Farra Gamo and Diane von Fursusberg.
Speaker 1: Even Paul Smith has gone k free, k leather free.
Speaker 4: I wonder if how many of those people are associated
Speaker 4: with Pete as well.
Speaker 5: I'm a sleep better tonight knowing all.
Speaker 1: This, this is the last thing. This is the last
Speaker 1: thing Jack, I know.
Speaker 5: Takeing notes.
Speaker 1: This is hot off, this is hot off the press
Speaker 1: because I just okay, So I was just in Wisconsin.
Speaker 1: I think from my fourth annual spring for my fourth
Speaker 1: annual the fourth annual time I've taken my kids two
Speaker 1: Wisconsin hunt turkeys, but the third annual youth turkey season,
Speaker 1: in which my older boy, who already thinks he's invincible,
Speaker 1: I catch like a turk. I see a strutter coming
Speaker 1: and it's like he's not gonna get closer. And I
Speaker 1: see a strutter coming, and I just compute my head
Speaker 1: that it's pretty far away. But we have like a
Speaker 1: you know, we got a good turkey choke iron sights
Speaker 1: spend a lot of time patterning the gun. Uh, and
Speaker 1: I already know it's like a stretch.
Speaker 5: And I'm like shot him, shoot, shoot him.
Speaker 1: So by the time he gets around to getting everything
Speaker 1: lined up and shoots and the turkey just goes down.
Speaker 1: But I stand up and that turkey is way out there.
Speaker 1: I pasted off. That turkey was seventy yards way what
Speaker 1: oh wow. So I would have never if I'd known that.
Speaker 1: I stood up and this turkey is like a spec
Speaker 1: He got lucky. So now he's like, I'm gonna start
Speaker 1: taking all the He's got the shell and he wants
Speaker 1: to put the beard in the shell. He's like, I'm
Speaker 1: going to write the distance on the shell.
Speaker 5: And I'm.
Speaker 1: Nice. Anyhow, spring Turkey Wisconsin two days long, and you
Speaker 1: can get boned by the weather, like two days. You
Speaker 1: can have two days of bad weather. So as I'm there,
Speaker 1: I realized that there's this thing. I asked Dirk, and
Speaker 1: do it. Pat Dirkin to explain this a little bit. Okay,
Speaker 1: ready for this, I am ready. Wisconsin had Okay, Wisconsin
Speaker 1: has a peculiar way. Okay, here here's how to get
Speaker 1: into this. If you listen, you remember we were talking
Speaker 1: about how how it was put to sort of like
Speaker 1: a public vote of sorts to determine whether you'd be
Speaker 1: able to start spearing nor the in Wisconsin. I was
Speaker 1: surprised that you can't spare northerns in Wisconsin, but you
Speaker 1: cannot spear northerns in Wisconsin, the thinking being I guess
Speaker 1: that people will accidentally spear muskies. Pat Diurkin points out,
Speaker 1: how can you be trusted to hit ducks flying through
Speaker 1: the air and know what they are in the rain
Speaker 1: and sleep. You're trusted to identify flying ducks, but you
Speaker 1: can't be trusted to look down a hole in the
Speaker 1: ice and identify a Northern and a muskie, which is
Speaker 1: a great point. I think that you could trust people
Speaker 1: to do this, and I was surprised by how Wisconsin
Speaker 1: sets these things. And there's a thing called I don't
Speaker 1: want to criticize it before I even explain it, but
Speaker 1: there's a thing called Aldo Leopold's Worst Idea. Some people
Speaker 1: know it as but there's a thing called the Wisconsin
Speaker 1: Conservation Congress. It consists of five elected men members from
Speaker 1: each county, so there are seventy two members in all
Speaker 1: of Doug duran is one of these from Richland County.
Speaker 1: He is one of Richland Counties, our very own Doug
Speaker 1: Durren is one of Richland County's citizen representatives. Everyone listening
Speaker 1: could learn a lesson from Doug. Many lessons from Doug Durren.
Speaker 1: What you shouldn't pick up from Doug is the idea
Speaker 1: that it makes sense to drive around listening to Grateful
Speaker 1: Dead concerts on satellite radio. That is a bad idea
Speaker 1: of Dougs. Most everything else that Doug says is good. Doug,
Speaker 1: instead of sitting around bitching and moaning about the fishing
Speaker 1: game laws in the DNR, Doug gets in there and
Speaker 1: gets in there always. If there's like a public comment period,
Speaker 1: he makes a public comment. He's on a citizens advisory panel.
Speaker 1: He's on the deer Citizens Advisory Panel. If he's mad,
Speaker 1: he be mad. He's got a right to be mad
Speaker 1: because he got in there and got involved.
Speaker 3: And he's constantly harassed by people who do nothing but
Speaker 3: bitch and don't do any of these things.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 4: But the idea behind this board is they're tackling issues
Speaker 4: and then they take what they think to the Game Commission,
Speaker 4: who should then implement these suggestions.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 5: So which they may or may not do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's such a peculiar way to handle things. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna I'm gonna dig in a little bit. Dirk can
Speaker 1: kind of explain it. The Wisconsin already said that. So
Speaker 1: it's got five elected members from each county, So seventy
Speaker 1: two and all is that possible? Could something times five
Speaker 1: be seventy two? Someone's lying or someone died. The WCC
Speaker 1: holds a joint hearing each April with the Department of
Speaker 1: Natural Resources to propose changes improvements to hunting, fishing, and
Speaker 1: trapping rules, and other conservation matters, air, water and other
Speaker 1: environmental issues. This year's ballot, so the Congress puts together questions.
Speaker 1: The questions then go to a public vote so they
Speaker 1: can sort of ascertain how the public feels about certain
Speaker 1: fishing game issues. This year's ballot had seventy six questions,
Speaker 1: thirty eight fish and wildlife rule changes, and thirty eight
Speaker 1: WCC advisory questions. To become a state rule, a citizen's
Speaker 1: proposal must go through a five step process, so on,
Speaker 1: on and on. I'm going to get to the main
Speaker 1: part of this. So it's interesting because you can take
Speaker 1: these little you can take these ideas and put them
Speaker 1: like very nuanced fishing game ideas and put them to
Speaker 1: a public opinion and It's interesting because you can start
Speaker 1: getting idea of what the public thinks about stuff. Since
Speaker 1: we talked about we talked about the spearfishing thing in Wisconsin.
Speaker 1: Should you be able to spear northern through the ice?
Speaker 1: Here's the here's the results. Yes. Three and forty three
Speaker 1: wisconsinights said you should. No. Three thousand, three hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty five said no, So it got beat by a
Speaker 1: narrow margin and no opinion. Three thousand, five hundred and
Speaker 1: two had no opinion. So they had ten thousand wisconsinights
Speaker 1: weighed in on their opinion about this, and so I
Speaker 1: think this has a low likelihood of advancing. Now here's
Speaker 1: an interesting way to measure public sentiment. There's a two
Speaker 1: day youth dear season. They put that to a vote.
Speaker 1: Should we expand it to four days?
Speaker 5: Youth deer?
Speaker 1: Should we expand youth e to four Doug was Doug
Speaker 1: was imagining the people down there who are opposed. If
Speaker 1: the kids are gonna hunt, I'm gonna hunt, And that
Speaker 1: is true. Should youth deer season be four days instead
Speaker 1: of two Yes, three thousand, four hundred and ninety two
Speaker 1: forty four percent No, three thousand, six hundred and forty
Speaker 1: nine or forty six percent no opinion, eight hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty five. A lot more people had an opinion, but
Speaker 1: it got shot down. Now this is the last one
Speaker 1: we're gonna touch on, because here's how nuanced it is.
Speaker 1: How about youth turkey season? Should we move that from
Speaker 1: two days to four? Yes? Four? Eight hundred and seventy two,
Speaker 1: now eight hundred and fifty five. So there's some bit
Speaker 1: where you're like, ah, turkeys, sure, dear, uh.
Speaker 5: Huh, these kids are gonna get them all.
Speaker 1: This is this so just a little glimpse into the
Speaker 1: psychology of of and and and you'll like, here's the thing.
Speaker 1: When it comes to wildlife management, people are always in
Speaker 1: myself included Rise ridiculing ballot box biology, right like, leave
Speaker 1: it to the professionals. Leave it to the professionals. And
Speaker 1: it shouldn't go to votes, right like reintroducing wolves in Colorado.
Speaker 1: You shouldn't put that to a vote. Leave it to
Speaker 1: the professionals. But here, I don't know, there's like an
Speaker 1: elegance to it. But I but I think it should
Speaker 1: be taken as a It's part of a process, it's
Speaker 1: part of a step. It's not the end all be
Speaker 1: all It's not like they just vote in everything. But
Speaker 1: when you go to set the law, uh, it gives
Speaker 1: you who as a law makes through the process, it's
Speaker 1: like an interesting to get a sense of public opinion.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, And like when we talk about making scientific management,
Speaker 3: the assumption is is like, well, that scientific management is
Speaker 3: going to be on behalf of the hunting community, right,
Speaker 3: But often that scientific management takes into account the hunting perspective,
Speaker 3: but also like the rangeland ecology perspective of all these
Speaker 3: ranchers out there with animals on state ground and on
Speaker 3: public ground that borders state, WMAs, et cetera, and how
Speaker 3: they are going to be affected by those deer elk
Speaker 3: populations as well. So, and everybody's a voter.
Speaker 4: Well, part of making the rules is keeping you know,
Speaker 4: people happy and interested and out in the field.
Speaker 3: Too, providing opportunity. What is opportunity? Quality? Opportunity is a huge,
Speaker 3: huge phrase.
Speaker 1: My view on that youth Turkey deal, which I'm following
Speaker 1: closely and I have really leaned on Doug to push
Speaker 1: on that hard, is that I think it comes down
Speaker 1: to who's got kids. I was just kidding, I got kids.
Speaker 1: So I'm a super big supporter if I didn't have kids,
Speaker 1: I'd be like, screw those kids. And then but as
Speaker 1: soon as it'll get enacted as twenty twenty five, so
Speaker 1: we're still gonna be well, we're still gonna be weather
Speaker 1: vulnerable next year. So your mom was a librarian, yeahs
Speaker 1: transitions speak is a library.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Before we get to that, though, did you see
Speaker 5: that the wolves in northern California? Have you seen that yet?
Speaker 3: I know about them, Yeah, just migrating through Do they
Speaker 3: have an established breeding I don't know, shafts.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, exactly, Yeah, trail cams catching them.
Speaker 3: There's plenty of good interesting I interviewed a very very
Speaker 3: nice lady who runs of a big operation. I apologize
Speaker 3: if you're listening. I can't remember your name, but they
Speaker 3: do a lot of like the noxious weed mitigation with
Speaker 3: sheep and goats, and they had one of the wolves
Speaker 3: that came through a few years ago knocked out some
Speaker 3: of their some of theirstation crew a few years.
Speaker 5: Ago in California. Yeah, oh wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they've been like for a while. Yeah, probably, I
Speaker 1: don't know, probably originating from that Frank church group.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it got into Oregon, California. Yeah, probably.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's hard to I don't picture California firing up
Speaker 1: a wolf season anytime soon. Maybe people surprise you that,
Speaker 1: oh man, this is gone too far.
Speaker 5: And in your book if you can your book though,
Speaker 5: by the way, when you read it, have you read
Speaker 5: the other ones? Or was this the first time you've
Speaker 5: read the full I've read three, you've read three, but one.
Speaker 1: You're good at it.
Speaker 5: You seem like you'd be good at it, just from
Speaker 5: reading right here, because I only read the new forward
Speaker 5: to a new edition of the Terminal List. So I
Speaker 5: wrote about So it's a new one about how the
Speaker 5: show came to be and how I got to dance one.
Speaker 5: So it's the one with Chris Pratt on the cover,
Speaker 5: and we put in some pictures from the from the
Speaker 5: show in there and stuff like that to make a
Speaker 5: special limited edition thing. And instead of Ray Porter, who's
Speaker 5: my narrator, reading that, we decided I do it. So
Speaker 5: I ran the cord into the closet and the house
Speaker 5: and I put a bunch of clothes on hangers everywhere
Speaker 5: until it sounded okay. So had the direction you know
Speaker 5: what I'm talking about? Yeah, it looked very similar to this.
Speaker 3: That's the direction.
Speaker 1: Exactly what it was Jack's close.
Speaker 4: Yeah exactly, you use like a trained voice actor for yours.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, so Ray Porter, he's a he's an amazing guy,
Speaker 5: Shakespeare trained actor who does it because you're because it's
Speaker 5: like it's like accidents.
Speaker 1: Really, it's like a thriller too though, so it's got
Speaker 1: to have like it's got to be a delivery exactly.
Speaker 4: He had felt that a like a flunky soap opera actor.
Speaker 5: Had read one of his books, not that I felt
Speaker 5: I know, that's fantastic, but it was hard. I mean,
Speaker 5: it was only like five pages, maybe six, and I
Speaker 5: hadn't written it years ago. I had written it days ago,
Speaker 5: and I'm reading it and it was difficult. So I
Speaker 5: now I have. I had an appreciation for Ray and
Speaker 5: all those guys who do this narration, but now I
Speaker 5: even appreciate it even more. And they have to do
Speaker 5: those accents too. I'm just reading my own voice, my
Speaker 5: own words, just setting up what's coming and how the
Speaker 5: show came to be and everything. And that was difficult
Speaker 5: enough for whatever reason. But now now so now when
Speaker 5: I'm writing, I think about, oh, I should probably put
Speaker 5: the accent, the Russian accent up front instead of mentioning
Speaker 5: it like halfway down the page. So he has to
Speaker 5: now go back and like part Russian accent in with
Speaker 5: a hint of this or that, so you know, it's uh, yeah,
Speaker 5: the German from with the Berlin accent or whatever that
Speaker 5: sort of thing. So he has to go figure with
Speaker 5: what that is. Better to let him know upfront, But anyway,
Speaker 5: it was difficult. So anyway, I was just curious if
Speaker 5: you had written read all your books out loud like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I used to. Yeah, I used to not
Speaker 1: be allowed to, but now you know, now I'm allowed to. Hey,
Speaker 1: I like, I don't like doing it, but love, I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't you get a sore of throat?
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's long, he said about he said it was
Speaker 5: about double. So if it's a fourteen hour read fourteen
Speaker 5: hour book, it's about double that what it took him
Speaker 5: to actually read it and actually do it, so about
Speaker 5: thirty hour.
Speaker 1: Deal.
Speaker 6: Does he read it at the pace that we hear it?
Speaker 6: Because I heard the prologue of your new book, But
Speaker 6: does he read at the pace that we hear it?
Speaker 6: Or is there any kind of good messing with you know,
Speaker 6: just just think.
Speaker 5: It's the cadence that he in some people's speed books
Speaker 5: up just to get through them faster, which is kind
Speaker 5: of don't know, kind of strange if you're listening to
Speaker 5: accents and all that sort of thing, and the dramatic
Speaker 5: pauses and all that. But I think he read he
Speaker 5: likes to read it. He just goes, he said, he
Speaker 5: just like skims it a tiny bit, just kind of
Speaker 5: get the feel, and then he reads it for the
Speaker 5: first time recording, so that you're hearing it the way
Speaker 5: you would read it for the first time. So yeah,
Speaker 5: it's not practiced yet. I think other different narrators do
Speaker 5: different things, but that's the way. The way he does
Speaker 5: it probably saves a little bit of time as well,
Speaker 5: rather than reading a whole thing and then going back.
Speaker 5: But but yeah, I try to give him the acronyms,
Speaker 5: you know, so it's not you see n O d's capitalized,
Speaker 5: you say n O ds, but it's really nods, you know,
Speaker 5: things like that instead a J S O C would
Speaker 5: be jaysack like that. That's sort of a sort of
Speaker 5: a thing. So yeah, there's always those those types of
Speaker 5: things come up as well. But it's tough. I mean,
Speaker 5: that's that's serious business. Being a narrator reading all these books.
Speaker 5: That's a lot of hours in a room by yourself
Speaker 5: just for reading. I don't know. But more, I mean,
Speaker 5: he does a great job, so it's good, more than
Speaker 5: happy that to have him doing it rather than me.
Speaker 1: I like, how you don't disparage You don't like to
Speaker 1: disparage the people you work with.
Speaker 5: I haven't had the cause. Really, Yeah, I pick up
Speaker 5: on that man in a different round.
Speaker 1: I'll be like, man, Phil just does a phenomenal job.
Speaker 5: Hayden calls just the right amount, the perfect amount.
Speaker 1: Hey, I want to go back farther than I do.
Speaker 1: Want to get to your mom being a library, but
Speaker 1: I want to go back farther than that. Uh. We
Speaker 1: took a little walk last night, we did. You're uh
Speaker 1: your grandfather was killed off Okinawan World War two.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, nineteen forty five. Never met his kid, never
Speaker 5: met I never met my dad. So we grew up.
Speaker 5: He grew up with the same things that I grew
Speaker 5: up with from my grandfather, which were those photos of
Speaker 5: him with his plane. He threw the course air which
Speaker 5: is a cooling that had the gold wings that you'd
Speaker 5: fold up like that put on aircraft carriers, and there
Speaker 5: was a show in the late seventies and I caught
Speaker 5: it in syndication with my dad in the early eighties
Speaker 5: called Black Sheep Squadron based off Happy Point and had
Speaker 5: Robert Conrad playing Pappy Point. And I think I had
Speaker 5: a lot of my leadership traits from that show. He
Speaker 5: was just a drinker and a fighter and it was awesome.
Speaker 5: I loved it. I thought, that's you. But yeah, it
Speaker 5: was perfect. Yeah, exactly. That's how you settle things. You
Speaker 5: settle it with your fists outside and you go out
Speaker 5: and then shoot down a bunch of Japanese zeros and
Speaker 5: have a few beers. And I was like, that's awesome,
Speaker 5: That's what I'm gonna do. But I knew it was
Speaker 5: just kind of in my blood to join the military,
Speaker 5: follow his footsteps into the military. I had those those photos.
Speaker 5: I had his his marine aviator wings. I had the
Speaker 5: silk maps they used to give aviators back then, because
Speaker 5: if you hit the water with a paper map, it
Speaker 5: would disintegrate in the water. But milk maps, Yeah, it's beautiful.
Speaker 5: I mean they're beautiful maps. Have them a frame now.
Speaker 5: But so I had all those those things, his medals,
Speaker 5: and that's the only touch point that and this show
Speaker 5: Black Sheep Squadron with only touch points because you couldn't
Speaker 5: get online back then, and go to the Facebook group
Speaker 5: from that squadron and try to meet your dad all
Speaker 5: these years later, like he had no touch points with
Speaker 5: anybody from his dad's squadron, nothing like that.
Speaker 1: So what was it that you took What was it
Speaker 1: that you took your family to to show them your
Speaker 1: grandfather's name.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so it's the the Mia wall because they never
Speaker 5: found found his body.
Speaker 1: But that's what you mentioned. I didn't know that makes sense.
Speaker 5: So there's a punch Bowl National Cemetery of the Pacific
Speaker 5: is overlooks punch Bowl Crater overlooks Honolulu.
Speaker 1: Dad.
Speaker 5: It's so powerful, so powerful. Going to national cemeteries, no
Speaker 5: matter which one, is very important for for kids especially
Speaker 5: and this was middle school, high school years, just to
Speaker 5: appreciate and kind of see have a kind of a
Speaker 5: have a viscial real reaction to seeing those headstones, seeing
Speaker 5: those those stones in the ground, seeing those names on
Speaker 5: the wall. So you realize what was sacrificed so that
Speaker 5: we could have these freedoms and options and opportunities that
Speaker 5: we have. So maybe before we make a snap judgment
Speaker 5: on something based off somebody's tweet, Maybe take a breath,
Speaker 5: research it a little more and then make that decision.
Speaker 5: So it's I think it's important to take take kids there.
Speaker 5: So that's what we did with our youngest who's twelve,
Speaker 5: brought him up there this past week and showed him
Speaker 5: his grandfather's name up there on that is that wall.
Speaker 1: It's it's massive numbers.
Speaker 5: Massive number and it's all they works their way up
Speaker 5: this slope of the crater and it's just wall after
Speaker 5: wall after wall after wall that leads to the top,
Speaker 5: and at the top there's a statue and a chapel,
Speaker 5: and then there's the history of World War two on
Speaker 5: these beautiful murals that spell it all out, all the
Speaker 5: battles in order up there, so you can walk through
Speaker 5: the history of World War two in the Pacific. And
Speaker 5: then you can turn around and look out and just
Speaker 5: see all those walls with all those names of the
Speaker 5: bodies that were never recovered, and then you see all
Speaker 5: the grass where they have all the people that were
Speaker 5: buried for the bodies that were recovered. So it's pretty
Speaker 5: powerful place.
Speaker 1: So if you're like with your grandfather, they don't then
Speaker 1: he's on the m I A. But there's no tombston't
Speaker 1: there's no tombstone marker.
Speaker 5: Right right when they do recover the bodies, because we're
Speaker 5: actively still out there looking for bodies from multiple past conflicts.
Speaker 5: So when they do find the remains, then they make
Speaker 5: up put a mark and they have this star that
Speaker 5: goes next to the name that lets you know that, hey,
Speaker 5: this body has now been recovered. And there's a lot
Speaker 5: more now than there were when I was a kid
Speaker 5: up there, you can definitely tell. But yeah, something that's
Speaker 5: something I alway wanted to do in the military that
Speaker 5: I ever got to do because we got so busy
Speaker 5: after after nine to eleven was be part of that
Speaker 5: m recovery group that would go out you got to Vietnam.
Speaker 5: You'd really go out to a bunch of different places
Speaker 5: and look for the remains of these in Vietnam, a
Speaker 5: lot of pilots but people that were not recovered. So
Speaker 5: it's a it's a large operation. You should be headquartered
Speaker 5: in Hawaii. I'm not sure where it's headquartered now.
Speaker 1: So now we'll get to your mom.
Speaker 5: Yes, librarians did where was she a library? So multiple
Speaker 5: different different libraries growing up. But so when I wanted
Speaker 5: to let her know, I wanted to be a seal.
Speaker 5: So I found out what seals were from my dad
Speaker 5: watching these war movies. So he called them frogmen, so
Speaker 5: he did because that was because it was the name
Speaker 5: of the movie. So we'd be watching football, So football
Speaker 5: was big on Sundays in our household. But I was
Speaker 5: really interested in football because even back then, at age five,
Speaker 5: six seven, I wanted anyone I want to join the military.
Speaker 5: So there was those few channels back then there's CBS, NBC, ABC,
Speaker 5: and then there's the outlier, and that outlier channel always
Speaker 5: had a war movie on on Sundays. So we'd been
Speaker 5: watching football, and when the commercial came on, my dad
Speaker 5: look at his watch and say go And I was
Speaker 5: the remote control back in those days, so I'd run
Speaker 5: up and I'd switch it to that outlier channel, that
Speaker 5: fourth channel, and there was always a war movie on,
Speaker 5: so I'd watched that. He'd be looking at his watch
Speaker 5: for your two or two and a half minutes and
Speaker 5: then say turn it back and turn Then we continue
Speaker 5: watching football and I just kind of wait till the
Speaker 5: next commercial, wonder what's happened in exactly, So I had
Speaker 5: a lot of one of the guys, isn't there just
Speaker 5: gone gone?
Speaker 1: Yep? And uh connect, Yeah.
Speaker 5: One of those was the Frogmen, and there was show
Speaker 5: these guys climbing up over the beach and putting explosives
Speaker 5: on obstacles and blowing them up. And I asked my dad, Hey,
Speaker 5: who are these guys? And he said those were Frogmen
Speaker 5: the name of the movie. And I sort of pestering
Speaker 5: him all about what frog who frogmen were and then
Speaker 5: he's like, change it back, change it back. So back
Speaker 5: to football. And someone asked my mom, uh, and she said, well,
Speaker 5: let's go for a trip, so down to the library.
Speaker 5: And she took every opportunity to we had when we
Speaker 5: had questions, to take us down to that library and
Speaker 5: show out of research and all that sort of things.
Speaker 5: So this is early eighties, and you could essentially get
Speaker 5: through everything written about seals in about an hour, maybe
Speaker 5: hour and a half if you're a slow reader. There
Speaker 5: just wasn't that much. And then there's more written about
Speaker 5: army special forces back then, typically about Vietnam, but you'd
Speaker 5: still you can get through that in a couple hours too,
Speaker 5: So you could potentially find the end of the Internet
Speaker 5: in the library back then as a kid. But then
Speaker 5: I started reading those same types of books that my
Speaker 5: parents were reading. So it's let's say fifth grade's one
Speaker 5: Hunt for a October comes out, and by sixth grade,
Speaker 5: for sure, when I'm eleven, that's when I start for
Speaker 5: sure reading all the same kind of thrillers that I
Speaker 5: still read today. So I'm reading books by David Morrell,
Speaker 5: Nelson to mill A, J. Quinnell, J. C. Pollock, Markold
Speaker 5: and Louis Lamore, Stephen Hunter and back then, all these
Speaker 5: guys and if you remember movies and television in the
Speaker 5: eighties that protagonists usually had a background in Vietnam, and
Speaker 5: it was either a Navy seal or Army Special Forces
Speaker 5: or Marine sniper or CIA PEL paramilitary. And now he's
Speaker 5: in the eighties and he's like a private investigator or
Speaker 5: he's a.
Speaker 1: Cop or whatever follows at those No Country for Old Men,
Speaker 1: they what is the guy? All those guys so in
Speaker 1: No Count for Old Men. Josh Brolin's character lou Ellen,
Speaker 1: lou Ellen, he did you know, you don't know, you're
Speaker 1: not quite sure what, but did something heavy duty in Vietnam.
Speaker 1: The assassin did something you gather really heavy in Vietnam
Speaker 1: and was you know, like a you gather some kind
Speaker 1: of ultimate badass from Vietnam. And because it was its
Speaker 1: about eight the eighties, and so it is these guys.
Speaker 5: That were the timeline worked kind of a skill set
Speaker 5: that made sense, kind of like.
Speaker 1: Crazy warriors that were wandering the drug lands of the
Speaker 1: Texas Mexico boarder.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean it makes sense, it makes sense.
Speaker 1: And I never really thought about that formula.
Speaker 5: But when you mentioned that, oh, yeah, they were all
Speaker 5: they all had backgrounds like that, and so that's the
Speaker 5: background I went in real life. One day, so I figure, hey,
Speaker 5: if I'm reading about this uh seal in a book
Speaker 5: by David Morrell, I'm reading about this Air Force pair
Speaker 5: of rescue guy in the book by so and so, well,
Speaker 5: they must have done their research somehow, they must have
Speaker 5: connections in there somehow. So as a kid to age ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen,
Speaker 5: I'm just having such a good time in the pages
Speaker 5: of these novels. I know that after my time in
Speaker 5: the military, that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna write these.
Speaker 1: Get to books. Okay, let's say, here's here's what I
Speaker 1: don't get it though. If someone had said you will
Speaker 1: not like like God says, you cannot be a writer ever,
Speaker 1: would you have been not going in the military.
Speaker 5: I would have probably said why.
Speaker 1: He said somebody did it? He said because somebody?
Speaker 5: Because because I said so, yeah.
Speaker 1: So whatever, Like, would you have not done it? Research stint?
Speaker 1: And that's a high risk research stint.
Speaker 5: I didn't realize how high risk it.
Speaker 1: A lot of writers like I spent six months walking,
Speaker 1: you know, you're like, I spent ten years in urban combat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it could be a writer. Yeah, so it would
Speaker 1: be like that doesn't sound that sounded very practical.
Speaker 5: I thought of them. I thought of the seal side,
Speaker 5: and the writing side is totally distinctly different. I didn't
Speaker 5: think of one leading to the other. I just knew that, Hey,
Speaker 5: if I want to do these two things with my
Speaker 5: life because of time and aging, you have to do
Speaker 5: the military side first. So yeah, there's no really like,
Speaker 5: what am I going to do first? It's like, no,
Speaker 5: you're gonna you have to do this first. But I
Speaker 5: was reading all those guys and then I found Joseph
Speaker 5: Campbell through here with a thousand faces and a series
Speaker 5: of interviews he did with Bill Moyer's on PBS in
Speaker 5: nineteen eighty eight called The Power of Myth, and then
Speaker 5: they had some books that came out based on that
Speaker 5: called the Power of Myth as well, and I saw
Speaker 5: that with my mom. She introduced me to that and
Speaker 5: he talked about how his hero's journey was in inspiration
Speaker 5: for George Lucas and Star Wars, and of course, as
Speaker 5: a kid of the eighties, you know, that really stood
Speaker 5: out to me. So I started applying that hero's journey
Speaker 5: in Joseph Campbell's Thoughts and Vision and Philosophy to books
Speaker 5: I would read, to movies i'd the TV shows i'd see,
Speaker 5: and even though I didn't think of it specifically in
Speaker 5: these terms, I just thought, oh, that movie didn't work
Speaker 5: because of that, that that hero missed a part of
Speaker 5: that journey. It didn't really take you what is going
Speaker 5: in for for James Reese, what is going into the cave?
Speaker 5: So there's distinct language that I'll use in the book,
Speaker 5: even if it's just a cabin or it's something and
Speaker 5: I'll put cavern like something, so I'll describe something. I'll
Speaker 5: throw that in there, cave of like cavern like something
Speaker 5: like that dark. So I'll describe a cave even I
Speaker 5: don't use those words because I'm thinking about that journey
Speaker 5: and he's getting some sort of information in there.
Speaker 1: Also, you go into a cave repeatedly, and there's there'll
Speaker 1: be one. I probably do.
Speaker 5: But there's one distinct part of each book that I
Speaker 5: think of as I'm writing. That is his time to
Speaker 5: change a little bit or learn something a little bit,
Speaker 5: emerge a little different so that he can solve this problem,
Speaker 5: usually very aggressively and violently in my novels.
Speaker 1: But well, yeah, with like so you think a bunch
Speaker 1: of where Luke Skywalker when he has to go to
Speaker 1: that little Yeah, he goes that whole swampy island and
Speaker 1: hangs out with Yoda.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's it.
Speaker 1: It comes back, leaves early, but comes out ready to
Speaker 1: That's right exactly, that's right.
Speaker 5: First it goes into the cave. There's rats all over them.
Speaker 5: You know, he's throwing those things off there the cave there.
Speaker 5: So so you'll notice it if you if you read
Speaker 5: here with a thousand faces and then start watching films
Speaker 5: that take you on a journey through a protagonist's size,
Speaker 5: then then you start noticing that some of these elements
Speaker 5: are are in some of probably your favorite films. It
Speaker 5: resonates for a reason, like there's a mentor along the way.
Speaker 5: We have Obi wan Kenobe, we have we have Yoda.
Speaker 5: We have someone that helps train, that's older and wiser,
Speaker 5: that passes along some training or some information along the
Speaker 5: way as well. So there's that there's that person in
Speaker 5: in books and movies and television, and it's just it's
Speaker 5: a very natural way to tell a story because our
Speaker 5: first stories around the campfire, and they're about the hunt,
Speaker 5: and they're about warfare, because you're passing down lessons from
Speaker 5: both the hunt and combat to that next generation through
Speaker 5: a story that you can remember.
Speaker 3: And why doesn't that get boring? It is used over
Speaker 3: and over and over again, like.
Speaker 1: That's in your they would say. It's it's like already,
Speaker 1: it's already wired into your brain.
Speaker 3: I love it every day. Every single boxing movie, every
Speaker 3: single one. It's like, I'm not going to train that kid.
Speaker 5: Exactly.
Speaker 3: It takes.
Speaker 5: I do, yeah, for sure. Then you get the montage
Speaker 5: and you come out stronger and wiser and get that
Speaker 5: ring and get it done.
Speaker 3: Not only am I going to prove it to you,
Speaker 3: I'm going to prove it to all of them.
Speaker 1: That's right, But you know there's but there's other things
Speaker 1: that are wired into the India the human head. Like
Speaker 1: if you look globally, if you look at world religion,
Speaker 1: the idea that a bad flood came and wiped out
Speaker 1: most everything is a recurring I mean, it's it's in
Speaker 1: like Native American mythologies from the primary like monotheistic religions.
Speaker 1: It's just like this idea that probably because you're I
Speaker 1: don't know, you're looking at stuff doesn't make that doesn't
Speaker 1: make sense to you anymore. You find like dinosaur bones whatever,
Speaker 1: and you're like, I don't know, must have been right.
Speaker 5: Well, all those different different cultures that had never had
Speaker 5: any interaction with one another, China, Native American philosophies, Christianity,
Speaker 5: all these different religions and different cultures really is better
Speaker 5: way to put it, had very similar stories, very similar mythologies,
Speaker 5: very similar heroes, journeys that they would pass on to
Speaker 5: that next generation. So across cultures that never had any interaction,
Speaker 5: they had these very similar stories because they're passing on
Speaker 5: some of those same things. It was about survival, and
Speaker 5: not only was it about survival, it was about prevailing
Speaker 5: because we're just gonna survive. That's a that's a rough
Speaker 5: way to go, but you need to prevail. That's the goal.
Speaker 1: You you like to put elements of hunting in I
Speaker 1: do is that now? Is that is that psychology too?
Speaker 1: Or is that just because you like hunting?
Speaker 5: That's because I like hunting, and it's because other people
Speaker 5: either don't or can't do that, and so it's different.
Speaker 5: And it's also a way for me to kind of
Speaker 5: give back to this community, the hunting community, really, because
Speaker 5: someone's going through the airport and they see this thing
Speaker 5: they think as a spy sponage thriller on the shelf,
Speaker 5: and they grab it. But what they're really getting is
Speaker 5: an education in hunting a conservation along the way, because
Speaker 5: it's woven in. There's hunting in all the stories, but
Speaker 5: in particular the second one true Believer, So it'll be
Speaker 5: interesting to see how we deal with that in the
Speaker 5: visual adaptation of it. And then the third one really
Speaker 5: has his savage Sun and that's really about the dark
Speaker 5: side of man through the dynamic of hunter and hunted.
Speaker 5: So the inspiration for that was back in sixth grade
Speaker 5: when I read The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell,
Speaker 5: and even back in sixth grade, I said, one day,
Speaker 5: I'll write the novel that pays tribute to the short story,
Speaker 5: and it was the one that I wanted to start with.
Speaker 5: When I started writing, I wrote now, six, seven, eight,
Speaker 5: nine different ideas, different one page executive summaris, and laid
Speaker 5: them all out on the table, and Savage Son was
Speaker 5: the one I wanted to start with because that's the
Speaker 5: theme that I wanted to explore, and that's the one
Speaker 5: I've been thinking about writing since the sixth grade. But
Speaker 5: I knew that the characters weren't developed enough to tell
Speaker 5: that story yet. So I had to introduce everyone to
Speaker 5: these characters in the first book, in the Terminal List,
Speaker 5: and then even at the end of that one, I
Speaker 5: was like, no, not quite ready yet. I still need
Speaker 5: to take him now on this journey of redemption, because
Speaker 5: it would be disingenuous to the reader or to the
Speaker 5: listener to take him after these traumatic events in the
Speaker 5: first novel and then just drop him into this second
Speaker 5: in this second one as Savage Son. He couldn't do it,
Speaker 5: and I'm surprised that Simon and Schuster actionly, my editor
Speaker 5: there didn't ask me to change anything about that second one,
Speaker 5: because it I take him on a pretty long journey
Speaker 5: where he learns to live agangs. He thinks he's dying,
Speaker 5: and he finds this next mission, this purpose in Africa,
Speaker 5: in Mozambique, taking his skills from the battlefield and turning
Speaker 5: those into something positive against the poachers out in Africa.
Speaker 5: So he finds this new mission, and of course that's
Speaker 5: when the CIA finds him and plucks him back out
Speaker 5: for a new mission. But that's a long part of
Speaker 5: the story, and that's probably people that really of my novels,
Speaker 5: Savage Son is probably people's favorite, and In the Blood,
Speaker 5: which was the last one. Those are the two favorites.
Speaker 5: But people that like True Believer love True Believer love
Speaker 5: that second one because of the hunting and because it's
Speaker 5: a slower story, a slower build up, because this guy's
Speaker 5: damaged and he needs to find that a reason to
Speaker 5: live again, and he finds that in Africa and Mozambique.
Speaker 5: And most people don't explore Mozambique and and hunting in
Speaker 5: modern thrillers as well. Most people don't put boots on
Speaker 5: the ground over there doing their research, which I did,
Speaker 5: and I didn't even have my deal yet. So I
Speaker 5: finished my first novel, hadn't sent it Simon and Schuster yet,
Speaker 5: got out of the military, and knew that I was
Speaker 5: always going to write too, because of the John Grisham story.
Speaker 5: He wrote A Time to Kill first, and he couldn't
Speaker 5: give that book away, and then he writes The Firm
Speaker 5: and that thing takes off, and John Grisham novel every
Speaker 5: year since. But if he thought this one didn't really work,
Speaker 5: I'm just going to go back to practice of law,
Speaker 5: like he'd probably just be retiring now for would probably
Speaker 5: be a partner to law firm and just be just
Speaker 5: be getting out still be thinking about that book that
Speaker 5: didn't work, called The Time to Kill, which I think
Speaker 5: is his best work actually, because they republished it after
Speaker 5: The Firm came out and hit it so big they
Speaker 5: went back and republished it, and then Matthew McConaughey started
Speaker 5: in that movie. But it's fantastic if you haven't read
Speaker 5: A Time to Kill for those listening and watching, it's amazing,
Speaker 5: amazing book. But so I was always gonna write too,
Speaker 5: So before i'd even sent it to to Simon and Schuster,
Speaker 5: before I had an agent or anything, I was on
Speaker 5: a plane in Africa to Mo'sambique, but boots on the
Speaker 5: ground over there had lists of questions to ask the
Speaker 5: professional hunters and the trackers and skinners and everybody else,
Speaker 5: how do you say things? And the different languages over there?
Speaker 5: What are the different languages that they're speaking over there?
Speaker 5: Of course looking at the rocks and the dirt, how
Speaker 5: am I going to describe that? And what's the situation
Speaker 5: like over there with hunting and poaching in China and
Speaker 5: minerals and exploitation and all the rest of it. So yeah,
Speaker 5: I was doing that research while I was over there,
Speaker 5: before I had any sort of a deal.
Speaker 1: But so you just you're just spending money out of pocket.
Speaker 5: Yeah oh yeah, And as I going in, you have
Speaker 5: to write your occupation in those those forms and so
Speaker 5: it sells you know, your name and all that stuff
Speaker 5: and has occupation. And I wrote author even though I
Speaker 5: didn't have any probably deal.
Speaker 1: Well the other option would have been probably not that helpful.
Speaker 5: So so yeah, so I wrote that. But I got
Speaker 5: that from Stephen Pressfield for his books on creativity that
Speaker 5: he writes the world of art turning pro authentic swing
Speaker 5: and he said, you know, you're a professional. Flip that switch,
Speaker 5: turn pro and write, And so I wrote author before
Speaker 5: I didn't met anyone from Simon and Schuster or had
Speaker 5: any cause I was gonna write too, and if both
Speaker 5: of them didn't work, then I was like, well, think
Speaker 5: about some fallbacks, but I didn't really want to.
Speaker 1: I never get to the point where I felt like
Speaker 1: I could legitimately, for occupation put down right. And I
Speaker 1: loved it. Man nice because for a lot of time
Speaker 1: I was like, I wrote, probably shouldn't put that down.
Speaker 1: I did it well before, like a tree surgeon. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I did it well well before.
Speaker 5: Yeah I was if you're looking at things professionally as like, oh,
Speaker 5: professionally you make money at it. Well, yeah, I jumped
Speaker 5: the gun. But I still thought of myself at first
Speaker 5: it was a professional soldier, a special operator, and now
Speaker 5: not that anymore. Now I'm an author. So I just
Speaker 5: flipped that switch and came up became a professional author.
Speaker 4: So before you, before you became an author, was there
Speaker 4: like external pressure in the military for you to be
Speaker 4: like a lifer, stay in and.
Speaker 5: Train people or yeah, so there is that, but once
Speaker 5: you less so at twenty years, as you're creeping up
Speaker 5: on twenty. That's kind of like because if you stay in,
Speaker 5: a lot of people say you're working for half pay essentially,
Speaker 5: type of a panel if that's was really true, because
Speaker 5: you could get out and get your retirement, which is
Speaker 5: it's not really half. It's way less than half because
Speaker 5: they don't include your special pays like your demo pay
Speaker 5: and your jump pay and your combat pay and all
Speaker 5: that sort of thing. So it's yeah, it's not It
Speaker 5: doesn't really work out that way. But I understand what
Speaker 5: people mean when they say it. But no, I was
Speaker 5: twenty was good, it was a good run. If I
Speaker 5: stayed in, it was I'd done everything that I wanted
Speaker 5: to do at that point, and if I stayed in,
Speaker 5: it would be staff job and then come back as
Speaker 5: a commanding officer at some point, which sounds really impressive
Speaker 5: if you say your commanding officer or something, But in
Speaker 5: today's day and age, as a commanding officer, you're really
Speaker 5: back in attach cole operation center when the guys are
Speaker 5: out there kicking in the doors doing the job that
Speaker 5: you really came in to do. And it's good you
Speaker 5: need good people to do that. But that just wasn't
Speaker 5: my thing. I was there for to be a tactical
Speaker 5: level leader on the battlefield, and that time was essentially done.
Speaker 5: So it was time to flip that switch and take
Speaker 5: care of my family. And we have three kids and
Speaker 5: one of them had some severe special needs, so that
Speaker 5: was like they needed me, So it was time to
Speaker 5: move on. It was very clear to me that it
Speaker 5: was time to get out, and it was also very
Speaker 5: clear to me what I needed to do now.
Speaker 4: And you never had, and like then or now, any
Speaker 4: interest in nonfiction.
Speaker 5: It was always funny you should ask, but not in
Speaker 5: the same way that most people think of nonfiction from
Speaker 5: someone coming out of the military. So I have a
Speaker 5: not from My first non fiction book comes out in
Speaker 5: fall of twenty twenty four, so about a year and
Speaker 5: a half and writing with a historian James Scott. He's
Speaker 5: written five books, most of them on World War Two.
Speaker 5: Amazing guy, And for my plan was always to write
Speaker 5: nonfiction on terrorist events. So this first one is about
Speaker 5: the nineteen eighty three Bay Rout Barracks bombing, and so
Speaker 5: it just hasn't really been the seminal work on that
Speaker 5: get and there's been something what.
Speaker 1: He said to me last that I was like kind
Speaker 1: of genius man, because there's like nothing about there's a
Speaker 1: few days revisited as commonly as other right seminal moment
Speaker 1: exactly in military.
Speaker 5: History exactly, And I have those. I mean, I remember
Speaker 5: distinctly some of my first memories of the nineteen seventy
Speaker 5: nine hostage crisis, and I remember going to church and
Speaker 5: praying for those people over there. I remember Walter Cronkite
Speaker 5: counting down the days that they'd been held hostage over there.
Speaker 5: I remember wondering why we hadn't gone to rescue them yet,
Speaker 5: So that some of my earliest memories are those black
Speaker 5: and white photos of the people from the embassy with
Speaker 5: their their eyes, you know, taped, tapped over and blindfolded
Speaker 5: and all that. But yeah, it made sense when I'm
Speaker 5: looking at all those events that were so impactful during
Speaker 5: the eighties. In eighteen eighty three Bairit Barricks bombing, and
Speaker 5: today actually is the anniversary of the embassy bombing in
Speaker 5: April of eighty three, and that's how we're looking into
Speaker 5: that first, and then everything that leads up to the
Speaker 5: October bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut. But I'm
Speaker 5: thinking about t w A eight four seven, I think
Speaker 5: you have, Achille Laurel. I'm thinking of panem one O three,
Speaker 5: thinking of all these different attacks in Europe at whether
Speaker 5: it's a cafe or a nightclub or whatever it might be.
Speaker 5: In airports, multiple airports, which one to start with. And
Speaker 5: the nineteen eighty three Barys bombing was so significant because
Speaker 5: it showed Hesbela in particular, that terrorism worked, and everyone
Speaker 5: else that was watching that isn't Hesbla that a terrorism worked.
Speaker 5: What did they want? They wanted us to leave Beirut?
Speaker 1: What do we do?
Speaker 5: We talked tough for a couple months afterward, and then
Speaker 5: we left more quietly in early eighty four. So there's
Speaker 5: the geopolitical aspect of it that continues to shadow our
Speaker 5: foreign policy today. So there's a lot to explore there.
Speaker 5: And then there's recently declassified documents about what was going
Speaker 5: on in the White House. Who was advocating for Marines
Speaker 5: to go ashore, who's advocating that they should stay on
Speaker 5: an AMPTHIB ship offshore, and how that decision got made,
Speaker 5: And so we get to explore all that in detail.
Speaker 5: Interview survivors, interview people that came to identify the bodies,
Speaker 5: which is the same group that identified the bodies at
Speaker 5: Jonestown and so it's a there's lots of lots of
Speaker 5: unpack there, so that'll be the that'll be the first one.
Speaker 5: So that was a very long way to answer that
Speaker 5: nonfiction question. So, yeah, nonfiction's coming and uh in fall
Speaker 5: of twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: Four, how do you how do you reconcile.
Speaker 5: That you.
Speaker 1: Spent so many years uh as a federal employee in
Speaker 1: a chain of command that flowed down from from the
Speaker 1: commander in chief, so like a democratically elected individual, and
Speaker 1: that flows down through all this stuff to the point
Speaker 1: where you and your guys are have enough faith in
Speaker 1: that system where you're not only putting your lives at risk,
Speaker 1: but your colleagues and frienziers are dying.
Speaker 5: Okay, so you have this, you've you've.
Speaker 1: Completely bought into or are supportive of this, and then
Speaker 1: your work has like a conspiratorial tone. You know that
Speaker 1: that not everything from up above is to be trusted.
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Is that? Did you did you feel that way?
Speaker 5: Or is that? Like?
Speaker 1: Is that the writer?
Speaker 5: Well, I certainly feel that way. Now, the government has
Speaker 5: not done a very good job of showing us as
Speaker 5: citizens that they can be trusted over time. And I'm
Speaker 5: not just talking about recent history, it's throughout throughout our
Speaker 5: history and throughout history in general. So I thought about it,
Speaker 5: but not so much that would overshadow what my job was,
Speaker 5: which is to accomplish this mission and bring my guys home.
Speaker 5: But you certainly think about it when you're over there.
Speaker 5: Let's say Iraq, and you're there in two thousand and four,
Speaker 5: and then you come back in two thousand and five,
Speaker 5: a year later, and you're like, Wow, things have gotten
Speaker 5: a lot worse here. Yeah, nothing is better than when
Speaker 5: I left. Then you come back and they're still there
Speaker 5: in two thousand and six and looking around like miscontinues
Speaker 5: to get worse. We continue to do the same things.
Speaker 5: And if you're a student of history and you're student
Speaker 5: of Vietnam and you're wondering what lessons we took from
Speaker 5: that that we're applying to this, or if you're in Afghanistan,
Speaker 5: like in the early days, which I thought were the
Speaker 5: late days in two thousand and three, I thought, oh,
Speaker 5: I'm going to miss this thing, and that didn't end
Speaker 5: up being the case. But what lessons do we take
Speaker 5: from the Soviets? Did we take the right ones we
Speaker 5: have nineteen seventy nine to eighty nine, and we can
Speaker 5: look at all these everything that happened there, and we
Speaker 5: can draw lessons and we can apply them, hopefully as wisdom.
Speaker 5: And we neglected to do that, or we took the
Speaker 5: wrong lessons. I think we took the wrong lessons. We
Speaker 5: didn't even have to go back to the three British incursions.
Speaker 5: We now have to go back to Alexander the Great
Speaker 5: or Genghis Khan, like there was more recent history.
Speaker 1: Is it like Kipling? Everybody's always talking about everything you
Speaker 1: know about Afghanistans?
Speaker 5: Yeah, there's Yeah, it's great, great poem. It was on
Speaker 5: the wall of one of our CIA houses over there,
Speaker 5: and I have a picture of it that I posted
Speaker 5: on on social and I don't call out the quote people,
Speaker 5: some people will. I have always curious who's going to
Speaker 5: notice the quote in the background written on the on
Speaker 5: the wall. But yeah, we had these lessons, We had
Speaker 5: history we could have looked at, and we neglected to
Speaker 5: do that and ended up being there for for twenty
Speaker 5: years and then leaving in the way that we did,
Speaker 5: and then we have just was it just last week
Speaker 5: we have officials appointed officials talking about it was a
Speaker 5: huge success the way we left Afghanistan. And then you
Speaker 5: can chextapose that with the photos of people hanging off
Speaker 5: jets and babies getting thrown over the walls and secured
Speaker 5: and barbed wire and okay, that's your death. That doesn't
Speaker 5: quite look like So you have twenty years to prepare
Speaker 5: for this, guys, twenty years and this is your only job,
Speaker 5: and this is what you get. This is the best
Speaker 5: you can do. But there's no I told them accountable
Speaker 5: in the pages of my novels, because don't differ accountable really.
Speaker 1: Like inept Oh there's anod there's but there's a neptitude.
Speaker 1: But then there's mail in tent.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think a lot of ineptitude is the way
Speaker 5: is if you have to blame something, because there hasn't
Speaker 5: been accountability really since Vietnam, since well before Vietnam. World
Speaker 5: War Two, there was a lot of accountability. George. People
Speaker 5: know George Marshall for the Marshall Plan rebuilding Europe, But
Speaker 5: really what George Marshall did and a lead up to
Speaker 5: World War two and during World War two was hold
Speaker 5: leaders accountable and remove them. He'd give them a one chance,
Speaker 5: maybe two not a third out of the way. Put
Speaker 5: someone in there that can get this job done. And
Speaker 5: all those names that we know, from Nimitz to MacArthur
Speaker 5: to Patent, all those guys got there because someone in
Speaker 5: front of them failed and they were held accountable, they
Speaker 5: were removed, and we put somebody else in place to
Speaker 5: see if they could do it. Back to the Civil War,
Speaker 5: Lincoln replaced after general after general after general until he
Speaker 5: got to Grant. Then somehow those things start to change.
Speaker 5: Maybe it's in Korea, but for sure by Vietnam. Now
Speaker 5: we have failure on the battlefield and what happens, well,
Speaker 5: they are not held accountable, they get out, they sit
Speaker 5: on boards of these different companies, and that has been
Speaker 5: pervasive all the way through today. There's a great book
Speaker 5: called the Afghanistan Papers by Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post,
Speaker 5: who got these interviews through two Freedom of Information Act
Speaker 5: lawsuits with the I think Department of Defense. But it
Speaker 5: was these officers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan being
Speaker 5: interviewed in a way that they thought was going to
Speaker 5: remain classified. And then he juxtaposes what they said in
Speaker 5: those interviews with what they said in front of Congress,
Speaker 5: so essentially to the American people, to their troops, to
Speaker 5: our elected representatives, and it's one to eighty out. And
Speaker 5: there's one guy, I think it's a two thousand and
Speaker 5: nine one general or admiral that says something it's not
Speaker 5: even that bad. And he's like, hey, things aren't really
Speaker 5: going as well over there as we think. If you've
Speaker 5: been led to believe, that's about as bad as it got.
Speaker 5: And he was quietly removed a few months later. Yeah,
Speaker 5: So it's that non accountability that is really I think
Speaker 5: killing us as a nation.
Speaker 1: I got a friend that spent a lot of years
Speaker 1: fighting in Afghanistan and he had mentioned that before he
Speaker 1: went there, his some commanding officer had wanted to have
Speaker 1: a lecturer come to talk about Afghan history and it
Speaker 1: wasn't condoned. And he always admired this officer because they
Speaker 1: paid for the speaker out of their own pocket and
Speaker 1: flew the speaker out to come, and they basically came
Speaker 1: in ten years in advance, he said, looking back, they
Speaker 1: came and told us what would happen. Yeah, and this
Speaker 1: was this was an uncondoned perspective, but it was it was.
Speaker 1: It was an Afghan it was in the US and
Speaker 1: they were I can't remember. They were professors somewhere, and
Speaker 1: he said, looking back, they came and basically said, here's
Speaker 1: what will happen ten years from now. And when when
Speaker 1: when we pulled out and cobble fell, I texted to say, like, man,
Speaker 1: it's got to be emotional for you or in some way,
Speaker 1: and he just said, I've for a long time, I
Speaker 1: just haven't been able to see any other outcome. There's
Speaker 1: nothing we've done on like assessments that would suggest otherwise
Speaker 1: to act like this is a surprise as bullshit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was his take, his take on and now someone
Speaker 1: has spent a lot of years there.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no, we had all those years to study, all
Speaker 5: those years to prepare. You could see from the spring
Speaker 5: end of the summer, province by province falling and it's yeah,
Speaker 5: it's really remarkable being aptitude amongst our senior level leaders
Speaker 5: that allowed them to put these eighteen nineteen twenty twenty
Speaker 5: two year old kids at this gate at Kabo Airport
Speaker 5: in a tactically dis advantageous position when we held the
Speaker 5: tactically advantageous position for twenty years at Bogram And it's
Speaker 5: just for those who have been there, they'll know exactly
Speaker 5: what I'm talking about, the standoff distances and everything else
Speaker 5: involved in securing an area or an airport. In this case,
Speaker 5: I mean, it's it's criminal, and yet no one's held accountable,
Speaker 5: no one was no one was even quiet moved aside.
Speaker 5: At those senior levels, they just continue to do their
Speaker 5: job and they'll retire with a full pension and then
Speaker 5: sit on a board, go to a couple of meetings
Speaker 5: a year for some of these defense contracting companies, and
Speaker 5: the machine rolls on. Unfortunately, this is.
Speaker 1: So far removed from anything to do with hunting and
Speaker 1: fish and whatnot. But there's a lot of parallels, but
Speaker 1: I don't even care. Yeah, in hindsight, Okay, with the
Speaker 1: gift of hindsight, do you have any idea of what,
Speaker 1: when and what should have been done in Afghanistan overall? Yeah?
Speaker 5: I mean you can go back to December of twenty
Speaker 5: twenty one, that's what I mean. Yeah, And when I
Speaker 5: talk about those lessons that we learned from the Soviets,
Speaker 5: I think our senior level leaders took, hey, we need
Speaker 5: a small footprint there. The Soviets went in with too
Speaker 5: many people, too many targets too heavy handed and it
Speaker 5: ended up being their their Vietnam is what they you know,
Speaker 5: like to they like determin it for ten years.
Speaker 1: I think they maybe found a new one.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, they to find a new one. We'll see,
Speaker 5: they've got nine years to see if that's and yeah
Speaker 5: they yeah, it's uh and they haven't even started. Really,
Speaker 5: I don't think as far as they're throwing bodies at
Speaker 5: that problem.
Speaker 3: But not if you look at history, Yeah that their
Speaker 3: previous commitments and manpower.
Speaker 5: Exactly, yeah, exactly. But yeah, December twenty twenty one, multiple
Speaker 5: requests from guys on the ground requesting either rangers or
Speaker 5: tenth Mountain Division Marines, somebody come in, block off these
Speaker 5: passes into Pakistan. We have Asama bin Laden right here
Speaker 5: in these mountains. All those requests denied and slips away
Speaker 5: and we get the next twenty years for whatever reason.
Speaker 5: So there's one. So there's there's one. But then now
Speaker 5: that you're in this thing, now what do you do?
Speaker 5: And now why are we there? And then well we
Speaker 5: get distracted by Iraq and all those resources that were
Speaker 5: focused on Afghanistan shift over to Iraq in two thousand
Speaker 5: and three, and you could see it on the ground
Speaker 5: in Afghanistan, you could see all these assets kind of
Speaker 5: pick up and and all these people that were doing
Speaker 5: all these jobs before just aren't there anymore. Just to
Speaker 5: a few people to keep things kind of keep things moving,
Speaker 5: keep these outstations supplied, keep this air overhead in case
Speaker 5: people need it. So, yeah, there are so many lessons
Speaker 5: that we can take and apply going forward. And that's
Speaker 5: what we're not so good at it as a country
Speaker 5: is taking those lessons and applying them going forward as
Speaker 5: wisdom because we're looking at for your election cycles, eight
Speaker 5: your election cycles for the real deep thinkers among us,
Speaker 5: But we're really not honoring all those people that either
Speaker 5: died or came home damaged from the wars in Iraq
Speaker 5: and Afghanistan. And the way we can now honor them
Speaker 5: is by taking those lessons and applying them going forward
Speaker 5: to this next generation. So these next these kids don't
Speaker 5: have to do the same things or don't have to
Speaker 5: suffer and through another twenty year war because of the
Speaker 5: ineptitude of senior level leadership. But really, in the military,
Speaker 5: as long as you don't pop positive on a piss test,
Speaker 5: as long as you don't get arrested, too many times
Speaker 5: or get arrested for like domestic violence or something like that.
Speaker 5: You're going to pretty much rise to the top if
Speaker 5: you just remain quiet, and you're going to see people
Speaker 5: that are kind of those go getters, those hard chargers.
Speaker 5: A lot of those people get to a certain level
Speaker 5: and move on out, either because they just want to
Speaker 5: do something in the private sect, or they they're kind
Speaker 5: of disenfranchised by what they what they see at senior
Speaker 5: level leaders or see their path ahead and they're like,
Speaker 5: I'm not gonna go work for that guy. I'm out.
Speaker 5: So really he's It's not the best and the brightest
Speaker 5: that are in my experien I'm sure there are exceptions
Speaker 5: for those that are listening. Yes, there are exceptions, but
Speaker 5: for the most part, if you just kind of keep
Speaker 5: your nose clean and stay out of trouble, you can
Speaker 5: rise up in any in government service in general.
Speaker 1: Do you I don't mean to keep beating this one
Speaker 1: into the ground, but do you think that do you
Speaker 1: think that the Afghanistans should have just been to focus
Speaker 1: on al Qaeda and then just that and had that
Speaker 1: be it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we definitely did not understand that al Qaeda was
Speaker 5: a guest that there are guests of the Taliban, and
Speaker 5: over there, if you were the guests of someone, well,
Speaker 5: guess what that person or that tribe is now obligated
Speaker 5: to defend you. And we stepped right into that. And
Speaker 5: so we made enemies of the Taliban. Who I mean,
Speaker 5: they're not, yeah, not the greater. They're just destroying these
Speaker 5: the Buddhist statues or earlier on. And obviously they weren't
Speaker 5: in New York City. They're not. Well maybe now it's
Speaker 5: a little closer from what I've seen on the news
Speaker 5: and videos I'm seeing, but we definitely made an enemy
Speaker 5: of someone. The accidental Gorilla is a good way to
Speaker 5: put a David cookol And has a great book called
Speaker 5: The Accidental Gorilla, and we made a lot. It's also
Speaker 5: called insurgent math. So you go in and kill somebody
Speaker 5: and guess what his kid sees you do that. And
Speaker 5: but what's that kid going to do? Well, he's probably
Speaker 5: going to join the Taliban or whatever organization that's going
Speaker 5: to allow him to now also honor his tribe by
Speaker 5: getting revenge, because that's part of the culture as well,
Speaker 5: deeply embedded. It's deeply meted in a lot of cultures.
Speaker 5: Not just not just Afghan not just Taliban, but we
Speaker 5: made a lot of enemies for sure. In twenty years
Speaker 5: we had ample opportunity to do that. So if we'd
Speaker 5: gone in with taken a little more lessons from the
Speaker 5: Soviets and realized that if we went in heavy handed,
Speaker 5: did the job and got out, we would accomplish that goal.
Speaker 5: But for some reason we stayed and then for some
Speaker 5: reason we got out the way we did. So not
Speaker 5: a big nation building guy, no expeditionary counterinsurgency is very difficult.
Speaker 5: So if you have a counterinsurgency campaign on your own soil,
Speaker 5: it's different than doing it overseas, doing it on someone
Speaker 5: else's turf, which can prove to be There are a
Speaker 5: couple instances of long term commitments playing out Malayia places
Speaker 5: like that, but that's a long term commitment with a
Speaker 5: cohesive strategy, not shifting here and there and not rewarding
Speaker 5: people for failure, which is what we do. People keep
Speaker 5: failing up in our system.
Speaker 1: You mentioned me last night that when you got when
Speaker 1: you finally got done at the military, you were looking
Speaker 1: for I'm sorry, I don't think this would be private.
Speaker 1: You were looking for.
Speaker 5: Physical and physical and psychological step, psychological separation. Yeah, I
Speaker 5: just saw so many during my last couple of years
Speaker 5: in I was at BUDS, so I was at our
Speaker 5: seal training commands, so I wasn't taking guys down range anymore.
Speaker 5: And I had all this leave built up from all
Speaker 5: these all these years that I wasn't really taking leave
Speaker 5: because I was so focused on being the best leader
Speaker 5: operator I possibly could. I was so focused and I
Speaker 5: think being honest with my wife about that, realizing that, hey,
Speaker 5: the team is coming first, and that's just how it
Speaker 5: has to be because you're responsible for those guys' lives downrange,
Speaker 5: so youhowe it to them, their families, the country, the
Speaker 5: mission to team. That's just how it's going to be. Eventually,
Speaker 5: when we're out, it'll it'll switch back. So when I
Speaker 5: got to Buds and I wasn't taking guys down range anymore,
Speaker 5: I could kind of take a breath and look around.
Speaker 5: I realized that I was going to get out. The
Speaker 5: pendulum started to just swing back. Because Buds is a machine,
Speaker 5: and it's push ups, it's sit ups, it's pull ups,
Speaker 5: it's runs, it's swims, it's it's what it has been
Speaker 5: for a long time.
Speaker 1: Oh, well, we know all about that because we have
Speaker 1: a thing now and then where you have to do
Speaker 1: one hundred push ups.
Speaker 5: In a day. Oh my goodness, you got to all
Speaker 5: about that.
Speaker 1: It's called the club.
Speaker 5: How many guys have you lost called the club? Well,
Speaker 5: it kind of comes was like, well, we'll.
Speaker 1: Have it be that we're gonna have the Hondole Club
Speaker 1: every day, but it winds up being like now and
Speaker 1: then we'll do a hondle club.
Speaker 5: So I completely understand now by the way you get it,
Speaker 5: I get for sure, But but I got to see
Speaker 5: people getting out and is My role is the operations officer,
Speaker 5: which is like a COO of a company, so you're
Speaker 5: kind of running day to day operations. But at BUDS,
Speaker 5: they're really running themselves because you have an officer and
Speaker 5: a master chief or a senior chief in every phase
Speaker 5: of training, and they've got it. Like they don't, they've
Speaker 5: got it. So you kind of have some some time.
Speaker 5: And I saw people get out of the military and
Speaker 5: have a hard time leaving it behind because you have
Speaker 5: this mission, you're so dedicated to it, You're best friends
Speaker 5: are a part of it. When you're downranged there to
Speaker 5: your right and your left and you're not worried about
Speaker 5: paying bills or leaky faucets or anything like that. You're
Speaker 5: solely focused on building target packages and going and executing
Speaker 5: those missions. Then you come home and you transition out
Speaker 5: and you think maybe you can recreate that in the
Speaker 5: private sector or something similar, and for some reason it's
Speaker 5: a surprise that you can't. And either you try to
Speaker 5: get back in or you're calling me as the operations
Speaker 5: officer saying, hey, can I bring my new boss buy
Speaker 5: for a tour? And I was always like absolutely, you
Speaker 5: know for sure, Even when I got told no by
Speaker 5: senior level leadership, I was always like, yeah, I just
Speaker 5: come by when at this time, because I know that
Speaker 5: guy is going to be gone and you know we'll
Speaker 5: get this, get this done for you. So I was
Speaker 5: always trying to hook up good guys in the teams
Speaker 5: or or out.
Speaker 1: But at the point being away.
Speaker 5: It was hard. It was hard for a lot of
Speaker 5: people to stay away all these foundation events that you
Speaker 5: have to support military families, you know, continuing to go
Speaker 5: to those going to the same grocery stores, the same bars,
Speaker 5: dropping your kids off at the same schools where you're seeing, uh,
Speaker 5: either somebody that was on your team before dropping their
Speaker 5: kid off because they happened to be at a shore duty,
Speaker 5: or you see the wife dropping the kid off and
Speaker 5: wondering where the husband's down range in a racker Afghanistan
Speaker 5: and you're feeling guilty about not being there. So I
Speaker 5: saw that those couple of years that I was at
Speaker 5: Buds at the end of my time in the military
Speaker 5: and decided that Okay, it's ull probably be healthy to
Speaker 5: make this physical and psychological break and head up to
Speaker 5: Park City, Utah raise our kids in a ski town.
Speaker 5: And I think that was a good decision.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because talking about that, you know, you're like, your
Speaker 1: boy likes the ski, your daughter likes the hunt. I mean,
Speaker 1: do you at night feel like you need to at
Speaker 1: the end of the day be like, you know, I
Speaker 1: want to remind you that there are are horrible things
Speaker 1: happened to people around this world. Or are you like
Speaker 1: that that the point of this is that that's not
Speaker 1: part of everyday life.
Speaker 6: No.
Speaker 5: I think about it and we talk about it, and
Speaker 5: I see that sun setting over the mountains and I
Speaker 5: think that it's going down here, but it's coming up
Speaker 5: somewhere else, that somewhere else may have a group of
Speaker 5: special Operators or sa PERI military guys just coming back
Speaker 5: from a mission or getting ready to go do some
Speaker 5: sort of daylight op somewhere. They're fixing gear from the
Speaker 5: night before, they're loading magazines, they're treating wounded, they're gassing
Speaker 5: up vehicles, or whatever they're doing. They will never hear
Speaker 5: about unless something goes wrong, and then we'll hear about
Speaker 5: it in the news. But if it goes well enough
Speaker 5: that no one dies, we're probably not going to hear
Speaker 5: about it. So I think about that. I think about
Speaker 5: that every day, but I don't dwell on it. I
Speaker 5: appreciate that they're out there doing that job so I
Speaker 5: can be back here doing what I love, which is
Speaker 5: which is writing. But I never forget it. I never
Speaker 5: forget they're out there.
Speaker 1: Did you get to it with writing? Did you also
Speaker 1: one day be like okay, because you knew you're gonna
Speaker 1: you know, you wanted to write since you were a kid.
Speaker 1: Did you one day be like okay, now now it begins,
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, just said a typewriter.
Speaker 5: Yep, yep, sat down my computer.
Speaker 1: Here's a movie. It'll be a type yeah exactly.
Speaker 5: I collect old typewriters now, actually at Havyway. Somebody gifted
Speaker 5: it to me in early twenty twenty. Yeah, he wrote
Speaker 5: a movable feast on it, published after after he died.
Speaker 5: But but yeah, so I have that. That's I really.
Speaker 5: A bunch of his stuff went up for sale. Yeah,
Speaker 5: the guy that started Newman's Owne with Paul Newman also
Speaker 5: was part of that that that crowd and had had
Speaker 5: purchased this typewriter for Hemingway to write a move Wolf
Speaker 5: east On in New York. Actually, and all his this
Speaker 5: stuff went up for sale when he passed away, and
Speaker 5: I was early twenty twenty, and a fan reached out
Speaker 5: and said that they wanted me to have it. So,
Speaker 5: I mean, waste typewriter now, but I don't work. I
Speaker 5: typed one thing on it. I wrote one Hemingway quote
Speaker 5: and I put it on there, and and I write
Speaker 5: everything on my MacBook.
Speaker 1: Cred. Do you think I should put him in his
Speaker 1: place and tell him about how we have that knife
Speaker 1: that was used to get the weights out of the
Speaker 1: walleye at the Walleye cheating scandal.
Speaker 5: Oh wow, I feel like this is a story that's
Speaker 5: been told him this podcast before anyway, typewriter.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm not.
Speaker 5: Sure the two campaigns.
Speaker 1: That's cool, but yes I did.
Speaker 5: I sat down, looked around after I was at buds
Speaker 5: and was like, Okay, my family needs me, son needs me.
Speaker 5: It's time to make this stay and I'm not going
Speaker 5: to go through this, uh this next ten years. So
Speaker 5: essentially come back as a commanding officer somewhere. It's time
Speaker 5: to get out. It was a good run. Started enlisted,
Speaker 5: did all the things I wanted to do, became an officer,
Speaker 5: got out as a troop commander at the end of
Speaker 5: when we got out a rack in twenty eleven, and
Speaker 5: now got home, looked around, realized that was a good
Speaker 5: run to time to get out.
Speaker 1: Did your wife think you were nuts? No, No, I
Speaker 1: will become a famous writer.
Speaker 5: We known each other since we were eighteen, and so
Speaker 5: the whole time I wanted to be a seal and
Speaker 5: an author. And so she's seen all these books travel
Speaker 5: with us from the days that I was eighteen, I
Speaker 5: still had books all over the place, and I still
Speaker 5: have those books. So she's been she's used to it,
Speaker 5: and she just knows that, yeah, this was my plan,
Speaker 5: so she's not she's not surprised by it. When when
Speaker 5: it was.
Speaker 4: Time to write like before that, like, leading up to
Speaker 4: that point, had you done anything to train yourself or
Speaker 4: school yourself in writing or you were just like, I'm
Speaker 4: going to write a damn book.
Speaker 5: Yeah, all that reading that I did, but no, like
Speaker 5: formal you didn't take any like didn't take a cloist
Speaker 5: or anything like that. I read On Writing by Stephen King,
Speaker 5: The Successful Novelist by David Morrell, all those Stephen Hunter
Speaker 5: books that were out at the time, on creativity. There's
Speaker 5: more of the mount now, there's maybe three or four
Speaker 5: of them out then, it's probably seven of them out now.
Speaker 5: So I read those and then I decided, okay, that's
Speaker 5: enough because today you can essentially study how to do
Speaker 5: something forever. You can take multiple online classes, multiple master classes.
Speaker 5: You can just essentially research until the end of time
Speaker 5: on the internet. Eventually, if you want to get something done,
Speaker 5: you have to execute.
Speaker 4: So oh some people that's just what they do.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and that's fine, and that's fine. But I was
Speaker 5: ready to write. But more so and on writing for
Speaker 5: people that have read it, is more autobiography than on
Speaker 5: how to book by Stephen King. But I love reading
Speaker 5: autobiography as by authors, and typically they write them later
Speaker 5: later in life. There's a few more of them out
Speaker 5: now that weren't out at the time that I started writing.
Speaker 5: If they had been, I would have read those as well.
Speaker 5: But yeah, read those, But luckily I had that foundation
Speaker 5: already built and then sat down and wrote. But really
Speaker 5: I started with the title, and this is how it's
Speaker 5: been for every book thus far. I like to have
Speaker 5: the title right out of the gate, so I'm not worried,
Speaker 5: I'm not wasting bandwidth, worried about coming up with a
Speaker 5: good title. So even if it's a working title, I
Speaker 5: like to have that down, even if it's going to
Speaker 5: change eventually. I like to have that not just book six,
Speaker 5: but a title, a theme that's going to guide the
Speaker 5: writing process. So each book has a distinctive theme that's
Speaker 5: just a sentence. And I got that from Stephen Pressfield
Speaker 5: misinterpretation of something that Stephen Pressfield said on Rogan But
Speaker 5: I'm glad that I misinterpreted it, and I interpreted it
Speaker 5: as he would take a yellow sticky next to his
Speaker 5: typewriter and write a one word theme. So I was like, ah,
Speaker 5: wonderful revenge, and then I changed that to revenge without constraint.
Speaker 5: I cheated a little bit.
Speaker 1: What did he mean?
Speaker 5: He was telling a story about a playwright in New
Speaker 5: York who would write a few sentences about a theme
Speaker 5: that would guide his writing process, and somehow in your
Speaker 5: head yeah one word, yeah, well done, hurt to be concise? No, no,
Speaker 5: And now I have the same thing, but it's a
Speaker 5: little more wordy, not not much, but it's definitely not
Speaker 5: more than a say. So start with that, and then
Speaker 5: one page executive summary, and I write that out and
Speaker 5: then I ask myself two questions. I say, would is
Speaker 5: this worth a year of my life or a year
Speaker 5: and a half of my life? And if it's yes,
Speaker 5: then I ask another question. I say, if someone were
Speaker 5: to read this like walking through airport, going into Hudson News,
Speaker 5: pulling the book off and reading the back or the
Speaker 5: flap jacket, would they be willing to invest time that
Speaker 5: they're never going to get back in this story. And
Speaker 5: if the answer to both of those is yes, then boom,
Speaker 5: I'm all in. And then I take that, turn that
Speaker 5: into an outline, and then take that outline turn it
Speaker 5: into a narrative. But what I don't do is get
Speaker 5: stuck on the outline, because if I get to a
Speaker 5: place in that outline where I'm like, oh, how he
Speaker 5: is ever going to get out of this? Is anyone
Speaker 5: ever going to believe this? This is going to be terrible.
Speaker 5: I'm never going to figure this out. If I get
Speaker 5: to that, I just put a bunch of x's and
Speaker 5: go around it, and I keep writing, knowing that I
Speaker 5: have a year and a half to figure this out.
Speaker 5: And on the battlefield, you had seconds to make decisions.
Speaker 5: Now I have a year a year and a half
Speaker 5: that first book.
Speaker 4: Or are you working completely solo or did you have
Speaker 4: an editor or anyone?
Speaker 6: Ye?
Speaker 5: Yeah, so nobody yet. I sent it to twenty people
Speaker 5: or so maybe twenty five even maybe twenty seven May
Speaker 5: thirty when it was done, when I thought I got
Speaker 5: it to the place where I got it to being
Speaker 5: the best that I could get it, and I told myself, Hey,
Speaker 5: if one person says comes back and says, hey, I
Speaker 5: really didn't like this part, this part didn't make sense,
Speaker 5: you need to do this, I would discount it two three, Yeah,
Speaker 5: discount those two. But if it was like five, six,
Speaker 5: seven of those twenty five or thirty people were like,
Speaker 5: you should think about writing this part again, or I
Speaker 5: didn't really understand this. Then I've been okay, Roger that,
Speaker 5: but now I sent it to four people ahead of time.
Speaker 5: They were part of that original original group, but now
Speaker 5: it's four and I sent it to them before I
Speaker 5: send it to my editor, and they give me different
Speaker 5: things back and there it's all super valuable and they're
Speaker 5: they're amazing. I thank them and the acknowledgments of my books,
Speaker 5: and then I make those make those changes or I
Speaker 5: discard them, and then send it to my editor and
Speaker 5: so they're so she's getting the best product that me
Speaker 5: and a little bit of feedback from like a fan base.
Speaker 5: And three of those four guys are lawyers, so they're
Speaker 5: good at finding things in written documents, so they're good
Speaker 5: at finding finding things need to be explained a little
Speaker 5: more exactly, yeah, exactly, and usually it's fixed with just
Speaker 5: a sentence here or there. So I do that and
Speaker 5: then send it to New York and Emily Butler, my
Speaker 5: editor Simon and Schuster. Emily Butler Books was imprint of Atria,
Speaker 5: so she has her own imprint and she's amazing, and
Speaker 5: she's the only person I ever wanted to be my editor.
Speaker 5: And the reason I found her is that I looked
Speaker 5: in the back of books people in my genre, and
Speaker 5: I'm like, why is Vince Flynn thanking this person named
Speaker 5: Emily Butler? Why is Brad Thor thanking this person named
Speaker 5: Emily Butler? And I decided, Emily Butsler will be my publisher,
Speaker 5: so I should probably. Yeah, she didn't know this. She
Speaker 5: didn't know this yet, she had no idea I existed.
Speaker 5: And same thing as I started writing. Being a child
Speaker 5: of the eighties, it only makes sense to pick the
Speaker 5: star that's going to star in your adaptation of this
Speaker 5: book that you have a sentence written of. And I thought,
Speaker 5: you know what, Chris Pratt's the guy and in Guardians
Speaker 5: of the Galaxy, yet hadn't been in Jurassic World yet.
Speaker 5: He had a very small role in Zero Dark thirty
Speaker 5: as a seal, and he was in Parks and Rec.
Speaker 5: So I saw this transformation from Andy Dwyer in Parks
Speaker 5: and Rec to this seal operator. And I also thought, Hey,
Speaker 5: I need someone who's likable on and off screen because
Speaker 5: this role is going to require an audience to forgive him,
Speaker 5: possibly for a lot of the things that I'm about
Speaker 5: to write about. And I thought about Magnum back in
Speaker 5: the back in the eighties, and I thought everybody loved Magnum,
Speaker 5: all the all the wives love Magnum, all the dads
Speaker 5: love Magnum. Everybody loved Magnum because he was funny. You
Speaker 5: wanted to sit down have a beer with him. He'd
Speaker 5: sit down and to have beers with his buddies at
Speaker 5: the King Command Maa club. But then he could flip
Speaker 5: that switch. And there were episodes. It was the first
Speaker 5: time that protagonist in in primetime television had killed an
Speaker 5: unarmed bad guy, and that was in Have You Seen
Speaker 5: the Sunrise? And yeah, so I love that episode.
Speaker 1: It's just my dad that I don't remember, So I
Speaker 1: don't remember. I just remember, like the shirt anything, yeah,
Speaker 1: very short shorts.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yep. So I thought about that. I thought, Chris
Speaker 5: Prats the guy he'll start. And then I'm like, well,
Speaker 5: I'm choosing my star, might as well choose my director.
Speaker 5: And I thought Antoine Fuqua. I love everything that that
Speaker 5: he's done. He's amazing. Training day, training day, incredible with
Speaker 5: Denzel Washington, of course, and I did shoot her, which
Speaker 5: is an adaptation of a Point of Impact by Stephen Hunter,
Speaker 5: and uh like yep uh. Antoine will direct and that's
Speaker 5: who ended up starring and directing. So it's uh so
Speaker 5: it worked out, which happens all the time. He lives
Speaker 5: in Utah, doesn't he Nope, no, he doesn't in California.
Speaker 5: He's California, but from uh moved around, but from Washington State.
Speaker 5: But but he's somebody you want to sit down, have
Speaker 5: coffee with, have a beer with, and just an awesome guy.
Speaker 5: When he optioned it, he came out to Utah, he
Speaker 5: spent a week together out in the in the back country,
Speaker 5: and he's just a solid dude. And being on set
Speaker 5: with him, you can tell like everybody is happy to
Speaker 5: be there on that set because he's set in the
Speaker 5: tone him and Antoine. Antoine's like the commanding officer and
Speaker 5: Chris is like the troop commander, and they are setting
Speaker 5: that tone for the entire three hundred and fifty other
Speaker 5: people on that set. And so many people came up
Speaker 5: to me that didn't have to to tell me that
Speaker 5: they'd been on hundreds of Hollywood sets before, whether it
Speaker 5: was hair and makeup people or stunt people or whoever
Speaker 5: it was, and they'd say, I've never felt the way
Speaker 5: I have on this set. But that's all due to
Speaker 5: Antoine and all due to Chris setting this tone of positivity,
Speaker 5: and they're mentoring people along and everybody wants to be
Speaker 5: there doing their best work. But I can see how
Speaker 5: it would be the opposite too, if you had a
Speaker 5: crazy director. I can see how that could totally set
Speaker 5: a negative tone, or had a star though I number
Speaker 5: one on the call sheet, who was just crazy person,
Speaker 5: and how that could set the tone and how people
Speaker 5: would be like, Oh, I can't believe I have to
Speaker 5: go into work today and work with this crazy person.
Speaker 5: So we had the opposite of that.
Speaker 3: It kind of goes back to our earlier conversation about government.
Speaker 3: It's like, well, why do you put up with those
Speaker 3: people in Hollywood?
Speaker 5: Yeah? I guess these they're employing so many people, I guess.
Speaker 5: But it doesn't have to be that way. You get
Speaker 5: to choose, and Antoine and Chris choose to be positive
Speaker 5: and choose to be encouraging and choose to mentor people along.
Speaker 5: And it's just really cool to see that. And again
Speaker 5: the only reason that came to be is because of
Speaker 5: a good buddy, Jared Shaw, who in the Seal teams
Speaker 5: was getting out and it was when I was at
Speaker 5: BUDS and I said, hell, hey, you're getting out. Oh,
Speaker 5: come come see me in my office at some point
Speaker 5: and just let me know what your plans are and
Speaker 5: let me know if I can can help you in anyway.
Speaker 5: So we sat down and talked, and I introduced him
Speaker 5: to some people in the private sector in the industry
Speaker 5: he wanted to get into, and followed up with him,
Speaker 5: and then I forgot all about it. And then five
Speaker 5: years later, about six months before my first book comes out,
Speaker 5: he calls and I hadn't talked to him in years,
Speaker 5: and he says, hey, do you remember me? And I said, yeah,
Speaker 5: of course, Jared, how are you? And he said, hey, man,
Speaker 5: I always wanted to call and thank you for what
Speaker 5: you did for me. The Seal teams, nobody else sat
Speaker 5: me down in their office. No one talked to me
Speaker 5: about transitioning out. No one introduced me to people in
Speaker 5: the private sector, no one followed up with me. I
Speaker 5: was just kind of brushed aside by senior level leadership.
Speaker 5: When I told him I was getting out, and I
Speaker 5: was like, oh, man, hey, my pleasure. How's it going.
Speaker 5: You know, how do everything work out? And he said
Speaker 5: everything's great, But I heard you have a book coming out,
Speaker 5: and I said, yep, come out a few months. I
Speaker 5: can send you a gally copy, which is like a
Speaker 5: I just learned what a gally copy was like a
Speaker 5: week earlier. It's like a rough draft, and I can
Speaker 5: send that to you if you'd like. And he said, yeah,
Speaker 5: I like that, but I'd like to give it to
Speaker 5: a friend of mine. And I said, who's that and
Speaker 5: he said Chris Pratt, Like, oh, that's convenient for me.
Speaker 5: So I sent it to Jared. He read it in November.
Speaker 5: He gave it to Chris in December. Chris read it
Speaker 5: in the at the end of December and then called
Speaker 5: a week later, want an option it? So yeah, do
Speaker 5: you have.
Speaker 3: People who are non like acronym pros that read your
Speaker 3: early drafts and kind of go be like, I don't
Speaker 3: know about this? Or do people just get on board
Speaker 3: with the vernacular so fast? And that's my assumption as
Speaker 3: people they do, They just like snap into those It's something.
Speaker 5: As you can tell from the context, like I pulled
Speaker 5: down my nods and now I can see it night
Speaker 5: type of thing. You're like, yo, a nod must be
Speaker 5: some sort of a night vision type of a thing.
Speaker 5: So a lot of times some context you can get it,
Speaker 5: but my editor will say, hey, can you describe what
Speaker 5: this is? Then I'll just put like little parentheses and
Speaker 5: say what it is. But I also brought back I
Speaker 5: don't know if I brought it back. I shouldn't say that,
Speaker 5: but I thought of it as bringing it back because
Speaker 5: before the Internet, glossaries in the back of books in
Speaker 5: the eighties were so much fun for me to go through,
Speaker 5: and I could go through the extra were I was like, Oh,
Speaker 5: this is so awesome. So I wanted to bring that
Speaker 5: back the book.
Speaker 3: It was just like an extra thing.
Speaker 5: So I put the glossary in the back. And some
Speaker 5: things are funny. I put some some funny things in there,
Speaker 5: and some things are actual definitions. But so I put
Speaker 5: that in the back for anybody that needs help with
Speaker 5: the acronyms. But otherwise you can pretty much get it,
Speaker 5: and you know, if not, maybe's not the book for you.
Speaker 5: You know, I don't know.
Speaker 3: I mean I think once people get into a story, yeah,
Speaker 3: it also is like it's just like language.
Speaker 5: Some people are like, oh cool, what is this? You
Speaker 5: can look it up? And now you can look it up.
Speaker 5: You know, you don't have to go to the labor anymore,
Speaker 5: you can like look it up like oh that's so cool, Okay,
Speaker 5: got it. But I try to describe at least what
Speaker 5: it is. But sometimes I do. Sometimes I'm just everybody
Speaker 5: knows what it not is now. Everybody knows what an
Speaker 5: idea is now after twenty years at war, but I
Speaker 5: might have to spell it out, improvise explosive device or
Speaker 5: explosively form penetrator or whatever it might might be. So
Speaker 5: so sometimes I make assumptions that that people are only
Speaker 5: to understand, and then I go back and I'll add
Speaker 5: a little something to describe what that means, because they
Speaker 5: are a little acronym heavy at times.
Speaker 3: Well I mean that's an acronym heavy profession. Like you
Speaker 3: listen to a group of you guys getting together.
Speaker 5: Like what language are they speaking?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I find that certain conservation meetings similar like that
Speaker 1: with the departments and then the package of the Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just like yeah, absolutely, But you know, I'd say.
Speaker 5: I.
Speaker 3: Mediated a panel at Pheasants Forever this year and it
Speaker 3: was the it was the governance the governance board for
Speaker 3: p f q F, you know, an open forum. We're
Speaker 3: talking about the farm bill. And I kept asking the
Speaker 3: questions and they kind of pause, and I was like,
Speaker 3: what is going on with this group? And then they
Speaker 3: told me ended up telling the whole crowd that they
Speaker 3: had a bet between the three of them that basically,
Speaker 3: if you used an acronym, you had to buy the
Speaker 3: other two a beer. Oh that's rough, because they were
Speaker 3: trying so hard to make it user friendly, make the
Speaker 3: whole conversation user friendly, and there was a lot of failures. Oh,
Speaker 3: a lot of failures. Yeah, it was tough.
Speaker 5: That was the thing I knew i'd get right in
Speaker 5: the books, was like the acronyms and describing snapper weapons
Speaker 5: systems and that sort of a thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was a cool factor of that stuff in
Speaker 1: a way that there's not around then, the way there's
Speaker 1: not around federal policy.
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, you might have to work a little harder
Speaker 5: at the federal policy because you could do it. But yeah,
Speaker 5: it may be a little harder. But I knew i'd
Speaker 5: get that stuff. And what I didn't realize was how
Speaker 5: much of the feelings and emotions behind what I've done
Speaker 5: down range would make it in to the novel and
Speaker 5: now novels. But in that first one, even through that
Speaker 5: whole process I just talked about. Until I started turning
Speaker 5: that outline into the narrative, I still didn't really think
Speaker 5: about those feelings and emotions weaving their way in to
Speaker 5: the storyline. But as soon as I started changing that
Speaker 5: outline into the narrative, it was very apparent right off
Speaker 5: the bat that this was going to be an extremely
Speaker 5: personal writing experience, because I'm going to be describing taking
Speaker 5: the feelings behind things that happened downrange and applying them
Speaker 5: to this completely fictional narrative. So if my character gets
Speaker 5: ambushed in Los Angeles, California, I go back and remember
Speaker 5: what was like to get ambushed in Baghdad in two
Speaker 5: thousand and six, and then I take those feelings and
Speaker 5: emotions and I apply them to my protagonist in Los Angeles,
Speaker 5: California in present day. Same thing with the sniper stuff.
Speaker 5: I don't have to go seek out a sniper out
Speaker 5: there and find a guy who was in Remady at
Speaker 5: the height of the war and say, hey, what was
Speaker 5: it like to set up and pull that trigger? And
Speaker 5: then if I'm taking notes, I'm comparing his answers with
Speaker 5: someone else. I might have interviewed another book, I might
Speaker 5: have read another interview I saw on TV another book
Speaker 5: I might have read fiction or non movies that I've
Speaker 5: seen biases, I have whatever filters I have in place,
Speaker 5: and then putting it onto the page into my story.
Speaker 5: It all comes right from my heart and soul directly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's no substitute for a first person. Yeah right,
Speaker 3: It's like, because we have so much input coming in
Speaker 3: all the time. Yeah, it's kind of impossible to block
Speaker 3: that stuff out after a while.
Speaker 5: And I really think that's what stood out to Simon
Speaker 5: and Schuster because they see thousands of these things every
Speaker 5: year come across their desks, and I think that's what
Speaker 5: made stand out. With those feelings and emotions, that's what
Speaker 5: made it different from some of the other books out
Speaker 5: there that they had read, and why they decided to
Speaker 5: publish me, which is humbling.
Speaker 1: Uh T de late people on your next book, Only
Speaker 1: the Dead.
Speaker 5: So it's sixth novel in the James Reese series and
Speaker 5: it's the most brutal to date, which is saying it
Speaker 5: is the most brutal to date. And I didn't start
Speaker 5: out that way. I didn't say, all right, I'm gonna
Speaker 5: write the most brutal one. Now it's just kind of
Speaker 5: naturally happened that way. But yeah, that one comes out
Speaker 5: May sixteenth, And.
Speaker 1: Give the base, just give the basic, give the basic gist.
Speaker 5: There are some unanswered questions from my last novel, so
Speaker 5: for those who have read it, they'll know what I'm
Speaker 5: what I am talking about here. But really it's a
Speaker 5: novel of truth and consequences. That's the theme to this one,
Speaker 5: and in my novels James Reese he holds those people
Speaker 5: that we talked about earlier accountable those people that don't.
Speaker 5: You can't really hold accountable in real life because if
Speaker 5: you do, you'll go to jail for doing the things
Speaker 5: that my character you'll probably be executed in many states.
Speaker 5: But you can do it through fiction. You can do
Speaker 5: it in a thriller, which is very therapeutic to write
Speaker 5: and hopefully to read for some of us. But it's
Speaker 5: him uncovering a lot of his past and his father's past.
Speaker 5: Then all connects in present day in a of course,
Speaker 5: a conspiracy. I love a good conspiracy, especially in the
Speaker 5: pages of my novels. That's what I loved about some
Speaker 5: of the books I read growing up was the conspiratorial
Speaker 5: element to them. So I try to weave that in
Speaker 5: to my novels as well. So he tends to a
Speaker 5: he's a thinking man, but he also is someone very
Speaker 5: comfortable with violence because it's just a natural part of
Speaker 5: his life, and some people need to be dealt with
Speaker 5: in a very harsh way in this book.
Speaker 1: So when you mentioned therapeutic, I'm at, yeah, you get
Speaker 1: to be as the author, you get to be judged
Speaker 1: jury and execution.
Speaker 5: Yeah, oh yeah, it's fantastic.
Speaker 1: Guilty.
Speaker 5: It was so different about writing screenplays versus this is
Speaker 5: that I can do anything. I don't have to worry
Speaker 5: about the cost of a set piece. I don't have
Speaker 5: to worry about flying them to Siberia or down to
Speaker 5: South America, up to Alaska wherever. I can just do it.
Speaker 5: There's no no problem. I can have huge set action
Speaker 5: set pieces, and I have to worry about the cost.
Speaker 5: Now when you get talked to start talking to Amazon
Speaker 5: and start breaking things down where you're gonna film and
Speaker 5: what these set pieces are gonna cost, Well, now you
Speaker 5: have to factor that in. You can't just directly take
Speaker 5: what you have on the page and transferred over onto
Speaker 5: the screen because there are there costs involved to a
Speaker 5: lot of that. So you have to work through some
Speaker 5: of that. But I love the freedom to be able
Speaker 5: to do anything that I want on that page, and
Speaker 5: I didn't know how it was gonna be. When I
Speaker 5: got into this. I thought, as Simon and Schuster might
Speaker 5: ask me to kind of take you really need to
Speaker 5: have all that hunting stuff in there? Or does it
Speaker 5: need to be so violent or do you really need
Speaker 5: to mention this about concealed carry in here? It seems unnecessary.
Speaker 5: Can you? Never have they even hinted that I need
Speaker 5: to take any of that out. It's been one hundred
Speaker 5: percent creative control the entire time, which is which I love.
Speaker 1: Yeah, little bits of political.
Speaker 5: In there, yeah, yeah, yeah, But a lot of authors don't,
Speaker 5: and you know, I didn't. Really you don't really get
Speaker 5: to know them those characters in the same way as
Speaker 5: you do from authors that give you a glimpse into
Speaker 5: their protagonist through how he feels about certain things. So
Speaker 5: my character is carrying a pistol in Washington, d C.
Speaker 5: He's not just carrying a pistol in Washington, d C.
Speaker 5: He has to think about the consequences of getting cut.
Speaker 1: Warren's coming.
Speaker 5: Yes, because if I'm doing that, or if I if
Speaker 5: I was to do that, I would need to. I
Speaker 5: would think about it and realize, Okay, here's the consequences
Speaker 5: to doing this. So my character does as well, and
Speaker 5: he has thoughts on it. But a lot of authors
Speaker 5: don't do that, but but I do, and I feel
Speaker 5: it gives people greater insight into his character. And because
Speaker 5: you're going to think about it. If you're doing something
Speaker 5: like that, you're thinking about rules and regulations as we
Speaker 5: head into the field, and these different states and things
Speaker 5: that are you can do in some one state you
Speaker 5: can't do in another. And I mean, you're gonna follow
Speaker 5: the follow those rules. You're not gonna not think about it.
Speaker 5: And just all of a sudden, if I was a
Speaker 5: writer talking about hunting and I'm putting them in the
Speaker 5: springtime in somewhere else, and I have him going deer
Speaker 5: hunting in a state where you can't do that in
Speaker 5: that area in the springtime or whatever whatever it is,
Speaker 5: you're gonna lose that hunting audience. And you're like, if
Speaker 5: he's doing that, he should at least be thinking about it,
Speaker 5: he should least be thinking about why he's poaching, and
Speaker 5: it should make sense for the story. But a lot
Speaker 5: of times you don't. You don't get that, so I
Speaker 5: try to give the give what I'd be thinking in
Speaker 5: a lot of these situations.
Speaker 1: Do you read Box?
Speaker 5: I have read CJ. Box, not all of them, because
Speaker 5: he's a lot of books out there and he's amazing.
Speaker 5: Oh my goodness, yeah, yeah, very good, very very interesting
Speaker 5: writer and very popular.
Speaker 1: Is h a lot of hunting in there?
Speaker 6: You know?
Speaker 4: Is this character going to be around for a while?
Speaker 4: Are you getting the antsy to explore a different character.
Speaker 1: Nope.
Speaker 5: I feel so fortunate that a readership and audience is
Speaker 5: connected with this character. Uh So the first one, as
Speaker 5: you're writing it, people don't know. They think it could
Speaker 5: be just a one off book. So your first one
Speaker 5: as people are reading it now, people find that first
Speaker 5: book today they or watched the show first, they realize, oh,
Speaker 5: or even if they haven't seen the show, they realize, oh,
Speaker 5: there's four other books, five other books out there. He's
Speaker 5: probably gonna survived exactly. Yeah, he's gonna shake it off.
Speaker 5: He's gonna shake that thing right off. But the first one.
Speaker 5: That's why the first one is so fun, because if
Speaker 5: you're reading that and don't know that it can continue,
Speaker 5: then you and the way that I end that one.
Speaker 5: I kind of leave it up in the air. It's
Speaker 5: it's interesting, but now that they're out there, you kind
Speaker 5: of know that it's going.
Speaker 4: It's a serious just wondering if this guy had a
Speaker 4: life span yet or if he's gonna be around for
Speaker 4: a while.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think around for a while. It's I've for
Speaker 5: other authors talk about how they you know, they kind
Speaker 5: of get connected to their character and they're not thinkfully
Speaker 5: aren't allowed to do anything else, almost, But I don't
Speaker 5: feel that way. Love. I just feel so fortunate.
Speaker 1: So the twentieth book will be like kicking it and relax, Yeah, we.
Speaker 3: Get to that twentieth book, or I kind of think
Speaker 3: about it in terms of Indiana Jones, Right, there's a
Speaker 3: lot there's a lot crossover there, Like people are like,
Speaker 3: oh yeah, and he can go back in his story
Speaker 3: and go forward in a story and he has that longevity, right,
Speaker 3: And there's a lot of those Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean I'm familiar with the main one, but
Speaker 1: I didn't know that there was a lot to it.
Speaker 3: Well in every it's like dad son, Oh yeah, you know,
Speaker 3: it's like there's a lot there.
Speaker 5: I very intentionally wrote things into the novels that I'd
Speaker 5: be able to explore later different families. Explore the Hastings
Speaker 5: family in Africa. A lot of people want me to
Speaker 5: do that, and I explore the Salut Scouts and all that,
Speaker 5: So that'll be something I'm looking at doing in the future.
Speaker 5: James Reese's dad in Vietnam, his transition from seal into
Speaker 5: the CIA back in the seventies, so there's a lot
Speaker 5: to explore there into the eighties. What did he do
Speaker 5: in the eighties, So I and his grand grandfather's on
Speaker 5: both sides, So I throw that stuff in there too,
Speaker 5: sometimes with the history of the firearms that they use
Speaker 5: that have been passed down. So I put all that
Speaker 5: stuff in there very intentionally so that I can I
Speaker 5: can go back and also it gone a little interest
Speaker 5: ahead of time.
Speaker 3: And you can turn it into a family business. You
Speaker 3: can get those kids get back on the on.
Speaker 5: The computers and be like, listen, some people have yeah,
Speaker 5: Clive Custler, his son, Dirt Custler, Stephen to.
Speaker 1: Leave them all those executive summ reasons.
Speaker 5: There you go here they are.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So yeah, there's like there's a couple of people have
Speaker 5: done that. Nelson de mill Is working on his second
Speaker 5: book with his uh, his son, So that has that
Speaker 5: has happened, that has that has been a thing. But yeah,
Speaker 5: I just feel fortunate that it's connected and people are
Speaker 5: reading these things and want more and and now there's
Speaker 5: and there's a responsibility also because uh, people are trusting
Speaker 5: me with this time that they're never going to get back.
Speaker 5: So whether it's a Instagram post or a blog post,
Speaker 5: that those sentences get as much thought as any sentence
Speaker 5: in my novel. Because people are trusting me with my
Speaker 5: time there on the social channels as well on those blogs,
Speaker 5: on my podcast, whatever it might be, they're never getting
Speaker 5: that getting that back.
Speaker 3: Do you ever read the book Misery? Stephen King Misery?
Speaker 5: I only saw the movie. I should, I should?
Speaker 1: I should read book.
Speaker 3: Sure, you should read the book for sure. But that's
Speaker 3: that's the other trap you're getting yourself into. At some point,
Speaker 3: you're gonna have some rabid fan who's like, I demand
Speaker 3: to know what happens to your character. Yeah, because I'm
Speaker 3: so dedicated to them.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there's a book. Landon Beach has a book out
Speaker 5: called Narrator where he does something similar with a narrator
Speaker 5: and it's it's really it's really good book. It's really clever,
Speaker 5: really well done. But but yeah, no, I think I
Speaker 5: take some security measures. I tend to still think things
Speaker 5: that way I did before I went to the military,
Speaker 5: and I continue to think that way today. This is
Speaker 5: a natural way for me to think, so I do
Speaker 5: take a little precautions here and there. It only only
Speaker 5: makes sense today where it's so easy to find somebody.
Speaker 1: Sure. Yeah, all right, guys, well me order it now.
Speaker 1: Can you pre order the book in the audio right now?
Speaker 5: You sure can? You sure can? Yeah? Audio, ebook and
Speaker 5: hardcover all come out on May sixteenth. Rayporter is narrating
Speaker 5: again and uh yeah, coming in to Hot May sixteen.
Speaker 1: Order it now comes out May sixteenth. Find it, I'm
Speaker 1: assuming anywhere everywhere, but everywhere book are sold. Only The Dead,
Speaker 1: the sixth book from our guest today, Jack car Available
Speaker 1: from Simon and Schuster. Yep, Only the Dead. It'll ship
Speaker 1: to you soon. You buy it now. Thank you very much,
Speaker 1: Jack car.
Speaker 5: Man, Thank you so much for having me. This has
Speaker 5: been awesome. This has been awesome, and I can't wait
Speaker 5: to see the new studio. Not that this one is
Speaker 5: lacking in any way, shape or form, but I'm really
Speaker 5: looking forward to seeing the new one.
Speaker 6: Here.
Speaker 5: It is awesome. Thank you guys, appreciate everything.
Speaker 6: Ride on.
Speaker 1: Seal gray, shine like silver in the sun, right.
Speaker 6: Right alone.
Speaker 5: Wait, done, beat this damn horse today, taking a new one, rive.
Speaker 6: With it.
Speaker 5: Done, beat this damn horse today. So take your new
Speaker 5: one and ride on.
Speaker 1: Chapter ten, Killing proper. There is a right way and
Speaker 1: a wrong way to kill a wild animal, and I
Speaker 1: don't mean that in a practical sense. An explanation of
Speaker 1: this is tricky, similar to explaining why it's more pleasurable
Speaker 1: to spend money earned through hard work than money earned
Speaker 1: through dubious means. It comes down to metaphysical issues, things
Speaker 1: of the heart. I was thinking about this one day
Speaker 1: while I was hunting mountain lions with a pack of
Speaker 1: about a dozen dogs in southeastern Arizona. They were tall,
Speaker 1: lanky hounds, most of walker bloodlines, owned by my companions,
Speaker 1: Floyd Green and Joe Mitty, two well known mountain lion
Speaker 1: of hunters with a combined lion hunting experience spanning about
Speaker 1: sixty years and five hundred cats. Many of their dogs
Speaker 1: showed physical evidence of past skirmishes with lions, including slit ears,
Speaker 1: lacerated noses, and scarred muzzles. The injuries were usually suffered
Speaker 1: when they brought a lion to bay, a term for
Speaker 1: when hounds chased their quarry into a tree or corner
Speaker 1: against the cliff, or trap it in a cave, and
Speaker 1: then hold it there until their master shows up to
Speaker 1: deal with the beast. Earlier, I had mentioned to Floyd
Speaker 1: that it seemed as though a dog would lose his
Speaker 1: taste for hunting lions once he got scratched a time
Speaker 1: or two. It's the opposite of what you'd think, replied Floyd.
Speaker 1: It just makes them hungrier. I was camped with Floyd
Speaker 1: and Joe at an old abandoned ranch house not far
Speaker 1: from ara vip A Canyon, at the end of a
Speaker 1: driveway that takes more than an hour to travel along
Speaker 1: this route. On our way in, we saw where something
Speaker 1: had been dragged across the road from west to east
Speaker 1: and then down into a dry arroyo. At the end
Speaker 1: of the drag marks was a dead buck with pick
Speaker 1: clean bones that had been buried with leaves and dirt
Speaker 1: beneath the scrubby little oak. The hide was in pieces,
Speaker 1: but still connected to the carcass here and there, like
Speaker 1: a person who passed out drunk in bed without getting
Speaker 1: completely free of his clothes. Floyd tipped his cowboy hat
Speaker 1: and peeled back the deer's skin to show me the
Speaker 1: blood clots and teeth marks around the animal's neck. He
Speaker 1: also showed me where the spine had been wrung around
Speaker 1: in circles three or four times. There wasn't a doubt
Speaker 1: in his mind that we were looking at a lion kill.
Speaker 1: Though it was at least a week old. This was
Speaker 1: good news. We'd come to hunt this area because a
Speaker 1: local ranger had lost fifty calves to lions here the
Speaker 1: previous spring, about nine months earlier, and this was proof
Speaker 1: that at least one lion was still hanging around. If
Speaker 1: you had asked me ten years earlier, I would have
Speaker 1: told you that I'd never want to hunt a mountain lion.
Speaker 1: What's the challenge? I would have asked in shooting a
Speaker 1: cat out of a tree. The notion of challenge is
Speaker 1: one of the most hotly debated aspects of hunting. Definitions
Speaker 1: of the word evolve so constantly and are so subjective
Speaker 1: that it's hard to find two hunters who define it
Speaker 1: in the same way. As a way of dealing with
Speaker 1: the confusion, Some of us abide by a more readily
Speaker 1: definable synonym known as fair chase. It's an ethical term
Speaker 1: that provides hunters with a guiding principle to abide by.
Speaker 1: Jim Posowitz, the founder of Oryan, the Hunter's Institute, writes
Speaker 1: that fair chase addresses the balance between the hunter and
Speaker 1: the hunted. It is a balance that allows hunters to
Speaker 1: occasionally succeed while animals generally avoid being taken. Some hunting
Speaker 1: strategies are such an affront to the idea of fair
Speaker 1: chase that hunters share in almost universal disdain for them.
Speaker 1: For example, most hunters would agree that dynamite shouldn't be
Speaker 1: used for duck hung because it would take away the challenge.
Speaker 1: Most hunters would also agree that night vision goggles shouldn't
Speaker 1: be used in deer hunting for the same reason. Often,
Speaker 1: as is the case with these examples, our notions of
Speaker 1: fair chase are enforced by law. It's illegal to kill
Speaker 1: ducks with dynamite. It's also illegal to hunt deer with
Speaker 1: the aid of artificial lights. However, fair chase is not
Speaker 1: universally legislated. Certain activities that are definitely not fair chase,
Speaker 1: such as the pathetic practice of hunting animals inside high
Speaker 1: wire fences is permissible in many regions as long as
Speaker 1: it's done on private property and with the proper legal permits.
Speaker 1: Whether or not a hunter chooses to participate in this
Speaker 1: limp dict activity comes down to personal choice. Other issues
Speaker 1: of personal choice are much more nuanced than this example,
Speaker 1: though they're taken no less seriously by many sportsmen over
Speaker 1: the years. I've met hunters who eskew rifles with telescopic
Speaker 1: scopes because they I prefer the challenge of using rifles
Speaker 1: with open or iron sights. I've met hunters who don't
Speaker 1: use rifles because they favor the additional challenge presented by
Speaker 1: compound bows. And I've met hunters who gave up on
Speaker 1: compound bows in order to take on the even more
Speaker 1: difficult challenge of hunting with a handmade long bow. However,
Speaker 1: some hunters who use handmade long bows hunt dear by
Speaker 1: sitting in a tree stand next to a bait pile,
Speaker 1: a practice that is considered unchallenging by many guys who
Speaker 1: prefer hunting on foot in open country with a rifle
Speaker 1: and a telescopic scope. I generally believe these differentiations to
Speaker 1: be positive, however, nitpicky because they demonstrate that hunters are
Speaker 1: thinking people who struggle to define the limits of their world.
Speaker 1: I know that I certainly do, though I've come to
Speaker 1: realize that rigid boundaries are sometimes hard to determine. Consider
Speaker 1: something that happened to me while I was living for
Speaker 1: about nine months along the Big Horn River in Wyoming.
Speaker 1: While there, I became friends with a hay farm whom
Speaker 1: we'll call Bill. He had a side business raising game birds.
Speaker 1: He would buy pheasant and chucker hatchlings from a wholesaler
Speaker 1: for around a dollar apiece and then raise the birds
Speaker 1: to maturity inside huge tent light structures made of netting.
Speaker 1: Hawks and falcons would dive at the birds from above
Speaker 1: and hit the netting so hard that they'd blast through
Speaker 1: it like it was wet and newsprint, so the upper
Speaker 1: portions were reinforced with wire fencing. Bill fitted each bird
Speaker 1: with a little piece of plastic called the blinder, which
Speaker 1: worked like the blinders you see on draft animals. But
Speaker 1: while the blinder on draft animals keeps them from getting
Speaker 1: spooked or distracted by objects in its peripheral vision, the
Speaker 1: blinder on a pen raised game bird is meant to
Speaker 1: keep him from seeing clearly enough to maul his penmates
Speaker 1: out of the frustration and anxiety that are hallmarks of
Speaker 1: wild animals that are forced to live in tight confines.
Speaker 1: When the birds were mature, Bill would sell them to
Speaker 1: want to be hunters for nine or ten dollars each.
Speaker 1: When a client called, he'd go into his bird tent
Speaker 1: and collect the number of birds that the guy wanted
Speaker 1: to shoot. He'd put the birds into cage and load
Speaker 1: the cage on his ATV, and then drive them out
Speaker 1: into a field one at a time. He'd pick out
Speaker 1: the birds and twirl them around with a windmill motion
Speaker 1: that Pete Townshend from the who famously used to play
Speaker 1: his guitar. This would put the birds to sleep, or
Speaker 1: at least something resembling sleep. Then Bill would form a
Speaker 1: little hut out of field grass and tuck the bird
Speaker 1: into it. The timing of this was delicate. He wanted
Speaker 1: the birds to come to their senses soon enough that
Speaker 1: they'd fly away when the clients came along, but not
Speaker 1: so soon that they'd wander off in search of food.
Speaker 1: Before that happened. When the clients came out, their activities
Speaker 1: certainly hinted at hunting. They would lead dogs and carry
Speaker 1: shotguns and shoot at edible birds that were flying through
Speaker 1: the air. But while game farm hunting does have these
Speaker 1: attributes of actual hunting, lacks the beautiful essence of uncertainty
Speaker 1: that is to hunting what pan drippings are to gravy.
Speaker 1: The hunter's success did not come from the fact that
Speaker 1: they'd studied the species and learned its ways and scouted
Speaker 1: its habitat. Instead, it came because they paid some guy
Speaker 1: to raise the birds and then make sure they were
Speaker 1: put out in the field where the hunters almost couldn't
Speaker 1: help but find them. One day, Bill invited me to
Speaker 1: hunt his place. This seemed like a strange choice of
Speaker 1: words for him to use. While Bill definitely advertised his
Speaker 1: business as hunting, he in no way actually thought of
Speaker 1: it as hunting.
Speaker 5: For him, hunting was.
Speaker 1: Packing his horses twenty miles into the upper Gray Bowl
Speaker 1: region of the Absorca Mountains to chase mule, deer, elk,
Speaker 1: and sometimes big horned sheep on a landscape defined by
Speaker 1: craggy peaks, narrow trails, and big grizzlies. When I asked
Speaker 1: him about this, he explained that his season was winding down,
Speaker 1: and that they were months worth of runaway birds on
Speaker 1: the property that had either eluded his clients or escaped
Speaker 1: his nets. At first I told him that I couldn't
Speaker 1: with all due respect, I said it ran contrary to
Speaker 1: my ethics. But then I got to thinking about it.
Speaker 1: I thought about how these bird species were not indigenous
Speaker 1: to this region or even to the continent, about how
Speaker 1: they'd probably never survived the winter, and about how if
Speaker 1: they did, their presence on the land was at least
Speaker 1: as false a concept as hunting for them would be.
Speaker 1: I also considered how tasty they'd be, so I went
Speaker 1: out with Bill, shot a few birds, boned them out,
Speaker 1: and cooked them in a stir fry. To this day
Speaker 1: I find myself thinking about the rightness and wrongness of
Speaker 1: that hunt, and I only mention it now so that
Speaker 1: I don't come across as overly cocky about the certitude
Speaker 1: of my own moral compass. It's helpful to think of
Speaker 1: the ethics of hunting as a form of religion, and
Speaker 1: that most people's beliefs are influenced as much by where
Speaker 1: they were born as bout what they've learned since leaving home.
Speaker 1: I grew up in an area where hunting deer over
Speaker 1: bait was the normal way of doing things. In late September,
Speaker 1: we'd sometimes drive to a carrot processing facility near Grant, Michigan,
Speaker 1: where we could buy a pickup load of oversized and
Speaker 1: misshapen carrot rejects for five dollars. We'd then go to
Speaker 1: our hunting areas and shovel these carrots into a duluthe
Speaker 1: pack and lug them into the woods near the intersection
Speaker 1: of deer trails. Once a pile started getting hit by deer,
Speaker 1: we'd add more carrots and hang a tree stand in
Speaker 1: a nearby tree. Hunting over bait, I spent an incalculable
Speaker 1: amount of cold and miserable hours without seeing a single deer.
Speaker 1: Sometimes the bow season would pass without my getting a
Speaker 1: shot at an animal, except maybe a squirrel or grouse
Speaker 1: that passed beneath my tree. The limited number of deer
Speaker 1: that lived in my hunting area had adapted to the
Speaker 1: absurd abundance of bait piles in the woods and had
Speaker 1: learned to simply avoid them during daylight hours. After all,
Speaker 1: there were plenty of other foods for them to eat,
Speaker 1: such as the apples and corn, and the orchards and
Speaker 1: fields that were often within a few hundred yards of
Speaker 1: our bait. So by using a strategy that some might
Speaker 1: describe as cheating or as taking away the challenge of
Speaker 1: the hunt, we were doing something that, in hindsight, had
Speaker 1: the effect of making deer hunting almost too challenging. Twenty
Speaker 1: something years later, I no longer hunt over bait at all.
Speaker 1: My reasons for this are not based entirely on ethics. Instead,
Speaker 1: I am not interested in using artificial bait because I
Speaker 1: am not interested in hunting animals that are doing artificial things.
Speaker 1: To go out and find a deer by solving the
Speaker 1: riddle of its natural patterns is far more enticing to
Speaker 1: me than finding a deer by interrupting those patterns. Baiting
Speaker 1: is not, in my opinion, a type of hunting that
Speaker 1: fosters an intelligent understanding of animals. But if you enjoy it,
Speaker 1: go ahead. My impression of hunting animals with hounds was
Speaker 1: formed through an equally subjective and haphazard set of experiences.
Speaker 1: My introduction to this kind of hunting came when I
Speaker 1: was about eighteen years old and was invited to accompany
Speaker 1: a raccoon hunter whom we'll call Dave. It was the
Speaker 1: late summer training season, when you're allowed to exercise your
Speaker 1: coon dogs in the woods, but you're not allowed to
Speaker 1: kill any raccoons. We went out at about eleven PM
Speaker 1: and turned the dogs out of the truck along a
Speaker 1: two track. We then drove along with the dogs running
Speaker 1: out ahead of us, the way you see some lazy
Speaker 1: people exercise their pets. We hadn't gone a mile when
Speaker 1: the dogs struck a hot trail and bellowed their way
Speaker 1: down a slope and across a creek and into the darkness.
Speaker 1: Dave cut the truck's engine and we listened to the dogs.
Speaker 1: He could tell from the pitch and intensity of their
Speaker 1: barks that they had already brought the raccoon to bay.
Speaker 1: With headlamps, we walked down the slope and across the
Speaker 1: creek and found the hounds scratching at a small oak.
Speaker 1: Up in the limbs were a female raccoon in several
Speaker 1: of her young cubs. Dave then explained to me that
Speaker 1: it wasn't good to pull the dogs away from the
Speaker 1: raccoons without killing one, because they might lose interest in
Speaker 1: hunting if they weren't properly rewarded. So he raised up
Speaker 1: a twenty two pistol that I didn't even know he
Speaker 1: had and shot one of the raccoon cubs dead out
Speaker 1: of the tree. After that, I told him I was
Speaker 1: done for the night, and I honestly figured that I
Speaker 1: wouldn't be hanging around any more houndsmen for at least
Speaker 1: a long time. But now in the deserts of Arizona,
Speaker 1: I was not only hanging out with a pair of houndsmen,
Speaker 1: I was doing everything I could to help them, And
Speaker 1: as I was learning, the pursuit of a lion is
Speaker 1: much more complicated than simply shooting an animal out of
Speaker 1: a tree. The real challenge was getting an animal into
Speaker 1: a tree in the first place. Doing that required finding
Speaker 1: something known in the parlance of lion hunters as an
Speaker 1: overnight track. That means a lion track that was made
Speaker 1: within the past eight or nine hours, when conditions are right,
Speaker 1: not too windy, not too dewey, not too rare. A
Speaker 1: track of that vintage is likely to retain enough of
Speaker 1: the lion's residual odor for dogs to be able to
Speaker 1: pick up the scent and trail it. Yet, despite the
Speaker 1: slaughter of calves that had occurred here, the previous spring,
Speaker 1: and despite the recently killed deer that we found, we
Speaker 1: had yet to locate a promising overnight track after days
Speaker 1: of searching for one. Every day, Floyd and I would
Speaker 1: wake up well before sunrise. Joe would already be gone,
Speaker 1: having left so early in the morning that it was
Speaker 1: more like nighttime. Floyd and I would head into the
Speaker 1: desert with some predetermined landscape feature as our ultimate destination,
Speaker 1: masas rocky buttes, deeply in sized canyons, high ridge lines,
Speaker 1: saddles passes, all places where lions are likely to either hunt, sleep,
Speaker 1: or travel through. Floyd is in his mid fifties, and
Speaker 1: his appearance brings to mind Robert Redford when the actor
Speaker 1: was about that same age. He's part owner of Western
Speaker 1: Hunter and Elk Hunter magazines and full owner of Outdoorsman's,
Speaker 1: an iconic Phoenix sporting goods store that specializes in high
Speaker 1: end European made optics, as well as Outdoorsman's own line
Speaker 1: of American made backpacking tripod systems. His line of work
Speaker 1: allows him to think of chasing lions as a business
Speaker 1: related activity, which means he can hunt as much as
Speaker 1: he wants to without having to feel guilty about it
Speaker 1: some years ago. He and his girlfriend owned and operated
Speaker 1: an aerial photography company. This required Floyd to buy a helicopter.
Speaker 1: I learned to fly a helicopter in a month, he
Speaker 1: told me. Meanwhile, I've been hunting lions for twenty years
Speaker 1: and I'm still learning stuff. Lion hunting is the hardest
Speaker 1: thing I've ever done, At least on this hunt, Floyd
Speaker 1: mostly preferred to look for overnight tracks without the assistance
Speaker 1: of his dogs. For one thing, he didn't want them
Speaker 1: to get tired out before it was time to actually
Speaker 1: chase a lion. For another thing, the passage of all
Speaker 1: those dogs pause has the potential to disturb the delicate
Speaker 1: evidence that a lion might leave while traveling over a
Speaker 1: portion of the Earth's surface that is covered predominantly in rock, cactus,
Speaker 1: and grass, surfaces that do not readily collect the tracks
Speaker 1: of a passing animal. Floyd calls himself a bare ground
Speaker 1: lion hunter, a description that differentiates him from guys who
Speaker 1: hunt colder and wetter regions with predictable and frequent dosages
Speaker 1: of snow, the world's most track friendly substance. While a
Speaker 1: big lion can weigh up to one hundred and fifty pounds.
Speaker 1: It can kill an elk weighing four times as much.
Speaker 1: They seem to walk about as gently as a balloon
Speaker 1: hitting the ground. The only place that they'll leave a
Speaker 1: track is in the sand, and around here sand occurs
Speaker 1: primarily in the same places creek beds. Game trails that
Speaker 1: attract a lot of competing traffic from mule deer, havevelina, cattle, quail, bobcats, coyotes,
Speaker 1: big horn sheep, and dogs if you let them run
Speaker 1: out ahead of you. Floyd spends so much time studying
Speaker 1: the ground for lion tracks that has begun to affect
Speaker 1: his posture. His natural stance has his eyes staring at
Speaker 1: the ground directly ahead of his boots. He's trained himself
Speaker 1: to tune out everything on the ground except for the
Speaker 1: tracks of lions. On average, these measure about three and
Speaker 1: a half inches from front to back and side to side.
Speaker 1: Perfect complete lion tracks are far less common than imperfect
Speaker 1: partial lion tracks. You might just see the imprint of
Speaker 1: a few toes in the sand, or the outline of
Speaker 1: a track that's interrupted by a flat piece of rock.
Speaker 1: The important part of a lion track, the part that
Speaker 1: eliminates impostors, is the trailing edge of the heel pad.
Speaker 1: It leaves an impression in the sand that looks like
Speaker 1: the bottom of three letter us placed together. When we
Speaker 1: were out looking for tracks, Floyd and I had many
Speaker 1: conversations that went like this, here's something interesting. I'd say,
Speaker 1: this has got to be a lion. Looks a little
Speaker 1: like a dog, but it's a lot rounder. You should
Speaker 1: check it out. Can you see the heel pad? Floyd
Speaker 1: would ask, No, I'd say, look for another one, he'd say.
Speaker 1: Then finally it happened. After five long days of doing
Speaker 1: little bit walking and looking for tracks, I found what
Speaker 1: we were searching for. It was blow a large butte
Speaker 1: in a dry creek bed where a few boulders funneled
Speaker 1: the animal traffic into a narrow gap. Here you go,
Speaker 1: I called out to Floyd, here's a heel pad. Sure
Speaker 1: than hell. Floyd walked over to have a look. His
Speaker 1: face registered a moment of interest, but then his enthusiasm waned.
Speaker 1: Looks to me like a coyote track where he spun
Speaker 1: around in the sand, so it looks bigger than normal.
Speaker 1: He said. Then to have Alena step down the back
Speaker 1: of it. That's what gives it a lobed. Look and
Speaker 1: notice how you don't see any more good tracks ahead
Speaker 1: of it or behind it. Just coyote and have Alena
Speaker 1: keep in mind. He went on, anything can make a
Speaker 1: lion track once it takes a line to do it. Twice,
Speaker 1: you find me two good tracks with lob pads, and
Speaker 1: then you've got something worth looking at. While I was
Speaker 1: disappointed by our inability to find a good lion track,
Speaker 1: I was hardly surprised. Prior to my visit to Arizona,
Speaker 1: I had had only three physical encounters with wild mountain lions.
Speaker 1: Each of those encounters reinforced my notion of the animal
Speaker 1: as a secretive and elusive creature. The first encounter stands
Speaker 1: out in my mind most visibly. It happened near Clearwater
Speaker 1: Lake in Montana's Swan Mountains, just after I moved out west.
Speaker 1: That night, i'd been fly fishing for cutthroat trout, and
Speaker 1: I stayed on the water until a little past dark.
Speaker 1: When I was done, I hiked three quarters of a
Speaker 1: mile through the woods back to where my van was
Speaker 1: parked on a forest service road. It was pitch black
Speaker 1: by the time I began to long and bumpy drive
Speaker 1: out toward Highway eighty three. About halfway along, I came
Speaker 1: to a place where the forest service road had been
Speaker 1: cut into the side of a steep hillside. I rounded
Speaker 1: the corner and there was a gang of meal, deeer,
Speaker 1: doze and fawns, all bunched up in the middle of
Speaker 1: the road. When I got close, they ran to the
Speaker 1: right and struggled up the steeply pitched hillside in a
Speaker 1: whirl of hoofs and falling rocks. Just as this was happening,
Speaker 1: I caught in my side view mire a sudden flash
Speaker 1: of movement and the halo of the brake lights. I
Speaker 1: shoved the shifter upward into reverse so that the van's
Speaker 1: backup lights would come on, and then I stuck my
Speaker 1: head out the window to look. There it was, standing
Speaker 1: within inches of the rear bumper, the first mountain lion
Speaker 1: I ever saw. He spun himself in a turn that
Speaker 1: seemed like wine swirling in the glass. With that, the
Speaker 1: lion vanished into the dark. Over the next few weeks,
Speaker 1: I thought about that mountain lion far more than I've
Speaker 1: ever thought about any single living creature, besides a dog
Speaker 1: named Duchess that my family owned for about thirteen years.
Speaker 1: I did a fair bit of thinking about what the
Speaker 1: lion was doing before interrupted its hunt that night, but
Speaker 1: I did a lot more thinking about what it did afterward.
Speaker 1: To the north of where I saw the cat was
Speaker 1: the largest tract of contiguous wilderness in the lower forty
Speaker 1: eight I was baffled by the mystery of that lion
Speaker 1: amid all that country. What did it do over the
Speaker 1: next few days? Where did it hunt? What did it eat?
Speaker 5: Where did it sleep? How did it react to the
Speaker 5: world that it encountered? Where did it go?
Speaker 1: As I pondered these questions and research the answers, I
Speaker 1: realized that the people with the most sophisticated understanding of
Speaker 1: mountain lions were the men and women who hunted them
Speaker 1: with hounds. By following their hounds as they track a lion,
Speaker 1: houndsmen get to literally walk in the trail of their quarry.
Speaker 1: They see where the lion hunts, They see where the
Speaker 1: lion eats, They see where the lion sleeps. They experience
Speaker 1: the land on the terms of the lion. They know
Speaker 1: where the lion goes. The lion hunter is also I
Speaker 1: found out one of the most hated types of hunters
Speaker 1: in the country. If you think of the conflict between
Speaker 1: hunters and anti hunters as a long term war, the
Speaker 1: right to hunt lions with hounds is the current front
Speaker 1: line battlefield in many Western states. This would have been
Speaker 1: unforseeable just one hundred years ago, when it was common
Speaker 1: practice for states to offer bounties on mountain lions because
Speaker 1: of the cats tendencies to prey on livestock. In Arizona,
Speaker 1: killing a lion would earn you fifty dollars. In the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties and seventies, Western states began to recognize mountain
Speaker 1: lions as an important part of the ecosystem and also
Speaker 1: as a species of interest to big game hunters. Most
Speaker 1: states reclassified lions as a game species and made it
Speaker 1: necessary for hunters to buy a legal hunting license in
Speaker 1: a mountain lion permit in order to kill one. There
Speaker 1: are several ways to hunt lions. You can attract them
Speaker 1: with a predator call, which typically mimics the sounds of
Speaker 1: wounded deer or rabbit. Or you can hang around in
Speaker 1: good lion country hoping that one of the cats happens
Speaker 1: to come along. But by far the most effective way
Speaker 1: to hunt mountain lions is through the use of dogs.
Speaker 1: In Montana, eighty nine percent of lion hunters used dogs,
Speaker 1: and Wyoming it's ninety percent. Over the last twenty five years,
Speaker 1: sixty five percent of all lions harvested by hunters in
Speaker 1: Arizona were killed with the help of dogs. Anti hunters
Speaker 1: have long recognized the importance of dogs and hunting lions.
Speaker 1: I believe that the more organized factions of anti hunters
Speaker 1: camouflage their opposition to hunting in general as a more
Speaker 1: specific opposition to hunting lions with dogs. It allows them
Speaker 1: to wage small scale legal battles against the broader spectrum
Speaker 1: of hunting without having to conquer the issue had on.
Speaker 1: Some of these battles have proved winnable, as it's easy
Speaker 1: to convince people who have never once hunted or laid
Speaker 1: eyes on a wild lion that hunt Hunting animals with
Speaker 1: dogs is somehow a perverse activity. In nineteen ninety four,
Speaker 1: Oregon voters passed an initiative that banned hunting lions with dogs.
Speaker 1: The hunting lions by other means remains legal. The same
Speaker 1: thing is true in Washington and South Dakota. Hunt lions, yes,
Speaker 1: with dogs no. If you're puzzled about how such laws
Speaker 1: could ever come into existence. Consider the results of a
Speaker 1: two thousand and one pole of Arizona residents. While only
Speaker 1: twenty nine percent of those polled indicated that hunting should
Speaker 1: be banned outright, sixty two percent indicated that the use
Speaker 1: of hounds two hunt lions should be illegal. To be
Speaker 1: perfectly honest, I was inspired by my personal lion experience
Speaker 1: to reconsider my own suspicions about the practice of hunting
Speaker 1: them with hounds. I wanted to see one of the
Speaker 1: animals up close and to experience the thrill of eating
Speaker 1: its flesh, and the only realistic way for me to
Speaker 1: do this was to join up with some high hensman
Speaker 1: and head into the hills in search of a track.
Speaker 1: If we got one into a tree and I didn't
Speaker 1: like the way it felt, I could always walk away
Speaker 1: without killing it. While we were hunting lions, Floyd's partner, Joe,
Speaker 1: slept in the back of his pickup on a pad
Speaker 1: of carpet. He kept his dogs tethered outside of the truck,
Speaker 1: scattered apart so that they didn't fight or get tangled up.
Speaker 1: When he got up at three am, he would pull
Speaker 1: on a pair of faded Levi's Danner hunting boots in
Speaker 1: one of Floyd's outdoorsmen's backpacks, and then he would unclip
Speaker 1: the pack of hounds and they would take off together
Speaker 1: into the darkness. They would cover several miles before it
Speaker 1: got light out, and then another six or seven miles
Speaker 1: after daybreak. This was an impressive bit of walking for
Speaker 1: a man who'd retired from the concrete laying business, with
Speaker 1: pass injuries including but not limited to a shattered Sternham
Speaker 1: concrete finisher, a gnawed leg, mountain lion, and a gunshot
Speaker 1: wound sustained after dropping a three point fifty seven revolve
Speaker 1: in such a way that the hammer hit the concrete
Speaker 1: and discharged around. As Joe walked, he would use a
Speaker 1: headlamp to study the earth in front of him for tracks.
Speaker 1: His dogs would range out to the sides and ahead
Speaker 1: of his line of travel with their noses to the ground.
Speaker 1: By their specific barks, he could tell whether they were
Speaker 1: detecting the recent passage of a lion. He spent five
Speaker 1: whole days this way without any significant strokes of luck. Then,
Speaker 1: on our last day of hunting, Floyd and I were
Speaker 1: getting ready to leave camp when we heard a cacophony
Speaker 1: of bellows coming from Joe's dogs high on the mountain
Speaker 1: above us. It sounded like someone torturing a gang of
Speaker 1: opera singers. Even from a great distance, Floyd knew exactly
Speaker 1: what Joe's dogs were saying. That dog you hear there
Speaker 1: with the low bellow. He doesn't make noise on an
Speaker 1: old lion trail, said Floyd. He's too old and wise
Speaker 1: for that. He only makes noise on a good overnight track.
Speaker 1: We studied the mountainside where the barking was coming from,
Speaker 1: and soon spotted the flickers of light from Joe's headlamp.
Speaker 1: He was moving quickly across the face of the mountain.
Speaker 1: There was a notch in the skyline that marked the
Speaker 1: entrance to a canyon, and soon Joe's light disappeared into
Speaker 1: that notch. The sound from the dog's barking began to
Speaker 1: fade as the distance increased. Joe's voice then came over
Speaker 1: the walkie talking. He implored Floyd to cut loose some
Speaker 1: of his dogs. Have you seen a track yet, asked Floyd,
Speaker 1: Any idea? What way the lion's going? Is it a tom?
Speaker 1: No tracks yet, said Joe, But they're really moving the trail.
Speaker 1: Just get some dogs loose and get them up here.
Speaker 1: Floyd unleashed six of his own dogs, who immediately headed
Speaker 1: uphill towards the source of the barking. Floyd then turned
Speaker 1: to me and said, we better get moving. The canyon
Speaker 1: that Joe and the dogs entered described a long arc.
Speaker 1: Floyd explained he figured that we might catch up with
Speaker 1: them by following a neighboring canyon through a straight or route.
Speaker 1: We headed across a sage patch, passed them sauaro cactuses,
Speaker 1: and then into the mouth of the canyon. The daylight
Speaker 1: grew as we made our way into the dry brown mountains.
Speaker 1: As we walked, Floyd explained the trouble of chasing a
Speaker 1: lion that the dogs could smell, but that you haven't
Speaker 1: seen a track from. While the dogs can certainly tell
Speaker 1: that a lion has passed through, they are not able
Speaker 1: to determine which direction it is traveling. This can lead
Speaker 1: to obvious and considerable confusion. As Floyd put it, there's
Speaker 1: a fifty to fifty chance that the dogs are taking
Speaker 1: to you in the wrong direction. After a mile of walking,
Speaker 1: we still hadn't heard the dogs, and we couldn't tell
Speaker 1: where Joe had gone. We were unable to reach him
Speaker 1: on the walkie talkie as the deeply cut topography interfered
Speaker 1: with the transmissions. We traveled another mile and then left
Speaker 1: the canyon bottom and started walking uphill toward a ridgeline.
Speaker 1: When we got up there, we still couldn't hear anything.
Speaker 1: I noticed a high, thumb shaped spire of rock that
Speaker 1: rose out of the mountains like a city skyscraper, rising
Speaker 1: above buildings half its height. I commented to Floyd that
Speaker 1: the lion was probably headed that way, or at least
Speaker 1: that's where I'd had if I were being chased and
Speaker 1: wanted to elude my pursuers. Floyd replied that the lion
Speaker 1: still didn't know it was being chased. He'd been here
Speaker 1: hours earlier and was probably off sleeping somewhere oblivious to
Speaker 1: our presence in the world. We pressed on. Hours went by,
Speaker 1: and the day passed into afternoon. As it would turn out,
Speaker 1: the line had indeed headed toward the thumb shaped spire
Speaker 1: of rock, whether or not he knew he was being followed. Later,
Speaker 1: Floyd and I would finally meet up with Joe near
Speaker 1: its base. By then, the dogs would have lost the
Speaker 1: lion's trail, and they'd be too exhausted to follow it.
Speaker 1: Even if they hadn't, we would find them lolling around
Speaker 1: on a jumble of rocks. Now and then one of
Speaker 1: the dogs would lick a certain rock and bellow it's saliva,
Speaker 1: having released some trace of a lion's order. Then it
Speaker 1: would head off in some direction or another, making a ruckus.
Speaker 1: I would get excited all over again, thinking that I
Speaker 1: might still get my chance to see a lion up close.
Speaker 1: But each time the dog would return, having lost interest
Speaker 1: in what was becoming an increasingly cold trail. Finally, Joe
Speaker 1: and Floyd suggested that we start the long walk back
Speaker 1: toward camp. We all had to be somewhere the next day.
Speaker 1: I walked away in silence, disappointed that I was unable
Speaker 1: to learn whether it was challenging to shoot a lion
Speaker 1: out of a tree. Getting to that final moment of
Speaker 1: truth had been quite simply too challenging.