Built to Kill: Writing the Gray Man | Mark Greaney | Ep. 433

Okay, got the red smoke. Gun run, north and south, west of the smoke, west of the smoke. Okay, Captain, west of the smoke. I'm looking at danger close now. Come on, win it, baby. Give it to me. I made it. Just clear it hot. Captain, clear it hot. Evan, the founder, is one of my best friends. Every time I see him, he'll grind stuff up and they do cupping. Oh, yeah. And he has this huge wheel of all these slices of flavors, and he's asking me, do you taste the orange? I just started saying yes, so he started leaving me alone. I'm like, okay, I guess I taste the orange a lot. With coffee, you like it or you don't like it? I lived in Guatemala for a little while, and everything was all about the roasting and the beans. I'm like, it's good. I drink for effect. Yeah, exactly. In the morning, I'm not having a coffee because I'm a fan of what it tastes like. I need to transition from my night slumber to my morning productive. Yeah, yeah. I say that about, like, you know, anything that's like it's a drug. Yeah. No, it definitely is. Not drinking a cup. So I was telling you at the coffee shop, of course, had to do research last night. My wife had not heard of The Great Man. Okay. Not that it's silly. And actually, she loves audiobooks. After I was explaining that you were coming on the show, she actually started looking up your audiobook series before we started watching the show. I'm sure. She was like, oh, okay, I can get into this. Yeah. It's a very weird Venn diagram of what she likes. She likes vampire historic stuff, which I don't know if you know that genre exists. I know it exists. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. And she likes the espionage spy thriller stuff. That's great. Well, it's weird. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff that overlaps and a lot that's really different in there. Right, yeah. So we hit play. We sit down. She, I think she missed maybe like the first 15 minutes or so before the antagonist comes in. Her first thing she says, why is Captain America being mean? Second thing was, why does Captain America have a mustache? Yeah, she's waiting for him to pull the mustache off and be the hero, right? Yeah, like I was telling you, the story, I don't know if there could be a more typecast person now. I think he did just fine. I think he's going to be okay wherever he lands. There might be some $100 bills in a safe. But it was jarring for her. I don't know if she ever got over it. She said it multiple times as we watched it. Yeah, yeah, she just couldn't get over the fact that he was the villain. All she sees is Captain America. Right, right. Which, yeah, I get it. An iconic role, and then now he's going to be doing that in the Doomsday movie. Yeah, yeah. I bet the check on that didn't suck. No, I think he's done okay. Do you think at that point, knowing that franchise is so successful, that they could almost ask for whatever they want? Well, you know, you always hear about how Don Cheadle took over. But that was early. Yeah, that was pretty early. That was from Iron Man 1 to 2. Right, right. So that was the early days. But yeah, I wonder now if Chris Evans goes, you know what? Let me think about it, if that just makes the numbers go up. Or like Thor. No, Hemsworth. He's done four or five Thors now. They want him to come back. Yeah. I saw the trailer saying he's getting ready to come back. Today's episode is brought to you by Black Rifle Coffee. Patriotism isn't a marketing trend for Black Rifle Coffee Company. It's the foundation of the company that Black Rifle Coffee Company has been built on since day one. Their American roasted coffee not only fuels your day, but gives back to veterans, first responders, and their families with every purchase. 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But I wonder. They'll get another Hemsworth. But I wonder how many zeros that no would take. Yeah, yeah. They're in the driver's seat. I think they are too, for sure. I was watching a clip of you on Rogan talking about actually the show The Great Man. You're like, yeah, not exactly like how the book went. Yeah. But I loved your response. it's the best advertising for your novels because it gets eyes on your series. Sure. Yeah. And it was incredibly successful for that. I mean, it was a $200 million movie. Production-wise? Yeah. Yeah. Whoa. Or, you know, Netflix. Yeah. And what I like to say, and this is true, and I'm a very successful author. I've got 27 books. I've been on the Times list a couple dozen times, I guess. About six days before the movie came out, I was at a book signing in Chicago. There were seven people there. Six days later, three blocks of Hollywood Boulevard is blocked off. There are thousands of people there. And the only delta in that was the movie, the movie coming out or being on Rogan? Well, this was the movie. It was the difference between me putting a book out that was not a Gray Man novel. And actually, you know, I went to other cities and had big turnouts, just, you know, that one particular turnout for whatever reason. And I'm sitting there going like, so you cannot really ever sort of over-exaggerate what this can do to somebody's career. And it's been really helpful. Did it, in the end, drive more people to purchase books as well, too? Because it doesn't really matter, right, what their entry point is as long as they find it and find their way back to your work. Yeah, I've always spent a lot of time with every book making sure every one of my novels stands alone. So I've got 15 Gray Man books. It's my 15th book. and every one of them, you can pick up number 8 and then read number 3, then read number 11 if you do read them in order there is a story arc that you can follow and enjoy, but if you don't, you don't have to they all have their own legs so I think I was on book number 12 when the movie came out it was called Sierra 6 and people of course picked that one up but then you would see you can look at your numbers you can see number 1 really bumping and then there's number 2 going and number 3 what's going on here, I wonder how they found them They call that, you know, like the long tail. And, you know, when my first book came out, it was just a little, The Gray Man, just a little paperback. I didn't get a lot of money for it. It wasn't a big deal. It wasn't like anything people were really talking about. But people would email me. They're like, oh, I love this book. And I went to buy everything that you had written. And I realized you hadn't written anything else. And I just remember going, damn, you know, it's like I could have sold another book. And now, you know, I've got 27 books. So it's nice to, nice to. Damn, that's a volume. How do you have him stand alone without having at least some nature of it being repetitive? Not in the story, but don't you have to introduce and explain the main character over and over again? Yes. And there's a shorthand that I try and change every single time. Even in sort of like the cast of characters at the beginning, I'll sort of refer to him as what you need to know about him in this particular book. Okay. Like here's his call sign with this group or here's what they call him in this book or he's just a gray man or whatever. and I will, you know, I really have it down to a couple of paragraphs that he... A couple of paragraphs? Yeah. Wow. That he had worked for the agency and for reasons he didn't understand, they turned against him and now he's doing this thing with this other group, you know. Yeah. And it's not, the history isn't a big part of most of the books. This book I really, but what happens is you throw out these little nuggets as you're writing the series And then you're on book 15 and you're going like, well, let's explore that thing with his dad. Or, you know, he was raised without a mom. I wonder what that would be like. So you do go back to those things. And then what I always tell people, and you'll, you know, you would understand this more than most just because of the life you've led. It's like when I wrote the first book very, very early in my career when I hadn't worked with Clancy and I'd never been to the Pentagon, I'd never been to CIA, I didn't know anybody. you write things in the book that you're kind of stuck with, you know, 15 books in. How do you change history? Exactly. And you're talking about how, like, he's a former SAD guy when he was, like, 25, you know, and, you know, just all this sort of, like, jargony stuff that I didn't understand the way that I understand it a little bit more now. Did you find those entities, the ones that you listed that you eventually got to work with, were they welcoming to you when you got the chance to go there were they kind of more arms open than holding you off at arm's distance no one's ever held me off individually i yeah people have been great and you know it's just funny all the people that will come up that have you know really done stuff and talk to me and you know they like appreciate the books and then and at the same time go like yeah this is silly you know obviously um it is a fictional book yeah exactly but i i I know that, too. Organizationally, you know, there's been times that have been a little bit harder. You know, there's just a process you go through. A lot of times I will just back channel the information that I need. And, you know, it's not I don't need official information about, you know, what floor this office is on or whatever. You know, so I'm not I'm not going to the Pentagon for that. I'm going to the Pentagon because I have a buddy and we're going to get lunch. and he's going to introduce me to some people. I went to Nellis, and I sat outside of the room when they had a classified talk inside. I'm the only guy out in the hall. But it's great. But it's great. Yeah, so everybody's been pretty welcoming. I remember I was writing a book about the cartels. It was the third gray man book. Yeah, and I was put in touch via somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody, and I talked to somebody who was very much involved in that, living down there. From the U.S.T.A.L.D.? No, no, no. Americans. Yeah, yeah. Working in the government. And he was just like, I don't even want to talk to you, dude. He's like, I don't want to be on the phone with you right now. And I'm like, I totally get that. Yeah, that puts him in a risky spot. How was the food at the Pentagon? I've never been. Oh, well, I think I ate Subway once. I think I ate Sbarro's once. It's like going anywhere else. The classic chains that are on all DOJ establishments. That, for somebody out there, should be a research project on how those chains have the ability to be on basis. Yeah, absolutely. Why are some allowed on and some are not? Yeah, there's money involved in that. 100%. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the older I get, the more I'm coming to the realization that money may actually be the single motivating factor for almost everything that makes this rock spin. I think you're probably right about that. That's unfortunate. Yeah. Have any of those entities ever asked you? because it's a fiction book, so you're not required for any pre-publication review, right? Have you ever had somebody reach out and say, hey, I know you're writing about something, and we would prefer you not leave this in the book? No, not once. Now, I've definitely been talking to people and ask them a question, and they'll be like, okay, I'm going to shut that down. So it's like, let's back up, let's move to the left, and then let's talk about something else. And that happens to me a lot. Okay. And like one of the funny, it's not funny for him, But one of my favorite examples of that was I was doing a thing, one of the Clancy books. I was doing some research with the Navy, and I went out to San Diego, and I'd spoken with their publicity people, and they were going to let me spend a day with one of their kind of top gun for the undersea warfare. I forget what you call it now. Do they call it bottom gun? I mean, what do you call it? Probably secretly. Michael, this is right in your wheelhouse of generation. What do you call the top gun for subs? I mean, it'd be bottom gun, right? I would say bottom gun. It was anti-Summarine warfare. ASW guys? Yeah, yeah. And this was a very young guy, and I come in all smiles, and I'm like, oh, I'm so glad to talk to you. This guy was miserable. By noon, he had told me that he'd spent the entire day before with Jag, you know, talking about what he could say and what he didn't say. And I would ask him a question, and he'd be looking up on the phone to see if it was like, you know, if it was out there. So there's a lot of stuff like that. And I felt like I was making this guy's life miserable. And I was like, I don't mean to put you through this. You know what the move is? You can lie to me at any time. Well, also, just have the JAG hang out with you, too. Take the emphasis off of the junior person. And if you're going to have to run it through a JAG or if you mess up and you're going to end up in front of the JAG, just have the guy in the room. The whole time I remember thinking, like, why am I putting this guy through this? You know, I could have just made up some BS or, you know, just like, you know. But it was cool to get the, you know, it was a Clancy book. He wanted to be as accurate as possible. But, no, he was great. He was terrific. He's probably going to watch this. He did the best he could. No, he was awesome. We were laughing about it later in the day. But those first few hours, the questions I was asking him, every one of them, I'm sitting there, he was just wishing he was anywhere else. At this point, I would almost imagine you can access all the data you need just with a laptop. There's a lot. I mean, you wouldn't be surprised. But, I mean, people would be surprised what you can learn. And, you know, a lot of times I've talked to people so often and I've been like, look, I am not looking to jam anybody up. I'm not looking to put anything in there that shouldn't be. If you want to look at it before, that's fine. Don't ever underestimate my ability to completely get it wrong and screw it up anyhow. I was talking to a guy once who was like, hey, you know, we're going to meet, but I'm going to leave my phone in my hotel room. and I would ask you to do the same thing. And I was like, oh, my God, what is this guy just full of crap? And then I meet him, and he goes, you know, here's the thing. I don't know what you're going to put in this book. And let's say a year from now that book comes out, and, you know, they ask me if I talk to you, or, you know, you tell somebody you talk to me, and you could coincidentally have, he's like, I'm not going to give you anything, but I don't know what you're going to put in that book. That's true. You could swing and hit one out of the park unknowingly, and that could be attributed to the person that you met. Yeah, for sure. Man, yeah, I held a TSSCI clearance when I was on the East Coast, and I was only read into, I think it was two programs at the time. And what I always tell people are this. One, what I was read into is not going to blow your hair back. Right. Two, it's all, I have done peripheral Google searches, not using the exact search terms. Yeah. And all of the information is actually out there. In some capacity. In some capacity. What it is is that people don't know what to search for. You'd have to point them in a hallway and say there's several doors here. Maybe work your way towards the end of the hallway. The third one on the right might have something interesting. It's all kind of out there. Whether or not you know how to access it or what you're looking for, I think, is the difference. And I think I noticed this more in the first few years when I was writing Clancy stuff. There was a lot of it's out there maliciously. There's a lot of, you know, like Julian Assange type thing. There was a website called, I don't even know on the drive. I don't know if it's still around. I shouldn't even say, but there was a website that had open source information, but it was literally like, you know, here's the back door to the NSA headquarters in West Virginia. I'm just making that up. But like, yeah, but it was all this kind of stuff. And I talked to a journalist friend of mine. I was like, have you heard of these guys? And he's like, yeah. He's like, I think that's complete treason what they're doing. You know, it's like literally they're just going like, here's the turn lane that the, you know, the agency people, you know, turn into when they go home at night. You know, it's just that level of. That's interesting. I think it's treason. Malicious for sure, without a doubt. They're not putting that information out there because they're being kindly stewards and neighbors. Right. But at the same time, are they breaking any laws by doing it? I don't know. It was up and running. I mean, that was a while ago. Hopefully it's not still in existence. But it just goes to show you that, like, I mean, open source can be dead wrong, right? And it could also be dead right. And it could also be dead right. Yeah. And for many different reasons. My favorite story about Clancy is that after the hunt for Red October came out, the old government came knocking and was like, hey, where did you get this information? And he swiftly escorted them to the library where it was all public. Yeah, like James Defense Weekly and these big tones. He was pre-internet. How do you guys not know that this stuff is out there in the library? Again, if you don't know what to look for it or it's not of an interest to you, the state secret could sit there for the rest of your life. Or you could have a, I mean, every time I think of that movie, of course, it's Sean Connery, where they switch from the Russian to English. Yeah, yeah. It's like, what a masterpiece. I watch that movie at least once a year. It still holds up. It's one of five films I've seen that, I won't say as good as the book, but I mean, like, holds up the book, Silence of the Lamps. There's just a very few to where I go, like, book is incredible, movie is incredible, but Red October is definitely one of those. Yeah. The fact that you could make that a fictional movie to the point where the government comes at knocking, like you are, you have a hell of an imagination. Yeah. And I mean, his initial printing was 5,000 copies and it was like Naval Institute Press. He didn't have a big... Of the Hunter Redux? Yeah, yeah. 5,000 copies. He did not have a big book deal. He had it published by Naval Institute Press, which had never published fiction. I'm pretty sure that's correct. and Ronald Reagan had a copy of it and was getting on or off a plane and somebody took a picture of it and it came out back when that was big news. Like if that happened now, no one would care. But that made everybody want it and then suddenly he went to the same publisher I have. How does that – so that's interesting though. Demand spikes. It's not like you can mass produce that book. I'm sure there was a scramble. Yeah, what do you do? Do you bump other projects off of the press? Because, okay, Reagan all of a sudden is cruising around. Well, actually, let's back up a sec. It wouldn't be Reagan because obviously he is no longer with us. But whatever. Whatever. Yeah, current president. It actually may not be a good thing if the current president gets a hold of that thing. It's very polarizing. Yeah, for sure. But whatever. You know, your initial printing is $5,000. The demand goes through the roof. Yeah. Especially in a non-Internet era like that. Right. How do you capture that? Like, how do you put the rope around that bull's neck without it just running out of the – I bet it was a scramble. Now they would just jam them out with e-book and overnight printing and figure it out. How quickly do you think they could solve that if you fast-forward that to today and they had a demand signal that just went stratospheric? Well, I can make an educated guess because back when I wrote Clancy books, after he passed away, I would be late with them because I was also writing my own series and a big monster Clancy book every year. How did the publisher like that when you were a little late? I'm still late. It's the same publisher. It's the same publisher. I mean, at this point, you know, it's like I'll tell my wife I'm going to be late with the book. She's like, you know, they give you extra time. I'm like, no, that's already factored in to me saying I'm going to be late. I'm going to be late with the extra time. I've pushed the envelope. It is now torn. But anyway, I think one of the Clancy books I was so late is going to give my editor a heart attack to say this because he's going to be like, now all the authors think they can do it. I feel like I turned it in, you know, the final version at some point in late October, and the book came out in December, which is, you know, a Tom Clancy book, which are this big in 400,000 words. That's going to the top of the heap, though. Sure. That's going to bump some other people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was probably a disaster. Sorry, Tom. I'm telling my editor secrets. But, I mean, it was interesting. That was a long time ago. But, yeah, I'm sure, you know, I always feel like if I'm late, I'm making problems for somebody else. I don't like to be late. But there were times in my career when I was writing 350,000 words a year. That's a lot. And then publicizing two books as well. It's a lot of work. Are you still pumped about writing? Yeah, right now I am. It's funny. I always say, like, the best part of every book is the day you kind of think up the idea. and then all the hard work comes. How do you know when you have it, the kernel that's actually going to stick? I don't know about you. I would say I have a relatively active imagination. Yeah. If I were to grade my ideas between an A to an F scale, most of them hover around a D. Yeah, but those Ds, you keep working on those Ds. No, I think. I recognize them. I'm like, no, next. No, see. No, next. That's what you think. You're saying feed the Ds? Yeah, absolutely. You're like them, pour shit on top of them? I don't think the entire time I was writing Clancy books, I don't think I ever had any kind of idea that didn't make its way into a book. Like, I don't really. I'd be like, what if it was like underground in France and the cat? Do it. You know, and then you just like, I don't have time. Just make it work. And so I remember there were a lot of things where, you know, when you first have that kernel of an idea, you think it's awesome. And then you start digging into it. And you're like, well, how would that work? How would that work? And you just keep germinating on it. And that's what I do now. So I really like what I do when I have that idea. And I sort of, you asked, like, how I know. And it's when I get interested in the book. Like, I'll come up with, like, a general idea. Oh, you know, North Korea is going to do this. Or, you know, the gray man is going to go try and find his brother. Or any little thing like that. And that's enough to, like, for me to tell people what the book's about. But internally, I'm not, like, excited. And it's kind of when I think, well, what if there was this organization that's been around since the Civil War? And you start getting into all this and you're like, well, I get to research this. And I just got back from the Austrian Alps like two weeks ago doing research on this book. And it was an idea I had like in late December. And I was like, would you really do the location research? I have a bad habit of, like, placing the book in the Alps in December or January and going in August to look at it because of just the way it goes. But I was like, I've got to get over there and look at that right now because that's what the scenery is like and really to pull that into my brain to get the juices flowing. And it worked really well. So when I'm excited about my own stuff, then I can really, you know, produce. But it's those months where you go, like, I've got an idea. I've got a word count. I've got a hit. I've got, you know, a Word document with a bunch of words on it that don't make sense to anybody, much like me. That's when it's a slog, but you get to the good part. How much per year do you think you would write if you weren't under contract? That's a good question. I, you know. Like if it was truly just. It was just because you're passionate about it. And when you, and you like, well, guess what my word count is? Whatever I want it to be. Yeah. I have, you know, a year off. Will I write? Maybe you wouldn't write for a year. Yeah. But if you were left to your own devices without the, we'll call it the publishing guillotine, which it seems like, I bet it only, like, they lowered a bit, then it just goes back up and lower. Like, I feel like it's just always in flux. Yeah, like, my books are due in the summer. The Gray Man books are due in the summer, so when I turn them, you know, the final draft in in the fall. Yeah, you just ratchet it up a few times. I'm lazy for a few months, but I know that that's coming back around. And so, like, now I'm doing publicity on last year's book, but I'm the one person going like, okay, well, next year's book's going to have to be ready this summer. So, you know, I've worked on it all day today. If I was just left in my own devices, I would not write nearly as much. I would dream and think about it and do little bits of research and I'm going to read this book about this thing. And I would do all that stuff, but the actual sitting down and writing it is the tough part. Do you think you'll ever get to a point in your volume and resume of work where you look at it and say, 27 books is, I mean, I'm sorry, that's a lot. In a good way. I mean, completely in a positive manner and respectfully. Do you think you'll ever get to a place where you say, you know what, that's enough. Now I'm going to write for me? you know i that that's a loaded question because it's not like i'm not writing for me because each book that i do like right now i'm writing a gray man book and then next year i'm writing a standalone that's not a gray man novel which is something that i want to write and i have other ideas for stuff so in that respect they're all for me but to have the schedule of them coming out the same time every year it's pressure cooker i would i would back away from that at some point I'm sure I will. And I used to write two books a year, and now it's, let's say, 1.4 books a year, you know, is the way that it's working out. My books are longer. No one's ever asked me to write long books. I guess when I was working with Clancy, that sort of, you know. He didn't seem to be boundary by word count. No, gosh, no. And I appreciate it. I grew up by Christmas present for many years. Well, I would get a couple of things, but one of them would always be the newest Clancy novel. I didn't need to bother unwrapping it because I just knew it wasn't a thing that looked ridiculously large. Me and my dad would give each other the Clancy book all through the late 80s and 90s, and that was just kind of our thing. Do you think you would like writing more if you took that stress away? Do you think you'd be more passionate about it? You know, I wouldn't even know if I was passionate about it because it would just be, I think I would probably finish a book every three or four years. My first novel took me 15 years to write, and I did nothing with it, which no one was going to do anything with it. Nothing was exactly the right thing to do with that book, but I learned a lot of stuff along that way. I started it in 1990. I finished it in 2005, and then I wrote my second novel from the summer of 2005 to January of 2006. Do you still have that first book? Yeah. Have you ever done anything with it? No, because I think I pulled out all the cool parts. You became the skeleton of other things. Yeah, exactly. That makes sense. It's like the car in the back of your house, you know, up on blocks. It was a very cool story idea, but it's very dated now. It would almost be historical fiction. It was sort of... There's a genre for that. Like I said, my wife enjoys somehow listening to vampire novels that occur in the time of, like, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. But that's a cooler vampire novel than the teen vampire novel genre and the other stuff. I'm not going to say anything about the vampire genre because I enjoy my marriage. There you go. And if she were to hear this, I don't – yeah, the vampire genre is great. Did you ever see that movie, A Blinken Vampire Hunter? Let me tell you. I was forced – well, I mean, I basically forced it. I watched The Gray Man. She forced me – she was into it, though, by the end. She was yelling at the TV. Again, mostly about Captain America behaving in a non-Captain America way. I did watch that movie. I am not a movie critic. I am not Siskel and Ebert. I would not rate it incredibly highly. Entertainment, yes. Yes. It's also a complete and utter hot mess. Of course. For what they went in to do, I think they executed. You can't have that title and then come out with anything more. How much of the Greyman movie, which, again, Captain America, Chris Evans, and then Ryan Gosling, how much were you involved in that, if any? Because at some point, somebody options the ability to write a screenplay off of the book, correct? Walk me through this process, if you would. Yeah, that's the process, exactly. So the book came out in 2009, and like a month before the book came out, we sold a film option. How does that work? You basically... So for three years, a studio has the right to make a film version of it. Do you give them a draft? Is that what they make the decision? Yeah, so they already have the book. So it's like a pre-release copy. They're getting a look at what they're looking at. Yes, yes. So they had that from the beginning. That's what they bid on, I guess. And then they didn't do anything with it for three years. Actually, they did. They got a really good screenwriter, had a great screenplay. Brad Pitt was very close to doing it. Oh, interesting. Yeah, back in like 2012. Like it was in the media and all this stuff, and it fell through. And then it got kind of close again, and it fell through again. And then the rights came back to me, and then different – I was just on phone calls like every day for like a week. Nobody cares about me. And then suddenly everybody in Hollywood wants to talk to you on the phone. Do you know why that change happened? Because the rights reverted to me. Oh, you're talking about in a short time period after you getting them back? Yeah, yeah. I got them back like on a Wednesday and within the next, you know, for a two-week period, all these people were interested in it because the screenplay that had been written, which I guess was owned by the previous studio and they couldn't use it, it got around everybody and everybody was like, this is like one of the best unproduced screenplays out there. It made people read the book and, you know, know about the series. And so once it became available again, also what had happened, I think is John Wick had happened. The Taken movies had happened, you know, all these other things that had done well in Hollywood were going on. And so I got on a call with the Russo brothers who had done, at that point, I think they'd only done one of the Marvel films, but they'd done other stuff. Yeah. And of all the people I talked to, they seemed the most energized by it and excited by it. And so we did a deal with Sony to where they hung on to it for three years. And then a whole – all these – the Russo brothers went back to do more Marvel films. Sure. Yeah, exactly. So they had to put it on a shelf, and Sony had it. And then the pandemic happened, and then the Russo brothers – like Joe Russo would call me six, nine months or whatever and go like, man, we want another crack at that one of these days. Did it come back to you again? It didn't come back to me for a long time. But then finally Sony bought it outright. So it was never coming back to me. Okay, so they owed it. Yeah, but then a deal got worked out with Netflix and the Russo brothers to make it. So you asked how much I had to do with it. When the Russo brothers first got the deal, I went out to L.A. and spent a couple days with them, talking about the series and how I saw it. And then they wrote a script that I liked. Joe Russo wrote it. And then other people got involved over the years. And I really liked the film for what it was. It's very different from the books that are written. Entertainment-wise, it's great. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like a spy genre movie for sure, kind of down the center of the road. Right. And I think when you're making a $200 million film, you have to get everybody's eyeballs on it. And so it's not going to be nearly as gritty as maybe the books are or deal with things. You know, there's things in the film that, you know, bug me. And there's things in the film where I go like, oh, that's clever. You know, I wish I thought of that. But I didn't have any say, so I was never on the set. I never, you know. The actors never reached out and maybe asked you about, well, I didn't realize that Chris Evans' character wasn't even in the books. No, there was a guy with that name, named Lloyd. You don't know if it was a first name or a last name, but he was not, you know, he wasn't like an action star. He was just sort of like a lawyer that was like behind the scenes. Definitely rewritten for the rest of the show. Yeah, but I mean, they got Chris Evans to do it. And so I think that was cool. So Gosling's character, though, would be the gray man. It's interesting that, I mean, I wonder what kind of research they do. I'm assuming they read the book or just, I mean, I don't know. Do actors even just skip that step and read the screenplay? I feel like he had to know more of the story. So the screenplay that was actually filmed involves things that happened in the first book, the second book, and like the fifth book. And characters that don't come around until later. So somebody was reading. Yeah. And I actually spoke with one of the screenwriters. He was definitely reading everything. I thought Ryan Gosling got the character so right and a lot of little aspects of it that I really feel like he must have done some kind of homework on it. But I don't know. He's a good actor. Yeah, he's very good. I mean, again, having just watched it within the last 24 hours, a lot of the stuff I think he gets right is actually not in stuff that he says, but just reactions or like a physical expression as opposed to a verbal expression. Yeah, yeah. That stuff is an art form for sure. Acting is an art form. I've watched a little bit from behind the lens, and I don't know how they do it. Yeah, yeah. No, I was very impressed by it. And when I read the screenplay as a writer, I felt like I'd seen the movie when I read the screenplay. And then when I saw the movie, it felt very different from the screenplay. And that was the, that's the, the, the actors putting their, you know, their two cents in. And I thought that was amazing. The Anna DeArmas character doesn't exist in the book at all. So to me, she kind of, kind of comes in and like solves a lot of problems that this. I mean, she's in the entire story. Yeah, yeah. So she's, she doesn't exist in the series or, or anything. And so like, I felt like, I think she's amazing and, you know, she's good in everything she does. But, you know, I felt like story-wise that it was a little bit of a crutch at certain points where she kind of like, you know, gets, you know, situations are resolved because, you know, she pops up and I'm like, I don't even know who you are. That's a constraint of time on that medium. Sure. They have 90 minutes to 120 on the far end to go from flash to bang. Yeah. Yeah. They have to solve some problems in ways that I think you need those characters for those bridges. Yeah. So the Gray Man novel is 100,000 words. It's my shortest book that I've ever written. That's your shortest book? Yeah, yeah. And the, you know, whatever a screenplay is, is, you know, 100, 110 pages of very few words on the page. Yeah. It's probably not even 10,000 words when you add it all up. So, yeah, they have to do a completely different type of storytelling than I do. If they had asked you to come and even just see how the movie was made, not even necessarily for author input, would you have gone down just to see how the sausage was made? Oh, absolutely. I mean, this was the first year of the pandemic when they filmed it, So they had all these protocols and stuff. It was, it would, so I don't think no one was excluding me. And, you know, I wouldn't have gone in and gone like, oh, I think you need to do this. You know, it bugged me when they would call like a CIA officer, an agent, you know, like little things like that. And I would have, it would have been like, you know, fingers on a chalkboard, but I wouldn't have said anything. The beauty is that bugs everybody at the agency. I'm not going to say that John Kiriakou is a friend, but I've talked with him a few times on shows and I've heard his commentary on other videos he's done. He's very upfront. Like, we watch all that stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you know it's absolutely driving down bananas, too. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure so. Which I can appreciate. And I'm sure they mess that stuff up, too, with FBI officers instead of calling them agents or the Secret Service, whether it's a uniformed division guy or an actual. Yeah, yeah. And no one would know otherwise. And then, you know, you sort of learn your lingo. You know, you ever watched a movie and it takes place on an airplane and you go like, that's not what a flight attendant would say in that situation or whatever. You know, it's just like any time you get into another world and you don't represent it right, people, it kind of looks like somebody learned about airplanes from watching movies about, you know, taking flights and not taking flights. And it's the same thing with guns or with, you know, any other thing. And I've had, you know, I get the emails from people who are like, you know, I'm an expert in thermodynamics. this is something you got wrong about cold or or i gotta write back is i'm not an expert in thermodynamics and this is a fictional book yeah yeah yeah i actually yeah i from time to times from time to time not time to times uh say things that i am at the front leading edge of my skis or over my skis about knowledge wise and yeah yeah i get some of those emails too and i mean i try to integrate it but at some point you know i actually don't know like if you were to write a fictional book about the SEAL community or your average SEAL deployment or SEAL combat operation, if you wrote it as it went and kept all of the details in there, it would be really boring. Yeah. So I think there is an aspect of the fictional being able to play with whatever you want to inside of that ecosystem. Yeah. You know, it wouldn't be boring. It would need to be edited, right? It would be boring. I mean, and then so-and-so walked to the corner and looked around the corner and there was no one there. Yeah. That's about of those 110 screen pages, it would be like 90. 90, yeah. I mean, how do you capture 72 hours of sitting in front of a computer doing planning on PowerPoint and arguing over the font? Right. I haven't seen that in any movies. Yeah. Early in my career, I was a ghostwriter for somebody who was in that community, and we had talked about an idea, and I had written the opening few scenes, and I sent it, and it took place in Afghanistan, up in the mountains. And I sent him what I had written. And he's like, yeah, okay, so the Reaper pilot would not know that call sign for him. So he would call him this. And then the people at the talk would not have a direct line of communication to these people. So they would call them this. And then I was like, okay, we're on page four. And we've got six different names for the protagonist. I'm like, you're going to kind of have to let me do my B.F. here and run with it that way. And he was great. You know, let me get away with those sort of things. But I'm sure it was like fingernails on a chalkboard to him to see everybody calling somebody Joe or whatever. I think there is an audience for people who want it to be word for word, specific and lay out all those things. There's also, I think, another audience that dwarfs the size of that first one. Yeah. That if you get that early into the minutia, they might close it up and move on to the next one. Absolutely. And then, you know, a smart editor or a smart director or a smart screenwriter is going to go like, please shut up. Let me just do what I know. Let me know. You know, let me do what I know how to do. And when The Gray Man when I first wrote it I met an agent who had turned down some other stuff But he like I like your writing I said if I write 50 pages of my next idea will you read it And I wrote this scene where it takes place in I forgotten now Iraq And it's like during the war. This book came out in 2009, so I wrote it in 2007. And a guy a mile away, he's got a Barrett, and he sees, the gray man, he sees a helicopter with Americans has crashed, and there's Al-Qaeda's got him. and just basically an act of vengeance. He just opens up with a Barrett on him and drives off. And he's a mile away. And so I gave it to the agent, and he calls me up. He's like, man, this is really good. This is just so good. You're way on the right track, everything. He just needs to save somebody. And I was like, well, yeah, I mean, but he's like a mile away, and there's like 30 Al-Qaeda guys. I don't know how he's going to do that. And he's like, yeah, well, he needs to do that. And I was like, but how? He's like, you're the writer. You've got to figure that out. And I remember, like, getting off the phone with him and going, like, okay, that's going to completely change my idea of getting this, like, as correct as I can. But it also is the reason that I'm on book 15 now. Because if I tried to make that, you know, he was having me swing, you know, for the fences on this thing. So I went back and I wrote this scene where he's like, screw it, one of them has been taken alive. I'm going to go, like, you know, cut off their pickup truck and shoot those guys. and you're going to close the distance from 10 to 100 miles exactly yeah but by myself you know a solo mission yeah yeah so but that kind of informed the whole series after that and so the agent was absolutely right um but it was not my first inclination was like i'm going to you know pretend like i really know what i'm talking about and try and get everything exactly right but he was right i'm glad people like that exist yeah keep people like you and i on the track yeah yeah otherwise that'd be just the train would be off and it'd go somewhere nobody would have come and look for it. For sure. And I've read stuff from people who are in the community that have written that is a little too in the weeds. Have you ever read Jack Carr's stuff? Of course. Yeah. His stuff, man, he flirts with having to submit for DOD approval. His first one, I think it took about 37 years to get it back, even though it was a fictional book. It's for people who know what they're looking at, who come from that world, there's a really, really high level of accuracy. And then for other people, it's just a lot of information that maybe they get behind and maybe they don't. And I can appreciate it. Jack was in my BUDS class, so I've known him for 30 years at this point. God, it's wild to say that. He is really smart to have never told anybody while he was in. He wanted to be a fictional writer. We would have eaten him for lunch and then probably an appetizer for dinner as well, too. But, yeah, I appreciate his writing. He's somebody who goes into that granular level like it was a Winkler hatchet, or he's literally describing the functioning of an M4 and the piece inside of it, or the gas system modification. Yeah. Some people are just like, hey, man, I'm driving my car here. Like, what are you talking about? Right. There's people that live for that, and then there's people that kind of indulge it, and there's people that kind of tune it out, but it doesn't bother them. And there's probably people that aren't. But you know what? Those people were never going to stick with a Jack Carr novel anyhow, or stick with my novels or whatever. So I was watching you the other day. Dear God. Be careful with this episode. Rob O'Neill. Interesting episode. It was a very interesting episode. I actually listened to his audio book when it came out, and he's the best audio narrator. Really? He could do it professionally. What did he get right that makes you say that? He didn't sound like he was reading. it sounded like I'm sitting there at a podcast and just telling me a story and that's very very rare and then if you told me that a Deb Grue guy was going to narrate his own book I'd go who knows I just did it two weeks ago how do you feel they just sent me the approved version of it they asked for no pickups no redos they said it was one of the more accurate copies that they've ever done I wouldn't do it in a million years Well, here's the thing. So it was three days. It was about six hours a day. But I enjoyed it, and I left with an appreciation for anybody who is a voice actor, by the way. Because the whole time I'm thinking about this, I'm looking at the words, and I'm like, I remember why I wrote this, and I remember how I felt when I wrote it. And I know exactly, even though it may not be on the page, where I would want the inflection or emphasis. You can kind of emote in a way that a narrator wouldn't be able to. How did anybody, and then I'm thinking about fiction. I mean, the only way I can even fathom doing an audio book as an actor is I'd have to spend like four months with the book kind of committing to memory, the sequential way that things happen so you can figure out in some way to emote at the right time. It was a fascinating process. You left that like, okay, you guys who do this for a living, absolute respect. Yeah, and think of like nine or ten different characters or 20 different characters. and all that. But yeah, no, he did good. But what I was going to say is we were talking about the minutiae and, you know, like I get off on like listening to people get real into the weeds about stuff. And you guys, you guys were like 0.003% of the world is going to understand all that stuff about the tandem jumping and all that stuff. But like, I loved it. And, you know, it's like, but people, a lot of people love it, but they won't necessarily understand it. And I understood the shit your pants part. Yes. Oh, so a canopy opens so violently that sometimes your passenger breaks their neck and you lose bowel control. OK. Yeah. I don't want to do that. And, you know, he's the type of guy that'll tell you about it. He's a great story. Yeah, he's a great story. But there was one point that I like you were talking about how nobody can really fist bump while we're not. and like to me that's like the best thing because like the stuff i like to put in my books are these just little things that make people feel like you've been there you've done it yeah and it's not just that it's funny it's just that you noted that and years later you're going like that's still a thing that like you know nobody can fist bump with nods on because there's the jet yeah yeah you're just two dudes whiffing yeah it looks awkward in the daytime plus it doesn't happen because you can actually make contact, but two idiots at the highest level of the military trying to be like, hey, what's up, bro? And you miss and just look like absolute clowns. And the only people who see it are your friends. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, but it sticks with you. But that's a wonderful inside baseball thing that would definitely go in the book. So take that. I have watched a close friend in Iraq sprinting as fast as he could get clotheslined by a clothesline in somebody's yard because he didn't see it with nods right underneath the neck. I couldn't do anything for like five minutes. I was laughing so hard. I don't think anything was going on, but if it had, they would have still been laughing. Oh, no. They would have needed to go get somebody else to handle it. I'm talking tears. He's laying there like choking. I probably should have asked if he was okay. I couldn't get a word out because I'm dying laughing. This is a JSOC command. Like, yeah, guys, we're all at the end of the day. There's monkeys running around. Yeah, I can see at night, kind of, through a 32-degree field of view. Right, right, right. Yeah, that just seems incredibly claustrophobic. It's not bad. You get so used to it. Really? Yeah. Yeah, you get, I mean, I think I have thousands of hours on goggles. And you get used to, like, a scam more than you don't realize you're doing it. You're just increasing your field of view. I've never worn them once. Really? I have two ARs, but they both have, like, real high risers just because it's comfortable on my neck. Yeah. And everybody's like, do you use Nodz? I'm like, no, I'm just sold. Well, the beauty with Nodz is you don't even have to shoulder it. Yeah. Most of the time you turn the laser on, you can have it with the buttstock a little bit underneath your arm. So, I mean, you can. And there's some optics that you can see through like Eotex that we'll have. You can actually see the reticle. It has a night vision setting on it as well, too. But, yeah, that was a fascinating interview. It was the first time he and I had ever sat down and talked, actually. Really? Yeah. No, that was interesting. No, I thought it was good. His audio book was. That's awesome. Yeah. I also, you know, I left reading my book as well. I think that if the author is willing to give it a try, I think the experience for the listener has got to be substantially better than somebody coming in blind. Right. Yeah, I would think so too. It's probably different in fiction because you have to do the accents and you have to. In fiction you have a lot of room to maneuver, shall we say. Right. Yeah. It was an interesting process. Yeah, I did sit right here at the table. They let me do it remotely. A guy was monitoring me from Zoom. swiping through on an iPad. He was telling me stories about how they used to have reams of paper that they had to come through or books, so they'd have to go back and take out the sound. Just edit the sound. The page flipping is the page. I listen to a lot of audio books, and I've listened to the Marines. This province in Afghanistan, it's read by a guy with a British accent. It sounds like he's 75, because they're not in its nonfiction. Oof, that's tough. But, you know, like some of my favorite authors are British, and they will say things, you know, dialogue-wise or whatever, that no American would ever say. You know, an American, you know, so it's all aspects of it. Do you know who the podcaster Chris Williamson is? The name is familiar, yeah. He is British, and it pisses me off. He has a Modern Wisdom podcast. He can say the dumbest stuff, but because his accent is what it is, He could literally read, I think, an encyclopedia and just have episodes that crush people like you are. I could listen to you forever, darling. Damn it. Yeah. He's got this amazing leg up. Yeah. I also wonder what we sound like to them. I don't know. Yeah. Do we all sound like we're from? Well, we certainly don't sound like he does. So he sounds a little bit. Yeah. I appreciate the British and Australian accent. I think they're two of my favorites. But, yeah, I also wonder what the hell we sound like. Yeah. Now all the British actors coming to America and they're playing like Hayseeds from Alabama. And it's like you've already got all the Shakespearean roles that we did. Totally. I'm from Tennessee. It's like we couldn't get that role. Are you traditionally trained in writing or is this just something you taught yourself? Taught myself. I never really studied or anything. I was just a guy that just read all the books. I mean, just read all the SBN Amish novels and got an idea for a story when I was in college. And like I said, I spent 15 years trying to write it. Are we talking at this point like pen and paper or were you electronic? So almost. You know, I think I started with a five and a quarter or five and a half inch floppy and then save it on a three and whatever they're called. No, it's wild. And then I was just thumb drive. Michael, do you even know what he's just talking about? A floppy disk? Yeah, I actually do know what that is. But did you see it on TikTok recently? No, I know. I know what it is. You saw it in a Jean Le Carre. People, my children, I had this conversation with them recently. I referenced a floppy disk. Yeah. And my daughter looks at me and goes, what are you talking about? Yeah. She's like, what is this floppy disk? Because it was actually a malleable disk that we had to put into the computer. Yeah. And the startup sequence was about two minutes long on the computer. And we thought we were such hot shit. Oh, yeah. And then sometimes, if you were real fancy, you would plug it into the phone. Yeah. And if anybody picked up the phone while you were using the Internet at a pace that a worm can go faster, it ruined it. And she's just looking at me like, why would you do that? Yeah. Like, oh, I'm sorry, sweetheart, that I didn't create Cat5 Internet cable when I was 16 years old. Yeah, yeah. And you just wonder what the next generation is going to be like in the next generation. I mean, I guess we know with AI and stuff like that. I think we're pretty close to having stuff plugged directly into our head, and I think that's the end of it. Could be. Yeah. We might work for the robot overlords for our daily water ration in your and I's lifetime. I mean, the people that are putting all their money into AI are going like, you know, there's a good chance it's going to kill us all. But anyway, I'm going to need to borrow more money to put into it. Yeah. I did in January, a buddy of mine sitting in that chair, we started talking about our screen time usage on our phone, which was for both of us mid to high three hours per day, which is if you add that up over a week, You're actually working a part-time job doing nothing but scrolling with your thumb. So I spent January, both of us tried to get our screen time down to under an hour per day. I got to an hour and one minute the week before last and an hour and eight minute last week. I have never felt better. That's good. It's fantastic. So all of this AI stuff, all of these devices, man, we are willingly participating in our demise. Yeah, yeah. Everybody talks about government spying on you, and it's like we've willingly given everything away to everybody. And if you look at it, think of the Industrial Revolution and all these generations where the billionaires were the people that created this or Henry Ford or whatever. And now it's like the most successful people that we all revere are people that have gotten us to give them all their information so they can throw ads at us. and those of the billionaires now. And it seems like we're going in the wrong direction. A buddy of mine had a great idea. He takes the user agreements and throws them into ChatGPT because nobody is reading that stuff. And this is, of course, a classic utilization of technology to explain how technology is just like we're now in a closed catch-22 self-licking ice cream cone. But he'll just ask it, where is this a risk to me and what does all this actually mean? I haven't done it yet, but he said the results are shocking. Because it'll tell you why not to sign. It'll tell you. Okay, so what is this 15,000 words, short story, what rights am I giving up? What permissions does this give to the person I'm signing this for, and what risk is there to me? He said there hasn't been a time yet where it hasn't spit out something where he was like, whoa, that's hidden in there? Yeah. And then highlight that section and show me the exact verbiage. And it's there in plain sight. Yeah. It's gotten so bad. This is the first year. So I've been published since 2009, and I've had books out every year. And this is the first year, probably about four or five months ago, some algorithms started picking up that I had a book coming out, and now AI can write emails spoofing real people. So every day I'm invited on 50 or 60 podcasts or someone wants to do. And, you know, there's probably a real company who's hired an agent to do this, an AI agent to do this. But it'll get like, Mark, oh, my gosh, I just finished your new book, and it's the most propulsive thing I've ever read. People can't believe, you know, I can't believe that Court Gentry did this, you know, from your third book. And it's not good. Like when you read it, you can pick it apart. It's not good right now. But I get really bad emails. You know, people write bad, and humans write bad emails too. Yes, they do. But what happens is it just chokes out. It's the same email address that, like, fans or people that, you know, have a request or want to reach out to me. So it's just choking out everything to where I can't see stuff. And someone had asked me for something, for an event I'm going to in New York, Thriller Fest, in May. And someone had asked me, you know, sent me a very nice email asking me if I would be able to do this thing for Thriller Fest. And I just didn't read it because it's like this is from Sally and this is from Fred and this is from Bob. and all day long I get them. And every one of them is, you know, done by some sort of, you know, pick me out with an algorithm. Sometimes it gets your name wrong. Sometimes it says author. But it's getting better and better. And it's, you know, it's a technology that's in its infancy. I wrote a book about weaponized AI a couple years ago called Chaos Agent and did a whole year of research. I like to sleep. I'm not reading that book. No, gosh. It's the one where you spend the entire night looking at the ceiling fan wondering, is it too far gone anyway, so maybe I just participate in the system because I can't stop it. Yeah, and I mean, gosh, the Chinese have basically decided they will hand over, you know, first strike capability to the machines at some point. And, you know, if you are – I mean, how do you counter that? You can't. Or is it counter that you do it yourself? The only thing is machine speed's got – you know, if you're waging war on machine speed, you're going to win if the other guy's not. And so unless, you know, the technology is not there. So we do have some advantages over China in AI a little bit. Hopefully we don't relinquish them. But at the same time, they're all in with it. And, you know. It is what it is. I got one of those emails last week. Andy, I just listened to the audible version of your book. And it laid some stuff out there. I responded. I said, just out of curiosity, where did you listen to the audible version of the book? Because I just finished doing it last week. Yeah, are they in the room? No response. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Something went tilt, and then just went on to the next guy. Yeah, a thousand other people. They actually just delivered the final file today. And when does it release? April 14th. I hope you give me a copy. I will give you a copy. When they finally, these stingy publishers give me a copy. I have like six galley copies that they gave me, and I think my agent sent me a couple more. But at some point, I'll send you a copy. Yeah. It's nonfiction, though. It may not be your genre. 80% of what I'll read is nonfiction, probably 90%. There's a real big step between – like, I read – I looked forward to every year the Clancy novel, like I said. There's a real big step between voraciously consuming that type of stuff and turning around and writing a novel based off of that. Sure. How did you bridge that gap? You know, I did stuff wrong a lot. I just think I was compelled to do it. And so, you know, I talked to young writers or people that are trying to get published. And I just, you know, you get to all these people who's like, never quit, never give up. And I'm like, I don't know if you should give up. Maybe you should give up because you might not want to do this as much as I wanted to do it. And, you know, there's other things I would love to do. And I probably wouldn't be very good at them. I should probably give up. before I, you know. To ever quit can be taken too far. Yeah. A real good example for that would be alcoholism. Yeah, exactly. You know, like how far do we want to go with this? You should never give up on anything. Yeah, right. What if you're addicted to methamphetamine? I think you should quit. You should try to find a way to quit. Yeah, and I mean, and if it's just not your thing, you know, some people want to have written a book. Just to say they have? Yeah, or, you know, they, yeah, I guess so. And to me, the process of doing it was something I enjoyed. Now, I was in my 20s and had sort of no success in life. I worked in restaurants, college degree. I tried to get in the Air Force OCT when I got out of college and didn't get in. And I worked, you know, selling computers. And then I worked in, you know, international sales. And but I was always just sort of a guy in a cubicle type of thing. But I dreamed of being a writer. And so I was just sort of compelled to do it. Like I would secretly do it at work and I would do it at night and I'd read novels all the time. And it was just something that I don't know if there was a point where I went from being bad to being good. But when I finished my first book, the Internet had been invented. And that's the first time I looked at, like, how do you get your novel published? It's like, well, you go to an agent. An agent will help you find an editor and whatever. And so I knew that that book, and it was also like, you know, you shouldn't have this many main characters. I knew I'd done everything wrong with that first book, but I'd learned a lot. And then I wrote a second book, and I got in front of an agent with that. And he was like, you're a very good writer, but the story isn't that compelling. Write something else. And I wrote a whole other book for him, and it had The Gray Man as the hero, but it was this book called Goon Squad. And he's like, yeah, I wouldn't have written it in first person. The plot line, I think, could be a little more exciting because you had this one subplot in Goon Squad about all these kill teams that are after him for something that he'd done in the past. And he's trying to do this thing in the present. He's like, this thing in the present doesn't interest me. But if you had another story where he had to run through this gauntlet of people that are trying to kill him for something else, that would be a cool story. So go write another book, which is like, see in a year. Yeah, totally. I'll be back on Thursday. I won't stand by for a draft. Yeah, and I remember just, you know, like being just completely depressed for about a day and then going like, you know what, you've spoken to like one of the best agents in New York who's given you a lot of positive things and told you what he wants to see. And you have to look at that as a good thing. That's a win for sure. Yeah. Even getting a response from somebody like that. Exactly. I'm pretty much in the WP. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then so I wrote this whole book literally for one guy. You know, from a five-minute conversation, I was sitting in my car in the parking lot at my, you know, my day job, you know, and he's going like, well, I'm not going to be your agent, but if you write me something else, maybe that'll work. And I just tried to execute exactly what he said. And then he said, okay, I'll represent you. And then he put it out to ten publishers, and nine of them said no, and one of them said yes. That guy was my agent from then until he just sadly passed away last year. Very young. And that editor, who was the one that said yes, is still my editor. He was my editor of my Tom Clancy books and of the Gray Man series. So all but two of the books I've done in my whole life, he's been the editor for. So, you know, I think for me it was just, you know, everybody's going like, you know, it's so great you never quit. And it was just like I didn't want to quit. I was doing it. There was a point when I was like 39 and unpublished. I think my first book came out when I was 42. I remember being very depressed about, you know, like lack of success in my life. I wasn't married, you know, and I just it just kind of occurred to me. You know what? You like writing. You like walking around, making up stories in your head. You know, even if nothing ever comes out of this, you're doing the thing that you love to do. I mean, you probably get depressed if you write books until you're 85 and never get a book published. But it was just sort of this thing where it's like, you know, you're doing what you like to do. Something good will come out of it at some point. And then within like three years, I was published and had a film deal. And within five years, I was writing Clancy books, which was, you know, complete head scratcher. There are so many people that would focus on those nine no's over the one yes. Yeah, yeah. And I do agree with you. I don't think that is brought to you by Helix. Love this company. Easiest ad read ever. Every mattress in my house is a Helix. And I started off by going right to their website and I did their Helix sleep quiz. It'll ask you things like, are you a side sleeper, a back sleeper, some sleeper for a mattress, softer mattress? Do you like sleep hot? Do you sleep cold? And it just works your way towards their recommendation. If you like it, you order this thing and it'll show up at your house really rapidly in a box that you don't think a mattress should fit into. And then you'll try to pick it up and you'll say, oh my goodness, this has the weight of a dying star. So you're going to get somebody to help you take it to your bedroom. You're going to take it out of the box, get it ready to go. You'll open it. It's going to reinflate itself. And then hopefully you have help to get it up onto the bed. And then you're going to have probably the best sleep of your life. It has 120-night sleep trial. So if you don't have the best sleep of your life, guess what? You can send the thing back. Limited lifetime warranty as well. Seamless returns and exchanges. The Happy with Helix guarantee offers a risk-free, customer-first experience designed to ensure you are completely satisfied with your new mattress. I actually have had listeners reach out, say that they have ordered a Helix. It showed up at their house. It wasn't perfect for them. They sent it back, no issues whatsoever, and are sleeping better than they have in their life. Like I said, every mattress in my house is a Helix. If you want to check this out for yourself, go to helixsleep.com slash clearedhot. Current offer is 27% off site-wide. That is helixsleep.com slash clearedhot for 27% off site-wide. Do me a favor. Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know that I have sent you. HelixSleep.com slash cleared hot. Back to the show. I think earlier in my life I would have told people that the key is just never give up. I've arrived at a place where I agree with you that not everything is worth killing yourself for. Yeah. For sure. It just might not be your thing. Yeah. There's something like your thing. I really advocate for people, go explore stuff. Like, hey, make sure you can pay your mortgage and your bills and stuff like that. But if you have free time, like, go find some stuff. And if you go down what you think is a road and it's a cul-de-sac, back out of that thing and go down. You don't have to, like, try to go get an excavator and turn it into a, you know, a road. Yeah. And those no's, though. I mean, you never know. Like, so, yeah, you got to know, and it sucks, and you don't want to keep going. But if you do, the next answer you get may be a yes. Right. Right, and you're the only one that knows. You know, it's like I think about like buds or whatever. Having somebody yelling in your face that you need to go ring the bell or whatever, I'd probably be like, yeah, you're probably right. But when he's writing, I think we need a training if we're going into it with this headspace. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think you were talking on the problem thing about some guy that, you know, like first day, first hour or whatever. It is shocking. Yeah. Every class. Didn't want to be there. I think they did want to be there. I don't know. Psyched out? I don't know. I mean, you don't wake up and end up at SEAL training. Right, right. I never stumbled into it somehow. To this day, I don't think anybody has. You volunteer for the military. You take another test in boot camp. You probably are going to go to a pre-selection program. You're probably going to have to compete for one of the slots because more people want to go than there are slots available. Then you get to Coronado. Then you're going to have to make sure you meet the standards to even start your first day. I don't think anybody does all of those steps with the intention of, I just want to quit a little bit farther down the line. Right. The first day of every class, people are quitting. I just, I don't understand it. Yeah. Maybe, I do think an aspect of it is, it's tough to prepare for somebody, an instructor, that is that, I don't know the right. Intense. intense in your space can make it feel as if like they're never going to go anywhere for the rest of your life right and they if they get you if you get there and they're able to get you to question yourself i would say your odds of graduation are going down for sure right but also what did you think it was going to be yeah use the internet go do some research yeah a lot of this is on youtube you can kind of see what it's going to be like and again there's a difference between watching a YouTube video and living a YouTube video. I get that. But man, don't you want to see at least day two? Right. That wasn't their thing. It definitely wasn't their thing. A row of helmets under the bell that would confirm that that is not their thing. It's an immense effort to show up on day one. Right. To throw the towel in then. Because it's not giving you anything you could go back and brag about. I mean, unless you spun it in some incredible way. There is some of that, my friend, let me tell you. The thing that always kind of breaks my heart is the poor guys that twist an ankle or just the medical stuff. And it's like, who knows? Mentally, probably some of the best SEALs that ever would have lived broke their foot. You can come back. Yeah. You know, unfortunately, being injured once doesn't statistically reduce the chance you might be injured again. And honestly, a lot of it is luck. And I didn't know that until I went back as an instructor. But, you know, it's not an immense amount of rain that comes in San Diego, but it's foggy at times. And one of the obstacles on the obstacle course is just that it's a wall. It's a vertical wall, and there's a small section of wood, kind of like a two-by-four, I guess it would be, for your feet, then another one for your hands. And it starts low, and it kind of goes its way up and comes down. I don't know how often they switch out that wood, maybe once a decade. Point being, it's not the flattest platform. And this is the obstacle. This is almost at the end of the obstacle course. Foggy morning. Yeah. You roll in there. Really moisture permeated. Yeah. A couple of people have gone before you. It's not that high of a fall. And I've watched quite a few. Here it is right here. You know, so one on the bottom for feet. And you can tell, look at the bottom one. That is no longer screwed up. And you literally just, you shuffle. You scoot along. You have the big boots on. Yep. and you reach up here. He's going to reach up with his hand probably. That's not how I would have done it, but whatever. What do I know? He's a white shirt. Hasn't even been through Hell Week. Yep, body and hips close to the wall. This is basically what Alex Honnold will tell you when it comes to how to climb stuff. I always went hand first and then brought my feet up because you could kind of anchor and then pendulum your body up there a little bit. But imagine that water-soaked. Right, and you're not the first guy doing it. You have boots, right? And those boots are not, you know, mountain climbing boots with a talon hook with, you know, rubber on their design. And usually it happens right about where this guy's at. They'll peel off, oftentimes on that obstacle right there. And there you go. And you start over? Well, it depends. But it's timed, right? You get three chances at every obstacle. So you could go back, but you have to complete it. But that fall doesn't look like it could be journey ending. Right. The number of times, you know, the classic you reach out to stop yourself. Oh, yeah. Double wrist. Break your wrist. Or, you know, you come off a little bit of an ankle. Like you said, your ankle goes and you roll it. I mean, that's the end. Yeah, yeah. Sorry. There's a lot of luck involved in that. I remember reading when it came out, the Mark Owen book. You can say his name. I don't say his name. He even says his name. I know he says his name. Matt Bissonnette. Bissonnette, yeah. And he sent it in there, just kind of made me laugh, like the Nas thing, because he said he always felt like he had wimpy little ankles or something like that. Sissy ankles. He had trouble with his ankles at different times. He was going like, oh, you wouldn't think that anybody would even think like that, that was doing that prolific. We all have our Achilles heel, and sometimes it's, I guess, really close to the actual Achilles heel. Yeah. In his case. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Biss. He got, let's see here, I would say it took about six hours when that book came out for people to figure out who he was. Really? Well, maybe don't put your actual hometown in Alaska that you're from, that seven people have lived in since the history of mankind. I mean, I don't know. No, Biss is awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, one of the things that fascinated me about your background is the volume of research that you do and all the places that you've gotten to go and things that you've gotten to do. How do you line that up? How are you able to work with SWAT teams or get an invite to the Pentagon or go to the agency? And again, this is like the wavetops. Actually, I won't have Michael do it, but your Wikipedia page is like, then he did this and this and this and this. I'm like, holy cow, man. I don't write my Wikipedia page, for the record. I don't know who does. The internet does, and that's a dangerous thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They have my birthday wrong. So like in October, people will be like, happy birthday. Or somebody, I was being interviewed live. So I'm meeting the guy. It's like, hey, you have the same birthday as my daughter. And I'm like, July 11th? He's like, no, October 15th. I mean, they have the same birthday. Yeah, and I was like, okay, it's wrong. You know, it's just over time. So really how it started when I was writing my first book, I just knew I needed to learn guns. I just wanted to learn guns. and I didn't grow up around guns other than my mom was a Kansas farm girl who had like a little .22 revolver. And we would go to the gun range at the Sheriff's Department gun range every now and then. And, like, all the old guys would, like, hit on my mom because she was, like, such a good shot, you know. And so, I mean, I shot when I was young. I mean, were they really hitting on her because she was a good shot? No, probably not. But it's too traumatizing to think about it. I see where you're going. Like, that could have been a causal. Yeah, she was corollary. She was the pretty lady in the 1980s at the gun range. I think that there probably were not many pretty ladies at the gun range at that time. Yeah, that's what I'm waiting for. The ratio of male to female there is going to be quite askew. Yeah, yeah. And so I just wanted to learn about guns, and so I bought a Glock, and I went to a local gun range and took a class and took another class, and then somehow found myself in a class that had no business being in it. The law enforcement guys were just really, really good. But everybody, you know, it's a community that's incredibly welcoming. It really is. And people don't know that. And people don't know that. And, you know, I feel like I straddle, you know, 50% of the people I know are conservative and 50% are liberal. I mean, conservative doesn't mean what it used to. I don't think liberal does either. No, I don't think it does either. But anyway, conventionally. Yeah. And I'm always telling people, like, you know, people that will help you out more than anybody are like gun people. And I would take more classes, and I'd just sort of, like, fall into something else. And I started training at a place in Tennessee that was training a lot of military contractors. You know, this was in the 2000s. And I would take a class that was a little bit more sophisticated than last time, and then a little more and a little more. And I got into carbines. And I just got into it. But really, meeting the people in the team rooms and the bunkhouses where you'd stay, you'd take like a week-long class, and it would be somebody who flew drones at Creech or it would be somebody who was in FBI or whatever, some tactical unit here or there, and they knew people and they knew people. And people were already super friendly and welcoming before I ever got published. So it wasn't like, oh, it's the writer guy. Let's do something nice for him. I mean, that came first. I had a lot of social anxiety. So I wasn't the guy that was going to call up the Pentagon and go like, hey, how do I go about this? But I knew a guy who's like, hey, let me introduce you to this person. And then once I started writing for Clancy, that opened up a lot of doors. When I did my first book with Tom Clancy in 2011, I wasn't allowed to tell anybody I was working with him the whole time I was working on the book. because they weren't even going to, you know, sort of announce the book until it was finished. And, you know, Tom was happy with the product and all that. So I remember how frustrating it was because I was like, I've got to go talk to an F-18 pilot at the Pentagon. And I just have to be me. I can't be like Tom Clancy's co-author. Yeah, that's a little bit of a box. Yeah, yeah. The next year, after that book came out, the next year the doors opened easier. But, you know, I've gotten to fly in an F-18, which is an amazing experience. I've gotten to be on different ships and do some cool stuff. And then I just do a lot of research on my own. I learned to scuba on my own. Yeah. Not on my own, but not through anything else. And then I still take the firearms courses. And I own a lot of the guns that are in the books. And I go to the locations as much as I can, not with every book. But usually, like, for the hard line, I went to Northern Ireland and spent a good bit of time there. Did a lot of research around D.C. and Virginia where much of the book takes place. For next year's book, I went to Austria, and I'm going to the Caymans. So some of the travel is, like, really awesome. And I'll go with my wife. It's going to be cool. You can really craft vacation. Like, listen, what, do you want to go on vacation this year? I've done that. I've absolutely done that. For a tax strategy, we need to do research. I saw that movie, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and I'm like, man, Sweden looks cool. I'm going to do a Grey Man book in Sweden. That was a great movie, too. Oh, it's still good. Actually, both versions were good. I saw the first one. It was a Swedish version. I did not know they had a Swedish version. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I saw the one with James Bond. Daniel Craig, which was fantastic. They remade it like two years later. It was such a success. Yeah, and so I went to Sweden because I wanted to see that area. So I've done that before. I'm lucky to be able to do it. But, you know, I don't come from the background, you know, that a lot of people who write these books come from. I don't come from Jack Carr's background. I remember thinking in the 2000s when the wars were going on, I was like, I want to be a writer. There's going to be a lot of these dudes 10 years from now fighting for the same, you know, readership. And I don't. Well, have you found that to be true? Maybe not, you know, the big writers in my genre, other than Jack Carr, like Brad Thor, who's not, you know, former military alum. Yeah, not like his books as well. They might have the lived experience. Yeah. It's a different skill. It's a very different skill. To be able to put it down on paper. The one that I would say, I mean, I don't want to shortchange anybody. Definitely shortchange Jack Carr. I love Jack. I'll send him the clip. Do you know Brad Taylor? No. Okay, so he's a former Delta guy who writes the Pike Logan series, and he's got, gosh, a dozen books. We came out about at the same time. His books are really, really good, but he doesn't parlay Delta. Like, his character is not, you know, Delta or anything like that. Of course not. That's completely on brand for a guy from CAG, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I would say he's more, like, hard-ass about that than a lot of people. Like he does not market in his past You know he one of my best friends He a great guy but he able to write the books that have the humor and all these other elements and they don get too far in the weeds. It is a different, like to me, I feel like I benefit from kind of like fanboying on stuff that I don't directly know. So when I'm talking to a friend of mine, who's like a, you know, a slot instructor or I'm going to like a, I'm playing op four at a shoot house with SWAT guys. Like I'm picking up on real little things that these guys who do this all the time aren't maybe appreciating as much as I am. And I'm parlaying that into, you know, I'm trying to be a representative for the millions of readers that will read my book and not trying to be the been there, done that guy. I bet a lot of those things you're picking up on, those communities don't even realize they're doing them anymore. It's just, it's, it's white noise in the background. It's habitual. It's ingrained in their tactics. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of specifics of that when I'm getting when I'm talking to somebody for research, because a guy will just be telling me all about radio frequencies and this and that detail. And then they'll just basically as an aside, you know, say like, you know, yeah. Just something that's not interesting to them. They'll be like, oh, yeah. A lot of those Taliban had Makarovs and, you know, be like, OK, let's talk about that for a minute. And let's not talk about what frequency this guy would be on. Yeah. And not to insult anybody, but it's literally that's the thing that interests them. And I was talking to a guy one time, and he was showing me some video of some breaching thing, and it was very involved. And then I was like, well, why are they pulling this over here? He's like, well, they're just putting a gun port in there because they can't, they don't have an angle on that. And I was like, what's a gun port? Let's talk about that. Exactly. Blowing a hole in the wall. Also, you know, it's like we can talk about that and less about exactly how much C4 has to go, you know, on that joint or whatever they're talking about. Yeah, the audience, first off, there's an argument to be made that nobody needs to know how much explosive. Yeah, yeah. Or the minimum safe distance. Or you can talk about MSD and stuff like that. Yeah, you can talk about the portholes or gun holes or, you know, gun ports and all that stuff. Yeah. What's the coolest trip you've been able to do under the guise of research? Or for legitimate research. but they tied directly into one of your novels. Yeah, I mean, I got to fly an F-18 in New Orleans. That's pretty sweet, isn't it? That was an amazing experience. Did they let you fly? Never mind, don't answer. I already know the answer based off the response. Yeah. I don't think they're allowed to, but I understand what you're saying. So, no, they did not. No, it was very, very cool. We got to do like seven and a half Gs, and I didn't throw up. It was the best part. I kind of wanted it. I said I was in that flight for like 90 minutes, and in about 75 minutes, I was really enjoying myself. So there was about 15 minutes where I was like, I don't want to do it. You started sweating. Oh, yeah. That's when you know. Yeah, yeah. It's right around the corner. Yeah, and I didn't pass out, but I remember telling myself, you know what? It's okay if you do. People do all the time. You know, like it was – As you're graying out. I was totally graying out. I was like, let it go. And then right then was when you pulled out of it. So I was like, yeah, I think I was going. It was cool. Those jets and those pilots, man. Yeah. You want to talk about a special skill set? Oh, for sure. With practice and reps, yeah. Yeah. I was able to do, I was a JTAC while I was in, and let's just say that the difference in optic from the ground looking up is way different than the up looking down. It was so helpful to be able to get up in one of those platforms. To get the experience so you can better describe. The sortie that I was with, I was just in the backseat, same thing, and they were doing simulated close air support runs. So I got to simulate being the JTAC from the backseat while looking at what it is they can see, which is such a vast difference. Controller on the ground, you're limited by 200 meters south of the red building. Right. Well, if they're orbiting at 15,000 feet and see 37 red buildings, that is not helpful. So really, if each of those people, the JTAC and the pilot, have a palette that they're going to paint on, it brings them a lot closer to be able to talk about things. Because even in the school they'll say, you know, talk big to small. Well, yeah, big is 100 yards away for me is microscopic to the dude who is in an orbit trying to not only fly the machine itself and set up the systems but also visually orient himself to the talk on him trying to do. Yeah. He could go like, hey, do you see the mountain? Let's start there. Do you see this bend in the river that arcs from east to west and then comes back? Right. It changed the perspective quite a bit. But it was, man, yeah, my head bounced off the canopy a few times. Oh, yeah. Didn't see some of the turns coming. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so we were one ship of four, and the other three had cannons. And they were doing gun runs in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. And we weren't allowed to have guns on there because I was on there. They don't want you taking over as fast, heading up towards D.C. Yeah, yeah. No, I was, like, the whole time I was just kind of looking at that ejection thing. And I told the pilot beforehand, I'm like, you know, you had to go and do the training. And I was like, I'm not pulling that. If we're four feet off the ground and we're going Mach 1 right into it, I'm going to just hope that you get me out of that. I think they can push you out from the front. They definitely can. In fact, I asked him. He's a friend of mine. He's an author now, Jack Stewart. And I said, so if I pull, is it going to throw you out? And he kind of was, like, uncomfortable for a couple seconds. He's like, ordinarily, yeah, I've actually turned it off to where if you dump yourself out. Have you seen the recent video of the F-15? And I immediately sent it to him. I was like, who loves you, baby? So glorious. So glorious. The guy accidentally punched out? Yeah. Yeah, that's a real rough day. God. That aircraft is not going to be flying for quite some time. And he was a backseater? Yes. It was a, I forget the exact terminology, but essentially it might have been like a re-enlistment, like a bonus flight, essentially. Right. Well, I guess he did fly for a few seconds. There was flight, I guess. Oh, here it is. Oh, my goodness. Poor guy. I mean, this is my nightmare. Yeah. He's already out, yeah. Yeah, he's already out, yeah. He's smoking back there. I love how, I can appreciate how the pilot's just continuing to taxi along. Oh, my God. Is that guy in the front seat going, I guess I got some paperwork? I don't know. Let me see if I can find where he's actually ejecting. I feel like there is a robust amount of paperwork for just about everybody involved, maybe even the guy who filmed that, writing what they saw from the outside perspective. That's an expensive mistake. Poor guy. I mean, you know, I was just... You should say poor guy. Also, don't touch the handle. Oh, God. What's the last thing you do before you take off is sort of like arm the seat? feet. I don't know if this is the same one, but it's... There he goes. You know, it's amazing. What are you thinking right now? It's amazing they function from zero-zero. Yeah, it is incredible. Wow. Oh my gosh. Michael, I'm not going to lie, I could see you doing something like that. Yeah, so you're going to take me on a jet ride? No, no, no. I'm just saying I could see you arming the handle and then asking yourself, didn't you say, was it twist then pull? or a pulled head twist to test it out. And the next thing you know, you're just, I wonder what this did. He got like three seconds of flight out of that. You know what I mean? So technically, he did leave the ground, yeah. Oh, my God. When did your first book hit the bestseller list? So my first book was The Gray Man. I don't mean sequentially. I mean, like, what book for you was your first one? Oh, okay. So book, well, really my first Tom Clancy, first book I wrote with Tom Clancy hit number one. and that was 2011. Well, I knew there was an actric because it was his name that made it hit number one. Who gives a shit? No, that's exactly what my editor said. He's like, well, you know, you've always got, you will forever have that next year, your name. And so my sixth Gray Man novel hit the times list. Was just straight your name? Just straight my name. And then they've all hit since. How does that feel? It's great. the landscape has changed so much. There's so much TikTok promotion of certain genres of books. Are you being serious when you say actual TikTok? I'm clearly being serious. Yeah. So there's some authors that will be on the times list for two and a half years, or, you know, like 180 weeks with one book. With a title? Yeah, yeah. And they'll have four or five titles on the book. I wonder what somebody else will pop out. I mean, trust me, you can guide Michael. He can be your weapon. You can fly him like that F-H-E-M. Are you talking about those, like, smart books, basically? Yeah. Oops. Go back to that. I've never heard of BookTok, which that is T-O-K for the listening audience. It's TikTok with the book. Yeah, and it's completely changed the times list. A massive influential sub-community on TikTok focused on sharing, reviewing, and rec. You know, this digital world where the short-form content is so easy to share. Yeah, yeah. You know, why can't they tell you what it takes to end up on the list? Yeah, it's a closely held secret. Why? I don't know. The numbers seem to be opaque. The genre of book, sometimes it has a better chance than others. The release time. Why is this so opaque? I don't know. And who doesn't favor by being opaque like that? And I've never heard anybody in the industry who seemed to know, you know, any more than I do. Um, but yeah, I've hit, uh, number one, number two, number three, number five. I think my first time I was like number 13 and then it was at number seven and it was number five. And I hit number one, uh, four or five books back. And since then things have really, really changed. So I can, I can three or four authors are going to have like four or five of the top 15 and there's 15 on the list. And, um, you know, and I'm happy to be on the list and I've had realized three or four authors were monopolizing that much space. Yeah. Yeah. And that's nothing against them. I mean, if I was in their situation, I'd be pretty happy. But, I mean, there's just less room for other genres because some genres just don't, you know, TikTok doesn't move the needle for... Are there different genres on the New York Times bestseller list? Like, is there one for, say, fiction? Do they separate fiction and nonfiction? They separate fiction and nonfiction. They also separate combined e-book and hardcover and then just specifically hardcover. but they don't say like this is a thriller or this is romance or romanticy or all these other different um so what's going on here is there some skiff at the new york times where somebody is down there i don't know a hamster running on a wheel just spitting out three by five i have never had a gray man book on there for two weeks so i i've hit number one and it was awesome and the next week it's not even in the top 15 so what yeah it's but you know you're i'm not complaining and I'm very thrilled of being there. And I have some friends that are fantastic writers and doing very well, and then one year one of their books won't hit the list. So you just never know. I know to never take it for granted. I think I hit number two last year and couldn't have been happier. How does it change your life, or is there any appreciable difference, or is it just a nice reward for yourself, a recognition for what you wrote? I think it's important for the publisher, and, you know, for me, just raw sales is what I want. You just want eyeballs on your book. For sure. You're writing it for a together. Yeah, the 20 years I was writing before anybody read my stuff, you know, you dream about, you know, having people read your stuff. So it's like there's never a number where you're like, oh, I've got enough people reading my stuff. And my sales have gone up every year. I won't say I've maxed out in this genre, but I mean, I want to write some, you know, slightly out of genre at some point just to um and i'll do that next year to kind of like you know see if i can pull in some new readers to write something a little bit different but um you know you just you i'm lucky to be here i i thought i understood some sort of a formula not formula but i thought i understood what it takes and i have friends who have had books out and i go like that guy is every bit as good as me like why is he not taking off like i have and i have no idea The publishers can't tell you either. No, no. I don't understand how this system that carries a lot of gravitas with it. I mean, somebody somewhere, I'm assuming, knows how this works. I'm assuming they're at the New York Times. But it is fascinating. I mean, if they were at the New York Times and they knew how to sell books, they'd probably leave the New York Times and start a publishing company. Then where is this warehouse? Where is this knowledge center or decision maker? It's a king to a degree. It is opaque. It is very, yeah, I don't really know. But, I mean, it's like when you're creating art, people, you know, you've been to an art gallery and you've seen, like, a streak of black paint on a white thing and go, like, well, that's bullshit. Well, I guess it's a $30 million painting. Exactly, you know. And I still, you know, go, like, okay, that's subjectively that's, you know, objectively that's terrible. And it's the same thing with any type of art, I guess. It's just what people are interested in. And I don't ever write my books going like, well, this will get me new readers by turning the story in this direction or having the character do this. I feel like that would be cheating readers. I also think you might do the opposite of getting new readers. Yeah, I think it would kind of destroy things. I'm going to keep trying to execute what I think would be cool and fun and interesting and explore different things and desperately try to not write the same book twice. And that's the tough thing at this point in my career. If I think up something cool, I have to go, okay, have I done that in one of my previous 27 books or is this new? And that's what I struggle with most probably, not treading over ground I've treading over. 27 is quite a dossier. What was it like working with Clancy? I mean, he has got to be one of the, in the modern era, I'm not obviously talking like historical writers, but he's got to be one of the most recognizable names in literature. Yeah, yeah. He was the biggest for a while, bigger than Stephen King for, you know, a period of time. Yeah. And I got the call. I had two paperback books out. I had turned in my third book. I was waiting to hear from my editor and I got a call from my agent and he's like, are you sitting down? I was like, yeah. And he's like, how do you feel about co-authoring the next Tom Clancy novel? And I remember just thinking like, why can't I co-author the next guy who's like one step above me instead of like, why does it have to be Tom Clancy? I was so scared. And at one point they were like, you're going to go to Baltimore and meet him and I just remember just being like, oh my God. I don't want to do this. This is freaking me out. But I was like, you can't say no to this, obviously. No, I feel like the answer to that question is don't ask me stupid questions. Just put me down in the hardest of yes columns for that. I wish manly-wise, I wish that's what I said. I mean, I remember just going like, oh, my God. That's like looking at the Grand Canyon, thinking you might broad jump across it, especially at the point where you were at where you had some books out, but not as proven as where you were at. I've never had a hardcover book at that stage in my career. Yeah, and that dude is on top of the mountain. that's on top of the mountain. Yeah. But I was a huge fan of his, and my editor knew that. And I remember it wasn't like you're being offered the job. It's like, do you want to have your hat thrown in the ring? And I was like, yes. And it was taking a while for them to decide, you know, if I was the guy or not. So just on my own, I said, what if I do a tryout? What if I write, like, 50 pages like it's a Tom Clancy novel, just so I can show everybody I know who Chavez is and I know who Clark is and I know Clancy's relationship with his wife or Jack Ryan's relationship with his wife. Also, what you just described is probably the best test as to whether or not it's going to work in the long run anyway. Exactly. You can let everybody do that. Yeah, exactly. So I just did it on my own and I gave it to my agent and I said, should we give this to the editor? And he's like, yeah, this is terrific. So I wrote this like fake scene that took place in an airplane over Paris where they're like halo jumping into the Place de la Concorde because the American embassy or consulate is right there and they've been taken over by Terrace. And there was no beginning, no ending. It was just this thing. And I gave that to them. And then I went and met Tom and had the job. But again, it wasn't going to be something I could talk about until like a month before it came out. And this was like February and the book came out in December. So that whole year I was working on that book and just really just sweating bullets. But it was called Locked On, the first one I did with him. And then we did three books. And then the third one was called Command Authority, and it was about Russia invading Ukraine and taking over Crimea. And it came out. What year did you write this? It came out in December of 13, and that happened in February of 14. And Tom sadly passed away in October of 13, so it was like two months before the book came out. And then really quickly the family asked me if I would keep writing. the Jack Ryan series. So I did seven in six years. And I was, um, I said, it's time to get some new blood in here because I had, you intuitively knew it. Yeah. Yeah. And I was like, this isn't a money thing. This isn't anything like that. This is just, I feel like I have said the stuff I know how to say in this world right now. And I kind of knew like at some point I'm going to want to do another one. And the idea of it is always appealing to me, but they've gotten other great authors to, to continue that series how was he as a person to work with so what you thought so he was not what i thought because i'd sort of been warned that he was real cantankerous and i'm using words like cantankerous to avoid using other words that age and generation when you say cantankerous i know exactly what you're talking about but he wasn't i mean it was it was uh a very cool experience to meet him, to be around him. And I think I instantly went up to Baltimore, and I was supposed to talk to him for like 45 minutes, just shake hands and whatever. And I think I was there for like five hours and had lunch with him and his wife, and I had to go get on a plane. And it was really a good experience. Now, there was never a point where I felt like, These are two peers talking about their craft. He was the master, and I was, you know, he would talk about like, yeah, you know, and I was sitting there having lunch with Freddie Forsythe, you know, Frederick Forsythe, and I was like, you know, like when he was a young author, he was talking about the same thing, and I was going like, yeah, this isn't really like that. I'm so new at this. How do you think he felt about it? Do you think he looked at you as a peer? Honestly, probably not. I mean, he looked at me as a guy that was going to do some heavy lifting, and I came highly recommended, you know, from the publisher. And they, you know, obviously read what I'd written. And so I think, yeah, I think he was hopeful. I think he thought, it was funny, when I first went into his office, he's like, so what are we going to talk about? He's very kind of cantankerous. And I just, you know, I was like, do I just sit here and, like, kiss his butt? You know, I was like, I'm not really going to do that. So I was just like, you know, here's ideas I have. And, you know, I've just been a – I did say I was a big fan. And at one point he said, you know, the best thing I ever wrote was – I can't remember what he said. And I was like, I've got to disagree with you. The best line ever I read in a Clancy book was about John Clark, who was the Navy SEAL. Yeah. And he was talking about – he was talking to another guy who was in the Navy. And then the guy, Clark said, well, I was in the Navy. He said, oh, what were you on? He's like, my belly most of the time. I just thought it was a really good line. I was like, that was just like a great line. It was like six words say more than like, you know, than six words. And, you know, we got along really good. And it was great to work on the series. And when he passed away, so I didn't do any promotion when he was alive because, like, they're not going to send me out as the co-author. But after he passed away, the first book that I did, I started to do promotion for the Tom Clancy books, which was awkward because you'd go to sign it at a military base, and the niece of somebody, some military officer, sees you at the PX, and it says Tom Clancy, new book. It had my name on there, but nobody sees that. Second billing. And they would come up, oh, Mr. Clancy, my uncle loves you. He's going to love this book. And I'm like, I can't really sign his name, so I have to explain that I'm not that guy. should have done a stamp. Yeah. But, yeah, but when I went out, I was sure that people were going to be so grumpy, you know, because Tom had just passed and I was going to continue the Jack Ryan series and I knew I was going to get, just get like tomatoes thrown at me at these bookstops. And it was exactly the opposite. It was people going like, thanks for keeping these characters alive and thanks for, you know, representing them the way that they should be represented. I never tried to write like Tom Clancy because that would have been, you know, it wasn't my job. It was, It was keeping those characters alive in contemporary situations that were happening in the world that Tom wasn't able to have Jack Ryan in. And so as long as people want to read those books, I hope and imagine they'll keep them out. I don't think if you had tried to write in his style, it would have worked. I mean, there are a few people out there that I truly think they break the mold with. That man may have been one of them. Yeah, and I remember talking to him and saying something like, you know, well, when you started this genre, this techno-thriller genre, he's like, I didn't start the techno-thriller genre. And he kind of talked like that. Like, he was just a little snappy, but not rude, you know. Cantankerous. Yeah, cantankerous. I'm, like, dialing it back, and I'm saying, well, that's exactly what it was. But he's like, Michael Crichton started that. I just made it about espionage and military. And I thought that was good. You know, that made sense. Jurassic Park and all those great Michael Crichton books that were that level of depth. And you couldn't write a Tom Clancy novel like Some of All Fears or something and put it out today because he got so deep into the minutiae of stuff. That one is one where the book is far superior than the movie. Absolutely. Yeah. I don't know Ben Affleck. I'm not throwing shade at you. He did a great Batman. Man, that book is so much more deep and complex. But again, 90 minutes to unpack. Sure. God knows what the word count on that was. Well over 200,000. I just know from writing 200,000 word books that that one's probably longer than anything I've written. What did he think about his volume of work, looking back? That's a good question. I don't know. We never talked about it like that. I remember asking him if he had a long storyline when he wrote his first book. because his first book, Red October, takes place after the events that are in Patriot Games, which is his third book. Oh, that's right. If you remember that. Yeah. I wouldn't have been able to say that unless you ever mind me about that. Yeah. And I was like, did you see that? And he's like, yeah, absolutely did. And I think a lot of authors would say that. I'm like on panels at writers' conferences, and I hear authors say things, and they're like, I don't believe that guy. That happens all the time. But it's like I believe that. It's a good crowd answer, though. Yeah, yeah. But I totally. Just working the crowd mark. I totally believe that when Clancy said it. And, you know, with me, I was just trying to be a published author. Like, I didn't see it as a series. And they came to me, and they're like, do you want to write two more in the series? I was like, yeah, what do you want them to be about? And they're like, you've got to think that up, dude. You're the writer. And I'm like, okay, that's how that works. But, yeah, Clancy, I don't know what he thought about it. I mean, I'm sure he was super proud of it and probably cantankerous to anyone who didn't like it. I know that he had talked to me about getting emails from people that complained about something and about how he would sort of like put them in their place or set them right. He kind of enjoyed that. Can you imagine the stones on somebody to reach out to, again, a guy whose mountain sits on top of the mountain of published authors in that genre to give him feedback and then just get this scolding avalanche of boulders. That's probably what they wanted. But yeah, no, you know, I had a book that came out in 2009 that's got three or four errors in it. And I'll get an email this week from somebody that goes like, oh, by the way, the capital of Botswana is this. And you have that. And I'm going like, did you not see this book 17 years old? You really think you're the first guy to tell me that? It's like they did not see that the book was 17 years old. Yeah. They probably saw it as a next selection in their audible. Maybe so. Maybe so. And for whatever reason, they are an expert on Botswana. Yeah. And decided to share that expertise with you. And I still know why I messed that up because it's like I did like a – I changed the country where this guy was from, from Liberia to Botswana. And I just went into the Word document and changed it from Liberia to Botswana, forgetting that I'd used the capital city once. Oh, yeah. And you're like, well, you're forever contented to get those emails. The internet is savage. Yeah. They will catch the smallest of mistakes, and you will be judged with the scrutiny that nobody could survive, let alone the person critiquing you. Yeah, you get the smarmiest emails like, oh, you have a handgun round that's going supersonic. You pretend like you know anything about guns, and you're going like, did I respond to this guy? No. Yeah, you don't. Early in my career, I kind of did. You kind of would feel like, I'm going to turn this guy around, and then you're not going to. They're actually not engaging with you because they want to hear what you have to say. Yeah. They want to hear what they have to say. Absolutely, yeah. And they get something out of that. And my wife always says, like, don't ever feel the trolls. The trolls. Yeah, feel the trolls. And then every now and then I go, like, what would you do? Because my wife paints. I'm like, if you started getting emails of somebody that would go, like, that's not blue or whatever. She's like, oh, yeah, I'd be so annoyed. Yeah. What do you like to do outside of writing? Even though, I'm going to be honest, it sounds like you don't have a lot of excess time outside of writing. You know, it's full. I write a lot, but I got married five years ago, and so suddenly I had three stepkids. That is a jarring difference from being a single person. It was a huge change in my life. Nothing but good. My wife is in the exact same situation you're in, but reverse. Right. Okay. Yeah. How many kids? Three. Oh, really? What do you got? Boy, boy, girl? Girl, boy, boy? A 21-year-old stepdaughter, an 18-year-old stepdaughter, and a 16-year-old stepson. 22, 20, and 17. We are being paralyzed. Super close. Boy, boy, girl on my side. Okay, yeah, girl, girl, boy. Yeah, and then we have four dogs. I had two dogs. What type? All rescues, so big old mess of everything. You can judge a man based off his dog choice. Yeah, I didn't choose these guys. Do you have any hairless cats? Because I'll have to ask you to leave. No, I don't have any hairless cats. If we don't have any cats, I think they would be ripped loose. That's good. We have four dogs that are in control of things. You know, a big 110-pound looks like a lab, but he's – in Memphis, everything's got pit in it where I live. There's Pitbull and every dog that's on the streets, and all these dogs are off the streets. So there's like Australian Shepherds and Catahoulas and all these sort of mixes, but they're all just – and we foster dogs too. So there's a lot of dogs around our life. But we do that, and we like to travel, and I like to read and watch movies. There's not a whole lot. I shoot a lot and work out. That's about it. How did you meet your wife? I met my wife. So I had gone through a divorce. We are living more people's lives than you can possibly imagine. So I've been divorced for a year. You've been divorced for a year? Holy shit. Seriously? Isn't that crazy? Yeah. And I always say, like, if I met her like a month early, it would have been too early. I met my wife, my current wife, at the right time. But I knew a lady in Memphis who, she's like, well, when you're ready and you want me to fix you up with somebody, I know everybody in Memphis. And I'm just like going like, when are you not ready? But I didn't say anything. And then she basically was talking to one of her friends who was single. And she was just going like, there's nobody in Memphis. And she's like, you know, I know somebody that's saying something to me about, you know, being single or whatever. And so she actually first heard me on a podcast. So she said, this guy is a writer. He's a friend of mine. Look him up. So she just Googled him, and she just listened to a podcast that I did and said, okay, he doesn't seem like all arrogant or anything like that. So she reached out to me. So I just got a DM from this girl in Memphis. She slid into your DMs. Neither of us knew that term. I didn't tell her. Classic tale from the last 10 years. Yeah, classic tale. Yeah, it's a modern day, yeah, Romeo and Juliet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I was, yeah, we met sort of, I guess, a blind date, although there's social media, so we saw this. Yeah, we saw this. Like 50-50 vision. Right, right, yeah. Or like maybe 2,200. That first date was like end of April, and I knew I was going to propose by the summer, and we got engaged the following January and got married 15 months after we met. You know, my first, how long were you married before you got divorced? Three years. 19 years and 11 months. So our stories have diverged. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know about you, and I don't mean this negatively about the institution of marriage. I don't mean this negatively about my ex-wife. But leaving that will make you question as to whether or not you would want to voluntarily enter into a system like that again. Do it again, yeah. But the character of my wife and just who she is, like, there was no even inkling. Yeah. of doubt. Substantially better person than I am by every measurable metric. Yeah. Yeah. I always, I always try and think back and I go, there was never a moment from when I met Alison that I wanted to be in another room with her. You know, it was like, you know, it's your person. Yeah, exactly. I was like, I was like, there was, I never went like, Oh, what should we do? Should we get married? It was just like from the, from the first date. It was very, I've never had an experience like that, obviously. And if I had, I wasn't going to say it, but I mean, it's like, I immediately knew that we were kind of on the same boat, same path, and we've been married five and a half years. Speaking of being on a podcast, how did you like going on Joe's show? I loved it. It was a really good experience. I was incredibly nervous. Why? The audience isn't that big. When did you go on? It's been almost three years. Okay. It sounds good to you, but I didn't check it. Yeah, yeah. It was less than three years, but not much less. He was in his new studio in Austin? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I was down in Austin. It was great. Ridiculously nice infrastructure he has set up. Yeah, yeah. It was very cool. It was very laid back. He's the best. Yeah. I went in there, and he came in a couple minutes later, and he's like, he wants some coffee? I'm like, no. He's like, sorry, I'm going to take a piss, and we're going to not unlike what's happened here today. Well, man, at some point you've got to work. But we sit down, and then I'm putting my headphones on. And he's like, so, Mark, good to have you. And I was like, oh, shit, we're doing it? Okay. Could you feel the gravity of that room? You know, I'm... Knowing that the audience is that size. Yes, and that's what makes me nervous. And it's not like stage fright. It's like, am I going to say something that's going to be the wrong thing to say about a friend? Those are the exact thoughts that go through my head when I sit down with him as well. Yeah. I say, please don't say anything stupid. Because I'm going to forget the cameras on here. I'm not thinking about the camera right now. I easily could go like. Yeah. The problem is I tell myself that and then almost always immediately proceed to say something stupid. Yeah. Yeah. You forget. I mean, that's, that's, you, uh. He's the goat. He's, but he's really good at, one, he'll talk to anybody, which I appreciate. And he makes you feel comfortable, which I think is one of the biggest keys. If you get somebody in there and you can, it happens sometimes. I have, I've had a few people on where you can tell, well, they'll tell you because I'll ask them, hey, like, have you ever done a podcast before? You can tell that they're super nervous. Yeah. Yeah. But in 10 minutes, if you could just sit down and do BS, maybe they're an author. Maybe they're not. It's like, knock the book over. Like, we don't even talk. It's like, how was your trip out here? What do you think about Montana? And you get them going, and it's like, whew. He is the master of being able to get people into that zone where they're just going to town. Plus his selection of guests, my God. Yeah. I mean, and he was like, he was giving me supplements, and I'm like taking them on camera. First off, you better be careful with that. I know. And it was weird because it was like, he's like, take six. I was like, six, really? And then, like, he gave me the bottle to take home, and I'm at the airport, and it's like, take two. Okay. And then I was getting, like, emails from friends. They're like, were you okay? And I was like, that was fine. Ish. Yeah. Now, that room has some gravity to it. Yeah. You can just, man, an audience of that size. I mean, traditional media at this point would kill. Absolutely. To have an audience of that size. I won't say that it sold as many books as the movie did, but, I mean, it was definitely you could see after it. It was a big bump. The Roman effect is what they call it. Like, I like to do media that I think is going to be fun. You know what I mean? Like, this was, like, they asked me if I were either like, okay, you're going to have to go to Montana. I'm like, that sounds awesome. I've never been there, and I've watched you on reels a million times. On reels? Oh, yeah. Oh, Instagram was. Yeah, yeah, like, you know, 30-second chunk. Thanks, Michael. Mr. Shilkoff. It's one of that platform content over there. He just picks ones where I have my eyes closed or a blurry camera. But since then, I've watched the show. I'm a fan. But you do a lot of media where you're going like, is anybody watching? But it's fun to do stuff that you want to do. The barrier, I don't think I'm anybody in this space because I know I'm so fortunate to be good friends with just behemoths in the space and I have a rough idea of their numbers. It's like, oh, we're both playing a ball sport. However, you're in the different league. Yeah, but look at all the leagues under you. You know what I mean? It's true. It's all appreciative of it. I think it's good to not say yes to everything because the reality is the barrier to entry is actually so low that almost anybody, if they wanted to, and I would never talk somebody out of trying it if they wanted to. But I guess what I'm saying is not all are created equal, and it takes a long time to build a platform. Sure. So if you go and – I mean, we all only have so much time, right? Right. If you permit that to a platform that isn't going to be able to help you at all, you know, an argument could be made. Right. Skip it. Yeah. You know, save your time. Yeah. It's – you know, this was like – I looked at this as a cool chance to come out and meet you, go to Montana. Yeah. Yeah. This is pretty cool. Are you taking off tomorrow? Yeah. I spent most of the day in Starbucks working. I mean, that's an acceptable place to work. You could have gone over to the Black Rifle Club. I know. You could have better Wi-Fi. Yeah. I wish they'd put me a little closer. I was on foot. Yeah, okay. Okay, I'm going to say this about your town, and this is a good thing. Okay. I had an Uber driver from the airport to the hotel last night, the same Uber driver I had. We had about three. Yeah. Man or woman? Male. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Oftentimes, they'll give you a business card and just say, call me directly. Really? Okay. Which I don't know if that's legal, but. I've had that happen, like, in the Virgin Islands. I've never had that happen in America. I tell people. It doesn't look like that small a town, though. Well, it's not that small. Geographically. Geographically, it's spread out quite a bit. And people actually argue about how many people live up here. In the summer months, it's hopping because Glacier National Park is just to the northeast. Glacier Airport, the one you flew into, gets its name, I think, from Glacier National Park, which is a 20-minute drive from the airport. Summer months, there's millions of people passing through. Winter months, lower holding capacity, 40,000 to 60,000 people. So the Uber pool. For Montana, it's not bad. Yeah. But the Uber pool is thin. Your airport has a bear spray rental kiosk. Yours does not? Mine does not. Are you even living life appropriately if your airport doesn't have a firearm rental or bear spray? Yeah. We have other dangers where I live. No, in the summer months, the signs then move them towards the security like, do not check your bear spray. There you go. Do not have bear spray. And there's another one on there that I don't get. Not only can you not have bear spray in your carry-on, you also cannot have huckleberry jam. Huckleberry jam? Correct. As ridiculous as that sounds. Okay, so I was in Guatemala once, and I was getting on a plane to come back, and they stopped me and pulled me aside. And I had bought some jam or jelly for my aunt, but that is a liquid or substance or whatever. I even think this sign says even under three ounces. I don't know if it like pops on their machines as an explosive. But I don know how jam could do that Yeah It not like a Well it a very huckleberries obviously don grow everywhere So they kind of in the summer months Michael have you ever gone and picked huckleberries? Yes. People will sell gallon Ziploc bags for a pretty good amount of money, but then why can't you take a small amount of huckleberry jam on an airplane? It's the huckleberry lobby that doesn't want that. It probably does. What if you want to enjoy some huckleberries on your Biscoff? That would be a disgusting pairing, but whatever. A Biscoff cookie. You just want to dip it in. On the aircraft, yeah. I'm not going to tell people how to party. You know? I don't know yet. Never had Huckleberry. Ever? This is where you reach down and pull out a big thing of Huckleberry jam. It's not in season, but I will send you some. I will send you some Huckleberry stuff for sure. I don't think I ever have. How do you write? What's your process? I ask every author this because I tell you what, at this point, I've read everything from I have an idea and I write that idea out and then I go both directions. They hop. They go sequentially. What do you do? And also, do you lay it all out somewhere before, or do you just, you're on typing? I really wish I could lay it out better than I can. I do get a super, super rough thing. Not the whole story, but. Do you do that digitally, or do you do like three by five indexes? All digitally. I've never been able to do that. I've never been able to do the mind mapping or anything like that. I just open a Word document. You're doing it in Word? Yep. Wow. Yep, and I, it's not even, you wouldn't even call it an outline. It's not like anyone else could take it. It would just be like. Random thoughts by book. Yeah, it's just sort of random thoughts. And then I just start writing, and I don't write in order. Like I will have an idea for later in the book, and I'll put down what I can put down. And I just try and do it every single day without fail. First thing in the morning, I try and write. I mean, there's, you know, with a family, just like, things change. And I'm like, I was explaining to somebody who doesn't have kids. I'm like, you're never more than five seconds away from whatever your plan is just being totally out the window. I would say two and a half seconds. Yeah, two and a half seconds. No, you're in the trenches. Yeah, yeah. There's never been anything that is not more important than my books. You know, it's happened in that house. So it's, you know, just everything else has to be taken care of. And then I work. But I try and do it first thing in the morning, and I just try and get a little – I definitely read what I've written the day before, and that gives you a little bit of a boost because you're editing that. A little momentum. Yeah, a little bit of momentum, and then you can fix things, and then you feel like you've accomplished something. Like today, all I did was edit the first 150 pages of the book, and I just went back and read over them. I'm like, is this a little long? because sometimes you'll make some, the first parts of the book you might look at 350 times, and the last few chapters of the book you might look at 20 times. Whatever. Yeah. That's right around the corner. Yeah, and you always get all the writing advice. It's like, you know, finish that book, put it aside for a few months, and then go back and say, I don't have a few months. Yeah, I never work with that kind of room. I'm in a pretty good place with this year's book. Like I kind of know my players. For me, when you're writing fiction, it's like if I know what the antagonists want, I can build a story. If the bad guys, if their plan or their want makes sense to me, I can sort of make everything else happen around it. And again, you don't want to repeat stuff you've done. And I'm writing this book and the book I'm writing now both involve kind of an inside threat in the U.S. government where I've written about China and Russia and North Korea and all these other things, the cartels. This book sort of involves people within the government who are bad actors. Outside influenced or American born and have their own ideas about how things should be? Both. Yeah, so definitely have their own ideas, but they're working with an outside influence to further – they think they have control of the outside influence. The outside influence thinks they have control of them. And so the way we are and the way America is right now, I think there's a lot of paranoia and there's a lot of division. And honestly, it sort of reminds me of a 70s era movie like Three Days of the Condor or The Conversation or The Parallax Effect or any of those types of movies that are very sort of domestic threat type of stories. and it's very interesting to me to think about that stuff, but it also means you have to spend a lot of time looking at the news. That's not healthy. De-conflicting. Yeah, exactly. When you're talking about your screen time, I'm going like, I feel like I've got way too much because you do spend a lot of time going like, you know, I think facts these days, you know, we're sort of in a post-fact time in America. Well, I've never seen – I'm not going to say that I've been a student of traditional media sources my whole life. I definitely can't say that. I paid very little attention to it while I was in the military. Not an immense amount even when I got out because I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next and how I was going to do it. But I don't understand how we've gotten to a place where you can pick a news station on the left and a news station on the right, and they could cover the same topic, but it looks diametrically opposed. Yeah, yeah. They're curating what you want to hear. People are now, they think they're well-informed, but what they're doing is they're only paying attention to one source of information. So they're not well-informed. They're in an echo chamber, but they think that they are operating off of truth or fact, which I would argue we can't even agree what that is in society anymore. And then the bigger question is where the hell does that go? If you can't agree upon what truth is and what facts are. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and it is very scary, and it's also, I mean, I agree with you. I have been a big media person my whole life. My dad was the head of the local NBC affiliate in Memphis, so I just grew up in the news. Like, I had a subscription to The Economist and U.S. News when I was, like, 15. Like, I was just into that sort of thing, and I've never seen it like this. Now, then you would get whatever bias, you know, those publications have versus other publications. But now, you know, you've got people that just absolutely can scream in your face, Pizzagate or whatever the thing is on the other side. Yeah. And some of it, I think, is actually intentionally a distraction. Absolutely. Because they distract you. Yeah. I mean, I don't know where it leads. Yeah. I don't know where it goes. It doesn't seem to be de-escalating. If anything, it seems to be escalating. To what, though, I don't know. Well, you see the people that, I mean, like the Russians have weaponized this stuff to a large degree. And that's not to say the Chinese haven't. That's not to say we haven't in other countries. I mean, the CIA was doing stuff in Central America in the 50s. How dare you, sir. Yeah, controlling the media. But at the same time, you know, you go like, wow, the influence of bad actors, you know, we as a people are sort of playing right into their hands. And, you know, you wonder how much of this is going to get tracked back to something. Or is that just a big conspiracy theory, too? You know, anything can be made to look ridiculous and anything can be made to look valid by the media, you know, that comes. because everything sort of comes in the same font. If every rage, you know, merchant out there, their writing on your phone was in bright red blood and you saw them there with gravy on their undershirt, you know, which is how they're writing it, you would discount them immediately. But you don't. Everything kind of looks the same. And then you read it and you... Or it's a meme that you are writing your facts. It's just so perfect because it's the six words that completely, you know, it's just cohesive of what you want the world to be. And, you know, I run into that a lot. And, you know, people treat me, you know, my books aren't political at all. You know, I think people of all walks of life like them. But, I mean, you know, I'm kind of against Russia taking over Ukraine and kidnapping the kids, which is a hot take for a lot of people, you know. I don't think kids should be kidnapped. Yeah. It's a general stance that a lot of people could get behind. Hot, hot egg, dude. Really? Yeah. No, I mean, I did a book called Burner that involves what's going on in Ukraine. It was all tons of research. Yeah. And it didn't take place in Ukraine, but it involved sort of like Russian FSB and GRU operations in Europe. You know, it's all very documented stuff. And people, you know, a lot of people just thought that politically made me like left wing, you know, which is crazy to me. It's insane to me. But I've sort of been a conservative my whole life. But, you know, it's just the way that people frame things now based on the rage merchant that's screaming at them. That's one of the things I think I missed the least. I was still. When you stopped absorbing so much? Well, the key for me was taking, you know, I didn't erase any of the apps on my phone. I left all that stuff on there. But I started making the intentional choice of if I want to get onto social media and post something, because to a degree it is part of what I do, so I need to exist there a little bit. Sure. But I'm going to do it off my laptop. And I tell you what, it's a way different, way less sticky experience that is harder to get stuck in a time suck. Yeah, I took Twitter off my phone a while ago. Force it, if you can, if you want to try, force it to your computer. I would get on there, and it's just way less simple. It's way less streamlined. It's a little bit more clunky. Right. And this with the thumb and just sitting there, and where did, whoa, would that 30 minutes go? Yeah. I found that I had way more time for activity. Yeah, yeah, for sure. But it was way less of the rage merchant as well, and I didn't feel any less informed. I would still know wavetop things that were happening. I also didn't feel any less connected. Right. Because the people I'm really connected with have my phone number. Right. And so then Apple CarPlay was registering as screen time. So anytime I would drive, it was so. And on CarPlay, I don't do a whole lot other than navigate. But when I'm local here in town, I know where I'm going. And this was a bet with my friend. I'm like, how dare you add 40 minutes to my time? I must have victory over my friend. because I'm obviously a better caliber of person. So sometimes, you know, you get the text messages that pop up and you can, you know, voice text back and all those things and answering phone calls. It's like, screw it, I'm just going to disconnect CarPlay. I'll leave my phone connected with Bluetooth. And then I realized, wow, I was doing a lot of texting while driving by hitting just that button. And none of it was essential. Anybody who needed to get a hold of me could still call through. So that drastically helped, too. It was more than anything, it was forcing. And then I have an F-150, and it has a little, in front of the cup holders, a little section that slides forward, and there's a charging pad down there, which charges about 1% every four days. Yeah, I have a Taho, the same thing. Yeah. Why even tease me with that? I know, I know. Yeah, you can have a, I actually think it's about 1% per four days. That's what it's published at. I would put my phone in there, and I would close it, forcing myself. I was putting barriers in, because when I first started, man, it was, I didn't realize how often I would just pick up my phone. It's a drug, yeah. And why am I doing this? I ended up with a lot of time asking myself, why am I using this device this way? Yeah. Or is this device using me? Yeah. You know, like, who's working for who here? Right. And by being way more intentional about it, I slept better. I felt bombarded by negativity far less. Yeah. And I was way more strategic. Like, if I was going to make an Instagram post, I'm like, all right, I've got to get this to my laptop, type it away, boom. done. Not a bunch of time looking in comments or stuff like you could check your direct messages and stuff like that, but it was, it was just clunky enough. Yeah. It's like, I should probably go put the dishes away. Yeah. You know, or go do something more beneficial. I used to, uh, opine a lot more on social media and it's just, it's just such a time. Yeah, no, it wasn't even what I thought was political, but I mean, I feel like I'm in this space where things that happen in international affairs. I write about them. I research them. It's like I'm interested in them. But it's basically anybody will turn anything into political, and I will come back from posting something that I think is just nothing, and there will be 134 comments. People are mad at each other. People are mad at me. They're like, oh, you write these books, but you're whatever, a left-wing cook or whatever. One of my favorites, classic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was like, no, I was just saying that the way that Article 5 of the NATO charter is structured is the two percent. You know, I don't say something like that. And people go, yeah, we'll vote for Hillary then. You know, whatever. Have you ever heard of the dead Internet theory? Dead Internet. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. We did it. We're into 2026 through the holiday season. And if you're anything like me, especially in years past, you know, the holidays can be a little bit rough. There's stress, there's buildup, there's anxiety, and there's no better time to check under the hood to see how you're doing than in January. Start your new year off by reinvesting in yourself. I've had a lot of problems in my life, some of them small, some of them big. Some of them I had the answers to and the tools that allowed me to be capable to work through them, and others I didn't, and I needed to reach out to a higher level of care. In the digital world that we live in, you are always going to have access to talk to somebody. even if you live geographically very remote. So with BetterHelp, there's over 30,000 therapists. It's the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million people globally. And it works with an app store rating of 4.9 out of 5 based on over 1.7 million client reviews. It's extremely convenient. You can join a session with a click of a button from your mobile device. So it fits right into your busy life. Plus, you can switch therapists at any time. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Talk it out with BetterHelp. Listeners get 10% off their first month at BetterHelp.com slash ClearedHop. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P, Hotel Echo Lima Papa, .com slash ClearedHop. Back to the show. There is a hypothesis that about 80% of the traffic online is actually bot-driven. Oh, gosh, yeah. And it's getting better and better and better, too. So now it's like bots arguing with bots. Yeah. Yeah, so the dead Internet theory. Essentially, most of what goes online. I like that title. You've seen the bot farms, right? Haven't you seen the big racks of the phones? Yes, and had Michael pull them up. It's like, this is who you're arguing with on the Internet. Yeah, Michael, it's worth it. Pull that thing up again. This is the person. And again, the tech. Oh, my God, look at this. The technology. Do the second one. Makes your blood pressure go up. You know what this is a picture of? This is how you make the New York Times best. This is what's in the SCIF in the NYT. And if you pay somebody enough money, you get to download your book. That is just crazy. That's who you're arguing with. Yeah, and I think Apple has got an incentive to keep this going. I think anybody who has something on that ecosystem, well, somebody way smarter than me said it best. If it's free, you're the commodity. Right, right. You don't pay for social media and all these platforms that we argue on. It's to monopolize and incentivize. Do you remember those first couple years when people were going like, what are they getting out of this? No, because I was a late adopter. Oh, you were in the... I didn't think about social media until like 2015 or something like that. Okay. Yeah, those first few years, I think that was a lot of things and people were going like, what are they doing? They're prepping the battles. Yeah. And then people felt like they owned social media and kind of like, what are my rights on social media? And I was just kind of going like, yeah, I think we're all being pulled into this. It's like it's a highway that everybody feels like they have to drive on suddenly. And we don't own the highway. There's a toll. I felt that way the first week of January. And I constantly reminded myself feeling like this and interfacing with all this, even though it's free, is voluntary. This is about Venezuela or? No, just the social. Oh, is that when you did that? Yeah. No, January. First week of January. Yeah. Venezuela was also voluntary. Yeah. It was a choice, an interesting choice. And God, so many people have asked me, they're like, what about the directed energy weapons? I'm like, listen, I don't know. I've never heard or seen any of those things. They also have said, how is it possible that a small amount of Delta Force operators could annihilate an entire building with a people? It's like, well, I don't think you know how good those guys are. Yeah, yeah. Because that is not a heavy lift. It's fascinating that there's like 32 Cubans that they're admitting were killed in it. And, of course, we know that Cuba is very tied to Venezuela and have been using their oil to stay afloat for a long time. But, like, it's very interesting to me. Yeah. And it's interesting how we sort of had the plan to put Rodriguez in and tell the, you know, the woman who has the Nobel Peace Prize, forget about that, the fact that, you know, her party is the one that won the election. and be like, yeah, she seems like a nice lady, but, you know, I think we have a plan with Rodriguez, Chelsea Rodriguez. I think it would be a good, sounds like a great man's storyline. I feel like there's some obstacles out there that your protagonist could navigate. Yeah. Well, I mean, the directed energy weapon, the Havana syndrome stuff, it's been going on since 2014. I've heard about that. I don't think they were hand-carrying stuff like that on the ground. No, no. I think they were still more ballistic devices. I mean, from an airframe, right? I mean, I know absolutely nothing about it. I don't either. I'm so detached. I can see it, honestly, at this point, yeah, from a manned or unmanned airframe. If it's real, I have no idea whether or not it's real. There's a great journalist named Michael Weiss who has been looking into Havana Syndrome the whole time, and they've pegged a couple of GRU guys, 29155 guys. Oh, would it surprise me? Yeah, no, I mean, they're very specific. It's like a 29155 scientist, you know, wrote a paper on directed energy weapons and got paid for it. You know, so it's like they know a lot about this stuff. But as far as like us having it and employing it, I have no idea. It seems like if I was like one of the Venezuelan security guys that lost the president, I'd probably be saying something like, oh, man, there was something from space that just knocked me on my ass. Which is probably what that raid felt like, actually. Yeah, yeah. For sure. It's incredible. Do you think they're going to make more with the Greyline movie? Obviously, they made that. It's out on Netflix. People can watch it. I watched it last night. I get Captain America's being naughty. Naughty Captain America with a mustache. Not too dissimilar to yours, Michael, I might say, which is why I tell you you should share the love. Which looks really good. It is. Yeah. That could be his top level right there. Damn right. I don't know. The physique of Captain America and Michael. I think I need to hop on some juice to get Captain America's physique. As long as you're not talking about carrots. then yes. You're going to need some prescription size. Do you think they'll make another one? Do they have the ability to do so? So Netflix owns it. I don't think they'll make it with the same directors and Gosling just because he's doing Star Wars now and they're doing Marvel films now. I hope it comes back in another format but I don't think that they will. I could be way wrong. I didn't know they were going to do this one until it was in Deadline or Variety or whatever. Oh wow. Yeah, I mean. Like you said, they bought the rights to it, so I guess there's no duty to inform. Yeah, my agent out there in L.A. was like, hey, Ryan Gosling is really interested in it. I was like, yeah, but I'd heard that about like 10 other actors in 10 years before that, so I really wasn't even that paying attention to it, and then suddenly it happened. So I don't know. Anything could happen, but it's not on the horizon. What do you think you'd be doing with your life if you didn't write anymore? uh i think i would be writing unsuccessfully if i wasn't writing successfully i really do you missed the second part of that question which is if you're not writing if i stopped writing um i i don't know i mean i worked in a medical device field for a long time and i wasn't in love with it i benefited from it i got hurt and i had some back surgeries and i was like hey i'm glad i work in this industry right now because it's helped me but i um you know I liked international sales I mean I like the international aspect of it I like traveling I liked studying foreign languages I like meeting people from other places and cultures so I mean I think I just feel like writing is the only thing that I'm any good at so it really is a tough question but you know I think I would do something if I had my life to live all over again it's like I go like I just I didn't have a wide view when I was younger Like I learned to scuba dive and my diving instructors like in the Bahamas are like 22, 23 years old. I'm like, I didn't know you could do this when you were 22. I thought you just went to college. That was 13th grade and 14th grade. And then you got a job and you worked in an office your whole life. And I literally had no bigger horizon than that when I was younger. And it's unfortunate. And I see like all these young people doing interesting things. And I go like, wow, I wish I thought about that. But, you know, now I'm 58. and it's like I'm looking to you know I want to write as long as I can because I really enjoy doing it and the rest of the time I just want to like be around my family and my dogs and I don't know I'd probably maybe have a dog a dog foster or dog thing although I'd probably hate that I don't know because I step in the dog poop some days and I'm like you can outsource that yeah I could own yeah when are you going to kill off the gray man how do you know when it's time to kill him It's been the same character through all 15, right? Yeah, the same lead character through all 15. His luck may have run out. It could always run out. You know, I like to – I've done a lot of research with the battlefield medicine and all that kind of stuff. So I like to work that stuff into the story. So, I mean, he's had horrible things happen to him, and other people have, because I really like – I like to not ignore that in the story. So, I mean, I guess one day he could just flatline, I suppose. But I like doing them. You know, I've never been one of those authors that only wants to write one thing. And I really have written a lot of these books. But I wrote a – I co-authored a novel with a Marine lieutenant colonel called Red Metal. It came out in 2019. He was active duty then. It was about a Russian invasion of Europe and Africa, actually. And we're contracted to write another one of those. So I'm excited to work on that at some point. There's other things I want to write. so I always kind of feel like I'm going to go back to the gray man after a pause I mean he could die off I mean it could end could you kill him and restart him with another character in there how do you think would the audience accept that I don't think so I don't think so it would be a hard right or left hand turn I'm not thinking about what the audience has told me I'm just thinking about me as a consumer and a fan of these type of books you know it's like if Jack Ryan died and And Bob Ryan, his cousin, you know, took over. He was like the second cousin that he never really knew. Yeah, exactly. You just kind of introduced him in the last act. He just happened to also have the same career path. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He has this certain set of skills. I don't know that I would do that. I think the series will end either with him dying or him. You know, people, you always get the emails going, I just want to see him happy, him and Zoya, that's his girlfriend. I'm not a real person. Yeah, and I'm like, no, you don't. you don't want to read that book where he's cut in the grass and she's, you know, like, you know, she's got her online, you know, she's selling jewelry online, you know, like that. You might buy that book, but you wouldn't buy the one that came out after it, you know? So it's like the tension. I had an author friend, James Rollins, tell me once, he's like, when people tell you what it is they don't like about your books, they're really secretly telling you what it is they like about your books. It's like, oh, I hate, I hate how you, you know, keep something at the end of the story. You have suspension. Exactly. And it's like, no, I think you're saying you like that. I mean, that tension bugs you or whatever, but you like it. It frustrates you, but yet you seem to keep coming back. Yeah, and I would never end a book with an absolute cliffhanger, but I like kind of like telling the whole story and then setting up something else in the last couple pages, and people will go like, oh my god, it's a cliffhanger. No, because you got the book. You got the 500-day story. This is a pitch for what's next year. Exactly. It's a little bit of a tease for what's coming up next, which kind of commits me to next year's book a little bit and maybe commits you to reading it. But, you know, it's like I think I want to keep doing these as long as people want to keep reading them. I mean, at least, you know, with writing, it's not like you're out there fighting somebody with a pugil stick. You can have a nice rocking chair and the newest MacBook Air pretty light and just go to town, man. Yeah, I used to want to be a soccer player when I was very young. Shorter careers. Was not good enough, but I'm going like, yeah, if I peaked at that job, I would have peaked at 28. I didn't even get published until I was 42, so it's a good thing that I'm doing this. It's amazing, though. God, how many people would have given up so far before 42? Yeah. Your writing career started early in your fourth decade, and there are some people, to include myself earlier in life, that thought life ended in your fourth decade. And I do, too. And now I'm almost through it. Yeah, I joke with my wife. I mean, this has been the best. My 50s have been my happiest decade. I'm like, if you told 18-year-old me that things were really going to get good in your 50s, I'd be like, screw that. Who cares? No one lives that long. Yeah, exactly. I don't even know what you're talking about. But, I mean, it is, yeah, it's like I look back on going like, you know, am I too old to do this? I'm the oldest person that's ever been published at 42. It's ridiculous. I have friends that have been published in their 70s and, you know, or whatever. And it's not about how long you've been doing it. I have friends that are roughly my age that have been published for 35 years, you know, and since their early 20s. That's wild. Yeah. Man. But, you know, maybe if I'd done that, I would have burned out or run out of things to talk about. I don't think you're going to burn out, man. Your volume of work, 27 in the can and on the shelves, is pretty impressive. Thanks, man. Yeah. Yeah. It's fun to do. Give me the, because I know this comes out on the 17th. Yes. So I'm going to release this episode the day before. Oh, terrific. 16th. Terrific. But we're going to need to get people, what are they getting into? Yes. And why? Why, Mark? Should they care about the book? Yeah, they need a question. People go like, tell me why to buy your book. And I'm like, well, I don't know if you should. I don't know if you like this type of book. It's what I said. You can tell them what it's about. They can make up their own informed decision. Yeah, it's like my publicist going like, God, you suck at your job. I was like, no, I'll tell you why you should buy this, if you enjoy this type of book. So it's the 15th book in the series. The hero's name is Court Gentry. He's known as the Gray Man. He's a former CIA officer who was actually sort of pulled in at a very young age. Does it follow the Gray Man movie where he gets pulled out of prison? Yes. Okay. Yes. Barely follows the Gray Man movie, but that part is... Billy Bob Thornton's Bubblicious. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was the pitch. Right, yeah. You can watch the movie and see the genre you like, but it's a lot grittier. It's closer to John Wick and less like a Marvel film or whatever. But yeah, so in this book, Cort is working for a sub-Rosa unit called Ghost Town that is working directly for the deputy director of operations of the CIA. and they're sort of all doing this under duress because of things that happened in earlier books that they basically sold their souls to get some help from the CIA and now the CIA sort of owns them. At the beginning of this book, you realize there's sort of a bad actor entity within the U.S. government that has brought some foreign assassins in that are killing off intelligence professionals in the D.C. area. And so Ghost Town, Cort and Ghost Town are sort of the only unit that hasn't been kind of compromised by this group that has sort of intelligence on what's going on in America. And so Cort and his group have to go in. One of the five assassins he's brought in is a northern Irish assassin named Whetstone. That's his code name. His name's Campbell Coyle. He's a former IRA assassin, and Cort killed his son. And so Whetstone is doing this for completely personal reasons. It's powerful motivation. Yeah, it's a very personal story. It involves Court's father. It involves Zach Hightower, who's the Navy SEAL guy that's in the book. His daughter, who he hasn't seen since she was a little kid, is in the book as well. So it's kind of an interesting story that takes place over different – it takes place in the present, but the children and the parents of the characters are involved, even the villains. So it's kind of like it's as action-packed as anything I've written, but it's got a lot more kind of depth and nuance than some of my earlier works. What does subrosa mean? Just under the radar. Covert. So, okay. Kind of. Covert. Well, I'm going to say that from now on. Now, subrosa, we use that term probably daily. Yeah, yeah. You're talking about a cutout organization. Yeah. Entities that, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So not like within the director of operations. I'll just say there's a reason that the DOD has never passed a budget, an audit. Real hard to track money is intentionally designed to be obfuscated. Exactly. All that Title 10 stuff and Title 50 stuff. Oh, it blends. Yeah. And, you know, those systems, if you know how to work those systems, you're never going to run out of money. Yeah, I'm sure. and there's hallways with doors that lead to nowhere that money's being sent somewhere else. I had a book once, the U.S. intelligence community. It was like 800. It was like the Bible, and it was like every organization and everything. I got it for research, but I was going like, I can't really use this stuff because it's so opaque and so. By design. Yeah, by design. I don't think it – when those systems were created, it was, I think, with the express intent and purpose of making sure that people, even under the hardest level of scrutiny, they would either hide behind national security or classification, or even if they had to pierce those things, it would be impossible to track. Yeah, yeah. I don't know about you, but our government has shown pretty shitty track record with our money. Yeah, for sure. I say that based off of a really large number that I don't even understand what a trillion dollars is to begin with. Like, mathematically, I know what it looks like, but I can't even fathom that, let alone high 30s of those. That's a problem. Yeah. It's a real big problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We used to be – well, I don't think we were ever fiscally responsible, but I think it's just gotten to where, like, just spend as much as you can. I mean, and then the first thing seems to be instead of fixing the systems, let's tax more. I'm like, listen. Yeah. You've shown me that you're not a good steward of the amount of money that I give you now. Yeah. Your answer is give you more? Yeah. No tax ever goes away. Even like city taxes when they're like, we need a half a cent sales tax to build a new whatever. It's like, that's never going away. That thing will get built and that tax will stay and something else will pile on it. We will forget what that was for. I agree. That's just how it works. Last question for you before we get out and let you enjoy Montana. Advice for young authors. Or actually, how about just advice for authors? You were first published at 42. You don't have to be young. Anyone who hasn't been published. I mean, I would say, I mean, like I said, do it because you love it. And the one thing that I, the biggest mistake I see from most people is people just don't really finish something. Now you can get self-published. And so you're the arbiter of whether or not your book will do well in the market. And I think that means people, there's a level of care in general. Now, some of the best books have been self-published. You know, The Martian, I think, was self-published. Really? All these incredible books. The one they made a movie about? Yeah, I think so. Wow. Anywhere, yeah. There's lots of examples of that not being the case. But, you know, people write the easy parts, and then they kind of polish it up enough, and then they can get it out into the world now. I didn't have that luxury. I came around a couple years before self-publishing became very, very easy. And so I really think finishing something, getting it as good as you can get it, and then telling yourself it's not that good. You know, write your first draft like you can do no wrong, edit it like you can do no right, and really second guess and just double check and triple check and quadruple check. And, you know, I've taught little writing classes at writers' conferences, and I go, everything is important. And that's why I'm going to take every one of your five pages that everybody will give me five pages, and I'm going to just Christmas tree it. I'm going to tell you exactly like this should have this line should have its own line. It shouldn't be part of this paragraph. You know, it just it's more powerful that way. It's just like looking at everything, you know, as it's equally important and crucial to getting published. And so I think people just get ideas down and they have their darlings. They have their little parts that go, well, this is good and this is great. So I'm going to put that in there. But the whole work itself isn't as polished. as it needs to be. And then you can go to all that work and it's still not get published and still not get successful. And then you just have to do it again and do it again. It's like my fourth manuscript was the first one that got published and it took me 20 years, but I'm glad that I didn't get published at 19 years because it would not have taken off. So, you know, it's just, you just have to do it because you love it and you just have to finish what you start. That would be my advice. People can get it anywhere. I hope so. You should be, You should be able to. Is there a portal that supports you better, though? Because, again, for numbers, and I'm talking about this now with publishers, it's like, yeah, there's Barnes & Noble and there's Amazon, and those are the two biggest accounts. Yeah. Because not all the numbers count. Yeah. It's like, again, this obvious case. I mean, I love when people go to independent bookstores. You say that a lot, though, too. I'm doing, because I love independent bookstores, I'm doing a book tour, eight-city tour, you know, and you can, any one of those places, you can go to my website, markgraneybooks.com, see where I'm going to be signing. They will mail you a book that I've signed and personalized to you if you buy it. So you buy it anywhere. It's the same for me, and I'm just happy that you read it. You can check it out from the library. I love that. Perfect. Last thing for you. I've got a gift for you. Obviously, I'm sure knives have played heavily in your novels. Montana Knife Company. Oh, wow. You're never going to guess where this is from. Upper Volta. It is from Montana. Just down the road in Missoula. Okay. This is one of their tactical knives, though. And I was thinking, are you checked luggage or did you go carry on all this? I'm checked now. I was going to say. We could mail it to you. Michael will be responsible. I'll check it. That's terrific. Check this bad boy out. This is in their tactical series. They're doing a good push in February. I'm making an ass out of myself trying to open it. Is it a slide? Is it a pop? There you go. And then it's going to be, they actually package it quite well. This is nice. It's like a filet. This is, I actually think this is the knife I have as my, nope, I have a different one, but this one's spectacular too. Oh man, that is nice. Yeah, so etched with the podcast logo on it, small. Very cool. The Kydex sheath has got great flexibility. You can kind of mount it in a variety of different ways. It gives you a lot of options on how you want to have it on there. This is fabulous. Those blades are spectacular, lifelong. That's a great hilt tip for the size of that knife. Yep. It's great. Great warranty on those things, lifelong sharpening. All that stuff, yeah, just push it, that thumb, and pump that sucker right out. That's fantastic. So that's their, I think it's the Mini War Goat. Slice my finger off. Yeah, don't do that. That's the Battle Goat, O.D. Green. It's probably up on the wall here somewhere. I don't know. One of those knives. That is fantastic. Thank you so much. Of course. Yeah, I'm checking the luggage now. I would, I was going to say, because if we trust Michael to mail it to you. This is good. 60-30 odds. Yeah. And I know that that doesn't add up to 100%. I can throw some Huckleberry into my chuckle. You said it's out of the season. Can you get Huckleberries in the wintertime here? I feel like it'd be the fake huckleberry. It's going to be the running color, but the number one ingredient is going to be sugar, not huckleberries. I've learned more about huckleberries today than I've ever known. This is fantastic. I really appreciate that. My pleasure. Well, thank you for making the trip out. Oh, my God. I enjoyed it. Feb 17th. And, yeah, we've been out for like two and a half hours. Let's get you out of here and go enjoy Montana. Awesome. So that's it. Thank you, man. You bet.