Ep 186 | How Navy SEAL UNMASKS the Deep State in ‘Terminal List’ Series | Jack Carr | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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I always enjoy fiction writers who capture the chaos of the world

as we know it

on every level right now.

Today's guest is one of my favorite examples of this style.

He takes reality and then lets you know at the end what's real and what's not.

He has a knack for telling stories that are a little frightening.

They're so similar to the upsets and the tragedies that plague the world we live in.

Writers like him offer a window into the world and better yet, possible outcomes of the world that awaits us.

He writes about modern warfare, but he also writes about time.

His novels reveal the ancient patterns of war that no amount of technology can erase.

He writes about all of it in an emotionally powerful and visceral sort of way.

mostly because he's writing from memory.

He began as a Navy SEAL sniper with deployments around the world.

Before long, he proved himself to be an elite among the elites and quickly rose rank.

During his two-decade career, he served as team leader, platoon commander, troop commander, task unit commander, and more.

From there, he became a New York Times best-selling author, knocking it out of the park with the Terminal List series, which has been turned into a series featuring Chris Pratt on Amazon Prime Video.

He'll talk a little bit about season two in today's podcast, I hope.

His latest thriller is Only the Dead, the sixth installment of the Terminalist, which is ultimately the story of James Rees, the ultimate military elite who Chris Pratt described as one rowdy mother effer.

Please welcome Jack Carr.

Before we get into all all the killing, because this is a violent book, let's talk a little bit about saving lives.

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Good to see you, Jack.

Great to see you.

Thank you for having me.

You bet.

You bet.

So I want to talk to you about the new novel, but I want to kind of start at news of the day.

This week we found out, let me just read two tweets

that came out.

I was so disgusted by the January 6th riot, I deleted my Twitter account.

I wrote introspective pieces on wanting to be part of the solution.

I never liked Trump, and I thought Biden beat him.

The Durham report is 100 times worse than January 6th.

It didn't reveal a handful of nuts getting out of hand and stealing a lectern.

It revealed our highest law enforcement agency trying to undo an election on zero evidence.

Or

from Adam Schiff,

no deep state, no secret society, no anti-Trump cabal at the FBI.

No evidence that political bias influenced decisions in the Clinton probe.

No indication that Comey's errors of judgment did anything but help the Trump campaign.

No vindication for President Trump.

I mean, it's just insulting.

They think that we're so easily manipulated by a few words in a tweet.

And a lot of us are.

And a lot of us are.

Shocking amount.

And it's

that side of it, but then also we've chosen our sides.

And rather than looking at something and applying just common sense to the issue, it's, oh, my side thinks this.

I saw this tweet here.

That is my side.

And it's versus the other side.

Without thinking we are all citizens here, and there are certain entities that are trying to manipulate us.

And if you look at it

without too many filters in place, that would be the logical conclusion.

And then you can ask why, who benefits?

And well, there's a permanent Washington establishment.

The establishment candidate, in this case, was supported by that establishment.

The anti-establishment candidate did not win.

And now we're seeing things bubble to the surface that

show just how much was done to manipulate the populace in the lead up to that election.

Like a frightening amount.

Like there's

things that have happened here in the last few years that we now are,

we now see the documents and the proof

are things I never thought could happen in America.

And I thought if it did,

we would have reacted a long time ago.

If you wrote this into a book 10 years ago, it would have been, I'm not really believing this.

They asked me to go, this author asked me to do too many, take too many leaps of faith here.

I'm not really going along with it.

I'm going to pick up something else.

And now those things are our reality.

And it's disheartening when you think about it for future generations.

For us, it's disappointing.

But for future generations, they're growing up with this.

And they're getting programmed for 15 seconds attention spans from China very intentionally.

And they don't go back in the pages of history because it takes more than 15 seconds to study these issues and put in the requisite time, energy, and effort they deserve before retreating something from someone with a lot of followers who also didn't put in the requisite time, energy, and effort to studying the issue or just appreciating this history that we have and what was sacrificed so we could have these options and opportunities so you and I can be here today.

The reason that all these people are trying to get across our borders, maybe not all of them, but a lot of them want to come here for those options and opportunities.

And if you were born in Guatemala or somewhere else, you'd probably be trying to get here too because of that, because of what was sacrificed by all these people in the lead up to today, from the inception inception of this country up until this very moment.

So I had Mike Clover on.

Oh, nice.

Yeah, recently.

What a great guy.

Great guy.

And, you know, he said that

elite

SEALs or the top of the food chain, your goal is to go work for the CIA.

Do you feel that way?

Because you were at the top of the top.

So I did.

I worked for the agency.

I was assigned to them in Baghdad in 2006 and had

it's probably one of the most impactful times of

my time in uniform.

And it influences a lot of the novels, actually.

So I was headed down that path and then ended up staying in the military.

But for me, it definitely was.

I don't know if it's that way for everybody, but I aspire to do that.

I got a taste of it for a few months in Iraq at the height of the war, doing this amazing job.

Well, you're operating under different titles, so you can do things.

So I don't have any inside information, but if we did have operators on the ground in Ukraine right now, they're probably from the CIA, paramilitary side of the house, and probably some military special operators that get sucked up under that title, under these additional titles, so that legally you can do things that the military cannot.

So, it just gives you a little more, as an operator tactical level, that's what you want to do.

You want to get in the fight, you want to do the job, you don't want to sit on the sidelines, so anything that's going on, you want to get in there and test yourself and be there for your brothers and teammates on your right and left.

So, do you,

I mean,

we obviously have a problem with oversight.

Oh, and accountability.

And accountability.

No, no, there is no oversight.

They seem to be running

anything that they want to run.

Can you survive as a nation with

an intelligence?

industrial complex like this.

Right.

Well, I don't know what happened.

People thought that the Central Intelligence Agency, in particular, was reorganized, which it was, after the church hearings and Pike Committee hearings of the 70s.

But to think that they wouldn't go back to exceeding their mandates and encroaching on the civil rights of U.S.

citizens, well, you're probably living

in a different reality.

Right.

And when you have an intelligence agency that is so powerful and is attached to the military and politicians and lobbyists and everything else that is permanent in Washington is this ecosystem that's a gigantic bureaucracy that makes up, is made up of more than just the Central Intelligence Agency, but the NSA and the FBI and all these supporting elements and bureaucrats and then elected officials.

And it's this gigantic bureaucracy.

You're bound to have that.

And it's just natural for something like that.

So how do you take additional control?

How do you root it out?

That is a good question.

And the question is, is it so big now that you can't?

And I don't know the answer.

That's kind of scary coming from you because this is what your job is.

war game things.

And

my job in the military and the paramilitary side of the house is very different than establishment type agency culture, I would say.

It's a very slim portion of that.

Those are the people that want to get out the door, do the job, remove the bag outfield.

Your job as a writer.

Oh, yeah.

They give me a lot to work with.

Yeah.

I'm not lacking for ideas,

nor am I lacking

very emotional and compelling content that is therapeutic to to write because my protagonist in these novels, he can take actions to root out evil that you couldn't as a citizen because you'll end up going to prison and probably be on death row.

But I can explore a lot of these themes in the pages of these novels and that in and of itself is very therapeutic and my hope is that these novels also encourage people to go back in the pages of history and if I talk about the church hearings, I talk about the Pike Committee hearings, they say, well, what is that?

I see this in a paragraph here, and I see that I understand it by context, but maybe I should go back and read a little more, understand a little more about this.

And when I get to the end of these novels, now I include an author's note that talk about what was fact and what was fiction so that people can say, oh, this was fact, this was fiction, but I'm going to go look into this a little more.

And here's some books that I can read because it's in here.

And the author talks about how it influenced him and why it's in this book.

So I include that in all the novels now.

You said that this is the most violent

that you've written.

Why?

I didn't start out that way.

When I start out, I have a title because I don't want any bandwidth taken up, worried about a title, because I've had good ones thus far.

So I have that title already.

I have a theme that keeps me on track.

So everything ties back to that theme, either directly or indirectly.

For this one, it's truth and consequences.

Then I turn that into a one-page executive summary.

And I ask myself, is this worth the next year of my life after I read it?

And then I read it again.

And I say, if someone was walking through the airport and looks into a bookstore and pulls out the book, turns it over and reads the synopsis here, would they be willing to invest time?

They're never going to get back in these pages.

If the answer is yes or probably, then it's into an outline and then into the narrative.

But

it's very, very therapeutic for me to do these things and explore these themes.

And

the violent.

And the violent part for this one, I got to that stage into the outline, still didn't know it was going to be the most violent.

And I started writing it and it just naturally occurred that way.

So that that part and being the longest as well, I didn't start off thinking it was going to be the longest, nor do I think it was going to be the most brutal.

But for me, it's all about the story.

So I don't read reviews and say, oh, look at these fans over here.

They didn't like the last one.

What's trending right now?

Or

I don't want to alienate this.

You can't.

No, it's all about the story.

It has to be pure.

You have to honor that story.

So everything goes right from my heart and soul right into the page.

And never have I once had anybody at Simon Schuster or my agent say, you might want to lay off some of this violence.

Or, hey, do you think you're alienating

part of the readership over here by some of this politics stuff?

And no, I've just, it's all about the story.

I'm not going to change this because for me, it's an art form.

It's my passion.

I love it.

I wanted to do it since I was a little kid, other than serve my country in uniform.

I wanted to write these thrillers.

So it all has to be about the story.

I have to stay true to that story.

If I have to push deadlines, I'll push deadlines because people are trusting me with that time.

They're never getting that time back.

That's something I take extremely seriously.

Does it tell you anything about the real heart of

America that your books sell?

Because

they are

deeply American and fighting for the right thing, truth, justice, and the American way.

And that's not real popular in most media.

If one was to just look at legacy media or just look at certain tweets from different popular figures with lots of followers, you would think that it wasn't.

But very telling to me is one, sales.

And two, just

they'll never share it, but Amazon has all the data from the show.

They'll never shall, any of those streaming Netflix, they'll never share their data, but they know exactly when someone changes, turns it off, or they have all of that.

And them wanting to do a spin-off in a second season tells me that it did very well in the areas between New York and Los Angeles.

And when does it come out?

Second season?

So Writer's Strike is underway right now.

So I don't know how long that'll push things to the right, but it's a spin-off series first, a prequel origin story series, and then we roll into the second novel, A True Believer, starting Chris Pratt, and go from there.

But once again, for that production team, for me, for Antoine Fouqua, the director, for Chris Pratt, for for David DeGilio, the showrunner.

It was all about making something not for critics, but for that person who went downrange to Iraq and Afghanistan over the last 20 years.

So when they sat down on their couch and cracked open a drink and they looked at that screen and turned this thing on, that they know that we at least made a show for them.

We at least put all our energy and effort into that, into honoring them and keeping this thing rooted in the realities of modern combat, exploring the mindset of a modern day warrior and making it not for critics, but for them.

So that was at the forefront of everything we did.

So you were a kid, you wanted to be a writer?

Because back then, you could find the end of the internet by going to the library and reading everything you could find on special operations.

Today, you could read the operations.

So, you were, I mean, you wanted to write about special operations or you wanted to be in special operations.

I wanted to be in special operations from age seven on.

Before that, I just knew military in general, found out about SEALs at age seven.

My mom was a librarian, so we went down to the local library, researched SEALs, found out that they were touted anyway as some of the most elite special operators in the world, and the training was the toughest ever devised by a modern military.

So, from age seven, I was in.

But about age 10, I started reading the same things my parents were reading for sure by sixth grade at age 11.

So I'm reading books by David Morrell, who created Rambo back in 1972 with First Blood,

by Louis Lemour, by Nelson DeMille, A.J.

Quinnell, Jay Z.

Pollock, Mark Olden, all these masters of the thriller genre because their protagonists back then had backgrounds I wanted in real life one day.

So if people think of the 80s action hero, they were typically a SEAL in Vietnam, Army Special Forces in Vietnam, CIA paramilitary in Vietnam, Marine Sniper in Vietnam.

And now in the 80s, they were a cop or a private investigator or a stuntman or something in these stories.

So I was reading those because I thought, hey, Nelson DeMille probably did some research into SEALs or Special Forces or whatever it is.

And I'm learning as I'm reading this.

And I just fell in love with those stories.

So I knew that one day, after my time in the military, I'd write.

But what I was inadvertently doing was giving myself an early education in the art of storytelling from these masters.

I talked to

Tom Clancy years and years ago, and he talked about how

the Russians absolutely thought he was floating things out there.

So they would read him and go, This is, they want us to think that they would react this way.

And it wasn't.

Did he have background in

he was an insurance insurance agent, certain insurance salesman, and he was just very into military and did that research back then, like going deep into

and then Hunt for Red October came out, and Naval Institute Press was their first novel they published, and then it got, then he went to a major publisher after that.

But yeah, what an amazing person.

And then also started writing the nonfiction, which I'm going to do here coming up in a year and a half.

Right now, I'm researching the 1983 Beirut Barracks bombing.

And so my first non-foray into nonfiction will come out in a year and a half, writing that with a historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist, James Scott, who writes primarily about World War II.

But there's some newly declassified documents from the Reagan administration that talk about the conversations in the Oval Office, who was advocating to put Marines ashore in Beirut, who wanted to keep them on an amphib ship in the Gulf, how that decision was made, the embassy bombing in April of 83, which leads into the Marine Beirut Barracks bombing in October, which is the Marines' greatest loss of life in a single day since World War II.

And the beginning, really, of modern-day terror.

It showed them that it worked because

there was a lot of tough talk afterward.

And then quietly in early 84, we started to leave.

So that teaches the enemy a lesson.

So what I want to do is keep this history alive so that we can apply these lessons going forward as wisdom, wisdom, which we find very difficult to do in this country for some reason.

So, we don't have to learn those lessons in blood for the next generation.

So,

all right, more with Jack in just a second.

I want to take a pause here and ask you to take a pause from what you're doing.

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We are goldfish.

I mean,

I look at history.

I'm a history buff.

And

I mean,

it was related to the Bible because if you read the Bible, you know, you'll read 20 pages and you'll be reading them about people going into

all the problems.

You're like, you were destroyed 20 pages before.

How did you not see this coming over and over again?

And I always wondered how the Germans could have

slipped into their insanity

and were slipping into the same kind of insanity.

I mean, almost

doing research now on the Weimar Republic and

LGBTQ and trans surgery.

The first trans surgery happened in Weimar Republic, Germany, 1926.

Really?

Yeah.

Wow.

It was a big deal.

The LGBTQ.

And the people of Germany were pushing back, but the culture was pushing it and the leadership pushing it, all of it.

And so when the Nazis came in and said,

we're going to burn books, the first books they went after that everybody cheered for were all of the propaganda for LGBTQ and trans that was in the schools.

It's almost exact.

Now,

when a change comes in, are we going to go

Hitler away and make exactly the same mistakes?

Because we're repeating all the first.

And if you don't know that,

you know, I understand why

LGBTQ people who are informed on history now,

I understand why they say Hitler,

Hitler, because that was their experience in exactly the same scenario.

You know?

Well, the pages of history

are,

I don't know, know, the best way to put it, but you have to have a foundation, a common foundation from which to build.

And we had such a solid foundation for so long.

And when we talk about, go back to that military-industrial complex, you talk about our intelligence services.

And there was a reorganization after World War II in 1947.

And for some reason, after that point, we stopped holding senior-level leaders accountable.

And these positions became careers, not professions.

We can go back to the Civil War and you see all the generals that President Lincoln had to go through before he got to Grant.

Same thing George Marshall.

People know him for the Marshall Plan in World War II and they can remember that anyway, something about it from high school, reorganization of Europe, rebuilding of Europe.

But what he really did was he fired people who could not measure up until he got to all those admirals and generals whose names we all know now who led us to victory in World War II.

They didn't start in those positions.

Someone else was and they didn't measure up.

So what did George Marshall do?

He replaced them.

He held them accountable.

And then for some reason, 1947 onwards, particularly when we get to Vietnam and then up to today, obviously, we do not hold our senior-level military leaders accountable.

They fail upwards, and then they go sit on boards with these defense industry companies, go to a couple meetings a year, maybe, make their money.

And that's just part of the machine, and the machine rolls on.

I have to tell you, Dwight Eisenhower,

great general,

amazing foresight with his farewell address

because he saw that and so much more.

He saw where we are right now.

And it's interesting that you hear now the mantra from the government is conspiracy theory, conspiracy theory.

And that's the only reason why when I was younger, I knew the military-industrial complex because it was a joke.

It was a conspiracy theory.

And it's now that same tactic is being used on

everything.

Oh, yeah.

And it's very effective.

Right from the beginning on COVID.

Yeah.

It couldn't have come from the lab down the street from the market.

And that was if you put that out there, you were banned on Twitter or they've saddlebanned you or however that works.

But right from the beginning.

And any big city detective is going to call the Wuhan lab that studies coronavirus a couple blocks down from the market where China is saying this thing originated as a clue to possibly investigate.

If you didn't follow that clue in a murder in a large city, you would probably be demoted or taken off the force.

But that's assuming that the force is not in bed with the murderer.

That's it.

That's it.

And there's, you know, I used to say this,

you know, before we lost our way so deeply.

You don't want to keep giving power to the government because eventually you run out of police.

to call.

Who do you call?

If everything is federal and it's corrupt,

there's no one to call.

That's it.

And we've just gone down that road.

And

I think that's why Rees does so well.

Thank you.

You know?

Because

in a way, he's, I don't know, would you call him vigilante or police?

I've heard that.

He's an American and he's a citizen first above all else.

And he's looking at this country the same, in a very similar way that I do,

hence the therapy.

But he has opinions.

And when I read other books growing up, sometimes they'd have opinions, but oftentimes the character would not.

And I thought, that's kind of odd.

If I write one of these books one day, my character will have opinions about these things.

So if he veers off the expressway in Northern Virginia into D.C.

and happens to have a pistol with him at the time, he's going to think, oh, geez, I'm becoming a felon for a few minutes here as I circle back in to Northern Virginia.

Other books, I've never seen anybody think about that sort of a thing.

And he's going to have opinions on that.

He's going to have opinions on being disarmed or steps being taken to disarm the populace.

He's not just going to go and do this job.

He's not a cardboard cutout that I pick up and solves a problem here, solves a problem there.

No, he's evolving.

And he's a citizen, and he's learning from past mistakes and failures and also from successes and applying those lessons going forward as wisdom.

So he's evolving.

He's moving along.

He's looking at this government.

And I think for the past, let's say, 20 years, it was me writing these books.

There was one enemy that kind of probably stood out.

In the 80s, there was another enemy that stood out.

Of course, 60s, 70s, and 80s, when you were talking about espionage, political thrillers, same thing.

But for me, when I write these things, there's a lot of enemies that are up here within our own government.

And my fourth book, I looked at the United States through the eyes of the enemy.

And when I say the enemy, back then, I was thinking of Iran, China, North Korea, Russia, a superpowered individual, a terrorist organization, and what they would have learned by watching us on the field of battle for the last 20 years at the time I wrote that book.

And as I'm writing this, of course, COVID kicks off.

And then I think, well, they're certainly learning something from our response to COVID.

Summer of civil unrest hits.

They're certainly learning from that, figuring out how to exploit that and incorporate that into future battle plans.

A very contentious political season follows.

But what was really disheartening about that research was that I just thought if I was the enemy, I might not need to do much right now.

I could just sit back and watch.

And we're doing a pretty good job of destroying ourselves from the inside out right now.

How many people have crossed our border

that wish us grave, grave ill

that have come in, Islamic terrorists, anybody, really?

And nothing has happened.

And I think it's because of that.

Just wait, wait, because we are destroying ourselves.

Lincoln was absolutely right.

It's going to come from within.

Yep.

Going to come from within.

Country divided cannot stand.

And

who benefits from this division?

Now we have this tool called social media.

It's a tool.

You can use any tool for good or for evil.

And you can weaponize this tool very easily to divide who benefits.

Politicians, obviously, who need to galvanize bases, the social media companies themselves, but who benefits and why am I being manipulated?

It's a very cynical way to look at things, perhaps, but it's the way that you have to look at things now before you take a breath and really dive in on an issue and then figure out what you can do as a citizen.

And you used to think that was your vote.

And now even that is being undermined by what we're seeing in the news here with

the Hunter Biden laptop and everything else that was used to manipulate and change the outcome of an election essentially beforehand through the manipulation of information.

Let me stay on the writing style with opinions for just a second.

I think one of the most underrated humans, not writers, one of the most amazing humans was Ian Fleming.

You know, he never was in battle, but

I have often wondered if we would have won World War II without him.

Oh, interesting.

Take him out of the equation.

Yeah.

I mean, he was responsible for getting us into

Italy and the Germans moving over to Greece.

I mean, he was brilliant.

I forget the name of the operation right now, but

it'll come to me as soon as we're off.

But there's some great history of him and his time in World War II and how that influences writing, obviously, later on.

And going back and looking at a lot of those guys who came out of that era, they served in World War II.

They were in the Royal Air Force.

They were in intelligence services or something else.

And then they started writing thrillers maybe in the late 50s, 60s, 70s.

And they all had these backgrounds, but I didn't know that growing up because all you'd see is the back flap of the book and the paperback, and it would say, oh, they're an author of this, this, this, and this.

And but now, when I go back and I look at these histories of these guys, and it's amazing what that generation is.

Those are just the ones that are, you know, the few writers that I'm thinking of right now, not to say nothing of the people who didn't write books and just came home and got back to work.

But Ian Fleming, in particular, is

I have

a few collections of his novels and of different stages, different editions, and it's fun for me to go back and collect those.

And when you read those, you can go back and it puts, it's a time machine because we can't get a time machine, not yet anyway.

But you can go back and you can watch a movie and see it through the eyes of that time or dive into the pages of one of his books or other books as well.

But think about this was written in 1958 or 1962.

Okay, what was going on in the world?

And you have to read it through the lens of that time to really immerse yourself in it.

And that's a time machine.

And it's Ian Fleming's slash James Bond's uh view of the world at that time and uh and once again now that's one of the things they're going back they they went back and censored some of those books in their latest editions that just came out so how do you feel about that little as a writer

leave they those should be left alone yeah should be left alone did you read the um uh the note that uh Ray Bradbury put at the end of Fahrenheit 451 I'm sure I have but it's not coming oh my gosh he is very clear he talks about in his time okay they're going back and they're re-editing and they're putting this oh yes yes and he's like

do not do that today in this book.

And

they're trying.

Oh, yeah.

Rewriting history and trying to manipulate that history to get an outcome today.

What is that outcome and why?

Well, it should be fairly obvious, but we're distracted by a 15-second TikTok video.

And even it sounds crazy to talk about it, but we have people testifying in front of Congress about UFOs.

Imagine if that had been 1985, and all of a sudden we have talks of, I mean, that would be the only thing we're talking about.

UFOs.

And now now we're like, oh, yeah, UFOs.

So,

honestly, this is so

crazy.

It is crazy.

So crazy that I thought, I've recently been thinking,

maybe that's just a distraction.

And there's not, because

I'll tell people, well, you know, we have a piece of some sort of metal that is otherworldly and it came from, and they'll be like, no.

I'm like, it was in the New York Times front front page.

You know, it was, it was everywhere.

We have all of this, and nobody's not, I don't know.

Well, it's the distraction.

It's uh, it's TikTok distraction, it's Instagram distraction, it's social media, it's all these other things.

But uh, that one is so bizarre.

Because it should stop everything.

For those of you who grew up in the 70s and 80s, I'm like,

we've always said, what happens to religions?

What happens to society?

Will we all come back together?

Nothing.

With all the talk about aliens, you wonder if they're just, you know, if they're flying by and they're taking a look at us like some of our enemies and they're like, I'm just going to pass this planet on by.

These people, there's no point in landing here.

Yeah, they're crazy.

This planet isn't long for the world, for the universe.

So keep going.

Back with more with Jack Carr here in a second.

But I know when

Chris Pratt is playing the hero in one of his books,

he gets beat up a lot.

And you're like, okay, the guy is not, I mean,

he's not going to, really, he's walking away.

At least he limps, you know, he's not a Superman.

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I just talked to Tristan Harris, who is, he was one of the chief ethicists at Google for a long time.

A chief ethicist.

Yeah.

He quit

because they had no ethics.

Wow.

And he's like, you people are

going into things that we should not, you know, we should at least talk about.

And so he left and has been warning about these companies for a while.

And now his big thing is AI.

And he is saying that,

you know, this could be absolutely the death of all biological life.

quickly.

And I know that in, what was it, your last book, you talked about quantum AI.

That's right.

Which I haven't even talked to him about.

That's terrifying.

Right.

So that's the coupling of quantum computing, the speed of quantum computing with artificial intelligence.

And then you add things like hypersonic missiles to that.

And you add things like passive targeting, which means, remember in Top Gun, when they're flying around, you're got missile lock.

Well, that means you're locked from anywhere, but you don't know it.

So it's passive targeting.

So you combine all those things.

And in my research for that for that novel, I'd be very shocked if the facility that I described there here in Texas is not almost exactly as I describe.

At the time,

things could have changed.

We were still ahead of China as far as that goes, as far as artificial intelligence and quantum computing goes.

They had a little edge on some of that passive targeting and some of those hypersonic missile technology.

But

that one was what people say is the scariest book to date just because of that.

And then, of course, January, now all people talk about ChatGPT and all these things.

And now we have the writer's strike in Hollywood, which has been building for a while.

And it started off with streaming.

The streaming part of it was building for a while.

But now it's AI.

And that is a huge part of this writer's strike.

Because as an executive, you can look at there and say, how much do these writers cost every year?

Or can we just tell this computer, this AI, to do this and make a show that has X, Y, and Z, it's this long or this many pages.

go.

So it'll be interesting to see how that

turns out.

And it will probably be a model for other strikes to come in other industries that are going to get taken over by AI.

And right now, it's not a question of should we or could we?

It's here, and it's about management at this point.

He talks about it as we have to have an understanding of mutually assured destruction.

And he said, the problem is

the

bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, it took that for the average person to go, holy cow,

that's so dangerous.

Nobody should ever use these.

And then it took a long time

before, you know, it took the day after that movie.

Yeah.

And it took that to make Reagan cry in the White House and Gorbachev to play it in Russia.

Isn't that amazing?

It's amazing.

Power of popular culture.

Correct, man.

Correct.

Used to be our most powerful export.

And now if you look at things in the 60s, 70s, and 80s and look at them today, a little different, a little different.

So, I wonder what the recipient on the other side of the world that used to be seeing these things

out of Hollywood in particular and what they're seeing today and how that changes why they want to come here.

So,

I don't know the answer to that.

I will tell you that when anybody said in 2001, you know, they hate our freedom or they hate our culture, I could understand it to some degree.

Now, there's no question that we are.

I mean, I'm a religious guy.

I don't know if you're religious, but,

you know, I believe that sometime there will be, you know, the end times.

And people used to say, how come America's not in the book of Revelation?

It doesn't play a role.

I don't know.

I think we might actually end up being Babylon.

Because we.

I'm going to think about that later.

Yeah.

I mean, we are.

Yeah.

We're sitting here.

We have Babylon is the great whore of the earth.

Who has had something so sacred that we have just whored out and for a cheap, cheap price?

You know, we're perverting all of the stuff that we've had and

we'll be darker than any Nazi group ever if this technology stands.

No, just think about the

possibilities, not possibilities probably, but for control that are attached to all.

We're already being controlled and manipulated right now.

Imagine AI.

Imagine

what you can do and how much power that's going to have in five to ten years.

And these things we're deciding today aren't really for us.

They're for our kids and our grandkids and future generations.

But yeah, going back to the United States and the Soviet Union for a second, in this book right here, I talk,

I had someone on my podcast where if we talk about Abel Archer and the events of 1983, where we almost had

a nuclear exchange for the Soviet Union, there were other things going on, like the shootdown of Korean Airlines 007.

There were some war games going on in Europe that were making the Soviet Union very nervous.

They thought it was a cover for an invasion.

And then there was a guy who was supposed to be on watch one night, and he was sick, so another guy took his place.

And this particular person just happened to be an intellectual.

He'd studied the United States.

He'd studied his own country, of course.

And

I bring this up because of the AI, if it wasn't this person and it was AI instead.

And so their computers show that there's a launch from the United States, ICBMs heading towards the Soviet Union.

So

protocol, he's supposed to launch.

Pressure down from the top, supposed to launch.

And he says, hold off a second.

This doesn't make any sense.

And he didn't do it.

And unfortunately, he had a very bad ending after that because he wasn't following orders, even though he saved, essentially saved us from a nuclear winter.

I think it was alcohol and all of this stuff.

Yeah, kind of went downhill eventually.

But he essentially, one person, saved us from this nuclear Armageddon or at least a nuclear exchange at the height of the Cold War in 1983.

But imagine if that person wasn't there and it was AI

and he saw, and this launch started from the United States.

It's just kind of going to launch.

So I don't know.

I don't know.

It's very, it's, you know, I'd like to,

man, it's a scary time.

It is a scary time.

So,

who is our biggest enemy?

You know, I watched, go back back to Ian Fleming for a second.

They've been after Spectre forever.

But Spectre

actually makes sense today.

You know, I don't know if it made that much sense in the 60s, but you look at it now, and the Daniel Craig series is like spot on,

spot on on today.

Do you feel that way?

Well, I do.

And I think it might be why in this book, there's this thing called The Collective.

I couldn't think of a name for it.

And I thought of the end of World War II, the the Brenton Accords,

who was there, what they did there, what the United States stepped up to do, really to allow most of the world a lot of the opportunities that we had by putting our Navy out there and essentially protecting global shipping.

And I thought, well, what if these, some people made, some elites made a pact back then, knowing that, hey, we can't trust the citizens of either country.

We can't trust some of our politicians.

We can't trust some of our military people here.

We need to make sure.

But out of preservation of both nations wanting at the beginning to save us from this nuclear Armageddon and coming together from both sides.

And so I weave this in from near the end of World War II up to today and how that's morphed into this new generation of something I call the collective.

And of course, James Reese is trapped up in this because of his father trying to uncover it back in the 70s and 80s and 90s and early 2000s and leaving his son a clue about who some of these people are.

And of course he has to unravel the conspiracy.

And then he deals with things very creatively, but also very violently.

It's in his nature.

And once again, that's the therapy.

Have you, because you're a voracious reader?

I read a lot.

Have you read

Tragedy and Hope by Carol Quigley?

No.

You have to.

I will add it to the list.

Okay, so he is a Harvard professor.

He had

consulted Truman, Eisenhower, for a bit of Kennedy, and then he was on the outs until I think Nixon.

And he was on the outs because he wrote the book Tragedy and Hope.

Interesting.

Tragedy was World War I and World War II.

The hope is this new

system that he proudly said would solve the problems because we've tied all of our banking and our countries together and we've done it intentionally.

So you'll see wars that are not full-out wars.

There'll be police actions, et cetera, et cetera.

He lays it all out.

Interesting.

And then he was called a whack job for it and had to stay away from the White House until people forgot about it.

Wow.

And then he went back.

I think he was telling the truth.

He was proud of it.

But he's, that's right up

what you're talking about in here.

Well, I'm going to pick that up.

And also,

I like things in hardcover.

I'm going back and I'm collecting encyclopedias and sets of encyclopedias from the 20s, the 30s, the 40s, the 50s, the 600s, the 70s, the 80s.

TPs and a pod.

The last ones, maybe in the 90s.

I don't know if in the early 2000s or something, I need to define it.

Are you tracking how it changes?

Exactly.

Exactly.

Because those can't be changed with a push of a button because they're physical and we have them.

So I'm going back and doing all that because I remember the set that we had.

I remember the color of the one we had, and we had it in the 80s, but it was from the 70s.

And I remember when we switched over from this red kind of burgundy color set to this one that was all blue.

And I was, of course, going into Vietnam and World War II and Civil War and Revolutionary War, and I was studying all that stuff.

So I loved those, but I want to get them before our history has changed at the touch of a button, which could happen with everybody electronically or audio books online.

But it's so convenient, but it is.

I mean, I have a large library as well

of Argogan.

And

it's the only thing I trust.

You know, when they remember when they did this with Oprah, there was that Oprah book

that

somehow was discredited or anything else.

And they reached in, Kindle or

Amazon, reached in and pulled all of them back.

Oh, wow.

And you woke up one morning and that book was no longer available to you.

Wow.

And that was years ago, 20 years ago.

Oh, wow.

And I've often thought, hmm,

that's an awful lot of power to have.

Oh, yeah.

So, movies, everything.

Yep.

Everything.

Buy your hardcovers, people.

But I know I love, I've grew up with books, love of reading, surrounded by books.

I've never been without one.

I've never finished one and said, what am I going to read next?

No, I know exactly what's coming.

What are you reading?

It's the end.

So I'm reading books for my podcast right now.

So I have guests coming up for my podcast, and I'm reading a lot about the 1983 Barracks bombing because I'm in that research right now.

So rarely do I read for pleasure anymore.

And I heard Lee Child talk about this when he said he was retiring.

Someone asked him what he's going to look forward to most.

And it's looking forward to reading for pleasure again.

Because right now it's work and it's research for this.

It's work.

It's research for the nonfiction.

Someone's coming from the podcast.

I read that.

But there's overlap because that story about 1983, I got that from the Abel Archers, Brian Mora, who came on the podcast, talked to him.

He's been in the intelligence world his whole life.

And so as we were talking, I thought, hmm, this is going to be worked into my next novel.

So that happens fairly frequently.

And I didn't anticipate that at the outset, but it's a different kind of reading.

I'm not sitting in a hammock just lazy,

enjoying my days.

I look for those days back to it.

So I am looking forward to that at some point.

Okay, one final break here from Jack Carr and right back into it.

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You've heard of Red Cell?

The Red Cell.

Have you ever been a part of Red Cell?

So it's an overarching term just for playing the part.

of the enemy.

And then at a time, they actually had something called Red Cell that would go and test security.

So depending on the context, it can mean a few things, but overarchingly, it does mean something similar.

Yes, we're going to test our defenses by a group of Americans essentially playing the bad guys, whether it's terrorists or former Soviet Union, Russia, whatever Chinese, and they're going to attack our infrastructure or something along those lines.

So can we play red cell here for a minute?

Do it.

Okay.

Pick an enemy.

China,

WEF,

our own people.

What is the biggest enemy you see?

I mean, China is certainly looming and seeing the influence that Chinese government has on our elected representatives, not just the ones that are entrenched in that bureaucracy, who never go anywhere to say nothing about those people who have been turned or influenced, but the ones that are actually in elected positions of power that are supposed to represent us taking in money.

And I talked about this in my first book.

I said something along the lines of, show me a politician in Washington and I'll show you a family member, a spouse, a brother, a son attached to a lobbying firm that

is getting money from a foreign entity.

So bad.

So back then, it's so bad.

So that's why I would say that China probably has a lot of tentacles here because one, our precursors for a lot of our drugs that we need made in China, of course.

We're being influenced by TikTok, of course, which is interesting that how what they show their youth over there on their version of TikTok versus what ours see is fascinating.

Very different.

Very different.

Very different.

Of course, we're seeing fentanyl come in.

We're seeing people have porous borders.

They're just doing the opium drug war on us.

On us.

Right?

On us.

I mean, again, learn history and you know exactly why they're sending

to Mexico.

They study their history.

They do.

And they look a little farther ahead than we do.

We look at things in terms of four, maybe eight-year election cycles for the real deep thinkers among us.

But they're looking generationally and they're moving pieces on the board, not for them, maybe not even for their kids, but for their grandkids.

And it's fascinating because the progressives, early 20th century progressives,

we're now living the result of their relentless vision and work.

You know what I mean?

Starts with

Woodrow Wilson, goes into FDR, Johnson, Obama, Biden.

I mean, it's just relentless.

And by the time that the producers in the nation realize what's happened, there's been this slow undercurrent going for a long time in even in finance, even in sports, certainly in Hollywood, obviously in politics, obviously in the education system.

But you take over all that, and you're not left with much else when it comes to influence.

And so, all of a sudden, these producers who have been going to work every day, who've been creating things, have been building this country into what it is today, all of a sudden look around and realize that they've lost all those other aspects of American culture.

And who's been influenced by it?

Well, their kids and grandkids.

And now, what do you do?

Now it's tough to come back from.

Do you buy into the idea that

our dollar is going to be no longer the world currency and CBDCs.

Well, I read a little bit about that in here.

Now, I don't go into about a paragraph or two in here as a touch point.

But it's certainly not beyond the realm of possibility.

And back in 1985, 1995, 2000, even would we ever have even thought that was a possibility?

In 2008, I was talking to some of the bigger bankers in the country, and I said,

It was right after their tarp.

This is not sustainable.

This won't work.

And you're debasing the money now.

You're just laundering it through the Fed.

What's the exit strategy?

And one guy was the only guy that was honest said, do you know how many national parks and resources this country has?

You just start selling things off.

You'll pay it.

And I was like, wow.

Oh, my gosh.

Just like a business going bankrupt.

And, you know, the rest of them would say, oh, no, it's going to, nah, that will never happen.

And

here we are.

And I don't think people understand

what that's like.

You pick China as our biggest

foe.

I think

they are ready and waiting to take advantage.

But I really think the

Spectre,

the WEF,

they have

laid plans and designs on this country and on the entire West, and they'll do it because

I think a lot of them,

I mean, at the

top,

I think a lot of them are very Malthusian and very anti-human.

And,

you know, they don't mind killing a few people for whatever it is.

Isn't that interesting?

And it's not the first time that's happened in human history.

But in this book, even going back to that end of World War II, I think that was a pivotal point point in our history right there, putting together

these different funds and

these different banks and all this power consolidated at levels that are so far beyond the sphere or the influence or the understanding of most people that are just trying to put food on the table for their family.

It's a consolidation of power.

It's a circling of the wagons when you see a threat.

And

they looked a little more long-term back then, and we're feeling the effects of of that today.

And it's not necessarily out of a loyalty to a country, not at all.

That's out of a loyalty to the control that certain families, individuals, institutions had and continue to have today.

So,

and once again, I don't know the answer to it.

Aaron Powell,

what is the thing that gives you hope?

That's the question.

That's the question.

And I was just talking to someone the other day, actually, because we were having a similar conversation.

And I was struggling to figure out how to have hope at the end of the day.

And he said, he brought it back to you have to have hope in order to manifest that future.

If you can't manifest some hope right now, you certainly can't manifest that future.

So it's that.

And it's also, once again, history, going back to the end of the Civil War and realizing that we did come together after that.

Now there wasn't social media out there where you could weaponize and someone carrying it, every single citizen carrying this thing in their pocket that was manipulating them.

And I wonder after the Civil War, if we had iPhones and social media, would different entities have just continued to poke and prod and manipulate and keep us divided?

And I don't know the answer there.

I was thinking about this the other day.

First of all,

the left has been right about so much.

I used to watch movies like Blade Runner and go,

I know the United States is now a corporation.

I got it.

And I used to think that was nonsense.

They were right.

They were right on that.

And now, for some reason, they don't care.

But

it's

the

I've lost my train of thought.

Well, go back and you look at some of those science fiction books, movies, things that people thought were science fiction back today, whether it's flight, whether it's space travel, whether it's submarines, whether it's the burning of books and the manipulation of information, whatever it might be.

And what do we do?

We have submarines.

What do we do?

We have space flight.

What do we have?

We fly.

I flew here today.

And a lot of people.

All thought is creative.

So

I remember what it was.

If you

just lost it again, I've never lost that artificial intelligence side of the house that now

I got all those movies

coming true today.

In the movies with artificial intelligence, I finally understand the or see a possibility of fantasy fiction, you know, elves and dwarves and everything else.

And those books always start out with, you know, the secrets of the past and all of the great power of the past.

And I could actually see us if AI

went

really dark on us

and was

killing us and somehow or another we survived or whatever, I could see people saying,

do not read any of the science of the past.

You know, don't.

You don't know what happened.

You don't ever, and that will lead you to that place.

And next thing you know, it's the book Burnings of Physical Books, exactly changing of those books through touches of a button.

And that's a very real possibility.

Yeah, we've seen it before.

People say, Oh, it'll never happen again.

Well, we're already changing things at the touch of a button, and there are still physical books out there, thank goodness.

But we've seen book burnings in the past, and I think that we might see them again.

So

when you're looking at

the

search for hope,

I'm talking to

people that have been in your role, and they go

one of two ways, it seems to me.

They either go dark,

or a lot of them are starting to find religion.

Do you find that true?

I'm trying to think if there's a third or a fourth option in there, but I do see those two for sure quite a bit.

Quite a bit.

And there's one of those paths is a lot more productive and healthy than the other.

No doubt about it.

One gives you hope.

One gives you hope.

The other puts you in a very bad position.

But not just you, your family, your spouse, your children.

But the other way does the exact opposite for that spouse, for that child.

So a lot of the things that veterans are dealing with today that take them down that dark path are going to have multi-generational impacts.

Big time.

So

we were talking to a military friend of mine the other day, and he was elite special forces as well.

And we were talking about the suicide rate.

And I said, I can understand

it

with a couple of things.

One, the elite of the elite coming home and then

What am I doing?

You know what I mean?

You were at the top of a field,

the most respected, and you were doing something that you felt really made a difference.

Then you got to come home and go,

Are you kidding me?

This is a fantasy world.

This isn't even real.

Am I right on that?

What did I do this for?

Why did I lose not just what did I do this for?

What did I lose my friend for?

Well, I think that's hang on just a sec, because I think that's another category.

I think coming home and losing that sense of purpose and meaning.

But then there's that other side of

what just just happened in Afghanistan.

What was that all about?

Yeah, 20 years.

And how disheartening is it to look as someone who served there or as a parent of someone who served there, a brother or sister of someone who served there, to watch how we had 20 years to prepare for that eventuality and that these people with these stars on their collars and all these awards here on their chest that sit in front of Congress, that was the best those guys could do with 20 years to prepare and no accountability.

George Marshall would never have stood for that.

President Lincoln would never have stood for that.

And now they fail upward.

They got to fail upward for 20 years.

You can go back and look at all that congressional testimony.

Those guys sitting up there, they say the same thing every single year.

And they said, we need more troops, more money, more funding.

They're making progress.

We are making progress.

Just need a little more funding from Congress.

Yeah, for 20 years, they all said that.

And the one person who said something,

not even juxtaposed, just kind of like he said he was in charge of Afghanistan.

I forget his name right now, but it was about the 2009, 10, 11 timeframe.

And he said, you know what, it's not going as well over there as we've been led to believe.

And he was quietly moved aside a few months later.

So what does that tell everybody else coming up behind him?

If I want to make that next star, if I want to get on that board of that company by making that next star and making these decisions to buy a bunch of new aircraft or whatever we need and sit on this board post-retirement, I'm going to probably should say the things the other guys said.

We're making progress, just need more funding, need more troops.

And then interesting, I don't know if you've read the Afghanistan papers by Craig Whitlock, but two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits by the Washington Post to get histories of the war that those people coming back, those same people sitting in front of Congress, thought were going to remain classified, now declassified due to these Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.

And what he does is he juxtaposes what they were saying to Congress, so meaning to Congress, to the American people, to their troops, and what they said in private that they thought was going to remain a classified history of the war, just 180 out from one another.

And it should, and anybody involved in doing that to the overseers should go to prison.

You lied under oath.

That used to mean something.

It used to and used to be held accountable up until about 1947.

For the first time, I don't trust the FBI.

I've always looked up to the FBI.

Sure.

I do not trust them at all.

I wouldn't want my son to go into the military today, and I've always been a big military supporter, but it has become something.

I mean, I had a Marine tell me to tell you,

well, the transgender thing, that's just kind of the way you guys roll

in the Navy.

He's forgetting that the Marines are a Department of the Navy.

Marines, you know, it's true out there.

Nothing but respect for all those Marines.

Anyway,

you know, when

you have a thousand people

that

have had transgender surgery

under the military medical plan, okay,

that's been, what, two years?

So you have a thousand people.

Now they're going and getting a transgender entertainer to be the ad

for the military.

What are we?

Once again, go back to the enemy and looking back.

Hey, we're going to attack the the United States.

Well, maybe we don't need to attack the United States.

Let's just hold off here on these plans and just watch.

What are they doing over there?

If it doesn't help make you better prepared for war, and then they like to, with the books that are on these recommended military reading lists over the past few years that pop up on the news every now and again or other things,

they always have a way to say, oh, it will help us in this way, shape, or form, but

I'm not buying it.

If it is not directly or indirectly related to making you a better warrior, making it, because that's your job in the military when you're not at war, is to prepare for war.

When that call comes in, you are ready to go.

And anything that doesn't add to that mission and make you a better warrior, make us a more formidable military, should not be in our military system.

So we are

behind on missile technology.

We are in a race for AI.

I'm very concerned about AI just taking over, especially who's programming it.

And

we're not getting people to join anymore.

We seem to have.

I mean, I wouldn't want to fight anything.

I wouldn't want to fight

a paper towel fight right now with our military.

I just don't know what they are.

Well, it's so sad because at that pointy end of the spear, our guys have 20 years of experience, 20 years of improving on tactics, of adapting on the battlefield, of using emerging technologies to give them an advantage over the enemy.

So we have 20 years of essentially research and development and the lessons from practically applying these things on the field of battle.

And we've been manhunting very successfully for all this time.

But it's kind of like any big city SWAT team tonight.

They're going to go out there, they're going to serve a warrant, they're going to grab somebody, and they're going to bring them back, and they're going to do that every single night of the year.

And it doesn't really put a dent in what's going on out there.

We did the same things.

It was just in Iraq and it was in Afghanistan.

We had AC-130s overhead and Reaper drones overhead and that sort of a thing.

But it's

so that's the hard, that's the tough part there: the people at the pointy end of the spear doing the tactical job are doing it in spite of decisions at the strategic level, sometimes the operational level here in the middle.

But those strategic level decision makers that we trust, they trust us down here.

And if we mess up down here, oh, we'll certainly be held accountable.

And it was Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling, I think it was 2006, 2007, he said,

a soldier who who loses a rifle gets in more trouble than a general who loses a war.

And that remains true to this day.

One last thing before you go.

Only the dead.

I love the meaning.

I like to have dual meanings to

all of my

titles.

Of course, people misattribute this quote to Plato, so it was not.

And I talk about who it is in there, George Sinai.

I'm going to mispronounce his last name,

who had amazing quotes from back in the day, but somehow it got attributed to Plato along the way.

So only the dead have seen the end of war.

And if we go back in the pages of the history,

that certainly rings true.

So that's where the title comes from.

And I like titles with a deep meaning.

I don't like titles that just are out there because

it might sell a couple books.

It just has to have deep meaning.

So I put a lot of thought into these titles.

But also before we go, what gives you hope when you sit down at the end of the day and you're thinking about all these issues and you have been for so long?

You've been sharing these, sharing your logic and your wisdom with people for so many years now.

And now we're at this point in the history of the United States, and you get away from all this at the end of the day, and you get home and you sit down.

What gives you hope at the end of the day?

Two things, God.

I know how the story ends.

And I feel a little like,

you know, if somebody, if I were Jewish in 1938, 39 in Germany,

and somebody said, hey, don't worry, Israel is going to be restored after all of this.

I'd be like, okay, that's good, but

what happens in between time?

You know, so I know how it ends, and I know it will be for

good

in the end.

I believe in the American people still.

It's really, it's getting harder every day when they don't stand up and

sometimes the ignorance is just

astounding on history, on histories in particular.

But I do believe that Republicans and Democrats in the middle of the country,

where they're not isolated, you know, where they are interacting at the base level, we're still getting along.

I believe that they will do the right thing.

And I think the right thing

is to be

forgiving.

Interesting that you say that.

My last book.

Then these are revenge thrillers and conspiracy thrillers and political thrillers, but the real theme of my last book, In the Blood, was forgiveness.

And my favorite chapter that I ever wrote is chapter three in my last book, In the Blood.

And it's just a conversation.

It's a conversation between the matriarch of the Hastings family, who comes down, she's a little bit older, and just has a conversation and passes on some wisdom to my protagonist, James Reese.

And for whatever reason, that conversation meant so much to me and ended up being so powerful.

That's uh, but it's about forgiveness.

And that conversation then made its way through the entire book, rolled through the entire uh story until the very end.

And it was about forgiveness.

Yeah,

Jack, it's good to see you.

Great to see you.

Thank you so much for everything.

You bet.

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