The Joe Rogan Experience

Yeah, it was, I always say that guy's name wrong. It's a tricky name.

You've all know a Harati.

Yeah, 21 lessons for 21st century.

I think he was talking about how many people plan on not being in the same job in 10 years because that job won't exist anymore versus what it used to be.

Yeah, used to be the people would think that they were going to get a job and they would stay in the job.

The consultant, Rapai, I think his name is and he's a book or something I'll call The Culture Code.

He did a series of interviews with Bill Moyers on PBS called The Power of Myth. And he wrote a book called Hero with a Thousand Faces. So back in 1988... I read that book and I watched all those interviews and I read the book that came out called The Power of Myth based on those interviews.

The Franklin Scandal which is a book about the original Epstein thing ... the original sex trafficking thing

I was reading East of Eden.

So I was reading this book called The Undiscovered Itself by Carl Jung.

And it's amazing how it fits what's happening right now today, right?

But he says in there, you know how during COVID, how comedians flipped and all of a sudden you weren't allowed to question.

But he had this concept about Flying Saucers.

He thinks they're constructs of the mind but not necessarily that they're not real.

A self-confessed skeptic in such matters, Jung was nevertheless intrigued not so much by the reality or unreality, but by their psychic aspect.

He saw Flying Saucers as a modern myth in the making to be passed down the generations just as we have received such myths from our ancestors.

I think the best book to start with Carl Jung is Memory Streams Reflections, which is his biography and he wrote.

And that he lets you in a little, because he was more than a psychologist.

He was a mystic.

And Chris Hayes wrote a book called The Twilight of the Elite about how that happens

And then he became a thing he wrote about.

Just being in the room with them.

There's an entire book called The Emperor of Scent about the academic, all the people who try to push you down, they're trying to push Luca Turen down as if he doesn't know what's going on. He's written the bible of perfume.

Oh yeah. Age 3 Anti-Racist Baby. That's a real book.

He said he doesn't remember writing Kujo. That's why it's so good.

His books got super boring.

He said he doesn't remember writing Kujo.

His books got super boring.

There's a wonderful book by professor Carl Hart from Columbia University Drug Use for Grownups.

Yeah we were talking about them yesterday.

And it's like, you know America's drug problem is a dosage and an adulteration problem, right?

He wrote a whole book about the risk of drugs because the interesting thing is we all throwing around the word risk without definition.

So what David did, he defined what actually risk is.

He made a real risk score simplified, said can you die when you take it, can you die when you take too much, can you become disabled, can you have long-term damages, can you become addicted, all of that.

So he for the very first time defined a proper, by the way never tested undisputed risk score for substances you can take.

And then he applied this risk score to most, he forgot sugar, but like most legal and illegal drugs from alcohol to heroin to psychedelics.

I did that one since I've been home. 21 keys of success. Those are 21 keys that I used when I got out of prison.

So if my character gets ambushed somewhere, I can remember what it was like in Baghdad 2006 to actually get ambushed and then I can take those and apply them right here to this fictional narrative so it's a fictional story, James Reese in the first book gets ambushed on the streets of LA by this assassin guy but I can remember what it felt like to be on the receiving end and then those feelings and emotions go directly on the page so I don't have to find a sniper from, let's say, Ramadi at the height of the war and interview him and then have those answers get filtered through movies I've seen, other interviews I've done, documentaries, other books, whatever it might be and then fictionalize it and put it on the page. It goes all heart and soul right in here so it was very personal, much more personal and it's remained that way even though this is the seventh book, it's still just as powerful when I'm writing it and I'm feeling it as it was for that first one.

If The Terminal List is your first book, that's crazy. How many rewrites were there or edits?

Very few. The questions that I got back are still the ones that I get, content edits today which are like hey explain this for somebody who wasn't in the military or now hey explain this for someone who hasn't read the previous six books. Put another sentence in there too just to explain who this person is and why they're here.

I thought there was gonna be a lot because you're sending this to Simon & Schuster, it's a publisher of all these books that I've read growing up and I thought oh they know what they're doing back there so they're gonna make all these changes.

So those are the kind of edits that I get but no real big content edits at all and I didn't know it because I'm stepping into this for the first time back then and I didn't know if it was gonna be like hey you know what, you should lay off on the violence or do you have to have so many guns in there or do you have to describe them? Nothing, there's zero.

Fifth grade was when Hunt for Red October came out which is why I have a submarine section in the beginning of this as a nod to the 40th anniversary of The Hunt for Red October for Tom Clancy and everything he did for the genre but I just absolutely love it but I had that foundation and I had that foundation from an early age so I wasn't at age 40 when I thought oh maybe I should be, if I'm gonna be a writer what should I have been reading or what can I read that has been written?

Yeah, if people get hooked on a character, they want a new book every year. Like Graney does a new Greyman every year.

My dad had gave me a book a long time ago when I was a kid called The Bridge in St. Louis Ray. And it's about these people that are on this bridge. It collapses and it's in Central South America somewhere and they all die. And the story is about why are these people, let's say there's seven, there might be more or less, but regardless, about that number, a group of people, why were they on that bridge at that time when it collapsed?

Look for his book "Death by Boomers: How the Worst Generation Destroyed the Planet, but First a Child" in 2024.