00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening Hunt podcast. You can't predict anything presented by first, like creating proven versatile hunting apparel from Marino bass layers to technical outerwear for every hunt first like go farther, stay longer. That's the island greeting. Okay, ready, make sure to cut out KLS singing. Joined today by very famous author Hampton Sides Listen. I don't Anthon, I don't want to reduce your I mean, you've written a lot of books, man, but I want to say this Blood and Thunder is a hell of a damn book. Agreed, God, it's a good book. Well, thank you. I just reread talking I reread the whole. I was going to like refresh. I was looking through like what I had downloaded on my phone from a way ago. I was like oh, And then I was like, man, I'm wanna get I want to see when you get that guy on the podcast. And I was like, I reread from start to finish. This is such a good book. But I mean, you know what, you probably hate talking about it because you wrote along. You've written so much stuff since then. Uh. No, authors never get tired of talking about their books. Uh it's like a little kid, one of my kids. I love talking about my kids, and especially that one, because it's really about my chosen home. I chose to live in the West. I chose to live in New Mexico, and I wrote that book to try to understand how Santa Fe and New Mexico and the Southwest got to be what it is and what an education it was for me, you know, just to to learn all the stuff and to follow. You know. It's not a biography of Carson, but it uses this guy Kick Carson as the kind of connective tissue to get me through all of this history of of how the American Western a single generation became, uh became part of the United States. Um, all the good, the bad, the ugly, all of it. Dude was like Kick Carson was like Forrest gump Man. He was there for everything. It seems like it's just amazing. Uh. Yeah, we're gonna get into that. We're gonna get into bunt your kind of whole body work. What you're doing now, which I gotta tell you a story, Please do well. You've taken an interest in Captain Cook. Yes, cal and I how many times did we go past where we're trolling for Wahu and Hawaii? I mean we must drove past where he supposed he died ten times? Oh at least yes, on the Big Island. We spear fished out in front of there out there one time. Oh you did. Yeah, they're like right around that corner, supposed Captain Cooke and that, and that brought us into like speculating, you know, one of those situations where no one really knows what they're talking about. We're all talking about what exactly his situation was, as if you know, the time long long ago when the Internet didn't exist, one of those conversations. And then later we we we all I think, I assume I know I did. We all went to bed and typed into Google Captain Cook. A lot of people think maybe it's Captain Captain Hook the Pirate, or maybe captain you know, Captain uh Kirk from you know, Star trek Uh. He gets mixed up with a lot of other captains, and some people think he was fictionalized, you know, there's always Captain Crunch, you know, but but he was really he's the guy that cuts the inside your mouth up every time you eat his cereal, especially sword cuts in the inside of your mouth, especially with the crunch berry. Remember conspirators of course, carcinogenic serial for bread for you know, for kids. Um. Yeah, yeah, I do think that uh Cook is one of those legendary mythic guys that a lot of people confused with, uh caricatures of of him, like where where's the real you know, you have to dig through all the layers to get down to the actual guy who was actually more interesting than all those caricatures, um, but also very controversial, especially now. I mean, you know, uh, a lot of these guys are you know, pettists there there. The statues are coming down and they're being yanked from from the history books, and uh, you know, because they are part of an era of colonialism that that is under you know, under attack right now. Understandably so from folks like from Hawaii. Native Hawaiians really hate Cook because he's sort of the beginning of the end of of that era. Um. Even though he was primarily just an expl or he was he was not a he was not an occupier, He was not a you know, he didn't lead an army. He was genuinely a great navigator and explorer. But he was the beginning. He was the beginning of modernity coming to their shores and changing everything, and you kind of pay the price for it in his own day. Well, that's what a large part of the book is going to be about, is all the events that lead up to that. You know, he's murdered and uh he you know a lot of people say he deserved it karmically or something like that. How many how many encounters with how many Polynesian people did he have before finally you know, violence escalated. There's a lot of misques, miss signals, and uh you know, a hatchet ended up between his shoulder blades, a hatchet that he had given them. Uh So note to self, don't give people a hatchet, uh that if you don't know them really well, Um, because it might he might I get returned to You might get returned in in a way you don't like. Okay, we're gonna get into uh getting all that stuff and the other books as well, um, including ah Arctic Exploration, smart things. We gotta cover off on a couple of things. You know what I'm just saying. You don't talking about like taking statues down. Listen, man, I'm telling you what I had a like a prophecy the other day. If any of us gets a statue erected about them, okay, in a hundred years, they will rip that some bit down. It'll be like they were flying in airplanes, they were burning fossil fuels. They knew what they were doing. And people would be like, but everybody was burning fossil fuels back then, and they'd be like, they all knew. And they will tear your statue down and throw in the ocean. And everything you've done that you think is great, and everything you've done it you think is good and worthwhile, no one will care about. They'll they'll reduce you to that one singular fact that you contributed to the destruction of the planet or yeah, and I don't care how nice you were, what kind of dad you were, the way in which you knew that it was wrong, But that's what you will become. That supersedes everything else. That's what you'll become. And they will tear it down and people be like, maybe should put into a museum. Think of what your statue in an ocean can contribute, Like that's that's some habitat right there. That's good. You should have a statue with a lot of fish size holes in it. Yeah, exactly, throwing off in there. Maybe put a bunch of coral polyps on there, and you know, dude, my statue is already doomed. Uh real quick, Oh brody, we gotta talk about youth deer opener. Montana has every like every state does. Now it's it's the I think it's the greatest thing in the world. Our state has a youth Dear Season. Yeah, special opener before the real opener. I if I didn't have kids, I would be against youth Dear Season. Oh I thought you were going to say you'd go find a kid to go hunt with. No, I would have been like like yeah, like you know most people on Earth. Like when I was in eighth or ninth grade, I had L. De Young Civics class, and L. De Young taught civics through the lens of them. He role played. We didn't know he's role playing, but now looking back, he was clearly joking, but he taught civics as them. He would go like, I am concerned only with what effects al de Young and he would like teach civics through the lens of an extremely selfish person like he would. He would be like, I don't I hope that you people in this room never registered to vote, because why would I dilute my vote? Yeah, so if you're if you're not a parent, you'd be like, yeah, so I would have. If I didn't have kids, I would be like, anti youth season. I bet Cal's anti youth season? Are you cal? Oh? All the ship I paid for your kids? Like the taxes and Gallatin Valley? My god, I mean, did they just suck up by going to that free school? Every person in his valley should stop me and say, hey, thank you so much for not breeding but paying for my offspring. So the sentiments like that, Uh, my god? Do I like youth deer season? So what happened with youth dear season? Um? It's this beautiful little system where like normally kids gonna take hunter safety in their twelve. Like when I was a kid, you could start bow hunting at twelve, you couldn't rifle hunt to your fourteen. You can take a hunter safety at twelve. What this does is there's a system by which if you're like, how do they describe you? Gotta be like within arms each of them. Yeah, there, there's wording in there. You can't just wander out. No, you're there. Yeah, you're their mentor. Um. They can get a regular deer license, they have to be with their mentor. It can be a parent, but a parent can also appoint a mentor who has to be I'm not sure if it's eighteen licensed, legal standing all that, and then the kid can hunt and it's a two days it's two days season, yeah, without taking Also they can do it for two years and that's not as kids, that's anyone right. Yeah, I'm staring at my hunters, my Montana Hunters ed certification right now. October four is when I went went through the program here in the state six uh and Brodie's boy got his first deer. He said, he almost teared up. How do you know when you're almost tearing up? I felt it coming, I felt it come. Did you choke it back? I choked it back? Really didn't want to come. Yeah. It was emotional though, man, it was you know, because we put our time in on that. It's a short season, but we did a day of scouting, day of hunting, day a hunting and killed one, you know, mid day, second day, when we thought it was all over, and my boy spotted the deer when I when I thought it was all over, Buck gave us a slip and then we slipped in on him. So it was fun. Yeah. And what what was the scene? You're driving down the road talking on your phone and your kids. No, man, we're high around in some public land that's only accessible by you know, hiking or boat or however you want to get in there, but you can't drive in there. Um. Yeah, it was. It was a great. We had this a little camp set up. Yeah. I had my daughter who's not old enough. She was there. It's great. Man. She's a hiker, Yeah, she's a hike machine. Yeah. She into the hiking part of the adventure. That's what she likes most, but not real what was her connection to the hunting part. She kind of. Um, she very much likes to go, likes the hike around, but isn't that concerned with what we're doing. Uh, he's only there. He's there for the shooting. Single minded. Yeah, he's there for the shooting. He's there to be succes. He's there for the success. Like he's there, he's enduring everything that leads up to the successful part. If he didn't enjoy it as much as he did, I just call him a trigger man. He's he's tournament. He's like there to be successful. He wants that that he's happy to skip ahead to that moment. My daughter, on the other hand, is there for the experience, to the point where we could be out of halibut fishing um and be really like fighting a halibit getting the harpoon ready, you know, And I'll look and she's looking off the other direction and isn't totally aware that we're in the middle of catching one. You know, my boy, But give me the rod. Give me the rod, just like did way different. She loves it though she's taking hike and machine. She picked up a bunch of andlers. Yeah, she had seven sheds. She found hike and fool man. She loves big old blisters on the back of her feet from her brother's boots. Are they all interested in uh cutting it open? And that? Oh yeah, yeah, that's actually you know. After my boy shot at his buck, he was he said to me, I feel happy and sad at the same time. I don't know what to do. But then once like that stuff all kinds goes away when he doesn't mind. Yeah, but once the butcher and starts, he's like he's like, okay, now, yeah, my daughter likes to do the looks, cut the stomach open. But I told her, you know that's interesting on fish, but I dear it's like it's just grass. Yeah, but maybe she wants to look around knock yourself out. But I'm like, you're not gonna find like a duck in air or something, just like well, she yeah, you know, she likes to cutting up. She likes all that. Oh she's great man um, and she's excited to turn but she's got another two years because she can't do it till she's ten. No, she's gonna be listen with her hiking and endurance. Um, she could turn into just a stone cold killer. Because that's the hard part, you know, that's the hard part. Uh. Oh, this is interesting, you know, Like here's a pee Like I hesitate to even do Pete news because Peter makes news. Their formula, like People for Ethical Treatment of Animals, Like their formula is to do something that the coverage will wind up being like what will they do next? It's like a it's like a pr formula. You do something so kind of like what huh, that it gets media attention, and then here we are talking about it. We're getting bated in by their like what come again? So the new thing is special occasion though we're in the middle of the World Series. Yeah, and we have a good friend who's in MLB, not in the you know, much to his chagrin, not in the participating in the World Series right now. But so Pete's new thing. They're like, hey, why everybody's thinking about the World Series. Here's something to try on. They believe that there's time to retire the world. The word bullpen because makes you think of a bull all penned up. I thought of the fact if I was if I was in charge of Peter and someone's like, hey, man, what should be our grape of baseball? I would probably be like, while the gloves are made of leather, the balls made of leather. Everybody's shoes are made of leather. Let's go after the leather. Those guys probably consume a lot of protein. But no that like, I got it, man, We're gonna hit him where it counts. In use of the term bullpen, uh, Pete Alonso mets first basement and Uh two times. He's the only guy he's been on the show. He's been the only guy to hit to win the old UH home run Derby twice. He says he likes to call it the bullpen um. Well, first, let me tell you what Peter says about it. There's he's confusing because we've got Pete and Peter, so you gotta he was gonna say. This would have been a good Halloween costume idea. Peter Alonzo, you don't even this guy. Listen, this guy is very good at sub sentence ship, dumb word plays, and dumb word plays. So you can like a baseball player wearing like birken stocks. You got like a hemp, like a purse or something. I got a baseball. That dude feels so good at ship like that. Peter says that words matter, and baseball bullpens de value. They're kind of playing. They're playing to the strength of the ball players. To begin again, quote words matter, and baseball bullpens d value talented players and mock the misery of sensitive animals. Peter encourages major League Baseball coaches, announcers, players and fans to change up their language and embrace the term arm barn instead, which seems kind of a bunch of severed arms in a bar like like it's disturbing him. And here's what petalso says. He says they should keep calling it the bullpen. How I see, it's when a new guy comes in. He's fresh meat anyways, he's there to smash that pictures earned run average, and that's how he views him as fresh meat. So he likes calling the bullpen. Moving on, that's a cal term. Oh, Kriant, tell us about your all your wild and all your wild food adventures. When you went to Ruby, Yeah, did you guys sing that song? A lot na? Didn't? But take it a waste, that's about all. Uh. Yeah, I went to Aruba for a for a vacation, but then kind of did it a little bit the meat either way. Went fishing, and there are quite a number of things that I learned about um. On one of the days that I went fishing, caught a couple of different species, but one was a pretty small parrot fish. And when it came uh, when we reeled it in the the guide said that it was a protected species, and so we returned it and an opportunistic seagull. God those he was God, they were just that that poor little fish just could not get down fast enough. Did you get the feeling that the seagull was like on your situation, Like he's like, these people will produce food if I stayed, if I fly around here. There were times where there were no birds around the boat, and then all of a sudden, they're going to be like a flock hanging out. And we tried to put the fish return it to a spot where yeah, exactly, we tried to do it surreptitiously, but this one was just just went in there and grabbed it. Um. But you know, we we we hope to get it back into the water safely. But um, anyway, so you killed a lot of fish. We killed a couple and killed a couple of fish. Um. But I was looking at it's its mouth and it is like a little it's like a it's like someone who just had their braces taken off, and it's got like really straight, a really straight top and bottom row of these just yeah, they're not like little sharp teeth. It's just kind of like a retainer. Um. Thankfully I did not experience that. Um. But I would imagine because they use that little beak type mouth teeth situation too. They eat algae, and they eat algae off rocks and coral. Uh, and then they poop out sand and you'll just see it coming off them. So they make their peaches. Yeah, yeah, so I I found that fascinating. Um. When h Kimmy Warner, we're we're spear fishing for parrot fish, Kenny Warrener. One of her strategies is when she dives down, she takes a rock and scrapes the rock on the coral to mimic the sound of feeding parrot fish. So she goes down and she's like and does it that like the rhythm they use when they're doing that to to try to like replicate the sound of a feeding one. You had to put them to put him at ease. How clever. She'll take two rocks and put them in her hands and just rub them together like that. Did you eat them when you got? Oh? Yeah, they're very popular. Like they're like they're like a high grade fish in Hawaii, and often they're protected and people say they're protected because they make sand, but they're protected because they're like they're they're a favorite of the scuba diving world. Yes, big, bright, beautiful at times, pretty easy to kill. And so it's one of those ones that in some areas it's just even like in places where it's like in Mexico you can, but it was explained to me in a lot of areas it's like, hey, you can, but we kind of don't because they're so popular with divers, these big blue, crazy as fish, you know, and people like you can shoot them. They're good to eat, but we generally don't because they're they hold a lot of value as a as a fish to behold, you know. And they do have like that sexual transition to right, so they're all female and then hermaphrod did it and switch over to male. And there's a worry of like the harvest, how the harvest is going to impact that dynamic for reading, which is another argument, Like in these places where it is a really good food fish, I mean we ate several really um and uh and and then you have a lot of us right land of any uses type of situation where you got divers and fisher mountain and people that just want to eat. And then there her when they they're hermaphrodites, and when they turned their their coloration. I can't remember what way it goes. Can you explained it? I think the blues are the males. Does that happen at a certain stage because the one I caught was pretty small like the big dogs? Or when they turned to a female or is it their way around to look at that Catl's gonna look it up on the internet. Yeah. I did get a really good opportunity to. We were talking dinosaurs with my buddy's kid the other day and he was explaining me how the females t rexes are always smaller than the male t rexes. I said, you know, it's called sexual dimorphism, and he was like, anyway, t rex Oh man, do we gotta you should bring that kid down. We got a guy coming up that kid would be extremely I don't want to say, who bring that kid down? At him sitting the lazy boy back there, I'll let his dad. No, he is like probably in between your two oldest boys. Mhmm, yeah, he takes uh. Well, he's looking it up and talk about the little the little going ads you were eating. Oh yeah. Um. So the other thing I did was I the first day uh of snorkeling. I spotted a number of sea urchin around, so then before I wanted to make sure that I was allowed to attempt to harvest one or two. Found out that it was not an issue, and um, I harvested one white sea urchin and one black sea arch and I was told that the white ones you could pick up without being stung. But I was kind of just very nervous about I was out there by myself, so I didn't want to miss step. So I was like, I used my scuba fin and I used like a mesh bag to try to figure out how to get it without really touching it. So that was successful for these two critters, and I was very excited to try to replicate like a great restaurant experience with these like plump you know, pieces of ny. Unfortunately that was not what happened. Um, boney is going ad. So the row well, I'm no, it's a going add. It is a gonad well going adds not a row like going add. How's that not a testicle? You know about this handine, you write a book, I do not stuff. We're getting pretty deep. So okay, this is from Science Daily. The general gland of a sea arch in. The so called gonad is found inside the urchin. The organ stores nutrients and contains milt and row during the spawning season, and you can eat both males and females um. And I, you know, I didn't know what season we were in for spawning and not. And I know that there are a couple of After reading, I found out there are a couple of factors that would influence how plump the row would be. So, uh my, my little urchins had just kind of a tiny bit of slime and they're not particularly orange, not particularly plump. I no, really, I kind of you know, I you you there's a lot of gooey guts stuff inside the urchin. You kind of wash that out, and the gonads are um kind of right at the back of the inside of the shell, and you can kind of scrape those out with your fingers. It's pretty easy to do that. And I just had like a little a little yellow film um, not particularly good. So I was disappointed, but the experience was was fun anyway, and just kind of cutting them open and seeing their parts and and yeah, so you try again next time. You're in the right area at the right time. Absolutely, Oh yeah, up at our up at my fish check. There's commercial guys come through in the winter. Oh really, and they're even up even they do. Yeah, they come through every winter for the cucumbers and the urchins urge and row. Yeah. Yeah, I would try again any day. I love finding things like that. How's it come col Should we just move on? Are you gonna report? Oh, I'm I'm gonna report. So yeah, blue blues are mail. According there's there's all sorts of parrot fish, as you know, but the ones that we were hunting specifically, UM, Hawaii considers them the blues male, and the males kind of tend to a harem of females. And when the big blue male is shot, as per our discussion, uh, the alpha female then transitions to a mail that is wild. It's I think she's just addressing a need huh. Oh man. Yeah, And so he's so interesting. You know, when I was diving down California, we talked a lot about sheep head down there, and that is a species that's like highly targeted for like the restaurant aquarium side of things. Um. And the argument down there is because they reproduce in the same way a male tends an area develops a harem of females or congregates a harem of females, and then when the male is caught or killed or removed from the scenario, a female then transitions to mail. Well, um, that population, they've seen it reduce in average size, Like the average size of the take is getting smaller and smaller and smaller because the um the population is forcing smaller fish to turn mail. And I think that's a big part of the argument here, because I know on the Big Island of Hawaii you can take male parrot fish, but on Maui you are not allowed any male parrot fish take. Can't can't kill the blue ones because they don't want you prematurely triggering younger ones into their sexual transition. I think would be the biology cole argument stuff. Speaking of sheep's had fish, I just looked up at picture of that that is gnarly. There's a good jillions yeah, good teeth, Oh yeah, the one I pulled up has like teeth look human. And then it's just like got these rows of flat like cut chewing muller looking things. Cal hit us with this deal you checked out on this poblo escobar deal. Yeah, Yeah, this recent development is new, but I feel very comfortable with the folks at the table. We can cover it just fine. So, uh, drug kingpan Pablo Escobar got into hippos and released hippos. Those hippos make a um in um narcos. Oh, they're making appearance. The hippos have like a what do you call it, like a cameo nice hips in arcs. Yeah, they're big, big stars. Um. So there was a point in the world, a point in time rather where people have the idea of transporting wildlife all over the place. Um. You know, you can probably get more eccentric than a big drug kingpin. But they do what they want. And and this guy Pablo got some hippos in as probably like an oddity. And then there was there's all these stories about like also for defense, you know, nobody can come in through his hippo defense whatever. So um, from an ecological standpoint, we know that they are they consume a niche where they're um, they're deforesters. They really they're they're huge animal and they reconstruct waterways and the world I was surprised to see is the world's largest invasive species, which makes sense to me, like a couple of thousand pounds. Oh yeah, over two and pounds. Yeah and UM, and they're they're very dangerous, they're very territorial all the things. UM. Interesting side note this, this was actually proposed in the state Louisiana to bring hippos in as a possible commercial enterprise UM for meat production, for meat production. UM. You can fast forward to see how well Louisiana did with neutria. I'm glad, we're probably glad they started small. Uh. If this works, then we go to hippos. Uh. So the interesting thing is, uh, somebody here in the US decided to get ahead of the hippo curve and have has somehow won some court case to bestow upon hippo's um some some human rights. And this has absolutely nothing to do with the very catchy headline of uh CO cane hippos as they're often called. UM. But it is interesting to say, like, here is this species that if something were to happen with one in the US, it would be protected under an extra level of protection, somewhat human, you could say, m hm. And but there's it's not doing anything to protect the hippos in Colombia because it's an American. Correct. Yeah, yeah, again, it's just like borrowing the headline. But you can see this as like an animal rights type of wind and um, depending on on if you want to take sides. I hate saying that we have to take sides, but it's like, is this a wind for animals or is it I'm leaning more towards the barn arm thing with this one. No man to see home this dude real quick. This dude is they're talking about cooling the hippos in Colombia. In Colombia. Yes, so some dude inspired by that threat try to make a is trying to make a thing in the US. But a legal analyst is saying that you can do all you want in the US. It has no like enforcement. Correct. So it's like it's just doing it for fun. Yes, but then it's like crusading against the bullpen. It's like you're just doing You're just throwing stuff out there. And then you know, let's say we have a situation where all of a sudden, somebody managed to get a bunch of Louisiana hippo started way off and some parish and then all of a sudden, now you have the legal president, you have this legal thing hanging out there is like you know, kids in their p rogues get sucked under by territorial hippos, right, and it's like, well those hippos have rights. Well, now's the time to get a hippo thing going down there if you worry about their long term deal. Brody real quickly dig into this, um, dig into this, this, this, this kind of crazy journey by this great wolf, and then we're gonna get into our esteemed author here. Sure, I feel like these wolf take a long walk stories are getting a little passe, But this one, dude, listen man, well, I mean, like any story about any animal that goes along ways for mysterious reasons, this one's is interesting because of where it ended up. UM. A gray wolf named O R. Nine from Oregon UH took a one thousand mile southward journey from northern Oregon to southern California. Thousand miles. It never gets old to me, crossed UH two major highways and the five um southernmost sighting of the species in the Golden State and nearly a century. And as it's typical, it's a two year old male that broke off of its wolf river pack and decided to go for a long walk, covering sixteen miles a day before his collar failed. You know what, but I'll just call it when I got something with a collar, they call it keeping it on air. But we kept that thing on air five years. Like that traveled through sixteen counties. There's a great quote in the end where he uh, now they're warning if the wolf is in Ventura County right yep, yea near Santa Barbara. There's a quote where is that. Oh, there's a quote from a guy who says, Um, it's very rural. It's not like he's at the beach with a whole bunch of people or anything like that. Stealing potato chips from someone's like towel off the beach. That's from Uh, that's what a from a spokesperson from California Department of Fishing Game. Um, that was his quote. It's not like he's at the beach with a whole bunch of people or anything like that. But when I read this one, you know how, there's a certain, uh, certain segment of people who are both anti wolf and anti uh left wing city people. They're like, well, we should turn those wolves loosen. Boulder, Colorado, list. It's just you know he's there. You got your dream though. Yeah. Wait, there's a wolf in Santa Barbro. Yeah I might be there now. Just speaking with a family that runs a mix like goat sheep operation to knock down um you know, like nasty They do like thinning operations around California primarily to um get rid of fuel build up, fire fuel build up and some noxious weed control and stuff. But so they run a ton of a ton of boor goats and a and a ton of a type of hair sheep that I can't remember what it is. But um, we're talking about um predators in the way of the state of California runs their their predator stuff and and according to these folks at Start Creek Land Stewards, UM, they do participate on like a wolf board in the state of California. Um it's to talk about like how we are going to manage wolves, Like, so California is like being progressive and in the fact that they are going to have wolves in their near future, well they have an established pack, they're already Yeah. Yeah, what did they do with this wolf? Did they? Did they know? I think he's good to go wherever he wants as long as he doesn't get in trouble killing a cow or something. I would assume in this guy, he was he made a bunch of headlines last year. But then when like off radar, right, yeah, yeah, they lost to signal and he just turned up. Um, he's probably a dead end. I mean unless he he either comes back, he's probably a dead end. He's got to run into a female. That's the weird thing about when when when you see these large predators that take off, you know, it's it's so often like juvenile man, and so I see what they're going for. He's like, you know, he's gonna find like the shangri La. But you would have going is you're like a you're like a um genetic that end, Yeah, because you're just not gonna turn up. What he's doing makes sense. He's just not going to find what he's looking for. The shangral on this situation would be unattended. Females, yeah, ladies and no competition. But cal going back to what you were saying, like, I don't I don't ever see California getting to the point where Montana, Wyoming, Idaho is with wolves Like no matter how many they have no, they'll never cut a wolf season in California. Holy ship, man, people have a heart attack. Oh yeah, man, can you imagine? But you know California does a lot of culling of predators because they big private landowners, because they don't have enough bear hunters or lots of agriculture get it done. Yeah, they yeah, they like to. They like to let the government do it, not not paying Sportsman's Hampton. Remind anybody what your books are. I got him here. If you can't remember, well I can remember them, um, although I wish, you know, they take me a long time to do. It take me like five years to actually get them done. So they're not as many as I would like, um, but they all count. So Ghost Soldiers, which is about the Baton Death March in World War Two and the Philippines and the prison war camps there um and a rescue that took place late in the war to rescue the last survivors of the death March. Um. That was my first book, my first history, and uh um moved on from there to Blood and Thunder, which you mentioned we mentioned earlier, which is about the opening of the American West in the eighteen forties. Fifties and sixties. Uh, and sort of follows loosely the the life of Kit Carson, this controversial frontiersman who did a little bit of everything and was kind of like, as you say that, kind of a Forrest Gump of the American West, um pinged and pond off of every every historical event and um was everywhere and mountain man, check, cattleman, check, rancher in general, scout courier, indian agent check. Uh And and of course in his last kind of act of his career, he uh did the roundup and the of the Novajo people that the Denay, and uh that's what he's known for now, um, not all those other things that he did. But after that, I wrote a book called um Hellhound on his Trail, which is about the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis, which is where I grew up, born and raised in Memphis, and always kind of wanted to deconstruct and try to understand this seismic event in my city's history. And uh, I decided that James Earl Ray was in fact the killer, and it ends up being a psychological file of of him and how the FBI finally caught him, um after one of the largest man hunts in American history where he's from southern Illinois. He was kind of a redneck, came from came from just terrible, terrible poverty. Um lots of I mean, I don't know how much time we have to go into him, but he he was a piece of work, a real piece of work. Uh. And the book follows him in the months just prior to the assassination. He begins to kind of stalk King and he moves to Atlanta, and he uh is trying to find his moment where he can he buy his rifle, He buys scope, buys the ammunition, buy but you know, buys a binoculars uh and and literally stalks him, you know, hunts m um. Uh. So after that book, Uh, that's when I moved to this Arctic story. It's called in the Kingdom of Ice, and it's about the first American, the first official American attempt on the North Pole. Uh. It's a story that almost no one's heard of. Uh. The U S S. Jannette, which happened in eighteen seventy nine. Eight Uh one. They went up through the Bearing straight uh of Alaska, and I got stuck in the ice, drifted in the ice for two years until the ship was crushed by the by the ice pack. And these men thirty three men and forty dogs and three small boats out on the ice pack, a thousand miles from the nearest land mass, which is the central coast of Siberia. And it's it's really a story about how they made it home. Some made it home, some didn't. But it's almost half through, so okay, I won't tell you killing no spoiler alert, except that you know, I think you can tell that it's not gonna go well for everyone, including the dogs. Almost the dog, sorry Peter, Peter probably won't. You know, it doesn't like my book that they won't have a problem with the I have a problem with those people. Oh yeah, yeah that that. That's one of the what I'm appreciating the most is just how I haven't heard any any of this, and um, how how much of a story it was in its day and not have not even a anything. That's why I wrote it. That's why I wrote it. I was like, why haven't I heard of this? Why haven't we all heard this? This is the American Shackleton story. You know, It's like greatest, one of the greatest survival stories of all time, I truly believe. And yet um, I had never heard of it until I, you know, just kind of found out about it by chance. Um. And it was in its day the story that everybody knew these guys. Everybody followed their fate and wanted to know what was going to happen to them, and uh, you know, it was like we had sent men to the moon uh uh and or the dark side of the moon really because they were gone for three years and no news from these guys come man. Um. So it's a you know, it's a it's a classic uh survival story, a little bit of scurvy, you know, a little bit of cannibalism. Okay, Now there's not actually cannibalism, um, but it seems like these Arctic stories always have that kind of that kind of ethos. So there's cannibalism, scurvy, Oh, mutiny, that's the other one. Good times um uh. But also a football like it's a very regimented okay, like to keep all active. Yeah, the captain's got a very regimented daily routine and and the um executive officer and it involves you know, like mentally and physically keeping people engaged because it's it's like us in this room are in a space not all that much bigger than this room for two years. Yeah, kel's dogs laying here and we'd probably want up eating it. Uh, I mean, how much of the year is darkness? About half of it? And and there's this one guy who is his name is Collins, and he is a word play guy. Um, you know, kind of kind of like you. Uh, he's you know, he's a he's a punster and and he does limericks and he's this jolly guy that you know, you know, we all know people like that, and they're wonderful to be with for about you know, an hour. I'm sorry, I'm sorry that that checks out. But Phil hasn't gone into limericks yet. If he were to go into limericks, he might be that would be the job. One hour would be enough for most of these guys. But they were with this dude for two years and they all wanted to wring his neck. I mean, they wanted to kill him. They did. Um so yeah, so yeah. A lot of the book is of study of of how people survive um close proximity and claustrophobia and darkness for half the year and arctic conditions. And one of the things they do is, apart from playing football out on the ice is UM they do a lot of hunting UM. And they hunt polar bear and walrus and seal UM and they get to be pretty good at it. And that's one of the reasons they don't get scurvy, as they're constantly eating fresh food UH and and greens that they find around the edges of the Arctic. So it's a it's you know, it's it's a cooking and hunting UH book a lot of ways kind of fits in with what you guys talk about UM and UH. They finally get to open water after a thousand miles on the ice, and they put in their boats and they start sailing for Siberia UH. And they encounter a gale the next day, a very bad storm, and the three boats are scattered from each other, and UH the story becomes, you know, really just follows these three boats as they make their way towards UH. Uh a river delta, the Lana the Lana Delta, which is uh one of the hugest deltas on Earth, and it's a labyrinth of thousands of islands and you know switchbacks and cold to sacs, and it's it's it's where the story, the rest of the story takes place. I won't tell you anything like a psychological false summit story where like as soon as I get on top there like keep keeps going. Yeah, yeah, the misery just keeps It's like misery porn, you know, it just keeps going. Hey, you know when you're mentioning there's certain I don't want to call them tropes, but certain things that Arctic exploration stories involved, Like you're always like looking ahead of the cannibalism part, the mutiny part. There's also um the encounters with Askimo or Intuit hunters who and you want it with this like really stark juxtaposition, because here's these people who are thriving, they're like raising children and they show up and it's often that they don't want to get too close. It's kind of like what are these people doing here? And you see like these two just like vastly different ways that people sort of comprehend the Arctic landscape and can live on the Arctic landscape. You know, it's like the thing that's killing all you people. Meanwhile, there are individuals who are raising children here by choice. Yeah. It's like and you kind of like because it brings up these all these things you're talking about, like resilience and ingenuity, but like that juxtaposition, they're raising families here and we're all dying. Yeah. In this story, they end up in a place in Siberia that I went to. Uh, and the Yakut people are still thriving, still living there. Uh And and they play a big role and rescuing these guys um and sharing what they have. They're great hunters and and they live off the land and they understand the nuances of ice and window fish and went to hunt and went to retreat uh to the south. And you know, Uh, it's a fascinating part of the story. Actually there is the people who actually live in this place that that seems to be killing uh these uh these white dudes, mostly white tings. But there are two um Alaska Inuit hunters who are part of this expedition from the beginning. And uh they play a big role. Uh they're great hunters and uh they keep this thing going. They keep these men alive. Uh. Their knowledge of of of of of how to hunt this kind of landscape, this sort of perma frost um landscape, and um, you know they're hunting reindeer mainly, but also polar bear and walrus. And I was thinking the mental side of things, right, it's like they I think they brought on a hundred dogs at the very beginning. No, not that many, about fifty that much. But um, the dogs are important, and UM, don't worry if they don't. They aren't eaten until maybe the very very very very bitter end because they're they're working, they're part of the team. They are part of the team, and they're beloved. And uh, there's one favorite dog named Snoozer. Things do not go well for Snoozer and the an I'm afraid, but we want Lesten not go there. It's too sad. But if you're on that boat too, it's like these these two, Oh I ask him, are there to take care of the dogs too? And man, if you're not a dog person, you have fifty of them that you're living with, their piano and pooping on staff. Walk everybody through your latest on desperate ground. On desperate ground is um a battle story. It's the story of the most the most epic Battle of the Korean War, and it's it's the Battle of Chosen Reservoir. Um. You know, I've I've always kind of been curious about the Korean War because, as you know, it's kind of an also ran in our in our history, Like we don't talk about it that much in school. It's not studied as much. Some people don't even think it was a real war because it's been called a U. N. Police action, or it's been called, you know, perhaps a civil a civil war that that the world kind of glommed onto. Um. But they killed far far more Americans than the Global War on Terror. Have absolutely and more more people uh per per year than the Vietnam War. Um. And I don't know it was more in a more efficient killer. Yeah, and it was. It was it was kind of a world war. It was like a world war crammed down into this one peninsula, the Chinese, the Russians, uh, and the North Koreans versus the U N. Led by of course the United States. But uh, it's also I kind of wanted to do this because it's sort of my my parents war, my parents generation war. Uh, my my stepfather fought. They're uh, my father in law had Korean War orders and made it as far as Japan. Um. So you know, I just kind of want to understand what they this was their conflict of and I unfortunately was saying goodbye to some of my uh that generation a lot of a lot of like I lost my stepfather and lost my father in law a couple of years ago. So um, that was kind of my personal motivation, just want to understand what what was this thing? Um? And and you know, I think the Korean War is a very tough narrative to get your arms around, so I decided to reduce it down to something more understandable, which is one battle you know, that has a clear beginning, middle end, And the Battle of Chosen Reservoir is that battle. It's um, you know, it's it's kind of like a classic. It's like something out of through Cydites or you know, Herodotus or something. It's like this. You know, this army marches up into this wilderness on the shores of a frozen lake where they are completely surrounded by tend to one by this force that had secretly entered the war. I'm talking about the Chinese Red Army, and uh, this is the first marine Division of the United States is uh, you know, seemingly going to be wiped out, and it's it's really how they fought their way out of this trap and how they fought their way back to the sea. You could say it's a retreat. It's a story about a retreat, but the Marines, of course, do not allow you to use the word retreat. And there's a lot of euphemisms for retreat. Uh, retrograde maneuver is one I like another one is advanced to the rear. But uh, this is one of the you know, this is a fighting withdrawal. This is they fought every step of the way to get there, to get out of this call loss. Will you know, it's a series of blunders that led to this, Uh, mainly by blunders committed by a guy named General Douglas MacArthur. You've heard of him, and and uh, you know, the Marines just can't stand MacArthur. They just to this day they hate him with such a passion. But so the first half of the book looks at all those blunders and kind of how it all happened that they were trapped and how they didn't know how could they not know that the three hundred thousand Chinese had across the border from North Korea, I mean from Manchuria. Um, And how how they got kind of put in this position? And then the rest is of the book is about how they how they fought their way out. Uh. How do you of all the basilions of ideas that flow through your head, how do you um narrowed down? I mean, is it is it like eventually it's like a throw in a dart at a wall and be like I'll pick that thing. Or does it become clear to you what you need to do when you're when you're doing book projects, You're like, I've been five years on when you said the five years, that's what I'm like, are you procrastinating for four? And what is the thing? Well, some people have said that I picked my books based on interesting travel that would be required. That's why I was going to ask about travel, because I was wondering how much you if it's always places you want to go, or if you ever like all that sucks, I gotta go there. Now that's not completely um untrue? You know I do. I do love to travel, and I do want to pick stories that require interesting far flung travel. Um. So that's true. Um, but it's also uh, you know, it's it's a whole combination of things. I think. I always say that it's like there's two sets of criteria. Are two ledgers that I use, Like one is one is the kind of rational ledger? You know, it's like is this a good story? Check? Is is there enough material? Check? Has it been written about? Not you know too much? Or not enough? Check? And you know, you check all the obvious boxes for what is will this make a good story? But then there's sort of the irrational side of it, which is does the hair on the back of your neck stand up when you think about this story? Does it grab you? Is it exciting? Is it? Is it? Uh? You know that kind of tingling in your gut feeling that I can I can live with this thing for five years and um, it'll sustain me. And you gotta have both of those. You've gotta have the rational side and the irrational side. Um. And I guess I guess timing also has something to do with it. I mean this Korean War book I thought about doing twenty years ago or fifteen years ago, uh, and kind of filed it away. How did it first? Like how did the how do how do you pronounce the chosen, chosen res chosen? I kdn't realize that. Yeah, how do you remember? How did the chosen reservoir? Or take kick Carson or the janette? Like, do you remember the first time entered your head? Yeah? Well, because I've never heard of it before. H And I was signing books, my first book, Ghost Soldiers, which is about some really tough dudes, the veterans of the Baton Death March. You don't you can't imagine people tougher than Baton Death March guys. But as I'm signing this book, this gentleman comes up who was a Korean War vet and he says like, yeah, he's Baton guys are a bunch of wuzzy's. You know, you should do a book on the on the reservoir. And I'm like, what, what's the reservoir? Tell me more? And he's like, well, you know, here's my card and he put his card down and it said the Chosen Few. It's the name of their organization called themselves the Chosen Few. And I like that little play on words. Yeah, and uh, Phil would like that. And he I noticed that he was missing his fingertips, and it turned out that he had lost his fingertips in the battle. Uh. I forgot to mention that this battle was fought in thirty five below zero weather, and uh that it was the third combatant. Really, you know, it's the Chinese, the Americans, and old Man Winter. It was fought in late November early December of n and uh it made an impression on me, you know, I was like, yeah, tell me more. And I took his card and I filed it away and began to read about it. But I think it took me about fifteen years before I started really deciding this is the time to write that book. But in the meantime, you're just you're probably reading books and you know, let me let me ask this question another way at this moment, sitting here right now, UM, how many contenders are floating around in your head? I don't know. I I got a list, uh four, maybe ten or ten or twenty book ideas that I might and you're not going to get to them all. Oh, I'm not gonna You're like, it's a race against the clock at a point, right, it's a right right against the clock. It's also race against Um, I mean I don't know about the future of publishing, you know, like I don't know if people are gonna be reading twenty years from now, at least not in the way that we think of of ink and glue and paper and you know, the old fashioned books that you know, I love to just read a good book and uh, you know, now it's it's a different kind of reading public. But but the you see, I'm getting back to I gotta ask you this, and I gotta go back to in their question. But the economics if people are reading on their phone, like that doesn't affect your economics, right, I mean too terribly. No, it's not. It's not too terrible. But do you mean they want to sit down and live with live with fies y, Yeah, that's part of it. I mean I have kids, as do you, and my kids, you know, attention span sometimes is lacking. You know. They like things quick, like movies quicker, they like they like you know, just uh you know, they want action, you know, and some of these books take a long time to set up, and you know, I mean they're long books, and you know, I just I don't know. Generational the generational reading reading habits is when one factor in all this, most of the people read my books are a little bit older. Um. You know, they're like people in their sixties, like, you know, start to really like history. I think it seems like that seems to be the turning point because you have to keep that in mind and you're writing. I kind of do you have to remember you're writing for Yeah, my wife was never worried when I went on book to her. You know, she's like because most a lot of my readers are like you can hear them coming before you see them. And uh, you know it depends generation. Um, but uh look, I love my readers and whatever age they are, and uh I do, I do have younger readers as too, but uh, I just do worry that. I guess this is just getting off on a tangent. But you know what is happening in publish ng and how as we're moving into the digital the digital age. Um. I also you know, audio books are are going going gangbusters and it's it's an edge. I read one of my books, um for an audio book, I don't know, did you read your like American Buffalo? Did you read after ten years? I did? Yeah, Well it was one of the hardest things I've ever done sitting in a studio. I I, um, I thought this. This producer said, it's gonna be really hard because, uh, you know, your mouth and your throat and your tongue, and you know, it's like sitting in a studio for eight, nine, ten hours a day reading. He said, it's gonna be like digging a six foot hole in the ground with your mouth. And that's the way it felt. That's the way it felt. But also I wanted to I wanted to change the book. Um, I mean, I kept saying, who wrote this crap? I I you know, I wanted to edit my own stuff for for a for a to be read aloud. Uh, And they say, you contractually, you cannot change a word of your own book. So you know, just have to read exactly what this clown wrote. But it was interesting. So audio books are going great though, I mean, they're selling and they're a bigger and bigger portion of the overall sales. Yeah, we just did a thing that went direct to audio and won't have a print life. That's it's like, yeah, but it's not. It's different the book. No, No, because it's it's um, it's a it's a collection of a bunch of people telling stories about Close Calls. But there's sort of like a there's a narrator component to it that comes in. But yeah, it was like I mean, you would experienced it very much like a book, but it just was built. You know you're talking about that you wrote it, if you were if you knew you were going to read it, you might have did some things differently just to have it worked that way. This is kind of like this project, which is called Close Calls, is just leaning into an adopt and adapting the project to be suitable to audio rather than having to be let's take a thing that was like built for print and make it audio like, just make it for audio, like, make it perfect for that format. Um. Yeah, And I think that that a little that a little bit ties into what you're saying about just trying to understand the future. Um. And you know, but you've probably learned to live with all that kind of fear because you were a magazine writer and you had to be nervous about how can I continue to pay the bills as a magazine writer, which is daunting. You've got to evolve and you know, we're living through I think one of the most consequential uh, periods of of change and transition in terms of information. And you know, it's like the Guttenberg Bible or whatever. You know, these these moments in history that are so important to publishing or two how information is spread around the world. Well, we're living through one of those moments now and that's you know, the digital age and everything that has come with it with the Internet. Um so everyone, all writers are having to evolve with it, trying to figure out how to make a living doing this and how to make their impact, you know, and you know, it's interesting. It's an interesting time. I think we have to look at it that way. It's interesting. Otherwise it's just kind of scary because the writers who aren't involving are are suffering. Now. I think there's either there's two paths you can take. You can take the path of resentment and fear, or you can take the path of there's a set of things that I want to talk about, and I'll continue to talk about those things. I don't give a ship what happens. It's like, and you'll find it. Take your choice, yeah, and you'll you'll find your own area almost yeah, you know, you know, when you were mentioned um interesting term for the cold Um during the creat there in the battle, the chosen chose what I was. I was like like, like chosen, Well, it's it's chose sin as is how you how as they say it. But and it's a complicated thing because that's a Japanese word even though it's set in Korea. But go ahead. You had an interesting term you used, which would be a third combatant for the cold Um. And there's things that I felt really stupid not even knowing that this happened. But to refer back to blood and thunder, Um, I didn't know that. During the Mexican American War, I didn't realize that we actually invaded that the U. S. Army invaded Mexico and made it all way to Mexico City. But remember you talk about like part of the strategy when someone invades Mexico is you just wait until yellow fever hits him or malaria, I can't remember what, and like let let disease take its toll, then we'll respond. Yeah, that happened. Uh, there was this huge amphibious invasion of Vera Cruz, Mexico, and then they marched all the way to uh, to Mexico City and held Mexico City for over a year. Uh um, occupied it. It's kind of a may. I don't think we teach that very much. I was. I remember, like, how like, how do I not know that we actually did that? Yeah? Yeah, we invaded their borders, you know, before they and you know there's so much news now about of course crossing the borders, and you know it's like it's it's a murky, messy history for sure. But but Carson kid, Carson Um and Blood and thunder, you know, is so mixed up in it all because he's married to a Mexican woman, a New Mexican woman, uh from Taos, New Mexico. And uh, he sort of sees all sides of it. And that's why he's such an interesting cat, is that you know, he's conflicted. He's his first wife was a rapp Yes, I had a child, they had two children, actually died. He like brought his his child to be raised elsewhere. Um. Yeah, like the and you think these people like like this like American figure, but most of the people around him in his life wouldn't have self identified as Americans. I mean that that idea hadn't really taken shape where he was, including him. I mean, he was a runaway. He tried to get away from America. He ran away on the Santa Fe Trail from Uh, from Missouri, and UH kind of never looked back. You know. He fell in love with the West. And as you mentioned, his first wife was a Rappaho and he lived with her tribe and spoke her language, and we always talked about it as being his favorite The favorite part of his life was was those years living with the Rappaho and being a mountain man. And but you know, eventually he after she died, he married a young woman from Taos, and then he started a different life. He converted to Catholicism, and he spoke Spanish and in the house and raised their kids speaking Spanish, and you know, he lived that life. He is like you know, as you say, Forrest Gump, but you know, he just keeps He has a cat with nine lives. He just organically morphs into the next guy, and then the next guy and the next guy. And by following his the trajectory of his life, you can begin to really understand all the different forces that shaped the American West. And that's that's really why I wrote it. There are two things in there that that that really strikes me in a way of just like understanding American history is I talked about the the idea of like being American being kind of a flimsy notion for a lot of the UM a lot of people who are in the Southwest, Like it wasn't like clearly defined, right. It was kind of like, you know, there's this government that's far away in Mexico and they exert some level of influence on this portion. And then also there's this governor, there's this government in Washington and they're exerting some level of influence. But it all seems very abstract to try to understand, like you know who to be with. But you can talk about when like the U. S. Army had people who had recently emigrated to America from Europe and they're leader they're in the U. S. Army, and their allegiance as Americans is also like fairly flimsy, and it's not a big part of the book. You make a mention of a group of um Irish Catholics who are in the U. S. Army waging war in Mexico and they feel conflicted between being a US citizen, but fighting against Catholics, that's right. And they leave the U. S. Army because they feel like they have like more of a sort of religious obligation. Two Roman Catholics, and then they leave to fight against the U. S. Army, And then the U. S. Army catches some of them in hangs fifty of them at once. They didn't tell you about that in history. Yeah, Like there's a painting of it in the in the Book of that Day when they hung those fifty people like man m hmm, just like just just I don't know, a sort of ruthlessness that existed then. Yeah, Yeah, it was a different obviously, a very different time, and I think the notion of what is an American was evolving then, you know, very very much. All of a sudden, all of a sudden, there was this western third of the continent that was kind of up for grabs. Uh. You know, I kind of described it as one of the largest land grabs in in in history. You know, like all of that terrain about the size of continental Europe was was taken uh in in one generation really in a four year period um in the eighteen forties. Uh. You just well, we'll take that we wanted all people in the time that we're involved in even acknowledging that they were in a moral they're a little bit of shaky ground, yes, and and that's why you know, people like Kid Carson, you know, you know, it's like they needed folk heroes back east to sort of begin to justify this land grab. They needed great stories of plucky guys who were already there out west. And uh, there was all these books that came out um that were kind of the proto Western's, early westerns that were called Blood and Thunders. That's where the title of my book comes from. Blood Thunders were these pulp westerns, and they always had some kind of hero who often was Kit carson Um. Kind of now we're getting into the fictional Kit carson Um. They said he was a you know, six foot eight and arian and blue eyed and he got all the ladies and win the day. And you know, uh, that wasn't what Kick Carson was really like at all. He was like five ft four, five ft five, awkward voice, I don't know about that, but a little twinkle in his eye. He was mischievous, but he was just to not you know, he spoke seven Indian languages. He was a lifelong, devoted friend to many Indian tribes. Don't go be wrong. He had an amazing life. But he wasn't this pulp hero that seemingly people back East writers back East needed to uh to celebrate. You know. He was this uh kind of ordinary guy who was extremely loyal. Uh. I mean it'd be great if you could have interviewed him on your show here, because I mean he was the ultimate meat eater, you know, like he he knew how to he knew how to hunt, and he knew how to fish, and he knew he knew how to butcher an animal and set up a camp and strike a camp, and he knew win to fight and win to bluff and you know, he just had all this sort of panoply of skills um that you know got him through a whole life living out here. And uh but he but he wasn't that that that sort of um cape crusader mythic hero that was that was the protagonist of these Blood and thunderbooks. Back East did a lot of running away for that to be true, right right right? You know what when when to fight and went out to fight? Yeah he he, uh he did. I mean, and that was one of his great skills, was, you know, sensing the situation. There was one particular battle in the Panhandle of Texas at a place called Adobe Walls where he was completely surrounded by Comanches and uh he in a small army and mostly an army of other Native American tribes. Actually, um, but he realized he fought with the youths a lot. He fought with the youths a lot, like you'd bring up. They traveled with them, they did, and they were his scouts. But um, he in that particular situation just figured out a way to get extricate, extricate himself from it. Add it was, it was another retreat story. I guess I'm kind of attracted to them. But he lived to fight another day. He figured out that, you know, this could have been Custard Custer times ten, you know, but he he was smart enough and uh cool under pressure enough too, to remove himself from that particular situation. Are you familiar with that. There's the first Battle of Adobe Walls and the second battle there too. He was involved in the first one. Yeah. Did you did you visit that site? Yeah? I haven't been there. Yeah. Yeah. The second one was a much minor deal, was Buffalo hunters like hide hunters versus I think But I believe the commanche in Kiowa again, Yeah, I think so in that same setup. How how do you approach, um, coming to a conclusion? UM? In your job, you gotta suss through all these sources, many of which are not around today, certainly when you're talking about kid Carson uh. Um, but you can very well come to a conclusion that can be refuted, uh even the next year. Right, Like we always talk about advances and technology and new findings and going back and looking at that thing in the drawer with the new technology that we have to have today. It happens, go through tons of stories like that all the time. UM. But you kind of brought it up in your UM when we're talking about James Earl Ray right, like you decided that that he did it right, because there's a whole bunch of other folks out there that think that conspiracy, big conspiracy, and a bunch of other things. So I guess I'm kind of interested in in UM, if you have a certain approach to coming to a conclusion with either a historical figure or a battle, and UM if now that you you have such a deep, um, you know, library of books that you've written, if if you've come across people who are supportive or not supportive, if you if you're working on the next story because you they don't like the conclusion that you came to. Well, absolutely, I mean, you know you're making a million little judgment calls all the time when you write a piece of narrative history. You know, you are you you have to unfortunately and and uh, you make mistakes sometimes and I think you know it's certainly um uh it's an art, very muddy, messy art, not a science. UM. And you have to be open minded like that maybe you were wrong. Uh, you know, maybe you have to revisit a subject sometime down the line and say I got that wrong. But in the end you just gotta be it's fair and as meticulous and as uh you know, try as hard as you can to put yourself in those times and not judge them by you know, today's standards of of UM politics or you know, sensibilities that we have today. UM. And uh read as many things as you can read, and you know, try to understand the times and give as much context as possible. UM. James were way. Interestingly, you know, I did not reckon with the the ferocity of this of the conspiracy people UM when I wrote that book. Uh, you know they're there. There's a small but very vocal group of people who who live just you know, live their life around conspiracies. And and it's a conspiracy. Well that one, but often it's that one is often tied to JFK and RFK at least at least those three. Um. But you know, like I knew they were out there, and I knew they wouldn't like my book because I happened to have decided independently that Ray pulled the trigger. But you know, wow, they are they hate eat me, they hate my book. They I am the enemy. You know. They actually have said things like Hampton Sides is obviously a name that was invented by the CIA UM and uh, you know he's obviously your previous works were all part of the same scheme. Like what they'll do is they'll establish him as a prominent author. I was groomed from an early will he then I was groomed from an early age to write this book. And uh, or it's just a made up name. I'm not even it's not even really me. It was written by some committee or something. Um. Oh, I mean I'm always approached by these people who at my talks about about that book. Uh that usually these are they almost always have two pays um or you know, really bad Dan Dreffer. You know, just something about them is off. And you can tell, oh, here he comes here, he's gonna he's coming at me now with you're not even done talking, you know, the that's going to be the guy that Yeah, and so you know, it's like they didn't It's not about whether they liked my book or the way I wrote it or or or where the uh you know, did I use nice metaphors or something. It's that they hate my guts because I came to a conclusion they don't agree with. And so conspiracy people are And I actually went to one of their I went kind of undercover one time and went to one of their gatherings, uh research, Yes, yeah, I just kind of want to understand who these folks are. And you know, everything is a conspiracy. Everything is connected. Everything you know, it's connected back to j Edgar Hoover and and uh the world you know, world order, you know, whatever the black helicopters, you know, Um and uh, nine eleven didn't really happen the way we thought it did because you know Bush ordered it all and you know he knew about it from the start, and you know it's like whoa, you just take some deep dives into into this alternative history. It's really it's fascinating and I think ultimately kind of pathetic. But um, these these people live and breathe. It's it's part of their is a big part of their identity. You know. Earlier I said there was two this is my last question about Kick Carson. But um, I said, there's two things that really stood out to me, and there uh one of them being I brought up the one about the sort of um developing sense of like American nous, you know, like people understand what that meant, and um that that it wasn't as sort of it wasn't like is as clean as we now imagine it, like how you identify your your national identity in those areas. But the second thing was how overt you mentioned earlier he was he wasn't responsible for um bringing the Navajo into reservation confinement and there had been a vaccine problem for hundreds of years, like the the war with New Mexicans in the Navajo, and then they finally put the task, they got serious about it and put the task to kick carson Um. Can can you talk a little bit about just like that the way he engaged and I think he used the term like total warfare, scorched earth policy. Can can you real quick walk through like what exactly that guy did to accomplish that task? Yeah? So so like for hundreds of years there had been this kind of low grade war between the New Mexicans and the DNA that Navajo where they were stealing each other's women and children and cattle and sheep and uh, it was just horrible. It was a horrible existence on both sides, like a slave trade slave between the two of them, And and you couldn't leave your house along the Rio Grand without fear of being kidnapped and vice versa. These these Denay would be doing their thing in places like Kenyan de Shay and suddenly a slave raid would come from you, a Spanish slave raid would come and take take women and children, and it was it was a horrible existence for everyone, I think. And so when the Americans showed up during the Mexican War and took over. Um. They looked at this problem and began to figure out, you know, how do we solve it, how do we stop this back and forth stealing of each other's people and cattle, um. And you know, they zeroed in on the didn't A because they were very successful raiders. They were they were a thriving, huge culture to the west of the Rio Grand Uh. They were. They were expert raiders. And they decided, this is the first group we're really gonna have to go after. You know. Of course the Comanches were also raiders, and so were the Apache um and so so there was this general General uh Henry Carlton, who James Henry Carlton, who decided once and for all that we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna really go after the Nova and we're gonna move them to the Pacos River, and we're gonna rewire their whole society and make them stop roaming around and teach him the big Christian farmers living in like apartment buildings and and and and dense areas, uh and you know, make them more like us basically. Uh. And and he decided this guy, General Carlton that kick. Carson had to had to lead the fight because it was going to be the culminating act of his career. And Carson very much did not want to do this. At first. He he rejected overtures. He actually resigned from the army at one point. Uh, but in the end he was convinced to do it. And how he did it, you know, it's like a couple of years before Sherman's famous scorched earth campaign against the South, Carson lead a scorched earth campaign against the novel that was every bit as brutal. Um the way he did it. He realized he couldn't fight the novel hoo, because they didn't fight in that any kind of traditional way with lines of with with you know, um, you know, basically they scattered, you know, and they not The who country is so conducive to scattering. You know, there's just endless canyons and caves and um. It's so Carson was frustrated he couldn't fight them, so he decided to fight their land. He you know, he killed every horse and every cow and every sheep, and he burned every cornfield and every peach tree, and uh, it was a war on the land. And um, I remember you're talking about like chopping down thought of orchard trees. Yeah, that's the famous part of the campaign in into Canyon Kenyon D. Shay. He also like had his men guard the water sources and the salt sources, and you know, it was just the systematic thing. And so you have this guy who very very much didn't want to do this. It was very reluctant, but somehow once he began, he turned out to be really good at this kind of warfare. Um and and it kind of went against so many of his instincts, and yet he led this campaign. He understood the landscape like no one did though, you know, and it worked, I mean and within a within a year, it took about a year. They began to starve, and they began to surrender in ones and twos and then dozens and then scores than hundreds and hundreds and thousands. This was one of the largest tribes in the North America. And he brought them to their knees and in the end, it was like they came to him, and they came to him. I'd be like if you took a town, like if you imagine today, you took a town and you came in and said like, okay, you destroy the highway coming into the town on either end, blow up all the gas stations, burn all the grocery stores. Right then you sit back and be like, give it a minute, boys, they'll be out. And eventually, you know, it's just like and then they were marched on this kind of thing that's often compared to the Trail of Tears of the Cherokee. But they were marched to this place on the Picos, and they tried to make it work, but it was so alien. It was such an alien environment to the Navajo, you know, just just in terms of geography, but also in terms of you know, it's like there was just nothing recognizable out there. It was like Mesquite and you know, just this kind of semi arid desert without all of those amazing rock formations that the not that that that DNA. You know, we we think of the Dnay Country and we think ship Rock and Monument Valley and all these amazing places. That this was just this flat, boring swatch a land on the Pacos. And and it turned out there wasn't enough firewood to keep them warm. There wasn't enough clean water for them to drink and UH, and they didn't want to be congested in a tight little area. UM. And they just it was like they suffered. The tribe suffered a psychological breakdown. You know, It's like they wouldn't plant, they gave up. They were morose and UH, diseases took over and a third of the Navajo died and in a few short years, and Carson understood this wasn't working. Um. General Carlton refused to admit that. UH. And finally it took General Sherman after the Civil War. General Sherman came out all the way to the Pacos and saw what was going on and realized that this huge experiment had failed. And he eventually sent them back to Navajo country. And it's one of the very few examples where people were you know, tribe was removed from its homeland but then returned to their homeland. UH. Somewhat bitter sweet, um, somewhat happy ending for the Nava Navajo after all this tragedy, that they were actually allowed to go home. When you're looking at your book subjects and thinking about what you're gonna do, uh, you were talking about things having things that you need to check, you know, sort of the I don't know, I can't remember what term you used, but there's sort of a yeah. I mean, you know, it's got to have good characters, just have good plot, good structure, you know, all the things that a good story needs to have. Do you, um, is death like death's big part of like misery and death? Are you are are you aware of that component or is that just sort of like uh that just happened. Yeah, well, I mean do you go like it has to have it has the about life and death? I suppose. I mean, I I don't think that I'm you know, uh, gratuitously depressed or looking for depressed subjects just just for the sake of of of making you know, making people um, you know down, you know. But I do think that you do have to have highs and lows, and a good narrative needs to have high stakes and it needs to you know, you need to care about there the character's fate, whether they're gonna live or die, whether they're going to survive uh and um uh yeah, I think a good narrative has history, has to has to have that component. Um, your felt, Little Santa Fean Corman McCarthy talks about you know this is I'm paraphrasing, but something to the effect of that. You know, if it's not about death, it's not important. It's about how you how people face death, and how they get through an ordeal and how they you know, all the combination of traits that they summoned to to survive, uh, an extreme situation. I guess that's a theme that runs through almost all my books. Um, for some reason, it just is a theme I keep returning to. And the truth is, you know, like a story and where in which everybody is happy and everything goes well and there is no adversity and and no one dies is rarely a good story. I'm sorry, Um, Sometimes what's the number one best seller? That everybody had everything they needed and lived happily every after and we started at a spot where they were still happy. I mean, there are a lot of stories that don't involve a lot of death. I guess like a political writer is writing about, right, I don't know, if you're reporting on a campaign, Yeah, they just stopped before they get there. We know this will eventually have this implication. Imagine these people all be dead, you know, tell us about tell us about how you got on, um, how you got on a Captain Cook? Like what like, how did that wind up grabbing you? Well? Um, I uh, I've been thinking about him for a long time because of that in the Kingdom of Ice story, which is you know, set in Alaska and in Siberia, and the only other person really tried to do what the Jeanette did was Captain Cook. Um. Captain Cook charted the entire coast of Alaska and on his third voyage, and you know, he's mostly associated with the South Seas, but Captain Cook was all over Alaska. Like we had our little thing where we kept going past where he died fish in a WAYI yeah, So then I got to read that night, we'd get done fish and I'd go read about Captain Cook a little bit. But um almost seems like almost like casually moving between like he'd go to Alaska then wind up out in the south the back to Alaska, right, which, interestingly enough, is what a ton of people in Alaska and it was such a strong connection between those two places. That's one of my brother. My brother lives in Alaska, and he's like, you know how it was because we grew up in Michigan, because you know how it is with Michigan people in Florida. He goes in Alaska. That's why. Yeah, well, you know, part somewhat facetiously, My wife said that, uh, you know, it's like you do all these books, like you did this book that's set in Siberia, and you did books setting the kind of remote part of the Philippines, and you know, why don't you pick a book that involves travel to places I would like to go to? Uh and we go together. And she was kind of kidding, but she was not really kidding. And I said, well, I've kind of fished out the old notes from previous book ideas and I said, well, how about Captain Cook? Um? Uh. She's like, well, where did that involve going to? And I said, well, you know, um, Tahiti, French Polynesia, you know, uh, Donga, New Zealand, Alaska, lots of other places. She's like, okay, bingo, that's it. That's the one. But but you know, I started looking at Kit Carson and I realized, I mean Captain Cook's story. Um, Captain Cook is a very controversial cat, just like Kid Carson. And you know, in terms of we were talking earlier of statues coming down and people um uh reassessing his legacy or something like that, And to me, that made him more interesting. Like whenever, whenever a historical subject has a pulse and has a controversy surrounding it, all the much better. Better. You know, like you're like, you're aware of whatever if you if you humanize him, you're where that you will be criticized. Ye, and then you know, but that's what also will bring people to the book. I think, you know, give it a pulse, you know, does that like does it change the lens you're looking him at? Like? Are you looking at him? You know through a lens you would have looked at him twenty years ago? Are you like I ought to be thinking about what he did right here a different way. Yeah. I don't think a historian can help you know that filter. You know, you have to be aware of your time. And I'm sure that like for example, Blood and Thunder, if I were writing Blood and Thunder today, I would write it differently. I can't help it. Times, I don't think I think you allowed a lot of people in that book. You allowed a lot of people their humanity, and you mostly when in that book, when you condemn someone for being inept, it's mostly that they were regarded as inept by their peers in their own time. You're not, you don't, Like, I'm sure you do, Like you can't not look at it from now, but um, the people that were assholes did things that were often recognized as asshole ish and incompetent by their own people. Yeah, like you really do it? Like in that project that a very good job of helping people understand what was happening at a time. Well, I think, and I think that's like I don't know how And I would guess if you if you take on a Cook and be like, okay, listen, at the time, this is ship that was going on, right, you know, and and let's just talk about what happened at the time and what people felt at the time, and then you can now go and interpret that. But like, at the moment, this is what the world looked like, right. And the other problem with with uh Captain Cook is his story. You know, he had three voyages. Each one was everybod as big as the other one. There They're just all very consequential and sprawling, And I realized I couldn't I couldn't do like a big biography of Captain Cook. That's not what I wanted to do. I had decided and my wife actually was was the one who said, you gotta pick one voyage, and I decided I'm going to focus on the third voyage because for a lot of different reasons. But it has this amazing murder story in the middle of it, said in a y And not only that, but it also happens you know, it's it's the most American, and I'm an American writer. This is the most American of the three voyages because it happens in July. It starts in July seventy six. It happens during the American Revolution. Uh. He discovers or rediscovers Hawaii, he charged the coast of Alaska, and he um after he dies, the voyage uh ends up in the hands of a Virginia, Virginia born American guy named John Gore who who captains the vessels home. So it's it's an American story in a lot of ways. Um. And so that's that's one part of it. The other part of it is, Um, there's something wrong with Captain Cook on the third voyage. All his scholars and all the kind of cook nerds out there are trying to figure out what's wrong with them the psychologically, psychologically, he's cruel. He's he's using the lash. He's being very cruel to his own people. He's cruel to the indigenous people he encounters in ways that were not true. How long have you been? How long have you been at it? By this point, the three voyages were Um, you know, he'd been doing it for about twelve years, doing this kind of voyaging. But he'd been in the navy for a long time. He was late forties when the expedition started. He was tired. Uh. He speculated that he had some kind of weird parasite from eating some bizarre food. You know what I was gonna say. He had cat scratch fever, probably kind of food. You guys talk about to plasm we've been we've been exploring lately. Um, all these there's latent toxoplasmosis. It's like a parasite doesn't sound good. Well, just all these links between irrational, um reckless behavior and people who have suffered like increased entrepreneurial ship, increase auto accidents with people who suffer from toxoplasmosis. So the minute you said that he was that he was behaving erratically, that's from my mind. Well, and an interesting cook. One of his attributes everyone talks about it is that he would eat anything and he would get you know what, whatever culture he was encountering, he would he would he would break bread with them and eat whatever they're eating. And a lot of his officers will go, God, I'm not eating that thing whatever, whatever it is. Uh kind of food you guys eat routinely. Uh. He he had an iron stomach and he would eat anything. But apparently something got whatever it was, I guess we'll never know. Like it was pronounced enough that people wonder if he didn't. It's beyond a bad mood, right. No, every his officers wrote about it, you know, all the all the the serious cook scholars, you know, from the eighteen hundreds on wrote about it. Something was wrong on the third voyage, and the old standby of syphilis hasn't gotten probably not because you know, I mean, I'm still open minded do this, but I think, um, everyone says that he never got it on with with any of the native I mean, believe me, all his men were and that's another issue that was going on. They were spreading syphilis all over the South seas. Um, and it was it was sad, it was pitiful, it was happening. But but Cook was married and apparently was loyal to his wife and didn't partake. Um. I'm still looking for evidence to the contrary, but um apparently, um he well, I suppose he could have had syphilis, you know, prior to even being married. Um. You know, syphilis is a very weird disease and uh manifests itself in a lot of different ways. But um no, syphilis usually is not one of the ones that that is, you know, listed as one of the culprits here. But anyway, something's going on with Cook, So that makes an answer kind of creates a little bit of a mystery to the story. Uh. As he moves through his voyage and when he by the time he gets to Hawaii, um he he's not his usual prudent self who knows how to negotiate, and you know, he pisces off a lot of people on the Big Island and uh you know, ultimately it leads to this kind of passion play on the shores of the Big Island where uh you know that's been dissected by a lot of different people, including the Hawaiians. And this is the other part, a rough sketch of what happened that day. I want to know if I looked at spot Yeah, well, um, so, uh, the Hawaiians, I have to go back a little bit, because so he had been on the Big Island for a number of weeks and had been treated like a king, had been treated almost like a deity. In fact, that's that's a whole Another issue is that perhaps the Hawaiians thought he was this god named Lano. Um what is that is that? Can you can you speak about that for a second? Is that connected to the way he approached the island and then sailed around the island a couple of times. And yeah, he's sort of fulfilled a prophecy in some of the y's exactly he sailed. He sailed in a clockwise fashion around the Big Island. And uh, there was this tradition and Hawaiian culture that Lana would come and during this particular season that happened to be right when Cook arrived. Um, they they either treated him thought he was Lana or they thought he was a manifestation of Lano. Uh, this is endlessly to baited. But nonetheless he came ashore and was treated truly like a god. I mean they rolled out the red carpet and and and his men were treated so well for about a month, and it was this huge celebration going on that he was there, and he was there. But then when he came time to leave to go back to Alaska, um, to pursue pursue this. The reason that he was going to Alaska was to find a passage to the Atlantic Ocean, like a Northwest passage obviously doesn't exist or didn't exist. Um, but uh, so he's going back to Alaska. And about two days after leaving Hawaii, Uh, he encounters a storm and one of his masked snaps and he has to turn around and go back to Hawaii to find some would uh you know, replace his mast. Also, he I didn't know he went back on such a flimsy not a flimsy premise, but it was like a freak Yeah. And this time they were like, well, what are you doing here? Lano? But uh, is it plausible that he would have never gone back to Hawaii? Like yes, like his future plans like he may have never he might if that thing had snapped, he might not have been there. Ever, very plausible, and it was. The plan was to go go back to Alaska and try to find the Northwest Passage and then go home after that to England. But uh, but when he comes back, everything is different. They they're like, you can't be a god. You know, God's ships, masks don't break. What are you doing here? Maybe you're just you know, here to steal our stuff. You want our water and our wood and our women and our food, our hogs and uh they it was pronounced. It was like a totally different environment. And uh. Within a couple of days, Um, some Hawaiians stole uh one of his smaller boats, a cutter. Uh and those these cutters were very important part of their expedition. And so he was. He was angry, and he came ashore cooked did to try to find the boat, and in the course of things, he kidnapped. But he physically goes on the beach. He physically did it. Yes, just going crazy. You know, you think he would have got one of his officers or you know, one of the marines or something to go do this. He personally did it. And he kidnapped this chief, the chief of the Big Island, pretty much the highest ranking uh figure. He kidnapped him and tried to force him on back on to the ship. The idea was that they would they would hold him until they got their boat back. You know, he's going to take them and you know as hostage. Well, some of the warriors saw what was going on. They didn't like what was going on, and they started to uh uh resist and wouldn't let their chief come aboard the ship. And um, things escalated, and you know there's certainly language differences in culture differences and misques and misunderstandings. And Cook fired a shot in the air. Um, and then uh he fired a shot at a native and killed a Native Hawaiian. And then uh, very soon thereafter, a hatchet ends up between his shoulder blades and he drowns in about a foot of water at on at the bay there k l a q K bay where you were fishing apparently, um, and uh you know there's a monument there still. Um. It was actually declared when a little brief area of that around where the killing happened is still technically British soil. It's so kind of a weird thing. I don't fully understand how that's possible, but uh, it's you know a lot of people go there. It's a monument too to what happened. But also you know the British presence. You know, it used to be a British possession, the Sandwich Islands that was called um and so it's kind of you know, I've I've been reading history stuff for a long time. I never I didn't know that the Sandwich Islands or Hawaiian I only I remember like putting it together, like, oh, that's that is well. Cook named him that because the great uh, the great advocate for all of his explorations, was the first Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Sandwich, and Lord Sandwich was the inventor of the sandwich. He was real busy all the time and he didn't have time to eat, so he just took two pieces of bread and put a piece of beef between him and stuck it in his mouth and became known as the sandwich. I'm not kidding, um, but anyway, Um, that's that's the book I'm writing now, and it's about two thirds almost three quarters done, probably come out late next year. Tell me about the character is the explain what's going on with your with your story you have about the guy my okay? Is that part of that's not part of the book. It is part of the book. It's just kind of like an early excerpt from the book, but also turned into its own thing. It's it's a kind of a story that I've carved out of the book. Um and uh it's just recently been published by Scripted Originals, which is a new new thing. It's kind of an interesting long form digital deal that uh that I've just discovered. I love, I love doing this piece for them. Um. So the piece is called The Exotic and it's about this young man named my who uh came to England as part of Cook's second voyage and was the first Polynesian ever to arrive on um on English shores. He was Cook took him, Yes he was. He was a Tahitian man, a young man who became this uh cause celeb in in England. He he just took that country by storm. They loved him. And uh it's really about his two years in England and how this noble savage as they called him, um, kind of one over the nation and the leading thinkers and writers and politicians. He met the King of England. Uh, and he was vaccinated that this new thing called a vaccination of smallpox. Um. Yeah, this was at least the procedure for smallpox was. And it was still a little risky. It was still a little experimental. But um. Unfortunately, what would happen is that English would bring up to that point, it had been native Americans and Eskimos into it. They're bringing them to London. They want to show him off, prayed him around, you know, make impress upon them how powerful England was. But they were also genuinely curious about these people, um, and how they would do and how they would fare in a big city. But almost invariably they would die uh a smallpox. It was almost always smallpox. Well, when my got there, the King of England, King George the third, said we got to get this guy vaccinated, and they did and it was successful and because of that he lived for this two years. It was healthy. The ladies kind of fell in love with him. Um. He ended up being this um they like. He became a gentleman, an English gentleman. He hunted, he uh uh, learned to play chess and backgammon, and we went to all the balls and dances and the salons and you know, but people it was kind of a mixture of like they were genuinely fascinated by him, but they also were studying him, you know, like is he really the noble savage? And h He also turned out this guy my brought barbecue to England because at one point one of the estates where he had been hunting um, one of the lords said, well, why don't we hear that you cook in this special way down in Polynesia. You know, perhaps you could cook these foul that they had just shot um in the Polynesian way. And he said, well, I would love to. And he turned out to be a great cook. You know, you dig a hole in the round and you you know, you cook cook it in in Uh the Polynesian way took in many hours, uh, slow and low, you know, lots of smoke, and uh. He they just loved it. They loved it so much that everywhere he went they asked him to cook for them. He became this kind of celebrity chef. You know. But was he was he even somebody treated as an equal or was it always sort of understood that he was uh like not quite European, yeah, uh mixture. I mean, I think a lot of his mates on the ship that he had sailed with almost viewed him as an equal because he he equitted himself very well and on on the ship he was a great fisherman, he was he was a great uh just someone who understood the ocean. You know, Polynesians are just excellent navigators. And you know, I think he was treated quite equally, surprisingly so on the ship. But by the time we got to England, I think there was this mixture of like, yeah, you're fascinating, your interesting, you're a prince of some sort, but you're still you're still a person of color. You know that you can't you can't divorce yourself from the racial views of that time. Um, they you know, there was a patronizing quality to the way they treated him. There's no way to avoid saying that. But but overall I think they did about as they treated him, about as well as they could possibly do. But and one of the reasons they did it there was a kind of a colonial competitive layer to this, which is that the English really wanted to take over Tahiti, and they wanted to make sure. The French didn't and the Spanish didn't, so they wanted to treat this guy like an envoy and make him, you know, happy, so that they would return him. And that's the second part of the story. Is he goes back to Tahiti on Captain Cook's third voyage, and he has returned to Tahiti with this experience that he's had, this excellent adventure that he's been on, and he's returned with all these possessions that are so alien to the Tehitians. He's got horses, he's he's got goats, he's got sheep, he's got a suit of armor. He's got all these guns and you know, muskets, and he's got gunpowder and knives and swords and all this metal. I mean, they had never seen metal before the Europeans had arrived. And it's sets in motion this you know, all these jealousies and you know, people are trying to figure out who is this guy. My he's not actually from a chiefly class. He's actually from a kind of a uh land. Listen, He's a nobody basically, but he suddenly he thinks he's big stuff and he's got all this all these belongings more than any chief. Uh. It just drives people crazy. And it's it's really about how he returns. And I forgot to mention the whole reason got on board Cook's second voyage to go to England really the only reason because he wanted guns. He wanted to go to war against the people of Bora Bora, which was this is a long old, festering kind of hatfield and McCoy's situation back back home that he wanted he wanted guns so that he could kick ass against the horrible runs and and in the end he ultimately does that. He fights a battle against them with these new things called guns and wins the battle. Uh. So, very interesting arc to his story. And I decided to kind of carve it out of the bigger book and turn it into a uh you know, it's like it's like it's like a novella length story, but it will go back into the big book. It'll go back into the big book with slightly with some differences and changing it up a little bit. But yep, So with your work, do you always are all your stories optioned out for films? Let's see, Well, yeah, all of them have been very few of them have gotten made. Ghost Soldiers was turned into a movie called The Great Raid that was made by a really nice man named Harvey Weinstein. Uh. He bought my first book. A wonderful guy. Oh is that right? My wife used to work for Oh my gosh, nice great, She's got great Harvey story that she does. Wow. Well, anyway, it was it was made um into a movie by Mirramax, and um, it wasn't great. I didn't do particularly well commercially or happy with it. I was happy with the historical accuracy of it. But it just didn't work, you know, I was there's some casting problems. I think maybe maybe they got the wrong director or something something about it wasn't quite right. It had James Franco uh, and it had actually an excellent cast. Um, but somehow on the end they it just didn't work. Uh. Did you get it way in on the historical accuracy of the actual film? Yes, yes, And I mean they actually wanted me to like it. They wanted me to vet it, and they actually flew me to the set, which unfortunately, it wasn't filmed in the Philippines, which is where it needed to be. It was filmed in Australia. So I went to Australia and I went to the set and they happened to be fighting that night. You know, it was nights night filming, and there was explosions and grenades and flares and all this stuff going on, and all of a sudden, this kangaroo, terrified hops across the camera, uh, in front of the camera, and the director has to say, you know, cut because there weren't any kangaroos in the Philippines. Um. But uh, but you know it was it was you know, like I said, I was happy with the historical accuracy. In the end, they listened to me and they tried and it was a decent uh movie. I call it the perfectly good rate, not the great rate. But went to in the Philippines that went to where where's the there's a ton memorial. I can't remember where I went, but I went to in the Philippines too. Yeah. I mean it's a huge event still memorialized, and it would have been cool to film it there, man. Yeah, it would have been. It would have been amazing. And that's that. That was one of the weaknesses I think of the film is that you can just somehow tell it's not the Philippines. You know, other stuff has been optioned. Um, the most interesting thing is Blood and Thunder. I mean there's just something about that book that people have just constantly. It's like when one group tries to make it and fails, then another group comes on board, and you know, I think it's too big and sprawling and ultimately controversial as story for people to figure out how to track it. It's like how you really can't do um, no one, like no one's really done, like Lewis and Clark expedition, right, Like, you can't. You're right, you can't. It's just I think I think it's I guarantee right now someone's working on that some bitch. Yeah, always know won't work out. Undonted Courage has probably been optioned twenty times, you know. Um yeah, I can see like how you'd have to, Yeah, you have the find for kick Cars. You have to find some like micro type event, you know. Yeah, I think you have to or or make it sprawl into a series, which is the group that's doing it trying to do it now is the same people who did Game of Thrones. You can imagine that just take out the dragons and and uh, you know, turn it into it's like this story of all these kingdoms all fighting over the same you know, trying to trying to you know, survive this. You know, it's it's a very similar story. Actually. Um, the group that's trying to do it now, it's interesting. But at first the first person who optioned it with Spielberg, tried to make it into a movie. Didn't work for him, and then it was Robert Redford, and then then it was Ridley Scott. Uh. Pretty cool. Every time I get very excited, and then of course it just somehow didn't work in the end. So we'll see what this new group is able to do. It'll be interesting to see. You know. The first meeting I had with anyone around like television and film and stuff, the first serious meeting I had was around like having a project in minn option And I always remember. The woman's name was Gloria. We're sitting in a room like this, a bunch of people, and she said, first off, I just want to say that, um, nothing ever gets done. It's impossible with that. Let's get started. Yeah, I mean I couldn't figure out why when the oscars happened there, you know, and somebody wins, and they're just all this exaggerated excitement, like, oh gosh, you know, it's so exciting, and they're just freaking out on stage. I always thought it was because they were just incredibly self obsessed, narcissistic people, which they are. But the reason there that way is because it was truly a miracle that the thing got made and that it was good and then it actually won an award. I mean, it's like, there's so many reasons why films fail, especially films about, you know, complicated historical subjects. Um. I think I've mentioned this quote in the past, but who's the you know, John lockra is how he says in The Intrigue Like Espionage, he described having his books turned into movies. He described it as watching an oxen turned into a bullion cube. That's great. Uh, well they always say that, uh, And I think it was Hemmingway who said it that you're supposed to the writer of the book is supposed to drive to the California Nevada border in the middle of the night, and the Hollywood guys show up on the California side, and you go into your trunk and you hurl your manuscript over the border, and then they go to their trunk and they hurl the money at you, and then the two cars just turned around and drive away and they never never meet. That's probably the smartest way to do it, because it would be a lot less heartache and a lot less U frustration. Yeah. Uh, well, maybe he'll be a big Captain cook blockbuster. Hey, real quick, when when you're when this does happen? Um, who's gonna who should play Captain Cook? Just give us an idea? Who should play captain? Like cag to you? Who's Captain cook Man? How old was when he died? Uh? He was or fifty? I guess I should know that off the top of my head, but I don't haven't gotten to that part yet. Who should That's a very good question. Is too old? You know? He was a very tall um and very severe looking guy. Um with an intense gaze, a very large nose. Um. Rick Moran is not gonna do it? That's a very good question. I haven't thought of that. But and in fact, that's another one that has not been done. You'd think there'd be a lot of cook movies out there, there really aren't has been done. I don't know. I think it's maybe way back days. But yeah, so when could people why could people see a new book come out, the one on cook You haven't even finished it yet, but I mean it'll be a while, right, it'll be late at the very earliest, will be the end of next year, around Christmas time. And uh. The tentative title is The Resolution, which was the name of his ship, the Resolution, um man, the British knew how to name ships, you know, the endeavor, Discovery, you know, uh, and this and this one, you know, the Resolution, which has got so many layers of meaning, including the resolution of his story, his life story. That's a good point, man. So that's why read that comes out? Well maybe maybe in fte me back on here and we'll talk like those people that when the new Harry Potter book was coming out, They're like line up at the bookstore. I'm gonna be out waiting to get that book because I need to find out did they at them? Did not at them? Well? We will, I mean, because I am from Memphis, and you know, we consider ourselves the barbecue capital of the world. We we we probably will have some barbecue recipes in the back, you know, like dry rub of European you know, or you know, different recipes. Um, it's it's you know. The the Liyons insist that he was not actually eaten, but he was, in fact, Um, he in fact was dismembered and cooked, baked and uh and uh uh when his remains were presented to the to the English who are still waiting in that bay waiting for something, uh, they only they brought him a thigh bone and part of his hand, and uh, some of his scalp and and his hat, and so naturally, so naturally the British thought, well, may they must have eaten him? Uh, And they just said, you guys don't have to worry about that parasite anymore. Remember uh, Nathaniel Philbricks in the Heart of the Sea. So the story of the tragic the Whaleship Essex and the book, um, you know, they get to eating each other. And there's a part of the book later where I don't know if it's like apocryphal story or not, but there's a part of the book later where someone meets a survivor of the whaleship Essex and he says like, hey, did you know Bill Johnson? I suppose you the guy says no him. I had him. Oh my, Well, well thanks for coming on, man, Um, I'm looking forward to your I see, I gotta go. I gotta read your whole damn cannon man, your whole damn library. Well please do and keep talking about it on your show. Well it's like it's yeah, um, it's just such well researched, un bullshitty history that like has all like this has like the weird parts. Man, you didn't know you got like a good ear for the weird, you know what I mean, Like and you wedge it in where it doesn't just feel like you're being um, you wedge it in where it doesn't smell like someone just trying to wedge weird stuff in. Like if it's still you find a way to like make it fit, you know. But you got an ear for the strange. Well, thank you. I I'll take that as a compliment, the highest compliment. Maybe it's just that I'm a little strange, and I do think that it's true that you know, uh, history is so much more interesting. Uh then then we were taught in school, you know, like there are these just undercurrents in these bizarre facts and little trip little trick doors and and interconnections. Uh that um, we somehow missed in history class. Um because in the class you couldn't spend an entire semester on a day. Yeah, you know, you just have to gloss over and it takes on this way that just feels not personal. True, So true. Well, good luck finishing your book, Thank you, thank you. I gotta probably I should be working on it right now. I'm a little behind. COVID has kind of slowed me down a little bit. I don't mean that I had COVID. I just mean I couldn't do a lot of the research. Have you got a lot of your travel done? Now? A lot of it. I still got a lot more to go though. Um. And you know I may not get to some of the places, which kind of just drives me nuts. But uh yeah, you just can't go to all the places where Cook went, even on just this one voyage. Lets go hang out and cook inlet in Alaska. I've been there before, but I need to I need to go back. I need to go back. So um, and you've got you You've got a connection to Alaska, don't you have? My brother has been there decades now, and you have some sort of shack up there right, Yeah, we have a place out there. Yea. He lives on cooking, let you, meaning lives an anchorage, but ars checks fars off therea. Well thanks again, we'd love to have be back on. But yeah, man, I highly just really highly recommend um like your books and the kind of the kind of history you do which is just so illuminating. Man. This helps you really understand why you know why America or you know why things look the way they look, and why we remember things the way we remember them, and and what sacrifices were made by people. Well, thank you man, it's been a pleasure. C

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