Jack Carr's Journey from Navy SEAL to Author | Joe Rogan

You know, when we first met, I knew you were an author and I knew that Chris Pratt was involved in doing that thing with you and that you guys were working towards making a scene, which is happening now, which is very exciting. Crazy. But I'd never read any of your work until now. So getting ready for this, I actually listened to the audio book, which is really well done. The guy who reads it, what is his name? Ray Porter. He's fucking great. Yeah, he's awesome. He's a little disturbing when he does a girl's voice, but... No getting around that. Like, if a guy's doing a girl voice, especially putting an accent to it, there's like no getting around the creepy part of that. It's a little weird. But you take... But he's so good at, like, Russian accents and then South African accents. And it's a really good book, man. It's fucking riveting. It's hard to put down. It's really good. And most of it I listened to either on workouts, walking, hikes with the dog, or in the sauna. Nice. It's a perfect place to listen to it. I burned through it in a few days. It's really good, man. Yeah, do you know like half the characters are the people that were inspired by actual people. I know. That was what's crazy. It's like so many people, whether it was John Dudley or Barklow or half-faced blades, like Black Rifle Coffee, Icon 4x4. There's like so many different things. Sitka. So many different things that I... It'd be strange not for me to talk about gear just because I was a gear guy before I went to the Navy. And then of course in the SEAL teams you're like, that's your time to shine and to go down these rabbit holes and try to make the gear better or anything that's going to make you more effective and efficient on the battlefield. So he really gets it go all in. And then just after the military, same thing, I'm just a gear guy. So it'd be strange just to say he pulled out a rifle or something like that. I couldn't do it. It wouldn't sit right. When you were in the SEAL team, did you think you were ever going to become an author? Is this something that you'd always had in the back of your head you would like to dabble in someday? Yeah. And the thing I was going to dabble in, I was going to do it. And since I was a little kid, my mom was a librarian, so I grew up surrounded by books and this love of reading from a very early age. And back then, like so early 80s, there's hardly anything written about SEALs. But what there is written is a lot of times from fiction. So protagonists in different stories by guys like Tom Clancy, David Morrell, Nelson DeMille, AJ Quinnell, all these guys in the 80s who had protagonists with backgrounds I wanted to have in real life one day. And I enjoyed reading them so much, I knew that after the military, then I would write. So I just said, wow. That's going to be the path. So you had kind of mapped it out. Join the military first, join the SEALs. And then after you retire, then and how many years were you in for? 20. You were in for, and then during that time you had always mapped out that you were going to be an author when you were done. Yep. Yep. I didn't really thought it like while I was in, I wasn't writing, I wasn't practicing, but I was reading. So I'm first, I'm a fan. I'm always a reader, both fiction and non. So all those guys I read in the 80s, those are like my professors in the art of storytelling. And then I coupled that with the academic study of warfare, terrorism, insurgencies, counterinsurgencies, and then the practical application from Afghanistan, from Iraq. And then it all kind of came together at the right time and place as I was getting out. So for that last like year, year and a half, then I started writing because I wasn't taking guys down range anymore. My job was essentially to get out of the military. And because it's, you feel like you're the first person to do it, even though people do it every day. But you walk in and you need to get something signed or go to a meeting or get read out of a secret program or go to medical or dental. So your job becomes to get out of this gigantic bureaucracy. So during that time, that takes like a year. I mean, you can probably do it in a week. Really? Like Jaco didn't do any of it, from what I understand. He's just like, no. And he just laughed. Like, you know, but I know you can enter those and I know he's like, yup, exactly. Yeah. I didn't do these transition classes you're supposed to do. And you sit there in these rooms and people drone on and on about transition and options for you. And you're awful, horrible. But I did it. I thought you had to. I'm not going to let you go. But yeah, you don't have to do it. I think you do. Just Jaco didn't. Like, that's what he told me. He's like, no, I didn't. I'm like, well, who's going to tell him to do it? You know, right? No one. No one's going to say you have to do this. Yeah, it's not good luck. Yeah. So you were planning all along to write. And so during that time, while you were being deployed and while you're, you know, you're being a seal in the back of your head, that was always a part of the plan. Yeah. That was when I'm done with this. I'll do that. So I wasn't thinking about how to set it up. I didn't know anyone in publishing. Didn't know anything. But I knew that one day that's what I would do. And it wasn't even a question. But you clearly had equal enthusiasm for being a seal as well. Oh, yeah. That's why they had to be separate. So I had to be 100% all in on being a seal because you have to. That's what you owe the guys under your command. When you're going down range, that's what you owe their families, the country, the mission. But when I got home from that last Iraq deployment and took a breath and looked around and saw, oh, my family needs me. I've been gone for quite some time. Even when you're training, when you're training, you're out for three weeks here, two weeks there, a month there, getting ready to deploy. So it's not just the six to seven month deployments. It's all that time spent training up to go down range with your team. So I knew that my family needed me. It's time to get out. So it was very clear. It wasn't a hard decision for me. Plus I'd gotten to the end of my time where I would tactically lead guys on the battlefield. So that's a troop commander. So that's where Jaka was when he did his last deployment as a troop commander as an officer, which is a major in the other services, a lieutenant commander in the Navy. And after that, yeah, you're still a leader, but you're leading from behind essentially or the tactical operations center. You're more of a manager type leader. You're not out there kicking doors with the guys, which is what we all come in to do, or most of us come in to do anyway. So I knew that that part of my life was over and it was time to transition, take care of the family. So it's time to start writing. Did you take journalism classes or writing classes or? Nope. It was all the reading, all that reading I did growing up. And my mom introduced me to a guy named Joseph Campbell back in 1997. So he did a series of interviews with Bill Moyers on PBS called The Power of Myth. And he wrote a book called Hero with a Thousand Faces. So back in 1988, so I'm, I don't know, 11 years old or whatever, 12 years old, I get introduced to him and I read that book and I watched all those interviews and I read the book that came out called The Power of Myth based on those interviews. And I think I applied that paradigm, that model of the hero's journey, the monolith, to really every movie I watched, every series I watched, every book I read from then on. And that really helped as I made the transition because I had this foundation. It wasn't just like I woke up one day and said, you know what? Can you make money at writing? Oh, that sounds like a good thing to do. I'll go back and read and I'll go back and see, kind of figure out the history of this genre. No, I already had that figured out because I did it my whole life and it was that foundation. So that was already there. And while I was in the military, I kept reading for fun. I read those fiction books still and I discovered Stephen Hunter and Brad Thor and Vicky. Vince Flynn and Daniel Silva and now Mark Graney today. So those are kind of the bigger names in the genre. But then I was also studying, studying all that nonfiction stuff, trying to stay up on my game to make the best decisions I possibly could under fire for the guys when it mattered. So just always studying, always reading. When I was down range, I never really watched a movie or played video games. It was always, if I wasn't out operating and we weren't putting together a target package, I was reading. That's interesting because I would think that most people that would venture and become a professional novelist, they would have some sort of background in writing, like some sort of education, some classical education, English literature or something. Yeah, no, it was all reading. It was all knowing what I liked, knowing what I didn't like. And that's why the first novel is really all about revenge because that theme resonated with me. Obviously it's resonated with people from the beginning of time from telling those stories around campfires, usually told in a way to pass on some sort of a lesson about something to the next generation so they don't have to learn the same lessons in blood. But they're told as a story and passed down that way. And I think that's why there's so many death wish movies. That's why there's just... Because if someone cuts you off in traffic, you can't go out and do something. Or someone at work, there's some politics, you don't get the promotion or whatever, you get mad. You can't do anything about it, but you can in the pages of a novel. You can escape there or you can escape in the movie theater and you can see somebody that goes out and gets this revenge. And it makes you feel good because you know you can't do it. Because in real life if you do it, you're going to go to jail, you're going to get the death penalty, it's not possible. But you can do it and you can explore all that in the pages of a fictional thriller. So I think that's why it resonates with people. And then in this particular case, I got to take the emotions and feelings behind things I was involved in down range and then just apply them to a fictional narrative. So I didn't have to talk to somebody and say, how did it feel to be a sniper in Ramadi in 2005, 2006? And then filter that through whatever biases I had or whatever my past experience or whatever and then put it into a fictional narrative. No, I just took my experience and then just morphed it and put it into the narrative. So it ended up being very therapeutic. So did you approach an agent first? How did you get started? Thank goodness I didn't know you're supposed to do that because I'd probably still be looking for one today. So I did very little research on that front because I think that a lot of people can study how to do something too much or too long and it's going to be different for everybody. But some people can study how to do something their whole life and never actually do it because you only have a certain amount of bandwidth. And for me, I read, so Steven Pressfield, who's become a great friend now who was on this show a while back. I love that guy. He's so great. He wrote Gates of Fire, Legend of Bagger Vance, the Afghan campaign, and then has those series of books on creativity. The War of Art. You gave that out to people, right? For a while? Yeah, I had a stack of them that I used to keep at the studio. Yeah. So he's amazing. And actually, listening to him on this show before I started writing gave me the idea of writing a one word theme down to keep me on point. So I wrote Revenge for that first novel on a yellow sticky. But he didn't really say this on your show. He was talking about somebody else, a playwright, who would write a sentence to keep him on theme. But somehow, through my filters, I heard him say, oh, a one word theme on a yellow sticky on my computer. And so I did the same thing. So it's not really what he said on the show. But I took it as what he said, and I wrote it down. And that really, for the first book, Revenge, second book, Redemption, and then fourth book, or third book, I morphed it a little bit, Dark Side of Man. So those are the themes that really kept me on track. And you're on the fourth one right now? You're on the fourth one? Yeah. How long does it take you to do one? The first one can take as long as you want, because you have to have, for fiction, you have to have the finished product. So for nonfiction, you can sell an idea, a chapter, an outline, something like that. If you're coming from sports or politics, you can sell that idea, because they know they're going to get some sales. For this, you have to have the whole manuscript done. So the first one took about just shy of two years. And you get it as good as you can possibly get it. And then what you're supposed to do is go to an agent. But I didn't know that, thank goodness, because I did that research I talked about with Stephen Pressfield's books on creativity, War of Art, Authentic Swing, Turning Pro, Do the Work. I read those, read Stephen King's on writing, David Morrell's. That's great book, too. Stephen King's book's fantastic. It's an autobiography, really. It's not just about writing. It's about his entire life. David Morrell is the successful novelist. I think those were the main ones that I read. And then I was like, OK, got it. And I put those within sight of me and my computer. But I didn't touch them again. But they were there. So I would look to them for inspiration as far as, oh, Stephen Hunter says you're a professional. You're a writer. You sit down and write. Writer's block doesn't exist, because it doesn't exist for dentists or truckers or doctors. You don't get doctor's block, so you don't get writer's block. You're a professional and you write. So just having them that close really helped with that transition. And I made the decision to not once I was a SEAL and now I write. So I think that really helped. But I didn't know you needed an agent. And thank goodness I didn't, because otherwise, like I said, it's still be looking for one. Because those are the gatekeepers, essentially. And they have assistants that are even gatekeepers to them. So it's tough, I think. But lucky for me, a friend of mine sat next to a guy named Brad Thor, who writes in this genre. He has a character called Scott Harvath, who's a former SEAL. And he's a great guy. My friend sat next to him at one of these events for To Raise Money for a SEAL Foundation type thing. And as I'm writing, I'm about four months in. And my buddy says, hey, do you know this guy named Brad Thor? And I said, oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know him, but I've read all his stuff. And he said, do you want to talk to him? I know you're writing a book. And I said, yeah, I'd love to talk to him. Would he talk to me? And he said, yeah. I'll set it up. I helped him out with a couple things in his books. So sure enough, he sets it up. And actually, I'm up here at an event in LA at the time. I was trying to find a quiet place to have this call with Brad Thor. So I go to the parking lot at the Terenay Resort parking lot up there. Sun's beating down on my old land cruiser. Everything's off, though. The engine's off because it's so loud. And I don't know, my pen and paper are there. I'm sweating. But sure enough, we have this great call. And it was like a job interview. He wanted to know, hey, why do you want to write? And I told him the same stuff I tell you or tell everybody that I grew up loving reading and knew I was going to do this one day. And about my mom being a librarian and knowing the history of the genre and all that and just being excited about it, he could sense the passion. And he's like, all right. So if you write a book, what I can do for you, your friend told me some things you did in the SEAL teams. And as a thank you for that, I'll let my publisher know it's coming. I can't guarantee they'll open the package. Can't guarantee they'll read one word. Definitely can't guarantee that they'll like it. But as a thank you, I can let them know it's coming. And I said, that's all I need. And he said, how long until you're done? I said, one year from today. And so he's like, all right, don't call me. How did you know? This is your first book. How did you know one year from today you'd be done? Because I was because other guys that have serious characters have one book a year. And so I figured, well, you know, doing this sort of thing, I was about four months into it. So I was like, I give or take a couple months. So sure enough, I called him back one year from the day. And he's like, but he said, hey, don't don't call me. Send me chapters. I'm not going to give you any advice. He did give me some advice on that call, but he didn't want me bugging him throughout the year, which I totally understand now. And called him back a year from then and said, it's done. And to his credit, it was so awesome. He said, is it done or is it the best you can possibly make it? And I said, well, I could probably edit it a little bit, but it's finished. And he's like, all right, call me back again. What is the best you can possibly do? So I took another four months of reading it and editing it, sending it to a couple friends and then called them back four months later and said, this is the best I can possibly get it. And he said, all right, I'll let them know it's coming. So how many hours a day do you think you were putting in? Gosh, so it's not like hours. I mean, I would love to get on a discipline type schedule, like a jocko type schedule someday, but I'm not quite there yet, especially at this stage where I'm still feel like I still feel like this is a startup and I can't say no to a lot of things. I need to take advantage of emerging opportunities just like I would on the battlefield. Looking at the enemy, they're learning from us. We're learning from them. And it's really who adapts quicker. You're looking for those emerging opportunities, taking advantage of momentum, looking for gaps. So the same things that you would do for a startup or starting like a coffee shop somewhere, you have to do for writing. And I didn't really get that at the outset. Like how so? So you're not just writing and sending it to New York, which is what I thought up until about the time I published the first one. I thought you just went back and forth with an editor a little bit and then you start the next book. Well, really you have to do advertising, branding, co-branding, your marketing stuff, your budgets, your social media, like anything you would have to do with any other business that you're starting up, you have to do as an author. So I kind of treated it as a startup and starting it like just like you're starting something in your garage and you're hungry and you're passionate and you're seeing an opportunity here or there and you just want to build this readership and let people know that you have this character and see where it goes. So it's been a sprint. So point being, at some point, I think you get to a stage where you can say no and you don't have to sprint off in all these different directions almost at the same time. And you can say, okay, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to wake up and I'm going to write for four hours. And it doesn't matter if someone calls for an interview or if CNN wants you on or Fox News wants you on, it doesn't matter. I'm just going to do my four hours and then after that, then I'll check my texts, then I'll check my emails. And if something comes up, yeah, we can schedule it out and maybe later in the week. But right now it's just like, oh, really? Fox wants me on? And then all of a sudden, no, I'm not writing for those four hours. Usually it's the first novel and all the others were really down between 10 at night and about four in the morning because that's the time it was quiet in our house with three kids, a dog, wife. And yeah, that's how I do stand up writing, too. Same thing when everyone's asleep, it's going to be your best work. Because there's no one interrupting. Because I have friends that feel like they can't work like that and they only work good if they get up in the morning and then write immediately. They write even before breakfast. So I was getting up and working out like that until the publication of the first book. And then things got a little crazy. The publicity stuff. The publicity stuff. And then writing late at night, also working on the next one, dialing that in and then you're editing one while you're writing another. So you're kind of jostling at the same time when you're on this book a year type program. That's what you're doing. And maybe I'll get past that at some point and I'll have an end date and then I'll start the next one. But right now, it's not quite like that yet.