And it can only be good for football when you have more teams like that that have that kind of competitiveness.

Yeah like if I was to discuss I suppose like the last few years since I've come back involved with the junior team I suppose I have to give a massive amount of credit to my brother Peter he had a vision and I didn't really believe him at the time I think it was around 2018-19 where him and Neil my brother were planning on going back to Colgate to play and I was actually playing with Galway Knight at the time but I just happened to be leaving at the time so he kind of convinced me to go play Division 2 football I was like why not just go and enjoy myself with my brothers and then it just became nearly like an obsession and we kind of steamrolled through Division 2 and 1 and then our first year up in the Premier I think we came like 4th and we got to the quarter final of the FAI Junior Cup and like the memories from that were like will be with us for life and then we probably lulled a bit for two years while still playing at a pretty decent level like we were getting to like a kind of cup semi and still coming mid-table in the Premier but we were definitely struggling a bit and then two summers ago now Peter told me that he's going to hang up the boots and he said I'm going to have to finish what I set out what I wanted to start

which he has definitely done

it's most certainly done and I again I kind of thought when I obviously thought when he told me he was going to stop playing I was like you are probably like you're the person to do it but I still didn't believe that he'd do it and he said it multiple times to Mike on Galway Bay FM about how like we never really spoke about winning the league or anything it just kind of he said to Mike himself the day we just arrived in Crockwell and when the league trophy was handed over to me that's when it like sunk in that we had won it we were just going game by game game by game and we're kind of still doing that and i think that's why like the scoreline isn't really a surprise to us yesterday because we're just still just going at our one game at a time and um like a lot of people would have said we reached the pinnacle in the summer and peter was back in pre-season telling us we've got little things we need to improve we've got other sides of our game to get better at and i personally think from being a player in that team that we're actually getting even better and better

One, two, three, four.

It really does, it does frighten me.

And y- once you realize that if a military is able to operate at machine speed, any military that's not doing the same thing is at an incredible disadvantage, and I'm putting that way [laughs] more mildly.

You know, it doesn't stand a chance, and which means that everyone has to sort of keep up w- with the Joneses, as they say, and I feel like that's going to make other militaries, even not, maybe even our military, make decisions they don't necessarily wanna make, which would be, you know, making systems autonomous that they know how dangerous making them autonomous is, but they also know how dangerous the not making them autonomous is.

And so you see, like, this logic and this quickening of, of events, and yeah, it's, it's very scary.

I never heard the term maladaptive daydreaming until just a few years ago.

[laughs]

Okay, so I'm gonna set this up, and this is early in the book, and there's a character named James Westwood, JW Westwood, who is a former congressman, and now he runs a think tank in Washington, DC that is actually a conduit for Chinese Ministry of State Security, their intelligence.

scary to me

i mean i can open up my email right now and i will have 30 emails that are all written by bots and they're all They're getting more and more sophisticated and they're all trying to sell you something or get you to appear on a non-existent podcast.

They're all some sort of artificial angle, but they're getting more and more sophisticated in trying to convince you that they're real.

And they will say, oh my gosh, I read your new book and here's what really fascinated me about it.

And they'll have all these details out of the book, but it's artificial information.

And it's completely clogging the airwaves.

It's very hard for me to tell if someone's sending me an email or recently I was asked to, I'm going to a conference in New York in May.

be such a downer about that.

Yeah

... 'cause it, it's helped me." But I, um, you know, I liked international sales.

I mean, I, I like the international aspect of it.

I like traveling.

I liked, um, studying foreign languages.

I like meeting people from other places and cultures.

So I mean, I think... [exhales] I just feel like writing's the only thing that I'm any good at, so it really is a tough question.

Yeah

What do you do? How do you study or research guns?

Before I was published.

So I'm not former military.

I'm not former law enforcement.

I worked in a cubicle.

I worked in international business and sales and marketing.

But I wanted to be a writer, and I read everything.

What do you think?