May 7, 2025 • 54 mins
This week, S.E. gets to see into the future with best-selling author Brad Thor. Brad talks about the impact of his favorite childhood book series and what inspired him to finally get to writing books later in life. S.E. and Brad do step lightly into politics and talk about how it shapes Brad’s audience, more than his storytelling. Brad talks about his narrative clairvoyance and where he gets his ideas from. He even gives advice to S.E. and writers out there on how to overcome those stubborn blocks and writing obstacles. Plus, it’s a super fun, thriller-inspired lightning round! Stay tuned to find out Brad’s favorite book-to-screen adaptation. Brad’s latest book is called Shadow of a Doubt and it’s out now.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
We really lie to ourselves. Writers are liars, particularly writers
of fiction. I mean we're telling stories, we're making things up.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hey, everybody, Welcome to Off the Cup, my personal anti
anxiety antidote. In covering politics for over twenty years, I've
learned one thing.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
We all need a break from it.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
We have become obsessed with politics in a way I
don't think we have been before. We're like centering our
lives around politics. We're making it our entire identities. We're
getting wrapped up in the machinations at sixteen hundred Pennsylvania
Avenue instead of what's going on in our local communities.
And I like to escape politics into the world of Bravo.
(00:45):
As many of you may know, some of you like
to escape into.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
A world that actually looks very similar to our.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Own, which is fascinating to me. My next guest provides
just that escape for millions and millions of readers all
over the world with books that are in some case
says rip from the headlines or in some ways eerily
predicting them.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Welcome to Off the Cup, Brad Thor.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Hey see, it's great to be here, and I need
you to make me a promise up front.
Speaker 4 (01:11):
Please that we're going to.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Save five minutes for the end to talk about Bravo,
because I have a little one degree of separation from
one of their hit shows that I watch all the time.
So we'll have to I haven't been lucky enough to
sit there with the Andy and the clubhouse like you
have so many times. But I got a little connection.
Actually I have two connections, am I.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Guys on the floor, my jaw is on.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
All right, we'll save it. We'll save it for the end.
That'll be the big I've got two connections to two shows,
so we'll save that for the end, or unless you
want to start out with it.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
I can't wait till the end. Let's do it. I
can't wait. There's no way I have an hour. I
can't wait. So go tell me everything.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Okay, all right, Well we'll have dessert first, to a
leader vegetables later.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
So, first of all, one of my dear friends from
growing up, she was originally Meredith Rosenberg, is one of
the stars of the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City
and so mayor sister Myra dear friends of mine from Chicago.
So that's one. Yeah, Meredith Marks, Meredith Mars Listen she
is a wonderful human being. She's a terrific, super smart.
(02:13):
Their family's wonderful, and I.
Speaker 4 (02:14):
Grew up with them in Chicago.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
I'm obsessed with her.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
So that's number one. And the number two, I am
a big fan of Below Decks. Okay.
Speaker 4 (02:22):
And and I have.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
A friend Erica Rich and she and her husband do
the casting for Below Decks. And so Erica is a
friend of mine from high school in Chicago. So there's
two Bravo connections that run through my life. And shot,
well we have.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
To do watch what Happens live together.
Speaker 4 (02:39):
Oh that'd be fun. I would enjoy that.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
Yeah, yeah, that'd be really fun. Okay, I'll try to
make it happen. I love good stories. I'm good glad.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
I'm so glad I brought up Bravo because.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
I didn't need to.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
But perfect correct me if I'm wrong.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Did we first cross paths, like at the while I
was at The Blaze and you were doing The Blaze?
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Yes, so you and I were in the same makeup room.
Speaker 4 (03:06):
This is when there.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Was a New York studio for The Blaze and I
had to go there to do like a Will cow
thing or something like that, and I had been watching
you on TV. I've never met you, and I walked
into the makeup room and started chatting with you. You
were super nice and super engaging and all that kind
of stuff. But that was the first time we met.
That's years and years ago in New York.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
That was years and years ago.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
And I worked so the Blaze was Glenn Beck's startup
and I worked there for a short time when I
was younger. I know you did a lot of appearances there,
a man, was that a different time.
Speaker 4 (03:40):
I got to tell you, it.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Is so so different when I look back at kind
of the at the places that I was and had
a very high profile that I'm no longer at the Blazze, Fox,
things like that, where I didn't change, just the landscape
change you are.
Speaker 4 (03:59):
I'm still the same person.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Me and you, Me and you. I have not changed.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
If I have changed around me and we don't get
like super political here, because like I said, this is
a break from that. But looking back at where you
and I were, could you have predicted I mean, I'm
an outcast.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Now, oh so, and listen, it's it's no question. It's
hurt me as far as television appearances, book sales, I
don't doubt any of that. That by kind of maintaining
my integrity and what I believe in, in not being
a weather vane, just blowing where it's easiest and blowing
where the trolls push you and things like that. It's
(04:38):
cost me, but I look in the mirror every day
and I'm happy with what I see.
Speaker 4 (04:41):
So there you go.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Yes, And I think you know when I talk about exactly,
and that's part of mental health, right, it's yes. I
think when you are grounded in who you are, that
helps you when you can turn out everything and not
care about outside opinions. Listen, it's I'm fifty five now,
so it's one of the blessings of getting older is
not caring a what people think. But I also think
(05:02):
it is one of the healthiest paths you can trod
in life. Tread in life is to trod would suggest
I'm done treading, Sorry, wrong tends there. It's one of
the healthiest paths you can tread in life. Is being
true to yourself and what you believe. Yes, regardless of
what happens. And you would have been easy to fold
and to go follow the mobs, but that's not where
(05:23):
I am and that's not who I am. And that's
why friendships like the one that you and I have
is even more valuable to me because I'm not the
only one who did the right thing. So when I
see you on TV, whether if I'm joking and it's
either in the clubhouse with Andy, or I'm watching you
on CNN, or I'm catching you on the web, I'm
just I can look at you and I've pointed you
out to my kids, and I've said to my kids,
(05:44):
she's one of the good ones.
Speaker 4 (05:45):
She stands up for what she believes in.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
So just in my own house, you have been singled
out as somebody who's doing the right thing. So I
appreciate your example that you've helped set for my kids.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
So thankssh wow, thank you. And I feel the same way.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
There's a handful of folks who I can look at
and say, oh, I just admire them for sticking to
who they are and not going where the power went
and the crowds went. I mean, you are one of
the one of the rare, one of the few. And
I know you became a political independent for all intents
and poises, and I did two because the conservatism has
(06:22):
has left the party. But your books are beloved by
Republican readers, and you sort of alluded to this. I
think has politics affected your relationship with readers?
Speaker 4 (06:35):
No, I don't think so.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
I think so. My first two big pieces of fan
mail when I started my career, one came from a
big politician on the right, New Gingrich, and the other
came from one on the left, a cabinet member from
the Carter administration, Bert Lance. And so I've always counted
people on both sides of the aisle as as readers.
(06:59):
But I do think that because I didn't get behind
a particular candidate that the people and I was not
and I was. My dad's a United States Marine. He's
no longer active, but once a marine, always a marine.
And we always believe the character is destiny. And if
you shouldn't vote for somebody for president of the country
who you wouldn't hire to babysit your kids, walk your dog,
(07:20):
or run your business. So that's kind of where that's
kind of where I came down on it. And so
I think that that probably alienated some people.
Speaker 4 (07:29):
I know it did.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
I mean, he was just even friendships in my own life,
people that couldn't believe that after years of voting a
certain way, that I wouldn't vote that way anymore. And
I said, I put country over party, So I don't
want to be that much of a tribal partisan that
that's what dictates all my decisions, because at the end
of the day, this is my dad the Marine talking.
We're stewards of our republic. We don't own America. We're
(07:51):
merely caretakers, and it's incumbent upon us to hand a stronger, free,
or more equitable, more prosperous nation to the next generation
that was handed to us. I always see myself as
an American citizen before I see myself as a partisan,
and so I act and make my decisions accordingly.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
I love that the new book is Shadow of Doubt,
and we'll talk about it, but first.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Talk about Black Stallion m.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
My favorite book series when I was a kid. Yeah, yeah,
I know, I loved these books.
Speaker 4 (08:24):
I don't know what it was about the books. I
saw the movie, which.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Was fantastic when I was a kid, and there was
something about the freedom in those books. Living downtown Chicago,
it's funny we had an old National Guard armory in Chicago,
and they would actually have polo matches on Friday nights there,
and people kept horses at the National Guard Armory, and
I was able to get a job there when I
was later in grade school, so probably about twelve thirteen
(08:50):
years old, and I was able to be what's called
a hot walker, which is you walk the horses between
the chuckers between the periods to cool them off. The
players switch up their polo ponies during the games and
they need somebody to just walk the horses around and
pull them off.
Speaker 4 (09:05):
And I was in heaven.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
I love that, being an inner city kid who only
got to ride horses during summers at summer camp or
up in my parents' cottage at the stables in Wisconsin.
So I love those books. But there was something about
the freedom that those books represented to me that was
always appealing. So those were some of the first books
that I read series wise and fell in love with.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
And what was going on in your life at the time, Well.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
I had started. I think my parents split up when
I was eight years old, so I think I probably
threw myself more into books at that time than anything else.
And I think books are a very healthy place, particularly
for kids to escape to.
Speaker 4 (09:46):
And I wish it was more.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
There weren't that many escapes if you think about it.
I mean, we didn't have one hundred TV channels, there
was no internet, there was no scrolling. So my parents
were always really good about it. If you want books,
we'll get you books. And we used to have these
Scholastic book club the little paper newsletter with a little
strip on the back where you'd write out what you
wanted and you'd bring in your cash and your coins
to pay for the books. And it was always so
exciting when those Scholastic books showed up. So I think
(10:11):
reading was probably an escape for me at at a
difficult time in my childhood because of the diurse wasn't
great between my parents, so it kind of allowed me
to to not think about it, to escape into a
different world. And I'm very thankful that those books were there.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
Did you write as a child as well?
Speaker 4 (10:31):
I did. I did a lot of writing.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
I always wrote plays and wrote short stories and things
like that. So I was always always a writer, but
my mom had been. It's funny I only learned this
in the last year where my mom lived.
Speaker 4 (10:45):
She lived on the Upper East Side.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
She was a flight attendant for twa in the nineteen
sixties and got to see the world with twa My
dad had been, like I said, a United States Marine.
You got to see the world with the Marine Corps.
And it was the arts in our family were something
to make you better round it.
Speaker 4 (11:02):
They were not a career path.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
My dad had always hoped that I would go into
the family business. My dad was involved with commercial real estate,
building office buildings, and you always hope.
Speaker 4 (11:11):
My brother and I would take over his business.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
So I had never considered the arts as a career
path until I was on my honeymoon and my wife
asked me, what would you regret on your deathbed never
having done? And I said writing a book and getting
it published, And that's what really kicked it off. But
that wasn't until my late twenties.
Speaker 5 (11:28):
You know.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Yeah, it's so funny because I wrote a lot as
a child as well. I think I wrote my first
quote unquote novel at seven. It was like six pages,
but it almost felt I loved writing and it was
an outlet for me too, because I had some instability
in my childhood as well. But it always felt like
it was I guess, i'd say, too easy to be
(11:49):
a career and so I ran from writing as a
career for a long time too, and you know, tried
to pursue something else for us. But I don't know why,
because you know, my parents didn't care kind of what
I did, as long as I was happy. But there's
something about it that I think you're just not ready
(12:09):
for until you are. And I wasn't ready for it
until I finally got to college and worked at the
newspaper and thought, oh, there's nothing better than this. There
is nothing better than this. But I just think it's
it's interesting that both you and I loved it so
much and didn't really embrace it until we were like adults.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
I'm going to ask you to lie down on the
couch here for a few minutes, and we're going to
talk about this. I think you used a great term, Essy,
which is you ran from it, because I ran as well.
And when I graduated college, I had worked in LA
leasing apartments and had saved a bunch of money, and
I had decided that I was going to I had
done a semester broad in Paris.
Speaker 4 (12:52):
I had friends who had an extra bedroom.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
They invited me after I graduated to come back because
I threatened I was going to try my hand at writing,
and so I went back over and I started writing,
and I had I got a couple chapters into a book,
and I had this voice in the back of my
head saying, you know, what if the book's no good?
What if you don't finish the book, or what if
you do finish it and it's so bad you can't
find a publisher. This voice just went on and on
(13:16):
and on. In growing up, I don't know if you
remember the PSAs that you used to be on TV
all the time when we were growing up, and it
was for the United Negro College Fund, and it said
a mind is a terrible thing to waste. And I
personally shortened that for my own catchphrase, which is a
mind is a terrible thing period because my mind kept
trying to talk me out of writing a book, and
(13:38):
I succumbed to that voice, and I shipped my laptop
back home, and I traveled with all this money that
all this money with the money wasn't a lot, but
traveled on the cheap in Europe with the money that
I had saved up working in college. And I think
that which you're most destined to do in life you're
often the most afraid of. And I succumbed to the
fear for the longest time until fast forward to my honeymoon,
(14:02):
and I told my wife that my deepest desire was
to write a book. And she said, fine, when we
get home, you need to start spending two hours a day,
every day protected time making that happen. So here I
am newlywed my husband, I can't tell my wife that
I just I don't have the courage.
Speaker 4 (14:18):
I'm too afraid of failure to write the book.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
So I had that. I had that not wanting to
admit my fear to my wife. That really drove me
into writing the book and I.
Speaker 4 (14:27):
Actually got it done.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
There's a lot that goes into writing, you know, fiction
or nonfiction. There's a lot that goes into it. What's
your favorite part of it? What's the part of writing
that you left the check.
Speaker 4 (14:42):
Cashing the check?
Speaker 1 (14:43):
If I'm being honest of no, you know, I mean
I like it because I'm a perfectionist. I'm a very
type a personality of perfectionist. And I think that being
a perfectionist, perfectionists are plagued probably with writer's block more
than anybody else because writer's block is a worry that
(15:06):
you're not putting the words on paper as well as
they could be placed on the paper. Right, there's that
old saying that you can't edit what hasn't been written,
so you really need to do You have to sit
down and see the pants to seat a chair, and
you have to open the tap because the water doesn't
flow if the TAP's not open. But you know, I'll
finish a book and that'll feel good, and I'll give
it to my wife and she'll read it. She's like,
(15:27):
that's good. My agent and editor will read it and
be like, wow, you know, really really good. And I
don't believe them. I don't believe them until because they
all have a vested interest in the process. I know
they would tell me if something was wrong with the book,
but it's not until it gets out into the wild
and I start hearing from the critics and ultimately the people.
Speaker 4 (15:45):
I work for the.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Readers, because I don't work for Simon and Schuster. I
work for the readers, and I have a job as
long as the readers are willing to buy my books,
so they're my ultimate boss. So for me, there's a
ton of anxiety until I start hearing from them what
they think, and then I can relax and enjoy a
little bit.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Yeah, and I can so relate to that too. You know,
half of my life is on TV. But but the
other half is writing. And I write for TV too.
But when people ask like, what is it? What do
you like about writing so much? It's the intentionality when
I'm on TV, especially when it's live. You know, I
like to think that I've thought out what I'm going
(16:25):
to say. Well, but you know, things come out the writing.
I can be intentional, deliberate, I can pick the perfect words.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
It's the perfectionist in me too.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
That I have more control. I have more control. That's
what it comes down to, and I love that part
of it too. I also like for me, maybe because
I do opinion and nonfiction, it's a puzzle. I love
putting words together like a puzzle, and putting an argument
together like a puzzle.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
I don't know. It just really turns me on.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Really, I hear you, it's and it is. It is
a different world I've got to imagine. I mean, I've
done I watch you on CNN do panels, and you
can only come in armed with a certain amount of
research it's funny since we're kind of talking TV a
little bit, we're talking mental health. I want to share
something with you that maybe you can relate to. When
(17:17):
I started doing TV, and I would do these remote
hits from like CNN studio in Chicago at the old
Chicago Tribune building, there was a studio in there, and
I would cram, like cramming for a test. I would
put so much information in my head. I would do
to three to five minute hit and it'd be done,
and the producer would say, in my year, oh you
were fantastic, we can't wait to have you back.
Speaker 4 (17:38):
And I would feel like if I.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
Didn't regurgitate every single thing I have prepared to say
during the failure, it was a failure. It was an
absolute failure. It took me years to finally get comfortable
with my performance on TV because I felt I was
under delivering, that I had not done my job because
I didn't spit back up everything I'd memorized.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
I used to do what I used to do when
I was coming up in TV.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
I'd write out like a column, like I would write
a column about what I wanted to say, and I
truly thought in my mind like I can, I can
remember and deliver this entire six hundred word column. Of
course you cannot. You don't have the time. You're human,
it's not going to happen. Someone's gonna interrupt you. There's
all the things. And when I finally let that go
(18:23):
mm hmm, it allowed me to just be present in
the moment. And then you rely on your institutional knowledge
and just the things you've you've known forever and the
things that you're still learning. So it's such I can
completely relate. And as a writer, I think every writer
goes through that kind of exercise when they first start
doing TV because it's.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
A very different muscle, totally different.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
I I'm writing a book now. It's very different from
my political books in the past. It's it's about my
mental health and it's about it's about me, and I
need your advice because.
Speaker 3 (18:52):
Okay, it's really really hard.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
The material is hard, and it's not it's not a
writer's block, like I don't know what to write next.
It's that sometimes when I'm feeling good, I want to
write about my mental health. I don't want to live
in that space, but I have to. I need to
get through this book. Do you have any tips for
(19:19):
kind of forcing yourself to the page where you don't
feel like this is not going.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
To be productive right now.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
You know, I need I need to be I need
to be good at this, but I also need to
just do it.
Speaker 3 (19:31):
I need to just get it done.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Yeah. I think probably the best piece of writing advice
I ever found was to give yourself permission to write
a crappy first draft, because at the bottom of everything,
I think is this fear of well, if I'm not
in the mood right now, the words aren't going to
come out correctly, so on and so forth. There's always
(19:54):
an excuse for why you can't write right. It's amazing writers,
particularly under deadline, will have the leanus closets, cleanest garage,
clean kids. Everything is going to get productive, exactly. It is.
It is the way that listen, we really lie to ourselves.
Writers are liars, particularly writers of fiction. I mean, we're
telling stories, we're making things up. But I think, see,
(20:17):
probably the best piece of advice I could give you
is to give yourself permission to write a crappy first draft.
You and I both know you're not a crappy writer,
but there's something about saying I give myself permission to
have a whatever word you want to use, crummy, jung xy, whatever.
You give yourself that permission, and what it does is
it removes the roadblocks. It removes the psychological blocks that
(20:37):
are stopping you from writing. Whether you're it's that perfectionism
that's raising its ugly head or if it's fear that
you don't want to go to the dark side, at
this point, you're actually doing well you don't want to be.
Who was it that referred to their depression as being
a big black dog?
Speaker 2 (20:55):
A famous writer, writer and illustrator, Matthew Johnstone.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
That's the one. I think.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
I think he actually did, Overcoming the black dog of depression.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Yes, so I think I think Churchill may have been
the perfon coin that, yeah, the originator of that term,
but then Matthew had done a book talking about it. Yes,
so I can only imagine that writing about your own
mental health is frightening. Is you have to lay yourself bear,
(21:27):
your entire soul.
Speaker 4 (21:28):
You're laying bare for this.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
So there's got to be times where you don't want
to go there for multiple reasons. But I think if
you give your try, giving yourself permission to write a
crummey first draft, because when you do that, when you
remove I'm gonna use air quotes here, the professionalism from it.
I want this to be good, and I really want to.
I'm feeling good now, and if I write about the
bad stuff now, I might not be truly tapping into
(21:52):
how I feel. Yes, that may be a dodge. That
may be a dodge that you're saying to yourself, the
book is not going to be any good unless I'm
totally it's you know, it's like saying I wanted to
write about this three day bender that I was on
in college, and I gotta get drunk for three days.
I mean, that's silly, right, but that's the way again.
Don't forget my slogan, the mind is a terrible thing.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
Totally advice, I hope.
Speaker 4 (22:13):
So I hope it works for you.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
So how does Scott Harvath come to be? How do
you invent this character?
Speaker 1 (22:34):
So it's interesting. I never ever intended to write a
series protagonist. I was going to be one and done.
You cannot be an even halfway decent writer without being
a voracious reader. And so I quickly moved out of
those Black Stallion books to stealing. My mom read thrillers
(22:55):
and my dad read thrillers, and when they would lay
one down that they had completed, I grab it. So
I'm very young reading Lecree, reading Clancy, reading Freddie Forsyth,
and I loved these books. So I had had I
was doing. I was on television before I became an author.
I had a travel show on public television, and I
was the producer.
Speaker 4 (23:13):
Writer, and host.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
That's what happened after I gave up on writing a novel.
I took that money from college. I traveled and I went, wow,
there's all these young kids with backpacks. I wasn't familiar
with this idea of get a rail pass, see Europe
and all that stuff. And the only person on television
at that time doing budget travel was this guy, Rick Steves.
He's still on now. I love Yeah. I do too,
(23:35):
but his audience was very, very much older than I
was at the Yeah.
Speaker 4 (23:39):
So I wanted to do a show for eighteen to thirty.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
Four year olds because I thought travel made me a
better person, made me a better American, maybe a better person.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
I got to see other ways of living, other ways of.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
You know, eat dinner at ten o'clock in Spain instead
of six o'clock. Yeah, it was just very broadening that experience.
So I did a show in Lucern, Switzerland, where I
saw this incredible monument in Switzerland that Mark Twain called
the most moving piece of rock in the world, this
Dying Lion, and I said, if I ever write a book,
I'm going to call it The Lions of Lucerne. I
don't know how I'm gonna get Switzerland into the book,
(24:12):
but that's what it's going to be. And so my
wife asked me on our honeymoon, what would your gun
on your death d Never having done, I said, you know,
I want to write a book and get it published.
She said, a right, two hours is protect the time
every day. So now I had I had said I'm
going to do it. I'd had the title floating around
in my head since I'd done my travel show episode
in Lucerne. And we shared an overnight train ride in
(24:35):
from Munich to Amsterdam with a brother and sister from Atlanta, Georgia.
They were fans of my TV show. They recognized me
when we got into the compartment with them and we
chatted all night. In the next day, the sister said, hey,
are you going to go back to the States after
your honeymoon and make more television episodes. I said, actually,
I'm going to be working on a novel, and she said,
oh my gosh. And when we got off at the
(24:56):
platform and went to trade contact information, she gave me
your business card and said, I work at Simon and Schuster,
and if you write that novel, I want to read
it before somebody else to see if we can help
you get it at Simon and Schuster. So I was
all excited, and it was a raiders dream, every writer's dream.
And the cherry on top for me was it was
raining at the train station in Amsterdam and we couldn't
(25:20):
get a cab. We had to walk to our hotel,
Tricia and I. We got to the hotel and the
manager said, I am so sorry mister and missus Thor.
Your room is not ready yet, but let us give
you a couple of umbrellas. There's a great cafe around
the corner. Go have a cup of coffee a sandwich.
Come back.
Speaker 4 (25:35):
I'll be ready now.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Little did I know they were putting flowers in there
and chocolates for us and getting it up because they
knew it was a honeymoon situation.
Speaker 4 (25:42):
Very sweet.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
But I'm the cynical Chicagoan, so I'm convinced his rooms
are never ready on time. And that cafe around the
corner is his brother in law's cafe, and he says
how he shuffles business over to his brother in law. Anyway,
we go to the cafe, we sit down in The
famous American Western writer Louis Lamore was known for always
having a paperback in his back pocket, so if he
(26:04):
was waiting online at the grocery store, the post office,
he'd take out up paperback and start reading.
Speaker 4 (26:08):
Trish was the same way.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
She always had a paper bag in her paper back
in her bag, yea, so she got hers out, started reading.
I didn't have anything, and I'm looking around this cafe
and there used to be this English language newspaper called
the International Herald Tribune that you can get in overseas,
and I grabbed it, picked it up, and I was flipping.
Speaker 4 (26:26):
Through, flipping through, and I found this.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
Little intelligence briefing. It was only about three inches. It
was a three inch high column, and it was all
about a Swiss intelligence officer who had embezzled all this
money from the Swiss government. To train a shadow militia
high in the Alps with high tech weapons from his
own private arsenal, and I said, that's it.
Speaker 4 (26:45):
Those are the Lions of Lucerne.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
I'm going to do my whole I'm going to do
my whole book around this, and that's that's where it
came from.
Speaker 4 (26:52):
In the character.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Back to your question, Scott Harvath, I was looking for
a name Scott with one T. My brother is Scott
with one T, because my mom didn't like the idea
of seeing SEO T T thho R three t's in
a row. So I eventually had to give Scott my
fictional character, the middle name of Thomas and explain his
mother didn't want to see Scott Thomas. And then Harved
(27:15):
is a friend of ours who works for the Department
of Justice processing FAISO warrants, and I thought it was
a really cool name I had not seen in books before.
And then the character was really kind of a mishmash
of people that I knew in the espionage world. In
the special Operations community, there's a lot of shared experiences
(27:35):
that they have, particularly difficulty being able to commit in
a romantic relationship or difficulties at home because they're constantly
going overseas to do some of the nation's most dangerous business.
So that's kind of who Harvath is. And I also
say that he's a little bit my alter ego, the
same way I'm sure Clancy was for Jack Ryan and
James Colland was for Ian Fleming.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
So, and you've basically written, not basically, you have written
a book a year since two thousand and two, since
the lines of this concern.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
And one year I did two books in one year
because I did a spin off about an all female
Delta Force unit. So I'm currently as we're recording this,
I am writing my twenty fifth novel, twenty fourth in
the Scott Harbath series. It's hard, It's hard. How do
you exactly?
Speaker 2 (28:24):
And this is coming from someone who loves to write.
I love to write. How do you churn out?
Speaker 5 (28:29):
How?
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Is this a matter of discipline? Is this a matter
of necessity? Like you have to do it how straight teeth?
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Yeah? Yeah, no, I mean it is.
Speaker 4 (28:38):
I mean it is my job. It is.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
It is very difficult. It's only gotten more difficult. You
would think doing the same thing every year. You know,
if you're only twisting a wrench on widget number four
that you become the best wrench twister, and it would
just be you know, old hat.
Speaker 4 (28:52):
It does not get easier.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
There is no formula. I pride myself because I'm such
a voracious consumer of news and such a creative person
that sometimes I get very lucky and I see over
the horizon.
Speaker 4 (29:04):
And I can beat the headlines.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
And that's one of the things people say about my
books as well. Four. If you want to know what's
going to happen tomorrow, read a brad Thorpe book today.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
But the Simpsons, oh well, I got to ask that question.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
I was just at a writing conference and they said,
it's better you are the Simpsons at predicting the future,
and I said, well, Simpsons have been doing it longer
than I have, so the Simpsons are definitely better. But
what's got it is very difficult, and it's only gotten
more difficult in that the publisher's coming to me sooner
and sooner. It's like Christmas being in the stores as
(29:36):
soon as fourth of July is over. So I'll come
out with the book in the summer, and before summer's
even over, they're like, what's next year's book? You know
you barely get time to kind of toy with different
ideas and all that stuff. But it is, as I
said earlier, I used the expression seat the pants to
sea to chair, which is not mine. I forget whether
that's Dorothy Parker.
Speaker 4 (29:53):
Who said that, but it really is. It is discipline.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
You have to sit down, you have to force yourself,
you have to at the world at some point. I
actually do have to take like, not only unplug the
router in my office, but actually take it out of
my office so I can't go plug it back in.
I'll do I'll do the hats because it's just I
have to. I can't. I'll convince myself that what's happening
out in the bigger world is so important that I
need to be tuned into it that if I'm not
(30:18):
taking I don't have the job that you have where
I've got to be. You know, I'm not punching it
up with Scott Jennings, you know on a regular basis,
you know where you need to constantly be prepared and
well armed when you go in there. But I've got
to imagine it's difficult for you. It's it's difficult for
me to turn it off because I am a news junkie.
I'm a geopolitics junkie, and I do write international thrillers
(30:42):
that involve diplomats and spies and foreign governments and stuff
like that. So I like to be but I have
to set a limit. I have to say, Okay, you
can check in. You know, I can have my cup
of coffee in the morning, and by the time that
first cup of coffee's done, the computer has to you know, yeah,
the web browser's got to be shut down sort of thing.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
But it is, I mean that's good for your mental
health too, it really is. I mean, there is a
thing that's too much news, yes.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
Oh and it's never ending too, I mean the particularly
I never was a big YouTube guy, but now I've
got so many people that I enjoy watching, you know,
whether it's you know, well, I'm not gonna listen names,
but it's just there's a lot of There's one particular
geo political strategy so I love named Peter Zaien, and.
Speaker 4 (31:22):
Huh he's just very charming.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
He's so smart. He worked with a buddy of mine
and he does these little six minute things on YouTube
and they're like potato chips for me, because it's like, oh,
my gosh, that makes so much sense. And my last book,
Shadow of Doubt, he had a view of Russia and
why Russia is doing what it's doing right now. That's geographics.
It's a geographical situation meets demographics. I didn't realize that
(31:46):
Russia's only been invaded through one of nine portals into Russia,
and that at the end of World War Two Russia
controlled all of them. But then when the Soviet Union
broke up, they lost seven out of the nine. And
this is the last generation that Russia will be able
to field their army, that they have enough fighting men
to field an army to go and retake those portals.
(32:06):
So Putin had no choice but to act now. And
it was it played so well into the book, and
so that kind of stuff. I get to eat my
potato chips and count it as work at the same time, right,
But yeah, it is. It is really tough to quiet
the world, to shut everything out if you will to write,
and you know that you've got a you can't get
(32:29):
it done if you don't kind of put yourself in
that cone of silence.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
Yes, my husband is obsessed, obsessed with your books.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
You're his favorite author, for sure.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Not even close, because it's got everything he loves. It's
got military, spy stuff, world events, politics.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
Who are you writing for?
Speaker 2 (32:49):
And don't say everybody, because no commissures will tell you
that's not You know.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
That, but you don't.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
The audience is everyone. So I know there's a reader
you have in mind, and that doesn't mean that they're
the only people I have, like your baby, But who
do you write for?
Speaker 1 (33:05):
I have a very handsome, very intelligent reader mind. I
write it for myself.
Speaker 4 (33:10):
I write the kind of books that I would want to.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
So I have a friend who is a fabulous author,
and he was a creative writing professor in Iowa. He
wrote Rambo. His name is David Morrell. He introduces himself
as Rambo's daddy. I just saw David at that writing
conference I was talking about back in August, and David's
got this big thing about when you pick an idea
to write your book, it's got to be something that
(33:35):
really lights you up, that's going to put fuel in
your rocket ship to power you for the next year.
So I always try to pick some really cool geopolitical
set piece against which I'm going to set the story.
So I really so my books function. So first of all,
for you, for your listeners who don't know my books,
and I said, oh, you know, I've written on my
(33:57):
twenty fifth book. You can read my books.
Speaker 4 (33:59):
They're like the James. That's what I tell people.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
If the new Streams Bond movie is down the street
and you've never seen a Bond.
Speaker 4 (34:04):
Movie, you can go see it.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
You'll know exactly who Bond is right away. You will
not feel like you're missing out because he didn't start
back with doctor No, you just jump right in. My
books are the same way.
Speaker 4 (34:14):
But I'm writing my books happen on two different levels.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
There's either you can bounce across the top of the
waves and have a really great kind of toes in
the sand book in the hand beat read. But there's
also a lot of stuff that is deeper in there
if you want to pay attention to it. People tell
me that they love to read my books with either
their laptop open or their phone nearby, because they I say,
what I do is faction where you don't know where
(34:39):
the facts end and the fiction begins. So people are
constantly searching stuff on the internet going he must have
made that up. Oh my gosh, he didn't make that up.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
Right, that's real.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
Uh huh yeah, And that's that's fun for me because
I think people close my books smarter, and I'm not
I'm not preaching. I'm not you know, I'm not evangelizing
for anything in the world. I'm just to give people
a great white knuckle thrill ride. But people really do
seem to enjoy that part of the book, that so
much of it is actually real, and they close it smarter,
(35:08):
which I think is a nice value.
Speaker 3 (35:10):
Add oh they do.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
And this is my husband. He'll be like, did you
know that in Sweden?
Speaker 3 (35:14):
Blah blah blah blah. You know, just from your book.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Again, without getting political, I just have to ask, what
did you think of the Hesbala pagers exploding?
Speaker 3 (35:24):
As an author who.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
Lives, I could have never written that.
Speaker 4 (35:28):
I could have never done it.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
Nobody would have believed it, nobody. I would have been
laughed out of my editor's office with that. It was
an amazing, amazing feat. I mean, that was so creative,
you know. Mark Twain once said that the difference between
fiction and reality is people expect fiction to make sense,
which is really funny. Yeah, I love that that term.
(35:50):
I often joke around that I would never say that.
Stephen King has it easier than I do. He's got
it different. Stephen King, You're peck and dining. You can
go stick it in an evil semit terry and it's
going to come back, right, It's going to come back
to life. He can make up those rules I can't give,
you know, CIA operatives, laser beams or you know, lightsabers.
I've got to I've got kind of a I'm hemmed
(36:11):
in with with what I can write about, so I
have to get those details details right.
Speaker 4 (36:16):
Have I come up with that pager thing?
Speaker 1 (36:18):
You know, my editor wouldn't have laughed me out of
her office, but it would have been a very very
tough discussion. Tough Yeah, like how are we supposed to believe? Like?
Because I think people's reaction if you put that in
the book is no way, no ways should ever work.
Speaker 4 (36:32):
There's no way they wouldn't.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
Like you're telling me, some guy wouldn't drop his pager
going into the grocery store and he sees the he
sees the explosive inside. Yeah, I mean, and that's why
allegedly they had to detonate all of them, is they
thought Hesbela was onto them. And so they that was
they were saving those pages for if they ever had to,
like the opening salvo of a war, and they believed,
(36:54):
based on their informants inside Hesbella, that it had been uncovered,
so they had no choice but to go and light
those pages up. They were forced into that. It was
pretty damn cool. And then the next day the walkie
talkie's exploded, which is amazing. I said, by the end
of the day, these guys won't even trust two cans
in a string, you know, they'll be afraid those are
going to blow up.
Speaker 4 (37:14):
So big psychological impact.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Not only was it a from a tactical standpoint, from
how do we winnow the enemy down? That was great
in my opinion. It particularly is a thriller author, but
it hesbalized, never going to trust any they're all starting
their cars with a stick.
Speaker 3 (37:28):
Now, the spycraft of it, it's just, uh yeah, okay,
I'm so glad I asked.
Speaker 6 (37:33):
You we we share a publisher.
Speaker 3 (37:47):
I don't know if you know that I'm also a SIMONR.
Chu star.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
How involved are your editors in the process. You just
said that that would have been like a conversation that
they would have had with you. Like this doesn't feel real.
How involved are they in? Like the con ten So.
Speaker 4 (38:01):
I will have a conversation.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
This is Christmas coming earlier and earlier every year. Where
the retailers want to know what's the next book. So
they want a title, They want the artwork done very quickly.
They want a description of the book which can be
changed later online. But go when I get locked in,
I'm locked in. I can't think of anything else. I
just what I've committed to, something I don't.
Speaker 4 (38:19):
Like to start. You're looking around for other ideas.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
Yeah, So I'll have that talk with my editor in
the beginning and say, all right, this is what I'm
thinking about writing.
Speaker 4 (38:28):
And we've been together.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
This is my twenty fifth book with her. We've been
together the whole time. So I'll write it. But Trish
is my first My wife is my first reader. Right,
so she will go through. She has an unbelievable eye.
She's so good she catches missing words, and she's fabulous
with grammar and so by the time so she'll go
through and read it, I'll make her changes. And it's
(38:49):
rare that she she'll say if anything, Hey, you said this.
Speaker 4 (38:52):
Three chapters ago.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
You either don't say it three chapters earlier and just
say it now, or you get rid of this one here. Yeah.
So she's really good with the help. So by the
time my editor gets it, it's really clean. She's not
coming back to me saying you got to fix this,
you got to but that I don't write that fast either.
It's an old joke, but I say it. The deadlines
make the most beautiful sound as they go rushing past.
(39:18):
So I miss a lot of deadlines. Shadow of Doubt,
the most recent book we had to change. We had
to change the publication date because I was just late
turning the book in because I was a very methodical,
very deliberate, slow steps by slow steps. But it was
called by a lot of reviewers the best book I've
ever written. So yes, there was a lot of anxiety,
(39:41):
a lot of agita at the publishing house at Simon
and Schuster because I didn't have the book in on time.
But in the end, i'd rather be late, I'd rather
have to change a pub date. I don't want to
do that if I can avoid it, I don't want
to have to take that. But in this case, again
I love my partners at Simon and Schuster, but I
did not want to turn in a book that was
isn't the best that I was capable of. And that's
(40:01):
the Midwestern upbringing in me. My parents said, if you
push a broom, you'd be the best damn broom pusher
in the world. And so I'm not a brain surgeon.
This doesn't kill people. If I move my pub date
by two or three weeks, it's very inconvenient for the
you know, the people in the business chain. So I'm
in a schuster of the bookstores, and I don't want
to harass them unduly. But in this case, I think
it was I think it was worth it.
Speaker 3 (40:23):
It's important. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
Yeah, I read that Sony's developing the books for TV.
Speaker 3 (40:28):
Is that true?
Speaker 1 (40:29):
Yeah. We're in an elevator now.
Speaker 4 (40:30):
We're racing towards the end of the year.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
And I'm excited to see where they where they place
it because they're getting ready to have all their meetings
with Netflix and Apple, Okay and Max and all those places.
Speaker 4 (40:43):
So yeah, so it's true.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
Yeah, We've got the director of the John Wick movies
as our director. We've got and this is a TV
series as one of our executive producers.
Speaker 4 (40:53):
We've got Howard Gordon.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
From twenty four in Rymeland and then then our writer
who's a brilliant writer. Steve Lightfoot wrote The Punisher, both
series of The Punisher. He worked on My Daughter Loves
and We Do Too. We loved Hannibal on NBC with
Madds Michelson where he plays Hannibal Lecter before he gets
captured with Lawrence Fishburne, and Steve was a writer on that.
Speaker 4 (41:15):
He's just a brilliant writer.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
So we had an A plus team, which having been
at this for over two decades, I've kissed every frog
in Hollywood by this point, I could write a book
about all the twists and turns, all the options we've
had and stuff. But we've got in my entertainment attorneys.
One of my dearest friends said, listen, every time we
got left at the altar for whatever reason, the option
time ran out, or the executives changed at the studio,
(41:39):
it's all worth it for the team we've built. Now
we really do have an A plus team. So I'm,
you know, fingers crossed that you know this time next
year you and I A were talking about the debut
of The.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
Well, and I know readers are going to are going
to look forward to that, and I'm sure you don't
have talent attached yet, but in your mind, I am
sure you.
Speaker 3 (41:57):
Have thought about who Scott will be.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
So here's what's really funny. For the longest time, I
thought we were going to start with the books as
they are currently. In fact, I thought we were going
to go back a couple of books and start with
Rising Tiger, which was all set in India that I
just did, which it was during Devali, which is really
a cool time, and it was just it was going
to be awesome to set it there. Plus, the crews
(42:21):
in India are fantastic. They've done so much film and television.
You get really very talented, experienced people. I just found
out a couple of days ago that the decision is
they want to start from the very first book. They
want to start from the lines of Liscern and show
people how Scott Harvath became Scott Harvath air quotes. So
they're modernizing. They're doing an updated take on my first novel.
(42:43):
They said, your readers are going to love this. We're
going to bring it up to speed. You wrote it
twenty years ago, We're going to bring it up to speed.
For present day, and they said, we really think this
is the way to go, and it's unique and it's
fresh because we're showing the making of this incredible American hero.
So now I'm like, okay, so this is a guy,
you know, is kind of late twenties, mid mid to
(43:03):
late twenties, so I have to rethink this entire thing.
And I'm sure the producers and the director have people
that they've worked with before and they love.
Speaker 4 (43:11):
You know, at one point.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
People were bugging me because I was so hot for
Chris Hemsworth, because you know, I want somebody, you know,
tough but handsome, great sense of humor too, which you
really can't fake. You can't stay being smart and having
a good sense of humor. So in Hemsworth has a
great sense of humor. So there may be some you know,
we go back and we've talked about does the star
(43:33):
make the series? Does the series make the star, and
they said, we'd really like to bring in a well
known actor, So it's going to be interesting to see
who they pick kind of in that demographic. So I
don't have I don't have anybody in mind, to be honest.
Speaker 3 (43:45):
What about Chris Pratt, He's already.
Speaker 1 (43:48):
Done terminal list, so that would be in the same genre.
Speaker 3 (43:52):
Close yes, yea too close, too close.
Speaker 1 (43:55):
Plus yeah, I mean I like Pratt, but Pratt's not
who I see as now as is my guy.
Speaker 4 (44:00):
I see more of a Hemsworth type.
Speaker 1 (44:03):
You know. At one point we thought about Scotty Eastwood.
I mean that's he's a potential to so I don't know.
I honestly don't know. And when you start getting into, like,
you know, anybody younger than Glenn Powell, I don't know
I'm seeing it. I don't know if I've seen any
of their movies, to be honest, but there's a lot
of you know who I like a lot. Did you
(44:23):
see the Guy Richie TV series that was based on
the movie, and it's called The Gentleman where it's all
about the So what's that guy's name? THEO James And
he was in second season of White Lotus. I think
THEO James would be He's such a good actor. He's
in the sweet spot of that age. If I could
pick somebody, if you said, all right, we're picking Scott
(44:45):
Harveth right now, I'd go with THEO James.
Speaker 4 (44:47):
I think he's a fabulous actor.
Speaker 3 (44:49):
Okay, THEO James, THEO James.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
I wait for the call, put my chips on THEO James.
Speaker 4 (44:54):
There we go.
Speaker 3 (44:55):
Okay, shadow of Doubt. What headspace were you in when
you set this book?
Speaker 4 (45:00):
So it's interesting.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
I'm always trying to do something different all this stuff.
I actually stumbled across something that happened in the nineteen
sixties that I used as inspiration for this book. I
did not know that during the Kennedy administration, real life
thing happened. A Russian defector came over to the United States,
and one of the biggest pieces of information he had
was that the French government and its intel services were
(45:24):
shot through with Soviet spies. Everybody here freaked out, and
they said, well, wait a second, if all these people
are compromised, how do we talk to our you know,
our contemporaries and these other agencies in France. How do
we let warn the French that they've got spies everywhere?
Kennedy wrote a letter, gave it to one of his
most trusted aids and said, you take this over to
(45:44):
the President of France. You stand in front of him,
watch him read it, and take the letter back wow,
and then eat it right yeah, then like eat it. Yeah, exactly,
and it was called it was called the Sapphire Affair,
and it was a really big deal.
Speaker 4 (46:00):
It fascinated me.
Speaker 1 (46:02):
I also didn't know, so I'm studying all this stuff
and I thought I kind of knew a lot about
the Cold War at that time. I also didn't know
that the original headquarters for NATO was built behind the
Arc de Triomph. I didn't know this, and that the
French wanted to be on equal footing with the Brits
and the Americans in NATO and we all said no,
and the French got the way the French can get,
(46:22):
and we moved NATO to Brussels. It's why NATO's and Brussels.
But there's this big building that was built in the
shape of an A to represent the alliance behind the
Arc to trioph in Paris, and I thought, wow, what
if we updated this? And there was a scandal like
this today inside the French government. And it's very interesting
because when the Brits did Brexit, Macron in France said, okay,
(46:44):
we're now going to become the military heavyweight in the
European Union. And they've been doing a lot of stuff
behind the scenes to help Ukraine that a lot of
people aren't reading about or hearing about in the press,
because Macron's smart. He wants the Ukrainians to learn how
to use French military equipment to keep buying it once
they're able to buy it. And Macarne and his advisors
also realized that the future of warfare is what we're
(47:06):
seeing in Ukraine right now, particularly with the drones, so
he wanted the ability to put as many military advisors
in there as possible to learn how to do this.
So what's happened is the Russians now are really really
worried about the French and so I thought, wouldn't this
be interesting If a French intelligence officer uncovered this whole
big thing, he couldn't even go to his own intelligence
(47:28):
agency in France, So he's going to go and talk
to his friend who's the head CIA guy at the
US embassy in Paris, but is murdered before he can
spill this to him. And that was kind of a
kickoff for the whole the book, and that's what I
was thinking about. So it was interesting in that I
reached back to the past to find a little bit
of inspiration, but I think it made for a believable
(47:49):
yet different plot for an espionage book.
Speaker 3 (47:52):
Oh that's great. Final question before we do a quick
lightning round.
Speaker 2 (47:56):
What's it like to be on a plane or in
a doctor's office and see like eight people reading your
new book.
Speaker 4 (48:03):
That's fun.
Speaker 1 (48:04):
I mean that is really really it's it's really it is.
It is cool to see and like I'll say to
people like, how's that book?
Speaker 4 (48:11):
You know what I mean, They're like, it's really good.
You know sometimes if I'm in the mood, I will.
Speaker 1 (48:15):
If I'm in the mood, I will and if I
get the right answer, you know, if somebody's like, yeah,
it's a great book or whatever.
Speaker 4 (48:22):
Then I'll continue the conversation. H I'll continue the conversation.
Speaker 1 (48:25):
And then I don't like it.
Speaker 4 (48:26):
I'm like, yeah, I was not that guy.
Speaker 1 (48:28):
Yeah not much for that thor guy. Yeah I didn't
like it either. You should just leave it in the
back of the seat back, like, don't even finish it
when you get off the plane, just leave it here
for somebody else, like a lending library. So fun. Well
you knew you knew Andrew Breitbart right back in the day.
Breitbart was a friend of mine in Breitbart would be
(48:48):
walking through the airport.
Speaker 4 (48:49):
He'd see somebody with one of my books.
Speaker 1 (48:51):
He would call me on his cell phone and then
hand the phone to the person reading my book like
I was supposed to tap dance and entertain them for
five minutes. It was funny. Anytime I saw the phone
ring with him, it was a good chance he was
in an airport and he.
Speaker 3 (49:04):
Was just like he just wanted to make your day
because he was the nicest.
Speaker 4 (49:07):
It was very sweet. Yeah, he was a sweetheart of
a guy.
Speaker 5 (49:10):
I loved that guy.
Speaker 3 (49:22):
Okay, Lightning round. Are you ready?
Speaker 1 (49:26):
Yep? Let's go.
Speaker 3 (49:33):
Best Nashville Hot Chicken Princess. Yep. What's your favorite place
to travel?
Speaker 4 (49:40):
Greece?
Speaker 3 (49:42):
Clancy or Grisham.
Speaker 4 (49:45):
Grisham. Well, that sounds weird, I said, I was not that. No, No, my.
Speaker 1 (49:52):
Dad swore that Clancy was paid by the word because
his books were so thick. You know, I don't need
fifteen pages when I describe a missile strike. All I
need is there's two green berets somewhere above a house
and they're painting it with a laser, and then the
missile hits. I don't need to know about the gyroscope
and all that kind of stuff. I read Clancy, but
(50:12):
I could put it down. I can't put a Grisham down.
I never could, totally never could.
Speaker 4 (50:18):
He is a brilliant, brilliant author. Clancy is a good
writer too. Yeah, he's no question he did a lot
for my genre. But I have to be honest with you, Grisham.
Speaker 2 (50:25):
Grisham, Wow, I just met John Grisham and he was lovely.
I met him and his wife. Southern gentleman, total Southern gentlemen.
They were great, They were great. Okay, wow, that blew
my mind all right. Alec Baldwin or Harrison Ford. Harrison
Ford best movie adaptation of a thriller.
Speaker 4 (50:46):
That's a great one. Eye the Needle from Freddie Forsyth's book.
Speaker 1 (50:51):
Okay, yeah, I really like.
Speaker 4 (50:55):
Either Needle or Day of the Jackal Day. I think
it's day.
Speaker 1 (50:58):
I think Day of the Jackal is the one, and
I'm really thinking about where they're going to asassinate the Gaul.
Speaker 4 (51:02):
I believe Day of the Jackal.
Speaker 1 (51:03):
So I got redone with Richard Gear and Bruce willis
not as good as the first making of it.
Speaker 2 (51:08):
Huh Yeah, Okay, Trojans, I got to take that back.
Speaker 4 (51:14):
Sorry, sorry, sorry, No. My favorite adaptation, my favorite and
it still is the best today. I can't believe I
blanked like that.
Speaker 1 (51:20):
Is The Eiger Sanction, which was based on a Travanian
book that starred Clineaewood where he was hired as a
killer to kill somebody on his team climbing the Eiger
Mountain and he didn't know till the very end, at
the end of the climb who he was supposed to kill.
That's the best. That's the best adaptation of a book ever.
Is The Eiger Sanction with Cline fantastic. Oh my god,
(51:41):
it's so good. It stands up today. It's fabulous.
Speaker 2 (51:43):
Okay, I'll watch it. I'm gonna go watch it. Trojans
or Commodores Trojans.
Speaker 4 (51:50):
I went to USC, so there you go.
Speaker 1 (51:51):
I know, I know I wants yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (51:57):
So no, I'm always going to be a through and
through US US.
Speaker 1 (52:01):
But living in Nashville, people called the University of Southern
California the other USC because they're used to South Carolina
since they're so close, right, so I always have to
distinguish between the two.
Speaker 2 (52:11):
Funny you, this is the last question you were recently
in my hometown where you posted a picture from inside
of my my church.
Speaker 3 (52:20):
Did you know that?
Speaker 1 (52:21):
I didn't know that.
Speaker 3 (52:24):
You were at.
Speaker 4 (52:27):
I was like, three guesses, I just landed in this city.
Speaker 1 (52:29):
Three guesses where I am first, two don't count, and
people are like and then people who are real fans
of dunks, they're like Quincy, quin Quincy. That's me. They
didn't get like people who are hardcore people because I
guess Duncan Don'ut's started in Quincy, right.
Speaker 2 (52:46):
It's Quincy first of all, and it did, and because
I grew up there in Boston when I was young,
I had a black and white picture of the original
Dunkin Donuts on my whow like next to my new
kids on the block posters whoa.
Speaker 3 (53:07):
That's what deep trandom goes. So the question is when
is iced coffee season?
Speaker 4 (53:15):
It's always iced coffee season.
Speaker 1 (53:16):
As far as that's a pret answer.
Speaker 3 (53:18):
It's a pret answer. We don't have to believe this
is okay.
Speaker 4 (53:24):
There you go, There you go. I passed. Thank you,
good to know, good to know.
Speaker 3 (53:28):
Well, that was really fun. Thank you so much.
Speaker 4 (53:32):
Sie.
Speaker 1 (53:32):
It's listen.
Speaker 4 (53:32):
I always love spending time with you and talking with you, and.
Speaker 1 (53:36):
You remind me that there are good people in the world,
there are smart people who care about things, who think deeply,
feel deeply, and I've been looking forward to doing this
ever since you first invited me. So I hope the
podcast I have no doubt is gonna be huge success,
and thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 2 (53:53):
Well, thank you for coming on. If it is, it'll
be because you gave us your time. I think, thank
you so much and adore you.
Speaker 1 (53:59):
Just do you right back at you.
Speaker 2 (54:04):
Coming up next week on Off the Cup, I sit
down with actor and fellow masshole Michael Chickliss and Yes
to end the suspense, our accents come.
Speaker 3 (54:14):
Out as a Boston guy hardcore I Go, I'm with you, Wicked,
had Coy, Wicked high Cos.
Speaker 2 (54:23):
Off the Cup is a production of iHeart Podcasts as
part of the Reason Choice Network.
Speaker 3 (54:27):
If you want more, check out the other.
Speaker 2 (54:28):
Reason Choice podcasts Spolitics with Jamel Hill and Native Land Pod.
For Off the Cup, I'm your host Se Cup, editing
and sound design.
Speaker 3 (54:37):
By Derek Clements.
Speaker 2 (54:38):
Our executive producers are me Se Cup, Lauren Hanson, and
Lindsay Hoffman.
Speaker 3 (54:43):
Rate and review wherever you get
Speaker 2 (54:44):
Your podcasts, Follow or subscribe for new episodes every Wednesday.
We really lie to ourselves. Writers are liars, particularly writers
of fiction. I mean we're telling stories, we're making things up.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hey, everybody, Welcome to Off the Cup, my personal anti
anxiety antidote. In covering politics for over twenty years, I've
learned one thing.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
We all need a break from it.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
We have become obsessed with politics in a way I
don't think we have been before. We're like centering our
lives around politics. We're making it our entire identities. We're
getting wrapped up in the machinations at sixteen hundred Pennsylvania
Avenue instead of what's going on in our local communities.
And I like to escape politics into the world of Bravo.
(00:45):
As many of you may know, some of you like
to escape into.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
A world that actually looks very similar to our.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Own, which is fascinating to me. My next guest provides
just that escape for millions and millions of readers all
over the world with books that are in some case
says rip from the headlines or in some ways eerily
predicting them.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Welcome to Off the Cup, Brad Thor.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Hey see, it's great to be here, and I need
you to make me a promise up front.
Speaker 4 (01:11):
Please that we're going to.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Save five minutes for the end to talk about Bravo,
because I have a little one degree of separation from
one of their hit shows that I watch all the time.
So we'll have to I haven't been lucky enough to
sit there with the Andy and the clubhouse like you
have so many times. But I got a little connection.
Actually I have two connections, am I.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Guys on the floor, my jaw is on.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
All right, we'll save it. We'll save it for the end.
That'll be the big I've got two connections to two shows,
so we'll save that for the end, or unless you
want to start out with it.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
I can't wait till the end. Let's do it. I
can't wait. There's no way I have an hour. I
can't wait. So go tell me everything.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Okay, all right, Well we'll have dessert first, to a
leader vegetables later.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
So, first of all, one of my dear friends from
growing up, she was originally Meredith Rosenberg, is one of
the stars of the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City
and so mayor sister Myra dear friends of mine from Chicago.
So that's one. Yeah, Meredith Marks, Meredith Mars Listen she
is a wonderful human being. She's a terrific, super smart.
(02:13):
Their family's wonderful, and I.
Speaker 4 (02:14):
Grew up with them in Chicago.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
I'm obsessed with her.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
So that's number one. And the number two, I am
a big fan of Below Decks. Okay.
Speaker 4 (02:22):
And and I have.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
A friend Erica Rich and she and her husband do
the casting for Below Decks. And so Erica is a
friend of mine from high school in Chicago. So there's
two Bravo connections that run through my life. And shot,
well we have.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
To do watch what Happens live together.
Speaker 4 (02:39):
Oh that'd be fun. I would enjoy that.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
Yeah, yeah, that'd be really fun. Okay, I'll try to
make it happen. I love good stories. I'm good glad.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
I'm so glad I brought up Bravo because.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
I didn't need to.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
But perfect correct me if I'm wrong.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Did we first cross paths, like at the while I
was at The Blaze and you were doing The Blaze?
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Yes, so you and I were in the same makeup room.
Speaker 4 (03:06):
This is when there.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Was a New York studio for The Blaze and I
had to go there to do like a Will cow
thing or something like that, and I had been watching
you on TV. I've never met you, and I walked
into the makeup room and started chatting with you. You
were super nice and super engaging and all that kind
of stuff. But that was the first time we met.
That's years and years ago in New York.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
That was years and years ago.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
And I worked so the Blaze was Glenn Beck's startup
and I worked there for a short time when I
was younger. I know you did a lot of appearances there,
a man, was that a different time.
Speaker 4 (03:40):
I got to tell you, it.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Is so so different when I look back at kind
of the at the places that I was and had
a very high profile that I'm no longer at the Blazze, Fox,
things like that, where I didn't change, just the landscape
change you are.
Speaker 4 (03:59):
I'm still the same person.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Me and you, Me and you. I have not changed.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
If I have changed around me and we don't get
like super political here, because like I said, this is
a break from that. But looking back at where you
and I were, could you have predicted I mean, I'm
an outcast.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Now, oh so, and listen, it's it's no question. It's
hurt me as far as television appearances, book sales, I
don't doubt any of that. That by kind of maintaining
my integrity and what I believe in, in not being
a weather vane, just blowing where it's easiest and blowing
where the trolls push you and things like that. It's
(04:38):
cost me, but I look in the mirror every day
and I'm happy with what I see.
Speaker 4 (04:41):
So there you go.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Yes, And I think you know when I talk about exactly,
and that's part of mental health, right, it's yes. I
think when you are grounded in who you are, that
helps you when you can turn out everything and not
care about outside opinions. Listen, it's I'm fifty five now,
so it's one of the blessings of getting older is
not caring a what people think. But I also think
(05:02):
it is one of the healthiest paths you can trod
in life. Tread in life is to trod would suggest
I'm done treading, Sorry, wrong tends there. It's one of
the healthiest paths you can tread in life. Is being
true to yourself and what you believe. Yes, regardless of
what happens. And you would have been easy to fold
and to go follow the mobs, but that's not where
(05:23):
I am and that's not who I am. And that's
why friendships like the one that you and I have
is even more valuable to me because I'm not the
only one who did the right thing. So when I
see you on TV, whether if I'm joking and it's
either in the clubhouse with Andy, or I'm watching you
on CNN, or I'm catching you on the web, I'm
just I can look at you and I've pointed you
out to my kids, and I've said to my kids,
(05:44):
she's one of the good ones.
Speaker 4 (05:45):
She stands up for what she believes in.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
So just in my own house, you have been singled
out as somebody who's doing the right thing. So I
appreciate your example that you've helped set for my kids.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
So thankssh wow, thank you. And I feel the same way.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
There's a handful of folks who I can look at
and say, oh, I just admire them for sticking to
who they are and not going where the power went
and the crowds went. I mean, you are one of
the one of the rare, one of the few. And
I know you became a political independent for all intents
and poises, and I did two because the conservatism has
(06:22):
has left the party. But your books are beloved by
Republican readers, and you sort of alluded to this. I
think has politics affected your relationship with readers?
Speaker 4 (06:35):
No, I don't think so.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
I think so. My first two big pieces of fan
mail when I started my career, one came from a
big politician on the right, New Gingrich, and the other
came from one on the left, a cabinet member from
the Carter administration, Bert Lance. And so I've always counted
people on both sides of the aisle as as readers.
(06:59):
But I do think that because I didn't get behind
a particular candidate that the people and I was not
and I was. My dad's a United States Marine. He's
no longer active, but once a marine, always a marine.
And we always believe the character is destiny. And if
you shouldn't vote for somebody for president of the country
who you wouldn't hire to babysit your kids, walk your dog,
(07:20):
or run your business. So that's kind of where that's
kind of where I came down on it. And so
I think that that probably alienated some people.
Speaker 4 (07:29):
I know it did.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
I mean, he was just even friendships in my own life,
people that couldn't believe that after years of voting a
certain way, that I wouldn't vote that way anymore. And
I said, I put country over party, So I don't
want to be that much of a tribal partisan that
that's what dictates all my decisions, because at the end
of the day, this is my dad the Marine talking.
We're stewards of our republic. We don't own America. We're
(07:51):
merely caretakers, and it's incumbent upon us to hand a stronger, free,
or more equitable, more prosperous nation to the next generation
that was handed to us. I always see myself as
an American citizen before I see myself as a partisan,
and so I act and make my decisions accordingly.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
I love that the new book is Shadow of Doubt,
and we'll talk about it, but first.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Talk about Black Stallion m.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
My favorite book series when I was a kid. Yeah, yeah,
I know, I loved these books.
Speaker 4 (08:24):
I don't know what it was about the books. I
saw the movie, which.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Was fantastic when I was a kid, and there was
something about the freedom in those books. Living downtown Chicago,
it's funny we had an old National Guard armory in Chicago,
and they would actually have polo matches on Friday nights there,
and people kept horses at the National Guard Armory, and
I was able to get a job there when I
was later in grade school, so probably about twelve thirteen
(08:50):
years old, and I was able to be what's called
a hot walker, which is you walk the horses between
the chuckers between the periods to cool them off. The
players switch up their polo ponies during the games and
they need somebody to just walk the horses around and
pull them off.
Speaker 4 (09:05):
And I was in heaven.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
I love that, being an inner city kid who only
got to ride horses during summers at summer camp or
up in my parents' cottage at the stables in Wisconsin.
So I love those books. But there was something about
the freedom that those books represented to me that was
always appealing. So those were some of the first books
that I read series wise and fell in love with.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
And what was going on in your life at the time, Well.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
I had started. I think my parents split up when
I was eight years old, so I think I probably
threw myself more into books at that time than anything else.
And I think books are a very healthy place, particularly
for kids to escape to.
Speaker 4 (09:46):
And I wish it was more.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
There weren't that many escapes if you think about it.
I mean, we didn't have one hundred TV channels, there
was no internet, there was no scrolling. So my parents
were always really good about it. If you want books,
we'll get you books. And we used to have these
Scholastic book club the little paper newsletter with a little
strip on the back where you'd write out what you
wanted and you'd bring in your cash and your coins
to pay for the books. And it was always so
exciting when those Scholastic books showed up. So I think
(10:11):
reading was probably an escape for me at at a
difficult time in my childhood because of the diurse wasn't
great between my parents, so it kind of allowed me
to to not think about it, to escape into a
different world. And I'm very thankful that those books were there.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
Did you write as a child as well?
Speaker 4 (10:31):
I did. I did a lot of writing.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
I always wrote plays and wrote short stories and things
like that. So I was always always a writer, but
my mom had been. It's funny I only learned this
in the last year where my mom lived.
Speaker 4 (10:45):
She lived on the Upper East Side.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
She was a flight attendant for twa in the nineteen
sixties and got to see the world with twa My
dad had been, like I said, a United States Marine.
You got to see the world with the Marine Corps.
And it was the arts in our family were something
to make you better round it.
Speaker 4 (11:02):
They were not a career path.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
My dad had always hoped that I would go into
the family business. My dad was involved with commercial real estate,
building office buildings, and you always hope.
Speaker 4 (11:11):
My brother and I would take over his business.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
So I had never considered the arts as a career
path until I was on my honeymoon and my wife
asked me, what would you regret on your deathbed never
having done? And I said writing a book and getting
it published, And that's what really kicked it off. But
that wasn't until my late twenties.
Speaker 5 (11:28):
You know.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Yeah, it's so funny because I wrote a lot as
a child as well. I think I wrote my first
quote unquote novel at seven. It was like six pages,
but it almost felt I loved writing and it was
an outlet for me too, because I had some instability
in my childhood as well. But it always felt like
it was I guess, i'd say, too easy to be
(11:49):
a career and so I ran from writing as a
career for a long time too, and you know, tried
to pursue something else for us. But I don't know why,
because you know, my parents didn't care kind of what
I did, as long as I was happy. But there's
something about it that I think you're just not ready
(12:09):
for until you are. And I wasn't ready for it
until I finally got to college and worked at the
newspaper and thought, oh, there's nothing better than this. There
is nothing better than this. But I just think it's
it's interesting that both you and I loved it so
much and didn't really embrace it until we were like adults.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
I'm going to ask you to lie down on the
couch here for a few minutes, and we're going to
talk about this. I think you used a great term, Essy,
which is you ran from it, because I ran as well.
And when I graduated college, I had worked in LA
leasing apartments and had saved a bunch of money, and
I had decided that I was going to I had
done a semester broad in Paris.
Speaker 4 (12:52):
I had friends who had an extra bedroom.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
They invited me after I graduated to come back because
I threatened I was going to try my hand at writing,
and so I went back over and I started writing,
and I had I got a couple chapters into a book,
and I had this voice in the back of my
head saying, you know, what if the book's no good?
What if you don't finish the book, or what if
you do finish it and it's so bad you can't
find a publisher. This voice just went on and on
(13:16):
and on. In growing up, I don't know if you
remember the PSAs that you used to be on TV
all the time when we were growing up, and it
was for the United Negro College Fund, and it said
a mind is a terrible thing to waste. And I
personally shortened that for my own catchphrase, which is a
mind is a terrible thing period because my mind kept
trying to talk me out of writing a book, and
(13:38):
I succumbed to that voice, and I shipped my laptop
back home, and I traveled with all this money that
all this money with the money wasn't a lot, but
traveled on the cheap in Europe with the money that
I had saved up working in college. And I think
that which you're most destined to do in life you're
often the most afraid of. And I succumbed to the
fear for the longest time until fast forward to my honeymoon,
(14:02):
and I told my wife that my deepest desire was
to write a book. And she said, fine, when we
get home, you need to start spending two hours a day,
every day protected time making that happen. So here I
am newlywed my husband, I can't tell my wife that
I just I don't have the courage.
Speaker 4 (14:18):
I'm too afraid of failure to write the book.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
So I had that. I had that not wanting to
admit my fear to my wife. That really drove me
into writing the book and I.
Speaker 4 (14:27):
Actually got it done.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
There's a lot that goes into writing, you know, fiction
or nonfiction. There's a lot that goes into it. What's
your favorite part of it? What's the part of writing
that you left the check.
Speaker 4 (14:42):
Cashing the check?
Speaker 1 (14:43):
If I'm being honest of no, you know, I mean
I like it because I'm a perfectionist. I'm a very
type a personality of perfectionist. And I think that being
a perfectionist, perfectionists are plagued probably with writer's block more
than anybody else because writer's block is a worry that
(15:06):
you're not putting the words on paper as well as
they could be placed on the paper. Right, there's that
old saying that you can't edit what hasn't been written,
so you really need to do You have to sit
down and see the pants to seat a chair, and
you have to open the tap because the water doesn't
flow if the TAP's not open. But you know, I'll
finish a book and that'll feel good, and I'll give
it to my wife and she'll read it. She's like,
(15:27):
that's good. My agent and editor will read it and
be like, wow, you know, really really good. And I
don't believe them. I don't believe them until because they
all have a vested interest in the process. I know
they would tell me if something was wrong with the book,
but it's not until it gets out into the wild
and I start hearing from the critics and ultimately the people.
Speaker 4 (15:45):
I work for the.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Readers, because I don't work for Simon and Schuster. I
work for the readers, and I have a job as
long as the readers are willing to buy my books,
so they're my ultimate boss. So for me, there's a
ton of anxiety until I start hearing from them what
they think, and then I can relax and enjoy a
little bit.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Yeah, and I can so relate to that too. You know,
half of my life is on TV. But but the
other half is writing. And I write for TV too.
But when people ask like, what is it? What do
you like about writing so much? It's the intentionality when
I'm on TV, especially when it's live. You know, I
like to think that I've thought out what I'm going
(16:25):
to say. Well, but you know, things come out the writing.
I can be intentional, deliberate, I can pick the perfect words.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
It's the perfectionist in me too.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
That I have more control. I have more control. That's
what it comes down to, and I love that part
of it too. I also like for me, maybe because
I do opinion and nonfiction, it's a puzzle. I love
putting words together like a puzzle, and putting an argument
together like a puzzle.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
I don't know. It just really turns me on.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Really, I hear you, it's and it is. It is
a different world I've got to imagine. I mean, I've
done I watch you on CNN do panels, and you
can only come in armed with a certain amount of
research it's funny since we're kind of talking TV a
little bit, we're talking mental health. I want to share
something with you that maybe you can relate to. When
(17:17):
I started doing TV, and I would do these remote
hits from like CNN studio in Chicago at the old
Chicago Tribune building, there was a studio in there, and
I would cram, like cramming for a test. I would
put so much information in my head. I would do
to three to five minute hit and it'd be done,
and the producer would say, in my year, oh you
were fantastic, we can't wait to have you back.
Speaker 4 (17:38):
And I would feel like if I.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
Didn't regurgitate every single thing I have prepared to say
during the failure, it was a failure. It was an
absolute failure. It took me years to finally get comfortable
with my performance on TV because I felt I was
under delivering, that I had not done my job because
I didn't spit back up everything I'd memorized.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
I used to do what I used to do when
I was coming up in TV.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
I'd write out like a column, like I would write
a column about what I wanted to say, and I
truly thought in my mind like I can, I can
remember and deliver this entire six hundred word column. Of
course you cannot. You don't have the time. You're human,
it's not going to happen. Someone's gonna interrupt you. There's
all the things. And when I finally let that go
(18:23):
mm hmm, it allowed me to just be present in
the moment. And then you rely on your institutional knowledge
and just the things you've you've known forever and the
things that you're still learning. So it's such I can
completely relate. And as a writer, I think every writer
goes through that kind of exercise when they first start
doing TV because it's.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
A very different muscle, totally different.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
I I'm writing a book now. It's very different from
my political books in the past. It's it's about my
mental health and it's about it's about me, and I
need your advice because.
Speaker 3 (18:52):
Okay, it's really really hard.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
The material is hard, and it's not it's not a
writer's block, like I don't know what to write next.
It's that sometimes when I'm feeling good, I want to
write about my mental health. I don't want to live
in that space, but I have to. I need to
get through this book. Do you have any tips for
(19:19):
kind of forcing yourself to the page where you don't
feel like this is not going.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
To be productive right now.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
You know, I need I need to be I need
to be good at this, but I also need to
just do it.
Speaker 3 (19:31):
I need to just get it done.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Yeah. I think probably the best piece of writing advice
I ever found was to give yourself permission to write
a crappy first draft, because at the bottom of everything,
I think is this fear of well, if I'm not
in the mood right now, the words aren't going to
come out correctly, so on and so forth. There's always
(19:54):
an excuse for why you can't write right. It's amazing writers,
particularly under deadline, will have the leanus closets, cleanest garage,
clean kids. Everything is going to get productive, exactly. It is.
It is the way that listen, we really lie to ourselves.
Writers are liars, particularly writers of fiction. I mean, we're
telling stories, we're making things up. But I think, see,
(20:17):
probably the best piece of advice I could give you
is to give yourself permission to write a crappy first draft.
You and I both know you're not a crappy writer,
but there's something about saying I give myself permission to
have a whatever word you want to use, crummy, jung xy, whatever.
You give yourself that permission, and what it does is
it removes the roadblocks. It removes the psychological blocks that
(20:37):
are stopping you from writing. Whether you're it's that perfectionism
that's raising its ugly head or if it's fear that
you don't want to go to the dark side, at
this point, you're actually doing well you don't want to be.
Who was it that referred to their depression as being
a big black dog?
Speaker 2 (20:55):
A famous writer, writer and illustrator, Matthew Johnstone.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
That's the one. I think.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
I think he actually did, Overcoming the black dog of depression.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Yes, so I think I think Churchill may have been
the perfon coin that, yeah, the originator of that term,
but then Matthew had done a book talking about it. Yes,
so I can only imagine that writing about your own
mental health is frightening. Is you have to lay yourself bear,
(21:27):
your entire soul.
Speaker 4 (21:28):
You're laying bare for this.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
So there's got to be times where you don't want
to go there for multiple reasons. But I think if
you give your try, giving yourself permission to write a
crummey first draft, because when you do that, when you
remove I'm gonna use air quotes here, the professionalism from it.
I want this to be good, and I really want to.
I'm feeling good now, and if I write about the
bad stuff now, I might not be truly tapping into
(21:52):
how I feel. Yes, that may be a dodge. That
may be a dodge that you're saying to yourself, the
book is not going to be any good unless I'm
totally it's you know, it's like saying I wanted to
write about this three day bender that I was on
in college, and I gotta get drunk for three days.
I mean, that's silly, right, but that's the way again.
Don't forget my slogan, the mind is a terrible thing.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
Totally advice, I hope.
Speaker 4 (22:13):
So I hope it works for you.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
So how does Scott Harvath come to be? How do
you invent this character?
Speaker 1 (22:34):
So it's interesting. I never ever intended to write a
series protagonist. I was going to be one and done.
You cannot be an even halfway decent writer without being
a voracious reader. And so I quickly moved out of
those Black Stallion books to stealing. My mom read thrillers
(22:55):
and my dad read thrillers, and when they would lay
one down that they had completed, I grab it. So
I'm very young reading Lecree, reading Clancy, reading Freddie Forsyth,
and I loved these books. So I had had I
was doing. I was on television before I became an author.
I had a travel show on public television, and I
was the producer.
Speaker 4 (23:13):
Writer, and host.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
That's what happened after I gave up on writing a novel.
I took that money from college. I traveled and I went, wow,
there's all these young kids with backpacks. I wasn't familiar
with this idea of get a rail pass, see Europe
and all that stuff. And the only person on television
at that time doing budget travel was this guy, Rick Steves.
He's still on now. I love Yeah. I do too,
(23:35):
but his audience was very, very much older than I
was at the Yeah.
Speaker 4 (23:39):
So I wanted to do a show for eighteen to thirty.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
Four year olds because I thought travel made me a
better person, made me a better American, maybe a better person.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
I got to see other ways of living, other ways of.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
You know, eat dinner at ten o'clock in Spain instead
of six o'clock. Yeah, it was just very broadening that experience.
So I did a show in Lucern, Switzerland, where I
saw this incredible monument in Switzerland that Mark Twain called
the most moving piece of rock in the world, this
Dying Lion, and I said, if I ever write a book,
I'm going to call it The Lions of Lucerne. I
don't know how I'm gonna get Switzerland into the book,
(24:12):
but that's what it's going to be. And so my
wife asked me on our honeymoon, what would your gun
on your death d Never having done, I said, you know,
I want to write a book and get it published.
She said, a right, two hours is protect the time
every day. So now I had I had said I'm
going to do it. I'd had the title floating around
in my head since I'd done my travel show episode
in Lucerne. And we shared an overnight train ride in
(24:35):
from Munich to Amsterdam with a brother and sister from Atlanta, Georgia.
They were fans of my TV show. They recognized me
when we got into the compartment with them and we
chatted all night. In the next day, the sister said, hey,
are you going to go back to the States after
your honeymoon and make more television episodes. I said, actually,
I'm going to be working on a novel, and she said,
oh my gosh. And when we got off at the
(24:56):
platform and went to trade contact information, she gave me
your business card and said, I work at Simon and Schuster,
and if you write that novel, I want to read
it before somebody else to see if we can help
you get it at Simon and Schuster. So I was
all excited, and it was a raiders dream, every writer's dream.
And the cherry on top for me was it was
raining at the train station in Amsterdam and we couldn't
(25:20):
get a cab. We had to walk to our hotel,
Tricia and I. We got to the hotel and the
manager said, I am so sorry mister and missus Thor.
Your room is not ready yet, but let us give
you a couple of umbrellas. There's a great cafe around
the corner. Go have a cup of coffee a sandwich.
Come back.
Speaker 4 (25:35):
I'll be ready now.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Little did I know they were putting flowers in there
and chocolates for us and getting it up because they
knew it was a honeymoon situation.
Speaker 4 (25:42):
Very sweet.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
But I'm the cynical Chicagoan, so I'm convinced his rooms
are never ready on time. And that cafe around the
corner is his brother in law's cafe, and he says
how he shuffles business over to his brother in law. Anyway,
we go to the cafe, we sit down in The
famous American Western writer Louis Lamore was known for always
having a paperback in his back pocket, so if he
(26:04):
was waiting online at the grocery store, the post office,
he'd take out up paperback and start reading.
Speaker 4 (26:08):
Trish was the same way.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
She always had a paper bag in her paper back
in her bag, yea, so she got hers out, started reading.
I didn't have anything, and I'm looking around this cafe
and there used to be this English language newspaper called
the International Herald Tribune that you can get in overseas,
and I grabbed it, picked it up, and I was flipping.
Speaker 4 (26:26):
Through, flipping through, and I found this.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
Little intelligence briefing. It was only about three inches. It
was a three inch high column, and it was all
about a Swiss intelligence officer who had embezzled all this
money from the Swiss government. To train a shadow militia
high in the Alps with high tech weapons from his
own private arsenal, and I said, that's it.
Speaker 4 (26:45):
Those are the Lions of Lucerne.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
I'm going to do my whole I'm going to do
my whole book around this, and that's that's where it
came from.
Speaker 4 (26:52):
In the character.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Back to your question, Scott Harvath, I was looking for
a name Scott with one T. My brother is Scott
with one T, because my mom didn't like the idea
of seeing SEO T T thho R three t's in
a row. So I eventually had to give Scott my
fictional character, the middle name of Thomas and explain his
mother didn't want to see Scott Thomas. And then Harved
(27:15):
is a friend of ours who works for the Department
of Justice processing FAISO warrants, and I thought it was
a really cool name I had not seen in books before.
And then the character was really kind of a mishmash
of people that I knew in the espionage world. In
the special Operations community, there's a lot of shared experiences
(27:35):
that they have, particularly difficulty being able to commit in
a romantic relationship or difficulties at home because they're constantly
going overseas to do some of the nation's most dangerous business.
So that's kind of who Harvath is. And I also
say that he's a little bit my alter ego, the
same way I'm sure Clancy was for Jack Ryan and
James Colland was for Ian Fleming.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
So, and you've basically written, not basically, you have written
a book a year since two thousand and two, since
the lines of this concern.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
And one year I did two books in one year
because I did a spin off about an all female
Delta Force unit. So I'm currently as we're recording this,
I am writing my twenty fifth novel, twenty fourth in
the Scott Harbath series. It's hard, It's hard. How do
you exactly?
Speaker 2 (28:24):
And this is coming from someone who loves to write.
I love to write. How do you churn out?
Speaker 5 (28:29):
How?
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Is this a matter of discipline? Is this a matter
of necessity? Like you have to do it how straight teeth?
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Yeah? Yeah, no, I mean it is.
Speaker 4 (28:38):
I mean it is my job. It is.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
It is very difficult. It's only gotten more difficult. You
would think doing the same thing every year. You know,
if you're only twisting a wrench on widget number four
that you become the best wrench twister, and it would
just be you know, old hat.
Speaker 4 (28:52):
It does not get easier.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
There is no formula. I pride myself because I'm such
a voracious consumer of news and such a creative person
that sometimes I get very lucky and I see over
the horizon.
Speaker 4 (29:04):
And I can beat the headlines.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
And that's one of the things people say about my
books as well. Four. If you want to know what's
going to happen tomorrow, read a brad Thorpe book today.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
But the Simpsons, oh well, I got to ask that question.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
I was just at a writing conference and they said,
it's better you are the Simpsons at predicting the future,
and I said, well, Simpsons have been doing it longer
than I have, so the Simpsons are definitely better. But
what's got it is very difficult, and it's only gotten
more difficult in that the publisher's coming to me sooner
and sooner. It's like Christmas being in the stores as
(29:36):
soon as fourth of July is over. So I'll come
out with the book in the summer, and before summer's
even over, they're like, what's next year's book? You know
you barely get time to kind of toy with different
ideas and all that stuff. But it is, as I
said earlier, I used the expression seat the pants to
sea to chair, which is not mine. I forget whether
that's Dorothy Parker.
Speaker 4 (29:53):
Who said that, but it really is. It is discipline.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
You have to sit down, you have to force yourself,
you have to at the world at some point. I
actually do have to take like, not only unplug the
router in my office, but actually take it out of
my office so I can't go plug it back in.
I'll do I'll do the hats because it's just I
have to. I can't. I'll convince myself that what's happening
out in the bigger world is so important that I
need to be tuned into it that if I'm not
(30:18):
taking I don't have the job that you have where
I've got to be. You know, I'm not punching it
up with Scott Jennings, you know on a regular basis,
you know where you need to constantly be prepared and
well armed when you go in there. But I've got
to imagine it's difficult for you. It's it's difficult for
me to turn it off because I am a news junkie.
I'm a geopolitics junkie, and I do write international thrillers
(30:42):
that involve diplomats and spies and foreign governments and stuff
like that. So I like to be but I have
to set a limit. I have to say, Okay, you
can check in. You know, I can have my cup
of coffee in the morning, and by the time that
first cup of coffee's done, the computer has to you know, yeah,
the web browser's got to be shut down sort of thing.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
But it is, I mean that's good for your mental
health too, it really is. I mean, there is a
thing that's too much news, yes.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
Oh and it's never ending too, I mean the particularly
I never was a big YouTube guy, but now I've
got so many people that I enjoy watching, you know,
whether it's you know, well, I'm not gonna listen names,
but it's just there's a lot of There's one particular
geo political strategy so I love named Peter Zaien, and.
Speaker 4 (31:22):
Huh he's just very charming.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
He's so smart. He worked with a buddy of mine
and he does these little six minute things on YouTube
and they're like potato chips for me, because it's like, oh,
my gosh, that makes so much sense. And my last book,
Shadow of Doubt, he had a view of Russia and
why Russia is doing what it's doing right now. That's geographics.
It's a geographical situation meets demographics. I didn't realize that
(31:46):
Russia's only been invaded through one of nine portals into Russia,
and that at the end of World War Two Russia
controlled all of them. But then when the Soviet Union
broke up, they lost seven out of the nine. And
this is the last generation that Russia will be able
to field their army, that they have enough fighting men
to field an army to go and retake those portals.
(32:06):
So Putin had no choice but to act now. And
it was it played so well into the book, and
so that kind of stuff. I get to eat my
potato chips and count it as work at the same time, right,
But yeah, it is. It is really tough to quiet
the world, to shut everything out if you will to write,
and you know that you've got a you can't get
(32:29):
it done if you don't kind of put yourself in
that cone of silence.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
Yes, my husband is obsessed, obsessed with your books.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
You're his favorite author, for sure.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Not even close, because it's got everything he loves. It's
got military, spy stuff, world events, politics.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
Who are you writing for?
Speaker 2 (32:49):
And don't say everybody, because no commissures will tell you
that's not You know.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
That, but you don't.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
The audience is everyone. So I know there's a reader
you have in mind, and that doesn't mean that they're
the only people I have, like your baby, But who
do you write for?
Speaker 1 (33:05):
I have a very handsome, very intelligent reader mind. I
write it for myself.
Speaker 4 (33:10):
I write the kind of books that I would want to.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
So I have a friend who is a fabulous author,
and he was a creative writing professor in Iowa. He
wrote Rambo. His name is David Morrell. He introduces himself
as Rambo's daddy. I just saw David at that writing
conference I was talking about back in August, and David's
got this big thing about when you pick an idea
to write your book, it's got to be something that
(33:35):
really lights you up, that's going to put fuel in
your rocket ship to power you for the next year.
So I always try to pick some really cool geopolitical
set piece against which I'm going to set the story.
So I really so my books function. So first of all,
for you, for your listeners who don't know my books,
and I said, oh, you know, I've written on my
(33:57):
twenty fifth book. You can read my books.
Speaker 4 (33:59):
They're like the James. That's what I tell people.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
If the new Streams Bond movie is down the street
and you've never seen a Bond.
Speaker 4 (34:04):
Movie, you can go see it.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
You'll know exactly who Bond is right away. You will
not feel like you're missing out because he didn't start
back with doctor No, you just jump right in. My
books are the same way.
Speaker 4 (34:14):
But I'm writing my books happen on two different levels.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
There's either you can bounce across the top of the
waves and have a really great kind of toes in
the sand book in the hand beat read. But there's
also a lot of stuff that is deeper in there
if you want to pay attention to it. People tell
me that they love to read my books with either
their laptop open or their phone nearby, because they I say,
what I do is faction where you don't know where
(34:39):
the facts end and the fiction begins. So people are
constantly searching stuff on the internet going he must have
made that up. Oh my gosh, he didn't make that up.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
Right, that's real.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
Uh huh yeah, And that's that's fun for me because
I think people close my books smarter, and I'm not
I'm not preaching. I'm not you know, I'm not evangelizing
for anything in the world. I'm just to give people
a great white knuckle thrill ride. But people really do
seem to enjoy that part of the book, that so
much of it is actually real, and they close it smarter,
(35:08):
which I think is a nice value.
Speaker 3 (35:10):
Add oh they do.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
And this is my husband. He'll be like, did you
know that in Sweden?
Speaker 3 (35:14):
Blah blah blah blah. You know, just from your book.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Again, without getting political, I just have to ask, what
did you think of the Hesbala pagers exploding?
Speaker 3 (35:24):
As an author who.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
Lives, I could have never written that.
Speaker 4 (35:28):
I could have never done it.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
Nobody would have believed it, nobody. I would have been
laughed out of my editor's office with that. It was
an amazing, amazing feat. I mean, that was so creative,
you know. Mark Twain once said that the difference between
fiction and reality is people expect fiction to make sense,
which is really funny. Yeah, I love that that term.
(35:50):
I often joke around that I would never say that.
Stephen King has it easier than I do. He's got
it different. Stephen King, You're peck and dining. You can
go stick it in an evil semit terry and it's
going to come back, right, It's going to come back
to life. He can make up those rules I can't give,
you know, CIA operatives, laser beams or you know, lightsabers.
I've got to I've got kind of a I'm hemmed
(36:11):
in with with what I can write about, so I
have to get those details details right.
Speaker 4 (36:16):
Have I come up with that pager thing?
Speaker 1 (36:18):
You know, my editor wouldn't have laughed me out of
her office, but it would have been a very very
tough discussion. Tough Yeah, like how are we supposed to believe? Like?
Because I think people's reaction if you put that in
the book is no way, no ways should ever work.
Speaker 4 (36:32):
There's no way they wouldn't.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
Like you're telling me, some guy wouldn't drop his pager
going into the grocery store and he sees the he
sees the explosive inside. Yeah, I mean, and that's why
allegedly they had to detonate all of them, is they
thought Hesbela was onto them. And so they that was
they were saving those pages for if they ever had to,
like the opening salvo of a war, and they believed,
(36:54):
based on their informants inside Hesbella, that it had been uncovered,
so they had no choice but to go and light
those pages up. They were forced into that. It was
pretty damn cool. And then the next day the walkie
talkie's exploded, which is amazing. I said, by the end
of the day, these guys won't even trust two cans
in a string, you know, they'll be afraid those are
going to blow up.
Speaker 4 (37:14):
So big psychological impact.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Not only was it a from a tactical standpoint, from
how do we winnow the enemy down? That was great
in my opinion. It particularly is a thriller author, but
it hesbalized, never going to trust any they're all starting
their cars with a stick.
Speaker 3 (37:28):
Now, the spycraft of it, it's just, uh yeah, okay,
I'm so glad I asked.
Speaker 6 (37:33):
You we we share a publisher.
Speaker 3 (37:47):
I don't know if you know that I'm also a SIMONR.
Chu star.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
How involved are your editors in the process. You just
said that that would have been like a conversation that
they would have had with you. Like this doesn't feel real.
How involved are they in? Like the con ten So.
Speaker 4 (38:01):
I will have a conversation.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
This is Christmas coming earlier and earlier every year. Where
the retailers want to know what's the next book. So
they want a title, They want the artwork done very quickly.
They want a description of the book which can be
changed later online. But go when I get locked in,
I'm locked in. I can't think of anything else. I
just what I've committed to, something I don't.
Speaker 4 (38:19):
Like to start. You're looking around for other ideas.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
Yeah, So I'll have that talk with my editor in
the beginning and say, all right, this is what I'm
thinking about writing.
Speaker 4 (38:28):
And we've been together.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
This is my twenty fifth book with her. We've been
together the whole time. So I'll write it. But Trish
is my first My wife is my first reader. Right,
so she will go through. She has an unbelievable eye.
She's so good she catches missing words, and she's fabulous
with grammar and so by the time so she'll go
through and read it, I'll make her changes. And it's
(38:49):
rare that she she'll say if anything, Hey, you said this.
Speaker 4 (38:52):
Three chapters ago.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
You either don't say it three chapters earlier and just
say it now, or you get rid of this one here. Yeah.
So she's really good with the help. So by the
time my editor gets it, it's really clean. She's not
coming back to me saying you got to fix this,
you got to but that I don't write that fast either.
It's an old joke, but I say it. The deadlines
make the most beautiful sound as they go rushing past.
(39:18):
So I miss a lot of deadlines. Shadow of Doubt,
the most recent book we had to change. We had
to change the publication date because I was just late
turning the book in because I was a very methodical,
very deliberate, slow steps by slow steps. But it was
called by a lot of reviewers the best book I've
ever written. So yes, there was a lot of anxiety,
(39:41):
a lot of agita at the publishing house at Simon
and Schuster because I didn't have the book in on time.
But in the end, i'd rather be late, I'd rather
have to change a pub date. I don't want to
do that if I can avoid it, I don't want
to have to take that. But in this case, again
I love my partners at Simon and Schuster, but I
did not want to turn in a book that was
isn't the best that I was capable of. And that's
(40:01):
the Midwestern upbringing in me. My parents said, if you
push a broom, you'd be the best damn broom pusher
in the world. And so I'm not a brain surgeon.
This doesn't kill people. If I move my pub date
by two or three weeks, it's very inconvenient for the
you know, the people in the business chain. So I'm
in a schuster of the bookstores, and I don't want
to harass them unduly. But in this case, I think
it was I think it was worth it.
Speaker 3 (40:23):
It's important. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
Yeah, I read that Sony's developing the books for TV.
Speaker 3 (40:28):
Is that true?
Speaker 1 (40:29):
Yeah. We're in an elevator now.
Speaker 4 (40:30):
We're racing towards the end of the year.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
And I'm excited to see where they where they place
it because they're getting ready to have all their meetings
with Netflix and Apple, Okay and Max and all those places.
Speaker 4 (40:43):
So yeah, so it's true.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
Yeah, We've got the director of the John Wick movies
as our director. We've got and this is a TV
series as one of our executive producers.
Speaker 4 (40:53):
We've got Howard Gordon.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
From twenty four in Rymeland and then then our writer
who's a brilliant writer. Steve Lightfoot wrote The Punisher, both
series of The Punisher. He worked on My Daughter Loves
and We Do Too. We loved Hannibal on NBC with
Madds Michelson where he plays Hannibal Lecter before he gets
captured with Lawrence Fishburne, and Steve was a writer on that.
Speaker 4 (41:15):
He's just a brilliant writer.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
So we had an A plus team, which having been
at this for over two decades, I've kissed every frog
in Hollywood by this point, I could write a book
about all the twists and turns, all the options we've
had and stuff. But we've got in my entertainment attorneys.
One of my dearest friends said, listen, every time we
got left at the altar for whatever reason, the option
time ran out, or the executives changed at the studio,
(41:39):
it's all worth it for the team we've built. Now
we really do have an A plus team. So I'm,
you know, fingers crossed that you know this time next
year you and I A were talking about the debut
of The.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
Well, and I know readers are going to are going
to look forward to that, and I'm sure you don't
have talent attached yet, but in your mind, I am
sure you.
Speaker 3 (41:57):
Have thought about who Scott will be.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
So here's what's really funny. For the longest time, I
thought we were going to start with the books as
they are currently. In fact, I thought we were going
to go back a couple of books and start with
Rising Tiger, which was all set in India that I
just did, which it was during Devali, which is really
a cool time, and it was just it was going
to be awesome to set it there. Plus, the crews
(42:21):
in India are fantastic. They've done so much film and television.
You get really very talented, experienced people. I just found
out a couple of days ago that the decision is
they want to start from the very first book. They
want to start from the lines of Liscern and show
people how Scott Harvath became Scott Harvath air quotes. So
they're modernizing. They're doing an updated take on my first novel.
(42:43):
They said, your readers are going to love this. We're
going to bring it up to speed. You wrote it
twenty years ago, We're going to bring it up to speed.
For present day, and they said, we really think this
is the way to go, and it's unique and it's
fresh because we're showing the making of this incredible American hero.
So now I'm like, okay, so this is a guy,
you know, is kind of late twenties, mid mid to
(43:03):
late twenties, so I have to rethink this entire thing.
And I'm sure the producers and the director have people
that they've worked with before and they love.
Speaker 4 (43:11):
You know, at one point.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
People were bugging me because I was so hot for
Chris Hemsworth, because you know, I want somebody, you know,
tough but handsome, great sense of humor too, which you
really can't fake. You can't stay being smart and having
a good sense of humor. So in Hemsworth has a
great sense of humor. So there may be some you know,
we go back and we've talked about does the star
(43:33):
make the series? Does the series make the star, and
they said, we'd really like to bring in a well
known actor, So it's going to be interesting to see
who they pick kind of in that demographic. So I
don't have I don't have anybody in mind, to be honest.
Speaker 3 (43:45):
What about Chris Pratt, He's already.
Speaker 1 (43:48):
Done terminal list, so that would be in the same genre.
Speaker 3 (43:52):
Close yes, yea too close, too close.
Speaker 1 (43:55):
Plus yeah, I mean I like Pratt, but Pratt's not
who I see as now as is my guy.
Speaker 4 (44:00):
I see more of a Hemsworth type.
Speaker 1 (44:03):
You know. At one point we thought about Scotty Eastwood.
I mean that's he's a potential to so I don't know.
I honestly don't know. And when you start getting into, like,
you know, anybody younger than Glenn Powell, I don't know
I'm seeing it. I don't know if I've seen any
of their movies, to be honest, but there's a lot
of you know who I like a lot. Did you
(44:23):
see the Guy Richie TV series that was based on
the movie, and it's called The Gentleman where it's all
about the So what's that guy's name? THEO James And
he was in second season of White Lotus. I think
THEO James would be He's such a good actor. He's
in the sweet spot of that age. If I could
pick somebody, if you said, all right, we're picking Scott
(44:45):
Harveth right now, I'd go with THEO James.
Speaker 4 (44:47):
I think he's a fabulous actor.
Speaker 3 (44:49):
Okay, THEO James, THEO James.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
I wait for the call, put my chips on THEO James.
Speaker 4 (44:54):
There we go.
Speaker 3 (44:55):
Okay, shadow of Doubt. What headspace were you in when
you set this book?
Speaker 4 (45:00):
So it's interesting.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
I'm always trying to do something different all this stuff.
I actually stumbled across something that happened in the nineteen
sixties that I used as inspiration for this book. I
did not know that during the Kennedy administration, real life
thing happened. A Russian defector came over to the United States,
and one of the biggest pieces of information he had
was that the French government and its intel services were
(45:24):
shot through with Soviet spies. Everybody here freaked out, and
they said, well, wait a second, if all these people
are compromised, how do we talk to our you know,
our contemporaries and these other agencies in France. How do
we let warn the French that they've got spies everywhere?
Kennedy wrote a letter, gave it to one of his
most trusted aids and said, you take this over to
(45:44):
the President of France. You stand in front of him,
watch him read it, and take the letter back wow,
and then eat it right yeah, then like eat it. Yeah, exactly,
and it was called it was called the Sapphire Affair,
and it was a really big deal.
Speaker 4 (46:00):
It fascinated me.
Speaker 1 (46:02):
I also didn't know, so I'm studying all this stuff
and I thought I kind of knew a lot about
the Cold War at that time. I also didn't know
that the original headquarters for NATO was built behind the
Arc de Triomph. I didn't know this, and that the
French wanted to be on equal footing with the Brits
and the Americans in NATO and we all said no,
and the French got the way the French can get,
(46:22):
and we moved NATO to Brussels. It's why NATO's and Brussels.
But there's this big building that was built in the
shape of an A to represent the alliance behind the
Arc to trioph in Paris, and I thought, wow, what
if we updated this? And there was a scandal like
this today inside the French government. And it's very interesting
because when the Brits did Brexit, Macron in France said, okay,
(46:44):
we're now going to become the military heavyweight in the
European Union. And they've been doing a lot of stuff
behind the scenes to help Ukraine that a lot of
people aren't reading about or hearing about in the press,
because Macron's smart. He wants the Ukrainians to learn how
to use French military equipment to keep buying it once
they're able to buy it. And Macarne and his advisors
also realized that the future of warfare is what we're
(47:06):
seeing in Ukraine right now, particularly with the drones, so
he wanted the ability to put as many military advisors
in there as possible to learn how to do this.
So what's happened is the Russians now are really really
worried about the French and so I thought, wouldn't this
be interesting If a French intelligence officer uncovered this whole
big thing, he couldn't even go to his own intelligence
(47:28):
agency in France, So he's going to go and talk
to his friend who's the head CIA guy at the
US embassy in Paris, but is murdered before he can
spill this to him. And that was kind of a
kickoff for the whole the book, and that's what I
was thinking about. So it was interesting in that I
reached back to the past to find a little bit
of inspiration, but I think it made for a believable
(47:49):
yet different plot for an espionage book.
Speaker 3 (47:52):
Oh that's great. Final question before we do a quick
lightning round.
Speaker 2 (47:56):
What's it like to be on a plane or in
a doctor's office and see like eight people reading your
new book.
Speaker 4 (48:03):
That's fun.
Speaker 1 (48:04):
I mean that is really really it's it's really it is.
It is cool to see and like I'll say to
people like, how's that book?
Speaker 4 (48:11):
You know what I mean, They're like, it's really good.
You know sometimes if I'm in the mood, I will.
Speaker 1 (48:15):
If I'm in the mood, I will and if I
get the right answer, you know, if somebody's like, yeah,
it's a great book or whatever.
Speaker 4 (48:22):
Then I'll continue the conversation. H I'll continue the conversation.
Speaker 1 (48:25):
And then I don't like it.
Speaker 4 (48:26):
I'm like, yeah, I was not that guy.
Speaker 1 (48:28):
Yeah not much for that thor guy. Yeah I didn't
like it either. You should just leave it in the
back of the seat back, like, don't even finish it
when you get off the plane, just leave it here
for somebody else, like a lending library. So fun. Well
you knew you knew Andrew Breitbart right back in the day.
Breitbart was a friend of mine in Breitbart would be
(48:48):
walking through the airport.
Speaker 4 (48:49):
He'd see somebody with one of my books.
Speaker 1 (48:51):
He would call me on his cell phone and then
hand the phone to the person reading my book like
I was supposed to tap dance and entertain them for
five minutes. It was funny. Anytime I saw the phone
ring with him, it was a good chance he was
in an airport and he.
Speaker 3 (49:04):
Was just like he just wanted to make your day
because he was the nicest.
Speaker 4 (49:07):
It was very sweet. Yeah, he was a sweetheart of
a guy.
Speaker 5 (49:10):
I loved that guy.
Speaker 3 (49:22):
Okay, Lightning round. Are you ready?
Speaker 1 (49:26):
Yep? Let's go.
Speaker 3 (49:33):
Best Nashville Hot Chicken Princess. Yep. What's your favorite place
to travel?
Speaker 4 (49:40):
Greece?
Speaker 3 (49:42):
Clancy or Grisham.
Speaker 4 (49:45):
Grisham. Well, that sounds weird, I said, I was not that. No, No, my.
Speaker 1 (49:52):
Dad swore that Clancy was paid by the word because
his books were so thick. You know, I don't need
fifteen pages when I describe a missile strike. All I
need is there's two green berets somewhere above a house
and they're painting it with a laser, and then the
missile hits. I don't need to know about the gyroscope
and all that kind of stuff. I read Clancy, but
(50:12):
I could put it down. I can't put a Grisham down.
I never could, totally never could.
Speaker 4 (50:18):
He is a brilliant, brilliant author. Clancy is a good
writer too. Yeah, he's no question he did a lot
for my genre. But I have to be honest with you, Grisham.
Speaker 2 (50:25):
Grisham, Wow, I just met John Grisham and he was lovely.
I met him and his wife. Southern gentleman, total Southern gentlemen.
They were great, They were great. Okay, wow, that blew
my mind all right. Alec Baldwin or Harrison Ford. Harrison
Ford best movie adaptation of a thriller.
Speaker 4 (50:46):
That's a great one. Eye the Needle from Freddie Forsyth's book.
Speaker 1 (50:51):
Okay, yeah, I really like.
Speaker 4 (50:55):
Either Needle or Day of the Jackal Day. I think
it's day.
Speaker 1 (50:58):
I think Day of the Jackal is the one, and
I'm really thinking about where they're going to asassinate the Gaul.
Speaker 4 (51:02):
I believe Day of the Jackal.
Speaker 1 (51:03):
So I got redone with Richard Gear and Bruce willis
not as good as the first making of it.
Speaker 2 (51:08):
Huh Yeah, Okay, Trojans, I got to take that back.
Speaker 4 (51:14):
Sorry, sorry, sorry, No. My favorite adaptation, my favorite and
it still is the best today. I can't believe I
blanked like that.
Speaker 1 (51:20):
Is The Eiger Sanction, which was based on a Travanian
book that starred Clineaewood where he was hired as a
killer to kill somebody on his team climbing the Eiger
Mountain and he didn't know till the very end, at
the end of the climb who he was supposed to kill.
That's the best. That's the best adaptation of a book ever.
Is The Eiger Sanction with Cline fantastic. Oh my god,
(51:41):
it's so good. It stands up today. It's fabulous.
Speaker 2 (51:43):
Okay, I'll watch it. I'm gonna go watch it. Trojans
or Commodores Trojans.
Speaker 4 (51:50):
I went to USC, so there you go.
Speaker 1 (51:51):
I know, I know I wants yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (51:57):
So no, I'm always going to be a through and
through US US.
Speaker 1 (52:01):
But living in Nashville, people called the University of Southern
California the other USC because they're used to South Carolina
since they're so close, right, so I always have to
distinguish between the two.
Speaker 2 (52:11):
Funny you, this is the last question you were recently
in my hometown where you posted a picture from inside
of my my church.
Speaker 3 (52:20):
Did you know that?
Speaker 1 (52:21):
I didn't know that.
Speaker 3 (52:24):
You were at.
Speaker 4 (52:27):
I was like, three guesses, I just landed in this city.
Speaker 1 (52:29):
Three guesses where I am first, two don't count, and
people are like and then people who are real fans
of dunks, they're like Quincy, quin Quincy. That's me. They
didn't get like people who are hardcore people because I
guess Duncan Don'ut's started in Quincy, right.
Speaker 2 (52:46):
It's Quincy first of all, and it did, and because
I grew up there in Boston when I was young,
I had a black and white picture of the original
Dunkin Donuts on my whow like next to my new
kids on the block posters whoa.
Speaker 3 (53:07):
That's what deep trandom goes. So the question is when
is iced coffee season?
Speaker 4 (53:15):
It's always iced coffee season.
Speaker 1 (53:16):
As far as that's a pret answer.
Speaker 3 (53:18):
It's a pret answer. We don't have to believe this
is okay.
Speaker 4 (53:24):
There you go, There you go. I passed. Thank you,
good to know, good to know.
Speaker 3 (53:28):
Well, that was really fun. Thank you so much.
Speaker 4 (53:32):
Sie.
Speaker 1 (53:32):
It's listen.
Speaker 4 (53:32):
I always love spending time with you and talking with you, and.
Speaker 1 (53:36):
You remind me that there are good people in the world,
there are smart people who care about things, who think deeply,
feel deeply, and I've been looking forward to doing this
ever since you first invited me. So I hope the
podcast I have no doubt is gonna be huge success,
and thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 2 (53:53):
Well, thank you for coming on. If it is, it'll
be because you gave us your time. I think, thank
you so much and adore you.
Speaker 1 (53:59):
Just do you right back at you.
Speaker 2 (54:04):
Coming up next week on Off the Cup, I sit
down with actor and fellow masshole Michael Chickliss and Yes
to end the suspense, our accents come.
Speaker 3 (54:14):
Out as a Boston guy hardcore I Go, I'm with you, Wicked,
had Coy, Wicked high Cos.
Speaker 2 (54:23):
Off the Cup is a production of iHeart Podcasts as
part of the Reason Choice Network.
Speaker 3 (54:27):
If you want more, check out the other.
Speaker 2 (54:28):
Reason Choice podcasts Spolitics with Jamel Hill and Native Land Pod.
For Off the Cup, I'm your host Se Cup, editing
and sound design.
Speaker 3 (54:37):
By Derek Clements.
Speaker 2 (54:38):
Our executive producers are me Se Cup, Lauren Hanson, and
Lindsay Hoffman.
Speaker 3 (54:43):
Rate and review wherever you get
Speaker 2 (54:44):
Your podcasts, Follow or subscribe for new episodes every Wednesday.
Host
S.E. Cupp
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