Off the Cupp with S.E. CuppIs Brad Thor better at predicting the future than 'The Simpsons'?
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.
We really lie to ourselves. Writers are liars, particularly writers of fiction. I mean we're telling stories, we're making things up.
Hey, everybody, Welcome to Off the Cup, my personal anti anxiety antidote. In covering politics for over twenty years, I've learned one thing.
We all need a break from it.
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. As many of you may know, some of you like to escape into.
A world that actually looks very similar to our.
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.
Welcome to Off the Cup, Brad Thor.
Hey see, it's great to be here, and I need you to make me a promise up front.
Please that we're going to.
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.
Guys on the floor, my jaw is on.
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.
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.
Okay, all right, Well we'll have dessert first, to a leader vegetables later.
Yeah.
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. Their family's wonderful, and I.
Grew up with them in Chicago.
I'm obsessed with her.
So that's number one. And the number two, I am a big fan of Below Decks. Okay.
And and I have.
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.
To do watch what Happens live together.
Oh that'd be fun. I would enjoy that.
Yeah, yeah, that'd be really fun. Okay, I'll try to make it happen. I love good stories. I'm good glad.
I'm so glad I brought up Bravo because.
I didn't need to.
But perfect correct me if I'm wrong.
Did we first cross paths, like at the while I was at The Blaze and you were doing The Blaze?
Yes, so you and I were in the same makeup room.
This is when there.
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.
That was years and years ago.
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.
I got to tell you, it.
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.
I'm still the same person.
Me and you, Me and you. I have not changed.
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.
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 cost me, but I look in the mirror every day and I'm happy with what I see.
So there you go.
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 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 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, she's one of the good ones.
She stands up for what she believes in.
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.
So thankssh wow, thank you. And I feel the same way.
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 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?
No, I don't think so.
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. 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, 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.
I know it did.
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 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.
I love that the new book is Shadow of Doubt, and we'll talk about it, but first.
Talk about Black Stallion m.
My favorite book series when I was a kid. Yeah, yeah, I know, I loved these books.
I don't know what it was about the books. I saw the movie, which.
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 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.
And I was in heaven.
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.
And what was going on in your life at the time, Well.
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.
And I wish it was more.
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 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.
Did you write as a child as well?
I did. I did a lot of writing.
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.
She lived on the Upper East Side.
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.
They were not a career path.
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.
My brother and I would take over his business.
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.
You know.
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 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 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.
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.
I had friends who had an extra bedroom.
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 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 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, 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.
I'm too afraid of failure to write the book.
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.
Actually got it done.
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.
Cashing the check?
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 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, 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.
I work for the.
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.
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 to say. Well, but you know, things come out the writing. I can be intentional, deliberate, I can pick the perfect words.
It's the perfectionist in me too.
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.
I don't know. It just really turns me on.
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 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.
And I would feel like if I.
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.
I used to do what I used to do when I was coming up in TV.
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 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.
A very different muscle, totally different.
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.
Okay, it's really really hard.
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 kind of forcing yourself to the page where you don't feel like this is not going.
To be productive right now.
You know, I need I need to be I need to be good at this, but I also need to just do it.
I need to just get it done.
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 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, 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 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?
A famous writer, writer and illustrator, Matthew Johnstone.
That's the one. I think.
I think he actually did, Overcoming the black dog of depression.
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, your entire soul.
You're laying bare for this.
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 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.
Totally advice, I hope.
So I hope it works for you.
So how does Scott Harvath come to be? How do you invent this character?
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 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.
Writer, and host.
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, but his audience was very, very much older than I was at the Yeah.
So I wanted to do a show for eighteen to thirty.
Four year olds because I thought travel made me a better person, made me a better American, maybe a better person.
I got to see other ways of living, other ways of.
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, 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 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 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 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.
I'll be ready now.
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.
Very sweet.
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 was waiting online at the grocery store, the post office, he'd take out up paperback and start reading.
Trish was the same way.
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.
Through, flipping through, and I found this.
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.
Those are the Lions of Lucerne.
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.
In the character.
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 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 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.
Yeah.
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.
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?
And this is coming from someone who loves to write. I love to write. How do you churn out?
How?
Is this a matter of discipline? Is this a matter of necessity? Like you have to do it how straight teeth?
Yeah? Yeah, no, I mean it is.
I mean it is my job. It is.
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.
It does not get easier.
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.
And I can beat the headlines.
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.
But the Simpsons, oh well, I got to ask that question.
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 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.
Who said that, but it really is. It is discipline.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
Huh he's just very charming.
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 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. 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 it done if you don't kind of put yourself in that cone of silence.
Yes, my husband is obsessed, obsessed with your books.
You're his favorite author, for sure.
Not even close, because it's got everything he loves. It's got military, spy stuff, world events, politics.
Who are you writing for?
And don't say everybody, because no commissures will tell you that's not You know.
That, but you don't.
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?
I have a very handsome, very intelligent reader mind. I write it for myself.
I write the kind of books that I would want to.
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 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 twenty fifth book. You can read my books.
They're like the James. That's what I tell people.
If the new Streams Bond movie is down the street and you've never seen a Bond.
Movie, you can go see it.
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.
But I'm writing my books happen on two different levels.
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 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.
Right, that's real.
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, which I think is a nice value.
Add oh they do.
And this is my husband. He'll be like, did you know that in Sweden?
Blah blah blah blah. You know, just from your book.
Again, without getting political, I just have to ask, what did you think of the Hesbala pagers exploding?
As an author who.
Lives, I could have never written that.
I could have never done it.
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. 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 in with with what I can write about, so I have to get those details details right.
Have I come up with that pager thing?
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.
There's no way they wouldn't.
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, 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.
So big psychological impact.
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.
Now, the spycraft of it, it's just, uh yeah, okay, I'm so glad I asked.
You we we share a publisher.
I don't know if you know that I'm also a SIMONR. Chu star.
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.
I will have a conversation.
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.
Like to start. You're looking around for other ideas.
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.
And we've been together.
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 rare that she she'll say if anything, Hey, you said this.
Three chapters ago.
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. 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, 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 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.
It's important. Yeah.
Yeah, I read that Sony's developing the books for TV.
Is that true?
Yeah. We're in an elevator now.
We're racing towards the end of the year.
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.
So yeah, so it's true.
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.
We've got Howard Gordon.
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.
He's just a brilliant writer.
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, 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.
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.
Have thought about who Scott will be.
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 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. 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 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.
You know, at one point.
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 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.
What about Chris Pratt, He's already.
Done terminal list, so that would be in the same genre.
Close yes, yea too close, too close.
Plus yeah, I mean I like Pratt, but Pratt's not who I see as now as is my guy.
I see more of a Hemsworth type.
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 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 Harveth right now, I'd go with THEO James.
I think he's a fabulous actor.
Okay, THEO James, THEO James.
I wait for the call, put my chips on THEO James.
There we go.
Okay, shadow of Doubt. What headspace were you in when you set this book?
So it's interesting.
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 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 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.
It fascinated me.
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, 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, 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 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 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 yet different plot for an espionage book.
Oh that's great. Final question before we do a quick lightning round.
What's it like to be on a plane or in a doctor's office and see like eight people reading your new book.
That's fun.
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?
You know what I mean, They're like, it's really good. You know sometimes if I'm in the mood, I will.
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.
Then I'll continue the conversation. H I'll continue the conversation.
And then I don't like it.
I'm like, yeah, I was not that guy.
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 walking through the airport.
He'd see somebody with one of my books.
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.
Was just like he just wanted to make your day because he was the nicest.
It was very sweet. Yeah, he was a sweetheart of a guy.
I loved that guy.
Okay, Lightning round. Are you ready?
Yep? Let's go.
Best Nashville Hot Chicken Princess. Yep. What's your favorite place to travel?
Greece?
Clancy or Grisham.
Grisham. Well, that sounds weird, I said, I was not that. No, No, my.
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 I could put it down. I can't put a Grisham down. I never could, totally never could.
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.
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.
That's a great one. Eye the Needle from Freddie Forsyth's book.
Okay, yeah, I really like.
Either Needle or Day of the Jackal Day. I think it's day.
I think Day of the Jackal is the one, and I'm really thinking about where they're going to asassinate the Gaul.
I believe Day of the Jackal.
So I got redone with Richard Gear and Bruce willis not as good as the first making of it.
Huh Yeah, Okay, Trojans, I got to take that back.
Sorry, sorry, sorry, No. My favorite adaptation, my favorite and it still is the best today. I can't believe I blanked like that.
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, it's so good. It stands up today. It's fabulous.
Okay, I'll watch it. I'm gonna go watch it. Trojans or Commodores Trojans.
I went to USC, so there you go.
I know, I know I wants yeah, yeah, yeah.
So no, I'm always going to be a through and through US US.
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.
Funny you, this is the last question you were recently in my hometown where you posted a picture from inside of my my church.
Did you know that?
I didn't know that.
You were at.
I was like, three guesses, I just landed in this city.
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.
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.
That's what deep trandom goes. So the question is when is iced coffee season?
It's always iced coffee season.
As far as that's a pret answer.
It's a pret answer. We don't have to believe this is okay.
There you go, There you go. I passed. Thank you, good to know, good to know.
Well, that was really fun. Thank you so much.
Sie.
It's listen.
I always love spending time with you and talking with you, and.
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.
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.
Just do you right back at you.
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.
Out as a Boston guy hardcore I Go, I'm with you, Wicked, had Coy, Wicked high Cos.
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