1100: James Patterson | Building the Architecture of Addictive Fiction

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Speaker 1 Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show.

Speaker 4 It's a beautiful day. I just slept the beach, one o'clock in the afternoon or something.
and it was like five mile an hour traffic. It was hideous.

Speaker 4 And on the other side of the road, about every 15 seconds, a car went by, whoosh. And I watched this for about an hour or so.
And here was this object lesson.

Speaker 4 And it occurred to me that I'm on the wrong damn side of the highway. And my whole life is on the wrong side of the highway.
And I got to get on the other side.

Speaker 1 Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger.

Speaker 1 On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

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Speaker 1 Today I'm talking with James Patterson, the best-selling author of all time, like in the history of the whole world, kind of, with over 400 million books sold.

Speaker 1 That is just insanity when you think about it. That's more than one book for every person in the United States.
And that's just when he stopped counting.

Speaker 1 Apparently, there's like other numbers you just stop. I guess at at that point, it's like, eh, whatever.
I've got the title. I don't need to wake up every morning and update it.

Speaker 1 In this episode, we dig into creativity, idea generation, thoughts on writing for the masses, what keeps people's attention, writer's block, literacy, his writing process, and a whole lot more.

Speaker 1 He was actually really engaged and engaging on this episode. And I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
Here we go with James Patterson.

Speaker 1 Thank you for doing the show. I think you're on vacation or attempting to take a vacation.

Speaker 4 I don't know what vacation is. I keep hearing that word, but I don't know what it means.
My life is a vacation in the sense that I don't work for a living. I play for a living.

Speaker 4 So that's the vacation part of it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, good for you. I like that.
I kind of feel the same way most of the time, and it's truly a privilege to be able to do something you love. And it sounds like you're in the same boat.

Speaker 4 Yeah, 100%.

Speaker 1 Your story in your autobio about golfing in winter, that's why I don't golf, man. Someone tried to teach me in winter in New York, and you couldn't hammer a T into the ground.

Speaker 4 Yes, that was one time we went out. It was so bizarre.
This golf course was covered with seagull turds.

Speaker 1 Was it goose turds or seagull turds?

Speaker 1 I was going to say, those are some small tees at that point if you're using seagull turds.

Speaker 4 Oh, no, no, no. You'd lay them out flat.

Speaker 4 It's not like you're going to drive them into the ground.

Speaker 4 At any rate, one funny story about that was my friend and I, we were at a public golf course in New York. This is a little before Christmas.

Speaker 4 And our thing was, if you wouldn't mind taking taking a walk that day,

Speaker 4 it would be fine. And we'd go out there and hit some balls.
And we got around the third hole, it started snowing.

Speaker 4 And by about the sixth hole, you couldn't put, I mean, because the ball just wouldn't go anywhere. So we're laughing, and it's fine.
We're not taking it very seriously. So we'll just play nine.

Speaker 4 And we were proud of ourselves because it was already a couple inches on the ground. And as we were going into the clubhouse, there were four guys walking out to the first tee.

Speaker 4 One guy goes, Marty, you think we'll get in 18?

Speaker 4 You know, there's New Yorkers, man.

Speaker 1 For me, I just, that was the beginning of the end. I think if I'd learned to play in California, maybe it would have been a different story.

Speaker 4 All right, okay, all right. Let's golf.

Speaker 1 I was reading your bio prior to the show. You have a lot of honorary degrees.
So how does that work? Do we have to call you doctor, doctor?

Speaker 4 Doctor, doctor, doctor, doctor. I don't know.
I've never really figured it out. I guess in theory, it seems obnoxious to do it, but I guess in theory, you could say doctor or whatever.

Speaker 4 You can just go online and get a doctor. You could probably buy one.
See, you can be a minister now and you can do that.

Speaker 1 I did officiate a wedding. I don't know if that makes me a minister.
I'm not sure how that works, but this show would gain a lot of credibility if this was hosted by Dr.

Speaker 1 Jordan Harbinger instead of just me in a t-shirt.

Speaker 4 Sure, you can do it. We still be in a t-shirt or we'd have to wear a white lab coat to cement my authority.
Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You mentioned doing a lot of interviews with radio personalities who just ask you what the new book is about. And I just find that kind of hilarious.
This interview might actually have some substance.

Speaker 1 I hope that's okay with you. I'm going to give it a shot.

Speaker 4 That'll be a switch. Yeah.

Speaker 1 The autobiography was really good, though. A lot of people's autobios are not that interesting.
Character development may have left a little to be desired, but other than that, I enjoyed it.

Speaker 1 You know, some plot holes.

Speaker 4 Character development.

Speaker 4 Yeah, well, you know, this tough audience.

Speaker 1 The European versus USA press interview differences. I've never heard anybody talk about this.
You seem to think the Europeans actually sound like they prepare for the interview as opposed to just...

Speaker 4 Yeah, they prep a little better, but it's just different kinds of questions. They'll tend to go into a little historical angle or sociological or whatever, which you don't get as much.

Speaker 4 What I was really talking about is you go on the road and I don't blame them. You're in wherever Grand Rapids or somewhere.

Speaker 4 It's a four-minute piece and they're not going to read the book for the four-minute thing. I get it.
So you do get, so James, you get a new book. Tell us about it.

Speaker 1 It just seems like that would be such a tedious thing to create from an interviewer perspective, but it also must be tedious for you to do the rounds when you're like, this person looked at the back cover.

Speaker 4 You get used to it. Yeah.
Yeah. Read the flap copy.
You should be able to get a few questions out of that. So Alex is in trouble again.
Alice Cross. Oh, yeah.
What a surprise. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 4 I wonder if he'll make, did he make it? Is this the end of the Alice Cross series?

Speaker 1 That's right. Well, yeah, I don't expect the end for a while if you're writing as much as you are.
And we'll get to that in a minute.

Speaker 1 I have heard you say some books and things like that are too long, where a paragraph could actually just be one sentence.

Speaker 4 It's a lot of self-help books or books where somebody's written a neat article in a New Yorker or something and then it publishes as turn it into 300 pages.

Speaker 4 And they do, but really article in a New Yorker would have sufficed. Yes.
So there is that, yeah.

Speaker 1 I feel that way about most media, especially podcasting. The new trend, and I'm not sure if you've experienced this yet, but the new trend is three to four hour long shows.

Speaker 4 I think I'm experiencing it right now.

Speaker 1 You are experiencing part of it right now.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 1 The trend is like these four hour long shows that I can assume are only listened to as background noise or by long-haul truckers or somebody who's really stoned or something.

Speaker 1 But usually the interviews could have been done by somebody better prepared in about an hour, and that's kind of what we're going for here.

Speaker 1 I'm curious how you think about this process, because for me, it's about respecting the listener's time. Do you think about the reader in the same way?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I pretend there's one person sitting across from me, and I don't want them to get up until I finish the story.

Speaker 4 So I always believe that our greatest strength is also our greatest weakness, at least frequently. And I get people to turn the pages.
That's a strength.

Speaker 4 The weaknesses sometimes don't go as deep as I should. And I got into this a little bit when I went to screening for the Alex Cross that's going to be on Amazon.

Speaker 4 And I got up there and I was with Aldous Hodge, who's the star and then the showrunner, Ben Watkins. And I said, I feel in the series that they got deeper.
They got deeper into Alex.

Speaker 4 And I thought that was great. I thought he's more contemporary.
He's not as perfect. He's more flawed.
It's more of the reality of Washington, D.C., and what it would be to be a cop there with kids.

Speaker 4 And I'm very happy with the way it turned out. It's really nice, at least the first season.

Speaker 1 I've heard you say something along the lines of, I started leaving out the parts that people skip. How did you find out what people were skipping? Did you literally ask or did you just assume?

Speaker 4 No, you kind of know. Yeah, that line actually is Elmware Leonard.
Somebody asked him, how did he all of a sudden go from not selling much to selling very well?

Speaker 4 And he said, I just started leaving out the parts that people skim.

Speaker 1 I kind of like that mindset, actually. Like you said, you're writing as if somebody is sitting across from you.
What does that actually do? If I'm trying to write something.

Speaker 4 Well, I mean, part of it is you're talking to somebody and it's the same thing. Oh, my God.
I don't need every single detail that, you know, get to the good parts or you start somewhere.

Speaker 4 It's a beginning, middle, and end. It's a basic thing.
And for some people, the middle is really long and there's no beginning and no end. Other than that, it's great.

Speaker 1 There's something you said in your autobio, I think, which was something like, beginnings and ends are great, but middles get you the Nobel Prize. Nobody writes middles.

Speaker 4 Yeah, if you can write beginnings and ends, you'll sell well. If you actually write middles too, you'll get poetry maybe.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this was on Chris Wallace's show.

Speaker 4 Okay, that was something too, because he wanted it, and I get it.

Speaker 4 He thought that a hook of the show would be that you go for whatever the time was, 45 minutes, or there's no editing, no blah, blah, blah. And I just wouldn't play it.

Speaker 4 I wasn't trying to be unpleasant, but I just wouldn't let him do that. I wouldn't let him cut me off and stuff like that.

Speaker 4 So it was going to go over, and I knew there were going to be things things because I was cursing occasionally that he'd want to cut. And he turned to my wife, Sue, who was in the studio.

Speaker 4 He said, is he always like this? And she said, yes, unfortunately.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I could appreciate that, though.
You as a guy has done a ton of media and me as a guy has produced a ton of media.

Speaker 1 The worst part about media is any sort of structure that changes the conversation. in a way that's less authentic or tries to get to the root of things quicker in some ways.

Speaker 1 Look, there's a difference between being prepared for a conversation and saying, this has to fit into 44 minutes. No more, no less.

Speaker 1 So we're going to fluff out this beginning part because I think it's going slowly. But then at the end, we have to crash into this wall and get all of this stuff done.

Speaker 4 Listen, I mean, that's one of the issues with network television with fiction shows, where the scene has got to work so that it's time for a commercial break versus when you're writing for Netflix or Amazon or whatever, and you don't have to write to commercial breaks.

Speaker 4 That's really good.

Speaker 1 You're known for, do we call it colloquial writing? Is that a fair thing to say?

Speaker 4 Yeah, sure. We could do that.

Speaker 1 And so does what what Larry King pioneered, but on radio. Larry King was the guy who was like, I'm just going to have a conversation.

Speaker 1 And your writing is more like, I'm just going to tell you a story as opposed to some sort of flower.

Speaker 4 Pretty much. I probably could show off a little bit, but I don't want to do that.

Speaker 4 And a lot of writers really, I think they want to show off or they want to talk to their friends more than tell an honest story or try to tell stories as well as you can.

Speaker 4 And I'm on Substack now, and I do interviews. And they're short.
They're 20, 30 minutes. And it's been cool.
I did President Clinton. I did Baldace and Ellen Hildebrand, and it's been fun.
I enjoy it.

Speaker 4 I just did Dolly Parton, which was really great. That was fun.
We're good friends, yeah.

Speaker 1 I read that. What a gem she is, eh? I don't know anybody that has a negative sort of impression of Dolly Parton.
That's hard to do over a career that long.

Speaker 4 And it's true with President Clinton and Dolly, and now I'm working with Viola Davis, and they've all become friends.

Speaker 1 How do you think about structuring your work? What does the idea generation phase look like? Maybe that's a better place to start.

Speaker 4 Well, it's, you know, when I interviewed David Baldacci, he doesn't use outlines at all, which is interesting. He just wings it.
And some writers do. I'm big on outlines.

Speaker 4 Interestingly, the first Alice Cross,

Speaker 4 I really wanted to do it differently than what I'd done before then.

Speaker 4 And the outline was something like 350 pages.

Speaker 1 That's like the whole book.

Speaker 4 It wasn't, but it was close. And I read it, and that's where the short chapters came from, the colloquial writing.
And I said, I like this.

Speaker 4 I did expand it another 100 pages or so, but that's where that whole style came from, that very long outline. But in general, I'll have 60 to 80 page outlines, and I'm not a slave to them.

Speaker 4 And sometimes the villain will be really interesting, and I don't want the villain to die at the end of the book because I want to write about the villain again, or a character gets more interesting than I thought.

Speaker 4 Or one of the drafts that I'll do, I'll go through and just look at every chapter and go, well, I went here. What if I go somewhere else? If I do this twist, what will it do to the story?

Speaker 4 And will that be fun? I like that.

Speaker 4 That draft is one of the things that makes the books interesting because you surprise people, which I think is important for my kind of book. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It sounds almost like you're surprising yourself, though, during the writing of the book. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Oh, yeah, sure. 100%.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's something I didn't necessarily expect. So how do you plan the outline? Because it sounds like you plan the outline, but like you said, you're not married to it.

Speaker 4 Yeah. What I'll usually do is there'll be three or four or five different things.
It might be a couple of storylines.

Speaker 4 So I will just write scenes down for that storyline and then for the next storyline and then scenes with Alex and his family in no particular order.

Speaker 4 And then at a certain point, I'll sit down and try to do the outline where I'll put the scenes in some kind of order.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this is fascinating. I'm always blown away by, you're familiar with this as well.
A director sees the movie in their mind and then goes to make it and they're moving things around.

Speaker 1 It sounds like you're doing that with your books and your stories.

Speaker 4 That's a really good example because directors do that. A lot of the young Turks now, they're just going, well, I'll just go shoot it.
You get somebody like, who's the guy that did Black Hawk Down?

Speaker 4 His brother died, Brett, whatever. But what he does is he's famous for it.
He's a really good illustrator, and he draws all the scenes.

Speaker 1 Like, actually, draws like a comic book.

Speaker 4 He literally will draw out the scenes. Wow.
Okay. Well, and the great thing about that is even if he wants to change it, he goes in and he knows what he wants to shoot and why he wants to shoot it.

Speaker 4 With, I think, the best directors, they don't just do crazy angles because they can. They do it because it's part of the story.

Speaker 4 It makes sense with the story as opposed to just going to be, oh, well, I'll shoot this on overhead or I'll shoot this from the, you know, why? Because that's the voice.

Speaker 4 And the voice is just a bunch of special effects and stuff. And it works for a lot of people, but I'm not a big fan of that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think a lot of writers are probably not a big fan of that kind of thing. Where do you get the ideas slash inspiration for some of these things?

Speaker 4 Yeah, there's a big stack with the clever title ideas on it. And there are literally hundreds and hundreds of ideas that I have for books.

Speaker 4 When I'm going to do a new story, sometimes I'll just go through that and see if there's anything that kind of turns me on.

Speaker 4 I don't know that I'll pull this off, but I probably won't so I can mention it. I'm thinking of this story now where this detective's wife gets murdered and he thinks she's come back as a hummingbird.

Speaker 4 And I don't know, I'll see whether I can pull that sucker off.

Speaker 1 That's the whole idea.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And she's going to help him somehow solve her murder as a hummingbird.

Speaker 1 Anything you write seems to do well, so you don't need the peanut gallery.

Speaker 4 I wouldn't do it unless I felt I could pull it off. Of course.

Speaker 4 And I don't know that I can. I'm betting against myself here since I'm laying that one out there.
If somebody steals it, we'll sue them.

Speaker 1 Nobody listens to this podcast. You have nothing to worry about.

Speaker 4 Oh, perfect. Okay.
All right.

Speaker 1 So the ideas that are in the box, those are also your ideas. Do you watch TV and movies and go, oh, there's a funny thing? Or are you sitting in a room full of chiropractors giving a keynote?

Speaker 1 And you're like, what if the FBI kicked the door down and arrested everyone? That's a good opening scene.

Speaker 4 All of the above. Really? Anything that's sort of odd, and you go,

Speaker 4 this didn't do it, but I happen to live most of the year in Florida, and I'm literally one mile north of Mar-a-Lago.

Speaker 4 So on election day,

Speaker 4 my wife filmed the whole thing.

Speaker 4 32 SUVs come by, and he's going to vote, he being President Trump, the ambulance or the medical supply thing, and 30 motorcycles, and there's a motorcycle blocking our driveway with a cop.

Speaker 4 And we went out and talked to him, shoot the shit a little bit with the cop. He's up there from Miami, and you're going, oh, my God.

Speaker 4 And I guess most of it had to do with the fact that night they were going to have a big shindig out in West Palm where he was going to whatever. announced that he won.

Speaker 4 I mean, in theory, there's a story. We had the assassination attempt, but I played that golf course, Trump's golf course.
I just don't get the Secret Service.

Speaker 4 I do not understand why in Pennsylvania there'd be one rooftop and they wouldn't have somebody watching that rooftop at all times. It's 150 yards from where he was speaking.

Speaker 4 That's like insanity to me. On the golf course, when you read about the guy who came by, and it's been like that all the way when he was president, et cetera, there's a fence.

Speaker 4 And there's a sidewalk where people just walk by. There's a bus stop there.
You can just sit there. That fence

Speaker 4 is 30 feet from the T on the sixth hole.

Speaker 4 I'm sorry, Secret Service. You could just pull out a gun at any time.
And they didn't even put a tarp up, so at least you couldn't see in there. I don't get that.
That's astonishing to me.

Speaker 4 You write books and snipers and what they're capable of doing. I don't think it'd be that hard to take a shot at somebody.
So you think about stuff like that. Not that I want to kill any presidents.

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, neither of us do. I mean, you're lucky in that those guys know you.
So I think that you could probably sell a convincing story about you not meaning anything by this particular thing.

Speaker 1 I'm a fiction writer and I golfed with him two months ago. I'm not the guy.
Although, wasn't there an impersonator of you that attracted the Secret Service's attention at a hotel or something?

Speaker 1 There's some story like this.

Speaker 4 Oh, it wasn't an impersonator. There's another guy down here in this town who his name is James Patterson.
I know him a little bit, and I'll see him every once in a restaurant or a bar or something.

Speaker 4 And he told me that he'll go places and people will go, are you the James Patterson? He said, yes, absolutely. I am the James Patterson.
Why not? He might as well say that.

Speaker 4 In his world, he is the James Patterson. Anyway, so I had to go out with Clinton.
We were getting pitched for people that want to produce the movie of The President is Missing.

Speaker 4 So we were staying at a smaller part of one of the hotels out there, and the Secret Service liked it because it was smaller and they could control it a little better. So I arrive and try to check in.

Speaker 4 And they go, oh, Mr. Patterson, would you just take a seat here? We'll be right with you.

Speaker 4 And about five minutes later, the Secret Service comes down and they go, oh, no, no, that's James Patterson, the author.

Speaker 4 And the reason that they were suspicious of me is that the other James Patterson stays there like once a month or something. And they thought he was the author.
Right.

Speaker 4 So I come and I'm going like, no, I'm the author. And they're like, uh-huh, I don't think so, pal, because we know the author because he comes here every month.
He wasn't an imposter.

Speaker 4 He was playing himself.

Speaker 1 But that must have been super embarrassing for him to be like, oh, yeah, no, I was just saying that because I have nothing better to say.

Speaker 4 I can buy, you know, the James Patterson. Okay, yeah.
God bless him.

Speaker 1 Putting shit on his room tab and he will stop impersonating you immediately.

Speaker 4 That's true. Right.
Yeah, right, right. Good, thank you.
Well, they did. They gave me extra fruit and stuff.
That was kind of nice, you know, because I was inconvenienced downstairs.

Speaker 1 Sure. And you got a story to tell.
It's worth it. For mangoes and a story?

Speaker 4 Sure, why not? Oh, 100%. Listen, in the book, and there are a couple of those kinds of stories.
I don't think this one is in the book.

Speaker 4 You know, it's interesting what price fame or whatever the hell it is. There's a little Italian restaurant.
I'm actually going there tonight with my agent, but he used to go there with my wife.

Speaker 4 And so we got there one night, and there was about a couple minute wait for us. And then the waiter, it's a very small place.
He took us down the aisle, we winding down this little aisle.

Speaker 4 And this lady pops up. She goes, I know you.
I go, hi. And she goes, you sold us our life insurance.

Speaker 4 I'm like, oh, man. And she would not let go of it.
She insisted, I know it's you.

Speaker 4 And I said, you know, lady, with all due respect, it isn't me, but I would never sell sell life insurance in southern Florida or beach insure.

Speaker 4 I'm not selling your house on the ocean unless I have life insurance. Seems like not a good idea.
The weird thing is, a little later that same night, we sit down and they serve the appetizers.

Speaker 4 And somebody behind me goes, you're from Boston, right? And I turn around and he goes, oh, my God, you're Tom Clanty. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Same night. I said, if I'm Tom Clanty, you're in big trouble because this means you're in heaven or hell, one of the two.

Speaker 1 Yeah, depending on how the food is, we'll tell you where you're at. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show.
We'll be right back.

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You can find the course at sixminutenetworking.com. And now, back to the show.

Speaker 1 How did you discover that you could actually write?

Speaker 4 I still haven't figured that one out.

Speaker 4 What I discovered was that I loved doing it. Okay.
I had not been a big reader in high school. I was a good student because I wanted to get out of my hometown.

Speaker 4 And then my family moved to Massachusetts and we were near this mental hospital, McLean, very famous. And I used to work a lot of night shifts.
I was getting money to pay for college.

Speaker 4 And I started going into Cambridge and then I started writing stories and I just loved it. I didn't know whether I was any good, but I loved doing it.

Speaker 4 And I would just write, write, write, write, write. When the first book came out, Thomas Behrman number, famous writer John D.
McDonald, gave Little Brown a blurb.

Speaker 4 And at the time, I'm like 26 years old. And he said that I'm quite sure that James Patterson wrote a million words before he started this book, which was a great quote.
John D. McDowell, smart guy.

Speaker 4 Reality of it is I hadn't because I hadn't been living that long, but it was a great compliment. He'd written story after story, and then I decided I'd try a novel, which I was lucky.
Wow.

Speaker 1 I should have addressed this at the top of the show, but I think, is it 114 New York Times bestsellers, or are we up? Is that old news?

Speaker 4 I have no idea. I don't count.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 You don't even care anymore.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And 67 of them or so started at number one. Surely that's a world record of some kind.
Do you know that much?

Speaker 4 They're all Guinness World Records, and I know that, and they were a long time ago, so presumably they still are. It's all fine, and it's nice, and I enjoy laughing at myself, so I smile at that.

Speaker 4 I don't take myself that seriously.

Speaker 1 Do you know how many were made into movies?

Speaker 4 I don't know how many. I mean, there were three Alex Crosses.
We now have the series. There was a series for Women's Murder Club, which I hated.
Kids movie, a couple of documentaries, Builty Rich,

Speaker 4 big documentary. We just finished a documentary on the murders in Idaho for college students.
And that's really a good documentary because it doesn't sensationalize.

Speaker 4 It just puts you there in that town and you feel it the way the people in the town felt it and still feel it. I'm really happy with the way that turned out.

Speaker 1 You mentioned there was a series, was it Women's Murder Club, which you hated? Yeah. How does that happen? I guess they don't consult you too much on how these go.

Speaker 4 No, I remember with, I think it was The Lone Came of Spider, and they asked me, there's a character, Gary S-O-N-E-J-I, in the books. They said, how do you pronounce it? I said, Soneji.

Speaker 4 So in the movie, of course, they call him Sonji, which is fine, but they asked, and then they could care less. It's gotten a little better lately.

Speaker 4 With the cross stuff on Amazon, we talked a lot about it.

Speaker 4 Ben Watkins, the showrunner, wanted to do a new story as opposed to one of the books. I was all for that.

Speaker 4 One of the things I don't like is somebody says they want to do one of the series, Michael Bannard or something, and then they send me like an eight-page outline of the first book, and I'm going like, okay,

Speaker 4 that doesn't seem very creative to me. I think there should be a difference usually between the book and the movie.
So I like the fact that this is a brand new story. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And so when things go wrong, what usually goes wrong? The series that you didn't like, what happens?

Speaker 4 Women's Murder Club, everything went wrong with that. You look at it and a postman gets killed in the first scene.
You go, okay, am am I supposed to care?

Speaker 4 And then they go and interview the postman's grandmother and the postman's uncle and you go, seriously? And they go, yeah, because it's going to be the dialogue between the women.

Speaker 4 And I'm going like, I don't know, man. I mean, that's a piece of it, but there's also a mystery story here, and that ain't it.

Speaker 1 Right. So they sort of missed the point.

Speaker 4 Yeah, plus a couple of the cast members really didn't like each other. Angie Harmon was one.
She was great. And she would call me pretty much every week and go, please help me.

Speaker 4 And a couple of the women, they were just bad news. It was painful.
And there's always ways to make these things work. All of the books, it's all problem solving.
How do we solve that problem?

Speaker 4 I have a whole series, Walking My Combat Boots. We just did American Heroes about Medal of Honor winners.

Speaker 4 And Matt Eversman, who I do with, Matt was the actual sergeant who was portrayed in the movie Black Hawk Down. Great guy, good friend of mine, has seen a lot of combat.

Speaker 4 And I saw him doing some interviews with men and women who had been in combat, and he'd get them to talk about it.

Speaker 4 And I was watching these interviews, and I went to him, I said, Matt, and I had the title, Walking My Comet Boots. I'd like to do something.

Speaker 4 And the mission will be that if you've been in combat, you'd say Everestman and Patterson got it right.

Speaker 4 And if you're one of these people that like the BS, that you really understand things that you don't, you would read it and go, okay, I really didn't understand the military at all.

Speaker 4 And now I understand a lot better. But the problem was, okay, so Matt did most of the interviews.
I did a few, but they're like 50-page interviews. That's not a book.

Speaker 4 And the problem solving was my saying to Matt, look, I want to turn these into five or six-page stories.

Speaker 4 So each person that's interviewed, you're going to get a sense for who that person is, why they went into the military, and then a couple other stories that are going to really be really interesting to read.

Speaker 4 So it's going to be a pace he had read The American Heroes. Every single one of those stories could be a movie.
It's just amazing. One of these guys was at Irogima.

Speaker 4 This is way back, obviously, World War II, and he had a flamethrower. And his flamethrower is a 90-pound flamethrower.

Speaker 4 And he went running with this 90-pound thing, and he would go into these places where snipers were and flamethrow the snipers.

Speaker 4 He did nine of these sniper outposts with a flamethrower on his back, and he had to reload it every time. Oh, my God, it's unbelievable.
And it's hard to come by now, duty, honors, things like that.

Speaker 4 And you just go like, well, I don't know, man. I think we need a little bit of sacrifice.
We don't seem to want to sacrifice. We become pretty greedy, I think, about stuff.
This is interesting.

Speaker 4 This kind of thing can can get you in trouble. But part of it is stop thinking that the government or the president is going to solve all your problems.
Dude, take some responsibility for your life.

Speaker 4 You did some of this to yourself. You're going to sit there and go, okay, I screwed up a little bit.
And not all on the government. There have always been problems.

Speaker 4 You always want to think that could be a whole lot better.

Speaker 4 Oh, we'll get a new president. That'll solve it.
Or we'll get a new coach for our team. That'll solve it.

Speaker 1 It might. This is quite a time to be discussing this a few days post-election for sure.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I try not to get too much into politics.

Speaker 4 I didn't get into it that much here in terms of where I sit on things, but I don't particularly like listening to entertainers on television who sit there and really go on and on and on.

Speaker 4 I mean, sing a song or something, do what you do, but they have the right to do it. But it always comes from like they really, really know because they've been talking to people who really know.

Speaker 4 And obviously, nobody really knows.

Speaker 4 I mean, one of the weird things about this election is nobody was out there interviewing, not much anyway, or the TV shows you watch all these shows with all their interviewers.

Speaker 4 I didn't see a whole lot of Latinos there, and Latinos were really the key, and that's 12, 14% of the country now.

Speaker 4 And folks, we're these smart people paying attention to this, which probably made the difference in the election.

Speaker 1 I think so. Yeah, I think so for sure.
You're right. I don't get too much into politics on this show either, just because I think people need a break from it.
You can find it literally anywhere.

Speaker 1 Maybe I can tune into Jordan and Jordan won't shove something down my throat. I'm always just sort of like, okay, let's keep a a refuge from the drama.

Speaker 1 Before I forget, I heard Hollywood wanted to make one of your most popular main characters, Alex Cross, who we've mentioned before. They wanted to make him a white dude.

Speaker 1 So this is an awkward question, but why do you think they wanted to do that?

Speaker 4 This was back a while ago. Right now, obviously, it's a different thing in Hollywood.
And at the time, I didn't have a lot of money, and it was a million dollars on the table.

Speaker 4 And I said, no, can do, sorry, can't do it. I had to walk away.
But part of it with Alex was I grew up in a town, real blue-collar, a pretty pretty heavy black population.

Speaker 4 I played a lot of basketball, so that was another connect.

Speaker 4 And my grandparents had a very small restaurant, and the chef cook was a black woman, and she was having problems with her husband, and she moved in with our family for a couple of years.

Speaker 4 And during that period, I spent a lot of time with her family, and they were funny and smart, and the music was good, and the food was great.

Speaker 4 And I liked being with her family better than being with my family. But that's a little bit of where the cross family came from.
They're not based on that family, but that's a little of that.

Speaker 4 But that's at least part of what started the cross stuff.

Speaker 1 Sure. And later that role was played by Morgan Freeman.
So

Speaker 1 amazing, iconic kind of thing.

Speaker 1 You used to write ad copy.

Speaker 4 So I've been clean for over 25 years now. I don't know why you bring that up, you bastard.

Speaker 1 No, I'm just trying to celebrate your sobriety or whatever we call it.

Speaker 4 Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 1 But you did keep that day job for, was it a couple of decades?

Speaker 4 Yeah, it was a long time,

Speaker 4 24 years.

Speaker 1 24 years to an overnight overnight success, I guess. Yeah.

Speaker 1 There's one ad that you wrote. I think you were recruiting writers and you wrote an ad.

Speaker 4 That was when I was running the New York office, and I'd just taken it over. And some of the offices were quite good.
The New York office was quite bad, and you couldn't get people in there.

Speaker 4 So I'm running the creative department, and it's, oh, we can't hire anybody because nobody wants to come work there. So once again, it's this problem solution thing.

Speaker 4 And I did an ad right if you want work.

Speaker 4 And it was six questions.

Speaker 4 And there were questions like, it listed the ingredients on, you know, baked beans. And they're terrible ingredients.
And it just said, make it sound mouthwatering, you know, stuff like that.

Speaker 4 And you could read the six answers in three, four, five minutes, and you could tell immediately whether that person A, could write and B, could solve problems.

Speaker 1 I see.

Speaker 4 Because it wasn't like hide from the problem by being a smart ass writer. It was like, no, you got to solve the problem.
You know, sell a telephone system to a Trappist monks who don't speak.

Speaker 4 And I'm actually doing a nonfiction book right now, which deals with that kind of thing, solving problems in innovative ways.

Speaker 1 What does writing ads teach you about writing novels or about writing anything?

Speaker 4 What it taught me was there's an audience. You go in there and you're a kid and you go, oh, geez, I can do this stand out of my head.

Speaker 4 And you give them an idea and they test it and nobody paid any attention. And you go, oh, okay, this is not as simple as I thought it was.

Speaker 4 But that whole idea of an audience, it relates to book covers, which I get involved in the book jacket thing.

Speaker 4 And I have a simple thing about book covers that you need to notice it and it needs to motivate you. So it's an easy way to look at it and go, like, I wouldn't notice this on a bookstand.
Okay, next.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And then I notice it, but it doesn't turn me on at all about this particular mystery or whatever the heck it is.

Speaker 4 A related thing, when I was in advertising, I used to address the first year people, and I would get up there and say, I can tell you the secret to making a million dollars a year or some nice sum in advertising.

Speaker 4 And it really is relatively simple. And I call up somebody and they would give me this cream pie.
And I would stand there holding this cream pie in front of 100 or so first-year people.

Speaker 4 And then I would call somebody up from the audience and I would sit there holding the pie. And they're standing next to me.
And I'm looking at them and holding the pie.

Speaker 4 And I said, well, here's how it goes. I gave the pie to your person.
I said, hit me. They hit me in the face with the cream pie.
And I said, here's the secret. Hit them in the face with the cream pie.

Speaker 4 And while you have their attention, say something smart. That's it.
No cream pie. They didn't even notice it.
So forget about it. You're just talking to yourself.

Speaker 4 And if you don't say something smart, once you get their attention, it's irrelevant. And that's it.
Hit them. And no cream pie, no sale.
And nothing motivational, no sale.

Speaker 1 And you're just standing there with a cream pie on your face, giving this lesson.

Speaker 4 100%.

Speaker 4 And licking it a little, eating cream pie.

Speaker 1 Calories don't count if it's stuck to your face. I know also with ads, one sentence has to flow into the next one.
There's limited space. Each sentence has to be there for a reason.

Speaker 1 Does that affect how you write your novels? I mean, you have plenty of space when you write now. It's a little bit different story.

Speaker 4 No, it should. And on another scale, the whole thing about chapters flying into chapters.
One of the things you always like to do at the end of the chapter is they must turn that next page.

Speaker 4 Bill Goldman, I'm just rereading Marathon, Man. He's so good at that.
And it was a good movie, but the book is so much better. It's just every single chapter.

Speaker 4 The writing is just wonderful, so entertaining, and he just keeps sucking you in and surprising you every single chapter. That's what the really good ones do.

Speaker 1 What gave you the initial courage back in, what was it, 1996, to leave a good career in advertising and then go do something where almost nobody succeeds, actually?

Speaker 4 I already was succeeding, so I had some bestsellers, so I knew I was semi-comfortable. That's also one of the stories in autobiography where I had a house on the ocean in the Jersey Shores.

Speaker 4 It wasn't a mansion, but it was a a nice house. And it was a Sunday, and I had to go back to New York to do some advertising crap.
And I'm like, oh man, I hate this.

Speaker 4 And I was on the Jersey Turnpike or one of the roads going north, and it was like five mile an hour traffic. It was hideous.
And I'm on that road, and I don't want to go back to New York anyway.

Speaker 4 It's a beautiful day. I just left the beach, and it's like one o'clock in the afternoon or something.
And on the other side of the road, like about every 15 seconds, a car went by, whoosh,

Speaker 4 another 10, whoosh,

Speaker 4 whoosh. And I watched this for about an hour or so.
And here was this object lesson. And it occurred to me that I'm on the wrong damn side of the highway.

Speaker 4 And my whole life is on the wrong side of the highway.

Speaker 4 And I got to get on the other side, not the side that's going into New York at five miles an hour to some place that I don't want to go to, the other side.

Speaker 4 where cars are going at whatever speed they want to go and they're going where they want to go. And that's when I decided.

Speaker 4 And within a week, I told the guy that I worked for, I said, look, I'm going to give you time to replace me, even though I'm irreplaceable, but I'm gone. You want more money?

Speaker 4 No, I don't want more money, but I'm going to leave.

Speaker 1 I was going to say, he probably tried to give you a raise. You're lucky it was back then because now they'll be like, what if we let you work remotely? That's how they keep you now.

Speaker 4 You're right. But I think he got it and he did let me go.
He's still a good friend, which is nice.

Speaker 1 I know that you, at least back in those days, would get up early and write, like 5 o'clock in the morning. You probably don't have to get up then now.

Speaker 4 I do. Really? I still get up at 5.30-ish, yeah.

Speaker 1 You mentioned some imposter syndrome, feeling a little bit like a fraud. They're going to find out I'm not supposed to be as successful as I am.
Do you still have that?

Speaker 4 No, I don't think I ever had it big time, but the first book that I wrote, Thomas Barram now, was turned down by, I don't know, 31 publishers. Then like a year finally picks up and it wins an Edgar.

Speaker 4 And I was working at Jay Walter and in advertising, I got this call from this woman. She said, this is a Mystery Writers of America.

Speaker 4 Your first book has been nominated for an Edgar in Best First Mystery. And I said, oh, my God, that's really great.
When's the date? And she told me, I said, I can't go.

Speaker 4 I don't know why, but I said, I can't go. And she said, no, no, no, no.
You've been nominated. I said, I know, I heard you, but I can't go.
And she said, no, you have to go. You won.

Speaker 4 I said, okay, well, I'm going to go somehow. You won.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4 But the weird thing was, so I get there. I brought my parents.
This is so cool. I'm 26 years old, 27, maybe.
And I still, I sat in the audience and I go, maybe she lied to me just to get me there.

Speaker 4 Clever.

Speaker 1 Super disappointing, but clever.

Speaker 4 Well, in other words, there was still some tension. And hey, when I got up, my whole speech was, I guess I'm a writer now.

Speaker 1 Huh, that must have killed.

Speaker 4 Yeah, right. They never stopped clapping.
Oh, my God. But what I meant by it was, especially in those days, if you told somebody you're at a bar and you're meeting a nice girl, what do you do?

Speaker 4 You're a writer. Oh, have you published anything? No.
And they just immediately walk away. Nowadays, you could say, oh, I published on the internet or something.
Oh, that's interesting.

Speaker 4 But in those days, you were considered a fraud if you call yourself a writer and you hadn't been published.

Speaker 1 It doesn't work for podcasters. If you tell somebody you're a podcaster,

Speaker 1 they rightfully chuckle to themselves and then ask which basement you live in, your mother's or your father's.

Speaker 4 Well, the worst thing is that they say, I am too. Let me tell you about mine.
Oh.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you're right. That is worse.
It's funny you had trouble getting published, man. Every successful author always mentions how hard it was to get anyone to believe in them.

Speaker 4 Yeah. John Grisham, his first book, which I think is still one of his best, A Time to Kill, and none of the big publishers wanted it.
He sold it to a small publisher in New Jersey.

Speaker 4 And then I think his next one might have been The Firm. And then everybody wanted that one.
And they broke that big time. But the first one, nothing.

Speaker 4 Yeah, Ellen Hildebrand, she had a lot of trouble in the beginning. Baldacci wrote about hundreds of stories, couldn't get them published.
Yeah, I never sold a short story.

Speaker 4 The first thing I sold was a book, was a full-length novel.

Speaker 1 What keeps you going? Did you ever start to think maybe they're right? My book is not worth publishing after all.

Speaker 4 No. No.

Speaker 4 No, I think they're good stories. I am confident that I'm a good storyteller, the end.

Speaker 4 And I'm still driven in a big way because I always hope the next one will be the best one or one that I really like.

Speaker 4 I have a series with Mike Lupica, who's become one of my best friends, sports writer, Hall of Fame. He was on ESPN, the Sports Recorder show for about 20 years.
And we have a series.

Speaker 4 James Smith is the lead character. And I think that it's the best character since Alice Cross that I've done, I think.
Okay. The initial thing was going to be three books.

Speaker 4 It was going to be 12 Months to Live, Eight Months to Live, Four Months to Live, because she gets a death sentence in the first book.

Speaker 4 And just the way Jane is, Jane Effing Smith, that was going to be the first title. She had been a cop briefly, and then she was a private investigator briefly, and now she's a defense attorney.

Speaker 4 She's never lost. She curses in court.
She's really interesting, funny, presses around it because she's a really cool character.

Speaker 4 And when she gets the 12 months from the doctor, she negotiates it up to 16 months. So whatever.
That's the spirit of it. But it's just been so much fun creating that character.

Speaker 4 Renee Zalinger has signed on to play it. She'll be great.
We sold it to HBO Maramax.

Speaker 4 And one of the writers from Mickey Johnson, who's a writer on Ozark, and then on the Presumed Innocent, the newest version of that, she's a great writer. David Kelly is involved.

Speaker 4 So I am hopeful that will be not just a series, but a really good series.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I guess you never know, I suppose.

Speaker 4 Have you ever had writer's block?

Speaker 1 Have you ever been like, wow, I just nothing's coming into my brain?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I did the first love of my life, Who Die in Her 30s. And after that, I could not write.
I tried to write. To this day, I don't remember the title.
I don't remember anything about the book.

Speaker 4 And eventually I shredded and people go, no, you didn't. I said, yeah, I did.
I knew it was awful. So it wasn't writer's block, but it was.
I just could not do it. I don't even know why.

Speaker 4 I mean, there was something dead in my brain. There was no imagination there.
It just couldn't do what it had been doing.

Speaker 4 And one other time, I had a little operation, and they say sometimes after you've had an operation, there were a couple of weeks when I was fuzzy and foggy, and I really couldn't write well.

Speaker 4 I was sort of like, okay, this is not good.

Speaker 1 Oh, from anesthesia.

Speaker 4 So now no anesthesia. No, just cut me, Doc.

Speaker 1 Yeah, is this going to be forever?

Speaker 4 All right, give me the anesthesia. Okay.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 No, just give me a cup of Tylenol, man.

Speaker 4 A few.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's scary. That would be like, you're not going to be able to talk for a few days.
And then three weeks on, I'm like, how many days did you say this is going to be? Yeah, a few.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that would not work for me. I can't imagine that feeling.
You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show. We'll be right back.

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And now, back to the show.

Speaker 1 I suppose it must certainly happen where you run into a little bit of a block and it sounds like you jump into something else.

Speaker 4 Very simple. One of two things.

Speaker 4 One, I just go to the next chapter or two chapters later, just write TBD for that chapter number, meaning the next time around or the next time around, because I'm a big rewriter.

Speaker 4 And sometimes you just go, okay, this is going to become a paragraph leading off a chapter.

Speaker 4 What had been was going to be, and it just, okay, and that's the solution or the best that I can come up with.

Speaker 1 Your agent must love that when he gets a manuscript. And he's like, TBD for the next three chapters, and then you jump ahead.
Let me fill those in for you.

Speaker 4 Oh, yeah, I forgot. Right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll clean them up before I put it in.
But yeah.

Speaker 1 So you're big on literacy, obviously. Thanks for that.
I think more of us need to be big on literacy, but you're also big on, I think you've coined this term thinkeracy, which resonates well with me.

Speaker 1 Teaching people how to think. It's the mission of the show, actually.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 Oh, kids, kids, kids, please. Your kid comes home.
How was school?

Speaker 4 What are you going to do this year? I don't know. And in school, man, well, what could you do? You could write, you could read, you could play soccer, you could rob a liquor store.

Speaker 4 so many possibilities. But just getting him in that habit of, you know, getting past that first thought and or the blank screen.

Speaker 4 If they did that in school, every single class or at least one class a day, just getting them used to going to the next step.

Speaker 4 This whole thing of first impression, first impression is frequently wrong and screwed up, messed up. How many people have you met in your first impression? You really, you got it all wrong.

Speaker 4 They were okay. They were shy.

Speaker 1 All the time. I'm a judgy SOB.
That's my problem. I'm a judgy guy, so I always get it wrong.
I have to be open to that.

Speaker 4 Well, if you know it then, but then at least you can come back and go, I'm going to give you another chance. And then you go, oh, no, I was right the first time.
Get lost.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. How do you improve thinkeracy inside your home? What did you do with your own kids? Or what did you do with your own kids?

Speaker 4 Well, we just have one, Jack. We tried to do that.
And the thing with Jack, a piece of it was

Speaker 4 trying to get him comfortable and understand what the core of himself is.

Speaker 4 Okay, I understand the acne problem and the hair, all that stuff, but that stuff doesn't matter. And we have sympathy for it, but just reminding of it who you are and getting comfortable with that.

Speaker 4 I wanted to play in the NBA. Well, that ain't happening.

Speaker 4 I know one woman and she went to a CC college to golf rather than an Ivy League college. And you go, seriously, lady, because you're not going on the tour.

Speaker 4 But kids will do that and they'll go to a not terribly good college. They could have gone to a lot better one because they, oh, with the sport.

Speaker 4 And if you got a chance to go to the NFL, I guess, but otherwise, I don't know about that. And I had a little of that myself in terms of I want to go play ball.
And really?

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's hard, right? We want our kids to be happy. We want them to follow their interests, but we also want them to be gainfully employed at some point in their life.

Speaker 1 Now, okay, so your outlines are 50 to 80 pages. You mentioned also that you use a pencil because you like to erase.
No computer. Is that still the case?

Speaker 4 I'm on a computer right here in front of me, but there is a computer, and I will use it for some research and stuff like that, but not to write. Gotcha.
Yeah, it's pencil and pad. Yeah.

Speaker 4 There's pads all over this office. And around the office, there are all these ledges and whatever.
And there are, I don't know how many.

Speaker 4 I'm going to say 30 live projects right now, 29, 30, something like that.

Speaker 1 So if you get stuck, you just move to the next chapter or even a different book. So if that's what happens, do you have a zillion partially written book manuscripts laying around the house?

Speaker 4 No. So they said, usually I will get it the next time.
And if I don't, the next time and the time after that, I will just figure out a way to eliminate.

Speaker 1 Gotcha. I was thinking you're going to be like Tupac releasing a new album every year after you've been dead for 20 years.

Speaker 1 2065, James Patterson at the top of the New York Times list once again.

Speaker 4 The new, right?

Speaker 1 Because we opened up a sock drawer, found it at the bottom of his sock drawer, three unpublished.

Speaker 4 Right, right, right, yeah. The thing with one of the books I have coming out next year, we're all aware of this now, that a lot of males in the country are really in a lot of trouble.

Speaker 4 They feel displaced and lost and irritated and angry, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And this is a book that will help them to become better dads.
Oh. I'm not going to go into it too much.

Speaker 4 Maybe we can talk about it some other time. It's going to be around Father's Day.
I read everything I could find on it and then talked to hundreds of dads about tricks of the trade.

Speaker 4 Just to give you one little example, it wasn't little in my life. The only time I remember getting a hug from my father was on his deathbed.

Speaker 4 One page in the thing, and it's a short book, is just hugs and the importance of hugs. Every day that Jack, when he was a kid and when he comes home now, he gets a hug every day.
That's the deal.

Speaker 4 One of my friends, his kids played football in high school and we were over at their house for dinner one night. My friend's a teacher, high school teacher.

Speaker 4 And after dinner, the boys were heading out the front door and he goes, where do you guys think you're going? And he goes, well, we're going out, man. He said, come here.

Speaker 4 He pulled him over and he made him give him a hug before they went out. And I said,

Speaker 4 I always remember, I said, I'm going to do that, man. I'm going to do that.
That's a great thing.

Speaker 4 Big boys, too.

Speaker 1 Big hugs. Big boys and men need hugs too, man.
There's nothing wrong with that. I'm a firm believer in that myself.

Speaker 1 I think it's a great idea to give your kid a hug every single day, no matter how old they are. Before I forget, I want to wrap up some of the tactical creation stuff.

Speaker 1 You craft the bones of the chapter first, and I've heard you never polish the chapter before the book is starting to really take shape and be done.

Speaker 1 And is the logic here that if you polish something too much, you might not want to get rid of it, even if you really should?

Speaker 4 Yeah, that's one of the big things. Absolutely.
You go, oh, but those two paragraphs, they really don't, they shouldn't be there.

Speaker 4 Or that chap, oh, my God, you know, like the hummingbird book that I talked about.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you get the sunk cost fallacy.

Speaker 4 And writers are like that. Oh, that sentence.
It's so beautiful. Yeah, but it really doesn't fit, man.
And there's a lot of stuff like that.

Speaker 4 I don't think people would like me as an editor because I'd be cutting a lot of stuff out.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You know what? I understand, though.
What's that show biz saying, kill your darlings? Sometimes you got to do that. I do that with show notes.
Oh, this story is so funny, but it's not the time.

Speaker 4 Well, even, you know, with CEOs and stuff, when my editor became the head of Little Brown, and I said to my editor, I said, Michael, one of the things you want to consider doing, you sit down and the night before you've done your to-do list, the 20 things you got to do.

Speaker 4 When you go in the next morning, the first thing you do is cross off 10 of the things. In like 30 seconds, you've cut.

Speaker 4 your workload in half because you're prioritizing and cutting out stuff that really didn't need to get done that you nervously or foolishly put down there.

Speaker 1 That's the story of my life. My to-do list is an exercise in futility a lot of the time.
And it's a lot of stuff in there is designed to keep me busy and away from the actual work that matters.

Speaker 1 That's a whole, that's a whole separate topic. Make sure you research the best screen cover for your Apple Watch, like just meaningless tasks, meaningless.

Speaker 1 You've met a lot of amazing people, presidents, celebrities, and some of these stories, I have to say, are pretty odd.

Speaker 1 Warren Beatty sending someone to meet you in a restaurant and he was in the restaurant just watching you and then the Tom Cruise thing.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And I'm sure Warren's a very nice guy.
And yeah, it was weird, though. It was, I can't remember whether it was an agent.
I think it was his agent.

Speaker 4 He said, Warren would really like to meet with you. I said, well, that'd be great.
I'd love to meet with Warren, but he's terrific. Bonnie and Cawai, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 4 And then he walked over like about 10 minutes later. I'm like, okay.

Speaker 1 It's so weird. Okay.
Didn't want to get rejected.

Speaker 4 So it was a little strange, whatever it was.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. What was the Tom Cruise?

Speaker 4 The Tom Cruise, that was just hilarious. So we have the same agent, creative artists.
We're at sort of on different levels. Oh, I'm at CAA too.

Speaker 1 God knows what rung I'm on if you're on a lower rung than Tom Cruise.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. At any rate, New York Times had done a thing on the cover of the magazine.
And CAA said, well, Tom Cruise would love to meet with you. I was out in LA.

Speaker 4 And I said, yeah, it'd be great. And they said, well, just stay in your room and stay by your phone.
And okay, fine. So eventually a call came in and they said, okay.

Speaker 4 Now, the driver's downstairs, but don't tell them where you're going. I said, okay, fine.
So I go down to the car and we drive not far from the hotel.

Speaker 4 and they pull up to the gate and the driver goes, oh, this is Tom Cruise's house. I go, yes, it is.
And he was great. In those days, he was still with, I forget her name, the wife, and a little girl.

Speaker 4 She was on his lap for 10, 15 minutes when we got together. And she was delightful, very sweet, nice, behaved.

Speaker 4 You could tell that they were very close at that point. And he was terrific.
He's not that short. Had a big basketball court in the front of his house.
And it was a really nice experience.

Speaker 1 Tom Cruise, not that short. People love to focus on that.
Like he's only 5'6 or whatever.

Speaker 4 I don't know how tall he was, but it didn't occur to me when I was reading with him. He was engaging.
You listen.

Speaker 4 Some people, they're really good listeners, which is nice. Hillary Clinton's a really good listener.
The first time we went out to dinner, the Clintons,

Speaker 4 it was about three hours because we just blah, blah, blah, blah, everybody.

Speaker 4 But Hillary was

Speaker 4 so warm, friendly, funny, and a listener. Man, Man, the people who handled her really just screwed up royally because they needed to get this out

Speaker 4 because that's more who she is. She's not really comfortable in a crowd, I guess.
She has trouble showing the real person. But it was really interesting.
I like her a lot.

Speaker 4 I like both of them, but I was a little surprised at how warm and funny Hillary is.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that is surprising. That's not the brand most people.

Speaker 4 You know, she's smart. Right.

Speaker 1 I've heard that you put your favorite products in your books to get free stuff. I mean, that's a little bit bit of a joke.
Oh, it's a joke.

Speaker 1 I was going to say, I do that with this podcast all the time. Usually while drinking in ice-cold spindrift flavored water, delicious.

Speaker 4 Didn't work very well. Usually it does.
I'll get these things. I'll get ice cream and pens and all the pencils.

Speaker 4 But no, nobody picked up on the, yeah, I do that on the Substack. Wednesday and Substack is free Wednesdays, and I give away shit.
Fuse pencils where I've been chewing the eraser and stuff.

Speaker 4 Good stuff. Useful.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 1 There's people out there that are going to try and use those chewed up erasers to clone you someday. Just throwing that out there.

Speaker 4 Yeah, well, I won't care at that point. It's like legacies.
I don't care. Buildings named after me, no, I don't care.

Speaker 1 Do you still write 360 days a year?

Speaker 4 Pretty much. I don't know the exact number, but yeah,

Speaker 4 it's 350 something, yeah, whatever it is. It's rare that I don't write.

Speaker 1 What stops you from writing?

Speaker 4 Usually something that came up. I'm traveling somewhere or something, you know.
But if I'm traveling on a plane, I'll always write. I don't remember the last time, to be honest with you.

Speaker 4 Maybe it is 365 days a year. Yeah, wow.

Speaker 1 It's a lot. Yeah, that's impressive.
I know that you finished a book that was being written by the late, great Michael Crichton, who did Jurassic Park and everything.

Speaker 1 And his wife brought the book to you to finish it, which is a really cool honor, I would imagine. Uh-huh.

Speaker 4 Part of it was I'm a big fan. I'd read pretty much everything that Michael Crichton had written, including his nonfiction Travels, which is a really cool nonfiction that he wrote about.

Speaker 4 Harvard, a lot of people don't know his story, but Michael went to Harvard undergraduate. And then when he graduated, his father said, well, where are you going to go? And he said, I'd be a writer.

Speaker 4 His father said, don't be ridiculous. So Michael went back and he went to med school.
And then he wrote two or three books. I think he'd written some undergraduate under pseudonyms.

Speaker 4 And when he graduated from med school, he had already written a dramatist drain and it had sold for a bunch of money. So he never practiced medicine.

Speaker 4 He went to med school and never practiced. At any rate, they came to me with partial manuscript.
And I said, would you like to finish? I said, I don't know. Let me read what he wrote.

Speaker 4 I read it and I went, oh, yeah, there's a cool, there were like two ticking clocks. One was potentially the worst volcano ever to happen in the Hawaiian Islands.

Speaker 4 And then there was something even worse buried on this island. So there were two clocks saying, well, yeah, yeah, this would be cool.

Speaker 4 And he hadn't laid out at all like what was going to happen, a volcano or the other thing. But I love the idea of finishing because it was a good story.

Speaker 4 And I wanted to know what the hell was going to happen at the end. But also, I hadn't really written anything with a lot of science in it.
So suddenly I had it, put a lot of science in the the book.

Speaker 4 And so I got a researcher that teaches at the University of Anchorage, Alaska, Elizabeth from Alaska. So she became my researcher and we would go back and forth and I'd say, here's what I'm thinking.

Speaker 4 And she'd go, I don't think that could ever happen. And then the next day she'd call up and go, I can make that work.
Nice. Yeah, it was.
It was very cool.

Speaker 1 How do you balance honoring Michael Crichton's legacy with adding your own style to a collaboration like this where your collaborator is literally not with us?

Speaker 4 Legacy was the biggest thing to me. And Sherry, his widow, was pregnant with her son when he died.
So he never met his son.

Speaker 4 So that was a big thing also with the son that he would take some pride in the book, which his father had started and never finished. So that was the big part.

Speaker 4 And the thing that I'm proudest of in the book is I defy anybody to figure out where Michael stopped and I started. And I think that's pretty cool, the fact that I think it's pretty seamless.

Speaker 4 That's cool. I'm happy.

Speaker 1 It is a cool honor. And look, I know we're running short on time.
Your newest book, American Heroes, is available now. And I know that because I was just in an airport.

Speaker 1 And if you set foot in any airport, you can't miss it. I'm getting it from my dad.
He just had a hip replacement, and he loves this kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 Speaking of covers that stand out, it's really well-designed. It's quite timely because I think a lot of people are having the patriotism conversation now.

Speaker 4 But also, we need heroes. And one of the things about the military, and it's very true in this book, in American Heroes, but also Walking My Combat Boots, the military is about we, not me.

Speaker 4 And one of the things I think we need to get back to a bit more is we, whatever your party is, whatever the deal is, it just has to be more we rather than just me.

Speaker 4 And as I said, it's very readable, American Heroes. You can do a lot of things in life that are just small heroic things to do.
Just do the right thing.

Speaker 1 Just do the right thing? Look, I'm thinking easier said than done, but not necessarily sometimes.

Speaker 1 It's tough in this day and age, I think, for people to live their values because there's a lot of pushback, especially depending on how loud you're living those values.

Speaker 4 Well, and a lot of people, they look at there and go, well, everybody's doing it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's for sure. Yeah.
That does make it more of a challenge, but maybe it shouldn't. James, thank you so much for doing the show.

Speaker 1 I know I'm honored to just be sitting here with you today, and I appreciate your time.

Speaker 4 Cool. All right.
I hope it turns out good for you. Thank you, Jordan.
It was a pleasure.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this was fun.

Speaker 1 Joining us is Mustafa Suleiman, Microsoft AI CEO, discusses the pivotal role of artificial intelligence in shaping the future, from job automation to national security.

Speaker 5 We are a technological species.

Speaker 5 from the beginning of time we have been manipulating the environment to reduce our suffering and that is the purpose of a tool but a tool has always been inanimate whereas now i think the profound shift that we're going through is that we're sort of giving rise to these new phenomena that i hesitate to call a tool because it has these amazing properties to be able to create and produce and invent way beyond and disconnected to what we've actually directed it to do.

Speaker 5 But now we've really crossed this moment, this threshold where now computers can increasingly talk our language. And that is just mind-blowing.

Speaker 5 People are still not fully absorbing how completely nuts that is.

Speaker 5 We want AIs to be able to solve our big problems in the world. You know, we want it to help us tackle climate change and improve drugs and improve healthcare and give us self-driving cars.

Speaker 5 And we want to solve these massive problems that we have in the world trying to feed 8 billion people and growing and so on right so that's going to change what it means to be human it's going to change society in a very fundamental way it will change work and so on it's been such a privilege to be creating and making and building at a time like this almost 15 years in the field now thinking about the consequences of ai and trying to build it so that it delivers on the upsides and it's just a surreal time to be alive.

Speaker 1 To explore the critical ethical, societal and geopolitical challenges AI poses in the 21st century and what we can do to harness its power responsibly on episode 972 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.

Speaker 1 Fun fact, he actually wrote the Toys R Us jingle when we were kids. Remember, I don't want to grow up.
I'm a Toys R Us kid. Remember that thing? He sold 400 million books.

Speaker 1 And honestly, his most famous body of work is probably still, I think most of us of our generation could probably still sing it. I know I could.

Speaker 1 All things James Patterson will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show all at jordanharbinger.com/slash deals.

Speaker 1 Please consider supporting those who support this show.

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Speaker 1 And if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It is a great companion to the show.
JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it.

Speaker 1 Don't forget about Six Minute Networking as well over at sixminutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram.
You can also connect with me and/or Gabrielle on LinkedIn.

Speaker 1 This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Frogerty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.
Remember, we rise by lifting others.

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Speaker 1 If you know somebody who maybe needs to rebuild or reboot their creativity, definitely share this episode with them.

Speaker 1 In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.

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Speaker 3 Thank you for listening to the Murdoch Murders Podcast, the show that started it all. 93 episodes will take you on a journey of twists and turns, ups and downs, tears and belly laughs.

Speaker 3 We continue this mission with our newest evolution, True Sunlight. Luna Shark's True Sunlight podcast is the antithesis of true crime.
True Sunlight values accuracy over access journalism.

Speaker 3 True Sunlight is shed with empathy, not exploitation. True Sunlight is the intersection of journalism, true crime, and systemic corruption.

Speaker 3 We continue to shed light on Stephen Smith's case and Alex Murdoch's co-conspirators, but also we like to take deep dives into other cases around the country.

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