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- [00:01]
A
Okay, I got the red smoke. Sun runs north and south. West of the smoke. West of the smoke. Okay, copy. West of the smoke. I'm looking at danger close now. Give it to me.
- [00:15]
B
I need it.
- [00:19]
A
I mean, nobody knows how this is going to go because this is the first time I've ever had to do a podcast when the power is out. But we solved it.
- [00:27]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [00:29]
A
I catch a little bit of an accent. Is this Southern California?
- [00:34]
B
Eastern Chicago?
- [00:36]
A
What brought you to the states?
- [00:37]
B
Actually, it's an old story. A girl brought me to the states.
- [00:42]
A
I mean, is there any better reason?
- [00:44]
B
I don't think so.
- [00:44]
A
I don't think so either.
- [00:45]
B
And even better than that, we met in a bar. We did it the old fashioned way.
- [00:50]
A
I have dating age kids, three, and none of them have met their significant other that way. That is not the way it is done anymore.
- [01:00]
B
No. Times have changed, haven't they?
- [01:02]
A
Do you think they've changed for the better or the worse?
- [01:07]
B
I mean, my gut says for the worse. Yeah, but I mean, I guess you'd have to look at the statistics really, to see how things, you know, how relationships are lasting. I think we've lost a lot. You know, I've got kids as well, that kind of age. And it seems like so much of the skills that we use to learn, you know, you'd meet somebody face to face. You would learn, if you're talking to them, are they interested? Are they responding?
- [01:33]
A
Yeah.
- [01:33]
B
You know, you actually have to physically.
- [01:35]
A
Look at them in their eyes.
- [01:36]
B
You would, you'd have to read the signs.
- [01:38]
A
Yes.
- [01:38]
B
Whereas now that I think people have lost all of that and I've heard about things like, you know, people are so paranoid these days. There are apps where you have to ask somebody, you know, would it be okay if I hold your hand?
- [01:50]
A
Oh, the consent apps. I have heard of those.
- [01:52]
B
Yeah. Which just seems crazy to me because obviously you want to treat people with respect and not crossing any boundaries, but you used to know where those boundaries were by being able to interact with people effectively and read the signs rather than having to have something on your phone telling you.
- [02:08]
A
I don't think the boundaries have actually moved either. I think we're nerfing the world for people. And I think in their attempt to do that, I mean, I want my children to have a crushing sense of anxiety in a bar where they see woman and they like, I would really like to talk to this person, but they don't have the stones to do it. Or my daughter wants to see, like, you need to, you need to feel that pit in your stomach, the uncomfortableness. You need to sweat a little bit. Like, you have to have that experience.
- [02:41]
B
You have to work for it. Yeah. It can't just be that an algorithm has served it up to you on a plate. You actually have to, you know, you have to use some initiative. Yeah.
- [02:49]
A
Yeah. So were you in the States?
- [02:51]
B
I was, yeah.
- [02:52]
A
Okay.
- [02:52]
B
I was in Baltimore.
- [02:54]
A
What had brought you there from the uk?
- [02:56]
B
So, you know the big crime fiction conference every year at Bouchercon?
- [03:00]
A
No, I don't know anything.
- [03:02]
B
Yeah, no, it's. It's, you know, one of the great things in the States is that there are loads and loads of book conferences and conventions for each different genre. And for crime fiction, the biggest one of the year, it's called Bouchercon. It's named after a really influential critic called Anthony Boucher, who years and years ago, he really. He started to give respect to crime fiction as a genre. It always still is looked down on a little bit, and it always used to be kind of derided. And he was one of the first people to say, wait a minute, you know, these guys actually know what they're doing. The books that they're writing really reflect what is important in society, the way that real people behave and bring some real value to people's lives. So he, you know, he was quite influential. And so this big conference is named after him and they move it. It moves to a different place in the United States every year, except that the rules are that once every 10 years, it has to go outside of the States.
- [04:00]
A
Today's episode of the podcast is brought to you by Black Rifle Coffee. Now, you might ask yourself, andy, why aren't you in the studio? Well, guess what? Yet again, I followed my checklist. Before I left, I thought I had done all my ad reads and I have forgotten to do this one. But that's okay. I don't need to be in the studio to do this because I can talk about my experience with Black Rifle Coffee over the last two weeks. I just ordered a ton of stuff for the studio. There's a bunch of studio upgrades that are going to be coming here about two weeks from today. I'm going to really be able to talk about it. But I ordered a bunch of different ceramic mugs, some tin camping mugs, two Chemex V60 for pour overs, kettle grinder, everything you could possibly need to make coffee for in the studio. K cups. I got a Keurig somewhere else, but the K cups for it. All of that straight on. Blackrifflecoffee.com I'm going to use my ECS subscription or executive or exclusive coffee club subscription for coffee with the guests. That's a one bag per month, very highly curated by Evan. He's highly involved in that. And if you want to get more coffee than that, they have a normal coffee subscription, but they also have it for T shirts, for stickers, all of those things. So everything I needed to upgrade the studio was right there@blackrifflecoffee.com if you need coffee stuff, if you have a coffee lover in your life, if it's getting ready to be their birthday anniversary, you need a guest. Fill in the blank. Head on over there. You will not regret it. It's a brand founded by amazing people that stands for legit and amazing things. Black riflecoffee.com Back to the show to like Canada.
- [05:29]
B
Yeah, generally they go all the way to Canada.
- [05:31]
A
I mean, if I was looking economically, I would probably do the same thing, to be honest, especially right now, because the dollar is kind of crushing up there. Yeah, but what, what, what genre do the Reacher books fall into?
- [05:41]
B
You know, it's very hard to answer that because they have aspects of so many different genres.
- [05:45]
A
There's an investigative aspect in all of.
- [05:47]
B
Them, for sure, so you could argue, you know, some more than others. Perhaps the ones where he's still in the police. Sorry, in the military police. There's. There's more. There's a kind of police procedural aspect to them. There's mystery, of course, in all of them. There is crime in all of them. They almost hark back to the kind of, you know, traditional adventure novels, you know, back, you know, the kind of Alistair Maclean type, type era. But I think, you know, the thing with Reacher, without getting too pretentious about it, is he. He really is the latest incarnation of just a immortal archetype of a character. You know, he is the knight errant who shows up in your town, fixes the problem and leaves. And that character creates more along the way.
- [06:29]
A
But, yeah, he's God.
- [06:30]
B
He does. But, you know, that character, that character has been around forever, forever in every different culture. You know, you see it in Japan with the ronin. You saw it in medieval Europe. You see it all the way back. Well, you see it through the Scandinavian myths all the way back to ancient Greece. So there's something about that character, whichever genre it fits in now, that I think is just universal.
- [06:53]
A
I was asking about the demographics because at least in the US like crime and specifically unsolved crime podcasts crush but the demographic, and then you get to the TV shows of Unsolved Mysteries, it's highly skewed towards women.
- [07:12]
B
Yeah.
- [07:12]
A
Which is pretty smart because the likelihood of them encountering. If they do encounter something like that, it is more than likely going to be a guy. So they are doing their homework on psychopaths, I will say, but it kind of makes sense to me. I'm curious, in those at the crime conventions, was it more men than women?
- [07:31]
B
I'd say it's probably 55, 45 in favor of women, I think. And also, it depends on the makeup of the conference, because some conferences are skewed more towards readers, some are skewed more towards the industry, either working writers or people who are trying break in. And so that can change it a little bit. But, yeah, I think even in crime fiction, the same as real crime, the demographic does skew more. More female, from what I've seen. I haven't. I haven't. I haven't examined the stats. This is just from experience of going to these kind of events.
- [08:05]
A
Yeah. My wife, I think, at this point, is disturbed by. I fall into somebody who really enjoys them as well, like a. What was the category that came up on Netflix yesterday? My wife was laughing. It was a controversial documentary. It was something where she was clearly underneath my tab, not hers, because I will surf through that. And I think dinner time is the perfect time to learn about a serial killer. She does not agree.
- [08:30]
B
Yeah, well, you know, there's a great. There's a great book I read a few years ago called the Wisdom of Psychopaths. Have you come across that one? No, Absolutely superb. And I forget who wrote it, unfortunately, but it explores, you know, it starts off with a premise. You know, when somebody says the word psychopath, you know, you think of Hannibal Lecter or something. Right. But they've been making the point that psychopaths come in different shapes and forms. And sometimes it's useful to have a psychopath. You know, if you've got a military situation where you need to sacrifice 10 people to save 100 people, you need a psychopath who's going to pull the trigger and not, not, not, you know, delay too long worrying about it. So, you know, he talks about that. But also all kinds of experiments that have been done, all sorts of research. And what you were just saying there reminded me of one of them. You know, there's a sort of urban legend that, you know, you are either more or less likely to get attacked in the street, depending on how you walk and how you carry Yourself, you know, so they did an experiment where they got a bunch of people, some of whom had been victims and some hadn't. And they videoed them just walking down a corridor, walking away from a camera. And they got some real life psychopaths and guys, serial killer types that had been arrested for these kind of crimes. They didn't say which people had been, were real victims and who weren't. They just said, if you're going to attack, if you're going to attack two out of these 10 people, which would it be? And they nearly all picked the people who actually had been the victims, really.
- [09:58]
A
Just because of how they carried themselves.
- [09:59]
B
So what they decided to do was flip that around and see whether regular people could identify people who might be dangerous. No. Yeah. And they did the same thing. And the really fascinating part was they found that the people that they conducted these tests with fell into three different groups. The best group at identifying potential threats were women. Second best group were less educated men. And the worst group were highly educated men. And the theory behind it was that certainly with the two different groups of men, you know, we have moved so far away from our kind of animal instinctive roots. You know, that's kind of been educated out of us. You know, we've been taught to think and analyze as opposed to feel, you know, in the back in the ancient of. Of times. You know, if you're, if you were on the plains of Africa and you thought you heard a lion coming, so you ran, you survived whether there was a lion or not, right?
- [11:02]
A
Yeah.
- [11:03]
B
If you were sitting around thinking, was it a lion? Not sure. I don't know. Let's look. Then you get eaten. And so, you know, the theory is that, you know, some of the, this kind of residual remnants of those kind of instinctive traits that have been around in humans forever.
- [11:20]
A
That makes sense. I mean, the stats are what the stats are. It's unfortunate that women are victimized in the way that they are at the statistical level. They are almost always by men. So it makes sense to me that they are probably a little bit more attuned to that. Yeah, yeah.
- [11:34]
B
I mean, they've had to grow up in that environment. So.
- [11:36]
A
Yeah, that makes sense to me. There's receptors probably, unfortunately, should be a little bit higher up. Okay, so you were in the US For a conference. Was it the classic love story? Did you lock eyes from across the bar?
- [11:49]
B
Well, you know, we did, yeah. What, what had happened was it was, it was before my first book had come out. And so, you know, everything I'm you know, still a surprise to me. Everything in publishing moves pretty slowly. And so when I sold my first book, I expected to come out. I worked in the telecommunication industry, where if you do something immediately, you're already late. So I was used to that kind of speed. And so publishing it, it's going to be 18 months or so between signing the contract and the book coming out. So it was approaching the time for that first book. So the publisher said, okay, you've got to start going to all of these industry events. You got to start meeting people, get your name known, get yourself out there. So I show up at this huge conference in Baltimore. A couple of thousand people are there, and I've been to dinner with my brother, and he was going outside for a cigarette, and I kind of wanted to go with him, even though I didn't smoke, just because, you know, it was Wednesday night. The conference was officially starting the next morning. But of course, everyone is in the bar. Yeah, bar is enormous. It looks like it's the size of a football field. It's got a bar down one side, round tables down the center, and booths down the other side. And, you know, I'm looking at all these people that I don't know. And, you know, coming from England, you're not used to just going up to people and saying hi. Let me tell you about me. You know, it's awkward, you don't want to do it.
- [13:18]
A
But how do you guys do it in England?
- [13:19]
B
Wait for someone to introduce you, grunt.
- [13:23]
A
At each other from across the room.
- [13:24]
B
Exactly. So find something to apologize for. About, I don't know. So I didn't want to do it, but I thought, well, I'm here to work. This is what I have to do. So I thought, what I'll do is I'll just go to the far end of the bar and then even if I lose my nerve, and I'll be bound to at least bump into people and have to say something to them. So I take one step into the bar, and I see this girl standing at one of these round tables with a group of friends. And I looked at her and I thought, okay, the plan has changed. I have to talk to her, but what am I going to say? But then I think, well, I'm in a bar and I haven't got a drink. And so, conference hotel, it's going to take forever to get served, so that will give me time to think of something. So I go to a spot at the bar, kind of close as possible to her table, and ask for A beer, and instantly it's in my hand and I still haven't had a chance to think of anything. So I'm thinking, oh, God, I'm doomed. What am I going to do? But I glance across and she is coming over to talk to me. And so we started talking that night, and we haven't stopped since.
- [14:28]
A
That's amazing. That's awesome. I do love stories like that. And for everybody listening who is of a younger age noticed that no screens were involved.
- [14:35]
B
None at all.
- [14:36]
A
None at all. And if you would have had a smartphone, that would be the time to put it in your pocket and engage with the person in front of your face.
- [14:42]
B
Absolutely, yeah.
- [14:43]
A
Not scroll your Instagram feed?
- [14:44]
B
No, we should all. We should all engage in person a lot more.
- [14:47]
A
Yeah. At that conference, did you start writing first or did your brother.
- [14:51]
B
He did. He studied first. Yeah.
- [14:53]
A
Was the Reacher series already out? We're talking about Lee Child, by the way, for people who. I mean, I'll put it in the. The picture will be on the. The thumbnail. But the brother, obviously, of Lee Child. He is. He started the Reacher series by himself, correct?
- [15:04]
B
He did, that's right. Yeah. So he started by himself. I was still working in. In telecommunications. And, you know, he started, you know, basically by accident because he was working in television in the UK and he got fired. And so he needed some. He needed. He had a wife, he had a kid, he had a mortgage. He needed to make money. He had to put food on the table. So, you know, he made the really smart decision to write a book, because what could go wrong? And so.
- [15:33]
A
So I have been a fan of the Reacher books for a long time. When I don't know the relationship to the woman who reached out originally part of the publisher or the woman who connected us over email.
- [15:45]
B
Oh, yes. I think she. Sarah, she works for the publisher.
- [15:48]
A
Yeah. So what. As soon as I saw. I think she put Reacher in the subject line, I'm like, whoa, hold on a second. They have been my travel books for years. Like, I read this. I went to Texas. It was within the last 48 hours. I came back. I read half of it on the way there, half of it on the way back. I've been doing that with the Reacher series for years. So as soon as I saw that, I was like, yes, we're absolutely gonna do this. But where. So he's working in tv. Where did he get the idea for the main character?
- [16:18]
B
Well, it came in. It came together in pieces. Part of it. You know, he knew he wanted to write Thrillers, because that's what he likes to read. Then he started to look at, well, who else is out there, who else is working, you know, who is active right now and what are they doing? Because it struck him that there's not really any point in trying to copy what someone else is doing. If somebody else is already doing a great job of police procedurals, for example, why try to do another police procedural? How are you going to set yourself apart from somebody that's already established and doing really well? So he kind of. There's a kind of process of elimination. You know, what are other people doing? Let's find something different. So a lot of that went into it, and then also quite a lot of practical thinking went into it as well. Because every author starting out writing what they hope is going to be a series, you know, you want to give yourself as good a chance as possible. And that means that you want to keep it fresh for a number of years. And the thing is that if you were to write a series where the hero is a homicide detective in Kalispell, Montana, guess how every book is gonna start.
- [17:27]
A
It was a dark and stormy night as the Tumbleweed was going. Yeah, you know, or tonight it could be. There's 300 trees down and nothing else in this building has power. But we solved it with generators.
- [17:37]
B
Exactly. But, you know, whatever surrounds it, it's gonna be a dead body found and the detective is pulled in. So part of it is he wanted to have an opportunity to have his character go anywhere and do anything.
- [17:49]
A
On buses.
- [17:50]
B
Yeah. Which is really important. Then if you have a character who's gon at fighting, who's going to be good with weapons, who's going to be good with tactics, who's going to be good at investigating. You have to justify that in some way. You can't really have it that this guy is just magically good at these things. So some kind of a military background is really significant. And then you've got the attitude. Right. And the thing that sparked all of this was that Lee had just been fired and he was not happy. He was seriously unhappy about this. Axe to grind. Yeah, so he had an axe to grind. So the specifics of Reacher, not only was he ex military, military police, but he was a victim of the downsizing at the end of the Cold War. And so just like my brother had been in television, he was extremely highly trained, but in a very, very narrow field, the kind of field that you couldn't just pick up and move to another kind of a job.
- [18:48]
A
I'm Familiar.
- [18:49]
B
Yeah. So, you know, there were parallel. There were a lot of practical decisions, but also there were some very personal ones. You know, he, in a sense, was that sense of anger and frustration about. From the way that he'd been treated on the page.
- [19:05]
A
Did he ever give any thought to using an SAS or an SBS character versus an American military?
- [19:13]
B
Well, he did, but ultimately, because he realized he was heading towards that kind of knight errant archetype, what you really need for that to work is a kind of huge, broad canvas you need. So I guess he could have had a. A SAS guy who happened to wind up in the States, but he really felt that the bait, you know, once or twice over the series reach has been in other countries, but virtually every book has been in the States.
- [19:38]
A
Yeah.
- [19:38]
B
Because you need that breadth, you know, you need that almost like a Wild west element to the background of the stories.
- [19:45]
A
Yeah, that's interesting. I wonder. I'm sure it would have done really well in Europe with an SAS SBS background. I wonder if it would have caught fire the way it did in the US or if it actually. Because those. Those guys are amazing.
- [19:57]
B
Yeah.
- [19:57]
A
But I wonder if it would have gone over the head of the American reader, especially at that time, because it wasn't the era that he's been at this for, I mean, a couple decades.
- [20:04]
B
Right. He has. And the thing is that Sam also, you know, like I was saying, he was trying to avoid doing what. What other people were doing.
- [20:09]
A
Yeah.
- [20:09]
B
There was that time, you know, post first Gulf War, where you had people like Andy McNabb who'd come through Chris Ryan, people, you know, from. From that project. Okay. Yeah. And so there were some people who'd done that for real out there writing books. So, you know, it didn't seem like a wise move to be doing something that was too similar to what they were doing.
- [20:32]
A
That's fair enough. Yeah. I mean, that's some good thought process going into that. So then when did you two start working together and collaborating on the series?
- [20:39]
B
Well, that's actually quite a hard question to answer because formally we did it. We started in 2019 when we were. We started writing the Sentinel, which is the first one that we did together, but in a way, we were working on it. We were involved with it together right from the beginning because when he wrote that first book, Killing Floor, and, you know, he needed this to work because this is how he was going to feed his family. I had a pretty decent job in the telecom industry, but he, you know, he knew that a. I was the only person that he knew that read thrillers the same way that he did. And also that would tell him the truth. Because, you know, all the time you get people sending you manuscripts and saying, hey, could you read my book and tell me if it's any good? And the worst thing that you can do is tell. Is tell somebody it's good. When it isn't, you're not. You know, you kind of. There's a bit of an instinct to sort of not be horrible to somebody and say it's tough.
- [21:39]
A
You feel like you're throwing water. Not that people are sending me manual scripts to read, but I can. I understand. It's almost like when your kids, like, hey, dad, rethink.
- [21:46]
B
Exactly. You feel like you should say something nice. But he knew that I wouldn't. He knew that if it was bad, I would tell him it was bad so that he wouldn't waste his time.
- [21:56]
A
You have to have those people in your life. Advice for anybody listening, because I've made this mistake. If you are in a room and everybody is telling you what you're doing is amazing. Oh, you are in the wrong room.
- [22:08]
B
Yeah. You're listening to the wrong people.
- [22:09]
A
Yes.
- [22:09]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [22:10]
A
Catastrophe is around the corner.
- [22:11]
B
It is. So, yeah. So he sent me that first manuscript to read to tell him is it good or not? And, God, that was a terrifying experience because I was thinking, what if it is no good? You know, I'm gonna have to tell him. And I wasn't looking forward to that at all. But luckily it was fantastic. So I didn't need. Didn't need to worry. But from that day onwards, we were always talking about Reacher. You know, I would go to all of his events, we would hang out together a lot. We were always talking about Reacher almost to the point where we were worried that if a psychiatrist came by and heard us talking about this invisible person, you know, they would be worried about us. And so for years and years and years, just for fun, we would be talking about Reacher. Daydreaming. What would he do next? What would he think about this? What would he do about that? And so, in a way, you know, there was a sort of 25 year apprenticeship, but informal, just for fun. And then the thing that really changed when we were working on the Sentinel was that as well as just getting around to sit around and talk, I then had to write it down at the end of the day. So it was actually a very, very natural thing. And I feel like I was involved from day one.
- [23:23]
A
You mentioned daydreaming and Is that almost a prerequisite for that many Reacher books that have come out, just kind of constantly thinking in somebody else's shoes?
- [23:35]
B
I think it is. And I think it is not necessarily even a long running series like Reacher, any kind of fiction. I think it comes from that kind of weird curiosity that almost expands beyond curiosity. That kind of feeling of, well, what if, you know, you know, everywhere you go, you look around and you know, we're in a room here with a whole bunch of cameras. So. Well, what if. What if those cameras were used for spying on somebody? What if they were, you know what. Other things.
- [24:02]
A
Horrible. Because they're in plain sight.
- [24:03]
B
Yeah, you know, that's. That's the sort of mindset, you know. I remember years ago and I used to live in Chicago and I was with my wife in a bar. We were waiting for a friend to turn up and looked round. I saw somebody coming. I looked to see if it was this person, but it wasn't. It was a woman arriving dressed in a smart business suit. She had a large purse with her with a big manila envelope sticking out of it. And she went and joined three other people at a table. And I was thinking, okay, so who is she? Who is she meeting? What does she have in that envelope? Is she going to give it to one of those people? Is one of those people going to steal it? What is in it? And you're just constantly thinking of all these. Just all of these alternative realities, I guess.
- [24:47]
A
Yeah, there are a lot of them for sure. How much? So you lived in the US for a bit.
- [24:53]
B
Yeah.
- [24:53]
A
And you. Do you still live in Wyoming from time to time?
- [24:55]
B
Oh yeah, I live. We were in Chicago for about 10 years and now we're in Wyoming.
- [25:00]
A
Yeah, basically the same.
- [25:01]
B
Basically the same. Very similar. Just as windy. Yeah.
- [25:05]
A
But then you also go back and forth. Your brother still lives overseas, correct?
- [25:08]
B
Well, he had been in the States for a long time, but he has recently moved back to the uk.
- [25:13]
A
Did it have something to do with the presidential election?
- [25:16]
B
It's possible. That was a factor.
- [25:19]
A
It is an interesting time in the US man. I think a lot of people that don't live in the US probably if all they see is what's social optics and wave tops. I think it's easy to develop a sense of the US that I honestly don't feel when I live in my day to day and I've had this. I have this conversation, I'll have it with Michael, I have it with guests. The jarring juxtaposition between what I see Online. And what I see in everyday life, granted, where we live in Kalispell is. It's kind of bespoke, it's small, it's rural.
- [25:59]
B
Right.
- [25:59]
A
There's less people. It's certainly not Chicago by any. Actually, you know exactly what I'm talking about. It's like Wyoming, depending on where you live of. It's salt of the earth. People that don't spend their time arguing about the stuff that happens online. And I think most Americans are like that. But the incredibly vocal minority, man, they paint with a big brush. And I worry that people are getting a bad perception of what the US is. And don't get me wrong, we got some colorful apples.
- [26:26]
B
But I think it goes back to what we were saying at the beginning. Less time looking at screens and more time talking to people, then you can see what you have in common rather than what you have that might divide you. There was a great experiment they did in Scandinavia a few years ago where somebody, some TV company, they got a whole bunch of people from different. If you kind of looked at the statistics that appeared to come from different group, different social groupings that would probably be opposed to one another on certain issues. So they got them all together in a room, 20 odd people, and they started out asking questions and asking people to group together based on their respons responses to these questions. And what they showed was that depending on the questions you ask, you can get a completely different result.
- [27:10]
A
Oh, for sure.
- [27:11]
B
So, you know, they started out and.
- [27:12]
A
How you ask it.
- [27:13]
B
Yeah, yeah. They started out asking one set of questions which had people divided, you know, into different camps. Then they asked different questions, and all of a sudden everybody's coming back together again. And so it really depends on are you looking to find those things that unify people or are you looking to have them divided? Because if you want to generate support, you know, a good way to do that is to get people angry and to get them scared.
- [27:36]
A
Yeah.
- [27:36]
B
And constantly feed them a diet of things that feed those emotions. I was reading a thing by someone who was involved in Richard Nixon's campaign back in the 70s, and he was talking about the fact that if you want to engage with people intellectually, that's quite difficult because, you know, that involves effort and time. But if you want to engage with them emotionally. That's right. On the surface, it's really easy to do so. It's much, much easier to make people feel than it is to make them think.
- [28:05]
A
God, that ties right into the screens too. I try to always conduct myself online. I Use the elevator principle is what I call it. I don't say anything to somebody that I wouldn't say if I was locked in an elevator with them. Which not everybody uses that philosophy. We'll just leave it at that. But if you look at those platforms, it's designed for short emotional reactions because you can try to have a conversation on the platforms and they act the platform and I don't know if it's by design is clunky in your ability to go back and forth and actually communicate something that is intellectual in nature.
- [28:39]
B
Yeah, there's no nuance whatsoever. No, but I always think of it rather than the elevator principle. I think of it more as the, the pub principle, you know, like an English pub. Because people have lot. You know, there are certain things that you just knew growing up that if you're in a, in a pub, in a bar, you just don't say, are.
- [28:55]
A
You gonna get smacked?
- [28:56]
B
You get punched in. And people have lost that, you know, because they know they're sitting in their mother's basement, you know, cranking out all kinds of hateful nonsense on, on the Internet. Never have to look someone in the eye and say, yeah, but I also.
- [29:09]
A
Don'T think that person is very happy either. And I don't, I don't wish that existence on anyone. I. The hatred, it seems. Well, and we have a kind of a negativity bias as well from, you know, evolution and probably paying attention to like you were saying before the line, probably a good idea to have a negative association with that. And I will catch this sometimes too. I mean, I know your guys books get reviewed. It's interesting. You'll have 99 great comments and one negative. And most of your energy is on the 1 versus the 99 sucks.
- [29:38]
B
Yeah. And there's a strange mentality about, you know, the people. I remember years ago, you know, if I watch something on, I love to find a new series to watch on tv and I love to read the trivia. You know, if you go on IMDb, you can read all. I love reading all the backgrounds of that kind of stuff. And of course you get viewer comments, viewer feed reviews and so on. There was some show I was watching where somebody had written a review and he said that he'd created this account on IMDb especially so that he could leave this review. And he watched the entire season of this show specifically so that he could say how much he hated it and how awful he thought it was, but was committed. Yeah, I was thinking, mate, there are so many TV shows, why don't you just watch something else? Yeah. Find something you do like or the people.
- [30:22]
A
Another one I saw, actually, this happened to Jack Carr, a friend of mine who writes thriller novels as well. His book went on sale and there was a negative review within minutes. I hated your book, Jack. I was like, how? Did you read it?
- [30:35]
B
Yeah, no, I know. Jack's a friend of Jack, too. And. Yeah, no, I mean, you get that on some platforms more than others. There are certain platforms out there that. I had another friend who. He had a book, it was something like six months out from being published, and people were really negative reviews because it was historical fiction about a particular person who people decided that they didn't like the central character, so they were leaving negative reviews. And he was thinking, well, no one has read this book yet. It isn't even finished, and you're leaving these negative reviews. And the platform refused to take them down because they were saying anything that promotes discussion or debate is legitimate. But the thing is, it can kill a book. You get too much negative. Too many people jumping on early with negative reviews views.
- [31:25]
A
It ties right into that emotional versus intellectual, because emotionally you see that and it kind of pisses you off. But then I'll take a step back and intellectually ask myself, what's going on in that person's life, where that is what they wanted to devote their time to. And then I start like, are you okay? I wish I could talk to you. What's going on? Can I help you in any way?
- [31:45]
B
Yeah. Because there clearly is something in there, isn't there?
- [31:48]
A
I. I mean, I was listening to a Joe Rogan podcast. He had Ethan Hawk on the other day, and they were talking about. He was talking about reviews of his films, and he. Ethan was. I'm paraphrasing wildly. Basically, I would like to say I don't pay attention to them, but they. But they hurt. And Joe was just telling him, like, hey, man, Michael Jordan isn't online leaving bad reviews. People that are wildly successful or that you would want to emulate your life with, they're not the one. Those that are out there, they're leaving those bad reviews. So, you know, unless it's probably somebody that you would want to switch your life with or you have an immense amount of respect for, you know, take it with a grain of salt.
- [32:27]
B
Yeah, no, that's a very good. That's a very good perspective.
- [32:29]
A
It's tough, though, because you have access to all kinds of people with the Internet. Not only do you have access to them, they have access to you, if you chose to go into the public spectrum.
- [32:38]
B
Yeah, it's true.
- [32:39]
A
Yeah.
- [32:39]
B
And, you know, it's one of those things that, you know, the front of your brain says, yes, that's a good idea, that's the way you should do it. But, you know, easier said than done. Yeah. Yeah.
- [32:47]
A
After few beers and you're sitting there with your thumbs out, you got them nice and stretched out, it's time to go warfare type.
- [32:52]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [32:52]
A
It's not great. It's not great. Have you watched, speaking of series, the Reacher series on, I believe it's Amazon.
- [33:00]
B
I have watched. Indeed.
- [33:01]
A
What are your thoughts?
- [33:02]
B
I think they've done a fantastic job.
- [33:04]
A
They could have picked a bigger guy.
- [33:05]
B
Well, you know, maybe they could stretch it out a little bit more.
- [33:09]
A
Yeah, well, I was just. I mean, for people who don't know this, there's been a couple movies, the star of which was Tom Cruise. And. And I'll just let them Google Tom Cruise's height. It's not. It's Alan. What's his last name? Richson.
- [33:20]
B
Richardson Richson.
- [33:21]
A
Richson. Yeah. Let's just say that Tom and Alan are not. They're both Homo sapiens, but they're very different expressions of Homo sapiens. You could not have found a different visible and physical actor to play that role.
- [33:36]
B
Yeah.
- [33:37]
A
You think they nailed it, though?
- [33:38]
B
I think they did. And I think, you know, I think that in terms of the movies, I think Tom Cruise did an amazing job of capturing the character of Reacher. Yeah. You know, he's an incredibly dedicated storyteller and he, you know, went all out to try to capture the kind of world weary. I'm not looking for trouble, but if you start it, I will finish it. You know, he captured the inner part of Reacher very, very well. But really, there was unfortunately no getting away from the external part of it. You know, the idea that Lee had at the beginning, which was that it was if Reacher. If you were in a bar and Reacher walked in, there'd be a momentary silence and people would be looking to see where the exit was. And there was. That wasn't there. And there's nothing that could be done about that. But with Alan, he certainly. But the other thing about it is that there's a huge difference in terms of the medium between. Oh, yes, streaming television and movies. Because with a movie, by the time you take off the beginning and the end stuff, you've got about 90 minutes.
- [34:43]
A
Of using two of the probably 10 episodes they did on Amazon in first season.
- [34:47]
B
Exactly. And so when you can take the time you can tell the story properly. When with Reacher in particular, that's really important because Reacher is always presented with a puzzle that seems insoluble at the beginning. And he has to peel it back, layer and layer, like peeling the layers off an onion until he gets to the center. And what you hear readers say often is that they love. They call it. They think. Call it thinking. Along with Reacher, they want, oh, this is impossible. And then step by step by step, Reacher leads them to the conclusion which if you do it right, is simultaneously a surprise but also inevitable. And you don't have time to do that in a movie. So that to me came over in the movies as a little cartoonish because he went too quickly from. Here's a terrible problem. Where can the thing be hidden in this room? Oh, look, it must be under your shirt. There it is.
- [35:41]
A
That's the limitations of the time, like you said.
- [35:44]
B
Exactly. But on some streaming tv, you have all the time you need. And what it means is you can explore everything. You can explore the quiet bits as well as the loud bits. You can have the slow parts as well as the. And the thing is, if you want there to be some parts that are really, really fast, it can't all be fast. If everything is fast, then nothing is. You need the slow parts as well to contrast. And you can do that with streaming TV because you have the time. So if you combine the benefit of having all of that time with. With somebody who embodies the physicality of the character like Alan does, I think it's a winning formula.
- [36:20]
A
Yeah. How do you guys do that? The puzzle? I find one of the reasons I like to grab the books when I travel is, I guess I would describe it a little bit like you did thinking along with Reacher. It's this willingness to kind of just engage in the story and just be a participant. And it's just great entertainment.
- [36:39]
B
Right.
- [36:39]
A
You're just sitting there and you're. Your time passes faster. And I will agree there's problems. And this is not just this series as well, but books, nonfictions, books that you kind of get tied into. There's always a left that you didn't see coming or right or something at the end. How do you do that? Do you lay all of that out before you guys start writing? Like, so the book in front of us is exit strategy. So somebody else on the plane reading it. By the way, when I was coming home, I got home yesterday, I think, but I was like, okay, we're doing good. I didn't tell Them that you were coming up and, you know, didn't want paparazzi around. But how do you, how do you do that?
- [37:14]
B
Well, some people do lay it all out in advance and we're talking like.
- [37:18]
A
Notes and they're literally. Or whatever medium they want. They're just drawing beginning to end.
- [37:23]
B
Yeah, I mean, you know, you could have 10 authors in the room and they'll give you 11 answers. But you know, I have friends. Some people will do it with post it notes that they stick all over the wall. You know, different colors for different aspects of the story. Some people would do it on spreadsheets. Some people do it on those old index cards that.
- [37:40]
A
What do they generally start with? Because there's got to be a first one. And I'm sure that varies as well.
- [37:44]
B
Yeah, well, some people don't even write the book in chronological order. Some people will start at the end or start with a key scene in the middle. But Lee and I don't do that. We feel that you've got to. It works for us to do it. You just, just start at the beginning and then without any real plan. What. What you need.
- [38:05]
A
What.
- [38:06]
B
Yeah, it's true. Well, what we do again and you know, I don't want it to sound sort of pretentious or whatever, but you know, at the beginning you, you sort of start off by, by kind of what you, you, you try to feel the mood of the book. What do you want? The. If, if it was music, it would be kind of what key is this in? Is it upbeat? Is it, is it somber? Is it triumphant? Is it, you know, in terms of the books, it's typically. Is it going to be kind of one of the claustrophobic ones where it's in a small town and you're in the same place all along and everything is all there crushed in together? Or is it one of the ones in a city where they're zooming around to different locations? That's kind of what you start off with. You start off with that feeling, then you try to get from that feeling to some kind of opening scene. And probably the best, the easiest example of that for me would be the second one we did together, which was better off Dead, where for some reason I just had this picture in my head of a big expanse of desert with the only living thing you could see was one single tree and a vehicle had crashed into that tree. That just came into my head. That is how this book is going to open. Because I think the way that a thriller becomes really, really powerful is if you either ask or you imply a question at the beginning, because people are just, for whatever reason, they're hardwired. If you ask them a question, they want to find out the answer. And so that means in a book, they have to keep turning the pages until they find that answer. And so, you know, a vehicle has crashed in other one tree. That's the only thing that you can say, well, how was it an accident? Why was it on purpose? Yeah, why? Who did it? What? You know, you've got to find out. And so you start off. Off with a starting point, and then you just. You work on that scene till you're happy with it. And then you think, okay, what happens next? What does Reacher do? What do the bad guys do? And, you know, you've probably got a sense in your mind of what the bad guys are going to be up to in general. It doesn't have to be totally specific, but somewhere, you know, you're going to have. In this book, for example, you know, I knew exactly what, what. What kind of thing I wanted the bad guys, you know, the. The scheme that they were up to. And part of that was because, you know, this is the 30th in the series. So, you know, I felt a real responsibility. You know, it's a big. It's a big landmark, a big milestone. And so I really wanted to do it justice. So I wanted the villain to be particularly nasty. And, you know, they've been physically nasty villains before, you know, like in Persuader with Big Paulie, you know, that everybody hated. You know, you had, Had. You've had villains that are horrible from a physical standpoint. This is what I wanted it to be. Just the scheme, you know, the thing that he was doing to be so violent, so repellent that, you know, people would just be dying for Reacher to sort the guy out. And so, you know, I did have a good sense of what the villain was up to, but not exactly how all of the pieces were going to fit together. That is something that we work out as we go along.
- [41:12]
A
And then how do you. I would say in all of the books that I've read, like you described this surprise you didn't know is coming. How do you get to that? Are you intentionally thinking, like, we have to do something that is divergent from the story? Like, is that part of the recipe of what makes a thriller book like this work? And then how do you decide when and where to put that in there?
- [41:32]
B
Yeah, no, that's a great question. And I think, yeah, absolutely. You are Aware that there are certain things that are. That people.
- [41:37]
A
There has to be a surprise, essentially.
- [41:39]
B
There has to be. It's a bit like. I just. I. Lee described it one time as, you know, if you watch the Winter Olympics, there's always like an ice dancing contest.
- [41:47]
A
I do watch the Winter Olympics, but I'm not gonna lie, I don't watch that part. I like the downhill skiing where they go fast.
- [41:52]
B
Yeah, well, it's, you know, it's just a thing where you've got two people dancing.
- [41:55]
A
Oh, I get it.
- [41:56]
B
Yeah. And there are certain. Within their routine, you know, they've got a two minute routine or whatever, and there are certain moves that they must execute. And the skill is combining those moves in a way that people haven't seen before. So because you've got the technical merit and the artistic merit, so you've got to have certain moves, but you've got to combine them in a new and interesting way. And it's kind of like that with a thriller. There are certain things in there. There's got to be surprises, they've got to be twists, they've got to be things that you didn't see coming. So, you know, those things have to be in. But in order to decide which things and how to combine them. And when I think that really just comes down to instinct because every author is first and foremost a reader. You know, we have spent decades reading thousands of books and thrillers and different, different kinds of things. And you absorb. You absorb that kind of, you know, subliminally. It's all there in the back of your mind. And that's another reason for not planning it too deliberately. Because as you're writing, you just feel, okay, now is the time to end the chapter. Here is the cliffhanger. This is the thing that we're gonna lead with. And then you suddenly think. You have these wonderful days where you just think, oh, yeah, this could happen.
- [43:09]
A
Back to the imagination.
- [43:11]
B
Yeah. And I like not planning it too carefully because another thing, back to better off dead. There was a thing where a particular episode. Reacher was having to investigate something. There was some information he needed. And he had reason to believe it was in this particular building that was kind of remote and. And distant. And initially I was thinking, well, he'll be very kind of forensic. He'll break in and he'll, you know, go through it like he was a detective. And. But then when it came time to actually write that scene, I thought, now he wouldn't do that at this point. He would be really pissed off. He would burn the place down. That's what he would do. So that's what. That's what we had him do. Yeah. And, you know, you. You don't want to be that. That wasn't planned. That wasn't expected. It just felt right at the time.
- [43:54]
A
How do you decide with your brother who's gonna write what part? How do you guys write collaboratively?
- [43:58]
B
Well, you know, these days, he's pretty much stepped back from. From the writing now.
- [44:02]
A
Unbelievable.
- [44:03]
B
Yeah, but what?
- [44:04]
A
30 is enough for him.
- [44:05]
B
I know, I know.
- [44:06]
A
He's like a lazy ass.
- [44:07]
B
He's a slacker.
- [44:10]
A
But when you guys did write collaborative, how would you do it?
- [44:12]
B
It was. It just. We were very relieved. It just sort of came naturally, you know, we really didn't know how it would work because would one jump ahead?
- [44:19]
A
Do you guys work on the same thing or where both could be true?
- [44:22]
B
Obviously, we'd work on the same thing. We would talk about it and decide what was gonna happen. We had to work out, unfortunately, we had to kind of figure out two ways of working together, because we started in September 19th, and we worked up until that Christmas. And Lee's house is three miles from mine in Wyoming, so next. But one neighbor's. So he would just come over to my place. We'd go down in my office in the basement, walk out, basement with a nice deck and everything. So we'd sit, have a cup of coffee, talk about the football and then.
- [44:52]
A
You mean soccer, don't you?
- [44:56]
B
We do, yeah. So, you know, we'd have a. You know, we'd chat about all that stuff, and then we get to talking about what would Reacher do next? And, you know, end of the. You know, he'd go home at some point, I'd type it all up, and then we'd. The next day look at what we'd done. And that was really, really fun because being able to do this for a living is just such a wonderful privilege. And getting to do it with your brother, even better.
- [45:22]
A
Do you know of any other authors that have paired up, like, it's got to be a handful at most?
- [45:25]
B
Very few. And if you've had occasional sort of, you know, parent and child. Yeah, a few siblings. I think a few siblings have done it too.
- [45:34]
A
But didn't Clancy do that a little bit?
- [45:35]
B
He did, but I don't think. I'm not sure that it was with relatives. I think it was with people that he chose to.
- [45:40]
A
Oh, that's right. Yeah. He started co authoring. Yeah. But I don't think it was another Clancy.
- [45:45]
B
And so it was. It was really, really fun to do that. But then, you know, Covid came along and we'd been traveling over Christmas and into January, and we wound up marooned in different places, so we couldn't physically get together. So we had to just talk on the phone and then email the document back and forth. And what we discovered was, on the one hand, it was much less fun because it's much nicer to actually hang out in person. As we were saying at the beginning, much better.
- [46:13]
A
This is so much better than a zoom screen.
- [46:14]
B
But. But the other thing was that you can't help it. Imagine if we were writing together and, you know, we talked about some stuff, we'd gone home, I'd written it up. When we get back together again, you just can't help it. You hand over the pages and you say, so this is why I've done it this way. And this is how it links to what we had before. And this is where it's going to go next. And, you know, and then you can't unhear that when you're reading it. And the person on the plane who's reading the book, they don't have you, you on their shoulder whispering into your ear at all? No, they only have the words on the page. They either have to be good, they have to be good enough, and they either are or they're not. And what we found was that simply emailing the document cold back and forth was much more. It was less fun, but it was more efficient.
- [47:01]
A
You were more of a true reader.
- [47:02]
B
Because we had the same experience. And right away you could see whether it was working or not. And if it wasn't, you could fix it that much quicker. So we stuck to that method even after. After Covid had receded and we could theoretically have got together in person again. We thought, we know that this other method works better, so we'd better stick to it.
- [47:23]
A
Huh? Yeah. That is interesting. Yeah. Less direct collaboration in person, but you are definitely going to get more of a reader's experience if you are just reading it. Absence the comment or absent the commentary.
- [47:33]
B
Yeah, for sure.
- [47:35]
A
So how long then, when you guys are working well together? How many. I think I looked at this. 200. What? 280. 80 pages? Maybe something like that. 300 towards the end. How long would it take you to get the rough architecture of it down where you. Then at that point, you're just polishing.
- [47:51]
B
Yeah, I mean, it usually takes for us, because of not doing all of that planning in advance, because of doing the planning in bits as we go. You know, most authors sort of look at word count per day and stuff like that, and ours would seem relatively slow because wind not. We're having to stop and think about what happens next. It will probably be in the region of 80 or 90 working days to get the.
- [48:16]
A
I mean, so that'd be four months if you took weekends off, five if you took, you know, worked a four day a week. That's not bad.
- [48:21]
B
Yeah.
- [48:21]
A
Do you guys feel a lot of pressure, given that it is the 30th? I mean, can you feel at this point, obviously your publisher is pretty sure you have an idea of what you're doing, you know, dossier of work behind you, so they probably, I would imagine, leave you alone. But do you just feel pressure because of the size of the series and not obviously only the written word aspect of that, but there's been the movies and there's now the streaming.
- [48:44]
B
Yeah. And the audiobooks too.
- [48:47]
A
Who reads the audiobooks in the.
- [48:48]
B
In the United States? It's a guy called Scott Brick.
- [48:51]
A
Are you telling me you have a different reader for Europe and the uk?
- [48:54]
B
The uk we do, yeah.
- [48:56]
A
Unbelievable. But are guys not good enough for you?
- [49:01]
B
So. But I mean, it's such an amazing skill to do the audio narration. I just cannot get my head around how they managed to, you know, they.
- [49:10]
A
Are artists in and of themselves.
- [49:11]
B
They are, they are, yeah. And so they do an amazing job. But. And, you know, I think it's. I think it's a great way to, to enjoy the stories too. Because if you think back to where stories came from, you know, would have been, you know, people sitting around a campfire, you know, one person would be, you know, would be. Would be telling that, you know, the equivalent of the podcaster would be they're telling the story.
- [49:34]
A
Yeah, for sure.
- [49:35]
B
Yeah.
- [49:36]
A
So you feel the pressure. It seems like at this point, though, it would be internally derived as opposed to externally.
- [49:42]
B
Yeah, it is, absolutely. And I mean, there's no pressure that comes anywhere close to the pressure you put on yourself. And I think that if you ever get to the stage that you think that you've got it nailed and that you know what you're doing, I think you've probably lost it at that point. I think you have to always be trying to do it better than you've ever done it before, and you've always got to be trying to push every aspect of it further forward. And, you know, the pressure, if there is external pressure that comes from the readers, you know, the fundamental bargain that we have that, you know, they will pay their hard earned money to buy the book and we will provide them with the very, very, very best book that we can possibly produce. So that is where the pressure comes from. Knowing the expectation from the readers. And then like we were saying, I was the very first Reacher fan, you know, so I know what that is like. I know what it's like to wait a year, looking forward to the next installment, the next time you get to spend time with Reacher and find out what he's been up to and what's what, what, you know, what adventure he's involved with now. So I understand that. And that is where, you know that, that, that the overarching desire is to put a book into people's hands that they will. They will love to read.
- [51:00]
A
Is that what you aim for? Once per year, a release?
- [51:02]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [51:03]
A
I mean, so there's some pressure there a little bit. I mean, that's going to change what you do with your time, right? You got to allocate. I've watched it happen with Jack. Let's just say he had a little bit more free time before he started writing.
- [51:15]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [51:17]
A
I've seen him far less since he became. I'm so happy for his success.
- [51:23]
B
It's been phenomenal.
- [51:24]
A
Yeah, he was real smart. He kept his mouth shut in the teams about wanting to be an author. He would have been made fun of appropriately, of course, but nobody would have tried to stop him. But he. Yeah, he would have taken some heavies for that one. But it's been awesome to see. But then you watch, okay, it gets picked up by. I think his was Amazon as well too, or the rights, you know, were bought by Chris. And next thing you know, he's on set and then he's advising and that's a couple months. And he's like, okay, I'd like to come up and do a podcast, but yeah, I am a month behind on this draft and I need to edit and so, I mean, there's pressure there. That's like. Almost seems like it's a guillotine. It almost gets his neck and then they pull the string and it goes back up and it almost gets his neck.
- [52:04]
B
Yeah, well, you know, we're fortunate in that respect because, you know, Lee is. Lee has taken on the work that goes along with the tv. Yeah. So I only have the books to concentrate on, which is luxury from my point of view. And it's great from him too, because he started out in TV all those years ago, so it's really nice for him that he's got kind of gone full circle now. And most of his time is back. Is back doing that, plus a couple of other things. You know, one of the reasons he's back in the UK is he's become involved with a couple of really important projects over there. One of them is to do with prison literacy.
- [52:41]
A
Really?
- [52:41]
B
Yeah. Because, you know, without looking at it in a kind of, you know, bleeding heart type way, you know, because a lot of people in jail are there because they deserve to be. But there are some people who are there because they made bad choices, they got into bad situations, and there is a chance for them to turn it around and do something productive and contribute with their lives. And a lot of research has shown that if they can become more involved in reading and potentially writing and channeling things in a creative way, the likelihood of reoffending drops helps enormously. So there are, you know, there's a subset of people who can really benefit from. From these literacy programs. So he has become very involved with that.
- [53:29]
A
That's awesome. Yeah. I'm. I am grateful that I have not been solely judged by my mistakes in life. I haven't crossed the line that doing something that would end, you know, terminate me being in prison. But if I were to do something like that and had the opportunity to get out, I would like to see people who have that opportunity to do everything they can to try to ensure that they have the tools needed to not end up back in there. Some people are just broken.
- [53:52]
B
Yeah.
- [53:52]
A
And for them, maybe, you know, the Hannibal actors. Let's go ahead and weld that door shut, you know.
- [53:57]
B
Yeah.
- [53:57]
A
Key.
- [53:58]
B
What?
- [53:58]
A
Oh, sorry. Oh, there was no spare. Yeah, let's just go ahead and weld that door shut. But for. For people who have the opportunity to get out, I mean, they're going to have a hard enough road as it is.
- [54:07]
B
Yeah.
- [54:07]
A
Just. You want to talk about pressure of the optic on that person here in the US if it raises to a felony, I mean, that changes your life. Life drastically. To prevent you from getting jobs. You can't own a firearm. Which is, you know, that's a conversation in the US in and of itself. But yeah, I would. I'm glad that those tools exist and I am very, very thankful that I am not judged solely on my mistakes. Because it's. It's. That's a rough look.
- [54:31]
B
It is, it is. But you know, this is kind of slightly off topic, but in the uk, the. There's a guy called Lord Timson who run. He's in. I think he's one of the. I don't know if he's prisons minister now, he's certainly one of the ministers. Not out of touch with exactly what role he has, but his family runs a. If you live in the uk, you've seen their stores. They do key cutting, shoe repairs, you know, they're at train stations, supermarkets. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [55:01]
A
Broad range of offerings.
- [55:02]
B
Yeah. And they specifically try to give employment to people who are coming out of the justice system so that they have that opportunity to find a productive path rather than. Than just being cut adrift and finding themselves back on a really bad path.
- [55:18]
A
Life is hard enough as it is. Yeah, for sure. That's awesome. When are you guys gonna kill Reacher?
- [55:24]
B
Well, that. In a way.
- [55:26]
A
Let's get to the brass tacks here.
- [55:28]
B
That is down to you and it's down to everybody listening to this podcast, because if we have our way, we will keep him going forever.
- [55:35]
A
Well, how old is he in the books now? Well, he doesn't ever really say, does he?
- [55:39]
B
Well, well, not specifically, but if you. There are one or two in a couple of the books. There are references that you can pick up on that one.
- [55:46]
A
Yeah, he's been out for a certain amount of time or his distance from service, things like that. But you guys have a choice. I mean, you're the creators of the universe. So you could do multiple books where he's in the same year or the next Journey down the. You know, his favorite travel, the Greyhound bus.
- [56:00]
B
Yeah. Or we can go back and do prequels when he's still in the Army.
- [56:03]
A
It's a bitch. I hadn't even thought about that. Okay. He's never gonna die.
- [56:05]
B
Yeah, well, if.
- [56:06]
A
Even if he dies, you could do a prequel.
- [56:07]
B
Yeah, but, you know, the thing about it is, you know, it all boils down to giving the readers what they want. And, you know, what?
- [56:15]
A
Is that what they want?
- [56:16]
B
Well, what we think, you know, again, you know, if we're wrong about this, you know, please let us know. But, you know, we could follow the. We know from one of the books. It does say which year Reacher was born, so we can figure out how technically old he would be. And so we could be very literal about that. And we could say, okay, so in the next book, you know, Reacher's going to be in line at the drugstore with his walking, you know, trying to get his arthritis medicine, you know, baby.
- [56:44]
A
Aspirin, thin, the blood out of touch.
- [56:46]
B
But, you know, is that what we want? Or do we want to see Reacher out There in the small town, coming across the bad guys, figuring out what they're up to and then killing everyone. I mean, what. What do people want? You know, and we're happy to give them what they want. And personally, I don't think the lining up in the drugstore is a very. Is a very fun story.
- [57:04]
A
Promised opening up to people's feedback is. You'll never get. Get a succinct answer because there would be a small group of people like, yep, drugstore. He needs to die in depends at a nursing home. But of course, he'd be running the nursing home or he'd be the muscle of the nursing home. The other one would be never die. I think I land on. It has to be a freak accident. He has to slip on a banana peel and crack his head.
- [57:26]
B
Well, you know, when, you know, when, when Lee was asked about, you know, why did he make the chain when he decided he wanted to step back, why did he decide to ask me to get involved rather than kill reach off? And he always. I remember going right back to the third book in the series because, you know, you write one book and it's a debut. You write another one and it's a sequel. You write a third one, and maybe the series has got legs, you know. And I remember at the launch event for that third book over in the uk, I was at the event, and a guy in the audience put his hand up at the end and asked, how many books are there going to be in this series? So. So, I mean, Lee obviously had no idea. It's not up to us. So he said, off the top of his head, 21. And, you know, it's partly just plucked out of the air and partly a nod to John D. McDonald, you know, who's a huge influence on Lee. And you could see people more or less doing the sums on their fingers, you know, so, okay, so there's been three. There's going to be 21 also probably.
- [58:26]
A
Seems unattainable when you're at three. 21. We'll deal with that 18 years from now.
- [58:30]
B
Yeah, exactly. Who can you put? Yeah, and so everyone was happy because there were plenty coming down the pipe. No need to worry. And every year at the launch, somebody asked that same question. And every year he would give the same answer, except that he started to embellish it a little bit. And what he would say would be that the 21st book was going to be called Die Lonely, and in it at the end, Reacher was going to bleed to death on the filthy bathroom floor. In a motel somewhere in the middle of nowhere were. And as you got closer to the 21st book, you could feel the temperature in the room drop. When he would say that, you know, the idea that there wasn't going to be Reacher anymore, people hated it. Yeah. And so, you know, Lee said to it when he, when he first set out, like I say, you know, we were all readers at heart. And one thing that he was very conscious of over the years would be that occasionally he would come across a series that, that he really, really loved. Not even necessarily a series, just a number of books by the same author. They might all be standalones and they would be brilliant at the beginning, but after a period of time, suddenly they'd drop off. You know, the guy would run out of steam or you'd get lazy, whatever it might be. And Lee always promised that he would never do that. He would never turn in a book that he felt was less than the best he could do. And he was hyper vigilant as a result. Every time he wrote a book, he was saying, saying, am I still on the right track? And he said that the 24th book, the last one that he did on his own Blue Moon, he said that there were maybe two days during the process, two days out of the 90 where he got up in the morning and wasn't enthusiastic to get stuck in. And he thought, okay, this is a warning sign. I'm not there yet, but it's coming.
- [60:13]
A
At least he caught it.
- [60:14]
B
Yeah. And so then he had to decide what to do. And he thought about killing Reach off. But then he remembered, you know, that palpable emotion that people. He would feel when he, when he talked about doing it. So instead he thought, okay, well, I'll talk to my brother. I'd already written nine books on my own by then.
- [60:32]
A
Yeah.
- [60:32]
B
And so, you know, it seemed like the natural way to keep Reacher going.
- [60:37]
A
When did exit strategy come out?
- [60:39]
B
It came out on. It was last. See, I think it was the beginning of November. It's either the end of October, beginning of November.
- [60:46]
A
So recently.
- [60:47]
B
Recently, yeah.
- [60:47]
A
Do you give yourself, yourself a breath and just let your brain de Reacher for a bit, or are you. Because. So I actually, of all things, wrote a book as well. It comes out in April. Non fiction. You want to talk about two years? Oh, yeah, it could have come out in 2024. And they said, yeah, we can do this, but if it's not a political book, you might as well throw this thing in the fire because nobody's going to read it. I'm like, listen, you guys know how to do this stuff. I don't. Today's episode is brought to you by Helix. This is continues to be the easiest ad read that I can do because I have been sleeping on one of these mattresses for somewhere between five to seven years. People are hesitant to order a mattress to their front door. I mean, it used to be you would go to a store, you would lay on mattresses, which is a little bit weird anyway because that's what a lot of people did. So you're laying on the same mattress. Totally digress. But now it's. We live in an Internet world and you can go online and you can ship something to your house and you don't know what to expect. Helix understands that, so they have a sleep quiz. I went through this sleep quiz and it asked you things like, do you sleep hot or cold? Do you sleep on your side, your stomach, your back? Are you heavier? Do you like a firmer or a softer mattress? And it works your way towards their suggestion. Now, when you pick that suggestion, it's going to show up at your house. It's going to come in a box that you're not going to think a mattress could fit in, but it will get a buddy, have them take it with you to where you're going to unpack it, the room it's going to come out of, then unpack the box. Because these things have the weight and density of a dying star. They're vacuum sealed, they're suc. And when you open that thing up, stand back. It's not like a jack o Lantern, but it does rapidly increase in size. You might ask yourself, what if I don't like the mattress? Cool. There's a 120 night sleep trial. If you head over to helixsleep.com ClearedHot right now, what you're gonna get is 27% off site wide. That's right, 27% off. And depending on the mattress that you order, that could be a substantial savings. Again, helixsleep.com this offer is exclusive for the listeners. If you are struggling to sleep. If you're ready to upgrade your mattress, I cannot recommend these enough back to the show. But what a process. The edits were insane. I thought I was done. And then they're like, hey, here's a legal review. Here's grammatical review. Which thanks, by the way, for that. Because I would look like a galactic moron if I didn't have those editorial reviews. I didn't realize that some words should always be pluralized. And I now know how to use a semicolon, but man, it was a bit. But I don't have any expectation of the next because it's not a part of the series by any stretch.
- [63:25]
B
So what is it about? Tell me.
- [63:30]
A
It's called Drown Proof, which is based off of an evolution that we did in SEAL training where your hands are tied behind your back and your feet are tied together and actually you're just bobbing up and down. The pictures look gnarly because it looks like you're drowning somebody. Ish. It's a one to one ratio. There's a student watching every student. There's instructors, there's doctors. Those aren't in the picture though, because that doesn't make it look as good. But what I realized somebody asked me this recently and I knew I need to have a good answer to this because I will get asked about what it is. I think people make the mistake of thinking that the experiences from that type of military career are out of their reach. And then therefore the lessons that you can learn from those experiences are not applicable to them. And I have found them to be be so wildly applicable in every aspect of my life. I think they have actually helped me more after the military. I'm not going to say they didn't. They probably kept me alive while I was in. But being able to figure out, how do I take this? Because as you mentioned before, there are people who come from such a narrow skill set job that you. It's like, okay, I'm ready to get out of the military. What's the civilian version of this job? And people are just going to laugh at you. What are you talking about? It doesn't exist. Exist. But I think that if people think that those experiences are just for an infinitely small group, I think that's a mistake. And for whatever reason, they will pay attention. It opens doors. The background opens doors. Why not try to take all those experiences that were immensely powerful for me and try to help somebody else with them? So that's the goal of the book is basically, it's almost all through the lens of my own mistakes. There's no war stories in it. What literally the first sentence is, hey, if you're looking for a book of war stories, you got the wrong one in your head hands. And trying to do something positive with it. I mean, that's, that's the overarching goal. And I don't know what makes a book economically successful, but if it helps people, then I'm. Then I'm happy. Honestly, that's it Yeah, I mean, I.
- [65:23]
B
Think that's the way to look at it. Because all the economic stuff is out of our hands.
- [65:27]
A
Yeah.
- [65:27]
B
But, you know, quite often at crime fiction festivals and things like that, a lot of people, I've had a lot of people come up and say that they have had a brother, father, uncle, you know, some relative who thought that they didn't like reading, wasn't interested in reading, and then they'd introduce them to Reacher and then that got them. That gave them the bug and that got them reading. And you know, the end of your career if you look back and say, well, you know, we made it so that people who didn't like reading before now do. I mean, that in itself is a.
- [65:59]
A
And you don't see that in your checking account. But I mean, think about the difference. Maybe if it's just an inquisitive in that person or they learned about something or found something, it changed, increased their vocabulary, which in, you know, they're at a bar and they need to talk to a woman and now they have, you know, a couple more syllables in their inventory. I mean, to me, I'm also, my theory is make no changes in your life. Like, oh, I got a book coming out. Time to buy a yacht. Which, Montana is not a great place to buy a yacht either. But how about we make no changes, we have no expectations, and if it works, cool. And if it doesn't, I don't care.
- [66:32]
B
Yeah, but at least you've done it.
- [66:34]
A
Yeah, yeah, but, but there's. I. I did it. Somebody else pitched the idea to me, but there is no pressure. Do you. I mean, are you already working on the next one or do you have a steam relief valve that you, at least for like a week, you put Reacher up on a shelf.
- [66:46]
B
Well, not so much Reacher, because, I mean, we've got to the point where he's just kind of with us all the time and you're always thinking about new stuff, but certainly in terms of the. The routine, you know, just not having to do. You know, every day, the closer you get to the deadline, the kind of. The more hours it tends to be. Just constantly you're planning your day around. Okay, so I've got to snatch something to eat, but then I've got to get back to my desk. Just not having to do that for a little while is really nice.
- [67:14]
A
Do you write to a word count or do you write until you feel like it's just kind of out of you for the day?
- [67:19]
B
Really? The second one, I mean, you've always Got to keep one eye on the word count and make sure that. That you're not going to be high and dry. But there's a real problem if all you're doing is looking at the number of words, because generally speaking, they're not going to be very good ones if all you're doing is trying to get to a certain number. And there's a way. You've got to trust yourself. If you're sitting down and there's a little voice in the back of your head saying, it's just not happening today. You've really got to. You've got to look at that and you've got to say, is that because you're just not. You're feeling lazy and you just have to push through, or is it actually telling you, no, don't do it today because you know, you're working with the wrong idea. You're going down a. And learning to trust that voice has been one of the hardest things. I remember when I was writing my first book. You know, I came. I studied out in theater, and so theater is really all about dialogue. So I love writing dialogue. Dialogue. And I knew that they. I finished at a certain point. You know, there's lots of tricks that people tell you. You know, people. People will say to you, never write until you're out of material, because then it's harder to pick up the next day, you know, stop when there's still a little bit left in the tank, because then you can get a running start the next day.
- [68:34]
A
That's a broad prescription, though.
- [68:36]
B
I. I even know some people who will stop mid sentence.
- [68:39]
A
What? Oh, because they don't want to jinx themselves or we'll leave it here. So I'm thinking about this until tomorrow.
- [68:45]
B
Well, now what they feel is the next day because. Because what you need is something to give you that push, you know? You know, inertia sets in, you know, when you sit down at the desk first thing in the day to start writing. If I don't do it myself, but people swear by it. You know, if you. If you stop mid sentence, then you read that sentence, and then you automatically just finish that sentence, and then you're moving, then you're up and running. But so I finished this particular day, and I knew that what I was going to be doing the next day was writing dialogue. So I was really. I was really looking forward to it. I was thinking, yeah, tomorrow's gonna be a great day. It's gonna be really fun. So I sit down the next morning, and I can't write a word. Cannot write a single word. So I'm frustrated. I'm wanting to beat my head on the desk. I'm thinking, why this should be the easiest day's work. This should be the most fun. Why can't I do it? So I got all. I got fed up. I went off to make a cup of coffee and it suddenly hit me. Me. The dialogue I was going to be writing all took place on the phone. And two or three days earlier, there'd been a scene where the hero lost his phone.
- [69:49]
A
That would make it hard.
- [69:50]
B
So how could he be having a conversation on the phone that he didn't have? And it was that little subconscious part of your mind.
- [69:56]
A
Oh, that locked you up.
- [69:57]
B
Yeah. That said, don't go down there because that's the wrong way. And then once I realized, I wrote a little extra scene where he went and, you know, stole a phone from someone, somebody. And then he could have the conversation and then it flowed. And I remember at that point thinking, yeah, this is so important because in future when you're stuck like that, you've really got to look at it and say, is this just because I need to push harder and just do it anyway? Or is this one of those times when your brain is saying to you, hold on because you're about to make a mistake?
- [70:27]
A
I think the longest I went without writing was two weeks. And I just, I would sit down. I'm like, not to day. But after that two weeks, I came back. And obviously your mind is subconsciously doing stuff. A lot of stuff had clicked together and I think I was probably able to do that two weeks worth in two or three days.
- [70:44]
B
Yeah.
- [70:44]
A
But I think if I had forced it. And again, it's not like I'm, you know, I'm not writing the Magna Carta here by any stretch of the imagination. But if I would have forced it, I don't think that would have been a good idea.
- [70:55]
B
No, it's often. Sometimes, sometimes it is. Sometimes you find that you. You in the morning, you're just feeling terrible and you just think, oh, I'm never going to be able to do anything. And somehow you. You produce something great. And it's one of the best days you can happen. But you do have to listen to yourself. If your brain is telling you to hold back, sometimes there's a good reason for that.
- [71:13]
A
So what's the key to dialogue? Because as you were saying, I was thinking, you know, non fiction versus fiction, non fiction. You probably end up quoting a lot of people or recounting or retelling dialogue that has already been had. That's pretty easy because you might even have it in the modern era. You could probably just transcribe it. You're talking about creating stuff between characters, playing tennis back and forth. What's the key?
- [71:35]
B
Well, it's a complete contradiction really, because everybody talks about loving to read realistic dialogue. And the dialogue. If you wrote realistic dialogue, it would be appalling because listen to how people speak. It's all full of ums and ah, yeah, tons of that stuff. It would be unreadable. So there's this very artificial form that you have to be able to create that is completely artificial and yet sounds when you see it on the page as if it is. As if it's real. And of course you want to add something to it discreetly that helps you to differentiate between the different characters because you know it's boring. If you had. Yes, he said, no, she said, are you sure? He said, you know, you want it to be that.
- [72:24]
A
It's a lot of he, they, she.
- [72:26]
B
Said, you want it to be that. You can tell from the way that it's constructed which character is saying it. So it just comes from experience, really. It's just something that you have to work on a lot and eventually, if you're lucky, it hangs together.
- [72:40]
A
Are you a trained writer? I mean, I know you're talking about coming up in tv. What was the impetus for your first. What was your first book?
- [72:46]
B
So, no, not, not trained in the slightest. I mean, I did do. When I went to university, I did English. I started out doing English literature, which was actually a huge mistake because when I was at high school, I went to a great high school and the teachers were fantastic, particularly the English teachers. And they would introduce you to all of this amazing literature, poetry, drama. You would read it and then in class you would talk about it and nothing was off limits. You could come up with the most outrageous interpretation as long as you could justify. And they would push you to back up what you were saying. And it just turned into. You'd look forward to it because it was just like verbal sparring. It would be a challenge. Can you defend this crazy position? And so when it was time to apply for university, that's what I wanted to do because I thought it would be bigger and better. And all my teachers said to me, no, Andrew, don't do English literature. Honestly, it's not your best subject. You should do something else. But I liked it the most and I didn't listen to them, which is Stupid. And so I went to do English literature because back then in England, it was a little bit different. I know that in the States, you typically apply to a school and then.
- [73:59]
A
You go, I didn't go to college, so I don't know.
- [74:01]
B
Okay, well, I didn't go.
- [74:02]
A
Michael, did you go to college? Just community college. So this is a house of learned dogs. Do you understand that? Movie reference.
- [74:09]
B
Yeah. Step brothers.
- [74:10]
A
Yes.
- [74:11]
B
Yeah. So. So, you know, from what I understand is, you know, you're typically at college in the States for a couple of years before you commit to a major. And then.
- [74:19]
A
I think so, yeah.
- [74:20]
B
Yeah. Whereas in the uk, effectively, you have to apply for that major upfront at what age? 18. And so, you know, the problem is, at 18, what do you really know? And so.
- [74:31]
A
Exactly. Jack shit.
- [74:32]
B
Yeah, I. So I applied for English literature, which I've been advised not to do. And. And it turns out to be absolutely horrible because instead of the teachers at high school who would encourage you to think for yourself, all the professors at the university are these internationally famous guys in their own fields. And if you come up with an idea that contradicts theirs, they don't see it as great. Here's an opportunity. Yeah. They see it as not only a challenge, but you being disrespectful. And I actually got kicked out of one of their classes once. We were talking about some obscure Shakespeare play, and the teacher had told us what he thought, and I came up with an alternative version, and he went crazy and he said to me, I am the world's leading authority on this subject, and I am telling you, this is how it is, and if you don't apologize, you can get out. So I got out. I hated doing it. But the problem was that. That at that time, it was very hard to switch major. Essentially, what you'd have to do would be leave and then start again the following year and dropping out in that way, our father was just. His mindset. He was former military. His mindset was, anything that even resembles giving up is completely unacceptable and cannot even be thought about.
- [76:01]
A
What if you were an alcoholic?
- [76:03]
B
Well, he was from Northern Ireland, too, so.
- [76:05]
A
Dad, I'm into heroin. Well, don't give up. Be the best you can be.
- [76:10]
B
That would have been. Yeah, that would have been a good argument for him, But. But being Irish, you'd have found a way to combine both sides, I'm sure. But he. So I couldn't drop out. That wasn't. That was just not. That was just not even possible. But you could broaden a Little bit. So I was able to kind of trade half the English literature for drama. And so by doing that, it meant that it got me involved in the drama and I absolutely, absolutely loved the drama. And I guess that was, that was really all about storytelling, isn't it? You know, and probably got introduced to.
- [76:42]
A
Some dialogue there as well.
- [76:43]
B
A little bit, yeah. Yeah.
- [76:44]
A
You know, it sucks to hear about the teachers there again, having no optic on higher education. My wife has multiple majors, mostly science background type stuff. I don't know what it's like in the uk, but in the us, Holy cow. I mean, you want to talk about saddling people with almost just crushing amounts of death debt at an early age that is hard to pay off. It's, it's tough. It's not that those degrees aren't valuable, but it comes at a cost, you know, and if you take the money, they'll give you as much as you possibly want and good luck getting rid of it. But I would like to believe that college or higher education is a meritocracy of the best idea. And it's this arena where you can throw things out. That's what I would want to experience personally as a student, not some authoritarian person saying it's either this way or that. I'm like, why? Yeah, why, why am I here then? I want to explore these ideas, not be told that this is the only way to do things. Because guess what, buddy? Every time anybody's ever told me that in my life, they've been wrong.
- [77:40]
B
Yeah. And you know, that's what. And I mean, obviously it's probably not that way in every university in the uk, but the one, you know, that's what I experienced. And that was, that was super disappointing because I had really thought it was going to, it was going to be like a, like a contest, you know, I'm horribly, disgustingly competitive. And if anything, if you can ever be involved with something that feels like, you know, a competition, you know, you've got your idea and you're pitting it against somebody else's idea. I love that. And I want my idea to come out on top. And if you're in an environment where it is structurally impossible for your idea to ever even be listened to, let alone alone to be, to be successful, then it's, it's just completely dissatisfying or.
- [78:24]
A
To be chastised for even having an idea.
- [78:26]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [78:27]
A
No, thank you.
- [78:28]
B
No. The people who did well in terms of the grades that they got were the ones who, I mean, in a way, you could say they were the smartest ones because they would read the professor's books ahead of time and then serve back up all those same ideas.
- [78:40]
A
Some people peak early in life though. I would rather be successful in a non academic academic setting solving the problems that I'm actually confronted with than an artificial academic setting where I can solve those concepts. But I'm not prepared for what happens afterwards.
- [78:55]
B
And I've, you know, also I'm, you know, I love, I love ideas, but I also, I love practical things. And that was why in a way, theater was such an attraction to me because I was never any good at acting whatsoever. I could never be on stage, but, but the writing was really, really fun. And then you have so many trades that go into it. You've got lighting, you've got sound, you've got rips, you've got set building, you've got costume, you've got all of these other things. And back in my day, sound was on quarter inch magnetic tape that you had to literally splice together. And if you were in the technical booth running the show, it was fabulous because at some point you knew that the tape was going to break. It was inevitable. And so then you were, you, you had that race against time. You know, could you, could you fix the duff joint it before the next sound cue? It was fabulous. You know, I love that kind of the practical side and then the pressure that went with it. Yeah, yeah.
- [79:56]
A
Didn't enjoy the practice of acting though.
- [79:59]
B
No, it, for me, acting was very, very like soccer, you know, in that I would have loved, loved more than anything to be really good at either one of those things. And there was this complete disconnect between what I could see happening in my head and what my body was actually doing. You know, I'd be there with the ball in front of the goal. I would see the, you know, magnificent shot and in fact, you know, it would skew off sideways and go out for a throw in. You know, it would, it would be in practice. It was a disaster. So same with acting. I was just the, you know, most wood and inexpressive. It was awful.
- [80:33]
A
I've been around other people at some pretty high levels doing it and I don't have it in me either. I have no interest in it to begin with. So I would never go down that pathway. But for people who don't think that that's an art form in and of itself, man, it's pretty impressive to see somebody who is really good at it. And then also there's this huge disconnect. Between what it looks like in person and what it looks like on the screen with the color correction and the music. Music is actually what changes it more than anything.
- [81:00]
B
Oh, it is, yeah. There was. When my kids were little, I used to take them to Disneyland in Paris quite often. That sounds horrible, by the way.
- [81:08]
A
They call it the happiest place on earth. I don't know if I've ever been more unhappy than with all of my children. Wanted to do different things at Disneyland.
- [81:14]
B
Yeah. Well, this one, there was one particular part it was in. I guess it wasn't the main park, it was whatever the secondary park was, where one of the things was, they had the car stunt demonstration and then they showed you how, you know, car stunts would be incorporated into a movie. And then they would show you a scene. You'd, you know, you'd watch them, they'd explain what they were going to do, then they would do it and all that stuff, you know, and they've got guys who can drive cars on two wheels. Unbelievable stuff. And then they would show it you without the music, and then they would add the music and it just changes it completely.
- [81:51]
A
Yeah. You know, my experience was through the lens of being a technical advisor and it was for tv, not movie. Even though there were some people who had been in movies that were there. It is just not exciting in any way. I mean, they're shooting for 10, 15 seconds, different angles, flipping the world around, getting the other. They're putting. I'm like, how. Why are you putting so much smoke in there? And then the lighting and all this. And then you see it on the big screen. Like I was there for that. And that looked nothing like that. That looks spectacular. It was. It was pretty eye opening. That is a craft that is way more nuanced. And like you said, all of the other things, there's the people who are on the other side of the lens, who are the performers. They're not doing a damn thing without hundreds of people behind the lens helping them out.
- [82:34]
B
Yeah. It's a good metaphor, isn't it, really? The fact that, you know, there's so many people that you don't see who are completely vital.
- [82:40]
A
Yeah. What are your thoughts as an author? Actually, before that, your first book, what got you into your first book?
- [82:45]
B
So. So after, it was kind of a convoluted thing after university, so I wound up doing this English and drama. Absolutely loved doing the drama. That was just. That would seem magnificent to me. Like I was saying about the storytelling, I love story. All my life, I've just loved telling stories. Never really had wanted to be a novelist. I never really thought about it. I just always loved telling stories. And theater was a great way of doing it because you've got somebody acting it out, speaking the words. Loved it. So at the end of our degree, six of us thought, well, before we get bogged down in the nine to five and the mortgage and all of that, there were so many things, you know, like, in my mind, I picture it a bit like, you know, you're walking down a corridor, there are all these doors, you push one open and you see this fantastic world on the other side of it, but you can only just take one foot in because you're only there because you've got to pass an exam and as soon as you've done that exam, you've got to come out and move on to the next door. So all of these opportunities, all of these openings that you'd come across but never been able to follow through all the way. So we said, let's set up our own theatre company and then we can explore all of these things properly. So we did. And it's kind of amazing looking back, we were only like 21, 22 or something. We were totally businesslike about it. There was this special scheme the government was running at the time in England, where it was basically. Basically gave you a slightly extra money and it took you off the unemployment figures. So everybody won. But you had to have a business plan and you had to bank it, you had to do it properly. And so we did and we set a whole load of objectives and we thought we'd do it in 12 to 18 months. It actually took two years. But we did everything we set out to do and critically it was really good. But financially it was an absolute disaster because most. Some theater companies, they will alternate a really well known play with a new one.
- [84:47]
A
So you gotta slide the new stuff in, in between the ones that fill the seats.
- [84:49]
B
Yeah. And to pay the bills. Yeah, but we didn't do that. We just did all new stuff. That's a rough business model. So a theater company that no one had heard of, doing shows that no one had heard of, you know, we ended up completely broke. And so I needed like a real job for a while to pay the bills. And so, you know, pre internal Internet, the way you found a job in those days was you had to buy the Sunday Times in the uk and then you look at the job section. So I was very, very scientific about it. I cut out all of the jobs that I thought I was even vaguely qualified for and put them in order of starting salary, applied for the one that paid the most, of course, and somehow managed to get it. And then I thought, well, I'll do it for a couple of years and then get back to something creative. But those two years went. End up being like 15 years. And over the course of the time, couldn't really go to the theater much anymore because I was always on the road, always too busy with work, but I could read. And so I was constantly reading and without really meaning to, got into things like a lot of Cold War espionage thrillers, a lot of action thrillers. And there was once the thing, if you look back, the thing that really was the turning point was I started reading this book, which starts out perfect. You know, the kind of book where if you're on the bus, you're going to miss your stop because you cannot stop reading it or, you know, you'll stay up all night reading it and you won't be able to get up for work the next day. You know, it was perfect at the beginning, but at the end it was awful. It was horrible. The ending was a disaster. And I remember thinking to myself, why did the author do that? He had this character that he could have exploited. He had this subplot that he could have brought back. He had all of. And I.
- [86:31]
A
You know, how does that happen? How does an author let that happen? They have to have editors, right? Or a publisher or people that are working with them.
- [86:38]
B
But just somehow it got away from him, and it was so disappointing. And so those questions that had kind of bubbled up in my mind, they were like itches that had to be scratched. And, you know, various things had happened with the company I was working at. It wasn't very satisfying any longer. And. And at the back of my mind, I wanted to see if I could do it. You know, I had this. I heard somebody said to me one time that the saddest words in the English language are what if? And I was making an okay living, and I could have stayed doing it, but I didn't want to get to the point where I retire. And I say, yeah, but I did. Okay, but what if? You know, I thought, I've got to try. Even if I fail, I've got to try. So. So that's what made me want to. Want to write my first book. I tried for a little while to kind of write in the evenings so that I was still getting paid, but I just couldn't get any momentum. Every time I thought I was getting somewhere. I'd be away from home for a week and then I'd lose track of where I was. So it really wasn't working. So in the end, I just had to take the plunge, quit my job. Sink or swim, That's a risky path.
- [87:47]
A
It's one that I hesitate to recommend to other people because you're on this statistically anomalous side of it working out. But it can work.
- [87:55]
B
It can. Like you say that, you're absolutely right. It's not. It's not to be recommended at all. But for me it was. That was the only way I was going to get it done. And I did not want to. To get to the end of my life and think, like I say, well, what if I tried?
- [88:09]
A
Yeah, I hate that. And then how did the other eight books come after that before you started working with your brother?
- [88:16]
B
So initially. So I had a character that I wanted to write about. And again, kind of not ex. Not the character wasn't the same as Reacher. But the kind of the thought process of reaching what the character I was going to write about was was very deliberate in the same kind of way. And originally I'd hoped that, you know, he would be my one character that I wrote about for the rest of my career. But I wrote, initially I had a contract for two books. I wrote the two books about this character. Then they offered me another two book contract. But I just had a feeling that I had a gut feel that things were not going in the right direction with the people at the publishing house that I was working with. And I didn't feel comfortable committing to two more. So in the end I committed to one more book and the process did not work well. You know, back in the 70s when you had all those super groups that would always split up and they always said it was down to artistic differences, you know, that was kind of how I would put it. You know, we just weren't. We did not see eye to eye. We were not on the same page by the end.
- [89:27]
A
Well, even in the negotiation, I would have to imagine if they're offering you two and you come back back with one, that's a little bit of a. Maybe this isn't working out so well.
- [89:37]
B
Exactly. Normally it should be that they offer you one and you say, no, please give me two or five perhaps. But I just didn't feel comfortable. I could tell there was something wrong, things were not going in the right direction. So we parted company and I moved to a different publishing house. And what they wanted was a lot of publishers don't like you to move a series that you started somewhere else. They like to have something that has, you know, their, their own fingerprints on it. And the publisher I moved to the way that they like to do things was to. If you've been writing series previously, they like you to do a standalone as a kind of clean break.
- [90:17]
A
Standalone, mean new character? Yeah, Whole nine.
- [90:19]
B
Okay. Yeah, yeah. Whole thing just self contained to see.
- [90:23]
A
If it has legs.
- [90:23]
B
Yeah, yeah. And just as a sort of, you know, as a breakpoint. It's not that series anymore. This is a thing on its own. And then after that they want you to start another series because publishers generally like a series. Really? Yeah.
- [90:34]
A
Oh, wow.
- [90:35]
B
So, and at first I was annoyed because I thought, well, I don't want to write a standalone. But when I did it, I actually really enjoyed the whole thing because you invent everything from scratch. And I did a thing where, you know, it's one of the kind of sub genres. It was. They call it the Ordinary man in Extraordinary Circumstances. So, you know, likely had done with Reacher. The character I initially had had had a service background, so that he had an explanation for the. The skills that he had and the experience that he had. But so the standalone I did, the guy was just. He was an IT guy. He had no, no skills whatsoever. And that meant that the writing was completely different. You know, you put him in a situation where he's barricaded in a room. Well, Reacher can get out of a barricaded room without thinking about it. It. But an IT guy, how does he do it?
- [91:26]
A
You know, depends on if it's a keypad lock or somehow attached to the computer.
- [91:30]
B
Yeah, exactly. He has to do something different. You know, he has to figure out a way to do it and he can't just smash his way through. So it gave me a whole set of different challenges as a writer, which I really enjoyed. So then I was like, all right, maybe I'll just continue doing standalones. But no, they said they wanted another series. So I embarked on another series and I did three of those. But then the publishing house, it had merged with another publisher. And then various people got let go off, including the editor I was working with. And so I got moved to a different editor. And similarly, a lot of times editors don't like to pick up series from other editors. So I started another series.
- [92:14]
A
Oh, man.
- [92:14]
B
And actually the series I was doing, it worked out well for me because. Because the series I was working on before moving and working with my brother, I was really enjoying. I was having a really, really good time with it. And, you know, if Richer hadn't come along, I would still be writing the other one. And it was a lot of fun. You know, in the same way we were saying Reacher is a kind of one of those eternal archetypes, in that he was the sort of knight errant. You know, one of the other character characters that you see a version of in all different cultures is Robin Hood. And so, you know, if you. If you take out the kind of Sherwood Forest living in Tree park, you know, he's a character who had some kind of nobility, some kind of social status, who he. Which he lost generally because he went to engage in some kind of combat abroad. And then he came back to discover the world he'd been a part of had been destroyed. So he's cast adrift and he must regain his respect. He has to redeem himself anonymously in order to the anonymous part. In the same way that with the Reacher type character, that the leaving at the end is really, really important for the Robin Hood type character. The fact that he has to do his good deeds anonymously is really, really critical. So I came up with this character who his mother had died when he was born. His father had raised him. His father was a staunch pacifist, and so his way of rebelling was to join the army. So he goes in the army, becomes a military intelligence specialist. And then over the years, he regrets the rift with his father. He wants to patch things up. So he comes to the end of his final tour, leaves the army, comes back to New York where his father was living, to find that the father is dead. And the police had suspected that he'd been murdered. But the suspected murderers had somehow slipped through the cracks of the legal system and had got away with it. So the guy employs his skills that he's learned, of course, and he realizes that whatever it was that went wrong, wrong that allowed his father's killers to escape happened at the courthouse. So he gets a job as a janitor at the courthouse, because if you're the janitor, you can go anywhere, you see everything, but nobody notices you. So it gives him the perfect setup. So the idea of the series was that the kind of broader arc was that he was going to find out what happened to his father and get justice for his father. But in each individual novel, he will spot something where a regular guy gets screwed over in some way. You know, the system goes wrong. You know, a big corporation has more expensive lawyers. You know, somebody somehow the little guy gets cheated and the janitor will step in and put it right. And I had this thing going where at the end of each novel, whoever it was that he. He'd helped would come and find him and would say, you know, everything has worked out fine. But I don't understand how it's happened, because the only person I told about it was you. Did you do this? And every book ends with him saying, how could I do that? I'm just the janitor. And so I was really enjoying doing it. It was really, really satisfying. And particularly the way things are kind of heading at the moment with the huge disparities in riches between the top fraction of a percent and everybody else. You know, I really felt that it was time for the character who just in the shadows, not doing it for glory or reward or anything like that stands up for the little guy. And I think it was. It was working really well.
- [96:04]
A
That's awesome. What I was going to ask you when we went back to the first book, what are your thoughts about AI and authors?
- [96:14]
B
Okay. That's something that I might not actually be able to answer right now because there are some ongoing lawsuits.
- [96:22]
A
Okay. Like that you're involved in. Well, I'm just curious because it's. You know, they thought the printing press was gonna. What was it? They thought it was gonna make people stupid because they were gonna stop having communication. Like, never mind the fact that fact it's allowed them to transfer knowledge across the world. So I think a lot of technologies. And it can be used for bad or good. Right. I mean, you could write Mein Kampf with it, or you could write Shakespeare.
- [96:51]
B
Absolutely.
- [96:53]
A
AI, I think sometimes not. Let me clarify this for everybody listening. My understanding of what AI is is the fact that I know it means artificial intelligence. I don't know how it works. I don't know anybody who develops it. It's an interesting tool. I use chat GPT like Google, because I'm a moron. But there are also other people you want to talk about disparity in wealth who are using these tools, and they're catapulting themselves through the economic system. It's a tool. It's. It. I'm just. And I would ask somebody who that it was in music because now songs are now charting on the charts that are AI derived. It just seems where it could bridge the gap. Gap in creativity. And I'm curious, any loss you decide as an author, do you think that's a good thing or a bad thing?
- [97:46]
B
Well, I think, you know, first of all, you're certainly onto something with that line of questioning because, you know, as you probably, you know, you've had your, your own experience in the publishing industry.
- [97:55]
A
Wish I just walked away for two weeks. I could have chat GPT it. But honestly, it felt dirty to me to do that. And probably, probably more because I don't understand how it's working, working so well.
- [98:04]
B
You know, the, you know, the joke in the industry is that, you know, when the Gutenberg Press was first invented, the first book published was the Bible. Second book published was why the publishing industry is doomed. Because, you know, I've been doing this 20 years now and every year, every year the sky has been falling and it's always been a different reason, but the sky is always falling. So there's, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of doom and gloom and, and, you know, if you think back to when paperbacks first came in, you know, when Penguin was the, you know, the driving force again, that was going to destroy the industry, it was going to. So there's this.
- [98:40]
A
What was their reasoning for that?
- [98:42]
B
I guess because it was seen as too kind of mass oriented, you know, it wasn't serious enough.
- [98:48]
A
Maybe a cheaper price point too.
- [98:50]
B
Yeah, yeah. And I love the way different countries treat books. You know, in France, for example, until quite recently, books didn't really have covers on them, you know, in the way that these do really would take. You would buy the kind of, the plain book and you would take it to your own book binder because you would have your particular style.
- [99:09]
A
Okay. Everybody's into their own thing. Who am I to judge?
- [99:12]
B
Yeah. So, you know, but then, you know, AI, you know, there are ways in which you could say, is it, is it another example of the printing press being thought of as a disaster in the paperback? But I think the difference is, as you said, the way that you print books and the way that you, the format that you publish them in is completely neutral. The book that you print or publish could be good, it could be bad, but it would be written by a person and it would have human creativity as its spark, as its origin. Whereas with AI, as I understand it, what is happening is that the computers are being kind of fed an enormous library of published works. It's a data set, basically, and that they are then in a sense they are coming up with versions of the stuff that has already been written. And the debate is, does that qualify as being something new and original or is it just a pastiche of things that have already been created by people or both? Yeah. And how does it. How does it impact on copyright as we know it? Because, you know, the book there on the table, if somebody took that book, opened it to page 34 and copied out, you know, more than a few lines worth.
- [100:35]
A
Yeah.
- [100:36]
B
That would be an infringement of copyright because it was something that had already been written. Yeah. But then if a computer produces something, not word for word the same, but based on. On its analysis of the way that the sentence structures work and so on, you know, would that be legitimate or not? Yeah.
- [100:54]
A
All of a sudden there's a jack breacher.
- [100:56]
B
Yeah.
- [100:57]
A
Who's cruising around and. Yeah, like you said, very similar habits, very similar archetype.
- [101:02]
B
And I certainly saw this in terms of the. The acting industry as an example, you know, where, you know, you know, the traditional way that you would become a. A TV star or a movie star is you'd start off, you know, you'd hang around the studios, you would get a job as an extra.
- [101:19]
A
Little background work.
- [101:20]
B
Yeah. And then maybe you get. You step up. If people notice you, maybe you step up to where you get one line, you get five lines, and you work your way up. But with AI, what the actors were concerned about was that once you'd done. Once you'd worked as an extra one time, they got you, they had your image, and they could then use that image anytime in the future. And even if you say you were a major star, if they had your image, they, You. You know, if you, You. You yourself as a star can decide what roles you want to take. And supposing somebody offers you the role of a Nazi and you don't like Nazis, so you don't want to play that role, you don't have to. But if AI if the studio has. Uses AI to just use your image portraying an act, a Nazi, in a sympathetic way that you might personally find objectionable, what can you do about that? So I can certainly see that there are a lot of questions that need to be. That need to be figured out.
- [102:16]
A
I think it's too close or too early to call it. And I think almost like any tool, it's probably in the. In the hands of the person who is wielding it. I mean, if we could train, let's say we weaponize AI against cancer research, like that would be pretty awesome. Awesome, except for somebody would buy the patent on that and make it completely unaffordable. That would be not awesome. Yeah, but I mean, you know, how about we work on cancer? How about we work on Alzheimer's? How about we cure leukemia? You know, I mean, I Can see great expressions of that. And again, I'm not exactly a learned doctor when it comes to AI, but the creativity thing, I mean, the fact that AI music is charming and it sounds good.
- [102:58]
B
Yeah, I've never. I've never heard one. At least not knowingly heard a.
- [103:02]
A
That's what I was gonna say. You may not know it. Yeah, I mean, there's AI influencers on social media platforms, and I think you can still kind of tell a little bit. But, I mean, we're a couple years into this, maybe four or five years into this. What's it gonna be like in. In 10 years? I mean, I can 100 see it being a place where, man, your main competition is a machine that's hooked up to other machines and you can crank it out. A book like this, well, it'll just give you all 30 in 30 minutes exactly.
- [103:31]
B
And, you know, you could see from a publisher's point of view the attraction of that because you don't have to wait a whole year.
- [103:36]
A
And I care more about money than people, I guess.
- [103:39]
B
Well, you know, I'm not saying publishing in particular, but business in general, you know? Yeah, there's a lot more about money than people, man.
- [103:48]
A
You think there'll be another Reacher movie?
- [103:50]
B
No, more movies. Movies, really? No. Like hard and fast rule, I think. I don't say see it as a hard and fast rule, but in terms of just, you know, Lee's preference, because of what we were saying earlier about the. The way that, you know, streaming to ev.
- [104:12]
A
Yeah, it's a shallower experience.
- [104:14]
B
You have a much better, better experience. So I can't see. I can't see any reason that he would want to sacrifice, you know, eight to 10 hours of screen time to go back to 90 minutes.
- [104:26]
A
I can think of one. And it looks like Thomas Cruise coming with a sack of money in his private jet, and the entire jet is full of sacks of money. I would reconsider that. Yeah, no, I mean, I do get that. I did enjoy the two movies, though. I thought they were good. First one I thought was better than the second.
- [104:45]
B
Yeah.
- [104:46]
A
But again, what I like about him is the twists and turns. And that's why I was fascinated about how people create that stuff.
- [104:52]
B
And I thought it was, you know, they were smart in the way that they chose the order to do them. Because the first movie was based on one shot.
- [105:00]
A
Yeah.
- [105:00]
B
And the thing that's unusual about the book is that that book is the one in which Reacher doesn't show up for the longest time because you have the Whole preamble of the sniper setting up in the parking garage and going. All the detail about how he. Who he's targeting, how he's targeting them, you know, the little details. And about a couple of the bullets winding up in a. What was it? It was some sort of pond.
- [105:24]
A
It was a jug of water.
- [105:25]
B
Yeah, it was some body of water, wasn't it?
- [105:27]
A
Yeah. And that's the. The round that they were able to keep because of the ballistic nature of it.
- [105:31]
B
Yeah. So all of that stuff, we spent a long time establishing that. So that Reach himself doesn't show up for. For quite a long time. So that given.
- [105:39]
A
I guess I didn't look. It actually happens in the movie that way too. Yeah.
- [105:42]
B
And so given the concerns about, you know, the height of the actor, it was actually. Actually a smart way to do it because then there was a chance that the audience would have forgotten about all of that stuff because they're so sucked into the story by that point.
- [105:53]
A
Have you seen how they make him appear to be. I'm not saying he's short. I'm just not saying he's tall. Like I said, people go to Google themselves. Have you seen some of the ways they make vertically challenged actors taller?
- [106:04]
B
I know. I mean, and that.
- [106:05]
A
That's what they have little platforms they walk on. The other actress.
- [106:09]
B
Yeah. And that's what's. That's what's so weird about, you know, it's not as if it's a thing. That's unit. That only applies to him. Oh, I know.
- [106:17]
A
It's a tough one.
- [106:18]
B
Yeah. Yeah. My wife and I went on vacation to a little island in Fiji a couple of years ago. And we didn't realize at the time, but when we got there, it turned out to be the island where they filmed Blue Lagoon.
- [106:29]
A
Okay.
- [106:29]
B
And it turned out that. I forget the actor's name, but whoever the actor was, he was playing opposite Brooke Shields was so much shorter than her that they had. Because it was all done on beaches. They had to dig channel. They did, like, trenches in the beaches that she had to walk in so that she wasn't towering over him. You know, that was. It's universal.
- [106:47]
A
It's smoking mirrors. I love it. Smoke and mirrors. What do you like doing outside of writing?
- [106:53]
B
Well, reading. Yeah, of course. Yeah. So we live in Wyoming, so I love a lot of the outdoor activities that you can do in Wyoming. And I also love scuba diving, which.
- [107:03]
A
Is not, I'm gonna guess, highly prevalent.
- [107:05]
B
In Wyoming, not in Wyoming itself.
- [107:07]
A
Yeah. Have you dove in Wyoming, though?
- [107:09]
B
Never. No.
- [107:10]
A
Really? You've never done like a high altitude or like a lake?
- [107:13]
B
No, down in Colorado I have, we live right on the, pretty much right on the border. So I, I, the, the scuba store that I use is down there and they, they have acts, they do, they do different, different things. Some training things and also some just, you know, in various. They're all man made things, you know, flooded quarries and that kind of stuff.
- [107:33]
A
Yeah, those can be pretty interesting though too.
- [107:35]
B
Yeah.
- [107:35]
A
Yeah. My wife got into scuba diving a few years ago. Her and my middle son got qualified and then we went, went to Hawaii actually. She got qualified while we, they finished it while we were in Hawaii. They did the pool dives up here. She has since done some, some lake dives up here where the visibility is measured in single digit feet and the temperature is not much more than single digit. And. Yeah, I don't know why she wastes time asking me if I would like to join her.
- [107:58]
B
No, I mean, I can, I can, I mean, obviously not for you, but I could see if you were, if you, you know, like me, if you, if you're, you know, that much newer to it, you know, anything you can do where you can practice your skills and get your air to last longer, you know, anything like that can be useful. But it is a shame if you go to all that trouble and you can't see anything.
- [108:18]
A
And it's just not my, the water sports stuff is not my cup of tea anymore. And the way I explain it to people is if you worked at Baskin Robbins for almost two decades and every day you had to eat ice cream, who was going there on their day off?
- [108:31]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [108:34]
A
This episode is brought to you by Brunt. How many people out there need a good set of boots? Maybe not professionally, even though there's a huge market out there for that. But personally, if you live in a place like I do, this type of footwear is, I'm not going to say mandatory, but it's helpful for about six months out of the year. And most people think that you have to choose between like this crazy durability and functionality and comfort. And that is probably what I like the, the most about these particular set of boots, at least the ones that I have. They sent me a set of the Omen boots, which is the first slip on like Chelsea type boot that I've ever had. Of course I'm not wearing them today, otherwise I'd be able to show it to the camera. But I ran out of the house this morning when it was still dark, getting my son to work. I thought there was going to be a break in period because that was my history with other pairs of boots that I have ordered and there wasn't. Right out of the box, true to size, super comfortable and they've been my kick around town boot for the power past three months since we've transitioned into winter. Maybe you've already got a good set of boots, you're not in the market for it. That's okay. Brunt is a lot more than just work boots. They offer a full range of high performance gear built for tough jobs. From heavy duty work pants to weather resistant jackets. Brunt designs durable, reliable workwear to keep you protective and productive in any condition. If this sounds like something that could benefit your life, if a Brunt product, whether it be outerwear or boot wear, is something that you're in the market for, my suggestion would be head over to Brunt worker and if you use the code cleared hot, you're going to get ten dollars off your first order. That is bruntworkwear.com Using the code Cleared Hot, you're gonna get ten bucks off. Surf through the site, check out some stuff. What I will say about the boots is they are comfortable and true to size right out of the box. So you don't have to worry about a crazy break in period, which has been my experience with most other boots that I have had. Bruntworkwear.com using the code clear back to the show so I can appreciate it. Actually, I did dive with them in Hawaii just because A, the water temperature and B, there was some good stuff to look at, but for the experience it was cool.
- [110:35]
B
Yeah, I'm working on. What I'd love to do is, you know, I'm fascinated with particularly World War II history. You know, my father having served in World War II and all around the Mediterranean there is an amazing combination of kind of ancient ruins and also, you know, shipping from, from World War II. So I would love to do some diving over there.
- [110:55]
A
I've had, I had a man on years ago and he worked for project Recover specifically around Palau. And man, they're finding and they're intentionally trying to find and dive wrecks from World War II. And they will find and identify not every time, but sometimes actually they're finding a lot of them on land as well too. But they have been able to find wrecks that had been missing, find identification markers of the people that were still in the cockpit or nearby, and then actually bring closer to those families.
- [111:27]
B
Yeah, that's a beautiful thing to Do?
- [111:29]
A
Yeah, yeah, it was one I was actually considering. We had some other friends that got certified as well, and they seem to be enjoying diving. What a cool way. A1 if you're able to find something. I told him, like, if we do this and we find something, we are seeing this thing to the end. We're going to the family, we're going to the funeral, we're bringing the tissue because everybody's going to be crying. But what just a cool way they enjoy doing that. I think it would be so amazing to find an artifact like that, but then also to be able to bring closure to a family as well, too.
- [111:57]
B
That would be amazing. And then there's a place that we like to go in the Bahamas where they are doing a lot of work to try to help with the health of the reefs out there. You know, they have coral farms and, you know, they. Where they've got all these kind of metal structures that have got little tiny pieces of coral growing on them, and then that has to be tended really carefully and, you know, kept clean and healthy and then. So we can go and help them with that. But then once it reaches a certain point, then they have to have qualified people who are then able to take that and move it and transplant it onto the reefs to help the, you know, the coral to regrow.
- [112:32]
A
So you're basically underwater gardener?
- [112:34]
B
Basically, yeah. Yeah.
- [112:35]
A
Does your wife dive as well?
- [112:36]
B
She doesn't know. She. She. Absolutely. She. She. There's really nothing about it that she would like. She. She doesn't like.
- [112:45]
A
I get it. I get it.
- [112:46]
B
And she's very claustrophobic. So I think everything about it, I just. I think it's one of those things you can't tell till you try. Some people just take to it and love it, and other people, I think it would be their worst nightmare.
- [112:58]
A
I have seen people who are claustrophobic have a very negative reaction to it. And then others who claim to be extremely, extremely claustrophobic and didn't find it to be that way at all. They actually found it to be very enriching. But that was a coin toss. Yeah, I could see that going both ways. Yeah. What is Reacher up to in the next book? Give me some wave time. What's he thinking about?
- [113:17]
B
Well, you know, this is. This is part of the problem with the way that we write, because so far.
- [113:23]
A
Let me guess, he's. He's been on a bus somewhere.
- [113:25]
B
So really, you know, it's. It's. It's an early stage. Yeah.
- [113:28]
A
So he's got his Passport port, his toothbrush. He's cruising around.
- [113:31]
B
He's got his ATM card now.
- [113:32]
A
Yeah.
- [113:33]
B
Post 9 11. He had to get the ATM card. Yeah, yeah.
- [113:37]
A
Okay. How far into it are you? The ideation?
- [113:40]
B
Still, still early days. Still early days. But the, the, yeah, we always try to work on the. I mean it sounds obvious what, you know, get the, get the beginning as good as we can to really, really make an impact and then we work, we work from there to try and, try and match the same standards.
- [113:57]
A
So what do you use for the beginning? What's your theory on that hook? How many pages do you think you have to really grab somebody?
- [114:04]
B
Well, I think you've got to do it pretty much immediately. And that is really the most. When you're talking about a long running series, it becomes probably the hardest thing to do because there's always an element of coincidence about it, isn't there? You know the old joke about Ms. Marple, you know, if you were checking into a hotel in England and you saw Miss Marple in the queue ahead of you, then you would just leave because you know someone's getting murdered, you know, and so you've got to find a way that Reacher gets drawn. It's always going to be some sort of coincidence, you know, wrong time, wrong place type thing. One or two exceptions, you know, there's been one or two of the books where it was more deliberate bad luck and trouble, for example, where his old friends from the army managed to get a message to him to ask him to come back and help. And then, you know, the prequels where he's still in the army, you know, then there are real obvious reasons for why he has to be involved. But other than that, it has to be a kind of wrong time, wrong place. And there's only a limited number of those. So it kind of becomes harder each time to come up with something that the readers are going to accept, you know.
- [115:15]
A
Yeah, because it can't be too implausible.
- [115:16]
B
It can't be. So we always want there to be. We feel like you probably, if you're lucky, you get one pass per book, you know, one thing that they'll let you get away with. And you play that card at the beginning, which is how Reacher gets pulled into the story. And once you've got him in there, then that's it. Everything else has to be completely watertight. And so with exit strategy, I was thinking, well, what are we going to do that's different? And so in this one what we did was the idea that essentially somebody was asking for help. They slipped a note into Reacher's pocket and he reached over accidentally. Yeah.
- [115:51]
A
Not to give it away.
- [115:51]
B
Sorry, spoiler alert. So he was, he was intrigued because who has the skill to sneak something into his pocket without him realizing? And also, clearly it was mistaken identity. So how on earth did that happen?
- [116:05]
A
Well, he did say give it to the biggest guy. Yeah, I liked the. And again, not to give too much away. I liked that the antagonist had ties to the military contracting world. That to me is. That is such a gray area area of outsourcing warfare, which. And again, it's fictional book, but that's kind of what the. I cannot. To give too much away, but that's kind of what the guy wanted to do. Maybe he had set some stuff up to make it, you know, even more profitable along the way at the cost of other things. But yeah, it was a. It was. I think it's a very germane topic in, in this current era.
- [116:45]
B
Yeah. I mean, and sometimes you write, you, you, you. You write something, it is fiction. You have completely made. Made it up.
- [116:51]
A
Yeah.
- [116:51]
B
And then something in the real world you come across.
- [116:54]
A
You probably did write that one about 18 months ago.
- [116:56]
B
And then. So right as the book was coming out, there were those revelations about the drone operators in Ukraine, you know, that have this user interface that is like a video game.
- [117:06]
A
Yeah.
- [117:06]
B
And the more successful they are, then the more access they get to, you know, better equipment.
- [117:11]
A
Yeah, it's actually. Yeah. I believe it was described as the video game point structure where they are. Man, you want to talk about dehumanizing and gamifying warfare, I don't think those things should be combined at all. I mean, my God.
- [117:26]
B
But you see, you know, that's how they're recruiting now. You know, we were down at the. There's a fantastic air show in. In Colorado that we always go to. It was the, it was the Thunderbirds this year. You know, it alternates between the Thunderbirds and the Blue Angels. And you know, there was.
- [117:40]
A
Sure. There's no rivalry between those two.
- [117:42]
B
Definitely not.
- [117:42]
A
Yeah. Was it F18s and F16s just battling it out?
- [117:45]
B
Yeah. And they had. There were recruitment stands there, you know, targeting. Targeting teenagers who like playing video games.
- [117:55]
A
I don't know where I land on that. It's such a horrible thing, but I think it needs to maintain that level of horribleness so it becomes. Or maintains a measure of last resort.
- [118:07]
B
Yeah.
- [118:09]
A
Yeah. Being a.
- [118:10]
B
You know, I read a lot of. I read a lot of non fiction and a lot of sort of Military oriented nonfiction. And that's something where, you know, if you go from, if you read stuff From World War II really pretty much up to the, to the second Gulf War, there are a lot of, A lot of similarities. But then beyond that, that's when the, the key difference is the use of drones. And you know, how they. Now, from what I understand it seems as if they're really becoming preeminent. You know, a lot of the operations are purely drone oriented. Whereas there was a spell where, you know, some hostages had been taken. They were being held in caves in Afghanistan. They had to be. They wanted to try to rescue the hostages, which the Special Forces would do. But the intelligence would come from drones because they could be flown, they could have heat sensors and whatever they could find where the, where the hostages were. But it was a combined operation.
- [119:10]
A
That's what I'm familiar with. So yeah, when I was. I mean I'm well dated now. I got out in 2013. But having. I mean we would call them drones, but it. The technical term would be ISR or intelligence surveillance reconnaissance. And they were predators and reapers and you hear them, they sound like lawnmowers. And we would derive a lot of intelligence. You could fly them at high altitudes and long orbits and so you could look at objectives and you could. You'd kind of look at pattern of life. But then again, it was the combination of the two. I don't. In at least my paying attention to warfare, I haven't seen anything like this velocity towards the first person drone operator. All the warfare happening with that. I mean, they were using M1 Abrams tanks, which I think they still are when I was in. And you can, I mean that's like, okay, that was a tank from 100 years ago. These are still kind of the same, same thing. And now it's like they have a DJI drone that's dropping grenades on people accurately. Multiple. I'm like, holy cow.
- [120:08]
B
We.
- [120:08]
A
I never once thought of. Thankfully, I'm glad I wasn't a part of that. I never once thought of something like that. And the velocity that it went from not thinking about that to now I can see it in images just of Special Forces, you know, we. The ballistic helmets. There's a lot of attachment points. Some of them are just flippable up first person straight, like. So okay. I mean that is, that is infiltrating itself at the highest levels. Yeah. What does that lead to?
- [120:34]
B
I know, I know. It's. It, it, it's. I mean it, it's almost scary to imagine it, isn't it?
- [120:40]
A
I'm worried Terminator might become a documentary.
- [120:43]
B
Yeah, well, you're talking about AI that. That's, you know, kind of the origin story, isn't it?
- [120:48]
A
Or maybe AI its expression is it becomes banana benevolent. Maybe it's the greatest thing to ever happen to humanity. I think we're basically. It will either be Skynet that becomes self aware or it might save the human race. I don't know if there's a lot of in between.
- [121:01]
B
Maybe there's no. Yeah, no mid ground in the middle. We've got us with drones, you know, blowing each other up.
- [121:06]
A
Yeah, man.
- [121:07]
B
And that's the other, you know, strange thing because, you know, particularly from the United States, because of geography, you know, fighting a war from the United States inevitably meant going overseas seas.
- [121:19]
A
It's also our greatest protection, the Atlantic and Pacific.
- [121:22]
B
Yeah. But think of, you know, now you could be a drone operator and never leave your house.
- [121:26]
A
That was happening. I believe they were flying a lot of the drones. So it would be. My understanding was the drones were housed in either Iraq or Afghanistan. They would take off and land with a local controller and then oftentimes be handed off to Nevada. That's where a lot of them were in. Just air conditioned.
- [121:41]
B
Yeah.
- [121:41]
A
And then, you know, there was. I don't have a lot of data around it, and some of it's anecdotal, but issues of. Of the drone operators dealing with post traumatic stress in the same ways, if not greater ways.
- [121:53]
B
I was gonna say that I've not studied it in detail, but from what I understand, the levels of PTSD can actually be higher.
- [122:00]
A
I could see that actually. I think there is a difference in the way that your body uptakes and processes that information when you are in person. A lot of it is very binary. Action, reaction and recognizing a threat and trying to react before the threat can react to you watching it on a TV screen. You know, where you have time and you have distance and you don't have that existential threat where you might feel it or your alarm bells are going off, there's got to be a difference in the way your body processes that.
- [122:30]
B
Yeah, I think that instinctive element, you know, that if you're there in person and you are, you know, it's literally life or death, that must affect you differently than if it's just purely a, you know, a mental.
- [122:43]
A
A sense of detachment would be. Yeah. Which I guess you both are mentally detached and physically detached from the. The battle space. Yeah, I don't know the answer to that. One.
- [122:52]
B
Yeah. It must be very weird. I remember. I don't know if this is related or not, but I'm thinking of. I read a lot about the effort in World War II to break the Enigma code, and a lot of that was down to attacks on the convoys. You know, they needed to know where they were going to be ambushed. And I remember reading about and then sort of trying to imagine the stress of a message is intercepted and thinking from the context of being physically remote, you know, if you were on one of those ships and you see a torpedo approaching or you see a conning tower pop up or whatever, that's going to be one thing. But here, guys, you know, in rural England, who. A message has been intercepted and if they don't decode it, hundreds of people die.
- [123:41]
A
Yeah.
- [123:42]
B
What must that stress feel like?
- [123:43]
A
You can add another layer to that. When they did crack it, they had to decide which attacks they were going to allow to be successful.
- [123:51]
B
Exactly. Because.
- [123:52]
A
And which ones they weren't. Because if all of a sudden you start having a perfect record.
- [123:54]
B
Yeah. They know that something's wrong. And that is why, you know, my brother Lee, he was born in Coventry. And that was. That was a perfect example of that, because through. They called it Ultra. You know, intelligence derived from cracking the Enigma code was called Ultra. And they knew, they. They knew that there were two upcoming raids, one on Coventry, one on London, and they let the Coventry raid go ahead.
- [124:19]
A
That has got to haunt you for the rest of your life.
- [124:21]
B
And this one thing, if you ever over in. I don't know if you spend much time in England, but I've been a few times. Yeah. If you ever go to the city of Coventry country, the, you know, that city was decimated by this raid, including the cathedral. There was this beautiful ancient cathedral, completely destroyed. Well, there's a, you know, two or three walls left and little tiny fragments. And they. When it. After the war, in the 50s, they built a new cathedral. But what they did was rather than clear the site and start again, they built the new one right kind of next to the remains of the old one. So that combination of the shattered remains and then the new one that, that was. That was built is really, really powerful.
- [124:59]
A
Yeah, I bet it is, man. What advice do you have for people who think they want to be a writer? Obviously you've already said, quit your job.
- [125:08]
B
Yeah.
- [125:09]
A
Cannonball, just jump off the cliff. It's either gonna work here.
- [125:12]
B
Yeah. You know, they say, you know, there's that old expression, you know, if at first you don't Succeed, try, try again. Except for skydiving.
- [125:20]
A
Yeah.
- [125:22]
B
I mean, I think if you want to write, absolutely, absolutely, you should write. If I can do it, anybody can do it. So absolutely give it a shot. But when it comes to advice, it sounds ridiculous, but my advice is to ignore all advice because there is actually, the best person in the world at writing your book is you. In fact, you're the only person in the world that can write your book. And the most dangerous thing, because what you want is your book to be completely unique. You want it to be, you want it to sound like you and you alone. What you don't want is to make it sound like there's a whole chorus of people interfering with it. And if you let too many people get involved and too many people say, oh, you should include this, you should avoid that, you should not do that, it won't sound like you anymore. It won't sound like anything, it will just be a mess. So, so ignore everybody else. Write the book that you want to write. What you can do, the only thing you can control is write a book that you like. And then that's where it comes down to luck. Because you just have to hope that if you like it, some other people will like it. 10, 100, a million, you don't know. But you just have to hope that if you write your book your way, then if you are lucky, other people will like it too. And that's out of your control. But what you have to remember, and I suppose you this is the only kind of practical advice, is that writing books is not a purely solitary thing. You have your part in the process, but there are a lot of other people involved. So you have to remember what your job is. And your job is to start on page one and keep going until you reach the end. Your job is not to worry about, is this book any good? Will this book sell? Will people like it? Because if you start, other people do that. If you start thinking about that, if you start worrying about it, you're going to second guess yourself and you're going to wind up paralyzed and you're not going to be able to do anything. So your job is not to make any of those decisions. You have one job and that is to start at the beginning and not stop until you get to the end.
- [127:27]
A
What do you recommend in the modern era where you can self publish on Amazon or a variety of different platforms, would you say? Well, let's say somebody gets, they do that. They get from the first page to the, the last, they love it. It's in their voice. Somebody's gonna have to publish it, whether it's you or a publishing house. Would you pitch it to a publisher, would you try to find an agent or would you just like hop on Amazon or all variety of other publishing options?
- [127:53]
B
Well, you know, it's great that there are so many options because I think what it boils down to is your, your personality, your skill set, what, what kind of things you like doing and what kind of things you don't like doing or are no good at. Because. Because if you self publish through Amazon or whoever, then you will be responsible for everything involved with that book. You will have to find an editor, you will have to find a publicist, you will have to find somebody to design a cover for you. You will have to spend all of.
- [128:23]
A
Those things ChatGPT can do.
- [128:25]
B
Yeah. You know, you'll have to spend an inordinate amount of time on social media promoting and some people love that and are brilliant at it. Me, I would be absolutely terrible.
- [128:38]
A
It would be tough to find all of that in one person who also by the way, wrote a book.
- [128:42]
B
Yeah. And so I personally just, I know myself, I would be really, really bad at it. So for me a traditional publisher is a better fit because then there are people employed by the publisher who are experts in the promotion and the COVID design and everything else. Now what it means is you don't, don't have to do all of those things, but at the same time you lose some control over them. And so if you like doing it, you like being in control of it and you're good at it, then maybe one route is better for you. If you would rather be able to focus pretty much exclusively on writing, then maybe the traditional route is more suitable. So there's no right answer. It's just a question of fitting your personality to the, the different demands and the different opportunities. Yeah.
- [129:30]
A
I am very tempted to take a stab at a non or at a fiction book. The problem is Jack Carr, it's not unique enough. Like you said. I don't, you know what I mean? I don't want it to be something that would be parallel because he really, his first book is essentially about revenge. But here's the idea and I, I pitched this idea my wife and she was like a, what's wrong with you? B, I don't want you to end up in jail. Like I don't think you can end up in jail for writing something that's fictional.
- [130:00]
B
No, you can't. Unless you're stolen it from someone Else.
- [130:03]
A
Yeah, I mean, so Jack's book, the Terminalist. Great book. His operational element, and you know this, but just for the listeners who may not be aware of it, his operational element basically got sold out by politicians and so. And his family got killed too. So his whole thing was, I'm going to kill all the people that were responsible. And that's where it would be a little bit similar. I want to write a book, hypothetically, of course, about somebody who couldn't be more patriotic and served, but finally gets to a place where they snap because of the corruption in the government and they have friends who also feel this way. And these people had millions of dollars invested in their training and they slowly, slowly start doing something about it. That would be a real problem because right now, thankfully, it seems like the people who are perpetrating attacks are idiots. It would be a whole different story if they were incredibly well trained. And I went into more detail with my wife and she just looked at me like, why? What is wrong with you? But that actually, to me, I think is probably the more existential threat. Everybody. I mean, again, there's plenty of external, but there's some really, really capable people who. Everybody has a breaking point. And I don't think people are ready if that gets weaponized against our own citizens.
- [131:24]
B
Yeah, I think the key to making that work, I think it's absolutely got the legs. But I think the key to making it work is the focus has to be on making sure that the reader sympathizes.
- [131:37]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [131:37]
B
With those people. Because if the, if the, if they have the reader sympathy because the reader can picture themselves being betrayed, they can't.
- [131:44]
A
Just be an asshole.
- [131:44]
B
Yeah, yeah. Because if they are, then you, you.
- [131:46]
A
Know, I'm not getting enough in my retirement. Like, okay, yeah, that's a conversation. Maybe you don't have to blow anybody.
- [131:52]
B
Up because that's something I'm fascinated with. If you, if you can, if, if you can pull it off, if you can have a situation where. I'll give you an example. The, you know the TV show the Americans. Did you, did you watch that show?
- [132:04]
A
I am aware of the TV show. Couldn't tell you the storyline or any real depth to it.
- [132:10]
B
So the storyline, it was semi, semi true storyline in that the idea was that the Soviet Union had planted sleeper cells in the, in the United States.
- [132:22]
A
Oh, yes.
- [132:23]
B
So, you know, people who were originally Soviet citizens that been moved to the United States, they'd essentially grown up here. They looked, sounded, smell American, but they were Soviet agents working against us. And the genius of the show is that we should have hated them. Right.
- [132:45]
A
But they're at the soccer game.
- [132:46]
B
Yeah, yeah, they, you know, they, yeah, they, I mean, they put some historical distance in. They were operating in the 1980s, but they were at. They are working for our deepest enemy. We should hate them. But the writing was so good that you sympathize with them and you don't want them to get caught and you can kind of see things from their side, you know, and that, I think is if you can do that, if you can have people doing things that you really shouldn't want them to do.
- [133:16]
A
Yeah, but you also understand.
- [133:18]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [133:20]
A
I mean, I think it's pretty easy to wrap up your imagination around because I think to a degree, I can't speak for anybody but myself, but I'm not a huge fan of some of the trajectory of things that are going on. And you look at the amount of sacrifice that I've seen by people that I care about, I, I, they were family, you know, but obviously family, a lot of people think is just blood. But it goes a lot deeper than that. To me, and having deep conversations with them and understanding their level of sacrifice. Sacrifice and why, and to see the things that they sacrifice their life for, to start to erode and then to turn the corner, then to be used against. It's like, ooh, that's a little rough.
- [133:59]
B
Yeah, no, I totally get that. And you know, Lee encountered that a couple of times because, you know, a lot of, A lot of service people enjoy the Reacher books. And, you know, evidently a large part of the experience of being deployed employed is there's a lot of sitting around, oh, 100.
- [134:18]
A
And throwing rocks.
- [134:19]
B
Yeah. And, and, you know, so people would, some people would fill that time reading. And, and so he got into.
- [134:25]
A
And there's only some. Well, there was iPads and stuff, but like, if you bring a paperback, it's going to get passed around.
- [134:32]
B
Exactly. Perfect. Perfect medium of paperback. So he wound up in correspondence with a lot of people and, you know, knew in their own words how, how they felt and became came. And also, you know, through the experience with our father as well, you know, the sense that it's an absolutely. A bargain between the person who risks their life for their country and the people who are sending them into the particular situations, onto the particular missions. There has to be 100% trust both ways. You cannot have people prepared to risk their life for their country if they are being misdirected by people who are corrupt or disputed, dishonest, which Is one.
- [135:11]
A
Of the things that just turns my stomach, at least with the public optic about what's going. It's tough. It erodes that trust. Yeah. It's kind of the bedrock of all of that. And it erodes that and makes you question yourself. It makes you question what it is that you may. Why did you join in the first place? This isn't what I joined for. This isn't what I think this stood for. And again, I'm hypothesizing, not talking about my own personal experiences, what I was in, but that all directly. It's like sanding an hourglass. It starts coming out and eventually there's not any sand left. And you better be real careful with people. You spend a lot of time training to be really good at certain stuff.
- [135:46]
B
You do know and then coming back.
- [135:48]
A
I'm telling you, you don't. I don't want a sophisticated, nuanced attack to happen anywhere. It would be a problem of an order of magnitude that people don't understand. I'm glad that it's. I'm not glad, but I'm glad that it's apparently dumb dumbs who choose to do these things.
- [136:07]
B
Well, you know, that was. That was a problem I came across when I was, you know, one of the series I was writing involved a police detective. And just by luck, I became friends with a retired police detective in England. And I was thinking, oh, this is great, because, you know, he can tell me all all kinds of stories from his. His career.
- [136:25]
A
Yeah.
- [136:26]
B
And I'll be able to use that.
- [136:27]
A
As of all these genius criminals that he's caught.
- [136:30]
B
And you know what he said to me? The main problem was. Point is, in his experience, most criminals are just opportunists.
- [136:38]
A
You know, I could totally accept that answer.
- [136:40]
B
Yeah. It's not so much that they pla. That they saw a way to pull all of these strings and move all of these pieces around the board to create this opportunity. It was just one day. They. They saw. They saw something and just thought, oh, okay, yeah, you know, and so.
- [136:55]
A
Or you caught him at a bad time. You know, everybody's got life going on. And yeah, it's. I'm friends with a lot of local law enforcement. They don't need to be Sherlock Holmes is the way I would put it a lot of the time, and especially in an era where there's cameras everywhere.
- [137:12]
B
Oh, yeah. That is a game changer in itself, isn't it?
- [137:17]
A
You know, at the airports now, like biometrics. Oh, you want to talk about a game that changes what's so called the intelligence world. Espionage. Okay.
- [137:24]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, a few years have passed since this was. This was the thing. But I remember one of the kind of litmus tests that the people developing that stuff had was they wanted a machine that could differentiate identical twins better than their parents could. And. And that. That milestone was passed years ago.
- [137:45]
A
Yeah. I did just watch a show, though. Actually, it wasn't a show. It was a YouTube video where the cassette casinos, shockingly enough, have great AI when it comes to facial recognition. False positive on a guy. Dude got arrested and I'm pretty sure there was a lawsuit that followed after that. He had every. He had registration in his vehicle. He had id. And they're just like, yeah, this software, it's pretty good, buddy. Yeah, off to jail.
- [138:09]
B
Off you go.
- [138:09]
A
I think he's in jail for like 36 hours.
- [138:11]
B
Yeah, that's. They're.
- [138:13]
A
They're gonna. They're gonna pay out on that one. Yeah. Where can people. What's the best place place? I mean, I see them at the airport again. So your guys. Books are everywhere. Is there a more optimal place for people to get them that helps you guys more than anything else, or just grab it wherever you can?
- [138:32]
B
Well, from our point of view, it doesn't matter, but I would say in terms of everybody's community, if you can find your own independent bookstore, that is always the best place to shop because a bookstore is really, really important to a community. So if you have a good independent, please do use it. If you don't, then there are things like bookstore.bookstore.org I think it is.
- [138:58]
A
We would look it up, but we have no Internet. Because the power's out.
- [139:00]
B
Because the power's out. Which also is a really good way of doing it. They support local bookstores also. And so. But, you know, each to their own Barnes and Noble, Amazon, they are very useful places, too. So wherever you like to shop, you know, please do.
- [139:18]
A
How many more Reacher books are there going to be?
- [139:20]
B
Well, you know, this is. This is down to you guys. If you. If you keep buying them, keep writing them. Yeah.
- [139:26]
A
What do you guys. I mean, you don't have to give me any inside baseball, but I'm assuming you guys do multiple books in a contract. Do you have. Do you have a specific amount left that there will be at least?
- [139:36]
B
I think they'll probably be. I don't think I'm giving too much away to say that there should be at least three more.
- [139:41]
A
Okay, fair enough.
- [139:42]
B
But hopefully more.
- [139:43]
A
Good chance.
- [139:43]
B
Good chance.
- [139:44]
A
Yeah.
- [139:44]
B
But hopefully you know, I would. In an ideal world, I would love there to be a lot more than that.
- [139:49]
A
We're gonna have to kill him. We're gonna have to kill him. Obviously the story would continue. You'd have an illegitimate child. Actually, he wouldn't have an illegitimate child. Cause that doesn't go with the art. The archetype.
- [139:59]
B
Yeah, yeah, but you know, the archetype is so important. And you know, everybody focuses on, you know, you can all. You can. Everybody can sympathize with having some terrible problem in your life that you're just at your wits end, how to solve. Then, you know, this huge stranger arrives. He. He gets to the bottom of the problem and he deals with it. But the key is that he then leaves. Because what if he didn't? What if he bought the house next door? What would you do? Would you have to mow his lawn every week? Would you have to buy him coffee? I mean, it would change the dynamic completely.
- [140:30]
A
Yeah. Do you have to hold his pocket when you're walking down the street walking his dog? Yeah. Yeah, that would be tough. Dude, we've been at it for. I want to let you get out of here. I know you traveled up here today. What do you want to leave people with?
- [140:42]
B
Well, just, you know, we've been talking about a lot of things, obviously including lots of Reacher books. We would love it if you would read Exit Strategy and all the other Reacher books. But if Reacher isn't your thing, just read something. You know, I absolutely believe that there is a book out there for everybody. And you know, it makes me really sad when I hear people say that they don't like reading. Because to me that just means you haven't found your book yet. And if you've read books before and you haven't liked them, don't worry. Keep trying. There is a book out there for everyone. And when you find it, it will enrich your life. So whatever else you do, whether it's reach or anything else, please read.
- [141:22]
A
Given that there are 30 books, does it really matter where they enter into the series?
- [141:25]
B
Not really, no. They're written that in a way that you can pick up any book in the series and start there. Yeah, yeah.
- [141:32]
A
Because I think even myself I found probably double digits in. And then, you know, flip on the inside cover, you're like, oh, okay. And you can kind of work your way backwards. Yeah. Cool. Well, thank you for making the trip out. I really appreciate it. Are you going back to the UK.
- [141:45]
B
Or Wyoming after going back to Wyoming.
- [141:47]
A
Okay.
- [141:47]
B
Yeah.
- [141:48]
A
Nice.
- [141:48]
B
It's going to be a Wyoming Christmas this year.
- [141:50]
A
Well, I'm glad we got this in. I mean, Montana threw us a little bit of a challenge.
- [141:54]
B
It did, but. It was. But thank you to you guys because. Yeah. I mean, it's what people.
- [141:58]
A
People can't see is extension cords everywhere, two generators out on the roof. We are the only. I mean, I can't see out of the curtains right now, but I bet you we're the only building. Michael, not even building room with any power. Yeah, the Internet's still down.
- [142:12]
B
Well, you know you are, because, you know, I took an Uber down here and the driver said to me, are you sure you want to go there? There's no power in town. Did you know. Did you not know that?
- [142:21]
A
You'll get out of here tomorrow. I think the winds will die off. There are hundreds of trees that are down and not uncommon having wind events up here, but usually they'll give you an estimate of, hey, six hours, whatever. I got onto the thread and it said, listen up there, we don't know.
- [142:39]
B
Yeah. But, you know, I really appreciate it because the rest of the town is out of action, but you guys would not be stopped, so.
- [142:44]
A
No, 100% not gonna be stopped. Is your hotel. Does it have power?
- [142:47]
B
It does. It's far enough out that it has power.
- [142:49]
A
Awesome. Well, I will let you get back to it. And Andrew, thank you again for coming up, man. I really. It appreciate. Appreciate it and just send me, you know, the overview of the next Reacher book. I don't. I don't think it's unfair to know what's happening next.
- [143:00]
B
As soon as we can, we will. Joking.
- [143:02]
A
I'll get it when it comes out. Thank you.
- [143:03]
B
Excellent. Well, thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.