Mark Greaney, author of The Gray Man series (23 books since 2009), reveals his blue-collar writing philosophy—books as survival tools for tough moments—while critiquing Hollywood’s sanitized adaptations like the 2022 film. His 12-year career began after quitting Medtronic in 2011, fueled by research in 38 countries and collaborations with military/intelligence experts, including co-authoring Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan series post-Clancy’s death. Greaney’s gritty realism stems from hands-on training (200+ days at Tactical Response) and firsthand experiences like surgery on scaffolding or observing Russian oligarchs’ yacht movements during the Ukraine war. Despite physical struggles—botched surgeries, chronic pain, and opioid dependence—his disciplined process (1,500 words/day) and creative grounding in real-world espionage keep his thrillers compelling, blending plausibility with high-stakes drama. [Automatically generated summary]
She'd find a positive, so she never complained about anything.
Yeah, I do run into people all the time, you know, kids' parents or, you know, on my soccer team, my kids' soccer team or whatever, and I'm like, I wonder what they think of me.
I liked it, and what I say, and I don't know how this makes me sound, it's like the movie is the best possible commercial for my writing, and if you're a writer, you want eyeballs on your work.
I love the movie.
Yeah.
You know, there's bits of dialogue in there and things they did with the plot that I really liked.
But as an author, you couldn't put out the Gray Man novel with her face on it, and they opened the book, and it has nothing to do with a woman.
And as much as I love her, I was like, well, this isn't going to sell books or get eyes in my work.
The screenplay was actually really good, but I remember thinking if I went to the theater and saw it and it had a different title, I would not even know.
There'd be like one scene where I'm like, oh yeah, I did a thing on a plane too.
It's too bad because I don't really know if it makes a difference.
I think they think it makes a difference, but I think if you have a movie that has an amazing plot and a great trailer and it looks wild, I think people get sucked into it anyway.
Yeah, and honestly, one of the best films I've ever seen in my life, which is an action film, it's a Korean film called The Man From Nowhere, and fortunately it came out after The Gray Man did, otherwise people would think I'd ripped off The Gray Man.
Because it's about a former assassin who's trying to lay low and he ends up having to rescue this girl.
But, I mean, obviously, if they can get Chris Evans in their film, they're going to beef up his role and make it a more mano-a-mano thing, and I thought that was fabulous.
I never believed anything could happen from it, but I like to write and I like to think about books and stuff.
So I spent 15 years writing my first novel.
I started it literally in 1990 and finished it in 05. Wow.
And never showed it to anybody.
I mean, you know, like three friends probably read it.
And I put that aside and I wrote my second book in seven months because it's like there's something about, you know, I always say everything in this world is cheapened by my ability to do it, you know.
It's like I always wanted to learn a foreign language and, you know, I'm not super fluent in any foreign languages, but I speak some German and some Spanish.
And it's like once I learned to do it, I'm like, oh, it's not that impressive because I can freaking do it, you know.
15 years for that first book, and then I got some momentum.
Like, once I finished it and I thought, hey, you know, the internet was invented while I was writing the damn thing.
So I, like, looked up, like, how do you get published?
Because I never even looked at that, you know?
Right.
Everything I'd done in the book was wrong as far as, like, it was too big.
There were too many characters.
You know, there were just things they'd recommend against.
So I tried to write something a little bit more mainstream, and I got that in front of an agent.
And he said it wasn't mainstream enough, but I was a good writer, so keep trying.
So it was this continually falling on my face, but falling forward, you know, and there was I've had very few epiphanies in my life.
I'm not one of those navel-gazing people, but I had this epiphany one day that, like, okay, nothing...
I was in my late 30s.
I was not successful in my job.
I worked in a cubicle, and I was destined to do that for the rest of my life.
And I was frustrated about not going anywhere, and there was just this point where I said, I like to write.
I like to walk down the street and think about some espionage theme or something, and I like to do research, and I like to type stuff out and fix it up.
And it's like, okay, nothing's going to come of this, but the thing that's going to come of this is you're doing something you enjoy to do.
And honestly, that just let a lot of steam out of the kettle, and suddenly I wasn't like, I'm a 39-year-old man who has no success.
And I just became this guy that's like, oh, I like writing books, and I think each one's getting a little better, and maybe something will happen someday.
And really quickly, I mean, within a couple years, I was published.
My dad had passed away in 2005, and my dad, he had kind of a white-collar job.
He ran the NBC affiliate in Memphis, where I'm from.
But he was a very blue-collar mindset, and you had to have a job.
And there was no way my dad would have let me quit my job, even though my first book was just a paperback, mass-market paperback.
It wasn't a big release.
It was Gray Man.
It turned into something, but when it first came out, it was not a big deal, other than the fact that Hollywood was interested.
But I had this, you know, it wasn't quit your job money at all.
And then they asked me to write two more books and make a series out of it, which I never even had considered.
I was just trying to hold something in my hand with my name on it and a title and a cover.
I wanted to be, you know, that level of a published author.
I had no higher ambition.
And they asked me to continue it as a series.
And I said yes.
And then I realized it's like, oh my god, I've got to crank out three books in the next whatever number of months.
It's like, I have to quit my job.
And it wasn't quit your job money, as I said.
And this was before the Hollywood money came in.
So I went to my boss.
I'd been at the company for like nine and a half years.
I went to my boss and I put my notice in on a Wednesday.
And the next Monday, They brought everybody in to the auditorium for a meeting, you know, 800 people there, and they're like, hey, listen, like sales are down or the economy, you know, this is 2009. So, you know, the economy is not doing well or whatever.
So we're offering voluntary separation.
If you quit your job right now, we will give you a month's pay for every year you've worked here.
We will give you insurance for a year.
We will do this, this, and this.
I'd quit my job four days before.
And so you think like, oh my gosh, there's this black cloud over me.
And I was scared about quitting my job, obviously.
And I remember my boss came into my cubicle right afterwards.
She's like, I'm going to talk to HR and see if they will allow you to come in.
I'm like, why the hell would they do that?
I'm like, I'm the best thing that's happened to HR in a while.
This dummy quits three days before they offer you a ton of money to quit.
So for about six months, I just felt like I had this cloud over my head and I'd done the stupidest thing in the world.
And then the film rights got optioned for Gray Man.
And it still wasn't quit your job money, but it was like I can eat for a year money.
And within a couple of years, I was working with Tom Clancy and things started to really go in the right direction for me.
And I feel like everything I've learned, I've learned by doing it wrong a few times.
I'm not like Yoda, I'm not this guy on a mountain telling them, it's like, yeah, no, I've done a lot wrong, and what I might tell you could be totally wrong.
And I used to sort of give advice to people based on my own problems, you know, like earlier in my career.
So like a young person will be like, what do I need to do?
And I was like, I wish I believe in myself more because I was very half-assed about everything because it's like I never thought anything would come from it, but I wanted to write a book.
So I'd pick here and pick at it here and there.
So I used to tell people, you know, believe in yourself, believe in yourself.
And then you start learning a little more about these people and it's like, yeah, self-confidence is not this person's problem.
Well, there's also confidence versus confidence that's based on an understanding of your competence and your work ethic and confidence that's built up over time with effort.
I'm not Jack Carr or Brad Taylor or any of these other guys.
I bartended until I was like 31. I always had a couple jobs.
I got my degree in international relations and political science, but didn't do anything with it for 20-something years, other than 10 bar with it, I guess.
I read every espionage novel, military stuff, fiction.
I actually tried to get in the Air Force at one point and didn't get in.
I was sort of fascinated by that world, and I'd read The Economist when I was 17 years old.
I had a subscription to The Economist and U.S. News and World Report and would read all this.
I was just interested in that, foreign policy and that sort of thing.
So I loved it, and I loved thinking up kind of like wild, crazy stories and big action set pieces and stuff.
Geopolitical, this and that.
Clancy, the first book I ever bought in my life or thriller I ever bought was Patriot Games, which was a Tom Clancy novel.
Yeah, in one of the books, I think it was Gunmetal Gray, it was the sixth book, I remember near the end, I was like, I'm going to have him do something that makes sense to him, but it's actually the readers, it's not what the readers are going to want him to do.
And that had never come up before.
And I was like, okay, if I'm reading this book, I'm going like, don't be an idiot.
Don't do it that way.
It was basically the outcome of the story, what he was going to do with this guy that he rescued.
And I was like, but it makes sense to him.
So am I okay with having a bunch of readers mad at me?
And I'm like, you kind of have to go with your gut.
And I was.
And I said, all right, I'm going to have him do what makes sense in the story for this character the way that I built him up over six books.
And I never really got much negative pushback from that at all.
It's always interesting when you're—reading is so fascinating to me, reading fiction, because someone is creating this world and you're trusting them with all these people in this world for it to not mess with your—it doesn't—you know, there's a suspension of disbelief that's involved in any, you know, reading literature or watching a movie or anything like that.
And you just don't want to mess with it to the point where someone's reading it going, ah, come on!
You don't want an ah, come on moment.
And you do a great job of avoiding ah, come on moments while you're navigating this impossible world of this elite assassin who somehow or another never gets killed.
He turned me down on a couple books, but he kept saying, you know, you're good.
Write me something else.
And I wrote the opening for The Gray Man.
And it's a sniper thing, and an American helicopter gets shot down.
And this guy that has nothing to do with the operation with the American soldiers...
It's just trying to get out of the kill zone where he's killed somebody, and he takes a sniper shot and kills some of the people that killed the Americans.
And so I gave that agent the first 50 pages of the book.
I'm still an unpublished author.
I'm like, will you tell me what you think?
He's like, yeah, it's great that shooting those guys from a mile away, that's really badass, but he needs to save somebody.
And I'm like, wait, how's he going to save somebody?
He's a mile away, and it's like Al-Qaeda, you know, since 2007. And he's like, I don't know, I'm not the writer, but he needs to save somebody.
So I went back into the story and I was like, well, shit, that doesn't really, you know, that's so implausible.
But then I'm like, all right, I guess it's my job to sell that.
And the whole series was informed by that early film.
Because what I do is I create pretty outlandish things and then work my ass off to sell them to the reader.
You know, put in the real world stuff, the geopolitical stuff, put in all these, you know, explain the hows and the whys to the best if you can.
And then at some point, you know, the bad guys have to miss their shots a lot more than the good guys miss their shots.
So, you know, it is...
It's fanciful.
Some people call it gun porn, but at the same time...
But at the same time, there's a heart to the story and all that, and I'm trying to pull the reader in to where they don't go, this is just way too out of left field.
Yeah, I have incredible respect for him because, you know, a lot of authors have co-authors or whatever as they get older and, you know, it's just harder to come up with new stuff, something you haven't done before.
My concentration levels at this point in my life is not what it was 15 years ago when the only thing competing with me writing my book was my Xbox, you know, when I was off work or whatever.
And, you know, now it's kids and dogs and, you know, travel and, you know, other obligations.
And so when I do have, like, a three-hour pocket of time to write, it's real easy to kind of lose focus.
And I'm like, wow, I remember going to Starbucks at 8.30 in the morning on a Saturday and staying until 9 at night, you know.
And it's like, I can't do that anymore.
I wish I could.
If I did that for a couple weeks, I'd have a book now.
I've been married on my second marriage, but I didn't get married the first time until I was 47. So, you know, I was in my—I was published and had several books out before I got married.
Yeah, I like to start writing as soon as I possibly can when I wake up, which used to be 5 in the morning.
I wrote my first book when I had a full-time job, and I wrote it between 5.30 and 7.30 at Starbucks over a six-month period.
Now, you know, there might be carpool or something else where I don't get started, but I have a detached, we have like a pool house that's my office and my house.
And so it's 30 steps out my back door and it's a completely different experience.
It's like being in, you know, it's like being somewhere else and nobody bugs me or whatever.
And so I like to get in there as quickly as possible, look at as few emails as possible.
I mean, you kind of look and see if things are, you know, there's chaos that you need to attend to, but if there's not, And I like to start writing and I will write in the mornings.
It's only when I'm like way on deadline and I'm going to be overdue where I will write in the afternoons too.
So I try to write 7 or 8 till noon or something like that.
And then that's done.
I'm done with my writing for the day.
I'll do...
Other stuff, I'll take the dogs to the park and I think about the books when I'm doing that and I'm always jotting stuff down in files for the books.
So, you know, there's a lot of, ask anybody in my family, there's times where I'm just sort of not 100% there at the dinner table for a minute because I'm thinking about, well, wait, what if that all happened in Singapore, you know?
So my brain resides there even when I'm not working.
But I try and like right now my writing goal is 1,500 words a day.
And so a lot of guys do that same thing that you're talking about, like there's a process after you're done riding where you're thinking about the riding of the day, and then you just sort of jot stuff down.
And a lot of guys like to, like I said, go for walks, or you like to take the dogs to the park.
Yeah, but for this kind of book, the only time I've ever really had it, it's kind of embarrassing, I don't know why I'm saying this in front of so many people, was when it was put in lime squares and nobody told me.
You're down there at one of those shark feeds where they have all this chum and a big ball and like hundreds of sharks.
And there's times where they're above you and there's the boat and then there's like 50 sharks and you're kind of down at the ocean floor going like, I'll wait for them to move on.
Yeah, it's been at different places, but I've done most of my training at a place in Middle Tennessee called Tactical Response.
You know, back at that point, they were training a lot of civilian contractors.
And so I took a, you know, you take pistol and advanced pistol and rifle and advanced rifle and this and that.
And then there's these things called, like, you know, HRCC, high-risk civilian contractor classes.
I took a bunch of those, and they're like a week long, and you stay in the bunkhouse or the team rooms with the guys.
And I learned really quick that, like, it's cool to learn about the guns and the gear and stuff for your books, but it's so much more impactful to sit there in the team room and drink scotch with, you know, SWAT guys or Special Forces Group dude or whatever, you know?
It's just like these been there, done that guys, contractors, Blackwater guys back then.
And so, you know, I feel like I kind of became a mascot of that school.
I probably took 50 classes.
I probably spent close to, you know, a couple hundred days there in Tennessee.
And I've done some other training.
I own a bunch of the firearms that are in the books and like to train when I can.
It's less and less as you get older and busier and more family and all that kind of stuff.
But I really do want to get back into it even more.
Early on, I mean, I actually heard the term The Gray Man at one of these classes from a guy, I think it was a contractor, which is just...
They would say, you know, be the gray man who just, like, not wear the tactical gear and the 511 pants and the Wiley X glasses and the Luminox watches or whatever.
Because they're traveling into the Middle East and, you know, the airport in Dubai or something like that, Al-Qaeda would have, like, watchers there, you know, seeing who was coming in and things like that.
Balancing the incredulity, balancing the plausible aspects of the story, is that difficult?
Because you've got a guy who's constantly involved in gunfights and knife fights, and people are throwing knives at him, he's jumping out of fucking buildings, and there's so much chaos.
I wasn't in India where it took place because this was pre-COVID. I was in Hong Kong researching a Clancy novel.
And I saw the scaffolding and I went up to it and I climbed up on part of it and I looked around, you know, and I was like, okay, if you cut this, then this ought to do this.
Now, I wouldn't do it, you know, because it's six stories.
But in the first Gray Man book, he has to have basically surgery or he has to get sutured up while he's driving, get his gut sutured up.
And I talked to, you know, a special forces medic and talked about doing that and plausibility of that and going into shock and all these other things.
And a lot of people kind of complained about it and said, that's so impossible, that's so impossible.
And I'm like, yeah, but if you read the book again, he passes out while it happens and crashes the car.
It's like it was not perfectly successful.
You know, it's just like he didn't come out.
It wasn't like he's just like, yeah, sew me up while I drive.
He intended to use a mirror to help him operate, but he found that it's an inverted view too much of a hindrance, so he ended up working by touch without gloves.
That is a problem with people that write reviews on almost anything because when someone enjoys something and they want to go see that something, that's their genre.
That's the thing they're interested in.
Then they're going to write a review based on someone who actually enjoys the genre.
Jack Carr and I had this conversation with his podcast once where we were talking about the The viewer reviews of our shows, Terminalist and Gray Man, and then the professional reviews or whatever.
And the people that watched it loved it overall.
The reviewers hated it.
But I mean, they're going to hate stuff like that.
And he's just doing something different than what the critics...
I remember David Lee Roth once said the reason that critics all hated him and they all loved Elvis Costello is because all the critics look like Elvis Costello, which I don't know if that's true.
You see people that are passionate about it, even if they're criticizing something.
Yes.
I've always had this philosophy, it's like if you read my book, if you spend the 12 hours to read that book or whatever it takes, it's like you get to share your opinion with whoever you want.
It's like I can't begrudge that.
Sometimes I'll disagree with what they say.
Sometimes I'll agree with it.
The worst negative reviews are the ones where it's like, oh, this guy, he's got it.
I like it when they're just assholes.
They're just like, oh, this guy's nobody.
But then sometimes you're going like, oh, he sees me.
But those guys are really good because if someone who can really see it and they expose something that makes you uncomfortable, that gives you an opportunity to get better.
Yeah, I've been saying that for years and years, but never as eloquently.
I'm going to watch this later and write down what you just said.
Because I have said, like, you'll read a review, and just to make the review a better little piece of writing for them, they basically...
Change the story.
There's basically really disingenuous stuff in there.
Not every review, obviously, but that happens sometimes.
And I'm going like, oh, okay, as a writer, I know how you wanted to make these two paragraphs really impactful here, so you just told some bullshit about my story that's not even in the story.
I think people are very much entitled to their own opinion.
Don't get me wrong.
But what I think is that the model of the professional critic, I think it has so many problems with it.
And I'm sure there's people out there that are professional critics that are very good.
And this is not a blanket statement.
But I think we're better served by the unprofessional, by the actual person who's just an intelligent person, who's a fan of the work, who reads the book, and then can write a little Amazon review or some other critique about it.
If a person's problematic, like if you're going to crowdsource a JK Rowling's book today, well, the thing about the criticisms, it would be overrun by people who are like trans activists who are angry at her for her stance on women being women.
And I've said that often about fights, that maybe we should crowdsource the scoring instead of having these people that are professional judges, because some of them, they get it so wrong.
And some scoring is so...
You'll see like 49, 47, 49, 47, and then you'll see one that is just like...
Some people like that, though, if you do somehow or another get in contact with them and you communicate with them, they realize, oh, you're just a person.
And what I used to think before I had any, you know, people knew who I was, I used to think, like, the really successful people turned to assholes because they're not as friendly.
They don't reach out.
But now it's like I'll get, like, you know...
90 people a day sending me some sort of thing on social media or an email or something like that.
And there's people that if I don't respond to them immediately, they're like, oh, I guess you're too good.
And it's not me being an asshole.
You get a little bit protective because...
One out of a hundred of them can ruin your life.
There's a guy who'll watch this, so who knows?
He'll probably wear my skin as a suit now.
It'd be all your fault.
But no, he thinks that he is the gray man, and he tells me about how we had met, and he gave me the idea for the story, blah, blah, blah.
And it's been going on for years, and I replied to him the first couple times, like, yeah, I don't think we met.
But he saw something I said publicly about where I got the idea for the story, and I was down in El Salvador when I got the idea.
And he's like, I met you at a bar in El Salvador.
It was like right out of an interview, you know?
And he's been doing it for years, and I'm not sure.
He's like, I don't want money.
I just want you to tell me that it's me or something.
Yeah, well, there's a lot of people that are schizophrenic.
I mean, there's a certain percentage of the population, I think it's like 1% or something like that, that is just schizophrenic, period, no matter what you do.
I had a guy call my then, like, 90-year-old aunt at 5 in the morning looking for my number because she was in the phone book in Memphis and I wasn't in the phone book in Memphis.
And she's like, I need his number, I need his number.
And so I figured out who it was because, you know, there's a short list of people that...
We're, like, being a little weird.
And I figured out who it was.
And I was like, look, man, you, you know, I'm going to the cops.
You do this again.
And he said, instead of him saying sorry, he's like, I hope you see that the links that I went to to reach you shows you how intense I feel about this project that we can work on together.
I was like, no, no.
What I see is that you called my aunt at 5 in the morning and tried to berate her into giving me a phone call.
People want, you know, they're like, oh, I've got a story for you.
You're going to want to write this book.
And it's like, and my pat answer, I don't usually reply to them now, but my pat answer was like, just as you are passionate about that idea, I have ideas of my own about which I'm passionate.
And that's what I'm working on right now.
But even people, you know, they're like, will you read my book or whatever?
And I blurb people's books all the time.
But I'm like...
Yeah.
for a couple of weeks of my free time.
And it's like, I do things to help people, there's some sort of connection or personal, but like you just can't. - You can't. - I can either be the guy that publishes 300,000 words a year, Or I can be the guy that reads the books when people have ideas.
Well, I don't think anybody who is not in this sort of public sphere has any understanding of how many people are coming at you with projects and ideas on any given day.
Like I can't keep up with the text messages from people that I know.
And then also you want it to be the best fucking thing you could do because you've done so many great books already that this has got, you've got to nail it.
And I hate to say I'm a perfectionist because it sounds like you think you've done something perfect before.
But I'm a perfectionist in the sense that at least this aspect of my life, it's never right.
It's never good enough.
And you just run out of time.
So I do go over it.
I'll turn a first draft into my editor.
It comes back to me.
He reads it and gives me his ideas, and I'll do a second draft, and then he'll read it again, and then he'll go to a copy editor, and I'll get it, and then he'll go to a proofreader, and I'll get it.
And still, there'll be some mistake that makes it into the book at the end.
Last book, Burner, is 165,000 words.
So I always say, yeah, in 160,000 words, there's probably five words I wish I could get a do-over on.
I'm the last one that looks at it before a copy editor goes and fixes the little things that I... And I kind of have a bad reputation at my publishing house for making a lot of changes at the end.
I crammed 14 pages into a Clancy book once.
After Tom had passed away and I was writing the Jack Ryan books, like literally the last go-around, I was like, you know, I really feel it needs this scene.
And they came back to me and they're like, we've already measured the spine.
And I was like, did not know that was a thing.
But to their credit, they made changes and they got it in there.
But I never read the books again.
I do listen to the audiobooks or at least part of the audiobooks because I think I have a good audio narrator.
I do, too, because there must be some sort of cues to where they can, because, you know, sometimes in writing, you don't identify who's speaking until after the sentence or whatever.
So somehow, I don't know how they reverse engineer that to do an audiobook.
It's a Navy SEAL book, and he read it, and I was like, this guy could be a professional audiobook guy, because there's an intensity to him and all that.
The first few books, you're pulling off the low-hanging fruit.
You have your whole life to think of these cool ideas and these interesting scenarios, and then you get a little bit more and a little bit more, and then you get to a point where it's like, okay, I've...
Taking all the parts off of the cars that I have in the back of my house, you know.
And so you just have to go out and get more information.
Go to other places.
I think I've been to like 38 countries doing research.
Talk to a lot of people, read a lot, and try and bring stuff in.
The macro level, I'm great.
I've got ideas for 20 more books, probably.
The micro level, it's like, okay, this guy has got to get on a private jet and fly to Malta.
It's like, okay, I've done that.
How does he do it differently?
Or this guy's following another guy down a street.
Or this woman is going to kill her husband or whatever.
It's like those things that you've done.
I used to joke, I'm like, there's going to be a point where I'm going to be riding a knife fight in a hot tub and go like, this is my third knife fight in a hot tub.
It's like, how many times can you get away with that?
One of the things to me that's been interesting about your books is going from the original Gray Man to Sierra 6, where I'm at now, where you have to deal with the new technology.
And you have to deal with new surveillance technology.
You have to deal with the internet.
You have to deal with the fact that someone's going to be a known person.
When you've got a guy like the Gray Man that's been involved in so many operations and so many different missions, at a certain point in time, people are aware of him.
Yeah, if you look at it literally, but I'll go back to James Bond.
He'd walk into a place and say, my name's James Bond, or Bond James Bond.
I'm like, he actually used his real name.
That's kind of funny.
It's like, I'm an MI6 guy using my real name out there in the field.
And Yeah, you know, you just try and sell it as best you can.
Like, The Gray Man really hasn't aged in the past 10 years or so.
He aged maybe in the first couple of books, but I didn't know it was going to be a series.
I had no idea.
And so there's Daniel Silva.
I don't know if you've read him.
He's a fantastic thriller author.
He actually ages his character, Gabriel Alon, who's an Israeli former Mossad guy.
And his books are fantastic.
I mean, I look up to him very much.
But that's not what I'm doing.
I mean, my guy's going to need to be able to climb that fence and jump off that scaffold and land on a tuk-tuk or something.
It's like that's not going to go away as long as I'm writing the series.
So if each story on its own stands on its own and is fun and is exciting and has something, some kernel out of what's really going on in the world, hopefully to make it current, then I'm probably OK.
As long as I can keep doing that.
I don't ever want to phone it in.
Like my career, my ambition isn't anything other than writing a good book.
And if I'm not writing a good book, I will do something else.
It's Josh Duffy series, which is only one book right now, but I'm working on the other one today.
So I like bouncing around.
But, you know, as far as exchanging the gray man out in a story like someone younger comes and takes a role, probably not because I'm really not aging him.
You know, it's like I mentally I'm going like, all right, so he'd be he'd probably be.
By this story, he'd probably be about 46 now or something like that.
So he could still do a lot of the stuff and a lot of the stuff he couldn't do.
I remember, you know, when I wrote the first Gray Man, like the older guy who, you know, was like his boss, Hanley, I think was like 44 or 45 or something.
I was like, yeah, it's this old fart, you know, and now I'm 55. And you're going like, what an asshole.
But yeah, I think the books are always going to sort of stand on their own and stand alone, like a James Bond or something like that.
And I want there to be story arcs and I want there to be psychology of interpersonal relationships and all these things in the story.
But I'm not looking to make the reality, you know, and have anything to do with time.
I went out and met the Russo brothers when they were going to write the script and spent a few days with them talking about the story and where the future story, because they wanted it to be a franchise from the beginning.
But I wasn't involved in the day-to-day, but I was sent scripts.
Joe sent me the script that he wrote, and then I saw the shooting script right when they were shooting.
That was my involvement with it.
And then I would be on Twitter and I'd see Ryan Gosling dressed up as a gray man on Twitter.
I didn't see it any way anybody else would have seen it.
I think I went into it with the right mindset that this was a film representation.
And I know that the directors are really creative people and the screenwriters and cinematographers and actors.
They don't look at it as their job that they're engineers that are going to take a piece of paper and turn it into celluloid with everyone doing exactly the same thing.
So I never expected that.
There are places in there where I think I really like what they did, and there's places in there where it's like I think my line landed a little bit better.
And that actually made me happy.
I wasn't mad that they didn't do it my way.
It's more like, okay, I think I have something to offer still instead of all these big shots with all this money come and make something so vastly superior to the little paperback that I wrote.
I think there's places where my stuff holds up and there's stuff in there that I think is fantastic too.
It is really strange.
The toughest thing is the complaints from fans that aren't happy because of the changes.
So people just pigeonhole me all the time at a conference or something.
And they'll be like, in the movie, they did this.
And in the book, they did this.
And I was like, yeah, I wrote the book and I saw the movie.
So this whole interaction is like, I don't know what to tell you.
You know, it's like I can't speak.
And people will email me and they're like, you've screwed up.
You gave it away.
You know, it was all for the money or whatever.
And you're like, I didn't have any creative control.
I'm not Stephen King or John Grusham or one of these guys.
You know, I had this little paperback that I got a little bit of money to advance to put out and they Well, Stephen King famously didn't like The Shining.
And I think it was just an age thing because in his head he was pretty literal about – at this stage when I wrote this book, he's a young CIA analyst who – Or whatever.
And I think Harrison Ford was older.
And I'm not 100% sure about that.
But I do know that, you know, I've read places.
Tom never told me this, but that he wasn't a big fan of those.
As I described the gray man, the look is pretty similar.
And he didn't overbake it.
I feel like the scenes with the girl that he's protecting could have turned schmaltzy and cheesy.
And they didn't.
And I like that.
In my book, I like it a little bit better because the girl actually has some agency in her own rescue.
She does some things to help herself, whereas this one she's just sort of like protected, you know, by Gentry.
I mean, she kind of saves the day to some degree too.
You know, you can pick little things.
The very first scene in the movie, Billy Bob Thornton is a CIA guy sitting in a prison with a dude saying, "Here's the name of our secret CIA program, "and here's what it does." Would you like to join?
That's how that works.
The funniest part was that there's a scene, a big action scene in Prague.
It takes place in Prague and the gray man is handcuffed to a bench and he's shooting bad guys and he can't get away and there's cops and dead cops around him and then the bad guys, Chris Evans sending the bad guys in from all directions.
And at one point, he reaches over to this cop and pulls a frag grenade off the guy's utility belt.
I mean, the kind of books I read are the kind of books I write.
And I wrote a military thriller, co-authored a military thriller in 2019 called Red Metal with a then active duty Marine Lieutenant Colonel, a good friend of mine, Rip Rawlings.
Because I always, even though I wasn't in the military, Tom Clancy wasn't in the military.
It's like I always thought that I had one of those in me, like a big military thriller like an old Tom Clancy one.
And so I wanted to do it forever.
And I met Rip at the Pentagon when I was researching a Clancy book, and he wanted to be a writer.
He was a writer, but it hadn't been published.
And he and I became friends.
And for like four years, we would just bounce ideas off each other.
And one day I just said, hey, Rip, I think I could go to my editor or my agent and I can get us a book deal if you want to do this together.
So we did.
And he and I went to Poland and to Germany and he went to France and we went to Nellis Air Force Base.
And we did research and research.
And this book came out in 2019. It was a Russia war with NATO. And it did really well.
It hit the times list.
And we're doing a sequel.
But the idea was I wanted to do something that was a little bit out of the spy novel thing.
This is big troop movements and aircraft and all this stuff.
And I wanted to write something big like that.
And I did it and I was really happy with the experience.
It was a ton of work, but it was also really fulfilling.
So I made...
I get a little bit afield in what I write.
You know, it's not always going to be like, you know, the assassin walking down the street, you know, chasing a guy.
But I probably won't go that wide.
I'm not going to be writing, you know, a Bollywood script or anything like that anytime soon.
Yeah, I didn't but now I realize how important it is and so last year I had two books come out and the film came out So I had all these things that didn't involve writing a book and I wrote burner which I went to several countries to research and took probably eight months to write the book and And I was supposed to write something else last year.
And both my agent and my editor, who are both great guys, they both said, why don't you just take the rest of the year off?
Because you've really been burning the candle at both ends and start fresh next year.
And so it was hard, you know, to get up one day and not feel like you have to be on your laptop in four minutes, you know.
But I used that time to kind of come up with this year's book to where I have...
Pretty more fleshed out outline than I usually do.
Significantly more.
But yeah, it was just days of going to the park or working out in a little home gym and listening to podcasts about stuff that would be in the next book or reading stuff and slowly taking notes.
And I don't really have the luxury of doing that every time.
When I finish the new Gray Man book, I've got to get right into the second Armored book, which is the one that will come out next year.
And I better have a plot to figure it out on the plane, you know, as I'm on book tour or something.
But when they first reached out to me, it wasn't a job offer.
It was more like, would you be interested?
Do you want us to put your hat in the ring for this?
where no decisions were being made.
And as scared as I was at first, I also knew enough about the publishing world to know that that book was going to be due whenever I started writing it, that the due date wasn't going to change.
So it's like beginning of February 2011, they asked me if I was interested.
End of February, I still didn't have it, the job.
And we're into March, and I still didn't have the job.
And I was like, I bet this book is due on a certain date, no matter what.
So finally I said, listen, I am a huge Clancy fan.
I know these characters.
I know these people.
Let me write 50 pages as if I was writing a Tom Clancy novel and do that as a tryout.
And so I don't think anybody else did that.
And so I just wrote 50 pages like in the middle of a book that never existed.
You know, just like I didn't worry about plot.
I was just like, there's a scene.
And I gave them that and then they had me go up to Baltimore and meet Tom and then I had the job.
I got found out about nootropics because of Bill Romanoski.
He was a former football player, great football player, and developed some, obviously, some neural issues, post-concussions and impacts and stuff like that.
So we created something called Neuro One, and I really liked that.
I started taking Neuro One because there was a show called Allison No Name.
And he's like, it's nutrients that help you think better.
I was like, well, what do you do?
And he gave me some.
And I started taking it.
I'm like, this is interesting.
It helps you form sentences better.
It helps your verbal memory.
And one of the things we've done with AlphaBrain, because this is a company that I owned, we sent a bunch of it and we funded two double-blind placebo-controlled studies at the Boston Center for Memory.
And they showed increase in verbal memory, increase in reaction time, increase in peak alpha flow state.
So it enhances your ability to think, and that's the thing.
It's not going to make you smarter, but what it does is it provides your brain with the nutrients it needs to function at its best.
Well, there's also a thing with the vitality of your body.
Like, the more vitality you have, the more robust your body is, the more you can function at a high energy level for longer periods of time, which is, I think, cardio is very important for anybody who's creative.
I mean there's a lot of like brilliant creative people that never work out ever and 100% you can do it I know some brilliant comedians and writers and all they do is they force themselves to sit down they create amazing work But I think if you looked at it comprehensively the overall robustness of your physical body the your body's ability to generate energy Function at you know a really good pace and to just be Overall,
healthy, I think, is very important for creativity.
And I think cardiovascular fitness, in particular, seems to really enhance creativity.
I know a lot of people that get very creative when they run, very creative when they'll do something that is a high tax rate on the body, like yoga or CrossFit, something that just keeps your body functioning at a very high level.
It's the same chemicals as was explained to me that fire out through your brain if you're, you know, having some crazy relationship stuff going on as if a tiger is chasing you or whatever.
It's like your brain doesn't have different chemicals for different things.
And I think that there's a real physical requirement of taxing your body that comes with that sort of anxiety that if you don't meet that physical requirement, your body's just like...
Because it's like, we've got to run, man.
There's something going on.
There's something attacking us.
We've got to get the fuck out of here.
Unless you meet those physical requirements, like wear your body out so that it can get back to a normal baseline, it doesn't burn off all that shit.
I'm obviously not talking about it like a scientist, but there's something to that.
For me, in times of peak anxiety and peak stress, nothing makes me feel better than a hard workout.
So the first surgeon went in to clean up a one-level bulging disc and left sequestered disc material, so the jelly inside the jelly donut that is the disc, in the foramen, which is the Joint area where the nerve root goes, and it crushed off my nerve root, my L4 nerve root, which means I can't dorsiflex my left foot.
Well, so I had a second surgery to kind of get that disc material out, and then I had a third surgery because I just had so much discogenic pain, so just midline back pain.
I was walking with a cane when I was 34, and I'd have been an amateur, but a very intense soccer player.
And the third surgery, they went in through my front, and they moved the whole stomach, the whole peritoneum, the bag that holds the stomach, and they put, like, these, like, shoehorn in there, and then they took out the discs, and then they put in these joints that look kind of like an Oreo cookie, but...
So I have two levels of that.
And my back pain, 65% of my back pain went away immediately.
And with therapy, another 20%.
I still have.
But then in 2017, I went to have a surgery to fix my ankle and give me the dorsiflexion back.
They can move a tendon from the inside of your foot behind your shin and attach it to the top of your foot.
And after a while, your body learns how to use that tendon right.
Anybody that says, you should do physical therapy, it's like I know all the exercises because I've been to like 10, 12 bouts of physical therapy and I do them and it probably makes it somewhat better.
Well, there's some places that you can go outside of the United States where they can do some pretty phenomenal stuff with stem cells because they don't have the same regulations that we have here because of the FDA. But I know a bunch of people that have had neurological issues and some serious injuries that they've helped recover from.
Yeah, but back surgery is a crazy one and I wish I had known you before you had gotten it because there's stuff that you could do with bulging discs now that you can really repair them with stem cells and with There's some decompression exercises that they can decompress the spine.
There's a machine called Reverse Hyper that's particularly good at the lumbar area.
It was created by this guy, Louie Simmons, who was a famous power lifter, who fucked his back up from compression, and they wanted to fuse his back, and he was like, well, why can't I figure out a way to decompress it?
There's got to be a way to decompress it.
So we invented this machine called the Reverse Hyper.
And what the Reverse Hyper is, we have one out here in the gym.
I'll show it to you after we're done.
But you lay your stomach down on this flat bench and you hook your ankles up to this thing that's sort of like a leg curl.
And you lift up And then you lift your legs up, which strengthens the back.
And then as you let it down, it swings and it's actively decompressing your back.
From the top of my neck all the way down to my lower back, I've had issues from jiu-jitsu.
Jiu-jitsu is the worst.
Jiu-jitsu and wrestling, it's like people are constantly shoving your neck into You're getting stacked, where literally all your weight is on your upper back and your neck, and someone's got a hold of your legs, and you're trying to pass, and you're resisting and moving, and there's so much strain on the spinal column.
Unless you strengthen all the tissue around that to keep it stable, you're going to get injuries.
So I do something for my neck.
I have this thing called an iron neck where I put a halo on and a I have a bungee cord that's like 50 pounds of pressure to pull it back.
But for bulging discs, I had a bulging disc in my neck to the point where it was causing ulnar nerve pain, where I'd have this pain in my elbow and my fingertips were getting numb.
He's getting better constantly, but that one particular area because of the fusion.
And he fucked his neck up, believe it or not.
Well, he had fucked his neck up many times in his career.
He actually fought for the heavyweight title when he...
Was it the heavyweight title?
No.
When he fought Teyoshi Kosaka, which was, I think, the first fight that he had in the UFC, he couldn't do any wrestling because his neck was so fucked up.
So he just kind of had to like spar and condition himself and get in shape without doing any wrestling.
And he still won the fight.
But then he was doing Sons of Anarchy.
He was doing a stunt scene and he fell on his neck and just fucked his neck up and then wound up getting it fused.
But now they're doing these articulating discs in the neck that have been very successful.
In fact, Aljamain Sterling, who's the UFC bantamweight champion, he actually had that done.
So he had a disc replacement in his neck where he fought Pyotr Jan, fought for the title, got illegally kneed in the head, and won the title on a disqualification, which a lot of people are like, boo, you can't win a title like that.
Then had to get this operation, so it was a long time before they had the rematch, and they came and dominated in the rematch with a fake disc in his neck.
And there's also, there's this perspective that comes from having been debilitated, having been really injured and And then recovering from that, will you really appreciate your ability to move?
And I'm like, nobody's asking me if I'm an assassin.
They're only asking me if I'm popping pills.
But I can understand how somebody could get on, you know, because I was taking them for pain and when the pain got, you know, low enough, I didn't take them regularly.
But I still, like, I would have a panic attack if I didn't have some access to hydrocodone because when it flares up, I mean, there's nothing that makes it go away that I know of.
I have a good friend who was an MMA fighter who had his nose smashed in a fight and got his nose fixed and like crushed all the bones and he got hit with an elbow.
Brendan Chubb.
And he fought this guy, Mirko Krokop, who's like a legendary assassin, like one of the greatest MMA fighters of all time, and he got his nose smashed.
Brendan wound up winning the fight by KO, but then afterwards his nose was fucked.
And then he had to get it reconstructed, like literally rebuilt.
And he got hooked on pain pills.
And he didn't even realize it.
And he was just popping them all day.
And then finally one of his friends was like, hey man, how many fucking pills are you taking?
But then the fear is that he gets some other injury and he needs, you know, it's like you hear about these people like, don't give me anything because I'm addicted.
It's like, oh my God, that's probably stressful for the doctor too to have to do some procedure without giving somebody.
If I'm really in pain, I don't even really notice I take it.
I just have less pain.
But there's been times where I've been like, all right, I'm going to be standing for a long time.
time, I'm going to take one now, like, preemptively or whatever, and I feel dopey.
And so I do get that dopey feeling.
But when you're really taking it to deal with pain, somehow it goes to another part of your brain or something, and I don't feel dopey at all when I take a hydrocodone unless I take one when I probably shouldn't.
Yeah, I'm usually listening to an audiobook or something like when I work out.
I don't even think about working out when I work out.
I'll sort of write down what I'm going to do and I try and do a little bit more than I did last time or another rep or better form or, you know, some little improvement because I can see what I did when I did whatever back and biceps three days ago.
But when I stretch, it is meditative because, I don't know, it's kind of like, I hate to use that term, me time, but it's so like this, I go in there and nobody's in there and I'm just kind of doing my thing and it makes me feel good afterwards and I'm happier doing it than not doing it.
And I'm able to sort of multitask and get some work done listening to audiobooks.
I've worked out with trainers before, especially with martial arts, but when it comes to weight training, especially because I don't do stuff where I need a spotter.
And I'm kind of like, You should read or listen to or watch YouTube videos from Andrew Huberman.
He's a professor out of Stanford who's done a fantastic job of breaking down the benefits of cold and heat therapy.
And it ramps up your dopamine by like 200% and it lasts for hours.
Reduces inflammation, produces all these cold shock proteins that are fantastic for your body.
And heat and cold together, the contrast therapy is also very, very good for you.
But just heat alone, you know, they did a study out of Finland that showed that four times a week of the sauna for 20 minutes had a 40% decrease In all-cause mortality.
I'm gonna send this to you, Jamie, because it's so crazy.
Because he was just telling me, he was just sending me some stuff about, like, things he's been doing.
And, you know, he thinks of it as, like, he literally says that it's like he's gaining knowledge from these suffer sessions, from these, you know, marathon runs that he'll do on a regular basis.
And, like, whatever he's getting out of there, he's like, I'm getting, like, he thinks of it as, like, that's his toe.
It's just the amount of hours and miles and the pain, and it's his mind.
It's all in his mind, and that's what he works on.
I mean, what he's doing when he's running like that is just...
He's extracting the maximum amount of human potential out of what his mind and his body is capable of doing it, and then he goes to sleep and does it all.
unidentified
This is probably back when it started in 2016 when he had almost a full nail.
Millions of people with this unstoppable fuel, like this fuel for the body and for the mind.
Like you see, like if David Goggins can do it, and he talks openly about how he used to be 300 pounds and he was lazy and then became this unstoppable force.
When you're talking about a guy like Court Gentry, who's this insanely exceptional person, knowing that there's insanely exceptional people that are out there that are just one of one, like a David Goggins.
Yeah, no, you know, there's a farmer that a tree fell on his leg and he had to cut his leg off.
We're talking about stuff like that earlier.
And crawl, you know, like a mile.
And you see these things and you go, like, don't tell me what...
And people say that, like, it's unrealistic.
It's like, it's improbable.
It's not unreal.
You know, it's not impossible.
Right.
You know, it's like I don't think there's anything in my books medically that doesn't make sense if you had the mindset to get through it.
And even in the first book, like, he's shooting himself up with, like, veterinary drugs or something, I can't remember what, to, you know, get his heart rate back up for this final fight, even though it's going to make him bleed more.
You know, it's just like...
He's so goal-driven that that's the only thing that matters.
And the fact that I don't have military experience, you know, I tried to make up for it by, like, learning specifics and stuff like that.
And honestly, people in the military love my books.
I've heard from people on FBI hostage rescue team that love something when I wrote about them.
And I don't know any of them.
You know, it's just like I hear about it after the fact.
I think...
I was a ghostwriter for a book of a guy that was a military dude early in my career, and he's a brilliant guy, and I'm really proud of the book, but he would just be telling me stories, and the thing that he might have been focused on in the story wasn't the interesting thing to me.
to me I'd be like wait what did you say about how you took Makarov's off of dead Taliban guy and didn't you know or just some little ancillary thing so it's kind of like what I bring to the table is I mean fanboy or whatever it's just it's some sort of like a buddy of mine who's a SWAT officer he was showing me pictures of There's some breaching they were doing and all this other stuff.
And then I was like, wait, why did they – why did you blow a hole in that wall there?
He's like, oh, we're just making a gun port because there was an angle.
And then he starts talking about something else.
I was like, go back to the gun port.
Explain that to me.
And then it's just like that works its way in his book because it's like there's the nugget that I've never heard of that I need to know details and why that would do that.
And it's like that's what I want to incorporate in the book.
So, you know, asking the right questions.
I got to fly in an F-18 last year, which was an amazing experience, obviously very rare for a civilian.
But every little thing about it, you know, like what the air smelled and tasted like and, you know, like what it felt like.
I got to fly a little bit.
And, you know, just every little bit of that, you know, works its way into the books.
And, you know, sometimes it's mundane stuff, but sometimes it's really cool stuff, too.
How difficult is it to when you're writing stuff about like international policy and you're writing stuff about like how people would be deployed and how like a special operations group would be deployed?
How difficult is it to kind of even Get a read of what would go on.
Yeah, a lot of it's classified, and so there is this point where I just make stuff up, but I try and build with as much detail as possible.
I mean, I have this book called The U.S. Intelligence Committee, and it's like onion-skinned paper, and it's like that thick, and it's like every unit, everything that's not denied or sub-Rosa.
What's sub-Rosa?
Just denied, you know, like black ops or, you know, like things that they don't admit.
I don't know why they call it Sub Rosa, but it's like under the red.
I don't know what that means.
But anyway, it's things that they don't, you know, admit to doing.
You have to learn all those terms, too, which is interesting in Sierra 6, where Cort, who doesn't have a military background, gets integrated with this group that does when you go back 12 years.
And, you know, he's got to kind of learn all those phrases, and they're all frustrated that he doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about.
I mean, he literally doesn't know what they call the mess hall or whatever, you know, these different names for different things.
Because he wouldn't.
When I wrote him in the beginning, the wars were going on, and I knew that there's going to be a lot of really good authors writing this stuff that are downrange right now.
And I ain't one of them, sadly.
But I was like, I want my guy to be different.
Everybody was a Navy SEAL at that point.
This was before Bin Laden.
Everybody was a Navy SEAL. In every book.
And I wanted somebody that not only wasn't a Navy SEAL, didn't even really have that background.
So his backstory is that his father was a police officer that ran a firearms training school in Florida.
And he, court as a child, was in these shoot houses with these people.
And then he, you know, grew and grew and grew, fired, you know.
Tens of thousands of rounds a month and all this other stuff and just turned him into something else.
And then I do think narratively it adds to the story that he's not, you know, SEAL Team 6 and doesn't have a bunch of buddies, you know, that are team guys.
And the guys on his paramilitary team in Special Activities Division in Sierra 6...
I don't like him at all.
Like, they don't get why he's there.
But he's there because he's been an assassin for the CIA since he was 20 and had done some operations in Russia, and they needed a guy on the ground that had a certain level of tradecraft abilities that these former SEALs didn't have.
Do you ever run plot lines and things that you're writing about past people that may know the way those things are handled and done and see if you're doing it correctly?
I've talked to CIA guys regularly or military people and, you know, I always hear, you know, here's the non-classified version or here's what I can tell you.
I've been sitting at the Pentagon and I've asked a question and they're like...
Yeah, the first book I did with Tom Clancy, I wasn't allowed to say that I was working with Tom Clancy because they didn't know if the book was going to be good or come out or whatever.
So it was so frustrating because it's like I'm in there going like, hi, I'd like to talk to somebody about something.
And they just meet with you?
I've written these paperbacks.
Yeah, I mean, it's not like I'm talking to the generals or anything like that, but, I mean, it's, yeah, there's people.
I've been on, gosh, I've been at, like, Camp Pendleton in California and the Navy base in San Diego, got on the destroyer, got to go out to the A-10 thing at Nellis Air Force where they're the warthogs.
I've had some really amazing experiences, and it's all kind of non-classified.
There's public information officers with each thing in the military, and you go through them.
Or, in some examples, I've just known a guy, like my buddy Rip that I wrote the book with, who now, incidentally, has his own foundation in Ukraine and is supporting a battalion of foreign fighters in Ukraine.
Spent his entire career as a Marine Corps officer, retired, and then this war with Russia kicks off, and he's over there trying to support, you know, the war effort.
But, you know, he was just a guy I met at the Pentagon.
I had a guy, a friend of my brother's was a Marine at one point, and he put me in contact with a Marine aviation guy, and he was going to be at the Pentagon, and I went up there and saw him.
And Rip was a guy that liked my books, and we were talking, and he just said he worked at the Pentagon.
And I'm like, I'm in D.C. all the time.
You know, I'd love to come up there.
And we did it that way.
So...
I've met CIA guys, former CIA guys.
I've met people that say they're something and you kind of figure out after a while, no, they're not.
It's like people that are legit and they're badass, but they're not badass enough for themselves for this story.
My buddy Brad Taylor, who's a fantastic thriller author, a former Delta guy, Army Special Mission Union guy, He's like, you know, you never meet a parachute rigger for Delta Force.
Everybody you meet is an operator for Delta Force.
There's just a lot of baloney about what people say.
He's like, yeah, we loved our parachute riggers, but no one ever says that's what they did.
And I have such respect for the men and women that go and serve their country because I've met 20-year-old female On a destroyer, it's her job to bring the helicopters in.
And you're just like, wow, when I was 20, what was I doing?
I was not doing that.
I wasn't responsible for a ship and an airframe meeting up at the same place at the same time on a deck, a moving deck.
Do you feel like a responsibility when you're writing to sort of reflect that, that, you know, you have such a deep respect for these people that you have to write that in a way that sort of portrays that in an accurate sense?
And, you know, I've had villains who are U.S. military or U.S. government people or stuff like that.
And I've had people, like, complain about that.
You know, like, they want all the bad guys to have accents.
You know, like, can't be Americans.
But I mean, it's just like, you know.
There are all walks of life all over the place.
But I do feel a responsibility to...
Again, it's sort of the fanboy in me.
It's like I have such respect for these people and what they do and the responsibility they have often at very young ages.
Yeah.
It's a fascinating thing to me to write about and to talk about.
And again, it's just I like to build stories around reality and then at some point go off, you know, where the guy's jumping off an airplane and without a parachute and finding a way down, you know.
My new book involves Russian mafia slash Russian government, which are one and the same in my opinion.
And so I'm looking at real cases.
I actually had finished the book, and it involves Americans who are being influenced by Russia or taking money from Russian foreign intelligence and Americans in government.
And just a couple weeks ago, this guy...
FBI guy in New York who was like head of counterterrorism at one point, but he was also involved in the sanctions, Russian sanctions.
He just got indicted for taking money from Oleg Darabowski, which is one of the oligarchs that, you know, Putin supports or supports Putin or both.
And, you know, these things happen and they just caught a Russian GRU guy that was about to intern at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
And they just caught a German BND, the German foreign intelligence, Bundesnachrichtendienst, guy who had been spying for the Russians for a long time.
And, like, all that stuff's really fascinating to me.
So I want to learn about it as much as I can and then write a fictional, you know, version of it.
And I'd actually written this book before these three things came out, but, I mean, the Russians have been doing stuff like that for a while, so...
Yeah, it's disturbing when you find someone like that.
Is this the same guy, the guy that was a part of going after Trump for Russiagate, where it turned out that he got indicted for conspiring with Russia?
There was a gentleman that was involved in Russiagate, involved in going after Trump for his ties with Russia, and it turns out that he was colluding with Russia.
And that he was either colluding with oligarchs or there was something involved and he was recently indicted.
Well, my book, Berner, opens with court blowing up Russian yachts just as something to do, just as a side gig, and then he gets pulled into the main part of the story.
Yeah, I was down in St. Lucia researching it, and these people came ashore in some kind of a tender from a big yacht.
They were all Russian.
I don't know anything about their story.
They could have been totally on the up and up, but I'm like, that's fascinating.
The war had been going on for a few months, but those boats are still out there.
There's a report that some Wagner troops were stacking their dead guys up as basically sandbags.
And, you know, that's pretty awful if you think about it.
This is a horrible war.
Putin really miscalculated.
People in FSB told him what he wanted to hear, and they were supposed to be setting up influence operations in Ukraine for years and years, but they've been stealing the money.
And then when he said, you know, is this now the right time to do it?
And they basically said, sure it is.
Things went really bad.
Their fifth service in FSB that does the foreign stuff, I think, really dropped the ball.
Not dropped the ball.
I'm glad they dropped the ball.
But, I mean, they told him what he wanted to hear.
I mean, if you're an autocrat like that, you value loyalty over competence.
And you've got to have loyalty.
People don't have to be competent, but they've got to be loyal for you to survive.
And so he has these incompetent people that were all stealing from the government, and they were also telling him, it was kind of this feedback loop.
That's got to be one of the most difficult parts of the job, is incorporating these fictional narratives in with this sort of very realistic world of espionage and crime and Yeah, finding out what to use and what to leave out is really, really hard because I will be very fascinated with something and I'm like, it really doesn't push the narrative forward.
And early in my career, I would read these like really dry government documents about this thing.
And I wanted to prove that I read it by throwing stuff into the story.
And my editor would save me from that.
Now I'm self-correcting.
In that matter.
But yeah, there's so much information.
But what really makes me enjoy my books is while I'm doing the research by myself, I come across something and I go like, holy shit, people need to know about this.
And I'm not trying to preach.
I'm not trying to give anybody a political view or anything.
But it's like, this happened.
And so I'm going to do a version of this.
And I've actually had...
People complain about my books, and they'll be like, well, there's no way a liberal female lawyer would support an al-Qaeda guy in prison.
And I'm like, okay, here's a picture of her.
I changed her name.
I changed a couple of details, but the actual real person that was doing that is now in prison.
I like to take as much from reality as I can because that's all interesting to me.
And then, again, fictionalize it, get wacko with it at some point, and then try and rein it back in a little.