1100: James Patterson | Building the Architecture of Addictive Fiction

1100: James Patterson | Building the Architecture of Addictive Fiction

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[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

[00:00:02] James Patterson: It's a beautiful day. I just left the beach one o'clock in the afternoon or something, and it was like five mile an hour traffic. It was hideous. And on the other side of the road, about every 15 seconds a car went by. Whoosh. And I watched this for about an hour or so, and here was this object lesson, and then occurred to me that I'm on the wrong damn side of the highway and my whole life is on the wrong side of the highway, and I gotta get on the other side.

[00:00:31] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show, I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks.

From spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers and performers, even the occasional rocket scientist, investigative journalist, real life pirate, or special operator. And if you're new to the show or you wanna tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime, and cults and more.

That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app. To get started today, I am talking with James Patterson, the bestselling author of All Time, like in the history of the whole world, kind of with over 400 million books sold.

That is just insanity when you think about it. That's more than one book for every person in the United States, and that's just when he stopped counting, apparently there's like other numbers he just stopped. Yeah, I guess at that point it's like, eh, whatever. I've got the title. I don't need to wake up every morning and update it.

In this episode, we dig into creativity, idea generation, thoughts on writing for the masses, what keeps people's attention. Writer's block literacy. His writing process and a whole lot more. He was actually really engaged and engaging on this episode, and I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

Here we go with James Patterson.

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

[00:02:09] James Patterson: I don't know what vacation is. I keep hearing that word, but I don't know what it means. My life is a vacation in the sense that I don't work for a living, I play for a living, so that's the vacation part of it. Yeah.

Good for you.

[00:02:21] Jordan Harbinger: I like that. I kind of feel the same way most of the time. And it's truly a privilege to be able to do something you love and it sounds like you're in the same boat. Yeah, a hundred percent. Your story in your autobio about golfing in winter. That's why I don't golf, man. Someone tried to teach me in winter in New York and you couldn't

[00:02:38] James Patterson: hammer a tee into the ground.

Yes. That was one time we went out. It was so bizarre. It. This golf course was covered with seagull turds.

[00:02:47] Jordan Harbinger: Was it Goose turds or seagull Turds? Think it was Goose. It was goose. I was gonna say those are some small tees at that point. If you're using seagull turds.

[00:02:53] James Patterson: Oh no, no, no. You'd lay 'em out flat. You wouldn't.

It's not like you're gonna drive 'em into the crowd. At any rate, one funny story about that was my friend and I, we were at a public golf course in New York. This is a little before Christmas, and our thing was, if you wouldn't mind taking a walk that day, it would be fine. And we'd go out there and hit some balls and we got around the third hole.

It started snowing. And by about the sixth hole, you couldn't put, I mean, 'cause the ball just wouldn't go anywhere. So we're laughing and it's fine. We're not taking it very seriously. So well just play nine. And we were proud of ourselves 'cause it was already a couple inches on the ground. And as we were going into the clubhouse there, four guys walking out to the first tee.

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

[00:03:35] Jordan Harbinger: You know, there's New Yorkers, man. For me, it's just, that was the beginning and the end. I think if I'd learned to play in California, maybe it would've been a different story.

[00:03:43] James Patterson: All right. Okay. All right. That's golf.

[00:03:45] Jordan Harbinger: I was reading your bio prior to the show. You have a lot of honorary degrees, so how does that work?

Do we have to call you doctor, doctor,

[00:03:52] James Patterson: doctor, doctor, doctor, doctor? Yeah. I don't know. I've never really figured out. I guess in theory, it, it seems obnoxious to do it, but I guess in theory you could say, doctor, whatever, you can just go online and get a doctor. You could probably buy one cheap. You could be a minister now and you can do that and, and

[00:04:08] Jordan Harbinger: you know, I did officiate a wedding.

I dunno if that makes me a minister. I'm not sure how that works. But this show would gain a lot of credibility if this was hosted by Dr. Jordan Harbinger instead of just me in a t-shirt. Sure, you can do it. We still be a t-shirt or I'd have to wear a white lab coat to cement my authority. Yeah, I think so.

Yeah, you mentioned doing a lot of interviews with radio personalities who just ask you what the new book is about and I just find that kind of hilarious. This interview might actually have some substance. I hope that's okay with you. I'm gonna give it a shot. That'll be a switch. Yeah, the autobiography was really good though.

A lot of people's auto bios are not that interesting. Character development may have left a little to be desired, but other than that I enjoyed it. You know, some plot holes,

[00:04:45] James Patterson: characters relevant. Uh, yeah. Well, you know, this tough audience.

[00:04:50] Jordan Harbinger: The European versus USA press interview differences. I've never heard anybody talk about this.

You, you seem to think the Europeans actually sounds like they prepare for the interview as opposed to just

[00:04:59] James Patterson: Yeah, they prep a little better, but it's just different kinds of questions. They'll tend to go into a little historical angle or sociological or whatever, which you don't get as much. What I was really talking about is you go on the road and I don't blame 'em.

You're in wherever, grand Rapids or somewhere. It's a four minute piece and they're not going to read the book for the four minute thing. I get it. So you do get, so James, you got a new book, tell us about it.

[00:05:23] Jordan Harbinger: It just seems like that would be such a tedious thing to create from an interviewer perspective, but it also must be tedious for you to do the rounds when you're like, this person looks at the back cover.

[00:05:31] James Patterson: You get used to it. Yeah. Yeah. Read the flap copy. You should be able to get a few questions outta that. So Alex is in trouble again. Alice Cross. Oh yeah. What a surprise. Ooh. Yeah. I wonder if film, did he make it? Is this the end of the Alice Cross series?

[00:05:43] Jordan Harbinger: That's right. Well, I, yeah, I don't expect the end for a while if you're writing as much as you are, and we'll get to that in a minute.

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

[00:05:56] James Patterson: It's a lot of self-help books or books where somebody's written a neat article in a New Yorker or something and then it publishes, says Turn it into 300 pages. And they do. But really the article in a New Yorker would've suffice.

Yes. So there is that. Yeah,

[00:06:11] Jordan Harbinger: I feel that way about most media, especially podcasting. The new trend, I'm not sure if you've experienced this yet, but the new trend is three to four hour long shows. I think I'm experiencing it right now. You are experiencing part of it right now. Yeah. The trend is, it's like these four hour long shows that I can assume are only listened to as background noise or by long haul truckers or somebody who's really stoned or something uhhuh.

Um, but usually the interviews could have been done by somebody better prepared in about an hour, and that's kinda what we're going for here. I'm curious how you think about this process, because for me it's about respecting the listener's time. Do you think about the reader in the same way?

[00:06:47] James Patterson: Yeah. I pretend there's one person sitting across from me and I don't want them to get up until I finish the story.

So I always believe that our greatest strength is also our greatest weakness or early, frequently, and I get people to turn the pages. That's a strength. The weaknesses. I sometimes don't go as deep as I should. And I got into this a little bit when I went to the screening for the Alex Cross that's gonna be on Amazon.

And I got up there and I was with Elvis Hodge, who's the star, and then the showrunner, Ben Watkins. And I said, I feel in the series that they got deeper, they got deeper into Alex. And I thought that was great. I thought he's more contemporary, he's not as perfect, he's more flawed. It's more of the reality of Washington DC and what it would be to be a cop there with kids.

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

[00:07:37] Jordan Harbinger: season, I've heard you say something along the lines of, I started leaving out the parts that people skip. How did you find out what people were skipping? Did you literally ask, or did you just assume?

[00:07:47] James Patterson: No, you kind of know.

Yeah. That line actually is Elmore Leonard. Somebody asked him, how did he all of a sudden go from not selling much to selling very well? And he said, I, I just started leaving out the parts of people's skim.

[00:08:00] Jordan Harbinger: Kinda like that mindset actually, like you said, you're writing as if somebody is sitting across from you.

What does that actually do? If I'm trying to write something?

[00:08:08] James Patterson: Well, I mean, part of it is you're talking to somebody and it's the same thing. Oh my God. I don't need every single detail that, you know, get to the good parts or you start somewhere. It's a beginning, middle, and end to a basic thing, and for some people the middle is really long and there's no beginning and no end.

Other than that, it's great.

[00:08:27] Jordan Harbinger: There's something you said in your autobi, I think, which was something like beginnings and ends are great, but middles get you the Nobel Prize. Nobody writes middles.

[00:08:34] James Patterson: Yeah. If you could write beginnings and angio sell. Well, if you actually write medals too, you get to Pulitzer maybe.

Yeah. This was on Chris Wallace's show. Okay. Okay. That was something too, because he wanted it and I get it. He thought that a hook of the show would be. That you go for whatever the time was, 45 minutes or there's no editing, no blah, blah, blah. And I just wouldn't play it. I, I wasn't trying to be unpleasant, but I just wouldn't let him do that.

I wouldn't let him cut me off and stuff like that. So it was gonna go over and I knew there were gonna be things 'cause I was cursing occasionally that he'd want to cut and he turned to my wife, Sue, who was in the studio, he said, is he always like this? And she said, yes, unfortunately. Yeah,

[00:09:18] Jordan Harbinger: I can appreciate that though.

I. You as a guy who's done a ton of media and me as a guy who produced a ton of media, the worst part about media is any sort of structure that changes the conversation in a way that's less authentic or tries to get to the root of things quicker. In some ways, look, there's a difference between being prepared for a conversation and saying, this has to fit into 44 minutes, no more, no less.

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

[00:09:46] James Patterson: Listen, I mean, that's one of the issues with network television, with fiction shows where the scene has gotta work so that it's time for a commercial break versus when you're writing for Netflix or Amazon or whatever and you don't have to write to commercial breaks.

That's really good.

[00:10:00] Jordan Harbinger: You're known for. Do we call it colloquial writing? Is that a fair thing to say? Yeah, Sherry, we could do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's sort of what Larry King pioneered. But on radio, Larry King was the guy who was like, I'm just gonna have a conversation. And your writing is more like, I'm just gonna tell you a story as opposed to some sort of flowery, pretty

[00:10:16] James Patterson: much, I could probably could show off a little bit, but I don't want to do that.

And a lot of writers really, I think they want to show off or they want to talk to their friends more than tell an honest story or try to tell stories as well as you can. And I'm on Substack now and I do interviews and they're short, they're 20, 30 minutes and it's been cool. I did President Clinton, I did Baldacci and Ellen Hildebrand, and it's been fun.

I enjoy it. I just did Dolly Parton, which was really great. That was fun. We're good friends. Yeah,

[00:10:44] Jordan Harbinger: I read that. What a gem she is. Eh, I don't know anybody that has a negative sort of impression of Dolly Parton. That's hard to do over a career that long.

[00:10:51] James Patterson: And it's true with President Clinton and Dolly, and now I'm working with Viola Davis.

They will become friends.

[00:10:58] Jordan Harbinger: How do you think about structuring your work? What does the idea generation phase look like? Maybe that's a better place to start.

[00:11:05] James Patterson: Well it's, you know, when I interviewed David Baldacci, he doesn't use outlines at all, which is interesting. He just wings it. And some writers do. I am big on outlines.

Interestingly, the first Alice Cross, I really wanted to do it differently than what I'd done before then. And the outline was something like 350 pages. That's like the whole book. It wasn't, but it was close. And I read it, and that's where the short chapters came from, the colloquial writing. And I said, I like this.

I did expand it another a hundred pages or so, but that's where that whole style came from, that very long outline. But in general, I'll have 60 to 80 page outlines and I'm not a slave to them. And sometimes the villain will be really interesting and I don't want the villain to die at the end of the book because I wanna write about the villain again.

Or a character gets more interesting than I thought or. One of the drafts that I'll do, I'll go through and just look at every chapter and go, well, I went here. What if I go somewhere else? If I do this twist, what will it do to the story? And will that be fun? I like that. That draft is one of the things that makes the books interesting because you surprise people, which I think is important for my kind of book.

[00:12:14] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It sounds almost like you're surprising yourself though, during the writing of the book. Yeah. Oh yeah, sure. A hundred percent. Yep. That's something I didn't necessarily expect. So how do you plan the outline? Because it sounds like you plan the outline, but like you said, you're not married to it.

[00:12:27] James Patterson: Yeah.

What I'll usually do is there'll be three or four or five different things. It might be a couple of storylines, so I will just write scenes down for that storyline, and then for the next storyline, and then scenes with Alex and his family in no particular order. And then at a certain point I'll sit down and try to do the outline where I'll put the scenes in some kind of order.

Yeah, this is fascinating.

[00:12:50] Jordan Harbinger: I'm always blown away by, you're familiar with this as well. A director sees the movie in their mind and then goes to make it and they're moving things around. It sounds like you're doing that with your books and your stories.

[00:13:00] James Patterson: That's a really good example because directors do that.

A lot of the young Turks now, they just go out, well, I'll just go shoot it. You get somebody like, who's the guy that did Black Hawk down? His brother died, Brett, whatever. But what he does is he's famous for it. He's a really good illustrator, and he draws all the scenes, like it actually draws like a comic book.

He literally will draw out the scenes. Wow. Okay. Well, and the great thing about that is even if he wants to change it, he goes in and he knows what he wants to shoot and why he wants to shoot it with. I think the best directors, they don't just do crazy angles because they can, they do it because it's part of the story.

It makes sense with the story as opposed to just gonna be, oh, well, I'll shoot this on overhead, or I'll shoot this from the, you know why? Because that's the voice. And the voice is just a bunch of special effects and stuff, and it works for a lot of people, but I'm not a big fan of that. Yeah.

[00:13:55] Jordan Harbinger: I

[00:13:55] James Patterson: think a lot

[00:13:55] Jordan Harbinger: of writers are probably not a big fan of that kind of thing.

Where do you get the ideas slash inspiration for

[00:14:02] James Patterson: some of these things? Yeah, there's a big stack with the clever title ideas on it, and there are literally hundreds and hundreds of ideas that I have for books when I'm gonna do a new story. Sometimes I'll just go through that and see if there's anything that kind of turns me on.

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

[00:14:35] Jordan Harbinger: That's the whole, whole idea.

[00:14:36] James Patterson: Yeah. And she's gonna help him somehow solve her murder.

As a hummingbird,

[00:14:42] Jordan Harbinger: anything you write seems to do well. So you don't need the peanut gallery over here. I wouldn't

[00:14:46] James Patterson: deal it unless I felt I could pull it off. Of course. Yeah. And I don't know that I can, I'm betting against myself here since I'm laying that one out there. If somebody steals it, we will sue them.

Nobody listens to this

[00:14:56] Jordan Harbinger: podcast. You have nothing to worry about. Oh, perfect. Okay. All right. So the ideas that are in the box, those are also your ideas. You watch TV and movies and go, oh, there's a funny thing. Or do you, are you sitting in a room full of chiropractors giving a keynote and you're like, what if the FBI kicked the door down and arrested everyone?

That's a good opening scene.

[00:15:12] James Patterson: All of the above, really. Anything that's sort of odd and you go like this, didn't do it, but I, I happen to live most of the year in Florida, and I'm literally one mile north of Mar-a-Lago. Okay. So on election day, my wife filmed the whole thing. 32 SUVs come by and he's going to vote.

He being President Trump. The ambulance or the medical supply thing and 30 motorcycles and there's a motorcycle blocking our driveway with a cop. And we went out and talked to him, shoot the shit a little bit with the cop. He's up there from Miami and you're going, oh my God. And I guess most of it had to do with the fact that night they were gonna have a big shindig out in West Palm where he was gonna, whatever announced that he won.

I mean, in theory there's a story. We had the assassination attempt, but I played that golf course, Trump's golf course. I just don't get the secret service. I do not understand why in Pennsylvania there'd be one rooftop and they wouldn't have somebody watching that rooftop at all times. It's 150 yards from where he was speaking.

That's like insanity to me. On the golf course, when you read about the guy who came by and it's been like that all the way when he was president, et cetera. There's a fence and there's a sidewalk where people just walk by. There's a bus stop there, you can just sit there. That fence is 30 feet from the T on the sixth hole.

I'm sorry. Secret service. You could just pull out a gun at any time and they didn't even put a tarp up, so at least you couldn't see in there. I don't get that. That's astonishing to me. You write books and snipers and what they're capable of doing. I don't think it'd be that hard to take a shot at somebody.

So you think about stuff like that. Not that I want to kill any presidents.

[00:17:03] Jordan Harbinger: Well, we, yeah, neither of us do. I mean, you're lucky in that those guys know you. So I think that you could probably sell a convincing story about you not meaning anything by this particular story. I'm a fiction writer and I golfed with them two months ago.

I'm not the guy, although, wasn't there an impersonator of you that attracted the secret services attention at a hotel or something? There's some story like this.

[00:17:23] James Patterson: Oh, it wasn't an impersonator. There's another guy down here, uh, in this town who, his name is James Patterson. I know him a little bit and I've seen him every once in a restaurant or a bar or something.

And he told me that he will go places and people will go, are you the James Patterson? He said, yes, absolutely. I am the James Patterson. Why not? He might as well say that in his world, he is the James Patterson. Anyway, so I had to go out with Clinton. We were getting pitched for people that wanted produce.

The movie of the president is missing. So we were staying at a smaller part of one of the hotels out there. And the Secret Service liked it because it was smaller and they could control it a little better. So I arrive and try to check in and they go, oh, Mr. Patterson, would you just take a seat here?

We'll be right with you. And about five minutes later the Secret Service comes down and they go, oh no, no, that's changed. Patterson the author. And the reason that they were suspicious of me is that the other James Patterson stays there like once a month or something. And they thought he was the author, right?

So I come and I'm go like, no, I'm the author. And they're like, Uhhuh, I don't think so pal. 'cause we know the author 'cause he comes here every month. It wasn't an imposter, he was playing himself,

[00:18:32] Jordan Harbinger: but that must've been super embarrassing for him to be like, oh yeah, no, I was just saying that because I have nothing, but uh, I can buy, you know, the James Patterson.

Okay. Yeah. God

[00:18:41] James Patterson: bless him

[00:18:42] Jordan Harbinger: putting shit on his room tab and he will stop impersonating you immediately. This is true.

[00:18:47] James Patterson: Right? Yeah. Right, right. Yeah. Good, good. Thank you. Well, they did, they gave me extra fruit and stuff. That was kind of nice, you know, because I was inconvenience downstairs, you know?

[00:18:54] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. And you got a story to tell.

It's worth it for mangoes and a story. Sure, why not? Oh,

[00:18:58] James Patterson: a hundred percent. Listen in the book, and there are a couple of those kinds of stories. I don't think this one is in the book. You know, it's interesting what price, fame or whatever the hell it is. It was a little Italian restaurant. I'm actually going there tonight with my agent, but I used to go there with my wife.

And so we got there one night and there was about a couple minute wait for us. And then the waiters, very small place. He took us down the aisle. We winding down this little aisle and this lady pops up. She goes, I know you. I go, oh hi. And she goes, you sold us our life insurance. Like, oh man, no. And she would not let go of it.

She insisted, I know it's you. And I said, you know, lady, little due, respect it. It isn't me. But I would never sell life insurance in southern Florida or beach insurance. I'm not selling your house on the ocean on must sell life insurance. Seems like a not a good idea. Weird thing is a little later that same night, we sit down and they serve the appetizers and somebody behind me goes, you're from Boston, right?

And I turn around and he goes, oh my God, you're Tom C Clancy. Same night. I said, if I'm Tom c Clancy, you're in big trouble because this

[00:20:01] Jordan Harbinger: means you're in heaven or hell, one of the two. Yeah, yeah. Depending on how the food is. We'll tell you where you're at. You are listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show.

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How did you discover that you could actually write.

[00:23:14] James Patterson: I still haven't figured that one out. What I discovered was that I loved doing it. Okay. I had not been a big reader in high school. I was a good student 'cause I wanted to get outta my hometown. And then my family moved to Massachusetts and we were near this mental hospital, McLean, very famous.

And I used to work a lot of night shifts. I was getting money to pay for college. And I started going into Cambridge and then I started writing stories and I just loved it. I didn't know whether I was any good, but I loved doing it. And I would just write, write, write, write, write. So when the first book came out, Thomas Berryman number, famous writer, John D.

McDonald, gave little Brown a blurb. And at the time I'm like 26 years old. And he said that I'm quite sure that James Patterson wrote a million words before he started this book, which is a great quote. Johnny Mgo, smart guy. Reality of it is I hadn't, 'cause I hadn't been living that long. It was a great compliment.

He'd written story after story and then I decided I'd try novel, which I was lucky.

[00:24:11] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. I should have addressed this at the top of the show, but I think, is it 114 New York Times bestsellers or are we up? Is that old news? I, I

[00:24:18] James Patterson: have no idea. I don't, I

[00:24:19] Jordan Harbinger: don't count. I don't know. You don't even care anymore.

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

[00:24:28] James Patterson: They're all Guinness World Records and I know that, and they were a long time ago, so presumably they still are. It's all fine and it's nice and I enjoy laughing at myself, so I smile at that.

I don't take myself that seriously. Do you know how many were made into movies? I don't know how many. I mean, there were three Alex Crosses. We now have the series. There was a series for Women's Murder Club, which I hated. Kids movie. Couple of documentaries. Ty Rich. Big documentary. We just finished a documentary on the murders in Idaho for college students, and that's really a good documentary because it doesn't sensationalize, it just puts you there in that town and you feel it the way the people in the town felt it and still feel it.

I'm really happy with the way that turned out.

[00:25:14] Jordan Harbinger: You mentioned there was a series, was it Women's Murder Club, which you hated? Yeah. How does that happen? I guess they don't consult you too much on how these go.

[00:25:21] James Patterson: No. I remember with, I think it was a long canvas spider, and they asked me, there's a character Gary, S-O-N-E-J-I, in the books.

They said, how do you pronounce? I said, Ji. So in the movie, of course they call him so and G, which is fine, but they asked and then they could care less. It's gotten a little better lately with the cross stuff on Amazon. We talked a lot about it and Ben Watkins' showrunner wanted to do a new story as opposed to one of the books, and I was all for that.

One of the things I don't like is somebody says they wanna do one of the series, Michael Banner or something, and then they send me like an eight page outline of the first book. And I'm going like, okay. That doesn't seem very creative to me. I think there should be a difference usually between the book and the movie.

So I like the fact that this is a brand new story. Yeah.

[00:26:10] Jordan Harbinger: And so when things go wrong, what usually goes wrong? Like the series that you didn't like? What happens?

[00:26:16] James Patterson: Women's Murder Club. Everything went wrong with that. You look at it and a postman gets killed in the first scene. You go, okay, am I supposed to care?

And then they go and interview the postman's grandmother and the postman's uncle and you go, seriously? And they go, yeah, because it's gonna be the dialogue between the women. And I'm going like, uh, I don't know man. I mean, that's a piece of it, but there's also a mystery story here and that ain't it.

Right. So they sort of missed the point. Yeah. Plus a couple of cast members really didn't like each other. Angie Harmon was one. She was great. And she would call me pretty much every week and go, please help me. And a couple of the women, they were just bad news. It was painful. And there's always ways to make these things work.

All of the books, it's all problem solving. How do we solve that problem? I have a whole series, uh, walking My Combat Boots. We just did American Heroes about Medal of Honor winners and Matt Everman, who we do with Matt was the actual sergeant who was portrayed in the movie Black Hawk Down. Great guy. Good friend of mine, has seen a lot of combat.

And I saw him doing some interviews with men and women who had been in combat and he gets them to talk about it. And I was watching these interviews and I went to him. I said, Matt and I had the title walking my Comic Boots. I'd like to do something. And the mission will be that if you'd been in combat, you'd say Everman and Patterson got it.

Right. And if you're one of these people that like to BS that you really understand things that you don't. You would read it and go, okay, I really didn't understand the military at all and now I understand a lot better. But the problem was, okay, so Matt did most of the interviews. I did a few, but they're like 50 page interviews.

That's not a book. And the problem solving was my saying to Matt, look, I want to turn these into five or six page stories. So each person that's interviewed, you're gonna get a sense for who that person is, why they went into the military, and then a couple other stories that are gonna really be really interesting to read.

So it's gonna be a pacey and read the American Heroes. Every single one of those stories could be a movie. It's just amazing. One of these guys was at I Jima, this is way back in obviously World War ii, and he had a flame thrower and it's flame throws, 90 pound flame thrower. And he went running with his 90 pound thing and he would go into these places where snipers were and flame throw the snipers.

He did nine of these sniper outposts with a flame thrower on his back and he had it reloaded every time. Oh my God. It's unbelievable and it is hard to come by now. Duty honors, things like that, and you just go like, well, I don't know, man. I think we need a little sacrifice. We don't seem to want to sacrifice.

We've become pretty greedy. I think about stuff, which is interesting. It's the kind of thing you can get you in trouble, but part of it is stop thinking that the government or the president's gonna solve all your problems. Dude, take some responsibility for your life. You did some of this to yourself. You gotta sit there and go, okay, I screwed up a little bit.

And not all on the government. There've always been problems, always wanted things that could be a whole lot better, and well, we'll get a new president that'll solve it, or we'll get a new coach for our team. That'll solve it. It might, this is quite a time to be discussing this few days post-election for sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I try not to get too much into politics. I didn't get into it that much here in terms of where I sit on things, but I. I don't particularly like listening to entertainers on television who sit there and really go on and on and on. I mean, sing a song or something. Do what you do. But they have the right to do it.

But it always come from like they really, really know. 'cause they've been talking to people who really know and obviously nobody really knows. I mean, one of the weird things about this election is nobody was out there interviewing. Not much anyway. Or the TV shows. You watch all these shows with all their interviewers.

I didn't see a whole lot of Latinos there. Latinos were really the key. And that's 12 14% of the country now. And folks, we're these smart people paying attention to this, which probably made the

[00:30:09] Jordan Harbinger: difference in the election? I think so. Yeah. I think so. For sure. You're right. I don't get too much into politics on this show either, just because I think people need a break from it.

You can find it literally anywhere. Maybe I can tune into Jordan and Jordan won't shove something down my throat. I'm always just sort of like, okay, let's keep a refuge from the drama. Before I forget, I heard Hollywood wanted to make one of your most popular main characters. Alex Cross, who we've mentioned before, they wanted to make him a white dude.

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

[00:30:37] James Patterson: This is back a while ago, right now, obviously it's a different thing in Hollywood, and at the time I didn't have a lot of money and it was a million dollars on the table and I said, no, can do, sorry, can't do it. And I had to walk away.

But part of it with Alex was, I grew up in a town, real blue collar, a pretty heavy black population. I played a lot of basketball, so that was another connect. My grandparents had a very small restaurant, and the chef Cook was a black woman and she was having problems with her husband. And she moved in with our family for a couple of years.

And during that period I spent a lot of time with her family and they were funny and smart and the music was good and the food was great. I liked being with her family better than being with my family, but that's a little bit of where the cross trailing came from. They're not based on that family, but that's a little of that.

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

[00:31:29] Jordan Harbinger: And later that role was played by Morgan Freeman, so yeah. Amazing. Iconic, Uhhuh, Uhhuh kind of thing. You

[00:31:35] James Patterson: used to write ad copy. So I've been clean for over 25 years now. I don't know why you bring that up, you bastard. No, I'm just trying to celebrate your sobriety

[00:31:45] Jordan Harbinger: or whatever we call

[00:31:45] James Patterson: it.

Thank you. Thank you, Uhhuh. But you

[00:31:47] Jordan Harbinger: did keep that day job for, was it a couple of decades? Yeah, it was a long time. 2024 to 24 years to an overnight success, I guess. Yeah, uh, as they say. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. There's one ad that you wrote. I think you were recruiting writers

[00:32:01] James Patterson: and you wrote an ad. That was when I was running the New York office and I'd just taken it over and some of the offices were quite good.

The New York office was quite bad and you couldn't get people in there. So I'm running the creative department and as, oh, we can't hire anybody 'cause nobody wants to come work there. So once again, it's this problem solution thing. And I did an A, right if you want work, and it was six questions and there were questions like it listed the ingredients on a, you know, baked beans and they're terrible ingredients.

And it just said, make it sound mouthwatering. You know, stuff like that. And you could read the six answers. In three or four, five minutes, and you could tell immediately whether that person A, could write and B could solve problems. I see. Because it wasn't like hide from the problem by being like a smart ass writer.

It was like, no, you gotta solve the problem. You gotta sell a telephone system to a trap. As monks, we don't speak, and I'm actually doing a nonfiction book right now, which deals with that kind of thing, solving problems in innovative ways. What does writing ads

[00:33:02] Jordan Harbinger: teach you about writing novels or

[00:33:03] James Patterson: about writing anything?

What it taught me was there's an audience. You go in there and you're a kid, and you go, oh geez, I can do this. Stand outta my head. And you give 'em an idea and they test it and nobody paid any attention. And you go, oh, okay. This is not as simple as I thought it was. But that whole idea of an audience, it relates to book covers, which I get involved in the book jacket thing and I have a simple thing about book covers that you need to notice it and it needs to motivate you.

So it's an easy way to look at it and go like, I wouldn't notice this on a book stand. Okay, next.

[00:33:37] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:33:38] James Patterson: And then I notice it, but it, it doesn't turn me on at all about this particular mystery or whatever the heck it is. A related thing, when I was in advertising, I used to address the first year people and I would get up there and say, I can tell you the secret to making a million dollars a year or some nice sum in advertising.

And it really is relatively simple. And I call up somebody and they would gimme this cream pie. And I would stand there holding this cream pie in front of a hundred or so, first year people. And then I would call somebody up from the audience and I would sit there holding the pie, and they're standing next to me and I'm looking at them and holding the pie.

And I said, well, here's how it goes. I gave the pie to your person. I said, hit me. And they hit me in the face with a cream pie. And I said, here's the secret. Hit 'em in the face with a cream pie. And while you have their attention, say something smart. That's it. No cream pie. They didn't even notice it. So forget about it.

You're just talking to yourself. If you don't say something smart, once you get their attention, it's irrelevant. And that's it. Hit 'em. And no cream pie, no sale, and nothing motivational. No sale. And you're just standing there with a cream pie on your face. Given this

[00:34:43] Jordan Harbinger: lesson. A hundred percent,

[00:34:45] James Patterson: eh, licking it.

[00:34:46] Jordan Harbinger: A little eating cream pie. Why calories don't count. If it's stoked to your face, I know also with ads, one sentence has to flow into the next one. There's limited space. Each sentence has to be there for a reason. Does that affect how you write your novels? I mean, you have plenty of space when you write.

Now it's a little bit different story.

[00:35:04] James Patterson: No, it should. And on another scale, the whole thing about chapters flying at the chapters, one of the things you always like to do at the end of the chapter is they must turn that next page. Bill Goldman, I'm just rereading Marathon man. He's so good at that. And it was a good movie, but the book is so much better.

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

[00:35:31] Jordan Harbinger: What gave you the initial courage back in? What was it, 1996, to leave a good career in advertising and then go do something where almost nobody succeeds?

Actually,

[00:35:42] James Patterson: I already was succeeding, so I had some bestsellers, so I knew I was semi comfortable. That's also one of the stories in autobiography where I had a house on the ocean in the Jersey Shores. It wasn't a mansion, but it was a nice house and it was a Sunday and I had to go back to New York to do some advertising crap, and I'm like, oh man, I hate this.

And I was on the Jersey Turnpike at one of the roads going north, and it was like five mile an hour traffic. It was hideous. And I'm on that road and I don't want to go back to New York. Anyway, it's a beautiful day. I just left the beach and it's like one o'clock in the afternoon or something. On the other side of the road, like about every 15 seconds a car went by.

Whoosh. Another 10. Whoosh. Whoosh. And I watched this for about an hour or so and here was this object lesson and it occurred to me that I'm on the wrong damn side of the highway and my whole life is on the wrong side of the highway. And I gotta get on the other side, not the side that's going into New York at five miles an hour to someplace that I don't want to go to the other side where cars are going at the whatever speed they want to go and they're going where they want to go.

And that's when I decided. And within a week I told the guy that I work for, he said, look, I'm gonna give you time to replace me even though I'm irreplaceable, but I'm gone. You want more money? No, I don't want more money,

[00:37:03] Jordan Harbinger: but I'm gonna leave. I was gonna say, probably tried to give you a raise. You're lucky it was back then.

'cause now they'll be like, what if we let you work remotely? That's how they keep you now.

[00:37:11] James Patterson: You're right. But I think he got it and he did let me go. He's still a good friend, which is nice.

[00:37:16] Jordan Harbinger: I know that you, at least back in those days, would get up early and write like five o'clock in the morning. You probably don't have to get up then.

Now I do Really? I still get up at five 30 ish. Yeah. You mentioned some imposter syndrome, feeling a little bit like a fraud. They're gonna find out I'm not supposed to be as successful as I am. Do you still have that?

[00:37:35] James Patterson: No, I don't think I ever had it big time. But the first book that I wrote, Thomas Barham now was turned down by, I dunno, 31 publishers.

Then like a year finally picks up and it wins an Edgar and I was working at Jay Walter and in advertising I got this call from this woman. She said, this is a Mr. Writers American, your first book has been nominated for an Edgar in the best first mystery. And I said, well my God, that's really great.

When's the date? And she told me, I said, I can't go. I don't know why, but I said, I can't go. And she said, no, no, no, no, you, you're being nominated. I said, I know I heard you, but I can't go. And she said, no, you have to go. You won. I said, okay, well I'm going to go somehow. Right? You won.

[00:38:13] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, exactly.

[00:38:14] James Patterson: But the weird thing was, so I get there, I brought my parents, this is so cool.

I was 26 years old, 27 maybe. And I still, I sat in the audience and I go, maybe she lied to me just to get me there. Ah,

[00:38:24] Jordan Harbinger: clever. Super disappointing, but clever.

[00:38:27] James Patterson: Well, in other words, there were still some tension. And Hey, when I got up, my whole speech was, I guess I'm a writer now. Huh? That must have killed.

Yeah. Right. They never stopped clapping. Oh my God. But what I meant by it was, especially in those days, if you told somebody you're at a bar and you're meeting a nice girl, what do you do? You're a writer. Oh, have you published anything? No. And they just immediately walk away. I. Nowadays, you could say, oh, I published on the internet, or something like, oh, that's interesting.

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

[00:38:57] Jordan Harbinger: doesn't work for podcasters. If you tell somebody you're a podcaster, they rightfully chuckle for themselves. And then ask which basement you live in. Your mother's or your father's.

[00:39:08] James Patterson: Well, the worst thing is that they say, I am too.

Let me tell you about mine. Ooh. Oh, that's, yeah,

[00:39:13] Jordan Harbinger: you're right. That is worse. It's funny, you had trouble getting published, man. Every successful author always mentions how hard it was to get anyone to believe in them.

[00:39:21] James Patterson: Yeah. John Grisham, his first book, which I think is still one of his best, a Time to Kill, and none of the big publishers wanted it.

He sold it to a small publisher in New Jersey. And then I think his next one might've been Affirm, and then everybody wanted that one and he broke that big time. But the first one, nothing. Yeah. Alan Hilderbrand, she had a lot of trouble in the beginning. Alci wrote about hundreds of stories. Couldn't get published.

Yeah. I never sold a short story. The first thing I sold was a book with a full, that novel. Yeah.

[00:39:52] Jordan Harbinger: What? What keeps you going? Did you ever start to think maybe they're right. My book is not worth publishing after all.

[00:39:58] James Patterson: Uh, no. No, no. I think they're good stories. I am confident that I'm a good storyteller, the end, and I'm still driven in a big way because I always hope the next one will be the best one or one that I really like.

I have a series with Mike Lko, who's become one of my best friends, sports writer Hall of Fame. He was on ESPN. The Sports Recorder show for about 20 years, and we have a series. Jane Smith is lead character. And I think that it's the best character since Alice Cross that I've done, I think. Huh? Okay. The initial thing was gonna three books.

It was gonna be 12 Must to Live, eight Must to Live, four Must to Live because she gets a death sentence in the first book. And just The Way Jane is. Jane Effing Smith. That was gonna be the first title. She had been a cop briefly, and then she was a private investigator briefly, and now she's a defense attorney.

She's never lost. She curses in court. She's really interesting, funny presses around. She's a really cool character and when she gets the 12 months from the doctor, she negotiates it up to 16 months. So whatever. That's the spirit of it, but it's just been so much fun creating that character. Renee Zinger has signed on to play it.

She'll be great. We sold it to HBO Merri Max, and one of the writers from Mickey Johnson, who's your writer on Ozark, and then on the presumed innocent, the newest version of that. She's a great writer. David E. Kelly is involved. So I, I am hopeful that will be not just a series, but a really good series.

[00:41:23] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I guess you never know, I suppose. Ha. Have you ever had writer's block? Have you ever been like, wow, I just, nothing's coming into my brain?

[00:41:28] James Patterson: Yeah. I did the first love of my life who died in her thirties, and after that I could not write. I tried to write, to this day, I don't remember the title. I don't remember anything about the book.

And eventually I shredded and people go, no, you didn't. I said, yeah, I did. I knew it was awful. So it wasn't writer's block, but it was, I just could not do it. I, I don't even know why. I mean, there was something dead in my brain. There was no imagination there. It just couldn't do what it had been doing. One other time, I had a little operation and they say sometimes after you've had an operation, there were a couple of weeks when I was fuzzy and foggy and I really couldn't write well.

It was sort of like, okay, this is not good. Oh, from anesthesia. So now no anesthesia. No. Just cut me,

[00:42:15] Jordan Harbinger: doc. Yeah. Is this gonna be forever? All

[00:42:16] James Patterson: right.

[00:42:17] Jordan Harbinger: Gimme the anesthesia. Okay. Yeah, no, just gimme a couple Tylenol, man. And some. A few. Yeah. That's scary. That would be like, you're not gonna be able to talk for a few days and then three weeks on.

I'm like, how many days did you say this is gonna be? Yeah, a few. Yeah. That would not work for me. I can't imagine that feeling. You are listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by progressive fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians.

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[00:45:26] James Patterson: Very simple. One of two things. One, I just go to the next chapter or two chapters later, just write TBD for that chapter number, meaning the next time I'm around or the next time I'm around. 'cause I'm a big rewriter. And sometimes you just go, okay, this is gonna become a paragraph leading off a chapter.

What had been was gonna be, and it just, okay. And that's the solution or the best that I can come up with.

[00:45:50] Jordan Harbinger: Your agent must love that when he gets a manuscript and he is like TBD for the next three chapters. And then you jump ahead, let me fill those in for you.

[00:45:57] James Patterson: Oh yeah, I forgot, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll clean 'em up before I put it in.

But uh, yeah,

[00:46:02] Jordan Harbinger: so you're big on literacy obviously. Thanks for that. I think more of us need to be big on literacy, but you're also big on, I think you've coined this term Think literacy, which resonates well with me. Teaching people how to think. It's the mission of the show, actually.

[00:46:16] James Patterson: Yeah. Oh, kids, kids, kids.

Please. Your kid comes home. How was school? What are you gonna do to say, I don't know. And in school, man, well, what could you do? You could write, you could read, you could play soccer, you could rob a liquor store. So many possibilities. But just getting him in that habit of, you know, getting past that first thought and or the blank screen.

If they did that in school, every single class, or at least one class a day, just getting them used to going to the next step. This whole thing of first impression. First impression is frequently wrong and screwed up. Messed up. How many people have you met in your first impression? You really, you got it all wrong.

They were okay. They were shy or, oh, all

[00:46:55] Jordan Harbinger: the time. I'm a judgy. SOB, that's my problem. I'm a judgy guy, so I always get it wrong. I have to be open to that. Well,

[00:47:00] James Patterson: if you know it then, but then at least you can come back and go, I'm gonna give you another chance. Yeah. And then you go, oh no. I was right the first time.

Get lost.

[00:47:08] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, exactly. How do you improve accuracy inside your home? What did you do with your own kids or what did you do with your own kids?

[00:47:15] James Patterson: Well, I, we just have one, Jack. We tried to do that. The thing with Jack, a piece of it was trying to get him comfortable and understanding what the core of himself is.

Okay. I understand the acne problem and the hair, all that stuff, but that stuff doesn't matter and we have sympathy for it. But just reminding of who you are and getting comfortable with that. I wanted to play in the NBA. Well that that ain't happening. I know one woman and she went to a CC College to golf rather than an Ivy League college.

And you go seriously, lady, you're not going on the tour. But kids will do that and they'll go to a a not terribly good college. They could have gone to a lot better one because they all with the sport and if you got a chance to go to the NFL, I guess. But otherwise I don't know about that. And I had a little of that myself in terms of I you wanna go play ball and really,

[00:48:08] Jordan Harbinger: yeah, it's hard, right?

We want our kids to be happy. We want 'em to follow their interests, but we also want them to be gainfully employed at some point in their life now. Okay. So your outlines are 50 to 80 pages. You mentioned also that you use a pencil because you like to erase no computer. Is that still the case?

[00:48:24] James Patterson: I'm on a computer right here in front of you, but there is a computer and I will use it for some research and stuff like that, but not to write.

Gotcha. Okay. Yeah, it's pencil and pad. Yeah, there's pads all over this office and around the office there are all these ledges and whatever, and there are, I don't know how many, I'm gonna say 30 live projects right now, 29, 30, something like that. So

[00:48:45] Jordan Harbinger: if you get stuck, you just move to the next chapter or even a different book.

So if that's what happens, do you have a zillion, partially written book manuscripts laying around the house? No.

[00:48:54] James Patterson: As I said, usually I will get it the next time and if I don't the next time and the time after that, I will just figure out a way to eliminate.

[00:49:02] Jordan Harbinger: Gotcha. I was thinking you're gonna be like Tupac releasing a new album every year after you've been dead for 20 years, huh?

2065 James Patterson at the top of the New York Times list. Once again, the new, right, because we opened up a sock drawer, found it at the bottom of his sock drawer. Three unpublished. Right, right, right. Yeah.

[00:49:18] James Patterson: The thing, which one of the books I have coming out next year, we're all aware of this now, that a lot of males in the country are really in a lot of trouble.

They feel displaced and lost and irritated and angry, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And this is a book that will help them become better dads. Oh, I'm not gonna go into it too much. Or maybe we can talk about it some other time. It's gonna be around Father's Day. I read everything I could find on it and then talk to hundreds of dads about tricks of the trade.

Just to give you one little example, it wasn't little in my life. The only time I remember getting a hug from my father was on his deathbed. One page in the thing, and it's a short book, is just hugs and the importance of hugs every day. That Jack, when he was a kid, and when he comes home now he gets a hug every day.

That's the deal. One of my friends, his kids played football in high school and we were over at their house for dinner one night, my friend's a teacher, high school teacher, and after dinner the boys were heading out the front door and he goes, where do you guys think you're going? And he goes, oh, we're going out, man.

He said, come here. He pulled 'em over and he made him give him a hug before they went out. And I said, love that. I, I always remember I said, I'm gonna do that, man. Yeah, I'm gonna do that. That's a great thing. Yeah. Big boys too. Big

[00:50:26] Jordan Harbinger: hugs, big boys. And men need hugs too, man. There's nothing wrong with that. I, I'm a firm believer in that myself.

I think it's a great idea to give your kid a hug every single day, no matter how old they are. Before I forget, I want to wrap up some of the tactical creation stuff. You craft the bones of the chapter first, and I've heard you never polish the chapter before. The book is starting to really take shape and be done.

And is the logic here that if you polish something too much, you might not wanna get rid of it, even if you really should.

[00:50:54] James Patterson: Yeah, that's one of the big things. Absolutely. You go, oh, but those two paragraphs, they really don't, they shouldn't be there. Or that chap, oh my God, no. Like the hummingbird book that I talked about.

Yeah. You get the sunk cost fallacy and writers are like that. Oh, that sentence. It's so beautiful. Yeah. But it really doesn't fit man. And there's a lot of stuff like that. I don't think people would like me as an editor because I'd be cutting a lot of stuff out.

[00:51:16] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. You know what I understand though.

What's that showbiz saying? Kill your darlings Sometimes you gotta do that. I do that with show notes. Oh, this story is so funny, but it's not the time.

[00:51:25] James Patterson: Well even, you know, with CEOs and stuff, when my editor became the head of Little Brown and I said to my editor, I said, Michael. One of the things you wanna consider doing, you sit down and the night before you've done your to-do list, the 20 things you gotta do.

When you go in the next morning, the first thing you do is cross off 10 of the things and like 30 seconds you've cut your workload in half because you're prioritizing and cutting out stuff that really didn't need to get done, but you nervously or foolishly put down there. Yeah,

[00:51:56] Jordan Harbinger: that's the story of my life.

My to-do list is an exercise in futility a lot of the time, and it's a lot of stuff in there is designed to keep me busy and away from the actual work that matters. That's a whole, that's a whole separate topic. Make sure you research the best screen cover for your Apple Watch, like just meaningless tasks, meaningless.

You've met a lot of amazing people, presidents, celebrities, and some of these stories, I have to say are pretty odd. Warren Beatty have sending someone to meet you in a restaurant and he was in the restaurant just watching you and then the Tom Cruise thing.

[00:52:26] James Patterson: Uh, yeah. And I'm sure Warren's a very nice guy.

And yeah, it was weird though. It was, I can't remember whether it was his agent, I think it was his agent. He said, Warren would really like to meet with you. I said, oh, that'd be great. I'd love to meet with Warren, but it's terrific. Bonnie car, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then he walked over like about 10 minutes later.

I'm like, okay. It's so weird. Okay. Didn't wanna get rejected. So it was a little strange. Yeah. Whatever it was. Yeah. Yeah. What was the Tom Cruise? The Tom Cruise. That was just hilarious. So we have the same agent, creative artist. We're it sort of on different levels? Oh, I'm

[00:52:57] Jordan Harbinger: at ca a A too, God knows what rung I'm on.

If you're on a lower rung than Tom Cruise.

[00:53:01] James Patterson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. At any rate. New York Times had done a thing on the cover of the magazine and CAA said, well, comp Cruise, I'd love to meet with you. I was out in LA and I said, yeah, that'd be great. And they said, just stay in your room and stay by your phone and okay, fine.

So eventually call came in and they said, okay, now the driver's downstairs, but don't tell him where you're going. I said, okay, fine. So I go down to the car and we drive not far from the hotel, and they pull up to the gate and the driver goes, oh, this is Tom Cruise's house. I go, yes it is. And he was great in those days.

He was still with, I forget her name, the wife and the little girl. She was on his lap for 10, 15 minutes. The first, when we got together. And she was delightful. Very sweet, nice behaved, da da da. You could tell that they were very close at that point and he was terrific. He's not that sure. Had a big basketball court in the front of his house.

It was a really nice experience. Tom Cruise, not that short. People love to focus on that, like he's only five, six or whatever. I don't know how cool he was, but it didn't occur to me when I was meeting with him. He was engaging, he listened. Some people get really good listeners, which is nice. Hillary Clinton's a really good listener.

The first time we went out to dinner, the the Clintons, it was about three hours 'cause we just blah, blah, blah, blah. Everybody but Hillary was so warm, friendly, funny, and a listener man. The people that handled her really just screwed up royally because they needed to get this out because that's more who she is.

She's not really comfortable in a crowd. I guess she has trouble showing the real person. But it was really interesting and I like her a lot. I like both of them, but I was a little surprised at how warm and funny Hillary is. Yeah, that is surprising. That's not

[00:54:50] Jordan Harbinger: the brand. Most people, you know, she's smart, right.

I've heard that you put your favorite products in your books to get free stuff and I, that's a little

[00:54:59] James Patterson: bit of

[00:54:59] Jordan Harbinger: a joke. Oh, it's a joke. I was gonna say, I do that with this podcast all the time. Usually while drinking an ice cold, spindrift flavored water delicious

[00:55:06] James Patterson: didn't work very well and usually it does.

I get these things, I'll get ice cream and pens and all that pencils and, but no, nobody picked up on the uh, yeah, I do that under Substack. Wednesday on Substack is free Wednesdays and I giveaway shit, use pencils where I've been chewing the eraser and stuff. Good stuff. Useful. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:55:26] Jordan Harbinger: There's people out there that are gonna try and use those chewed up erasers to clone you someday.

Just throwing that out there.

[00:55:32] James Patterson: Yeah. Well, I won't care at that point. It's like legacies. I don't care. Buildings named after me. No, I don't care. Do you still write 360 days a year? Pretty much. I don't know the exact number, but yeah, I would say it's three 50 something. Yeah, whatever it is. It's rare that I don't write.

What stops you from writing? Usually something that came up. I'm traveling somewhere or so, you know, but if I'm traveling from on a plane, I'll always write, I don't remember the last time, to be honest with you. Maybe it is 365 days a year. Yeah. Wow. It's a lot.

[00:56:02] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's impressive. I know that you finished a book that was being written by the late great Michael Creighton, who did Jurassic Park and everything, and his wife brought the book to you to finish it, which is a really cool honor, I would imagine.

[00:56:15] James Patterson: Uhhuh part of it was, I'm a big fan. I'd read pretty much everything that Michael Kreen had written, including his nonfiction travels, which is a really cool nonfiction that he wrote about Harvard. A lot of people don't know his story, but Michael went to Harvard undergraduate and then when he graduated, his father said, where are you gonna go?

And he said, I'll be a writer. His father said, don't be ridiculous. So Michael went back and he went to med school, and then he wrote two or three books. I think he'd written some undergraduate under pseudonyms, and when he graduated from med school, he had already written a dramatist strain and that had sold for a bunch of money, so he never practiced medicine.

He, he went to med school and never, never practiced. At any rate. They came to me with partial manuscript and said, Hey, would you like to finish? I said, I don't know. Let me read what he wrote. I read it and I went, oh yeah, there's a cool, there were like two ticking clocks. One was potentially the worst volcano ever to happen in the Hawaiian Islands.

And then there was something even worse buried on this island. So there were two clocks saying like, yeah, yeah, this would be cool. And he hadn't laid out at all like what was gonna happen outta the volcano or the other thing. But I loved the idea of finishing 'cause it was a good story and I wanted to know what the hell was gonna happen at the end.

But also I had really written anything with a, the science in it. So suddenly I had it put a lot of science in the book. And so I got a researcher who teaches at the University of Anchorage, Alaska, Elizabeth from Alaska. So she became my researcher and we would go back and forth and I'd say, here's what I'm thinking.

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

[00:57:48] Jordan Harbinger: How do you balance honoring Michael Creighton's legacy with adding your own style to a collaboration like this where your collaborator's literally not with us.

[00:57:56] James Patterson: Legacy was the biggest thing to me. And Sherry, his widow was pregnant with her son when he died, so he never met his son. So that was a big thing also with the son, that he would take some pride in the book, which his father had started and never finished. So that was the big part. And the thing that I'm proudest of in the book is I defy anybody to figure out where Michael stopped and I started.

And I think that's pretty cool that the fact that it, I think it's pretty seamless. That's cool. I'm happy.

[00:58:25] Jordan Harbinger: It is a cool honor. And look, I know we're running short on time. Your newest book, American Heroes is available now. And I know that because I was just in an airport and if you set foot in any airport, you can't miss it.

I'm getting it from my dad. He just had a hip replacement and he loves this kind of stuff. Speaking of covers that stand out, it's really well designed. It's quite timely 'cause I think a lot of people are having the patriotism conversation now,

[00:58:48] James Patterson: but also we need heroes. And one of the things about the military, and it's very true in this book, in American heroes, but also walking my combat boots, the military is about we, not me.

And one of the things I think we need to get back to a bit more is we, whatever your party is, whatever the deal is, it just has to be more we rather than just me. And as I said, it's very readable. American heroes. You can do a lot of things in life that are just small, heroic things to do. Just do the right thing.

Let's do the right thing.

[00:59:18] Jordan Harbinger: Look, I'm thinking easier said than done, but not necessarily. Sometimes it's tough in this day and age, I think, for people to live their values because there's a lot of pushback, especially depending on how loud you're live in those values.

[00:59:29] James Patterson: Well, and a lot of people, they look out there and go, well, everybody's doing it.

[00:59:31] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's for sure. Yeah. That does make it more of a challenge, but maybe it shouldn't. James, thank you so much for doing the show. I know I'm honored to just be sitting here with you today, and I appreciate your time. Cool. All right. I hope it turns out good for you. Thank you, Jordan. It was a

[00:59:44] James Patterson: pleasure.

[00:59:45] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, this was fun. Join us as Mustafa Suleman, Microsoft ai. CEO discusses the pivotal role of artificial intelligence in shaping the future from job automation to national security.

[00:59:57] JHS Clip: We are a technological species. From the beginning of time, we have been manipulating the environment to reduce our suffering, and that is the purpose of a tool.

But a tool has always been inanimate. Whereas now I think the profound shift that we are going through is that we're sort of giving rise to these new phenomena that I hesitate to call the tool because it has these amazing properties to be able to create and produce and invent way beyond and disconnected to what we've actually directed it to do.

But now we've really crossed this moment, this threshold where. Now computers can increasingly talk our language, and that is just mind blowing. People are still not fully absorbing how completely nuts that is. We want AI to be able to solve our big problems in the world. You know, we want it to help us tackle climate change and improve drugs and improve healthcare and give us self-driving cars.

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

[01:01:26] Jordan Harbinger: To explore the critical, ethical, societal and geopolitical challenges AI poses in the 21st century, and what we can do to harness its power responsibly. On episode 9 72 of the Jordan Harbinger Show, fun fact, he actually wrote the Toys R Us Jingle when we were kids. Remember, I don't wanna grow up. I'm a Toys us kid.

Remember that thing? He sold 400 million books and honestly, his most famous body of work is probably still, I think most of us of our generation could probably still sing it. I know I could. All things James Patterson will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show.

All at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show. Also, our newsletter wee bit wiser. The idea behind this is to give you something specific, something practical, something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships. In under two minutes, and if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out.

It is a great companion to the show. Jordan harbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Don't forget about six minute Networking as well over@sixminutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me and or Gabriel on LinkedIn. This show is created, an association with Podcast one.

My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogerty, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we've rise by lifting others. The feed for the show, as you share it with friends, when you find something useful or interesting, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

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