Speaker 1: 0:14

thanks for coming in the rain, like that's snow in texas, right, yeah, thank you guys, good to see y'all thank you guys.

Speaker 4: 0:28

Good to see y'all good deal. Well, don, thank you so much for being here. Uh, congratulations on capture kill. This is a phenomenal book. I know if you guys haven't had a chance to run through, I know some of you already have. Uh, you're really going to love it. It is phenomenal. Um, I know in the dedication you uh say that you hope that vince is proud of this, and I know that he will be. It is a wonderful, wonderful book. Uh, you really honor Mitch Rapp and uh, you know so many others in this book and I just wanted to say congratulations.

Speaker 1: 0:51

Thank you and um, oh yeah, you can clap, clap again.

Speaker 1: 0:55

Yes, yes, um, so the dedication was really special to me. Um, I never got to meet Vince, um um, never knew him as a person, but was all of us that write in this genre take something from vince, because he was the first post 9-11 writer who unabashedly wrote this protagonist whose job was to track down his nation's enemies on their own turf and shoot him in the face, and he was unapologetic for that and, I think, as a fan for me. I always kind of equated Vince with Afghanistan, because I read a lot of Vince books. When I was there, almost every bookware in Afghanistan would have these little pop-up libraries where people could leave a book or take a book, and there were a lot of Vince books.

Speaker 1: 1:43

And then, as a writer, he was a huge influence on me when my I wrote three books that didn't sell, and when my second book didn't sell, I went back to my favorite Vince, which was protect and defend, and I tore that book apart and tried to figure out how he did what he did, and so when I finally got the opportunity to write in his universe, I was just kind of blown away and incredibly grateful, and so I've been fortunate enough to get to know his wife or his widow, lisa, a bit.

Speaker 1: 2:13

In fact, we had dinner when I was out in Minneapolis the other day with her new husband and a couple of Vince's siblings. It was amazing, and so I actually emailed her and I said, hey, this might seem cheesy, but I'd really like to dedicate this book to Vince. Is that okay? And she's like it is absolutely okay, and so it was kind of full circle for me. You know, to have this person I never knew but was a hero of mine, and then to finally be able to write in his universe and then dedicate one of his books to him was pretty neat.

Speaker 4: 2:47

So yeah, Well, and you know his untimely passing. Eventually, Kyle Mills took over and wrote nine books and I'd love for you to discuss and tell everybody about how you ended up being tapped to be the next writer in that legacy series, Because I think it's a wonderful story.

Speaker 1: 3:04

Yeah. So there are two morals to this story, and the first is Kyle Mills is an incredibly generous guy. If you see him on social media, he's like that, but better in person. But there are two things I need to tell you about Kyle Mills. Number one if he ever says to you one, if he ever says to you let's have one more margarita, just say no. Just say no, no, Kyle, we're not going to have one more margarita. The second thing is do not ever play poker with Kyle Mills.

Speaker 1: 3:38

And so I'm going to come back to both of those statements, in that I was so for about two and a half years I was writing a book every five months, and so I would write one of my Matt Drake books and then one of the Clancy books, and it was really really hard. I was really fortunate to have that opportunity, but it was crushing me. And so when I got to the point where I'd written what was the fourth book in my Clancy series, Weapons Grade, I was kind of taking stock of my writing career and what was going to come next. And another great friend, that another moral of this story is that this community, this genre of writers, is incredibly supportive, and everybody I know who's a thriller writer is genuinely trying to help you and trying to help you get better, and so for me, one of those people was Mark Graney, and so he wrote the Gray man. He writes the Duffy series of books. He wrote with Tom Clancy when Tom was still alive and then was the first writer to write once Tom passed away. And so when I originally had the opportunity to write the Clancy books, my editor said don't say yes or no yet. Call Mark Graney and talk to him.

Speaker 1: 4:53

And so at the beginning of the conversation, Mark said I'm not going to tell you to write these books, I'm just going to lay out the pros and cons and you decide. And by the end he's like you have to write these books. And part of what he told me is two things. It's number one if you're lucky enough to be a writer, especially a genre writer in this, in thrillers, he said the work will be there before the money is, and what he means by that is you'll have opportunities. But the advances as a new writer that you're getting is not enough usually to pay the bills all on its own, and so at some point you're going to have to much like you're starting a small business, kind of make that. Do I jump in? Do I do this or not? And then the second thing he told me is that if you get to write one of these legacy series, like Clancy or potentially the Bourne series or WEB Griffin or Clive Cussler he said that's the industry's way of putting their stamp on you and saying this person can write, and if you do it with one series and you do it well, you will probably have opportunities with other series.

Speaker 1: 5:55

And so kind of fast forward to the point where I was in the middle of finishing weapons grade and trying to figure out what am I going to do next, Because I don't think I can keep writing a book every five months. And I was praying about it and trying to figure out you know what does this look like for me or my family? And as I was praying about it, I really felt like you know, God was saying to me if you had to write a series and it was one series what series would you write? And I'm like well, my favorite author in the world is Vince Flynn, but Kyle is never going to give up that gig. And so I thought about it some more and thought about it some more and so I had a call scheduled with my agent and at the end I was like, hey, this is going to sound crazy, but I would love to write the Vince Flynn books. And he's like, well, I don't know that they're looking for anybody to write the Vince Flynn books. And he's like, well, I don't know that they're looking for anybody to write the Vince Flynn books. And he said, but it's an agent's job to find out, so let me make some calls. And so he came back and he said you're never going to believe this. Kyle had told them actually a year prior, so they would have plenty of time to find somebody that he didn't want to write them anymore. And so we'll put you in contention for him.

Speaker 1: 7:04

So fast forward to the two unkind things I said about Kyle Mills. I was already scheduled to meet him out at the Poison Pen and interview him, because that's another great bookstore like this one. It's out in Phoenix and Barbara, the Poison Pen owner, will sometimes have authors come out to interview other authors. And so we did the event. And we're going out to dinner and Kyle's beautiful wife, Kim, is there and she's talking to the owner, and so Kyle and I are sitting on this side of the table and I'm like you know, I was an FBI agent in my prior life and I'm not saying I'm an amazing interrogator, but I have made a grown man cry before and so I feel that Kyle has no chance for me. And I'm not saying I'm an amazing interrogator, but I have made a grown man cry before. And so I feel that Kyle has no chance for me. And I'm like I'm going to poke at him a little bit and see if I and I couldn't sleep at the hotel because I was convinced he was getting fired and didn't know it. And so at three o'clock in the morning I actually text my agent and I said listen, take me out of contention for this gig, because Kyle's getting fired. He doesn't even know it. I just had dinner with him and his wife. I can't be the guy that pushes him off this ship. And so, thankfully, my agent, as he's done many times, is like cool your jets a little bit there, Bentley, how about I make some more phone calls? And that's when I figured out Kyle had lied to me the entire time and knew, had knew, but he didn't know I was in contentionention. So we lied to each other for 30 minutes at dinner and then, um, once we got done with our um, our lies to each other, I actually interviewed there.

Speaker 1: 8:53

There are two people who are kind of the gatekeepers for vince flynn's legacy, and that's his longtime editor, uh, emily bessler, who is brad thor's editor, and this unknown writer but I think he's got a future his name's Jack Carr. I don't know if any of you have heard of him before, so she's kind of a she is a giant in this industry. And then Sloane Harris, who is his longtime agent, and so I had to talk with each of them. They read my books. I had to talk a little bit about what I thought for the series, but what was?

Speaker 1: 9:27

It was very, very different from when I got the opportunity to write the Clancy series, and part of that was because there had been a heck of a lot of writers who had written in the Clancy universe before me, and the Clancy brand is everywhere, right, there's video games, there's movies, there's books that my publisher published. Actually, in Clancy's divorce. Part of the settlement is he spun some of those books off that his ex-wife then got to have, and so there are some Clancy books that weren't even published anymore by the same publisher, and so his name was out there forever. And the editor, Tom Colgan too many Toms in this story had done a great job of bringing in the right writer to write in that series, and so for the fans, it was pretty much they didn't really care who wrote, because they had enough confidence that the estate was well managed.

Speaker 1: 10:24

In contrast, when they announced I was taking over for Vince, it started trending on Twitter and so the publicist he's like you're trending on Twitter and I'm like I have nothing left to achieve in this life. But the reason why it was trending is because so many of the fans were saying I don't know who this Bentley guy is, but this is my favorite series in the world and he better not screw this up. And it was a completely different thing from the Clancy and even interviewing for the job it felt much more like I was joining this family owned small company that had been built from the ground up and they would even people who know Vince and knew him well in the industry still get choked up when they talk about him because he was that good of a guy and he was that well-loved. And so it was completely different from the Clancy one, but also just the most rewarding thing I've ever been able to do, and so I'm super grateful to be here, even if I am still a little angry at Kyle Mills for lying to me.

Speaker 4: 11:33

Well, you know, I'm curious about you know, I know you said when you were reading through Vince's books you found a gap, yeah, and that was where you decided to insert Mitch Rapp in your world and he in yours. And I was just curious what was it about this era and this timeline that made you kind of want to run and write?

Speaker 1: 11:53

with this. So I can't say enough good things about Kyle. Like I said, it's both a person and a writer, and so when Vince died, for a while nobody knew whether the series was even going to continue. And then, once it did continue, kyle could have very easily just written book after book. That was the continuing adventures of Mitch Rapp, right, kind of like I'm a kid of the 80s, kind of like the A-Team Every Tuesday the same things are going to happen and you get that. Tuesday the same things are going to happen and you get that.

Speaker 1: 12:27

But he was not content to tread water and he took the series in completely new directions with new characters. And so once I found out I was going to get the opportunity, I wanted to go back and reread all of the Vince books Because, number one, I didn't as fantastic a job as Kyle did. I didn't want my Mitch to feel like he was a derivative of a derivative, like I wanted to go back to the source and immerse myself in those. And as I was doing that, what I noticed is that when Vince wrote, he aged Mitch in real time, and so every time a new book came out, vince was that old and they would often reference things that happened at that time period, and he kept doing that until Pursuit of Honor, and then, after Pursuit of Honor, he hit pause on the series and he went back and he wrote Mitch's origin story, and so he did that with two books, with American Assassin and with Killshot. And then he jumped forward in time again instead of picking right up after Pursuit of Honor, to the Last man, which was, tragically, the final book that Vince wrote before he passed away. But there were about three years there in between Pursuit of Honor and the Last man and nobody knew what Mitch did for those three years. And I thought, well, that's really interesting. And so I did a little detective work to try and figure out what years those covered, and one of them was 2011. And I'm like 2011, that sounds familiar. And so Capture or Kill is the answer to the question that Vince Flynn fans have been asking for the last 13 years, and that question is what role did Mitch Rapp play in the operation to capture or kill Osama bin Laden? And so when I saw that was there, I started to look and say did Vince ever address this? And so if you go to his website, there's a section where fans used to write in questions, and one of them was what role did Mitch Rapp play in the Bin Laden raid? And so, vince, kind of, he answered it very generically and said listen, the SEALs certainly were the ones who did this mission, but there were also intelligence officers who set the conditions for that raid, and I imagine that Mitch did something with that. And so I thought, well, that's really interesting again.

Speaker 1: 14:46

And then, as a writer you know again, kid of the 80s, one of my favorite movies in the world is Top Gun. In fact, when I say no to my kids, it's still not no, it's negative Ghost Rider. The pattern is full. And so I was very, very anxious when Top Gun Maverick came out, because I'm like they're going to destroy this thing that I have loved. And they didn't. You know they, they had an homage to all the scenes and things I loved as a kid.

Speaker 1: 15:12

And then they took it in new direction and I thought you know what? I've got this fan base who is justifiably very anxious about me and what I can do. I've got Kyle, who's done amazing things, but he also upset the apple cart a little bit in some of those books and I thought can do, I've got Kyle, who's done amazing things, but he also upset the apple card a little bit in some of those books and I thought you know if I could go back and write when Vince wrote and do it as kind of like my love letter to the fans and say I am just as big a fan of this series as you are, and here's the proof of it. And if I set it between these two books, it's almost like I got Vince as my training wheels right, because I am putting my book in the middle of his too, and so that's kind of how it all came together and why I chose that gap in time.

Speaker 4: 15:54

Wow, Well, it's so wonderfully written, I'm just blown away. And you talk about paying homage, and there's one thing you've done in a lot of your books is you bring in some of your friends, your family and you sometimes and for those who don't know, there's times where you might switch military backgrounds just to kind of get a little kidney punch on some of your buds. But I was kind of curious who were some of the people that you brought in and kind of honored and I know that it's not just people that are still here with us. There's a lot of people that have been heroes, that have been left on the battlefield, and you honor them and their family members, which I highly respect and salute you for. So I'm just kind of curious some of those people that made their way in and why you chose them to come into this book.

Speaker 1: 16:36

Yeah. So, like I said, I wrote three books over 17 years that nobody cared about, and so, if you discount that, I'm pretty much an overnight success. And so when I wrote my Without Sanction, that was the first book in my Matt Drake series that it actually sold. When I was writing that book, I had no expectations that it was going to sell, and one of the things I hate the most is coming up with um names of characters, and so I was lazy and used a lot of friend names in that book, never expecting that it was actually going to sell. And so then, when it did, I had to go back and start changing names around or make calls and say, like in without sanction, john shaw is a friend of mine and said, listen, you kind of get your ear cut off, but you make it through at the end, is that okay? And said, listen, you kind of get your ear cut off but you make it through at the end, is that okay? And they're like, yeah, you can keep me. And so the other thing when that book came out, I had an interviewer say you know, I was doing a radio interview and she said are you Matt Drake, are you your protagonist? And I said I am absolutely not, but I've stood in the same room with men who could be. And so once I got the opportunity to write those books, I thought less than one quarter of 1% of the US population voluntarily bore this nation's combat burden for 20 years and most of those people did it multiple times across Iraq and Afghanistan, did it multiple times across Iraq and Afghanistan, and so I got to know folks. Certainly I was the anomaly. I only served in Afghanistan. Most people did multiple tours, and so I ended up, before I wrote full-time, I worked for a number of small companies and we designed or marketed technology to customers in the special operations community, and so those people that were my coworkers and friends and customers were people who could be in my books, and so I started putting them in my books with mostly their permission.

Speaker 1: 18:27

But what I thought was fun, which they didn't like, was to change their branch affiliation, and so in the Clancy books there's a Navy SEAL named, or a Green Beret named, jad, and Jad in real life is a Navy SEAL and there's a Ranger or a Navy SEAL team leader are Brandon Cates, greg Glass and Jeff Mishler, who Sanger, who is in the back right there. You might see him as a pilot in, uh, in Capture or Kill, damon and I flew together. He was an instructor pilot Um, we were actually in two units together, I think and he gave me my pilot and command ride and actually passed me. So, um, he's in there, and so I try and put as many folks as I can in there as kind of a testament to their service. It took a little different turn in my last Clancy book, weapons Grade, and then I put two people in there who were fallen service members.

Speaker 1: 19:52

So Shannon Kent is the wife of Joe Kent, who's a former Green Beret that's now running for Congress. She was the mom of two little boys, was one of the first women or one of the few women, rather in the unit that she was in in JSOC, in Joint Special Operations Command. She was a Navy non-commissioned officer and she was killed by a suicide bomber in Syria. And then there's another character called Isaac Black in the book. So Isaac is the son of Brian Black. Brian was a Green Beret who was killed in Niger. His widow, michelle Black, has written a pretty gut-wrenching book about that story and what she had to do in order to get the truth of that raid and what actually happened. And so I knew both of them a little bit and got permission to use their loved ones, because there's a there's an old saying that says that people actually die twice, and so the first time is when they draw their final breath, and the second time is when people no longer say their names. And so I thought, you know, if I can get people to say their names a little bit longer, maybe that would be a good thing.

Speaker 1: 21:02

And so in Capture or Kill there's a infantry company or a ranger company commander named Mark Garner. And so in real life Mark was ranger qualified, he had a ranger tab, but he wasn't from the ranger regiment. He was a infantry platoon leader in the 82nd and then was a infantry company commander in Germany, and he and his beautiful wife, michaela, were our next door neighbors. And so when I rotated home from Germany, he took his company to Afghanistan, and he was an amazing lady. She actually stayed in of the men and women who served. He's from a small town in North Carolina. He and Nikala were hometown sweethearts. He was a graduate of West Point, and I thought it'd be something neat to be able to do to use him in the book.

Speaker 4: 22:13

Well, you also have one other name in there that I think we need to cover and there's a Bentley and I was curious if you could tell that story. Think we need to cover and there's a bentley and I was curious if you could tell that story. I know we spoke about it for a minute, but I thought it was really a good one that the audience would appreciate yes, I have three kids.

Speaker 1: 22:28

Uh, my oldest is actually uh with my wife right now. So he graduated from texas a&m just a couple weeks ago yeah, um, the uh, and he was in the corps of Cadets. He was commissioned in the Marine Corps and he is a second lieutenant and he's on his way to Quantico to go to the basic school. And then I have two daughters. My son has read all the books. My oldest daughter has read one of the books, and my youngest daughter could care less about the books. And so my son claims and he's sort of right that I've used both daughters, or aspects of both daughters, in the books. And he's like dad, I'm the only freaking one who actually reads your books and I've never been in one of your books. And so and this one, scott Coleman has a new friend. He's a Marine named Will Bentley, and so Will gets a spot in this book.

Speaker 4: 23:19

That's nice, very appropriate. Love it, love it. You know I wanted to take a quick transition to cover this book. You know, obviously a lot of times you know there's a lot of talk about the design of this. I think it's absolutely amazing. It's very honoring. We're very close to 9-11 right now and I was curious was this an idea that you had? Did someone bring it to you? How did you guys come up with this as your design?

Speaker 1: 23:45

Yeah, the cover. People are fantastic because they're trying to crawl in your head. Sometimes I have ideas for covers and stuff and you just tell them the idea or you you do a google search for an image or something. For this one I didn't have that idea at all. Like I showed them some stuff. I'm like, well, maybe it'd be cool to have a picture of the bin laden compound or something like that. And then, and so we talked about that a little bit and then I can't remember if it was emily or somebody else is like you got to see this, how, how about this? And then, as soon as you know, I saw it.

Speaker 1: 24:20

All of us that are old enough to have lived through 9-11, which I think it looks like everybody in this room remembers that the two spotlights afterwards, right, and what that meant and what we felt as a nation. And even when I was pitching the book as a nation, and even when I was pitching the book, I didn't know whether they would be okay with it or not. And Emily Bessler, at the end, I remember her looking at me and she said, yep, you should write that book. And then she said, because we win. And it was just that thought of kind of the national unity that we all felt on that day, and when I saw that cover, that's what it reminded me of. And so you know again kind of like Mark's story, where it's tragedy but something maybe good can come out of the tragedy I think that moment of seeing those two spotlights shooting up in the sky made us proud to be Americans again, maybe in a way that we haven't felt as a nation like that since then.

Speaker 4: 25:18

Unfortunately, I had a very similar feeling when I saw that. It just brought on a lot of emotion. I remember I was working in New York City around that time just happened to not be there in that day and when I remember seeing those spotlights it was so powerful and I remember to what you're saying. As far as the idea of that unity, there was a gentleman who said I I never want to see another 9-11, but I'll do anything for a 9-12. The way that our country came together was like unlike anything we've had since then, and that tragedy brought us together and you know we never want another tragedy, but I do remember that and I look at that, that and I get emotional.

Speaker 4: 25:58

Looking at the cover of that book and obviously writing everything through it is just phenomenal. You know, I wanted to take a quick little turn to talk about the audiobook because you're working with a new reader in this and so you have in the past, worked with Scott Brick and now this is Steven Weber. I was curious because I got a chance to listen to that last couple days. Uh, really enjoy his work. And how did you guys get linked up? Why was it? Uh, you know, stephen instead of maybe scott, this time, was that a choice of yours or someone else?

Speaker 1: 26:31

so for. So for my books, uh. So I was never really an audible guy, um, before my book started getting publishing, published, and I didn't understand the power that the reader had or the the narrator for the book has. And in my first two books, my first matt books the guy was okay, um, he wasn't fantastic. And then I heard scott brick on the first clancy book and I I'm like, oh my gosh. And so my publisher was nice enough to actually switch to Scott Brick for my other Matt Drake books and then went back and re-recorded them with Scott so that all of them were there. And I remember I'm blanking on the name. Maybe you guys, the bookstore guys, can help me.

Speaker 1: 27:18

The guy that writes the Joe Ledger books has a gazillion. He's written a gazillion different books. He, he worked with Ray Porter, who's another giant in the in the one, and he had done so many books with Ray that he said when he writes now he hears Ray's voice and that he writes differently because he thinks how is Ray going to say this? Jonathan Mayberry, that's who it is. And so for these books though they're not mine and so I didn't have any input whatsoever into the narrator, but I know Steven Weber took over for Code Red was kind of the first one he did and then did this as well, and so I never had when I worked with Scott, it was always just the how do you say this? You know what is this? Stephen Weber was very, very kind in that he reached out to me separately over Instagram and he's like listen, I got to tell you I do a lot of books, but this book was special, like we were even talking about it. The engineer was talking about how good he's, like it was, and I'm paraphrasing what he said a little bit here. But something kind of the. The analogy he made was kind of the difference of like you can have, you can be a great actor, but you need to have a great script. That kind of goes along with it, and so it was. It was very, very kind for him and for me personally.

Speaker 1: 28:37

I have a really hard time reading my books because, as a writer, all you all ever see are things you wish you would have changed and you look at a page.

Speaker 1: 28:46

It's kind of the joke about when you do the reviewing process, the very end. For some reason it's called first pass pages, and I don't know why, because it's your fourth time through, but they used to send you these nasty notes to the writer that says if you change more than X percentage, you have to pay for the type to be reset at the printer, because anytime you give a writer their book, they will try and change it again. In fact, mark Graney is famous for having put like 40,000 more words in the first past pages for one of his books, but for me when I listen to it it takes me out of reading it and I can actually enjoy it for the first time and I think a lot of that. Some of that is the medium, and then the other part is just the really talented voice actors they bring in. And so I'm waiting until I'm done with tour and I finally get to relax a little bit to hear Steven read it, and I can't wait to pick this time period.

Speaker 4: 30:00

There's a gap. And then what did that look like for you? Because I know how important it was for you to get this done right. And what did that look like from the day that you kind of said, okay, I've got the thumbs up to do this. And then what did that research and your kind of routine and rhythm look like in writing and studying for this?

Speaker 1: 30:14

Yeah, there are a couple of parts to the research for this. So one of them I kind of alluded to before is that I read all of the Vince books again, and then I can't tell you the number of times I read Pursuit of Honor and the Last man just over and over and over again, because what I was number one I wanted to get. So Kyle was famous for saying his first book was called the Survivor and Kyle called it a forgery from the standpoint that Kyle spent a lot of time trying to mimic Vince's writing style with that book, that he dedicated a tremendous amount of time to see. You know, down to that he would have little algorithms, not algorithms, but he would say, like, how many times did Vince use this word? Have I used that word? And so I knew I couldn't do that, but I wanted to be able to, on a subconscious level, refer to the characters and do the things the way Vince did. And so that's all I read were his books, and those books for probably six months or so I was, I was writing them to try and just so that it would be instinctively, I'd refer to things or I'd I'd describe Mitch how he described Mitch, and so, um, that was one portion of the research. Um, another portion.

Speaker 1: 31:30

There's a another guy in there named Jason Beefley, who is um in the book. He's a CIA paramilitary officer. Jason is one of the people who could be Mitch Rapp, and so he's a very close friend of mine. He spent the first part of his career in the Ranger Regiment and then the majority of his career in an Army Special Mission Unit. He was actually in his first assignment with that unit was Operation Gothic Serpent. With that unit was Operation Gothic Serpent, which we all know is Black Hawk Down, and so he's the guy that I would in some of my books. We'd actually I'd draw out a map and I'm like I want to do this and this kind of ambush, and he would tell me how crazy I was and then tell me how to do it correctly, because I'm not a gear guy, really I'm not a gun guy, and so the things that my characters use are what I used, what I carried as an FBI agent, and so when it goes beyond that, I use Jason a lot.

Speaker 1: 32:25

And then to go back to Damon, so Damon was the chief instructor pilot in our unit, and so he was charged with making us all better pilots, and I should have reached out to Damon for this. I didn't think about it, but I wanted to show one of the things that's unique about army aviation. It's a little bit of inside baseball. Is that every other branch so for instance, in the marine corps, marine corps, attack aviation exists only support the guys on the ground. The guys and girls on the ground in the army, they use aviation as if they are big tanks and so apaches, you would go out and we do movement to contacts or reconnaissance, zone and area reconnaissance and stuff like that. And so there are a couple guys I flew with. So kelsey smith, um who damon also, uh, trained in two units was a fellow troop commander with me in afghanistan. Um, his safety officer was a guy named darren swan, and so they're both in the book. And I had to call Kelsey up and I'm like, hey, I need to do I think it's an area recon. He's like it's a zone recon, here's how you do it. And I was like I want them to come in from Pakistan. He's like that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard have them come in here. I was like, well, I was just testing you to see if you were gonna pick that up, and so, um, they helped a lot too. And then I did a lot.

Speaker 1: 33:48

I didn't read any books on the bin laden raid because you don't it's gonna sound corny, but you don't have time to read books because you have to write every day and so.

Speaker 1: 33:53

But I got so many different articles about how did they know bin laden was there, what were some things that they did, and then trying to figure out where mitch would fit in there. And then another thing I paid attention to like when we look back in history, we have the benefit of knowing how it turns out right. And so when we look at the normandy invasion, it never occurs to any of us that that might have failed. Right because it didn't fail, and so we think it wouldn. Might have failed right Because it didn't fail, and so we think it wouldn't have failed. And so when you look at the Bin Laden raid, there were a lot of things that could have gone wrong, right To the point where President Biden famously told at the time President Obama, don't do it. Like it's too risky, don't do it. And so I tried to get a lot of that and have it reflected in the book, where the raid is kind of the metronome that's driving the pace of the book, and then Mitch is doing Mitch things around that.

Speaker 4: 34:44

Wow. Well, again, there's so many things I'd like to ask, but there may be some spoiler things, so I definitely don't want to jump in, but you guys are going to love it. If you haven't already checked this out, it's such an amazing book. I was kind of curious if any of you guys had any questions that you'd like to ask, don, and if so, we have a microphone over here. I figure we can take a few questions here before we kind of break to do some signing, and I will bribe you with books.

Speaker 1: 35:08

The first two people to ask a question get a book All the way in the back. Oh, you got got that one already I got the other one oh, thank you. So you're planning more mitch books? That's a question am. I say are you? Planning to write more mitch books. Yes, yeah, I'm working on my next mitch book now so how?

Speaker 3: 35:47

how much will he age? Because now he's probably what? 60? She gets your book too um, he's, you know he's now. He's about 60, right, I know he's in good shape.

Speaker 1: 35:59

I don't think he's quite that old. Yeah, I can't talk with any specificity about the stuff I'm working on. So she asked, like how much is Mitch going to age? Because one of the things so Vince, who aged Mitch but didn't, didn't have and part of it was Mitch was younger didn't have those years accumulate on him. Now, like I'm 50 and have sneezed while shaving and thrown my back out for the rest of the day, right, and so Kyle added a little bit more of that into the book, where you can see Mitch has gotten a bit older, and I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to do. So, though, no, but that was a good question.

Speaker 2: 36:45

Yes, sir um question about the movie rights for any of the books yeah the one that I was really anticipating was american assassin yeah but they butchered it. So the question that I have is, if there is a a new movie that's going to come out, would it be on a streaming um format, to where you've got 10 episodes and a streaming format?

Speaker 1: 37:13

yeah, I can't um talk to that because it's the. I'm not involved in any of that. Like I, that's the decisions and stuff the families make. What I will say is that more and more books seem to be adopted by streaming um services both, and the authors love that because you get to tell a more detailed story over episodes and stuff, and so I don't know um answer your question, but if it was following, like when Jack Carr had as much success as he did with terminal list, they kind of broke it back open for a lot of different thriller writers because they um, he, he and he's probably talked about it publicly. But the amount of um back and forth they had to do with the studios to say no, trust me, trust me, this is going to be great Because it costs a lot of money and it was kind of pushing boundaries from what Hollywood typically makes, especially as a streaming service. But because it did so well, it kind of had some more opportunities, hopefully for the rest of us.

Speaker 2: 38:17

Good question, though, yeah for the rest of us. Good question though, yeah, for this book. What did you find easy in the process, or actually specific parts of the book that don't give away spoilers, and what was hard or really difficult?

Speaker 1: 38:34

Um. So what's what's really hard with Mitch is that he's such an oversized protagonist that it's kind of like a little bit of like what do you do to put Superman in jeopardy, right? Like, what do you do so that people are worried about Superman? And so with Mitch, what I did especially in this book, is, had like one-on-one with another person, you're not usually in too much doubt how that thing's going to turn out right, but if, but, mitch can still only be in one place at one time, and so what you almost have to do is stack the entire universe against him and say how do we, um, how do we arrange things so that it's a big enough problem that even Mitch has a hard time solving, I think, is one. The other part of that that was also hard is I was terrified. I loved having Vince be my training wheels, but I was also terrified of't been answered. Had they been answered somewhere else and stuff like that.

Speaker 1: 39:48

What was really fun was there are a couple different things in here where you get to see Mitch from other people's perspective, right, who don't really know who he is, and so I had a lot of fun with that. Where you get to see how does somebody else see Mitch? How does he appear? Because you, you know this is a little bit of writer inside baseball, but if you have the character tell the reader something about themselves, they're like, eh, whatever, maybe they're just bragging. If you have somebody else watch that character and tell the reader about it, then the reader believes it a little more, and so I got to do that a couple of times and it was really fun. Yes, sir.

Speaker 7: 40:25

It's kind of a crazy question, but I was here when you were here with the other four or five guys, yeah, and y'all went through so much in your early careers and everything point. Or did you find yourself with a desire to be a writer, and especially how you convert what y'all went through to, uh, write about fiction? Yeah, story.

Speaker 1: 40:49

Yeah, I always wanted to be a storyteller. So even as a kid, like I said, I was kind of tongue-in-cheek about, uh, the a-team. But I grew up in that era where you had, like, the A-Team and Airwolf and Knight Rider and Blue Thunder and Magnum PI and like all these amazing for a young boy stories about action and heroes, and I remember as a kid thinking well, what if they would have done this instead? What if it had ended this way? And so I had kind of a a storyteller. When I'd mow the lawn in the backyard I'd tell myself stories as I was mowing the lawn and it took a while for my, my toolkit, my writing toolkit, to be able to catch up to the stories that I wanted to tell. But I knew from a long time I wanted to do that. In fact, my senior year of of high school I had a really good English teacher, my AP English teacher, and at one point she pulled me aside and she's like I think you could do this, like you could be a writer, and she comes to my signings now when I come back home, which is really neat. But I took that advice, her encouragement, to heart and went to college and majored in electrical engineering.

Speaker 1: 41:58

It's all good Writers do. That was good and so it took a long time. That was part of it. Like if you're gonna ask people to pay money for your art, like you just think, how many people do you know are decent singers? You know how many people you can go to church and you hear them, you're like, yeah, that's pretty good. But then to be able to go to the next level, where people are going to pay you for an album you put out or come and see you in concert or something it's you know that that that pyramid gets really narrow really quickly and I had to be good enough for people to be able to want to spend money and to buy my books.

Speaker 7: 42:33

That's interesting. I know, uh, uh, all those guys. I've read your books and those guys' books and they're all really great books. You mentioned one thing about things could have gone wrong, Like I was in a meeting with a man named McRaven that wrote a book and talked about what was happening? During that time.

Speaker 1: 43:02

And yeah, things could have gone wrong. Yeah, no, for the bin laden raid. You mean, yeah, absolutely, if you think about that. I mean you could have had everything from um, the pakistani air force, shooting down our helicopters to things going. Things did go wrong on the compound itself, or one of the helicopters, um, got into settling with power and crashed. I mean they could have had a firefight between the Navy SEALs and Pakistani police that responded, or military units and stuff. A lot could have gone wrong.

Speaker 7: 43:31

Yeah, Then they said how do you know that's him down there?

Speaker 1: 43:34

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Yeah, Anybody else. Okay, I'm slow. Thank you, yeah, anybody else. Okay, I'm slow. All good, no worries, okay, hang on, I'm working on it. I swear to God. Okay, first, you have my permission to use this name. Uh-oh, okay, don't make a bad guy. I can't promise all that. You know what I don't remember.

Speaker 6: 44:07

Can you do something? Well played. I need your show. That's it. My question is different I think you may have when you're going to write a book. Do you start with a basic idea, or do you say, hey, I'm going to finish it this way. Or how do you come up I'm the least creative person you're ever going to meet. Okay, Sure.

Speaker 6: 44:30

Writing a book. You know it was a dark and stormy night, Ta-da. What do you do to write a book? Do you have a great big whiteboard? I mean, how do to write a book? Do you have a great big whiteboard? I mean yeah, how do you write a book?

Speaker 1: 44:44

yeah, yeah. So I'll try and keep this um quick, because my wife says that when I talk about the writing process it's like human ambien, and so I will. I will try. In fact she has, and let's see, texted me from time to time during an interview that says this is boring, move along.

Speaker 1: 45:04

But to answer your question, writers tend to fall into one or two categories, and so there are people who are plotters and know the story before they write, and people who write organically, or write by the seat of their pants, or are pantsers that are telling themselves the story as they write. And so Kyle is very much a plotter, in that he would write like a 30 or 40,000 word outline before he ever started writing the book, and so he understood the story. I fall very much into the other category, where I'm telling myself the story as I'm writing it, so I usually have kind of a general idea. And then, as you're writing, you're constantly asking yourself questions like how do I raise the stakes, how do I increase tension, how do I make things harder for my protagonist? And so your first draft is awful, and there are hypothetically many times where you wake up at two o'clock in the morning and look at the ceiling and say I'm going to be the guy that brings down the Clancy franchise, like this is going to be me. I'm going to burn it to the ground with this book because it's going to be so bad.

Speaker 1: 46:14

And so your book becomes better in subsequent drafts as you're going over, and so what I do is there's a a good book called save the cat, and the guy that wrote it, um, was actually a screenplay writer, and so he breaks down what the three-act structure looks like and what beats belong in each one, and so about every 20 or 30 000 words, I take everything that I have and I note card out those beats and I put them on the dining room table, which my wife also loves, and I'm like do not touch these note cards.

Speaker 1: 46:47

And I had. I used to put them on the floor, but there was a tragedy that happened at my house where the Roomba came in my office and made some drastic changes to the book I was working on, and so that's all very different and dependent. Stephen King and Lee Child are both famous for being pantsers. If you've ever seen an interview with Lee, he's really funny, and somebody asked him if he outlined and he's like, why would I want to do that? Then I'd already know what the story was before I started writing, and so, again, that's very dependent from author to author.

Speaker 4: 47:20

So thanks, yeah one more question, anybody?

Speaker 1: 47:29

all right, told you human ambient, put them right to sleep.

Speaker 4: 47:34

Somebody woke him back up just uh curious.

Speaker 5: 47:41

I mean, you got, you guys have. You've been an apache pilot, fbi agent, now a world renowned author. Do you have any like words of advice for people when you've obviously taken a lot of risks in your life? Yeah for how to how to take those risks intelligently, to where you increase the odds of success I love that you presume I took these risks intelligently.

Speaker 1: 48:03

To where you increase the odds of success. I love that you presume I took these risks intelligently. Thank you for that. No, all seriousness aside, when I got out of the army my wife and I are high school sweethearts we moved back to our hometown. We bought our forever house that was five houses ago, we don't use forever house anymore and got a job at a great company. And I was miserable, and I was miserable for a couple't realize how much of who you are is defined by what you do and how much of your satisfaction comes from that, until you have to try and figure out how to find that somewhere else. And so, about three years into this great company, the FBI was recruiting folks who had military service, and to take that job I'd have to leave our forever house, leave our families, take a big cut in pay, do all of these things. That, in my mind, was detrimental to my family and I should just suck it up and do this thing and sit in the cubicle.

Speaker 1: 49:17

And so there was a guy at work that was a mentor to me. He was Brazilian classic immigrant story came to the US when he was 18 to go to the University of Pennsylvania or Purdue or something, barely spoke any English, didn't have any money. And now when I knew him, he was in his late 50s, early 60s, and so I asked him I'm like Dennis, what should I do? And he said him I'm like Dennis, you know what should I do? And he said, listen, I'm in the twilight of my career right now.

Speaker 1: 49:45

My kids have all moved out. I've been successful. When I look back at my life, the things that I regret the most are those instances when I didn't take a big swing, when I was too scared to do it when it felt safe and I took the safe choice. And he, when I was too scared to do it when it felt safe and I took the safe choice, he's like you should do this. And so that's been something I've tried to do going forward. And it doesn't sometimes you strike out when you take big swings, but sometimes you get to do really cool stuff and find yourself writing for Vince Flynn.

Speaker 5: 50:15

So yeah, I'm also an electrical engineer as well. You can't spell geek without the ee well y'all.

Speaker 4: 50:25

Thank you so much for coming out and you know, don, I just wanted to say thank you on behalf of everyone here for your service to our country, for honoring Vince the way you had with this book I know for everyone who hasn't had a chance to run through it, I know you're all going to feel the same and for honoring all those who have served as well, and how you put them into your book. It's a wonderful thing and I'm truly grateful for this opportunity to sit here and be able to chat with you today, and I know that everyone else was definitely excited to meet you and have you sign their book. So if you guys give us a couple minutes, I'll clear some stuff off and be able to have this set up for you guys to come over here and get your book signed. And once again, thank you so much for joining us all today.

Speaker 1: 51:06

Yeah, absolutely, thanks guys.