James Patterson
speaker
661 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 5 Jun
James Patterson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You always wanted things that could be a whole lot better. Oh, we'll get a new president. That'll solve it. Or we'll get a new coach for our team. That'll solve it. It might. This is quite a time to be discussing this a 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 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 comes from like they really, really know because 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. And Latinos were really the key. And that's 12, 14 percent of the country now. And folks, where are these smart people paying attention to this, which probably made the difference in the election?
This was back a while ago. Right now, obviously, it's a different thing in Hollywood. And at the time, I didn't have a lot of money. And it was a million dollars on the table. And I said, no can do. Sorry, can't do it. I had to walk away. But part of it with Alex was I grew up in a town, real blue collar, a pretty heavy black population. I played a lot of basketball. So that was another connect.
And my grandparents had a very small restaurant. And the chef cook was a black woman. And she was having problems with her husband. And she moved in with our family for a couple of years. 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. And I like being with her family better than being with my family.
But that's a little bit of where the Cross family came from. They're not based on that family, but that's a little of that. But that's at least part of what started the Cross stuff.
So I've been clean for over 25 years now. I don't know why you bring that up, you bastard.
Thank you. Thank you.
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 it's, oh, we can't hire anybody because nobody wants to come work there. So once again, it's this problem solution thing. And I did an ad, write if you want work.
And it was six questions. And there were questions like it listed the ingredients on, you know, baked beans. And they're terrible ingredients. And it just said, make it sound mouthwatering. You know, stuff like that. And you could read the six answers in three, four, five minutes, and you could tell immediately whether that person, A, could write and B, could solve problems. I see.
Because it wasn't like hide from the problem by being a smarty-ass writer. It was like, no, you got to solve the problem. You know, sell a telephone system to a trappist monk who 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 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 on my head. And you give them an idea and they test it and nobody paid any attention. And you go, oh, okay, this is not as simple as I thought it was. 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 and go like, I wouldn't notice this on a book stand. Okay, next.
And then I notice it, but 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'd call up somebody and they would give me 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. They hit me in the face with the cream pie. And I said, here's the secret. Hit them in the face with the cream pie. 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. And if you don't say something smart, once you get their attention, it's irrelevant. And that's it.
Hit them and no cream pie, no sale, and nothing motivational, no sale.
No, it should. And on another scale, the whole thing about chapters flowing into 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, just to be reading Marathon Man, he's so good at that. And it was a good movie, but the book is so much better. It's just every single chapter.
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.
I already was succeeding, so I had some bestsellers, so I knew I was semi-comfortable. That's also one of the stories in the 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.
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