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
Okay. Didn't want to get rejected. It was a little strange, whatever it was. What was the Tom Cruise? The Tom Cruise, that was just hilarious. So we have the same age in creative artists. We're sort of on different levels.
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, Com Cruise would love to meet with you. I was out in L.A. And I said, yeah, it'd be great. And they said, just stay in your room and stay by your phone. And OK, fine.
So eventually a call came in and they said, OK, now the driver's downstairs, but don't tell him where you're going. I said, OK, fine. So we go down to the car and we drive not far from the hotel. And they pull up to the gate. 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 a little girl.
She was on his lap for 10, 15 minutes the first time 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 short. Had a big basketball court in the front of his house. And it was a really nice experience. Tom Cruise, not that short.
People love to focus on that, like he's only 5'6", or whatever. I don't know how tall he was, but it didn't occur to me when I was meeting with him. He was engaging. You listen. Some people are really good listeners, which is nice. Hillary Clinton's a really good listener. The first time we went out to dinner, the Clintons,
It was about three hours because we just blah, blah, blah, blah, everywhere. 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.
I like her. I like both of them. But I was a little surprised at how warm and funny Hillary is.
Usually it does. I get these things. I get ice cream and pens and all the pencils and... But no, nobody picked up on the, yeah, I do that on Substack. Wednesday on Substack is free Wednesdays and a giveaway ship. Use pencils where I've been chewing the eraser and stuff. Good stuff. Useful, you know, yeah.
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, it's 350 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 something, you know.
But if I'm traveling 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.
Uh-huh. Part of it was, I'm a big fan. I'd read pretty much everything that Michael Crichton had written, including his nonfiction Travels, which is a really cool nonfiction that he wrote about. However, 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 going to go? And he said, I want to 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 Andromeda Strain and it had sold for a bunch of money. So he never practiced medicine. So he went to med school and never practiced medicine.
At any rate, they came to me with partial manuscript. And I said, would you like to finish this? 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, well, yeah, this would be cool. And he hadn't laid out at all, like what was going to happen at a volcano or the other thing. But I love the idea of finishing because it was a good story and I wanted to know what the hell was going to happen at the end. But also, I hadn't really written anything with a lot of science in it.
So suddenly, I had to put a lot of science in the book. And so I got a researcher. It 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. Yeah, it was.
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, the fact that I think it's pretty seamless. That's cool. I'm happy.
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.
Well, and a lot of people, they look out there and go, well, everybody's doing it.
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