The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Black Coral: A Thriller by Andrew Mayne

Episode Date: February 18, 2021

Black Coral: A Thriller by Andrew Mayne For a police diver in Florida, solving a cold-case mystery brings a serial killer out of hiding in a deep, dark thriller by the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Naturalist. Sloan McPherson and the Underwater Investigation Unit have discovered a van at the bottom of a murky Florida pond. Sealed inside the watery tomb are the bodies of four teenagers who disappeared thirty years ago after leaving a rock concert. To authorities, it looks like a tragic accident. To Sloan, it looks like murder. Every piece of evidence is starting to connect to a string of cold case vanishings throughout Florida. Clue by clue, Sloan navigates the warm, dark waters where natural predators feed, knowing that the most dangerous one is still above the surface—nesting and dormant. But when a fresh young kill is found in the Everglades, Sloan fears that her investigation has reawakened a monster. How can she catch someone who’s a genius at hiding in plain sight? By acting as prey. The dangerous gambit is working—only too well. She’s being lured into a deception of the madman’s own design. Has Sloan set a trap for a serial killer? Or has he set one for her? About Andrew Mayne Andrew Mayne is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author whose books include The Naturalist, a Thriller Award finalist and Black Fall an Edgar Award finalist Black Fall. He's the star of the Discovery Channel's Shark Week special Andrew Mayne: Ghost Diver, where he swam alongside great white sharks using an underwater invisibility suit he designed and also was the star of A&E's Don't Trust Andrew Mayne. @AndrewMayne AndrewMayne.com

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrissvossshow.com, thechrissvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast.

We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Thanks for joining us at another podcast on the Chris Voss Show. Be sure to further show your friends, neighbors, relatives, dogs, cats, mistresses, pool boys. Get them all listening to the show. They can go to thecvpn.com or chrisfosspodcast.com. We've got a most excellent author

on the show. He's a multi-talented, multi-faceted, multimedia talent, and we're going to be talking about his newest book black coral andrew main but first if you want to see him on video you can go to the video version of our podcast at youtube.com forward slash chris voss hit the bell notification button you go to good reads.com forward slash chris voss you can also go to facebook.com forward slash the chris voss show and there's four or five groups over there for our books you can also go to linkedin as well and also instagram at chris faust and the chris

faust show and we'll be broadcasting live taking your questions on the new clubhouse app so you get to hear andrew live and ask him questions just send them to my instagram if you are listening in currently today we have and Mayne on the show. His new book, as I mentioned before, Black Coral, a thriller. He is an Edgar-nominated author, Thriller Award finalist, star of Shark Week, and A&E's televisions don't trust Andrew Mayne. He is an author of more than a dozen thrillers, works of science fiction, and books on writing. His novel, The Naturalist, was an Amazon Charts bestseller and spent weeks as the number one book on Amazon. His new underwater investigation series, published by Thomas & Mercer,

includes The Girl Beneath the Sea and Black Coral, and features a police diver in South Florida. Ooh, sounds like a thriller. Andrew, welcome to the show. How are you, sir? I'm doing great, Chris. Thank you for having me. Awesome sauce. It's wonderful to have you on. And man, you've written a whole lot of books. You've been on TV for a lot of different things. You're a magician. You're like, is there anything you don't do, Andrew? I don't have any real skill like everything i do whether it's magic or writing it's like kind of bs it's like fake it kind of stuff

so that's the thing like real talent don't have it but if it's like hey let me let me improvise and make something up there i'm good i have a weird feeling people would argue that you have some talent there's some good talent oh stop stop uh me hold up the book, although there'll be a thing in the queue here. Looks like a foil. That looks awesome. Yeah, it's got that foil thing. This is the special press edition, I think, that they've sent out. You've published this book, Black Coral, and it's a thriller.

Give us your plugs, where people can find you on the interwebs, get to know you much better. So my books, Amazon's the easiest place to find it. To find me, main.com that's m-a-y-n-e i'm very active on twitter at andrew main and i love to talk about writing and creativity of people so uh fairly i mean if i don't respond it's because i'm like in the middle of a book deadline but other than that i love just talking about creativity there you go go. So your newest book, Black Coral, has come out. What motivated you to want to write another book? I love interesting characters.

I love talking and talk. I love stories about people who have different ways of looking at the world. And Black Coral is the second book in this series, but it's standalone. You can just jump in there. And it's about a woman named Sloane McPherson, who's a police diver in South Florida. And police divers are a very interesting breed. These are people that you send into water to go recover things, guns, drugs, people, whatever. And in South Florida, some of these waterways are kind of sketchy and you never know what you're going to find in there or in canals or lakes, other vehicles, other things there. And Sloan, we first see her in the book before,

The Girl Beneath the Sea, where she's studying underwater archaeology as well as working part time as a police recovery diver. And she gets pulled into a bigger case and realizes she has a passion for law enforcement. In this book, we see her developing her skills as a detective and she gets presented with a cold case, which is actually based on a real cold case in South Florida, where four teenagers went missing after going to a rock concert, never to be seen again, and presumed to have run away. Years later, they pulled a van from a canal and found their bodies inside of there and so i took that premise and decided to take it down a different pathway and where people thought i was an accident she suspects maybe something else was there and it ends up being a long-time serial killer operating in the south florida area so there could be foul play yeah definitely foul play by the way it's a very short book it's just a transportation brewer investigation yep we need

to put guardrails in all right done done there you go the end you just what was that movie get shorty you just put it like a period at the end and say yeah yeah there you go i always love that line from get shorty what made you want to write a female in this series i just like to write interesting people and whatever's going to work best sort of fits. And I think that when, when you talk to women in law enforcement, it's very interesting because, you know, law enforcement is still very male dominated and it has its own issues with that. And writing a female character, you add in a new layer of complication because she's got to navigate through that. And that was sort of a fun sort of interesting thing to sort of add into like,

how can I make my character's life even more difficult? Oh, let's put them into an environment where it's not going to be as readily acceptable. She's going to have to deal with these sort of challenges. Yeah. I mean, diving and finding stuff and then you got, you got sharks and everything too. Was, was, was your experience of being on shark week as a host? Was that, did that play into wanting to go into this sort of environment well so it's funny is that i wrote the first book girl beneath the sea and that rekindled my interest in scuba diving in the ocean and i had been talking to somebody about this idea i had about trying to fool a great white shark because of my backgrounds in magic i did

magic for years and created magic for people like pen and Teller, et cetera. And I had this love of just how the brain works. I thought what would be really cool to fool would be like a great white shark because they have an incredible number of senses. They're actually very smart. They've been around here longer than we have. And so I finished that book and I just getting back into diving. And I mentioned, yeah, I think I have this idea for how I could fool a great white shark. And it's a week later, I'm on the phone to the head of Shark Week explaining how I'm willing to go underwater in South Australia and be surrounded by great white sharks in the Isle of Jaws to test out my theory, which I did. So careful what you say, kids. I think it would be cool to do this. And then the next thing you know, that happened,

which was an amazing experience by itself. So basically'm like they fed you to the sharks they're like yeah he wants to go he's clearly expendable we got an idiot on the line all right get him a special so without giving too much away what are some of the other aspects or plot twists or or not really plot twists but you but whatever you want to discuss about the book that are features of her journey in solving this mystery. So I like to incorporate a lot of things about South Florida and Florida in general. Florida's amazing.

Florida's got this deep history. There's a lot of layers to it, and there's a lot of interesting places. You have the Everglades, the Sea of Grass, which is incredible, but you've had people who've been living there for a considerable part of our history. And it's this, on one surface, you look at it, it's just a bunch of grass. But then you realize there's an entire ecosystem. There's other things going on out there.

There's also alligators. I love alligators. When I was a kid growing up in Fort Lauderdale, we would go driving on a little boats. We'd go knee boarding, whatnot. We'd see alligators. The first time you see one, you're like, oh, gee, and then you get used to them. But then we forget how many alligators and how present they are in Florida and the fact that they have their own sort of environments and trains. And I love alligators and alligators are absolutely a big part of our ecosystem and super important. And I wanted to sort of talk about, but also they can be scary. And particularly if you're a police diver and you're by yourself and you're going into some very sketchy places alligators can be a little bit disconcerting yeah that

reminds me of billy madison with uh what's his face the guy played in star wars his head it can go bad for you when it comes down to it. Are there real life underwater investigation units? And how did you do your research for the book? There's not, not that I'm aware of. There are, you'll have units, the FBI will have a, like a dive recovery team will have teams that do this, but police departments will have either sometimes people trained in the department or they will hire contractors to do that. And sometimes when you have big instances, you bring in a lot of people. We had a horrific air crash in the Everglades years ago in Florida. You had a number of dive teams that are working there and varying reading about the conditions

those people worked in. It's just insane. So you have that from time to time. And then obviously in the military and the Navy, you have specially trained people that have to deal with like, how do you protect your harbors? How do you deal with things if you find suspicious things and deal with that? So I kind of pulled from a bit from there to kind of create the idea of this unit. What's funny is I watch those YouTube videos, and I think there's some guys that they're just amateur divers, and they dive just to find stuff.

And every now and then they'll find, like, a gun or a body or, you know you know a suitcase and shit and then the cops are showing up going why are you down here and they're like we're just trying to find stuff we weren't we weren't we were hiding the body but i don't think i want to be that guy and i don't want to know that they'd be swimming with a dead body i don't know well that's uh in the middle of writing this book there was a case came up where literally in the middle like middle like halfway through here and somebody was on google photos looking through photos of south florida and they noticed a suspicious rectangle in a lake in the middle of this community and like it looks like a car make some calls next thing please show up there's a car and there

was a dude in it no longer a living who was like some elderly dude in a storm or something who had driven in there and been missing nobody knew what happened to him they kind of florida's like maybe he drove in a canal but he was in the people's backyard just right out there was like maybe 10 feet out and who knows what else is out there yeah Yeah. It wasn't that like he'd been there since the 90s or something, I think. Maybe. Yeah. It was a long time. And he looked at Google Maps.

It's right there. Yeah. Note to self, move those bodies that I put in South Florida. All right. Yeah. So with your female character, did you model her after anyone in real life? Yeah. I have some friends.

Like I always kind of borrow examples of people. In Florida, there's a type of woman that we get in Florida that's pretty amazing because they're comfortable going out fishing, filleting a fish, scuba diving, whatever, then putting on a nice dress and going out that are very outdoorsy, but also elegant. And I wanted to sort of capture that sort of side of things because I think that's attractive. And I wanted to sort of capture that sort of side of things. I think that's attractive. There's something about people who have a lot of dimension are interesting. And so I have friends that are like that and didn't tell them,

oh, by the way, I'm stealing you to use you in a book. So is it a compilation of people then? A couple, yeah, a couple of people that have a sense of humor and whatnot. It's just the easiest to write that way. It's just, I'm going to take you and you, I'm going to merge you together. Anytime I see a woman who fishes, catches a fish and cleans it, I'm just like, whoa. My girlfriend loves fishing. Serious.

Loves fishing. That's awesome. That's awesome. I grew up around it all the time. My dad's a super avid fisherman. So to me, it's kind of, yeah, whatever. But she loves it. That's awesome.

That's awesome. Because usually it's, oh oh they're wearing me the hook and whatever but it's great that they don't like that you're a professional illusionist how does creating and performing illusions influence your storytelling and writing in your books i think a good and i i learned a lot by kind of observing and so when i was a kid i was a fan of Penn and Teller and David Copperfield. And years later, I got to work with both of them and understand sort of like, or try to understand their approach towards storytelling. A really good magic effect is there is a conflict that gets resolved through magic. And then the resolution should feel obvious after the fact. Not obvious how it was done, but obvious that this makes the most sense that this is the perfect solution to that. And that's the same with storytelling. If you read a really good book and you get to the ending, a satisfying ending is something that fits. You may not have known the shape of what was going to fit there, but a good ending fits in there. And that's been sort of thing I've tried to wrestle with a long time is

like adapting. How do you do one and do the other but it wasn't easy for me I I started writing 10 years ago like I didn't I never wrote a novel prior to 10 years ago I couldn't write more than 20,000 words and then I had to sort of rethink what I thought about storytelling and what my goals were then once I did that things sort of clicked there you go I've restarted a room here on clubhouse and those of you who joined the room, we're talking with Andrew Main. He is the Edgar nominated author, Thriller Award finalist, star of Shark Week and Annie's Don't Trust Andrew Main. If you guys do have questions, send them to me on Instagram in writing and we'll probably answer them here as we go through the show and everything else. Let's see. What other challenges did you face writing a police procedural series that focused on crimes occurring in the water? So even though I'm a diver and even though I'm, I'm, I'm trained to like rebreather and all these things, it's easy in the moment to just sort of gloss over a detail. Like I'll talk about oxygen tanks and their air tanks. And then you'll get people who are like,

I'll point out to you. And it's like, all right, like let me refer you to my work where I'm like a hundred feet underwater breathing and you get some, and it's fine. And it means people are paying attention, but you gotta pay attention to details. And sometimes the thing,

but you just sort of gloss by and you have to go back through it. Like I wrote a thriller set in space once and I'm going back through a chapter, checking it. And I have a person drifting into a space, into a capsule in the space station. And I wrote, he sits down and I'm like, don't sit down. And I'm like, I know this, but I, when I wrote it, it was just, I'm trying to get to this person there. And I went back and fixed it and got rid of, try to get every detail I could. And later on, I got like, you know, a nice letter from an astronaut who said it was very realistic.

And when you write a book like this, trying to get those details right. And even, even there are things, but when you're writing it, you're trying to get to the next thing you forget. So that's critical. There you go. There you go. Now you've, you do magic and you've got a devoted and massive following on social media who call themselves the maniacs is that correct yeah i mean that was when i i used to write and publish books for magicians and do how-to stuff so i had a lot of fans that were like equally disturbed individuals like myself who liked that and so that started because one day i got an email from a kid like oh i'm a maniac and i'm like oh that's that a thing and then became a thing for that's pretty awesome i mean it's a great it's a great choice of words based upon your name i mean beats uh vossiaks that sounds cool that's

unsophisticated i'd buy that vodka that's like that's like some top shelf stuff by the way i don't know the way i used to drink it's probably bottom shelf so what are some other aspects of the book that people should know we're talking about black coral for those who are joining us i like to i have to when you write a thriller novel and not a horror novel you have to sort of kind of walk a delicate balance but i think that i kind of got into i've had the reactions from some people early on have been there's some stuff that was terrifying to them which i feel sorry not cool and i have another novel coming out where i had my my publishers like we need to tone some of this down because we're gonna get we're gonna get angry and it's not i'm like let's

if i was like in horror, this would be cool. And here, but it's, these are, these are ladies who like to knit. So you have to find that balance, but I'd say there's some, I like to write really cool thriller and create these situations where you're like, oh geez. Cause I think like what terrifies me and I have a habit though. Like sharks terrify me. Sharks terrify me. I'm scared of like great whites, whatever I watch, I'd week i'm never gonna go in the water again and then a week later i'd be in

the middle of a night dive surrounded by who knows what and then years later literally on shark week and it's how does this happen as well my curiosity my stubbornness well it's a great way to learn too as well is there a protagonist in the book Is there an evil genius or somebody who's after? Or is it mostly about solving the crime? Well, there's there is probably an antagonist in there, not not necessarily a genius level person, you know, but somebody who has been clever and knows how to sort of do what they've been doing for a long time. And one of the things that happens in and I write, I have a series called The Naturalist where I have a character who's a computational biologist who hunts serial killers. And his adversaries tend to be kind of intelligent, very capable people.

And these books, you kind of look at like for the Sloan McPherson books, I look more towards a lot of real cases and people who are, how do you get people who stay under the radar for so long? And part of it, like, where does the anonymity come from? And you had cases like the Grim Seeper in Los Angeles. This was a guy who was an extremely prolific serial killer who in the middle of, you know, everything else going on in the world, nobody was paying attention to because his victims were people who were kind of, we lost through the margins, women who had to work the street, people, drug addiction problems, people that we casually dismissed and and it's you know i deal with that in one of my other books too because and that's what it's interesting to me is like there are people like that there are predators out there like that that you're not even aware of it because they just don't fit the

pattern that we kind of think from tv and film note to self don't fill any patterns. Well, that's like the, you know, difference between like, you have a, like a spreek frenzy killer person who just in the, you know, in the moment kills versus somebody who's more calculated and you can take like Ted Bundy was more of a frenzy, but he was smart. And he would just knew to get, get up and move. He tried not to stay in the same place. You get some people more calculated and they just operate in one area and they know, well, if I put the bodies over here, man, nobody will know.

So this is the second book in the series. Do you see further books in the series? Is there more planned or anything cooking? Right in the third one right now, right in the third one right now. So you've got to read this one, get ahold of it, read it quick. So you can see, you can find out what's coming next now i you may have mentioned this at the beginning of the show but are this uh the books made where if you haven't read the first one you can jump right into the second one you can totally jump in any point like i i'd always try to make my

books standalone i'll give you a little bit of a backfill on what you need to know to get into it and then people generally i have people tell me i read this one and I jumped into that one. I loved it. It was like reading a prequel. And I try to make each one steal, you know, and it's, I have a book coming out the end of this year called Mastermind, which is I'm taking two different characters, two characters from two different series and bringing them together. And I know some people read one series, some people read the other series, and then I'm starting this new series of the two together. And so that's fun to try to figure out, like, how do I make this work without assuming I can't do a

Marvel Comics previously in issue 82? There you go. So are you going to continue doing work with Shark Week? I don't know. I mean, if there's something else clever that I can come up with, perhaps. I mean, my last conversation was, the discovery was, they asked me like, how do you feel about crocodiles? I'm like, in theory, great. In me and crocodiles, not so much. I mean, that was, so I was, yeah, we'll see. Yeah, I never could i i always loved who was the australian guy who was always like steve irwin and he was always so fun and so

great and and then tragedy happened and i see his family they're they're doing their own things in fact i saw somewhere scrolling through a tiktok or something. I saw one where a snake is about killing though. I'm like, Oh my God. Wow. This isn't, this isn't, maybe you guys should just go into accounting after this.

Maybe that would be good for you guys, but it's pretty cool. Anything more you want to touch on the book and give potential readers a chance to want to grab that thing. Yeah. I think if you want a fun, interesting thriller and a cool character, she's funny. She's very, an entertaining person. My books, people tend to sort of just go read through them pretty fast. Cause I try to make these tight sort of thrillers

and it's an audio, audio phone too. It's audible too. So it's available in kind of multiple formats and, you know, give it a shot. If you like it, if you like it, here's the thing I'll tell you. If you like it, good news. You'll probably like most everything else i've written and i've got several series and several characters out there and people kind of discover the sort of universe of characters and enjoy it so between my theo craig my jessica blackwood books and now this there's a lot of a lot of books out there that are fun reads your story that i'd heard in research on you was pretty extraordinary as to how you started book writing. Do you want to give us the background on that?

I mean, I don't know which version. It was the one where you self-published on Amazon. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, yeah, I thought about becoming a writer forever. I mean, everybody has the potential to write. And I had been in the middle of, I'd been doing TV pilots that had never made it to air. I did a pilot for MTV.

It was a fun show. Never made it to series. I did a show for like Cartoon Network. Never made, I'd been spent several years having done these TV pilots, nothing to show. And people like, and all of them were like secret. And what have you been up to? I'm like, nothing for the last several years.

And I'd been on sets and shooting this cool stuff. and because I never I never I didn't like to talk about stuff that never aired and I was thinking I was had was it South by Southwest and I went to go see some friends do a show there and I was sitting in the airport on my way back and I'm like I wish I had something to show people I wish that there was something to show and I thought writing came up because I was reading the New York Times article at the time about the success of the Kindle and the platform that Amazon had called Kindle Digital Publishing, which was this way in which anybody could write an ebook, publish it on their platform and have an audience.

I said, this is really cool. I don't need to go to a publisher. I just write a book, make proof, read it, hopefully get a nice cover and put it out there. And if people like my book, then I just write more books. And it's a great way to see if I want to be a writer. I don't like, I think gatekeepers can perform a very valuable function. But the problem with gatekeeping is that they are gatekeeping a gate. And sometimes things should go through there. Sometimes things don't. The story is about Harry Potter and the sorcerer stone of philosopher stone. Reportedly that was rejected 40 times, 40 times. There are 40 people who probably still have jobs in the publishing industry who said no to the most successful publishing children's franchise in history. Now to their, you know to their

point that would be like some publishers that would never been the success it would have been and there's a fit to a publisher but i'm still like 40 publishers 40 people's like nah and like we're gonna do something about a mouse that likes to eat mayonnaise and so nobody knows anything i mean i think you can know stuff, but I would say that many people who drive stuff, a lot of things that I see this in Hollywood where I work in entertainment, I see this in a lot of sides of stuff as often people like they, they look at their successes and go, Oh, I must know something's wrong with it. Forget they got 10 times up at bat. And so I said this to myself, like, why don't I write? So I self-published first a novella and the reaction was good. People liked it. So then I sat down in 10 days, I wrote a novel and had some,

you know, crowdsourced some people to help me edit this thing. It was called Public Enemy Zero. And I put that out there and that just started climbing the charts. It started doing extremely well. And then that led me to get my first movie deal, my first agent and publishers started being interested in me. But it wasn't until a year later, I wrote another book called Angel Killer, that that exploded that put me on the top 10 best selling authors on Amazon to indie authors. And just that was my early momentum all came through self publishing. Now I work with Thomson Mercer, which is owned by Amazon by amazon publishing and that's been a wonderful experience that's awesome so you stuck with it now we just have to build you a harry potter style theme park for your characters and i and i can see i live in i live in birmingham go to my block i can actually see hogwarts from right it's not crazy man so it's such a great story too i i i'm lucky enough i don't know if it's luck is the right word for it but one of my first business my first big business that we turned in we we submitted you had to submit it back in those days to an authoritarian authoritarian what the fuck authority for tariffs

and stuff and so they they they took a look at our thing and they wrote me this letter that was just really cynical and this is the worst application we've ever seen for a business. There's no way this business one will work. We're just really a rough letter. And so I went in and sat down with them and explained what I was doing and building a company of sweat equity. And we built a multi-million dollar company that lasted for nearly 15 years. Yeah. That's just it. It's that people, sometimes people have to say, like a publisher, if you're a publisher,

the challenge you have is you get 500 people who have books and you only have 10 slots. You only have so much opportunity. If you're a person doing bank loans or doing other stuff like this, we try to look for the thing that fits the pattern

we're familiar with. Even if it's an imperfect pattern, even if that pattern doesn't work, we're like, well, it works well enough. But we don't spend enough time being skeptical or trying to do a counterpoint or contrarian thinking to figure out this is really the right approach the and what's cool is i have i have a frame to keep that thing everywhere so there you go like fred smith and fedex yeah yeah yeah that's stories the and hollywood does thing, too. Like you see, usually the movies that win the Oscars, the Academy Awards,

or these kind of independent filmmakers or people that are kind of outside the fringes. Meanwhile, everyone at any production studio is like, we should do Iron Eagle 20. We really should because Iron Eagle 20 needs to come out. Man, if Lou Gossett Jr. is available, I say yes. Any movie with him in it there you go so do you see i'm sorry i was gonna ask you do you see any characters playing this in hollywood any potential for i mean there's potential for it going i think you've had other movies optioned or or sent to hollywood haven't you yeah i mean i don't yeah the it's

dangerous to sort of say oh i see so-and-so because literally I had somebody come to me who was attached to something. Oh, we see so-and-so for this. And so then you don't want to be out there. I like this person. Have that actress find out that you're like, I don't think he wants me for it. And so this town, I mean, I remember once, like I'm not a negative person. And like on Twitter, like I only think I like criticize like one movie like ever. And then one

day i'm in a meeting with that person who directed that and oh huh i gotta rethink my strategy on you know what i say about things i remember one time we had uh you still in a model mentality you see in utah and we had uh i think it was kirk douglas kirk douglas's son sean douglas had come up and he'd been in Iron Eagle four or five and he used to do standup, just bashing the directors and stuff. And I'm like, I don't think that's going to help you in Hollywood at all. Yeah. I had a, I had a thing. Like I did a series and I get, it did one season and people like, Oh, those executives, they don't know what they're doing. I'm like, how do you know they didn't know what they're doing i'm like how do you know they didn't know what they're doing when they gave me the series it works both ways i can't say they were genius

when it worked my way and they were dumb when it didn't like i mean so there you go just for the this just in folks chris voss will not be in iron eagle 20 based upon criticism of the iron eagle series there you go what's your future for your, in your magician, illusionist stuff that you're going to be doing? I don't know. I've been really involved in artificial intelligence lately. That's, I work with a company called OpenAI, which develops GPT-3, this really incredible language model. So I've been spending a lot of time doing that and working in exploring the capabilities of that because it's a very interesting area. So kind of between that and the writing, it's not a lot of time left over who's the ceo of open ai

i think sam altman yeah i think you sam we've had him on the show from ces i think so that name is really familiar i'm visual so i'd have to go look it up but yeah we go to ces we do shows we do live interviews at the boost there and stuff like that. And I swear to God, we've had that on the Chris Voss show. So do the maniacs love your books then? Are they big readers of the books or do they stick with just your magic work and stuff? You get carryover. It's interesting to see that sometimes people just like what you do and you can see them. They'll go from a TV show to a book to something else.

And then you find that you meet new people along the way. And I literally sent out an email this morning about, Hey, I got a new book out. And somebody who had been performing one of the tricks I created had said, Hey, I have a question about this trick, by the way. And it's something like, you know, like 10 years ago. And it's funny. And I'm like, Oh yeah, here. And so it's, you kind of just build people. And I'm sure you've seen the same thing. It's like, you have an audience of people that know you over, over the evolution as we sort of from the years of the different things you've done. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of interesting how it works out. So as we go out on your new book here, Andrew, anything you want to plug or anything

you want to throw at us in the last part of the, of the interview here? If you want to check out, like we said, my website's andrewmayne.com m-a-y-n-e i have an email uh newsletter i just signed up for substack you can do that so uh i talk you know very infrequently so don't worry and then i'm on twitter at andrew main i'm pretty active on twitter if you have questions want to talk about creativity or whatever just hit me at a reply me and i'd love to talk to you there you go guys check out the new book by andrew main black coral a thriller you can take an order from from your local booksellers or you can go to amazon or wherever your good books are sold support your local bookseller too if you can

that's always a good thing to do thanks andrew for being on our show with us today thank you for spending some time sir thank you and in, what you should do is help Andrew. He's a magician. You should help his books disappear off the shelf, if you will. Order one up today. Go to YouTube.com to see the video version of this interview at YouTube.com, 4chesschrisfoz.

Go to Goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoz. Go to Facebook.com, 4chess3chrisfozshow, LinkedIn as well, and Instagram. And of course, you can follow us on Clubhouse. Thanks, my audience, for to Facebook.com, 4chase3ChrisFossShow, LinkedIn as well, and Instagram. And of course, you can follow us on Clubhouse. Thanks, my audience, for tuning in. Wear your masks, stay safe, be good to each other, and we'll see you guys next time.