The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Dead Drop (A Handler Thriller) by M.P. Woodward

Episode Date: May 30, 2023

Dead Drop (A Handler Thriller) by M.P. Woodward https://amzn.to/43vc2ph International nuclear negotiations turns allies into enemies in this electrifying thriller from the author of The Handler. Nuclear negotiations between the United States and Iran have reached a crisis point. The new American administration is determined to move ahead, but there are several stumbling blocks, not the least of which is Lieutenant Colonel Kasem Khalidi, the Iranian intelligence officer the CIA has hidden away in one of its safe houses. As always, John and Meredith Dale are caught in the middle. Mossad—the Israeli intelligence agency—wants Meredith's help to find the lead Iranian rocket scientist; while John is in a desperate race to keep Kasem one step ahead of an Iranian hit squad. They are pawns in an international chess game, and any player knows you cannot capture the king without sacrificing some pawns.

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. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. 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. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com.

Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you coming to the show. You guys are the most valuable, juicy audience in the world. I don't know what that means. If you're a juicy audience, I don't know. I just made it up because that's what we do on the Ramble. I just make stuff up every time there's a different Ramble. There's people who actually tune in just to listen to the Ramble.

Can you believe that? Because they're just like, I want to see what Chris just makes up today. So you guys are now known as the juicy audience i think uh what is the bieber as the bieber answers i don't know what his bullshit is i don't care uh there's uh somebody else uh i i forget uh that one other gal who was in that one movie and uh from the 70s the chris christopherson was in but they remade it anyway brad somebody was in it too anyway she's got like some things that she calls her people and i don't really care i'm just done with this whole rap that i just started and i can't finish because i got no references i can

pull but that's half the joke people sometimes you try and tell a joke you can't pull the reference and it dies and hopefully that kills it makes you laugh but if it doesn't well then that's on you man because i'm gonna laugh at it and i'm the only one laughing anyway guys uh as always you guys the most amazing audience as well refer to share your family friends and relatives go to youtube.com for just christmas linkedin.com for just christmas goodreads.com for just christmas and uh we're trying to be cool on tiktok so check that out as well. And also, there are 1,400-plus episodes of Chris Voss Show now, 14 years, two to three new ones a day. Simon Schuster is like auto-booking the show and killing me on the schedule. If you are not listening to these episodes, I will die and haunt you

for the rest of your life, so don't let that happen. Anyway, we love you guys. We have an amazing returning guest on the show. We always love our returning guests because they're so brilliant. We have M.P. Woodward on the show we always love our returning guests because they're so brilliant uh we have m p woodward on the show today he's the author of his newest book in a series to come out uh may 23rd 2023 you see i like you like you know that 23 23 falls into there i just kind of noticed that was funny anyway his new book dead drop which is part of his handler theory or handler theory zander three a handler thriller series that he has uh he was uh joining us on his prior book that had come out i think

what was that last year when did that come out the handler yeah the handle was exactly a year ago yeah the time flies when you're having fun so this is his second part of that series of his uh handler thriller series uh he is joining us today as you can hear in the background he's already uh piping up in the background and getting on the show but we're going to make him hold for one second we'll read his bio because that's the juice or no he's the juice i know there's a lot of juicing going on the show juicy juicy i don't know that's the callback joke i think for the show mp woodward is a veteran of both u.s intelligent ops and the entertainment industry as a naval intelligence officer with the u.s indo-pacific command he scripted scenario moves and counter moves for u.s war game exercises in the middle east in multiple deployments to the Persian Gulf and Far East, he worked alongside

U.S. Special Forces, CIA, and NSA, and he later transitioned to the private sector as an executive in the media streaming industry. Most recently, he ran international partner distribution for Amazon Prime and Prime Video. Welcome to the show, Mr. Woodward. How are you? Hey, Chris. It's great to be back. Thank you. It's wonderful to have you back. An honor as well. Give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs. Yeah, you bet. That's mpwoodward.com.

There you go. And it's Mike, right? Yeah, we'll go by Mike. Yeah. We'll go by Mike. But Google him on the MP Woodward. So, Mike, what motivates you? I want to write this latest book.

Well, a couple things. First off, you know, I'm really enjoying the thriller genre. We got a tremendous response from the handler. People told me over and over again they wanted to know what happened next. So I wrote a story where I can tell everybody what happens next. But the subject matter was something else that caught my attention. This book is about what would happen when Iran actually does get to what the intelligence community calls breakout, which is enriching uranium U-235 to 90% or better, and how both the U.s and israel would respond to that there you go and israel

does not like that sort of stuff from my understanding of weather activities yeah they're not too fond of it and what we uh what we explore in the book is um the the characterization is through the side and a lot of details on the side on the the Iranian side, the real threat becomes, well, while on the one hand, there might be a diplomatic effort to contain a nuclear Iran, there's still a country with lots and lots of terrorist resources, mainly through Hezbollah, which is kind of a country within a country in Lebanon. So this book explores the idea that while there might be diplomatic initiatives for everybody to play nice, Iran could still get a nuclear warhead through to Hezbollah, which is parked right on the northern border of Israel and therefore an existential threat.

Definitely. And I mean, these are real things that are going on in our world, too. I was reading recently that Iran was working on some developing nuclear material under a mountain so that the U.S. would have a harder time dropping one of those bombs that go through bunkers. Well, that's just it. They are doing that. They have been doing that. The nuclear deal that Presidentama signed with them in 2015 was undone in 2018 and all along uh iran has has more or less um thwarted inspections by the iaea

the international atomic energy association and all the evidence suggests that they are making tremendous uh strides on enriching uranium. And, yeah, they I don't think that this is something certainly that Israel would stand by and let happen. One time I met when I was in the service, I met an Israeli fighter pilot and I asked him, you know, how how far would would Israel go to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon? And he said, 2,000 nautical miles. So it gives you kind of an idea of their mindset and how hard they would work to either prevent this from happening or do something once it does happen. Yeah, they've assassinated scientists, nuclear scientists and different things.

So tell us about the character. Is this a playthrough from the character of your previous books? And tell us more about the protagonists that you developed in the book. Yeah, sure. So the protagonists, it's really two protagonists that work hand-in-hand with each other, though not very well because they're a divorced couple. So the woman, whose name is Meredith, is reasonably senior in the CIA,

and she works in the, which is a real-world thing, the Counter-Proliferation Center, which is the group within the CIA that works day and night to do everything they can to thwart this, to thwart adversarial company or countries from getting nuclear weapons. Her ex-husband is someone who left the CIA some time ago, but has a number of relationships that are important. Now it's true in this one as um the u.s has a uh a an asset a defected iranian kud's officer under its control but he he really will only deal with the guy that doesn't want to deal

with him uh meredith's ex-husband but together they have to solve a mystery mystery as to whether uh as to whether iran is smuggling a weapon to Hezbollah or not. Meanwhile, the Israelis are convinced that they are. The Americans on a political level are working on a diplomatic deal. So they kind of don't want to hear that the Iranians are doing something bad. This ends up pitting the Mossad against the CIA. So much of the book pivots around that adversarial relationship. Yeah.

The billing on it says they are pawns in an international chess game. And any player knows you cannot capture the king without sacrificing some pawns. Tell us a little bit about that or tease out what you can on it. I know we can't get away with it. Yeah, sure. We're basically talking about three countries, the.s israel and iran and all three have their interests and agenda um in the book they're dramatized through through john and meredith on the american side uh through the iranian coups officer as well as the counterintelligence people

who are who are you are looking to find him. And especially Mossad, where we have the leader of the operations group in Mossad that's called Cesaria and his protege, who is who is an assassin. And Mossad thinks that the Americans are holding back information from from them because they think that, you know, we do have this Quds officer. We don't admit that we have this Quds officer because in so doing, that would screw up the diplomatic deal. So the Israelis think that the Americans are being soft and political. They really want to get at this Quds officer because he can tell them everything.

And so the Israelis end up spying on the americans ah yeah that's been going on you know back and forth is everyone's spying on spy versus spies they used to say in my magazine i still love that comment well it has in in israel is a great ally of of the united states of course and the most significant ally we have in the in the middle east but but countries um at the end of the day are all about their own interests and their survival no matter how tight that relationship and back in the 70s um we arrest the fbi arrested an israeli spy named um jonathan poll, who was a naval intelligence guy and was passing along secrets to Israel. Back in the early 70s, there was even armed conflict between Israel and the U.S. Most people have forgotten about this, but we had an intelligence ship called the Liberty

in the eastern Mediterranean. Theis didn't like that we were snooping on them and actually bombed them so um countries that we think of as being natural allies don't always play nice with each other and i wanted to explore that idea that if a country like israel was facing an existential threat and had the capabilities that they do with with massad that they would use them and they would get to the answer they needed and take the capabilities that they do with Mossad, that they would use them, and they would get to the answer they needed and take the actions they needed to take, regardless of what the American political position was.

Most definitely. It's interesting how that whole relationship, I mean, the whole Middle East thing is such a crazy thing. We've had some authors on that talked about the history of all the different presidents who, going back to Carter and stuff and probably Nixon. But going back to, I think about Carter when, you know, every administration would come in and be like, we will be the administration to solve this problem. And the characters you develop in the book now, you've got a second book in the series.

What do you think most of the readers that read your books find appealing about those characters and what goes into them um what i hear uh and this this is certain certainly something that i that i try to do but um that people describe these as character-driven novels um and you you know while i try to have a big juicy, you use the word juicy, geopolitical setting, that's really the context for characterizations. And one of the things that I set out to do is to not treat intelligence agencies as big, monolithic, secret organizations and they're magical and can do anything but really to portray this as these are ordinary people doing extraordinary things and that means getting in the head of the Americans of the Israelis of the Iranians that that means that they have families and family concerns and the same sort of mundane challenges going on in their lives that the rest of us have too. They just happen to have a different job with much higher stakes. So I try to make these people as

real as possible and, and, and fill them up with, with emotion. And hopefully that makes for a much more satisfying read. Kind of humanizes it maybe in a way. Does that sound good to you? Completely. And, you know, I probably need tons and tons of therapy by the time I get done with these books because to me, at the end, they always seem so utterly real. These are people that have become real to me.

And if I ever get stuck on a plot point, all I do is put the people in the room, and they're so real to me that I sort of know how they're going to react, if that makes any sense. But that's a lot of, at least my psychology, is I'm writing these. Well, this sounds great for a juicy audience. I think what I'm going to do is every show, I'm just going to get me a verb,

and I'm going to start calling my audience that for the show. It's not a bad idea. I think juicy might be an adjective, but you could juice things. There's a verb. See, I didn't know it was an adjective because I flunked second grade. Yes.

So there you go. You know, your experience is quite vast in working with the intelligence agency in the military. Uh, tell us a little bit how that plays out. You know, we've, we had a lot of great authors on the show, uh, and novelists lately that, you know, they experienced, you know, they worked in military for 30 years. We're trying to get James Comey, the ex FBI director on the show for his new book. And it's kind of interesting how everyone who's worked in the intelligence business and the military

has the ability to create these juicy stories of suspense. Yeah, juicing it up. In my case, I am fortunate that as an intelligence officer in the Navy, I got to see the way the 17 agencies within the U.S. come together to basically inform warfighters. And my job, at least for a period with the Pacific Command, was to write war gaming scenarios uh for everything from you know natural disasters to um full-on full-on war and in in so doing you're you're looking to create all kinds of um realism which means working with all these other agencies to really filter out information to create create challenges, etc.

That ended up being a pretty good training ground for writing books because it makes you think about a whole bunch of different things that are happening simultaneously. big professional agencies and organizations like the U.S. military have to assess and act and react oftentimes with only partial information. So that's what I'm always trying to portray in my books because that's what I saw happening in the real world. And I think it makes the books even more richer, or if we can abuse the word juicy, because like I said, everybody we have on that's a popular selling novelist like yourself, they all have military backgrounds or intelligence backgrounds. And so they're able to pull from this vast database that they had over the years serving. And they've been able to enjoy it.

But I think it makes for better book reading. Because if I wrote a book, it would be about you know the ci or fbi it would be like dumb because it'd be like well i you know that when uh when i've always been a fan of this genre you know grew up with tom clancy etc um what one of the things that that made those books really satisfying i think and the reason they took off is because it was one of the first times we saw a lot of authenticity being poured into this genre. So before I feel like it was spy genres, good stuff, like, you know, John LeCray, guys like that.

But when Clancy came along, it was really the first time he took that stuff going on with the Cold War, but backed it up with technology descriptions and operational descriptions that we really hadn't seen before you know people had never been inside a submarine they didn't know what it was like and all of a sudden you get a hump red October and it's like oh yeah I I get it and that's both a spy story as well as a military story so that that informed a lot of my thinking and i i think like you if i pick up a book and don't see authenticity you detect it pretty fast and it blows everything up suspension of disbelief is gone right you kind of don't trust it like you lose the ability in my

in my opinion to be entertained now there's times when you're willing to let that go if you go to the you go to a big marvel movie you know what you're in for right and you're gonna like let all kinds of crazy things happen that have nothing to do with the real world but i think people that buy books like this they're they're looking for authenticity and i try really hard to provide that yeah i plugged the tom clancy books we uh just had one of the other authors on and don bentley is returning the show for the new job. I know Don very well. I was with him in Austin two nights ago, and he and I are going to be together in Scottsdale at the Poison Pen on June 13th at 7 p.m., if anybody would like to go.

There you go. Hi, Voxers. Voss here with a little station break. Hope you're enjoying the show so far. We'll resume here in a second. I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website. You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements,

if you'd like to hire me, training courses that we offer, and coaching for leadership, management, entrepreneurism, podcasting, corporate stuff. With over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as a CEO, and be sure to check out chrisfossleadershipinstitute.com. Now back to the show. Now, he must be following you around because in two days he's on. So there you go. Yeah, that's Don. He's always chasing me down.

He's always following you. I think this will be his second return to the show. So you got him beat by two days. So there you go. But yeah, I think we've had everybody on the show except for Tom Clancy now. And it's probably not going to work out getting Tom on the show. Yeah, I don't think so unless you're going to seance mode i think that's probably the next podcast we're going to

do the seance mode podcast where we bring people back from the dead reanimate them i think you do that now with ai and shit we probably should do that yes i have an idea i i would see i would see how that goes i'll get sued by like don't know, whoever the inheritance families are. Any tease-outs of the book? Any plot twists? Anything you can tell us? Because it's always, you can't give away too much of the middle and the end of the book, because you've got to buy the book, people.

That's why we're here. But any tease-outs? Any juicy stuff that you want to tease out? I would just say that there's a lot of deception in the novel, and so that things don't see, you know, things aren't necessarily as they seem and that it's the relationships between operatives on the Israeli side and the American side lower down

than at the, than at the high level political side. It's those lower down relationships that really drive the drama and, and, and ultimately lead to the, the shocking plot reveal. There you go. The shocking plot reveal.

That's the teaser boys and girls order up the book. Cause you know, it's going to be there. So what, what's in the future for you? Do you see yourself any, any movies? Are you going to continue on with the series of this character? Yeah, we've had, so I can't, So what's in the future for you? Do you see yourself in any movies?

Are you going to continue on with the series of this character? Yeah, we've had – so I can't announce anything on the film side, but there have been some really, really fun discussions. I'm just now – your listeners probably know, because you've had so many authors on, that there's a significant delay between when you give a you hand your manuscript over to your editor and when it finally comes out you know you're a bit like about like a year and so um i have jim just now finishing up my fourth book so you see yeah so you'll see the third book in this series uh next year and we've ref reframe thing it's really things um it'll be uh

about about china and then and then a fourth book that is a standalone novel uh about about something completely different but in the same genre there you go there you go it's it's interesting to me and i i think what you say about how you know having the intelligence background makes for richer stuff i've always been just intrigued and i and despite you know spy stuff has been huge probably for the longest time i don't know if it started with 007 james bond or before that i'd have to think about movies but you know we've we've always been enticed by the secretive nature and the intelligence to me it's like it's like the chess game of it you know i i remember as a kid first book was 1000 days and reading about how john f kennedy had been deceived by the cia and you know all the intelligence that was going on in the bay of pigs

and then and then how that played into how he handled uh the cuban missile crisis and we stood at the brink of wiping ourselves off the planet. You know, and you read about, you know, so many different moving parts, especially like the CIA on its own, what the FBI does, Hoover. You know, there's so many different plays of parts and how they sometimes have been pivotal or, you know, had moments that maybe sometimes saved the world and maybe sometimes made it worse?

You know, Pinochet, Wayne. You know, your first point about, hey, when did this start? Was it James Bond? I think it kind of did. I think that's actually a pretty accurate observation because he was a World War II guy that had gotten involved with the early stages of British intelligence. Ian Fleming wrote that book book and it took off.

And then, you know, for the next 20, 30 years, really, it was that Cold War chess game. Like John Lecrae's The Spy Who Came In From the Cold very much embodies that, where it's like, you know, hey, by by the end you realize there's been a cross a double cross and a triple cross um all you know so that one one could get on top of the other and i a lot of those even though james bond there were a lot of physical aspects to that for entertainment value a lot of that spy versus spy stuff has been mental, really psychological. And then around what really shook that up, I think, was 9-11. Then the genre changed quite a bit so that in the 2000s and the last decade, the heroes pretty much were picking up a gun and shooting that thing by page five.

It got to be much more visceral and violent. And the big heroes became, you know, Mitch Rapp, who's an assassin, the gray man who's an assassin, etc. In my book, I'm, I'm, I'm hoping to get back a little bit to that to that chess match between nations that is really the foundation of the book but i also recognize that the genre has changed to demand um some action and that's why i created these my protagonists as someone who is a spy master that's really meredith and then someone who's on the ground as as a as a gun wielding tough guy. Because I think people kind of want both. And this is all about providing strong entertainment. Yeah, the spy mastery and the spy mastery works.

I mean, it's interesting, you know, how they develop people and all the stuff that goes into it. It's just, it's crazy. Spy versus spy, the game that we play. Do you have any thoughts on who the next James Bond should be now that we threw uh yeah any thoughts on who the next james bond should be now that we threw bond in there uh yeah i mean um i would i i recently wrote a piece that's out there actually because um well it's funny you ask about it because when i was i left amazon not too long ago

and amazon had acquired mgm and mgm has uhGM has the big reason for that acquisition is because MGM has the rights to James Bond. So now James Bond is an Amazon character. And that happens right as Daniel Craig, that James Bond literally died, right? So it becomes this big, you know, multi-billion dollar challenge as to oh okay what what do we do do we you know yes there's another 007 is his name james bond because i think he just died so it'll be interesting to see and i've heard that you know there's been rumors and rumors um harry styles and i i can't remember all the actors every cavill maybe yeah a lot of um handsome british guys idris elba but i would imagine that they're um racing to get that

announced that are going to make as much pr value out of that as possible i'm sure they always do that i mean don't they usually do that i mean you paid oh yeah they paid 10 billion for mgm um the bond franchise is a big part of that it definitely is i was you know i was more angry that they killed him at the end i kind of like how they kind of i don't and correct me if i'm wrong but i don't think any of their bonds like they died on film they just kind of no i looked into it out right absolutely no i looked into it faded out right absolutely no i looked into it it's literally the first time the man dies and not just like not like in a you know end of the born you know born supremacy is that like where you're not sure what happened like no he not only died they toasted him at the end right oh yeah i mean it becomes yeah i i like i said does that

mean that they're stuck in prequel mode or i don't know i'm not i'm not sure what that's gonna be to me it was an ugly thing due to character you're really beloved i like the whole you know just make him disappear say that you know he retired or you know i don't know he went and took care of the wife and kid there that he picked up at the end uh you know maybe you know he went off into the you go off in the sunset right i mean it's like the western you know you don't see you know the cowboy goes off in the sunset you know you just okay there he goes and that's it's kind of a nice way but i i really think it's a writing look look it was a big bang emotionally right oh yeah they certainly they certainly like lit that up giving him a daughter and i mean god forbid anybody watching this or listening to this

hasn't already seen it because we've spoiled the hell out of it but you know hey i think it's like a year and a half old now um and so like yeah they played it up to the max but it's like okay now now what yeah and it was it was so visceral like i was angry about it i was violently not violently i didn't hurt anybody but i was i was very juiced up about it um and i was not happy because seeing him killed it was just you know it's when you kill a character i think it almost makes it harder to watch the the earlier, which I'm a fan of, is Daniel Craig. Yeah. Because you're like, well, this guy's fucking dead. It's not a bad point.

I guess the bet is that with Bond, it's like I was talking about earlier with the MCU, you're already willing to suspend disbelief, you know, to come in and have some fun with this character because you know what it is and you know what to expect so i suppose that's uh i suppose that's the big bet they made there you go and and you know the the the lifestyle lead to the masculine nature of james bond is sort of getting willing down in the movie i mean the whole the whole family thing and stuff i i was just like what and i know i know yeah i know they are right it's like sean connery's turning over his grave right

what it says you're crying over your daughter come on yeah it was just i mean it was i i suppose it appeals maybe to a broader audience but i mean come on man you know i think one of the biggest things that issues that i have with film nowadays is it plays a little bit too much to the culture and society's sort of views right now and i and i think that really takes away from what the franchise was you know it used to be the biggest audience for films was 12 year old boys who would go to the movie theaters and of course they could afford to that's another thing but uh you know nowadays it's really flipped and it's more emotionalism based and feminine based and you know well i well i appreciate movies that are in that genre i'm like you know i really don't think that she's got the upper body

strength for that that i'm seeing you know i have problems with cgi and stuff too i think this is this is an industry challenge is that um you know, the big blockbusters that we're used to have to have to appeal to this audience that is actually going to go to the theater. Right. And so right now it feels like, man, if it's not a Marvel movie, then they don't make the investment to put know put in the theater they don't make as many movies etc instead it splinters up into these lower budget very um niche oriented uh films that are going to end up on streaming platforms and so that it's it it feels rarer and rarer to find um to find good entertainment that that that does both i mean top gun maver last year, I think that was an example of one. That has a super wide audience, obviously. Look how successful it was.

But that was one where you could see a guy in his 50s with his wife sitting next to his kids and all of them enjoying the crap out of it. And so it would certainly um nice to see more of that with respect to uh to intelligence thrillers i i think there's fewer that feel real to me and more that more and more that are kind of like you know crazy comic booky funny one-liners and entertaining but not necessarily realistic i did see one though over the weekend um called kandahar uh i think it's probably a pretty small film but i saw it in the theater it has um gerard butler in it and man i thought i thought it was cool it was really exactly it was very similar to

my book dead drop it's you know it opens up with the um iranian underground nuclear facility at natanz getting blown up and then the spies who more or less were responsible for it on the run into Afghanistan which borders Iran and all the trouble that that makes so I was super happy to see

a movie like that there you go well if you recommend it I'll go check it out because I love great movies I was looking at that ever I, I've been, ever since COVID's over, I love going to the theater again. And I also love it cause no one goes either. Um, so I have the seats have gotten better. I mean, yeah, there's a new years. There's a new theater that they have by us.

And yeah, we do have one of those beer places. They serve excellent pizza and you can eat the pizza at the they got like a table there between the chairs it's like an old it's called brewvies here in salt lake and i love it um and it was nice when i when i used to drink um but the pizzas they make are fucking out of this world and probably more healthier than eating that butter popcorn but uh uh i'll check that movie out but i'm constantly looking for good movies to see and uh it's so hard to tell did you check out the covenant i did not that's a i don't know if it's good but yeah you're right they make these movies now they're kind of like they're

kind of like uh you know the rolling stones kind of got into that gear where they would do and it was kind of a genre there for a while with albums where they do like one or two good hits on the album and the rest is just filler b-sides right yeah yeah and that's that's what made people get sick of music and devalue it and go i would just would just download off the internet was because you know you listen to led zeppelin one and two like the whole album is like you got to listen the whole album yeah there isn't i don't think there's a track on there where you're like well this one well i mean that's the business model right it used to be you'd go and you'd buy that you'd buy that thing and now you stream and you're paid you know right so it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't it's no longer a package the

way that it used to be i think the let's everyone did that yeah i agree it's like hey this whole thing has like this one sound and you're gonna listen to it and we ordered the songs in a certain way now you go on spotify and yeah you can listen to it by album but most of the time you don't you know it's it's stuff's just served and that's how you discover it yeah well hopefully things will get better with uh with everything i i i hope they don't ruin the braun bond franchise by doing something really stupid with it because, you know, you want, I think every guy idealizes himself and puts himself

in that movie. He gets the beautiful girl. Most all guys love their women. They think that they've won the great woman in their life, their wife or whatever it is. They have that ideal of like I've worked hard and accomplished things and so the whole intelligence thing is so much fun.

Don Bentley, who's going to be on in two days, we were in Austin the other night having a drink after a book event. And we were talking about book covers, right? And so he's doing the Tom Clancy book, I think, that he's coming on to talk to you about. But he said, look, when it comes to covers, every guy wants to visualize himself as the hero, right? And so if you're going to have a person,

so you can see, let's see, my book over here. There you go. You're going to have a person, right? And a guy's going to read it. He wants to look at it and think, I want to be like that guy. Or a woman is going to say, I want to get with that guy. I think Lee Child, who writes the Jack Reacher series, said that he modeled Reacher to be a character that guys would want to be and women would want to be with.

And I think at the end of the day, that's kind of right. You know, even though we probably don't necessarily want to admit it, we want a good story and i think at the end of the day that's kind of right you know even though we probably don't necessarily want to admit it we want a good story and all those kinds of things i think there's some there's a lot of truth in that yeah when i used to be in advertising and uh stuff uh you know the the key thing of when you look at ads when a woman looks at an ad she's like what is that woman wearing and the woman is always the feature the guy is always the accessory in the background and uh they she looks at you know what is that guy what is that woman wearing and she's beautiful so i'm gonna go buy accessories or clothes whatever and the guy looks at it and goes what is that guy

wearing to get that girl and that's basically right yeah we're not too hard to figure out right yeah we're pretty simple creatures so don't you know fix the movies make it so that men want to go back to the what is james bond doing that he's got so much luck with this yeah there was a recent is it thor movie there's a recent thor movie that came out where the whole movie is tension between him and like an ex-superhero girlfriend and i'm like what the fuck is going on we're bringing ex-girlfriends into movies now? What kind of weird stuff is that? We don't need any of that crap. It's a superhero.

It's a superhero. He doesn't want to hang out with an ex-girlfriend. Yeah, I guess you've got to create sexual tension these days. What do we know? Well, it's been wonderful, Mike, to have you on the show again and come back for the show. Anything more you want to tease on the book before we go? No, I just hope – well, I would say that this is a book that you don't have to read

the handler, but it's most people I think who have read this said, oh, I can't wait to go back and read the handler now. So enjoy, enjoy both. There you go. Give us your dot coms, wherever you want people to find you. It's mpwoodward.com. It's mpwoodward.com. And all my social stuff is right there.

And I love to interact with my audience. It's a lot of fun.com and all my social stuff is right there and I love to interact with my audience. It's a lot of fun. There you go, folks. You're going to find it's juicy. Juicy as juicy can get. It's juicy as juicy fruits. Do I get a check for saying juicy fruits? Anyway, folks, it's available wherever fine books are sold.

May 23rd, 2023 if you're watching this 10 years from now, which people do. Dead Drop, a handler thriller. M.P. Woodward. You can order it wherever fine books are sold and look forward to his future works. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys

next time. And that should have us out, Mike.