The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Tom Clancy Flash Point (A Jack Ryan Jr. Novel) by Don Bentley

Episode Date: June 2, 2023

Tom Clancy Flash Point (A Jack Ryan Jr. Novel) by Don Bentley

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 rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. On a monster rollercoaster with your brain. What brains do I have left? Welcome to the show show my family and friends this is chris voss from the chris voss show and i'm your host at least that's what it says here on the card

welcome to the big show we certainly appreciate you guys being here today thanks for coming by uh we have an amazing gentleman on the show he's a returning guest and uh returning guests are always good because i'm not sure why they come back it's like they've already been here and they're like what the fuck was that anyway guys uh we'll be talking with the amazing uh writer for uh his books and the tom clancy series a jack uh ryan jr novels that he puts out uh we've we just had uh another jack ryan author or i'm sorry jack r Ryan. Yeah, Jack Ryan, Tom Clancy author on two days ago. So check out that show as well. I think we've had him on except for Tom Clancy

himself and reasons been known to us, but maybe he knows. But we'll talk to you about that. But in the meantime, as always, we need to plug the show. We need listeners. People are putting out, I mean like Simon Schuster kind of deal with us. They're auto-booking the show now with listeners people are putting out i mean like simon schuster kind of deal with us

they're auto booking the show now with all their people uh that's awesome with penguin random house and they are destroying what uh brain cells i had left but we have the great authors in the show they improve my brain cells so between the madness of two to three shows a day and everything else uh somewhere i'll make it or my head will explode. But that's why you tune in. You're just like, when is he going to hit the wall? We want to see it the moment he hits the wall. So there's two to three shows today, folks, going out. 1,400 shows on the Chris Voss Show, 14 years. We're in a double and triple in size again this year at the pace we're going.

So if you're not listening to all those shows, I want to make you feel guilty. And if you aren't, also for the show and your family, friends, or relatives, YouTube youtube.com for just christmas goodreads.com for just christmas linkedin.com for just christmas we're trying to be cool on tiktok please for love god falls over there we're old and the kids don't like us uh he is the amazing author of the tom clancy series and his own series we'll talk about as well. Don Bentley joins us on the show today. His book, Tom Clancy Flashpoint, a Jack Ryan Jr. novel, just barely came out. Hot off the presses. May 23rd, 23.

See how that works? 23, 23. Don Bentley is the New York Times bestselling author of Forgotten War, Tom Clancy Flashpoint, and Vince, or Vince Flins... I almost said Vince Neal of Motley Crue. It's a long day. Vince Flynn's Mitch Rapp series. And who knows? He may pick up that

autobiography of Motley Crue. Don is a former FBI special agent. I had to make sure I wasn't on the 10 Most Wanted list this morning before he came on. He's a SWAT team member and Army Apache helicopter pilot. Welcome to the show, Don. How are you? You know, I'm doing fantastic. I figured for certain that you would be once bitten and twice shy.

So the fact that I am back here again just proves that someone else canceled in this slot and you reached out to me but I'll take it I will take it Chris there you go it's once bitten twice shy a poison reference great white my friend oh great white wow I'm you know I should know this I I was in high school during all of that you may have to give back your 80s card right now you may just have to put it on the table you know I'm running a little light on sleep, so I'm going to use that as an excuse as an old man. I do for my afternoon nap and I don't know. So there you go. So welcome back to the show. Give us your dot coms wherever you want people to find you on the interweb, sir. Yeah, absolutely. So the easiest place to keep track of everything I'm working on is just my website. It is donbentleybooks.com. So just

B-E-N-T-L-E-Y. You can sign up for my newsletter there. We do giveaways, talk about books, talk about stuff I'm working on. If you are a social media kind of guy or girl, you can find me on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram conveniently all with the same handle, which is at Bentley Don B. So B-E-N-T-L-E-Y. And that's it. There you go. And how many books do you have? So we can get a plug in. People can go just hit the order them all button on Amazon.

All of them. I have all of the books on Amazon. I'm actually Flashpoint is my seventh book and my third book in the Clancy series. My fourth book in my series was forgotten war that i just was on to talk to you about a couple weeks ago and then i have my eighth book uh which is called weapons grade that comes out in september which is also a clancy book there you go and is forgotten war i remember that uh is that is that is now is the zero hour a different thing or is that uh yeah that's the matt drake yeah that's right zero that's your series uh so forgotten war is my series um zero

hour is the clancy series so zero hour uh was book two that i wrote for clancy and flashpoint is book three that i wrote for Clancy. All right. The Annapolis old man is kicking into gear. I see at the top, it says Tom from the bestselling author of Zero Hour. So there you go. I just, well, we clarified that for everybody. So no one makes that thing too. You know, the eyes get bad to bring it to the old age.

I think that's the callback joke for the show. So tell us about Tom Clancy Flashpoint. What motivated you to want to write this book? Yeah, so it's my third book in the Tom Clancy series, and I wanted to write something bigger for this one. And what I mean by that is usually the Jack Ryan Jr. books are kind of smaller in scope, where they just follow kind of the adventures of Jack Ryan Jr. And I've had got a bunch of friends that are still in the military and everybody who's on active duty or in the reserves is focused like a laser on the South China Sea right now. And in fact, we just had there's a news article that came out, I think yesterday about a Chinese fighter that almost collided again with American

surveillance plane. And that happened in the South China Sea. And that actually forms kind of the context or one of the major inflection points in Flashpoint. And it's so it starts in Regensburg, Germany, which is a little town near where I was stationed my last assignment in Germany, beautiful little German town. My youngest daughter was actually born there. And it follows Jack Ryan Jr., who's doing kind of a shakeout with a new surveillance team. He's surveilling a Chinese scientist and sees this scientist get redacted by what he thinks is a Chinese paramilitary team. And that eventually leads him to the other side of the world, to the South China Sea and something that's going on there.

And what you see that's happening is the United States and China stumbling towards a hot war in the South China Sea and Jack Ryan Jr. trying to prevent that. So it was a lot of fun to write. There are actually, this is kind of the first time when my editor got it. He said, you've actually written a Jack Ryan Sr. book because the scope is so big for it. So you get to see submarines in this one. You get to see airplanes.

You get to see Jack Ryan Jr. And kind of, I did, one of the things that's fun about writing this series is putting in Easter eggs or doing callbacks to the older Clancy books. And so if you're a Clancy fan, you will love this book because of the amount of Easter eggs I was able to sneak in and kind of references to old Clancy books. So hopefully that resonates with folks. There you go. It sounds like it'll make a great movie too. It's got all the fun stuff,

submarines and all those things, you know, when we, when we had the other gentleman on the show, uh, earlier, uh, we were talking about,

uh, the hunt for red October and what a, what a great launch off that was. And of course the, uh, uh, who's the, who's the, who did the, uh, right. Alec Baldwin. Alec was. And, of course, who did the Ryan series?

Alec Baldwin. Alec Baldwin. And then who did the Indiana Jones? Old man. Oh, Harrison Ford. Yeah, he was Jack Ryan too. Jack Ryan during the, what was it, Clear and Present Danger? Yep, Patriot Games.

We were talking with MP Woodward about that a couple days ago. So what made you excited to come back to the thing and to write again for it? And are you going to continue writing for it, the Jack Ryan series? Yeah. I've gotten to the point where I am now because my editor had me on this schedule where every five minutes I would switch from one of my books to a Tom Clancy book. And so when I'm writing one of my books, part of it, you know, the back of my head, I'm thinking, what's the next Clancy book going to be about? What's the next Clancy book? And so I had this

idea of a big conflict happening in the South China Sea, but it being a faint for something else. And so as I was researching the South China Sea and what was happening there, there are all kinds of nations that claim that same area of the ocean. And so you have China that does the Philippines, Vietnam, and most of the time what they're jockeying for back and forth is fishing rights or mineral rights or something. But then I started doing more research and there's this very interesting thing they're called metallic nodules and um they are a combination of a bunch of rare earth metals and so there have been some companies that have actually looked at trying to mine them under sea because they're so valuable they're actually called like a battery in a rock because it has

these minerals yeah it's it's incredible But getting to them is very hard. And getting to them in the South China Sea is even harder because of all the geopolitical stuff going on there. And so I had kind of an idea of what would it look like if all of this kind of stumbling towards war was actually a feint for that, for somebody who's trying to get their hands on a newly discovered stash of these metallic modules. And so I knew I needed a bigger story to be able to tell. And so I wanted to do it from two perspectives. So one being a submarine, there's a Virginia class submarine and a female captain of

that submarine that plays a big role. And to do that, the current authors of the new, the Jack Ryan Sr. Tom Clancy series are Brian Andrews and Jeff Wilson. Brian Andrews was a submarine officer for six or seven years. And so he gave me quite a bit of help with that. I also knew, in fact, there's an article that just came out, I think it was yesterday, about a Chinese fighter that intercepted an American plane over the South China Sea and almost tore the nose off of it. And so that actually happens in Flashpoint. And it's kind of a callback to an incident that happened, I think, in the early 2000s, where a US P-3 Orion actually collided with a Chinese fighter that intercepted it. And the Chinese aircraft was destroyed and the American aircraft had to make an emergency landing on Chinese soil and it was a huge debacle the Chinese kind of held that crew for a while and did some

brinkmanship but was what was even worse is that the contents of that plane, the Chinese got their hands on. And so it was a huge kind of big international incident. And so I recreated that as part of Flashpoint 2. And so it was really fun to do. It was really hard to do because I had to get, like I said, I got Brian Andrews to help with the sub. I got another friend of mine who's also a thriller writer and was a Top Gun aviator and then flies for southwest name jack stewart that helped me with the airplane parts so it was really fun but it was a really big undertaking too that's crazy yeah that there's stuff that's going on in the south china sea the saber ratting over taiwan and the whole lay to claim book we have authors

that have been on that have explained why that whole taiwan china thing is a thing uh it's really interesting um did you get to study any of those you know the island building they're doing out there yeah they just throw up islands and military bases crazy yeah it is nuts so there's a um one of the guys I listen to a lot on the South China Sea and China in general. He's a congressman from Wisconsin. His name's Mike Gallagher, but he was a former Marine intelligence officer, has a PhD, and now he's the chairman of the Select Committee on China. And so he has some really interesting analysis because I'm like you, I'm assuming. I'm not a Navy person. You know, I wouldn't at first, at first brush, it would not make a lot of sense to me of why is it so

important that an island 6,000, you know, miles away from the US coast remain independent. But when he starts breaking down the amount, first of all, the amount of traffic, naval traffic that passes through the South China Sea and what that would mean if China was able to control all of that. In fact, you saw them doing a little of that just a couple weeks ago where China said, we're going to start doing inspections of vessels that are passing through this area of the South China Sea. And if they had Taiwan, they would be able to control that passage of sea. But perhaps even more importantly is that the majority of semiconductors and the vast majority of the high-tech semiconductors are all manufactured

on taiwan and so if you think there's an event that's been used over and over again by thriller novelists where you have an emp and electric uh electromagnetic pulse that shorts everything out and you know you cause armageddon for a while well that that would be true but you could eventually get more chips and replace that imagine what would happen if the sole source of the chips that power your computer your cell phone your car if china had all of that and so now we're not going to give them to you anymore or we're going to alter them or we're going to do something else. And so it's really interesting when you start to look at why is Taiwan important? Why is that area of the ocean important? And then when you superimpose that with the size of our navies, and so right now, the US Navy is at,

I think, its lowest level ever, certainly its lowest level since World War II, where the Chinese Navy has not only surpassed us, but they add the entire size of the Australian Navy to their Navy every year because they're building ships so fast. And so there's another really interesting concept. One of the admirals I follow that talks about this, a guy named James Stafridis, and he likes to say that quantity is a quality all of its own. And so what that means is they recently had a war game where China invaded Taiwan. And actually, Congressman Gallagher had a company come in and run that for the Select Committee. And within the first week of the war, we had exhausted all our precision guided weapons, all our smart munitions. And so now just the sheer quantity of the Chinese Navy becomes a decisive factor,

right? Because you can have the best boats in the world, but if you only have 250 of them and they sink, you know, a hundred and a hundred in a pretty bad spot. And that's what we're looking at with our parity with China right now and specifically in that area of the world. Hi, folks.

Chris 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 CEO, and be sure to check out chrisfossleadershipinstitute.com. Now back to the show. And this is ripped straight from the headlines. I mean, we recently did a thing, the Biden administration did a thing where they blocked certain chips or most all chips from China. And then, you know, I think after COVID and the chip shortages and supply chain issues, you know, there's big, I think there was a bill there, she signed with the Biden administration to help fund companies to build chips here. And there's a big push to have them built here because

they realized that, you know, even the Russia war with Ukraine ukraine you know one of the things we did was cut off the chips and they're having trouble replacing their tanks and building tanks and and other things they need to run their war uh you know we're finding these these these stupid little chips or you know it's a whole new war for the chips so this is ripped right straight from the headlines yeah absolutely and and ukraine plays more heavily in this than what we would think for a couple different reasons. So the first being Ukraine shows a great example of what could We can argue back and forth about whether we're providing them quickly enough. But you can certainly make the case that if we had turned Ukraine into a porcupine earlier, maybe Russia would have second guessed that invasion and done it. And certainly you can make that case with Taiwan. And so that's the first thing. The second thing is that as we're providing these weapons to the Ukraine, things like Javelin missiles are highly technical,

take a lot of the chips and stuff that you're talking about to make, but they also can take up to a year, a year and a half to produce, right? And so if you go back to quantity beating quality, we could expend all of our smart munition stores and then be looking at a year, year and a half or two years wait to replenish those stores in a war if we even had access to the chips to do that. And so I think there are a lot of very dire conclusions that you can draw from Ukraine that can be readily applied to a potential conflict in the south china sea over taiwan yeah i mean there's a lot of people that saber rattle over that so yeah pulled straight from the headlines goes to all the things any more tease outs on the book you want to throw out it's uh i think um i thought i think what folks will like is that you'll get to see all of the Jack Ryan universe together again. And so, again, a lot of times what you do is that you see a separation between the books. And it's done for a reason, because there's two of us who are writing in that universe at the same time.

And so as Mark Cameron and now the Anderson Wilson guys are working on a book, we kind of have to de-conflict efforts and say, how are we going to keep our storyline state? Which characters are you going to write? And so for this one, I really had the opportunity to reach in there and show Jack Ryan Sr. to show what's happening in the White House, to do all that. So I think folks who love the Clancy books are really going to love this book. There you go. There you go. How do you keep it fresh in constantly coming back to the series when you write it? Yeah, I think so. I read a lot of news. I listen to a lot of defense-related podcasts. And I have kind of a research folder where I'll throw articles that just kind of ping. You read something and you're like,

oh, that's interesting. You might not know why yet, but there's just something about it that sparks an interest in you. And so when I sit down to write my next Clancy book or my next Matt Drake book, I'll peruse back through that folder and say, hey, what was interesting for me? What was it that I liked? Because part of writing a book is that whether it takes you five months or like normal people a year, you have to have something that's interesting enough to sustain you for that period of time. And so usually what that means is going back and saying, Hey, what are the things that really caught my attention? Or, or when you read that article, it set the light bulb off. And so I kind of keep a little, a little backdated, um, list of those

topics and stuff that I'll go through. And, and also, I think you, you also pay attention to what's happening in the world, right? Like what are people, as a thriller writer, um, especially in this genre, you don't want to try and beat headlines because you'll, you'll, you know, the headlines will always win or things will go a different direction. But I think you certainly want to look at the world and see what are people concerned about right now? You know, what are in, in certainly in this example, the South China Sea, there's a reason why we now have a select committee on China, right? Because the American population, especially since COVID, has kind of woken up to the threat of what the Chinese

Communist Party represents. And so as a writer, what you always want to do is tap into what is your audience thinking about? What are they, what's keeping them up at night? What are they consuming? And so you, again, you don't want to mirror current events or anything, but you also want to know what your customers care about. and perhaps you want to structure your books around that as well. Plus, real events or real scenarios help build into the story and make it real. Are you going to write maybe in the future about the India-Pakistan War? Oh, wait, my card says here that's next year never mind oh now it's blown everybody knows what the next year book is this live damn it damn it i wasn't

supposed to let that secret out but uh zoom is my crystal ball of an alien or something i don't know what the fuck you never know anymore with the way the world's been going since you know the start of covid you're just like what the hell is next i know anymore with the way the world's been going since the start of COVID. You're just like, what the hell is next? I mean, for a while there, it was kind of like every day there was like a new bottom. There was elephants mating with the giraffes and stuff. It was just getting out of control. But it seems to calm down.

That's an OnlyFans channel, by the way. I'm just kidding. So, Don, what's the future hold for you are you do you go back to your book series of the mate with the matt drake novels yeah so um like i said in september the fourth book uh my fourth book in the tom clancy series comes out weapons grade and um i'm finishing up edits for that now and i'm also starting work on my first Vince Flynn, Mitch rap book. So really excited about that. Um,

that will be kind of consuming me for the foreseeable future. Um, that my first entry in the Vince Flynn, Mitch rap series will come out in September, 2024. Um, what I plan on doing is, is probably in December or something is coming back and saying,

okay, now I've got a period of time where i'll hopefully have the mitch rap book where i want it to be to then say uh do i want to go back and look at another matt drake book do i want to look at a standalone do i want to potentially look at another tom clancy book and so i'm very lucky from the standpoint that i've got more potential fires in the iron or irons in the fire, maybe fires in the iron. Who can tell? Then I can work on right now.

And so right now I know it's Mitch Rapp next. After that, I'm not sure. There you go. Well, it'll be exciting to see whatever you put forth and keeping us on the edge of our seats and the tension, the thrillers. Any chance at any stuff you've worked on so far uh hitting hollywood going in the hall there's a big hollywood strike right now so but you know strangely enough they haven't called they have not said hey wow while everybody's on strike why don't you come on in now i think you and i talked about this before one of my friends

uh taylor moore got his first book. And it's a fantastic book. It's called Downrange Optioned. And when he got it optioned, which means that a production company or a producer, somebody has said, hey, I'm going to pay you this amount of money so that I can reserve this book to potentially make a movie out of it. And it's for a period of time. They option it for whatever it is, a year and a half or two years or something. He told me his film agent sat him down because he was very, very excited. And he thought he could already see himself going to the film premiere. And his film agent said, listen, this is good.

This is good. But what you have to understand is you have a greater shot of going to Mars than you do seeing this book become a movie. So that's kind of where I'm at now. I'm, I'm aiming for the Mars shot. There you go. You know,

it's, and there's a lot of that goes on. They, I mean, when the option of book, you know, they, they're technically locking down it from,

you know, keeping anybody else from getting ahold of it. We're talking a little bit about that with MP Woodward, that we need to get a return of hunt for red October movies. Uh, you know, I, I,

ever since, you know, I quit going to movies years ago and it's in, and over COVID, I really miss them. I was able to go see the Godfather 50th anniversary. I went and saw the big Lebowski 20th remake. and you know,

I really appreciate seeing stuff in the big screen again like never before and i find myself constantly searching for good movies to go to and all these movies they're you know they're great for women you know there's a lot of emotional relationship movies and stuff and that's fine but i we need some like hunt for red october jack ryan you know guys doing shit you know uh the james bond movie i mean everyone is jonesing over that because they put it off over because of covid and then they finally come out and then they kill well i probably shouldn't ruin this for people but i think most people know we talked on the woodward show dude you know they they kill the guy off and you're like well that sucks and uh so you know we need

some more jack ryan movies eh i guess that's what i'm trying to say here yeah i think i think people were hoping that the success of top gun maverick might um blow that back open again because what i've what i've heard from the people who work in the business is that Marvel changed everything. And so when you can make a billion dollars or whatever crazy it is off of superhero movies and special effects, it's hard. There's not a whole lot of oxygen left for anybody else to compete in that. interesting when you see that now though the last couple of marvel spinoff movies and stuff haven't performed as well as the original ones and so you know some of the gossip is you know is that pendulum swinging back a little bit are people going to be asking again because it was you know i was talking to a guy who had done it for most of his career and he was kind of cynical about it

and he's like what those are are vehicles to sell merchandise right so so you can have and it is lynn that's what he was saying about somebody he's like you know with that star wars movie every character you see gets to be you know an action figure or something like that and so he and he wasn't saying it specifically about the star wars but you can see his point that yeah i mean it's not you reference the godfather versus um and i'm an avengers fan you know i love the i i love robert dowdy jr i thought iron man was fantastic but it does after a while it's it's i think you start to get to the fact where you're like okay i've seen enough cg stuff i've seen the world blow up five times already.

What else you got? Yeah. I mean, the CGI is the kind of thing that buggers me up as an old man. When I was younger, I probably would have liked more of that stuff. But, you know, I still have my Michael Corleone action figure doll, uh, who's the head of hunt for October. How come I remember that right now? The bond, the James Bond, Sean Connery. I still have my Sean Connery action figure.

So, uh, you know, come on, man. But you know, when you really look at like the Jack Ryan series with, uh, with, uh, oh, the, the John Krasinski, uh, who's the, who's the guy who, the Han man. John Krasinski. Who's the guy, the Han Solo guy who played all the time? I'm not pulling anywhere. Harrison Ford. Harrison Ford. Chris needs a nap. It's the callback joke.

You know, Harrison Ford, you know, he's running all over the place. He's doing action things, you know. Same thing with the Bond series. But, you know, the Hunt for October wasn't really like an action runaround series. There might have been a couple of those but it's just so damn well done and it was such a great plot great writing yeah i mean the the lines from that show are are epic memes that still resonate god what is it this one thing here yeah mother God, you know, James Earl Jones bits and, and stuff, you know, we need more of that. Eh? So let's, uh, let's,

let's get the writers off strike and get those boys writing something and girls. So there you go. Well, uh, Don, it's been fun always to have you on. Thank you very much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Absolutely. Chris, thanks so much for having me again. There you go. And we'll look forward to your future works. I i mean i think at this point you just come back every couple months just scheduling in and do it all for your new books works for me works for me uh give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs yeah absolutely it's it's don bentley books.com so b-e-n-t-l-e-y or if you're a social media person it's at at Bentley Don B on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

There you go. I'd buy a hunt for an October submarine. You know, whatever. I would too. And the action figures that go with it. Absolutely. I would have liked to have seen Montana. All right.

Well, thanks to everyone for tuning in. Thanks for Don for being here. Go to goodreads.com for Jess Crisfass. Go to YouTubereads.com for chest chris fuss uh go to youtube uh and linkedin order the book wherever fine books are sold may 23rd 2023 it came out tom clancy flashpoint a jack ryan jr novel is available now wherever fine books are sold thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time there