The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Tom Clancy Line of Demarcation (A Jack Ryan Jr. Novel) by M.P. Woodward

Episode Date: May 16, 2025

Tom Clancy Line of Demarcation (A Jack Ryan Jr. Novel) by M.P. Woodward Amazon.com MPwoodward.com The discovery of an oil field off the coast of Guyana plunges Jack Ryan, Jr into a cauldron of lie...s in the latest entry in this New York Times bestselling series. It starts with the destruction of a US Coast Guard cutter and the loss of her entire crew. But the USCG Claiborne was on an innocuous mission to open a sea lane between an oil field off the coast of Guyana and the refineries of southern Louisiana. The destruction of the ship, tragic as it is, won't stop that mission from continuing. So who would sacrifice twenty-two men and women just to slow down the plan? That's the question plaguing Jack Ryan Jr. He's in Guyana to work a deal to get his company, Hendley Associates, in on the ground floor of this new discovery, but the destruction of the Claiborne and the kidnapping of the Guyanese Interior Minister make it clear that there's a malignant force working to destroy Guyana's oil industry. It's up to Jack to identify the killers before they draw a bead on him, but how can he do that when the line of demarcation between friend and foe is constantly shifting?About the author M.P. Woodward is the NYT bestselling author of the Tom Clancy Jack Ryan Jr. books SHADOW STATE, LINE OF DEMARCATION and the Handler CIA espionage series (THE HANDLER, DEAD DROP) from Penguin Random House. He served as a U.S. Naval Intelligence officer before going on to a career in tech. For more, please visit his website or find him on social media

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Starting point is 00:00:55 ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen,
Starting point is 00:01:03 ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and and you just skipped the next one. But thank you for listening. We certainly appreciate it. Today we've got amazing. Another Tom Clancy author on the show. We've had them all except for Tom Clancy himself. There's probably a reason he's not returning our calls, but he's not around anymore, unfortunately, but we continue his legacy on the show. We have the author of the newest book in the series of the Jack Ryan Jr. novels, Tom Clancy line of demarcation, the Jack Ryan Jr. novels, Tom Clancy, line of demarcation, the Jack Ryan Jr. novel, book 13. And it is out with M.P. Woodward. And let me see if I can get a date on that. The
Starting point is 00:01:33 audio book never shows the date. May 20th, 2025, it's out. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, Chris Foss, one of the Tik Tokity, and Facebook.com, Fortress, Chris Foss. We'lloss, one of the Tik Tokity, and Facebook.com, Fortress, Chris Foss. We'll be talking today with MP Woodward. He makes his fourth appearance on the show. I think at five, we have to give him one of those Saturday Night Live robes or something. I don't know. Is that what we have to do?
Starting point is 00:01:56 There's something like that. MP Woodward is the New York Times bestselling author of the Tom Clancy, Jack Ryan Jr. books, shadow state line of demarcation and the handler CIA espionage series from Penguin random house. He served as a U S naval intelligence officer before going into a career in tech. Welcome to show. How are you Mr. Woodward? Good Chris. Thank you.
Starting point is 00:02:20 Thanks for having me back. Thanks for coming back. We really appreciate having you. It's always an honor. Give us your dot coms. How can people find out more about you on the interwebs? Thank you. Thanks for having me back. Thanks for coming back. We really appreciate having you. It's always an honor. Give us your dot coms. How can people find out more about you on the interwebs? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:02:30 MPWoodward.com and then MPWauthor on Twitter and MP underscore Woodward at Facebook. So give us a 30,000 already. What's in this new Tom Clancy novel? This is because it's a Tom Clancy book. There's a geopolitical intrigue involved. And in this case, it's yeah, I know. In this case, it's the Russians teaming up with narco terrorists out of Venezuela, trying to pull off a Crimea down in Latin America this time, but a fait accompli as they try to snatch some geopolitically important territory in the country of Guyana where there
Starting point is 00:03:05 has recently been a massive real world oil and gas discovery and American interests are there developing that right now. Ah, there's always some of that political intrigue, political, you know, you got to save the world sort of stuff with pseudo, what would you call it? Like spy warfare maybe? Can we call it hybrid warfare or, or gray zone warfare. Not in the gray zone. If you, it sounds like mission impossible where, you know, we, we disavow anything. It's in the gray. Yeah. I feel like most of the CIA work really in
Starting point is 00:03:40 the gray zone. I was studying over time. What prompted you to take course with the settings and nature and character this time that maybe might be different or the same or what were some of the things you did in your choices on designing the book? Yeah, the first off, Tom, you know, the Tom Clancy name and writing in that, in this series, that's a brand, right? It's kind of like saying that the Marvel cinematic universe and a Marvel movie without superheroes would be weird, right? I think a Tom Clancy book without geopolitical interest would also be weird. So I was looking at flashpoints around the world and in the real world, this small country called Guyana, that is the only
Starting point is 00:04:23 English speaking country in South America. They're an American ally. They also happen to be a tiny neighbor of Venezuela and it's a country with less than a million people and they have had a Saudi Arabia like discovery of gas and oil just off the coast there that will soon make the Guyanese the the richest people per capita on earth. This enormous discovery is gonna do things like upset global oil and gas that will soon make the Guyanese the richest people per capita on earth. This enormous discovery is going to do things like upset global oil and gas markets, and that's not going to make the Russians happy. So they're trying to head all this off by basically flipping Guyana into their orbit in the book. And I thought that'd be an interesting premise.
Starting point is 00:05:01 What made you choose Guyana? that be an interesting premise. What made you choose Guyana? Just the fact that first of all, Venezuela, who, you know, shows up in the, on the, the bad guy list quite, quite often. They, they claim they're already claiming this oil and gas discovery. So there's a region, these two, these two countries are on the border and a river separates them. And this, this oil and gas discovery is right off of that river delta.
Starting point is 00:05:26 And so this region, this disputed region happens to be called the Essequibo region. Venezuela has actually moved tanks there. They've threatened it. Marco Rubio was there, I think three weeks, four weeks ago, telling the Venezuelans to knock it off. So this is one of those things that, one of those crises that is flying under the radar for us most of the time. Uh, but that, that fits, that fits things like fiction really, really well. I mean, it's kind of interesting that you wrote the book and hear your current on the times when it comes to their politics. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know whether it'd be happy or sad about that, that, because
Starting point is 00:06:03 I have a second Tom Clancy book up for presale that comes out in September, that'll be my third one called terminal velocity. And it takes place in India. And in between India and Pakistan and Kashmir. And I set that up as Oh, Pakistan is going to have terrorists that attack India, and then India is going to respond. And then boom, this was all happening in the news a couple of weeks ago. And I'm like, Whoa, that's a little scary. You know, two nuclear armed countries. I'm just, I don't read the news anymore. I just read your Tom Clancy novels to find out what's going to happen.
Starting point is 00:06:37 As it should be, as it should be. You learn a lot more for me. Trust me. It definitely gives it a validation that, Hey, this, you know, there's these, these things are happening. Do you study? Did you just pick Guyana or did you study that you kind of felt that was a future hotspot? Did you kind of use some of your military intelligence background to determine that? David Sinclair Yeah, a bit. The other funny thing is that
Starting point is 00:07:02 this was before I went down to Panama. So this was last year. And I was thinking about a plot that involved the Panama Canal. And then I learned about a little more about the geopolitics in that region and settled on Guyana just because I think I think let's call it resource politics, right? Like very recently we've been what's been in the news with rare earth minerals, right? This deal with Ukraine. We've been talking about, you know, oil as a driver of political politics and war for many, many years. And, you know, even with Russia and Ukraine, you have the Russians trying to really hold, you know, use gas, gas supplies as leverage against Germany. So the thought of this happening in South America where it's closer to home was really interesting to me. So that's how I ended
Starting point is 00:07:52 up thinking about it. Pete Slauson Oh, wow. Is anything, has the character developed or what stage is the character in? Because I know some of the Tom Clancy's will do regressive stuff though, so they go back and then forth, I think. Is that this way with this one where is he moving forward or backward as a character in development? Benj So in the Jack Ryan Jr. series, this is really the generational series. So, you know, you do have crossover characters like John Clark and Mary Pop Foley, and Jack Ryan Sr. is in the book, really almost like a cameo. But the action centers around Jack Ryan Jr. and I've been evolving him as a character, you know, in literature,
Starting point is 00:08:34 if you will, and trying to mature him a bit. So I inherited him, you know, he was probably in his early 30s. And he came into this series kind of in his early 20s as a really impulsive guy. At this point in his development, he's you know, he's a he's a mature he's a mature guy. We're always fuzzy with the ages in novels. But, you know, let's say he's around somewhere between 35 and 38. He's engaged to be married, they're taking care of her niece. And, you know, he's following the footsteps of his famous father, who started off as a stock trader, before he went into academia and government service. And so Jack Ryan Jr. is actually down there in South America trying to put deals together, you know, trying to make a name for himself
Starting point is 00:09:23 as a private equity investor and venture capitalist. So I've enjoyed fleshing him out, you know, trying to make a name for himself as a private equity investor and venture capitalist. So I've enjoyed fleshing him out, you know, thinking about how people just sort of do grow up in their late thirties, but you know, they're still young enough to not have all the wisdom in the world and you can have the character learn things along the way. Do you, what do you think Tom Clancy fans will be most surprised in by line of demarcation and are there any Easter eggs or callbacks long-time readers might recognize? See most, most surprised.
Starting point is 00:09:52 I have some new tech that I'm, that I am bringing in that is based on real world stuff. I just happened to put it through the defense procurement process a lot faster than probably in the real world. There's that. It has to do with waterborne vehicles. And the Easter eggs, yeah, as I mentioned, this is a generational book and John Clark is in it, Domingo Chavez is in it, as well as the new characters. And there are carryover issues. It doesn't drive a lot of the plot, but they're a carryover issues to another South American Clancy book, which was clear and present danger. And that those, those issues show up in this book as well, especially for John Clark, who was actively in Columbia, if you'll recall in those books.
Starting point is 00:10:40 Pete Slauson With Tom Clancy fans, if you were to see this Jack Ryan Jr. on the screen again, who do you think would best play them? Maybe? Do you want to curse it or anything? I don't know. When I was still in business, I was at Amazon Prime Video and worked on the show Tom Clancy Jack Ryan, as we called it, and it's coming back for another season soon. And that starred John Krasinski. And to me, it's kind of a John Krasinski character. He's about that
Starting point is 00:11:09 age and about that size. I actually think he's, he's, he's well cast for it and displays the right mixture of intelligence, a sense of humor, emotion, and, and just sort of physical, physical action. Pete Slauson Ah, should be fun. Now, tell us the story. How did you come to first discover Tom Clancy, I guess, when you were young, if I recall? And then how did you influence, you know, your writing for your series, personally, that you do? And then also, how did you get involved with Tom Clancy? How did you get the luck of that draw? Tom Clancy Yeah, the first get the luck of that draw? Yeah. I, for the first time I read much like everybody else, I read, you know, we was had a hot word of mouth was hunt for red October.
Starting point is 00:11:52 And at the time I was a naval ROTC scholarship student and couldn't think, you know, was super excited to go into the Navy as an officer and all these kinds of things. And so when that book came out, it was really the first novel I had read where it sounded right to me, like the way people talked in the ranks and the, you know, like the little stuff around the setting were all correct. And all of us admired that. And then once I got on active duty, there were more of these books. And so it became more and more, more and more popular over time. And then once I got on active duty, there were more of these books. And so it became more and more popular over time. And so certainly it was very wrapped up in that.
Starting point is 00:12:31 As I completed or got towards the tail end of my business career and started writing, certainly those books were on my mind, but I wanted to modernize them and make them fit sort of more diverse personalities, which I did in my series. As I did my series, what the feedback or the positive feedback I got was around the authenticity, which is similar to Clancy. And so my editor was the same editor who had been doing Clancy for years, including Tom Clancy before he passed away.
Starting point is 00:13:04 And so he asked me, Hey, would you, would you take this on? And I was thinking in the back of my head, hell yes, you know, of course I would. But he goes, before he said yes, realize there's a book due every seven months. I mean, this is a commitment and he was right about that. It's been a significant commitment. It really is. I mean, you've got this book coming out in May, you've got the other one coming out in September. What's got the other one coming out in September.
Starting point is 00:13:26 Anything going on with your series and what you work on? Yeah, I have a new standalone book coming out in September that is called Red Tide, a novel of the next Pacific War. And for Clancy fans, it would equate to Red Storm Rising. It's very much like Red Storm Rising. It's very much like Red Storm Rising. And this is the great smackdown between China and the US navies on the high seas as China attempts to blockade Taiwan to starve the world of chips. That's effectively the plot. And I based much of the action because in a battle like that, in our current
Starting point is 00:14:06 times, we have all these amazing modern weapons. They completely rely on data links and communications. And the very first thing to go in one of these wars, there's going to be the data links and communications and satellites that power these weapons. So it ends up being a blind man's bluff kind of naval battle that I think has parallels to the Battle of Midway. Pete Slauson Oh, wow. That would be huge. Yeah. And something that we don't really want to see. Let's keep in the fiction books. Jared Larkin Oh, yeah. No, no. May God grant it, it's
Starting point is 00:14:35 a work of fiction. But it was fun to think through all those as an intellectual exercise to think through how that would really unfold. Yeah, totally. I mean, it is interesting to see the strategy of that arena over there in the, I don't know what you call it, the South. South China Sea. South China Sea, yeah. And some of the things they've been doing, the little islands, the threatening of the Philippines and Taiwan, the recent activities they've been doing where they've been doing military drills surrounding, I think the recent one surrounded the whole island of Taiwan.
Starting point is 00:15:10 Yep. And boy, a lot of saber rattling going on over there. And doesn't help that we, this, this, this new trade war that we got going on. In Red Tide, I had all the action start because of a trade war. Did you really? I did. And I mean, I'm like, this was two years ago. We embargoed ships to them because we didn't want them to catch up to us in AI.
Starting point is 00:15:35 And they said, you know what, your Navy's not that great. And we think we can just kind of surround this island and sort of affect things in our direction. And once we have all the chips, you know, what are you going to do? And by the way, you asked, you're the aggressor here because you're the one who embargoed us, right? And somehow or other, I don't quite know how the hell that happened. But to your point on the exercises, and this is in the book too, Red Tide, one of the things about those exercises is they're not only meant as exercises for
Starting point is 00:16:06 them and to, you know, maybe influence politics in Taiwan, but they're also meant to desensitize us. And so after a while you're like, Hey man, there's all these troops mass. And you're like, dad, they do it every week, you know, and that's, and that's, that happens in the book where, where people are going, isn't this a big deal? Nah, you know, they do it all the time. Ah, I mean, that's kind of, I don't know. I don't know if that's kind of what we said about the Russia Ukraine war when they amassed
Starting point is 00:16:34 all the troops. Although I think, I think the Biden administration had intelligence on, on that one. Yeah. I felt like on that one, it was unusual enough to like, wow, they're really amassing. They're really going at it. Yeah. They really do that. Yeah, I felt like on that one, it was unusual enough to like, wow, they're really messing. They're really going at it. Yeah, they really do that. Yeah. Yeah. Turns out they are. Turns out they did. Yeah. The, so all the good stuff. So you've got, we've talked about some of the things you have going on, some of the things that are in works for you. How do you keep your storytelling fresh and relevant? That's gotta be hard, especially with politics, constantly changing
Starting point is 00:17:03 the world. You know, definitely the world order is kind of thrown amok from the last, what, 75 years, 100 years or how long has it been since World War II? 45, 80 years? Yeah. Jesus, I'm old. And I'm like, it's not like you were there. Yeah. I sure felt that way because I was always cowering under my desk with the Russians. Seeing us cozy the Russians right now is really weird. Yeah, I mean, somebody's got to be useful in this world. The turns out it's us this week. I don't know.
Starting point is 00:17:35 Yeah, it's kind of it's weird what's going on. And to see, you know, I grew up reading books on politics and studying great leaders and all that sort of good stuff. And one of my first books was 1000 Days with Schlesinger on the John F. Kennedy administration. And it was interesting to see the CIA, how it steered him into the Bay of Pigs and of course the strategy of war, studying Eisenhower and McCarthy and the strategy of wars and how they played out and battles, you know, I used to collect ships and all the military stuff as a kid. It's interesting. And so how do you keep that fresh and relevant, I guess? Chris McPherson First, a comment on the geopolitical environment.
Starting point is 00:18:18 I mean, we really went through a, you know, after World War II, we went through this, this Cold War from 45 to 91. That, that really drove all the, you know, spy thriller fiction, John Lecrae, and Clancy, you know, was, was born in that. When that, when that ended and the world really went into globalization mode, there wasn't, there weren't a whole lot of threats out there in the, in the late nineties. And then after 9-11, it all turned into terrorism. Now we're at a position where the shift is away from terrorism in the real world and in thriller fiction, back to what I would call sort of imperial classic geopolitics, right? Where it's, it's great power competition, trying to compete for
Starting point is 00:19:06 politics, right? Where it's great power competition, trying to compete for spheres of interest. And that means that it's devolving somewhat from a safer globalized world, which is creating all these issues. So I think that lends freshness to the plots. But the plots are all just settings for the characters. I think the way you keep the fiction fresh is in character development and putting characters in unusual situations, giving them unusual backgrounds. So for example, in the book Red Tide, the key hero is an admiral who was about to retire, who really didn't expect to end up commanding this fleet. And he's in a different discipline, but as others fail, he keeps being right about stuff and then they elevate it. And so I think having an admiral in charge of
Starting point is 00:19:53 something that's filled with self-doubt, it was a fun character exploration. In the Jack Ryan Jr. series, I think it's Jack picking up family responsibilities and having all of a sudden to make choices like, okay, am I going to charge off and do this and leave my seance behind? Or am I going to leave my job because I'm more serious about this over here? You know, choices that we've all, you know, forks in the road that we've all had in our in our lives.
Starting point is 00:20:21 Yeah. And it's pretty complicated being a Navy Admiral. I mean, you guys have to deal with, I think we've had some Navy folks on that ran ships and you guys have to know how to deal with the nuclear issues internally. If the reactor on a ship decides it wants to go south or something or there's some sort of other quandary in that sense. I mean, I was talking to one, I was like, holy crap is, there's like a lot more you have to think about on these ships. Oh, it's and you said you guys just to be clear, I was never an Admiral, not even close. But but writing writing about it and treating it more like a journalist, honestly. Yeah,
Starting point is 00:21:01 it is I would just describe it. You have a lot of great leaders on your shows that on your show that run complicated enterprises. It's a complicated enterprise. And you're a leader of a massive staff of people, managing this enterprise. And that enterprise involves, tens of thousands of people in a battle group and dozens of ships at times.
Starting point is 00:21:24 And yes, so that the larger ones have power plant issues and where are we on the nuclear reactor core, where are we on the airplanes in terms of air frame stress and how is their fuel coming along? And so keeping this entire war fighting capability is fantastically complex. And I don't think it's something that most civilians ever really, let's just say we take it for granted. We probably accept that it probablyastically complex. And I don't think it's something that most civilians ever really, let's just say we take it for granted. We probably accept that it probably is complex, but we hope that somebody out there's got it.
Starting point is 00:21:52 And the guys to whom you refer are incredibly talented individuals for a reason. Yeah. It's, I mean, it's kind of like a city on city in the ocean, isn't it? On a boat. It's a, it's, it's more than a city, more like a county because it's a collection of cities. Yeah, because you've got, you know, in any carrier strike group,
Starting point is 00:22:10 you've got the aircraft carrier itself. You've usually got a couple of ships on plane defense that are, you know, cruisers, destroyers. You've got a submarine prowling around, et cetera. So it is, and then there's all the support ships that feed those guys. But yeah, it's, it's complex. It's amazing. All those are modders and stuff like that.
Starting point is 00:22:29 How do you feel your experiences as a U S naval intelligence officer influences you and writing about this stuff? And of course it keeps you abreast of all the details. Do you find you have to keep up with technology too? You know, some of the new things like drones and crap are going on. It's really interesting how the art of war is changing maybe. Yeah, I think about it kind of like if you, if I had been a doctor a while ago and I was writing about, you know, medicine, remember how Michael Crichton used to do that and he
Starting point is 00:22:55 was a doctor. And I think you're in that case, your medical training, you would know how doctors think and the issues that they face. I think it's the same thing with me currently writing about military issues or intelligence issues. I was trained in it, but it's been 20 some years. However, the technology has changed. The other things have not changed that much. We still talk about signals intelligence and satellites have changed in terms of technology, but there's still satellites or drones have come in, but that, you know, there's always been aerial reconnaissance.
Starting point is 00:23:28 So they're feeding systems that are a little more sophisticated, but the consumers of that intelligence are more or less the same. So the battle problem stays the same. The methodologies are similar, but the weapons systems and tech change. And personally, having been in the tech industry for years, I'm very comfortable keeping up with the actual tech. And if anything, I'm super excited when I see that the military is keeping up with it. No, yeah. It's kind of wild now. Do you see more books maybe on these military novels incorporating AI? AI seems to be the big sort of issue there where, you know, a lot of the crazy stuff
Starting point is 00:24:11 going on. Yeah, I actually have that in this book, In Line of Demarcation. And I think that you can, you can, you can Hollywoodize AI, right? I was rewatching the last Mission Impossible movie and there's this Russian submarine. It's got like this giant golf ball in the front that's like this brain with sparks coming off of it. Remember that scene, and then it sinks, and you need to get the key, because it's the entity,
Starting point is 00:24:33 and it's going to control the world. I was like, hold on. So I think where we are with AI right now, though, as a large language model, as a predictive model, that could be, if you think about the world of intelligence, you're taking tens of thousands of points of data. And having a tool to assist an analyst, put all those data points together,
Starting point is 00:24:59 and find things like patterns, that's certainly relevant and useful. It's not as sexy as I think people wanna make AI out to be, but I think that that is how the tool works, right? It analyzes patterns and then it extends those patterns. And that's certainly going to be useful for somebody who's looking for patterns. Oh yeah.
Starting point is 00:25:20 And I mean, we've had conversations with people about should or should they not hook AI up to weapon systems or automatically weapon systems, you know, like, I guess, putting them in charge of launching nuclear things. I mean, you know, some of that's inevitable. You think about a long range missile system, it's going to have AI algorithms that say, okay, I was just detected. Now what are my decisions?
Starting point is 00:25:46 Oh, now this is now there's a, you know, a missile counter missile fired at me. What am I going to do? So it's like all the, all these sort of countermeasures need to get down to the machine learning aspect. I think where you're at, it is more like the trigger puller, right? Like at what point do we, do we do that? And I happened to be studying an incident in the Cold War that was really scary, where the Russians had a system called
Starting point is 00:26:11 OCO, and it was a preemptive system. And at the time, in 1988, they designed this or 1983, sorry, they designed this, this intelligence database. And they were like, this intelligence database is flawless. And we will tell us the Americans are going to do a first strike. And when we get that happen, then Oka is going to launch and they almost launched once. And the reason they almost launched is because there was a reflection of some clouds that said one of the inputs to intelligence and a human in the middle of it, a Russian guy said, yeah, I'll buy it. I just don't think they would launch one missile out of nowhere, blah, blah, blah, and just decide not to do it. But that's an example. Yeah. You can't take a man out
Starting point is 00:26:54 of this. I think that's a scary, a very scary proposition. Yeah. I think what some of the AI experts have talked about is, you know, we have our AI and I think we're going to try and make it good before we'd ever hook it up to something like that. But, you know, some of these, you know, these countries like China or Russia, you know, or some sort of third world country that decides they just want to start having fun, you know, we've kind of seen how Indian Pakistan are about ready to go nuclear on each other, that if they have systems that are AI, but maybe they're not coded well or poorly put together or ham-handed put together, they could hook that up to their systems and we would have a situation we'd
Starting point is 00:27:39 have to respond to if there was some sort of AI that was like, I'm halfway made. I'm halfway made. I'm going to launch missiles for fun. I don't know. You know, I don't know how that would. Yeah. That, that, that, or, or has holes where it can be hacked or vulnerabilities that other countries understand where they can manipulate it. So it's, it's not only a scary prospect, but it's a reasonable, it's a reasonable
Starting point is 00:28:03 predicate for another novel. If you ask him, Hey, how do you stop nuclear war? You kill off all the humans first. You remember that happened? That happened in the weird. You and I are probably old enough to remember Matthew Broderick and war games. Remember that million years ago, right? And you remember that he was, he was like dealing with the computer and it was like, Ooh, computer. And at the time, he was like, okay, so here's the situation. Here's us and the Russians. And it would like, ooh, computer. And at the time he was like, okay, so here's the situation, here's us and the Russians. And it would always end in Armageddon, it was honestly kind of the only answer. Here we are 40 years later, we're back.
Starting point is 00:28:34 And we're back. Yeah, we think we're pretty smart humans. We figured out how to destroy the whole world at once, all of us. Good job. Very clever. Very good. Yeah. Now, can you solve world hunger for Christ's sake? Anyway, now can't do that. We got styrofoam boxes for the ozone layer and nuclear bomb. I can't remember the line from, from rocking in America. Keep on rocking in America by Neil Young, Neil Young, that line. There's one that line that he has. We got bombs for babies.
Starting point is 00:29:08 Anyway, fun is fun. That's where we're a group of people, this human race. But anything more we want to tease out Mr. Woodward before we go? All that good stuff in e.coms you want people to look at. You know, I'm at mpwoodward.com also write the right blogs on there about geopolitics that help inform and inform my stuff. But yeah, three books up for presale line of demarcation, terminal velocity and red tide coming in the fall. Thank you very much for coming on the show again.
Starting point is 00:29:35 We'll look forward to having you hopefully soon here coming up. Genuine pleasure. Thank you, Chris. Thank you. And thanks for tuning in order of the book where refined books are sold. Thank you, Chris. Thank you. And thanks for tuning in. Order of the book wherever fine books are sold.
Starting point is 00:29:44 Tom Clancy, line of demarcation, a Jack Ryan Jr. novel out May 20th, 2025. You got about six more days to pick it up. Pre-order it so you can get all, you can be the first one on your block to read it and know all the deets. Thanks a lot for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Voss, Chris Voss 1, the TikTokety and all those crazy places In it be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time

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