Tom Clancy

John Grisham, Michael Crichton, they were just all these paperbacks.

Tom Clancy.

Tom Clancy, all of whom I read at that age.

You can sort of pull off.

Daniel Steele, we'll talk about that later.

But we don't have the monoculture around these kind of big blockbuster authors anymore that we used to have.

And that was really interesting to me.

Well, but Gilbert, I think you said something earlier that I wanted to touch on, too, that he wasn't John Grisham or Tom Clancy in terms of like individual titles selling five million copies really at any point.

We get back to Magumi.

Magumi's going very covert ops, very Tom Clancy with his, you know what I'm saying? He's moving through the shadows.

He's dipping the niggas shadows and putting them in rear naked choke holes.

Um, ultimate creep.

And it was actually well written.

I think the thing a lot with a lot of these is the Tom Clancy's and James Patterson's of the world, even Stephen King, who though I think people have come around to Stephen King being a legitimate, like great American writer.

But these guys, the reason why they could churn them out, and they may be a little generic.

They may be playing to what the audiences want to get and obviously what sells.

Yes, Neil has always been a clear and present danger.

To borrow from Tom Clancy's spy novels, he's been a clear and present danger to Jeff Lieber's campaign.

Jeff was never able to lead a coalition because of Neil's candidacy.

And so you can talk about fatal, but it's only fatal if the spread between, let's say, Jeff Lieber and Mark Sutcliffe is under five points.

Well, who was the author that came to

town? Tom Clancy.

Tom Clancy.

He bought

the Vikings.

This guy

might not have been serious enough to even make artificial intelligence.

You guys mentioned Tom Clancy.

Political thriller, right? It's the sort of thing that...

Well, Dumas does so well in The Three Musketeers, right? It's a setup for a 19th century Tom Clancy, right? Where here you can imagine, right? Because I think that's it exactly.

It is a political thriller, Drew.

And so it necessarily has some elements of mystery, but they're subordinated to the psychology of the individuals inside of the story.

And, you know, there's the odd political shenanigans that are just going, hang on, that might actually be happening.

Like if you watch, you know, Tom Clancy or something, you're going, yeah, that's probably a documentary more than...

Yeah, ripped from the headlines.

So it's North Korea is invading South Korea.

And it's a novel that's an exciting tale, a mix of science fact and fiction that was the root of authors like Michael Crichton's novel and like Jurassic Park.

And it's got the military and political escapades that people will find in Tom Clancy's books.

And I've tried to... to model my work after authors that I like like that.

Barry, I wish you continued success.