Navigating Alternate Realities with Blake Crouch

0:00Look, as a manager of people, as an employer, as an entrepreneur, and as even an investor in startups, I can tell you the most important thing for your business is the quality of the quality of people. you hire. The best part is that great candidates are already on LinkedIn. Employees hired through LinkedIn are 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor. And I will tell you that the great thing about LinkedIn is that you're not just looking at random people. You're able to see the people who your friends and trusted peers and colleagues who they trust and who they've hired in the past and who they recommend.

0:42And hiring doesn't have to be complicated. Realistically, when you have a business to run, you don't want to spend hours on hiring. You want to hire the right person as quickly as possible. That's why LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant suggests immediately 25 great big candidates daily so you can invite them to apply and keep things moving. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature. then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find the top candidates. That's linkedin.com slash Altachirk. Post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

1:25I am so excited. I am like a fanboy of my favorite TV show of the year. It's called Dark Matter. It's on Apple TV Plus. It's, I don't know how to describe it. It's thriller, it's drama, it's science fiction. It's emotional. It's great. It is a great show. Every episode's a cliffhanger. I mean, it's just a well-written show. The reason it's well-written is based on one of my favorite novels, Dark Matter, by one of my favorite novelists, Blake Crouch. Blake also was involved in writing the TV show. Blake agreed to come on the podcast and we talk all things writing, thrillers, dark matter, TV, publishing.

2:11He answered all my questions about my favorite show and about his writing process and on and on. So here's Blake.

2:23This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show.

2:39I almost even don't like categorizing it as science fiction because I feel that says, oh, there's science fiction shows and then there's real shows with good acting and, you know, good writing. Like, it's a great show. Like, I'm surprised how great the acting and the emotions are. and I you know it's always hard to talk to a fiction writer on the podcast because I don't want to give away any spoilers but perhaps let's let's first off let me just say great show everybody should watch Dark Matter I reached out to Blake because I love the show I'm so grateful you came on on the podcast uh Blake and but also I've been following your career and writing for quite some time so uh when i saw dark mariner was on tv i watched it instantly and it and it was well worth it and uh welcome to the show well thanks for having me on man and and i want to get i mean you're such you're so great at like coming up with these great science fiction ideas that on the one hand seems so obvious like oh my gosh why didn't somebody else beforehand think of such an idea and and some of these tropes are i don't want to say common but have been used before but dark matter was particularly like creative and interesting this idea that there's a a multi because of quantum mechanics there's a multiverse there's an infinite number of worlds and infinite number of versions of you where you make every decision forks off a new world and so the main character um well i can't even say much of the beginning because why don't you describe dark matter so then i let it lets me know which spoilers you're comfortable with or how you describe it i mean it's a by the way the book came out 10 years ago and the show's been out now going on it'll be three months soon and i feel like we can talk some spoilers um and if your viewers haven't watched the show go watch it and come back and listen to this uh dark matter is sort of a scientific exploration of that Robert Frost poem, The Road Not Taken.

4:52It's about a guy who has lived a pretty good life and has a wonderful family, has a good job. They're not really wanting for anything, but occasionally he wakes up at three in the morning and asks, what if I followed my work back in my late 20s and just stayed head down on that? Instead of embracing the family life and all that comes with that the good but also time is finite and you can't do everything um and it's a show that really gives him the chance to see what that other life might have been like um all in the service of sort of this epic journey across worlds and multiple versions of our characters um and yeah i mean it is sci-fi but it's about life too and and and And there's a thriller component as these kind of different versions of this character kind of vie for the reality that they want.

5:50That's right. That's right. Oh, yeah. All my stuff is probably first and foremost a thriller. I think that's the most core DNA of my fiction and the shows that I make. What one realizes when watching this is that it's not just like, oh, I wish I had, you know, chosen this different path over here and then my life would be different. But your personality depends on those choices you make. So, like, the two different characters, they seem like they're the same but just in, you know, other universes. But they're actually, you start to, the differences start to really crack open. And that is revealing to the other characters in their lives.

6:34Well, that's right. Well, a lot of that goes to Joel Edgerson's performance, a very nuanced take on two versions of the same man. But you see in the Jason 2, which is sort of the Jason, the interloper who kicks this whole story off, the one who takes over this guy's family. You see that not having had a family for all those years and just really focusing on himself and his work, it sort of made him a little harder around the edges. Whereas having a, being a family man and being selfless really made Jason one sort of our protagonist, um, a little more, I would say well-rounded and a little more generous of, of spirit to his loved ones because he's had a life of, um, that was in service, not just of himself.

7:28And, you know, I want to get into your writing career and process and so on, but I do want to, you mentioned the actor, Joel Edgerton. He really did a brilliant job, like conveying these subtle differences in personality, even towards the end where I won't give any spoilers, but there's, you know, there's aspects where it probably was particularly hard for him to do the acting. and he did a really great job. Like I was impressed how different that I had to really tell myself it's the same actor. Yeah, that's a huge compliment, I think, to Joel's work because he, but he also never made it feel like a skit.

8:06And one of the things that we talked about a lot was like Jason, if you look at all the versions of Jason, it's not like yellow Jason and black Jason and white Jason and purple Jason. They're all shades of the same color. And so the differences between them aren't massive and huge. They're subtle and the differences are attributable to the choices that they made. And we just really zeroed in early on on wanting the show to have a grounded feel. And part of that was not making wildly different versions of our characters. The closer they are to this core character, then I think it helps you buy in a little bit more.

8:50Now, do you believe that perhaps in some version of quantum physics, that what you described is more real than we realize? That there is a multiverse where every universe is spun off from every decision? I think it's highly possible. I think the – I mean, like with all of my books, which are kind of technically techno-thrillers, it's all about this core concept in the case of dark matter, this box, which cancels out all external stimuli and this drug that cancels out the consciousness piece of our minds that give way to decoherence or collapsing all realities into one. And yeah, it's just a matter of is this technology something that we would see in our lifetime?

9:41And I don't necessarily think it is in the case of dark matter. I had subject matter experts on the show, and we would talk about this kind of stuff and what it would actually take for us to put a human being in superposition. And it would take a lot. It would take a lot. Like, you know, what's the roots of this? Like, were you thinking to yourself one day, boy, if I had made X, Y, Z decision, I wonder what my life would have been like. Like, what were you, what were you thinking when you kind of, aha, this is the book I need to write? I had been, um, I didn't take any science courses in college, in college, except for, you know, geology, rocks.

10:23I was like, I was far more interested in, in literature and writing. But when I got out of school, I became fascinated with science just because of emerging technologies, and also I saw it as a way to sort of put a different sort of a spin on the kinds of books I was writing, which at the time was just more straight thrillers and a little bit of horror. um and this was in the early 2000s and you know we didn't have a marvel movie coming out every month that was making use of uh quantum superposition as its core story point um there hadn't really been like a real i don't think like definitive take on the idea of the multiverse and multiple versions of ourselves i mean there have been things that did it but Yeah.

11:11Nothing like huge. I mean, DC Comics has, you know, infinite Earths. They have their kind of – but, you know, the comic book version is not really – doesn't really deal with any of the actual issues. It's just sort of comic book. They're not human. It's not about like the human ramifications of playing with that sort of technology. So anyway, I fell in love with the idea of quantum mechanics, just started reading a lot about it and wondering if there's a way to turn that into a story. And I mean this was like 10 years in the making. And I was writing other things. And around the time that I started working on Dark Matter, I was in my mid-30s and just like for the first time in my life, like old enough to look back at the choices I had made, some great, some not so great.

11:53And I started wondering if there are other versions of Blake out there, what they were doing, what that looked like. And that just sort of married really seamlessly into this concept. What decision in particular do you wonder about? You know, early on, I thought I'd be a lawyer. Not because I really wanted to be. I just thought, well, writing isn't really a kind of career path you set out to endeavor to make money on. It's very lucky if you're able to support yourself in the arts. So I had applied to the law school out of college, but only to one. And I got waitlisted. So they considered me. but it was like on the bubble and i just was wondering like what what if i hadn't gotten in my life would look really really different you think it's one of those moments where how how close were they to admitting me and if they had i probably definitely wouldn't have pursued writing to the extent that i did i might have done it in my spare time or come to it much later in life or forgotten about it altogether and i just thought a lot about that and how tragic that would have been to me not to do it but for all i know if i'd been a lawyer and even happier than I am now.

13:10So I think it's dangerous trying to look at the path not taken with regret, which is sort of what the book and the show is about. And do you consider yourself pretty happy right now? I do. Yeah, I get to do exactly. I feel like I'm busy. I feel like I could not have ever imagined my life as busy as it is and creatively interesting. It's kind of hard to process sometimes especially coming off the after like a show like this which has been so long in the making for me and then suddenly like millions of people get to watch it and have opinions and thoughts about it it's very surreal yeah like on the surface you're kind of living the dream life you get to write science fiction novels they get made into tv shows i mean probably everyone listening to this podcast would be like oh i'll sign up for that if i can so yeah um and And, and, but was it like you started writing, like you said, in the early 00s, what was, what was the beginning of your career?

14:08Like, like what, what got you into writing? What did you start writing? You, you weren't always writing science fiction like this. You've written a couple of different genres. Yeah. Um, I was always a storyteller back when I was 10 years old. I tell my young, my younger brother, uh, bedtime stories and try to scare the shit out of them and then i wrote some short fiction in uh in middle school and i went through a spell of writing a lot of bad poetry in high school um and then my senior year of high school i started to try to write a novel and i finished it my freshman year at college at carolina and it was this giant like 200 000 words sprawling family saga that was you know was never going to go anywhere but But I sent it out to literary agents, and I ended up meeting one, and she rejected it.

14:58But it was very encouraging about the writing itself, and I was already writing a new thing at that point in time. And it was something that was – it was much more of a thriller. It became my book, Desert Places. And it was more of the kind of thing I loved to read and to watch. And I sold that, and that was my first book that was published. So your first thing, other than your virgin effort, your first thing that you wrote, you basically got sold it. Who did you sell it to? St. Martin's Press. And I was 22 years old. And I thought I made it. I've made it. I made it. And I had not made it. Okay.

15:39How much did they pay you for that first book? $6 ,000. $6 ,000. Okay. That was, that's a thousand dollars more than my first book. So congratulations. And did, um, when you were 22, you sold your first book, you got the news. Did you instantly go out and ask the girl you had a crush on out on a date? Cause you had confidence now or like, like what happened? No, I was actually married at the time. What? You were married at 22? Yeah, I was, I was married at 22. No, it was a big celebration and it felt like, oh, this is amazing. This is – but like everything, you set this – like you want to do something, and you achieve it.

16:17And then you realize that this little mountain you've been obsessing about getting to the top of, that when you get to the top of it, then you see the real mountains in the distance. And they're even farther away than that one is because the book comes out. It just does okay. It sells a few thousand copies. You get a new book deal, but it's not for that much more, and you're still having – now you're having – you still have a day job, and you can feel the dream of wanting to do this full time. and throwing yourself completely into it, like it's struggling to stay alive. And I did that for 10 years until I finally broke through and wrote something that really connected.

16:53I want to get back to the beginning stuff, but what was the breakthrough? It was a combination of things, actually. So this would now have been around 2011, and I had written this novel called Run. It was the first thing I wrote that had a little bit of a speculative twist to it. I wouldn't say – it's not sci-fi in the way that Weird Pines or Dark Matter or Recursion are, but it had a speculative thing going with it. And it just was the best writing I'd done, and the story had really come together. And I had a new agent, but they couldn't sell it because all of my track record for my first four books was not good.

17:36and interestingly this was the moment where self-publishing was a viable new thing and i got the rights back to my old novels and i published this and it's the only book i've ever published it's new it would be front list i self-published and it just took off and suddenly i was making every month what i had been paid for my first novel and in a very impulsive moment i I quit my day job and threw myself straight into all of it. And doing that allowed me to focus in a way I hadn't before. And then the next thing I wrote was the first book of the Weird Pines trilogy, which did change my life. And that eventually became like a TV series, right?

18:19M. Night Shyamalan directed it. It came out on Fox at the time. It was the biggest day-in-day release of a TV show ever. We had a great cast. It was right before the streaming thing really hit, came out in 2015. Yeah, it really increased my profile and also gave me more of a platform to do my next book, which was Dark Matter.

18:54Take a quick break. If you like this episode, I'd really, really appreciate it. It means so much to me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast. Email me at Alcatra at gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed. Thanks.

19:14Look, as a manager of people, as an employer, as an entrepreneur, and as even an investor in startups, I can tell you the most important thing for your business is the quality of the people you hire. The best part is that great candidates are already on LinkedIn. Employees hired through LinkedIn are 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor. And I will tell you that the great thing about LinkedIn is that you're not just looking at random people. You're able to see the people who your friends and trusted peers and colleagues, who they trust and who they've hired in the past and who they recommend.

19:57And hiring doesn't have to be complicated. Realistically, when you have a business to run, you don't want to spend hours on hiring. You want to hire the right person as quickly as possible. That's why LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant suggests immediately 25 great fit candidates daily so you can invite them to apply and keep things moving. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash Altature, then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find the top candidates. That's linkedin.com slash Altature. Post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

20:35Let's talk about the self-publishing for a second because you said you self-published and in part because of the frustration you were having getting published because publishers were relying so much on track record and so on. And around that time, you also saw things like Wool, which became Silo by Hugh Howey. That was originally self-published. And The Martian was originally. Right. So Andy Weir and Hugh Howey has been on this podcast several times. And self-publishing, Fifty Shades of Grey was originally self-published. All this was kind of occurring around the same time. in this as, as people realize that Amazon Kindle was not, it was print on demand.

21:16So you didn't have to like stock up with some vanity publisher, a bunch of books and the Kindle reader was, was coming out. So people could easily and cheaply download your book and you could control your marketing. And you got, like you said, you got paid every month and you got all the statistics about how it was selling. And, and you teamed up actually to write some stuff with J.A. Conrath, who's been a who's a writer who's a big proponent of self-publishing so what what right now are the pros and cons of self-publishing versus publishing i have no idea i haven't actively self-published since um 2012.

21:53i guess because like see i thought i thought the i never i knew that i always felt like we were in a moment and the moment was great and it was like there's this time where it felt like you could you just like open the umbrella upside down and in self-publishing money rained down out of the sky this was before amazon started gaming the system and trying to you know sell right now i know writers who are who do really well self-publishing and they spend thirty thousand dollars a month to do it i don't think it's not i know this it is not the same environment it was 10 12 years ago um i just i never believed that books were really going to go away i never believed to that like i i would sell a lot of books but i always wondered like when you sell a book for 2.99 are people really reading it i don't think it makes i never felt like the numbers were good the money was good but it didn't feel like you make fans at 2.99 for an ebook but but people can't make some fans but not not at that level it's it's a skewed metric like if you sell a million ebooks there's a much smaller percentage of those people are actually reading finishing the books and going on to your next one versus if you sell a million uh of a print book like you buy a print book you're probably gonna read a print book but you could buy you you could self-publish your book and say okay it's i want it available as kindle but also paperback hardcover and audible you can make the audible version too sure and i did that i did all i did all those things and i just saw i just saw the tail starting to yeah and you had to do more and i didn't get into writing to be my own marketing i mean i did it for a while i kind of built a um a core group of readers who you know helped get the word out and and loved my stuff and but that's not why i got into this business to to um to market myself and to put myself out there like that and so when i had the opportunity coming off of uh wayward pines which was not self-published it was published by Amazon publishing, which is a real publisher.

23:51I jumped because I was like, now is the moment to go back to traditional publishing in the right way. So I've gone back and forth with nonfiction and I can't really decide which I prefer. But like you say, when you self-publish, you're the publishing company. So you have to do everything. You have to market it. You have to find a designer. You have to do the whole thing. So it's a little, it's a different type of task. maybe less frustrating, maybe more frustrating, depending on your personality. So, you know, and how much you like dealing with publishers and so on. You know, just what self-publishing relied upon, in my opinion, was that Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and some Ashwards and all these places, but mainly Amazon, at that moment in time, wanted to give visibility to self-published authors.

24:45They stopped wanting to do that. And they saw them instead of bringing up a bunch of writers, letting them have an equal footing with traditional publishers, they just made, you know, I think they saw them then as, oh, these are marketing targets. We can sell marketing packages to them, which is what it's really become now. It's hard. It's hard. I think it was really cool for a moment, and it helped me. and my it bridged i i was a failed traditional novelist okay that's being harsh but i think i was a failed traditional novelist self-publishing bridged me into my success and for that i will always be grateful now earlier you kind of described that you basically your very first effort this 200 000 word family saga was didn't really work and then you wrote something you started getting more into writing you know thrillers and techno thrillers what is a thriller like what defines what are what's the boundaries of that genre would you say i think what really defines a thriller is sort of the intensity of the plot that's happening to the protagonist and everyone i think there's multiple versions of of what a thriller is that are valid But for me, it's the intensity of what happens to the protagonist.

26:05I think you have thriller and then I think you have horror. Not like horror in the sense of monsters and things like that, but I mean horror in the sense of like truly horrific stakes, truly an intensity of the experience they're going through. And all of my books have a little bit of that horror in them because all of my characters do go through hell from page one to the end of the book. For me, it's about that. It's about pace. It's about how fast, how much are you sucking a reader in and making them neglect their home duties? So what are the beats? So in the first chapter, is somebody kidnapped or killed?

26:47What would you say? And again, there's no formula. I'm just saying for you. Yeah. Maybe you can take the structure of Dark Matter or some other book. What are the basic beats of a thriller? as opposed to a family saga or or a mystery it's about it for i i think there has to be a certain normal normalcy about the protagonist's life to me a thriller is they have to keep they have to feel like a normal person and then a normal person who is dragged into an insane situation and how quickly they're dragged into it i think is up for debate uh yeah you can do it in chapter one but i think sometimes it's better to slow burn it out and like really let the shit hit the fan in chapter three um i i did that a little bit more with recursion the book i did after dark matter i didn't i didn't want to get pinned down into uh having to do some like crazy thing to grab someone's attention in the first chapter.

27:54Like I wanted, I wanted to do it in a more nuanced way that built and built and built. And there's all sorts of ways you can grab someone by the throat in chapter one. You can just slowly turn up the temperature between one and two and three and four. There's truly no one right way to do it. Well, let's say you do it in chapter four. How do you keep people interested in chapters one, two, three? How do you keep them interested? Yeah. Let's say you're going to really turn up the intensity in chapter four. What are the tricks of the trade to keep them interested in the reader in turning the page chapters one, two, three?

28:30Oh, you, see, I don't, it's not just about like what happens that I think pulls a reader along. It's asking questions that makes them lean in. Like, is there, there's something under the surface. There's a backstory that's only teased at, but you tease it in such a way that you're like huh um i don't ask me to name it i was literally reading a book last month um that did this very thing it was just like one sentence like the first chapter was kind of quiet and just setting the scene and introducing the character but it was like one sentence that suggested a backstory that it grabbed me um sometimes i think you can overly you can do it you can do too much in the first chapter because um you don't want to like use all of your ammo in chapter one and then because and that's what i read that happens a lot some crazy stuff happens in chapter one and then it's like flat lines for a while before while we do all the other business um it's a it's a weird equation and there's no one right way to do it every every book is hard because every book needs its own approach and like every book sort of has to teach you how it wants to be written well to make what you have in your mind work in in in In Dark Matter, I like how you do it in both the book and the TV show mirrors what happens in the book where, and I don't think this is a spoiler to describe chapter one, but basically Jason, Jason's friend Ryan, wins this great prize for his intellectual, his scientific brilliance and is given like a million dollars, all sorts of money and opportunity and his life seems great.

30:07And you're kind of, it's hinted at that this could have been Jason. And so, so you don't, you're not real, we're not really into the story at all at this point, but you do sense the kind of personal conflict Jason has had. And, and to some extent his wife also has had in, in their lives, uh, leading up to this point. That's tension as well. Like tension, isn't just like running from somebody or a gun coming out. There's a, there's a lot of different ways to, to build tension. And for me, it was like – in Dark Matter, I thought like, well, what I would do here is sort of give you a sense of something just not right under the surface.

30:47And that will pull you to the inciting incident, which is the masked man comes out, grabs him at gunpoint, whisks him away, and then you're off. I don't know. Do you have to be swept away by some crazy thing in Chapter 1? Like what works on you? I think for a regular, let's call it a procedural thriller, like a crime detective kind of thriller, I think I have to be swept away as early as possible because those are more formulaic. And I know as I'm reading what I'm getting myself into, I know some kid's going to be kidnapped. His parents are going to hunt down the killers or the kidnappers and whatever.

31:30um but for something like what you're doing there's there's an idea component where i'm trying to i don't need to be swept away because i'm also i'm i'm getting excited to be indoctrinated into the ideas i know roughly what the ideas are by the the you know the back cover and how other people have told me about the book so i know this is going to be a topic i'm interested in and and i'm curious how the writer is going to engulf me in those ideas so it doesn't see i don't i don't i don't really yeah that's fascinating i don't really sit around and think about i don't i don't try to um i think it's dangerous to try to reverse engineer how a book works because the premise of that is you're just going to go do that again that is not what i think readers want i think i think readers want to be surprised the best thing you can ever do is just surprise someone see i I think that's a really important point because like, I always wonder how writers do a police chase because how do you surprise somebody if you're writing a police chase?

32:33It's kind of obvious what happens in every scene of a police chase. Someone's being chased. They have some, they fall a little bit and eventually someone's either caught or they get away and we're going to have to chase them later again. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there's either. Yeah, exactly. There's a, yeah, there's a great quote. Robert Frost said that, you know, no tears in the reader, no tears in the writer, no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. Like, so you have to surprise yourself first. If you surprise yourself and if you move yourself, then there's a good chance the reader's going to feel that as well.