Episode 48 – Ruthless.com
The Worst Bestsellers
Worst Bestsellers
4.5 • 609 Ratings
🗓️ 9 May 2016
⏱️ 82 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kait, Renata, and their guest Patrick read a book a ghostwriter wrote based on a computer game created by Tom Clancy based on a nonexistent website. If that sounds confusing, it’s still not as confusing as this corporate espionage-y Orientalist mess of a novel. Please don’t hack our website and/or submarine! Dot Com!
Readers advisory: Here.
Footnotes: Tom Clancy’s Ruthless.com on Moby Games
Tom Clancy’s Politika on Board Game Geek
The Cold War of Clancy vs Clancy
No way is this domain worth thousands of dollars!
No way is this domain currently hosting pornography!
Candy pairing: Kait says an actual microchip, Patrick says a durian cream puff, Renata says Candy Crush.
Coming up next: X-Men: X-Cutioner’s Song by Scott Lobdell, Peter David, et al.
* Worst Bestsellers is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
(But no pressure, we’re also happy if you get these items from your local library or independent bookstore.)
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the worst bestsellers, where we read about the quaint and ruthless world of 90s technology so you don't have to. |
| 0:18.9 | I'm Kate. |
| 0:19.6 | And I'm Renata. |
| 0:22.4 | And for this episode, we read Ruth ruthless.com by Tom Clancy and Martin Greenberg joining us to discuss this ghostwritten |
| 0:28.8 | crypto techno thriller is Patrick Webb professional tech person and crypto hippie. Hi Patrick. Hello |
| 0:36.4 | it's nice to be here. |
| 0:39.0 | We're glad you're here and not trapped in some mysterious submarine and or underground technology vault. |
| 0:50.3 | No, in fact, thankfully I just got off a few airplanes which weren't crashed by irresponsible |
| 0:56.9 | actions of the pilot oh thank goodness um so right at the top i want to talk about why of all of |
| 1:07.8 | tom clansy's books we picked uh one. And the reason is 100% that the title |
| 1:15.3 | Ruthless.com was so funny to me. Like, you know, Patrick mentioned that he'd read a lot of |
| 1:23.3 | Tom Clancy and he'd be interested in discussing some kind of, you know, thriller type book on the podcast. And that's something that Kate and I don't have a lot of expertise in. So we were like, yeah, we should do that. And then I asked Patrick for suggestions and he was like, no, you should pick. And I was like, okay. So I searched the catalog for Tom Clancy and I was just like reading through this list of books, and I was like, oh, ruthless.com, that is the one. |
| 1:48.8 | And it's probably not, I mean, I hope it's not the best representation of Tom Clancy for a lot of reasons. |
| 1:59.1 | It's not, it's not even close to the best representation of Tom Clancy, partly because |
| 2:03.7 | Tom Clancy had very little to write with this book. |
| 2:07.2 | Yeah, so this is the second book in a series, and the series is based on a video game, |
| 2:15.8 | and then, so there's a couple of things going on here. |
| 2:19.5 | Friend of the show, Jenny, wrote when she heard we were doing Tom Clancy. |
| 2:23.4 | She wanted to let us know that apparently Tom Clancy's books are co-written. |
| 2:29.2 | It's because his wife's divorce lawyer was so good that she gets a cut of all of his future book earnings. |
| 2:36.7 | But if he co-wrote it, then it didn't count towards that. |
| 2:43.1 | So it's not co-written in the sense of like a James Patterson book where it says like James |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Worst Bestsellers, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Worst Bestsellers and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.