How a Real Family Argument Became a Technothriller

**John Kuendig** (0:08)
Oh, Charlie had a story.

**Charles Levin** (0:10)
Welcome to The Munn Avenue Muse, where we explore stories behind the storytellers and the craft behind great books. I'm Charlie Levin, your host. Today, I'm joined by debut novelist John Kuendig, author of the provocative new techno thriller The Good Club. Fascinated by what happens when truth, power, and morality collide, John has crafted a story born from the fears and rumors that gripped the world during the pandemic years, questions about control, surveillance, and the hidden forces shaping global events.
In this conversation, we'll talk about the inspiration behind the novel, the challenges of writing a large scale thriller, the editing and rewriting process, and what happens when fiction starts to feel a little too plausible. John, welcome to the Munn Avenue Muse.

**John Kuendig** (1:07)
Thank you, Charlie. Glad to be here.

**Charles Levin** (1:09)
Oh, it's great to have you here. So tell us, what sparked the idea of Behind the Good Club? What made you say, I want to write a book about this?

**John Kuendig** (1:19)
Well, it started with my brother, my brother Bill, during the COVID period was a conspiracy fanatic. He followed QAnon, he followed everything that was there, and he would fight with me and two of my other brothers about what was real and what wasn't real.
They were very heated conversations at times. So one day I was walking with my wife along the shore in San Francisco, and I said to her, what if he's right? What if what Bill is saying is true? We don't know.
And so that kind of then said, why don't I write about this? Let's think about what the world will look like in 30 years if a number of these rumors were true. And that was the beginning of the idea.

**Charles Levin** (2:07)
Isn't that interesting? I ask that question all the time. I think that's the first time I've heard an answer like yours. It kind of came out of an argument. And looking at the other side of the opinionator in that argument. So that's so interesting. Well, the novel explores control, freedom, fear, and manipulation.
Did writing the book change the way you personally think about governments, technology, or society?

**John Kuendig** (2:36)
I'm going to answer that a couple of ways. First of all, I'm a child of the 60s. So I lived through the Pentagon Papers. I lived through the Iron Contra. I lived through Bush and what his people told him about Iraq. I was a political science major as an undergraduate. I have always believed that there is a lot more going on behind the scenes than what we're told. Did it change how I feel about them? No, not really. But two other things did change as I was writing the book. First one was, I was actually giving government access to technology in ways that they hadn't seen it before in this book, the government through the Good Club people.
I thought, well, does that really exist? Do they have that and should I be afraid of it? And yeah, I am. And this made me even more so. Look at government access to phones as they were doing before, and then they had to go to court to stop them from doing that.
General Motors cars until a year ago had bugs in them that would call your insurance company and tell them if you were a good or a bad driver, and you didn't know they were in there.
And then you look at the social algorithms. I play on most of them, and once in a while I'll say, I'm going to just change what my beliefs are or what I like, and suddenly I got a billion things like that showing up. Or if I look at something for a little bit longer than normal, the ability for them to track everything I'm doing kind of led into this. And then the last part is, as I was thinking to the book and how would all these things happen, it's real today. If you look at people behind the scenes controlling the government, you look at Elon Musk and what he did to fund Trump, you look at Soros and the Democratic Party, or Cochran, any of these guys, it's happening anyway. So mine was just picking them and bringing them to the forefront. Even The Good Club itself, as you may know, exists and it's a group of very rich people. And their goals, the real Good Club, their goals is to make the planet better.
And so I was able to look at those things and how do I feel about them? I don't trust the government anyway for all of those reasons. And I know that there are people behind the scenes that are manipulating what they're doing.