Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey everybody, this is Brad Thor and you are listening to the Son of a Blitch podcast.

Speaker 2: 0:20

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Son of a Blitch podcast. I'm your host, George Blitch, and guys, today I just wrapped up a wonderful conversation with the one and only Brad Thor. He is a number one New York Times bestselling author of now 24 books, that's right. 23 of those books have been with his main character, scott Harvath, who is a former US Navy SEAL, a CIA operative, a true leader and patriot and man. Those books are just so fascinating.

Speaker 2: 0:48

The one we discussed primarily today is his newest book, which drops today, which is called Shadow of Doubt, and it is by far one of the greatest that he's written. You know he talked about this being one of the more challenging ones and rewarding, and we talk about the whys of that question there too. And you know we we really get a lot of background with Brad talking about what it is that goes on behind the scenes of writing, his you know discipline, his research, the studying, the writing. What it is that you know is the, the output of these books, like what's going on behind the scenes. So we kind of pull back that curtain a little bit and talk about that and that personal journey with him. And you know his travels too and how that it makes into the book. We talk about him being a part of the Red Cell program, which he'll discuss in this podcast, and we talked a lot about what's coming up too.

Speaker 2: 1:37

In case you guys weren't aware, scott Harvath is coming to the screen. What a wonderful team he's got together with that. So we discussed that and so much more. We had a wonderful conversation, as always. Brad Thor is such an entertaining, educational and just informative person and I really really enjoyed chatting with him today.

Speaker 2: 1:58

I think you guys are really going to love this podcast. I very much encourage you all to go over to his website, bradthorcom, and you can sign up there for a new newsletter, notifications, information that's coming out, for anything he's got his hand on, and I think you guys really should do that. I highly encourage that Just wonderful guy all around. Thank you again, brad, for joining me and you guys. You're going to love this. So, without further ado, here is the podcast with number one New York Times bestselling author, brad Thor, and we're discussing Shadow of Doubt, which you got to order today if you haven't already. You guys enjoy. Thanks again. If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe, share with a friend and give it a follow and thank you so much for tuning in. You guys take care, hey, brad, how?

Speaker 1: 2:39

are you doing today? I'm well, George. Thank you for having me, oh man.

Speaker 2: 2:43

I'm well, george. Thank you for having me. Oh man, I'm excited for you to be here. Listen, this is a great day. This podcast will drop on August 6th, the day that Shadow of Doubt hits the bookshelves and the audiobook waves and everything. This is very exciting. This is your 24th book. You've taken your main character, scott Harvath, through so much. He's a former US Navy SEAL, cia's most lethal weapon, and he's been on some fascinating missions. I just wanted to start with, maybe if you could give a brief synopsis of this book for the listeners. You know some folks may be new to your work, and so I wanted to have you kind of do that and then maybe give a little snapshot of who Scott Harvath is.

Speaker 1: 3:19

Okay so I'm going to start with one thing that you did not mention, but I think it's good to establish a baseline for all the listeners and the viewers of the podcast, which is I tell people that my books are like the James Bond movies. If you have never seen a Bond movie before and the newest Bond movie is in your local movie theater, you can go right down and see it. You will not be missing anything if you haven't seen a prior Bond movie, and it's the same thing is true for my book. So if you have not read a Brad Thor thriller before, you can jump right into Shadow of Doubt and you will not be lost. You won't have a problem. It's all that. All that is good.

Speaker 1: 3:53

So Shadow of Doubt is basically it opens with a cargo plane taking off from a remote airbase that's accompanied by four of a particular country's most lethal fighters and it's being picked up on Western radar and a lot of the NATO allies are very concerned. They don't know what's in this cargo plane, they don't know where it's going. Alarm bells are going off at the Pentagon. The next chapter you've got a French intelligence agent who is uncovered in absolutely devastating series of moles throughout the French intelligence community and he doesn't know who he can trust. And he says the only person I can go to is my colleague, the CIA station chief in Paris, and I'm going to see him for breakfast and I'm going to lay out everything I've discovered about these spies throughout my own services. And before he can even get himself tucked into bed, he's murdered in his apartment in Paris. And then, finally, we've got the United States. Like I said, the alarm bells are going off in the Pentagon and they're concerned about a Russian defector that just crossed from northern Russia into Norway and they think this guy is the key to unlocking all these mysteries, including what is on board that cargo plane.

Speaker 1: 5:01

So my protagonist, scott Harvath, former Navy SEAL who's done private intelligence work and does a lot of contract work at the CIA, he's on his way to Oslo. And so the station chief in Norway, at the US Embassy in Oslo, meets him at the airport and says listen, this is what we need you to do. Essentially, they say we need you to spy against your fiance. That's why he's going to Oslo. She's a deputy director at the Norwegian Intelligence Service and he basically tells them to go F themselves. He's not going to do it and they said well, we thought you were going to say that. And then they blackmail him. They found something morally ambiguous from his past that could be looked at one way or the other and they've basically said we're going to use this against you. And so it's the first time in my character's career he's been blackmailed into service. He has always gladly stepped up to service nation and now, because this is such a questionable thing, they want him to do, they're blackmailing him into it. So those are all like.

Speaker 1: 5:52

That's like in the first three chapters, those are the kickoff points for the book and that's that's essentially. That's lighting the fuse for you on shadow of doubt. So it's all these different things and trying to untangle them and then bring them all together and solve this big puzzle, which basically three different intelligence agencies each have pieces but they don't know if they can trust those pieces and the people that have garnered the intel for them. So it's the shadow of doubt. There's a lot of doubt. Can I trust this person? Can I trust myself? Can I trust my own government to my own intelligence agency? So that's all kind of mixing around in this stew of action and intrigue in Shadow of Doubt.

Speaker 2: 6:27

Well, it's a fascinating book. There's so much detail involved there too. I really wanted to kind of pinpoint too. You talked about how there's an article about a French spy scandal in the sixties that was known as the Sapphire Affair. That was part of the inspiration for this book. What was it about that, that story and that scandal that really kind of inspired you to kind of run with Scott in that direction?

Speaker 1: 6:47

So I'd say that's a great question, george. My kids make a joke and it's from the internet. My kids didn't make this up, but they always tease me and they say, boy, you know, that's really got. It's interesting being a father in middle age because you've had two choices of passions. You can buy a little green egg and smoke meats with it, or you can get into World War II era history. You have those two choices. My kids like joke around. There's only two things you get to do as a middle-aged dad.

Speaker 2: 7:10

You can't do both. No, you can't.

Speaker 1: 7:12

Well, then you have no time for the kids and then they get upset, that's true.

Speaker 1: 7:16

So I really do. I'm fascinated by World War II. I've long been fascinated by the NATO alliance and it's the most successful military alliance in the history of the world. If you look at the history of warfare on the European continent and what NATO has been able to prevent from happening, it's an amazing organization. My junior year I've been back a bunch of times.

Speaker 1: 7:37

I was just there last year researching this novel and I didn't realize that there's this building behind the Arc de Triomphe that was built in the shape of the letter A and that that was the original NATO headquarters. And I thought I knew everything about NATO. I did not know that NATO was originally placed in Paris and the building was built in the shape of an A that was supposed to represent A for alliance among the NATO countries, and that de Gaulle was really too big for his britches and he wanted to sit at the big kids table with the US and Britain and he wanted to be on equal footing. He wanted France. He really had these kind of delusions of grandeur. I think he thought a lot more of France than the Allies did and there was a lot of bad blood between France and NATO and basically they did the hokey pokey, they kept one foot in and they pulled one foot out, and I never knew this. I never knew that we had to pull our air bases out of France, that we moved the NATO headquarters from Paris to Brussels that's why it's in Brussels now is because we had to pull it out of Paris. And so in the 60s there was also the Sapphire Affair that you brought up, which I thought was fascinating, because there's a little known film by Alfred Hitchcock called Topaz, and Topaz is based on the Sapphire Affair. And Topaz was a book by a great thriller writer in the 70s named Leon Uris, and essentially what happened was the Soviet Union had gotten all these spies placed in different places throughout the French government, the French intelligence services, and when word got back to JFK the reason word got back to JFK is America got this big Russian defector and he said listen, one of the biggest pieces of intel I can give you guys is that you can't trust the French.

Speaker 1: 9:21

They are shot through with spies. And this put JFK in a very difficult position because the CIA couldn't contact its usual counterparts over in the French intelligence services. So JFK picked a trusted aide. He hand wrote a letter and said you take this to the president of France. You stand in the room with him, you watch him open it, you watch him read it, and then you take the letter back and bring it back to me.

Speaker 1: 9:43

We were so afraid of any intel getting to the Soviets, and the Soviets bragged that this penetration of the French intelligence services, as well as another interior penetration in NATO, meant that they could get top secret NATO intel within 24 hours. In fact, they were picking up, they were stealing so much top secret intelligence from NATO that they stopped marking the documents in Cyrillic. It was coming in so fast and furious that they just used the NATO numbering system. They left the numbers in place and adopted the NATO classification systems and numbering systems. And it's one of the only times the Russians did not use Cyrillic to mark documents because they were coming in so fast and so furious. And it's amazing. I asked buddies of mine I'm like have you ever heard of this? Did you know that, basically, france didn't fully come back into NATO until a few years ago? And I couldn't find a single person within my sphere of acquaintance that knew this, george. And so I thought, okay, this is kind of cool and it would be neat to update this idea for a thriller of having the intelligence services in France shot through with spies.

Speaker 1: 10:50

One of the reasons I thought that would be cool is that with Brexit, with Britain leaving the European Union, the French are very keen to kind of position themselves as the 800 pound gorilla on the European continent. And they've been doing a lot of stuff in Ukraine that you don't read about in the newspaper. They've been sending a lot of advisors down there. They've been donating a lot of weapon systems because they want the Ukrainian military to be dependent upon French systems. They want them to know how to use them, like them and buy them in the future. And also the French military, the Ministry of Defense, is very, very wise because they realize the drone warfare we're seeing vis-a-vis the Ukrainians attacking the Russians, how the Russians are jamming some of the electronics, how the Ukrainians are getting around that. That's the future of warfare and the French have said we want to be on the cutting edge of that technology. So to me, this kind of hearkening back to that Sapphire affair, kind of updating that in the modern day, I thought, okay, that would make for a really cool summer thriller.

Speaker 1: 11:50

And again, there's a lot of stuff that goes into my head when I write these. But essentially I'm writing books that have got short, crisp, cinematic chapters and I hear from two pieces of fan mail. George, that I love to get is number one. I gave the book to my son or my husband or my sister or whatever. They weren't readers. You've turned them into readers again. That's number one. And then number two, I call what I do faction where you don't know where the facts end and the fiction begins, and I love hearing from people that say I have to read your books with my laptop open because I'll read something and I'll go. There's no way, that's true. Thor must've made that up and I'll Google it. And, oh my God, it's true. So that's fun for me that there's all these neat little things in the books that you might not know about but that you learn while going on this. Great really, the high adrenaline, fast paced adventure.

Speaker 2: 12:35

No, and I also will add to that not only my laptop up in your books, but having a map so you can just see where everything is. I think it's great and visual, or globe, to be able to spin around. Okay, this is where this character is going in this, and man, it's. It's fascinating this book is. It's riveting and thrilling from beginning to end. Uh, I lost a lot of sleep, but I was glad to do it. It just couldn't put it down and I'm like it's three o'clock. In was your most difficult and rewarding to write.

Speaker 1: 12:58

And I was just curious. You know what was that that made it so?

Speaker 2: 13:10

challenging and the rewarding side of it as well.

Speaker 1: 13:13

So it's a good. It's a good question. So there's a there is a particular character. Again, you don't have to have ever read one of my previous novels to to pick up this one and enjoy it. So there's a character that pops up that Harvath had first encountered I don't know, I'm looking off to the side because I can see my books lined up here maybe 12 or 13 books ago, where he stole a, a really cool supercar from a hotel. It was idling with the valet and he jumped in and he stole it because he had to make it to get away and there was a woman in the passenger seat and that's 12 books ago and I brought her back, which was fun.

Speaker 1: 13:47

There was something that happened four books ago at the end. I never fully described it, I kind of planted this seed there that comes up, which is that scene in which something morally ambiguous happened that could be taken one way or the other, and so, for this is this is the high wire act, george, that I have to do, where I have to give enough information to bring brand new readers up to speed, but not bore existing readers and, uh, you know, people that have been with me from book number one, so it was fun to. I always knew that Harvath had done something. I didn't lay it out black and white like put it in the reader's face, but I knew that once my longtime readers read Shadow of Doubt, they're going to go. Oh, I never thought of that.

Speaker 1: 14:31

Is that what happened at the end of that book? I didn't think to even ask that question. Oh wow, that's so cool. So it's a neat Easter egg. There's a couple of Easter eggs in there that I think readers are going to find longtime readers are going to find long-time readers are going to really, really enjoy.

Speaker 1: 14:44

So it was tough in the sense that I wanted to make sure that paid off without it seeming gratuitous. I didn't want people to feel I wanted it to be something where people would be like oh yeah, I can understand why that happened, instead of, oh, he just hid that behind a curtain and that's cheating, you know, which was not the intent. In fact, I didn't even have the idea. I knew what Harvath did in that final scene in my book in Near Dark and I never explained it. I knew what he did and I knew at some point it would come back. So that was one thing and how that might motivate Harvath, and there's another motivation in this book for him. So not only is he being blackmailed by the CAA, he finds out he had a list of people responsible for something very, very bad that he had gone through and he'd killed everybody on the list, and this defector who rolls into Norway shares with him that actually he didn't have a complete list, that there was one name that he did not know should have been on his list. So it gives him added motivation. And the difficulty level went up because I did something I've never done before, which is you really don't see the actual bad guys until the end of the book.

Speaker 1: 15:47

Normally when I write you've got every X amount of chapters. You've got a chapter with the bad guy right, so he's picking the target where he's going to bomb. And then the next chapter he's assembling the components for the bomb. And the next chapter one of the neighbors is suspicious and the police come around but they look at the wrong apartment. You know there's this building of tension where you're seeing the bad guy working through his or her steps towards their ultimate goal, and I did not have that in this book. So essentially the readers kind of left working through the three different pieces of the puzzle in real time with the people who are handling those pieces of the puzzle If that I'm being vague because I don't want to give away too many spoilers who are handling those pieces of the puzzle, if that I'm being vague because I don't want to give away too many spoilers.

Speaker 1: 16:23

Sure, sure, sure. But that's what made it difficult and it's also what makes my job so rewarding. So I've written 24 books overall, 23 with Scott Harvath as the main character. I wrote one year. I did two books and I'd done a spinoff book about an all-female Delta Force team called the Athena Project.

Speaker 1: 16:40

So it's 23 books with Harvath and the challenge with a repeat character like that is how do you keep them fresh, how do you keep them exciting, how do you keep them believable for your audience and what's his motivation and all that kind of stuff. So that's what was really difficult about this book. But it's all the more rewarding to get to the end and then to have reviewers. The early reviews for it have been fantastic and so that's really. It's just been really, really good and that's that's very rewarding for me as the author to be at this point in the series to still have the book hitting the top of the New York Times. The book's hitting the top of the New York Times list and and readers just saying my God, this guy never, thor, never, slows down. The stuff's just continues to be a great ride. And, george, at the end of the day.

Speaker 1: 17:21

I don't work for Simon and Schuster, I work for the readers. They're the ones who pay my paycheck and as long as they read, I have a job and they're the most important people in the world to me, next to my family, and I want to keep them happy. So I constantly work my ass off. My dad's a Marine, my mom was a flight attendant for TWA and they told me even if you're a broom pusher, you work your butt off and you'd be the best damn broom pusher in the world.

Speaker 2: 17:48

Well, it shows too, and like you were talking about too, you don't have to have started with Lion's Illusion, you don't have to be at the book one, but anybody who picks up this book or any of your other books is, I think, ultimately going to be called to go and begin at the beginning of that journey and make their way through, because it's such fascinating writing. Every single book is just amazing standalone, but this series and being able to see the progression of Scott and the other characters that you bring in is just phenomenal. I really wanted to take a minute to speak about the cover design, because that is something that's such a huge element when people are putting out their books, and I wanted to know what did that look like? Did you have an idea in mind? How did this actual design come about?

Speaker 1: 18:31

So I can't get my finger into your screen to point at the book that's just over your right shoulder. I've got the book right here. So I went through a bunch of photography that I'd seen online and I knew that I wanted to do something with the Capitol, kind of in stormy weather. So I was searching Capitol, gray skies, capitol lightning, storm, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I wanted to. You want that cover? Listen, the cover helps people pick up the book, the title and the cover, and so I wanted to suggest Jeopardy. I wanted it to be obvious this was the United States, and so putting the flag at half mast.

Speaker 1: 19:14

We're doing my books differently the covers than we ever did before, where I'm sitting down with the art director at my Emily Bessler books and Atria books at Simon Schuster, sitting down with him as I'm beginning to write the book, and so he'll say well, what are kind of your broad brushstroke ideas? And we put together a creative brief, if you will, and I said this is what I want, and he came right back with it, and the only tweak we did is it wasn't immediately evident that the flag was at half mast and we needed to shine up the silver on the flagpole. That was it. I mean, he knocked it, he got it, he got the assignment. No-transcript. They just hire the best people. They're just fabulously excellent at what they do and they hold themselves to very high standards. I like working with people like that.

Speaker 2: 20:32

Absolutely, absolutely. The end product. I mean it speaks for itself and, yes, I know what you're talking about with that texture. It's fun to hold that and just have that in your hand.

Speaker 2: 20:39

Great artwork I wanted to touch base on. There's a particular passage that just really jumped out to me and in that you're talking about the engagement to Scott and Solveig and their relationship and how it's interrupted by their professional and sometimes their personal responsibilities. And in that passage you wrote Solveig Kolstad has appeared at the lowest moment in life and had given him a reason to live, something he hadn't imagined would ever be possible. There were two shattered vessels he broken from the murder of his wife, she abandoned by the husband because she couldn't bear children. Broken from the murder of his wife, she abandoned by the husband because she couldn't bear children. Yet what had felt like the end of is actually the beginning.

Speaker 2: 21:22

A form of Ken Ken Sugi, a Japanese art of putting together pieces of pottery, back together with gold. I loved the idea that you brought that art form into. I think it perfectly encapsulates their relationship and I was really curious because I remember back in college I was in Boston learning aboutulates their relationship, and I was really curious because I remember back in college I was in Boston learning about that art form and I was curious when did you first come about learning about that and what was it that inspired you? Because I think it is very eloquent of their kind of encapsulating their relationship and I was very curious. I just jumped out. I was like, oh, I love it that you mentioned that.

Speaker 1: 21:50

So I originally envisioned their relationship as two coffee mugs being dropped on the kitchen floor and then putting it back together as one. But it's not a perfect reassembly and there's jagged pieces all around it, right? So you've got to be careful how you approach this relationship, because you're going to get hurt, you're going to get cut, and it wasn't as elegant as I wanted. It made them both sound prickly and a little short-tempered and things like that. And then I've seen that art form at social media and on the internet and everything, and reading about Japan in the past, I'd seen it and I thought, okay, that's beautiful that you can actually take two broken vessels, which is what they both are. That's beautiful that you can actually take two broken vessels, which is what they both are.

Speaker 1: 22:33

They're both broken, they both had these terrible relationships, they were both at very low points in their lives when they met each other and that you could bring those shattered pieces together and actually fuse them with that gold and they become stronger and what they have by bringing their pieces together is more beautiful than what the pieces were separately. So that was kind of the, but I'll tell you what that makes me feel so good that that resonated with you enough as a reader that you wanted to call that out, so that that tells me that you know you want to be careful. I like doing some of that in the books, but that's. I don't want to be doing that too much because I'm an action thriller guy. But I thank you for calling that out because that tells me that you know I, I know I have a very mature and intelligent audience and that people are going to appreciate that. So thank you for that, george.

Speaker 2: 23:19

Oh, absolutely man. No it it, it just jumped right off the page I was like where'd you go to school in Boston? Well, I was going to bring that up. Northeastern university who?

Speaker 1: 23:28

you have a character who went and got their masters.

Speaker 2: 23:32

I was going to ask was there a particular reason that you chose? I mean, obviously, the proximity. You had Smith and then Northeastern and she's there in Massachusetts and the Cape and there's a lot of uh, you know her, her life and surrounding her grandmother and so there's a lot of history there. We don't give too much away there, but I was curious was there a reason?

Speaker 1: 23:48

Yeah, yeah, there's a, there's a reason. So, number one, because of the things that Maggie studied, it was important. Northeastern offers some of the best the best educate, one of the best abilities to get educated. For somebody that runs Russia House at the CIA, that's a big reason. It's also a nod to Boston because this is going to sound crazy and it's going to sound crazy to people who don't know the following person's background.

Speaker 1: 24:13

Okay, so a lot of people don't know how active Julia Child, who lived in Boston, had her show on the Boston Public Television Station. How active Julia Child was in the precursor to the CIA, the OSS. During the war. Julia Child invented shark repellent. I mean, she was an amazing, amazing person.

Speaker 1: 24:34

So when I created this character at the CIA of Maggie Thomas, whose grandmother had been at the CIA, one of the first women to get hired and everything who was a legend there, that's based on Julia Child. That is kind of an homage to you know people think of her as this goofy, weird sounding, you know, very tall woman who cooked French food, but she was an amazing patriot and she did a lot for this country to help us win the war and then continued on in service to the nation when when the CIA started. So anyway, that that's part of the reason, and I watched both seasons of Julia on Netflix, which are fantastic. It's a fun look at Boston. It's a really fun look at the publishing world, which is what I like in having gone to school in Paris when they flashback to her time in Paris.

Speaker 1: 25:20

So I just really like Julia Child. I like her as a human being, but I love her as an American patriot and what she did. So that's a little thing in there. I don't say Julia Child. In fact, this is the first, it might be the only interview in which I talk about this. I haven't talked about it for anybody else, but that's part of the reason for Boston as well, since that was home to Julia and Paul Child.

Speaker 2: 25:40

I love it. I love it. Well, I'm glad that not it was, it was a very. It was the same thing too with the Gansugi. I was like, oh yes, cool, northe it, but it's, you know, it's a good school. So it was a great school. You know, you just mentioned Paris and you said you went back to Paris, kind of to studying up for this book and doing some research. Was there any other places or what was you know when you were in Paris? So there's some specific things that you were looking for that kind of made it in the book that you can include as far as that research.

Speaker 1: 26:08

Yeah. So in chapter one, when the French intelligence officer is coming home from the train station, he'd been at his cottage up in Brittany and he comes home and he doesn't want to go right into his apartment and he's a little bit of a drinker. He thinks somebody might be tailing him. So he pops into the restaurant across the street from his house. That's a real restaurant in Paris called Robert and Louise, and it's funny.

Speaker 1: 26:29

I was just with a good buddy of mine over the weekend and he was the national security advisor under the last administration. His name is Robert O'Brien and before that he was the hostage czar for the United States, responsible for negotiating the release of Americans held either by state or stateless actors overseas, overseas. And so Robert introduced me to some of his friends and they said oh, you're a thriller writer, I haven't read any of your books. What should I read? And immediately Robert steps in front of me and answers Backlash, because Backlash was dedicated to him and has a hostage czar in it. And what's fun is that? So he did that.

Speaker 1: 27:06

Every time we bumped into one of his friends he was like you got to read this book. He would never let me answer which book people should start with. But I brought him a copy of Shadow of Doubt and he started reading it and he goes oh my God, you put in this restaurant in Paris, robert and Louise. He said I've been there and I said, really, he goes, yeah, I'm Robert and my wife's middle name is Louise. So we thought this restaurant was like the, and it's a great. It's a famous restaurant that's been around since the 1950s and all they do is roast meat there. That's they do one thing and they roast, roast roast, and it's fantastic.

Speaker 1: 27:36

So that there is a little thing I do about some buildings that aren't what they seem in Paris investigating those, because one of those buildings had been mentioned in a book, like in the 1980s, and I'd always wanted to see it and I hadn't done it when I was a student there because I didn't read the book until after I got out of college.

Speaker 1: 27:58

So anyway, there's a whole bunch of little things that happen in and around Paris that I went and that I like to do that if I can. I like to, I like to be there, I like to sit at the cafe and look at the building. There's a safe house that gets used in Oslo, that Solveig uses, and I did not go in that actual apartment but I did see it from like across the street in another building and all the drapes are open and I'm like that's going to be the safe house that I put in the book. So I like to do that. That's part of the fun of being an author is doing that research, because you want it to be as authentic as possible.

Speaker 2: 28:31

Absolutely Well. You know your authenticity signs shines through and also the discipline. I mean we just talked about this too 24 books, what an enormous output and the quality it's characteristic in every single book. I was kind of curious, like what does your writing and research schedule look like when you're working on these books? Do you have a discipline, set time every single day, is it? You know what? What does it kind of look like as far as that routine while you're working on these books?

Speaker 1: 28:59

It's a great question. Um, and I forget who said this, but being a successful writer is all about seat of pants. To seat a chair. Uh, and that's. That's very, very true. Jack London had said that you can't wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club Also very true.

Speaker 1: 29:29

So the research is the fun part, because, essentially, when I pick a subject, it and be able to put things on the page in such a way that I can inform my readers, but also I can do it in a way that's fun, that's quick, that's fast. I mean, the last thing you ever want to do is slow a book down. So you've got to be very, very careful with how much you put in and in fact, probably the hardest part is deciding what to leave out, because if you're a good researcher, you're finding lots and lots of cool stuff, and Stephen King calls it killing your darlings when you go through and you have to cut out stuff that you thought was really cool but is slowing down the book to make it move fast. So I've always treated it like a 9 to 5 or an 8 to 6 job. My kids are in college now. Job. My kids are in college now so, but before they were, when they were home, you know I'd want to be there for breakfast in the morning and that kind of stuff. Get them off to school and then I'd go work out and then I'd be in the office and I'd work till about six and then I'd be home for dinner at 630. So that that really I try to contain it, because while this is my occupation, it can eat you alive being an author, right.

Speaker 1: 30:33

So you've got a deadline where you owe the manuscript to the publisher, but how you get your work done in there is up to you. So some people it's. You know. The old joke is I love deadlines. They make the most beautiful sound as they go whizzing past.

Speaker 1: 30:46

So you really do have to be disciplined. It is hard. I think there's so many distractions and I know people that'll and I've done it before too where they've unplugged their wifi routers and things like that just so they can't be tempted to just get online. And obviously a lot has been going on in the country over the last, you know, four years, eight years.

Speaker 1: 31:04

Whatever you can, you can tell yourself particularly if you're a political animal like I am you can tell yourself that it is the responsible thing to do to be a well-informed citizen. So therefore, I need to read these 10 articles that have nothing to do with the book I'm writing, but have everything to do with the shape and direction of the country and all this kind of stuff. So if you're good at lying which a lot of writers are, because that's part of what writing is is lying you can lie to yourself and you can get yourself in a lot of trouble. So it requires a lot of self-discipline and you can't get 24 books into your career without having it. But I do find that certain projects, as the degree of difficulty goes up, you have to do it, you have to figure out a way to do it, and the people who can do it, who can be disciplined, are the ones who are going to be successful in the long run.

Speaker 2: 31:58

Absolutely, and you know you talked about in other interviews and articles about the idea that when you're not writing, you're editing or researching.

Speaker 2: 32:08

actually, starts first, but there's a cycle and then you got the PR and everything and obviously you know you're about to do a little bit of a book tour as this kind of launches. I'm sure there'll be a lot more interviews such as this and podcasts and whatever it may be. But I was kind of curious. You're obviously a huge fan of travel international travel at that and there's, you know, times, the family and obviously the summertime, maybe the kids are back home from college. I was just kind of curious is there a certain period of time where you're like I am not going to work at this point in time and give yourself that break, or that? You know mental, you know, drop out just for a minute, because it sounds like the cycle is 24, 7, 365 in a sense.

Speaker 1: 32:48

you know, but I was wondering like what is it that?

Speaker 2: 32:49

you're doing and when are you picking that time, like you handed it in? All right, I'm off for a couple of weeks. What does it look like for?

Speaker 1: 32:55

you on that kind of schedule. So I'm not complaining about the fact that I have a family. I'm very glad that I've got a family. I'm going to do that as a as a setup for this next thing.

Speaker 1: 33:07

My joke I became an author because I'd always wanted summers off and my dream had always been to travel in Europe for the summer. I mean, I had lived, I'd gone to school in Paris, I'd lived in Greece and worked in a bar and I had a travel show on public television before I became an author. What ends up happening is I think it was John Lennon that said life is what happens when you're busy making other plans, and the moment you have kids, everything changes. So I wanted to do a lot more travel, but one child would have baseball camp, the other child would have tennis camp and all this kind of stuff, and it wasn't like sleepaway camp, it was daytime camp and it was local in Nashville and all that stuff. So my ability to travel, my ability personally, was fine, but I had family responsibilities and I couldn't do that. So I I I missed a lot of travel. Then COVID obviously shut us down for a couple of years.

Speaker 1: 33:56

I have a friend who's a songwriter here and his name is John Bettis and he wrote a lot of the hits for the Carpenters. And John asked me a great question, artist to artist, at one point and you being an artist, george, I think you'll appreciate this he said Brad, how do you reset your creative battery? And I said, brad, how do you reset your creative battery? And I said what are you talking about? And he goes well, I'd finish an album with the Carpenters. And he said I had my boat in Los Angeles, my sailboat, and I would sail out to Catalina and I'd anchor off Catalina and for a week I would only eat what I could pull out of the ocean. He said I wouldn't set foot on land, it was just me on the boat. And he said that was the reset for me. And I'd never really thought about it.

Speaker 1: 34:34

And when John said that to me, I was like okay, here's the deal, I've got it. I got to reset that creative battery. It doesn't mean I don't love my family, I've got to get away. If the family can come, great. If they can't come, also great. I can just sit and not say anything, because I love to sit in a cafe and just watch people walk by.

Speaker 1: 34:52

So I started committing to trying to get away in the fall after book tour and things like that if possible just to kind of get the cobwebs out of my head, to kind of do a reboot creatively and memory space wise. There's so many things I have to remember for the interviews because I'll get asked questions about the book and that kind of stuff and I want to make sure that I because I'll get asked questions about the book and that kind of stuff and I want to make sure that I can answer all those fully and sharply. So that really is my reset is a little bit of international travel. I'll go see friends somewhere in another country, whatever it might be, and that really is the creative reset. Like John Bettis would get in his boat and sail to Catalina for a week.

Speaker 1: 35:33

For me it's to just get out of the country and just drop into a completely. What's really funny is I don't watch any TV and I don't read my email and I don't check the internet. There's something about physically being away, particularly, like I said, I'm a real political animal. So there's something about physically being outside the United States where I feel like I don't have to be on top of every single bit of breaking news. So that's kind of cool. It's very relaxing.

Speaker 2: 35:55

Good, I'm glad you have that, you know, kind of making a little pivot here, I wanted to talk a little bit about how you were recruited into the Department of Homeland Security's Red Cell program. It's an elite group of writers and artists brainstorming terrorist scenarios for the US government. When did you? I was kind of like what does that invitation look like when that came to you and when was that and talk about? Is that something that's still ongoing with you?

Speaker 1: 36:19

So it's always ongoing. You'll hear from them out of the blue, for no apparent reason, for whatever. They'll reach back, kind of to talk to people and get ideas. But before the 9-11 Commission was assembled, the federal government knew that 9-11 had happened because of a failure of imagination on the part of the US government and they were determined never to get caught with their creative pants down again. So this was something that was spearheaded by the Department of Homeland Security, by the Department of Homeland Security. So once that was stood up, they wanted to.

Speaker 1: 37:01

It's the tendency of great powers to often look in the rearview mirror and project forward to think the next war is going to look like the last war sort of a thing. I mean you just have to look at Europe and how the blitzkrieg from Hitler was so much different than what they'd experienced in world war one. So the idea by with the federal government, spearheaded by dhs, was to bring in a bunch of creative thinkers from outside dc to help break the kind of institutionalized thinking of all the alphabets in the soup, whether that was cia, fbi, dss, even dia, all of these agencies. So they brought in people like me, mich, michael Bay, who did the Benghazi movie and the Transformer movies and they were very good at steering the conversations and everything. So sometimes they wanted you to help dream up terrorist attack scenarios that would happen in the United States, things that might happen overseas, what targets might be attractive to terrorists, and sometimes we'd be given things saying how would you connect these? And it's like what? Well, we found a pair of Air Jordans in Karachi that had been purchased in Brooklyn, and a cell phone from Paris was located in Morocco, like weird things, and so you wondered if they were actually giving you, feeding you, real pieces of intel that they couldn't figure out how it connected. But they said, if these things had to be in your movie or your novel, how would you connect them? Sort of a thing. I think it's the most forward thinking program the United States government, one of the most forward thinking they've ever put into place. I was very proud, particularly as the son of a Marine, to be asked to serve my country not by picking up a rifle but by using the gray matter here, and my joke is, george, that the Red Cell Unit is the Las Vegas of government programs, because what happens in the Red Cell stays in the Red Cell.

Speaker 1: 38:44

I worked with them on a particular terrorist attack that I thought we needed to be mindful of. And then the attack happened halfway around the world in another country and it was all over the news here. And I called my person in the Red Cell unit and I said listen, this is all over the place. Can I go on Fox and talk about this? And they said no, even though the attack has happened, even though it's something we discussed, we don't talk about anything out of the Red Cell.

Speaker 1: 39:08

In fact, they only ever publicized one scenario that they had wargamed and that was how terrorists might leverage an approaching hurricane, how they might target shelters where people were gathered to get out of the path of the hurricane, as well as targeting the marshalling yards that get set up outside the path of the hurricane where you have your cherry pickers and maybe you move fire trucks and ambulances away so they can get back in that kind of stuff, and might they attack those pieces of equipment to prevent the rescue of people in the quick rebuilding and putting the power grid back together and that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1: 39:46

That's the only thing they've ever publicized. So not only can I not talk about the actual scenarios, I'm not allowed to use any of them for my books, but what they were doing was taking the way I create my books and applying them to potential real life scenarios. So again, it was an honor to have been asked and invited and the invitation was like something out of a movie. I was living in Utah at the time and I was hiking way up in the mountains where my cell phone never worked, never, ever, not even a bar. And my cell phone rang and I got the invitation from DC. It was wild, I mean like totally out of a movie.

Speaker 2: 40:20

Wow, they're like hold on, we're going to give you all the service you need.

Speaker 1: 40:24

It's almost what it was like. You know, it's pretty, pretty wild pretty wild.

Speaker 2: 40:28

Wow, well, that's fascinating. I'm glad that you've been a part of that and helping out. It sounds like a wonderful program. It is. You know you kind of talked about like serving your country. You know our love and patriotism as Americans right, and it shines through in your own self and your writing. And you went out and actually spent some time in Afghanistan where you shadowed a Black Ops team in some very dangerous times and situations and places. And I was just curious I mean I know that that probably helped you tons as a writer to really be in that space. I know you have tons of friends that work and serve and you're obviously from a military family, but I was curious about what that experience was like for you, how that affected you personally and as a writer, sure.

Speaker 1: 41:41

You know it was funny. One of the things the guys told me to do before growing over was to grow out my beard, and so it was really funny because when I met up with one of the guys from the team, he didn't even recognize me. I met and the same thing same thing happened on the way back. Which was really funny is that we spent a day in Dubai and I couldn't wait to shave the beard off. I mean, it was like huge and I shaved it off and I popped down to the bar in the hotel in Dubai and it was really funny because it took a couple seconds for the guys to recognize me because the beard was no longer there. They had, they had just like frozen my face in their minds. Now with the beard, um it. It was really cool. And at the very end of the trip they told me that they had actually reserved a hotel room for me in Kabul because they didn't know if, once my feet touched the tarmac and caught Kabul, if I was going to be like, oh shit, this is real, maybe I made a mistake in doing this and it didn't. That didn't happen, it was.

Speaker 1: 42:33

It was an amazing trip. I learned a lot. Best fried chicken I ever had was in Jalalabad. We spent a night there on the way to someplace else and we never went into any villages where we were not welcomed and expected by the village elders. And there's that code of Pashtunwali where the Pashtu will fight to the last man in the village to keep you alive and to protect you because you're their guest. Excuse me, it was cool. It was a very, very unique experience. I'm glad to have done it. It was really cool to see all that stuff. I mean, you know that was a little while ago but the war was raging and all that kind of stuff. We, you know you could hear gunfire. We were never shot at or anything like that, but the French had just suffered a pretty big hit not too long before we were there.

Speaker 1: 43:24

There was something I wanted to go down to Kandahar and there was a particular thing I wanted to see in Kandahar. To Kandahar and there was a particular thing I wanted to see in Kandahar and the guy who was really the expert on what was going on on the ground and where things were, and he was constantly dipping into the reporting stream and reading and had all these contacts and he said listen, he said I don't think Kandahar is safe, I don't think it's smart and I'm like, well, this thing's kind of on the edge of Kandahar, we could drive down there and then there was a. There was a massive suicide bombing, like right at the thing I wanted to go to, and this guy goes Thor, you don't even get to decide where we stop, to take a leak for the rest of this trip. He said you are a lightning rod for trouble. He said I can't believe that the one place you singled out that you wanted to go to there was just he's just he's yanking my chain, but he's like. He's like I don't care if they're offering us cocoa or tea, you don't get to make the call. You've got bad judgment. I'm like come on, I couldn't have known there was going to be a suicide bomber. Obviously they didn't know there was going to be a suicide bomber there. So that was kind of their joke going forward in the trip.

Speaker 1: 44:26

But it was good it was. It was very educational. I got to see, I got to learn a lot about the culture. I didn't know that next to being a doctor, being an author was considered very, very, very, very big deal to write books. That was a revered profession and so it was cool. I met I learned the difference between capital T Taliban and small T Taliban people like kids that are in terrible neighborhoods, whether that's like East LA or whatever, and they have a gang affiliation because it's the only way to survive, that if you don't have the protection of the Crips or the Bloods, you're a dead man sort of a thing.

Speaker 1: 45:01

So it was. The food was great. I thought I wouldn't eat. I thought, and the food was fantastic. The people were unbelievably honorable and kind. Um, you know, there's there's a lot of cultural things that I don't like about that part of the world the way they treat people want to leave islam, the way they treat women, the way they treat minorities, non-muslims um, there's a lot of that garbage. And then there's also a lot of people that are kind to people, just it. It's. It's an incredible part of the world, but it is a difficult place.

Speaker 1: 45:34

I think we were very misguided to think we could go in there with democracy on a silver platter and just hand it over. I don't like that. The constitution for Afghanistan involves Sharia law. It was based on Sharia law and I think that you can't give people democracy. They have to want it, they have to be willing to fight, bleed and die for it. Only then do you know they'll protect it if they get it. So I think we learned a lot of lessons over there. I hope we never get dragged back into something like that A lot of blood and treasure, but anyway, so I went. I went long on that one. Sorry, george, I probably took it further than you wanted, but you opened up a vein there and that was a pretty interesting time I spent over there.

Speaker 2: 46:17

No, it's wonderful. I really appreciate you expanding on that. Another thing I kind of wanted you to kind of a little expand on was you know you talk about with your characters like there's so much brotherhood and sisterhood between all these military members is like there's so much brotherhood and sisterhood between all these military members and you even there's a I won't give anything away there. But uh, scott harvath has a personal mission that he's going on to and before he even really explains what it's going to entail, his whole team's like we're in, we're in, we're in, like didn't even he didn't even get to lay everything out, they're just like yeah, what are we? When are we leaving?

Speaker 1: 46:48

when are we leaving're already like I can get packed up.

Speaker 2: 46:50

I'm ready in five minutes. You know, and that kind of camaraderie. You know, when I was reading that and then I was listening to some interviews, kind of researching, you know our podcast here there's so many times where I've heard you talk about this brotherhood and even sisterhood there within your own writing community, which I kind of drew some parallels there and obviously you know it's not a life or death thing there in the same it's a little bit different vein. But there's something that that I was very encouraged by Um, I love seeing people come together and help out their fellow man and woman and whenever people kind of climbed to the top extending a rope to be able to help bring people along with them and as opposed to pulling up the ladder right, exactly Right, cause so

Speaker 2: 47:32

many people do that. I'm here, okay, everything you know, no one else can come in, right. But like you talked about, like how, your friendship with Vince Flynn he wrote your first blurb, he introduced his agent to you and other interviews where you talked with Jack a few years ago on his podcast, talked about how you kind of helped uh, you know, bring him to the door. Obviously he walked through there too, but there was a camaraderie and a friendship and it seems like that's something that I'm seeing at play with your, your community of peers, in a way that really was just encouraging. So I wanted to see if you could maybe talk upon that just for a minute and maybe a little bit of that culture and what that's like and why that's important for you maybe a little bit of that culture and what that's like and why that's important for you.

Speaker 1: 48:16

Okay, so I've been at this game for more than two decades. I actually and maybe there's some people been in it longer than I have. That'll disagree. My frame of reference is that's new. It is not always been like that. Yes, you could get lovely people who would write a blurb for you. You know another author who's willing to help out a newer author and write a blurb for you. You know another author who's willing to help out a newer author and write a blurb.

Speaker 1: 48:32

But this idea that we support each other and promote each other's books and things like that, that maybe we didn't see it kind of with the older guys who are out of the business now because we just didn't have social media back then. But it's taken a while, even with social media, to get to this point and I don't know if that's out of a sense I can't speak for everybody else and I don't know if it's out of a sense that we're kind of all in the same foxhole together and we're competing against Netflix and people scrolling on Instagram for time. The Brits just came out with. The British government just came out with a survey that said only 50 percent of adults are reading in the United Kingdom. That's bad, that's really, really bad. And a lot of them just say they just don't have the time. So now, whether that's because they got a side hustle going, it's more than likely. They're spending so much time on Instagram and Facebook and they're just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. They're taking the phone to bed at night scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. They're taking the phone to bed at night.

Speaker 1: 49:36

I always say it takes a tremendous amount of discipline, self-confidence and calm to read a book. You have to sit down, tune out the distractions and just read. Well, we used to lead lives that had a lot of calm. You had ABC, nbc, cbs If there wasn't something on TV. Now there's something, always on tv, there's something else to binge. So I think I think there's a lot of people that want to whistle past the graveyard. I'm not one of them, I'll tell you. I think it's.

Speaker 1: 49:58

I think it's tough to be an author in this environment. Uh, with so much competition, easy competition. It's like, hey, we'd like it. Not that there's, there's. There are a lot of people who love to read, uh, but I think there's a lot of people who would love to read if they weren't already distracted by social media and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1: 50:17

So one of the things that I realized and again, I can't speak for all the authors out there is that the more I got to know my colleagues, the more I realized this isn't a competition. There's 365 days in a year. People can read more than one book. They can buy more than one book. So these people are not taking the cheese off my burger if I'm helping them out, and one of the things that I think social media shows you is and that includes, like Amazon reviews and stuff like that I think what you'll learn is that a lot of us in this genre share the same readers, so they'll read my book and then they'll read another author's book and so they have authors they like and it may be three or four authors and we've got. We share those readers. So I think it's a good thing.

Speaker 1: 51:03

You're not going to catch me promoting until my show's on Netflix. You're not going to catch me necessarily. If I see a really good show that I think is really smart, then I'll pop that up there, but I'm spending more of my time reading books than I am watching Netflix, so I'm going to be promoting books and I'm going to shout out books that I think are really really good. So I take a lot of pride in that and I think it's important for people in an industry, particularly when that industry is I mean, we're under siege, there's no other way to say it. With the scrolling and Netflix and all that kind of stuff, it is massively attractive competition for reading books. So I think it's important in that sense and I also think that once you attract a following of readers on social media, they don't care about the Netflix shows. They want to know what good books are out there.

Speaker 1: 51:49

So you're not only helping your colleagues, you're also helping. We're back to who do I work for, not Simon and Schuster, I work for the readers. So if I can recommend books that I love to them, I'm helping them. I'm helping them find their next great read. So the incentive structure is not just, hey, we're under siege and we need to all stick together and fight back against the distractions, but it's also that I know what my audience wants. People are following me not for TV and movie recommendations, although I do do those when I find stuff that I think is really above average and really good, but I know that I share a love of reading with the people who follow me, so I want to you know. Of course I'll talk up my own books, particularly when I've got a new book out, but I'll also talk up other people's when it's a book that I really enjoy. So there you go.

Speaker 2: 52:35

Good answer. And you know I know a ton of your readers have been wanting to see Scott Harvath on the screen, and so I know we're kind of talking about the idea of, like you know, netflix will or whatever show it may be coming out in that form, but you just got together and you've got some exciting news to talk about in that realm. You've got an amazing team that's actually working on that project. Can we go ahead and chat a little bit about that and how that team came about?

Speaker 1: 53:00

Yeah. So I got approached by two unbelievable movie producers in Hollywood. They do movies and TV and their names are Sean and Yvette Reddick, and so they had turned the book into a film Black Klansman, which a bunch of Oscar nods. They did Get Out another super successful movie On Netflix. They did the vampire movie with one of the directors out of the 8711 stable who were responsible for John Wick. They did Day Shift with Jamie Foxx the vampire movie, so you saw a lot of the John Wick style action.

Speaker 1: 53:38

So they came to me and they wanted to turn the books into a series of television seasons and feature length films. And I was like, wow, this is really cool. And they said, well, who would you like to direct it? And I said I get to pick anybody. They said, yep, pick who you want, we'll get them. And I said that's no question, I want Chad Staholski, who directed the Wick movies. That's who I want. And they're like all right, we'll call you back. And they were able to bring Staholski in movie.

Speaker 1: 54:09

Then do another season. They said so we want to bring in another executive producer, somebody who's really experienced in TV. If you could have anybody, who do you want? I said anybody. They said we got you, we got you Chad Stahelski to direct, so aim high. And I said, well, that's easy, I want Howard Gordon, the force between 24, the force behind 24 and Homeland. And they're like, all right, we'll call you back. And they got Howard Gordon. And so Howard, uh, howard has an uh exclusive at Sony, so that's. So to get Howard, we had to partner up with Sony. So that's where we are now.

Speaker 1: 54:40

And then the uh, the writer that they brought on board is absolutely fantastic. He really gets the military ethos, uh, cause he grew up with a lot of guys guys, buddies of his that went into the military and he had written both seasons on Netflix of the Punisher with Jon Bernthal, and it's fabulous. He gets it, he gets all that. He's got a series on Apple TV right now that's based on a book called Shantaram, which is very interesting about this guy trying to get his life turned around. And he agrees to do one more bank robbery and gets busted and goes into jail. A cop got shot on it and he's getting tortured by the police in jail and the inmates think he's a snitch. So he has to escape jail, escape prison, and he flees to India and he tries to rebuild his life while staying one step ahead of the law. It is very visceral.

Speaker 1: 55:30

I've got my claws in the side of my couch watching this thing because it's so intense. But his name is Steve Lightfoot and Steve's awesome. So Steve's our writer. So we are now at the point, as of the recording of this podcast, that we are ready to start doing our pitch meetings at Netflix, apple TV, amazon Prime, showtime, hbo Max or it's just Max now that kind of stuff. So we should know by the end of the year where we're going to be, what the home is going to be, who's going to broadcast the Harvath series. So we'll know that by the end of the year. Knock on wood.

Speaker 2: 56:04

That's exciting. I can't wait to hear future developments about that. What an A-list team and man. That's going to be phenomenal. Look, I know we're wrapping up here. We've got a few more questions. Uh, one that I have that I'm very curious about. I ask a lot of my guests about legacy and I wanted to know what your thoughts are about legacy, and kind of in two forms one in a personal setting and then also in a professional. Obviously you have so much work that you've put out so many amazing, wonderful masterpieces that you've put out in the world here I mean 24 books. It's incredible. So there's a lot that you've had as far as your output. You have a rich family, a very deep appreciative life, and I wanted to kind of just talk about that idea. What does legacy mean to you in those two settings, in the personal and professional way?

Speaker 1: 56:51

Listen when I go, when I kick the bucket, george, it's going to be up to my kids, and actually it may not even be up to my kids. I have no idea if I personally will go the Clancy and Ludlam route, where there's other authors, or Vince Flynn. I mean, look, vince has now gone through Kyle. The estate has had Kyle Mills who wrote a ton of great Mitch Rapp books. Now they have Don Bentley, who's a great writer. My family might decide to do that. I have no idea. They're free to do what they want.

Speaker 1: 57:23

I think once you build a brand, if you can consistently deliver the experience that the originator of that brand was able to create on a regular basis, then that's great. People love those characters. In fact, when I started after I wrote my first book, the Lions of Lucerne, I wasn't planning on bringing the same character back. I was a big fan of Michael Crichton and I loved this idea that, yeah, I could have this guy who's an ex-SEAL and is now working with the secret service. That's this book. But the next book is going to be about a doctor that got tricked into piling a bunch of drugs into his private plane that he was flying to go see his daughter at college with and that was going to be the next thriller. And my publisher said, how many books have you read from the same author? Because that author brought back a character whom you love and you want to go on an adventure with that character again. And I'm like, oh my gosh, all the books I read and it was like then the light bulb went off. I got it. People love a character. They want to keep experiencing and doing things with that character.

Speaker 1: 58:23

So legacy is going to be in the hands of anybody that comes after me. So I have no idea what's going to happen. My family is free to do what they want to do. Personally, from a vanity and an ego standpoint, I don't need it to keep going. If my family decides they want to keep it going and there's enough of a demand from the people who I currently work for, the readers, then that's great. That'll be up to them. But I, you know I could stop tomorrow and be very, very happy with what I've achieved, because I've worked my ass off every time. I've never phoned a single novel in. I've worked really, really hard. I'm proud of every single one of them. So that's where I am. I don't know if that answers your question at all, but that's where I stand on kind of the professional legacy stuff.

Speaker 2: 59:05

Right on, man, Right on. Well, you know there's going to be a ton of people who want to know hey, how can they follow you if they don't already? Can you go ahead and give your website some socials in the best way, and what are you most active on and how people can kind of keep up with what's going on and learn about? Book tour dates and announcements.

Speaker 1: 59:22

Yeah, so bradthorcom has links to all my socials. If you want to interact with me, don't go to Twitter, because I don't interact with anybody on Twitter. Twitter is an open sewer, as Bill O'Reilly, from formerly of Fox News, used to call the entire internet. It's just. One of the best things I ever did was just it's just announcements I put on Twitter. It really is. You know, people will say things to you on Twitter that they'd never have the balls to come up to you and say in person. It really it sucks and it's only gotten worse.

Speaker 1: 59:54

I do not like Twitter at all. What I love is Facebook. I have found that the people who follow me on Facebook are absolutely lovely, lovely people. They love books, they love to talk, they love to talk current events, and so Facebook is the place that I'm most active. I'll throw stuff on an Instagram, I'm on threads, but Facebook is. I'm there every day.

Speaker 1: 1:00:16

I respond to, uh, just like I do on Instagram and threads. Uh, I respond. I don't have somebody responding for me, and that's if you look at my Twitter feed. There's no like back and forth, unless unless a colleague's like I just read your new book and it's awesome. I might say, hey, thanks, bill. I appreciate it that. That that's the extent of my interaction on Twitter. So I'm not on Twitter, but Facebook is is really the big one, and that's that, that that I have a lot of fun keeping in touch with, with fans, because I'm able to say thank you again. These are the people I work for. So if your boss wants to pop up and give you an attaboy, great. If it's a piece of constructive criticism, also great. It helps to make my work better. But bradthorcom has got the links to everything.

Speaker 2: 1:00:55

Nice, and we'll have all the links in the show notes below, so any of the listeners or viewers, make sure you go and check those out. Brad, is there anything that we haven't covered today that you wish to share?

Speaker 1: 1:01:07

to your passionate fans or even some of the new readers. It's a good question. I don't know. I don't know You've. You've asked me some fantastic questions and I and I want to thank you for that, because I'm doing all my pre-release publicity uh, now, and in actual release publicity, and you can get asked the same question like 80 times. You didn't do that. You obviously did your homework. You've asked me questions nobody else has. So I really appreciate that, and I think that's the value of your podcast is that people are getting information here that they're not going to see anywhere else. So that's awesome. So thank you for that. Thank you, and I obviously don't have a problem speaking. You know my family jokes that, like Al-Anon, there should be a 12-step program for me, except it would be called On and On and On. So you know, there's really nothing left unsaid here. There's nothing that I've been dying to get off my chest. So I think we pretty much covered all the bases in this one, george. So thank you for having me Wonderful.

Speaker 2: 1:02:02

Well, listen, thank you so much. Congratulations on your 24th book. It's a masterpiece. I love it Everyone. Make sure you go pre-order your copy today and copy today and go and check it out. There's going to be some tour dates you got going on. I'll have all the notes below, so make sure you guys go check that out. Go to bradthorcom, subscribe to all the updates. And, brad, once again, thank you so much for all you're doing. You're a national treasure, sir, and I really appreciate everything you're putting out in the world Right back at you.

Speaker 2: 1:02:26

Thanks, george, right back at you. Thanks, george, thank you sir.