Best of the Program | Guests: Brad Meltzer & Chad Robichaux | 3/14/22

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Today's program, filled with facts that your family needs.

One, what was the tripwire that happened over the weekend?

One of the few tripwires that

I have placed for my own family on.

If this happens,

it means we're getting close to something big.

That tripwire happened.

I explain it in hour number one of the podcast.

Hour number two, we talk all about Ukraine and ESG, and then the great Brad Meltzer is on to tell us about his new book.

But all of the secrets that he has gone through in the

government archives, he tells us about his trip to the actual Indiana Jones warehouse, the real one the government has.

And I surprise him with Superman's Cape.

All on today's podcast.

You're listening to the the best of the Glenbeck program.

Welcome to the Glenbeck program.

There's a couple of things.

First of all, let's welcome Mr.

Pat Gray.

Yeah, thank you.

Great to be here.

Yeah, yeah.

Is it?

It is.

It is.

It is.

You wouldn't want to be anyplace else.

Nowhere else.

Not at all.

If I could choose one place to be at this moment, it would be right here.

Right here.

Yeah.

Not at Disney.

No.

Not

some exotic vacation.

Nope.

Not even at home in bed.

Uh-uh.

No.

Right here.

No.

That is great.

Isn't it?

That's the kind of dedication you get from Pat Gray, from Pat Gray Unleashed.

He's got a passion for being here.

Pat, how are you?

I'm good.

Good.

What was on your mind today?

What is it that you see that there's no trouble in the world?

There is no trouble.

I'm very excited about the fact that everything's been fixed, except for the things Putin keeps screwing up.

Yeah, he pisses me off.

Everything would be perfect if it weren't for him.

We'd have a great economy.

Gas prices would be incredibly low.

You could buy a house for $1.98.

The Putin.

God,

Putin, dang it.

I know.

I hate him for that.

Could we play Americans Don't Understand What We're Doing, Clip, please.

Never forget what we've accomplished together

so far.

And by the way, the American people just trying to stay above water don't understand this.

Yeah, they don't.

You tell them what the American Recovery Act was, they look at you like, what are you talking about?

Right.

They're so stupid.

They are so stupid.

They're so stupid.

They're so stupid.

And

they don't understand that Putin has caused inflation.

Can I tell you something?

It is simply not true about government spending.

Listen to this.

When we're having this discussion, it's important to dispel

some of those who say, well, it's the government spending.

No, it isn't.

Her too.

The government spending is doing the exact reverse, reducing the national debt.

It is not inflationary.

Government

spending is reducing reducing the national

debt.

Okay, look at, look at how bizarre.

Look at.

Are you not

married?

Yes.

Okay.

My wife is married to me.

You're married to Lisa.

Lisa and I have a lot of things in common.

For instance, honey, we're saving money by spending this money.

I've heard that.

We're saving money by spending this money right now.

Yes.

And who doesn't know the basic principle?

When you're in debt,

if you go out and put more things on the credit card, you're actually not adding to debt.

You're making things better.

Don't think that through.

I mean, that's what she's saying.

That is what she's saying.

We're not adding to debt.

How are you not adding to debt?

Well, what we did with the money we spent was buy counterfeit money machines.

And now we're counterfeiting money and paying off debt.

All right.

There you go.

Good.

Well, there's already kind of doing it.

It's called fiat currency, but that's a different story.

Here's the president.

He gets a little testy.

Cut through, please.

So I'm sick of this stuff.

We have to talk about it because the American people think the reason for inflation is government spending more money.

Simply not true.

Simply not true.

How?

Now, the Treasury Secretary of the Obama administration, Larry Summers, said it was true.

One of their lead economists, Furman, also said that it was true.

But

obviously, every conservative economist says this as well.

But it's just simply not true.

It's simple.

Just because he says it.

He's sick of it, too.

Have you noticed that he seems a little angry a lot of the time?

Yeah.

Or a lot angry a lot of the time.

Yeah, or a lot angry at just

off the cuff, just kind of like, hey, I like, I like chocolate ice cream.

It's not true that I don't like vanilla ice cream.

Yeah.

I mean, it's, it's, he goes from zero to 60 in a heartbeat.

There's a little bit of the old man yells at cloud thing going on.

You know,

it's like, there's something, it's not normal.

He seems to burst into real visceral anger out of nowhere.

It is normal.

It is normal.

For a super old guy who's losing cognitive functions.

Yes, that is super normal.

We've all seen that in our family.

I guess that's true.

In that situation, it's true.

But it's scary for us.

It's not normal for a president.

And you think about how he's losing it in front of crowds and at the press who has done nothing but coddle him through this presidency.

He's mad at them.

Imagine what he's like behind closed doors.

I've heard that he is

angry at the drop of a hat a lot.

I bet he is.

I bet he is.

Well, his presidency is going down the drain.

I don't know how you salvage it at this point.

And he is pissed off that people are noticing.

And yet they are talking this weekend that he is seriously thinking he's going to run

for re-election.

Insane.

And no, no, no, that's not insane.

Here's what's insane.

The head-to-head polls between him and Trump, it's a dead heat.

Yeah.

Are you

what?

I mean, look,

my wife says this to me all the time, speaking of my wife, and she's always like, how can, like, I don't understand how could anyone even think this would be close?

And how is it possible?

And it's like, well, we all sat here and complained for four years about the media turning Donald Trump into Satan.

Right.

Well, that has an effect.

I mean, Donald Trump is going to, if he runs, when it seems like he will,

he's got the nomination locked up pretty much on his side in the primary, but he's going to face this same treatment and multiple years of him being turned into Satan by the media.

It's not going to be a cakewalk for Donald Trump if he runs.

I mean, they have, we all sat here day by day

catalog

how bad the media was against him and complained about it and said it was unfair, and it was, but it was real and it occurred.

Yeah.

And they're going to go back and reverse themselves completely to anything negative that Joe Biden has done.

All the whatever sits.

They're already trying to do it already.

It's in real time.

Yeah.

It's going to be a lot.

And their groundwork is already done.

It's going to be a challenge.

I mean, President Trump, if he runs, it's not going to be a cakewalk.

It's going to be hard.

And he's going to have that same awful treatment from the media.

He's going to have to overcome.

And we've seen how difficult that is, even for Donald Trump, who's very good at dealing with the media.

So I would, you know, I

know this is never going to happen, but I would love,

love to see President Trump endorse DeSantis and then take the role from Nancy Pelosi.

No Speaker of the House thing.

Oh, my God.

Can you imagine he would tear it apart?

The Speaker of the House.

because he doesn't have to be in congress to be speaker of the house no he could all he has to do is the ruling party needs to say we would like him speaker of the house and i mean they could pick i think they'd do that too don't you think they'd do that if he wanted it if he wanted it i don't know that he'd want it can you imagine I mean, because then he is actually responsible for all of the investigations.

Oh, my God.

He would be responsible for.

Yeah, we're going to do a little investigation on Hunter Biden.

We're going to look into that one.

Oh, my God.

We're going to do a little investigation into

the Democrats that were here and doing my impeachment.

We're just

going to look into that.

He could approve.

He wouldn't be on the

committees.

He might be.

But he would be the one who would say, we're doing it.

Can you imagine?

Because

That may be a more important role because if you want to clean out the hornet's hornet's nest, you have to do it through Congress.

You have to do it.

The president could sign all kinds of executive orders and do what this and that, but that doesn't last.

And if the president wants to fire clean house at the State Department, all of you out.

He can't do that without Congress.

If he is the Speaker of the House

and Ron DeSantis is the president, I think you have a one-two punch.

I mean, this is a bit of a fantasy league we're playing here, but it would be interesting.

I don't think Trump would have as much interest in that role had he wanted to go back and be in Congress.

If it's good enough for, you know, John Quincy Adams,

if John Quincy Adams was willing to do it, and John Quincy Adams, in the end, is the reason why we got rid of slavery.

He tried and tried and tried and tried and tried.

And then he saw this upcomer, you know, that just came to Congress and he was like, you get it.

And he

tutored that young congressman on how to stop slavery.

And that young congressman became the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln.

I don't know.

I think it might be good.

It's not a joke to be in Congress.

It is now

because Congress isn't doing anything.

We send all these representatives, and it's really only Schumer and McConnell and Pelosi

and maybe McCarthy that are getting together in the rooms and like, yeah, we're going to do this.

And then just send it to everybody to rubber stamp.

That's the problem.

It would be fascinating to see.

Yeah, by the way, have you seen all of the things that are in the spending bill that we didn't know about?

Because nobody read the bill.

All stuff that's cutting inflation, I'll tell you that.

Yeah, people just don't understand it.

Why don't you get it?

It's cutting inflation.

He is themselves.

And there wouldn't be any if it weren't for Putin.

Yes!

Damn Putin!

Darn!

I don't like that guy.

I hate him.

Lord of Putin.

Are you really angry?

I'm really angry at Putin.

Darn dang on it.

So

you really think that it's not printing of money?

Oh, it's Putin.

But it was starting.

That's an absolute lie.

I'm sick of it.

But he started before the occasion.

There was a Putin!

What don't you understand about Putin?

When I scream his name, does that not tell you it's Putin?

Fair point.

Oh, I think I get it now.

Yeah, I think the American people.

Thank you very much.

This is the best of the Glen Beck program.

Huddled in a bomb shelter in Kyiv, a seven-year-old girl named Emilia Anasovich

sang a song in Ukrainian.

She sang frozen.

It went viral as people commented on her sweetness, the innocence, and the hope for this little girl.

The video tugged on everybody's heartstrings.

In the beginning of the video, you can hear the whole room go quiet as the crowd realizes that she's singing.

Here it is.

I am happy to report

after six days in an air raid shelter, Amelia, her brother, and her grandmother walked for about two days to the border and are now safe.

Her mother, along with her father, decided to stay behind to provide food for Ukrainian forces.

But

dad said, I always knew Amelia was very talented and a sweet angel.

Now Now the whole world knows the same.

Currently,

in the hotspot is the founder and CEO of Mighty Oaks Foundation and the co-founder of Save Our Allies, Chad Robichaux.

Hello, Chad.

How are you?

Glenn, how are you?

The last time we talked, I was in Afghanistan.

I know, I know.

Now you're in Ukraine.

Tell us the situation on the ground and what's happening.

Well, you know,

it's pretty dynamic and very different in different parts of the country.

As you're aware, you know, over in Kiev and the cities more to the east, you have the direct

kinetic combat with Ukrainian troops, Russian troops,

as well as

militia Ukrainians fighting for their homes and their towns.

And then over to the west, you have

still major cities intact that are at threat.

And we see yesterday, over at Lviva getting rocketed.

And so the whole country is in chaos.

Everybody's scared.

People are evacuating, not just out of the country, but people are evacuating from one dangerous city to a safer place.

And a lot of people that are helping, like say our allies and other organizations are helping, aren't just evacuating people from the country, but actually moving people from a dangerous place to a safer place, moving medical aid forward, moving supplies forward, and moving people out.

So, Chad, you've been in special operations for a very long time,

now retired from military service.

But

what is Putin thinking?

I mean, I can't make heads or tails of this.

Yeah, you know,

we were just in the middle of all the operations we're doing.

We kind of paused for a second a little while ago.

What is he doing?

Why is he moving forward?

I mean, he's obviously

he had everything the way he would want it.

If you look at economically and globally,

he was winning.

America was buying oil from him, even though we all disagree with it.

America was buying oil from him.

The rest of the world was buying oil from him.

He was just in a really good geoeconomic position.

And then he does this.

And for what?

To gain Ukrainian oil that he won't be able to sell now.

It just doesn't really make sense to someone who the world has thought was a very strategic thinker and made decisions, all his decisions.

I mean, everyone you talk to to on both sides of the aisle and politically and people around the world said, you know, Putin's not a good guy, but he always makes calculated strategic decisions.

And we're just not seeing that right now.

So we're seeing this weekend, the U.S.

said that he asked China for military help or at least supplies.

I'm hearing that he's going to get more vicious.

Do you have any sense that being there, what's coming?

Is this ending?

Is this getting worse?

What's your feel?

It's going to

my feel is, and look, it's not just from my experience.

I'm here on the ground with people, the smartest minds in the special operations community.

I'm here meeting with the highest level of from all different governments of the world, intelligence agencies and things like that.

Everyone is in

a consensus agreement that

it's going to get worse.

It's not going to get better.

If you watch what he's doing right now,

you know, towns like Kiev, he's

he

Khviv, he's surrounding these towns, holding, destroying infrastructure, roads, bridges, rails, any egress routes out

inside these cities while the Russians are holding the outer perimeter.

They have the ability to get resupply, but those inside can't.

So

medicine, like

something as simple as insulin,

that's as deadly as a nuclear weapon to someone with

diabetes, right?

A lot of children's hospitals have no medicine, no medical aid, no supplies.

Water,

potable water is gone now.

They're starving them out.

And not only starving them out at night, it's going to get 15 degrees.

So you get people freezing to death, particularly the people trying to evacuate, the women that children are trying to evacuate.

All right.

So what is it you guys are doing on the ground and how can we help?

So one of the things that we're doing,

you know,

a lot of great NGOs here evacuating people, trying to move supplies, food in,

medicine in.

What we're doing specifically is we know that the cellular network is going to fail.

And

our experience in not only special operations, but some of our teammates are some of the world's best precision recovery, precision rescue experts.

And we know that the most crucial thing is to have communications.

So we're building communications infrastructure.

to make sure that everyone in all these cities around Ukraine have the ability to communicate with us.

So when a cellular network goes down, we can still rescue them, we can still move supplies to them, and we can still communicate with them.

So So that's our priority mission right now, is doing that and then tying that communications network and infrastructure to the ability to be able to rescue, move medicine forward, move medical aid forward, and then provide some ambulatory services to be able to move people from places like Kviv to a safer place or to a medical station.

So that's the kind of thing that me and my team are doing.

We're doing that through Save Our Allies.

We need all the support we can.

I know.

Thank you, Glenn, because you may not even be aware.

I think you are, but you guys just a donation to Save Our Allies.

So, I thank you for that because we can't do it without

people like you.

Well, I like that so much, an Afghanistan fan.

I have to tell you, Chad, we're big fans of

yours and Save Our Allies.

We know what you do and how important it is, and we are proud to stand with you and stand behind you.

You just let us know what you need.

If you want to make a donation and be a part of saving Ukraine and saving the people, literally saving the people.

You can give now to saveourallies.org.

That's saveourallies.org.

If you forget that, just go to Mercury One, market for Ukraine, and we'll get it to Save Our Allies.

It's saveourallies.org.

Chad,

stay safe.

Always, always, Glenn.

Thank you so much.

God bless you.

Thank you.

Mighty Oaks Foundation and Save Our Allies.

I can't recommend them highly enough.

They are,

Chad is a remarkable guy, and they've been, you know, Mighty Oaks Foundation works with veterans to save their lives because the suicide rate is just outrageous.

And he's a guy who contemplated it himself, and

somebody saved his life and started Mighty Oaks.

and now Save Our Allies.

And these are ex-military guys that go in.

They know how to help.

And they're not shooting anyone.

They're getting and rescuing people.

And can you imagine?

I mean, you'd kind of feel like your life was worth something, wouldn't you, if you were bringing insulin to a children's hospital?

That's the kind of stuff they're doing.

Please donate now to saveourallies.org.

They're doing not only great work overseas, but the work they're doing here is really, really important.

Amazing too.

So just an awesome organization.

Awesome, dude.

You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Author of The Lightning Rod, Brad Meltzer.

How are you, sir?

I'm good.

It's so good to be back in person.

Yeah.

So

you're one of my favorite people.

Let's start with...

Let's start with a book, and then I have a surprise for you.

Oh, I'm ready for a surprise.

Okay, so here's the book.

I always always start, you know, with my great fears.

I think that's what you, when you write a thriller, you got to start with your fears.

Right.

And so the opening scene has a character handing his car keys over to a valet at a fancy restaurant.

Valet takes the car.

Rather than parking the car, he hits the little GPS button on the steering wheel, says the magic words, go home.

Now the car plots a route to the man's house.

The valet's going to have the car keys.

He's got the man's house keys.

He's going to break in.

This is a robbery.

But as he steps into the man's house.

Give that that idea.

No, no, I'm telling you.

No, this is the key part.

As he steps into the man's house, the valet sees another man waiting with a gun.

This is not a robbery at all.

This is a trap.

And when his body goes to our hero Zig, Zig finds something hidden on it that leads to one of the government's most closely guarded secrets.

Now, I just ruined chapter one of the lightning rod.

Oh, you believe in the book?

That's chapter one.

But chapter one is, you know,

and there's only two chapters in the book, right?

No, they have to be.

The funny thing was, I was at an event yesterday in Florida.

My nephew raised his hand.

My nephew's like eight years old and he said, Uncle Brad, what's chapter two?

And I was like, oh, I got my nephew now.

So that was good.

But the lightning rod opens with that.

And then obviously the action takes off from there.

So what is the closely guarded secret?

So let's talk about that.

That's the key part.

You know, my, listen, I love the plot.

I love the murder mystery.

I love that you have great characters that everyone loves and we get to bring back.

But the fun of this is always the research.

I've taken readers, as you know, I've been on your show talking about the secret tunnels below the White House.

We've done the hidden labyrinth below the Capitol.

This was the one I got for this one.

I I spoke to the government, there's a couple of them actually.

And the U.S.

government has, I did not know this, almost a dozen secret warehouses hidden all across the country.

And they're there to deal with bioterror attacks, whether it's anthrax, whether it's smallpox, or anything else.

And if there's an attack in Texas, in New York, in California, Idaho, anywhere in between, they will have within hours what they call a push package of antidotes right to your doorstep.

And I'm like, you're you're telling me the government has secret warehouses all across the country.

No one knows what's inside them.

No one knows what they have inside.

No one can go in them.

You better believe I want to go in them, right?

I'm like, I want to go in that right now.

So thankfully they took me in.

What you see when you're reading the lightning rod, you're turning the pages, you're trying to guess the mystery, the final section of the book takes place in the warehouses, the final scene of the book.

And what you see in those warehouses, I did not make up.

What you see in there is really there.

And it's amazing.

It's like...

like a jealous are you?

Well, I'll tell you, you know, it's like a Costco for the end of the world.

They're massive warehouses.

I mean, they're like five Costco's.

So instead of being like a, you know, in Costco or BJ is a giant jar of mayonnaise and, you know, bug box of cereal, there's obviously, they have everything from,

you know, things to deal with radiation poisoning.

They have iodine tablets.

They have

everything you can imagine from amphetamines to they have Cobra Venom.

God knows what Cobra Venom does.

Like you're going down these aisles the one thing they all have in common though which i love is they all have giant the only thing that they all every warehouse has is a giant american flag they make it say and and what's great about it is this started and you're going to love this little history lesson for it is that back when nuclear war was the great threat in the cold war they decided to commission and figure out how are we going to keep the president alive How do we make, if there's a nuclear war, how do we get him to live?

And they create a secret commission called Operation High Point.

And High Point is designed to figure, it's the beginning of the continuity of government.

So they make Mount Weather and all these places where Dick Cheney went in 9-11 and where, you know, just outside of D.C., it's where the senators go.

It's where the president goes.

It's where the top staff goes so the government can run.

What they also commission in Michigan is Operation Low Point.

And that's to discuss what happens to the rest of us.

What happens if there's a nuclear war to everyone else in America?

They make a whole plan.

They study it.

They say mail carts are going to turn into hearses and carry bodies rather than letters.

They have giant plans for everybody.

And the one thing they finally realize, this is all true.

If you think I'm making it up, I can see your face.

No, it's all true, right?

I know it's true.

It is all.

You can look it up.

Just Google it.

And the thing that's so-called, we'd look under Operation Low Point.

Operation Low Point, Operation High Point.

You will see it.

And you can see this all in the lightning rod.

The whole history is in the thriller because obviously I set it all up the warehouses.

But one of the things that's really amazing to me is they study all of this.

And you know what they figure out, Glenn?

None of it's going to work.

None of it's going to work.

If there's a nuclear war, it doesn't matter.

That's why we don't hide under our desks anymore.

They were like, we're all going to die.

That's what's going to happen.

And basically it goes away.

They kind of figure like, we're not going to do this anymore.

We do have Mount Weather still.

We do have secret locations for the president.

We do have all those.

But for the rest of us, we're in trouble.

Until this one guy, Stephen Beiss, in the 90s, a government employee has an idea.

And he says, you know, the threat today is not nuclear war.

The threat today is bioterrorism.

That's what we got to worry about.

So we should probably have like a warehouse somewhere that houses all the stuff to deal with whatever comes out, whether it's Hantavirus, whether it's anything you.

And for the first time in like, I feel like in recent memory, the government listens to a good idea and says, we should do it.

This is the most positive thing I've heard from our government.

I bring some good for you today, right?

I bring a good idea from 40, you know, 30 years ago.

And in the 90s, they basically say we should do that.

And they do, and they build not just one, but many of these secret warehouses and they pack them full of disaster materials.

When anthrax hit after 9-11 in D.C.

and in New York, I know you remember that.

The reason it didn't get out everywhere is because this is who dealt with it.

They had push packages within hours to New York and D.C.

My wife was working in the U.S.

Capitol at the time.

She was nine months pregnant with my son at the time.

And I remember they opened that first thing of anthrax powder and going, oh my God, my kid, my unborn child is there.

My wife is there.

And that's who dealt with it.

It was what became the strategic national stockpile, which is now all over the country.

So did you read this weekend about Switzerland?

What happened in Switzerland?

Switzerland has fallout shelters.

Oh, I did read this that are going crazy.

Every citizen, they've had it for a long time.

They almost stopped requiring them by law after the wall fell.

And they thought, you know what, let's just keep it.

So every house that is built, every apartment building, every office building

has a fallout shelter in it, or you have to pay part of your taxes to be part of the closest fallout shelter.

Well, this last week, they decided to activate all of those things again, and they said, go into your fallout shelter now and report on what you have because there are certain things that every citizen has to have in their fallout shelter and it's water and food and and everything else.

And I thought, you know, I mean, there's a country that has prepared and I'm actually glad to see we have.

No, we, that, the great thing is, is no one, we have.

We actually, for once, now, obviously in COVID, everyone's, I'm sure, thinking right now, well, what happened in COVID, right?

I started researching the lightning rod as a book five years ago.

This, all those, the warehouses at that point, they're just, it's an asterisk in the government.

No one cares about it.

So I go in.

It's fine.

They take me to the headquarters, the command center.

I see where everything's taken care of.

Then COVID hits.

I call my sources.

I'm like, is this you guys?

They're like, this is us.

So what happened, right?

What happened is, and it's so easy to Monday morning quarterback and say this, but from Trump to Obama to Bush, they've been warned for administration after administration.

Listen, there could be, there's a likely chance that we could have this kind of natural virus occur like this.

But everyone bet on the wrong thing.

And I hate to say it, but Trump doubled down on it.

You can't know the future.

No one can predict what was going to happen.

But they believed that the only thing that was going to attack us was a foreign government.

So we were perfectly and still prepared for that.

If there's anything like that, we're ready.

They could have never prepared for anything like this.

But this is where all the ventilators are.

This is where all the masks are.

This is where that's where they were coming from at the beginning of the pandemic.

No one knew what the name of it was.

They just were appearing from the quote-unquote government.

But it was these secret warehouses that the government has stockpiled with stuff.

The author of the book, The Lightning Rod, it is out today.

It's a thriller by Brad Meltzer.

I love your books because

they always are accurate and things that I just never knew about, and usually about American history because you and I are brothers from another mother on that.

Always, always.

So listen, my love of this one, I do a lot of work with the USO.

And I've been, the USO has asked me as a thriller writer to go and tell stories to our troops all around the world.

I've been to Kuwait, Omar,

Qatar, Turkey, Cuba, you name it.

I've been to military bases reading to our troops.

And I'll tell you that it was there I first heard NKMR Radar Dover Air Force Base.

And you know Dover, even if you don't know the name of it, Dover is where when our service members die in service to the country, their bodies come back to Dover.

And those coffins with the flag on top, that's where you see everyone saluting.

That's Dover.

And that's also where the president's plane is.

Of course.

And what's amazing about Dover is the morticians who work there will spend such care on our fallen troops.

They'll spend 12 hours rewiring someone's jaw, smoothing it over with clay so a family can see their son one last time, rebuilding someone's hand.

from scratch because a mother says, I want to hold my son's hand one last time.

These are the best of the best of us working on the best of the best of us.

That's the hero of the lightning rob is a hero named Zig, who's a mortician at Dover.

And that's where the body comes to.

But what I love about Dover Dover and the history lesson I have is this, is that when the space shuttle exploded, the astronauts' bodies were brought back to Dover.

When 9-11 happened, all the Pentagon victims' bodies went to Dover.

I didn't know what

happened.

They found bodies.

They did find bodies that came back.

I had no idea.

It's incredible.

And it's called mass fatalities.

They all go to Dover.

So even all of our spies, our CIA spies all around the world, our 007s, their bodies go to Dover too, which means Dover is a place filled with secrets.

So that's one of my heroes in the book.

I'm like, oh, we're going into Dover and we're going to see what that's like.

And then the other one, another history lesson for that I found that I was with the U.S.

military and they took me to a warehouse that is, it's right out of something you're going to love because it's a warehouse filled with art.

I'm like, why does the army have all this art?

And they don't just have art painted by service members.

That's where Adolf Hitler's art is.

They took me to the room with all of Hitler's art that he painted.

I'm like, why does the military have all this art in one place?

Was he a good painter?

He thought he was.

Whatever heaven's going to say.

Very, very flat.

The thing that is very flat, and the great part is, is you see a giant hole punched in his face because he puts himself up on a horse.

Our service members, when they took the history of it.

We have that painting?

We have the painting.

I saw it myself.

Oh, my God.

And there was a punched hole in it where a service member just basically either kicked it or punched through it.

And the hole, they never repaired, which is beautiful.

It's breathtaking.

So I'm like, why does the military have all this art?

They explained to me that since World War I, this is true, the U.S.

military has had an actual painter on staff that paints disasters as they happen.

So whether it's storming the beaches of Normandy, whether it's Vietnam, whether it's 9-11, they've got someone painting it as it happens.

And I said, you're telling me everyone's racing him with guns blazing.

And you've got someone racing him with paintbrushes in their pockets.

That guy's crazy.

I got to meet him.

I want to meet him.

And they said, you mean her.

You want to meet her.

It was a woman, was our current artist in residence.

So that's the other hero of this book.

Zig and Nola, a mortician at Dover, and this painter are the heroes.

And they obviously are both based on the reality of me being able to pull apart this world that no one ever gets to see.

Where does the painter sit?

The painter sits actually where this warehouse is in Port Velvoir in Virginia.

But where they really sit is wherever they want.

They can go.

They have unlimited access to go.

If 9-11 happens, they want to paint 9-11, you go to 9-11.

When the 13 service members came back from Afghanistan, you want to go there, you go there.

Get selected.

You got to be a good painter.

It's literally a contest.

That's the thing is you literally submit your paintings and the military says they pick one painter who is selected by the military to be our person.

Amy Brown was the woman who it was.

I named my character Nola Brown after her to honor her.

And they have a new one now.

They keep going over and over through history.

And the fun part is for me, is is, of course, finding out their secrets.

So I went to the government and I said, how do you possibly, I went to my friend who works as a high-level security guy in one of the great security agencies, used to work there.

I said, how do I communicate with my friend Glenn when everyone's watching all our emails?

How do we, any of us, communicate when everyone can see what we write?

And he said to me, listen, the moment you hit send on your email, I don't care if you use Signal.

I don't care if you use WhatsApp.

Anyone who wants to crack it will find a way to crack it.

He said, here's what you're going to do.

Here's the trick, Brad.

He said, I put this in the lightning rod.

He says, you take a Hotmail account, you open the account, you write an email.

Do not hit send.

What you're going to do is hit save draft.

Now I give Glenn the sign into my email.

You come in my email.

You open up the save draft.

You write back whatever you want.

You don't hit send.

You hit save draft.

Now you and I are having a secret conversation.

We've never put a single cyberspace, which is a great idea until...

Until General Petraeus, the former head of the CIA, used that trick that's in my book, The Lightning Rod, to cheat on his wife with his mistress.

And I said to my buddy, I said,

I need a new trick.

He just used the trick you gave me.

I got to get a new trick.

So what he gave me in the book, you'll see something called Black House.

Now,

here's the history that you're going to love.

We all know the White House, of course, is the White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

When Richard Nixon

famously recorded himself and his staff without telling anybody, every staffer in the White House realized, oh my gosh, all of our stuff could be recorded.

So, what do they start doing?

They all start figuring out where we can have a private conversation in this place if everything's being recorded.

That's not called White House, that's called Black House.

And Black House moves generation by generation.

Okay.

It is just a code name that someone gave me, right?

And it's basically George Stephanopoulos supposedly did it during the Clinton era in a gym.

Dick Cheney, maybe he sat in his homemade man-sized safe and had, God knows where he did his.

But every,

there's always a place in the White House where all the staff knows this is where we can sit and have a private conversation.

You will see in this book what Black House really is and the trick he gave me, I did not make up.

It's an incredible one from the government.

You'll see it in the lightning rod.

I mean, if you don't want to read this book now, you're dead.

You're dead.

You're dead.

Now, listen, James Patterson said, you can see the things on the back.

James Patterson said that it was his favorite book by Brad Meltzer so far.

And the guy who created Reacher said that Nola Brown, our hero, hero, was like the girl with the dragon tattoo, one of the best modern creations in fiction.

It took those two things.

I tell you that simply for one reason.

I finally impressed my wife.

She does not, she doesn't care about anything I write, but my gosh, the fact that James Patterson loved the lightning rod, that I'm waiting for that moment with my wife.

I am waiting for that moment.

She finally was like, finally, Brad, you did some good.

Yeah.

No, no, no, no.