Ep 44 | Brad Thor | The Glenn Beck Podcast

I have to convince Brad Thor to come with me on our cruise through history.

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Seeing the birthplace of the Republic, seeing the birthplace of commerce, seeing the birthplace of our faith, those things are so important because those inspired our founders to come up with the idea that man could rule himself and that all men are created equal and create this incredible experiment called America.

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Walk where Jesus and the prophets walked in the Holy Land, Italy, Greece, Croatia.

Bill O'Reilly is going to be there.

David Barton's going to be there.

Rabbi Lapin, Stu, myself.

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My guest today has been called The Master of Thrillers.

His very first book was dubbed by Barnes and Noble as one of the best political thrillers ever.

That was back in 2002.

For 17 straight years, he's released a book every single year.

And to read one of his books, it's really like looking into a time machine.

It's giving you a sneak peek of what is coming.

If you read his books, it's as if you're getting copies of every major world newspaper a full year before it was published.

He's a fascinating guy.

The question on my mind right now is, with his new book out, how does an author who has never attempted writing before succeed in writing one of the best political thrillers of our generation on his first try and then follow that up every single year for 17 straight years with another bestseller?

If you've read his latest book, it might provide some answers.

It might not.

Brad and I are friends.

I've never had this conversation before.

But reading Backlash, it follows his main character as he's forced to use all of his past experiences and training and and sheer determination to survive.

It's part spy novel, part survival manual.

And like this character, he had to draw on everything he knew for the ultimate test.

I'm wondering if that isn't exactly what Brad Thor does.

Did he endure a crucible of his own to create the author that we know today?

On today's episode, this author, like you've never heard him before, the master of thrillers.

This is a different book than what you've written before.

What's changed?

What's happened?

It's hard to put my finger on it.

I turned in last summer's book, Spymaster, with an ending that my editor didn't like.

And she said, you need something bigger for the end.

so uh

i went back to my office and i said okay give them give the reader something bigger and i put in a big cliffhanger i had a character yell to scott harvath my protagonist

run

he had just stepped outside and this woman yells run and that's where we ended it now wait when you did that yeah were you just like i'll come up with yeah something you had no idea

i'll do something next year yeah right and there were a million possibilities it could have been a team was coming in to kill him and then the cavalry got that team for, I didn't know what it was going to be until this year and I started talking with my editor and I said, you know, she asked me a lot of really good questions about what do I like in my reading and also my television viewing.

What is good storytelling, period, to me?

And I talked about some of the shows that I enjoy, Ray Donovan being one of them on Showtime.

And she said, well, what do you like about that?

And I said, well, the protagonist never catches an easy break and nobody is safe.

You don't know that this character is going to be there the next show.

And she said, okay, well, play with that and see what you come up with.

And that started leading me down the road to Backlash, the current thriller.

This is getting rave reviews.

You always do.

Rave reviews.

This has been

exceptional.

Yeah.

This has been, I have heard from people, the book's been out not very long, but within 24 hours of the book coming out, people were hitting me up on Facebook and on Twitter saying, I picked it up just to read a couple chapters and I stayed up all night.

And that sounds like a hooky author thing to say, right?

Oh, you can't put it down.

It's a page turner.

But I've had more people come out.

I've always had people say, oh, I read it in one sitting, my other books.

So many people have come out.

I mean, even somebody from your own team said to me,

this book.

Yeah, couldn't put it down.

He told me, and I retweeted him.

It was one of the most wonderful tweets I've gotten.

So, yeah, there's something about this.

It's funny because I had a couple of influences that I wanted to weave in there.

I've always been a big fan of the Western, and I like the idea of a man with a code, and he is going to abide by that code, even if it's difficult for him personally.

And I also read a translation in English of the Odyssey, a more recent translation where the person got rid of all the repeats and stuff.

And what hooked me on that was a review of that book in the New York Times that said, Men and women leaving for war should read the Iliad because that will tell them what from their civilized lives

needs to stay behind in civilization.

But when you return from war, they need to first read the Odyssey because that will tell them what needs to be left on the battlefield for them to successfully reintegrate into civilization.

So, this is a little bit Clint Eastwood Magnificent Seven with Scott Harvath and also Odysseus in the Odyssey.

This book,

he's taken by the Russians.

So let me start with a couple of obvious questions.

That

leave your audience with something bigger.

That would have been unbelievable just a few years ago that the Russians would come in here and

risk an act, yeah, act of war, grab an American operative on U.S.

soil.

Did what happened with the GRU in England play a role in your thinking?

Absolutely.

So there are a couple things the Russians have done that played a role.

One of them is what the GRU did with the poisoning, but also the other poisoning with the polonium with the journalists that they were willing to go into.

The fact that they would go back into the UK and commit another assassination told me

they don't care.

They'll do whatever they feel like doing.

So

that spooked me.

There was also a story that

some of my guys who have been in Iraq told me about a Russian diplomat who was kidnapped by a a faction in Iraq.

And the Russians sent over a special team of intelligence operatives.

They found a relative of the kidnappers, took that person and started like it was in a deli, slicing parts of his body off and

mailing it, dropping it off for the kidnappers and saying, okay, it's an ear today, it's a nose tomorrow.

If he's not back by midnight of tomorrow, you're going to get a leg.

And they wrapped this diplomat in a baby blanket and put him right back on the steps of a Russian facility.

So

they have been emboldened.

They are fearless.

The fact that under George W.

Bush, they went into Georgia.

Under Barack Obama, they took Crimea.

And I have a lot of concerns that Putin's territorial ambitions are not going to stop.

And that's why I did Spy Master, because I was concerned what happens when you have an American population that's tired of going to war.

And rightly so, I get it.

I don't like war.

I don't want to go back to war.

But with Afghanistan under our belts and still going on with Iraq, if the Russians came in and tried to take back Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, three NATO member countries most Americans can't find on the map,

we're not going to have the stomach to put our people in.

But

it's our duty.

Article 5 in the NATO Treaty is an attack on one, is an attack on all.

And so I had this idea, what would a president be willing to do to prevent that?

Would he be willing to send somebody like my guy, Scott Harvath, over to prevent it from happening?

So that was last summer's book.

And in this summer's book, as you said, the Russians, they've had enough of Scott Harvath.

He has ruined so many of their operations that they said, you know what?

We're going to get him.

We're going to put them in our own version of a black site, wring them out, and then we are going to reserve the honor of putting a bullet between his eyes for the Russian president.

So, at the end of the book, the Russian president could come in and put a bullet in him, but Harvath thinks otherwise.

So,

you this is like a survival guide.

It is, it is a lot like that, Yeah.

And

he has to take everything he's learned in his whole life

and

use

absolutely everything, all the good, all the bad, everything, to be able to survive.

I told people,

well, I make a lot of movie comparisons.

One thing I've told people, it's my 19th novel, but it's like the James Bond franchise.

You can go see a James Bond movie.

It doesn't matter if you've seen one, none.

You've seen them all.

It doesn't matter.

You can pick pick up any of my books at any point.

I was telling people, imagine if you had the predator,

that's a great science fiction character, but the batteries on his suit were dead.

And you drop him in Russia, and the Russians are chasing him, trying to get a hold of him.

And I always refer to Scott Harvath as an apex predator, somebody that's at the top of the food chain.

I kind of want a little bit of Jack London Call of the Wild.

I wanted to put him in a situation he'd never been in before.

And so this idea of the Russians being able to put a bag over his head in the U.S.

and drag him back to Russia, but when they're moving him within Russia,

the plane goes down, and this is his one chance for escape.

And this is something that when we teach

what's called Sears School here to our military, it's an acronym for survive, evade, resist, escape.

One of the things they're told to be prepared for is you may only get one chance to escape.

And when it comes, you have to take it.

You've got to make the decision.

You've got to be ready ahead of time that if it presents itself, you're going to run with it.

And so that presents itself for Harvet.

And so he's not only got the Russians chasing him, but he's in one of the most remote, most isolated, dangerous parts of Russia.

And it's freezing outside.

So I spent time with

a legend in the Navy SEAL community who teaches this stuff, cold weather warfare and survival in Alaska for the SEALs.

And the flip side of it is, I also spent time, I was interested, what happens in Washington, D.C.

if we lose a high-level spy like this?

How do we get them back?

And I learned that under Barack Obama, when James Foley, the journalist, was taken by ISIS and beheaded, that there were a lot of agencies going, well, who's in charge of getting them back?

Is it the State Department?

Is it the CIA?

Is it the Defense Department?

And in the aftermath of that, Barack Obama put something together called the Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell.

And he set it up.

It was a State Department program run out of the FBI where they could bring people in from all the agencies.

There's a desk for Treasury, there's a desk for the NSA, there's a desk for the CIA, FBI.

And they sit them around here so that they all talk to each other and they share information and they try to figure out

how to get the American back.

And President Trump, I think, very wisely chose to keep this program and he pumped more resources and things into it.

In fact, my book, it's a friend of mine from college that President Trump tapped to be the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, and I dedicated this book to him because I think what he's doing, helping to free the Christian

pastor in Iran, all of these things, he is constantly on planes going around the world trying to get Americans back.

And there's a lot of different levers they pull on.

But with this book, I took a lot of license.

It isn't like the Russians could read this book.

They're not going to learn how we get our guys back.

It's not going to happen.

So let me take it back to somebody who's taking everything in their life and then applying it.

Because one of the questions I want to talk to you about is how Scott was born.

But before I get there,

what experiences, what tough things in your life, what were the tools of your life that you put together to be able to create what you've done?

I mean, this is your 20th book.

19th.

19th.

19th, yeah.

And aren't they, they're all bestsellers, if not all number one bestsellers.

Yeah, they haven't all been number ones.

We started out by my first book making it onto a regional bestseller list, and we built from there,

ended up then having repeated number ones on the New York Times list.

So I've been very fortunate and have built a wonderful audience.

I grew up in Chicago.

My dad is a no-longer active Marine who went to school on the GI Bill and became a real estate developer.

My mom was a flight attendant.

I always think of the movie Boeing Boeing with Tony Curtis when the Jets got introduced to international travel.

My mom flew for TWA in the 60s from New York to Paris, Paris, New York.

And she had to be beautiful.

Oh, she was stunning.

Yeah, that was a pretty good day.

And the little pillbox hat and the white gloves.

And you had to know how to carve a roast in flight and all of this stuff.

And it was really neat.

My dad saw the world with the Marine Corps.

He was in the Philippines.

He was in Japan.

My mom saw the world with TWA.

I had a travel bug growing up.

But the arts in our house were something to make you better rounded.

They were not a career path.

And I ended up going to the University of Southern California.

My dad wanted me to study

before we get there.

Back up.

I jumped too far ahead.

Back up.

Your folks got divorced.

Yes, they did.

How much of a role did that play on you?

I was always a big reader, and I think my folks got divorced when I was nine, and that was, it was not easy, yeah, it was not easy.

So I think I became an even bigger reader.

I think I retreated into books.

And I think that's really where the writing started because my grandmother had encouraged me to write down what I was feeling, what I was thinking.

So it became a way of dealing with

how does a nine-year-old find the words to talk to adults about why aren't you staying together and that kind of a thing.

So

I'd always loved to read my favorite book when you were reading.

As a kid.

As a kid.

At that time, the Black Stallion novels.

I loved those.

Those and the Hardy Hardy Boy books I absolutely loved when I was in grade school.

Love Hardy Boy books.

Yeah, they were great.

They were great.

Yeah, they were great.

All right.

So you start this, you always had read, but now writing is starting.

Yeah, I started writing.

And I'd known I wanted to write even earlier than that, but it started to take off.

So we go to my grandmother's house in Wisconsin for weekends, and I'd write plays and things like this and short stories.

So it almost as if my my parents, in that divorce, that opened up something for me.

I turned my attention inward because my world was changing so rapidly and so

in such a difficult way for me as a nine-year-old that I turned in and I found this part of myself where it's where I could control things.

I couldn't control things outside, but any world I was writing about was a world that I was in complete control over.

It's fascinating.

We have very similar,

I mean, that's really what got me to talk on the microphone.

Wow.

So you go to a, is it a high school or junior high school that's very left?

It's in Chicago.

It's your high school stars, right?

Right.

So this was a very progressive liberal arts school.

My dad was freaking out because he wanted me to continue my Jesuit education in Catholic school because I'd gone to...

Well, Jesuit education is not necessarily...

conservative either.

No, yes, yeah,

that's very true.

So he wanted me to go to a particular Catholic high school and continue that education.

I didn't.

I really liked this school, Francis Parker in Chicago.

And Daryl Hanna had come out of there, the actress.

Jennifer Beals, the actress.

A couple years older than me is Billy Zane.

And Billy was, what, the Phantom, and he was in Titanic.

He's done a ton of stuff.

And in my class was actress Ann H.

And the Mammoths, Tony and David Mammet had been there.

So we had a lot of, and then some of my classmates had been on jailbreak, like Paul Paul Edelstein and just really neat people.

And in fact, Adam Scheer, who was,

I think Adam's a year younger than I am, now runs Ryan Seacrest Company.

He had been at William Morris Endeavor and now runs Ryan Seacrest Company.

So that school has turned out a lot of successful people in the entertainment business.

I liked it because you go from Catholic school to a progressive liberal arts school where it's like, you don't do your homework, you just get a zero.

You don't get the

ruler.

Okay, so you're there.

Did that play a role in shaping your worldview of seeing things differently, being able to relate to more people later in life?

Did that play a role in anything?

A little bit.

I remember the watchwords

above the stage were a school should be a complete community, an embryonic democracy, something else.

I've forgotten it.

I knew it forever.

But

the emphasis on personal responsibility I thought was very, very interesting.

And they said, you know, when you get to college, you don't do your your homework, you also get a zero.

But I think I had the school record for going in front of the disciplinary

committee because

I would push on the rules in the handbook because I want them to walk the walk.

And I won every single time I went to the disciplinary committee based on, I said, here's what the handbook says.

I was like a little lawyer.

I'm sure I annoyed the heck out of the teachers that dragged me in front of that committee.

But it was good.

I really came into my own because I had people watching on the edges, the teachers, but they really left you to your own development to a certain degree, if that makes sense.

So you're then now let's get to your dad.

Your dad, when it comes time for college.

He gets to pick.

He's paying.

That was part of the divorce thing.

And I had applied for college.

He gets to pick.

So I had a girlfriend in St.

Louis.

So I applied to go to Missoula.

I thought I'd go into the journalism program there.

It's fantastic down in Missouri.

In fact, I was the first senior in my school to get into college.

And I didn't even use the college counselor.

So there's another teacher that didn't like me I was messing with his rice bowl because he gets paid extra he was the math teacher and he got paid extra to be the college counselor but my dad said no he said listen I'm paying and I want you guys you know you'll go out to school in California you're gonna work too while you're in school it's not a full float thing so I ended up leasing apartments out there but he was building office buildings and hotels

in Southern California and he really liked the network of people that went to USC.

There's a real reputation that if you're interviewing me me and someone else and you went to SC and I went to SC and this person, God forbid, went to UCLA or someplace else,

the legend was that I would get hired because we have that in common.

It's called an old boys club.

Yeah, so we call it the Cosa Nostra of Southern California.

But yeah, so I went to USC and

studied business administration because my dad wanted me to

get my degree in that and then come out and go into business with him.

And I hated it.

I hated it.

We had an econ class.

It was like an introduction to economics.

And

Valentine's Day was coming up and we had this teacher that was so excited.

He was sweating and he said, I got the perfect, we're going to work on this.

You've got X amount of flowers, red roses that have been ordered, but not enough vases.

And how do we keep the customers?

And I closed my books and my friends were looking at this.

What are you doing?

I said, I'd rather take a bullet between the eyes than be a middle manager in a flower store chain.

I'm out of here.

And they said, it's just

an example.

You don't have to do this.

And I moped in my room for two days, my dorm room, and somebody suggested I go see the college counselor, the career counselor, I should say, at USC.

And I took a test, which they've changed the name, but at the time it was called the Strong Campbell Personality Test.

And I scored off the charts for writing and publishing.

And I said, okay, this, I've wanted to do it since I was a little boy.

I'm not going to tell my dad.

And I went into the registrar's office and I said,

can I switch over to creative writing and film and television production while it still says business administration on my report cards going home?

And they said, yeah, you just within 24 hours of graduation, you have to declare that major and you better make sure you've taken all the classes.

And that's what I did.

My dad figured it out well before graduation.

What was his response?

It was interesting because it was the late 80s, early 90s, and a lot of the bond traders were leaving New York to go out and do financing in Hollywood.

And those stories were making it into the mainstream business magazines that he read,

Forbes and Fortune, and it was in the Wall Street Journal.

So he just said, wow, that's great.

You can go into the movie business and get in on the finance side.

Maybe we'll do a master's at USC in finance.

And I was, as long as I can just graduate without him, you know, trying to steer me, I'll deal with it then.

But he's very proud of what I've done now.

I don't think he would have ever said, yeah, that's a great career path.

Go do it.

But he's very proud of what I've accomplished.

This isn't when you started.

I mean, you didn't start.

No.

You didn't start writing.

No.

What did you do when you got out?

So I got out and

I decided to do something.

I saved money while I was working at USC, leasing apartments, and I decided I would do something no American had ever done.

It's going to be the first.

I'm going to move to Paris and write a novel.

Oh, that's never happened before.

Like those North Koreans.

Always thinking.

Always thinking.

All right.

So

I went and got about three chapters into writing a thriller.

I didn't know what I was going to write.

I sat down and I got three chapters in, and then that voice that we all have in the back of our minds started talking to me, saying, this might not be good.

This This could be embarrassing for you.

What if you take this time and nobody likes the book, you don't get it published?

It's not even worth the risk.

Why don't you just ship the laptop back home?

You've saved some money.

You can travel on a Urail pass and stay in hostels.

Why don't you see a bit of the world and you know, put this silly idea to bed?

And I gave into that.

I gave into it.

And so I did some traveling.

I came back to interview with William Morris to go into their agent training program.

And it was a bunch of interviews over several months.

But while I'd been in Europe, I got an idea for a TV show.

I thought traveling made me a better American.

I realized how lucky we are to live in this country.

It's true.

It's very true.

And I wanted to encourage young Americans to travel while they're young, not when they're retired.

Don't wait till you're retired.

Go now.

So I had this idea.

I came back.

I ended up going to work in my dad's business because

his assistant had been on a leave of absence and I knew the business from growing up in it and I could help him.

And he said, here's the deal.

I'll let you run your little production company.

I was pitching public television on my idea.

I still want you to go and do these interviews with William Morris because I'd like to see you.

That'd be a great rocket ship into doing movies.

So I was based in Chicago doing this and public television bit.

They liked the idea of a travel show for young people.

And I had, the day they said yes, was the day I had my final interview at William Morris.

And the head of the television department at that time was a gentleman by the name of Bob Cristani.

I've looked for him ever since.

I don't know where he is, if he's even still in the business.

But I sat down with him and we talked and I told him PBS bit.

They said they're interested in this.

And he said, Brad, I'm going to give you a piece of advice.

You don't strike me as an agent.

You strike me as a creative person.

You're the kind of person we would represent here.

And he said, I'm going to give you a piece of advice.

You decide to take it, not take it.

He said, but if you've got a chance to be the writer, the star of your own show on public television, he said, grab it with both hands.

Grab it.

You'll regret not doing it.

It was one of the best pieces of advice I ever got.

I did it, and I did 23 episodes,

10 episodes the first season, 13 the next season.

And that was Traveling Light, my travel show.

It's too bad somebody didn't have an archive to be able to show those embarrassing.

I've still got some.

I've still got some.

I just don't travel around with them.

So do we.

Oh, shoot.

Okay.

So

when do you meet your wife?

So I am home

from filming the

first season.

I had come home.

I've been working in Europe.

I just wrapped the first season of shows.

I had a little bit more left to go back and shoot, but I had a plane ticket I had to use.

So I came home.

I always have a rule.

I don't go out the first two nights I'm home because I'm falling asleep with the jet lag, and it's rude, and I just can't help it.

I hit five o'clock, and my eyes do this.

So I'm out having lunch with my godfather, and we're

sitting outdoors in Chicago and a friend walks by that our family's known forever and he says to me, he says, hey, Brad, good to see you.

We're throwing a wine tasting party at our house tomorrow night.

Would you like to come?

We're just inviting a bunch of friends and everything.

And something told me, some force said, don't say no.

You have to go.

And this was my number one rule I never broke.

And I said, yes, I'll go.

And it turned out that this friend of ours, he and his wife were trying to get all their single friends together for a wine tasting.

I walked into this thing, I saw my wife across the room.

I had been in love with Meg Ryan forever, and that had been my picture of the perfect woman.

And I found better than Meg Ryan.

And I saw her, and I just knew that was the woman I was going to marry, and I did.

We've been together 23 years now.

Wow.

She is wonderful.

Yeah.

By the way.

And very lucky, too.

Oh, very, very lucky.

I don't know about that.

She says, I've graded everything but humility.

So you are,

she's the reason you are a writer.

Yes.

Nothing else.

You gave up on yourself.

I did.

And you're on your honeymoon.

And she looked at me.

We were in a piazza in Italy one night and she said, what would you regret on your deathbed never having done?

That's a good question to ask maybe before you get married.

It's a good, it really tells you a lot about the person you're considering spending your life with.

But she asked me there, and I said, writing a book and getting it published.

I didn't even know I had said it.

It just

came out.

And she said, fine, when we get home, you start taking two hours a day, no phone, no, no TV, no internet going in, that you focus on this and you make that dream come true.

And that's how I got started writing.

I don't hear a lot of

Scott in this story, except for perhaps your dad's experience.

Where does Scott come from?

So when you're looking for a character and you need to develop a character, especially one that's run this many books,

you have to know him inside and out.

Where did he come from?

It came from people that I knew.

So I had a really good friend of my dad's who was in the FBI.

One of my neighbors in college had been part of a top-secret U.S.

program that placed

operatives in Berlin while the wall was still up in case the Russians ever overran the wall.

Their job was to create guerrilla warfare.

They had hidden weapons caches and radio sets and money all over Berlin.

Fascinating group.

But for me, Harvath, I think Bond was part Ian Fleming, just like I think Jack Ryan was part Clancy, kind of that alter ego.

I think Harvath was that for me.

He's the ultimate Boy Scout.

He's somebody that loves his country.

And I knew based on what my parents had taught us growing up that there is no American dream without those willing to protect it.

And so

we were raised with a very informed sense of patriotism.

We were very appreciative of law enforcement, the military, what the members of the intelligence community do.

So I had been steeped in those areas growing up, hearing stories, knowing friends of my parents and things like this growing up.

And I understood what courage and what dedication it took to stand on a wall, to put yourself into hostile territory.

So for me, it was a way of honoring those people.

But also, Stephen King had said that,

number one, a writer is someone who's trained their mind to misbehave, see things differently, think differently, but that you should write what you love to read because that's where your passion is.

So as I graduated from the Hardy Boys books, I started picking up my dad's Freddie Forsyth books, the Le Corray books, the Clancy books, and I couldn't read them fast enough.

I loved those books.

So, I was introduced to all of these different characters, like Jason Bourne and Jack Ryan, and all of this stuff.

So, that was really the world that I was living in

with books.

Let me go back to you.

you've talked about something inside of me said

um

i just knew i felt this was you you are a divine providence kind of guy

how many days after your wife said you have to go and write books was it between that conversation and you on the train with your wife and somebody sitting across from you?

So

it was probably,

I don't know, a week later.

So a week later,

so when I was doing the show for public television, our sponsor was Rail Europe Group, the people that do the rail passes.

And as a wedding present, They gave us first-class passes in as many overnight train compartments as we want.

And the joke in my family is in addition to being Swedish and Norwegian, we have a little bit of Scottish, so we wouldn't cough up a buck if we were choking on it.

And it was a great way, and I knew this from doing a budget travel TV show, that overnighting on the trains is a great way to spend money.

And I thought, oh, North by Northwest with Carrie Grant and the train and the Orient Express, what a romantic thing.

I didn't know my wife gets motion sick.

So it wasn't as romantic as I thought it would be for a honeymoon, but she, you know, we found some drama, I mean at some point and she was good.

But our very last overnight was going to be from Munich in Oktoberfest to Amsterdam.

That was the only train compartment we would have to share and sleep with strangers.

And every town we were in throughout Europe on our honeymoon that had a train station, I would walk in and say, have there been any cancellations?

Can we get a private on this last leg of our trip?

And my wife said, eventually, you know, we're spending more time in train stations than we are seeing the sites.

And you're the one that always says, Brad, everything happens for a reason and it always works out for the best.

I said, well, that's why I tell friends of mine when they won't take my advice and they keep repeating this is their problem.

And she said, you're fired.

No more travel agent.

Let's just go and whatever happens, happens.

When we boarded the train that late afternoon in Munich for the ride or early evening to Amsterdam, there was a lovely brother and sister from Atlanta, Georgia on board.

They recognized me from my TV shows.

And the sister and I had this shared love of books.

It's one of the things I love about reading.

It doesn't matter if you're Democrat, Republican, rich, poor, black, white.

If you love books, you have a shared love language.

And we spent

all night talking about books.

In fact, fact, she introduced me to Vince Flynn.

She had said, oh, there's this great new book, a guy named Vince Flynn.

It's called Term Limits.

You've got to read it.

I said, I'll look for it when we get near an English bookstore.

But anyway, we talk all night, and she said, well, you know, I love your TV show.

Are you going to film more episodes?

And I said, because I figured if I told my secret again, that it would be easier.

I said, well, I'm actually going to write a book when I get home.

And she's like, wow, that's really neat.

We get off the train.

We get very little sleep that night because we stayed up talking all night.

But when we get off on the platform in the morning and we go to exchange contact information, she hands me her business card and she's a sales rep for Simon ⁇ Schuster.

And she said, if you write that book and I can help you at Simon ⁇ Schuster, let me know.

So divine providence, God saying, you know,

my wife asked me that question and it just all came together.

And as we left the train station, it was pouring down rain.

There were no cabs.

We had to drag our bags to the hotel.

The room was not ready.

So they said, go to this cafe around the corner and have a coffee, have a sandwich.

When you come back, it'll be all set.

We sat down at the table.

My wife's like Louis Lemour, the great Western writer, in that she always has a book with her and she's always reading something.

I found a newspaper and I opened it up.

It was an International Herald Tribune.

And in it was a story about a Swiss intelligence officer who embezzled all this money from the Swiss government and was training his own shadow militia high in the Alps with high-tech weapons from his own private arsenal.

That became my first novel, The Lions of Lucerne.

So all that stuff happened within like a week on my honeymoon.

If I remember right, let me see if I can get the exact quote.

The first book that you wrote, I think, was called, I believe by the New York Times, one of the best political thrillers ever.

I believe that was Barnes and Noble.

Yes, Barnes and Noble, and that's my very first book.

Yes.

So

when you wrote it,

here's a guy who was in Paris who stopped writing did you use any of that no in fact still have it I had lost it I found it four days ago before leaving on tour I found those first three chapters

I've talked about them for 20 years you at least have to put them online I have to do something with them yes

so you you know didn't have a lot of self-confidence

your wife kind of walked you through that when you submitted it how were you feeling well i'll tell you what felt fantastic was finishing it.

Because when I finished it, I sensed this must be what it's like for someone who runs their first marathon, climbs their first mountain.

No matter what happened to me for the rest of my life, I knew I could do it again and that I would not go to my grave wondering what would my life have looked like had I just sat down and tried.

And it felt fantastic.

So I submitted it, not knowing what was going to happen.

My friend Cindy Jackson, the lovely young lady from the train, she read it, made some suggestions, and she was slowly trying to work it through Simon Schuster because she had one editor in mind for it.

And in the meantime, I'm querying agents.

I'm trying to get an agent.

I'm getting rejection after rejection after rejection.

I found one agent that said, I like this, but it needs a little work.

And if you'll do X, Y, and Z, I'll read it again.

So I said, okay.

And about that time, my friend Cindy called me and said, Emily Bessler at Simon ⁇ Schuster, a fantastic editor.

You know Emily.

I do.

Who was Vince Flynn?

And still your editor.

Still my editor.

She was Vince Flynn's editor.

Emily, Cindy said, Emily Bessler's going to call you.

And Emily Bessler called me and said, you've given me the best two days of reading.

I don't know.

It's been so long since I've read something I've loved and have been so excited about as the Lions of Lucerne.

She said, do you have an agent?

And I said, can I call you back in five minutes?

And I called the agent, Heidi Lang, who I have now and I've had ever since.

And I told her the story.

And she said, well, I guess you don't need to make my changes then to that manuscript.

And it's lovely because I would tell anybody who would listen how much I love my agent, Heidi Lang.

And I would say it in newspaper articles and all that kind of stuff.

Dan Brown ended up going over to Heidi and he said, I've got this new book.

I want a new agent.

And let me tell you what it's all about.

And she goes, Oh, it's pretty interesting.

What are you going to call it?

And he says, I think I'm going to call it the Da Vinci Code.

So it's, for me, I'm always happy when people who are meant to be together,

when they come together and good things happen.

And that's exciting for me.

So you get good reviews.

It's regional.

Yeah, we'd make regional bestseller.

Is writing what you thought it was going to be?

Is the life of a writer,

what's it like?

What'd you think it was going to be like?

I'll tell you what I thought.

There is a great movie with Tom Selick and Paulina Portzkov called Her Alibi.

He's a writer that has writer's blocks.

So he goes down to the criminal court court building, leaves his place in Martha's Vineyard or Connecticut, goes in, and here's this beautiful woman who's been accused of murder.

She doesn't speak English, but he's got writer's block, and people are bringing him casseroles.

His editor's coming out to help, or his agent, and all this kind of stuff.

I thought it was very romantic, and all the misconceptions I had about Hemingway and all this stuff.

It's work.

It's hard, but it's hard because of who I am vis-a-vis my parents, who told me every day on the job, treat it like it's your first day on the job.

Don't ever phone it it in.

That's why you're raise the bar each time.

You'd think it gets easier.

It doesn't.

It gets harder, but I don't work for Simon ⁇ Schuster.

I work for the readers.

And when they leave a review online, that's my annual performance review.

And I want five stars.

I want them to say, your job is safe for another year.

You know, we've got you.

You're great.

Keep doing what you're doing.

And do they see all of the sweat and all the tweaks and all the angst and teeth pulling that go into it some nights in my office no and they're not supposed to they're supposed to get a great white knuckle thrill ride and if you close the book a little bit smarter we've talked for years about faction where you don't know where the facts end and the fiction begins then I've done my job and that's that's what I work for is to make people happy to entertain people those are my favorite my favorite books of yours are the ones that I spend with the laptop right side by side that can't be true is that really true is that really happening which I think you're the you're the best at um do you ever do you ever

my kids said to me height of my success

um i'm very positive you know on everything you know as you think it will become

but i've said to my kids uh

ever since we were successful at all enjoy it while it lasts

because

Nothing is forever.

And my daughter asked me one time, why do you say that?

And I said, said, well, because I've been through it before.

Not at this scale, but I've been through it before.

And

success is meaningless.

It shouldn't change you.

This is just an extra little perk of life.

It's what you do and who you are and how you express yourself.

That's what means something.

Not all of the gifts.

Right.

that come with it.

And what good can you do with it?

What can you do outside yourself?

How can you take the blessings that you've enjoyed and make other people's lives better?

Not make their lives easier necessarily, but make other people's lives better.

So yeah, I talk to my children about this all the time because it's important for you.

But do you ever sit down and think,

I don't know if I have it anymore.

I don't know if I,

man, I, I.

Well, you top yourself.

Like, I'm this was.

When they said,

when you came back and said, run,

did you have any time that you were like,

oh, the whole time.

Okay.

The whole time.

I was not.

Because Scott Harvath, my character, goes through some incredible loss.

And

I'm looking for that balance.

It's a high wire act.

How do I keep this an exciting thriller but reveal him as a human being?

Is he going to keep things completely compartmentalized and be only focused on survival?

Or is he going to have these down moments where the horrible things that happened, that the Russians did to be able to put a bag over his head, the people he cares about who died, that's got to bleed in at some point.

Even if you're trudging through the snow, you've got to say, those people are dead because of me.

They're gone and it's my fault.

I couldn't protect them.

Somebody who sees himself as a defender of the defenseless.

So let me ask you this.

Who's your favorite Bond?

Mike.

You watch Bond?

Oh, yeah, I've seen them all and I've read the books and everything.

In the movies.

In the movies.

Are you still watching the Bond series?

Oh, yeah.

I've seen all of the movies, but I keep, I watched the launch for 25 that they did.

My wife surprised me one year with a trip to Ian Fleming's home in Jamaica before we had kids, and I got to sit at Ian Fleming's desk and write.

Fascinating.

Fascinating.

He's a wild guy.

A wild guy, but people don't.

That is him in many ways.

That is him.

I have to show you before you leave.

I'll take you to our vault.

I have...

An actual Ian Fleming exploding rat from World War II from Paris.

It's unbelievable.

He was the guy who said, why don't we put, why don't we get real dead rats, fill them with explosives, and when the Germans are, we have to slow down their war machine, they're shoveling coal.

Yeah.

And I mean, people don't know.

He was really clever, really clever.

Very devious.

So who's your favorite Bond?

So I think probably Sean Connery is always going to be my favorite.

I love Sean Connery, but I think Daniel Craig and the reboot they did with Daniel Craig was absolutely fantastic.

I mean, here's a guy.

He's 51 years old.

He looks fantastic.

I know.

And he, I got.

He's Scott.

Yeah.

He's Scott.

You see.

Unlike Sean Connery,

there's never a scratch on his outside or his inside.

Yeah.

Where Daniel Craig

you see the scars inside as well, which I think adds such depth.

to the character.

From a writing standpoint, if you study what happened happened in Casino Royale, how they had that double beat ending where it ends, he's rescued from getting tortured and all that kind of stuff.

And then he's sailing with Vesper.

And then there's that whole other thing, and the building collapses on the Grand Canal in Venice.

That, from a writing standpoint, is fantastic, but they really revealed his inner scars while showing the outer ones as well.

The most important line in that is

why?

The bitch is dead.

Do you remember when he's coming home and she's talking to M.

M.

I remember?

You see him just

cold.

Yep.

Swallop.

Yep.

Let's go back to the book now.

Okay.

Talk a little bit about.

There's a couple of places.

For instance,

Scott talks about vengeance and the importance of vengeance.

And I thought that was

an interesting word to choose.

Can you tell a story a bit without wrecking anything?

Yeah, I think I can.

I have a big thing about Putin.

I do not like Putin.

So Putin was on my mind a lot when I was writing this book.

And one of the things that I'm most concerned about is when the Soviet Union broke up, a third of their nuclear arsenal was in Ukraine.

And we wanted Ukraine to part with it, to get rid of it.

We made Ukraine a promise, and we said, you will never be invaded.

You will never lose any of your sovereign territory.

We guarantee it as the United States of America.

And they said, okay, get Russia to sign it too.

And the Russians did.

It wasn't even worth the ink on paper.

But then under the Obama administration, Putin did it.

He sent his little green men in there, a lot from what's called the Wagner Group, which is, you and I talked on the radio about them.

Wagner.

Yeah, yeah.

And so they, this private military corporation.

Let's explain that because I think it's in the book, but I think it's really.

I didn't even know this.

I mean,

I know the history of Wagner with Hitler, and it's a fascinating-

So it's like a Russian version of Blackwater.

So they take former special operations, Russian military people called Spetsnaz, and they hire them, and they come to work for this private company.

By the way, these things are illegal in Russia.

You're not allowed to have a private military corporation.

This one exists, and this is the one that does Putin's bidding.

So as Maduro was starting...

Who pays for it?

I don't think the money comes directly from the Kremlin.

I think they funnel it around so that there's no direct, but the Russians are funding these guys because they're doing all of what Putin once done.

They're going into Syria, backing up Assad.

These are the guys we killed in that bombing.

About 150,

200 of them.

Right, and it was like, no big deal.

You know what I mean?

The Russians were kind of like, what soldiers killed what?

And that's why they exist, to give them a plausible deniability.

And as Maduro was starting to topple, these are the guys that went into Venezuela to back him up and make sure that if there was a military coup, he'd be protected.

Why are they called the Wagner Group?

So they're called the Wagner Group because the colonel who runs them, his call sign in the Russian special forces, was Wagner.

He chose it for himself because they are obsessed with the SS and Nazi ideology.

And Wagner was one of Hitler's favorite composers.

So he chose Wagner as his call sign.

He named his company Wagner.

And these...

What do you mean he's obsessed?

And they are obsessed with the SS.

There is a, and it's a difficult word for me.

I should have written it and had it on a card here, but there is a hybrid religion/slash cult that grew up around paganism and Nazi ideology at the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Do you know,

what's his name?

Kurt Lander.

Kurt Lander.

He's just written a new book.

I'll remind you.

It's very scholarly, but it is all on this.

And he wanted to write the quintessential

basic text

on the religion of the SS and the religion of the German people and how it came apart.

It's not a commercial book.

It's really scholarly, but you would love it.

Oh, yeah, I totally love it.

Because it goes into all of that.

It's fascinating.

So there's people in Russia.

I know that the,

what's his name, the guy who wrote the fourth political theory, he's a Putin advisor.

He is also fascinated.

There's a lot of people in the former Soviet Union that are...

they buy into this religious nightmare.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And there's a lot of kind of ethno-ideology that can be wrapped into that.

And you see, Putin is there, even now,

he's been making comments about immigration and all this kind of stuff.

So there's a lot that works for them.

It's master race stuff.

It is master race stuff.

So, as an author, looking for bad guys for a novel, I couldn't.

This is, I guarantee you, this is one of the things that readers will go search and say, this group can't be real, number one.

And this ideology, Thor, it's so over the top.

And it's real.

And people are going to search it reading Backlash, and they're going to see it.

So do they

is that, like, for instance,

the SS had,

you know, I can't remember which one it was, but it had the castle for the SS where they were performing rich rituals and everything else.

Is this just the lead guy, or

are they indoctrinating these people into that kind of cult?

I think there's a certain amount of them that are hardcore believers, and then there's some others that say, this is a good paycheck in a crummy country where it's tough.

I don't want to be a security guard for a gas station.

I want to use my skills.

And so I think there's a lot of wink-wink.

Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, Nazis.

So I don't think they're all, they all follow this.

But the elite around Wagner, the head guy,

it is like a circle of these people.

So why are they so dangerous?

I think they are incredibly dangerous.

Number one, because of the ideology and anything goes.

So this is all about serving the state and it's all about serving Putin.

So it's almost like a Putin worship.

In place of Hitler, it is Putin now.

Are they the ones who sliced

up the missing, that sliced up one of the family members of the terrorists who took the Russian diplomat?

No.

I don't know that that I was led to believe that this was more kind of on the intelligence side of stuff, mixed with a little bit of special forces, but not the Wagner guys.

So I wasn't.

But they'll slice them up in a meat slicer.

What will these guys do?

What won't these guys do that they will?

Well,

there isn't much we've seen.

It's because of these guys that Putin was able to take Crimea.

They come in, they're very smart, they foment revolution.

So this is the plan.

This is why last summer's book, Spymaster, and my concern about Putin grabbing one of the smaller NATO states on the Baltic, like Latvia, Lithuania, or Estonia, what these guys do is they come in where there's native Russian speakers, much the way Hitler did in Czechoslovakia.

You rile everybody up, and then you come in saying, well, we're here to protect the ethnic Germans or we're here to

do that.

That's what it was.

Exactly.

Except Putin's on the, Russia's on the Security Council at the United Nations.

So if they can go in and stir enough of this stuff up, and then the United Nations wants to send in peacekeepers, Putin can veto it, but say, here's what we will do.

We don't think this is a UN problem.

This is essentially a Russian problem.

We'll send our own troops to keep peace there.

It's a de facto invasion.

And that's what I'm really worried about happening because if Putin gets away with that, that's the end of NATO.

If the U.S.

does not go in, and I don't think we have the stomach to go in and back up smaller NATO,

I just don't think it's going to, I don't think it would happen.

I don't think we'd honor the argument.

He didn't move very quickly with Georgia, and the Russians changed the borders there.

So,

yeah, not a and they weren't sufficiently scared off from the United States when Barack Obama came on the scene because they went even further and they took the entire Crimean Peninsula.

So,

can we change subjects?

Sure.

Let's just talk about

news of the day.

Yeah.

Donald Trump.

I've

always

said,

I want a president with a twitchy eye.

I want a president that

keeps them guessing.

Our enemies always go, I don't know.

I think that SOB will do it.

Like they thought of Reagan.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You have to be that cowboy that is like reaching for your gun and you're like, he'd be stupid to pull that gun out.

but he just might do it.

We should sit down and talk.

You know what I mean?

That's what we have.

I never expected to get one with a twitchy eye where even the Americans were like, I don't know, he just might do that.

What do you take away from

Trump, the administration, and his relationship with Putin?

What do you think is happening there?

And I'm not talking about conspiracy stuff, and I'm not talking about the election.

I'm just talking about

what do you think is happening?

So, first of all, Donald Trump got elected to go and be Donald Trump.

Even though he said, I can be more presidential, but it'll be boring and all this kind of stuff.

He was elected by our fellow citizens to be president.

So he is president, fair and square, no cheating, democratically elected.

Boom.

I think.

He has a way that he does business.

I think he has a comfortable.

He is very much a, do I like you?

Do I not like you?

I'm going going to get, I'm not going to read those briefing papers.

I don't want to know about this.

I'm going to see, I'm going to look him in the eye and see.

You know, Bush said that about Putin.

I looked into his eyes and saw his soul kind of a thing.

Bush tried to do the, you know, you know, the let my heart lead me, how we're going to do this stuff.

I think that can be okay,

but I think it needs to be, let's not pretend like this is 4D chess that's going on here.

Trump goes with his gut.

It's what he does.

This isn't some grand plan.

And I I think that we lose out a little bit by not having a more coordinated strategy behind the scenes.

But we were doing the same thing over and over again, for instance, with North Korea, which is sanctions, more sanctions, sanctions, more sanctions.

It didn't get us anywhere.

He's talking to him.

And if that does make a difference, it was Churchill that said, jaw-jaw is better than war-war.

So, and that was the one thing Barack Obama apparently said to Donald Trump when they passed, you know, when the moving trucks passed

at the White House, he was most concerned with North Korea and their program.

So Putin, though, is not a dummy.

He's super, super, super smart.

Do you see anyone on the world stage that is as smart and strategic as

Putin?

As smart, but not as strategic.

No.

No.

He wants things.

This is something I mentioned in Backlash, is that he wants all the benefits of civilized Western democracy, but he doesn't want to play by any of the rules.

So he wants to do things his own way.

And he, I mean, it's a kleptocracy over there, and it's a bunch of oligarchs that are raping that country.

The Russian, think about Russia's history pre-communism.

Think of the artists that came from there, the composers, the writers.

These are people who love to read, that still love to go to the ballet, that love music.

Russia is an incredible country, but for its terrible government, the Russian people.

But you get the government you deserve.

If they don't have the stomach to overthrow these people, it's not our problem.

We shouldn't be going around the world handing democracy on a silver platter to countries, because if you don't fight for it, you won't be able to keep it.

You don't value it.

But Putin's dangerous.

Putin's dangerous.

I'm glad that there's certain foreign policy people around the president so that when Donald Trump goes and gladly shakes his hand, they can quickly count Trump's fingers and make sure he got all of his fingers back.

But I am concerned.

I think they've been way too soft with Putin, way too soft with the Saudis, particularly with the whole Khashoggi thing.

I think that's dangerous with the crown prince.

Is that any different than

the usual?

I don't like being being friends with the Saudis.

I think they're despicable.

What they stand for, yada, yada.

I don't believe the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

It just doesn't, it never works out.

But we should show some moral condemnation for things like this.

We shouldn't just say, well, he said maybe it's rogue people that did it.

He doesn't know what happened.

That kind of stuff of taking these people.

Putin says he didn't interfere with the election.

I buy that.

Even though my intelligence agencies, we need to stand for more than just a great economy.

America is more than just its economy.

America is a set of ideas and principles.

This is what's great about America.

You can come from anywhere in the world and be an American.

You can't come from anywhere in the world and be a Frenchman.

You can't come from anywhere in the world and be Japanese.

But here we subscribe to a set of ideas and values.

And those are important.

But do we?

I mean,

I think our government hasn't subscribed to those values off and on throughout our history.

But really, since the progressive era, we have just been sliding.

I remember when they took and the American Way out of Superman.

Yeah, truth, justice, and the American Way.

So it's just truth, justice, and we were like,

and the American Way.

But wait, we have also now taken away truth.

There is no truth in it.

Yeah, that's true.

And justice is social justice.

There is no Superman as America anymore.

They're all gone.

All three of those are gone.

If, fine, you want to be out of the fight?

You want to just give up?

We can still fight, and we need to have a set of principles and values that we're willing to fight for.

If you have not read George Wills' new book on conservatism, I didn't know this story about Woodrow Wilson.

Did you know that Woodrow Wilson, while he was the You're talking to me?

Dude, I forget who I'm talking about.

I didn't know about the fight that Woodrow Wilson had at Princeton over where the graduate school should go.

And he lost that fight.

He wanted it on campus.

He wanted the graduate students with the undergrads.

And the person who headed the graduate school at Princeton said, no, there's this beautiful hill.

It's a 15-minute walk away.

That's where it should be.

Woodrow Wilson was so ticked off, he resigned.

That's why he left Princeton.

He ran for governor of New Jersey that year.

That started his,

that was, that marked his entry into politics.

And he's the guy that really took on Madisonian democracy.

Had he won that fight, had Princeton put the graduate school where it was, he might not have ever left.

We might have been a more Madisonian republic, Madisonian democracy,

if not for that happening at Princeton.

I thought that was a fat.

That's what George Will opens his book on conservatism about, and it's fascinating.

I'd say it's a great book, and I know you're a big reader, and I just got it for Father's Day,

and I have loved it.

But that was all the times I've listened to you on Woodrow Wilson, I never knew that story or why he went into politics.

Yeah, I didn't know that story.

I didn't know that story either.

But while we're here,

speaking of Woodrow Wilson, one of the things he said was:

the job of education is to make a

son

the most unlike his father as possible.

That's not good.

We're there.

We're there.

So what are the principles that you think we still hold?

I want to clarify something.

I think

the coasts, and not all of the coasts, the media centers,

I think that kind of poison, that toxic hatred stuff, I think that's real and it's there.

I travel the country, I talk to people, nobody's talking about this stuff in their real life.

They talk about it when they're watching television, or you're talking about a politician, but nobody is talking about a hundred some genders.

They're not

doing it.

They're not.

So I'm not convinced we're as divided as we think we are.

However,

the universities are pumping out these these kids now that don't have any idea at all what the American Republic really is and what the American idea and the American experiment was all about.

Have we lost that?

I don't think so.

I don't think so.

I think we are finally starting to see the beginnings of a correction in the marketplace of higher education.

I think the scandal of all these people buying their kids into school

has put out there what's the value of an education.

I'm a big fan of Mike Rowe, and I really think that

one of the bad things the American dream turned into was this idea that everybody's got to go to a four-year college.

I agree.

You get people that spend a year or two there, realize it's not for them, they leave with a tremendous amount of debt.

Vocational training is huge.

We've been handing out visas for nurses in the Philippines because we can't get enough people here.

We were looking in Eastern European countries for electricians because we didn't have enough electricians here.

So I think America

is a place where there's going to always be the constant battle of ideas.

You've got the progressives

and it should be.

This is why we have checks and balances within our republic and it exists in the cultural space as well.

So I will never say die.

I will never say we've lost this fight because the fight continues.

I mean, I'm a Sonny Reagan optimist, and I really believe America's best days are ahead of her, that we haven't hit our full potential, that there's there's so much coming.

Jonah Goldberg's book, A Suicide of the West, was fantastic.

And Jonah talks about us being at the

peak of the mountain right now.

And we have to be really careful because if we lean too far one way or the other, we're going to topple off.

This is the best moment in history, in the best country in the history of the world, to be alive.

We are so blessed to be here right now.

And that's worth fighting for.

And I want to fight for more than just a robust economy.

I want to fight for those ideas and what it means to be a good neighbor.

There's Robert, I'm just completely throwing out all my favorite books,

but Putnam's book, Bowling Alone, is a fascinating book.

And he has a cocktail party gag or question he likes to ask.

And I do it every time I'm out with people.

What do you think was the invention of the 20th century that most served to isolate us from each other?

The 20th century, I would say that it is the internet.

You know what he says it is?

Air conditioning.

He said we used to sit on the front stoop, stoop,

trying to catch a breeze.

People would walk their babies.

You would talk to your neighbors.

True.

Because it was too hot to sit inside.

So, do you know?

Um,

you know, about Ebcot, what Ebcot was supposed to be.

Good,

experimental prototype city of tomorrow.

Every front yard

was facing a park.

Okay, there was no street, there was no sidewalk.

Your front stoop opened up into the park.

Okay, I didn't know that.

Every home was built around the park, and your backyards were very small.

You couldn't barbecue.

You weren't having picnics there.

You had nothing.

So he was trying to bring back that spirit of community where you would sit on the front porch, you would have the kids play, but you would be playing with your neighbors in the big backyard, whatever.

And in the center, you would climb stairs and it would be a monorail system right directly into the city.

So

there was no traffic, no cars, nothing.

That is what we've missed.

We don't,

I talked to a taxi driver one time in New York City and he said, I said, and he was

70 maybe at the time,

and he had been driving since the 1950s.

And he was an amazing guy.

And I said,

how have, what changes have you seen in this city and in people?

He said, the change came in the late 60s.

He said, we used to all just, it would be hot, we'd all bring our mattresses out and we'd sleep in the park.

Wow.

And he said, we would either sleep on the fire escapes or many of us would go down and we would sleep in the park because it was too hot.

We'd go out.

Everybody was there.

Everybody knew each other.

He said, and that all ended in the 60s and the violence that started and the and the

the the serial killings and everything else he said and we all kind of went in back into our homes he said it hadn't been the same since

I agree I agree and we've now progressed from what will the neighbors think to not even knowing our neighbors names and that's a big difference too because those breaks on personal uh behavior have come off uh i have someone i work with and she said if there was one thing from america's past she'd bring back it'd be shame this idea that shame on you.

I remember that was the worst thing that an adult could say to me on public transportation.

It was such a horrible thing to have thought you've brought shame on yourself or your family.

But these aren't irreversible problems that America has.

It really isn't.

But I don't think there are solutions without first plugging back into what the values and principles of America are.

You read Rudyard Kipling's Gods of the Copybook headings?

No, and I should have because you did that great commercial that freaked everybody out.

I think it was for the Overton window, wasn't it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That was such a powerful commercial.

I remember seeing that going, I wish I'd thought of that.

It's from Rudyard Kipling, and he saw exactly what we're going through right now.

He saw it in his time.

And he wrote this poem.

It's hard to find because it's,

you know, they, I mean, it's in one book that I found.

And I think that's intentional, burying him.

But he warns and he says, when all of these things happen, when you see them again, the gods of the copybook headings will limp back and say it once more.

It was in the beginning.

It'll be in the end.

The dog returns to

its vomit.

And the gods of the copybook headings with terror and slaughter will return.

He says...

that he feels that once you go to a certain point where you are no longer recognizing truth, you won't be able to even understand truth or even know how to find truth until truth reinstates itself and says, sorry, these things are always universally true.

And because you deny them,

you're in trouble.

And trouble happens, you know, real trouble happens, World War I in his case.

I like what Ben Shapiro says.

Facts don't care about your feelings.

Truth is truth.

And

I used to be, I used to to make lots of jokes on Twitter.

It's one of the things that I enjoyed about social media was the intelligence of people you could interact with.

There's a lot of garbage on there.

But I don't do it anymore.

And I have a little software program that deletes my tweets after two weeks because I don't want somebody coming back and saying three years from now, out of context, that I made some joke that if I had said it, like if I bumped into Stu in the hallway and I gave him a big hug and somebody said, you two ought to get a room or some silly thing and you didn't know the background.

And I said, hey, Stu, I'm looking for rooms for you.

You You know, on Twitter, it is, so my own free speech, I feel, has succumbed to a,

there's been a chill.

There's been a chilling effect on my free speech because it is a, it is a slash and burn kind of a thing.

And it is very dangerous.

And that is part of the war on truth as well.

People want to say black is white.

And they, I understand now as an adult and as an author why

movements come for the academics and the poets and the writers and and the artists first because we have a way of boiling things down and making it easy to understand.

I mean, you do it every day in all your programs and that makes you a threat to the storytellers and those with those with

a fixed star field on truth that is demanding evidence.

If you say that's not the North Pole, show me the evidence.

Right.

You know, those people and the storytellers are the first to go and they are doing it.

And not only are they doing it, but people are turning their backs on storytellers because they're allowing themselves to be siloed in Facebook, people getting all their news there.

So they're not even listening to those storytellers.

They found people that will lie to them 24-7 and tell them what they want to hear.

So they found a way to kind of put wax in their ears so they're not even hearing truth anymore.

And that is one of the dangers of the internet.

Are you following up the stuff that's happening with Google and their algorithm?

Little bit.

I actually sent you a message, and I don't think you saw it.

I sent it late last night because we had talked about what books we would want to see preserved because of digital and what's happening.

Microsoft is now shutting down its e-reader service.

You get your books until the end of 2019 and then it's just, they're gone.

And I thought you'd really like reading that article, but you are really on to something is what I wanted to say.

It only makes sense.

I mean, if we have all of our books digitally stored, I have all my Brad Thor books.

You fall fall out of favor.

They're gone.

Well, where are the little rascals?

I always heard this rumor that somebody had bought the rights to the little rascals programs because I never see them on TV anymore.

I had heard this thing, and I never dug into it.

I don't know.

Maybe because I grew up with them.

I thought they were funny, but apparently somebody decided they weren't, and those are now gone.

And we can have the discussion.

And I would, I saw them as a kid, so I can't argue for or against the little rascals.

And I don't want this to explode into a little rascals thing's force, pro, pro spanky.

And everybody knows Spanky was a monster.

We treated Darla like she was a piece of meat.

Alfalfa was blah, blah, blah.

I don't want to have that fight.

How is it?

How appropriate would it be that you would flush your career down over

little rascals?

Just a throwaway

cultural.

You'd be like, and I was going to be someone, and then I talked about those damn little rascals.

But it is scary that you could have your entire body of work just turned off.

Gone.

Just turned off.

I mean,

you could erase me

easily.

You'd take me off of radio.

You could take me off of YouTube.

You could ban me from the internet, make me just an absolute pariah.

Deplatform you, yeah.

Deplatform me, get rid of my books digitally.

Overnight, all of my work could be gone.

And would anyone know that I even lived five years from now?

Well, we've seen this, and I'm going to jump right into Godwin's Law, which is never a good idea.

But what are the Nazis like burning?

They burn books for the same reason.

They were trying to expunge certain ideas, certain people from

Grad that there is a...

There is a fundamental flaw in humans.

I mean, when you look at the Holocaust, the Holocaust happened like, I think it's 25 times, okay, throughout history.

It's been going on forever.

And, and, you know,

the star sewn to your clothes, that's not the first time that happened.

That happened in Persia 700 years ago.

And, and little things just keep carrying on, and you make the same mistake.

We look at the Gestapo, and we see the Gestapo uniform, and you're like, holy cow.

Well, that was designed by Hugo Boss.

He was the designer of that uniform.

It wasn't designed to look scary.

It was designed to look classy and snappy and buttoned up.

If you take away what you know about the Nazis, I think most people would still say, that's a sharp uniform.

But once you know what that uniform

stands for, then you're like, oh boy.

So

we have this part of us that doesn't recognize, we just assume that evil's going to come with big black black boots and a red armband.

Wasn't that Jonah Goldberg's book, Liberal Fascism?

And I think he was quoting George Carlin saying that fascism will come with a smiley face.

Correct.

Correct.

And so

we're not seeing things where we refuse to recognize.

Yeah,

I know that

it's unlikely that this is going to happen, you know, in America.

But now in America, it's not so unlikely, and it's not going to come looking the same way.

They're burning books right now every time they take somebody offline and put them in a digital ghetto.

It is Francis Fukuyama who said, history does not repeat, but it does rhyme.

So it means you have to be looking.

You have to be willing to have the intellectual curiosity to say, is this, is this similar?

And I grew up, I went to a largely Jewish high school in Chicago.

So my progressive liberal arts school, I can't remember the breakdown, but

the friends that I have now from high school that I know who are of the Jewish faith, I joke I've been to more high holidays than I have to Christian holidays.

But I remember talking to parents and grandparents and how important it was not to forget, never forget, right?

We talk about that all the time with the Holocaust because it can repeat.

And Jewish people understand that it can come again.

And that's why it is so important to preserve that piece of history.

But it's also just as important not to forget.

It's also important not to let it happen, not to let those seeds grow.

And that's what I am concerned with.

If we can silence certain speech, then we're on a slippery slope.

You're a fiction writer.

Yes.

Write the the fictional story from where we are,

the high points of how this ends

in a good way and a bad way, and which one's more believable.

So, particularly because of my friends growing up who are Jewish, I always wondered how was it that the German population in the 1930s could be so physically and intellectually and economically intimidated into

not necessarily supporting.

They weren't all Nazis in Germany, but boy, I think very quickly people shut up.

There were some people that, like Bonhoeffer and things like this, that didn't.

Have you read Defying Hitler?

No.

You have to read this book.

It's actually

a journal, a diary of a guy that lived in Germany during the Weimar Republic

and saw Hitler come to power and was actually writing something to warn the West.

Okay.

You don't know what you're dealing with here.

You don't know what's happened to the German people.

And he goes through it and you see it in a completely different way.

You all of a sudden answer that question, because I've wondered that my whole life.

How did that happen?

And Brad, when you read it, put World War II instead of World War I, instead of World War I,

just replace that with the World Trade Center.

And it's all coming this way.

It's there.

Well, so what we see is there were very likely everyday Germans in the streets saying, these Nazis are idiots.

We don't want this.

And then all of a sudden there's bricks through their windows.

There are burning stores and don't hire these people like you see on Twitter.

It's not enough to disagree with someone on social media anymore.

You have to destroy them.

I've had people get pissed with me and they always want to tag my publisher in everything.

Right.

Who do you care?

Just ignore me.

I'm one voice.

Ignore me.

You don't like what I have to say?

But you're supposed to, I'm supposed to lose everything and you salt the earth.

They did do the bricks through the windows, but the more effective thing was the SA.

And the SA, the brown shirts, marching down.

And at the beginning, people didn't say Heil Hitler because they chose to.

It's because the SA was in public and they would beat, they would go down.

They'd take over a street.

And if you didn't, they would stop and they would beat that person until everybody did.

And the U.S.

media kept it secret, they refused to report on it.

If you read Eric Larson's fabulous book, In the Garden of Beasts,

it is one of the most perfect books.

There isn't a single,

there's no typos, there's no grammatical.

It is so.

And I've become friends with Eric and I've told him I love that book.

Please tell him I talked about that book every day for almost two years, trying to get just the people on my staff to read that book.

It is fantastic.

And it reads like a thriller.

Yeah.

How he puts things together.

But in that's exactly, you're right.

I didn't know about that until I'd read his book about how there were people that wouldn't.

One of my favorite pictures on the internet is all of these, all these Germans saluting the one guy's like this.

And they got a circle saying, be this guy.

Be this guy.

And I love that.

That's who I want to be.

But yeah, there's a story.

Yeah.

But

I want to change the ending.

Be that guy alive.

Be that guy alive.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It is

great to see you again.

It's great to see you.

Great to see you too.

What is the next book?

What are you going to take on next?

I don't know.

I really don't know.

Having just gotten back from visiting Hemingway's house, this is such an arrogant thing to say, to compare yourself to, to even say I walked in the rooms of Hemingway's house.

I looked at what drove his style, what he learned in newspaper work for short, powerful sentences.

I'd never read To Have and Have Not, and I'm reading it now, and it's fascinating about a man who kind of is losing everything and has to turn to crime to support his family and run smuggling back and forth with Cuba.

I don't know.

I have a deep, deep desire as an artist to maybe do a couple of one-offs that are a little different.

I'm going to turn 50 in, I think it's like two months from today.

We're getting really close.

So I have a major milestone in my life and I want to spend at least the next two years

adding to what I've already done with the Scott Harvest stuff, continuing to make my fans happy, but to stretch myself and go further with different things.

So can you write two books?

I did it one year.

When I did my all-female Delta Force team, the Athena Project, I did two books.

But walking around Hemingway's, and I joked with you earlier that, you know, we talk about how much we write in a day, and Hemingway did five to 700 words.

If I'm doing it just for myself, maybe, I don't even consider it for publication.

It doesn't have to be a 100,000-word book.

There may be another way I do.

I've got friends that have been begging me to do graphic novels with them.

They love graphic novels.

There's lots of little things we can potentially do, but I want to stretch myself as a writer.

I want to do more.

I love Scott Harvath.

He's not going anywhere, I promise.

He's going to be around for a long time, but I'd love to do some more stuff in the genre.

I've got a really cool idea that actually takes one of the stories from the Bible and puts a major spin on it, drops it in the CIA that I think would be so current.

And you'd read this and not have any idea.

until the end, oh my gosh, I know that story.

But it's told in such a way that it's all of the same things play out.

That's the one I'm most excited about.

And I feel like I have to do it.

I have to do it.

Not because I want to promote the Bible or anything, but I just think it's one of the greatest stories ever told.

And I think dropping it into the CIA with spies and all this stuff could be so cool.

That's great.

Yeah.

That's really neat.

That's your cliffhanger.

Yeah, there you go.

Thanks, Brent.

Thanks, Glenn.

Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.