August 3, 2024 • 44 mins
#1 New York Times and #1 Wall Street Journal bestselling author Brad Thor returns to Sofrep Radio to introduce his latest high-octane thriller, "Shadow of Doubt". This summer thriller follows the next adventure of America's top spy Scot Harvath as he gets entangled in a whirlwind of double agents, international intrigue, and heart-stopping chases.
Harvath is forced to choose between his conscience and his country as he navigates between a shadowy Russian defector, a jaw-droppingly gorgeous Norwegian operative, and a lone French agent who stumbles upon a conspiracy so explosive it could ignite a global firestorm.
Get a copy of "Shadow of Doubt": https://amzn.to/3LRxuOv
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Loot for us.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
If it doesn't work, you're just not using enough. You're
listening to SOFTWAB Radio Special Operations, Military Nails on straight
talk with the guys in the community.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Hey, what's going on? Welcome to soft Rep. I am
super excited to have my next returning author guest friend
on the show. But first, my name is Rad and
I got to remind you to go check out our
merch store right soft rep dot com forward slash merch.
Go check it out. We got branded soft reap items,
not to be confused with Brandon web, the creator of
(00:57):
soft Rep. And then we also have a book club
and that is soft rep dot com Forward Slash book
hyphen Club, and you can find all sorts of great
books that have been curated for your brain to read. Now,
speaking of reading, you may have already read twenty two
of the twenty three books that we're about to talk
about with Brad Thor. New York Times number one best
(01:19):
selling author Brad Thor is on the show. Welcome back,
Hey Ren, thanks for having me back.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
It's great to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
You know, I'm excited to have you back. And you're
a heavy hitter, bro. There's just no joke about it. Okay,
New York Times bestselling author is not a joke. Oh
where did it just go? I had your whole little
dotsy ach gear. Let me see if I can find
it real quick. Held on one second here. So Brad
Thor has written Red Cell books based off of time
(01:46):
in Red Cell with the CIA government.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Correct, Brad, No, I am not allowed to write about
anything in the Red Cell. That is verboten. I call
the US or the Analytic Red Cell program in the
Las Vegas of government programs, and they were very clear
that what happens in the Red Cell stays in the
Red Cell. So but because of being a thriller author
kind of in that genre of ludlum or clancy, I
(02:13):
got invited into the Red Cell program to help them
wargame out potential terrorist scenarios in different attacks the bad guys,
different targets they might pick here and abroad. So but yeah,
everything that I developed for them stays there. But what
was cool is they as the son of a marine,
I got to serve my country not by picking up
a rifle, but by using the gray matter between my
(02:36):
years to help maybe come up with things for the
federal government that it helped keep the country safe.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Right, So you go into a brainstorm session and come
up with all these scenarios within the Red Cell organization.
So you did do that, yeah, and then those things
stay there. So I almost got you to say, yeah,
book all my books, Yeah, all my books are Red Cell.
But no, no, and if you just use your creative
power exactly.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
And in fact, there was one attack scenario that I
came up with in Red Cell and then it actually
happened halfway around the world and made international headlines. And
I said to my contact, the person that I interact
with the most there, I said, hey, this is all
over the news. Can I go on Fox and talk
about this and tell them how we developed this idea
in the Red Cell unit? And he said, absolutely not.
(03:19):
There's only one scenario they have ever released publicly from
the Red Cell Unit, and that was about terraces exploiting
our preparations for a hurricane, whether that means attacking a
shelter where people were pulled together, or you know how
we have these marshaling yards where we move rescue equipment
out of the path of a hurricane so that if
(03:40):
we needed to get so that when you need to
get back in. You've got all your trucks, whether that
be for restoring power or ambulances, whatever it might be,
to get out of the path. So that's the only
thing they've ever publicly released from the Red Cell program.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
So cool, bro, Yeah, so cool got into that. It is.
And for the listeners that might be learning about Brath
for the first time, or for those of you that
have returned and heard him talk about this, it is
a very interesting program that he was in where he's
just writing out scenarios about what possibly could happen, and
then how do we prevent the what ifs and could happens?
Now I have a little description, I pull it back up,
(04:16):
and I'm going to talk a little bit about your
book called Shadow of Doubt. Is that that's correct?
Speaker 3 (04:20):
That's my new summer thriller, Shadow of Doubt.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
That's right, And that follows Scott Harveth, who is just
this person who winds up in all these different predicaments
and in a world shrouded in shadows where doubt is
the only weapon. Can one spy expose the truth? Number
one New York Times and Number one Wall Street Journal
best selling author Brad Thorpe delivers his latest high octane thriller,
A mysterios excuse me, A mysterious cargo plane flanked by
(04:47):
a squadron of Russia's mostly lethal fighters has just taken
off from a remote air base closely monitored by the
United States. No one inside the Pentagon has any idea
where it's going or what it's carrying. A high level
Russian defector, walking vault of secrets that could shatter the West,
seeks asylum in Norway. Across the continent, in the heart
of Paris, a lone French agent stumbles upon a conspiracy
(05:08):
so explosive it could ignite a global firestorm. As alarm
bells as alarm bells ring in Washington, the CIA's most
lethal weapon, Scott Harvest, is forced to choose between his
conscience and his country. You'll be left breathless as you
read as Harvest is swept into a whirlwind of double agents,
international intrigue, and heart stopping chases. This is all coming
(05:30):
out of you.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
Yeah, yeah, that's it. You know, that's my job is
to give people a great toes in the sand book
in the hands, summer summer thriller beach read, get them
all excited. You know, one of the cool things that
I hear from people is, you know, I bought my
brother the book, or I bought my husband or my
dad the book, and they weren't readers. And you've got
these great, short, crisp, cinematic chapters, you leave each one
(05:52):
with a cliffhanger, and you've turned these people into my family.
You've turned them into readers. And so that's always music
to an author's years to know that somebody stopped reading
years ago but picked up one of my books and
loves the way I write, loves the stories I tell,
and it's turned them back into a reader. So that's
probably the familiar people think that about it.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Yeah, million, you know what.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
The other thing that is equally makes me just feel
terrific is when I have people say I've decided I'm
going to go into the military after reading your books.
So I get young people that have read the books
and stuff and say, you know what, I respect what
these people do in your books, and I want to
go serve the country as well. And that you know,
those come in every once in a while, And that's
(06:32):
probably the most prized compliment that I've ever received as
an author.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
It's just to spark that little bit inside of someone
to say, Hey, what's it like if I went the
next step and then maybe go join and then who
knows what Scott harvest or what character you can become
once you get in there. Right, everybody's so cool, has
such a cool rockstar story to tell. You know, you're
just coming from within your own rockstar self to bring
Scott to these books. And again, he's been all over
(07:01):
the place. I mean, you know, he's just like found
the fountain of youth.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
Well, the fountain youth is is performance enhancing drugs. I
readily admit that in the books that Harvath is. You know,
he's in his forties and stuff. And I know a
lot of guys that are still kicking indoors and shooting
bad guys in the face and all of them. There's
nothing in There's nothing in the rule book that says
(07:27):
guys that go down range, at least guys like Harvath
that are kind of on the dark side, there's nothing
that says they can't give themselves every single advantage they need.
So competing with the younger generation of guys coming up
behind him and not wanting to come out of the
field Harvath readily, readily does a certain amount of injectables
that give him the edge and add a little bit
(07:48):
to his bench press, shave a little bit off of
his hundred yard cash. And that's just reflective of the
guys that I know, like I said, that are still
out there doing some of this country's most dangerous work.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Do you ever see you're Scott meeting up with like
maybe another character you know that's very popular in other
drama or other thrillers that you know, they're like walking
down the same Paris street in his book. He's going
to the store, to the drug store. We've done Scott's.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
Yeah, we've done that a couple of times, a handful
of us. And it's about it's about all you can
do is to say, Okay, we agree, you can make
a mention of my guy. I'll make a mention of
your guy. And that's it. Because none of us who
are writing a book a year can ever sit down
and write a book together. I mean, it's just it's
it's it's near impossible to do an entire book with
two characters and still crank out your own individual book
(08:38):
in a year. But yeah, we've a bunch of us
have done that where we've mentioned other people in the books,
or what we've said is that our character was reading
a book by the actual real life author. That's another
thing we've done back and forth here, which is kind
of It's kind of fun because a lot of us
we share rad we share the same readers, right, So
if you're reading a Brad Poor book, there's other thriller
(08:58):
authors you're reading during the year, and vice versa. So
it is kind of an ic easter egg when fans
stumble across if they love a certain author and then
they're reading the book and they hear that author mention
another author they love. That's that's fun.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Stuff, right, Like say your character Scott's at the airport
just looking at like he's like observing somebody in the
you know, where all the books and the candy are
and people signed the books, authors signed their books, and
he's just looking at a book. But it's like one
of like, you know Jack Carr or Brandon Webb have
a book and yeah, and then he puts it down
and he goes after the objective.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
You know.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
It's like, so we've I don't know.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
I did that interactly, and Jack has done that with me,
So we've both done that back and forth. So yeah,
so that that's the part that I should have cited
that example. It's a perfect example of what Jack and
I have done. So James Reese has had a brad
Thorpe book, or Scott Harvath has had a Jack Carr
book that kind of that kind of a thing. So yeah,
that's that's fun to do.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
No, I love that. I love that, and that's been
in my own head. But I'm sure that you've already
been done it. You're New York Time's best selling author.
You guys already have a vision. Okay, people with visions
of your vision like, hey, we know what you want
to do. Here's a storyboard. You're like, how'd you know?
Now when we find Scott, you know, is he going
into Norway? Are we going to be seeing going to
(10:12):
be reading about Norway and what's going on?
Speaker 3 (10:15):
So Harveth a couple of books ago Cross Paths with
the So to back up, and you've got a very
smart audience that knows a lot about what's happening in
the world. And I'm going to say something and probably
ninety nine percent of your audience knows this that Norway
has an all female special forces detachment. It's called the
Jager Troop. And Harveth several years ago came across a
(10:38):
woman from that unit in the Norwegian Special Forces who
had left because she got sick of doing hearts and
minds bullshit in Afghanistan. She's like, I don't want to
sit down over tea with another group of women in
Afghanistan again. I signed up to kick indoors and shoot
bad guys. And she left the Norwegian Armed Forces and
(10:58):
became an intelligence operative. And that where Harveth meets her.
And she's tall, she's gorgeous, she's younger than Harvath, and
he says, listen, the only thing I've got over this
chick is that I've been this woman, is that I've
been at the game longer than she has. But other
than that, she's faster, smarter, more talented than I ever was.
And he freely admits it, and the two of them
end up falling in love and they get engaged. And
(11:20):
so what ends up happening in this book is Harveth
is just let me set the stage better this way.
For those who aren't familiar with my books, I tell
people that my thrillers. The brad Thor thrillers are like
the James Bond movies. If there is a new Bond
movie at your local movie theater and you've never seen
a Bond movie before, you can go see that one.
(11:41):
It doesn't matter if you've seen the earlier ones. You're
not missing anything. Same thing with my books. So in
this book, Harveth has just come off and op where
he had to rescue a hostage and because he's staying
in the field so much and he's refusing to come
back and help kind of spot the next generation of talent,
like his agency really wants him back in DC. They
(12:02):
don't want him going out in the field anymore, but
he's refusing, and so what they've done is they've increased
his ops tempo. They're giving him very little downtime, which
is extremely dangerous Number one, to not give him time
to kind of rest and recuperate. But they're basically trying
to beat him into submission to finally have him say,
all right, that's it, I'm out. I don't want to
be in the field anymore. So Harvett has just come
(12:23):
off an op. He's turned off his phone and basically
given the big middle finger back to Northern Virginia and said,
I'm not doing anything. The world can burn down in
the next week, but I'm taking a week off. I'm
gonna go see Solvi, my fiance, in Oslow, because she's
been promoted now at the Norwegian Intelligence Service. She's a
deputy director. She's got next to no vacation time at all,
(12:44):
so if he wants to see her, he has to
go to her. So he's on his way to Oslo
plane lands and the station chief for the CIA in
Oslo meets him at the airport and says there's something really,
really serious we need you to do. And he's like,
what is it. She's like, no, no, no, not here, not
till we get back to the skiff at the embassy
in Oslo. And when they get to the skiff, she
(13:06):
lays out what's going on, and she says, the Norwegians
have got information and we want you to keep your
ears open and ask your fiance a couple of questions,
and he says, what you want me to spy on
my fiance. He's like, fu, I'm not doing it. And
then the CIA, anticipating that he would say FU, blackmail
(13:26):
him and they say, if you don't, we know something
from a prior op that you were on that you
thought nobody saw, that nobody knew. And so he's kind
of caught between two. He did something morally ambiguous and
now they're asking him to do something morally wrong. In
his estimation, this is a woman who's gonna marry. He
understands Norway's and Allied Intelligence right their services that lied
(13:50):
with ours, they're part of NATO. But he's presented right
off the bat with this incredibly difficult thing. It's either
you know, submit to the black, submit and do what
the CIA wants to do, or you know, say be
honest with his fiancee, yeah and say I'm not gonna
They want me to spy and I'm not gonna do it.
So that's kind of the moral heart of what's at
the center of this. But the whole thing is an
(14:11):
action thriller with lots of intrigue and all this kind
of stuff. But that's kind of the hardest thing. Harvests
being pressed into service against his will by the CIA,
by the deputy Director of Operations at the CIA.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
All he wants to do is see his girl.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
It's all he wants he wants a week off. He
wants a week off. This guy's the first thing he
asked for when he gets on the plane to go
to Norway's ziplocks full of ice to put on his
battered body. And he's got a bourbon and he's just
been he's had the shit kicked out of him, and
he just wants a week decompressed.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Yeah, he just wants a week off.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
A week he doesn't even need R and R just
one R, just one R, which just ur.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
Just a little, just like let chill, let me just
buckle my seatbelt, let me just sit exactly, you know,
like eat. But no, they're like, you're not gonna sit
down and just get up real quick. He's like, you're
just gonna sit out. He can.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
That's exactly it.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
That's exactly a go, go go. And then they are
they're trying to overload him but get all they can
out of him at the same time, like they don't
want the mission to fail, but they want him to
basically quit one day.
Speaker 3 (15:08):
Yeah, they want him to come back and ride a
desk and they basically want him to you know, step
off the field and be a coach, you know. And
I've I've equated him for the longest time. I equated
him to Tom Brady, that he would know when it's
time to step off the field. That it isn't for
anybody else to tell him it's time to come off
the field and help scout and train different players. He'll
tell you when he's ready to come off the field.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
And that's a big act.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
It's a big thing. And at the very end of
the book, there's something very interesting that happens that deals
with that question about should he be in the field,
should he be in the office. He's kind of been
playing the hokey poke with one foot in, one foot out,
trying to placate all the powers that be in Northern Virginia.
And there's something very interesting that happens at the end
of Shadow of Doubt that kind of is a is
an interesting moment of development in Harvest character. I don't
(15:52):
want to spoil it because it's a fun choiste at
the end of the book, but there's a little little
easter egg there at the end.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
And I think that when our Converse station comes out,
your book will just be releasing out there, so everybody
should go check it out. It'll be released everywhere, including
at your local airport.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
Yeah, yes, hopefully knock on wood. That's where a lot
of people find them.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
I was flying into San Francisco early June and I
literally walked into the airport to see if I've seen
any of you guys who I interview this book on
there and low and behold yours? Was that awesome? I was?
So I was like, really like, all right, that's cool.
Brad's is there? All right? I was like, let me
see what else is here as anybody else is here,
and I was like, Brad's there. That's all I needed
to see. So I mean, still in June, your previous
(16:35):
book is still Yeah, that's a big deal to be
at the airport's bookstore.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
Well, and you know what you with with the new
book coming out, So airport bookstores you used to be
able to if you're a big best seller, you could
you could sit there all year. That really doesn't happen anymore.
And I'm gonna guess you maybe saw last summer's book
not in hardcover but in paperback, and that San Francisco
and SFO, because what happens is is they try to
(17:01):
put out your paperback a month before your hardcover's coming out,
So that's kind of the You get in the airport
twice really in a year, so you're you're around for
maybe five or six weeks with your hardcover when it
comes out, and then eleven months later that hardcover is
a paperback and that goes in a month before the
next hardcover comes out because they are there seems to
(17:24):
be less and less space in bookstores. There's more books
coming out, so the churn is a lot. If you've
got a phenomenon like the Da Vinci code, that'll be
there all year, you know that if they if the
sales are such. So it is kind of an interesting
thing that the business has changed so much that those
of us that used to be in year round, you
know where, we're doing it twice a year now.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
So well, SFO has it. That's good, good, it's funny.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
I was just up in Sonoma. I got home last
night from Sonoma and I didn't go through SFO. I
went Dallas to Santa Rosa and uh, because I didn't
want to do the drive from SFO two hours. Yeah,
I've done that drive a bunch. I had a buddy
that got married up there a little while ago and
When I found out that I could do Dallas to
Santa Rosa, I'm like, oh, that's good, that's good.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
That's what. Yeah, because we go from Utah to San
Fran and then rent some type of SUV from San
Fran and then drive up to uh menden scenes. Oh nice, nice, yeah,
really nice, really nice drive, go through all of the
different you know, Napa Valley sono'ma the whole vineyardiful, yeah
it is. And we stayed a friend's house who's a director.
(18:30):
I'm not going to say his name, but it's a
very nice house. It's like you go into his backyard
and you're almost in the sequoias and you see slugs,
these yellow slugs that are like so big that when
we went to the Redwoods with our families to go
explore the Redwoods, I was like, there's got to be
like a sixty foot slug or somewhere. I'm like, you know,
I am so minute, little on the floor, I am
(18:52):
like crumbs of sequoias, like so big, so glorious. And
we walked in the there was a sequoia zoo up there.
We walked through their whole tree system that they have here,
like one hundred feet up and then there's still like
another one hundred and fifty twohunred feet up for the
top of the trees. It's amazing up there.
Speaker 3 (19:09):
It's beautiful like nothing else. And for those listening who
have never been up to this part of the world
that Rad and I are talking about, this part of
the country.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
It is.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
It is a must see. Mussy. It's so beautiful showing
up to Sonoma. And we were all along the Russian
River and we were doing a lot of the forests
and everything, and it was just it's I wasn't up
there doing wine tasting stuff. I was up there doing
a guy's weekend kind of a thing. And I love
those trees. They're just beautiful. It's an incredible part of
the country.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
It's all about the nature around us. You know. I'm
wearing like my Boonty hat. I've got on like my
Catpat military uniform, and my wife's like, oh, that's look
got a lot of neon green in your Catpat uniform
Canadian pattern. I was like yeah. But once we got
into the woods up there, She's like, I understand why
they made the cat Pat the Pacific North Northwest coast,
Like you can't it's like they got trees like that.
(19:57):
It blends in. I'm like, where did Rad go? That
was great? I mean, really, what a great time to
wrap myself around nature and just let the I mean,
there's a whole ecosystem just raining down on you. And
it's not even like raining anywhere else.
Speaker 3 (20:11):
It's pretty special, pretty special.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
We Scott to go meet Rad in the Redwoods.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
There you go, there you go. That'd be a good scene.
Get gathers, here's your next mission. Or you've got some
intel that you've got to pass off to Harvath and
we do it out there.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
That's right, that's right, that's right. It'll be his uber
driversfo Oh, that's awesome. Dude, you're awesome. I'm so glad
that you got back on the show. I'm happy that
you're still writing and that you're pumping out books and
you know when David David is your Yeah, yeah, I'm
(20:47):
just trying to give him a shout out. He's always
like Rad, let's get Brad on. I'm like, how can
we not Brad and Rad together? Sophomore?
Speaker 3 (20:54):
I made you that joke before that. I've got my
buddies and to take that, take that line out of
the Jamie Kennedy. Uh, the Jamie Kennedy movie where he
talks about the mean streets of Malibu and his name
is Brad and he calls himself be Rad most Wanted.
(21:16):
That's the movie.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Yeah, thanks Jimmy, Jamie Kennedy for having a file in
my brain there had.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
You that Malibu's most wanted be Rad?
Speaker 1 (21:24):
Yo? What's up? Most wanted?
Speaker 3 (21:26):
Yo?
Speaker 1 (21:26):
What's up? Yo? Oh?
Speaker 3 (21:28):
Man?
Speaker 1 (21:29):
Okay, Scott's got to meet him too. We'll have an uber.
It'll be Scott Harveth, Jamie Kennedy and me and you. Yeah, right, exactly,
an executive version please, just because I'm six fives now,
are you signing the books that you see at the
airport somebody? Normally?
Speaker 3 (21:46):
Yeah. When I go through an airport and I see
the books, I always stop and sign them. Yeah, all
the time. And that's kind of fun too. People pass
through the airport and they'll be a sticker on there
signed by the author.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Yeah. Oh is that right? Do you do? The airport attendant?
So they like just like you're over there, like just
signing up.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
I always ask their like, I always ask first. I
don't want to get tased on my way to catch
my flight. So uh, I always walk up. But that's me, right,
I'm the son of a marine. My mom was a
flight attendant raised in the Midwest, and so being polite
was a very big part of our upbringing his kids.
So I always introduced myself at the counter and I'm like, hey,
I'm here. I'm happy to sign anything you got. I
(22:22):
saw you've got. And first I make sure they have
the book right, and then I ask them. I'll bring
up a copy and show them, hey, here's the author photo.
It really is me, and then excuse me, can I
sign for you? And then oftentimes I'll have stickers that
they put on the book so that it pops that
it's signed by the author. So I don't just I
don't just kind of go in covert and sign. That's silly.
It's a It helps draw attention to the book, and
(22:44):
maybe somebody will buy your book as opposed to somebody
else's if they see that it's signed, because it has
a perceived increase in value.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
So yeah, you just touched it, maybe just thump through
the pages. Maybe there's a bookmark in the middle that
you've signed. Go buy the books it, buy a book,
Go get a book. Go find a book, get a book,
buy a book, Barnes and Noble, local bookstores. You know,
his books are also in very mom and pop bookstore.
So if there's one in your area and you don't
even really go read that much, go to their store
(23:10):
and buy a book. Thank you, buy his book, thank you,
Go buy go, buy Brad's book, Brad Thor right here,
who we're talking with, It goes a long way. And
also if you're out there and you do read the
book like electronically, I believe that leaving a review goes
a long way for the author. So whether you find
the book on Kindle or.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
Audio, hardcover, softcover, reviews are very very helpful. And so
now you have a choice about whether you actually just
rate it and you pick how many stars you want
to give it, and you can also write something. It
used to be the had to write something for the
review to actually pop up online, but now you can
just if you're in a hurry, you can just give
it X amount of stars if you like it. So
(23:50):
that's really helpful. And you know, rad I always tell
people that that's like having a virtual suggestion box in
the lobby of my business. When when somebody takes the
time to write a review. And I don't work for
the publisher. I work for the readers. The people who
read my books are my employers. So I am very
interested to hear what they think. Did they like this,
(24:11):
did they not like something about the book? Do they
want to see more of something? All that kind of
stuff is really helpful because I'm constantly I'm a small
business person. I'm constantly trying to improve my product because
I want my employers, my readers, to be as happy
as possible.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
So and a reader has their mind wrapped around the
book and the character and all the things that are
going on, and they may see something or think something,
and you can suggest that and and Brad might say, oh,
you know what, they were right. They should be in
an uber with that.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
There you go, and Jamie Kennedy be rare.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
All of a sudden, you're gonna get flooded. I could
fit fit fit it'll make it'll make it all work out. No,
I love books. I love books that are so intriguing
that they can be turned into a movie or a
TV show. In your brain. Yeah, where like you said,
(25:01):
you don't have to go back and read the previous book.
It's cool, but it'll put you in a whole different
realm because that book is its own entity, and then
you can follow the next book. In the next book.
Like you said about Bond, right, you don't have to
go back and watch the first James Bond to see
you know, there's multiple James Bond's as what right, So
it's like yeah, And that's my experience when I'm writing
the books.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
It's very cinematic. So when I write each of these,
it plays out across the movie screen of my mind.
And one of the biggest things you have to do
is a thriller writer, is when you're coming up on
the next scene that you're writing, you have to think
about the first you look at the first four things
that pop into your head of what could happen, and
the rule is you throw all those out because if
you have four things that immediately jump into your head
(25:43):
as to what should happen next, probably the reader does too.
So if you're going to jettison those first four things
and toy play around with five, six, or seven that
jumps into your head, that's where you're going to be
successful because you're giving the readers something they didn't expect.
And that keeps them guessing, keeps them turning those pages,
keeps it. That's where the intrigue in the twists come from,
is jettison, getting rid of the first things that hop
(26:05):
into your mind and really trying to reach for things
that nobody saw coming, maybe not even you the author.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
You know, I've read a book. It was really good.
It was about a navy seal he got stuck on
an aircraft carrier. There are all these different characters in it.
And every time I flipped a page to read this book,
I was reading all these characters and I didn't realize
that I was introduced to all the characters that are
going to be involved in the Shenanigans. And I was
like reading more and reading more, and then all of
a sudden, I was like, it was the doctor. I
read about him already. Wait a second. Here. It just
(26:34):
pulls you in. You know, you're like, wait, he was
supposed to be a good guy. Wait, how did they
trick me?
Speaker 3 (26:39):
Good good twists? That's hard to do. There's an old
saying that says easy reading is damn hard writing, and
that's very very true.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
See Sam Run, Yeah, No Kids, four pages Platinum. I
mean even like Jimmy Fallon writes children's stories and has
them like they're just like four or five pages long,
and they're just like these little opens the wash your hands,
wash your hands, dry your hands, close the book.
Speaker 3 (27:10):
Yeah, that's not exactly what I'm talking about, easy reading
being damn hard writing. But yeah, so for you to
sit down with. Like I said, my books have very short,
cinematic chapters. It's what turns a lot of people back
onto reading is that the books are fun and they're fast,
and you really you close them a bit smarter. I
hope you learn a little bit about what's going on
(27:32):
both at home and abroad, which I slide in surreptitiously.
It's you know, I'm in the business of entertaining people,
not educating them. That's not my job. It's not supposed
to be a textbook. But if I do talk about
something that happens, you know, in the seal community or
in the anywhere else in the special operations community, find
some cool thing, and I slide it in the book
and now you know about it. That's fun for me
(27:54):
to do. And people tell me they love to read
my books with their phones out or their laptops open.
Because they'll come across something they'll go, there's no way
that's real. Thor made that up, and then they google
it and they're like, oh my god, that's a real thing.
And so that's fun for me too, is to find
all these really cool real life things to put into
the books. And that's why I say what I do
is faction, not fiction, but faction where you don't know
(28:17):
where the facts end and the fiction begins.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
Freaking Willy Walker over here. I let's tell you right now.
I love that. I love that. Now I'm just kind
of cruising over some of your things and I see that,
you know, brad Thorp's Shadow of a Doubt is out there,
but there's also a record.
Speaker 3 (28:34):
So we did a playlist. So we did a playlist.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
And were you kind of see like the record on
the brad Thorpe site. There's a record for Shadow of
a Doubt right now.
Speaker 3 (28:43):
So that was just some some art that my designer
made up. If you go to my website bradthor dot com.
I picked a bunch of music that was either referenced
in the book or in keeping with kind of the
mood of the book, and in fact, a big op
happened in a certain part of the south of France,
and I picked this place because it's really cool. I
(29:05):
didn't know a lot about it, and as I was
doing the research, I found out that's where the Rolling Stones,
when they all had these massive drug problems and we
were being hounded by the press and had were like
teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, they went down to
this little peninsula in the south of France to record
Exile on Main Street. And so I put that in
(29:25):
on that Spotify playlist that we did for a Shadow
of Doubt because my readers really like that. They love
to kind of listen to the music, get in the
mood for the new book, and it's just kind of
a fun. That's why I have the website, is to
do extra stuff for the readers that's fun for them.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
I'm blown away. I'm blown away that there's a record
to go along. So you have a record of Shadow
of a Doubt for your book that goes along with
the book.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
Now I have a Spotify playlist that record. It's not
an actual record, that's just the designer created that as
an image to have. So if you click on that,
it takes you to a Spotify playlist, so there isn't
a piece of mind. I mean that would be really cool,
but I'd have to do royalties out to all these people,
right if I did a compilation, Spotify doesn't cost me
a dime. So it's just it's just fun. But it
(30:12):
looks like a real record, doesn't it.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
I Mean I was, well, my family were record obsessed.
My kids love records.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
Yeah, so do we. I mean we really think vinyl
is cool. So when my designer came back with that,
it's like that that album is sitting on red shag
carpeting in like a wood panel basement.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
I mean he.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
Captured kind of this seventies vibe with that bro, which
is what I wanted to do with the with the
music that was covered in there. So it's just kind
of it's yeah, there you go.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
Yeah, that's leg that's fine. I mean yeah, Braaththor dot
com has what we're talking about. If you go check
out Bradthor dot com, you'll see really clean, uh really
clean website on the phone too, Like it's almost like
it's just straight to app you know, like you know,
looking at your scrolling on it, it's very easy, you know,
dead Fall. Uh.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
Last summer's book, dead Fall, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
Yep, dead Fall, Brad Thorne dead Fault. In fact, now
that I see Dead Fault, it is probably the newer
book coming out that I saw.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
Oh you saw the paperback edition or the trade paper back?
Speaker 1 (31:11):
Yeah? Yeah, because it was red. Oh okay, yeah yeah,
I said Brad Thorne red on the book like wait, wait, wait,
I swear it was Okay.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
Well, listen, I'm just thrilled you saw Brad Thor book
at a major airport books store. That's pretty good to
be twenty four books total into my career and I'm
still in the instill in the bookstores. So I'm thrilled.
I'll take whatever it was you saw, Red.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
I'm happy International Airport homie. I'll tell you right now. Yeah, No,
it's great. Yeah, Brad Thor, Shadow of a Doubt. The
book will be coming out August sixth, so ye pick
it up wherever you want to pick it up, and
you can download it, but I would say go buy
it from the local bookstore if it's available at their store. Now, Brad,
(31:54):
when are you gonna, like, you know, bring this to
the TV.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
Screen so we can just bag questions? So we just
announced our television program a couple of months ago. So
we've got an awesome team pulled together. We got an
A plus team, so it can be some people get
very lucky and get a show right out of the gate.
Sometimes people get a lot of options, which is essentially
renting with the option to buy at at different at
(32:19):
different studios. So what we had happened was, let me
see you get my camera went out of focus all
of a sudden. Sometimes I bring back. Yeah, I don't
know what's going on with that. It's a little weird.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
There we go.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
So we've got this awesome team pulled together. So we've
got Steve Lightfoot who wrote The Punisher, so both seasons
of The Punisher with John Burnhal that were on Netflix.
He's our writer. He's fantastic. We've got Chance Dahlski, the
director of the John Wick movies, as the director, so
there'll be plenty ofhead shots. And then we've got Howard Gordon,
(32:54):
who was the force behind twenty four and Homeland as
the executive producer. So yeah, we're it's Sony right now.
So Sony is our is our studio with this, and
we're doing a television series and we will know by
we're supposed to know by the by Christmas where it's
gonna it's gonna air. So we don't know if that's Netflix,
(33:15):
we don't know if it's Amazon Prime, Apple. Obviously, Howard
Gordon did Homeland at HBO, so Homeland was it HBO
or Showtime? I should know that and I'm drawing a blank.
But anyway, so we've got from now to the end
of the year to figure out where Sony's gonna place it.
But yeah, so we're we're doing a TV series with
a just an unbelievable powerhouse, a list team.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
So we haven't picked an actor, everybody, the whole creative
force is there.
Speaker 3 (33:42):
And then once we place it, I think the next
step is then we try to figure out who the
lead is gonna be. I think I'm looking at yeah, yeah, yeah,
I wish listen. I asked them rad if I could
be in it, and their joke was They're like, yeah,
you can be in it. I'm like, Stephen King is
in everything. I'm like, I got to be able to
had a role, and they're like, yeah, we know.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
You want to be on.
Speaker 3 (34:02):
The front of a stack, kicking in the door, going
put the weapon down, put the weapon down, they said,
but it could be you standing there with the mop
going sorry, sir, office is closed still tomorrow morning.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
So I don't know what they'll do for me, but
I was like, guys, I want to have at least
one line in this thing, or an appearance like Hitchcock
used to show up in all his movies.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
You should, you should? You should? You should? Just like
or like stan Lee.
Speaker 3 (34:24):
Yeah, stan Lee's and yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
Bro, He's in every single thing. And even before he
knew he was passing, they filmed like five innings for
five of the movies.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
That's awesome. I just don't want the half a second
that Jimmy Buffett got in Jurassic Park or Jurassic World.
It's like, if you blink, you miss it. He's got
two Margarita's and he's running away from like the pterodactyls
or whatever. Yeah, so I want I'd love to have something.
So we'll see. It all comes down to the director.
But he's he's awesome. He's super super cool. He's one
of the coolest dudes I've ever met. He's an ex stuntman.
(34:54):
He's really awesome, super smart and very creative. And right
now he's re doing the movie Highlander. That Christophe the
only one. So he's rea currently as we're sitting here
recording this podcast, he's doing Highlander. So he's gonna come
off Highlander and we'll go to Harvest.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
So awesome, such an awesome movie. First Highlander. It's hard
because Queen Queen. As soon as we're like, they read
the whole soundtrack.
Speaker 3 (35:21):
Yeah, that was a great Freddie mur Christoph Lambert was
the French actor who starred in it alongside Sean Ronnery. Yeah,
that's very exciting for the reboot.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
Dude, that's gonna be legit. Yeah, because there could be
only one. And also funny note is that the guy
that has the safety pins on his neck, on his neck,
the main you know, the bad guy that's looking for
you know, Highlander. He's Spongebobs. He's Krusty Krabs. No, he's
is he only Spongebobby boy? That boy he's from shaw
Sake Redeption. What's his name? Oh my gosh, it's blowing
(35:50):
me away. His name is Clancy right, I can't remember.
I had no idea that the guy did the voice
of the SpongeBob. Better to burn out the Fatal Way.
Speaker 3 (35:58):
Yeah, yeah, act yeah, that's it.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Oh that's mister Krast.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
I know that guy. Now, he does have a very
distinct voice. Did he play one of the guards in Shawshank?
Speaker 1 (36:06):
Is that what he did? Yeah? He was the Big Garden.
Speaker 3 (36:09):
Yeah, you're right. I can I picture him from Highlander
and I can picture him from shaw Shank.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Oh yeah, better to burn out than the Fatal Way.
He's in the church.
Speaker 3 (36:16):
You have given me pop culture references. Now I'm not
better educated in the realm of pop culture. Thanks to you,
Red Well.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
I love that movie. Did that Highland of that movie?
And then just you know, boy, I'm forty six years old.
Yeah still, you know what was it?
Speaker 3 (36:30):
That was like early eighties? I think, yeah, that was classic.
A classic movie is so badass.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
I can't wait for your books to become something that
we can watch and see what the director and everybody
puts together for a vision that we have in our head.
I remember my dad went and read Hunt for October.
It was a very popular. Fancy Tom Clancy came out
on the movie. Yep, we went and watched it right away.
I remember we went to the theater and my dad left.
I was like did you like it? I loved it.
(36:57):
I didn't read the book. He read the book. He's like, yeah,
it was. I was like, what do you mean it was?
Speaker 3 (37:01):
It's different, right, they have. And that's one of the
things that I understand going into this is that there's
gonna be things they can't do word for word, page
for page out of the book. It's just it can't happen.
There's multiple reasons why they have to change things. But
what these guys said was is they said, that's why
we're making you a writer on this, Brad, is so
that if we do have to change, you can do
it in such a way that you can go to
(37:23):
your readers and say, okay, it is based on the
first season of shows is based on this book. We
made a couple of changes, but there's actually a we
in it. I was there in the room for every
single change, and I actually think these changes are good.
Let's say right, because I'm not going to say, hey,
that's cool. If it's a sucky change, I'm going to say, guys,
you can't change it like this. All those guys jumped
(37:44):
on the helicopter with MP five's you know three days ago,
there's no way they picked up a HK four to
sixteen in the middle of downtown Philadelphia. That's not the
way that's going to work. So but if you need
them to have an HK four sixteen for whatever reason
further down along the line, let's make sense of that
right now kind of a thing. So you'll have a
continuity expert on it that their job is to make
(38:05):
sure that, like if there's a bite out of the
sandwich in this scene, it's still out of the sandwich
in the next scene. But I created this universe, so
I can't tell them how to make the move or
the TV series, but I can be there to at
least say, guys, just understand that if you make this
change here, this is what it affects downstream. So I
want to make sure that any of that kind of
stuff is done in such a way that we keep
(38:27):
the most important people happy in this which which are
the readers. Because that's the hope. That's what Amazon and
Netflix and everybody else hopes that if they, if they
create the Harvest series, if they spend the money to
bring it to life, that my fans, my readers will
want to come to see it. And I'm cool with that.
But we have to keep those people in the number
one in the pole position. Everything we have to do,
(38:50):
everything we do has got to be in service of
a great production. But we have to keep in mind
we can't just call it harved and it has nothing
to do with the books, right, you know, So you
got to WA's it's hyprope. It's a high wire act. Basically,
rad keep everybody happy. That's a hard thing to do.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
It is because you really want to keep the people
on the front seat happy, which is the reader aiming.
You know, you're really just writing as an entertainer. And
then you know, and it's good that you're on board.
So any pre production production, post production, it's like you'res like, hey,
they would have gone this way, yeah.
Speaker 3 (39:20):
Way exactly. You know, because I'm gonna still write books, right,
these people are still going to be my bosses. We
get a season, hopefully we get another season and get three, four, five, six, seven,
what are But I'm still going to write a book
a year. These are still the most important people in
the world to me. I will love every television viewer
we get that's great, But I'm still going to be
an author and i still want to write books. And
(39:41):
those people have given me an incredible life. I send
my kids to college, they had braces, all this kind
of stuff because of the readers. So the readers will
always be the VIP for me. Those are always going
to be the people I'm most focused on, and I
want to keep happy.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
I love that. I love that, And you know what,
I can't get mad at you having kids with braces,
you know, And I love the respect that you have
for saying such a thing of you know, your you
know you respect where your fans are spending their money.
They're coming to you, they're purchasing your stuff, and they're saying,
we appreciate your writing. I mean, bro, that's got to
(40:18):
be really cool to go down as an American author.
Speaker 3 (40:21):
It is really cool. And they are spending their money
with me. And the one thing that's great about money
is you can make more of it. Your time, though,
is something that's finite that you cannot make more of.
So if you're going to read a Brad Thorpe book,
it is incumbent upon me to give you the best,
most exciting, most heart thumping adventure I can. And if
you're going to come and watch a TV series that
(40:43):
has my name on it. It is also incumbent upon
me to give you the best, most high adrenaline, most
action packed, most intriguing, most the most interesting adventure I'm
capable of giving you. So that's the son of the
United States Marine and me is always excelled. Never settle, never,
never settle for mediocrity. Never never settle for the way
things were yesterday. It's keep pushing forward, keep pushing forward,
(41:06):
keep getting better.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
Well, I love that, you know I usually go longer
on my podcast, but I think we've kind of just
kind of touch based on everything that we need to hear.
I've had your time for forty five minutes today, and
I know you're very busy, and there's other airports that
you have to go and sign books in bro And
are you going to be doing the whole book tour
when we'll be able to catch you before I let
you go. We'll be able to catch you, like you know,
at some spots, yes, around the count.
Speaker 3 (41:29):
So I'm doing I'm doing a for cities around the
country starting first week of August, and I got the
whole tour up at bradthor dot com so you can
see the cities where I'm gonna be when I'm gonna
be there, and if you if you get your orders in,
I'm still doing personalized copies of the books. So if
you're if you want to get a signed personalized copy,
there's information on Bradthor dot com on how to do
(41:51):
that too.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
Okay, So what we have is we have Bradthor dot com,
all right, and that's going to be down belows. You
can click on it. If you've followed us on softwarep
dot com or any of our YouTube or Spotify, go
ahead and click on Bradthorne dot com. Make sure you
check out his book Shadow of a Doubt. It is
number one already. Okay, just know it, all right. And
(42:15):
when you go to the airport, if you happen to
be fortunate enough to be able to fly somewhere in
your lifetime, check the airport's bookstore and see if an
author that you love has a book, because you can
grab it and read that on a plane and not
worry about logging onto Wi Fi, trying to get your
phone to any of that. Nothing. It's all just you
can just read your book. They call it raw dogging
it on a flight.
Speaker 3 (42:37):
Thanks man, So do I appreciate you having me on
the show and sharing me with your fantastic audience. You're
always very kind to me every year.
Speaker 1 (42:43):
Rad.
Speaker 3 (42:43):
I really appreciate you.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
Thank you for being repeat, thank you for writing books.
Thanks for making me smarter, allowing me to read things
that are cool, that are interesting that I want to read. Right.
It's really true. It's like, how do you get someone
to read something right? They got to want to like
to read it, and then once you start reading, you turn,
they turn the page, You turn the page, and then
there's a twist. That's what you do, Bro. And I
don't want to give away too much more, but go
(43:05):
check out all of his books right twenty three harveth books.
Go check them out. And Brad Thor, I keep wanting
to talk to you, but I'm gonna let you go
and say thank you so much for being on soft
rep and this will be uh just a pleasure to
have you back again. Check out our merch store, check
out our book club at soft reap dot com, Ford
slash Book hyphen Club. And thanks to Brandon Webb who
(43:28):
also is an author and allows me to be his
audible guy.
Speaker 3 (43:31):
I appreciate you awesome great writer as well.
Speaker 1 (43:34):
Great writer as well well. Thank you, Brad. Thanks to
your father, United States Marine Corps. All right, simpify to
him always and forever. What's his name, Brad Thorpe, Sr.
Brad Thorpe Senior is immortalized on this podcast. So thank
you so much, sir, and you have a nice day.
Speaker 3 (43:48):
Thanks Brad, you too.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
Okay, cheers, we're out peace.
Speaker 3 (44:01):
Use them.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
Listening to self red Radio
Loot for us.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
If it doesn't work, you're just not using enough. You're
listening to SOFTWAB Radio Special Operations, Military Nails on straight
talk with the guys in the community.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Hey, what's going on? Welcome to soft Rep. I am
super excited to have my next returning author guest friend
on the show. But first, my name is Rad and
I got to remind you to go check out our
merch store right soft rep dot com forward slash merch.
Go check it out. We got branded soft reap items,
not to be confused with Brandon web, the creator of
(00:57):
soft Rep. And then we also have a book club
and that is soft rep dot com Forward Slash book
hyphen Club, and you can find all sorts of great
books that have been curated for your brain to read. Now,
speaking of reading, you may have already read twenty two
of the twenty three books that we're about to talk
about with Brad Thor. New York Times number one best
(01:19):
selling author Brad Thor is on the show. Welcome back,
Hey Ren, thanks for having me back.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
It's great to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
You know, I'm excited to have you back. And you're
a heavy hitter, bro. There's just no joke about it. Okay,
New York Times bestselling author is not a joke. Oh
where did it just go? I had your whole little
dotsy ach gear. Let me see if I can find
it real quick. Held on one second here. So Brad
Thor has written Red Cell books based off of time
(01:46):
in Red Cell with the CIA government.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Correct, Brad, No, I am not allowed to write about
anything in the Red Cell. That is verboten. I call
the US or the Analytic Red Cell program in the
Las Vegas of government programs, and they were very clear
that what happens in the Red Cell stays in the
Red Cell. So but because of being a thriller author
kind of in that genre of ludlum or clancy, I
(02:13):
got invited into the Red Cell program to help them
wargame out potential terrorist scenarios in different attacks the bad guys,
different targets they might pick here and abroad. So but yeah,
everything that I developed for them stays there. But what
was cool is they as the son of a marine,
I got to serve my country not by picking up
a rifle, but by using the gray matter between my
(02:36):
years to help maybe come up with things for the
federal government that it helped keep the country safe.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Right, So you go into a brainstorm session and come
up with all these scenarios within the Red Cell organization.
So you did do that, yeah, and then those things
stay there. So I almost got you to say, yeah,
book all my books, Yeah, all my books are Red Cell.
But no, no, and if you just use your creative
power exactly.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
And in fact, there was one attack scenario that I
came up with in Red Cell and then it actually
happened halfway around the world and made international headlines. And
I said to my contact, the person that I interact
with the most there, I said, hey, this is all
over the news. Can I go on Fox and talk
about this and tell them how we developed this idea
in the Red Cell unit? And he said, absolutely not.
(03:19):
There's only one scenario they have ever released publicly from
the Red Cell Unit, and that was about terraces exploiting
our preparations for a hurricane, whether that means attacking a
shelter where people were pulled together, or you know how
we have these marshaling yards where we move rescue equipment
out of the path of a hurricane so that if
(03:40):
we needed to get so that when you need to
get back in. You've got all your trucks, whether that
be for restoring power or ambulances, whatever it might be,
to get out of the path. So that's the only
thing they've ever publicly released from the Red Cell program.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
So cool, bro, Yeah, so cool got into that. It is.
And for the listeners that might be learning about Brath
for the first time, or for those of you that
have returned and heard him talk about this, it is
a very interesting program that he was in where he's
just writing out scenarios about what possibly could happen, and
then how do we prevent the what ifs and could happens?
Now I have a little description, I pull it back up,
(04:16):
and I'm going to talk a little bit about your
book called Shadow of Doubt. Is that that's correct?
Speaker 3 (04:20):
That's my new summer thriller, Shadow of Doubt.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
That's right, And that follows Scott Harveth, who is just
this person who winds up in all these different predicaments
and in a world shrouded in shadows where doubt is
the only weapon. Can one spy expose the truth? Number
one New York Times and Number one Wall Street Journal
best selling author Brad Thorpe delivers his latest high octane thriller,
A mysterios excuse me, A mysterious cargo plane flanked by
(04:47):
a squadron of Russia's mostly lethal fighters has just taken
off from a remote air base closely monitored by the
United States. No one inside the Pentagon has any idea
where it's going or what it's carrying. A high level
Russian defector, walking vault of secrets that could shatter the West,
seeks asylum in Norway. Across the continent, in the heart
of Paris, a lone French agent stumbles upon a conspiracy
(05:08):
so explosive it could ignite a global firestorm. As alarm
bells as alarm bells ring in Washington, the CIA's most
lethal weapon, Scott Harvest, is forced to choose between his
conscience and his country. You'll be left breathless as you
read as Harvest is swept into a whirlwind of double agents,
international intrigue, and heart stopping chases. This is all coming
(05:30):
out of you.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
Yeah, yeah, that's it. You know, that's my job is
to give people a great toes in the sand book
in the hands, summer summer thriller beach read, get them
all excited. You know, one of the cool things that
I hear from people is, you know, I bought my
brother the book, or I bought my husband or my
dad the book, and they weren't readers. And you've got
these great, short, crisp, cinematic chapters, you leave each one
(05:52):
with a cliffhanger, and you've turned these people into my family.
You've turned them into readers. And so that's always music
to an author's years to know that somebody stopped reading
years ago but picked up one of my books and
loves the way I write, loves the stories I tell,
and it's turned them back into a reader. So that's
probably the familiar people think that about it.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Yeah, million, you know what.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
The other thing that is equally makes me just feel
terrific is when I have people say I've decided I'm
going to go into the military after reading your books.
So I get young people that have read the books
and stuff and say, you know what, I respect what
these people do in your books, and I want to
go serve the country as well. And that you know,
those come in every once in a while, And that's
(06:32):
probably the most prized compliment that I've ever received as
an author.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
It's just to spark that little bit inside of someone
to say, Hey, what's it like if I went the
next step and then maybe go join and then who
knows what Scott harvest or what character you can become
once you get in there. Right, everybody's so cool, has
such a cool rockstar story to tell. You know, you're
just coming from within your own rockstar self to bring
Scott to these books. And again, he's been all over
(07:01):
the place. I mean, you know, he's just like found
the fountain of youth.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
Well, the fountain youth is is performance enhancing drugs. I
readily admit that in the books that Harvath is. You know,
he's in his forties and stuff. And I know a
lot of guys that are still kicking indoors and shooting
bad guys in the face and all of them. There's
nothing in There's nothing in the rule book that says
(07:27):
guys that go down range, at least guys like Harvath
that are kind of on the dark side, there's nothing
that says they can't give themselves every single advantage they need.
So competing with the younger generation of guys coming up
behind him and not wanting to come out of the
field Harvath readily, readily does a certain amount of injectables
that give him the edge and add a little bit
(07:48):
to his bench press, shave a little bit off of
his hundred yard cash. And that's just reflective of the
guys that I know, like I said, that are still
out there doing some of this country's most dangerous work.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Do you ever see you're Scott meeting up with like
maybe another character you know that's very popular in other
drama or other thrillers that you know, they're like walking
down the same Paris street in his book. He's going
to the store, to the drug store. We've done Scott's.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
Yeah, we've done that a couple of times, a handful
of us. And it's about it's about all you can
do is to say, Okay, we agree, you can make
a mention of my guy. I'll make a mention of
your guy. And that's it. Because none of us who
are writing a book a year can ever sit down
and write a book together. I mean, it's just it's
it's it's near impossible to do an entire book with
two characters and still crank out your own individual book
(08:38):
in a year. But yeah, we've a bunch of us
have done that where we've mentioned other people in the books,
or what we've said is that our character was reading
a book by the actual real life author. That's another
thing we've done back and forth here, which is kind
of It's kind of fun because a lot of us
we share rad we share the same readers, right, So
if you're reading a Brad Poor book, there's other thriller
(08:58):
authors you're reading during the year, and vice versa. So
it is kind of an ic easter egg when fans
stumble across if they love a certain author and then
they're reading the book and they hear that author mention
another author they love. That's that's fun.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Stuff, right, Like say your character Scott's at the airport
just looking at like he's like observing somebody in the
you know, where all the books and the candy are
and people signed the books, authors signed their books, and
he's just looking at a book. But it's like one
of like, you know Jack Carr or Brandon Webb have
a book and yeah, and then he puts it down
and he goes after the objective.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
You know.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
It's like, so we've I don't know.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
I did that interactly, and Jack has done that with me,
So we've both done that back and forth. So yeah,
so that that's the part that I should have cited
that example. It's a perfect example of what Jack and
I have done. So James Reese has had a brad
Thorpe book, or Scott Harvath has had a Jack Carr
book that kind of that kind of a thing. So yeah,
that's that's fun to do.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
No, I love that. I love that, and that's been
in my own head. But I'm sure that you've already
been done it. You're New York Time's best selling author.
You guys already have a vision. Okay, people with visions
of your vision like, hey, we know what you want
to do. Here's a storyboard. You're like, how'd you know?
Now when we find Scott, you know, is he going
into Norway? Are we going to be seeing going to
(10:12):
be reading about Norway and what's going on?
Speaker 3 (10:15):
So Harveth a couple of books ago Cross Paths with
the So to back up, and you've got a very
smart audience that knows a lot about what's happening in
the world. And I'm going to say something and probably
ninety nine percent of your audience knows this that Norway
has an all female special forces detachment. It's called the
Jager Troop. And Harveth several years ago came across a
(10:38):
woman from that unit in the Norwegian Special Forces who
had left because she got sick of doing hearts and
minds bullshit in Afghanistan. She's like, I don't want to
sit down over tea with another group of women in
Afghanistan again. I signed up to kick indoors and shoot
bad guys. And she left the Norwegian Armed Forces and
(10:58):
became an intelligence operative. And that where Harveth meets her.
And she's tall, she's gorgeous, she's younger than Harvath, and
he says, listen, the only thing I've got over this
chick is that I've been this woman, is that I've
been at the game longer than she has. But other
than that, she's faster, smarter, more talented than I ever was.
And he freely admits it, and the two of them
end up falling in love and they get engaged. And
(11:20):
so what ends up happening in this book is Harveth
is just let me set the stage better this way.
For those who aren't familiar with my books, I tell
people that my thrillers. The brad Thor thrillers are like
the James Bond movies. If there is a new Bond
movie at your local movie theater and you've never seen
a Bond movie before, you can go see that one.
(11:41):
It doesn't matter if you've seen the earlier ones. You're
not missing anything. Same thing with my books. So in
this book, Harveth has just come off and op where
he had to rescue a hostage and because he's staying
in the field so much and he's refusing to come
back and help kind of spot the next generation of talent,
like his agency really wants him back in DC. They
(12:02):
don't want him going out in the field anymore, but
he's refusing, and so what they've done is they've increased
his ops tempo. They're giving him very little downtime, which
is extremely dangerous Number one, to not give him time
to kind of rest and recuperate. But they're basically trying
to beat him into submission to finally have him say,
all right, that's it, I'm out. I don't want to
be in the field anymore. So Harvett has just come
(12:23):
off an op. He's turned off his phone and basically
given the big middle finger back to Northern Virginia and said,
I'm not doing anything. The world can burn down in
the next week, but I'm taking a week off. I'm
gonna go see Solvi, my fiance, in Oslow, because she's
been promoted now at the Norwegian Intelligence Service. She's a
deputy director. She's got next to no vacation time at all,
(12:44):
so if he wants to see her, he has to
go to her. So he's on his way to Oslo
plane lands and the station chief for the CIA in
Oslo meets him at the airport and says there's something really,
really serious we need you to do. And he's like,
what is it. She's like, no, no, no, not here, not
till we get back to the skiff at the embassy
in Oslo. And when they get to the skiff, she
(13:06):
lays out what's going on, and she says, the Norwegians
have got information and we want you to keep your
ears open and ask your fiance a couple of questions,
and he says, what you want me to spy on
my fiance. He's like, fu, I'm not doing it. And
then the CIA, anticipating that he would say FU, blackmail
(13:26):
him and they say, if you don't, we know something
from a prior op that you were on that you
thought nobody saw, that nobody knew. And so he's kind
of caught between two. He did something morally ambiguous and
now they're asking him to do something morally wrong. In
his estimation, this is a woman who's gonna marry. He
understands Norway's and Allied Intelligence right their services that lied
(13:50):
with ours, they're part of NATO. But he's presented right
off the bat with this incredibly difficult thing. It's either
you know, submit to the black, submit and do what
the CIA wants to do, or you know, say be
honest with his fiancee, yeah and say I'm not gonna
They want me to spy and I'm not gonna do it.
So that's kind of the moral heart of what's at
the center of this. But the whole thing is an
(14:11):
action thriller with lots of intrigue and all this kind
of stuff. But that's kind of the hardest thing. Harvests
being pressed into service against his will by the CIA,
by the deputy Director of Operations at the CIA.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
All he wants to do is see his girl.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
It's all he wants he wants a week off. He
wants a week off. This guy's the first thing he
asked for when he gets on the plane to go
to Norway's ziplocks full of ice to put on his
battered body. And he's got a bourbon and he's just
been he's had the shit kicked out of him, and
he just wants a week decompressed.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Yeah, he just wants a week off.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
A week he doesn't even need R and R just
one R, just one R, which just ur.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
Just a little, just like let chill, let me just
buckle my seatbelt, let me just sit exactly, you know,
like eat. But no, they're like, you're not gonna sit
down and just get up real quick. He's like, you're
just gonna sit out. He can.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
That's exactly it.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
That's exactly a go, go go. And then they are
they're trying to overload him but get all they can
out of him at the same time, like they don't
want the mission to fail, but they want him to
basically quit one day.
Speaker 3 (15:08):
Yeah, they want him to come back and ride a
desk and they basically want him to you know, step
off the field and be a coach, you know. And
I've I've equated him for the longest time. I equated
him to Tom Brady, that he would know when it's
time to step off the field. That it isn't for
anybody else to tell him it's time to come off
the field and help scout and train different players. He'll
tell you when he's ready to come off the field.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
And that's a big act.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
It's a big thing. And at the very end of
the book, there's something very interesting that happens that deals
with that question about should he be in the field,
should he be in the office. He's kind of been
playing the hokey poke with one foot in, one foot out,
trying to placate all the powers that be in Northern Virginia.
And there's something very interesting that happens at the end
of Shadow of Doubt that kind of is a is
an interesting moment of development in Harvest character. I don't
(15:52):
want to spoil it because it's a fun choiste at
the end of the book, but there's a little little
easter egg there at the end.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
And I think that when our Converse station comes out,
your book will just be releasing out there, so everybody
should go check it out. It'll be released everywhere, including
at your local airport.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
Yeah, yes, hopefully knock on wood. That's where a lot
of people find them.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
I was flying into San Francisco early June and I
literally walked into the airport to see if I've seen
any of you guys who I interview this book on
there and low and behold yours? Was that awesome? I was?
So I was like, really like, all right, that's cool.
Brad's is there? All right? I was like, let me
see what else is here as anybody else is here,
and I was like, Brad's there. That's all I needed
to see. So I mean, still in June, your previous
(16:35):
book is still Yeah, that's a big deal to be
at the airport's bookstore.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
Well, and you know what you with with the new
book coming out, So airport bookstores you used to be
able to if you're a big best seller, you could
you could sit there all year. That really doesn't happen anymore.
And I'm gonna guess you maybe saw last summer's book
not in hardcover but in paperback, and that San Francisco
and SFO, because what happens is is they try to
(17:01):
put out your paperback a month before your hardcover's coming out,
So that's kind of the You get in the airport
twice really in a year, so you're you're around for
maybe five or six weeks with your hardcover when it
comes out, and then eleven months later that hardcover is
a paperback and that goes in a month before the
next hardcover comes out because they are there seems to
(17:24):
be less and less space in bookstores. There's more books
coming out, so the churn is a lot. If you've
got a phenomenon like the Da Vinci code, that'll be
there all year, you know that if they if the
sales are such. So it is kind of an interesting
thing that the business has changed so much that those
of us that used to be in year round, you
know where, we're doing it twice a year now.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
So well, SFO has it. That's good, good, it's funny.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
I was just up in Sonoma. I got home last
night from Sonoma and I didn't go through SFO. I
went Dallas to Santa Rosa and uh, because I didn't
want to do the drive from SFO two hours. Yeah,
I've done that drive a bunch. I had a buddy
that got married up there a little while ago and
When I found out that I could do Dallas to
Santa Rosa, I'm like, oh, that's good, that's good.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
That's what. Yeah, because we go from Utah to San
Fran and then rent some type of SUV from San
Fran and then drive up to uh menden scenes. Oh nice, nice, yeah,
really nice, really nice drive, go through all of the
different you know, Napa Valley sono'ma the whole vineyardiful, yeah
it is. And we stayed a friend's house who's a director.
(18:30):
I'm not going to say his name, but it's a
very nice house. It's like you go into his backyard
and you're almost in the sequoias and you see slugs,
these yellow slugs that are like so big that when
we went to the Redwoods with our families to go
explore the Redwoods, I was like, there's got to be
like a sixty foot slug or somewhere. I'm like, you know,
I am so minute, little on the floor, I am
(18:52):
like crumbs of sequoias, like so big, so glorious. And
we walked in the there was a sequoia zoo up there.
We walked through their whole tree system that they have here,
like one hundred feet up and then there's still like
another one hundred and fifty twohunred feet up for the
top of the trees. It's amazing up there.
Speaker 3 (19:09):
It's beautiful like nothing else. And for those listening who
have never been up to this part of the world
that Rad and I are talking about, this part of
the country.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
It is.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
It is a must see. Mussy. It's so beautiful showing
up to Sonoma. And we were all along the Russian
River and we were doing a lot of the forests
and everything, and it was just it's I wasn't up
there doing wine tasting stuff. I was up there doing
a guy's weekend kind of a thing. And I love
those trees. They're just beautiful. It's an incredible part of
the country.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
It's all about the nature around us. You know. I'm
wearing like my Boonty hat. I've got on like my
Catpat military uniform, and my wife's like, oh, that's look
got a lot of neon green in your Catpat uniform
Canadian pattern. I was like yeah. But once we got
into the woods up there, She's like, I understand why
they made the cat Pat the Pacific North Northwest coast,
Like you can't it's like they got trees like that.
(19:57):
It blends in. I'm like, where did Rad go? That
was great? I mean, really, what a great time to
wrap myself around nature and just let the I mean,
there's a whole ecosystem just raining down on you. And
it's not even like raining anywhere else.
Speaker 3 (20:11):
It's pretty special, pretty special.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
We Scott to go meet Rad in the Redwoods.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
There you go, there you go. That'd be a good scene.
Get gathers, here's your next mission. Or you've got some
intel that you've got to pass off to Harvath and
we do it out there.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
That's right, that's right, that's right. It'll be his uber
driversfo Oh, that's awesome. Dude, you're awesome. I'm so glad
that you got back on the show. I'm happy that
you're still writing and that you're pumping out books and
you know when David David is your Yeah, yeah, I'm
(20:47):
just trying to give him a shout out. He's always
like Rad, let's get Brad on. I'm like, how can
we not Brad and Rad together? Sophomore?
Speaker 3 (20:54):
I made you that joke before that. I've got my
buddies and to take that, take that line out of
the Jamie Kennedy. Uh, the Jamie Kennedy movie where he
talks about the mean streets of Malibu and his name
is Brad and he calls himself be Rad most Wanted.
(21:16):
That's the movie.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Yeah, thanks Jimmy, Jamie Kennedy for having a file in
my brain there had.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
You that Malibu's most wanted be Rad?
Speaker 1 (21:24):
Yo? What's up? Most wanted?
Speaker 3 (21:26):
Yo?
Speaker 1 (21:26):
What's up? Yo? Oh?
Speaker 3 (21:28):
Man?
Speaker 1 (21:29):
Okay, Scott's got to meet him too. We'll have an uber.
It'll be Scott Harveth, Jamie Kennedy and me and you. Yeah, right, exactly,
an executive version please, just because I'm six fives now,
are you signing the books that you see at the
airport somebody? Normally?
Speaker 3 (21:46):
Yeah. When I go through an airport and I see
the books, I always stop and sign them. Yeah, all
the time. And that's kind of fun too. People pass
through the airport and they'll be a sticker on there
signed by the author.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Yeah. Oh is that right? Do you do? The airport attendant?
So they like just like you're over there, like just
signing up.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
I always ask their like, I always ask first. I
don't want to get tased on my way to catch
my flight. So uh, I always walk up. But that's me, right,
I'm the son of a marine. My mom was a
flight attendant raised in the Midwest, and so being polite
was a very big part of our upbringing his kids.
So I always introduced myself at the counter and I'm like, hey,
I'm here. I'm happy to sign anything you got. I
(22:22):
saw you've got. And first I make sure they have
the book right, and then I ask them. I'll bring
up a copy and show them, hey, here's the author photo.
It really is me, and then excuse me, can I
sign for you? And then oftentimes I'll have stickers that
they put on the book so that it pops that
it's signed by the author. So I don't just I
don't just kind of go in covert and sign. That's silly.
It's a It helps draw attention to the book, and
(22:44):
maybe somebody will buy your book as opposed to somebody
else's if they see that it's signed, because it has
a perceived increase in value.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
So yeah, you just touched it, maybe just thump through
the pages. Maybe there's a bookmark in the middle that
you've signed. Go buy the books it, buy a book,
Go get a book. Go find a book, get a book,
buy a book, Barnes and Noble, local bookstores. You know,
his books are also in very mom and pop bookstore.
So if there's one in your area and you don't
even really go read that much, go to their store
(23:10):
and buy a book. Thank you, buy his book, thank you,
Go buy go, buy Brad's book, Brad Thor right here,
who we're talking with, It goes a long way. And
also if you're out there and you do read the
book like electronically, I believe that leaving a review goes
a long way for the author. So whether you find
the book on Kindle or.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
Audio, hardcover, softcover, reviews are very very helpful. And so
now you have a choice about whether you actually just
rate it and you pick how many stars you want
to give it, and you can also write something. It
used to be the had to write something for the
review to actually pop up online, but now you can
just if you're in a hurry, you can just give
it X amount of stars if you like it. So
(23:50):
that's really helpful. And you know, rad I always tell
people that that's like having a virtual suggestion box in
the lobby of my business. When when somebody takes the
time to write a review. And I don't work for
the publisher. I work for the readers. The people who
read my books are my employers. So I am very
interested to hear what they think. Did they like this,
(24:11):
did they not like something about the book? Do they
want to see more of something? All that kind of
stuff is really helpful because I'm constantly I'm a small
business person. I'm constantly trying to improve my product because
I want my employers, my readers, to be as happy
as possible.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
So and a reader has their mind wrapped around the
book and the character and all the things that are
going on, and they may see something or think something,
and you can suggest that and and Brad might say, oh,
you know what, they were right. They should be in
an uber with that.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
There you go, and Jamie Kennedy be rare.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
All of a sudden, you're gonna get flooded. I could
fit fit fit it'll make it'll make it all work out. No,
I love books. I love books that are so intriguing
that they can be turned into a movie or a
TV show. In your brain. Yeah, where like you said,
(25:01):
you don't have to go back and read the previous book.
It's cool, but it'll put you in a whole different
realm because that book is its own entity, and then
you can follow the next book. In the next book.
Like you said about Bond, right, you don't have to
go back and watch the first James Bond to see
you know, there's multiple James Bond's as what right, So
it's like yeah, And that's my experience when I'm writing
the books.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
It's very cinematic. So when I write each of these,
it plays out across the movie screen of my mind.
And one of the biggest things you have to do
is a thriller writer, is when you're coming up on
the next scene that you're writing, you have to think
about the first you look at the first four things
that pop into your head of what could happen, and
the rule is you throw all those out because if
you have four things that immediately jump into your head
(25:43):
as to what should happen next, probably the reader does too.
So if you're going to jettison those first four things
and toy play around with five, six, or seven that
jumps into your head, that's where you're going to be
successful because you're giving the readers something they didn't expect.
And that keeps them guessing, keeps them turning those pages,
keeps it. That's where the intrigue in the twists come from,
is jettison, getting rid of the first things that hop
(26:05):
into your mind and really trying to reach for things
that nobody saw coming, maybe not even you the author.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
You know, I've read a book. It was really good.
It was about a navy seal he got stuck on
an aircraft carrier. There are all these different characters in it.
And every time I flipped a page to read this book,
I was reading all these characters and I didn't realize
that I was introduced to all the characters that are
going to be involved in the Shenanigans. And I was
like reading more and reading more, and then all of
a sudden, I was like, it was the doctor. I
read about him already. Wait a second. Here. It just
(26:34):
pulls you in. You know, you're like, wait, he was
supposed to be a good guy. Wait, how did they
trick me?
Speaker 3 (26:39):
Good good twists? That's hard to do. There's an old
saying that says easy reading is damn hard writing, and
that's very very true.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
See Sam Run, Yeah, No Kids, four pages Platinum. I
mean even like Jimmy Fallon writes children's stories and has
them like they're just like four or five pages long,
and they're just like these little opens the wash your hands,
wash your hands, dry your hands, close the book.
Speaker 3 (27:10):
Yeah, that's not exactly what I'm talking about, easy reading
being damn hard writing. But yeah, so for you to
sit down with. Like I said, my books have very short,
cinematic chapters. It's what turns a lot of people back
onto reading is that the books are fun and they're fast,
and you really you close them a bit smarter. I
hope you learn a little bit about what's going on
(27:32):
both at home and abroad, which I slide in surreptitiously.
It's you know, I'm in the business of entertaining people,
not educating them. That's not my job. It's not supposed
to be a textbook. But if I do talk about
something that happens, you know, in the seal community or
in the anywhere else in the special operations community, find
some cool thing, and I slide it in the book
and now you know about it. That's fun for me
(27:54):
to do. And people tell me they love to read
my books with their phones out or their laptops open.
Because they'll come across something they'll go, there's no way
that's real. Thor made that up, and then they google
it and they're like, oh my god, that's a real thing.
And so that's fun for me too, is to find
all these really cool real life things to put into
the books. And that's why I say what I do
is faction, not fiction, but faction where you don't know
(28:17):
where the facts end and the fiction begins.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
Freaking Willy Walker over here. I let's tell you right now.
I love that. I love that. Now I'm just kind
of cruising over some of your things and I see that,
you know, brad Thorp's Shadow of a Doubt is out there,
but there's also a record.
Speaker 3 (28:34):
So we did a playlist. So we did a playlist.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
And were you kind of see like the record on
the brad Thorpe site. There's a record for Shadow of
a Doubt right now.
Speaker 3 (28:43):
So that was just some some art that my designer
made up. If you go to my website bradthor dot com.
I picked a bunch of music that was either referenced
in the book or in keeping with kind of the
mood of the book, and in fact, a big op
happened in a certain part of the south of France,
and I picked this place because it's really cool. I
(29:05):
didn't know a lot about it, and as I was
doing the research, I found out that's where the Rolling Stones,
when they all had these massive drug problems and we
were being hounded by the press and had were like
teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, they went down to
this little peninsula in the south of France to record
Exile on Main Street. And so I put that in
(29:25):
on that Spotify playlist that we did for a Shadow
of Doubt because my readers really like that. They love
to kind of listen to the music, get in the
mood for the new book, and it's just kind of
a fun. That's why I have the website, is to
do extra stuff for the readers that's fun for them.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
I'm blown away. I'm blown away that there's a record
to go along. So you have a record of Shadow
of a Doubt for your book that goes along with
the book.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
Now I have a Spotify playlist that record. It's not
an actual record, that's just the designer created that as
an image to have. So if you click on that,
it takes you to a Spotify playlist, so there isn't
a piece of mind. I mean that would be really cool,
but I'd have to do royalties out to all these people,
right if I did a compilation, Spotify doesn't cost me
a dime. So it's just it's just fun. But it
(30:12):
looks like a real record, doesn't it.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
I Mean I was, well, my family were record obsessed.
My kids love records.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
Yeah, so do we. I mean we really think vinyl
is cool. So when my designer came back with that,
it's like that that album is sitting on red shag
carpeting in like a wood panel basement.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
I mean he.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
Captured kind of this seventies vibe with that bro, which
is what I wanted to do with the with the
music that was covered in there. So it's just kind
of it's yeah, there you go.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
Yeah, that's leg that's fine. I mean yeah, Braaththor dot
com has what we're talking about. If you go check
out Bradthor dot com, you'll see really clean, uh really
clean website on the phone too, Like it's almost like
it's just straight to app you know, like you know,
looking at your scrolling on it, it's very easy, you know,
dead Fall. Uh.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
Last summer's book, dead Fall, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
Yep, dead Fall, Brad Thorne dead Fault. In fact, now
that I see Dead Fault, it is probably the newer
book coming out that I saw.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
Oh you saw the paperback edition or the trade paper back?
Speaker 1 (31:11):
Yeah? Yeah, because it was red. Oh okay, yeah yeah,
I said Brad Thorne red on the book like wait, wait, wait,
I swear it was Okay.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
Well, listen, I'm just thrilled you saw Brad Thor book
at a major airport books store. That's pretty good to
be twenty four books total into my career and I'm
still in the instill in the bookstores. So I'm thrilled.
I'll take whatever it was you saw, Red.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
I'm happy International Airport homie. I'll tell you right now. Yeah, No,
it's great. Yeah, Brad Thor, Shadow of a Doubt. The
book will be coming out August sixth, so ye pick
it up wherever you want to pick it up, and
you can download it, but I would say go buy
it from the local bookstore if it's available at their store. Now, Brad,
(31:54):
when are you gonna, like, you know, bring this to
the TV.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
Screen so we can just bag questions? So we just
announced our television program a couple of months ago. So
we've got an awesome team pulled together. We got an
A plus team, so it can be some people get
very lucky and get a show right out of the gate.
Sometimes people get a lot of options, which is essentially
renting with the option to buy at at different at
(32:19):
different studios. So what we had happened was, let me
see you get my camera went out of focus all
of a sudden. Sometimes I bring back. Yeah, I don't
know what's going on with that. It's a little weird.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
There we go.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
So we've got this awesome team pulled together. So we've
got Steve Lightfoot who wrote The Punisher, so both seasons
of The Punisher with John Burnhal that were on Netflix.
He's our writer. He's fantastic. We've got Chance Dahlski, the
director of the John Wick movies, as the director, so
there'll be plenty ofhead shots. And then we've got Howard Gordon,
(32:54):
who was the force behind twenty four and Homeland as
the executive producer. So yeah, we're it's Sony right now.
So Sony is our is our studio with this, and
we're doing a television series and we will know by
we're supposed to know by the by Christmas where it's
gonna it's gonna air. So we don't know if that's Netflix,
(33:15):
we don't know if it's Amazon Prime, Apple. Obviously, Howard
Gordon did Homeland at HBO, so Homeland was it HBO
or Showtime? I should know that and I'm drawing a blank.
But anyway, so we've got from now to the end
of the year to figure out where Sony's gonna place it.
But yeah, so we're we're doing a TV series with
a just an unbelievable powerhouse, a list team.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
So we haven't picked an actor, everybody, the whole creative
force is there.
Speaker 3 (33:42):
And then once we place it, I think the next
step is then we try to figure out who the
lead is gonna be. I think I'm looking at yeah, yeah, yeah,
I wish listen. I asked them rad if I could
be in it, and their joke was They're like, yeah,
you can be in it. I'm like, Stephen King is
in everything. I'm like, I got to be able to
had a role, and they're like, yeah, we know.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
You want to be on.
Speaker 3 (34:02):
The front of a stack, kicking in the door, going
put the weapon down, put the weapon down, they said,
but it could be you standing there with the mop
going sorry, sir, office is closed still tomorrow morning.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
So I don't know what they'll do for me, but
I was like, guys, I want to have at least
one line in this thing, or an appearance like Hitchcock
used to show up in all his movies.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
You should, you should? You should? You should? Just like
or like stan Lee.
Speaker 3 (34:24):
Yeah, stan Lee's and yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
Bro, He's in every single thing. And even before he
knew he was passing, they filmed like five innings for
five of the movies.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
That's awesome. I just don't want the half a second
that Jimmy Buffett got in Jurassic Park or Jurassic World.
It's like, if you blink, you miss it. He's got
two Margarita's and he's running away from like the pterodactyls
or whatever. Yeah, so I want I'd love to have something.
So we'll see. It all comes down to the director.
But he's he's awesome. He's super super cool. He's one
of the coolest dudes I've ever met. He's an ex stuntman.
(34:54):
He's really awesome, super smart and very creative. And right
now he's re doing the movie Highlander. That Christophe the
only one. So he's rea currently as we're sitting here
recording this podcast, he's doing Highlander. So he's gonna come
off Highlander and we'll go to Harvest.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
So awesome, such an awesome movie. First Highlander. It's hard
because Queen Queen. As soon as we're like, they read
the whole soundtrack.
Speaker 3 (35:21):
Yeah, that was a great Freddie mur Christoph Lambert was
the French actor who starred in it alongside Sean Ronnery. Yeah,
that's very exciting for the reboot.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
Dude, that's gonna be legit. Yeah, because there could be
only one. And also funny note is that the guy
that has the safety pins on his neck, on his neck,
the main you know, the bad guy that's looking for
you know, Highlander. He's Spongebobs. He's Krusty Krabs. No, he's
is he only Spongebobby boy? That boy he's from shaw
Sake Redeption. What's his name? Oh my gosh, it's blowing
(35:50):
me away. His name is Clancy right, I can't remember.
I had no idea that the guy did the voice
of the SpongeBob. Better to burn out the Fatal Way.
Speaker 3 (35:58):
Yeah, yeah, act yeah, that's it.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Oh that's mister Krast.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
I know that guy. Now, he does have a very
distinct voice. Did he play one of the guards in Shawshank?
Speaker 1 (36:06):
Is that what he did? Yeah? He was the Big Garden.
Speaker 3 (36:09):
Yeah, you're right. I can I picture him from Highlander
and I can picture him from shaw Shank.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Oh yeah, better to burn out than the Fatal Way.
He's in the church.
Speaker 3 (36:16):
You have given me pop culture references. Now I'm not
better educated in the realm of pop culture. Thanks to you,
Red Well.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
I love that movie. Did that Highland of that movie?
And then just you know, boy, I'm forty six years old.
Yeah still, you know what was it?
Speaker 3 (36:30):
That was like early eighties? I think, yeah, that was classic.
A classic movie is so badass.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
I can't wait for your books to become something that
we can watch and see what the director and everybody
puts together for a vision that we have in our head.
I remember my dad went and read Hunt for October.
It was a very popular. Fancy Tom Clancy came out
on the movie. Yep, we went and watched it right away.
I remember we went to the theater and my dad left.
I was like did you like it? I loved it.
(36:57):
I didn't read the book. He read the book. He's like, yeah,
it was. I was like, what do you mean it was?
Speaker 3 (37:01):
It's different, right, they have. And that's one of the
things that I understand going into this is that there's
gonna be things they can't do word for word, page
for page out of the book. It's just it can't happen.
There's multiple reasons why they have to change things. But
what these guys said was is they said, that's why
we're making you a writer on this, Brad, is so
that if we do have to change, you can do
it in such a way that you can go to
(37:23):
your readers and say, okay, it is based on the
first season of shows is based on this book. We
made a couple of changes, but there's actually a we
in it. I was there in the room for every
single change, and I actually think these changes are good.
Let's say right, because I'm not going to say, hey,
that's cool. If it's a sucky change, I'm going to say, guys,
you can't change it like this. All those guys jumped
(37:44):
on the helicopter with MP five's you know three days ago,
there's no way they picked up a HK four to
sixteen in the middle of downtown Philadelphia. That's not the
way that's going to work. So but if you need
them to have an HK four sixteen for whatever reason
further down along the line, let's make sense of that
right now kind of a thing. So you'll have a
continuity expert on it that their job is to make
(38:05):
sure that, like if there's a bite out of the
sandwich in this scene, it's still out of the sandwich
in the next scene. But I created this universe, so
I can't tell them how to make the move or
the TV series, but I can be there to at
least say, guys, just understand that if you make this
change here, this is what it affects downstream. So I
want to make sure that any of that kind of
stuff is done in such a way that we keep
(38:27):
the most important people happy in this which which are
the readers. Because that's the hope. That's what Amazon and
Netflix and everybody else hopes that if they, if they
create the Harvest series, if they spend the money to
bring it to life, that my fans, my readers will
want to come to see it. And I'm cool with that.
But we have to keep those people in the number
one in the pole position. Everything we have to do,
(38:50):
everything we do has got to be in service of
a great production. But we have to keep in mind
we can't just call it harved and it has nothing
to do with the books, right, you know, So you
got to WA's it's hyprope. It's a high wire act. Basically,
rad keep everybody happy. That's a hard thing to do.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
It is because you really want to keep the people
on the front seat happy, which is the reader aiming.
You know, you're really just writing as an entertainer. And
then you know, and it's good that you're on board.
So any pre production production, post production, it's like you'res like, hey,
they would have gone this way, yeah.
Speaker 3 (39:20):
Way exactly. You know, because I'm gonna still write books, right,
these people are still going to be my bosses. We
get a season, hopefully we get another season and get three, four, five, six, seven,
what are But I'm still going to write a book
a year. These are still the most important people in
the world to me. I will love every television viewer
we get that's great, But I'm still going to be
an author and i still want to write books. And
(39:41):
those people have given me an incredible life. I send
my kids to college, they had braces, all this kind
of stuff because of the readers. So the readers will
always be the VIP for me. Those are always going
to be the people I'm most focused on, and I
want to keep happy.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
I love that. I love that, And you know what,
I can't get mad at you having kids with braces,
you know, And I love the respect that you have
for saying such a thing of you know, your you
know you respect where your fans are spending their money.
They're coming to you, they're purchasing your stuff, and they're saying,
we appreciate your writing. I mean, bro, that's got to
(40:18):
be really cool to go down as an American author.
Speaker 3 (40:21):
It is really cool. And they are spending their money
with me. And the one thing that's great about money
is you can make more of it. Your time, though,
is something that's finite that you cannot make more of.
So if you're going to read a Brad Thorpe book,
it is incumbent upon me to give you the best,
most exciting, most heart thumping adventure I can. And if
you're going to come and watch a TV series that
(40:43):
has my name on it. It is also incumbent upon
me to give you the best, most high adrenaline, most
action packed, most intriguing, most the most interesting adventure I'm
capable of giving you. So that's the son of the
United States Marine and me is always excelled. Never settle, never,
never settle for mediocrity. Never never settle for the way
things were yesterday. It's keep pushing forward, keep pushing forward,
(41:06):
keep getting better.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
Well, I love that, you know I usually go longer
on my podcast, but I think we've kind of just
kind of touch based on everything that we need to hear.
I've had your time for forty five minutes today, and
I know you're very busy, and there's other airports that
you have to go and sign books in bro And
are you going to be doing the whole book tour
when we'll be able to catch you before I let
you go. We'll be able to catch you, like you know,
at some spots, yes, around the count.
Speaker 3 (41:29):
So I'm doing I'm doing a for cities around the
country starting first week of August, and I got the
whole tour up at bradthor dot com so you can
see the cities where I'm gonna be when I'm gonna
be there, and if you if you get your orders in,
I'm still doing personalized copies of the books. So if
you're if you want to get a signed personalized copy,
there's information on Bradthor dot com on how to do
(41:51):
that too.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
Okay, So what we have is we have Bradthor dot com,
all right, and that's going to be down belows. You
can click on it. If you've followed us on softwarep
dot com or any of our YouTube or Spotify, go
ahead and click on Bradthorne dot com. Make sure you
check out his book Shadow of a Doubt. It is
number one already. Okay, just know it, all right. And
(42:15):
when you go to the airport, if you happen to
be fortunate enough to be able to fly somewhere in
your lifetime, check the airport's bookstore and see if an
author that you love has a book, because you can
grab it and read that on a plane and not
worry about logging onto Wi Fi, trying to get your
phone to any of that. Nothing. It's all just you
can just read your book. They call it raw dogging
it on a flight.
Speaker 3 (42:37):
Thanks man, So do I appreciate you having me on
the show and sharing me with your fantastic audience. You're
always very kind to me every year.
Speaker 1 (42:43):
Rad.
Speaker 3 (42:43):
I really appreciate you.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
Thank you for being repeat, thank you for writing books.
Thanks for making me smarter, allowing me to read things
that are cool, that are interesting that I want to read. Right.
It's really true. It's like, how do you get someone
to read something right? They got to want to like
to read it, and then once you start reading, you turn,
they turn the page, You turn the page, and then
there's a twist. That's what you do, Bro. And I
don't want to give away too much more, but go
(43:05):
check out all of his books right twenty three harveth books.
Go check them out. And Brad Thor, I keep wanting
to talk to you, but I'm gonna let you go
and say thank you so much for being on soft
rep and this will be uh just a pleasure to
have you back again. Check out our merch store, check
out our book club at soft reap dot com, Ford
slash Book hyphen Club. And thanks to Brandon Webb who
(43:28):
also is an author and allows me to be his
audible guy.
Speaker 3 (43:31):
I appreciate you awesome great writer as well.
Speaker 1 (43:34):
Great writer as well well. Thank you, Brad. Thanks to
your father, United States Marine Corps. All right, simpify to
him always and forever. What's his name, Brad Thorpe, Sr.
Brad Thorpe Senior is immortalized on this podcast. So thank
you so much, sir, and you have a nice day.
Speaker 3 (43:48):
Thanks Brad, you too.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
Okay, cheers, we're out peace.
Speaker 3 (44:01):
Use them.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
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