Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision in global business. The dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years.
Speaker 1:
Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearing houses around the world. And now, welcome inside the ICE House. Here's your host Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
When I asked myself what spurs lifelong curiosity, I think of the empire that Henry R. Luce built, the founder of Time and Life magazines, and later, Fortune and Sports Illustrated. The first issue of Time was published 98 years ago on March 3, 1923. From the first days, I could read or just look at pictures the products of Time Inc along with, in early years, the World Book Encyclopedia and the Childcraft series were my constant companions. I even think that the photojournalism of Life and Time were the driving forces behind my early career in politics and at the White House.
Josh King:
Time famously merged with Warner Communications in 1990. When it was announced, the deal was the top of the fold in the front page of The New York Times with Warner's Steve Ross and Time's Nick Nicholas, creating the world's largest media company. 10 years later in 2000, AOL's Steve Case even more famously bought the whole shooting match and what may have been the high watermark for all of those names in what we now regard as the content business.
Josh King:
Now, try to follow along with me. AOL Time Warner eventually split up with Time Warner going its own way spinning out Time Inc. With its own ticker symbol, that's NYSE ticker symbol T-I-M-E or TIME. That was in 2014, four years later. In 2018, AT&T, that's ticker symbol T, would buy Time Warner creating Warner Media under its roof, becoming a major content player. And Meredith Corporation, that's ticker symbol MDP, acquired the remaining parts of Time Inc. Quickly jettisoning the flagship magazine brands scattered to new owners around the globe. The Time masthead landed in the hands of Marc and Lynne Benioff. Marc, of course, being the founder and CEO of another one of our illustrious teams here at the NYSE, Salesforce. That's NYSE ticker symbol CRM.
Josh King:
But where did it all begin? With the simple subscription model that Henry Luce created, much to the delight of kids like me, my parents paid an annual fee and each week a new issue of Time or Sports Illustrated would arrive at my door. The subscription renewed year after year. Predictable revenue flow even before they had a term for it. Time-Life also expanded into a subscription model for books. That was the richly illustrated American History series, which is my favorite, along with such titles as Lost Civilizations, Foods of the World, and even The Art of Sewing. There was also in 1969 a 17 volume set called A Child's First Library of Learning. If you look for it on Amazon today, you can find one new hardcover set for the princely price of $813.
Josh King:
Time-Life books is long gone now, replaced by everything on screen that sucks attention of those kids who used to turn pages for pleasure. And even the publishing industry is rapidly consolidating. The Authors Guild and the National Writers Union, a few weeks ago, sent a letter urging the Department of Justice to block the imminent publishing deal between literary giants Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, the number one and number three biggest names among trade book publishers in the country.
Josh King:
But in one little corner of the publishing universe, the subscription model for children's books lives on and is thriving. Brad Meltzer, the prolific author of thriller novels, comic books and nonfiction works also has 24 children's books to his credit. The Ordinary People Change the World series. These are the books that tell the stories of such disparate individualists, leaders, and artists, and inventors. Names like Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, Jane Goodall, Walt Disney, Lucille Ball, and I. M. Pei, among many others.
Josh King:
There are many names that could have been found in citations and those old Time-Life books, but there are also many names to whom history for so long gave short shrift. This year, Brad and his team are launching a subscription service for Ordinary People Change the World for $31.99 a month. You get all 24 books and support an independent bookstore in the process. Just like the old Time-Life books that kept me occupied for thousands of hours, it's a hassle-free way for parents to introduce their kids to a lifelong Hall of Fame of role models.
Josh King:
Our conversation with Brad Meltzer on crafting the thriller, exposing the truth of hidden mystery, shaping the values and outlook of this and future generations of children, and how the publishing industry needs to evolve to keep those missions alive is coming up right after this.
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Josh King:
I met our guest today, my friend, Brad Meltzer when we were working in the White House in the early and mid 1990s. The graduate of the University of Michigan and Columbia Law School was part of the earliest staff members for AmeriCorps, which is created to give those young people eager to serve an opportunity to work in cities and towns all across America. Launched with the pen of President Clinton and brought to life on the South Lawn of the White House in a ceremony that was also on the front page of The New York Times just like that Time and Warner merger a few years before.
Josh King:
And from there, Brad has published 12 best selling thriller novels beginning with The Tenth Justice in 1998. Contributed to five comic book series. Written another five nonfiction works, most recently, The Lincoln Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill America's 16th President and Why It Failed, which covers some of the same ground our recent guest Ted Widmer explores in Lincoln on the Verge. And as of this year, 25 entries in his Ordinary People Change the World series. As I said, now available as a subscription as parents like me grapple with how to channel our children's energies with the right mix of curiosity, inventiveness, leadership, and a value structure for the modern world.
Josh King:
Brad's newest book, along with illustrations from Dan Santat is A New Day from Dial Books for Young Readers which tells the story of when Sunday just quit being a day, causing the other days of the week to band together to advertise for a new day. Its job requirements must be relaxing, tranquil, and replenishing. And as we'll hear, there are a lot of job candidates for that gig. Brad, welcome inside the ICE House.
Brad Meltzer:
Thank you, brother Josh. It's a good one to do, because we have good history and I love history, so this is going to be fun.
Josh King:
Brad, Sunday is sort of the perfect day. We got the New York Times, weekly news shows, football, 60 Minutes, the Daytona 500. Why screw around with it?
Brad Meltzer:
Of everything I've ever written, it's the first book I ever dreamed. And which sounds completely new agey and ridiculous. I think writers always, we love to be ... We're so precious and we keep notepads by our side table as if lightning is going to strike and we will write down the genius.
Brad Meltzer:
And in my 20 plus years of doing this, I've never ever done that. I have the pad there. Now, I have, of course, the phone there, and I have that little app to put my notes in, but there's nothing. Every time you wake up in the morning and you write something. You wake up the next morning and you go, "What is that? Like a cloud has eaten a kitten?" It's like writing down your dreams. It's nothing.
Brad Meltzer:
And I woke up in the morning two years ago and I wrote down Sunday quit just like that. That's it. Sunday quit just like that. And I was like, "That's a book." The idea of what happens if Sunday leaves and all the other days have to find a new day, and they have tryouts. So, the first day comes. Let's do fun day. Every day will be fun. And they're like, "Nope, next." And they're like, "Run day, everyone will run." They're like, "Nope. Next." They're like, "Bun day. Everyone wear buns like Princess Leia." "Next." And needless to say, A New Day was born.
Brad Meltzer:
I've never written a book as fast. I've never dreamed a book, but I do think it came from my internal clock, which was telling me. And again, think of where the universe was two years ago, but just we were all exhausted. The world has been an exhausting place. It's been an anxious place. Our politicians, whatever your politics are, whatever side you're on, you're exhausted. I just imagined it came out of me in this way, which is even in one chill, calm day has just had it and is unappreciated, and there goes A New Day.
Josh King:
I looked at an advanced copy. It sort of pulls together a lot of parts of your career. A thriller of sorts, a comic book, a hero or two, and the incredible illustrations of Dan Santat. Why was this the right time to start something fresh and new for you based on these series that you've been cultivating in these characters both in the adult genres and the children's books?
Brad Meltzer:
Yeah. I think from the business perspective, I'm in a strange way, the publishing oddity. I'm saying it nicely, but I'm really a headache for the publisher. Because what you're supposed to do and what most people do in the publishing business is you stay in your lane. If you're a thriller writer, you write thrillers. John Grisham, God bless him, nice Guy, dear friend, has written thrillers for 25 years, and great ones. And they're still great, which is amazing. My friend Scott Turow does the same, but I just have a different kind of attention span.
Brad Meltzer:
I remember when I first started DC Comics, they knew I was a comic book fan. I was writing my fourth thriller, and DC Comics came to me and the director, Kevin Smith, was writing Green Arrow at the time. It was their number one superhero book at the time. And the director, Kevin Smith, was leaving the book, and they said, "He's leaving." And they said, "Brad, if you want to take this book over, we'll give it to you. You'll either succeed on a big stage, or you'll fail on a big stage, because it's our number one superhero book. What do you want to do?" And I was like, "Well, I'll take that any day." And I started writing superhero. I started writing Superman, and Batman, and Spider-Man.
Brad Meltzer:
I remember at the time, all these other people in publishing said, "Why are you slumming in comics? You're an established bestselling author. Why would you ever write a comic book?" And I remember looking at them and going, "Because it sounds cool, because I love that." And what was really funny, Josh, is that the first panel I did at Book Expo, it was with me, Janet Evanovich, and it was Walter Mosley. And we're sitting backstage, and people were kind of like ... They just announced the news that I was going to write a comic book and everyone is like, "You shouldn't do this. It's going to hurt your career. You're going to lose your audience. You're going to dilute your audience." Like what every business worries about.
Brad Meltzer:
And Janet Evanovich leans over to me right before we go out on stage, and she says, "Man, I love Wonder Woman." And then Walter Mosley leans over to me and goes, "Green Arrow, huh? Does he still have Speedy?" Which is his Robin, sidekick. And since that time, I have gotten everyone from Jodi Picoult made introductions.
Brad Meltzer:
I mean, if you want to be a novelist who writes comics, I've been like the drug dealer. I'm like, "The first one is free. We'd come for the rest." And I've made introductions to every novelist. I feel like most of them you've seen writing comics. But I realized in that moment that I just like doing what someone says I can't do. And from there, I said, "I want to write a nonfiction book." And the publisher said ...
Brad Meltzer:
I went to my publisher, and I'll never forget. I had kids and I was like, "I want to write a book for them. I want to write a kid's book that teaches them values, teaches them how to be a good person, how to teach them kindness, and compassion. I felt like I was tired of all the heroes that my kids were being exposed to these days." And I was like, "Let's teach them character, heroes of character."
Brad Meltzer:
And I went to my publisher and I said, "I want to write a book for my kids." And I said, "Listen, I know you have a lot of authors who come to you and say, 'Listen, I want to do a kid's book.' And then you got to go, 'Oh, my gosh, a thriller writer wants to do a kid's book, I got to service this guy, because he sells a lot of books from me.'" I said, "I never want to be that guy to you. So, if you don't like the book, don't publish the book. I won't take no hard feelings." She said, "Okay. We don't like the book." And I said, "What are you talking about? It's a great book. This book is fantastic."
Brad Meltzer:
But the reality was, as we took that book that the publisher rejected, it went to a new publisher, and the book came up number two on the bestseller list. And everyone in publishing said, "How did you do that? You're a thriller writer. How did you just write a nonfiction book about Amelia Earhart, and Abraham Lincoln, all these people?" And I said, "It wasn't me." I said, "It was just people are starving for heroes right now. And we need these heroes more than ever."
Brad Meltzer:
I just know one thing, Josh, to really sum it up, I'm not that special. And if I want that for my kids, there's going to be people out there who want that for theirs. And the same way if I like a thriller, people out there are going to like thrillers. None of us ever want to read just one type of book. We never want to see ... If I said, "What's your favorite genre, Josh, in movies?" And you said, "Oh, I love art house film." I said, "Great. That's all you're going to watch for the rest of your life." "I like superhero films." "Great, that's all you're going to watch for the rest of your life." You would eventually hate them. And for me, going to different genres is always how ... It's like the grass is always greener. I get to come back and try something new.
Josh King:
On this newest project, A New Day, how did Dan come up with the visual inspirations for the days of the week? From his Twitter feed, it looked to range from like Jeff Bridges and The Big Lebowski to Barbara Billingsley in Leave It to Beaver.
Brad Meltzer:
I know I love that he did that on Twitter, and I just retweeted it as well. It's funny. We said we wanted to have the days of the week and you have to show them. Sunday is a person. Monday is uptight and loves margins and loves discipline. I had descriptions of everybody, and the personalities, obviously. Wednesday was kind of the hump and would kind of like the day you got to get over. And Friday was chill and Saturday was even way more chill.
Brad Meltzer:
Dan is this incredible Caldecott winning artist. I said, "Now, you're screwed because you got to figure out what they look like." And the only thing I had from him is as I said, "I felt like they should be different colors." I imagined them in weird ways like these globes you could see through. I'm not an artist. Dan is the award winning artist and I just said, "Go for it." I had no idea that he had based everyone on a real kind of famous movie star or actor.
Brad Meltzer:
So, Monday was all uptight. Leslie Knope from Parks and Recreation, which I love. This Amy Poehler character. And then it was very obvious when the art came in that he made Saturday looks like Lebowski. Looks like from The Big Lebowski. I mean, he's wearing literally the sweater. So, we all knew that one. I never knew that he based Friday on Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which I was like, "Oh my gosh, it's totally Spicoli."
Brad Meltzer:
He realized that and then, to me, the only way that a kid's book works, and I learned this the hard way. As a novelist, I have an infinite palette. I paint with words. I can use all the words I want. I can say everything I want. But what I learned writing kids' books and writing for Superman and Batman, is that you don't just paint with a palette of words, you rely on the artist. And what you have to learn as a novelist is how to shut up. Like you don't have to say everything, let the artist do the heavy lifting. That's what they're there for. To Dan's credit, he just blew everybody away with the art, and that's why people love the book. That's why A New Day, everyone is like, "Oh, that looks really fun," is because Dan's art is so spectacular.
Josh King:
One of your early novels, Brad, 2006's The Book of Fate brings us from Washington, DC to the glittering world of Palm Beach high society, and its city fringes, as the publicity reads. It's a path most recently traveled by our most recent former president. You took your talents to South Beach as you're my eyes and ears down there with President Trump and his children taking up residence along with Governor DeSantis and everyone who lives in the villages. What's the status report on the Sunshine State making its way through the ebbs and flows of COVID?
Brad Meltzer:
Listen, Florida always, whatever state you live in, whatever your crazy is in your state, we in Florida, we see you're crazy and we raise your crazy. That is what our job is. Florida is a bunch of states in one. We are part Alabama, and we are part Georgia, and we are part New York. In Boca, right? And we are part Latin America, and we are part every Jewish suburb that you've ever been to. So, we're all these things kind of fighting for goals.
Brad Meltzer:
Actually, I wanted to see what security was like at Mar-a-Lago, so last week I drove by it.I know how the security works for every living president and former president. I've been to visit former presidents and seen their offices. I know what their security like. There is nothing like what I've seen right now at Mar-a-Lago. There's a guy with a machine gun at the front boarded up front. It is not this welcoming, open. It is not, "Oh, the Secret Service is going to lay back like they do with most former presidents where you can't even really find them." It is machine gun ready, and that pretty much says I think that the perfect metaphor for where Florida is right now.
Josh King:
Besides those few blocks around Mar-a-Lago, how have you and your wife and kids managed during the pandemic, I mean, going back now really a year?
Brad Meltzer:
Yeah, it's interesting. I've spent, Josh, 20 years sitting in my office by myself talking to my imaginary friends. My life should have changed in no way, shape, or form in the last year. That's my job. I don't go anywhere. I stayed home. And the moment that the universe told me, "You can't go out." I was like, "Well, what do you mean? I can't stay here now. I gotta get out." The reality is our kids' books really do save me.
Brad Meltzer:
I mean, when we started the kids' books, I wanted my daughter ... I was just tired of the princess phase and I was tired of the reality TV show stars and loud mouth athletes my other kids, my sons were looking at. And I said to her, "I got a great hero for you, Amelia Earhart. I'm going to teach you about Amelia Earhart, and she flew across the Atlantic Ocean. Isn't she amazing?" And my daughter said, "Big deal, dad. Everyone flies across the Atlantic Ocean." Was completely unimpressed.
Brad Meltzer:
I then told her the story that when Amelia Earhart true story was seven years old, she built a homemade roller coaster in her backyard. Took a wooden crate, put rollerskating wheels in the bottom, shoved it to the roof of her tool shed. Got into the crate on these roller skates, came flying down the side, flies through the air, crashes, gets up. It's like, "That was amazing." Whatever she yells at the time, and my daughter was mesmerized.
Brad Meltzer:
And I was like, "Okay, that's the book I'm going to tell. I'm going to tell this book, I Am Amelia Earhart." We did I Am Abraham Lincoln, we did I Am Rosa Parks. We did Albert Einstein. My son who loves sports, I was like, "Forget a millionaire athlete. You want to see what a real sports hero looks like? Here, I wrote this for you. Meet I Am Jackie Robinson." And we did I Am Lucille Ball, because I wanted my daughter to have a female entertainment hero. It wasn't just famous, being thin and pretty. And Lucy stands here, yeah, it's okay to be different, and that we all need that.
Brad Meltzer:
And this amazing thing happened. As Donald Trump was being elected in 2016, it was right before November. It's in October as Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump are arguing everyday nonstop on television. Two of our books started selling more than any others. And this is, to me, the business side is so fascinating. Two books started selling more than any others, and they were I Am Martin Luther King Jr. and I Am George Washington.
Brad Meltzer:
And it wasn't a Democrat or Republican thing. It was a parents and grandparents on both sides were tired of turning on the TV and seeing politicians. What they want to show their kids were leaders. And we all know, you know especially that there's a huge difference between a politician and a leader.
Brad Meltzer:
And for me, these books have become this way to kind of fight back against the cynicism in society. And we did I Am Jane Goodall, because my daughter loves our dog. And I said, "Oh, you love animals? Look what you can do with the love of animals." For my son who's creative, I did I Am Jim Henson. Of course, the creator of Kermit the Frog. And we did I Am Walt Disney, one of our best selling books right now, because Disney loved what we were doing, and so we're going to help you with that.
Brad Meltzer:
And now, I love that people build libraries of real heroes for their kids, and their grandkids, their nieces, and nephews. I'm telling you all that simply to say is that has saved me in the pandemic. I've actually written more books for the kids and about things we need in the pandemic more than any other.
Brad Meltzer:
So, in the pandemic, I wrote I Am Benjamin Franklin, because I was like ... The attacks on the free press that I was seeing happening every day, I was like, "I need to show people." Remember when humility was a great American value? We lost that. We lost and we need it back in. So, I wrote I Am Neil Armstrong for that, and I Am Benjamin Franklin.
Brad Meltzer:
Benjamin Franklin understood that the best experiment you could ever have is not the science experiment, not the lightning, and the kite, but it was the experiment on yourself, how to be a better person. He had rules to live by, to be a better person. Whatever business you're in, you're not perfect. You can improve, and he had the rules for how to do it. One, don't lie, tell the truth. Two, work hard. He literally numbered his rules. I needed that in the pandemic.
Brad Meltzer:
The one I needed more than any other is probably the riskiest book we wrote, but I wrote I Am Anne Frank. I saw that antisemitism in the past year. The Anti-Defamation League said it's at the highest rate in incident that it's had in 40 years since it's been tracking it. A study of millennials recently said that millennials don't even know that six million Jews, the basic idea, died in the Holocaust. And I was like, "How do you teach kids hope in the time of the pandemic?"
Brad Meltzer:
And I immediately got to work. When I couldn't write my thriller and couldn't write anything else, I was like, "Write what helps you now. I know you're not that special." And I said, "I need to write about hope. I'm going to write about Anne Frank, the little girl who has hid in the attic for two years from the Nazis." And to teach my kids that, that's what hope is. It's a light that burns within you. It's a fire within you. When you light it, nothing puts it out.
Brad Meltzer:
That book became one of our biggest sellers, again, because parents out there were like, "We're just at this time in the past year where we need hope more than ever." So, I literally turned my entire business into ... Maybe I've done it all these years, I've just never really consciously thought about it, but just doing what I need and just, again, rely on that idea that if I need it, then hopefully there are others out there that need it as well.
Josh King:
What's your process in going from giving kids and readers a new sense of this person that old history books bound in paper from the '60s, '70s, and '80s that you and I grew up with when you were growing up in Brooklyn and South Florida, to give them a fresh view?
Brad Meltzer:
Everyone think, "Oh, you did Amelia Earhart. That's a history book." They're not history books. They've never been history books, their value books. They're just like your Time-Life ones that you were talking about. I mean, on the back of I Am Amelia Earhart, it says, "I know no bounds." On the back of I Am Abraham Lincoln, it says, "I will speak my mind and speak for others." And each one has a different value. Neil Armstrong is, again, about humility, or perseverance, or kindness, or compassion. Those things that are missing in the world today.
Brad Meltzer:
And the one thing that we've been able to really do is show you those heroes when they're little, when they're kids. That story I told you about Amelia Earhart when she's seven years old. And that's been our secret sauce. What we do, we make a mistake with our heroes today in society. I think what we do is we build these great statues of our heroes. We chisel them out of granite, and then we go and we worship at their feet. And we do those heroes a huge disservice, because what we do is they become these bigger than life kind of lowercase G, gods, and they're not human beings anymore. So, how can we possibly relate to them if they're so perfect?
Brad Meltzer:
I think that's a huge disservice, because anyone you look up to, whether it's Rosa Parks, or Dr. King, or Amelia Earhart, or Abraham Lincoln, they had moments where they were scared, and they were terrified, and they didn't know if they could go on. So, seeing Abraham Lincoln as a 10 year old boy standing up to bullies when he sees a wrong happening, or seeing Dr. King. Congressman John Lewis helped us with the Dr. King book, and we got the story of Dr. King as a little boy comes out one day. I think he's 10 or 11 years old, and his white friend was his best friend at the time says, "My parents said I can't play with you anymore."
Brad Meltzer:
Dr. King is a little boy is so mad. He's like, "I hate that boy. How could he do that? Just because I'm black? He didn't understand." He's like, "I wanted to hate him with everything." He goes back to tell his mom and his mom says to him, "Don't meet people with hate, meet them with love." And it changes his whole outlook on life.
Brad Meltzer:
We may never be able to lead our own marches on Washington. We may never be able to fly across the Atlantic and set world records, but we can all be kind, and we can all stand up for someone, and we can all do something that we feel like is beyond ourselves. That's something we can all do. The goal with these books has always been these aren't the stories of famous people, this is what we're all capable of on our very best days.
Brad Meltzer:
I always wind up digging in and finding that. I go to the biography and the first six chapters are usually their childhood. Maybe one chapter of their childhood, but that's where I spend my time. Because you show me your childhood, I'll tell you who you are. Anybody out there.
Josh King:
And maybe I'd flipped that on you. I mean, you've talked about the relationship you have with your most immediate reader, which is your kids and why you started the series at the outset. You were the first in your immediate family to attend a four-year college. So, what was it about your upbringing that ultimately created the kind of parent and writer that you are?
Brad Meltzer:
Yeah. No, I love that you know me so well and you did the research, then you reveal me, right? If you said my moment is ... I remember when I was 13 years old, which my youngest is about to me. God willing, it's incredible. And I came home from school in Brooklyn, and my dad was home at 3:00. And your dad is home at 3:00, that's not a good thing. You know something bad happened.
Brad Meltzer:
And I remember just sitting there in the dark, in a chair. We had a little apartment in New York, just a two-bedroom apartment and he said he got fired. And he told me that we were leaving New York immediately. "I got fired. We're leaving, we're going, we're moving to Florida, and we're going to have the do-over of life." He was 39 years old. I was 13. And he said it like it was a game, like it's this amazing adventure we were going to go on. The do-over of life, and I was terrified. I was like, "This is not fun."
Brad Meltzer:
And it wasn't one of those moments just because we didn't have money, which we didn't. But it was one of those ones where we didn't have safety. We didn't know where we're going to live. My parents can't afford money for a down payment for the security deposits. We had to live with my grandmother for four different months in a row just so they could save money for security deposit.
Brad Meltzer:
I remember on the day that I was born ... My dad was always bad with money. He had like $1,200 to his name at the time. But on the day that I was born, he bought a bottle of champagne and he said, "I'm going to open up this bottle of champagne when my son, Brad, gets married." And I remember we got in the car. And when we moved, anyone has moved. You put your stuff in the moving van. Whoever is moving you, whether professional movers, you put your couch there and your clothes there and everything gets packed, and that's your stuff. But there's those things you only take in the car with you, you trust to nobody, and that's not your stuff, that's your life. There's things that nobody is touching, I'm taking this myself.
Brad Meltzer:
And I remember it was my mom and dad in the front seat. We drove down from Brooklyn, New York to Miami, Florida. In the backseat with my sister and I in the back of this crappy Dodge. Behind the headrest, we had two bottles of champagne that used to roll back and forth in the Florida Sun. Because my parents didn't know anything about taking care of champagne, but we were their lives. And thank god, I went to a really, really wealthy suburban high school with amazing people at it that all had ... It was really an amazing place. I gave a fake address to go there. I can't afford to live in that district. So, I gave a fake address for four years to attend high school. I never got a report card sent home because we didn't live there, but it was there that I got a chance.
Brad Meltzer:
And a woman named Sheila Spicer, my ninth grade English teacher changed my life with three words. She said to me, "You can write." I was like, "Well, everyone can write." She's like, "No, no, you know what you're doing." She tried to put me in the honors class, I had a conflict. She said, "Here's what we're going to do. You're going to sit in the corner for the entire year. Ignore everything I do on the blackboard, ignore every homework assignment I give. And what you're going to do is you're going to thank me later."
Brad Meltzer:
And sure enough, a decade later, my first book came out. I went back to her classroom, I knocked on the door, she said, "Can I help you?" I said, "My name is Brad Meltzer. I wrote this book, and it's for you." And she starts crying. And I said, "Why are you crying?" She said, "I was going to retire this year, because I didn't think I was having an impact anymore." And I said, "Are you kidding?" I said, "You have 30 students, we have one teacher."
Brad Meltzer:
And that for me was my like, "I got a shot." And I got a shot by completely ordinary, regular people. My parents weren't connected. They didn't know crap about school. I applied to one college because that's what we had the money to apply to. "Here's 50 bucks for the University of Michigan. If you don't get in, I'll give you another 50 to apply somewhere else." I got in, so I went there. There was no college visit. I went there after when I got in. They sent me up by myself at 18 years old and said, "You like it?" I'm like, "I've never seen a college before. Sure, it looks good. I'll come."
Brad Meltzer:
But it was all these teachers, and strangers, and counselors that would ... They knew I needed the help, and they helped me. It's my core belief. It's an every book that I talked about today. Every thriller I write, all the TV shows we've done, it's my core belief. I believe ordinary people change the world.
Josh King:
You come out of University of Michigan, you went to Columbia Law School, you spent your time in the White House working for the legendary Eli Siegel. And then comes this sort of do-over in life for you. Now, we've just finished a presidential term with the introduction of three new Justices of the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, all of whom needed to hire a team of clerks to staff their chambers in one of their first acts on the High Court. But tell me about Ben Addison, fresh out of Yale Law and how he came to life.
Brad Meltzer:
Yeah. I was in law school. This is good business advice for anybody. I did not go to law school because I was ... One of legal thriller ideas. I went to law school out of fear. I was terrified of having my father's life. I just did not want to struggle with money the way he struggled. It caused us great headache, and harm, and mental anguish. Knowing not to pick up the phone at the end of the month when the bill collectors were calling. Knowing how to recognize who the collections people were on your caller ID when they have caller ID and we finally got that. I just wanted to not ... I needed something to fall back on.
Brad Meltzer:
I was working at the time for Eli Siegel, as you mentioned. He was my mentor. This amazing businessman, entrepreneur who wound up running AmeriCorps, the National Service Program. And my first book I ever wrote was this ... I loved it. It was this wonderful book about the University of Michigan and it got me 24 rejection letters. The only 20 publishers at that time, I got 24 rejection letters, which means some people wrote me twice to make sure I got the point. But I was like, "If they don't like that book, I'll write another. And if they don't like that, I'll write another."
Brad Meltzer:
And the week after I got my 23rd and 24th rejection letter, I started what became The Tenth Justice, which was about the Supreme Court. And I went to the Supreme Court, I was working for Eli at AmeriCorps. I was in Washington, DC. I figured I'd go to the court, knock on the door and I'll say, "Hey, I'm Brad Meltzer. Can you help me check out the court? I want to do research here." Let's just say that is not how you get into the nation's highest court.
Brad Meltzer:
So, I went back to Eli's office and I called the marshal's office with a security for the Supreme Court and I said, "Hi, I'm calling from AmeriCorps and we want to have a bunch of clerks go on a tour there. Could you give them a tour around?" They said, "Absolutely. What are their names?" I said, "His name is Brad Meltzer. He'll be coming alone." And that was how I got into the nation's highest court. That was the crack security team that was taking care of them at the time, and they let me in, and they showed me, yes, the curtains are burgundy, the justices' robes are black. It wasn't really much of anything except what the public sees.
Brad Meltzer:
And then my girlfriend at the time, my now wife introduced me to a former Supreme Court clerk. And I told her the plot of my book and I said, "It's about a Supreme Court clerk who inadvertently leaks the decision before it's announced to the public to make money on the stock exchange, and this is how it happens, and he uses that insider information." And it was this huge pause on the other line, Josh. And I'll never forget, and she said, "The scariest thing about your book is it could happen."
Brad Meltzer:
And I knew in that moment, I have my first thriller, and The Tenth Justice was really born in that moment. And since that time, there have been actually law review articles written about insiders doing exactly what I proposed. And I love the fact that we got amazing reviews for that book, but we did get a couple that ripped us apart, so this could never happen. I love every single place that has proven me correct, because that's all I want in life, to be proven correct.
Josh King:
11 best selling novels would follow over the next 20 years after the 1997 publication of The Tenth Justice. Reflecting intense research, they dive into the White House Counsel's Office, the inner workings of private banking, halls of Congress, the National Archives, Jefferson's 200 year old code, even the biblical story of Cain and Abel. What's the through line in all this?
Brad Meltzer:
It is whatever interests me on at the time. When I started, they wanted me to be a legal thriller writer. "Stay in your lane, run your business, be true to your core business." And my second book, I went to write ... I said, "I have this idea. I want to do this historical story. It will be Cain and Abel. It will be this amazing thing." And the editor said to me, "Don't do that. We just put you on the bestseller list for writing a legal thriller. Legal thrillers are big. John Grisham is big. Scott Turow is big. David Baldacci is big. You're there. You're the next guy. Do not do that."
Brad Meltzer:
And I had this moment where I could stand strong for my beliefs or cave. And I cave faster than anyone in the history of caving. Because at 28 years old, I was terrified of losing everything. I was terrified to kind of do something different. And I love the book that I did write. It was the hardest book I've ever written in 20 years, and I promised myself I'll never do that again. I will never, ever make that mistake again.
Brad Meltzer:
The next book I wrote, whether they liked it or not, I said, "I'm not doing the law. I'm doing dating the president's daughter, a young guy in the White House, which of course, how we met." And with our help of our friends, Steve Cohen, and I just said, "I'm throwing myself into that. I don't care that it's political and not legal. That's what I want to do." And it wound up being a bigger seller.
Brad Meltzer:
And I realized now as I never look back, in the next book, I was like, "Private banking?" I'm like, "You tell me there's a place where if you have X more money, you're treated differently? That if you have $50 million, they'll send a plane for you, they'll have a private chef?" I was like, "I want to know about that. I'm writing a financial thriller." And every book I've written has just been whatever that thing that I love is at that moment in time.
Brad Meltzer:
Think of any good book that you love. It's because when you open that book, the X Factor is not either it has good researcher, or it's even well written or anything like that, but it's that the author loves what they're doing. It's like a good business. If the author loves what they're doing, you feel it from the founder, and it radiates out to your entire staff. And to me, a good book is it has to feel like a bullet train. You know the ones you love. It feels like the author just has been waiting their whole life to write this page. It's leaving the station, the train is going, are you getting on or not?
Josh King:
When you pivoted from the adult genre to Ordinary People Change the World series. Now, there's, I think, three and a half million copies of those books now in print. The roster of these books, the most recent is I Am Frida Kahlo, which is on sale March 9th. It reads like a hall of fame, or the type of diversity, values, ingenuity, leadership and inventiveness that we'd all want our kids to embrace. Tell us about the sequencing research writing illustration and publishing protocols that go into it. Putting people, as you said earlier, like Ben Franklin in league with Anne Frank and Billie Jean King.
Brad Meltzer:
Yeah. In the beginning, it was actually really easy, because you said to anyone ... If I came to you on the street and said, "Give me your top heroes." America actually kind of, for all our venomous hatred of each other right now, we do agree on one thing. We do agree on who we kind of look up to. Abraham Lincoln is right at the top of people's list. Amelia Earhart, Rosa Parks, Albert Einstein, Jackie Robinson. Yes, you maybe pick George Washington before Lincoln, depending on where you are, but we generally agree. So, this first ones were really easy.
Brad Meltzer:
And then we just started getting letters from kids. We got letters from kids saying, "Listen, I'm Hispanic. When are you going to do a Hispanic hero?" And I realized, "Wow, we hadn't done one." I didn't even think about it, because I was still just doing the greatest hits. And kids say, "When is the next Asian here?" Which is why we have I. M. Pei coming out in six months. It was just so many letters from kids saying, "Where's one that looks like me?" And the one thing that I've realized over time is I can't channel these people's voices without help. I obviously use their words when I can find them, but I also try to find the best expert out there on them.
Brad Meltzer:
If I mess up for George Washington, what's he going to do? He's long dead. But if I mess up Jane Goodall, she's going to show up in the middle of the night at my house with a bunch of chimpanzees, I'm in trouble. So, I went to Jane Goodall. I'm like, "Can Dr. Goodall potentially read our book and proof it for us?" And they were like, "We'd love to."
Brad Meltzer:
I sat with Billie Jean King. I sat on my phone, two hours with her. I remember she said, "In the scene you did here, I actually was wearing blue shoes, not white shoes." She was really correcting the shoe color, because she knew it so well. And she said, "In this scene, everyone says I was here when I got this news, but I wasn't, I was here." And I said, "No offense, but I got that from your autobiography." She goes, "I know, but I hadn't proofed my autobiography. I was too busy back then, so let me set the record straight." I love that I Am Billie Jean King, our kids' book is now more factual than what was her own biography.
Brad Meltzer:
As I said, John Lewis helped us with Dr. King. Michele Norris helped us with Rosa Parks. Everyone that we do we try and go out and find that estate, that expert. The Disney Archives were opened up to us for Walt Disney. And Jim Henson's daughters helped us proof I'm Am Jim Henson, and the Lucille Ball estate jumped in for that.
Brad Meltzer:
Once it started really rolling, now it's much easier to obviously get people to come help. But the one thing we realized is these are lots of different amazing voices and kids need them where our culture right now is starving for heroes. Parents are starting for heroes. We're an age of anxiety right now. And as I said before, our leaders make us anxious, our kids make us anxious, our kids are anxious right now. I think reminded people not that these people were amazing and different than you, but what the Ordinary People Change the World series does is they would just like you. It's reassuring in the very best way.
Josh King:
Talking about our kids being anxious right now. You once said, I think, that you wanted to give your own children these heroes of character, kindness and compassion. That you didn't want them to think that someone famous for being famous on social media constitutes someone to emulate. It's a theme that I saw explored by journalist, Nick Bilton, just a couple days ago in a new documentary for HBO Max called Fake Famous. Creating tens of thousands of Instagram followers with created scenes, lavish photography and bought followers and likes for hire, these bots. With all this, how are we putting our next generation at risk if this is their world instead of your books?
Brad Meltzer:
I was in the mall the other day picking up ... I had to pick up my computer. It was busted, and so I had to go actually out to the mall. For the first time, I've been there in I can't tell you how long. So, I haven't been there in almost a year and there's a store in the Aventura Mall that is really just called like Selfie Store. And it's an empty store from where the Apple Store used to be. They gut it. Think of the size of an Apple Store. It's just like half of an old fashioned car, all with lighting. And you just go around take beautiful pictures of yourself. That's the store.
Brad Meltzer:
There's a study that was recently done a few years back that Harvard did that said when you and I were growing up ... And not to sound like old fogey, "In my day, this happened. In my day, this happened." What we were taught, for good or for bad, was that what mattered was intelligence. Success was measured by that. Were you smart? Did you achieve something? Intelligence had a real currency to it.
Brad Meltzer:
What social media really does with all our likes, and our things, and our subscribers, and how many people downloaded, how many hearts we got on something, thumbs up we got on something. And showing whether we like it or not. No one is for it, but we are teaching our kids that being popular matters. I hate that.
Brad Meltzer:
The Ordinary People Change the World series is designed to give you ... I knew one thing and we didn't get to talk about it, and I showed this. I want my kids off their screens. I want them off their phones. And that's not a bold statement, just about everybody does. The one thing I have really is the only way you can do that is you got to give them something better to look at. That's it. You got to compete with it.
Brad Meltzer:
And I went for an artist in our kids' books named Chris Eliopoulos who work for Marvel Comics, who did Spider-Man, who did the Fantastic Four and the X-Men and these amazing superheroes. And that's why kids love art books. It's not because I'm a good writer. I mean, there are plenty of great books have been written about these heroes, but our artists has an art style that's a little bit like Charlie Brown meets Calvin and Hobbes and kids look at it and go, "Oh, I love this."
Brad Meltzer:
When I chose him, it's easy for any cartoonists to do cute. It's easy for cartoonists to do funny. But the hardest thing to do and what the best artists can do is they can show heart. I knew if we wanted your kid to love Rosa Parks, or Dr. King, or Amelia Earhart, or Abraham Lincoln is you've got to fall in love with them. And Chris' art makes you fall in love, and that is the alchemy that really happens in the book is giving kids something better to look up to, so they stop focusing on popularity and say, "Oh, I want to be like this."
Brad Meltzer:
I can't say how many people have written to us with letters that say, "Thanks to this book, my kids started riding their bike. When they fell over, they got back up again because they remembered your book about getting back up again." They really are using these lessons, and it is humbling as it can be.
Josh King:
After the break more with Brad Meltzer, author most recently of I Am Frida Kahlo, part of the Ordinary People Change the World series and A New Day. A rambunctious and big hearted story about the power of gratitude and kindness. On where his franchises go from here amid the rapidly changing world of content and publishing, that's all right after this.
Speaker 5:
Board diversity is important.
Speaker 6:
Board diversity is important.
Speaker 7:
Board diversity is important.
Speaker 8:
Board diversity is very important.
Speaker 9:
Not just because it's the right thing to do, but because diverse leadership at companies creates better companies.
Speaker 10:
This is about value, not values.
Speaker 11:
With board diversity, you build better companies.
Speaker 12:
Diversity of thought, diversity of perspective.
Speaker 13:
Different Perspectives often yield better outcomes.
Speaker 14:
You need to have different perspectives with different backgrounds to really inform and find the best solutions for our organizations.
Speaker 15:
Companies that have more diverse boards perform better.
Speaker 16:
Diverse teams are better performers, that is absolutely true in the boardroom as well.
Speaker 17:
It makes a difference to the employees who work for companies. It makes a big difference for the communities in which they work.
Speaker 18:
Our business is about building leaders for the future, and that talent cannot be only half the population of the world.
Speaker 19:
What are you waiting for? 50% of the population, for some reason, isn't qualified? Let's put the smartest people we can in the boardroom, and why ignore people or exclude people for any reason other than that they're not qualified.
Josh King:
Welcome back. Before the break, legendary bestselling author, Brad Meltzer and I were talking about what brought him from law school to the White House to ungodly success in basically every corner of the publishing world. Now, I want to dive a little deeper into that world that he inhabits.
Josh King:
Alright, buddy, we're talking about it before the break, social media. Some stats on you. 63,000 Twitter followers, 167,000 Facebook followers, 29,000 Instagram followers. You are a publishing and promotion machine. How did it start and what kind of team does it take to maintain?
Brad Meltzer:
All our social media is done by me. Not a thing is done by anyone, which is probably stupid of me. I'd probably be more productive if I wasn't, but that's just the way it goes. But I feel like I don't want to read anything that feels like some schlub wrote it. I want to feel like the author is talking to me.
Brad Meltzer:
And I think that they did an analysis of my social media, and it was fascinating because the number one group ... We had teachers and librarians, we have people who like history, of course, and thrillers, but the number one group that we had was other writers, which was they said is usually not the case. Like other people are watching you to see what you're doing.
Brad Meltzer:
I just did an article with Ink Magazine of how is your social media so personal. I'm like, "Because I write it, man. I'm a writer. If I can't do that, what can I do?" The only thing that I've allowed myself is I do have help, because it was taking me 20 minutes to just post all the accounts. So, I just write it and get to send it to one person. They can help me put it up, but I do everything.
Brad Meltzer:
The only credit I can give is we were really early on Facebook, because I went to high school with Sheryl Sandberg and she's a friend and she was like, "We're doing this thing called Facebook. You should get on it." And I was like, "That sounds good. Let's go."
Brad Meltzer:
The New York Times said they wrote an article that said I was the first author to ever have a website and off a website. I don't know how they figured such a stat, but they wrote that and I guess they did their homework. And the only reason I had it was the same exact story is my buddy worked for IBM, and he's like, "We're making these things called websites. You want one? I'll make you want for The Tenth Justice." I was like, "Sure, why not? Make it." And so we had the first website.
Brad Meltzer:
And it's funny when I went to Amazon again in 1997, so literally the year it goes public, I get to Seattle and they take me in this backroom somewhere. I just started and they show me part of this file that's like inch thick folder and they said, "We have this thing that you can do on the books where you can actually write a review of your book online." And we just launched it. But what's interesting is you don't sell the most books on Amazon, they said to me. They said, "But your books have more reviews and responses than any books and most books we have."
Brad Meltzer:
And it was because I was 27 years old at the time and our readers were 27 years old, and so they were all early adopters of the technology. They're like, "You're getting all these articles saying you're the best writer in the world and the worst writer ever from people in there 20 Something age demographic." And the one rule I have from all those things is I don't ever mind being the guinea pig. The publishers know it. When they did disposable audio books, they were like, "We're going to do a disposable audio book where you listen to it, you chuck it in the trash, but we need someone to try it." They know I'm Mikey from Life.
Josh King:
You earn part of your fan base spread by really never missing a publicity tour. I always got my notice in the mail, that old fashioned thing called a mail when you were heading up to New York to promote your latest tile at Barnes & Noble at Union Square. How have you had to pivot during COVID when this stuff is not possible?
Brad Meltzer:
Yeah. I do miss book tours I will say. I do miss to travel for them, but there's nothing like going out and seeing people. And listen, the pivot is not brain science, brain surgery. We just do on Zoom. It's like the concert. You buy the concert T-shirt when you go to the concert. Otherwise, you don't buy the concert T-shirt. And so, we definitely lose sales.
Brad Meltzer:
When we do our kids' books tours, people will come and buy 12, 14, 20 books, stacks of them saying, "I'm building a library for my kid. I want this for my niece or my nephew." Sign them all. And what we had to do is we pivot it. We work with Books & Books in Coral Gables in Miami, and everyone knows on my social media that on the Friday after my book comes out, Books & Books will have books by me. They will be personalized as long as you call before that Saturday. You can put your kid's name in there, I will write it directly to them.
Brad Meltzer:
Whatever, when we used to do like, "Hey, we're going to sign books at Books & Books." You get 50 orders, we'll get 100 orders, whatever. We were really lucky. Books & Books recently brought 2,000 books to my house. I signed 800 kids' books, and then that rest was for like stock. And it was crazy. Because clearly what had happened was there's no one could get that personalized sign book for their kids anymore. And again, it was just because we were like, "Let's try something different." And we tried it and it works. So, that's been our pivot.
Brad Meltzer:
As you mentioned, we started a subscription service just two days ago. I don't know if it's going to work or not, but I love it. And basically, we did it with through Books & Books. You go to subscription.ordinarypeoplechangeaworld.com and you can get all the books, all 24, it will come to a month to your house. And the publisher would not do that. I was like, "Why not?" They don't want to compete with Amazon or anyone else. I'm like, "Well, let's try it." So, we paired up with Books & Books. You support the independent bookstore, and that's been the fun of it.
Josh King:
Brad, it's Presidents' Day weekend as we're recording this conversation. You've got a post up offering the statement. If only there was some way to tell someone loves Presidents' Day, which has the cover art for your I Am George Washington book from the Ordinary People and the first conspiracy book, your adult novel about Washington, and also your I Am Abraham Lincoln and The Lincoln Conspiracy, the adult version of that. Brad, the cancel culture has even come for these American icons. Washington was a slave holder and Lincoln continued the subjugation of Native Americans causing San Francisco to take his name off of one of their public schools. Has cancel culture gone too far? And how do you vet people we've long regarded as heroes who may or may not stand up to modern scrutiny?
Brad Meltzer:
There are some that are very easy. There are some that you're just like, "That person is not a hero anymore." The Confederate leaders are like, "I think the world has obviously turned on them." My philosophy has been this, and that is if you are looking for the perfect person who has no blemishes in their life and has never done anything wrong, then you're going to write about nobody, because nobody is perfect by any stretch.
Brad Meltzer:
Now, of course, like I always say, the only thing that's perfect is God. Everyone else take a number. It's harder. It is hard, and we try to be sensitive to it. They took our kids' books and they turned them into a show on PBS called Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum. And now, you can watch our books come to life on PBS Kids with Sesame Street and everything else and it's an amazing opportunity.
Brad Meltzer:
There we've done, because each show is only 11 minutes. Instead of doing 24 books, we've done 70 heroes. I can't tell you how many heroes we've gone through. Obviously, when you go deeper into the bench, when you get past the Rosa Parks, and the Dr. Kings, and the Amelia Earharts, how hard it is to find those people who you feel like, "You know what?" And I'll be the first to say, Thomas Jefferson, I think, a lot of people, we would get a lot of demands for. I don't get any calls for Thomas Jefferson anymore. It's fascinating.
Brad Meltzer:
Everyone is like, "I'll take Hamilton now." No one ever gets for Hamilton before Thomas Jefferson. And obviously, part of it is the show. I got someone on Twitter the other day say, "You do an Aaron Burr over Thomas Jefferson." So, it's just fascinating to watch the world kind of recalibrate what we think is a hero. And as I said, we always try and use advisors and people who are sensitive to that issue in that community to tell us like, "What do we not see in here, and what do we know?" Because we're there to kind of help educate your kids, and we can't just do that with your gut. You got to come with some real experts.
Josh King:
We talked earlier in the show that your first book, The Fraternity was rejected by 24 publishers. I suppose it would be great if there were still 24 independent publishing houses to reject an author's first work. I know that the concerns that authors have with Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House combining, how consolidated and fragile is the publishing world today you think?
Brad Meltzer:
I have a friend who's a consultant. And he said to me that of all the industries he's ever worked on, he's never seen one as backwards and unable to jump forward as publishing. And I don't know if it's because publishing is the original business. It's literally the old timey, print it out, and run it through, and create a book. It's the original technology. The first technology company, right?
Brad Meltzer:
It doesn't have the funds or the money. I don't want to say it's a dying industry, but it's taking a beating so often that it can't figure certain things out. I mean, basic stuff, I went to my publisher. I remember I was like, "Our television ads work. They used to run TV ads for us." And I went to them, I said, "Are the TV ads better than the radio ads? What do we get more bang?" And they were like, "We don't know." And I said, "What do you mean we don't know?" I'm like, "You never ran James Patterson ads in the Twin Cities and one of the cities and not one of the other and just compared sales?" "No, that takes money."
Brad Meltzer:
When I was on History Channel, I can tell you that they knew within seconds, if I appeared at the beginning of the episode, if a George Washington recreation was the first thing you saw, or if they showed you a painting of George Washington, between those three, they could tell you how many people you would lose or gain depending on how you started the show. Because millions and millions of dollars are at risk.
Brad Meltzer:
As publishing has just shrunk to compete with social media, and Netflix, and everything else, it's hard. I think as you shrink those things, as you said rightly, there were 24 publishers to tell me no. What we've seen happen is that midlist group of people who are people who are making a living, not making crazy amounts of money, but just making a good living, that whole segment of authorship has gotten decimated. And that's terrible. It's terrible for everything, because it's just you lose the diversity of voices, you lose people try new things.
Brad Meltzer:
When I came out with The Tenth Justice, you went into Barnes & Noble and Borders and my books sat right next to whatever big other book was out. I got just as much shot. They certainly got a bigger promo, they had a bigger poster, but my book sat next to you and you walk in the store to buy a book and you'd look and go, "Huh, that looks interesting. Let me try that." And on Amazon, how many books get to look at? Amazon is great to us, I love it, but the reality is people just ... You can't physically see online the breadth of work they used to see when you go into a bookstore. So, publishing has to contend with that, and it is hard. It's a hard business to be in these days.
Josh King:
There was an article in The Times last week that Kate Hartson, the editorial director at the Center Street imprinted Hachette, one of the last places that a conservative could get their message into print had left the publisher. What's going to happen to conservative thought if it all gravitates to niche corners without the megaphone that the mainstream has its offer?
Brad Meltzer:
Full disclaimer, Hachette was my old publisher. I know them there. They're wonderful, amazing people there, but we are sadly becoming a house divided. We are house divided. And when you do that, and when you start having people saying ... If you speak the opposite side, to me, you're my enemy. I mean, the perfect place to talk about this is Abraham Lincoln comes into power.
Brad Meltzer:
We wrote The Lincoln Conspiracy, not because it's a cool story about a secret plot to kill Abraham Lincoln, but because of where it shows Lincoln is elected three days. After he's elected, South Carolina passes a resolution they're going to secede from the Union. That's how long they give them, three days. The culture is split in two. The country split in two. Whatever side you're on, you hate the other side. You think the other side are awful, horrible people.
Brad Meltzer:
Does that sound familiar to you? It's exactly where we are now. And what Lincoln does in that moment in his first inaugural address is he gets up there, and they hate him. They're just trying to physically murder him on the train ride he's taking to and through Baltimore to get to Washington, DC. Literally, a white supremacist group is going to murder him, and he gets in front of this group and he says, "We shouldn't be enemies, we should be friends."
Brad Meltzer:
And to me, a great leader unites us, doesn't divide us further. And I think that as long as we have the, "If you don't think how I think, then you're my enemy." We have problems. I take our Ordinary People Change the World books, I take it in my friends on Fox News, I take it in my friends on NPR, I take it in my friends on CNN, I take it in on my friends on Glenn Beck. It is the one thing I can take that everyone agrees on.
Brad Meltzer:
When I'm in those green rooms, and I have listened. I have longtime friends at these places. One thing they all whisper in my ear before we go on or kind of kibitz in the back or my ear is the way we talk to each other as a culture right now, we're doing it wrong. We're doing it wrong. I encourage anyone out there listening, go follow ...
Brad Meltzer:
If you are just watching one station for your news, you are not an informed citizen. Go follow people who do not think like you. Go follow people to have the opposite view of you. It will make you crazy, you'll want to murder them within their first five tweets. But it will show you that they're also, when they celebrate their kids' birthdays, and when you see what their marriage is like and you see them say what they love and don't love or what movies they love, that they have the same hopes and dreams you do. And I think the more we can find a little bit of common ground, the better off we're going to be as a culture, because otherwise, we're just never ever going to change, because we'll never talk to each other. A US president said to me, you can never change until you have someone in charge who's willing to except the other side.
Josh King:
We mentioned your foray into television with History Decoded. We didn't talk much about your other foray, which talked about people who might become presidents in the future. That's Jack and Bobby with our friend, Steve Cohen for the WB. I'm surprised that more of your titles haven't found their way into film and television beside the children's series. What are the challenges in crossing over these days?
Brad Meltzer:
It used to be that John Grisham had a film that came out every year and Stephen King had a film that came out every year and those books were made into movies. You saw Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent had Harrison Ford. You saw those. Those movies aren't made anymore. Think about it. When was the last time you saw a Grisham book? When was the last time you saw a Baldacci book or a Turow book? I mean, those are still the kings of the field.
Brad Meltzer:
As the reality of what happened in the entertainment industry is tent pole movies, the superhero movies, the big budget movies are what movies are now. What I write in thrillers have really truthfully, except for like that Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or something breaks out like in a phenomenal way, that Gone Girl phenomenon. For the most part, those books that used to be big movies have now become streaming shows on Netflix. Whether it's The Flight Attendant. There's great books that are out there, but they tend to become something on television.
Brad Meltzer:
And the truth is I sold the The Tenth Justice to the movies when I started. They bought it outright. They spent millions of dollars on screenplays with giant, amazing screenwriters, and they never made it and it sits on their shelf collecting dust. And I don't own it anymore and they do. And I was like, "I'll never do that again." And then of course, I did it one more time and I was like, "I will never do that again." And now, I just won't sell it until I feel like it's a sure thing. I don't mind waiting, because I'd rather have control than have something that's out of my control.
Josh King:
One of your greatest stories was the work that you did in television with your Lost History series in which you helped find the 9/11 flag that flew over the World Trade Center. And this year, Brad, marks the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks, which we've talked a lot about on this show. It's the most iconic artifact now sits in the 9/11 Museum, just a few hundred yards away from the New York Stock Exchange. What was it like to find and authenticate that flag? And what is its enduring lesson now 20 years on?
Brad Meltzer:
Yeah. I went to the History Channel, and I said to them, "I want to use your network as a modern day wanted poster. I want to show people a missing object and say we want to find this and we'll give you a reward if you find it. I think people will bring stuff back to us." And they said to me, "What do you think we'll find it? Are we going to find anything?" And I was like, "I don't know what we're going to find. I can't possibly tell you that, but we will find something. And whatever we think we're going to find, we'll never find it. Whatever we think we're never going to find is going to show up."
Brad Meltzer:
And the very first item that we did, Josh, on the very first episode of Lost History was the missing flag from 9/11. The famous photograph of the firefighters raising the flag at Ground Zero, that flag, 24 hours later, went missing. Became the image of 9/11, but the flag went missing. And for 13 years, no one knew where it was.
Brad Meltzer:
We aired our first episode. Three days after we aired the episode, a man walked into a fire station in Washington State and said, "I saw the show Lost History. I'm looking for the 9/11 flag. I have it, I found it, I want to bring it back." Because I went on TV and said, "If you have it, someone out there, bring it back." And this guy three days later brings it back.
Brad Meltzer:
We spent a year. I couldn't tell anyone the story. I spent a year authenticating. And we work with the former head of the FBI's Art Crimes Unit. We worked with the guys who testified in the 9/11 trials about what the dust is made out of. We knew through the forensic evidence that the dust from ground zero is not just ... It's just not airplane fuel, and metal, and rebar but human remains. Someone said to me, "These scientist said you can't recreate the dust from 9/11 without creating 9/11."
Brad Meltzer:
We knew we had a flag from ground zero. The question was, did we have the flag from ground zero. We wound up getting high def video to do this forensic, amazing work on that no one else had that the press didn't even have. We really truthfully got lucky, because as they unwrap the thing, there were marks on the flag that were homemade that we could see. And the former head of the FBI's Art Crimes Unit said to me, "Brad, this flag is now more authenticated than most Rembrandts at museums." And I was like, "What's wrong with the Rembrandts in museums?" You're just like, "Wow."
Brad Meltzer:
On the 15th anniversary of 9/11, I couldn't believe it's going to be five years ago, I got to unveil that flag. It's in the 9/11 Museum right now, not far from where you are on the stock exchange, of course. I mean, truly probably the most humbling moment of my whole life is to be there, and it's still on public display there. I encourage you to take your kids there. It's not a museum of depressions. It's a museum of hope and of these stories of amazing heroes from one of the most incredible moments in modern American history.
Josh King:
Your partner in the Ordinary People Change the World series, Chris Eliopoulos, who we talked about earlier, the illustrator posted on Twitter today a rough sketch of what looks to be a waitress in a restaurant musing wonder who the historical figure is. Can we play a little History Decoded here? What's coming up?
Brad Meltzer:
You're going to see. I love the fact no one has guessed right on today's guesses so far. Chris always, before we announce who it is, I'll always put work in progress, so you can go see that. What's amazing to me is that, I don't know if you saw, but the number one guess that people guess from that waitress picture was Flo from Alice, which shows you ...
Josh King:
[crosstalk 01:05:56] but it looked like a little bit.
Brad Meltzer:
But that just reveals the entire Gen X demographic of aging Gen X'ers that clearly follow us on social media, and I love that. So, here's who's coming up. We have, as you said, Frida Kahlo comes out in a couple of weeks, then we are doing I. M. Pei. And then we have a couple of surprises planned. And the one that Chris is drawing right now, I can tell you, you personally, I know, I think, are going to love. I think you're going to love this one. I'll tell you off air.
Josh King:
All right. Can't wait to see it, Brad. We've got Frida Kahlo coming out along with the subscription program for the series that we talked about. Are you going to be turning back to the adult genre anytime soon?
Brad Meltzer:
Yeah. The paperback for The Lincoln Conspiracy is coming out, actually, very soon. I just finished the sequel to The Escape Artists, the new thriller. I've been working on that. I mean, everything looks like it's always the kids books, but because they're only 30 pages and 40 pages to write. A 500 page thriller just takes me two years.
Brad Meltzer:
The sequel to The Escape Artist will come out either late this year or early next year. And finally just handed in a draft and I can't wait. The Escape Artist is definitely my favorite book I've written. So, if anyone tries one, try The Escape Artist.
Josh King:
Given that most people won't be able to sign up for any Brad Meltzer readings or signings at Barnes & Noble around the world anytime soon, what's the best way to keep in touch with what you're working on?
Brad Meltzer:
Yeah. Obviously, on social media, I'm at Brad Meltzer everywhere. If you go to bradmeltzer.com, sign up for our mailing list and we will tell you. You'll see the events that we're doing. We will notify you when we're doing what. You'll also know first who the new hero always is. That's why I can't tell you on the air, because we always give it to those who subscribe and we give them free stuff too.
Brad Meltzer:
I love our invisible army. It's really our most supportive group, and they're my family and friends. They're not readers out there. They're not customers, but to us, they're really our family. They've been with me for 20 plus years, and I love making sure that they get everything first.
Josh King:
Can't wait to figure out who the new hero is, so we'll wrap this up now, get off the air so you and I can have a quick chat with that. For the rest of our listeners, they'll have to wait because I will never tell. Brad Meltzer, thanks so much for joining us inside the ICE House.
Brad Meltzer:
Thank you, brother Josh.
Josh King:
And that's our conversation for this week. Our guest was bestselling author, Brad Meltzer. His newest works, I Am Frida Kahlo, part of the Ordinary People Change the World series, and A New Day with illustrations from Dan Santat are out in March from Dial Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
Josh King:
If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or a question, you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected], or tweeting us at ICE House Podcast. Our show is produced by Pete Ash with production assistants from Kim Able and Ian Wolf. I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening, we'll talk to you next time.
Speaker 1:
The information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties expressed or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information, and do not sponsor, approve, or endorse any of the content herein. All of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
