[00:00:03.280] – Alan Petersen
You are listening to Meet the Thriller Author, the podcast where I interview writers of mysteries, thrillers, and suspense books. I’m Alan Petersen, an author of mysteries and thrillers myself, and it’s been a privilege to interview amazing authors in the genre that I love to write and read. So far, I’ve interviewed over 200 authors, including thriller icons like Dean Koontz, Walter Moseley, Tess Gerritsen, Lee Child, and many, many more. You can find an archive of all my interviews with show notes, resources, book reviews, and a lot more over at my website at ThrillerAuthors.com. From there, you can also join my Thrilling Reads newsletter for book deals on great thriller and mystery books. So head on over to thrillerauthors.com. And check all that out.

[00:00:47.960]
In this episode of the podcast, Number 200, you’ll be meeting Brian J. Morra. Brian is a former United States intelligence officer and a retired senior aerospace executive. He helped lead the American intelligence team in Japan that uncovered the true story behind the Soviet Union’s shoot down of Korean Airlines Flight 007 in September of 1983. He also served on the air staff at the Pentagon while on active duty, and as an aerospace executive, he worked on many important national security programs. Brian has also provided commentary for CBS, Netflix, and the BBC. His debut novel, The Able Archers, won a national indie Excellence Award for military fiction and was a finalist in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. The second installment of the Able Archer series, The Righteous Arrows, will be published on April 16. A lot of pleasure talking to Brian. It’s such an amazing background. So stay tuned with that interview. It’s coming up here in just a second. Welcome to the podcast, Brian.

[00:01:53.690] – Brian Morra
Thank you very much, Alan. Thank you for the invitation.

[00:01:57.040] – Alan Petersen
Amazing. Your real world experience as an intelligence officer in the military is just amazing. Can you tell us how you turned some of those work experiences from that part of the world, which is highly classified and all that, into grippy military thrills? How was that balanced?

[00:02:15.820] – Brian Morra
Yeah. Well, that’s an excellent question. And well, one thing is that my books are reviewed by both the Pentagon and the intelligence community community, even though it’s historical fiction. But once you sign those clearance letters, you’re bound for life. And so that’s one of the ways I’m able to write about it is I get permission. And in the case of the first book in my series, which is called The Able Archers, most of those events were highly classified until about the year 2015. But around 2014, 2015, through the efforts of some very, very hard working people, the US government finally released a lot of the records surrounding the events, the 1983 nuclear war crisis. So that’s one of the main things, really, that prompted me to start writing once I retired fired from my industrial career, that these documents were becoming available, and I could begin to even think about contemplating writing about them without the FBI knocking on my front door. So that’s a little bit of the background on that.

[00:03:53.050] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, a concern that most writers don’t have, right?

[00:03:57.520] – Brian Morra
Probably not, yes.

[00:04:00.070] – Alan Petersen
It’s fascinating. I watched that Netflix documentary on the Cold War, Turning Point, the Bomb, and the Cold War, and you were featured extensively in the documentary. So before we get into the nitty-gritty, but I just got a curious, how did you get involved with that and what’s it like being in the Netflix documentary world?

[00:04:22.630] – Brian Morra
Well, I was contacted by the production company that does the Turning Point series. Some of your listeners may know that they did a highly acclaimed Turning Point series on 9/11 that aired on Netflix on the 20th anniversary of 9/11. And I And not long after that production was completed, they started working on this Cold War production. And they contacted me not long after the Able Archer’s book came out. And then the Able Archer’s was published in the spring of 2022, so almost exactly two years ago to the day. And they got the book, and I didn’t send it to them. I’m not sure how they got the book, but they did. And the production team read it, the director read it, and they reached out to me and asked me if I would consent to be a consultant, be a talking head on their Netflix, on the documentary they were putting together for Netflix. And so that’s how that came about.

[00:05:37.960] – Alan Petersen
That was an excellent documentary, too. A scary but excellent.

[00:05:43.120] – Brian Morra
Yes. Yeah. I agree with you. And just sorry for interrupting, but for your readers or listeners, rather, who haven’t had a chance to see it, I do recommend it. And some of the footage that they have from the Soviet Union, from East Germany, from Russia after the fall, the Soviet Union, is nothing short of remarkable. And a lot of the footage I’ve never seen before. And it’s compelling stuff. They really did a fine job.

[00:06:18.000] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, it was amazing how they even interviewed the military officer in the Soviet at the time who was there ready to launch. But he thought, Oh, this must be a computer glitch. And he did. And he never realize how close we came. Was that 1983, right?

[00:06:39.290] – Brian Morra
Yes. That whole sequence of events is part of what I write about in the Able Archers. That’s Stanisław Petrov, also known as the Man Who Saved the World, who on the night of one night in September of 1983 was the watch office officer at the Soviet National Missile Defense Center, and he saw waves of incoming American Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles coming at the Soviet Union. And he, pretty much on his own, made the decision that I think there’s a glitch. These are what are known in the business as false alarms. And he was right, fortunately. And he He was an expert in the signals coming from these missile warnings satellites. So that gave him a credibility with his leadership that most officers would not have had in making that judgment. So So yes, if someone else had been on duty that night, I think that’s one of the great unanswered questions in history. Had someone other than he been on duty that night, would the outcome have been a calamitous one, where the Soviet Union might have launched their missiles on those warnings, thinking that the US was launching on them?

[00:08:12.710] – Alan Petersen
I think that was something that most people didn’t even I didn’t even realize how that went down in ’83. I think now that stuff, like you said, we’re getting declassified. But it reminds me even like the Cuban Missile crisis. We didn’t find out until way later, and it was a lot worse than we were told in the beginning. And now this stuff is coming out from the ’80s, which is the era that I grew up in. It’s fascinating.

[00:08:36.700] – Brian Morra
Yes, it is, isn’t it? And yeah, that episode five in the Netflix series covers the 1983 nuclear war crisis, which in many ways was just as bad as the Cuban Missile crisis and is, as you just pointed out, far less known.

[00:08:55.460] – Alan Petersen
Yeah. It’s interesting to us. Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, I remember the Cold War, of course, and fears of nuclear bombs and all that. Then the Cold War was over and we got a break from a little while, but now it seems like we’re right back to where we were. What are your thoughts on that? Is it a Cold War II or is it just never went away? I’m curious about that from your perspective.

[00:09:21.380] – Brian Morra
Yeah, it really is a central question of our times, isn’t it? I’ll answer it this way. To to some degree, it never really went away, certainly not to the extent that most people think. And while the level of nuclear alert that US forces and Russian forces have been on since 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, it has not reached that fever pitch that we had during the Cold War. Nonetheless, those nuclear forces are sitting alert every day, 24 hours a day. So that never changed. Now, as you point out, in the immediate post-Cold War years, it seemed like everyone could breathe a sigh of relief. And to some extent, that’s accurate and that’s not misplaced. Today, we find ourselves in a very different world than we did in the 1990s, which is that immediate decade after the Cold War ended. And we have obviously a revanche-ish Russia that has invaded Ukraine twice in 2014, again in 2022, has threatened to use nuclear weapons numerous times over the war in Ukraine. And we have a China that is embarked on the largest nuclear buildup in the history of the world. And their objective that they’ve stated publicly is they want to achieve nuclear parity with both the United States and Russia by the early 2030, so less than 10 years from now.

[00:11:12.700] – Brian Morra
And then you have actors like North Korea who are really unpredictable, who, unfortunately, have continued to build up their nuclear arsenal, even though they’re off the front pages. You don’t hear that much about North Korea these days, but their nuclear buildup continues unabated, unfortunately. And then, of course, there is India and Pakistan, both of which have nuclear weapons. You can go on and on and on. So we’re living in a world of nuclear proliferation that is different than what we confronted during the Cold War. And soon we’re going to have three major nuclear powers as China completes its buildup. And we’ve never experienced that before in world history. We’ve had a bipolar Soviet Union in the United States as the major nuclear powers during the Cold War. We’ve never had to manage a nuclear calculus where now you’ve got three major nuclear powers. So without scaring everybody, it’s a dangerous time that we live in. And unfortunately, nuclear weapons have not gone away. And in fact, nuclear weapons are more proliferated now than they ever have been.

[00:12:48.180] – Alan Petersen
Yeah. There doesn’t seem to be that much of a coverage on the news about that. It was back when I was growing up and even in the ’50s and ’60s, it just seems to I don’t know. It’s weird. We’re watching that documentary here in Utah. We should be a little more concerned about it. I mean, not live in fear, but it’s there.

[00:13:09.310] – Brian Morra
I think so. And another factor that has changed, and most people, I don’t think, are aware of it, really. And Alan, I’ve done a number of speaking engagements where I’ve started to talk about what I’ll call the death of arms control. And what I mean by that is if you look at the Cold War period, after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, there was a great push on the part of both the Soviet Union and the United States for arms control treaties. And if you look at that period after 1962, up through the 1970s, there were a lot of arms control treaties that were put in place. Similarly, after the 1983 nuclear crisis, which again is the major topic of my first book, The Able Archers, after 1980, President Reagan and Mikhael Gorbachev negotiated a number of crucial nuclear arms treaties that continued on through the Bush administration, the first Bush administration, and into the Clinton years. So we had this golden age of arms control. And one of the things, as I said, I talk about in my talks recently is I put together a slide that shows where are all those arms control treaties today?

[00:14:51.050] – Brian Morra
Those arms control treaties that came out of the Cuban Missile crisis on the one hand, and then came out of the 1983 crisis. And the sad fact is They’re all gone. All of those treaties have been either aggregated or vacated by the United States or Russia. And of course, China was never a signatory to them in the first place. They were just between the Soviet Union and the United States. So it’s a really stark record when you look at it, as I do in this presentation I give, where they’re all gone. All of those arms, all of that effort that people put forth for decades into trying to control nuclear weapons, those treaties are all essentially dead now.

[00:15:44.280] – Alan Petersen
Yeah. Was that the salt? I remember that. Was that one of them, salt? I remember that was from- Yeah, there was salt one, which was about the anti-ballistic missile.

[00:15:55.030] – Brian Morra
It’s also called the Anti- Ballistic Missile Treaty, and then salt two. So yes, the Salt treaties, there were the Start treaties, the INF Treaty, which came right out of the 1983 crisis because the missiles that caused, in effect, the 1983 crisis were intermediate nuclear force missiles in Europe. And that was the first treaty that Reagan and Gorbachev got together on was to ban those weapons. And they did. They banned an entire class of weapons. And we had to destroy ours. The Soviets had to destroy theirs. And then the Start agreements, which were replaced by New Start. And New Start was vacated by the Russians a year a year ago, in 2023. And Putin just talked about it a couple of weeks ago. He was asked in a press conference, Are you going to start up arms control talks with the United States again, revitalize the start agreement? And he said, I don’t see any reason to.

[00:17:02.280] – Alan Petersen
Oh, wow. That’s scary.

[00:17:04.490] – Brian Morra
Yeah.

[00:17:05.500] – Alan Petersen
So they’re not even attempting to try right now, at this point, at least.

[00:17:12.080] – Brian Morra
There are no discussions at all. And the United States did reach out to China last November, and China did agree to a meeting, an initial meeting, to talk about the terms of reference for potential nuclear arms talks. But that’s not really gone anywhere. Maybe it will. One hopes it will. But, yeah, we’re really sidelined now from arms control at the very time when, as I mentioned earlier, nuclear weapons have proliferated around the globe in an unprecedented way. So the combination of that proliferation and the fact that arms control is essentially dead, you’re right, it should be an issue. One would think it would be an issue in the presidential campaign, but it’s not.

[00:18:04.630] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, that’s just what I was thinking. I didn’t even hear about it. Yeah. And so I’m curious, too, now with regards to your book, The Righteous Arrows, Coming back a little bit on the fiction side of things, what’s the core story there? And what was the journey like for you to bring this this book out to the public?

[00:18:27.770] – Brian Morra
You bet. Well, I mentioned the Able Archers was first published two years ago. The Righteous Arrows is the follow-up to that, and it will be released in just a couple of weeks. The official publication date is the 16th of April. And in terms of the story, it contains the same two main characters from the Able Archers. One is an American intelligence officer who’s based on me and my experience. The other is a Soviet officer who’s a GRU officer, Soviet military intelligence, who’s based on a lot of KGB and GRU defectors that I knew and worked with back in the 1980s, as well as some active GRU and KGB people I knew. And those two characters I follow them and their development through each one of these books. So the Able Archers ends at the end of 1983 with the apparent conclusion of the great nuclear war crisis of 1983. The Righteous Arrows begins just a few months after that in the spring of 1984, where our hero, our American hero, and the American intelligence community at large, discover that, well, maybe that crisis isn’t quite over yet, and the Soviets are still doing things that concern us.

[00:20:10.380] – Brian Morra
So the core story of the Righteous Arrows begins with the not quite concluded great nuclear war scare of 1983, 1984. And then it transitions into the Soviet war in Afghanistan. And the year I focus on for the war in Afghanistan is 1986, because that was really the high watermark of that war, when the Soviets had the most troops in Afghanistan, and when the United States began supplying the Afghan rebels with advanced weaponry, and notably the Stinger surface-to-air missile, which the the Mujdatideen fighters wanted in order to offset the Soviet advantage in air power. And so what the story talks about is how the Soviets are dealing with these Stinger missiles coming into the country and shooting down lots of their helicopters and lots of their fixed wing fighters as well. And the political dimension of it is that Mikhail Gorbachev, who again was the general secretary in Moscow, by 1986, he decided, Hey, this war is not working, and we need to get out of Afghanistan. And so part of the dynamic in the book is that the Russians have made the decision that we’re going to get out. But ironically, the Americans arming the Mujdatideen with these advanced weapons makes it more difficult for the Russians to get out, even though that’s really the American objective.

[00:22:06.820] – Brian Morra
And then another part of the story is the unintended consequences of the United States supplying Islamic rebels, jihadists with advanced weapons. And my Russian hero, the GRU officer, he warns the Americans in the book that, Hey, you guys open Pandora’s box here, and the consequences may not be consequences that you’re going to like. So that’s the central themes of the Righteous Arrows.

[00:22:43.390] – Alan Petersen
I was interested, too, because you have so much experience, obviously, in the research and everything. Like your approach to ensuring, of course, you want to ensure that the technical details are correct and are there, but you don’t want to overwhelm us as the readers. How do you think about it?

[00:23:01.900] – Brian Morra
Well, my wife is my story editor and chief editor in chief in any event, and she’s got an excellent eye for that. She has helped me in certainly the first two books, and I’m working to get the third book to the publisher right now, at not overwhelming people, because it’s pretty easy for me to geek out on weaponry and on intelligence collection systems and all that. So she keeps me honest with that. And I think between the two of us, I think we come up with a pretty good balance of enough detail, but hopefully not overwhelming people. I wanted these books to be fast moving and to be page turners. And the real events, the historical events are so thrilling in and of themselves. I don’t have to do much embellishment to them. I put my characters front and center into these historical events, but the events themselves really I think, carry the books forward. And I don’t have to get super detailed with things. But in the Righteous Arrows, I did have to… One One of the things, Alan, I did a lot of research on was just how did the Soviets really conduct operations in Afghanistan, and especially their Special Forces.

[00:24:40.670] – Brian Morra
How would they conduct a raid? Because one of the climactic points of this book is a raid that the Russian Special Forces, the Spetsnats, conduct. So I did a lot of research to make sure I didn’t get that wrong.

[00:24:58.920] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, that’s It’s fascinating stuff. And then I’m also curious, too, because like you said, it’s based on your real life experience and real people. But were you still surprised when you were writing it? Like your writer, your brain took you in directions that surprised you? Does that happen to you while you’re writing to me?

[00:25:17.600] – Brian Morra
Oh, yeah, absolutely. It does, yes. And the characters, you’ve probably heard from other authors that the characters tell me what they’re going to do next and things like that. That’s definitely a phenomenon. It’s definitely true. The characters take on a life of their own, and they’ll tell you. Sometimes when I write something, I’ll go back and look at it and I’d say, Well, my Russian hero would never… He’d never actually say that. He wouldn’t do… So his conscience is telling me, Keep it real. Yeah, so that absolutely happens.

[00:25:59.220] – Alan Petersen
Yeah. You You’re writing in eras where dealing with some hardened people in that type of a world, how do you make them compelling for the readers, like the Soviet people and all that?

[00:26:14.950] – Brian Morra
Yeah. And one of my objectives, starting with the Able Archers, was to make the Russians, especially my Russian hero, whose name is Luftschenko, to make him human and not a stereotype and someone that people could relate to. His wife is a character in these books, and she’s Ukrainian. She’s from Kyiv, and she has a real Ukrainian sensibility and doesn’t particularly like Moscow and doesn’t particularly like Russians. And so he has to deal with that dynamic in his personal life. And so you You see that she loves him, but she’s not a fan of Russia in general. And when I put these guys, these characters, into situations, historical situations, I want the reader to be right there with them. And one technique I use in my books is first-person narration. So I have the American character do first-person narration, and the Russian does first-person narration. And so I think that does two things. It really gets the reader inside their head. And you’re experiencing vicariously what’s going on through their eyes. So that’s the first thing it does. And it humanizes them, I think. And then the second thing it does is it allows you to see the same events through very different perspectives.

[00:28:03.180] – Brian Morra
So the American is viewing something one way, and then in the next chapter, you may see the Russian doing the exact same thing, and he’s looking at it rather differently.

[00:28:13.100] – Alan Petersen
Oh, yeah. I love that one. That’s a great approach, where you’re showing basically the same scene from two different perspectives from characters. A lot of fun time. So now to get into the nitty-gritty of the writing process, because that’s always something that I’m very curious about always. Are you a plotter? Are you a panzer? What’s your writing process?

[00:28:40.100] – Brian Morra
Yeah, since I’m writing historical fiction about real events, I do have a template for what I think is going to happen in the book and what key events are going to occur. And that helps definitely to guide me in And it gives me a structure. And once when I was writing the Able Archers, I decided to do the first person narration technique. And that’s also helpful, too, I think, in terms of me setting scenes. And I know that if I set a scene through the American hero’s eyes, it’s going to be different than through the Russians’ perspective. And so that’s helpful, too. So I’m not one of those guys that writes a detailed outline. I tried doing that, actually, with my first book, with the Able Archers. And I found that It’s like a war plan. No outline survives first contact with the enemy. So it helped me, I think, especially on the first book. But I’m not a real big guy on doing detailed outlines or storyboarding, but I have a pretty good idea in my mind of where the story is going to go. But I also want to leave room for exactly what you were talking about a few minutes ago, which is that the story and the characters dictate to you where it’s going to go.

[00:30:25.150] – Brian Morra
So I want to leave that freedom in place. And And that seems to work. So that’s how I do it.

[00:30:35.790] – Alan Petersen
And then with regards to your writing tools, because I always ask this from my guests, do you use Microsoft Word or another software program? I use MS Word, and I haven’t used any AI help yet.

[00:30:53.580] – Brian Morra
I probably should, but I haven’t done that yet. And yeah, And that’s what I just… I don’t do anything too fancy. Now, my books, because they’re historical fiction, I do include maps and aids like that for the reader to orient them. And I think, particularly with historical stuff, a lot of people don’t necessarily know where I’m talking about. So that’s one tool I use is to have maps in the books to help people orient themselves.

[00:31:37.200] – Alan Petersen
And do you write… Because I noticed from your website, you also do… You’ve mentioned before, you’ve written a lot of non-conviction and articles about non-conviction. Is it a different approach then when you’re writing non-conviction compared to writing fiction? Is it more fun? Is it to just be able to let loose? What’s the difference between those two?

[00:31:58.830] – Brian Morra
Yeah, I think writing novels is more fun. I bet. Yeah, I do. I think it’s more fun. Although I do enjoy writing articles also that are straight history or straight observation, I I’m writing an article right now about Afghanistan that pivots off of the Righteous Arrows and its focus on Afghanistan. But it’s a straight analysis of what lessons could we or should we have learned from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan? And then what lessons should we have learned from our 20 years in Afghanistan as well? So That’s fun, too. It’s a different writing, but I enjoy doing that, too. I find that for me, the combination of different types of writing is very helpful, and it keeps me interested. It keeps me fresh. It keeps me interested in each writing. I’m motivated to get to it. When I do a non-conviction piece, then, boy, I’m ready to go write fiction again or write historical fiction because it does feel more free. But each has their own on attractive features. So it’s.

[00:33:36.040] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, I mean, like a palate cleanser. Like, oh, writing fiction.

[00:33:39.960] – Brian Morra
Yeah. That’s a good way of describing it. Yeah.

[00:33:44.800] – Alan Petersen
And do you write every day? Do you have word count goals?

[00:33:51.010] – Brian Morra
Well, I don’t have word count goals, and I don’t write every day, unfortunately, because I’m busy with other things. I’m on a couple of corporate boards, and I do some consulting with one company. So sometimes my schedule is not my own, which has been true the last two days, especially. But I find that is helpful, too, because doing other things, again, keeps my approach to writing, I think, fresher, because I don’t experience writer’s block, really. I’m so excited to get back to writing that it feels like a reward. It feels like in a An escape, in a sense, from the real world of working on problems for a particular company or what have you. So it’s… Yeah. That balance, again, for me, in this way, is helpful, too.

[00:35:00.020] – Alan Petersen
And you mentioned you’re working on the third Able Archer’s book. Can you give us a little sneak peek? Is that coming out next year?

[00:35:06.800] – Brian Morra
Well, yeah. I’ve been talking to the publisher about when we could bring it out, and that’s why I actually hadn’t intended to get to it quite this soon. But the third book in the series is called The Wall Breakers, W-A-L-L, Breakers. And It is mainly about the events leading up to and around the fall of the Berlin Wall. And again, it’s my same two characters. And in each one of these books, these two characters confront each other. They actually meet in each one of these books in the third act of the book. So the Wall Breakers is, again, about the fall of the Berlin This November is the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And we were thinking about, can we get it out? Can we get the book out in time for the 35th anniversary? That doesn’t look like that’s going to happen, but I’m hoping it can be published in early 2025. And I had a two-year gap between the Able Archers and the Righteous Arrows, and I don’t want to have that two a two-year gap. I want to bring them out every year or so, or maybe even a little bit more often.

[00:36:37.210] – Brian Morra
But that’s what the third book is about, the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

[00:36:42.380] – Alan Petersen
All right, great. And final question I always ask my guests is because of the inspiring writers I’ve mentioned before that listen to this podcast, any advice that you have, especially if someone’s got a military background, that maybe it’ll be a good cool to put their real-life experience to fiction?

[00:37:00.200] – Brian Morra
Well, I would fall back on the old writer’s axiom, write about what you know. I think that brings a certain genuine quality to the writing, especially when you’re starting out. I think as you’re getting your sea legs as a writer, I think it may be even more important to write about what you know and leverage that in your writing. And then I think that is perhaps an easier path to becoming good at the craft of writing. And perhaps once you’ve mastered that, then you can do some more crazy things about maybe some topics that you don’t have personally experience with. But I do think that it’s helpful, especially when you’re getting started to write about what you know. And then you can really hone your craft on topics and things that you’ve got. So some real emotional and personal connection to.

[00:38:20.770] – Alan Petersen
That’s great. That’s great advice. And for listeners, probably best place to find more information about you is at your website, brianjmera. Com, right?

[00:38:31.270] – Brian Morra
Yes, brianjmera. Com, B-R-I-A-N-J-M-O-R-R-A. Com. So there’s lots of information about me and about my writing on that website I do a newsletter once or twice a month also, and people can sign up for that. I try to keep those newsletters short and very informative because I know people are busy. And there are also links on my website to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books of Million, and other places where you can buy the Able Archers and the Righteous Arrows. And the Righteous Arrows is available for pre-order now. And again, it’s going to be published on the 16th of April. And I will say I’m very honored by the endorsers I’ve gotten for both books. And the lead endorser for the Able Archers was former Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, who was also, as many of you may know, he was a career CIA officer, and he was a very senior guy at CIA during the events of 1983 and during the Afghanistan war, the Soviet war in Afghanistan. And then for the Righteous Arrows, Mike Vickers, who who was the guy that actually ran the program to get Stinger missiles to the Mujdatideen in the war in Afghanistan.

[00:40:09.870] – Brian Morra
He wrote a very nice endorsement for the Righteous Arrows. And there’s a There are characters based on both Bob Gates and Mike Vickers in these books, or at least in the Righteous Arrows. So, yeah, it’s a fun thing. I think this is one of those books where you may want to just take a look at the endorsements because there’s some pretty interesting people that have endorsed the books, and they write some pretty cool blurbs.

[00:40:43.380] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, I have to check that out. Those are some pretty big names in politics and history. All right, Brian. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, for talking about your career, your books. It’s been fascinating talking with you.

[00:40:59.170] – Brian Morra
Thank you very much, Alan, for the invitation. It’s been a real pleasure. Thank you.