Steve Cuden: On today’s StoryBeat:

Martin Dugard: When I’m on airplanes and every now and then I’ll see people reading one of my books, whenever they stop, they stop and they put it in the seat back in front of them. They close their eyes. I want to walk up to him and shake him and say, why did you stop? Tell me what. I’ll take that out next time. My job is to keep them awake. I mean, when people tell me they stayed up late reading my books, that makes me very happy.

Announcer: This is StoryBeat with Steve Cuden, a podcast for the creative mind. StoryBeat explores how masters of creativity develop and produce brilliant works that people everywhere love and admire. So join us, uh, as we discover how talented creators find success in the worlds of imagination and entertainment. Here now is your host, Steve Cuden.

Steve Cuden: Thanks for joining us on StoryBeat. We’re coming to you from the Steel City, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My guest today, Martin Dugard, is the New York Times best-selling author, known for his nonfiction works and historical thrillers. Among them, Taking London, Taking Paris, Taking Berlin, the Killing series with Bill O’Reilly, Into Africa and The Explorers. Recently, I read Martin’s excellent book, Taking London, Winston Churchill and the Fight to Save Civilization and can tell you it’s a riveting, well researched tale of truly fascinating people in London during World War II who were both extremely famous like Churchill, Neville Chamberlain, Edward R. Murrow and others, as well as various less well known fighter pilots who stood in the breach when dealing with harrowing life and death challenges. A seasoned adventurer and journalist, Martin has written books and articles that have been praised for their engaging narratives and meticulous research, engaging in subjects such as the Tour de France, ancient civilizations and adventure sports. In addition, Martin serves on the board of Directors of the USA Track and Field foundation and he also coaches cross-country high school athletes. So for all those reasons and many more, it’s a great privilege for me to welcome the prolific adventurer and author Martin Dugard to StoryBeat today. Martin, welcome to the show.

Martin Dugard: Steve thanks, thanks. That was a great intro. Thanks for having me here.

Steve Cuden: well, it’s my pleasure to try and make it sound like something. So alright, let’s go back in time just a little bit. What were your earliest inspirations and influences? Why did you start to think about history and digging into it and then writing about it?

Martin Dugard: I didn’t know it at the time. So what happened was when I was about six, my parents gave me a bunch of these Fisher Price history books and one, it was about Captain Cook and Stuff And I still have that old book and I read it. But at the time I told my mom, I said, someday I want to be a writer. And she said, don’t be silly. You know, writers don’t make any money. So I kind of set that aside. And then I took forever to get through college because, you know, I did the usual partying and.

Steve Cuden: Sure.

Martin Dugard: And lack of focus that college students will do if they live on the Newport beach peninsula. But when I got a corporate job, I realized within a couple weeks that I didn’t fit, I didn’t want to be there. I finally had my degree and um, so I began doing little short magazine pieces on the side, little freelance pieces for running in triathlon magazines. And at some point in my career, like 10 years in of freelancing where I’d finally quit my corporate job and gone on. I realize that you know, sports, unless you work for. It’s different now, but at the time if you didn’t work for a big paper or a big magazine, you really weren’t going to get the respect you wanted to get with your career. It was kind of a dead end. And I kind of turned back on that history element and I wrote a book about Captain Cook, my own book about Captain Cook. And then I’ve been doing history with a little bit of sports ever since.

Steve Cuden: So I just want to go back half a step again. You started thinking about being a writer when you were six years old?

Martin Dugard: Yeah, look, and I wasn’t a complete nerd. I mean I played Little League and I shoot a basketball and stuff like that. But for the most part I went to the library in Read and so much so that my dad was an Air Force pilots. We moved a lot and um, one of the bases we lived on, I spent so much time in the library that when we moved the librarians actually held a going away party for me. Like this little eight year old kid. So there’s a picture there, you know. But I love books. I ve always loved books, you know.

Steve Cuden: Well, I’m always fascinated when someone has kind of. Even if they haven’t decided to become a professional edit, they’ve made decisions that influenced their life at such an early age. It wasn’t like you were in your 20s and made a decision, oh, I would like to look at history. No, you were thinking about it when you were a small child.

Martin Dugard: You know, it’s funny, um, the more and more I read about people who are successful in a broad number of fields, it seems like at some point in their life even Though they go through the usual growing process of deciding if that’s their ultimate fate. People usually know by the time they’re about five or six that there’s something going on. They have an intuition, they have a focus and a passion. You hear about it in sports. You hear about it especially with music. Musicians are famous for delving into the violin or whatever at a very young age. So I don’t think it’s unusual. But at the same time, it’s nice to be able to go back and chart that own path for myself.

Steve Cuden: Well, having been doing this show for, uh, a good almost eight years now, what I have noticed over many different interviews is it’s all over the map to a certain extent. Some people, like you, you were into it very young. Some people don’t really know it till much later in life. They go off on one road or another because they were influenced by whoever or whatever. But I find it very interesting that, that you knew somehow intuitively at that age that this was going to fascinate you. And it’s history that fascinated you. Not just science fiction or goofball comic books or something like that, but history. Yes.

Martin Dugard: Yeah. You know, it’s a weird thing because I think the brain has a way of charting your own path. And so what happened was when I went to college, and when you go to college, all your reading is for studying, so it’s no fun.

Steve Cuden: Sure.

Martin Dugard: So I literally stopped being a reader for a long time. And even though my major was political science, the classes that I migrated to were the history classes. And what I started doing is I started, uh, not going to my poly SCSI classes. What I would do is I would go to my history classes that I would drive down to Newport beach and to 6th street and get a beach chair and sit there with a couple of beers and I would read Hemingway and Thompson. And everybody under the sun in the back of my mind thinking, wouldn’t it be cool to be a writer? And just not really knowing that that was. But at the same time still having that voice in my head that said that that’s not what you can do for a living. So those are some of the best days. I remember reading For Whom the Bell Tolls, like While sitting on 6th street just in the sand, me and a couple Molsons and reading Hemingway and saying, man, that’s a life. That’s a life I want.

Steve Cuden: And you’ve achieved that.

Martin Dugard: And I got it.

Steve Cuden: Yeah, it’s amazing and a strange way Hemingway-esque in your career too. I mean, you’re all over the world? Yes.

Martin Dugard: Yeah, I’ve been everywhere. But, you know, you’re a creative guy, so you know the process. Like, at first you start emulating. At first I wanted to be Hemingway, and then I wanted to party like Thompson. And you can’t do that. And then all of a sudden, you find your own voice and your voice takes you around the world and you start looking at things in your own way and telling stories in your own way. And those are still the touchpoints. If I look at my library, I still got a lot of Thompson and a lot of Hemingway, but I’ve got lot of other people who have also been kind of signposted along the way.

Steve Cuden: Do you think you’ve brought those sensibilities into the world of writing about the subjects that you take on?

Martin Dugard: I hope so. I, uh, really hope so.

Steve Cuden: I think you have.

Martin Dugard: I mean, from him, like you read Taking London, like from Hemingway. M. I get that clarity, I think, from people like Thompson, I get that those little random moments where you just kind of go way off the path and you find your way back to the path. And that’s kind of the fun of it, is to know that you’re not mimicking them, but you’re using them as inspiration. And it works.

Steve Cuden: You write in a way, now that I think about it, not exactly like Hemingway, but Hemingway-esque in the sense of you write terse, you write colorful, and you write clear. And it’s not highfalutin and above everybody’s heads with a ton of fancy words. It’s really clear and dynamic in that way.

Martin Dugard: Well, thank you. That’s very nice. Appreciate that.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s the way I saw it. So do you think of yourself primarily as a storyteller or historian or an adventurer or, uh, a combination? What do you think of yourself as?

Martin Dugard: I used to think of myself as just, I want to be a writer. You know, that was the thing like about anything. Like. Yeah, but, you know, now it kind of transforms. Like, there was a period where, like when I was doing the Tour de France for 10 years and I was going to places like Survivor and all those places around the world for different things where I was more trying to be an adventure guy. But kind of as you grow into your career, um, and I think with any writer, it’s all about storytelling. And like, I did just did a book about the Battle of Midway, which should have been as boring as they come, as dramatic as it could have been. But instead of people, it’s kind of a book about battleships. And so I had to really resort to some really, um, hardcore storytelling skills. And it was super fun because I was able to make, like, for instance, my editor care about a battleship. But it’s just the way you tell the story, the way you build it, the context, you surround it. And I don’t think that happens when you’re 18 and you feel like you’re a writer. It happens when you’ve done literally decades of storytelling, where all of a sudden the term once upon a time, which I think every story should start with, really is an inspiration to just go, just find a new way to tell a story.

Steve Cuden: So this was a big question for me with you, is you make it seem like you’re reading some kind of a fictional novel rather than dry, dusty history, which I. I sometimes find when I read some history. I can’t get through it. It’s a slog because it’s so dry. But you don’t write dry. You write it so that it has a feeling of action and movement and thrust. Is that the technique is that’s what you’re trying to get to by starting it with once upon a time and thinking about it in sort of a fictional way?

Martin Dugard: Yeah, exactly. And by the way, that word thrust you use is really what I’m looking for, um, is somebody who loves history and who feels like the great historical stories are so often told in this dry, academic fashion. And if you don’t do it like you’re a bad boy, you need to leave the room. You’re not really a historian. I mean, I’ve been doing history for 30 years. I mean, I don’t have a PhD, but I’ve written 30 books about history. And I’ll tell you what, the one thing that I love to do with every single book is find a way to accelerate the pace, make the drama more dramatic. Because these were dramatic times. If I was writing a book about this modern election right now, 30 years from now, people go, oh, it’s an election. It happened in 2024. But I would have to find a way to make it really bold and exciting, because it is bold and exciting in the moment. And I had a review where someoney was kind of making fun of the fact that I wasn’t doing all the usual footnotes and endnotes and stuff. It’s like, fuck that. Uh, I’m trying to write a book that’s going to entertain people.

Steve Cuden: Right?

Martin Dugard: History is no good if you’re not turning the pages.

Steve Cuden: Well, the term that is used in your bio and elsewhere is Historical thriller, which is an interesting combination of words we don’t often think of as history, as being a thriller, though it can obviously be thrilling. Do you think that that’s apt for what you try to do? That you’re trying to write it like a thriller?

Martin Dugard: Oh, yeah. You know, obviously I spend six to eight hours a day writing history, which means research in all sorts of. It’s old newspapers, it’s books, it’s everything. I look across the spectrum. But when I want downtime, when I want to go someplace quiet on my back porch and close out the day with something, because I still love to read, I read thrillers. I read things that don’t make me think very much, but at the same time make me turn the page in the way that these guys write. The’re really good guys and like I’m a huge John Le Caray fan. Just people who tell the StoryBeat in such an explicit, detailed way but make it impossible for you to put the book down. That turns me on so much. As a matter of fact, when I’m on airplanes and every now and then I’ll see people reading one of my books, which is pretty cool.

Steve Cuden: That’s pretty cool.

Martin Dugard: Uh, whenever they stop, they stop and they put it in the seat back in front of them. Close your eyes. I want to walk up to him and shake him and say, why did you stop? Tell me what bored you. I’ll to take that out next time.

Steve Cuden: You know what it is? Sometimes people are just tired.

Martin Dugard: I know, I know. But you know, it’s not my job is to keep them awake. I mean, when people tell me they stayed up late reading my books, that makes me very happy.

Steve Cuden: Well, yeah, I would imagine it does. It is very challenging to make any reader compelled to keep reading. That’s a big challenge for any writer in any medium. And when you achieve it, that’s a really, I think a high goal to get to. You also write a lot about sports and you’ve written a lot about sports. Is your technique and approach toward writing about whether it’s running or cycling or whatever it is you’re writing about. Is the approach the same for you?

Martin Dugard: I’m trying to blend them more and more because whenever you’re doing, especially in endurance sports, it’s very personal thing and there’s all sorts of stuff that’s going on about. You could write about someone’s face as a mask of pain, or they’re heartbeat is elevated, or they’re sweating, or they’re full of self doubt. Um, I’m trying To put that more of that into the history. And again, with history, you can’t pretend, you can’t say, oh, he thought. Unless, you know from his writing that he thought that. It’s one of those things where if I’m doing an interview with somebody, like when I cover the Tour de France, they can tell me what they thought. So I could have put that into the story because they had told me that with history, the challenge of getting people to turn the pages and see it and have them forget, like you mentioned, that it is nonfiction and have them all of a sudden, at some point, go to this place where they feel like is completely fiction and that I’ve taken to this other place. It’s the same thing with sports. It’s that drama, that escalation of humanity is really super important.

Steve Cuden: Obviously, there are some themes that seem to play out throughout the majority of your work. There’s war, there’s adventure, there’s serious human challenges, there’s death. There’s certainly a bunch of death in your work. I mean, you have a whole series based with the word killing. And so how did you come up with those interests? Where did that come from?

Martin Dugard: You? I’m 63. I’ve been a writer since I was professionally. Since I was. I joined the business when I was in my mid-20s, let’s put it that way.

Steve Cuden: Mhm.

Martin Dugard: And so you go through those life phases. And so at one point, I wanted to be more of the guy who covered the Tour de France all the time. And then you get into history. The Killing series kind of landed in my lap and it became something where I designed the tone of the books, I wrote the books, the format of the books with the date stamp and stuff like that. But that was always a work for hire. And it was a great way to shore up my career financially in a point where I had had three kids in college and my wife and I were bridging that gap. And they’re great books and they have sold literally, I think, 19 million copies at this point.

Steve Cuden: 19. Right.

Martin Dugard: But what I want to do is escalate the whole process so that. With the taking books which followed the Killing series, and obviously I’m piggybacking on that, uh, for a reader, for readers say, oh, I know that guy from this. Because I want to make it better, I want to make it faster, I want to make it more entertaining. I want to make it one of those things where people read it and say, this is something I couldn’t put down in the middle of the night. It Wasn’t planned. I don’t think my career is. Has a master plan. I wasn’t one of those people who went back. But, um, I’m very much one of those people who. I’m in the moment and when I’m writing, love to feel what I feel. Sometimes it’s hard because, like, for instance, in some of those killing books, like with the book about the Nazis, you have to write about the Holocaust and the death camps. That’s a burden. It weighs on you.

Steve Cuden: Oh, sure it does.

Martin Dugard: It’s in your head. You have to. To do the research. I went to some of these camps and I walked through them. And you don’t walk away from them as if you just went to Disneyland. They stay in your head for a long time. But all that kind of informs, uh, I think the greater creative process. So that now that as I write about other aspects of war or peace or whatever, like my next book is going to be a huge departure. But it’s all tied together. It all fits. You accumulate this body of knowledge that informs what you’re going to say and do next.

Steve Cuden: Are there stories that you tend to avoid? You just don’t want to have anything to do with them?

Martin Dugard: I don’t like stories about evil. It’s just evil.

Steve Cuden: About evil.

Martin Dugard: Evil. Well, we did killing Jesus, which you would think would be pretty straightforward because the gospels kind of tell the story and you would think you’d just line it up. And then you. You read about the things the Romans did to the Jews and the Christians, and it was horrible. And that lived in my head for a long time. And I’m not a Pollyanna-esque person, but at the same time, I don’t want to go there again. I like to wake up every morning and not be thinking about gloom and doom. I’d like to be thinking about possibility.

Steve Cuden: You want to write things that are uplifting, not negative.

Martin Dugard: Not necessarily. I mean, I want to write things that are real, but I don’t want to focus completely on awful. You know, a lot of people like that, they like things that are about bad people. They read Hitler biographies, they read Mao Zedong biographies, stuff like that. I don’t want to write that book. That’s for somebody else to write, win their own Nobel Prize. But that’s not me fictionally.

Steve Cuden: There are lots of authors that write about evil. I mean, Stephen Kings made a pretty good living at it. But you’re writing about reality and real people and real events, and so you want to stay away from that sort of thing. I Get it.

Martin Dugard: But I feel like there’s enough going on in this world. Like, I’m looking at my library. It’s like I’ve got a bunch of Joe Nesbo books up there that are half-finished because he’s a brilliant writer. But it’s so dark that, uh, it just makes me just not want to finish the. Joe, I appreciate writing, but I just. I don’t want to finish this book, you know?

Steve Cuden: You know, Steven Spielberg has famously told the story more than once of when he was making Schindler’s List. It was so dark and difficult for him that he would call Robin Williams at the end of the day so that he would get him to laugh because he needed to be uplifted out of the, uh, gloom and doom of what he was doing every day. So I get it. I mean, that’s. It does affect you. You’re. You’re in it. It’s in your head, it’s in your. You marinate in it. You can tell when you read your work that you marinate in that material. It’s not fluff to you. It’s really deep. So let’s talk about your process a little bit. What do you do to gather these. This information? Are you a note taker? Are you a gatherer of materials? Are you a deep researcher online? Where do you find all this stuff?

Martin Dugard: Usually, once I have signed the contract to do a next book, I just start by just reading an overview. Somebody who’s done the book really well. You know, that’s three or four books where you just kind of figure out what’s going on.

Steve Cuden: You’re talking about reading other authors.

Martin Dugard: Reading other authors to see how they’ve handled it. Because at some point then I put those books away because I don’t want to copy them in any way. But I want to know the story before I start telling it from my own point of view. And I compare the process of writing, um, any history book, any nonfiction narrative nonfiction book. As a PhD program. You come in as a student who is eager, and then you read a couple books. You go, yeah, I know the subject. And then you start the fun stuff, which is the travel. And then you go places and you stay in nice hotels and you go to museums and you visit historical sites and you fly in Spitfires. Super fun. You drink in the same pubs that the pilots drank in. That’s fun. And then you go back home and they sit down at your desk, and then you begin that inevitable writing process of saying writing is all decision making is like, what’s my first chapter, what’s my first sentence? How do I open this book in a way that’s going to make people care about it? And then it becomes literally line by line research. If you open the book on, um, September 1, 1939, for instance, what’s the weather like? What’s the temperature in London, what’s the temperature in Poland? And what are people wearing? What are people eating and drinking? What are people thinking? And then that’s the slow process. And so like you talked about Stephen King. What? I love that Stephen King says he stops his creative process every day at 2,000 words. Holy, holy schnikes, man. I would love 2,000 words a day.

Steve Cuden: No kidding.

Martin Dugard: There are times when I write these books where I’m getting 50. What I do at the end of the day, I print everything out. I get a pencil and a sharpener, uh, and I put it on my back porch. I go back out in the morning to start maybe with a cup of coffee and I edit what I did the day before. Some days everything I did the day before just gets wiped away. It’s like it never happen. And I’ll literally do the same pages as like 10 times. So it’s obsessive but at the same time it sharpens, it sharpens, it sharpens, it sharpens so that when you finally get to where you want to be with the final book, it’s what you really had hoped to achieve.

Steve Cuden: All, uh, you don’t do purge drafts, you don’t draft through and then a major revision, you actually hone it as you’re going.

Martin Dugard: Yeah. Uh, and at some point you have to stop because to if you’ve read page 1050 times, there’s a point, it’s like we’re going to put these pages aside for a while and we’re going to write. But it’s a really good feeling. Another thing I do is I read stuff out loud. So I don’t just look at it, I read it. It’s a narrative thing. Read it out loud. If I trip over the words when I’m doing it, I know that the reader is going to trip over the words and they read it. And you feel kind of dorky when you’re on your back porch at 6:30 in the morning with a cup of coffee and the neighbors are looking down on my little desk, uh, in a reading in my best Shakespearean accent. But it’s my process. I love it.

Steve Cuden: Uh, okay, so you’ve given me by saying that a trick that you use that I think the listeners should pay attention to. When you read it out loud, what you are ultimately doing is you are then infusing your personal voice into the writing. And so it becomes your voice that we’re then reading, which then gets into our minds and we start to hear you talking, even though we don’t hear you talking.

Martin Dugard: Exactly. And ah, it should be. Here’s the thing is like, I remember if you read like Tom Wolfe with the right stuff, the way he wrote that book, there’s a very specific voice to it in. It’s a great example of how to write entertaining narrative nonfiction. But he never says his name. He never says, I am the narrator. But you hear his voice so clearly that you. He’s talking to you. And when you know enough about what you’re trying to say, when you write the book with as much knowledge as you can, in other words, you’ve researched enough that you can tell it in that way, it really transforms the narrative when you become, um, the authority. And they’re listening to, like somebody sitting around a campfire a thousand years ago, you know, telling a story once upon a time.

Steve Cuden: And that’s a piece of. What makes it compelling to read rather than dry and dusty, is you’re not just reading facts laid out on a page. It has a voice to it. It has some kind of a narrative feel to it.

Martin Dugard: Well, that’s the goal. I mean, if I’m bored, if I’m reading my stuff and I’m bored, you’re going to be bored. And that’s just the number one thing. I think every writer starts with that negative person on their shoulder. Like, remember Animal House with the good and the bad? But we all have that negative voice. And for me, it was my mom. My mom would always be standing my shoulders saying, oh, you can’t do that. You can’t say that. But the more you write, the more you of become your own voice. You say, why can’t I say that? I’m going to say that. And then all of a sudden, it just becomes second nature to just take a bunch of risks, which are kind of cool. Like with the midway book, again, we’re talking about naval history. If you read a lot of naval history, it’s very rigid. And at some point, I was kind of bound by that. After about three months working on the book, I started just going in different directions. And all of a sudden, this little voice inside of me became a really devilish narrator. And it was super fun. You know, it was playful, but at the same time, it was paying respect to all the stuff that happened. It was great. I had a good time with it.

Steve Cuden: So you’ve written. I didn’t count them. But you’ve written several dozen books, right?

Martin Dugard: I’m, uh, up to about 30ish books. And so you clearly write relatively quickly. You’re not taking 10 years to write a book. You’re writing much faster than that. And so do you have timelines and deadlines on when you have to turn stuff in?

Martin Dugard: Yeah, and I pride myself in hitting my deadlines. I like to write two books a year. I got a notice from my mortgage company that I have seven years and seven months left on my mortgage. So there’s an imperative to every day motivation.

Martin Dugard: It’s motivation. But no but beyond that. I mean, I’m with the age where a lot of my friends are retiring and they’re talking about, oh, we’re going to finally travel. It’s like, well, I’ve been doing that for 40 years, but I still want to write. I want toa become a better writer. And so that means just the daily discipline. I sit myself down in my chair. This is my office. It’s not very big. Uh, it’s in my garage. There are no windows. And I sit here for four or five hours a day, but I do it every day. And not because I need to, but because I love to.

Steve Cuden: Seven days a week?

Martin Dugard: Uh, no, five days a week. And I give my weekends to my wife, but she’ll find me out here on Saturday and Sundays at random moments, because you get that little voice that says, hey, what if we fix that sentence to do this next thing, I’m out here for two hours on a Sunday.

Steve Cuden: And you do a lot of travel, obviously. You’ve said that already several times. And you’ve been all over the world, I assume, more than a few times. And do you write, you start to write your material as you’re traveling, or do you need to gather and then bring it back?

Martin Dugard: I do both. I gather and I write with the most recent book with, well, Taking London, the most recent one that came out. When you go to London enough times, the whole Battle of Britain thing is almost a cottage industry. And so it’s very inspirational. You go to a museum and you see things. You take that spitfire flight. You see things. I stood in line when the Queen was buried to walk past her Kafkaesque, which was amazing, really. So that’s why Elizabeth found her way into the book. You know, stuff like that. Once I did That I realized I needed to make that happen. But you know, I’ve been traveling first as a journalist and as an author, um, since 1989, 1990. And even back then when Apple came up with the first laptops, I had a laptop. So I’d sit in airports and work on my laptop. It’s just some people fear writing. There are days where I think writing is a horrible, awful thing that just is draining the blood from my veins.

Steve Cuden: It can be a killer for many people.

Martin Dugard: Yeah, but, but there’s Sunday days. It’s like, I don’t know, some people watch porn. I write books. I just love putting words together, making them pretty and fixing bad sentences. And um, I love the process.

Steve Cuden: It’s a compulsion for you, which is good. I mean, that’s helpful. Can you tell when you’re writing and you’ve already said that you sometimes take a while before you find whatever that core is. Like in the book on Midway, it took you a while and then the voice hits you and you go, oh, I know what I need to do. Can you tell generally when you’re writing the book that it’s working or not? Or do you need to wait till it’s all done before you look back at it and say, oh yeah, this is really working well.

Martin Dugard: Mhm. I’d start with the first one, but it’s a slow process because what happens is the worst thing I can do is write a section and send it to my editor and say, hey, look what I’ve done. Because the minute I send it, I go back and fix it. I make it better. Truthfully, what happens. And the people, uh, my publisher don’t want to hear this, but I’ll send the best book I can. But as soon as they come back and say, here’s the copy edited manuscript, address all the corrections, I rewrite the whole thing, I just go back. It’s like, oh, why didn’t we see that? Like this thing on page 300. We could have echoed that on um, page 11. And I love doing that. And like with taking London. And I say this because I love my publisher, but at the same time they weren’t happy with me. They came first pass is when you get the manuscript pages in the actual font that they’re to look like it’s gonna look in a book. You get the actual page. And so I got first and they said, get us your corrections within two weeks. And I went through the book and I made like 305 corrections and I changed sentences. Was like, I was appalled by Some of the sloppiness. Even though when I delivered it I thought it was perfect. And they said, okay, you’re going to get second pass in a couple weeks. You only have a day. Don’t make many changes. Oh my goodness, they made like 204 changes. But. And there are things that nobody cares about, but there are things that tighten a sentence, that shorten it, that make a reader want to keep turning the page instead of fumble through it. Writers are, we’re not like actors. We’re not really that self-absorbed individual who has to publicly bear our soul. But at the same time, that’s our chance. The only chance we get to bear our soul is when you put a book out you feel is the best you can possibly do. And even if you’re going to risk the ire of your publisher, it’s pretty amazing when all that comes to pass. Well, they say, okay, we’re going to let you make these changes and it’s better.

Steve Cuden: Well, they probably know. And if you’re working with the same publisher over and over, they probably know after a while this is your M.O. and they’re go, going toa go along with it. And in fact, they may have a tactic with you where they say, we know we’re going to give Martin these notes and we know we’re gonna get something better back, so let’s give them the notes.

Martin Dugard: You know, I think that’s the case. I think that they indulge me and I’m very happy to be indulged. I love them very much.

Steve Cuden: How do you structure your books? Do you sit down and plot them out? Do you know in advance? Do you outline. How do you structure books?

Martin Dugard: I wish I had it, but when I’m writing a book, a big piece of butcher paper that’s about six feet long and I get a Sharpie and I outline the whole book.

Steve Cuden: Um, so it’s a big visual form on your wall.

Martin Dugard: Yeah. So whenever I get stuck, I look at it and say, there’s my roadmap. And so it helps me, but at some point I’ll change the whole thing. So I’ll rip it down and put another one up and start from scratch. But it’s not an outline, it’s not a table of contents. But for me it’s just like you said, it’s a visual, it’s something to look at and say. It’s a reassurance. It’s like, okay, at the end of the day, let’s start to finish that we’re going to get there. But we have a lot to cover in between. We need to find that. And then what happens is some little wrinkle comes up. You find something new out a about a character, or there’s a love affair or a sudden death, and you go, oh, we need to address that. And then that goes into it. But that’s kind of the way it work.

Steve Cuden: When you put the butcher paper up on the wall, do you know in advance what you’re going to probably do, or are you working it out as you’re writing on it?

Martin Dugard: I know in advance the beginning kind of in the middle and the end. The little tent poles, like with Battle of Britain, with Taking London. I knew Churchill was the tent pole. So where does Churchill appear? He’s in the middle. He’s about the quarter way mark. He’s the halfway mark. And then he disappears for a bit, but he kind of props up again at the end to kind of give us closure. And once you have that, then you can kind of do all the fun stuff beneath that.

Steve Cuden: Well, and by the way, and why this is, I don’t know. Maybe you know the answer. But all these compelling characters that you have in the book, um, and they’re all compelling in some way, he stands above them all as the most compelling. O there’s something about him that in the long view of history, there’s something about him. And even though he was much maligned and not well thought of by many people in England, even through the war, he still rises above. There’s something about that guy.

Martin Dugard: Yeah, he was. I’ll, uh, tell you, I’ve heard about Churchill. So you talk about the tent pole, the taking series up until actually now. So the four books, Taking Paris, Taking Berlin, Taking London, now Taking Midway, Churchill makes an appearance in each of them. And so you think of the narrative arc of a single book where he is that guy who kind of props up the narrative. I’ve successfully used him to prop the narrative for four books. Now in Halfway Through Midway, he kind of hands it off to another group of people. And I don’t know if there’s gonna be another taking book, but I, uh, like the fact that Churchill made an appearance in. He gave continuity to all the books. So when people read, let’s say Taking London, they say, oh, I want to go back and read Taking Paris, or I want to just jump forward to Taking Midway. He’s there. He’s this voice, he’s this giant who reassures the character, almost like a, ah, narrator himself.

Steve Cuden: What do you think it is about him that makes him so uniquely compelling? Is it his language? Is it his thinking? Well, what is it?

Martin Dugard: Well, you think about what we think of as a heroic individual. We usually think of someone like. More like a George Patton.

Steve Cuden: Sure.

Martin Dugard: Uh, a tall, physically fit, very disciplined man. Or MacArthur or MacArthur, who was a shit, by the way. I refuse to write about MacArthur, but Churchill is. In his youth, he was a really handsome man. He was very heroic. But he just settled into his life and his routine and his discipline. And I think that’s why I kind of connect with him, because I’m very much about the routine and the discipline of writing. He was on a whole nother level. He was doing it with the government, with his career. He went through amazing periods, like 20 years where he was just out of government. And he fought back and he had resolution, he had belief in himself. And I think that resonates with people. And then you go back to his speeches. Most people know the words to his speeches, but most people have not heard them. And he was a great orator, despite the fact that he had a little bit of a lisp. He kind of was a little bit sauced. But half the time, half he knew. Like, he wrote in stanzas, like, he actually wrote his speeches out, uh, in the stanzas. It was amazing.

Steve Cuden: He is absolutely one of the most fascinating people to listen to when he speaks. He is a great orator and unusual, and the world doesn’t have much of that today. We don’t have great orators today. We have people that sort of spew out stuff. But he actually made it sound poetic in a way.

Martin Dugard: And when you think about it, he spoke in sound bites before we had sound bites.

Steve Cuden: Absolutely.

Martin Dugard: We’ll fight him on the beaches, you know, which he stole, by the way, from Rick Kipling in the Jungle Book, which I find fascinating.

Steve Cuden: If you’re going to steal, steal from the best.

Martin Dugard: Exactly. But he was also one of those guys who read everything. He was just voluminous in everything in his life. And he was all in, in every aspect. And I think a lot of people are afraid to do that now, but I think that’s what you have to do to really make a difference in the world.

Steve Cuden: All right, so in taking London, how did you then decide to focus on these very famous characters, Hugh Dowdting and Neville Chamberlain and certainly Churchill and Edward Armero? But how did you then decide to focus on RAF pilots? Why the RAF?

Martin Dugard: Well, there’s a lot of, you know, Churchill of this speech, where, you know, never before in the history have so few made a difference? Blah, blah, blah. So when they said I got the okay to write a book about the Battle of Britain, I was super happy. Like the battle of Britain, but greatest literally aerial conflict in all time. It’s like Top Gun meets the Nazis. This book is going to be so easy to write. And then when I started to write, it’s like there are a thousand moving parts. How do you tell the story t of everything? It’s not just the diplomacy. Churchill versus Hitler. And then you have within the British bureaucracy you have the fighter command versus the bomber command. Then within fighter command you have the different tactics of people who wanted thousands of planes in this guy at the same time versus Downing, who wanted just a handful. And I had to kind of segment it. And then at some point you have to say, I need heroes. I need people that people can relate to. And so once I had the big players like Churchill and Doubting, I had to fit their story. And like they kind of way through I went, I found four fighter pilots that I found that I thought told the story best. And it was a veteran pilot, it was a brand new pilot, literally a teenager, um, an American pilot who came there and then a pilot who was kind of the golden boy of everything. And it went up horribly burned and disfigured in a crash. Like all examples of glory and pushing past their own limits. It was just amazing to find these guys and tell their stories. So some point I actually even stopped the book because I was tired of. I tell things in a chronological order. I was tired of stepping away from these guys. So I literally wrote each one of their stories. I, uh, stopped the book and wrote each one of their stories from start to finish and then put wove their chapters back into the book one by one.

Steve Cuden: Oh, very interesting.

Martin Dugard: Which is interesting. But at the same time, when the book was finally finished, there were a lot of continuity errors. It’s like a movie where the editor isn’t really paying attention to the continuity. So then I had to fix all those. But then when you all of a sudden we had that rhythm. My editor said, what about an outsider? Like, we’re so inside, let’s find somebody on the outside to see what the average man is seeing. Which is where AR Murrow came in, put into the thing and then it really just kind of neatly wrapped itself up. It’s like I got done. It was like, it was such hard work for eight months and all of a sudden it just became like wrapped itself up in a bow. It was beautiful.

Steve Cuden: One fell swoop just came together.

Martin Dugard: Everything dovetailed into a single narrative, which I did not see coming. It was such a relief, let’s put it that way.

Steve Cuden: There have clearly been literally thousands of books written about World War II. It’s one of the most written about subjects ever.

Martin Dugard: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: And so how do you come to it and think to yourself, I have a unique point of view on this? How do you figure that out?

Martin Dugard: Actually, it’s really terrifying because it helps. Uh, I say this in with all deference. It would be tougher to write these books if most of The World War II pilots and soldiers and sailors were still alive. But now that people are not alive, it’s Easter to write these books knowing that I’m trying to tell their story and trying to get as accurate as possible without trying to step on anybody’s feelings. But there’s so many books, and I’ve read a lot of these books. If, uh, I try to compete with, for instance, with Cornelius Ryan, the Longest Day, and those books, they’re just different. He was there, I wasn’t there. So my job is to do as much research as possible and find a way to turn these epic moments in history into stories that resonate with people so they really want to know about it. So I feel like I’m retelling these stories in a way that a whole new generation of people will say, oh, man, I understand that now. We get it. Like the Battle of Britain, there were so many pilots wrote their own book about it, but there’s only one living pilot left, John Hemingway’ 140. He lives in Ireland. So I’m trying to tell the story in a way that they’re not going to be forgotten. For instance, if you go to the Imperial War Museum in Tokyo after all these years, it still tells the story of World War II as a war of American aggression, which isn’t problematic so much right now. But in 100 years, if that display still stands, people won’t see World War II in the way that we see it, like that we were attacked. And so my job is to tell the story in a way that makes people. I want to put people right there and want to put them right in the moment. I want them to feel with the pilots and the Churchills and the doubting they’re feeling and see history through their eyes, the eyes of people who are trying to make a difference.

Steve Cuden: Well, as many books and TV shows and movies have been made about the Civil War. There’s no way for anyone today to actually know what that felt like, like in its time. Because it’s 160, 70 years ago.

Martin Dugard: Yeah, it’s forever.

Steve Cuden: Exactly.

Martin Dugard: Which is one reason, like, my agent keeps trying to get me to write a Civil War book. It’like uh, I don’t want to do that. That stuff is still too raw, mean, even though people can only suppose what happened. But people are still living, and I don’t want to do that.

Steve Cuden: What is your technique for taking these wonderful characters that you decide you’re going to expand on their lives in history? How do you then develop them as compelling characters again, you’re not writing dry material about this guy got up in the morning and he had coffee. You’re not writing that. There’s something about their actual humanity and character that must draw you to them. How do you then develop that to make them somewhat almost like fictional characters?

Martin Dugard: Well, I learn everything about them. I learn about, you know, who are they married to, what they eat for breakfast, you know, where they came from. And I just get to know everything that I can about them so that when I put them on the page, they’re not, um, some caricature. They’re a human being. And it takes a lot of time too. For instance, like with the younger pilot in Taking London. Literally. On my last trip to London, I went to the tube station that he stepped out of, and I retraced his steps down to the Air Ministry. And it’s still pretty much the same walkway. The tube station hasn’t changed the walkway. The only thing is the Air Mystery Building now is, um, a different corporate building. I want to get inside their heads and their psyches and just know as much as I can about them. It just takes time. There are so many different places you can look. You can look at where people buried. How did they spend their time? It’s just all these things where you get to know every aspect of the person to know are the introverted or extroverted, are they, uh, a glory hog? And just you get to know them until I like to say, like, when I wrote about Stanley Livingston into Africa, which was 20 years ago, I got to the point that, uh, if Stanley or Livingston walked into my office and started talking to me, I would not have been surprised. I knew what they ate. I knew the cigars Stanley smoked. I knew how they dressed. I knew everything about them. So, like, once when I was at the Royal Geographical Society in London, I actually got the chance to look at Stanley and Livingston’s, the actual hats they wore in Africa during that time, during that famous Dr. Livingston presumed thing. I wasn’t surprised. I knew exactly what I was looking at. It looks like I had just put them personally into the box five minutes before.

Steve Cuden: Because you’re so well immersed in it.

Martin Dugard: It’s kind of like I don’t want to get weird about this, but it’s kind of like method writing. I get super, super, super strange when I write because if I’m. Whether it’s 1869 or 1940 or 1944, I go there. And so when I leave my office and go back into my house, my wife literally takes the keys away from me for an hour. So I’m not allowed to drive because I really, I’m not here. I’m, um, still there. And you have to go there.

Steve Cuden: You’re actually seeing all that in your mind’s eye. It’s really playing out for you.

Martin Dugard: Oh, yeah, no, no, it’s. It’s so there. It’s like it’s Sue. I’m sure someone would say it’s ADHD or some kind of source of hyperfocus.

Steve Cuden: But it’s your superpower, Martin.

Martin Dugard: Yeah, well, I mean, I don’t know about you when you write, but.

Steve Cuden: So when I write, I see the scene play out in my mind’s eye and I act to myself. I act like a journalist or a reporter and I’m reporting from the field and then I’m putting it on into the computer or the paper in that form in the proper screenplay or script form, which is a little different than when you write in, you know, pros. But I’m actually seeing it in my mind’s eye now. I don’t get deeply enough in where I have to have my keys taken away from me, but I do get off into that zone. And when you get into the zone, that’s the most fun for me is when you are in that other place, that zone where you go into that world because you’re seeing the world before you.

Martin Dugard: It’s the best place. Again, if you’re going to create, you have to create within that space to go there completely. I don’t know about you, but when I get those days where I, uh, sit down, then you do all that little warm up stuff where you check your email and you kind of fart around on the Internet and then you really start writing and then four hours pass and you don’t even know it’s pass and glorious. You know, it’s the best thing. It’s the best thing.

Steve Cuden: It is the best thing. Now, I am curious in Writing stories, especially fiction, one of the things that I’ve taught forever and is everybody that I know, when they teach, they teach the same sort of thing, which is storytelling. Compelling storytelling is about conflict in all of its flavors. Personal conflict, external conflict. You also happen to write about events that are highly conflicted. Do you have to actually think about the personal and internal conflicts of these characters to bring those forward so that it helps to tell the StoryBeat?

Martin Dugard: Yeah, you’ve got to seek that out. But it’s not just the way you speak about the characters. It’s the way you put the sentences on the page. It’s like if you write a paragraph or a sentence about an individual that is uplifting and positive, but afterwards you can’t just layer those. You need to put stuff in the middle. Like, he was a superlative individual, he was general, blah, blah, blah. And then the next paragraph should be and yet he had severe gonorrhea, something. Know what I mean?

Steve Cuden: Yeah. You need to put that conflict in.

Martin Dugard: You need to build the conflict. It can’t just be like they’re at war. It has to be. Everybody has something.

Steve Cuden: Well, but that’s what you’re looking for. That’s what draws, I think, most people into great, memorable, popular stories. They’re drawn to what makes these people flawed and how do they overcome their flaws. Because we as humans want to somehow vicariously live through those characters and then somehow work our own flaws out. I think that’s what storytelling does ultimately, is that it helps us to understand ourselves. And you’re not giving us material back. That’s merely history. It’s history that actually informs the reader about themselves. I think that’s what you’re doing.

Martin Dugard: Well, thanks. I appreciate that, but I agree with you. I feel like I’m a big fan of the Olympic Games and we just had the big Olympics in Paris.

Steve Cuden: Right.

Martin Dugard: And I’m always amazed every time the Olympics come around. Like in the lead up the Olympics, people are like, oh, um, I’m m not going to watch the Olympics. Then everybody watches the Olympics and they’re so transformed.

Steve Cuden: Absolutely.

Martin Dugard: And the thing about it is the Olympics are the only time in modern society where we actually watch people achieve that emotional and physical excellence that we all strive to in our daily lives, but which we all fall so appallingly short. And so my job was not to write about Olympians because those guys, those high ideals are something. But my, my job is to write about the people who strive to be Olympians and who fall short, but actually. But then change the world despite that.

Steve Cuden: Achieve greatness despite failure.

Martin Dugard: Exactly.

Steve Cuden: I think that that’s really superb.

Martin Dugard: Look at. We’re creative guys. We’ve had setbacks. We’ve had great moments. Um, I’m looking at the Jekyll Hyde thing behind you right there. That’s a great moment. Know, but how many times have you and I have people slam the door in our face or say no or tell, you suck, and you just got to pick yourself up and say, I’m better than that, and I’m going to tell a better story?

Steve Cuden: The question is, how many days have we not had that happen? At least for me. I can count them on two hands.

Martin Dugard: It’s very true.

Steve Cuden: Have any of your books been optioned for making a movie or TV series?

Martin Dugard: I’ve had three. Well, see, three books made into TV shows. Um, I’ve had four other book options, but it never made it through. But it got so close. Like, I had one that just got to the point where everybody was. A list is like, man, we’re gonna make so much money. This is gonna be amazing. I’m gonna be immortal. And it’s just that, uh, killed.

Steve Cuden: Welcome to Hollywood.

Martin Dugard: Welcome to Hollywood. Right?

Steve Cuden: Exactly right. I would be remiss if I did not ask you about working with Bill O’Reilly. You’ve written how many books with him now? 17 or 18 books?

Martin Dugard: We did 14. We’re done 14? Yeah, we did 14. And it was transformational for me. It. Like I said, it came at a time when we were about to put three kids through college. The money was great. We sold a lot of books, and it was fun to build that series and kind of do the series. But sometimes it just. After a while, it’s nice to be back in my own again, let’s put it that way.

Steve Cuden: Oh, sure. I mean, you know, you get a little burnt out on one thing after a while. You’re working together in some way. There’s a collaborative effort going on. What makes a good collaboration work? What worked between you and Bill O’Reilly? How did that work?

Martin Dugard: You know what’s funny is, um, I’ve been asked to ghost books for other people. I mean, people whose names you would easily know. And none of them worked in this one. We just found a rhythm. And again, I don’t think of myself as a collaborative person, but with Bill, strangely, it worked because what we did was, um, unlike other people, I think a lot of people think when have a writer ghost your book, like, they’re going to follow you around and fawn over you and do this and neither Bill nor I had time for that. I, uh, live in California. He lives in New York. So I researched the book. I wrote a first draft. We got on the phone three or four times a week, put it into Bill’s voice, which is great. Bill made suggestions about maybe we could add or subtract. Um, I’d go back and do that. Then we get back on the phone again. And we did that for every book since 2009 until just a few months ago.

Steve Cuden: In this case, you were doing most of the legwork, but he was contributing mightily to the final product.

Martin Dugard: What people don’t know about Bill, and let’s take the political out of it, because I’m completely creative place. Bill and I do not have the same political views, and yet we work together very well. The thing about is Bill has a really good nose for StoryBeat and it actually helped develop me a little bit more as a writer because he would say, we don’t need this, we don’t need that. Let’s do this. We need more action. And he was never wrong. Between him and me, we created those books. And it’s one of those things where, uh, it was just such an unlikely.

Steve Cuden: Pairing, but it worked well, that’s wonderful when it does. And like you say, you wrote 14 books together, and so that’s saying something. If you’d written one and it didn’t work between the two of you, that would have been it. But you went on and on and on. And so that there’s a testament to you guys working together well that you got through that many.

Martin Dugard: Yeah, it was interesting because like I said, we got on the phone and very often I was the one who did the travel research. So we would edit. Like one time I was in Guam on my way back from Tokyo and he said, can we get on the phone? And I said, yeah. What time? Well, it was 3:00 in the morning. Guam. I had a 6:00 flight and I didn’t want to wake up my wife’s. I dragged a chair into the. The bathroom of the hotel room and we did the call. I just made the changes on my computer there. Then I finally woke my wife up and went to the airport. And it was just one of those things where I made change those books in my car in the parking lot of Track Meettes. It was just one of those things where it just became such a part of my life. I didn’t think twice about it.

Steve Cuden: Clearly. And you wrote up and how many years did it take to write all 14. How many. How long that take?

Martin Dugard: About, uh, 15 years.

Steve Cuden: So about one a year? Yes, approximately, give or take. I think that’s just an awesome achievement one way or another. I mean, and they’re very popular and they’ve sold very well, so that’s a big deal. I’ve been having a ton of fun speaking to Martin Dugart now for an hour, and we’re going toa wind the show down just a little bit. And I’m just wondering, in all of your vast experiences, your travel and so on, can you share with us a StoryBeat beyond what you’ve already told us that’s either weird, quirky, offbeat, strange, or maybe just plain funny?

Martin Dugard: There’s a bunch. Um.

Steve Cuden: Well, you can tell us more than one if you got it.

Martin Dugard: I got one when we were working on Survivor. So Mark Burnett had been a friend of mine, actually was one of the reasons I became. I got out of the corporate world. Like, Mark Burnett literally called me my corporate job. He’d read an article of mine and he said, I’m going to take a team of people to Madagascar for this event and we want to take you with us. And he had no money at the time. He didn’t have two pennies to rub together. But he was so convincing that I not only flew with him and his team of Navy seals to Madagascar for this race, but, um, when I got back, I got fired for my corporate job. And I told my wife, I said, I’m going to make it as a writer. I’m not going to go look for a job. So flash forward seven years. He’s about to do Survivor. He’s doing pretty well. He calls me in a few days before they’re about to start filming. He says, we had a writer for the book. She quit. Can you write the book? And I said, yeah. He said, well, you need to be on a plane tomorrow for Borneo, so. Yeah, whatever. So, um, I get there and they all the crew was on one side and the castaways were on the other, and we live in these little bungalows. And, um, every day I like to go for a little run, but the mile was only like. The island was only like 3 miles wide and a mile long. There’s no place to run. But there was one area on the map of the island that was completely off limits because it was supposed to be just a danger zone. So I read the map wrong one day and I went for a run through this area and I got this really spooky feeling and I kind of came out of it. And one of the botanist working on the set came to me and said, don’t go there again. I go, well, I just need to get my run in. I just need to do this. And he goes, no, there are pythons that live there and there used to be feral pigs on the island. If the pythons can eat those pigs, they will eat you. And it’s like, okay, so I didn’t run over there anymore.

Steve Cuden: So there’s adventure and then there’s adventure, right?

Martin Dugard: Exactly. And that’s stupidity.

Steve Cuden: So obviously when you go adventuring around the world, you have to think about it a little bit.

Martin Dugard: You know what? Yeah. But at the same time, you just want to also go by the seat of your pants sometimes. I mean, like, you don’t want to be afraid to walk through a certain part of. You don’t want to be afraid to go certain place. But at the same time you need to know, maybe that’s not the pub where I want to have a pint tonight, you know, because it looks a.

Steve Cuden: Little dang, a little dicey.

Martin Dugard: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: You know, I think that you have that sense about you. That’s a good thing. You’re not going to stumble into total.

Martin Dugard: Ah, famous, you know, famous last words.

Steve Cuden: Famous last words. So, last question for you today, Martin. You’ve already told us a lot of very interesting stories, but I wonder if you have a particular tip or some sort of tactic that you like to give to those who are starting out in the business or maybe they’re in a little bit trying to get to that next level.

Martin Dugard: I got a few tips. First of all, write every day. If you’re a writer, write every day. You can’t pretend that you can write only when the inspiration strikes you, because it’s a job. It’s a blue collar job. And you sit your butt in the chair, need to write, and then the next thing you need to do is silence that doubting little voice that says, you’re not good enough. You can’t do this. That’s a stupid mistake. You’re not allowed to do that. And I struggle with it to this day. You make a storytelling decision and you go, oh, that’s kind of cool. Then some little voice will say, oh, you can’t do that. There’s a grammar rule against that, or there’s a style rule against that. And you go, oh, okay, well, I guess I can’t. But once you start breaking those rules a little bit, that’s when the magic happens.

Steve Cuden: I think that is phenomenal advice, all of it. Especially that last tip, which is that you have to know the fundamentals and the rules to begin with, and then if you master those, you can break them. But people sometimes come along and want to break the rules before they even know what they’re doing.

Martin Dugard: Exactly.

Steve Cuden: And that’s where they get into trouble. So I think being a master of what you do and then figuring out how to change all that, I think that’s really wise advice. Martin Dugard, this has been a lot of fun for me and I can’t thank you enough for spending your time, your wisdom and your energy with me today on Story Beat. I thank you kindly.

Martin Dugard: It’s a lot of fun. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. It was great.

Steve Cuden: And so we’ve come to the end of today’s Story Beat. If you like this episode, won’t you please take a moment to give us a comment, rating or review on whatever app or platform you’re listening to? Your support helps us bring more great Story Beat episodes to you. StoryBeat is available on all major podcast apps and platforms, including Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Tune In, and many others. Until next time, I’m Steve Cuden and may all your stories be unforgettable.