Sep 24, 2026 · 36 min · 12 segments
What happens when two storytellers — a serial entrepreneur and a cultural historian — decide to swing for the fences? Donald Thompson and Bob Batchelor sat down with producer Jason Gillikin to go…
Bob BatchelorGuest
Jason GillikinHost
What's been the feedback from the early readers of Are You a Patriot? Don, I'll start with you.
And I'll be brief, but, you know, The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.
And now one could say, well, if you show it to your mom and your grandma shows you, of course, right there, they're going to love it.
But the reality is we purposely sent early versions of the book to a really, really diverse group of folks.
And once people got into the story, the feedback was really, really strong.
And quite frankly, one of the things I'll share with you is we are using our marketing and our communications mind to really test that thesis.
And so one of the things we're really proud of so far on this journey is our Facebook community has over 50,000 subscribers.
And all we've put out is some quotes and teasers and some images about the book.
We built out and Bob's team led this, but we built a little movie trailer for the book.
Like we're super excited about it, but we're trying to use data to make sure we're not all super naive.
But we think that the story is resonating because the question is so central across so many different people that can connect to it.
Yeah, and I would add that I think that the happiest I was in terms of getting feedback, because even as somebody who's written 16 books, I'm still nervous when I send it out to somebody.
How are they going to react? And a reader that I really trust who would be honest with me and give me really feedback, whether it was good or bad, said, I read the book.
It's been a couple weeks now, and I can't get these characters out of my head.
What's been the feedback from the early readers of Are You a Patriot? Don, I'll start with you.
And I'll be brief, but, you know, The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.
And now one could say, well, if you show it to your mom and your grandma shows you, of course, right there, they're going to love it.
But the reality is we purposely sent early versions of the book to a really, really diverse group of folks.
And once people got into the story, the feedback was really, really strong.
And quite frankly, one of the things I'll share with you is we are using our marketing and our communications mind to really test that thesis.
And so one of the things we're really proud of so far on this journey is our Facebook community has over 50,000 subscribers.
And all we've put out is some quotes and teasers and some images about the book.
We built out and Bob's team led this, but we built a little movie trailer for the book.
Like we're super excited about it, but we're trying to use data to make sure we're not all super naive.
But we think that the story is resonating because the question is so central across so many different people that can connect to it.
Yeah, and I would add that I think that the happiest I was in terms of getting feedback, because even as somebody who's written 16 books, I'm still nervous when I send it out to somebody.
How are they going to react? And a reader that I really trust who would be honest with me and give me really feedback, whether it was good or bad, said, I read the book.
It's been a couple weeks now, and I can't get these characters out of my head.
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