Let's be honest, most men drift. We wake up, we scroll, we work, and then we just rinse and repeat. And we know we're softer than we should be. That's why I built the 31-day resilience reset. This is not a devotional. It is a field manual for men ready to stop drifting and start fighting back. So, for 31 days, you'll train your spirit, mind, and body with scripture, prayer, and daily challenges that forge real resilience. Go to www.undaunted.life/31. life/31day to download this resource for free. That's undaunted.life/31day. Start your reset today. This is Undaunted Life, a man's podcast. I'm your host, Kyle Thompson. Let's get into it. Brad Thor, welcome back to the show. But I got to tell you, right from the jump, we've had a major upgrade. Do you know what it is? >> What's the upgrade? >> Cuz last time I'm throwing you under the bus here right from the beginning. Last time in the background there, you know, there was something sitting on the couch, it was a pillow with a UK flag. Oh yeah. [inaudible] it. This is the 250th anniversary of us not having to care about it. So I appreciate that that pillow is nowhere inside. Sir, >> I'm glad that you're a healthy adult male and can let things go. That's great. >> Yeah, I'm very well adjusted. I get that compliment all the time. I definitely don't take things and beat dead horses. That's not really my style. Uh but hey, we need to talk about you cuz you are back on the show cuz again, you're a prolific writer. You just won't stop. We got a new book out and guys, I got it before the rest of you did. Aren't y'all jealous? This is the new book Choke Point, the new thriller. Gosh, it's such a beautiful cover. But here's the thing about about this book. So, this is the continuation of the the Scott Harvath character. Correct. >> And so for some guys in my audience, you know, they were here uh for the last podcast where you did kind of a one-off with a with a co-author. And so it wasn't Yeah. It wasn't with the the Scott Harvath character. And so let's just start there. Let's start kind of 30,000 foot view. For those in our audience that are not familiar with that character, who in the world is he? >> Yeah. So I always I always set the table by saying that my thrillers are like the James Bond movies. If there's a new Bond movie at your local cinema, you can go see it even if you've never seen a previous Bond movie. You'll get caught up right away. So, it's the same thing with my my books in Scott Harvath. So, this is my 25th Scott Harvath novel and uh Chokepoint and Harvath is the character I created. Harve came out of the SEAL teams, distinguished himself on a presidential detail where the president was near water and uh the Secret Service took a shine to him and said, "Let us bring you on board to help protect the White House against terrorists to better improve our counterterrorism expertise." And then the president took a shine to him and said, "You know what? This guy shouldn't be playing defense. We should take the chain off and let them go after our enemies. Uh if they're not going to play by a rule book, then let's let Harvath go after the bad guys without a rule book." But with one understanding that if you're going to trust somebody not to uh be bound by the rules, you can't send a sadist, you actually have to send a man with a good strong moral compass if you're going to say no rules because you don't want somebody that goes from 0 to 80, 0 to 100 in the blink of an eye as far as kind of the the continuum of force. And so that's that's a little bit of Harvest background. Presidents have come and go during his uh career. He's he's had his job shut down. he's been let go and currently Harvath works for a private intelligence company that uh in the midst of dysfunction at the CIA is kind of picking up the slack for the CIA and taking on their most dangerous assignments, but because it's a private organization, it allows the White House and the CIA a certain amount of plausible deniability. They can say it wasn't us, it was Harvath. So there you go. Okay. And so yeah, 25 thrillers, that's just incredible. And so the question I have for you, because obviously there's a lot of people that will have the same character that goes throughout their thriller series and they just kind of keep those going, but I'm just curious for you, how do you work to make sure that the character remains fresh, that they remain interesting? Like how do you decide, you know, what to do with the character? How much of their backstory do we tell? How many new settings do we have? How many offshoots do we have? Because I guess the concern is with somebody like Harvath is that eventually it just kind of becomes a little bit like okay they're Superman now like they're literally unable to be controlled or killed and so that's kind of the tendency towards the fantastical. So how do you avoid that? >> Yeah. Well you you if you want to do it and you want to be successful at it you have to keep him human. So there are things that people like Harvath uh experience that we can all relate to. difficulty at work, difficulty with colleagues, uh difficulty in his personal relationships, things like that. People that don't understand he's got to do X in order to achieve Y. So, there's a lot of the interpersonal struggle particularly that men go through uh not only in their personal relationships outside the office, but also what happens in the office. So, I try to have things be very very real for Harvath. And one of the things that I've done is that even though I've written 25 books and people see a new Harvath book every summer, that's not necessarily a full year that's passed in Harvath's lifetime. So for you and me in our world, it's one book a year, but not for Harvath. So some of these books, these assignments, just like one of these guys who would work for the CIA or the Defense Intelligence Agency or BNB SEAL, you're not just doing one op a year, you're doing multiple ops throughout the year. So each book represents a different operation that Harvest done. But the key to keeping him human, I think, is uh is giving him those that friction, right? If it's too smooth for him, it's not believable. So, I've aged him a little bit. I have younger members of the team that have come on board that even though he's the team leader, they give him a little bit of static. Okay, old man. And stuff like that, even though he's not that old. Uh, and he does reflect a lot of the men that I know that are staying in the game that are actually doing things that professional athletes would do where they are training. Uh there's one particular place down in Florida that gets a lot of football players ready for the combine and they have been um rehabilitating special forces operatives that get hurt, injured in the field because a lot of the stuff that our our special operations warriors uh encounter physically, a lot of the injuries are similar to sports injuries, the repetitive motion injuries, things like that. And there's nothing that says these guys can't use performance-enhancing drugs. Uh that's part of keeping the edge. you'll find guys that are either on TRT or doing other things um to help them keep that edge, even if it's just to, you know, shave a little bit off of their, you know, their 50 yard dash or whatever it is, or give them a little more force when they're putting that boot into the door and kicking it open. Uh all that stuff is fair game for these guys. And so I have Harvath doing that, too. And then at the end of the day, the most difficult thing for me, Kyle, is it's been 25 books. I've got to find situations that number one are exciting to read about. number two, Americans care about, and number three, Harvest has never done before. >> So, I spend all year looking for like what's next summer's thing going to be? What's the thing we're about to talk about? And you know, I picked that title chokepoint last year and now you can't turn on cable news with because of Hormuz, and this doesn't take place in in the straight of Hormuz. Chokepoint refers, we'll talk about it, to to the Indo-Pacific and to Thailand, but I couldn't have picked a better title. I got super lucky with this title. Well, and so the the interesting thing about this the Scott Harvath character, I asked similar questions of my buddies Steven Presfield and um and Jack Carr because Stephen Presfield has a recurring character Telmon and Jack Carr obviously has James Ree and so I'm wondering how much of Scott Harvath is Brad Thor or Brad Thor is Scott Harvath. Is this almost like there's there's elements of you? There's elements of hey, if you didn't have any responsibilities or any family, this is an aspirational identity. So, how much of an interplay is there? >> I don't know Presfield, but if you heard that from Carr, if he says it's his alter ego or whatever, he stole that from me. So, this is something that I've been saying for decades that I believe that Ian Fleming uh that Bond was his alter ego. When you see how Bond interacts with women, and if you know anything about Ian Fleming, it's like so obvious that Bond is his alter ego. uh particularly with some of the work that Fleming did uh particularly during World War II, which is fascinating stuff. Um and then I'm sure that Jack Ryan was Clancy's alter ego. So to a certain degree, Harvath is mine. He gets to go and do those things. I joke that my wife won't let me do, you know, and if my wife is ever an earshot and she hears me say that, she says, "Well, I did, you know, kind of bless going to Afghanistan," which is true. I got to go to Afghanistan. That was a lot of fun. Um, this is this is there's a certain amount of kind of self-exloration I think that happens when you have a franchise character. You're working through some of your own stuff. You are you're learning about yourself. You're trying to reveal a little bit more about the character. And in truth, what you're revealing to readers is just little pieces of yourself that the reader doesn't know about you. But you have to limit it. You So, I've been at this. This is my 25th Harvest, my 27th novel overall that I've written. And so you want, like I said, like the Bond movies, pick up any Brad Thor book at any point, no problem if you haven't read one before that. So the key is how do you bring a brand new reader up to speed quickly without boring longtime readers who have been with you for a while? And one of the best examples I ever saw that so the the the lazy lazy default that uh lazy writers will do is they'll have their character stand in front of a mirror and they will reflect on what they see and that's how they describe what the character [clears throat] looks like and maybe the character will think a little bit about work. The best way I saw about giving a character's background was Joe Nesbo who is a Norwegian uh thriller author. He does uh these detective novels and he had his main character who has the worst name in English uh thriller history because in Norwegian Harry and his last name is Hull in Norwegian but when you read it in translated in English it's Harry Hull. It's a terrible [laughter] name for a protagonist. But what Nesbo did that was fantastic was Nesbo had his character taking a walk through downtown Oslo and he passed the buildings of different places where he had worked and he was able to reflect on what he had done, what his job had been when he was with this particular agency for the Norwegian government or this police department. And that was brilliant. So that's that's the challenge. Don't bore people. Keep it going quickly. bring new people up to speed very fast and then give folks I I say Kyle that what I do is it's like I own a big amusement park and every year I open a brand new roller coaster. So Chokepoint is just my latest roller coaster at my boundless uh I've got more acreage than I need uh that I'll ever I'll never run out of acorage to build roller coasters on with the books. Well, and Brad, I really appreciate whenever authors of thrillers, they put people into real places, right? So, he's walking down the streets of Oslo, not some madeup uh place in some madeup universe. I'm not really big into the whole fantasy world. And so, I'm just curious for you. Well, let's go and get into a 30,000 foot view of Chokepoint, just an overview of the synopsis of the book because you chose a specific area, right? And geography does play into this entire thing as well. So, how did you choose that place? And then go and give us an overview of the entire narrative. >> So, from a geopolitical standpoint in real life, I'm very concerned about the Chinese as is the US government. And so, uh, we're we're concerned about what China can do there. They've got a navy, but that they've got a navy that they can actually float on the water, but it can't travel very far. Uh, and so there's a lot of concerns about what China might or might not be able to do. And one of the things and we, you know, if we want to get into the weeds of politics, we can look at um we can discuss what Elon Musk did with Doge, which I think setting a bunch of 20some year olds loose to cut government when they don't understand how government works, I think is a mistake. I I would not go to my mechanic to have a cancerous mole or skin tag removed. I wouldn't have my mechanic do that. I would actually go to a dermatologist, somebody that knows what they're doing to remove that, get the margins out properly, and that kind of stuff. But we trusted this guy Musk uh who had no clue what he was doing to go in and slash just tons of stuff. And by all accounts, it didn't save us any money. It just it cut off a bunch of contracts. And one of the most important things in our national security that it cut off and it shows the ignorance of how the US government works is our strongest soft power tool, which was US aid. So we can make arguments about how much money should be going overseas to different countries. That's a fine argument to have if you're having the argument in its totality. If we're talking about what do we get in return for uh supporting health clinics in some place like Kinshasha in Africa where we're now seeing you know this huge Ebola outbreak that is happening now and uh if the supplies aren't getting there, if the testing kits aren't getting there, if we're not able to help them get their arms around it and it spreads potentially, uh there's all this talk now about we won't let Americans come back in here potentially with Ebola, which is another thing. Anyway, it's a soft power issue. We actually get a lot for a very little amount of money. And the Chinese, this is where it comes back to chokepoint. The Chinese do something very similar. And what the Chinese call their effort at soft power is the belt and road initiative where China looks at countries that it wants to influence and it identifies things that the country needs. You need a port upgrade so you can get more product in and out of your country or you need to up upgrade your road system or your rail system. We'll bring in the experts and we'll finance it for you. And what that does is it allows the Chinese to like the camel to get their nose in the tent and then they have influence in that country over domestic policy, foreign policy. And I've seen it happen in so many different countries. I mean, even Pakistan, other places. I said, "Has a country ever said no to China on one of these?" And it turns out they did. And it was Thailand. China wanted to go in and do this big project because Thai the Chinese don't. So you see all you heck I filled up my car yesterday. I know what gas prices are now and there is no end in sight to this crisis. Trump bounces around from one of three answers. You know, we're gonna bomb the hell out of them. They really want a deal or we're just about to sign the deal and then it just he waits a couple of days and they changes. It's three consistent I mean for the last 100 days we've been getting the same three [ __ ] answers. Pardon my French. That thing is such a problem. And if you look at where China is, China has an a similar problem in something called the Straight of Mala. And the Chinese are very concerned that if the US ever wanted to do to them what we're doing to the Iranians with helping to prevent shipping from getting in and out of the Straight of Mala, the US Navy could do it. So the Chinese always wanted to get the Thai government to allow them to make their own canal across the southern part of Thailand. And the Thai government said no. Partly because they didn't want to get in bed with the Chinese that deeply. And number two is in southern Thailand, it's full of Muslim extremists. And they were worried that if a canal went in that those Muslim extremists would go even wilder than they have been in the past and they would declare themselves independent of Thailand. >> So with my Thriller writer hat on, I thought, "Oh, this is interesting." Because Thailand's had a lot in real life of military coups. So a what is the US interest in that region? And we have a lot of partnerships and agreements with Thailand. One of our largest embassy complexes is in Bangkok. We have a lot we do with the Thai military and so on so forth. What if the Chinese wanted to come in and stir up so much trouble that Thailand would collapse and Thailand's military would have to step in and take control and it would be another military huta and then the Chinese are thinking they could get along with them. How might they do it? And how might they execute it in such a way that it doesn't look like they're involved? And that's where I come up with this idea that I've got an ex-Navy Seal who's very disgruntled that got drumed out of the SEAL teams and went to went to Mexico and got scooped up by the cartels. And then his handler in the cartels said, "This guy's amazing. We can take him globally. We should be renting out his services." And the Chinese end up hiring this guy to do all these bombings and all this kind of stuff. And it turns out that this guy used to be on Harvest SEAL team. And so Harvath has to hunt this guy down before any more of these bombs go off. in anymore. There's been a ton of Americans that die in the book in the very opening of the book because of what this disgruntled uh American has done over in Bangkok. >> Yeah. And and the thing about it at the beginning you established, okay, he was an EOD tech, but he was also a pretty hard Spartan dude and so goes through uh BUDS goes through SEAL training and then deploys as a SEAL. The thing I'm interested in even because I want to speak even more on onto China but there was another interview where you were talking about choke point where you mentioned the thusidities trap which is where there's a rising power challenging an established power so think China rising and challenging the established power which is the United States of America and then conflict obviously ensues thereafter and so talk a little bit more about the thusidities trap as it pertains not just to the book choke point but also to what's really going on between China and the US >> right so that that was a term that was coined coined in the late 1990s. I have a great article on my website about it uh that I linked to at bradthor.com. And the the idea is is that it is practically inevitable when you have an established power uh particularly one that has no uh no other global powers uh in competition with it. We call China a nearpeer power, but they're not at par yet. And so what this thusidities trap suggests is that uh China We're destined to butt heads with China. We're destined uh if you believe this concept that we are destined for some sort of a military conflict in the you know next 15 to 20 years potentially with China. We don't know what the trigger point will be. And that's part of what I was playing with in this book is this idea that while all eyes are on Taiwan and we expect China to make a move on Taiwan, they actually pivot and go someplace else. And that's the move that nobody sees coming. And that potentially can kick off war between China and the United States. uh whether it's something that happens in the Philippines where we have a uh military uh agreement with the the the Philippine uh government. There's a there's a lot of different places where we can get hung up uh and drawn into something even though we don't want to. And so there's this whole question now about has what happened in Ukraine, did that actually embolden the Chinese to eventually make a move maybe on Taiwan? uh right because a lot of people don't know that at the end of the Cold War when the Soviet Union broke up, a third of their nuclear arsenal was actually in Ukraine. And so we did a memorandum promising the Ukrainians that if they gave up their nukes, these Soviet nukes, we would make sure they never lost an inch of their sovereign territory. And so we it's called the Budapest Memorandum. We signed it. They said, "Great, get the Russians to sign it." And this is prevladimir Putin. We got the Russians to sign it. And so they felt like they could count on us to keep them out of war and to protect them. and they give up their nukes and now you see that uh you know that paper wasn't even worth what it was printed on uh because we didn't come to their aid at least not very quickly and and not in the levels not at the levels that I think everybody expected us to come to their aid. >> Yeah. Yeah. And whenever you looked really closely at the invasion of uh Putin and the Russians into Ukraine, obviously we had a dead person in the White House and you know it it was even worse than the red line that uh Barack Obama did in Syria to where it's like, "Hey, you better not see. You better not make me mad." See, and then they're like, "Oh, this red line that we're about to step over and then we did nothing." There wasn't a red line. There wasn't a warning. There was nothing. It was basically just it just kind of happened. And then now we're dealing with the fallout. But you mentioned, you know, the original cold war, but obviously the new cold war, you know, it feels like it's United States and China, but that's the headline, right? US vers China, right? And again, whenever you say it like that, it does make them seem like they are on equal playing fields, which is not exactly the case militarily, uh, from a financial standpoint with their economy, all of that. Yes, all eyes are on Taiwan. But even as you see throughout Chokepoint, it's a much larger conflict than that. and you can take shots at another organization, at another country, at another group of people without him making headline news. And so talk a little bit about that about almost I I hate to call it shadow warfare because that has a lot of different connotations that I'm not trying to bring into the conversation, but it is kind of a shadow warfare going on between the US and China. >> Yeah. So there's a lot of gray zone conflict. There's there's there's constantly stuff that we're that we're dealing with with the Chinese. Uh there's a lot of disinformation. So there's a lot of intelligence campaigns that are going on. Uh it is it is extremely interesting to watch particularly what's you you think of how much of its uh China's energy how much of its oil comes out of the straight of Hormuz and you have to wonder at what point does it get to be so painful for China that China says either you know they force the Iranians or they re reach a deal with the the Iranians and they tell the US listen we don't care what your objectives are in the region we have our own objectives too and we need this. We need the oil out of there and we are going to send in, you know, the PLA Navy and we're going to we're going to have our own ships escort uh Chinese flagged vessels out of there or whoever it is that they get their oil from. This has got to this has all the you think about what if you look at World War I it is if I had written how World War I started with Archduke Ferdinand with the fact that these guys [clears throat] these idiots tried to shoot and kill him and he went to the mayor's house and got patched up and it's only as he was leaving the mayor's house to leave town that one of the assassins luckily stepped out of a coffee shop at exactly the right time to see his car passing and then kills him and this sets off World War I and we're now looking at the straight of H for Hormuz and uh the dependence that the Chinese have on all the oil and stuff there. It it is it is a tinder box. I think we don't realize number one, like you said, how much kind of in the shadows we we butt heads with the Chinese and everything that's going on. You know, they just busted that mayor in California who was a Chinese uh Chinese asset. There's just so much stuff uh that's going on. There's a lot of tension beneath the surface and I don't think it would take a lot to get us into a a very difficult skirmish and I also don't know that if the Chinese moved on Taiwan. We have a big big dependence on Taiwan obviously because of the semiconductor business that's there. That's one of the biggest reasons that we're concerned about Taiwan. That was one of the big reasons the chip act came out. We want as many semiconductors to be built to be fabricated here because that helps us with our national security. But boy, I got to tell you, you just have to step back and and wonder, you know, I think President Trump thought that bombing the hell out of the I think he was very gullible. I think the I think the Israelis really took Trump for a ride. I think they had a good piece of intel that all those mullas, all the people were going to be in one place at one point. You could bomb a bunch of them, but I think Trump was lulled into a false sense of we have the best military in the world. But I think he didn't understand that Iran was not going to be Venezuela. I think he thought he could get in, out, shock and awe and all that kind of stuff. And it hasn't happened. He keeps telling us two more weeks, two more weeks, which is kind of his BS line about everything. His whole first term, he told us in two weeks he'd have a new healthcare plan that was going to be less than the cost of a cell phone bill, and we're all going to love it better than Obamacare. We haven't seen it, and it's his second term, and he's halfway through it almost. So, I think I I I think that the world is very dangerous, very complicated, and we don't necessarily have uh a a commander-in-chief right now that a has the grasp of history and an understanding of what's out there, nor does he have the humility to to say, "What if this doesn't work? What if I'm wrong?" 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That's mountain.com promo code Kyle. Well, Trump, I think he he's more so a he reads the tea leaves as opposed to becoming a true believer. And so there are a lot of people like again I don't really uh give a whole lot of of play to the fact that the Israelis like like tricked him or anything like that. I feel like Trump kind of makes his own decisions, but he's trying to react. He's trying to react in a world where there's >> reaction sometimes works well, but also you can't be as reactionary. you have to do some planning. This kind of gets back to the next thing I wanted to talk about because you brought this up and it's a through three-pointed choke point. So, right now we have the United States, which is a constitutional republic, but you know, people just call it a democracy, even though that's not even the same thing. >> And by the way, the word doesn't even appear in any of the founding documents. The founders did not like democracy. It doesn't exist anywhere in the founding documents, >> right? And the reason why is pretty obvious because they didn't want 51% of the population to rule the other 49. Like, that's the most basic way to look at it. But if you look at it like okay western democracy call it versus an authoritarian dictatorship. So obviously we in America we think in two-year cycles. As soon as the 2026 election was done it was well well it's not even done. As soon as it's done we're going to think about 2028. You know but you know before we could even think beyond uh what we're dealing with right now. Back in 2024 it's like I wonder what's going to happen during the midterms. The Chinese are not having to worry about that at all because it's Xihinping and then it's whoever is going to be after him and it's these people are going to be running things at infanitum, right? you know, they're not they're not gods, but they they will pass away, but their ideas will will endure. And that's where it becomes strategically very difficult, especially when you have the vacasillation in the US uh system where it seems like every four years we're just going to switch right back and forth to where the Republicans are going to control the White House and both houses of Congress and then the Democrats will do it. And so, if you're the Chinese, you're just going to try to hit the ball right down the middle of the fairway. >> Absolutely. There's no question. One of one of the things that I think would serve this nation so well is term limits. uh so that we don't have politicians that are just concerned with getting reelected. Um and the other thing, you know, we've got we've got gerrymandering to a large degree. You know, I will say this, and I show up for primaries, and I don't think I'm a cook, okay? But a lot of cooks show up on the left and the right for primaries. We don't have normies. We don't have down the center moderate, normal people, moderate left or moderate right that show up for primaries. They just don't care and they don't show up. And unfortunately what ends up happening is if you have a gerrymandered district, if it's a if it's a alldemocrat district or it's an all Republican district, what you're going to see is people that are way out on the edge, those are the people that can motivate primary voters to come out. So you're going to get far left or far right people. And when you get people that are that are so beholdened to a certain portion of their base that compromise on anything is seen as weakness and as giving up um that becomes a problem in DC. We're not able to reach across the aisle and say, "Okay, how do we get this done?" And I think that's the problem that we that we run with gerrymandering gerrymandering and and not having normal moderate lefties and righties come out and demand that we get better candidates beginning at the primary system because if you're in an all blue district and you win your primary, you've won the general. That's it. You're in. So we don't get the best people uh letting uh going to Washington on our behalf. You see, I mean, I just look at what's happening now in Maine with this Platner guy. >> I was literally about to say that. Graham Platner versus Susan Collins. It's like the left is so excited about Graham Platner, but I'm like, "Guys, he might be a psychopath." Like, he it's just insane. >> And they're very they're learning very quickly that uh how how fast a campaign can kind of unspool with the Nazi tattoo and text with old girlfriends and stuff like this. So, listen, it it's a it's a tough tough uh it ain't beanag, as they say. politics ain't bean bag. But I I would like to think that in a nation of 300 million plus people that we actually have >> people that can go to Washington that can put their selfish the the graph the greed the corrupt corruption the people making money on couchy and poly market trading on insider information. You should not be going to Washington to get rich. You should be going as an act of public service to serve your your fellow citizens, serve your nation. I you know our founders were farmers. They would go, they would vote, they go back to their farms and they go back to work. So the idea that people >> That's the Cincinnati approach. >> Yeah. The idea that people can be there for life is disgusting because they end up working for special interests. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I'm a I'm a conservative. Have been my whole life. I'm a small government pro- capitalism guy. And um you know, but my mind I believe a mind's like a parachute. Got to be open to work. And one of the things that I realized particularly in the last 10 15 years is as much of a capitalist as I am, I realized that you can't you can't do anything in a bubble without thinking about consequences because I look at you know we want to increase shareholder value. So how do we maximize profits? Well, they sent all these jobs, all these factory gigs overseas and nobody thought, wait a second, there's three generations of a family that have worked in this factory in West Virginia. Grandpa worked there. Dad worked there. I'm working. Oh, wait. My job just disappeared. And what do you do with that guy who figured he could have his whole career working in that factory because for the previous two generations, his his dad and grandpa worked there. So, I think I think we need to be smarter. We definitely have the capability to have better leadership. I think what we need to do is realize at the end of the day, I might not agree with everything on the other side of the aisle, but these are my fellow countrymen and women, and there ought to be certain things we can all agree on. strong national defense. Uh you know, you and I talked about democracy. Listen, the the the Constitution's set up to protect the smallest minority in the world, the individual. That's right. >> That is who it protects. And that's I want life, liberty, and the ability to pursue my happiness. I don't want the government getting in my way. Um and that was kind of Thomas Jefferson's thing. You know, if it doesn't break my leg or pick my pockets, my neighbor's business is kind of my neighbor's business. But I I got to tell you, Kyle, I there are nights where I worry that it might take another 9/11. I don't want that to happen. But I ask myself, is it going to be that? Is that what it takes to bring us back together to get us to take off the the jerseys and start looking at each other not as the other team who's unworthy of our respect and our friendship, but to start looking at each other again as as fellow Americans, because we've got more that unites us than divides us. You want the same things for your kids as, you know, somebody else down the street who might vote differently than you. I just it it it bothers me. We are too good a nation to be as petty as we are in our politics right now. >> Well, Brad, I I'll say this. This this September will be the 25-y year anniversary of 9/11. This country is not even recognizable as to the foundations of what it was like then versus what it is now. Because back then, yes, left, right center black white Islam Christian, whatever. Everybody was waving the American flag. We we were all like, "Oh, this can't stand. We can't happen." But I feel like we almost got on September the 10th of last year, we got a little hint as to how different things were when Charlie Kirk was murdered uh in public because, you know, how did the right and conservatives and Christians react? Prayer vigils. There's never been a more full Sunday morning of church attendance in this country, in the history of this country, than the Sunday after he was murdered on Wednesday, September the 10th. And then you saw what the left did, right? They either tried to explain it away or they outright celebrated it. It just feels very different. But, you know, you know, go ahead. >> But the but let's be clear. Let's let's not lump everybody in together. Not everybody on the right was in church and not everybody on the left was celebrating Charlie's murder. There were some absolutely abhorrent people on the left that were on social media and all that kind of stuff. I will say this, I think I I did not see a single Democrat politician of note that did not come out and condemn that. That, you know, to kill somebody for their political speech, for their ideology, for their free speech is horrible. It is so freaking anti-American. It's terrible. It's It doesn't matter if it was Charlie Kirk or if it was Bernie Sanders. It's the the attempts on President Trump. None of that is okay. None of us want to live in a country where we have to be afraid for our own lives because we are speaking. Listen, Charlie Kirk spoke what he believed to be true, what he thought was good for the country. He would sit on college campuses, the whole come on, let's let's talk and all that kind of stuff. I it I am glad that things didn't speed up. I was worried that we were going to see accelerationists try to pour fuel on it in really because there are some bad actors in this country that would like that think we're going in a bad direction and they want to speed us up to get to collapse. And I certainly don't want to I I don't want to see that happen. But I do want I do want to be fair because I actually had friends of mine on the left reach out and say, "Did you know him?" And I said, "You know, I I' I'd gone to lunch with Charlie once many years ago. I but I didn't have an ongoing I wasn't texting with him. I hadn't seen him in years and years and years. So, I didn't have a personal relationship with Charlie Kirk, but I did have people on the left reach out to me and express just shock and horror. So, just for whoever listening, I just want people to know that there are people of good conscience uh on both sides. And there are there were plenty of people that that just shook them to their core because we don't want to go back to a 60s where everybody's getting murdered, right? JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King, and blam. We don't want to live like that. That's not who we are. when Brad look what the Weather Underground did. They were accelerationists, I guess you could call, with what they were doing. Yeah. Throughout into the the '7s and so we don't want to get back to that place. I just feel like in the last 25 years, we don't have the communal bond. We don't have like a lot of people could cling to the American flag whether they voted blue or voted red. And now it's like, okay, on certain segments of the blue side, it's like, wait, no, the American flag is it's anathema, it's racist, it's, you know, it's it's colonial. It's it's all these different things. And even just going back to the the point about uh term limits, I'm I'm kind of one of those guys. I like a straight 12. This will never happen, but it's like [laughter] senators, you get two you get two shots at at it. You know, House, you get six. Or it's like, hey, you get three terms. So if you're in the House, you get six years. In the Senate, you get 18 because it's like, okay, the House is, you know, kind of the excitable chamber. The Senate's kind of the cooling chamber. I'm fine with all that. >> One thing that, you know, even circling back to the Chinese uh side of this equation >> because this this comes up, you you talk about like turn coats, right? So, you already mentioned, you know, the Chinese uh having spies here in the United States and they even become mayors of towns in California. How in the world did that happen? But you'll have the Chinese turn American citizens to do things that are against the interests of America and Americans. >> And then, but at the same time, I'll hear a lot of people on the right rail against that, but then our colleges and universities are full of Chinese students, right? paying full freight out of state tuition. Yeah. And then they're not staying here and starting companies and and doing that for the most part. A lot of them are going back to China. And even the ones that do stay here, the immediate worry and the concern is that they're giving trade secrets or things that they learn back to the Chinese Communist Party. And so for me, I when I hear a Republican talk about that, I'm like, okay, are you going to do something or are you just pointing at it? Because it's one thing to oppose, it's another thing to propose a solution. And so I mean, what what's your read of that? Because you know that goes into the whole turn code situation. >> Yeah. So one of the things we have to appreciate is that the Chinese pay full freight. They don't get they don't get markdowns on their tuition. They don't get assistance. They pull they they pay full freight which does help at a lot of universities. It helps them offer scholarships to uh American citizens who might not be able to pay. So that is one thing we did. The the colleges do charge them through the nose. They they pay the full the full bill there. Um, I would also make this argument as somebody who believes in the power of the United States. You give me a bunch of Chinese kids and I get to have them in the United States for four years and I get to subject them to the beauty of America. To let them feel what free speech is like, what our entertainment culture is like, what it means not to be followed everywhere you go, not to be racking up social credits, to not have the CCP looking over your shoulder every single moment of every day. Listen, if we get a hundred kids through and one of those kids takes an idea back to China that leads towards more of a liberal atmosphere, liberal in the sense of democracy and freedom, holy smokes, man. And they paid us, [laughter] they paid an American university to come over here and have Americanism seep into their bones. I think it's a I think it's a good thing. I you know, we take students in from from all around the world, and that is something that you do have to be concerned about is are they agents of a foreign government? So if you're going to allow these kids into advanced research programs or things like that, they obviously have to be fully vetted and we should talk about national security research programs. Are those areas where we really want foreign students playing a role even as you know graduate school assistants and stuff like that. That's got to be that's got to be weighed to a certain degree. But I will say to you, I like the United States being open to Chinese students because anytime we can get a crack at wearing them down and convince them our way is better, I mean, they got to come over here and just be like, "This is amazing." You know what I mean? >> So, I I I don't know that there's been a lot of optimistic and and I don't know that I've read enough stuff in the news that says that it's a danger to have Chinese kids here. And maybe there are some stories. I'm not familiar with them. I haven't I have yet to see that that we've had Chinese students here that have turned out to be a huge national security risk. But I could be wrong. Could have missed it. >> No, you're certainly more of an optimist than I am. I'm fairly pessimistic. Sky's always falling over here. Hey, if you ever need to consult me on something to be really, really sad in one of your thrillers, I got plenty of sadness up here. And so, yeah, I typically think of it like, okay, the odds of them swinging them are not nearly as good as the odds of the Chinese uh Communist Party basically continuing to control them, but that's not really the the center point of the issue. One thing I do want to get your get your read on, we're seeing this between in the war with Ukraine and Russia right now. Uh, one of the one of the most terrifying things that I've seen in all of modern warfare, Brad, is drone warfare, >> right? When you see these videos of these drones falling out of the sky and chasing a Ukrainian soldier into a foxhole or a Russian soldier or something like that, and all of a sudden they go boom. Because these drones are easy and cheap to produce and you don't have to put a whole lot of an explosive on there to take out a human body. We're basically just, you know, water balloons as humans ultimately. We don't have an exoskeleton any of that kind of stuff. And so it doesn't take a lot to take us out. And so I feel like Brad, a lot of us are still stuck at this mindset of, you know, warfare back 250 years ago, right? When we're fighting the English, where it's like, okay, you on your side and your stupid little uh, you know, wigs and us on our side and then we shoot at each other until all of us fall or run away. And then it got to more modern, right? So we're we're going, you know, from building to building, clearing buildings and, you know, IEDs and all that kind of modern warfare. A war between the United States and the and China, unless there's some sort of nuclear fallout and we're left just with sticks and stones, the drone warfare piece of it, especially with drone swarms. We've seen evidence of drone swarm activity even here in the United States from nefarious actors because I' i've wondered aloud about if Trump's outside at the UFC event uh that that's coming up, you know, as of the recording of this, it will have already passed by the time this comes out. But, you know, a drone swarm, he's standing outside and like how many how many I mean, you can't have an iron dome for drones. That's 100% effective. And so, I'm I'm pretty concerned about what the next the next kind of type of warfare that we're getting into. Brad, >> no, you're you're very correct. Um, you know, it's I I point people to the French. I think the French are some of the smartest people in this realm right now is the French weren't going around screaming about how much support they were giving the Ukrainians. They were giving the Ukrainians a lot of support and they still are. And they embedded a lot of French military advisers with the Ukrainians to learn how to do the drone warfare, how to defend against it, how to launch these attacks. So, the French are going to come out of uh out of this with some incredible battlefield experience because of their close relationship with the Ukrainians. I think we've I think we've to a large degree been we've been playing catch-up when it comes to the drone stuff. You know, we pay, you know, million dollars plus for a Patriot missile to take out a drone, but the drone itself is $40,000. These things can be produced quickly, cheaply by all accounts. Um, and it's listen, you see how Ukraine has held Russia back and you see how we have not been able to force the uh the Iranians into surrender. Remember, President Trump had said his original goal was unconditional surrender and he was going to pick the next leader of Iran. That's 100 days later. How's that going? That's not going well. And you know, these strikes on their neighbors and on the uh the oil facilities of their neighbors. I mean, I and I'm a thriller writer. I never anticipated that they were going to go after Dubai. And by the way, I hate all those influencers who are living in Dubai. And man, I don't like property destruction. I don't like war. But I took a certain perverse glee in seeing all those smug influencers, you know, all those guys on steroids and all the girls with the plastic surgery and everything being chased out of Dubai and back to their home countries uh in the middle of this. I I would I would of course rather it never happen, but that was a little bit of perverse joy I got out of that. But listen, this is the future of warfare. It is these drone things. And you know, you see what happened in the Ukrainians uh and the Russians were trying to jam the signals of drones. And so what did they go to? They went to these huge spools of fiber optics that are on these drones. That blows my mind that they can fly drones for kilometer after kilometer after kilometer with a thin fiber optic line that's unspooling behind it so that they can give control give codes to the drones or give commands to the drones uh to do what they want. And there's even I think it's on the the the shahed the shahed the Iranian drone if I remember the article I read uh correctly they actually have alternative targeting packages um targeting decks built into kind of the brain of the drone. So it tells the drone, here's your primary target, but if you can't hit it, here are two others to look for in the area or look for something that looks like this. So the drone can actually react and it is really the future of warfare. And one of when you talk about the swarms, one of the things that I saw, and I don't know if the Chinese have just kind of hinted at it, that the Chinese lie all the time. So until I actually see one up in the air, you know, footage of one, I'm not going to believe it. but a carrier drone that can release lots of little drones out of it so it can get on station and then drop the swarm. And if you'll remember probably about two weeks ago when President Trump was making the argument for the ballroom, one of the security things that he said was going to be necessary was kind of a drone port like a sky port on top of the ballroom. Uh where I imagine that would all be kind of drones that handled counter drone. It had a counter drone assignment, right? So, their job would be go knock drones out of the sky and stuff. But, yeah, I I if I was in the Secret Service, I probably and I'm sure they've addressed this. And I don't know how you stop a drone uh swarm from getting in there. I don't know if they have like big huge miniguns like hidden on the roof of the White House, but yeah, I I'd be afraid anytime the president stepped outside, no matter where he was, whether it was a rally, whether it was the UFC fight, which uh hopefully when this airs, that will have gone. I hope they get good weather. I'm not a big fan. I I I like the UFC. I don't like that for America's 250th birthday. I I just think it's I think it is so on the nose about us fighting each other in this country, Democrat, Republican, red and blue. I think I I I think if I had scripted it in a book, my editor would have pulled it out and said it's too on the nose. I would have liked to have seen something happen that was more unifying. I would have liked to have seen Republicans and Democrats come together uh to celebrate the country to say we have our differences. It's been tough, but we're going to set the example for our fellow citizens by putting our differences aside for this one special day, 250. I mean, we could have King Charles come here. How can we [laughter] have the king of England come and help celebrate our 250th anniversary, but we can't do something lovely like bring Republicans and Democrats together on the South Lawn? I I I don't know, >> Brad. What's more lovely than two grown men that are trained killers punching each other in the face? Hey, I love it. I'm I I guess call me a pugilist, call me whatever, bloodthirsty, all the different things. I think it's going to be awesome. So, you need to you need to like stop being such a funny daddy. Okay. >> I like Listen, I like the UFC. My daughter doesn't like it. My wife doesn't like it. And I would in I I would like to see some sort of an entertainment that is more uh again, I just don't think, you know, a UFC fight is the best way to celebrate America. And UFC is popular. Granted, I like it. There's more people that don't like it than do like it. So, it's very, and you and I can both like it. We can be very excited about it. I mean, look it, I was going to make a movie with Ronda Rousey. I think Ronda is absolutely cool as hell. Um, but I do think it's narrow casting on America's Birthday. I think we could have found something that we could all get behind on America's birthday instead of just a segment of us. I think again, it's emblematic of the the times that we're in that we couldn't we couldn't pick something to do on the people's south lawn. The people's house is the White House. Uh, that that represented just a moment to step away from combat. That's what we do all day long in politics is combat. I would [clears throat] have liked to seen one combat free day, >> but it's not on July 4th. That's true, too. I mean, it's coming up for Flag Day. It's President Trump's 80th birthday. Um, and guess what? He won the election. He gets to do what he wants. So, if he wants a UFC fight on his birthday, just like if he wanted to celebrate the US Army on his birthday, the anniversary of the army, it's completely up to him. There is he can do that if he wants to. And and that's where it ends. I don't have to like it, but you know what? Good for him. I I like our system. I like that we have the freedom to respect elections and respect the outcome of elections and President Trump won and so he gets to call the shots for America's birthday. >> Well, and the upgrade of upgrades. I mean, we upgraded your pillow selection in your studio there, but also during the Biden administration, we had guys with fake boobs running around with their tops off and now we got two guys with their tops off, but they're trying to kick each other's heads into oblivion. But I will say this as well. Uh, one thing that I'm kind of interested in is in with all these kinds of things is, you know, we didn't even mention with the drone stuff, we didn't even mention AI and quantum. We didn't even mention the fact that we're trying to get guys, you know, out of rooms in, you [clears throat] know, somewhere here stateside, basically playing video games, blowing up targets overseas. AI and quantum is going to be able to be weaponized because everyone thinks that's about the economy and the economic impacts of AI. It all kind of circles the same drain which it comes back to whether or not it's going to be able to be useful in warfare. But the the thing that you talked about a lot in the book or you didn't talk about it explicitly because obviously it's a thriller just the weaponization of chaos, right? We don't always need direct warfare. We can destabilize. We can use proxies. We can use bombings, political manipulations, we can do coups. That's all kind of part of the shadow warfare piece of things. But one thing I think that attaches to, Brad, and I' I've, you know, extrapolated this out and thought about a lot and talked about a lot on the show, is just this ultimate crisis of discernment we're experiencing just as as a people and as a society. Conspiracy theories and theorists are having their profiles elevated to an extreme degree. You can make a claim and then people in your audience hear it as evidence and it's like, no, that's not what evidence is. Evidence is a claim that can be backed up with some sort of a truth, right? Some sort of an evidence. That's what makes it evidence. be tested. Thank you. And you know, we have alltime low institutional trust because a lot of the things we saw during 2020, not just with CO 19, but with the BLM riots and the billion dollars worth of damage and the lies we were told even about that case. And so the the thing about it is is it's like a bunch of these really nefarious things are all meeting at the same point. Uh in an unbelievable acceleration in technology, institutional distrust, nothing can be what it seems. Everything's got to be what it doesn't seem. That's what the conspiracy theorist, that's the thing about the conspiracy theory. It's a superpower. You just always expand out the group that's involved. So, it was one person, then it was a small group of people, now it's an evil cabal of people. And now it's, oh my gosh, it's some sort of nameless, faceless they out there that we can't even define and fight. And so, for you, that's really interesting to work into a thriller. It's another thing to have to live in this world and be like, where does all this go? Well, it's a I I came across a a a way to kind of put that in a it's a great phrase which is I can't use logic to talk you out of something that logic didn't talk you into to begin with. >> So that's great. >> If you particularly anger is the best fuel for politicians and for corporations. So, they use anger to drive you to the polls, whether it's on the right or on the left. It's that's how they get you out to the polls. They want you angry. >> They want anger and fear. >> Anger and fear. That's how they get you to keep coming back and clicking on the next article that's online, whatever. And you know who knows this better than anybody else? >> Our enemies. The Chinese, the Iranians, the North Koreans, and the Russians. So if you're angry, if you're really upset, you know, your algorithm is going to push more stuff towards you that gets that reaction out of you. And you need to take a breath and say, "Who benefits from me being angry? Who who benefits?" Because the Russians in particular, the Chinese are really good there. All four of them, the Iranians and the North Koreans too, are really really good at for if you they are good at finding cultural um fault lines and putting pressure on them. So if they know that MAGA ticks off people on the left, they're going to try to push more stories that'll anger the left about the Make America Great Again movement. And the same thing on the other side. So they'll push stuff about blah blah blah this that the other thing to make people on the right angry. They know how to get you. And I've been asked by people, what do you think America's most the the weakest link in our armor, if you will, our national security armor. What do you think it is? And I always say it's social media because if I am going particularly like I have older members of my family that are that do a lot of Facebook pages and a lot of Facebook groups and what happens when they're there is they think they're surrounded by people of like mind and they are for the most part everybody that's in there thinks politically the way they do and what happens when you're around people who think the way you do. You drop your guard, Kyle. And when your guard comes down, you are susceptible to being influenced. And that's where the bad guys put an idea in there. And because your guard is down, you know, we make the joke in my house, too good to check. >> You know, you get told the story, it's too good to check. You know, we we have the we have the computing power, more computing power in the palm of our hands than NASA had to send the astronauts to the moon. And we so rarely check things. We so rarely step out of our silos, our media silos to just see is this right? Am I being manipulated? And I think the default for everybody particularly in the you know I remember when deep fakes started coming and we were all like oh >> yep crud we are in big big trouble. And I think with AI I I mean I'm seeing stuff now and I am I I am doubting Thomas. Every single thing I see I check. Okay. But I see some AI stuff now and I'm like >> is that real? And then I'll be like whoa the level to which it looks like a human being. I mean some of it's some of it's obvious AI slop but it's we as Americans if you are a good citizen you should be operating from the position is this true? How do I verify it? And then what is my responsibility once I know the truth? Do I nod and go along with stuff that I know is not true or do I say to my friends at the risk of upsetting them? Guys, I looked into this. This isn't true. Because we cannot build healthy communities for ourselves, our businesses, our families, our our fellow churchgoers. We can't build a a nation on lies and conspiracy theories and stuff like that. And and I agree with you. I think people are way too susceptible to those these days. I think life is complicated. People want easy answers, right? In conspiracy theories are life is messy. There's not always a good answer for why things happen, you know? So that's I was at a I was at a cocktail reception. Very successful people. Senators were there. There was a governor there. And I stood next to a guy that if I told your audience who he was, I bet eight out of 10 people would know who this successful businessman was. He confided in me that he thought the Democrats controlled the weather. I'm like, you've got to be effing kidding me. The Democrats control the weather, which is why they send all the mudslides and forest fires and blah blah blah. California. I'm like because that's a Democratic state and they control the weather. I couldn't and I thought he was pulling my leg. I thought he was pulling my leg. And what you'll often find with a conspiracy theorist is in for a penny, in for a pound. If they believe one, they believe all of them. >> That's it. >> And it was there was no talking [clears throat] this guy out of get out of it. Again, I can't talk I can't use logic to talk you out of something that logic didn't talk you into. But you can be >> for them. >> Well, and Brad, for them, it's not all a cart. It's everything on the buffet, right? So they take the entire thing and and we've seen these these shifts that have taken place like so back in the 1300s we have the first bank established in Florence. So it went from land being wealth to money being wealth. 1700s first steam engines. So we went from human bodies doing work to machines doing work. 1900's information explosion. So it went from wisdom like like wisdom is knowledge and now it's information is knowledge. But now with AI we've gone from humans think and create to machines think and create. And so we will allow the machine to think and research for us. And I use this as an example because of how ridiculous it was. But Bad Bunny performed the Super Bowl halftime this year. Obviously it was in Spanish. Nobody knew what he was saying. But I knew that the lyrics of his songs were very runchy cuz that's his kind of mo. So the next day, Brad, I go to I think it was Chat GBT Gro. It was one of those. And I said, "Tell me which songs Bad Bunny sang at the Super Bowl halftime show and then translate the Spanish uh lyrics into English so that I can read them." And it it literally said Bad Bunny didn't perform the halftime show this year. It was George Strait. And I'm like, [laughter] aside from that being the most insanely hilarious switcheroo, I literally told the AI, George Strait's never played the halftime show. That'd be awesome. But the Cowboy isn't riding away into that Super Bowl. It was Bad Bunny. And then he goes, "Oh, I'm sorry. That's my mistake. >> If you didn't know to push back, you wouldn't you wouldn't. >> If I didn't know, >> Yeah. I'm going to go out in front of the entire world and make an absolute doofus of myself. And so that's part of the issue as well is how much easier is it going to be for people to be manipulated when they're basically allowing for the machine to do their thinking, problem solving, and discernment for them. We're going to need just like we need, I think, more civics to be taught more thoroughly in school to to teach children what their role is as they grow into adulthood in America to be the best possible citizens they can be. I think we need classes about digital hygiene. You know, it's like a health class but for online. I think that's really important because yeah, AI is it is amazing and I it lies all the time. It makes things up. I think to call it artificial intelligence is such a misnomer because there is no intelligence. Essentially what it is is it's a high-speed search engine that does that guesses. So it can go out and retrieve stuff really really fast, but it it leapfrogs. It doesn't swim through the pond. It jumps from lily pad to lily pad. makes big assumptions as it goes from one lily pad to the other. I I gotta be honest with you. I think I I don't think AI is going to be the job killer and the end of times that a lot of people think it's going to be because I just don't think it has the capability. I don't think it has the capacity. I think it's like I I've done stuff with AI where I've said, "Okay, give me give me a concept for the next Brad Thor book." And so what does it do? It goes out and looks at all my books. And again, every book was pirated from this uh David Baldachi was just talking about this from a big Russian pirate site that they train the large language models off of. So if I go say give me a plot and make sure it doesn't jive with anything my competitive set has done, my colleagues have written, it comes back with just garbage. It's just it takes everything and then just gives me the middle of the road. So I know my job is safe. Uh uh there is no humanity, there's no spark of life, there's no magic, there's no soul in it. So therefore, EV is incapable of doing some of these big things. >> So I'm gonna be the guy who says I actually don't think AI is gonna is going to do uh all the bad things that people think. I just don't think it's capable to be honest with you. >> So well and Brad, that doesn't make you a leadite, but it's one of those things that if if you stop thinking and creating, you cease to be what it is essential to be a human, right? Because you're right, these AI machines do not have morality. They have programmed morality. meaning the left-wing people that program this stuff kind of get it to kind of mimic morality, but there is no spark of life there because machines don't have the IMO day. They don't have the image of God written on every single part of their DNA. But Brad, uh, we're out of time. I always love talking with you because we we talk about the book for a little bit and then we shoot WAY OFF INTO RIGHT FIELD. BUT IF WE CAN DO this every summer, that's fine with me. But before we let you go, is there anything else you want to get off your chest? >> Well, I want to say how much I enjoy chatting with you, Kyle, and your audience. You know what I that we can be different flavors of right of center and we can still agree, we can still politely and intelligently discuss things. We can share ideas because I always believe the mind is like a parachute. Got to be open to work, right? And I always look forward to talking with you because I've got an opportunity to learn something new. So I now know it definitely was Bad Bunny and it was not George Strait at the Super Bowl. So I can go forth with that confidence that I can say it definitely wasn't George Strait. So guys, I haven't accomplished anything in my career up to this point, but right there, I just helped you grow a ding dried. I helped you make a connection for life. Brad, you're the man. Thanks again for coming on. >> Thanks for having me, Kyle. >> Thank you everyone for listening to this episode. Wherever you're listening to this, please subscribe, rate, and leave us a positive fivestar review. If you want me to come speak live at your event or on your podcast, shoot me an email to info@undaunted.life. Follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook. And check out our website for everything else, including how to donate to keep more content like this coming. www.undaunted. undaunted.life. The music on this podcast is the song Conqueror by the Christian metal band Void Awaken. Be sure to stream their music on Spotify, Apple Music, and wherever else you get your music. I'm your host, Kyle Thompson. Remember, keep pushing back darkness. Keep forging spiritual, mental, and physical resilience. Keep seeking the Lion of Judah. Now [music] heat.