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/31days to download this resource for free. That's undaunted.life/31days. Start your reset today. This is Undaunted Life, a man's podcast. I'm your host, Kyle Thompson. Let's get into it. Greg Hurwitz, it is always great to see you, sir. Do you have a very consistent background? I think every time you've been on, you've had a fire going in the background. Is it really that cold in California? It's not at all, but it's a good writing distraction to have a little bit of movement around. Okay, so you got a little bit of movement. Now, do you do any like, you know, white noise or any I've heard there's brown noise, green noise, pink noise. They all have like different whatever registers. >> noises, man. Okay, tell me about the noises. Let's hear. Well, I usually have noise just to block everything out. I got a new, you know, padded door on my office that's quiet, but half the time I have 300 lb of Rhodesian Ridgeback in here with the mutt. So, I got four dogs up here and I got a balcony that way. Um and so, I like to keep it quiet. I like to be I don't want to hear anything from the house. Now and then I'll put on classical music, especially if I'm writing about a piece of classical music, I'll just kind of loop it and get it into my, you know, subconscious. But, I don't like um hearing noises around the house. Some people can only write in cafes and stuff, which I just don't understand. I cannot read nor write whenever there's really any type of sound going on. So, I I'll put on There's something I I just went on YouTube and I typed in soft white noise, and then there was a video that was called softest white noise. So, I'll have that in the background. I sleep with pink noise on cuz apparently it's uh supposed to make you sleep better. >> Pink noise is the sleep one? All right. >> That's that That's what I heard from dorks on the internet, and they're never wrong. And so, like how how in the world could anyone be wrong? So, yeah, I got the pink noise app, but I do want to get into the subject matter for today because, you know, we've got the new book out. It's already doing well and everything, but you've got a novella coming out here next month. If you guys are listening this on time, this will be coming out in May of 2026. It's called The Delivery. And what's interesting about The Delivery, there was already a subject matter that I wanted to ask you about before I knew what the subject matter was for The Delivery. Because my understanding is The Delivery deals with a lot of different things, but artificial intelligence, quantum, like that kind of thing is like a major theme of that. And so, I guess the thing that I'm a little concerned about is this this idea that the culture or really the the society at large is moving away from human brains, human minds thinking and creating, and then just giving that over to the machine. And I've thought about it in a lot of different ways. I've thought about it even in terms of, you know, shoot, project should be a part of this conversation. What it means to be human, Greg, to where it's just like if we give our thinking and creating capacities over to something that's, you know, algorithmically inclined to usually make us happy and satisfied, I don't know that I really like that very much. And so, I guess talk about how that became a part of The Delivery, and then you can just talk about Delivery, and then we'll flow from there. Well, I've done a lot of tracking of some of the extremism that we've seen explode through the culture. Part of that is is as a thriller writer, I know a psyop when I see one. Mhm. And so, I started to look at all the issues that have us at each other's throats on a daily basis. And sure enough, a lot of them are sourcing to hostile foreign regimes. Sure. >> And then I got very interested. I mean, our extremism really grows out of um there's three players. One are hostile foreign regimes running troll farms and operations all through, you know, it's not just our social media, it's on hunting and fishing websites. It's in It's It's everywhere. Um the other is psychopathic algorithms cuz they're maximized for profit, and profit maximizes off stickiness. Um and those algorithms, I think of them as as human sin fused to uh machine learning. Okay. But, that when they're driving that toxicity. And the third The third one is bad faith domestic players. There are some people here who don't really care how divided we are and stand to profit from it. Sure. >> write a lot about that and what the basis is, the need what we need to regrow and put roots down and have fresh uh seeds, a fresh orientation in the world. That's really important to me in light of the change cuz change is going to be hurtling at a rate that we will scarcely be able to keep up with. So, we better have our incentive structures lined up pretty well. Well, Greg, as as I look look at this, I I just got to tell you like typically the church is usually behind on everything. That's why the church, and I don't mean that as like a particular denomination, I mean Christ's church writ large, they typically are on the back end of things. They're downstream of culture, downstream of what's happening happening politically, and there's very few people I guess that are stalwart voices anymore, or at least they're not amplified. And there's something to that as well. But, I feel like a lot of pastors and a lot of ministries are being caught completely flat-footed by what AI and quantum actually means and the effect that it's going to have on their flock. And I don't I don't just mean because of what I just described earlier, which is essentially AI being a lure, but every lure has a hook. And so, the the lure is, "Hey, you don't have to write that email anymore. Hey, just buy a Mac Mini and set it up in a in a separate room, and then set up an agent AI to do all these things for you, and it's just going to make money for you while you're in your sleep." And and look, there are great things. Like I have three or four AIs up at any one time, and I use them for different things in different ways, but I don't use them to create, I use them to fetch. "Hey, go fetch me some information on this." Or "Hey, if I reworded this title, you know, to be a little bit more snappy, like how would you do it?" Hey, truncate this paragraph down to to the nuts and bolts of what I'm trying to get out there. And so, it's helpful, but I'm not letting it create and write for me. And I'm I'm even curious for you, is there any pull or tug inside of you to let the AI kind of do your job for you, right? Because you got enough stuff out there. You got 11, you know, novels in the Orphan X series, and you've done enough thriller writing with Batman and everything else. It can learn you. An AI agent can learn you, and then gosh, you can take those Rhodesian Ridgebacks on a few more walks if you're not actually sitting there pounding the keyboard. Yeah. I mean, where to start? I mean, I think part of what you're saying is, and this is very much how I think of it, we need to have AI be a tool, but we have to be the one who is wielding the tool. We don't want to be wielded by We want to be sorcerer Mickey from Fantasia. We don't want to be the eyeless mops hauling buckets of water. So, we have to be the ones directing it. And for me, it's very similar. AI is the best I use Grok. Grok is the best personal assistant and researcher I've ever had. It's extraordinary how useful it is and how great it is. But, I don't have it where it switches over, it's under my direction at all times. And I think the biggest problem we have right now, I think there it's twofold. One, I don't think that people comprehend the extent to which deep machine learning is reading and learning them, as you were saying. If you spend 1 minute scrolling on TikTok, there are 26 different uh bio measures it can take from your body. How your pupils dilate, exactly where your thumb's snagging to look at something. And so, I think about this a lot like it's it's if I go and swim around on algorithms, and I do this a lot when I'm tracking extremism. But, it's really funny. Like I always used to like to watch uh like bar fights or street fights. Like if I was out somewhere and somebody got in a fight, I found it very hard to look away from a brawl in the street or something. Yeah. And so, what's very interesting is I'll notice like so so and that has nothing to do with my searches or peregrinations on social media, but I found all of a sudden, obviously if one of those flew up, I'd stop to look at it. It's like, "Oh, a bar fight. A guy gets knocked out." So, then part of what happens is I start to get fed stuff that's more and more extreme. And then you get Then I start to get fed stuff that's all like immigrants beating the hell out of like petite blonde girls. Like it'll start to just move, and it'll start to move your worldview, and it'll start to define different enemies. And so, what the problem of that is is an extent. There's not really a sin is really just something that's in not in its proper place anymore. It's not like um having concerns about money or or sex or your self-definition or negative, it's just when you elevate them above everything else. And so, that starts to be the onboarding process. It starts to onboard you into things that are more and more extreme. And so, it's It starts to feed the part of your brain that likes to do a little dance with chaos a little bit more and more, and then it opens you up to direct you into whatever political stream it wants. And the direction of the political stream doesn't matter. Because if you are running a troll farm in North Korea or at the at the behest of the Islamic Republic, you don't really care if somebody moves very very far to the left or very far to the right because they meet around back. That horseshoe meets in nihilism. And once you're nihilistic, it doesn't matter if the next bus that pulls up and you get on is a hardcore far-right neo-Nazi one or a hardcore far-left violent antifa disruptive group. It doesn't matter to North Korea. What they What matters is to create the conditions for that nihilism where you no longer believe in anything. And so, it's powerful. And The Delivery, my my next story or the novella that's coming out is very much about that. It's about how we get seduced by luxury into offloading more and more responsibility even in a family. There's a There's a family with a young daughter at the center of the delivery. Um and they're given sort of a magical technology that's going to solve a lot of things in their life and it starts solving a lot of things in their life and then it keeps solving more and more things in their life. It's very hard to know where that line is between luxury and shortcut to starting to lose control and indulging too much your laziness or your greed or your lust or whatever how whatever you want to label it. And then it starts to become a tool cuz then it has you by the by the leash instead of vice versa. Yeah, and I think that that's one of those things, you know, your AI is learning you. And so I remember uh cuz the first one I started to use was ChatGPT cuz I guess it was like the name brand, right? It was the Band-Aids of bandages I guess you could say. And so I was using it and then the AI knew who I was, right? It knew about Undaunted Life of Man's podcast and it knew about my other show The Daily Blade. And The Daily Blade is 5 minutes a day, you know, quick quick just to the point, you know, Bible study stuff for for men devotional type stuff. And I remember the first time it asked me this and I was like, "Oh, no." So I asked it to fetch me something to research a topic or whatever and then it prompted me cuz I'm prompting it, right? That That's my That's my role. And then it prompted me, "Would you like me to turn this into a 5-minute transcript for The Daily Blade?" And I was like, "No. No." I I I think I yelled at the screen and I didn't type back. I was like, "Absolutely not. Like under no circumstances would I want you to do that." And part of the other thing that I feel like is manipulating us, Greg, is we look at it like it's neutral. And how many things in this world are morally neutral? And I even heard today uh that Anthropic brought in a bunch of leaders and including Christian thought leaders. I mean, who the heck are these people? I didn't even know any of them. But uh to talk to them about the morality, the the constitution of what Anthropic has built with their AI chatbot Claude, right? And And what that means and what it does. And what I'm hearing is not, "Hey, we're trying to make sure this thing is, you know, provides the most utilitarian, you know, the most good for the most amount of people." What I'm hearing is we're trying to make sure that our chatbot can make people think it has its best interests at heart. But that is a moral distinction that only image bearers of God can have, humans. A machine can never do such a thing. What's What What's your read on that? A machine can never do what? A machine can never be a moral agent. It can never make a decision based on uh on morality. Look, and and you know, I've written about this quite a bit in the Orphan X series. And in Lone Wolf, one of the things I was reacting to very much in that book is I saw that they're starting to design So the rates of PTSD in soldiers has risen quite drastically since World War II. Even guys who are far away. Like if you compare, you know, being in a container in the in the desert in Vegas doing drone warfare, it's very different than boots on the ground in Iwo Jima. I'm not saying that there's not a toll and I'm not saying that it's not an incredible and awesome responsibility, but it's different. But what we're seeing is more and more PTSD the further in some regards that people are getting. And that's kind of wild to think about and figure out. And so there's a bunch of reasons for that. A big one is the breakdown of our communities in general. When people came back from World War II, we had ritual, right? We had celebrations in the street and war heroes were honored and respected. And we had men went back to men's groups, you know, at their church and at the community center. And we had bowling leagues and they had softball teams and they had other groups where there were on packs of like-minded men on their evolutionary design, which was the thing in war that was the most horrifying and the most horrific and the most meaningful because everything's existential. So we've deteriorated a lot of that fabric. And part of what is happening now is that they started to want to design an AI conscience, a conscience built of ones and zeros to make the kill decision so that humans could be out of the loop entirely so that we could have removed their suffering and trauma. And when I saw that being developed, I made that a centerpiece. A lot of Orphan X is him up against different kinds of emerging technologies cuz I think those are all the Bond villains of the day if they go awry. But basically, if you have something that is that takes humans completely out of the decision loop, you feed in targets and it goes and kills them, one of the only breaks that we have on endless warfare is in fact the suffering and pain and sacrifice of our soldiers and their families. And so there's a line by Donald Rumsfeld in uh Fog of War where he says, "When you see war get this profitable, you're going to see more of it." And there's something that's very similar, which is if we want to remove and excise the pain, "Oh, it's just our drones fighting China's drones over in some place halfway around the world." We lose that. And it's very hard to give up because we don't want to feel the same pain and we don't want to have the same trauma and we don't want to have the same chaotic meltdowns that we have. 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Well, I think you have your finger on the pulse of something very interesting as well when you brought up community there, Greg, because the other thing we had with the guys coming back from World War World War it took those ships a while to get across the Atlantic Ocean, right? Uh it took a a while for them to come back from Japan across Pacific Ocean. And so now it's like they're back stateside. They fly out of Germany and they're they're on the East Coast of the United States, you know, 10-12 hours later. And it's like sheesh, there's there's no decompression for these people. And you're right, you know, there there's very few all-men spaces anymore where men can go and do things where women haven't infiltrated or where, you know, effeminate men haven't infiltrated. And so it it's kind of hard for these men to really find uh find, you know, a sustaining type of community. But the other thing I find interesting and a lot of commentators have pointed to this, Greg, is we're we're losing a shared experience as a culture. And so, you know, people love to talk about the Walter Cronkite days about, "Hey, everyone tuned in to kind of the same newscast." Now, Cronkite was left of center, but it wasn't blatantly obvious. But now because of algorithms and outrage, which you've thought and written a lot about recently, every one of us is siloed. I mean, every time I go to Instagram or or to to YouTube and I find someone that has millions of followers or subscribers and I've never heard of them, not a single person in my huge web of people that I know has ever even mentioned this person, but they're mega famous to a tremendously tall, skinny silo of people, I'm like, "Okay, good for that person. They're able to make a living with this very niche point of view or or interest." But I'm like, "Gosh, you know, everyone used to gather around to watch, you know, the the series finale of Mash or Seinfeld. Everyone used to gather around to watch, you know, games game six of the Bulls at the Utah Jazz at the NBA finals in the '90s." And now we don't really have any cultural experience that is that shared save for something like the Super Bowl, but that's even a little bit uh artificial if that makes any sense. So what What are your thoughts there? Well, Carl, you've read The Great Divorce, right? Of course, yeah. >> Lewis? Yeah. I mean, what that is when we're removed from a shared narrative and we are removed and distant from each other with our little bespoke entertainments, then that's basically a C.S. Lewis's description of hell in The Great Divorce. We're far from God and we're 1,000 miles from each other. And so on the one hand, it seems amazing to say, "Oh, I can create my own book. I can have my own I want my own Jack Reacher book, but I want it written using all my family's names and I want to have the vocab tuned to my IQ, which is 113, and don't have any violence against kids. And you push a button and out it comes. Mhm. And so we think it's what we want, but it's really Pleasure Island from Pinocchio. Mhm. Right? You can go, you can indulge in everything, and it'll turn you into an ass, and then you're enslaved by it. And so and I think pornography has shown that very, very well, right? Pornography on offer. I mean, kids, you know, eight, nine-year-old boys go into school where we're like, "Hey, you know, you're going to have unlimited access to pornographic imagery that is more excessive and vast in its variety and quantity than all of your ancestors back to the beginning of time in your pocket. And now go to school. It's in your desk, it's in your locker, it's in the bathroom, it's everywhere with you. But we can't do anything about it because, I don't know, free speech." There's this helplessness that we've handed over adult responsibility. And I think that's often what gets in the way of our ability to bridge a divide because I think that some of the kids who are dislocated by this stuff, in a way, they're almost like evidence of our sin of having abdicated our responsibility. And so it's easier to meet them with disdain rather than try to reach out and figure out how to help them. But you're right. I mean, if you get everything that is what you think you want in the short term, that's a disaster. That's a nightmare. >> Yeah. And just to give the the the quickest example, I still remember, you know, going through when I was an undergraduate, wandering through my university. I had We There's a lot of weird bookstores in Boston, and I'd wander through and you'd find this thing. And on this front table, here's a cool World War II memoir. And here's a book about propaganda and in some Like there's all these weird things that you get. It's the opposite of when you order books online because they have your algorithm and they think, "Oh, well, Kyle, if you like Jason Bourne, you'll like Jack Reacher." It narrows what it is feeding you. And so you become more and more specific and in that lack of chaos, the chaos of interaction with new ideas and books, you're you're instead of expanding, which you're supposed to, you're narrowing and narrowing. It's the same rule for for variations and mutations in DNA when we reproduce. There's always pieces that flip and change slightly to alter the genetic material so that we're not all exactly identical. There's wild cards. And that lack of what can be automated in deep machine learning, the that that connection of of of flaws and idiosyncrasies and sins and triumphs and shortcomings in life, that thing is inherently human. And if we abdicate, if we allow that spark to be dictated to us rather than sparking our engagement in the world, then we're foundationally passive and we're just floating around like those blobs in Wall-E in the movie where they're just eating and they're all watching their own entertainment and you're perennially um you know, drugged. Yeah, I mean, and you're in just this stupefied state where you think you're getting what you want, but I mean, as a lot of people have said, they reach the top of the mountain and they realize nothing's up there. Right? You've heard athletes talk about this. They they win the Super Bowl, they win the golf tournament, they walk off the World Series, and they realize, "Wait a minute, is this it? Is this what I've been working for since I was a child to have this feeling? Yeah, it's a great feeling, but my gosh, the fleeting nature of this feeling is there." And you brought up the pornography thing, which is a theme of of the new book Anti-Hero, which we're going to get to. And now it's even more nefarious. Heard a story within the last week of a classmate that was suspended from school because they they used AI to create a pornography video of one of their classmates. Right? So they took one of the girls from school, uploaded a bunch of pictures over to this AI, and turned her into this, you know, girl that was being abused in a hardcore pornography video, and then sent it around to all their friends. And we see that as like >> it's it's digital kidnapping and rape. It's wild. Right. Well, it's the same reason why I was absolutely floored when Dennis Prager said there are no moral issues with someone viewing child pornography or creating child pornography. He said that on an interview with I forget Pints with Aquinas guy or something like that. And I was just like, "Well, there's the people that developed the algorithm that did that that it's harming. There's the people that are viewing it that's harming. And then there's also the children that are downstream of the men that are watching this where the video becomes something they can't do." >> I don't I mean, I I I'm happy to stand corrected, uh but I don't think that's what Dennis said. I thought he said that if men are using pornography, that that's not as bad as cheating on your wife. I thought that was the only controversy. That was a separate thing. We he was specifically asked about AI child pornography. And so during your next answer, I'll see if I can find the exact quote. But yeah, this was a separate controversy entirely because that was a separate moral thing where it's like, "Dennis, come on. Like you can't you can't really talk this way." But it was the the the He was basically like, "Who's it harming, you know, if if if it's like a a digital image that's been created or or something like that?" Happy to correct the record if I'm wrong. Okay, yeah. That doesn't doesn't sound like Dennis to me, but I'm certainly in agreement with you about the underlying moral point that you're making, which is we can't just, you know, there's this weird notion when you deteriorate everything to this sort of hardcore individualism, it can't help but turn hedonistic. If you're the center of your own identity and the center of your world and the and your expression, so your culture, your family, your community, your state, the laws need to bend to your own self-expression, then there's nothing there. And it's one of the the problems I have, you know, as a liberal with far left protesting because the whole point of the civil rights movement was when you protest, you take on greater moral responsibility. It's the opposite of saying, "Oh, well, I'm outraged cuz the world's unfair and colonial. I'm going to break stuff and blow it up." It was like, "No, there's a there's a doctrine of shouldering responsibility, of knowing, you know, I mean, Martin Luther King wrote beautiful stuff from prison. There was no question that that that they were willing to submit to whatever consequences came and to bear up to them in the godliest fashion so that the laws would be seen as unjust and that the only way that you can win a change in the culture at law is to negotiate it in some ways with your moral fortitude. It's the it's the precise opposite where you have, you know, kids go to protest and they're complaining to their universities that they want to get class credit for it. It it puts the endeavor upside down and on its head. Yeah, and that's that's deeply problematic. But I want to go ahead and say so so I'm using Grok here, but this was an exchange with Matt Fradd, who is Pints of Pints of with Aquinas. This was a 2023 debate between Dennis Prager and Matt Fradd, who's a Catholic apologist. So this is Matt Fradd. These are direct quotes. Suppose a man says, "I viewed I view animated child porn. So there's no real victim in that sense of child pornography, which we both agree is horrendous. And by viewing animated child porn, it prevents me from acting out sexually on a child." Now, I deny that. I think that pornography inflames us to then want to act those fantasies out. But surely you wouldn't say to the man who views animated child pornography, "That's not bad so long as you don't act on it." Wouldn't you want to help this poor sick dude? And this is Dennis Prager. Yes, I would, but I'm thrilled that he's not acting it out. No child is being used, it's all animated, and he would would you use the word evil of animated child pornography? And then Prager, you know, his direct answer was "No, I wouldn't I would use evil only with behavior. That's where we might differ from forgetting the sex issue. You can't be evil, you didn't do evil if you thought evil. If I'm masturbating to animated pictures of pornography, I'm not doing something evil." And that was the thing because again, Matt Fradd went way to the extreme, animated AI-generated child pornography. And Dennis Prager said, "There has to be a victim in order for it to be some sort of a moral evil." And I thought it was of all the things that Dennis Prager said that I agree with, which is about 90% of the things that he said, I could not believe that it was him that said that. >> Mhm. Well, I would say, I mean, first of all, that's a conversation that I would have with Dennis. I To me, that is the that's the beginning of a long conversation of clarification cuz I don't think it's the same I I think there could be a lot more overlap and agreement. I don't think he means it in the way that it's strained through knowing his thought. But regardless of that, let's set that aside because I think Dennis can, you know, even still, even now, defend himself and elaborate better than I can for him. I mean, for me, I think it's twofold. One, of course, we'd always rather have anything that is a step removed from what's happening in the real world, right? It doesn't mean, though, that where we put our attention doesn't lead us to ill and have impacts on our families and the community and our marriage and kids and a general morality. That's not my belief. My belief is I I tend to be very, very rangy in two things. What I'm willing to think and contemplate as a creative because I need a very broad range. I write about all sorts of horrific stuff, as you know, when we get to Anti-Hero. So I want to be able to have an unfettered mind that's free to think about all sorts of things, and I think it's very important that when we um press in to punish people and individuals for transgressions from the law, that we focus on on their actions and not their thoughts because we can't have thought police, obviously. Now, I think where you and I are in agreement is, for me, if you're downloading and viewing something that is illegal material, then that to me is cause for legal intervention. Okay. I don't think anybody should have that kind of porn on their phones or anywhere else. But, you know, so I I All I'm saying is I think there's there's more nuance and agreement around the edges of this stuff probably as we're lifting up the as we're lifting up our view than than the than the worst interpretation of what Dennis might have said. But, my position is very much in agreement with yours. Well, sure. And if Dennis were here, I think we would eventually get to a fundamental difference between the, you know, Jewish worldview and the Christian worldview because Jesus set a separate standard for sin because in the Jewish law it was actual adultery, you know, which or any type of fornication, which would be any sex outside of one man and one woman for life under the covenant of marriage. Whereas, Jesus was like, "If you've looked at a woman and lusted after her, you have committed sin in your heart." And the only sin in the Bible that is described as being against our own bi- our own bodies is sexual sin. There's no such thing as all sins are the same. A white lie is the same as murder is the same as adultery. The the Bible doesn't really give us that. But, but I'm curious as we kind of, you know, wrap this AI quantum thing and start making our way towards antihero, you know, I It's one thing to describe the problem, right? Describe, describe, describe, banter it about. It's another thing to prescribe what we should do in light of what we're seeing. And so, I've got a lot of things that I've been thinking about and things that I talk about on my show to kind of help these men understand how AI can be used and the safeguards they should have for their own use and certainly the use for their children. But, for you, understanding the algorithms, the outrage, how these things are working and how they're weaponized as you elucidated tremendously earlier, what are we to do? Well, I think there's a couple things that we need to do with the social media companies. And I think the first is is we need to set down this zero-sum game. When something becomes politicized, no matter what the what what the issue is, everybody loses once it's politicized. It becomes zero-sum between call it right and blue, who even knows what any of this means anymore, right? The the other side and the other other side. Let's just call it that. And that's true for everything. It's true for the border. It's true for abortion. It's true for anti-Semitism. It's true for everything because once it's political, no matter what the other side says, you have the opposite position. And there's no nuance and there's no negotiation. So, the first thing I would say is we're not going to suddenly cross our arms, blame all of the billionaires and tech companies, and shut this down across America, and permit China and Russia and the Islamic regime to proceed unabated in their development of AI, and thereby come to dominate us. It's not a reasonable position. There's a lot of people, furthermore, within technology who have and are working on and are deeply concerned with solutions. And there's also not really a question that we aren't going to have to work with them. We can't We can't decry the entire tech industry. It's where our healthcare is going to come from. It's where our defense is going to come from. It's where our solutions, our ability to compete is going to come from. But, there's a few things I think that are very important, which is that we need to make a libertarian free market argument about what the limitations should be around AI and and with companies and what we can come to expect of companies. So, to start at kind of a higher resolution level, after World War II, every single major company in the United States was run by a member of the greatest generation who'd come back from war. And they all had a tacit understanding that part of having a giant company in America, which had just done great things and whose freedoms they were recently alight with in gratitude from witnessing the horrors of the world, had to also be a positive thing for America. That's not such a radical view that if you have a giant company with workers in America, you want to do well for the workers, and you want to do well for the community, and you want to do be good for the country, and you can get rich doing it and be prosperous, and that's how our country works. And so, I think that when we have active foreign psychological operations being visited upon our kids, that is something that's foundationally un-American, and it is it's a it's a war. We're at war basically right now. And we don't see it as such. And we can certainly place limitations on having people who are funded by foreign regimes on ours talking to our kids unabated using mind control techniques to cause chaos and consternation and to distress as a nation. We're allowed to call it that. And the key to this, as with most things, is transparency. Let us see. Let us see what the inauthentic bot activity is. Let's open up the algorithms, not so we can control them, but so that third parties can do it and can say it. And that is actually the best long-term strategy for the companies, for the advertisers who want to advertise on the companies, for you and I when we go on there, for kids. We want to We should at least have a right to know if I'm talking to a real human being or if I'm talking to a Russian bot. And there's also ways to privilege that. Like, let's say that we're posting under our own names, as you and I do. Yep. Then maybe we can be privileged. And privileged doesn't mean that you don't leave any room for the anonymous. They can just be in a different level down, and people can go visit that if they want. And whistleblowers can emerge from that. There's a lot of ways that in times that people are on social media that are important. Maybe you're reporting from inside Iran right now, right? Maybe there's conditions and reasons you want to have anonymous access. Okay, but we can still privilege conversations between people who are standing behind their names and where it's a verified. We can have the algorithms be able to be viewed so that in a free marketplace of ideas, businesses know who they're advertising to. They're paying advertising money, do you really want it to be that 6-35% of the views are troll farms in Pakistan? So, we can let in light, and we can also assert a couple principles, which is we don't have to hang up on the question of like, "Well, it's free speech or it's nothing, and that's it." I'm as close to a free speech absolutionist as you're going to find. It's I'm a writer. It's This is If you'd asked me in college what would be my single issue I would vote on, were I ever to limit myself to that, it would be this. But, free speech is not freedom of unlimited reach backed by algorithms to maximize profit at all costs to everybody despite the overall health of the system and the fact that you're pushing poison. You know, and we've seen this. Like, I We did some interventions where there were true and active threats, let's just say, in the area of anti-Semitism. Not like, you know, jokes, not like, "His nose is big. I don't like Jews." You're not You're allowed to not like Jews. Not like that. But, stuff that was really calling for violence. And we got some of these. We tracked some of them. And when we we filed them, that which which meet a very clear standard and definition of those, and some of those were taken off. All we saw next was a surge in self-harm in young women and in girls. Mhm. And so, the aim behind this isn't like, "Oh, let's take the bait. Let's all talk Let's all fight about anti-Semitism forever." Right? Then the next thing is going to be trans rights. And then the next thing is going to be self-harm in girls. And then the next thing is going to be immigration. But, these are paper tiger effects. And so, if we're going to conduct ourselves on the chessboard of the international community, we are we should be allowed to know transparently and what is happening, who is feeding this information. We should We're allowed to have certainly controls on our kids and standards we want to set for our children in schools. There's no problem with that. That's not a free speech issue. And we can have uh human experts who also intervene around the the means of common sense and common decency. Everything can't be decided by algorithm. And the answer can't simply be, "Well, it has to be an algorithm cuz any person is biased." What's a lot more scary than a biased public person is a biased algorithm and, you know, teams of addiction specialists who are backed by, you know, deep machine learning to addict us is a lot more dangerous than figuring out a public panel of people to start to talk about this. Well, the transparency would would certainly be helpful. And I think it would also be helpful now. I mean, I recognize the majority of my audience listening to this right now are Christians. And we as Christians are called to be salt and light. And so, in this culture, you cannot be salt, nor can you be light. And salt is a preservative that prevents decay or slows decay. You can't do that if you just unplug from all this. Cuz what a lot of people are thinking is, "All right, you know what? I'm just going to unplug from all of it. I'm just going to get away completely from social media. I'm going to get away from politics. I'm going to get away from government. I'm going to get away from all these areas." But, when we're told to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, that downstream, that there are beliefs, our behaviors, the things we advocate for. And if we just abdicate our responsibility to all these different areas of life, then we're only going to allow wicked people, atheistic people, the bots, you know, foreign actors, we're only going to allow them to rule these different areas. And I don't know that that's a a very positive thing. But, I do want to take a hard left turn here and talk about the the newest thriller. So, this is the 11th thriller in the Orphan X series. So, it's antihero. It is right here. It's out now. Guys, check it out in the show notes. You can get a link to this. But, the dedication was very quick. And I already brought his name up earlier. It's for Jonathan Paggio as iron sharpens iron. So, obviously, you're referring to a proverb there. And you and Jonathan have done a lot with the DailyWire series, you know, with Exodus and with the Gospels. And you know, both have a very personal connection to Jordan Peterson, who we're all praying for and hope he gets well soon. And would love an update at some point from somebody about how how the heck the guy is doing. But, let's just talk about Jonathan Paggio and why you dedicated this particular book to him. Well, I didn't You know, so I grew up culturally Jewish, not particularly religious. And I went to a Jesuit high school, which was tremendous. I didn't want to go, but I wound up really liking it. And I have So, I have a lot of familiarity and a lot of um admiration and respect for Catholicism. And I also grew up in communities with a lot of evangelicals. So, that's also communities that I'm very comfortable with and count a lot of friends among, but I didn't know as much about um orthodoxy, Christian orthodoxy. And Jonathan and I have been closer and closer friends over the years. I mean, we first were in we met through Jordan, we're in a lot of conversations, we've done a lot of things at Ralston College, too, with Stephen Blackwood, which is wonderful. And then we've we've crossed more and more, and I've just found the the Orthodox approach to Christianity compared to the two others that I'm most familiar with, which are you know, evangelic evangelicism and or like you know, whatever you say that through Protestantism, Catholicism, but the Orthodox approach, and especially his approach as a symbologist to me, was just captivating. And so it opened up a lot of different ways that I look at the world and symbolism and scripture and Christianity and Judaism. And so it's been it's just been a very fruitful and yielding relationship. And we we come from pretty different um perspectives. I mean, there's a there's a great deal that's shared as as we tend to forget a lot in our you know, debates. Like do we you know, do we So there's a huge shared amount of values that are foundational, but there's a lot of areas that we come at things from very different angles. That's the most useless kind of of friend and acquaintance to have. I mean, you don't I mean, I can't imagine wanting to have groups and friendships where everybody comes from the same belief structures and just reinforces the same value set. Um and so he was great, and there's a Orthodox Christian character at the center of of the series, um at the center of the story, who Evan has to help. And so Jonathan was my go-to for that in terms of the research, in terms of the framing. Uh and and it was it was just an incredible experience. So I gave that as a tip of the hat to our friendship and to my appreciation for him. Well, it seemed like there was another tip of the hat because before the beginning in the book, you have a quote uh from C. S. Lewis, "A man who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness." And so you mentioned the Great Divorce and C. S. Lewis earlier. And so there's an interesting thing about C. S. Lewis because you would not consider yourself to be an evangelical Christian, uh follower of Christ. However, even people on all sides, from from ardent atheists all the way to the most dyed-in-the-wool evangelicals, they're all reading C. S. Lewis, and I'm not talking about The Chronicles of Narnia. They're reading The Great Divorce, they're reading Screwtape Letters, they're reading Mere Christianity, they're reading these different books. And so I found it interesting that you quoted C. S. Lewis. And then obviously the character that you you mentioned, you know, I think it was in chapter 15, this character is in distress, and in the most distressing of situations maybe you could possibly imagine uh for a woman, she's summoning scripture on suffering. And she's quoting James 1:2-4 and Romans 8:18 as she's going through her suffering. And I just couldn't help but think that there was some sort of connection there with Pajeau, C. S. Lewis, the scripture that's coming down through orthodoxy, but also through evangelicalism. So talk a little bit about the inclusion of the C. S. Lewis quote and any themes that maybe came out in Antihero. Hm. Well, I've been thinking a lot about all the ways that we are tearing ourselves apart right now, uh or seeming to in America, and in fact in the world. And so I've been thinking a lot about what foundational what what's a foundational story? When we talked about that atomization earlier, Kyle, about how if we seek individualism in in each of us and we can we're our own expression of our own identity, um that there's something in that that gets lost. That's that's the lack of a shared story, right? We're talking about that. And so as we're reaching back, it's like, well, what what are the foundations upon which all the values that we hold dear are based? Um how do we get to the law, right? We get to to the law a lot through Exodus. How do we get to a freely entered into covenant? That's that is also picked up in the Torah and then and then expanded upon in the New Testament. And there's so many ways and discussions I've had with Pajeau about the ways that the New Testament is so hyperlinked with the Old Testament. And how how are we pushing towards, you know, these things that value to us, the treatment of women and the rights for minorities. And by minorities, I don't mean how the term is captured. I mean, you're a minority if you're three Christians at a very far left school, meaning everyone has the right to hold their own values, have rights like freedom of religion that we all share in, the ability for us at the top to have to have as much liberty as can be allowed. And one of the one of the things that I that I realized and and found uh pretty altering for myself was that notion of a freely entered into covenant is so important. And it's at the basis of Judaism, it's at the basis of Christianity because it's not meaningful if you're coerced. If somebody puts a gun to your head and forces you to declaim your love for Christ and you do it, but you don't think it, it doesn't mean anything. It has to be chosen. It's not neither one of these are coercive. And there's all these tributaries that are fed. I mean, Socrates was this, right? Socratic technique, Socratic questioning is I'm not going to tell you what the answer is. I'm going to ask you questions until you of your own will, it's drawn out of you towards a higher goodness. And so I think I've started to sort of reappraise, and you know, we did a seminar first on Exodus and then on the Gospels uh for Daily Wire, and I've started to have even more gratitude and appreciation and respect and awe for these seminal um sacred texts that that are there foundationally. And look, I'll even say, I'm not an atheist, but even if you are an atheist, you could look at it and say, "Okay, do you want Do you want to pick a story that is the most evolutionarily selected through the history of the world?" And to to grant things like English common law and the abolition of slavery, which was done by Protestants on the high seas, and equal rights for women, and all these other regards. Like if you want to pick something, even if you don't believe it's God-given, but you just think it's evolutionarily selected, you know, these are the myths in which our world was born. And the return to them and the return to those themes, and in a way it's a need for Evan Smoak, who's the world's, you know, he's the greatest assassin of this or any generation. So what happens when Evan Smoak, when Orphan X, has a woman who is at her worst point, and she demands of him, she asks of him at one point, she says, "Who do you answer to?" She starts to she's aware he's pretty badass. And she says, "Who do you answer to?" And he says, "No one." And she says, "A man who answers to no one is very dangerous." And so what she you know, so and she makes him swear that he won't kill anybody in his as he exacts not his vengeance for her, but a setting right. He has to track down this pack of young nihilistic men who just violated and assaulted her cuz they're going to do this again. And she makes him swear he won't kill them because what her interest in is is being transformational in the world. And so one of the things that Evan realizes is we see a lot of talk and there's a lot of fighting when people decide to be advocates for others or allies for other people's suffering. And one of the things Evan realizes when Anka, that's that's the character's name, tasks him with this, is that if he goes and avenges her assault by killing all these guys despite her wishes, he's stealing that from her. He's stealing her suffering from her. And in a way, if we do that, he's hiding his own darkness and justifications beneath the sort of false cloak of of righteousness, and it's borrowed. And so the question of this book that's at the throbbing center of this book is, can Evan Smoak integrate a higher value, even if it's one he doesn't believe? It's not his value set. He's got his code. His code is the assassin's code. But can he integrate this and go on this mission? Is he capable of not killing anybody? Is he capable of affecting something in a change that might actually be transformational in a way for the world? And if he goes into a mission with both hands tied behind his back, is it even possible that he can survive it? Well, Greg, C. S. Lewis and the the character from the book, they're both right that if you're not tethered to to someone else in terms of judgment, then we get we get Stalin, we get Lenin, we get Hitler, we get Pol Pot, we get Mao Zedong. Like we get these these people that thought no one is watching, right? I am the supreme power, I am the supreme being, and that's why there was so much bloodshed. I mean, you would talk about the the work of Jordan Peterson, and you know, just he basically brought Alexander Solzhenitsyn's work into the 21st century for a lot of kind of lay listeners and lay studiers. And it was basically the atheistic regimes of the 20th century and how much bloodshed there was cuz people love to talk about the Crusades. And then as they talk, uh they have a fundamental misunderstanding about why they were fought and how they were fought and even for how long, and they don't want to have any discussions about the 20th century. But I'm even curious for you, spending as much time as you spent in Exodus in the Old Testament, but also reckoning with what is said in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, it's impossible to read the Gospels, to spend time in the Gospels, and to have them not transform you in some way. That does not mean that everyone that reads them comes away as a follower and believer in Christ, believer in the resurrection, and putting their faith, transferring their faith for their, you know, afterlife from themselves into the finished work of Christ at Golgotha. But I'm just wondering for you personally, just for Greg, what what did spending that much time with those texts do for you outside of just, well, I appreciate them more, I appreciate the value they have for modern society and morality, but for you specifically as an individual? I think it's the it's the greatest exemplification of the least deserving person meeting the most awful aim. That's right. >> And behaving in the only way through an embrace of his suffering that is transformational. And he was betrayed by every single spoke of the culture. People forget that, right? Oh, he was killed by the Jews. He was killed by the the wise people. He's killed by the Romans. He was betrayed by his friends. He was betrayed by the politicians. Right? We know what he said about, you know, with with Caesar's face on a coin. It's it's money. It's it's every single aspect of a coin. >> He was betrayed by the same people that were proclaiming Hosanna as he rode in during Holy Week. He was the same people said, "Give us Barabbas. We want Jesus crucified." Yes, he was betrayed by his friends at you know, one of his closest friends at a table. And even the denying of Christ three times before the [ __ ] crow before the [ __ ] crows. Yeah. I thought I That's something for me. I remember that from high school very deeply. That feeling of utter like chagrin that must have settled into his bones when he realized that that premonition had come true. And I thought about that a lot in the early days of cancellation culture when people wouldn't speak up for friends who were under assault and were you know, at the mercy of the media and their institutions and the public when that reputational damage by mob, not by English common law standards, which we have the greatest standard of law in the world, which is another fruit of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but outsourced to a mob when people were obliterated and humiliated and dismissed. I thought of that a lot. I thought you don't ever deny what is good, but you don't ever deny or or or your association with a friend because the mob is coming for them. And so look, I mean that story for me is a template. And one of the other things I realized is that that we're also meant to be every character in that tableau. It's not like we read that and we think, "Oh, I'm Christ. I'm the one who will like we're we're both thieves. We're Judas. We're uh we're Pontius Pilate. Like we're everybody in the story because we have all of those abilities. And in terms of having something, you think about what what constitutes what constitutes something that is sacred or something that's pure. And it's it's a diamond. I mean, a diamond is just coal that's been put under the most unbelievable pressure imaginable for the millennia until it becomes fractal. Every part of it internally is pure. Every part matches every other part. And it in a lot of ways, on the one hand there's an amazing literary plausibility to have one story told slightly differently with variations from four people, which in a way makes it more believable as an event because it's not like everybody practiced to get the story right. And on the other hand, it's unbelievably pure in its distillation of being the seed for maximum good and maximum freedom and maximum goodness and maximum human regard. Um and that was reaffirmed for me quite deeply and profoundly. Well, and even going back to C.S. Lewis, when you read the Gospels, Lewis's trilemma comes up. He's either liar, lunatic, or lord. These things either happened or they didn't happen. And you know, we can get into uh textual criticism and and manuscript transferal and all those different things, but we eventually have to reckon with who Jesus is. And we're kind of winding to a close here, so I'm going to mush together a few different themes from Antihero. So, obviously, you know, a through point of the entire series is Jack Johns, who is Evan's mentor and father figure or was his mentor and father figure. And this great quote, "The hard part isn't turning you into a killer. The hard part is keeping you human." Well, we've seen kind of, you know, a little bit of a turning of the corner with Evan over these last few thrillers, right? He's saying things that you would have never thought you would have heard him say. He's doing things that you never thought you would have seen him do. And with his little, you know, sidekick Joey or whatever, which I don't know, does he see her as a as a niece, as a daughter? Like how does he see her? We almost see Evan showing signs of the Oedipal mother, right? The devouring mother, right? Who who wants to protect her from the world out there, but if you do that too much, you end up consuming the very person you're purporting to protect. And so, just talk to me a little bit about about the evolution of Evan because it's one thing to just drop your protagonist into a different, you know, place, they kill a bunch of people, and then it's all wrapped up at the end in a nice little bow and continues on into the next thriller, but it's another thing to have that character evolve over the long term. So, let's just talk a little bit about that evolution. Well, that's it's the most important thing. That's that's the core of the story. The line you just said you know, the hard part isn't making you a killer, the hard part is keeping you human is the line and around which the whole series coalesces. And for your listeners, those of them who are readers who followed Orphan X, I mean, he has changed quite drastically from book one to book 11. Um and that's part of what needs and needed to happen. He's integrating, you know, a a all these different parts of himself, all these different assimilations. And so, to become more human, one of the things he says is that, you know, to feel more he was very flattened out, you know, in the early Orphan X books in his childhood, but to feel more, then you have to feel more. If you open up to human emotion and human suffering, then you have to bear it. And the aim with him is, you talked about becoming the devouring mother, I think what happens with the devouring mother is is that you open up to the suffering of the world, but you can't contain it. So, you try and control it. And then you cinch off other people's development. But Evan is not that's so contrary to who Evan is because Evan is so solid unto himself. And as much as he has protective flares for Joey, who is his, as you said, his niece person um and it's part of his job. I mean, part of our job as men is to protect those around us. And so, he has that in spades. You know, but what he really wants is to start to figure out, you know, as he becomes more human, one of the things that starts to happen is everyone around him starts to become more human. And we started to see We understand this a lot. Like once you have kids, you get this really quickly cuz now and then you'll have your kid who will get stuck in a way that's that's specifically bugs you cuz it reminds you of some part of you or part of your family of origin, and you realize, "Oh, I have to grow up and fix the part in me to fix that part in them." Right? I have to see myself and feel what's in me to not shift encounter my disdain or frustration or resentment over onto this. And so, kids are huge calling to that, but so is everybody else. And as Evan has progressed in this, the first thing that started happening is all the ridiculous people who live around him in Castle Heights in his, you know, his condo. He's got, you know, the guy with the hair plugs who thinks he's Krav Maga badass. He's got Ida Rosenbaum, who's like the 90-year-old Jewish woman who lives upstairs from him who's always yelling at him that his truck's leaking oil even though it just got shut up shot up. And so he starts to see them through the series. They move from being sort of ridiculous caricatures to being more and more fully formed humans. And at one point, he's in Ida's room. She gets assaulted, and he's he's seeing her in her in her place, her apartment for the first time. And she has pictures of her departed husband through all the years. And he has this realization that she has a kind of courage that he has never been able to muster to marry yourself to somebody else and then bear the grief of that. And so, those people around him start to become more human. And eventually, the people he protects are more human. And then even the people who he is in pursuit of are also human. And to kill them, to take a life means something very different in Antihero than it did in Orphan X or the Nowhere Man or Hellbent or Out of the Dark or Into the Fire or in those earlier books because he is evolving and he's changing, and that's what that's what he's been doing through the series. And that's what any interesting character has to do. Otherwise, it's going to get stale, and you're keeping it from from happening. I know you got a hard out. We know the Delivery is next, but what's next next? What are we working on now? Well, I'm figuring out what to do with Evan from here. Uh and so, there'll be more news on that later because, you know, Antihero ends in a pretty surprising way. And so, how how am I going to reset the bit and gallop off towards towards the next mission and and manage to thread all of this into the overarching narrative that is life. That's where I got my head right now. Well, very good. Uh that's all for me. Anything else you want to get off your chest? No, it's good to see you, Kyle. Good to see you as well. Talk soon. Okay bye. Thank you everyone for listening to this episode. Wherever you're listening to this, please subscribe, rate, and leave us a positive five-star review. If you want me to come speak live at your event or on your podcast, just 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.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. Fearless. >> Oh, yeah.