0:00
[MUSIC]
0:20
This is Undaunted Life, a man's podcast.
0:23
I'm your host Kyle Thompson.
0:25
Let's get into it.
0:26
All right, guys, we have a special return guest to the podcast today.
0:29
His name is Greg Hurwitz, so he is a novelist, screenwriter and comic book writer, and he
0:32
is the number one New York Times bestselling author of over 20 different thrillers, including
0:38
his wildly popular Orphan X series, and we're talking to him today about his newest title
0:42
in that series and that is Lone Wolf, that is the ninth out of, you know, we'll talk
0:46
a little bit more about how many that's going to be before it's all said and done.
0:50
But this is a very interesting guy to talk to because he and I connected last year with
0:54
the last novel in the Orphan X series and, you know, he and I hit it off, became good buddies,
0:59
and the funny thing about last year's interview is I prepare all my interviews fairly, fairly
1:03
much the same way.
1:04
I read the books that the people are releasing or watch the documentaries that they're putting
1:08
out or whatever the thing is, and then I prepare my questions accordingly and I prepare them
1:11
as if the person's just going to straight up answer them, like answer this one.
1:15
And then I go right into my next one, right in my next one, so I can still kind of create
1:17
a narrative arc to the conversation.
1:20
But I remember last year, getting to the end of the conversation, having so much fun talking
1:24
with him and then looking at my notes and being like, I didn't even get to like a quarter
1:28
of the questions I wanted to ask him.
1:30
And so this time around, I'm like, okay, I'm not going to do that.
1:32
I'm just going to do like one fourth the preparation I did last time.
1:35
And then we still didn't get to like half the questions from this time because every
1:39
time he and I talk, whether it's on this podcast or in person, we kind of delve into all these
1:43
different philosophical areas.
1:44
And so for some of you in my audience, there's going to be things that you hear today in this
1:48
conversation where you're like, well, why didn't Kyle ask about this?
1:51
And why didn't Kyle press here or press there?
1:53
The thing is, is when he and I talk online or offline on the show or not on the show,
1:58
he and I are just connecting to try to get a deeper level of understanding each other,
2:01
but also a deeper level of the human condition.
2:04
And really this conversation, I guess you could say centered around the quest for human flourishing,
2:08
if I could just, you know, come up with something off the top of my head, because a lot of it
2:12
kind of bends towards that because we talk about, you know, what it takes to keep a thriller
2:16
series exciting whenever you're, you know, nine books in, how do you kind of keep the
2:20
storyline going?
2:21
But then we talk about some different themes from the book because there's a theme in the
2:24
new book where it's very heavy on the father son dynamic, but specifically deadbeat dads,
2:30
absent fathers, you know, deadbeat absent fathers that are okay with that and they kind of lean
2:34
into it.
2:35
Deadbeat absent fathers that aren't okay with it, but they don't really know another way.
2:38
We also talk about if there's a culminating, culminating event coming for Evan in the Orphan
2:44
X series, and so we get into that.
2:46
But then we talk a lot about his relationship with Jordan Peterson and specifically the work
2:50
that he did with Jordan on the Exodus series that was put out by daily wire.
2:54
Just an absolutely fantastic series.
2:55
It was Jordan Peterson, Greg Hurwitz, and then others like Oz Guinness and Jonathan
3:00
Pajo and Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro and James Orr and Stephen Blackwood and others.
3:04
And they were getting around diving as far into the Exodus stories as you could possibly
3:09
go and coming at it from a myriad of different circumstances, like places.
3:12
So, you know, he's more on he was raised in kind of a secular Jewish household, but then
3:17
went to Jesuit school and high school and so he talks a little bit about that.
3:20
But then you have guys like, you know, Jordan Peterson who's on his own faith journey, but
3:24
then you had Christian theologians from Cambridge and then you had, you know, Dennis Prager
3:27
and Ben Shapiro, who are Jewish guys and it was just very interesting to hear him talk
3:32
about that experience, but specifically talk about how it's going to affect him and how
3:37
it's affected him up to this point and what it's going to look like moving forward because
3:41
the spoiler alert, they are going to be doing another series of biblical lectures, another
3:45
seminar of sorts before too long.
3:47
I haven't got them to, you know, give me the, the skinny on what the book of the Bible is
3:51
going to be or not.
3:52
But again, as always, I really, really enjoy my time with Greg Hurwitz.
3:54
So I'm not going to keep him from you any longer.
3:56
So without further ado, let's get into it.
3:59
Greg Hurwitz, you are back for your return appearance.
4:01
That means I didn't scare you off the first time.
4:04
Do I need to try harder this time?
4:05
Is that what we're going for?
4:07
I hope so, it's called the Undaunted Life, man, it's not called the Meek Life.
4:11
That's right.
4:12
So I'll see what I can do to make things get weird.
4:14
But before we get too weird, I do need to make sure that we make your publisher happy
4:17
because of all the things that you are, probably the biggest thing you are is a best-selling
4:22
prolific author.
4:23
And so you've written a, you know, a couple of dozen best-selling thrillers at this point,
4:26
but you got a new one out now if people are listening to this on time.
4:30
And that is novel number nine in your Orphan X series and this one's called Lone Wolf.
4:35
I just finished listening to the audio a couple of weeks ago.
4:38
And so the thing is, as I've told you before, I don't really consume a lot of fiction.
4:43
I do a lot of nonfiction.
4:44
And so I'm very, very picky.
4:47
So it's basically Greg Hurwitz, Jack Carr, and I'm trying to think of somebody else.
4:52
Like those are the ones that I will expose myself to.
4:55
And Dolph Stoyevsky, I think, that completes the Troika.
4:59
Yeah, that certainly like covers all my bases.
5:01
What did it?
5:02
Yeah, there you go.
5:03
And Stephen Pressfield.
5:04
Okay.
5:05
I guess my question.
5:06
That's a great company.
5:07
Yeah.
5:08
That's pretty good company for sure.
5:09
But I guess my question from the very beginning for you is as an author, the main, you know,
5:14
protagonist of the series is Evan, how do you keep the character fresh for you so that
5:21
you can continue putting him in these different environments to where he stays fresh for the
5:25
audience?
5:26
Like how do you, how do you play with that in your brain?
5:29
It's so weird.
5:30
I answer this so much differently than I would have earlier in my career.
5:34
Something really weird happened for me with Orphanax.
5:37
And I think part of this is that I started writing it when I was on the cusp of turning
5:43
40.
5:44
And 40 was like, was a [inaudible] for me, man, like for some reason.
5:47
I just turned 50 and 50 was great for some reason, but 40 was really tough.
5:52
And I think I always write there's a quotation from Joan Didian.
5:56
She says, I write so I know what I think.
5:59
It's a wonderful quotation.
6:00
And I think part of it was when I turned 40, I was having this moment where, you know,
6:05
while I certainly had a great deal to be grateful for, I was like, is this just what
6:10
I do again?
6:11
Like I write X more books and comics and I mean, not that that sounds terrible.
6:15
But it was, there's that feeling sometimes of, is this all there is?
6:20
And one of the things that I realized was that the rules by which I govern the first
6:24
part of my life.
6:27
I didn't want to just have them repeated again.
6:31
I wanted to break them apart and figure something else out.
6:33
And so it's really interesting that Orphan X, it's about a government assassin.
6:36
He's got his 10 assassins commandments.
6:39
The most prominent one is how you do anything is how you do everything.
6:44
And that's been, you know, a lot of reach.
6:47
But there are these very rigid rules about operational perfection as an assassin.
6:51
But I decided to start the series.
6:53
And this isn't something that was a conscious connection, not at the point that he's training
6:57
to be the assassin or when he's Orphan X killing people overseas in ways where the US government
7:03
can't go because we don't have a footprint.
7:05
Or when he flees the program and becomes the nowhere man, he becomes an assassin for people
7:10
who are in desperate need who have nowhere else to turn.
7:12
His number is one eight five five to nowhere and you can call the number.
7:17
So he does these missions where people call him and he goes and helps them if they're
7:21
being terrorized by somebody else.
7:23
I chose to start the series right at the point when a mission comes up where he has to break
7:27
all 10 of his commandments and figure out new rules for what govern his life.
7:32
And so as much as I wasn't aware of this connection consciously until I'd written that, a great
7:38
deal of what the books are about are when we fragment our rules, our commandments are
7:45
code and have to reassemble them in some way that is is more mature or has more meaning
7:52
or is more robust.
7:55
And the thing that's hardest to let go of, they're not the obvious idiosyncrasies.
8:01
Let's say you're a you're too heavy a drinker.
8:03
Let's say you have a temper.
8:04
There's things that we know get in our way.
8:06
The hardest things to let go of are some of the habits that we might have as striving
8:10
young men or striving young women that actually benefited us enormously, defense mechanisms
8:16
that no longer serve their purpose.
8:18
So here's Evan, who's the top assassin in the world and in a way, looking back, I think
8:22
of the series is he almost realizes he's this archetypal hero of fiction.
8:28
He realizes he's Pinocchio, but he wants to be a real boy.
8:31
But for him to let go of these things, they've given him everything.
8:35
They've given him his safety, his security, his life, his code.
8:39
And those are the things when we have to let go of that become really difficult.
8:42
And so to be honest with you, this series is the first time that my own life sort of
8:48
caught up to the fiction that I'm writing where like Evan's learning things slightly
8:51
ahead of me or I'm slightly ahead of him, because a lot of the book is me being very
8:56
aware of where I am and what I'm letting go of and what I'm trying to strive imperfectly
9:02
towards.
9:03
Hey guys, real quick.
9:05
Here recently, one of my family members was telling me about how they partnered with another
9:08
family and they bought some beef from this local cattle producer.
9:11
And when they got the beef, it was unbelievably terrible.
9:15
And I can tell you this from experience because they made me some beef ribs from that animal
9:19
and they were terrible and they even gave me some stakes and some ground and it was basically
9:23
inedible.
9:24
Like I couldn't believe how bad it was.
9:26
And they ended up finding out that the person killed an old bull or something like that.
9:30
And just the meat was old and tough and awful.
9:32
And that's just what happens when you don't have a quality cattle operation that you can
9:36
trust to give you a quality beef product on the back end.
9:39
And that's guys why I want to introduce you to the official beef delivery partner of
9:43
Undaunted Life, my friends at Primal Beef.
9:46
So Primal Beef is a cattle operation owned and operated by Sean Glass.
9:50
He's a retired Navy SEAL that has partnered with Jocko willing to launch Primal Beef.
9:54
So what makes Primal Beef different from some of these other cattle operations where you're
9:57
going to end up getting bad beef?
9:59
This operation is all American black Angus cattle.
10:02
The beef comes from one farm and that's in Virginia Shenandoah Valley.
10:06
The beef is all natural, no hormones ever, no MRNA ever, no vaccines ever.
10:11
And after slaughter, this is a big deal.
10:12
The beef is dry aged and then it's hand cut by artisan butchers and then flash frozen
10:17
to ensure that it maintains tenderness, marbling and flavor.
10:19
And here's another great thing about it.
10:21
For every box sold, Primal Beef donates meat directly to a member of America's Special
10:25
Operations Forces through the C4 Foundation.
10:28
So you can take pride knowing that your purchase will help to put literal food on the table
10:32
for America's finest warriors.
10:34
If you're not salivating yet, it's probably because you're a communist.
10:37
Don't be a communist.
10:38
Try Primal Beef out today by going to www.primalbeef.com.
10:43
That's primalbeef.com.
10:44
Use the promo code Kyle.
10:45
That's my first name to get 10% off of your order.
10:48
The great thing about that promo code is you can stack that on other deals as well and
10:51
get all this money off.
10:52
Again, that's primalbeef.com promo code Kyle.
10:55
That's KYLE to get 10% off your order.
10:58
Okay.
10:59
So I don't want to get into any spoilers, so I'll be as vague as possible.
11:04
But one of the themes of Lone Wolf, I guess you could say is just the interplay and potential
11:10
conflicts of a father-son relationship.
11:14
That's a pretty vague way of saying it, but even specifically, deadbeat dads or absent
11:19
fathers, whether that's absent physically or mentally or both.
11:23
And one of the fathers in Lone Wolf is a deadbeat and apparently likes it that way, which is
11:29
kind of its own brand of nasty, I think.
11:32
Like a guy that knows he's kind of sludgy and terrible, but the head's kind of like
11:36
leaned into it.
11:38
And then there's another father in Lone Wolf that's a deadbeat, but really doesn't want
11:43
to be.
11:44
And so you kind of have these dueling deadbeats.
11:47
One guy's just like embraced it.
11:49
And one guy is almost like he's on the pathway to embracing that as his identity.
11:55
And perhaps I'm painting what's too broad a brush here, but do you feel like that interplay
12:00
of those two types of fathers has a direct, I guess, reflection on things that you've
12:05
experienced?
12:06
Or is that just something that you feel like the character needed?
12:09
God, that's a great question, Kyle.
12:15
Boy, that's interesting.
12:22
So I don't think it's a spoiler to say.
12:24
So Evan is an orphan by name, right?
12:27
That's the code by which he lives.
12:29
That's the program that trained him.
12:31
He's orphaned acts.
12:32
It's very fortunate he didn't wind up being like orphaned W if he'd been a few later in
12:36
the alphabet because that, you know, what it would have been embarrassing for us.
12:39
So we're fortunate in that regard.
12:41
But he had a wonderful father figure.
12:45
He never knew his parents to begin with in Jack Johns and Jack Johns was the handler.
12:51
He's a former CIA station agent who raised him.
12:53
And Jack tells him very early in the series, and it's repeated in every book, this series
12:58
you can come in on any book and I reset.
13:00
He says, when he's 12 years old, he takes Evan out of a foster home and he's the littlest
13:04
scrappiest kid.
13:06
No worth.
13:07
Jack's the first person to treat him like he's got any worth and he chooses him over
13:10
everybody else because of his heart, the smallest kid.
13:13
He gets knocked down the most times on the playground and Jack tells him that also means
13:17
you get up the most times.
13:19
And at age of 12, Jack tells him the hard part isn't turning you into killer.
13:23
The hard part is keeping you human.
13:25
And so Jack's the author of this horrible profession where he becomes an assassin, but
13:31
he makes sure his moral compass is intact.
13:34
And so in the beginning of Lone Wolf, one of the things that we find is that Evan gets
13:39
a notice that he thinks he's located the man who purports to be his father.
13:44
And this is sort of shocking for us and for him.
13:46
We've never thought of this.
13:49
And the book opens in a regard of him confronting this and we don't really know what happens.
13:55
I don't want to get into that, but it's a confrontation.
14:00
And the way that you phrase it's very interesting because the opposite of love, of connection
14:05
of care, isn't hate, it's apathy.
14:07
Yeah.
14:08
Right.
14:09
And so, and we talk about the banality of evil and we have a lot of phrases of different
14:12
ways that this sort of parses through the moral universe.
14:19
And so a lot of this is about a man who's given up his commandments, he's given up his
14:25
bearings.
14:26
And where do you find them again if you are an orphan?
14:29
Now you ask me about this in my personal life.
14:31
I have a wonderful dad, I had a great dad, he's like, I think that we all come equipped
14:41
with different problems, genetic, environmental, experiential.
14:47
I certainly have a host of them, but having a dad who is a template for me was not one
14:52
of them.
14:53
But I do think in a lot of regards as we all move towards especially a definition of ourselves
14:59
through, and if it hasn't hit you early, it'll certainly hit you in middle age, where we're
15:04
taking apart the rules and the codes and the stories that we've lived by.
15:09
We reach for other authority figures to anchor ourselves and to make our own until there's
15:15
a moment.
15:16
I had a friend just visit me, whose father just passed away, who he was so close with
15:19
his dad.
15:20
I mean like it was his best friend all the way through.
15:23
They studied military history together, hikes, endless conversations.
15:28
And he said he had this realization in the back of his head where he's like, I always
15:32
knew I had some sort of safety net that my dad was around.
15:36
And then he had this realization that he's now the safety net for the entire family,
15:40
the siblings, the nieces, the nephews, he's the patriarchy.
15:44
And ideally no matter where we come from and no matter what influences we have in our life,
15:51
that's in a certain way what we're training for, right?
15:53
We're training to be the head of a family and a community in a way that is graceful in
16:01
a way that we've learned to swing our sword sufficiently that we can keep it holstered
16:07
right and be transformative.
16:09
And so that's a process we all have, whether that's intellectually, whether it's creatively.
16:14
I have certain differences in the family and environment that I grew up in, my influences,
16:20
my family, my education.
16:23
And we're seeking different things and we're seeking different points of contact that pull
16:28
us closer to what our moorings might be.
16:32
And so the personal question is one thing, but intellectually and creatively, I have
16:40
had to reach for different points of contact and different points of anchoring in order
16:46
to figure out what's the, as I continue to strive imperfectly towards the most fulfilled
16:52
version of myself, right?
16:54
So as we stumble forward, we look for different moorings and anchors and if we can get some
17:00
of that right and reconstitute ourselves in a way that's the purest version of ourselves,
17:04
then maybe we have a chance to be that for other people.
17:09
When I think one thing that is almost implicit in what you described, it's as your good buddy
17:14
Jordan Peterson, it says you want to be the guy at your father's funeral that everybody
17:18
can anchor themselves too.
17:20
And so, you know, it's interesting that you point out a friend that just came by that
17:22
just lost their father, but what I feel like is unfortunately, there are a lot of adult
17:28
men that are not actually men, they're just like a boy second shave, they've ascended
17:33
to a certain age, but not a certain level of maturity.
17:36
And then if their father or if the patriarch of the family goes the way, and now the rest
17:41
of the family is default looking to them, they don't have a code.
17:45
They don't have a life of resilience behind them to substantiate their claim to the role
17:51
of patriarch in their family, and yet that is what it says on their family business card.
17:57
And so, I will say for me, I've got two sons that are there three and one.
18:02
And so all of my failings, all of my issues, all my everything are front and center, especially
18:08
if I see it mirrored in my children, right, negative and positive.
18:12
And so for me, it's very important to not only raise them in a positive environment where
18:16
they see me loving their mother and, you know, taking care of people that need to be cared
18:20
for and defending people that need to be defended.
18:23
But at the same time, I can't hand them down my wisdom in my head that I never never share
18:30
with them.
18:31
I can't hand them down my muscular ability.
18:33
I can't hand them down my cardio.
18:35
I can only hand them nuggets of the wisdom that has been given to me that they can then
18:40
build off of.
18:41
Does that make sense?
18:43
Yeah, it's it's absolutely.
18:45
I mean, one of the things you talk about is, for all of us who are parents, it's so funny.
18:52
It's a very humbling experience, right?
18:55
Being a parent is kind of like writing a novel.
18:57
I remember one time there was a screenwriter who wanted to meet and have lunch.
19:01
It was early in Hollywood.
19:02
I was 23.
19:03
And I sat down with him and he I think was more successful to me on the screenplay for
19:07
it.
19:08
He said, I want to talk to you about a novel.
19:09
I don't do anything until I know that I can do it perfectly and won't make any mistakes.
19:15
So I want to know all the roles are writing a novel.
19:17
And I was like, buddy, you're out of luck.
19:19
The only way to write a novel if they get into it and screw it up constantly.
19:22
I mean, and parenting is a version of that where you go in with your highest self.
19:29
I think ideally most of us want to.
19:32
You clearly did.
19:33
But you know, what you say that's so interesting is when we see our flaws reflected in our
19:38
children, there's a choice.
19:41
It's a very stark choice.
19:43
And a lot of times it has to do with are we going to chisel away at the rock of our denial
19:48
over something we're seeing in our kid that might be a reflection in our own heart to
19:53
face and confront that in ourselves to then show the wisest approach for our kid in order
19:59
that they can move past that.
20:01
And I will tell you as a parent time and time again, if I've been stuck in something that's
20:05
a frustration or resentment or something with one of my with one of my kids, often there's
20:11
something for me to go, you know what?
20:12
I never figured this out all the way in my own life.
20:15
I covered it.
20:16
I covered it.
20:17
I faked it.
20:18
I hummed along.
20:19
And this is when we talk about generational trauma, it sounds very like voodoo, right?
20:24
But we have a choice in everything that we do with our interactions to figure out, you
20:28
know, and when I've seen, let's say one of my kids struggling with something, if I stop
20:35
and there's some way I'm engaging with it, maybe it's maybe it's something I've diminished
20:39
and hidden in myself, it's down to 5% of me that I've covered through willful blindness.
20:44
And they're still writing it.
20:45
If I chisel that 5% away and can open up to the vulnerability of admitting that in myself,
20:52
then I can engage with them in a way that's transformational and guide them out of it as
20:55
an adult.
20:56
And I think that's one of the things that's, it's like the beautiful sacrificial nature
21:02
of parental love or any kind of love, a good friend, you know, my dad always says, a good
21:09
friend holds up a mirror, so much of this is about, you know, if you're frustrated with
21:16
one of your kids, if you're aggravated, if you're resentful, right?
21:20
There's a lot of emotions we don't give ourselves as much room to discuss around kids.
21:25
A lot of times if you go inside and you can clear it, you know, it's pretty amazing.
21:30
And by the way, that dovetails quite nicely with your first question, which is what are
21:34
the codes that benefited us right in the first part of our life?
21:38
And I'll tell you, when I was first married, though this was an earlier realization, you
21:43
know, when I was young, no one in my family went into a creative field, Hollywood, writing
21:48
any of this, and I had a very intense, you'll relate to this, Kyle, because discipline, meticulous,
21:57
don't knock on my door, don't call me, don't bug me during the day, I kind of felt like
22:01
I had to kick everyone over to clear this timeout.
22:05
And some of that stems from advice and fact that Jordan gave me, I was still in college
22:09
when I started my first book, and he said, make your writing time sacrosanct if you don't
22:14
know one else will, right?
22:16
And so I did, you know, being a writer in a lot of ways, there's a self-centeredness
22:22
like being an athlete, right?
22:25
Why are you training all morning when there's other stuff to do?
22:27
You have to, you have to elevate day 17 of 365 of finishing a novel to being the most
22:34
important thing that day, or else go to a movie, or pick up your dry cleaning, or clean
22:38
your kitchen.
22:39
You just have to make it thus.
22:41
But I think part of it was I had made it thus, but without grace, let's say, or gentleness
22:48
because I was just alone and who cares, right?
22:50
It was me, my friends, firm boundaries.
22:54
That's an example of maybe something that doesn't work when you have kids, and you start
22:59
to realize that this armoring, armor is great because it protects you, but it also limits
23:05
your flexibility.
23:06
And I still remember when my younger daughter was born, I could never, I never really got
23:10
babies as a guy until I had one.
23:14
Like other, I love kids, I adore kids, man, like two to three on, I'm in.
23:21
But babies, I'm always like, they all look like Winston Churchill or WC Fields.
23:24
They just sort of like cry and [inaudible].
23:26
Like I didn't get it.
23:27
And I kind of even prepped my wife.
23:28
I was like, look, you know, I just want you to know I'm gonna be spending, you know, early
23:33
days, I'm not interested.
23:34
I was like smitten with this baby, right?
23:36
The hormonal thing hits and you're, it's amazing.
23:40
But I remember I would work in my office and my kid, if she was crying, being fussy, being
23:44
hungry, no problem.
23:45
There was a cry I knew and I never believed people when they said, oh, the cries mean
23:51
different things.
23:52
I thought, are you crazy?
23:53
Like all they mean is like get it, get an insulated office door.
23:56
But if she hurt herself and had that one cry, I'd be out of my office downstairs and it
24:01
was like, you know what, get back up and figure out, I had a lot of pretentious, like when
24:06
I'm in my office, I'm spinning these plates and I'm so important.
24:09
I'm such an artist.
24:10
And if I'm disrupted, they fall and like forget all that.
24:14
Your baby's hurt, you go comfort that baby and then you figure it out.
24:18
And that's an example of these ways that our codes need to break up and reform or else
24:24
we just move through life rigidly and brittlely and things that are brittle shatter.
24:28
Well, and one thing you mentioned earlier is we have this tendency to fake it.
24:32
Like we will fake it and we will certainly fake it for a long time.
24:36
If we don't have friends that will hold up a mirror to us and that's why I encourage
24:40
guys all the time, you need foxhole buddies.
24:42
You don't need golf and buddies.
24:43
You need three AM friends.
24:44
You don't need six PM friends.
24:46
You need those guys that are going to like, you know, if you say something off color to
24:49
your wife at dinner and you embarrass her and you just move on with the conversation,
24:53
that's the guy that's going to grab you by your shirt in the parking lot and be like,
24:55
bro, I know you love her.
24:56
I know you didn't mean to hurt her, but you did and you're not going to do that again.
24:59
You need guys like that in your life, but we will insulate ourselves speaking of insulation.
25:03
We will insulate ourselves from those types of guys, but it's because of our inability
25:08
to be humble.
25:09
It's because of our inability to get our emotions and our ego in check.
25:13
And also, I think one of the worst types of father.
25:16
So we've talked about, you know, absentee fathers and, you know, dead be dads and dead
25:20
be dads that don't want to be dead be dads, but they just can't help themselves.
25:23
So they're just kind of eff ups, but it's also the do as I say, not as I do father, because
25:29
kids do understand language.
25:33
Obviously you are you are a linguist.
25:34
You are a professional linguist.
25:37
Kids do understand words and how they attach themselves and make sentences and then paragraphs
25:41
and then philosophies and tomes, right?
25:45
But what a kid sees you doing is so much easier for them to emulate because when I do see
25:50
positive and negative things in my three year old and one year old right now, it's not because
25:54
I taught them how to do it verbally.
25:56
It's because they watched dad dad do it and now they're going to do it.
26:00
And so when you have that do, as I say, and not as I do father, the overweight father,
26:04
the father doesn't take his job very seriously, doesn't take anything very similar seriously
26:07
other than maybe video games or fantasy football, it's kind of hard for the kid to be like,
26:12
yeah, I'm going to go ahead and follow that advice because it's like, well, dad's not
26:15
doing, why should I?
26:17
Yes.
26:19
And you know, you're talking about the different friends we need to have around us.
26:23
And I think one of the most important things is it's not just that we're faking it in some
26:29
ways.
26:30
The real danger I think is that when we fake it, do we start to believe the whisper of
26:34
our own lie?
26:35
Right.
26:36
And shame is a terrible thing, right?
26:40
It's terrible for men in certain ways that perhaps is different from women, though the
26:46
boy women contend with it greatly.
26:50
But you know, what happens a lot of times if you're faking it is there's a real temptation
26:56
towards kind of self deception, right?
27:00
I fake this so well, this is who I am and I'm not going to see it.
27:04
And the willingness to be open to shame and the willingness to know that you're strong
27:10
enough to have something exposed to the sterilizing light of day is essential.
27:17
You know, the point that you make a about friends, absolutely.
27:20
I mean, I have one of the ways that I think I'm perhaps the, well, I just feel very blessed
27:27
in my community.
27:29
But my friends are a fairly raucous bunch of like, you know, almost everyone's like
27:35
a tame savage in a way, you know, like I don't, I don't trust people who are overly civilized.
27:41
So, you know, one of the descriptions, which I think I mentioned last time we talked of
27:49
orphan acts, one of the things I say is the OSS, which predated the CIA, their recruiting
27:55
standard was a PhD who could win a bar fight.
27:59
Right.
28:00
Yeah.
28:01
And so there's a lot about having that toughness that let's say the front part of orphan acts
28:06
is journey, right?
28:07
But then knowing how to integrate and deal with that, what you're talking about with
28:11
your kids, it's really interesting because it is what we do, you know, our prefrontal
28:17
cortex can process two to three pieces of information a time, whereas our visual field
28:22
takes in 20,000 pieces of information.
28:24
So, if you've ever had one of those discussions of like, hey, I got all the words right, right?
28:29
Like, what are we arguing about?
28:30
Right.
28:31
I said it.
28:32
I said the apology.
28:33
I told you what to do.
28:35
Those things don't go in so well, especially to people who are more intuitive, higher EQ,
28:40
right people who are more clear in their emotions initially, right, whereas men tend to switch
28:47
like the shame to anger, resentment, loop is a fast one, often with men, right?
28:54
And there's not that, what the boot is called that sacred space between feeling and action
28:58
or emotion.
29:00
And if there's a shame, anger, reaction, we can think we're grown up if we're calm and
29:05
we say all the words right, but there's bite under us.
29:08
And if you do it purely in with the open heart, like you're talking about with your
29:11
kids, right, you're doing something with focus, you're doing your work with gratitude.
29:17
You're engaging with them with a lesson with the aim, really, for their highest good and
29:21
moral development out of connection, out of love.
29:26
I don't mean you're walking around like a Marcus Aurelius all the time, but you know
29:29
what I'm saying?
29:30
If your lanes are open, if your mechanisms clear, there's a different sort of learning
29:36
and emulation that gets imparted.
29:38
And I think one of the things for me, you know, I don't speak a lot of, I don't speak
29:43
any other languages, I'm fairly decent at English.
29:47
And a lot of times I'll think if I get the words right, I got it right.
29:50
And there's a lot of connection that goes beneath the words that goes all the way down
29:54
that you have to line up.
29:55
It's like lining up your spine for a tackle, you know, if you have it wrong, you'll break
30:00
your back.
30:01
And so you want to make sure that whatever you're doing, you're aiming right and you're
30:05
aligned right.
30:06
And it takes a lot to move through the discipline of the day, right, and being tough where you
30:13
need to be tough.
30:14
And you know, for your job being meticulous, where you need to be meticulous and being
30:18
gentle and soft in the ways that you need to with the right people who need it.
30:22
And firm enough, there's a lot of responsibility.
30:25
And you're talking a lot about men and fathers, right?
30:28
And I think that I think one of the things that gets difficult or complicated in this
30:35
age is there isn't a great, very clear cultural template for the kinds of toughness, for the
30:43
kinds of firmness of purpose paired with grace, right?
30:50
What we tend to find is an argument for overwhelming empathy or inclusion, let's say.
30:54
And it's like, that's a very important value set.
30:57
We want to welcome the outsider.
30:58
We want to have empathy to people who are in pain, but it can't be the transcendent value
31:03
of all things or else nothing functions.
31:05
So where is the right place and where are the times that we reward that?
31:09
And a lot of what I'm realizing that I'm writing an orphan X, though I don't create from this
31:15
place.
31:16
But when you talk about there not being a code, I'm trying to create and show not just
31:21
that code, but the process by which that code occurs.
31:24
What's the process by which someone who says, look, I'm a badass, right?
31:28
I'm, I'm, I'm Shane from a Western.
31:31
I have my black and white rules and of everything I'll write off onto the sunset.
31:35
It's like Batman.
31:36
Batman for two years for DC, right?
31:39
Batman represents human perfection.
31:41
What's the opposite of perfection in a weird way is intimacy.
31:45
Once you're intimate, your life's messy, people are messy, emotions are messy, and they'll
31:49
point out where you're messy.
31:51
That's your friend who grabs you by the short collar and goes, dude, pay attention to your
31:54
wife's eyes when you made the joke, right, that you referenced.
31:59
And so I'm inadvertently writing, I think in some ways a book about the process by which
32:05
that code and awareness can occur.
32:08
But saying it that way, what's interesting is that's a more intellectual version of
32:14
it.
32:15
And it doesn't come intellectually.
32:16
Like when I'm writing, all I'm thinking about is Evan and Tommy Stojak and Josephine Morales
32:21
and assassins and the scenes and the people I'm writing about and what they're dealing
32:25
with.
32:26
I'm not thinking of it in some abstract way that I'm trying to like create a certain
32:29
mythology.
32:31
But guess what?
32:32
Those are all the things that are going on in my lizard brain, right, in my spinal cord.
32:37
And so that's what's coming out on the page.
32:39
And it's likely that that's a lot of what's going on in all of our lizard brains if we're
32:43
paying attention either in on the way up or on the way down.
32:48
When you mentioned Shane, that's my favorite Western that I've ever read.
32:52
And there's an undercurrent, guys, if you haven't read Shane yet, it's a quick read.
32:56
It's, it's, you have to read it if you're an adult male.
33:00
There's an undercurrent in that novel of this tension between what true righteous manhood
33:08
is because we know what it's not.
33:11
We know it's not the ardent pacifist and we know it's not the machismo guy, right?
33:17
The, you know, the, the, the hunting boots and the beef jerky and the whiskey and the
33:22
chase and the women and all that.
33:23
Like that's equally.
33:24
Yeah.
33:25
I had one more.
33:26
It's also not the endless activist.
33:31
Yeah.
33:32
Sure.
33:33
Yeah.
33:34
The person that can tell you everything that is wrong about the way that you view the world
33:37
and how you should pattern it after them because they've got some sort of Gnostic knowledge
33:42
that has been revealed to them because standpoint of epistemology or something that they learn
33:46
from their, you know, psych 101 professor or something like that.
33:49
And so the interesting thing about that is, okay, how do you fall in the middle to where
33:55
you can lean to one side or the other when needed.
33:58
So the other day at church, there was a disruption at church and where I was in the church, I
34:04
thought the disruption was a physical attack of some kind.
34:07
And so I literally had a sandwich in my hand.
34:09
I drop it and take off towards where that is.
34:12
And I was prepared in that moment to use my body and what was on my body to take on a
34:17
physical threat.
34:18
Now go to the other side.
34:20
I showed some anger in a different context and my three year old son was scared by dad's
34:26
anger.
34:27
Right.
34:28
And so I had to get down on one knee and get eyeball to eyeball with my son and two minutes
34:32
after I scared him to the point of tears, apologize to my three year old and ask him
34:38
for forgiveness because of what dad dad did and it wasn't appropriate and how can a man
34:44
vacillate between the two without becoming one or the other.
34:47
And I think that's an important thing and so I say all that to say, that's what I feel
34:51
whenever I read the undercurrent of what's happening with Evan because he's not just the
34:56
bloodthirsty killer, right?
34:58
So if the goal was to not just turn him into assassin, but to keep him human, he's very
35:02
much so human so much so that is human part of his brain is haunting him as he's trying
35:07
to go through and even the score for other people.
35:09
At least that's my read of it.
35:11
So I mean, is that kind of the point in how you approach it?
35:15
And like the example you gave, which is a beautiful example, he's failing constantly.
35:21
Like we all fail, right?
35:25
So I have a couple of observations about that.
35:27
The first one is having eaten with you a couple of times.
35:30
I can't imagine anything that would ever make you drop a sandwich.
35:33
That's the first thing.
35:34
I typically you can't get between me and my meal, but that was an exceptional moment.
35:40
And did everything wind up okay in the church?
35:42
Everything was fine.
35:43
It was a medical emergency, you know, we were able to help this man out and all that.
35:47
But at the at the time, I thought it was going to be kinetic.
35:51
That's that's I was thinking about the example you gave with your son, you know, and people
35:56
have studied this lot.
36:00
What's important as we parent, what's as important, and I think even more important,
36:07
it's not when we screw up, it's can we can we reconnect, right?
36:13
Because what you gave your son is something that's that's actually quite beautiful, meaning
36:19
if you lose your temper and then your reaction is one of two things, well, it's justified.
36:24
I'm a dude.
36:25
It's how guys are.
36:26
We have a temper deal with that.
36:28
And you know you're wrong because it sits uncomfortably in you, right?
36:33
That's number one.
36:35
Number two is to have shame to come back to be little boy shameful, right?
36:41
Overly apologetic in a way that isn't connected.
36:45
But for you to have something and catch yourself and then it is more important with kids how
36:49
you make up than what the conflagration is.
36:52
Obviously, that doesn't apply to to literal abuse, right?
36:56
But if you can show your kid that there's always time to have a decision to make up properly.
37:04
And one of the things I have on my head all the time, William James, the famous psychologist,
37:09
he has one of my favorite quotations and this is in Orphan X, he says act like the man you
37:13
want to be.
37:15
And I've been in some tough situations in my personal life where I literally have thought
37:21
if I was writing a protagonist in my novel and I admired that protagonist and I wanted
37:26
readers to admire him, what would what would he do?
37:29
And then I do that thing because I know I'm not good enough to do that thing, right?
37:35
And for you to go what you've given your boy now at three is a template for saying it's
37:41
not that you're perfect, that you're maintaining an illusion of parental perfection, right?
37:47
So a lot of the times when we talk about parents that have negative effect, it's from abuse
37:54
or it's from neglect, right?
37:55
There's another one which is sort of like the great worshiped patriarch on a pedestal.
38:04
Everything I do is perfect.
38:05
Of course, everything you do isn't perfect and you're setting an unreasonable template.
38:10
So to give to give your kid the skill to say things can happen that are scary and I'm going
38:17
to show you how you come around, how you make it right, how you make it not scary is teaching
38:23
him a little feedback loop.
38:24
It's like a little mini hero's journey, both for you and for him when you talk about, when
38:29
you talk about emulating, right, doing doing the thing with your kid that they do what
38:36
dad does, not what dad says.
38:39
And what you've taught him is things are scary, people can be scary and then it's okay and
38:44
there's a way to reconnect and that's an option for me when I do that, right?
38:49
And it builds much more trust with you and we're always going to screw up.
38:54
There's no perfect thing.
38:55
And if we're, if we think that we're going, if you think you're never going to have another
38:58
moment of temper or piqued iron in your life, good luck, right?
39:02
But what we can do is always seek to heal and repair and to emulate that.
39:07
And so yes, a lot of this with Evan, you know, but look, what's so fun about writing Evan
39:13
about writing a thriller series is it's like all the stuff we go through, but it's writ
39:17
large, right?
39:18
So it's not just that he has a moment of, of temper, it's like he's, you know, he's just
39:22
killed four cartel guys and he's, you know, he's going back to his place and gets dragged
39:27
into a HOA meeting and he's bleeding through his sleeve, trying to cover it.
39:31
He's moving between the quotidian, the everyday parts of life and this other life and he's
39:37
trying to integrate them, right?
39:40
So he's perfectly comfortable calculating the wind drift on a sniper round and gets like
39:44
undone if he's by the mail slots and has to make small talk.
39:48
And in a way, that's what we're, we're all sort of doing that.
39:51
We have an interior life, I think, you know, as men, that, that's, that we're integrating
39:59
with all these other needs and confusion.
40:01
I said as men, as women too, obviously, we all have some different template that we're
40:07
integrating with the demands of everyday life.
40:09
And that's not always easy, especially if you're doing something that requires drive
40:14
and focus and muscularity, whether that means literal or intellectual or spiritual or moral.
40:21
Well, and it seems like, and, you know, I don't want to give anything away.
40:26
Well, I don't, I don't have any, any behind scenes knowledge, but it seems like we're
40:30
coming to a head here.
40:32
So obviously lone wolf is number nine in the series of orphan X, X, Roman numeral 10.
40:39
There are 10, you know, rules or laws that he lives by.
40:42
Uh, I mean, are we expecting a big shift with, with the 10th novel?
40:47
Are we expecting some sort of a consummation of a goal, like where are we going to or is
40:53
it just orphan X because it's orphan X and I'm just reading into it?
40:57
That's, that's precisely correct.
41:00
Okay.
41:01
He's coming up on the 10.
41:03
The 10 will be of a piece.
41:05
It's a ecology.
41:06
And again, I want to emphasize you can pick up anyone and I reset for the reader, but it's,
41:13
it's a story.
41:14
And X is the cross point, right?
41:18
X is X marks the spot and X is the point of no return for something.
41:23
And so lone wolf is heading to that end.
41:25
And you know, a lot of times with the books, all the orphan X books, it's very interesting.
41:31
It's, it's in some ways, it's almost, um, I do something in the novels where I close
41:36
the entirety of, of the story, I hope and satisfying fashion.
41:41
That's the aim.
41:42
And over one card for what's coming next.
41:45
And it's a cliffhanger of sorts or it presages a conflict, calm.
41:51
And the end of lone wolf is the biggest card that I've ever turned over for what's going
41:54
to come next and acts.
41:56
And by the way, my working title of the rough draft was X.
42:01
So you're, you're pretty perspicacious young man there, Kyle Thompson.
42:05
All right.
42:06
Well, I'm glad and that makes me even more excited about what's to come.
42:09
But it's that same feeling that gets people to wait until after the credits are rolling,
42:13
you know, for their, their favorite comic book movie, wherever, whether it's, you know,
42:17
Marvel or DC, it's because they're waiting for that little 30 second clip that turns
42:20
over that next card.
42:22
And so I'm very excited to, to see where that goes from here.
42:25
But as much as I enjoy your thrillers and going through those, perhaps my favorite work
42:30
that you've done, uh, that I've been exposed to is what you did on the Exodus series with
42:35
daily wire and with your good buddy, Jordan Peterson.
42:39
And so I don't think I need to explain to my audience what that is because I've talked
42:40
about it at length here, but you were part of a round table discussion about the book
42:45
of Exodus in the Pentateuch.
42:47
And you were there with guys like us, goodness, who has been on the show, but also Jonathan
42:51
Pajo and Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro and James Orr and Steven Blackwood and just, there
42:56
was kind of a rotation of different people.
42:59
And then you came on there and you were part of that group for a good number of, of those
43:03
episodes.
43:04
Like if you haven't watched the series yet, it's some of the biggest minds in different
43:10
areas of life going over small sections of Exodus at different points for an hour to
43:16
an hour and a half and really digging into the questions that are beyond just the theology,
43:21
but also the orthopraxia of how this is applicable to a modern life to the historical side of
43:26
what's being, uh, what's being discussed there as well.
43:28
But for you, I guess back to the beginning, how did you become a part of the project?
43:33
Uh, you know, what made you want to say yes when you were invited to be a part of this
43:37
and then the experience itself?
43:38
Let's, let's get behind the scenes.
43:41
Well, Jordan called and invited me and it was, um, to be honest with you, Jordan and
43:47
I have had a lot of adventures, right?
43:50
We go back all the way.
43:51
Jordan was my thesis advisor when I was an undergraduate.
43:54
I mean, so he was the first person to introduce me to Carl Jung, who's sort of my, um, one
43:59
of my, one of the lights in the firmament for me, intellectually act, not just intellectually.
44:05
Um, maybe we should start there.
44:09
I was raised at a very secular, uh, Jewish upbringing.
44:14
Uh, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, um, my parents, um, wonderful humanists.
44:20
My dad's a, as a, as a wonderful physician.
44:23
My mom's a social worker and her life's work was bringing in adoptive kids from around
44:28
the world.
44:29
We had 3,000 kids from orphanages around the world and the families in the Bay area.
44:33
So growing up for me, my house, my backyard was like the UN.
44:36
I mean, we had kids of every shape and size, you know, we'd have picnics with a flag for
44:41
every country that the kids came from with the food and the toys in the art of that culture.
44:46
So imagine multiculturalism in the best, most joyful way, right?
44:51
Children, food, music, games, um, and what was interesting when I was growing up is I
44:59
wasn't surrounded with a lot of Jews at all.
45:02
It was a very, um, Christian town.
45:04
This was in Silicon Valley before.com, before diversified, a lot of dudes who look like,
45:09
you know, those NASA launches where you have the white engineers with the hornroom glasses.
45:13
It was like Hewlett Packard early days.
45:16
Okay.
45:17
Um, so my best friends were, you know, Christian, um, you know, it was, it was, it was very interesting.
45:25
I was very out of place and then my parents sent me to a Jesuit high school.
45:30
Um, and I went kicking and screaming, all boys Jesuit high school.
45:34
Not only, um, was this, uh, not only was it religious, which I was not, it was a all boys
45:42
school, which I was public school.
45:44
I didn't know a single person, it was a school of 1200 guys and I was the smallest kid in
45:49
the entire high school.
45:50
Oh man.
45:51
It was like five to 90 pounds as a freshman.
45:56
So I went kicking and screaming long story short, wonderful school.
46:00
Um, you know, there were priests teaching classes.
46:02
I mean, this was as insane as if I, you know, shoved you into a synagogue, you know, in
46:09
it was just like it didn't make any sense.
46:13
First year we read the Old Testament, Jesuits are amazing, Jesuit education man, they're
46:19
spectacular.
46:21
And the template, which really matched my parents' ethic, um, which was my school is
46:26
called Bellarmine.
46:27
It's in San Jose.
46:28
It's a wonderful school.
46:29
And the template was a man for others.
46:31
They pounded that in our heads, right?
46:34
Everything was, you do community service all four years.
46:36
So I had, um, a sort of opening into the match of these, I'm going to call it two worlds
46:43
and of the secular and let's call it the religious.
46:46
These are very imperfect terms.
46:48
When I went to college, um, almost all my roommates were Catholic.
46:52
I went to school in Boston, like Irish, Italian.
46:57
And so, and then in college with, with Jordan, you know, he's teaching psychology and, and
47:04
Jung for me was the entry point, um, because Jung, um, master psychologist, he only wrote
47:11
about narrative.
47:12
Everything he wrote about was mythology.
47:14
It was alchemy, which if you think about with alchemy, you're turning base matter in the
47:19
gold, right?
47:20
It's a hero's journey, but projected onto, um, you know, material, yeah, yeah.
47:25
That's right.
47:26
And he analyzed Shakespeare and he analyzed, of course, the Bible.
47:30
And so it was a sort of intellectual and psychological way down to this reservoir of spiritual thinking.
47:36
And so that was a kind of path that I took down to all of a sudden to understand things
47:41
that were in that nature and open up a kind of, um, spiritual vocabulary that made sense
47:47
to me, meaning Jungian synchronicity was something that made sense in a way.
47:54
And a number of my closest friends are born again, Christian ones, a former 60 gunner
48:00
in the, in the team Navy Seal.
48:03
Another one grew up the son of missionaries, um, all through China, um, and, um, and so
48:10
all of a sudden we started to have these, um, conversations, um, where we'd be going through
48:16
something at the same time in our life and I'd be like, Oh, it's like Jungian synchronicity.
48:20
And they'd have a description that was totally Christian and we'd put them on top of each
48:23
other and they would match.
48:25
So that's about where I was, which is not an incredibly sophisticated level.
48:29
And Jordan called and asked me to do this seminar.
48:32
And I literally said no two times because I was like, I don't, that's not a fit.
48:36
We do so many other things we've done and other adventures.
48:40
And he really wanted me, um, he was insistent, which I mean, not in a way that's, that's
48:47
flattering to me, but meaning I think he thought it would be important for me, for myself,
48:55
and also to have a different kind of voice because everyone there's fairly devout.
48:58
I mean, look, Prager, who I didn't know before this has written an entire book on every book
49:03
of the Torah.
49:04
Right.
49:05
You know, Ben Shapiro has the Torah essentially memorized.
49:07
And then we have theologians from Cambridge.
49:11
And so part of why Jordan, I think when he was building this, and by the way, you know,
49:15
Blackwood and I were friends, Peugeot and I were friends.
49:18
So I had a lot of familiarity and warmth about some of the, some of the people who were there
49:23
wound up having that with virtually everybody.
49:26
I mean, or spectacular.
49:27
I mean, it was wonderful.
49:29
But so for me, I was sort of went as a, I suppose an expert in story, narrative structure
49:34
and storytelling, which is a very different expertise and I was really the only person,
49:38
I would say from this, whatever sides mean anymore, which, which is nothing, but we use
49:44
them as a organizing way to talk about it, my tendency is probably center left.
49:48
I'm more liberal.
49:49
I'm high trade openness.
49:51
And I was really the one person who was on that side of the divide.
49:54
And so that was the point of entry.
49:56
I kind of showed up and that experience for me was, was spectacular.
50:01
It was life altering.
50:03
So you said that Jordan thought it would be important for you.
50:08
So he didn't say that he's too, he's too gracious and smart.
50:11
So he said, I'd really like you to come, but I, you know, it's, uh, yeah, I think, yeah,
50:19
we involve each other in a lot of different adventures is probably the best way to say
50:24
it.
50:25
And he was like, pay attention to this one, you know, so and thank God he did it.
50:29
Probably he wanted you to pay attention for a particular reason.
50:33
As I understand it, is your journey is not finished.
50:37
I get the sense that Jordan is putting together another crew to tackle some other parts of
50:42
the Bible as well.
50:43
I keep asking you to tell me what book and you just won't do it, Greg, you just won't
50:46
do it.
50:47
But I'll keep asking, um, off air, of course, but has this experience put you on a journey
50:55
of sorts?
50:56
And some people, they use the term colloquially because it's like, Oh, you're going to end
50:59
up at, you know, at the foot of the cross.
51:01
And that's like everything is an evangelical push, right?
51:04
But for you, you came into this experience, open minded, while a little bit demure, like,
51:10
Hey, I don't know if I should be here or not where there's, there's some inherent humility
51:14
there, but you show up, you spend tens of hours recording, but also preparing and discussing.
51:20
And I can only imagine what the dinner discussions were like afterwards.
51:24
But, uh, we had some epic, epic conversations.
51:29
If you want to talk about that, go for it, but I just want to know what, what kind of journey
51:32
has this done?
51:33
Has this like altered your life in a particular area as it pertains specifically to the divine?
51:38
Look, you, you can't be around that much brilliance and pay attention and not be altered.
51:45
I mean, I'd like to think that that's the engagement that we all have for each other.
51:50
Because we come from different angles of it, I mean, it's really funny watching, like,
51:55
you know, Pajoe or Oz will have some, you know, respectful, different approach on something.
52:01
But for me, look, I'm, I'm pretty high in trade openness.
52:04
I don't have a hard time opening up to something that's brand new.
52:07
I've gone undercover in a mind control, calls to research stuff.
52:10
I've spent a lot of time with a lot of different communities.
52:14
And so once I was going, I went like full and open of heart, let's just say.
52:19
And I didn't, I knew Ben enough to know him a bit personally and trust him.
52:23
I'm, I'm friends with Andrew Clavin, but Ben and Prager are fairly across the aisle,
52:28
whatever, again, whatever the hell that means.
52:31
You know, you can, you can pull a lot of things and I didn't know Prager very well.
52:36
And so one of the first things that was amazing was just, and we've done this, there was one
52:41
time Jordan and I went to Congress, gosh, this must have been 2018, I want to say.
52:49
And just did a dinner.
52:50
We had 10 Congress, Congress be, Congress bulk from the Democratic Party and 10 from
52:56
the Republican Party.
52:57
And we just had a dinner.
52:59
And the rule was like no filibustering and no one talk about policy.
53:03
Just say why you went, got into politics and what you care about went around the table.
53:08
20 people, if we haven't reached the peak of polarization, this was certainly one of
53:13
them, right?
53:14
So let's hope we haven't.
53:16
And at the end of it, there were 20 of the finest people you could possibly imagine.
53:24
Like you, nobody could possibly have an issue with anybody else when they told the story
53:28
of what inspired them, what drove them, when we avoided the political, and I always think
53:33
about that statistic, which I'm sure I'll misquote that we, you know, we have 99% of
53:37
our DNA we share with chimps, right?
53:40
But we look insane.
53:41
So it's like, so with each other in America, in politics, what do you think we actually
53:47
share between the parties?
53:49
Is it 99.9999% aside from the radical fringes?
53:54
And if we can start on the massive amount that we share before just focusing on what
53:59
the differences are.
54:01
And so one of the things about Exodus, there's a number of things that were just mind-blowing
54:04
for me.
54:05
Because look, if you approach something in fellowship, right, whether that's a seminar
54:11
on Shakespeare, whether that's, whether that's anything that you do with people where everybody's
54:18
in their best self, me included, this sort of bonding and understanding not only that
54:24
you can have over something, but that starts to build in terms of feeling like the world's
54:30
pulling together a little bit.
54:33
It's quite extraordinary.
54:35
And the fact that we didn't go in there to be like, look, we're going to spend 32 hours
54:39
talking about trans bathrooms, right?
54:43
The fact that we, it was literally like instead of finding the most obscure mosaic pieces
54:49
of things we might disagree on, let's talk about something that everyone's bringing in
54:52
a way their best pure self.
54:54
So with me, it's not going to be the wisdom, the symbological wisdom of Peugeot.
54:59
It's not going to be the sweeping historical, evangelical insight of Oz Guinness.
55:08
But it's a genuine curiosity and openness, an engagement with story and trying to link
55:16
that to psychology.
55:17
You're just in a conversation.
55:19
And it calls to mind they did a study on gangs where they were trying to figure out how
55:24
to end a spate of gang violence.
55:29
And they found out if you take two gang members, you do an outward bound kind of thing, and
55:34
you just mess up the teams.
55:35
It's like capture the flag, right?
55:37
Like, what do you need to do?
55:38
You need to be joined in another venture that's aiming upward.
55:42
And we did that.
55:43
And it was amazing.
55:46
And so my friendships with, I already, you know, I was, I was already, I would say probably
55:51
closest with, with Peugeot and Blackwood going in.
55:54
But the friendships I had solidified more, and then there was, you know, enormous, enormous
56:01
regard.
56:02
And so when someone dismisses somebody else for a political position, even what I might
56:07
consider an ill-advised partisan statement, and by that, I mean, I'm sure I've made plenty
56:14
as well, there's a totality of a person that I'm looking at, right?
56:18
And it's like, oh, you know, Prager said this thing in this time that someone's offended
56:22
about.
56:23
And it's like, I, in a way, had access to his, you know, kind of capacious heart and child-like
56:32
wonder and curiosity, you know, he has, you know, he knows as much about music, he could
56:37
conduct an orchestra, Prager.
56:39
Right.
56:40
Yeah, I think he's done the Los Angeles County Symphony or something like that where he'll
56:44
go and conduct.
56:45
Yeah.
56:46
Well, what, what does he think?
56:47
Yeah.
56:48
It's like, can you not be good at everything?
56:50
That would be awesome.
56:51
But what does he--
56:52
I mean, the other thing that--
56:53
Go ahead, please.
56:54
Well, the other thing I was going to say is, you know, one of the things that also was
56:58
so very interesting was, I had one conversation with Oz, Oz is, I mean, you know, you've
57:05
interviewed him.
57:06
What do you say about Oz?
57:07
He's like, he's who you want an evangelical to be.
57:09
He's like beaming with Goodwill.
57:10
I want to create like an action, an action series featuring Oz Guinness with like Goodwill
57:15
and a machete in the Amazon, right?
57:17
Yeah.
57:18
Like, and you're just following him.
57:19
I'm in.
57:20
He's amazing.
57:21
But he, we had this conversation, we're talking about globalization.
57:26
And so you have to think about where people come from.
57:28
And for me, I come from, think back to my backyard with kids from all the countries
57:33
of the world, you know, who would have basically like died impoverished or been turned out
57:39
for prostitution and orphanages who were like integrated in these communities.
57:43
And sometimes it was, it was a very global childhood that, that was part of my mom specifically
57:51
but my parents guiding ethos.
57:53
So globalism for me meant like great man, the best of a bunch of cultures, right?
57:59
Free trade.
58:00
We lift half the world out of poverty.
58:01
I can get an iPhone for, you know, instead of it being $5,000 like I can, I can get one
58:07
for $1,000 and other people are making money in other areas.
58:11
And, you know, we're stitched tighter, we can travel across Europe without passports.
58:16
I'm coming in from a different angle, right?
58:20
And if somebody comes at me with, you know, all the judgments that adhere to that, I'm
58:28
just going to solidify, right?
58:29
It turns into boxing, not judo.
58:32
It's not combative.
58:33
That's not quite what I mean.
58:34
But so I was talking Oz and Oz sort of explained with his tone of sort of hushed reverence
58:40
and wonder and ceaseless good nature, like he described for me what a global ethic looks
58:47
like, right?
58:48
And then, you know, like do we out, and I've been thinking a lot about sort of technology
58:55
and polarization.
58:56
I wrote a comic book series called New Think, which in which I examine a lot of these things.
59:01
But I had this conversation with him and it sort of just connected me with the other stuff
59:05
that I had studied and the other ideas I'd integrated, like Orwell, right?
59:10
For some reason, it just hadn't been framed that way.
59:12
And Oz was describing the side of globalism.
59:15
It doesn't mean that globalism, we need to have a view of like the emperors thumbs up
59:19
or thumbs down.
59:21
But an awareness that if we sort of outsource everything to a more global ethic, once that
59:25
bleeds away from local communities, local wisdom, ground truth, right?
59:32
We start to lose and then you have this centralized control.
59:35
The rest becomes quite obvious to someone who's conservative or libertarian minded.
59:40
But for some reason, there was just like a connection on it for me.
59:43
And I already knew it in so many ways.
59:45
I knew it from, you know, Orwell, I knew it from Arthur Miller, the crucible.
59:51
I knew it from working in communities, both liberal and conservative, let's say, right?
59:57
If you go into a broke community in Western Tennessee that's opioid-ravished, if you go
1:00:02
into a community that's a rural community in Chicago and you're assessing the needs,
1:00:07
you have to know what's happening on the ground.
1:00:09
Obviously, you can't have things top down.
1:00:12
And so it just really opened up a bridge.
1:00:14
I always think of things, you know, my key symbol for me is the yin-yang.
1:00:19
And one of the things I always say is based on my experience, my genetic traits, my meaning
1:00:25
my big five personality traits, my upbringing, I come at everything from a liberal open center
1:00:33
left perspective.
1:00:34
But whenever I can get enough wisdom and talk to enough people, I find that on whatever
1:00:39
issue I come almost where I'm half conservative and half liberal.
1:00:42
And I think if I was wiser, I'd be that way on sort of every issue.
1:00:46
And so when talking to Oz about this and having him frame it, you know, so delightfully after
1:00:52
trusted, obviously been established in a host of other ways with conversational exchanges
1:00:57
and engagement, it just really opened that up to me starting to have an understanding.
1:01:02
I do a lot of a good amount of pro bono work in the political space against polarization
1:01:07
or outreach.
1:01:09
But it was like one of these things where you get an insight like that, which to you,
1:01:13
perhaps that connection's obvious, but where all these, the epiphany slots all these things
1:01:17
in place, right?
1:01:18
Like literature, ethic, philosophy, but then it becomes this wonderful new filter that
1:01:24
I can pick up and look at everything with.
1:01:27
And so if I'm talking to democratic leaders, I can think about it differently.
1:01:30
If I'm talking to community organizers, if I'm talking to conservatives, right?
1:01:36
It just becomes something that is, it's like this tool that you can have way more insight.
1:01:41
And if the interest is trying to find truth, if the interest is trying to move towards an
1:01:45
understanding that can bring people together in the clearest way, then it was rife with
1:01:53
that, Kyle.
1:01:54
I mean, we could talk for six hours about an offhand line that Ben Shapiro said between
1:02:03
takes on something, where like a throwaway line from him that I'd spent enough time with
1:02:10
him to not be, you know, engaged on some partisan nonsense to go, wow, okay?
1:02:17
Like, you know, clearly, clearly Ben's got a big, you know, interior singular, he's got
1:02:22
a big engine.
1:02:23
It's got bright headlights.
1:02:24
But some of the throwaway stuff when we're applied to something is I have an opportunity
1:02:28
to pick it up and think and carry it through and contemplate on it.
1:02:32
And it's not engaging with a tweet where I've, I've already decided that I don't agree
1:02:37
with it and it's not phrased the right way and we could disagree and can't he see this
1:02:42
other side.
1:02:43
So, you know, it's like I said, we could talk about this for hours, but well, we're certainly
1:02:49
going to talk more about it.
1:02:50
We don't.
1:02:51
We're running out of time in terms of today, but I can't say that as I was listening to
1:02:54
it and watching the series, it seemed like it was a room full of people that were focused
1:02:59
on human flourishing.
1:03:02
Everybody has their own opinion as to how we accomplish that in the best way possible
1:03:06
for humanity in total.
1:03:08
That's part of what arc is.
1:03:09
And that's part of what some of the other work that y'all are doing is.
1:03:12
But also it seemed like every, it's one of those few times where you got to witness everybody
1:03:17
in a room whose sword was very, very sharp.
1:03:21
Now, people's, you know, there are swords where, you know, different makes and models
1:03:25
and all kinds of different things and their swords are wielded in different ways depending
1:03:29
upon the chosen profession.
1:03:31
But that was one thing to where it's like, man, everyone here is sharp and it didn't turn
1:03:36
into a dick measuring contest where it's just like, Hey, let's see who's the sharpest
1:03:39
tack.
1:03:40
This, this game around, there was so much defaulting to everybody else and allowing everybody
1:03:45
else to kind of have their, their moment to say what they need to say.
1:03:48
There wasn't a whole lot of divisiveness.
1:03:50
And you know, for a guy like me, I'm very high in trade conscientiousness, but I'm also
1:03:54
very high in trade openness, which is not a super tip of my favorite combination, Kyle.
1:04:00
Well, it's, it doesn't make sense to me.
1:04:02
But again, I don't know the psychology behind it.
1:04:04
But that's one thing for me is I felt like I was in tension the entire time between the
1:04:09
conscientiousness part of my personality, the openness part of my personality.
1:04:13
Because sometimes I was wanting to shut the conversation down and say, no, stamp it, move
1:04:16
on.
1:04:17
We've made the point.
1:04:18
Other times it was like, I think they need to explore this for a little bit longer.
1:04:20
But as per usual, every time we get to the end of the conversation, there's more that
1:04:24
needs to be said.
1:04:25
But as we wrap up, I'll just kind of throw out a generic final question, which is what,
1:04:29
what are you most excited about that you have coming up, right?
1:04:33
So whether that be something that you're writing, something that you're working on, which, you
1:04:37
know, might be the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship or might be the next biblical
1:04:41
thing that you take on with Jordan or some project that you haven't told anyone about.
1:04:45
What's that thing that's like really getting you going that you're excited about?
1:04:48
That's a great question.
1:04:50
I want to just have a quick remark to bring something full circle that we talked about.
1:04:55
You know, you told that kind of poignant anecdote about you and your three-year-old.
1:04:59
And it ties to the thing you kind of raised in your first question or your, you know,
1:05:03
in the early part of the conversation where you said that what's embodied, what you do
1:05:08
as a dad is more important than what you say.
1:05:11
And in a way, so much of what happened in Exodus that is, I think, more important even
1:05:19
than the ideas that are discussed.
1:05:21
And the intellectual, the intellectualism, the insight, even the wisdom that was passed
1:05:28
is, as you said, it didn't turn into a sword measuring contest, which was important.
1:05:34
But I think in some ways it's watching everybody who was there, it was authentic.
1:05:40
There wasn't a false no.
1:05:41
There was no engagement with somebody who was possessed by an ideology of one side or another.
1:05:47
And I think the thing for me that was the most meaningful was watching everybody who
1:05:52
was the manner in which we were engaged and what we hope that that is showing a template
1:06:00
for, people who might disagree, right?
1:06:02
We come from, everyone comes from different disciplines, you know, it's not just me and
1:06:05
everyone else.
1:06:06
You know, there's plenty of different approaches to this matter from everyone at the table.
1:06:12
But watching and understanding that we can pick up ideas and notions that are deeply
1:06:17
meaningful and have, you know, around which we've all built our respective world views
1:06:23
and just share them openly in a spirit of exploration and adventure and chisel down
1:06:29
and even argue and negotiate and compromise and bridge build and find connections.
1:06:34
The mode of that, it was in hindsight, I think, in some ways, is the most important thing,
1:06:39
is just is even if you, if we changed, I mean, the content, of course, is essential.
1:06:44
But the means by which we engage with it in some ways, I think, was the most meaningful
1:06:51
part for me.
1:06:52
And to your last question, I am enjoying, it's hard to describe how much I'm enjoying
1:06:58
writing Orphan X right now.
1:07:01
It's like it's this weird thing where I've caught up to what I'm writing and I'm thinking
1:07:05
every night about what's next and I'm writing it and I'm figuring out from what I'm writing
1:07:10
things I'm trying to fix in my own life, it's been this really weird confluence.
1:07:16
And the book comes out, you know, in two weeks and I'm going to go on tour and tours
1:07:21
are great, man.
1:07:23
I get to meet a lot of people, I mean, more and more people who come in from Exodus, from
1:07:29
your podcast, from, you know, obviously books, Hollywood, the comics that I've written, but
1:07:36
a real range.
1:07:37
And so what's been a total blast, and I got to see you last year at one of the events,
1:07:42
which was really fun, is watching and having these sort of like little communities that
1:07:48
gather around a shared story at these stops.
1:07:52
And I get to do that again in two weeks, you know, and I can't wait.
1:07:56
I'm going to, you know, Houston, I'll be all over California, Sacramento, Bay Area, LA,
1:08:01
Orange County, St. Louis, I'm going to go to, I'm going to Scottsdale, I'm doing something
1:08:06
in Des Moines at one point.
1:08:09
And that's going to be amazing because the creative has been so engaging and now I get
1:08:13
to kind of go talk, talk about it with people.
1:08:17
And I can't wait to do that.
1:08:18
And maybe we could even figure out, I could, I could grab you again somewhere, somewhere
1:08:22
else at some point and, you know, we could get together and eat beef jerky and drink
1:08:28
bourbon.
1:08:29
Oh, no, that's not what we're doing.
1:08:30
No, no, we're going to eat, drink, eat, you know, jerky, drink bourbon and smoke cigars.
1:08:34
We're going to do all those things, but I will say, when I was with you, oh, and your last
1:08:38
tour in Dallas, one thing that I did, because, you know, I have a bigger personality.
1:08:43
And so sometimes I could be the center of attention in life of the party.
1:08:46
I loved being able to sit in the back of the bookstore and watch you interact with people
1:08:52
that have interacted with you so much through your writing and through your work and not
1:08:58
just to see how much it means to them, but for them to be able to talk to their favorite
1:09:02
author and ask that burning question that has been on the front of their brain for months.
1:09:07
And then they finally get to see you and then they just get to lay it out there.
1:09:10
And you so graciously gave your time to everybody and attention because a lot of these things
1:09:14
turn into, okay, I'll sign it out, I'll take your stupid picture and I'll get the hell
1:09:17
out of the line.
1:09:18
But you were actually investing in these people because you knew you had a nugget of
1:09:22
time with them and you wanted to make sure it was worth it.
1:09:24
So that was fun for me just to be, you know, a fly on the wall and get to be able to interact
1:09:29
and see that in a lot of ways.
1:09:30
Greg, you always have an open invitation every time you release something awesome to come
1:09:34
back on the show.
1:09:35
But that's all for me.
1:09:36
Is there anything else you want to get off your chest?
1:09:38
No, man.
1:09:39
Thank you.
1:09:40
It's, it's always nice to talk to you.
1:09:42
All right.
1:09:43
We'll talk again soon.
1:09:44
There you go.
1:09:45
Guys.
1:09:46
I hope you enjoyed my time with Greg Hurwitz.
1:09:47
But before I let you go, we are going to do a quick resilience boost at undaunted life.
1:09:50
Her mission is equipping men to push back darkness with content that forges spiritual
1:09:53
mental and physical resilience.
1:09:54
Got a couple links for you today.
1:09:55
I've got a link to the Amazon link for you to go and buy your own copy of lone wolf.
1:09:59
And then I've also got a link to Greg's website.
1:10:01
So I went specifically to the events page.
1:10:03
So if you want to catch him on his tour as he's going across some places in the Midwest
1:10:06
and out on the West Coast, you can also check that out there.
1:10:09
Thank you guys so much for listening to this episode.
1:10:11
Wherever you're listening to this, please subscribe rate and leave us a positive five
1:10:14
star review.
1:10:15
If you want to come speak live at your event or on your podcast, shoot me an email to info
1:10:19
at undaunted.life.
1:10:21
That's I N F O at undaunted.life, follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook and
1:10:25
check out our website for everything else, including how to donate to keep more content
1:10:28
like this coming your way.
1:10:30
Just go to www.undaunted.life and also we want to thank the band Holy Name for allowing
1:10:35
us to use their music for our content.
1:10:37
The music on this podcast is our song Perpetua, which is off their self titled debut album
1:10:41
on face down records.
1:10:43
The links are in the description.
1:10:44
I'm your host Kyle Thompson.
1:10:46
Remember keep pushing back darkness, keep forging spiritual, mental and physical resilience.
1:10:52
Seeking the lion of Judah.