The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Headcase: Book 1: Shock & Denial by Chris K. Jones

Episode Date: August 5, 2022

Headcase: Book 1: Shock & Denial by Chris K. Jones Chriskjones.com Dr. Andrew Beck is the go-to sports psychologist for troubled pro athletes. There isn’t a head he can’t fix—except his own. Whether it’s a violent hockey pro, reckless power forward, or drug-addicted major league pitcher, Andrew’s therapeutic strategies get players out of their heads and back to their winning ways. His status, wealth, and privilege afford him box seats for every game, flying private, an office overlooking Central Park, sports cars, country clubs and a Greenwich mansion. Andrew and his brilliant PR executive wife, Sandra, enjoy a life most would envy. But Andrew has demons of his own. A former golf prodigy and the son of a Masters Golf Champion, he knows firsthand the stress of topflight competition. Ted Beck taught Andrew everything he knows about being the best, but his father’s emotional and physical abuse pushed him past a breaking point. At 18, as the country’s top amateur, he walked away from golf to pursue psychology. The father and son bond was destroyed. But while Beck quit the game long ago, the game won’t quit him. Years later, the drive to win at all costs still burns deep in his soul. He gets entangled in the world of illegal high-stakes gambling—and a dangerous relationship with Fergus Mackenzie, a ruthless operator of an underground club that caters to the vices of the ultra-wealthy. Andrew uses his insider access to athletes in a wager which leads down a path of blackmail, a mysterious murder, and life-or-death bluffing. With his livelihood, marriage, and life on the line, Andrew finds himself playing the ultimate mind game and risks losing everything. And now the only way out is ALL-IN.

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All our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, all the crazy places those kids are playing these days. And check us out, including Chris Voss Leadership Institute.com. You can see some of our courses and leadership training that we have there as well, my speaking, et cetera. Today, we have Chris K. Jones, a new author on the show. He's the author of the newest book, Headcase, book one, Shock and Denial, that came out March 10th, 2022. We're going to be talking to him about his amazing book.

He is a recovering serial entrepreneur who quit at the peak of his career to honor the promise he made to himself at 19 that he would become a writer. He splits his time between Tarrytown, New York and Barbados, where he finds time to swim with turtles and observe cloud animals. Although he doesn't have any children, his inner eight-year-old keeps him on his toes. He's an extrovert who has decided to work in the world's loneliest profession, writing books. Yes, I can tell you that from my experience. Writing his first novel, Headcase, has been the best form of therapy he's ever had. Well, that's good for him because mine broke me.

Welcome to the show, Chris. How are you? I'm great, Chris. Thanks. Thanks for having me on. Really appreciate it. I think it was the editing and the, it was the editing mostly that broke me, but I did, I wrote it in three months, so a bit of a head spin. So welcome to the show. Congratulations on the new book. Give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs. Sure. You can go to chriskjones.com, and if you sign up for the mailing list, you can get the first seven chapters free of Headcase.

So I figure if you like it, then go buy it. You can also reach me on Instagram at headcase underscore novel, as well on Facebook, Chris K. Jones author, and on Twitter, headcase underscore novel. There you go. So what motivated you on to write your first book? Well, I always wanted to be a writer. So when even as a small boy, I had all these real vivid imagination and all these things in my head and I can't draw. So I couldn't get them out. So I learned to write them down. And then I had encouragement from my high school creative writing teacher who I dedicated my book to, Mr. Paul Putanik. And then even in college.

So, but, you know, I'm right brain and left brain and I love business and I had the choice between accounting or English. And I kind of went with the more practical side and left brain. And I love business. And I had the choice between accounting or English. And I kind of went with the more practical side and studied accounting. And even when I was in college, my sophomore professor said to me when I was 19, said, Chris, you're really talented. You should switch from accounting to English and pursue your writing. And I said, look, I grew up poor. Don't want to be a poor starving artist. I'll go make some money and then I'll write. Come on, poor starving artist. It's great.

Everyone does it. It's a thing. No, not really. It's the latest thing. Yeah, it's probably, it might be a better, it might be a better field of avenue to, you know, get the money first, then go chase your dreams. Because chasing dreams sometimes requires money, I suppose.

So give us an overview of the book. What's the book about? It's a novel from my understanding. Yep. It's a novel. It's the first in a series, and it's called Headcanon. The first book is Shock and Denial, and it follows a week in the life of Dr. Andrew Beck, who's the go-to sports psychologist for troubled pro athletes. And there isn't a head he can't fix, except his own. And when his own inner demons get the best of him, he misuses his insider access to athletes in a wager, which leads him down this dark path of blackmail,

mysterious murder, and life or death bluffing. And his only way out is to go all in. So the theme of it is really, if you don't discover your demons, they'll destroy you. And it doesn't matter if you're rich and famous or pro athlete. If you don't solve for your traumatic issues, they're going to bring you to your knees. Trauma, the favorite subject of human beings everywhere, whether they realize it or not. So that's interesting.

So, Dr. Andrew Beck, he's a go-to sports psychologist for troubled pro athletes. What was the reason you chose the title head case? Head case is actually a derogatory term for an athlete who is having trouble either on the field or off the field, on the field with maybe the yips or off the field with just issues he's having in his personal life, he or she. And I just thought it was interesting. I've always thought about, I was a competitive athlete. I was a wrestler in college and judo after college. And I always was very interested in what happened.

And I always was a big sports fan growing up, growing up in New Jersey and right in the Meadowlands. I grew up in Rutherford, New Jersey. And I always was very curious about what happens when pro athletes fail, what happens and how do they deal with it? And I thought, well, you know, maybe they go out and they get a sports psychologist. And then my favorite question as an author is what if? So what if that sports psychologist had more issues than the people that he treats? And Dr. Andrew Beck was born. And he's just, you know, he's very talented at treating his clients

and his patients because he's the son of a master's champion. And he was a golf prodigy at five and his father wanted them to be the first father and son master's champions. But he brought, he drove him to the breaking point. And at 18, he walked away right was he was about to turn pro to go study psychology and their relationship never healed. So it's a lot about family trauma, generational trauma. And you hear and there's just a whole lot about how each even the athletes and what they dealt with in their families. I mean, all our trauma starts with our own within our own family. Right. Because that's what we're closest to.

And then just working through that. And we see that he's so able to compartmentalize his life. And it's like a doctor heal thyself and things you would think he'd be really aware of because he's a psychologist. He's not because it's his own trauma. And it doesn't matter all the training that we've had. If we really don't work hard to understand our own trauma and get to the dark part of it and bring it to the surface, you know, we're really not going to have, we're going to have a hard time healing. And I hopefully people really just enjoy the book. It's entertaining. It's a page turner,

you know, it's twists and turns throughout, you know, and just seeing how this guy's life, this goes down, goes from, you know, way up top to a life we would all love to have. And then he's really hurting at the end. And just seeing what happens to him. But it can happen to any one of us. But I do hope people are entertained. And if I can raise awareness towards mental health and sports, I'd really be happy with that too. Oh, that's a good angle. You can contribute that way.

So did you pick the psychologist and the trauma theme from your own experience of life? Sure. I mean, we've all experienced trauma. I did not experience the traumas that my athletes in this did. They really had a lot of, or even Andrew, physical and mental abuse. I didn't have that. And we all have our experiences of who we are and the things we struggled with. I mean, as a wrestler, I struggled from eating disorders and I was battling the scale and not my opponent, which was great when I went to judo. And it was actually my Buddhist and my Buddhist teacher was one that suggested I take judo. And I like being able to do things over again. Everything in life is

reincarnation, I believe. And so I got to do judo again. I played it my healthy way. I had a healthy approach to it and I won. So it's really like everything in looking at how we approach the sport. I mean, I didn't, I was very competitive. I hated it when I lost, of course, you know, you sit there and you just think about what happened, go through every move, every second, watch the video a thousand times and try to correct yourself. So, but it was still that those points of still those points of looking at what I went through,

even as a competitive athlete, but I wasn't on the Olympic team. But then I did speak with Olympians. I did do a lot of research. And a lot of pro athletes, their childhoods were horrific. And I think it's just they don't get a lot of compassion. I mean, right now, at least it's really great that we're starting to hear more about it and, and that athletes are able to come forward and people like Michael Phelps with his documentary weight of gold and yeah, it's okay to say you're not okay. Definitely. I mean, that's,

I think that's the hardest part is finding out, is admitting you have trauma and finding out you're not alone. So I think that's very helpful to a lot of people. So this is kind of interesting. You know, I've always kind of had a little bit of a snicker about psychologists because, you know, I dated some psychologists when I was younger and they're the one group that I will never date ever again. They were usually people in college getting their psychology degree. And usually they were getting their degree because they were trying to fix for free basically what was going to take decades to fix. And they have a high suicide rate in their thing. I think they're number two next to the dentist or something.

And so they have a high suicide rate. And I'm like, wait, the psychologists who help people with their mental health so they don't commit suicide or have the second highest suicide rate. Well, that's like nonsensical, but maybe in a way it is. So I think it's kind of interesting that your book deals with, you know, a psychiatrist who fixes everyone else's problems but his own. Maybe in a lot of ways there's some sort of analogy of that to human beings and what they do. Yeah, I've spoken to quite a few mental health professionals. And even, you know, I've dealt with that even in my own family and dealing with just everybody's issues. But a lot of times the key to the people who've gotten through very healthy,

like dealing with, like as well as people deal with children is they need sort of a process to sort of come home and decompress and kind of unload their day. If I think the suicides happen when they're bringing that, all that, they're hearing people's issues and sometimes really just horrific things, and they're bringing that home with them,

but they need an opportunity to, and sort of their own little process for de-rolling, for saying, okay, now I'm not, if it's me, say I'm not, you know, Chris Jones, the psychologist, I'm not, but walking home like, okay, I have to be Chris Jones, the father, the husband, the partner, the friend, and change your role and really change. There aren't too many professions where you really just need to de-roll, but anything that's really high stress, you know, police, firemen, AS surgeons, I'm pretty sure you kind of, it's very healthy stress you know police firemen uh yes surgeons i'm pretty sure you kind of it's very healthy if you can do a de-rolling and just go back to being who you are as a human being yeah some people come home and then they gotta hear about other people's problems but

you get all that when you get shot when you get home so did you base the characters on anybody else you knew in your immediate family? Any movie stars? What were some of the characters that you brought to life in the story? What did you base it on? That was really the best part. And I didn't use real teams. I made up my own leagues.

I made up my own teams. And it was really fun just to put together the athlete's profile. I had a lot of fun doing that, even designing their uniforms and things like that. It was a lot of fun. On my website, you can go and see the pictures of the athletes and kind of what I did. But it was really an amalgamation of everything. I also worked with a pro team in the locker rooms when I was young and I used to spend time talking to the athletes. I just wanted to know about what their life was outside of football. My older brother,

he worked for the Giants. My dad did work with a lot of pro athletes doing personal things. So I spent time talking to pro athletes when I was very young. But it was really just an amalgamation. It wasn't one person. They don't, there's no character in the book that resembles anyone. It was interesting, one of the characters, Andrew Beck's brother's name is Brandon, and my brother is Brendan. And I had to call him and I'm like, I said, Brendan, this has nothing to do with you. I just like the names. Don't read into it. Because their relationship isn't very good, and Brendan's and mine is. But I was like, don't read into this at all. It has nothing to do with you. So yeah, you do,

people do ask that. And it's, it really, it's just, they're all figments of my imagination and just a ton of research and, and experience just being around athletes my whole life. Interesting. How did, how did you read the book? Like what, what did you, what's the word I'm looking for? How did you have a complete brain fart and shut down? When you were writing, how long did it take you to write the book? That's what I'm looking for. Well, I'm glad you asked that.

Okay. So spending my career as a CFO, like I said, I have this really strong left brain as well as the right brain. And leaving, I left my, I sold my last business in June 2019. And I really, and I spent like during the transition. But my last day at my company that I co-founded was January 31st, 2020. So I had February to kind of figure out what my new life was going to be as a writer. And then we went into pandemic. So then I was like, you know, it was great for me because I got to just have all this time to focus on writing. And then I moved to Barbados and wrote the novel down there. And that image in the back isn't some random shot. That's actually my backyard in

my house in Barbados. And it was a great place to write. It was also motivating, realizing I'm getting up each day and saying, look, I know I'm living an author's dream. I'm not. And so get to work because most authors would give their right arm to be able to write from a beach in a beautiful place so that was it but because i have this other side this logic side the cfo that's constantly asking what's the roi what are we doing how are we doing this and i needed that time for the creative person to come out i kept the time sheet because now it gave him a metric. So I know exactly how long it took 714 and a half hours. So I know two to half hour, I know exactly how long it took. That's pretty freaking awesome, dude. That is pretty freaking awesome. What else do we need

to talk about the book? Do you have any teasers you want to put out for scenarios or, or things that you think are really sure, like, even though it deals with a lot of, you would think, masculine topics, I wrote it in a way that was very sensory and more about emotion. I have a lot of international friends living in Barbados. I went to college in Northern England, in Newcastle. I have a lot of people in Europe. So I wrote it in a way that if you didn't know anything about sports or psychology therapy, you'd still be able to really enjoy it. I made it so you can, you're experiencing what the players are feeling rather than so much the technicalities of what's going on in the game, which would bore people who aren't sports fans. He's also got, you know,

these gambling issues. So there's card playing. And so, yeah, I think it is something in my female readers we've been really great i got great feedback from them one of them said to me it was such a great insight into the male psyche you know i'm writing it i'm a male right so i'm writing like that but you you are really following like a shadow in a in the narrative of going through whatever andrew was going through it stays just in, what we call the close third-person narrative. We're just in Andrew's head. But you're feeling what he's feeling.

You're seeing what he's feeling, smelling what he's smelling. And I purposely wrote it so it was very sensory. So people who, some people are visual, some people are auditory, some people are kinesthetic. I wrote it to different modalities on purpose so people would feel connected to the story. And I think, you know, my female readers have enjoyed it just as much. And even my male friends who aren't sports people, they all said they enjoyed it because they could follow the story because it's really about relationships. It's about emotions. It's about dealing with our own issues and how we can

get tripped up even when you got a PhD and you can still get tripped up. So we're all human. Yeah. And everyone thinks, you know, you get successful, you think you're, you've got it all. And, you know, and sometimes we see people that seem to have it all in this world and yet they, they don't, you know know sometimes you can have that outward expression of of having everything and then inward you're a freaking mess and you know i i went through my life where i started my first companies early on and became successful and i thought that money would heal all wounds and i would be able to you know i'd be it would perfect me of in some sort of sense.

Really, all it did was amplify all my traumas and problems and issues, and it just made it worse. And so a lot of people don't realize that's kind of the course a lot of people take. So it's interesting that he goes on that course. He becomes successful. He gets, you know, all the stuff, the Central Park, the sports car, the country clubs, the Greenwich Mansion, and seems to have the perfect life. And yet it's a mess. You teased that there was murder.

Murder, you say, in the book. Do you want to tease a little bit more on that one? I know people have intrigued. Yeah, definitely. You know, he gets mixed up with this where he goes to gamble because he's got this gambling addiction. When he left pro sport, sport well he left competitive sports i mean doing this since he's five years old and his father rate you know just push push push when he left it it was a big fu to his father to say i'm going to make my own path but he still did not have an outlet for that competitive nature. So I firmly believe when we have these things,

if we don't solve for them, they're going to go sideways on us. So yes, he was studying psychology, became a psychologist, working with athletes, but he still needed that competition. So it came out through gambling because in gambling, he gets that rush, that rush of, for him, it's less about the money and more about, can I just own this person? Can I listen to their mind? Can I read them? Can I read all their tales? Because now it's legal, right? But he can sit there and read all their tales, use all the things he's learned

in psychology and all the things his father taught him about messing with people's heads on the golf course and just getting in there. Yeah. His dad was a fan favorite, but the other golfers hated him and in learning all this. And even though as much as he really despised what happened with him and his youth, this comes out and he gets caught gambling, you know, in this place and he's down with it. And it takes place on Mercer street. There's the place called the five iron that I sort of created. There's an elevator on Mercer Street with a camera. And while I was doing my research on Google Maps, because we're all in quarantine, I saw it. I'm like, oh, that's it. That's the spot.

So I do have some videos that I'll be posting in the next few weeks about I did a whole talk about why I came up with it. So, yeah, he gets mixed up with this underground kind of gangster that has this gambling hall. And he makes this bet that he shouldn't have used because he understands who the athletes are. And it just all goes sideways after that. All goes sideways. And now you meant in the title, it says book one. Is this meant to be a series? Yep.

I'm already working on book two. I don't really have a title for it yet. I did all the outlining, working on book two. I don't really have a title for it yet. I did all the outlining working on book two and hopefully we'll release that probably early next year. Yeah. So that's going to be fun. And it's been, it's an enjoyable ride. You know, you said something about, you know, I had a very similar path to you in that I started my first company at 23, doing accounting and consulting in the Princeton area for entrepreneurs. I got heavily involved in tech. I got involved with a text-to-speech company in 99, 2000, raised money.

I raised $2 million for them and then sold their software to Microsoft. Did really well. I thought, oh, my God, this is great. I finally made it. Years of poverty and, you know, just scraping by and and ramen noodles and you know just getting by and i thought okay this is great i finally made it so then i took that money put it into a mobile gaming and this is 2000 2001 so we were way in front and we had and august 31st i raised money just to get us through the next month and that's 2001, August 31st, 2001. We had contracts ready to be signed

with Vodafone and Verizon, AT&T, AOL Sports and Fox Sports and AOL Mobile. And then 11 days later, the universe changed. And we didn't get calls back until November. Nobody even called us. And we ran out of money and we had the show because every project got canceled and I lost everything I had. I was deep in debt, living an expensive lifestyle in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and it really beat me up. It really, really beat me up bad. So if you think like it's, I think it's really tough to not have money, make money and then lose it all. And it really beat up my own self-esteem, my confidence until one day I was on the phone with one of my buddies and I was, you know, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, woe is me. And he said, don't worry about it, Chris,

you're a survivor. I said, what? He goes, you're a survivor. I said, you know what? You're right. I am. God damn it. I'll get through this. I made a goal, get a new, I started my consulting company again and said, 90 days, I'll get a client. And I got one in 89. And then that helped me build. And then I sold that and got onto the next company, Durante Rentals, which I built with my two partners over 10 years and then sold that. So it's like rags to riches to rags to riches story. And it's tough. And like you said, like you think you've made it. And even then, I think it's really important to have a what's next. So, so many people when they succeed, they think, oh, I'll just play golf for the rest of my life. No, you need to have a what's next. And I think one of the things that's really kept me very healthy about this is that I wanted to write. So I knew what I wanted to do next. And I really advise people, you know, when they're coming to that point where they've achieved some success, they want to sell their company. Think about what you want to do. Think about how you want to, what's going to be your life's mission. What's going to be your purpose?

How are you going to go out? How are you going to give back? You know, I think philanthropy is really, really important. You know, how can you raise awareness? For me, it's telling stories and raising awareness to generational trauma and mental health and sports. You know, telling stories, whether they're a novel or a business book or any other kind of book, you know, it's almost like a manual for life. You end up learning from other people, learning stories. You know, we don't have a manual for life. You end up learning from other people, learning stories. We don't have a manual for life. At least I didn't get one. Mine got lost in the mail, evidently.

We learn from stories. That's why we watch movies. That's why I watch TV, which always makes me nascent about those people who watch CSI. I'm not sure what they're learning. But it's interesting to me. What you've said resonates a lot. watch CSI. I'm not sure what they're learning, but you know, it's, it's interesting to me. And so, you know, what you've said resonates. Yeah. When people go through cathartic moments where they lose everything and then, and then come back and sometimes you gamble and sometimes you lose,

sometimes you win, you know, it's all a part of life. And, and a lot of times in those cathartic moments, you realize that it, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't the money. It wasn't the success. It wasn't the property. It wasn't all the things you own that end up owning you. It was always you the whole time who generated all that. And that's the real beauty of those cathartic moments. To follow up to the previous question, so is the further books going to have the same characters in it? Or are you going to? Yeah, a lot of the same characters are in it.

We'll keep following the athletes. I added a couple of new ones. uh yeah uh it gets a little shakespearean ah it's always he always had you know if you add a character you gotta get rid of the character because you can only keep so many people in line otherwise it becomes lord of the rings you know it's kind of fun to kill off a few people here now and then is dr. Andrew Beck going to be a continuing feature? Yeah, definitely. So he'll be through it. He's got a long journey to go through.

He's still got to get to the point where he's just starting to see that he has a problem. That's step one, right? When you first recognize that we have a problem and you can admit that to yourself, you know, that's just the beginning of that journey. So yeah, he's got a long journey to go and a lot of, a lot of things are going to happen. And, you know, he's going to learn that he can't as smart as he is, even though he's the smartest guy in the room, he's not always so self smart,art you know his self-awareness that's very true someone's commenting made it is truly about what's in your head yeah so people assume that they made it and

there really never is no made it in fact if anything the more successful you get the higher that tightrope goes you know the more you can look down and go there's a long way down like you know no one gets paid this amount of money and you can just quit and go, there's a long way down. Like, you know, no one gets paid this amount of money and you can just quit and go to McDonald's and get paid the same. I think if you start changing your, your metrics to how many people you can help versus, you know, how many zeros in your bank account and hopefully, hopefully to the left side of the desk. So I've been in that side too, but yeah, it's really, I think, start thinking about how can I, how can I help? How can I influence how, what's the best way? I mean, having a podcast where you go out and you're helping and teaching individuals and

bringing on people who can hopefully inform and entertain. And that's what I like to do. I want to entertain first and foremost. I want you to be entertained. I want you to pick up the book at the end of your day and lose yourself in the world that I built and give yourself, you know, 20 minutes of break from, from your difficult day. And if you can pick something up, if something motivates you, inspires you, well, that's just bonus. You know, that, that to me is, is something, I mean, you said it like how many times did we watch a movie that kind of changed our perspective on life? Right. And I do think through storytelling, rather than writing a nonfiction book, I thought it would be more fun. It was more fun for me. Honestly, I'll be honest. It was more fun for me to make up and play with all these characters and have them in my head and and and mess around with them but i think you can through storytelling kind of it's almost a better way to tell non-fiction is yeah right yeah i had a i was i was struggling i think there was one point in editing and one point where i was writing like 12 hours a day and re-editing and re-editing at that point. And I was losing my mind, and I reached the point where I was ready to throw it all out the window.

And I call up a lot of my friends who were authors, and they go, yeah, if you're at that point, you're at the good part because you're almost through it. Yeah, just keep going. Just keep going. Yeah, keep going. And I was like, are you freaking out of your freaking mind? I'm so done. And I was frying myself up.

I was pushing it way too hard i mean i banged it in what three months and you know a lot of it you know a lot of was easy initially because it was stories that i've been using as a griot of my business lessons for you know 54 years or 20 30 years however long it was and so you know there's a lot of putting those stories to paper but then the editing and the rewriting and the structuring and how we wanted to do things and, you know, do this, do that. It was, it was pretty, it was pretty whipping, but you know, somebody, one of the, one of my authors, I think on the show came on the show. She said to me, she told a story about how she one time met this gal at a book signing, and she said that her books helped her while she was in prison.

And she told the story about how all the women in the women's prison were reading her books and using them to help set a course for a better life when they got out of prison and improving their kind of mindset. And so she keeps a picture of that person that they sent them in the orange jumpsuit at a writing desk. And she realizes she's not writing for herself anymore. She's writing for someone else. And that really helped me. And then another author friend of mine, somewhere in the editing process, she wrote me and she says, there's somebody out here who needs this book. And if you don't finish writing it, you're not going to be able to help them. And they're going to read this book at the right time and need it at the moment that they need it most. And your job is to get that book out so that they get that book in their hands.

And that gave me a mission. A mission from God, but, you know, whatever. Yeah, from who you are as a person and i think that's really important we all have a story to tell and i think the more we can go out and and help in a way if that's what we can do and and we want to tell our stories and hopefully they have positive influence on people and then yeah then that's good work that's that's good work it's it was enjoyable yeah i mean i think the the version you you kind of hit that point about you get where you're at i'm like oh my god i'm so done my version that finally got published was version 8.6 so if it got a whole number like my you know

this is my accountant in me right so if it got a whole number that means the change was so big that it that it changed something really important in a plot point. And that if it was like a point something, that just meant there were other minor changes that needed to be made. But so yeah, eight versions. Wow. Wow.

I mean, the editing is good. It's important. But man, it gets frustrating. But we had a tight timeline on mine. This next book that we're working on now, we're taking our time with. Probably taking a little too much time. I've been screwing around a lot of it. But, you know, it's one of those things.

But I'm glad you wrote a book that people can learn from. There's a story there where they can learn some lessons about life. And some of that is interweaved with your own experience. And it'll be interesting to see how this goes. Do you have any numbers of books that you want to run this through? Or are you just going to take it book by book? This series? Yeah,

this series will be about three to five books, depending, you know, honestly, I let my characters kind of talk to me and they kind of tell me what they want to do. It's pretty interesting experience. And so they'll tell me where this needs to go and when it'll end. And then I have a list of other books that I want to write and some historical fiction, some other. I wrote a

play years ago while I was going through learning writing and everything. I wrote a play about two Marines and their PTSD. That's something called Twisted Metal, and that's something I want to then turn into a novel. And I have a couple of other stories of things that I've written over the years. I always really started to just keep – I've got tons of halfway things, outlines, and stories. So there's a lot to do. Now it's just like to get the word out about this, and I hope people really enjoy it.

And then a couple of people have asked, like, when is the next one going to be ready? They read it and they're like, are you done with the next one? I'm like, no, the pressure's on now. You do you do it well once. And it did win an award from Literary Titans, a gold medal. And yeah, it's won an award. It's gotten some five star reviews and it's been really nice. People have been very gracious with their words and I've enjoyed, I just want people

to enjoy it. I really do. And kind of, if you can pick something out of it, that'd be great. But first I want you to be entertained. Yeah. There you go. PTSD. That might be an interesting book.

We just had Jason Kander on the show. I listened to that. Invisible Storms. Great guy, president. He ran for president and he has a great political podcast. Great guy. And PTSD, I think, is something that's underrated and a lot of people don't realize they have it. That's another thing of trauma.

We're not wanting to admit that you have it. Anything more you want to tease on the book before we go? I think it's just that, you know, if you're looking for a good summer read something and get through quick, I think it's, it's, it's a great pickup for you.

Again, you can go down and if you're not sure, go out to my website, just subscribe to the mailing list. You can get the first seven chapters for free. And if you're not hooked after seven chapters, don't buy the book, but if you are,

go buy it and read the rest of it so there you go yeah that's that's it there you go well it's been wonderful to have on the show chris thank you very much for coming on we really appreciate it thank you i really enjoyed it i've really been enjoying listening to your podcast and so i've been i'm glad we've been introduced and i look forward to hearing more so thank you very much for having me. We've got some really exciting guests coming. We always have exciting guests. So the book company sent us just the most wonderful people and just brilliant CEOs.

There'll be more leadership discussions we'll be having on. My next book is interviewing a lot of CEOs on leadership and how it works and stuff around my first books. And so it'll be interesting to see how that whole thing plays out. And yeah, lots of discussions. And it'll be interesting to see how the world changes with COVID and everything we're doing. Give us your dot coms again one more time. Sure.

It's www.chriskjones.com. And on the site, you can either order from Amazon or you can, again, download the first seven chapters free. You can find the book on Amazon, ebook on Apple Books. And if you want to reach out to me through Instagram, it's Headcase underscore novel, Facebook, Chris K. Jones, author, and Twitter too, also Headcase underscore. There you go. There you go. Well, thank you very much for coming on. Thanks, my honest, for tuning in. Go to youtube.com, thank you very much for coming on. Thanks for tuning in. Go to youtube.com, 4chesschrisvoss.

Hit the bell notification button, goodreads.com, 4chesschrisvoss. See everything we're reading and reviewing over there. Also, our big LinkedIn group, the LinkedIn newsletter. Subscribe to that thing as well.

Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time. And that should.