The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Σ Book I: Thumos Rising: Thumos Rising By Demitrios Lopez

Episode Date: June 27, 2024

vΣ Book I: Thumos Rising: Thumos Rising By Demitrios Lopez https://amzn.to/3L4iY5K "They said he was handsome, but with alien features, purple, pupil-less eyes..." With the world of Ninivon on the brink of annihilation, Zeno finds himself pitted against a vampiric overlord from beyond the stars. The tyrant, wraithlike purple glowing from his eyes, is obsessed with one thing: unraveling the mystery of the Σ a primordial and otherworldly power. A power that has chosen Zeno as it's champion. But Zeno will not accept the power, terrified of what the Σ will make of him. Until he discovers that Alexandra, his childhood best friend, is leading a rebellion against the Vampire and his monsters. Then Zeno becomes the demigod he was destined to be and joins the fray. But the lines blur between his duty to save Ninivon and his desire to protect Alexandra, whose past is shadowed in secrecy. Where dragons soar alongside futuristic spacecraft and magic intertwines with advanced technology, Thumos Rising chronicles Zeno's quest to unlock the mystery of the only thing those with purple eyes fear: The Σ.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Keep your arms and legs in the vehicle at all times.

I don't know why, but I was sitting here listening to the intro of the show, and I was just like, it sounds so funny. Keeping the arms and legs in the vehicle at all times. You know what happens if you don't, people, right? I don't know, either. Maybe you lose a head or something. Some sort of appendage gets chopped off, but maybe some people need that. Anyway, guys, welcome to the big show. And the reason you listen to the Chris Voss Show is so you don't lose any sort of appendages

or body parts or anything like that. And if you do, that's part of the brain bleed. Anyway, guys, as always, for the show to your family, friends, and relatives, go to goodreads.com, 4Chest, Chris Voss, linkedin.com, 4Chest, Chris Voss, Chris Voss, one of the TikTokity. And if you really want to buy me a coffee, I'm a little light right now, you can go to buymeacoffee.com, 4Chest, Chris Voss, just because you love me and you care. Or not, you know. If you don't care, you can still buy me a coffee.

Anyway, we have an amazing author on the show. When do we not? We only have amazing authors on this bloody show. And that's the great thing about it and why you tune in all the time. Today we have an amazing gentleman on the show. His newest book is entitled Sigma, Book 1, Thumos Rising. It comes out July 15th, 2024. Demetrios Lopez is the name he goes under when he writes his books.

We're going to be talking to him in his real name, Justin Germain. So we'll be talking to him on the show so we'll have two people on the show at once he maybe have maybe it's one of those dual personality things we're going to find out i can flip back and forth yeah if you need me to there you go and i have eight personalities so i can flip back and forth between them all except for the one that says kill kill kill all the time judge says i can't use that anymore under threat of penalty imprisonment justin Germain writes into the pen name Demetrios Lopez. He's a debut author who's publishing his first book, the first in a

fantasy sci-fi series, Sigma Thumos Rising on July 15th. Welcome to the show. How are you, Justin? Doing great. Happy to be here, Chris. Thanks for having me. Happy to have you as well. Congratulations on the new book. It's always fun to become a new author. You only do it once. There you go. Give us your dot coms. Where can people find you on the interwebs?

Okay, so pretty straightforward. DemetriosLopez.com. No space, just the two names together. And then I'm also on Instagram, Demetrios underscore Lopez on Instagram. That's my handle. There you go. Give us a 30,000 over your new book that's coming out July 15th. Okay.

So Sigma Paquan, Thumos Rising, as you said, is the first in a new fantasy sci-fi series. I say fantasy slash sci-fi because it really is an amalgamation of both. What I do is I take traditional fantasy themes, magic, dragons,

sword fights, knights in armor, and I blend that with sci-fi, spaceships, advanced tech, weapons, laser guns, bombs, that kind of thing on the battlefield. It's very much inspired by an old childhood love of mine, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. So as a child of the 80s, I grew loving those cartoons and i i just i was fascinated by the using tech spaceships to fight dragons and and that was really sort of the the the seeds of the series everyone knows you to fight dragons you do need to have spaceships yeah yeah definitely and what are some of your your other influences as well so I would say probably the, there's kind of tiers here, probably the next biggest influences were the short stories and the writings of Robert E. Howard.

And for those that don't know, he was the creator and the author of the Conan the Barbarian character made famous by Arnold Schwarzenegger and the classic 1982 film. Just absolutely blown away when I started reading his work. It was really, He-Man was sort of my gateway drug to Conan. And then Conan was kind of my gateway drug to the next influence, which is Superman. And He-Man, for those who remember the 80s, was kind of a mix between Conan and Superman. Had some Superman type powers, but had this Conan kind of look to him. And that was very much an influence on the book. My main protagonist, Zeno, is very much that character. I would say my next biggest influence would be, again, I'm a Greek and Latin

professor by trade. So the classical world, there's odes to Aristotle, there's odes to Plato, odes to the Stoics. If you know where to see the whole thing is, or where to look, the whole thing is kind of an analogy for Stoicism. There you go. And I see some H.P. Lovecraft as well. Oh yeah, sure. Yeah, so I mean, again, there's sort of like cosmic horror, right? It's not the horror of like demons in the night that the church is fighting or ghosts under the bed. It's this very scientific horror. It's the existential horror of humans sort of being this this very alone but but also very small species and otherwise vast and somewhat merciless universe and you get that here as well there you go so a lot of things going on there that are scary and and and and going on who hurt you no i'm just kidding i had

to do that joke hp left he hurt me i didn't hurt me. I lost a lot of sleep because of that guy over the years. There you go. It was probably him. You know, Cthulhu and the other things he wrote that were very kind of occultish and stuff. Absolutely. There was some dangerous dark stuff there that made you, give you the nightmares. That's why I have a bunch of H.P. Lovecraft books. I don't think I ever read them because I was like, I'm just going to get nightmares.

I just know. Yeah, sure. I just know. There you go. So tell us a little bit about how you grew up. What were some of your influences? How did you get down this road? We've kind of covered some of it, but I mean, tell us about your childhood and when did you start writing? You get a knack for it or feel you had a knack for storytelling? I mean, even as young as a kid in kindergarten, I was always that kid that would rather, you know, during recess, I would want to sit back and write a story and draw. I was a bit of an artist back then. I sort of peaked my dad, not to go too much down the therapy thing here, but that was why I think very early on, He-Man, this is gonna sound really kind of weird,

but he was almost a bit of a father figure to me. And if you remember like those old 80s cartoons, because the talking heads in Congress were really concerned about the violence of some of those cartoons in the early 80s, He-Man, Transformers, Thunderscats. But so the creators of He-Man Filmation, they wanted to make sure it had positive social messages, right? So at the end of every episode, there'd be this, hey, remember, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Hey, remember, your parents love you. When they say no, it really hurts them, but they do it for your own good. And so he sort of really did kind of fill in for that sort of daily fatherly presence that gave me like this practical advice of how to grow up. I think moving on, like a lot of men that sort of grow up without their fathers, I'm sort of looking for masculinity in other venues. I played football. I was an athlete as a kid.

I wasn't very good, but I did it. I was very religious when I was younger. I really got into fiction, especially sword and sorcery fiction. And again, I sort of found a male archetype in a lot of these fantastic heroes and creations that sort of helped sort of bend me down the trajectory that I eventually went as an adult. It eventually led to me joining the military. And then long-term, it pushed me into classics and the study of Greek Latin. And lo and behold, you put all that stuff into the pot, stir it up, and out pops me and out pops this book. There you go.

It's interesting, the journeys that we go through in life. And we don't get to sometimes choose the initial part of our life. But it's cool that you go through these journeys. You go through these cathartic times. You go through these journeys you go through these cathartic times you go through struggles and you know the lessons you learned or the stories you've collected you know they kind of become this amalgam of amalgam rhythm of i i clearly didn't go to college and i skipped it to start a company but you you you know it becomes these things that help give you this these these resources for telling great stories. And we always say that stories are the owner's manual to life.

I mean, stories are the fabric, part of the fabric of people's lives in their journey. And that's kind of what we do through life. We wander through life, we collect these stories, and we build them. They're the fabric of really who we are. I was writing the other day, and I was like, people, some of the stories collected on their journey through life and the fabric of who we are. And that's really, really important because we are our stories. I mean, without our stories, I mean, I don't know who we'd be. Just, I don't know, some weird person walking around or at least that's what the judge told

me. Yeah. And the nice thing about writing down as you go, right? and for people that have maybe journal practice or something like that, is it allows you to sort of track the growth. I go back and look at some of the things, even within fiction, that I wrote before I started working on this book from five, 10 years ago, and look back and say, not only am I a better writer now, but I'm just a very much different person. And sort of your perspectives and your experiences and how that shapes your characters, how that shapes how you tell the story, how you just value the art of storytelling

is just so much different over the years. And to me, I think, Chris, it's like the, ideally, you're constantly dealing with bigger problems, right? There's that sort of axiom success is having better problems all the time. And sometimes that's with bigger problems, right? There's that sort of axiom success is having better problems all the time. And sometimes that's more complex problems, right? But hopefully we're more mature and we're more equipped to deal with the complexity. And so in some way it just sort of feels like that next grip on, on the mountain that we're climbing.

There you go. It's a, you know, it's one of those things where you just, you just got to get through it. And, you know, sometimes that you go through these dark points in time, but the stories that you can collect, you know it's one of those things where you just you just gotta get through it and you know sometimes that you go through these dark points in time but the stories that you can collect you know and then you talk to other people about them i wish that i discovered better to keep a journal and and to record stuff i would have had like four books of employee stories of all

the crazy stuff my employees put on me over the years yeah and i at one point i remembered most of them but over the years they faded away one point, I remembered most of them. But over the years, they faded away to, I don't know, a bunch of other stuff. And so the bigger stories stuck out. And God, I wish I could remember all those employee stories. They kind of come to me every now and then. I just kind of go, wow, that was really something. Now I would imagine you could probably just take that journal, almost publish it as is. It would just be a phenomenal manual for how to manage people and start a

business and just deal because I mean, human beings, like we have lots of potential, we do some great things, but we're also highly flawed. And sometimes we just run into walls a million times in a row and you got to manage it. Yeah.

And, and so that's a PSA folks. If you, if you're keep track of your stories and write them down because the you know don't be like chris don't forget all your stories like i remember sitting down when i was writing my book 2021 going what the hell are my stories again unfortunately a lot of the good ones came back yeah but yeah that's why it's important to do them so this project started 10 years ago for this new book i gotta be honest i mean if if you really want to peel the layers of the onion back, the basic plot, I was probably playing this out with my He-Man toys back in 87.

Really? You know, yeah. I just remember going through the basic, again, the skeleton of the plot. So the book started out again, is He-Man Master of the Universe fanfic, very analogous to things like, you know, Fifty Shades did with Twilight and some of the Harry Potter fanfic over the years. But then as I kept working on it, I was like, man, I just, I, at some point, I think anytime you put so much blood, sweat and tears in any project, the natural progression is, okay, can I turn this into a business can i monetize it is this something that people are going to want to consume but of course you know if you're when you're doing fanfic

you got copyright issues and it's just i mean i'm just a little guy right i had no clue how to deal with that stuff so i said so here's what i'm going to do i am going to all the things that are holding me back about this world the things that i didn't like about that world that the he-man mythos was set up in i'm just going to break them I'm just going to completely erase them. Not completely starting over from scratch, because again, the plot is quite the same, but character names, mythology, backstory, all that stuff. I'm going to take it and make it more adult, more interesting. And so that was the trajectory. I would say I got pretty serious about trying to get this version and bring it to light about 2014 i remember being in rome that

summer on an academic trip and going through the museum and thinking through some of the finer character arcs in the story and you know i get back home i just get the computer out i start writing and and lo and behold it's listen chris it's been an incredible journey so i got off of social media in 2016 when like the lakers or i'm sorry not the when the Cavs got swept in the finals against the Golden State Warriors. I was talking so much crap about how the Cavs were going to blow them out. I don't want to hear it. I knew nothing about Instagram. I knew nothing about TikTok.

I completely deleted my Facebook. I've had to figure out how to build a website. I've had to figure out how to associate with people on Instagram and not be a creeper. And then there's the course to sort of the salesmanship of going and talking to bookstores, you know, about stocking the book, promoting, doing great shows like yourself and the Chris Voss show. So it has just been an incredible educational experience. And again, if I had more time, I'd write more of this stuff down and pass it on to someone else. But like right now I'm very much in sort of the thick of the battle and it's just i could genuinely say it's been fun going from point a to point b you learn a lot now this is a series correct

there's going to be more coming in the same vein the characters are going to be extended is that correct yes of course the second book is already. I've had a couple of advanced readers, you know, they say the ARC readers copies have went out and they've been read. And I've got one more chapter to add that seems to be the general consensus that there's one little scene that needs to be put in. But other than that, it's basically ready for the editor. So I'm hoping to maybe get that to them maybe sometime in the fall. I mean, right now, sort of full court press on promoting, you know, this first book. And then I've already broke ground on the third book. I've already started writing it. It's a general rule. I mean, I very much have a vision for where I want the story to go, big picture. But the other thing about it is, Chris, that I just find writing fiction, some people can set down an outline and they could tell you from A to Z, from alpha to omega, from almost the beginning. What I have found is that the writing flows best and it reads best on the other end for the consumer if I let the characters develop sort of on their own. And what I mean by that is my main female character in this first book there was one way her story ended you know in book one and then the more i looked at i'm just like you know what that's just not her that's

she was constantly making decisions but then i felt almost like for plot i wanted to go this way because i had this sort of preconceived notion of the way i wanted it to end but it just wasn't fair to her it just that just wasn't the kind of person she was that was going to make that final decision at the end, right? So I changed it. I went back and I said, okay, let's scrap this. Let's start over this part from scratch. And although I kind of know where the finish line is going to be, I don't know the exact pathway to get there yet.

And that's part of the adventure and surprise of figuring it out. There you go. So it's going to be fun to see this develop. People love characters. They love following these characters. You know, I think we had an author on recently, and they were talking about how they did a book, and they were just like, ah, it's a one-off.

That's it, in the can. We're going to do some other book with some different characters. And I guess the call-out from their readers was so much that they're like, no, you have to develop these characters. They were like, okay, you have to develop these characters. They were like, okay, sure.

Okay. Whatever you want. You, you almost feel like you owe it to him. Right. And so there was this story that just really spoke to me. I heard years ago, again, referencing back to Robert E.

Howard, the creator of the Conan, the barbarian character. He told this story about how he would, he'd be in his room alone at night, probably influenced a little bit by the scotch and the whiskey. But he would, he'd sort of pass out and then he'd wake up and he'd have this vision that Conan was standing over him with this axe and saying, he's given it to man. And so he would, he would wake up in this sort of like drunken stupor. He would write like his hair was on fire until he passed out again.

And then he'd wake up the next morning and like his first thought was okay i have to like start boarding up the house right and sort of you know because at night this guy's gonna come back and demand me to to write again all that to say the characters do take a life of their own and i can tell you i'm not having visions of my characters coming at me and then the the darkness of the night yet not yet but maybe i haven't had enough scotch, too. I mean, we'll have to wait and see. Yeah, the scotch helps. There's still time.

So there you go. You mentioned, you know, I think we were talking about this green room. You mentioned you have a five-year-old little girl. Oh, yeah. And she loves to have fun. Recently, I think you took her someplace, and she was putting TikTok filters, we were talking about, I think. How do you think, does, you know, five-year-old girls are, you know, having a, I mean, most

kids having an intense imagination and vision and, you know, from what we were talking, it sounded like she had a lot of fun. Does that help you with your creativity in your writing? You know, I can imagine that maybe it might. No, absolutely. Again, God knows they don't need the press but i took alora to disney world it was her first trip it was it was my first trip too i never got to go as a kid oh wow so it was it was very unique at one point she was walking around with makeup dressed up as a princess

because we did the big you know makeover day for the princesses and she did on fridays around here she was put like the rouge and like the lipstick on daddy and you should have seen me. But no, one of the really interesting things about taking her there is she would ride these rides and her first question always seemed to be when we were done, okay, how does that work? And we got to the point that I started, okay, baby, do you want the narratological answer? I use words like that with my five-year-old, right? Do you want like the story answer do you want the magic answer or do you want like the actual this widget makes that widget go and and sometimes you want one sometimes you'd want the other but i guess how it does serve as a bit of an inspiration is that she has no problem holding like these two spheres in her

mind at the same time okay she met at one point five different versions of Ariel from The Little Mermaid, right? She met the live-action version in human form. She met the animated version as both a mermaid and a human form. She met two other like versions. So on one hand, she was genuinely excited every time to meet Ariel like it was the first time. And so there's this openness of just magic and not everything has to be explained, but there's still enough of a curiosity to sometimes want to see how two plus two equals four and how that goes into the bigger equation to making this overall experience. And so I think

that has helped me in that it has allowed me to release the creativity. A lot of people might say, hey, how are you going to make it work dragons and spaceships in this massive epic battle which is a scene you get in the first book but it just the kind of obvious that's not going to work because spaceships go so much faster and you know those things i was able to jump past and then i started thinking about okay how can we make this work what physics need to be in place to make it possible for spaceships and dragons to basically compete in sort of a almost MMA style makes the fight kind of

contest on the battlefield? How are you going to work in laser guns with swords and shields? Again, there are some series that have done this quite well, all that served as inspiration. But again, it's sort of the both. It's the how, it's sort of the vision of the world and then how it works that's got to be interesting lasers and swords yeah and you see this even in like real

military history right so if you just were going to look going from like the roman era up through medieval times and then the renaissance and so on and so forth to the you know the advent of gunpowder, you saw weapons that tended to be designed to beat the armor of the time. And then once you got to a point where the weapon couldn't beat the armor, you had to evolve the weapon. So when you started getting these full plate mail suits that guys were wearing on horseback in Europe

in the late 13, 14, 1500s, that's when you started seeing some of the larger swords, like some of the big sort of claymore two-handed swords. Why? Because you're not going to pierce that steel suit of armor with a blade. But what you can do is if you take a six-pound steel stick, which is kind of what the big sword is, and just whack someone in the head, it doesn't matter if you pierce the helmet, you're going to break their neck, right? So there's like this natural progression of arms, armor, arms, armor. And so with me, I just include the projectile weapons with that so you have armor that's able to dissolve the energy that is sent forth by the guns they're not technically lasers

i always got a little annoyed with that star wars thing with the lasers because that's not really how lasers would work that was my that was my i can't break that you know a suspended disbelief but but no i i wanted the advanced weaponry and it's just it's arms armor evolving and you very much get that the people that have seen the advanced copies have said okay you this made sense and it made the battle scenes very interesting ah there you go so it's so it's pretty dynamic what what the greek sigma title why did you choose that for your title? Okay, so there is sort of a longer answer and then sort of a nerdy Easter egg answer. I'll give you the good one first.

The Greek letter Sigma is the Greek S. It is the first word or first letter, I should say, in the word Sophia, which, of course, we know is a very popular name. But in Greek, it means wisdom. So if your kids or your sisters or your nieces are named Sophia, I mean, that literally means wisdom in ancient Greek. And so again, because the book is very much an analogy for stoicism, right? This pursuit of wisdom, this ruthless willingness to be introspective, to look at yourself, to try to push yourself, to realize your full human potential to me Sophia was if you could tailor down to one Greek word at least that's it that's what this book is trying to promote like the pursuit of wisdom and the idea that both is on the individual level and on a civilizational level we can all be better for it right also again the sigma being the greek s like for superman right as like with

superman he's got the s right and so it's kind of like this soft sort of again the main protagonist xeno is is sort of my take on superman in this very different world so it's kind of got the the dual sides there is there a lois lane type in the book? We do not really have a Lois Lane type. We more have the Wonder Woman. I guess that's not entirely fair to say. So, again, the main female protagonist, there's that old trope of the damsel in distress, and, of course, now you've got more of the damsels that cause distress.

I'm the damsel in distress. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. But no, it's kind of closer to that other side. She's very much a warrior that takes the battlefield with Zeno. She has her limitations. Don't get me wrong, but she also has her strengths. There you go.

And she very much is the love interest in the book. Ah! It's always good to have a love interest. Yeah, yeah. People like love. Oh, they do. Generally speaking. We're all softies, I guess, when it comes down to it.

It's funny. For so many of the women that, again, read the advanced copy of the first draft, they said, Hey, listen, we like this romance. We like where it's going. It's like, you've got to give us a little more meat on the bones. You give us these very detailed battle scenes. Can we have a sex scene? I'm like'm like okay let me channel my inner romance novelist and i think i can do that for you yeah everyone wants he-man with a little bit of 50 shades of

gray you know it's like he was you always had to wonder like him and teela right what's happening off camera yeah there's something going on there everybody knows that i don't. I was too old for that series by that time, so I don't even know what the references are, but I'll take your word for it. Yeah, what's crazy is if you probably Googled He-Man porn, something would pop up, almost certainly. Yeah, let's not do that. We won't do that now, no.

Normally, I'll pull up references for the show as we go along, so I can know what's going on. For sure, yeah. I'll do that after, though. That sounds like fun. So, final thoughts as we go along so I can, you know, know what's going on. But I'll do that after, though. That sounds like fun. So final thoughts as we go out on the book. Round us out and, of course, tell us people where they can pick it up and.com

so they can find out more about you. So, again, you can find me on my website, demitroslopez.com. If you just type in Thumos Rising in Amazon, it'll pop up. It's right there. So I guess sort of final thoughts. Again, the thing that's special about this book, we already talked about the amalgamation between the fantasy and the sci-fi.

The other thing is, again, because I'm a classicist and a historian kind of by trade, all the cultures and civilizations that are in the book are based off pre-industrial civilizations in our own world. And in some ways, it was kind of the happy medium for me because it prevented me from having to create everything from scratch, but at the same time play with just different – in these different historical contexts. you know person in grad school that would wonder okay what would happen if the spartan army set off against an a army of samurai or what would happen if the samurai took on something like comanche 19th century style light cav right cavalry and so you kind of get answers to those questions in this book you know again with the advanced weaponry thrown in so the military historians we got a little something for them. That's interesting. The final thing I would just say is that, again, we've got several editorial reviews out already and it did win the gold award from Literary Titans. So again, not to be too self-aggrandizing

because it is very vulnerable, Chris. Like when you write these books, you put so much effort into it. And I think just, I'm sure you probably had the same thing when you were first starting, right? It's like, I believe in this, but are people going to like the product both on a financial level, like purchasing it, consuming it, but also are the

people that sort of judge, you know, how are they going to feel about it? And, you know, the book comes out July 15th. So whether or not it's a financial success is, you know, yet to be determined, the jury's still out. But at least on the critical end, the book has gotten really great reviews. I mean, you can't do better than a gold award. So I'm very proud of that. And again, I can't really, you know, I mean, again, I'm the author. So I mean, I want to take the appropriate credit. But at the same time, I had great readers that read it for me in early drafts. I have had so much support over the years. And listen, the whole thing's really been a team effort.

And I could name names, but I won't. But so many people have contributed to put it where it is today. And I'm very grateful. This is the time to be self-aggrandizing because you're promoting it. It's okay. Fair enough, fair enough. It's okay to do it. You mentioned the award.

Give us a rundown on what that award is real quick. So Literary Titan is one of the big literary presses that they put stuff out there they review books again you can look up their website literarytitan.com and whenever you have new releases they will select x amount of those that they and they'll have a couple of tiers and they have the bronze they have the silver and they have the gold and in it i should say this is this was just this wasn't the gold award for fantasy or sci-fi this was just the gold award full stop so it's not just competing with other books of its ilk it's also competing with romance it's also competing with thriller crime novels you know

high-end literary fiction it's it's just sort of out there in the wider audience with the best of the best and and and what can i they, they thought it was good enough. There you go. There you go. That should be good, man. That should be awesome. The,

what's the other thing I was going to ask you about? What's the.com? Oh yeah. Dimitrios Lopez.com. There you go. So we've got that as well. Pretty straightforward. Thank you very much for coming to the show.

It's been fun to have you on and find out about this. I'm just look forward to your future success in these multiple books and stories. People fall in love with this stuff. They really do. I wish I could write novels, but it seems like a great business because you can just make stuff up and design it and build these whole worlds. Me, I just write boring stuff about business. I mean, yeah. I talked about this all the time in the academic setting, right? Because I have so many business majors coming through my classes. They're like, oh, you just talk about, you know, truth and beauty and these ideas all day long. That's great. I'm like, yeah, you're getting the MBA though. That means something too. And again,

I mean, it's just every experience and every knowledge is like very unique to the individual and to the discipline, right? But no, I can genuinely tell you, it's just, it's been fun. And I would assume that again, entrepreneurs are just, you know, what, what a scientist, whatever the yolk might be, right. There's something about, if you love the process, you like, it's still work and you're still working hard, but it feels like play in a way when you enjoy doing it. And that's one thing that I'm, I'm very fortunate to say that was my process for this book there you go it's been fun to have you on thank you very much for coming on thanks thanks to our audience for being on the show with us as well we couldn't do it without you guys order up

the book wherever fine books are sold you can pre-order it now on amazon or other fine places uh sigma book one thumos rising it's going to be coming out july 15th 2024 to pre-order your copy now so you can get available the available stuff and beat all your local book clubs to read it and refer the book of course as well you can buy me a cup of coffee because god knows i need one now we had a great show buy me a cup of coffee.com fortress chris foss tell him chris foss saying or whatever i don't know what that means. I guess I'll know if I get coffee. Go to Goodreads.com Fortress Chris Voss. LinkedIn.com Fortress Chris Voss. YouTube.com Fortress Chris Voss

and just all those damn places. The original Chris Voss. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe and we'll see you guys next time. Thank you. That should have us out. Great show.