The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Conscience of the C.O.D. by James Terminiello

Episode Date: July 26, 2026

The Conscience of the C.O.D. by James Terminiello https://reason-able.blog/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CZV9VMQ4 We’ve all had bad days, but nothing compares to Trip Torrent’s. PR director of the luxury cruise ship Climax of Dreams, he awakens to the discovery that the ship’s owners have donated it to house 4,000 squabbling refugees. Then, at a celebrity-glutted fundraiser, it gets hijacked. And that’s only the beginning! Torrent’s reluctant sea voyage includes seminude female commandos, a secret stash of special ops weapons, a billion-dollar cloud of money, a kidnapped tech guru, a ship navigation system with a dangerous stutter, a soccer match haunted by Navy drones and fighter jets, a faded comic whose skills at mimicry could save or sink the ship, an unexpected global fashion craze, a double-dealing repairman, and a whopping big hurricane. Even his attempts at romance are interrupted-by the synthetic charms of a robot bartender with a bit too much charisma! What will blow up first: his career, his relationship, or the ship? About the author After a 40 year career in advertsing, marketing and PR, Jim Terminiello concentrates on writing blogs, newspaper columns, (nearly 200 as of 2024) and books – with a 7th in process for 2025. He is married to Tara and has two children Alex and Gillian. Alex suffers from autism and Jim works everyday to fight this challanging afliction.

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on the interweb, sir. All of my books, I have eight right now, are on Amazon, and you can find me there. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm also, I guess the word is it, Xmeister, if that means anything. I don't know, what do you call someone who's regularly on X? I don't know. Someone who likes X. Then I'm on an Xmeister. How do I sound, by the way? Am I still? You're coming across great. Yeah, the video feed was just overwhelming your service. So we'll put a book over on where your face would be. So give us 30,000 over you. What's inside this new book? Actually, this is written in 2024. Interestingly enough, it was written during the depths of the COVID crisis. And in fact, that's where I got the idea. I was, like many people, sent home from work. I worked in New York

City. And I worked directly across the street from the world famous Roosevelt Hotel on 24th. And I, my office looked out the window and there it was. In fact, I'd been there any number of times. I even met Isaac Asimov there at the young man. He was coming out of a Star Trek convention, and he was in the company of a, how shall I call it, groupies? Anyhow, it's a beautiful hotel. And I learned, while I was working right where I'm seated right now, that they were going to house a lot of migrants in that hotel.

And I thought to myself, this is a colossally bad idea. The hotel is going to be ruined. That gave me the springboard. What would happen if, and as you probably remember, cruise ships were not doing very well back in the COVID days. Oh, yeah. They stopped doing nothing. What would happen if a cruise line said to the city of New York, how about you put your refugees on my cruise ship? And I thought, hey, that's a spectacularly bad idea.

So I postulated that my hero, Tripp Torrance, who's the PR director of said cruise ship, found out one morning while he was shaving that that was the end of his job. So we thought to himself, all right, I'm out of work. What are I supposed to do? Take revenge. What a great idea. The best way to do that is to, I see your smile. That just went completely dark.

What positive things should you do to lighten the world in the moments of my cathartic challenges of life? Revenge. Don't tell me you never thought that. Yeah, that's true. I'm not in that case. I mean, there might be some freshly turned over dirt in my backyard, too. So I don't know what that. By the way, since Tripp Torrent is a marketing person, he can find the dirt or you can't

find any, you can make your own. But that's a different story. Anyhow, he decides the refugees need money. Why not have a celebrity telethon or webathon, as we call them these days? So he organizes one. And it's a spectacular success. And I use this as an opportunity to make jokes. about current celebrity culture.

I have characters that you would recognize as current celebrities. I have a rapper named Tyrone Soresex, who is accidentally machine-guned while waiting to go on a cruise ship to go to the event. But the point is that it's a raging success. But of course, as with all raging successes in good novels, something goes wrong. And in this case, the ship during the telethon is hijacked by South American Revolutionaries, who take the ship out to sea.

So we now have a crew ship, which is almost entirely denuded of its crew because everybody ran away. Obviously, once there's a hijacking, people tend to do the most logical thing, which is get the hell out of there. Yeah, run. We have a ship in the,

basically near Staten Island, floating along with a bare minimum crew, 4,000 people who don't know how to run it, and of course, my hero is on board. And so what do you do? What would you do? What I did was turn on the automatic pilot because they have them now.

This is where I started to get into science fiction country and little did I realize because this was don't forget, this was a million years ago 2024 when I wrote this. And AI was not in the news in those days. As you may know,

it's slightly in the news right now, raging waves of paranoia. It's going to be recracing Chris Voss with a What's the word simulochrome of who you really are? It's going to happen. But you know I'm not a simulation already. That's right.

Not Chris, but an amazing simulation. So they turn it on. Of course, it doesn't work very well because it was a prototype because they hadn't planned on using it. So it stutters. It makes mistakes. It doesn't quite know how to do things. Also, it only responds to certain voice commands, that of the captain, who's in my case,

and this is purely out of the conceit of an author, I made him a Jamaican because I love Jamaican accents. And I allowed him to pepper all of his dialogue with Jamaicanisms, which I think are very, very glorious. In fact, side note, I had one of my previous jobs. Our receptionist was Jamaican, and she had the most luxurious Jamaican accent. So much so that she wanted to step up in the company and go into a, sales and the president said, I'd love hearing your voice on the loudspeaker. I don't want you to leave that job back and forth, back and forth. She got what she wanted. The point is that I think it's a glorious accent and it makes for wonderfully humorous asides.

Yeah. Except when it's on Jarger Binks in Star Wars, that's really annoying. No, no, no, no, no, no. Just that I'm turning on the camera for a second and giving you a dirty look. Okay. Okay. Now I'm back. Okay. No, no, he's, I make him, he's not a caricature by any chance. He's a 60-year-old, elegant, well-seasoned mariner, if that's the word. What do you call an old mariner, a mariner, a mariner, a mariner, yeah. Anyhow, so the long and the short of it is, a lot's going on in this ship. The Navy, obviously, has been alerted. Now, this is where, I guess I'm slightly dated. You will recall that the Navy was the military in general was becoming politicized or politically correct. So I postulate an almost all-female Navy with ships named after Sarah Jessica Parker and Ocasio-Cortez.

And by the way, I don't make them incompetent. I simply put them in these positions. And they, of course, have to do something about this hijacked ship. Now, of course, the hijackers, they are well aware that they left port without enough fuel because the ship was starting to bring on people on board during this event. It was all set up for a party. It wasn't set up for passengers. So they have to negotiate them.

Obviously, they have hostages, 4,000 of them, and they're threatening to kill them if they don't get what they want, which is fuel and everything else. There are a lot, the ship gets to see, but there are, massive amounts of problems. And among them are attempted raids by the Navy, which fail. Sometimes, if you're old enough to remember what happened in 1979, we tried the rescue the hostages. It doesn't always work. I have one of those that doesn't always works. And it leads to a number of things, including, and I'm just going to give this as a tease, an unexpected fashion craze.

Now, how could that possibly be? I'm not going to explain it to you. On board the ship, there are often people who live on cruise ships. Oh, yeah. In the entire lives. And I have a character who has been living on the cruise ship for years. Wow. And she happens to be a fashionista.

And at one point, one of the commandos from South America blows up a room that was intended for, and you're not going to believe me, but it's true, a vaginal steaming room, which, by the way, really exists. It's an old thing. And it was like one of those things, you go on cruise ships and they have things like goat yoga.

I decided to go one step further. I look this up, it's a real thing. But it was actually used, in this case, to house weapons, because the ship was going to stop in a South American court and the weapons were going to be transferred to the local hunt. So they stumble upon by accident this thing, and this young girl is the one who stumbles on it. And she blows up a room, and when she emerges,

she's wearing a commando outfit that's very singed. And this fashionista sees this and says, that's a great look. So she contacts her friends in the fashion industry. and suddenly we have a fashion craze. As you could say, this is not intended to be a dark, penetrating look into the lives of people. It's my attempt at satirizing our entire culture. I satirized the military.

I satirize the fashion industry. I make a point that not all refugees are noble people who are oppressed, but sometimes they're just like everybody else, some good, some bad, some indifferent. I have a personal vendetta against ennobling people that don't deserve to be ennobled and unnobling people who might very well be noble. My lead character does noble things. Sometimes his motivation is wrong. Sometimes the motivation is right. You never know if what you've done is a good thing or a bad thing.

And that's only in hindsight, really. That's what I always tell people. In hindsight, I shouldn't have stolen the law for bread, eh? It did taste good. Okay, guilty is charged. It's really, it's, it's really funny how, I don't know where we get our conscience from. It might be a religion, it might be upbringing.

I remember as a child, I was in the department store, and I saw an aircraft carrier. It must have been six. And it had a little airplane on it, and I stole it. It must have been worth in $1966. dollars, 0.3 cents. And do you know the next time I was in the department store, I returned

it? Really? And nobody knew that I stole it. Nobody knew that I returned it. That part of me is long dead, but that is conscience for you. Yeah, it really is. I mean... Latt latent Catholicism. I don't know. Yeah. I ordered something one of, one time I have a picture

line, and it was a $300 monopod for my camera work. And I bought it. I went into the store and I bought it and they normally somehow when you buy stuff from them they would ship it to you and so I bought this thing and I said hey I don't want it shipped I just want to take it with me today and utilize it on a shoot and they're like okay so they grabbed it and gave it to me but their shipping department decided that there was an order that need to be shipped because normally I have stuff shipped and they're like

within a day of shipping stuff to me so I tend to do that and they're like 45. five miles away. They end up shipping me two. Basically, I ended up with two. I ended up with the one I took out that day and the one they shipped because their systems didn't know. And I remember getting it going, this is a good deal, but this isn't honest or integrity. And your word to yourself is very important. And so like a week later, whenever I got up there again, I brought the unit in and said, by the way, you guys shipped this to me. And here's this thing back. And they were quite surprised. They're like, we've been looking all over for that thing. And we were wondering what happened to it.

It just disappeared. And I'm like, yeah, here's what happened. And they were really grateful because I guess they were really confused at what had happened. But, you know, honesty and integrity, it speaks to who you are. And your brain listens too. Your brain goes, is his word of being honest, integratable matches actions? And it's really important your word into yourself. Because if your own brain, back brain starts thinking you're just full of shit all the time,

it'll keep making sure that you're all. always full of shit all the time. You have to live with yourself, because that's the only person you live with. In any case, as a writer, I always felt the best dramas are for people who fall into situations that are completely out of their realm. Perfect example. Six mountain climbers who have been training for years go up a mountain and they're trapped by an avalanche.

All right, that's a drama, but they're fully prepared, they're probably healthy, they've got food. Six office workers with beer bellies crash on a mountaintop and have to survive. That is the essence of drama. And that can be either a comedy or a cannibal story. But the point or probably both. Or both, maybe. If you're Tim Burton, it might be both. Yeah, you can make candles and fun. But the point is that none of the people in, in my story, are prepared for what's happening to them. I have, for example, have you ever been on a a cruise ship? No. Okay. I've been on the I've been on the Queen Mary that was parked in the harbor

and I photographed it numerous times. I slept on the Queen Mary. That's a, it's a fun thing. I went to the Churchill's restaurant there. But the point is, I have, for example, comedians who work on cruise ships, probably not highest of the grade. So I have a character in the story. His name is Sunny Chance of Rain. Ha-ha, a little joke there. And he is a pivotal character because his ability to mimic voices, which a lot of comedians can do, the frank portions of the world, becomes pivotal to whether the people live or die, because at a certain point, the captain of

the ship, who's the voice that controls the automatic pilot has a heart attack, so he can't talk anymore, which is why a Jamaican accent was good, because Jamaican accents can be mimicked, and sunny chance of rain has to do that. It's his moment of glory, and if he doesn't do it, bad things are going to happen based on the story that I've created. But I like to throw people into situations like that. The commander

of the people who kidnapped the ship, he's an idealist. He wants to use the money that he's going to be getting and the refugees to go back to his country and take it over and do the right thing. The revolutionaries

always try and do and almost always fail at. And that's the idealist in them. And I truly believe that a lot of people like that are, at least start out as idealist. Did Stalin start out as an idealist? Did Fidel Castro start out as an idealist? Probably early on, that peels away pretty darn quickly as reality sets in. And I give this guy a hard dose of reality when he has to, when he has to, in effect, execute someone to make a point. and however I find a way to make that execution not an execution

but I'm not going to go any further than an idealist don't want to execute people but the point is he's challenged he's challenged he's challenged and he's challenged yet again and my guy the lead character Tripp Torrent obviously he's in marketing hey 40 years in marketing I get it

he's compromised a number of ways but in point of fact he winds up ennobiling himself despite himself. He, for example, has his eyes on the cruise ship director that he's in love with. And he winds up in something that I didn't expect this to be as important as it was to the story. But now in the age of AI, I didn't realize I was being a little prescient. On board the ship is a prototype robot bartender.

He is an AI bartender. He resembles a film noir character that you may have heard of, made a lot of movies, but because they didn't want to get sued, and I didn't want to get sued. I called him boogie. But he has a bowtie. He wears a white jacket, and he talks a little bit like this. So you get the idea of who he is. A little booger?

Maybe. Influence? I'm going to do it again and give you a dirty look. My lawyers will be calling you tomorrow. Anyhow, again, he's a prototype. So he's a bartender. He responds to things like, make me a margarita. But he also responds to human emotions.

And the female character in my story goes to this bar and talks to him and starts establishing more than a friendly relationship with him. Because he's learning, you know how they've learned now that even on AI here, you can respond to the sound of my voice. You can detect whether. I'm worried, angry, whatever. And an AI figure. And it's only going to get worse when they replace you eventually with these machines being able to do that.

Now, my machine, my boogie is not really capable of doing that. But he does it enough so that Tripp Torrent feels like he's in competition with boogie. I have a triangle here between two humans and a machine. that's pivotal to the story. Because Boogie is, as we all know, AI, everything is linked, and he's linked to the directional system of the ship in ways that the people who designed it weren't quite aware. I don't know if you've ever seen a movie called Colossus the Forbun Project.

No. Okay, it's a 1970 black story about a super American military computer linking up with a super Russian military computer to take over all nuclear weapons in the world. And therefore basically say, there'll be no more war or will nuke the hell out of you. Wow. It's a great story.

And it was made in 1970, certainly well ahead of its time. I can say this, but we're darn close now. Yeah, we are. But not in ways that the people who did make that movie work. But the point is that AI is getting, I didn't know this at the time I was writing this. I also, for example, have drones that fly over the ship to spy on what's going on for the Navy,

which since the war in Iraq and certainly the wars in Ukraine and Russia, drones are the everything. They're replacing almost everybody except for the humans that they're killing, there's the tragedy. But the point is that I brought drones into the story because I kind of foresaw it, but I solely didn't foresee it happening so damn quickly. Again, 2024, we're in 2026, and you have a military story without drones. You don't have a story.

That's true. It's amazing how much that's changed in the face of warfare and stuff. With the book, I had a question for you here on this. Did you work anything into the story that you just wanted to? Yes. Yes, yes. Yeah, and there were a number of things. Hey, I'm a writer.

Basically, I'm not. I didn't do what the hell he wants. We have a lot of literature about that. But actually, I remember seeing a story, and this relates back to my friend, Captain DeCosta, because he's worried, here he is, 60 years old, his ship has been hijacked, it's probably doomed.

And this could be his last command. And he's, at a certain point during the story, he talks to people around him about, there is a place somewhere in India where they literally take old cruise ships ram them onto the beach and then a bunch of guys go up there and with metal cutters and they

strip it down like the old whalers used to do when they caught a whale and ripped out the guts and pulled out the blubber and I saw a documentary and I thought to myself if a cruise ship could be condemned to hell this would be the place

because it's nothing but smoke and steam and rivets popping and paint curling and heat and the guys who work there are probably all dying of cancer because they're probably breathing about 30% oxygen

and the rest is particles and so he goes on a lament which I think personally is rather well written about the fate of his ship and how all beautiful things like this must have an end and it's so horrible that this end my poor cod

which by the way cod stands for climaxed dreams Oh, that was something I had on my question base for you, yeah. Yeah, the reason why I did that is that you've probably heard a million ads for cruise ships now. They don't have really cool names like The Majestic or the Britannic. Now it's the fantasy of the foam or something like that. And they also have this obnoxious habit of painting playing cards and dice on the sides of the ships. I don't even notice that.

No. You know what is? I've been to the Key West a number of times. A lot of ships pouring in there. And they all look like, they look like cartoons. And of course, they're amazing creations. They're enormous. They make the Titanic look like a fishing boat. But in many ways, they become Vegas on the seas.

And it's a lot of glitz. That's a good glitz, though. and zip lines. Yeah. You got to, you want people spend the money, you got to have,

you got to have a good time with them, that you pay like a bulk price to a, to a thing, and you've got to keep everyone entertained. I have, I have a story about that. I have an autistic son. And we did not know when we went on this particular cruise ship,

that they gave you a key card, and the key card can be used to order drinks. And my son is a dikechokoholic. So at the end of the cruise, he spent something like $1,500 on Diet Coke. Wow. They were probably $8 a pop because he probably went to the bar. He doesn't drink booze.

He just wanted to his Diet Coke. But they hook you in with things like that. Our fault we should have known. But that's the way life is. Anyhow, the point is that, yeah, I have that. I threw that in because I thought it was a lament. And look, I think I told you about the fashion thing. I go into how a fashion craze is created.

I've been in marketing. I know about this. And nowadays, you can tell a production company to come up with a cinematic quality video to advertise your new fashion line. And of course, this fashion line is relating to something that's in the news. It's like if the American team had won the FIFA thing, which didn't happen, you would obviously have seen any number of companies dishing out all sorts of fashion lines that relate to soccer. Now, it didn't happen, so nobody wants to buy something from Spain. So it was a marketing opportunity that was missed.

But had it occurred, the fashionistas would have been out there 13 seconds later. Anyhow, off the point. The point that my book, The Conscious of the God, is my pull-out-the-stop satire on culture in general. I attack politics. I attack fashion. I attack the cruise ship world. I point out that not all refugees of good people or bad people. And I issue some warnings about the future of AI.

I do have a side story about at a certain point, the ship becomes, not surprisingly, disabled at sea, because there's no one to take care of the engines. And this is something I only learned by accident. There are fixers out there. in the world of maritime. If your ship's in trouble and you want to do it quietly, there are people who can come aboard your ship

without letting the world know. We've seen situations where you've got diseases on board the ship and they want to try and keep it quiet. So I developed two characters who are basically fixers. You have a ship that's been sabotaged. And by the way, ships have been sabotaged. I know for a fact of two situations, one historical, one not so historical.

There was a cruise ship docked in the South American port, and the people down below, below decks weren't getting paid. So what did they did? They damaged the shaft that ran the propeller. Holy crap. So that way you have a preparer that waltz, and that means you're not going anywhere. So that kept the ship in port.

Then there was another story, and this, I can always. This one's a real story. some crew members kidnapped a rich man who was living on the ship and they stored him in the meat locker. But they forgot that the meat lockers damn cold and he died there. Wow. There's a lawsuit for you.

And then this one, you can look it up yourself on the internet because it really happened. Have you ever heard of the Morrow Castle? No. Morrow Castle was a cruise ship that went between New York and Havana in the 30s during the depths of the Depression, which means the crew wasn't paid very well. And guess what? Crew wasn't paid very well and they got angry and somebody started

a fire. That cruise ship caught fire in a storm and went blazing onto the beach of Asbury Park in 1934. You can look the pictures up. If you want to see a burnt to a crisp cruise ship, there it is. And that was savage. So I had enough rooted fact to make my story correct. So my my my fixers come on board and they fix the ship. But of course, since fixers are not known for their scruple, they go for a double payday. So they both fix the ship and they sabotage the ship. That way you get paid both ways. I think some mechanics work this way in auto shops.

Oh, I have a story about that one. Ah. If you want to hear it. Sure, yeah. This is an absolutely true story. I was working for a company in Northern New Jersey, and one day, a company, I'm not going to mention any names, they said, we don't think that this transmission company across the road from you is dealing well with their customers. Do you know anybody who owns a Ford escort that we can adjust their transmission, have you bring it in there? The fix should cost you no one on $10.

And if they tell you that you need a whole new transmission, just let us know. just so happened that my father-in-law owned a Ford Escort. And I said, oh, I'll ask my father-in-law. So I brought it in. They did exactly what they said they would do. Exactly what they said was going to happen, happened. I just took the car back and called them up, and they put that dealership out of business.

And my father-in-law got himself a Ford Escort with a permanent transmission fix for as long as he owned the vehicle. And my mother-in-law got angry at me because she hated. the escort. It was a, to use the French word, Mered Kicker, and he kept it for 260,000 miles. Wow. Even though, even though you could practically see the highway below the four boards at the end. Yeah, free, free. The point is, the point is, yes, mechanics. Yeah, if I was him, I would have gone and did the same thing with the engine, find a scammy engine company, and that way you get your engine and your tranny being replaced whenever you want.

This just fell into my lap, and he, he appreciated. the fact that I gave him a free transmission for the rest of the life. It all worked out except for the crooked dealership. But the point is, yes, that does happen. All right. All right. Now, let's get in your other book here we want to talk about today. Not yet your time.

Give us a tease out on this and what's inside. Not yet your time. I'm actually getting very, very good response on that one. Okay, a young man almost gets hit in a traffic accident, and a woman saves him, touches his wounds up, but then she leaves and just says, it's not yet your time. okay he's really like wow good looking saved my life what the where did you go so it turns out he goes to work and it turns out that people from an undiscript government agency come to his office and say do you know

this woman and of course this is new york city all of what happened to him was on camera because it's new york city and everything in york city is on camera and i can attest to that fact i worked in new york say for 26 years So it's all true. It turns out that she is a member of, for lack of a better word, it's kind of the wrong word, but it defines it, a cult. The cult called the apologizers. But they're a noble cult. They believe. No, really, they believe. They're right. They all believe that God has forsaken mankind because we've been so perfidious. And the only way to lure this being back is through good deeds of which she just did one. She saved this man from a traffic death. But it turns out that same day, she attempts to save a Chinese industrialists

from being kidnapped by Arab terrorists and by interposing her body by saying, take me instead of him. But of course, they take both and they wind up. That's a bad deal. Wow. That backfired. You don't feel in that kind of stuff. That backfired horribly. Yeah. So we, the story is they're held up in his gigantic

60-story building in New York City and the agent say, you must know this girl. They want her out because the problem with her is she's a pest and that's the word that they use. She's basically annoying. They want to just negotiate

this guy from not being killed and she's in the way. So can you go up there and see if you can get her out? Because she seems to like you. Now he doesn't know anything about her,

but like any how many times have you or any male had a fantasy about being the night and shining warmer that's kind of a nice thing you've always got our whole lot of mode and i i rescued my wife with the hymlich maneuver once i felt good about myself yeah a good 30 seconds very good most guys would be like let's give this a few minutes to see you anyhow does anybody notice she's joking yet oh i'll kick in when no i'm just doing jokes Just for the sake of my wife, I'm going to give you another dirty look. Ah, dirty looks. The worst we're going to name this dirty look show.

Okay, we're done. Unless you can hear me. I don't know. Should I go? I can hear you fine. You're coming to great. Okay. All right.

So he goes up into this building and he has to strip naked because they don't, they don't look. He has to wear an outfit because they don't trust. They don't trust the American authorities to not wire him with something. So they give him an outfit. sandals. But cleverer people that we are, they hide something in the sandals that emits a gas that knocks everybody out. So they get him to go upstairs, everybody gets knocked out, and when he wakes up, he's in an underground facility. Because they don't know if he's involved, they don't know

if she's involved, and they don't know what's going up with the terrorists. So the facility, in my postulation, I always thought this was going to be the case. You, of course, you remember when the World Trade Center came down. Yes. I was in town that day. I have stories about that. A holiday to be in town. Yeah, yeah. It took me nine hours to get home.

I watched the second tower go down while I was on a boat bobbing in the Hudson River. On that day, people were telling me that the Sears Tower was blown up, which is not true. That the Eiffel Tower had been blown up, which was not true. That they were terrorists in the subways, which was not true. Rumors all over the place. Anyhow. What was it like? Let me ask you this.

I know this is an aside, and we're delving away from your book, but I'm curious, what was your, what did it, what happened to you when you watched that tower fell? Because we all were sitting there gaming out the odds and we're like, let's on fire. I'm sure the fireman will put it out. And then when it collapsed, it was, what were your thoughts when you saw? I will tell you exactly why. I remember where I was when John Lennon was killed. I remember where I was, I was in grade school when President Kennedy was killed. but I was sitting in my boss's office

and I was on my side, her desk, very much like this, and she had a monitor in front of her, and all of a sudden while we were talking, she's just, oh, my God, somebody, a plane crashed into the World Trade Center, the first one. And I said, I'm assuming it was, I've been in small planes where you could actually, you were flying at the level of the World Trade Center.

It's certainly possible. And I started to tell her the story about the Empire State Building being hit by a bomber in World War. World War II bomber that, which is a long time ago. And while we're talking, she then goes, oh, my God, the second tower's been hit. Then it was, then it was like buildings closed, loudspeaker saying everybody go home. I didn't have a cell phone at the time. That's how long ago it was.

So we all immediately thought terrorism. Yeah. Once the second one, it was like, all right, who? We had no idea. Who the hell was Osama bin Laden? Yeah. I remember turning it on that morning and I was horribly hungover. I'd been locking a bunch of loans the night before that I shouldn't have locked if I would have known 9-11 was happening.

Our mortgage loans. Because our rates were storing, I think we lost like $75,000 that day. And if I hadn't unlocked, we would have gotten our money back. We just waited a week or two because it kind of signal there was another recession that would come from it. But I remember the horror of it. I woke up and, yeah, my lock. desk said you need to get on your TV and and Wall Street's been blown up and I'm like, holy shit. The same rumors you were hearing. And I got on. I saw the first tower on fire and CNN was covering it.

And they were walking through it like it was maybe an accident and they were, everyone was kind of in shock. And then they go, there's a second plane. Is that a plane on the horizon? And yeah, I just, I lived through the drama of watching that lead up to what it did. And it was at that moment that it became just apparent. But when the buildings fell, and you knew there were people in there and the fire department was in there, my stomach just, it just fell. It just, it was, it was your horror. I actually believed I was experiencing a nightmare and I tried to go back to bed so that I would wake up. I literally did that with that experience. So I envision that 10,000 people had died. I know how big those towers were. Oh, yeah. So I'd note, 11 people from Michael.

company had broken off from the company I was working for and moved to the World Trade Center. Oh, wow. They moved a month earlier. The good news is they moved to the third floor and they were all. Sorry, to look it out. But we all knew these people. And it was not a bad breakup. It was just like with starting a wrong business.

And I don't know if you probably don't remember this, but it is interesting. About three weeks after this, back in the office, And all of a sudden, we hear that a jet plane had blown up in Queens. Oh, my God, it's starting out. You go to work in the morning after 9-11. You look up in the sky and go, because there's always something buzzing around. Yeah. It's next.

So this one actually was an accident. Yeah. By the way, this is one of my PC things. There was a girl in my office about 23. I'm in my 50 or something, 40s. Her parents lived where the plane crashed. Oh, wow. There was no cell phone communication at the time.

There was no phone communication. She was crying her brain out. Why? Because her parents could be dead. And I gave her a hug. Years later, I had one of those sexual harassment things that you have to go through when you're in the office, what's good and what's bad. And I related that story. And I was told I should not have done that.

Yeah. And I said, you know what? Fire me. I'm sorry. 23-year-old kid is crying because her parents might have been killed in a plane crash and you don't want me to go over and hug her. No, I'm going to do that.

Sorry. I understand sexual harassment is an issue. It certainly was, certainly is. That's not it. There's a time where we have to be humane and stuff. So people can order that book up. Do we get it fleshed out there enough so people can be teased out and want to pick it up? Yeah, all right.

You know who Peter O'Toole is? Yes. I love Peter O'Toole. I think he could read the telephone book backwards and I just listen to him all day later. And he just, he savors every word. Anyhow, the founder of this organization called The Apologizers is a guy named Caninas, who I made Peter O'Too. Tall, Bill, Drunken, is not quite sure of himself.

He came up with this idea of God has to be lured back because we screwed up the planet, which, by the way, he even admits is not even an original idea. But it caught on. It caught on and he got a lot of followers. And now he's sort of like the guru who doesn't want to be a guru. So he gets caught up in this kidnapping because it's essentially his fault of this woman is here. and the long and short of the story is I explore how myths and legends are created.

I have a running joke about Julius Caesar was a pastry chef in the 12th Leisure. He wasn't really a big deal. Why did he get assassinated in the Senate? Because he was catering and the buns were scared. The Senate got angry and the knife came out. It's probably not true, but the point is you really don't know what happened.

You don't know. Oh, then anything's possible. Thanks for great book coverage. There, I'll give you a plug. I wrote four, count them, a trilogy of four books, a comedy. Do you ever see the movie, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum? Yeah. Okay.

Imagine the emperor Caligula has a chef, and he's the only smart man in Rome. That's the basis of my story. Oh, wow. And he's the one who talks about the fact that Julius Caesar was a pastry chef. in the 12th Legion. And I ran it through four, it was so much fun. I couldn't stop writing this. So they're also available on Amazon. It's called Caligula's Kitchen. And there's a series of four of them. I highly recommend them only because I wrote them. Hmm. Hmm. Anyhow. So any of eight books you have in published. People should be.

I have eight books right now. The one that I'm working on is done. It's being edited at my good friends at Kohler Books. Plug, plug, plug. This is the one I was going to ask you this question. Chris, you have an opportunity to do an incredibly noble thing. That noble thing can and probably would change the course of history, or at least keep history from being changed for the better or for the worse. You'll never know.

It's in your hands. The only stipulation. no one will ever know that you did it would you still do it yeah if it would change history for the better I don't probably but we don't we'll never know yeah yeah and then there's there's a lot of movies have been done on this where

sometimes the best intentions don't always turn out because history remaps itself and but you will never be acclaimed Chris Voss will you've already a historic figure so it doesn't really matter anymore But if you weren't the historic Chris Voss, and so my character has to make a decision in this book. And by the way, one thing a writer does,

because he can, if he can grab hold of the historic character and put words in his mouth, as long as those words are accurate or within the character. And in this case, he saves or doesn't save Ben Franklin's life. Oh, that would definitely make this change in this. Ben Franklin becomes a, he is a contemporary person who, through my story, meets and befriends Ben Franklin. And Ben Franklin has been time displaced. I'm not going to go, oh, actually, I will give you, I will give you the basis. My character works for an author. You know about authors. They're all

crazy people anyway. The most famous author, historian in the world, because he gets these insights into starry figures that no one ever gets. And you know how he does it? How? He has a time machine. Oh. Time machine, he only uses it for one purpose. He goes back and gets deathbed confessions of famous people.

So in the opening of this book, my author goes back to Joseph Stalin's deathbed. If people don't know this, he had a stroke and he died alone in his bed. the character impersonates the angel of death. Because Joseph Stalin, if people don't know this, studied for the priesthood before he stopped being religious. So somewhere in the back of Joseph Stalin's mind was the fact that he had betrayed Christianity entirely. So my guy says, hey, this is the best time to do it.

You're going to die, and if you don't confess your sins, you're going to that place that no one wants to talk about. And it's not the Bronx. Uh-huh. And that's the basis for that story. So it's called a gesture to the wind, the gesture being, you can either do this noble deed and be not, be forgotten by history or not do it. It's, it's a, I make it a difficult question for this guy.

And that's, that's my new book. But it's done. It's just being ripped to shreds by an editor. You know about editors. Yeah. Yeah, they take your 50,000 word manuscript, hand you back a thousand, and we threw the rest out, and now fix this and make it right. You know the story about, I think it's, I'm not sure if I have it right.

It's either Catcher in the Rye or something like that book. Somebody retitled it and just duplicated it and sent it to like 20 publishers, and only one accepted it as an acceptable novel. And of course, that's I Writing like art is subjective. I remember once I had a boss who came back from an art auction

and he showed me a white drawing of a woman's behind. A line drawing. It's just one line and it was a very nice woman's behind. I'm totally in favor of that. And you know, he thought it was wonderful. And how much you pay for it?

And it was like $800 or something. I don't remember the name of the artist. And I thought to myself, I have a protractor at home. I can do that too. But I guess what's the more interesting is the fact that he was gay, maybe that's the reason. Maybe.

But the point is art writing is subjective. I've, go to a bookstore right now and look at the top ten books and you say to yourself, Snooky wrote this? And $29.99? This is good? You don't know.

There's an open mouth gum chewing and the word like in 50,000 times. I think I've had dates like that. You know, anyway. I was once online with a college professor in San Diego, and I mentioned that I was from New Jersey, and I said, he said, no, I'm not in the mob, even I'm Italian. No, the Jersey Shore is not all of New Jersey.

The Jersey Shore. I'm always defending New Jersey. We were a small state, and we do have a lot of guys who talk like this. but not everybody. We have Cape May. We have Princeton. We have forests. We have beautiful beaches in the East Coast.

And we also have the Sopranos. Yeah, the Sopranos. I was just going to say that. The Sopranos really sunk the knife on that one in giving this sort of reputation to anybody in Jersey. They all talk like the mob, and they're all down at the Bada Bean Club and whatever. And by the way, I'm actually,

since the Sopranos, there are a number of bars in Northern New Jersey that basically were designed to look like the Sopranos. Let's face it. Oh, really? Oh, yeah, yeah. It brings in money. And yeah, there are people like that. I was born in Hoboken. My mother sat on Frank Sinatra's lap.

Oh, wow. You want to know why? Why? Not for the reasons you think. He was going to a place in Hoboken called the Union Club, back in 1937 or so. He's still a young punk. And they all piled into one car because cars were expensive in those days.

And my mother weighed 120 pounds and Frank weighed 108 pounds. So he sat on her lap because he was the lighter of the two. Hey, it's Sinatra, man. If he wants to sit in his lap, you want to sit on his lap, whatever Sinatra wants. This was young punk Sinatra who was really worried about the gig, she said. He was like, yeah. What was he? At 19?

Give him a break. Oh, wow. Really crude me there. And his mother shopped at my father's store. Oh, really? Wow. Still haven't paid all their bills. So they still still credit.

You can take that up with Sinatra's and see what they'll do. Yeah, that, yeah, that would know. I would have said, well, right off your bill for an autographed picture or something like that. I don't know. But young Sinatra, yeah. He was quite the figure. So as we ran out the show, give people a final pitch out on picking up your books, especially the one we featured the conscience of the COD, and all your other ones we've tapped into, and your dot-coms as we go out. Okay. James Terminello, author, Recontere, as you can see. You can catch me on X. I'm on there every day.

If you like books that are a fast read, have a few insights. They don't ask you to think too deeply, but they occasionally ask you to think. and I hope you'll find them, I hope you'll get a couple of good guffaws out of them. I heartily recommend, particularly Conscience of the cod. Conscience of the cod is basically a satire and everything that you are living through right now, including things I didn't know were as important as they'd become.

And my next book's more metaphysical, a gesture to the wind. But I think it's appropriate since we're celebrating 250th. I didn't think about that when I was writing it, but Ben Franklin, I give Ben Franklin a lot of, Ben Franklinisms. He is real in my book. He is speaking the way Ben Franklin. He won't be saying any dees, dems or don'ts. He's a wise, rather Randy sort who can discern people, which is

what he was. And by the way, read about Ben Franklin. He's one of the most fascinating of our problems. Did you hear about how he funded and early fund that's still alive today that engenders, I think, journeymen and teaching? It was a fun that he set up. I think for a few hundred dollars back in the day. And it's still operating today. We had as someone on the show that wrote a book about it. And it still gives out money, and Dole's money and operates today from the seeding of Ben Franklin.

It's pretty wild. And it helps. Really great, man. We were, if I get religious, we were blessed with some of the most ingenious founding fathers, Franklin being one of them, but not the only one. Franklin, anti-slavery when it was like the wrong thing.

to be. But Jefferson happens. Hamilton. Oh, my God, Hamilton was, he basically created the federal government. Yeah. When they say there, we won't see those like again. We won't. We won't. That was a unique. It really was. Yeah. It was a peak. Right at the beginning we peaked, and it's been downhill ever since. I think it was the actor Brian Blessed in talking about Shakespeare, said, the little blue planet has found its author. That's it. That's Shakespeare.

The rest is, oh, I'll leave you with this one, if I have to leave. It was a famous Jewish philosopher who said, what is the fundamental basis of our religion? And he said, the golden rule, everything else is commentary. And if you think about it, that's true.

Do want to others, as you would have yourself be done under. Everything else follows. Whether it's mortgages, Sexual relations, business dealings, or baseball, maybe not baseball. Basically, cheat every now and then. That's what steroids are for. Check with that one guy is.

That whole era of whatever that was. So thank you for coming the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you for inviting me. I really appreciate it. Please, folks, take a crack in my books. They're not that expensive. You'll have a good time.

And if you want to read the story of Ben Franklin and his thing, there's a book called Ben Franklin's Last Bet. and it tells a story of Michael Meyer, it tells a story of how he set up this fund to help train journeymen and people, and it's still alive today, and it's very vibrant and thriving and has plenty of money. So it's crazy.

250 years later. Anyway, thank you very much for coming to show. We really appreciate it, James. Folks, order up his book, where refined books are sold. It's called The Conscious of the COD. You can find it as link on the Chris Foss show. and check out as other books as well.

Thanks for much for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, Chris Foss, 1 on the TikTokity, and all those crazy places in the internet. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time.

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