 Welcome to Books, Books, Books to Tech, Hawaii. I'm your host, Elaine Gallant, and here's where we'll talk about reading books, writing books, and everything in between and beyond. Today, I have a crime thriller that I can't wait to talk about that involves the Catholic Church and its ongoing problem with pedophilia. Now, I know this could be a very heartbreaking topic, but I have with me today the novel's author, Tom Hogan, to guide us through this discussion. Welcome, Tom. Thanks, Elaine, nice to be here. Well, I'm very happy to have you. First, I wanna say, I wanted this interview so very much because I was raised Catholic, and I seriously think I could have been your character, Carla Jessup. Okay. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Everyone seems to love Carla. I love Carla. I love the fact when they ask her if she's Catholic and she says, what did she say? I'm lapsed permanently. Yeah, lapsed early and permanently. There you go. I love that. I always say I'm Catholic and I'm upset about it. So, I'm with her on that one. Not to knock the Catholic Church. It's a very good religion, but there is a problem in the Catholic Church and I love the fact that you have made, you have written a crime thriller that uses this as its base. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself first and what might have influenced this novel and then we'll go into the novel itself. Sure. As far as the novel, the background, religiously, et cetera, I studied religion in fact for a year. I was in the Catholic Seminary, so I'm familiar with the system. I wound up studying in religion and getting degrees in it, bachelor and masters, working in biblical archeology. So I was in religion, but not in the theological. But in the process for one year, I also lived in a Protestant Seminary just because it was the only place when I was doing archeology that would hold me. So I've got experience with both the Catholic and the Protestant Seminary systems and how different they are. And then as a professor of religion, I obviously was exposed to any number of different religious types, including the priests who were at some of the schools that I taught at. So I was pretty familiar with the church as well as the people within it and then the Protestant side of the coin as well. Yes. And you have a very diverse background actually. You have written several novels, which we'll get to shortly. You've written screenplays and have won awards, in particular the Page Competition and the Austin Film Festival. You've also written for Newsweek and a number of political and travel publications, including the Jerusalem Post and the Bulwark. But prior to joining Silicon Valley, and I'm gonna just read this part, where your agency, Proud at Ocean, launched over 50 startups. You are a professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Santa Clara University and UC Santa Cruz. I just wanna make sure I have all of that and if there's anything you wanna add. That's all correct. There you go. Okay. So let's talk about the empty confessional. I've already identified with Carla. Do you identify with Father Michael or Father Gabe? You know, Father Gabe, definitely. Not because I'm 26 years old with a buff body and skilled in the martial arts, but because of the idea that you could have a calling, which I thought I did when I was younger. And yet, you know, the calling brings with it an institution, in this case, the Catholic Church, which has got some laws and some practices that even at 18 years old, you sit there and raise an eyebrow and go, you know, this may not be for me. And so, you know, that kind of internal drama that he had, as well as the idea that the Catholicism comes with it, the idea of celibacy, which isn't very attractive to a 17 or 18-year-old young man in California during the 60s and early 70s is, yeah. So I identified with him. I'm glad you identified with Carla, but had you identified with Father Gabe, we would have had a different conversation here. So, but yeah. All right, now, let's talk, there are, you bring this out in the novel briefly, that there are several kinds of pedophilia. Pedophilia being the preference for children ages under 11 to 14 and F ofophilia and Hebaophilia, which is a preference for children, boys being the first, girls being the latter of ages 15 to 16. I don't know where I wanna go with this because I just wanted to define it first because there are levels of pedophilia and we don't know how far the Catholic church has gone, the priests have gone with this and I wouldn't even try to figure it out. So I'm not even gonna go there. We're gonna stick with the book. Yeah. The first thing to know is that it's never called pedophilia, according to a conversation between Gabe and Father Michael Montgomery, which you don't know is really a priest until very late in the story, I have to say. So I was tickled to learn that. I hope I'm not spilling any y'all. Oh, no. You know, anything there, but it's always considered inappropriate contact by the Catholic church. Right. No, I mean, if you look at it and the reason that I parsed the different kinds of pedophilia was not because I wanted to be scientific, it's because as I was pointing out in the conversations between the priests who are investigating the scandal, there were times where the church used just those legal distinctions to end a case. In other words, you're charging us with pedophilia when in fact it's another one of these corner cases and the case was dropped not because of the merits, but because of the legalities. And yeah, the church basically has a playbook that it goes through when, let's say a 12 or 14 year old girl or boy approaches their parents and tells them what happened with father so and so, they will go to the church and the church has essentially a playbook where it will never use certain terms. It will always attack the, first off, gently attack the accuser and say, you know what kids are like, they can misinterpret, et cetera. If the parents or the child wants to stay the course and continue their charges against the church, then the church goes too well, you could damage a good man's reputation. We've seen cases where the people who charged the church become pariahs in their own neighborhood, lose their jobs, you really want that to happen to you. And then it's only the rare cases that stay with it that the church will actually open its checkbook. And if it does, it does with very draconian restrictions on it so you never hear about them in terms of the settlements, how much and what the charges were. And the church has got it down to, if not a science, a very strong craft. And even with the new pope, it doesn't seem like it's moved that far off what it's been doing for centuries, but only recently been brought to life. Well, I love how you laid that out in the book because, you know, we're curious as to how, you know, we hear about it happening and we're curious how all of these things, and you're very thorough in this book. I mean, it's a crime thriller first, okay? And believe me, I felt like I had to strap myself in the chair, the novel moved very quickly. It was very exciting. The fact that I know so little about Krav Maga, I had to look it up. I had to, I mean, I know it's from Israel, you know, the martial arts is from Israel, but I didn't know how it differed from other martial arts. So it was a very educational book in a lot of ways, but first it was a thriller that kept my attention. It was a vigilante justice. You call it vigilante and or pilgrim justice in your book. And we can talk about that because, Matt, I was thinking, this is like that Charles Bronson movie, you know? He gets revenge for the rape of his wife and daughter. It was that, I mean, I hope there's gonna be a sequel to this book and I hope there's gonna be a film or a series or something. That would be quite interesting because the topic is so, not unusual, but so taboo. Nobody thinks of writing a book and having this as the basis for it, except for you. I think that's fabulous. I appreciate what you're saying. Yeah, I liked very much the direction that it took as well. I was just on the phone this morning conversations with people out in Hollywood or a dime a dozen, et cetera, but there is some interest in this being like a mini series or even a series because it's such a, if you think about buddy movies like Lethal Weapon or whatever, this is a weird buddy movie of a priest, a young priest and a cynical middle-aged woman detective. And what are they joined by? Well, they're both joined by a desire for justice or vengeance depending on your definition. And if you think about it, she wants to get the people, this is, I don't think I'm spoiling anything. She's frustrated by the people who walk in her world because of a court. It's fine when an innocent person walked, but it frustrates the hell out of cops when someone gets off on a legal technicality and goes back to their life of whatever. In Gabe's world, it's the idea that if you go to confession, you can have your rapes and your abuses of your spouse wiped clean and go back into your world. And in the case of the pedophilic priests that are part of his world, he's looking to exact vengeance that the church should be doing for justice and isn't. So yeah, the idea was with all of the novels that I've written is someone came up with the term, these are educational thrillers. I'm good with that because as you said, you learn a lot about the Catholic church, but not in a textbook or a nonprofit document or a documentary of sorts. It was the same thing with the Holocaust novel. It was a crime thriller set in Auschwitz, but you learned a ton about the Holocaust and how the camps work. And my first novel was about sexual violence in prisons. Again, a thriller, but in the process, you learn quite a bit about violent offenders and prisons, et cetera. So the idea is always to combine or impart a certain amount of knowledge about a setting with, but always keep it within the context of a thriller. So what do you know about the current Catholic church of stance on pedophilia? Has anything changed? I mean, there's been cases, there's been investigations, there's been charges filed. Has anything changed? It's a great question. I mean, I think the biggest issue is there's a new pope who seems to have his heart in the right place. And sometimes his head is in the right place and sometimes his head gets moved by the old guard. I think the bottom line is, if you looked at this from the standpoint of zero tolerance and encouraging the church to share all of its files with the local authorities, the church is a light year away from that, even with the new pope and his good heart. And I think the reason for that very simply is the church is still the foremost guidance that the church has is self-preservation. And there's a part in the book where the guy says, when he's looking at Gabe, a 27-year-old guy, he goes, I was looking for more of an Irish guy with a drinker's nose in his fifties. And he said, nah, those guys are kind of gone if you're more likely to get a Filipino guy than you are the old Irish guy from the thirties. What that means, it's the same thing as with nurses today. You wonder why there's a ton of Filipino nurses is because they can't find enough American-born nurses. And so there's always this recruiting. It's the same thing with the church. They're having to go offshore to get their next generation of priests and they're just trying to hold on and they're afraid that they decimate their ranks if they took a zero tolerance and went after the known pedophiles within the church. So it's self-preservation number one and number two for them. Yes, another good thing about your book is you have Gabe fighting battles of his own. I'm not gonna give that one away, okay? And I don't wanna give away the ending either because I loved what you did. I'm just gonna say that, I loved what you did. I have to say, I enjoyed the read. I'm so happy that this novel came my way to talk to you about it. So thank you very much for writing it. I wanna ask you about your other fiction books and that is, you've already briefly mentioned them. One was Left Alive, Left For Alive, about missing persons, rape and murder in Northern California and a group of ex-cons and political refugees living in an abandoned Luggenburg camp. You wanna talk about that one real quick? Sure, I mean, and here's the people say, write what you know. And I've written three novels, one about pedophilia, one about the holocaust and one about sexual violence in prison. Well, I've never been in prison. I wasn't in the holocaust and I've never been defiled by a priest. But I know a bit about all of those in the case of sexual violence. My wife was the, when we met was the head of the rape crisis center and for Northern California. And she asked me to get involved as a male in that to do counseling of male rape victims as well as husbands of women who had been raped. And the husbands quite often have no idea how to deal with the crime as well as when and how to approach their wife as the healing goes on. So I learned enough about that to write that book. As you pointed out, I was a lecturer or an assistant professor at holocaust studies. Something that I had studied while I was over in Israel working on digs. So when I came back to the US, I taught that for a while in 2000, I walked away from Silicon Valley for five years to teach again, this time holocaust and genocide at UC Santa Cruz. And so one day it occurred to me, you know, all of the things about the holocaust that you read or see, rightfully the holocaust is front and center. It's the star of the show. It's blaring at you and, you know, in 64 point letters, six million killed, et cetera. And I thought, what if you backed off from that and used a form that more people find attractive like a thriller, but set it in Auschwitz so that you learn about Auschwitz, but you don't have it hammered right into your forehead saying, feel bad, you know, learn everything that you can, et cetera. So that was the idea behind that. And that was the title, The Devil's Breath. That's the Devil's Breath. And that set in Auschwitz in 1943. And the idea again is, I think some people know about this, but there was a gold operation at Auschwitz where they would harvest from the corpses from the gas chamber. They would harvest the gold from the teeth of the victims and smelt it down and then provide it to the third Reich. As well, they would take out the jewels that were either in the luggage or quite often with the victims, they had started secreting them in their anal cavities to avoid having something to barter with in the camps, but then boom. So the idea was, well, what happens if that whole operation gets compromised by a murder and the commandant has to solve it and recover the gold before the SS comes for its next shipment. And he can't do it with his guards because they'll all report him to the SS. So he has to do it by finding a detective team within the prison population. And that's what he does. He finds a husband and wife team where the husband was the head of detectives in the Warsaw Ghetto and the wife was his right-hand person and an investigative reporter. And he threatens them with not just their death, death of all of their cabin mates up to 1,000 people if they don't help him solve this crime. So that became the basis of the devil's breath. Okay, so I'm gonna ask you a question you get asked a lot. And why do you write about such grip topics? Sexual violence and prison life and left for alive, the Holocaust and devil's breath and pedophilia and the Catholic church and the empty confessional. Why do you write about such grim topics? Well, I mean, and this isn't intended to be a flip answer, but if you hear actors, they'll say, drama is easy, comedy is hard. And they get, they comment on it. And I think you commented on it already in terms of the empty confessional. I have a kind of a sardonic or a black sense of humor that I use in all three books so that it's not so heavy handed, but I couldn't imagine sustaining that for 350 pages. Right. Whereas the themes that you were just talking about are easier to write about in the sense that they are are so fascinating. I mean, to give you an idea, and I never came up with an answer for this, but there were two elements that I could never get my hands around in writing the empty confessional is. Number one is how would I as a pedophile priest go about recruiting other priests, which is how it happens. There's gonna be that moment, even if I think that you're leaning in that direction where I've got to reveal myself to you and say, hey, how would you like to join us tonight and rape 12 year old kids? I mean, I could never envision that moment as a human being. And the other one was when that priest, even if he cultivates the kids with, oh, God is special and here's why I'm so in need of release. There comes that moment where he has to cross the line into abusing a small child that trusts him. And as much as I wrote it, I finally had to write it into the book and say, I can't get my hands around these two things. And I like how you handled that because it also, because the reader feels the same way. They don't know how to get their hands around this. You know, their heads around it. You know what I mean? They just don't know. No, I agree. It's horrendous and it's not accepted practice in the Catholic church, but it sure as hell has winked at and has been probably for as long as there's been a Catholic church, but certainly in the 20th century when we have files about it. Well, I'm glad you wrote these books. Somebody has to approach the subject. Things have to come out of the closet and they have to be explored. And this is a fabulous way. You put it into such a fabulous format, not format, you put it into a genre that makes it, I didn't know whether to focus on the thriller part or be angry over the other part, the Catholic church. You know, I kept flipping between the two and I ended up on the thriller side. So kudos, you did it. Great, thank you. Okay, so you're also asked this question a lot. You're a professor of Holocaust studies. How did you end up running corporate marketing at a company like Oracle? And well, no, I'm gonna wait, I'm gonna wait for the second half. You answer that one first. No, and yes, you're right. I mean, you nailed the two questions that I had asked the most, you know, why the hell are you such a grim son of a bitch? And you know, number two is how did it happen? I can guarantee you that it would never happen today. What happened was, in fact, I was speaking at a retreat for a human rights organization and when I was still teaching Holocaust studies and one of the people on the board of the organization was a really, he was the CEO of a large company, not Larry Ellison at that point. And he came up to me after my presentation, he said, why don't you ride back with me to San Jose? And I wanna talk to you about something. And he said, this valley, it wasn't even known as Silicon Valley, I don't think at that point, you know, is about to explode. If you're done with teaching or if you want to make a different change, et cetera, you should get into it now. And that was it. It's the basically, they were hiring anyone who could put a noun in front of a verb. It was early days of Apple, et cetera. So I went with his company and then went from that company to Oracle. And I joined Oracle when Oracle was 90 million in sales. And, you know, I was the only corporate marketing guy and then the great thing about Oracle is, I don't know that I would recommend it as a business practice, but it doesn't trust outsiders. It does not want Elaine Gallant to come in and say, you know, when I was at Xerox, we did it this way. They wanna hire people who are inexperienced, but that they think are bright. They were determined to be the number one employer of Harvard, MIT and Stanford graduates. And in fact, they did, you know, those people would even be working the front desk and then move their way in kind of like people starting in the mail room, in the agency business in Hollywood. So the point was I got there early. They hired beneath me and kept promoting me until all of a sudden I'm the head of corporate marketing for a billion dollar corporation, but it happened for two reasons. One was that early hiring talent drought and then secondly, Oracle's refusal to bring in experienced people above me. They'd rather promote you. That was how it happened. It would never happen that way today. Well, you're a lucky man because you went on to form crowded ocean. We could probably have a whole show just on that, saying I wanted to strap myself in, but you did write, can we show the website, please, Tom's website, Tom Hogan's website because you have several books. And I do want to just take one, 30 seconds, talk about the ultimate startup guide, marketing lessons, war stories and hard-won advice from leading venture capitalists and angel investors. And then I want to mention your new one because I love the terminology you're using. Okay. There's your website. There we are. So the ultimate startup guide came about, you know what it is? Well, number one is we were introduced as the people who wrote the book on startup marketing because we'd launched so many of them. And then we thought, well, what the hell? Then probably we should write the book and then we can be introduced formally that way and people will buy the book. What had happened was my partner in crowded ocean, Carol Broadbent, had been my counterpart at Sun Microsystems back in their early days. And she had put Sun on the map the way that hopefully I had helped put Oracle on the map. And then we met later in life at another company and then we both went off and did other things and came back together to form crowded ocean. And what was great about crowded ocean was we didn't really prospect for work. What would happen is the VCs, the venture capitalists who knew us from Oracle and Sundays were delighted to have people that they knew and trusted that they could bring in to the startups that they were investing in and say, hey, listen, I love your stuff. The technology is there. By the way, you've never run a company. You've never organized a sales team. You've never built a website. Here's the people who've done it at Oracle and Sun and for at that point, 20 of our customers, many of whom had become famous by then. Someone gives you $8 million and then recommends that you use crowded ocean. You're probably gonna use crowded ocean. Yeah, I'm gonna leave it there, Tom, because we are out of time. I didn't even get to mention your new book. Doug got it, but it's called Timmer Humor. It is? Just go to the website. I appreciate all of the time, Elaine and both. That's a great download. Great download. Tom, you're very diverse. You're a true Renaissance fan. I'm so happy. It shows in your work. It is of such a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for joining us. I wanna thank everyone at Think Tech, the technicians, Jay Padela producer, all our supporters, our underwriters, our viewers. Thank you so much. We can't do it without you. Tom, come back and visit us sometime. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.