The Eric Metaxas Show - Dr. Louis Markos (Encore Continued)

Episode Date: June 14, 2025

From Plato to Christ: Socrates in the Studio with Professor Louis Markos

Noble Gold Investments is the official gold sponsor of the Eric Metaxas show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals. Learn how you can protect your wealth with noble gold investments. That's noble gold investments.com. Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. Have you heard that some people have a nose for news? Well, Eric has a nose for everything. That's why this is called The Show About Everything. Now welcome your host who definitely passes the smell test, Eric Monttaxas.

One of the friends of this program is the Herzog Foundation. If you're interested in homeschooling, education in general, quality K-12, Christ-centered education, we always say go to the Hertzog Foundation.com, herdsockfoundation.com. But Chris DeGal, who is with the Herzoghvalk Foundation, and who's one of the Hurtsock Foundation, and who's one of our colleagues in the Salem Radio Network is on today to talk to us about Herzog and other things. Welcome back. Hey, Eric, it's great to see you again. I saw you in a very, very cold, frigid, uncomfortably bitter cold Washington, D.C.

A couple of weeks ago for inauguration week. That was fun, was it? Well, people don't realize, because it always sounds glamorous if you're not there. Like, ooh, it sounds great. It was like, it was just bad. It was so cold. It was unbearable. It was unbearable.

I can't remember the last time that it's been unbearably cold. Were you like, I can't know. Can't do it. And couple that with the security. I don't know how much waiting outside you did. Oh, no, no, no, no. That wasn't in any privileged class. I had to wait outside for like two and three hours just to get in places.

It was nuts. It was horrifying, horrifying. So if you missed it, you hit it. It's like to go there. I mean, my wife and I, we were all excited, like, oh, we got tickets to some ball. And we got there to the, you know, like you walk in the bitter, bitter cold because the, the Uber can't even take you because security is so tight. There's like Humvees and military stuff and security. And yeah, finally we get near the line.

And I just looked at the line, I thought, not a chance that I'm going to stand. And those poor women, I mean, you know, at least we had tuxes on. Those poor women were in bald gowns and listen, I don't hear what you're wearing. Nothing was what it was forget. No, no, no. Anyway, may I just say on that? That week was so positive that the vibe in that town despite all that. Even people that couldn't get in or see what they were hoping to see, didn't you notice that everybody, it was devoid of protesting?

People seemed happy in a bullion anyway, a different vibe there. Oh, it was stunning. It was absolutely stunning. And listen, it's not over. It's not over. here in the midst of great things are happening. It's frankly hard to believe, but we need to believe it and we need to do what we can. I mean, let's talk about, I mean, since, you know, we're talking with the Herzog Foundation,

school choice, I mean, what's going on? And I want people to know that there's a website, read Lyon, R-E-A-D-L-I-O-N-O-R-G. Yes, we keep you up to date there every day all week long, constant breaking news, and updates on news related to culture, to government, to, yes, certainly school choice and so much more. If you really need a site that you trust that you want to come to depend on for objective, honest journalism, truth, great opinion, great cultural insights, readline.com is one I'd come in to you. You know, we're going to be at the National Religious Broadcasters Association event at the end of the month in Dallas with you, Eric.

We're looking forward to that because both the foundation, Broadley, Herzog Foundation, I hope you'll look that up, as well as the lion, our media arm and some of our podcast shows. We're going to be doing shows and introducing ourselves to the convention floor with all of our other media colleagues. So in addition to the show that we'll be doing at Salem, and I know you'll be there too, I'll be there in my capacity with the Herzog Foundation talking about the great work they do and introducing ourselves to other Christian media. We want people to know that we're a source, not just to teach folks how to homeschool or

develop their own Christian school or grow their Christian school, but also plug into our network of shows, our great friend Sam Sorbo, and the news and media we provide all week long. It's a new day in America. It's exciting. And I always say that, you know, we have to take back every one of the mountains, so to speak, and one of them is education, that if we don't, I mean, it's as fundamental as it gets. If our kids are not learning the basics about what is true, about history, you can't function. And I, and we basically drift. for, you know, 50 plus years. We've not been teaching this kids, this stuff to our kids, especially not in the public schools.

And you can't have a functioning free, self-governing republic unless kids are learning the basics in school. So this is absolutely vital, absolutely vital. Peggy Noonan was on with Bill Maher over the weekend. I don't know if you happened to catch it on Mars show, but they were discussing that very point that it used to be... Do you think I watch Mars show? Yeah.

It's making crack, Chris to go on. No, no, no. I caught a, the only reason I went back to review it was because the clip caught my eye. Brother, I'm teasing. I'm teasing. Please continue. No, I hear you. But he has actually, I tell you, the worm has turned with that guy a little bit. I think it's gotten so crazy. It's actually whipsawed on him a little. But Noonan was making the point, and I thought it was a solid one, that once upon a time, and they were really kind of broadly making the point for school choice, but I don't think they realized it. You were growing up in an impoverished community or something, and you thought, well, this country's so great, I can bring myself out of my circumstances. And Noonan was making the point that. kids aren't even taught the greatness of the country. In fact, they're taught that quite literally anything outside of your own neighborhood where it might already kind of stink is even worse, that America is just rotten to its core. And even people like Bill Maher, along with Peggy Noonan, were discussing that we're teaching our kids to grow up hating this country,

hate the flag. And that, I'm sorry, it just largely stems from public education. That's not to castigate everyone in public education. but we know that's where it comes from. And something's got to change there. You said it so well. If we don't teach our... It comes from Bill Maher and the liberal left and the Hollywood left.

So thank you, Bill Maher, because you're a big part of the problem. And frankly, Peggy Noon, and she used to be a friend, but she was very anti-Trump. Yes. A lot of these people have unwittingly participated in destroying the country. Because attacking Trump, you know, that's the classic virtue signaling among, you know, whatever. certain conservative elite groups. But Trump was always pro-America. And we're at a day now where I think even Peggy Noonan and even, God forbid, Bill Maher,

are understanding, oh, yeah, this is common sense. And this is to me what's amazing is that so many people are coming around. So many people, they're not coming around on everything, but they're coming around in a lot. And I think people like Bill Maher, nobody was more anti-Trump than he was. But common sense is common sense. And I think some people still have some common sense. I mean, the people leading the Democratic Party don't have common sense. They're still in a, I don't know, in a fevered dream.

I don't know what world they live. That bizarre thing they put on this weekend trying to pick their new leader. They clearly haven't gotten the memo yet as to why they lost as badly as they did. But you see with Trump and the OMB, I know you're, talked about this, this surgical strike that he's doing with Elon Musk, looking at our nation's finances, you know, when you have mid-air collisions outside Reagan and he says, there's something wrong with the way our government is functioning, or these government apparatchiks that say, I don't want to come to work, and I'm mad at Trump. The American public, you, me, people, Eric,

who report for duty every day and have bosses and budgets and timelines and metrics, welcome to realville government workers. And I'm not, that's not the same. say that everybody in government doesn't work well and work hard, but a lot of them don't. And yeah, we don't have an appetite for it anymore. Eric, we want results. We want answers. We want accountability. That's an education.

That's in air travel. That's in the way we spend our taxpayer dollars. Yeah. Well, and again, things had to get this bad for many people to wake up. But enough people are waking up. And it gives me hope, Frank. It's just so interesting that, you know, again, Bill Maher is the ultimate example when he recognizes some of this stuff. Yes.

So we're in a new day. Yeah, John Federman and Pennsylvania is another one that I think is coming around or realizing he's up, his first term is up, you know, in 2026. And suddenly he's starting to sound kind of mansion populist, kind of like Joe Mansion of West Virginia used to. he was elected with the help of some really radical left-wing progressive Marxist socialists types. Now, as he approaches 2026, he sounds like he could easily be a Trump union voter. I think they're getting the message. I mean, and listen, just to be clear, he's still enough out of his mind that he shows up at the inauguration wearing a hoodie in shorts. To me, that's not funny.

That's utterly disrespectful. Well, yes. Respectful to the nation, to our traditions, to the office of the president. and see. Chris DeGal, we're out of time. God bless you. God bless you for your show. Look forward to seeing you in the weeks ahead in person. And folks, don't forget, herdsogfoundation.com. Hurtsockfoundation.com. There's been a national focus on eating only the healthiest of foods, and that's great news for balance of nature. Their method of producing a vibrant nutritional supplement is second to none. While so many others use chemicals

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use promo code Eric or call 800-858-0-263, 800-858-0-263 to grab this exclusive deal. That's Mypillar.com. promo code Eric or call 800-858-0-263. promo code Eric. Welcome to Socrates in the studio. And welcome to you, my friend, my dear old friend, Dr. Louis Marcos. Can I call you Doc since we're friends?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. You, in some ways, sum up to me why I do this, because I've always said that the pursuit of truth should be fun. And we always aim for that. And I think because, you know, I and you believe that there is such a thing as truth, it can be fun to look for it. We're not afraid that we're going to find that at the bottom there's no truth and there's no meaning in the universe. But you, you in some ways typify that. You're, you're kind of like the, the college professor that I think everybody wishes they had, certainly that I wish I had. So there's a lot to talk to you

about. Today, I want to talk to you about your book. I mean, you've talked about this subject a lot over the years, but finally you wrote a book about it. And it's called, from Plato to Christ, how platonic thought shaped the Christian faith. So the first question may be rather obvious. What led you to put these ideas into a book? Thanks for having me on, Eric. It's great to be back in New York City. I grew up in New Jersey, so I grew up close going to...

I actually forgot that. Could you imagine? I know. Back in the 70s when New York was just terrible, we would sneak in here, we'd see a show, and we'd go right back home before it got dark. It was wonderful. We had this little ritual whenever we went through the tunnel.

Whenever we got to the New York side, we would start coughing like we couldn't breathe, which is probably what the New Yorkers think about in New Jersey. But anyway, now I'm in Houston, Texas. Right. But there's kind of two reasons why I wrote the book. The first reason is back in, I think it was 2007, I published a book called From Achilles to Christ, why Christians should read the pagan classics. From Achilles to Christ.

See, this is the problem with you. You've written so many wonderful books. From Achilles to Christ, we will kind of talk. touch on that in another conversation, but you didn't, I'm not giving you a chance to finish, but I don't want to forget to say, we're both Greek. Yep. And we're both serious about our faith. And what you do and what our hero, C.S. Lewis, does is you, you don't throw away the pagan classical literature. So from Achilles to Christ, I forgot about that book, but that kind of leads a as you're saying.

Because when I wrote that, I focused on the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, and the Greek tragedies. And in my preface back then, I said,

I really should talk about Plato, but he deserves his own book. So it took me about 15 years to finally write the Plato book because I've been

thinking about it and simmering about it. But my whole point is what you said, I'm a truth seeker. I believe that there is a real truth. And as a Christian,

I believe the ultimate truth is in Christ. But that doesn't mean that everything outside of Christianity is necessarily a lie, right? My motto is that Christianity is not the only truth. It's the only complete truth.

So wherever you look, you're going to find bits and pieces of truth, of goodness, of beauty, and they're going to point forward. And much of what I write is called bringing Athens and Jerusalem together. I want to bring together. Who originally said,

what does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? Who said that? It was actually Turtulian. It was an early church, Holy castle. Wait a minute. And the funny thing is, you know, the 19th century. I mean, it's kind of been brought back. But he first asked it as a question.

And you know, in Greek, of course, every word is Greek. You can ask a question in a way that points to a yes or no. Can't really do that. Well, you can in English. Athens and Jerusalem don't have anything to do with each other, do they? Or, you know, if you put in the heck. Yeah. What the heck?

The heck, right? Does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? And when he asked the question, he seemed to think it didn't have much to do with it. But he was a great human. and classicist himself, Tertullian, pointing all the way forward. So the belief is that, okay, it all rests on a theological distinction between general revelation and special revelation. Special revelation is when God speaks directly, Old Testament, New Testament, the prophets, Christ himself. But, and I don't know if this ever worried you, Eric, but so are you telling me

that before Christ came, God just ignored 99% of the world? I mean, only to the Jews, did he speak directly? Well, listen, but he didn't ignore everybody. This is another reason I like you, because you are kind of pushing against certain, what shall we call them, evangelical Shibboleths. I think that what you just said will rankle some people. There are some people that they see everything as purely issues of salvation. They don't see the fullness of truth. and they're made uncomfortable by the suggestion that the Christ whom we worship is present in everything before he came to earth that we see you know in other words that that idea kind of makes some people they want to act as though you know it was all the devil and then Jesus came and you were saying in other great folks it's ironic eric

both you and I grew up in the Greek Orthodox Church, sort of God moved us into the evangelical world because we wanted something more evangelical that actually shared the gospel. But a lot of my best students today are now moving the opposite way. Exactly. Orthodoxy or Catholicism. You can get it wrong in

both directions. Because I think the reason is that they're yearning for a kind of sacredness, ritual, sacrament, all of these things, you know. You know, Baptist school, sometimes you can't tell a Baptist church from a of a business office or something like that.

Right. So there's a yearning for the beauty that goes together with goodness and truth. And you and I first met over our mutual criticism of the movie Shrek, because a lot of Christians understand the importance of goodness and truth, but they don't understand the importance of beauty. They might even think beauty's bad because it's anti-egalitarian, right? It makes distinctions between people. Well, I was going to say, goodness and truth are also anti-egalitarian.

But the thing, the reason. a lot of people. And again, this gets into this kind of puritanical, um, gnostic anti-world, right? Anti-re-God created the reality of the world and beauty and all these things. But they really have this Gnostic view. It's like spirit versus, um, the, the, the, the flesh or spirit versus the world. They don't, they don't have a fully incarnational view of the world. And so they're always dividing. And so beauty. is, oh, that's worldly.

And you think, whoa, no, that's not, it could become worldly. Any good thing could become an idol. But the real religion of America's is twofold. One is utilitarianism. We're talking about that another day. The other is what we call dualism. The idea that body is bad, soul is good. And there are a lot of Americans that think that body is necessarily bad.

No, body and soul are good. Body and soul are fallen. Right? We are incarnational beings. And a lot of times people forget that. Our friend Nancy Pearson has really. written about this in several books, but this is like a fundamental problem in what we can call the evangelical church. It's a fundamental misunderstanding. And again, it's one of the reasons I love

you and your stuff is that you are, you're trying to build these bridges and say, whoa, whoa, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Don't throw the classics out when Jesus arrives. No, no, no, no, no, no. They point to him. It's why we love C.S. Lewis. But, yeah, God has a sense of humor area, and I can prove it, okay? Because when the sort of Christian homeschooling movement started, and that kind of moved into classical Christian schools, I speak for them. Both my kids work for classical schools. Now, in the beginning, you probably remember, a lot of those homeschoolers were Bible-only people. That's it. Yeah. Maybe even King James only Bible people. Now, today, it is what we call classical Christian because they are teaching

the full pagan classics. Homer, Virgil, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, all of the Herodotus, Cucydides, Sophocles, European, all of these wonderful Greek names. And here's the ironic thing. At the very moment that the so-called Ivy Leagues, Harvard, Yale, are throwing out the classics, what's happening, the least likely people imaginable are going to save the pagan classics. There was a great book came out out 10, 15 years ago, how the Irish saved civilization by Thomas Cahle. You probably know that. he argued that a lot of the pagan classics were saved by these Irish monks in the middle of nowhere. What is going on here? It's really kind of ironic. And here's another irony. The first homeschoolers

in America, 50s, were not classical Christians. They were hippies. What do hippies have to do with classical Christians? With conservative Christians. We don't want our kids raised by the man. We want something that is authentic. And if you really read the classics properly, you're going to see the authenticity. You're going to see the beauty. You're going to see the humanity and the challenge of it. Now, all of this comes back to Plato to Christ because, look, two reasons I wrote the book. One was the follow-up from Achilles. And by the way, from Aristotle to Christ should be coming out in about two years from Interversity. So I just decided to contract with them. I'm inviting you back now. Now. Now. So from Achilles to Christ to Christ. And then Plato to Christ.

The next will be Aristotle to Christ. And then Tinkers to Evers to Chance will be the fourth. of that's right yes okay so so from plato to christ there are a lot of people who know that somehow the gospel of john in the new testament is somehow greek platonic elements there uh should we start there or should we get more eventually interestingly is it it isn't john but the place that i think is the most Greek oddly enough is in hebrews now why is that because the book of hebrews Oddly enough, it says that the temple, the sort of temple in Jerusalem, is only a shadow of the true temple that is in heaven. Look how it comes tomorrow, that's when. I mean, that sounds like Plato's came.

I'm not saying that the writer of Hebrews, whether it was Paul, whoever, is necessarily reflecting. See, I am any, you know, old-fashioned, you know, traditional English. professor, we love to trace influences, right, from one to the other to the other. But it's important that when I make these connections in a book like from Plato to Christ, I'm not always arguing that there is a direct influence from, say, Plato to this. What I'm saying is, is that Plato got it right, at least from a Christian point of view. He got something right with his general revelation, from his study of creation, from his study of conscience, reason, imagination, what CS Lewis called the good dreams of the pagans, right, that they study these

things and they arrived at something that was true. Now it's partially true. It's not fully true. You know, the Bible has that famous phrase in the love chapter. We see now dimly in a mirror, then we will see face to face. Well, sometimes the pagan saw very dimly in a dirty mirror, but they saw something. Although, couldn't you argue that, um, that, How do I put this makes me think of my dear departed friend Thomas Howard. Oh, he was who I've interviewed at Socrates in the city. But in his book, Chance of the Dance, he says effectively that everything points to everything, everything means everything.

In other words, any piece of the truth points to all truth. So if a pagan comes up with the truth that one, plus one equals two. One plus one equals two. On one level, it's a partial truth. On the other hand, it is truth, which means it pertakes of all truth. Like, it's inescapable. So anytime a quote unquote pagan, a pre-Christian, comes up with anything, it's equally valid to, you know.

All truth is God's truth. To Isaac Newton coming up with the theory of gravity, you know, pointing to God or the, it all, truth is truth. And I guess what fascinates me is that you have these people in the fourth century BC in Athens

reasoning their way, this is not to deify reason, but reasoning their way toward the God of the Bible, not maybe getting there, but reasoning their way in that direction. Is that part of what you talk about? It is. And there's a big

misunderstanding, especially in our country, in Calvinism, right, there's the tulip, right? And T stands for total depravity. And when I was growing up, everybody went to misunderstand the acronym. The acronym. Not everybody's going to be familiar with this. We don't always have, you know, necessarily whatever, cognac drinking, bearded, pipe smoking, reformed people watching this.

So you're just referring to the acronym in the reformed tradition, tulip. Right. Which is appropriate because most of them are Dutch. Yeah, that's true, actually. Yeah, that's true. Okay. So, so their concept summed up in the acronym, go ahead. Right. So total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, perseverance of the saints. We won't go into that. But the first one, total depravity is often misunderstood. I think especially in America, there's this idea that total depravity means utter depravity, that we are so utterly depraved that my black is God's white, my white is God's black. and that is simply not biblical, right?

I mean, we were created in God's image. We still retain the Imago Day, Latin for the image of God. They can kick that away. Yeah, sometimes it makes them uncomfortable. It makes them uncomfortable. This is, again, that's why I love your stuff, because you're, we have to look at things. We have to hold two things at once. Right.

That's the nature of reality. And I think the higher Greeks and Romans knew this, even though they didn't have the Bible. What is what does it mean to be man? We are made in God's image and therefore we have inherent value, worth, and dignity, but we are fallen, right? Yeah. And we have to not fall into one of two camps. If we fall into the pure Darwinism, then all there is is a survival of the fittest and, you know, anything goes. But if we go to the other extreme and we forget about the fallen nature, we become Rousseau and we try to build utopia every time it becomes a dystopia, right? But we need the balance between the two.

So what total depravity is supposed to mean is that every part of our being has been subjected to the fall. So my body is full and my soul is full and reason. There's no part of me that's absolutely pure. So, you know, that's why we need a touchstone of truth. But the, but not utterly. But the other side of it is that every cell in our bodies while partaking of the fall is also reflecting the image of God.

Yeah. So it's inescapable. It's both. And so, yeah, there are some people that, they're uncomfortable with beauty because they say that's worldly. Yeah, they want to have this binary view, dualism. Okay, so from Plato to Christ, to get back to your book, where does Plato, how does Plato, this,

you know, this classical Greek, how does he begin pointing toward what we now know to be Christian faith and Christian theology? How does he do that? Where does he start? And, you know, nobody can say 100%, but I make my argument, what's the relationship between Socrates and Plato, right? Socrates never wrote anything down. but in most of Plato's dialogues, Socrates is the speaker. There's a few later dialogues where we don't see Socrates, but most of the great ones, Socrates is speaking, but it is Plato's ideas. What's the difference between the two? My argument would be that Socrates is the man that comes in and wipes the board clean

so that Plato can then come in and write the truth on it. Let me explain. Most of Socrates, what he's doing is trying to arrive at definition. So we're having a dialogue and I ask you what is truth and you suggest a definition for it. And I use that famous Socratic dialogue question and answer to show you that you're wrong and you've actually contradicted yourself. And it's a lot of fun. It also gets rich people really angry. That's why they killed Socrates because he made them all look like idiots.

He was deconstructing in the sense that he wanted to break down the phony truth, tea with the truth with the little tea. He wanted to wipe it clean, but not as an end in itself, but as a preparation for now seeking the real truth. It's really the opposite of deconstruction. One of them is a neolithic project. And the other one is the opposite. I don't know what the word would be for the opposite of a neolithic project. But the point is he had, Socrates and of course Plato, had this core belief. And you wonder where they get this from, except that God put it there.

that there is such a thing as truth, that it is knowable, that it is worth arguing toward, reasoning toward, that that process is likely fruitful and worth pursuing. So it's interesting that they had that view, so that even though, even Socrates, who's trying to tear down false arguments, there's no question that it's only, as you've already said, to prepare the way for finding truth. It's not an end in itself. It's a preparation. So once we know what is false or what is not universal,

then we can. And my argument would be that Socrates is mostly a negative kind of philosophy, but it prepares the way for Plato to then answer the questions. Because if you read the early Socratic, if you read the early platonic dialogues, which to me seem more purely Socrates, they almost always end with an impasse. The Greek word is aporea or aporea, a waylessness.

Like you get to an end and we don't know and we just end. And it gets you very frustrated. And in fact, if all we had were those early dialogues, I don't think we would consider Plato to be the great philosopher. But then we move into the middle dialogue. The great middle dialogues are things like the Republic, the Gorgias, the Fedris, the Phaedos, all of the other, the Temeas, the symposium.

In the middle dialogues, we move past the impasse into truth. Now we want to get to that which is good, true, and beautiful. What is universal, absolute truth. And many people today are very uncomfortable with anything that's absolute truth. So to reiterate your characterization of Socrates as principally, negative. In other words, tearing down, would you say that when he says that, did they say it of him or did he say it of himself? But, you know, he's the wisest man because he knows that he knows nothing. That's the preparation. Right.

Is to know that you know nothing. And if you know that, now you can maybe move toward knowing something. If you want to start your reading of Plato, the best place to start is with the apology. And this is 399 BC. And Socrates was about 70. years old is put on trial. They don't like his teaching. They accuse him of impiety, right? They accuse him of corrupting the youth. They basically accuse him of everything they're guilty of. We won't go into the people that do that today, right? But they actually accuse him of what they are guilty of. And they bring him before the trial and say, defend yourself. And Socrates says, let me explain to you why it is. Every day I go to the Aghaara, the marketplace. I go there, set up my

table and I question people because many years earlier when he was younger, someone asked the Oral Hall of Delphi, who is the wisest of men? Okay. Now I'm, thank you. You remember that? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. This is why you're here. This is this is Socrates in the city. This is why we're here, right? So Socrates said, no, no, I'm not, I'm not the wisest man in the world. And I'm going to prove that I'm not the wisest man in the world by finding someone who is wiser. And so I don't know why, Eric, but the first people he goes to that he thinks are wise are the politicians, the statesmen, surely they know. They are running our great democracy.

Surely they know. And so he would go and ask them simple questions like, well, you're running a country. What does justice mean? What does it mean? What does democracy mean? And he discovered that none of them had any idea. They thought they knew, but they didn't know anything. And you said in a moment ago, Socrates realized that he was wiser in the sense that at least he knew.

That he knew, no, right? Got it. Got it. Got it. He knew that he didn't know. And so he did, but see, the trouble is that every time you do that, all the young people gather around and laugh at the big puffed up politician, and that makes you enemies. Then he said, all right, I'm going to go find, and I'm going to go talk to the poets because they say these wonderful, beautiful things. They must have wisdom. And he discovered that the poets actually don't know anything. And he says that anybody in the crowd could have been. interpreted the poem better than the poet. And so poets basically act by inspiration, a sort of divine madness, but they don't know what they're doing. Then last, he goes to the craftsman, the people that have a technique. They go to the craftsman. And he finds out there that they're very good at woodworking or whatever. But because they're good at that, they think they're good at everything else. And probably half of your people listening are doctors, but I like to make fun of doctors, because most doctors are brilliant and they therefore think they know everything else. And usually

they actually don't know anything else. And it was so funny that he broke the moment. This is the human condition. Let's be, let's be honest. It's like Freud, you know, writing Moses and monotheism, proving himself to be an idiot because once you leave your field, it's embarrassing. So that's a classic case of you where you should stay in your lane. But okay, so what you're saying, this is, I'm, forgive me for being openly fascinated. But that's why I love you, Lou, because you really do help us to understand. how it all happened. And so here you have, as you're talking about Socrates, simply, and it's just, look, you have to be a genius to do it. He was a genius.

But to question people in just the right way to reveal what they know and what they don't know. And it's horrifying for those people. But of course, and I don't mean to leap from Plato to Christ so quickly, but it reminds me of Jesus talking to the Pharisees,

and the Sadducees, it must have been horrifying for them to have this genius questioning them with precisely the questions that would reveal their ignorance and foolishness and in some ways their evil intentions. Right. And it's interesting that you'll bring that up because the difference is Jesus is giving us that paradox, let's say, to open up the truth. But when the Pharisees do it, tell me, Jesus, we know you are a good man who speaks the truth. Yeah.

Shall we pay taxes to Caesar? Yeah. They're not seeking truth. They're seeking to trip him up and make him sort of damned himself whatever he does. There's a big difference between that. Whenever I speak for evangelicals, especially 10 years ago, they always ask me, is postmodernism good for the church? And they say, well, it's good and it's bad. Postmodernism is good in just one sense that it helps to break us out of that modernist box,

where everything is explained by Marx or Freud or Nietzsche or Darwin or somebody like that. So that's good. But it's also dangerous because they break us out of the box, but then they leave everything open and there's no truth, there's no direction. In fact, they are like the people that Socrates attack because they said, every time you get to a truth, it shoots you somewhere else back and you never get to the truth. Folks, welcome back talking to Colin Plum with noble gold. And Colin, you know, you're sharing some stuff.

I've shared on the program before about when you talk about something like silver, I tend not to think about this kind of thing because I think about, you know, silver coins. You know, Suzanne has a package in the mail of these beautiful silver coins that no gold sent us. And I look at it and I think of it that way. But obviously, maybe not so obvious, silver is used in all kinds of applications. And so you're saying that because of that, that. It's going to increase in value. It's a good investment. And in your book, silver is the new oil. You talk about some of that. You were just mentioning some of those. Keep going on that.

Yeah, so industrial demand 10 years ago to today, they have double the amount of industrial uses for silver than from 10 years ago. So there's just so many industries that are gobbling up silver that need it, including the government, including defense. The government, actually last year bought $400 million in silver and about $100 million in gold. It was a four to one ratio. So they bought more silver than gold because they used silver, drones, warheads, all of these things. They actually, I tried to find it in my book, but I couldn't find anybody that would tell me how much silver they used because they don't want the public to know, right?

They kept it under wraps. But that's just one of the areas and the government continue. And every year they're buying silver, people don't realize that that silver, has doubled over the last five years, yet it's still half the price of where it was in 1983 when the Hunt brothers tried to corner the market. So even though it's doubled in the last five years, it's still got a lot of room to run. So I really like where silver is sitting today. I like the price of it, but it's, it has to do with the underlying value and why people continue to use it. If you just look at solar panel usage alone, that's,

17% of the usage, it continues to grow as people add this to their homes. That's not going anywhere. So they're used between 10 and 25 grams of silver and every solar panel. And then a little known fact that's just kind of a silly thing, but it kind of adds to the values that most refrigerators today have one to two ounces of silver. And it's unlikely that someone's going to go to a place where the refrigerators, the old ones are, and pull that silver out, right? because it's worth 60 bucks.

If it was gold, they would do it. They'd rip that refrigerator open. So what I'm saying is that they only recycle between four and five percent of the industrial uses. So as much as they're trying to find it in Mexico and in the U.S., they're not recycling a huge amount of it either, which means that they have to continue to find more and mining gets more expensive. And obviously, everybody knows what labor and inflation is doing to everything. So the price, the underlying price has to go up because it just costs a lot of money to pull it out of the ground. Well, your book is silver is the new oil. Yes.

Much more about it. But, you know, folks are basic recommendation here. You understand that, you know, the economy is, it's always volatile. But the next year or two, it's probably going to be tough in any circumstances, but especially now, gold and silver are the safest bet. It's even safe. It's better than safe. So if you're interested in doing that, getting some gold, getting some silver in various ways, you can go to Eric Mataxas, gold.

com. Eric Mataxas, gold. If you have questions, you want to talk somebody, you can call 877-646-3-4-4-7-877. 646-5347. And again, the website, Noble Gold, you can go to Eric Metaxusgold.com. Ericmetaxisgold.com. It's an exciting opportunity. It's good, Colin, to be able to talk to somebody that I trust on these important issues. Thanks for partnering with us. And congratulations on the book, Silver is the New Oil. Thanks for being with us. Thank you.