The Eric Metaxas Show - J.D. Vance

Episode Date: March 25, 2022

J.D. Vance, author of "Hillbilly Elegy" and candidate for Senator of Ohio, returns with an update on his campaign and to weigh in on the Lia Thomas and NCAA controversy and the larger implications for the country.

Folks, welcome to the Eric Metaxus show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m. Investments.com. That's legacy p.m. Investments.com. A taxes show with your host, Eric Mettaxas. Uh-oh. Albin. You know what it is? Oh, I know. It's hour two on Thursday of the Eric Mattaxas show. Do you know what that means? Oh, I know. It's time for another episode.

So, Zode. of Ask Mataxis. Okay, Ask Mataxis is when you, Albin, read questions that people have sent in these wonderful people. I can almost see them, and yet I can't. I can't. I tell you, I can't see them. But some of you submit questions, and we pick the best ones, the ones we have time for. So, Albin, I'm ready. I'm ready.

Sometimes we pick the worst ones, but these are the best. Do you want to write more children's books in the future? Actually, this is funny. I prefer to write more children's books in the past because then they would already be written and there's no work. So I don't really want to write more children's books in the future. I want to write more children's books in the past. You can only write them in the present if you think about it, right?

You know what? That's true. But I guess the future eventually becomes the present if you wait long enough. So that's my way of dithering because the real answer is, yes, I do want to write more children's books. In fact, this is kind of weird. I have written children's books in the past that have not been published. So I will be publishing some children's books in the future. I did a whole series for kids, kind of like my Squanto book called The Great Cloud series. I have yet to publish that.

I wrote the story of St. Patrick. I wrote the story of Eric Little, Cherites of Fire. I wrote the story of Jackie Robinson. I wrote the story. I'm trying to think, who else did I? I'm pretty sure. I just did a whole bunch. Some of the ones that I did in the seven women and seven men books I did as kids' books.

But anyway, the point is, yes, I do. And there are many other children's books that I want to write. So the short answer to do you want to write more children's books in the future is yes. Okay. I got a question, when are you sleep? Yeah, exactly. Okay, question two, the real one. What do you think the implications for China, Taiwan are after the Ukraine-Russia war?

I think it's pretty obvious. I think that the current administration is just unprecedentedly awful. You have to understand that whoever is president, it affects the whole world. And this president and vice president and administration, they are unprecedentedly awful. as somebody who's approaching his sixth decade in life, I can just tell you that when America projects this level of incompetence, weakness, whatever it is, people suffer. And it invites tyrants like Vladimir Putin to do what they're doing right now.

So the people of Ukraine are suffering as a result of American policy, which is an amazing thing, a horrible thing to think about, that your vote, if you didn't vote or you did vote, it affects lives around the world. And yes, obviously, China is just licking its chops to snap up Taiwan, just as Russia wants to snap up Ukraine. What do you think? So the answer would be that's that. Okay, here is another question. Thoughts on the end of the NYC mask vaccine mandates? We've been living through an epic of madness, absolute madness. When I'm I see little children in the playground in school wearing masks, my head is tempted to explode

off of my shoulders. It is sickening to me. Even talking about it is so upsetting to me. I just don't talk about it because I know that these kids are going to be dealing with us for the rest of their lives. They're going to write memoirs about this. Just wait. In about 10 or 15 years, the memoirs are going to come out of what it was like to live under this cultural Marxist madness. that we're going through right now. So the idea that we had vaccine mandates, the idea, I mean, we don't really get into this in depth on the program, but I do enough reading that I am simply astonished that Americans allowed this to happen.

You know, people talk about their head exploding. Why don't people say my head imploded? Okay, well, that's not a real question. Because nothing, implosion is like a weird concept that you can't picture. So anyway, by the way, that was your question. in one of the official questions. Here's number four. Official, official.

Why don't you wear suits? What do you mean? Why don't I wear suits? Huh. Who says I don't wear suits? Of course I wear suits. I just don't wear suits often because I don't have many occasions that call for it. Okay.

In taping the pilot for the late night talk show, I wore a suit. You did. So I'm not averse to suits. In fact, I love suits, but they, I think normally I go for the more dressed up casual look when I'm just kind of living my life. So I wear more casual. pants, even jeans, and a blazer of some kind. But I love suits and I own suits and I plan to wear them if given the opportunity. Thoughts on the dangers of alcohol versus weed? Weed. I love the fact that

now it's called weed. Oh, you mean marijuana? Well, let me tell you. Here's the story. Alcohol is very dangerous in a way that's different from marijuana or weed or wacky weed or hemp or Mary Jane, whatever you want to call it. Both of them are very, very dangerous. Now, I just have to say that I think weed cannabis is more dangerous in a way for young people because it's very tempting to think that you could do a little bit every day, that you just want to be mellow. And I think what it does is it robs people of any ambition and it kind of puts you in this. Now, this is not everybody, but most people, it can really affect you badly forever. Like it can, you know, kind of mess up your life because it just becomes like a habit. It becomes that thing you do. Alcohol,

I think that, I mean, we know the dangers of alcohol. Alcohol ruins many, many lives, but I'm not averse to alcohol being legal. I am averse to weed being legal. I think it's going to lead to all kinds of social ills. But we don't have time, so we'll just move on. Okay, I'll put this next one in the form of a question. How to make reading the Bible daily a priority? How to do that?

Well, you simply have to do that. I don't know. I do the read the Bible through a year. there's a number of plans, but it doesn't matter. Grab one and do it. It's important. Right, there you go. Happy spring, this person writes.

What is your favorite season? Actually, I'm against seasons totally. Okay. I just don't like them. Well, Congress did that thing about the daylight savings time. Why don't we just get rid of all the seasons? Get rid of them. Enough.

Enough with the seasons. No, I love seasons, and I can't imagine living in another part of the world where we don't have robust seasons. as it were, hot summers and cold winters. I love it. So what's my favorite season? Well, I think it would have to be summer, but I really, every season brings its own blessings. So I really, I really love every single one of the seasons. Yeah. Okay, favorite year of your life? 1972, next question. Okay. Do you, okay, do you think the Supreme Court is effective in what it's set out to do? Okay, I just want to say that's officially the strangest question in this list.

Do I think the Supreme Court is effective in what it's set out to do? I think I'm guessing that whoever asked this question means is the Supreme Court doing what the founders set it up to do? And I would say largely it is. I mean, look, the Supreme Court is a bulwark against madness. If you have an executive branch and a legislative branch that starts going crazy, you need a third branch of government to say, eh, you can't do that. That goes against the Constitution. In other words, if you have a president and a Senate and a Congress that votes crazy things into being,

it is the role of the Supreme Court to say, no, that is fundamentally unconstitutional. in other words, the fundamental law of the land is the Constitution. And if you pass a law that makes a group of people second-class citizens, if you pass a law that says, I want to be dictator for life, if you pass a law that violates the Constitution, it's the role of the Supreme Court to say, no, you can't do that. And I think by and large, they have been effective. But I say by and large, because it's only by and large.

We just have seconds left, and so I will simply say largely, yes. Okay, that's great. We're at a time. We'll catch you next week. Folks, did you know that 60% of U.S. pork production comes from one company owned by the Chinese, and their hogs are given something called ractapamine, which is banned in 160 countries, including China, yet you find it in your grocery aisle every day. There's a better way. I'd like to tell you about Moink. That's moo plus oink. Moink delivers grass-fed and grass-finished beef and lamb, pastured pork and chicken,

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M-O-I-N-K box.com slash Eric. That's moinkbox.com slash Eric. Tell me, Eric, why is Relief Factor so successful at lowering or eliminating pain? I'm often asked that question. The owners of Relief Factor tell me they believe our bodies were designed to heal. That's right, designed to heal. and I agree with them. So the doctors who formulated relief factor for them selected the four best ingredients, yes, 100% drug-free ingredients, each helps your body deal with inflammation. Each of the four

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His name is J.D. Vance. He is running for the Senate in Ohio. J.D., welcome. Thanks, Eric. Good to be with you. At what point in your life are you going to be known as the guy who's in the Senate versus the guy who wrote Hillbilly Elogy? I just think it's going to be interesting to see how that goes.

I think I'm really excited about your run. And there was just a straw poll that put you way ahead. Can you share that with us? Yeah, so we've had a couple of debates in the past three or four days, and, you know, we've done very well. I think the audience responded very well. And one in particular, we had a straw poll of the attendees who came in pretty undecided. And I think at the end of the debate, we were sort of won 45 percent and the other four or five candidates combined to get the rest. So, you know, in a good place.

The campaign's going well. We need people to actually vote May 3rd in Ohio. If your listeners are in Ohio, please remind them to feed out their vote. If I can get to Ohio, can I vote? Well, actually, thanks to the way our elections work, you can vote three or four times. Why not? And if you have any deceased relatives, maybe bring them. Listen, rules.

Rules are just part of the white patriarchal construct that needs to be dismantled. Let's just have a free-for-all. Come on. Okay, so you're running for the Senate in Ohio. And when you were here in New York, you were on this program, and we got to know each other a little bit that day. And I just want to say to my audience, you know, how impressed and really thrilled I was to hear you because you have this rare thing called common sense. I mean, to find somebody running for political office who has basic common sense, it's almost shocking in this day and age. And there are many things that you shared.

Talk a little bit. I want to talk to you a little bit about the transgender madness. I mean, I think as a country, we're very forgiving and understanding. And if people are dealing with issues, we want to, you know, we want to. want to love them and respect them, but the idea that you've got the six-foot-four dude crushing it in women's swimming, I think most Americans know it's preposterous. It's almost funny, except why aren't people in leadership saying, excuse me, we have a problem. This is not acceptable. I mean, what do you think, what do we do about this? It just seemed, I just can't imagine,

I couldn't have imagined until now that we would ever be in a position where anybody would have have to weigh in on something like this? Yeah, I think the simple thing we have to do is actually change Title IX so that biological males can't compete in girls' sports. It really destroys the entire enterprise of girls' sports. It's funny, like, I'm pretty far out on this, as you are, Eric. I mean, I think this is fundamentally an assault on male and female as God and nature have have us, and that's really what this transgender moment is about.

But it's funny, I was talking to a friend of mine who's much more liberal, on the gender issues than I am. And she was like, you know, you are more conservative. I'm a little bit more liberal. But even I can accept that biological males shouldn't be participating in female sports, right? They've, they're just, their bodies are different. The whole idea why we separate male and female into different sporting categories is to recognize that. And again, it's just basic common sense of this shouldn't happen.

It's unfair to the girls, by the way. I think it's insulting to them. Many of these athletes have gone, you know, a young lifetime, competing, training, preparing for these moments, to have it taken away from them by progressive social policies, pretty sickening. Well, you're one of the few voices that is willing to talk about the idea of these progressive social policies. I mean, it seems to me that anybody with half a brain in America, which is, you know,

more than half the country sees, that there's something off, that there's something, it's not in everybody's best interest. there's some ideology that it's basically taking over and it's ruining lives. I mean, we could go down the line. You know, it's like talking about, well, we don't want to have borders. And you think, well, okay, that's a really sweet idea, you know, in a children, in a Dr. Seuss book or something. But in reality, fentanyl is coming into the country, lives are being destroyed.

You've seen that up close. So I wanted to know if you would talk about that for a moment. Yeah, absolutely. This is one of the reasons I care so much about the U.S. southern border. Of course, the left accuses us of caring about our border because we're allegedly racist or xenophobic. And I look at this through the eyes of Ohio grandparents, right, who've had really two double whammies from the Biden administration. The first is that many of them have lost children to fit in all overdoses. It's the leading cause of death among 18 to 45-year-olds in our country and certainly in my home state. But then you think all these grandparents, taking care of grandkids,

They weren't expected to take care of on a fixed income, doing in some ways the most selfless and loving thing imaginable in their golden years of life. And now we have a horrible inflation crisis with their fixed income, making it harder for them to put food on the table for their grandkids. And you just realize that so much of what the Democrats accuse us of, right, were either idiots or xenophobes were racist, like whatever buzzword they're going to use, it's not because they actually care about minorities. it's not because they care about whatever group they allegedly care about. It's really weaponized compassion. They're trying to take our own compassion and turn it against us so that we ignore the problems that are happening in our own community. I just refuse to play that game.

We need politicians who are willing to say, look, it's ridiculous that we have poison flowing into our communities, killing our people, orphaning our children. It has to stop, not because we hate anybody, but because we love our own people and want to put their interests first. Well, it really is just, it's difficult. for most people, certainly for me to comprehend that the leadership class in this country could be so out of touch that they lack the most basic compassion to want to solve these problems. I do not think the Democratic Party of the past was that out of touch. I might have disagreed with the party,

generally speaking, on many issues, but it struck me that most of them were coming from places of compassion, looking for solutions. It seems, and I don't know if you can, respond to this or want to, but it really seems to me like certainly Biden and his vice president and his administration, but others in leadership of the Democratic Party have really been taken over by ideology, and they've been, they seem blinded, genuinely blinded to real people, the people they're supposed to represent. It doesn't seem to occur to them that they're people suffering, that they need to do something about that? It's funny.

I was actually watching old clips of President Trump at rallies or at debates. And I was watching for something in particular, which is, you know, obviously, you know, he loves the political combat. But the object of President Trump's combat is the media or other politicians or sort of people who are in the public square. He doesn't talk about the citizens of his own country with scorn, right? Whether they voted for him or not, there's not this sense that he hates people who live in his own country. You listen to the Democrats talk, and I agree with you, this is very different, right?

I grew up, a lot of my family members were sort of classic Blue Dog Kennedy-style Democrats. The way they talk about their fellow citizens is really demeaning. Remember when Joe Biden was going on about the vaccine mandates and it was the pandemic of the unvaccinated. And, you know, you're going to have a winter of suffering and death because you guys are all stupid and you've made terrible decisions. Like, I just have never lived, 37 years old, I've never lived in a moment where the political leadership of this country seems to hold the rest of the country in such contempt. And it's very dangerous, right? Because our whole constitutional republic, the whole idea is that it's held together by leaders that see their citizens, not as subjects, right? Not as people to look down on,

but as fellow, you know, sort of common interest tidying them together in this shared project, all of us call America. Like, hard to do that when you hate your own citizens. Well, part of this goes back to, you know, roughly since the 60s, we've not been teaching civics. We've not been teaching basic patriotism. Why the American system is beautiful, glorious, fragile, worth defending, worth spreading to the rest of the globe.

These ideas have not come around before in history. Only in one moment, one glorious moment. Were they able to be put into our Constitution, into our founding documents, and to create the freest, most prosperous society since the beginning of humanity? I mean, it's an amazing thing. But these ideas have not been taught to recent generations. And I really do think that that's kind of the answer. In other words, the idea that we would either rule ourselves

or some elite class would rule over us, that used to be normative, that people kind of understood that we get this or we get that. That's kind of gone out of the picture, it seems to me, and it's because of education. Yeah, that's right. And, of course, you know, education indoctrnates children into something, right? You're always teaching children something. You know, you could be teaching them good civic virtues. You could be teaching them to respect one another.

You could be teaching them that there are differences between boys and girls and those differences are natural. Or you could be teaching them that you're either a victim or. oppressor based on the color of your skin, that there's no difference between the biological sexes and that America's fundamentally an evil country that its leaders have no obligation to. And unfortunately, I think, you know, you're very good about this, Eric, but this really all starts with education. The ideas that you and I are fighting against in 2022, they didn't come out of nowhere two years ago, right?

They've been slowly working themselves through our universities and then our schools, and now, through our corporations, our governments, our entire institutional world. And that really does go back to education. It started somewhere, and it started, frankly, in the universities. We've just got a few minutes left. I'm talking to senatorial candidates from the great state of Ohio, J.D. Vance. Folks, don't go away. In case you haven't been paying attention, the Biden administration has caused a financial crisis, and they have no clue how to fix it. Oil prices have skyrocketed. And when oil prices go up, the cost of transportation and shipping, spikes, leading the prices of goods to rise. And when we're already seeing record inflation,

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Call Legacy at 866-528-1903 or visit them online at LegacyPMinvestments.com. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to J.D. Vance. Some of you know him as the author of an extraordinary book, Hillbilly Elegie. But now he is running for the Senate in the state of Ohio. And in my opinion, which is a considered opinion, he is one of the bright lights in the political future of this country. I think of Governor DeSantis being another one of them, people who understand things in a way that has become, alas, tremendously rare, and who are willing to be bold and to talk about their understanding of things.

So, J.D., you were just talking about education. Something has happened over the decades, and you get this because you've been to Yale Law School. And you know that the ideas of the Marxist left, because that's what it is now, it's the Marxist left, these are fundamentally atheistic, fundamentally anti-American ideas. They have, in fact, taken over the academy, and they are really polluting the water system, so to speak. They are destroying every part of our society. There was a story about what was going on at Yale Law School recently. What do you think folks like you can do about this if you're elected to the Senate?

I think we have to start from the premise that like we talked about earlier, the education system really drives so much, right? I mean, so many, our corporate leaders, our military leaders, our generals, our politicians, pretty much every person of leadership in this country goes through some of these institutions and is heavily influenced by the ideas that come out of them. And I think we have to recognize, you know, in my view, that these institutions are largely unsalvageable. and we have to start dismantling the preferential treatment that these places have gotten so that things can come up and replace them. So just to give you one example. You know, I come from a working class family. Every single member of my family pays a higher tax rate than the Harvard University Endowment, which is a $45 billion hedge fund that pays no taxes and uses its incredible wealth to fund left-wing causes. Hold on.

Wait a minute. You said that the Harvard Endowment. $45 billion hedge fund pays no taxes. Zero taxes, right? That is extraordinary. That is, I mean, everybody needs to know this. Ladies and gentlemen, Yale and Harvard, the money that they have. Okay, so what can somebody in the United States Senate, like you, what can they do about that, potentially?

We're going to start creating a level playing field, right? If I started a private company, of course, it would have to pay taxes, as it should, if my family has to pay taxes, then these other institutions have to start paying taxes, too. I think the thing that is so important about this, the point that I'm trying to make, Eric, is that these left-wing institutions, they haven't just taken over the country naturally. They've been given preferential treatment, and they've used that preferential treatment to accumulate more and more power, and then to use that power to push their own dogma on the rest of the citizenry. That's what's really going on.

You see this in so many different spheres. Google, Amazon, Apple, pay a lower tax rate than the small and medium-sized businesses support the community that I live in. Of course, they engage in massive censorship. You have these massive foundations that are treated differently, even from many of our churches, of so many of our nonprofits, which are harassed by the IRS. Meanwhile, these foundations are let off the hook by the IRS. There's so many ways in which the left has subtly gained control of these power centers

gotten themselves special benefits. And then, you know, conservatives like me and you look around and say, well, we keep on winning elections. Why does the left keep on winning the longer war for our society? It's because they have used their power very smartly, and we've got to push back against it more aggressively and more intelligently than what they've created for themselves. I just get the impression that most of your, I hope, future colleagues in the Senate lack courage. they are unwilling to take these things on. I can think of a tiny handful of senators, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton,

just a tiny handful of senators who are willing to use their power, their accumulated capital, really, to do something for the American people, which is why I get so excited about you, because if we don't do this, it is game over for the United States of America. That's not hyperbole.

I'm not being Cassandra. This is absolutely true. Anybody with eyes to see understands that we're at the edge of the volcano. I mean, we almost have gone over. Yeah, look, you're absolutely right. Holly's great. Cotton's great. I think there are a few critical mass of our leaders that get what's going on.

And the hopeful note that all sound is that our voters are very awake to what's going on in the country. This is one of the great things about running through office is, you know, the media thinks that conservative voters that were fundamentally stupid, that we don't know what's going on in the country. And our voters are so far ahead of where our political leaders are. Eventually, that gap is going to have to close. And when it does, we're going to have a real class of fibers in Washington that are going to take it back to the country. I mean, that's kind of what I see happening. I didn't mention Rand Paul, another great hero. And in the Congress, Jim Jordan.

I mean, people who clearly get it. And I think that it's not just getting it intellectually. In other words, if you really understand how bad things are, You know that not fighting with everything you have is madness, that the only thing to do about this is to fight. Just 30 seconds left. Final thoughts for my audience. Well, I think you're exactly right. I mean, the thing that I would encourage them to look for in political leaders is you have to be willing to take the heat from the media.

If you go to Washington and you're desperate to get a good headline written about you in the Atlantic or the New York Times, you're eventually going to stab your own voters in the back. It's maybe one of the best things I can say about my candidacy. I don't care about what these people say about me because I'm not in it for them. I meant it to save the country. Well, we'd like to get you back as soon as possible to talk more about big tech and other issues. I know your time is short. J.D. Vance, God bless you. And we'll talk to you soon.

Thank you. Hey, folks, if you listen to this program, of course, you've heard me talk at infinitum about my pillow and my friend Mike Lindell. Well, Mike has just announced that you will. receive one of his books, and the book is next level insane. It is called What Are the Odds from Crack Addict to CEO? It's his story. You will receive it absolutely free with any purchase using the promo code Eric. Did you hear that? It would be a great time, by the way, to buy his warm and wonderful My Slippers. For a limited time, he's offering 50% off my slippers. We all wear them in my extended family, my slippers, check it out.

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Hey there, folks. Do you want to talk about crazy success in business? when the Inc. 5,000 announces year after year that your company is one of the fastest growing companies in America. The 37th fastest growing in retail probably means you know how to grow a company. You guys, meaning the Talbot group, Pete and Seth Talbot, you were on that list three times? Yeah, we made it three times in a row.

In a row? Yeah. Okay, so I would say maybe you know something about business. You know what's so exciting about that fact, I remember our first spend with that particular company was just we were excited to get 20, 30 people to come to the website every day to buy our product. And over the eight years that we were involved to jump that to 20,000 a day, actually more than 20,000 a day. But that was a process that, as we've talked about on other editions here on your program, Eric, that involved a lot of science, a lot of testing, adjusting, and retesting. It didn't just happen.

It didn't just happen overnight. You're not a one-hit wonder. No. Well, happily. You actually know the principles of how to succeed in business with actually trying. Well, I, you know, the team that, you know, when you're getting 10 a day and then it goes to. 100 a day and then a thousand a day or whatever your systems processes the marketing the strategy all changed dramatically from that it wasn't it wasn't the same idea same execution same strategy

from one to the next it was an evolving strategy i remember early on we were working on ad copy and uh i would even say for the first couple of years our ad copy missed the mark because we were using primarily radio only and radio is harder to test. We did it strategically, but we were honing in and it took time. So we found some level of success and then we would test and then we would test. But it took us, 18 months probably, to narrow in because I remember you coming in my office and you'd have your stacks of sheets like this and we'd be going through ads. And those completely changed by the last season.

I mean, it was a completely different approach because we realized what the customers cared about was different than what we thought they cared about, and it took us a while to test that, and not only are the lessons different, you start to realize, like, man, I remember we didn't,

I mean, the product was so expensive to make, and it was so hard to bring to market, and we've talked about this before. It was very, very, very challenging. It took a while. In fact, just real quickly, when we first started, we failed. We were failed.

Sailing. Yeah. And he comes to me and he said, Dad, I think we had like $70,000 with the product in the warehouse. And he said, Dad, you got to sell it because in time it'll expire, you know, and we got to sell it. Go burn the price. Fire sale is that you're on one of our radio shows that I produced. We burned the price, cut the price in half. And because we did that and we were still measuring like maniacs, we started getting these testimonials that were coming in.

that were so freaky. They sound, in fact, most of our testimonials, tens of thousands now, we can't even use because they sound so dramatic. They sounded so dramatic. And so legally, people have problems. And so our attorneys were saying, oh, you can't say that. It's true, but you can't say it. People are saying.

But it was that process of test, adjust, retest over and over and over again. That's what we've learned again. the science of marketing. You've got to define the problem, test it carefully, and it doesn't take a ton of money. That's one of the biggest fallacies, isn't it? Well, the other thing, too, it doesn't take a ton of money, but also your systems have to be prepared for it.

And our systems, we really struggle during different seasons to keep up with it because all of a sudden we would try something and all of a sudden, you know, you're getting like 100% increase. You remember when we first started TV, all of us, Seth, We were on the phones ourselves. Our CFO, all of the people. So you can't keep up. I had a headset and worked customer service.

Absolutely. Oh, my gosh. I did. And in fact, my last two years there, I worked customer service quite a bit. In fact, most of my attention was put on customer service.

Because it was, customer service is very expensive to ramp up. And as you might imagine, as you heard, the labor shortage was hits. And customer service tends to be an area where you get a ton of turnover. Right.

And so the trick with good customer service is that everybody wants to talk to a live person. But the truth is is that it's very expensive and it takes forever, which is why people that insist on talking to a live person often have to wait forever. And so trying to figure out how to guess at what the people's issues were and make it easier so they wouldn't feel like they needed to call. So creating the systems that scale to our growth was probably one of the biggest challenges. because near the end, we had figured out the messaging, but our systems couldn't handle it. And so we spent a lot of time and resources, a ton of money and resources on scaling the systems,

so that we could instantly handle customer service issues that just hadn't, we just didn't take it that seriously. We were so focused on sales and marketing for the first few years, because that's like your survival metric. You're just focused on sales and marketing, sales and marketing, conversions and margin, whatever. and customer service tends to kind of be the like laggard. And it became a real liability for us.

And thankfully, we really turned it around about two years ago. You know, what's also interesting is people really don't want to talk to somebody. They want satisfaction. And what he was able to create. Absolutely. What he was able to create in the artificial intelligence software is that they were getting satisfaction faster. See, that to me, that is the silver bullet. Now, there was everything you're talking about.

the fact that you were able to do that, that's worth everything. See, we grew in the last 18 months while we were there. We were exploding, but our number of employees dropped. And customer service. Customer service was so good. It was so efficient. And as he had said before, 60% was handled totally by AI. And satisfaction was up because the thing that's interesting, you ask a consumer,

do you want a text thing? Do you want a website? Do you whatever? Younger audiences will, of course, say texting or website. Older audiences will, of course, say, live. So the trick is delivering service to that person who would opt for in person, but deliver high quality so that they walk away super happy, regardless of what the interface was.

And you can do this for other businesses. Here's the key. We can do this for it doesn't matter the category. It could be legal. It could be medical. It could be carpet laying. It could be any business, any industry, and nonprofit as well.

We're often asked, well, can you do these principles hold true for ministries? For non-pran. Oh, man, yes, maybe even more so. I better tell people where to go. I think they can call you or they can just go to talbot group.com or if you want a live person 866 Talbot. Thanks. Folks, what a day, what a day, what a day, what a day.

Oh, my gosh. Hour one, we talked to Heather McDonough. Donald. She's astonishing. Let's be honest. In hour two, that's this hour. We did Ask Metaxus. That was our first segment where you write in with questions. I answer them. Then we did J.D. Vance, future senator, future United States senator, I certainly hope. And then we spoke to the Talbets. Now, remember, the Talbets want our questions. So you have any business questions? They're business geniuses. They built relief factor, you know, $100 million. I'm probably not supposed to say that, right?

Well, it's true, $100 million business. They want to answer your business questions. So the Talbot group, you just come to our website, metaxistalk.com, send us any business questions that you have and they will answer them in future segments. Metaxistalks talk.com. While you're at metaxistock.com, we need you to help out. with food for the poor. The phone number, if you can give to help,

this is from now to the end of this month. So we've only got a week left and we're way behind. So I hope everyone will participate a little bit. But you can dial the number 844-8663, hope, 844-863 hope, 844-8663, hope. And you can go to mettaxistocot.com, the banner, help Ukraine is at the top. As I said, they have shifted over toward the end of the month from now onward to get emergency relief to the folks in the Ukraine. So we hope that

everybody will participate. Most of you haven't, and I simply want to say they are, they're doing God's work. And I hope you and your families will see that they're a worthy the organization. It's so hard to know where to give. So we try to vet these organizations so that you have a place that you can depend that your money goes a really, really long way. And so that's again, 844-863 Hope, 844-8663 Hope or just go to Metaxistalk.com. Alvin, I've got to mention a couple of the things real quick. Mike Lindell, he's a hero. There's a reason if you're watching this on Rumble that you can see that he's standing behind me in two-dimensional cutout form, not quite as talkative or as boisterous as he is in person.

But Mike is a hero, and if you go to frankspeech.com, you will see a report. It's just astonishing. I don't know what to say. When people say, where's the evidence? Where's the proof? There's tons of it. I think a lot of people just want to say, there's no evidence, there's no proof. The fact of the matter is that we, the people, the people,

people have to get involved. So share this on social media. You can just go to my social media. I've shared it everywhere. You can also support Mike by going to my store.com and my pillow.com and use the code Eric. You can also go to frankspeech.com and use the code Eric. If you go to frankspeech.com, you can see at frankspeech.com and Lindel TV, you can see this program every day. Some of you are watching this program on Lindell TV. But please use the code Eric at Mikelund at when you go to my store.com and my pillow.com. And I want to say when you go to my store.com, they're gorgeous bonhofer posters. They're huge. They're gorgeous. Very high quality. And the books are all hardcover books. Use the code Eric and you get the discount.

Yeah. And Mike is even more of a hero when you use the code Eric. Yes. That's what we meant to say. Which also advice the Nutrametics, which is great. because 25% off all this week only. Only this week. Okay, thank you. You just reminded us. Only this week, folks. Nutrimetics.com when you use the code Eric this week only.

You get 25% off when you use the code. Eric, this week only. We warned you, okay? Final plug for my website, Ericmetaxis.com. We want you to get. There's all kinds of stuff that we sent out once or twice a week. You can't get it. You know we're canceled from YouTube.

Just please go to ericmetaxis.com and sign up. And I think that's it.