The Eric Metaxas Show - Jonathan Jakubowski

Episode Date: July 10, 2020

Is there hope that younger voters can be reached to help save the country? Jonathan Jakubowski has interviews and data collected in his first book, "Bellwether Blues: A Conservative Awakening of the Millennial Soul," and presents the optimistic evidence.

Today, Eric will interview a man with the head of a turkey. No joke. The rest of his body is perfectly normal, but his tiny turkey head is very unnerving. It's teeny weaning. And now, Eric Metaxus. Folks, welcome to the program. I am still talking to Dr. John Lennox. We thought we'd carried over into the second hour here.

And we were just talking about the meaning of meaning, and you were saying that if somebody doesn't believe in transcendent meaning, if they don't believe in the Bible, they don't don't believe a God exists beyond this universe, this is all there is. They say, we have to create our own meaning. Now, the problem with that, it seems to me, is that they are contradicting themselves. In other words, if you say that we evolved via random mutation, via accidental processes into who we are today, then we have no value. There is no such thing as meaning. And if we confront that, be like Albert Camus or Sart. We will see the hopelessness and try to find a way out of it. But a lot of people aren't willing to see the bleakness of what they say they believe. They

pretend that they can have it both ways. And what they do really is borrow, you know, from the meaning that they have. They don't, they don't question where it came from. They just grab it and they talk about this is important. If family's important, something's important. But they're not, They're not dealing with the fact that if this is all there is, then in fact, there can be no meaning. They seem to want to have it both ways, and they aren't forcing themselves to deal with that. Well, the way I would say that is quite simple, actually, that doing science involves believing that there's truth out there to be discovered and that it is accessible, at least in part to the human mind. mind. And it was Einstein, one of the greatest physicists or scientists of all time, who realized there was something amazing in that. And he said the most amazing, the most incomprehensible thing

about the universe is that it's comprehensible. In other words, he saw there's a problem. How is it that a scientist with her mind looking at the universe can understand something and reduce it to mathematics. Now, I often discuss this with colleagues and I say, look, you do science with what you call your brain if you don't believe in the mind. Tell me about the brain. And often they will say, well, the brain in the end is a product of a mindless, unguided process. And I often have said to people, and it's been very interesting to do this, if you knew that your computer that you use every day was the end product of a mindless, unguided process, would you trust it? And I've always forced an answer, gently, of course, but nevertheless, I've forced an answer. And it's always been no.

Now I say you have a problem because you're inconsistent. you're telling me that what you're doing science with, that you can't trust, really. Now, I have a reason for trusting my mind, at least in part, because it is ultimately the product of the vast intelligence of a personal God, as is the universe out there. And that's why the two match together. But you don't have that.

In other words, your argument, your atheism is not simply undermining Christianity. Well, of course it tries to do that. It's undermining science. So here I sit as a scientist who is a Christian, the two sit together. And I'm suggesting to you that the conflict is not at all between Christianity properly understood and science properly understood,

but the conflict, the deep conflict, as Alvin planting, as put it, is between science and atheism. That's where the conflict is. And I think it's very important to point these things out. Many people who take the grim view, as you called it, will say, as Dawkins did to me in one occasion so far as I can remember, it's grim, but that doesn't mean that it's false. And I said, no, that's right, but it doesn't mean that it's true either. And so we need to investigate and if people are interested in and looking for hope, and they ask Feynman's question, what is the meaning of it all? He's got a little book with that title. What is the meaning of it all? It's a hugely important question. And I do believe that humans are made with eternity in their

hearts. And we are questing for a solution to this. And this is why we grab it a lot of this artificial general intelligence? Is this going to bring us hope? When all the time there's a message whose credibility has been growing over the last 20 centuries that really gives us not superficial answers but deep answers

that enable us to have hoped that transcends the basic barrier and that is the death barrier. I want to bring up before we end that if people, sometimes the way way we make our decisions in life, it happened to me. In other words, if we can see something particularly negative and horrifying, that can force us in the other direction. And I think if people don't see the positive side of this, they can look at the negative side, meaning that if you

look at where does the worldview take you? If you say that we can do as we like, might makes right, this is all there is. If the human being is not transcendent and sacred and have infinite value, as the Bible says, what does it lead to? Well, we know that it leads to the Nazi death camps, and today it leads to Uyghur Muslims being taken by the Communist Party and treated as nothing, treated as creatures that can be used for their organs. We can make profit. In other words, follows logically that if you believe there is no God, who dares to say to the communist leadership in China, you mustn't do that. On what basis? I think most of us, because we're created in God's image, we recoil at the horror of using human beings in that way, in the way

that we recoil at slavery or the slave trade or any of this kind of thing. And that we need to allow that revulsion to something to force us to see what it is, what that worldview is, and then to be open to the other worldview. In other words, I think there's some hope in that. Well, I think there is because if we follow that and realize that we revolt against this because we're moral beings, we then need to ask ourselves the question, where do these standards come from. You see, the fact that you and I and many millions of other people will revolt at this kind of stuff shows that we're responding to moral principles that are independent and outside of ourselves. Now, that's an intimation of transcendence. That's an evidence

that we're morally made in the image of God and that we recognize the difference between good and evil. And where we have to begin to look to put a break on all of this is to say, look, if we follow the atheist route, then there is no absolute morality. Everything is relative, but it doesn't stop there, because morality will then be determined by power. And the people in power will be the white-suited scientists who have the programming power to modify human beings, and that is absolutely terrifying if they start doing it with no basic concept of what good and evil are. And so in the name of morality and in the name of civilization, we need to protest, and begin to ask, look, where do these basic cornerstones of our civilization come from?

And that brings me back to Peterson's remark on Genesis 126 human beings made in the image of God. He says, man, we're going to neglect that at our peril, and we are neglecting it at our peril in our contemporary society. I'm sorry we have to end it there, but John Lennox, we will have you back as soon as possible. We've been talking around the subject of this book, 2084, artificial intelligence and the future of humanity. Thank you for that. We'll have you back to talk about COVID and other things as soon as we can. Thank you so much for your time. My pleasure to be with you.

Thank you very much. The preacher told me and he smiled. I'd rather have Jesus been still. Hey there, folks. Welcome to the Erkmataxis show. Want to talk politics? What do you want to talk? This is the show about everything.

We talk about pretty much everything. Today we're talking with an author. We've never had an author on the program before. His name is Jonathan Jacobowski, I think, Jonathan Jacobowski. He's the author of a new book called Bellwether Blues, A Conservative Awakening of the Millennial Soul. Jonathan, welcome to the program. Thanks so much for having me. It's really an honor.

Well, let me tell you something. I like what you have to say in the book. So tell my audience, tell us again the title of the book. First of all, did I get your name? name right. Yeah, Jacobowski. Great job. Jacobowski. Okay. Jonathan Jacobowski. Tell my audience, you know, what the book is about and why you wanted to write it. Sure. In 2018, I received a phone call from New York University. I'm a chairman for a local county party here, the Republican Party in Wood County, and he called me

saying, did you know that you, what's that? Which state? Ohio. Wood County, Ohio. Okay. Yeah, I should specify that. Yeah, Wood County, Ohio. So up Northwest Ohio, and this professor from New York University was doing research on swing counties in swing states. And he said that of 3,142 counties in America, there are 59 that are classified as swing, having voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004, Obama, 2008, 2008, 2012, and then Trump in 16. And Wood County, my county, happened to be one of those counties. So that launched me into this journey of investigating why Wood County is a swing county. And as a millennial, I particularly wanted to know what millennials were doing, what was their status. So part one of the book is all about that. It's about understanding the millennial demographic

what's happening as the left goes further to the left and what's happening and what caused Wood County to swing during the course of those years. And so, but you, what do you do when you're not writing books. I mean, it's a big thing speaking as an author when you decide to write a book. What made you decide that you wanted to go to that extent with this subject? Yeah, so I run a business. It's called SmartSolve. We work in sustainable technology, so that's my paid day job. But as a Christian, throughout the years of life, I've had many sources of influence that have led me in the direction of being engaged politically. And you, Eric, believe it or not, have been a major part of that. You're one of the mentors of mine without

knowing it. In 2000, let's see, it was 2013, I had just returned from D.C. My wife and I moved back to Northwest Ohio, which is where we're originally from. And I was really disillusioned and frustrated because I had voted Republican for most of my life. And then I got to graduate school at Georgetown in 2008, and all of my colleagues were really persuasive and very eloquent in their arguments and their defense of why I should have supported President Obama. And one of the, as being, you know, one of the handful of students that voted in the other direction, I found myself really questioning why I voted for the Republican candidate and decided to disengage entirely.

And then I picked up a book by you, or about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, followed by another book called Amazing Grace, which I'm sure you remember very well. I cannot admit to having any connection to them, but please go ahead, thank you. Of course not. Well, those two books were formative in my thinking, and I spent probably five years from 2010 to 2015 where I really studied the foundation of our country.

I studied really what is true, what is tied to principle. Those books are really helpful in catalyzing me to say, okay, I do believe I need to be engaged and specifically I need to be engaged in the party of Lincoln, the party that led to the abolition of slavery. That was really what motivated my engagement into the political, the local political realm post-2015. So then I became chairman of a county party here, being engaged in campaigns, and that's when the story of the book kind of begins. Unbelievable.

First of all, I had no idea that my work had influenced you in any way, so I'm sitting here surprised and deeply blessed to hear that. I mean, that's every author's dream, isn't it? That, you know, you work on something and you hope that it will reach people and touch them. So that just thrills me. Thank you for saying that. When you talk about, you know, politics, I wrote another book called If You Can Keep It.

And that was kind of my moment where I discovered things that I was shocked. I didn't know. And I thought to myself, we have got to communicate this mostly to the younger people in America because it's so obvious because the times we're going through right now that so many people just don't have that background. And they're making decisions in a sense based on not enough information about who we are as a people and as a as a as a country and so what is your sense i mean when you write a book like this what do you think uh it can accomplish when if people find your book if they can spell your last name

jacobowski that's key right well uh i would say if you can keep it was also very formative it was now post the political journey when i picked up if you can keep it and it's quoted in my book several times it also led me to os guinness with the golden triangle of freedom faith family and freedom and I actually sat down with Osgynas in Virginia, and we had a four-hour meal, and I talked about that meeting in part three of the book. So maybe as I go through Bellwether Blues, I can just, after part one, excuse me, I identify this alienation of the left from the tenets of classical liberalism, the principles of freedom and the formation of the First Amendment,

which leaves this whole group of millennials, especially in the mainland America, not the coast. Millennials are different. It's a very large generation, the largest generation in America. And millennials that grow up in Ohio are very different than the ones that live in New York or Los Angeles or Seattle, for example. So you look at those millennials and the question is, are they feeling disillusioned by that movement? And I think the answer is yes. And data seems to demonstrate that.

So through empirical evidence, I see this move of the left, away from the left. All of these millennials now no longer really desirous of being part of the Democratic Party, finding themselves disillusioned, frustrated, and really they have a case of. the Bellwether Blues. That's where the title comes from. Okay, now explain Bellwether and Bellwether blues for those, for folks who are unfamiliar with that term, people who are not, you know, sheep farmers may have no idea what you're saying. Absolutely. Yeah. So Bellwether is the leading sheep of domesticated flock that had a bell hung around his neck. Wherever that sheep went, that's where the rest of the flock would go. So every four years, we hear the term, this is a

Bellwether state, meaning as this state votes, so goes the rest of the nation. And Ohio is really the tie cream of the crop when it comes to being a Bellwether state. So Bellwether is that term. And then Blues is back to my recognition of the Millennials State of Affairs as they're skeptical, disdlusion, and frustrated. They really don't trust political institutions, and they're not willing to embrace conservative principles yet. That's our job. So they find themselves in kind of this no man's land, very frustrated. And that's the whole part one of the book is investigating the chaos that has ensued as the left has left the left. And then I want to get into in part two, this. Excuse me, as the left has left the left. That is pretty well said.

I hope I remember that and I can steal it, but I'll give it with attribution. If I can remember your last name, how to pronounce it. The left has left to left. When do you say the left, left, left. And what we mean by that, of course, is something happened. I mean, the left of, the the Democratic Party of Kennedy is no longer related to the Democratic Party of today. It's a simple fact. But when did that happen in your estimation? I think it's relatively a recent shift. I think especially over the course of the last decade. And you look at the party platform. from 2016 of the DNC, the Democratic Party, and you can't differentiate that from a Marxist track.

That platform was a shift from previous platforms where, for example, they used to recognize God, and I think they took God entirely out of the platform in 2016. So I think it's been a process of evolution over the course of the last decade. Well, I think you're right, and I think that the most, the clearest contrast with the left of the past

and the left of today has to do with the issue of free speech. I mean, the left were the champions of free speech, the free speech movement in Berkeley in the 60s. I mean, it's an extraordinary thing to move from that to being, you know, the leaders in winding the censor voices, censor dissent from their own opinion. That's very dramatic. And let's face it, it is illiberal. It is not liberal.

That's why we say left and not liberal. It is utterly illiberal. It is fascist. It's un-American. But somehow it's caught on. Yeah. I use the example in Bellwether Blues of the ACLU. So in the 1960s, if there were a baker of a cake who wanted to, was asked by the

KKK to bake a cake for one of their rallies, the ACLU would have defended the baker and his ability to bake that cake or not. Whereas today, if there is a gay couple that comes in and asks them to bake a cake, the ACLU will now target and seek to abolish that cake baker because they don't stand with his ability to think freely. So there's been a major shift in those institutions. It's very, it's very, very dramatic. It thrills me that younger folks like you are getting this and talking about it. I mean, look, we have the facts on our side. We're not trying to ram anything down anyone's throat. I just think that if we can get people to reason on these things as you're

trying to do with your book Bellwether Blues, there are many people who are open-minded enough that they will get it. Folks will be right back. It's the Eric Mataxis show talking to Jonathan Jacobowski. Belwether Blues is the book. The Trump campaign has a special offer just for you. President Trump wants to meet you. This will be the first opportunity he's had to meet with American patriots like you since our country started reopening. His team will cover the flight and hotel and give you VIP access for yourself and a guest. He'll even take a picture with you. have to do is text VIP to 88022 today for your chance to meet President Trump. Again, that's VIP to 88022 for your chance to win and join President Trump in the fight to keep America great for four more

years. That old wheel is going to roll around once more when it does. It will even up the score. Don't be weak. Hey there, folks. We are talking politics. We're talking history. Jonathan Jacobowski is my guest. The title of his book is Bell Weather Blues. Jonathan, what is the subtitle of the book? A conservative awakening of the millennial soul. So you do see some awakening. In other words, you were talking earlier that the left, left, the left, as you brilliantly put it, and became a really radicalized, Marxist, anti-American. And there are many people raised with heartland values that just say, whoa, that's not, that's not the party of FDR, that's not the party of JFK. What, what is this? And they are recoiling from some of those things.

And you're suggesting, I suppose, that many of them are, in fact, willing to consider fundamental principles. Well, I think as millennials grow, they're today around 23 to 38 years of age, born between 1981 and 1996. As we have families, as we enter the job market, as we pay taxes, there's a natural evolution and process of thought that occurs in the millennial mind. Were the Democrat Party to be the Democrat Party of the 1980s? I mean, I think that they would be dominating elections and maybe 2016 might have been theirs. I don't know.

But there's definitely been a shift that's been recognizable because the one value that I see in the millennial generation that is broadly shared is that of freedom. Millennials love freedom. part of our national anthem, our coins, our foundation, the ability to be free from tyranny to pursue things that we desire and yearn for. That's something that I believe millennials highly value, especially millennials in mainland America and the places where the votes count the most in swing states with the electoral college, that's what matters. And I saw that as I investigated my county, Wood County, Ohio, where the swing county we talked about. And I got deep

into the evidence of seven lives or seven stories of millennials who not only left the left, they went away from voting democratically, but they also went all the way across to vote for Donald Trump in 2016. And I wanted to assess what was it that caused them to make that leap all the way over because there's many millennials who kind of find themselves lost in the middle and just disengage. But not for these millennials. They made that leap. I can't help but notice hanging behind you a couple of documents that look familiar. Now they're totally fuzzy, but I'm guessing one of them is. is the Declaration of Independence, the other is the Constitution. Is that right? That is correct. Yes, sir.

Isn't it funny how we've seen them enough that just the hazy outlines and probably the color of the parchment or something like that? But it's obvious you value those, otherwise you wouldn't have them hanging behind you. Those who are listening on radio or listening on podcasts, they don't know quite what I'm looking at, but they can guess now that I've described it. And a lot of us, a lot of folks watch this on YouTube and they can see what I'm talking about. At what point in your story did you discover the importance of those documents and of the American founding? In other words, were you raised in a home that valued these things? How did it go for you?

Yeah, actually, it weaves, the segue is really nice because as I looked at the stories of these seven millennials, what I found is kind of like me. they maybe grew up in homes where politics weren't necessarily discussed. My family voted a Republican, but I didn't really know why. What I did know is we were raised with Scripture, the foundation of the Word of God, and as a strong Christian, I recognized that the way that I need to approach the world and the issues of the world is through the lens of the Bible. So I knew that, and I had that foundation.

But it wasn't until I went to Georgetown and really recognized that I didn't have any knowledge or baseline of the history of our country, the way our government function, the way the political process worked. And when I was being questioned by my colleagues with their persuasive arguments, I knew that the currency of conversation was not going to come from Scripture with them because they didn't believe in the Bible. I knew that if I were going to have effective arguments, it would require me coming to understand and learn these documents, which I have since done. I've begun memorizing the Constitution, for example. It's really a document. I think we need to understand and be fluent in to have persuasion in our conversations.

Well, that's an amazing undertaking, since it doesn't rhyme. so it's not going to help you there. But what I always say over and over and over again is that, you know, the Democratic Party of the past that was centrist. I mean, people like Al Gore and even Bill Clinton and others, they were dramatically centrist compared to Barack Obama and whoever is in charge today. It really was a different party. It was a pro-American party.

that had different views on some things. But that has all shifted. And I guess, you know, people, the way they make their decisions, everybody's different. But a lot of people just kind of drift along. I mean, you know, my in-laws, they were Democrats because of FDR. They still associated the party with FDR. And I think that the problem today is a lot of people, including, I would say, Joe Biden himself, are confused. And they just kind of drift along.

But they don't really know what they're. believe or what they should believe anymore because the party has drifted away from them. Right. If you would come to Wood County on that election night in 2016 to November, and you'd have looked at the perimeter of our county, which is, you know, the blue wall concept of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, where no Republican candidate could ever scale the blue wall because of the blue collar vote. Well, if you would have come to Wood County, you would have seen that he was performing incredibly well on our perimeter, which is also the blue collar vote. and that would have been a great indicator for what was to happen.

And one of the stories in my book is about a young guy named Jeremy Harple, who worked in the unions, comes from a union lifestyle, everything you just said about what they thought the Democrat Party was, had changed on them. And when Hillary Clinton mentioned deplorables, they really felt the pain from that statement and thought she was speaking directly at them. And that's when then candidate Trump,

now President Trump, was speaking deep into that specific voting block, and that led to a massive shift that changed Jeremy. vote. And not just then, but I think they're with President Trump for the next election and time to come. We're going to have to go to a break. We'll be right back, folks. We're talking to the author of Bellwether Blues, Don't Go Away. Blues. Jonathan, you talk about going to Georgetown. Now, I know, you know, Georgetown is full of really smart people. I think it's harder to get into, frankly, than Yale or Harvard. It's the cream of the crop. And what did you want to do with your life when initially you said,

I want to go to Georgetown? Did you know what you wanted to do? Yeah, I wasn't certain. I really wasn't. I had a, when I was in Houston, Texas, I saw the story of an individual who was a former congressman named Tony Hall. And it The story inspired me, and my fiancé, who's now my wife, she was living in D.C. as an event planner. We both had graduated from Bowling Green State University and went to different locations and then started dating. So I was in Houston. We were dating and I told her about this and she said, well, maybe we should consider a pivot. Instead of getting married and then moving to Houston, why don't we look at D.C. So that's what led to pursuing graduate school, which led to Georgetown, without really being certain of where to go or what to do.

So when I got there and started school, I took five different internships. in private public sector, nonprofit sector organizations in order to learn what it was that I liked or didn't like. Now, Tony Hall was a Democrat and a Christian, correct? Correct. Because I remember him. I had the privilege of meeting him a few times. And he was one of the old school Democrats, you know, the blue dog Democrats. He was a real Christian.

And that's the issue right now is that it's no longer possible to be, in the Democratic Party today, if you're pro-life, if you're outspokenly Christian in that way, or you can give it lip service, but you're still going to have to go along with the Marxist drift. And that's part of the dramatic shift we're talking about, isn't it? It absolutely is. And you brought up a really important point, and that's pro-life. There's a lot of millennials as science continues to evolve, and we learn more about life in the womb. A lot of millennials are being awakened to this recognition of why. life matters. And as I talk about in Bellwether Blues with one story, Tiffany Crane, I believe

the pro-life argument is like the underground railroad for taking a mind that was once liberal or leftist and bringing it towards conservative principles. That one issue is key. And if we can persuade the younger generations to embrace it, I also think we'll see changes in their voting patterns. It's funny. I've talked about that a lot myself, that as science progresses, science is not on the side of the pro-abortion crowd. And that's the dramatic difference between, you know, 1973 when Rovi Wade was passed and today, and that I think I've said this as well,

that anybody born after 1973 knows that they might legally have been snuffed out. And it changes things when you think that could have been me. If my parents had had an argument that weekend, and I might easily not exist. And so it changes things and it makes it personal. And then, of course, the science becomes more and more dramatically clear about what is in the womb. It sure ain't a clump of cells. So that's interesting to me.

I guess when we're talking about millennials, we do have to take that into account as well. What other kinds of issues do you see millennials being interested in? So within the seven stories, I bring up different issues. as welfare. There's a black American, a couple of black Americans who are some of the seven stories that changed their votes. Welfare was a big issue. When they looked at the effects of welfare over a long period of time, what that did to destroy their trust in government. That distrust led this individual, Aaron Lawrence, to make a major shift in his voting pattern. I have the pro-life issue. There was some level of religious freedom. One individual who

became a believer, became a Christian, really saw what the government was doing to, to suppress and oppressive freedom, and that led to his awakening, the Second Amendment for a young lady in Bellwether Blues named Jenna. Her change happened because she saw the infringement of that. But in every single case, I think the most amazing revelation from Bellwether Blues is what I noticed that was most similar was they all had mentors. There were mentors, individuals that stepped into their lives, not really with political motives, but just living their lives and caring about them as individuals. And through the development of the currency of trust, the millennials were willing and able to listen to these individuals. And as they heard their

arguments and saw their lifestyle, they became attracted to it. And that attraction led them to this awakening. And that's the primary recommendation that I make. Authentic relationship wins the day. That's very interesting because that is, you hear this over and over again with regard to faith, with regard to politics, that, you know, we were created in the image of God and that there's nothing more sacred among us than relationships, you know, between us and among us. And I have to say that it happens every time because it humanizes the issue. When someone is talking about something, it's a little different than if you read about it in a book or if you see about it, if you see it someplace on social media. And oftentimes it's somebody unexpected. It's sometimes, you know,

we have a reaction against our parents because they're our parents. We have an against them because they're our parents and we may love them and they love us, but we can hear it from an uncle or we can hear it from a mother friend or something like that. But that's actually very interesting. I'm glad to hear that. The election that's coming up, I want to talk about that in the remaining minutes we have together. I've never seen such a clear choice in my life. when you have a Democratic Party that I would say actually has no leadership, they are being led by what we call the mob. They are afraid to think for themselves and afraid to put any daylight between themselves

and the mob because they're afraid that they're going to get eaten alive by the mob themselves. And so you have Joe Biden, who's like a husk, practically non-existent. It's the strangest thing because of social distancing and because of the COVID, that we don't see him on the stump. We don't see him. It's a bizarre thing. What do you see ahead in this election? Yeah, I have optimism,

especially if conservatives get out from behind the screens and engage in conversation, millennials, and other people that are in our generation. I think it's critical for us to have these kinds of conversations because one of the things that we've seen with Democrat mayors and governors is really signs of what's to come, as they oppress the freedoms of Americans

through draconian measures that they've taken and through, I mean, pure hypocrisy. I think you're in New York, right, Eric, in New York, New York? So in that city where Mayor de Blasio is willing to go and march with thousands of people, but then close down synagogues because social distancing measures are a concern. Millennials recognize that. They see that dissonance, but they have to learn from it. They have to hear from somebody who can talk to them about it. So if conservatives step out, if Republicans step out and have these conversations,

I'm very optimistic about the results of the 2020 election. Okay, we've got a few minutes left, folks. Don't go away. I'm talking to Jonathan Jacobowski. The book is Bellwether Blues. Stick around. Possessing and caressing me on the sea somewhere. Hey there, folks.

I'm talking to Jonathan Jacobowski. The book is Bellwether Blues. And it is about the millennial generation. Jonathan, final thoughts. We've just got a few minutes together. What do you think we're going to see in this country? because we're going through a real tough time right now. We are. It's unprecedented in many ways.

On top of one crisis, we now have another crisis, statues being pulled down, racial tensions, people questioning the fear of the virus that's come in. So we are definitely in uncertain times. And I think more now than ever, we need to recognize the power of prayer. That's my first hope. And the first thing that I'm doing with some of my brothers, we have a fasting in prayer once a week as we seek, God's answer and his his peace for this nation. Additionally, I just really believe that we need to

get out from behind our doors, behind our screens, like I said before. We live in a world where we're inundated with information, YouTube videos, social media outlets, media, press, where we have lost the amount of relationships maybe we used to have, especially authentic relationships. So that's really my challenge and my hope is develop more relationships, authentic relationships, with more individuals throughout the course of the rest of this year. What a wonderful thing. Now, I forget, where do you say you live right now? So I live in Wood County, Ohio, in Bowling Green.

And bowling green. And so what, are you part of a church there, a large church there? You know, what is Christian life looking like at this point for you, where you are? Yeah, so I attend an assemblies of God church here called Day Spring. And we have been very proactive in reaching out to families that have come into difficult financial situations. So we've created deeper outreach. We've followed all the social distancing guidelines. Our state, I think, has followed common sense guidelines for churches and other organizations.

So through the church, we're doing a lot of outreach. Through nonprofits, we're engaged in helping those that are in need. And then in our individual lives, we're doing what we can to reach out to families that surround us. You know, when you talk about fasting and prayer, there is no question in my mind that prayer works. There's just no question. There are a lot of people listening right now. They may say, I don't know. I don't get that.

So when you talk about fasting, I'm always curious. How do you and your friends go about that? Do you fast an evening meal? What do you do? Well, in this specific case, we really, is Black brothers. I played football at BG, so I have a lot of teammates that come from different cities across the country. And one of the things I recognize is I hadn't stepped into the pain of my fellow brothers.

and fasting for an entire day, 24 hours, no food, would make me feel some pain. And that pain would allow me to recognize that maybe the difficulty of the situation and remind me to pray and actively reach out to help them. And I found myself in Minneapolis just a couple of weeks ago, meeting with members of the black community who, for most part, most part, they would say, I haven't heard you, I haven't seen you. You haven't stepped into my church. You haven't heard and felt my pain.

So when I talked about fasting, it was really an encouragement to them. And it's something that I believe is very, powerful. Well, that's amazing. You know, a lot of people aren't looking for pain. But the fact of the matter is, when you do it the way you've just described it with wisdom, there is a way. There is a way to do it. And God notices it. And it's a beautiful thing. We're out of time. I just want to congratulate you on what you're doing generally and then specifically with this book, Bellwether Blues. I do think that millennials are looking for wise voices to process what is happening right now. So Jonathan Jacobowski is there a website I should ask before we go.

Yeah, thank you, Eric. You can go to bellwetherblues book.com, and one of the things that I learned with Bellwether is how you spell it, which is B-E-L-W-E-T-H-E-R, Bellwether Blues book.com. That's the trick. You got to spell Bellwether Blues correctly and Jacobowski. you got to pronounce that correctly. Man, what a challenge. But God, God will help folks find it and find you.

Jonathan, really, just a joy to meet you. Thank you so much for your time and for this book. Eric, thank you very much. It was an honor to be on your show.