The Eric Metaxas Show - Louis Markos

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

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

Noble gold investments is the official gold sponsor of the Eric Mataxis 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. Do you like your gravy sick and rich and loaded with creamy mushrooms? If no one was looking, would you chug the whole gravy boat? Chug, Chug, Chug, Chug! Stay tuned. Here comes Mr. Chugg-a-Lug himself, Eric Ma, Texas. Hey there, folks.

Welcome to Friday, May 30th. Holy cow. Chris Himes, tomorrow is the last day of May. What's going on? What is happening? We're in some kind of time warp, Eric. I don't know if you saw Inception or Back to the Future or any of those time travel movies, but clearly we've been sucked into a time vortex.

It's insane. It's like we're approaching warp factor 8. Yes. Mr. Sulu. All right. Okay, so today is May 30th. It's Friday. And folks, I got to tell you, first of all, today I am in Washington, D.C.

Chris and I were here yesterday in Washington, D.C. A lot of crazy stuff going on. We're at the Museum of the Bible. but big announcement Monday ladies and gentlemen Monday this coming Monday I fly literally I fly in a jet plane in an aeroplane I fly on Monday to Greece to Athens Greece I've talked about it for months and months on this program we are doing a special cruise with many of you we've got about 300 of you who are joining us in Athens, either next week or June 6th is the day the ship sails. It's the Norwegian line.

It's the Viva, their newest ship. There's like, I don't know, almost 3,000 people on this monster ship. But about 300 of you will be there. I guess to hear me pontificate about my books, I'm so sorry. but I'm going to be I'm going to be fantastic. I think it's going to be fun. Listen, I love meeting people who've read my books

or care about what we're saying on this program. This is a joy for me, but to do it in Greece. So Monday, we're out of here. We're leaving the United States of America. So I got a couple of quick announcements in case you're wondering. First of all, let me say, after this segment, right now in a couple of minutes, we are running

my conversation with Dr. Michael Eggnor. He is a neurosurgeon. He's done 7,000 brain operations. And he wrote a book called The Immortal Mind, which is a neurosurgeon's case for the existence of the soul. Absolutely fascinating. I hope you're signed up to my newsletter, because when you get the video of my conversation with Dr. Michael ignore. You need to send this to every friend, every agnostic, atheist friend. This is amazing stuff. Amazing stuff. So that's coming up in just a few minutes. Yeah. And he makes a good point that I've never really thought about before, but, you know, with somebody who's done brain surgery, they have expertise on the human brain as opposed to people that study brains and labs. Some of them

never actually work on a human brain. They just have animals and other things like that. So, yeah, I won't give away too much, but he's performed many thousands of actual brain surgeries. Yeah, yeah. Well, listen, first of, I hope people will read the book. But when you hear my conversation with him, this is like a big deal conversation. So I said, I want to re-air it because we aired it a couple days ago. And you got to hear this one.

So that's coming up any second. Okay. A couple of other things that I want to mention. While I'm away in, well, we'll be in Greece, will also be in Turkey. two of those days, but while I'm away, I may be doing radio updates, but I don't think it's going to be possible. So if you want to stay in touch with me and you want to see pictures and videos of what I'm doing, the main thing I would say is follow me on Instagram, not on X. I mean, I hope you're following me on X, but on Instagram I'm going to be doing videos and stuff. John Zmirak's going to be

there. Albans going to be there. Victoria Jackson is going to be there. And lots of of friends and it's it's going to be beautiful. I can't even imagine some of the things we're going to see. I want to share that through video, but I'll be doing that through Instagram. So if you're not following me on Instagram, please follow me on Instagram because the videos are going to be fun. They're going to be fun. So I want to say that. I also want to say to remind you, today, tomorrow is the last day to help the folks of Christian Solidarity International to free slaves. So if you've said, oh, that's a great idea, that's a great idea. We stretched it out this week because I know many of you have not yet had a chance.

Now, those of you who have stepped up, God bless you. Human beings are going to have their lives changed because of your generosity. God bless you. So if you want, this is the last chance today and tomorrow, please don't miss it. Okay, the gate is closing. This is it. We stretched it a week so more people could participate. Metaxistococococ.com is the website.

Metaxistocococcom is the website. And you will see at the top of the page, Metaxistock.com, you'll see the banner. If you haven't done it, this is it, folks. I mean, if you give $5, $10 a month for a year, this is changing people. people's lives. This is a big deal. All right. I've talked about it enough, but I want to let you know this is the last opportunity. Literally, this is it. It's not like I'm going to be on the air on Monday or Tuesday. Like, this is it. So it's the last time I'm going to remind you. Metaxistocococon.com is the website. The banners at the top of the page. If you haven't done it yet, do yourself a favor

and participate in what God is doing. God is doing this. Please. I'll give you the phone number. you prefer to call. This is the last chance, folks. 888-253-3522. 888-253-3522. Our goal was to free 100 slaves. As of right now, we have exceeded that goal. Do you understand how wonderful this is? Because of you, because of CSI, because of God moving on your hearts. If you haven't done it, join us. This is a glorious thing. This is God at work in our time. You want to talk about a golden age of America?

A golden age of America, where people in America of their own free will, moved by God, give money to free slaves. This is real. This is just beautiful. 888-253-3522. 888-253-3522. 888-253-2522. today I'm not sure what we're airing in our two,

but what we're going to be doing over the next week and a half or whatever that I'm in Greece is we're going to be airing some encores. We have gone back and found the best of the best of the best, stuff that most of you have never heard of stuff we did three years ago, five years ago, eight years ago. And it's just an opportunity to introduce you to some of the best of stuff that when we did it, we thought, oh my gosh, this is amazing. This goes in the vault. Yeah, the vault. Yeah, the vault. It's like the end of Indiana Jones.

I always bring up Indiana Jones. It's, you know, I don't know why. But at the end of the movie, they famously, you know, the bureaucrats hide away the Ark of the Covenant in a bunch of boxes, thousands of boxes. And that's basically our show archive, is thousands of shows. And so, you know, we've sent Albin back in, like, you know, the old guy with the dolly back in there to wheel some out. No, it's, we didn't send Album.

But the engineer and James and we've all kind of like compared notes and gone back to the archive and pulled them out for you. So in the next week or so, you're going to get to hear some really, honestly, this is some great stuff. And I'm glad we have an excuse to use it. So that's coming up. One final announcement, in case you didn't know, on June 22nd. So obviously I'll be back from Greece. I'm preaching at King's Church in New York City. So if you know anybody near New York City, in New York City, you want to come to New York City.

I'm preaching at the King's Church in New York City, June 22nd. I think the service starts at 11 a.m. That evening, I'll be up in Connecticut with Ken Fish. If you know anybody that can get to Bethel, Connecticut, his vineyard church in Bethel, Connecticut on Vale Road, June 22, 22nd, it'll start at 6 p.m. If you've never been there, when Ken Fish is doing ministry, it is spectacular, folks. It is God moves. It's a beautiful thing. It's almost unbelievable. So that's June 22nd. Ken Fish, I will be there. All right, stick around. We got much more coming up. There's been a national focus on eating only the healthiest of foods, and that's great news for balance of nature.

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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

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 kind of like 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 it. Can 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 ones. wonderful books. From Achilles to Christ, we will kind of 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 us, as you're saying.

Because when I wrote that, I focused on the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Inead, the Inead, 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 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 and... have to do with Jerusalem. It was actually Tertullian. It was an early church father. 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, or, you know, if you put in the heck. Yeah.

What the heck? The heck. 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 humanist and classicist himself, Tort Julian, 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. Right. They don't see the fullness of truth and they don't, they're made uncomfortable by the suggestion that, uh, the Christ whom we worship is present in everything. Right. Before he came to earth that we see, you know, in other words, 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 then Jesus came. And you were saying in other great folks. It's ironic, Eric, because 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. Right, 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, Baptist school, sometimes you can't tell a Baptist church from 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, the 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-react, 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 flesh or spirit versus the world. They don't, they don't have a fully incarnate. 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 in.

incarnational beings. And a lot of times people forget that. A friend Nancy Piercy has 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 you, 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. throw the classics out when Jesus arrives. 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, Eric, 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 the Herodotus, ucydides, Sophocles, European, all of these wonderful Greek names. And here's the ironic thing. At the very moment that the so-called Ivy League's, 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 Kael. You probably know that. And 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. okay 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 plater 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 inviting you back now we'll do do that now. So, so, so from Achilles to Christ, then Plato to Christ, Plato to Christ, and then Tinkers to Evers to Chance will be the fourth. That's right. Yeah, exactly. 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. Should we start there or should we get there eventually? Interestingly, it is in John,

but the place that I think is the most Greek, oddly enough, is in Hebrews. Now, why is that? 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 K. I'm not saying that the writer of Hebrews, whether it was Paul, whoever, is necessarily reflecting. See, I am any old-fashioned, 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 C.S. 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. 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, how do I put, this makes me think of my dear departed friend Thomas Howard. Oh, he was wonderful. I've interviewed at Socrates in the city. But in his book, Chance of the Dance, he says, effectively, that every, 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 partakes of all truth. Like it's inescapable. So anytime a quote unquote pagan, a pre-Christian, a pre-Christian, comes up with anything,

it's equally valid to, you know, to, to, 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's, I'm sorry, the acronym. The acronym.

Not everybody's going to be familiar with this. We don't always have, you know, necessarily, whatever, for cognate 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 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, this is 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 they make them uncomfortable. It makes them uncomfortable. It's, this is again, it'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 the end of the Bible. What is, what does it mean to be made? 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 the two camps. If we fall into the pure Darwinism, then all there is is is survival of the fittest, and, you know, anything goes. But if we go to the other extreme and we forget about the fall in nature, we become Rousseau, and we try to build utopia every time it becomes a dystopia, right? 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 fallen. 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. Um, yeah, they want to have this binary view.

Dualism. Okay. So from Plato to Christ to get back to your book, um, where does Plato, how does Plato this, uh, you know, this, this, this classical Greek, um, how does he begin pointing toward, uh, what we now know to be Christian faith and Christian. Christian theology. How does he do that? The beginning is, 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 downed. 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 white, the board clean so that Plato can then come in and write the truth on. Let me, 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, you know, 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. Okay. It's really the opposite of deconstruction. One of them is a neolithic project. Yeah. And the other one is the opposite. I don't know what the word would be for opposite of a nealistic 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. Right. 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, 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, the Phaeus, 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 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, who's 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 truth. trial and say, defend yourself. And Socrates says, let me explain to you why it is. Every day I go to the Agorah, 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 wiseness of men. Okay. Now, thank you. Do 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 didn't know, right? That's the Giacratic humility, if you want to call it that. 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 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 craftsmen, 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 over. This is the human condition. Let's be honest, right? 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 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. And you know, it's interesting that you 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. Shall we pay taxes to Caesar? 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 at 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 Plume 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 when, you know, Suzanne. I don't have 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, 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. 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 continues. And every year they're buying silver, people don't realize 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 try 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 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. People can find out much more about it. But 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, getting some silver in various ways. You can go to Eric Mattaxasgold.com. Eric Mattaxasgold. If you have questions, you want to talk somebody, you can call 877-646-3-4-7-877-646-5-3-4-7. And again, the website, Noble Gold, you can go to Ericmetaxisgold.com. Ericmetaxusgold.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.