The Eric Metaxas Show - Mitch Albom

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

The acclaimed author of "Tuesdays with Morrie" and "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" joins discuss his newest book "The Little Liar"

Folks, welcome to the Eric Mattaxas 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. Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. They say it's a thin line between love and hate, but we're working every day to thicken that line, or at least to make it a double or triple line. But now here's your line jumping host, Eric Mattaxas.

You know, folks, it just occurred to me that people that watch the program on TBN may not know that I have a radio program or that they could go to Eric Mataxis.com and sign up to get all the other content I do. And I realize that my TBN audience probably doesn't know that the guy who is in the animated sequence, in the opening to this, this show to the, to the, you know, the whole animated sequence, the chauffeur is Albin Seder. And you're wondering, what, what happened to that chauffeur? What happened to Albin? I wanted my TBN audience to know. He's right here. I don't know what you're talking about.

Albin, you're right here. I'm right here. Actually, though, but you've been a little busy. I have. So people want to know what have you been up to. And I would say that what you've been up to ought to be obvious. It should be. It should be obvious.

In fact, it is obvious. what you've been up to is obvious. Yes. I wrote a book that just came out called Obvious. What? Yes. And you know what else is obvious? It was actually inspired by you and your book, Letter to the American Church.

Because we talked on the show many times about how people need to get involved, whether it's voting or writing a letter to the editor or talking to your friends about things that are important today. And I thought, well, you know what? I've written a lot of articles for different online publications. Right. And I had enough. I thought, this could make a book. So I went to a major publisher.

And fortunately, they said, uh-huh, yes, Post Hill Press. Right. And they put out the book obvious. But it took me like six months to work on this, really hard work. But this was your title. Yes, it was. Your title, because you kept saying these things are obvious. Yes.

And then you realized, hey, wait a minute, that would make a great title. Okay, now I noticed it says on the cover by Albin Seder, and then it says Forward by Eric Metaxus. That's the Bonhofer author. I think he passed away. I don't know what happened to him after he wrote the Bonhofer book, but that was such a big seller that forward by him. That's like a big deal because, you know, he wouldn't just put his name on anything.

So obviously he must think a lot of this book. Well, what's really funny, I was just looking at before we came on air again. And do you know the longest chapter in this book? It's actually a section. Your forward is the longest. All the chapters are like three or four pages long. They're very quick. There's a lot of cartoons and funny memes.

It takes on serious subjects, but it does it kind of in a whimsical sort of way. Except for the forward. Except for the forward that I wrote. Yes. That is not whimsical at all. No. But actually, seriously, the book is loaded with you have a talent, and you know I'm not joking, that you really have a talent to take serious stuff and make it light and bite-sized.

And that's all of the chapters are pretty short. But I want to start with you. what you're doing, it says the title of the book is obvious, seeing the evil that's in plain sight and doing something about it. So what is obvious? One of the things that you say is obvious that we need to say over and over and over is God exists. Yeah, that's so important to me. In fact, I was going to make, there's four parts in the book and originally the fourth part, the last part was going to be God exists. And then it was my wife, my beautiful wife, Anne, who said, no, you need to take that part and put it in the beginning because you're telling people where your from. You want them to know this is your viewpoint because you know that God exists. And there's even little examples of how you can, you yourself in a way, God is trying to reach you all the time and speak to you. And he's trying to make it obvious to you. He created you out of a little tiny thing that became this big body. He created billions of stars and planets. He can certainly prove to you that he exists, but you've got to keep yourself open to it. Now, if you want details

on how God exists, then you've got to read my book, which is not whimsical called Is Atheism Dead? If you want the details, but if you don't want the details, you just want the chapter, the bite-sized version, you go to the book Obvious by Albin Sater. Now, obviously, Albin, you have stories in here. There's one story, I think you've shared at another time, but your friend Connie, tell the story. Oh, I love it. Because this is early days. When I first came to New York City, I was involved in a playwriting, of course, right? And I was writing funny, silly, family-oriented plays. She was writing these deep, heavy things. And I was talking to her. We became very good friends. But she said she doesn't

believe in God. There is no God. And she came from a very dysfunctional family. I came from a very loving family, brothers and sisters. We had a great time. And I just knew that God exists. And he had given examples in his life of who he was and how he loved me. And I said to her one day, I said, Connie, why don't you believe God exists? Why? She said, because I tested him one day. She said one day my parents were arguing like they always did, and I was crying, and I was upset, and I was young, and I didn't know what my life is going to be. So I went out on the back porch, and I looked up at the sky, and I said, God, I want you to prove to me right now that you exist. I want a sign right now. And I'll tell you, about five seconds later, a little bunny came hopping out of the woods.

And I said, this is Connie speaking. She said, that's when I realized there was no God. there was only nature. And I said, Goddy, what are you, who do you think sent the little buddy? But she's,

no, no, nature, that is, I forgot that. That is, that's powerful and it's, it's a little heartbreaking

because you realize that God loves us, he's trying to speak to us, but sometimes, um, it's so funny because he knew, he knew that nature would reach her. Somebody else might be a scientist,

somebody else might be a baseball player. But God knew her, her deepest feelings, the things that would make her smile and appreciate life again and start to focus on those things that matter. And that's the way it is for all of us. We go asking all kind of pundits and all kind of smart people and all this. And what we really want is a personal experience from a personal God. Right. He's ready for it. And it just so happens God is personal.

In fact, he is a person. So, well, the title of the book, again, is obvious. and I don't mean the title should be obvious. I mean, the title is obvious. In case I haven't made that clear, the title is obvious. Maybe I need to show people. The title is obvious. Now, by showing people that the book,

I see the back of the book has a quote by George Orwell. Oh, yes. Not a blurb. Not an endorsement by George Orwell. He's very hard to get a hold of. He doesn't give a lot of endorsements these days. But do you want to read that? Oh, I definitely do, because when I read this,

I had come up with the idea of obvious, and then I saw this quote from George Warwell. I said, I can't believe it. Again, it's as if he wrote it today. This is what George said, probably back in the late 40s. We have now sunk to a depth at which reinstatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear in times of universal deceit telling the truth will be a revolutionary act. That is powerful. We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. So saying God is real, you know, and everybody wants to hear that. I put it on Twitter, I think it was this morning or last night, I put out that, you know, we're seeing such darkness and evil, what happened in Israel. And I said, the only answer is the God of the Bible. And he wants you to turn to him. He wants you to give your heart. to Jesus and to trust that he will lead you through this.

Yes. And that's true. I'm stating something that to many people say, well, that's obvious. But it's important because there are people who don't know that and they need to hear that. And you will offend people sometimes when you speak the truth. There's no doubt about it. So there's some responses on Twitter. People get angry.

Yeah, they'll say things that are crazy and you're not supposed to get offended. When they'll tell you things that are obviously not true, you're supposed to stand there and take it and kind of scratch your chin and say, yeah, yeah, I guess so. But when you tell the truth, oh, they're offended and you're not allowed to do that. Actually, I see in the back of the book, you do have endorsements from two people who've been on this show. Doug Giles, I just smile as soon as I mention his name. He says, this fresh opus from Albin Seder's comedic cranium is a prophetic exhortation to be a dynamic biblical force in the earth and not an evil-assisting evangelical farce.

Forest Forest. Get it? You get it? Lucas Miles says, full of wit and a truckload of common sense. Albin Seder's new book, Obvious is a refreshing compilation of tales, including two stories and legendary whoppers that offer much-needed reminder that contrary to what some might say,

the sky is blue, the grass is green, and thankfully God is good. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so there's so many things in this book. It's just filled with honestly pithy, important, bite-sized, but profound things. The title is obvious. The author is Albin Seder. Albin, thank you.

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Folks, as promised, Mitch Album, gigantic bestseller, Tuesdays with more, A, five people you'll meet in heaven. New book, a novel. The Little Liar. Mitch Album, welcome back. Nice to see you again. Thanks for having me back. Tell us about this novel. I was particularly intrigued on a couple of the points, of the plot points and the story, but tell my audience about this brand new book this week out this week called The Little Liar. Sure. So it's basically a novel that deals with truth and deception and forgiveness

and redemption. And the story is actually inspired by true events. It centers on an 11-year-old boy named Nico, who lived in Greece during World War II. And when he never told a lie in his life until he was 11 years old. And when the Nazis invade his town, they find out about him, being so honest, and they kidnap him and decide to use him to their advantage. And they say, listen, you can go back to your family, all you have to do is stand on the train tracks and tell the passengers that are coming that they're going to new jobs and new homes and everything's going to be fine. And then you just do this for a couple weeks and then you can go back to your family. So thinking that he's telling the truth, he does this day after day until the final day and the final

train when he sees his own family being shoved inside a box car and someone screams out that they're taking them to concentration camps and he realizes that they're all being taken off to their death, and he's held behind and the train takes off. And it follows what happens from that point forward for the next 40 years, the ramifications of that lie on him, on his family, on the Nazi officer who created it, how they intertwined with one another, and how in a very, very hopeless time, hope and forgiveness become motivations in his life as he seeks to be forgiven, and his family tries to find him again after the war is over to tell him that. they understand that it wasn't his fault.

It's an extraordinary story. My father, who was called Nico, now I call him dad. He's 96 years old, but he lived through World War II in Greece. My mother lived through World War II in Germany. So this is very touching and personal for me to read about this. And a lot of people don't know that, you know, the Nazis were rounding up Jews from everywhere, including from Greece, and this is Thessaloniki. Is that right? That's correct. In fact, and it's interesting to hear that your family is from there.

You probably know this of all the countries in World War II. Greece lost the largest section of its Jewish population. 90% of the Jews in Greece were killed by the Nazis. And in Thessalonica, it was 95%. And that city had actually been the highest percentage Jewish city in all of Europe in terms of, you know, percentage of people. It was actually the majority. Can you imagine there was a city where there was a Jewish majority? And it was wiped out within two years. Everybody was dead and gone.

So I said it there partly because people don't know that it took place. And partly because I lived in Greece for a stretch of time when I was younger. And so I just thought it would be different. I didn't want to write a typical Holocaust book. They're very good. Don't get me wrong. But they've kind of been done before. A lot of them that begin and start of a concentration camp

and end with the liberation. I wanted to place it someplace where people hadn't seen before and also carry it not only from before the war, through the war and after the war, because the ramifications of what happened and the way that people had to deal with the things afterwards, like being forced to tell a lie, you know, that you didn't think about your whole life. Very few people explore. They kind of end the book in 1945. And, you know, it didn't end for the victims of that in 1945, I can assure you.

That's so interesting. You say that you're, do you have any Jewish blood in your background? Oh, yeah. I'm Jewish. I'm born Jewish. Yeah. You're Jewish. Well, I was going to say that you, I wrote a book about Dietrich Bonhofer, a German pastor who spoke up for the Jews, tried to wake up the church in Germany, that they need to stand against the Jews. And a number did. But most. did not. They looked the other way. I talk about this wherever I go. But it's so fascinating to me to think many people, especially in America today, we forget about satanic evil. The idea that not just that the Nazis killed Jews, they went to Greece and systematically rounded up Jews in Thessaloniki, Thessalonica, Greece to murder them. You think, who would do that? What level of evil? are we talking about can human beings be that evil that intentional it's it's very hard for people to fathom Mitch and that's why I think we need to people want to look away they don't want to

look at the evil it's too painful but we need to look at it and the story you tell in this novel ladies and gentlemen this happened some of the details of the story and the Nico what it that yeah that's fiction but but the reality that millions and millions of Jews were rounded up in places like Greece. You think who would do that? It's mind blowing and it happened and these people were murdered. And it does get to the issue of what happens after the war. Just like you said, okay, 945, hey, it's over.

It's not over. People had to live with what they did. People had to live with what they didn't do. And that's really ultimately what your story is about. And I really focus on the, lies because, you know, what I've studied in all of this is that the Nazis didn't rise to power and thrive because they have bigger guns. They did so because they have bigger lies. And they were able to lie to their own people and blame the Jews and say, you know, they're the problem with

the country. If we can just get rid of them, we'll get better. They were able to change laws with different words, change the language, so it didn't look so offensive. But meanwhile, they could do anything under those particular laws. They certainly lie to all their victims. There's even an incident in the book where they have a concentration camp that the Red Cross wants to visit because they're hearing stories about these horrors about the concentration camp. So they actually beautify it.

They put in trees and flowers. They gussied everybody up. They showered them. They gave them clothes. They invited it in an orchestra. And then they had the Red Cross come in and watch while a concert was performed for the, quote unquote, prisoners who they said weren't prisoners. They were just working there.

And you can see the full. of this, it's, it's horrifying, because they told the Jews, if you say anything, will kill you. And so the deception, to go to that kind of level of deception, of course, when the Red Cross left, they said, well, everything was fine. We saw it. It was a, and that's how they were able to get away with that kind of evil that you're referring to for so long. But the lies, you know, it was Gerbil, sadly, who said, a lie told once is easily identified as a lie, a lie told a thousand sometimes becomes the truth. And that's a very cautionary tale for our society today, you know, when people are sort of picking their own truths and deciding I'm going to believe this

or I'm going to believe that. So I wanted a story that would resonate with today like that. But I also, and I think this is important, I also wanted to point out the hope that it took to survive that. And there's a scene in the little liar in the book where in the concentration camp, the prisoners, including Nico's family, who are now there, every night, despite the horrors that happened to them during the day, they gather in their bunks and they quietly pray. And then they go around and they insist that everybody say one good thing that they were grateful for that happened that day, even though they're in a concentration camp.

And the things that they say are, you know, I had an extra spoonful of soup today. My rotted tooth fell out. The guard who usually beats me didn't beat me today. And the fact that we still have that hope inside of us, even under the worst possible human conditions, shows you what it is that we need to go forward and to overcome periods of time like that or even like we're in right now. Victor Frankel in Man's Search for Meaning said, the people who survived, the concentration camps were the ones who still thought there was a tomorrow.

The people who died were the ones who said it will never get any better. This is awful. This is hell. They gave up. They didn't make it. So there's a lesson to be learned there, I think, for our time as well. What led you to write this book? You've written so many books, gigantic sellers.

What led you to this particular story, The Little Liar? Well, I actually heard an account of a Holocaust survivor in a video in a museum in Israel when I was visiting 10 years ago. And it said that, well, when we went to the train tracks, the Nazis had used Jewish people to lie to us and say, it's okay, it's all right, get on the trains. Because after all, you're going to these trains, if you see a bunch of guards and they say, we're taking you to concentration camps, chances are you're not going to get on willingly. So the Nazis in their in their in their forever evil mode said, well, oh, let's trick them. Let's just just tell them, you know, they even had people give them their money. Like in Greece, your family may know this. They had the Greek Jews turn in their Greek drachmas, the money for a receipt.

And they said, when you get to Poland, which is going to take you to Poland, your new jobs and your new homes, you can turn this receipt in, you'll get all your money back in Polish money. They literally did that. And people did it because they believed them. So I had heard this story and I wanted, I always thought that there's something there for our time. And I wanted to find a way to spin it. When I decided to do it with a little boy instead of adults, that's when it came together. The book is The Little Liar, Mitch Al, B-O-M.

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Welcome back talking to Mitch Album, ALB-B-O-M. You know him from Tuesday. days with more, eight, five people who meet in heaven. The new book, a novel called The Little Liar out this week. And Mitch, it is part of what staggers me is, again, I mentioned it earlier, the evilness of evil, that there are people who they have thrown out all morality and to them murdering, lying. If you're hanging out with nice people, it's easy to forget that there is real evil, that there are people who are willing to lie, to deceive, to say anything to get their way. If you haven't been around those people, you know, it's easy to believe them when they say,

do this, do this, do this. You go, oh, you know, most people I've known have been nice. I'll listen to them. So what you just said about, you know, the Nazis are murdering, systematically murdering Jews and others. They don't have a problem with murder. So they have no problem with lying. but there's something to those of us who believe in telling the truth, who believe in the idea of truth and goodness and love,

there is something so wicked about lying like this. And in your story, they get others to lie. So your book The Little Liar is about this boy who is deceived into lying himself. He thinks he's telling the truth. He finds out he's not. And it haunts him for the rest of the thing. of his life. Yeah. In fact, he becomes a pathological liar himself. He can't speak the truth anymore. But every time he tries to speak the truth, he's reminded of what he thinks he did to his family.

And he ends up coming to America, changing his name multiple times, changing his identities, multiple times. And so he can't be found. And his brother and the girl who loved him, you know, as a little girl, they survived the concentration camps. And they spend the whole rest of the book trying to find him, trying to locate him to tell him that he can be forgiven, you know, that they understood that it wasn't his fault, but it takes forever to try to find him. And the, the idea of forgiveness was such a big thing for me, because ever since I wrote Tuesdays with Mori, I think every book that I've written since Tuesdays with Mori has contained a piece of Tuesdays of Mori with it. And he once told me, Mori was my old college professor

who was dying from Lou Gehrig's disease, and I visited him every Tuesday and sort of did a last class and what's important in life when you know you're going to die. And one of the things he told me was most important was forgiveness. And he said, you need to forgive everybody, everything, and forgive yourself. Because when you get to where I am and you will get to where I am, you're going to wish that you have been nicer to yourself, and you're not going to care who was right or wrong in the arguments in your life or the disagreements. You're just going to want to be able to hold their hands. and tell them what they meant to you. And so I took that idea of forgiveness and I thought, well, how far would you go to be forgiven the

worst thing that you ever did? In Nico's case, the worst thing he did was fall for this lie and tell his own family that everything was going to be okay when it wasn't. And he spends his life trying to do repentive acts so that he will be forgiven. And meanwhile, this girl who's in love with him for years, decades, without seeing him, she's driven by the need to forgive him. So we're often driven by the need to be forgiven, but we're also driven by the need to forgive.

People forget about that. And she wants to make it right because she was the last person he saw before the trains took off. So I really want to explore that idea of hope and forgiveness set against the backdrop of the kind of evil that you're talking about because sadly that evil still exists in this world today. It may not be in the form of Nazism, but there's plenty of people lying and plenty of people doing very bad things.

And how do we combat that? And, you know, I wanted to have a book that ultimately was inspiring and hopeful, even in the in the shadow of such awful things. Well, when you talk about forgiveness, forgiveness is one of those things that I think typically people talk about it cavalierly. Like, oh, you need to forgive. You need to forgive. And obviously, you know, people who have a problem. problem with forgiving, many of them are saying, I don't think you understand the evil that was done.

I'm just supposed to let that go. And I would say to them, no, you're not supposed to just let that go. That evil is evil. That wrong is wrong. One of the examples I often give is when somebody tried to kill Pope John Paul II. Well, they arrested that guy. That guy goes to prison. The Pope visits him in prison and prays with him and forgives him. But he doesn't say, but you know what, no big deal. Let the guy out of prison. No, no. The murderer or the would be murderer has to stay in prison.

So, you know, justice and forgiveness, we need to really understand what that means. We're not talking about some sloppy thing like, hey, just let it go. It's not that simple. There's more to it. I'm not sure how you deal with it in the book. Yeah, well, I think that that's right. And I do deal with it with the book. The book follows four people, Nico, the boy, Fannie, the girl, Sebastian, his brother,

and Udo Graf, the Nazi who perpetrated all of this. And it follows them for all 40 years. So you see the way that they intertwine and affect one another. And you're absolutely right. You can forgive and still want justice. The two don't contradict one another. You can, you know, what's going on in the Middle East right now. And, you know, there's going to be a time where people.

going to have to come to some point inside about forgiving. That doesn't mean they don't want justice or people jailed or paying a price or facing a trial or whatever it is. So the thing is, if you don't forgive, you're letting that evil sort of be a two-sided blade. You know, it cut you, you know, in the person that you lost and it cuts you because you won't let that pain go. The book is The Little Liar. I'm talking to Mitch Album. Final segment coming up. Don't go away. Welcome back. We're talking to Mitch. album. You know him from Tuesdays with Moray, five people you meet in heaven, and other zillion selling books. The new book is called The Little Liar. Mitch, just to reprise it, it is about a boy

in Greece, Nico. And again, my dad as a boy in Greece was called Nico, lived through World War II. But this is on the other side of Greece. My father's from the Ionian island of Cephalonia. This is all the way over in Thessalonica, which had a huge population of Greek. Jews, 90% of whom were murdered by the Nazis, almost impossible for us to fathom that that happened. So first of all, thank you for drawing attention to this really important piece of history that most people don't even know. And I don't know if you answered it, but how was it that you stumbled onto this particularly? I know you said you're of Jewish background, but most people don't know about the Jews from Thessalonica, Greece and this horror.

Well, I lived in Greece when I was younger, so I knew a little bit more about it than most people did. And I wanted to bring to light a story that was new to people about a time that everybody thinks they've already learned everything about. The fact that Thessalonica was such a majority Jewish city that it had 17 newspapers, Jewish newspapers, 7. 17 newspapers in Hebrew or Jewish subject. It had dozens of synagogues and the largest cemetery, Jewish cemetery in the world. And all of it was destroyed within two years. All of it. Imagine, you know, imagine 90% of Christians in America being wiped out in two years or something like.

I mean, it's unfathomable. And yet it happened. So I wanted to set a fictional story against a backdrop of a very real thing. And it is a, although all the characters are fictional, everything that happens, there is actually real. And the evil that was faced, the forgiveness that was required afterwards, and the whole idea of what is truth and what is deception. I use a parable, several parables in the book, because the book is actually narrated by the voice of truth. You know, it actually begins, you can trust the story you can, you're about to hear, you can trust it because I am the only thing in this world that you can. trust. I'm the shadow that you cannot outrun. I am truth. And it tells the whole story from the

perspective of truth because truth was so damaged during that time that I thought by telling it in the voice of truth and saying, look what you did to me. Look how you destroyed me. You know, it would have a different resonance than if I just told it in the third person or the first person. And truth actually tells a parable you may be familiar with it about itself saying when God, was deciding to create man, he got all the angels together to see if it was a good idea. And the angel of mercy said, yes, let man be created because he will do merciful things. And the angel of righteousness said, yes, let man be created because he will do righteous things. And only the angel of truth said, no, do not create man because man will lie and be false.

And God thought about it. and then he took the angel of truth and cast him out of heaven and threw him down to earth. Now, there are many theories about why God did that. In the book, my theory and what truth says is, I believe I was cast down to earth to smash into a billion pieces, each one landing in one human heart. And that's where I live or that's where I die. It's up to the individual to choose,

are you going to make truth a precious commodity or are you going to kill me? And it was an interesting voice to write it. I mean, that's obviously a parable, but boy, is that beautiful. That's just that is so beautiful. Listen, we're living at a time, you know, I was saying that a lot of people are very naive and they forgot that evil existed. Like really satanic, sadistic evil. What just happened in Israel, the butchery of human beings, of innocence.

we need to understand folks that that's real. We live in a world where that has never stopped happening. We just happen to be blessed to live in America where, oh, we don't see very much of it, so we forgot about it. There is real evil. And I think that in a funny way, too, people forget about the beauty of this idea of truth. A lot of people are cynical. They say, well, what's truth?

You got your truth. I got my truth. They don't really believe in the idea of truth. And there's something sacred about truth. And we need to hold on to that idea. idea. And it's why I think your book, The Little Liar, is important because we need to remind ourselves how important truth is, how important it is to know what is true, to know when you're being deceived, to know that there are people who want to deceive you. It's hard. And again, we're living

in a time where truth, the very idea of truth has been undermined in our culture. Yeah. Well, to follow up on something you just said, if you talk about what's going on, now, I thought in creating this story that, you know, I was creating a really novel idea about a boy's innocence being used against him, you know, by an evil force. And then over the weekend, I happened to be talking to a correspondent, a war correspondent, who had just spent three weeks in Israel reporting and just got back. And when he read my book, he said, oh, my God, do you know the story about this Israeli kid, Tomer? And I said, no. And he tells me the story about he's a kid, about 17 years old, 16, 17, who lived on the border there in Gaza.

And when the Hamas terrorist came over, they kidnapped him. And under threat of saying, we're going to kill your family if you don't do this, they took him door to door and made him knock on the people's doors and say, it's safe to come out. They're gone. It's safe to come out. And because they knew his voice, people came out and the terrorist shot them. This just happened.

This just happened less than a month ago. and then when they were done using him, they killed him. So I sat there when he told me that and I just sunk in my chair and I said, you know, you think you're imagining something that's so awful because you want to use it in a novel and you want to make a point. And then you realize that the human imagination can't even compare sometimes to what evil humans actually do. So when you say it's not gone and we're living in a time of deception and

Look at that. They had their own little liar, you know, so to speak. And then, and they murdered him when he was done. So it's a cautionary tale. It's a hopeful, you know, in my book, it's a hopeful tale and it's, because there is hope at the end. It's inspirational. I don't want to give away the ending or anything like that. Yeah. If you follow it along, there's, you know, the whole idea of forgiving and whatever is, is taken to its highest end. But we have to hold on to those kind of ideas because we do live in a world where the opposite is out there and is waiting to destroy us. Well, it's a beautiful subject. I'm so glad you've turned your attention to fiction. The book is The Little Lire by Mitch Album. Mitch, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Thanks so much. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to Robert Netsley right now, who is with Inspire Investing. Robert, I can't help but get excited about what you've created an opportunity for people to find out if their money is funding wicked things. if they have money in a 401k or retirement fund, whatever it is, that is invested in companies that are doing evil things, that is promoting pornography, promoting abortion,

promoting any number of things or ideologies with your money, folks. So Robert Nestle has created something where you can get a free report that tells you where your money is, and they will help you get your money into companies that are doing good things. So you have to go to InspireAdvisors.com slash Eric. Inspireadvisors.com slash Eric. You get a free report. But this is something I, you know, Robert, I guess it just gives me hope that it's possible

to turn things around in America. Because when I think of how much money people have invested out there, if they would understand what's going on and shift that money to good stuff, it's just huge. It's just absolutely monstrous. It's enormous. It's enormous. and we are seeing fruit from that labor. It's remarkable.

It doesn't have to even be trillions of dollars to change things. I've been on the phone, you know, in recent weeks, you know, with investor relations and CFOs and whatnot. We regularly engage with companies that we invest in or are like to invest in or kind of just speaking biblical truth to corporate power. And, you know, one of the things we hear is often that, number one, these people have never heard. they tell us they've never heard from a faith-based investor before.

They've been doing their job for 20, 30 years. You know, executive major organizations never heard from a faith-based investor. So, number one, they need to hear our voice. Number two, they're thankful to hear it. Even in some of these sort of, you know, woke businesses you think that this don't care, there are people in those businesses of influence that actually do care about what we have to say and oftentimes have enough influence to change things. So, for instance, Costco stopped giving money to gay pride parades.

Chevron stop giving money to Planned Parenthood. There's a laundry list of other organizations that have changed things. That is unbelievable. Robert Nelson, that is unbelievable. It is so wonderful. I want to tell people, folks, what you do and don't do, you can change the world if you take an interest in this. When I hear that a company like Costco would stop giving money to something like that

or Chevron, these are huge, huge companies. And you shop there. your money may be invested there. When we get involved in these things, we can change the world. So I want to say the action point is go to invest. I'm sorry, inspireadvisors.com slash Eric. Inspireadvisors.com slash Eric. You'll get a free report that will help you figure this out.

And I know, Robert, that you guys will help people if they want to transition to invest in companies that believe in their values. But this is a gigantic thing that we have, I mean, it's to me scandalous when we have power and we don't use that power. It's like when I say, I'm not going to vote. I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to do that. When you don't do those things, people who don't share your values, who share opposite, who have opposite values, they're going to prevail. So I just want to say to you, Robert, thank you for taking this on. because it is game-changing. Like you said, it's a movement.

The more people that do this, it's an amazing thing when we think of the money that is out there, that many people of faith with traditional values have invested in woke companies. Ladies and gentlemen, you've got to do something about it. You've just got to do something about it. This is like a mandate that we've got to live our faith out in every sphere and where your money is, that's a big deal. So please go to InspireAdvisors.com slash Eric.

This is a free report, inspireadvisors.com slash Eric. Robert Natsley, thank you. Pleasure. Thank you, Eric.