The Eric Metaxas Show - Stephen Iacoboni

Episode Date: August 18, 2022

Joining Eric is the author of Telos: The Scientific Basis for a life of Purpose Stephen Iacoboni

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. The Texas show with your host, Eric Mettaxas. Hey there, folks. If you know me, you know that I love talking about faith and science. And I just came upon a book about faith and science. It's called Telos, the scientific basis for a life of purpose.

Now, being Greek, I already know what Telos means because it's a Greek word. But I won't spoil it. I will let my guest tell you all about it. His name is Dr. Stephen Yakoboni. Sounds Italian. Yacoboni. Stephen Jakoboni, who is an award-winning researcher. He has founded four cancer centers.

in the Pacific Northwest. Here's a guy who knows a little bit about science, the author of Tellos Stephen Yakuboni. Welcome. Thank you, Eric. It's really a pleasure and an honor to be here. Well, you sound very confused right out of the gate. It's my honor.

No, seriously, I can't help at noticing behind you a copy, not just of your book, but of my book. And I don't know if you did that on purpose, but all I can tell you is thank you, because you know how much I care about faith and science from my book is atheism dead. But what you write about in your book, you're taking a different angle on it. So let me ask the most obvious question.

You are an oncologist for decades doing what you do as a scientist, as a medical doctor. What led you to want to write a book about the scientific basis for a life of purpose? Well, that's a fantastic question, Eric. And the answer is actually not dissimilar to your journey, although your journey was more archaeological and biblical, which you chronicled in miracles. I came of age in the 70s, which was the time of the biologic revolution. And in those days, we were taught that science had shown that life is a chemical reaction. and that belief in a supreme being who did things in a mystical way was no longer necessary.

And I went to school in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and I was in the midst of the cultural revolution in those days, the 60s and the 70s. And I bought into all of that. And I lived that life for many, many years until two things happened. the first was that the gaps in the scientific atheism article argument instead of being narrowed between 1970 and 1999 actually widened as you chronicle in your book. Yeah, it's kind of amazing, right?

I'm always amazed by these things, but then I'm further amazed by the fact that nobody knows this. So people like you and me, we have to write books about it to tell people, hey, look what happened. But anyway, okay, so you're telling us the story. Continue. And then the other thing was that I was in academic oncology at MD Anderson. Some people say it's the best cancer center in the world, certainly one of the top. And I was a junior professor there, and I realized that we weren't addressing anything spiritual.

It was sort of like a protocol factory, and I actually ended up getting as far away from that as I could. I went to a small town in eastern Washington, farmers, grape growers, winemakers. And my patients were mostly churchgoing Christians, and they were very faithful. And when they got to the end of their cancer journey, they wanted answers from me. They were outside of science, and I didn't have those answers. And I realized I had to get those answers. And so I went back, and I studied the scientific atheism of Dawkins and everybody that I had bought into. to and I realized how actually wrong it was.

And I began my spiritual journey back to faith. And I'm affiliated with Discovery Institute. And the more I read about how wrong the scientific atheism argument is, the more compelled I was. And then exactly like you, I realized, nobody, hardly anyone else knows this. Even with the books being published by Discovery, a lot of those books are written by PhDs for other PhDs. And I wrote this book for the average person to understand the science of God. As you know, that's exactly why I wrote my book. And it warms my heart to hear you say that. Because as important as it is, extremely important for PhDs to write books for other PhDs,

folks like you and me need to write books for everyone else because this is such earth-shattering news. It is so countercultural, paradigm-shifting, seismic information coming out of science, pointing to God, and virtually no one knows about it. So that's why when I saw your book, I said, I've got to get you on here, because everyone needs to know what is going on. And it's funny because I want to ask you so many questions. The first question is, when did you – when did the penny drop for you? In other words, when was it that you went on this journey? You said that you moved to, is it Oregon or is it Washington? And you're a doctor there.

You're an oncologist there. And suddenly at some point, you realize you don't have these answers. When was that roughly? What decade are we talking about? It was in the 90s and became more and more intense in the 20 years after the millennium change. I was in Washington State on the border of Oregon. I actually practiced in both states, had a satellite office in Oregon.

I found that my patients wanted that from me, and the instinct of a doctor is at first instinct is to not want to get into that because it's outside of our lane and messy. But my patients more or less demanded it of me, and what happened was when I finally gave in to offering spiritual advice only when asked, of course, because you can't just proselytize in the clinic, that the patients loved it.

And they already had an inclination that the science of atheism was permeating their world, even though we were out in the middle of Walla Walla, Washington. And that's what really got me going, was I thought, well, you know, the people in New York and San Francisco can play these stupid intellectual games, but the rest of us don't care.

Unfortunately, it's getting through to the population, in a subliminal way. That's right. And I said, I've got to stop this. Well, that's exactly right. And the reason I titled my book is Atheism Dead is because I realized in 1969, when Time Magazine puts the question, is God dead in the middle of every living room, that's trickled down culture.

Suddenly, these terrible ideas from the universities and the intellectual world trickle down. And they just create an atmosphere, a default. atmosphere in effect. And you're, you're telling me that you're picking that up in Walla Walla, Washington. Is it literally Walla, Walla, Washington? Are you just using that as a metaphor for, you know, Boise or, I don't know? It literally is Walla Walla Bing Bang, Washington State. It's an Indian word. It means many waters, and a famous missionary came here named Whitman, not Walt Whitman, and founded a fort here. And actually, Whitman College, one of the top colleges in the Northwest, is in Walla Walla.

Okay. So, but your larger point, as we're saying, it's very close to my heart, and it's what I talk about wherever I go. So when I saw your book, I got very excited about it. So I want to ask you, first of all, to save my audience from hearing me talk more than I already do. tell us about the title, Telos. What is the word telos and why is it the title of your book? Well, you're the first host who's known that word, and of course you'd have to because it's a Greek word. And it is a word that Aristotle used to describe the world around us.

And we all understand that there were Greek philosophers, Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle. and Aristotle in particular, in those days, as you know, the philosophers had nothing to do but look around the world. They didn't have equipment. They didn't have data. They didn't have labs. Aristotle looked around the world and he realized what every 10-year-old realizes. Remember being 10 years old and walking outside and seeing a bird flutter around

and an aunt getting up food and your dog running around with pads on his feet? In nature, everything is designed for a purpose so that the creature can survive. We're going to have to pause there, folks. That's a cliffhanger. You'll hear the rest from the author of Tellos. We'll be right back. In case you haven't been paying attention, the Biden administration has caused a financial crisis, and they have no clue how to fix it.

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Vivalor has helped those with normal memory, mild or severe memory loss, and it can help you. Vivalor has many brain-fortifying nutrients to help focus in memory. Don't wait until your memory slips. invest in your memory now. Vivalore is V-I-V-O-L-R. Get 30% off with code Eric. Memories are real treasures. Keep yours. Help us pray for miraculous healings that give God glory. V-V-A-L-O-R dot com, and use code Eric. Vivalore.com, use the code Eric. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to Dr. Stephen Yacoboni, who is the author of a brand new book called Telos, the scientific basis. for life of purpose and Dr. Yakuboni, you were just talking about the meaning of the word

tell us and how everywhere we look in nature, we see that things are designed for a purpose, or I guess the other word for that is an end. Everything has an end. There are different ways the words can be used, but that's what the word tellos means. Right. It is, it means the end as it was intended. In other words, even though Christ was 300 years away from, appearing on earth at the time of Aristotle, and Aristotle was mostly a deist, he realized that the world was made of things, living things,

who were designed with everything about them for a purpose. So if you look at your dog or you look at a horse and whiskers and eyelids and their ears have a funnel, ears are the way they are because it funnels the sound in. And eyelids are there to keep things from getting in your eyes. and he, as a pure biologist, realized these things didn't happen by accident. Nature or whatever you want to call it, designed life so that the end would come out the way it was supposed to. So as St. Augustine, I mean, St. Thomas Aquinas said, as the acorn becomes a tree and not a bush or a shrub, everything comes out as it intended.

So Tilos means the end as it was intended. And the importance of that is that, as you know, and you point out in your book, the scientific atheism argument is things appear attended, like the sun appears to go around the earth. But the science really says that everything on earth, including our lives, is an accident. There is no God. And we are just alone in the universe. That's the most devastating lie told by anybody at any time. And it is destroying our culture. Well, that's very heavy. I wasn't expecting you to go there, but that's, of course, exactly correct. And it needs to be said, or I want to underscore it, that, and again, I talk about this wherever I go. If you say there is no God, there's absolutely no God, therefore there's no meaning in the universe, everything is random. If you can really wrap your head around that, it is the bleakest, most nealistic, depressing,

nightmare imaginable, and if you have the intellectual courage to see it, you would at least say that that's true. It's depressing. The good news that you know and I know, not only is that not true, but we now know increasingly from science itself that if you just want to look at the evidence, let's say you don't want to believe in God, but you look at the evidence, if you're intellectually honest, you're going to see, okay, it looks very, very strongly that there is a that there's a designer. But it's kind of funny how Aristotle kind of picks this up, and pretty much everybody assumes this until you get to the 19th century and Darwin.

I point out in my book that Aristotle created these concepts, and they were amplified by the great St. Thomas Aquinas, who many believe is the greatest theologian in the history of Christianity. He certainly is one of the top five. and he used Aristotle for a lot of his metaphysics. What I point on in the book is that if Christianity, this is before the Reformation, so it wasn't about Protestant versus Catholic,

if that was true, how did it get lost? And I chronicle in the book for the sake of understanding how we got here is that scholasticism of Aquinas was overshadowed and sort of put to the side by Descartes and then Newton. Now, they basically said, well, we don't need telos because that's spiritual and that's gone. It's not science. And we want to limit science to the things we can know and leave life and the explanation of life to vitalism. But we have to be clear that that is very subjective.

In other words, they make it sound scientific, but it simply doesn't follow. I mean, if Newton is talking about a mechanistic universe, first of all, Newton was a Christian. But even if he's talking about a mechanistic universe, the implication might be that there's no God. But Newton certainly didn't believe that. So it's just kind of weird how ideas develop over time. But so you're saying that Aquinas, at that point, we don't have a problem. We have a problem once we get to the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, I guess. That's where you're going.

That's exactly right. And I know you wrote about Newton in your book. And Newton actually, it's one of the greatest sort of tragedies in the history of science that Newton said that he was reading the mind of God and limiting what he said to pure mechanics and that he had no jurisdiction or no ability to talk about living things in the way that Emmanuel Kant later said, of course not. Biology is inscrutable. What happened in the 19th century? What does the Michael Kant know about biology? There's a question. He knew a lot about mechanism.

He knew a lot about a lot of things. And so there's something called the Newton of the Leaf. There's a famous quote where he said, Never will there be an Isaac Newton who can describe the genesis of a single blade of grass. And so that's called the Newton of the Leaf. And Kant is famous for a great quote, which actually pertains to Telos. And understanding life, he said, life is cause and effect of itself, meaning that everything else in the world that you make like your car or your battery or your phone is made by somebody else.

Life makes itself. Life is self-sustaining, and that's one of the fundamental differences of life. In other words, organisms don't need external agents to make themselves. Now, they need food and water and they need an environment, but they reproduce themselves by themselves. They reproduce themselves, and they make themselves. So, for example, the whole idea of AI replacing life is, first of all, you'd just, well, you'd have to have an AI that thinks, which will never happen. But even if you did, it would have to reproduce itself to be life. And that's never going to happen, no matter what they say. And that goes back to Girdle's Incompleteness theorem, which basically, I think, it proves that AI will

never be what people say it is. Well, that's, I don't want to get, I don't want to get too far into that, even though that's, I would love to talk about that. But just to track with you, So you're saying that Kant says, which I think is true, that life is self-replicating. But does he imply, because I don't know, does Kant imply that this is the process of, that this is random? Or does he say that there is a God behind it? How does he frame it? Oh, he says that there's a God and that life is inscrutable. And he was just trying to point out, in those days, the scientists,

for saying, like Laplace had said, we have need for the God hypothesis, as Steve Myers' famous book says, the title of, and Kant was saying no, you do need the God hypothesis, you'll never understand life. But getting back to what happened was the mechanisms of Newton were so successful that the scientists decided that they would explain life on the basis of the mechanics. And Newton had no intention of it happening that way. And so his work was totally turned to. on its head. And here we are stuck with this huge mistaken impression that life is mechanistic when it's not. As you know, if you read my book, Is Atheism Dead? I talk about James Tour from Houston and Abbey O'Genesis. And I, really, one of the reasons I wrote the book, is that I realized I hadn't thought about this, this issue of life emerging from non-life. It is the most dramatic leap imaginable that somebody would say, science can show us how you go from literally non-life, there's no life, to life, which is, you know, single-celled organisms. The simplest life is a single cell, which is unbelievably complex.

And it's just interesting to me that we rarely deal with that. But obviously, you're saying that it was Newton that kind of bumped science along that line, that everything is explainable by mechanics or by cause and effect, and that we don't need a prime. mover, I guess. I don't know. Where do you come out? Well, Newton actually believed that we needed a prime mover. It was his descendants 200 years later, who when they found that chemistry could define life that they found that you can synthesize urea in a test tube, they thought, oh, life is chemical. And from there, they kept going until they found DNA, and then they found genes. And it was in the 50s and the 60s, where Watson and Crick said, you're just the expression of the DNA molecules

in your body and you're just a chemical mechanism, which is why people keep saying it's in my DNA. And I was 19 at the time, and I said, yeah, that's right. Now we know the DNA is the weakest sister in the whole cellular mechanism. And I talk about the origin of life as the absolute failed benchpin. and the atheism argument, it can never be overcome, as James Tuer said. And so beyond, and so the point is, like Darwin said, that natural selection operates on or creatures that want to survive. And I said, well, why do a cluster of molecules want to survive?

They have to be purpose-driven. So life is purpose-driven at its root. This is heavy stuff, folks. I hope you're tracking. We're talking to Dr. Stephen Yakoboni. that's Italian. That's Italian. And the book is called Telos, the scientific basis for a life of purpose. I just love the conversation. So grateful to you, Dr. Yakoboni for the book. And for this time, we'll be right back with plenty more. Don't Go Away. Tell me, Eric, why is Relief Factor so successful at lowering or eliminating pain? I'm often asked that question. The owners of Relief Factor tell me they believe our bodies were designed to heal. That's right, designed to heal. And I agree with them. So the doctors who formulated relief factor for them selected the four best ingredients, yes, 100% drug-free ingredients, each helps your body deal with inflammation.

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really came up with this preposterous idea. We certainly know it's preposterous now, for honest, that life emerged from non-life. If you believe in evolution or natural selection, which I don't, but if you do, you can see the mechanism. There's a mechanism, reproduction, and you can see how things would change over time. You can get that idea. But the idea of life emerging from non-life where there can be no evolution, you got nothing, and then you got life. it seems to me that scientists are very wary of talking about that, that they, I think probably my guess is by now they're embarrassed

because they know that you can't get, you know, from A to Z in a single bound. That's exactly right, Eric. And one of the things I did in my search for answers was to try and get the atheist scientists to slip up and admit something. and so there was a book by Franklin Herald called The Ways of the Cell, and I wrote a six-page chapter in the book on him. And he ends his chapter by saying,

even though I am a scientific atheist, we still don't understand the origin of life, and until we do, the mystics and the skeptics will continue to say that there is a God. And he was an emeritus. emeritus. And so he couldn't get in trouble to get fired because he wrote this book being slightly honest. What I write in my book is

I try to stick to everything that is considered accepted science. I don't try and make things up. And so the received wisdom is that the universe is 15 billion years old with the Big Bang, which you write about, and then Earth formed and

it took a long time in a billion years later there was life. So as Tour says, and everyone knows, you can't get there from here, period. And so my book also goes on to say that there is a mystical force called Tilos. I just call it Tilos, because Aristotle calls Tilos. And I point out that he's a smart guy, not me. And that somehow there is a driving force in nature that drives all living things. And it drove the first cell somehow to become alive. And, of course, that's a fantastic thing to say, but I point out, we're familiar with forces

that push things and propulsion and baseball bats and windmills. There are invisible forces that we're familiar with, like gravity. You can't see gravity, but you know it's there. Well, if you walk outside and you look around at the purpose-driven behavior of every single living thing

in every moment of its life, except for when we sit and watch TV, We are purpose-driven, and there has to be an explanation for that. And in fact, as Tuer says in your book, unless these molecules were somehow purpose-driven, there could be no life, but there is life. So that is my attempt at explaining it. And, of course, in the first book, I couldn't get any further into the weeds on that. I just wanted to give non-scientists the understanding that there is this mystical force,

which is spiritual in nature, which is the only explanation for life on earth, and therefore we must understand, like you said, atheism is dead. Well, I mean, I don't see any other conclusion, and I try to be polite about it. In other words, if you want to say, look, I don't like the idea of God, I have questions. I say, well, I have questions too, but I don't see how intellectually knowing what we now know. I mean, it's one thing to be talking in the 50s or even in the 60s where you had this paradigm that was just everywhere. It was really impossible to see what we could see now. But as you're saying, it's kind of like with the fossil record, the decades pass and you don't get the transitional forms.

You get less and less and less. I mean, you get the opposite. You get more piles and no transitional forms. Similarly, with this, we know more and more and more and more. And the fine-tuning and the obviousness of the complexity of a single cell, we could say, hey, we didn't know a few decades ago. but now we do, so we're kind of stuck. We're absolutely at that point. And like I said, I was a committed scientist,

and I wanted to be a famous cancer researcher. And I bought into all of that because it was necessary to join the club. So I was a junior professor at NB. Anderson. And I became disillusioned, and I said, I don't know what my life is here for, but I have to go somewhere else and find it. And as you said, all of those, ideas we had way back in 1960, 1970, have turned out to be false. In fact, when I was still

sort of an atheist and I was struggling with my atheism, I read Dawkins book, and I had the same reaction that you did to reading Hitchens. And I, of course, never had any urge to read Hitchens. But I read Dawkins and I go, this is ridiculous. How could you write this book as an Oxford professor and say these things. You obviously think your audience is stupid, and so that just pushed me further. So what year was that, roughly? This is the early 2000s?

It was a 1999-2000, yeah. So you were still effectively an atheist at that point? I was. I was an atheist for 25 years, and I encountered some quasi-mystical experiences with my dying page, which is one of the great things about oncology. People say oncology is depressing.

It isn't. It's the most exhilarating thing in the world. If you can take the drama. And when I embrace the drama and my patients struggle for life and death, they revealed things to me that can't be revealed in any other way. And so I wrote another book about that. It was my patience and their faith in dying that moved me to the point where I had to give in to faith. I have to say that's beautiful. I want to hear more about that. We've got plenty time talking to Dr. Stephen Yacoboni. The book is Telos. We'll be right back.

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We're talking to the author of Tellos, the scientific basis for Life of Purpose, Dr. Stephen Yakoboni. You just were referencing your previous book, The Undying Soul, that you. Your journey, and I'm always fascinated with people's stories, that you yourself, you're an oncologist, you're dealing with cancer, you're dealing with patients dying, and that led you to think more deeply than just the material realm. So tell us what you can about that, if you would. So the book is a series of stories. Each chapter is a story. The previous book. The previous book, The Undying Soul.

It's a collection. Each chapter is a story of my interaction with patients. And it starts out with my being as a scientific atheist in the ivory halls of M.D. Anderson, treating people and watching them die and the suffering and lack of succor that was going on, it became very difficult. And I decided I needed to get out into the world and treat patients my own way. If you don't mind my asking, why do you suppose it was difficult for you and maybe not for some of your colleagues? In other words, was there something in your past?

Because I imagine that oncologists typically would steal themselves against getting too emotionally involved because it would be painful. Most oncologists do, and I did. I don't know what. I guess I must be accessible in some way. But when I had colleagues who would go in the room and say to somebody, You're going to die. I'm sorry, I got to rush out of here. And that would be that.

And I would go in the room and say, I want to tell you that, you know, the test is not good and the treatment's not working. And then I'm in the room for two hours. And, of course, I didn't mind being in the room for two hours. That's my job to heal the soul as well as the patient. But then I realized the chemicals aren't working, but the spiritual or the emotional support is what they need. And, of course, you're Greek. I'm Italian. I was raised as a Roman Catholic.

And I had 12 years of Catholic school, and it was ingrained in me how Christ was the great healer and that he took care of the least among us. And all of that background in my life somehow came out, and I couldn't escape it. And I thank God every day that it didn't. My atheism was a burden, and I got it off like a bad cold. That's, I mean, it's extraordinary. So when did that book come out, The Undying Soul? It came out in 2010. It was self-published.

And one of the most successful self-published books. But I've sold about 5,000 copies on my own, out of the back of my station wagon, so to speak. And I still have it, and it's going up on my website soon. Well, I mean, that's important because I think, you know, we're touching on so many things here. But one of the things we're talking about is, how it is that science and then medicine became increasingly secular materialist.

In other words, when you think about a doctor, most of us would think about somebody who cares about healing and who cares about the patient. It's not just manipulating chemicals and so on and so forth. But what you're saying is that, you know, 20 years ago when you're at Andy Anderson, that somehow there was this pressure not to be that guy, not to be the person with a bedside manner who actually cares for the human, but that you're just dealing with a body and with cells, and that troubled you.

So it's interesting to hear you talk about that, because I think when we talk about health care today, a lot of people have that frustration, that doctors, they're in, they're out, they don't seem to be what many of us have led to believe a doctor ought to be. So you probably know, remember Marcus Welby, and that's, I think, what you're referring to. And when I went to medical school, my professor said, you want to be as unlike Marcus Welby as possible. And so I introduce each chapter in my book with a poem.

And one of my favorite stanzas goes like this. Remember then when your patient comes to you pleading. Your primary goal is to just stop the bleeding. remember we taught you they have not a soul mechanic to machine so noble a goal that's what medicine has become it's frightening it's frightening you wrote that's my poem yeah

that's the stanza of one of the poems yeah that sarcastic poem i was going to say who wrote that trash but you wrote it sarcastically so it's not trash it's actually terrible it's a point out that exactly the problem that you say that we're taught to treat people like their machines and we're mechanic and that's the most horrible thing.

It's a very sad thing in medicine like that. The only doctor poet I can think of as William Carlos Williams, and even his poems were not as depressing as that one. So you did that very deliberately, obviously. Yes, yes. Well, there are other poems that are very uplifting. And they introduce each chapter and what's going to be said in each chapter.

That poem introduced what I struggled with, and I realized how horrible it was to take that. approach and I had to liberate myself from that. Yeah, and of course I'm mostly joking, but it is very important for us to understand that everyone who's a doctor struggles with this, that they're being told, you know, yeah, you're a mechanic. But I think that the doctors most people seek out, including non-believers. You don't have to be a Christian or a person of faith to seek out somebody who looks at you holistically, who doesn't see you as a conglom. of chemicals as we've been so often taught, that that's simply not true. A person is more than that.

And that gets to the heart of what you're talking about in the book Telos. So tell us more about the book Telos, what you say in it. Well, we start with the observation. The way I wrote the book was I start by talking about just things that everyone can relate to. Because again, the book is not really for scientists, although there's a fair amount of science and philosophy in it. But it's at about senior high school level, I think. But I just talk about the fact that a lot of people don't understand, like you said, people aren't aware of these things. People think that when a salmon fry, which is three inches long and leaves the mouth of the

Columbia River, with a brain the size of a grain of rice, travels 8,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean, comes back, finds its river of origin, goes upstream and spons. People go, oh, well, that's just what they do. It's not just what they do. It's a mystery that's totally inexplicable by science. There's a book by someone at the Discovery Institute. I can't think of the title now, but there's a book about this, about animal behavior and exactly what you said. And it is one of the most amazing books.

I need to get the title of that. I've had the author on this program. But what you just said, we need to think about that. The mystery, tremendous, tremendous mystery in the natural world. And some people say, it's nothing. Look the other way. We refuse. We'll be right back.

Folks, the headline is we need your help. What do I mean by that? I mean at least three things by that. Number one, if it's possible for you to get to be part of our studio audience, August 3rd, 4th, and 5th, and 8th. New York. This week, it starts about 4 o'clock every day. We're taping the late night, the talk show with Eric Metaxus. It is a mainstream TV talk show. We don't have time to get into it now, but it's nuts. We've got a lot of mainstream guests. It's going to be a blast. We can't share

most of it with you yet. But if you can get there, go to Eric Mataxis.com. You'll see where it says speaking or schedule, whatever, and you click on it. Every day, you can sign up through, event bright. We'd love you there all four days or just one day. You can bring as many people as you want to sign them up. But this is going to be a wild, fun thing. We need some fun, folks. We need some fun because there's a lot of tough stuff going on. But we want you to be there. Please do what you can. That's number one. Number two, if you follow me on social media, let me just ask you, instead of liking what I put there, would you retweet it or would you share it? Would you share it on Facebook. I'm trying to get a lot of information out. And I don't think I've ever said this before,

but a lot of times people will like something. We need to get the word out. We are being suppressed. We know that what we're doing, whether we're being shadow banned, I don't mean to sound like, you know, like the, like Chicken Little. This is actually, or not Chicken Little, who am I looking for? Oh, the boy you cried Wolf. This is actually happening. We need your help, folks, to multiply our message. Everything we put out, it's a struggle. So whatever you can do to help us. And speaking of helping us, as you know, every couple times a year, we try to raise funds for an organization that we think worthy. At the top of the list is Food for the Poor. Food for the Poor is an amazing Christian

non-profit relief organization. They go where there is a need. And I just want to tell you, right now, they are helping families who have fled the Ukraine. Now, we don't need to get into the politics of it. These are people that are suffering, and we want to show them the love of God. We want to help them. Food for the Poor, I can't think of anybody that I would trust more to do that. So Food for the Poor is partnering with a number of Christian organizations, relief organizations, ministry partners, to get food, literal food to these families.

that have fled their homes, they've left everything behind. If you know anybody who's ever been through anything like this, my parents experienced this kind of thing, it's hellish. And we want to show them the love of God. So I want to ask you simply to call this number to help, or you can just go to the banner. Our banner is metaxis talk.com. That's the radio banner. We want you to give. We want you to give generously. We just want everybody who listens to this program to do what you can. By God's grace, we are able to do something. Let's do what we can. So please go to metaxis talk.com, or you can call this number. I'll give it to you right now. 844-863 hope. Please dial that number. Please give what you can now. It's August 1st. We don't have a lot of time to do this.

It's always a struggle. God bless you as you give. 844-863 hope. 844-863 hope. These are people are struggling and we need to do what we can to help them. 844-863 Hope, 844-863 Hope. Metaxistalk.com. You'll see the banner there. And Albin and I will shortly let you know everybody who gives anything. We will put your names in a hat, so to speak, proverbial hat, and we'll have a number of grand prize winners.

We want to give you signed books and all kinds of things. And I always say anybody who can give $10,000. as tax deductible, I'd be delighted to have dinner with you, to spend an evening with you. We always manage to make that work. So remember 844-863-hope, 844-863 hope, or go to metaxis talk.com. God bless you.