The Eric Metaxas Show - THE INTERVIEW with Hugh Hewitt, featuring Eric Metaxas

Episode Date: February 22, 2021

After 30 years of working to perfect the art of the interview, Hugh Hewitt has launched a new podcast called "The Interview" that features conversations from now back through the past several decades. Here's a sample of Hugh's conversation with Eric Metaxas about Eric's new book A Fish Out of Water. To hear the entire episode, subscribe to "The Interview" on Apple (http://apple.co/3qLlOjZ), Google (http://bit.ly/3qNgQDt), Spotify (https://spoti.fi/3uxxNEm), or at the SalemPodcastNetwork.com.

Hello, Eric McTaxis, listeners Hugh Hewitt here, and I want to let you know that I've just launched a new podcast. It's called The Interview. Over 30 years, I've tried to perfect the art of the interview. I've done more than 25,000 of them that does not count callers of the radio show. And on this new podcast, the interview, you'll hear new interviews as well as interviews from the past 30 years. And this week, I spoke with Eric McTaxis himself about his new book, A Fish Out of Water. Here's a sneak preview of that interview, and I'd invite you to check out the entire episode by subscribing to the interview with Hugh Hewitt at Apple, Google, Spotify, or Salempodcastnetwork.com.

People who know you from TBN, from the radio, from the National Prayer Breakfast, from Bonhoeffer, from Luther, from Wilberforce, from everything that you've done, will not think of you as a Queens kid. They simply will not. It's stunning how much of a Queens kid you are. I mean, Yale, Queens, it doesn't go together. And moving from Queens to Danbury, as you communicate effectively and fish out of water, I grew up in Warren, Ohio, and we moved a couple of times. We stayed in Warren. It would be like going from Warren to Atlanta.

I mean, it's a giant cultural drift. It's down the rapids. It couldn't be much bigger in America, right? I mean, you go from being an immigrant from New York. city city and I don't mean fancy city New York, which is Manhattan. I mean Queens. Growing up in the world of the Greek Orthodox Church and the Greek Orthodox Parochial School, you know, all our friends are European immigrants, and then suddenly moved to Danbury, Connecticut, where you don't wear a school uniform, you play baseball, football, kickball, you go, you ride your

bike, you go fishing. This was like moving to, you know, Huck Finn's Mississippi. This was a, this was moving to America. It was my first real experience of America, America. And I never, all this stuff, Hugh, what's so interesting is I never really processed some of this stuff. And writing this book, you know, I title the chapter Moving to Danbury. I title it Moving to America. Because for me, that's what it was. I became fully American when we moved to Danbury, Connecticut, which is a working class town just beyond the gravitational pull of New York City. Now, you're a decade behind me, but we're watching the same TV. I'm just older than you.

And by the way, I'm checking up, but go ahead. We're watching Red Skelton. We are watching laughing. We are watching the same TV. And you detail this through the eyes of the Greek world. Now, my giant experience with Greek America is going to the Episcopal, to the Greek Orthodox Church dances, and going to, which they would put on for kids in the summertime,

to get us into trouble, and watching my big fact Greek wedding. And so when you talk about... I want my book to supplant my big fat Greek wedding as the cultural touchstone for Greek Americans because I enjoyed my big fat Greek wedding, but that's kind of the, it's kind of the tacky Chicago cartoon version of the Greek immigrant experience. And so it's way better than nothing. But my story of growing up among the Greeks, I think, is probably... more typical, more nuanced, in some ways genuinely funnier because it's so true.

The interview with Hugh Hewitt, available now on Apple, Google, Spotify, and at Salem Podcast Network.com.