Merritt, welcome back to the Real Talk with Zubi podcast. How you doing, man? Doing good, doing good. It's a pleasure to be back. Thank you for having me on. No doubt, man. It's a pleasure. People really enjoyed the last conversation that we had, so definitely came to do another one. So first of all, tell me what you've been up to since our last conversation. Yeah, yeah. So if folks remember the last time we met, it was several months ago, I believe,

we were talking about my little discussion with the connectlies, who are very famous Protestant teachers and speakers who go from college to college.

And if you remember, towards the end of our little discussion,

I mentioned that I was working on a book that would kind of address some of the major issues

that we somewhat touched on. And so since then, the book has been written, it's been published,

it's being disseminated as of now. The name of the book is called

Defending the Ancient Faith, and so I've been doing a lot of work pretty much surrounding

that. We've had a number of different book programs across different states in the United

States. I've even traveled back home to Ethiopia. We've had a little book released there as

well. So that's kind of been

the main work right now for me has been the book disseminating it, having the opportunity

to meet with different audiences and different people from different demographics across

different countries. So that's kind of been the focus right now.

Awesome, man. Well, you've kind of touched on it already, but how has your life changed since that viral debate?

Oh, I think in many ways it's changed, but also I would say in some ways it stayed the same.

And what I would say to kind of clarify that is I've always had a very active role I would say in serving

my religious community, my church. But I think with the kind of virality that's come in the past

couple months, it's only just intensified the role I've been playing. So it's not that I'm doing

anything different. It's just now I've intensified kind of my commitment to the service that I want to do.

And so it's given me the opportunity to kind of communicate with a lot of different people that I kind of didn't know or didn't have bridges to prior.

Especially I would say coming from an Orthodox church where there's a lot of different diverse local churches.

You have, you know, Coptics, you have Syriac, you have Armenians, you have Ethiopians, Eritrians.

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