The Eric Metaxas Show - James Orr (Continued)

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

Why Technology Will Never Replace the Mind: James Orr

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. We'll get you from point A to point B. But if you're looking for point C, well, buddy, you're on your own. But if you'll wait right here, in just about the two minutes, the bus to point C will be coming right by. And now here's your Ralph Cramden of the airways, Eric Mott, Texas. Now, sometimes it will be the case that tracking truth will confer adaptive value. Right? If you can know that there are two tigers in the next door valley and two tigers in the other valley, you know, it's good. more likely to survive.

But there are other, you can imagine all sorts of other scenarios in the history of hominids where belief, falsehood tracking will confer adaptive value. After all, what is it the atheist tell us about where religion must have come from? It is a sort of, it is a belief that systemat, a set of beliefs that are systematically false, but must have confered some sort of adaptive value, maybe the consoling power, or it's a very convenient social technology or a coordinating mechanism or something. Some just-so story about how we got religion.

And that seems to be all you're really allowed to help yourself to on a kind of strictly atheistic account, evolutionary account of human origins and development. And so Lewis's point and buttressed by Plata here with a bit more sort of analytic philosophical firepower is simply that naturalism refutes itself, like a strictly naturalistic account, of evolution, effectively ends up sawing off the branch that it's sitting on, because it can give

no account of the reliability of our cognitive faculties, because it can only give an account of our development in terms of survival tracking. I want to talk a little bit about materialism, but before that, you know, when we think of the West, can't help thinking of the Enlightenment. That's just me. But the idea of reason, the reasonableness of reason, the efficacy of reason, and then, of course, the limits of reason. So you spoke a little bit in one of the videos I watched, if you may have been the same one about Kant. Can you talk a little bit for someone like me who knows nothing of Emmanuel Kant and his critique of pure reason?

Yeah. So, I mean, Kant is the person we get the name, get the label, Enlightenment from. He writes this famous essay in 1784, Vastéiléren, what is enlightenment. And that age comes in it, known as the age of the Alvclaire, the German Enlightenment, or the Lumier in French, the sort of the light. So the German word for enlightenment is Alphclaren? Alcleron, yes. And the enlightening. It's like clearing it up. Yes, kind of. Clearing. It's so funny how German words. You're right. I hadn't thought about that.

Enlightenment sounds so much better than the up clearing up. Exactly right. And so he publishes in the summer of 1781 a book, The Critique de Heinzvenom, the critique of pure reason. And I was just actually lecturing to my students about this the other day. There's an ambiguity, I think, in that title. It can mean both the critique that reason undertakes, but also the critique that reason,

the critique of reason with reason as its target. Okay, so is that, was that an intentional double entendre? Because when you hear the title, it sounds like, you know, Luther calling, you know, reason. It sounds of self-reducing. Yes, exactly. So you're saying he was talking about both sides of it. I think so, yes.

And his basic point is that reason often has a tendency to overreach itself, particularly to range beyond what is given to us in sense experience. So Kant is wrestling, the two great streams of the philosophical tradition, one that tends to stress the validity of sense experience above all else, and the other that tends to stress the validity of reason above all else. And the question is, how do we reconcile these two traditions? And Kant's genius was to see that reason and experience might, somehow be woven together.

Reason mustn't overreach itself, mustn't go beyond what's given to us in sense experience. Nevertheless, sense experience on its own can't just be, it can't just be the whole story. It can't just be that we sort of, when we're experiencing the world, there's some sort of avalanche of raw, un-pixelated data that just sort of, you know, tumbles into our brains.

There must be some filtering mechanism. There must be something that's doing the pixelating. Why? Because we are undergoing intelligible experience. Nobody doubts that. Even if you're a brain in a vat or even if you're being persistently diluted, you're undergoing some kind of intelligible experience. And the world, he says, doesn't give itself ready-wrapped.

There's nothing in the world. There's nothing in atoms and laws of nature that pixelates itself. So he comes up with this very, very elaborate and sort of an interesting fusion in the critical philosophy over the course of the 1780s. But what you see here, again, as well, with Descartes we talked about a little bit earlier is again, whether he's right or wrong, again, you see this turn to the subject,

the turn towards thinking about reality and thinking about the deepest problems that reality gives us, fundamentally in terms of the subject and of the self. It's my mind, it's my reason. And very often, certainly in the what is Enlightenment essay, the notion, the way Enlightenment is understood

is primarily through autonomous reason. The idea that reason is something that couldn't possibly be distributed, that reason isn't something that could be given to us by the church or through scripture or through tradition, but really is something that we're kind of born with and that we have to sort of exercise ourselves. And that's the sort of kernel of the kind of enlightenment thinking as we start to, now, as we start as we think back on it today. And it seems to me, I mean, look, it's so strange the way we periodize, you know, the way we carve up history. I mean, it's so self-congratulatory that term, Enlightenment. I mean, what comes before enlightenment. I mean, it's just like the dark ages. And death.

And, you know, it's amazing how kind of freighted and loaded these periodizations are. I mean, Renaissance, you know, what comes before the Renaissance, you know, it's death. You know, the darkness, it's death. The Middle Ages, you know, between what? The glories of Greece and Rome and then the rebirth of the glories of Greece and Rome. And as Tom Holland and others have shown, Greece and Rome, the moral universe of Greece and Rome was not necessarily enlightened and it wasn't something that would sort of excite us to think about new birth and life. So yes, I mean, the enlightenment, it always sits slightly uncomfortably alongside those two wellsprings of the West that you. I think absolutely correctly and plausibly described before of the Hellenic and the Hibraic.

In many ways it was an attempt to repudiate, certainly the Hibraic, but also the Hellenic. If you think of the Hellenic as people like Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics, I mean, what Descartes is repudiating, what Kant is trying to repudiate, what Hume and Barclay and Locke are throwing away, is that Hellenic inheritance, right? Plato and Aristotle believe, because Plato believes in a lot of spooky stuff, stuff. He may not believe in, you know, he may not have been an Abrahamic monotheist, but he believed that there is this timeless, spaceless world of forms. I mean, there is a platonic heaven. He certainly didn't believe that science was, was the be all and end all,

quite the reverse. He thought the world that science explores is contingent. It's constantly changing. It's constantly vulnerable to destruction. And so he, Plato was insistent that we can't have any certain knowledge of a world that is constantly changing. And there's something true about that. I mean, you know, if I found that my children were being taught physics from a textbook from the 1920s, I'd be concerned because science is changing the whole time. It's an unstable kind of knowledge in that sense. If I discovered that my children were being taught maths from a textbook from the 1920s, I'd be over the moon, right? I wouldn't be worried that they'd be teaching math They would be being taught mathematical errors.

And so for Plato and indeed for the theistic tradition, the idea that where the mind can latch on to truths that are transcendent, you're attaining knowledge that's actually more secure precisely because it's necessary, they're the necessary truth that you're tracking, the true no matter what. And that seems that's a very sort of plausible way of thinking. But it gets entirely, you know, both the Hellenic and the Hebraic,

many of the sort of insights of those two traditions of the Hellenic and their break get brushed aside effectively as an age of darkness that preceded the moment of enlightenment. But he's got the dirtiest job in town. Bending low at the people's feet on a windy corner of the dirty street. Numbers don't lie. The impact that balance of nature makes every single day is astounding. You can see the numbers for yourself on their web.

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MyPillow.com promo code Eric or call 800-9783057 to order now. MyPillow.com. As you go deep into the 18th century, I mean, you see. start to see the rise of a much more confident, self-confident unbelief. Is that Hume? Do we start with Hume? We see it in Hume, perhaps most brilliantly in Hume. I mean, David Hume, though I think he was wrong about, most things, is unquestionably the greatest philosopher that these islands have ever produced. He's a wonderful, wonderful thinker, and his dialogues concerning natural religion. I mean, you know, Richard Dawkins,

Daniel, then, and eat your heart out. I mean, it's just a wonderful, wonderful exercise in philosophy. published 1779, and very, very different from Kant's attack on natural theology and attack on the rationality of religious commitment. The German Enlightenment, you know, there was never an Enlightenment. There were, at best, Enlightenment. There was a German Enlightenment, which was very different from the Scottish Enlightenment, very different from the French Enlightenment and the Neapolitan Enlightenment and so on and so forth. But you do have a sort of shared hostility to religious belief.

In France and the French Enlightenment, it tended to be more of an institutional hostility, a sort of political anger at the church. In Scotland and in Germany, it was a little bit more of a kind of humane, a bit more sort of urbane and genteel kind of atheism. Kant is a kind of tragic figure in many ways because I think what Kant is trying to do in the critical philosophy is to say, look, theologians and believers

are an incredibly vulnerable place. if they naively try to argue for God from sense experience. Because as soon as they've done that, you're starting to get you getting very close to the idea that God is something that you can know, you can capture, as if you were just doing some scientific experiment. So there's something quite moving about what Kant tries to do. He says at one point in the preface,

the second preface to the critique of people, your reason the first critique. I've found it necessary to place to place limits on knowledge in order to make room for belief. And what he's saying is we've got to be able to sort of draw a distinction between knowledge and belief. Otherwise, if we start to turn belief into knowledge, then somebody's going to come along and show us that it is absolutely not knowledge. And that's going to be a torpedo in the rationality of religious commitment. It's going to unsettle everything.

So what he's really trying to do is he's trying to just say, look, these are the limits of reason, this is the limits of theoretical reason, but he then goes on to say, we can know God, not in the natural world, but we can know him in the moral world. There's a moral universe which is integrated, which makes sense, or at least which is only integrated and only intelligible if we grant that if we assume that God exists. We must so act as if God exists. this leads us to where I wanted to go. When you're talking about pure reason, I guess in some ways it's like just it's like talking about, you know, pure material. There's only material. It leaves out the moral question. It leaves out good and evil.

And that to me seems to be the fatal flaw of that kind of thinking because you could say, you know, we hold these truths to be self-evident that there is such a thing as good and evil. And some people would bravely argue with that, Nietzsche. But most people seem to sense innately. No, there's something called evil. There's something, there's this malevolence or there's certain things that move past. oh, it's tragic, it's awful, it's evil. And that, to me, is the ultimate question.

What does someone who is a strict materialist say about whatever, the murder of children or the torture of children? And so the larger question, what does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? I mean, it seems to me that the philosophers in Athens and, you know, the prophets in Jerusalem, they all dealt with these moral questions. So it's interesting that the West gets to a point where, you know, you get to Nietzsche and others who seem to think, no, those are just categories. Those are just that there's nothing there. Yeah. The interesting thing about Nietzsche, of course, is that it's a kind of backhanded compliment to God or to religion. Because he says that the reason that there's no goodness, the reason that we've got to do away with this idea that there's some kind of moral landscape out there, is that we've done away with the belief that there's a God out there.

So in a way, Nietzsche does see God and the good as conceptually complicit, that you can't have both. If you're getting rid of one, you've got to get rid of the other. He's honest. He's brave and honest. There's an honesty there. Whereas I think with some modern philosophers who want to be so-called moral realist, that is they want to claim that there is a moral universe out there, but there is no God out there, are playing a game of sort of intellectual twister.

You know, they've got one arm there, and they've got one arm sort of stretching. Now, it's not impossible. You could, for example, be a Platonist. You could say there is a good that's hovering as a kind of impersonal form. up there in Plato's heaven and you could be an agnostic. You know, you could say there's no God that it's just this, it's just this blob. It's like this metaphysical cloud. I mean, that wouldn't be insistent. Before you go too further, let me, I just want to ask, because when we're talking about God, you know, Aristotle says, a God is thought thinking thought. That's very different from

the Jehovah of the. Yes, the cosmic narcissist. It's very Athens versus Jerusalem idea. But it's interesting that I don't know who it was who said that oh evil is a privation of the good I don't know who that was Augustine You're sure It's a tradition

I mean he may not have been the first He's certainly the one to develop it The Privatio Boni tradition But it's interesting because as we're discussing good and evil it seems to me that that's not quite right Or maybe when you think of the privation of the good

The evilness of evil seems to me to be, there's something unique about malevolence that's different from merely a privation of the child. Maybe I'm overthinking it. I think, you know, the hole in your sock can be very irritating. What is it that's irritating you? Well, the absence of cloth, the privation of cloth. And so it's not, Augustine's point is not to sort of deny

or trivialize the reality of malevolence and evil and so quite the reverse. I mean, he's often... Well, it's accustomed. He's often criticised for overdoing that side of things. No, it's more that he's committed to this idea, or at least he converts to the idea, away from a much more Gnostic dualist understanding of the world,

of, you know, this is very crude, but roughly speaking, that matter is evil and to be deprecated and the immaterialist and the spiritualist is good. There's a very dualistic picture of the world. He comes to the... comes to the idea that all of reality, that all of reality distinct from God,

depends upon God, originates with God. And if God is also goodness, and God is the source of all goodness, how could it be the case that God creates evil? God brings evil into the world. He says, therefore, it must be the case that evil is not, as it were, a positive, created reality, but is simply a kind of ontological wasting disease.

Right? it's like cancer. What does cancer do to the cells? To my mind, there's no doubt about that. It's just sometimes the phrase, privation of the good doesn't do justice to the evilness of evil. Yes, I think that's probably right.

But one has to sort of back up a little bit and understand that it's Augustine's theological commitments, which are perfectly orthodox and intelligible theological commitments, whereby it says that it's got to be that evil has some other, there must be some other account of evil that is independent of God's agency and God's intent

and it can't have as it were any any positive created ontological status and that's not to say it can't have terrible consequences I mean you know what sinks the Titanic is it the iceberg or is it the absence of the steel in the hull It was the privation of steel in the hull and it was the pretty pretty a terrible

effects? Or is the privation of air in the chambers that filled with water? It's always the privation. We're talking... You don't get Swiss cheese without privations of cheese. That's, I was going to say, although are the holes in the Swiss cheese, those privations of cheese, not intrinsically part of the Swiss cheese itself? Holes are one of the most fascinating areas of philosophical inquiry. I know I'm out of my depth. Let's move on. Let's move on.

As you know, one of the friends of this program is the Herzog Foundation. If you're interested in homeschooling, education in general, quality K-12, Christ-centered education, we always say go to the Herzog Foundation. HurtsockFoundation.com. It's really important for people to understand that this is a phenomenon. Now, some people are well aware of this, but there are a lot of people, they have no clue. It is amazing, folks, and that's why I keep saying the Herzog Foundation is a place to kind of acquaint yourself. HertzogFoundation.com is the website.

And read Lion, R-A-D-L-I-O-N, readLion. ReadLion.com. There are all kinds of resources. This is a world. if you're a parent, it's a wonderful thing. We will be an amazing country if we get education right. I want to, at some point, you said, I think you were talking about the difference between orthodoxy and orthopraxy. I don't know where, but it's something I've thought about a lot in the last few years in particular.

And it all starts with Luther. I mean, for me, it starts with Bonhofer, but then it goes back to Luther, this idea that if, you, or I should say it really, it's, it really goes to the Enlightenment, that if you overfocus, for example, on theology, and you get overfocus on reason and rational statements about faith, you can substitute that for actual faith. And I think that actual faith, a kind of holistic, Hebraic view of faith, is different than a rationalist enlightenment view that I have to believe this and this and this and this and then that's faith. And so I don't know if you've written about that or talked about that, but it was just something I wanted to mention. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you go all the way back to the New Testament, there is this ambiguity in the Greek word, Pistuane, to believe or to have

trust. And depending on which case it takes, it can mean to believe that or to believe. in and Jesus often plays with this sort of language particularly in John you know believe in me believe the things that I have said because you should believe you know believe that because you're believing in because you should believe in me so this is appeal to testimony you know believe me because I'm telling you that it's true and I am who I say that I am so there's always that tension between knowing that and knowing how right you could you could be you could be somebody who's read every single bicycle manual in the world and memorized all of them

and still not know how to ride a bike. It seems to be that it's a different kind of knowledge. It still does, knowing how to write a bike, it still seems plausible. I mean, it does seem, it's a complicated activity, you know, it takes a little while to teach a kid how to, how to ride a bike. But we don't want to call it propositional knowledge. And yet the two are not completely distinct. It's not that they've got absolutely nothing to do with each other. They are integrated. And so the challenge is that integration, the orthodoxy with the orthopraxy.

And, you know, you see this in all sorts of different debates in the church, and you see it in this debate over liturgy. You know, should we, could we amend the liturgy to do X, Y, Z? And that's the old phrase, Lex or Ande, Lex Credendi. No, actually, the law of prayer or all, or, or, how you do things liturgically has an impact on how you believe things. The two have got to go together. It can't be that your liturgy is out of sync with what you claim that, what you claim that you're believing. That is, say, what you're doing in church and the service has to correspond, has to conform to,

even though it's not the same thing as, has to be expressive of the propositional knowledge, the propositional belief. That's, this gets right to the heart of the question. What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? because I think that the definition of faith to which most modern day Protestants and evangelicals subscribe is overfocused on the rational statements and things, whereas the Hebraic, and of course, that's always the tragedy with translations, but that to trust in something rather than, because we could say the devil believes in God. he doesn't trust in God. So he has faith that God exists.

He believes that God exists, but he hasn't given himself over to God and just the opposite. That to me seems to be at the heart of a problem that I think exists in the church today is this really enlightenment view of faith. Yes, I think that's exactly right.

And it's because the enlightenment gives us a very, anemic way of understanding reason. Ironically, the Enlightenment is not rational enough, you might say. It's a tradition that gives us a very rarefied, restrictive, narrow conception of what human reason is. Whereas I think if you, you know, if you, if you read Aquinas, you read the Great Scholastics, you read Augustine, Augustine understands that knowledge, reason, love, desire, the will,

all play, all as it sort of work together in a kind of harmony, a kind of symphony, or sometimes a disharmony or cacophony. But they're always very attentive to how these fit together. And they haven't got this sort of elevated, sort of almost fetishized view of what reason is, which tends to be sort of just calculative, deliberative. When, in fact, we reason about the world in all kinds of different ways. our reasoning is laced with our emotions. Sometimes it's laced with a particular psychological perspective. But that's what's so interesting.

They've moved away. And it doesn't make it irrational. They've moved away, right, they've moved away from a holistic view, a really human view. And it's like everything becomes atomized and digitized. And you realize, no, there's something, you know, why does an LP album have? There's something there that I can't get in digital music. What is that thing? But it's something.

And I think that that's what happens when you, as I said, overfocus or reason, you stretch it in a certain direction and you leave something behind. MyPillow's excited to announce they're extending the mega sale on overstock clearance and brand new products. This is your chance to grab incredible deals on some of My Pillows' most popular and newly released items. For example, save $40 on the new spring My Pillow bed sheets available in any size, any color. These luxurious sheets are designed for maximum comfort and breathability, perfect for a great night's sleep. Looking for a meaningful gift, save 30% on the brand new MyCrosses, inspired by the one Mike is worn every day for over 20 years. Go to MyPillow.com. Use promo code Eric or call 800978-3057.

MyPillow.com promo code Eric or call 800-9783057 to order now. I think when you get to this atomized conception of reason, then you stop thinking of reason as something, for example, that might be shared, that it might be a shared inheritance that traditions might carry within them, a reason that is too big for you to carry within your own head. And so with this very rarefied, restrictive kind of reason, you see this in the Enlightenment 2, you get this sort of ground zero mentality. It doesn't matter what came before. I've got my own reason now. I can work everything out myself. I don't need to defer to the cumulative wisdom of the past. I can think it all through myself.

You see it too in sort of theories of central planning. The idea that a civil servant in the middle of the government bureaucracy can just work out what the price of a pint of milk is going to be tomorrow morning. All right. It's just a question of reason and calculation. It's not. Nobody knows. No single person is rational enough.

to be able to work that out. Actually, but that's not to say that what the price of a pint of milk is tomorrow morning is some sort of, is irrational or something. No, it's not. It's a very, very, very precise signal and indicator, but it's too complex for one person to reason their way to it. It's something that's got to emerge organically in a relatively free marketplace where the price signal is what represents roughly the trade-off between the

aggregated desire for a pint of milk to buy a bite of milk and the aggregated desire to sell a pint of milk. Well, it's the same kind of out of touchness, to use an awkward phrase, that you see in social engineering. It's arrogant and it really is out of touch with humanity. It's this desire to make abstract what cannot be made abstract. Yeah. I think that's absolutely. Absolutely right. And if you think that what reason is, is not so much contact between mind and world, that is to say, contact between a reasoning mind and a world that is open to being reasoned about, that is intrinsically intelligible, but rather a reasoning mind that is imposing its structures on a kind of inert, random, chaotic world, which is basically the picture that human, others, and can leave us with, then there's no idea of any kind of reciprocity.

between mind and world. Obviously within a religious, within a kind of monotheistic universe, that's not at all the picture of reason and how the reasoning process works. That's not at all how it emerges. You have, the world is given to us. It's not something that reason can simply manipulate and make up, at least in its sort of fundamental character. It's given to us and it's given to us as something that reason can get its teeth into, that it can render. under intelligible, but it's, as it were, it's reading it. We're reading the world because it's, as it were, it's legible. It's, it's something the God's creative blueprint that animates the world renders it intelligible. It's something that we can track. It's not perfectly, but,

but we can read it. So it's a fundamentally different model. And what it means is that it's a model that does not permit us simply to construct the world as we would like it to be. It does not permit us to engineer society as we would like it to be. We've just got a few minutes left, but I wanted to go back to the question, what's the future of the West? Are you at all encouraged by some of the developments we've seen, a few of which we've barely alluded to, that there's hope for the West? Where do you see things now roughly? and yeah

Well I think we are definitely in a twilight phase you know dawn comes after dusk eventually but you know things are

civilizationally you know things feel let's say transitional it does feel as if what some have called the long 20th century has just drawn to a close and that we are on the threshold of something new.

There is some excitement in the air that there are things that we can be hopeful for, positive about. I'm not, you know, I'm not as terrified, for example, of AI and various technological developments as some people are. I think there are ways that we could harness that to achieve the goals of human flourishing. But broadly speaking, I do not think that secularizing the West has done anything other than introduce the sort of seeds of its own demise. And I think if we are going to have a future, then that future is going to lie with communities that are focused on what's eternal,

what's timeless and I believe that that's that's God I think that's a belief in the values that God has revealed to us and the hope that that transcends any any worldly catastrophe and disaster and that hope and confidence is what you know we know just from plenty of empirical work is what is most conducive to bringing new life into the world make bigger society happier societies, bigger families, smaller state. And so that's, we've got our work cut out. And in the end, you know, I just need to remember that hope is a virtue and despair is not just a sin, but one of the very worst of sins. That biological death is not death.

That we must simply, as I think Gandalf says to Frodo, we must simply, you know, work with the time that has been given to us. even if we had rather the ring had not come to us. I concur with those sentiments, and I'm so grateful for your time, Dr. James Orr, thank you. Great to be with you, Eric. Numbers don't lie. The impact that Balance of Nature makes every single day is astounding. You can see the numbers for yourself on their website at Balance of Nature.com. Listen to these stats concerning balance of nature's worldwide success. More than a thousand success stories reported each month, hundreds of thousands of customers

worldwide, millions of orders delivered each year, and billions, yes, billions of fruits and veggie supplements consumed by people who've decided to start living better. There's only one number missing and that's you. Do what I did and add yourself to these numbers. Start taking Bounce of Nature's Whole Food Supplements like so many others around the world. Here's another number that should get your attention. 35%. Use my discount code Eric to get 35% off plus free shipping and their money back guarantee. You must use my discount code Eric.

Call them at 800 24668-751 and use discount code Eric or order online at balance to nature.com. Use discount code Eric to get 35% off plus free shipping balance of nature.com. Folks, a lot of news to share right now. Okay, real quick, remember I was telling everybody to boycott Target because of what they did. you know the whole story. I think it's time to reverse engines. Target, you need to reward people when they do the right thing. Target made a huge decision to blow off their whole DEI thing, which is amazing that on a corporate level, a company that's been sort of progressive would totally change their tune and say, we are no longer going to play the DEI game. That is big news. They are being

boycotted by all kinds of radical Marxists. There's some insane level. leftist mega church pastor calling for a boycott on Target, I am here to say we should reward them. When somebody totally changes their tune, we need to reward them. So I am today going to buy a TV at Target. Not making that up. I've got to get a TV for my mom. I'm going to do it at Target today. We need to reward them. God bless them for changing what they've done. By the way, I wanted to talk more about, you know, Donald Trump's ultimatum in Israel. It's just, it's just amazing had the evilness of Hamas. I can't talk about it because I get so upset. But I wanted to say that portions of this program are sponsored by the Israeli Ministry of Tourism on behalf of the

government of Israel. But that's not why I talk about Israel. I just want to mention that. But I'm asking you specifically to visit goisrael.com for more info on visiting Israel. Obviously now is not the perfect time to go. But to think about it. Everyone I talked to who's been to Israel. They all say the same thing. It's like funny. They go, oh, it was life changing. It was life changing. It was life changing because that's where it all went down. That's where it actually happened. And when you see those things, I was just there briefly a number of years ago, I guess it was seven years ago. And even though it was there briefly, I was moved to tears by realizing that Jesus walked here. And so it's a life changing event for

everyone I've talked to. So it's important that we stand with Israel and pray that the horror is going over there and soon. So I look forward to going back there when I can. In the meantime, visit goisrael.com for more information. Also wanted to mention that we talk about education a lot on the program and how our nation's public schools have been taken over by lunatic ideologues. You know, just like corporate America. I was saying like Target, well, Target has reversed course. We need to take back our schools as well, which is why I'm exhorting you to visit our friends at the Herzog Foundation, herdsugfoundation.com. They are the trusted source on American K-12 private education. They have a remarkable suite of free resources for

parents and grandparents thinking about making the switch from public schools to a Christian education or to homeschooling, which is the best of the best. They have an online publication, the lion, the lion, sorry, you can go to readlion.com, R-E-A-D-L-I-O-N dot com. They have a podcast called Making the Leap. These guys are heroes, folks. If you've encountered them, you already know they're on the same page as we, and I want to say that it's important that we're aware of them.

And again, they're there to help. Herzog Foundation.com. Before we end our one, I want to mention that we've got a lot of of Socrates and the city stuff coming up. I've done a whole bunch of Socrates and City interviews in London. We're going to be airing those soon. One is with Ian Herssey, Ali, buckle your seatbelt. So that's going to be all on. Go to Socrates and the city.com. Sign up for Socrates Plus on our YouTube page. Most of the stuff's available. We're doing an event in Lexington, Kentucky, with Hillsdale President Larry Arne. Very excited about that. That's April 16th, Palm Beach,

March 21st. I'm interviewing Senator, Senator Josh. Hawley, but there's so much stuff at the Socrates and the city website. And then finally, plug for my store.com. You can get most of my books and especially the Donald, the caveman books at my store.com. Be sure you use the code Eric at my store.com. Donald drains the swamp is there waiting for you. Donald drains the swamp discount code Eric at my store.com.