The Eric Metaxas Show - Michael Egnor

Episode Date: May 29, 2025

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor joined us to discuss his book The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon’s Case for the Existence of the Soul

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. Did you ever see the movie The Blobs starring Steve McQueen? The blood-curdling prep of The Blob. Well, way back when, Eric had a small part in that film, but they had a is seen because the blob was supposed to eat him, but he kept spitting him out. Oh, the whole thing was just a disaster. Anyway, here's the guy who's not always that easy to digest. Eric the Texas!

Folks, I often claim to be excited on this program about my guest. Usually, I'm lying. It's just show business. I'm not excited at all. I'm just pretending to be excited. But right now, actually, I'm genuinely excited. Listen, I'm often excited. But right now, I've got to tell you, this is a big one.

Right now, I'm going to speak to someone. He's a doctor. His name is Michael Egnor. He's a professor of neurosurgery and pediatrics at the State University of New York in Stony Brook. He has written a book. This is a big deal. This is right up my alley. So I really am so excited about this.

The subject of the book, many scientists and doctors say that there's no such thing as the soul, that there's no part of us that persists beyond death. Now, most of us know that's nonsense. But we are not medical doctors and we can't speak about it in the way that my guest right now can speak about it. Michael Engor has written a new book. He makes the case based on 40 years of medical practice and over seven. thousand brain surgeries that science has gotten it all wrong, that there is such a thing as the soul. So the book is called The Immortal Mind, a neurosurgeon's case for the existence of the soul.

The immortal mind, it's co-authored by Michael Engor and Dennis, Denise, sorry, O'Leary, brand new book. Very, very excited about this. Welcome to the program. Thank you, Eric. Thank you. Now, listen, your credentials, you say, you know, you've done over 7,000 brain surgeries. Now, a lot of us have done 2,000, 3,000, 5,000. None of us has done 7,000.

Most of the people I've had on the program, most of my friends have not done 7,000. So that's where we differ. You're an expert. Of course, I'm joking. What an astonishing thing. You've been in this business for 40 years. So I've got to ask you the first part of the question. What led you, Michael Angor, to write a book called The Immortal Mind, a neurosurgeon's case for the existence of the soul?

What led you to this? Well, I had started out my career many years ago as a materialist and as an atheist. And I loved science. I loved neuroscience. I fell in love with neuroscience in medical school. decided to become a neurosurgeon. And I went on to practice. I joined the faculty at Stony Brook in 1991,

and I've been a professor there ever since. And I've seen things over the years that led me to think that my textbooks, all of which had kind of a materialist perspective, didn't really get the relationship between the mind and the brain right. And the question that has haunted me is the question,

does the brain explain the mind completely? And that is, is the mind completely a product of brain function? And I started out thinking that. And I've had many, many experiences that contradict that notion. For example, I had a little girl born about 25 years ago who was missing about two-thirds of her brain because of a birth defect. And I told her parents that I didn't think she was going to do very well. She's going to have a lot of problems. And she's grown up completely normal.

She's at her mid-20s now. She's bright. She's been on the honor roll in high school. She's a bright young woman. And you never know anything is going on with her brain. But two-thirds of what's inside her head is just water. I have another young lady who is in her early 30s now, who is also missing a major part of her brain. I first met her when she was a student in a gifted person.

program for children. She's, she's brilliant. She's gone on to earn a master's degree in English literature, and she's a published musician, missing big parts of her brain. I have a little boy who passed away some years ago, who had severe cerebral palsy. He was missing all of his brain above his brain stem. He had a condition called hydrancephaly, where he had strokes in intrauterine life, and he didn't have a brain above the base of his skull. But he was perfectly awake. He was conscious. He would laugh and smile and cry and do all sorts of normal reactions.

He was quite handicapped. He couldn't speak and he couldn't walk. But he was very with it. And all my textbook said that none of this could possibly be true. But it's very true. And all neurosurgeons know that. We see it every day. Well, it seems that we're talking about, forgive me for interrupting.

I just want to clarify. It seems like we're talking about two things. In other words, maybe not. I just want to clarify for my audience. In other words, someone can have a fully functioning brain, but you're saying that there's more that my brain and my mind and my soul, we're not just the brain. We're not just material.

What you're talking about now, I would guess, falls into the category. of the plasticity of the brain, the brain's ability to do things where science would say, well, it can't because it's so limited. So those are related, but not exactly the same thing. Am I getting that right? Well, that would be the conventional explanation from neuroscientists, that this is a matter of brain plasticity. The problem with that view is that, for the most part, just hand-waving. That is that in these particular situations, there's no evidence whatsoever a brain plastic. No one measures that. These patients haven't had the studies that would document that. Okay, so I'm glad I clarified, because if what you just said is true, this is shocking.

So, and that's why I wanted to push you to be clear, because this is far more shocking than what I thought you were saying. This is extraordinary. This is really extraordinary. So we're going to, I want to take the whole hour with you to really explore this, because this is, this is, this is monster information here, monster news, especially you with your credentials, would be talking about it this way. When you said, for example, that this, a person who had a third of her brain, basically, who was perfectly functioning, so you're saying that most materialists, most scientific doctors would say, well, it has to be an issue of plasticity. The part of the brain she has is simply making up for what's lacking and isn't that amazing.

But you're saying something more than that. Yes. If one, in order to invoke plasticity here, you have to provide evidence of plasticity. And the actual evidence here is that people very often, not always, but very often, can function surprisingly well with substantially deficient brains. That's the real evidence. Now, whether that is due to plasticity or whether that's due to an aspect of the mind that does not depend on the brain for sufficiency of function remains to be seen.

And there's been a lot of research on that question. So what I'm encouraging the neuroscience community to do is not to jump to materialistic explanations, but accept the evidence as it is and then look deeply into the best explanation for it. And there's a lot of neuroscience that has looked at this. And it's fascinating stuff if you'd like me to talk about. Well, what you're doing, of course, which is what doctors and scientists are supposed to do, is you're doing actual science as opposed to fake science that limits itself and then says, you know, we'll solve for X unless X equals Y, in which case we'll throw it out and we'll come up with another theory.

So you're doing the actual science. And this is, of course, what most of us who are not scientists and medical doctors would expect. But we have, in many cases, been gravely disappointed at the materialistic bias, which is ultimately, that's a fancy way of saying an unscientific. bias within the scientific community. And so in your book, you're challenging us to actually think scientifically and to think clearly. So folks, lots more ahead. I'm speaking to Dr. Michael Ignore. The book is The Immortal Mind, a neurosurgeon's case for the existence of the soul. Stick around. There's been a national focus on eating only the healthiest of foods, and that's great news for balance of

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800-8-0263 to grab this exclusive deal. That's Mypillow.com promo code Eric or call 800-858-0263. promo code Eric. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I have the proof. privilege of having a conversation right now with Dr. Michael Egnor, who has been a neurosurgeon for a long time, who has performed 7,000 brain surgeries, and who has written a book, this is extraordinary, ladies and gentlemen. The book is called The Immortal Mind, a neurosurgeon's case for the existence of the soul. So, Dr. Egnor, talk more about your process. There was you, like many people in the medical field and the scientific field, were pushed to have a materialist bias, to say, I can talk about everything but that. Even if the science leads you to that, it's off limits oddly.

So when did you begin sensing that there was something wrong there, that what you were seeing would lead you beyond the merely material? Well, I had seen many patients who had brains that were deficient on brain scan, but had very good minds. And I realized that what I was taught in textbooks, to some extent, didn't match up with reality. As an example of how strange things can be, I had a woman who had a brain tumor in her left frontal lobe that was infiltrating intricately into, into her brain. And I had to remove the tumor. This was about 30 years ago. And she, her speech area for her brain that controlled her speech was also in her left frontal lobe. And I had to perform the operation with her awake so I could test her speech as I was operating to make sure I didn't damage her speech. This kind of surgery is, is widely done. We use local

anesthesia, so there's no pain. And you can test and see how someone's speaking as you're operating. So while I was removing the tumor along with a substantial part of her left frontal love, I was talking with her. And she was under the surgical drapes. The surgery took four or five hours. And we had a nice conversation as I was taking out a major part of her brain. And she never turned to hair. She was perfectly normal through the whole thing. In fact, occasionally, she would ask me, what's that noise? And I didn't want to tell her that noise is me taking out a big part of your brain. And if you were taking out a big part of my brain, I don't want to know. about it. Right, right, right. I kind of kept it from her, but, but, and she did beautifully. She had no

neurological deficits at all, never turned to hair and made a nice recovery. And I thought a lot about that case. I thought a lot about how all my textbooks showed all these brain pathways and said that the frontal lobes were responsible for higher intellectual thought, et cetera. And I took out a lot of that and she's still the same person without any change whatsoever. And that kind of thing is a common experience. So I began to look deeply into two things. I looked deeply into the neuroscience research on this, what other people had found. And I looked deeply into the philosophy of the mind-brain relationship because I believe that the philosophy of the mind-brain relationship is critical in understanding this because that forms the framework for understanding what's happening.

If you don't get the philosophy right, if you don't get sort of the logic right, you really can't get the science right. Science has to begin with a stable foundation of making sense and the philosophy can help us make sense. So I looked into this and it came, it became apparent to me over a period of years that there was a much better way to look at the mind-brain relationship that made a lot more sense. Well, what year roughly did you, did you operate on this woman? How long ago is that? It was around 1990, 91. Okay. So quite a long time. five years ago. And so you've been on a journey. At what point did you come to faith at any point in this journey? Yes, I did. I had a religious conversion around the year 2000. And I had been an atheist

and a materialist before that. And the conversion was related some to my work and some, I think just the Lord doing things in me that made me see him and understand him. And what it really did is it opened my mind. It took me out of the materialist atheist box and let me look at the evidence objectively. And when you look at the evidence objectively, there are much more accurate ways of understanding the relationship between the mind and the brain. And I read a great deal of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and came to see that the Aristotelian tomistic way of understanding the human soul made a lot of sense and really predicted modern neuroscience, I think. Well, when you mentioned a couple things I want to pick up on.

First of all, when you talk about, you said you began to look into books about the mind-brain connection. If you're a materialist, how is there any such thing as a mind? there is just the brain. I don't really understand how a materialist can talk about something called the mind. He just thinks,

I would guess, that there is a brain and that's it. Yes. There are, materialism is a very ill-defined philosophical perspective,

and it's ill-defined because it doesn't make any sense, and it's hard to define something precisely that doesn't make any sense. There are three sort of general

materialistic ways of looking at the world. The first is reductive materialism. where everything in the world can be reduced to simple particles to stuff. The second is a non-reductive materialism in which things can't actually all be reduced to stuff, but stuff is all there really is. That is, there's stuff that we just can't figure out,

but stuff is still the only thing that exists. And the third is eliminate of materialism, which is the viewpoint that the only thing there is is stuff, and the mind, for example, is just a fiction. It's just a misunderstanding that minds don't exist. The people who espouse eliminated materialism, I think, in one sense, they're crazy because, I mean, how can you make an argument that there is no mind? Because if you're making the argument that there is no mind, then what is it that you're using to make the argument? to say that there are no thoughts means you're speaking without thinking.

So it's problematic. But there is something, I think, that's admirable about them. The eliminated materialists have enough sense to realize that materialism can't even begin to explain the mind. So something has to get jettisoned. Unfortunately, instead of jettisoning materialism, they jettisoned the mind. Well, and I want to go back to when you were talking about, about the woman upon whom you were operating 35 years ago, and you said that you took out the

speech part of her brain and she talked in. No, I, I protected the speech part. The purpose for the open surgery was to make sure that I didn't, that I didn't damage her speech part. But I took out parts of the brain that are normally associated with thinking. But she still thought perfectly fine as I was talking to her. There was no change in her thinking. Well, I guess, all of this would seem to beg the question whether a physical brain is needed at all. In other words, if we don't need our brain sometimes, you know, if I can be brain dead, but my soul can float off and I can perceive things, why would we need a brain to begin with? Well, it's a great question.

And it boils down to a question that I pondered for a very long time is that what does the brain actually do? And the brain is an organ. It's an organ very much the same way that the heart is an organ and the kidney is an organ. Each organ has a job to do in the body. And what the neuroscience evidence shows is that the brain's job is basically five things. it regulates physiology. That is, it keeps your blood pressure normal, it keeps your heart rate normal, keeps your hormones going, all that stuff. Your brain enables you to move, to move your muscles, and so on.

Your brain enables you to have sensations so you can see light. You can see things. You can hear things. You can feel things. Your brain enables you to have emotions. Clearly, the brain is very much involved in our experience of emotion. and the brain allows you to have memories, at least certain kinds of memories, like memories of pictures of things. But there are two things that the scientific evidence suggests that the brain is not sufficient to do,

and that is the intellect and the will. The intellect is the ability to form concepts, the ability to use reasoning, the ability to make propositions, to make arguments. Most of what we're doing now is using our intellects. the brain is necessary for the normal expression of intellect, but not sufficient for it. That is, the brain sets the conditions for us to be able to talk to one another. If you or I were hit over the head with a bat,

we wouldn't be talking as well as we're talking now. But intellect and reason doesn't come from the brain. The brain is not sufficient for it. And free will doesn't come from the brain either. So intellect and will, the brain is necessary, but not sufficient. for the exercise of intellect and will. The brain is necessary and sufficient for physiological stuff, for movement, for sensation, for memory, and for emotion.

These are absolutely groundbreaking observations you're making here almost cavalierly. It's a big deal of what you're saying. How has what you say been received in the medical and scientific community when we come back. I'm going to ask you that question. The book, folks, is the immortal mind, a neurosurgeon's case for the existence of the soul. Michael Egnor, E. G. N-O-R is the author. Talk to Michael Egnor, E.G.N.O.R. The book is the immortal mind, a neurosurgeon's case for the existence of the soul. Brand new book. Very exciting. Dr. Egnor, tell us how has what you say, which is quite radical and antithetical to much of the medical establishment, scientific establishment,

as it stands today. How has it been received in that establishment? Well, just a brief background. What I'm saying is not new at all. What I'm saying is what Aristotle said and what Thomas O'Kline has said. This is... Neither of them was working within the current medical and scientific establishment. Neither of them, to my knowledge, performed brain surgeries, So you're being very humble, but the fact of the matter of the current environment, what you're saying is very radical. It's one thing for a sane medievalist or somebody from antiquity in Greece to believe what's true, for someone in the materialistic environment of modern science and medicine to believe these things and to say these things and to make the case for these things is something else entirely. Yes, but that's one of the things that really kind of took my breath away is that as,

I came to see these things, both in my own experience and in reading the neuroscience literature, and at the same time reading on philosophy of mind, on metaphysics, I came to realize that these questions were, this framework was laid out thousands of years ago, and people understood it quite well, actually, and we've moved away from that understanding, which is very sad. My reception in the neuroscience community, and certainly to the extent that the neuroscience community has interacted with these ideas, has been pretty chilly.

I've had a lot of pushback on this. Most neuroscientists don't know much philosophy. Many of them know practically no philosophy. They don't really pay much attention to it. I went to a lecture by Patricia Churchill, who's a philosopher who, who advocates Eliminative Materialism

and I had a colleague who's a friend who's a neuroscientist and we were at the lecture and as I was leaving the lecture I asked him I said well so what did you think about what she said

and he says well I guess it makes sense but he didn't have much interest in the philosophy and I said so how does the brain generate a thought and he said oh it's just stuff that happens into cortex

it's just electrical impulses that's all which is philosophically you can't put the two together. It doesn't work, but he had no idea that what he was saying was just nonsense. So most neuroscientists don't even think about the philosophy

in anything that resembles depth. Well, I mean, let's be clear. We're talking about consciousness, and what they're saying is that the material brain produces this thing called consciousness. And we don't know how it happens, but we'll figure it out pretty soon.

And what you're saying, that's nonsense. And we all know that no computer ever in the history of the world will be able to be conscious. It's another thing entirely. And they keep pretending at some point we'll make that leap. But it's an infinite leap. It is impossible to leap from one to the other. But they keep fudging it, don't they? Right, right. And they're fudging it for a number of reasons. One reason is they just don't understand the issues involved. Many of them don't. The other issue is that if they were to question whether, for example, if you're doing AI research and you question whether AI can become conscious, you're undermining your applications for grants. I mean, part of the excitement of the AI is that it might become conscious and that directs a lot of money towards it.

The other thing, quite honestly, and I see this repeatedly, and people have told me kind of privately, that if a neuroscientist comes out as a dualist as somebody who believes that there's an immaterial aspect to the human mind, your career takes a dive. I mean, you're considered a flake, and it can really hurt your ability to get grants and to get employment. Well, of course, it's funny because we can go back to the opposite side of this whole kind of. I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Dr. James Tour. He's a nanoscientist at Rice University. And he talks about the other side of this, you know, how people have been saying that we go from non-life, zero life, suddenly, bing, there's life. And we don't know how that happens, but we're getting there.

You can never get there. There's an infinite distance from non-life to life. They keep pretending, well, we'll get there eventually. We'll get there. No, you won't and you cannot. But if you know that, you won't get funding. Similarly, if you say, well, we have the brain and we can show eventually how you leap from the material intelligence computer at some point leaps to consciousness. No, you can't, you won't.

It's not possible. And we know this. But there are people that just keep thinking, well, we'll see. We'll keep trying. We'll keep trying. It's fascinating to me that you as a very experienced neurosurgeon see this and that you have enough years under your belt, not to be afraid to talk about it. Are there others talking about it? I know Dr. John Lennox, he's obviously a mathematician, not a doctor, but he has talked about this.

Many people have talked about the difference between the mind and the brain. Yes. Yeah. In fact, I think that my perspective is probably mainstream among neurosurgeons, although I maybe get into the philosophy and the neuroscience a little more than most people care to. But neurosurgeons are kind of an independent lot. Ben Carson certainly agrees with this basic perspective. Even Alexander, a neurosurgeon, has himself had a neurosurgeon. Has himself had a neurodiction. death experience and it is very spiritual. Dr. Evan Alexander. Yeah. Yeah. We've had him on the program. We're going to go to a break, folks.

We'll be right back. I'm talking to Michael Egnor, E.G.N.O.R. The brand new book, The Immortal Mind, a neurosurgeon's case for the existence of the soul. Welcome back talking to Dr. Michael Egnor, G.N.O.R. The book is The Immortal Mind and neurosurgeon's case for the existence of the soul. Dr. Ignor, this has to be the book, your willingness to talk about this. This has to be a big deal. I think that this is going to cause trouble in the medical establishment.

The best they can do, and we know they're probably going to do it, will be to ignore this because it simply makes them uncomfortable. Yes, yes. I think the reaction from the medical establishment may not be too bad because physicians I think are much more likely to embrace reality when it comes to understanding the human soul. For several reasons. One is that we have a lot more practical experience. You have to recall that to be a neuroscientist, you never have to see a living human brain. That is, that everything you do can be in a laboratory on rats and looking at scans and

data. Neuroscience are neurosurgeons and people who work in medicine deal in a very intimate personal way on a daily basis with these issues. So we, we, I don't expect any pushback from the medical profession. From the neuroscience community, I, I think there will be quite, quite a bit of pushback. And that's a good thing. I mean, that's what science is all about is pushing and pushing back. So I'm happy to see them push back. And I'm happy to talk to them about it. Well, if they're willing to talk about it, my guess is, is that they would be fundamentally hostile to it because you threaten something. Right. Right.

Just as James Tour threatens those who are advocates of abiogenesis, it's threatening to them and they're funding, and they just know that they don't like you. I mean, when you talk about a soul, again, they would immediately dismiss that as fundamentally inescapably unscientific, whereas you know it's not, but that's what they do. They'll say it's not science. That's true.

And what's not science is to dismiss scientific evidence because it doesn't fit your metaphysical bias. That's really what's not science. Science is just following the evidence. It's just keeping your mind open. And frankly, there's nothing at all threatening to neuroscience as an endeavor from accepting the existence of the soul. You can still do great research. There's a ton of things to explore. There's new things to explore.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with taking a sort of a tomistic or aristotelian understanding of the soul and applying it to neuroscience. It adds to neuroscience. It doesn't detract from it. The idea of the soul, are there people maybe who would say, well, I can buy the idea of a separate consciousness, but the term soul makes me uncomfortable? Yeah, well, it depends on how one defines soul. And my definition of soul, which was Aristotle's definition in St. Thomas's, isn't at all spooky. We're not talking about something. It's not a Casper the ghost kind of soul, like a translucent thing that looks like you, but it moves out of your body.

That's not what I mean by soul. What Aristotle meant by soul is that soul is the life principle of a living thing. My life principle, he meant that if you take everything that you are when you're alive and then, retract from it everything you are the moment you die. The difference between the two is your soul. So your soul is everything that you do that makes you a living human being as opposed to a dead human being. So it's not spooky or mystical. It's very practical. My heart beating is an activity of my soul. My breathing is an activity of my soul. My thinking is an activity of my soul. My talking, my eating, my remembering, all of those are soul things. It's not the least bit mysterious.

is. But what the classical philosophers, Aristotle and St. Thomas, did is they looked very, very deeply into what this means, into what are the implications of understanding the soul in this way? And when you look at modern neuroscience, it looks like what they were talking about. It really fits very, very nicely. Now, how so? I'm not following there. Well, a very good example is, according to the Aristotelian to a mystic understanding of the soul, the intellect, the power, of reason of forming concepts does not come from from the body or from the brain. It's an immaterial power. It's a power that's not generated by matter. So Wilder Penfield, who was a neurosurgeon in the mid-20th century, worked in Montreal, did 1,100 awake brain operations.

I mentioned that lady that I did with a tumor. Well, he did that 1100 times. And he mapped people's brains while they were awake. And what the mapping involves is, stimulating the surface of the brain to see what people do when the brain is stimulated. And he found something that just amazed him. He found that he could, when he stimulated the brain, and he had at least half a million individual brain stimulations over these 1,100 patients, if you consider one or two simulations a minute for an eight-hour operation, that's a lot of stimulations. He could only stimulate four things.

He could stimulate movement. He could make them move their limbs. He could stimulate perceptions. He could make them see flashes of light or feel tingling on their skin. He could stimulate emotions. He could stimulate fear or anger or pleasure. And he could stimulate memories occasionally, where you would have a memory of something that happened in your childhood. But he could never stimulate abstract thought.

He could never stimulate mathematics. He could never stimulate you to say, well, one plus one equals two. He can never stimulate you to do anything logical, to have a concept. None of that. And that was like a half million stimulations, and it never happened once. So he concluded that the capacity for that kind of thought didn't come from the brain because he couldn't evoke it. He also couldn't stimulate free will. That is, he couldn't stimulate the brain and make you do something that you thought you did.

Every time he stimulated the brain and the patient did something, the patient said, you made me do that. The patient didn't do it. So he found also that free will didn't come from the brain. And that's just what Aristotle said. So there's a ton of evidence that supports this viewpoint, both in my personal experience, and in the scientific literature. But neuroscience is so committed to a materialist ideology that they just ignore it. They just pretend it's not there.

Well, this is just huge. I'm so grateful to you, Dr. Egnor for having written this book. I want to talk to you further. We will speak with you further on another occasion. We're going to have to leave it there. But ladies and gentlemen, I hope you understand. This is a big deal what we're talking about.

The evidence from science for the soul. This is huge. We're living at exciting times. The book is The Immortal Mind, a neurosurgeon's case for the existence of the soul. The author Michael Eggnor has been my guest. Dr. Eggnor, thank you. Thank you, Mark. If you're interested in the sun,

wandering what will be falling down on your knee and caught in the sun. If you're interested in homeschooling, education in general, quality K-12, Christ-centered education, we always say go to the Hertzog Foundation.com, Hertzsock Foundation.com. But Chris DeGal, who is with the Herzog Foundation and who's one of our colleagues in the Salem Radio Network is on today to talk to us about Herzog and other things.

Welcome back. Hey, Eric, it's great to see you again. I saw you in a very, very cold, frigid, uncomfortably bitter cold Washington, D.C. a couple of weeks ago for inauguration week. That was fun, was it? Well, people don't realize, because it always sounds glamorous if you're not there. Like, ooh, it sounds great.

It was like, it was just bad. It was like so cold. It was unbearable. I can't remember the last time it's been unbearably cold where you're like, I can't know. Can't do it. And couple that with the security. I don't know how much waiting outside you did, but. Oh, no, no, no, no.

I wasn't in any privileged class. I had to wait outside for like two and three hours just to get in places. It was nuts. It was horrifying, horrifying. So if you, if you missed it, you hit it. It's like to go there. I mean, my wife and I, we were all excited, like, oh, we got tickets to some ball. Yes.

And we got there to the, you know, like you walk in the bitter, bitter cold because the, the, the, the Uber can't even take you because security is so tight. There's like Humvees and military stuff and security. And yeah, finally, we get near the line. line, and I just looked at the line, I thought, not a chance that I'm going to stand. And those poor women, I mean, at least we had tuxes on. Those poor women were in bald gowns. Listen, I don't hear what you're wearing. Nothing was what it was forget. No, no, no. Anyway, let's talk about something positive. That week was so positive. The vibe in that town, despite all that, even people that couldn't get in or see what they were hoping to see, didn't you notice that

Everybody, it was devoid of protesting. People seemed happy in a Boolean anyway. A different vibe there. Oh, it was stunning. It was absolutely stunning. And listen, it's not over. It's not over here. In the midst of great things are happening.

It's frankly hard to believe, but we need to believe it and we need to do what we can. I mean, let's talk about, I mean, since, you know, we're talking with the Herzog Foundation, school choice. I mean, what's going on? And I want people to know that there's a way. website, read Lion, R-E-A-D-L-I-O-N-O-R-G. Yes, we keep you up to date there every day all week long, constant breaking news and updates on news related to culture,

to government to, yes, certainly school choice and so much more. If you really need a site that you trust that you want to come to depend on for objective, honest journalism, truth, great opinion, great cultural insights, read lion.com is one I'd come in to you. You know, we're going to be at the National Religious Broadcasters Association event at the end of the month in Dallas with you, Eric. We're looking forward to that because both the foundation, Broadley, Herzog Foundation.com. I hope you'll look that up, as well as the lion, our media arm, and some of our podcast shows.

We're going to be doing shows and introducing ourselves to the convention floor with all of our other media colleagues. So in addition to the show that we'll be doing it to Salem, and I know you'll be there too. I'll be there in my capacity with the Herzog Foundation talking about the great work they do and introducing ourselves to other Christian media. We want people to know that we're a source, not just to teach folks how to homeschool or develop their own Christian school or grow their Christian school, but also plug into our network of shows, our great friend Sam Sorbo and the news and media we provide all week long. Chris DeGal, we're out of time. God bless you. God bless you for your show. Look forward to seeing you in the weeks ahead in person. and folks don't forget herdsog foundation.com. Hurtsockfoundation.com.