Alan Estrin (24:59)

I can tell you he's doing better, but I don't want to mislead anybody to think that he's about to get out of his hospital bed and return to the radio as if nothing had happened. He suffered, Dinesh, as you know, a catastrophic injury. He is 100% above the neck. That's the good news. And he's close to zero below. So that is what we're dealing with. And the most remarkable thing about this whole story is Dennis's attitude. This is a man who has been tested and has passed the test, Dinesh. He is living his values. Dennis has told me, he's told other people his level of happiness, given his current condition, is not much different than his level before the accident. Because of his attitude, he looks to find what is good, and he focuses on that. And in the odd, very odd calculus of this kind of thing, he's done remarkably well. Given the kind of injury he's had, for example, the nature of the injury, he shouldn't be able to speak, but he now can speak very well. His voice is strong, and as I said, his mind, when you're talking to him, you're talking to the great Dennis Prager. That has not changed at all.

Dinesh D'Souza (26:36)

Wow, that is really remarkable. I mean, for most of us, the idea of being disabled in that way, it's hard to believe that you'd even be the same person. But we're telling us is that Dennis is the same person and that he has brought his whole powerful religious and moral perspective to bear on his own experience, which is, as you said, the ultimate test of an honest man.

Alan Estrin (27:07)

You put it perfectly, Absolutely perfectly. This is, as I said, he had a set of values, a set of principles that he brought, as it were, to this tragedy. And it has sustained him. His values have sustained him. And Dinesh, there is, and you'll Be hearing them as your audience will hear them eventually from Denis. There's a whole lot of lessons that Dennis is going to bring to the world that I think will help many, many people. And I'll say this as a kind of general statement to what we can all take away from this. And I've said this to a lot of people, given what's happened to Dennis and given the fact that Dennis has been able to maintain his happiness level. If something goes wrong today in your day and you find yourself in a bad mood, you have no excuse but to pull yourself out of it. If Dennis can be happy in his state, you can be happy in your state, meaning the state of your health, the fact that you can walk around, the fact that tomorrow is truly another day with infinite possibilities. You can just look to Dennis and say, here is somebody who's managed to maintain a level of happiness and positivity under the worst circumstances. I have no excuse for not being a little bit happier today.

Dinesh D'Souza (28:53)

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Alan. As you know, there's a. There's a swirling debate, but I would also argue a lot of confusion on the right about who we are, what do we stand for? What does conservatism mean? What does America first mean? You have a new book that is a survey of the presidents, all the presidents, going all the way back to the very beginning. Perhaps we could talk about some of the lessons from that book and see if they might be helpful in some way to what we're arguing about right now. Let me start by asking you. Perhaps the best way to start is at the very beginning, the earliest presidents, the names we all recognize. Is there one that stands out from that early group as a president? And what is the thing that you would want to highlight about that person?

Alan Estrin (29:58)

Well, it's very difficult to discuss the early presidents and not highlight, of course, George Washington. So every survey that's done on the presidents and Puerto U, by the way, just put one out. Washington is number one. And you were very kind to refer to a Dennis in your introduction as the indispensable man. That's the way people referred to George Washington in his day as the indispensable man. And if there was anybody who was clear on first principles, it was George Washington. And he lived out those principles almost to perfection. And the highest principle was that the United States was going to be a country ruled by its citizens. The citizen was going to be the key person, the individual was going to be key, and the concept of a monarchy or anything like that was going to be dispensed with. And Washington, who could have just simply said, look, I'm the guy in charge and I'm going to stay in charge, and then I'll tell you who's going to come next. People probably would have gone along with it. He was that revered. But he said, no, this is what we fought for, and I'm going to be the last person not to stick to those principles. And there are many examples in his life in which that was the case.

Dinesh D'Souza (31:37)

I think it shows you, Alan, that when you're dealing with the President, you're not just dealing with ideas in the abstract, you're dealing with the personification of principles and ideas in a man of not only of words but also of actions. And I say this because to me it's striking that if you follow the debates around the Constitution, Washington is almost silent. He almost says nothing. And so you'd get the idea these other guys are just far more brilliant, they're far more important. Washington is kind of like the figurehead who's just sitting there. But no, for the founding generation, all those guys agreed that he was the guy, he was the main man. It was not even a difficult choice as to who should be the first president. And there were some of the founders themselves who were. Would not have objected, as you say, if Washington had essentially crowned himself a monarch.

Alan Estrin (32:34)

Your point about Washington being almost silent in the debates is just again, a tribute to Washington. He knew these ideas had to be worked out. He didn't want to insert himself in such a way to tip the debate one way or another unless. And he did on occasion direct the conversation in a particular way when he felt it was absolutely necessary. And there have been other presidents who have kind of followed his example. I mean, you can think of people like, I'm going to jump right ahead to someone like Calvin Coolidge, who is another president who lived by the model in his. His nickname. People would call him Silent Cal, but he was a person who thought that he who governs least governs best. He trusted, like Washington did in the American people. Dwight Eisenhower, another president who people would often criticize because, oh, they would say he was out golfing. He wasn't intervening when he should intervene. His own advisors told him during the whole McCarthy era, you've got to say something about this guy. You've got to put him in his place. And Eisenhower said, no, I'm not. And Eisenhower despised McCarthy because McCarthy criticized in a very vicious way General Marshall, who obviously was a major figure in World War II, a mentor to Eisenhower, even Then Eisenhower said nothing about McCarthy because he said, no, let him. He's going to expose himself. If I step in, I'm going to tip this debate one way or another. Eisenhower stepped back and in fact, that's what McCarthy did. McCarthy exposed his weaknesses in his argument and ultimately, even before the end of the Eisenhower administration, essentially drank himself to death. So the principle of letting the American people work these things out, it's when we don't let the American people work things out, and there are many examples of that among our presidents that we run into trouble.

Dinesh D'Souza (34:56)

Who would you say are a couple of the outstanding figures that we don't know from the 19th century? I say this because, of course we know Lincoln and the towering influence of Lincoln. But it strikes me that there are a couple of other characters in there. I mean, off the top of my head, I think of a guy like Polk who in a very short single term, virtually doubled the size of the United States. In other words, the acquisition of Texas and parts of Arizona, the Gadsden Purchase, the acquisition of parts of the Northwest. Suddenly the United States became a country, sort of from one ocean to the other. Do you see a guy like Polk as a figure who maybe is. Doesn't quite get the attention he deserves? I'm not even necessarily saying it's for good or bad. I'm just saying that his impact, just objectively viewed, seems to be quite large. Would you comment either on Polk or just about a couple of figures that stand out to you in the landscape of the 19th century?

Alan Estrin (36:02)

Well, let's talk about Polk and maybe I'll go to a couple of others, but I absolutely agree with you. Wilford Maclay writes the essay in the book. The book is a series of essays from a wide variety of historians and experts about Polk. And there's an interesting question, just based on what you said. Why isn't there a big museum memorial to Polk in Washington? The guy literally doubled the size of the country and did create the United States from sea to shining sea. And he was, he was very focused, very responsible, knew exactly what he wanted to do and did, and a very impressive president who does not get the attention he deserves. So let me go to another figure in the 19th century who doesn't get the credit he deserves, and that would be James Monroe. He's earlier than Polka. He's considered the last founding father. He's the fifth president of the United States, and he was president in the early part of the 19th century. Polk is a remarkable character. His life. He lives one of the most Remarkable lives in American history. He was a hero in the Revolutionary War. He played a key role in the Battle of Trenton. He was a hero in the War of 1812. He was in France. And earlier than the War of 1812 when he was a emissary for Jefferson, it was Monroe that Napoleon's foreign minister presented the idea of the Louisiana Purchase. Monroe was there, he had no authority. He went there to try to acquire New Orleans. The French said, well, why don't you take the whole thing, take the whole Louisiana Purchase. He had no authority. And Monroe said, we'll take it and we'll deal with the money later. So that's all James Monroe. He becomes president after Madison. As I mentioned, Madison was a brilliant, brilliant guy. Not the most successful president and certainly was not a wartime president. When he ran into trouble in the War of 1812, he turned to Monroe. Monroe was the secretary of war. And when Monroe comes into office, he's a two term president and he's responsible. The thing he's probably best known for his presidency is the Monroe Doctrine. But during his presidency you also have the Zuri Compromise. So there's many major achievements. Monroe may have been the first president who really saw the United States as a world power. That was really what was behind the Monroe Doctrine. Steyo, with the Monroe Doctrine said to Europe, stay out of this hemisphere. It's not your concern anymore and we're going to take it very badly if you interfere in our hemisphere. So Monroe, impressive Ulysses Grant. Much going much later. Ulysses Grant is often kind of tarred by the fact that he had some scandals at the end of his administration. But Grant was another one of these guys who had this faith in the American people, trusted in the people, kind of stayed out of the way, let the country grow. Of course he was the one who completed the transcontinental railroad. He was the president when that happened. There were real serious issues in the south and every position basically Grant took on that issue. On the issue of Reconstruction was positive. The Ku Klux Klan had started in the south during Grant's administration. Grant put it down, he ended the Ku Klux Klan. Now came back again as ironically during the Wilson administration. This was now in the 20th century, came back very strong. But Grant would have none of it. And this is another theme that pops up in this book. It's usually your friends, not your enemies that get presidents in trouble. I mean if I skipped ahead just on that thought there, Warren Harding, a president in the 20th century who is a very underrated. He didn't finish his term, he died in the middle of his term, but did very good things coming out of World War I to get the country back in a position so the Roaring Twenties could happen. But his end of his administration before he died was marred by scandal. And his famous line is, it's not my enemies that keep me up at night, it's my damn friends.

Dinesh D'Souza (41:06)

Wow.

Alan Estrin (41:07)

And that happens. That happens more than a few times. So the point I'd like to make, and maybe people are kind of getting this from about the book, Dinesh, that I think is very valuable. It is biographies of every single president through Trump, Washington, through Trump, meaning including Trump. It is also a biography of the United States of America. Meaning. And the reason I can say that is because every major issue, whatever it was in its day, ran through 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. So whether it's the most revered or the most reviled, whether it's James Madison or Benjamin Harrison or Chester Allen Arthur or Dwight Eisenhower or Truman, whatever the major issue is, we're dealing with it. The President is dealing with it. So you're getting this book is a biography of the United States.

Dinesh D'Souza (42:11)

What I'm getting, Alan, from the things that you're saying is it's so striking how even in the founding generation, you begin to see that principles can endure, but the situation is in flux. And by that I mean, at the very beginning, the founders are like, we are a very small, fragile power. We don't really want to declare ourselves from sea to shining. From sea to shining sea. We don't actually have all that. And nor are we going to meddle in anyone else's affairs because we're way too small and we're going to get crushed. But by the time you get Monroe, the United States is a little stronger. It's almost like saying that the, you know, the infant has now become an adolescent, and he can look around and say, well, at the very least, stay out of my neighborhood. So this is not Monroe betraying the principles of the founders. It's Monroe recognizing the United States is in a different place. And I think that's really important for us today as conservatives to recognize that we have enduring principles. But the application of them varies from time to time, from era to era. And figuring out how to do that kind of application is the task of statesmanship. It's the task of the president. But I think also it's a task of every citizen to try to think through how that can be. Can be done effectively. Guys, I've been talking to Alan Estrin, founder, co founder of Prageru the website is prageru.com and the book, the Honest Book of Presidents, the Men who Shaped America. It's available now for order and purchase wherever books are sold. Alan, as always, thank you so much for joining me.

Alan Estrin (43:53)

Dinesh. Thank you.

Dinesh D'Souza (43:57)

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I'm continuing the discussion of my book Life After Death. The evidence we are in a chapter talking about near death experiences. And the last time I gave an example of an 11 year old who, despite having no heartbeat, cardiac arrest, and was supposedly deprived of all his functions of perception, nevertheless is able to describe what's going on in the hospital. Now let me give you an even more stunning example from Seattle. A Seattle woman reports a near death experience following a heart attack. She tells a social worker, Kimberly Clark, that she had separated from her body, had not only risen to the ceiling, but floated outside the hospital altogether. Clark didn't say anything, but didn't really believe her. But a small detail that the woman mentioned caught her attention. The woman said that she had been really distracted by the presence of a shoe on the third floor ledge at the north end of the emergency room building. She said, I'm trying to look inside, but I keep getting distracted because on the ledge of the emergency room building there's a shoe. It was a tennis shoe, she said, with a worn patch and a lace stuck under the heel. The woman asked Clark, go find the shoe. Clark said, this is ridiculous. She said the woman had been brought into the emergency room at night. She could not possibly see what was going on outside the building, let alone on a third floor ledge. Somewhat reluctantly, she said, I'm gonna go check. And it's only after trying several different rooms, looking out several windows, that finally climbing out onto the ledge, she was able to find and retrieve the shoe. Now, some of the most sensational claims in near death research involve blind people reporting out of body experiences. And in the out of body experiences, they can see. The researcher and author Elizabeth Kubler Ross, in her book on death and dying, talks about patients who had been blind for 10 years, recounting near death experiences in which they gave detailed descriptions of their medical procedures. They could even identify the jewelry and clothing of the people who were around them. And this has also been corroborated by other studies. In 1982, the Gallup organization published a study called Adventures in Immortality, reporting on a number of these experiences. And that too included some reports from people who were blind. Now, near death experiences have been controversial from the very beginning and they remain controversial to this day. They have been criticized, impugned, attacked, questioned from various quarters. Interestingly, the liberal theologian Hans Kung and the evangelical magazine Christianity Today have both criticized near death experiences and. But there has also been a Criticism of these NDEs near death experiences from the evangelical conservatives. In a monograph, John Ankerberg and John Weldon said that near death experiences seemed fishy, seemed bogus, because of all this kind of. Well, first of all they're happening all over the world, so evidently they're occurring in various different religious and cultural contexts. Second of all, this whole notion of everyone going through a tunnel, everyone seeing a light, everyone having a warm and peaceful feeling. Ankerberg and Weldon say, well, this sounds like some kind of universal religion. God seems indifferent to evil, everybody lives happily ever after. So it doesn't really jibe with Christian theology and certainly not with evangelical theology. But. But while it's true that the common thread of a lot of these near death experiences is in fact this sentiment of universal love and forgiveness, there are also a number of records of pretty dark and gruesome near death experiences and those were not reported in the original literature. But as the studies became more thorough, more widespread, more systematic, there was an acknowledgement that these experiences are not all positive. However, consistently the people who go through these experiences tend to become more religious, they tend to become more committed to what you could call traditional religious practice. And now we get to what may be called the atheist critique, which is of course not that the near death experiences are out of line with some pre existing theological commitments, but rather these aren't real. This is somehow bogus. And let's go through this atheist critique and a couple of its key points. Point number one, which is partly valid. These people are not fully dead. So I suppose strictly speaking this is true. You don't have some guy who like died five years ago climb out of his coffin and tell you this is what it's like. If you define death as the permanent and irreversible breakdown of human functions, then there can't really be a near death experience. And, but look, even if these people are not strictly speaking dead, they are as close to dead as we can get because we are talking here not simply as a, of cases of people who have lost heart heart function. By and large, death today is understood a little more in terms of a cessation of brain function than it is of just heart functions. But you have near death experiences in both cases. In the British medical journal called the Lancet, a physician, Pim Van Lomel reports near death experiences that took place even after the patient's brain activity had completely ceased. This, scientifically speaking, should not really be possible. And yet we know it's possible because it has in fact occurred. Now one theory that Carl Sagan and some others had put out years ago that has now been discredited is that the near death experience is somehow a kind of recapitulation of what is happening to you in the womb. In other words, you're on the verge of dying, you're at the end of life and your mind flashes back to the beginning of life before you have full awareness when you're inside the womb. And at first glance, this is a very clever theory because it seems to account for some of the features of the near death experience. One feature, of course, is the tunnel. Well, hey, that's what happens when you are first born, the sense of floating. The fetus is floating in the womb. The movement from darkness to light, Aha, I'm now out of the womb, I can experience light. So all of this gave some plausibility to this idea that maybe this is a kind of flashback to the very beginning of life. However, researchers began to look more closely and they pointed out, well, the first thing that was pointed out by philosopher Carl Becker. Relying on medical evidence, he goes number one, newborns can't see. So when newborns come out of the womb, they can't see anything. So this idea that we're remembering what we first saw, we first saw nothing. And so right there you have a serious problem for the Carl Sagan theory. Even if newborns could see, they don't have the mental faculties that could recollect what you saw in the birth process. I mean, try to think about this way. Can you remember what life was like when you were six months old? No. How about a year old? No. How about a year and a half? Generally, no. My earliest memories are probably around five. Debbie says she can remember things that happened when she was three, but very few people can remember things that happened before that. You don't even have that knowledge. So the idea that you can somehow remember it later, when you're dying, you suddenly remember things that you couldn't remember your entire life. This actually doesn't seem to make a whole bunch of sense. Not to mention that when you look more closely at the birth process, it doesn't really resemble the near death experience at all. And it's not a case of moving, for example, in a kind of a smooth way from darkness to light. The actual birth process, you're in a tightly compressed passage. The newborn emerges typically head first, sometimes chafed or bruised from the process. So not to mention the fact that one of the points that was made by philosopher Carl Becker is he says, I can tell you about near death experiences from people who didn't even go through the normal birth process. They were born by cesarean births. So clearly this tunnel, this light, this kind of replication of what life was like coming out of the womb. They didn't come out of the womb that way. So I think that taken together this is a full and adequate refutation of the Carl Sagan thesis. And so when we pick this up again tomorrow we're going to consider further atheist objections to the near death experience notably the idea that this is sort of a culturally conditioned experience. We're going to look at that and also the argument that by and large this is a distorted brain state that can be replicated by giving people hallucinogenic drugs. So the idea here is if you give people hallucinogenic drugs they see wild things also and they may even see wild things in common. Different people under drugs may have similar experiences. That doesn't prove of course that those experiences are somehow real. They might even they might just be illusions or hallucinations occurring within the brain.

Dinesh D'Souza (57:09)

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