Timeless Wisdom: Ultimate Issues Hour - Freud w/Peter D. Kramer

Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager. Hear thousands of hours of Dennis's lectures, courses, and classic radio programs. And to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles, go to DennisPrager.com. Alrighty everybody, welcome to the Ultimate Issues Hour, an hour each week devoted to the great questions of life. And I think I got a signal from heaven, as it were, to move Peter Kramer over into the Ultimate Issues Hour. So it's actually worked out better for you, and it worked out better, I think, for the show. So I thank you for your patience. Peter Kramer is a professor of psychiatry at Brown University, a well-known psychiatrist, and there is a series of biographies, short biographies, that have been put out They're called Eminent Lives, and he was given the honor, and it is an honor, to write the one on Freud, whom, as I reminded you folks earlier in the show, I was my nominee, either he or Hitler, and I'm not comparing them, although it's amazing how people will pervert what you say. I'm a veteran of having my words perverted. They're in no way related, but those were my two nominees for person of the century Time eventually picked Albert Einstein, which was just a safe pick. But the effects of those two individuals, one for ill and one perhaps, I guess, a mixed bag. I have been, to the great consternation of many of my listeners, I have been a fan of Freud. I thought the man was the genius of the 20th century, for good and for ill. But I really believe he was a genius in opening up of the unconscious and, and all of the, of, of the ideas that he had. Do you agree, first of all, on the effect that he has had on modern man?

Enormous effect. I, you know, I think you have to, and when you write a short biography, choose one challenge or a couple and say these are the ones I'm gonna look at. And I think what's happened to Freud over the past 20 years or so is that his stock really has gone down as a scientist And even as a person of character, I think, as we know more about what he's done through witnesses, you know, beyond himself, he looks less good. But he has had this enormous influence on how we experience ourselves. So that contrast, that paradox, how you can be less and less respected as a scientist and yet have this enormous influence on how modern man lives with himself, you know, that seemed to me my challenge.

Well, it is a challenge. So the question is, I mean, there are people who believe this, many people, that, that psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, at least insofar as they are related to psychiatry, uh, are not based on science and therefore are more harmful than good.

Well, I think psychotherapy has done well. There was psychotherapy before Freud. Most psychotherapy today doesn't have very direct links to Freud. And so I think psychotherapy is still one of the really important treatments for mental illness, for minor mental illness, for growth, for education. But the particular additions that Freud made about infantile sexuality, some of the things he said about the nature of the unconscious, just have not— nature of dreams have not held up as well as probably everybody expected 50 years ago they would hold up.

What do you think of psychoanalysis itself? And for those who don't know the difference, psychotherapy is if you go to a psychologist or you go to any therapist and you talk through your problems. Psychiatry is, is somebody who does that and also has an MD and can prescribe prescription drugs. And then there was psychoanalysis where you go about 4 times a week, uh, and what is it, for about 2 hours a session?

Well, no, usually the same 50 minutes.

Same 50 minutes. Yeah. And, and you— but it is about that much a week.

Right, it can be 4 or 5 times a week, and of course doing that is a different experience. You really come in touch with aspects of yourself. The psychiatrist, psychoanalyst becomes very important in your fantasies and imagination.

Have you undergone psychoanalysis?

I have, I have. I, and I was a Freudian psychoanalyst. I was in London, uh, where Freud had moved after he left Vienna. Anna Freud was still in London, his daughter. I was at that institute where, you know, they presided, and I was a patient, and I thought it did me a great deal of good, although you have to ask, was it for the reasons that people imagined at the time? You know, was it important to bring forth the Oedipus complex, this notion of having a sexual incestuous interest in your mother and being willing to murder your father in the interest of that, you know, that sort of thing. Is that— did that really hold, or was it just that I was in the hands of a very good person and given some time and space to think problems through?

I publicly admit that if I had the time, I would love to undergo psychoanalysis.

Yes, well, I say that and my wife says, you know, she'd leave me if I did.

Yeah, but you did already.

Yes, I did already. I did already.

I see. But, but, so you're lucky you did it before you married.

Right, that's it. That's it. She doesn't want me to know any more than I know already.

Oh, oh, yeah, no, I understand that. And it may be better if both spouses do it than if only one does.

I suppose so. But, you know, it has changed very greatly. Freud thought he was a great scientist. He thought that analysis had to be scientific, so you should stand at some distance from the patient. Not be empathetic, not be overly sympathetic, let the patient remain very anxious. And then he had these notions of what it was you were going to discover, and in particular these repressed sexual desires. And as I say, that particular line of thought has just not fared that well.

Do you not believe in the Oedipus complex?

I think the Oedipus complex is probably— and many people thought this when Freud was alive, including some of his competitors like Jung— that it's sort of a shorthand for an awareness that there are conflicts even in the best regulated of families. I just reviewed a book which is about Freud's visit to America. He became friendly with a man named James Jackson Putnam, who was an American neurologist, helped spread psychoanalysis in this country. And there's a funny correspondence where Putnam writes a letter saying that he used to have fantasies, dreams, that when he grew up he would sit in front of a fireplace and have a devoted wife and children and so on. And Freud writes back to the effect of, well, you know, your sadism and masochism obviously are coming to the fore. He was a man who would not take yes for an answer.

What's wrong with that fantasy, by the way?

Well, it must be a repression of the reverse. You know, Freud could turn anything into into the Oedipus complex.

All right, so do you or don't you believe in it?

I, I don't believe in it in that form. I mean, I think that what was valuable about Freud, and I think what his contemporaries admired, was that he was very open and frank about sex and aggression in an era— you know, this wasn't exactly Victorian England, but it was Habsburg Austria— where these matters, although they were widely spoken about by the intelligentsia, you know, were were still somewhat repressed. And I think bringing the possibility of conflict and desire, even in ordinary intimate circumstances, into the—

Did he, did he help patients?

Well, that's an interesting question. You know, the— his patients, the ones he wrote about, almost uniformly did less well than he said they did. He was working with very sick people. You know, we think of neurosis as a mild manner matter, but he was dealing with very disturbed people. And researchers have gone and found these patients, and they went on to be rehospitalized and, you know, have very spotty careers and so on. And some of them lived long enough to be interviewed, and they were really still mentally ill at the time of interview many years later. So I don't think he had miraculous effects on his patients, let's say that. There are patients he didn't write about who have written memoirs and diaries, and some of them say they did quite well with him. But those accounts show some other problems, which is that he didn't really do psychoanalysis. He was somebody who had strong opinions. He'd give people advice. He'd have them over for dinner. He'd lend them money. You know, it didn't look the way psychoanalysis he wrote about. It was a different, different—

I'd like to tell you, I'd like to tell you in a nutshell why I have always admired him, because it often surprises people because I'm also very religious.

Yes.

And, and usually people think there's a conflict between Freud and religion. Freud himself was an atheist and had no use for religion. He thought it was essentially, uh, you know, some psychological construct or crutch that we needed, and that basically God and our father were, were interchangeable. How we looked at God is how we looked at our father. And, and, and many people think his worst work is Moses and Monotheism anyway. So But I want to tell you in a nutshell and have you react. I think that what he said was, look, we are really messed up inside. And don't walk around with this idealistic notion of the Enlightenment that we are basically wonderful beings who have just been somehow ruined by the economics of our time or by our parents. But we are really We really are a mess, and I, and I, that's a religious belief in my opinion as well. Peter Kramer, the psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry, my guest. His book, Sigmund Freud. This is the Ultimate Issues Hour. We continue. This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.

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Now back to more of Dennis Prager's Timeless Wisdom. Hi everybody, this is the Ultimate Issues Hour on the Dennis Prager Show. You can't get much more ultimate than the father of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and all the like. And there is a new excellent brief biography, and you know how much I adore brevity in writing, by Peter Kramer, who is well known for writing on psychiatry. He's a professor of psychiatry at Brown University and in private practice in Providence. By the way, of the two things, can you say which gives you more joy, the teaching of psychiatry or the practice of it?

You know, I love working with patients. I'd say the number two for me, probably even before teaching, is writing. I love— I write in the morning, I see patients in the afternoon, and it's just what I've wanted to do.

When do you teach, in the evening?

No, I teach during the day.

I was wondering what was left.

For a while. I try to cram it, wedge a few things in. I've got kids. There's a lot going on, but basically it's writing in the morning, seeing patients.

All right, I was saying to you that a lot of religious people have big problems with Freud and Freudian psychiatry and the whole arena of much of that psychotherapy.

No, I think you captured something, which is that this is one of these figures who says, rationality has its limits in human beings, and that is a philosophical and religious issue. And, you know, science aside, whether you get it exactly right about dreams or the Oedipus complex, that issue about our irrationality having a big part in our makeup is, is at the center of Freud.

Yeah, exactly. I say to my, you know, to my religious audience that he, you know, he understands how limited we are. He He is no romanticist about human nature, and that's exactly what I got from religion.

And you know, Freud certainly was, in a certain manner, a good Jew. He never turned his back on Judaism. He, you know, played cards with his male friends at B'nai B'rith every week. He told Jewish jokes. He wasn't pretending not to be Jewish just because he was an atheist, in the sense that all scientists at that moment were. Atheist. That was the stance. He had contempt for belief in God, it's true. But this wrestling with Moses is also an interesting issue. I mean, he got the theological history wrong, he got the anthropology wrong, but at least he was trying to do something very brave in the face of the Nazis. Here, you know, was this change in Austrian politics, the Nazis were at the border, and here is Freud saying, "We as Jews have to be honest with ourselves. This is a new way of looking at Moses." I mean, there was something very touching about doing this, and this was really in his old age. I mean, he was one of these bold, outspoken types from adolescence till death.

Give a couple of examples when you and I both believe he's been such a powerful force. I mean, the subtitle is a great subtitle for your book, The Making of the Modern Mind.

Yes, inventor.

Oh, inventor. Yeah, yeah, he made the modern mind.

He did, and you know, as I say, he did it without necessarily being right on the science. He thought that these things like the Oedipus complex were discoveries, that he discovered natural laws the way Copernicus did or Darwin. He compared himself to those scientists and to Einstein repeatedly. And I think that isn't who he was, but he captured that sense of there being a lot of absurdity in life, of symbols being important. Of, you know, what goes on in modern intellectual studies, you may like it or not, where tag team wrestling may be looked at as a subject of serious inquiry. I mean, here Freud was looking at jokes and slips of the tongue and trying to find basic indicators about the culture and about the human mind in these very trivial products and trivial events. And that really just has shaped the way we look at the objects around us. And think about— I mean, to give the most humble example, say you're on a date and the person doesn't show up or shows up late and has some sort of quasi-reasonable explanation. You will think, you know, maybe he or she is hostile. Maybe there's something more going on that even the person as he speaks doesn't know about. Well, that's Freud, the notion of the power of the unconscious.

That's such a great example. See, it's humbling. That, that's what I mean, or is one of the things that I meant. It is humbling to know how much of ourselves we don't know. Yeah, that's why, by the way, I said to you I would love to undergo psychoanalysis. I want to know Dennis better.

Well, there's a project.

You want it? Is— but that's the— that's— it's not because I'm sick, it's because I want— it's, it's like We like to, we like to explore outer space. To me, psychoanalysis is exploring inner space.

And I think that probably is why most people undertake psychoanalysis as opposed to, say, you know, taking Prozac or undergoing a brief cognitive therapy. I think if you're going 4 or 5 days a week, you're looking for some real insight and transformation.

But I will tell you this: if I were to choose a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst— that's what it would have to be— I would want a Freudian one.

Aha. And why is that?

Because I have— I would want them to tap into— I don't think it's all nonsense. I don't, I don't think that all of these almost cockamamie things, for example, obviously wouldn't be applicable to me, but I don't, I don't know that penis envy is totally nonsense. Do you think it's not totally nonsense?

Well, I think it is much too simple. If you think of the, you know, if you were a woman in late 19th, early 20th century Vienna and all the power you know, were really in the hands of— all the explicit power were in the hands of men, you know, of course you might wish that you had some more of the benefits that manhood brings, whether that is related to thinking, you know, that you're having the fantasy that your penis was cut off, you know, which was what he imagined, that women thought that they were, they were in a sense wounded or injured. You know, that does seem a little nonsensical.

Yeah, I agree with that in a mature woman. I always thought about it more in a younger girl. And I must tell you, and you know, I don't want to saddle you with this so you can say, Dennis, I completely disagree and I will never talk to you again, at least not publicly. But I have viewed much of the feminist movement as a form of penis envy.

Yeah.

In that whatever men do, that's what's really valuable. And so let us women model ourselves on the male model of achievement.

Yes, I do disagree with you. I do, you know, I think that there's a lot to be said for power. And if you're in a culture, and I think this is less true now, and, you know, you look at Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice and Maggie Thatcher and so on, it certainly is less true now. But if you look at the culture over the past 100 years, men have had so much more power. And then if you go back to times when women really couldn't own land or assume certain positions in the culture, become professionals of certain sorts, have positions, you know, within religions. I think there are lots of reasons women would be envious of men without having—

Yeah, but the feminist argument has not produced, in my opinion, the average woman I don't think— I think is less powerful today. She may have a bank account, but in terms of her influence, I mean, I think, for example, women are far more sexualized in public life today than they were in, in Freud's time, right? I mean, I mean, look at, look at, look at what a Miss America contestant has to wear today compared to 50 years ago in terms of the skimpiness of the bikini.

Well, you know, that can be degrading or that can be liberating. I think that's a, you know, that's a close one.

That— oh, that is interesting. We'll continue in a moment, the thoughtful Peter Kramer, and we'll take calls, 1-800- Prager 776, his latest book on Freud. You're listening to the Ultimate Issues Hour on the Dennis Prager Show, talking about the— I think correctly stated by the author Peter Kramer, professor of psychiatry at Brown University— the inventor of the modern mind, and our, our take on Freud, on psychiatry, on all the insights here in a freewheeling discussion. We were just talking about penis envy and the silly or non-silly notions that Freud had. And I, and I was saying that if I were to undergo psychoanalysis, I would want a Freudian, and that I don't fully dismiss that notion, and especially in light of my view of the feminist movement, which I think exhibited it. And you don't agree, and I didn't think you would. And then I asked you, though, you spoke about women in power, and I said I thought that the average woman, not, not Madeleine Albright, But the average woman, Dr. Kramer, today in fact has less power, and the average girl in high school and college feels that essentially her greatest power— I say the average girl, not every girl— is in fact the flaunting of her body.

Well, let me ask this question: if you could just drop down out of the ozone and be born at any moment in history as a woman, when would that be? Because I think you wouldn't be in college for most of history. This is, you know, the fact that a majority of people in college, I think, and certainly in the selective colleges, are women is absolutely unique. There's no moment like that in history. So, you know, lawyers, doctors, it's right. Well, women have assumed more of the burdens of men, but it's But I mean, I don't know how you would answer that, but would you want to be in the '50s as a housewife, or would you want to be, you know, now as a professional?

Well, the truth is, I don't know. It's a very fair question, and I don't know the answer.

I agree with the downside, and Freud would have agreed also. Freud was very interesting. He's thought of as being one of these sexual liberation people. I think he was very aware of sexual repression. But he wasn't entirely against it. He thought that sexual repression in Leonardo da Vinci produced great art and science, and he was actually worried that he would be misunderstood as being in favor of much more sexual directness. He actually was very much of his time in that regard.

Yeah, and to answer your question, I do an hour every week on my radio show on happiness. I wrote a book on it. I am very, very concerned with that subject, and I don't know if the sum total of female male happiness today is greater than the sum total of female happiness 50 years ago. I just, I really, I'm, and when I say I don't know, it's not a euphemistic way of saying it isn't. I really don't know. But I don't know if all of the, I have, Peter Kramer, I talk to women all the time who did in fact go to college, did go to graduate school, did become doctors, did become lawyers, did become businesswomen. And bought the whole idea that profession and vocation and professional achievement are roads to happiness, and now find themselves at 38 years of age alone, and not quite as easy to find a husband as at 28, let alone at 22. And they say to me, you know, Dennis, I bought the whole feminist bill of goods, and I can't say that my happiness level is terribly high.

[Speaker:DENNIS PRAGER] Well, you know, there are these scientists who say happiness doesn't change much altogether, that it's somehow a characteristic that we have or don't have at a certain level. You know, I think you're capturing what the upside and downside are. I think there is less divorce, say, in the '50s and '60s, but when it happens, it's more catastrophic and also harder to get out of abusive marriages, and there are probably more of them. or more as accepted.

Yeah, I was just— yeah, that's true.

It's a mixed bag. You know, to call it a culture is very difficult. We certainly do have problems in our culture, and one of them is, you know, what happens to the 40-, 50-, 60-year-old woman who's single and doesn't want to be.

Why would somebody go to a psychiatrist, in your opinion, and not a psychologist?

Well, I think medication is one of the issues. That is to say, these medicines like Prozac, Zoloft, the other ones you're familiar with, are often very helpful in helping people get out of dead ends or past roadblocks, and certainly to treat major mental illness. My prior book before this was called Against Depression, and it was about the notion that depression is an entirely legitimate disease that affects us throughout the body. So medication is important there. I think the quality control in the training of psychiatrists is that they go through medical school, which, you know, is a fairly stringent, stringent barrier.

All right, we'll continue in a moment, take your calls as well. Peter Kramer, his book is on Freud. This is the Ultimate Issues Hour. Your challenges to psychiatry are welcome too on the Dennis Prager Show. This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.

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Now back to more of Dennis Prager's timeless wisdom. You're listening to The Dennis Prager Show, and this is the Ultimate Issues Hour. It's 44 minutes past the hour. My guest is Peter Kramer. We're talking about the whole world of Sigmund Freud and how he changed life. And he is— I think it's a great term— inventor of the modern mind. And that is the short biography that he has in fact written about Freud, and I recommend it to you. And it is certainly no hagiography, which is a term for biography of the saints. He hardly regards Freud as a saint. I have a challenge I'd like to pose to you as a psychiatrist, because I am a big defender of psychiatry to many of my callers who have a lot of dubious views of it. But I, I have an increasing worry about the entire psychotherapeutic world, and that is, uh, two— it's— they're, they're related. One is I have met too many people who have, who have undergone some form of psychotherapy who have had their victim status reinforced, right? And I believe that they literally come out worse from therapy than they went in because they now blame their problems on everybody else. And they now have confirmation from a doctor, right, that everybody else is responsible for their problems. And the other is the whole modus operandi of, of a psychotherapist is the opposite of anybody trying to get to the truth. Can you imagine a detective analyzing a homicide and only questioning one witness?

Right. Well, I think psychotherapy, you know, is aware of those problems. You probably know Paul McHugh, the former head of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, who was very critical of this victimization tendency. And I think most psychotherapists, and by the way, I should, I said something about psychiatry versus psychology before. I have great respect for psychotherapists of all stripes, psychologists, social workers, clinical nurse specialists. They're terrific people up and down the line. I think most of psychotherapy really is to get people back functioning better. And the measure of psychotherapy is that you're doing better, not that you feel sorrier for yourself or have more people to blame, but you know, that you're out and about achieving your goals. So I think that, you know, that is that side of the question. And when the second part is—

the second part is the modus operandi where you're only interviewing one witness to the reality, right?

I mean, That's true, and I think there's a reason for it, which is that a lot of what goes on in psychotherapy has to do with empathy. It has to do with not necessarily knowing the external truth, but really sitting and seeing the world from the perspective of the other person. And that turns out to be powerful in ways that sometimes gets people to move off the dime. But psychotherapists have thought a lot about this, and there certainly are therapies where collateral where people are brought in either to be interviewed about what's gone on or where people are sent out sort of on fact-finding missions in their own lives to interview people and bring back the results. And then there are couple therapies and family therapies where you hear plenty from other people. And group therapies where people get also plenty of feedback about their characteristic ways of tripping themselves up. So there's some variety there, but I think both those criticisms also are valid.

All right, let's go to some calls. Matt in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, you're on with Dr. Peter Kramer and Dennis Prager. Hi.

Hi, how are you both doing? I just, I wanted to comment. I thought it was fascinating when I was in college learning about Freud that here's someone who I absolutely think is disgusting when it comes to his comments on society and different atheistic views, but at the same time in an age of increasing materialism, he was this person coming up with this new notion that there's this huge cauldron of unexplored ideas. And in a time when people wanted to just say, oh, it's just the human animal, it's just the mind, there's no spirit, he actually, I think without meaning to, did a better job of describing what the Christian world, or even the Jewish world, would call the spirit and the soul and the mind and the and the battle between the conscience and the flesh better than almost anywhere outside of the Bible. Well, it's interesting. I don't start with your premises, but the notion that people are well worth exploring, that you're going to discover a lot of complexity, that the mind has layers— he certainly brought those concepts to the fore. A lot of what Freud did was not truly novel. Philosophers have gone back and said, look, the ego, the id, and the superego look a lot like categories that Socrates was said to have spoken about having to do with reason and desire and, you know, social awareness, and that what he's doing is really ancient Greek philosophy in this modern, you know, vocabulary. So I think he's one of these figures in a tradition, you know, in a tradition of Western ways of looking at the self.

Okay, over to Minneapolis. And Thomas. Hi, Thomas, you're on with Peter Kramer and Dennis Prager.

Hi, I'm a committed Christian, and I think that there's way more toward what makes a person's mental makeup than the sex drive.

Well, I think so did Freud, and so—

and by the way, so does modern psychiatry and psychology. I think the sex drive is important. There seem to be, you know, drives for self-preservation, all kinds of hungers, and then there's curiosity. I think one of the, one of the big things that Freud tried to eliminate that we very much recognize as sort of striving for competence and mastery and understanding, which curiosity, which really seems also to be innate in human beings, you know, whatever their sexual state.

Among the patients that you see, uh, what would you say the greatest single problem in general is today?

Well, I've written a lot about depression and minor depression, so it's a skewed sample. I see a lot of people with mood disorders, and I think some of that is related to their circumstances, which can have been quite bad, you know, both growing up and currently. And some of it is probably genetic. So we're looking at, you know, we're looking at complex problems. There are people who come in with what you're, I think, pointing toward, which are these more existential problems. I think they're men who are very successful in their career and say, but I'm not satisfied, what really is there in life? And you point out women who find limitations in their life. And, you know, you do see a fair share of that.

All right, let me recommend your book again. It is Freud and the Eminent Lives series by HarperCollins. Peter Kramer, the author, and I look forward to our next meeting.

Thank you.

You're very welcome. I'll have some thoughts on this, and I'd like to explain to you why I have incorporated Freud into my own religious worldview when we come back on the Ultimate Issues Hour of the Dennis Prager Show. This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.

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Now back to more of Dennis Prager's Timeless Wisdom. Alrighty, my friends, Dennis Prager here. I'd like to explain to you, in light of this being the Ultimate Issues Hour, and the interview I just conducted with Peter Kramer, the psychiatrist who just wrote this short, fine book on Freud. A lot of religious people like myself, who are like myself in their religiosity, are surprised at my openness to Freud. And I'll tell you in a nutshell why. I explained it earlier and I'll develop it further now. Freud knocks one of the most— destroys, not knocks— he destroys one of the most pernicious myths of the secular humanistic age known as the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason, and that is that we are basically good souls, we are basically good, and that we are basically rational. And he shows how naive those views are. He did not have a particularly optimistic view of human nature, nor do I, nor does the Judeo-Christian value system. One of the reasons for the need for religion and for the need for God is in fact because we are so messy inside, and it gives us a way to act independent of our psychological state. You may be morose, and you may be unhappy, and you may be embittered, and, and you may have been wounded by a mother or father, a spouse, a child, a brother or sister, or a friend. But you still have to act in a certain way. And there still is a good God who governs the universe. And so I take all of his insights. I just don't end with his insights. I take them all and I realize that religion gives me a behavioral way to live. It tells me how to live, how to make a good life despite whatever goes on in my psyche. It's not a clean place. I can make peace with that. I make peace with the fact that the human being is filled with a lot of, if you will, awful thoughts, sinful thoughts, whatever they may be. Yes, that's right. And that is why there is religion to help me act in a way that I don't live in the world of those thoughts. That's a great thing. But I, I'm not going to be one of those religious people who live in denial, or one of those secular people who live in denial about what our nature is. And so Freud helped. You just can't end with it. It doesn't— he doesn't give you— he doesn't give you answers nearly as much as he gives you the pathology that make up the human being. Dennis Prager here. Tomorrow night I speak in Yorba Linda, California, in Orange County, California. It's on PragerRadio.com, or call 714-693-0770. 714-693-0770 tomorrow night, Orange County. Thanks for listening, my friends. I'm Dennis Prager. This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager. Visit DennisPrager.com for thousands of hours of Dennis's lectures, courses, and classic radio programs, and to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles.