Dennis Prager critiques Air Canada for removing "ladies and gentlemen," arguing this radical experiment harms children by denying biological sex, driven by activist pressure rather than tolerance. He contrasts this with Hillary and Chelsea Clinton's views, asserting the Democratic Party has shifted dangerously left on healthcare and Israel. Addressing viewer queries, Prager emphasizes friendship's role in longevity, condemns an atheist parent for silencing Christian grandparents as bigoted, and notes women need emotional security while men require sex to feel loved. Ultimately, these segments illustrate a societal crisis where progressive norms erode traditional structures and interpersonal dynamics. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Asking About Lives00:03:16
Hey there, this is Marissa Streit.
I am the CEO of PragerU, and you are about to listen to a special edition of Fireside Chat with Dennis Prager.
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Hi, everybody.
Dennis Prager here.
Great to be with you.
Welcome to my home.
It really is my home.
Otto is really out.
I'm sorry.
Normally his head is toward here.
Do you get his head?
Is his head in?
All right.
So, on behalf of Otto, myself, my wife, my kids, kids are no longer living here, but.
The kids, in any event, you know, I don't talk about them.
I have on occasion because I'll tell you why.
Now that I think of it, because this is completely spontaneous, these fireside chats, it's a big part of its appeal.
It's also a big risk.
There's nothing scripted.
I, I, God, I got to choose my words so carefully on this one.
It's such a sensitive issue for so many people.
I like to ask people about their lives.
Believe it or not, though I write books on it, lecture on it, broadcast every day for three hours, well, some of the hours are not on it, but so much of my broadcast, so much of my life is devoted to big subjects, macro subjects, what I call.
But I'm really just as interested in micro.
So when I talk to somebody, At a table, for example, where I'll be seated for an event, I prefer to talk to people about their lives, their families, their lives, rather than politics and society.
Because I do that all the time.
That's my work as it works.
Like a doctor isn't really aching to talk about the pancreas at a dinner event.
But that's my assumption, anyway.
Having said that, uh I uh okay this, this is where i'm debating.
This is uh, maybe doesn't reflect well on me, but nevertheless I don't find uh people showing me pictures of their grandchildren, for example, fascinating.
I have never shown a picture of my grandkids to others.
For that reason I, why would you care about a picture of my grandchild?
I I they, In any given group, they look the same anyway.
Beauty Beyond Gender00:10:45
White grandchildren look the same.
Black grandchildren look the same.
Hispanic grandchildren look the same.
Japanese grandchildren look the same.
So, what's the point?
Especially babies.
That's the one that really cracks me up.
Babies really look the same.
But, so I don't like sort of, I don't want to burden you, even though it certainly might appeal to you.
But anyway, I have two wonderful boys, and I'll leave it at that for the time being.
So I don't even know how I got to that.
How did I get to that?
Oh, yes, on behalf of the Prager family.
That's it.
My mind immediately fixates on what I just said, and then we move on.
Okay, so listen to what's on my mind today.
Air Canada has just announced that it will no longer say what it has said since the beginning of Air Canada.
I don't know when it was founded, maybe in the 1940s, maybe even before that.
So we're talking about 60, 80 years ago.
So, for all of its history of nearly a century, I presume, Air Canada, like every other airline, would say, Ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seatbelts.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are arriving.
Ladies and gentlemen, we'll be taking off in a moment.
Ladies and gentlemen, they'll be going around with the cart to give you the beverage of your choice.
Not anymore.
They have just announced they will never say, Ladies and gentlemen, because there may be people on board. who do not identify as a lady or gentleman, as a man or a woman, and so for their sake, they will not any longer say, ladies and gentlemen, this is sick.
It's just sick.
Remember, it's not even a favor to the transgender.
Transgendered people, by definition, identify with the gender they have transitioned to.
So they're perfectly okay with ladies and gentlemen.
They're just not okay if you don't identify them as what they want.
What percentage of humanity, what percentage of Air Canada travelers, to be precise, has no gender identity?
It's so below a tenth of a percent.
That's a tenth of a percent, if I'm not mistaken, is one in a thousand, right?
One percent is one in a hundred, so a tenth of a percent is one in a thousand.
Right, right.
I doubt if one in a thousand Air Canada travelers does not identify as male or female.
The price paid, though, is a terrible price.
There is a beauty to, ladies and gentlemen, there is a beauty to boys and girls.
I have been aware of this now for years.
It's now about two years since I announced the teachers that began this, so I think in North Carolina.
We're told, do not talk, do not refer to your kindergartners, kindergartners, as boys and girls, just as students.
Why is this happening?
Why is something so truly destructive and absurd happening?
Because companies feel terrible pressure to look moral.
That's why.
They don't ask what is good for society, they ask what sounds good to the Powerful influences of various activist groups.
That's all it is.
They're not doing anybody a favor, but they are hurting society.
And I shudder for you who are really young, who watch this, you're being experimented with.
This is the most radical experiment.
That I know of really in history with regard to society, the denial to children of the existence of male and female.
This is a terrible price to pay for some very strange notion of tolerance.
It has nothing to do with tolerance.
Who is not tolerating people?
By the way, do you know anybody?
How many of you watching?
How many people even know?
I mean, virtually every one of us knows gay people.
That's a given.
And they're a small percentage, that's 3%.
And yet, we know.
Every one of us knows someone, or in my case, many couples and individuals.
But people who have no gender identity?
I had Camille Paglia.
She is a woman with sexual dysphoria and one of the greatest thinkers, really, of our time, a courageous woman thinker.
And she doesn't think it is a good idea for society to do this.
She thinks it's absurd.
She's a professor in Philadelphia, and you should take a look at her writings, Camille Pagli, a P-A-G-L-I-A.
And she said to me, you know, I just had her on, and she said, I spoke to her for an hour on my radio show.
She said, Dennis, I just have gender dysphoria.
I'm not comfortable as a woman, which is my biological sex, and I'm not comfortable as a man.
I have gender dysphoria.
Okay.
I honor that fact.
I don't think less of her.
But she would think it absurd that Air Canada won't say, ladies and gentlemen.
You are being toyed with, young people.
You are.
And by the way, the whole thing is hurting a lot of kids because of the notion that if they feel at 15 that they are.
Not the sex that they were born or the word that people love today, gender.
But then they make most make peace with it later.
Thank God for them.
It's a lot easier life.
Not because people will make fun of you or persecute you.
It's just life is easier if you are at peace with the sex that you were born.
Not a sign.
A sign is nonsense.
It's a silly word.
You're born a certain sex.
Hillary and Chelsea Clinton were just asked on a TV show, what was it, if someone has a beard and a penis, can it be a woman?
Can the person be a woman?
And Hillary Clinton said, well, I'm not really there yet.
I'm learning.
And Chelsea said, of course.
Of course.
You have a beard and a penis, and of course you're a woman.
Wow.
Of course you might feel you're a woman.
That's a separate issue.
I honor people's feelings.
But I'm also allowed to have feelings.
And if I see a person with a beard and know that the person has a penis, I'm allowed to assume that it is a male.
It doesn't make me a hater or a bigot.
It makes me real.
These are very troubling times.
Part of the reason is people need causes.
People, a lot of people need a cause as deeply as they need food.
Food is a biological need and a cause is a psychological need.
Without a cause, people feel life is meaningless.
And in the unprecedentedly affluent West, where people do not have to worry about food and shelter in the vast majority of instances, they need a cause.
And with the death of Christianity in the Western world or Judeo-Christian religions in general, This is what now becomes a cause.
So there's always a new cause.
These are troubling times for that.
I pray that American and United and Delta and Southwest and Alaska and other U.S. airlines do not follow the Air Canada example.
Canada has really, in some ways, gone more radical even than the United States.
Maybe because Canada is so affluent and so secular that especially secular, it's more secular than America, they need a cause.
Who benefits from Air Canada's decision?
Virtually no one.
Who is hurt?
Virtually everyone.
It is a loss to society to not say, ladies and gentlemen, Five years ago, nobody would have believed this would be the case.
The rapidity of this radicalization is unprecedented, I think, in the human experience.
How fast something that is so normative has now been declared bad.
All right, just some thoughts on a very, very serious matter.
All righty.
Liberalism Versus Leftism00:02:16
So we begin with a video question.
Here we go.
Come in, video.
There we go.
Hi.
Hello, my name is Emily Martinson, and I'm 18 years old.
I'm enrolled at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.
And my question is In what ways has the Democratic Party become more extreme in their views?
In every way.
It's the Democratic Party.
You name the arena.
The Democratic Party would never have, until very, very recently, had many of its candidates for president or people running to become the candidate for president advocate a government takeover of all health care for 330 million people, whatever the population is of the United States.
That's radical.
That is a completely radical idea.
In other words, the Democratic Party.
You name the arena.
The Democratic Party, probably many of its senators and congresspeople agree with the idea of having an all black dormitory at a college.
The Democratic Party of the past was pro integration, not segregation.
In other words, in a nutshell, the Democratic Party was liberal.
It wasn't leftist.
Now it's leftist.
See my video at Prager U on the differences between liberalism and leftism.
I give six examples.
The Democratic Party was known as the truly pro-Israel party.
From Harry Truman to John F. Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson, it was just, to Bill Clinton, it was known because America tended to support the open and free and liberal democracy in any battle against non-free, non-liberal, non-democratic societies.
Pain And Purpose In Life00:15:16
But not any longer.
Now it's torn down the middle on that subject.
So you name the area, and it has gone left as opposed to liberal.
This is why it's so important to know history.
The ignorance of history in the West today is a very bad thing.
Because if you don't know history, you cannot understand the present.
I'll give you a perfect example.
You cease to exist.
You, me, any of us, we cease to exist if we lose our memory.
We are not us any longer.
In fact, I interviewed a man who, because of a fall, damaged a part of his brain with memory.
And it was fascinating.
He wasn't he.
He had to be coached.
This is your wife.
These are your children.
He didn't know anything.
Now, and to her great credit, his wife stayed with him, retaught him everything.
He looked at pictures to learn what his past was like.
But without memory, we are not we.
Societies without memories are no longer that society.
It's the exact same thing as with the individual.
That's why history is memory.
No memory, no present.
Okay, let's go back here.
All right.
Let's see.
Aaron, 17 years old, Cleveland, Ohio.
Hi, Dennis.
What is your opinion on friendships in general and how they can change over time?
Oh, I have a lot of opinions on friendship.
I don't know how people get through life without friends, and in fact, they don't.
People who don't have close friends are lonely, die much sooner.
Having friends, if you look this up, I think this is accurate.
There are a few things that are so health inducing that.
Not having them is the equivalent of smoking cigarettes.
And having them sort of almost gives you the years that you would have lost theoretically if you smoked cigarettes.
One of them is friendships.
And we have a crisis in the West of lack of friendship and therefore of loneliness.
And it is.
I knew in high school, no, elementary school, my first close friend, male friend, was sixth grade.
In elementary school, and every year of my life, all the years of my life, I have had extremely close male friends.
I mean, extremely close.
Not buddies, friends.
And by the way, I have a definition.
I have a working definition of a friend a person to whom you can tell everything.
And by the way, that's true for marriage.
Whatever you hide from your friend, and ideally your spouse is your best friend, whatever you hide, Makes the gap between you that much greater.
It's very important to be able to open up to somebody and ideally a few people.
That's real friendship.
I have raised this on my radio show, and it is amazing to me how many people are afraid to open up to anyone.
And I don't relate to that at all because I don't think the purpose of life is to avoid getting hurt.
Let's say you get hurt, okay?
You opened up and somebody hurts you.
So, what are you going to do?
To avoid opening up to anyone because you might be hurt is like avoid driving because you might be in a crash.
The price paid for not driving is too great.
So, I'll risk a crash.
Being hurt by a friend is a crash.
It's like people won't get married.
They're afraid, oh, well, my parents divorced or whatever.
I find that so bizarre.
If your parents were in a car crash, would you not drive?
I should talk about this once.
The purpose of life is not to avoid pain.
The purpose of life is to live a full life.
A full life includes friends, includes marriage.
How do they change over time?
There's no answer to that.
Sometimes, look, you're 17, the chances of your having the exact same friends at 35 that you do now at 17 are small.
I acknowledge that.
But over time, you will have lifetime friends at some point.
People that maybe are 25, maybe now at 17, that's possible.
But you still need friends now.
Whether they last forever or not is not the worry.
The worry is do you have such friends now?
That's what matters.
Okay, now this one's disturbing.
Kathy69, Mount Vernon, Washington.
My son and daughter-in-law are atheists.
That's not the disturbing part.
This is.
Their children are boys ages eight and four.
Every summer, the whole family stays as guests in our home for at least ten weeks and have forbidden my husband and me, good English, by the way, forbidden my husband and me, not my husband and I.
That is correct, to talk about God to our grandsons.
Our lives are God centered, and this is very difficult for us.
What is your advice?
Look, I'm thrilled that your kid spent ten weeks with you.
I don't want to screw it up.
So, I want to make that clear at the outset.
There's something very bigoted, though, and intolerant, truly, of an atheist who has told their parents, who are, in this case, Christian, you can't talk about it.
Whoa.
If my parents were atheists, let me turn this completely around.
If my parents were atheists, In my case, I am religious.
I'm a religious Jew.
If my parents were atheists and I brought the kids to visit my parents, I would never tell them, don't talk about atheism to my kids.
I want you, my parents, to talk about you.
Who am I to tell you what you can or can't say?
I mean, if you were vulgar people, I might say, please, you know, don't curse in front of my kids that much or something.
Obviously, that's a separate issue.
But.
I wouldn't tell my atheist parents, you can't say.
If my kid says to you, you know, grandpa, you believe in God, I expect you to say, if you're an atheist, no, I don't.
If they are so afraid that 10 weeks of the 52 a year that they will hear something about God or religion or Christianity specifically will undo the other 42 weeks of atheism, then okay, they're not doing a great job of.
Of conveying their atheism to their kids.
Anyway, what kind of atheist is it?
The atheist that I have.
I know atheists.
I mean, I have a movie out with Adam Carolla.
You should all see it.
NoSafeSpaces.com.
You'll see the trailer, and it's coming out momentarily.
It's a terrific film, actually.
Adam Carolla says he's an atheist.
Fine.
Do you think he cares if I talk to his kids about my belief in God?
He thinks it's wonderful if I do, actually.
If this question were addressed to Adam Carolla, he would think this is weird.
This is a sort of intolerance.
It doesn't matter what the grandparents believe in.
I mean, if the grandparents believed in evil, okay, if the grandparents were white supremacists, let's say, okay, I could see, please.
I don't want you to convey your white supremacy to my children.
I get that.
But Christianity is not evil.
Christianity abolished slavery, just for the record.
This is a Jew making that point.
I mean, it's a very upsetting question to me if this is truly what they want.
I wish I could talk to them.
Aren't you open minded?
Anyway.
That you don't believe in something, I respect that.
But why is it important to you that your children not believe in God?
It makes your atheism into a form of religion, but a very intolerant religion.
Wow, that's a toughie.
Again, I don't want this 10 week thing to stop, but.
I'll just say to the kids, if you're going to have them watch this to your kids, one day your kids, the grandchildren, are going to ask grandpa and grandma, what do you believe?
Or do you believe in God?
Do you want them to lie?
What are they supposed to do then?
Or how about this?
What if they find out when they're 20 or 15, mom and dad did not allow grandma and grandpa to lie?
To talk about what they care about most in life.
You think you'll look good.
You won't.
It's our time factor here, Nicole.
This is another toughie.
You guys send tough questions, I gotta say.
Nicole, 28 Greeley, Colorado.
Mr Prager, i've heard you say that men need sex in a relationship to feel loved.
I agree 100.
My question is, so this is from a wife.
My question is, what do women need?
To feel loved?
My husband has a hard time following my endless list of things I think I need.
I haven't been able to simplify what I need in a way so that he understands.
I'm starting to think I have absolutely no idea what I want or need.
You are great, Nicole.
This is so, you are so commendable for being so honest to yourself about yourself.
So, Mr. Prager, please attempt the impossible and answer a question that has plagued mankind since the beginning of time.
What do women want?
That's, this is, first of all, let me begin with the first part.
because this drives a lot of people who deny reality.
The issue, the left-right issue is really reality versus non-reality.
Reality is painful.
And leftism, not liberalism, leftism is a form of reality denial because a lot of reality is painful.
It's a painful truth for some, for many perhaps, that yes, most men, nothing is true for everyone.
Okay?
But for most men in a marriage, a very powerful way that a woman says to her husband, I love you, is for her to have sex with him.
That's reality.
You might wish it otherwise.
I don't live in wish land.
I live in real land.
Now, since that is not the same with a woman, of course, a woman who is not desired sexually is going to feel unloved, but it's still not the same.
Very few women think, oh, he really loves me.
He wants to have sex with me.
Most women don't think that way for good reason because that's not the, it's not, we're not the same thing, men and women.
So it is true.
And I have helped innumerable marriages by making this clear because it's not intrinsically clear to a woman.
And most men are not going to admit it because they're embarrassed to.
So I speak on behalf of a lot of men because I'm not embarrassed about any of this stuff.
This is the way God created us.
I have no problem with it.
But what's the other side?
That's what you're asking.
Well, so how will I, a woman, know?
What should he do for me to know that he loves me?
So my first response when I read your question two minutes before coming on here was to feel secure.
Secure both physically, in the sense that taken care of.
And secure in that he won't be straying with other women.
So it's both emotionally secure and physically secure.
But that's not enough.
If you go on the internet, you will see so many examples of differences between men and women.
So here's one of my favorite there is a male box and a female box.
The male box, well, which one should I begin with?
I'll begin with the male box.
The male box has one switch, an on and off switch.
Very simple box.
The female box has about 20 different buttons, knobs, lights, diodes, switches.
That's what she is saying.
That is exactly what you're saying.
That is correct.
It is a more complex creature, the female, in this way.
That is true.
So, since you can't even fully answer the question, I think the security factor is, and another one is, where.
For most women, if the husband talks to her and just communicates, I love to talk to my wife.
My wife knows I love her because of so many reasons.
Timeless Wisdom For Middle Age00:02:57
That's a big one.
I love to talk to her.
I love to be with her.
I think that's a big one, just being with.
If he wants to be with you, that's a good sign.
What else can it mean other than he loves you?
Well, I guess it could mean he really likes you.
But you know what?
Really like is sometimes more important than love.
You can love your spouse, but not really like being with them.
So, really like is a big deal, and it leads to love.
So, I think that those are big factors.
It doesn't hurt to say it periodically, too, that you love her.
Words matter.
So those are some of my guesses based on a lifetime of talking to couples and being unafraid of reality, of which there is a great deal of fear today.
I guess that's pretty much it.
So a couple of reminders.
No Safe Space is the film.
It's a great film.
It's not great because I'm in it.
I'm in a great film, not the same thing.
Go to nosafespaces.com and see the trailer and see what it's about.
And I will be with you next week.
And if you want to understand life, I'd like to offer you my first two volumes of my five volumes that will eventually be written on the Bible, the rational Bible, even if you're an atheist.
I promise it will open up vistas of understanding.
Thanks for being with me.
On behalf of Otto, see you next week.
Thank you for watching.
If you'd like to keep these fireside chats free, please do by donating to Prager U. Tomorrow, on Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
By the way, I think it's one of the signs you know when you're hitting middle age is when you visit a podiatrist.
I never went to a podiatrist in my life, but a couple of years ago, my feet started hurting.
At any rate, I went to a podiatrist, and it was incredible.
You know, I'm sitting above, he's looking at my feet, he's down there.
He looks up, he goes, Mr. Prager, You were never a track star, were you?
And I say, well, that's absolutely right.
How do you know?
And then he described my feet as the feet of a speaker.
Join us tomorrow to hear more on Timeless Wisdom with 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.