From Hollywood Writer to PragerU Co-Founder | Stories of Us | PragerU

I've been producing Dennis Prager's radio show for decades. Dennis has all this wisdom, but he's not reaching young people. This idea dropped into my head. We could potentially reach not hundreds of people at a time, not thousands of people at a time, but millions of people at a time. My name is Alan Estrin, and this is my story. I'm the co-founder and executive director of PragerU. I'm the executive producer of the Dennis Prager show. I was a Hollywood screenwriter. I did teach screenwriting at the American Film Institute, and I'm the president of my synagogue. As the joke goes, I was born at an early age, but the truth is I was really born at age 40. I was always, from the very beginning, I guess you would say an old soul. I grew up in a middle-class home in Wilmette, Illinois. I had a very good childhood. There were fights with the older son. There were problems with the second-oldest son. There were problems with the youngest daughter. So I was just, like, almost off on my own. It's kind of been a theme. You know, people say, oh, you're not terribly emotional, you don't get upset. Yeah, I don't get upset, because that was how I managed my childhood. If there was chaos, I was the one who was quiet. But I was competitive, and I wanted to do better, and I had this insight. And this may be the greatest single insight I ever had. Alan, you can't cram for the test the way Bruce can. You could do okay on the test, but if you're going to do okay, you're going to have to study for a week before the exam, not the night before. And once I had that insight, everything changed. My father was a great role model for me. I could sum up my father in one word. He was responsible. My father just did the responsible thing. I'm very much like that. The big influence in my early life was my older brother, Mark, and I wanted to do everything he wanted to do. So he was very interested in literature, so I became interested in literature. He was fascinated by the movies, so I became fascinated by the movies. I graduated from Neutral High School, went to the University of Illinois, and at the University of Illinois, I became the film critic for The Daily Illini, which was the biggest college paper in the country. I went to England for my junior year of study. I went to the University of Exeter, which is in Devon, England. I was a pretty good basketball player. It was just such a bizarre notion that I would be a college basketball player. I was. That was fun. And while I was abroad, this is really the late 70s. It was a very bad time in the United States. There were arguments being made against America, and it's interesting, it bothered me. I'm this yank at Exeter, grew up in a liberal household, but I was having to defend the United States of America. I realize I'm not doing a great job. I felt patriotic, and I hadn't needed to feel patriotic when I was in the United States, but I really felt it being outside the United States. And that really started me on my road to a more conservative outlook, but it was a slow process. The big change happened when I read a book by Paul Johnson, great British historian, called Modern Times. That book really opened my eyes to the growth of socialism and what that meant to the world. I went to the American Film Institute where I studied screenwriting and then began my career in Hollywood as a screenwriter. I worked for a number of shows, Touched by an Angel and The Practice, and I wrote the sequel to Pocahontas. And I worked with my brother Mark. He came to Hollywood with me, and we wrote TV movies together. And along the way, I met Dennis Prager. Now, that happened because I was working on a project with a film producer by the name of Rich Markey, and he asked me to write the script for this Dennis Prager video, and I said, I'm not interested. He said, why? And I said, because I have a rule. If you don't pay me, I don't write. He said, before you absolutely positively say no, I have a box of material from this guy, Dennis Prager. I want you to read it and then give me your final answer on Monday. If you don't want to do it, okay. I read the material, and I just thought, wow, this is fantastic stuff. And I told him on Monday, I'm in. We had a meeting set to meet Dennis. Suddenly, the door bursts open and this tornado enters the room, and the first thing he says is, I love this script. The video we did, by the way, is called For Goodness' Sake. You can see it on the Internet. We did the video and became friends, and soon Dennis started to say, you know, I really think you should produce my radio show. Now, this was a very, very difficult decision for me because I'm kind of in the middle of my Hollywood career, but things are going on in Hollywood that are really starting to trouble me. I see that Hollywood is starting to change. So when I came to Hollywood in the early mid-80s, there was only one thing Hollywood cared about. There was only one color Hollywood had any interest in. The color was green because making money was the way you moved up. Good ideas make money, and bad ideas don't, and so money drove the decisions. It was the most capitalism-centric place on planet Earth, which I loved. But then, starting, like, in the late 90s, into the 2000s, it started to change, and I could see it. Ideas and ideology started to infect the movies. Hollywood became more concerned with diversity and indoctrination than money. They became self-conscious about certain stereotypes, and you couldn't say this, and you couldn't have a character like that, and the bad guy had to be this or that. It wasn't conducive to creativity. So when Dennis made this offer, I thought, maybe the time has come to make a career change. So I did make the change. I'm much, much happier now than I was when I was a Hollywood screenwriter. And I did put one condition on the change to Dennis. I said, look, if I'm going to produce the show, I have to be critical of your performance or what you're doing. I have to be able to speak very, very frankly to you, and if I feel in any way that's harming our friendship, because we were very good friends at this point, I'm just going to stop the producing thing. So we said, okay, that's fair. My only interest is, I think you'll make the show better, and he was true to his word. And not only did our friendship continue, but I think it actually got closer. It's been such a blessing in my life to have spent so much time with him. He had a profound influence on how I thought about the world. He's a very easy person to love. We're very much the opposite. Dennis is a genius. He is the person who can ace the test without studying for the test. In my case, it is a matter of will. I am Mr. Average. I have always been someone who has to push through the objections, and the objections are in front of me every single morning. For example, I've been running basically every day for 40 years. I hate running. I've been a writer my whole life. I've never enjoyed writing. I just do it because I like the result. When I get up in the morning, I think, oh my God, am I going to do this again? Really? And the answer is, yeah, you're going to do it again. Because if you do anything enough, you get good at it, and you get good at discipline. I've been producing Dennis' radio show for decades, but early on, I saw a problem. Dennis has all this wisdom, but he's not reaching young people. This is all long before podcasting. The Internet is kind of there, but it's still in its kind of early stages. Parallel to this, two people approach me and say, we want to start a new university. It should be something that really is centered around the foundational ideas of Judeo-Christian, Western, American civilization. Create a new university. You and Dennis put it together. We help finance it. I thought about it, but we can't form a brick-and-mortar university. Just too much. Take too long. This idea dropped into my head. We could do a university on the Internet. That way, we could potentially reach not hundreds of people at a time, not thousands of people at a time, but millions of people at a time. Let's try to distill the best ideas from the best thinkers into, how about, five minutes? And we did it. We started PragerU and realized there was something here nobody could imagine that. I'm often asked, what is my favorite five-minute video? Because that's my preoccupation at PragerU. This week's release, whatever that is, that's my favorite. I kind of approach life as a research project, and we cover so many different topics, it requires me to try to master each of those topics. Part of it is because I've always been curious, and part of it is, in order to help Dennis prepare for the show, I have to read news articles, sources from the left and the right, because I have to understand how the left is thinking. And all this stuff just accumulates, and as it does, you start to see a clearer and clearer vision of how you think the world works. I try to actually pare everything down to its essence. That's part of the five-minute thing, I guess. What is the essence of this thing? That's what I'm most interested in. What's the best way to eat? What's the best, most efficient way to exercise? Best, most efficient way to get information? I want to make things better. I start with me, but I hope I can make things better for other people. If there's one thing I would hope all Americans would come to believe, it would be that you are very fortunate to live in this country, and that its history, from the very beginning, is worthy of celebration. I don't know if you can have a thriving country without a patriotic citizenry. How does a country survive if its citizens don't love that country? Young people aren't being taught the great things about Judeo-Christian Western civilization. That makes me angry. PragerU exists to fight against that. I think there's a bright future ahead, and my natural inclination is toward optimism. The possibility does exist, truly, for a new golden age. But we need to equip people with the tools to make it so. Those of you out there who are average, I say, we're not all going to be Einstein, Steve Jobs, or Dennis Prager, but you can improve yourself. You're just simply going to have to work harder, be more disciplined, be more perseverant. If you do it, you will succeed. 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