Chad Adams Filling In On The Brett Winterble Show

What is Toyota affordability? It's buying smart. Your local Toyota dealer has great deals available today on RAV-4, Grand Highlander, Camry, and Corolla, with the features and style you deserve. It means driving for less with hybrid and plug-in hybrid options across the lineup, delivering great MPGs. And it means trading for more. Toyota is known for building long-lasting vehicles, meaning your car will hold its value for years to come. Shop Toyota.com to find out more. Toyota, let's go places. Happy birthday, America. Yeah, July 3rd. Now, I want to start off by correcting something from yesterday. By the way, this is Chad Adam, sitting in for Brett Winterville Hiller at 107.9 FM WBT, Charlotte's Talk Station, no doubt. And it's an honor and a privilege to be here. And it's always great to follow Pete Buttigieg also a privilege to follow my good friend Nick Craig as well. And I've known Nick longer than the audience. I'll guarantee you. I know that because we helped. get him from New York down here. And he's a great, great young fella. And one of my, the funniest story about Nick that I'll tell you. And Nick may not be hearing this. So I'm just going to share it with you. I was listening. This is when I was in the process of buying a radio station several years back. And I was listening to the station. And I, it. And it was just funny because I'm listening to Dave Ramsey and Ramsey's on. And I hear this kid calling in. He had to be 15, 16 years old. And it was Nick. Nick had called in on Ramsey. And I had already met with Nick and talked to him. And I was like, I know that voice. And I was like, kids already talking on the radio. He's like 15, 16 years old. So he's technologically fantastic. And a good foundation is doing a bang up job. So just a special shout out to Nick here on this wonderful birthday. Now, I'll kind of start off with. With where, you know, kind of the political, I am in awe of this country. I always have been, and having been blessed with living in many different states and even one of our territories and traveled, I'm blessed to have been able to travel and come back and appreciate this country. I'm deeply, deeply fascinated with it. In fact, I was at a... The resiliency of this country is nothing short of miraculous. More so than probably anywhere else. It's an undefeated kind of attitude about things. And without getting too specific, I was at a place last night where a shooting had taken place just last year and where innocent lives had been taken. And... It made the national news. And I was amazed and I went to this place. It was vibrant. It was full of life. There were actually boats out in the harbor and lights. I mean, they were, it was just the people came back.

It was a senseless act when people came back and they were celebrating, they were living, and it was just kind of like 9-11, you know, when you come back and become great, great, it just doesn't, it's just this undefeated, undefeatable spirit of this country. And as I'm, and I'm going to go through a little bit about this country. That is simply astounding. I'm not going to get too far in the weeds. I will in some of the opinions that I'll share with you. But. Just amazing. And I want to start this with the mayor of New York. So the mayor of New York, who now sees himself as a prominent national leader. Zohran Mamdani is the mayor of New York. And he has come out with his version of America's 250. And when I tell you what really sells to us all is this. Positive optimism. That is what makes us great. It is the we see a challenge. We accept it. We take it. We innovate. We create entrepreneurs, design, build. We see challenges, whether they're from an engineering, mathematical, science, whatever standpoint. And we rally. our folks to that challenge. Even Robert F. Kennedy Jr., we're going to put a man on the moon by the end of the 60s. The 60s, the flipping 1960s, and they had the arrogance to say they're going to get to the moon. We have more power in your cell phone than all of the computing power that was involved in the Apollo lunar landing from NASA and the craft that went there. It's hard to even put that into a context that makes sense. We got them there safely and back. And the challenge was, it wasn't that the science said, yeah, we could do it right now. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. issued that challenge at the beginning of the 60s, that by the end of the decade, and so this incredible team did it. We struggle with trying to get, you know, back to the moon for the next 50 years. And there are a lot of people that still, if you wonder, conspiracy theories are people that don't believe we went, flat earthers and all sorts of things. But I want to start with where Mayor Zohran Mamdani, his position on it's only 49 seconds, 40 seconds longer, at least what I'm going to play. But I want you to listen to the words he uses to put down this nation in the most myopic. narcissistic, ultra-liberal fashion, you can imagine. I mean, fits in well with where his, I guess he's the new leader of this ultra-leftist party, or at least he envisions himself that way. But this is not a positive message. But it has its own darkness to you, and I want to play it for you. As we mark 250 years, what do we see? We see a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions. We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world, one where children go to sleep hungry while the world's first trillionaire hungers for more. We see monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs who buy elections. We see mass agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans.

We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked hands, those who toil on factory floors and chisel into stone. And we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft hands of a precious few. That is the declaration of class warfare. It is the complete and utter repudiation of anyone who worked hard and became successful. That nobody that's successful, the soft, uncalloused hands, he calls them. The world's first trillion are hungers for more, as if it's about having more money. Elon Musk lives the life of a pauper almost. It's kind of strange, as wealthy as he is. A lot of uber wealthy people don't live like Uber well. Like you would think, you know, jetting around like Bernie Sanders or living in 20 million oceanfront. houses like the obamas in martha's vineyard in hawai you know you wouldn't they don't live that way but this is this is the attack on america oligarchs controlling elections mask people going in the only reason they're mask mayor is because your party will put out hits on them basically by outing them and doxing them So they're not, they're mass to protect their families. They're rounding up criminals. And this unbelievable way of saying it to allow children to go hungry while billionaires and oligarchs gain more power. It is the foundation of all socialism, which is class warfare and entitlement to take from others, to take and control the means of production, to ultimately have government take control of capitalism. It isn't just one or two policies. By the way, everything that Imam Dani wants to fund in New York has to be paid by somebody who earned it. And again, this is going to be an optimistic show. This is not going to be a negative show. But I wanted to start there because that's where the Democrats left is. The Democrats left is right now a hatred of this country, a desire to tear it apart, to take from those who earn and give to those who has. Now, that doesn't mean we as citizens don't have an obligation to help. The less fortune means we have a lot of an obligation. It isn't. But government has failed to take care of the problem. Trillions of dollars spent in all these social programs. And here's Zohran Mamdani complaining. So what he should say is why after 50 years of declaration of the war on poverty, well, after 50 years of the great society, why is it still like that? Mayor. Your party has thrown every bit of money at all of these problems and they still exist. They're still there and they've grown in some ways. But you don't admit that. What you're doing is you're blaming the current plight. You're saying it's a zero-sum game that because some have done well, others are doing poorly because of those who have done well. And that is nowhere near what this country is about, what it was founded for, what it stands for, what it represents, where it's going, where it's been, and what it desires to be. None of that.

But again, we'll go through a little bit of a list, a little, a little bit of a list of what's amazing about that. Oh, I love their selections. Chad, I'm your guest host here. Having a blast, as always, here in 107.9 FM, WBT, you'd like to get in on the conversation. By the way, sitting in for Brett Winter Bulls, no change. I'm appreciative, and Brett will be back. And it is an honor and a distinct pleasure to be here on the day after what John Adams said would be the day filled with pomp and circumstance. We will talk about that. How did it end up being the July 4th? Adams thought it should have been the second. He wrote the letter on the third, which is why yesterday I said Adams was talking about the third. He wrote it to his wife. And what's great about all these founding fathers? All of them, we call them fathers, but these were kids, relatively speaking. These people were in their 30s when they did all this stuff. They were educated. They were highly read. They were very special individuals that got together in Philadelphia and put this thing together with heavily influenced biblically, heavily influenced by John Locke, heavily influenced by... the heavy hand of government that was upon them at the time. But nonetheless, remarkable, magical, special. And for it to be 250 years into it, it's remarkable. Now, as I was going back through just a list of things that have happened in that 250 years, things that challenged us. It wasn't that long after it that, you know, we kind of went on this terror to try to take Canada in 1812. We almost lost that one. So we had the revolution. We took on the world's greatest superpower. In 1812, the Brits were feeling themselves doing great after the Napoleonic victories. They were going to kick our butts again. I mean, they sacked the White House, set it on fire and did a lot of other things. But it basically fought to a stalemate. And we came out of that one heavily in debt again. We're good at being in debt. We are remarkable at being in debt. I'd say it's kind of a characteristic almost that we're in debt. We had a civil war. We had a Spanish-American War I, World War I, World War II, World War II,

Afghanistan. Good gracious. Not to mention the Depression of 1873, Depression of 1929, both horrific circumstances that harmed millions and millions of Americans. We had four presidents assassinated, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.. In less than 100 years, all four of those, you know, being in office apparently out of 47, well, 47 you could say, 45, I guess, or so. But nonetheless, Four of them, almost 10% killed on the job. Three more were shot. Well, two of them were shot on the job, Roosevelt and Reagan, but then we had Trump shot between jobs, between first and second term. We had two of our space shuttles blew up. We had 9-11. We had the dot-com challenge, the Y2K, fear. We've overcome a lot. Civil rights legislation. slavery there's so many things we've overcome that and all of those i would say that every single one of these challenges in this great country's history served in some way to both scar us and make us stronger you know unlike human beings scars can make us stronger too In our psyche, in our emotional development, in our spiritual development, scars can make you stronger. And they have our nation. And it's as sturdy and strong in many ways. But so many different times, we were on the edge of failing. I mean, but for what happened in World War I and two, we'd be a totally different country. If you want to watch a fascinating rendition, just watch the man in the high castle. Kind of interesting, very interesting take on things. There's some of the Cold War. I didn't even mention the Cold War. It is a system like none other. It is a system. And when Democrats see it as see capitalism as the enemy, they can't recognize that but for it, we wouldn't be the country we are today. But for it, none of their programs that they love would have money to be spent on them. The wealth must be created in order for them to criticize it. Things that get created from nothing and become these titans of industry. What is Toyota affordability? It's buying smart. Your local Toyota dealer has great deals available today on Tacoma, Tundra, and Forerunner with the space and features for any adventure. It means driving for less, with available hybrid options, delivering great MPGs without sacrificing power. And it means trading for more. Toyota is known for building long-lasting vehicles, meaning your truck will hold its value for years to come. Shop Toyota.com to find out more. Toyota, let's go places. History or even small companies, the number of entrepreneurs. I mean, I look at something like Shark Tank that's been going on for the past eight. It's hard to believe it's like 18 years, maybe longer, but it's around there. But if you look at that, think of the number, the hundreds of companies that have spun off on just that show, and not just those, but the thousands of others that have been inspired by kids watching a show like that. So lest we think all of social media is evil and horrific and sprouts horns and, you know, has a bifurcated tail attached to it. When you look at that.

You look at the number of entrepreneurs and the goal to be. It isn't about greed. And I know I felt like a channel Gordon Gecko when I say that. Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. It is the desire to create, the desire to make, to mold, to do things that haven't been done before. People forget that. Zohran Mamdani, when he sits there and castigates Elon Musk, that's almost envy, isn't it? It doesn't come across as pride or happiness. He wants to pretend that the entire country was only built by... The downtrodden that we're taking advantage of by monopolies and oligarchs. It is insane. But that's how you start. That's how you kick off things in a class warfare way. It's what you do. It's what you do. So just you roll on through that. And again, the challenge is if you just think that's just in the past 250 years, and even the past 100, so we know you can look at that list and discern from that list the great number of challenges we will have moving forward. It's not a matter, it's kind of like hurricanes on the East Coast. It's not a matter of if you're going to have another hurricane. It's when. And with America, it's not a matter of if there's going to be another great challenge. to the country's existence. It's a matter of when. Does it come from within? I mean, our worst one in history came from within. When we blew ourselves apart, killed hundreds of thousands of our fellow countrymen. Or 9-11, you could say 9-11 has created. We've got, I was amazed. I went to a briefing a couple of years ago. And it was an intelligence briefing. It was kind of fat, terrifying the number of sleeper cells within the U.S. that had come across the Mexican border. This is way before Trump, this is 2009, 10, the number of terrorist cells that they believed were trying to operate within the confines of our country. This is post-9-11, but pre- Donald Trump. So the threats are always there. And but for... The folks in the military, the folks in our intelligence services, the folks in our law enforcement, but for those folks, this would be a very different country, wouldn't it? We sit there and we take putting hot dogs on the grill for granted. We just, it's always going to be there. And it's not. It doesn't mean. It's paid for with blood, sweat, tears. It's paid for with folks that create jobs. It's amazing to me when I see. people like Zohran Mamdani that want to bash America and the entrepreneurship. And it's like, you know, all the, you think all of this, if you take all the entrepreneurs away, you don't have America. You don't. And we'll talk about that because America really is an ode, is an homage to the call of the entrepreneur. The freedom breeds that. When we have rights and given to us from our creator and we can pursue those things, we have the right to property. We own ourselves. We have the right to own what we create without it being confiscated. That's freedom. That's a form that's a, you know.

pursuit of happiness. Howdy. A couple of funny things to, well, I don't know how funny you'll think of, but I was just looking at, and I'm not going to get into climate change because right now it's hot, there's a heat wave, so of course the climate change crazies are out. Oh, it's the end of the world. Oh, my God, air conditioners, power grid. Well, if we'd spend a lot of time not wasting time on. wind and solar in building some nuclear power plants, the power grid would be just fine. We haven't, though. We subsidized the hell out of it, and it isn't producing what it should have produced. And now you've got Zohran Mamdani telling people to keep their thermostats at 78, suggesting it, suggesting it up in New York and others. It will be strained on the grid. It just is air conditioning systems aren't necessarily designed to go 20 degrees or more below the outside temperature. But it's going to happen. And you know what? Remarkably. Most can handle it. But here's another prediction. So this is from the Guardian and the New York Times. And these are some of the predictions made 20 years ago along those lines. 21 years ago, it was reported the Bering Strait, by the year to 2020, 7, 6 years ago, the Bering Strait would be open year round. It's not. European ships would routinely pass through the Arctic to reach Asia. Nope. Polar bear populations would have been declining. Snow would disappear from the tops of Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya. Sea levels would start rising by seven millimeters a year due to accelerated Greenland ice melt. None of those things have happened. None of them. So if you wonder why there's a lack of faith and trust in not just the science of what happened with COVID, but in media in general, because media doesn't spend a lot of time. It finds a narrative and then it sticks with it. And that's what it's doing with these Democrat socialists, acting as if they have some kind of equal footing, not asking if we could fully implement all of your ideas, what would it look like? If we could fully implement everything you want to do, what would that look like? How would you get the funding to fund all of the things you want to do while destroying all of America's free enterprise? And the answer is you kind of can't. So then I said I went to salon.com, one of my favorite lefty places. There's a plethora, a cornucopia, if you will, of things you can look at that bash everything on the right. Just for fun. I mean, it's a lefty lean. So they have this great article. And as I say great, because it's perfectly illustrative of what I'm talking about you. And the title of it is Trump wrecked America's 250th in D.C., but other blue cities will save it. So I said, okay, I'm intrigued. Trump destroyed the 250. Don't see that, but that's where they want to go with it. That's fine. And then it starts out with Donald Trump's will-documented ability to destroy everything he touches, has come to what should have been the easiest of task, making the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence Fund. If there's one thing the world's oldest democracy is good at, it's throwing Independence Day parties, hosting outdoor events, concerts, filling our state fairs, blah, blah, blah. But when you read through this, I thought it was going to be talking about the, and this is where you always see the political left rarely.

touch upon. They rarely, if ever, will actually talk about the founding documents, the founding communications, what all happened back then. They'll refer to it loosely. Hey, we're 250 years old. What's 250 years old? Who did that? What did they do? What did it mean? What does it mean? They just kind of refer to it obliquely. You know, it's there. But so I read the entire article and they don't, that's where they kind of stopped mentioning anything about it. It was just, it was regularly a Trump bashing thing. And it goes to, hey, in Philadelphia, we're going to have a nice party. Nothing about the fed. Nothing about it. Nothing about it what it even means to them. It's just a reason to throw a party. Trump ruined it. So we're going to do a good one. And that's pretty much the entirety of the article about heat waves and that everything he did, the Great American State Fair was a failure. And Donald Trump's speech is going to be terrible, and he's trying to create a statute to himself. And he finishes up with Freedom 250's failure, which, by the way, it's not over yet, especially when contrasted with the real parties happening in so many other places, is a preview of a coming post-Trump future where he will be a man unhonored and eventually unmorned. And they're just wrong about that. It's wishful thinking. It just is. Say what you want to. You may not like him, but what's happening in our economy right now is worth noting. It is a boom time. It is a great country. The comeback, the story, the American story, you can dislike it. And look, you know, everybody's history is imperfect. Everybody's. There's no other than. one individual in the history of the planet, basically. It's a pretty sorted thing. And you can focus. If you just focus on that, you can't see the accomplishments. Now, Dave Barry, I'll lead with a little humor. I'm going to try to. We'll not lead. We're going to get to. In fact, I'll talk about it before we get to it. So Dave Barry, a great American humorist, he's, it's hard to believe if those of you who've been around for a while and know who Dave Barry is, he is a... 79 years old. Well, he's actually born on the 4th of July. But he'll be 79 years old tomorrow, or tomorrow, which is today, if you read the article tomorrow. Anyway, it doesn't matter. He kind of reflects on what being an American is. And I think he does a good job because one of the foundational things in our country do is our ability to laugh. I mean, we have a great sense of humor. We have phenomenal things to laugh. And the better, the more we can laugh at ourselves, the better our sense of humor will be. And I'm going to start it off just a little bit because I don't want to belabor it too much. What does it mean? It means that tomorrow, the United States will celebrate its 250th birthday, the anniversary of that fateful day in 1776 when the founding fathers adopted the Declaration of Independence, an act for which they could have been hanged.

Imagine being that brave. Granted, you and I routinely accept terms of service agreements online that, for all we know, give Google and Microsoft the right to harvest our kidneys with unsterilized toenail clippers, but that's not us being brave. That's just us being stupid. The founding fathers knew what they were risking, and they did it anyway. And that's why today we live in the greatest nation on earth by almost every meaningful statistical measure. To cite just one. And I'll give you that one in a second. But think about that. They all said, you know what, when we put our name on this piece of paper right here, and it's going to be delivered to the world's most powerful army and their leaders, the king, it means we've committed an act of treason against the most powerful force on the planet at that time. And they're going to hang us. They're going to hang every one of us. We're going to hang separately. We can hang together, but we're going to hang. And they signed it. How many of you would have signed it? I don't care, especially left or right. How many would be able to say, you know what? Enough. And if I'm wrong, you know, all those people who did the chop zones and the summer love, they didn't want to, they didn't care. They knew they weren't going to hang. They knew they weren't going to get killed. So anyway, what Dave Bari Weiss says, hey, the founding fathers knew what they were risking. They did it anyway. And that's why today we live in the greatest nation on earth by almost every meaningful statistical measure. And here's just one of those. If you look at the distribution. of waffle houses worldwide. You look at Australia has none. Brazil has none. There are none in the Soviet Union, none in Afghanistan. There are none in Africa. There are none in Canada, none in Mexico. There are 2,00038 waffle houses in the U.S. It's ironic because I talked about Waffle Houses two days ago. Those are the people who visited us from Italy loved a Waffle House because you don't have them in Italy or Europe or anywhere else, but America. It's one of the things that makes America fantastic. So I will get to the rest of day, Barry's column. I really want to, and I will, I shall. Man, I'm a good... There's a lot of good perspectives. One thing I do, I love the constant, I love the creativity musicians, magicians for that matter, but anyone. I just love human ingenuity and creativity. And so someone online had written something fantastic about the anti-capitalist left, which I thought was pretty astute. And it talked about why does the left hate capitalism so bad? And it said this is because the anti-capitalist left is not actually against people being crazy rich. They're just against certain types of people being crazy rich. Artists and athletes make sense to them because they've played music and sports and because their success can be explained by luck and talent. Someone like Messi. Their wealth, Messi, meaning the soccer player, their wealth is not offensive to them because they understand Messi is much better at football than they are. But when it comes to business, the anti-capitalist left has no framework for understanding why Jeff Bezos might be super rich since 99% of them have never ever created a product, a business or service that was a value to other people. They never taken an entrepreneurial risk. They never employed people and felt the burden of responsibility that comes with that. They never picked up...

A business and given it a play in the way they've picked up a ball or a guitar, they literally don't understand wealth creation. They think there's a fixed amount of money, and the only thing a business does is split it unfairly. It's why the age at Elon Musk, they rage at Elon Musk and other successful business leaders because they genuinely don't understand why they're wealthy. Also, and this is just as important, athletes and artists are disproportionately young, attractive, diverse left-wingers. Business leaders are evil middle-aged white men who success offends the average anti-capitalist leftists because they don't understand, A, what it is. They do and B, that people like Elon Musk have the same talent advantage on them as Messi does. It's just harder to measure. That's a very astute spot on point. You never hear the anti-capulous rage at your athletes. You know, they're not going after LeBron or the success, the post-NBA success of people like Michael Jim Jordan. Interesting and astute point. So here to that one. So appreciate that being shared. So back over to Dave Barry. It's just funny because he made the point, you know, one thing that makes America great is we have 2038 waffle houses nowhere else on the planet. What is Toyota affordability? It all starts with buying smart. And your Toyota dealer has great deals available to qualified customers on reliable cars and SUVs, including the redesigned RAV4, spacious Grand Highlander, sporty Camrys and Corolla's. It means driving for less. with efficient hybrid and plug-in hybrid options available throughout the lineup, extending your overall driving range and delivering great MPGs, saving you money at the pump. And it means trading for more. Toyota is known for building long-lasting vehicles. And as the best resale value brand, according to Kelly Blue Book, your Toyota can be worth thousands more than average when it's time to trade in. That's Toyota affordability. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. Shop Toyota.com or your local dealer for deals and details. Vehicles projected resale value is specific to the 2026 model year. For more information, visit Kelly BlueBookskb.com. Toyota brand average resale value is 53% versus the average vehicle at 45%. Toyota, let's go places. We have a Waffle House. Yes, we have a lot to celebrate. Tomorrow, there will be festivities from Sea to shiny sea. The most spectacular celebration will, of course, be in Washington, D.C. in spite of leftist claims to the contrary, where a huge crowd is expected to gather for the lighting of the official semi-quincentennial sparkler, which at 150 feet tall is believed to be the largest sparkler ever made. And it is ginormous, if it's real. They've got a fake picture of it, which I still think is hilarious. The semi-quintennial sparkler was built by Lockheed Martin at a cost of $27 million. Once ignited, expect to be as visible as far away as Cleveland. A spokesperson for the National Park Service State, the sparkler is probably very safe, but suggested that as a precaution, spectators should be prepared to flee. I'm kidding. This is just him saying stuff, okay?

What does make America great? That's the question I was asking myself in preparation for writing this essay when a man named Joey Smith rang my doorbell. Joey is the proprietor of Trees Gone Wild, a service that comes around every year to trim our trees. The idea being that there's a hurricane, we won't have 165 mile per hour oak missiles whizzing through our family room. Joey wanted me to come outside. Got a present for you, he said. And what he gave him was a carved log with like Dave's face in it. The log came from a palm tree that the workers were removing because it was dead. A worker named Alfonso Salguero had climbed the palm and was lopping off pieces with a chainsaw when he noticed this section. So instead of letting it fall to the ground, he tied a rope around and lowered it. The workers heard the squeaky noise and figured there were animals in there. So now he's the owner of a log with... critters inside little birds definitely birds three of them calling for mom who was probably around somewhere wondering what happened to her kids so i made some phone calls eventually got in touch with karen deaderman who runs an operation in the florida keys blah blah blah they saved them as but anyway the point dave barry's making is that, you know, only in America, he went through all of this to save, like he spends the next two hours trying to save these birds, 45-minute drive from his house, he kept the birds talking the whole way, he has the log in his front seat with a seatbelt around it to protect the birds, driving them to get saved. And the people he meets along the way are just emblematic of what it's like to be America. What makes America great, prepare for a Syrian insight is Americans. I don't mean American politicians. I mean everyday, hardworking, generous, friendly, decent Americans, who I believe greatly outnumber the idiots. I mean, the people who hold the door for you and say thank you when you hold the door for them. And buy Girl Scout cookies, even though they've already had some at home and never bud in line, and we'll lend you their jumper cables. And we'll take the trouble to lower a log gently to the ground instead of dropping it because there might be critters inside. And we'll take time out from bottle feeding a dozen baby raccoons to slip 50 miles in the rain so they can take custody of three baby woodpeckers. And all the millions of small but decent good things that millions of Americans do every day, which is not to say we can't be better. But I sincerely believe, and I'm professionally cynical, old guy at 79, not me, Chad, but Dave Barry, that were pretty good. So happy birthday to us. And I think that's spot on. each of you in your day-to-day lives, you come across a lot of that. Even when I'm watching those fantastic videos of the World Cup fans and they're meeting Americans, one of the things that comes across in probably one out of every five videos, is the kindness, approachability of Americans, that they're...

they're encountering in state after state after state. As they even drive, they love renting cars and driving through. That's how they end up at Buckees, by the way. They're driving through in the middle of nowhere, and then they're on the interstate somewhere, and they run into a Buckees. But it's the how Americans, and when I travel to, especially in Europe, Europeans are far less likely to just say hello. That doesn't mean they're not friendly. It doesn't mean they're not capable of it, but it's a culture. We are a culture that embraces. People. We do. I mean, when Venezuela got rocked by earthquakes, we are the first nation. Now, think about that. This is a nation we just took out a narco-terrorist leader, and we're the first flying boatloads of supplies in there and rescue operations and helping. Everywhere on the planet, there is no other nation on the planet that rises to the aid of anyone in any... in any substantive way like we do. If there's a tsunami, there's an earthquake, there's a volcano, there's some horrific tragedy, we as Americans, not just the government, and the government probably is a poor way to do it, an inefficient way to do it. But when you look at a group like Samaritan's purse, when you see different groups of Americans that will just mobilize, and it's not that they sit around going, we should do something, they just do it. That is part of what makes us remarkable. I think from the time we were created, that culture is just part of who we are. Now, what we are not is a bunch of whiners. And whining is not what makes America great. People complaining about that other people have too much. That is not American. It's not American to sit there. You know, America, a lot of people say, man, I don't like that operating system and they'll go build a better operating system. They don't like that app. They'll build a better app. They don't lie. If they, you know, prove it. Get out there. Show the world what you got. But sitting there and lamenting what other people have, that's not American. What Zohran Mamdani's screaming about and scream is just trying to pit one group against another group. That's never going to make a scrape. It doesn't. So Democrats, I ask you to join us. Be happy. Love the country. Become part of what makes this country great. Come on.

I'm having so much fun. I love the exchange. I just saw it was a... It was one of these liberals just melting down. Anyone else concerned about safety with these? Talking about the flyovers. So they're doing these flyovers in D.C. that they've updated the schedule for the flyovers. Amazing. All the military hardware flying over D.C. And these people are like, anyone else concerned about safety? No. Oh, okay. Nick Sordor, who's fantastic out on Twitter. Seeing liberals like you melt down over flyovers is almost as entertaining as the flyovers themselves. They just, they're so. easily triggered, man. If you've been to Daytona and you've seen a fly over a football guy. I mean, it's almost as if they wake up in the morning and go, I've got to be upset about something. I've got to be upset about something that everybody else thinks is completely normal and legitimate. So, you know, of all the things to get, to me, you got too much time on your hands. I don't know what it is. You hate your freedom? I don't know. Would you rather than, like, you know, quarantine you in your house and tell you can't go outside or you have to wear a mask? Oh, wait, you were okay with that, weren't you? You're melting down. This melting down stuff just cracks me up. Anyway, and I will get to buy the text line. Love you folks out there as well. So how did we get? And this is for trivia because I'm a trivia junkie, just as I love, and for those of you listen, by the way, my name's Chad Adams. I'm sitting in for Brett Winterville. Appreciate the opportunity. Always a pleasure here at WBT. Fantastic station. If you would like to call in at 704-5701079, 5701079, 5701079. The chat room, for lack of a better word, the text line also is the same number, by the way. It's 704-5701079. You know, it's the WBT text line driven by Liberty, Buick, GMC. You're welcome to get in on there. And I do read them. I read everyone, anyone who makes a comment, I promise you, I look at every single one of them, as do the host of all of the wonderful programs on this wonderful station. Now, so in addition to loving conspiracy theories, which I do, it's not that I believe in them, it's that I love them. Because the pretense of every great conspiracy theory is that all of the people involved, all of them who have knowledge of it are able to keep it a secret, except for those who speculate that exist, right? And they don't necessarily have direct knowledge. So there's this pretense. There's a group of individuals who know the truth, but they aren't telling you. And by them not telling you makes whatever assertion you believe to be true, true. Now, some of them may be true. I don't know. One of my favorites is the Roswell crash. I love that one, July 3rd, 1947, I think.

Did it happen? I don't know. The Air Force kind of dumbed up the messaging because they did recover something, and then all of a sudden said, no, we didn't. But the fake moon landing, the flat earth stuff, the multiple shooters of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., there's just enough that makes it believable. You know, that's what I love. A good conspiracy theory has just enough of, oh, yeah, that's right. So in addition to me, my love of conspiracy theories, is my love of either useless trivia, borderline useless trivia, or fascinating trivia. Just because the greatness of life is the experiences we go through, many of which are things that you just can't believe happen. I cannot believe I survived childhood. I fell out of enough barns and trees and enough of a daredevil as a kid. I'm shocked that I didn't break anything. I'm really shocked when I look back on my life and I haven't ever experienced a broken bone. I am shocked that I didn't spend time in hospitals concussed. I mean, played sports for 20 years. Never got a concussion. And. So I am amazed. I look back and so the coincidence of all the places I've lived and been and known the worst for error and two or three times I should have been killed or absolutely should have been killed and walked away without a scratch. So I'm astounded at that. So the question is, you know, how did we as a country arrive at July 4th as the date? On July, this is, the Washington Post has a great piece on this. On July 3rd, 1776, John Adams wrote the following words to his wife Abigail from the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. He was a prolific letter writer. And if you ever want to read that, it's great that our founding fathers wrote so much about what they were thinking. I mean, it was the text of the day, right? Instead of the text being instant, the text took like three, five, six days to get to the person. And then there were text. Imagine that. If you had to text. Well, that's what letter writing was. It was texting where you had to wait for a response for a long time. It was an instance. Imagine that they had had texting. Oh, by the way, Abigail, we just signed the Constitution. Anyway, he wrote for the Continental Congress the second day of July 1776, which would have been yesterday, two and 50 years ago, will be the most memorable epoch. epic in the history of America. I'm apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade with game, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forevermore. Now, at that point in time, what's interesting is there was no one end of the continent to the other. It was this western frontier on the other side of Pennsylvania. But Manifest Destiny took us all the way to that coast, kind of prescient on the part of Adams to say that. an irritating Adams, but one nonetheless that was very germane from this time forevermore. Why did Adams think July 2nd was the decisive day? Because it was when the members of the Continental Congress approved a proposal from Virginia declaring that, quote, these united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states. As Adam saw it, that was the vote, declaring a shared commitment to American independence. In another letter,

On the same day, Adams wrote yesterday, the greatest question was decided, whichever was debated, and American perhaps never was or will be decided, nor was Adams alone in sensing the gravity of the steps they'd taken. Many years later, Benjamin Netanyahu Rush. A Philadelphia physician and signer of the declaration shared with him an anecdote that Adams liked to repeat. On the vote, after the vote on July 2nd, Benjamin Netanyahu Harrison of Virginia approached Elbridge Jerry of Massachusetts. He quote, I shall have a great advantage over you, Mr. Jerry, he observed. When we are all hung for what we are now doing from the size and weight of my body, I'll die in a few minutes. But from the lightness of your body, you'll dance in the air for an hour or two before you're dead. Because they knew. They knew if this went south on them, they're gonars. And they were joking about it. Can you imagine? We're sitting in a room and we decide to go against, whatever country we feel oppressed by, it certainly wouldn't be the U.S. And we signed a document that says, man, if we get caught, we lose this endeavor. and me joking with you saying, hey, you know what, I'm going to die pretty quick because I'm heavy, and you're kind of skinny. So you're going to dance around for a while. It's going to take a while. What Adams did not seem to understand was that no one outside the Continental Congress knew about the vote on Virginia's proposal. What the rest of the world did know was the vote on the Declaration of Independence, which did occur on July 4th, and the printer put that date on the document that went out to the world. Moreover, the popular musical film 1776 concludes dramatically. with all the members of the Continental Congress stepping up to sign it on July 4th, but that never happened. Most members signed the Declaration on August the 2nd, but some didn't sign it until September. The confusion becomes even more complicated because a painter of John Trumbull that hangs in the Capitol Rotunda entitled Declaration of Independence. The painting shows five men, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, approaching the desk of Hancock, the president of the Congress, as dozens of delegates look on. Viewers then and since have assumed that the scene depicts the decoration being signed on July 4th. Instead, it depicts the delivery of the declaration drafted by committee on June 28th. On the next few years, Adams changed his mind about emphasizing a single day for celebration. Most especially, he was in favor of a... If I wanted to focus on the passage of the declaration, he thought doing so detracted from the slow but steady way that a... What is Toyota affordability? It's buying smart. Right now, your local Toyota dealer has great deals available on some of the most reliable trucks on the market, like the off-road ready Tacoma, rugged, full-sized tundra, and legendary forer, each with the space, tech, and features to handle it all from the work site to the trails. It means driving for less, with efficient hybrid options available.

extending your overall driving range and delivering great MPGs, meaning bigger savings at the pump without sacrificing power. And it means trading for more. The Tacoma and Tundra are ranked number one and number two in resale value over all vehicles, according to Kelly Boo Book, which can mean thousands more than average right back in your pocket when it's time to trade in. That's Toyota affordability. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. Shop Toyota.com or your local dealer for deals and details. Vehicles projected resale value is specific to the 2026 model year. For more information, visit Kelly Blue Books, KB.com. Toyota brand average resale value is 53% versus the average vehicle at 45%. Toyota, let's go places. The majority of American people reached the conclusion that independence was inevitable. In any case, he came to believe that May 15, 1776, when a resolution by the Continental Congress, calling on the colonies to do it, was overwhelmingly approved. So. On July 4th, 1826, the fates delivered a conclusive answer to why we celebrate the 4th of July. Precisely 50 years to the day after the vote on the declaration, both Jefferson and Adams died. Though accounts of their last moments vary, the story goes that on their deathbed, Jefferson and Monticello said, is it the 4th? And Adams in Boston, and unaware that his friend and rival had died a few hours earlier, said Thomas Jefferson survives. and thus was settled. The likelihood that both men so instrumental in forging a nation would die on that special day defied all rational mode of measure. The God seemed to be speaking, I would say God. From that day forward, July 4th was unquestionably the proper date for the celebration of American independence. So the nation's 250th this year will be richly ironic given that the current occupant of the White House apparently believes that he is the second coming of George's third. So you see, This is what I love about these pieces, is they have an entire piece that's great with facts, context, history, that everything, it's got the fullest. And they just can't help themselves. They did he thinks he's the coming of George III. Thinks again, it's the no kings. They want to say that President Trump thinks he's a king. Yet America's semi-quincennial is bigger than any individual. And for that reason, the fourth warrants plenty of pomp and prey. Again, that one line they couldn't resist. But here's the funny thing. Trump lost. was out of office for four years. The Democrats cannot accept that. It's funny that they act like, you know, did Trump, you know, whenever they get someone in there to talk, will you agree that President Trump lost the election in 2016? Or 2020, whatever it was, 2020. But they never will accept. Hey, do you guys believe that Trump got elected? Overwhelmingly, popular vote and with the electoral college that your country elected him? Yeah, they did. They can't get over.

Good afternoon. Happy July 3rd. I hope you guys can all enjoy some time with friends, family, in celebration. It really should be, you know, Charlotte's going to have an amazing fireworks display. Luckily, we're still in a state that appreciates that. Some of them, I've seen a few cities cancel theirs. I guess it's too controversial. to celebrate stuff like that. Maybe. I don't get that. I do want to mention something weird as we're complaining about the grid. It's been ironic that everyone's complaining about the electrical grid and running out of power and heat weight. And yet the same people that do that are also the ones that are pushing you to conserve energy are the ones that are also pushing electric cars, which need to be charged. They're not even talking about the strain of all the electric cars on the electric grid. But do you need the same electricity? It's not like it's a, oh, well, we'll just not plug in the car for it. We'll go empty. No, you're going to plug in your electric car. Worry about that thermostat, though. But what about the electric car? I don't know, the refrigerator, all the other stuff. Oh, just the AC. Okay. And please, over the past years, what have you heard? Oh my God, Trump and $5 gas didn't get there, but it is amazing the screaming and gnashing of teeth and tearing of clothes over the price of oil, which over the past 20 years, what we've heard is, please stop using oil. Okay, take it away from, you guys that don't want to use, here's the way we solve this. All of you lefties that don't want to use gas anymore, oil, stop using it. No problem. Don't buy any of it. Show the world how you survive without it. How you can do it. And for that matter, get rid of all the petroleum products you use, like the buttons on your shirts and everything. Tires, everything. Your phones, your cell phones have petroleum products. Just don't use them. Just go back to being, I don't know, Amish. The Amish are really good. No hypocrisy when the Amish, they don't complain about the price of gas. Go get a horse. Go get a carriage. Ride around. Get rid of your cell phones. Get rid of everything related to petroleum products. I think even the wagon wheels, I think those are just metal and wood on the wagons of the Amish. But alas, I digress. It's just funny to me. I guess it's just kind of. strange to me that we do things like that. And in the break I was watching, apparently the Japanese, it's already July 4th over there. I can't imagine it is. I guess I don't get it. But they are putting on one hell of a show in Tokyo. about July 4th. There's no way it had to be. It's got to be. Oh, they're doing it early, I guess. Japan celebrating the 4th of July. And also several European countries have put on pro-American displays lighting up like the Eiffel Tower and other things with red, white, and blue in honor of our birthday. That's pretty strong. For all of you liberals out there saying the rest of the world doesn't like us, doesn't respect us and all that, they sure have an odd way of showing that they don't care about us.

They come to our World Cup. They brag about our country. They light up their capitals with our colors. They congratulate us on our success. That sounds like a really good time. It didn't perfect. But by God, there's a lot of admiration for what the hell we've created over the past 250 years. There's a lot of it. Now, a little bit of a perspective. And I'll get into it. One of the things about the, as we had, I think there's a lot to be thankful for over the past 250 years. I went through the litany of things that we've overcome. Just an amazing litany of things you ever come. And the things that we have to be thankful for, one of the listeners had piped into the text room, I guess, to the text line, the WBT text line. It's from Ian. I grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, whose denizens had the collective personality of a stop sign. After each and every one of the myriad blizzards we had, total strangers broke their back shoveling other people's walks or pushing cars out of snowdrifts. Often with no word spoken besides thank you or God bless. Good health and God bless. Happy 250th. That story right there, that small, tiny story is illustrative. of what makes this country great. Because I don't care where, and I've been, like I said, I've been very blessed to travel many, many, and there's many more over the next couple months. I'm going to be hitting a lot more states. That's one of my master plans right there. I'm going to hit states I haven't been to. I've been blessed to be, have been in many. And there is a universal truth, even in some of these northern states that, you know, different attitude. But I've always found the level of, in general, the level of kindness is amazing. Now, when people get pushed, the anxiety gets high. I think people are different when they're behind the wheel of a car, although where I live, it's extremely crowded. And I've seen an amount of kindness for people letting people into traffic at an excessively crowded place that was never meant to have the number of citizens on the roads it has right now. And it is... the astounding amount of kindness and generosity that we have, not just when there's horrible things that happen in Venezuela or Puget Thailand or somewhere like that, not just when a volcano blows up, but in general, going about our day-to-day lives. That's part of it. And that's what the people that are watching the World Cup are saying. They're seeing this kindness, this just remarkable ability to just communicate with people no matter where they're from. what they look like. And the left wants us to believe that we're all, you know, there's a bunch of this group of racist and we're a racist country and we're whole about each other. There's this huge disparity between rich and poor. That means that people that have more are bad somehow and the people that have less are inherently good. There's just this strangeness to this. But it doesn't work. We're kind of cross demography, geography, race, culture, creed, sexual preference, all of them.

We are indeed. Appreciate you all joining us this afternoon on this, you know what? You look north. It's a lot hotter. My sister, I just have to crack you. My sister sent me a text earlier today. Sent it to the kind of the whole family lamenting that she lives in the Raleigh area. So I can say this without getting her in trouble. She's out of the blue. She's like, it's 104 here right now. She's a. quite a bit younger. I took temperature on the road with a piece of oven thermometer, 152. To fry an egg, you need 158. I took the temperature on the hood of my husband's cars. 182 is a black car. I took the temperature on his dash, also black dash. After no sunshade with the windows up, it was 202. As I read it, I responded, I said, so cook the eggs on the hood and use a little bit of oil. Didn't realize you were so hard up to cook eggs. I was like, okay, it's July. It gets hot outside, and this two will pass. This two will pass. Oh, my gosh. Someone actually gave me a compliment on air. Really appreciate what y'all do. Radio has been a faithful lifelong companion, have done just enough of it to know how difficult it is. Looked up, Mr. Adams. appears as affable as he sounds. That wasn't John Adams. She's trying to refer to me. So thanks. Nice. Appreciate it. I always have a good time, man. Life is short. And I am just ever grateful. I am one of the most grateful people. you would ever meet. I mean, I am. I had phenomenal life. I've been blessed with friends and family. I've screwed up lots of things in life and come back fighting harder and have been an entrepreneur. That's the great thing about being an entrepreneur. You know it's going to hurt sometimes. You know it's going to not go the way you want it to, but the art of making, of being successful is sticking with it and making changes. And putting your... putting all of your effort into it and you can do about anything. I had a funny story. If you want to hear one of my many entrepreneurial endeavors, it wasn't too long ago, I had a college roommate. Years later, he says, hey, you know, I've got a jewelry store. You need to have a jewelry store. And I'm like, I don't need to have a jewelry store. I got all these other things I'm working on. He says, no, you need a jewelry store. You know what? I ended up with a jewelry store. And so it took over, turned it around, looked around having a great time with it, and then turned it over. We got some goldsmiths in there and then turned it over to them. So it's been great. I love entrepreneurship. That is of all the things when I go to other countries, I come back, I'm always this amazed, profoundly, deeply at the spiritual level of how incredible this country is in doing things like that. I mean, I've been in so many different capitalist endeavors that I have friends, in-laws, in fact, that are missionaries in Italy. They've been there for about a decade. And every time we have discussions about what life is like for them, they're wed to that idea of staying there, they're trying to start a business over there. And the sheer complexity of trying to get something started is nothing short of astounding. Nothing short of...

I just can't, you couldn't believe it. You know, they, they will say things like, oh, we want 10% down or 20% down and 30% down on, on a given house. They, it's variable. It's not fixed. The way you get loans is very, convoluted, the way the government has to approve or disapprove or add taxes or fees, and depending on who you're talking to, things change. Even in starting a business, the way you track time and the kind of bureaucracy you have to go through, if you can get down in front of them, it may take, they've been trying to just start something that here I could have started in, especially if I could find a business, it would probably have taken me about 60 days and probably another 30 to 60 to ramp up. So 120 from the time I'm ready to go. They've been doing this. They started in October. They still aren't anywhere close. They don't even have a place to start the business. They, it is. It is unbelievably complicated. And that is, you know, when I was over in, you know, I was in Portugal and Spain for a while, it's not too far from that. I think Portugal is probably a little better, but nothing like here. It is so much quicker, easier and simpler to start. And if you can tell your kids anything, teach them the value of the entrepreneur. Teach them that it's not that complicated. That it is hard. But if you have a dream, pursue the hell out of it. Pursue it with vigor. Pursue it with, with, I don't want to say lust, but have a lust for creating things. And that's a beautiful thing to do. Now, onto the entrepreneur, a little bit. And I don't know which direction I want to go here, but I'll try this. Sometimes these things can be a little long in the tooth. But I like this one. This one is about entrepreneurship. And it's America's 250th birthday. This is from, to put it bluntly, which is. I guess it's kind of their own blog. It's an occasional opinions on politics, foreign policy, law, and culture. It's well read, often posted. And it says, this is by, let me see if I can get the author. Well, I think the author's at the end. America's 250th birthday is an occasion for introspection, it starts out with. But as we examine and reflect upon our glories and our shortcomings, one element of our national characters rarely mentioned. The American spirit of free enterprise, that's unfortunate because it should be. On July 4th, 1776, the founding fathers were probably too distracted, and to notice the publication in London just three months earlier, a book called The Wealth of Nations. Great book, by the way. Authored by a Scottish economist and moral philosopher named Adam Smith, the book laid out the case for an entrepreneurial society with an economy governed by the invisible hand of market forces. The revolution itself was a rejection of the British government's attempt to regulate and control colonial commerce. Interestingly enough, it's where New York is heading. As the ripple effects of the book crossed the Atlantic and lapped onto the shores, our shores, Adam Smith's ideas were embraced by this new nation. Jefferson called the wealth of nations the best book extent on political economy. James Madison studied the book extensively and nominated it for inclusion in the proposed congressional library.

Alexander Hamilton, who disagreed with Jefferson and Madison on many domestic issues, nevertheless absorbed Smith's readings. Ron Chernow, Hamilton's biographer, notes that his report on manufacturers displays an intimate familiarity with the book. What united the often disputations of the founding fathers and led them to welcome Smith's work. Was their shared idea of a thriving, dynamic future economy, powered by upwardly mobile citizens, one that would radically diverge from the static, stratified systems of Europe? You can come here. You can come here and be great. Doesn't mean you will become great, but you have the opportunity given the right circumstances, the right vision, the right passion. To become great, to do something. I'm going to go back to this. The Young Nation, and I'll run this paragraph that we'll take a break. The Young Nation was filled with ambitious men on the make, eager to amass fortunes in the richly resourced, sparsely populated continent. The French visitor, Alexis de Tockeful. What is Toyota affordability? It's buying smart. Your local Toyota dealer has great deals available today on Tacoma, Tundra, and Forerunner, with the space and features for any adventure. It means driving for less, with available hybrid options, delivering great MPGs without sacrificing power. And it means trading for more. Toyota is known for building long-lasting vehicles, meaning your truck will hold its value for years to come. Shop Toyota.com to find out more. Toyota, let's go places. Observe the spirit of enterprise. We quoted Alexis to Tocqueville yesterday, and his democracy in America written in 1835, Tocqueville. noted that nearly everyone, regardless of wealth, worked for a living and that unlike European aristocrats who limited themselves to noble pursuits, Americans enthusiastically embraced commerce and business. A man, however opulent we may suppose he is, is almost always dissatisfied with his fortune. Consequently, nearly all the tastes and habits born from American equality naturally drive men towards commerce and industry. The drive to make fortunes was the reason the United States, as it matured in the 19th century, changed the world by creating entirely new industries. It was unique. To this day, unique. There's nothing like it. Often imitated, but never replicated. That's what's great about this country. Thank you.

Nick and the guys there running those boards. I'm thankful for them. They do a bang-up job each and every day. Holding it all together, making it sound good, making me sound like I have a voice made for radio, right? I'm kidding. I do appreciate them, though. Now, we were talking about entrepreneurship and free enterprise. And these phrase, kind of like economics, economics, entrepreneurship, free enterprise capitalism, these phrase, these words that are part of our lexicon, they're not, they... In my opinion, they do not have the import they should. They do not have... the connotations they should in our society. And I'm not talking about the mom dynies of the world and the AOCs that poorly understand it and think somehow capitalism is bad and the completely misguided youth that go to the universities and don't understand it at all. And they're fraught with wanting to become a third world country. I'm talking about in general the K-12 coming out the kids graduating or even college that don't understand basic economics. Economics is not just about money. It's about decision-making. They don't understand. Free enterprise capitalism. They don't understand how money works, how to manage it, how to save it, how to invest it, things of that. They just, they don't have these fundamentals. And that's really shameful because there's nothing that really defines us more in a simple way than that. The quest. for free enterprise. And the call of the entrepreneur, the Amy Acton Institute did a movie years ago to this day is still a seminal work that talks about the founding of this country and even the rapid growth of this country and how free enterprise shaped it, even the creation of insurance, to insure ships to come over here because without the ability to insure a ship's wealth coming across here, we wouldn't have had the kind of ships coming. Once they had insurance, they could insure it, then the massive number of ships that crossed the ocean, because companies would go bankrupt if one ship went down, but they could survive that if they had insurance. So back to the article over there, which is from to put it, to put it bluntly.com, and it said to make, uh, It said the drive to make fortunes was the reason the United States, as it matured in the 19th century, changed the world by creating entirely new industries. While Europeans continue to produce custom-made complex goods by hand, American pioneers like Eli Whitney, Eli, Terry, clocks, Eli Whitney with firearms, developed the first assembly lines. Goods can now be produced rapidly, inexpensively, using interchangeable parts, mass production, democratized commerce, making an array of products widely affordable. While Europe staggered and stammered around, Americans revolutionized communications by inventing the telegraphs, Samuel Morse, and later on the telephone, Alexander Graham Belt, and mechanized agriculture by inventing the steel plow. John Deere, the mechanical reaper, Cyrus McCormick, oil drilling and refining on a mass scale were developed by Americans Edwin Drake and John D. Rockefeller, creating the infrastructure for the modern industrial society. By the way, a lot of these people took great risk.

They are the Elon Musk of their time. And the way we demonize, think if we demonized every great jump in technological success. We just demonize him. Elon Musk is terrible. Wait, he's changing the way we, you can get internet into some of the most remote places on the planet because of Starlink. You can get it into war-torn, war-and-ravaged areas. It's helping Ukraine. It's helping the citizens of Iran communicate. As petroleum replaced whale oil, in that amazed, we were slaughtering whales to get oil. Then we moved. As a source of light and heat, the oil industry delivered the added benefit of saving the whale population from being hunted to extinction. Charles Goodyear developed vulcanization and suddenly highly unstable natural rubber could now be used for waterproof boots and raincoats. In time, rubber would also be used to make tires for automobiles. Yet another industry pioneered by Americans who invented the stationary assembly line, Ransom Olds. Oldsmobile and the moving assembly line, Henry Ford. The American drive to become rich by innovating continues today and is a magnet drawing foreign-born innovators to America. Politicians enjoy invaying against billionaires, but it's interesting to note how many American billionaires are immigrants, many of whom arrived here with little or nothing before creating that fortune. Sergei Bryn, who co-founded Google, now Alphabet, came to the U.S. at the age of six, having left Russia to escape anti-Semitism. Jay Chaldry, who founded Z-Scaler, grew up in a small village in India that liked running water and electricity. Jan Corum, co-founder of WhatsApp, left Ukraine and immigrated to California with his mother, where they settled out living on food stamps. Jensen Huang, who co-founded NVIDIA, left his homeland in Taiwan and arrived in the U.S. as a young child. Peter Thiel came here from Germany before founding PayPal, Palantir, and Founders Fund. Elon Musk, founder of Tesla SpaceX. The first trillionaire immigrated to the U.S. from South Africa. Now, when you run that through your head, all of these people, if I were to read those names off, those are the litany of what the Elizabeth Warrens, the AOCs, the Bernie Sanders, they would call them old cards. They would call them names. They want to confiscate. Think about this. The people who've never created jobs, who've never run companies, the Elizabeth Warrens, the AOCs, Chuck Schumer, Nancy, well, Nancy Pelosi is good at investing money. Looks like insider stuff, but who knows? I don't know. But Zohran Mamdani, Zohran Mamdani's never created a company or a job. But they feel when they speak, what you hear, Pramila Jayapal, Omar, Alon Omar, when you hear them speak, the tone and words they choose leads you to believe that it's okay to talk about confiscating stuff. It's okay to put those guys, call them oligarchs, call them names, try to demean them as humans in the eyes of your fellow Americans, and to say it's okay that they have enough. We, who've never created jobs or been entrepreneurs or created anything, we feel they have enough. And because we feel they have enough. We are thinking, and we are collectively coming together, to find a way to take what they earned, or at least part of it, because we feel it's fair. We think it's fair, and so we're going to confiscate. We're going to take a portion of what they created through the industriousness of their minds and their efforts and their ability to get people to invest in them, because that's not fair. Now, that doesn't make life better for the country.

These are the people that employ millions of your fellow Americans who create jobs and they create wealth for millions of Americans who can then take their own money and invest it and save it and create something new. Be bold, be different, be unique. Be a nonconformist. Though not billionaires, it's worth noting that many American high-tech companies are helmed by foreign-born CEOs, including Sundar Peshai of Alphabet from India, Satya Nadella of Microsoft from India, Lisa Suu of AMD from Taiwan, the spirit of enterprise Luromir, enriching the nation even as they enrich themselves. Another immigrant's life demonstrates what distinguishes America from other lands. Schwarzenegger was born into the lower middle class and the Austrian... Town of Gras. He recognized early on that he was made of different stuff no less than his less motivated countrymen. And so he left to become an American. A 2003 New York Times article said, Mr. Schwarzenegger's career has all the elements that the average Austrian with his dreams of a tenured job in the bureaucracy that leads to early retirement. With his love for his 38-hour work week and his five weeks of holiday per year would despise, venturing into the unknown, enduring hard work and physical pain, testing limits of body and mind and drawing a roadmap to the top. He could have been a bureaucrat in Austrian. You would never have known his name, but it was for drive, work ethic, and constantly thinking he could be more. And you know his name. because of that. There's more to this, but I think it embodies what makes this country great. This is a great day to do that, to think about. Give you fuel, give me fire, give me that which I desire. Happy Eve.

249, 365 days later. Happy 250th, man. It's going to be a smoker of a weekend, but I hope it's going to be exciting for most of you out there. Or all of you, I really do. I hope all of you, regardless of your political persuasion, I hope you take the time. I hope that life and you have that moment to reflect upon what's great about the country you live in. I hope you have the opportunity to think. how blessed you are to be here. You may have disagreements. You may not like certain things. But if you really were to challenge yourself and say, okay, I don't like Trump or whatever, and say, where would you rather be on the planet? I'm not talking about just to visit because certainly there's about 100 different places I plan to go before I keel over, if God willing. But it doesn't mean I want to stay there. But can you think of any country that you, as much as you may think you don't like the country, can you think of one that overall is better for you and your freedom and your family and where you want to go and what you want to do in life? And for immigrants that come here legally, Nobody begrudges that. Nobody says no to that. Just do it legally. I mean, for the left to act like the political left, you should, if you are in that political party, you should agree with that. You want legal immigrants here. Because if you're worried about taxing the system, if you really want to help Americans with American tax dollars, you can help the most Americans with American tax dollars by not helping people who are not Americans. Just this isn't complicated. You know, you can, these people that talk about socialism and all these, they can't name, so where did that work? Can you give me an example of where socialism worked? And they can't. Oh, if we just tweak it, tweak what? What are you trying to tweak? All the money you want comes from people who earned it. So you have to be, yeah, socialism has to be funded by something until it takes over. The last, I'm not going to read the entirety of the rest of the entrepreneurial article, but I don't want to leave you with one. Anne Rand. a fountainhead and just the author that's done so much. She was a philosopher, novelist who fledged a little different, but a remarkable author. And she wrote, she fled the Soviet Union to come to this country. And her hero was Francisco de Acconia, delivered a speech from her. And part of what she said was, if you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose. Because it contains all the others, the fact that they were the people who created the phrase to make money. No other language or nation had ever used those words before. Men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity. In other words, it had to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words to make money hold the essence of human morality. Now, that runs an ethema to people in the left. They don't want to believe about there being a morality to that. But think about that.

Americans don't sit here and say, I want to beg my, I don't want to seize. Now, the only people that want to seize other people's stuff are the socialists in our country, the Mondanis, the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Bernie Sanders. They want to seize. That's not an American trait. To beg for it, not an American trait. To inherit it, it happens. But what we find with a lot of generational wealth is when it's inherited, it typically is lost because the people who inherit it don't have the, not always, don't have the same work ethic that their parents did. But when they do, when they come from humble, when they're still humble. What is Toyota affordability? It all starts with buying smart. and your Toyota dealer has great deals available to qualified customers on reliable cars and SUVs, including the redesigned RAV-4, spacious Grand Highlander, sporty Camrys, and Corolla's. It means driving for less, with efficient hybrid and plug-in hybrid options available throughout the lineup, extending your overall driving range and delivering great MPGs, saving you money at the pump. And it means trading for more. Toyota is known for building long-lasting vehicles. And as the best resale value brand, according to Kelly Blue Book, your Toyota can be worth thousands more than average when it's time to trade in. That's Toyota affordability. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. Shop Toyota.com or your local dealer for deals and details. Vehicles projected resale value is specific to the 2026 model year. For more information, visit Kelly BlueBookskb.com. Toyota brand average resale value is 53% versus the average vehicle at 45%. Toyota, let's go places. They can do that. And growing that is the part that makes you more American. You got it shared with you. You alluded for it. You obtained it as a favor. I got a favor from this guy. He gave me some money. But what you really want to do is create lasting wealth that gives you security for you and your family. That's what everyone wants to do. They want to provide. I believe that. I believe in my heart of hearts we like to provide. I also see in small town America and many of small town America where I've lived the ability, desire and the uniqueness of wanting to not just to help people in Taiwan, but to help your fellow man. Because I think the government that's out of the way that people tend to help more people, even from a Christian ethic, it's you that has an obligation, not passing the buck and say, well, you know what, my government's going to take care of that. I don't have any obligation. Kind of a faith in God gives meaning and purpose of human life and uniqueness of being American is helping your fellow man locally. And so that doesn't mean we don't have problems. It doesn't mean that society's an easy fix. It's not. It's complicated. It's ugly. but we can always do better. So, and when she wraps it up, she goes into a thing about normally, but at the end, she says, as we celebrate the nation's 250th birthday, by the way, Anne Rand wrote Atlas Shrug just occurred to me. That's another big book out there. As we celebrate the nation's 250th birthday, we would do well to remind ourselves of what visitors like Alexis de Tocqueville, bodybuilders like Arnold and high-tech titans like scores of newcomers to our shores have long noted the United States of America.

It is still a land of opportunity where success and riches are attainable in dreams, though often deferred, still have a pleasing tendency to come true. And that's it. That's it. I mean, whether you are, and we shouldn't make the distinction between people who have success and entertainment. whether it be sports, music, acting, whatever, and the people who create companies. I do think that the left has trouble making the distinction because they can relate to people who play sports. Whenever we watch sports, don't we? Now, ask yourself this. When you're watching, whether you're watching the World Cup or World Series or any sport, even golf, don't you, as you're sitting there, Don't you think you could do that, even for a minute? Man, I've hit a ball like that before. Maybe when I was younger I made a move like that before. Or you wish to envision yourself making that move. That's what makes, I think, makes it so relatable. And I think to an earlier point that was made on the show, that I think that's why liberals don't really begrudge. the people they can relate to, they don't look at the people that are actors that make a lot of money or athletes that make a lot of money or singers that make a lot of money because those, they can relate to that. I think we all can kind of relate to that. If I just played my guitar hard enough, I could do that. They cannot relate to people who create businesses and industries, who go out and raise funds, who then invest those funds in growing a business or industry, getting customers, growing that product, and paying back those people that invested and growing and becoming something bigger and bolder. They can't relate to that because they don't think that way. Zohran Mamdani will never be able to do that. Cortez won't be able to, Bernie Sanders doesn't do that. Even Gavin Newsom, these guys don't. They are popular. They're only claimed life. Even Roy Cooper, the guy running for office now. He's been in office 40 years. If I interviewed you about what he's accomplished, you couldn't tell me. He's gotten elected. That's his accomplishment. He created jobs. None, ever. Never created any jobs. Never started a company. Never grew a company. Never went through the hardship. There's a difference between a check and the back of a check, isn't it? There's a big difference in the stress level between those two. Do you have enough to make payroll this month? Did enough come in? Did your supply chain get interrupted? Can I get that product to put it together to put it in front of my customer so I can pay my employees? Roy Cooper never had to worry about that. These Democrats that are moaning about America never did that. But that's the foundational principle that's at the core of what makes us fantastic. In addition to the blood, sweat, and tears that allowed us that freedom. Those battlefields all over this world pave the way for us to do that. We should never take it for granted. And I know I'm getting preachier. I don't mean to. Because we all take it for granted sometimes. Much more to go. Yes, we are. Just listening to the guitar riff for a little bit.

Having fun, 107.9 FMWBT. See, it sounds really impressive with the music behind it, doesn't it? Much more so than me just saying it here on the Brett Winterable Show, Chad Adams, the guest host, sitting in July 3rd, 2026, the day before it all gets celebrated. And it's honor and pleasure. You want to get in on the phone conversation. It's 7.04-5701.07, I'm always welcome to do so. Also, the text line. Thank you guys. Dan, Ian, Dr. Nina, Stanley, Scott, all of you guys, Kevin. All of you guys. Thank you. You guys make, and even the anonymous ones out there, it's fun to read your reflections on things and your thoughts on things. And I try to get them in the show when I can. Now. I do have a, as we wrap up things today, I'm going to do something. I always liked to end shows with something kind of scientific. And this one's going to be no different in that regard. It's kind of weird as we hit to the 250. Coffee. I would make the argument that nothing has. I'm going to say this in a way. I strongly believe deep in my heart that when we moved from an alcohol-based society to a coffee-based society when they introduced coffee beans from Central and South America to Europe and we switched from alcohol. It was the age of enlightenment was beginning. That's really because all of a sudden we became from a And I guess we were ate more. We did more. We weren't drinking as much. And it really changed things. And that, I just think Western Europe evolved with that and then from that birthed out this country. Now, I'm not saying the coffee being birthed American. Not saying that. I'm just saying probably didn't hurt. But I will in it. There's some great stuff about coffee out there. If you are a coffee drinker, you're going to like it. It's an interesting. It's also. the proof that we need to constantly be questioning science, especially nutritional science, and the World Health Organization. And it's a shame that we've gotten to this point, that we've become enamored with questioning these things. But that also is what makes us uniquely American. We don't just accept crap at face value, do we? You know, that, again, it's what I love about the host of the show, all the hosts of the show, the Vince, Pete, Brett, Nick, all of them, very unique individuals. They may share a lot of philosophical constructs, but they're not identical people. And they have very many different opinions. I love reading what Pete writes. It doesn't mean I always agree with him. But man, great guy. And it's also great food for thought. Now, Jay Pedersane has a piece over real clear politics. about what's truly radical about America's revolution. And I like, I think this is an uplifting piece. The Democrat Socialists are right. Can you believe that? The talk show host said that. The Democrat Socialists are right. This is no time for half measures. If the United States is to thrive for another 250 years, we must commit ourselves to a profoundly radical vision of the future.

Our present divisions, strains, and disconsents are so severe they demand nothing less than a revolutionary response, one that reimagines our relationship to each other and our government. It's a daunting task. Fortunately, there is a simple principle that can guide us. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and they are endowed by their creator, I know that drives you liberals crazy, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life-liverted in the pursuit of happiness. These, proclaimed in Philadelphia in 1776, those stirring words from the Declaration of Independence remain the most revolutionary platform ever endorsed by a political body. Their radicalism is unmatched because they negate the basic tendency of all governments to extend dominion over the people they rule. Think about that, you Democrats. This country was founded on a repudiation of that. It negates the basic tendency of government to extend dominion over us. Their message represents such a thorough break from historic norms that other ideologies claiming the mantle of radicalism, especially Marxist, and the woke ideology embraced by Democrat Socialists, are exposed as reactionary efforts to restore top-down systems. In other words, their systems have been tried and failed. You're trying to take us back to something we know fails rather than forward with the radical ideology that created and sustains this nation. Back to the column. For almost all of history, from the epics of Pharaohs, emperors, and kings to the modern bureaucratic states, governments have been potentially hierarchical. A small cottery of leaders held strict control over the people, whom they directed as they saw that citizens weren't individuals with agency, but members of a collective whose ultimate purpose was to serve the group at the discretion of rulers who knew best. thick Roman legionnaires. As American school children were once taught, the declaration and later the Constitution upended all of that. Rather than focus on the authority of government, our founding documents establish the rights of the people. The idea that each of us is endowed by a creator with unalienable rights is both a religious and political statement. It set sharp lines later codified the Bill of Rights that our government could not cross. Human rights, dignity, and freedom were not granted by rulers who could them take them away. They were birth rights. A nation whose people are free to define life, liberty in the pursuit of happiness, as they see fit, proved to be a far more radical proposition than mere democracy. Citizens were not simply empowered every once in a while and decide how they would be ruled. They were allowed broad space to direct themselves, and hence the country through their choices. Again, that also means, it doesn't just mean the power to succeed. It also means the power to fail. It also means the power to be lazy. But if you are lazy, don't expect the government to come and scoop you up and pat you on the back and say, good job. I don't care what Zohran Mamdani says. I don't care what Elizabeth Warren, these confiscatory politicians that derive power from you thinking you deserve something someone else created. The success of the revolution, already in full swing by 1776, is self-evident. America became a beacon to the world's huddled masses precisely because it afforded freedoms that were available nowhere else. We were the most innovative nation on Earth, one whose can-do attitude and know-how has lifted up everyone on the planet by allowing people the opportunity. Think about that. The influence that America's had on products, services, everything else has extended outward from beyond our shores and has lifted other people out of poverty all over the planet. That's true.

If they seized it, by allowing people the opportunity, if they seized it, to become the best version of themselves, our founding vision advanced the truly radical proposition that millions of self-directed people, thinking and acting with freedom, were more likely to create a just and prosperous society than a handful of powerful rulers, wisdom inheres in the crowd. Again, this is lost on many on the political left who want to restore more power in government. It's hard to think of a more optimistic view of humanity than the idea that all people are created equal because it suggests that all of us, no matter birth or station, might have the capacity for greatness. The fact that few of us turn out to be Benjamin Netanyahu Franklin, Harriet Tubman, or Thomas Edison also underscores our belief that we should have all of us should have the opportunity to see if we might to. At the very least, be allowed to lead lives of dignity and respect. The genius of America is that abiding paradox. We are the most forward-thinking nation. Think about this. This is a great line. Don't let this get lost. We are the most forward-thinking nation because we are so backward-looking to our radical roots. We're the most forward-thinking nation because we are so backward-looking to our radical roots. America has never completely lived up to those ideals, but that only underscores the radical nature of our founding. The problem that has bedeviled us, especially slavery and the frequent use of state power against citizens, have beset all people. The difference is the Declaration and Constitution gave us the ideas to strive for or toward. James Madison was correct when he observed that if men were angels, no government would be necessary. A free people will make bad choices. They will exercise their own authority for good and ill. But the founders also recognize that a system based on the selfish decisions of millions of people is far more self-correcting than one directed by a small number of leaders. Think about that in a school yard where kids act a certain way. That kid acts like, he needs some help. But when you get kids around each other, collectively, they learn how to act. Because of what other kids are doing. Freedom has that same tendency. Yes. You know, it's interesting. I'm juxtaposing in my head. I'm in the break, and I'm just kind of pondering things. Weather's beautiful. Warm. It's summer. It's July. Not a mac and rip. If you ever worked in a tobacco field when you were young in North Carolina in late July, early August, you know what heat feels like. And you never forget that. You never forget that level of exhaustion and what remarkable sleep you could have after a day of hard work like that. But I'm not going to talk about that. It's just... But what I was juxtaposing in my head was kind of the political dynamic we find ourselves. On the one hand, the political left has got to be hating this 250. Because I've gone through it probably just today, probably 20 different columns when I look at Vox or Salon or all of these other lefty organizations that I look through, it's almost as if somebody, you know, when you rub a cat's hair the wrong way, it's all ruffled and fluffed up and they don't like it.

It's like that's what... What is Toyota affordability? It's buying smart. Your local Toyota dealer has great deals available today on Tacoma, Tundra, and Forerunner with the space and features for any adventure. It means driving for less, with available hybrid options, delivering great MPGs without sacrificing power. And it means trading for more. Toyota is known for building long-lasting vehicles, meaning your truck will hold its value for years to come. Shop Toyota.com to find out more. Toyota, let's go places. The celebration of what this country is is doing that to them. So it is bothering them. Flyovers are bothering them, talking about freedom. I don't know why, but it just seems to rankle their fur. It's just like pushing the cats hair the wrong way. And it shouldn't. Because it didn't mean 250 was just for conservative Americans. But for some reason, when you say the words make America great again, the left, rather than, you know, if I were on the left, and that would be, you know, I'd have to take out part of my gray matter to do it. But if I were, I would really want to embrace that phrase. I would do everything I could to embrace that phrase for my own political. Yes, I want to make America great again. What I'm doing and what I'm standing for makes America great. But when you say you want to bring in people without documentation for every other country, there is no America. When you say that the law enforcement folks are the bad guys, yeah, you're kind of not doing the American thing. I don't know what you're doing, but it's not really American. But you would think they would want to embrace. At least on foreign policy, you would think they would want to embrace some America first policy and say, yeah, I want to make America great. But when I got to the end of this, it was about the radical idea. And the truth is, in this column that I went through prior to the break, is that the radical idea is us. 250 years into it, it's still us. The people who embrace the endowed by their creator mentality that we derive our rights from that from a piece of paper, not from government, is still the radical idea. The socialist aren't the radicals. They're the tired old retread. They're the, I mean, Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie, they're tired old retreads of something that never worked, even when it was popular, it didn't work. It never leads to anything. Well, they're not new. These aren't new. None of what they propose is new. And so I think that if conservatives want to win, they need to say we're the real radical idea is trying to keep America alive as a radical proposition that we still believe these things. We still believe that these inalienable rights don't come from government. They don't come from government. And we need to do everything we can. You talk about a no Kings rally. Embrace that. No, we don't want kings. We want less government. We want Trump to continue to defund. Get rid of the Department of Education. Heck, hell, the environmental stuff you can do at the state level. There's so much we can do not at the federal level. We have 50 states that can handle a lot of their own stuff. That's the radical idea. The radical idea is less government and figuring out a way to...

pay for the bills instead of racking up all this debt. The radical idea is personal responsibility. The radical idea is self-determination. The radical idea is freedom. That's a radical idea. To continue with this set, with the column, you know, I just am blown away about it. is that, especially since, uh, la, la, la, okay, America has never completely loved with the ideals, but that only underscores the radical nature of the founding. The problem that has beset us, especially slavery and state power used against citizens, the difference here, it happens all over the place, the difference here is the Declaration gives us these ideals. Madison said, and he wrote it, if men were angels, no government would be necessary, a free people will often make bad choices. And that's why we created government that made it hard to get things done. The goal, the historian Richard Hofsted observed, was to check interest with interest, class with class, faction with faction, and one branch of government with another in a harmonious system of mutual frustration. Government was never designed to steamroll over people, not in this country. Nevertheless, especially since the rise of progressivism in the early 20th century, and I love how they call themselves progressives when they're really not. We should call them the regressives. Because their ideas are not new. They're regressive ideas. Their ideas have been tried and failed. They're not progressive. They're not new. The rise of progressivism in the early 20th century government has become ever more powerful in our country. In our complex world, the promise that learned experts can solve our problems is attractive. The politician who has a plan for everything can seem more compelling than one who tells us it will all work out if we just trust one another. This helps explain why socialism and Trump's strongman politics dominate our country today. More and more people want government to fix seemingly intractable problems. Never mind that many of them were created by government overreach. History teaches that when people allow the authorities to take more power, guess what? They will. You give it to them? They'll take more. The dynamic, this was the dynamic that Jefferson was contemplating when he asked, what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Today, many Americans rightly feel the need for resistance, but in dark mirror reflection of American history, we are battling each other instead of our leaders. Rather than insisting on more freedom, we seem bent on investing more authority in government to run our lives and decide our fate. We are allowing ourselves to become puppets rather than puppeteers. That old way of running things did not work in 1776. It doesn't work in 2026. As we watch the skies alight with fireworks tomorrow night, we should remember what we are celebrating, a radical, a radical vision that promised government of the people by the people and for the people. This truly radical proposition is what makes America exceptional. We squander this legacy at our own peril. J. Peter's Own is an editor at Real Clear Investigations, and that's his column.

And I think he succinctly talks about the fact that we can't take it for granted. And I do love saying that the radical idea is what we have. The sad part is I think as we as a society become lazier, we abdicate freedom. for government doing more. And unfortunately, we know where government doing more always leads. It has throughout time. It will forever. It's the nature of government. As Milton Friedman said, why would anyone believe that the people in government in some form or fashion, and I'm paraphrasing, he's a great economist, why would we remotely believe that the people in government are somehow better or more altruistic or more well-meaning than the people that are not in government? And that's a very logical thing to say. And so that's why you've got to limit that power of government. We need to be, and it's hard because it's not a, it's not a popular message. That's why Republicans don't go out there and try to sell it, which is, hey, we need a massive re-envisioning of the role of government. We need to get rid of a lot of what's gone on in D.C. We've vested too much power in Washington. It's a massive departure from the intent of the framers. And unfortunately, that is what gives rise to people thinking that the left left wing of what's left of the Democrat Party makes sense. Because if you already believe that government should have more power, then people saying, hey, we need to give government a lot more power, is an easy pill to swallow, even though it's a poison pill. But it looks good. You think it's going to be good. But it will wreck this country. Because once we go down that path, we've basically shut the door on where we started. And the 250 years will have been a great footnote in the history of the world. We can't afford to do that. Man, you wish you could shout that freedom like Braveheart, right? Freedom!

It's so interesting, Mel Gibson did like, so the Patriot is America's version of Braveheart. Braveheart is Scotland's version of Braveheart or the Patriot, I guess. So Stanley, Stanley, thanks for the note out there. You know, it is true. Freedom is, and it's so funny how we, you don't give up, it's kind of like, when I look at local, county, state, national politics. It is always fascinating how people get wound up about national issues. And there's nothing necessarily wrong with having a passion for what is happening there. But your freedoms are typically taken away with the death of a thousand cuts locally. At the city level, the town level, the county level, your HOA, that's where your freedoms get nipped and tucked and government grows. You go to any Facebook community in any town and you'll see a litany of people who want to, you know, there's always a criticism of government. They're all in the take. They're all corrupt. That gets old. That trope is tired. More importantly, it's constantly a screed of we need to do more. There's kind of this nimbistic attitude. And the nimbism is in an attempt to stop other people, it's to control the people that are there. We need more regulations. We need to stop people from doing this, stop people from doing that. And by stopping people from doing all these things, you have to take away freedom from all to stop a few. And we don't get as impassioned, typically. We get angry. There's not as much passion for that local stuff. I mean, it's neat to see Charlie get fired up. I mean, when Irina Yerutska got killed, it was neat. It took forever for that passion to get inflamed. But once in flame, people realized, oh, it's bad. This is bad. This needs to be fixed. The fact that the mayor took so long to release that file was clearly, I don't know, hiding something. But this is the problem. We need to be stripping. Gosh, and it sounds terrible to say it. We do need to be stripping down government. If you don't, here's the problem. If you don't believe that government has too much power, it's because you don't like your fellow humans. You don't like your fellow men and women. You don't like your fellow citizens because you want the government to exert more power over them, not thinking that you're exerting more power over you. And so this radical experiment means all. All means all. It means all people created equal endowed with these freedoms. It doesn't just mean, hey, I'll use government to get and take away your freedoms. But, you know, here's hoping that I'm hopeful. I'm still optimistic that many of the unaffiliated, and a lot of people want to think they're in the middle, but they're not. You get run. That's what happens to squirrels in the middle of the road. They get run over. Being in the middle is not a lane that you want to live in. And it's not a true lane because if you ask you certain questions about your kids and what you want for your kids, you're not going to be in the middle.

Are you? Or you ask stuff about your spouse, you're not going to be in the middle. If you ask about yourself and what you really want for yourself, you're not going to be in the middle. Do you want more government in your life or less? Okay, you're not in the middle. Do you want more freedoms or less freedom? You're not in the middle. Do you, you know, that's where you need to think about things. Now, having said that, I did want to mention something positive. Well, I think it's been an uplifting and positive show because I'm enamored with our country still. But over the Washington Post, most people drink coffee for a bit of a buzz or boosting their energy levels. Here it is. They were celebrating the 250. I'm talking about coffee because I think it matters. But coffee has wide-ranging effects on your health. Coffee is arguably the world's most scientifically scrutinized beverage. Researchers have collectively carried out thousands of studies looking at its effects lifespan. cardiovascular health, blood sugar, weight loss, cancer, risk, and more. Coffee contains more than 1,000 chemical compounds, many of which are active, like magnesium, potassium, nicin, and B vitamins. And while scientists suspected that drinking coffee was hazardous to your health, in 1991, the World Health Organization, yes, that very same one of COVID fame, listed coffee as possibly carcinogenic because of studies linking it to bladder cancer. Other studies suggested it might cause an increase lung cancer. Then those crafty scientists realized something. In some cases, they had mistaken correlation for causation. People who smoke also tended to drink a lot of coffee. And in many of the early studies, a large percentage of the coffee drinkers, they were also smokers. Once studies took that into account, the link between coffee and cancers disappeared. In the decades since, hundreds of studies have painted coffee in a different light, showing that it may be protective against major diseases, including several cancers. As they look closer at the compounds in coffee, they discover that a number of them have anti-inflammatory anti-cancer properties. A lot of the meta-analysis study over the past few of the past decades, 67 health outcomes concluded that for most adults drinking coffee on daily basis, more likely to benefit than harm. On average, the analysis found people who drink several cups of coffee a day are nearly 20% less likely to die early compared with people who drink little or no coffee. And you could read that early in the day. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Less likely to die early in the day. We reviewed the data and interviewed experts to find out which of the health benefits of coffee are backed by the strongest evidence. So, strongest evidence is it boost your liver. It's good for your liver and almost always lower rates of liver cancer, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, liver cirrhosis, other forms of liver disease, also associated with lower liver enzyme levels, which means your liver is less stressed. It's across the board. A coffee also helps to lower type 2 diabetes. It improves insulin sensitivity. May also explain why researchers have found that coffee drinkers are less prone to getting it.

Many large studies have found that people who drink three to four cups of coffee a day have a 25% lower risk of the disease compared to people who drink little to none. The effect has been found in dozens of studies involving more than a million people across Europe, North American Asia. So that's another good one. Also, seems to be a lower risk of Parkinson's disease. Scientists think that is in large part due to the caffeine in coffee and a large meta-analysis of data from two dozen studies. More than a million people. Scientists found that people who drank up to three cups a day were 28% less likely to get Parkinson's. Last, more physical activity. This is the funny one. So it turns out amping people up on a coffee, on caffeine, on a stimulant, makes them move around more. So exercising on a daily basis is one of the best things you can do, apparently drinking more coffee. makes you want to move around more. The site is found that on the days when people drink coffee, they typically got a thousand more steps in, the equivalent of walking about half a mile. That's a significant increase in physical activity and could be one reason drinking coffee is better linked to health. Folks, have a beautiful Fourth of July. Celebrate this great nation. Don't take it for granted. Love you. Always appreciate being here. Chad, I'm signing off for the Brett Winterable Show. Have a great one.

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