Hi, it's Mike, and while it is Monday, October 9th, this is not a regular gist.

In this, a spiel-like segment I want to address some of the events that we all witnessed.

In Israel, going on in Israel later on today, they'll be a regular show, a Columbus Day

show that was pre-scheduled with new content and some old content contemplated Columbus,

contemplating Native Americans.

With the horrible, terrifying events in Israel, I've drawn a couple conclusions.

I want you to know the staff is pursuing guests to bring you to make this all much more clear.

One thought I've had is that it's very hard to avoid the conclusion that hostage-taking

as a tactic has worked in the past. It's clear to me that Hamas and Iran have concluded this.

Iran just got billions of dollars released to them for essentially taking hostages and holding

in detention, people with American citizenship. Yes, I know the Biden State Department says

that the money the billions given to Iran did not fund these exact endeavors. I guess they

don't understand how credit works. But I'm even speaking about specifically the Israeli context

in 2006, a soldier named Goliath Shalit, was kidnapped by Hamas. He was held for five years,

and ultimately Israel wound up giving over 1,000 Palestinian militants or at least convicts

back to Palestine. And some of these, it was unquestionable. Some of the people released

in that prisoner exchange had killed dozens of Israelis. But the conclusion was, and this was

Israel saying these are our values that one Jewish life is worth all of that.

However, if you make that calculation, you're going to incentivize future actions,

and that's what we've seen. Israel may have to recalibrate its attitude towards hostages,

the US should as well. But I also think that by unleashing murder and mass hostage-taking,

Hamas thought it was serving an execution order, but they may have written their own death warrant.

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